Mister Hat

Paolo had a great birthday and got a cowboy outfit - yes, really. I gave him a hat and a belt to match, and his mom got him the plaid flannel shirt and he had the boots, a wedding gift from my brother, so that goes back a few years.

To understand this hat, you have to picture Rod's Western Palace. It's off the freeway in Columbus, and you know it from the full-sized fiberglass horse standing on the front porch. A wooden Indian says 'How' to customers, and cowboys croon over the P.A.. You've got cowgirl chaps and riding britches, saddles, lariats, whips, spurs, horse-shoe earrings and lone-star necklaces. You've got pink boots and brown boots, turquoise boots and white boots, for all the cowfolks in your life.

Well, this cowboy hat was so authentic, Paolo had to take it back to Rod's to get it blocked. They steam it and put in the crease on the crown, and a curl in the brim. The man behind the counter was so po-faced in his grey felt hat, deep-yoked shirt and fingers hooked around his shiny belt buckle, I thought he'd ask Paolo to show him a picture of his hoss - or at least his 200 acre spread - to prove he was a re-ul cowboy before he'd shape the hat to Paolo's skull. (Ok, so Paolo's English accent didn't make him sound like a minor character from Brokeback Mountain, but our counter-cowboy had ingested so much of Rod's soundtrack and southern atmosphere, he'd got a good picture of himself as Mr Stallion. All non-hat knowledgeable people who stumble into Rod's from mainstream america were geldings....)

And I felt thoroughly ashamed to have only 5 acres and no chickens until I saw a Mexican fella skulking around the hat counter. He caught my eye and gave me a sly grin, as if to say these gringo cowboys don't know sh*t. That made me feel better, because I knew that guy had more cowboy in his little finger than Mr Hat had under his button fly. Later I saw the same guy pick out a pair of black matte boots with a square silver toe which were solid working plus a little bit of show, an easy double for salsa on Saturday nights.

We climbed into our SUV and drove home to the range. Paolo will look fabulous riding the tractor this summer in his black cowboy hat, button-down banker's shirt and sarong.

The Moms of Powell

Ok, we get bored in the 'burbs some of these gray days. At the bank, the sour face of a middle-age woman (and then in Kroger...and then at the Y) inspired this rap. Why's everyone looking so miserable? Cheer up guys. It's not the end of the world.

Dah boom boom boom...

We drive da SUV
we on da cellphone constantly
Da moms of Powell
Da moms of Powell.

We like da blonde highlights
we stay inside at nights
we drink da wine
and wish we could go back in time
da moms of Powell
da moms of Powell

Kroger is our only store
we shop there more an' more
what we buy is instant trash
but we give dem all our cash
da moms of Powell
da moms of Powell

Da YMCA is our gym
we swim and stretch and spin
and when we finish wit da pain
we weigh and see what weight we gain
Da moms of Powell
Da moms of Powell

To da soccer we are slaves
to da dance class, gymboree and skate
we buy our children many ting
and ourselves dat diamond ring
but when the bank say cash is due
we look around for someone to sue!
da moms of Powell
da moms of Powell

Happy Christmas everyone. Don't spend more than you earn. Make cookies instead!

Time Candy

Everyone has their time candy. The thing they do when they're avoiding that thing they should be doing. Mine is reading New Age websites. I'm particularly addicted to Solara's NVisible and her work with the 11:11. Ok, don't switch off. Hear me out. As an addict, I'm also a connosieur, and I read Solara's because she's so damn accurate. She says things like: this week we're releasing pockets of the past, and it's going to be painful but quick (my paraphrase. check out Solara if you want the horse's mouth). Purification. And that's what it's been like for me.

The weather's doing some purifying in Ohio at the moment. Traffic lights are at a horizontal as high winds kick leaves into crunchy brown vortices. I'm in Borders, and Tony Bennett's singing his creamy and mellow 'there'll be peace at Christmas' while the wind snaps branches in the parking lot. And that's sort of what it feels like in my body at the moment: that abiding peace that's moved in and decided to make a permanent home in my chest, but at the same pockets of the past burst, showing me the fear I used to feel reaching out for my deepest desires.

Overlaying it all is this vision of Oregon and the Pacific Northwest where my family lives. I missed Thanksgiving for living too far away for the 20th year in a row, and I'm really done with that. I'm beginning to seriously dream how we can make life there a reality for us within the next 2 years. (I've actually set a personal deadline, but I'm not telling yet.) It inhabits alot of my thinking during dawdling time - dishes, driving, or catching myself staring out the window, body in Ohio, spirit in Oregon.

When I moved to Ohio, I had these dreams of going along a river road looking at houses. I saw how the light moved in bars through the trees, and how the bank cut steeply above the road. Six months later, I drove along the same road looking for houses with a realtor. That hasn't happened yet. But I have begun its precursor - the dreaming. Make it an expansive dream. Give it room for everyone to grow and thrive. Dream big! This is the intention, the planning phase. I can feel it coming, like when a woman knows she's pregnant before she takes the test. The exciting part is the journey, our onward journey of never-ending change.

May peace inhabit your heart.

Belief speaks

It seems that now is a powerful time for belief. That belief separates and defines us at this moment in the USA in a way that is overly or supra-significant. It feels like belief is as important in this time as belief was when fascism was on the rise. As if people must create or adhere or attach themselves to beliefs in order to have power in the world.

It's not about achievement right now, a litany of accomplishment. It's not about what you've built or the good deeds you've done. But what belief brought you to this point in time and your choices in the now. George Bush showed this when he climbed to power on the back of belief, an ex-addict with a track record for spin.

The election next month is all about 'what kind of Christian am I?' and candidates hand out business cards with the ten commandments on the back. We are in dangerous territory, and a hop, skip and a jump from the rule of Ayatollahs. We are at war with Islamists because of oil but also because they are fundamentalists. They mirror part of ourselves, the part of this nation that wants control over women's minds and bodies and wills, that seeks to control entertainment, sex and free speech.

The Lord supports us; everything we do is right because we are in service to Him. You are not us, you do not serve our Lord. You are dangerous as an outsider.

Belief is a precursor to action. So what we believe, we create. Ideas become words which become strategies which become things. What are we creating with our National beliefs? What intentions do we send into the world?

Crush!

