Dear Mom,
You’re one of my angels now, nine years gone, cheering and challenging me from the spirit world after you blessed my vocation in our last real talk….but I’m still trying to make sense of your paradoxical legacy as I, in my turn, approach elderhood. Not only your legacy in my own life, but the legacy you left the nation through your contributions to the Heritage Foundation and Republican Party and the rest of your conservative causes.
I’m watching the election returns, seeing my friends’ Facebook feeds registering fear, horror, anger as each new bit of news shows 
up. Fighting the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, madly tracing Reiki symbols in the air and sending energy, then turning back to the spiraling disaster.
What happened???? Yes, the polls were all over the map, and when I went to Standing Rock the Midwest was a sea of Trump signs….but how could anyone seriously vote for this racist rapist….we all know the epithets he’s earned.
Leaving Edinburgh was not easy – in one day I’d seen enough to fall in love with the city’s glorious stone buildings, urban mountain, royal and postage-stamp gardens, and friendly people – but I took a great and shamelessly touristy thrill in riding a real British double-decker bus to the train station.
I’d been hoping to find a congenial – and informed – seatmate for the four-hour ScotRail ride to the North….and glory be, next to me settled a delightfully acerbic elder lady from Inverness, who’d been taking the North/South ride throughout her life. 
Together we entertained a young mother’s active toddler, while my companion shared her memories, gave history lessons about landmarks, clued me in to differences between British and American English, and dished gossip about the royal family and their Balmoral Castle, far over the snow-clad peaks of the Cairngorms to the east.
In a long-ago job, a manager once told our team – “I don’t want to hear about a problem unless you have a solution to offer.”
I’ve tried to take that as a guideline for blog posts: not to kvetch about an issue unless I can work my way through it to an answer…or at least a new perspective.
Four years ago, in the midst of studies towards my Master’s degree, I birthed the precursor of this blog on the free WordPress platform. What a journey has taken place between that time and this!
At the beginning, I had no idea of where the journey would take me. I only knew that I was waking up to the reality – not just the single, catechism-shattering experience that I’d had in childhood, but the everyday, sublime-and-mundane Reality — that we exist in a conscious cosmos.
And along with that awakening came the calling to, somehow, integrate and share both that experience and that Reality.
These images are part of an evolving series honoring the Standing People (trees) as their fallen forms return to the soil.
I’d gone to the woods seeking peace and guidance, with too many personal paths beckoning, too much spinning in my mind. Almost immediately I found myself drawn off the pathway by the forms of felled trees and boughs in a massive brush pile. As I clambered about, witnessing the wood meshing with fallen leaves and returning to mulch, totemic shapes, faces, portals began to emerge in the dance of light and dark, pattern and texture….
I shut down another conversation the other day on Facebook. Didn’t intend to do it…but my comment was one of those that are met with embarrassed averted eyes and even more embarrassed silences.
No, I wasn’t sharing the intimate details of my health, sex life, or bathroom habits. I wasn’t evangelizing or objecting to the exclusive holiday greeting “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Easter” or what have you (though I do object to such exclusivity, early and often).
So what taboo did I break in this supposedly taboo-free society? I responded to a friend’s posting of Elaine Boosler’s comment: “When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It’s a whole different way of thinking.”
Click the image to learn about the work of http://blessedaretheweird.com in affirming those of us who obstinately refuse to fit the cookie-cutter.
As my husband’s teacher used to say – Give thanks that you’re weird. Look at the alternative – normality, a.k.a. death.
I was deeply saddened to hear today of the passing of Gabrielle Roth, meditative dancer/artist/musician/shaman/healer. Although I never had an opportunity to participate in one of her classes, I’ve been awed by her videos and her philosophy of retrieving our souls, our humanity through the metaphor of dance.
When I was a child, I used to dance. Not the usual little-girl structured dance experience, though my parents did send me to ballet and tap classes in response to my kindergarten dreams of being a ballerina. Like poorly fitting toe-slippers, between chronic respiratory issues and two (apparent) left feet the lessons didn’t get far…but somewhere, somehow, some vestiges of the dreams and the lessons did remain.
how
do i know
what i mean
till i see
what i say
quoth
the quixotic
artist provocateur
catch
an image
a word
a dream
thumbprinted
with truth
to ride
like a pegasus
like a dragon
like a phoenix
(like a fish)
to revelation
absorbing
the essence
of
life
death
sex
birth
shamanically
dis-integrating
to zero
point
(like a 10-foot mackerel
surrounded by cats
in a feeding frenzy
on the living room floor)
chaotic
shapeshifter
truth
emerging
remorselessly
from wreckage
like a beachball
rocketing out
from
downthrusting
child hands
plunging naked
as a cliff-diver
from a despairing
precipice
to scrape
bacteria
from abyssal stones
probing
vents
to the planetary
core
If these words resonate for you, Phila Hoopes also provides intuitive copy writing - web content, ghost blogging, articles, e-products and more - for healers, social entrepreneurs and visionary nonprofits at Your Words' Worth.
She also practices Reiki for animals and people, in person and remotely. To learn more, visit All Relations Reiki
