"god & chocolate ice cream"

This morning's Monday Morning TV is a great film that fits right in with a recent post.
(Of course, most of you that read here will have seen it already.)

Posts (when they come) will be short here. Blogger seems slow and riddled with glitches, so I've been checking out Typepad. I'll let you know when/if I make the switch.

God/god/goddess/Nature/Cosmic Mind

I'd call this one The State of the Union, but I can't see much unity at the moment.

I was talking to a friend last night about news & emails & stuff and commented to her that I am SO tired of having to struggle the find the truth of any issue. Do you feel that way, too?
We see the 'news' on TV, then I go check out some blogs on related subjects and find that there is a new & different opinion for EVERY site I check. And the varieties of 'slant' that can be attached to a single item is just astounding.

If you're not doing any of that kind of checking, I suggest you try it some time. Just pick a subject - say, New Orleans & Katrina recovery. Read some news, read a few blogs, then talk to someone who's been there. I swear you'll end up believing that everyone is talking about totally different subjects. And if you think the Katrina debacle is over, or is being handled, think again.

Then consider the war in Iraq thru the eyes (?) of the national media,
then thru the eyes of someone who has been there...
like this one.

Then I go to Tai Chi for some meditative exercise and this is the day Jim wants to show us the 'application' for some of the moves. Tai Chi is a martial art, don't you know... so I can (meditatively) consider ripping out someone's liver at the end of that punch that 'looks' like I might be serving canapes to someone.

I believe in the power and energy of our words and our thoughts.
So, usually, I don't spend a lot of time listening to war stories, or political corruption, or the latest celebrity scandal. It seems that my job must be to teach peace, model love, and meddle not at all.
Is that the right choice?
I don't know.

I grew up in a fundamental Christian environment and have studied metaphysics and looked for a place to be part of a spiritual family. I've gone back to the fundamentalists a couple of times, and have burned tons of incense over my Tarot cards in the past. I even thought I could be very comfortable and happy in a convent. I like the uniform and the quiet, and I'd be just great stuck in the kitchen making bread or something.

I want there to be God. or Goddess.
I want to know the name of that thing/spirit/entity we call god.
I want to know the truth. I want there to BE truth, somewhere.
I want to come back as someone's favorite house cat...or as a tall, active multi-racial woman with dark curly hair and green eyes.
I want this trip around the planet to be absolutely the last one - ever.

Laura is making a lot of sense to me, though, when she talks about nature as the abiding spiritual law. (My words - read a few paragraphs into her blog here.)
I can hardly wait for further comments from her on this subject.

If she's right, where do I go to church?
Well, the forest, of course - unless it's closed...

So perhaps I'll study mediation. or Ethics. or art appreciation. or drumming.

One thing I know for sure (thanks for the phrase, Oprah)
is that we (ALL of us) need to love more, learn more, share more, understand & accept the consequences of our actions, and above all
strive to be the highest and best that we can be.
We as humans have set our sights way too low.

If you think you don't know how to do that, then look around you at the best people you currently know, and emulate them. Ask them what they believe and what makes them strong enough to be gentle.

If you go to church, examine you faith and your practice of it. Why do you go there? What does that church really teach? Do they practice love even to the nonbelievers? How much judging of others happens there? How do you feel when you come out of there. How many times in one sermon does s/he pound the pulpit? Does s/he preach against, or for...?

Belief and faith are (or should be) decisions we make after careful thought and soul searching.

I still struggle with 'am I good enough'. I still yearn for the convent in some ways. I still wonder if there might be some 'right' church for me that I just haven't found, yet.
But so far, I've found only crumbling foundations or exclusion. Just the fact of being a lesbian puts me outside of the loving arms of most religions, and absolutely on the 'hit lists' of others.

Ever read a sf story called The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur Clark?
Interesting. very.
So is Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
and The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk.

It may be that the real truth of god is how much of that Principle lives within each of us.
What are my values? Do I really stand beside my friends and stand up for my beliefs?
What would I die for? What will I live for? What am I teaching?

ooooh...THAT may be a key question. What are we teaching to the people around us? Do you know? And if you think you're not teaching...think about how you learned all that you know...and then think again.

Old & New: Pt. 2

Well, let's try this again...


All the rooms in the new house were white - just white. Not eggshell, not cream, not antique satin.....just white. Like these - the living room & the bath:













Oops, I'd forgotten about that awful wall paper... the paper in the kitchen was even worse. You can see the seam covers on the walls, too; that nice 'trailer' touch that is so chic.

