Mountain Climbing

Been away a while. I like writing...but the creative juice has been pouring into painting. I've got 3 "in the oven" now with a 4th that I'm wrestling with...cannot get the drawing the way I want it...it's the "Woman of the Andes" and I have been trying to downsize her and she won't have it, so I need to paint her big which is what she seems to want. There are the technical aspects to painting, as in I've been painting on masonite board...2'X2' and 2'X4'...but now I have to paint her on something bigger...looks like a canvas for the larger size, as the masonite board will be too heavy to manage.

Felled by a flu virus apparently. It moved in slowly after a huge dental appointment last Tuesday. I had a cervical spine surgery in July that now requires me to take an antibiotic an hour before any dental work...and that seemed to cap the globe and my immune system crashed. I think there is also the reality that grief had moved in, too. I'm still sorting and sifting the myriads of feelings...places in me known and unknown that presented themselves with Joseph's death. I was not a parent...I didn't bring a child into the world, so now the more distant perspective is that I was going to be a grandmother...and I had no clue how I was going to be able to manage that...to live it. And how to be the mother/grandmother to Brandy and Paul and all the mystery of all of that. Joseph's death somehow punctured that neurotic obsessing. None of that matters now. So I've allowed myself the discovery that there would have been a delicious role I could have played in this little boy's life...and that maybe I'm not the monster my mother needed to paint on me. As I sit in this garden of a new reality, there is a large measure of the grief, not just for the loss of Joseph...I know his soul is making the journey that is intended for him....but for Brandy and Paul. I feel them so keenly and when I wander into the place of the empathic knowing of the hugeness of their journey to receive this pregnancy that culminated in such tragedy, it undoes me. They are greatness in their soul presence in their ability to hold the anguish of this...I can only visit it piece by piece.

Thanks to the gods they are gifted cascades of synchronicities such as the memorial service yesterday at Mariposa. A greater tragedy would be if they could not be aware of the spiritual bounty that is laid out for them each day...in small ways and large, such as yesterday's gift. We get so much when we're able to hold the tension of both the wonder and joy AND pain and anguish of life...and there they both sit in the middle of that. They embrace their grief and they embrace their joy in life and I know they will be...and are just fine. And I am doing the same...not as gracefully maybe...but that's been my life's story and journey to learn. And so here is another chapter.

Winter is here in spades. I think it is the inevitable stamp of aging that to my surprise, I am not welcoming its entree. I'm feeling the weight of it. The cold is a challenge to me. The snow...as much as I want it and know that the land needs it is a challenge to me. Life in New Mexico is not for wimps and I know that and relish it. Am I up to it now? Too bad, as my soul depends on the "food" that is here, and somehow I must find a way to navigate once again, the steep challenges that have been mine to climb since earliest years.