VACATION!!!!

Thanks to whoever stops in for a visit. But I'll be spending a few weeks writing in private and don't want to leave anyone hanging. I'll be listening to the silence and exploding on paper in ways that the "public" might not understand or appreciate. Wishing everyone a blessed summer break...including myself.

GOODBYE MAY

Holy Moly. Where did the entire month of May go? Today...the final day of the 5th month of the year 2012, has been gorgeous. The bluebird sky, the wind blowing gently and lifting the tree limbs in a dance of shimmery greens...a busy male bluebird hunting bugs for his lady who sits on the eggs. The sun hot and the earth warm as I weed and mulch and feel the space around me. I am drifting...feeling myself embedded in the backdrop of beauty that I call home. My planet Earth. I feel her breath, lifting the curtain of sadness covering my heart and watch her winged beings cavorting on the draughts of deep sighs. I realize I have nothing to say that could improve on the beauty that is spread out before me. There is nothing I can add. As I think this thought, an indigo bunting lands in the bush beside me and melts me with his song. Perhaps all I have to offer this great symphony of planetary life, is my deep gratitude for all of it...every last species of it. I lull myself thinking perhaps this is enough. But how can it be? How can it be enough when stupid people throw their beer cans out their windows and toss their garbage like the scenic byways are their own private trash barrels. I'm grateful for the beauty but I'm god damn mad at the stupidity of humans and I'm not gonna shut up about it. Good bye May. Thank you for putting me into my gratitude. The vividness of your beauty in May takes my breath away. When I get it back...I want to sing praises to the beauty of the Earth and remind people of how they are screwing it all up for everyone for evermore. Goodbye May.

WILD INSPIRATION

Finally...a break in the rain and the chance to take a nice walk into the woods with my poor neglected puppy. Actually, she isn't the least bit neglected. Her need to run pushes us out the door at all manner of hours and she can chase balls and frisbees until we are falling down tired but there is something a wee might sad about her obsession for fetching things like balls and frisbees. I love to throw things for her but even I get tired of the repetition and my arms and shoulders begin to ache. I've started throwing the ball with the blast of a tennis racquet because she runs so much further that way. Her passion for fetching has a riveting quality to it. She is driven and as I watch her and throw for her, it seems she could run herself to death...and yet there is her happy left-side flopping tongue that indicates a joy in what she is doing. Yes, she is obsessed. Yes, the balls and frisbees have a power over her. Even when she is feeling her most rebelious and refuses to come when called, she will always come running to the sight of her humans with a throwable object in their hands. Maybe it has a quality of addiction. I don't know. I just know that there is absolutely nothing more heart swelling than taking her for long walk in the woods near a brook or stream. She loves making the woods her agility course and I adore watching her. She races full speed, jumping over tree limbs, stumps and rocks. She is grace in movement and she  shows absolutely no hesitation for any obstacle she encounters. Her confidence never falters. But when she hears the gurgling of a running stream, she is carried away with her joy at dancing through the water, lying down in a pool and drinking the wild water leisurely. She is free. She is encountering every living thing with a curiosity and trust that inspires me. I believe she hears the music of the rambling stream and her exuberance is obvious. Would that we could all live our lives like Sadie in the woods...in an unbounded expression of love.

EATING FROM THE GARDEN OF THE WILD MOTHER

A Maine spring is elusive...it shows a peak of full summer in March and April but when May comes I find myself sitting by a fire plotting my garden and feeling frustrated because it is cold, raining and I'm dog tired of garden veggies from the freezer. I am hungry for FRESH! I set myself free in the woods and am becoming a feisty forager. I love, love love foraging. It sets something deep inside me singing. My souls wild music...I wander about in the woods watching my dog Sadie expressing her passionate joy moment by moment in the woods. She especially loves the brooks and rivulets...you can see her ears go back when she hears the music of the moving water, and then she's off...her pace picks up and she races with all herself, bounding on rocks, jumping back and forth over streams, ducking under tree roots and then lying down and drinking her fill from the  wild water. As I watch her, I feel my own animal self surrender to the pleasure of foraging. Not only am I up and walking for several hours, but I am filling bags with spring green goodies that I will cook for supper when I get home. I'm spending calories for groceries from the wild mother's garden and since I'm unemployed, its the right price. The neighbors I run into are the telltale signs of passage by deer, moose, bear and birds...the whitewash tells me where the barred owl sat quietly watching...the pile of moose scat is fresh enough to be today, so he proceeded me by a few hours. The bears poop is large and unformed. Don't know what he's eating right now but he's definitely been here too. The Kingfisher makes all kinds of excited noises as he flies up and down the river bed. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of a friend's company. She is a lover of foraging too and together with our field guides and experiences, we shared with each other what we knew and came home with plenty. Maine Fiddlehead ferns are one of foragings best finds. Where they grow, there are hundreds so its pretty easy to fill up a bag. The season though is coming to an end, at least in the valleys. Up in the higher elevations, things are coming along a little slower. I was home cleaning the fiddleheads and I had a discussion in my brain. I had enough to freeze some. I have been told they freeze very well and I played with the idea. Then...I said...NO. No, I'm not going to freeze any. I've been eating frozen veggies all winter and I will pick only what we can eat fresh. The great pleasure of foraging is that I am out in the garden helping the plants thrive and eating some fresh picked and local.The Wild Mother's garden gets along fine without me and is taking away the impatience I have from not seeing my asparagus grow fast enough. I fix my fiddleheads very simply. After cleaning them well, I boil some water...enough to cover what I'm cooking. When the water boils, I dump in the ferns and let them boil for 5-6 minutes. Then I pour them out in a strainer to remove the water, put them back in the pan, and drizzle some herb vinegar and wild mushroom infused olive oil, and toss with a pinch of garlic seasalt and fresh ground black pepper to finish them off. They are so good.

My new discovery yesterday was the spring shoot of the cattail. It was a little more of an adventure to harvest them because they grow right in the water. I fell in with my right leg going in up to my knee, but it was pretty funny and I could ignore the discomfort for awhile. My harvest of spring cattail also included some dandilion greens. Elba shared her preparation with me...a Curried Cattail Soup. Mmmm. It was simple. You cut the bottoms off the cattail shoot...the part that is white. It looks alot like scallion or green onion. Then you slice the white shoots. I started my quick saute with 1/2 an onion chopped small and some chopped garlic in olive oil and 1 tbsp. of curry powder. Then I threw in some sliced mushrooms, washed and chopped dandilion greens and added the sliced cattail. When everything was tender but not overdone, I threw it all in a sauce pan with 2 cups stock and 2 cups water, topped with fresh ground pepper. I didn't tell Stephen what it was made of until he was half done eating his...so he knew he liked it before I told him what he was eating.

The meal also included Trader Joe's sundried tomato and goat cheese raviolis with an Oyster mushroom sauce. I grew the oyster mushrooms on my kitchen counter from a kit I bought at Garden Day Maine. The mushrooms grow in a mixture of pressed wood chips and coffee grounds. Interesting...but very expensive for the amount that you actually get. But...now I'm just a week or two away from wild oysters for free. Weather permitting and also, my ability to locate them may be up to the oyster mushroom fairies who are unpredictable. Sometimes you find things when you aren't looking for them...so be prepared.

I am so grateful to live near wild places where I can mosey about and find good things to eat. When one thing stops growing, something else is just starting. The hummingbirds leave Maine just after labor day and their leaving creates a big hole...a void where once vibrant life buzzed about and cavorted with its young. When they go...its time to hit the woods for wild mushrooms. When they come back in spring...it marks the time of first mushrooms...and the celebration of their return. Such tiny glimmering buzzing irridescent jewels...they are a joy to watch. As I eat my foods from the wild garden and drink my Chaga and Birch sap, I am aware of being touched inside by the outside. Not only am I enjoying my environment of the wild woods and all that live in it...I am literally drinking and eating and partaking in that wildness and it feels good. It feels FRESH. It makes me feel alive...like a puppy jumping stream banks. Well. Almost.

A POWER FAILURE...JUST MY CUP OF TREE!

