With Mars in Gemini, I require an outlet for that brash, brazen, ballsy voice. Gemini is duality; two public identities. I also hold space for my more deeply considered material, my quietly serious voice, which hasn’t felt quite at home here. When I began this blog it was called ‘Truth is a Crazy Poet,’ and that energy has never shifted. I do like it. It’s part of what I am.

In fact, I love it. Just try to make me stop!

But the truth is, it’s not what I really need to be presenting to folk as a reason to trust me with their hearts, which is what my particular line of work mandates.

I’m not going to hide this part of me away. The blog will still be here at this domain, easily accessible, and my facebook friends will see it. I’ll still post my rants, rah rahs, rhapsodies and riffs along with photographic art.

But! It won’t be the address on my business cards or brochure anymore! That’s a small shift, but it might have big consequences. For starters, it’s a big difference in first impressions, which matter.

Tomorrow is the Full Moon in Capricorn. The Moon will be tightly conjunct Pluto. There will be a massive Grand Cross. Every planet in the zodiac is engaged right now. We’re in the middle of the Cardinal Climax. Our time is up! Choose or lose. What really matters to you?

Tomorrow a window opens. This is my way of jumping through. Big changes can start with small actions that carry great significance. Changing my name was one. Preparing and publishing my new website is another.

Separating my distinct voices into their correct channels feel like the perfect thing to do now.

So, I’m webcited!

More tomorrow. No photos tonight; I’m busy.

What are you doing for the Grand Cross / Full Moon tomorrow?

Still, I’ve been Phoenix for a long time now, and there’s a limit to how long anyone can be comfortable as a Phoenix. It’s a turbulent path! Sooner or later, I have to just, well, Bee.

My birth name, Debra, means ‘The Bee’. I’ve always loved that, about as much as I disliked the name itself. Not that it’s a bad name, it’s a fine name! I like it fine on other Debras and Debbies I know. But it happened to be the commonest name for girls in my age group; it felt like a generic name, a non-identifier.

Once, when I was a shy new bush kid in town, a kid yelled across the street at a group of girls I happened to be standing near, “Hey Debbie!” Nobody answered, and after he called again several times, I dared to imagine he might mean, gasp, ME… and he was cute, and I hoped… so I tremulously answered, “What?”

Well, he fell down laughing, gasping, to the mass hilarity of his audience, “I knew it, I knew there’d be a Debbie, there’s one in every crowd!”

Please believe when I say that was a ‘please kill me now’ moment! Ever since, I knew I must eventually find a way to change my name. I couldn’t find one that worked, though; then back in the winter of 87, my buddy Sir said, “I have the perfect name for you! You’re Phoenix!”

And I said, “Phoenix? That’s not a name!” But Sir is a wise woman, yes indeed. I couldn’t forget the damn thing.

I happened to be moving to a little Gulf Island where everybody seemed to have odd names. I decided I’d just try it on, just in case, you know. And nobody laughed or acted surprised even when I introduced myself (except a guy who said, “Phoenix? Isn’t that an awfully strong name for a woman?”). Then after a month I had a dream in which somebody called me Phoenix and it just stuck.

It’s time for now for me to let go of the Phoenix phase of my life and move into a Bee phase. I like its simplicity, I love what it says. The bee is a singer (buzz buzz), a dancer (they dance to show the hive where to find the pollen), an explorer in service to its folk, and those are all things I both am and aspire to become more of.

I am also taking out the hyphen in my last name and including Wolf as a middle name. I will be Bee Wolf Ray, or Bee Ray, or Bee W. Ray. Wolf honours my motherline (it’s my mother’s birth name), while Ray is the surname I was born with and the one I still feel most at home in.

Thanks for understanding, y’all… this is a stretch for me, despite having done it once before (I was much younger then! And I no longer live on that little Island! And people don’t even give their kids weird names there anymore! And I’ve changed my name once already, how many times in one life does a person need to change her name?).

I don’t anticipate needing to do it again. This fits very comfortably and gives me lot of room to grow. I’ll take my time with things like changing business related stuff like brochures & advertising, if I do so at all. I may just keep Phoenix as a business identity, it’s a familiar brand locally because of my horoscope column in the Word. And because of this domain name! I can still be found, and I will still answer to Phoenix and Phee for those who find change difficult (this means you, Mom ).

But me, as a person, I’m going to just Bee.

With love,
Bee Wolf Ray

Time to start new things, discard old ones. For every new thing, an old thing has to go away to make room for it. No, that’s not an argument for mandatory retirement, or for older folk to ‘know their place’ (quite the contrary). We’re all the gods of our own creations, and we’re not here to make way for others, but to maximize the potential of our own selves. There is room for everybody, even if we have to make room for ourselves by inventing new spaces into which to unfold.

