Simple Magic: Egglantine "beeps" into a camellia.

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile you may have sensed that I’ve been working really hard to find my place in the world. Really, really hard. Well, actually, the struggle has been in knowing the actually story and dream I’m here to live, and not being able to find a form that will help me do so in an effective way, in a true way. I was once described in a review of my harp music as “endlessly creative”, and for several years that phrase seemed like a curse rather than a blessing! I love creating and inventing my life, but the past decade have been something of a tormented tussle of finding where and how I can truly live my real magic in the real world and make a real difference–in the lives of the people around me, but also in the big, wide world, for our dear Earth Island Home.

I’ve played with ideas and forms and abandoned following them forward, because they haven’t felt like they truly fit me. That somehow the sleeves were wrong, or the shirt bunched in a funny way, or I kept tripping in my shoes. I could have taken up the bardic storytelling and harping in full glory, but … big concert performances don’t fire me anymore. I could be mentoring parents and kids in the magic of nature, but I don’t want to lead games and manage a weekly program (or a monthly program, or whatever). I could just write children’s fantasy fiction–but I want to mentor girls into living real magic in our own everyday lives. I really, really want to offer my own mix of healing and mentor women into nature connection, and their own true nature connection, nurturing them to become wisewomen, clan mothers, elders/grandmothers–so desperately needed in our world and culture. But I hadn’t found that point of connection, where it matters and makes a difference in the immediate lives of these women. Where we can start conversing, where I see: oh, this is what you’re struggling with right now, and here’s how I can help. And by the way, here’s something that might nourish you too, some ideas to play with, play in–what do you think? And the conversation goes from there, and a song emerges, and a story unfolds.

In truth, I want to do all of these things in some way–and especially the last one, and in some way the one just before that. My struggle has been finding the outfit that fits just right, that is simple, easy, natural, exciting. A “small is beautiful” expression that just lets it all shine. One that focuses my intent and belief, and gives my creativity a fun little playground, so that I can actually both do and be, and not go crazy anymore with the over-abundance of possibilities. One that actually infuses my home life and the magic I want to live in my everyday (or return to living), because I tell you, this journey has been so consuming, that I don’t feel I’ve truly been able to live my talk, except in plops and smears.

Now, when I think of other women who are consumed by their concerns (whether it’s a personal or health crisis or a desperate soul quest or the realities of work) who feel they aren’t truly living their values in their everyday lives, I have wayyyyy more compassion with who and where they are. I see that they (you?) are truly living your passionate life of connection in those plops and smears. And that we in our time (and in any time?) are a bundle of seeming contradictions. I believe in the essential need for us all to deeply connect with the natural world, and be outside soaking in that lively, diverse, intricate tapestry that is our community and birthright–of which we are designed as human beings to be an active, engaged citizen–and yet our family at this time spends hours a day on the computer, engaging in our connection with others and our passions and our creativity. This is not a bad thing, but i do feel we are out of balance.

Still, we pass time with our chickens in our suburban backyard, and we nurture a pocket garden that gifts us with greens, flowers, and sugar snap peas (yes, in November!), and we are with each other most of the time. Arguing or companionable, learning or creating, doing the work (at least in fits and bits) that needs to be done here.

In my tussle with self and expression and yearning to connect, I’ve realized that–as with our family’s search for home–I have to just decide. No, not decide on just anything. But choose from among the possibilities for the one where I can truly be home. A surprisingly difficult thing to do! After struggling with trying to live in a new place (NE Oregon), and realizing we would be living in an old place (San Francisco Bay Area), and no longer wanting to search and quest for a different home place altogether, I made a decision. I love my island, I love the community and the landscape. I am free to be myself in all my goofiness and experiments there. And I believe it can be good for our family again. We even knew of a property there that we knew was just right for us, after all our wandering (I’ll have to write about all this another time). Yes there were ifs, ands, and buts (especially since at the time, members of my family weren’t so firmly convinced they wanted to do this), but in the end I decided that after our stint in the Bay Area, I wanted us to return to Vashon. I didn’t want to wander anymore, I didn’t want to entertain other possibilities–in California, or Canada, or New Zealand …. I just wanted to be home. In a place I knew and loved, and which nourished my soul and imagination, where we were in intimate relationship with the trees, plants, birds, a particular terrain already in a particular corner of the world, one which offered us the right form of playground in which we could return to our semi-sustainable lifestyle and carry ideas and dreams further.

It’s the same thing with my biz. I just want to be home, and not scattered here and there, trying to work this strand or that, or thinking that I “should” work up a harp performance, or start a song community movement or any other thing. Certain expressions in my past ten years have been simple and joyful. Certain others have been ones I returned to again and again (that children’s book, for one). It’s plain and simple what the true form is. The other threads are not quite in alignment, but if I relax into that little shining place where it is clear and sweet and true, really that changes everything. Why not just claim this little place as my own, and discover how all those other stars constellate into alignment as a result? Hm.

To Be (or not to be) Continued ….

A view of our land. No, really, it's practically in town.

Simple Magic 2: Lord Firestar -- great noble rooster of kind hearts