Up before the sun so I can properly greet her when she arrives. Settled on a screened-in country porch with coffee, permakitten and I sniffing that sweet, sweet air. Grateful, so grateful. The birds singing a song so true I don’t want to interrupt but am feeling Joni strongly today. (Is she close to slipping away entirely? is she simply the goddess of early morning melody?) Ladies of the Canyon is added to their symphony and then–
Grace doing her yoga mistress poses–she’s got those down–me reaching toward that peach and pink horizon, hands in the air, toes in the wet grass.
It’s still Taurus season, and I’m upstate at A’s as of yesterday. I needed to be put in my place by wood nymphs, birds, big blue sky.
It got hot so fast this week in New York. In general, my favorite city has never been keen on interstices. Fur hats one day, bare shoulders the next–tempers rising, horns honking. So it was that the glorious kerfuffle of a NYC summer boiled over in the course of one day.
I’d been living with such good wind, too. Follow the muse, embrace the day at its brightest, early to bed, early to rise.
But the one thing you can count on is change. We fight it, goddess knows, because growth is always accompanied by bad-beau entropy–grief with joy, death with life. But resisting change just makes you perverse, and not in a good way. Trying to hold onto anything is where human sin begin.
Not holding on has made me feel more protected–more serenely attuned–than I’ve ever felt before. Even the money has been showing up in the most mysterious ways. Ordinary extraordinary, these quiet kindnesses and divine occlusions I’ve experienced on an almost daily basis. (I keep a running list to shore me when I falter.) Emboldened by Just Enough I’ve been writing toward the finish line I’ve feared and fantasized about since I was the young girl I’m voicing in this book–a path materializing before me with every step I take into the magical unknown.
All around me the world is blooming in ways I never anticipated. Tesseracts, good ones, are opening to the past and maybe also the future.
Of course on the heels of all this come the disappointments, we humans being our gorgeously flawed selves. It’s a good thing I consider myself first and foremost a child of the universe rather than a daughter of one clan or community. Toeing a line has never worked for me, and I guess those reminders are necessary from time to time lest this book ring false.
I don’t talk about family here much, and will not now. But I will say you don’t recover from blows of willful callousness when you’re surrounded by humans at their crabbiest, and this is what you get when New Yorkers start sweating buckets before their air conditioners are installed. So I’m back in the woods for the 
first time since my birthday, just me and Grace with the wood nymphs, the birds, the big blue sky. To fall asleep here I require only the clack and whistle of nature rattling the trees. Here the wind is not good but great.
I used to mind that we all are just small specks in this great sea of life but now I find it most comforting. Ellen Gilchrist says:
We cannot get from anyone else the things we need to fill the endless terrible need, not to be dissolved, not to sink back into sand, heat, broom, air, thinnest air. And so we revolve around each other and our dreams collide. It is embarrassing that it should be so hard. Look out the window in any weather. We are part of all that glamour, drama, change, and should not be ashamed.
To that I only would add that we are part of the silence too, and sometimes that’s the greatest glory of all.