Smoke and rabbits

There is something about the smell of wood smoke in the morning.  The still quiet crackle of the fire against the backdrop of birdsong and the voices of a village awakening.  I think it must be hard-wired into our DNA. After all, we as a species have spent tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of years with a campfire as our major source of fuel.  That smell meant home, hearth, food, family.  We would not exist if it were not for our harnessing of fire.  This morning I feel a deep reverence for the element of fire, a sacred gratitude.

This wandering life, too, feels more like home than any house I have lived in.  Now I am home wherever I go, as long as I have our “wagon,” as long as I have this man to love and be loved by.  Our feline companions are happy, too, so long as they are with us.  And friends.  We have found and made good friends, too.

Last night, Rigel, the beloved rabbit of Daniel and Mandy died.  It was a sorrowful evening.  They were both so heart-broken over his imminent demise!  Rick and I could only stand by and try to be of comfort.  Somewhere around midnight, Rigel slipped away quietly in Daniel’s arms.  Tearfully, he was wrapped in his favorite blanket and with his favorite toy bell, and received a final tobacco blessing.  Then the four of us walked in solemn procession to the camp dumpster.  There he was hugged one last time and ceremoniously placed in his metal coffin.  We all wept and sang “Amazing Grace” softly, then arm in arm we hugged each other and returned to our camp sadder but somehow enriched by the beauty of our impromptu ceremony under the starlight. 

Best darn rabbit funeral I ever attended.  

Mandy and Dan comforting poor Rigel.

Angels schedule a potty break

When we were in Minneapolis, I plotted the maps to the bookstores in town.  Since I didn’t have my printer with me, I simply wrote down the directions as I planned to move as efficiently as possible from location to location. I visited Bellaluna, Eye of Horus, and Magus Books, as well as Llewellyn Worldwide.   

Without the maps I relied blindly on the instructions I had written.  Somewhere between Eye of Horus and Magus Books, I had to go to the bathroom.  Following my directions, we exited per the instructions, found the first gas station restroom, then continued following what was written on the paper. The directions took us instantly back to the exit we had just come off and back on the same highway heading in the same direction.  The only reason I could figure why that had been written in my instructions was that somehow Spirit knew I was going to need a potty break right then.

This event may not sound very woo-woo, but at the moment, I felt a sense of timelessness—that all things exist always, that time is flexible if not complete illusion and somehow the bending of that had facilitated a simple potty-stop exit written down inadvertently.  And that the Spirits who were guiding me had known and built-in a small kindness. 

Late night musings

August 7, 2013

Sitting up late in the dark and the cool, working in the new Office, on the new computer, with all the new software (Windows 8).  Nothing looks familiar, except the letters on the page.  It makes me feel disconcerted, disoriented, discombobulated.

Two weeks now of wrestling with computer issues and I feel like I’m getting further and further behind in the Psycards tasks.  The little scraps of paper pile up—receipts, reservations, business cards, contact information.  I can’t even seem to get organized enough to make a proper list of what needs to be done. 

I am anxious, too, nervous about the Colorado show I’ve now committed to.  How will we manage?  I think. How will we pull this off?  Then there is the little inner voice that is worried about what happens after that.  It is an empty-handed leap into the void and I’m scared. 

My friend, the train, is coming, hooting in the distance, the rails begin to rattle and soon it whooshes by just feet behind the RV, its crying whistle a startling comfort.  I love the train. 

I’m crying and my hands are trembling a little—What have I done?  Do I even know what I am doing?  It is a moment of deep doubt, and one that I know will pass, but could it pass quickly, please?

So I have committed to advertising for the next year—expensive stuff and spending money always makes me nervous, unless there is plenty of reserve.  My Capricorn moon needs cushion to feel safe, but my life has been virtually cushionless, creating a kind of chronic fidgetiness about finances. 

I must remind myself of the synchronicities and miracles that have brought me this far.  I remind myself of events like the Rent Fairy and Eleven Cents.  The Rent Fairy is a story I told earlier in this blog, and the Eleven Cents story is this: When Rick and I left the ‘Vard (Apache Boulevard in Tempe, AZ), we had no idea where we would go or how we would live.  We had the station wagon, no drivers licenses, no income and eleven cents between us.  There was a moment when I stopped worrying—what was the point?—as if I had become so saturated with fear and worry that I reached a point of WTF.  But that was the moment when all that fell away and the next thing I knew we were heading to Buckeye, Arizona to find an acquaintance.  She let us stay with her, lent us money, and introduced us to her landlord. 

It was during the time of the Blue Kachina comet—Hale-Bopp—February 1997.  The night we left the ‘Vard was the night of the Phoenix Lights UFO sighting.  I never even looked at the sky that night.  Two weeks later we were watching the comet, there was also a Mars/Jupiter conjunction and on March 9 a total solar eclipse, though we couldn’t see it.  It felt like a momentous time, both personally and globally.

Tammy’s landlord was Jimmy Port Parker, and he was kind enough to rent us an apartment with no money down, simply allowed us to clean the place for a deposit.  It was a new beginning.  Soon I landed work with the local paper doing everything from ad sales to delivery, as well as editorial stuff.   

So, we managed to get somewhere even with only eleven cents.

Tonight we have a lot more than eleven cents and we will also have more than that when we leave here for Colorado next month.  From there the idea is to move down toward New Mexico and Arizona—to visit friends and relatives, and to finish writing the Kokopelli novel.  I can’t write it here, I need to be in the southwest to feel its pulse.

Writing this has helped.  I feel calmer now, and reassured.  Thanks for listening.

