February ends on a cold grey note as we woke to snow dusting the earth.

“That won’t last long, did it?” The sun emerged and the snow did its vanishing act, only now grey clouds close over the blue and whitening appears imminent.

The weather reflects my heart, for today I forget how to play my part, to stay the faith-course into a future of brightening and warming trends. Still, spring is unstoppable, and if it is to be followed by winter, that’s too far from now to pray away.

I breathe in, I breathe out, I breathe in.

Back from tonight’s radiohead meeting where we brainstormed new ways to explain dead air. It’s Little Red Hen Radio, I say, everybody will want a piece once it’s built but no one wants to help. “Not I,” said the cat, “Not I,” said the pig, and so it goes; they expect explanations despite their non-participation. Results!

They may lose faith, but still the studio grows at its own snailish pace. What grace might our hydra-headed piratical vision-mongering manifest? I’ll attest this radio-active group quest has mysterious magnetic momentum that keeps me onboard despite my prior stated desire to step down.

A difficult day driving around town endlessly seeking the right price for… nevermind, the details are boringly snoreworthy. Stress, headache and shaky hands were the consequence of spending more hours and cash than planned.

Necessary repairs having restored our wheels to unobstructed revolutions, we caught the last ferry home in time for a flurry of preparations for the evening’s scheduled program of groovy tunes and homemade jam. Monday’s magic triumphed, the prevailing winds held true as I struggled through personal power failures and slipped gears in my confidence drive.

Life is easier than I thought but harder than I dreamed.

Saturday night the glass ceiling cracked that had capped my pleasure and life-joy. I melted, I moulted, I was reborn. I told my bovine birthday brother that Aries fire might be dampened if we give up, but it can never die … he thanked me. He might have cried.

No words describe the highs that blossomed in bright sweet blurs and bubbles of clarity. Making love after marinating in music, mojo and rampant hotness was an auspicious beginning to the end of the night and a fit anniversary for me and Pea, nine years together on Reuben’s birthday. Blessed be.

The world revolves, a new day dawns, the wind shreds yesterday’s terrors like tarpstrings in the yard. Onward to new fears, everborn til I’m so deliciously evolved this world won’t fit me anymore.

I’d wonder whether it fits me now, but that falls into the fear-think category, and those thoughts are not how I think these days. Fear is fear, but when it starts as thought, it’s just another mind-control manipulation. All those damn memes zotting in the breeze, shrieking ‘fear this, fear that!’ A good sneeze will take care of them, then move right along into music, yes.

Life is about risk, or what is it? Security-seeking parts beg to differ, but nothing is certain or predictable, let alone reliable. Besides, that which does not kill us, yada yada. So we’re in a risky sitch once again, or feels so to fearful ones inside crying, “Nomommy, nodaddyno…”

Such wounded creatures we peeps be, open-mouthed blind baby birds fearing Mama won’t come despite that she came before and before that too. Too many histories and herstories layered and blended into scary stews of ‘what if’ and ‘what once happened must happen again’.

Danger plus faith equals evolution.

Well, the shocking news proved anticlimactic, merely paranoid imaginings of a teen-fearing mother. Lack of bad news translates to good news, and I am pleased to reclaim the space I thought I’d lost, grieving the good part of bad, which would have been nice too.

Today, the storm has passed, the sun has returned, the days are lengthening and bulbs are burgeoning. Once a tree falls (rather, twice) it’s hard to be sanguine about the howling wind! My gratitude now that it’s calm without calamity is positively primitive. Sing praises to the wind elementals, who bless us with their mercy…

As it consistently has these past few weeks, music with friends proved gorgeously enjoyable, feeding the hungry beast within, unfed and growly for far too long. Alas that such openings should come to pass just when I have committed to leaving for six months!

Oh, but never mind that, for the positives here far outweigh any imaginary or potential future negative. Gates are opening on the inside, and the truth is, I take those gates with me wherever I go. Any present-time openings can only bode well for the future; my tribe is not confined to this finite location. Blessed be!

