Maitri's Heart

Catching Up Here On My Heart Blog About Life At Dragonfly Cottage...

2012-01-29T15:32:00.016-05:00

First of all it's best I introduce you to Phinneas and Mortimer lest they will never stop hollering and carrying on the whole time I write this entry...

Dear Ones,

You must wonder by now if I'm ever going to do anything but write about other people and send a whole bunch of collages over to this blog. Well, I loved doing all of that but I am getting things back into balance a bit. You will still see the collages as they arrive because I just love them and want to share them with you. There will be long entries of an arty nature with the collages on the other blog, but just sharing the collages themselves are sharing an important aspect of my life as it evolves in these fast moving days of explosive creativity, the likes of which I have not experienced for long time... (15 years?)

I have had help in the Magic Ship Garden from pugs and mermaids and gnomes and fairies and the little people and a dear soul who helped plant over 500 daffodils last weekend. The above is the picture from Holland Bulb Farms of the mix I got in bulk in November at a close-out price of nearly 1/4 of the regular price. They will naturalize and that 500 will be thousands one day...

One of the reasons I've been slow to get here is that tiny Penny pug has taken to wanting to be on my person, hanging on to me like a baby koala bear, making typing go slowly and some of the words that come out as I type, pug on person, are absolutely hysterical and part of no language I'VE ever heard of. But I think she really does resemble a baby koala bear here...

And then there was the sad tale of the paper whites, heart-breaking but whattayagonnado?

Ever since I was a young married woman I have potted up bulbs galore before Christmas to be "forced" inside over the winter. I have planted many kinds of bulbs but always LOTS of paper whites and the fragrance wafting through the house is one of the most glorious scents in the world to me. I planted well more than 50 altogether this year in three pots.

However...

Just as they were reaching their glory with tons more blooms than you see above, my very best and dearest friend in the world who is here every single week came in asking what that horrendous smell was and I couldn't imagine what he was talking about and he pushed his nose into the paper whites and consequently had such a horrendous allergic reaction he was sick for days and had to go to the doctor for some pretty heavy duty medicine. I felt so awful, and, as I carried all of my paper whites out onto the deck where I can at least sort of see them from my work table here, I was absolutely bereft. I had to open up all the windows in the house and air it out for a day or two before it was safe for him to come back, and I thought what a cruel twist of fate it was that for one person, whom I love dearly, but is only here once a week, I wouldn't be able to have my beloved paper whites in my studio at all. I've been so depressed by it all. I know in the whole scheme of things this is peanuts, but it has been important to me for nearly 40 years. Has anyone out there experienced this or have any suggestions?

And the fall was all about redoing my kitchen and it now looks, in one person's words who came in, "like a dollhouse." I will get some pictures up very soon, I swear, but every time I think of taking them, like now, there are an unseemly amount of dirty dishes in the sink with cluttered counters and, well, it kind of takes the doll-housy effect and smashes it to smithereens! But, as everything was white, white, white in my kitchen, all of the cupboards were painted French Blue and Sun Yellow, new big cabinets built to attach to an old 1930's cabinet that was completely falling apart and had to be restored and a whole new back put on (I am NOT one for painting old furniture other than cleaning and polishing it up, but this charming cabinet was nearly past repair) and a long L-shaped open cabinet was attached to it and then they were painted French Blue and a salmon orange. They butt up against the huge old worn wooden vintage booth I bought when I moved in that at some point had been painted blue, orange and a bit of yellow and it looks so great together! There were also narrow shelves put up all the way around the kitchen over the kitchen cabinets, stove and refrigerator up high that now are full of my vintage teapots and teacups and vintage what-nots and I must say it is positively charming. (Oh, and did I forget to say that the refrigerator and front of the dishwasher were painted persimmon orange? Ahem.)

Besides all of the above (and I got a little video camera so I can do a walkabout inside and out and show you more of the cottage and garden, as soon as I figure out how to work it. I'm still confused by the remote control. I admit it, I'm a luddite living in an electronic digital world and sometimes just dog-paddling in the stream of all of this technology!), I took one look around and got "that look" in my eyes. The guys who helped me said, "Oh no, what is she thinking up now?" I looked at them and said, (My poor dear proper mother is turning over in her grave as I write this.) "I think I'd like the ceiling painted a, oh, yes, that's it! A pistachio green!" (There are bits of green in the design in the kitchen too and it matches.) And they looked at me and said, "But it's all one... oh you're kidding (I nodded No...) you want the whole ceiling in both rooms painted pistachio green? I glowed from ear to ear with childlike delight, and the ceilings that were all one were painted green ANDDDD it was Christmas time so as lights were aplenty and on sale cheap it was getting so late, I got lots of lights. My Christmas tree glowed a gorgeous blue, and I had -- wait for it -- a mega-ton of tiny green Christmas lights strung all around the ceiling in the kitchen and cozy room. It is so gorgeous, I just cannot tell you, glowing against the soft green ceiling, and they will stay up all the time. The Christmas tree is gone but the magic is still here. I lay curled up at night with the pugs and all the lights out and the room is aglow with a beautiful sea of twinkling green and it just leaves me breathless.

The guys said, "Nobody in Wilmington is gonna have a house like this." I said, "Nobody in the world will probably be daft enough to do this!" Now I am in the process of having the old thin raggedy carpet taken out of the cozy room and my big studio with windows all the way around onto the woods and garden, and vinyl tiles put down. Not only does the carpet look bad, but when you take in several rescue pugs at once, lets just say it gets "fragrant" in here, soaks into the pad under the carpet, and even after steam cleaning it still smells and really isn't healthy. So the tiles are a bright sunny yellow with little speckles and between that yellow floor and the green ceiling that pine paneled room will be brightened up NO END! This is not to mention that my studio has pomegranate walls and a sky blue ceiling and wooden shelving put in all the way around the room up high and white LED lights were put all the way around the room tacked along the edge of the shelves. Somewhat unfortunately they are a little, well, LARGE for the effect I'd planned (but they are LED, cheap to run, and cool to the touch always...) but it kind of looks like Vegas in here. And just imagine that bright yellow floor, the pomegranate walls, the blue ceiling, the white Vegas lights, and oh, to soften the lighting I'm going to get little Christmas lights from a place you can get them year round that will be hung up and strung hanging between the bigger white lights.That will soften the look and bring more color in (Just when you thought I had too much already! Ha! Never!) This place has them in cool colors like pink and purple. Now just what color do you think I'll choose in here? Ha ha ha. You'll have to wait and see.

Okay, I know you can't stand it. Betwixt and between the white lights that go all the way around the room up high will be PINK lights (They look big here but these are mini Christmas lights...) ~~~

And ~~~~~ TA DA!!!!!!

I found the most amazing little 7.5" "Starlight Globes" with 100 lights each that are PURPLE and they will hang on the underside of the shelving, just over my old, old roll-top desk looking out onto the patio. They will be centered along the desk top length, spaced out to fit the outer window edges and wooden piece in the middle that separates the 2 windows. It will be positive DAZZLING in here at night when I'm working. Talk about inspiration!!!! Here are the purple starlight globes...

So now, while I wait for the lights and the flooring to come, I am sitting here in a sea of garden catalogs and books and planning the spring seed order. Oh, what fun! There were be plenty of vegetables, lots of herbs and tons of flowers. I am primarily an heirloom, cottage garden gardener, but this one will be growing in a very unusual arty setting which is ONLY getting started! I look and scrounge around and hunt out things from junk places, sides of the road, and just about anywhere for old, worn down, and charming things to put in the garden and it will definitely be an artist's garden. These are some of the "bones" of the garden which you won't be able to appreciate until mid-summer when the garden is lush with things growing in wild abandon. I'll show you a few things and then better let you be lest you nod off and fall into your computer somewhere along the line...

The pink picket fence garden which needs to be a shade garden and will be worked on in a vast planting with things like hostas, bleeding hearts in pink and white and all manner of things. Those big pots have a beautiful pink mandevilla in both, light pink, not in bloom when I took these pictures mid November. Mandevilla is perennial here so they will come back and right now there are pots of daffodil bulbs sprouting on either side...

Albert, our mascot for "Loop-de-Loop Productions." He hangs from
a white plastic chain and flys through the air. (Well, I mean you HAVE
to have a fish in a garden with a Magic Ship towering over the whole
thing.)

The Magic Ship which I'm sure most of you have seen before. It came with the house but was in ghastly shape. Greying, rotted boards, things falling apart. Of course I had it restored by the above-mentioned fellas of mine, and once all restored and the staircase built up to it they said, (They didn't know me well then. They soon got to!), "Do you want to paint it?" "Oh Yea." What color?" Ahem. "Pink, purple and orange." After they nearly fell off the ship in shock, realized I was serious, and got to painting it they started having great fun. Since they've gotten to know me these last 2 years nothing surprises them! And it's a good thing because...

.
I had them paint the old beat up corrugated metal shed lime pink and bright cherry pink. By now nothing was going to surprise them, and they are my fellas whom I can count on to work miracles around here for me at prices I can afford and we all have such fun together!

There's just SO much more I want to show you, but I believe I've run out of time and space and I hope you haven't nodded off. You still need to see the OLD wooden mantelpiece that is nailed to the 6' high privacy fence. That whole area will be charming. And the area with, so far, a long table, full of oversized teacups, and a lopsided bright green picture frame hanging on the fence over the table that is the beginning of a garden area that will be an homage to "The Mad Hatter's Tea Party." And there's a whole new bright green picket fence area for a cottage garden that gets sun with the fence built to protect from the pugs who will, en masse, pee on anything that looks like it might want to grow, and there's the Magic Village just started with glass houses with roses and pansies growing in them (roofs are open front and back for air and rain), with gnomes, Buddha, dragonflies and more, and a very old rattan lamp with all the electrical wiring taken out bolted to the shed above for an old fashioned rose that will end up growing all over the building and will start growing up the lamp! Here, okay, just a couple of pictures, and remember that you are looking at the bones of the garden in winter so it looks pretty barren....

Oh, and there's just so much more...

Gardening goes on year round here at Dragonfly Cottage because between the planting, the growing season and tending of it all, things like putting in thirty roses grown from babies this year, I am on the hunt for the arty things to form the bones for garden interest.

One of the areas where roses are started from tiny little slips of things, or bands, own root and most heirloom. These were big enough that they were planted in the ground soon after, and now 18 more roses are wintering over in 4 of the above planters and all manner of pots. Life is never dull at Dragonfly Cottage!

I Am Finding What I Truly Want and Need For My Life Pasting Pictures and Words On To Little Boxes...

2012-01-27T20:13:00.007-05:00

“You can find whatever you're looking for, so decide what you're looking for.”

~*~ Seth Eisenberg ~*~

(Click on the above collage to go to it's entry on the
"Making The Wild Dreambook" blog.)

Greetings Dear Ones...

There's a famous quote, "I don't know what I think till I see what I say," by Wallace Stegner, that is the perfect explanation of what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. I am at a crossroads in my life and I am designing my own map, or path, into the future by sorting out what is really important to me, finding out what my gifts and talents really are, and making concrete steps into the future as a productive, creative, whole woman. I don't need to follow the yellow brick road. I need to BUILD it! Phew, it's been quite a job and seemed hopeless, until...

One day, for no apparent reason, I just let what was in me fly out onto the paper any old way it wanted to, and what emerged was a vast array of words and pictures, obscure images and quotes, inotherwords a collage, and I had no plan or clue where I was going. When I got finished I looked at it so startled my bloomers nearly fell off! All of my thoughts and dreams, hopes and wishes, and the first of many tiny inklings of what it all might mean were there in that little collage before me, and that night I started the website, "Maitri's Wild Mad Enormous Dreambook," and created my own little company, "Loop-de-Loop Productions" because I knew that I had found exactly what I needed. All of my work had been flying in a million different directions. I needed a receptacle to hold them all and that night I found it. I was amazed.

To blog and create and sell my art, to write and publish my books, to teach and do phone counseling and support other women and create a community for Crones, we women past the mid-point in our lives when we are finding out who really are, have become, and what we have to offer now and how we might go about using these gifts and talents to make our way in the world and earn an income and find the support we need. And so much more. That first little collage has birthed a website, a blog, a production company, a small press and there is so much more to come.

What I want most of all to say to you is that you shouldn't be afraid to dream big dreams, you just need to take that dream and then find a way to make them into reality. I'm learning a lot from Goddess Leonie, a young woman I've known for a decade and have watched in wonder because thirty years younger than I she has done what I had not been able to do. I had been writing and publishing and making art and teaching and doing many of the things she does, in my own way, but I could never make a BUSINESS out of it. Leonie has taken her talents and dreams and created a six figure income. I'm about to take her course starting Feb. 1, "Becoming A Business Goddess eCourse" because she amazingly shares how she did what she did down to the tiniest details and includes things that most successful people would never share. She is so amazing not only in her multitude of talents but in her ability to carry through and make a successful business for her family, when so many of us have big dreams but can never find a way to take them into reality and become successful at what we're doing in a way that we can support ourselves doing what we truly love. Leonie did it, and I'm so anxious to learn from her. I'd love it if some of you would jump aboard and share the journey with me. As I wrote on the other blog, life is finite, not infinite. What are we waiting for? Me, I'm not waiting any more!

And so I work every day, producing SOMEthing. I am kind to myself and allow a certain amount of spaciousness around the work as long as I do something every day and just keep moving forward. By the beginning of next year my first book will be out and I will have an income-producing, joy-filled website. In the wonderful movie "Field of Dreams," the message came, "If you build it, they will come." I think most of us don't believe that so we don't try. Well, I'm trying, no, not trying, I'm doing it every day of my life now, one yellow brick at a time! It feels SO good. So come on over to the other blog, jump in and you can share too. Right now I'm working on my list of 33 (Yes, 33, gotta get all 33) gifts and talents that I can use to take me into the future, to realizing the dream and make it into a reality. So women, if you would like to make a list and share it with me, please do, and I'll gladly put it up on the blog with that entry. We are here to help one another and the more we help others the more that energy circles around back to us. Would you like to start building your own yellow brick road? If so, come with me now, we needn't be alone on this journey!

Up, Up & Away!!!

Letting Go Of The Past, Celebrating The Present, Slowing Down and Letting Yourself Experience A Beautiful Transformation In It's Own Perfect Time...

2012-01-24T08:50:00.000-05:00

Dear Ones,

I will have this blog updated with it's own entry in the next day or two (slow, slow, slow, allow things to come to fruition in their own time...) as I take the lessons I have been learning as expressed in the collage above and follow my heart with my art and in my life. It is an amazing time of transformation and growth and an explosion of creativity in many areas which I will share with you in the next entry. If you click the collage above you will be taken to the Wild Mad Enormous Dreambook site and you can read the new entry on the blog there that goes with the above collage. In creating these collages I am learning so much about myself, who I am and what I am meant to be and do in the world, and celebrate with joy all that I have learned and all the lessons and wondrous joys and surprises to come. I hope you'll follow the other blog too. It's lots of fun and it will be the place where I will publish my books and sell my art and allow all areas of my creative life to find expression.

This blog is truly my heart-blog, my personal journal of my life's inner and outer journey and I cherish it and will keep it up as I always have. In balancing the two I balance the two sides of myself that both need expression, and that helps me have a more peaceful life with far greater equanimity than I have been able to muster in these last years. You cannot cut off any part of your life and expect to find balance and happiness. I am learning so much just now and I can't wait to share my thoughts and feelings with you in a lengthy post coming very shortly.

Blessings and Love to Each and Every One of You...

A New BIG Collage and Blog Entry Over At My Wild, Mad, ENORMOUS Dreambook Site ~ Take a Peek!

2012-01-21T20:07:00.001-05:00

Just click on the collage below...

(It's bigger on the site/blog!)

When you get to the main page just click on the blog link ~ "Making The Wild Book Blog!" I'm having such fun with this!

Blessings to one and all!

This is something I don't ever do but I just have to, just this once... Say hello to Goddess Leonie Dawson!

2012-01-09T12:23:00.000-05:00

Dear Ones,

Ten years ago I met the most sparkling, radiant soul I'd ever met. We became friends on SARK's community board and I watched her glow and grow. At 22 she self-published her first book, all hand done, and glorious, called Today I Grew Like A Wildflower. I immediately ordered it and cherished it and always keep it near me. If you need to be cheered up, you need Leonie. She has another book out this year which I've almost finished and love.

We did a barter and she took my on-line journal course in exchange for creating a logo for me:

I've been going slowly reading this new book because I am learning so much, you know, the kind of book you highlight, parenthesize, make notes in the margins, that kind of thing. She is helping me to move mountains of fears out of my life, fears that I never thought I could release, and she has given me the courage to follow my dreams, one very long held that you will be hearing about soon. And she hit one particular fear so head on it knocked the breath out of me, and it has changed my life! You can order this new and wondrous book of Leonie's at amazon and here's a link. I am not an amazon affiliate, I just want to share this glorious miraculous book!

Visit here which will take you to amazon

for one of those crazy wonderful things

where you can see inside a book and you

will really see what it looks like and how

magical it is!

Leonie has not just made wonderful art and written books, she has connected a (non-denominational) "Goddess Tribe" of women who are the most loving supportive women you will ever meet in a wide variety of groups offering more than you could imagine possible, and her e-courses have rocked people's world, most especially mine. The one that is helping me now because I have had plans and dreams and worked for decades giving much of what I made away for free (a woman's insecurities, all too often) or making very little money, I will be 58 in April and I have to be able to use my skill and talents and love and dreams to create an actual business. Leonie has created such a course and I'm here to tell you she is totally, well, almost shockingly honest about how she created every little asset of her business and how you can too. I mean she gives so much away I don't know another person in the world that has ever done anything like this. After years of not making money, by gosh and by golly, I'm working this course to make it happen. And I will. Leonie has told me, us, all in her knock your socks off class, her business course ...

Her work is so incredible that I am dedicating this year to re-taking the courses I've already taken and working with her newer materials and becoming more active in the Goddess Circle, the "Tribe" for the support I really need. I have needed this badly and as I am very shy and barely leave the house this gives me the opportunity to learn and do everything I need to do from the comfort of my own home.

And...

Even more wondrous than that, Leonie offers something unbelievably gorgeous and incredible. The value of all of her courses would be close to $1000. For $99 a year when you join the wonderful, supportive Goddess Circle. You can get ALL of her courses and materials for FREE and whatever else new she creates during the year. This is the most amazing thing I have ever had and it's worth well more than $1000 and I've taken a number of her courses and I'm here to tell you that they are so fabulous it's just an amazing deal!

I do not write these kind of posts and I do not promote other people's products, but Leonie's work has so changed my life and I am over the MOON about my new project, made possible by all I've learned from her so far, that I just could not NOT share.

Here's the amazing Goddess Circle. Just click on the link and find out more!

Finally, I am downloading the most spectacular thing to see me through this year. Lives have been changed in ENORMOUS ways but using the Guidebook for the year. Women have made a list of things they wanted to accomplish and looked back at the end of the year and accomplished every one! And it's not just one or two woman, a great many women are saying this! So I am taking my downloaded book to the printer to make my copy and have it bound with the plastic ring binding. I want to carry it with me wherever I go. You get a glorious calendar too.

Finally, if you think I can't be so over the top excited about this, enough to break all of my rules I have had for a decade and more of several different blogs and never taken advertising or promoted anyone -- and I've taken this very seriously -- you must know how dear and important this is to me, and I'm so excited I want the world to know about Leonie's work because she is like no one you will ever meet in your life. I will end with her amazing story...

"Goddess Leonie Dawson is the creator of GoddessGuideBook.com, one of the longest running creativity, spirituality & business blogs on the web.

Leonie is a writer, blogger, retreat leader, globe-trotter, visual artist, mama, and vessel of wild creativity & sage guidance for the 20,000 Goddesses who orbit around her virtual altar each month. Her strategic musings & practical wisdom have been featured on Problogger, Tiny Buddha, spirituality magazines like Goddess, Spellcraft, Life Images and Spheres, and in three of SARK’s best-selling books on creative fulfillment & freedom.

Purposeful, passionate & unendingly prolific, Goddess Leonie published her first book at 22, held her first art show at 23, began leading women’s circles at 23, created her first retreat at 25, launched the Goddess Circle — a subscription-based women’s community for creatives of every color — at 27, and has guided 4,000 women through transformational Circle experiences over the past 3 years. She’s also released 5 e-courses — including her signature workshop for entrepreneurs, Become A Business Goddess — 4 meditation kits and 2 workbooks into the digital ether, building a multiple six-figure business in the process.

Leonie has walked labyrinths in the moonlight, wept atop mountains in the middle of a storm, danced with a baby in an old cow shed as a Filipino tribal chief sang, and once married herself in a public commitment ceremony — witnessed by goddess maidens of honor that she’d met on the Internet.

No stranger to praise, applause & offerings of gratitude, Goddess Leonie has been called an “illuminated creator,” “inspiring, wise and oh-so-talented,” a “healer, guide and sacred teacher” — and she’s here to help you bring your soul-stirring dream into reality, and become the Goddess you were born to be."

There's nothing more I can add to that, except click the links above, or below at the bottom of this blog to read about more of her works (I couldn't even fit them all!) and join with me on a life-changing year. It's going to be the most important thing I've ever done for myself in my life...

Blessings, Love & Joy to one and all...

Another Goal For The New Year, Living Small...

2012-01-02T09:53:00.000-05:00

From A. A. Milne's "The Te Of Piglet":

"Heavenly Power at work in the natural world (according to Lao-tse) is mostly feminine in its actions. It is gentle, like flowing water. It is humble and generous, like a fertile valley, feeding all who come to it. It is hidden, subtle, and mysterious, like a landscape glimpsed through mist. It takes no sides, grants no authority. It cannot be influenced or appeased by sacrifices and rituals. In dispensing justice, as in all things, it operates with a light touch, an invisible hand. As Lao-tse put it, “Heaven’s net has wide meshes, but nothing slips through.” Shying away from displays of arrogance and egotism, it communicates its deepest secrets not to high government officials, pompous scholars, or wealthy landowners, but to penniless monks, little children, animals and the “fools.” If it can be said to be biased in any way, it is in favor of the humble, the weak, the small..."

My goal, this year, is to live and be very small, and I believe I will find greater joy than I have ever known...

Bless you all, I love you dearly, and I wish you small, delightful, glorious, peace-full times ahead....

Happy New Year Everyone!!!

2012-01-01T18:15:00.003-05:00

"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best -- " and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called."
~ Winnie The Pooh ~

Isn't that grand? :o) And just think, we are, on this new year's day, at the moment just before the honey appears. And the honey is the whole year ahead! Whatever it's called I just love that!

On The Eve Of The New Year...

2011-12-31T22:59:00.006-05:00

"For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning."

~T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"~

Dear Ones,

We are in the last hours of 2011. My, how fast a year goes. And it is true that things end, a year passes, some things, some people, we will never see again. Some of us will have lost a dear one. Some will have lost jobs. Some will be in such drastically different circumstance at the end of this year that they would not have believed possible at the end of 2010 as the clock neared the near year. But here we are, where we are, on the verge of where we will be. And the one thing we can always count on is change, and as the poet T.S. Eliot so wisely wrote, "To make an end is to make a beginning."

I am not alone in my tradition of spending New Year's Eve taking stock of the past year -- lessons learned, mistakes made, joy experienced, people who have left my life and others who have entered... someone whom I still long for, deeply, who has been gone from my life for a few years, but whom I have learned to carry in my heart and carry on, animal companions who have crossed the Rainbow Bridge and others who have arrived, a book not written, lessons I hoped to learn not yet learned, and joy so great it breaks the bounds of every expectation I might have held, and so much more. -- Yes, an old year is passing and another is about to begin.

I do not regret any of the hard times, or disappointing times, for they have brought me to where I am today and we can never regret who and what and where we are in this moment. We have a whole new year to carry on toward the goals we will set for ourselves, not the typical New Year's resolutions (Does anyone ever keep those?) but the goals we set for ourselves, the ones we feel deep inside even if we have not yet fully acknowledged them. We know what we don't want to repeat, we know what we want more of, we know the changes we want to make and those changes that we have begun to make that we want to settle into more deeply. These things needn't be spoken, we carry them inside like a woman pregnant with a child, these things that are full of potent possibility abundant. I have always, even in my darkest hours, been a glass half full kind of woman, and so I shall always be. I believe my loved one will return, I believe that this year I will finish my book and that it will change my life, I know that there will be roads not yet taken, roads I could never imagine taking that I will indeed take with joy and delight, filled with surprise and wonder, and I know that there will be hard sad times that I'm very glad I cannot foresee. These things, all of these things, are part of the human experience. And so I reflect back over the last year, and feel the excitement of the year to come.

Too, I treasure the present moment and all it holds. I am not out celebrating as many are, I am in my humble home, listening to the washer going and clothes tumbling in the dryer. I am sitting in my desk chair writing with my four beloved pugs all snuggled together on blankets under my feet. My air filter is humming away next to me, and the dogs and I have been out and will go out again and as they wander around the yard and do their business I will look at the garden, barren now, but I see next year's garden in my mind -- vegetables, herbs and flowers -- and one thing I will do this night is order seeds. That feels very significant. There are seeds I can plant and scatter in our warm coastal region teetering back and forth this year between freezing and temperatures in the seventies, because they need to be planted in late fall or winter. I will plant them at the beginning of the New Year, and the spring garden will begin even when I cannot see it. Gardens are an enormous act of faith, as is life. I have faith that this year will be full of so much that will fill me and change me and no matter what comes this time next year I will be grateful for it all. It will not all be easy, there will perhaps be grief and sadness beside joy and wonder, but it is all part of life moving forward. The beginning of the new year will find me planting seeds in my own life, with hope, and faith, and the determination to carry through even when I cannot yet see the results. We are all gardeners in our own lives. Having faith is the key to yielding a good crop. Some things won't sprout and grow, but there will be plenty of things that grow in such abundance it will take my breath away. That is how I see the new year.

This year I am 57. In April I will turn 58. In 2011 I finally hit the tipping point, my menses stopped and I am now in menopause. Many women dread it. I am simply delighted. I am now a crone. I will grow in wisdom and appreciate life more everyday. I can use the wisdom I have gained and that which will come to help those younger ones around me, and in spring I will have another grandchild, another daughter giving birth, a celebration unparalleled. I feel a deep sense of peace as I grow in faith. I embrace the tenets of many faiths and my life is all the richer for it. I am more and more open to the richness and diversity of the world, and my life expands accordingly. I walk around my house doing my daily round of chores whispering "Thank you," over and over again, to God, to all that I hold sacred, to the angels and spirits that companion me on this journey, and I grow more and more filled with gratitude for the smallest things. These are abundant riches for if we can celebrate the smallest things, those things that come along that are bigger than we could ever have imagined send us over the moon, into the cosmos, we can touch the stars.

