For Once Upon A Time

For the two of you who read and respond.... Grizz and Violet... May your 'Soon to Be' be as magical as your 'Once Upon A Time'.

Christmas Eve

This post is late in coming, but a good friend reminded me... and it's timeless, anyway.

Christmas Eve this year. I got out of work at 3 p.m., got home and walked the dog. I've always noticed a natural silence on that day, mostly because I live in the city and people are gone.... to families somewhere else.

But as I walked...two days ago, and stood by the water and looked at the stars of twilight there was a depth of feeling that only comes on that day. And that thick, wonderful, mysterious feeling wrapped itself around me and I wondered why it happens every year. I ceased being 'religious' when I was nine years old so I wasn't buying into the 'meaning' of the day.

Dog chewed on a stick and tugged this way and that, but I stopped and looked down... and up. What of the silence of the rocks, the stillness of the water? Trees did not shiver in the wind. Clouds stayed still. There was as always, an uncanny reverence to the world.

In years past, the rocks would have been hidden by the rush of the water.. the trees and clouds thrown sidewise by the wind, Maybe snow. And still that mysterious feeling overwhelmed me.

Nature does not know it's Christmas Eve, so it's all in my head.

It's all wonderfully in my head, I told myself and we walked on.

But, when I said I ceased being 'religious', I didn't stop being a spiritual person. I think there's magic in the world, and if I can't name it, so be it. I'm just grateful it comes to me in the most unexpected places.... the small wild places, where man lives, anyway.

Ah, the Holidays

Still sick? Check.

Lose the oldest friendship I had? Check.

Grateful for another friend who stayed close? Check.

Expected money not coming in? Check.

Dog happy, nonetheless? Check.

Glad this Godforsaken Christmas is over?

You betcha.

Woman's Gift

There's no question about it. I've become as bitter and mean spirited as I have ever been in my life. It comes from constant fear and being tired and being alone and from having any part of life as I knew it torn away in about 45 minutes. And don't say I'm not bitter. Half the time I can't stand being in the same room with myself.

And let me say, I've never really liked women. I grant you I didn't have many stellar role models, but there's always been something in me that made it easier to talk to men... straight or gay. That's not to say I haven't had a few estrogen filled spirits in my life. My dearest friend in high school was Leslie, a beautiful scarred woman who as best as anyone can determine (thanks to her Godforsaken parents) died in her late twenties of AIDS.

And there is Kevin. I kind of had to half like her for her masculine name, but she made her own impression fast enough and we've known each other for about 25 years. She knows too much about me.

Then there's Reva. Let's just say I would not be sane today without her.

...........

As I've gone on this journey of change, bucking and kicking all the while, almost every male has made his departure. Keith (my Happy Homo) is doing his best, but he's going through his own brand of hell.

........

I say that to say this. I sit here three nights before Christmas and it's quiet. Years past it would have been filled with busyness...getting ready for the party, or the Holiday itself. House would have been full of light, banked with Poinsettia's, filled with food, wrapped gifts from the ten foot tree halfway into the room, music playing.

You can't help but compare them.

As I was putting away the things I brought home tonight from the store and work and wherever... a gratitude filled me.

There were cookies. I've eaten more damned good homemade cookies this year than I have in life.

There was candy. Really good candy.

There was a handmade journal, just for me. Beautiful in it's leather lustre, perfect card enclosed.

There was a handmade pine cone wreath to hang somewhere, she said.

There were loaned DVD's, to turn me into a Geek.

And I glanced over to a needlework flower with the word 'Grow' made by certain, pixie hands and remembered in my freezer was a gift for guests who will arrive... in time.

And the gratitude rained down, because that's how it feels, gratitude. Like a warm shower sluicing from your head and down your back. It warms and opens you. A priest friend of mine said it's not gratitude unless it truly gives you chills. Well, I had them.

And it was because of women. Every one a woman from work, a retail environment that's fluid at best and divisive at worst.

But these women have helped sustain me when I've been distant, angry, sorrowful and petty and couldn't give anything in return. They could have 'read' me all these months the way I've 'read' women most of my life but instead they've kept giving because as one of them so aptly put it, " That's how I roll".

Without sarcasm, thank you all. Merry Christmas to me.

Osceola Flies Again

I knew I shouldn't have watched it. Sometimes people can be so kind.

I Could Weep

I have health insurance again.

Thank you, God.

(Now, if you could only help with the copays...).

Signs and Wonders

The backdrop of the entire day was usual. Get up. Go to work. Go to lunch. Go home.

..............

So, as I'm driving to work I glance down to change the radio station and look up to see... maybe four feet ahead of me... over the hood, my huge Hawk straining for lift because he's carrying another bird, whose feet are tight with shock against it's chest. My breath just hung, somewhere, and it's a miracle I didn't run into something. And then he was gone.

To me, that Hawk is magic and so was the moment... but for the quarter mile I had before arriving to work I alternated between wonder and sorrow, wonder and sorrow, as what I had just seen at such close range kept playing in my head.

Having some time I pulled over on an empty street to have a cigarette and be with that moment. The music that was playing on Satellite Radio was spare and soaring and beautiful and so I looked to see the name of it. 'Hawk Above the Hammock'.

Went to lunch and drove to the Lost Place. Put it in Park, looked up and there was my Hawk wind-dancing with the Kestral who lives there... diving and spinning and disappearing... What a gift. I rarely see him so often.

Ran an errand and pulled into the parking lot at work. Getting out of the car I noticed a crow in a tree across the street, cawing so loudly and urgently and oddly that he sounded like a dog barking. And then more came, cawing back and he rose to meet them and swept east.... where there were Seagull's crying and dipping and diving frantically. And I wondered.. Is he here? And, yes, there was my Hawk swooping. And the crows went after him as the cowardly gulls hung back and he lazily flew north into the blue and I stood there, agape.

Off work, turn on the car and the radio pops on. First words I hear (it's set to NPR) is "The hawk is kiting maybe 15 feet above us"... a piece about a man who believes we need natural urban spaces just a much as we need the pristine remote areas.

And I think, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than I can dream of (Shakespeare) and I've been handed a Hawk's blessing.

Small Joy

There are times when no matter what happens during your day, nothing can surpass the shower that ends it.