I've been wrestling with the double-edged sword of communication by computer. There are so many benefits in terms of ease and visibility, connection to friends and family, sharing photos and spur of the moment thoughts and even giving support when there is pain in somebody's words. I love that side of it. But then there are the viruses, the time that gets eaten up while I sit at a screen, the things I read that I'd rather not see, and the whole idea that I am visible to the powers that be that are not interested in being kind or supportive to me. I shared that conundrum with a friend on Facebook today and then proceeded to get on my treadmill for my 30 minute make my heart beat hard routine. I was running on all cylinders when my treadmill suddenly stopped. The wind today has been wicked...chilly and insistent. I moved about the house to discover that there was no power. Powerless...I entertain a metaphor in my brain. The power going out is alot like quitting coffee. My computer shuts down and I must use my pen. Quitting coffee is a form of unplugging. There is an electrical buzz to coffee that stimulates...it is a connecting drink and a start the day ritual that I have shared all my life with friends and family. I love the taste and the buzz and the whole shebang but as I approach my 60th year, I find it is not liking me too much. I love the lift but the crash is no fun at all and the result of drinking coffee for 5 days in a row after quitting for a week and then quitting again, reveals the level of exhaustion that I feel when I buzz on coffee. I inevitably take on more that I can handle and it leaves me wiped out and irritable, weepy and weak. I have recently been introduced to chaga...a form of mushroom/fungus that grows on the white birch that is prevalent here in my area. A little research on the medicinal benefits of chaga reveal a substance that is anti-inflamatory, anti-cancer, sugar and cholesterol balancing, beneficial to the heart/liver and for stomach problems. I love nothing better than foraging about in the woods and chaga hunting has become a regular obsession. I add some fresh ginger, cinnamon, clove and nutmeg to the chaga when I grind it up and the result is a delicious chai-like drink that has the consistency of coffee but none of the buzz. It gives a burst of energy that is more subtle and it is a substance that gifts it's fans with long life. The Siberian people drink chaga regularly and have a life span of 85-100 years. The Inuit do not drink chaga and their life span is 50-60 years. Thats pretty remarkable given they both live in similar climates with easy access to birches.

So, today was unusual because the power failed. I cut my workout short and took to the woods with Sadie because I couldn't compute, clean,  wash or cook with no power. The spirited wind was gusting and the ravens played on the draughts. I walked up the back hill on a road that was covered...not in pavement but with tiny flowers...bluets and violets. As I walked I became so grateful that I had to lie down and kiss the ground. I ate a few violets and bluet blossoms and tried to see if Sadie might like them too. She wasn't too impressed. Lucky me. I get to walk on a road paved with flowers. While I scoped out birches and potential chaga, Sadie pretended the world was her agility training course. She played with the fast running stream, rolled in who knows what and raced over obstacles having a blast. We walked for an hour or so and headed back to see if the power had been restored. No. Not yet. So I warmed up my dandilion green soup on the woodstove...slowly but there was a fire to feed and once fed, it did the job. I enjoyed my dandilion soup. It was made of all the dandilions I took out of my garden...the small ones without flowers, but still  bitterness was part of the interesting flavor of the soup.  
I love knowing I'm eating something free and wild that is tonic to my body, helping my liver and filling my hunger for life.

With power out, I couldn't make coffee anyway. Coffee is an electrical buzz that helped me move through lots of situations I wasn't that motivated to do and a ritual I shared with my Mom and sisters and friends. Now that I'm not living in the buzz of Massachusetts and my life is slowed down to a more natural pace, I find drinking chaga is envigorating. It is to partake in the grace and flexibility of the white birches...to feel the power of rootedness and the upward reaching of the tree branches...to feel a oneness with the woods around me. In fact a tree branch is what caused the power outage...that and the gusty spirited wind. So this power failure today? It was just my cup of tree.

HEART-MY MAIN BRAIN

28 years ago today, I gave birth to myself as a mother...and to a beautiful manchild who has become a human being that I feel honored to know in the deepest possible way. I remember the morning he was born. I had a long back labor and had been working with the pains since the morning before. I reached transition and found myself quite beside myself. I had opted for a birth center birth and in so doing, opted out of using drugs to help manage the pain. I became a person I wasn't familiar with...I swore, growled, grunted like a bear. I was demanding and wanted Stephen to constantly press on my back. I begged for a ceasarian because the other women had been taken across the street to the hospital. It was a busy night...with 4 of us giving birth. I was the only woman who managed to deliver naturally that day. I have read about some of the tribal women giving birth silently. It was bad luck for the mother to expose her difficulty with pain to her child. I sure hope it isn't the case...but back as a new mother, I feared my swearing and screaming might have a negative impact. I never felt real fear till I had a child. And the mind can become very active imagining all kinds of things that might happen if...Being a new mother was like rock climbing...hanging on to the edge for dear life, getting stuck in certain positions, fearing the fall. I was in a constant state of hyper alert. As I began the work of pushing this baby's head through the birth canal, my Mom stopped by on her way to work at a local bakery. She hadn't wanted to be present for the birth thinking she didn't want to see me in pain. But she stopped...and she came in and kissed my feet. A few minutes later, Sam emerged with a name we hadn't chosen. Once he was safely delivered and the pain was done, I experienced a week long high...feeling like I could do anything on earth. I felt truly powerful...deeply capable in my body and my heart...but incredible mental fears began to slowly grow like weeds. When Sam was a few months old, Stephen and I were walking beside Jackson Falls in the spring and the falls were ripping. Stephen was carrying him and I was nearly paralyzed with fear as he scampered around like a goat beside the rushing water. Eventually, the highest high gave way to the lowest low...the postpartum thing hit me like a brick upside the head. In truth, I have struggled with depression several times in my life...mostly hormonal but a few deep losses also prepared the soil for a fully flowered depression. It is truly the only regret I have in life...the days that were lost to negative thinking, the moments I couldn't fully participate in the love of my family and friends. Having lunch in the car with my 28 year old son last week while a seagull sat on the hood of my car begging like a dog for bits of sandwich, we talked about so many things...things that matter. We talked about his grandmothers, their aging process, the stress of their loss of capabilities, the ability to manifest dreams. He shared a video of a TED talk with Jill Bolte Taylor discussing the right and left brain, the feeling of having a stroke, the difference in the functions of the 2 brains. We cried a little and we talked about music. One of the interesting likenesses we share is the artists soul and sensitivities and the challenge of scheduling time for the making of money yet making sure there is creative time for self expression too. Sam and the video both described a sense of being big huge energies being pressed into small human bodies. I share that feeling and I can't describe the joy in my heart when I realized after all these years of saying "Sam...I think we need to talk"...and having him hold his hands over his ears or moan and groan saying.."No Mom...not another talk."...that here he was, talking to me...understanding me...and visa versa. He gave me a great gift. He listened, he heard, and best ...he understood from his own deep heart. I just adore my 2 adult men. They hear me with their hearts. I can stop struggling with words and explanations and the weight of guidance and move on from the feeling of being ole misunderstood Mom who's always making mountains out of molehills... and get in to my heartspace ...where a mother's main brain has always been. So Happy Birthday to me as a mother. I'm proud of the job I did. I'm delighted I chose to intuit my way through rather than read all the how to books. In hind sight I see that I made many solid choices and did all I could to bring up men who are good human beings. And Happy Birthday to Sam...I hope you see that music is an essential purpose in your life and that even if youre currently split...one half to make money to live on and one half to protect some creative time for continuing your music...you are in the process of weaving your selves together and soon a time will come when your passion will become your livlihood and there will be no stopping you.

If The Slipper Fits....

Last time I wrote I was an April Fool. Time seems to be racing by and yet, paradoxically, I've slowed my life down to the bear essentials. I am lucky to be at a place on the river, where I can stop whenever I want to.  I don't need to live my life as though I'm shooting the rapids. I no longer rush from one thing to another to accomplish all that I set out for myself. I work for myself on my own schedule. Stephen has always cultivated this talent. And my Dad was self employed as well. I am beginning to appreciate the gift of not working for someone else's agenda. But it hasn't come easy. Getting a job, following a schedule, being a particular way for the sake of professional personna...I did that. I worked hard to be responsible, dependable, focused, goal-oriented, pleasant and to do it on the clock, whether or not I slept the night before. My challenge was to schedule my life so that I had time for my husband, my kids, my home, and eventually for my own passions...like birding, writing, making art, cooking. It was impossible to do what I planned for myself in 24 hours. Now...at 59, things have changed. Now I have the freedom to schedule my own agenda and the ability to live my life honoring my own priorities. Even when I had a child, which was the only other time in my life that I was not working out in the world... the schedule of my days was focused on the eating and sleeping schedule of my children. I have become a master of adapting the choices of the people I love. It is a strength but like all great human qualities, that strength can become a weakness or a fault.

