beyond the map

a chapter closing

2008-08-07T21:08:00.000-07:00

My birthday is next week. Another year, a marker of time in which I look back upon and wonder how it is possible to get from there to here, how strange it is to look at passages of time, when it is experienced only in the moment. Still, I pause, I glance back over my shoulder. I celebrate. The life given, the life lived, the day after day after day.

What has changed? Nothing. Everything.
I look back at that first entry I wrote here, how all was in transition. And I am here, again, having come full circle.
I am sitting right on the cusp of things, of endings moving into new beginnings.
I am feeling a momentary sense of completion, a pause, a waiting for the change to come, the change that has already, even now, begun.

Leo is a boy now, no longer baby, or even toddler. Just tonight we went roller skating. Roller skating! Is he really big enough for this? Apparently so, because though I offered to hold his hand as he wobbled about, he would have none of it. �??I�??m fine mom. I�??m fine,�?? he said. And he was.
His questions stun me. His words surprise and amuse and delight me. Like this. At night, tucking him into bed he looks at me and says, �??mom you are as cute as a rhinoceros.�?? �??Well, thank-you Leo.�?? Then, as if he thought about it and changed his mind. �??No,�?? he says. �??You are as cute as the way penguins look when they walk.�??

I have been writing with a renewed passion and love and curiosity. A year ago it was writing here, writing in a regular way again, returning to my love of words. Now, it is writing in my journals, pages and pages of longhand interwoven with pictures and sketches and snippets of dreams remembered upon waking. Writing my stories, my memory, my truth, my hands typing fast to keep up with the words that come. Words that seem to come not from out there, ideas and images for which I seek, but words that come from within me, that have been forming for some time and now have their say.

This past weekend I was present as doula at a birth of twins, two new little boys, twins, healthy and pink and eyes squinting up, searching for mom. And I was very aware of it being a last. Not that I will never be a doula again. I will. I love this. But I am no longer doing it as work, for work, building a career, a birth business. It has been a slow leaving and this birth marked the official �??end�?? for me. It felt very right, and as I walked out of the hospital I knew something was ending, had already left.

In less than two weeks I leave to go to Vermont for ten days, the beginning of my return to school. I will be doing my work at home, with week long residencies once a semester. It�??s been quite some time since I was in an academic environment. I honestly don�??t know how it will be, the ways my days will change, when or exactly how the work will get done, how I will feel with my nose in books and my mind stretched and my creativity entering new expressions. I only know things will change, I will change, and I am ready for this. It has been a long time in coming and the time is right. So I begin.

I begin. I end. I circle back around. I say good-bye. I say welcome. And in all of it I say thank-you.

And I don�??t know how else to say it except I feel this chapter closing of writing here Beyond the Map. It�??s time. Ending time, beginning time, the two inseparable. So I say good-bye to this space that has held me well, a space for my words, an emerging self, a longing for a unconditional relationship with life. It was important to me and I am so grateful. Grateful for the way it helped me begin to write again. Grateful for the people I met, many who have become friends. Grateful for the container it offered me, a womb of sorts, allowing me to speak my truth and find my way back home.

alignment with myself

2008-08-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

"Kairos"

As part of my, still very successful, care plan to treat and help prevents headaches I go to see a NUCCA chiropractor. It is all very exact, taking x-rays and measurements and the adjustment is not at all invasive, but precision is everything.

I�??m still going twice a week and the good thing is, I seem to be holding the alignment for longer periods of time, and soon, I will move to once a week and then once a month and there will come a time when I will be going in once every few months or so, just to get checked, make sure I�??m still holding the adjustment and staying aligned.

In my love of words, I find great meaning in this: that these adjustments re-align me, that this headache has re-aligned me, bringing me to a much deeper place with truths I have been walking and circling for all my years really, the story that is my story, the one I am in some ways always writing and that remains living.

When faced with such pain, all day every day, I had to stop, to listen. I had to check in with myself several times throughout the day, asking what I could do rather than just telling myself what I should do. I had to let go of the �??agenda�??, the �??plan�??, and find my way through very bit by bit. And this is, of course, the way I want to live, the way I feel most alive, the way I know to remain embodied, in alignment with my truth and heart and loves.

It reawakened this in me, all over again, this experience I had in the months following my surgery and cancer and recovery nearly two years ago. That there is a time for things, all things, and that I can listen to my own body and rhythms and cycles and seasons and they tell me where I am and what I need or what to do or not do, what is being asked for, called for, what I have to offer.

I am very much here right now, this listening deeply to what my body and internal knowing, �??intuition�?? is speaking, and then moving from that place. And patterns do emerge, cycles of and for things, a sense of routine or rhythm, which feels to me a kind and grounded container for the rush of sensations that come into me, the dream world of psyche, the juggling of demands and needs and desires. It�??s all there, all belonging, all having its place and home. Just not all at once. And this is what I am learning, all over again.

It�??s a strange world I live in. A world where I can eat strawberries in the middle of a Chicago winter, where I can trick myself into thinking it is not the darkness of sleeping hours but instead turn on all the lights and work through my bodies limits, where I can buy just about anything at just about anytime, where everything is always there, always available, and I�??m told I should in fact have it all, all of this. And this way of being leaves me, and I sense a great many others, very lost. A sense of disconnect. An absence of being in alignment with the seasons of things and cycles of myself, with responding to what wants to be done here and now, in this moment, and not trying to do it all or do it all at once or do it because some arbitrary thing �??out there�?? told me I should or must or have to.

There are so many energies that live in me, that manifest.
Times when I feel a building energy, when I�??m on fire and ready to get shit done, when I feel all slow and sensual.
Times when I am in the throes of creation or at the door of destruction, when I feel mentally clear and everything seems to fit into place and times when I�??m cloudy and all is murky and I must stay here and not seek explanation.
Times when I�??m gestating or birthing or protected in cocoon.
Times with I need to withdraw, to turn inward and be quiet and still, and times when I need to be active and doing and lost in the task at hand.
Times when I�??m watering and tending, times when I�??m planting, times when I�??m uprooting.
Times for grounding, for flying, for letting the water hold me.
Times for puttering and rambling and roaming, for nurturing and for challenging and stretching; times for celebration and for storming and for taking Leo to go play miniature gold and out for swirled ice cream cones.

It�??s all in me. And yet not all at once, and I want to live in communion with myself, my flesh, my heart, my knowing, so I might live in alignment, not going against my grain (and yes, the wording again makes me pause: migraine - my grain)

When I try to force something, to make myself fit some mold or arbitrary schedule of when things should happen or be done, I start to feel stiff and brittle and I get grouchy and bite people�??s heads off, or else I shut down or get sick as way of trying to restore and find alignment once again.

How much more life giving to honor this knowing inside me, to follow where it leads, trusting that there is a time for all things and I can only be right here where I am, in this right now. And to do so, to live this, it requires I listen, which asks I be still, and silent, silent enough to really hear with my body and see with my heart. It is just too hard for me to listen when I am going at full speed and forcing, pushing, plowing through the list of to dos. So I stop. And I listen. And the answer is always there.

To know this, really feel it the way I have been in my headache recovery, sinking into it and celebrating it, it transforms the moments themselves, the days. All of life becomes a way of offering devotion, of loving what is, of compassion and go softly and finding myself, again and again, having entered so deeply into things that I understand what it is to be present, as if for the first time.

everywhere is falling everywhere

2008-07-24T09:20:00.000-07:00

Photo by Collin I. Mills

My poor flowers on the porch have all withered and died and I will need to go and buy new ones, planting them in pots and watering them to life.
I have not washed my hair in too many days and it sticks up in strange places and looks like a birds nest.
The pipe underneath our kitchen sink broke, spewing water everywhere, leaving warped damage in the cupboard and on the floor.
My refrigerator is empty and when I go to make a salad it is of wilting lettuce and a few found sunflower seeds and shriveled green onions.
I�??m supposed leave for school in just a month, to be gone for ten whole days, and I have no real idea what I�??m doing or how it will all work itself out or what I need to have done before departing.
The cd in Leo�??s stereo skips at song nine and I have to go in and fast-forward past that song three times every night.
It is summer so there is no good tv on and I just finished watching the last of Weeds on DVD and have to wait months before the next season comes out.
My car is filthy and cracker crumbs are ground into the seats and there is likely a cup of juice rotting somewhere in the back.
There is a tickle in the back of my throat, like I�??m coming down with a cold.
I�??m behind in pretty much every area of my life and there is hours of catching up work to do.

But right now, I do not care about any of this.
I am choosing to let all this go for now, for the moment.

Because today, right now, I do not have a headache.

After fifty three days of pain, I now feel a hollow in my head where the ache once was.
I do not have a headache. I do not have a headache. I do not have a headache.
And right now, it is ok that nothing else matters.

Some things happened which I believe had a direct affect on the pain level going down, resulting in me having these whole stretches of time in which there is NO pain. And yet, I honestly can�??t say how or why or what. I did everything I could. And something, likely many things, worked.

Slowly, I will decrease the �??treatments�??, until I am, I hope, living a more normal life rather than consulting the calendar every day to see what doctor and healer appointments I have.

And some things have shifted inside me to, during this whole process.
I feel like things I am here on this earth to do, that I cycled through them again, on a deeper level. And so new insight will emerge. New, deeper, integration of my stories, my myths, my images and symbols that have been winding their way through me for the past two years.

But not now, not yet. For now, I just know something happened and shifted and feels alive and I need to not know. To just rest in the not knowing, how this loosens control, the ways in which I want to claim control, that I get to know and decide and determine.

Then my horoscope for the week.
Always crazy, in the best sense of the word, when it aligns so much with where I am.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): "Everybody experiences far more than he

understands," said philosopher Marshall McLuhan. "Yet it is experience,

rather than understanding, that influences behavior." This is always true,

but it will have special meaning for you in the coming days. You're about

to be inundated by a flood of raw perceptions, sensations, and feelings,

and only a fraction of it will be namable, let alone comprehensible. That

shouldn't be a problem, though. Your job is simply to marvel at all the

novelty that's flowing in, not to be in an anxious hurry to define it.

This is what I plan to do, to enjoy my pain free periods. To marvel at all that has poured in, without rushing in to define or even understand.

***

There is going to be a fall out from all of this, from so many days of being in bed. Things got lost here, in this maze of pain. I really quickly start to feel overwhelmed, as if the pain lets up and then I am expected to just leap back into life�??s doing. There is a shadow cast by so many days of debilitating pain, of being in bed, and it will have its due.

A friend sent me an email this morning. She said to me that maybe now that I�??m not in pain all the time, I still need to recover from the headache, from what it meant, from what it took out of me.

Yes, this is it. I need to recover. Though not in pain, I need to recover from the pain.
And I don�??t know how long this will take, only that I must go gently, listen deeply and offer myself the space for the fullness of my experience, all the crazy contradictions of emotions and the desire to be doing again and the exhaustion in my body and heart. And let all of this be, without understanding, just being in it, with it.

Recover.
Go gently.
Say thank-you, again and again for the pain that has lifted, has lessened, seems to be leaving all together.
Rush nothing.

This is the poem I felt come to me the last two weeks, in some way capturing for me my headache and what it has been for me and meant for me. Falling up into the bowl of the sky. Watching as the bowl breaks all together, shatters inside me and outside in my days. Falling towards something else all together, a different way of being, a Presence with no name.

And now, in ways I don�??t understand and need to understand (again, this letting go of understanding), the poem is showing me the way to Return back to myself, to my daily life, my family, my world. To weave things back together, to settle in, to do what needs to be done, refusing to rush and clamor, to be gentle in the days to come, as if to offer balance, tender container, for the severity and fierceness with which this has been teacher to me, teaching me about myself.

�??The New Rule�??
Rumi

It's the old rule that drunks have to argue
and get into fights.
The lover is just as bad. he falls into a hole.
But down in that hole he finds something shining,
worth more than any amount of money or power.

Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.
Nothing else to do.

Here's the new rule: break the wineglass,
and fall toward the glassblower's breath.

I�??ll leave with those words I think.
I plan on being off line for a few days, maybe longer, as I recover and sort through what got left behind as I was in bed with a headache and everywhere was falling everywhere, to go gently as I find my own way, falling again and again toward, and into, the glassblower�??s breath.

two paths make my whole

2008-07-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, sitting here on the couch or lying in bed or en route to one of my many appointments, I think I can actually, quite literally, feel myself stretching, becoming more, an expansiveness splitting open old ideas and bringing me so close to another way I can feel her breath on my face.

The old, familiar, known, well-rehearsed, comfortable routine way: either/or, this/that, black/white, right/wrong.
The new way: I will do anything, try anything, open to anything and do so all at once.

Which means, as this headache continues and remains and does not leave, I am choosing to come to it, to treat it, to tend to it, from many different perspectives and angles and supportive therapies. I am allowing myself to open to the truth that maybe I need all these things and it is ok to use all of them, to accept what they have to offer and give thanks for the way it helps, without saying that one way is the way or the answer or the cure or the fix. Just to say yes, to open and say yes and keep going, day after day, starting over again and again.

So, I am going here twice a week.
And in two weeks I have an appointment here.

I am taking herbs and I am taking medicine made in a laboratory somewhere, a medicine I had hoped to avoid but now just hope will work and make a difference.
I am opening my body to be cared for by those who believe who my body has everything it needs within it in order to heal. And I am opening my body to be tested and examined and perhaps helped by those who believe my body, my headaches, are a puzzle of sorts and nothing more than chemicals or physiology and if we find the right combination, I will be cured. And on the surface these two don�??t fit, don�??t go together. But for me, for now, they do. And this is good for me, the me that can be quite rigid about one way or another, this way or that, that finds some kind of comfort in passion, in all or nothing gusto, in believing with religious zeal. Now I am being opened to letting both ways be present for me, a part of my path. To not pick one over the other but say yes to both. This is, oddly, exactly the place I need to be.

I don�??t know what will finally help. I don�??t know if I will ever know what it is that finally helps or if it is simply the collection of things that seems to, over time, lessen the headaches until they are again manageable. Maybe I will know. Such as, I went the Botox route and now my headaches are gone. Or maybe it will be much more ambiguous: I got Botox and acupuncture and swallowed pills and had craniosarcal massage and somewhere in there, they began to lessen. The old me would be crazy with the not knowing. Now, after being here for as long as I have, this headache for fifty days now, I feel it has worn away some of my rigidity. I�??m open to anything, to all of it, in moments even open to being here and nowhere else but here, at this place where I have a headache that won�??t go away.

I remember when I was going through menopause and felt I was spinning in a cyclone of treatments and therapies. And it was upsetting to me and hard on my body, harder than the symptoms of menopause itself. I felt in my gut, I just knew, that I needed to walk away, to go off all the supplements, to stop the therapies, to do nothing but give myself space for my body to transition, all on its own. Without interference. Which it did.

And this time around, I know, just as clearly, yet it is a different knowing. I know I need help, that this headache is not going away on its own, if given space and time and nurturing love. I know that this headache is coming from somewhere, in me and my body, and I need help, from many places, to tend to it and alleviate its pain and find a way to live moving forward. I know it just as clearly, as fully, and I trust this knowing. So I proceed. I change my diet and I go to see another doctor. I feel my feelings and I research new medicines. I invest in good ice packs and peppermint for the nauseas and the very expensive alternative treatments that are available and I invest in medicine for pain and a clinic my insurance will not cover and doctors recommended by those I trust. I do this. All of this.

Yes, and. Both.
Seeing and accepting and embracing the life giving qualities in all of it.
The way through, my way through, not clearly marked and hedged one either side but a sprawling path that takes me here and there, and here and there some more, that asks me to open my mind, leave behind assumptions, and say yes to the healing and support offered.
To trust, above all else, the voice in me that knows what I need.

Today is a yes/and day, a thank god for all of it day, a refusing to settle for just one way day.
Today is a good day.

reading and other things

2008-07-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

This is how I�??m coping, making it through, hoping to alleviating pain and learning to live with pain.

I go to see the chiropractor once, sometimes twice a week.
I go get acupuncture twice a week. There, I lie on the table and stare at the octagon in the ceiling and I notice how the light from the small lamp hits each angle differently. I imagine the pain in my head leaving my body and being sent up to the eight sided container. I feel things tingling in my body, my left foot and wrist, my right temple and eye socket. I feel the soothing oils of peppermint from the cloth she puts over my forehead.
I take six scoops of Chinese herbs, ground to a powder, twice a day. They are bitter and smell like root vegetables freshly pulled up from the ground. I mix them with orange juice and chug them down, three bug gulps.
I sit with my feet in hot water in the bathtub, with a bag of frozen pees on my head.
I rub the soles of my feet. I have Todd place pressure right in the center of the arch. I paint my toenails: bright red and black and deep purple and the palest pink.
I take a medicine I did not want to take but have come to accept as needed medicine for me, for now. I swallow the tablet at night, feel an achy sadness, pray for relief.
I fall apart and weave myself back together.
I save up my energy and do fun things with Leo: going for walks, eating our Popsicles, going mini golfing, making pictures, watering the flowers on the porch that are starting to whither in the heat.
I take pleasure wherever and however it comes: memories of dancing on the porch with Todd and eating watermelon, summer dresses and bare feet, drinking Dr. Pepper with crushed ice, connecting with friends when the moments allow, listening to the insect orchestra at night, eating peaches and plums and fat grapes.
And I read. I have done more reading in the past weeks than I did all the other months of this year combined. There are times when even reading is too much, hurting my head and eyes, and then I put the books down. But as soon as the pain allows, I�??m back with my books. They are offering me such solace and escape and joy right now. I�??ve read The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy, Stand Facing the Stove by Anne Mendelson, The Name by Michal Gorvin, The Book of Salt by Monique Truong, The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison, Psyche in a Dress by Francesca Lia Block, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson, Best Friends by Martha Moody. I�??ve gone back and re-read old favorites: Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Carl Jung, A Passage to India and Howard�??s End by E.M. Forrester, all the poetry books by Marie Howe, Pilgrim and Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, A Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. I read in bed, on the couch, sitting on the porch in our broken wicker chairs, in waiting rooms to see doctors, before sleeping, in the morning after Leo is at school and I�??m sipping my morning latte. I read waiting for dinner to cook, waiting for Todd to come home from a trip, waiting for the headache to go away. I am not really that picky, the way I usually am about books, searching for just the right book to fit the spot, the need, the sate I�??m in. These books are bought cheap, under a buck a piece at garage sales, pages upon pages of story and words that transport me, take me to other worlds, offer me reprieve. I gobble them up. Then I open another and begin again. So, if any of you out there have recommendations, particularly for rather easy reads and good story telling, do share. My rather large pile is now dwindling and I may be here for a while, asking books to keep me company. Which they do. And I am so grateful.

falling apart and weaving back together

2008-07-14T07:50:00.001-07:00

I am learning how to fall apart. How to fall apart, wholly and fully, down to the bones. And I am learning how to get back up again.

