There seems no “conducting” about one, to me. It seems to simply unroll in front of me – a memory of an experience, a thought of years past, word of an old friend who represented an era for me. Thoughts that bring me into others which I better understand now.
The items to review (come under review?) seem to crowd up with the mistakes, errors, etc. of just about everything in the known world I could be accused of, with more than a few in the queue.
But now I can be bolder & call forth (call into review?) the goodies – the shy ones in the back, the collage of goodness I keep tossing stuff into. I do good in this world. I see you as a force for Good in this world.
Only know my mind seems fixed on selective memory, but wanders in other vineyards all the time… The memory right on replay, not even having to push a button. Which is a fancy way to say I remember every detail.
Re-member. Putting it all together again. Re-view. Seeing with new eyes.
This’ll be a disturbing blog for some. I don’t mean for that.
I had to get AI to generate me a photo. I don’t look like the woman in the picture. Maybe Death doesn’t look like that either.
I may never have been as serious about death as others. I’m not sure. I am pretty serious about life for the most part but it’s life in the moment that provides a spark. Dying isn’t devolution of life. Dying is kind of like a propeller. Lower it into the water of life & everything agitates.
Lately, I have heard of many suicides: voluntary deaths. If life is a gift, isn’t this “re-gifting”?
And for those who gifted you with life – parents/friends/teachers/etc., isn’t this a slap in the face? But a slap is also a wake-up – it’s what we do when someone goes faint, no? A little smack can refocus & bring meaning into fadeout.
Death is almost universally misunderstood & feared. But the only way to escape death is to experience it as what it really is: the introduction to eternity. Can human mind grok eternity? Not really, no.
This 3D construct is not a truth of reality, it’s a simalacrum at best. We adopt death like an exotic pet, keeping it in a closed room where we can take a quick peek to see what its doing, tossing it the occasional bone by thinking about it, experiencing peelings of it when life gets slippery. We pet it gingerly when things go raw…but when it growls, we quickly take back the hand.
I couldn’t tell you where death got such a bad rep & bad rap. Go forth & multiply is to imprison someone in our DNA. Progeny are seldom all they’re expected to be. Everything ends, so does it die? Not really – think of all the songs you still sing, jokes you still tell, the repetition of phrases Mom always said, or Dad. Think if all the do-overs keeping ideas alive & likely distorted. If you aren’t Original Mind, how dare you repeat? It’s always in your own language & not what the speaker was saying for the most part.
Thing about life is we want quality! We want to live our best life, find our largest expression, enable our most humongous dream, spread wordwide wings & fly. I know so few who do that & most of these are the ones facing death.
It’s harsh to get to the end & look back to see no shadow.
So, to death, a handshake. Just got your nails done, too, I see. You think you’re gonna hold me down? You think you’re gonna (h)arm-wrestle me? You’re just the key I need to go blasting off into universe & light up Source Itself! Like I recognize you, everyone will recognize me.
I have a few more appointments in Samarra. But I’m well worth waiting for!
In the blogstreams I follow, this word appears often, preceded by so many others: abundance consciousness, gratitude consciousness, unity consciousness…I could go on & I’m sure you could add your own words there as well. Yes, these all work for people in their ways.
My vote is on regular old consciousness – the one that the nuns drilled into me as 2×2=4. three branches of functioning government, Alaska not being connected to the contiguous USA.
I went to Walmart yesterday & now will Go There No More. The entire place is third world mercado. I asked ten people about where to find pie shells. I was directed (silently as none spoke English & after deep consultation with cell phones – one clerk handing the unit to me indicating the “search” box) to yogurt, walked to breakfast meats with a flourish, taken to the bakery, to frozen pizza & to the pasta shelves. My single English-speaking helper (#11) said “no place but the ice cream freezer.”
After awhile, even tho it was the end of the day & “my dogs were barkin,’” & I was pushing a cart the size of a VW, it became a kind of Where’s Waldo Quest: how many people does it take to find a pie shell to make quiche? Walmart is now officially not the place to go if you need to ask a question, unless you’re collecting answers for grins & giggles & willing to go walkabout for goods.
I stopped at Publix across the street & got a couple. Come by later for a slice.
Hello my loyal readers, my new readers, my online world… Hello!
