CATCHING TIME

Coming or going, where is the present?

 The experts of soul say we should live in the present. 

I can’t find a present just the going back and forth between past and future. 

 Not even a nano-second can hold such a thin slice of time.

 It’s like the fly weaving frantically around the kitchen too fast for my flyswatter. 

 Maybe I’ll stick with what can catch me, the past and future.

  

I’ve reached a phase of life where time shatters and it’s hard to remember what pieces go where. Did that pot of marigolds sit in the same corner of the patio last year? Is it already July? But it seems like Sunday, are you sure it’s really Thursday?  When did we last change oil in the car? Damn, I thought our appointment was next Thursday! 

Ok, I’m getting old, I know that but I really think there is more going on than a lack of schedule plus memory loss.  This is a new universe and it’s intriguing. It’s a shame I have to be pinned to a board with all those practical earth-bound notes trying vainly to hold me to a present that doesn’t exist.  As soon as clock and calendar lose their authority, anything can happen. Bring it on!

WHAT’S IN A NAME

Today, PQ and I were on our way to the grocery store in Sedona and he brought up my name again. He knows that I don’t identify with my given name. The issue comes up often because I still haven’t changed my name since we got married.  Sometimes it really bothers him that my accounts still have my ex-husbands last name on them. I certainly understand his displeasure but I’m stuck.  I want to change my name but feel strange being Marti Standing Deer because Marti is short for Martha a name I’ve never liked. Marti isn't bad but should I make it permanent.  I keep putting a name change off because I don’t know what I want my name to be and I don’t want to keep changing it trying to find out. Now and then, He and I go through lists of names and I just can’t identify with any of them. Sometimes I think I’ll take back my maiden name but it feels like defeat.

I need a real name! My name is a constant bother. The name has never belonged on me.  It feels like an alias tagged on after a bout of amnesia. I’ve always know that my birth name was a compromise based on my Mother’s desire to please, not her preference.  She believed that there was great honor in being self-deprecating. In truth, it dominated her life and consequently my life as well. Earning admiration for her excessive modesty came with a constant struggle.  She tried very hard to avoid any action that might appear selfish or attention seeking and this troublesome concern actually ended up working in reverse (as the Leo nature intended). 

Wheel of the zodiac: This 6th century mosaic pavement
in a synagogue incorporates Greek-Byzantine elements
Beit Alpha, Israel

 Mom was born with the Sun in Leo conjunct Neptune and opposing Uranus. I’ll never know for sure, but I suspect she had Virgo rising, she tried so hard to match a fantasy standard of perfection. Since she was number five among seven children the time of her birth lay buried at the bottom of family events, and I became interested in astrology long after there was anyone left to remember. 

Here is a little basic astrology to bring the previous paragraph out of the clouds. Leo is the ultimate sign of self-importance and personal power and the Sun is its ruler.  Just as the Sun is the center of our Solar System and the other planets revolve around it so Leos feel most fulfilled when others revolve around them. Being highly regarded in the tribe is essential. Self-deprecation darkens and kills the life force in a child of the Sun. Neptune is such a different energy that only insanity or spiritual transcendence could bring them into cooperation. Neptune is selfless, cosmic, and easily attracted to a life of imagination, and spiritual sacrifice. On the down side, it has little tolerance for harsh realities, is prone to addictions and easily consumed by fantasy.  Uranus opposing the Sun is embarrassing. Leos want to be magnificent not weird.  Uranus loves to horrify authorities, is eons ahead of boring social conventions, and is definitely different.  Uranus is the only planet that spins vertically rather than horizontally. Uranians fraternize with ET’s.

Since she demonstrated many Virgo characteristics, I’ll also give my take on Virgo.  Virgo has very high standards. They want to be perfect and have little tolerance for people who don’t have the same goal. However, they sometimes become so frustrated in their pursuit of perfection that they decide, “to hell with it, if I can’t do it the right way, I’ll make a perfect mess of it.” Also, they may become obsessed by little things while neglecting the big ones. While pursuing one pesky mouse all day they may not see that a gang of rats are having their way. In addition, they are attracted to healing because they need to fix things. They are necessary in this world, but not easy.

Now back to the name. Mom wanted to name me Ruth Ann but my father wanted me named for his mother Lillian Martha. As usual, mom wanted, needed, absolutely had to make everyone happy except herself and me.  Especially she wanted to make Dad happy, after all, I was a girl not a boy, and she was guiltily pleased about that knowing that he would have liked to have a boy. So she felt obligated but she wanted to be fair and balanced. (Her Moon was in Libra, the sign of balance compromise and judgment) Her mother’s name was Kate Ruth.  Since she didn’t like the name Lillian, she decided to name me Martha Ruth, thus measuring the balance half and half for both grandmothers by giving me their middle names.  I could have been proud to carry their middle names but perhaps the element of compromise motivated by self-effacement turned into shame on my part.

When I was a child, I automatically disowned my name except for practical purposes. I would have preferred no name.  When a teacher called my name, it frequently took a few seconds to put the name and me together before responding. I was never Martha Ruth inside.  When I was in my early thirties, one of my best friends started calling me Marti, and I was relieved that someone cared enough to rescue me from my dorky fate. Before that, I assumed it would hurt my mother’s feelings and upset the delicate arrangement of our psychic cords.  With that simple act of friendship, I felt initiated into the world beyond my family.  

Words focus the light of our consciousness.  Without words to point here or there, we blindly stumble through an immense psychic forest .  Maybe I need more than one name, or maybe I haven’t taken the initiation that will reveal my true name.  While PQ and I were on the road, he said, “Maybe your name is an ancient name from your original people. Maybe that’s why all the Christian and popular names that we try don’t work.”  That felt right. But am I ready to take it on?

Names have the power to seize our essence.  That’s why the old Testament priests were not allowed to speak the name of God. When a shaman conjures a spirit he/she calls it’s name.   My name doesn't touch me because it alien to my essence. It's a key that doesn't fit the lock.

I don’t mean to bore anyone with technical astrology symbolism, but in my birth chart the Sun, Mercury, Jupiter and the Moon are in the 12^th house.  People of the 12^th house often are born with the key to the family stronghold in their hand.  From the beginning, I experienced my given name as I experienced the clothes forced on me as a child, an ill-fitting costume designed to hide my true nature from the world lest I blow our cover.  Maybe the key doesn’t fit the lock, I’m still trying to open the closet door, or maybe there never was anything to hide in the closet and all that cover up was in vain.

Heading into the Next Decade from the High Desert

 Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”
Lao Tsu― 

 My husband, Pba-Quen-nee-e has been a bit concerned for me lately.  I'm just recovering from a cold/flu that took a month to come on and is taking just as long to leave. I recognize the symptoms of a big change in inner landscape. For those of you who have some astrology background, I have transiting Pluto in the 6th house apposing the Moon and Jupiter in the 12th house, and also my Cancer ascendent . There are some other things going on as well but this one is amounts to psychic and possibly physical meat grinder machinery. However, just writing about it is helping to move into it with fresh faith. As a Cancer rising person I process life changes with emotional and physical upheavals. My poor husband is very sensitive  and often reacts to my changes before I do.  I just can't have a private crisis anymore.

