“Metamorphosis isn’t always pretty but it is always awesome and absolutely essential.” – Oprah Winfrey

A blogger I admire once wrote a post about her cupboards being bare.  I didn’t really understand her until this month.  My own cupboards have been incredibly bare for the past few weeks.  Writing of any kind has felt foreign and impossible.  My inbox is full and unanswered. My journal is gathering dust. I have neither read nor written a word since my last post. Just when I was getting to the point of re-vamping my blog and getting on with all kinds of exciting writing, ‘real life’ intruded rudely and I retreated.

I wonder how other people do it. How do you work full time, have a juicy marriage and family life, keep up with friends and have a creative life? I have begun to find simply the wanting of those things exhausting.

So when health and work slid, so did my writing.  For a long, long time.

But there is the delightful and – if I am honest – stressful thing about our creative wild souls:  they will not be silenced for long.  I finally sat down this week to finish the vision/ dream board that I started on my 37th birthday in October and felt myself relaxing deeply.  There I was.  Finally.

My vision for this year does not have anything on it that resembles the tense, dry, sick, sad soul who has been inhabiting my body for the last month.  No, that vision is rich and lush and wild and whimsical and strange and sacred. In fact, it is deeper and more connected than any of my boards in the past.  Just looking at it makes me excited for the year to come.

In the spirit of fallow times and cocooning, I am taking a short break from my blog. We are going on holiday until just before Christmas and then my live-in tech-guy will help me make a few changes to my site so that I am ready to greet you again just before the new year.  What will be here then will be as chock full o’ sacred, feminine, powerful wild writing as I can possibly get in. I promise.

I hope you’ll come back then.

In the meantime I wish you and yours a happy, healthy, delicious festive season.

Take care of you!

with love,

P.S. I am temporarily turning my comments off because I get so much comment spam, but I’d love to hear from you if you want to connect. Please contact me here.

“If there is one thing that the faithful people of all deep and ancient creeds believe… it is that faith has no timbre and no strength unless… unless one lives it out publicly.// This does not mean jabbering about it incessantly, but neither does it mean denying that one follows a wild and precious soul life – one that helps to keep the lanterns lit high enough to see by, during dark times in one’s own life and in the lives of others.” – Elena Avila, Woman Who Glows in the Dark

There are words that hold power over me.  When I read them – especially when they are together – I always stop and take a breath.  It’s like my soul and my spirit remember something from so long ago, my mind has forgotten.  It’s as if the memories aren’t actually mine, but part of a history I have inherited from generations long gone.

One of the first quotes I ever wrote down to taste again and again was a mix-up of an Audre Lorde quote: “For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises…Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.”

I remember feeling almost wicked just writing it down.  It felt dangerous.  I realise now that what I thought was danger was actually a deep connection between my truth and hers.  Since then I have connected through time and space with many writers.  You know the feeling: you read something that makes you gasp with recognition, and for one tiny moment you feel less alone.  It is those moments of true and sacred that keep me reading and writing and collecting quotes.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because I have been blogging for long enough to know one thing for sure: when you are writing, be brave.  When I am brave and blog what I am really truly thinking or feeling or longing for, I hear back from people who tell me that they connected to what wrote.  When I am afraid and hold back that deep truth out of fear of showing too much, I miss an opportunity to connect.  I miss the sacred.

The one thing that we can all do for each other is to keep our “lanterns lit high enough to see by.”  Lets show each other the way.

“…be confident enough to say, ‘This is what I believe in. This is what I like. This is my soul, exposed.” – Geraldine James Creative Walls

I am lucky enough to have a commute that consists of a 10 minute walk in the country.  Up until this week I always took the same route because I thought it was quicker.  Well, the crazy train threatened to stop at my station this week and I was desperate not to fall into old patterns of woe and angst so I decided to shake things up.  Four mornings ago I turned right instead of left and walked a different way through the woods.

On day one I noticed a lone deer standing underneath a tree.  I noticed, I whispered hello, but I kept on going: earphones in, walk determined, and focus clearly pointed ahead.  Heavy things were weighing on my mind and I was afraid to be late for work.

On day two as I turned down the last path through a bit of woods, I startled a deer. It ran across the path in front of me and away through the trees.  I looked up from the path and watched it go, and then hurried on to work.

Yesterday – the day before the crazy train was due to arrive – feeling a bit disconnected and nervous, I sat still in the morning and asked for some help to get through the next couple of days. Then I put a podcast on my ipod and walked to work.  I have no idea why, but for some reason about half way there, I stopped in my tracks. It was like I had been halted.  Looking up I realized that not 5 feet away from me stood two deer – a male and a female – standing and staring right back at me.  The next thing I heard was the voice on the ipod say, “NOW do I have your attention?” I laughed out loud, but the deer didn’t move.  They just stood there and watched me right back until I finally went on my way.

I was filled up with the knowledge that I was not alone and that everything was going to be okay – whatever happened.  Ted Andrews says that the original meaning of deer is ‘wild animal.’  He also says that: “When deer show up there is an opportunity to express gentle love that will open new doors to adventure for you.”  Crazy train averted.

Lessons, it seems, are repeated until you get them.

(I have no idea who took this picture. I have chased it through Pinterest to no avail, but if anyone knows who took it, please let me know and I will credit properly. UPDATE: The photograph is ‘Three Deer Glade” by Mark Simms. Winner of the UK Wildlife Photography Competition 2010. http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/photo/uk-wildlife-photography010.html)