Breathing in all my crankiness, breathing through my indecisions, in and out breath for my restless, irritable and discontent attitude, I call upon all the gods, angels and fairies to flutter away my human sludge and reveal only spirit.

A day where the first lines of all the prayers can be my mantra:
Our Father
Hail Mary
Breathe in me the way to love you
I am that I am
Make me a channel of your love
Holy God
My life is filled with loving kindness
Meera Meera Meera
I set aside for peace of mind
Ohm namaha shivaya
Sheera sheera sheera sheera
Tis a gift to be simple
There is only one of us, in your eyes it’s me I see
Blessed always blessed always

and the day smooths out ahead of me.

Taking dictation:

Damn you’re lazy.
No I’m not–I’m working hard.
Hardly.
Up yours.
You too.
You say you love these little animals and don’t want to traumatize them again today, but what you really are doing is that you just don’t want to go through all the coaxing and carrying and driving and paying money.  You’re cheap.
No I’m not cheap, but they say one thing and then charge me twice as much.
You didn’t ask the right questions and didn’t take care of your other older pets well.
Up yours twice.
Same to you.
Jerk.
Freak.
I just don’t want to take any being to be prodded and pinched and given crap supposedly to boost their own freaking immune system against the normal bugs of earth life.  Pisses me off and hate it.  Hate doctors asking personal questions and trying to get me to poop in their bag or piss in their cup or take off my clothes and test me for crap that I’d just rather DIE from.
assholes.
You shouldn’t write that here.
up yours.
You shouldn’t say that either.

Why is loving something, someone, so troublesome?  Why do I freak about spending money on something that supposedly is to help me or the animals stay healthy?  Isn’t spending money just a sign of love?  It doesn’t feel that way.  Like insurance.  Paying month after month like a gambler in case I fall prey to the normal journey of human life and get sick, cancer, break a leg, whatever. 

My warrior is leaking through here.  I just want to take off to the end of the longest bus ride out of the city and lose myself in the deep woods.  I have cheese and crackers, a blanket and a book and I don’t want to come back for weeks.

I call on Diana–goddess of the forests–to be my scout in this briar-filled day of pinching, aching, and pouting.  She stands tall, bronze with weather, not young, not old, tending the fire of eternal warmth and beckons me to sit with her.  She witnesses my travels and I am heard, safe, and comforted.

So that’s a good question–why love anything?  It will only hurt in the end.  One of us will die before the other.  You’ll piss me off, I’ll leave mad.  Or you’ll get sick and I’ll be powerless.  If I get a pet, I’ll probably outlive it and love it and then cry for days when it is gone.  Why bother with friendship, intimacy or love.

Why not? I guess is the best answer.  What else do we have to do?  What else brings the most bliss, the heavenly gaze, the timeless delight of walking or sitting with a pet that gives that complete unconditional affection? 

It’s a funny game we set up, us spirits here playing as humans, to have such an astounding fulfilling thing as love be an emotion that seems to fill up and then rip the heart out.  Once wounded, some of us never try anything again, closed up tight like a stubborn flower bud resisting spring.

Love just happens like the seasons I guess.  We try to hide beneath the cold crust of earth, staying deep in Gaia’s womb.  But then the warmth, fragrance and sweetness of spring calls us out.  We unfurl our flags of happy, shake the pussywillow fuzz in the air and blossom into brilliant colors.  But then we wrinkle with age, droop with maturity and fruit pushes through the flower creating couples, new lives, and even children. 

Later we seek the warmth again of the soil, we slowly lean into the home of dirt and ash, ready to lie down and weep with gratitude at such a Divine gift of human life.

Ha, what is small talk anyway?  I guess it is phrases that I keep in my pocket when I want to be kind, friendly but detached.  “How are your kids?”  “Have you been watching the Olympics?”  “Some weather we’re having, huh?”  I like being with people, but some days I don’t want to be too vulnerable, and there are people I’m honestly not that interested in.

Plus some people don’t seem to be able to talk beneath their surface.  I’ve given up judging–for the most part–and recognize it is their business.  It does bother me, however, when it is people I care for that continue small talk to me, when I can’t get through that shield of platitudes and “niceness”.  Hearing “I’m fine, thank you,” always makes me hear “I’m Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional.”  But again, that’s a legitimate warned to me to keep my distance.

I appreciate those friends who have an easy open door.  I can be honest and sad, joyful and silly, sharing what is really going on.  Or even not answering the phone knowing that my insides are spilling over my outsides and the conversation would be too muddy or too cranky.

Today I dive into my Beloved One, wrap myself in Her cloak of comfort.  There is no talk needed here with Her at all.

I’ve been scanning through a book that debunks positive thinking.  Well, the author sees all this affirmation, law of attraction, magnetizing good practice as being in denial.  She has all sorts of scientific evidence that prayer doesn’t really work, and spiritual healing is just an ambiguous theory without any grounds to stand on.  She was angry when she got cancer, and repelled all the “it changed my life for the better” routine. 

