Saturday and no Chaco for me

Light leaden skies above and melting snow below and all around in this 39-degree heat wave. The sun is out and sparking crystalline fire from the snow covered ground and it's quiet here as always.

My thoughts speed outward to Chaco Canyon where Bev and the kids are exploring the ancient Anasazi ritual site and to a friend who had surgery on Monday. My thoughts are also with the friends I shared with one who is now in a more peaceful state and my tears are for my loss and what the rest of the world has lost as well.

Death does not frighten me. It is another journey for me to take, an adventure to a place I have known before and yet will not know again until it is time for me to visit there again. Silence has been my friend but today it is seductive poison that tempts me to find solace in sleep and dreams, dreams that take on a strange and dangerous tone where I battle forces that consume those around me and threaten to consume me as well, but I know how to combat them and I gather those who are willing and teach them the skills they need to survive. How magic and Jane Austen and a world over 200 years in the past could come together is beyond me, but I know that the outward world changes the inward world, the world of hearts and minds and people, never really changes. The words used are different, but the thoughts are always the same -- to search for and find happiness. Sadness, destruction, emptiness -- they frighten me because they are the opposite of life. They are the black holes of the soul that drag us inexorably into the darkness and twist our hearts and minds.

I need more sun. I need to bathe in the ancient streams of hearts and minds united in the desire to be one with the universe and with each other, to find the guiding light of the Infinite, to be at peace and in the arms of one who cherishes me as I cherish them.

I need spring.