The drum skin is cracked.  Great.  In less than an hour, I'm supposed to facilitate a ritual.  I have never done that without this drum - my oldest and dearest friend.  This latest piece of fubar makes me sad and more than a little nervous.  What else could go wrong?  In addition to the drum, I have also discovered that the bag of sage I stash in the basement is conspicuously missing, no doubt stolen by the parade of workmen who have been in and out over the last year.  I'm sure one of them thought it was weed.  Jokes on him I guess.  So I have no herb with which to smudge.  On top of that, I have a kind of hangover from being phenomenally sick yesterday.

In that moment all of me wants to quit, or in the very least sit down and pout.  But, I still have to shower and get ready, load the car and finish writing an invocation.  No sitting or quitting.

When I finally get in the car along with all my stuff, I take a few deep breaths.  In between the breaths I hear someone say

"The torn skin is the highest blessing for what you are about to do."

I feel the truth of that in my bones and I realize that even before we start we have been blessed.  I was telling Lisa the other day, the gift is on the other side of the wound.  I could be pissed off or sad about needing to re-skin the drum.  I mean, I don't know how to do that.  So, I will have to find someone who does.  Instead, I'm kind of happy about knowing it has served up to its last measure in thousands of healings and drum circles.  It has brought joy.  It has made music.  Today will be it's last playing and I can't imagine a better home for the last energy of the drum to reside in than at WWFaC.  It will be retired after today.

I gave the honor of it's last playing to Mary Pierce Brosmer.  It made perfect sense that she be the one to shatter it fully and release the energy.  I mean who better to do that than the person who imagined the very place we stood?

There will be other drums.  There are other drums already.  This will always be my first drum.  The one I bought to facilitate healing work.  The one with the traditional Navaho inspired hands painted on the skin.  I will continue to love it even after it's re-skinned.  Even after it becomes a new drum with the re-skinning.  I will miss my old friend, but I know that it's energy will continue to do good work.

The Nature of Time

30 minutes of battery time left.....GO!

Today I am trying to write a piece related to the four directions.  I want to use this piece for a clearing/blessing I have been asked to do.  It occurred to me that this same piece could be used for the poetry book to address one of the major criticisms - that the structure needed to make more sense.  With that thought and the cute blond boy sitting at the next booth - POOF!  Writing muse goes on hiatus.

Design available from zazzle.com

BITCH!


I'll fix her though, I invited in the science muse-ette to take her place.  Some deep and weird mulling thoughts about directions, seasons, time in general ensued.  Understanding that time is perceived as a spiral of a clockwise direction.  A few people living it counterclockwise.  Some able to see that it is in fact both spirals overlapping - my beloved double helix.  Why wouldn't it be represented in both its infinitely small, DNA level and its super duper space-time level?

Finished with 25 minutes to spare.

Something's Gotta Give

My life is full of so much drama and BS.  I used to handle it all easily, but this morning I hit DEFCON 5 when the handyman appeared on what is perhaps the 15th weekend in a row to putter on the windows.  I lost my mind.  Rightfully so.  Looking forward to a weekend of quiet downtime, I got more of what I'm trying to find a refuge from - noise, inconvenience and drama.  Pissed off, swearing, I slammed some things in my backpack, pulled on some jeans and bolted.  Still looking for that quiet.  Now perched at the CCPL.  So far, so good.  Despite Saturday, it's pretty quiet.  Between there and here - a quick trip to St Stephen's cemetery to visit with the pops.  I like the cemetery when I get like this.  I can bawl like a wounded animal and no one wonders why.  The library is OK, but honestly ANY people is too many right now.  Maybe I'm giving off that vibe because folks are giving me a wide berth.

Seems the only break I have had from the shit that make up my life these days is when I sleep.  Days are filled with work stress and drama.  Evenings are mostly filled with mama stress and drama.  It's been this way for over a year and I've been able to handle it because my weekends were mine mostly.  Full of quiet writing, of friend visiting, of napping.  Then the window refurbishing started and suddenly there was no breathing hole for my life.  Three months of noisome smells and hideous screeching noises to fill up my once blessed weekends.

My body is screaming at me in ten thousand ways to find other ways to deal with this.  I haven't and I'm slightly concerned that it will find some BIG way to get my attention and force the down time.  My knees are so busted up, my ankles hurt all the time, I'm gaining weight like a pregnant Duggar and I'm radically unhappy.  I mean an every day unhappy.  The kind you can't shake.  I can't remember the last time I laughed, I mean really laughed at something which means it's been a while.  Those are way past the early signs.  Hell even the middling signs are in my rear view.  No kiddies we are definitely well on the way to hell riding in a styling handbasket.

I know if any one of those three major things would lessen, things would be OK.  But work - that one's completely outside my control.  The mama - maybe we've finally reached that place.  The one where I can't do any more for her.  Not one more atom of worry can I add to the pile.  I tell myself it will be easier if someone else takes over her day to day care, but that just moves us into the next shitty phase of cleaning out her hoarder house of shit.  So out of the frying pan, into the fire.  The never-ending windows?  Those I CAN do something about.  I have been a great tenant for 5 years.  I find it completely disrespectful to me for the construction to have carried on this long.  First floor, then a kitchen gut and remodel and now endless windows.  I will have silence.  Or I will move.