The rain falls lightly on my garden.  I spent some time there this weekend, pulling out some of the last of the root vegetables and filling more bowls with tomatoes and raspberries.  I seriously cannot believe that I am still pulling vine ripened tomatoes out of my garden.  Insanity of the best kind.  I cleared away much of the debris and turned the dirt over and left some herbs to continue growing for a little while longer.  She is such a teacher and a healer and I always walk away from her feeling altered and more at peace with myself than I thought possible.  I honour her cycles even as she teaches me to honour mine.  When I first started gardening five years ago, I wanted a clean pretty space molded by vision but it never works out that way, the messy happens and things die and wither, flourish and grow wild and I am never in control and neither is she.  We have to work together, it is a give and take and along the way we continually surprise each other. 

I found out that I am going to be okay.  I knew that but I also found out that it was going to be okay.  I am relieved and incredibly grateful not only for the gift of good health but also for the reminder.  It is odd really that I have watched so many people die, held death in my arms and listened to the whispers and yet most days, I feel that invincibility of youth, the sure footed knowledge that I will be the old crone, white silver hair soft on my head wound in an irritating braid, wrinkles and folds hiding all the experience of my life.  For the past week and a half, I have walked around feeling the fragility of being human, the fragility of myself and my mortality.  I am fine and feel sure that the vision I have always held of myself will come to fruition but I have realized that the vision of the old crone gets closer and closer seemingly faster every single day.  I think that it is a gift to be reminded of my own cycles and that I am aging and while that is okay, it is important that I look after my health, that what I do now will affect how I am later.  Time is speeding up, every day is a little bit faster than the last and from what I can gather, it continues to speed up faster and faster.  I don’t want to take even one minute of it for granted.  Not one.

Something else I realized in the past couple of weeks.  I am blessed to have an incredible group of women friends in my life.  Five years ago when my world fell apart I didn’t have the supports that I have now and while I can’t go backwards, I can praise the moon for the women that have entered into my life since then.  Close friends, tribes and circles of goddesses … women who listen, understand and hold the space.  Women who run with wolves, women who love fiercely and women who know that fear and tears are as much a part of us as celebrating, joy and laughter.  Passionate women.  I am so grateful for all of them and for me for allowing that into my life.  It is a risk to allow yourself to be seen, to be held and to be loved but it is a risk worth taking.  I may not have a lot of money or any really but I am incredibly rich in my friendships.  so thankful for that.

Thanksgiving was quiet this year.  There was laughter and good food and we gave thanks for our lives, for the living, for the love.  My little family amazes me continually and I am blessed in this love that surrounds me, soaks into my skin and blesses me on a daily basis.  At the end of the day, there is a colourful little house in the middle of a street filled with the leaves of life and in that house, there is a home that sits solidly on a foundation of love and that is where I breath my greatest thanks.

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A bit of housekeeping.  I recently, as in this past weekend recently, moved my entire website from squarespace to wordpress.  If you follow my feed, you will need to update it, there is a button on the right hand side of this blog.  I will be adding a button to my photoblog and my three collaborations (polaroid girls, the four and reel time) to make it easy for anyone who uses a rss reader.  I loved squarespace but am on a bit of debt diet and am saving money everywhere that I can so while wordpress upkeep is a little more work for me, it is a lot cheaper in the end and I can host more than one domain so am creating an artistic space for myself outside of hippyurbangirl.  I can’t wait to share it with you.

Peace.

(polaroid sx-70 / px70 impossible film)

When I moved into my house five years ago, the yard was pretty much broken.  The front stoop leaned sideways and jiggled in the most alarming ways; there was a rotted tiny platform behind the back door and the only things growing were the plentiful weeds and quack grass along with the forgotten tree stumps around the house.

When I moved into my house five years ago, I was pretty much broken.  My boobs hung down to my belly milk still trying to find its way to mouths that no longer breathed; varicose viens and loose muscle from bedrest and a heart that had been fractured so many times, it was hard to see beyond the loosly tied threads keeping it together.