We got rid of all of that.


Joel did a ton of taping/texturing and sanding of seams through the whole house. I completely resurfaced the bathroom walls with stucco and Everything got plenty of paint. Here's the new living room and bath:






Most people want to touch the beige wall; they think it is suede....Joel worked on it for three days and taught me several new words. :)

The bath became our reminder of Florida, hence the colors. The things hanging to the left of the mirror are combs my Mom brought back from Africa. You can see a little of the tub corner reflected in the mirror.

The dining room turned out like this:

And the kitchen got yellow cabinet doors and fresh (eggshell) paint over that nasty paper:

This area is a lot more open than it seems; furniture seems to find a new home almost daily as we pack up and still try to keep things presentable.

We worked like trojans and did a great job. ALL the rooms; three bedrooms, another bath, and the den, too.

For landscaping we invested in 24 tons of rock of varying sizes. Because of fire danger and the acute water shortages, we garden mostly in pots and have two areas where grass & clover grow periodically when conditions allow. And we installed two 100 gallon rain barrels that really help.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I look thru all the photos we've taken, I can see that this is really just a house.
It's the history, the work, the parties, and even winning the building code battle with the seller...that have made this Home. My home - of 26 years - a place that's hard to leave.

And still, it's time. Time for change, time for adventure, time to step to the edge of another cliff and see if I can fly.

Old & New: A look at house history, Pt 1

I've been figuring out how to show you some of the changes in my property here in Ruidoso as I talk about the angst of leaving...
For overview, know this. When I bought this 1/3 acre lot in 1981 it had on it a 10X60 trailer with two add-ons, and a separate frame building (on a slab) that housed a workshop/studio. That space is why I chose this place. It looked like this:

There was an extra room with a fireplace built out on the back side, too. I could stand flat-footed in any room and put my palms flat on the ceilings...I'm 5' 4"! The extra building is at the other end loosely connected with a concrete slab and a roof...like a breezeway.

In some decade (?) I replaced the roof with a pitched one that covered the trailer, the add-ons, and the breezeway.

It was a comfy home for me and Patina, my first cat.
When we added Joel to the mix in 1994, it started getting really small.

In 2001, we found a great deal on a freshly re-po'd double-wide modular. Truly too good to be true....no, really.

The new one started out like this:

We had to bring in a lot of dirt to make the lot level out beyond the original porch (see 1st photo).

In this shot, you can almost see just the tiniest edge of the studio on the extreme left...that rusty brown square is the edge of its roof. As you can see, the new house, being 27' wide instead of 10', had a larger footprint. The old house had 3 steps downs to extra room and two more down to breezeway/studio level. The new one-level house ended up sitting much higher one the studio end than the original. So figuring out how to put it all together became quite problematical. The differences are clear in this shot from the back:

...I can't seem to add more pictures to this. I'll post this one, and come back in again....

aaarrrrggggghhhhhhh!

Don't know if it's me or Blogger, but the photo thing is not going to happen today.

...so...ttfn

Crabby Crustacean

I spoke some time ago about the crabby crustacean who lives within -(I'd link if I could find it!)
She's appeared in the guise of dragon lately.

I didn't really (haven't yet) gone to battle with her...actually.



I just stuck my thumb in my mouth, skittered up close beside her, and
held my breath
while she beat me, familiarly, about the head and shoulders.

I'm not sure which of us got tired of it first, but it's not happening now.

Spiritual evolution basically sucks -------now and then.
I'm not fond of looking into mirrors

well...I say that, and yet I seem to do it Over & Over ...and over & over... blah, blah, blah

I'm having/have been having a lot of trouble giving up this house. No, this ground. The structure has been replaced or remodeled...
Neither of the above - it's HOME that's hard to leave.
So, my sign is Cancer, the Crab - the crabby crustacean
...so attached to HOME that she carries it on her back.

What I think I'm seeing is that this displacement has been going on for over four years now, and is finally coming to a head.
Ever since we first replaced the ancient trailer with the new double-wide modular, I've had stuff in boxes. Some things have still not been unpacked since 2001!
Most things came back into the new house in the fall of 2001.
Then in late 2002 we decided to take a sabbatical in Florida while I finished up some schooling - so pack a bunch of stuff for 6 months in FL, and pack up the rest to make room for the woman and 2 kids who will live in and care for the house and take care of the cat.
Big sad story about that, and two months later, I'm back to pack up EVERYTHING so that I can lease the house and take the cat back to FL.
Then coming back to NM - UNpack..the car, the U-Haul, the stuff in storage!!!...
Now we are packing yet again. I reach for a tool or a dish in the kitchen only to realize that it is already packed and gone.
Where is that curling iron? You're kidding, that, too?! Never mind that I haven't used it in two years....what about NOW?

