As this has become my travel blog, I am checking in from Sydney.

There is a writer’s festival on. There is VIVID, the festival of art, music and ideas, and there is a refuge retreat at Mahasiddha Kadampa Meditation Centre. This is the same group I flirt with in Auckland.

Add to this collision of events a sprinkling of intellectual exhaustion, and there you have it: a perfectly plausible reason to clear out for a week.

I do love Sydney. Because of my history with it (which is another story), I attach it to healing. It’s where I run away to regroup, to restore and revalue. It’s where I go to lose myself, to be myself and occasionally to be someone else.

Tomorrow I start a meditation retreat a convenient 20-minute walk from this gorgeous apartment. This is comedy fodder I’m telling you now. 90 Minutes is the first session. I’m hoping there’s a lot of talking that will go on (the monks not me) because 90 minutes wrestling my own thoughts to the ground is not something I presently imagine to be possible.

No matter.

It is the process of searching for meaning, not its attainment, that is most important for me. A little bit of this, a little bit of that; its spiritual cross fit for this girl.

Looking at my social media feed these days, there seems to be a few of us limbering up at the starting line of enlightenment. Is meaning the new money? Is it becoming fashionable to repost someone else’s musings and show off one’s spiritual wealth?

Maybe I’ll know the answer to this, and all my other questions, after a week of Oooom.