When Stephen had his bypass surgery and for the 12 months following, I prioritized him. I centered the choices of my day around him and what he seemed to need...for company, for food, for space, for entertainment. I found myself regulating my life to his. I'm sure I did that when we first fell in love and I know I readjusted when the children came. Now I find myself doing the same thing for my Mom and sister...putting down my schedule and plans to go accomodate theirs.Part of me feels lucky to be able to do what I'm doing. Part of me feels confused. How is that Stephen doesn't do the same for me? He does his process no matter what is going on for me. He doesn't put aside his games to spend time with me. He doesn't come rushing home just because I'm coming back from a few days in Salem. He knows he'll see me plenty and get all the scoop eventually. My mother never put her process aside to come to my assistance either. She always made it clear that she was not going to babysit because she had been there, done that having had 5 children. I just came home from my long weekend in Mass. to hang with my mom and to give my sister some respite. The whole time I'm there, I'm aware of suspending my own routine. I don't do my usual writing, excersise...getting outdoors. I even drink real coffee at Moms, when here at home, I don't drink it any more. Then, when I get home...the overstimulation of being in an urban environment, settling in to my mother's eating/drinking/toileting routine, driving the highway, being surrounded by the Mass. Pace...a palpable frenetic energy that stands out in stark contrast to my quiet  rural home in Maine where I can go days without seeing anyone but Stephen.

Is it really any wonder why I come home burdened with irritability, and the feeling that I give too much for love and leave myself bankrupt...wondering why I don't have a person in my life who loves me the way I love. Then it dawns on me. Gee. Maybe my idea of love is unrealistic. Maybe I'm the only one who can love me the way I love my family. Maybe they can only love me their way...and isn't that really just enough? The city is like my left brain...all scheduled, organized but overbooked. Too many people and details buzzing around my brain...too many people to see for the time I spend. Then I get home to my open space, open schedule, quiet home. The chatter and buzz is still going in my nervous system even though the grass is growing slow, and the birds are courting and building their nests. I am back in my right brain, where I feel peace and serenity but I have carried with me into the green meadows...a trail of garbage thinking. I need to remember that when I come home, before poor Stephen feels my brittle irritating quills and the itch of my anger...I need to get me to the woods...to take of my city slicker and put on my wild, sweet Lady's slipper. The wild breath of trees will refresh my inner peace. Then...share it again.

I FELT YOU GREAT BLUE!

The Great Blue Heron is a regal bird. It stands motionless for long periods of time scanning the shallows for frog morsels and small fish. It never hurries...and when it spots a meal...it nabs it with a sure and confident motion, so fast that the meal doesn't know what hit him. I love Great Blues. They are always a reason for celebration when they first show up flying in their deliberate undullating motion up the Androscoggan River. Such an important bird presence in my life. When Stephen and I first got together and let the love between us wake up, my sister Beth was  beginning her long slow journey to the great beyond. It was a difficult time in my life, punctuated with the heavy pauses of guilt that were touched off by my good fortune in love developing as my sister began to slowly lose her life. Stephen and I met a woman who had MS and she was living alone in a daylight basement apartment in Marblehead. I was practicing massage at the time and because Beth had received a diagnosis of  MS, something in my heart was moved by this woman and her story of being bedridden all winter and how she kept her spirits up. Stephen and I visited her and when she asked us to take her outdoors, we made a seat with our hands and carried her out to see the sky and smell the air for the first time in early spring and as we carried her outside, a Great Blue Heron flew over our heads and all three of us were moved. From that day on, whenever we see a Great Blue, it has the effect of lifting our spirits and making us feel like whatever is happening...its all right and good. A few weeks later, that woman left in an RV for Arizona and a changed life in a friendlier climate. Great Blues spend much of their lives in a solitary hunt for food. They are opportunists and they don't really sing so much as they bark. I had the chance to hear the Great Blue's call when we took our first paddle around North Pond in our new kayaks. We managed to paddle up close to a large adult and when we got too close for comfort...he let out a hoarse bark and lifted off with his stunning wings spread wide. The call he made reminded me of how close this bird seems to be to the dinosaur Pteradactyl. The call was out of another era. It made the goosebumps rise on my arms. When I began sitting yearly with a circle of Shamans, the Great Blue arrived with a lovely woman art teacher from the coast. She had heron wings and made a dance by herself under the double rainbow that graced our day. When Stephen had his bypass surgery, I had many birds show up to bless us with their presence. But Stephen's encounter with a Great Blue on the day of his first motorcycle ride after the traumatic opening of his sternum was so very special. He was actually riding the Harley up route 5 headed to Bridgton when he spotted a large Great Blue beside the road. As he closed in on it, the bird slowly took off and as it lifted, it touched Stephen's head with a brush of it's wing. It was a close encounter with grace and he felt touched by an angel upon having that encounter. He was moved to tears when he told me about it afterwards and it is a story I'll never forget. So...upon finishing my blanket of songbirds and a saw-whet owl, it seemed only natural to try my hand at felting a Great Blue for Stephen. And having found this beautiful piece of birch bark on a walk in the woods with the dog, it seemed like a perfect background to display it. My only problem is how to attach it to the bark. I think I'll try to sew it with embroidery thread and a blanket stitch but maybe, if that doesn't work, I'll glue it. I never seem to love my creations when they are first made. But they kind of grow on me after time and after my inner critic falls asleep. The Great Blue is lots bigger than the rest of my felted bird squares...and as I worked on it, I discovered the Cornell birdcam of the Great Blue nest so I could see the heron in it's full breeding plumage. He has two black feathers off the top of his head and lots of showy feathers off his chest and saddle. He is one fancy dude and now I think of him as riding the motorcycle with Stephen when he goes off alone. My Dad had a boat named The Heron...it was a double bowed dory or something just a little odd and one of my last photos of my sister before she got sick were of her sitting in the bow seat of that boat with a captains hat on...one of those portuguese fisherman hats that my Dad loved so much. It's funny how the brain makes connections between things...like Beth and Birds and Birch and Stephen and a Great Blue for a healer. Birds do a powerful job of constellating memories for me. As I think about each one, I can go on and on about how it has featured in my life as a message or as a messenger. If I listen..without rushing...what would they tell me about my life? Have I even really known a bird until I felt it?

