I just got back from a week-long trip to New York. I rode my folding bike to and from the Atlanta MARTA train (including home in the pouring rain), which took me to the airport (for the first time since my journey via buses, trains and working on organic farms across the USA). I rode Citibike and Schwinneola while in New York. 

I visited community gardens, Slow Streets, and public art. Ate at a wonderful farm-to-table restaurant, a soup place and a pizza joint. Celebrated my step-mom’s 90th birthday at an Italian dinner that never seemed to end in its bounty, and hungrily ate dates and Cliff bars at other times. Walked a labyrinth on the lowest tip of Manhattan. Spent nights both in the Long Island village where I grew up and in the Manhattan neighborhood where I lived right before moving to Atlanta almost 34 years ago. 

I used my astoundingly wonderful new Cotopaxi backpack. Rode escalators for the first time in 20 years without vertigo-like attacks. Continued being both alcohol and caffeinated-coffee free (both of which I had quit for my recent five-month journey). Wrote those two magic words (“The End”) in the first draft of my new book, Round America with a Duck. 

I missed both the man jumping into the 9/11 memorial fountain and the woman stabbing four people in the Atlanta airport by an hour each. Mid-visit, a war started between Israel and Hamas that is shaking my family, my country and the world to its core. 

And now I’m home again home again jiggedy jig. It’s the year anniversary today of when my life-changing contract with the CDC Foundation in service to the State of Alaska Department of Health ended. Just a few days until the year anniversary of when I pilot-tested Round America with a Duck in a micro tiny-house at a nonprofit farmstead in Mableton, Georgia, the newest city in the USA. I revisited it just two weeks ago via a 51-mile round-trip bike ride.

Today, a day of possible planned worldwide terror, I will pray. I will ride my bike. I will work more on my book while supporting some local business. I will harvest and share fresh kale and turnip greens from my front lawn, which I planted just six weeks ago when I got home from my 10,000-mile/16,100-kilometer journey around a country-at-a-crossroads in a world-in-crisis. Planting a seed is an act of faith in the future — and I continue to believe in us. Somehow. Some way.