I ran a half-marathon last Saturday. It was thrilling.

Now, four days later, on Wednesday, I am blue. After all that strengthening and tightening over the past three months of pre-marathon training, everything is firmer. Everything but my mood.

My psyche is saggy.

For me, this was a tremendously big deal to run this far, given that up until a year ago, I’d never been a runner. My friend Kim sent me a bouquet of chocolate-covered strawberries to congratulate me, and told me how bad ass I am. My son Sam said he was proud of me. So did my husband and mother and sister and pretty much my entire posse of supportive friends who were willing to exclaim over something that is sort of a big deal.

(Sort of a bid deal. I think of David Sedaris’s essay on how he once saw a woman almost fall to her death from a ferris wheel at an amusement park. If she had really fallen to her death, that would have been a big deal, something great to tell at a cocktail party. Saying I ran a “half marathon” is the same thing. It’s not a full marathon, something truly incredible to boast about at a cocktail party.)

Even still, I was Queen for a Day. At race’s end, I was given chocolate and champagne and energy bars and hugs. During the race, every few miles, a group of enthusiastic kids were cheering us on, enthusiastically waiting with cups of water, anxious to give it to one of the bad ass runners.

Ha. Me a bad ass. It’s such a joke. I was having all sorts of problems with long runs. I learned about muscles I never knew I had, and talked ad nauseum about them in the boring way that athletes will do. God bless my husband Steve for not falling asleep in his soup during one of the dozens of times I launched into a tedious running monologue.

“My It-band hurts so much. My trainer said I should roll on it, although it might be better to . . . “

“My left lateral hamstring has a strain, so I’m icing it and staying off it for a week before the run. But I’m worried about . . .”

“My right knee is popping. I wonder if I should see a physical therapist or a sports doctor . . .”

Do other runners experience similar aches or am I a big baby who just can’t take it and run through the pain? When my thigh seizes up at, say, mile 9, I can’t seem to do anything but walk for about 30 seconds until the knot is gone. (See, this is boring! I know it is.)

Then I would fill too much of my working day reading Runner’s World and running blogs and talk with my marathon-running neighbors Ethan and Mike, and my running buddies Tita and Beau, about quads, hamstrings, rollers, blisters, race times, good running watches, runner’s nausea, bonking, and the merits of so many sports beans and gels.

Running is the strangest thing. You run. Then you run more. Oh, then you run. And you have to train for a long run, you have to run and run and run and run. Then you talk about running.

See, running is boring, but it’s so exciting. It’s painful, but exhilarating. On long runs, I often felt like keeling over but rarely — except a few times in my life, like when I fell in love with Steve, gave birth to Sam and Molly, hiked in Canyonlands, river rafted on the Colorado river, traveled alone on trains throughout Europe — have I felt so alive.

I’ve been talking with other runners who, like me, fell in love with and began this boring-cum-exhilarating sport during middle age. Why did we fall in love, so madly in love, later in life?

Because running equals youth. Movement. Freedom. If we can run fast and far, we hold out hope of gaining back these prizes.

There’s more. Running offers us a marker, a goal, something tangible and definite, when so much as we age becomes fuzzier, blander, less remarkable and less…felt. With age, the sharp edges of youth — confusion, heartache, existential despair — are finally smoothed over by less pain and more contentment. But there’s a price for the cushy-ness of middle-age. Being ordinary.

We go to Trader Joe’s and get excited about that free little cup of coffee. We look forward to a new season of Mad Men. These very cheap, very ordinary thrills.

Work–that Holy Grail that once promised fame and fortune and inspiration in our twenties–is a disappointment, a reminder of what we haven’t achieved, or of how little we’ve earned for the hard work.

If it weren’t running, maybe I would have found something else during my 46th year help me feel this life acutely, to wake me up and help me see and think more clearly: Buddhism, jewelry making, gardening.

But I stumbled upon running, which feels exceptionally real. It reminds me of my body and my capacity, still, to do something new and well. Even more, there’s always the promise of doing it farther and better: The next race, when I’m even faster and stronger.

So, then, why the saggy psyche today? I don’t know. But I’ll hazard a guess.