I guess I have to get in line to echo “What a year!” with all of you – an echo heard round our worlds. My first blog of 2024 was titled “Decisions”. It ends with the line “Am I there yet?” Well, guess not even yet a whole year later.
What happened to 2024? I “lost” my job in the midst of a great shuffle from semi-organized to the Witch from Miami’s takeover of the church & driving out most of the congregation I started the year with. It may have been Biblical, but only in the sense that she enacted that driving the moneylenders out of the temple part… only they weren’t such.
But I was lucky – I at least got a luncheon with friends & supporters before walking out of my own accord – unlike earlier & later employees, one of whom was threatened with a police escort by the Board President. What lies heavier on a church…financial or spiritual debt?
I got a new car & we tiptoe around town still discovering conversation. I settled more into the apartment where I live. I made many resolutions & kept about 65% of ’em. I burned candles, sage, poems, bridges… I moved heaven & earth only to find the same under the Big Blue Marble as atop it. Where once I approached change eagerly, I now drag my sore feet, tucking in my head like a turtle to survey the lay of the land before venturing forward. I learned there are no safe spaces needed; I am in the hands of Universe all & every. Just need to make sure the shoelaces are tied.
For the last day of this year, I pulled out all my oracles. They pretty much say the same thing. All the arrows point in the same directions: health, self-care-taking, some stargazing, much release, more adventure. I got the words: Confidence, Kindness, Evolving, Radical (rootedness), Generous. I got the angels of abundance, adventure, release, vision, strength. I drew the cards for contemplation, huge change, vision, strength. I drew from the Motherpeace deck: vision, self-solidity, wariness/awareness, contemplation, [again] change. My Southwest Oracle deck rendered tortoise, starry skies, yucca, mullein, tumbleweed, desert moon – all indicators of what is listed just above. Louise Hay advised centering, new life to be whole, release, being part of Everything by just being me.
I can’t decide if the message is repetitive or insistent. Actually, it’s both!
I start as I ended & vice-versa, no?
What did I learn this year? I learned my heart is more resilient than my brain. I learned my liver & spleen can renew & change their emotional charges more easily than my feet which drag when they should dance. I learned living up to my promises is hard only when they’re made to myself. I keep the outer ones way more easily. I learned I am often the last in my own line to learn & to love. There’s no emotion tied to it all – just learning.
I learned all of this in many renditions, each situation earning another notch on the climbing ladder, each rung bringing a loftier view into range. I learned perhaps more than I wanted about teeth, betrayal, sanctions, the effects of change & the need for peaceful acceptance. All’s I can really do is straighten the tablecloth the cards are dealt on.
Outside, the first firecrackers pop in the distance. Night blankets the land. I run the usual questions: did I lock the car (go push the remote til it honks), did I remember to do everything I wanted to do today? Yeh, pretty much I did. I changed the cat litter, brought out the trash & recycle. I vacuumed & washed down my favorite chair. I checked the brand-new phone for messages as I now check my head for the same. I’m out of books to read – the library was closed at 2 when I popped by. All I have left are the books I promised to read at the beginning of 2024 & now, the time to read these.
I wish for you whatever it is you most wish for yourself! It won’t get any better than that.
Holidays. The best. The brightest. The bane. What a triangle to ring, a summoning to change… a precursor to taking up the polished, jingling harness of 2025.
For years Christmas has not been anything magical in my life. Oh, the spirits it engenders, the hopeful faces gazing into colored lights: these all nourish Hope, always a fire in need of a bellows. I’ve always had hope, it’s just not been tied to holidays so often a source of angst. Somewhere the anxiety fluttering around holidays left & these softened into hours of peace & the silence of a power-down: a parenthesis opening to slide into no-time. A day I didn’t have to be anywhere, have to show up, have to live up to anything except the contents I unpack for the day. Memories & moments, merriness & mess.
I hope I’m one who gets happy endings.
I could describe my Christmases, given the rest of my life & an unending supply of ink & paper. The only consistent gift for me is writing – it keeps on giving. It’s a responsibility & a talent I nurture as I do nothing else in my physical, spiritual, emotional life. It keeps on giving & I remain in awe of its harmonics, its melody & how these dance thru me. My words are wounded birds unable to remain in flight so, fluttering onto paper, they make you smile.
