Have I mentioned that I live with the spirit of Gustav Mahler? He's a regular in our home. Silas is close to being Mahler reincarnate, the 2009 version. He's busy (Silas, that is) composing a symphony, and when his own music is not resounding through the house,  Mahler's is. And then there are the Mahler biographies, documentaries, compositions. As part of our Christmas celebration, Silas persuaded me to sit down one night and watch a documentary about Mahler's life and music entitled Journey of a Wayfarer. I cannot recommend the film more strongly than this: stop whatever you're doing now and go rent it. Seriously. And not just you lovers of classical music. The film is so much more than an ode to one artist or even the creative process. The creators of the film have used Mahler's music and his personal life as a touchstone to explore topics as rich and luminous as creativity of the soul, suffering as an agent of transformation, art as an instrument of healing. I cried at least four times in the film, and not from sadness. From pure, radiant,soul-piercing inspiration.

I had to pause the film at one point.I was so moved by conductor Christoph Eschenbach's words on the process of creating, I had to write them down:

In order to express yourself in a piece of art you have to be secure in yourself, know yourself, have confidence in yourself, and finally love yourself, at least enough that you can cause a potential BELOVED (your audience) to believe in you and your message.

I literally shook in my seat as I considered these words.

How many years have I wandered as a wayfarer down the paths of Doubt? How long have I meandered through the halls of Insecurity? For that matter,how much authority have I given to Uncertainty? I'll tell you how much. I might as well have crowned the fucker and called it king, given it a gem-encrusted scepter and a gilded throne, that's how much. I've appointed it emperor and submitted to its rule willingly. And at this juncture in my life that kind of behavior is no longer an option. Something huge and glorious wants out of me and into the world. I'm just trying to get out of its way. And in order to do that, I'm having to consider this notion of certainty, of confidence.

Let's back up a few months.

So I'm sitting in a marble-floored hotel lobby in Puerto Vallarta. The palm trees are swaying, the ocean outside the doors is glinting. M yheart is pounding. My eyes can't seem to rest on the mac laptop screen in front of me for more than three seconds. I've just purchased a"trainer for a day" program online that will take me onto a tiny, private island off the coast of Puerto Vallarta tomorrow to spend the day training dolphins and sea lions. I'm jittery and unfocused. I close the laptop and try to reason with myself. "Where is all this fear coming from? You've learned this stuff. You are radiantly confident in yourself. How is it that this panic even exists?"

"Panic?" You might ask. "What is there to be frightened about when gallivanting in the water with the creatures of your dreams?" The chatter in my head goes something like this:

What was that marina called? What if I can't convey to the Mexican taxi driver where I'm supposed to go and end up at the wrong place? What if I end up at the right place but I slip and fall as I try to get on the boat? What if I can't manage to maneuver in and out of the pool? What about those awkward pauses when I'm in a group of people and no one knows to whom I am speaking because of my lazy eye?  How do you say "lazy eye" in Spanish? What if I'm required to wear a bathing suit and all of god's creation can see that I've attached the entire dairy section of Albertson's grocery store to my ass? What if I have to walk around exposing what time and waffle irons have done to my thighs? What if I hate the trainer? Or he hates me? And says something like "Mees, you must leave dees pool right now. We don allow keesing dolphins on dee leeps or leeking dee face. Eeet is wrong doing." Will he make me swim laps? Take away my sea lion hugging rights and banish me from the island? What if I have to sue the company and find myself reliving my trauma over and over in a Puerto Vallarta court room? No one really looking me in the eyes because mine travel in two different directions so the litigating Mexicans just end up looking at their shoes? And shoes! What if I can't keep up with the tour because these sandals are falling apart? And these blisters...

So I'm exaggerating a little bit. Just a bit. Maybe. But the point is this: after several years of self examination and deep soul investigation, I emerged out of my solitude cocoon in the summer of2008 feeling radiant, powerful, self assured. So why this panic?  I have no answer, but I do have a flashback.

