Small Ponderings on New Year's Day 2019

Yesterday, a brilliant New Year's eve afternoon, my husband  and our oldest daughter and our son went for a walk in a nearby woodland. 

I did not take part in the walk. Too much Christmas coupled with the cumulative exhaustion of the travails of 2018 left me with no other choice but to seek the refuge of my own bed and a couple of good books for company. As much as I wanted to be out walking, resting was not optional.

When they came back they shared with me some sustaining images from their outing.
The walking trail was narrowed by ice and snow and took them from a declining snowy softwood stand to an old pit and a then a farmer's field.

They came upon several different piles of snowshoe hare droppings numbering in the hundreds (and evidencing a small snowshoe hare population there) with the most being spotted at the edge of a snowy field of abandoned green cabbages. A veritable Mr McGregor's garden of Eden to the hare's, minus Mr McGregor but likely frequented by enough predators' to keep the rabbit's tail short.

Another note was the sighting of coyote (or perhaps coywolf as my son has photographed one in the area) tracks in the snow and a third and final nature note was finding a dead bird which had been ravaged most likely by a sharp-shinned hawk. 

Before they left for home they heard a rumbling sound and saw a person on a four wheeler coming towards them.

My husband wondered if the land owner might not like someone tearing around on his property near the gentleman's new home because in the autumn he had complained to my husband about being bothered by some kids on ATV's on his property. He was very surprised to see that the person driving the  ATV was in fact the land owner himself. He paused and spoke with him for a moment. The driver is a friend of my husband's, a man in his seventies who was extremely ill and had been hospitalized with cancer a few short months ago. He responded well to his treatment and decided that there was no time like the present to be having some fun and living his life. He and his two children all had cancer treatments in the past year. He gifted himself the ATV and tore around in the snow like a little kid. What is there to say to that but Happy New Year and que sera sera?

 So much of life and death right there in one short outing.

New Years are funny times. They can feel ominous or filled with potentiates. They represent many different things to so many different people. Maybe a time of new beginnings for some. Same old, same old for others. 

Like this morning for example.

I was the first asleep in our home last night (no rah, rah, sis boom bah for me) and the first awake today. After completing my happy early morning chores for our two dear pet rabbits I made myself a pot of green tea and sat in my little dining room looking out our window to the snowy New Year's morning. 

There was nary a track in the yard near our garden or the stump by the old Maple out front which our oldest daughter keeps well stocked with black oil sunflower seeds in the colder months.

No greater perfection can there be to begin the year with but a woodland scene enveloped in a smattering of fresh snow.

Our resident squirrel (Snap-pea) keeper of the stump and general yard defender was still in his little nest in our back woods. First, two crows swooped in from their night time roost and they headed for the stump. They were quickly followed by three others. They rooted around the stump and one found a bit of bread the squirrel had buried in the seed. Another dug up some bread he had hid in the leaves which had gathered in the corners of the sandstone bordering our front garden. They all chomped a few seeds before the ruler of the roost, little wild red Snap-pea,  zoomed in with a defiance that seems to border on evil (but is simply  the ways of a dominant and very territorial squirrel). It swooped in and managed, as it does several times daily, to scare off all the crows and two blue jays by seeming to be in many places at one time--and it isn't even an actual, biological flying squirrel. 

This scene will play out many, many times in the days and weeks to come so long as something doesn't take the rascally squirrel the way of the bird on the walk yesterday.

Today I welcome the quiet of a deep snowfall to ponder how and where my feet might fall in the year to come. This evening there will be a New Year's potluck at my sister's place if the roads are clear enough to travel. Tomorrow I will make fresh footprints of my own.

Happy New Year!

May 2019 be a year filled with more and more people connecting deeply with nature and dissolving those stories that separate us!

In Peace and Goodwill,
Jill

All I Want for Christmas...

I have been done with Christmas for a long while now. 

I can't help it. 

For too long I was a willing participant and far too long an unwilling participant in a cultural charade that perpetuates the capitalistic enterprise and tells a twisted version of a story whose time is long past.

As my sense of dis-ease with our consumer culture increased in my early to middle parenting years I found myself questioning my own role in Christmas. We decided as a household back then that we would continue decorating, baking, shopping but do so more mindfully. 

Many years have passed since that early decision to practice a more mindful Christmas but still the consumer excess grows madly around us. And with no apparent stopping mechanism beyond the tipping points of environmental collapse and an economy in which the rich get richer and the poor get increasingly poorer.