That’s what I’m working on. Creating a niche for myself, and I gotta tell you, it isn’t easy. I’m a work in progress, and when I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

One thing I’m letting go of is my astrology class, at least in its current form. Yes, sad to say the air has been slowly bleeding out of that particular balloon, and after several weeks in a row of non-attendance and non-response, I am taking the hint. It doesn’t mean I’m letting go of teaching astrology, but I am going to shift focus for a while. Roll with the changes.

As an Aries Sun person, I have a birthday coming up in the next few weeks, so this is my rebirthing time, and traditionally I have started new things on or around my birthday, so I have a grace period to work out what it’s going to be. The theme of the new year.

The Solar Return chart for my birthday is exciting, though. Sun in the tenth house of career (at the same time as my Progressed Sun is transiting over the midheaven into the tenth house), Moon in Aquarius, fiery Leo Rising with Mars on the Ascendant. So, it (yawn) should be my year this year.

Yup. So why my lack of enthusiasm? I can’t lie, I’m in the doldrums, Aries sun or no. Getting out of bed is a chore lately. As once-exciting but no-longer-new things seem to be fizzling, and new things aren’t quite igniting yet, I’m having a hard time connecting to my motivation. Oh yeah. Life. Ho hum, says the tired old thing in my brain.

Still, there’s always energy for something new, once I get a bead on what it’s going to be. I’ll just have to keep on keeping on until then.

In the meantime, here are the lyrics to the song I wrote about Aries (you can find the song itself in the player in the sidebar as soon as I upload it):

The Aries Song

Aries woman, Aries man, warrior-born, you are a firebrand.
You ask no quarter, nor give it, your goal in life is to live it.
The only battle worth winning is escape from conditioning -
to free your shining star.

Okayyy…. I’ll be back to it real soon. Real soon, now. The Sun’s in Aries, after all. And I’m due for a rebirth on the 9th of April.

Tonight, there is an event on Hornby I’d love to be at, and if I still lived there, I’d be all over it. But instead, I am here, home alone (I did receive an invitation to read today at an event on Mount Washington, but my car isn’t mountain-worthy and I was unable to hook up with anybody else going, not knowing any of them and all.

I miss my island! I miss my community. That’s the truth. Still, I feel so many exciting openings beckoning in this community, I don’t imagine I will be lacking for opportunities. But. It’s not Hornby.

So, ain’t I a woman? On this day of days, let me speak for me and for all the women, as I have not for so long. I go dormant sometimes. It seems to be a necessary part of my creative (ie, life) process that certain inner spaces shut down for maintenance while others are focused on, then re-open sometimes months or years later richer and fuller and more productive than other.

I suffer from a surfeit of creativity. That’s a problem when you don’t have enough outlets through which to express, as has been my lifelong issue. I created this blog (in its original form) to give my writing / poet / activist / teacher / storyteller voice an outlet, but it’s expanded to become the place I exhibit my art and music as well.

So yes, here is my blah blah place, and I have held back because I don’t want to look too weird in case potential clients and listeners come shopping to see what I have to offer.

What I have to offer is me, and this is the place I let me hang it all out.

Well okay. One of the places. There’s Facebook too, and Flckr, and Tribe, and Twitter (though I don’t bother much there, which would change if I had followers, and yes, that’s a hint for ya) because it happens I have a lot to hang out.

I’m done being ashamed of that. I was the kid who tried to hide my ‘too-many-A’s’ report card from my parents. It wasn’t okay to be ‘smart’ or play the game of school too well. But I couldn’t help it. I suppose I was ‘smart’ in that kind of way, though virtually oblivious in others.

I have a lot to say and a lot of ways to say it, and that’s the way it is. That’s just how I roll, as the whippersnappers say these days.

It’s scary to say something like that and to realize that I’m old enough to. That it might not actually be a joke to somebody who thinks I am my number. Actually I’m pretty much a whippersnapper myself.

I’m having too much fun rolling with the times and keeping up with who I am now to be old, you see. How could I be old? How could anybody? I still feel as far away from old as I ever have.

It’s true, I’m doing that ‘men’ thing that my mother hates for me to talk about. (Menopause! There! I said it!)

But does that make me old? What is old, for a woman? It seems to be tied into our reproductive capacity. I am no longer in a position to conceive a child, and this in the collective belief system indicates that I’m past my sell-by date. It’s all downhill from here, they say. Whoever ‘they’ are.

I didn’t get heavily influenced by ‘them’ in childhood, which makes it easier to unplug now. I am from the North. I grew up without electricity, a television or a particular community to define myself by (though we always returned to Fraser Lake).

We always lived on the wrong side of the tracks, and I was always the new weird kid. I was the new weird kid in Fraser Lake several times, in fact, because we kept moving away, then coming back a few years later.

I’m once again the new weird kid. I liked this position because it meant I was outside the social hierarchy, though it terrified me too, because of what happened to Melody.