I'm five years old. I've just walked out of the YMCA's dimly-lit, chlorine-fumed, lady's locker room to the bright light of an Orlando afternoon and the even brighter light of a blue public swimming pool. Before me are six children all my age and a young, male swimming teacher. He has a silver whistle around his neck. When he blows it, he wants us to get in the water. I am petrified. Not of the water. Not of swimming lessons. I'm scared to death of being in a group and trying to learn something new. I feel exposed. Vulnerable. What if I do something wrong? I'll be humiliated. Shamed. My stomach churns. My legs turn to Jell-o. I want to run. To beg Mernie to take me back home. But I know I have to do this. I choke back the sobs before they can escape and go to the edge of the blue pool. There might as well be alligators inside, I am so utterly panicked. When the whistle blows, I jump in, on cue.

I hated it. And I hated myself for hating it. I felt like the plague. And here I am 34 years later feeling the same thing. A group of people, a foreign (literally and figuratively) environment, a need to learn and perform something new, on cue, and me, the plague.  The panic reaches my throat before I can stuff it back down. I don't force it back with a pint of Jack Daniels or an entire pan of Sarah Lee cheesecake. That story belongs to someone else. But I do wander about the beach looking out across the expanse wondering how I could come so far only to end up back at my five year old self, anxious, irrational, plagued.

The thing that rescued me that night in my Puerto Vallarta hotel room was, as is so often the case, a book. I had picked up The Way Toward Health by Jane Roberts on my way to the airport. I'm a huge Seth fan and believe thoroughly in his teachings regarding self-made reality, so I was curious what he'd have to say about physical health.  Now it laid on the nightstand, as I crawled into bed, fireworks exploding from the back of a tourist pirate ship outside my window in the Pacific Ocean. As I picked up the book I felt a bit like one of those fireworks--bright and dazzling at the thought of soon playing with my ocean friends, but fragile and explosive at the thought of somehow embarrassing myself. I let the pages randomly open. This is what I read:

In a basic way, it is against nature's purposes to contemplate a dire future, for all of nature operates on the premise that the future is assured. Nature is everywhere filled with promise--not only the promise of mere survival, but the promise of beauty and fulfillment.

...Children spontaneously take it for granted that their acts will result in the most favorable circumstances, and that any given situation will have a favorable end result. These attitudes pervade in the animal kingdom also. They are embedded in the life of insects, and in fish and fowl.They are the directions that provided life with purpose, direction, and impetus. No organism automatically expects to find starvation or disappointment or detrimental conditions--yet even when such circumstances are encountered, they in no way affect the magnificent optimism that is at the heart of life.

I laid the book on my chest. I sighed. How and when in my own wayfaring journey had I diverged so far from Nature's path? I traced through the lines and curves of memory all the way back to first memories, and those contained this overwhelming panic of "getting it wrong." Since I couldn't distill this issue to one moment where I went astray or one event that shaped my anxiety-path, I brought myself back to the present. And that's when it hit me. "The Present." This present. As in Here. Now. In a single moment my focus shifted from attempting to parcel out "where I went wrong" to contemplating how much Here and Now I'd missed by living outside of the Here and Now. Like being in this hotel room Here and Now but really living in tomorrow's blue pool of awkwardness, embarrassment, humiliation.

I then did two things in quick succession that made all the difference.

First--I envisioned the best possible outcome. I played with the sea lions, frolicked with the dolphins. I stepped gracefully on and off the boat, handled each new task of the day with light-hearted fun. I laughed a lot. When my sandals fell apart, I tossed them in the garbage and went barefoot. When I missed the top rung of the pool's ladder and fell in the pool unexpectedly, the impact shoving my bathing suit so far up m ycrack I could feel the atomic wedgie in my throat, I emerged spluttering but laughing, knowing the dolphins laughed with me. They didn't care how I got into the water, just that I got in.

Second--I took the expansive, joyful feelings from this vision and brought them into my here and now. I let the particulars of "tomorrow" dissolve and allowed the feelings of joy to remain, settling on me, the book, the nightstand, the bed like a canopy of well-being.