I simply see no place in my life for what Christmas has become. Nor do I believe we are living in a world that can afford for us to continue to celebrate this (and many other time honoured traditions still held sacred) in the manner in which we collectively do so.

I am done with Christmas in all its mindless excess.

Yet please do not be misconstrued.

The heart of Christmas I still hold dear within me. 

I adored Christmas as a child and a young woman. It represented the joy and sense of connection I found in the faith tradition I practiced at the time. I welcomed my prayer vigil I held for myself each advent evening as a time of quiet reflection on the first Christmas and its relevance to my own life. I continue to value the depth of a December evening and its call to quiet and honouring what the darkness offers. I realize how contradictory the consumer culture of Christmas and its inherent busyness is to this call I feel on early winter nights.

And yet, taking the time to honour the return of the son/sun as a means of walking from darkness to the light has brought me to an new understanding of the birth story and what it means to me.


Celebrating the birth of a radical whose life demanded we choose terrifically inclusive love and the beauty of simplicity over amassing possessions is something I am all for. So too with opening our hearts and minds with a childlike sense of wonder to the natural world and all its offerings. But what might that honouring truly look like? Do you think it would honestly look anything like the madness that we have turned Christmas into in our modern lives?

A few years ago when I first noticed the local flyers in mid November announcing their upcoming Black Friday sales I knew that the takeover of our hearts and minds towards full scale American capitalism was underway. Black Friday, Cyber Monday , even Giving Tuesday-- all American terms entering our Canadian lexicon. And to my dismay I saw people all around me seeming to adopt them without question.

It was then that I really felt the scream enlarge within me.

"I want out!"

I am tired of paying homage to a tradition which generates so much waste and wanton greed.

I am tired of seeing the same scenes play out over and over, year after year in the stores and online retailers.

I want an equalizing factor to emerge from our collective hearts and minds. I want to envision a radical new way to more justly secure objects to meet our basic needs for food and clothing and shelter. 

I want to crack my heart wide open to the suffering of this beautiful fractured world of fear and wonder. I want release from the ties that bind me to old ways so that the more beautiful world I know is possible can become real. 

I want this for my children and their children and all the creatures, soil and waters of this world more than I want a world of Santa Claus and consumer make believe.

All I truly want for Christmas is a real, living and breathing healthy earth. A world that we live in harmony with and whose support systems we choose to recognize and honour. I want to co-create a world freed from reckless inequalities and the desperate suffering of children and animals. I want peace.

When I close my eyes and settle my heart and mind I can already see a new world emerging from the dust of the collapse of our modern lifestyles. I can see it in the willingness of others to begin to craft that world from the precious clay of their own living.

But what am I truly willing to give up in order to help birth a new era? How can I celebrate Christmas with my dear family in a way that honours the truth of what I feel within and what I see before us?

A few starting points to consider regarding celebrating Christmas in this era of climate change:

Love is greater than fear. Christmas can be a time to remember that Jesus was the King of Love. He welcomed the suffering and marginalized and asked that those who were to follow in his footsteps do the same. Practice an act of radical lovingkindness for self and other and for this broken world. And remember to love the earth!

Consider the well being of the environment in all your purchases. Do you need to buy processed food wrapped in single use plastic, or wrapped in plastic at all? Has the food you have in your cart been ethically sourced? Have you considered adding a vegetarian or better yet, *vegan dish to your holiday meal? Rethink whether a gift item is truly of benefit to you or your family or friends? Can you purchase second hand goods as gifts, craft from homemade or support local artisans in their craft? Can you support a local farmers market or CSA for your Christmas celebration?

Who are the disenfranchised, the marginalized in your community? Can you give to a local charity, food bank , environmental group or women's shelter? Can you welcome to your table those in need of food and warmth and friendship?

Give the gift of presence. Practice the act of engaging in presence with those whom you love, with nature, and watch as your world beautifully expands.

Joy can be found in so very many places beyond what the sales flyers and endless ads try to sell us. In caring for the earth, for self and finding room in our hearts for welcoming others we can bring a simplicity back to our lives which is so lacking in this modern age. 