My guess is that for all that hard work, and despite the zing of passing through a giant plastic archway that marked the 13.1 mile finish line, a few days later I’ve returned to the land of the bland.

How, now, to feel so alive as that particular moment, when I have to make dinner tonight, and tomorrow, and the next day? I have an invoice to send a client. Clean up the garage and the files in my office. Figure out how to arrange the family photos in an artful way in the hallway. Yawn.

I’m so churlish, not to thrill at these little things, these banal duties of everyday living. I know. I know. I have my two children, my husband, plenty of loved ones and friends.

The true achievement isn’t an actual finish line, but to be present and feel truly alive and grateful for a peaceful, healthy life.

The trick, the truly difficult assignment that I’m failing at so miserably today, is to absolutely feel this, not when you get a cheap medal for a race that–let’s face it–2500 other people also managed to pull off, but to feel alive and to embrace this ordinary day.

Oh, maybe it’s as simple as the fact that my muscles–quads, hamstrings, heart and brain–are strained and exhausted today. Maybe I need to give all of it a rest. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a new spring in my step, and my psyche.

Tight, uncomfortable, it’s easy to back into but often tremendously difficult to escape. At least, once you’ve laid down the law and explained the rule to your screaming three-year-old child: “THIS IS HOW THINGS ARE, AND THIS IS WHY YOU CAN’T.”

The other night, pressed for time before I left for my weekly track run, I set down two bowls of split pea soup and grilled cheese sandwiches on the kitchen table for Sam and Molly.

“I want to eat my dinner in my room,” Molly says.

Now, Sam, who is eleven, has eaten dinner in all kinds of places: on a blanket on our front sidewalk, in the bathtub, on the neighbor’s trampoline.

But for no apparent reason, tonight I decide to be inflexible and tough with little Molly. “We don’t eat food in our bedrooms, Molly. That’s what the kitchen is for.”

I’ve made up this arbitrary new rule based on the sudden twisted logic that is an amalgam of several free-floating ideas drifting around my brain, including: 1) There must be order in the house because if there isn’t, then what will happen? 2) If she eats in her room tonight, she’ll think she can anytime, and then what will happen? 3) I need to be a firmer parent, not all loosey-goosey and permissive, because if I am that way, then what will happen? I’ll tell you what. Terrible, terrible things. I don’t know what, exactly, but it will be very bad.

In response, Molly starts to scream. Ninety-five percent of the time, she is a rather calm child, but when she shrieks, windows howl and dogs shatter into a thousand pieces. “I. Want. To. Eat. In. My. Room! Sob. Sob. Sob.”

By now, I’m standing in a very uncomfortable position in that bad, bad corner of our house and don’t know how to escape.

“What does it matter, Mom?” asks Sam, very reasonably. By now, Steve has gotten home so I can leave, and he’s also giving me a look like, “What does it matter?” but he’s a complete mensch and never disagrees with my rules—however arbitrary and crazy making—in front of Sam and Molly.

It’s not right to leave Steve with this chaos that could last for over an hour, given that Molly rarely ever gives up a fight if she feels her honor—or a lollipop (we’ve had more tantrums over lollipops)—is at stake.

When I’m in one, I often forget. But here’s the thing about corners. When you are facing the wrong way, there appears to be no way out. You are trapped by walls. But then, idiot that you are at that moment, you realize you can walk right out of it anytime, if only you can turn around and see that it’s all quite simple. You need only take a step or two and then you have plenty of wiggle room. Not just wiggle room. Room to run absolutely free and do as you like.

Suddenly, I flash to a page from Where the Wild Things Are, just after the character Max has returned to his room after his romp with the monsters. On his side table is a sandwich and bowl of soup, “And it’s still hot.”

I realize, at that moment, that there is a logic driving Molly’s desire. We had read the book a few days before, and it was the warm dinner waiting for Max, more than the escape from home, that made an impression on her. “Molly, did you want to be like Max and have your soup and sandwich in your room too?”

“Y-y-y-yes,” she says with a sniff and clutching her soup bowl like a shield.

“Oh, now I understand,” I say, stepping further and further away from that corner, that oxygen-deprived vortex. “So let’s do something special tonight. Usually, we don’t eat in our rooms. But just this once, you can be like Max and eat in your room.”