Tonight I will go out with the dogs and I will reach for the stars, the stars that sparkle in the firmament of my life even though they are still far far away. I am content to wait, because there is so much to do along the way. Everything will unfold as it should, and the very thought of that delights and excites me. I wish you a new year filled with good health, peace, contentment, and all good things that life can bring. I wish you the strength and people to support you lovingly through the hard times. I see so much that is possible for all of us. Let us plant our seeds, and watch our gardens grow.

To the New Year and all it will hold! Let us bow in gratitude for the old year as it passes and open our arms wide for all that the new year will bring. That is how I will say goodbye to the old year and greet the new year ahead. To 2012! To life and all it brings..

A Very Brief Christmas Post From A Very Tiny Girl...

2011-12-14T10:37:00.004-05:00

From Penny Pug and All The Rest Of Us!

Dear Ones, If You Are Sad And Melancholy For Times Past During The Holidays, Make New Memories, Write New Stories...

2011-12-08T20:26:00.001-05:00

“When one door closes another opens. Often we look so long so regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened.”

~ Helen Keller ~

This piece is dedicated to my dearest friend, the woman who is the sister I never had, who once again brought me out of the darkness and into the light with her good counsel. Telling her that I was sad and melancholy, as I become every year during the holidays, stuck in the memories of Christmases past, and how now, divorced, children grown, the hub-bub, excitement, secrets and surprises, decorating the house and more no longer exist. I get up on Christmas morning alone, save my menagerie of animals whom I dearly love, they who make my lives richer, and make me feel loved every day, but still it is not the same.

My dear one said, "Okay, that was then, this is now. You need to write new stories for your life right now. What new rituals can you create, what new delights can you bring into your life that you can do just for you that will create a new narrative for what the holidays can mean for you now?" Of course I am paraphrasing, she said it much better than that, but her point was well taken and set me to thinking. So I am making new rituals, I am dreaming new dreams, I am living in the now, and all of a sudden I am finding myself delighted, joyful, giddy-happy and doing things just for me that I never did before because those around me didn't want to or it wasn't their cup of tea. It all began, about 6 weeks or so ago, with bad plumbing.

I hired the brothers of my best fella friend who do amazingly beautiful work at very fair prices. They fixed the plumbing in both bathrooms and the kitchen. And then we stood in the kitchen and one said, "You know, I could get a used sink that is practically new. It would be $500 new but I can get it for $50 because it was in a new house that the new owners didn't want. It was my dream sink. Old fashioned white porcelain with white handles. A big open sink, deep, and beautiful. I looked and looked at that sink, and it looked so grand that the old worn white speckled counter-top looked drab and everything in the kitchen was painted white, with white appliances, an off-white tile floor, and all circa 1970. I sighed. I had to have some color.

The one thing colorful in my kitchen was the old vintage wooden booth that I had purchased when moving in nearly 2 years ago. Everything I bought for the house, my beloved cottage, was old, used, vintage, cozy, the things that I loved dearly, and I brought some old things with me that I had purchased in years here and there since my divorce. Charming, says everyone who comes in, but it was not yet quite right. Never mind that before I moved in not only every room was painted a different color but every door down the hallway was painted a different color. My studio was painted a bright pomegranate peachy-orange and I had the ceiling painted sky blue. I just love it. When I sit here writing it's like looking up at the sky.

So we three stood in the kitchen with a beautiful new sink. A very, very white kitchen. And they looked at me and laughed and said, "She's got that look in her eyes." They were the dear men who did all the work when I was moving into the house. They painted the life-size Magic Ship purple, orange and pink; an old aluminum shed lime green with a bright pink roof, painted a nicer shed on the other side of the huge fenced back yard the colors matching the ship, and put a picket fence next to it that they painted a bright candy pink. They have just built another picket fence for me, a large one for the garden I will have next summer, a bright green which matches my green shed. More than one person has come into my yard and said it looks like a Dr. Seuss book. I will be taking pictures of my kitchen to share but you can see my color sense in the back-yard work!

The incredible Magic Ship which I had restored and painted when
I moved in. The guys said, after they restored old boards, built the
stairs, and so on, "We suppose you want it painted. What color?"

To which I responded, with a twinkle in my eye, "Purple, pink and
orange." They were about to begin an adventure the likes of which
they'd never had, and they loved it!

Well, you can't have a rickety old aluminum shed right
close to a magic ship so it got painted green and pink. Now
we were on a roll!

And of course there had to be a pink picket fence with
a crookedy purple door...

And then there's a giant fish named Albert who hangs
from a tree and flies through the air. (Well, there's a
Magic Ship for goshsakes. There surely should be a
fish...)

And so the guys that made all this colorful magic happen, even though they couldn't believe they were doing it, were back with me with the pretty white sink, and they knew, they just knew that this kitchen would not stay white. I had been living in a house. I was making it a home. A place of my dreams that I could live in, really live in, and write my new stories and dream my new dreams. So in the last six weeks, the cabinets were all painted yellow and blue, the refrigerator and dishwasher painted a bright orange. A little shelf was built up high all along the wall with the sink and down the side wall to the refrigerator, painted bright yellow with blue trim to match the cabinets, and it is filled with my collection of vintage teapots. An old 1915 cabinet I got really cheaply because it wasn't in good shape and the back was falling off got a new back and sturdied up, and a new cabinet was built in an "L" shape and attached to the old cabinet so the two cabinets make a perfect "L" and go down the wall and fit perfectly behind the big old wooden booth bench. The cabinets were painted sky blue with orange shelves and the "L" shaped cabinet is open so you can see the brightly colored shelves. A new counter-top is a "denim blue" and finally (yes, we're finally getting to Christmas) we needed something to finish it off. The boys got that "Uh-oh" look in their eyes again and waited for my next idea to burst wide open. "What if..." I paused for a second because the kitchen opens down into the little room I call "The Cozy Room", 2 steps down from the kitchen, all open to one another. It is pine panelled all the way around circa 1970 which I love but it is really pretty dark in there because there are no windows in the room.

I looked up. They looked up. The said, "You're kidding, right?" I said, "No, I'm not." They knew that I wanted the ceiling painted and it couldn't just be the kitchen because the kitchen and the cozy room share the same ceiling, so the whole thing got painted a beautiful pistachio green." Yep, a green ceiling. Which leads through a big open doorway to my studio with pomegranate walls, a sky blue ceiling, and windows all the way around. The green looks gorgeous in the kitchen, brightened up the pine-paneled cozy room, and it is really lively looking from the colors in the studio to the cozy room and back again. The guys were getting a big kick out of all of this. The said, "There's not another house like this in this town." I said, "There's likely not another house like this in the world." They laughed and said it suited me. and now here we are, finishing up, three weeks before Christmas. And my Sissie said, "Write new stories for your life to make the holidays bright and cheery and NEW for you." And all of a sudden I realized that's just what I'd been doing from the time that white sink got put in my kitchen. I had flung the doors and the windows wide open and done what I wanted for a change. I was making a dream come true. I have been making a magic house. And the boys said they would stay on and help me with Christmas decorations. We sat and we laughed and we planned.

They know it's hard for me to leave the house so their help was much appreciated. And herein my new Christmas story begins...

"Write new stories for yourself. Do things that delight you..."

Okay, so I wanted a big fresh tree brimming over with blue lights. They went and got the tree and the lights and put it up for me. I didn't have time to be lonely for the holidays. We three were too busy planning and conspiring to think about being lonely. At the end of the days mostly I was just plain tired and fell asleep early on the couch with pugs all over me sleeping and snoring. They were pooped too from all the activity!

I said I really want sparkly lights all around. My studio has always been dark, and they had also built high shelves all the way around the room and floor to ceiling shelves on one wall for my massive amount of books which I've never had anywhere to go with. They got some 70' of white LED lights and put them up all around the room attached to the shelves. Now, ahem, these are not little twinkly lights. They are not as big as the old fashioned Christmas lights but they are, well, biggish compared to the tiny lights I had imagined. But the LED lights are cool and run on very little electricity saving on the power bill and brighten the once dark room up no end. At first I was so startled by the lights I felt like I was in Vegas! But they are so bright and cheerful and really make the colorful room shine so cheerily that you just want to giggle when you see it. And an old, very old ver large mirror (I'm into collecting really old mirrors that are somewhat flawed so cheap!) got hung on the opposite end of the cozy room which -- la di da di da, I am bouncing with delight -- is so big and placed just where the Christmas tree chock full of blue lights reflects all the way into the studio so as I sit here typing and can only see the corner of the tree, but I see the whole thing down across the room reflecting in the mirror. Heavenly days, I am living in a magic cottage and to top it all off a woman came in, took one look at the kitchen and said, "It's like a doll's house!" He he he, that thrilled me to pieces. But it's Christmas now, and I got "that look," in my eyes again. I looked up, the guys looked up, I looked at them, they looked at me, I said, "Wouldn't it just be GRAND to get green twinkly lights and put them all around the ceiling in the kitchen/cozy room! Today the green lights went up and I tell you they are so gorgeous, the bright green lights against the softer pistachio green ceiling that you nearly swoon when you look at them. It's very Christmasy now, but after Christmas when all of the decorations come down, the green lights will remain and the rooms will just be enchanting.

A new Christmas story... Give yourself the gift of living the life you always really wanted to even if it mainly means painting everything wild bright colors (or whatever colors you like... I once saw pictures of a woman who painted her whole entire house bright pink and black and it knocked me right over. I have been looking for her ever since but can't find her. I'd love to see pictures of that pink and black house again...).

I live in an enchanted, magical cottage just made for Christmas. And I am not going to worry about feeling like I have to get gifts I end up spending too much money for, I am going to get things that are wonderful and will be dearly loved and that I love buying and I am not going to stress over it. I have given myself a little cottage filled with wonder and delight, and it has set the stage for writing all new stories for myself all year round.

I would love for you to sit down and write a list of everything that would change your holidays, if they aren't already all that you would dream them to be, things that you can do, and start doing them. And make a list of things for the whole year. And dream big dreams. And stop looking at the closed door and throw all the windows wide open. It's time, for you and me and everyone in the whole wide world.

It all reminds me of a book that I read to my children when they were young. I always remember the lines, "The time has come, the time is now, Marven K. Mooney will you please go NOW!" It's Dr. Seuss of course. Dr. Seuss would have loved my house. And I am over the moon with the very thought of it.

This Christmas will be filled with cheer and joy. I know it will. I'm writing the story right now...

Writing Your Heart's Truth ~ The Thing You Think You Cannot Do...

2011-12-04T17:46:00.000-05:00

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do."

~ Eleanor Roosevelt ~

Writing from my heart...

I've been having a wee bit of trouble with my book, or rather it's been having more than a wee bit of trouble with me. They taunt you, you know. You write your heart out with your stomach kind of going flibbity-jibbity because you know that while you are almost saying what you wanted to say you are somehow skirting the truth because:

a.) You're scared.

b.) What will people think?

c.) What if you offend someone and they don't like you anymore, even if they didn't really know you in the first place, or even more to the point, even if they've always known you and never liked you anyway.

d.) You're scared. But you're pretending like you're not. But it shows, like when your slip hangs down beneath the hem of your skirt and you keep twisting this way and that and trying to yank it up when you think no one is noticing (of course they are) but it always shows anyway. When a writer is scared and doesn't say what she was meant to say, what she knows she should say, that slip is hanging down in neon colors.

Of course there is a solution. You get online. You dilly-dally on Facebook, perhaps throw out a word or three on Twitter. Stare around the room. Play with the pugs. Finally, you decide to write a blog entry because at least its writing. Well, that's what I'm doing anyway. Just get it all out in the open, take the dang slip off, throw it across the room and go back to my book. Yes, this is the tact I've chosen. Is it working? It's too soon to tell, but since I am here doing this and the pugs are running between my knees like 3 little hooligans being boys as boys will and tossing toys and hollering and carrying on, it's at least taking my mind off of the fact that the last thing I wrote sounded so bizarre it terrified me. I thought, "Either no one will buy this book or they will cart me off to the loony bin." As no one has bought one of my numerous books in decades and I've already been in a loony bin (Okay, it was a nice hospital for a month after a nervous breakdown but that counts, doesn't it? I mean my room-mate was having electric shock therapy which scared the hoo-ha out of me.) You see, dark memories come up that you don't know what to do with when you are writing a book.

I've tried the, "Oh, I've had decades of therapy and I'm dealing with my past and I'm so much better I will encourage people by writing about the fact that we can live through trauma and go on to have wonderful lives." thing Well, it's not that that's not true, and it is a message I want to get across, but I wanted to skip over the elephants in the room and not write about the abuse, and all of the things that led up to me being me today, good, bad, wonky and otherwise. All of it had to happen, you see, or I wouldn't be me as I am today and as odd as I do seem to most people I'm quite happy with who I am now. As happy as one can be.

I'm fully aware that you can't stay mucking about in the past and ever live fully in the present, but you also can't deny it or hide it or the full picture can't be appreciated. I can't show you how I've healed and have any impact if I don't tell you the truth about how I was wounded. And not just the abuse. Throw in a little thing, perhaps, like finding your biological mother at 26 simply to find out if there are any medical issues you needed to worry about for your children -- I had a 3 year old and a 6 month old at the time -- and we were very discreet in the search and I swore I didn't want a mother, I had a mother, I simply wanted information for the sake of my children, but she threatened to kill me, tried to sue me, and, well, let's just say it wasn't the storybook ending that adopted children long for when they are in that, "If I only found my real mother she would love me and take me away from all of this." Not so much. You know there are things like that that I can throw in, but this is the first time I have ever even mentioned this last part publicly. I am far past the fear and the sorrow, that was more than half my lifetime ago now, I just feel sadness, for her, and for all of our tender gentle wounded selves that soldier on as best we can against a tide of people who on top of whatever we went through are hell-bent on giving us grief about being or not being any and everything they think we should or shouldn't be. No, I'm done with that, and that's why I'm writing this book. I want to help others who have had lives that for whatever reason held them back from the full and satisfying and even glorious life that we can live. Notice, I did not say perfect. There is no perfect, but there is good. We can live a good life. I am.

I must do the thing I thought I couldn't do. Some of it is not pretty. None of it comes from a place of seeking pity, nor because I can't stop wallowing about in it like a pig in the mud because it feels good to have an excuse to hide from life (been there, done that) but I'm a big girl now and if I don't own my past I will never really get over it. I keep inching up to the precipice, looking over it, and running back from my life thinking that surely I can just write a book about gardening or pugs or something that I know a fair amount about and that would be fun, but that's not who I am as a writer and it's not why I'm here. Writing is my spiritual path. There, I've said it. I've written all kinds of things here about my spiritual journeying and everything I've written is true, but if we are going to truly live our path we are sooner or later going to have to have a long dark night of the soul as St. John of the Cross did, and we are going to have to face our demons in our darkest hour. I know to my core that I am meant to live a life of service. I also know that as a borderline agoraphobic that the way I will achieve that is not by going out into the world. There's only one way to do it and it is best summed up in the words of William Butler Yeats in his poem, "A Coat."

"I made myself a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
in walking naked."

I have been trying to write this book for years, fully clothed, hiding the dark places, the lumps and the bumps and the scary, hidden things. And I shall not, now, go into the specific details of the abuse. It isn't necessary, it isn't the kind of writer that I am, I truly am no longer in that place, and yet I, like any other survivor, am marked by it. We don't tell our story without telling our truth. For such a long time, like Yeats, who is one of my most beloved poets for only one poem that I long ago memorized and sing in my sleep as if it is a long ago song from a time when I could really voice my experience and in tears and on my knees offer my humble story to you. I no longer need be on my knees. The tears are long dried. I am healed in so many ways I cannot tell you, and yet I wear the scars of a warrior, but I am a warrior with a tender heart, and the only reason I will tell my story is so that other survivors can know that it is possible to survive, and, in our own way, and in trying to please and appease no other, no matter how much we genuinely love them and care about their feelings, we must be fully who we are, and love as we can, and give what we have to offer, in whatever way that manifests. To try to live otherwise is to never live a full life, never be able to give to the world that which we have to give, never really be able to help others in the way we so dearly wish to do. And so I will go back to my book, and I will tell you my story. I will do the thing I thought I could not do. It is time, and I am ready.

Tonight I will leave you with my favorite poem, the one that lives in my heart and speaks to my feelings more closely than anything else I have ever read. I leave you with these words, I send you my love, and I will return to my pen and paper...

"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams."

~ William Butler Yeats ~

Pull Up A Chair And Let Me Tell You A Story...

2011-11-26T20:17:00.000-05:00

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms."
~ Muriel Rukeyser ~

Maybe it's because I'm finally deep into writing the book that has long been growing inside of me but would not manifest. It is creeping out onto the pages before me and it has found it's form. Like pearls on a necklace these little pieces, or connected stories, make up the whole. Some of them are so close to the precipice that I catch my breath and think, "Can I really say that?" I have been trying to figure out a way to write my story without going into the dark places, not that I intend to dwell on them, and I've healed and moved past them, but I can't tell my story without the dark times because the focus of the story is how we can come out of the darkness and into the light. And no matter how healed we might be, if we have moved past being crippled by the abuse itself in our minds, we are still left with the scars. If you've lost both legs after the shock of the tragedy you go on with your life, but your legs never grow back and you learn how to live another way. Some people never get over deep traumas, some don't survive, but a lot of us do, and the key is in coming to accept ourselves as we are, and learn to celebrate the gifts and lives that we do have, and to live our lives to the fullest extent within whatever limitations the world around us might think that we have.

When I found the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that I used in my new header I knew that I had turned a corner and it was because of something the beautiful Goddess Leonie wrote just the other day. It was a simple thing that she said, almost a throwaway line. She wrote, "This is my life's work." And reading that I asked myself, "What is my life's work?" and it really threw me. Just like the other day when I wrote about listening to the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song, "Teach Your Children" and they sang about the fact that we must have "...a code we must live by," and it, too, threw me for a loop because while I could share a whole list of things that I do, I couldn't think of a "code" that I lived by, nor could I, reading what Leonie had written, figure out what my life's work was. It was too scattered, I was trying to do too many things and it just froze me up. And so I have meditated and prayed and walked in the garden with the dogs and wondered about it. And then I sat down to read a marvelous book last night that I've had for a long time but only paged through and never really read, Gardening At The Dragons Gate: At Work In the Wild and Cultivated World, by Wendy Johnson, just a fabulous book, and the Fitzgerald quote was in that book, and my jaw dropped. I have been living my life like a bunch of puzzle pieces tossed up in the air, scattered all over, hither and yon, chasing around to try to figure out how to put them together, and they never would fit, or if they did for a time they seemed to fall apart again and I went skittering around trying to scoop them all up and make sense of them but I was too worried and worn out to stick to any one thing.

And then it came to me. If I were to do the work that I want to do I have to write on the precipice, facing the scary things, and in putting it all down on paper I will anchor myself and stay safe and sane in this world. I realized, even as I am in the process of putting together a room to see clients to do healing work in, and moving back into my fiber art, that they were important parts of my life, things that I would definitely do, but with my practice for example it takes years to hone your skills and build a practice. Like the flowers in the garden you can't hurry them. Fiber work is slow but immensely gratifying. My spiritual life, gardening, my work with pug rescue will always be a part of my life, but they are all also part of the story of my life. I am a writer, and instead of trying to do everything at once I will allow all of the various parts of my life flower in their own time. Some are annuals, some biennials, and some perennials. Each element of my life will come into it's fullness when the time is right, and the way in which it all happens is the story of my life. The story of a woman who was abused from 4 to18 and spent decades in therapy but came out of the darkness and into the light and is, for the most part, happy, fulfilled, at peace, and I have learned that I have something to offer, and most important of all I have realized that I can live my life just as I am, I can build a world that works for me and stop apologizing because I don't fit the picture others would like to see, I won't turn my life inside out until I am sick all the time because I am so afraid that I will never fit because who I am is a square peg in a round hole. And now I celebrate being a square peg, because even square pegs can give much to the world, they just have to love and accept themselves as they are. It has taken me 57 years but I finally figured it out, and I am kind of giddy and grinning as I write this because it is such a relief.

And so today I paid for the image that would be in my banner. It so completely represents who I am inside. A woman whose life purpose is to love, to love and open my heart as big as a full moon, and the best way that I can spread the love, the acceptance, the stories that I want to share to help others realize the light they have within them, to love themselves, and to celebrate all that they are is to write about it. I have carried the quote by Muriel Rukeyser around in my heart for ages, used it in my journal classes for decades, but now I really know what it means. The universe is made of stories, and like Fitzgerald wrote I will ask you to draw your chair close, and if you get dangerously close to the edge as you take in words that perhaps scare you a little because they touch down in the middle of your own life, good, that's exactly what I'm hoping for, and I want you to think about something I saw on a little placque in my therapist's office. It said "Leap and the net will appear." Don't be afraid to leap. Even baby steps are fine. Just keep moving forward. We can hold hands and leap together, no matter where we are in the process.

I often hear young people say, sadly and with angst, that their lives have not taken the path they had hoped it would. These young people are generally in their thirties or so. And if I talk to one of them I remind them that Grandma Moses didn't start to paint until she was 70, and she became the pre-eminent folk artist in America, and she painted until she was over 100 years old. I also heard a wonderful story of a woman who spoke at a graduation commencement. She didn't start writing until she was 50, but at 70 she had written 20 books. The young graduates asked her, "Aren't you sorry you didn't start sooner?" and the writer/speaker, who had raised six children, laughed kindly and said, "It was only 20 years."

It is often said that life is short and passes far too quickly. I have said it myself in years gone by. But now, near 60, I feel exhilarated to be coming into my own, and I know that life is BIG, and full of potent possibilities abundant, and it is never too late, you just have to open yourself as wide as the ocean, knowing that everyday in your life is full of endless possibilities. We can do anything, we really can, or a version that fits our own lives and who we are.

I wish you a wonderful journey, the journey of discovery that is before you. I am right here, beside you, and I am sitting here on the precipice, in my chair, telling you stories. Take them to heart, in whatever way they speak to you. Take them into your own lives and find the little nuggets that might help you through the night and into the light of day. Love yourself, celebrate yourself, just as you are, whoever you are, whatever you are doing. We can do this, and what better time to start than now? I am looking at the rest of my life in a whole new way and I am thrilled beyond measure. I can live and love and plant my roses and kiss my pugs and write my books and sing my songs and I can soar like an eagle. The precipice doesn't scare me, I've been there all my life. Now it's time to fly!

Roses For Mary...

2011-11-26T11:21:00.000-05:00

In the dewy morning I went out with the pugs who raced around the yard, while I, bundled in a long dress and heavy shawl, scissors in hand, went to cut to gorgeous roses that were blooming up a storm. They are David Austin English Roses, the beautiful peach colored one is 'Pat Austin,' named for his wife, and the other, my most beloved rose, 'Heritage.' the fragrance of 'Heritage' just lifts you off the planet.

I knew where I was headed with these roses. On my long antique Farmer's Table where I work is my altar. I collect old chalkware and have a gorgeous large bust of Jesus with Sacred Heart. There is Mother Mary, Buddha, Lakshmi, Kwan Yin and so much more. Rosaries and Malas and all manner of prayer beads. I burn incense here. I meditate, I pray, and it is all beside me as I work.

But these roses were meant for Mother Mary. The rose is her flower. I offered these to her this morning for the love that I feel from her at all times, lifted up to the heavens surrounded by her motherly love. So these are for you today Mary, and there will be many more. My mother, who passed 2 years ago, was very devoted to Mary, and since my mother passed Mary has grown closer and closer to me. I feel that my mother is beside her and I am being bathed in a motherly bath of the kind of love I have sought for a lifetime so that I can pass this along to others. This is my life's work. To love, to nurture, to be compassionate, to spread loving-kindness in the world any way I can. So these are for you Mary, and I love you...

Blessings and Love to one and all this beautiful late November morning...

Happy Thanksgiving To You Dear Friends...

2011-11-23T08:56:00.005-05:00

This is a video of a beautiful piece of music that has meant the world to me for decades now, George Winston's Thanksgiving. I share it here with you for it's innate beauty, peaceful calm, to celebrate all that I am grateful for in my life, the many blessings that I have had, do have, and will have in the future, and I want you to know how deeply grateful I am that you share a few moments of your life with me each time you visit here. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Blessings, Love, and Happy Thanksgiving to you all...

This post is dedicated to little Pugsley, the newest member of my family of pugs, who came just a few short weeks ago, having been badly abused, very frightened, and now, at home, at peace, in my heart and home forever. Happy First Thanksgiving with us little Pugsley...

Sometimes On Saturday Nights I Get Lonely...

2011-11-20T00:23:00.000-05:00

I think loneliness is like the dark side of the moon...

... a mysterious state of mind that rises when we are empty, when there is a place for thoughts to arise. During these times depression sometimes washes over me and feels unmanageable. I know that I am not alone in this. It is that very knowledge that makes me feel less lonely. We are never really alone. You are in your house and I am in mine. Two of the pugs went racing through the dog door outside and are barking at things I cannot see or hear. Even though it is 11:00 at night the 2 youngsters, Tanner and Pugsley, are in and out that door like it is the middle of the day. Dear old Sam is barking inside, just feet away from me, having his say, but at 13 he'd rather do it from the comforts of the soft world inside. Wee little Penny is asleep on my feet on top of the fluffy afghan.

When dark times arise I think it is good to acknowledge them, feel them, feel it all to ease our way through it. Some nights I have had a glass of wine, usually sipping half and putting the rest back in the refrigerator. It just makes me sleepy. I'd rather feel the hollowness inside and see where it leads. It leads to mysterious places, sometimes, like that side of the moon we never see.

I thought I might just let my mind wander and ramble a bit here to clear the way back to a comfortable solitude. My favorite writer and dear friend May Sarton once wrote, "Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self." Mostly I live in solitude but we all slip into loneliness at times. Saturday nights seem to be the time when the ache of that existential loneliness that we all feel at times rises for me. Not every Saturday, but some. It is the time I miss my love who is currently far away. But the pugs are here, and I am shored up by their sweetness. They are not happy that I am writing this late. They don't know what to do. Usually when I do write late I am writing on my laptop on the couch so they can be in their usual places where we all belong at night, snuggled together with pillows and covers, but my laptop went kaput and the new one has not arrived yet. I took a long hot shower to change gears and thought sitting here for awhile to share my thoughts with you might be comforting, and it is.

I just got up to turn off the overhead light thinking the dogs would settle down but they all jumped up and ran around in circles and headed into the living room relieved. When I came back and sat down they looked perplexed and did the pug head tilt which is so cute it made me smile. I said, "Mama won't be long," and I think Sam shrugged. Penny got back on my feet and all three of the boys headed into the chair they pile into together having pretty much given up on me for the time.

I once wrote "Loneliness has eaten so many holes in me I feel like a piece of Swiss cheese." That was during a particularly lonely time many years back when my days were more dark than light. Those were the days when depression weighed me down like a paper weight on a pile of letters. I don't get depressed like that any more, but I do get melancholy. When these times rise now I chart the days just past to see where the trail might have led. Sometimes I think we are supposed to get to this place so that we will stop long enough to reflect on where we are in our life.