Saturday we crushed 375 cases of grape - cabernet sauvignon, merlot, pinot noir, San Giovese, syrah - to make 27 barrels of juice and must. A big party! Brothers Mike and Marty, their parents Marie and Ott, Fairy Sue, Jay and Susan and little Cory, Kevin and Martha, and James the blue barrel supplier and his new, very tiny blonde girlfriend, Anton the elder, Mike and Katrina and us - Paolo, Cynthia, and our kids.

Our first surprise came when Marty picked up a bunch of blue-black San Giovese and found a black spider with a red hourglass belly clinging to the underside of the stalk. The black widow, chilled but alive from its refrigerated journey, went into a little salsa jar. Later we found another spider on the outside of a box and popped that in too. Jay said he saw two more on empty wine crates he'd loaded into the truck for his homeless friends to burn.

And as Sue and Susan and I sat inside with cups of tea and leftover lunch we found another black widow crawling up Sue's sleeve. Susan dispatched it with a squish inside a paper towel. As Anton-the-elder changed out of his grapey, tractor-man clothes, he found he'd been cuddling with another one of the arachnids for god-knows-how-long. It kinda freaked him out.

But no-one received injury despite this spiderly plethora as we sorted grapes for hour upon hour (barehanded - rubber gloves are in order next year) and we had a little production line: grapes go into the tractor dumper, which toddles off to the hopper, where pulp, seeds and grape gets sucked into the basement via hose & pump.

Guests began to dwindle at 4pm, but the men still had several pallets of grape and kept it up through a thunderstorm, then hail, then spectacular double rainbows before sunset that called everyone away from their posts to gaze in admiration, rainbows stretching from the southern to northern horizons.

We finished cleanup by 10pm and fell asleep soon after, exhausted by the day and by the preparations for it, holding the energy and vision for all who come to our house to participate in a joyful event.

Our wine will be full of the chattering of friends, of our silly jokes as we sorted grape, and of our dreams for what the success of this venture will bring.

Moon Dancing

Naked pagan hippies, dancing in the moonlight. Maybe a mudbath or two. That's what I told the winemakers we'd be doing at the women's retreat last weekend. Writing in our journals and sitting in a circle listening to each other cry doesn't sound so glamorous.

Ok, so we did some of the first - but clothed. Modesty and mosquitos are powerful incentives. We camped next to a pond and they were on the buzz for blood to lay more eggs. I've got bites on my legs and my hands, but none on my eyelids. That's the worst place for a mosquito bite because the skin is so thin and it swells up like an apricot.

I'm a huge believer in women pampering themselves, in whatever ways we can. I'm cast in the supporting role at home, as mom and cook and household visionary, and I need outside air. This one, at the Ecological Center, had plenty.

We cooked a meal on the first night from food raised at the center, on its farm. Goat milk ice-cream with apple crumble, the goat milk not goaty at all, but a nice undertone like a ripe cheese. Stuffed green peppers, a salad with flowers from the herb garden including orange nasturtiums and yellow citrus marigolds, herby purple potatos, and good bread.

At 7am we got up to feed and milk the goats, cut sunflowers for the farmer Laura Ann to sell in the town market who also led us in stretching exercises. As well as a farmer, she's a polarity therapist & mom. Then off to an incredible breakfast including fresh-baked bread, blackberry muffins, eggs from the chickens and sausages from the pigs.

As well as cooking and eating, we also played bubbles, jumprope, kicked a medicine ball, walked in the woods, and meditated. I felt like my feet chewed on the gravel, and when I closed my eyes I saw indigo and green, orange and violet.

In the forest we tried to feel the woods observing us. I felt a tree's energy field expand to encompass me as if the tree's field took a cast of my body as it wrapped around me. The tree sensed how far my roots grew, and knew I was a thing that travels on top of the soil. It knew I don't fly. Then it communicated this to other trees through its trunk, branches and leaves.

Whether these impressions are flights of fancy or the way a tree truly senses, doesn't matter to me. What I treasure is a brief, possible perspective of another living being.

Mountain King

In the hall of the Mountain King you must fight the demons, unless you choose to be turned into a cardboard cutout of yourself, and go to sleep. When you wake yourself up, there will still be demons to fight.

So goes the only story on earth.

We are all called to step forward to take our natural places in the world. And if we do, we receive magic. But with the magic we have to fight demons - the demons of torpor and anger, of resistance and fear, of danger, uncertainty and the unknown. Or we can choose to sleep.

If we choose to sleep, we lose the magic and join the queue of the ordinary and turn back into our everyday selves, until we decide to wake again.

This is the only story for humans on earth, because it's the story of the hero's journey. All stories - from Star Trek to Spongebob to Mission Impossible to Brokeback Mountain are the same story. Anyone who tries to write outside of the hero's journey writes a book that won't sell.

The hero's journey is the walk we all take. If you're awake and fighting, joy to those around you. Zap that demon!

In the end, we become the Mountain King. Because his cave is the cave of our hearts, and the demons are places of our darkness, waiting for transformation. Each demon transformed becomes a new magical tool, until we become king over all the demons, the Mountain King himself. We also become the Mountain, and the hero's companion (Dr Spock, Patrick, That Pretty Girl with Tom Cruise) supporting others on their fights to become wholly themselves.

We can continue to pursue our dreams and fight obstacles or we can go back to sleep, to the safe life of errands, to-do lists, and live without a vision. Safety's price is torpor, and the reward of safety is uncertainty.

The vision's price is energy and uncertainty and the fighting of 'demons' - internal and logistical. But the reward of the vision is magic and accomplishment, true security arising from a core of internal peace, and the view from the mountain.

Accident

It's been hard to write today. This morning it's a move your hand for 20 minutes across the page and don't look back kind of start. That's the trick to jumpstart writing. No, I'm not really going to write anything. I'm just going to sit here and doodle in sentences. Then it comes out.

When a big emotion sits in my throat, it's sometimes hard to write. At which angle do I start? What bit do I want to describe? Was it the man from the AAA with his long curly blond ponytail and his lined face, driving us almost into (yet another) ditch as he scrabbled around with the paperwork after he recovered my broken car? Or the baby racoon on the road, newly squashed? As I sat on the roadside waiting for a breakdown truck, I kept hearing this obscene pop as people drove over the small body, until they'd worn a groove through its guts. I wished for a shovel and gloves, to give him a little burial in the woods, or at least scrape him off the road into a plastic bag. I know people who carry shovels and bags for that reason. So far, I haven't been one of them.

