The rain outside soothes the pain of my excess dryness. I feel parched places opening in soft petaled quivers and shivery sounds of satisfaction. She who Remembers has always showered pleasure on this green grass and black welcoming soil. There has never been need for toil, though we moil through our fettered, furrowed days in a haze of fret and worry, hurrying on errands deemed necessary, spurred toward destinations that disillusion and disappoint. Each foiled appointment with destiny messes with our minds, blinds us into fascinated imaginings of an axe that we fear will fall and sever the golden thread of our precious eternal selves.

So we chant our litanies, weave our spells of guilt and fear, hoping someOne will hear: “Our Father, Who Art somewhere up there, please forgive us the crime of being human.”

We’ve twisted perfectly good truth into skeins of fantasy, woven it into densely complex tapestries of chaos, cause and effect, then pointed to this as proof that God does not exist (even as we prayed to His ghost). We persist in this outmoded, ill-logical, out-of-sanity, vanity approach to life, the strife, stress and distress we suffer grist for the mills upon which we grind our dreams to fine powder, which we sift into the minds of children and innocents who entertain our jaded brains with novel reactions to extreme stimuli.

Once, I believed in villains. We all blamed our shadows for their perfect ability to mimic what we found most odious about our own desires; yet the fires of life burn eternal despite our intent, demented attempts to make it stop. The world will not end just so those who seek oblivion may find it. If oblivion is what you want, you shall have it, but please, stop striving to obliterate the lives of All. All does not seek oblivion. All seeks to live.

The joy and pleasure of plain old life is ready to return to our tales. Soon, our old trials will resolve into a sinless new beginning. All the heroes and villains we imagined were merely filler, fodder for frittering away moments which we refused to fill with our awareness and interest.

The possibility of finding out what actually is happening scared us into inventing gory stories to explain, process and justify our fear. We created a nightmare existence made up of our own collective resistance to discovering the Real.

“What if?” This most destructive question (that can never be answered) continues to be asked, haunting our hearts, bedeviling and daunting our most noble purposes, crystallizing parts of us into habits of discipline and crumbling others in servile surrender to the cold careful eyes in the mirror.

Bringing it back to Here and Now, the rain still patters overhead, the damp in my own hair nearly dry, the washing of my aura having progressed ever so slightly into the past as the future continues to unfurl in its usual direction of motion. Oh, the magic and the challenge of this single perfect moment, the Now in which I dancingly strive to thrive, resisting new habits and ditching old.

As this moment ever-unfolds into newer, scarier emptiness, still my petrified private parts continue to fill it with ghastly, ghostly old tales of triumph and torment, imagining adventures and pretending participation, sitting in seats of power on centre stage, while the audience, the parts of self not written into the story relegated to watcher status, lurks in shadow, hating that boring position and plotting its own version of the film, a sequel which will bring the hero to her knees and restore justice and balance to the world.

And so the pendulum swings, and the wheel goes round and round.

Time to leave it all behind, returning blindly back to this moment, here and now, oh yes, the deep slow breath, vibrating my dancing particles in my mostly space, my emptiness of self, opening into the discovery of something fractally beautiful, delicate, new, indestructible and true.

It wasn’t my first job, but it was the most memorable. I was seventeen, freshly fired from my first, low-paid, boring stereotypical waitress job for attempting to drink beer in the hotel bar. Well duh, of course they knew how old I was, but I was trying to be cool with my friends and hated working there. It was worth the risk, I thought, and when the axe fell, I went for the only job in town that paid real money in exchange for doing real work, down at the sawmill.

It was a guy job, in fact, all the guys in town worked there, but in the seventies there were already a couple girls at the mill so I thought I’d give it a try. It appealed to my tomboy side, always strong in my girl heart. As a kid, I was the one who played outside making roads, towns and tree forts with the boys. When I did play with dolls, I put them through their paces outdoors, chopping off their hair and staging elaborate space-operas (including some disturbing scenes of torture).

Thrilled to be hired on at a job that paid so well and came with such a coolness factor, I invested in the required pair of steel-toed boots (hard to find in my size), donned jeans, plaid shirt and hardhat and strode off to work. I was assigned to pair with an older woman (in her forties, but she seemed quite old to me—older than my mother) piling one-by-fours. The lumber landed beside us via chute from the guys upstairs who cut it to size; we piled it neatly on pallets and strapped the finished loads for the forklift to haul away.