Happy Winter Solstice! Happy Mindful Christmas!
Much Peace and Joy to you and may the darkness help you better appreciate the Light.
Love Jill

*We are living in a world which holds the real potential of seeing the extinction of large mammals in the wild in the very near future given current rate of demise as per the WWF Living Planet Index.  Going vegan is considered to be quite possibly the sanest response to this massively difficult to compute extrapolation. 
https://www.preventyearzero.org/take-action



Sending out a huge tip of my hat and my heart to my favourite vegan, my oldest daughter Maria. Her incredible love of animals and desire to nurture all life inspired her own shift from vegetarianism to veganism. Her dietician declared that she should write a book on how to properly, healthfully be a vegan or teach classes at least. She has chosen to create an instagram account  called thisnourishedvegan which she has her brother Lucas do food photography for. Her cooking and baking is wildly delicious and always inspiring. Kudos to you dear Maria for leading our family in the direction of veganism through your quiet and beautiful dedication to your craft.

To Love this World

Mount Herbert
November 21st, 2018

The air is blinking thick with flurries so we pull our hoods up to  ease the worst of it, the best of it we breathe in, a freshness too soon, although strangely welcome.

It is only November 21st and we are walking on a trail covered with a six inch depth of snow, third snowfall this week and each a measure to be reckoned with.

At winter's height last year the trail was never worse to walk than this and yet we do not mind
because we are back walking a trail we love  so well  and after too long a time away--we can't help but feel so alive!

Interestingly the last time we were here it was too sweltering to make it far.

Mid summer's heat had lingered late, the sun ablaze and air as humid as the tropics 
threatened to send us back to the air conditioned comfort of our car--
but in the car, windows up we deny so much more than heat.
We deny connection to the buzz of insect wing and drum of amphibian's song,
we deny the fragrant scent of sweet meadow grass and tender sway of roadside wildflowers
and in doing so we deny ourselves.


Instead, that fiercely hot day we chose to linger and we noted Bobolink's of quite a number busy in the meadow--their total flock unusually large and so despite the heat we stopped a moment to take it in before we continued languid but soul-heartened back to the car.

Now, in the snow squall so thick we cast our eyes downward, we know full well we could have chosen the warmth and comfort of our cozy home but instead we walk downcast
and stumble as almost underfoot wooly bear caterpillars leap out at us from the pure white snow.

Their tiny black and orange bodies so delicate and still we think they are dead but upon closer inspection realize they are indeed still alive. Curled in a tiny ball on my gloved hand I move them to the bushes near the ditch.

What resilience in the face of unpredictable weather--we could do so well.

Further along we turn off the trail and are stopped in our snowy tracks by a deafening thunderous cacophony of geese as a flock of thousands lifts off from a field a distance beyond the trail.

Breathtaking, 
the power of their wings, their voice, their unison centers and connects us in the beautifully lyrical way that nature, like music and art, and poetry, mystically can.

We leave the trail as their flock parts way, half heading east and the other west, and as we walk down to the pond  we find it swelled to overflowing while two muskrats make themselves known with their busy attentiveness to their own lives--such graceful, playful, fluid creatures.

We pause and be still in our own silence,
feeling the briskness of the snowy air, flakes landing, fleeting, on our faces as we
listen to the rush of pond waters flowing over a dam to the brook below us.

Standing in the power of such awareness we know we are being graced. 
And in this graciousness we are filled with something you simply cannot buy... the contentment of true presence...and the beauty, peace and joy and love it so generously affords us.

The economics of this world demand that we rush onward and pay little heed to the natural world of which we are an intrinsic part. Walking in the quietude of a snowy wooded brook side trail feels like an act of rebellion against the digitization and commercialization of human life. With our attentiveness we forge a rebellion in our own hearts  towards re-connection with all we know to be right and true and worthy. 

The desire to be well and a part of the living wildness of the soil and air and waters of this little Island we adore, swells large within us not unlike the swelling of the pond waters and the song of the wild geese who gather and sing despite the hunter's season.

The hurting of the world demands our song.

Time is passing and we can choose to pay attention. Future generations depend on our willingness to reconsider our lifestyles and model re- conciliation with self and other, with constructed and natural environs. With heart and soul and body and the Earth.

There is a whole entire world whose delicate balance is being challenged by the disruptive and greedy ways of human enterprise. Courageous hearts and minds can choose to bear witness to the truths as they are seen before us. In doing so we tell the story of the world as it is and with leaps of faith as it might be imagined to be. Whole and well and loved.

