It’s early still so that may be an optimistic title… those hardy few who are regular readers of this blog may have noticed an extended gap between postings here; I’ve given one excuse already in my previous post but I have a new one now.

Which is: I’m sick. I seem to be on the mend, though an outsider would be hard pressed to notice much difference in my behavior. I still shuffle about like a zombie in my fuzzy purple robe, coughing and sneezing, with headache and wooziness. But the fever broke last night and I haven’t slept since I got up, I have marginally more energy and (wonder of wonders) I cleaned the cat litter box today! We’re talking the Litter Box From Hell! It was the crowning achievement in a day of no other achievements.

I’m way behind on virtually everything… this is a placeholder post with a couple of self-portraits from my Hornby visit. If you click on the shot, it will take you to the flickr page where I actually talk about the picture.

More when I am better. Maybe even tomorrow, who knows? Thanks for hanging in there, you guys, and you know who you are .

So, I didn’t keep up with my blog posts while I was gone, but I have an excuse. I was on dial-up. I got so frustrated with the fricken fracken internet that I hardly even stayed caught up with my scrabble games. It’s all about priorities, right?

Anyway, I’m back, and I’ve just posted the last few days’ worth of self-portraits to my flickr page, so I’ll share them with you in order.

This shot from the 19th is photoshopped, and it’s best to view it in the large size to grasp the full effect. To do that, click on the image then click the ‘all sizes’ button above it. That will open it in a bigger size so you can see its true coolness. I worked hard on this shot and am happy with how it turned out!

It’s me snuggling up with my new favourite Free Store score, a leopard-spotted polar fleece boa scarf. It’s the best scarf I’ve ever owned. I want to sleep with this thing. All praises to the Hornby Island Free Store.

Other new favourite Free Store finds from this trip: a long slinky green velour dress with slits up both legs (rowr!); a pair of hiking boots a size too big that worked awesomely well with three pairs of socks and enabled some good walks while on the island; several warm sweaters, and various odds and ends.

I got arty once I got home. Originally, this one from the 20th was my face silhouetted against P’s skylight. Boring! So now that I am home and back on broadband, I’ve been having some fun. I edited this shot using picnik. Easier than Photoshop.

I quite like this one, actually; it’s the second photo I’ve edited in that puzzle-piece style. I think it suits me.

Almost forgot this one from the 21st. It’s me beside the woodstove trying to get warm. It was so cold! And P’s woodstove makes pretty flames, but it doesn’t put out much heat; it mostly goes up the chimney. I don’t do well in the cold, as I say later on in this post.

For the next shot, from the 22nd, I decided to go for drama. I was getting tired of my normal face. So this is the horror movie version of me!

Again, it’s best to view this one in large format. I was having a lot of fun with my camera and a sweet time with my sweetie and connecting with some old friends while on the island; but I didn’t spend as much time outside hiking and such as I had originally thought I would. I ended up doing a lot of indoor nesting, finding delicious ways to keep warm. I recommend it. I don’t like the cold.

Let me put it another way: I’ve had my quota of cold for one lifetime. When I was a kid, I was never warm enough. Now, I’m about ready to move to someplace tropical. If I can see my breath, it’s too cold. Snuggle time.

And now here I am, back *sigh* home, in my usual position in front of the computer.

I feel enriched by the last week, rejuvenated, refreshed and nourished. At the same time, I feel depleted, depressed, deranged and ready for some profound and fundamental change in my world. My life is beginning to suck butt. Yet, by now I’ve learned that this is just how January feels to me.

Still, I’m broke, and I have rent to pay. If you know anybody who wants or could benefit from an astrology reading (and just about anybody could), or any of the other services I offer, please do pass my info along to them! Thank you! Mwahh!

It involves walking to the neighbourhood coffee bar and indulging in thick strong bitter espresso with dark chocolate on the side. Yes, those are chocolate stains around my mouth and yes, that’s a satisfied smirk on my face.

Afterward I walked to the beach, watched the ducks and listened to the foghorn. Fog puts everything into perspective somehow. Then when I came home I had some energy to pack for my trip to Hornby tomorrow. That’s the second part of the cure.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, you all won’t even notice I’m gone.