We very nearly ended up in hospital on Sunday carting a load of tiles home on our trailer. We had a blow-out which caused the trailer to jacknife several times across lanes of traffic, missing - like dodgeball or jumprope - an oncoming black jeep, then missing a telephone pole and finally into a ditch with a gentle slope and two piles of gravel at the bottom. We coasted to a stop so slight it didn't even engage the seatbelts.

I kept silent as Paolo negotiated the crisis, but remember thinking: "I have to stay alive for my kids. They need me." When we got out of the car we discovered one rear tires off its mud-caked rim, the other too compromised to move, and the left wheel of the trailer had blown. Incredibly (upon incredibly) we lost only one box of tile.

Paolo didn't touch the brake or accelerator and steered in the opposite direction each time. Little did he know he hadn't the use of either back tire. He practices in the snow in the back field with the Ford to improve his driving skills, and that experience kept us from flipping. But the oncoming traffic, the telephone poles - that was sheer serendipity.

Afterwards I watched them cart away my Explorer with it's bumpersticker: "Angels, don't leave home without them," with its corny graphics showing flying angels with lunchboxes.

You do the math.

writing in the woods

Stratford Ecological Center in Delaware provides a great place for rest and retreat. Yesterday, with pen, backpack and sarong for cover from the mosquitos I took their walk down to the river, now a dry bed, for solace and inspiration.

Muggy and buggy, with spiders webs strung across the path, tree to tree every five feet, high season for gnats. Plentiful nets. One spider looked as if it had a moth attached to its back, perhaps a female carrying spiderlets.

I sat down by the river that a friend and I visited two winters ago, then in full flood with bright orange shelf fungus against the black logs, when her marriage seemed dead and I struggled with my family's divisions.

In the morning, I'd prepped myself to write a poem by reading my favorite book of poetry, 'Ants on the Melon' by Virginia Hamilton Adair, which alwasy opens my mind to fresh images and the play of wordsound. Faced with a dry streambed, slapping at the bugs, sitting on a fungus-infested log, I wondered how anything deep could emerge from such an ordinary woodland scene. So I began to play with words in my head, to listen, and got the first line: in a dry riverbed, stones lie with uncovered heads.

After some fiddling, it came through:

August
In the dry riverbed
stones lie with uncovered heads
waiting for water
to run again.
Humidity's potential presses me
air like sea.

September's thunderheads
will bring flooding rain
a log's fungal ears
hear a plish plash refrain.

Shadow is the progeny of sun.
In this swollen cloud
lightning's begun.

After the Pacific Northwest

It's back in Ohio after being out in the Pacific Northwest gorging on crab and salmon, fresh caught, grilled on the beach, smoky salty and sweet all at once. After our engorgement, we lay on the beach under mover's blankets watching the meteor shower with my best friend Dani and her love Andy.

We listened to the swish of waves over the rocks - agates, carnelian, jasper, granite, shale. They knew a beach untouched by tourists, a local's preserve, a teenage hangout on one of the San Juan Islands. We revelled in it - next year it gets new owners and we will be turfed out by watchdogs, human and canine.

I love the beach with a deep love that gets fed by salt water every time I return to my childhood home and memories of swimming in water which numbed us before August and chilled us thereafter. We'd dive into the water with our open wounds, and it would sting and heal us. Any scrape or cut and we'd be sent into the salt with directions to bathe.

Now, returning to the Midwest, I reluctantly launder my clothes. I want the smoke to stick. I want to stink of smoke and salt, and greet the memory of seaweed and kelp when I wear them. I convince myself to wash them, eventually.

Ohio's as hot as ever. Tonight we ate from the garden - peppers, chilis, corn, tomatos with black beans, cumin and coriander. A fragrant, favorite meal. Soon, school begins and the autumn chores of pruning and moving trees. But I collected 38 stones on the beach for a medicine wheel, and keep them in my kitchen in the form of a sacred hoop, with horseclam shells and a sprig of cedar as living memories of the place I will always call home.

whisperblog

Blogging at the moment feels like a secret whispered into a room full of people. I don't get much traffic (can't even find the bloody thing sometimes when I put in the url) so this site is a hidden little corner, a delicious place to play with words, day-to-day experiences and emotions.

It feels like a mini-vacation, a magical slice of time to write, explore...and maybe someone stumbles into this little corner of words and takes a peep. That's part of the fun - not knowing whether someone's listening in on this out-of-the-way space, or if I'm talking into thin air.

And really I don't care either way, 'cos I'm having fun doing what's always been fun for me, I'm playing by myself in the sandpit of writing with a glorious array of pinwheels, trucks, cranes and bright blue buckets and don't care who drops by to enjoy the sunshine too.

Actually, I know there's one other person in the sandbox with me - my best friends since I was eleven, Daniela (hi Dani!) gets the automatic email alert allocated by blogger. And so it's kind of our secret club in cyberspace that no-one else can join except by accidental click and then you get to be part of this whispered conversation.

While other blogs rack up as many clicks as possible, I'm revelling in being a microblog. All my professional life subscription figures - for newspapers, or sales figures - for books, or articles in nationally-read publications, have been important. And this is the tails to that heads.

Are there other whisperblogs out there? Others who write publicly in private? Who are just having fun writing and insta-publishing?

Where are you? Who are you? Let me know.

Downtown

Today took me downtown to the homeless camp along the Olentangy River, located across the railway tracks on a piece of undeveloped ground. As you drive along the tracks, paths lead into the woods. If you follow these paths you come into encampments - shelters made of tents, or skids, or plywood with tarps for roofs.

Scattered over the ground you see spam tins or broken glass, or plastic bottles with the labels worn off. It's 100F if it's a degree, and there's little shelter from the heat. People nurse beer bottles and cans to escape, but dehydration must be an additional hurdle in the summer, along with food and hygeine and illness and fights.

I've always felt a connection to homeless people, and put an encampment in Motherhunt, my first novel. I guess in those early days in London when I was two steps away from the streets myself, being thousands of miles from home and dependent on the good wishes of my boyfriend and his family, it hit home how easily I could slide onto the streets. All it would take was a fierce fight and losing my job and I'd be under a bridge with my stuff in a backpack.

As young as I was I wouldn't have possessed the nous to present myself at a welfare office or the US Embassy, at least initially.