Change happens, life is more a zig-zag fractal path than a straight and narrow road. Received news last night of the shocking variety, but I’m not ready to spill it yet. It’s still too soon to know what, but it portends a possible shift in our lives of the sort that giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other. “Yes, you will receive this gift that you’ve been asking for, but you must pay by losing a piece of the dream you thought you were manifesting.”

Pfah, there should be a better way. Music tonight. That’ll do it.

How to find the right words is the story of my life. I fill with impulses to write this or that, mixed in many confused layers, and it feels urgent to purge the mess, to create some sort of sense, to separate the tangled threads of meaning into something I can weave into a message that might matter or illuminate. It builds until I grip the bit in my teeth and spew forth something, anything to release the pressure.

Then when I read back, it sometimes happens that a light ignites and it feels so right, as if I knew what I was talking about. I impress myself with my own accidental brilliance, the way the words blend into a whole that actually says something real. I feel honoured to be me, in those moments.

“Yes, that’s what I meant to say—but I didn’t know I knew how to say it.” Or, even better, “Hey, I didn’t know I knew that… who said that? That is so true and beautiful!”

In those moments, I admire myself with a writhing kind of embarrassment, as if I might be caught noticing my own worth and be punished for it.

I had a recent close encounter with a woman who has the power of self-acceptance. She can say, “I am so honoured to have such wonderful gifts to offer,” and she means it. That blew my mind wide open. I judged her at first from my own grudging grip on so-called modesty, so trained to await praise from others that I didn’t allow myself to deserve. I was in a trap of need, psychically pulling on ‘them, whoever they are’ to give me what I could not allow myself to have, a feeling of worth.

The women I most love and admire stand up and rock in their own power, say Yes to themselves, are willing to be seen, heard and absurd. Yet those are the qualities that in me are seldom allowed the time of day except when they slip out sideways at those times my guard dog is seduced by substances into a sort of slumber. Afterward, I remember with shame the ways I praise my own self so slyly and shyly, say without admitting that I am saying it, “Hey, I’m pretty good, don’t you think?”

The ‘don’t you think?’ part feels to the other like being pulled on, sucked on, grabbed at, and who could enjoy that? Praise must come from inside, undemanded, commanded only by a natural upwelling of appreciative responsive life-energy that spontaneously speaks, “Hey, you rock, you’re amazing, I admire you.”

I must shamedly admit that I have been told such in the past by various beloveds and strangers and that I could not allow their praise to take root in the soil of my being or help me become more confident in the value of my own existence. I was trained young to doubt my right to be, and since then I’ve colluded with the forces of my own eradication, turning the oppressor inward and calling myself a victim. My internal bias is still skewed far from acting on the significance of the injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. To my mind, this can only mean that love of self is the place true love starts.

I’m not so hard to love, really. I’m sweet and chewy inside, with just the right blend of spice with nice. If I were outside of me, I’d like what I saw. I’d be my friend. So what’s the problem in here? Even now, somebody in my shadow is sneering at the self-obsessive slant of this posting, like don’t I have anything better than my own innards to focus on for heaven’s sake?

And I must say, give me a break, you critic voice within, it’s you I’m struggling to escape. I’ll self-obsess for as long as it takes, because you are the problem, not the solution. Once I get free of the sneering contempt aimed my way from within where it does not belong, I’ll free my song and spread my wings, finally getting to give to the world my gifts; and that will be because I do so love the world, not because I’m obsessed by how great my gifts are.

Somebody once told me that if I didn’t give my gifts to the world, it would be the same as taking them away. That’s a bit of a guilty twist, but the bottom line is, hey, perhaps the world needs my piece of the puzzle. Why shouldn’t it? What kind of a universe would it be if I somehow turned out to be the only puzzle piece that had no place in the solution? Now THAT’s self-aggrandisement, to suggest myself as some sort of unique exception to the law of the universe which states that everything has a part to play and a role to fill.

Everything belongs in its own right center, in its own world. I am the Queen of my Inniverse, and this is as it should be. I’ll leave the Universe alone except for what it is my right and true role to give to it from my heart and truth, and anybody in here who implies that I am not right to be beautiful and blessed in my own sight is going to have to go find some other self to shame.