Once I got over the considerable aches and pains of the first few days, I loved it. The machinery broke down regularly, so whenever we fell behind we were assured of a chance to catch up. We paced ourselves, worked hard and steadily and were able to rest during some of the breakdowns once we caught up. The first two weeks I worked day shift: then I rotated to afternoons, 4pm until midnight, which meant going to parties late in work boots, covered with sawdust and sleepy most of the time.

One day, one of the men approached us, a dark, heavyset Portuguese man that I didn’t know well. He said in a heavily-accented voice, “Girls, you shouldn’t work so hard. You work too hard!” He kept looking around as though worried that someone would see him. At our puzzled stares, he only repeated, “Please, don’t work so hard, it’s not good.” Then he anxiously hurried away.

We quirked our eyebrows at him, shrugged, laughed and went back to work. Obviously, the guy was threatened by our ability to do the job so well. It made us proud and motivated us to work even harder.

A few days after that, the foreman sauntered over to us. He hooked his thumbs in his vest, smiled toothily and said, “Girls, you’re doing very well. So well, in fact, I’m going to have to lay you off. The job’s too easy. I figure one man should be able to handle it.”

So. That was that. There was no possible argument to that logic, not in the seventies in the North. In a daze of helpless rage, I packed up my steel-toed boots, turned in my hard hat and went home. I took a job as a waitress down at the Chinese restaurant, trying to decipher the lesson I’d learned. Working too hard was wrong? Success was failure? Only if you were a woman, it seemed, and I added it to my every-growing list of all the ways it sucked to be female.

They hired Gordie from down the road, a burly young guy, to do our job. A few days after they hired him, they had to hire someone to help him, but we weren’t called back. I was crushed, but it was worse for the other woman, who had worked there for years with a family to support. I was just a kid, and I tormented myself with the fantasy that I had caused her to lose her job.

The only positive result from that fiasco was that it compelled me to return to school and graduate. I hated waitressing, but I might be at the sawmill today if I hadn’t been laid off.

It’s been a while since I posted here. Here are some random bits I’ve written over the past week, as a placeholder until I write more. It’s been a busy time. Transformational. Big. Hoo-ha!

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The grey skies continue to dump their load between bouts of sunshine, and being so weather-centric in my mood is making me feel schizophrenic. Happy? Sad? The negative ion count is oscillating and so am I.

It’s not so bad. Life feels more natural that way, connected to the real world of nature, the cycles of seasons and weather, even though I view the wind and rain from the quiet side of the picture window. I can imagine that I am out there, though the experience exists only in my mind and memories of actually being there. This is better.

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Summer Solstice begins the countdown to the year 2012, significant in New-Age circles for various reasons. If you count the days from June 21, 2007 until January 1, 2012, it comes to 2,012 days. I don’t know what it means, but it’s cool.

This is the shortest day of the year
The hours of daylight at maximum
Now, we open the gate to transformation
Dance, sing, play, celebrating
The changes in the world
but first we go through our
Own kaleidoscopic unfoldings
Sweet and bitter, cycling in and out
Pleasure and pain, heartbreak and joy,
Love and isolation.

Life rocks.

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I like the word ‘thrill’. It sounds like its meaning, a frilly, fluttering feeling that ripples through the flesh as it is spoken. Life lately is one thrill after another. Even the quiet moments contain depth and vastness, opening more and deeper as I expand myself to notice.

Life feels wonderful these days.The smallest things cause me to grin in goofy gratefulness. Synchronicities, minor and major, are becoming commonplace. I’ll think of something I need, then realize it’s in my pocket, though I don’t remember putting it there. More than once. Little things are adding up to make big things which all fit together in meaningful ways. My life is integrating. Praise is radiating my way from unexpected directions. God is proving Themself to me, skeptical brain is surrendering. Though my fuzzy-minded mystic self has predominated, still the skeptical part of my mind has been rigidly resistant. That’s melting now. Damn, it’s working!

I thrill to the knowledge of self-as-God, God-as-All reflecting back to me-as-self, as Dr. Bronner would say, All-One-God. The old soap guy knew things. We each are a religion of one. Each of us approaches the Infinite from a different angle and perceives it in a different light, whatever we want to call it.

Call it ‘the human spirit’ if you want to label yourself an atheist.

“Here we are now.” Yea and hurray!

Oh the horror!!!

Some people have phobias about spiders and snakes. Not me. I like spiders. I once lived a whole winter with a huge wolf spider hanging out in the corner of my bedroom. I called her ‘Charlotte’. We had good talks. I like snakes—they’re so sensuous and magically graceful and gorgeous. I enjoy slugs, I call them ‘the slime people’. Very little in the animal or insect world has the power to give me the creeping heebie jeebies.

