I see you sitting at your desk in the living room..facing out to the room…a sweet smelling pipe in your mouth and a bowl of licorice in a cut glass bowl on the desk in front of you, always dressed in a three piece suit with a gold watch chain looping from your vest pocket into another little pocket where the watch surely lived.
In the early 90’s, living in New York City, I attended NYU for my masters degree. One day, while settling down with a hot pretzel for lunch, outside my classroom, a psychic sat down next to me and began to speak.
I believe you have massive scars on your back.”
Every single one of us is born with an amalgamation of gifts that is absolutely our own, as in there is no one else on earth that shares this unique arrangement. This is our raison d’etre! To unearth what these gifts are and use them. Some may be obvious and others are not, but one’s mission and joy is to hunt for them, find them and live them.
Giant brains in little bodies and massive fears running around my classroom. My answer was music. We gathered in a circle on the floor, with my guitar on my lap and I would sing. Soon we had ducks flapping wings and frogs jumping off of lily pads, and tales of long ago being listened to while closing sleepy eyes. Magic happened. Miracles. My guitar and I, not stellar musically, but together a team.
My evening excursions often lead me along the edge of a narrow, steep canyon. Every single time that I stop and gaze out over it, a memory relives itself in my mind with crystal clarity, flooding my senses with smells and cellular sadness, even though my mind has made peace what ‘what happened, my being … Read more
Standing on my rock,
on the top of my bluff,
feet planted,
arms to the sky.
The wind whips my hair into a tangled mass around me,
challenging my hold.
She reached up and a huge seagull came to her and sat on her hand. “You need to remember the distress with all of your might, and you need to let it go with every breath.”
We have a choice at every moment, in how we rise in the morning and face the day, in how we greet each other or strangers on the street, in how we treat our bodies and our minds, in how we look at others’ woundings with compassion or disdain, in how we focus on making money rather than addressing the core of our security needs.
My evening excursions often lead me along the edge of a narrow, steep canyon. Every single time that I stop and gaze out over it, a memory relives itself in my mind with crystal clarity, flooding my senses with smells and cellular sadness, even though my mind has made peace what ‘what happened, my being goes there and brings to light one more wisp of seeing.
The human condition in despair and confusion and fear, needing to communicate.
For years I have held this position of listening. What I have gleaned is that often our deepest, most articulate, honest sharing is in the lap of a faceless person. A person who has no role our life and we have no role in theirs, a person who is not going to advise, a person who does not judge, a person who is neutral, a person who is a kind stranger, a person who holds still and listens.
Rhythms, balance, ebb and flow, new rhythms, new balance, ever changing, ever present. All one needs to do is ride the wave in and paddle out, ride the wave in and paddle out but we humans get busy, forget this simplicity and we forge against. We lose our connectedness, our joy, our true north, our raison d’etre.
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning. This being so, what does a pink blush that spreads itself across the sky like honey on a banana leaf mean?
A day of Love. A day of Play. Yes.
Someone needed to do this in order to shine a light, as a conduit between the haves and have nots, on what ‘being homeless’ in all of its obvious and subtle ways, was about. These two worlds needed to be brought together. But now I was exhausted…
The wind howled all night, whipping trees and tossing flower petals outside my window. Forever in my life I have adored the wind. As a child in a boarding school in the hills of South India, lying awake in my bed at night, the fierce wind was my passionate friend. All of the sounds of this land … Read more
The message of the year hidden in connection to nature, connection to stillness, connection to each other in new ways, connection to lives out there beyond our knowing, connection to self, connection to goodness, connection to God.
Three years and eleven months ago, my loving and supportive friend and landlord was forced to hang an eviction notice on the door of the little blue house by the sea, that my husband and golden retriever and I had inhabited for five years. In that moment, that one act, shifted the reality of our plummeting dreams and finances, into a reality that we, over these years, have had to be with, sleep with…