Melody was a beautiful blond girl who moved to the town I moved to at the same time Imoved there. She was stunningly gorgeous, I mean it hurt to look at this girl. Nobody had ever seen a girl that beautiful.

I was very pretty (at the time I believed I was hideous), but I was not in Melody’s league. The boys went mad for Melody. Even the ones with girlfriends. And one day, I saw a circle of girls, with Melody in the middle, and the girls were throwing rocks at Melody and yelling at her to get the hell out of their town.

And Melody went. Her family moved away shortly after. I don’t know how badly Melody was hurt, but they obviously took it seriously. And that was the power of women, to me. The circle of girls made up the social hierarchy at every school I went to, but because I was always new, I never belonged to it.

The circle of women in my family was my social net, one that followed us from town to town, as there was always a relative nearby, an aunt, an uncle, cousins. The men swapped hunting and fishing stories while the women gathered in the kitchen, and that’s where the life was. The laughter, the wit, the magnetic centre of life was with the women.

Men had their own magnetism, for they were the ones who played the music at parties, which drew me equally strongly (not to mention the other thing), and so I perched on the thread that connected the men to the women in my world. Neither one nor the other, I have always felt like the outsider no matter where I was.

The weird new kid, in other words. Which can be fun some of the time.

The world of people outside my family circle was a chaotic swirl of strange events, for everything was changing, my context kept shifting, it was like living in a kaleidoscope. Moving that often was profoundly disorienting to a child of my disposition. I often had fugues where I didn’t know where or who I was. I imagine I could have benefited from counseling, but alas. It was the North.

And so, to age. It’s taken me this long to begin to feel myself poking my eyes outside the inner coils of my own mystery. The feeling is one of youngness, of unfolding potential. I know I have only begun to become who I am, and I expect to live a good long time. I am living as if I will live a good long time. Longer than most people would imagine possible.

I challenge the beliefs of my time, for I know just how malleable reality is and how temporary most laws, even the apparently immutable physical ones (like the law that humans couldn’t fly) turn out to be.

I believe I can alter my life expectancy by altering how I live, what I believe, what I eat, what I do and how I relate to myself, the earth, the ones I love and the ones I am coming to know. Astrology opens the door to learning how to live better, in order to live longer, but not for the sake of being old for a longer time.

If we are to increase life expectancy, we must increase the proportion of our lives that we spend growing. As long as I am growing, I don’t have to be dying. I prefer the feeling of growing to dying.

Growing does not have to occupy more physical space. I don’t need to live in a mansion or have a big footprint on the land. I am growing in my creative potential. Yet I don’t need to produce anything until I am ready, and the longer I wait to become ready, the better. I don’t believe I will die anytime soon, and I see no reason to behave as if I am on the decline in any way.

I expect to be dancing in my nineties. I expect to be reading slam poetry and speaking the word and singing and following my faerie path into greater and greater life right up until the day I die (assuming that happens, which I refuse to do).

What have I got to lose?

So that’s the current status of me. I’m turning fifty-three in a month, and I used to think that was old. The wrinkles in my face do show that I’ve been around a while, but I can’t really see those lines as being about anything except how I look right now. I can see beauty in those lines. I feel I’ve earned them. And I care less and less about my packaging. It’s what’s inside that counts, and the world is going to find out more, when the time is right.

I am officially coming out of denial about my personal confidence and power. I watch myself on video and I radiate a confidence, an angry power that has very difficult for me to own. My mother is a very nice lady. She is sweet as all get out, in a self-effacing, kindly way. You’d like her.

I am nothing like my mother, but not because I haven’t tried to be. Most of my life I believed that I was. Just like her, I mean. I’m not, though, and that’s the way it needs to be. Because this is who I am; I am an Aries, as she is a Cancer. We’re very different people. I have six planets in the fire element, and two fire planets on angles. That adds up to a lot of life force.

If anybody can do this, I can. And my body self has always been confident and self possessed, even when my emotional, mental and spiritual selves have been insane.

Oh yes, didn’t I mention that? I have journeyed through that dim mirrored halls of insanity; you might say it runs in my family.

I have learned how to be sane, and that is to align myself with my body. My body is the part that knows what is best for me. My body is the wisest part of my being. My body is my most loving self.

My emotional self, when aligned with my body, has no pride, is all puppyish desire for petting.

My mind and spirit, on the other hand, have been holding back from this shameful pleasure, for aren’t we here to work and struggle and pay the debt incurred by Adam and Eve who were evicted from that play place? Weren’t we all born in sin, and all that blah blah? This kind of religious guilt feels positively genetic, for even though I was raised an atheist, I come from a long line of religious fanatics.

Um, I mean ‘good Christians.’

