Still deep in it, hot water bottle strapped around my middle, I breathe and sway with the red tides inside. Movement is slow, and so are thoughts, while sleep is never far away. Problems weigh heavily on the surface of my mind, but down here the pressure is global, like seabottom, and solutions are dim and distant, difficult to discern.

I wish for the Red Tent, the sister-gathering sacred womb room, earthy floor lined with cedar boughs, hot with fragrant smoke. I would sink into Her darkness until it was time to gather my essence and re-emerge into the world.

It comes back to this moment in which I breathe, my heart beats counterpoint with my pulse, and my fingers perform their stuttering keyboard dance. Forget last moment when similar things happened, and moments from now, when anything might happen. I speak of tuning my consciousness to the precise intersection of time and space where past meets future: here and now.

After a half-century of living, such basics are still news. Admittedly, it took me a while to begin the actual living part of life, but it’s an expanding process. The future is bright and vivid in my sight.

I am thrilled to turn fifty. I haven’t been so excited about flipping decades since I was ten. Ten was my passage into menarche, womanhood insofar as that is defined by hormonal surges and monthly blood-purges. Fifty is my passage to moonpause, womanhood marked by the absence of such surging and purging. A joyous prospect!

I have been debilated by bloat, cramps, low energy, seeing through dark red-tinted lenses for three days of every twenty-five for nearly forty years, and, while honouring that phase of life and blessing the babes I bore, I am now beyond ready for my freedom.

Can’t always be positive, not even most of the time. Right now, I’m in a life sucks moment, and I accept it as I accept the many darknesses I share only with me, myself and those kindred souls who accept their own. I don’t pretend superiority except when I do, when I’m temporarily stupid or forgetful. Such lapses pass, and I forgive myself.

Presence of darkside selves doesn’t mean schizoid transformation into victim moaning, ‘nothing goes well for me.’ I know too much in too many places to fall into that too-easy trap.

Still… it’s tough to be me tonight.

So what is the real issue? Parting the tissues in my numb forebrain, I peer through the veil to view skeletons, clattering like castanets in that box I thought I’d thrown away long since. I should know by now, that never works.

Shreds of flesh still cling; they may be revivable. I have become a believer in recycling as the path to ‘enlightenment.’ I no longer discard my old fears; I love them, listen and give them what they need. When they are milked of life and meaning, the essence freed from its rigored hell, I shed the empty shell.

When I was a child, fears were my friends, but not good ones, for they kept me from others who might have befriended me. Heeding fear’s guidance, I shunned all beings and circumstances. Fear was my savior, for I believed it would keep me safe. Frightened, I need not risk, I need not test wings that might prove too weak to bear my weight.

The weight I carried was mainly fear, hence my wings’ failure on those occasions I dared feebly flap. Fear proved itself right, repeatedly.

Now, as shells of fear fall away, risk appears in a new light.

Breathing in clouds of mildew is not the way to have a nice day. My head hurts and sinuses swell, but what the hell, the thing needs cleaning. Next time I’ll wrap a handkerchief over my face. A surgical mask is best for that task, but I’ll use what’s available.

The weight of work awaiting doing in this finite span of time hangs around my neck, anvil-like, but only when I ‘think about the future, Jack.’ Don’t think about the future! Root here in the now, while somehow maintaining awareness of what needs doing when it’s time to do it.

I’m hardwired to weather. My tears flow readily when it rains, and it’s poured all blessed day, a catalyst for pent-up emotions seeking release. Visions of a fire on the beach tomorrow are withering, but tomorrow I’ll bring wood in to dry and hope for the best.

Tomorrow’s forecast is a forty-percent chance of rain. Is that a sixty-percent chance of no rain, or rain forty-percent of the day? If it rains and more than twelve people show up in this teensy house, we’ll be sitting in each others’ laps.

Hmm... come to think of it, that could be fun...

It happened, and it was fun, magical, special, nearly everything I could have wished. About one in five of the people who said they would come showed up (typical), so the house wasn’t too small after all. They were the right people and it was a lovely night. I received gifts and honourings, played music, sang, drank homemade beer and even had a deliciously pleasurable cry when Brett gave me an abundant angel shower of appreciation for my songs and singing.

Made me realize how seldom I receive musical feedback. That was the sweetest gift and I shan’t soon forget!

I went to the other birthday party after mine. It was delightful in a darker, drunker way, as I switched from homebrew to Bombay Sapphire gin. Music, dancing, sexy snuggles and laughter, yum. It ended on a sour note with my car in a ditch, compelling me to walk too far for my state of being at four a.m. How it happened, I can’t recall, but I was clearly in no state to drive.

My friend Kim’s sure-fire cure for depression: get pissed, stagger home in the dark, the farther the better. It might work, except for the hangover (groan).