Molly looks so relieved. She starts marching upstairs. Steve looks so relieved. Sam gives me a look like, “Why are you so dim?”

No one is crying anymore. I can leave the house. My very square and corner-filled house.

Time to move to a round house.

Must be on my mind (oh yes it is, this aging thing), but more on the middle-aged woman front . . .

Yesterday, a few friends sent me the same YouTube video of a British woman named Susan Boyle. I then sent it to a few friends. I think by now everyone I know has seen it.

If for any reason you haven’t, it’s a clip from the British version of “American Idol” (and, in fact, is the show from which Idol was created). We are shown a middle-aged woman who looks like the portly and slightly dim farmer’s wife in the movie “Babe.” Stuffed into an unfashionable, ill-fitting pale yellow dress, she looks so homely and odd that, at first glance, it’s not even clear if she’s mentally all there.

In a brief interview before she walks on stage, Boyle says that she’s “never been kissed” and lives alone with her cat, Pebbles. Oh God, we’re about to watch something humiliating, so of course, we all keep watching.

As a friend of mine commented, there’s something of Roman circus to this: the camera pans the audience’s reaction as she walks on stage: people are covering their mouths in shock or grimacing, delighting at the opportunity to see her eviscerated. Judges included, they are practically salivating, getting ready to tear her apart the minute she opens her mouth. “I’m 47,” she says, and the entire audience gasps, as if she’s just told everyone that she roasts babies for her nightly supper. (Oh, as a 46-year-old woman, that one was hard to endure, the gasps at such an old, old age.)

Then she sings.

Oh yes, Boyle sings like an angel. Her voice, as one of the clearly bowled-over judges said afterwards, is “stunning.” When the audience realizes that the joke has been on them (they’ve been appropriately humbled once the fat lady sang), within seconds of hearing her perfect voice, they stand to applaud and then when she finishes singing “I Have a Dream” from Les Miserables, they give her another standing ovation.

Like many, I was crying by the end. But then I thought about it, and a couple of my middle-aged women friends emailed me back after I’d sent it, and they were a little…peeved if not full-out pissed off. Why is it so GD amazing that an older woman (but she’s not 120 years old, for lord’s sake), one who is a bit heavy, can sing like Beverly Sills?

Why does this video surprise us so much? Is it because she’s older? Because she doesn’t look at all, at all American Idol-ish? Did the producers of the show set us up, making sure she wore the most unflattering dress and coffee-colored panty hose with frizzed-out hair, just to make sure we were shocked?

I don’t know. But still I was touched. There’s no question. She won.

I will add her to my list of middle-aged, late-blooming women. Matter of fact, she’ll be my new poster girl.

That terrible, uncomfortable feeling I would get in my chest and legs when I would run more than a block. The embarrassment of falling so far behind the tall girls in junior high during gym class. The scorn I had for those self-satisfied lithe runners I’d see bounding past my house.

This meant that as an adult, I would never break into anything more than a trot. Which doesn’t quite fit me, or my idea of me, because I love to exercise. I always enjoyed those painful aerobic classes back in the nineties and was a yoga enthusiastic before everyone and their New Agey aunt trolled the neighborhood with their irritating eco-friendly yoga mat holder self-righteously slung over their shoulder. I spent my years in Paris always on my bike, once riding from the Loire Valley back to Paris during two, twelve-hour days when I found out my boyfriend John was cheating on me.

I liked the pain and sweat and catharsis that came with excessive effort. But pain and effort for running? Never.

Until about eight months ago.

For the past 11 years, ever since Sam was born, I stopped doing much of anything physically. We live on a hill in San Francisco, and I’m not macho enough to power up and down it with 30 pounds of toddler behind me on a bike. Classes of any kind – yoga, Pilates, aerobics — average out to cost about $35 an hour if you figure out the cost of the class and the babysitter. As a freelance writer, I never made quite enough money to justify the money to spend regularly on such a luxury. And I usually felt too guilty asking my husband Steve to watch Sam so I could jet off to a Saturday or Sunday Bikram yoga class.

But this year, at the age of 46, a few things at the same time happened in my life that turned me into a runner.

