The Lucky One

Hello fellow Earthlings,

I'm cut off from most social media out in Sequim. In fact, it's hard for me to get phone service where I am.

 I went into the city early on Wednesday for my class at the college and spent the night at a friend's in Greenwood. It was nice being in my old, familiar stomping grounds of Seattle, but the pace was also intense. Everything in the city has been created to make humans comfortable. I walk into Whole Foods and it's like walking into Las Vegas, only with food. In fact, I swear I heard some sort of electronic sound that seemed to mimic a winning on a slot machine.

The day after my class, the creature comforts were actually welcome. I didn't have much to do that day and I found myself browsing in East West Bookshop above Whole Foods. I walked around and looked at native jewelry and picked up tarot card decks and sat in the back with a book from the Used Book section of the store.

Then, I wandered back down to Whole Foods and drank a Kombucha and filled out a Valentine's Day Card for my boyfriend. He just got a new place in the city. Originally, the plan was for him to move to Sequim with me, but all his work is in the Seattle area, so it made more sense for him to be there. It's strange, we are in a relationship, but I hardly see him. I will see him tomorrow. I bought him a housewarming gift for his new place. It's good that he has a place in the city, because it makes it easier for me when I'm in town and need a place to stay.

Whenever I come back to Sequim, out here on the Peninsula of Washington State, everything slows way down. It's hard for me to move at a fast pace. I feel like there is a lot of healing going on here. I haven't written as much as I've wanted to. I feel I will write more, but I've been called to pay deep attention to each moment.

Today the sun outside pulled me towards The Spit and I walked way down the beach late in the afternoon. The waves were calm and the tide was out. It was pleasant and warm. My heart loves the ocean. It comes alive there. I like looking at the vastness of it. It's like looking at emptiness.

I took a stick I found on the beach and began to draw words in the sand: book, house, love. After I wrote these words, I enjoyed watching the gentle waves roll up on to the beach and erase them. Just like that they were gone, out to sea.

And I feel like the lucky one to have this time. Somehow in this life I'm living I have created time for inner work. It's so valuable to me. In fact, it's the most important work I'm doing. It's very subtle. Sometimes it feels I'm doing nothing at all and wasting time, but when I slow down, I can actually feel so much happening on the inside.

I move as slow as the animals move out here. Did you know that when you slow down and feel each movement, wild animals will come very close? You are moving at their speed. They can sense your gentleness. You are speaking their language.

I want to speak the language of the Earth.

I'm in a comfortable house out here that protects me from the outside. Today I received a text from a friend who I hadn't heard from in a very long time. He didn't write any words, he just sent me a link to Alison Krauss's song "The Lucky One." And when I listen to the words, I can really feel that this is my life.

You're the lucky one so I've been told
As free as the wind blowing down the road
Loved by many, hated by none
I'd say you are lucky 'cause 
You know what you've done
Not a care in the world, not a worry in sight
Everything is gonna be alright 'cause 
You're the lucky one....

It's not that life is easy or without problems. There are problems. The world can be fierce and crazy sometimes and, like the waves out on The Spit which can take everything in their wake, it can toss and turn us and leave us flat on our asses, pardon my French.

But deep under that ocean is a calm. It's available at any time. All the dramas in the world are the waves. They just keep coming.

Instead of letting these dramas, or waves, get stuck in me, I'm experimenting with letting them wash over me and not suck me out to sea.

I want to ride the waves, not fight them.

I'm working with boundaries and what feels right to me in any given moment and I'm not afraid anymore of the uncomfortableness that it creates to speak my truth.

I stepped out onto the deck of the house at around 10pm because I heard coyotes howling. I was barefoot and the cold against my skin woke me up. Is it a full moon? I wondered. I saw the big dipper, it was straight up and down so that the dipper was pointing towards the earth as if it were pouring its sparkly brilliance onto the green grass of the golf course. I then walked out the front door in search of the moon. No moon. All was quiet in the small suburb where I am staying. There were lights shining from windows in all the little houses and I imagined people were snug and warm inside. How lucky we all are to have food, shelter, hot water, etc. Most of us have the essentials and the rest is icing on the cake.

We are not here to own and fight and worry and fear. We are passing through this place to love and to  learn lessons and then we will return to that great big ocean that we came from, all of us drops of it.

We are the lucky ones to be here and have this opportunity to be alive.

We are the lucky ones...

Hello Darkness, Hello Light

Dear Earthlings,

I was alone in the house organizing a few of my boxes of things, when everything went dark and silent. I stepped out of the bedroom and felt along the wall to the living room where I knew I had a candle and lighter. The wind was howling outside and it must have blown the power out. I stepped out on the deck and could see swirls of snow spin on the golf course like mini tornadoes. I was aware that it was getting colder inside the house. I found other candles and lit them. Eventually, I found a flashlight.