Mission Accomplished

Back in October, while my Mom was still in rehab recovering from a fall that has left her in need of supervision 24/7...my sister decided that the only way to keep Mom home was if she moved in with her. Her presence and a patchwork of willing souls who come in every day to help out so she can keep working, have given Mom this past winter, the gift of staying in her home. To me, my sister's decision to move in seemed huge...too big in fact and I became concerned about her mental state...and offered to come to Mass. every other weekend to sit with Mom so Sue could have some free time to call her own. Every other weekend felt like the least I could do...a piece of cake...after all, I could drive home. I'm always amazed at my mind. It's very quick to jump to conclusions both positive and negative. Before the winter I figured Mom was on her way out. Now she seems stronger...her humor is quick and though she gets confused when she gets up from her chair...she is sharp as a tack when she is sitting in her spot in the TV room. She's like a bird stitched into her environment...perched for flight but comfortable in her favorite tree. I also eventually realized that I had some concern for my own mental state and was projecting my version of reality onto both my Mom and sister. Being torn in half, that was my status for the winter. I flew down to Mass. on a Friday and returned to Maine on a Monday afternoon. As time ticked on, it took me longer and longer to get back into the rhythm of my own life here in Maine before it was time yet again to drive south. I wonder how well I truly know myself. The first stretch I spent in Salem was a 10 day stint right when she came home from rehab. I worked my artfelt landscape...a winter sunset view of looking out my kitchen window with the pink sky reflected in the pink water of the river...a frozen image yet rendering it in wool gave it texture and warmth. I quickly realized that I could sit for hours and even talk while working on the felting. I fell in love with the process. Meanwhile, as I sat with my mother, every hour was marked by the call of a bird from the Audobon bird clock I gave her years ago. The calls never corresponded to the hours and we would laugh and make jokes about owl time or chickadee time. I recalled the clock that we had as children in the kitchen of our home in Beverly Farms. It was a fascination to me because it was a village with houses and people and mountains and stuck to the second hand was a tiny train that passed through a tunnel as it made its way around the circle of life. As a child, I had a terrible fear of being late for school. It had much to do with the woman who was my scary witch-like second grade teacher who would point her fingers at us kids and yell DEAD DUCK if we were out of step with the rest of the class. I would watch the clock obsessing about being late for school to the point where my Dad actually took it down from the wall in the morning before we left for school. I loved and hated that clock...even though I remember it with great affection. The train whistled at certain times too. We had a real train that passed our house at the boundary of the back yard. I listen to one now as it blows its signal and passes through town. Anyway...my lifestyle is very moving...I don't sit long and I spend hours outdoors everyday. The cold is tolerable to a point where most folks would think me immune. As I sat each weekend with Mom, I began felting birds like the one April gave me for Christmas...the chickadee. It was a kit. I'd never even heard of felting before so I began doing research about the history of felting and due to the prohibitive price of kits, I set out to make my own squares and draw my own birds. Each bird now hold memories of conversations I had with my Mom or sister. I opted to arrange the patches in a circle because of the bird clock that chimed a Hoot Hoot Hoot...or some other call to mark the hour. The sound of felting often made Mom drowsy in the afternoons but it kept me busy and sane...and I thank goodness I had the foresight to bring the handiwork with me. I would have gone stir crazy I believe. As much as I love my Mom, I find her life of sitting isn't good for me. And by the time I returned to Maine...I had a backlog of unmoved energy that I needed to deal with or poor Stevo got some outfall. Thank goodness he was watching over me. He noticed my stress before I did. By mid February he was insisting I cut down on my trips to Salem. I made the decision to cut down to one visit a month beginning in April. I completed my promise of everyother weekend through the winter. I grew some self awareness and was successful at fulfilling a commitment. I also learned that it is not an easy task for a daughter to take care of her aging mother because the care comes out of the crevaces of hardened places in the heart. It seeps through the cold and ice that lies like a blanket of snow over the river in Winter...melted by the present moment of cherishing the time we have together, the love trickles into a flow despite the burdensome baggage of a lifetime of perceptions and feelings. I discovered I still held disappointment in my mother...anger at her...and I was forced to sit with it while focusing of bird forms and the promise of a returning spring. Those birds helped me stay above the petty angers in my old suitcase of despair and helped me realize the beauty and freedom of choosing to find love and forgiveness in the the presence of my mothers love. I realize now...it is never too late to love and to forgive, until a person is gone. Now my mission is accomplished. My promise was kept and Mother Nature will keep her promise. The birds will return and the frozen landscape will become green and alive with Eagles, geese, ducks and all manner of songbirds...and when my Mom is gone, I will put my blanket over my shoulders to stay warm in my heart and remember the time we had together when nothing but love flowed freely between us.

TRICKLE TURNS TO FLOW

Mmmm...today is March 23. We've had six straight days of temperatures in the 70-85 degree range. The snow is nearly gone and places that usually wet my feet up to my ankles are bone dry. There is no doubt in my mind that the climate is changing and I didn't need Al Gore to tell me either. Just keep watching NOVA and Discovery, and the changing habitats of the Arctic and Antartic tell the whole story loud and clear. We tapped our sugar maples just two weeks ago and already the run is finished. Our years harvest is 1/3 of the usual sap run. But this year we tapped 2 birches and have been drinking birch sap which is touted as a spring tonic in Russia and the Nordic areas.  We Americans are so focused on consumer use of resources that we don't even think about trees as a food and medicine resource right in our own back yards. Birch sap, if you research it on line, is useful for balancing blood sugars, cholesterol, blood pressure, treating inflammation, helping the body release unnecessary fluids, clearing grit from the liver and kidneys and providing unusual protiens and trace minerals that support a glowing immune system. I also discovered Chaga tea which is helpful in detering the growth of cancer. I'm having a serious love affair with all things Birch and where the sugar maple run is done...my Birch sap continues to run...and I'm along for the ride. The intense heat has made hiking a little treacherous as water is flowing beneath the ice pack and that is thin enough to step through so every step is an adventure...a good motto for living life fully. The usual thin trickle of March waters is a veritable flow this year and as I walk and sit beside the streams and brooks of my habitat, I say prayers for the changes ahead. I fear a hot dry summer because healthy life needs good moisture and our whole humanity depends on water for our survival.

But when I think of trickle...I think of my sister Beth, whose name in the Druidic alphebet means Birch...
she left this life as a beautiful 26 year old with a whole life of unfullfilled dreams ahead of her. The story is long and sad...and her surgeon , when she was in the original trauma of surviving a very bad car crash,   gave her a stuffed Owl as a get well gift. He became important to her as she made her 4 1/2 year journey
from a hospital bed to her creator. She named him Trickle...after the tears that made a constant stream down her pretty cheeks. My Mom still has Trickle. And while sitting with my Mom, after her fall, I got into needle felting and upon felting a Northern Sawet Owl, I then began making tiny baby owls and giving them away. There is magic in metaphor and some how my brain has made a link between Trickle, my owl making, birch sap and Chaga(a fungus that grows on birches), Beth and birch and healing a deep core wound that has prevented me from being a full participant in my own life. What's important here isn't the details of the story so much as the thread of perception that has connected me in my family tree to my sister Beth and the passion I have for Birches...lithe and graceful, sweet and flexible...Beth and Birch and simmering sweet saps of spring have all opened my eyes to the meaning of Trickle becoming Flow. Now to trust...and hope for a thirst quenching beginning to a new and full participation in this un-frozen being

TAKING MY THYME

WOW, March blasted in with a 12 inch snowfall and today it's nearly 60 degrees and the snow cover is vanishing. I came home from my last weekend visit to Salem with some kind of New England crud that immediately went to my chest. I felt it hovering around for the days I spent at Moms but the weather wasn't so great so we ended up sitting in the living room most of the days. Sunday, being nicer, I tried to push a walk...just a little one but it was windy and she feels the cold so much more intensely than I, that I let her turn us around almost immediately. I find it difficult to stay in all day. Most days here at home, I'm outdoors for at least 3 hours and many days are upwards of 6 hours outside either walking the dog, skiing, snowshoeing or even just catching some rays in a chair by the fire pit. When that old tightness in my chest started, I consulted my homemade medicine chest. Back in 2002, I took an Herbal Apprenticeship and learned a lot about different plants both wild and cultivated and I learned how to make teas and tinctures, salves and oils. I chose Thyme...a very good plant for fighting flu and respiratory infection. I began taking it 4 times a day and after only 24 hours, I was aware of a difference in my ability to breathe deeply. I also began having a productive cough rather than a dry irritating one. I had the luxury of time as well because of the fact that I'm still unemployed. I was much quicker to reach for the Drugstore remedies that mask symptoms when I was working. I have been remembering the feeling of being rushed...the pressure of getting to work at a given hour, to be able to accomplish customer service when not feeling well, the polite disgust of customers when you are seized by a sudden attack of coughing. There is something about the way we are conditioned to live and work that honors what we can do for the business we work for...what we are paid to do...that comes at the expense of doing what we most need to do for ourselves. And we do this for our entire lives. It starts with kindergarten where we first beigin to learn that what we want and what we feel is not important if it is not in sync with what the group is doing or with what the teacher says. truly, it's no wonder that some people shrivel up and die when they retire because they have no practice living their life according to their own inner promptings. If they don't have a time clock to punch, they don't know how to structure their day. So for 5 days now, I've been taking my Thyme tincture and whatever was heavy in my chest seems to be gone. My mind keeps playing with the words Time and Thyme...and since saturday nite when we all set our clocks ahead, we have more light if not more time. I realized that taking charge of my own time, and slowing down my pace to accomodate some of the changes aging brings to my body, I have given myself the time to experience the power of Thyme as a healing herbal ally. The rich reward of being unemployed is that I am redefining my relationship with time and my time belongs to me. I have slowed down enough to learn something from taking my Thyme and the medicine spreads to encourage me in my efforts to take my time. I can't describe in words what this feeling is...to lift the plaster of artificial definition and expectation that comes to a small soul at the tender age of 5 with the beginnings of a lifetime of conditioning a person to fit in with the crowd...and the lifetime of the workday world causes that plaster to harden...to become hard, crusty and inflexible. What it feels like to lift off that artificiality is huge...I just can't find words to describe it. So, I'll just keep taking my Thyme...taking my time and know that somehow I will get this pressure off my chest. And with the deep genuine breath of March's soft springlike air, I can begin to feel five again...in my heart of hearts.