But one thing does. Ticks make me freak in a most amusing (from an outsider perspective) and dangerous manner. There was the time I saw one diving into my foot on the freeway—I wasn’t even driving and I nearly caused an accident. Peter had to pull over (not easy with me spastically flailing and shrieking like that) and pull it out.

Fortunately, he’s good with ticks and calm under pressure. Unfortunately, he’s not here. I woke up this morning and, brushing my hand across my upper back in the process of getting dressed, I felt what I thought was a giant zit or boil. Sore and lumpy. I looked in the mirror and

FREEEAAAKKKK!!!!!

It was a tick. Its swollen little (gulp) body, legs waving, poked out of my skin, buried headfirst. In. My. Flesh.

Red emergency lights flashed in my brain and I kicked into ‘get it out of me NOW’ overdrive; took a pair of tweezers and very carefully (amazing, considering the level of insanity I was experiencing) pulled it off me. In pieces. One piece of which stayed there, and is still there right now.

The good news is, my healer / acupuncturist / herbalist friend will handle it for me when I see him later on. Pull it out, clean it up, do what is needful.

At least it wasn’t one of those yogurt-raisin types that dogs get. I can’t bear those. Of course, I didn’t bear this very well either. What is it about ticks?? I cannot get over this. Now I’m scared to walk in the woods. And I keep feeling things crawling on me. Sheesh.

I think my adrenals are awake now. Hoo boy.

Since childhood, I’ve been prey to this life-wasting pattern:

I struggle to the surface of dream late in the morning, a corpse rising from the crypt. I scrape off graveyard soil, toil through fog waiting for a sign of conscious presence in my body. Through the day I slowly perk up. I retire when I must, when body crashes but mind keeps going, buzzing, elated and inspired. By next morning, it’s the same thing over again.

Rarely, I wake early and my day feels rich and full. But mostly it’s a wasteland.

Can I please be a morning person instead?

I went to a voice workshop today that turned out to be just as much about songwriting as singing; in fact, we each wrote two songs as part of the day. Some of them were, of course, more complete than others; some turned out to be snippets.

Here are mine:

The assignment for the first was this: write what is unsaid. In other words, whatever we are afraid to say, that’s what this song will be. And indeed, it was a serious piece of darkness:

The Hunger

Held-back hunger, return to womb
Swimming through darkness, turned to tomb
Like a fish in the river, like a wave on the sea
This weighty feeling, this gravity
The sea overhead is pressing me down
In the deep sweet darkness I drown

Opening bottom, aching for light
Hoping in boredom, itching for fight
Who is the hero, who the enemy?
Like a lurker in the shadows I wait and see

Hold me in your arms and never let me go
Or I’ll slip between your cracks like sifting snow
Like the rhythm of the night, the great starry void
In the chanting, secret caverns lies the truth I avoid

What are the questions for the answers I desire?
I chop through the brush but the woods grow higher
Til the world has shrunken to the size of a pea
I swallow it like medicine to help me see

Take me to the bottom, lift me to the light
Save me from boredom, don’t make me fight
Who’ll be my hero, where’s my enemy?
Lurking in the shadows, wait and see

The assignment for the next song was: write a song for yourself, then sing it.

Encouraging Words

Don’t you worry about your life
Your next step will be obvious
Listen to your own truth, the song in your heart
Will teach you what you most need to know
Let go of that load on your mind
Close your eyes, it’s time to travel blind
You’ve senses beyond your sight
Listen to the guidance of the light
And walk into the darkness of the night

The stars overhead all know who you are
You are their sister and their lover
They know that you’ve come far
You have access to more help than you know
When you let down your barriers
And let your lovelight show

This is a window into life
Open it now, your choices are obvious
When you wake up your body,
You’ll stretch out your wings
And fly where you need to go
You’ve senses beyond your sight
Listen to the guidance of the light
And walk into the darkness of the night

The earth underfoot knows you like a child
She cradles you in shelter, she lets your feet run wild
You have access to more help than you know
When you let down your barriers
And let your lovelight show

This is a window into life
Open it now, your choices are obvious
When you wake up your body,
You’ll stretch out your wings
And fly where you need to go

When it came time to sing the songs, I was deeply impressed (translation: gobsmacked) by Edwin’s virtuosity on the piano. He could play along with any of our faltering rhythms and fledgling melodies, support the song and make it sound rehearsed. It was an amazing experience to have a brand-new song accompanied right out of the gate—I tend to write the melodies first then sweat out an arrangement on the guitar much later. Lovely!