Well, what if the debt has been paid already, a thousand times over? What if God has forgiven the debt as He has realized what a fucked up thing that was to do to His children, what if He’s much smarter now, what if He’s learned a thing or two?

Or what if that story is just something somebody made up in order to justify their own bone-deep fear of pleasure? What if our path to consciousness from our prior existence as bipedal animals took us into some kind of a profound species neurosis that has grown to plague the planet?

Or! Or what if we are doing exactly and precisely the right thing to express what the Earth herself is feeling? What if?

Oh such a question is this. I can only answer from my own perspective, and because the title of my blog is ‘Spreading the Gaia Word,’ I will presume on my mandate as translator here.

My body is a part of the Earth, in fact, is made of Earth’s stuff. So in listening to my wisest self, I can also hear the voice of the living planet.

Earth is an entity. She is a woman, to be precise. She is a fat, wrinkled, ancient child-woman, and everything we are doing is Herself doing it. If we suffer from a plague as a species, it is one of hubris, which is a sin (or sickness) of believing ourselves to be separate from our context.

We think that people are the cause of what we see around us, when the truth is, what we see around us, and we ourselves, are simply what is happening now. We cannot, as individuals, control what we do as a species.

Regardless of our political system, we always end up ruled by the few, and these few make up the patriarchy. The patriarchal system and its relationship to the Earth reflects on Earths own crisis of evolution. It’s a crisis. We’re in trouble all right, but it’s the trouble of a changing organism. Earth is in upheaval. She is becoming conscious now.

This craziness can’t last; change is coming, but who knows when? She’s got her own timetable, and we don’t have input, no matter how important we want to think we are.

How do I know this? I just do. I am her, in a way, I think her thoughts. This is a bold claim, but really, I don’t think I am alone in this. I believe many think her thoughts, but most people don’t know that is what they are thinking.

Here is my theory: Earth is still very young, and she is just learning to think coherently. We as a species, along with our inventions (which are really Her inventions), create the structure through which her thoughts flow, as our own synaptic systems form the structure through which our own thoughts flow. We are infinitesimal holographic models of Earth, but we are at best tiny parts of an unimaginably vast whole, and our brilliance is beggared by her potential.

But she’s young. She’s still growing. She’s confused and in a crisis. And we can help her by learning to think ourselves. By harmonizing with our bodies, with our feminine selves. Everyone, men and women alike, is half feminine. We all got half of our chromosomes from our mothers. Half of what we are is her essence.

We can help the earth by helping ourselves. By pulling out of the insanity of the patriarchy, which is going to go down just as the dinosaurs did, and for the same reasons: they were not sustainable–their behavior did not honour the balances of nature. So they had to go.

That’s what I think. And ain’t I a woman? It’s my day, you know.

This song has possessed me. New songs can do that, but this one especially. It’s rare for me to write songs inspired by a world situation; I’m normally more self and relationship-focused and inward-looking with my songwriting. Only three times have world events inspired me to write a song.

The first song, ‘The Women Are Rising,’ was inspired by the Montreal Massacre… the second, ‘Red Hands‘ (this version is from the TreeRoots Revolution CD, “Deeper Than Grass“) was written the day after they started bombing Afghanistan.

My newest song, which I wrote yesterday, is called “The Story in My Head” and you can hear it here. I posted the lyrics in a previous post, here.

To listen online, just click on the link; to download, right click and choose ‘save file’. This is the first time I have ever written a song in one day and recorded it the next. It’s rough; I’m still creating the guitar part. It’s raw and edgy and dark and the pain in my voice is real.

Those disasters, and this earthquake. There’s no telling what will call a song forth, but in some ways this is the darkest thing I’ve ever written. Something about a disaster of this magnitude to a people so vulnerable and with such a terrible history stirs the deepest despair in me. Yet, by the end of the song, what is found is, not hope or faith but simple desire that love be strong… ‘love be strong, pain be healed, may all beings be real.’

That last line bears explaining, I feel. ‘May all beings be real’. Aren’t all beings already real?

No. An earlier line says, “You know that you should let me, you should let me be real.” In the song, being real implies a recognition by others of our realness, an honouring which includes the right to have enough space and time to get our needs met. The Haitian people have not been allowed to be real. They’ve never had their needs met. They’ve been imposed on and intruded on and projected on with others’ realities, and they have not been able to find one of their own, and to the extent that they had, now their realities lie in rubble and the eyes of the world are lasering them with horror and pity but not enough food, not enough water, not enough on-the-ground, here-and-now help.

I hear their anger and suffering in interviews: “Nobody cares! Nobody is helping! We are suffering!” they cry. And it makes me want to howl with the dread and despair of helplessness. I can donate cash to a charity, but it does not get to them now, when the need is greatest, and I will not see their faces.

This song is my gift to Haiti, such little as it is, in my hope that they may hear. On the radio, they said that while they don’t have water, food or electricity, the internet is working there. Which kind of blows my mind.