I had been doing The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron’s book on tapping into your creative self. Just as I had pooh-poohed running for so long, I’d also discounted Cameron’s book as too “New Agey,” too narcissistic, too pretentious, too too. But then my writer friend Hazel, who is as smart and sensible and non New Agey as they come, told me the book had changed her life as a writer.

I was looking to change my life as a writer, so bought the book, again, after having given it away only months earlier. I began doing Cameron’s morning writes every morning, and at week five in the 12-week self-directed course, had one of those rare epiphanies you pay a brilliant therapist to arrive at. For years, for most my life, I had been caught up in my own self-designed “virtue trap.”

For as long as I could remember, I made sure I was a good girl: a “good” mother, wife, daughter, employee. But in being the long-suffering “don’t worry about me” strain of your average fallen-Catholic martyr, I realized, you lose yourself, you lose your direction. And worst of all? You are secretly, silently seething, and blaming everyone around you – your fabulous husband, your adorable children – for not letting you live your life as you’d like to. But it wasn’t them who was stopping me. It was me who was stopping me.

When I realized trying to be Mother Mary Leslie, Holiest and Longest Suffering of All Mothers on the Block and Surrounding Environs, that’s when it hit me with the clarity and force of a religious epiphany what I needed to do: Stop blaming everyone else.

So right at the same time I realized this, thank you Ms. Julia Cameron (former wife of Martin Scorsese, by the way), I also looked in the mirror: Straight on, in my underwear, without squinting or flinching.

I’m a thin woman. But just because you’re thin doesn’t mean you don’t have fat. Weird fatty areas around the underarms and especially at the waist. And it was newish fat. Blobs of skin and excess I hadn’t noticed, and certainly hadn’t reckoned with, since my thirties. My waist had disappeared. I’d turned into a human refrigerator: A square torso with skinny legs and arms sticking out.

That gift of psychic self-awareness along with the stunning, startling realization that my body had gone all squishy middle-agey brought me to the divine realization that my time of reckoning had come. Time to stop being a martyr. Time to find time for myself. Time to fight the blobs.

And just around this time I read an essay in The New Yorker by Haruki Murakami, entitled “The Running Novelist,” which was an excerpt from his new memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

What surprised me was how sort of ordinary, almost lacking affect, Murakami’s essay was. As opposed to his lyrical, almost mystical novels, his writing wasn’t inspired or beautiful. It was matter-of-fact and sort of rambling and almost boring. But it got to me. He wrote about how one day he had his own epiphany: He had been running a jazz club and had been at a baseball game when suddenly, at the moment the bat hit the ball, he thought: I could be a writer.

He began writing, but was getting heavy, and then decided to start running. For Murakami, running meshed perfectly with writing. He would sit and be sedentary for much of the day, but running gave him the emotional and physical outlet he needed to stay balanced and fit.

For decades now, he has run and written with equal intensity and dedication. They are his two passions, and one passion feeds the other.

“Leslie, you idiot,” I thought. After all these years as a freelancer, after those many days when I’d feel all stiff and fuzzy-headed, I could have done something so simple, and free, as to go for a run.

So the next day I ran. It was terrible, but also inspiring. I ran a block. Then I walked. I felt mildly uncomfortable. But then I’d run a little more. The next day I’d do it again. I surprised myself at how driven I became. Not driven compared to an accomplished runner, or even a garden-variety runner. But compared to me. Compared to the old me. The squishy, martyr me.

My knees started giving me problems and I talked with my next-door-neighbor Mick, who is a scientist-cum-marathon runner, who told me I might want to invest in real running shoes rather than wear my 10-year-old tennis shoes. My knees got better. And of course, after a few weeks, I found myself getting incrementally stronger and better at longer distances.

I’d wake at 6:00, zip out of the house before anyone – my husband, my son, my daughter – had a chance to wake and ask something of me. (Confession: Plenty of mornings I’d hear my three-year-old daughter wake, she usually wakes crying, and I’d escape from the house with my shoes still in my hand…then put them on a half block down. The old me would have felt too guilty doing this: Poor Molly crying. Poor Steve having to take care of her. Now I know we’ll all be okay. Better than okay. Molly learns Steve can take care of her. Steve learns he can take care of Molly. Leslie learns she can take care of herself.)