HEARTFELT and WHOLEHEARTED

This is a story of a Creating Circle...a love story...a story of healing long and slow. I am going to tell it backwards because I can only see it looking back and I am supremely grateful that I have learned to see it at all. This little felted lady is all heart. I spent an afternoon with my friend April playing with felting. It was Valentines Day actually and I started out poking hearts shaped with cookie cutters. I made a bunch...6 anyway. As we jabbed and poked, and talked and laughed, I noticed April was forming a head just as I noted that the pink heart looked like feet. Soooo...I started making a head and suddenly I knew what the 6 hearts were for. I do love the spirit of creativity. You always have to take a leap of faith even to begin to make something because sometimes you just don't know in your head what your heart wants to do. Writing is like that too. Sometimes you just have to start without knowing where your headed and all the steps you take finally begin to point the way...and you say AHA! so that's where I am going. So her little body is a heart with another heart at her center. Her hat is a smaller heart and if you turn her around, she has a heart backpack she is wearing that says LOVE. Her wings are half hearts. Her hair is white and she has a rat tail in the back because she is a cool old bird. She came together in the spirit of creativity, of sharing and hanging out with a good friend who also finds sustenance from making stuff and delights in the discovery as things unfold. I love my friend April. I have known her since we were young parents in Marblehead, though I knew of her from early high school years. Her friendship has helped me navigate some very stormy seas...painting pottery at her shop called Hands On...making ornaments for the UU church fair...working at Me and Thee...taking part in Goddess education and when I hit the bottom in Marblehead, April had appreciation for parts of me that no one else seemed to notice. It was a great pink morning when she and Ken moved to Maine and once again, we became neighbors. In February 2003, just before they moved up, Stephen and I were invited for a dinner with April and Ken at Gary and Les's house. It was once again, Valentines Time...the day after I believe. Stephen couldn't come to dinner because he had contracted the flu at Sunday River and he was too sick to go...but I went anyway. Stephen and I were having some relationship difficulties that seemed a product of moving away from the familiar old and welcoming the new and unfamiliar...a necessary process to moving from one state to another.

Two days later, I came down with the flu. I had a high fever. I found myself beside myself...nearly hallucinating...feeling like I wanted to jump out of my skin and bite the wall. Had I been a dog, I may have had rabies. I was ferocious and frothing at the mouth. Stephen took me to the health center and I was given something that was supposed to reverse the growth of the virus. I'm not sure it was a good thing. The upshot of the whole thing was, the virus caused me to have Congestive Heart Failure. I was weak, fearful, unable to participate in anything fully. By April, I noticed that I could barely carry my skis from the car to the lift at Barker. The little mound from the porch to the lift was like a mountain to me. I began my regular trips to the doctor. That spring was a wet one and over time it became more and more difficult to breathe. I was treated for asthma. I moved very slowly through the spring and summer. My sister heidi came to visit and she expressed real concern about my health as I had to sleep in a chair by that point. I was a crappy wife at that point and a worse friend. I had no energy for anyone or anything, though I did manage to plant my garden. It was harvesting my first potatoes that told me something serious was going on. DUH!!! I couldn't even carry 2 lbs of potatoes up the ramp to the house without stopping a bunch of times to catch my breath.

Stephen and I were celebrating our 20th anniversary in 2003. It was August 20th. We made our way to Monhegan Island after a stop at the doctor. I wanted something so I could breathe...thought a boat ride in the fresh air and some recreation time with Stephen was all I really needed. I was given an inhaler and some kind of sodium based medicine that I can't remember now. Driving to the coast, we passed a farm. I was mildly alarmed by the fact that as we passed, I experienced a cow that appeared to turn into a pig. In my usual dismissive way, we laughed and ignored it and continued on our journey.It was a gorgeous hot weekend and I was looking forward to the fairy houses and the art and spending the night in an inn. So...that meant walking. Monhegan isn't flat but you can't call it really hilly either. As we walked I became increasingly distressed, finally with Stephen taking my hand and waiting patiently every few steps for breath, we passed an ambulance with grass growing through it and plants curled all around it. I became frightened because it suddenly dawned on me that if something of a health crisis were to happen,
we were miles out to sea and far from any emergency assistance. I couldn't sleep all night and when we got up in the AM, I was swollen with elephant legs. How did I wait so long? How did I dismiss the signs? How did I not care enough about myself to get help? When we finally went home, I saw the doctor again. This time...4 months after the first symptoms, they took an x-ray and discovered my heart had hugely enlarged and my lungs were full of fluid. By the time I was seen by a cardiologist, my heart was functioning at 19%. But the scariest thing was, I was imagining how great it would be to stop breathing altogether. It was so hard to breathe that I wanted to die. I not only had heart failure... I was depressed, unable to sleep, feeling unloved and unloving and that no only was my heart failing...but my whole life was a failure. I no longer feared death. I welcomed it. Perhaps one of me did die.

Today...nine years later...I seem to be healed. It has been a very long journey, learning to see how the mind and spirit interact with the body both positively and negatively. Mental habits are the most insidious and difficult for me to get a grip on. I am my own worst enemy and I see that in the self talk that I indulge in when I am tired, depressed or frustrated. I was on a ton of medications, including antidepressants until just last fall. Today, I still have to take a few heart meds and will have to take them for the rest of my life.That wasn't an easy pill to swallow for a nature girl who wants everything natural and pure. But today...Ah yes TODAY...in this very moment...at this present time...I just finished 30 minutes on my treadmill and I jogged the whole time...and I didnt get tired. I felt heart power surge. I felt whole...I felt wholehearted and connected to my homemade St. Johnswort/ Dandilion/Hawthorne tincture that helps my heart have wings and I feel the love in my heart being liberated...slowly at first...toward the folks that have been caring to me. I feel grateful for the wonders of friends in my life and the healing power of nature and I try now to imagine...what can my life hold when I set that heart power free ?

The moral of the story is...care for the heart first...then give it a head...but don't forget the wings. This ole bird has dreams of flight. Perhaps today is lift off.

EVOLVING FELT

I received a gift from a friend for Christmas. It was a Felting Kit to make the chickadee coaster at the bottom of the photo. Amazingly, I'd never heard of felting before or if I had, I never paid any attention to it. But the soil had been worked so to speak. Two years ago, we bought a lamb from a friend who raised them and Stephen was invited to his house one November morning to shoot the purchase. When he returned with the dead lamb in the back of the truck, I sunk my hands into the wool and sobbed my heart out for it's loss of life. I felt the lanolin on my hands and the soothing gratitude in my heart that somehow made it possible for me to come to terms with the death caused by my choice to eat meat. I love lamb. We don't eat much red meat but we both love the flavor of lamb...and the way it smells when it's cooking reminds me of my mother making Sunday dinner for the family when I was a kid. It was the only meal during the week that we shared with our parents. After I had my private mourning for the lamb and my gratitude had been expressed, I cut some of the raw wool thinking that one day, I might make something to honor the life of that spring lamb. Then I sent most of it to a friend who makes fiber arts. That was that. Then I got this kit. It was a small block of foam, two needles, a selection of colored wool needed to render the image and a 5x5 piece of wool felt...a canvas for the image. There were also directions and a picture of a chickadee to transfer. I carefully avoided it for a few weeks. It seems to be a deep pattern for me. Whenever I buy new art supplies or something new that is just for me, it takes a while for me to warm up to it. I might have avoided it all winter if April hadn't invited me over to play with the felting with her. I discovered I loved the process. You can do it beside a fire or while chatting or watching stupid shows on TV. I love the tender softness of the wool...the bright natural dyes that color it, the rhythmic poking, pricking, and smacking of the fibers. I love how forgiving it is...how easy to correct errors and how easy it is to pick up after. I love the fact that it is a process that works with the natural properties of wool fiber and encourages the warm wool to become fabric even in its raw form. I quickly realized that I wanted to do more birds and a field trip to A Wrinkle In Thyme Farm opened up a whole new vista. First and foremost, I wanted to do a larger piece inspired by a photo of the view out my kitchen window. Purchases needed to be made...a multiple needle felting tool...a larger piece of wool felt backing...lots of colors. I spent quite a bit of money rapidly and realized I would not be able to buy kits of birds because the price was inhibitive. My next hurdle was to decide I could render the birds on wool myself...not easy for a person who really doesn't draw well. So it took one more field trip with April to find more colored roving and some real wool yardage to create my own bird squares. Meanwhile...I tentatively worked on my larger landscape while I sat with my Mom in Salem. The landscape was pretty exciting because I really got a sense of painting with the wool. It fed my confidence just enough to get up my mojo for making some birds. That is how I became hooked on felting.