Haiti, if you are there, if you can read this, even if yo don’t, I’m just saying. I care. And ‘I give with what I got, and I sing with what I am.’

May love be strong, pain be healed, may all beings be real.

I’ve started the next year’s worth of photos already and I’d like to start the new year without being way behind on the last year. And I want to show them ALL! Unfortunately, this blogging software doesn’t allow me to effectively display photos; in particular, I can’t post captions under a particular photo. If you’re interested in seeing captions, you can click on a given image and go see the original caption on my flickr page.

And if you just want to see the originals for the last half-year on flickr in a nice slideshow, you can go here:

for Tempest Grace Gale

I am pixelated,
lacy fronds of frost encasing
the heart of my matter
etched in stone patterns of grief
for she whose existence
we all depended on
now ruthlessly bereft
of future

she, robbed of life;
we, denied the gifts
she had still to bestow

…………………………………………………………………………………………………

Tempest Grace Gale
Feb 5, 1984 – Nov 17, 2009
murdered in paradise

Hear her music on myspace

It’s not their fault that they are who they are (ie, my children). They didn’t ask to be born, nor did they ask for the storm I called into being partway through their childhoods.

It’s true, I confess, at my behest a tempest tore through the fabric of my family, sundered children from ancestors. To become a better mother, I chose to face my demons.

I knew not what I did; I was not ready; they were not ready.

They raged like escaping a cage, or Pandora’s box. And lock, stock and shock, I was overwhelmed, underwater, lost in an inundation of pain, an avalanche of tears, a phantasmagoria of multidimensional experiences. I saw my schizophrenic brother in the hospital, and I knew that could be me.

I was careful, I channeled my crazy into songs, stories, poems, drawings, tears, personal growth study and creative conversation.

Still, it had to have been hard to be my kids. I feel for them. Not that it was so easy to be me, but it was their needs I most longed to meet, and I grieved as I washed away on waves of creation.

The Artist’s Child

The artist’s child sits
staring at Mother’s
canvas, growing
magical brushwork
effortlessly flowing.

“O Mummy, will i?
can i ever? who
will i be?”

she whispers
but Mummy does not hear
Mummy is in her creation
and nothing can reach her.

The child is alone yet
somehow filled
its body is lit
from within in
pinpoints of diamond light
the night full of stars
is inside

knowing something yet
pierced by mystery
he longs and sighs
and waits to grow up.

I stopped being a ‘good mother’ when I said yes to the past and demon Memory clattered into my world like a rattle of skeletons.

They had to know. The skeletons were always there, hiding behind smiles and normal, loaves of homemade bread, hand-sewn jeans with heart patches on the knees, cunning preserves and careful focus on life that revolved around children, devoted solely to meeting their needs, talking about their needs, befriending only mothers with kids the same age needs.

I bit the dark all for my own, it slipped through in late night whispered fights.

Yes, I speak of forbidden things. I am driven to grow, to become my best self that my chldren may benefit from my existence. They, in the abstract, continue as my prime motivator. It is the way of life, to seek evolution, improved survival, for following generation.

I am no longer one who may step aside to provide for the needs of offspring, and since the storm rose, I have had to bid them bye bye and hope that I have given them strength and pride to weather it well.

Alas, I failed to factor in their indifference to my existence and disinterest in my offerings. Even so, complaint is unfair for I directly offer naught, nor have I discerned their desires besides imaginally. I must needs plead Mars in Gemini, compelled to bleat from its Midheaven pulpit mea culpa, mea explica, mea blah blah.

None of this is their fault, yet still, I must speak of forbidden things. Hidden shards and shavings of blame chew like broken glass and must be consumed most discerningly.

Pluck out such sharp splinters, my children; in the name of the love I bear Life itself, I invite you to hold your own hearts blameless and innocent of shame. I am deeply and growingly grateful for the privilege of serving Life through mothering. I take it not for granted, nor do I hold you to account. 

Your births, childhoods and continued existence, as yourselves and as my children, have cost me dear. Still I asked for you, and I welcome cost and consequence, and so you owe me nothing.

I am a free will parent. I honour my children’s choices insofar as having a relationship with me as mother or individual is concerned. I write about them in this blog only because they are the living embodiments of the precious babies I bore, and this preciousness has abated not in the slightest from the moment of their births. I can’t not feel them, speak to them in my heart, be pressed upon inwardly by their existence on a near-steady basis.

Is that creepy? I try not to be, but this is who I am. I speak to my children, the ones I am Mother to, and to whom I owe the best job of parenting possible, without identifying them, for their identity is nobody’s business. They are an archetype, the paintings of my babies, innocent receptacles for my love.

