The Whole Blooming World

Outing Myself

2015-08-22T23:11:00.000-06:00

I'm not the type of person to get nostalgic and long for the good old days. But the one exception is my longing to return to my "golden age" of blogging. Between 2009 and 2011, I was blogging regularly; I was inspired to write and felt free to post whatever I wanted, and a community of other bloggers formed that gave me a wonderful sense of belonging and affirmation.

I really miss that. And I've been thinking about it a lot lately because of this crowdfunding campaign I'm in the middle of. I feel this constant pressure and inner conflict, because I know there are things I could and "should" be doing to spread the word about the campaign and encourage people to back the project, but I have tremendous inner resistance to doing these things, and that resistance is tied in with the reasons I don't blog anymore.

I just finished reading the book, The Art of Asking, by Amanda Palmer. In case you're not familiar with her, she's a musician who raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter to produce an album. (The book came about as a result of a pretty amazing TED talk she gave about that.) There are many factors that contributed to her campaign's remarkable success, but what she really emphasizes in the book is that people were willing to back her because she had spent years connecting with her fans and creating a true community with them, via the Internet.

The only way I can relate to that is in the community I felt connected to when I was blogging. And reading the book made me envious, not so much of her successful crowdfunding campaign, but of the online community and her ability to consistently connect with it. My blogging community fell apart, and I've often pondered why that is.

Out of the variety of factors at play (including the rise of Facebook and the tendency we all veered towards of blip-posting and endless scrolling), the personal one most troubling to me is how much more hesitant I became to put stuff about myself out on the Internet. When I started blogging I had just moved to a new town and didn't know anyone; the people who were reading my blog weren't people I knew in "real life." It was therefore "safe." Now that I'm widely connected in this town, and am friends with many locals on Facebook, I have much more fear and self-consciousness about sharing publicly at the level I used to on my blog.

That really bothers me.

I even made this collage recently to help me try to get over myself. It now lives on my fridge.

The other major thing that Amanda Palmer talks about in her book is that these relationships she's built with fans over time are based on trust - she really puts herself out there, not just on the Internet but in face to face interactions. She allows herself to be vulnerable. And this is what I have such a hard time doing anymore.

That's why I'm writing this post. I've been feeling like a coward and it's making me sick. I used to write and post with abandon, and I want to be doing that again. Even if nobody reads it. (And of course, part of me hopes they don't, because it's safer that way, ha.)

So I'm treating this post as a confessional, I guess, just putting it out there, admitting my fears and being vulnerable in the hope that, at the very least, my courage will be generally bolstered (which it actually already is just in the writing).

And if any of my old (or perhaps even some new) blogging friends happen to read it and comment, well, that will just be a tasty bonus. I'm guessing I'm not the only one out here who struggles with such things.

Amanda Palmer's TED talk

Into the Blue and Beyond Laundry

2015-07-22T11:27:00.000-06:00

I'm a multiple hat wearer; I've always been that way and always will be. That's part of what makes me fit in here in Taos so well, I think. Most of us here are like that.

The hats I've been wearing for the last couple of years include being an instructor at UNM-Taos and being a celebrant, and both are things that I enjoy. However, it finally hit me this past spring that, even doing both these things, I was barely making enough money to get by. Also, a crisis in my life at that time caused me to reevaluate my sense of purpose and core values, to revisit a passion for environmental sustainability that I had pushed to a back burner for too long.

I began to think about my "green laundromat" idea again, which I first came up with in 2009. In fact, I mentioned that in one of my early posts here, The Little Flowers of St. Clare, because Clare is considered the patron saint of laundry, for some unknown reason. (Anybody know why? If so, tell me in the comments, as I'm dying to know.)

Once I started revisiting the laundromat plan, things began to serendipitously fall into place. I became aware of a free online course in social entrepreneurship offered by Copenhagen Business School, so I enrolled. Through that course, I've been fortunate to connect with an international team who I'm now working with to not only open a laundry center in Taos, but also to eventually franchise and use 10% of our profits to bring sustainable laundry systems to developing countries.

There are a lot of things I could say here about how this business plan has developed, and what all it entails, but if you want to know more, you can read about it on the website, www.beyondlaundry.org. We also have a crowdfunding campaign going on right now, and I tell a lot of the story behind this project on that page: igg.me/at/beyondlaundry.

What I do want to say here, because even though I rarely post anymore, I still consider this blog my spiritual writing home, is that this whole plan has at its core a deep appreciation of water, not just as a natural resource, but in a spiritual sense.

This is my blue year, and once again, my color for the year has played out in unexpected and profound ways. In the collage I made for 2015, the central image is a woman diving into the blue, into a mandala of light and water, and that depicts beautifully what my experience of diving into this plan has been like.

In case you're wondering what the weird contraption under the diver is, it's actually the center of a bicycle wheel I placed over the whole collage. And it spins! And that thing poking out is a chopstick holding it to the wall.

I will continue to wear and enjoy my other hats, but Beyond Laundry (the name of my new company), has finally become the central focus of my work life, as I've wanted it to be these past six years. I can see now that when I first envisioned it, I wasn't ready, for a variety of reasons. Timing is a funny thing. I learn to trust it more and more.

And in really putting myself out there with this new business in a way that sometimes takes me way out of my comfort zone, I'm also learning to trust the water, the source. I came across these words of Jesus recently: "Out of your heart will flow rivers of living water," and that speaks to me in a new way these days. It occurred to me that rivers flow from mountaintops, and to do something so bold in my life means occupying the mountaintop of my heart and then letting the rivers flow, and as they flow, they pick up speed and force. They are pure, and they have a destination. When I allow myself to connect with the poetry and mystery and spirit of water in this way, I find the courage I need to keep diving into the blue, the clarity to identify the flow and the trust to go with it.

A Backdrop and a Blanket, but not Boring

2015-01-17T13:36:00.002-07:00

2015 is the fifth year in a row that I've chosen a word and color for the year, and I've finally come around to blue. I feel like I've kind of been putting off blue, because frankly I've always been a bit bored by it. All my past yearly colors have stood out to me in some significant way, "popped" so to speak, and I've enjoyed researching and exploring their symbolic associations. Blue doesn't inspire me in this way, and now I understand why: it's the backdrop.

This was uncannily brought home to me the night I made my collage for this year. I gathered up all my materials, sat down at the dining table, and turned on Pandora on shuffle. Believe it or not, the second song that played was "Blue Lips" by Regina Spektor. (As a side note, this is why I generally prefer radio over playlists, and also one of the reasons I love collage; there is magic in randomness.)

Ms. Spektor sings that "all the gods and all the worlds/began colliding on a backdrop of blue," which is actually a poetically fitting description of the collage process. And indeed, as I sat there browsing through a (randomly chosen) stack of magazines, I found that the blue images I was picking were more for the backdrop rather than the collage's featured images. Here is the final product (which I'm going to post more about in the near future, since there's a lot going on with it that I feel the need to discuss):

Another line of the Regina Spektor song says blue is "the color of our planet from far, far away." As I sit here at my desk and look out the window, I realize that it's also the most ubiquitous color from the perspective of the planet's surface, at least my little portion of it, because of the sky, of course. (And here in northern New Mexico that sky is an intense and vivid blue more often than not.) Perhaps it's this ubiquity that's influenced my previously unexamined feeling that blue is boring. I've taken it for granted; it's just the backdrop. But embracing it now, the blue blue sky feels more like a blanket enfolding and warming all of my life, keeping it safe and cozy, and walking out into the big wide world is so much easier with from this perspective.

This all ties in very well with my word for the year, which is "innocence." This word came to me like a breath of fresh air one day, and I immediately knew it was the right one for the year. Throughout my life I've struggled with feelings of guilt, sometimes warranted and sometimes not. In the past few years, I've made great strides in terms of growth and personal evolution, which has made the guilt issue that much more obvious as something that still needs to be healed. And so, rather than try to make those feelings go away, I will spend this year consciously connecting with the quality of innocence, embracing it within myself. One of my first lessons in this regard has been that in order to embody innocence, there must be a deep and childlike trust, a feeling of safety. At this point, I still can't fully articulate why this is so, but on a visceral level, I've experienced it to be true. And feeling enfolded by the sky, this living blanket of blue, is currently doing more to develop in me the sense of safety, trust, and innocence than I could have ever imagined.