How often do we allow fears of tomorrow or regrets from yesterday to rob us of the well being available only in the Here and Now? How much doubt and uncertainty do we allow to creep into our art--our life's expression--because our concerns lie outside the boundaries of the present moment? Take me, for example. I have spent twenty five years journeying to find my life purpose, my art. I am a dancer, a poet, a singer, a photographer, a writer, a collage-artist, a healer, a comedian, an actor. But none of those have singled themselves out as"my thing." I do each reasonably well. Sometimes more than well. But not so blindingly well so as to deserve singular focus and driving ambition. But maybe, just maybe, I have allowed the scars of yesterday--where boys and girls and more than a handful of adults reacted to my lazy eye, my thick hips, my loud voice with ridicule and rejection-- to drive my attention away from the one gift present within me from earliest memory: storytelling. And perhaps I have so sought to evade those same kinds of judgments from reoccurring in a someday future that I have evaded the talent pervading my very nature: performing.

If Christoph Eschenbach's philosophy is true, and I believe it is, then the very thing I have needed to secure my place on the path (my art, my soul's expression) and encounter my beloved (my audience) is the very thing I've spent years deflecting. Certainty,confidence and self-love are by-products of living fully in the Here and Now, just as one is. Not in the What-Have-Beens or the What-Might-Bes. Stay in either of those realms and you can wander eternally, never quite arriving home. Take it from a wayfarer who, only at forty, is securing her soul, taking to the stage, arriving home.

Tattered sandals and a few blisters on my feet, dolphin grins in my back pocket, I arrive at the cool blue pool of potential. Let's get this party started.

 In the days following the election, many of us who voted for Obama have rallied to celebrate the feeling of Hope and the sense of Yes.

A few days ago, someone sent me a link to the From 52 to 48 with love project by Ze Frank, who asked people of both voting "parties" to communicate their hopes and fears through personalized notes captured photographically. I was so touched by the messages, and by all the things that tie us together as human beings, that I put some of the photographs to music.

If you're feeling optimistic and want to share in a sense of communal hope, watch the film. If you're feeling dejected and cynical, watch the film. I am not sure Obama will lead us out of the problems we are in, but I am absolutely certain we can. If enough of us embrace our commonality, the tides can't help but turn.

We are, in short, quite amazing. It's time we act like it.

To view the film click here

To visit Ze's blog and read about the project:
http://www.zefrank.com/from52to48withlove/index.html

"I dare you, while there is still time, to have a magnificent obsession." - William Danforth

Passion and obsession are curious words. They conjure images of kissing lips and wandering hands, smoldering in the act of love. But passion also quickens the soul. One can be passionately wild for chocolate covered strawberries, ruby throated hummingbirds, full moons, roller coasters, knitting, golf (though I cannot fathom why). I've been mad for many things, allowing myself to fall madly in love again and again with life's many beauties. Though as wild as I let my abandons become, I never saw the pregnant belly obsession coming.

But I get ahead of myself.

I came to Taos on a self-imposed spiritual retreat for forty days and forty nights in the middle of October 2006. Since then, I like to tell people that Taos kept me, for I never did return to Kennesaw, Georgia (and the house we'd built there) for anything other than a brief visit. Before packing up the 4-runner with art and books and chihuahuas for the long drive out west, I spent many hours on the computer trying to find just the right place, the spot that felt aligned, kindred.

But in between searches on Google for adobes and shamans, I would browse for hours images of pregnant women. This befuddled all who knew me, including myself. I never wanted to have a child and those few moments where I'd briefly entertain the notion, the biggest drawback for me was the actual pregnancy. Who'd willingly do that to their body? And the pain? Yeesh. You can have it, I thought. So why, then, the sudden desire to find paintings of pregnant women? Extended bellies covered in henna tatoos and sacred symbols? And why was I printing them out and posting them all over my walls?

Believe me, the entire family wanted to know. I had no answer.

I was 37 years old and though I was probably fairly close to biologically passing from the "motherhood" stage, I had not yet left the maiden phase, at least not energetically. All the art I'd purchased, every print I fancied, and gads of heroines I related to in stories and films and music were all maidens. Hell I built a business marketing maidens, faeries and mermaids--all young, beautiful, soulful, feminine beings--usually alone and consumed with longing. This is what I knew.  Who I related to.

So I am just as surprised as everyone else by these images on my wall. Just after arriving in Taos I decide that flat art--paintings, prints, photographs, greeting cards--of pregnant bellies won't do. I write an artist friend, a talented and successful sculptor of mythic creatures. I ask her if she'll sculpt a nude pregnant woman for me. "Someone who'd belong in the desert," I say, suggesting a wild deer-goddess type woman: powerful, engaging, her body and posture at once a howl at the moon and a shape-shifting dance of fire.

