so here's the thing...

for the better part of the winter, i've been pining away for my Grand Summer Enlightenment...last summer being a startling, mind-blowing combination of learning my Self, my mother, and feeling very Carly Simon, earth mother-ish, totally where i should be, Yogic (without all the pretzel configurations), spiritual - you get the picture. by the beginning of the new year (a bit after my surprise birthday party) (which i still bask in from time to time!) i felt that sort of slide away. the lessons stuck, but that euphoric Apple-Trees-And-Honeybees feeling sort of slunk off into the snowdrifts. i have spent the past bunch o' months trying to figure out why...praying, meditating, working art, being a really really good person, giving diva extra pets. nope. maybe a glimmer from time to time, but not that gee it's uber-great to be alive feeling. so yesterday morning i think i caught a ghost of a glimmer why. 1st of all, winter is my crazy, unbalanced time...s.a.d., cabin fever, and bone-chilling cold all conspire to steal my joy. there's just something cruel about getting up at dark o'clock and pulling off perfectly good quilts from your body, just to go outside in 0-degree weather to shovel mountains of snow from the driveway just to go to WORK. and the town plow usually arrives 5 minutes after the shoveling to drop another 3 feet at the bottom of the driveway. brrr & aarrgghh. also, and here's the smart part, i've spent so much time craning my neck looking backward to last year that i haven't even discovered if THIS year holds any promise! (i think that's how women get stuck with the same hairdo - looking back to their glory days of the 70's - or 60's God help us - and time just keeps going without bothering to turn around and wait for us). so the lessons from last summer, although glorious and grace-ful, were last summer's....this year surely must have some merit of it's own, eh? so i'm off to find it. speaking of finding things, yes it IS true that i'm headed to NH in september. y'all know this will be remarkable for me, in that i rarely go that far from home, at least without an escort. an escort, 4 maps (color coded), snacks, cell phone, blankets, emergency road kit, AAA, fix-a-flat, mace and a tazer. and i rarely GET that far from home without getting mundo lost. actually, these days, a parking lot may as well be New Zealand for all the directional inclination my menopause-muddled brain has stored up. 2 weeks ago i went to Auburn to drop off my piece for the Schweinfurth show....i HAD to go and it HAD to be that day. yup - took the GPS. which works fine, but is not the most logical technology. but i gave up. so i think this year may be a bit about stretching my wings a bit - both figuratively and actually. there had to be some pretty compelling workshops there in order for me to gear up, put on my Big Girl crocs, and actually sign up and PAY my non-refundable fee. and there are. and the time is right. this time, as i pre-stress everything, i welcome the thoughts of doom (what if i get really lost & my car breaks down and ok what if i actually make it there and no one talks to me or worse if i can't think of anything to say to anyone else or completely lose any artistic talent/gift/inspiration and spend the better part of 4 days making the equivalent of a kindergarten ashtray, or or or ) ...i welcome them so i can chide them, sort them, and learn about myself from them. (well, welcome is not the right word- more like "know these thoughts are coming and have decided to deal with them as individual bad children and leave them at some emotional orphanage for someone else to choose"). i don't usually travel easy, anyway, but being that it is just myself that i have to plan for, pack for, get somewhere, it should be a very interesting trip. and to the oddsmakers - i have not yet started packing. now just stop that smirking. L.