The strangest thing was that as I was going through a box of my writing, I found a loose piece of paper with a dream written on it about the end of the world. Every night I've been dreaming these dreams again. I see buildings falling down and water flooding streets. Somehow I'm able to just observe it all, as if I'm watching a movie. I see it happening, but I'm strangely not affected by it. Instead of jumping into the swirl of chaos and panic with everyone else, I stand a distance back and observe. Somehow, in my observing of the chaos, I get answers and solutions, but they hard to put into words because they come from the dream realm.

I know that I'm meant to be out here. In the dark last night, I felt I should be scared, but I wasn't. Instead, I felt a kind of returning. We have lost connection to the darkness. We depend so much on light. Without electricity to fuel our devices and appliances, we are lost.

In the darkness, with just a candle, I felt a deep connection to the wild world outside. Just before dawn, before the power went out, five deer walked in a single-file line past my bedroom window. They seemed to glide with extreme grace, ears twitching with alertness.

These animals bring me to the answers. This is native land. What's the point of being out here if I don't take time to tune in.

I could not walk yesterday in the blizzard-like winds. I watched the snow rapidly accumulate outside the living room window. By the late afternoon, the snow was blowing sideways towards the window and then the wind would shift and it would blow in another direction. After the power went out, I gathered candles, a flash light, warm clothes, a down comforter and hunkered down in the living room near the gas fireplace.

Around 11pm, the power was restored and I returned to the bedroom.

I awoke when light began to stream in through the blinds. It was quiet outside. I did not hear wind. I got up and made myself some tea and returned to the bedroom to get dressed. I bundled up in a long down jacket, scarf, hat and gloves before leaving the house.

I walked along the property line of Graysmarsh farm towards Graysmarsh Beach. All of a sudden I began to hear trumpets. I thought I was going crazy. The sun was hitting the snow and making everything extremely bright. Through a gap in the trees that created a boundary around the farm, I saw huge white swans, that I later learned were trumpeter swans, flying in circles above the fields of snow on the farm. They literally sounded like trumpets.

It was beautiful and heavenly. The image of huge white swans above bright, white snow making the most angelic sound touched me to my core and opened my heart. I don't know the language of these animals I see, but I often times I feel like I do. They all call me to slow down and tune in. Maybe that is the answer.

People talk of darkness and it is there. I don't watch the news out here and I've stopped Facebook for awhile. I want my media to come from nature. It's been speaking for a long time.

I feel every moment I'm able to step lightly on the Earth and listen, it's another moment of awakening to a world that has always been there for us and only asks us to listen.

The Spaces Between Doing and Being

Hello fellow Earthlings,

I woke up this morning with the awareness that the Earth was covered in a blanket of snow. Everything on the Earth was very still. I couldn't see it, but I could sense it and I knew. I walked through the dark hallway to the living room and pulled open the blinds that confirmed my thoughts. A deer stood there in the snow staring at me. They seem to come all the time now and very close to the house. We locked eyes for what seemed like a few minutes before it began munching on grass that poked through the snow. Then, all of a sudden, as if it had been called by something in the wind, it turned and walked across the golf course leaving fresh hoof prints in the otherwise untouched blanket of white. It didn't walk in a straight line. It created a curvy pathway back to the bushes on the edge of the golf course. The curves were perfectly symmetrical, almost as if the snow was cut with a cookie cutter of waves. As the morning moved along, those hoof prints became deep grooves that left a mark. It was just one squiggle on a blank page of white. It was an invitation to pause before I began to write.

And it seemed like every time I wanted to write, the moment pulled me in again.

It's now evening. I fired up the sauna on the deck. When I plug it in, lights and music come on. I waited until it reached 105 degrees before I got in. I sat in there and drank lemon water and journaled. What a luxury to be out here alone to write and prepare my online class for the college. How fortunate to have this blank canvas to create. I breathed in the dry cedar and let it warm me to the bone. After an hour I came out and my deer friend was sitting on a snowy hill in the dark, legs gently tucked under her, staring at me through soft snowflakes that swirled around before they found a suitable place to land.

I turned off the sauna. One button shuts off the whole machine, heat music, lights and all. It was me and the deer in the dark. I started to feel a chill enter my body standing there now with snow all around and I hurried inside to warm up. I immediately went and showered and pulled on a pair of sweats, wool socks, a t-shirt, cashmere sweater and and my favorite lambswool scarf that I got on a trip to New Zealand a few years ago.