This is what the headache is teaching me, in moments, forcing me, to learn how to do.

I am noticing a cycle begin to emerge.

I go along with things, in pain, but able to manage, to function, to cope. I have to stop more, in days stop all together and stay in bed, but for the most part I do ok. I get Leo to school, I manage to eat three eat meals a day, many of which I have cooked. I take advantage of the low pain days and catch up on housework, on laundry, and write furiously for three hour stretches at a time, in a trance of words and a head that is allowing me these moments of clarity.

And this goes along. Until it does not. I do not know what causes the break down, if anything. Is it that the pain gets worse, more acute, more piercing, more throbbing, demanding my attention, my last nerve frayed, frazzled, until snapped? Is it the culmination of so many days of the middle level pain, the way it wears me down, makes me tired, makes me irritable, makes me so sad, missing the old me?

I honestly don�??t know the what, the why, and cannot really predict the when. Only that it will happen again, that it cycles back around.

I fell apart again Saturday night. It felt good.
I cried. I let it out. I gave up and in.
I had a pity party, complete with its not fair and I give up and what if nothing ever, ever makes this headache go away, with spinning in my fear.
I let myself give over to the pain, and to the anger it can bring up in me, how I�??m seeing how much and how greatly I believe I should get what I want and how much it pisses me off when I don�??t. It�??s not right or wrong, good or bad, just angry, raw and real.
I made space for floundering, for feeling like I was drowning, for sputtering and gasping for air.
And then I did nothing but lie in bed and stare out the window, at the trees in our front yard and the wind that was shaking them and how good it felt to feel so emptied, that I had let things be loosed inside me and leave. Emptied of hope, of desire, of need, of motivation, of strength, of anger, of anything, everything. I would not want this state all the time, or even often. But when it comes, at the times it seems to come to me, it is always just what I need. It is rest.

And after I fell apart, again, I woke up Sunday morning and started again. I got some laundry done, and the floors swept and mopped even. By evening I was in a low pain period so I did some writing, some reading, some catching up on bills and paper work and boring real life stuff. And it was ok again.

I did not know this was possible. And I think there was a time in my life when this was not possible. To break down would mean I would fragment into so many pieces, and I might never collect them all, find a way to weave them back together. It might mean that some part of my brain, my psyche, would split off, leave, and perhaps not return. This is what I feared in the falling apart, the breaking down. It had happened to me before, and I was afraid of it happening again.

That was then.
This is now.
Now, I am able to do this, a greater resiliency having been born, built, created fiber after fiber over time and my willingness to enter the fire and come through, out the other side.
And now, I am breaking down, learning how to break down again and gain, and learning that it feels like the end of everything, and it is really not. It is just breaking down, apart, letting what needs to come out, come out. And then I get up again. I do the dishes. I go for a walk with Leo. I put my arms around Todd from behind, and rest my head inbetween his shoulder blades, my favorite spot on his back. And I realize, I am here, all of me.

***

As if to brighten my day, help me get back up again and carry on, and even do so with some pleasure and delightful surprise, two different bloggers gave me awards on their blogs.

Claudia from Dragonfly Dreaming made my day with this.

Allison at the Rabbit Hole gifted me with this:

I don�??t quite know how to respond. Except to just say thank-you.
Nothing like a little treat to help pick oneself up again, put yourself back together, wake up again, and start the new day.

darkness lighting the way

2008-07-10T20:12:00.000-07:00

The good news is that there is nothing serious causing my headache.
It is not a symptom of some other illness, and in moments when I can hold the bigger picture I am very grateful for this.
The other side of this good news is that there is nothing really causing my headache, meaning there is nothing really to make it go away.
My body gets headaches.
At the moment I am in the midst of a very long headache.
So it becomes about learning how to alleviate the pain as much as possible, care for myself, and seek support.

There are no clear answers, formulas, promises, givens, guarantees.
I will have to navigate by a different kind a light.

Yesterday afternoon I had a window of time in which the pain was significantly lessened.
I seized it, determined to have some time with Leo that involved more than me laying on the couch asking him to not be too loud. We were going to go out.

It took us a while to get out the door, the kind of �??while�?? in which I start to doubt whether it is worth to even go, as in never mind lets just stay home because clearly he could care less and who raised you and please don�??t let it be me because I cannot stand the way you are throwing yourself on the floor and whining and insisting on your own way.

But, we did, get out the door.
And once we did, we had the best time, the kind of time that made me feel so delightfully, deliciously happy to be Leo�??s mom, to be with him, to be spending a summer afternoon with this spark of a four and a half year old.

We walked outside and it was hot, but not too hot, just really warm with a little bit of a breeze and we were both wearing shorts and sandals and it felt good to be together, in the outside, in the hot. We walked to the library, something with I will admit we had never done before. I�??m not sure why. Sarah had taken him, but I never had. And so it was a first. We walked to the neighborhood library and walking inside those doors, being there, in that un-air-conditioned building with row after row of children�??s books and those little tables with little chairs and the very way it smelled, it flooded me with memories of my own childhood, the good and sweet kind. I was so happy in that moment.

Leo and I looked at books and I told him he could pick out five books to check out and bring home for the week. After he had made his choice we sat there and read them all them, in a hushed library voice, all very lazily and dreamily quiet except for those moments he burst out laughing at the most random things in the stories, shaking his head at jokes that were obviously written for him alone or else for the four year old crowd, encrypted messages not intended for grown ups.

Then we went up to the front desk and got him his very own library card of which he was incredibly proud, proud to see his own name spelled out, in his own hand writing, proud to see them scan his card and then the books he had picked out, proud when they handed him the books, and then the printed out receipt telling him when they were due back.

Walking home we got treats from the ice cream truck. I picked out a Drumstick and Leo had one of those ginormous Popsicles that starts red and then goes green and then blue and then orange and then ends with a yellow core. We walked and licked and lots landed on the side walk and neither of us cared.

We stopped in at Todd�??s office to say hi and it with the exception of the Popsicle hands on the dry clean only pants Todd was happy to see us. It was fun to see Leo sitting on Todd�??s lap, pretending to do �??important�?? things, feeling a part of his dad�??s world.

With this relentless headache fun has not been frequent and oh how we both needed it, needed that afternoon, needed time without battle in which we simply enjoyed each other, the summer day.

Today I had acupuncture with a new practitioner today and though I am withholding grand absolute statements, such as this will cure me from this headache and I will never get another headache ever again, I do feel that this is a part of it for me, a part of my path in caring for myself, my body that is prone to head pain. I have a good feeling about her. I trust her and I knew in her presence a rest I have not felt since this whole ordeal began. I also experienced a lessening of pain, which at this point is worth a great deal.

Now it is late, and dark out, with the exception of lightening that cracks through the sky making tree branches looks like bones. Hard rain has been falling for the last four hours, welcome after a day of clouded skies. Thunder comes so loud, like lions roaring; I feel its vibrations inside my chest.

And I�??m sitting here, thinking of the horoscope from this week�??s Free Will Astrology (below).
Feeling how I feel that though this headache is still with me, I am coming through it, one way or another.
Feeling the mystery of poisons becoming medicine, that sometimes the thing I think I don�??t want is the thing I need.
Feeling the lessening of pain, bit by bit, and the love of simple pleasure with Leo and a deep respect for the darkness of my being, the pain that coils its way around my head, the body which cannot lie.
Feeling the darkness of this night, lighting the way.

This oracle was originally commissioned by a
spiritual wilderness school to train its students in high-stress meditation.
It has been tested by disciplined explorers who've learned to be fluid and
resourceful in the midst of natural chaos. Now it's being made available to
you, Leo -- just in time for the last stretch of your dash (or crawl) across
the wasteland. By contemplating the code phrase that appears at the end
of this message, you will discover the key for turning poisons into
medicine, taking advantage of your weaknesses, and knowing your
direction without a compass. Here it is: *Love the beauty and intelligence
that are hidden in your darkness.*

note to self: let it be really real

2008-07-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

I wonder what took me so long.
I mean, seriously, why did it take so many days of a headache, of really bad pain, before I would admit to myself, and others, where I was, how bad it was?
Since I wrote here last I have been to the doctor again, which did not help, and to the emergency room, which did not help and is a rather long story I don�??t have the desire to even write out in this moment.

Today I go to see the neurologist, and the hope is that I leave with something to help with the pain and with some basic action plan, clearly laid out steps to take in order learn what is causing this relentless headache which has not been populated with a smattering of other symptoms. This is what today will, fingers crossed, bring me.

And the last couple of days have been one big long surrender, giving in to just how shitty I feel, letting it be fully real. To not try to make it better or put on a happy face or trudge through or limp along. But to just let it be what it is: I am in pain. My head hurts. All the time.

I did not admit this to myself or others for a long time, how I woke every morning and felt my head throb in pain and yet then went about the day as if it was no big deal, normal, until the fatigue of coping with the pain for so long would come and catch up with me and I would turn into a raving bitch or else melt into a puddle of �??can�??t take it anymore�?? tears. I did not let this be spoken, admitted, as if I could trick it into leaving. I know, it sounds funny, silly, very child like. But I do it all the time. I did it this time. I did not want to know what I knew. I did not let it be fully real to myself.

I tried to pretend it was not so bad, or that it would just go away if I gave it another day, or that, or that, or that, anything to not let it be a situation that would require doctors, hospitals, my body being prodded again, the care providers unknowing, and all the experiments, the testing this and then that. I was not aware until this week, when I realized the extent of my denial, which was very tangled up in the extent of my desire to not have to be �??helped�?? again, just how upsetting the experience of menopause was for me, the post surgery recovery, the cancer tests and genetic tests, being put on this and then that, being checked, always checked, and feeling in the end that all the �??help�?? was actually making me very sick. And now, here, as I am seeing my fourth doctor in just over a week, it all comes back to me and I recognize this feeling, how familiar it is, and how much I had been avoiding it.

I want the pain to go away. Oh, how I want relief from the pain. But I do not want to be treated like I am broken, be filled with pills and promises, be tested and tweaked and charted and graphed. This experience awakens something primal in me, something pre-verbal, and all I know is that my body recoils, so afraid. And though I understand, and in some ways, really truly believe in the need to be empowered with our own health care, to take responsibility for how we are treated and what we need, to be our own advocates, to trust our own knowing and do whatever it takes to have that heard, while I believe all of this, I also feel it come face to face with its other side, its shadow, that in some ways I feel powerless, meaning, not that I have no choice but that I am vulnerable. Yes, I have options, a voice that I may have to scream to be heard but perhaps is worth screaming for, and I know all this, I really do. And I will do what I need to do to have my voice and concern be heard and to get the care my body needs to stop this horrific pain cycle.
But there is also this: my body is vulnerable, sometimes does break down, and what I want so much in those times is not to fight but to release and rest and be held in something beyond me.
Both are needed, both are within me. And I�??m doing what I know to makes space for both of these energies and impulses and to be gentle with myself in all of it.

I am also aware that I shared little with others about how bad the pain was, how long it had been going on. I wrote of it here, but only recently and not in any detail. And even my closest friends heard that I had a headache or wasn�??t feeling well, but I didn�??t call to just complain, to be unhappy, to let it be real, to have my much needed pity party, to freak out and unravel and thrash and fall apart. I didn�??t do any of this because then it would be real.

And I also feel that a part of me was protecting myself, knowing that I was feeling vulnerable, I just didn�??t want to have to deal with the help, the advice, the concern, the tip-toeing, the subtle and direct suggestions which sometimes feel to me like unhelpful problem solving and sometimes in moment even blaming, a way to protect the listener from having to confront the sometimes unknown, unpredictable world in which we do not always have the power to cause the affect ourselves and this can be scary because then it, something bad, could happen to any of us. Sometimes I think it feel safer to imply that we are causing things ourselves because then we get to maintain the illusion that we have a lot more control than we do.

It was both things, the not wanting to admit it to myself and my fearing of the response.
And maybe others would have responded very differently. Likely they would have. And maybe next time I will give them that chance sooner, to respond with validation, with empathy, with tenderness and with respect, simply holding the space without rushing into fill it with, well, anything at all.

But I am aware today that I have known I needed to be protected, sheltered, held with nothing but tenderness. And so, I have been reluctant to let others in.
This did change this week, a welcome change. And it is not easy for me, but I also think it is teaching me to just let others be who they are, respond how they will, and to not take it personally, to just let their love, the way they love, be love and to receive it, without having to agree or disagree with anything, to like or dislike anything in order to know myself as loved.
Just see the love part and say yes.
That is what I am doing.
Letting others in and letting them be who they are and saying yes to love.
Owning what is mine, taking some responsibility for this, for my own personal hot buttons and triggers and things that set me off or open up old wounds. Those are mine, and I love them tenderly.
And letting my pain be pain without trying to ignore it, letting my feelings be my feelings, my truth be my truth.

And today I am feeling the clarity and calm that comes from speaking my truth, my truth in this moment. Which may, will, change and shift over time, the way an ocean can be at high tide or low tide and still it is the ocean and both are its truth.
My truth right now, today, is that I am in pain. And that this scares me. And that this is real and I am ready now to tend to it as real and needing my attention.
My truth is that I am doing what I know to care for myself, everything I know, and that I am in moment growing very tired of living with this pain.
My truth is that I want to be seen and am afraid to let others see because I feel so very vulnerable in this moment and I want the safety of just rest.
My truth is that what is mine gets to be mine, nothing more or less.
My truth is that there is love, that there are a circle of faces who love me, who want to love me, and at the word go, they are here to do just this. And letting them in makes this all real, and I am ready for this now. For this to be real. To welcome others in.
My truth is that I am tender. I am in pain. And I am needing gentleness.

And just writing this, owning my truth and then letting it leave me, so as to be present to the next moment which may or not be something else entirely, I feel like I have just done some really good, deep cleaning. Taken out the clothes from the very back of the closet, opened the boxes languishing in storage for years, dusted the top of the ceiling fans coated in layers and layers of dust and grime.

Yes, I am in pain, but there is what I only know to describe as a cleanness to it.
It is what it is.
I may feel a million different ways about what is, and this is fine too.
But just that deep breath of letting what is be what it is.
I feel expansive, the freed up energy of so much spaciousness.
I needed this, the space.

For future reference - Note To Self: It is okay to know what you know and feel what you feel and let whatever "it" is, be real. Despite what your fear is and will likely again and again tell you, this will set you free and bring you rest and invite you into the wide open fields where the long grasses grow.

grounding: for the love of dresses and barefeet

2008-07-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Summer,

I was thinking the other day that I am no longer underwater.
I�??m not sure when this happened, if it was a slow emerging or if one day I simply swam ashore and stepped out on dry land. I only know in a looking backwards sort of way, remembering how deeply I felt that underwater world with its murky protection, seaweed tangled in my hair, muffled sounds and liquid ways. How this was a cocoon for me, a needed one, and how gently I was held there in the water, even in her darkness and unknowable depth.

And now I am back on land and it is not just that I am not underwater but that I am feeling very rooted, tethered to the Earth, my limbs deliciously heavy at the end of the day, as if I could sink into the soil and let them find their way into a nest with the other vines and branches, the bramble and the roots of trees as thick as my fist. I am feeling held here too, held by the Mother, the Earth herself, the dark wet soil, the summer day.
Maybe this is when the shift happened from water to land, that it was simply that you came.
And I am a summer baby, a wild child, a lover of the heat and humid, of peaches and skinned knees, the thicket of ivy and winding flower vines that know nothing else but their moment of abundance, the call that comes every year, wooing me, returning me to this Earth, my home.

How can I not surrender, sink into it all, to you, the smell of honeysuckle and the laughter of losing fear and inhibition and the ever anxious voice that whispers to me I am lost. And I�??m not anymore, not now anyways. I�??m right here, at home, with you.

Last week I sat outside on the porch at eleven o�??clock at night, drinking a cold beer, and it was still hot in the darkness, so hot the air was heavy, damp, and I could feel myself, my sweating skin, sort of melt there; melt into the chair, the night, the humid air. I was deliriously happy to be this hot, this heat, this humid, the summer of my childhoods coming back to me. And I am grateful to you for protecting some of those memories, for giving them back to me, those times and moments and days and summer nights when, against all odds, I was happy as a little girl. And I can do what I want with that night, mind fuck it to death or tell myself it wasn�??t real or grieve now what I could not possibly have held and made sense of then. But you protected her, that moment, when I would lie on the floor in my bedroom, right next to the box fan, and the feel of that air brushing against me was sensual bliss and grounded container for a chaos I had no name for. The echoes it would make when we put our faces right up to the fan and yell into it, to hear the rippled out sounds vibrating through the room, broken up by the whirring fan blades. I was happy in those moments. I know that now. And I love you for keeping those memories safe for me until I could take them back out without fearing them, without needing to go back and rescue, to just look at them and fall in love all over again, to know in that moment, it was happiness.

My headache is still here. I did go to the doctor finally and she wants to run all sorts of tests. She gave me some hard core prescription pain killers, for the days when I just can�??t take it anymore. I�??m seeing my NUCCA chiropractor two days a week now and I�??m hoping that once I�??m holding my alignment maybe some of this pain will go away. I know that getting these tests may turn out to be a good idea. But I�??m not there yet. I still feel like this headache is trying to have voice, to speak to me, and I�??m wanting to take the time to really listen. I may end up doing these two things simultaneously; going in for a CAT scan while I heed the words the literal pain in my head brings to me. For now, I am grateful for you, for summer, that it is a time, a season, that brings me to slowness, to lingering, to lounging, to easing into things, leaning into them. It is allowing me to listen to the headache in a new way and who knew you had such unexpected talents?

My youngest brother�??s dog is being put to sleep today. This makes me cry. The dog is quite old, fifteen human years, and he was in pain beyond what could be helped or eased. So my mom and dad are going to be there with the dog today, as the vet comes to their home to put him to sleep. My brother could not handle being there, asked that they do it when he would be out of town for the week. I feel an ache in my heart. For this dog that has been loyal companion and lover of my family all these years. For my parents who feel this loss so deeply and the house will feel quiet for some time to come I think, a house that is now, simply, them. For my brother who has lost his pet, his dog, his friend since he was five years old. And I feel the loss of the childhood that comes with this. My brother is no longer five, no longer ten or twelve or even sixteen. He is in his twenties now and in college and something of that makes me physically ache, even as it fills me to overflowing with love, for a complete rest in the way of things, that this is how it goes, what time looks like in its passing and I would, truly, not want it otherwise.