After I purchased a black woolen blanket and centered the landscape on it...I could see it more as an art piece. The January Landscape of a pink sunset and the flowing pink river was a perfect meditation for healing prayers for my sister's breast surgery. The cold winter image and the stark trees amoung snow in the meadows made me feel all that was frozen inside as well as outside. Fears...stoic crustiness...frozen water and the absense of wildlife all seemed bleak. But the light...so pink above and below...thats where the prayer was. And funnily enough, a pink dawn greeted me after I took her to the hospital for her morning mastectomy. Pink is good. It's a happy color...soft and girlish.  A gift of prayer for her healing. As we awaited and I sat with my mother for hours, I felted birds. They seemed to be a reminder and a promise of return...the return of spring...the return of birds and their songs in the trees...the return of my sisters good health. And while I felted birds...my mother and I chatted about her mother's love of cardinals...the Cedar Waxwing that signaled my Grandmother's immenent death...lots of experiences where birds crystallized memories. She would become quiet and doze listening to the gentle pounding of me needling the felt. There was alot of love in the air and I managed to bring it on down to earth by working those birds. And as I worked, each hour was marked by the calls on my mother's bird clock. I wonder...what time is bluebird time? What hour is the cardinal song? Is the Goldfinch ready for tea? And then it seemed quite obvious what I should do with the birds. I thought...I'll make 12 of them and put them in a circle around the Winter Sunset and when I am finished...I will have my mother's promise of return hammered into a blanket that will keep me warm while I sink into my reveries. I like it. I like the whole thing...My Mom...Mother Nature...the deep freeze...the pink light and the returning songbirds. And I especially love my first friend, the chickadee...persistent...undaunted...and even in the dead of winter...cheerful. I will also have something that will forever remind me of my sweet alone time with my Mom as she rested her old bones by the fire.

IS IT TIME ???

Hello 2/12/12. Today here in Bethel is a frigid one...a real breath of ole man winter. The wind makes my nose run and when I breathe in deep, I can feel a cold burn in my lungs and even Sadie is ready to come inside after chasing her tennis balls for a bit. The snow is crunchy and everywhere we walk regularly has become slick with ice. This is a strange winter, and strange is unusual, unfamiliar, unpredictable...surprising. A week ago, there were 35 robins in my crab apple taking turns on the fruitfest with a large flock of Cedar Waxwings. Shocking on a groundhog day in early February. My trips to Mass. create an unusal pattern to my life and as I journey north to south...then south to north twice a month, I feel a little like The Little Engine That Could...and as I repeat my mantra of "I think I can...I think I can...I think I can" when I feel like I'm running out of steam, I find there is real power in self talk. Expressing fear of not being able to handle it seems to affirm my inability to handle it...where the more positive tune on my dial, leaves me feeling surprised at how much I can accomplish. So I keep putting along as winter confounds and I am blessed with extraordinary signs of early spring to reassure and promise the icy slippery slope that I'm on will eventually become solid ground under my feet again. Massachusetts has already tapped for Maple syrup and these big fat buds are already set to bursting while here the windows are still decorated in frost patterns and the air is biting. I feel like I'm journeying between two worlds as I make my way between seasons. The ravens and fox, owls and coyote are all restless with the deep stirrings of spring. As the north wind bites my nose today...I am filled with a breath of warm southern air during a thermal inversion on the chairlift and there is the promise. I imagine my Mom is journeying between worlds as well...though I expect her journey shuttles her between here and the great beyond. She is building a bridge just as I am...a bridge between two worlds.

This visit was a bit different because my sister was scheduled for her mastectomy on monday and the atmosphere of the house was a generalized concern for her procedure and affirmations for the outcome. Mom was aware of the issues but she frequently visits other times. She woke up Tuesday morning saying she had to go see Bethy at the hospital. She knew she might be needed by one of her daughters but in her early morning post dream state, she was visiting my sister Beth who passed away in 1985. The brain is a remarkable thing and one is left wondering about the validity of parallell universes. Perhaps the doorway to those realms is in our own brains.

Any way...we are 2 women travelling between 2 worlds in our own unique way...even as we make the journey from winter to spring. There is no real "RIGHT" time for spring to start. We humans are so enamored of our timepieces...our clocks...our 24 hours, our time zones...all created by the brain of the human. Real time is told by processes. Real time is the department of Mother Nature. She is the authority on timing and she doesn't really give a hoot if we are syncronized with her rhythms or not. But I can assure you...the less one structures ones life around human made time and embraces the rhythms of the changing Earth, the more harmoniously one can fulfill ones plans. Spring is supposed to start on March 21. The Celts celebrated the deep stirrings of spring on February 2 with their holiday known as Imbolc. They seemed to understand that even though the cold and snow met the eye...there were mating ravens and owls, arriving flocks of birds and life starting to move deep beneath the surfaces of things...all perceivable by the heart. I'm feeling the quickening of approaching birth. This year I am more in tune with my wild mother. We had a really early spring arrive in 2009 and Stephen and I were so conditioned by our experience with past time that when the sap started to run in mid-february, we ignored it and stayed in denial because we don't tap before the first weekend in March. Holding on to human time...we missed the first half of the maple sap run altogether. Thanks to taking care of my personal Mom, I am more tuned in to my wild Mom and I am listening to the secret signs of the birds and animals. Spring is coming. And if we want to catch the sweetness of life and harvest the gifts of the trees, we are better off hearing from the birds...what time is it? Time for the Robins to start singing in the spring.

BREATH OF SPRING

Age is really just a statistic. Isn't it? There's a person inside of me that seems untouched by the passing years. She keeps life interesting because she doesn't act her age. She doesn't really even seem to be aware of her age. Nor does she really care about anybody elses'. She just keeps on keeping on yet she constantly surprises me. Today was race day. I remember as a 12 year old skiing at Wildcat and Black Mountain in Jackson NH that I was most impressed by the "Silver Streaks". That's what they called the skiers over fifty and I remember thinking to myself...Wow. I hope I can still ski when I'm that old. When we moved to Maine in 2000, I was a terminal intermediate skier because I really never had too much of a chance to practice my skills. We...as children...came north with my Dad to ski maybe once a year. I was told by a ski teacher at Whitney's Hill that I might become a ski racer because I seemed to so enjoy the speed. I was rubbery and much closer to the ground...bouncy and springy and flexible.As parents of young children, we struggled financially and managed to make one trip a year to the mountains...enough to pass on our love of winter sports to our kids but still not enough time to break through the intermediate barrier. I would be pretty confident after the third day but we never stayed longer than 4, so the next year, I'd start from scratch again building up my confidence. Stephen lived in Vermont for some years and he really became proficient as a skier...but until he learned how to coach a student in skiing, he was pretty pathetic as a teacher. He believed in me. He figured I could do terrain that I felt intimidated by and sometimes it seemed that skiing with him set me further backwards. But things have changed because of living up here. He actually talked me into participating in the locals challenge race and so at the tender age of 57...I dropped into my first course and skied my first gates. When I crossed the finish line whole...I cried like a baby....such was the cache of fear that I had built up in my mind and the relief I felt once I completed the run. I felt like a 10 year old. And actually...as I recall...I fell that run even though I finished. Today I felt similar. Now I'm 59 and I've been participating for 2 years and now am working on my third.

As I weave between caring for my Mom and trying to be strong and supportive of my baby sister as she sets out to beat Cancer...I feel tender...uncertain...never clear if I will become tearful at some odd little thing...a song in the supermarket...a look between a mother and child...I have very strong feelings...anger, sadness, delight in my blessings. Sometimes when I come home I am irritable and crabby and I just want to hide. I can't do anything to change things for my family...but I can be there and I can help get through the days that challenge. But I often feel like an infant. Can't find words to communicate...sometimes I can only cry...kick my legs and pound the ground. Anguish is exhausting and it leaves me little in the way of energy for the more superficial issues that surround me. I find I am open and vulnerable...somedays, feeling like an almost 60 year old...somedays feeling like a 12 year old.
Strength ebbs and flows. I'm never sure if I can actually pull off what I've set up for myself based on my self-knowledge of the past. I went to my first day of volunteering at MHS...Maine Handicapped Skiing and rather than help a disabled person to feel the joy and freedom of skiing, I began to weep. I met my own sad self and was totally unable to rise to the occaision even though rationally speaking...a time of unemployment is a wonderful time to volunteer and stay connected. I realized I couldn't take the pressure right now...that my needy little self needed to free ski as therapy. Everyone is super...very supportive...understanding...forgiving. And there I am...feeling inept...can't rise to the occaision...that old critic slips in for a field day. Confidence is hard won. And it builds slowly. Set backs are tough. They demand that a person develope a new tactic within ...supportive...understanding...forgiving. Can't I BE THAT PERSON? Well yes I can...as long as I'm willing to see the rude, mean and critical way that I talk to myself.