I’ve been haunted by images of the past lately. I tell myself that it is an indulgence that  doesn’t make sense and probably isn’t healthy but it won’t go away.  Last night when I crawled into bed, the moonlight and the sound of crickets suddenly brought up a 3D surround sound vision of a moonlit night at our old family cabin in the Black Forest southeast of Denver.  It is gone forever, a time and place I will never experience again. When that place was still a part of my world it never occurred to me that the time would come when it would exist only as a memory. 

Right now, a big hummingbird moth just flew in the front door. I remember that my cat Joe thought they were delicious but he is also a part of the past. This one is too fast and erratic for me to catch (strictly catch and release, in my case) but brings up memories of some other hard to catch light as air beings. Right now, I am desperate to catch those Holy Ghosts flying around my head.  The great teachers from my past and near present are seductively teasing me. They must know that I want so much to renew familiarity with them again but they are diving in and out of inner space too fast to catch.  I’ve been longing to sit again in their secret ashrams. Yet another wished for journey to the past.

These reflections are bringing back the wonder and loneliness of my strange adolescence and beyond to those passionate searches for a wisdom that would load unresolvable paradoxes on an inter-dimensional space ship headed to that place where the wise ones gather on the Astral Plain to mingle and discuss the mysteries of the universe.  Not just this physical universe, but also the one encompassing all dimensions and times. I hunger desperately to time travel again because the present seems suffocatingly tight. 

I no longer remember all their names but feel their personages, master Lao Tzu was one of the first I met.  During the most lost and desperate of times, around age 16 I was wandering through a second hand bookshop on 15^th street in Denver.  There isn’t such a neighborhood anymore and I’m sorry for those who will never experience it. I love the internet, it is delicious magic and appeals totally to my mercurial Gemini self, but these old second hand shops were an entirely different level of magic with a touch of the Harry Potter ambiance. I can remember two particularly whose owners were definitely fey and a bit shadowy.  These places were dusty and dark with books piled on the floor and in the corners as there was never enough space to shelve them all. I stumbled (literally) on “The Story of Oriental Philosophy,” first copyrighted by L. Adams Beck in 1928. This was one of my introductory first steps through the enchanted door to a larger, cosmic mind.  I was hooked on mysticism and the arcane. 

This was true treasure hunting, a search for the elixir of life and an antidote to the poisoned teachings of my childhood.  In those bookstores, I found a world sequestered in secrecy lifetimes ago, and the path to my real identity. My life depended on these excursions into forbidden magic. I’m not using the term “magic” metaphorically. Frequently I would venture downtown, always alone, attempting to be invisible while searching for something that might guide me to the next step through my fascinating adolescent existential horror show. Whether in the library or one of my favorite used bookstores, I would pace back and forth in front of the shelves until a particular volume said, “it’s me you’re looking for.” Thus I was unerringly guided to the next step, and a path revealed through the current impasse. My very life depended on it. I've come to believe that emotional intensity and focus are the elixir of magic.  In other words, it helps to be desperate.

Today I’m watering my garden, yet between sentences and hope that the big cumulous clouds above will take pity and lend a hand, I find myself time traveling to another important memory. With bare feet squishing through mud and wet grass, I’m transported to an entirely different dimension of the same past or so it seems. I am now searching through a book possibly on comparative religion, mysticism, philosophy, anthropology, history, psychology, etc., while sitting under the shade of our family’s biggest apple tree, working the irrigation ditches between paragraphs through the strawberry rows, and vegetable garden. I still have these two dominant personalities, one-half, is nature girl and the other half gets quite heady. After dropping out of school to pursue the things I really needed to know, (actually I think I had some very wise spirit guides) I also decided I should learn to cook and sew.  I didn’t have enough money to buy clothes, so sewing came in handy, and I was home while my parents were at work so it seemed natural to take up cooking and gardening. On my first two years off the grid, I went barefoot winter and summer except for my forays downtown. Apart from the meat, soup or stew came directly from the garden and I loved pulling carrots and onions out of the earth and picking beans or peas off their vines. One year I made 50 apple pies and froze them, apples donated by that dear friend who generously sheltered my dual selves’, seeker of the keys to life and gardener.

I was much better back then at everything except living.  The books I read were way more scholarly and arcane than those I read now. I became a gourmet cook, and could even make my own coats and jeans. At one point I learned how to tie dye African and Asian patterns, took up classical piano, learned music theory and ethno-musicology, and finally took ballet lessons since dance was one of the activities forbidden by our narrow spirited religion when I was a child. School was a concentration camp in my experience, so I drew my fantasy world on ruled papter in class, and studied what I wanted to know instead of the curriculum. Of course, I got very bad grades and frequent punishment, but I didn’t really care. School wasn’t leading to any world I wanted to live in, and after my disappointment with the first grade, I decided that the system wasn’t interested in teaching us anything worthwhile. But when I finally cut myself adrift I developed a passion for art, especially abstract art, as well as the more arcane fields.  Now I’m a good cook but not so fancy, and I’m not really a scholar anymore but I have a much better relationship with life. My art isn’t as sophisticated or driven now but comes from the heart. Life gets simpler as I take off one pack after another along this mysterious winding trail called life. And another thing, I have no idea where the trail is headed.  It’s just that I’m curious by nature and will always wonder what’s around the next bend.

Maybe the past has been hanging close lately because I’m going to move into another decade on June 14^th and its recap time. I don’t recall going through this the last time I started a new decade but I sense this one is going to be a big crossing to a country I haven’t seen advertized in the psychic travel literature.  It doesn’t feel like a step forward, or backward but maybe off the trail entirely. I suspect my review of past times and places is a way of taking stock and prepping for whatever is out there waiting to surprise me. 

A powerful clap of thunder just shook the house, and now rain is pouring down after a long dry spell. I Take this as a sign that nature's power and abundance are unleashed on all dimensions. Yes! I believe in signs.

A WEDDING IN LAKE TAHOE, AND GODDESSES OF PLACE

We are back in the desert simplicity of Cottonwood again after a weekend in Lake Tahoe attending the wedding of friends who used to live in Angel Fire, New Mexico.  I’m trying to understand why I feel so comfortable and comforted here.  It surrounds me with soft clarity, quiet and a sense that time is meaningless. I watch and listen as the Mourning Doves sing in the tree behind us, we wait hoping to see the illusive Cardinal or the lizards climbing walls, trees and a large stone by Carol’s Buddha statue. The old mesquite bush on the other side of the wall is finally leafing out.  The older larger ones leaf out last.  Perhaps it’s due to experience from years past with late frost. Before we left for Lake Tahoe a few days ago, we discovered that our little house, the one we lived in two years ago, was for rent. We went to the Real Estate Office and picked up an application, knowing that we couldn’t afford to rent it, even though the rent is slightly less than it was back then. It was a “gesture,” in Don Juan’s sense, and an honoring of our attachment to the house and the memories of our life together first experienced there. Be well little house!

