Hi.
If you’re on my website email, my apologies because you’re about to get the same schmazzle twice.
Basically the message is this:
I took the time to really think about the work I do, the things my heart really desires, the stuff that makes me get up in the morning feeling a sense of joy.
Most of you already know that that’s all about death and dying.
My life, as it turns out, has been one long ode to death.
Someone’s got to do it, right?
But I keep being super lame about dealing with putting this out in the world in any kind of organized way, with any actual oomph behind it. I have been running on this idea that … oh, it’s fine, it will do its own thing. Which is sort of like planting a garden and then leaving it alone and expecting it to be a gorgeous, weed-free, prolific and perfect little plot.
I hate social media, I hate the game, I don’t like wasting my time and attention with any of it. I like reading books and holding babies and making salad dressing and hugging friends. I like swimming and seeing new places. I like exploring museums and talking with my kids and playing tennis and kissing. And I have spent my summer doing all of these things and more.
So many good books! Selma Blair and Viola Davis and Amy Bloom and Alice Waters … so many inspiring women.
This world is so beautiful and so heartbreaking, all the time. I love seeing what the new flowers look like, even though I’ve been seeing the same flowers for probably forty summers now, since I started paying attention to flowers. We caught trout while we were in Colorado and it made me cry, the reality of how we get our food. There are babies around now and I have been lucky enough to spend time with them, be reminded of their Zen grace.
Coco, my mini, my last one home, is heading into her last year of school and I am crying already thinking about her strutting across that stage next June. My son, Nate, and his remarkable Gretta are moving east, which I can barely believe because my boys have been west so long now that it’s just the way it is. To imagine I will be able to pop over and have a cheeseburger with them on a Friday night gives me the vapors.
I was feeling, for a long time, a kind of disconnect here. Like I wasn’t really in my body and so I did something truly hypocritical and joined a gym, where I do all the things I used to disparage: use a treadmill and lift weights, indoors. It’s working; I like getting stronger, showing some gratitude for this body that has served me so well for so long.
This is a very long-winded way of saying that though I care very, very much about the things I love to do in the realm of Spirit and life and death, I also love everything about my days so much that I haven’t been very effective at selling myself, I guess.
I’ve done this so many times now that it seems folly, but I put a website together that better reflects the things I love doing and the ways I offer them to the world, including a workshop on mediumship and death + dying, here in my home in Vermont on a Saturday morning in September. Coffee, treats and conversation and a chance to connect yourself more deeply with yourself.
It’s been a long, beautiful and weird summer. Thank you for being a reader. xomo
Human kindness unbounded, always soothing to read these messages from the green mountains.