Creative Nomads versus Creative Stay-at-Homes

One of my favorite websites is Cynthia Morris's Journey Juju. Cynthia is a Denver-based creativity coach who took a creative leap last year, leaving behind her life in Colorado to wander around Europe: leading workshops, working on her novel, romancing her Muse. Along the way she even fell in love with a Portuguese rock-climber and made a longer-than-previously-expected sojourn in Lisbon. I've attended workshops lead by Cynthia, and it's impossible not to come away from any time spent in her presence with an enhanced sense of life's glorious possibilities.

But I think that rather than being a creative nomad, I may be a creative stay-at-home. I'm having fun on my trip to California, I really am. Only not QUITE as much fun as I would have spending the same days at home. Yes, the ocean is beautiful, sparkling outside my Ocean Avenue window here in Santa Monica - but so are the Rocky Mountains outside my window in Boulder. Yes, it was lovely to have an early morning walk from Santa Monica beach to Venice beach yesterday, while Gregory and Sierra slept late. But it's just as lovely to have an early morning walk on the trail that begins a few blocks from my own front door. I did love the hot chocolate I had at the French Market Cafe in Venice - but I love my own Swiss Miss hot chocolate on my own couch even more. My idea of a perfect vacation is to find a place where I can curl up and write, but, it turns out, places vary in perfection pretty much as they are more or less like my own little cozy house.

Then this morning I stumbled on a farmers' market in Venice, and the man selling the croissants there was so lovely. "Two dozen croissants, Madame?" he asked. When I bought only two, he was perplexed: why just two? "I want to be thin like the French women," I told him. "But, madame, you are already so thin, I can hardly see you!" he exclaimed, the charming old flatterer. Now, I'm eating one of them, and licking the buttery crumbs from my fingers, and the breeze off the Pacific is soft and salty. And the life of a creative nomad suddenly seems quite sweet.