I still have some cold symptoms, mostly tiredness and extreme sensitivity to tastes and smells.  Gratefully, we made it through our friend’s wedding without succumbing to our colds.  PQ was almost over his but mine was hanging on tilting back and forth between worse and a little better. However, the trip was magical.  Not only was the lake and its surrounding mountains spectacular, but the people we met and those we already knew but now know better were splendid. It was obvious that the lake and mountain spirits were dancing with joy. The newlyweds are in Hawaii now, we hope relaxing from the frenzy of pre and post wedding events, and we are settling into gentle Cottonwood like contented hens on a pillowy straw nest.  I hope we have some creative golden eggs coming soon.

Past experience tells me that every time I get this sick it is about an approaching initiation experience of some kind, at least that’s how I like to interpret what usually follows. It eases the stress and satisfies my appetite for meaning. Maybe it’s a cleansing before the next challenge.  We will be going back to Taos for a couple of weeks before the end of the month. I’m wondering what will happen this time.  With each return, the reentry seems to be another dramatic rite of passage.

From this still Zen like mode, I’ve been thinking about the nature of Taos.  I’ve always known it is a feminine energy, and so is Cottonwood, but Taos is harsher and more extreme. It crackles like lightning.  In Taos this year we are celebrating the “Remarkable Women of Taos,” artists, authors, and pioneers including Mabel Dodge Lujan who is a part of PQ’s personal history. As I was following that thought, I realized that the feminine energy of Taos is like Kali, the Hindu goddess of time, change, annihilation and redemption.  The Taos goddess, also like Kali, is fierce tough, unyielding, protective and resourceful. She lays the scene for the primal power of Mother Nature. The men of Taos often live in desperation, fascination and dependence. This Taos mountain mama is like a lioness guarding her pride.

Kali Spirit in Taos Mountain

I witness the powerful female energy of Taos balancing and avenging the disrespect of life, nature, soul and all things excessively masculine in the outside world.  It is the Hindu goddesses that typically disport that utter fierceness of  creation and devastation that I associate with Taos. Black Kali portrayed with lolling tongue, long fangs and a necklace of severed heads is another aspect of the goddess Durga who is frequently depicted riding a lion or tiger.  When the demonic forces inspire men to create destructive  imbalances in this world, the gods of creation transmute into that all in one goddess Shakti/Durga/Kali to sweep away the vain debris of false power and corruption.

When I first came to Taos, I was amazed at how easily women from upper middle class families, and city conveniences so quickly adjusted to living in old adobes, draped quaintly over the landscape in accommodation to the earth on which they lay, frequently lacking modern conveniences such as reliable electricity or indoor plumbing.  And if not an old adobe, it was probably an equally dilapidated single wide trailer, up on a mesa, down by the river or comfortably wedged along one of the canyons.  The Taos woman didn’t live in the lap of comfort and luxury like elegant Venus of the soft tush, but chopped wood and carried water, and rather than living under the protection of men she fiercely nurtured and protected one or more of the many struggling artists and craftsmen that lived in naive expectation that their life was  just about to launch them upward on a cloud of fame and success  with a little help from mama.

These women simply fell into their true nature because the air, earth and mountain told them who they were.  So I say it is Kali the fierce Tantric goddess who dwells between the highest most magical mountain in New Mexico and that deep cut in the earth that takes one’s breath away when rising up the last loop in the Horseshoe as you enter Taos Valley.

Great worldly success is seldom a reward given by this goddess.  Life is fraught with extremes  of passion, clarity, and loss.  Why do we stay?  I think because it matches our nature like no place else.  

Three years ago I suddenly decided I should visit my friend Carol in Cottonwood, Arizona.  It was not explainable, it was a hunch.  I needed a change because too much intensity, struggle, loss and even bone stripping clarity wears down the body and soul. I came with a vision, and like everyone else who comes with a vision I went through Mother Kali’s ego grinder. I finally gave up and accepted that I would never have time or resources to develop my art, and the love of my life would never  recognize who I was. In other words I accepted defeat, age and poverty.  That is when the black goddess morphed into gentle sage.

There is some dynamic psychic balance I’m trudging toward between the harsh clarity of Taos and the indesturbable simplicity of Cottonwood.  Perspective and hope are the rewards. And in between there is sphinx like Sedona wedged among and surrounded by  spectacular red rocks waiting for someone to catch its true alchemical password.  And in the meantime incense, lavender flyers and psychic mumbo jumbo attempt to fill the void of sacred silence. The great red rocks smile, biding their time.

The Best Playground Ever: “At Play in the Fields of the Lord”

After beginning this blog entry, the phrase, “at play in the fields of the Lord,” from Peter Matthiessen’s novel suddenly popped to mind.  I think it has a Biblical source but don’t know which book or chapter it came from. If anyone remembers the source I’d love to have it.

Spring Lizard Two Days Ago

I started this piece a few days ago.  I was mentally drifting as I drove up Paseo del Pueblo Norte on the way to Cid’s, our local whole food market, when I became aware that I was floating toward the “what if” cloud again.  The power of spring was all over the place and the uselessness of life itself and the pure joy of being surrounded me. I do a lot of drifting and I get my best ideas that way.   All the same, I don’t believe I can really take credit for insights found in the mysteries of space, it’s more likely that when I’m in that state of semi mindless drifting, certain concepts floating out there on a cosmic iCloud find their way back to my personal hard drive. I can imagine an invisible fractal infinity that bids me follow its stems and curls to the maybe land of creation.

Long ago, when I was a much newer member of the Earth Now club, having arrived only five years earlier, I began to get the concept of play vs. work as interpreted by our local tribe.  My family was of the mind that work was good and play was bad, i.e., unproductive, possibly out of control and therefore without value. I was by nature quite playful as are most young creatures.  However, we were Baptists, a conservative evangelical denomination, and perhaps you’ve noticed that most evangelical church buildings are utilitarian boxes and that says a great deal about their stance toward play.  I suppose the idea is to avoid such worldly expressions of pride and sensuality as beautiful architecture by making the unfortunate though unavoidable physical aspects of life bland and uninteresting.  We were routinely indoctrinated with the concept that “this world is not my home, I’m just a passing through,” as the old spiritual says.  Play is by essence pleasurable and pleasure creates a seductive attachment to this life and consequently to our ultimately damned world. 

The moral problem with this anti-play philosophy is that it disables our hardwired ability to enjoy and we inevitably and naturally value whatever we enjoy.  An inability to enjoy counters the ability to value and have faith in life.  Ironically, all of the qualities that glue us to life are equally necessary for a bona fide relationship with our spiritual source.  If we are alienated from our nature, we won’t have much appreciation for the source of that nature. We don’t learn to love just because the Bible tells us to. Philosophers and Theologians are inclined to forget their rank in relation to the Big Boss and assume that they actually know more than their maker does. The experience of existence is a reality not because of learned beliefs or reason but because of emotional investment in what feels right.   In addition, just because the modern orthodoxy, of Scientific Materialism has replaced older religions as a dominant belief-system doesn’t mean that its approach isn’t equally misplaced arrogant. In most ways, it is as unnatural as the older religions. Nature will always trump philosophy. That’s why religion and philosophy have a history of going bad every time they attempt to go over Mother Nature’s head.