I feel grateful it is to you that the family dog, my brother�??s dog, is taken. It feels fitting and right that it is Summer that holds him as he leaves this world. It feels comforting that there will not be cold harsh winds blowing as his ashes are buried in the back yard but the heat of early July. It feels fitting that it is the season of childhood, of Popsicles and bare feet, games of tag and fireflies that this dog leaves us, as if leaving us with the best of him. I hope it is always summer where he is going.

Sarah is getting ready to turn thirty, our summer birthdays approaching. And I�??m feeling really proud of her right now, of who she is and what she is moving into. Not the condescending proud, as if she might need my approval for her life, but proud in the way that I am proud, honored, to have her as my sister, to have her be my family. She is living her live authentically, true to who she is, and I can feel that for her, in her, life is coming to summer, to you, that place where green things grow and fruit ripens and you, in your invitation, ask us come linger.

I�??ve been wearing dresses with bare feet. My friend suggested it as a way of self nurturance and, of course, how could I go wrong with this prescription for pleasure? It feels sublime. It connects me to the earth, a very physical tangible grounding, my bare feet against the floor, the ground, the dirt itself. And I feel you here, in this gesture, this freedom of a dress that sways and that you love it when your kids come to play, to dance their feet into your hot and humid days. It feels like my thank-you given back to you.

We are leaving tomorrow for three days. Three days of family time, Todd and Leo and myself staying at a house in Michigan by the lake. No work. No school. No appointments. Just us, just you, just the summer play of cooking out and eating ice cream and getting dirty and falling asleep exhausted, the face still flushed from the sun and later, when I will come into his room, to tuck him in and watch him sleep, I will swear I can even smell you on his little boy body, the fragrance of summer seeped into his skin. And I will breathe deep. And I will offer what I can only describe as a prayer to you. Those two words uttered over and over again.
Thank-you.
Thank-you.
Thank-you.

I love you summer,

Bella

refuge

2008-06-27T08:34:00.001-07:00

This is my bedroom, the smallest room in our home, if you don�??t count the bathroom.

It is just big enough for our queen sized bed, two nightstands and a dresser.
And this is it. And even this is pushing things bit.
So it�??s a little bit of a tight squeeze to get from the bed to the dresser and closet door. But we make it work.

It is this room that offers sanctuary at end of day and inspiration at beginning.

She doesn�??t get pissed, claim I only use her and then spend most of my waking hours �??out there�??, in the other rooms, living and feasting and cooking and writing.
She just waits, always, and I feel well held here, in my bedroom.

I love the little things.

The nightgowns that wait for me until, tired and needing comfort or sometimes saucy, I come and peel off clothes and feel the freedom and luxury of silk or soft cotton against my skin, and there is really nothing quite like the sensory feel of bare feet and tangled hair and a nightgown.

The box underneath the nightstand that contains every letter Todd has ever written me. I don't go back and re-read them though maybe one day I will. But oh how I love having them there, a written record of our love, calling me back to what I know is true about us when I�??m lost in a fit of irritation or rage or apathy, using him for target practice. Those letters, the existence of them, is strong medicine for me.

The perfume bottles on the dresser. I mostly just wear one scent, but I do have a small collection. I wear the others from time to time, especially as weather warms and I want the crispness of green tea and salt water and grass and citrus. But mostly, I just wear the same one every day, and I have others because I just adore the bottles, the glass and chrome and how it reminds me of my paternal grandmother who was, by all accounts, the most glamorous woman I knew in childhood, painting her whole world red and adorning it in perfume bottles.

Mostly though, this room is about the bed.

And yes, I do the obvious here.

I have sex here.
I sleep here, falling into the fast slumber of the very sleepy most nights, though still on occasion I have bouts of insomnia, wide awake in the middle of the night. Sleeping was actually like a hobby for me before menopause. And my heavy �??sleep through anything�?? nature seems to be returning more and more, as my body fully adjusts to the loss of hormones.

I like sleeping with my man. When he travels for work I find I always wake up on his side of the bed, as if I went looking for him in the night.

It reminds me of this snippet from a poem I always loved:

Love comes from years
Of breathing
Skin to skin
Tangled in each other�??s dreams
~Mary Mackey

There is a comfort in knowing that through all these years, when in love and when struggling, when feeling so connected I�??d swear we never know disconnect and when feeling so lost in my own shit I can hardly even see him standing there, a person reaching out to me, that in all of this, we have required sleep. And so we come here, fall into bed, crawl into bed, ease into bed. And we sleep. There is something so terribly human about it and it comforts me.

But my bed is more to me than the location of sex and slumber.

It is a home base of sorts, a space where I go when I'm sick or tired or just needing at good old fashioned time out. I feel nurtured in my bedroom.
I come here some days to write, when I need to feel supported, nourished. I spread out my papers and pens, books and computer and coffee cup, and I settle into the middle and prop myself up with pillows and I write here, in bed.
I journal here.
I dream here.
I cry here.
I read novels here and sometimes give over to the indulgence of reading in bed for hours at a time, usually in the summer, and I feel the ceiling fan send out ripples of breeze and the hum it makes is hypnotic and the heat and iced tea I�??m drinking and the fan and the bed, all this becomes part of the memory of the book itself, even after the last page is read and it lives only in my imagination.
I write love letters here.
I watch as Leo plays here, jumping on the bed and wrestling with his dad and throwing the pillows and sometimes needing to just curl up and feel held here, on this big expanse of comfort.
I sit in stillness and silence here.
I take refuge here.

I come here, to this room, when I need protection, tenderness, a dark cave, safety, cocoon, indulgence, stillness, a way to shut out the noise and hear myself or forget myself.
And maybe this is why the bedroom has been seeing a lot of my lately.

I�??ve had a headache that has lasted for over twenty days now, some days quite bad and others just a throb at the base of my neck and a twitch in my right temple. Then yesterday it exploded, pain splintering out into my whole body, my head spinning in heat and piercing pain, my vision blurry, and the slightest sound bringing waves of what feels like motion sickness. Migraines can kick my ass.

And I was here, in this room, for quiet and darkness and stillness, needing to do nothing buy lie here with an ice pack on my head and drift in and out of foggy sleep.
And the thing is, those headaches, though caused by a variety of things in all likelihood, they are speaking to me, wanting to be heard.
They tell me that the world feels very stimulating to me right now, so much coming in, coming at me. And sometimes I don�??t know how to shut it out or filter it, and so it becomes overwhelming.

So I�??ve been coming here, into my bedroom and being on my bed and it helps to ground me, to quiet me. And I need this right now. I need this so much.

I�??ve been feeling irritable and prickly, agitated and hyper sensitive, as if a scratch gets felt as a cut to the bone, an absent minded comment felt as a insult, a cause for mild frustration turning into a storm of rage. I stomp around, close doors and drawers too loudly. I feel like a porcupine, like my quills are ready to shoot out at anyone who dares draw near. I feel like a wounded dog and as anyone knows, you don�??t just go bouncing up to a wounded animal, charging towards them with help. You have to go so gently, quietly, until the breath deepens and you know trust is gained and then you might see what the problem is, inspect the hurt limb. If you just walk right up, the dog will snap and snarl, bite you in defense, as they do what they know, what instinct dictates to take care of the wound.

And this is where I�??m at right now.
I feel no purr and all claw.
I feel prickly and peely, peeling off layers of old skin and not having enough buffer always to feel the stimulation without being assaulted by it.
I feel sharp and bitter to the taste.
I feel mean in moments, and a darkness that starts in the core of my belly, and is rooting me to the darkness of earth and soil, this shadow of the Mothers lap.
And yet, so much of the irritation and daggers, the hyper sensitivity and the claws, it is to protect what feels so tender, so raw, so vulnerable right now.

And I need to protect this, go gently with myself. And part of this means creating space to not be bombarded with stimulation, to not feel forced out too soon, to let my soft places be soft, knowing they are being cared for and held gently, with so much love.

To give myself permission to spend time in my bedroom.
To feel wrapped in blankets and swaddled in love and comfort.
To feel cocooned in this cozy room and held in this bed that nurtures sleep and dreams, words and visions, my soul speaking to me.

I am needing this right now.
And she, this room, gives me this freely, as if to offer such sanctuary is the highest calling a room, a dwelling space, could fulfill.
And I love her for it.

bone woman: listening

2008-06-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

I went everywhere with longing
in my eyes, until here
in my own house

I felt truth
Filling my sight.

~ Naked Song, Lalla

I was supposed to be somewhere this past weekend.
It was for something I had signed up for, paid for, wanted to attend.
And I did not go.
This meant I lost money, looked fickle and unreliable, doubted my sanity, and perhaps �??lost out�?? on an �??experience�??.

I knew as early as the beginning of last week that I needed to stay home.
And I could not tell you how or why I knew.
It was gut feeling, intuition, just this sense, this knowing. I needed to call and say I was not coming. I needed to stay home.

It was at first difficult for me to listen to this voice inside me, to trust it.
After all, I had no rationale explanation. I had no real good justification or reasons.
What would it mean to simply honor this intuitive knowing, to not demonize it or ridicule it or dress it up in mystical language? But just honor it.
That I just knew, that I had what I can only describe as a visceral, body based intuition, and it was telling me to stay home.

Some people claim to hear the voice of god speak to them. And maybe what they are describing is not so different from what I experienced last week. Because I swear to the gods, I heard a voice as clear as my own. And, for me, I think it was my own.
The moment I grew silent, silent enough to really hear and listen, I would feel my whole being come into alignment and agreement that I should not go. There was disappointment over this, but there was full agreement.
It was not some kind of mystical out of body experience. In fact, I was entirely grounded in my body, and for me at least, I cannot know this intuition, hear this voice, unless I am awake inside my flesh. As if it is nothing more or less than the embodiment of Soul.
It was not an audible voice, though I could verbalize it.
It was really quite simple.
Stay home.
It did not give me lots of detailed reasons, a bullet point of the pros and cons and staying or going. It did not offer me something I could easily explain to someone when they asked why I was not going.
So what would it mean if I just listened?

I fought with it, tried to be sensible, talk myself into still going, even though I knew I should not. After all, I had paid money and it was something I had wanted to do so why was I hesitating? It was probably just me being a little nervous at something new or that I was tired, but I should soldier on, plow through, and just go.
I tried to do this, because I wasn�??t sure if I could or wanted to trust that intuitive voice I had heard. It felt a little crazy to be honest.
And yet, it was one of the mores sane experiences of my life.

After resisting, trying to silence what I knew and brush past it and talk myself into something, my body ended up having to take over and make things very, concretely obvious.
I got a horrible headache, with terrible sinus pressure. I was feverish and clammy and sick to my stomach. My body was, quite literally, rejecting my bull shit, my acquiescing to the pressure to do what I thought looked like the right thing, even if it was not the right thing for me in that moment.

When I finally made the choice to not go, it was the sweetest, most grounding feeling of clarity that came over me. Not that there was no chaos, or that it was suddenly peaceful in a cloud parting and music descending from the heavens sort of way. I still did not know in any tangible way the �??why�??. But I can honestly say I was ok with not knowing the why, even if a little baffled. The peace came in there being no internal division. What I �??knew�?? was aligned with what I was choosing.
I was neither resisting or forcing.

And I had listened to myself.
This sounds so simple.
It was, for me, profound, an experience I am still unraveling, letting sink into my body knowing.
One of my lost bones, those parts of me scattered over time and trauma and now lovingly gathered once again and transformed all together, one of them is this piece about doubting the safety of trusting my own body knowing, listening to that voice, and that in doing so now I know what it is to not abandon myself. To listen to myself in this way is to reintegrate that which was for so long lived in dissociation. This being awake in my body, listening to what I hear within me, and not needing to have it all "make sense", but falling in love with its truth. This receiving it as oracle, as messages from my Soul, not fragmented but embodied, woven into poetry. This voice that does not offer me explanation but only invitation.
And last week, in staying home, I said yes and walked in.
There was a voice in me that knew, a different kind of knowing than the thinking, reasoning mind. And I listened and trusted, even if it took me a little time. And it was the most intoxicating feeling of rest that entered me, came over me, stayed with me all weekend long as I stayed home.

I have had such moments at different points in my life. Each time, I am at first skeptical and I resist, and then finally feel compelled to surrender to this other voice, other way of knowing, this deep and abiding navigation inside of my own body and heart. And every time I do, I feel initiated all over again, into this way of living, this walking by the moonlight, abandoning my precious lists, sitting in the discomfort of silence as so much gets spitted out until there, in some kind of patiently waiting center, is the voice.

And it is almost always clear and very rarely is it dramatic. Sometimes it is, and these times are easier to remember. When I just �??knew�?? I was supposed to do something or not do something that to anyone passing by would seem illogical.
But most often it is just the truth of the moment, my own truth, offered back to me.
She says drink it in.
This is not for anyone else but you.
No need to convince, defend, cajole, explain.
She says lighten up; you don�??t have to think so hard. You already know anyway, so just let yourself know.
She says, walk through the wild woods, eat the honey from the sticky comb as it drips down your skin, dance to music maybe only you can hear, become a student of your dreams. She says let your heart break, and break again, and break again, until there is nothing left to be broken because it is forever open.
She says stay home.

And so I do.

feast

2008-06-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

The soul doesn't evolve or grow, it cycles and twists, repeats and reprises, echoing ancient themes common to all human beings.
It is always circling home.
~ Thomas Moore

At Home
Dining Room

This is what this room is �??supposed�?? to be called. The dining room. And I will admit to calling it this, as in, �??can you bring me the notebook on the dining room table?�?? or �??Do you want to eat in the dining room or on the couch tonight?�?? But honestly, it feels kind of silly calling it this. Because we don�??t do much dining here.

To me dining conjures of feelings of china and crystal and silver, of long tables and cloth napkins and fancy food. And while I do have and sometimes use the cloth napkins and I can enjoy fancy food, I don�??t even own china. And we don�??t dine. We eat. We have others over and eat buffet style. We snack, have parties, laugh, cram more chairs around the table, decorate sugar cookies, getting more frosting and sprinkles in the mouth and on the floor the cookies themselves. We Feast. I think this is what I will call it: the Feasting Room.

And in our Feasting Room, my new favorite thing is the color of the walls.

When Jeni asked me what I would do if I had only twelve months to live, painting my walls the color of summer plums was on my list. And as I have been living this question and living my answer, painting this room the perfect shade of plum purple took place a couple of months ago. And it has made me so very happy. I love the richness of it, and how it looks next to the bright white trim. I love how it makes me feel playful and luxurious all at once and that when I come in here I feel grounded and close to the earth, to the physical matter of things.

Our Feasting Room has the most spacious feeling windows, three of them lined up, one large one wrapped in two narrow ones. It looks west, out to the corner where our street connects to its counterpoint and floods the room with light, even as it offers me so many trees to watch as they change, cycle through again and again.

Our apartment building is one of the old kinds, a six flat with built in features, like a china hutch and old antiqued mirror. So, lucky me, I get to see my pretty things out in the open, though safe behind glass doors. It is here I also keep board games, the cloth napkins, the pictures and candles and icons I use for rituals, and I even managed to put some books in there because for me, books and pictures, belong in every room.

Here is our picture wall.

I do try to restrain myself, not put up every cute picture of Leo, every sassy one of myself, making some kind of awful face at Todd. But I do love having photographs on our walls, in frames on tables.

I love remembering those moments and I love getting to see how time changes things and there is story here.

I keep this old trunk in here as well, enjoying how it brings in a feeling of history and old stories, besides the fact that it works well to keep a pitcher of iced tea on and the dish of green beans, when the table becomes to crowded. We received the trunk when Todd�??s paternal grandmother died, and it belonged originally to her uncle. It traveled in a covered wagon, from Iowa to Illinois. And I like to wonder what was inside, and I imagine the women opening it up and gathering there things, hoping for some kind of order, settling into a new land, a new place, a new home.

I sometimes spread out my �??supplies�?? and sometimes do my art here or a creative project, like making invitations for a caravan party, a coming together of fellow seekers and lovers of life.
We play games here, spreading out the rummy cube tiles, drinking vodka and tonics.
And yes, we eat here, feast here.

This room of my home serves us, wearing different faces as asked of it.
All of it seems to center around the table.
Oh, this table.

She, yes I feel it as a she, is the piece of furniture we�??ve owned the longest. I have had this table in my home in some fashion since we first moved to Chicago, six months after we were married. This means it is not particularly the nicest table, the highest quality table, the most well made table. I believe we paid something like a hundred and fifty dollars for it, including the four chairs. And yet, it has lasted. For eleven years. In many incarnations.

We bought it and it stayed in the corner of our loft style apartment, the first we lived in here, with one big great room, all open, and only the bedroom had a wall dividing space. That day it was delivered I felt like a real grown up, even as I was all of twenty and still more interested in cigarettes and academic pursuits than a domestic life. But that table represented a longing, a settling, a choice to say yes to having home, belonging, grounding. It sat in the corner, its original oak stain and I liked having a circular table, how you could sit in any seat and it was all rather the same, all equal. This felt good to me. As did having real furniture, in a real apartment, furniture we went to the store and bought, rather than took as hand me downs, the remnants of dorm living. This table said I was an adult now, and would cook real dinners and serve them, here, at my table. Which I did. Along with the Fuzzy Navals we made and drank while sitting there, in the corner, around this table. That was the year I decided to make, as in sew and craft and felt, all my Christmas presents. And the table was covered in fabric scraps glue sticks and an old sewing machine that made me curse profusely and come alive inside.

The table moved with us in each of the other two apartments we lived in, before we moved to Seattle. By that time I had painted it, an antique off white and I �??distressed�?? it to look like I had happened to stumble upon it at a flea market, the cream paint peeling off around the edges just a bit, revealing green paint underneath.

It was there I had my new friends over, sitting around that table, for chicken fajitas and margaritas. I made her a birthday cake and covered the table in flowers and presents and I knew then, that night, that I had found a friend for which I had actually been looking a long time. And it has been many years since then, and some friends have remained and become even closer and some have ended in pain and brokenness and some have simply gone on to live their own lives freely, as I have lived mine and we would be so happy were we to stumble into each other on a city street somewhere, but we don�??t know anymore what happens in each others lives. And yet, I learned about friendship in that city, about what I wanted in friends, about what it meant to open up and be seen and let others in, about being a friend. And this table nurtured such an unfolding, and it houses all those memories inside its wood now.