The overall effect, which is already profound only 17 days into the new year, is a level of peace and relaxation I've never known before, at least not on a consistent basis. Blue is elemental, associated not just with the sky, of course, but also with bodies of water, and I feel like I'm floating: surrounded, supported, and upheld. Floating in the sky, or floating in the water, in trust I dive into the blue and am pleasantly surprised by the intensely vibrant tranquility it offers in response.

I realized just now (although this may not make sense to anyone else) that my blue year experience so far is comparable to listening to the Enigma song, "Return to Innocence," which is powerful not so much in its lyrics detailing the meaning as in its power to effect the felt experience of innocence. When I searched for this song on YouTube, I ended up watching what I suppose is the official video, which I'd never seen before. It definitely adds a different dimension to the experience of the song:

Gold and Mud, and What I Mean by Kindness

2014-09-28T10:02:00.000-06:00

Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing...You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm!"

~ Hermann Hesse

During my gold year, I entered a process I metaphorically referred to as kintsugi, which refers to the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. (You can read my musings on that process and how it can apply metaphorically to the inner life here.) And where I stand now, it really does feel like I've been repaired.

Another metaphorical process related to gold that I contemplated last year was chrysopoeia, which is what the ancient alchemists called the transmutation of base metals into gold. According to everyone's good friend, Wikipedia, this transmutation "symbolized [the alchemist's] evolution from ignorance to enlightenment."

(And then there's this perspective, which I also like.)

I certainly don't claim to be enlightened, but I do feel like a transmutation has happened within me. I have these moments, fairly often these days, in which I'm profoundly thankful for my life. I've come through some shitstorms in the past few years, but now my inner and outer landscapes are pretty clear. Not perfect, of course; I still find annoyances and worse in my outer landscape, and pettiness and worse in my inner landscape.

The real difference is that I've learned to give myself a break, and in doing so, have discovered that I love my life just as it is, both the mud and the gold. The transmutation has resulted in, if not enlightenment, at least a certain kindness. But the way I mean kindness here is not really in the conventional sense of being super nice and thoughtful and generous; I am definitely not always those things (and am even sort of suspicious of people who are). No, it's more like recognizing that everything is kindness, and simply receiving that.

But I'll leave you with this, because the poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes about it much more eloquently than I:

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Just for the Joy

2014-09-17T17:57:00.000-06:00

I suppose it's no coincidence that I started blogging again just a few a days before my blogging anniversary, which is today. However, it has more to do with the season than the day. It's fall* again, and the magic is at work that hits me every year at this time. A bursting of creativity that I sense all around me. A nostalgia for a home deep within me, and in that nostalgia a return to it.

I got away from blogging for many reasons, and most of them are good, but the one that irks me, and that, in truth, is a primary one, is Facebook. It became so much easier to just scroll endlessly, skimming and posting snippets, than making the effort to read and comment on actual blog posts, let alone write one myself.

There was sort of this exodus to Facebook, way back in whatever year that was. Many of the people who were blogging regularly during the years when I was migrated over there at the same time as me and more or less abandoned their blogs.

It was fun for a while, I guess, but I'm just so over Facebook these days. I still use it, but in a more moderate way than I have at times. And I'm hungry to blog again, to be posting regularly, to be reading other people's posts, getting back into conversations that are far more meaty and satisfying than those that generally happen on Facebook.

For me, Facebook is kind of like a town square where everyone's talking at once, selling something, whereas blogging is like an intimate group of friends meeting in a quiet cafe.

That whole thing of selling is another issue that drove me away from blogging. When I first started this blog, it was purely because I wanted to be writing and connecting with people through my writing. As time went on, I ventured into other blogs that were more about "generating traffic" to a website, whether it was my own or a client's. I started thinking about stuff like keywords and SEO. Blech. It took all the joy out of blogging and put it into an entirely different paradigm.

What I love and have missed about the blogs I used to read was how the people were writing and posting just for the joy of it, just to be setting down and sharing their experiences, just to be playing with words and ideas. This is where I want to be again. It feels like home.

The photo from my very first blog post, in honor of my "blogiversary"

* I realize that fall has not technically begun yet, but in my world, seasons start on the first day of whatever month they officially start in.

Vision of Wholeness

2014-09-14T10:23:00.001-06:00

I've been a practicing ceremony celebrant for over a year and a half now, and it's a more fulfilling vocation than I could have imagined. It's really confirmed for me the value of ceremony and ritual as a tool for transformation, as well as celebration.

There's a place just outside of Taos on the Rio Grande that's become a "sacred spot" for me, where I've now done five ceremonies, beginning before I was even a celebrant when I scattered my brother's ashes there. In a significant way, that was the beginning of my journey into celebrancy, although I didn't know it at the time.

Since then, I've performed two weddings there (both same sex), a baptism (the bride in the second wedding I ever did requested it), and a personal ceremony that was one of the most meaningful, important, transformative things I've ever done in my life.

It was a ceremony for forgiveness, healing, and closure with my ex. He had begun a new relationship almost a year earlier, and I had a very hard time dealing with that. Long story short - when I mentioned in my last post that I went through a period of utter misery, that's what it was about. But I had to find a way to accept it, if for no other reason that we have a child together, and there was now a new mother-figure in her life.

That process began last fall, when I had a dream about my ex's new partner on what happened to be her birthday. In the dream, we were talking across a table, and there was a palpable feeling of love and tenderness between us. I woke up feeling the same way; in fact, it permanently changed the way I felt about her. I felt compelled to reach out to her, and I sent her an email message, to which she responded with such openness and kindness that it moved me to tears. It still took several months after that for us to connect in person, but when we did, I knew we had crossed a threshold into a much more pleasant and positive part of the journey.

Meanwhile, my ex and I decided to do the forgiveness ceremony. I'd found a resource online for us to use called 6 Steps to Completing Relationships. It entailed writing down resentments, apologies, things you forgive the other person for, things you're grateful to the person for, and things you appreciate about them and will miss; and then expressing all those things to each other.

It was an incredibly powerful thing to do this. When we were done reading our lists, we burned them together and threw the ashes into the river. We cried and hugged and knew without a doubt we had truly moved into a new way of relating with each other, a rebirth of a relationship that was not just about raising our daughter, but was based on a love and willingness to grow with each other, and that now included his new partner. I felt expansive, clean, whole. At peace. Full of joy and acceptance.

Fast forward to the present. He and his partner have been going through some really difficult stuff related to a health problem she's been having, and the other night he and I talked on the phone about it. When I got off the phone, I was shaken up. I felt the need to process the complex emotions I was having about all of it and to in some way focus healing intentions toward these emotions, and her, and him, and the whole situation.

I had a sudden urge to make a collage (which I haven't done since I made my 2014 collage last December). My plan was to give it to my ex and his partner, and I would keep a photo of it for myself. I got out a bunch of magazines, put on my awesome Pandora shuffle, and sat down at my dining room table for the next few hours, staying up way past my bedtime.

During the whole process of making the collage, and especially when I stood back and gazed at the finished product, I felt that same sense of healing and wholeness and expansive warmth I had when I first connected with my ex's partner, and when my ex and I did our ceremony. The feeling that we are all together, part of a great tribe on a momentous journey.

"Vision of Wholeness"

The Year of Curing Sadness

2014-09-11T15:52:00.002-06:00

"Red is the ultimate cure for sadness." ~ Bill Blass

I do this thing from time to time when, after I've finished writing a journal entry, I go back and look at that day of the month's entries for all the journal's previous months. In this way, I can see what's changed, and, hopefully, progressed.

Last night I did this for the first time probably this year, and was shocked when I realized how much my overall state of being has changed in the past few months. The final sentence I wrote in last night's entry was, "I am basically content." When I went back and looked at the entries from this past winter, (I started the journal December 26th, 2013, being that it was a Christmas gift), I was reminded of how utterly miserable and harrowed I was at that time. I wrote things in those months that amount to, "I believe I'll be miserable for the rest of my life; I dread the future."