Play seems to be a fundamental expression of the life force.  Close after food and sex would be play, which frequently is intertwined with the first two. All young creatures learn about their potential abilities and their species’ life essence via play. Play is a fundamental interaction with environment and fellow creatures. The more intelligent the animal the more playful it is and the longer playfulness will persist throughout its lifetime.  I was raised to believe that playfulness was silly and childish, something to be suppressed until grown out of. But I was also taught that we human beings are made in the image of God, and as near as I can see God is the source of playfulness.  Now I’m trying to bring it out of the lockbox I’ve hidden it in for safe keeping all these years because intertwined with play is creativity. God him/herself/theSelf must be playful and although there is much pain and struggle in the world, play is an antidote to defeat. Of course, I’m thinking of that natural playfulness that delights in discovery, appreciation and invention while skirting the edge of danger. There is also escapist play lived in denial or excessive indulgence but like any addiction it is based on the misuse and imbalance of a normal function. 

I watch baby animals playing with boundless joy and sometimes wonder how it’s possible when in the wild, their future is doubtful and many of them will never make it through the gauntlet of perils all the way to adulthood yet in their window bit of time they explode into life with rambunctious faith.  Paradoxically, misery is often the inspiration of great works of art and literature.  How can that be? Perhaps the bitterness of pain and frustration make playfulness even sweeter and stronger by contrast. We all know that dark chocolate, French Roast Coffee, and hot chili are even more pleasurable because they have some bitterness or pain adding oomph to their pleasurable qualities, just as a few dissonant notes gives spice to a song.  One of the gorgeous things about playfulness is that it comes from an original innocent part of being. It is spontaneous and fresh, and because of this, it is the necessary state for discovery and creation. A volcanic eruption, tornado or lightning strike doesn’t seem playful any more than does war and famine. Nevertheless, destruction seems to be part of the life game as well. After such destruction, life surges forward with even more gusto.

Yes, I can see that God is playing all the time, even when it seems dangerous to us. It isn’t a perfect world in the sense of painless and complete but in constant change.  We are in the life game not as helpless pawns but in constant interaction with the cosmic gamer and ever co-creating the outcome.  We are “at play in the fields of the Lord.”

SPRING TUNING

I haven’t written anything for almost a month.  There are ideas that pop up here and there like the dandelions popping up in my garden right now, but I failed to write them down and when I don’t they fade back into the same shadowy corner where I keep the “will use this sometime” clutter in my mental basement.  Not yet getting around to doing taxes is another sign of avoidance.  I’m just not ready yet. What is really going on?  I feel intuitively that I’m trying to collect energy around something in order to surge into something new with laser focus but what that might be is eluding me. 

Spring in El Prado by White Deer Song

We will be making another trip to Arizona in a couple of weeks.  We both feel that we are supposed to be there at this time but haven’t yet found a way to make it happen long term.  Since giving up the little Cottonwood cottage, along with all our furniture, we haven’t had enough green resources to start again.  In the meantime, PQ needs to be at that lower altitude more than ever. He is coasting right now.  Here and there, I get the urge to interfere and confront him with the need to make a decision about preparing for a lung transplant and then something stops me. Now and then he will say something like, “I’m waiting for a sign that I’m getting better or worse.”  Actually, he is gradually getting worse.  I notice that he runs out of wind more easily doing small things now, and each time we return to Taos from Arizona it takes longer for him to adjust.  We seem to live quietly in our monkey-mind morning coffee on the patio and, “do you want to go to up to Seco for lunch and then pick up the mail” world. However, I notice small changes that are adding up to pretty big.  Maybe we humans love these little habits because they assure us that our world is familiar when it’s actually full of blind corners.

Spring is a new start for an old theme.  After a winter of hiding underground, plants begin to pop to the surface, the leaves bud out, butterflies escape their cocoons and birds chirp their love songs.  Life is never perfect but in the spring, we all want to do life better than we did last year. It’s about a new beginning, but the seeds for this year’s garden are the product of last year’s fruit.  This is the dilemma we all face when trying to get a new lease on life. 

What if time is an illusion and everything is always now, it’s just that we can only see little bits at each viewing and within one lifetime.  Not a new idea, I know, but its having a new effect on me and maybe, just maybe that’s where a new beginning really exists.  It may be that this Mayan 2012 idea is ultimately about cosmic spring, and of course, winter comes before spring so there may be some cold grey times before any fresh outlook is even possible. 

 Actually, I don’t believe previous history or planetary karma will disappear even if we blow ourselves into the stratosphere.  Although there always is this hope/fear that we will get the messy slate cleaned by cosmic forces, I don’t think there is anything in history to support this hope. Revolutions begin with enthusiasm for a pure new start and end up falling into the same pattern as the previous regime and frequently worse. Simply wiping the slate clean only means that we will soon write all over it with the familiar design embedded in our species’ memory.

Maybe genetics provides the best metaphor for hope.  A species maintains a certain genetic pattern for ions and yet every now and then there is a small mutation in the mitochondrial DNA that may make a creature better adapted to changing conditions but sometimes less adapted in which case this alteration tends to extinct itself. It seems to me that consciousness has a similar progression.  Changes are minute and sometimes undetectable in the beginning but those better adapted to the greater picture gradually become stronger. Learning to recognize the potential of those small changes is possibly the biggest challenge.  

Spring is here again and each of the plants in our garden are little different than they were last year.  Some didn’t survive winter, some have spread and flourished, some found a new location that they like better than where I planted them. The Starlings in our bathroom air vent quit leaving in the winter two years ago and are now permanent residents.  PQ talks to them when we have our morning coffee and they answer back.  Has anyone really studied them?  Their repertoire of calls, chirps and gurgles is awesome. We humans are so homo-centric that we seldom consider how other beings might see this world we share or if it intersects with lives on any other dimension. After all, we might not have the biological equipment to venture beyond our species borders but imagination isn't so limited.

Consider stepping off the cliff of reason and its pretense of security and find out where the winds will take you.  This is what happened when your ancestral DNA mutated again and again and again over many cosmic springs.  That's how you got here and its the only way you'll get anywhere else.

Dreaming the Tree of Life

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent… Carl Jung

Dreams have been my greatest teachers. There is something about primal dreams, and I regard Tree Dreams to be in that category, that synthesize the essence of our motion through life: where we come from and where we are headed. I recently pulled these out of an old dream journal and saw them with new eyes.  These are among my teaching dreams.

Three Tree Dreams:

The Tree of Life

A tree is half in the visible world, half hidden in underground darkness. It sends delicate fractal tentacles deep into the moist mystery of Mother Earth, but also equally high into warmth and light. In several of these dreams, my father says he must cut it down and destroy its visible presence. The tree is dangerously proud of its life. The dilemma is it can’t live in just one-half of the world. Visible and invisible are two sides of one reality.