Where am I? I realize as I am writing this that it is most likely that I am on a plateau. I was very busy from May through October studying, working on all that will one day lead me to the healing practice I think I am supposed to have, but then that familiar state rose once again and the thought of leaving home engulfed me, overwhelmed me with such fear I could barely breathe. My teacher said "Breathe Maitri, you have to breathe." I am borderline agoraphobic. I say borderline because I can now go out a little more for short periods to do errands but I am home as soon as possible with a sense of relief that almost always leads me to the couch under a soft cover and a pile of pugs. The world is so big and I am so sensitive that the reverberations of the outside world become too much. I have canceled appointments. I have put off one day something that perhaps I could do tomorrow if it means having to go out to do it, but tomorrow comes and a long string of tomorrows follow until the day comes when I have to go out and a pile-up of errands must be done. Sometimes the refrigerator is almost empty. Sometimes my meds have nearly run out and that can't happen. Sometimes there is a package to mail and it is the 11th hour when I can finally get to the post office which I dread. It's funny,. I never used to feel that, but sometimes standing in line feels interminable. I am not impatient, I just feel crowded in by the people around me. I feel afraid.

I do not write these things because I feel sad about them, I write them to attain clarity for myself, and to let you, dear reader, know that if you feel your own form of loneliness, fear, sadness or whatever might be rising in your life that it will pass. Just writing this I do not feel that aching emptiness any longer. My body has relaxed into the chair and the little pug on my feet has grounded me.

It has been awhile since I have updated this blog but it hasn't been for lack of trying. I have started numerous entries only to see them peter out and trail off into that pile of writings that lead to dead ends. All of this past week I have been playing a You Tube video, an older one, of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young singing the old song, "Teach Your Children." For those of you who are too young to know it, you can click on the link to the video. It is a deeply touching song, especially for one who has been a parent, and a child, and a daughter. Here are the lyrics if you can't understand all the words. Listening to the first line of the song over and over -- "You, who are on the road, must have a code, that you can live by..." -- I became stuck, and then almost obsessed, trying to figure out what I would call the code I live by. I have yet to figure it out. I can tell you what I believe, what is important to me, how I hope to live and what I want dearly to achieve in my life, but I can't think of anything that I consider a "code." This has left me perplexed all week. I'm still trying to understand. It seems an important key to something but I can't figure out what. So I keep playing the video over and over again and I get teary every time I do. Parents teaching children, children teaching parents, the song moves something so deep inside of me, and so many others feel the same that I have talked to this week, that I wonder if it is something that matters more once you reach middle age and can look back at the whole picture. The picture to date anyway. I have tried to write that entry many times and given up. It remains a mystery to me.

The pugs have settled down and gone to sleep in odd places all around me. It is almost midnight and they look so very dear, just wanting to be near me, but too tired to stay awake. I got cold and reached down for my shawl but Sam is asleep on it so I grabbed an old sweater nearby and slipped it on. I will be with them soon. I can't wait to snuggle them.

Tonight I am waiting to hear if a 5th little pug will come to live with us. I won't have more than that at one time, and I would dearly love to have her here with us. She is a one year old little black girl. My first pug ever was a wee little black girl named Babs and I lost her, at 16 1/2, a year ago last June. I can't believe she's been gone a year and a half. If not this little girl I will adopt another one. The right one finds its way into my home and heart when the time is right.

The pugs are starting to snore and that is one of the most comforting sounds to me. I have had a lifetime of nightmares from childhood trauma, but with four little ones asleep around me snoring in a harmonious chorus I go to sleep many nights smiling. I think I will tonight as well, and I usually fall asleep with at least one hand resting on warm fur. It's like sleeping with living breathing teddy bears, these soft little dogs so full of love they snuggle up to me just wanting to be close. It's hard to be sad or lonely for long with a house full of the wee folk. I think it's time for us to head to bed. I don't have to wake them. No matter how deeply they seem to be asleep as soon as I move they are all up like a shot, and off we go.

It has been a melancholy evening, but now it feels mellow and soft and sweet. If we just hang on long enough and immerse ourselves in things that wrap us as if in a warm blanket of comfort we get through. Tonight writing to you has helped me. I thank you for that.

Tomorrow is another day. If Saturdays are sometimes lonely I love Sundays. Sunday mornings fill me with a kind of joy that leads almost to ecstasy. It is a holy day to me, a day of deep meditation, of gratitude, a time of remembrance, a time to look forward and make plans, a day that I always seem to just be glad to be alive. I don't know why Sunday, but Sunday it is.

My eyelids grow heavy and I, too, look forward to sleep. I will head in with my crew of teddy bears and sink into the covers with my dear little souls all around me. Tomorrow is another day. Ah, 12:02, it is already a new day. Sunday is here. I smiled when I wrote that. The fog has lifted.

Goodnight, Sweet Dreams, Sleep Tight...

Growing A Dream, Starting Small, and Sharing My Journey With You Along The Way In Hopes That It Might Help Others Who Want To Realize Their Dreams...

2011-10-27T20:19:00.000-04:00

“As surely as the acorn becomes the oak tree, the images in your mind become your reality.”

~ Author Unknown ~

Dear Ones,

It has come to me in the night, and all day long as I have studied the costs of building a building, getting a permit to do so in a residential area, the complexity of becoming non-profit when you are starting so small and more that I need to -- while working in any way that I can to achieve my goals along the way -- write a mission statement and outline concrete plans. The website is underway, and more important than building a building that is a sanctuary, I think we all have to start with building both a sanctuary inside ourselves, and one right where we live. This includes personal healing, guidance, and many of the others healing modalities that I have been trained and certified to do as well as phone counseling, starting to print the small books that I hope will help people along the way, and as much else as I can do to begin to realize my dream so that it can grow and grow like that acorn into a tree. Will you take this journey with me? Will you plant your acorn, water it, and watch your tree grow? It might grow slower than you'd like, but once it has grown it is incredibly strong and bigger than you might have ever imagined. What is my dream? What is yours?

I've written so much about mine here that it would be redundant to go over it all again. Suffice it to say that once you name your dream, instead of it being this ambiguous, amorphous blob of a thing like jello that has only begun to set, you will wade about in that congealed mess of a mass feeling lost and weighed down. I know I have.

After starting countless books that I thought might be right, but knowing that something was off and not getting very far, I realized, suddenly, that my dream, inasmuch as I have written for over 40 years, (It saved my life starting at nine years old...) and considered myself first and foremost a writer, and to that end thought that what I had to give to the world would come in my writing, I realized that that wasn't enough. I studied for months on end this last summer into fall to become certified in healing modalities that stretched my dream a little further, and gathered together skills and talents of a lifetime into a basket along with the others to look and see what I had. I formed a plan, a good plan, one I was happy with, but then came the dark side of the moon.

I am borderline agoraphobic and I became terrified to step out into the world to use the healing gifts I had worked so hard to acquire. I would still write, but I needed to do more. And then the words came to me, The Love In Every Moment Sanctuary. That was it. It was one of those moments when you feel like you've been hit by a lightning bolt, something I hadn't felt before. Oh, being Bi-Polar I've had lots of big ideas, believe you me, and as the pendulum would swing the high highs would catapult me into a new beginning and the low lows would bring whatever the then goal was to a crashing halt. What's different now?

What's different is that I'm different. I have been changing more than anyone around me, who knows me well, has been able to imagine, and the healing work that I've done the last several months, work on myself with several different healers, as well as learning these modalities myself, and able to use them on myself, and spending much more time in meditation and prayer, (...and yes, having a very good doctor and medications that have evened me out over the last several years, and even she has seen enormous changes...) I am changing at the cellular level. I might not be able to venture as far out into the world as I thought I might, yet. (You'll pardon me, I hope, if my writing is a little wobbly for a moment. The new little pug whom I already adore is under my desk chewing my toes!)

So then came the thought of the sanctuary, and when the disappointment began to engulf me for all the reasons I noted at the beginning of this entry, the fear quickly subsided and a new plan began to form, and most important of all I realized that sometimes, in the beginning, we may overshoot the mark with a dream just to finally settle back into the place we were meant to be all along. This reaching forward and sliding back a little over and over still moves us forward, at a pace we can best manage, and this is the way we all grow and change on every level. I love the idea of having a sanctuary, an actual building, where I can have people come here for healing work so the fear of the outside world doesn't keep me from doing it, (I can't do it inside here, can you imagine laying on my table having a gentle healing with beautiful music and essential oils wafting in the air while four pugs raced around barking, parrots screaming in the background? I think not!), so what then?

I rustled around in my basket and looked at the talents and skills I had that I could use. Yes, I could write. Yes, I could teach online (I was a journal writing teacher teaching a very healing, spiritual class for thirty years, the last five online.). With the new healing modalities, healing that can be done as "distance healing," and my work in pastoral counseling, spiritual teaching and support, and more, I could start right from here and build that sanctuary that is fueled by love, not only in every moment but in every facet of everything I will be doing. So the website, the phone, the internet, and anything possible to do from here -- and there's a lot, far more than I at first realized -- will get the ball rolling, and once rolling I know that I'll go farther than I ever dreamed possible. I have gone out to study and to a wonderful healing center where I will continue to go and meet once a month with the group of people who became Master Healers in the Shamballa method. I have been working on people here, people who know me and whom the dogs don't bother because they will settle after awhile, and I know that I will venture out to do healing work on people that I know or who come to me when the time is right through channels that open as I am ready to meet them. I know these things to be true because I am not the same person I was.

I know that I am different as well because I am not tossing a dream away out of fear, I am looking for new ways to see it into reality and I know it is possible. I am not just dreaming, I am doing concrete work. I am taking a business class, I have worked out a structure so that I will write everyday (first here, and then a section on the book) and it is working, and it is good, better than I ever imagined. And I have made friends here and started to build a community and as I venture out into it, even a little at a time, the ability to do my work outside the home will grow too. I am meeting my demons and making friends with them. It is possible after all.

And finally, when you talk about your process, your dreams, your fears, how you move through them, out loud, to other people, to you dear reader, it all becomes less scary and seems more possible. I get tremendous support from both my online community and my growing local community as well. My dreams may shapeshift along the way but this time I am not letting fear stop me. That I could go out to a workshop from nine in the morning until six at night actually shocked people, but I knew I could do it. I had been going out and working with healers for months, and so I will go again. The most important thing that I am told by those who support me and work with me is not to push myself or rush because I'm afraid others will think badly of me. This had been a recurring theme in my life that can only lead one place and that is into a paralyzing downward spiral. One of the most profound things that anyone has ever said to me came from the woman I have loved for a decade. She said, "You are not your diagnoses." She made a point of telling me that I had many talents and gifts and that she believed in me and just because I had certain challenges in this life didn't mean that I couldn't achieve my dreams. To this day it is the most important thing that anyone has ever said to me, and it has kept me going and moving forward when otherwise it would have been very hard. Kind of wobbly like little pugs chewing on your toes as you're trying to get something done.

And so I am doing this. Let me say that again for my own benefit... I am doing this, and though it is changing by the day it keeps floating on the surface and bobbing along and my dreams keep shining through. The pebble has been thrown in the pond and the ripples keep moving outward. It is thrilling to watch them and the very notion that they keep on rippling outward propels me forward. And I have a lot of pebbles. When the ripples stop I'll throw another pebble in the pond. Nothing will stop me now.

The "Love In Every Moment Sanctuary" ~ And So The Work Begins...

2011-10-25T17:15:00.003-04:00

"Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul."

~ Thomas Merton ~

Dear Ones,

I have just purchased the DVD of the movie made by the Carthusian monks, "Into Great Silence," and I am listening to the music with deep reverence to the CD as the monks go through the rounds of their musical day. I am also studying the works, life, and music of Julian von Bingen (Julian of Norwich), and have just purchased the beautiful movie made about her life, "Vision." I daily study the works and lives of monastic traditions everywhere.

Here is a wonderful page discussing the monastic tradition in an interfaith, all inclusive view of this life. I am an interfaith minister among other things and though I do not practice in that capacity I embrace all faiths, traditions, and spiritual paths. The sanctuary will be one that honors all. The page linked here speaks of all of these including the increasing number of lay people who are turning to this way of life.

The Monastic Tradition: Discussions on this way of life in many faiths, books, resources, and more...

I feel closest to monastic life these days, and in working toward turning Dragonfly Cottage into a sanctuary called the "Love In Every Moment Sanctuary" for meditation, prayer, and healing I will have found my true place in the universe. All of my writing and healing efforts will be centered here. It has been a long journey to come to this decision and I know that it is right. I will also do phone counseling sessions and have a new blog dedicated to the healing work, a website is in the works, and I am working on a newsletter that will be nearly daily, with podcasts, prayers, journal exercises (I am a teacher of 30 years of a very healing journal process) and more. If you sign up for the newsletter you will hear first about the services when the are ready, have first chance at the very limited number of people I will be able to see or counsel on the phone, and if you are a member of the newsletter, you will get a discount on services. Watch this page to find out when the newsletter starts. It will also be announced on Facebook and Twitter. I am dedicating my life to the service of love, for all of you, for the entire earth and all it's inhabitants, of working with the people who want gentle spiritual guidance and healing, of the animals that need me to comfort them, love them, and offer them safe space and a forever home, and the books that come out of the sanctuary will serve as ongoing support for those of you who seek it. I humbly offer my heart and my life to you all. My work is non-denominational. You needn't even follow a specific spiritual path, but come to find inner peace, and have the goal to lead a more compassionate life, living compassionately, finding your way into a mindful way of living and loving-kindness for all.

I have to work on my own life and a way to make my living independent of my current means, and this will include all that I have mentioned above, and a return to my fiber art, hand-spinning yarns, weaving, crocheting fiber art pieces, and using whatever talents and gifts that I have to offer to support the creation and ongoing efforts of the sanctuary. I will also accept Free Will Love Donations until my non-profit status goes through, and I will have that up soon. Building the small building in the middle of a whimsical garden and natural world (Joy is a wonderful spiritual practice so you can find a statue of St. Francis next to a Magic Ship, roses growing everywhere, and I will accept barter as a form of payment for services as needed for a healing. This will be limited, but offered in love and gratitude. Everything from garden work to fresh organic vegetables, and more of the necessities of life here. I trust that God will provide, and to those of you who will be part of the building of this dream and all that I have to give, I give my thanks in advance. Your tender hearts are truly at the center of all that I will be doing, and if you join my prayer list I will include you in my prayers and meditation by name every single day. I spend several hours in meditation each day.

It will take several years, most likely, for me to learn the ways in which to live a simpler life, for I have not followed this path, and my life will not be without human comforts or contact, but the more we can simplify our lives the more we find the peace that helps us greet each day with more love in our hearts, and a greater capacity to give. This too will be a journey that may take the rest of my life, but I take one moment, one day at a time.

My blog entries will be more frequent and my books will begin to come very soon and be small, books that you can carry close to your heart. My writings will be both spiritual as well as stories of my daily life here with the animals, the rounds of my day, the process of simplifying my own life, slowly, over time, and my work here as well as the building of the sanctuary and the miracles that I know will happen along the way. I hope to help you find solace through my endeavors.

I wish you love, I wish you peace, and a river of blessings to carry you through your life with as little pain and as much joy as is possible.

Finally I share with you this vow, one of deep commitment that I take very seriously. I took the vow on my own many years ago in sacred silence, and now it will be at the heart of all of the work that I do all the days of my life...

Prayer of the Bodhisattva
As long as space endures,
As long as sentient beings remain,
Until then, may I too remain
and dispel the miseries of the world.

What If You Woke Up One Day And Knew Exactly What The Entire Rest Of Your Life Was Meant To Be About?

2011-10-24T10:12:00.000-04:00

Saint Francis will be my guide...

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

Pugsley upon arrival, wearing his "Thundershirt" for anxiety,
which quickly came off and he hasn't had to wear it since. He
is snuggled here with his wee tiny sister Penny. Both had been
so terribly abused, and yet they are pure love, tender, and sweet
beyond words. I live in a sanctuary filled with angels, blessed
with God's grace, surrounded by angels everywhere, and spirits
of every size and shape bringing protection and joy and love, and
in the midst of it all here I am, blessed beyond measure, with
endless love to give. Charity begins at home. The love we are
all creating here we are sending out to each and every one of
you, every single day of our lives. When you take a breath in,
a deep, full, cleansing breath, on the inbreath feel a sweeping
of a warm, pure, pink light, warming you all the way down to
your toes and filling you with tremendous joy. Walk out into
the world lighter than air. Now remember you are never alone.
We are always there sending out love...

This is a terrible picture, all fuzzy-fied, but it was so precious and we couldn't get a good shot so I'm just sharing this with you so you can see how much fun we had. The two women who brought Pugsley yesterday also brought their 3 pugs so we had 7 running all over the yard and you never saw anything cuter in your life! When we came in we flopped on the couch and I was covered with little baked potato shaped hooligans! Ha ha ha!

There's a reason everybody calls me Mama Maitri!

And so I awakened this morning with a terrific JOLT! One of those that raises you up out of your chair so fast you hit your head on the ceiling and see stars. And though this has obviously been growing in me for sometime to come I knew then, as I know right now, with perfect clarity, exactly what I am supposed to do.

In 1999 I left a 25 year marriage to begin a spiritual journey that I would little understand, be devastated by, everything I thought I knew torn asunder, everything that held me up ripped out from under my feet, and I spent a dozen years in deep seclusion. Oddly, while it was very painful and frightening and confusing time, the seeds were planted for the life I was supposed to live, though it would be years before I could understand the meaning of it all. I had named my little cottage Dragonfly Cottage, both because the dragonfly had become my totem animal (In Native American spirituality he leads us out of the darkness and into the light, he is a sign of transformation.). Every place I have lived since in these tumultuous years of having to move, being more and more afraid, and not understanding how I could go on, I sat in the little cottage cottage I lived in in the mid-2000's. I had come to the end. I could take no more. I was ready to leave this earth and the unrelenting pain and terror I felt every day of my life. But then.... Oh great mercy of God, then a miracle occurred.

I sat quietly contemplating the way that I might exit the world. I worried about my children, my family, I didn't want to hurt anyone else but when the pain is so deep you can't see your way out, when you are broken down and never get any rest, finally you collapse into this darkness and see no other way out, and it was just at this exact point that, sitting in my little cottage, a miracle occurred. I saw a flash of gold out of the corner of my eye and saw the biggest dragonfly I had ever seen. Brilliant, iridescent gold, just huge. And he very calmly floated over to me and sat on my hand. He said, "No, it's not your time yet, we have much work to do," And he sat with me for the better part of 2 hours, just sitting peacefully, and I took lots of pictures. I have never seen a more beautiful dragonfly and I didn't know that such a one even existed, but here he is...

And when he was ready to go, when he had taught me that what I was considering doing was not only selfish, but was wasting my God given life, and that we all had lessons to learn and to share and love to give and a path to follow in our own lives. THIS, he told me, was our true path, the very act of finding it, and then to fight through all circumstances, doubts of others, self-doubt and just keep putting one foot in front of the other, no matter how many years it took, until the day that we woke up and said, "Yureka, that's IT!" (Or some words to that effect!) "It's time to get started!

Started, for me, has been the acknowledgement that that was true, even if I had no idea how it would come about. The process took 2 disastrous cross country moves, having dangerous encounters, meeting amazing teachers, and finally, the last years, finding these little pugs who are truly my angels and my teachers and the little loves that shore me up. They will be with me for the rest of my days.

This is only the beginning of this story, Part 1. But Part 2 will come in the next day or two and the plan that I have laid out in my mind is beginning to find shape and form and amazing clarity. Nothing I have done and learned will be wasted but it will take on a whole new shape than I have ever imagined.. It is thrilling, scary, but finally what of any real value ever takes all we can give and then some? My life will be changing rapidly (at a snail's pace...) over the next one to two years with much starting to happen very soon. I am to create a sanctuary, one of love, of healing, of hope, and of light. My writing, the garden, the pugs and the parrots and the wildlings, my healing practice and oh, so much more, are going to grow and fill this one little spot on the planet, and from this space all of my love, my dreams, my hopes, and the miracles that are always present around me will grow here, the one, true, final, always meant to be Dragonfly Cottage Sanctuary. I hope to see you here one day. Until then I will be doing healings for money and barter and accepting donations to get this place built and up and running. Perhaps one day I will become non-profit, but really, I prefer free will love donations for now. It feels gentler that way.

Now I have pugs climbing all over me and I am getting many many kisses and giggling a lot so I better stop here. There are mountains of things to do and finally I realized that I can climb every one...

Oh, I love you all so dearly....

Love As A Spiritual Path...

2011-10-19T21:05:00.002-04:00

"Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love."

~ Leo Tolstoy ~

Pugsley, the newest member of our family, who
will be coming very soon...

Dear Ones,

One day I woke up in love with the whole world and it changed my life forever. I can't say why it happened. Raised Catholic, a student of Buddhism since I was in my twenties, attending many churches to see what I could learn, what felt right, studying Native American spirituality, Goddess and Earth Based paths, being ordained an interfaith minister in the Christian church, and finding that even with all of that, all paths, religions and promises, as much as I wanted to serve, to live a contemplative life and dedicate myself to helping others, no building or tenets of any faith seemed to fit. I wanted Direct Communion with God. And so it would go, with me finally deciding that my "church" was right here, in the garden, with the many animals that I rescue who also rescue me, caring for the wild animals outside my cottage and in my woods, and this summer and fall I ventured out to go through the 3 attunements to become a Reiki Master and then took the Shamballa training to become a Master Healer in the Shamballa method. Still, tending my garden, walking in nature, sleeping with 3 small pugs surrounding me, their tender little faces moving me so deeply I would sometimes get tears in my eyes, I knew that life itself would provide me with everything that I needed to walk the path of faith in my own way. I knew that God would approve, and so I have continued on.

It has been my privilege to share my life with several parrots who came to me in my days of running a non-profit shelter for disabled and unwanted parrots. The last few years I have dedicated my life to pug rescue, and I have adopted 7 to date with the 8th on his way. I take in the elderly, disabled, or badly abused little ones who need much love, patience, and care, and last year I lost 3 of them, the elderly ones. I have since adopted more.

My last rescue, wee little Penny, such a tiny girl, was left outside for a year, her eyes crusted over leaving her 90% blind, she had no hair and her skin was a mess, and she had severe urinary tract infection. The foster mother and vet got her in good shape and when she came to me I knew that she would need special care the rest of her life. My eldest, my heart pug, Sampson, came to me 4 years ago after being so badly abused and left alone so much, often without food for days at a time, and then adopted out and returned twice to the rescue so that he was terrified, came to me and clung to me like a limpet on a rock. They said, "He has abandonment issues." I said, "That's okay, so do I," and we have been constant companions ever since. Two year old puppy Tanner was a stray and nearly run down by a car when he was rescued and he came to save both Sam and I when we lost two pugs, my beloved Big Dog Moe, a lab-doby mix we had adopted from the Humane Society as a little puppy and who was, at his death, 18 1/2, 3 weeks before sweet Harvey pug died leaving Sam and I alone. 4 beloved elderly animal companions lost in less than a year. Sam nearly grieved himself to death, and so Tanner quickly became part of our family. He lifted our spirits no end and Sam and Tanner bonded so deeply that often the two of them sleep curled around each other at night. It is a joyous thing to see two small boys happy and secure. And now comes little Pugsley.

I will never understand people that abuse innocent little animals, but Pugsley was adopted, crated ten hours a day, and then hit so frequently that he came back to the rescue so terrified of everything he was almost inconsolable. He went to an amazingly wonderful foster mother, and now is on his way to me since I also work with the little ones who have been hurt and are afraid. Pugsley has been put on Prozac, he can't bear being left alone and will become so terrified he will likely wet himself and go to pieces, and he has to wear a "thunder shirt" to calm him down when he gets really upset. To any of you who have heard of the brilliant autistic woman, Temple Grandin, and her "squeeze machine," the thundershirt was based on that. It velcros snugly around the little one and makes them feel safe. When he becomes very nervous and afraid he must wear the thunder shirt and it helps calm him down. He lost several teeth trying to chew his way out of the crate, and needs to be held and cuddled and reassured a lot to know that he is loved and okay. He is coming to the right home for that.

We live in a society where self-love, not selfishness but pure, unadulterated, innocent love, is almost non-existent and it has been the downfall of great numbers of people around the world. The Dalai Lama said, "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness." He also said, "Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive." I don't use the word religion any more, not about my own path in this world. I am a deeply spiritual woman who defines my walk in this world as one of love, compassion, and kindness. When Pugsley

I find that more and more it's the little things that matter most.Borderline agoraphobic, and sometimes full out agoraphobic, I learned that there was much that I could give from my own little corner of the world. My life here, centered in meditation, prayer, healing work, caring for the little ones, and being mindful of the small things in life, is the basis for my life and all of the writing that I do, and in this way I try to reach out in the world and say to people, "You are loved, you are truly loved. You need not live life as the world expects, live the life that you have and find the gifts therein. Celebrate what you can do, do not denigrate yourself for what you feel that should do but cannot. There is no one right way, there are countless ways to be of service in the world. I share with you how I have learned to live my life, not so that you feel you have to live this way, but so you can see that you, too, can live your own life, your own way, and be a blessing to the world, and find fulfillment and joy right where you are, right as you are. You are beautiful to me. I don't need to see you to know that. I feel the beating of your heart from this chair that I am sitting in. I close my eyes and say a prayer for you and ask that even in this one brief moment you know that someone, somewhere in the world, treasures you, and wishes you well. Start from there. Look in the mirror and say 'I love you.' You may feel uneasy at first and like it is a silly exercise, but if you do it every time you pass a mirror, with as much tenderness as you can muster, somewhere along the line you will believe it. Say to yourself, 'I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you,' and as you say it say it not just to yourself but to everyone and everything around you. Every natural thing on this earth is a living being. A rock, a crystal, a flower, a blade of grass, a spider, the wild bird at the feeder. Your elderly neighbor, a little child passing by, the lady at the checkout counter at the grocery store who has been on her feet all day and is tired but still serves you with a smile. Remember to say thank you. Say something kind to her. That is love."

The more you do this in your life, the more that you find your own cup filling up, brimming over, with so much love to give you can't help but let it spill out into the world. What can you do? How can you spread this love? It doesn't take much, or it can take a great deal, whatever you have to give. Imagine if everyone on this earth did one bit of loving-kindness, each and every day, what a world we would be living in.

Can you go a whole day without complaining about anything or making one negative statement? Try it. It's not as easy as you think. Don't beat yourself up if you do it, just start over again from where you are. And then do it the next day and I'll bet you'll go longer. And then make it a practice. It will change your life.

If you are walking down the street smile at a stranger. Think gently, "I love you." Don't say it out loud. A genuine smile can say it all and change the course of that person's day. Can you move through your day and smile, mindfully and with love, at 5 people that you would normally pass by? Do it today.

