My Happy Place

Each change of season carries its own current of energy, inviting us to move in rhythm with it. As summer fades and autumn quietly rolls in, I feel that same transition unfolding in my own life.

For the past two years, I’ve kept a private office in Palo Alto. Modest in size yet spacious in spirit, the room is filled with light filtered through two great magnolia trees outside of the window. I’ve spent countless hours there, sinking into the inner world, exploring layers of consciousness, and observing the outer world from both afar and within. It was a daytime retreat, a sanctuary I felt grateful for every day.

I have renewed the lease several times. This time as it draws to a close again, part of me still wants to hold on, but a wiser voice within whispers otherwise. Life, in its mysterious intelligence, signals when one season has completed and another is ready to begin.

Letting go is never just about releasing something old. It is to trust, and follow the greater current of life. When we cling to something outside of us, we cling to something already dissolving inside. When we release, we return to the vast field that has been holding us all along. In that surrender, we allow ourselves to realign, and from that realignment, a new cycle begins.

Have you observed closely how the leaves fall in autumn? When the season calls, the trees let go with generosity, and the leaves part with grace. Neither resists or clings to the other. Both seem to know that while the form passes, the essence remains, awaiting its next expression.

I will miss seeing the morning sunlight spilled across the room, leaving imprints of magnolia branches like living calligraphy on the desk. I will remember the time of solitude, the space to go inward, the freedom to simply be. It was a private sanctuary, my happy place.

Yet true sanctuary was never the room itself. It was the presence that held me from within. That sanctuary is timeless, always near, beyond form.

That is my true happy place.