my friendly world

There is that moment
when the email inbox empties.
“honoring the trickle” a friend calls it.

More and more often it is like this
Fewer and fewer messages
And I rest easier and easier
with the silence of my aloneness
And the regeneration of my true desire.

Not counting those generous birthday notes,
Remembered in the heart
That I am here
And more than just me is glad for it.

That makes for a world where I live.
My friendly world.

close to home

"It is critical that we feel worthy."
Flora Aube
The Heart is a Portal for Beauty and Light

And the heart is a portal for truth!
Today, I understand the truth and power of this word - critical.

It is absolutely critical that we feel worthy.

I did not feel worthy for many, many, many years.
I was too critical, of myself.
And yet I painted and I showed paintings.
I ping ponged between feeling the best and the worst.
I could not bear to see what I painted for long.
And I destroyed a lot of painting.
The painting on this postcard is from a small exhibit of my work at Lord Fairfax Community College, some time before 2006.

The name of the exhibit was "Close to Home."
I destroyed the painting, let it go to hold another painting,
because no one "wanted" it.

It is clear for me that I could not own it myself.

The woman standing at her home is me.
And today I can see she is also the goddess Lakshmi, pouring golden blessings from her hand.
And I can see and feel Hecate dressed in black even though I don't know much about her. As the asteroid Hecate she is a dark moon goddess who stands at the crossroads between the visible and invisible worlds. She can bring the need to live in day to day reality home to us.
If I had not reacted in fear to the strength she exhibited, I could have learned from the forms that I intuitively painted and felt worthy of the mirror they offered to me.

Ah, now a memory arises. I painted that painting from an old photo I saw of a local woman standing in her garden.

I forgot. 
I was trying to remember myself through her. 

It is no mistake, that I forgot 
and that I remember, through women,
who I am.

I have been able to hear my sister Flora and understand her work as my heart opens, no longer afraid of our differences or the certainty she shares in her process.
I have remembered who I am through the circle of Awakening Women Institute, led by Chameli Ardagh, no longer afraid of the multitude of forms and gifts woman embodies.
It is no mistake that I have come home again, returning to a home studio after three years of being in a group space at River District Arts.
And it is no mistake that I am writing this morning for Wild Woman Rising, a piece in response to Mel Shapcott's question/prompt - where is your heart?

My heart is close to home.
And home is family and a few friends, mountains and woods and rivers.

It is critical to feel worthy of love and beauty
then it rushes to "curl up at your feet" as Franz Kafka once wrote -
in his own way.

I am closer to home every day, in my own way, in this body.
In every moment that the gap closes, I am simply home. Period. Present.
In this awareness of the flow of life and death, I am home as life itself, as Woman.

It is critical that we feel worthy of our way of being and creating and living.
May you be home in your way.

There is work to be done and celebrated.
It is critical to know,
where is your heart?

nested like this

Busloads of children are arriving on the borders of the country I live in.

A wren’s nest
holds a few barely visible eggs
in the potted begonia on the porch.
They nestle in the cave she and he made
of moss and dry field grasses.

Deep inside the nest of myself
is a fullness
That holds the complexity of life.

Grace takes my mind aside
Enveloping it completely in her nest.

Home.
Like this.

Trusting the nest maker within.
To celebrate.
To care for.
To create and express.
To share in the wonder of all conditions.

Like this.

desire

the old in me is dead
pure desire is left.

i cannot live without it.

the wheel is in my own hands
i see where desire has taken me

there is no map
but there is always a sense
of the right direction.

oh, yes.

now
i am turning it inward.

i trust it to lead me home,
continually,
without end.

the pink castle

I wake up and keep my eyes closed

Trolling the space I have left behind in sleep

For dream fragments.

Sometimes I can only find one picture

And I feel the expectation I carry

that anything I find will 

be a key

To the question who am I?

What am I doing here?

The fragment for me is a link I think I need 

to a homeland I have forgotten.

In the past if I couldn’t find anything

It would be one of those days when I got up on the wrong side of the bed,

Disturbed.

I can see now that is a good set up for a “bad day.”

This morning

No clear piece came from dream land.

Though what surprised me was an image from the past.

Dream like, the image rose up 

A girl’s drawing of a pink castle 

I had found her drawing on a rainy walk in Freilassing.

I brought it back to my studio and saved it, laid it out to dry.

I could relate.

When the image came to me this morning my heart was heavy.

They say a man’s home is his castle

But I feel a woman’s home is so very often deeply connected to her life.

Is this true for you?

When life circumstances invite a woman to let that home go

Quite a journey begins.

This morning I am inspired to ponder letting go of my castle,

The land and home on Keyser Run.

Five acres of woods and hills and fields and gardens and paths.

The place a family grew up

The place I was carried through my own initiation as a mother

And wife.

I will take myself through the rooms of that castle in the next days

To find my way home, again.

I have lived in many houses. 

I begin to feel the threads of every home I created.

Whether it was the room of a girl created with the help of my mother's sewing skills 

or the house of a woman or the woodland Hütte of a wild woman on the brink of herself.

Did I ever let them go?

Was I told to let them go?

Do I need to let them go?

In one of the first moves of our Navy family, my Dad said he was proud that I could let go of a pet. He had chosen a career that called for moving, of course he would want this letting go to be learned at an early age. How could he know what else was always working in me if I could not show my feelings?

Now is the time for tears,

they are allowed when they rise. 

I understand them to be signs that something or someone has been loved,

even if it was "just a dream".

I have loved.

This is what matters more than anything, ever. 

In acknowledging these changes and the loss woven into them,

I can acknowledge a love of self and what I have created 

as the expression of home, 

in all the phases of my life. 

And in this silence I can find the key 

that opens the door 

to what lives always already before my ever changing sense of self, 

as girl or woman.