Time to meander the myriad mall-like hallways of my mind, tasting trickles of past experiences that twine like wisps of scent tickling the nostrils of cartoon characters, lifting and wafting them down already-trodden pathways to play in pastures of the past where the bad is safely-mapped in easily-avoided, well-marked nodes of trauma.

Those red warning blinkers still serve to divert attention from pains I was trained to avoid. ‘Don’t go there! You know what happened next! No, stay in the happy birthdays, Christmases and summer vacations of your life, sans strife, sans growth and challenge.’

If I could choose, I would lose divisions and meld my mind with the Infinite. My boundaries would blow in a blissful implosion; all considerations of self versus other would vanish like bubbles into the air.

Knowing all, feeling all, experiencing and comprehending with full lucidity, that is a good dream.

t must be sweet to be God, knowing each sparrow that flies, every dancing particle of thought crossing a worried mind, cradled within one consciousness, held in the awareness of all-embracing love. I like to imagine God as Mama and Papa, the all-gendered helping hand, wise words, soft cradling lap and abundant nourishment. In my infantile mind (comprising much of what calls itself me), I cry baby bird tears and blindly open my mouth for cosmic kindness and sustenance.

I’ve been thinking about God a lot lately, though I can be skeptical as the next cynic in my hard-assed ’show me’ self. Still, I must admit to hearing the small voice within that whispers, “I Am.” It explains itself in terms undeniably, lucidly sane yet if I listen to it, I am labeled crazy or at least creepily vain. Society is beginning to define itself (despite lip-service bible-thumping done to placate a silent but vote-heavy majority) as atheistic, preaching a paradox of random clockwork, chaotic order, and meaningless beauty.

If no higher truth governs our lives, why should we feel such desperate craving for meaning? If a hunger exists, it signals something important missing. Like God, the vital vitamin with the power to sustain life.

To be sure, not everyone feels this way. To some, abandoning such a seemingly futile search is blessed relief from a burdensome task. But others can no more abandon our seeking than we can refuse to see with eyes wide. Because one is blind, must another blank her vision or deny what is plainly visible?

Okay, that stretches the story out of shape, making a claim of clarity when the foggy forms I see are admittedly amorphous enough to be nearly anything. Still, the words whispering in my inner ear make a perfectly loving and kind sort of sense and teach me things I am not aware of knowing.

I must believe something. Why not this?

An ode to poetic prettifications of reality, nodes of calcified bone knobbing my shoulders into boulders notwithstanding. Take a walk, a long hike off a short dike and dive into the deep end where transformations occur outside the mainstream, then when you return with seaweed twined in your hair, seawater streaming from your eyes, try to tell those lies again. Look, surly lurker, the work has already been done under the sun outside the purview of the purveyors of canned reality television billed as life.

The universe and everything goes on, whatever you may think about it.

You’re scaring me, carrying that heavy load on shoulders cobbled with knobbled bone, hobbling on your last legs, sucking down the dregs of a life which was never much but strife and struggle. Please, take care of you, because I can’t and neither can I live without your life burning in my ears, your heart beating in my brain like sanity itself.

How can the world end when friends like you huddle in my corner, cuddling cobwebs of confusion from my skin? I’m ready, waiting for divination, the truth behind the shadows cast by the last gasping fish on the line.

This is a truth exercise. Open the gates of mind to blinded bats flapping flabby wings from couch potato positions, exercising their thumbs while their perceptions grow numb from misuse. Following the bouncing ball only calls game players into your world, and since a game generally involves a villain and a victim, guess which you’ll get to be?

Those who make the rules call the shots, and if you fail to question your reality you will be trapped in it. That may be okay with you, but in case it isn’t, this is an escape clause, down the hatch into the dark.

So I went back to my island home, more alone than I had expected, for visiting can never be the same as belonging. Expecting blessings can backfire if beings in the basement hold their cards so close to their chests that your mind’s eye can’t see them.

I am still on the path to awakening the bits and pieces that float within my gravitational pull and claim to own my name and identity. What is self? What is me? If I had the answer to that, I would be rich and happy.

The patchwork princess toddled down the grassy path. She had escaped her minders for the moment and reveled in her unaccustomed freedom until a jewel-eyed dragon swooped low to scoop her into its taloned grip.

In its airy aerie overlooking the kingdom that her pauper parents struggled to maintain, surrounded by glittering gems and storied glories accumulated over many eons of thieving from her ancestors, the princess heaved an ironic sigh. She wished for size, strength and above all a sharp sword suitable for the slaying of dragons.

Eventually, she grew to forget and came to love her captor (as is common).