When we moved back to Chicago, the table came with us. We had a real dining room again, living in a bigger space than we had in Seattle. Seven months later I was pregnant, and two months later Sarah came and moved in with us and the �??dining room�?? turned into her bedroom, until we could get to a bigger apartment. So the table went into storage, down in the basement, patiently waiting for us.

Then it had another life out on the deck, in the apartment Leo came home to when he was born. We didn�??t have space again for a separate dining room but we had snagged a humongous deck. So we set up the quite old table by now out there and it got beaten up more with rain and then winter came and snow fell and piled up and you could chart the inches of snowfall on its surface. When that spring and summer came it was out on the deck, on this table, that I began to write again, finding words again, finding voice as this new mom, learning it was somehow different, forever altered since giving birth, carrying life, letting myself love in this way. And this table was there for me, for that. And I loved her.

When we moved into this apartment it had a dining room and the table would come back indoors again. It was so sad looking by this point, very well worn, well loved, flaking paint and warped a bit on one side. So I sanded a few layers off the top and painted it shiny black. Which happened to be just the thing it was looking for. She came back alive, perked up, and she has been in the middle of our feasting room for three years now.

I have been feeling like it is time to get a bigger table. It is hard to have others over and all fit around. The kids end up on one of Leo�??s little tables and you can�??t seat four people and serving dishes. It would be nice to have a table that expands, to grow as needed. And in the next couple of years, I will likely find one. But I�??m not sure I can just get rid of this table. I don�??t know her next invention, but I do know that she is here to stay, for a long time. She has been there, solid, for me, for us. For our meals and dinners and parties, our projects and conversations and experiments and words. We still belong together.

This room, though it has many facets and speaks to me in so many ways,
this room is all about this table.
The feasting room, where I have feasted at this table year after year, in all its reincarnations, feasted on food and words and friendship and home.

snapshots

2008-06-16T18:21:00.000-07:00

Snapshots.

This is what I have from my time away, my time with Leo, my time where I drove the roads I used to wind daily and where I read little and wrote less and where I met new friends who felt like old friends and where I had these moments that feel somehow branded on my skin, woven into my brain, a part of me now.

I am sitting here, attempting in my mind some sort of narrative structure, some kind of cohesive recap of my time, wanting these words for myself as I return back to my city. And I don�??t have them.

I have only snapshots.

· I am sitting with Leo on stools in the kitchen eating Popsicles. Cherry flavored and the red juice dribbles down his chin. He looks so old to me, so big, so little boy. It is hot there, in the nineties and so humid you feel sticky, dirty sweaty as soon as you step out of the shower. And we are licking Popsicles and laughing. They are so good, better than a Popsicle would taste on normal occasion. We lick them and eat them down to the wood stick. Then we open up two more from the white plastic wrapping and begin again.

· Meeting friends in person who I have only known through words, blogging, email. Enjoying real live conversation. Feeling like our words dance together, like improvisation, like jazz music. Midwifery of the soul, unconventional families, writing for pleasure and for the alchemy of finding and expressing Voice, returning back to work, long days with small children. The conversations weave effortlessly between and amongst the questions and thoughts and feelings that happen to be pressing onto our hearts that day, that moment. And safe harbor is found is the companionship of another. And their faces. Oh, there is nothing quite like getting to truly see the face of another, of those you have come to love.

· Noticing that old companion come to visit me: checking out. The desire to zone, to leave while my body stays in the room, to disconnect and depart and dissociate. It is so alluring, whispering promises of relief and numb detachment. Noticing it come and beg me enter. Noticing me recoil in anger and sit with discomfort. Noticing that I neither judge it nor surrender to it, but that I am, in fact, just noticing.

· Meeting my little niece for the first time. She is chubby, the kind with luscious rolls on her thighs and belly. She smiles like all is well in the world. She laughs from her gut, throaty and big and with abandon. Watching Leo play with her, take care of her. He is so sweet, so tender hearted and he beams with pride at being the big kid who knows how to take care of the little one. He counts her toes and wants to feed her ice cream. He pushes her around in a wagon and tells her he can show her how to walk if she wants to learn.

· Driving back roads that wind and are surrounded by trees on either side and it is late at night, so dark, and it is warm out, hot even, in the night air. I have not been on these roads in so many years and yet they are still familiar, like tracing the lifeline on my palm. And then suddenly (yes, it feels sudden I think now), the night I was raped comes back to me. It was this time of year, early June, and it was hot, and it was on these roads that I think I knew. He was driving fast, too fast, speeding around turns and curves. And it was then I had that thought, �??He can�??t be trusted�??. He was driving too fast to care about life. And now I am driving them, driving them back to the room where Leo is sleeping, waiting in his bed for me to come back, and how is it possible to be in two times at once, now and fourteen years ago. I hear the sound of my own heartbeat, pumping thud after thud. I can feel his breath right behind my ear.

· Going to the swimming pool day after day and asking Leo if he wants to come in and swim with me. I will hold him the whole time. I�??ll keep his head above water. I will make it ok. And every day the same no, the same I don�??t think so, the same maybe tomorrow. And he plays by the side of the pool, throwing the ball in the water for me to swim out to catch and toss back onto the concrete. And then the day he says ok and lets me take me him and I am holding him and walking around the pool. We spin around. Again and again. I jump up and spin and the water swirls around us, coursing over our skin. His arms are wrapped around my neck and his head is thrown back in laughter. I will never forget that moment for as long as I live I think.

· The long journey home. Arriving at the airport to realize I had the time wrong and we missed our flight. Getting tickets for the next flight back. Getting luggage checked and through the security check point. Getting to the gate and seeing that the flight has been delayed forty minutes. Then an hour. Then two hours. Then the flight is cancelled. Standing in more lines with a now whining Leo who is tired and wanting to be home. Having to stay another night. Getting up at five in the morning to go back to the airport to take the flight, that thankfully, does bring us home. Sitting on the plane and having the man sitting in front of Leo turn around and yell at us three time because Leo keeps kicking his seat. Being so tired, so passed my limits, my ability to keep my shit together and assure Leo everything is fine, will be fine. Crying in the middle of the airport. Both of us.

· Then home. A home Todd has cleaned, bless him, and I am here, sinking into my couch, my bed, my things, my coffee. There is so much to do. It will have to wait. For now, I need to just be here, be home.

housekeeping

2008-06-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

As I live at home, in my home, there comes a time for housekeeping.

In my apartment this means cleaning, and cleaning some more. It means letting rooms and space evolve to meet our changing needs. Like when we moved around the bedrooms after Sarah moved out. Or realizing that Leo�??s desk belonged in the living room since this is where we were doing all the coloring and picture making. Or knowing when the time has come to weed out clutter, or bring in blue, or paint the walls. For me, it is constantly changing, adapting to our lives, there to meet our needs and offer shelter and it is a very creative process as inside and outside dance together.

Someone asked in a comment on my living room post if things were always so tidy.
I laughed.

Because the answer is yes, and no.

I do tend to like things to be ordered. I like to feel I can enjoy time in my home and that it is there to be a loving container for our lives, a space where rest happens, a space that nurtures and nourishes us. If there is too much chaos at home, I feel a chaotic inside as well.

So I spend time picking up, cleaning, keeping things in order.

I am also a splendid mess maker.
As is my son.

Things get messy so very quickly as Leo can storm through a room, leaving a trail of cracker crumbs and toys, bits of paper and magic markers with missing caps, socks and legos.
And though yes this can make me feel batty sometimes and I throw hissy fits over how out of control the rooms are and insist we stop the instant and pick things up NOW, I also want and need my home to be and look lived in. Too much cleaning leaves things feeling sterile; too much tidiness and it starts to feel like we might as well not live here. Because real living is messy.

For me, it is about the movement, rather than a constant state of order or chaos.
We mess up the rooms and then we pick them up.
We enjoy the sanctuary of a warm and inviting space and then we spread out there and blankets and pillows are strewn about, as are the books and games and stuffed animals and trains and very quickly things are what can only be defined as messy.

There is no real beginning or end here, just living.

I�??ve been doing some housekeeping here as well.
I�??ve been playing around with my space here as if decorating my home: rearranging furniture, changing the paint colors, trying things on for size.
I took down the pictures from last fall and will be adding some new ones soon, thanks to Sarah. Since god knows I can�??t seem to take a photograph, even the easy digital kind.
And I finally found a �??layout�?? that feels right and good. At least for now. Come next year, next season, next month, it may be time for change again, to have the outside space here reflect the inner landscape, the creative well from which my words are found and offered.

And the words themselves? Those are constantly unfolding too.
I have been blogging for a whole year now here at Beyond the Map.
I was reading back over some of my older posts. The words felt so familiar, like visiting myself through time and each step of the way and I could hear the shifts in my voice.
As I come upon this one year mark, I feel truly at home here in my writing.

And as I write of home, feel like all of life is throwing me a great big welcome home party, Leoliscious and I fly out tomorrow morning, going away on a vacation for the week.
I am ready to have that kind of time with him. To not be in school or working deadlines but to have nothing but time. For whatever we want, whatever strikes us. Likely miniature golfing, taking in a matinee, exploring new places, and if I am lucky sleeping.

I spent my day doing laundry and packing our suitcases and cleaning out the refrigerator lest horrible smells greet us upon our return.
It's own kind of housekeeping, the kind that allows you to take home with you even when you go.

heart and hearth of my home

2008-06-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

"If some wizard would like to make me a present, let him give me a bottle filled with the voices of that kitchen, the ha ha ha and fire whispering, a bottle brimming with its buttery sugary bakers smells."
~Truman Capote

Coming Home

The kitchen

We chose this apartment, our home for the last three years, because of the kitchen really.

I remember the walk-through and how it was all nice, pretty, seemed like a good fit for us: a big living room, three bedrooms, a stunning small porch, a workable bathroom, the dining room flooded with light from three west facing windows, and then. . .

I turned the corner and walking into THE kitchen.

I was speechless, stunned, and I felt that pang in my heart, the kind when you know you are so filled with desire that if you do not get what it is you want, it will physically hurt.

The kitchen was the largest city apartment kitchen I had ever seen, with long elegant stretch of real COUNTERS, rows and rows of cabinets, a good sized window that made patterns of light and shadow on the tiled floor, and space enough I could even fit a small table in there if I worked it right.

I was sold, captured, head over heels in love.

A week later the lease was signed, a month later we moved our boxes in and this dream of a kitchen has been my home ever since.

I love her. It is really that simple.

This is where my morning �??begins�?? in a way, as this is where my coffee is brewed first thing in the morning, set on a timer, so that when we wake the aroma is already wafting a bit down the hallway. And it feels welcoming, nurturing, like a big embrace. Having my first cup of coffee, that comes from this kitchen, its like stumbling out of bed and walking into to see that a old plump woman (who looks a great deal like my deceased Grandma Fletcher) is whipping up some homemade biscuits on the counter, her sleeves rolled up and her hands drenched in dough and the wisps of hair around her face are beaded with sweat and held back in her kerchief. Yes, she wore a kerchief, and even now, just sitting here as I write that line, I miss my grandmother, this woman, and I wish I could be with her now, talk to her, learn from her. And it has been so many years since she died but I think now, that this kitchen brings her back to me. And maybe this is why I knew when I first saw it that some part of me belonged here.

The kitchen is where the cooking happens, of course. Which, as I mentioned, I�??ve been doing more of. And enjoying. Beyond my expectations. And so it is here, in this room, that I unload the box of produce form the co-op every weekend, see what fruits and vegetables we have been given, knowing then how to meal plan for the week and what to put on the grocery list (because yes I am anal that way and meal plan and make grocery lists. It really saves money and time and stress for me)

It is here, at this counter, that I stand and slice vegetables and bread, open cans and measure grains. I am a tad bit (read extremely) sensitive to the texture of food when I�??m eating it. This also applies to the preparation. But unlike the eating, where certain textures make me unable to event tolerate the feel in my mouth let alone chewing and swallowing, in the cooking it is all pleasure. I love the whack sound as the knife punctures the melon, right before it slices through and juice spills out everywhere. I love the paper feel in my fingers as I peel an onion and how when I chop it, the layers want to unfold, as if once given the opportunity, to stay tightly contained would be unbearable. I love the snap of green beans and asparagus and what it feels like to hold them and bend them and wait for the moment they open. And when they do the smell of summer lingers on my fingers. I love the crunch sound of the peppers and how smooth they feel in my hands, even as they reveal bumpiness on the coarse underside of the skin. I love seeing the seeds: of the peppers, the melons, the apples, pomegranate. I love how they feel delicate and yet how they feel they have nothing to loose, how freely it is they spill out, gush out, pepper my hand as I take my fingers and feel the inside whirl of the pepper where the seeds cluster and once separated they fall out and everywhere like confetti.

It is here, in this room, that Leo does his own cooking. He is an excellent chef. He makes things like carrot pasta with potato dressing and green pea and orange smoothies. Pretend cooking is on the first �??games�?? he really played and he is still going strong. He has his own kitchen where he works, flipping his pancakes and yelling �??toast is ready�?? and tossing his toy food into the toy blender and then wondering why it never quite seems to make a �??real�?? smoothie. He also has his little grocery store, where his food is stocked and the game is that one person goes shopping and the other works at the store and rings you up on the cash register. And when he is the sales person he is rather pushy I must say, telling me what foods I really want to buy and then he says, �??here, I�??ll just fill up your cart for you.�?? Then the cash register man offers to come over to your house and cook your meal for you! What service.

Leo has recently started helping me with the �??real cooking�??. It is one of my favorite things to do with him. I feel like I am teaching him something important, valuable, a good skill to have and that I am also revealing to him the mystery, letting him partake of it. So I show him how to measure and he loves �??whisking�?? everything and yes it is very messy and so sometimes I just don�??t have the energy to deal with it. And yes, to see him standing there on the chair working so hard to measure without spilling and stirring so intently, it makes me choke up with the beauty that is him.

It is here, in my kitchen, that I grow the humblest of herb gardens. It was a housewarming gift when we first moved to this apartment from my dear friend here in the city. And it is the perfect color of green, a mix of creamy mint and sea glass. Sometimes my herb plants die, or get all used up, and then I plant more. At the moment we have rosemary, sage and thyme. They stay in the window where they can get sun and when I pick a few of the leaves to use in what I�??m cooking, I feel connected not just to the ground, but to women before me, women who used to begin all their cooking this way, going out to the garden to see what to use and bring in. And it is those moments I feel proud of my lineage, my heritage, of the strong women who came before me.

It is here, in my kitchen, that I actually have a table. This has been a dream of mine since I�??ve had my own space. I have always wanted a kitchen big enough for a small table and a couch. Yes, a couch, preferably a worn looking velvet couch. It�??s that I want space for people to sit here, to hang out here, to rest here. I wanted to curl up on the couch in my kitchen while the dinner was in the oven, sip some wine and be here, in the center, the heart of my home. Because the kitchen is where home is. It is the true gathering place, the room where the real conversations get had, where the family all ends up together, where the homework gets done and the party always ends up, standing around with drinks in hand, not wanting to leave and see the loss of a perfect evening. It is the smells of the kitchen that we associate with home. Maybe it is onions fried in bacon grease or the smell of bleach mixed with lemon, or the smell of citrus and anger and tenderness or the smell of bread and yeast and coffee. And so, I have wanted a kitchen where I could sit and just be.

And I have this now. No, it is not a couch. But I still can�??t quite believe I have this space, this table with chairs. It is a very small table. It has only two chairs. But this makes me so happy, I find I must come in and sit here at least once a day. I have sat here with my friend while our sons played �??cooking�?? and we drank coffee and kept offering cookies to keep them quiet. I have sat here and read, made my grocery list, talked on the phone, read a magazine, paid bills, written emails, done nothing but drink my coffee and stare out the window and watch time pass.

This is the window, the view I see outside my kitchen. It is, to me, deliciously urban, even for such a secluded neighborhood street like the one we live on. From the window you can see the back garage that has ivy growing over its brick, and beyond that into the alley, and you can see the lovely tree lined street that up at the corner intersects with our street and you can see the telephone poles and the backs of the apartments in another building, their windows close enough to ours if we both had them open I bet we could hear each other if we talked loud enough.

It is a kitchen with enough counter space I can actually own and keep out a mixer. Which is what I finally bought. I had always wanted a KitchenAide, a big mixer not a hand held, the kind where you can crack eggs and just watch as the paddle swoops them into the batter and turns everything into creamy goodness. But it never made sense to have one if I would have to find someplace to store it and then lug it out every time I needed to use it. And now it stays on the counter, its own little home in the corner, and just seeing it makes me feel rooted, nurtured, comforted even. They were also expensive so I didn�??t know if or when it would happen for me. But a year after we moved here, into this kitchen, I found her, my own KitchenAid at a garage sale for thirty dollars and she works like a dream and she feels like a presence in my kitchen, like more than an appliance but as if she has personality, embodies the energy of my kitchen. Maybe this is why when I�??m lighting my candles in honor and observance of holy days or the people I love who need to be remembered and have space held for them, I often move them next to my kitchen mixer, as if she watches out for them.

I have a small shelf, an alter of sorts, above my sink. What I put there changes according to my need or the season. (Right now it is a painting on a ceramic tile of a woman taming the lions and walking peacefully among them. There is also a small picture of the Virgin Mother, my wax burner and a sparkly flower made of beads that I brought in when spring seemed cold and forever and I needed to know that it was really here and coming and summer would soon fill my body.) It has things that are important to me, special to me, that represent what it means to me to be nurtured and fed. I think this is important. That the activities that take place in a room are reflected in the energetic and symbolic objects within the room. The space where I cook food to eat should somehow honor what it means to me to be fed, nourished. My own way of honoring and bowing to the source of my food and the source of all that nourishes and the source of green, growing things.

Maybe this is why I frequently find myself drawn to bring images of the Madonna into my kitchen. She feels like an embodiment of the Great Mother to me, the ever present lap, the woman who would hold you close and yet slap you awake if need be, the woman who wears her heart above the skin even as it is pierced and bleeding open, the woman who, though some depictions of her have steered away from this, is dark and light both, fully human and yet the mother of god. And so she feels like she belongs in my home, especially my kitchen.