Ironic that they are not MY words. They belong to everyone, no?
I want them to belong to the worlds & take their place where they belong – memories & moments, merriness & mess.
Christmas is a scab I pick at til I bleed sometimes. But mostly I’ve gotten better at ignoring its physicality for its ephemera. The best of the Times:
Once, in a motel breakfast bar en route to New Mexico during this Season, a fella with soft white wavy hair & a soft white beard wearing a red tracksuit stood in line for pancakes. My husband du jour had to take me by the elbow when I looked at this man, my eyes starred up & I drifted across the room towards him, convinced it was Truly Santa reaching for the syrup. Husband smiled & whispered, “Carol, honey, that’s not him.“
Once, meeting the new boyfriend’s family at the holidays I answered “a pony” when asked what I wanted for the holidays. They gave me a makeup kit with fifty different colors of eye shadow & a tiny stuffed animal of a checkered horse.
Once I wore a brocade dress to midnight mass, a maroon brocade top stitched to a satin bell-skirt bottom, with patent-leather kitten heels which were too big so I slipped on a pair of white cotton athletic socks , innocently ruining any formality. My hair is parted on the left, I have spitcurls, my eyes are crossed in the photo (which I kept for a long time.) Brother Joe sits beside me in a chair holding a wrapped gift. The Christmas tree lights glitter softly behind us.
Christmas. Synonymous with hope’s annual renewal & the opportunity for unexpected gifts, unmitigated joy, unbound blessing.
May you have so much Joy you must give it all away at once!
So when my friend could not make breakfast, I took myself to The Breakfast Cottage in Venice. I gazed at the awning next door thinking how little one hears of ukuleles & how interesting a word it is, not often used in conversation.
The Breakfast Cottage had no Hawaiian motif, more Bee Gee oldies playing. There’s always something to write about, tho. This tiny journal alone starts in 2015 with a riff on moving to the Delaware beach, wet towels slung over railings, single flipflops on the beach, sandpiper races along the tidal edge. I am ten years older than when I started it.
Time capsules litter my landscape, an upended medicine bottle of life. Years of massage now packed into one. Office work reopened & spilled out, granular fear playing a whack-a-mole with Rescue Remedy & Hyland’s Calm along the way. Invisibility revisited: I hang my cape in an old phone booth & walk on. I lost my taste buds to Covid, my Volt to an attack of acute metrics, my eyes to the 2-fer $89 glasses special, my hair to diminished vanity & so much more. I gained faith, trust, health, friends & a cool new restaurant as of today.
It would be a crime – albeit a misdemeanor – to be a half-block from the ocean with a new journal in hand, and not write by the sea.
The symmetrical punctuation of sea & sky over the ellipsis of brown dune grass is all needed for inspiration.
The bench can face either direction: the haze lids my thoughts.
Without the energy of walkers, the boardwalk is a meditation, the heat of its wood calming as a forest at midday.
I am studying prayer now. This requires a fresh frame of mind founded not in everyday thinking. Prayer is a lifelong study, a bursting, Oh My God! of inspiration. I have not learned enough & may never do so about connecting to Divinity, not in my mortal years.
I wade in the shallows of morning finding shells of life. Funny no one else has chosen this beautiful spiral one here, striped in pearl. It has always been mine to claim, pocket, protect & cherish.
In administering my days, my life has changed, dividing its own house over & over. I sit beside my perception of the nature of God, writing, & no one asks what I say. The artist nearby is constantly interrupted as people peer over her shoulder, catch her hovering glance.
Writers remain anonymous, uninterrupted, silent. I recognize myself as a shadowy thoughtform as church bells ring in the distance. The earth is incandescent with changing light; the sea shows green, blue, gray with the lengthening day. My pen nib worries the paper, a slippery future escapes before being set between the lines. That artist only paints, after all, the simplest rendering of 3D life. The writer lifts all the dimensions, putting bookmarks among them, finding lost punctuation, pearling words, simmering descriptions. She knits these together precociously, ferociously, furious & bleeding, she writes. Surfaces do not hold, seams burst apart, giants wake & roar, words soar, sour, separate all the layers & put them back together as they never were before.
She stares down a pixelating universe unraveling itself as quickly as it can. She writes it all; nothing is ever lost again.
Riding the Light - 