Can you pick one neighbor in your neighborhood and do a kindness for them? A bouquet of flowers from your garden, or fresh vegetables if you grow them. Cook a meal for an elderly neighbor or help a child who has fallen down. Adopt an animal companion if you are able or show the ones in your very own home some extra loving care. Water your plants and say, "Thank you for growing." Fill feeders outside for the wild birds and put fresh water in a big old pot if you don't have a bird bath. Take a notebook and write down as many things that you have to be grateful for as you possibly can. Shoot for twenty-five. Like the White Queen in Alice Through The Looking Glass don't get out of bed until you believe "six impossible things before breakfast." Now write them down. Now figure out how to do them. Now feel the joy of even trying. Feel the smile come across your face. Feel that warmth welling up inside. Sit for a minute and just feel it. That is love. Fall in love with yourself, with everyone and everything around you, with the whole world.

When you feel downtrodden and put upon think of ways that you might help another. That small act creates miracles. Feel your heart opening up. Feel your very cells changing shape and form. You are shedding old layers, of blame, of guilt, of shame, of grief, of pain and all the ways of living and being that no longer serve you. Cross a line in the sand and step over it. Leave all of those things behind. Walk into the world seeing it with new eyes, seeing it for the very first time unburdened by your past, not worrying about your future, living in the now, living in this moment, in the most trying times there is something good in the world around you. Hold onto that, and say thank you. Take another step. You have made it through.

Nothing is too small. Start something that is tiny, go from there. I have saved the tiniest of parrots abandoned by their mother. Nothing has brought me greater joy.

Love everything. Start small. Love everyone, start where you are and let it fan out to the world. Know that I love you, and that I mean that with my whole being. You are treasured, just as you are. Now treasure and love yourself. It will be the most important thing you have ever done. You can't give from an empty well. Fill your own and then let it spill over into the world. Is there anything more important that you can do?

Fondly, and with a full heart...

Because There Is The Promise Of Joy, I Go On...

2011-10-01T11:33:00.002-04:00

"Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow...
Joy shall be reflected in all things."
~ Helen Keller ~

Dear Ones...

Some of you have never been here before. Some of you have come to this blog for many years and know my story. In the end, or rather the beginning, or most importantly now, nothing matters except this moment.

In this moment, on the first of October, in the year 2011, the temperature has dropped dramatically and I have all the windows in the house open and a cool, slightly chilly breeze wafts in, rinsing the house clean, lifting my spirits, rendering me almost a little too cold but fully alive, more alive than I have been in months. Some people suffer in the winter from lack of light, they burrow in under covers like bears wintering over in a cave not daring to venture out or fully live again until the winter is over. I love winter, autumn has always been my favorite time of year, I suffer terribly in summer's heat, but in the dog days of summer there is the promise of fall to come. Leaves changing color, frost on the grass, geese honking overhead as they fly south, the dogs running in the yard and frolicking instead of drooping out -- I droop with them -- to do their business and then we all creep back in, thanking God for air conditioning, and looking to better days when we can take deep breaths of fresh air that make our lungs tingle, that make us laugh.

I could tell you all about my past, my childhood, young adulthood, marriage and motherhood, divorce and coming into a whole new life at midlife as well as all that I am doing in my life today but it really wouldn't matter. Who were you yesterday? Who will you be tomorrow? You can really barely remember the former, not in the clarity of pure truth, you have no idea what the future holds, but oh, my heavens, look to today! It is full of potent possibility abundant. There may be sadness, tears, heartache and hard times in your life but there is always the promise of joy just around the corner. There is in mine.

A joyful heart is the inevitable result of heart burning with love."
~ Mother Teresa ~

I used to feel shy and melodramatic when saying such a thing but I can tell you, right now, in this moment, that I am unequivocally in love with the whole world and every one in it. Everyone. Inside the worst criminal on earth there was once a tiny seed of potential. The crimes he commits are terrible tragedies, but one wonders if the greatest tragedy of all is that that light went out inside of him. Imagine who he or she might have been had that light grown and grown into a kind of holy brilliance that could have changed the world. These are the great losses, but thank God there are so many more good people that come fully into this life with their whole being facing each day as a rich new blessing that they intend to live to the fullest. I think the bravest person I ever knew was my mother. Despite the fact that we had often had a difficult relationship, and one that really no one ever understood, we made peace in the end and loved each other dearly when she passed. Every day, through a painful, shattering, life-diminishing cancer that destroyed her body -- Multiple Myeloma -- there was not a day when you would talk to her and in the worst of her pain and long after she had gone blind, she always started her day saying, "Every day's a good day, it is what you make it." Until she was absolutely unable, she got up, got her bath, made her bed, dressed and did her best to put some makeup on, and someone drove her to very early Mass where she led the congregation in the rosary before the service began. She was truly an inspiration to all who knew her, and that phrase will stay with me until the end of my days, "Every Day's A Good Day, It Is What You Make It." If a dying woman in terrible pain who has gone blind and has to spend 2 days a week getting a complete blood transfusion and platelets the next can say that with a smile on her face and a softness and belief in her heart as she said, even while she was dying, how could I possibly do anything else?

"Every Day's A Good Day, It Is What You Make It."
~ My Mom ~

This moves me doubly deeply because it reminds me of one of my favorite passages ever, written by Colette about her mother Sido. It is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read in my life...

"Sir,

You ask me to come and spend a week with you, which means I would be near my daughter, whom I adore. You who live with her know how rarely I see her, how much her presence delights me, and I'm touched that you should ask me to come and see her. All the same I'm not going to accept your kind invitation, for the time being at any rate. The reason is that my pink cactus is probably going to flower. It's a very rare plant I've been given, and I'm told that in our climate it flowers only once every four years. Now, I am already a very old woman, and if I went away when my pink cactus is about to flower, I am certain I shouldn't see it flower again.

So I beg of you, sir, to accept my sincere thanks and my regrets, together with my kind regards."

"This note, signed 'Sidonie Colette, néeLandoy,' was written by my mother to one of my husbands, the second. A year later she died, at the age of seventy-seven.

"Whenever I feel myself inferior to everything about me, threatened by my own mediocrity, frightened by the discovery that a muscle is losing it's strength, a desire its power, or a pain the keen edge of its bite, I can still hold up my head and say to myself: 'I am the daughter of the woman who wrote that letter -- that letter and so many more that I have kept. This one tells me in ten lines that at the age of seventy-six she was planning journeys and undertaking them, but that waiting for the possible bursting into bloom of a tropical flower held everything up and silenced even her heart, made for love. I am the daughter of a woman who, in a mean, close-fisted, confined little place, opened her village home to stray cats, tramps, and pregnant servant girls. I am the daughter of a woman who, many a time, when she was in despair at not having enough money for others, ran through the wind-whipped snow to cry from door to door, at the houses of the rich, that a child had just been born in a poverty-stricken home to parents whose feeble, empty hands had no swaddling clothes for it. Let me not forget that I am the daughter of a woman who bent her head, trembling, between the blades of a cactus, her wrinkled face full of ecstasy over the promise of a flower, a woman who herself never ceased to flower, untiringly, during three quarters of a century."
~ Colette, Earthly Paradise ~

I do not fear getting old, nor do I fear dying. What I do hope for, pray for, is that I might be that old woman so full of joy and expectation at the opening of a single flower that she knows she will not have the opportunity to witness again in her lifetime that she will place it's importance above even seeing her beloved daughter, and knowing that my daughter understood. Can there be any greater love than this?

Last weekend, at the beautiful 4 day Shamballa Master Healer workshop we had an exercise where we were to wander about and look at trees. There was one so big with such a glorious trunk I just sort of fell against it, wrapping my arms around it as far as they would go and laying my head against it's bark. I felt a deep communion between us and I cried. The world is so full of such enormous miracles and connections beyond our human knowing that it is staggering. We need only open our hearts and be to witness and experience it all...

"Being, not doing, is my first joy."
~ Theodore Roethke ~

I am the daughter of a woman who, to her dying day, knew that every single day, no matter what the odds, could be a good day, as good as possible given your circumstances, and that we must never stop believing and trying to make it so. Now that she has been gone nearly two years I feel her presence very near me more and more. It is that place where all is forgiven, no sins were ever committed, and there is only love. I cry as I write this, I cry with joy.

I know mom, every day is a good day, and I plan to make this a splendid one, filled with joy. I love you mom. I love you all...

My Roses, My Heart ~ Following My Bliss...

2011-09-11T21:58:00.001-04:00

I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.
~ Emma Goldman ~

Deadheading and nipping back the roses makes for a
beautiful bouquet...

Dear Ones,

It has been a beautiful day outside and in my heart as I worked with the roses. I order them in the spring, very tiny own root roses just leafed out and "bands" which are also very small but it is a wonderful way to buy a bevy of roses that are otherwise hard to find -- I mostly buy old heirloom roses but have begun to add a few more "modern" varieties (... from the 1950's and '60's or so, but I have a mad passion for David Austin's English roses that while cultivated in the last few decades are descendants of the old roses, and I must also admit to falling for unusual colors that I read today are referred to as "coffee" colored, deep rusty browns with tinges of orange or pink.). My favorite roses of all are the Noisettes and the Teas, the old ones. And now there is a variety called "Tea Noisettes," which is not yet an official category, but these grow very well in the south.I adore them and have virtually every one planted here.

David Austin's 'Abraham Darby,' one of
my absolutely favorite roses. It is always
in my garden...

And so today I started moving the once tiny baby roses into large pots or into the ground. It is such a joy and an exciting time because now I am ordering the fall roses to plant in October that will begin their little blooms and start toward their own maturation process so that they can grace the garden with their fragrance and color, they do take one's breath away.

Beautiful Rosa 'Juliette Wingfield'

Being in the garden with the roses seems to refresh my spirit and wipe away the laundry list of things that I worry about. How can one worry about a thing amidst so much beauty? And I plant the roses for many reasons. Of course I fill my little cottage home with roses, and love to give bouquets away to family and friends, but I plant for the future. I have been bereft, in the past, to have left very large gardens that I had made, one with seventy or more roses planted over time, but one day I came to realize that every place you plant a garden lives on even after you are gone, beautifying the landscape for the enjoyment of the people who follow, and leaving lush color and fragrant delight for passersby. We never lose a garden when we leave it, we simply pass on the glory of the garden for those who follow.

And in my heart I am a "rose rustler" though I have not really had that experience. In one of my favorite all time books on the subject, In Search Of Lost Roses, by Thomas Christopher he writes about these grand rustlers who scour the countryside for lost roses, in old graveyards and abandoned homesites, by the side of the road, and even, when they see huge old rose bushes perhaps in an elderly woman's garden, they would knock on the door and ask if they could take a few cuttings. There are few people more generous than gardeners and the rose rustlers saved a lot of roses in their wild and wily pursuits because of the gift of these cuttings from the gardens of other rose lovers whose roses will be perpetuated far into the future. Oh, if you love roses you have just got to read that book. (By the way I am not an affiliate and make no money referring you to amazon but it's the best way to share these books with you.)

For years most of the roses I purchased, and still do, have come from Heirloom Old Garden Roses. Sadly, to me, they are now simply called "Heirloom Roses" and have modernized their catalog and website, but such are the times. Luckily they are still the same wonderful rose growers in Oregon who offer own-root, virus free roses. I have planted so many of their roses over the last twenty years I have longsince lost count. Another favorite has been the delightful Antique Rose Emporium in Texas. I love to just read through their site and dream.

Today I ordered roses from two rose companies that I have grown to love. First of all Chamblee's which I have loved for a long time, and then a company that I just found this year and have been having a heyday ordering from because they have the little "bands" which I had heretofore not heard of, very small to start, which allows for purchasing a number of them, and for every so many roses you buy you get free roses and mystery roses as well. They are Rogue Valley Roses. Talk about a bonus! All of the nurseries I mention are family owned and run and this too I cherish. They so love their roses, they are not just commodities, and so buying roses from these companies is also supporting these wonderful folks who really love and live for their roses. I long for "Romantica Roses" and will order some of those next Spring.

Rosa 'Souvenir de la Malmaison'

The utterly amazing thing about these old roses is that they have come to us from centuries back by cuttings passed forward, for example the above beautiful rose, 'Souvenir de la Malmaison,' comes to us hundreds of years later from the garden of Empress Josephine (Napoleon's wife) at Malmaison which she purchased in 1799! The history of roses is so fascinating to me. I have a vast library of books on roses and I will never learn enough in this lifetime. While I grow many other things, annuals, perennials, flowering bushes, herbs and more, roses are my heart-flowers, and what I mainly concentrate on now. I want to pass cuttings of my roses on so that they may live and grow in other gardens and bring the joy and delight that they bring to me.

Luscious 'Jude The Obscure,' another David Austin English Rose

And so today as I worked in the garden, with the three pugs wandering around and about and wondering when mommy would EVER go back inside, I gloried in the blue sky with tufts of white clouds floating past as I dug roses up out of their "growing on" containers and planted them in their permanent spots. Pricked fingers and arms bled and I didn't notice because I was pressing my nose into fragrant blooms and marveling at their color and form and dreaming of the day they would grow into big roses bushes.

One must get out into the natural world. It is soul-saving. As much time as I spend on the computer, as a writer must needs do, if I didn't turn it off and go out into the garden everyday I don't know what would become of me.

Another favorite, 'Maggie,' a "found" rose...

And so I will end this day dreaming of roses, and losing myself in rose catalogs and websites, and planning gardens that will not mature for years, but will bring me pleasure and delight at every stage, and in the process of planting these roses I am following Joseph Campbell's dictum, "Follow Your Bliss..." and it is a blissful thing indeed. Plant a rose bush today and enjoy the beauty ever after, even when it is just a long ago memory in your mind. We never lose the roses we've planted. They are firmly planted in our dreams...

Blessings to one and all...

Taking The Risk and Trusting Oneself To Live Fully Their Own Truth...

2011-09-07T09:11:00.000-04:00

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
~*~ Anaïs Nin ~*~

Dear Ones... the day has come...

Was it when I was a little girl, nine years old, hiding under the forsythia bushes and writing in my little red spiral notebook with my 19 cent Bic stick pen, afraid to come out, that I learned to use writing to heal myself? Did thirty plus years of teaching a very deep, spiritual writing/journal class to thousands of people and listening to my student's stories move me to realize that all of our stories are important, even though we often don't think that our own are? I smile a little to myself thinking of those first nights when we would go around the room, introduce ourselves, and say just a word or two. Inevitably there would be one shy woman in the back who would say, barely above a whisper, "I probably won't have anything interesting to write about, I'm just a housewife," and I can tell you that I knew, even as she said it, that her writing would blow us all out of the water, and it did. We look at other people's lives, amazed at who they are, at what they have accomplished, and we feel that we have somehow fallen short. We see our faults and foibles, we tally up our failures, we let the world around us judge who we are and what we are doing and allow them, no, allow ourselves, to be influenced by their opinions. Finally, one day, we begin to outgrow the confines of the sheath of the bud around us, and we begin to burst forth, we begin to be who we really are, and it can be shocking, terrifying, awesome, a joy beyond our imagining, and we begin, trembling, the journey of discovering all of who we are, and take those gifts and talents out into the world. I have begun to burst forth, out of the bud. I am beginning to blossom.

I am blossoming because I am gathering up the gifts I have been given into my basket, turning them over and looking at them closely, and without judgment I am beginning to use them. I am owning my gifts and talents, many I have used since I was a child, or for decades, shyly, not daring to let them shine forth from the center of who I was. I thought about my life, the abused girl, the frightened woman, the bi-polar individual, the woman married nearly three decades and, finally, and gently, came out as a lesbian, with a quiet pride, a softness, viewing the world around me with new eyes. I mourned the loss of lifetime friends who left my life when I told my truth even as I maintained a close and dear relationship with the husband I would not legally divorce for six years, and did my best to nurture my nearly adult children through the changes. I was the broken one, hiding in a cocoon of safety, not leaving my new little home for a dozen years. And then my world began to change, and it would still take a couple of years before I would, tentatively, begin to venture out. And when I did, when I began to let the outer skin tear and begin to fall away, the petals pushing their way into the sunlight, I saw that the gifts came from God, that they were good, that they were to be celebrated, even if many of the people I knew of different faiths did not understand. I have lost friends through many of the changes in my life. I bless them and I let them go.

I have so much love in my heart. Love to give, love to share, and yes, love to receive. I have loved a woman for ten years and celebrate that love with all my heart even if it is too complex for most people to understand, and even though we have been separated for some time because of her work somewhere else in the world, my love only grows stronger, and she lives in my heart. While she is doing her work, I am doing mine, and I trust that one day we will come back together again, walking quietly together through the rest of our days, loving one another gently and with respect. I know that she will understand and accept me in a way no other ever has. She saw the strength in me before I saw it in myself. She said to me, "You are not your diagnoses," and my whole world shifted on it's axis. She saved me without even realizing that she did, and I brought something to her too. She is my soul-mate, and there is nothing more beautiful in the world. As I blossom that is part of the blossoming too.

I can tell you that since I was a child when I hold a crystal in my hand -- and today I live with crystals all around me, that line the top of my computer keyboard, crystals that I never take off-- I am healed and I will use them to heal others. They are not, as some people think, some New Age make believe scary things, they are minerals mined from deep in the earth and they have their own vibrations as we do. I can tell you that I will use them all the days of my life, sitting with large ones in my hands and lap as I meditate, laying them on the bodies of people that I heal. I can tell you that a tiny pug that came into my life blind and afraid now not only follows me all over the yard but has done things I was told that she would never do. I was told that she couldn't use the stairs, and at first I carried her up and down every step we encountered. I regularly held her in my lap and did Reiki on her. One day, to my utter amazement, she ran ahead of me, up the stairs and into the house before I could catch up with her. Another day I said to the three pugs, "Time to go out," and then I realized I had an almost finished e-mail that I needed to quickly finish and send before I lost it. The boys went through the dog door out onto the deck, down several stairs and out into the yard. When I finished I got up and called her, "Penny," I called, "Pennnnyyyy," and I could find her nowhere. Much to my surprise the boys came bursting back through the dog door with her right on their heels. Boom, through the plastic flap came the little blind girl that couldn't do stairs, and I laughed out loud for so long I didn't think I could stop. I would never have let her do it on her own and I still go out with her every single time she goes out to go potty, but I don't carry her down the stairs anymore, I am beside her as she goes down the stairs and out into the yard to do her business, and even then she is back up the stairs and into the house before I can catch up to her. She is my little miracle and I love her so much it is impossible to describe it. There isn't a word big enough.

I don't just credit the reiki and sometimes she still bumps into things in areas she is uncertain of, but she runs all over the house, knows where all the beds are and the numerous bowls of water, where I am and where her pug brothers are, she knows so much more than I ever dreamed she might. I credit the reiki, I credit the crystals I use with her, I credit God and the angels that surround her, that surround all of us, and most of all, I credit love. I believe that at the heart of every healing modality there must be a heart so full of love that it opens wide, a channel, to allow the healing energies to flow through them and to the one we are blessed to be allowing this energy to move through, gliding through our bodies, our hands, and into the etheric and then physical bodies that rest under our hands.

I have titles, but I don't use them. I am an ordained interfaith minister, Reverend Mother Maitri Libellule. I have a Baccalaureate degree in Spiritual Counseling and Healing and I am a teacher of over thirty years. I am a healer of mind, body and spirit, and now a Reiki Master. By the end of the month I will be a Master Healer in the Shamballa method, an integral part of the development and meshing together of all of my talents, brought together in one complex whole. I use many tools that scare some people and are venerated by others and yet I know that they are all God given and Heaven blessed. I don't expect anyone else to understand or believe in all of what I do, and I respect and bless them on their own journey. I welcome them with open arms as they come to me for healing, for guidance, for counsel. I am not a therapist and will suggest that they go to a psychologist or psychiatrist if that is what they need, but I can do pastoral counseling and spiritual healing. I have, at 57, brought all of these gifts together and they are becoming, like a fine tapestry, all of a piece, and I spread it out on the table and invite them, invite you, to the banquet. I will soon do phone counseling as well as healing sessions in person. I was afraid before but now I am ready. I am ready, and it is time. The risk to remain tight in the bud is no longer an option. It is time to blossom.

And so I don't use the titles. I am simply Maitri, the name that I took legally in 2005 because it is the Buddhist teaching of loving-kindness and compassion, and the heart of that teaching is that we must first have it for ourselves before we have it to give to another. I did not take the name because I thought I had achieved it, but because I wanted it to be my guiding star, and to remind me every moment of my life what my work was to be. It has taken me decades and a lot of work to have it for myself, but with enough therapy and spiritual seeking and growth, which will be ongoing, I am now ready. I am still a little afraid, but I will walk through the fear. It is time. We use the gifts that are given us or they die inside of us, wither, and we carry those lost gifts in the pit of our stomachs. I believe not allowing all of who we are, even if those we most love don't understand, even if we lose friends, even if we see the fear and disappointment, perhaps rejection in other people's eyes, we bless them, we love them freely and without exception, and we continue to move forward with all that we have learned, with all that we have let rise to the surface.

I have had visions, real visions, in meditation, as my hands moved over someone lying on a table, as I felt their spirit rise to meet mine, and something higher and beyond my own knowing came to me. I am mostly very silent about this, and sometimes, most of the time, it is simply a way to guide my hands to a part of their body needing healing the most. I have done this with my own animal companions. I am studying using reiki with animals, a special calling of mine. I listen to my spirit guides and intuition, the angels that surround me and give me messages, as if I were listening to another person before me. There were the days I would have been afraid to write this, but I share these words from a heart so full, so unafraid, so sure, so certain in the knowledge that it is real that I have no shame or fear in telling you these things. You can believe what I share or not, but they bless me and make me who I am, and so I thank God, I offer praise and gratitude every single day of my life, over and over again, even as I write. Sometimes I don't even realize what I have written until I am finished and I am surprised, even the next day, when I read it again, but I know that it comes from a special place so deep inside of me that it is like a river flowing. I am simply meant to flow downstream, to stay open, to breathe, to float, and ride words as a raft, and I take deep pleasure in the birthing of the words I am writing. Again, I am filled with thanks and praise, maybe just for myself, because they heal me, they empty me, to allow more to come in, more lessons, more spirit, more guidance, more unexpected gifts.

This reminds me of the famous Zen story of the Master and his student and the pouring of the tea. The Master asks the student to pour their tea and not to stop until he tells him to do so. The tea fills the cup and begins to overflow. The student looks desperately at the teacher who sits quietly allowing the tea to spill over the table, the floor and to keep flowing. The student pleas, "It can hold no more," to which the Master replies, "This is how you come to me, with your mind so full of beliefs that you are not open to what I have to offer you. You must come with am open, empty mind, ready to receive, to make space for the lessons I have to give." I am paraphrasing here but it is the same story. We can only learn if we are open to new truths. I am learning that over and over in my own life. I am not here to force my beliefs on anyone, even pressing them into the one before me ever so gently, if their beliefs are different than my own. I honor and respect the paths of all others. I am simply here as a channel of light for those who would come to receive what I have to offer, and I am quite satisfied with that. There is room, like in the finally opened mind of the tea student, for many ways of being and believing, and part of my own healing, the heart of my own maitri, was accepting all of who I am, and then using the gifts that I know I was meant to use, ever so gently, and only for those who desire and need them. The bud began to flourish when I allowed this to happen. What a relief, what joy, what a blessing.

So I share my story with you. Yours will be different than my own but I pray that you will take the quote at the top and look at your own life and see how you might move from the bondage of the bud to the opening of the blossom, the sharing of all of who you are, despite the consequences, and, with comfort and joy, all of the blessings.

I offer you love, I offer you peace, I offer you all that I have to offer. And so be it. And so it is.

With all the love in my heart...

I Am Declaring The Rest Of The Month "Be Silly In August!"

2011-08-19T18:37:00.004-04:00

"Don't Be Afraid To Look Silly."

~ Tara Strong ~

Dear Ones,

I remembered something today as I was wandering around out in the yard with the pugs. It just tickled me to pieces, and it prompted this silly yet sincere entry. I am declaring the rest of the month of August a time to be as silly as you can. At least do one silly thing a day. In these trying times with the economy, people struggling and out of work, the war raging on, if we can't be silly on a regular basis life could be unbearable. I make silly a daily practice, as serious a practice as meditation or prayer. Yes, I'm very serious. Now put your silly hat on and join me, especially those of you who always have your serious hat on and are horrified at the very thought.

I will share with you the memory that popped up... For a time I worked in the MRI department at the hospital. We would see some terribly sad cases, one in particular that got us all so down we couldn't see up. A lovely young woman who had been trying to get pregnant for some time finally did, she and her husband were elated, and then she found out that she had a very serious form of cancer. We saw hard cases all the time but this one just broke our hearts.

The next day, on the way to work, I was thinking that none of us could change that very sad situation, but we all needed a spirit-lifting to go on and do our jobs. I stopped at the drugstore on the way to work and bought a big box of those cheap little bottles of bubbles that we buy for our children. If ever there was a time we needed a little bit of the joy of that inner child that still lives within us, it was now.

I walked into the MRI department and went to every desk and every room, even my boss's, and handed them all a bottle of bubbles. I told them they had to use it at least 10 times. First, I think, some were a little startled and uneasy, but as I walked back down the corridor to my desk I could hear laughter starting all over around me. As I looked back down the hall I saw bubbles floating out of nearly every office and when I got back to my department all of the women were laughing and blowing bubbles at each other. The most bubbles of all were coming out of my boss's office. We laughed and blew bubbles all day. We blew bubbles at some of our more jovial patients. Some went down the halls of the hospital blowing bubbles. I never forgot that and many of them told me for some long time after that that it was their best day at work. Everybody needs bubbles. Go buy a bottle of bubbles, you have to use them at least 10 times a day, and get a bottle for every one you know that is sad or having a hard time. You won't regret it.

Then there was the time an old woman in the complex I lived in had just lost her husband. She was bereft. After a couple of weeks went by I cut a huge bouquet of flowers for her from my garden and had a bottle of bubbles in my pocket. She was so happy about the flowers and the big hug and kiss on the cheek I gave her she started to cry. She had no children in town and at 90 was a shut-in and saw few people besides "Meals on Wheels." As we sat and talked I said, "Mable, I have another little present for you and I want you to promise me you'll use it." She hesitatingly said okay and I pulled out a bottle of bubbles. I handed it to her and she looked something between baffled, embarrassed and confused. I went over and opened the bubbles and blew them right in her face. She burst out laughing. Then I handed them to her and she blew them in my face and we both laughed. I said, "Mable, you promise me you will get these bubbles out and blow them 10 times a day even if you never leave the house. Blow them at the t.v., blow them at the toaster, blow them at the refrigerator, take them into the bathroom and blow them while you're on the potty. This kind of shocked the hoo-ha out of her but she burst out laughing. She said, "You're crazy you know." I said, very seriously, "I try." I hugged her as I left and the next day when I went out to get in my car to do errands there stood Mable, standing on her doorstep, blowing bubbles out into the air and looking as happy as a little kid. I shouted "That a girl Mable, keep blowing!" and she blew bubbles in my direction. I drove off laughing out loud at the 90 year old woman filling the air with bubbles. Bubbles are magic!