One phase that was used was “how can you continue to say the glass is half full when it is smashed on the ground.”  It’s a good point.  We are human.  We do get angry, sad, frustrated, depressed, and in horrible pain–in the heart and in the body.

I believe it is all about choice.  You can smile peacefully standing on smashed glass and say it doesn’t hurt.  Or you can scream and weep with a hangnail.  We furiously hoard and search for more money when wealthy, and also sit peacefully in a small shack in the woods and feel rich.  We can be persuaded by any convincing argument–if we choose to.

It’s up to me to choose.  Choice is powerful.  My struggle was to be aware that I did indeed have a choice.  Today I decide to live in a miracle.  I am surrounded by playful angels.  I see elves behind every tree shadow.  I hear fairies giggle when I walk to the bus.  And I feel the warmth of the Divine Friend leaning into my back as I work.

I don’t even need a 1/2 glass of water.

I was distracted this morning.  Which car should I buy?  I should be practical, but I don’t WANT to be practical!  What to do about the arguments in my head.  Is it really heart vs. head?  Do I want to live a practical life?  Is that what responsibility is about, or do successful people really live their bliss? 

Who knows.

All of sudden I realized I was ignoring the trees on my walk.  How rude.  Distractions certainly get me off track.  So I asked the trees–what do you think I should do?

“Soak it up.”  Soak it up?  What does that mean?

“Hey, we just had a good rain storm and we’re soaking it up.  You should too.”

Ok, so it’s about gratitude.  Sure, ok, sure.  But soaking it up means more.  It means to me today to relish every bit of being human.  To absolutely get delight in projects dumped in my lap, fighting off drinking too much soda, watching the blue sky open up beneath the dark grey clouds, hearing the click of these gentle keys.

Just simply to soak it up.

I lost a couple animal friends–family, really–this past year.  Grief is real because love is real.  Now I am preparing to invite new pets into my home, and I’m scared.  I found myself weeping in the car to recognize that I was getting hooked again with a soft creature and their tiny inquisitive yet fearful eyes.  The minute I met them I wanted to save them from a tiny glass box in a busy pet store and bring them cozy to my couch.

I wept because I know I will love.  And I know it will involve cleaning up after them, and worrying about them, and scolding them and and and loving them.  Love does hurt, I think because the body–made of earth–sobs when it is separated from the soil of another.  Material as I am, my child was pulled from my groin, there was screams and moans of pain.  Human as my life is, now that this child is thousands of miles away and is happily distracted with life, sometimes I moan, missing the closeness of her soul.

So I invite these little cat creatures to my home and heart, bowing to the afterglow of love: tears.

Sometimes silence is soothing.  After a long trip with endless crowds, jet noises, conveyor belts, agents, tight spaces–all busy tired necessary sounds that erode the serenity.  The simple delight of coming home with deep quiet and solitude is cherished.

However, there are times and stories that show the sword-like wound that silence can inflict.  What would it be like to endure the stony silence of parents not talking for years?!  What confusion, painful endurance, tiresome immature games that a youngster would learn.

“Don’t feel. Don’t talk.”  And certainly “don’t talk about feelings.”  Are the concrete rules of the wasteland of a dysfunctional family.  Sure, we hardly know what a “functional” family would be.  But those rules have been huge invisible elephants in our homes blocking the joy all and any relationships.

Here I speak my feelings.  Thank you for listening, for honoring who I am here and now.

I didn’t feel safe this morning.  Something in the air, warrior and soldier squared off (Mars v. Saturn), thinking about love and missing bodies, wondering about the rightness of my actions–past and future.  So I chant when I am uncertain: Ohhm safe love.  Safe ohhm love.  Over and over again.

My walks these mornings pass by all sorts of new trees.  I talked with them a lot, asking their advice.  “Let your bark work for you.”  Ha, when I let my “bark” work for me, sometimes I seem cranky.  But they meant the skin.  Let my skin work for me.  Let it protect me.  Allow the covering and protective shield of my body keep my feelings inside my gut and heart. 

So today I let the soldier and warrior stand guard for me.  They won’t bark or bite, but they hold the human grief inside, the subtleties of insecurity, the doubts of actions, the bouncing of uncertainty inside.  With the flaming sword of Michael at my side, the infinite leather skin of Ganesha and the impenetrable velvet cape of Grandmother Spider, I am safe. 

So I stole this from Pema Chodran actually, “Chaos should be considered good news.”  And it is a fabulous meditation today.  I hear this also in the Tao: The Master know the world is forever out of control, so she just does her job and let’s go.”

Chaos is growth, green, tangled swamp briar bush messes.  It is covered with green in the spring, berries in the fall, and hoards of crows scream chaos from the trees.  Chaos brought the biggest bang and Poof!  Humans were slowly spawned into the galaxy.

Art comes from chaos–from that murky molasses of emotion that pushes against my heart in the morning before I write, before the artist picks up a brush.  It is the spark of life.

I call on Ganesha, who stands at the Gate of Chaos and laughs at the swirling swing rock music of the universe.  He grabs the world by one of his million arms and does his dervish dance for me.