This is my kitchen: the center of my home, even if it is in the back end of the long apartment. This is where I cook and read my cookbooks as if they were travel brochures.
This is where I make things, grow things, fill myself with green.
This is where I keep two old pictures that tell stories that are important to me. One is of Sarah and I, when were quite young, it looks to be about two and four. We are sitting in swimming pool, the kiddy kind at the public pool. Our bathing suits show you what decade it is. And there is something about the way we are sitting there, the look on both our faces, that feel like they tell the story of our childhood, as girls who grew up together and needed each other and yet did not know how to help each other. Not until they grew up into women and now they love each other and love the little girls they once were and this is a healing.
I also keep a picture here of my mother in her own kitchen, when she was newly married and just nineteen. And she looks so beautiful and yet so lost somehow, and even though she is wearing what is undeniably a top from the early seventies, the way her hair is pulled back, the way the light falls on her face, she looks like a Vermeer painting and it takes my breath away.
I keep this photograph on a chalkboard, next to a home remedy for arthritis scrawled out in my grandfathers handwriting, one of the few things of his I own, that was given to me after he died. My aunt showed it to me off hand, laughing. And yet it spoke to me. This little piece of paper, him scribbling down one random day some recipe for raisins soaked in gin that was going to help ease his aching body, this is what the living do. And I wanted that reminder.
This is where I make my coffee in the mornings and the summers make pitcher after pitcher of iced tea in raspberry and peach and passion fruit.

This is where I know myself as connected to other women, to the earth beyond my urban dwelling, to the Mother in me and the Mother that feeds me.
This is where I am fed, and the space from which, I learn to feed.

the room for living

2008-06-02T10:06:00.000-07:00

"To us our house was not unsentient matter--it had a heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome
--and we could not enter it unmoved."

~Mark Twain

I've been feeling very "at home" lately.
Both within the walls of my apartment and the container of my flesh, the energy that is being lived inside the rooms of my living space and the interior world of my own self, with all the dreams and images and words and emotions that occupy space and keep me company.

It feels good to come home. Both physically speaking and metaphorically.

It feels good to walk in my doors and feel welcomed, embraced, like I have stepped into sanctuary, refuge, welcome of sensual tactile pleasure, and carnival fun house, all mixed together, a mirror of what lives inside me.

�??We could not enter it unmoved�?? those words keep coming back to me.

This is how I�??ve been feeling, how I�??ve always felt about physical space, home in all its reincarnations. And as I find myself more and more at home within myself, my body, my knowing, the meaning grows ever richer of my walls and floors, these rooms and the objects that populate the space. Space does have energy. I believe this. And homes tell stories. And if you wanted to know how I came to be where I am today, I could take you back to each home I ever lived in, all the shacks and dilapidated buildings, the starter uppers and urban dwellings, the suburban home I came of age in. I would take you here and show you and just by seeing them, being in the space where so many things happened and failed to happen, you would know the bones of my story. Because it is all there.

The black hair dye on the bathroom tiles from my obsessive hair coloring as a teenager. The holes in the wall punched by my sibling, wounds in plaster that would not let us forget what was happening even as we all tried so hard to pretend reality was anything but what it was. The closet I found and would go hide in and how I learned about boundaries there, about doors and the safety of contained space. The bedroom I went crazy in. The porch I sat on those years of writing and finding salvation. The kitchen where new life began. The bathtub I would go sit in when I was mad at Todd and needed space. The hallway I walked down as I carried a baby Leo in my arms, bringing him home, to his home.

I�??ve been wanting to write some about my home and today I will begin. The time has come to let myself wander about my rooms, both inside and out, and put words to what is being lived.
And today I begin.

Living Room

I have had a red living room since I have had my own apartment, that year I got married and left behind the college dorms. It all began with that stunning red couch I saw in the windows of a chic and likely very expensive home furnishings boutique in Bucktown. I saw it and I wanted it. Oh how I wanted it. And every since then, I�??d been after that couch in some way or another. Even after I knew I no longer wanted a red couch, I still was having my affair with red: red velvet blankets and silk pillows on the couch, big bunches of red flowers and red pictures on the wall and a red rug, and sometimes even red candles. You'll have to trust me when I say it did not look like the inside of one of the honeymoon suites at frightening hotels. Maybe because there were no hearts. anywhere. No, it was more like fire red, heat red, the red of pomegranate seeds.

I like the sensual and passionate and steamy and sultry and intense and magnetic allure of heat and fire. I�??m a fire girl, a Leo sign, a hot chili pepper who enjoys the heat and sometimes can even burn inside to the point where it starts to spew out at my family, and sometimes I think we have all had the thought that I might just burn the whole fucking building down.

And so, as color, as my living space, red worked for me, it spoke to me, it felt like home.

And then, I�??m still a bit startled at this, I realized I was ready for a change. Eleven years is quite a long time to have the same color scheme, in some form or another. I had felt it coming for a little while but last week I finally brought it into fruition. I had been picking up pieces here and there of my new energy/color palette and was just waiting on the floor rug to finally make it all work. And I found just the rug, and on sale, with a coupon on top of that, so it felt like the rug was mine, asking to be mine, wanting to come home with me. So I brought her home and she looks gorgeous.

I lovingly removed the hot fire of red and brought in the cool water of blue. And it is . . . .lovely.
I don�??t know a better word. It is just lovely.

My furniture all stayed the same, in the same place as did my bookshelves. I still kept the silk and faux fur that I really can�??t do without. And the candles and flowers and matte silver. They are just different embodiments. But wherever I had once had red, the most alluring shades of sea blue now resides. And it feels so right.
When I walk in the front door, this is the first room I see and it comes to greet me and I feel welcomed, at home. I have a home that nourishes rather than sends the adrenaline pumping through my bloodstream as I walk in the door and hold my breath, as I did every time I ever came home as a child. A living room that nurtures rather than harms, that is rest and respite and shelter and holding space. This is healing for me and yes, I cannot enter it unmoved.

It turns out, I really do have enough fire and heat to warm up any space. And so having blue, having water with enough brown to feel grounding, having elegant calm, it actually offers me a space in which I can be my fire self without feeling like the whole place will burn down. I feel held in this water and earth room and it is container for all the craziness, the heat of life, the wildness and funniness and tantrums and loving that goes on here.

The room is offering us her structure, her walls of knowing and compassion, the window that looks out to the street corner we live on and the tree in the front yard that is always waiting to show me the season of things. The mantel of brick and wood, lined with so many books: Leo�??s story books, novels, mythology, poetry, Jung, Fairy Tales, Annie Dillard and Anne Morrow Lindberg, baseball books and the history of beer books, E.M. Forrester and Gail Godwin, Curious George and Charlie and Lola. Leo�??s little desk, an antique child�??s school desk I actually owned before I ever knew of Leo, used as a table for years until he came and now it belongs to him and it is where he does his �??art�??, all those hours of decoration making.

My couch which feels like a woman in a tuxedo winking at me, a play of masculine and feminine: with its brown leather and clean lines, covered in silk blankets and furry pillows. It is comfortable and comforting, and it has held me through a thousand tears, stories, periods of panic and luxurious rest.

My pictures which tell my stories and I really can�??t have enough of them and even already, we stop and stare sometimes and can�??t quite believe how Leo came to be this baby who turned into a boy.

The globe that we play with, as we teach Leo the degrees of home: planet earth, continent, country, state, city, neighborhood, street, apartment building, our home.

Our living room restores out ability to live fully and freely and with abandon. I truly feel this way. It is a container for our love and arguments, our late nights of sickness when all you can do is huddle up on the couch and watch infomercials on the tv, our creative play of paintings and pictures and decorations, the floor we sit on and eat our dinners many a nights, sitting around the coffee table and telling stories and answering the questions asked for the hundredth time, �??how many bites do I have to have for me to have dessert?�??

This is our living room, the space we live at home.

I have doubted my capacity to go off Paxil, sitting across the couch from Todd, curled up in my blanket and crying hot fire tears.
I have put up my pole and swung around and danced so freely, the curve of hips moving in their rounded arcs, I actually had over an hour pass by without even remembering time.I have read delicious novels in the room, written pages and pages in this room. I have had parties for friends and seen it transformed every December when we bring in the tree and string lights everywhere.
I have made a fort and watched as graham cracker crumbs get smushed into my new rug. I have caught up on �??Weeds�?? on DVD and sat in the middle of the floor, the table pushed out of the way, and I have felt the ground as firm beneath me and myself as aware in all directions and my breath was so deep, so long in its inhale and exhale, I swear I could feel myself merging into the room, the world.
I�??ve had dance parties with Leo, our newest favorite the Buna Vista Social Club, to which Leo informs me he knows how to speak Spanish (which they teach him some at school and he certainly knows more than I do) and he will tell me what they are saying.

This is my home. This is my living room.
We live here.
We rest here and are nourished here and this room feeds us and comforts us and supports us, giving us so selflessly what we need so we can go live fully every time we walk out that front door, knowing it will all still be here when we return, and come back home.

i am circling around my knowing

2008-05-30T09:06:00.001-07:00

My friend sends me my horoscope via email. I believe it is the Rob Brezny Free will Astrology ones, which I must say I have come to adore.

So this was my most recent.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): I love this excerpt from "The Seeker," a poem by
Rilke in his *Book of Hours* (translated by Robert Bly): "I am circling
around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a
thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a
great song." Here's my own personal variation: "I am circling around love,
around the throbbing hum, and I have been circling for thousands of days,
and I still don't know if I am a wounded saint, or a rainy dawn, or a
creation story." Please compose your own version of this poem, Leo. It's
an excellent time to fantasize about what you're circling around and what
force of nature you might be.

And here is mine:

I am circling around my deepest knowing, around the still quiet voice, around listening and trusting what it is I hear there, and I have been circling for a thousand mornings, and I still don�??t know if I am a lightening storm or a new born baby, or the rings inside the tree trunk, arc after arc telling us her stories.

Isn�??t this fun? I had the most pleasurable minutes here just now, writing this.
So, even if you are not a Leo, give it a go. I�??d love to hear your own versions here.

I'm not entirely sure why this little line above is what I came up with today.
If I had to guess I�??d say I�??m still sitting in the rich images that came to me last week, when I had a tarot card reading. It was the most amazing experience and I loved it. Truly loved it. This was my first time connecting with this woman and she was so phenomenal. Intuitive, yes. But more than this, she was a painter with images put into words. My images, her images, the images on the cards, they were all dancing together and into each other and it was the messiest clarity I�??ve known. It was gorgeous. It felt like things I�??ve known for some time, known but not wanted to know or known but been afraid to know or known but wondered how I would handle their implications, all those known things were out in the open, handed back to me, and to my surprise I was ready to hear them, accept them, and it was not burden that greeted me but pleasure.

And this morning, this is what still lingers, what has come to settle inside and what is still being created in me.

· It is a lovely day last Friday. The weather is warm and what I might even call balmy. I�??m cleaning my apartment, preparing for our weekend visitors, puttering around, lighting candles that smell like tobacco flowers and water lily. It is a good day for creation. We begin our time together, over the phone as she lives in NY and me in Chicago. My first card drawn is "the world". Holy shit. What a way to start, yes? And what I know in looking at the card, know as if for the first time, is that I see the way things connect and how there is not really this or that, but only one giant web of fingers interlacing, and yet, even though I can see much and how one thing is always everything, I am not meant to hold this as burden. I am here to take my place in the family of things, not be everything. I am here to speak my truth, not show anyone the way. I am here to delight in the world, not take on every last burden. I am here not to carry the whole world, but lean into the world and let her hold me. I look at that picture on the card (I was using the Goddess Tarot as I do so love mythology) and what I see is these two women holding earth, holding her with love and delight and compassion and humor and wholeness. And suddenly I see that they are holding themselves, pregnant with themselves as they give birth to the whole world. There is no separation. Chills go up my body and I breathe deep and close my eyes, as if to let this image burn itself into my brain and stay with me forever.

· As I move, change, walk ever further away from my work, the work I�??ve done for many years, birth still comes with me. I no longer mentor my childbirth classes; the births I attend are few. (Again, though I have known the whys of this for a while now, intense clarity came to me during the reading, the kind so swaddled in compassion I could see very painful truths and not feel judgment.) And where I am going, what I am stepping into now, it is different and yet not at all. My work is to support, to serve as a doula to other women, as they give birth to THEMSELVES. I have known this for some time. And now, here I am, saying it. It feels good, a long clean exhale. I don�??t know exactly what this will look like or how it will all happen and I don�??t really even need to know this. It is enough right now to simply know that this is what I hear call to me, this is within me, and I am here now, saying yes.

· Images of holding return, of suffocated ovaries, wrapped inside cyst and tumor, the very source of my creative beginnings unable to breathe. Images of the weight of holding too much that sinks into my core, weight I have taken that was never, ever mine. These images, this knowing, it comes not as blame or judgment or new age manifestation lingo, but as the poetry of the body. Though the body is so connected to the emotions and interior psychic world I�??m not sure we�??ll ever know where one ends and the other begins, the body also has a will of its own; I believe this. And it is poetic in ways that beg me come sit, be still, and listen. This is what it tells me. I have so much power; we all do. How will I harness this power and do so with pleasure?

· Three of staves/wands. She is standing with her back facing the viewer, alone, solitary, and though she holds one of the branches, the other two tower over he and in moments as I take her in I think maybe those are prison bars she has created. The loner in me, though still needing her solitude and time in away, she is also letting herself feel the sometimes loneliness of this, and she is beginning to ask for others to be there with her, inviting them in. This is huge for me. It changes everything. It makes me come alive, feel alive, vulnerable and yet the kind of vulnerability that knows it really has nothing to lose so all that is left is to expose the heart and let the body move to what has been dancing inside all along.

* There IS NO RIGHT WAY. So take pleasure, have fun, enjoy things, get messy, go after what you want, let go of it all together, be still or move like a wild woman. There IS NO RIGHT WAY. There are some truths I think I will need to hear over and over again in my lifetime. This is one of them. And I am breathing it in, letting its laughter come to me.

* There is much emotional upheaval going on for me right now and some days I feel like a tornado coming through and I don�??t blame those around me for wanting to run to the basement and hide out there with a supply of candles and snacks until it passes. And yet, I am open in ways I�??ve never been, never imagined, never knew possible. I feel cracked open, wide open, wounded open, loved open. And though there is rage and grief and confusion and so many old hurts never felt that come back to knock on the open door of my wide open heart, here is what I cannot explain and only rejoice in: there is pleasure here, in all of it, in the way I don't want to be anywhere else but here. I feel pleasure. I am pleasure. The pleasure that comes when I let myself grasp that there is no right way, so I can let go. I can get messy and be real and have no concrete answers and I can ask questions and explore and be curious and make ghosts out of the napkins on the table and light up in laughter and wear sequins and make my own rules and let myself love what I love. And so I do. And the whole great big world? It smiles with me and says welcome.

"When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly.
It probably doesn't matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life's many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are.
It probably doesn't matter if a passerby sees us dipping a finger into the moist pouches of dozens of lady's slippers to find out what bugs tend to fall into them, and thinks us a bit eccentric. Or a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our sense like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move."
--Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses

disconnect

2008-05-27T06:37:00.001-07:00

I'm writing this hastily, from the coffee house, checking email, checking up on people, checking in.
My internet is down.
This says it all somehow.

This feeling of loss of connection, or confused connection, of something being down.
We're having two different experiences. And who the "we" is or what the experiences are, does not seem terribly important right now. It just hurts. This much I know.
I want to be seen. So what do I do when what he sees feels incongruent with what I have felt inside of myself?
I feel like I'm waiting for us to have a conversation and suddenly realize that one of the wires was disconnected and as soon as we plug it back in, like the computer blinks it little light saying internet is available, we both nod our heads, suddenly clear and understanding one another.

Feeling like synapses in my brain have short circuited.
I forgot a conversation I had with the two women who work at Metropolis, where I get my lattes. It's not a huge deal. No one really cared. But I'm still in shock somehow. How did I just forget? This is not how I normally operate, me with my memory that can recount conversations nearly word for word and tell you where you were sitting in the room and what pattern the light was making on the floor as it flooded in the window. And I simply have no memory of a conversation I apparently participated in. This disturbs me.

Feeling out of sync with weather patterns. We have had an unseasonably cold May. It is supposed to feel more like summer, at least the beginning of summer. And it has been chilly, even cold. Yesterday it was hot and humid. My jeans felt sticky and I wished I had put on a skirt instead. My hair went frizzy in damp curls. Our skin smelled like sunscreen and sweat and warmth. Then this morning it is only in the forties and it feels so cold and I already put all the jackets away for the season and I couldn't find my slippers and so my feet stay bare, even though freezing.

Feeling out of the loop. Unable to check email or read blogs or hop on the computer to look something up whenever I want. Feeling like though the idea of this upsets me, the reality does not. Yes, I miss it and I'll be happy when I get my internet back. But I feel like things have become suddenly crowded in my head. And I need to quiet and stillness, or loud music and wild dance.
Something has changed in me and my mind is kind of freaking out about it actually, trying to catch up, understand, make sense of. And so things that I used to do a long time ago have come to revisit me, as if to see if they still hold power, still would work, still contain my secrets. And they do and they don't. There are those things which do come back and feel so familiar I could swear it was ten years ago and I was sitting on the front stoops of our new apartment in Wicker Park, smoking my cigarettes and weeping in silence to the knowledge that I was unwell, was so sick, was crazy, was not going to be able to just brush myself off and move on. And I'm having moments when it is like no time has passed at all and I'm back there or still there, as if I never left. But even then, it's not the same and the ways I knew and relied upon to handle the horrible "too muchness" of it all, those just plain don't work anymore. Which is not such a bad thing, but it is a very groundless feeling.
I'm here, waiting for the shoe to drop, the page to turn, the weather to warm and finally stay warm, the call to come, the message to arrive, the internet to come back on. And this time out, this time lag, this disconnect I feel, I think it is everything trying to catch up, and part of that is the tugging backwards in time and ways of being, as if to feel it all over again before walking on, as if to remind me I'm not walking a straight line, not at all, even if it sometimes feels that way. I'm walking in circles and spirals and right now I'm at that place where the line swoops in a arc, a curve, and it is blurry as to whether this is forward or backward or if such ideas even exist.
So, for now, I'm unplugged. Which, all things considering, is not such a bad place for me to be now. So I'll hang out at home, internet down, just me and maybe some music and the sound of my bare feet padding across the hard wood floor, insisting summer is coming.

nowhere else but here

2008-05-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

�??We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy,
even if it is only
picking grapes
or sorting
the laundry.�??