Then, there were the flamingos. I was going through a very hard time and in a deep depression. I knew something had to pull me out of it and driving down the road I saw a little garden center that must have had one hundred pink plastic flamingos all over the place. I laughed all the way home. I got on eBay that night and ordered pink flamingos for my garden. I put them right on and was just thrilled with myself...

I mean did I look GRAND or what?

Then came the day that I found the flamingo hat and it rocked my world! I don't have a picture of me in it because there wasn't anyone around to take it, but this is the hat. I mean really, don't you just want to go out and get one???

For a time I wore it out every day to get my mail. I got dirty looks, perplexed looks and saw some people laughing. I told friends "If you can't do something to shock your neighbors you aren't living right." The year of the flamingos I decided to decorate my Christmas tree in flamingos and other little birds from the hobby shop. Sadly I didn't have enough flamingos to fill the tree but a friend sent me pink Christmas lights and that was my favorite Christmas tree ever. See...

It has a 1950's plastic atomic bomb ornament on the top and I tucked in any little odd thing I could find. You can't really appreciate it in this picture but you should have seen it at night with all the pink lights glowing and the flamingos sticking their necks out. In the end I stuck a few more garden flamingos in and I think it was my happiest Christmas ever! I'm all about vintage and kitsch.

That was also the year I bought the grandest light ever from an old lady who sold them on eBay. She made them herself and talk about kitschy! It breaks my heart that I don't still have it but I moved several times after that and I don't know what happened to it. She turned a white plastic plant pot upside down and screwed it to the bottom. Light Brite plastic pieces and even some little birds which, living in a house full of parrots at that time ticked me pink! This you've GOT to see. Everyone should have one. I wish I knew how to make them...

Oh! And one of the lights I found one Christmas just delighted me to pieces and I wish I had a picture. I left it up for a long long time until it kind of fell apart. I found the light at a tiny little country garden stand where I'd gone to buy a fresh pine wreath. In the little shed where you went in to pay there were these fabulous Christmas lights hung up all over in all kinds of bright colors and I practically jumped up and down. The lady, about 70, had made them (See, there's just no reason to fear getting old. Older people know how to have fun I just bought a DVD because I had read about it and they didn't have it on Netflix. It's called "Over 90 and Loving It." Oh my, it's one of the greatest most joyful movies I've ever seen. Beg, borrow, or buy that movie and you won't regret it!).

These delightful lights were made by gluing countless little clear plastic cups together, open side facing out, into a great big orb, and in the center, before the last cup was glued into place a whole strand of Christmas lights were stuffed in, leaving a long tail with the plug sticking out so you could plug it in. I wish I had purchased more but I love a Christmas tree with blue lights so I got a blue one. I used to sit at night with the lights out and stare at it just mesmerized. I mean really, the cheap little things like this that you can buy I believe really are the most precious joyful things of all. That's why I frequent junk shops, flea markets and the peculiar little shops that have all kinds of old weird things. I have purchased some really odd things there that have delighted me no end.

And every day you should do the hula...

And most definitely you should do the macarena every chance you get...

And you should you should certainly have flamingos on top of your refrigerator (You can never have too many flamingos!)...

And sometimes you should forget the hats and scarves and just wear birds. It's an old picture but I still look like this a lot of the time...

Now, there's not a lot of August left so get crackin'. And I would love for you to leave notes on the message board on the right and tell me about all the silly things that you do. Share the joy!

I do, however, have to warn you about two things. Watch out for the penguins. They are not to be trusted...

And never, I mean NEVER, have anything to do with a sheep wearing stockings and heels. They are ALL floozies and not to be trusted. They will tarnish your reputation...

My reputation is badly tarnished at this point, but maybe you can save yours. Just don't forget to be silly and I double dare you to go get some pink plastic flamingos and stick them everywhere. No serious gardener should be without them if you ask me...

Now get out there, be silly and have fun, and DON'T forget the bubbles!

Oh, and anyone want a banana?

I have been waiting for you for a long time...

2011-08-10T16:49:00.000-04:00

My Dear Readers...

I have been giving a great deal of thought lately to how lucky I am that you are there. It is also my firm belief that while people are quick to complain when something is wrong, all too often no one bothers to say, "Thank you so much, this is just splendid!" when things go right. I do that. I probably sound a little wonky to the store-keepers, places of business, cell phone companies, and all the rest but I will even ask for their managers to tell them what wonderful service I have been given and how much I appreciate the customer service person who helped me. It is a very small gesture, certainly, but it has meant a great deal to many and I have been deeply touched.

And so I watch the scroll go by here on my blog and I read the comments and lovely notes left here on this board where we open our hearts to one another and I feel incredibly moved and blessed that such loving people with such open and gentle hearts take the time to stop and read and share a few thoughts. In the middle of a universe of people from around the globe that I have met in over a decade on the internet I have met some of the people who are dearest to me today, some very special friends, and more, and even further, the knowledge that I have the knowledge that, when I get up in the morning and do my chores -- going out with the pugs, getting them their breakfast, feeding and cooing and kissing the parrots, and finally leaning against the kitchen counter as I fire up the espresso machine, froth milk and make my latte --that my friends are waiting, such dear ones, ever near, at the flip of a switch. The internet has opened up a world for me, who seldom leaves my home, who works mostly in silence and solitude, with animals and some gentle folks that I work with to do healings. Most of my time is really very silent.

You are my family, my community, my friends, and whoever you are, and wherever you are, I genuinely love you in the purest, sweetest, most innocent and yet true way. I hold you close in my heart, and very dear, I have you in my circle of silence as I meditate and pray, wishing you well, sending you positive, loving, gentle reiki energy, praying for your well-being, that you may feel peace, and calm, and that perfect stillness inside, if only for a few moments here and there. Feel them and let them carry you. You are in my thoughts as I carry the bird's water dishes in to wash and fill with fresh water, and stand on the step-stool on the porch to fill the feeders for the wild birds just outside these studio windows. I feel hearts around me, in an ever expanding concentric set of circles that fan out and out and out and reach all the way around the world and back to me. I am sending out so much love, I just cannot tell you. I so genuinely feel it and live it and believe it is my purpose that I continue in my thoughts to send out waves of warm, glowing, golden tinged pink light, the heart's light on angel wings, out to every single one of you reading this and far beyond.

I love you. If you ever doubt that anyone does, doubt no longer. If you ever feel alone come to the blog and read my words. I offer them up, sometimes shyly, in an attempt to make you smile, or feel the tenderness that I lay out like a cloth to have a simple picnic on, a feast that feeds every part of us, heart, mind, body and soul. I believe that this is why we are here. I believe that we are all supposed to be this to one another.

I am a healer. With heart and hands and words, in silence and in song. This is my path. And while this is simply a blog it is a way to reach out to others and say here, dear, take my hand, feel this energy that connects you and I and he and she and all of the peoples of the world. We are one, and individually we must needs hold up our own little corner of the universe weaving together the strands of time, stitching back together broken hearts and broken dreams and broken lives for each other. We must all be healers for everyone around us. It is possible. Hold a child's face gently in your hands and kiss away the tears. You are a healer. This is how it all begins.

I hold tiny Penny, the new little rescue pug that came to me having been sorely neglected and left with many hard problems for life, and yet she is tiny and soft and gentle and sweet and her little face just looks up at me with so much trust and love. She gives me many tiny butterfly kisses and nuzzles me. As she is almost completely blind I carry her out into the fenced yard that the boys frolic in all on their own, and she steps gingerly around, finding her special places, and I usually carry her to two different spots. She likes to do her business in separate places. And I am always near but if for a moment she kind of freezes and just stands there, lost, before I can even get to her her two pug brothers run to her, on either side, flank to flank, and nuzzle her and stay there for the brief moment it takes for me to walk the few feet to her. This bond between these little dogs who are vastly different ages and never knew Penny until less than three weeks ago, touches me so deeply I just cannot tell you. It has brought tears to my eyes. If these small creatures can look out for a new little one in need, can we not do that for one another?

And so I wanted to take the time today to say thank you. I wanted to say that I appreciate you, your presence here as you stop by to read or say hello, or even thinking of you doing kind and loving things for others in your own corner of the world. We may stand continents apart, but truly, we are joined, heart to heart.

And so dear readers, dear friends, know that I am here, even though you can't see me. Know that even if you visit at a time that I am fast asleep the energy of your presence warms my soul. Know that I know how busy you are and yet you have taken time to stop by for a few moments. Know that I bless you as you go, and send with you an invisible cloak made of handspun threads of gold and glittering pink, invisible to you, but perhaps somewhere in your subconscious mind you will be able to feel, to know, that you are not alone, that you are loved, cherished, touched softly on the cheek, and blessed, even though I am many miles or light years away. And for a moment close your eyes, and breathe deeply, calmly, rhythmically, and open your heart and hands and think silently, "I love you, all of you, my brothers and sisters. Let us stand together. Let us be at peace."

I say this everyday. I am saying it now. I will continue on. And for now I give you a gentle kiss on the forehead and blow gently to send healing light and love from my hands and heart to you. I love you. Let's love one another. Let's be true. No one need ever hurt again if we each do our part.

Each one, reach one. And love, always love...

Tanner Has His Say, "Sam and Penny Aren't The Only Pugs In The House!"

2011-08-04T13:17:00.006-04:00

I'm Depressed...

I mean really, what with all the pictures of old Sam and new Penny you'd think they were the only two pugs in the house. Well, I'm here too. And I'm only 2. I'm the puppy...

I'm little too...

I can't help it that I'm not a runt like Penny. (Sniff) I mean I feel sorry for her, she had a hard life. I was just a stray, running in the street, with no family... (Little Puppy Sob) But I came after Mom and Sam had lost 4 dogs in one year, and Sam was so so depressed Mom was worried about him. He lost 2 brothers 3 weeks apart. So mom got ME. She said I'm her little "Joy Boy," and she tells everyone I brought she and Sam back to life. Somebody had to do it...

I'm scary too...

But don't get the wrong impression. I'm not pitiful like some of the, ahem, others here. I am mama's fierce protector and NO one will get past me. Nosirree...

My favorite place...

Mostly I just like to lay up here on the old brown chair next to mama when she's on the computer. I'm the only one that gets up here, and I rest on mama's knee while she works. I can jump up here you see. Some pugs are too old and some are pip squeaks and can't make it up, so this is my chair and this is where we are right now and this is where I'm gonna stay. Right here. I'm not moving. Except...

... mama is about to go outside to take pictures of the garden and carry the little runt out. She doesn't carry me out. But I've got this chair. Nobody else will ever get this chair.

I just wanted you to know. Sam and Penny aren't the only pugs in the house.

Signed,

Tanner

...or Tanner Bannaner, or Tanny Tanny Bo Banny Banana Fanna Fo Fanny Fi Fi Mo Manny, Tannnnnyyyyyyy..... (That last one is SO embarrassing... sigh...)

Settling In & Tending Our Wild Gardens...

2011-08-03T17:18:00.004-04:00

Dear Ones...

So tiny Penny and big brother Sam are settling in. I write with them next to me snuggled together in their bed. This is one of the joys of life at Dragonfly Cottage. When a new little arrival is finally just a part of the family and no longer "the new kid on the block" you know that you have crossed another threshold, the family expanded becomes the family simply as it is.

This is my attempt at updating the blog more often. Somewhat random thoughts as they float through the hemisphere of my brain like clouds in the sky. And so I was thinking, just this morning, as I walked around the yard while the dogs did their business, and meandered over to the Wild Garden, that place where I break all the rules and cast seeds with wild abandon, and imagine that I am doing it just as Mother Nature intended that this is the way we should live. The garden will result in a helter skelter topsy turvy cottage garden with a tangle of flowers in abundance. I just love this. Imagine how rich our lives would be if we weren't so darned careful and cautious about every little thing.

When you see fields of flowers no one planted them in careful rows. However the seeds were originally planted finally they were left to their own devices, flowered, went to seed, the pods burst and were carried on the wind, and each year the wild flowers spread further and further until there was such a glory of flowers you wonder how it could have possibly happened. When I become The Whirling Dervish Of Seeds this is exactly what I am trying to achieve, and I have done it again and again and again, which makes me wonder. Unlike the areas of my garden that are carefully and artfully planted, and the roses which need much tending, and the flowers in pots amidst flamingos, gnomes, and other magical garden creatures, the wild garden allows some place in me that longs to just burst forth, no matter how the world around me might take the outcome, to be fully and freely me. Too, in such a garden, as the years go by, what were originally many kinds of flowers will settle into fewer. Only the strong survive. Which made me think that...

... we should do this in our own lives. In my own particular case I have struggled terribly, when working on the present book, after many false starts, to find just the things I want to write about, the things that matter, the strong pieces that will hold with time and spread across the land having, I fervently hope, a lasting effect, resonating with people long after they have read the book, a book that hopes to heal the heart, lighten the mood, touch the soul, make one smile, and perhaps tear up a little, moves the reader to rejoice and see through my words into their own lives. I am only a vehicle, a way to find your own true heart. This is what my writing was meant to do, has tried to do for so many years.

And so there is only one way to approach this, to write it all, to write with wild abandon, not to worry if it's "right" or really belongs in the book. Like casting seeds in the garden helter skelter, I am doing the same in the pages of the book I am writing, and as I go along some pieces will fall by the wayside while others cast their seeds allowing the book to grow and grow and be the book that will birth all the ones to follow. In any case this is the method to my madness, my writing practice, throwing all the pieces and bits of my life into the soup -- pugs and parrots and garden and my philosophies about life, washing the dishes, trying to live mindfully, meditating, praying, walking barefoot, falling from grace, getting back up and starting all over again. I will write about many things and the book is telling me what it's supposed to be. My typical blog entries here have taken me sometimes days to write, carefully composed, and this has meant that there were too few entries and that I have lost touch with the frequency of interraction with my readers and a more natural way of being with you here. I think of Colette's line, "What's the point of this wish, this journey, this magical flying carpet?" In terms of a blog I think it should be more free-flowing and in the moment. My blog is teaching me how to write a blog entry. And it's about time.

I am about to take a nap with the three pugs. They have been waiting patiently because it is past our usual naptime so I will stop here and come back tomorrow. These entries will be the warm-up times for working on my book and I love the freedom that that will bring. Like new little Penny I am settling, finally, into a routine that works. As I have more and more to do -- I got my certificate for having achieved Reiki II status on Sunday and in just less than 3 weeks will do my one on one several hour session with my teacher to become a Reiki Master. There are several other modalities I am working on, bird cages to clean, African violets that line a long counter overlooking the forest that hides the back of the cottage from the world with the Magic Ship at the back, to water, laundry to do, life to live, and I will be talking to the trees and the roses that are growing, cheering them on and wonder of wonders glorying in the roses that were, a couple of months ago, barely slips of plants now almost all in flower -- I am more and more organized so that I am accomplishing much more in less time and it is a joy beyond measure.

Let's dive in wherever we are and not worry about what comes out and if it all makes sense and if people care because we are changing our focus, whatever is going on in our lives. Let's have fun. I think that's the only way to approach life.

I will now curl up under a pile of pugs and take a nap so that I can get up and write late into the night. I love my life despite it's ups and downs. I ride the teeter-totter that my days bring with more equanimity and simply being alive is a relief. I am here, it is now, everything will get done soon enough. I am tired of worrying. I am going to allow myself to be happy. Imagine that!

The pugs and I send you love, and now we 4 will all go to snore together...

Amazing Days, Gentle Nights, A New Little Pug, Growing In Spirit & Falling In Love With The World...

2011-07-29T23:31:00.005-04:00

New very tiny 9 year old rescue pug Penny has
just joined our family. She came from terrible
neglect that caused her to lose most of her sight
and will have several issues to deal with for life
but she is the most precious girl and so full of
love. Here she sits on 2 pillows on the arm of
my chair...

Dear Ones,

I am so behind on updating this blog I simply can't believe it and I'm so sorry to my loyal and beloved readers. What a time this is! Gardening in intense heat (100 degrees today with a heat index of over 100!), welcoming new little Penny, the sweet pug who came from the rescue with a heart-breaking story. Left outside for a year her eyes were crusted over leaving her 90 percent blind, she had no hair, her skin a red mess of infection and worse, and bleeding and crystals in her urine. She was also from a puppy mill and is so tiny that at 9 years old she is only 14 pounds, very small for a pug. She sleeps on the arm of my over-sized chair or tucked in the crook of my arm. I am so in love with her I just can't tell you. And since she came 2 weeks ago there's been a lot of settling in since she has to follow a regimen of several medications, eye drops, and supplements for the rest of her life. We are now in the swing of things and her two pug brothers from the same rescue think she's been here forever now. I have to carry her out into the yard to go potty but she will trot around the yard like a little trooper. When she wanders too far afield in our big fenced yard I call to her and clap my hands and she runs right to me if in a wiggly crookedy line, her tail wagging all the way. It will never cease to amaze me how these terribly neglected and abused little animals can be so full of love. She is just the sweetest cuddly girl, and I have been doing reiki on her which she is responding to beautifully. So it's been a very busy time.

In addition to the new arrival and the maintaining of the garden I am continuing to work with amazing healers, I do my Reiki II attunement on Sunday and then will go on to the Reiki Master level. While I will do Reiki and other healing modalities on people I would like to center my practice on working with animals. It is a growing and very successful niche in the world of reiki and since my life has longsince been dedicated to rescuing animals, now mainly pugs, and almost exclusively taking in the seniors or disabled ones, even in my own home it will be wonderful to work with these gentle little souls. We will be taking in one more little one some time in the near future. There is such a terrible need. I limit my rescue pugs to 4, but that's a nice number for a little family of companions. The four parrots keep me busy too. I get tickled when someone asks, as they inevitably will, "Don't you get lonely?" (You know, divorced, kids grown and off into their own lives.) to which I always reply, "I might, if I had the time." There's not much time to get lonely around here.

In September I will be taking a 4 day intensive workshop to receive Master Healer certification in Shambhalla, a beautiful method of deepening love and healing on many levels which works beautifully with reiki, and I will be studying many other modalities to expand my knowledge and ability to serve. Even the pugs are great teachers. As I mentioned above these little ones, many who have gone through unspeakable lives filled with abuse and neglect, come through with loving spirits, gentle and tender-hearted. It is a good lesson for us all. Animals truly are some of my greatest teachers.

How could you possibly resist this little face?
Sweet tiny Penny snuggling close to me...

Late night is one of my favorite times. The three pugs and I settle into the over-sized recliner, the boys on my right...

Sammy sleeping belly up using 2 year old puppy
Tanner as a pillow!

... and Penny on my right. As they sleep around me, half on me, I am covered with soft, warm, sleeping teddy bear creatures, and I thank God for them every day.

So as I work close to the earth and the wonders of Nature, care for the little ones so in need of gentleness and love and giving it back to me tenfold, continue my studies to prepare for setting up a healing practice, and work on writing my book there never seems to be time enough to do everything. I like to update this blog weekly and am sorely behind these last couple of months, but I intend to update more often even if shorter entries. I want to reach out and touch those who are kind enough to visit, many again and again and again. You are so dear to me faithful readers. I owe you my best and I will try harder. It is pure grace to be sitting here writing an entry.

In this last year and a half as I have moved deeper and deeper into a life of spirit, wanting to serve others to the best of my ability, I find myself falling in love with the world, and the tiniest living things on our planet captivate me. In the garden now there are ladybugs, the magical praying mantis, birds too many to count at my numerous feeders, and the mischievous squirrels who are bent on turning the feeders upside down in their attempt to eat everything they can before I shoo them off! And all the dear little plants. I buy tiny own root roses, small rooted cuttings from home gardeners on eBay, and I plant them in an area of the garden where the little ones grown on before they are large enough and sturdy enough to plant in the ground. It is truly a wonder to see them grow big and tall and put out buds and burst into flower. I have my camera back and ready to start taking garden pictures which I will share very soon. Some of the roses have grown big enough that I am transplanting them around the cottage, and the front porch is surrounded by ten hanging baskets, four huge pots with roses and clematis growing up the pillars to be trained, as I have already begun, to drape the porch with roses. There are herbs aplenty and the porch is redolent of the scents of lavender, rosemary, lemon sage, fragrant geraniums, huge pink gerbera daisies planting amidst the herbs and so much more. Bright yellow coreopsis, petunias in many colors and lilac colored colored verbena, impatiens in a rainbow of colors, oh, the world is so full of so many wonders this time of year.

And so dear readers I have been remiss in writing here, but my heart was with you and you were so very often in my thoughts. I am planning a great many offshoots of my budding business, Maitri's Heart & Hands, that come out of being a writer, journal teacher of 30 years, healer, gardener, artist, and more. The many facets of my life are coming together, all of a piece, in the most wondrous ways and I can't wait to share them with you. I offer all that I do in love. I send gentle reiki energy out to you in waves. Feel it like a breeze against your cheek. Know how very much you are loved. We are never alone, even sitting by ourselves in our own homes. Tap into the energy that surrounds you, feel it, you can if you try. I feel it very strongly in my daily meditations, 3 times a day. I feel it when I am washing dishes, imagining all of the other women, and men, standing at their sinks, hands in hot water and bubbles as they do their daily chore, and I feel a oneness with the whole world around me. I feel that with you now.

Take tender care, dear readers, and know that if I am not here as often as I'd like I am in the garden or settling in a new little pug, or working on that which will enable me to reach out to others to heal and soothe their spirits in need of mending, and working on a book that I hope will be a comfort to others. Days fly by too fast, but it is important for me to be here too. I am thinking of creating an e-mail newsletter. Leave a note for me on the board at the top of this page on the right if you think you would be interested in such a thing. I'd really like to know.

Walk gently on the earth, love as widely as possible, smile at all you meet, and remember that you must fill your own well first to have something to give to others. The garden will feed you, as will little animals, as will cooking a meal, waving to a neighbor, helping one person each day in the smallest of ways. I wish you days filled with joy, and rivers of happiness. I wish you love. I send it from my little cottage to you, wherever you are. I wish you peace.

Now I will take the pugs out into the yard in the moonlight for the last time, and we will snuggle into our chair, and end the day, our little family, in peaceful harmony. And I will count my blessings, as I do each day, and I will have tremendous gratitude for all of the people and animals and living growing things that fill my life, and I will count you in my prayers.

Warm Regards and Deepest Blessings to All,

Our Deeper Womb Powers ~ New Gifts Of Magic...

2011-07-01T21:09:00.000-04:00

"As we age,

we have the chance to reinvent ourselves

and to have new adventures...
As we age, our connection
to our deeper womb power increases
and we are often blessed
with new gifts of magic."

Ingerborg Ten Haeff, at 78

I have fallen in love with Ingerbord Ten Haeff and all of the other women, past midlife and some near 100 years old, who are still full of fire and possibility in the beautiful book of photographs and quotes in Joyce Tenneson's incredible book, Wise Women: A Celebration Of Their Insights, Courage, and Beauty. This book was in it's 4th printing in 2002 and I recently bought it on amazon.com. I have been buying books about women at mid-life and older who, strong and courageous, have kept on working, inspired, full of life, wisdom, and yes, deeper womb powers. At 57 as my own womb makes the transition from youthful fertility to the stronger, powerful womb of the wise woman, I rejoice at all that is, and all that is to come. I could not do the work that I am now doing if I were younger. I dance with delight at the "new gifts of magic" which are opening up to me as I cross the threshold into the last decades of life when the true Self is revealed and who one really is, is discovered fully, at last, if not before, and one can really begin to live. Ingerbord died in May at 95. Oh, what a firecracker she must have been!

I think of women in their 30's and 40's who fear getting older, terrified by the prospect of what lies before them. If only they could see the intense glory that is possible in their golden years, that shimmering time when they can truly do the best work of their whole lives. I have always been in love with Grandma Moses who is often quoted for her famous statement, "If I hadn't started painting I'd have raised chickens." She didn't start painting until she was 75. She died at 101. The year before, at 100, she illustrated Clement Moore's A Visit From Saint Nicholas. I think my motto now is another quote from Grandma Moses. She said, "Life is what we make it. Always has been, always will be."

And so now, at 57, after a lifetime of writing betwixt and between raising three children, and struggling to write at all in the decade plus after my divorce, I have crossed a threshold into that time where I may be a wise womb-woman, in touch with all the possibilities I hold inside, unafraid to tell people who I am and what I am doing and fully jump, as if from a high dive, into the white waters of the decades just ahead. It is exhilarating! There are some days I need to nudge myself to keep myself going, I slip into depression and fear, but not about aging, simply one of those hormonal slumps that a woman my age can go through during the years of "the change," the much feared menopausal years. And yet these years, with all that they bring, are proving to be the most powerful and intense of my life. This truly is the time a wise woman is born. Now I honor my elders and kneel at their feet to learn all that I can. What glorious wisdom they hold.

I have always been a writer and teacher, and even a healer, though I didn't fully realize my fledgling gifts, caught up by other worries about life, about how I might survive, about what would happen to me when my children were grown and when I was alone in the world. It was a decade of forging a soul, of the Phoenix crashing and burning. The last year and a half I have been on the rise. Now I am spreading my wings and about to take a great leap. Inside I am already soaring.

The reason I have written this is because I want all women to realize, at whatever age they now are, that they must live life fully and unafraid. My Zen teacher once asked me, "If not, why not? If not now, when?" It is a question that has been asked of many people, but it is true for any of us at any age. And the answer keeps changing and moving through deeper and deeper levels. "Don't worry about where you are and what you are doing," I want to cry out to my younger sisters, "just do it well and with all your might, don't worry about where you're headed, life will take you there."

And so I moved through my first Reiki attunement, afraid and excited, and when I felt the energy, the heat in my hands as I moved around the table during my turn at my first experience of doing Reiki on another woman in our class, somewhere along the way the fear dropped away. I felt a sense of awe and I had a vision. I was afraid I was making it up, and shy to say what I had seen, but our teacher encouraged me to tell them. When I did the woman I was working on began to cry. The vision was real, I had touched down on what would be the very beginning of my life of using the gift that is developing in my hands and heart, and daily, in meditation, I am amazed at the things that I see. When we are open, our whole universe expands so that we might be more than we ever dreamed possible. It took my breath away. I still tremble with fear, "Will I learn how to use these gifts fully to best serve others?" but I know that worrying never served anyone. We do the work, we move forward one step at a time. If we fall, if we become afraid, if depression lowers a dark cloud over us, we need to know that it will pass. I have been through that these last days but my belief in what I was doing never wavered. Today the clouds parted and I could see the sun, and so it will go all the days of my life, but nothing will stop me, not now, and if I get stuck I will seek out a wise woman to take my hand and help me move forward. I will one day do that for other women.

