Whoever said sport isn't an art form, hasn't seen this ...

Move over Damien Hirst ... Vaughanie's moving in!

Butterfly days are not here just yet ...

"Take time to Sit Quietly. Connect to your higher soul. Breathe. It will calm down inside if you know every thing happening around you is all part of your path and all part of the process of becoming. Think about a cute little caterpillar ~ it you told her that she was going to weave a cocoon, and tuck herself into it and evolve, she'd probably say, Nope, not me, I don't wanna do it. Literally, the caterpillar dissolves itself, it’s stout little solid body and loses a bunch of legs into a bunch of gooky, sticky DNA juice and protoplasm while in the cocoon. It reconstitutes itself (after a while) as a winged butterfly, less legs, lighter on its feet and with a whole new diet ~ pollen instead of leaves.

The forces taking place now are the forces of evolution in your life, similar to the butterfly. Like that caterpillar, you are in the process of evolving. You are on the middle part where you let go of the old life and the new life isn't here yet. It can feel like a gooky, sticky mess of protoplasm inside your cocoon or world. The butterfly is not yet formed BUT you can't go back to being a caterpillar any more either. You have to trust the process and keep moving forward.

Focus on the THINGS YOU ARE CLEAR ABOUT, that is the path through the process of change. The parts you are NOT clear about, put those in a pile in the corner and don‘t worry about them. Easier said than done, I know, but that is the best approach to take with the unclear pile.

The BEST thing to do is to distract your MIND and give it some tasks it can focus on (see, do and work on the stuff you are CLEAR about). Even if all your mind can focus on is how nervous and anxious you are ~ see how your fingers are nervous and drum, how your leg wiggles or you feel short of breath. Distract that busy and crazed working mind of yours with a job to do to keep it focused on what it CAN do something about rather than the uncertainty before it.

You DO have to work to both create and see the underlying story that supports your dream. It is a good week to keep your mouth shut and observe what other people say and do. You are going to see wounds and delusions flapping around all over the place. We all have wounds and delusions. This week, they are hanging out to dry on the wash line and the neighbors are talking.

So be gentle and kind with yourself and others this week. We are all combinations of gooky sticky protoplasm, brave bold dreamers, the heroes and heroines of our own life’s journey and hanging out on earth to help each other evolve as our wounds and delusions hang on the line to dry out. We are all going to be a bit of a mess. At the same time, we all know, with quite a bit of clarity, what we want (at least in some part of our life) for the next chapter. Move towards the clear part in your life. Put the stuff you don’t know what to do with in a pile. Give others hankies if they cry. (Gonna be a lot of tears this week). Say “there, there” and pat hands as needed. Distribute hugs. Big, big evolutionary week. You are leaving caterpillar life behind (wave so long to it!) and moving toward becoming your own butterfly."

- Anne Ortelee - Interpreting the stars for this week -

The road not taken ...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost (1874 – 1963)

Message update ...

Did the other stuff wait? NOPE. Did the other stuff get in a truck? Kinda did for the best part of the day. Did it F*&£**g back up? In a manner of speaking, can you hear the beeps ... and see the boxes crashing down !!! The one small ask for the 'other stuff' to wait went unheeded ... joy unbound ... and the consequences were deeply unsettling to say the least, and yet not wanting to sound unappreciative or ungrateful for the lessons the Universe in it's ultimate wisdom is choosing to send my way, I know the 'other stuff' came from a place of love. Can I do without the judgement? YUP. Did I learn anything? SURELY DID ... good stuff too, although it may take awhile to sink in.

1. Think about what I want as opposed to what I don't want. We're back to the dopeness versus the wackness.

2. Separate stuff out, label it, put it on a shelf and bring things out one at a time.

3. Even when all around feels overwhelmingly rubbish, find the positives.

4. Be more aware of the consequences on others and act with greater responsibility.

Message for today ...

The stuff that you are NOT clear on is NOT part of your path. Or at least it is NOT the main part of your path. The stuff you ARE clear on IS your path. Go work on the stuff that IS YOUR path. Ignore the rest of it for now.