Through a Child’s Third Eye

When I was little I was playing in front of the TV while Grandma watched some WWII movie.  In it, there was mention of Chinese water torture.  I remember a man, with water dripping relentlessly on his forehead, his face in shadows of black and white, his face twisted in a portrayal of agony.

I couldn’t imagine how simple drops of water could be so painful.  The man wasn’t the Wicked Witch after all.

Later, in the bathtub, I lay back and dripped water from my washcloth onto that center spot on my forehead.  It tingled.  Tingled in a good way.  It felt lively, lovely, and made me feel a sense of well-being like having the back of my neck stroked.  It almost gave me goosebumps.  I guessed that if one dripped water on that spot for hours, it might make one crazy, but my experienced was a pleasant one.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned about chakras, those energy centers of the body, and specifically about the third eye.  The minute I read about the third eye, I remembered my little experiment in the bathtub.  My third eye was apparently open and sensitive even in early childhood.

This is one of those little clues that I have had my whole life that I was more than just a physical human being—that I was a greater being than my body.  But also that I seemed to know more than my peers.  I remember learning things in school and thinking, “I knew that” but couldn’t for the life of me understand how I had already learned it.   

When I was about seven, walking to school in the morning alone meant a half hour of imaginative mind-play.  I pretended I was all grown up and that I had children and we were walking together.  But I distinctly remember that my imaginary children did not seem real to me.  I knew they were imagined, creations from my own head.  I had no emotional attachment to them.  But I realized one morning that I was certain that I knew what it felt like to be a grownup.  I knew. Somehow, I must have been a grownup before—before I was little Kitty Anthony.

One afternoon, I asked my father about this.  I remember him clearly sitting in the gold vinyl recliner that had been recently purchased.  We were in the living room of Grandma’s house and he was reading a magazine. 

This conversation went something like this:

“Dad?”

“Hmm, what?”

“I have a question.”

“OK.”

“Well, you’re created when you are born, right?”

“OK.”

“And when you die, you either go to Heaven or the other place down there, right.”

“OK.”

“Well, if that’s true, then how come I know what it feels like to be a grownup?  I mean, I feel like I know that I have been a grownup before.”

“What you’re talking about called reincarnation.”

I repeated the word and he explained to me what it meant and that some other religions believe we live over and over again.  He gave me a little paperback book titled We Have Lived Before:  The Enigma of Reincarnation, by Brad Steiger.  I was fascinated and frightened all at the same time—I read stories of memories of terrible deaths from Civil War soldiers, and the story of Bridey Murphy.  I didn’t remember dying, specifically, what I remembered was the sense of being alive and being someone/someplace else.  But I was afraid that if I explored further, I might uncover unpleasant memories. 

Still, it was the beginning of my work, my study and hundreds of books and a half century later, I am still learning and studying things of the spirit.

First blog on new computer

I have been effectively offline since last week and it will take me some time to get caught up. 

Last week I decided it would be best for business if I replaced my “Franken-puter.”  This was my original laptop, the one I had custom-built, but which has experienced a series of accidents in this RV journey. 

The first was a Pepsi assault.  Cat Rocky affectionately rubbed his head against my cup with Pepsi and spilled it all over the keyboard. This happened back in April.  The keyboard mostly survived until it happened again a week or so later.  The second time was the death-knell for the keyboard.

We were in Fairfield at the time and I couldn’t afford to replace the computer, but I was able to purchase an external keyboard and employ that.  This worked fine for quite a while, until about six weeks ago, when Rocky (that affectionate and demanding little devil) somehow managed to close the laptop onto the auxiliary keyboard and cracked the screen! 

This required a visit to town to purchase an exterior monitor, which I also employed. Now the computer was a laptop, folded nearly closed, with an ergonomic elbow pad used to prop it open, with the keyboard on the top, and the new monitor looming over all from behind, amid a mess of cords.  Franken-puter.

With Psycards finances being what they were, it was time to invest in a good, reliable, and portable computer.  So I took Franken-puter to the repair guy we know and I traded it in for another laptop he had for sale.  Happy, I brought it home, but it wasn’t working properly, was too slow and I took it back to him.  (I won’t share the long version which involves three days of trying to hunt him down.) After some arguing, he “repaired” it and I took it home.  But I still wasn’t happy.  Of course, by now I had spent several days trying to install the software I need, and he was gone now on vacation for a week, so I finally chucked the whole deal and took the laptop I had purchased to Best Buy and traded it in for a new Lenovo.

Convinced the problem was now solved, I took the Lenovo home and began the long process of setting up one’s computer to one’s liking.  But the Lenovo didn’t like my wireless connection and kept constantly disconnecting me!  I had trouble downloading because it would shut off the wifi in the midst of loading programs. I did research and followed all the Lenovo/Google/computer geek tips I could find, but with little result.

Finally, I had to take the Lenovo back and exchange it for a Dell, which I am working on now.  Happy at last, I got it home and found that I had left the USB drive for my mouse in the Lenovo!  All these trips to town from the campground cost gas money, and I was frustrated by now beyond all tolerance.  Rick was kind enough to run back to town and get me a new mouse, I called Best Buy to have them mail me the USB thingy, set up the computer’s initial stuff, then closed that bad boy and spent the last two days making jewelry instead.

I desperately needed the artistic break.  The good news is I made lots of nice things for an arts fair coming up at Shady Creek Campground.

At last, this evening I decided it was time to go back to work and the best place to start was this blog. 

Some pieces were repairs.  The white and blue necklace and the yellow necklace with matching earrings were made by Mandy.