The future is bright, but the present is busy and where did the time go? I’ll be at the housing conference for the next couple of days, blazing a trail with an interestingly diverse group. Something may start here tomorrow to bring good changes to our home front. Shift must happen, or this community will become just another ritzy resort where broke folks commute from off-island to serve the rich fogey residents.

Wherever I go, this is still one of my homes, and I will help as I can to co-create ways to foster sustainable living on this island.

The housing conference was ‘a watershed’, many peeps impassioned, ready for action on the sustainable, affordable, community-friendly home front. Me too. Still, am left with letdown feelings of, ‘what now’? Where is the group, where is the support, how do I do this?

Isolation is my issue. It comes from growing up in the bush with so few people around me; I don’t know how to reach out, to join in. As a kid, I lurked at the edges of whatever was happening, shyness compounded by isolation, alone in my oddity, the one piece that didn’t quite fit the puzzle.

My mind is blocked right now. I drift and dream, conceiving wild and wonderful visions of froth and foam, but translating these fancies to linear words that obey certain conventions of grammar and readability feels like slave labour right now. Existence is a dreadful burden at times, my body too heavy to carry, my thoughts too dense and complex to unravel into anything like understanding.

Still, fresh epiphanic moments, lightning-struck with truth and beauty, transcendent, transpersonal, transformational eternities, endlessly and reliably revivifying my experience do make it all worthwhile, no questions asked. Life, new and improved, asks, hey, why not?

Opening the heart is a good goal. It happens regularly in any case, without prompting or forcing, so no need to stress about it. The weight on my brain is not me, not the self that lives in this moment here and now, it’s just old habit pressing in with a life of its own, commanding my attention, pointing out this and that, what if and who knows?

These habits of thought pretend to be consciousness, but when questioned, they have no answers to offer, merely further seductions of loopy logic, dragging my mind into their vortex of sinking thinking.

Go with the flow, wherever it takes you, even if the direction is down. Stay awake the whole time, take acute interest in everything you experience. Breathe, be, and allow all without judgment. Down there, beneath everything you have protected yourself from, below the humdrum layers of everyday, new discoveries await you, new forgotten selves quiver hungrily, eager to escape their endless compression, waiting to be noticed.

So, notice them, embrace them, cry their tears and welcome them home to yourself. They are your saviors, as you are theirs. Without you, they are lost. Without them, you are not whole.

“Don’t take your guns to school…”

The new craze: mad at your girlfriend, shoot everybody in sight. Today’s headlines positively oozed lurid thrills, a slow news period broken by Real! Exciting! News! The masses sharing a vicarious simultaneous orgasm.

“Ooh! How dreadful! Do tell! How, when, who, why?”

Why this urge to delve into behind-the-scenes dirt? Everybody wants to know what made the guy so angry. I won’t be surprised to find the girlfriend blamed for it.

Real reality TV, the ultimate get-off. Interview the survivors, roll the cameras, have the victims cry on cue.

Next: hire shooters, raise ratings…

Cynicism aside, these events catch me deep in the quease pit of my gut. Empathy grips me, wondering what must it have been like for them? The clip-vested killer cruising from class to class, opening fire systematically, panicking people leaping from second-floor windows to escape the deadly hail…

He, though, escapes my empathy radar. I can’t imagine him. I view him only through the lens of ‘monster’. Yet my heart knows that can’t be right. What forces made him? What drove him to do it? The urge to know is driven by pity for the child in the killer.

I said I would, and I did. I am now punctured and proudly pierced; my recent transition across the invisible line, turning over a half-century, felt significant enough to make me want to visibly mark it.

This is a serious initiation. I wanted to make a statement about my commitment to wandering this fey path. I’m all in favour of alternatives to the so-called ‘norm’. So I now sport a rather large magenta nose-ring. This means I can no longer be mistaken for an ordinary middle-aged woman. Hallelujah! Why on earth should I want to? I am anything but ordinary.

I am a drummer, singer-songwriter, goddess-loving, tribalist, astrologer, psychic, artist, reader-of-oracle, wild dancer, yes! I don’t have to pass for normal, and no further desire to pretend that I want to. I did, once. I originally pretended for my very-conservative childrens’ sake, but they’re not children anymore, are they? Besides, the wisdom of denying my ownself ‘for them’ was always questionable.

And now I’m all grown up. As a hobbit I’ve come of age, and I chose to nose-pierce to mark my passage. I might have tried tattooing, but tatts are expensive and I had a barter going with Amber.

Amber, my flesh-puncturing friend, used a monstrously large hollow needle, of the approximate thickness of a toilet plunger. The logic was that if you made the hole a bit bigger than the object occupying it, it would be more comfortable to install. Sure. Why not?

The hollowness of the needle made sense too—I could see that it would punch out a thin plug of, well, me, leaving a neat hole, which makes proper engineering sense to my mechanical brain. I can spare that little bit of me; I bleed out more of myself than that every month. No biggie.