My color this year, I had decided, was red, and shortly after I'd begun my geeky research stage into the significance of this color, I discovered the Bill Blass quote above. It seemed like a good sign and gave me a measure of hope, but the sadness I was immersed in was so deep and all-encompassing that I honestly couldn't imagine what it would feel like to be cured of it. To be healed and whole. To be content.

My 2014 collage, which naturally I titled, "The Ultimate Cure for Sadness"

And now, just a few months later, I am more healed, whole, and content than I have ever been in my life, than I believed was even possible for me. This is because I have experienced the loss of the thing I wanted and needed most, and genuinely moved beyond that want and need. But, it's also because, in another sense, I've experienced the thing I wanted most, and moved beyond it. For the first time in my life, at the tender age of 46, I finally reached the point where I no longer felt the need for a relationship, a romantic partner to prop me up to live.

"The miracle of the psyche's ways is that even if you are halfhearted, irreverent, didn't mean to, didn't really hope to, don't want to, feel unworthy to, aren't ready for it, you will accidentally stumble upon treasure anyway."

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Also in this past year, I stumbled upon the joy of reading comic books, and have been happily exploring this world of treasure ever since, to the point that I'm now writing a comic book series, and have realized that this is the medium for fiction writing that suits me best. My writing-medium soulmate, if you will.

That may seem like a strange and random topic shift, I know. If one of my students had written that, I'd probably tell them, "You need a transition there." (But that's the beauty of blogging; no one's grading me).

The thing is, there's actually a strong connection between my emotional healing and my newfound love of the comics medium. In fact, there's a process there that's worth describing, which is why I'm writing my first blog post in over a year.

"In [the Curanderisma healing] tradition a story is 'holy,' and it is used as medicine. The story is not told to lift you up, to make you feel better, or to entertain you, although all those things can be true. The story is meant to take the spirit into a descent to find something that is lost or missing and to bring it back to consciousness again." ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I have wanted to write fiction for a very long time. I did write fiction when I was a child, and again a bit when I took creative writing classes as an English major and grad student. But I have generally avoided it, and written in pretty much every other genre instead. Why? Because when I sit down with a fictional story to write, I get utterly consumed by it. All I want to do is write. I forget to eat, and worse, I forget to feed my kids.

When my kids were younger, this was a very bad thing, but about a year ago, it occurred to me that I had reached a point in my life where I probably could fit some fiction writing in, not just because my kids mostly know how to feed themselves now, but because I'm more disciplined and balanced these days, and could do it without completely losing myself in it.

The other thing that got me thinking about writing fiction again had to do with the relationship I was trying to get over, a relationship I had been obsessing about for years. What occurred to me last fall was this: I am obsessive by nature, but instead of obsessing over that tired old relationship story, maybe I could apply my outstanding powers of obsession to the writing of an awesome fictional story. The problem was, though, I had no such story in my head at that time.

Meanwhile, I had recently been told I was going to get to teach an English class I could design myself. It was October when I found this out, and I would start teaching the class in January, so I immediately began planning it. The class is technically "Expository Writing," but I would be able to organize it around a theme, and it didn't take me long to decide that the theme would be "the hero's journey," a la Joseph Campbell. I'm not going to go into detail here about all the wonderful things that class consists of (you can read more about it at our blog, here, if you so desire), but the important part for this discussion was that I knew I wanted to include a comic book or graphic novel in the reading material. Because clearly you have to talk about superheroes in a class about the hero's journey. (And also just to mix things up and free the curriculum from canonical slavery.)

But it had been years since I'd picked up a comic book. (I should mention at this point that I was married to a comic book aficionado for 15 years, but in all that time of having those long cardboard boxes full of comic books all over the house, I probably only read about three. Comic books were "his thing," not mine.)

I Googled something like "best graphic novels" and this is how I discovered the brilliance of Alan Moore's Watchmen, which I ordered because it was on Time's "ALL-TIME 100 Novels" list, and because I read a review that said something to the effect that it was a subversion of the superhero genre.

Did I mention it's fucking brilliant? And it made me fall head-over-heels in love with superheroes, comic books, and Alan Moore, all in one fell swoop. From there, I went on to read the supremely helpful and informative Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (sort of a "The Glory That is Comic Books 101"), the first volume of the original Invincible Iron Man comics that started in 1963, V for Vendetta (also by Alan Moore), and a really good, surprisingly scholarly book of comic book literary criticism called How to Read Superhero Comics and Why by Geoff Klock. It was this book that showed me the way toward what to read next, so after that I ordered The Planetary Omnibus by Warren Ellis and all five books of the Promethea series by Alan Moore (my absolute favorite so far).

Being that it was October when I read Watchmen, naturally I decided I needed to be some kind of superhero for Halloween. It was still my gold year at that point, and I had this long flowy gold skirt that I had planned on using as the foundation of some kind of gypsy-fairy-princess costume. But the more I read about superheroes, the less interested I became in gypsy-fairy-princesses. I realized that my entire life I had been aspiring to be a gypsy-fairy-princess, dressing up as some variation of that for Halloween, waiting around for some gypsy-fairy-prince to kiss me awake, and now I was thoroughly sick of the whole thing.

The version of the costume I wore
to Denver Comic Con this summer

Thus, I turned the skirt into a cape and made up a superhero. I bought leggings at Wal-Mart for $5; they were black with bewildering gold applique zig zags all the way down them in rows. I got a gold mask and shiny black high heeled zipper boots. I decided my superhero's name was Ora, and that her superpower was the ability to remove evil from people with her special gloves. So I bought long shiny gold gloves from a costume shop in Santa Fe.

That is how The Fantastic Fortune of Ora Moore, the comic book series I'm now writing, was born. The story began to form in my head, plot points tumbling themselves into being in my imagination before I ever wrote a word.

And guess what? My hunch about replacing one obsession with another was right; it totally worked. For the first time since I was four (I'm not exaggerating), I wasn't obsessing about a relationship. But furthermore, what dawned on me with a dazzle and velocity equal to the flash of Ora's cape, was that maybe, just maybe, the reason I'd spent my whole life obsessing about relationships was because I had been trying to fill a void that only writing stories could fill.

Ordained in Gold

2013-07-29T10:43:00.000-06:00

In order to be able to perform wedding ceremonies as a celebrant, I needed to get ordained, and so I did this through Universal Life Church, as I mentioned here. Anyone (in the U.S., at least) can be ordained in this way simply by going to their website, filling out a form, and paying a small fee.

I went through this process on February 13, 2013, because I had just been asked to do my first wedding. A week or so later, I got a certificate in the mail saying I was now an ordained minister. It felt weird; it gave me an odd sense of power that immediately was followed by a great sense of responsibility. But because there had been no ceremony involved, getting the certificate also felt quite anticlimactic and incomplete.

Around this time, an amazing photographer and good friend, Heather Sparrow, and I had been planning a photo shoot for me around the theme of gold. We had talked about this being ceremonial in several ways, but now we decided to turn it into a full-blown ordination ceremony, which she would both photograph and officiate.

So I wrote my own ordination ceremony. I adapted vows used in more traditional ordination of Christian ministers and added poetry that I drew from various sources. Heather and her assistant Jackie Kolbenschlag created a labyrinth on Heather’s land, and then on the morning of March 27^th, as the full moon set and the sun rose, we held our ceremony in the labyrinth. I was wearing an incredible outfit created for me over several months by the phenomenal Brooke Barlow, who took my rather vague ideas about wearing gold and juxtaposing the ultra-feminine with stuff like metal and leather, and executed a costume that felt like, well…it was made for me. It perfectly but also far exceeded what I had imagined. Brooke and Jackie also painted all my exposed flesh gold.

A shot taken in Heather's studio following the ceremony
sparrowphoto.com

Over the past months since this event, I have written a much longer piece about it because it was a truly transformative experience - not just the event itself, but many things that happened during the planning in the months leading up to it. This piece will be published on another website with more photos in the near future, but here on this personal blog, which has been such a valuable and often life-changing medium and community for me, I wanted to share a bit about it first.