So I've been crabby.


more later
probably


Laura has sparked some interesting thought trails with some recent posts.
She made quite a bit of sense to me as she described what she was coming to understand about the nature of her god object. (Read this post to get the pun.)
I liked it as well as I understood it.

I haven't seen a way to reconcile that concept with my yearning for congregation in the way that churches provide. I especially miss vocal, harmony-rich, spiritual music. If you want to see an example, check out the Gaither Vocal Band or any singer(s) on the Gaither Gospel Hour. That just seems to me to be such a perfect way to celebrate spirit. Why does that music seem to be so inextricabilly tied to fundamental Christianity?
And how about the air in a room where 200 or 2000 others are all focused on spirit -
whether through led or silent prayer, or any of a number of meditation practices...

Lots of questions these days.
Lots of interesting thoughts.
Periods of anxiety and mild depression.

I see that I am 'in process' as some of my friends would say.
It isn't really a different process than the everyday process we all live through as we pass the time on planet earth. This stretch of road just feels a little bumpier than others have been.
Compared to most, the bumps are tiny...but that only matters when I am objective. In the midst of my own personal angst, I am sometimes overwhelmed by their size and complexity.
Anyone identify?

Now that the floodgates have opened, you may see exactly that - a flood.
Grab a couple of innertubes, the sunscreen, and a cooler full of sparkling wine and maybe you'll enjoy riding the current.
ttfn

It's Hard to Come Back

...almost two full months since my last post... wherever have I been?
I'm not completely sure.

First, I'm just going to bring this up to date as to facts...

We've been to San Antonio. We liked it.
We had so many boxes around the house (inhibiting the viewing pleasure of (the so far nonexistent) prospective buyers, that we took a 6' X 12' trailer full of stuff to a storage unit down there.

That experience sent us running to the local moving company for estimates when we got home.
We thought we could move ourselves. You know, rent the truck, have some friends help load it - especially Steve who can pack more stuff in less space than even my Mom could do - then Joel drives that truck (hauling one car on a trailer), while I follow in the other car with the cat and our own small open trailer of any odds and ends...
...hhmmmm, then who is going to unload everything? Who's going to carry the refrigerator inside? OMG! What were we thinking of!?

Now, it's possible that Steve and Eden (no, NOT Steve & Edie) might go with us. And our realtor could probably find another muscle-y person or two to help...
Does this make more sense?
What do we consider? Cost? in dollars? in physical wear & tear? How about emotional wear & tear?

The movers estimate the move at $3500 if we do all the packing and they can get the 18-wheeler close to the house in San Antonio. If they can't get the truck close, then figure an extra $800.
It may all cost a little less if the move happens in the fall...when their busy season is over.
Prof. Movers = $3500 - 4300 = very little heavy lifting for either Joel or me.
U-Haul option = at least $2000 plus costs to feed and house the men = huge amounts of lifting/climbing.
U-Haul is our only self-moving option, and we hate them. Three times they have given away our 'reserved' trailer, this last time forcing us to make a 97 mile round trip to ANOTHER TOWN to pick one up! Makes me SO crazy!

I think we better plan on the professionals.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On Memorial Day our realtor hosted an Open House with advertising, balloons, treats, etc. and showed our house to ONE couple. Since that day, NO ONE has looked at it. (We've seen a few people drive by slowly...)
I'm of very mixed feelings about that. I'd rather make the move in Sept. or Oct., but I'm nervous about the house staying 'listed' that long. I'm mostly just nervous.
Here's the thing.....
.............wait, let's just stick to the facts for the moment...

We did bury St. Joseph (well, actually, a small statue of St. Joseph) in the garden last week.

The forest has finally reopened. I'm about to hit some of my favorite hiking trails. And I have a new friend anxious to learn more about the trails. That will be fun.

What have I been doing all this time? Well, nothing really. I've been covered up with dragons and to a large extent, I just let them climb all over me. I'll talk about that a little later on...

Joel is doing very well. There is still some pulling on the surgical sites and some recovery still to be done on the nerves in those areas, but her energy is way up, as well as her spirits. I'm the only one making her mildly crazy these days.

So we're basically set to go.
Committed to the move, and now committed to San Antonio, Texas. Amazing.