Hello Sweethearts All

It is Friday night. I'm sitting on my couch next to Mario listening to Linda Ronstadt and Ann Savoy singing "Adieu False Heart." Man. I love this album. I love their voices. Love, love, love. If I could sing, I would have been a singer. I just can't get over you.

I don't know enough about music to describe this album. A combination of Cajun and Celtic. Reminds me of my time sitting in the Quail House writing. Mmmmm. I am lusting after the sunshine and the Old Mermaids Sanctuary. Knock wood, we'll be there in about ten days.

I've been having a lovely time here, however. I feel as though I am finally weaving together a community. No, that's wrong. I am finally becoming part of a community. A part of the tapestry. Using that word sounds corny, I know. But I am a little bit corny. I do hail from the Midwest. We had the second Old Mermaids Gifted workshop on Saturday. On Tuesday, I went to the Reiki circle in Gresham, at the end of a very long day. A healing day. Acupuncture, some other stuff. Plus we went to see Milk. (We thought it was a fabulous movie, by the way.) I love these Reiki circles. It just feels like love, love, love.

What is Reiki? Hmmm. My friend Therese Fisher says, "Reiki is most commonly described as a Japanese stress-reduction and relaxation technique that also promotes healing. Reiki is translated as universal or spiritually guided life force energy. Reiki itself is not aligned with any specific spiritual path or religion."

When I first heard about Reiki years ago, I thought it was a racket. For one thing, it sounded like a pyramid scheme. You could get the first two attunements for relatively little money, but to get the third attunement, to become a master, you had to pay $10,000. No way! If this was such an amazing healing technique at a time when the world needed it why would they charge that kind of money?

Well, others felt the same way and they began training people to use Reiki for free. The first time I got a Reiki treatment, I got vertigo the very same night. In fact, I woke up with vertigo, didn't know what was going on, and thought I had gone blind. One of the most terrible moments of my life. So I didn't go near Reiki for years.

Then when my dad got sick, I became a Reiki Master just so I could have one more tool to use when I went home, you know, to make my daddy all better. Uh-huh. Instead I had one of the worst visits to my ancestral home I had ever had. Vowed never to return home. Ever. And I didn't use Reiki again. Even when Linda was dying. Just kind of forgot about it. And then this past year I started using it again, along with the braucherei (Pennsylvania Dutch folk healing that involves chanting).

I am at heart a scientist. I don't believe science is separate from the Invisibles. Nor do I think our minds and bodies are separate. Descartes did the world a great disservice with his articulation of the mind/body split—a false mind/body split. Yes, we need sanitation, we need to understand our physicality, we need to know how to staunch a wound, and we need to know from which direction the cold wind blows, where the sun sets and rises, what the air smells like before it snows. And we also need to know how to create community with all that is Visible and Invisible.

I don't happen to believe in God, but I've never thought it was out of character for a scientist to believe in God. The more one knows, the more wonderful, profound, and mysterious life is. By separating our life with the Invisibles from our life with the Visibles we are creating a schism—a chasm—which becomes harder to bridge as time goes by.

So we need to step out of time and listen to the whispers...

When I do healing work, I keep track of what works and what doesn't and how long a "healing" lasts. Sometimes it is amazing what happens. Powwows are known for being able to stop bleeding and heal burns—chants seem to work well for many inflammatory conditions. The other night, Mario burned himself on the edge of a cookie sheet. He came into the living room where I was and held out his arm. "Can you powwow this please?" I gulped when I looked at his arm. I breathed deeply. It looked like a second degree burn.

Powwows don't generally put cold on burns or anything that might push the inflammation back into the body. Instead they want to take it out of the body and stop the inflammatory process completely. I immediately began chanting, "Inflammation and pain come out of the marrow and into the bones, out of the bones and into the blood, out of the blood and into and the flesh, out of the flesh and into the skin, out of the skin and into the hair and out of the hair and into green forest..." while my hand went in a counterclockwise motion over the burns. I could feel the heat.

I kept chanting until the heat was gone. A few minutes later, I put my hand over his arm and it again felt hot, so I chanted some more. I was not confident this would work. I mean, I was pretty sure it was a second degree burn. He was going to hurt and hurt bad. I worked on him until I felt no more heat. When he first got the burn, he felt pain. Once we started doing the powwow, Mario had no pain.

Anyway, I think there are more things under the sun and moon than I will ever know or understand.

Last night we had our Healers Circle here in town. Ten people came. I am so moved and impressed with this group of people. We are all so different with different training and different interests, and I LOVE that. At the bottom of every email flyer we send out monthly we say, "We come together without dogma, in tolerance, respect, and love for one another." Is that not so cool? I have visions of us starting a healing and teaching center here. A true Old Mermaids Sanctuary. All about sustainability. Local economy. Communion with the Invisibles and Visibles. Love, love, love.

I applied for a full-time job this week. It's amazing how much energy looking for work entails. I haven't been able to do any "promotion" on Church of the Old Mermaids. Thirty people have bought a copy of the book from Amazon.com. Two people have bought Kindle versions of it. I am so grateful to those people, and I'm confident they will love these Old Mermaids as much as I do.

The Old Mermaids often turn up in my healing work, by the way. I did a Soul Retrieval for someone this week, and the Old Gals showed up. I kind of like that.

Neither Mario or myself was laid off this week. We are glad for that. A woman who worked at the library for seventeen years was laid off. These are grieving times. And times where we can remake the world. It is scary. And it is exhilarating. I wear the necklace I made at the Gifted ceremony most of the time now, along with my Old Mermaid pendant from Cate. I look down at it and remember I am Gifted. And so are you. We can dance through this. We can cry, laugh, make love, dance, drink, and be merry. Why not?

Tomorrow at this Old Mermaid Sanctuary we are having an Enchanted Evening. I am teaching some of the things I have learned this year before Mario and I head south. The coyotes, bobcat, and Old Owls are calling to me.

My life is so blessed. It is dark and hard and beautiful and easy.

And I am trying to dance my way through it all. Naked in my mind's eye, singing out Boom-chicka-boom!

May You Live in Beauty!