I want to tell my children that the future looks bright for them, as they are bright young people with hearts wide opened to art, music, love and nature. But it is a difficult time to be growing up in the world. It is a difficult time to be an adult in this tumultuous era too. 

The one truth I hold fast to is that their willingness to love this world, broken and fragmented and disappearing as it is, will never be a wasted effort. 

For to love this world is its own reward. Love is rather beautiful like that.

Happy sixteenth birthday Nov 21st to my son Lucas--cherished child adored by his mom and dad and two loving sisters for his kind and gentle ways, his humour and his willingness to always lend a helping hand. 

A keen eyed nature observer with an artistic touch in all he does, Lucas is a storyteller who uses photographs and canvasses to show us how things are in his mind's eye. I have a faith in his art that I do not have in the dominant capitalistic system which overlords itself onto our lives at every turn. His ability to utilize art to convey what so many seem to miss on their daily rounds absorbed in the minutiae of their own lives is a gift to the world. 

But then again I am just his mother.

Wishing you a deep sense of your own connectedness to this blessed Earth.
XO
Jill

 Thank you Lucas for the bobolink photo and the idea and act of yesterday's Mount Herbert walk.

All Hallow's Eve--A Heart's Transformation from Fear and Confusion

In Oct 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) released its most recent report on the state of the climate globally. Its prognosis was startling in its immediacy. Human societies must act now in order to stall the most grievous effects of increased warming of our planet. And urgently so. They gave us a timeline of 10-12 years to get our collective acts together. 

But how when we are hapless victims and perpetrators both?And what is there to do in the face of such overwhelming and urgent news? 

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing and personally had no idea where to begin beyond those measures my family and I had already put in place.

I was beginning to be given to despair.

I mentioned this despair to a person I admire greatly and who marches gracefully to the tune of his own heart, his very life work a lovesong to trees and the natural world as a whole. He said to me that for him, hope is prerequisite to breathing. It is what keeps him moving forward. And he trusts in the goodness of others. And he can't help but bear witness to the beauty all around. 

And I understood his words as though they were my own. Beauty of the natural world exists to sustain us so that we can protect the earth. A kind of symbiosis beyond the obvious life supports systems the earth affords us with—it is a symbiosis of the heart. 

And so I took a breath and held it all lightly trusting that a shift in my own heart would occur.

And then last night this awakening happened:

I knew to wait for this moment, trusting that it would arrive without even being certain how exactly it would present itself but that I would somehow know when it did.

Tenderhearted awareness--that is how I choose to respond to the immense suffering of the world. With the tenderness I offer my own children in their times of suffering and confusion. 

This too I offer the world. 

I have been lost as of late in the uncertainty and confusion I see around me. In the midst of dire climate change warnings and painful and confusing political and social upheaval I have been drifting like an un-moored boat from unknown shore to unknown shore in search of a sheltered harbour. I have identified too deeply with the confusion and pain of the world, internalizing it to the point of becoming it.

But tonight on my yoga mat I arrived at the harbour I had been searching for in vain as though it was outside my bones and breath. My bones and breath. And all I had to do was lay them down prostrate before the world, on my own living room floor in order to find what I had been looking for.

I arrived back home in myself with the same sense of being received as my own little two year old self did at my grandparent's upon my announcing I AM HERE...I arrived at a place of  humility and acceptance and welcoming and love. 

This world is swirling and twirling about in a vast sea of space with room enough for all possibilities to unfold. Mine and yours included.

In my own fear and confusion I had not allowed any of the immensity of that vast sea of possibility to truly permeate my thoughts and actions. 

Space---and time---those strange companions that my unusual brain has struggled with for so long came together within me last evening in a dance of joy so profound that I realized that I do not have to do or be anything or anyone other than  who I already am. 

Nor do you.

The simple act of being, of existing and bearing witness to this world is all that is asked of me and any of us.

Be and bear witness. That simple.

And I came to realize once again that when I fall open-hearted into the arms of that vast expanse of universe I can trust that my very existence contains the fullness which I so earnestly seek. 

I need look no further, it is there--here-- in the moment of my relinquishing from the stranglehold of self. The very act of trusting in the larger processes at work and bearing witness to the unfolding is all that is asked of me. 

Of any of us.

Compassion, non judging, a field of love so wide that even to call it a field is restricting.To call it love restricting too. That field of awareness which the poet Rumi so beautifully spoke of is where I found myself. Conjoined inseparably to the nameless void containing all is what I had become.