Later, as I moved into reporting the Hornsey and Tottenham beats, I met young girls who'd become pregnant to get onto the welfare housing lists. Their stories contained foster homes or parents who hated them and kicked them out of their homes at 16. With no network of established friends or willing relatives they literally had no-one to take them in, nourish them, and help them get an education.

In overcoming my own fears about going forward in life, I've often wondered about those people who have much less support in terms of education and childhood development. If I've had bundles of fears and anxieties which create hurdles for moving forward, with as much priviledge as I've been given in a first-world country with a college education, then what happens to people who don't have that? What happens when they face the same fears and anxieties but have race or poverty or bad government to contend with?

Today I picked up a friend from the encampment, a friend ready to rejoin society and get back on his feet. We ate fresh-picked broccoli from the garden (steamed, it turned day-glo green with energy) and fresh-picked beans and beets, and corn-on-the-cob from Kroger. He drank Pepsi and called people to let them know he'd emerged, laundered his clothes, showered and shaved, and then another friend showed up to take him home.

I hope he's out of the woods now - literally and figuratively - and feels the surrounding arms of the people who care about him, lifting him up, helping him to a place he can love, and feel is his own.

Agree

Swinging in a hammock in the hot sun today reminded me so much of our trips to Tuscany where my husband's father has a home in his ancestral village.

As we walked over the mountain meadows, we crushed wild oregano under our sandals, and its scent wafted into the hot air. We heard the shush of a snake as it rushed through rattling, dry grasses, into cool homes under shale rocks. I love being in those mountains. They feed me like the ocean does, like the waters of the bays in the Pacific Northwest, like the creak of rigging and smell of creosote in boats.

Last year, while inhaling Tuscany through my pores, I wrote this:

Agree to pick up the next puzzle piece
to step
into a quickened labyrinth of fear
to walk through the static fog
of anxiety.

Agree and you will see
as future unravels into present
and you stand in a pattern of your own
knitting
you will see

See the past, dropped stitches, burls
whorls and how

How this now is safe and cuddled
How this now can relax and unwind
How this now can be gracious and forgiving

Stepping through the weft.
Step through the weft.
Next step.

For all of us who are repatterning our lives at this very moment, who face extreme anxiety and fear as we confront old programming, remember our safety.

And for every being on this planet who is caught in war or torture or starvation and is not safe, my prayers go out to you, that you find safety and peace.

Grounded

Summer's suddenly got heavy. Whether it's the thunderheads outside my window, or the sweaty humidity of sauna Ohio in July, or this new moon, suddenly everything seems like a huge effort.

Everyone in the house is grounded - whether through misdeeds, or simply laying-on-the-couch with a good book, stomachs full of the muffins we baked as breakfast but ate as lunch. We got fresh blueberries from the store last night in a late, out-for-milk dash, and I broke up the muffin and ate it with the berries and milk in a big cup, like Peter Rabbit.

Sometimes the books I like to read aren't grownup fiction. I read Touching Spirit Bear yesterday. The author has raised his own 700lb black bear and his cover photo shows the bear - with a huge grin on its maw - giving the author an equally massive hug. It made me think about how important fiction was for me until college, when I had to read too much for work and couldn't justify it for pleasure anymore.

And going to England where I couldn't afford to buy books and let others convince me book-buying was frivolous and not a lifeblood thing. How long does it take sometimes to recover who we were and what we loved - and what would still nourish us if we could only remember?

It feels so good just to be in this house listening to the clock ticking and writing on my new toy. What's inside me today is a yearning for rest, and beneath that, a lovely sense of peace that's been occupying my chest since summer began. I would love for everyone to be able to feel this - although it was so disconcerting at first. What? Is nothing there? Who turned out the lights? Where's all that anxiety gone? I'd love for all people to feel this. Not just an absense of fear, but a unique sensation of goodness.

Blessings!

writer's life

I'm having so much fun. A friend gave me a laptop and now I'm wifi. I think I just made my first internet error (at least one I know about) by subscribing to dadamobile.com for ringtones after seeing an attractive ad on my blog. Now I can't get through to the company and it looks like they're set to charge me 10bucks a month for a service advertised for free.

But I'm having such a good time! Choosing all those fun options (homestarr runner, the bhaghavad gita, the NYTimes) for my front page. I love how writing is evolving so rapidly that it's leaving traditional publishing spinning and shaking.

Really the industry now treats authors the same way they treat pop-star would-bes, and the author who builds a catalogue, progressing toward finer work and slowly building sales is non-existent.

This from The Author (journal of the Society of Authors, UK) in an article by Nicholas Clee: an author sold 18000 copies of a novel in paperback, not enought to cover the advance - but a respectable figure. 'The author's at work on his third,' the agent said. 'I haven't the heart to tell him not to bother.' The publisher had written him off and planned not to promote the second book (presumably, the author didn't know that either).

Can you imagine the bewilderment, the shame, humiliation, anger and even guilt that author will feel when he figures out the game that's been played? Books is the music industry now.

That's why I'm loving this tech stuff so much. In the same magazine, Danuta Kean talks about books-to-mobile phones - called iCue. But it's expensive. And the way publishers lag behind with websites. And the way they haven't figured out blog culture yet. Part of me reads that with a perverse glee. Part of me wants them to pay for being so short-sighted they see only the bottom line and not the glorious opportunities that exist for writers in cyberspace.

As a person who loves alternative culture, I'm excited about the ways that authors no longer have to play the big-books game. The cost of self-publishing is rock-bottom - and going down. You'd have to put your advance into publicity if you wanted another shot at the big cherry anyway, so an author who self-publishes and arranges professional publicity often makes more than with traditional publishing and all its middlemen.

We can publish instantly on the Internet. Turn up your noses - call us 'pajama writers', but look at how the music industry - wedded to vinyl, cassettes, and lps - lost out to the kids who dowloaded millions of dollars of music and sent those multi-million dollar musicians to rock bottom.

Will Barnes and Noble suffer the same kinds of shocks as the libraries did at the advent of dvds and vhs?

I love books. But I'm not wedded to books. I'm wedded to writing and the joys of writing. In The Right to Write by Julia Cameron she says: What if there were no such thing as a writer? What if everyone simply wrote? What if there were no 'being a real writer' to aspire to? What if writing were simply about the act of writing?