This blog has not only traced a journey of creative and spiritual awakening in my life, but also helped facilitate it, and for that I am so very grateful. My ordination ceremony and photo shoot in many ways was a summit on my journey, kintsugi and tikkun olam, the crossing of a major threshold in my personal life. I am now ordained. Creating the ceremony for this made me consider deeply what that means. What am I now ordained to be and do? I don’t want to be casual or glib about that.

The way I see it is this: My role is now to assist people in crossing major (and also less major) thresholds. Creating and participating in my own ordination ceremony profoundly showed me how powerful a ceremony really can be when approached with humility, creativity, and openness. A ceremony done this way is not merely a symbol of crossing a threshold but is (at least part of) the actual crossing itself. And I am honored and inspired to now be ordained to companion people through such ceremonies.

If you want to read more about what I offer as a celebrant, click here: Enchanted Circle Ceremonies.

Monkey See, Monkey (Hair) Do

2013-04-13T12:30:00.000-06:00

Okay, so I lied. I said I was going to tell you about my ceremony and photo shoot this time, but I just had to share this all-important news with you first.

I decided to do a DIY deep conditioning treatment on my hair, after running across a recipe for one on Pinterest, my new ~~addiction~~ pastime. The recipe called for:

1/2 an avocado
1/2 a banana
1/2 c. coconut oil
1/2 c. olive oil
2 Tbsp. honey

All of these are things I already had at home, so I figured, why not? I probably should have put all of that stuff in the blender, but I just mushed it up with a potato masher, and then whisked it to get it a bit smoother, but there were still little chunks of avocado that I decided not to worry about.

The mixture smelled great but looked, frankly, like vomit. Green vomit. Complete with chunks.

Since I was already in the kitchen, I decided to just put it in my hair there. If I was fortunate enough to have a bathtub (and what I wouldn't do for one!), I would have just taken a bath and done it there, but, alas, all I have is a very tiny shower stall. Sigh.

So I crouched there on the kitchen floor, scooping up handfuls of muck and working it through my hair, with my head bowed over the bowl I had mixed it in. Engaged in this activity, I suddenly and thoroughly felt like a monkey.

My son walked in at one point and caught me in the act.

hoo hoo hoo hoo ha ha ha

As you can see, I ended up using all of the mixture, which surprised me, since it had seemed like an awful lot. But I have pretty thick hair, and that stuff was very thick and gooey.

After application, you're supposed to put on a shower cap and let it sit for 20 to 30 minutes. A shower cap, seriously? Who has a shower cap? So I used a plastic grocery bag instead and congratulated myself for my resourcefulness, and for recycling.

The look of near-horror on my face here is due to the fact that within moments of putting on the "shower cap," oil started dripping down my forehead, threatening to get in my eyes. Actually, "dripping" isn't quite the right word; it was streaming in rivulets that I couldn't wipe away fast enough. (Note to self: next time, just wrap it in an old towel. Not that there will likely be a next time.)

Twenty minutes was about all I could bear of that, so I made a beeline for the shower at that point. I lathered (and oh, what a lather that was), and then rinsed. And rinsed. And rinsed. And then, yes, I did it - I repeated. Why? Well, because my hair felt so greasy and heavy, even after all that rinsing, that I just couldn't stand it.

Unfortunately however, by lathering and rinsing a second time, it pretty much undid any benefit of the treatment. When my hair dried, it looked dry and even frizzy (and as I brushed it, I discovered little chunks of now-solid coconut oil that somehow had managed to hide from the rinsing process. Yee haw.)

I've never been much good at the girly stuff, so all of this was a bit of a stretch for me, and one that I don't think I'll repeat anytime soon. But thanks to Pinterest, I'm sure I'll come across some other deep conditioner recipe that seems a little less elaborate and messy, and give that a shot instead.

A Monumental March

2013-04-06T13:11:00.000-06:00

March 2013 was a monumental month for me. Pivotal. Epic. Seeds that had been planted in the first two months of the year quite suddenly burst up through the soil, so to speak. Just to give you some context, between the beginning of the year and March, I:

got ordained through Universal Life Church so that I can perform weddings (and then I performed my first one on March 5th)
found out I was going to become a grandmother this fall
realized that my long-term relationship, after years of wimpily limping along without really being anything, was FINALLY. REALLY. OVER.
turned 45 and, largely because of items 2 and 3, was faced squarely with the fact that I am entering "middle age," and will never have more babies; thus, my long-held dream of a specific domestic bliss in which I raise a child in a loving marriage to the child's father is gone forever. Forever.

So....in short, big changes were afoot, and I decided that I wanted to meet them with grace. Some of you might know that I'm fond of giving things up for Lent (even though church itself was one of the things I gave up in Lent of 2010 and never really went back to). I no longer consider myself a member of an organized religion, but I do still see meaning and value in adhering to some of its practices, and in immersing myself in some of its stories. Lent, for me, is a good opportunity to focus on what I can shed in the interest of becoming freer from attachments, to explore the alchemy of death and resurrection. (Which is especially meaningful to me right now as I'm finishing up my funeral celebrancy class.)

This year, rather than give one thing up for the entire period of Lent, I did a three-week cleanse in its second half. A cleanse is something I had considered doing for years, but never could find the resolve. Most of the ones I had looked at were juice fasts, and seemed too extreme. But this one is different. The first week is mostly vegetables with some fruit and nuts/seeds; some of it is juices, but it also has soups, salads, and some cooked dishes. The second week, you add back fish and legumes, and the third week you add back gluten-free grains and eggs. It's available on the Whole Living website, and all the recipes are provided, which makes it very user-friendly. A friend of mine does it about twice a year, and seeing how well it affects her was a big selling point for me.

Amazingly enough, I made it through the entire three weeks without cheating (and I was surprised to find that my biggest temptation was not coffee but macaroni and cheese). The first week was hell, especially with the caffeine withdrawal, and I briefly considered switching to a juice fast just to get it over with sooner, but I'm very glad I didn't, because it opened me up to a whole new way of eating and has had a permanent effect on how I shop, cook, and eat. Some of the recipes were actually gourmet-level delectable, and I will continue to cook them on a regular basis. I tried foods I thought I didn't like, and learned that I actually do. I lost weight, which was an unanticipated but welcome side effect, especially losing that nasty belly bloat. I firmed my lagging resolve to consistently avoid wheat and dairy; in fact, I haven't even much wanted those things since finishing the cleanse.


Grilled Salmon and Bok Choy with Orange-Avocado Salsa. My absolute favorite recipe from the cleanse. Get it here

And the effects were not just on the physical level; the ultimate value of doing the cleanse was in the very deliberate act and enduring commitment to care for myself. It was a demonstration of self-love that has moved me into a new way of being. This change actually began a year ago when I started doing weekly yoga and meditating on a daily basis, but the cleanse was a quantum leap in this direction. I feel a greater acceptance, appreciation and gentleness toward myself now. And then there's that wonderful feeling of accomplishment that I did it!, and the sense of strength and confidence that comes with that.

I planned the last day of the cleanse to coincide with my son's birthday on the 26th, and with a truly monumental event that was planned for the 27th, on the full moon: a ceremonial photo shoot that I did with three amazing women in the wee hours of the morning. It involved a labyrinth, an ordination ceremony, and lots and lots and lots of gold.

But I'll tell (and show) you all about that next time.

Tikkun Olam by Kintsugi; but First, the Furnace and Flux

2013-02-05T10:29:00.000-07:00

Sunday was the first anniversary of my brother's death, and as I began to write this post, something he once said popped into my head. Commenting on my penchant for symbolism, he said something to the effect that I'm always trying to read meaning into things where there is none.

True enough; most of the content of this blog is a neon flashing case in point. But my response to him then, as it would be now, was that basically, it doesn't matter if the meaning is "really there" or not; what matters, and what I enjoy, is creating that meaning, working - and playing - with it. Symbology is fun.

Working and playing with gold as my color for the year has so far - pardon the pun - been quite rich. Around the time that I realized 2013 was going to be gold, a Facebook friend posted about the Japanese art of kintsugi, which I had never heard of before. It means "golden joinery" and is the practice of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer resin sprinkled with powdered gold, thereby making the item more beautiful and valuable than it was originally.