When I fall into that place of trust I fall out of all the things in life which hold me back--fear, judgement, a sense of lack, resentment, exhaustion and I fall open-heartedly into an awareness so spacious that there is room for everything to unfold. 

Falling into the unknown can be a life changing experience.

There are endless parallels and portals into my yoga mat experience in the natural world if only we have the hearts and minds to see them.

Over the past several days I have had the great pleasure of watching the hardwoods near our house release their leaves. The way they swirl off the tree is an ecstasy itself. 

The first day I noticed our Maple letting go there was nary a breath of wind to incite the riot of leaves as they took leave and fell. I watched rather breathless, knowing that this was their moment--that the urge to fall had grown so huge within them that nothing could hold them back. 

I felt honoured to watch their little copper faces catch the morning sun as they downturned swirling towards the still green grass. And I felt a little heartsick too. 

Time passing before my very eyes and almost frantically so. 

I tried for a few minutes to choose a leaf and watch it make its way to the ground but I kept being interrupted by another and then another leaf. I noticed my heart rate beginning to increase to match the madness of the swirling and had to pause to catch my own breath.

Each departure so singularly beautiful I felt as though I just might cry.

All of a sudden these leaves were my beloveds; dear friends whose life span I had witnessed from bud to leaf and whose season of life was waning, dry and muted now in late October. 

A fullness come to pass.

And it came to me upon my mat this evening after my own dry patch of soulless disconnection to my life that I must hold it all with tenderhearted awareness. 

The suffering in my own household, the pain, the uncertainty and confusion. The tiredness, the fear, the forgetting to be kind to self before all else so that I can be kind to others.

And in that moment my heart grew to accommodate the whole world and all the suffering parts with such a measure of compassion and clarity and purity that despite my tiredness and the late hour I knew I had to write this out to share with you.

The paths through the darkness of this era in which we live are there before us if only we have hearts that are brave and willing enough to trust in their very existence.

The paths will show their way through our very willingness to act out of kindness and open-heartedness. They will be revealed to the degree in which we are willing to look with truly open eyes of awareness and hearts and  minds of acceptance.

We are victims and perpetrators both but there is no one person to blame for where we have found ourselves. Multitudes and eons have brought us to this moment in the universes' expression. 

But we are here and this is the truth before us and so we must bear witness and act accordingly with a loving responsiveness we would offer our own beloveds in their time of need. 

After all, we are all of the same flesh and breath and sea and bark and bone and petal and rock and crawl and dance and slither and swoosh of falling leaf. 

There is no separation. 

We are one.

And so I've come to the conclusion that there is nothing to fear and everything to gain from our willingness to tend to this world with a mother's tenderness for her suffering child, with the graciousness and humility of the wise, with the kindness and urgency we would wish for our own healing and wellness.

The task before us is a large one but I know we are up to it-- otherwise we would not have been called to do so.

In love and beauty.

Thanks for reading,

Jill

Late August Clouds

I suppose there are any number of things I could prattle on about this last August day but I choose what has chosen me; clouds.

I must confess that it is difficult for me to even sit here for these few moments to compose this brief piece as the sky is calling to me in whispers of azure and cyan with brilliant, slow moving grey-white clouds like pearly everlasting drifting on the cliff edge breeze.

I am planning on driving east today to Monticello where my parents spend the summer on their shore frontage of my grandparents old farm. I will drop our son off to spend the weekend birding with my parents and my uncle and visiting with other relatives keen to savour the long weekend's offerings.

We will likely scope out blackberries to pick and take a stroll on the sandstone beach below the cape before the girls, and my husband and I return home this evening.

But in order to do any of this, if I am to drive an hour east, I must first write out my strange intoxication with the sky on this last day of August. It feels as though it is calling me to honour the truths of my present by being in the present and witnessing how even the clouds upon the sky are ever changing. Breathe with me, breathe with this.

My dear sister Janice has returned to her family on the west coast after spending the bulk of the summer here with us. Bidding her farewell is always a difficult thing for me. Our relationship has often been a complicated one--we are sisters after all--but I have always adored her and she has always adored me. Being the two oldest with two children the same age we share similar life experiences even though we live a continent apart for most of the year. This summer our hearts crossed a lot of bridges to meet each other in a place of openness and acceptance. We witnessed firsthand the fabulous reality that we can become anew in each new moment so long as we grant each other that breathing, growing heart space.