 By Christmas Deer Woman has arrived and she's not at all what I'd expected.  And I'd tried to keep my expectations low and my hopes few; just a big belly with swollen breasts, thunder thighs, a pair of antlers and an air of authority. But this chick?  She's beautiful-- oh yes--and luminous. But she's small. And gentle. She's got her eyes closed. And...get this..she's smiling. Now I ask you, what is there for a pregnant woman to smile about? I have over 50 images in my house of pregnant women in various poses and none of them are smiling. They're damn serious about this birthing business and they look like they're gonna be powerhouse, hell-on-wheels-take-no-prisoners kind of mothers. But this Deer Woman is...dear. I want to shout at her "Wipe that grin off our face! Squat down in the red dirt and mix your blood with the sage! Paint silver tattoos on your body that sing of bones and legacy and wild moon imaginings!"

But she smiles. Serenely. Radiantly. And she just won't friggin' stop.

I don't hate her but every time I look at her I get a little angry. I want to flick the smile off her face. What kind of mother will she be if she's this passive in pregnancy? I hear June Cleaver click-clacking her high heels through the kitchen with a pitcher of crisp yellow lemonade and no less than four tall, frosted, iced-filled drinking glasses. Silas, as ever the voice of wisdom, says, "I think she's got a secret. And I think you're mistaking wisdom for passivity. Give her a chance. She knows something."

"Yeah," I say, rolling my eyes, "she knows how to darn little deer socks and sing cloven lullabies and she'll probably be the first one pegged by a well-placed bullet, just like Bambi's mother. You watch--ten minutes into the film and she's a goner."

He's right, though. She's got a certain charm. But still I want to flick her.

Fast forward. It's 2007 and I've written my first book, a story that I'd labored a lifetime to develop and several years to birth. It comes out in a rush--just like real birth--all imperfect and awkward, but gorgeous and healthy. I'm thrilled. I'm still living in my little adobe, no more aware of why I'm in the desert than when I'd first arrived. No more of a plan than when I drove cross country wondering what would happen in my forty days away from family, home and business. I haven't a clue why Taos still holds me, but hold it does and I surrender. There are still images all over the house of pregnant women. In fact for Christmas Silas labored to find me a hand-carved, wooden belly mask used by African boys in tribal coming-of-age ceremonies. Their elders tell them they are unqualified to become men if they don't first travel the road their mothers took to bring them into life. Once they dance the trials of life-giving and motherhood, only then may they be eligible to be called men, fathers.

"Maybe I came to the desert to give birth to a book," I say one night by the fire as the winter draws 2007 to a close. "I think maybe you came here to give birth to yourself," Silas says. "A you that you've never even dared hoped to be. A mystery, but still a life that wants to be lived." I think he's right.

And this brings us to the events of last year. 2008 was filled with magical meetings and events, challenging exchanges, a great "cleaning house" of spiritual, physical and psychic baggage. I let go of a great deal and stepped lightly into a heavier mantle--a deeper sense of "place", a grounded sense of authority. Without going into all the detail, let's just say I came into my power in 2008. My shoulders no longer hunch in fear or anticipation of other people's opinions. My spine stands straighter now that it no longer curls around other's expectations. I lie my head on a pillow each night without a blanket of anxiety. I know more who I am and confidence is no longer something I wistfully yearn for or fake. I own it. I am it. Unapologetic and unafraid, I fully inhabit my space, big ass and all.

And somewhere during this time I grew less attracted to images of longing-filled maidens and seekers on hopeful quests. My eyes instead turned not only to round power-bellies, but to the faces and hands of older women, those lined with strength and dotted with experience. Fires at their backs and staffs in their hands. Mothers on the road to being grandmothers on the path to being great-grandmothers. Knowledge-keepers. Wisdom-makers. Power-dwellers. Guardians, entitled to their piece of earth, fully inhabiting their form, unapologetic. Unafraid.