How glorious! My metaphorically-oriented mind was off and running, and the first thing I thought of was the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam, meaning repair of the world. In Jewish spirituality, this is seen as humanity's responsibility.

Tikkun olam by way of kintsugi; I love this concept. But what would such a process entail? Obviously, one needs to first have some gold. It has to be extracted, refined, then ground to a powder and mixed with lacquer.

As I delved more deeply into exploring the metaphorical meanings of these processes, it became clear to me that the reason gold is so valued is because it represents pure love, pure being. If one wants to repair the world with it, one has to find it in oneself first. And in order to do that, one has to first trust that it is actually there to be found, then actively look for it.

I realized at that point that I tend to deny the gold in myself because I recognize that it's not pure and so I discount it altogether. But in exploring these metaphors, I began to understand that I must value the impure gold for it to be purified. I must "extract" it by gathering it within myself from all the "veins" where I can find little bits of it. Interestingly, I discovered that just by turning my imaginative focus more to the image of gold, feelings of joy and love were increasing me. (And by the way, I learned in my research that the human body does actually contain tiny amounts of gold.)

The next step is purification. Find and extract the the impure gold, then surrender it to a 2100-degree Fahrenheit furnace and add something called flux, which causes the impurities to separate and rise to the surface where they can be poured off. The funny thing about flux is that it consists of very ordinary substances, and can actually be as simple as 100% borax. Boring old borax, available at any corner store.

Perhaps, then, I should value the ordinary circumstances of my daily life as the flux that catalyzes my purification. Maybe I should also welcome the intensely challenging and painful things in life when they come because they are the fiery furnace, without which, the flux has no purpose and the gold remains impure. And perhaps, when impurities rise to the surface, I can let them be poured off instead of clinging to them because I identify with them. Then, with the pure gold that is left, I can repair what is broken - but only after it's ground to a powder, another wonderful metaphor for appreciating life's way of taking something that seems so solid and breaking it apart so it can become useful to the world.

I feel like all of this is happening simultaneously in me, but I can give my attention to one part of the process or another, depending on my need in the moment. I am one piece of the broken world and the whole process is the repair. Kintsugi, tikkun olam, the furnace, and the flux are one.

Tamamizu Ichigen , (Japanese, 1662?-1722)
Edo period

Higher Resolution

2013-01-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

I'm not a maker of New Year's resolutions; rather, I choose a word and color for the year to guide me. That way, what resolves in me can flow freely out of what's revealed to me in contemplation with those guides. It just feels a little less rigid and more inspired than making a resolution.

Just because it's New Year's Day and I love to look at multiple levels of meaning, I did a little exploration into the word "resolution." Turns out the origin of the word is about "a breaking into parts." There is also, of course, one of the most common uses of the word these days (when it's not the end of the year), which is about computer images and screens. Resolution in that sense is a measurable quantity (and therefore quality) of image detail.

Common display resolutions, according to Wikipedia

So, now I find myself asking, what will be breaking into parts for me this year? Another way of saying that might be: what will I be analyzing? And what images in my life could benefit from a higher resolution? Where do I need to see more detail?

Wonderfully enough, these are exactly the kind of questions choosing a color and a word for the year lead me to contemplate. So I guess, in a way, I do make resolutions after all.

The End of the Rainbow

2012-12-31T10:05:00.000-07:00

“Dare to love yourself
as if you were a rainbow
with gold at both ends.”
― Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams

My 2013 collage

Word for the year: treasure
Color for the year: gold

A Purple Passage

2012-12-29T12:32:00.000-07:00

One of the things I discovered in my research about the color purple is that a paragraph containing "ornate and flowery language" is called a "purple passage." Metaphorically speaking, that's a good way to describe how 2012 has been for me. Also, this year has been a major rite of passage, resulting in discovery of what a new friend of mine calls the "heart treasure," that one still point of purpose that, once discovered, turns everything else in one's life to serve it.

During the time of planning my brother's memorial, I happened to see an ad in a magazine for the Celebrant Foundation & Institute, which trains people to become professional Life-Cycle Celebrants - people who create and perform ceremonies with and for people. I immediately knew this was for me, and I entered that funny process of coming to decide something that you've actually already decided.

At the time, I had just started working toward building my new business as a personal historian, and I questioned the wisdom of aborting that in midstream and starting another new thing. But the rightness was so apparent to me that I took the leap of faith and signed up for the training (which I'm now in the middle of).

The thing is, I knew I had found my true calling, and so many things that had happened in recent months all worked together to form one big twinkling, neon arrow pointing to celebrancy. It started with writing about wedding officiants and realizing the importance of celebrations of milestones. But the biggest thing was leading my brother's memorial. It felt totally right to me, and many people who attended, most of whom I didn't know, gave me very positive feedback; a couple of them even leaned in and whispered, "I want you to do my funeral." I know it may sound strange, but I am so intensely grateful to my brother for this gift.

I have always felt drawn toward ritual and ceremony. I've even considered going to seminary; and now, in the Celebrant Institute, I've found my tribe, my place. I'm amazed at how this vocation will draw on all my passions and talents. I'm so used to having multiple jobs, but for the first time in my life I see the various side paths all merging into one. And since focus on the client's personal story as a "hero's journey" is one of the hallmarks that makes a Life-Cycle Celebrant different from other kinds of officiants, the personal history business is also simply being absorbed into this profession.

All the bells in my heart are ringing in one accord. Hallelujah.

Merry Meltdown

2012-12-26T18:23:00.000-07:00

Almost every year, at some point on Christmas Day, I find myself in tears. You might say it's a tradition - not planned and anticipated like wrapping presents or making my eggnog cheesecake, but just what spontaneously seems to happen. I think it's largely because of attending Midnight Mass at the Ranchos church the night before, the way it opens and softens me. Also, being up so late means I'm tired on Christmas Day, and that adds to my feeling of vulnerability.

This Christmas crying is not a bad thing. As Kahlil Gibran pointed out, sorrow and joy are inseparable. And for either to exist, the heart has to be open.

Christmas is about the birth of a baby - the most vulnerable, crying kind of creature there is. When the Holy Child is born in my heart, joy cracks the brittleness inside me a little bit more, and I see the remaining brittleness more clearly. The desire to freely and fully love is ignited anew but starkly contrasted against that, I see where I still fail, where I am still frozen in fear and resistance, and in noticing that, a little of it melts into tears.

Though God’s wisdom and holiness remind us of our limitations, it is precisely within these limitations that wisdom is often revealed. The incarnation represents the moment in which this wisdom enters the human sphere in all its contradictions, so that nothing is left without transformation and transfiguration.

~ William J. Danaher Jr. (via Edge of Enclosure)

So here I am the day after, and I can treasure these insights and begin again. It's perfect that the new year begins soon after Christmas; I can plant seeds in this darkness and water them with these tears, and watch a new thing grow. The light has been reborn, the world has been reborn, and I am in these movements too. This beautiful day is mine to live, to surrender and surrender to the flow of grace in each moment. And when I fail, to surrender again.

Always we begin again.

~ St. Benedict

Consuming Christmas

2012-12-24T08:49:00.000-07:00

Blessed is the season which engages the whole world in a conspiracy of love. --Hamilton Wright Mabie

The world is made of stories, and traditions and rituals are the ways we collectively enact those stories and keep them going. Most would agree that many of our collective stories are dysfunctional, but to say they are not "true" is to miss the point. There are no true stories: stories, like anything else in the world of the senses, can only point to truth, make space for an experience of truth.

The senses are the portal, as we are flesh and blood creatures in this world. This is what has been given. And that's why I love Christmas, because it is a shared feast for the senses. We vary in what version of Christmas story we hold dear, but if we hold any of it dear at all, there are certain agreed upon symbols, colors, scents, etc. Surrendering to the profusion of those, for me, is what makes Christmas magical, even though I am well beyond childhood.

Representing a progressive Christian point of view, Richard Rohr says:

Christmas is a celebration of God become flesh, of the sacred presence which shimmers through everything in this world. The Incarnation is not an abstract theological principle, but an intimate flesh and blood invitation to celebrate the gifts of our senses and our bodies as portals to the divine. We are called to awaken to the holy birthing happening within us, not demanding our work, but our consent for this work to happen through us. And yes, this is much harder than it sounds.