Half the time, I don’t know what I’m talking about. No matter what anybody tells me, it’s only one perception of a story that has multiple facets. Sometimes, I make the mistake of swallowing another’s perception whole, shifting my own point of view over to theirs, which is sheer laziness, abandoning my ability to evaluate situation from my own perspective.

“Do tell! Why, you poor thing. You never… they never… really!?” This is one way that gossip is born. Then, because my own perception is inescapable, my judgments and assumptions warp the story into sheer fiction, assumed to be truth.

As I struggle to break free of archaic rules of obligation and friendship, I find myself tangled in others’ mixed perceptions. Who to believe? Who is telling the truth? Is it either-or? No, it’s both-and.

Really, it doesn’t matter. I can’t know who’s ‘right’. There IS no ‘truth’, only stories. Someone tells me his story, and I can empathize with his pain and support his feelings without reinforcing his point of view or allowing him to corral my consensus. Another tells me her story and I can do the same. No right. No wrong. Just people, their pain and pleasure.

“I got it straight from the horse’s mouth.” “I trust you, I believe you.” “If you hate X, then I hate X too.”

I’m so annoyed by the knee-jerk way I adopt others’ opinions as my own without thinking. I’m conditioned to call that ‘friendship’. Abandon my brain, abandon what I know to be true, i.e. that there are not just two but many sides to any story. How person A feels about or perceives person B is not necessarily how I should perceive that person. It is quite possible for me to like two people who hate each other.

Life might be so simple if only we could find easy answers to complicated problems of human relationships. We believe that life IS simple, it’s just a question of finding the right formula, the magic pill to render and purify problems down to their component elements so we may choose correctly without fear of mistake.

Life is not simple, it’s chaotically and fractally complex. It only becomes simple in practice if we surrender to its inherent mystery. There are no sides to choose. There are only shifting points of view and fascinating stories to listen to, share and learn from.

I don’t have a lot to say on certain days of the month. Something about blood loss brings me down, directionally speaking. Changing the subject now. Packing and readying to move on Monday is occupying all my waking focus, saying goodbye-for-now to all that I love about this place.

We weathered a lot of storms here, some more successfully than others. It’s sad to leave just when things are calming and warming. The energy is sweetening, and I am leaving, again. One day, I’ll root in and actually live someplace. Meantime, I’m practicing mobility and non-attachment to material things. Sigh.

It feels (and certainly smells) like spring. Stepping outside to pee, baring my butt to warm floral winds is an exercise in upliftment. These spring breezes would waft me away if not for gravity’s annoying reality.

I’ll be surrounded by flowers soon, awash in floral scents and flower faeries. I dropped a load of stuff at the Shawnigan Lake place this past weekend, and the garden is all very neatly weeded and trimmed. This time of the year things have just started growing well; you can still see each plant for what it is, with stretches of bare dirt between.

Beauty is an incredibly delicious tonic, though it’s possible to become jaded by the same beautiful sights every day. This may well be one of the earth’s most gorgeous settings, but the thought of that lush garden is a thrill! I’ll be freshly thrilled to return here, too. Best of all possible worlds.

The most exciting thing about the garden is that I’ll be able to take close-up photos of new kinds of flowers. I love that super macro setting… I’m hungry for new things to photograph; I’ve pretty much milked this island dry of new sights. Change is good.

Here at the new place, the daffodillies are already browning but the other flowers haven’t bloomed yet. I need to get out there to plant veggies, but it’s raining, so I’ll catch up on my words instead. I’ve fallen behind, what with packing, moving and general all-around busyness. Even at the moment, I can’t think of anything fascinating to write, just lists of what I need to do. Unpack boxes, plant garden, pick nettles to get them started drying, start indoor seeds (hoping it’s not too late), buy seeds I don’t have, like squash and cucumber, and tomato bedding plants.

Thinking about it all is so much work it makes me tired. I’m leaving for several days on Friday morning so won’t have time over the weekend while the weather is (supposedly) nice. Still, it will be worth it, a business vacation with goddesses on San Juan Island. Feasting with friends will jumpstart my lagging batteries and I plan to return full of vim (love that word).

Meantime, I’m huddled in confusion, having unpacked little but my clothes and food. What else is there? Oh man, I’ve asked myself that too. I have way too much yet still not enough.

Immediate goals: water the plants, unpack sewing materials, move things I can’t unpack out of the way to make room for the things I need to put where they are, rearrange furniture, come up with a way to make money to live on while I’m here, and do it. I can’t pick flowers to put out for sale yet, because I’m between crops, what with brown-edged daffodils and nothing else up yet. In a way that’s a relief, because it’s one less thing to do, but the flowers are a moneymaking device and I am in sore need of such.