Moving to Ananda

I just signed the papers yesterday to move into an apartment at the Ananda community in Mountain View. I'll be doing the actual move in late September, and I'm greatly looking forward to it.

I'd been vaguely wanting to move to the community for a while now, especially after spending two weeks at Ananda Village, the original Ananda community, for the Living with Spirit retreat. But I hadn't let myself get too attached to the idea, since I didn't think I could justify raising my rent as much as I thought I had to. Then last week I found out that there's a "junior one-bedroom" apartment there with almost exactly the same rent as I'm paying now. So I just tossed the excuses out the window and went for it.

Since the apartment is a "junior," I'll have about 1/3 less space than I do now. But I don't really need all the space I currently have, and there's a bunch of stuff I've been wanting to get rid of, rearrange, and/or simplify anyway. So I think it'll be a fun challenge to find a way to fit well in there.

And it's a nice little apartment, in spite of being small. It has a lovely fenced-in patio, with space for all my potted plants, and even some actual dirt to plant things in. (And of course there's the community garden I can play with, too.) It's probably one of the sunniest apartments in a complex with lots of big, shady trees, so that's sort of the best of both worlds in that department. And I think it's literally the closest apartment to the meditation temple, which is just a very nice place to be.

Add to all that the fact that I'll get to live in a beautiful community with a spiritual family of wonderful people, and I think this will be a very good move. "Ananda" means "Joy" in Sanskrit, so as we say at the end of service every week, "I will live in joy!" (Literally!)