Yesterday was the anniversary of the night I fell in love with the Aurora Borealis. It was 1991, I was pregnant with my son, and a friend came pounding on the door in the middle of the night, saying “Get outside! You’ve got to see this!” We threw on coats and ran out the door […]
This Samhain season has brought some , uh, growth opportunities for me. Oh boy. There are things that for most of my life I have been sort of programmed to think I need to do, and those things, which I thought defined me, don’t fit anymore. But because I have this programming, I didn’t even
I lingered under a brilliant canopy This day too perfect This air to alive This energy too delicious To put aside. It’s Halloween, and I’m in the woods, I said, where I belong . . . so . . . I won’t go back to the grinding and the racing and the ordinary. I just
We area always learning, whether we know it, or want it, or not. And some lessons are way more important than other. But I think the biggest one is when we understand that we can screw up big and still love ourselves. It’s simple, but it’s so deep, and so true. When we get past
God, so I have come to understand Them, is formless. Not some old White dude who hasn’t shaved in 6000 years and hangs out in a bathrobe even more than Jeff Lebowski. They’re not somebody you can walk up to and carry on a conversation. They’re somebody you are actually in, like a fish is
Mythology is something I think about a lot. Not quite an obsession, but definitely a big thing for me. Maybe you’ve noticed. I find a strange kind of satisfaction in piecing together puzzles with missing pieces, so many missing pieces. Making wild leaps head first, connecting dots that are barely visible, finding little coincidences that
One of my favorite Iowa poets, Deb Marquart, published a small volume of poetry manymany years back, called Everything Is A Verb. The title stuck with me, and I have revisited many of the poems over and over as well. But that idea, that everything, everything, is a verb . . . Mr. Rogers reminded
Have you ever been just gobsmacked by something, some song lyric or piece of poetry you memorized as a child without understanding, or some family ritual that seemed to make some kind of sense when you were little, or some song you used to sing in church that you never even thought about, when it
I’ve been on a songwriting kick. (Yay! Dry spell over!) I’ve written two songs in as many weeks, and am working on two more. So the fields have done the fallow thing, and they’re over it. Let’s grow something! One of the things I frequently do to encourage inspiration to flow is to go through
I keep forgetting how new sound healing is in the United States. It’s been around, of course, but not in anything like a mainstream way. When I say I’m a sound healer, most people get a very confused look on their faces–but fortunately most of them are curious and very intrigued. So I thought maybe