When I met Luisa, a Shaman who lives in Santa Fe, two pieces of a giant soul-puzzle came together in our sessions, which were a mix of soul retrieval and journeying. First, my sixteen year old self that had been rejected by me, who'd been relegated to the  "too feminine, too weak, unqualified to compete in the harsh world of men" shallow end of the psychic pool was welcomed back into my being, bringing a new softness and femininity to my core. Once back inside my center,  she was no longer elusive. I needn't search for her (our) essence in image, in story, in song.

And then the crown: through a series of past life visions,  we uncovered a long series of traumas surrounding birth. Reliving the memories was tactile, intimate. I could feel the agony in my teeth, my palms, my hips. At the end of August I was sitting on Luisa's couch when I not only heard but felt a huge block of scar tissue leave me. Words cannot capture what happened in that room and in the rooms of Otherwhere we occupied that day, but at the end of the session, as I lay in the warm lavender-scented air, listening to the breeze outside the window carry rain down the Sangre de Cristo mountains, I heard a voice pronounce, "A long-endured cycle has now ended. It is time for you to give birth. And you will give birth in this lifetime again and again. You will fill this world with children. You will know pregnancy and birth with utter joy. After many many lifetimes, it is now your time. In birth, in motherhood, you are radiant."

And instantly I wanted to pounce on my sculptor friend and give her a huge kiss. And take back every finger flicking impulse I ever had toward the Deer Woman. She finally makes sense--a profound sense I couldn't see until I became it. The Deer Woman precisely captures the self as home.  There is no reaching here. There is only knowing. No striving. Only being. No need to conjure or convey a thing. She is settled power, rooted, sure. Possessed and possessing.

Her eyes are closed for there is nothing she can see outside of her that doesn't already exist inside of her. She is complete. Confident. Contained without being restricted, she is at home in her body. In her power. In her joy. As above so below. As within so without. Her inner world and her outer world are the same: radiant. And in her fullness she has become her own magnificent obsession. This is her secret and her smile.

As now it is mine. In the coming days I will turn forty. And though physically maidenhood may have already passed from me, I know intuitively that only now am I passing from the Maiden to the Mother, at once the culmination of forty years of seeking and lifetimes of suffering and resistance. The crossing has already occurred, as the smile on Deer Woman's face, and the one on my own, could tell you. But now I seek to be with women who have also crossed, to perform ritual and ceremony marking the occasion. In their presence I turn to the center of the circle and say "Then" and "Now" and "Yes" with witnesses, with mothers and crones, with women. Bellies full of stories and ideas and wisdoms. Bodies full of hope; bodies full of home. Women with secrets. Women with smiles.

Tink is still with me. She's doing well. Thank you to all who've written to inquire. Your blessings are a mantle. This is us in the gold from last night's sunset, sucking up the last burst of brilliant-ember light before dark.

It's practice.

I feel as if I've just escaped the jaws of death. Or life. Isn't that what they call those big fat salad tongs that pull babies from the womb, fresh and steaming from the void? In any case, I have come up for air on the other side of a dark and gleaming experience. Dark like coal. Gleaming like hematite.

Two weeks ago Silas and I head to Santa Fe to take Tink to the vet. She's not been eating well and is having trouble breathing. In the deep mountain pass between Taos and Santa Fe, the 4Runner starts making a whining noise. Flat tire. It becomes readily apparent we're going to miss Tink's three o'clock appointment. Picture me in a last-days-of-summer white sundress and sandals with my I-can't-be-bothered-to-learn-how-to-change-a-flat-tire-since-I-have-triple A-and-they-can-do-it demeanor. And there's Silas in blue jeans and a white poet shirt donning his nineteenth-century, a-horse-and-carriage-is-the-only-way-to-travel attitude. The mountains are high. The bars on my cell phone low. No coverage, so no triple A rescue. We get out of the car and realize neither one of us even know where the spare tire is located (which, as it turns out, is underneath the rear of the car suspended by a steel cable).

An hour and a half-sunburn later, thanks to a good Samaritan named Chris who stopped to help (well, actually, to conduct the entire affair), we are back on the road and decide we'll continue on. Tink needs to be seen by our doctor. But by the time we get cell phone coverage and call the vet there is no answer. They've left for the day.  We grab two lattes at Starbucks and head over to our favorite cemetery to walk the dogs and plan our next move. It's there, after Tink scrambles out onto the fresh-cut soft green grass, that I notice she has diarrhea and it's bloody. Too bloody. I've never seen anything like it. I call the vet's office again. Maybe they haven't gone home. Maybe they were just with a last-minute patient. No answer. No emergency after-hours number on their machine. I call again. Again. Again.