San Francisco, despite or because of the hills, is a wonderful city for running. Because of the hills, there are odd little hidden staircases I discovered; remarkable, living here for 20 years and just finding them now. There are plenty of undeveloped hills where, after laboring to the top, I stop for some push-ups and a few Maria von Trapp twirls as I look out over the city, just waking up. There are gingerbread houses and Dr. Seuss trees. There is silence and birds and just my own self huffing and puffing. And so often, so often, I think of me here running and it feels ridiculous: Me, a dyed-in-the-wool running hater. It’s like I’d been one religion and switched. I’d recreated myself, in my own stealth, middle-aged, unremarkable way.

For my last birthday, my friend Kim – who has also had a recent born-again fitness experience, thanks to her very ripped goddess  personal trainer Kelly (who writes about getting in touch with “your inner baddass”)– gave me an IPOD Nano with hours of running music. Kim felt sorry for me because I told her when I would run with my IPOD, more often than not “Elmo’s Song” would come on, because it mostly had Molly’s favorite songs on it. God bless good friends.

Through See Jane Run, this fantastic women’s running store down the street, I’m now training for a half marathon, which really, isn’t that much, when compared to most serious runners. But compared to me, it’s something.

“Mama, when are we going to the zoo?”

“Tomorrow sweetie.”

“Is it tomorrow right now?”

“No, it’s today. When today is over, then it will be tomorrow.”

Then next day (a.k.a. tomorrow) Molly will wake up to find she’s the star in her own little Groundhog’s Day movie, and say, “Mama, is it tomorrow?”

“No, love, when today is over it will be tomorrow.”

I can see her sitting there thinking: But big head, you said it would be tomorrow today. Because none of it makes sense, she starts crying. “But I wanted to go to the zoo tomorrow!”

“We are going to the zoo,” I say, as if to reassure her. “Tomorrow is today.” Oh yeah, thanks for explaining things Mom!

Time, for children, time is such a tricky concept. As we grow older, we learn to conform to this artificial construct — time — even though it trips us up for years. We have to figure out what “Just a second” and “In a minute” really means (what we figure out is time is relative, depending on who is saying it), and how eternal a Sunday morning is when it’s just as long as any other morning. Then, as we enter our twenties, we learn that time is no longer this vast, sprawling thing, but as the older we get, the more it speeds by.

When Sam was just about Molly’s age, he very cleverly came up with his own word that perfectly sums up anything in the past: Lasterday.  Lasterday could be a few hours ago, yesterday, a week ago, a year . . . anywhere in that murky territory of time that is particularly vague when you are three and — unlike grown-ups who resort to meditating so we can, usually futilely, try to being in the moment — every thing is in the moment. Unless it’s tomorrow. Today.

“No, love, a wizard can’t turn you into a boy,” I say. “You are a girl. That’s what you are. That’s all you can be.”  It’s one of those things a parent says that has no logic, and that has an edge of cruelty to it.

True, a wizard can’t turn her into a boy. But in her three-year-old world, why not? Why can’t a wizard turn her into a boy? Of course he could. Every day, a wizard turns my daughter into a rabbit, a frog, a dog. Wouldn’t a boy be half as easy? Tears are puddling and about to spill over the edges of her lovely blue eyes.

It’s the same look she had, that on the brink of despair look, when last week I finished singing, “On Top Of Spaghetti” and I had to spend fifteen minutes reassuring her that that original meatball that had rolled out the door was okay, it wasn’t dead. “Wh-wh-what happened to the meatball?” she asks, her voice shaky. Well, sweetie, yes, it turned into mush, but then it turned back into a meatball, so everything is okay. Her lip is quivering, eyes still watering. Wait, wait, there’s more! It gets better. That meatball that landed in the garden grew into a meatball tree and grew hundreds of wonderful little meatballs just like it. So everything is okay. The meatball is better than okay!

Why can’t I be so generous in my lies with this new question?