Yesterday she spent most of her day flying across the sky, through clouds not unlike those which I am gazing upon today. I am gazing this morning as though bewitched by their splendour and I am reminded that we ourselves are like the clouds. Far too often we think of ourselves as fixed entities--I am Jill and you are You-- but really we are fluid like the ocean and the sky. We are waves of light and love, we are shape shifters in our mind's eye and co creators of the world in which we live. The beauty of the clouds is not unlike you. It is you.

Miss you already dear Janice but welcoming September into my heart one cloud moving breath at at time.

Thank you Janice! Thank you August. Thank you sky--for being You!

xoxo 
Intoxicated by clouds, but now ready to let them go...
Jill

Photo taken by Lucas MacCormack
Monticello, PEI 2017

Where I'm From

Pin point it on a space-time map:

1:05am

Friday, August 17^th, 1973

Charlottetown,

Prince Edward Island,

Canada,

Planet Earth,

Earth-Moon System,

Solar System,

Milky Way Galaxy,

Local Group,

Virgo Supercluster,

The Observable Universe.

Breathe and hold-

One final laborious push and I appeared in the maternity ward of the Charlottetown Hospital where both my paternal grandmother and my mother had trained and worked as Roman Catholic nurses.

Me, Gillian Marie McGuigan, first born of five,their singular Gold Cup and Saucer parade girl I was that day. 

My mom, nurse angel, is a
creative, loving homemaker and lifelong learner;
my dad, the endless provider, a loving,
quiet and detailed problem solver/computer guy extraordinaire.
Both birders, so artistic and so hard working.
But that is not the whole truth of where I’m from.

I’m from the same myriad of places which each in their own way have brought us all into existence.

Trace your fingers on the bark of an evergreen nearest you and you will feel the rough and willing touch of ancestral longing. A longing which is etched into each of us for the preservation of a species that was perhaps not ever destined for more than a maybe answer to where we are headed and, despite science and religion's best efforts, to why we are here.

If three hundred years ago you had told my ancestors in Ireland, Scotland and Africa that I would be sitting here today laced with cellular remembrances of their homelands, same starlight in my eyes as theirs, yet looking and living as I do, no doubt they would think you crazy. 

 But I am here and I did come from their distant histories by an entanglement of story lines that only a skilled author could render.

And what if someone then was told we’d know where humankind found its origins? And also, that during the same relative time/ space as that wild discovery, too many descendants of those humans who lived so desperately close to Earth would be at least partly to blame for the ridiculous mess we are in today as perpetrators of greed and a foolhardy disconnection with same Earth. 

Would they have thought you crazy? 
Do you think we are crazy now?
And what is crazy anyhow?

Climate change and a sixth mass extinction?
Guns, warfare, inequality, grinding poverty, endless growth?
Measuring our worth according to GDP?
Measuring worth at all?
And what of
opti-genetics on transgenic mice,
Nano-robots fighting cancer,
Reality TV in a plasticized world?

How about falling so wildly in love with an idea that you would walk off the face of the earth just to see if the idea might float? 

What about falling in love, period? Is that crazy?

Where I am from is two people who met by chance, fell hopelessly in love, and in time, decided to hop in the sack together. I am the end result of one of those encounters; a kind of give and take only possible through courage and naivety combined. That and the biochemistry of hormones.

Where I am from is truly a strange and beautiful place with a graceful and stumbling quality about it. A world so full it can scarcely contain it all:
 
Family and community and brokenness and wholesomeness too.
Wonder and laughter, love and fear and bliss,
Wide, bright expanses and dark cramped quarters, and  little known
wounds in far away lands and far back times. And kindness, do not forget kindness.

I am from small talk in small towns on an achingly beautiful little bit of fading away sandstone in a great big, turbulent sea.
I am from some sort of wonderful orchestral wavelength that an ancient part of me knows is truth and beauty.
That and the unequivocal forbearance of spirals and fractals as well as the survival of heartbreak and other dis-ease. 

And if I thought any of it was especially special I would have said so already.
Except I did.
My mom and my dad are ultimately where I am from.
That and an endless universe of possibilities
of which I am both one and many.
Jill MacCormack
http://www.johnagowan.org/elements.html
Africa cover by Weezer