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.