And my heart sinks. How will I live without her? How can I breathe in a space with no air? I've loved dogs my entire life. Tink is not a dog. When I attempt to explain this to people, they nod in appreciation, as if every dog had this effect on its human. But I have loved deeply and been loved back by the world's most fetching canines and Tink is not one of them.

What she feels like--and I am not being metaphoric here--is a daemon. If you've read Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, you'll know this is a reference to the animal partner every human being is born with. The word "daemon" means spirit, loki, genius. It is the attendant spirit, the essential nature of a thing, as Tink is mine. She's not what I would have designed in a dog. For starters I probably would have chosen a partner who looked more like a dog and less like a wingless fruit bat. I would have designed my animal counterpart to be snuggly and affectionate, with thick, soft fur to nuzzle. My ideal soul-partner would protect and nurture, curling up with me in big canine pile of love in my time of need. Tink is a touch-me-not dog with short, wiry fur like a Brill-O pad. She doesn't like to be picked up or handled. She's keenly independent. She loves to be loved and to give love, but on her own terms, usually while standing on my chest, pinning me down with her chicken legs of steel.

But in her love and protection of me, she is fierce. Loyal. And I hesitate to even use those words, for in truth I feel she has no choice. She, on some level, is me. She is not an "other" who can choose to love or withhold, to protect or dismiss. She is steadfast, a constant companion, because she is the animal essence of me projected outward, in blood, muscle and bone. Which makes her mortal, vulnerable. Which makes me sad. And delighted. And devastated.

I've been practicing for her death ever since she was born. Well, ever since she unexpectedly came into my life four months later. After she'd been with me only three days I found myself sobbing at the wheel of my car. I was driving to a friends house, puppy Tink curled up behind my neck against the headrest of my Acura, when I heard Green Day's song The Time of Your Life. It's this that got me:

It's something unpredictable but in the end it's right. I hope you had the time of your life.

The sweet tempo of the song, its melancholy hope, the wistful notes of parting, and I suddenly saw myself years later, an old white-whiskered Tink and I saying goodbye after years of wet kisses and fond memories. Through stinging tears and a melting heart, I risked the hope that, though adopting her had been entirely unpredictable, in the end, it was right. For her. For me. I hoped to give her the time of her life. I hoped the time of our lives would leave me blessed and better for risking love. It was a daring move.

But not until those first red drops on green grass did I feel the practice of parting might turn solid. Tangible. Real. I watched her skip around the headstones, weaving through dandelions, roses and day lilies, wondering where she'd finally come to rest. And how, when her heart stopped beating, I would continue my own heart's rhythm.

It sounds as if I'm being dramatic. But I'm just being honest. I look at Silas, my beloved man, and I wonder how to love him, relate to him, without my essence. How do I love my friends, my dog-child Isabella and my family without my essential nature? Where do I begin once I have ended?

to be continued...

I could spend weeks in an old cemetery and want for nothing. The moredilapidated and overgrown the cemetery, the better. Something aboutbeing surrounded by all that love comforts me in a haunting sort ofway. The roses, the candles, the statues--each a testament to a soulwho blessed another. Sometimes, as I sit at the base of an angel, Iswear I can hear it singing. Something soft and low, a hymn made ofcandle wax, of wind and leaves, stained with tears and hope andlonging. Theirs is a song of twilight,  emerging from the space betweenHere and There, a living shrine of transformation, burning like a starin God's palm.

If stone lips could sing, I imagine the song goes something like this:

a sentinel's song

though you sit
by the grave to weep
he is not there
she does not sleep

they've left the grave
unfettered, free.
they don new life
alive.  unseen.

i stand guard
but not for death
i wait for those
with mortal breath

who come to mourn
to shed their fears
to voice their pain
to mark the years

i catch each tear
i hold each sigh
i cradle thoughts
of where and why

i stand in stone
but watch it all
seasons turning
spring to fall

and when you leave
still i remain
carved of hope
and love's refrain

and this i sing
forever true:
love's eternal
and so are you