The idea behind The Stardust Journal came from a retreat. It was at Menla a retreat center in Phonecia, NY, which is a neighboring town of Woodstock's. I went there to attend a yoga workshop title "Becoming." It was the ending of one chapter of my life and the begining of another. Lanie, one of the two leaders of the workshop spoke about the idea that we were "souls having a human experience." It was comforting to me having lost my soul mate of almost five decades that the time we spent together was her human experience and she was now off having a new experience.

As I was sitting on cushions in a circle with 12 strangers I thought of Joni Mitchells song Woodstock "We are stardust, we are golden, We are billion year old carbon, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden." I began thinking of us in terms of souls wrapped in dust of stars that all things are made of. We are all using and reusing matter created in the Big Bang.

There are so many different places to begin this story and There were "incidents and accidents There were hints and allegations" along the way as Paul Simon mentioned in "You Can Call Me Al"

By the end of the retreat I had made friends with at least half of the participants and am still in touch with them. Stacey was the other leader of the retreat. She led our yoga practice, created a sound bath and participated or co-led the exercises we did to explore "Becoming"