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?

a woman's promise

as i listen to  your words
I'm knitting
with midnight blue angora
a shawl
in my favorite pattern.

the first day i had the thought
i'm not being attentive

but today
i feel your heart words and our circle
entering the softness
of this handwork.

warmth, of the temple
beauty, of the temple
dark, of the temple

a holy shared care
for expressing as only women can,
our promise.



written to my writing raw circle
October 2014

for a siStar on the path

Grieving in Love

It is no mistake that of the women friends who I am gifted to live near by, one of them has many years experience with hospice, death and dying, and of course grieving. She has what we both call a 'normal' waking life and yet her dream life and her experience with death is what gives her the depth that brought us into our sisterhood.

Another sister has sat silently and firmly at the upper rim as I plumbed to my depths. She knows and lives her own depth in her daily life. It was this that brought us into our sisterhood.

And another has carried her own experience with death and grief and love quietly, and was changed by it long ago. 

This was my first encounter with the loss of a sister. This is not something I should have experienced before now. I am grateful for the impact of this woman's death in order to be shown the gift she was in my life.

My friend helped me tonight. As I was slipping into troubled stories about this and that and them in relation to her death, she invited me to celebrate what I had experienced knowing Sandra, and to let myself simply grieve this loss of her being here. 

I am seeing into and honoring the relationship that was mine to share with Sandra. The presence we shared is what remains.

Although I have an old recipe for "Sandra's bread" in my recipe box, it was not the personal friendship that she shared with other sisters that brought me close to her, but my willingness to be healed in relationship to her.

 Sandra listened with her heart as she skillfully listened to me and to those invisible ones she called in who guided her work.

 I celebrate her sensitivity and compassion tonight, her unconditional love and her service to Spirit that worked through her.

Her service was both light hearted and intimate. She knew how to get out of the way. 
She has become a part of everything.

Grief, like love, is a place where no stories are needed. 

Both sweep clean the heart,

and leave gratitude in their wake. 

So, tonight I sit and "do dynamically less than nothing" and just remember you, Sandra, my siStar. 

The love we shared and the desire to heal in love is expanding infinitely.

So many sistars have lit candles for you.

Everything is the path.

And of course it cannot stop raining.......