Well, the bugs appear to be gone.  At least mostly.  The exterminator (which I called terminator while speaking with our landlord) who inspected our attic most definitively found rat poop, but said our shake roof makes it impossible to effectively rat-proof the place.  He wanted, instead, to set us up with a monthly rat-killing service.  Suspicious, I called some rodent-proofing specialists who told me shake roofing is actually not a problem, and they’re more than happy to come take care of things.  Now I’m waiting for the landlord to coordinate all the tenants in our building being home at the same time so each can let the rodent people into their attic to do the job.  In the meantime, the round of mites that has loved me so thoroughly has mostly died (apparently, despite all bodily evidence to the contrary, they need rats to live, and our former coinhabiters were keen on someplace else), and I’m praying to every god imaginable that another round doesn’t come before the rodent people finish their job.

In other news, I had a really great reflection time on Thursday, and came to a few conclusions.  a) push full-steam ahead on my novel, b) pursue more involvement in public life, c) get some training in Soul Collage (thanks, Fran, for introducing me to the process!) and see where that leads—both personally and professionally, and d) devote one evening a week to essay-writing. I’ve been wanting to write essays for publication for a very long time, and have a sparkly, hopeful feeling about committing to do it—hopefulness about what I’ll learn as I research my ideas, and about my life interests crystallizing and clarifying in the process. 

So here are the things I hardly want to say, for fear they won’t happen…but that I’ll say anyway so that maybe they’ll be more likely to!  By the time 2006 comes to a close, I want to have a book deal signed and half a dozen articles either published, or sitting on editors’ desks for review.  I want to be in a book club for myself and a play group for my son.  And I want to have a dream in the works for how my interests in spirituality, storytelling, and soul care can combine and translate into some form of public life.  Okay?  Ready…go!

This afternoon I took a long walk with Elijah to listen to the last of a set of tapes Jen sent (thank you once again for those, Jen!)—Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s The Creative Fire.  Wow.  What a gift.  Both content and delivery made me feel wrapped up and up again in peace.  I feel named, as an artist, and set free to live more fully into that.

While walking, I wandered onto the grounds of a Catholic church, and sat down in front of a fountain.  The air was colder there than elsewhere, and sunlight kept away.  I felt like I was sitting at the fountain of my soul, of my artistic self, watching the abundance there that often gets hidden from view.  I noticed there were four tiers over which the water endlessly fell, and smiled at the symbology of that—four being the number of wholeness and completion.  Yes, there is wholeness, settledness, peace in my pursuit of my art (writing, child rearing, soul care).  And as if the universe wanted the lesson more thoroughly spoken, I turned to see a very large bee perched on the sleeve of my sleeping baby.  “Wholeness isn’t just about honey, honey,” the universe seemed to say, as I gingerly maneuvered the bee away.  Her stinger pointed up at me stiffly, as a warning.  “There’s danger in it too.  Opportunities to hurt.”  Again I had to smile and nod the truth of that, even as I breathed a sigh of relief that no one got stung this time.

I feel happy.  Deeply so.  My life isn’t without struggle.  I feel frustrated and confused and depressed with the best of them.  But somehow in this season, maybe even because of the things that I’ve suffered most deeply, I feel like I’ve been given Life for the first time.  Years back I went through a season of wanting, quite badly, to be dead, but the thought of death now makes me panic, I want to live so badly.  I want to live this Life I’ve been given.  I want the chance to watch it grow old.  I want the chance to feel with intensity its joys and its challenges and its pains.  I feel just that happy to be alive.

Well, goodnight, dear friends.  Enough this and that for one night.

Happy New Year, everyone!  Here’s hoping this is your best one yet!

In true new-year fashion, I’m going to find some nature-y spot tomorrow to do some taking stock—to reflect and journal about who I am and who I want to be, what I’ve done and what I’d like to do (or do more of).  I realized as I walked this morning that in a number of ways I’ve been gearing up for this activity all week.

The enjoyable part of the gearing-up began when I cashed-in on a gift certificate my sister gave me for scrapbooking supplies.  I’ve never been much of a scrapbooker, but now that I have a baby, I have all kinds of pictures I want to be able to enjoy.  So I’ve begun a baby album, and must say I’m having a hoot!  I love the whole process of looking closely at chaos and trying to find order in it all.  In this case the chaos is a pile of pictures, but for the very same reason, I write.  When I’m done with an essay or a chapter or a page full of pictures, I feel giddy.  Giddy, and somehow very clean.

While working on the album, and everything else I’ve done each day, I’ve noticed my eyesight being worse than usual.  How does this happen?  The glasses I’ve only needed for distances are getting a lot more important for all the other lengths, too.  I realized on my walk this morning that all this blurriness makes me pay less attention to the world beyond myself.  I get lost in my thoughts.

So I’ll say how all of that is a gear-up for reflection after I explain the hugely un-fun part of the process.  Mites.  Yes, you heard me right.  Mites.  They have infested my apartment and have chosen me as their queen.  Or, dinner, I should say.  They don’t like the baby, and they don’t like N, and apparently, according to the dermatologist I finally saw this week, their normal fare of rats (!) has completely jumped ship.  The cheapest way to get rid of them, doc says, is to get some rats to come live in our crawl space again.  Any takers?

I have had an absolutely miserable week on this front, covered from head to toe in extremely itchy bites.  The perpetrators are so small I can’t see them to figure out where they’re coming from.  All I’ve been able to do is join N in doing tons of laundry in hot water, disinfecting all the window sills and floorboards, putting double-sided tape all around our bedposts (to keep them from crawling onto the bed), and vacuuming like there’s no tomorrow.  I would put a picture of any section of my skin on here to prove that it really has been that bad, but I don’t want to offend anyone.  At least not by that means.

So anyway.  Here I’ve been bodily experiencing the need for refocused sight, the zing of discovering and/or making order out of chaos, and the dramatic impulse to be rid not only of rats (…skeletons in the closet), but of the tenacious, voracious annoyances that feed on them—all of that while moving daily toward experiencing the same things in a mind and soul way when I do my session of reflection.  Talk about holistic new-year work!

2005 was an amazing year for me—I think my best ever, so far as doing things I love to do and living more comfortably in my skin—and I’m eager to continue its trajectory with a mindful sense of where I’ve been, where I am, and where I think I’d like to be.  I’m even considering a Mondo Beyondo list!  Yeehaw!!!