I’m tired today. Feel lacklustre, dragged out, pale. I probably need iron. Part of it is emotional (though it’s a classic case of ‘chicken and egg’: do I feel depressed because I’m feeling washed out and tired, or vice versa?); my life is in limbo and I don’t know what direction to move in.

I have mad skills; I’m very good at what I do. But marketing isn’t one of the things I do well. If everybody who had a reading from me who loved it told a friend who then also got a reading, I’d have a thriving practice. But it doesn’t seem to work that way. And I’m too tired and crabby right now to try to figure it out. I need to advertise or move or both.

Bleah. It’s january. It can only get better from here.

Well, I’m home from Saltspring. I had a beautiful time there helping one of my oldest and dearest friends, Sheya Jordan, celebrate her 40th birthday.

I met Sheya on Saltspring 23 years ago when she was 17 and I was not. She gave me my first-ever massage a year or so after I moved to Saltspring from Fraser Lake. I was not yet accustomed to coastal ways and felt a wee bit skeptical and skittish about the idea that anyone might stroke, caress and massage my naked body without having sex in mind, but I was adventurous and I trusted her. She was a sweet, wide-eyed rainbow faerie who has grown into a wise, almost supernaturally loving, profoundly unique and gifted woman I am proud to call friend.

Sheya is the visionary and primary artist behind Wild Earth Arts, the Saltspring based company that sells (among other lovely and sacred things) the Goddess Prayer Flags that you have seen in various places on the Islands and elsewhere.

This is Sheya: I was her official photographer. I took over two hundred shots of her birthday gathering, ceremony and celebration, some of which, tweaked, optimized and edited, can be seen on my flickr page.

Saltspring has changed, of course. I find myself drawn back there, as though to an old lover I broke up with but never got over. I had a poignant time there exploring Ganges where I used to spend so much time. Some things are the same; Centennial Park seems much as I remember it, though the trees have grown. Certain landmarks remain, but they stand out amid the new garish buildings that have sprung up around them. Mouat’s, the Embe Bakery; ah, memories.

Like my friend, the island has lost some of its youthful innocence and magical glow, but it is beautiful still and likely contains depths that I would like to explore.

I have a feeling that I might come to love it even more than I did back then, and if a space opens up there for me, I will likely choose to move there. However, it is Saltspring, a place where it has always been notoriously difficult to find affordable housing. That’s why I left it in the first place.

I remember the passionate awe I once felt when, freshly off the ferry for the first time from up North, I set foot in a fairyland where the grass was green all year long. I’ll never forget that moment, nor my first whiff of the salt tang of the sea. Actually the smell is not salt at all; rather, it’s a brew of rotting seaweed and marine life, but ‘salt tang’ sounds much more romantic than ‘rotting brew of decomposing sea stuff.’

But I digress.

Love for the place aside, I like the idea of living there because

a) It’s easily accessible to Vancouver, Victoria, the southern Gulf Islands and the Cowichan Valley. Kind of amazing really. It’s a hub. I love the community here and I like the idea of being able to stay connected.

b) The island population is predisposed to accepting my particular brand of strange. It is a Gulf Island, after all. And there are lots of them, something like 10,000 people. I could conceivably make my living there, doing what I do.

c) After 20 odd years of living on Gulf Islands, I find I’m not quite comfortable living somewhere that’s not closely bounded by water. I miss the uniquely integrated sense of community that happens when the ferries shut down at night, leaving you stuck with each other. Vancouver Island is practically big enough to be a province; it doesn’t really count.

I’ll keep you posted.

This is me and my granddog, Edge, a rottweiler-shepherd cross. A sweetie, if he knows you.

I’ve spent the holidays here in Edmonton, where my two sons live, and though I’ve enjoyed it (I’ve missed them!) it’s time to go home. I’m looking forward to being home a lot more than I am the journey; we’re driving. And it’s snowing. And it’s cold. Agh. Whose dumb idea was winter?

So this will be short; I’m waiting to be picked up any minute. Fortunately my friend was smart enough to equip her car with studs before we left. We’ll need them. We’re taking it slow, though, with two overnight stops planned along the way, in Hinton at K’s cousin’s place and in Mission where my sister and her family live. That part, I am definitely looking forward to as well; I’ve missed them. That’s the trouble with this modern world, we live so far apart from our dear ones.