I know that the life generating roots below visibility will die when cut off from their above ground connection to the sun. This theme morphs into many forms throughout my childhood, but the theme of forbidden visibility always comes out the same.

ONE

In this dream, a tree is half-dead and half alive; my father is cutting down the whole tree. He says it can’t survive that way and he must destroy both sides. I fight ferociously to save the living side but it seems hopeless; the dead side constantly pulls more and more life from the living side. I struggle and struggle to find a resolution but nothing seems to work.

TWO

In yet another dream, someone cut a huge old tree at the base, severing it from its roots. The person who does this believes it is the right thing to do. I’m horrified. I hope for a miracle but it can’t live without roots. Someone tries to help me prop it back up over the severed roots, pretending it won’t make any difference. This is denial and I know it, but I must try. The appearance of life will soon fail.

THREE

I go for a walk and discover a tree I once knew about but completely forgotten. When I see it, I remember that originally, there were two trees. I’m shocked and ashamed when I rediscover the forgotten one. I remember that it once gave me shade and comfort, how could I ever have forgotten it. The second tree is also important. If I abandon it, I will grieve as much as for the first. I feel unremitting pressure to choose between them but it’s impossible, I love and need them both.

FOUR

In another dream, a Cottonwood sapling is secretly growing in the backyard. It’s a volunteer and I’m delighted, visiting daily to water and admire it. Then my father finds it and digs it up as a weed. I am furious and begin digging up the plants in his garden. My mother is horrified. She asks me how I could be so cruel knowing all the effort and hope my father invested in his garden. I feel regret for what I’ve done and stop the destruction. I know how sad he will feel. He will never understand the damage he causes.

Many years later, in waking life he did cut down the Cottonwood tree that was my retreat and comfort from a world that constantly bombards me with demands I can’t meet. He knows how important that tree is to me and that’s why he cut down. After that, I know that I will treat him respectfully but keep a wall between us. I will always hate his God. My father thinks he is doing right, and right must be painful. Life should be painful. Wonder, beauty, comfort, attachments of the heart will only harm ones adjustment to reality. Life will be hard, a struggle, a gantlet to be survived. Love in any form but servitude is dangerous. I’m supposed to learn that good people don’t get what they want in life, and to accept what I get.

REFLECTIONS

Children often live out what their parents most fear. This is especially so when the parents embody very little of their life force, their own unique nature or potential. For this reason, my parents both feared and secretly admired me. They regarded me as dangerous, someone to be hidden and caged. This led to great conflict and confusion. Because of this abandonment to the narrowest ledge of their world, I learned to live with and work through rejection. Their denied life force was the solid material that built this shelf to which I clung precariously overlooking a steep drop. However, by any standards this tiny space was too small to live on. Somehow, I had to make it bigger, hopefully large enough to encompass and transcend both of our worlds.

What if the parents fear life itself and believe God is jealous? They also thought they knew me but it wasn’t I they knew but the fantasy images of their projected hopes and fears. Contradictory evidence was always overlooked, denied, and if too obvious for denial, eliminated. Still I have doubts. Did they really have faith in the molding clay they wrapped around me? It was the life force itself that was the real source of their fear. It was an elemental storm that constantly threatened to rage through our fragile house like a tornado. The fragility of my parent’s world was a crippling dilemma. It seemed that my first obligation was to keep danger away from this precarious and fragile structure. Instinctively I knew that when their house fell the crash would bring down my delicately attached little ledge as well.
In my dreams, the dilemma was to find a way to protect the dead side of the tree because of it hopeless attachment to the live side. It was comparable to being a Siamese twin whose other half was mortally ill. It seemed that there was no way to avoid sacrifice to the connection.

The story went on, and I finally recognized that I was an invisible but special treasure hidden from a jealous god, both a source of shame and fear. All very confusing to say the least. However, it seems that the tension of contradiction fuels creation. The first contradiction is between being and non-being. Having spent most of the first part of life beneath its visible surface in darkness entwined in the buried roots of our family tree my task is to find some healing elixir to rejoin the severed trunk to the roots.

JOE AND MISSY 1989 – 2007

Today I feel sad and nostalgic but I’m not sure where it’s coming from. There was a rather intense full moon last night, maybe that was the trigger. Then this morning I read fellow blogger John Farr’s ode to his previous cat and realized that I’d never properly honored my life with Joe and Missy. It was a private thing. But it also framed a time of my most important rights of passage in the sense that new beginnings are usually heralded with a loss, or at least that’s how I’ve experienced them. My cats Joe and Missy represent a life lived within my larger life, one that is gone now but set the stage for what my life is becoming. They were the constant in a period of profound changes. Now and then I see something move from the corner of my eye across the left side of our living room, almost transparent, but movement nevertheless. Joe loved to lay in an intimate corner made by the TV stand and rocking chair. I haven’t seen Missy, but then she was less attached to me than to her brother. But perhaps they now move across the edge of my vision as one entity.

THE BEGINNING

Joe and Missy came into my life 22 years ago last September. My ex-husband and I had recently moved into a place I considered perfect (still do) although it turned out to be a short stay. I was happy there. It had three bedrooms, two baths, walk-in closets and a covered porch yawning onto an intimate Japanese style garden surrounded by a high wooden fence. It was only a few blocks from where I worked at the renowned Tattered Cover Bookstore which is still famous in the book world. There were coffee shops, galleries, a well stocked health food store, quaint cafes and a video store all within a few blocks. We could easily walk to everything we needed, plus the few remaining farm houses and pre-40’s bungalows added an intimate small town ambiance. The neighborhood was further enhanced by great old trees joined at their tops to make an arch over the narrow streets. It had been a semi-rural community when I was a child, then a Bohemian like art community and now was in transition toward Yuppyhood. One felt perfectly safe walking all over the neighborhood after dark, and since I worked until 10 pm that was important.

According to the lease agreement we were’nt allowed to have pets but my husband who was rapidly advancing toward another manic episode, (these occurred with increasing intensity each time with a regular rhythm of 6 months on and 6 months off with a few months of transition time in between) obstinately refused to be daunted by lease agreements and insisted that we had to have this cute black kitten born to our neighbors across the street. It was their cat’s first litter and there were just two babies; a long haired black female and a short-hair male tabby. When I saw them I immediately figured out who their fathers were having seen two suspicious culprits around the neighborhood. Eventually he wore me down and I reluctantly went with him to see these kittens. We ended up bringing both home. My ex wanted the black one but I said, “ if we ever get a cat it will be two so that they would have company when we were out of town.” And I said to myself, “we won’t be in anymore trouble with two than one, lets take them both.” He said, “but the other one’s just a plain tabby,”and I said, “I like tabbies.”

The next day we brought them across the street in a shoe box. I remember that the tabby was terrified and it took awhile to calm him down. The black one seemed more curious. We named them Joe Tiger (the tabby) and Bat Girl (the black one) because her ears were batlike when she was a kitten but before long they became just Joe and Missy.