I look forward to every age. The years ahead are full of potent possibility abundant, a phrase that came to me many years ago and one that becomes more powerful and true all the time. This time in my life can be scary, uncertain, but also full of joy, a celebration. We must allow all of the feelings to arise and know that they are part of the process. Don't get stuck in one phase because the others are coming, and they will keep cycling around because each time we come out stronger, more sure of ourselves, and more on fire to do the work at hand. Oh, what a glorious time this is!

It is time for me to put the parrots to bed now, to make my dinner, to do the normal everyday things in life. Night has fallen and the darkness is a comfort to me. I am a creature of the night. I don't sleep as well which is part of this time of life, and that, too, has its riches. When I go out late with the dogs I sing joyfully up to Mama Moon and dance in the midnight breeze. As we age every single thing becomes holy, and when I tell each of the parrots goodnight they will stick their little beaks through the bars to give me a kiss, and I will sing their song to each of them. When I hand-raised them from tiny babies I made up a song for them, and each of them knows their own song and gets very excited when I sing to them.

We all like to be recognized. This begins to happen when we truly open ourselves to all that we were meant to be. These are the gifts of magic that are waiting for us as we come into our fullness in the last decades of our lives. Oh, what a joyful prospect this is.

So now I leave you, but I will be back. Write down these words, "I can do this." It doesn't matter what you are referring to, and as the thing changes, as the goals and dreams before us shapeshift, surprise and delight us, let us not be filled with fear, but always get back up and reach for the stars. We were meant to, and if you believe in yourself, so you shall.

With tremendous love for all of my womb-sisters everywhere. Let us celebrate this moment and all of those to come...

My Work ~ The Esoteric and The Mundane...

2011-06-23T22:48:00.002-04:00

Like Jumping off of a high dive, until you reach bottom you will not ever be able to push off with your feet and swim back up to the surface. This is what I experience every time I meditate. I now meditate for an hour three times a day. I turn the phone off, I do not answer the door. I am at once healing myself, and then slipping back into real life where I struggle like everyone else to find balance, but I continue to work toward living a loving, peaceful, and open-hearted existence where I can reach out and heal others, feeling the tenderness of their hearts and sending them silent loving energy. You cannot see me but I am there...

The Esoteric ~

The Place I Touch Down On In Meditation

You cannot see me, and yet I am very much with you, for when I am meditating I am at one with the Universe, filled with love, and breathing it out into the world around me. I am at the loci where past, present, and future intersect. This is difficult to describe and comes after very deep healing sessions for weeks, working one on one with a teacher who does transformational healing, and preparing for Reiki 1 attunement. A healer must heal herself first, find an inner peace where the past is let go and the present is the Divine. It is there that I reach you, and yet, for now, you cannot see me. You cannot fathom the place that I am, it is hard to verbalize, and yet I will tell you this -- without it you will not walk in this world healed, whole, and spreading the seeds of love in every step you take, through the journey ahead to the end of your days.

The Mundane ~
My Days Are Just Like Yours

Ah, if only I could carry that state of grace with me throughout the day...

I meditate, I pray, and for a time I experience a state of near bliss, calm energy, soft air, silence, but then I open my eyes and come back to the world. Back to the knowledge that there is a sink and counter full of dirty dishes because I have not washed them in 3 days. This is not a spiritual path. I am not in balance. It is not a good thing to meditate so much that you float about distancing yourself from the sacred daily chores. Meditation can be a drug. Balancing spiritual practice with daily life is vitally important. I needed to do all that I have done to get to this place where my life as a healer will continue on on a deeper level. I will cut back to meditating twice a day, morning and evening. I will do the dishes.

I Have Barely Left My House In More Than A Decade,
I Am Beginning To Take My First Steps Out Into The World...

The Way Of The Lotus is the way of unconditional love. It is non-denominational, it speaks to every living being. This is the life I have chosen. This is my work. For a long time I did not speak of this to a single soul because I knew they would not understand. Now I have let go of fear because it does not serve me, and I am here to serve. We are all here on our own path and I trust and love those around me enough to know that they are on their own journey and that does not include them understanding mine. I send them love and bless them on their journey. I pray that they find peace in a way that suits them and their life. There is no one way. I believe this to be true.

The lesson of the lotus is the lesson of our ability to transcend all that came before and bloom, in this lifetime, no matter the outer circumstances. The lotus rises from the muck and the mud and becomes a beautiful flower. Our feet are eternally in the mud, the difficulties of daily life, of relationships that are difficult, of human worries and woes, but spiritual practice, in whatever form it takes, even if you don't call it spiritual practice, even if you never sit in a church but perhaps like I do sit in the garden or with a small innocent animal on my lap and meditate and pray and breathe and smile, or perhaps you just walk down the street and smile at a single human being, changing the whole course of their day, you are practicing kindness, the root of all things. I practice kindness. I try.

Finally the need to serve supersedes the need to hide, and yet I know most of my life will still be lived in solitude and silence. That part of me comes not from fear but from a desire to continue to go deeper so that I have more to give. My writing is a vehicle for healing, and I am with you wherever you are in the world. Sit with me now...

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath, take another, and another, breathing in, and as you breathe out let every bit of tension in your body slide down into the earth. Notice how much lighter you feel. Now as you sit with your eyes closed, breathing in and out, you feel a lightness in your body. Feel a presence sitting opposite you. This is very real. It is the transference of energy from where I am to where you are. Do not open your eyes. Let your senses take over. Keep breathing and feel the warm gentle energy. You are not in this space alone.

I reach my hands out, palms up, and ask you to put your hands above mine, not touching, just barely above. Keep breathing. Feel the heat from my hands. Feel the energy. Feel the warm glow surrounding our hands. That warm vibration is love.

Now allow your hands to rest very softly on top of mine. We are barely touching but we are connected, from where I am, to where you are. In this moment we are not separate, we are not in different places in the world. This is the Oneness that is spoken of. There is an infusion, a transfusion, of gentle, loving harmony flowing out from me, through my hands, into you, through yours. Feel that energy. Feel it flow through your body from the palms of your hands to the soles of your feet, circling round and up your body to the top of your head and beyond.

This is real. It is possible. It happened. As you draw your hands away, lying open on your knees, you feel a cool breeze. I have slipped away but you are filled with a river of love, of golden light, you are shining, shimmering. This healing energy did not come from me, but through me, as a channel for God's peace, love, light, hope, and joy. I pray for this every single day, many times a day. We have touched each other. Now you will carry that beautiful energy with you into your day, if only for a few moments. The moments will stretch out over longer periods of time. But we are human, we are imperfect, we will slip in and out of this state of grace.

Meditation, prayer, whatever path one follows that takes them to the Divine is all that is needed. Perhaps for you it is at the height, the peak, of making love. I want to make love to the world, through the opening of my heart, and hands, and the spirit that I allow to enter and flow through me. This is my task, and it becomes easier each day. And yet...

I Am Human, I Am Afraid...

We never stop feeling this you know. Even as I write this I think, "They'll think I'm nuts. They will never read anything I write again. They will think I am full of ego and they've had enough." But then I remember. I am releasing fear and following what I know, for myself, to be true. I cannot and do not expect everyone to feel as I do, to think as I think, to accept all that I accept as true and real in my life, and it doesn't matter. I am not responsible for another's thoughts, actions, or opinions. I am only here to offer what I can, and show the love that is in my heart.

Even when I slam my toe in the door and shout obscenities as it bleeds and hurts and I limp down the hall to clean the wound and take care of this human body, too heavy, hidden from the world for the most part, in that second I don't feel a spiritual bone in my body. But then two pugs come down the hall. They look up at me with huge, bulging, perplexed and worried eyes, and I laugh as I bandage my toe, and their innocence and sweetness brings me back. I hug and kiss and squeeze them and limp on into the kitchen to feed them. I am only human, and I will be so all the days of my life, but it is in remembering those moments of grace that lifts me back up again.

I sit, I take up my beads, I begin to breathe, I meditate, I connect to All That Is. This is the balancing point, the teeter-totter we ride in this life. Up and down, up and down, the goal of a spiritual life is to be more up than down, but we have plenty of times that we tumble and fall to remind us of our own fragile flawed nature. Having a practice brings us back. Meditation is a practice for me, as is writing, as is gardening. Sitting here with you, as I did earlier, is a practice. You don't see me, but I am there.

I have written this to share my journey with you. My shape, the shape of my writing and my life are shifting. I have crossed a threshold. The liminal time has passed. I move forward with certainty even though I have a long way to go, even knowing that this path I have chosen will call for daily practice and that I will fall from grace many times over. The goal is not to try to avoid falling from grace, no, the goal is to keep picking myself up and moving forward. That is the ultimate goal. To open more and more, to have more to give, to learn more each day and to infuse my life and teaching and writing and healing with the knowledge gained, grounded in prayer and meditation, in cooking and doing the dishes, of kissing and feeding pugs, of banging my toe and shouting words I will not use here, of cancelling appointments over and over because I am afraid to leave the house, and then sitting down to meditate and starting all over again.

This is real life. The spiritual life is not one that raises one up above flaws and faults and foibles, it is simply a continual reminder to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and get back on the path. And I am trying.

I love you. I really do. And I am sitting opposite you, hands outstretched, breathing with you and allowing a healing energy that comes from a place beyond me to flow through my hands to you. Close your eyes, keep them closed, keep breathing, relax your body, and stretch your hands out, resting gently on mine. You cannot see me, but I am there...

Meditation, Purification, Transformation, Illumination, And A Healing Vision...

2011-06-12T11:54:00.004-04:00

When I meditate I connect to my deepest Self.

When I meditate I see God.

When I meditate, I am surrounded by angels...

I am moving through a time of deep healing, cleansing, I am being transformed, the whole world around me is illuminated. It is a state of bliss, I am blessed, and then I wake up to the real world as it is. This is why it is essential to meditate regularly. I always walk away with some gem. I always carry with me a peace and calm, at least for a time. I have touched down on pure grace and seen God, felt angel's wings brush against me, and though I might only carry those visions with me on a subconscious level, they are there, woven into the layers of my being, hidden behind a veil. Thankfully, the veil lifts from time to time throughout the day, and it is enough to keep me going. But it would drift away completely if I did not keep up with my practice.

There is no one way to meditate and I do not meditate, anymore, on a zafu on a cold hard floor, as I did when I began to study Zen meditation more than thirty years ago. We can't all sustain that posture, but it doesn't mean that we can't find a way to meditate in our own lives. In fact, after having been in a head-on collision, having had surgeries on my feet and then breaking them both at the same time, it is only comfortable for me to meditate in a chair, and this does not make the meditation any less potent. We can meditate at any time, anywhere, even if only for five minutes, perhaps it will be a hour. I like to do it for shorter periods many times throughout the day so that I may come back to myself. And I have company when I meditate. They meditate with me...

You can continue to meditate even if a puppy wakes up and kisses you on the nose, or an old fella burrows back into you to feel closer to you and get more comfortable. We are always meditating in sync with real life. Opening our heart and breathing our way over and under, around and through helps us sustain that peaceful calm of meditation when we move out of this state into the reality of our day. We meditate with the world and it carries us along on the tide of the minutes and hours before us. It is a life raft as we bob up and down through the stormy seas of life, and a raft to lay back on and bask in the sun. It is the core of my life, and further, it's what keeps me sane.

I often have visions when I meditate and this past week I had one so profound I shared it with a woman who has breast cancer. I told her in addition to whatever healing therapies she was doing, this could be a tool to strengthen her spirit, and her healing process, as she moved through her days. I believe it will work for her. I believe it will work for me. I have several issues that need to be healed, in body, mind, and spirit. I am working with this meditation now and I can't tell you what it is doing for me. It is already in the book that I am writing, and just rereading what I've written takes me back to this state, reminds me, and I pick it up and carry it with me once again after it has slipped away from me. I encourage you to try it, in whatever way you are comfortable, with eyes closed, relaxing your body, breathing in and out regularly, easy, easy, gently, you feel your whole body slip down into a very soft place. You are ready.

Breathe In, Breathe Out, continue gently with your breathing. While you are relaxed and breathing, eyes closed, visualize your self as the radiant golden being that you are, surrounded by a beautiful radiant aura, all around you, of shimmering gold. This is the healing light it brings. See yourself breathing in this golden light and filling your body with it, breathing out allow the darkness, the illness, or pain in your body or mind, to leave your body, blow it out and away. Breathe in the golden healing light, breathe out the darkness which may also come from your heart, mind or soul. Cleansing, clearing your body, can speed your healing and uplift your mind and heart. These things are known to speed up the healing process.

Keep breathing in this golden light, and as you do feel the rivers of darkness flow out of your body with the outbreath. An amazing healing is taking place. Purification, transformation, illumination. Continue with this meditation until it feels as though it has come to a natural end. Repeat at least daily, or many times throughout the day. Sometimes just closing your eyes for a few moments and breathing that golden light in and releasing negativity, pain, illness, anything that holds you back from your true and perfect Self is a perfect way to keep the energy flowing. Some can do this instead of any outside therapies. Some will be under a medical doctor's care. Some will be working with holistic practitioners. This practice works in perfect tandem with them all, it makes no judgment about other areas of your life or the mode of healing you have chosen. If you are not working with a healing issue, it will enhance and brighten your day and everything that you do will be done with a greater feeling of peace inside, a warm spreading of grace inside of your body.

We heal on many levels, some unseen and unknown by us, but with faith in yourself, in the meditation, with the process, you will be amazed at the results. I will go so far as to say that you don't have to believe in any specific outcome. You don't have to even believe that it works. If you are open and willing to experience whatever may come, even if you don't know what that is, you will be blessed beyond your wildest imaginings. Miracles occur every single moment of every single day. You are now able to see with a golden eye...

So I sit in my chair, pugs sleeping at my side, I close my eyes and breathe, I breathe in the golden light, I release whatever is troubling me that day, and I feel far more things leaving my body as I do, and in the reverse, feel more and more golden light coming in. This is my meditation. I call it "Breathing In The Golden Light." It is the name of the book that I am writing. Even writing about it puts me in touch with these feelings, and for a time the world around me shimmers with that healing light, and I smile, and it transforms my day.

My work these days is very intense. I am having amazing healing sessions with a Reiki Master, Transformational Healing Sessions with an incredible practitioner, and studying privately with a man who channels angel's messages -- and yes, it is very real and I was astounded -- and does one on one work with students with healing the soul and helping prepare you for your life's work. This is one of the most amazing things that I have ever experienced in my life.

Also, next Sunday I go to my first Reiki attunement session so that I will begin the process of become a Reiki Master myself, although I see all of this work that I am doing as something that I will bring to my writing, to be able to reach out and touch people through my words, and I pray that my work will be of value to the world.

My days and nights are now full with healing work, study, meditation and writing. I work with crystals as I always have, healing essential oils, prayer and guidance from spiritual teachers, and students are already coming to me. For now I practice a combination of Deep Listening, Calming Energy, Meditation, Healing Journal Writing Guidance designed anew for each specific student. This comes out of thirty years of teaching journal classes and working one on one, and with groups, in hospitals, healing centers of all sorts, with ministers and counselors, in colleges and women centers, and much, much more. I have taught thousands of students and they have blessed me and enriched my life. Our students are always some of our greatest teachers.

And so I offer you The Meditation of the Golden Light. Try it, gently, regularly, and allow feelings to arise with no judgment. The healing process is different for every individual, no two alike, and just right for the person doing the work. I believe in you. I have faith in you. No matter what you are doing, or who you are, inside you there is a flame that can never be extinguished. Breathe in the light. Watch it grow.

I send you my love, and blessings, from my little cottage to where you are in the world.

God Bless You and Keep You,

Believe in Yourself,

And Love, Always Love...

Standing On My Tippy Toes ~ Divine Confidence... Toe Lessons, Day Two.

2011-06-01T00:10:00.001-04:00

Once upon a time I could...

Dear Ones...

Toes have dreams too...

When I was young I took 15 years of ballet. I was a dance minor in college. If you read the last entry you will know that my feet are now so damaged that I will now see toe shoes only in my dreams.

It's not that I was destined to be a ballerina. I wasn't that good. I got by and I just continued because I loved it. I love that I had the determination even when I knew that I didn't really have the talent. When I was in college I minored in dance just to keep up. Tap, modern, jazz, and yes, ballet. I had one of those little jewelry boxes that when you opened the top a little ballerina popped up and danced to the music. I think fondly of that little ballerina box and wonder whatever happened to it. Another one of those things lost in childhood, like my dancing, and my perfect toes. But...

The thing that we learn, in life, is that the past was full of many things, as the future will be, and even my feet as they went through their lumps and bumps and surgeries have been great teachers. I can no longer wear toe shoes and the world didn't lose a great dancer but I remember being on point and my toes are on point about a lot of things now. I forget, they remind me.

I think the thing I miss most is yoga and I hope to be able to do it again some day. I was taking yoga regularly until I broke both feet, shattered them as the doctor said. The thing is, though they healed, albeit lopsided and cattywompus, I still could have done yoga, maybe a little wobbly but it would have been doable, but my wonderful yoga teacher worked very hard with me and it just wasn't possible. You see my left big toe will not bend at all. It is rather alarming and strangely fascinating to look at the x-rays. The bone broke so badly that the bones in my big toe look like a cross. It was excruciating for a long time and now it just won't bend. If you know yoga you know that your toes just have to bend. Any posture where you have to go up on your toes, bend your toes, or get in any position wherein you have to get up without crawling across the floor to grab something to pull yourself up, disrupting the class nevermind being incredibly embarrassed, its just not doable. I once took a yoga class with a man who had lost both legs to the knees. He had to sit in a chair for some of the postures, but by gosh he could get through the class just fine.

For awhile I could only think of how much I lost when I lost my "normal" feet. And I gained a lot of weight. I couldn't walk almost at all for the better part of two years, can no longer walk for exercise because if I go a little too far and my feet start hurting badly I can't get back. This too is frustrating. But someone gave me a treadmill and I'm starting to use it. When my feet hurt I can get off of it and walk out of my studio into my cozy room and put my feet up and tuck in with the pugs. I'm very excited about this prospect.

Here's the thing... one day I just got a grip and started thinking of all the things I could do that weren't toe related, and it was an amazingly long list. And my toes were proud of me and cheered me on. They told me that I still had pretty feet and that I could tuck flowers between them and they would take me where I needed to go. And I have gone many places, and I will go many more, and I have ten happy toes cheering me on. My toes have given me Divine Confidence even if they can't get in toe shoes anymore.

Flowery toes are very cheerful.
Even toes that can't bend can hold
flowers. I'm not sure toe shoes could
top that. Maybe some day I can do
yoga with flowers between my toes...

The thing is, we all have dreams, not just toes. And it is easy to hold onto early dreams, or dreams before an accident of some sort that change everything we thought we knew, everything we thought was possible, everything we planned to do, but maybe, just maybe, losing one thing makes way for another. Maybe we had a bright shining thing in our lives for awhile to love and be passionate about and celebrate and be proud of. But we are none the less for shifting our focus and dreaming new dreams. This is why mindfulness is one of the most important things in my life.

Ram Dass said "Be Here Now." And really, where else can we be? And now is full of so many rich and wonderful things. My feet carry me out into the garden to plant my heirloom roses, and through the house to do my work, and I can pick flowers and pick up pugs and cook and hug and kiss and laugh and love and dream thousands of new dreams with my funny toes. And I love them. I love them dearly. How could I not?

Right now my toes are going to take the rest of me to meditate. I make beautiful places to meditate, with flowers and candles and incense and fragrant oils, and when I meditate I am completely at peace. You can do some of the most sublime things in life with funny toes, meditation is only one of them.

Love your toes, love your life, love yourself, just as you are. You are a divine human being. You have many gifts. Don't get so stuck on one or two and think you have nothing else to offer. You have the sun, the moon, and the stars. And you will get everything you need, and go everywhere you want to go. Believe it. I do. It's true.

You can have sassy toes even if your toes don't bend....

Toe Meditations ~ Or ~ Dipping Your Toe Back In Gingerly When You're So Overdue Updating Your Blog You Almost Forgot You Had One!

2011-05-30T18:55:00.000-04:00

Dipping my toes back into the bloggy waters...

Well, this is embarrassing, but... sigh... when I wrote the last blog entry I had just lost my beloved 18 year old dog Moe, was preparing for a newcomer, a little 2 year old pug puppy named Tanner, and 3 weeks to the day Moe passed Harvey did too leaving my heart-pug, my precious little 12 year old Sampson, grieving so badly I was afraid I might lose him. He was very close to Moe and Harvey and we lost them both so quickly it was hard to get a grip anywhere in life. I thank God that Tanner's adoption was already in the works because he really has saved Sam. He got Sam playing, and active, and they are both asleep beside one another right now to the right of me in this chair. I tried to put one on each side as the right side has always been Sam's and I didn't want him to feel like this little interloper was trying to get in his spot, but Sam doesn't seem to mind and Tanner always waits patiently until Sam is up and settled before he jumps up. Sometimes however he does sleep on the other side and seems to have taken a shine to falling asleep on my laptop. It's hard to update a blog with a puppy asleep on your laptop...

The flash woke him up but 2 minutes later
he was sound asleep again and snoring, his
tiny face smooshed into the keys!

Then, the day after Tanner arrived, my beloved greenwing macaw, Flounder, who had come to me the previous October when his owner died, left me to go to his new forever home. It absolutely broke my heart and I would never have let him go any place that was not absolutely perfect. But these people are not only so wonderful, loving, have lots of parrot experience, and 2 other macaws, but they have created a veritable Rainforest for their macaws with trees to sit in, a fountain to bathe in and so much more, and they are constantly refining it to make it better and better. I think the parrot area they have created in their private residence is as big as half of my cottage. I could never have provided for him what such a big bird really needs. We really loved one another and were very attached to one another but when you love a rescue your first concern is what is best for them, not what is hard for you. I talked to the new owner the next day and she was delighted and he was doing very well. Now he is settled into his new home and very happy. It was perfect, but I will always miss him.

My beloved big bird. Oh how terribly I miss him,
and I will always know how blessed I was to share
several months with him. He left a big void in this
house right at the time the dogs were passing. Oh,
what heartache...

In one fell swoop I went from living with 12 animals to living with 6. I was in shock. I am still trying to get used to it but now it seems right. It's time for me to start doing a lot of work that has long been put off and it is so much easier with 2 dogs instead of 5, and 4 smaller parrots instead of 7. (Another little pair were adopted out right after Flounder.) There was so much loss, dying, leaving, swooping life changes, and then the 3rd week in May I left town to go to my son's wedding in Atlanta. I've been home a week now and it was just the most beautiful wedding and I had a wonderful time but now I am just ready to re-enter the world. I had a month of being in grief and shock and just needing to go back into the cocoon for awhile.

So here I have sat, embarrassed past all possible belief to be so late updating my blog, and making a promise to myself that not only would I finally get this blog updated but I am going to try to update it as close to daily as possible. I usually wait until I am inspired to write a long entry that I have been meditating upon and something that moved me deeply. I read, study, make notes and then one day the Muse moves and I will take hours or most of a day off and on writing a long entry. I can no longer do that because I am at work on two books and I really need to concentrate on them but I thought if I started here and did a bit on my blogs in the morning as kind of a warm up it would get me going and then I would move into my books. The thing is when it's been so long you get embarrassed and then you sit and keep looking horrified at the blog and how long it's been, well, I didn't know how to start. I couldn't get going.

And then I realized that I had to just do something fun and maybe kind of silly to get me going. I was sitting in my big chair here with my feet up on the recliner looking at my bare feet with my pretty painted mauve toenails done for the wedding. And then, oddlike, which is my usual mode of being, I just kind of went into a meditation. Looking at my toes. A toe meditation. I thought, "Now THAT'S a book for sure: Toe Meditations ~ 10 Little Chapters. And it made me giggle. And I thought that toes might get me back to this blog. And so they have. So... without further ado, deep thoughts, silly thoughts, and ten pairs of toes to meditate upon during this very serious and deep (ahem), one might say life-changing experience will hopefully help get me moving once more. (Being delusional is one of my strengths. Don't knock it!)

1.
Sometimes You Have To Make Space
For New Dreams To Grow In...

Before you laugh -- oh, go ahead and laugh, I sure am -- this set of toes spread wide open, after a good chuckle, make me realize how cramped my toes often are, practically over-lapping in places. We get like that, so set in routine, just getting by, afraid to change the tiniest thing for fear that it might turn our world on it's ear that we will not be able to comfortably move forward with our lives as we have. Heaven forbid anything might change! Well, I had a month where so many changes knocked me on my keester and then one day I realized that with all the unwanted loss and pain something else had happened. Everything that had been swept away had left spaces for new things to enter my life, things I had long put aside saying, "Someday I will get back to that..." As we all know, some day never comes. We have to make that some day, or life will do it for us. Life did it for me and it was not pleasant. Now I am going to take some initiative and make spaces for the changes and revel in them. Oh, this feels so good.

I have been taking a hiatus from teaching my journal classes for the last several years. I taught them for 30 years and they were a very healing experience, for myself as well as my students. I have taught literally thousands of people including 5 years of also teaching large groups online, but finally I needed a break. Ballantine Books almost published the book coming out of my classes, but finally, as so many writers know, things fall through. There were many versions before and since but finally I laid the book aside. Maybe I just wasn't supposed to teach anymore. And then one moves through divorce, coming into middle age and being swept along through many life changes. In the last few weeks when so much has happened, and my toes finally stretched open and made some space, I could see through those spaces into what I am supposed to do. I am going to teach again, and while the classes, workshops and more will be based in the thirty years of teaching, the last decade I have grown so much in so many areas that it will be a whole new experience. I am going to spend the summer finishing the book for the new classes, publish it, and then begin to teach in the fall or winter, whenever the book is in print and I have steadied myself firmly in my new approach. I am very involved in a healing center now and part of the personal work I am doing there is also fueling my journey with the book and preparing for the classes. I feel such joy.

So stretch your legs out and spread your toes. It's amazing what you will find there!

2.
Sometimes We Forget To Love All
Of Ourselves, And We Suffer For It...

How often do you think about your toes? Really? Our toes, in fact our feet, are one of the most important parts of our body and the things we most often forget about. We worry about maladies all over our bodies but unless you do have serious foot problems they are often one of the last things on our minds. Not so, for me.

In 1997 I had a surgery to remove a tumor in the arch of my right foot. Birthing 3 children was a snap compared to this surgery. They also had to remove something from the top of my foot at the same time. When finally the numbness wore off I was in the most godawful pain I had ever experienced. They had to cut through muscle, nerve, tendon all the way through to the bone in the arch of my foot. I was in a wheelchair for sometime, then a walker and then, dear Lord, crutches. Within days of getting the crutches I fell breaking the same foot. My foot doctor almost had a stroke. He threatened to tie me to a chair. Back I went into the wheelchair. Long story short, it was a year before I could walk unaided, and I have been walking pretty much like Chester in the old program, "Gunsmoke" ever since. (You young whipper snappers, Google it!) I limp and kind of walk crookedy and lopsided, and at this point I was just getting started.