Thus, Advent and Christmas are for me a call to keen awareness of both light and dark within myself and in the world, and of my own power to bring forth light through surrender to the light that wants to come forth. I find myself, at this time of year, both brimming with gratitude for the grace in my life - the abundance I have done nothing to deserve, as well as more aware of where there is want.

This is what happens to Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. His transformation occurs out of awareness of want, both within himself and others, and gratitude that he has the power to do something about it. I recently read a commentary on Internet Movie Database which added a new dimension to my understanding of this:

The word "humbug" is misunderstood by many people, which is a pity since the word provides a key insight into Scrooge's hatred of Christmas. The word "humbug" describes deceitful efforts to fool people by pretending to a fake loftiness or false sincerity. So when Scrooge calls Christmas a humbug, he is claiming that people only pretend to charity and kindness in a scoundrel effort to delude him, each other, and themselves. In Scrooge's eyes, he is the one man honest enough to admit that no one really cares about anyone else, so for him, every wish for a Merry Christmas is one more deceitful effort to fool him and take advantage of him. This is a man who has turned to profit because he honestly believes everyone else will someday betray him or abandon him the moment he trusts them.

People today who call Christmas a humbug, although they no longer use that word, often do so because of the nasty consumerist nature of it all, with which I have no argument. I would, however, point out, that consumption in and of itself is not a bad thing; it's what we do as creatures of flesh and blood. A feast, by its very nature, is an excess of consumption, and serves the purpose of celebration. Giving gifts and feasting both enact sharing of abundance in a way that stretches us; this, in my experience, is a healthy and valuable exercise occasionally. As with anything, what makes it valuable is how consciously, conscientiously, and imaginatively we go about it. It is in imagining and re-imagining what we already have that we create a better dream of life.

However, to me it's not so much about consuming as being consumed. By immersing myself in the sensory overload of Christmas; by pouring out creatively, financially, and energetically, I realize surrender of ego a little bit more. I am the Yule log, each year learning a bit better to surrender to the flame and thus become one with it.

An Extra-Spectral Year

2012-11-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

This year has been something else. I suspected it would be when I realized purple was going to be its color. I've never been fond of this color; you might even say I'm porphyrophobic. I've always associated purple with discomfort, with intensity, and also with death. When I finished making my collage for the year and contemplated the finished product, I just knew it was going to be a fiercely disturbing year, and that there would be death in it.

Then, at the beginning of February, my younger brother Scott unexpectedly died. And that was just the beginning. There have been deaths and brushes with death on many different levels this year. I could do about ten more posts on each of those experiences, but I'll spare you all that.

Really, the death theme started at the end of 2011, and that's partly how purple came to be my color for 2012. I had been writing the weekly blog for a client's website. Her product, called Life at Hand, is a system for recording and organizing personal information and vital documents, so a lot of what I was researching to blog about had to do with estate planning and other end-of-life stuff. In the process of that research, I became more and more aware of (and disturbed by) how deeply in denial we are as a culture about all things death-related. I began to feel an urgent sense to do something about that, but I knew not what. All I knew is that death was going to be a focus for me for a while.

When Scott died, I took on the task of planning and leading his memorial. At the time, I had been happily planning the Valentine's tea party I mentioned in my last post, inspired about the opportunity to create a celebration of my woman friends. Now that enthusiasm went into creating a different kind of celebration altogether, a celebration of Scott's life.

But I had never done anything remotely like planning a memorial before, so I went into major research mode, and what I quickly discovered is that there is very little freely available on the Internet that is useful for such a task . The poems and readings I found were mostly cheesy and/or bland, and I was horrified that several sites wanted to charge for the most basic resources. For instance, one site I landed on wanted $30 for a funeral program template Word document. After many, many hours of research I did finally find some good stuff, and managed to put it all together, but my sense that how death is approached in our culture needs to have the lid blown off it was amped up several levels.

It wasn't just because of the research, either. It was because of Scott.

I had never had much of an opinion or feeling either way about the idea of connecting with people beyond the grave. When people recount experiences of having felt the presence of a dead loved one, I've never really believed or disbelieved it. But with Scott's death, that changed forever.

One day, shortly after his death, I was sitting with a friend in a coffee shop, talking about him. Some amazing things had been happening among those he was connected to; a sense of community had formed over many miles among us. His two ex-wives were connecting with each other, for instance. And for me, who had been alienated from Scott for several years because his addictions and demons had made him an unsafe person for me to let into my life, I felt all of the walls I'd erected with him come down, and I simply loved him once again. As I discussed all this with my friend in the cafe, I said, "I have no regrets; I'm at peace with all of this and I can tangibly feel that he is at peace too. I just wish I could give him one good hug." And as I said that, all of a sudden everything just lit up and became more alive, vibrant with warm good life; and his spirit, his essence - HE - was there hugging me, and it was infinitely more satisfying than any physical hug.

Eckhart Tolle says that when someone dies it's like a soap bubble bursting; the outer form of the bubble is gone, and what was inside that bubble is released. That's as good an analogy as any I've heard to describe how this could be.

Can I prove that it was really Scott's essence there with me? No, of course not. But I know it on a level that trumps the puny "knowledge" of the rational mind. Conveniently, there's a fitting metaphor here involving my color for the year:

There is no such thing as the "wavelength of purple light" on the visible color spectrum; purple only exists as a combination, and is therefore referred to as "extra-spectral." It wasn't even acknowledged on Newton's color wheel. However, as it says on Wikipedia, "The spectrum is often divided up into named colors, though any division is somewhat arbitrary: the spectrum is continuous."

Just as the color spectrum is continuous regardless of the divisions we impose upon it, so is the spectrum of life and death. And whether you classify and divide the spectrum, whether you name the color or not and include it as part of a system you recognize, you know it when you see it, and that's all that matters.

Celebrating Stories

2012-05-09T07:20:00.000-06:00

In my last post, I said that the TV show My Fair Wedding has had a major impact on my life. Let me explain.

The premise of this reality show is that couples with a small budget and a distinct theme in mind for their weddings get help from world-class event planner, David Tutera. He comes in three weeks before the wedding and takes over, usually changing everything from the dress to the venue. What he doesn't do, however, is change the theme, no matter how wacky or tacky it is.

After watching the show for a few episodes, I began to realize why it was so appealing to me. (Keep in mind that I rarely watch TV, ESPECIALLY reality shows.) David Tutera has a true gift for taking the ideas and desires people have and ultimately treating them with respect, even if he begins with a little eye-rolling. He takes it upon himself to understand where his brides are coming from, what it is they truly want, and then making it happen in a way that always far exceeds their expectations. And underneath it all, I realized, his foundational philosophy is that life is meant to be a celebration that we share with our loved ones and ourselves.

I found this very inspiring, and even began to plan a Valentine's Tea Party for my closest woman friends as a result (which actually turned out to be quite lovely.)

Valentine's Tea Party, with heart-shaped lemon lavender shortbreads and heart-shaped cake

But even more significantly, I made connections between his gifts and my own. Watching Tutera at work and really observing what he was doing made me realize that I have a similar gift in how I work with people I write about as well as those I teach writing to or do editing for. I love to tell people's stories; I love to teach people how to find their writing voice. I love to honor people's truths in these ways and even help them to recognize their own truths in some cases. And from the wonderful feedback I often get from people I've written about, from my students, and from my clients, I know that this can have a real impact on them.

Around the same time as I was getting into My Fair Wedding, I was also feeling restless, like my life was in need of some new direction. For a long time, I'd been feeling like even though I love what I do, I was missing out on time for "my own" writing. But out of the connections I was making between David Tutera's work and my own, I had an epiphany that stopped me in my tracks: Writing other people's stories IS "my own" writing. It satisfies me, and I feel called to it. Realizing this was like coming out from under a huge weight I didn't even know was there. It gave me permission to stop pressuring myself to do "my" thing, and fully embrace what I was already doing. And this led me to make the decision to launch a new service in my writing business: writing personal histories for people.