~ E. B. White

What brings me joy these days is, well, everything.
I have this raw experience, of not wanting to be anywhere else.
I�??m not used to being here, finding myself most often more comfortable with the known routine of hiding or running away, shutting down or checking out.
Yet here I am, baffled, amazed, getting my knees stained with dirt and grass as I am unable to stop bending down and staring with rapt awe and letting my fingers tangle with the roots and soil. I am here. Right here.
I don�??t want to be anywhere else.

When beaming, laughing, content, quiet, sleepy, wide awake.
When stretching, cleaning, going to the post office, sorting the laundry, picking the grapes, baking the banana bread, painting my nails pale pink.
Even when raging, when hurting, when feeling like my heart is worn outside my body and bleeding over everything.
Even when grumpy, irritable, tired, worn down, the crazy lady who yells at her kid, the silly mom who can�??t stop laughing with him every time he hiccups.
Not perfect, not perfectly happy, not constant and predictable, not known or easily translatable, not packaged or able to be held.

I don�??t want to be anywhere else.
It is a new meaning to joy.

A small list of joy, slices of the everything:

I rearranged our bedroom. This is not a particularly easy task, as it is a small room, meaning there are not countless options for where to put the bed, the dresser, the nightstands, and have it all fit. When we originally moved into this room, after Sarah moved out and we reshuffled things, I believed we had found the only possible way for it all to fit. Well, I was wrong. After measuring and scooching and swearing and sweating, all while Leo jumped up and down on my bed saying, �??weeee, this is fun.�?? My bedroom got re-ordered and changed shapes. And I love it. I love sleeping in a new place, facing west now instead of south. I love that my side of the bed is not up next to the wall anymore and so everything feels spacious and opened up. My dreams have changes since the rearranging. Which is why I did it in the first place. I�??d been having nightmares and when I woke in the night I felt rather claustrophobic, knew I needed air on all sides, no walls pressing close to the mattress, staring me down. And now I have that. The bad dreams left. And I just like laying here even in the middle of the day, listening to the whir of the ceiling fan, staring out at the window.
The Shiatsu I�??ve been getting. I thought it might help with the detox/withdraw, that it could nurture me and help facilitate the leaving of this substance from my body. And it has. And it has done more. There is a magic in her hands and there is a surrender in just giving over my body for her to move, stretch, knead into with pressure. After the session she tells me what will happen in the days that follow. �??Lot of heavy things will come up for you now,�?? she says in her Swedish accent. Or, �??I can feel you need to cry and lots of tears are coming out and this is good, this cleanses you.�?? And she is right of course. I�??m still feeling less verbal. Though I sense this is slowly changing, for now words are still a struggle. And tears become my communication, the love offering I have, the prayer I know to utter. It feels really welcome, this being more in my body, my tears the beginning of my body talking for me.
We planted flowers last Sunday out on our porch. They are so lovely and though the temperatures have been a bit on the brisk side, meaning I�??m simply enjoying them from the window most of the time, this weekend it is supposed to reach 80 degrees and I will be out on my porch soaking up sun and fresh flowers. I�??ve been watering them diligently, which is interesting. Last year, well honestly pretty much every year, I get the flowers, plant the flowers, love having the flowers, and then do not water the flowers. I intend to. I think it is something that needs to be done, that I want to do. And then I fail to do it. So they struggle, go limp and the green stems turn yellow. Todd will come to their rescue with buckets of water now and again and they perk back up again. And so far this year of our container flower gardens, I�??m feeling this desire to be out there every day, watering them. It is my joy. It is my outer manifestation of my inner world. That I am not just planting, but also watering; not just creating but also tending.
I changed my voice mail. It�??s a small thing in some ways. Just a voice mail message, saying whom you�??ve reached and that I will call you back. But it�??s also a big step for me. It is no longer the name of my birth business, no longer about being a professional and having this be my �??work number�??. It�??s just my voice. My name. My self. My phone number. Me. There is still some loss in leaving this behind, moving into other projects and school and work. And there is still so much winding about in me, growing like ivy over the brick on the building. But for now, I�??m in the in-between. This is a little wavering feeling, and it is also a sense of clarity. It feels right. I�??m letting myself listen to my intuition, my own inner knowing, the voice of that wise woman who is amazingly always available even though I don�??t always check in. And I�??m allowing myself to respond, to trust, to surrender, to believe. And so, here we go, leaving something behind, only the unknown awaiting me. Thank-you for calling. You�??ve reached. . . . me.
Food. I�??ve been cooking more, making �??real�?? meals. I wanted to help myself as much as possible with this transition time and eating good food felt like a big part of that, to not binge or starve, the very all or nothing space I can so quickly occupy. So I�??m cooking, in the kitchen, making meals that involve more than two ingredients and don�??t come from a box. And the very act of the cooking is feeding me. There are moments when I feel I�??m losing my shit: when Todd is home later than I thought and Leo is now running around the kitchen yelling at me to �??please, please, please let him use real orange juice and milk�?? in his own little kitchen for the cooking he�??s doing, and I realize I added twice as much of something as I meant to, and I could gladly throw the bowls across the room and watch them shatter on the walls. So, no, I am not domestic goddess whipping up divine concoctions in the kitchens with no effort and nothing but a smile. Still, even in the messiness, the spilled orange juice, the running out of sausage, the not knowing if I will scream or start laughing, being around food, working with food, cooking food, its been good for me. And I�??m making some incredibly yummy dinners that feed our bodies and our energy. A little tang and rice vinegar to clear through the cloudiness in the head and open the throat to speak. A little cool and crisp cucumber salad to mellow and chill and turn down the internal temperature that is raging with fire. A little chocolate to warm us, enliven us, send my hips swaying and my face opening and sink me into earth energy. A little garlic mashed potatoes to soothe frayed nerves and bring comfort and nesting and warmth. It is becoming one of the ways I love those in my life, love myself, love what it means to be present to my life in the day to day. And all of it is feeding me.
My potholder from Georgia Grace came in the mail, which I bought on the auction we had for Jeni. I love the bright colors, the yellow and green. I love the girl who made them. I love having this little piece of her with me, brightening up my kitchen, reminding me of connections that exist even before we have a face or name. Some part of me knew her before I knew her. I believe this.
This brings me to the auction itself, which I�??ve been wanting to share about.

Thanks to so many of you, in the donations of auction items and paypal donations we received, in the bidding and buying at the auction itself, in the donations that were sent directly to Jeni, $3,800 was raised to give to Jeni for her care and for her son Jack.

I believe Jeni will be posting about it soon on her her blog, sharing with everyone her own experience of these efforts made.

But I wanted to take the time to thank-you as well, to let everyone who played a part to know what, together, we were able to raise, to care for a woman who has in so many ways given us back our own lives as she wakes us up, reminds of what we love and what matters to us, and gives of her own experience and heart with such freedom it makes me stand in utter awe.

To all of you, THANK-YOU.

It was a rich and meaningful experience for me to be a part of this, to be able to offer my own love and care in a tangible way that, and to do so with a sense that I am part of a community of others.

To Jeni, I love you my dear. I feel like you are a sister to me in so many ways, that some part of us knew the other long before we met and when we finally connected it felt not so much like becoming acquainted with something new but more like coming home.

There is a song in the Muppet's movie that has lyrics that sums up how I feel.

Come and go with me,
It's more fun to share.
We'll both be completely,
At home in mid-air.
We're flyin', not walking
On featherless wings.
We can hold onto love
Like invisible strings.

There's not a word yet,
For old friends who've just met ...
Part Heaven
Part Space
Or have I found my place ...

That�??s how I feel about you sweet friend.

So, this, then, is my life right now. These days that in some ways are just ordinary days of sorting laundry and picking grapes, each known as joy. These days of feeling things deeply and surrendering and knowing even when hurting, I really don�??t want to be anywhere else.
Even though so much is unfamiliar, unknown, I feel deeply at home within myself.
I feel a sense of belonging, inside my own self.
I feel like these things, these joys, these words even now, they come to me and then leave and I could not hold them if I tried. They were never meant to be held. Just seen, known, felt, experienced, loved, welcomed, and in the house of my belonging, the doors swing wide open, the windows never close. All comes and goes. Like seasons. Like cycles of hunger and cooking and feeding and full. Like the morning glory flowers that only ever blooms once. And still, this is what it does. It blooms.

wild saftey

2008-05-19T09:08:00.000-07:00

Tears come quickly these days, as if glaciers have thawed and now all that was once solid is loose liquid water, spilling out everywhere, slipping through cracks and eyelids.

I feel weightless, groundless, like I stepped off a cliff and didn�??t fly or fall, just realized I didn�??t need the rocks underneath me as I had always assumed. To have nothing predictable, known or secure surrounding me, to have so many things cracked open, it is not a picnic. Neither is it scary. That is the surprise, the sanctuary, the thing that makes me feel safe. Even when I�??m feeling afraid, experiencing anxiety, it is not scary to be feeling this. This has not always been the case for me. Until now, this has never been the case for me. The mythology of fear runs through my stories, my memories, the veins winding blood through my very body. And right now, though nothing feels stable and in moments I feel afraid by this, it is not scary. I�??m breathing it in, crying all the way.

I have a companion.
Leo is at a place of trying to make sense of things in this world, what is safe and what is dangerous and what those words even mean. I have no idea how much he really understands, but I watch him begin to explore some of life�??s harsher realities, and curl up in what comfort can be found and take risks even in the face of the unpredictable and even dangerous. And it makes me cry, makes my chest throb, makes the cracks running through me open so wide I could swallow the world whole.

***

His leg had been hurting for a few days, really badly, enough to make him limp.
It was rest time and I was sitting on the couch while he curled up next to me, blankets wrapped around him and his entourage of stuffed animals.
�??Let me love that little leg of yours,�?? I said, wishing just touching it would make him better.
�??Mommy, it�??s like I�??m a baby bird in my nest and you are the mommy bird and when it hurts you come and put your wing over me,�?? he said. �??You�??re like the bird wing.�??

He�??s been asking lately about our home and what is safe, if other people could come in or not, why we lock the doors.
�??I feel safe,�?? he�??ll say at random moments, while coloring or in bed or when having books read to him. He stops what he is doing and as if checking in with himself and, noticing a sensation, he gives himself over to it.
And then he pushes he shoulders up and scrunches his nose and smiles, as if embodying safety itself.

Last week, lying in bed, after the endless drinks of water and trips to the bathroom, but before falling asleep, he says this:
�??I�??m never going to die.�??
A hush. Two beats of time.
Then,
�??I�??m not going to die for a very long time.�??

I can�??t even write this now without crying, without my heart aching.
What does his really know of death? I honestly don�??t know what his four year old mind can grasp, understand, make sense of.
His innocence is still so tender, so uninhibited, so sweet.
I�??m not sure what other response there is except to let the tears come.
For who he is, for this cusp he stands at, becoming aware of darkness in life, that danger is real, that death does happen as does new life and yet in all of this feeling so fully his own sense of safety and boundless space, in some ways still very present to the wisdom from which he came.

I did not know this, this innocence, of trusting that home is good, is safe. And it was not safe. The intruder was not �??out there�?? but within our walls.
Something in me is broken open all over again to witness Leo having what I so craved.
Something in me is healed.

***

I feel a little raw, exposed, vulnerable.
I feel like this is not making things more fragile but, in its own way, radiating a new kind of strength. The security of having no security. The freedom of losing knowns and so having nothing to lose.
A wild safety.
Not calm, composed, tranquil, void or absent of intensity or grief or rage or fear.
It is this sense, this feeling, this gut knowing that I can�??t shake, that I am, in all of this, loved beyond my imagination, that I am even in my thrashing being held by this universe, by god herself. And even writing this is putting me in the �??unknown�??, me who shies from using the �??god�?? word, unwilling to label or limit with such terminology. But it is the word I have right now.
God is holding me, this much I know.
I am holding me, this much I feel.
And in some way I cannot fully understand, these are one and the same thing.

I keep thinking of those images of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, the sacred heart pictures like the one above, where their hearts are literally worn outside their bodies for everyone to see. I keep looking at these pictures, transfixed with their beauty. This is how I feel. That my heart is not just exposed but outside my skin, as if the layers of protection, the skin, have been opened and all comes in and all flows out. And that this is not weakness or fragility but power, a power so fierce in its love and compassion, it bleeds.

So, yes Leo, though people can and sometimes do break into homes and hurt those who live there, though people hurt those within their very homes, though danger is real, you are safe, and for the first time in my life it feels, mommy is safe too. Safe even in danger.
Curl up, feel that bliss spread warm over your body. Here is my mama bird wing coming to shelter you when you need it, always. And in the shadow of another wing, in the fire that burns from my heart exposed, I let go and surrender to the love that is another name for god, for mama birds, for the water that holds me.

First Lesson
Philip Booth

Lie back daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

jena: surrendering, becoming, a circle of love

2008-05-15T14:35:00.000-07:00

Jena Strong is a wife, mama to two girls, writer, life coach, dreamer and poet, realist and magic maker, wise woman and radiant light.
And she my friend.

She has offered me safe space and permission to be all the contradictions I am, connection and laughter, honesty and mirror, inspiration and grounding.

Did I find her or did she find me? Does it matter?
Because all I know is that she is kindred, soul sister, one of my gifts in this lifetime.

So you can better believe I was excited to hear her responses to my questions when she agreed to let me interview her in my phenomenal woman project.
And I�??m happy to share her words here.

Enjoy.

What do you love about being a woman?

When I was fourteen, I wrote a poem called �??Glad 2 B Female.�?? All I remember now is the last stanza:

And I hold my head high
when I walk down the big street,
�??cause I�??m glad to be female.

I laugh now at the words, themselves (especially since the �??big street�?? was North Pleasant Street in Amherst, MA). But what strikes me is that even then, being a woman, or a young woman, was central to my identity. Being female carried a sense of self, of power, of beauty, of strength, of importance. At the time, there was some growing defiance, too.

Being a woman means feeling connected to women throughout time and space �?? with my own mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and back beyond that; as well as with being a mother to daughters who may one day become mothers themselves. There�??s huge solace in that for me. I grew up with sisters and aunts, went to an all-girls�?? summer camp, and knew from about the time I wrote that poem that I wanted to attend a women�??s college (which I did).

You work as a life coach, with your own private coaching practice, Strong Coaching. Can you share a little more about what this is, how it differs from psychotherapy or career counseling, and what you love about this work?

I love that my clients genuinely want to get to know themselves better and are willing to risk discomfort in the name of living more fully. It is such a privilege to hear someone�??s story and then see them realize that they have permission to choose to keep that story or not. We have so much more room to define ourselves than we sometimes realize.

Coaching allows people to rise above the details of their daily lives, which are so often all-consuming. The point of this is to look over the whole landscape.

I see coaching as very much a combination of introspection and action. Some therapists work this way, too. The main difference is that in coaching, the primary focus is less on resolving the past and more on taking ownership of the present and the future. I witness my clients as they practice becoming more available to their experience, more conscious of their choices, beliefs, and perspectives.

We also roll up our sleeves and address the aspects of your existence �?? from work to physical surroundings to schedules to habits �?? that may indeed by out of synch with your values or vision for your life. I�??ve written about this from time to time on the blog, how we all have it in us to thrive, to feel like we are in the right place at the right time. But it can be difficult to perceive this as a possibility without creating a space for that to occur.

Most of all, I love the mystery of coaching. We start out with some forms, a few exercises, but mostly there is a great deal of improvisation that always seems to lead in exactly the right direction. It forces me to be very present and to trust my own instincts. And the process of building a business has challenged me in huge ways to articulate, and not compromise, my own commitments.

You also have two daughters, Aviva and Pearl. What surprised you about becoming a mother?

This question makes me wonder when I began becoming a mother. Was it during pregnancy, or childbirth, or when I saw my girls for the first time, or in all the days since they were born? And the answer is yes. All of this. What surprises me most, every single day, is that being a mother brings into full relief the practical necessity of surrendering: Surrender a sense of control, surrendering ego, surrender knowing. And most days at some point or another I fail miserably at this. But I keep learning.

Becoming a mother is like becoming a person �?? it�??s not something you do all at once. It�??s perpetual. The mother I became when Aviva was born in 2002 was in some ways quite different than the mother I became in the months after Pearl came in 2006. More than anything in my life, motherhood is like this narrow bridge I walk everyday that spans heaven and earth, the sacred and the mundane. It�??s like you�??re staring into the face of God and washing the shitty diapers all at once. It puts me simultaneously in touch with my ultimate purpose on the planet and the fact that that purpose is embodied by washing my daughters�?? bodies or reading to them or helping them learn how to manage their own emotions.

The winter when Aviva, who�??s five now, was about fifteen-months old, I remember the sensation of being a bird with a massive wingspan, hitting my wings against the windows of our sweet little house. I felt confined and confused. But it was this that really forced me, in a process that was painful but so important, to move towards who I was and what I wanted. My time with Pearl post-partum had a completely different quality, as if a pipeline from the Universe was directly attached to the top of my head.

In what ways does having daughters affect your sense of yourself as a woman. Are there any things in particular you hope to teach them, about what it means to be a woman?

I want them to love themselves! I want them to love their bodies, their minds, their friends, their ideas, the seasons, the stranger.

I feel fiercely protective in the sense that the media gives us so many distorted images of women. I have slowly disappeared many of the Disney princess stories and movies from around the house. I feel a thrill when I see them riding their bikes or making up their own stories or being inventive. I cringe to think they could ever NOT love themselves, their bodies. And yet I guess I know that some of this is inevitable and that giving them the tools to respond to what�??s out there is probably time better spent than trying to shield them from the world around us.

I think the majority of women in our culture, myself included, experience some degree of self-loathing, which is incredible to me. The most I can do to teach them to love themselves is to whisper in their ears day and night that they are just right, and to model self-respect and kindness and strength and creativity in my own doings.

I want to teach them the importance of belonging and contributing to a community. We lucked into an amazing neighborhood with open backyards and tons of kids and parents who watch over each other�??s kids. It has been a real gift.

The other thing I realize I want them to learn is how to express themselves, how to share what they�??re feeling, how to put words to their experience. And to know that it is always safe to share.

You have written some about your choice to step away from pursuing a full time career for a time to be at home more with your girls. How did you come to such a choice?