I have studied parenting from all directions, and my urgency to become a more effective parent has guided my choices, yet I have had blind spots. I continue to. I live in a strobe world of swiftly alternating clarity and confusion, and when confused, I make errors. Now, I often choose inaction when confused, prefering non-consequence (or consequence for lack of action) to inflicting harm.

O yes, I am a harmo-phobic. In particular, pricked perhaps by evolution’s fork, I dread hurting my children.

I have slowly withdrawn from their sphere over the years, preferring they toughen, grow strong outside the sticky web of me than that I harm them in any way. Yet my withdrawal risks its own harm.

I wonder whether I’m even capable of not harming them with my spider mother weirdness. I wonder whether it would be better to swallow such words, contain my refrain. And often I do, but to maintain silence for too long causes its own strain on my brain.

I am okay they’re living their own lives. I speak not, nor imply, criticism of their absence from my world, for I have faith in their choices, feel deep trust for evolution’s guiding force.

“Time is my friend, I have plenty of it”. This feeling may be deceiving; it is certainly soporific and so I remain passive for years.

With passiveness comes fear of action. When decision time arrives, I dither. I do not reach, I absent myself not understanding that maybe my absence is hurtful. I forget how to make connection in order to keep family alive.

Family is what this is all about. Species survival, genetic survival, is about family. I bear a history, a lineage, and it seeks to be inherited, and the ones who must be the inheritors are those who bear my genetic material. I am driven by the forces of evolution to pass on the memetic imprints which I participate in developing.

My creativity is lunar, with Leo Moon; this means, I express my maternal self, my Mom-personality, creatively, as an artist. This is not very personal for children–it can not have been easy to be my kid–see poem above.

Christmas is coming, and this year I do not plan to spend christmas with them. I was there last year, but not the year before. I need to give them breaks from me. But I also confess to fear of reaching out, fear that contributes to the falseness I feel in my face when I am face to face with them.

I do not fear them.

They are wonderful, good hearted, alive people. They are everything I wanted them to become, and they are that because I saw them, I knew them, I welcomed them in. Their pain may look at me with hardness, but behind the surface, they are still who I know them to be. I knew what I was doing and I am not surprised by who they have become.

Here is my fear: I fear them not liking me.

How can our genetic lines survive if our children do not like us?

I had a sweet plan in place to travel down to Seattle this week, pick my sweetie up on the plane, spend some time visiting with a friend… but disaster befell the friend’s son (at whose home we were meant to stay). So, the plan has been ditched and it’s back to business as usual, me at home, he on the bus to find his own winding way, calloo, callay.

Business as usual is a jog in the path, when you are expecting the unexpected. Still, I’m partly relieved to be relieved of the task of all that packing and driving long miles in predicted heavy weather.

***

My new classes are proving to be just as much fun as I had hoped; the bright eyes and willing hearts of my students inspire me and re-ignite my passion for this work. All right!

Astrology is so much more than a belief system; in point of fact, belief is not required. One stunned soul said to me after I did an in-depth reading for him as a gift, “I want you to know, I don’t believe in astrology, and that hasn’t changed. But [long pause] I have to admit it was right on.”

Astrology is a well-equipped tool kit, a blueprint, a multidimensional map to an infinitely expandable experience of reality. How could that not be fun?

This next class (which had been meant to be cancelled due to aforesaid thwarted plans) takes place on the Taurus Full Moon, on the Day of the Dead which follows Samhain (pronounced “sah’-win”) aka Halloween.

What a fruitful topic that will be; in fact, Taurus is the sign of fruitfulness, bounty of the senses, abundance of comfort and pleasure. The balance between Taurus and Scorpio shall be the theme of the evening, so do come if you like comfort and want to learn how to manifest more of it.

Taurus is also the sign of music, so I will be taking the opportunity to break out the guitar and inflict song upon my captive audience. I, as you might guess, have many songs to suit the theme of dear old Earth-ruled, fixed-earth Taurus.

Taurus is my area, you might say, so I’m really looking forward to this one. Everything else funnels through the body, the senses, the physical manifestion of self.

Sample Taurus lyric: “She is the stars in the heavens, for she is the eyes I see with” (the Gaia Song).

***

I’ve just come off my first trial run of triple horse care, four days of looking after all three horses full time, and this is a first, as so far I’ve only had the full care of the stallion, Dancer. It was an enlightening experience! I know now, much more about horses than I did before.

For example, they are positive geniuses (genii?) when it comes to getting at food. If I let them out the front door of the barn, but leave the back door open enough for them to get through, they’ll circle the barn in no time flat, slip through the crack and be munching hay behind my back.

If there is a wall thin enough to chew through, behind which hides lush green hay, then they’ll rip it right out of there, as Royal did on Friday. I wet to let him out in the morning and his sides were sticking out so far it seemed he’d swallowed a whole haystack.

