The moon filling and emptying.  The seasons coming around.  The circular path.  In nature, you can only plan so many yards ahead.  If you are hiking, and you find a beautiful wildflower meadow, the best thing to do is sit right there.  If you are kayaking on the ocean, and a storm comes up, it doesn't matter if you have been out for two hours or ten hours, it is time to get to shore.  Your plans don't matter. 

I was unhappy when I did not have to wonder if I could pay my bills.  When I have had a forty-hour-a-week job, I didn't have time to understand who I was.  I didn't have time to spend quality time with my community of friends.  I felt like I was getting more hollow and more hollow and more hollow.

I can't walk to work, be overcome by an incredible smell and not follow it to the bush it comes from.  You have to follow your bliss.  I cannot notice an intoxicating smell and keeping going.  The other day I heard an owl some distance away.  I climbed over fences and tracked it down.  It was around sundown.  I found the owl in the crotch of a big old pine.  The owl was turned sideways looking at me.  Then it leaned over and answered a call to another owl.  All the feathers on its neck fluffed out.  I went to bed, hours later, feeling bliss, feeling ecstasy.  When I am in a forty-hour-a-week job, and can pay all my bills, I can't live that kind of life.

You walk from flower to bird -- that's how I like to live.  I may get to meetings late, but I am late because I was living between the time I started out and the time I got there. 

When people come on my sea kayak trips, they often come from high-stress jobs.  From all over the country -- Tallahassee, Chicago, New York City, Texas.  They get out there in the kayaks, and after the second day, people talk about coming back and changing their lives.  It has to do with how much richness you get when you are out on the ocean, not sensorially confined.  By walls, a roof.  By an air-conditioning system.  When you live in a way that allows you to appreciate everything around you.  Even the hardships.  Who cares if you can't pay your bills?

My father said, "Hey, we wear second-hand clothes, we drive a Volkswagen, we don't go out for dinner, but we travel around the world.  Which would you rather have?"  When I was sixteen, I went in to get fitted for braces, had the molds done, etc.  When we got the estimate, my father said, "There is a lot you could do for $1,500.  You could go to Europe for quite a while for that much money.  So, I'll give you a choice.  You can go to Europe, or you can get your teeth fixed."  So I went to Europe, and my teeth are a little crooked. 
- Jennifer Hahn. This was from an early Heron Dance interview, roughly thirty years ago. Jennifer’s LinkedIn profile indicates that she is a guide for Sea Wolf Adventures, and I found this profile for her on the Cloud Ridge Naturalists website:

Jennifer Hahn is a writer, illustrator, naturalist, teacher, wild harvester, and coastal traveler. She has 30 years of wilderness travel experience, including guiding natural history trips by sea kayak in the San Juan Islands for 22 years, solokayaking from Southeast Alaska to Washington, and has spent many seasons guiding in Southeast Alaska. She is author of the award-winning Spirited Waters: Soloing South Through the Inside Passage, and Pacific Feast: A Cook's Guide to West Coast Foraging and Cuisine.