And so I have reworked my writing business, Illuminated Manuscripts, to reflect this new direction. Rather than make this post any longer explaining about what it means to be a personal historian, I will simply direct you to my new website, www.illuminatedwritingandediting.com.

Here Comes the Bride

2012-03-24T11:50:00.000-06:00

My 2012 collage

As you know if you've ever been a regular reader of this blog, I choose a color and a word for each year. This year my color is purple and my word is juice. Last year, I also started the year by making a collage that represented my color and word, which turned out to be a wonderful thing, so I did it again this year. I have a ton of stuff I want to share about how this year and its themes have unfolded so far, but I'm going to have to break it into several posts, so I hope you'll bear with me and come along for the ride.

In choosing the images for a collage, I keep my theme(s) in mind, but sometimes I will find myself drawn to an image that doesn't completely fit. In the 2012 collage, that image was the face in the top right corner.

She is a bride from a small village in Kosovo where they paint women's faces for their weddings. The colors used on her face, other than the obvious white, are blue, red, silver, and gold - not purple. But I felt the need to include her with no idea why. A bride? What did that have to do with anything?

Lo and behold, a couple of days after I finished the collage I got an email from one of my editors at the Taos News, asking me to write an article for the Taos Wedding Guide supplement that comes out every spring. I would be interviewing three women in Taos who are all ordained interfaith ministers and wedding officiants.

After interviewing these amazing women and then transcribing the interviews, I had no idea how to jump into writing the article. Weddings are not something I've experienced much in life. I did marry the same man twice, but the first time was on Halloween in a cemetery, and the second time was on a Wednesday night (in a church this time at least, but it was extremely casual). I was a flower girl in my uncle and aunt's wedding as a child, and a bridesmaid for a friend from high school, but that's about the extent of it.

I always like to say there's a fine line between "the pre-writing process" and procrastination. In this case, I felt I needed some inspiration to get started on the article, so I went onto Netflix to try to find some kind of wedding show to stream. After comparing the few that came up, I chose a reality show called My Fair Wedding because it was higher rated than the others, and I proceeded to watch two episodes in a row, which did in fact inspire me to write the article.

However, this show had a far more profound impact on me than just helping me write. I ended up watching all 24 episodes available on Netflix over the period of a few weeks. Once again, something fluffy has changed my life, and in my next post, I'll tell you how.

How A Fluffy Movie Saved My Life

2012-01-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

I'm writing this post in response to a question a friend of mine posted on Facebook; she asked bloggers what their goals are for their blogs. I started to formulate a response, and quickly realized it would be too long-winded for a Facebook comment, because I have more than one blog, and more than one reason for each of them. (It's probably even too long-winded for a blog post, but you can decide that for yourself.)

This blog was my first. And I don't think I've ever confessed this here before, but I started it because of watching that epitome of "feel-good" (i.e., fluff) movies, Julie and Julia. If you've seen it, then you know that it's based on the true story of a woman who started a blog and eventually became famous for it.

Well, I knew going in that there was little chance of fame in blogging these days, now that EVERYONE has a blog. No, what convinced me to try it was what the Julie character said in the movie when she made the decision. She said it would be a "regimen" for her, and she saw it as something that would fulfill her need to do something meaningful and creative. This inspired me, because at the time, I had been living in Taos and working at Subway for about a year - it was one of the most miserable years of my life. I was a lifelong writer who wasn't writing, and hadn't really since I'd finished my Master's in creative writing four years earlier.

For my Master's, my concentration was poetry, but I had always wanted to get into writing personal essays. Blogging seemed like a great way to do that with the benefit of immediate gratification, just getting it out there and dropping the whole burden of "trying to get published," which graduate school had completely turned me off to.

So I started this blog, and proceeded to visit other people's blogs and leave comments. Within a fairly short time, blogging completely and wonderfully exceeded my expectations. I found myself part of an eclectic online community including (to name just a few) a young man who had been homeschooled, taught in Korea, then proceeded to get his bartender's license and his pilot's license more or less simultaneously; a male Buddhist kindergarten teacher in the Bay area who is married to the town's female mayor; an Australian storyteller-poet-naturalist; a glitzy woman entrepreneur in Dallas; a Scottish woman with equally passionate interests in cooking, photography, and literary pursuits of all kinds; and several spiritually-oriented women who sort of became my church. One of those women I actually count now among my very closest friends, even though we've still never met in person.

That in itself was fulfilling enough, but there was more. Blogging gave me the confidence to think of myself as a writer again, so I started a writing business called Illuminated Manuscripts and created another blog for it. I made business cards and brochures and joined the Taos Chamber of Commerce, and out of that, I got offered a job writing a weekly column for the Taos News, which I'm still writing today. Other writing jobs came my way as well, and I have found myself living my childhood dream of writing for a living.

However, since I now had several clients and was no longer working at Subway, one might say I had a life, and blogging began to take up less and less of my time. And anyone who blogs knows that if you don't do it on a pretty regular basis, the warm glowy sense of community begins to dissolve. Less and less people comment on your blog, as you comment less and less on theirs, and after a while you just kind of lose touch altogether. In the past year or so, I've posted here very infrequently, and hardly anyone comments anymore. It sort of feels like a ghost town. I miss those golden days, but that's okay.

The blog I started for Illuminated Manuscripts never really took off at all because I found myself with more than enough work without having to promote it. I'm now about to expand my business' services and will be building a new website for it elsewhere.

My third blog came about when I decided to buy land off-grid and build an earthbag house on it. Where my purpose for The Whole Blooming World was simply to be writing and sharing that writing, my purpose for Home Sweet Hive is more to document my project and connect with other people doing similar things. It fascinates me to see that an entirely different group of bloggers has sprung up around me over there, although there are a couple of loyal readers that followed me over from this blog.

I know a lot of people blog for money, and I also know that if you want your business to grow online you should have a blog, but so far, blogging has had nothing to do with these things for me personally. However, nowadays, I write the weekly blog for the business of one of my clients, and I've seen how it can be a whole different animal. And once I get my new site up for Illuminated Manuscripts, I will be blogging regularly there for the sake of promoting my business.

Even though this blog has faded into the background of my life and there is little chance that will change in the foreseeable future, I know from time to time I'll still post here even if no one's reading it, because it's become for me a way to track and tell and change the story of my inner life.

If I hadn't watched Julie and Julia it's hard to imagine that my life would be as rich as it is today. So there's a lot to be said for fluff. For instance, milkweed is fluffy but plays several important roles: it remedies poison ivy, insulates, repels pests from plants in its vicinity, removes warts, and serves as the sole food source for monarch butterfly larvae.

But I guess some curmudgeons would consider butterflies "fluff" too. Too bad for them.

Money-Time

2011-11-21T13:43:00.001-07:00

My green year is winding down, and in this last portion of it, I have turned my attention toward the last green-related item I wanted to work with this year: money.

Money has always been a bit of a bugbear for me. When I was a teenager I rejected my comfortable middle-class upbringing and decided I was "anti-materialistic," i.e., anti-money.

I got over that quite some time ago, but the truth is that I've never been good with money. It tends to slip through my fingers alarmingly quickly, and my overall financial life has been very much feast or famine, and utterly chaotic.

So I've been working with a book called The Energy of Money, by Maria Nemeth, which approaches money from a spiritual viewpoint and guides you through a series of exercises to help you become conscious of and heal your relationship with money.

I'm still stuck on Chapter One, in which you are supposed to write your money autobiography. She provides a whole long list of thought-provoking questions to help the process. I shouldn't say I'm stuck, really, because even though I'm moving through this process very slowly, I AM doing it. It's eye-opening to say the least, and so I'm taking the time to really process what I'm writing.

One thing I've realized lately is that as I've been with money, so I've also been with time: confused about where it all goes. Which, of course, brings to mind that saying, Time is money. I never really understood what that meant, primarily because both time and money were such abstract concepts to me that I couldn't really comprehend either of them on a practical level.

But I get it now; it means that money comes to you for time spent earning it. Duh. Conventional wisdom might see this as a one-to-one correspondence: If I work so many hours, I will get so much pay. If I have a "bad" job, the pay will be low and if I have a "good" job the pay will be high. But frankly, I think it sucks either way, and I believe it can be different. In fact, I know it can. There's a sort of momentum that can be created around money that brings a greater and greater return with fewer and fewer hours. I've seen it in people I've written about for my Taos News column, Innovators & Entrepreneurs, and I also just know it intuitively.

