I live in the city. Sometimes, like this morning, this still strikes me as an oddity. I wish he wasn't at work as my coffee for one feels lonely. Simultaneously solitary and yet enough as I pad around the property scuffling under the juniper and squatting in the dewy grass. This morning there was a single vertebrae left atop eight month old detritus I've yet to clear in the name of "forest compost." I'll add it to the collection because clearly the crows left it for me to find.
* * *
First there are take out breakfast burritos and drive-through coffee. The glare of sun on the lake and consequent wall of cloud cover. It's never the temperature I expect. We tromp, they gallop, I whistle, we talk. Everything is so green, the chroma bursts and makes me heady. There is such an art to joint dreaming but somedays it comes easier than others. Today, as we pick out properties, discussing important details such as where the studio with its conjoined solarium will sit, I know it's one of the easy ones.
* * *
Is it common to stride through life unaware of the exact weight we carry in stress until it leaves? I hold my breath awaiting medical results - as though the act of testing itself makes real the possibility of illness. But for the first time in three years, the weight was matched by a single beacon of belief in health. After all, I'm learning. After all, I'm restructuring each level of my being towards wholeness. After all, I believe my work here is barely begun.
And after all that, the results came back. Utterly, perfectly healthy.
(Healer Ring, sterling silver and prehnite)
* * *
Sometimes I hold an image for a long, long time. Sometimes it just needs to gestate, sometimes I'm waiting to see more, sometimes it's just too much and I find the excuses to stall. Three years is a long time and this moves straight past all my comfortable barriers into the realm of unknown possibility. Now it's begun.
It may be finished in a week's time, it may be finished in three months. I'm not rushing it. But around here, it will be referred to as "the painting Hummingbird blessed:"
Sketching with a long brush, details of gesture, details of the red-tail, details that will come. I step close to work, I stand back to view, maybe five feet, eyes squinted. At that distance, the hummingbird flew down between my physical self and painted self. It hovered inches from the painting, back and forth between the face and the hawk, rose up, nearly landing on the top edge of canvas. It turned to face me, lowering its busy body to the center of the canvas and hovered. For a long second it just buzzed there midair, looking at me, looking at it. And then with a zip and that flash of iridescence, it was gone.
And that is how I know I'm on the right path.
* * *