“But I want to be a boy,” she says, her voice shaky, and I know we’re heading towards a meltdown, a meltdown over the impossibility of getting a gender change at age three. It’s all become very important this past month: Who has a vagina, who has a penis. Of course, because she is three and so has pretty much no boundary issues, she feels compelled to review who has which equipment no matter who, what, or when: at the Whole Foods check-out line, to our neighborhood librarian, or to her wonderful godmother, to which she says as part announcement, part query: “You have a vagina.” And just as further proof of how wonderful she is, Molly’s godmother didn’t blink or laugh in that icky way adults do when a child says something inappropriate. She just said, with the enthusiasm of a new campaign slogan, “Yes, Molly,  I do have a vagina!” (I imagine a chorus of newly empowered, unembarrassed vaginas chanting, “Yes. We. Can!”)

I start reading too much into her question: What if my little girl feels like a boy trapped in a girl’s body? This will be her burden to bear throughout life. But why do I care? I live in San Francisco, a half mile from Castro and Market, where Sean Penn playing Harvey Milk made his famous “I am angry” speech. There’s an enormous, multi-million center for Lesbian, Gay, and Transgender individuals not far away from where we live. I know a couple transgender people, and here I am, getting uptight about a comment that may, or may not, mean anything for my tiny little girl. You’d think I’d be down with whatever, or whoever, she wants to be, thinks she is.

Steve is completely unfazed and, I think , surprised that I was bothered by Molly’s question. “It’s a normal thing to say at this age,” he says. Oh really? And how many parenting books have you read in the last ten years, I want to say? But what’s most infuriating is that even though the answer is “zero,” Steve’s right. It is normal at her age to be sorting out girl from boy, vagina from penis, pink from blue.

And even if for some reason she does grow up wanting to be a boy and finally becomes one, adds Steve, who has morphed before my eyes into Dr. Sears, then we’ll love her and hope she is happy.

Now…what was it that I was worried about?

My friend Gail send me this funny and honest piece by Lisa Belkin at nytimes.com on why, sometimes, a harshly spoken word may not be that bad. Belkin makes a good case.  Kids need to know that anger is an acceptable emotion, as long as its not abusive.

But I still contend (and as perfect a mother as I vowed to be, woe is me, I’ve had my tantrums) that children shouldn’t be yelled at and this doesn’t make kids behave. It makes them cower. Or retreat. Or rebel.

They get other people to do and say things they later regret. (Or as Joan Didion said: “That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”)

Not only did I voluntarily become the sacrificial New Age lamb, tiptoeing and tromping in front of the camera for French TV, I felt up a tree…blindfolded. I asked a flower’s permission if I could connect with it before rubbing it’s felty leaves. I stood alongside a woman named Hyacinthe and a man named Sunbeam and consented to renaming myself Sparrow.

Hello France! Watch the daffy Californian engage in a nefarious New Age ritual. How did I — a journalist, who, I repeat, should know better — fall so far so fast?

I’ll tell you why.

About a year and a half ago I wrote a feature for San Francisco Magazine on eco-anxiety. Yes, it seems crazy that I — Madame Neuroticmama  –  would be anxious about anything! (Ha ha ha.) But thanks be to Gore, who went all eco-Cassandra on us, ruining the pleasure of all these balmy San Francisco February days we’ve now accepted as normal, I found myself frequently waking up in terror about this inconvenient end of the world (and somehow, a man-made apocalypse is inconvenient…’cause if we had just been more conscious and less consumeristic and piggish and thoughtless, our children’s children would still know what it is to have snow in winter). It would be an ending that — I wonder if this is worse than nuclear devastation, which is as brutal as it is quick — wouldn’t end quickly.

It would be more of an excruciating, heart-breaking, fast-melting, slow-burning, environmental apocalypse.

One thing led to another.

A French reporter who wanted to do a story on eco-psychology couldn’t find many  eco-neurotics in California who were willing to go on film. So, why not. I volunteered myself to be France’s poster girl for American eco-neurosis. After all, I’m happy to be open about my anxieties since the very reason I wrote the article is because I have been so freaked out about the planet and wanted to know a) Were others as freaked out as I was? b) I they weren’t, why the hell not? How they couldn’t possibly be besides themselves with the terribleness of it all and how can they live with themselves as they idle in their Land Rover in the carpool lane?