Earlier in the day,  I walked out to Graysmarsh Beach to the eagle totem pole and walked further out on to the frigid beach with blue glacier-like water. It was so cold that even the seagulls took shelter on a nearby neighborhood street. I stared out past the water to the snowy banks of land dotted with houses that were also covered in snow. So quiet. I could smell cedar burning in wood stoves and it warmed me inside to know that people were snug in their own spaces.

On the way back, a few cars wandered down Woodcock Road. The roads were pretty clear and I imagined people were going about their day regardless of the weather conditions. I suppose I could have scraped the snow from my car and made it down to the post office to send off some bills and letters, but I felt like everything on the planet was calling me to stop. So I did.

I keep trying to understand what I am meant to do. I keep trying to grab a hold of a thread or a clue or a sign. I created a list to keep me on task, but the moments unfold on their own. If everything is planned, I miss what's right here.

Right.
Here.

I did knock some things off that list. I prepared my online class, did a load of laundry, emailed a few people. But between each task, there's a huge pause. Even typing these words feels a bit like wading through molasses. Even if I want my fingers to flutter across the keys, they don't. Maybe I meant to find the answers in the spaces between doing and being.

Crashing and Burning at The End of The World

Dear fellow Earthlings,

While I sit on a log on Dungeness Spit in the Pacific Northwest, with 40 mile an hour winds whipping at my face and waves crashing on the shore, I'm thinking about Australia burning. Just the other day a friend said on a blog post she shared with me said,
"THE WORLD IS GOING CRAZY!"

It's a very strange feeling to be way out here where nearly a dozen deer come to my window and graze on the grass each day. These docile, gentle beings remind me that there is still softness in the world, while in other parts there is FIRE burning all around!

As I see my Australian friends' pictures from their backyards of air that is thick with gray smoke and hear them speak about itchy throats and teary eyes, I feel hopeless. I am here in the Pacific Northwest in winter where it mostly rains. However, I have strong memories of the fires that blazed through our own forests all the way down to the California coast the past several summers. I remember sitting at Carkeek Park looking at a couple sitting on a log in the haze and a man in the distance wading up to his waist in Puget Sound. He looked like he was baptizing himself for the end of times.

What are we to do?

And now there is talk of war. Facebook, news and social media sites are buzzing with opinions and theories and fear and anger and...

I have to turn it off.

Throwing my own energy into the fire will only stir it up even more.

The way inside is very subtle. I find it in the forest next to two huge cedar trees with bark graying from the dampness of the air. They are like very old, wise grandfathers. They must be more than 200 years old. Their top branches sway in the wind, but they are grounded with deep roots that I imagine reach the core of he Earth. They call me to stand still and listen. I breathe in the air and raise my hands over head for a minute and then bring them down to hold my heart in gratitude for being with these elders.

I tread further down the moist, pine-needled path to the ocean that roars with tsunami-like waves. They crash through my chest and blow me wide open so that all of the molecules that make up who I am are now blowing in the wind across the Sound and when I sit down on a log with the wind whipping at my face, those same molecules come back into place as if the log were a buoy pulling everything back to its center.

Crashing, Crashing....the waves are relentless in their fury. Fallen trees that are now logs riding the waves come barreling on to the shore. Even the seagulls hunker down behind old stumps and sticks in the sand. Walking down the spit was easy, but when I turn around to walk back to the forest, every inch of me has to fight the wind. I cover my face with my scarf and pull my hat down so I only have a tiny window for my eyes which are shut tight and wet with salty tears.

When I reach the upward slope back to the forest from the Sound, I lift my gaze past the waves and I almost detect a calm smoothness out between the Spit and the land mass on the other side. And then my mind imagines sitting on the bottom of the ocean with the sea creatures there. All of the bottom fish barely moving while so much activity happens on the surface.

 If it is the end of the world as we know it, I don't want to be crashing and burning and fighting and fearing. I don't want to add fuel to the fire. I don't want to predict, judge, criticize, hypothesize  or even proselytize.

The only thing I can do now is look up when I hear the piercing shrill of an eagle overhead. He swoops down and lands right on a high branch of a cedar tree above me. When he lands, he does not move, but stares with that all-knowing gaze that actually brings me a deep peace for the moment.

Going Deep at Dawn

Hello fellow Earthlings,

It's 2020. Doesn't that sound like science fiction? Given that I came to the Earth in this present body in 1969 in Earth years, the year Neil Armstrong walked on the moon (THE MOON!), 2020 sounds even more OUT THERE.  And what can I say? Have we gotten more Sci Fi? Have we destroyed this planet yet?