Terrified that he was going to die (since I’d heard that horses can, literally, eat themselves to death), I called John, and was reassured that too much hay wouldn’t hurt him. But he ate himself a sizable hole in the wall of hay that had formerly been blocked by a plywood wall. He slept in a different stable the next night.

Poor Royal was cursed at birth to be what is called a ‘good keeper’. I myself am a good keeper, and I feel his pain.

He thinks he’s starving because he is given much less food than the other horses, who are not good keepers. They need to be fed more to keep their weight up. Royal cannot see the blessing in this and his life is a constant search for more food.

And he’s smart. A horse genius, in fact. I’m impressed. This guy, Royal, is a character. He can’t be locked into a stall and a fenced-in run like the other horses. If he is, he’ll go nuts trying to dig his way out under the fence, endangering himself in the process. So he gets access to the big run outside. He needs the space; he demands it.

Sadly for Royal, he is low horse in the hierarchy. Top gun is Dancer, the stallion, who never lets anyone forget that he is the King of Horses. Then comes Mystic, who is pushier and more dominant than Royal.

But Royal gets his own back in many small ways; he suspects himself to be secret royalty (perhaps because of the name). He often forgets to behave submissively, getting in trouble (and bitten) in the process. I feel for him.

Starting mid-November, I will have sole care of these three eccentric and very large beings, and I expect to learn a good deal more.

I sleep in a suite within a workshop; I like to keep the outside door open so that my inner door opens directly outside rather than into the cavernous workshop. Better feng shui that way.

The other night Mystic and Royal came to visit me at the workshop door, seeking strokes and nuzzles, and when I bade them goodnight, they made as if to follow me in. Horse hazards abound in the shop, so I reluctantly closed the door.

I felt honoured. It was a visitation, an affirmation that they like me.

Aww! They like me!

And now, assuming all goes well (yes, let’s), my sweetie returns from his journeys this Saturday in time for Samhain snuggles, and that is a Very Good Thing indeed.

Life is exceedingly lovely when it isn’t strange and frightening, and it’s strange and frightening when it’s isn’t exceedingly lovely.

One friend called raw food ‘celibacy for the palate.’ At first, my response to that was along the lines of, “You haven’t had a good raw meal, obviously!” because oh my my, I suffer from no lack of yumminess. I’m equipped! I have the cookbooks, the dehydrator, the food processor, the blender, the seed grinder, and I’m using them all to good effect. And having fun, too.

But l’m starting to get what he meant by that. There’s an addictive quality to the comfort foods, the melting cheeses, the breads and cooked grains, sauces thickened with flour, meats, processed foods. Those foods provide a kind of throatgasmic satisfaction of a different order than the kinds of deliciosity I am now discovering.

Celibacy is not quite the right word for this way of eating, however. If food is sex, then cooked comfort foods are porn, and this is the real deal. My body loves me while I eat this way. It responds (so quickly!) with more energy, clearer skin and clearer senses. And that love is reciprocated, more and more. We have some work to do on our relationship still, my body and me; I sit at the computer far too long at a stretch without stretching or moving and I’m terribly hooked on any and all means of distraction from the visceral experience of this now, this moment, my breath, my self.

That’s what it’s all about.

In her book, “12 Steps To Overcoming Your Dependency on Cooked Foods,” Victoria Boutenko suggests that we define our personal goals… what we hope to accomplish with the aid of the improved health, energy and free time we gain with this lifestyle. Kind of a personal mission statement.

Mine (though I haven’t defined it yet) might be something like this: to bridge the gap between awareness and flesh, to mend my primal breach and experience what life can be like as a unified whole self. And from that place of wholeness, to actualize my fullest potential as a human being.

It sounds lofty and perhaps unrealistic to some, but I already have moments of experiencing what that feels like, and it’s surely wonderful and worthy of striving for. It’s the act of stretching, of striving that matters, more than the completion, to me.

This new style of living has so far been easier than I expected. It’s also difficult and challenging, and not for the obvious reasons. I don’t crave cooked food at all, at least, not yet. I’m thrilled by this new landscape of taste sensations and ease (now that I have gotten more or less used to the different rhythms and skills required) and I feel zero draw to the smells and sights of food I encounter out and about in the world.

Coffee, surprisingly (to me) has also fallen by the wayside. I hadn’t specifically intended to quit, I just stopped, and I don’t crave other stimulating hot drinks (like tea) either. I drink green smoothies most days and lots of water, and that’s about it, for now.

I just learned from the video link I just posted that I’ve been making the smoothies incorrectly, adding carrots and beets which are starchy vegetables rather than simply fruit and leafy greens. So! Oh well, right? I’ll try it the ‘correct’ way and see how that works. I’m on the very beginning stages of this journey, and if I have my way, it’s going to last me a while.

Ideally, this is not just a ‘diet’, but a lifestyle change. So far, it feels easy on a physical level to keep up.