That's our future. That's cyberspace. There will always be room - and a need - for the person who's put in years crafting, making deadlines, and reporting responsibly. For the novelist who redrafts 16 times. But its an expansion that's taking place, a making room for many voices.

Today, we can all be writers.

airsoft for breakfast

I'm staring at an airsoft course of ten camouflaged plastic 60-gallon drums with boards and scraps of cardboard leaning against them. They're spread over two acres in tall grasses, and we expect about seven teenagers today to dodge plastic bee-bees and ticks playing capture the flag, before cooling off with drinks & pizza.
It's disconcerting to think that in some countries kids their ages would be carrying metal guns and doing this for real, but I know that's true particularly in Africa and the Middle East.
I don't like gun games.
My son tells me that some parents at his school buy their children real guns. The children save up their allowances and the parents take care of what little paperwork is required. I find this disturbing too.
Airsoft is a game, but it's a child's game that prepares for war and violence. I'm sure they're learning other things too - like how to organize a group, how to work together, and to create rules.
I never thought I'd be the kind of person who would allow playstation or airsoft. I'm a books and wooden toys sort of parent. But I also know the importance of being in the culture you are raised in, and this is part of his culture.
Although I'm a pacifist, I know that oddly, somehow, this is right for my son, and he needs to explore this part of his psyche, and this is a safe way to do that.
Still, I keep poking him and saying: 'tell me again you're not planning to join the Army?'

Funky day

It's a funky old day. Hot, but rainy, as Ohio does to grow the corn. Working on a piece of scupture in the garage the sweat drizzles down the back of my legs. I'm enjoying this piece, in a soft stone, which incorporates a snake as an orobous in a figure eight.

It's an image that's been with me since my grandpa called me 'squitchicumsqueeze' after a nursery rhyme about a monster that swallowed its own tail. (The squitchicumsqueeze that swallowed itself...). I loved the story and would have him read it to me over and over.

After 35 years I can see why I chose that rhyme out of the whole book, and loved to be called the special name: 'squitch'. The oroborous represents the eternal cycles: birth, death and rebirth, the sacred spiral. In our DNA, in our galaxy. In the cycles that women have - outwardly spiralling during ovulation, inwardly spiralling up and through menstruation. The snake coils itself as the spiral.

This summer seems to be about peace and creation for me. While people around me go through tremendous upheaval, I'm experiencing peace from the inside out. I'm exploring the idea of creating my writing through peace and courage, play and joy, rather than through the fear-driven paradigms I learned in the newsroom.

Peace and play are the ways I learned to first write, in the long, boring summers when school was out. I wrote for my amusement, for emotional release, to have fun!

Summer's here again.

The Cradleboard Story

It's very peaceful this summer. A few days ago, a friend and I were de-cluttering my basement. Everything moldy or mildewy worth keeping came up and we wiped it down with vinegar and sat it in the sun. We rescued the children's old toys and games, and a toy from my childhood - a cradleboard - and a toy from Paolo's childhood, a purple velveteen frog stuffed with millet.

The cradleboard had been a gift from Mr Bird after my father died when I was seven. Mr Bird, who we knew from church, could see my passion for all things Native American and thought I should have a toy that a father would make. He took brown vinyl from Hancock Fabrics and sewed it to a wooden backing with leather lace. He tacked the front pieces down with tiny nails, and stapled two straps to the back. It used to have a little leather belt to go around my waist. The wood looks like yellow cedar.

My daughter never showed an interest in my cradleboard. I suppose the wood feels to stiff on a back used to the flexibility of a nylon pack. And so it got tossed around the playroom for years, and finally ended up mildewy and gritty with sand on a basement shelf. I didn't know what to do with it, but my friend Susan told me: 'make it your's. Add beads and strips of fur and make it pretty and keep it in your room.'

We're going to a pow wow soon and I think I'll follow her advice. Buy a strip of beading, some fur, a few animal effigies and decorate the cradleboard for myself.

Mr Bird died of a stroke shortly after making the cradleboard for me. But I've always kept it, remembering the kindness he showed.

Dream of the cross

A dream of several nights ago continues to beat its wings through my days. It's such a profound dream to me that I don't want to forget it.

A real-estate agent on the West Coast had been trying to sell a property for $50,000, but she couldn't because the bungalow was inhabited by a dark spirit. And so I travelled to the house to help her.

On the hardwood floor of the livingroom-cum-kitchen I crouched down. On the north side of the floor I drew the first stroke (top to bottom) of a cross, and felt deeply at peace. I knew that making that stroke invoked peace, and I could feel that peace in my whole body.

Then I drew the second stroke (left to right) and I could feel joy in my whole body. I knew that making that stroke invoked joy. The true meaning of the cross was peace and joy, and drawing it invoked peace and joy. The symbol itself radiated peace and joy.

Where peace intersected with joy it created unconditional love. The center of the cross is Love.

I drew these symbols of peace and joy on the four directions which gave me a sacred space of pure love. I asked the realtor to stand on the northern symbol. She intuited what I asked rather than heard me, as if she couldn't see me in the room, but suddenly felt an urge to take a step backward. She became part of the sacred space of peace, joy and love.

With us standing in the sacred space, I breathed in light and let it flow from my hands. The light flowed to the dark entity and surrounded it. By breathing in light and letting it flow from my hands, it gently lifted the entity out of the house and into the arms of angels. Then I cut the cord from the entity to the house.

Immediately I woke up, and propped myself up on my elbow. Peace and joy and a center of Unconditional Love - the true meanings of the cross. And drawing the symbol creates peace and joy. It radiates peace and joy.

These concepts have colored my mind ever since.

Home Farm Here We Come!

Although we've got the vegetable plot in, there's a yearning to address. And this is a yearning to take our little patch of earth into production.
[My dog Jessie, the Best Dog in the World. I only have to think of what I want her to do and she'll do it.]
Although we're flanked by beaucoup houses whose owners may not appreciate the smell of sheep, goats, and chickens, the township planners say the neighbours will just have to get used to new aromas! All those years of dreaming of our own farm when we vacationed in Italy, of eating the delicious mild pecorino cheese, of fresh eggs, of seeing farms on two acres in fervent production, with each nook a place for something to grow, might now be ours.

It seems so sad that the earth here isn't put to good use now, that we watch the grasses wave to themselves, never to be cut for feed or to give nourishment to goats, who will also eat the thistles. But that is About to Change.