I’m feeling pensive and sentimental right now. It’s so sweet to be around my progeny; my daughtergirl was here for a couple of days (not long enough) as well. All I can see when I look at them are the adorable children they were, which no doubt annoys them; it would me. They’re grownup people, but where did the children go? It’s sad.

Onward into the weather we go. Have a good one, all. And wish me luck.

Over on my flickr site, I’ve just joined a group called ’365 Days’, the purpose of which is to post a self-portrait every day of the next year. I’m going to post them here as a kind of adjunct to my daily posts… here’s today’s.

I’ve been feeling old and ugly lately, a consequence of my societal programming that says that a woman comes with an expiry date when it comes to worth, beauty and desirability. It’s a terrible feeling, but then, I’ve always had a certain dissatisfaction with myself when it came to comparisons with the societal ideal, so really, not so very unfamiliar.

The other night, I had a wonderful dream. I love dreams. They’re perfectly real, of course; while I’m in a dream, I’m experiencing a reality that is as tangible as anything I experience while awake. I’ve learned to accept these experiences and their validity, which is lovely, because this was a very sweet dream (sigh).

In this dream, I am at a coffeehouse and a man is singing. He has an amazing voice, sort of country-folk. Imagine Greg Brown crossed with Steve Earle crossed with Hoyt Axton. Iows, sexy, deep, resonant and to die for. He sang this song:

“A woman’s age
is a love agenda
A woman’s age
is a beautiful thing
It shows in the way she grows
Shines through in all the things she knows
I want to be where Heaven
Heaven is a woman’s age.”

I felt this man singing directly to me. He felt like the voice of God. This dream made me feel good. The song goes through my head all the time, and I find myself singing it a lot. I expect to add verses to it soon.

The subtext of the song was this: a woman blossoms over time, and the blossoms keep unfolding and unfolding. Aging is not about fading and growing less, dimmer less vital with age, rather it’s about complexifying, opening, deepening. And the feeling was that men in general (the collective culture) are stunted and unable to grow along with this ‘woman’ (seemed like a specific woman, who in the dream I felt to be ‘me’, rather than ‘women’ in general), but the problem was not the woman herself.

Understandably, I rather liked this.

I feel like the kid next door to the family that won the lottery. It throws me back to childhood, that feeling of growing up next door to the American Dream. I always had the impression that everything important happened down there, and that we were some sort of afterthought, a backwater. Well, maybe it’s true. ‘Peace, order and good government’ doesn’t have the same emotional ring as ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’

So… we had our disappointing election, and they’ve had a nationwide epiphany, an orgy of joy and transformation and hope for change. It’s inspiring and exciting and scary all at once. How big of a change will this really bring? How different can things get, considering that the system is still the system, and just how much power does a president actually have? We will see…

This moved me, in particular. The emotion and heart that people are experiencing through this is touching and astonishing. Lovely.

When will it be our turn?

I signed on for Blog Action Day today, because the subject, poverty, is near (if not dear) to my heart, and because I needed the inspiration. It’s been ages since I posted anything here, and poverty, or my struggle to escape it, is a large part of the reason why.

Poverty means to me struggling to find avenues through which I can make some money, enough to pay the rent and groceries. I’m not feeling very inspired, though, because I’m still struggling.

There is something about chronic, bottom-line insecurity about where next month’s rent is going to come from the sucks the life out of my muse. Yes, it’s a drag. Some have told me to just ‘get a job’, but with the sort of jobs I am qualified to perform, I’d be taking away from some young person just getting started. I have skills, I have a business, I have valuable services to offer, and I’d much prefer to work in my own area.

Do I sound whiny? I admit, it’s hard to avoid feeling pathetic sometimes. I’m trying to find a way through the self-pity to that magical platform of self-empowerment, you know, the place where I Make Things Happen, pull myself up by my bootstraps (hm, I’d like to have a pair of boots with straps) and turn my life around.

I’ve done it, too. Lots of times. But I keep falling back down onto my bottom line, which is a lot lower than I’d like it to be. (more…)