Category Archives: Inspiration

German Healers Triptych (47)

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Last December I met three women in my quest for healing. I knew I wasn’t completely well, wasn’t thriving. I’d found Adrienne, but she only came to Palm Springs once a month. I had insurance now that paid for acupuncture, so I looked through the provider list and found Beatrice (Beatrice Moncrief, Garden of Wellness). She is warm and generous, and German. This was unexpected, but because that is the bulk of my own ancestry, it made sense. (When I was five I decided I was three-quarters German.) The first time I met her, she suggested I may want to give up eating grains. I was already gluten free and mostly vegan, so I balked. I was defensive and cranky at the thought of giving up anything else, but she was kind and patient. Now when I lie facedown during the restorative part of my treatment, I go somewhere deep and watery and return restored. She tells me I’m always happier when I leave, and I know it must be true. One day I want to be able to be less depleted when I get there. And Beatrice led me to Michale (Michale K. Cashe, Herbal Wellness Center). Like me, she is the daughter of a German immigrant. She is warm and assertive. She reminded me of Auntie Gardi’s daughter Luisa who is another strong German-American woman with a wonderful big laugh. Michale smiles like Luisa, too, so I liked her straight off. She does this very cool biofeedback test and a voice analysis that I was especially fond of. She is the reason I am doing the toning to heal my thyroid and my kidneys. And in December when Adrienne didn’t show up, I had a healing and laying on of stones with Gitte (Europa Gitte). She told me I have something in me that resists my efforts to change. I remember standing in the back of the store after the healing and asking about her accent. When she told me she was German, the pattern was hard to miss. “I seem to have a theme of German healers in my life right now,” I said. And I am grateful for each of them, and to the universe for bringing me this triptych of German women helping me along the way. So thank you, Beatrice, Michale and Gitte. Here’s to you. And here’s to thriving.

The Promise of Pretend Rain (46)

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Summer in Palm Springs requires a kind of stamina, I think. You discover ways to cope with the searing heat. Again and again you count the months remaining until it will be over. We are not quite there yet, and I haven’t given up hope for a stretch of cooler days still between us, but temperatures here are set to keep hugging 100 degrees for at least a few more days. Last summer we had thunderstorms, and I got excited at the thought that global warming might bring a monsoon season to our valley here. When I left town for my annual work retreat in June, I dragged all of my potted plants and trees into a clump and set an automatic sprinkler on them. When I got back, I left the odd little jungle in the corner of our courtyard garden. I liked looking at all that green in one place. Then one day when I was sitting on the patio something went awry with the water pressure, and instead of my 4-foot tall circle of water the sprinkler shot up twice that high. I closed my eyes, and the water hitting the umbrella sounded just like pouring rain. I could hear it pounding on the roof, hear it running off my neighbor’s trailer. When it was done, the wooden fence was soaked, and if I looked at only that one corner, that almost quarter of my courtyard, it was exactly as though the world had been drenched, made new by rainstorm. It felt incredible. In spite of the drought, I couldn’t resist letting it run another time or two before I reeled myself back in. I wanted that feeling again, had no idea we could manufacture it. It made me want to fill the courtyard with plants and drench them like that every day. It made me wish I could just keep letting the sprinkler run amock. And remembering this unintended luxury, I will tuck it away for a possible repeat this summer, one desperate day in July or August. Maybe just knowing it’s an option will ease that sense of desperation in the endless brutal heat.

Night Sky Delight (44)

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The eastern sky is washed in dark pink, our version of a sunset here, so near the San Jacintos. The clouds stretch north, too, as far as I can see on tiptoe. I am weeding the driveway, but I stop to look. There are two of the huge round kind I have only seen in these skies, big puffy smooshed almost-spirals that look like spaceships. The pink pales, and I go back to pulling weeds until the twilight plays tricks on my eyes. Later I remember I have left my shears sitting in the gravel. When I go back out to get them, I see the new crescent moon beside Venus in the west, a hands breadth above the mountains. I stand still, the dangling shears a weight pulling on my arm, my lips parted. They are surprising and bright above the darkening ridge. Back inside, I grab my laptop to do more work. I am carrying it to the living room when I have the impulse to look for them again. I bend my knees to peer out through the 4-inch slit of open window in my front door. They are still there, shining now through the silhouettes of the Palo Verde branches. I am like a little kid, scrunched down, nose pressed up against the screen. I stand there in the narrow hallway, giddy, computer clutched against my chest, watching the two of them for a long time, magic beings in the night sky.