Missy and Joe on the Sofa

The kittens ran up and down the hall every morning, attacked us from every dark corner and doorway, slept in the flower pots and buried potential prey under the carpet, things like wrist watches and Christmas ornaments. One day I captured Joe in a corner and our eyes locked. I have never experienced this before with any animal and with only one human when I say that we looked at each other with mutual recognition and even though I wasn’t sure about reincarnation in animals I was nevertheless sure that we knew each other to the core. He and I would always have a singular and powerful bond.

I forgot to mention that just after moving into this apartment, and a month before the kittens, we had visited Taos and Santa Fe for the first time. For many years I’d yearned to see Northern New Mexico and especially Taos, but had been too poor to travel. It was an unexplainable yearning, as if my ancestors had been exiled from the promised land and I wouldn’t be truly myself until I touched the holy soil. This is a ridiculously common story in Taos and generally underwhelms seasoned Taosenos, but nevertheless its real.

THINGS FALL APART

Since my then husband was crossing over the border of another psychotic adventure, I felt some unease about the trip but it was our first chance to get away in several years and off we went. The trip was a complex experience full to the brim with synchronistic encounters, instant infatuation with the place and terror about what would become of us as my husband’s mental state worsened and his ability to deal with people and everyday reality plummeted. Shortly after we returned home his demons took over and life became a living hell. Eventually with my mother as witness, I had to sneak off to a judges office and get a court order to have him taken in via police custody for evaluation and treatment after neighbors, landlord and co-workers told me they were terrified of him and what he might do next. I remember a three week period during which I didn’t sleep a single night because of the unpredictable 24 hours a day raucousness in our house. He swept frantically through encounters with cab drivers, restaurant owners, old and new friends, insisting to everyone that he was king David returned to save the world and other boundless extravagant claims until the time came that he could no longer put a sentence together to tell anyone anything. Word salad they call it in the psych books (tossed salad, no doubt). I walked to work every morning wondering how I kept on going without sleep while immersed up to my eyebrows with a full tilt boogie, unpredictable, high volume, blinding speed mania.

For awhile I had to leave the house because I wasn’t supposed to go near my husband due to the legal actions I’d innitiated. Although worried about leaving the kittens in such chaos I knew he wouldn’t intentionally harm them. When I was able to return they acted somewhat confused but recovered quickly and when they were a year old my parents who were helping us survive the financial disaster a severe manic eppisode creates, felt that we were paying too much rent and should own a home. Under their patronage I found a cute bungalo in a neighborhood I liked and my folks co-signed for it. It was a bit of a fix-er-upper but nothing serious. By then things had calmed down considerably and we were living in the same house again. Nevertheless, I cried all night when I received the news that our offer on the new house had been accepted. I now remember the little house fondly and I certainly put a lot of work into fixing it up but I never felt settled in, and was antsy and out of kilter all the time that we lived there. It was a trap to keep me from my life path.

THE PROMISED LAND

Around this time the bookstore started giving long term employees a paid one week vacation and of course I was off to New Mexico as soon as possible. We also made many three day weekend trips. On one such trip we had few funds but were lucky enough to get motel rooms that had something wrong with them, i.e., the air conditioning didn’t work or the TV was fried, cheap. I still remember it as the broken motel trip. Somehow there was always a way to go to New Mexico and especially Taos. The cats stayed with my parents when we left town. Then something strange happened. I suddenly became interested in the Native American world. A long dormant issue burst through a wall of lifelong ignorance and denial, breaking down layers of protective unconsciousness.

This wasn’t a real surprise to anyone except me. For years people had asked me if I was Native American or Native Hawaiian, but then they sometimes thought I was Italian or Spanish, as well. Of course I just attributed it to my long dark hair. At first when we went to New Mexico my interest was more in the Moorish/Spanish influence and history, the Native American part hadn't yet caught me. I was also totally uninterested in the artistic history of Taos even though art had been on and off a part of my life since I was five years old. I’ve since learned to look for those issues that people deny or neglect for a clue to their essence.

Synchronicticly we had arrived at the quincentenial year, 1992. It took awhile before this reality soaked through my unawareness. Now when we visited New Mexico I had an entirely different focus. I began reading everything I could about indigenous people not only from the Americas but around the world. I was also submerged in unexplainable grief that entire year. Although used to being depressed or sad, this was different. It was not personal and I couldn’t understand it. Suddenly I noticed Native People everywhere I looked; waiting at a bus stop, working on a construction project, moving next door to my parents, coming to our yard sale, in the book store and even among my fellow workers. I read up on AIM, native history in this country, and the horrendous history of all European encounters with the indigenous residents in places of their conquest.

My ex-husband had been bringing assorted “medicine men” and exploitative “apples” (red on the outside, white on the inside) purporting to be spiritual leaders and teachers into our life for several years and I wanted nothing to do with them. Now I recognized that there was a hidden theme. My ex-husband, though seriously damaged emotionally was specially attuned to my spiritual path (probably in self defense) and often intuited what was coming next in my life. I will always credit him with a genius for inspired accidents. I remember going to our first powwow. I stood near to a “drum” and the vibration  song and drumbeat surged through my body with awesome power and I was haunted by this experience for years.

THE INSPIRED ACCIDENT

One spring he called in a reservation to our favorite Taos motel.  It was inexpensive and walking distance to everything in town. The next morning the owner of the Adobe Inn called. She thought my husband may have called her Inn by mistake the evening before, since she had no reservation for us. They were listed close together in the phone book. He must have made a glitch. I assured her it was a mistake. But after talking to her for at least half and hour I agreed that we would love to meet her and also her dear friends a Medicine Man from Taos Pueblo and his wife.

We arrived in early afternoon and decided to stop by the Adobe Inn to meet owner Diane before checking in at the Adobe Wall. We never made it to the Adobe Wall. After talking to Diane until well after midnight she offered us her bedroom and she slept on the couch. The next day we met Joe J. and Frances her Taos Pueblo friends. Except for their oldest Son, Blue Spruce Standing Deer (Pba-Quen-nee-e) who was living in California, and after several more visits that summer, we’d met the entire family.

At the end of the summer I decided I had to move to Taos. My husband liked our Denver house and neighborhood but agreed that our life was in suspended animation. We decided to sell the house. I think in retrospect that he didn’t have an agenda of his own and just followed my direction. The house sold even before it was officially listed. We’d planned to list it in the fall because our real estate agent told us it might take until spring, and that was the most likely time for a sale. Hopefully, that would give us time to plan our move and find a place in Taos. But I thought to myself, “unless God wants us there sooner.”

MOVING TO THE PROMISED LAND

The house sold before it was listed and we had three weeks to find a new place and plan the move. And the move was frantic. I shut the cats in the bathroom until the movers were through taking our house apart. Everything was loaded by 2 pm except our personal items and the cats. It was mid-November and the ground was covered in ten inches of snow. After the moving truck left we put our suitcases in the car and spent the night at my parent’s home. The next morning we came back for the cats and their accessories. They were on their pillows in the basement. Joe desperately hung onto his pillow with the claws of all four feet, Missy came easier but complained verbally. I felt sad taking them out of a home that was so good to them. It was a sweet house but it was in the wrong state for the direction my soul was headed.