My yard is now a beautiful oasis of herbal remedies, bright flowers, a pretty green stained solid wood stoop, a brick patio nestled in the middle of tomatoes and thyme; yarrow and echniacea and a large cedar deck overlooking lilies and roses and an array of daisies and cucumbers.  Raspberries drip red between low slung hops and strawberries peak underneath bright green leaves and white flowers.

My heart thumps in quiet pink freshness and the threads have since fallen away leaving thin silver scars that are more beautiful than painful.  Since June I have lost almost 30 pounds.  I have 50-60 more to lose to find myself comfortable again in skin that feels familiar, in skin that matches who I have always been.  I have tried endlessly to lose this weight that causes joints to ache in winter months and feet crammed into high heels to carry too much around to not scream out in anguish at the end of a long day.  But not really.  You see I wasn’t really ready and it was safer to hide behind it than to continue moving forward but when I returned from my holiday in June, I started making some real changes in how I live, how I do my job and how I engage in my life.

The weight is coming off and it feels easy, it feels like a relief and I realize now that for the past five years, I have been denying myself the joy of wholeness.  So long as I didn’t dig down to my roots, so long as I pretended to myself that this was my new normal, I could hold on to the anger because anger and sadness are so entwined.  But I am meditating in love, surrendering to the vastness of the universe and am writing and living with all the joy of my being and somewhere in the conversations along the shores of manzanita, the city of portland, the comfort of bellingham and the trampoline fires of vancouver, I realized some things about myself and how far I have come in my journey to myself.

I spent last week hanging out in my garden with my family, marveling at the difference in my garden and realized that while it was a lot of work, a lot of sweat, tears and laughter … it was easy because I wasn’t really starting from scratch.  The yard had been neglected for 20 years but prior to that it was well loved and the soil remembered and all it took was a little love for it to spring back to exactly what it remembered.  My body has been neglected for only five years and with proper nourishment and love, it is happily and easily remembering who it was.

Disclaimer:  Weight and Diet is such an incredibly personal journey and I don’t want to offend anyone with my stories about it as we are all on such differering journeys and are at different points in our own paths.  I gave birth to twins after months and months of bedrest.  My twins died.  This was only a few years after my sister died and that was only shortly after I went through a divorce.  I say this because I gained a lot of weight with the birth of my twins and continued to gain weight while I worked through my grief.  I am no longer grieving and while sadness can still creep up on me, I no longer feel the dark weight of depression piercing my skin and greying my eyes.  I have a beautiful life that I am finally allowing myself to live again.  I am no longer running away from it, hiding behind drama or crazy excitement.  I am just living fully in my present.  I am loved and I love and there is a new calm that swirls around me and I see with clear eyes again.

So, yes.  I am dieting.  My diet consists of calorie counting because that is what works for me to figure out appropriate portions as that has been skewered over the past five years.  I am not eating diet foods but rather am eating healthy whole foods that I cook at home.  I am eating mostly organic as I have done for most of my life.  I am not denying myself because I sort of feel like sitting down and mindlessly surfing the internet while plowing back a bag of potato chips was denying myself of me and life whereas now I am sitting down with a bowl of freshly picked raspberries or a salad made of all my favourite fruits and veggies and huge hunks of avocada while writing in my leather bound journal or reading a book that has my lips curved up is feeding myself.  I am hooping barefeet on the grass or the warm floorboards of my living room and I am walking, biking and swimming in bits and spurts with friends and family.

I am not dieting with any sort of self-loathing to this body that has carried the pain and emotions of my losses.  I was beautiful back in June when I weighed 30 pounds more than I do now; I am beautiful now and I will be beautiful when the scale shows me the familiar numbers of my past.  This isn’t about hating myself, this is about my outside reflecting who I am on the inside, this is about body, soul, heart alignment and having the freedom to be who I am.

I am more at peace than I have ever been.

namaste.