Not yet, friends, not yet. I could never have imagined that I'd be typing my thoughts into a computer for others to read. And these strange things called Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We live our lives with our head in devices. Devices. gadgets that are meant to make our lives easier. I will admit, my iPhone has become part of my right hand. I'm not going to toss it in the ocean. It would take millions of year for it to decompose.

I woke up at dawn. My boyfriend was snoring away on his futon he brought out here. We were on different cycles last night. He came in late from Seattle after working a full day and all he wanted to do was grab a beer and lock himself away with Netflix. I had very different plans for the New Year. I wanted to go into it with eyes wide open. No alcohol or glass clinking for me last night. You could say it was a pretty silent night and it was very intentional.

I did a vision board for the New Year. I do one every new year, but this year my vision seemed particularly important. I'm getting a HUGE sign to let go of things that do not serve me any longer. Maybe it's because I'm now 50, I don't know? A girlfriend who turned 50 five years ago or so said, "It was like I was walking through a doorway and could only bring a few things, the rest I'd have to let go of." That's how I feel.

So what am I bringing into the New Year that serves me? Love for myself and my direction and goals, love for the earth, love for my partner, family and friends, good health, abundance, travel, a house of my own, book writing and book completion, creation of my own website with online classes, retreats and readings. First and foremost is being here NOW in Sequim, Washington and finishing my book. Well, and blogging...

At dawn I pulled on my jeans from the day before, a puffy long, powder blue jacket, scarf, hat, gloves and red rain boots and headed out into the darkness. It was as if the sound of the waves out on Dungeness Spit was drawing me to it like a magnet. Before leaving, I asked my boyfriend, "Do you want to come with me down to The Spit?" He mumbled something that was clearly an indication that he wanted to sleep more, so off I went.

I drove down Woodcock Road and turned right on Dungeness Spit Drive heading past red barns and cattle and green fields with the Olympic Mountains as a backdrop. The sun was starting show signs of itself and I was in a hurry to get to the sea. I was the first car in the parking lot. I have an annual pass to The Spit. It's the longest spit of sand in the U.S. and if you walk the entire thing down to the light house and back, it would be a total of 10 miles. I have yet to do that, but I will.

I decided to take the primitive trail through the woods down to the sea. I could hear the waves crashing on the shore in the distance and I had one thing in mind. I wanted to be down by the waves. I wanted them to pound through me and shake me wide open. I wanted the undertow to take with it all of the unwanted in me and the world. Take my anger, take my fights with my boyfriend about finances, take toxic people's comments, take all the disbeliefs, take hatred, take avoidance, take addictions, take pollution and human consumption, take all the ill of the world out into the swells and break them down, smooth them out and return to the shore the light, the kindness and the highest good.

A bit idealistic, isn't it Kathy? I thought out loud. My thoughts were forming their own swells in my mind as I walked at rapid speed over the damp, moist earth through a thicket of pine trees. I walked so fast I nearly trampled over a doe and her fawn. They stared at me through those big eyes. They were as still as stones and I became still too. My stillness made them comfortable and they stayed cleaning each other and munching on vegetation in the woods. They were so close I could touch them.

I carried on and eventually the primative trail spit me out at the ocean. Not a soul was in sight and the waves were so huge they devoured the entire walking area of the beach. I thought about turning around, but they called me to them. They called me out on The Spit where I had to walk very close to the roped off area that separated the beach from the bird sanctuary. Ocean spray covered my jacket and moved like lava up over logs and over my red boots. Salt from the water was in my hair and eyes and mouth. I wanted, in a weird way, to be consumed my those waves. Maybe I secretly wanted them to TAKE ME out into their swells and churn me through their underbellies smoothing me out like a stone with perfect rings around it that a fellow hiker might pick up and skip out into the quiet sea making new wishes for the new year.

A rainbow appeared in a cloud across from The Spit, illuminating the land on the other side. Snow mountains sat like majestic watchers of the land off to my left. The sun rose on the bird sanctuary side of The Spit slowly illuminating it from the lighthouse to where I stood. Majestic. All of it.

No, we weren't in danger of destroying the Earth. We were in danger of destroying ourselves and all the earth wants us to do is listen. I heard the squawking of an eagle overhead and looked straight up to catch a glimpse of it as it disappeared through the trees. I was alone on this thin stretch of sand with waves thundering against the earth.

In those moments, I felt cleansed and alive. I knew I would move forward no matter what. There was nothing stopping these waves. They were unforgiving and relentless in their will. They moved with force and purpose. And standing there, I knew I would do the same.