So we had a few inches of snow yesterday and we slept great on our new king sized bed. The morning dawned soft and everything was highlighted in white. As I rode the chairlift to the top of Barker to take my first race run, there was a thermal inversion. It was cold and sleeting some at South Ridge but higher up on the hill, the temperature went up a lot. We rade through the fog and as we came out of it, I inhaled deeply and my lungs were filled with a warm southern air...a real smell of spring. I felt like a little kid. Conditions were great but the light was flat and my goggles kept glazing over. I was nervous about the race. I try not to think too much because that seems to screw me up. If I think too much I talk myself out of things better than I talk myself into them. So...no talk. Just do it. And I did. I took a dive about half way down the course. But I told myself...get up and finish. So I did. No dramatic tears at the end. No awkward self-conciousness. I made it. I finished. I'm whole. And because I got up and finished...I didn't go again. Didn't need to. I probably came in DFL...but the whole point of this lesson is to show up and do your best for the team. Noone is judging me. Dare I drop the judgement of myself? That really makes me feel young...just like a child of the universe who deserves to be here. I'm so much younger when I lead with my heart... and that old almost 60 year old lady that thinks too much...talks too much and judges too much...well she's really doing just fine...especially when she forgets too much.

QUESTIONS

I'm trying to get used to this changing energy of mine. I used to know myself pretty well...I could anticipate how much gusto I'd need for various areas of my life and not think twice about saying "Sure...I can help out with that" or "you can count on me" and I was that person who prided herself on walking her talk or doing exactly what I said I would do. I was dependable, responsible and if I said I'd be there, I'd slog through whatever the mud of the day appeared, to follow through on my word. Lately, I'm somewhat of a stranger to myself and I don't always like this older me. I'm trying to be gentle with myself. I've made one commitment that I feel compelled to follow through on. That's my promise to my sister that I will come down to Salem every other weekend to take care of my Mum. At the time she was discharged from the rehab center after her fall in September, I was unemployed. I decided that making this plan to give Sue respite time and hang out with Mom was the most important use of my time and unemployment was a great blessing, allowing me the luxury of scheduling my life around those biweekly visits. Given my sister is doing a huge amount of caring for her, I look at my offer of Friday afternoon to Monday morning twice a month as a piece of cake. Yet each time I go, I am utterly drained and it takes me a couple of days to get back to myself when I return home. Monday morning when I returned to Maine, I walked outside to put my bags in the car at 8:30 am and I sucked the fresh air in for all I was worth. It dawned on me that I hadn't stepped foot out of the house since I had arrived on Friday afternoon. I...who spends at least 2 hours a day outdoors in the woods romping with Sadie and on many days even more...hadn't set one foot outside. When I'm in Salem, I'm on...and it is easy for me to watch myself get antsy and then tell myself to relax...I can do all that when I get home. Consequently...by the time I get home, I'm cranky and irritable and feeling put upon. I take my books and writing and even some felting down with me for diversion and something to do that has some quantum of solace for me to feel like I care for myself as I care for my Mom. But how do I explain the feeling I have of being drained? By Wednesday, I was ready to do some skiing and I showed up to the Locals Challenge to make points for my team...Rooster's Chicks...but it was another windy Wednesday and the race was cancelled.

I notice my energy level is more like Mother Nature's...it comes and goes...sometimes it's behind the fog on the river...sometimes it is hiding in my long johns and once I put them on, I feel perked up and raring to go. First there is a mountain... then there is no mountain...then there is...caterpillar sheds its skin to find a butterfly within! 70's songs bubble up from the sulpher mud of my heart and sometimes the words are wise. Sometimes they are not so inspiring. Nature doesn't always come through to support human plans either, so I don't know why I expect otherwise of myself. My intensions are good but I don't always seem to have the carry through. I find my words are more often things I trip over when silence might be the wiser song to sing. Today, I'm trying to make piece with my emotional neediness. I burst into tears because I've held them back for some time. I try to make myself available as a volunteer at Maine Handicapped and discover that I am the needy, handicapped person I need to help on the slopes. I am so full of unshed tears that as soon as I enter the scene at MHS, I'm raining...dripping...verclempt...unable to be of assistance to anyone. And I leave having broken my own heart. I just don't have the extra to give...even though to my rational mind, this winter seemed like the perfect time to be a volunteer, I find in truth that I am overburdened just being there for my family. I have to laugh thinking of a conversation I had with Mom before she came home from rehab. She asked me if I missed taking care of people...I've done it all my life. I chuckled and told her no...I'm done taking care of everyone. Her response was...Good...at least you know that. And so much for knowing that because I'm taking care of her anyway. My theory that taking care of people can be an addiction is biting me in the butt. It reminds me of wrestling with the thoughts of being addicted to a person in a marriage. A cool, indifferent attitude is not going to result in warmth and closeness in any relationship. In fact, seeing any relationship as an addiction is dishonoring that relationship. Why devalue love by calling it addiction? Why not see love as a higher truth? I take care of people because I care for them...often they are family. I love and therefore, I care...I care and therefore I take care of. It is true that caring too much can burn you out. But I'd rather be burned by caring too much then be so cool that I am indifferent to the needs of the people I call family.

I'm not going to wallow in guilt for not being able to come through for the handicapped skiers. And I'm not going to assume that just because I've worked at something all my life...it will keep working for me. I seem to be as unpredictable as Mother Nature so the best I can do is to dump all my assumptions about myself and allow myself to flow like the river...sometimes hidden in ground fog...sometimes iced over...sometimes ripping and overspilling the banks with unleashed springmelt. Is a river addicted to flow? I suppose you could say that. But why not say it is the river's nature to flow? Then flow seems like a noble destiny... rather than minimizing that noble destiny by assuming the river is addicted to flowing. Can you think outside the box simply by using different words? Am I trapped by the language I use? Freed by the silence? Mmmmm? Sssshhhhh. Maybe this explains my obsession with removing labels and reframing what I see. Now to call work...play.

I LOVE HOW I FELT

This photo is the view from my kitchen window in January. I never cease to be amazed at the beauty before me and I count my blessings...in fact it seems like an absolute miracle that I should wake up every day and be able to say wow...this is my home. It's a soft fuzzy feeling. As a lifelong keeper of journals, I have noticed that my journaling habit really jelled when I started using writing to understand the complexity of my feelings. Nothing is ever cut and dried for me. There is always feeling and reaction to feeling...superficial feeling and deeper, truer feeling. There's what I tell myself to keep on keeping on when the juice is gone and then there is the underneath yearning for to find the juice itself. Writing is my friend that way. It helps me to feel my way along...to move through the dark and to do so in a way that is honest for me. I've made all kinds of discoveries about myself through writing and I am grateful...yet writing only goes so far. Words take you places and words can be put together to form endless images to surprise and delight. The words themselves have color and feeling and the language has a rhythm and a music. But there are places where words are ineffective. In fact, they can actually cause more misunderstanding than they solve...especially between folks who have a very long history together...like family or a long term spouse. There comes those places in life when the words touch off a sarcastic "blah blah blah" going off in my brain. And focusing on the words that someone says only drives me farther away from the essence of their intent. Communication is a downright miracle but I want to get to the bottom of it all. So writing starts to seem like my old favorite jeans when life wants me to try out something new. I have drawn this view from the window...and painted it in acrylics and watercolors...made pictures with crayons and craypas. Once I even tried to render it in stained glass but that was a bit of a disaster... creating many slivers of broken glass and a feeling of embarrassment because I had tried to do something so complex with a medium that I had no experience with. And so I wrote out how I felt. And I laughed it all off. I am pretty funny.