That’s why I write most articles. I want to know: it just me, or is there something going on that wasn’t before? Or again, to conjure up the great Didion: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Is everyone else as afraid for the world as I am?

So there I am last Saturday, having consented to Monsieur French Journalist to be filmed attending a workshop in Golden Gate Park on how to reconnect with nature.

The idea is that so many of us urban dwellers, who live most the sunny hours of our days cubicle-bound and fluorescent-lit, are so disconnected from the natural world that we can’t feel part of it. If you separate yourself from anything — a tree, a person — then you don’t care so much. And if you don’t care as much, then it’s not so sad a thing if that weeping willow is later milled as paper for your derriere.

This seminar, a group of about eight middle-aged white people, was to help us bridge that rift. To once again go back to the garden — yes, that garden — before there were cell phones and  Cinnabun (TM) franchises. To be alive and aware as one who is part of nature rather than another of some 6-billion hapless onlookers who are either helplessly (gotta drive to work, gotta feed the kids) participating in its devastation or a  heartless butcher of its bounty. (Stay with me here. This gets cheerier in the next paragraph.)

Sure, I make fun of the New Agey-ness of it because I felt self-conscious being so predictably Californian, so touchy-feely with the lawn. But here’s the thing. After 2.5 hours of consciously communing with the natural world, I came away feeling connected and softer and less in free-fall despair out about our planet. Maybe somewhere in the Amazon they’re burning down a football field’s worth of rain forests an hour. But I realized in that afternoon, in a moment while I looked without distraction at this one noble, big-barked tree, that the world might be burning up and melting and falling into the sea.

At least, though, there is this one tree in front of me. And I loved it and touched it and felt, for that moment, at peace with the world. It’s been so long that I’ve felt anything but very, very nervous. I mean, come on, the Boy Scouts sold thousands of acres of preserved wilderness to developers. Next thing you know, the Sierra Club will be clubbing seals.

The reporter asked me something to the effect of, “Will this solve the world’s environmental woes if we all hugged trees?”

“Of course not,” I sort of laughed, embarrassed. We need legislation. We need bold steps. But it doesn’t hurt, the hug, that is.

I know it’s so retro. So earnest. So seventies to be hugging a tree. It’s the environmental equivalent of the original and  icky and all-too-hirsute Joy of Sex. So the hell what.

Come on, just try it. Hug him. Or go ahead and stroke him in a very suggestive way. (So much better to feel up a tree then to fell it.) Because after that, you’ll never look at your new wooden deck in quite the same way.

Finally, I think, I am unburdened. I have time to myself. I can get to the articles I have to write. I can wash the dirty breakfast dishes (let’s just say standards for fun change after children) and sweep the kitchen floor. I take a shower and talk on the phone uninterrupted and eat the fancy chocolate I’ve hidden in the freezer.

This morning, I found a little plastic pig Molly had left on the bathroom sink. That pig made me so sad, made me miss her so much, because suddenly I could picture her being so busy with that pig, washing it and talking to it and then getting distracted by something else she needs to do right now! (Put a clump of Silly Putty in a glass of water, cook a pile of snakes on her toy oven. . .)

I walked around the house, doing my morning post-child clean-up, and after the pig had caught me off-guard, I noticed other physical echoes of my children. The arm from a pirate pinata Sam had brought home after a party this week-end. The deflated Trader Joe’s balloon Molly had me tie on the tricycle she rides around the house, faster and faster these days.  Sam’s pajamas that he left, as usual, on his bedroom floor, and the pile of BB gun pellets he’d emptied out the night before, excitedly telling me how he’d found them on the AstroTurf at soccer practice.

Usually, I’m so obsessed with getting the house clean before I get to my work. But today, I left the things where Sam and Molly had left them. The house became the Historical Museum of Sam and Molly. This is just how the house looked on February 4, 2009, when Sam was 11 and Molly was 3.

All these still-lifes are so loaded with my children, and seeing these things now inert, lifeless without the life Sam and Molly breath into them, well, today it hit me: There’s life with my children, and sometimes, no often, it’s more than I want — too many demands, too many tears and conflicts and needs and talking, talking, talking, and just too much life.

But how can you have too much life?

Tomorrow, I’m sure, I’ll forget that you can’t. But at least for today, I got it.