Whenever releasing an addiction, though (and I’m releasing several at once now), emotional issues inevitably raise their formerly buried heads. “Oh, you’re not stuffing me down anymore! Good! Time to come out and play…”

And that’s a good thing, in my book. Moving through the murk and pain from a position of light and strength, reclaiming the old parts of self that I have been attempting to edit out.

Now if I could just stop reading those dang webcomix. There are too many of them. And the internets are crammed full of annoyingly compelling distractions. I am developing strategies to deal with that (writing in this blog more is one), but I haven’t implemented them yet.

I’m being gentle with myself. I have to want to, right? I’m not interested in shoving anything down my own throat in the name of ‘health’ unless my body and all the rest of me are ready, willing and able. Otherwise it’s a doomed enterprise.

So what does it mean to eat raw food?

Here’s what a typical day looks like for me. For breakfast, I have a bowl of steel-cut oats (rolled oats are not raw) ground in the seed grinder and soaked overnight with dried fruit and salba (chia seeds). To this, I add fresh fruit, a pear maybe or a banana and homemade almond milk.

I’ll normally save the green smoothie for later, but that may shift; the recommendation is to have it first. I’m not a stickler for the rules, but I do like to try it out the way you’re ‘supposed to do it’ in case there turns out to be a good reason for it.

I don’t tend to need lunch after having that for breakfast, but when I’m at home I’ll graze on fruit (fresh or dries), crackers, dried almond cookies (using leftover pulp from the almond milk), veggies in dip or somesuch. At work, I might walk over to Zen Zero and see what they have on offer for raw snacks.

For dinner, I might have sunburgers, which are a ground up mixture of sunflower seeds, carrots, onions, herbs and flax seed (for binding). I make up a big batch of dough that will last for several meals (I have no problem with having the same meal a few times in a row, if it’s yummy). The burgers are much easier to make into patties than meatburgers which I always found gross, sticky and smelly, and the flax makes an amazingly effective binding agent. They hold their shapes perfectly. I form them into two half-inch patties and pop them in the dehydrator in the morning.

To serve, I pile a thick bed of lettuce onto a plate, place the sunburgers on the lettuce, add various condiments (right now I’m using, from Raw Rose’s cookbook, ‘Better Than Mayo’ and ‘Barbecue Sauce’–though why on earth she would call a raw sauce by the name of a cooking method is beyond me), sliced onion, mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, etc., whatever I have on hand. I sprinkle with a bit of lemon juice and by the time I’m finished I’m stuffed and sated.

They say that you don’t overeat on raw food. I still find it hard not to eat too much, actually. It’s too darn tasty. Weight loss has not been part of this journey so far, and I’m okay with that. I’m happy being round as long as I feel good, strong, energized and healthy. I’m lucky enough to have a lover who likes me as I am, so I don’t have to deal with that pressure.

The eating too much thing may shift as I adjust to the new lifestyle and new way of eating, but even if it doesn’t, I don’t suffer aftereffects from overeating this kind of food the way I used to. I don’t feel like I’m carrying a brick in my belly. I just feel too full, with the expanded sensation of holding more stuff in my stomach than necessary. But that goes away, there’s no pain, queasiness or suffering involved. Freedom!

I can eat all I want, all I can, stuff my face with food I find absolutely delicious and which meets all my nutritional needs, and feel good. Hallelujah for that.

As a lifelong compulsive eater, I need to choose my battles. I’m choosing to change the sort of food I overeat and work from there. And oh, yes; I’m now extremely regular. Constipation used to be an issue for me; no more.

So, that’s dinner. I might have a snack later in the evening if I get hungry. Often (like tonight) I don’t need anything more to eat at all.

The feeling-quality of my body has shifted in a way I find hard to describe. It’s as though my flesh has become more permeable to light. I feel slightly altered; sometimes downright high. I’m still in transition, and I don’t know where this new way of eating is going to take me, or how long it will last, but so far, so good.

Winter has always been a hard time to maintain any kind of distance from my eating compulsions, for obvious reasons. I’ve been invited to Thanksgiving Dinner with a dear friend and I would love to go. I’m hesitating because it will involve, in addition to turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, partying.

And you know what that means. Substances other than food will be served and I don’t know how my newly sensitized flesh will be with that. I’ve never been very good at just saying no to drugs or alcohol. I don’t seek them out, I don’t keep them in my home, but when they’re on offer, I’m generally a big yes. I feel good about it, since it’s an occasional thing and who wants to be a party-pooper? You have to let loose sometimes, right?

But it’s a bit fraught right now. Being melted and heightened with the aid of drink and smoke will very likely lower my resistance to other things, and I’m afraid.

Still, I’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to give up fun for the rest of my life for health’s sake. My body likes fun too. Maybe I’ll bring my own food and drink to the party. I hear red wine is raw!