Today I talked to the farmer at Stratford Ecological Center who - amazingly - said he used to be in business helping people like me set up their little farms. That the first step will be a soil sample, and a US Geological survey report. Then, when his piglets and lambs are a bit older, he will come by our property and have a good look at what can be done.

Exciting! Home Farm, here we come!

Fairy Sue's in love with The Land

I've never met someone in love with a piece of land. But the way fairy Sue talks about her property in Hocking Hills is like someone talking about her child, or her husband. 'The Land' as she refers to it, is a character in her life. Like a long-distance lover who's rarely in the room, she talks about the gorge, the grassy hill, and the campground where she pitches her tent with all the dreaminess, excitement, and tenderness of a first crush.

Although she's given the land a feminine name - Melethwyn - I think of it as much more male. He's even got faults - swathes of poison ivy and hordes of ticks, particularly in the spring and late summer. He's got his inaccessible places, and the places where she loves to lie - for instance the big, flat mossy rocks by the stream where she puts herself flat on her back and wriggles, working out the knots and kinks. Or the downed beech tree across the river bed, a place to shuck shoes and play high-wire artiste, a sunny patch in the forest canopy for staring up at twilight to the emerging big dipper.

She's jealous of him too, and careful which friends she lets in on this great love. It's an honour to be invited by Fairy Sue to take the hour-and-a-half trek down to The Land, and test your SUV's 4-wheel capabilities through hood-high grasses, down a steep grade, onto a track marked only by a slight deepening of green which only Fairy Sue seems to be able to see. She's broken an axle against The Land, and on our last trip her uncomplaining Toyota had to sit it out at the shop with a mysterious oil leak, probably concocted by the Toyota's uberangel when she started throwing camping gear in the back.

I enjoy The Land, in the way that I enjoy talking to a handsome and amusing married man at a party. That is, I'm as happy to wave goodbye to him as I am to see him again, and happy that my friend is so ensconced in her love. She doesn't need much when she's on The Land - her plastic jerry-cans of water, tp, some food. She sits for hours on The Land with her two Jack Russels, drawing magical creatures, and seeing magic in all the happenings - from the hooting of a barred owl, to the deer trekking through, to the birds calling through camp. It's all For A Reason, and part of the magic of a lover so strong as The Land.

Ollie contemplates ripping us off

Ollie came to meet me one afternoon in the front office of the newspaper, a tiny foyer with industrial carpeting and plexiglass windows. We could see the advertising department trying to keep the paper afloat with endless telephone calls, nose-pickings and screen-watching.

A girl walked out of the heavy, metal door carrying a plastic shopping bag. She tootle-ooed her friends saying "do you want any sarnies after I drop this off at the bank?"

Ollie lifted his wrist and stared at his watch. He said to me, deadpan: "Does she do this every Monday at this time?"

I may have been an ingenue but I'd watched enough cop shows to know what clicked in his brain. "Don't you even think about it," I told him. "I know exactly where you live."

ollie the hood

Got up at 4am to deliver Mom to the airport, came back to get the family off to their pursuits. I love to see the sun coming up and the slow waking of the highways, and the birds chiming in like harps in an overture. I napped on the couch for an hour, until the piano tuner arrived. Although I envied his coffee I stuck to water and sat watching him, listless and reluctant to move. He told me about his army days, and I told stories about my reporter days as he slid the keys up a quarter to half a note.

Surprising that I remember Ollie so well. The ex-villian who inspired scenes in Butterfly Eyes, who taught me how foolish and naive I'd been, haring around the ghettos of London in my British-racing-green mini as if being a reporter gave me some invisible shield.

One of our regular assignments were 'death calls'. Someone dies, we hear it on the police report, the editor sends you to interview survivors. In the posher districts, death came via accidents, or dodgy fire alarms and rollup cigarettes that slow-burned the carpet. But in the dicier parts of North London, you got blown up or stabbed or firebombed. I'd pull out the A-Z street atlas, get into the Mini with my notebook and pencil tucked into my purse, and go knocking on doors trying to get quotes from neighbors.

In the nicer districts, neighbours would open the door, invite you in for a cuppa, and say a non-committal sentence or two. In the dodgy places, you'd stand on some dirty, crooked and cracked step staring at a door that hadn't seen paint in two decades, and knock. Years later when I studied energy work, I learned to recognize the feeling of static electricity pillowing out from a door as a warning signal.

It took a couple years on this beat to learn how British police work. They didn't run out and arrest a suspect. They let him (or her) marinate for a few days, and kept poking back for questions, biding their time, gathering evidence. Then at 5am, they'd pounce and make the arrest. It gave the villain a false sense of security. It lulled him. And it gave the reporter time to go knock on his door and interview - guess who? - the murderer! We'd be invited in, would make cups of tea for this "devastated" partner, get quotes about how wonderful the little spouse was and what kind of maniac would do this? only to find out from police later that the bloody knife was under the bed in the next room. Not a pleasant job.

Now I've got a guardian angel who's been doing double-overtime since my birth, and this spell in London didn't give the heavenly hosts much relief. I remember my first interview with Ollie particularly well. He'd come into the newspaper offices, wanting to see a reporter about a story and I got sent down, a little cutie in a size six skirt and a red bolero jacket with a pencil and a spiral-bound. He had a tale about an upstairs neighbour who tried to kill him with a shotgun as he lugged groceries off the bus and up 15 flights to his apartment in the aptly-named (because it was so damned depressing) Dylan Thomas block of flats. I couldn't tell which pissed off Ollie more: that he dropped twenty-quid's worth of vegetables onto the linoleum skeedaddling to his apartment, or that the man had the front to try to shoot him. I agreed to come hear the whole story on Wednesday, when we'd finished putting the paper to bed.

The day comes and I find myself staring up at this tower block of concrete and steel with drab curtains in each dirty window. The elevator reeks of pee and vomit, and as the doors close I get the feeling: I'm not supposed to be here. I make it safely to floor 15, and find his door at the end of the concrete corridor. My knocking creates a scuffle on the other side as he shoots back bolts and finally peeks out through two inches of brass chain, then apologizes for being so careful.