The choice was never a one-time thing. In the last six years, four and a half of which I was pregnant or nursing, my work life has gone through so many iterations and schedules. I did long to spend time with each of them early on; going back to work after Pearl was born was agonizing, especially since I didn�??t love my job. I would go nurse her at lunchtime and long to take her home with me.

These moments definitely shaped certain decisions I made. But I didn�??t exactly �??choose�?? motherhood �??over�?? a career, nor do I believe that women who have careers are making motherhood secondary. The way our system is set up is excruciating when it comes to this binary, this either/or, the supposed choice women make. It is so much more complex to me than that. Countries that recognize that taking care of small children IS work are light-years ahead of ours.

I spent many years �?? I�??d say all of my twenties at least �?? believing that I had to define and pursue a �??career�?? that would reflect my talents and �??potential.�?? I longed to create a life that fit my own rhythms. Nursing my babies fit my rhythms. So does writing. So does coaching. But it took time to extricate myself from an ambitious academic/professional model that I assumed I should want.

These days, I�??m feeling more settled. In a way, my main goal is to not accomplish anything �?? just to be in my life and to trust that it is unfolding in just the right ways. I still have a lot of excitement and energy when it comes to work �?? but I finally accept and really love that my work will most likely never again occur between the hours of nine and five. And that being a mama is at the heart of things.

You write on your blog and have spoken of possibly writing a book. What does writing mean to you?

Writing means coming home to myself; using words and language to reflect my experience shapes my experience. When I was in kindergarten, I decided I wanted to be a poet. This is actually the only thing I ever remember really knowing I wanted to be. Everything else has come and gone. And in the end, I realize I just want to be myself.
Writing saves my life. Over so many years, it has given me refuge, it has given me hope, it has given me expression and a way to connect with myself and the world.

As long as I can remember, the minute I finish a poem or any piece of writing, the first thing I want to do is share it. I crave this instantaneous witnessing; it�??s like the poem is a tree falling and I need someone else to stand there in the forest with me watching it go down. This must be why blogging has turned out to be a great medium for me �?? there�??s that immediacy.

The downside is that when it comes to writing something longer or more sustained, more coherent �?? all the things I imagine a book would be �?? I sometimes doubt I have the discipline to keep large portions of writing to myself. And I�??ve never been much for revising my own work. But I do have visions of books to be written, and eventually I intend to figure out how to shape my writing around some organizing principle. I�??m just not sure yet what that will be exactly, so I�??ve decided to stop worrying so much about it for now �?? and to just keep writing.

When did you feel you had found your voice as a writer, and a woman?

I have found my voice so many different times, and lost it, too. I�??ve always been writing. In high school, I self-published a few little chapbooks of poetry and made copies for all my friends and family. I also made one for my first love, when I was eighteen. I wonder if he still has a copy. I loved the process of cutting and pasting and compiling these little books; it is one of the things I think I have lost somewhat to computers.

At Barnard, where I went to college, I didn�??t officially study any �??creative�?? writing. I was a Russian Studies major, and that meant weaving together many disciplines. I discovered that all writing is creative writing. I loved crafting papers and essays and reflections and analyses of books and ideas and experiences, loved synthesizing information and making things sound good. I spent a summer in a rural orphanage in Russia and filled three journals that became a travel diary that I self-published and shared with the Barnard community. I spent a series of weekends with my maternal grandmother, trying to get her story, and together we wrote her autobiography. This was an incredibly meaningful experience. My senior thesis was a study of Russian-Jewish identity, and it very much became a piece about my own identity. This may have been the beginning of finding my own voice and moving away from the academic writing.

In 1996, I studied with a poet named Deborah Digges and spent a good nine months or so writing poems like mad and smoking a lot and living in a little studio apartment in Mexico. Then came several years of not writing much at all, and missing it terribly. In 2007, I took a fifteen-week class with a group called Women Writing For (a) Change, and it really jumpstarted me. I think over the past year or so, I have once again found my writing voice. And it turns out to be indistinguishable from my voice as a woman, as a mother, as a wife, as myself.

Are there times you feel the need to silence that voice and if so, how do you summons the courage to speak your truth?

This is a hard question. If there�??s anywhere I silence myself, it�??s when I�??m feeling insecure or depressed. It�??s so much more fun, there�??s so much more ease, sharing moments that are lucid or poignant or clearly inspiring, and I think I judge and censor myself a great deal when I�??m not there, when I�??m nowhere, when I�??m struggling and doubting myself.

As a teenager, I was bulimic. This had so much to do with silencing myself, swallowing my truth, not taking up too much room. I was the student who always had her hand up in the classroom, who was quick and bright. Somewhere along the way, I got self-conscious about that and learned how to stifle my exuberance. At the same time, I�??m naturally introverted. So, I continue to learn that balancing act �?? between sharing, speaking up, being open, and at the same time honoring and getting comfortable with the quiet that is very much a part of me.

You have also shared some on your blog about your Jewish heritage, your quest to embrace and understand your roots and come to terms with your varied spiritual influences. Can you tell us a little about this process for you?

As a young child, I was exposed to things like Tarot cards. I always felt that sense of being part of something big, bigger than myself or any one of us. I grew up in an academic, artistic, intellectual, and pretty much secular environment. We celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving and danced barefoot and went to summer camp and took piano lessons. My parents are both Jewish, but my mother�??s parents converted to Christian Science, setting in motion a legacy of secrecy that I have spent most of my adult life exploring and recovering.

In high school when I took a class on the Holocaust, I began to realize in a conscious way that I was Jewish. I felt a deep connection to this, but had no idea really what it meant in practice. This led to years of finding my way �??in�?? �?? educating myself and defining my Jewishness. I felt alienated much of the time, but also profoundly drawn to the community, the tradition, the heritage, the connection to Jews across the centuries and throughout the world. Then I went and fell in love with a non-Jewish man, who would tell you now that he is on his own kind of Jewish journey. It has been interesting.

In college, I was exposed for the first time to mindfulness practice. I took some theater classes and read Thich Nhat Hanh and felt a strong sense of at-home-ness there. I learned the term �??Bu-Jew�?? but have never really identified myself that way. I guess now I think of myself as Jewish with strong Buddhist leanings, but one of the most instructive comments I ever got on my blog was when Karen Miller said something about forgetting the �??ist�?? and the �??ish�?? and making mine real. That feels right to me.

Are there any traditions or practices, Jewish or from another faith practice or homegrown, that you experience with your daughters, together as a family?

Lighting candles and covering our eyes and clanging silverware as we sing songs to welcome Shabbat on Friday nights. Holding hands before we eat �?? making a Circle of Love �?? and thanking all the sources and each other. Sharing High Points & Low Points from our days. Making challah french toast on Saturday mornings. We also observe Jewish holidays at home and have begun creating our own traditions within those, like making a �??Tzedakah Box�?? one night of Hanukkah �?? each of us chooses some books, clothes and toys to put in a box that we decorate and bring down to a local homeless shelter. Our Judaism is itself pretty homegrown, since neither Greg nor I had a Jewish childhood per se.

You have mentioned the desire to consider becoming a Rabbi. Whether in this form or through other means, what calls you to a life of service?

At one point �?? that lasted for about ten years �?? the calling to be a rabbi had an incredibly strong hold on me. It wouldn�??t go away! I must have received a dozen application packets to a number of different rabbinical programs. I explored Reconstructionist, Renewal, Reform, and transdenominational programs. But it was always this big thing over �??there,�?? and I couldn�??t see how to integrate that path with the one I was committing to here in Vermont.

I have almost been to Israel several times �?? and each time something has fallen through at the last minute. I�??ve dreamt about being in Israel and knowing exactly where I was, and knowing I was home. Somehow the �??calling�?? to become a rabbi came to represent the highest expression of my love for Judaism and of being a spiritual teacher or guide or presence in some way.

I think it also became a replacement for really creating my own Jewish life; somehow, in order to be �??really�?? Jewish, I thought I had to take it to the top. That habit of thinking applied to many things for me �?? maybe it�??s a form of perfectionism. Letting go of the need to go �??big�?? with it freed me up to start deepening my actual experience of being Jewish �?? which is actually much harder and also more real than the fantasy.

Honestly, I think part of it too is that I love being a student, so I imagine I probably would love rabbinical school itself. I say I�??m done with it, but really, who knows? Right now, I�??m enjoying knowing I can be of service in other ways, without having to have a title like �??rabbi.�??

Tell us a little about your own mother. What did she teach you about what it means to be a woman?

Looking back, she taught me the most by what she did. That alone is pretty instructive.

My mom�??s a dancer and a dance educator. She went back to work full-time when I was about three, so I grew up with two full-time working parents, both teachers. She worked all day at a job she loved �?? creating a dance program at an inner-city magnet school in Buffalo in the late seventies �?? AND had dinner on the table at 5:30 every night for our family of five. I never remember her not being there. She made matzo ball soup (and I didn�??t know we were Jewish!?) when I was sick. She picked the nits out of my thick, curly hair when I got lice. She was loving and maternal �?? and I don�??t remember a time when she wasn�??t weaving the pursuit of her own work, her career, around family life.

If anything, I am so struck now by how very similar a path I�??m following. If I had to say what she taught me most about being a woman, it�??s that there are a lot of pieces. And that you do what needs doing. And love your kids. And go to your dance group Tuesday nights (or, in my case, writing group). We spent a summer in Arizona when I was little because my mom was dancing there with Barbara Metler. She completed a Master�??s degree over the course of several summers while we were at camp. I consider her path and look at what she�??s up to now, and realize it�??s no wonder I�??m so committed to doing things my own way and to not settling for a false sense of choices.

What women inspire you?

My sisters. My girlfriends. Survivors and storytellers.

Women who love themselves, who have nothing to prove and no need to compare or compete with each other. Women who work and juggle and balance, who offer friendship and guidance and ask for help when they need it. Women who fight and women who forgive. Women who don�??t settle.

You inspire me.

What do you hope to know for yourself and teach your daughters about what it is to live comfortably in your own skin?

That sometimes it�??s NOT comfortable. Sometimes it�??s downright uncomfortable, and that we don�??t have to judge ourselves or evaluate ourselves at every turn. If there�??s one thing I�??m working on, it�??s not being so damn hard on myself. It�??s trusting that I�??m really just right. This is what I want to convey to my daughters �?? and we teach what we have to learn, so we�??re right in it together.

What makes you feel most alive?

Skinnydipping! Coffee! Running in the early mornings. Swimming off the rocks and doing yoga in a dripping-wet swimsuit. Walking briskly in the city. My kids�?? kisses and my husband�??s hands. Being in my body. Connecting with you.

bone woman: underwater world

2008-05-12T20:53:00.000-07:00

"The Little Mermaid"
by Edmund Dulac

Where have I been?

I�??m not entirely sure. No, that�??s not right. I know where I�??ve been; I�??m just not entirely sure how to describe it.

I know what I have been doing. I�??ve been quite busy with the doing of life, as tends to happen this time of year when the earth wakes up and I come awake in the morning to warm weather which makes me it easier to get out of bed and start the day.
I�??ve been in the Pacific Northwest with mountains that hold my secret longings and lattes that are so yummy I could swoon. I�??ve been in the presence of a dear friend, sitting with her and hearing the beginnings of her birth story emerge, laughing and playing and baking chocolate cake with her daughters, taking in the beauty that is her, layer after layer.
I�??ve been tagging boxes of items for a yard sale this weekend, happy to purge my home of things no longer needed and clear space, enjoying the work involved in sorting and making piles, knowing the fun I�??ll have with my friend as we sit in her yard and watch our things looked over by strangers and taken home.
I�??ve been stretching my body and cooking more, putting together puzzles with Leoliscious and arranging the furniture in the new doll house I bought for him, of which he adores. I�??ve been seeing my man here and there, as we pass through our home, leaving and returning on different schedules, awaiting two weeks from now when things will slow just a bit and we can again share the same bed on a regular basis. I�??ve been reading poetry and dying my hair the darkest of brown and washing the bed sheets and making numerous trips to the post office.

This is what I�??m doing, what is filling my days. But where I�??ve been is a different state all together.

I feel I�??ve taken up residence in the underwater world, deep in the ocean�??s blanket of waves.

I feel I am swimming underwater, hearing muffled sounds, my body weightless in salty liquid. I feel I am here with the fishes and mermaids and seaweed, the coral and sharks and clams and sunken treasure. I feel like I have lost any sense of which way is up and down and all I know is that the sea will hold me.

There is a time lapse (likely the result of going off Paxil). It takes a few beats of time for information to compute in my brain, for words to make sense, for my body to catch up with what my mind. It takes a few beats for things to come out, for my words to form from thoughts, for expression to find its way through me. In moments I feel I need an interpreter.

It is not the darkness of the Underworld, where I have been before, the descent underneath the earth to Hades, the feeling of being swallowed by the ground. I do not feel darkness or depression, barrenness or sadness, heaviness or the inertia of being stuck in the mud. But neither do I feel I walk the earth, feel the ground firm beneath my feet, feel the sun on my face. No, I am underwater these days. It is quiet here, and I am protected as if in amniotic fluid. I see deep blue and bright turquoise and the brightest of tropical colors as fish swim by.

I am writing little, here or anywhere. And it feels like a welcome reprieve. Though I am still reading so many of you, I have not commented as much, mostly because though I hear and hold tenderly your words, my own words in response allude me. Still, I am grateful for the sense of connection it brings me, to hear voices of others and know we are all in this together.

Sometimes the water around me is calm and I slither about, making friends with the sea life. Sometimes it is choppy and cold and I am tossed about in its current. I am in a quiet space, a weightless space, unknowing and rather unconcerned with the unknowing. Because here, underwater, I can hear the Bone Woman singing her song.

And then, as is the case tonight, I swim to the surface of the sea. I lift my head out of the water to breathe air once again. My body still submerged, I look around. I can see the land in the distance, the half moon in the night sky, the world going on with all its activity, so much energy.

Before swimming back down again to my water womb, I take this moment to delight in the dark night. The stars are many. Outside my window I hear, even at this late hour, cars driving by and a siren in the distance, my city which is always awake. My little boy is sleeping soundly, limbs tangled up in blanket. Soon I too will sleep, again in my own bed. My wine tastes like grapefruit and violets. My heart is pumping blood and love.

Sherry: no regret

2008-05-07T18:22:00.000-07:00

I "met" Sherry through our blogs. At that time Sherry had a blog devoted to sharing her experiences with breast cancer. She encourage me to use my voice to write of my experiences with illness AND wellness, heartache AND celebration, the whole of life. Her passion and sensitivity made me feel at home with her. Simply put, I love Sherry. I am happy to share here some of her stories, her wisdom, her radiating beauty.

Sherry is a self taught artist who creates mixed media and altered art collage and cards ~ traveling on the journey of life. She writes, reads, talks, laughs..."I love life and living it every day with a positively optimistic philosophy. Letting the beauty of art and life inspire."

What do you love about being a woman?

Mostly I love being a person, regardless of gender. I love just being �??me�??, an individual. Having said that, since we are discussing women in particular, I love my ability to multi-task, my ability to be and do more than one thing at a time. I love being able to mother, nurture, counsel, advise, listen, make a meal, pick up something dropped on the ground and to be able to think about all of it as a whole rather than one thing at a time. Yes, I know there are men who can do this, but it seems that women have more connection to this part of themselves.

I also love my empathy and sensitivity, my ability to discuss issues that are relevant and to be open to hearing others.

You describe yourself as a self-taught artist. How did you begin teaching yourself?

I started to teach myself to be an artist from a very early age, even before starting school. I think most children do this. My mother would make play-doh for me and I would spend hours rolling it and shaping it. From there it was paper dolls to cut out and then I�??d move on to old catalogues and cut out the images I wanted to create �??scenes�?? using furniture, decorations and people for the family. Very early collage! I always had crayons, colouring books, sketch pads, pencils, charcoals and I loved art in school. I had a talent for art but didn�??t pursue it in school, yet my natural ability for colour, design, texture has always been present in the clothes I would choose, the furnishings for my home, colours for décor. Over the last few years I began to reach back and start clipping from magazines, I was drawn to beautiful papers, picked up some books, started reading artists�?? blogs and sat down to begin. I�??m still evolving, still finding a style that I can call my own. For now I just let the creative muse tell me where we�??re going.

What is your creative process? Do you have an idea before you begin a mixed media collage or does it evolve in the process?

I quite often use challenges and prompts from various websites. The person who maintains the site will choose a �??theme�?? and whatever you create is based on that theme. I might have an idea of my own before I start a project but 9 times out of 10 it goes in it�??s own direction. I find that if I pre-determine how I visualize a piece turning out it just won�??t because I stem the creative flow. As I said before, the muse usually takes itself where it�??s going to go and once I begin to choose colours, place pieces I see where I�??m headed. For example, I did a collage about �??ribbons�?? for a challenge prompt. I used the �??pink ribbon of hope�?? and created my piece around that. I used a body form in the piece that had no arms and a �??3�?? over the breast. I had 5 forms to choose from, all with different patterns yet I chose that one and never veered from it, never changed my mind. What speaks to me about this is that I created this piece, three years after my diagnosis. So you see, it�??s the silent voice the one I�??m not even aware is speaking to me that quite often directs me.

You say on your profile that you are about �??Letting the beauty of art and life inspire.�?? What things in this life do you find most beautiful?

If I say �??everything�?? that will raise an eyebrow�?�but I truly believe there is beauty in everything. It�??s all in how you choose to see and what you are looking for. The most beautiful are people, especially children, the sky, clouds, colours, water, smiles, eyes, flowers, shadows and reflections and the list goes on. In something (or someone) that does not immediately evoke thoughts of beauty, it requires looking beyond, looking deeper to see and find something that is redeeming, something that is in fact beautiful.

You were diagnosed with breast cancer and for a time you wrote a blog Abreast in the World. What did writing about your experience with cancer mean to you?

Bella, if I�??d written this blog while I was being diagnosed or treated, I don�??t think it would have been the same blog that it was post-treatment. During treatment I think I was too �??self�?? focused and living within my own daily world. To do this post-treatment as I was re-entering everyday life, the world as it continued to be while I was �??standing still�??, was therapeutic in some ways. It allowed me to start living life as this �??new�?? person who viewed the world so much differently than pre-cancer. I was able to use my voice, my experience, the things that I learned in order to talk about the fact that life does go on while we are being treated for cancer, or for any other life threatening illness or disease. How important it is that we continue to live, to be present in the here and now, the day to day as much as we possibly can. Cancer and other illnesses take away so much and it�??s what we do with what we are left that matters so very much. I stopped writing on that blog when I realized that I had moved myself into my new life and was comfortable within it. I no longer wanted to look back, I needed to look forward and start talking about life as it is and is going to be as opposed to what it was.