Between 1997 and 2004 I sprained my ankle once and tore a ligament another time. My already wonky foot started wobbling more. This would not serve me well. Oddly, the bottom of my foot where the surgery was no longer hurt, but for some reason my foot would just buckle at the ankle and I have taken so many falls I've lost count banging about spraining things, getting bruises on half my body, and wobbling about so I was afraid to get out of a chair. The doctor told me that it was scar tissue from the bottom of my foot up to the inside of my ankle. This caused the ankle to just collapse in on itself at times. Such an odd string of events. Then came that infamous night in December, 2004.

We were all of course in "Getting Ready For Christmas" mode and I was baking cookies and making and wrapping gifts. I went upstairs in my then little cottage to get something, oh, say, a hand towel or something, and coming down, you got it, I made it all the way to the last 4 steps where there was a turn in the staircase and I fell. Not so much fell as flew, landing on my tippy toes like a ballerina, and then not so much like a ballerina, and with the tips of my toes planted firmly on the ground, I fell over, the tops of my feet hitting the floor with the toes still on it. You could hear the godawful splitting and cracking noises amidst me screaming bloody murder, as much afraid as in pain. I lived alone. My only phone was down the hall in the living room, and I was flat out with 2 broken feet on the floor in horrendous pain. I lay there for quite awhile crying, my poor Big Dog Moe was going nuts and kept putting his paw on me and licking my face and he was just a wreck. I crawled, finally, dragging myself by my arms into the living room to my phone. I called for help. I ended up in the hospital half the night. The doctor, looking at the x-rays said, "Honey, you didn't just break your feet, you shattered them." And so I did.

For many months I could not get out of a chair by myself. I was in two casts. My daughter came in the morning and helped me get to the bathroom, made my breakfast, took care of all of the animals, and left me with lunch made. My son, who just got married and now lives out of the area, came over every night after work. He took care of the animals, got me to the bathroom, made me dinner, did the grocery shopping, and they both did so many things I can't even remember but I will never forget the tender care they took of me. My mother arrived for Christmas and as she was staying with me she took over the household and took care of everything. Two months after Christmas she was diagnosed with the cancer that finally took her in December of 2009, but I will never forget how sweet she was as she cared for me then. It would be another year, with a few mishaps again along the way, before I could walk unaided. In several years I spent 2 years of them off my feet and I will have foot issues for life. So I know what I'm talking about when I say --

Don't forget your feet! They take you everywhere and trust me, you don't appreciate them until you can't use them, and when they have become Shamanic wounds, long painful unimaginable journeys which teach you lessons you would never have otherwise learned, you don't forget. I am forever changed because my feet are. And it's not that I'm happy about it, but I am very mindful, grateful to be able to walk at all, and though my feet are constant reminders that if I don't pay attention I will fall and get hurt again and be kept from living life, I am grateful for the lessons learned. I am now doing a lot of holistic healing with wonderful practitioners who are working on my feet, which are of course the seat of all the pressure points to the different areas of our bodies.

Love your feet, treasure your feet, they support your whole body, they take you many places, they make walking in the world possible. And while you're busy loving your feet, love the rest of you too. There's a price to be paid for any part of your body, your life, or the persons in it who are important to you but feel unloved and are indeed not cherished as they should be because they are forgotten in the midst of too much, too many, too fast, inotherwords life as the tornado it can be if we don't slow down and become mindful.

Love, always love, and watch where you step.

I think I will stop here now, and tomorrow I will carry on with more toe meditations. There are far too many toes to explore in one entry, but trust me, I will not be away so long again. Why who knows where I will go after I get through all the toes?

... who believes that toe socks are the bomb!!! I sure wish I had some!

Interstices ~ The Spaces In Between...

2011-05-05T20:18:00.006-04:00

"Life lurks in the interstices..."

~ Maria Reinecke ~

"Accept Loss Forever."

~ Jack Kerouac ~

Dear Ones,

I am sorry that it has been so long between posts but it has been a very hard time in my personal life and just when I thought I was recovering I was blindsided by another loss just a couple of days ago that I am having trouble recovering from.

Everyone who knows me, and those who have read my pieces here, know that I live a very quiet contemplative life, seldom leave my cottage, and that my animal family are my daily companions that help me walk through life. I take in rescue animals and they rescue me as well.

Three weeks ago Tuesday, after having lost my wee little black pug Babs, my first little pug from the rescue, who died last June, and then in January my precious little Coco died on the operating table, my "Big Dog Moe," the leader of the pack, died. He was 18 and had had cancer for some time, having all kinds of treatments and pain medication that gave him a few more months but he had been our family dog, adopted as a puppy from The Humane Society, and though he has lived with me since 2002 he was our family dog and the whole family took his death very hard. He died, as all of my dogs have, with me kissing him and telling him how much I loved him, and I sang "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" to him until he closed his eyes for the last time. I cried for days and just ached inside. Having lost Coco such a short time ago and Babs just 6 months before that, it felt like too much, but just a few days ago, on Tuesday, three weeks to the day that Moe passed, I lost my beloved little Harvey, the precious funny little pug that I simply adored. He, too, died in my arms and I sat with him for some time after he had passed, his little head on my chest with his eyes still open gazing into mine, though he was gone. I stroked him and cuddled him and kissed him and sang softly to him, telling him what a wonderful boy he was and how much I loved him, and when I finally handed him into my vet's arms I thought I would collapse. I don't even remember driving home. Sampson, my sweet "velcro" pug, and I drove home shaken, and still, there was more that would make the grief expand to fill all the spaces so that I could not see the places in between, the places where there is no loss, the time when there is hope and light and greeting each day with gratitude and a smile. A dark cloud has descended here.

Anyone who knows little Sampson, now 13, who has been with me for 3 1/2 years, knows that he is practically glued to my body most of the time. If I'm here in my big over-sized chair he is in it with me, snuggled closed and sleeping, his soft little snore making me smile with a tenderness I had never known before these little pugs came to me, one by one, four in a year. I have had just about every kind of breed imaginable from some rescue or other all through my 57 years, and I loved them all dearly, but it wasn't until I gave that first little pug a home did I fall so in love with a specific breed. I will have pugs from the rescue (Mid-Atlantic Pug Rescue) for the rest of my life. Sam sleeps with me too, and to go to bed with a small boy who feels like a soft warm teddy bear and snuggles all up to me making me feel warm and loved in a way I never have, is precious beyond my ability to express it.

Sam was the only pug that Big Dog Moe would have anything to do with. They played together, they laid together, and when Moe went outside through the doggie door into our big fenced yard, Sam followed him, the two of them meandering around the yard like "The Jolly Black Giant and The Little Nibblet." It was so cute. My heart danced every time I watched them together...

You can't see Moe here but he was just
opposite Sam...

Sam, who never leaves my chair if I am in it, took to jumping off from time to time just to lay in Moe's bed. It was so sad. But three weeks later he seemed to be recovering. He and Harvey were very bonded and often snuggled and slept together in Harvey's bed...

Tuesday, after having gotten up seemingly fine, eaten his breakfast and gone out to the potty with Sam, Harvey took a nap next to me but when he woke up he was not right. His back legs collapsed out from under him, he couldn't hold himself up and he was breathing funny. By the time we got to the vet he was very bad, breathing terribly hard and in obvious pain. I couldn't see him like that and so it was time for his passing as well. I loved that little boy so much...

Though he had passed on I couldn't stop hugging him and kissing and kissing him, crying so hard that my eyes were almost swollen shut, but worst of all was little Sam. I tried twice to get him up in the chair with me but each time he jumped down and went over and laid by Harvey's bed, just staring into it, finally, climbing into it and burrowing his face into Harvey's cover and going to sleep. He slept for 5 hours and I couldn't rouse him. Finally he got up and got in the chair with me but he hasn't been the same since. People who think that animals don't have feelings should witness what I have been witnessing. This little pug is experiencing full blown grief.

Time will pass and I have already made arrangements for my first adoption so that Sam will not be alone. Pugs need each other for company and Sam who a year ago was one of a tribe of 5 is now alone. I have been committed to adopting the seniors but my daughter and others begged me to adopt younger ones, at least for awhile. My heart cannot take so much loss. To that end in about three weeks a little boy named Tanner is coming to live with us. He is 2 and just adorable past belief. He will be a little energetic person for Sam to play with now that he has lost his Big Dog Moe, the only one he played with. Here is little Tanner...

In my commitment to open my heart and home to the little ones in need, this is my mission, and my heart is full of so much love, and little Sam, the pug that is part of my soul, needs our family to expand as well. And so by the end of the month a wee little boy will join us and I know he will bring us much joy.

There have been very few interstices in the last year when grief fell upon grief, closing the path before me, but one must always open their heart for others in need, make space for those to come. My heart is still aching, tears run down my cheeks at odd times, and little Sam follows me and cries if he can't see me, something he has never done. We are both clinging to each other during this sad time, my little pug and I, but we will shoulder on and the sun will once more glisten through the spaces in between.

The lessons of love, loss, letting go, and finally moving forward seem to be some of the most powerful in life. I am still transitioning slowly through these phases, but the door to the cottage is opening again. I am ready. It is time.

Survival, Staying Sane, Living A Simpler Life & Being Happy ~ Where Do I Begin?

2011-04-09T20:14:00.002-04:00

"A morning glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."

~ *~ Walt Whitman ~*~

Where does one start really? My thoughts have been such a jumble that I have started numerous blog entries only to discard them in dismay and sit, as I have been for weeks now, depressed and kind of lost and not really knowing why. Finally, it becomes apparent that you just can't sit frozen not doing anything and it doesn't really matter what you do, just that you start doing something.

I am starting here. I have written a few words. I have begun the garden. I have planted morning glories galore.

I have been examining my life, going through one of those phases where everything is cloudy and one tries to grasp anything that is solid. A rotation of thoughts circle round and round in my mind. "Did she really love me? Does she still?" "Does being Bi-Polar with PTSD and a few other diagnoses in the soup, does it mean that I will never have a life where I won't constantly doubt? Feel pain? Feel frozen? Feel unproductive? Have great leaping beginnings and the inability to carry through? Will I ever be able to jump tall buildings with a single bound? (Or at least finish the book I'm working on...) Will I ever be able to get through a day without feeling like the bottom is going to drop out and I will fall into a black hole in the Universe?" It's been one of those times when I can't get out of my own head, and it's not always the most peaceful place to be.

These are not the kind of thoughts that I would like to share, but they are real, and they have been haunting me for weeks. I have a good doctor, have spent decades in therapy, take meds that really help, and am closely monitored with them, have a wonderful psychiatrist, and a full life if one pretty much cut off from the world. I live with ten animals. Animals have never hurt me. People have, and I live having to rise from the ruins of those early traumas again and again and again. But like the Phoenix I keep rising, and in the end some of my best work comes out of the most painful cycles, and the rising is a time of great fertility. I am starting to rise again.

I have lived most of my near 57 years never fitting in, being eternally the square peg in the round hole, and being criticized for it. I once wrote an essay called "Legless With Too Many Pairs Of Shoes." The essay was about a woman who was legless, in a wheelchair (a metaphor for my broken self, unable to "walk" or move in the world as a "normal" woman much to the chagrin of every one around me...) and everyone around her kept bringing her pairs of shoes, sure that if they just got the right kind of shoes she would get up and walk. They couldn't grasp or wouldn't see that she had no legs, that she would never be able to wear any of these shoes, and their anger at her for not getting up and walking, not being what they wanted her to be only made her withdraw further and further inside herself.

I was in my early forties then. This has been going on for a lifetime. It's part of my journey. The proverbial albatross around my neck and I am ready to set it down. But where do you set an albatross? And will I feel naked without it? Am I more afraid to lose the part of me that gave me an excuse to be "less than" because then I'd have to be "more than?" And can I really be "more than?" More than I have ever been, I mean.

And then I found the books that would make me feel sane for the first time, really, as if there was another person in the world who got it. I am nearly finished with the second book and I'm going to start the first one all over again and if you have ever felt lost or remotely like what I have described here, PLEASE get these books (They are ten years or so old and you can get them cheaply on amazon now where I did.)

God Bless Susan Brackney. Her books are:

The Lost Soul Companion ~ A Book of Comfort and Constructive Advice For Black Sheep, Square Pegs. Struggling Artists, and Other Free Spirits

... and ...

The Not-So-Lost Companion ~ More Hope, Strength, and Strategies for Artists and Artists-At-Heart

And what I am carrying away from these books along with wonderful stories, some funny, or touching, and all of them filled with wonderful, practical, down to earth advice from a woman who just like the rest of us who are Square Pegs can relate to as if she were a sister or best friend, is that we will continually come upon these stumbling blocks of one sort or another but we just pick ourselves up and keep on keeping on, as best we can, even if it looks like we are not doing much of anything to anyone else.

I have told people that I am working hardest when it looks like I am doing nothing at all. The internal creative process can be like a pot about to boil over all the while you sit there staring into space. If you haven't been there it is an impossible thing to grasp. To the outside world you just look sort of crazy and real lazy.

I am talking about creative people, deeply creative people, who don't do their art as a sideline. And I'm not referring to artists who work a day job and do their serious art when and in as much time as they can. And I'm not talking about selling or not selling your work or making lots of money or none at all, I'm talking about the people who live and breathe and walk in the world as artists of one stripe or another and their whole being can only see and experience the world through a kind of lens that often makes them, us, look to others as a rather skewed person with a somewhat unbalanced, perhaps peculiar way of living and being in the world, as opposed to someone who paints or knits or builds things with great joy, as a hobby perhaps, and this is wonderful, but it isn't what defines them.

Today I just say, "I am an artist." I don't need to ramble on about how I am mainly a writer and teacher of same for 30 years, but also a fiber artist, and I have this doodly wannabe painterly sort of person in there somewhere and I dabble in mixed media and I love collage and I've filled hundreds of journals which I threw out when I moved in here a year ago. That shocked the hoo ha out of people but I had been there, done that, literally wrote the book, worked out a lot of things that I needed to let go of, and while much of the writing had been incredibly healing and cathartic, I didn't want to carry around the ashes of the painful parts of my life that had been burned away by the healing process. Maybe it's thirty years of studying Zen, but it sure helped, that letting go of the great mass of writing that I used to stand on as if I were those hundreds of books. The last year and a half have been about being stripped down to essence and trying to discover a way to move forward in as authentic a way as possible. And I want to live more simply, which is a serious goal for me, but I'm not talking about going into the woods like Thoreau or being Zen spare. I will always have a cozy home filled with old, vintage, used, well-loved sorts of things with a lot of animals as companions, and I love my mode of living, no, I am talking about a different kind of simplicity.

I started to call this piece, "Less Intake, More Output," because as a bi-polar person I have had great sweeping times of acquiring far more than I need of just about everything, and starting lots of projects (...and rushing out to buy every conceivable thing I might need to complete said project...) only to never do the project at all. Inotherwords, I Don't Need Anything Else. Less Intake. I have been struggling to move forward with my creative work, especially the book I'm working on. When you stop filling every crevice of your life with stuff (...be it things, ideas, starting too many projects that never get finished, or a thousand other things...) you make a great open space to move forward into, unfettered, finally having clear space to actually create because your arms and hands and head aren't full of all the junk you've been running around buying and picking up. I have a lot of stuff here. An amazing lot of stuff. I plan to go through it all and clean it out and organize it. I figure if I work at a steady clip I might get close to getting through it in oh, say, ten years. But what's the rush? Where am I going?

What I'm trying to say is that I am looking at all manner of ways to survive this crazy life, and stay as sane as I'm ever likely to be by living the simplest life that I can (Even if no one else can see that it's simple. I'll know inside, I'll feel it.) and allowing myself -- let me repeat that -- allowing myself, to be happy. I think I can do it. By gosh and by golly, I think maybe I can.

So this has been the road I have been traveling these last weeks, trying to find my way, trying to let the work reveal itself, trying to get out of my own way, trying to trust that the table will rise if we simply relax and allow it, and knowing that I may always be bi-polar but I'm learning to take good care of myself in that respect and I'm pretty comfortable in my own lopsided, cattywompus skin.

I finish this in a nearly completely dark room with a couple of small lights beside me, all seven of the parrots put to bed and the three dogs all sleeping around me (well, one is on my head), two small pug boys snoring softly, and I am sitting here smiling. Life is good. I will survive. I am sane enough. I am learning to live more simply, and, yes, I am happy. And grateful. And now I am going to eat some hummus. It's a quiet Saturday night. I'm going to make my dinner and slip back into my book with a good cup of hot tea and with my notebook beside me I will write as thoughts arise. I could not ask for anything more.

I'm Trying To Find My Inner Snail ~ and~ On Keeping "Knockabout Notebooks..."

2011-03-27T03:15:00.000-04:00

Fellow Travelers,

I have lost my inner snail and I'm on a search to find him...

I made the above graphic a couple of years ago for another blog. "How Slow Can You Go?" has long been a mantra of mine with the snail my symbol for slowing down for a very long time. My mind can get reeling and running 50 miles ahead of me if I don't so I have been taking the last couple of days to try to get a grip on why I have been going hither and yon, doing 20 things at once, spinning my wheels and not getting anywhere. I started this blog entry yesterday and I didn't got exactly nowhere. I knew what I wanted to write so I typed in the title and that's as far as I got. I sat down and kissed a pug. And then a gigantic greenwing parrot came strutting across the room, having come down off of his cage, walked across the living room floor, climbed up the cover thrown over my legs onto the recliner and said, "HELLO!" I closed the computer and kissed a big beak and we played for awhile. That big macaw plays like a puppy! And then he settled down on my leg as he is wont to do and went to sleep, and Sam, my velcro pug, was snuggled into me snoring away, and I somehow just drifted off in my mind.

I have been doing a good bit of beating myself up for taking on a new project that I know I'm supposed to do, and pushing myself really hard trying to get it together, having started the website and a new blog to go with it, until I have been bleary eyed and teary and ready to toss it all because it was taking too much time away from my book and I thought, "Yegods, here I go again, starting so many things I'll never finish anything!" But then...

Then I stopped and thought, "Where in the world am I going anyway? There's no time table here. I need to find my inner snail and just ride along on his shell for awhile..." And so today I found him and I've been riding on his shell. It's been lovely. I did not work on the computer all day but started getting ready for spring planting. I am planting 4 roses with 2 clematis with each rose -- all climbers -- to go up the scrolly pillars on the front and sides of the cottage front porch. And then there will be four hanging baskets, and herbs and flowers to plant in some planters under the hanging baskets, and I got spring fever and felt joyful!

Sometimes you have to let the computer cool down so you can warm up.

And something else. Having been a journal teacher for thirty years, the last five of those online, and having filled over 300 journals and then some, in the last few years I completely got out of the habit of journaling. Blogging has been part of it I think, but blogging doesn't really take the place of a journal. And then one day I just kind of dragged my toe along in the sand and thought, "I don't really have to keep a JOURNAL if I don't want to, I can just get a big old notebook and lug it around and put whatever I want in it." And so I have, and I've filled a whole big notebook in a month. And I bought a bunch of different kinds of colored pens and I'm having so much fun.

I prefer plain sketchbooks and I've taken quite a liking to Ultra Fine Point Sharpies. Got the big package cheap with lots of colors at Sams. (Not the pug, the store that is somehow tied up with Wal-mart which I never go into.). Always been a fan of the big box of prismacolor pencils (Great prices on eBay.) Great packages of Flair markers in lots of colors (I doodled with Flairs when I was in gradeschool and now I'm in my 50's. I love that they're still around!). Got a package of highlighters in lots of colors. All ramped up and ready to go.

I've been getting these pens and things in bits and pieces over the last several weeks. I tote the big old notebook around with me and yes, the permanent markers bleed through the paper and that's kind of the point. Because then I only write on one side of the page and the side that has the "bled-through" bits I cover up with collagey sorts of things, quotes, funny little cut-outs from this and that. I'm not talking great works of art here. I'm just talking about doodling around and having fun.

Don't be intimidated by the word "Journal" or "Diary." Just get any old notebook (those cardboard covered composition notebooks are great and cheap) and you can collage all over them and you don't need to try to do Collage with a capital "C." It's all the rage I know, and I love it, but we can get intimidated if we think we have to create Great Art. We just have to cut and paste and doodle and write a little of this and that as the spirit moves us.

Every now and then I meander out of the house to a small nearby cafe. I get a latte and ice water and lots of little paper napkins because I'm just bound to spill something or my fountain pen will leak, and then I open my book bag and get out the half dozen books I'm reading all at once and I spread colored markers and pencils all over the table and open up my big notebook. I read a little of this and a little of that and I jot down quotes and all of a sudden I find myself actually "journaling" a little bit and it kind of tickles me because I said I didn't have to and it happened anyway, and somebody or other at a table next to me will say that it's fascinating to watch me (I'm in my own little world with my latte and books and pens and notebook and forget there are other people around...) because I keep dropping one colored pen and picking up another and on and on. I do this because I am kind of color coding my work so I can go back and find things easier. And then I kind of doodle. And then I relax. And then I find that I am actually breathing again, and that I have found my inner snail and he and I are just kind of slip-sliding slowly along quite happily.

The thing is that in this "Knockabout Notebook." There are no Big Ideas about what it's supposed to be. I just doodly doo along and it's become such great fun I am back to what I always used to do which is carry it everywhere with me (different spots around the house, accompanied by pugs, parrots and whatnots) and plop down and just write. And color. And doodle. And write something funny down that Garrison Keillor said on Prairie Home Companion. And there are little holes in the sides of the pages sometimes where Big Bird Flounder decided he might like to take a bite. And maybe a bent corner where Sam the pug stepped up on top of the notebook on my lap desk to see what I was doing and bent a corner.

I have notebooks with lots of character (because there are always lots of characters around my notebooks.)...

I have also been listening to a lot of books from audible.com while I do fiber art and when I'm too jumbled up in my mind to do anything very useful, I have my notebook and bunch of colored pens and I write down things that occur to me when I listen. Book ideas creep up on you when you're not looking. That's why I always keep my fiber art by my writing spots and vice versa. When my brain gets all screwed up in knots I stop writing and pick up my fiber art and go out of my head and into my hands and let my brain unwind. I don't think I could write without my fiber art.

So in the process of not trying to keep a journal I seem to be keeping some kind or another of a crazy kind of one, and in deep conversation with my inner snail I realized that I can work on my book as my main focus because that makes me feel happy and more secure, and I can work on my other projects around the edges which makes me feel productive, and I can color which keeps my inner child happy...

And I can plant roses and herbs and annuals for color and dilly dally outside with the dogs and play with the big parrot who climbs into my lap, and let him sit on the pages with his big tail sticking out and resting on Sam's head who doesn't notice because he's too busy snoring, and we can all just kick back and relax about the whole thing because I've made a vow to be less serious and have more fun along the way. And when I do I'm more productive. Imagine that. Just like the way books creep up on you when you're not looking. So the lesson is slow down, don't try so hard, and if you feel like writing anything just do it in any old kind of notebook, journal, sketchbook or whatever any way you want to.

A funny aside... Years ago I was teaching a group of people at a college. Color-wild even then I had lots of different fountain pens with all different colored inks and I was writing in all different colors and encouraged my students to do that, kind of step out of the box and break open their old ways of doing things and see how it affected their writing. One poor soul came up to me after class, bewildered, and said, "I've tried and tried and I hate writing in color. Is it okay if I just write in black?" And I was shocked. And I felt terrible. And I said, "Of course!" And that's when I learned that it's okay to share your ideas but don't be so zealous that your students (or anyone else around you) feels like they have to do it your way, or any one way. Write in color. Write in black. Write with finger paints. Or a plain old pencil. Or not at all. You'll write if you want to when you want to. Maybe you just want to chew bubblegum and watch ladybugs. And it's all okay.

We need to stop being so hard on ourselves. We try too hard. And then we beat ourselves up. We're not in a race, we're just living our lives.

I hope I remember that. I'm going to write it down in my notebook right now so I don't forget (...and scribble a little while I'm at it!)...

Be good to yourself. Find your inner snail. See how slow you can go. I think you'll feel better all around, at least I have. And am. And will. Finally!

Never Give In ~ Or ~ By George! I DID it!!! ~And ~ Follow All Of Your Funny Little Dreams Even If No One Else Understands Them!

2011-03-17T16:48:00.002-04:00

"Never give in, never give in, never give in."

~ Winston Church ~

Well Gee Willy Wonka. Who'da thought? Not anyone who knows me, that's for sure. Today I have begun actually spinning on a spinning wheel. That might not SOUND like such a big deal since I have been spinning and selling my art yarns for years, but I have always been a hand spindle spinner and have rather a huge collection of spindles at that and love them, but I have LONGED to spin on a wheel. I just never could get it. It was like higher math to me while with a spindle in my hand I felt like I had been BORN spinning and have spun hundreds of skeins of yarns, but, I have still longed to spin on a wheel (... and with the equivalent of about a dozen 18-wheelers full of fiber if'n I didn't ding/dang/dong get goin' on a wheel I would never get all this fiber spun in three lifetimes on a spindle...).

The thing is I have purchased three wheels. I bartered the first one, a perfectly gorgeous, brand new, Kromski "Symphony," for fiber. It nearly gave me a nervous breakdown and I crept happily back to my spindles but that gorgeous wheel's new owner did dandy on her from the get-go. But Gertrude, above, was always my dream wheel, an Ashford "Country Spinner" and this is an older one because you can no longer get one with a single treadle which is what I really wanted. I bought her used in 2005 and could never get going on her. The next year I bought a vintage wheel not made since the 70's, and had no better luck with her. She's not a looker but a fine little wheel. Her name is Matilda...

Since I spin thick art yarns I needed a wheel with a large orifice (the opening where the fiber feeds through onto the bobbin) and when I started looking a few years back there were precious few wheels with large orifices that the then newly on the scene art yarns could easily produce. Now you can find a number of wheels for this purpose and that's grand, but I'm an old fashioned sort of girl and I like old, vintagey, used things. The energy of a spinner gone by who spent many happy hours spinning away on her beloved wheel, which is now in my living room. I've got a real mess over there, just opposite me, where the wheel has been set up with a good spinning chair, a huge container of fibers on one side for spinning and a giant basket with handspun yarns on the other with my huge fiber art piece that I'm working on on the other. I got so excited about getting going I just wanted to get this entry up but within the week I shall get several more pictures of both fiber art and wheel-a-spinning in a new entry. And it won't take so long for the next entry to get up because all of a sudden something conked me over the head and I am, well I blush to say this, kind of giddy-happy!!!

Embarrassing, I know. I will be 57 on the 30th of next month but yes I still do get giddy-happy and I even think the pugs get kind of snorty-giggly right along with me. Happiness is contagious. Why you should hear big Flounder Bird, my greenwing macaw. When I start laughing he starts cackling with glee sounding more like Vincent Price than V.P. did in his day. That bird is scary-adorable.