Inside it's a dragon's cave. He's got turkish carpets, parquet, black leather sofas, a smoked glass coffee table: understated, expensive, and careful. I sit perched on the edge of the sofa, and make chicken-scratches in my notebook as he talks about this man, who had been in The 'Ville, and their mutual criminal acquaintances. I couldn't print these allegations - no way to verify anything. Like the Ethiopian refugees I'd met who'd seen relatives thrown to the crocodiles, Ollie needed to tell his story to someone, and I was 'it'.

After giving me a fruit juice glass of orange squash, and answering a few questions, I got up to leave. It occurred to me, I might not get out. That my editor didn't know when I'd be back or Ollie's address or his name. And with all those locks and bolts and fifteen floors between me and the car...but there he was, all gentleman, bustling at the door. That's when I noticed a square box on the wall next to the door. Balanced against the lintel on top of this box was a long, sharp, cruel-looking knife with a wooden handle. He noticed me noticing the knife and explained: 'in case he comes again.'

That afternoon I turned a corner. That afternoon I realized that crime and criminals are cheap glamour, and I'd bought into that kind of excitement, at my own personal expense. That afternoon I stopped doing death calls. I'd drive by a house, but I didn't have the heart to knock and go inside. When my editor said: "weren't they home?" I lied, and felt like a weasel but nothing could make me go back.

Thank you Ollie.

Are you tired yet?

These past two weeks my dreams became intense and technicolor. Don't know if it's a spring thing (I remember my friend Donna talking about her dreams going to ten or twelve a night this time last year) or if it's an energy thing. According to fairy-Sue, we didn't rest enough during the winter months and so now we're day-napping and yawning to make up for the energy we didn't gather when the earth was still. Whatever the reason, come 1pm I just want to fall asleep. Love the nighttime dreams though...bits of them swirl throughout my day.

My Mom's with me this week. She loves to organize. This afternoon she's moved the lids to a new drawer, queried me about where the milk should live in the fridge, suggested my knife block needs a new home, and said the craft drawer needs to be moved so the heavy pots could live on the sliding shelf, which was (evidently, but nobody told me) made for that job. All that time I spent with the personal organizer before she came so Mom (past eighty) could have a relaxing holiday...and there's more to do. Ok fairy-Sue - that's why I'm so sleepy!

got the publishing blues?

Two weeks ago I went to a writer's conference in New York, and listened to 48 hours of speakers telling us how to make it as authors and journalists. I had my first novel Motherhunt published eight years ago, just as everything in the publishing industry began to change from a gentlemen's club to an industry focused on creating instant stars.

Publishers still talked about 'developing an author', taking a writer through three books to build a following, and breaking out on book three or book four. This means the author had a chance to learn what it's like to write over 80-100,000 words, how to work with editors and agents, and made a bit of money on the side (but don't quit the day job!) while they grew.

When I landed a two-book contract after networking my butt off, I received a sheet of paper which asked me to list, for publicity purposes, everyone I knew who might be influential in promoting my book. What a humbling exercise! The top editor I knew was in a woman's magazine writing a books column. I thought I had an ace in the hole.

Although the PR department of the publishing house made all the right noises about me, they wouldn't give me any information about how the publishing process worked: the role of the distributor, how the books got sold into stores, and how important it was that their sales team pitched my book to buyers. They didn't have a website, and barely knew what that meant. New PR companies sprang up to cater to authors as publishers saved PR budgets for stars. My single biggest mistake in publishing was taking the advice of my editor when she told me 'you don't need a PR company until book three' and not noticing that my agent was aghast.

Today, the PR company is a must-do for every serious author. You spend your advance on good PR. Sorry, the mortgage will have to wait if you've got ambitions to be writing for a big-name publishing conglomerate over the course of ten years. You will also need a website, a blog, and a support team which raises your profile through speaking engagements. It's best if you're an expert in a particular field (mine is holistic health) and write columns about it for national magazines and newspapers. So, in order to be a successful author, you need to already have cracked it as a writer and as a personality.

This suits people like me who live to write and like to talk to groups. But it also doesn't suit people like me who also want to spend time with a family and make a contribution to the planet, in my case through a holistic health practice. And who it really doesn't suit are those people with a day job, who slave over the Great American in the wee hours. Their best solution is to attend writer's conferences during their holidays, and get into the one-on-one sessions with the visiting junior agents who are trawling for new talent to build. Then, keep it professional with that agent. (Get a book on agents if you don't know what that means.) They are not your counsellor - get a shrink - your mother or your best friend. They do one thing - sell your book. Take their advice. Show willing. They know the business and it's tough.

However, that's traditional publishing. And it's more and more of a dinosaur. It doesn't foster great new writing over the long term. Savvy authors with business experience who come to the industry after researching their market, who provide agents and editors with forecasts of numbers of books they can sell (I have commitments from every Kiwanis club in the country) are like a box of Belgian chocolates to an agent. But we have a basic conflict in the book industry: authors are generally private people.

I know one man who has written NINE books between the hours of eleven pm and three am, and puts each one in a drawer (or on CD rom) because he doesn't want to confront the publishing juggernaut. We are not rock stars. We didn't get into this because we have big boobs, big personalities, and big hair. We were the nerdy kids at school, and we're generally nerdy adults, no matter how much the agents want us to be cool.

I love cyberspace. The click of the 'publish post' button. More and more, our really good writing is going to be found in the blogosphere, and then it will be siphoned off to agents and editors - or not. If you are not a big name already, and don't have the connections to become one in the next two years but you're sitting on a great book, why let your book be discounted on the supermarket shelves to $2.00 (assuming they get there) when you can sell it through your blog at $9, two bucks higher than the cost of per-book on your print run (try ipublish), and bank the money for yourself? It means handling stock and getting friendly with the gals at the PO, but it keeps you in connection with your readers. They comment to you, you're invested in them, everyone's excited to read the book, and your mileage to the PO gets written off against tax.

I always told my husband: if it's worth publishing, it's worth getting a publisher to do it. But I'm not so sure now. You can get a professional product by hiring your own editor and designers through a quality self-publishing company. And a relationship with readers through blog, website and podcast. This isn't the future, it's today.

Who wouldn't want to be part of that?

Crazy makers

Yesterday I was with a girlfriend who was letting go of a long-standing relationship with a man and it hurt. It reminded me so much of the year that I went through the same thing with M, that I scurried upstairs and ferreted out my diary.