All the way to Taos we drove through blizzard conditions. We are each driving a car but I have both cat’s in their carriers. After a challenging trip over La Veda pass in a worsening blizzard we stop briefly in Fort Garland to let the cats out of their cages to use the litter box and have water. Then on to Taos. We arrive in the dark about 7pm and our new Land Lady has hot chocolate and our keys ready. The new house is next to hers. We put the cats and their accessories in the house and head to the Adobe Inn. The next morning after meeting with our moving truck driver we go to the house. I can’t find the cats anywhere which seems strange in a totally empty house. I spend several minutes looking in closets and behind appliances. Finally I find Missy under a raised shelf in a closet. But I can’t find Joe anywhere. Then I stop, tell myself not to panic but to think like a cat. Going straight to the kitchen I automatically open the cabinet door beneath the sink. There he is huddled in a corner and almost invisible. The cabinet door was not that easily opened. I ‘m impressed!

TAOS AS TRICKSTER

Again I put the cats in the bathroom while the mover unloads our things. However, I need to regress and explain that when we decided to move to Taos our lives changed so rapidly in that direction that our heads were still spinning. When we arrived in Taos, its famous trickster energy immediately overtook us. The driver of the moving truck, a Texan named Bo, had to rent a shuttle vehicle because the old bridges on Upper Ranchitos were too frail for an 18 wheeler. In the meantime he left his big truck at Hinds and Hinds Storage where we’d rented a space for items that didn’t fit in the new casita. After everything was unloaded at around 3:00 PM, Bo presented us with the bill and I started to write a check. Since I’d never before hired a mover I didn’t know that they don’t accept checks. Of course I didn't have the cash. Bo said he would have to load everything back on the truck and take it to Santa Fe until I got the cash or money order. We were working on a narrow slice of time because his big truck was at the storage place and would be locked up at 5:00 pm. I immediately decided to find a way that I could my bank to wire the money. We checked several possibilities but it turned out that the weather was so bad that our bank in Denver had closed early. I went back to the house and begged the mover to wait while I tried one more option. We went to a local bank and asked if they could find a way to get the money another way. Finally after dead ending with several ideas I called mom and she called her Credit Union. Fortunately they were not yet closed and managed to transfer some money to an account that we opened on the spot. We got in just under the wire and Bo was able to retrieve his big truck.

Our first meal in the new Casita was Thanksgiving. I still remember that shopping for the Turkey gave me a feeling of putting down roots. We were really living in Taos! The living room was still piled with boxes but I’d cleared the kitchen for action. All was well except for one memorable mistake. I couldn’t find my spices and tried to substitute sagebrush leaves for sage in the dressing. Not the same thing! The results were terrible. I ended up throwing it away. But the turkey pasole and atole cornbread I made with the leftovers were splendid.

The little Casita on Upper Ranchitos

Now we were in a new country, because Taos New Mexico is world apart from Denver. Without jobs or any clear idea about what to do next, I remember looking at the cats and thinking, “what have I done to you?” But it became a great adventure. We walked all over town, exploring the narrow winding lanes and shops, driving in the countryside to ancient villages that seemed caught forever in an earlier century, and also spending hours at the Taos Inn and Café Tazza meeting locals and journalizing. Almost every afternoon we went to the Adobe Inn to visit Diane and wait for Joe J. and Frances to come by. This usually resulted in a private powwow with Joe J. singing and drumming while the rest of us danced. And when we left into the total darkness of a Taos that didn’t yet have street lights, the air was laden with cedar and pinon smoke and I felt that I had finally arrived at where I’d always been in spirit.

Our marriage was rapidly becoming unworkable in Denver and although we enjoyed walks, trips of discovery in this new adventure, a practical foundation just wasn’t there. This new life I was discovering was a serious challenge to my husband's desired status in my life.  He resented that he wasn’t able to follow me into this new phase. Although there were many fondly shared memories plus the strange bond that comes from living through several disasters together, it was no longer a true marriage, and it wasn’t possible to integrate this relationship into what my life was becoming. I felt that I was walking with heavy chains on my ankles and yet felt an enormous sadness for what we’d once hoped for that could never be.

I’d begun working in a local bookstore, a job he proudly engineered for me, but I soon discovered that my bookstore days were over. On one day off I stopped at Diane’s house to see off my new friends Joe J. and Frances who were going to visit their daughter in South Dakota. Their son Pba-Quen-nee-e (Standing Deer) was also there. From the moment we’d first seen each other a few weeks earlier there was the most powerful sense of knowing and attraction that I've ever experienced. But at the time I considered my life much too dull and set in defeat and frustration to be of any interest to someone who seemed to get whomever and whatever he wanted. Beside that my dear friend Diane loved him and I thought they would someday be partners. I would later learn that he felt the same about me.

INITIATION

We both had a free afternoon and as we left Diane’s house PQ proposed that we get a cup of coffee. But before we got to the coffee shop we agreed it would be a good day to drive to Santa Fe. I will always remember the date. It was the 23rd of June, 1993. I called to tell my husband I’d be late but couldn’t get through. My husband’s whereabouts and schedule were erratic (is that an oxymoron?) and I decided to call again when we got to Santa Fe. To shorten the story, I will say that this little excursion became the turning point in my life. Nothing was ever the same from that point in time. When we got back to Taos, everyone we knew was aware that we had been in Santa Fe together and had already taken sides. I discovered that in Taos karma is instant. This created such tumult in our social group that I could never again live a compromised life hidden in the shadows. I who was used to being invisible was catapulted onto a very lonely stage under a glaring spotlight. Because of the turmoil and my husband’s constant interruptions, I lost my job. It was the first time I’d been fired. I remember thinking, “it serves you right for trying to live your old life in this new place.” A choice was demanded. My husband went into another manic episode and chaos reigned on uninhibited until I decided to move out. Joe and Missy lived with him until our divorce was final. My now ex-husband moved back to Denver and the cats and I lived in the casita for the next 12 years. This would be the womb then nursery for my difficult rebirth.

The three of us lived in the little house on Upper Ranchitos until we moved into our new Habitat for Humanity home in 2006. I don’t know how I managed it, but somehow during this time, I trained both cats to stay close to the house. I suspect that they intuited my concern and resolve to keep them safe. If I sensed that one or the other was thinking of venturing beyond my sight I called to them. But each had his/her close call before they believed me. For this reason they outlived all the other cats in a neighborhood where dogs ran loose and coyotes came out at night to prowl the neighborhood. Outwardly this was a relatively uneventful time, but internally I was quietly but radically being reconstructed from the inside out. Surprising myself, I also began painting again after a creative drought of 20 plus years. Although I knew that Taos was an artistic community that was not a serious attraction when I moved here. Instead I came to discover where I’d left my soul, and then began the process of psychically digging my way through dense layers of compromise. During this time PQ and I continued to grow closer even as he was working through his own demons, a number of relationships and two more marriages.