I don't know what happened to me, I really don't, but Gertrude has been calling to me. I mean seriously creeping into my consciousness and doing a number on me. I've almost gone out to the shed to get her 100 times, but today I charged straight on out there, carried her in, got the polish and rag and cleaned her up until she gleamed, sat down with what I admit was a nervous grimace and tried. And failed. And tried. And no-go. And I kept gritting my teeth harder and getting more determined. And then I laughed. And then I relaxed. And then I thought, "Oh, what the hey! It's bound to happen sooner or later." And DANG, as soon as I relaxed it happened sooner!

Now, I've not ANY illusions that I'm spinning great yarn on her yet, but I'M SPINNING ON HER AND WE ARE BOTH ALL WHOOZY AND WHEEZING AND GIGGLING AND CLUNKING ALONG. And I will be spending many hours a day I can tell you and we shall be, if wobbly at first, spinnin' away, "to infinity and beyond!". Buzz Lightyear would be so proud! He he he. I feel silly I'm so giddy, but Gertrude and I are going to conquer the world, or at least our own little corner of it.

The moral of the lesson, as Winston Churchill said, is to "Never give in, never give in, never give in." It may take years but one day a bee gets in your bonnet and you don't even allow yourself to imagine it WON'T happen. It's taken me nearly 7 years to get to this point so don't feel bad if it takes you a while, whether it's spinning or running a marathon, or flying a plane, it really doesn't matter. It's never been about the wheel. I made up all kinds of excuses like the fact that I'd bought her used and something "must have been wrong with her." Well there wasn't diddly squat wrong with her. Me, that's a whole 'nother matter. Timing is everything, and it's never in our own imagined time frame. That's the thing. We think we can conquer time. Well, that idea can be set out with tomorrow's trash. Just get up every day and keep on keeping on living the best life you can and when the time is right -- and not a moment before -- the "impossible" says, "IT'S TIME!!!" and you're off to the races.

I would like to address something else here. It's embarrassing too, but so full of lessons and truths that I'd like to share that I think I must, especially since I've gotten over the hump so to speak (which has only taken, oh, say, 12 years or so...).

I have been a professional writer for more than 30 years. Taught creative journal writing classes for thirty, five online, before there were the plethora of books that there are out now on journal-keeping. It's a wonderful thing and should be shared and multiplied and added to and just be the creative explosion that it has become and I am thrilled about that, but after having been scarily prolific to most people for 4 1/2 decades, when my 30 year marriage ended something happened to me. It was the beginning of my going into deep seclusion, a place in which I've found comfort and respite, and really the place I prefer to live and be and do my work, but then, ahem, the work part, well, it has dragged along hither and yon and not done so well. Fits and starts and sales and publishing things here and there but I used to be a writing machine and in most of the last decade the vast part of my writing has been on blogs.

Now, here's the thing and it's something I want to say LOUD AND CLEAR not just to others but to myself, so I can hear it and remember it and feel the flood of gratitude I now do to this marvelous art form and the community of friends I've made here. Here goes....

You see everyone who knew me as a decades long prolific writer who wrote for magazines, newspapers, was published in anthologies, and had three small presses, (...this was under my previous name, and I'd like to leave it there. I changed my name legally in 2005 after my divorce was final and it was a rebirth for me. All that I was helped lead me into who I am and am becoming, but it is the work I have been doing in the last 12 years, the new woman that I am, that is the direction I both want to take and be remembered by if my work is remembered at all. That matters to me.) and more, have worried about me. If I heard from one more person that "doing all that blogging is keeping you from doing your REAL writing" I think I'd throw a cantaloupe at their head. Or bash one on mine. And I didn't realize until just this week, with certainty, that though I always BELIEVED (or wanted to) that they were wrong, now I KNOW they were wrong.

Blogging did not "take my real writing away from me." No, blogging kept me writing when I might not have otherwise during the most difficult decade+ of my life. Blogging has probably SAVED my life in more ways than I will understand or see for sometime, and I am committed to this blog and to all of the wonderful people who visit and the dear friends that I have made in the blogging community for the rest of my days. YOU, dear friends, have been a life raft in a sea that I thought I might drown in, never to be seen again. The kind men and women and their wonderful blogs and wondrous creativity and even more incredible huge open hearts have meant more to me than almost anything ever has, and I thank you all, humbly, from the bottom of my heart.

I AM Maitri Libellule, legally, spiritually, and every other way imaginable. Maitri has to do the work now. There is no such thing as resting on past laurels. They had their day. I'm proud of my accomplishments and certainly much of what I did, like having had 3 different small presses, and writing for so long, are the foundation of what my work is today, but we can take all of that and funnel it into a new reality and that is exactly what I am doing. And I am spinning, and I am blogging, and I am writing a book that is a compilation of everything I love, writing and art all in one, and this too has held me back for EONS. I kept feeling that I had to -- and most of my friends were encouraging the same thing -- write a "traditional" format book and try to have it published through one of my past agents or find another. This never felt right for me and it has kept me frozen. I'd start but always get to the place where the ice was too thin and I was afraid I'd fall in and I'd slip-slide back to shore and another ill-fated, lately started book would fall through the crack in the thin ice. AND I THINK THAT THIS IS WONDERFUL!!!

Wonderful because it is a Testament to everything that I have come to believe, and that is that if we are continually fighting our way upstream against what we really long in our hearts to do we will never make it. To thine own Self be true. I may end up being the woman in the flamingo hat with all the pugs and parrots that scares the hoo-haa out of the neighbors who think I'm nuts all the while I'm just sitting here doing my work as happy as a clam, but by gosh and by golly I'ma gonna do it all the way I want to do it. The way I BELIEVE I am MEANT to do it, and I have no doubt that I will succeed. I don't know what that success will look like, but if it keeps my life moving forward in a positive and loving way, keeps me productive and able to feed the zoo here, fills me with a sense of purpose and allows me to achieve my deepest, most important goal, the goal that is seated in the prayer that I wrote for myself decades ago and say every day of my life, "God, help me to be a channel for your peace, love, light, hope and joy." then I will have achieved something that I can be proud of.

I may never, as most of us don't, ever really see or know what I have accomplished and plenty of people around me will never truly understand, even if they love me and want what's best for me, but finally I have to live my life the way I see fit, and try to do the best for myself and others, and it all finally came together when I sat myself down in front of Gertrude today, foot to treadle, fiber being guided gently and a bit sheepishly through my hands, and then --- oh red hot heavenly days, I DID IT -- and it wasn't just spinning I was doing, it was finding myself. She was always there waiting, but I couldn't believe in her. Today I do. Two parts of myself are coming together as one and I can hardly believe it.

In the end, none of it is really my business. In the Zen sense spinning will do spinning and writing will do writing and I will breathe and bow and feed my animals, chop wood and carry water, and continue on. I have no way to see the future and it doesn't matter. Today I know I'm on my way. Today I'm writing the book I want to write the way I want to write it and I am SPINNING amongst pugs and parrots, mountains of books and fiber, music and air and light and the first flowers of spring and a marvelous cup of tea right here beside me. I am blessed beyond measure, I am humbled and grateful, and now my job is just to live my life, do my work and yes, keep blogging. Blogging had a big part in getting me here. Blogging is not a waste of time, no, blogging is a CELEBRATION.

Today I feel so much JOY! Hot dang diggity dog, it's about time.

With more love than I can possibly say, and big warm hugs going out in every direction...

P.S. Just put a folder full of nearly 80 photos of a sampling of my fiber work up from 2010-11 on Facebook. You can visit the album here if you'd like to have a look-see!

Small Things With Great Love ~ and ~ The Dandelion...

2011-03-05T12:35:00.001-05:00

"My life led me into solitude, and solitude led me into my real life..."

I wrote the above phrase in my notebook and closed my eyes and tried to really see, in the stillness around me, the woman I have become and am becoming. In the last year my life has begun to coalesce, and, like a crazy quilt, all of the odd bits are being sewn together into a life few understand but that fits me perfectly. And I love my life, all the colors and textures, and I think it's beautiful, and I am moving past any worry or concern that others find my life odd or confusing. I'm not there yet, but I'm on my way.

Someone asked me the other night, "What do you do all day?" She did not mean it negatively, she was asking what others have asked and many have wondered -- How did a woman once married with three children, involved in the community, teaching writing for 30 years to hundreds of students, come to withdraw from the world, to a life of silence and solitude? -- and what do I do all day? I know what I do but it's hard to describe my life to others. I have been pondering about just this these last days.

And then I read the well known quote by Mother Teresa, "We do not great things, we do small things with great love." It was then that I came to a kind of clarity about my life that even I hadn't had before. I do small things with great love. That is the best explanation that I can give to anyone who asks, the basic truth underneath all of the facts.

And then, with a start, I sat up and said, "I am a dandelion!" There is nothing majestic about a dandelion, it is a small brilliant yellow flower that most people consider a weed and try to eradicate, but I have loved dandelions since I was little, and I've made bouquets of them to put in small vases as long as I can remember because I am in love with these little flowers. Radiant as the sun and sure to bring a smile to the face of a small child, and even a big one like me. Every year I have a love affair with dandelions...

And as I mused on these little flowers, and thought of their myriad uses, from the roots to the leaves these medicinal, edible plants give us so much, and yet often go unnoticed and crushed underfoot, but even that doesn't kill the humble dandelion, no, somehow it musters up the strength to stand up again, and then come the glory days. Who among us hasn't, with glee, held a dandelion gone to seed aloft to blow all of the tiny head of seedlings hither and yon on the wind to land in a thousand directions and sprout who knows where? And that one dandelion will create millions of others on into infinity as the cycles of seasons move forward long past our time on this earth, and isn't that the answer to everything I have been looking for?

One needn't be a field of dandelions to create great change and make a tremendous impact on the world. Each of us is like a single dandelion with infinite possibilities to plant our "seeds," our dreams, our ideas, our love, our work, our lives, and watch them grow into all that they will become. Even as one woman living on a small plot of land tucked into a forest leading down to a creek, surrounded by animals inside and out, and in the silence and solitude I have found, have drawn to me to create the cushion that I need to both create space between the world and my open soul, my tender heart, as well as allow, in meditation and prayer, the seedlings of my work to appear, even here I can be as the dandelion able to do my work and cast my seeds upon the wind. It isn't necessary for me to list the litany of things that fill my life and days, no, what has become more important to me has been to understand, to come to this metaphor, and in holding this idea that the dandelion who though only a small, humble flower, is more fecund than most other plants on the earth. I have felt a great peace come over me as I think about this . So too can we, as each individual human being, be in our own little corner of the world, however we choose to live and be, full and ripe and able to spread potent possibilities abundant.

All of a sudden I bask in the glow that a single dandelion casts and sunshine flows into my house and through the windows of my soul. My quiet little life is enough, and I am filled with joy, with gratitude, with a kind of bliss thinking of this life that I am creating, these small things that I tend with great love, the elderly dogs around me, the large parrot who needs me, the ravens I have begun to watch with great excitement as they join the multitudes of other birds that I feed outside, along with a host of Carolina blue birds this year that have delighted me no end. It hasn't been until this year that I have seen them and there are a lot of them.

Look for the dandelions around you. Hold them tenderly. Cherish them, for you, too, are a dandelion.

Well Fer Cryin' Out Loud, Mom Fell In The Fiber Again...

2011-02-20T22:11:00.000-05:00

Do you see this? She's got me shoved under
the table while she works on that blasted
snake.

"It's NOT a snake, it's a Rainbow Serpent
of the Dreamtime, a mythical creature,
part of an Aboriginal Creation Myth..."

Well, I don't care what the heck it is, it wears

me out just thinkin' about it. Last time you

made me help and we worked so hard we fell

asleep. Slave labor. A pug isn't supposed to

have to work so hard for his treats...

And then the blasted spindles are all over the place and she's a-spinnin' like a crazy woman and we could break a leg around here trippin' over them and she'd never stop spinnin'...

She said she was going to make me help wind
it all up in those weird shapes after it dries.
Have you seen the crazy mess she makes of
that yarn. I've got a bad heart. I'm on drugs.
Can't she get the parrot to help? Just look at
this stuff. It scares me...

I'm gonna act sick...

Me too...

"Oh Sampson, Harvey, it's time to sort the yarn. Let's get moving. I've got a lot of work to do..."

PPPPHHHHBBBBTTTTTTTT....

I HEARD that!!!

Harvey, let's pretend we're asleep. This might
work. Shut your eyes and be still....

I know you two aren't asleep. Up and at 'em. We've got batts to make, and yarn to soak and I've got to get to work on Mellisandra, the serpent...

Sam? Harvey? We've only got 8 finished. Where are you? Boys? Sheesh, good labor is so hard to find. I'm going to go look for them. I'm sure they're here somewhere...

... determined to find those pugs...

I think we're doomed...

A Cozy Sunday At Dragonfly Cottage & "My Funny Valentine!"

2011-02-13T14:26:00.002-05:00

"Once upon a time there was a piece of wood. It was not an expensive piece of wood. Far from it. Just a common block of firewood, one of those thick, solid logs that are put on the fire in winter to make cold rooms cozy and warm."

Carlo Collodi

Dear Ones...

It was a very cold morning this bright Sunday and once all the little ones were fed and settled I lighted a fire to warm us up and create a cozy atmosphere for my morning of writing and being with the little ones. Everyone was happy! Big Dog Moe likes to lie right in front of the fire so that his fur is almost too hot to touch, but he will bask in it's glow and sleep for hours...

Wee little Harvey snuggles into his bed but will not lay his head down to go to sleep until the entire room is settled. He does not like things un-settled. He is a very detail-oriented pug. He is looking at me like, "Would you kindly speed it up a little? Some boys need a nap!" I try my best, I tell him, I truly do...

Sampson is waiting in our "chair and a half" for his "other half" to get in the chair but I was busy trying to get a couple of pictures of my new/old vintage cupboard which was just what I needed next to my side of the chair to organize pencils and pens and notebooks and books and fiber supplies underneath and the beginnings of an altar on top and coffee and so much more. I found it for $40 in a little old consignment shop after looking for some time and I am so tickled with it I can hardly stand it! Isn't is JUST the thing for a "Cozy Room?"

Close up of the Cozy Room Cupboard...

Ahem...

"When she thinks a piece of furniture is cuter than me it's time to move out... but... she does give me treats..."

And then I was joined by my valentine, my lover boy Flounder the Greenwing macaw who gives the best kisses in the whole wide world. It's nice not to have to spend Valentine's Day alone!

We are all wishing you a cozy, happy Valentine's Day filled with lots of love (And Sampson said to add, "Lots of treats!") ...

Living Your Whole Life As A Spiritual Practice ~ Living The Sacred and Building A Structure For Your Life...

2011-02-10T22:33:00.010-05:00

"When Rikyu, Japan's legendary Tea master, was asked the secret of the Tea Ceremony, he replied, 'Lighting the fire. Boiling the water. Whisking the tea.' 'Well, that seems easy to do,' said the student. Rikyu responded, 'If you can truly do this, then I will be your student.'

To act with an individual mind -- this is the secret. Nothing is left out. Nothing extra is brought in. It sounds so simple, yet the Tea Ceremony is known to be one of Japan's most subtle and exacting art forms."

Bettina Vitell

A Zen Approach To Cooking and Eating

Dear Ones,

Living your life as a spiritual practice is to know that you never will never attain perfection and that this is okay. Life as a spiritual practice means acknowledging that we are students our whole life long, and that this, too, is fine. Today people strive for perfection to the point that they cause undue suffering for themselves, in their own life and in the world around them. I have tried to set the table for eating at the banquet of life and it's many courses by building a structure for my life that I seldom stray from, give or take life's uncertainties, surprises, and the monkey wrenches that will be thrown into the middle of the best laid plans, and through it all I continue to strive to live in the moment, to steep myself in the knowledge that everything around me is sacred, not just the pleasant, joyful things -- the things that make us happy, that lay the ground for the gift of peace in our life -- but also to treat as deeply important lessons the painful, scary, and unknown in life, for these are the things that truly forge a soul. This is why I write. I write to remember, writing is the rudder that guides me through life, and I am a devout student of all that is.

Why do I write what I write? -- deeply personal essays and stories about my own life which some have thought self-centered, have chastised me for, have puzzled over -- "Why not write novels, short stories, or non-fiction about other subjects?" I can tell you why, and I can tell you because I have spent these last many years as a contemplative, living a life of solitude, silence, prayer, meditation, and not simply to further my spiritual journey, but to discover what my true purpose is, what I was meant to do in this life that might serve others. I have long felt that I was meant to live a life of service, and yet because I am who I am, ill at ease in the outside world, afraid, often, I came to terms with the fact that I would have to learn how to serve from this sanctuary that is my home, living an almost completely cloistered life. This has been a very perplexing quandary, and though I have written since I was nine, publishing before I was twenty, and having written many novels (that didn't sell) and a number of poems (some of which did), and having written for newspapers and magazines as well as having my writing included in an anthology of women's writings, I finally came to realize that none of these were the road I should take, and that I could not serve others in this way. Some can, but this was not meant to be my path.

Unbeknownst to me it was the thirty years of teaching journal classes that were spiritual in nature, writing as a healing and contemplative art, and listening to the stories of my students who were also great teachers for me, that I began to realize that what mattered to me most of all were the lives that we all live, the little things that often slip by and get lost, to center my own life in the practice of celebrating the quicksilver, fleeting moments of our human lives through the practice of mindfulness (... which I have to begin again and again because I slip away and get lost and have to continually pick up the threads of my life and move forward once more...), and to help others realize, by offering my own journey up as an example, by sharing thoughtful reflections that come up in my meditation sessions, and the rounds of my daily life, that their lives are precious. I wanted to write, "Dear Reader, your life is sacred, it should be celebrated, you can live through the worst and revel in the best," and as I came through these last twelve years, most especially this last one which has been one of the most complex times of my life, I came to understand how I might move forward, within the constraints of a life lived mostly cut off from the world, by writing my own truth as I live it. This is what I wrote in my journal recently...

I care about your life. This is why I write about mine, so that it might open a door for you to walk through the words on the page with certainty that everything you do is important, even and especially the smallest details, that it is sacred, that it should be held gently in your heart so that without judgment, and with tenderness for your own human life, faults, foibles and all, you can live with compassion and loving-kindness, in as much as any of us can, and find peace in your own humanity, first and foremost for yourself, for without finding these things for yourself, you have nothing to give to another. We must tend the fires of our own soul so that we can light that of another, that we can perhaps illuminate the path of another so that they are not afraid of the dark. This is why I write, this is why I try, this is how I hope that I can serve others, from my own little corner of the world.

We are only as limited as we believe we are. The fact that I cannot live in the world in the "ordinary way" does not mean that I do not have anything to give, and you, too, have much to give, even when you can't see the way, living fully in each moment you will find your true path. It needn't be discovering the way to bring about world peace, a cure for a terrible disease, or any number of other things that are held up as lofty goals that we, in our inability to meet them, feel useless and fail to treat our own lives with the respect it deserves. We are not all meant to win the Nobel Prize, but we can all be kind to those around us. This is what I believe, what I try to live, what I have to offer, and what I will continue to share in the hopes that it might be a candle in the darkness for even one other person. I believe that this is a worthy goal.

My own rituals, routines, and practices are simple and to many seem mundane, but they lead me deeply into the knowledge, daily, that every moment of our often fragile lives are necessary to be whole human beings with the ability to have compassion for even the smallest creatures around us, to the person we pass on the street, the woman who checks us out at the grocery store, the bank teller that cashes our check, the little child reaching down to pick a dandelion with a sense of awe and wonder, a chickadee at the feeder, your mailman, elderly neighbor, for everyone and every thing in the world around us. It all matters and not a single second should fall through the cracks of our lives, at least this is the goal, and while we can live fully in each moment, remembering all of these things, if we continually strive to meet the goals that we have set for ourselves, whatever they might be, we will have found our true purpose, we will have lived the life we were meant to live, and we can be at peace within ourselves because we live in the knowledge that we have continued to pick up the thread when we drop it, and journey onward. What a powerful way to live.

So the structure of my daily life, each and every day with few exceptions, goes as follows:

I rise with my animals, beginning with my small elderly pug Harvey who has to go out and sounds the trumpet for the others, and we all greet the day together. If it is very early, 6 a.m. or before, I give them a little treat and we go back to bed. By 7 a.m. Harvey lets me know that he might cease to exist if breakfast is not served immediately. Now is the time our day really begins, and, oddly, the 7 parrots in the house seem to know that the first time we are up we are not really "up" but drifting through a few moments of a pre-dawn ritual that does not concern them. One hour later, however, before my feet touch the floor, every single bird in the house starts to chitter and chatter and sing and talk and Big Bird Flounder, my greenwing macaw, screams at the top of his lungs, "Good Morning Flounder, Good Morrrrnnnnnniiiiinnnnggggg." Every single day. It never changes.

Once the dogs are fed, and medications dispensed to these furry old folks, I make the rounds washing bowls and getting fresh food and water for the seven parrots. There is nothing more satisfying than knowing that my little ones are all fed and cared for. All seven parrots kiss me good morning, and I rub feathery faces and bellies and talk our secret language. Then, and only then, with all of the animals started on their day do I move into my own.

Making coffee is a ritual from the grinding of the beans, to the heating of the cup, the brewing of the espresso, frothing the milk and finally cleaning the machine. In the bitterest cold of our winter days I set the fire and light it, staring into the flames, drawn into the beginning of my silent routine.

With the over-sized mug in my hands, the first sip of my latte is divine, pure bliss, and I stop to say "thank you" for this most extraordinary moment. I say thank you all throughout the day, acknowledging the many gifts that I have in my life. In so doing peace flows through my being like blood through my veins, and these moments of gratitude are the connective tissue of each day, weaving together the threads of the tapestry that make up a single day of my life. No day goes uncelebrated, each are filled with grace, of this I am well aware, so that on the hardest, most painful days this practice of gratitude makes me aware that amidst it all I still have so much to be thankful for.

When I recently lost my precious pug Coco who died quite unexpectedly on the operating table, wracked with grief and sorrow so heavy that I could at first not see through it, I came home to three dogs dancing and crying and wagging their tails. They needed me, they loved me, they give me more tenderness and so many gifts with their simple presence that I cannot wholly allow myself to disappear into the darkness that grief brings. And there are the parrots singing and calling to me, a very large bird practically dancing off his cage wanting me to pick him up so he can ride around my shoulder as I feed the dogs and put all the other birds to bed. I hold his large beak in my hand and draw his face to me, kissing all over the silky soft skin around his bright macaw eyes. He croons to me and whistles. How can I be completely lost when I have so much?

My mornings are very quiet. I pray, I record the thoughts that arise in meditation, I make a list to organize my day, and then I follow the hour's rituals ahead with a sense of peace and safety, a kind of peace I had heretofore never known. Having suffered a lifetime of clinical depression when I felt lost, tumbling through space and time without anything to hold onto, with no safety net below me, I went through very dark times when I didn't think that I could survive. The seesaw-like imbalances of my Bi-Polar disorder could render me so off-kilter that there were days I was so frozen in confusion, sadness, and despair that I could not leave my over-sized chair that was as if a life raft that carried me through the days. But the day came when a kind of structure started to float up from the bottom to the surface of my life, and the rituals and routine that I now adhere to today became a spiritual practice that lifted me me up out of the darkness and into the light.

Yes, there have been therapy and medication as well, but the most stabilizing factor has been building a structure like a ladder that I climb through the hours of the day, and I am more at peace than I have ever been in my life. Spirit has led the way. If I can help one other single soul on this earth, everything that I have been through in my life will have been worth it, for the most painful times, the times I thought I could not bear, have become Phoenix times that caused me to crash, burn, and rise again, many times over. I no longer dwell on past sorrows, I look to the ways in which I might live fully in each moment and those moving me upstream through the rest of my days. I record the lessons learned. I share them with you.

When finally all seven parrots have been put to bed, the dogs fed and out for their early evening time stroll in the great wide world that exists within the safe confines of our large fenced yard, they settle into their beds and go to sleep before the crackling fire where the warmth radiates out making fur shine and feel warm to the touch. I put the kettle on and while the water comes to a boil I heat the teapot and my favorite vintage mug, measure out the tea leaves into my little infuser, and finally gently pour the water over the leaves watching the clock as the leaves infuse the water with translucent color and a fragrance that fills the kitchen. I carry the pot, the cozy to keep it warm, the cup and spoon, a napkin and glass of water to my huge chair and a half, my only new piece of furniture (I told the sales woman that I needed a chair big enough to fit a person and a pug...), and I settle in for the night ahead.

I love this time of night, the silence, save the snoring of the pugs and the crackling and popping of the fire, brings deep pleasure and a sense of contentment. As I sip my tea I take up any one of several books next to me and read and make notes, I set my pen on the table next to me and open up the computer to write, I bend down to kiss a soft sleeping pug, and I float on the hours until bedtime. I take the dogs out one last time, gazing up at the moon while they go down the deck stairs and into the yard to sniff and snuffle and do their business one last time. The fire is now out or nearly so, and I turn on the few lights I have on at night, preferring a small pool of light around my chair, candlelight, and the small colored lights glowing inside the old Moroccan lantern.

We go back to bed, the dogs and I, and I lift Sampson, the pug that sleeps with me, up onto the high, one hundred year old bed, and Big Dog Moe and Harvey sleep in their beds on either side of mine, and I go to sleep smiling listening to the soft snoring of the pugs, and the knowledge the my big old black dog is sleeping peacefully in his big bed. Sam moves up and snuggles into my back, often, with his back against mine, and his little head in the crook of my neck, and I drift off to sleep with the reverberations of his soft snoring like the old beds with "Magic Fingers" you used to put a quarter in that vibrated and relaxed your body in the most blissful way, and I offer up prayers of thanksgiving with my eyes closed, drifting into sleep, closing the curtain on another day.

These are my days, this is my life, I celebrate each moment, my cup runneth over. I would like to pour a cup for you. Instead, I write this blog entry in the hopes that it might bring comfort to those who find it, and make them realize that their own lives are sacred, share with you, dear reader, the beauty of life, even amidst the pain and sorrow that sometimes arise, and offer up the knowledge that there are miracles all around us if only we have eyes to see. Like the tiny wildflower that grows up through a nearly invisible crack in the cement below our feet, we are daily blessed with more than we know exists. I am coming to know this. I bow in gratitude.

And now a sleepy pug raises his head with eyes still closed, snuffling in his sleep and then snuggling up against me again. It is time for me to close here and sink into the cushion of silence that fills my final hours. Even when I watch t.v. I am aware of the way I am shored up in this restful place, and in this warm cozy room the day draws to a close.

Rest gently dear souls in the lives you are creating. Build a structure that can hold you up under all circumstances, carry it with you inside yourself when you must travel outside into the wide, wide world. It will stand you in good stead. Let us now move forward into our days.