Shortlisted (42)

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shows my name and story titles from the Fish shortlist

I make a point of entering my work in writing contests. I’ve been doing it for about four years now. One of my pieces won a small local contest, and most of them have now been finalists here and there. Each time, it heartens me, makes me hopeful. At first I entered almost every contest I came across. Over the years I have narrowed things down some. I tend to not enter the very expensive ones, for instance. And I try to re-enter the ones where people have liked my work in the past. Some contests seem more far fetched than others, but for some reason they appeal to me, so I keep entering them. Fish is one I’d put in that category. I think maybe once a good bit of time ago one of my pieces made it to their longlist, but I don’t remember the details. I don’t remember feeling encouraged by that. (I think it was a very long longlist.) The other day when I was looking over something contest-related, I wondered if I should stop submitting to them. After searching through their lists for my name so many times and not finding it, I was discouraged. And they always had a gazillion entries. I think without admitting it to myself I was wondering if the competition was too stiff, if maybe my work wasn’t good enough. Yesterday when I got their email announcing the winners of their 2014/15 Fish Short Story Prize, I started scrolling through their shortlist with zero expectations of finding my name. (They present the lists in alphabetical order by the writers’ first names.) But I got to the Rs, and there I was–not only listed, but listed twice. Both of the short stories I entered made the shortlist. Out of 1575 submissions, my two pieces were among 103 that were shortlisted. I can’t believe they both made it there. It still makes me grin, remembering what a sweet surprise it was to see my name and the two titles. I just wanted to let you know, my faithful readers. I am feeling encouraged now. And grateful, too. If Fish has shortlisted them, then who knows what might happen next.

As the World Turns (41)

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yellow palo verde blossoms and buds

The mockingbirds seem to be celebrating the equinox today, marking this turning of the world. I have heard them singing day and night, more of them than I can ever remember. So, I think they must be heralding in this changing time. Yesterday I walked beside the creek bed with Audrey and Bear. I left them near the bridge and walked back along the path in the late dusk. The big frog choir starting up held all my attention, unconscious of my head cocked toward them as I walked. And I could hear a large gathering of birds beginning to roost in big bushy trees on the other side of the wash, their high-pitched calls coming across to me in waves as they settled in for the night. But when I left the path, it was the mockingbird songs that followed me home through the neighborhoods. They sang from the fan palm to the east, the telephone pole behind me. And when I was almost home a mockingbird was singing across the street in the tree whose name I do not know but whose smell takes me back to childhood. I felt the warm silky air against my calves, my face. This would be summer weather, I thought, almost anywhere else in the world. But here we have a chorus line of deep-voiced frogs and spiky ocotillos blooming red and the bursting of yellow Palo Verde blossoms everywhere you look. We have warm night air and mockingbirds singing their hearts out in the almost dark. Here we are in the throes of late, late spring. Happy vernal equinox. Happy solar new year, everyone.

Adrienne (39)

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In more recent months, I stumbled upon a healer who practices the laying on of stones combined with her own version of energy. She names it quantum healing. It was the same experience I had with Lisa, the angel intuitive. I remember standing in the back room of the store, the art gallery where the healers often work, getting a feel for the three women working there that late September day. They were each working on someone, and again it was Adrienne’s energy that drew me. I chose her. And I was never sorry. It is a vulnerable act, an act of faith, to put yourself on the table in another’s hands. But I trusted her. She helped to bring me back from the last terrible summer months. She told me I had a chance to heal now at a deeper level, and being me, I felt like she was saying I should be doing something I wasn’t. She was patient with me, with my weird defensiveness. “Well, if you’re driving, and you get to an intersection in the road, it’s only then that you can turn left or right,” she said. “You can’t do it before you get there.” I believe it was my work with her that helped me find that full moon healing in December, the shedding of that old, heavy cloak. I went back to see her later that month, eager to hear what kind of progress she might see in me after having had that experience. But she was gone. And I know I have to trust the universe in this. I have to believe those three visits are what I was meant to have with her, and now they’re over. But I can’t help but wonder why. Could I not have kept Adrienne and Lisa a bit longer in my life, companions on this journey? Is it selfish of me to wish I could be buoyed longer than these brief bits of time? I can’t help but ask, is it something in me that makes this happen, that makes them go away? And the thought that comes is this. Maybe it is only to prevent me from becoming too dependent on them. Maybe it is the universe telling me to trust myself.

Lisa (38)

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A couple of years ago I happened upon a woman doing readings at our local “new age” store. I looked around the room, and she was the one who drew me. She was an angel intuitive. I’m not sure I’d ever heard that expression before. But what she had to tell me was simple and direct. I don’t remember most of it now. I know she talked about my writing, my book. But there was no moment when I felt as though she was just telling me things she said to everyone. It all felt personal and accurate, a validation of things I felt or knew already, as the best readings tend to be for me. When the information resonates inside me, that’s when it carries weight. I was delighted to have “found” her, to know I now had someone I could go to like this. And she even taught a class about angels. I was all ready to attend. But I called the next week, and she was gone. Her husband had died, and she never came back. I still think about her, hope she was able to be as kind to herself during that hard time as she was to me the day we met. I hope her angels and her human companions saw her through it, and she has come out on the other side. And if I am honest, I have not given up hope that one day she’ll come back, and I can sit across from her again, feel her deep sweetness, hear the news she has to bring over for me from that other realm. But all selfishness aside, may she be well loved, happy, thriving. Vayas con diosa, Lisa. Que te vayas bien.