It feels (and certainly smells) like spring. Stepping outside to pee, baring my butt to warm floral winds is an exercise in upliftment. These spring breezes would waft me away if not for gravity’s annoying reality.

I’ll be surrounded by flowers soon, awash in floral scents and flower faeries. I dropped a load of stuff at the Shawnigan Lake place this past weekend, and the garden is all very neatly weeded and trimmed. This time of the year things have just started growing well; you can still see each plant for what it is, with stretches of bare dirt between.

Beauty is an incredibly delicious tonic, though it’s possible to become jaded by the same beautiful sights every day. This may well be one of the earth’s most gorgeous settings, but the thought of that lush garden is a thrill! I’ll be freshly thrilled to return here, too. Best of all possible worlds.

The most exciting thing about the garden is that I’ll be able to take close-up photos of new kinds of flowers. I love that super macro setting… I’m hungry for new things to photograph; I’ve pretty much milked this island dry of new sights. Change is good.

I don’t have a lot to say on certain days of the month. Something about blood loss brings me down, directionally speaking. Changing the subject now. Packing and readying to move on Monday is occupying all my waking focus, saying goodbye-for-now to all that I love about this place.

We weathered a lot of storms here, some more successfully than others. It’s sad to leave just when things are calming and warming. The energy is sweetening, and I am leaving, again. One day, I’ll root in and actually live someplace. Meantime, I’m practicing mobility and non-attachment to material things. Sigh.

Half the time, I don’t know what I’m talking about. No matter what anybody tells me, it’s only one perception of a story that has multiple facets. Sometimes, I make the mistake of swallowing another’s perception whole, shifting my own point of view over to theirs, which is sheer laziness, abandoning my ability to evaluate situation from my own perspective.

“Do tell! Why, you poor thing. You never… they never… really!?” This is one way that gossip is born. Then, because my own perceptions are inescapable, my judgments and assumptions warp the story into fiction, assumed to be truth.

“I got it straight from the horse’s mouth.” “I trust you, I believe you.” “If you hate X, then I hate X too.”

I’m so annoyed by the knee-jerk way I adopt others’ opinions as my own without thinking. I’m conditioned to call that ‘friendship’. Abandon my brain, abandon what I know to be true, i.e. that there are not just two but many sides to any story. How person A feels about or perceives person B is not necessarily how I should perceive that person. It is quite possible for me to like two people who hate each other.

As I struggle to break free of archaic rules of obligation and friendship, I find myself tangled in others’ mixed perceptions. Who to believe? Who is telling the truth? Is it either-or? No, it’s both-and.

Really, it doesn’t matter. I can’t know who’s ‘right’. There IS no ‘truth’, only stories. Someone tells me his story, and I can empathize with his pain and support his feelings without reinforcing his point of view or allowing him to corral my consensus. Another tells me her story and I can do the same. No right. No wrong. Just people, their pain and pleasure.

Life might be so simple if only we could find easy answers to complicated problems of human relationships. We believe that life IS simple, it’s just a question of finding the right formula, the magic pill to render and purify problems down to their component elements so we may choose correctly without fear of mistake.

Life is not simple, it’s chaotically and fractally complex. It only becomes simple in practice if we surrender to its inherent mystery. There are no sides to choose. There are only shifting points of view and fascinating stories to listen to, share and learn from.

I said I would, and I did. I am now punctured and proudly pierced; my recent transition across the invisible line, turning over a half-century, felt significant enough to make me want to visibly mark it.

This is a serious initiation. I wanted to make a statement about my commitment to wandering my fey path. I’m all in favour of alternatives to the so-called ‘norm’. So I now sport a rather large magenta nose-ring. This means I can no longer be mistaken for an ordinary middle-aged woman. Hallelujah! Why on earth should I want to? I am anything but ordinary.

I am a crazy poet, drummer, singer-songwriter, goddess-loving, tribalist, astrologer, psychic, artist, reader-of-oracles, wild dancer, yes! I don’t have to pass for normal, and no further desire to pretend that I want to. I did, once. I originally pretended for my very-conservative childrens’ sake, but they’re not children anymore, are they? Besides, the wisdom of denying my ownself ‘for them’ was always questionable.

And now I’m all grown up. As a hobbit I’ve come of age, and I chose to nose-pierce to mark my passage. I might have tried tattooing, but tatts are expensive and I had a barter going with Amber.

Amber, my flesh-puncturing friend, used a monstrously large hollow needle, of the approximate thickness of a toilet plunger. The logic was that if you made the hole a bit bigger than the object occupying it, it would be more comfortable to install. Sure. Why not? The hollowness of the needle made sense too—I could see that it would punch out a thin plug of, well, me, leaving a neat hole, which makes proper engineering sense to my mechanical brain. I can spare that little bit of me; I bleed out more of myself than that every month. No biggie.

Then she asked, ‘Will seeing the needles bother you?’ I said, “Nope,” and was well-impressed to find it was so. With a device that resembled a cross between vise grips and kitchen tongs, she clamped my nostril flat, the pain of which distracted me from what was going to happen next. When it actually happened, though, it occupied every corner of my consciousness, be assured. Amber gripped the ginormous rod in a pair of tongs (reminding me of a blacksmith plucking a heated bar of iron from the fire), plunged it through my flesh, and oh my, did I holler.

I see the attraction of this self-mutilation / body art thing now, yes indeedy. It was a big improvement over the time I was fourteen and my stepsister poked my earlobes repeatedly with a dullish darning needle, an ice cube and a dime, trying to force her way through the cartilage.