Ok my path for today is ...
step one - walk becky in the woods (yeah, I love step one),
step two - get cleaned up and go to work (boo, not so much fun there!),
step three - do stuff at work (I'll do my best, I can't promise much, except I will write G's reference),
step four - pick up Lou, Steph and Bargy on the way to cricket training (ooh, could get messy not feeling too great),
step five - come home and chill (lovin step five on my path)
step six - all the other stuff can wait, seriously it can get in a truck and F*&$£...g back-up and wait.

On the edge of civilization

Colleen Kelley

"Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth - our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human ...

... Still, the current commodification of 'nature' by civilization tells us little or nothing of the perceptual shift that made possible this reduction of the animal (and the earth) to an object, little of the process whereby our senses first relinquished the power of the Other, the vision that for so long had motivated our most sacred rituals, our dances, and our prayers.

But can we ever hope to catch a glimpse of this process, which has given rise to so many of the habits and linguistic prejudices that now structure our very thinking? Certainly not if we gaze toward that origin from within the midst of the very civilization it engendered. But perhaps we may make our stand along the edge of that civilization, like a magician, or like a person who, having lived among another tribe, can no longer wholly return to her own. She lingers half within and half outside of her community, open as well, then, to the shifting voices and flapping forms that crawl and hovered beyond the mirrored walls of the city. And even there, moving along those walls, she may hope to find the precise clues to the mystery of how those walls were erected, and how a simple boundary became a barrier, only if the moment is timely - only, that is, if the margin she frequents is a temporal as well as a spatial edge, and the temporal structure that it bounds is about to dissolve, or metamorphose, into something else."

- David Abram (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage, New York, p. 22-29 -

When a woman looks in a mirror ...

Photo copyright Dan Tuffs

"... I hope you see yourself.. Not one of the myths. Not a failed man - a person who can never succeed because success is basically defined as being male - and not a failed goddess, a person desperately trying to hide herself in the dummy Woman, the image of men's desires and fears. I hope you look away from those myths and into your own eyes, and see your own strength. You're going to need it. I hope you don't try to take your strength from men, or from a man. Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot. I hope you'll take and make your own soul; that you'll feel your life for yourself pain by pain and joy by joy; that you'll feed your life, eat, 'eat as you go' - you who nourish, be nourished!

... On the maps drawn by men there is an immense white area, terra incognita, where most women live. That country is all yours to explore, to inhabit, to describe. But none of us live there alone. Being human isn't something people can bring off alone; we need other people in order to be people. We need one another.

... I think we have a responsibility to freedom ... especially to freedom of speech. Obedience is silent. It does not answer. It is contained. Here is a disobedient woman speaking (Wendy Rose, saying in a poem called The Parts of a Poet),

parts of me are pinned
to earth, parts of me
undermine song, parts
of me spread on the water,
parts of me form a rainbow
bridge, parts of me follow
the sandfish, parts of me
are a woman who judges.

Now this is what I want: I want to hear your judgements. I am sick of the silence of woman. I want to hear you speaking all the languages, offering your experience as your truth, as human truth ...

This is what I don't want: I don't want what men have. I'm glad to let them have their work and talk their talk. But I do not want and will not have them saying or thinking or telling us that theirs is the only fit work or speech for human beings ...

I know that many men and even women are afraid and angry when women speak, because in this barbaric society, when women speak truly they speak subversively - they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes.

... That's what I want - to hear you erupting ... I want to hear you talking to each other and to us all: whether you're writing an article or a poem or a letter or teaching a class or talking with friends or reading a novel or making a speech or proposing a law or giving a judgement or singing the baby to sleep or discussing the fate of nations. I want to hear you. Speak with a woman's tongue. Come out and tell us what time of night it is! Don't let us sink back into silence. If we don't tell out truth, who will?

... So I end with a poem (Linda Hogan, The Women Speaking),

Daughters, the women are speaking.
They arrive
over the wise distance
on perfect feet.
Daughters, I love you."

An extract from Ursula's Bryn Mawr Commencement Address (1986), published in Le Guin, U. (1992) Dancing at the Edge of the World, Paladin, London, pp158-160.