BY ALL ACCOUNTS...

... I should be writing today or getting my picture done for the back cover of Butterflies or editing the poems I started a week ago ....

but I'm not.

I'm in a mode of cleaning, lightening, throwing away, ridding myself of all the things I no longer need.
The Spirit of Change is upon me. I feel it's breath, it's pulse beating within my own. I hear it's whisper: we are getting ready.

Getting ready for me is a process. I've acted impulsively at other times in my life, thrown caution to the wind and the results were disastrous. The Creator has always had a wonderful sense of humor in my life. He protects me from my foolish Self. Honestly. The decisions I made in youth should have, by all accounts, cost me more than they did. Like my elder spirit, Alice Walker, it seemed that I felt better, or at least more alive, when I lived on the edge. The closer I was to the edge the more alive I felt. But now there are two lives depending on me --- and that is a good thing --- for who knows where I'd be right now were it not for them. And so care has to be brought into the process. Care.

So where I want to jump and do and go and be, I have to calm the escape beats of my heart and rest in the knowing that Spirit must lead the way. Any other way would be disastrous. For now, Spirit says we are getting ready. There is work to be done, finished, completed. There is much to be gotten rid of. There are commitments that must be fulfilled. I know, for now, that the novel is one of those commitments. It is a "here" thing. I finally see why I am here in this space. The novel is intricately tied to here both physically and metaphorically and I know that it must be done. The journey depends on the completion of here. This I know. And so the task at hand is to stay focused, to keep the dreams alive, to look and read and research all the while staying focused; to not act impulsively, unwisely. To wait for Spirit counsel; to remain open and not rule out anything; to be careful of the thoughts put out in the wind, in the air, in the consciousness.

I am cleaning today.

---A.