This is powerful magic. I am now initiated. The moment of piercing lit up my whole world. My hollering was the sore-throated rawness of a woman giving birth, appropriate in light of the fact that during three births, I remained unnaturally silent. Once it seemed a virtue to be stoic, but it’s so much more FUN to yell. I didn’t wriggle or flinch, I just opened my mouth and let molten sound, stream out, pure raw energy in motion.

I was never a screamer, but I am now. I held back then. I’m not holding back anymore.

“Don’t take your guns to school…”

The new craze: mad at your girlfriend, shoot everybody in sight. Today’s headlines positively oozed lurid thrills, a slow news period broken by Real! Exciting! News! The masses sharing a vicarious simultaneous orgasm.

“Ooh! How dreadful! Do tell! How, when, who, why?”

Why this urge to delve into behind-the-scenes dirt? Everybody wants to know what made the guy so angry. I won’t be surprised to find the girlfriend blamed for it.

Real reality TV, the ultimate get-off. Interview the survivors, roll the cameras, have the victims cry on cue.

Next: hire shooters, raise ratings…

Cynicism aside, these events catch me deep in the quease pit of my gut. Empathy grips me, imagining what it must have been like for them. The clip-vested killer cruising from class to class, opening fire systematically, panicked people leaping from second-floor windows to escape the deadly hail…

He, though, escapes my empathy radar. I can’t imagine him. I view him only through the lens of ‘monster’. Yet my heart knows that can’t be right. What forces made him? What drove him to do it? The urge to know is driven by pity for the child in the killer.

My mind is blocked right now. I drift and dream, conceiving wild and wonderful visions of froth and foam, but translating these fancies to linear words that obey certain conventions of grammar and readability feels like slave labour right now. Existence is a dreadful burden at times, my body too heavy to carry, my thoughts too dense and complex to unravel into anything like understanding.

Still, fresh epiphanic moments, lightning-struck with truth and beauty, transcendent, transpersonal, transformational eternities, endlessly and reliably revivifying my experience do make it all worthwhile, no questions asked. Life, new and improved, asks, hey, why not?

Opening the heart is a good goal. It happens regularly in any case, without prompting or forcing, so no need to stress about it. The weight on my brain is not me, not the self that lives in this moment here and now, it’s just old habit pressing in with a life of its own, commanding my attention, pointing out this and that, what if and who knows?

These habits of thought pretend to be consciousness, but when questioned, they have no answers to offer, merely further seductions of loopy logic, dragging my mind into their vortex of sinking thinking.

trying truth instead:

Go with the flow, wherever it takes you, even if the direction is down. Stay awake the whole time, take acute interest in everything you experience. Breathe, be, and allow all without judgment. Down there, beneath everything you have protected yourself from, below the humdrum layers of everyday, new discoveries await you, new forgotten selves quiver hungrily, eager to escape their endless compression, waiting to be noticed.

So, notice them, embrace them, cry their tears and welcome them home to yourself. They are your saviors, as you are theirs. Without you, they are lost. Without them, you are not whole.

The housing conference was ‘a watershed’, many peeps impassioned, ready for action on the sustainable, affordable, community-friendly home front. Me too. Still, am left with letdown feelings of, ‘what now’? Where is the group, where is the support, how do I do this?

Isolation is my issue. It comes from growing up in the bush with so few people around me; I don’t know how to reach out, to join in. As a kid, I lurked at the edges of whatever was happening, shyness compounded by isolation, alone in my oddity, the one piece that didn’t quite fit the puzzle.

The future is bright, but the present is busy and where did the time go? I’ll be at the housing conference for the next couple of days, blazing a trail with an interestingly diverse group. Something may start here tomorrow to bring good changes to our home front. Shift must happen, or this community will become just another ritzy resort where broke folks commute from off-island to serve the rich fogey residents.

Wherever I go, this is still one of my homes, and I will help as I can to co-create ways to foster sustainable living on this island.

It happened, and it was fun, magical, special, nearly everything I could have wished. About one in five of the people who said they would come showed up (typical), so the house wasn’t too small after all. They were the right people and it was a lovely night. I received gifts and honourings, played music, sang, drank homemade beer and even had a deliciously pleasurable cry when Brett gave me an abundant angel shower of appreciation for my songs and singing.

Made me realize how seldom I receive musical feedback. That was the sweetest gift and I shan’t soon forget!

I went to the other birthday party after mine. It was delightful in a darker, drunker way, as I switched from homebrew to Bombay Sapphire gin. Music, dancing, sexy snuggles and laughter, yum. It ended on a sour note with my car in a ditch, compelling me to walk too far for my state of being at four a.m. How it happened, I can’t recall, but I was clearly in no state to drive.

My friend Kim’s sure-fire cure for depression: get pissed, stagger home in the dark, the farther the better. It might work, except for the hangover (groan).

I’m hardwired to weather. My tears flow readily when it rains, and it’s poured all blessed day, a catalyst for pent-up emotions seeking release. Visions of a fire on the beach tomorrow are withering, but tomorrow I’ll bring wood in to dry and hope for the best.

Tomorrow’s forecast is a forty-percent chance of rain. Is that a sixty-percent chance of no rain, or rain forty-percent of the day? If it rains and more than twelve people show up in this teensy house, we’ll be sitting in each others’ laps.

Mmm… come to think of it, that could be fun…