I was given a gift this Christmas. My good friend April gave me a felting kit. Ever hear of it? I hadn't...though I had seen lots of wonderful creations at the Fryeburg Fair made from fibers, I was not informed about felting. My grandmother made lace. She tatted. And she made our clothes...navy coats with anchor buttons, Peter pan collared dresses that we wore with black Mary Janes...and my grandmother was Love embodied. I tried sewing and gave up because my sister was so much better at it. I tried knitting and after what seems 100 years, I've finally mastered the knit stitch but never learned to pearl. I keep trying because there is some need inside me to express myself in fabric. I want to be moved in the very fabric of my being. I want to live the warp and the weft because I feel the duality of things even in the essential oneness of their manifestation. I feel it when I go to Salem now to care for my Mom. I come back like a shuttle thru a loom and then I'm home again just a little changed but still the same...and then I take myself from home and under I go again, shuttling back and forth adding rows and creating the fabric of my life as I enter the threshold of the Elders. So I got this kit. Felting is applying colored fibers with a special needle to a background of felt or distressed wool. The nature of the wool fiber makes it possible to make one out of many. You can apply small amounts of a color and work it into the fabric to create pictures, birds, landscapes or even small sculptures. I worked on the Chickadee square that April gave me. Oh...it's so satisfying. It's a wordless process...banging, needling, poking, prodding and you can do it by the fire...and while your talking as long as you are careful not to stab yourself. I enjoyed the process so much that a trip to Wrinkle In Thyme Farm became essential. We went up to Sumner on Sunday and suddenly a whole world of potential opened up.

I saw felted squares and flowers and wall hangings and even landscapes. There was a whole pallette of colors to choose and a real felting needle that is definitely the right tool for the job. I thought about my writing. All my soft feeling written on the pages and hidden away. I thought of Sadie and how she turns an open stomach to us when she surrenders to love, making all her tender places open and vulnerable. I tend to cover mine up and pretend bravado so as not to seem overly sensitive or soft. I learned to do that to protect myself in my family of 5 girls. Exposing my softness...the hardest thing about marriage is to become truly vulnerable and open and yet it is that which is most satisfying because that softness, that tenderness...those places that hurt and that dance quietly in the trees where no one can see...those are the places that need to define a relationship if it is to have the strength to survive the aging process. So now I can bang and needle and poke and prod the fibers of the sheep we had the honor of eating thanks to our friends who raised her...and I can mix colors and define spaces and essentially draw my landscape in wool...a warm, soft, project that slowly becomes a fabric that captures the beauty of the vision beyond my window. I'm excited. Suddenly my day begins with more energy. I feel like a teenager in love...right down to the fabric of my being. And the days below zero pass happily while I imagine the potential ways to create in this medium. Thanks April...you have brought so much warmth to my January.

SO MUCH FOR A DOT

Woke up this morning with an image from my dreamscape...I saw a white rotary telephone and in the middle of it there was a red circle...a button to push for emergencies. It all had something to do with my mother and in that sweet place of right brain thinking, I began to let other images color the landscape. A conversation I had with my sister over her MRI yesterday where she said..."There was a surgeon but all I remember about her was her red blouse and her ruby necklace" Then my friend Jill approaching me at the Locals Challenge cocktail party to tell me about a large male cardinal she spotted in her dwarf cherry tree yesterday. I thought of the Japanese flag...a white field with a red circle on it...and our family ritual meal for celebration being sushi. That brought back a conversation in the chairlift with a young man who shared a secret...that in the kitchen at a local sushi place, the kitchen staff likes to cook steaks and hamburgers for themselves one night a week. Then I remembered a poem I wrote about a red spot on a field of snow and the portending...a sad moment for a small animal whose vital fluids left the mark but a triumphant moment for a hungry raptor who seized the opportunity and the moment to feed his strength and to take his meal. That brought back a story from another friend about her dog going missing for less than 3 minutes and coming back covered in fresh red blood. My little brain is perking with the snippetts of images and conversations, weaving some kind of meaning into what might otherwise seem like unrelated subjects. Suddenly, there is a focal point for all kinds of associations.

The fresh snow is falling fast and furiously. It is a quiet blanket that lays a mantle of silence over everything. And in the extra white extra silent atmosphere, an angry redness beats against my right ear as I busy myself doing the things that I've told myself are more important than creative expression...like cleaning, fireplace sweeping, food preparation...anything but creative play when creative play is all I seem to want. There's a red dot on that white field too. And any white field of my life has an army of naysayers hanging around and telling me to wait...wait till the house is clean, wait till the food is cooked..ssshhhh...don't speak up. Oh no...don't mess up. I can hear my 2nd grade teacher with her pointy red polished fingernails pointing straight at me and her witches voice yelling DEAD DUCK. How did Tidiness become the Queen of my life? How did that iron clasp of shuffling around incedental nothings become the important center of my life? No wonder there is a feeling of emptiness in my heart . I've become so adept at avoiding the error of my ways...ie expressing myself honestly and creatively...that I have warded off all the love and pleasure and juice to focus my energies on sweeping ashes, making beds, doing laundry and creating food. In my effort to follow directions for the tyrant witch of my second grade art class, I have censored my deepest uniqueness...put my hands over my ears and pretended to not hear the urges of story coming across the radio waves. And whats really pathetic about all this is that I've been wrestling with it all my life. The effort becomes boring and ineffective. My poor little inner bird chick wants satisfaction. She is tired of going through the motions of freeing up the inner artist and then not giving her a time and place to play.

Sooo...the white blanket of snow...a long awaited storm day and an openness to receiving some help from the universe...I ran outside with my spray paint and made a big red splotch on the white snow to see if there was something there...something trying to speak to me...something I try to close my ears to...and what did I get? I got the open white moment and the opportunity to make my mark. My heart beats a red blotch...a period...a dot...a life lost for a life gained. A red splat is vital...a new beginning...a sun rising...new life in the midst of cold white nothingness...a trail. I placed that red splat at the base of the family totem pole and now it is a prayer...a prayer for the healing power of red to step forward from the backround of white...to take the risk and put itself out there...to say yes to life and to love and Fuck you, to Miss Pelletier. That red spot is a calling...it is a new beginning. So Lisa...take that red dot and turn it into a line. Go ahead. I dare you.

ICE IMAGES

Finally. The temperature actually seems to be in harmony with the month. It is January. Cold as a witches'...slow as mollasses. January is supposed to be cold.  How else to move on and flow into 2012 than to give 2011 the cold shoulder? Yup. It's cold...about 15 and windy. Finally got some free skiing in since the vacation people have all gone home and it's a good thing because the races start tomorrow. I prefer skiing in the cold. It's not that I like to go that fast but I like the sound of the very cold snow...the squeeking reminds me of the sand at Singing Beach. My skis sing. My cheeks pink. My nose hairs crackle. It's finally winter.  And the most inspired artist ever is at work delighting me with surprises of light and crystal shine. That old wild mother is using her tools...wind, cold and contrast...to whip up the most amazing landscapes on windowpanes... and in the woods where ever water travels... and where moments drip into flow and disappear forever from awareness, she has captured those moments in icicles of diamond shine catching light.. and twinkling a pale pink. Ice formations in the woods are extraordinary. The are such a surprise to encounter and when you take the time to look at them, to appreciate the uniqueness of the varied formations, it encourages a mental reflection. How do I freeze time? I think about taking photos. They certainly freeze the moment and reflect light. But so too does my writing...I can think of my journals in the closet as caverns of colored icicles...2010 and all the thoughts I recorded as Stevo moved through his heart surgery and recovery period...notes on my garden and my bird sightings. Poems I've written that consolidate images and metaphor into a form that seems penetrated by light. Surely all those words have come from gusts of wind from the changing climate of my heart. Why resist the cold? It only makes your shoulders ache. I don't think bears get grouchy when they are going into their stupor for winter. It's when they wake up that the grumpiness of hunger moves them out of their slumber. I'm experiencing a first this winter. For the first time, I am unemployed. In a great gift of kindness from the universe, I am not working for money...but I am working for love.

With Mom's change in status after her fall and my sister's recent diagnosis, I find my heart wandering down to Mass. on a regular basis. I'm  committed to every other weekend and I feel blessed to have the freedom to schedule in respite time for my other sister.  But the best silver lining of the whole situation is that I get to ski and write and do my own thing the rest of the time. I can even hibernate if the spirit moves me. And..I can volunteer at Maine Adaptive. Such is the great gift given within the wrappings of aging and challenge. As I concentrate on the exhileration of my first winter's freedom, I am given strength. It's just what I need for my trips to Massachusetts every other week.

As I get on board Winter with Wild Mother Nature, we play with frozen crystals of passing moments and reflecting light and it is much easier to feel the deep gratitude for blessings than the heaviness of heart regarding the situation...and with that gratitude comes a buoyancy of spirit that results from the support of the universe. Janus is a two-headed God image. He is January's namesake and he uses one head to look behind at the ways he did things before while the other head looks forward to the unwritten page of the future and the possibility of becoming something more. Happy page 2012...it could be a whole new story.