What did you learn about yourself, your own strength and capacity, in living with cancer?

I learned more than I ever thought it was possible to know about myself. Having cancer allowed me to see my soul, not just know it was there�?�I was able to look inside and see it. And realize that even without cancer I could always have done that. I just hadn�??t known I could, or that I wanted to. I learned that being a �??giver�?? and a �??doer�?? is wonderful but that it�??s just as important to allow others to be givers and doers and to let other people be a blessing in my life. I asked for things when I needed them without feeling a burden, I learned to give thanks graciously, as graciously as I learned to say thank you without feeling guilt. That only the day we are in �??matters�??. I knew I wanted to leave life with no regrets and that meant saying what I felt to the people I needed to say it to �?? and I still do this. I don�??t hesitate to say �??that�??s some of the best work you�??ve ever done�?? or �??aren�??t you proud of yourself for achieving this�?? and �??I love you�?? and �??you are one of the most special people in my life�??. If I say something harsh or react instead of act, I remember to apologize and mean it. I don�??t worry about yesterday and I don�??t fret about tomorrow. That�??s not to say that I don�??t plan or think ahead or disregard things that need to be dealt with. I�??m talking about simply living life to the best I can each day. I look for the joy in each day and I look for ways I can be a blessing. Even if it�??s just holding the door open for someone else. All those �??little�?? things are actually quite large. And strength? I discovered that I have always been a strong person but because I�??m a woman I had kept that hidden for so many reasons. And I know now that it�??s quite all right to let it be known just who I am and what I can do. No apologies.

What did it teach you about life, how you choose to live life?

I answered this in the previous question to some degree. Cancer has taught me that bad things happen but they aren�??t necessarily the end of the world. It has taught me that we always have choice, most especially about how we see ourselves, our place in the world, and what kind of a world this is. I�??m a glass half-full person and I would rather choose to see the positive, be optimistic and keep my hope and spirit alive. With hope and spirit we have nothing.

You are a mother to two sons. Have there been any surprises about being a mother?

Surprises? No. I knew I wanted to be a mother from the time I was a child and knew I wanted to be a stay-at-home mother if that was possible and it was. There were sacrifices for that, all of them financial, but it�??s been worth it. And strangely, I always knew I would be the mother of sons.

What do you enjoy most about being their mom?

Watching them grow over the years. Watching them develop, their personalities come into play, how they make decisions, how they interact, how they have grown and changed with one another. My children have faced a lot of crisis in their young lives. My mother passed away when they were 9 and 5, my father-in-law and then my sister when they were 11 and 7 and then my breast cancer diagnosis when they were 17 and 13. At 20 and 16 they have faced and dealt with more adult issues than some adults twice their ages. And I�??ve seen them mature and know how they handle adversity and sadness. How they cope with fear. And I know that I played a large part in helping them with that, that how I behaved, reacted and coped was a role model for them to copy. And now that they are these ages, I enjoy knowing them as the young men they are going to be and look forward to having adult relationships with both.

Can you tell us a little about your own mother?

My mother was a product of the depression born in 1929. She was a wonderful woman, but she had a lot of her own issues and fears. None of which she talked about but knowing what I know now as an adult I understand her so much more. As mothers our children do look to us as role models and we learn about life and ourselves at our mothers�?? knees. I was not the child who my mother thought I was and she tried to �??mold�?? me to be who she wanted me to be�?�and I allowed that. For love I suppose or fear that she wouldn�??t love me if I was �??myself�??. I spent years being someone else and the shoes didn�??t fit. It wasn�??t until my mother passed away that I finally let go of those chains and allowed myself to be �??me�??. It didn�??t happen overnight and it wasn�??t an easy journey. Cancer was the final knock on the head to me that I wasn�??t being as true to myself as I needed to be. What my mother did teach me though was adversity and that when bad things happen we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get on with it. She truly was one of those women who made lemonade with all the lemons that came her way.

What did she teach you about what it means to be a woman?

Everything that went against what I truly believed instinctively! My mother was in an emotionally and quite probably physically abusive relationship with my father. And she allowed it �?? for all kinds of reasons, primarily because she did not have a good self-image and low self-esteem. She taught me that men are bad. That sex is bad. It�??s sad when women feel that by saying nothing or not addressing issues, or staying in unhealthy relationships �??for the children�?? is the right thing to do. Children learn mixed messages and incorrect messages more than anything and question their own self-worth. I grew up torn and mixed up about what being a woman was really all about. My mother taught me to �??play it safe�?? and not risk. I no longer adhere to that. I taught myself that being a woman is a good thing, standing up for yourself, for what you want and need is necessary. And if I had daughters I�??d be teaching them the same thing that I taught myself. Having sons I believe I have taught them what women are, how women are to be treated and hope that I have set an example of the kind of women they will find for themselves.

What women do you admire and find inspiring?

Those who have risked, taken bold steps. Those who don�??t worry about what others will think of them and do what they must and want to do to be true to themselves. Women who are prepared to take a stand, even if it makes them unpopular because they know in the end the only person they need to answer to at the end of the day is themselves and their maker. Women who love themselves.

What makes you feel most alive?

Sunshine, a smile from someone, even if it�??s a stranger passing me on the street. A long walk or being by any body of water to just think and reflect. Laughter, that laughter that comes from deep within and it�??s especially good when shared with someone else. Figuring out a problem, or tackling something I�??m not sure I�??ll be able to do, and being able to say �??I got it!�?? or creating a piece of art/writing something and just knowing right down to my toes that it�??s �??good�??. A compliment from anyone about anything. A hug from someone I love. Waking up each morning and being able to say �??this is it, this is my day�??.

bone woman: my place in the family of things

2008-05-05T09:06:00.000-07:00

"Wild Geese"
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting �??
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

***

I don�??t know if I�??ve ever been good.

I know I�??ve tried at times.

I know I�??ve gone after good as if it is a prize, an achievement, a contest, a battle ground.

I�??ve hurt people in the name of being good. I�??ve hurt myself, refusing to listen and hear the voice inside me that tells me I�??m tired, that I need a time out, that I�??m broken and bleeding, losing a great many of my bones along the way.

I may have even done some good in my efforts at being good. It�??s hard to tell when the mirror is so clouded with self-importance and the guilt of not being good, or good enough.

I am lonely, lost, seeking.

I am weary of going it alone, fending for myself, protecting my self from intrusion at the cost of bolting the doors to intimacy.

I want to belong, to connect, to fit.

And I get connection confused with conformity, belonging coming to mean that everyone must be the same, want the same things, live the same way. It is easy to feel lost here.

And then Mary Oliver�??s words come to me: like holy scriptures, like invitation, like kind hearted laughter at my effort and striving.

I read "Wild Geese" many times this past week, several times a day. I don�??t even have to read it anymore because I could recite it. (I'm in good company.)

�??Welcome home,�?? it says. Welcome home to yourself.

And tell me, what is it the soft animal of your body loves?

I love the ocean, the beach, and how the salt in the air sticks to my skin and enters my nostrils. I love the sound of the waves, forever coming and going, the sound of seagulls flying in the distance, the sound of my prayers offered to the infinite mystery of her tides. I love the feel of sand in-between my toes and sun on my flesh and walking on the shore at night, counting stars.

I love my city with its energy and the vibrations of so many people living different lives, all seeking in some ways the same thing. How everything seems to wake up this time of year and the people come outside. I love the Midwestern thunderstorms and the tall buildings that reach towards the sky. I love the Korean restaurant I sometimes take Leo too, driving down Devon and seeing all the saris in the window fronts, the kids playing baseball in the park, the raucous festivities that will take over the streets today, Cinco de Mayo.

I love circles and spirals, labyrinths and curves. The conch shell, the round of my hips, the winding road, the dilated pupils of birth and sex, the snake slithering like an s through tall grass.

I love my home. The play of masculine and feminine: rich brown leather with supple red velvet, my office with its manly solid wood desk and pictures of Inanna and Persephone and Kali and Hecate on the walls. I love my kitchen table and how I talk there with friends over coffee, how it always has fresh fruit in a bowl, how I have spent hours of life sitting there watching Leo play in the sink or cook his funny concoctions. I love my ordered closets and my inviting bed and the luxury of plush towels and blooming flowers and candles that smell like grass and amber and tobacco.

I love elegance in the ordinary, magic, earthy sensuality. I love a little glamor, a little vixen, a little va-va voom. I love bare feet and back alleys and mermaids and soft skin.

I love jeans that fit well and boots, high heels and silver cuffs, tousled hair and smoky eyes. I love dresses the drape and cotton underwear and black lace. I love leather and leg warmers and sweatpants and cashmere. I love the play of hard and soft. I love comfort.

I love the heart center and gladiolas and words and dance. I love fire, lilacs, love letters and oracles. I love burned ashes and spaciousness and soft bathrobes and roots. I love sea glass and smooth stones, trees and laughter. I love questions and intuition, being an empath and being a warrior. I love stretching and journaling in bed, slow cooked food and ritual. I love water and fluidity, playfulness and self sovereignty. I love the sacred and profane all mixed up together. I love vulnerability, the heart exposed, the body as temple.

I love the map of my body, the stories it tells. I love the constantly shifting energy within me, manifesting energy as needed. I love intention, permission, grace. I love common sense, voodoo magic, owls and spiders and wild horses and butterflies. I love the way Leo looks when he�??s sleeping, such surrender and trust. The way he asks questions and is always coming with �??the plan�??, and how he is who he is without apology.

I love summer nights and porches, peaches and lush green that covers the ground. I love seasons and cycles. I love nakedness and tattoos and my morning rituals. I love driving on the open road, dive bars and smoky jazz clubs, white wine and dark coffee. I love being held by my man and the feeling of strength in his chest and arms. I love our history, our romance, our struggle, lazy nights at home and conversations when the whole world seems to open up before us. I love solitude and family. I love feeding others and being fed. I love connection and intimacy, my friends and tribe of women. I love letting down my walls and letting others come inside. I love honesty and celebration and ceremony and spitting watermelon seeds. I love passion and compassion, storytelling and sight.

My place in the family of things.

It is right here. Right in front of me.

The world is big enough, spacious enough to hold the contradictions within my own being and the wide expanse of all that a heart and animal body can love. It is open and free and embracing enough for everyone, everything, to belong.

My place in things is my place.

It is here, for me, an invitation to come home.

To be fully myself, letting myself love what I love, this is when the striving and seeking comes to rest. I�??m already here, already arrived, already where I belong.

I cam coming home to myself: listening, honoring, delighting, letting go.

I am living at home with myself: tending and caring, getting comfortable, growing roots, feeling my feelings, awake to the aliveness of my flesh.

I am greeting the guests that arrive at my home: each one a messenger, teacher, a reflection.

And I am here, inviting you in.

Welcome.

Liana: large heart

2008-05-04T20:14:00.000-07:00

The final questions in my interview with Liana:

What has your own journey been that has brought you to a place of desiring to �??risk your heart and soul in the liberation of love and life?�??

In truth, I am always amazed at people�??s tolerance of pain actually. I feel that I have a pretty big pain tolerance, but everything in life has been done to alleviate pain and suffering for myself. How selfish is that?

So, it has just gotten to be more painful not to risk my heart.
I feel more alive in the risking of my heart. It feels more REAL.

And sometimes I still want to and do hide under the covers.

You say on your website that �??Our feminine hearts desire to live as nothing less than an artful whole body offering of love. . .�?? How do we move from a closed state of self-protection, fearful of being hurt, to this artful love?

Come to My Dangerous Beauty and find out.

What has connection with other women meant to you in your own life?

I have never been a woman who has had a plethora of women friends, but I have a handful of woman friends that are so dear to my heart that I can hardly breathe. They know me, love me, champion me, stand beside me and kick my arse when it needs to be kicked. I have women friends who will cry for me when I cant cry for myself.

Can you tell us a little about your own mother? What did she teach you about what it means to be a woman?

I have had a difficult relationship with my mother for most for my life and still do. I saw my mother for the first time three weeks ago after 4 years. We�??ve been on speaking terms for the last two years with a phone call once every 3 weeks.

My mother was adopted and her adopted mother died when she was 4, so there is a big story in her life of abandonment, abuse and betrayal.

My mother defiantly and purposefully got pregnant with me when she was eighteen, just a girl trying to get out of a hellish situation, and I was a convenient means to an end. But once she had me, she didn�??t really want me nor know what to do with me. But I got her out of a tough place with a very sexually abusive father and it got my father out from under an alcoholic father�??s regime.

I feel that my mother in many ways taught all the things that women shouldn�??t be.

·* I learnt a lot about the betrayal women do to each other.

* I learnt a lot about competition my mother played my younger sister and I off against each other until we were in our 30�??s and my sister had her first child.

· I received very mixed messages about sexuality from my mother. When I was 13-14 and she was 31-32 she began walking around the house naked and discovering her own sexuality but punishing mine (my mum has moon in scorpio) �?? she burnt the very first outfit I ever bought. The outfit was soft yellow coloured cheesecloth fabric (muslin-like) very flowy and feminine. She branded me a slut for having purchased such a thing.

The list is long and I could go on but I think you can catch my drift about my mum.

When I was fifteen my mother and father kicked me out of home, and I am 47 now. Our relationship has been such that there have probably been 7 years on and off over that time that they have been speaking to me.

So although my mother was abandoned and bears the wound of that she is pretty much in denial of the abandoning she has initiated herself and she lives in the world of victim pretty much all of the time. She�??s taken many drugs to numb the feelings that follow her everywhere.

My sister is currently in the process of teaching my mother something very valuable. My sister has been a very dutiful daughter and in the last seven years my sister has chosen to live her life very differently and outside of the shadow of my mother�??s tyranny.

My sister took the golden granddaughters with her. It has been very painful for my mother to have lost access to the grandchildren.

As children, my siblings and I had very little to do with our extended family, no access to positive or negative grandparents. This has been a very hard lesson for my mother to learn, and she is still learning it.

I guess I am a survivor of abandonment and the tyranny of victimhood and I didn�??t chose the same path as my mother to follow. But having said that I am still my mother�??s daughter.

If you could back and talk to your twenty one year old self, what would you tell her?

I feel that if I was speaking to my twenty one year old self, I would tell her (if she would listen to an old fart like me that is) - that every woman has a bottom line of �??self-doubt�?? manifesting as �??Am I Beautiful?�?? or �??Am I Lovable?.

If she can catch herself before she makes any decisions or moves in her life that are based on these fears and doubts running her life, to stop find her centre, come back home to herself. She needs to know that she is beautiful, lovable and be in love with herself regardless of anyone elses threats or actions. She will save herself a lot of heart ache.

And if your boyfriend tells you he loves you, but wants you to have an abortion. And your heart and truth is telling you not to, don�??t sell yourself out for someone like that. Anyone like that is not worth having around. You deserve someone who really loves you and would never make you chose between him or the baby. His actions are selfish, and not about what is good for everyone concerned. It�??s not that having an abortion is right or wrong. It�??s about feeling everyone including the baby and making the best decision for everyone concerned. He�??s just scared and immature and so are you.

And if I could give her a little preview of the upcoming attraction. It�??s a big drama. He lied about having children with you later and he punished and belittled you for those desires and then he cheated on you and broke your heart into a million pieces.

He�??s not a good one through him back!

What does it mean to you to stay true to yourself and live authentically?

This is a great question to end. In actual fact it has been a question I have been living while responding to these questions.

Some part of me wanted to play it safe and hoped that you would like me. And I wondered if I should write to that small part of me�??s dictatorship, whose creed is to keep me safe.

But I wouldn�??t be living my truth if I did that and I wouldn�??t be living authentically and I especially wouldn�??t be my own My Dangerous Beauty then would I.

So I guess being truthful and authentic to me is about getting naked with you. Writing the good, bad and ugly of me. This is me, and if you don�??t like me that�??s OK. I could somersaults and seek to please.

But in truth the only thing I need to be authentically beautiful for is �??the divine�?? within all of us. I am just a simple cracked Japanese tea cup with a few stories to tell and a large heart that wants all of your dangerous beauty.

***

To learn more about Liana's work with My Dangerous Beauty go here.

Here�??s what Lynne Udell, mid-wife, herbalist, wife, mother and dancer had to say about Liana and the gifts she offers:

"My husband and I became interested in exploring our intimacy after 15 years together. Sexually we had never truly met each other. In fact we hadn't had sex for several years and didn't have the skills necessary to even know where to begin. Sexual abuse had dogged me and he had a history of substance abuse
We lacked the ability to be present and no knowledge of how to apply all the 'fixes' in the books I had read.

I was initially attracted to the work Liana offers because it was practical and spoke to a place that I knew existed but couldn't easily access.

Lianas workshops offered basic profound practices for experiencing heart connection and the revelation of the play of masculine and feminine energies. They were intense and scary...a leap off the edge for both of us. This is not work for the fainthearted but having stepped into it my husband and I have been able to start again when a divorce was a high probability.

Liana offers a unique understanding of 'what is really going on' under the facades of unconscious behaviour. She is not one for mucking around...a lashing served with deep compassion, are all part of her inherent makeup. She almost instantaneously knows you and what you need from a first meeting. She doesn't adhere to set formulas and this has become more apparent in our individual work with her, in which she has gotten to know us intimately and taken us where we wanted to go....Having people live in their true heart is paramount to her and her intensity of commitment to this is unwavering......She has profound heart integrity from which we can all learn just by being in her presence...

For a beginning embodied understanding of the love play of Him and Her and the joy and pleasure that is, I recommend any of Lianas weekend workshops. They will give you connection with the opposite sex , community with your own, the experience of sexuality that descends into your body before expanding in every direction, a lot of fun, softening and surrender for the women and solid grounded strength for the men.

For those who want to learn how to apply it in specific relationships with their unique play of fear and holding, I recommend diving into one on one work with Liana. It has been the pivotal point for change in our relationship and others who I have observed and shared in this work with.

My husband and I now make love and when we disconnect we know how to reconnect. All the changes we have made have been supported and held within the space that Liana creates for that possibility. Its been far beyond what seemed possible and yet undeniably simple in its conveyance. Within partnership is is often not possible to see the wood for the trees. We are not taught how to find all that is God in everyday life and making love...Liana has been our portal into having out hearts be truly given and received."