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I just got back home, hot , humid, green, Pacific in the front yard home. Another journey to the Dreaming capital of the West Coast, Los Angeles. I had a meeting with an all-time great film producer, Jon Peters and my friend Bob Waldman. Dreaming up new deals, I love it.

While I was there, I got to stop by the Interventionists Conference at The Lowes Hotel in Santa Monica. I know the Lowes well. We hosted our SPIRIT RECOVERY Conference there a couple years back and it's also where our family holed up during last year's Malibu fires. Half of Malibu seemed to be living at The Lowes for a few days during those fires. High-end refugees for sure.

While I was at The Lowes this time, I got to see a bunch of people I hadn't seen for over a year. The conference was a gathering of the business people of the Mental Health Addictions treatment world. World-class characters who'd found a day job helping others help themselves. I've lived the last 10 years close to that world and that community of people. The Ranch's CEO, Miles Adcox, was there with Ryan Martin, our master intake director.

Walking in the exhibit hall felt like a new experience. With hundreds of people all talking, either to each other or on their cell phones or both, there was a dull roar ringing through the building. As I looked around I realized I was completely detached. It was great seeing The Ranch exhibit and Miles and Ryan but for the first time in my 12 year relationship with whatever the word Recovery means I was not affected by the scene at all.

This was cool, to be walking through a situation that for years would get me all jacked up and to have no reaction at all was freedom. Saying hello to people I've known or worked with over the last few years in California was great and I had no agenda or need for anything from anyone. I talked to who I wanted, not to who I felt like I should talk to. It didn't matter who they worked for, or how much business they were doing with us, or anything else. I didn't care, it was just good to see some of the faces.

After an hour I met up with Keith Arnold, an old friend that dedicated many years to Sierra Tucson the treatment program in Arizona that I had checked myself into 11 years before. I always respected Keith and on several occasions tried to figure out how I might get him to go to work with The Ranch. He's a good guy and a smart operator.

Keith and I walked outside and sat on the boardwalk that runs from Venice Beach to Pacific Palisades and talked about the reality of the Recovery world, and what we'd seen over the years and what we were seeing now as opportunities to create a better opportunity for the people trying to help themselves, and how we could contribute to that. This was not a conversation based on bottom line or business deals...none of that stuff. This was two men who know that reality is really just beyond what we call home here on Earth and that doing our best is what we live for today.

Several years before, on one of my visits back to Tucson, I had invited Keith to a Sweat Lodge Ceremony and he'd accepted with great enthusiasm. That was his first sweat and the beginning of his relationship with the Great Mystery of Life's magic. Before we headed back up to the bustle of the conference he said he was going to be with our old friend Albert Sombrero, a Dine' healer and an all around funny human on Saturday at a Ceremony.

So there it was, one of those big circles in life passing through the two of us on the beach in Santa Monica. What had been set in motion in the Sweat lodge in Tucson years before, was still evolving and coming back around through us and we were checking in between rounds. If you know what I'm talking about, that great circle of integrity that flows around and through us all the time but only gets snapshots of recognition in this world today, then you must smile at it all like I'm doing now.

It was great to check in Bob, Keith, Miles and Ryan and all the rest...we are doing it.

In a few minutes my little girls' friends and their families are coming over to our house so we can walk down the beach and watch a big hatch of baby sea turtles set free in the surf for the first time. I'm gonna take my long board so we can paddle out as they swim for the horizon. All of us and those little turtles making another one of those great circles of life that when you catch them in motion makes everything around you feel like magic. It is good to be back home, in this body, in this world , in this life. Peace be with you , Lee