I'd been angry with M and my energy healing teacher observed: 'you thought this man was a visionary; I saw he was a dreamer.' With hindsight I can see that neither is true; we were both stuck in our own despair, anger, and frustration. I prayed for guidance and felt that I had chosen to help M - he'd put out a call and I responded. My reasons for responding were full of shadows - self importance, ego, trying to be big in the world, ingratiation. And I lied to myself to hide this to my family and to M. Many veils. I wrote:

"On Friday night I diligently worked out the last weeds. Throughout the day the relationship - its beginnings, obscure little scenes, kept coming to me. As soon as I let these into the 'obsession loop' I had to turf them out. Sometimes they popped up spontaneously, sometimes they seemed called up as if I was trying to see if they still held power. I literally dug in the garden, rooting out dandelions and thistles, planting new seeds. A very curative activity! I put a rutilated quartz on the earth and dumped my thoughts there. At one point I just sat on the ground humbled and begged for mental relief.

I was taken back to the beginning of the relationship, and how I needed to fill an emotional empty space. I filled it with long, anguished, angst-ridden, gossip-spiked moans about my relationship. I got my needs met when M was also angst-ridden, gossip-spiked etc. However, if the power is siphoned away, it can't be used to build a strong emotional connection with my beloved.

I broke the lentils jar, and as it shattered, cut my left thumb and wrist. My son heard me and came into the kitchen and got a bandaid for me. He then announced: "I'm going to cook dinner Mummy, just tell me what to do." I mopped up the glass and tied an apron around his waist. He got the pasta from the fridge, put a pot of water on the stove, and made Angel Delight. I sat down and moaned, "do Mommys get to cry? What I really need is a hug." And my children put their arms around me and hugged me until I was full of little-people hugs.

For the past couple nights my dreams have been wakeup dreams - where I'm straining to open my eyes while I'm dreaming. At 3.3oam I called myself out of sleep with the imperative: 'Wake up Cynthia!' It's as if someone called to me from the room itself to wake me up.

I send M love and light and peace as we part, and always wish him well. I say to myself this little poem I've created: Light, come to me, transform this negativity; peace come to me, transform this negativity; love come to me, transform this negativity. Bring Light, Peace, and Love to me, to him."

The transformation that came into my home & family after I let M go into his destiny was radical. We each held a piece of the other's energies, and could not move on. I think what I instinctively did that day was a shamanic soul retrieval, but it felt like I was going nuts. Truly, the funny-farm looked like a safe haven. Was I competent to be in charge of children? I asked myself. Now I'm glad I had the courage to do the work, instead of burying my pain. I used that energy to help create a new life.

Detox, then re-tox

I'm doing this crazy detox which involves a white plastic tub of 'medical food' - aka rice protein powder. Caramel-colored, sweet and gritty it goes down like candied sand. The first day of the detox - no sugar, no wheat, no caffeine, no CHOCOLATE - and I was on the couch sleeping like I'd drunk a fifth of vodka the night before. Next day, felt like I'd been kicked in the head by a goat. Next day, felt like my legs had been run over by small children on bicycles. Next day, finally got some energy together and tackled de-cluttering the back bedroom. Why does a detox always bring on boughts of spring-cleaning? Like scrubbing out the gut means you've got to scrub out all the back entrances, starting with the garage and working your way into the attic.
My husband's overtaken the basement with wine barrels, so I don't go there no more. He's a 'garagista' - see the cute picture of him covered in grape lees and looking happier than in his wedding photos. He and four other guys have found the entertainment of their lives making natural wines, hence their company's name 'Via Vecchia' or old road in Italian.
Paolo brought the first glass demijohns with him when we moved from England. He's been stomping grape in his father's garage since he was old enough to climb into the vats, and his father stomped in his village in Tuscany, and on back it goes who knows how many thousand of years.
We do these fun, big-production lunches with mafia top-tens blaring in the background on the stomping days, everyone working hauling grape, squishing grape between their toes, or sorting grape. I'm always in the kitchen, overseeing the menus which are a combo between traditional Italian and American pot-luck, and include (of course) cheeses and grapes and crackers; mortadella, salami, olives; pickled red peppers, good bread, olive oil; pasta or polenta, and usually some barbecque. Mike and Marty (the brothers Huster) stop at the pie place and pick up fresh buckeye (pnut butter & chocolate), blackberry, and an apple.
When we're ready to fall over with tiredness and full bellies, we sit around with our wine glasses and speak dreams about Via Vecchia's success, and laugh alot, and revel in the companionship and easiness of it all.

Small things

Our lives are made up of the small things. The silver twigs of the maple unfurl tiny red leaves, sewed on for now, as if forever.
Our house deeds sit in a small, flat box, in a concrete room accessed by keys, protected by alarms. It's a dry, cool vault with brass edging each box. Our illusion of permanence: bought; mortgage-free; owner. Each hints at longevity but it's only tenure. Where will we fly next? And then, this place so dear now, slides past as slick as plastic photo wallets, their pages turning in bundles of white, slippery and thick.
We age before our eyes, time ellapsed. Our children grow teeth, lose teeth, grow teeth again. Soon there will be new faces to add - their loves.
I love to watch my face age. The little pooches at the jaw, and the wrinkles under the cups of my lower eyelids. My face is softer, more loving and lively with life written on it. I can smile at everyone now, and it means no more than happiness.
Sweetness, fondness and gentle stewardship; our memories of this earth.

who's the grandma?

This afternoon, sitting in the sunshine on my back porch content as the cat, I got a call on my cell. An elderly, Southern woman asked for Adriana.
"There's no-one here by that name," I said, fully expecting to press 'end' the next second.
"I'm your Grandma!"
She said it so forcefully, it took me a moment to realize this was my cell and not a call from Beyond the Veil. "I'm afraid not. I haven't got any grandmas. They're deceased."
"I am not deceased!" the disgruntled lady almost shouted her indignance in my ear.
"I think you have the wrong number," I insisted.
"Is this the McCoy's?"
"No, it's not."
"Oh, I'm sorry dear," she replied, a bit deflated.
"That's ok," I said.
"Love you," she told me.
"Bye."
My cell captured her number. Part of me wants to call her back and ask if I can be adopted. I sure hope those McCoys are nice to such a lovely woman. How often do complete strangers say 'love you'? I can think of only one other time in my life, and then it was me doing the saying.

you gotta write

It's an invitation. Write your heart out. Speak up! Let the Earth know you're living, and want to be part of the conversation.