You Can't Take me if You Can't Find Me

Only twice did I leave Joe and Missy in a friend’s care while I took the only two vacations of my Taos years; a month in England when PQ was doing workshops in Glastonbury, and a seven day trip to Arizona to visit a dear friend and relocated Taosena. For most of our years in the casita the only times away from Taos, were buying trips to Gallup with my boss and trips to visit my parents in Denver. Generally I took Joe and Missy with me to Denver, although they were’nt fond of travelling. I always tried not to let them know we were going until the last minute by not packing until they were outside, but cats are psychic and I had to be careful not to think about the trip in their presence. However, inevitably Missy ended up under the bed clinging to her blanket while Joe crawled into a dark corner where his tabby coat made him almost invisible. When on the road they complained vociferously until we got past Questa and then would resign to reality and huddle on the floor, jumping up now and then to look out the window to see if we were getting close to their home away from home. On our way home, arriving at Questa was again the sign that we were almost home. Joe would jump on my lap and Missy moved to the front seat. For the first time during the trip they would both peer out the window to see where we were.

This pattern continued until a number of years after my father passed, when mom decided to sell the family home. Although I didn’t realize it at the time this event heralded the end of a major life phase and the beginning of another. Such passages have always been alchemical events both psychologically and spiritually. One would think I’d be aware of the signs by now, but they always manage to sneak in without detection or perhaps my attention becomes so diverted by the inevitable chaos that I’m only able to process these events in retrospect. The sometimes boring but quiet life at the Casita was coming to a close.

Now remembering mom’s sale of the house and the move to her new apartment I wonder how we all survived. Only two weeks to do what we needed at least six weeks to accomplish. There were fifty nine years of accumulated belongings to sell and disperse while involved in the house closing, setting up new accounts, and settling mom and her remaining belongings in the new place, and putting the leftovers in storage. Joe and Missy were terrified and spent as much time as circumstances allowed under my old bed. Chaos tornadoed around them and eventually I decided to leave that bed in the house so that they would have a place to hide while the old furniture and all they were familiar with in their home away from home came undone.

ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

The day after moving mom into her new apartment, I received news that PQ’s father Joe J. (Medicine Mountain) was dying and that I needed to be back in Taos as soon as possible. We had all visited him at the hospital just before I left for Denver. I was concerned that I wouldn’t see him again and felt a helpless apprehension because I could do nothing about the timing. Now I was focused on getting back to Taos as quickly as possible. I arrived around 5:00 pm and learned that Joe J. had asked to be taken to his ancestral Pueblo house to die. We waited, family and friends for that time when there was no turning back. His brave wife signaled his son, Pba-quen-nee to turn off the oxygen and all went quiet. I walked out the familiar ancient door into a moonlit night leaving the family members to talk among themselves, making plans and preparations for his final ceremony. The Pueblo magic was powerful that night. I looked toward the sacred mountain and was sure that Joe J’s spirit was already there. The peace was as soft and smooth as velvet.

Life went on but not as usual. Missy never really recovered from the chaos in Denver. She began to lose weight and often peed on the carpet, something she’d never done before. I suspect she’d become diabetic. I took her to the vet and he gave me a special diet for her but she never really recovered. Joe always got through things easier than his sister but I noticed that he was beginning to limp and found it difficult to jump on the bed. Since he always jumped onto my bed about half way through the night this was a big change. The next summer, the Habitat for Humanity house I’d worked on and with for two years was finally ready. We moved in on August 6, 2006. Again I put the cats in the bathroom while movers took out all the big furniture. This was traumatic and profound for all of us. The old Casita had been our home for so long, it felt like who we were. On the other hand it was fun choosing colors and arranging rooms. In this new house, weeds wouldn’t be growing up through cracks in the wall, and it would be much more difficult for skunks to dig a home under the porch. The cats were now too old to bring snakes and prairie dogs into the kitchen but I would miss my hollyhocks. I took seeds from the many flowers I’d planted around the old house, just as I’d brought seeds from my garden in Denver when we moved to Taos.

New Casita

This new house was a fresh start. But it required that I loosen my grip on the past. I refreshed my skills with electric drill and hammer and enjoyed planting grass, laying down flagstones for a patio and seeding new flowers. I chose matching sheets and towels for the first time in my life. I anticipated that the cats would enjoy the wide adobe window sills but discovered that they were now too old to jump. Nevertheless they became used to their new digs faster than I expected. In a short time I felt I’d lived in this house a long time. Mom and my Denver friends came to visit and it was great to have more than one bedroom. PQ’s mom, Frances wasn't feeling well and we took her to her medicine man in Isletta, but I think we knew that she didn’t want to be here anymore. She and Joe J. were partners in every way and she felt her job was over. One evening he came to the house to tell me that she’d been diagnosed with cancer and only had a few months left. Frances appeared to be relieved, and though in pain, she looked out her kitchen window toward the big mountain and talked to her husband promising to join him as soon as possible. She left us during a blizzard the week after Thanksgiving.

Missy and Joe on the Porch of our Old Casita 

I lost Missy the following summer in late July. I’d just returned from a family reunion in Denver and PQ took care of Joe and Missy while I was gone. She was as usual when I returned but the next day she broke a tooth and went into toxic shock. It turned out that she’d been living with a serious gum disease for several years. Added to her diabetes it was too much for her weakened body. It was a personal loss but strengthened by the realization that an era of my life was ending. I consoled myself with the knowledge that she’d become comfortably at home in the new house but I wondered what Joe would do without his sister. They had been together since conception. He was losing weight and his arthritis caused him to limp when he first got up. He liked the space between the TV and rocking chair. It was protected dark and cozy. He was no longer able to jump on the sofa or my bed, although sometimes I lifted him up.

 Two days after Thanksgiving I had to make a choice. He was in pain and cried constantly. I couldn’t let him go on like this until Monday and talked the vet into making a space for us on Saturday morning. The ride to the vet seemed like driving through a dark tunnel. I couldn’t help thinking that when I came back my life would be forever different. The end was easy for Joe. After the shot he went to sleep quietly, but as I ran my hand over his soft coat for the last time, the impact of having stepped across a one way border in time was overwhelming. Our life together was in the past and with it went eighteen years and all the beginnings and endings that made this life what it had become. When I got home I took a photo of his last footprint in the snow.

MATURITY LIKE IT OR NOT

My mother passed away the following spring. Now both Pba-quen-nee-e and I are orphans and there is no generation ahead of us to pad the future. It’s a strange feeling; this knowing that in what seemed like an eye blink one is thrust into the role of family elder. Time takes on an entirely different meaning. Through 19 years of lives within lives, each story deserving of its own telling, we finally came together as life partners this past September. In reliving the events that brought us to this particular spot in eternity, I see how important it is to look at the past with awe and gratitude, and to grieve in honor of those that no longer share the journey with us for they have become the backdrop to our drama for the rest of this earthly performance. And my little feline markers of time have taken an honored role as time brackets in the most important story of this woman’s life.