Recently I was browsing at one of my favorite websites, mythinglinks.org, and I came across a very interesting page about money. The author of the site, Kathleen Jenks, laments that in terms of earning a living, "it's been unsettling to face the fact that I've lived most of this lifetime feeling like a racehorse hitched to a plow."

Reading this really bummed me out, because I can relate. I also recently interviewed a woman for my column whose work life as a freelance writer and a teacher parallels mine. But she just started an online business (her website is journalsandnotepads.com), and she talked about how different this is from freelancing, where you're selling your TIME.

That conversation got me thinking about starting my own online business, but that's a story for another day. The significance for this discussion is that it was yet another pointer to my need to focus on my relationships with time and money. I began to think that perhaps a budget would not be such a bad thing after all. And while I've always been okay with schedules, I haven't been disciplined enough about them when I'm working at home on "my own" time. So I decided that thinking of a schedule as a sort of time-budget might be a better idea - to trick myself into sticking to it, essentially. I've decided that the planner I get for 2012 will have the hours of the day in it so that instead of just making a list of what needs to be done each day, I can actually schedule all of it.

I also signed up at Mint.com. I had read several very good reviews of it, and then came across another one recently that finally convinced me to check it out. And I have to say, I LOVE it. I honestly cannot overstate how much this tool is helping me at last to really grasp my money situation and how to manage it. It's like when you look at what appears to be the chaotic blur of a stereogram and then finally see the image, and go, "Oh wow, yeah," and your eyes relax. For the first time in my life, I have made a balanced budget that is realistically based on what I actually have coming in, and I can see exactly where all of my money is going.

This is both relaxing and and freeing, which is ironic, considering how long I resisted budgeting because I felt it would be so stifling.

It's an interesting side benefit that budgeting my money is helping me budget my time as well. I'm currently writing an ebook for a client who pays me an hourly rate. It's up to me how many hours a week I put in. What I've been able to do is put into my Mint.com budget the amount of money I need to make monthly working on the ebook, and then figure out exactly how many hours a week I need to put in to make that happen. Cake!

All of this has resulted in an incredible feeling of awakening and empowerment in these areas of my life. I realize now that I've always let money and time just kind of happen to me, but I'm increasingly feeling like I'm in the driver's seat. Money and time are tools, and while there will of course be unexpected things that happen and certain limits beyond my power to change, overall it's possible to exercise control over how I receive and use them, and in doing so, the mysterious result is abundance.

The Little Things

2011-11-17T17:08:00.001-07:00

To step over the south-facing threshold of this darkening house and out
into the surprising almost light, the winter smell of cold and diesel,

to turn one way, west, toward a silhouette of shoes,
laces tied together,
flung over a wire
beside so perfectly unstraight a stroke
of pulsing black, a pole,

then nine strides north to where
those two horses made of grass and wind
draw changing angles to the ground,
whose soft noses break

my green heart, oh what it is.

I had merely thought to smoke.

Why would I call these things little
when they live me
as the life I do not have,
as large as this only moment.

My Heart's Content

2011-11-09T10:17:00.000-07:00

Last night as I was lying in bed, I landed on the word "content" to describe how I've been feeling lately. This is not a word I've ever given much attention to; it's not phonetically beautiful, and definition-wise it's always seemed a little boring and naive to me. But when it came to me last night, it floated into my consciousness in a way that made me see it as if for the first time. I began to consider what it actually means to be content, to not desire anything more than what one has, because that is truly what I was feeling as I lay there.

We live in a culture that so values goal-setting and achievement, that it's no wonder contentedness is barely on the radar, that my automatic response to the word has been a sense of dullness and disinterest. I mean, if you don't want anything, what fun is that? What would motivate you to get up in the morning and DO anything? Who would ever receive special recognition for how content they are?

It had never really occurred to me that the meanings of the word as an adjective (con-TENT) and as a noun (CON-tent) are actually related. When I did a little research this morning, I discovered that they in fact have the exact same source - the Latin contentus, meaning "contained."

And this is perfect. The feeling of contentedness that I've been experiencing on and off lately has everything to do with the content of my life - not the circumstances, the content. The substance. It's all about what's inside the container of my life, which is related to circumstances, but only in the sense of how I perceive, experience, and integrate them.

Contentedness, I'm finding, is not a position of dullness and complacency, but a dynamic state in which the things my life wants to move into are contained. They find satisfaction first within my being and then flow out into form. It's not that I don't want anything, it's that want is reduced to its essence, a recognition that it's more about merging with energies than attaining objects. By merging with those energies within first, even the energy of desire, there is a first-level satisfaction, a contentedness created, which then allows the manifestation of any desire outwardly to be a natural momentum rather than a future-based striving.

In other words, my heart's cont-TENT because of its CON-tent.

The heart my very best friend crocheted for me.

Back From the Hive

2011-09-17T15:05:00.000-06:00

Today is my two-year blogging anniversary, and I couldn't let that slip by without making note of it. The last time I posted here was in March. Seven months ago, wow. With the advent of my new blog, Home Sweet Hive, about my housebuilding/off-grid adventure, I've sorely neglected this one.

It's been interesting to have a blog that's so very different from this one, with different subject matter and a new variety of virtual community. But I've missed those of you who I used to connect with through The Whole Blooming World, and I've missed blogging about the kinds of things I've written about here. I'm about to move back to town for the winter and one of my jobs is about to end, so I'm planning to spend more time here over the next few months, and to make time once again to read my "old" friends' blogs.

I love the fact that picking a color/theme for the year came out of blogging. This green year has reflected "greenness" in a variety of ways. Reflecting on it lately, I've been thinking about the Green Tara, and how she stands for "enlightened activity." This has definitely been a year of activity, of outward movement and energy. It's been great: challenging and rewarding in ways very new to me. Fulfilling.

But now I find myself thirsting for the inwardness of fall and winter, taking the time to retreat and rest a bit and process all that has happened, all that I've learned and done. I look forward to sharing some of that here.

The Giver of Rocks

2011-03-17T08:51:00.000-06:00

So it turns out I'm not quite done with the San Francisco de Asis church after all. And it occurs to me that really, as long as I'm living in Taos, I will periodically find the time to stop by and sit by Clare and the hawkmoths.

Last Sunday, Eliana kept saying she wanted to go for a walk, so we went over there together, which is something we haven't done very often, and the last time she was still too little to walk by herself. But this time, we went side by side, and it was lovely. And when we walked through the grove that is no longer a grove, I noticed that the huge tarp they left there after enjarre last summer was still there. (To be honest, part of what I was looking forward to about this walk was seeing if the tarp was still there, because 70% of my thinking these days is about where to get building materials and equipment, and tarps are needed to protect earthbags from UV rays during the building process.) When I stretched it out and saw how big it really was, I realized I would need help folding it, so I called Graeme and he came to help me and then carried it back home.

Then Eliana and I proceeded on to the church, and I came across my second great find as we walked through the alley next to the gift shop. They often leave boxes of empty used glass 7-day candleholders out there, but this was the first time they seemed of any use. I've been researching making windows using old bottles and jars lodged in cob, so I was very excited to find these. Now I will have part of the church permanently built into my house.

Do you see the cross design? So cool!

Over at the church, there were quite a few visitors milling about the courtyard, and I found myself sitting at St. Francis' feet engrossed in a pleasant conversation with a couple from Dallas. Meanwhile, Eliana was running happily around the courtyard, picking up rocks and then running up to whoever was nearby and saying "Here's a rock for you." One couple was so delighted with this, they even included her in the photo they were posing for in front of the church doors.

It was a beautiful spring day, one of the first of the season, and I felt rich in my relationship with that place again, and blessed with the abundance of gifts of the day. A tarp, a box of candleholders, a daughter who's an exuberant giver of rocks. In my Lenten practice of giving up "stuff," it's these simple things that are coming to me in the new space I'm making. I think Francis and Clare would approve.