I just baked an apple cake with my three year old. It's one of those bright, Colorado fall-into-winter days, where walking towards the library was chilly from the wind, and walking home (after realizing the library is closed on Veteran's Day) I had to take off my coat. We found a marble on our walk, clear and pearly. My daughter picked dandelions and threw leaves in the air. Now the house smells of apple cake and my tea is almost ready.

Life isn't perfect, but it's pretty darn perfect anyway.

It depends. Most of the day my audience is a brilliant and high-powered three-year-old little girl. For my writing it's usually spiritually-minded green-type folks, mostly women, whether that is my writing group or strangers picking up a book of mine.

But those are the obvious answers.

I realized when my father passed away last May how much he had become my internal audience (Gestalt practitioners call it an introject). Everything I did was measured on some level against how he would see it - and I'm almost 33 years old! Often too it is my internalized husband. This realization made me squirm. I want the measure of my behavior to be my own witness or Spirit or guides or something, but of course it is largely an internal representation of those I want to please, of those I love and value.

I save odds and ends that might one day be an art project. I save plastic containers I can't throw in the recylcing for the Children's Museum to turn into kids' art projects. I save broken pettery for my imaginary mosiac I will one day create. I save toilet paper tubes for my daughter to use as "'tend 'noculars" (ie pretend binoculars). I have scraps of paper and ribbon from when I was in high school, stored in boxes and moved from house to house. I have a large spring (maybe from a mattress?) and the end of a pitchfork I thought might be transformed into garden art.

I am not a pack rat - quite the opposite. I love to donate books to the library, I clear out the garage and our closets at least once a season, and I generally love to purge unused things. But art and craft materials get saved and squirreled away.

Interactive art. Installations and sculptures that invite the viewers to participate in some way. Especially children. And if the interaction could be something inspiring or far-reaching, all the better.

There is a piece in Longmont, Colorado, where enough weight on the platform below makes the metal sails overhead move. It is the weight of 100 infants or 10,000 butterflies, if I remember correctly. It makes one think. I might improve upon it by adding a website link where people could donate to end hunger or protect butterfly habitat.

Green technologies could be used to insire and invite participation somehow. Like... what if time on a stationary bicycle generated energy that went into an elementary school's grid, or pressing a button would play music to algae that would eventually be used as biofuel...

hmm...

I said to my husband a few nights ago that you know life is a little crazy when you are making meals for several friends in crisis - one just had a baby and is dealing with crazy blood pressure, one is grieving an unexpected death, another is getting surgery on her knee. There are three other women in my community who are getting meals from us, although I live farther away from them so have not signed up to help them this time. And this comes after a wave of break downs in my own life. In a period of two weeks we had our internet/phone go down for two days, the car was broken and the mechanic couldn't figure it out at first, my financial aid went into a tailspin, our dryer broke, and our cell phone was on the fritz. Oh, and my two checks (I get paid twice a year) arrived weeks later than anticipated. In the midst of all that personal chaos, Obama was elected. I knew the crazies were both my own call to greater honesty and integrity in my life and part of a bigger picture.

The Natural Time Update website helps clear things up for me. We are in the moon-calendar year Blue Electric Storm. From the website:

These times on the planet are unspeakably intense -
the contrast of simultaneous catastrophes and miracles
permeate our collective field every moment.
It feels the amplification and acceleration of the transformations that are happening on the planetary and cosmic levels are affecting all levels of our inner and outer worlds, as we are the mediums of this transformation itself.

http://www.13moon.com/3storm.htm

This month is called Overtone: http://www.13moon.com/3storm.htm.

Check it out. Pretty revealing I think.

Blessings to all of you dealing with loss. Let us all open to the flow of Love and Universal Power. We can be the transformation.

Namaste!

Today I affirm the preciousness of life, held in the palms of the miracle of death.

My daughter and I went to play with a friend's kids today while she worked on the program and slide show for her brother's funeral. He was sixteen, and killed himself.

Another friend lost her baby very soon after birth six weeks ago.

My father crossed over this past May.

A little boy I knew was shot a few months ago and died in his father's arms.

I feel so deeply blessed to have a healthy, happy, amazing daughter, to be married to a magical and creative husband, to have a loving and funny mom, to have a brilliant and crazy brother, and to boast a large group of dear friends. I am so blessed.

So I affrim those blessings, and the life that is rich with them.

Aho.

Yesterday I came across a black widow spider in my garage. I was spraying out an old aquarium to house the goldfish our neighbor gave us and realized I'd blasted a large black spider. I pulled her out of the tank with a stick, and realized she was a black widow. My daughter came to look and said, "It's a nice spider."

I wish I had not freaked out. I watched her for a while to confirm she was in fact a very poisonous lady spider, then I stepped on her. I never squish spiders. But I feared for my three-year-old. Later I studied black widows, looking for the message she might have offered me, and learned they are shy spiders who rarely bite. I should have tucked her back behind the garage and not worried about her. But I didn't.


Last night I sat in meditation at my altar to apologize to her spirit and to meditate on the message of black widow. Over my altar I've hung a painting I did in college of Artemis standing before a full moon, bow in one hand. The message that came to me, gently as the black widow, was that I need to embrace my warrior spirit. I need to become the lady spider concious of my web and my actions. While I feel I am aware of my power, I am also afraid of it. I was told it is time now to embrace my power without fear, with greater courage.


I plan to make a warrior mask to mark this next phase of my life (I've encountered several other blaring messages from the Power that Be to wake up, so spider was only one of a long strong of calls), and to read Chogyam Trungpa's book Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior in full.

Thank you spider. Thank you Artemis.

Certainly writing - that's my profession. But I also love to paint, draw, act, dance, sing, and garden! So perhaps my favorite form is integration of multimedia. I love to write about painting and dancing and gardening. I love to paint about the earth and creative force and Spirit. I love to sing (and I used to play cello) about nature and love.

My avatar actually doesn't relaly look a whole lot like me... it's a painting I did called GreenWitch, and it represents my inner spirit. It's a good example of the work I did for a period of my life about 10 years ago, a lot of faces of spirit women. Painting has been calling to me again, though I haven't really painted anything in years.

While pulling my iron out of the closet to iron fabric for a doll bed, I discovered an old pair of glasses as they tumbled to the floor (we live in a very small house, so our hall closet contains just about everything from towels to the iron to seeds to old eye glasses). I put them on. The prescription is old, but not too old, and they are not as scratched as my current pair. My contacts have just not been sitting well with me.

I've worn glasses or contacts since sixth grade, so twenty years. I can trace my sense of fashion and even sense of self through my changing frames, like the era I only wore contacts and wouldn't be seen in glasses except in emergencies. This pair I have on now with its dark, boxy frames marks the time in my life when I was pregnant and birthed a baby and then learned how to be a mom of an infant.

I went to dinner wearing them, and my now three-year-old daughter asked "What kind of glasses are you wearing?" My husband said I look like an author in them. Which is funny, because I am an author.

Maybe by finding these glasses I am coming full circle. I am owning being a mother and an author.

Or maybe I'm just looking at the world a little differently, with a nearly imperceptible blur, but more clearly than I do through scratched lenses and dried out contacts.  If it were a dream where I found and put on and old pair, I would say I was seeing the world through an old but updated view. I like that idea. I've needed a little shift in my metaphorical vision, and I think these glasses can offer just that.