News

Hi.

I'm very excited tonight because I spent the morning working with John Warner who knows a LOT about making movies. He took my files of still shots and little videos and we put them together and now I have a video. It still needs some work to make it as perfect as he and I want, but I think it's going to be very good. Yay!

I'll be speaking in Washington soon and it will be the finale of my speech. I'm the closing speaker so that's pretty cool. This little video will mark the end of the conference. I spoke in February and had a fat two minute on the program. Now I get to be the closing speaker. Whee! (And it's especially nice to know that those little videos I took all during the ride will turn into a pretty good little movie. As I was writing the storyboard last night I was stumped for a time, faced with the blank page it seemed overwhelming. But I knew a few things and started there and then I added a few more things that I knew and pasted bits in here and there and filled in and now, today, I have an almost finished video.

Suh-WEET!

Got some other news for you too:

Tomorrow night on WCQS, 88.1 I will be David Hurand's guest on his radio program "Evening Rounds" talking about the ride and ovarian cancer and early detection. This was something that I imagined doing before the ride even happened, so it feels good to know it's actually going to come true. If you don't live here, I think you can do the streaming feed and listen to it. 6 pm Asheville time.

In a couple of weeks I will be the guest DJ on Laura Blackley's program "Local Color" which is broadcast on Friday nights from 8 - 10 pm. I'm not sure of the date on that one yet, but I'll keep you posted.

And I would love to have you join me in a fun fundraising bike ride in Washington, DC on the Sunday of the July 4th weekend. July 5th is the date, to be precise. We'll ride about 30 miles from Silver Spring. I'll get back to you with the details, but do come ride, say hello, and get a chance to ride off some of that post firecracker lethargy. I'll be in the area for the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance's national conference, speaking on Wednesday the 8th.

And, in other news, do stop in to my shop. Things are bustling with really delicious local food and fun things to eat and drink. We're serving breakfast 6 days a week, not to mention all kinds of other great foods for other times of the day. I'll be cooking at the tailgate market in July, the north Asheville one. I'll keep you posted.

Anyway - just wanted to let you know about a couple of things. Good stuff. Good stuff. Oh, and I have two meetings this week to talk about making all of this into some published project. I am wide open to their thoughts. For now, as I said, right here is just fine.

Back on the bike

I rode again today. Funny, now just plain RIDING merits a note here.

I joined a sanctioned ride today and had a nice time, feeling pretty strong, almost back to my normal place. I forget that I have written so much here and, even if I don't forget, I forget that there are people reading my words. Today on the ride a number of people asked how my back was doing and how my re-entry was coming along. It comes as a surprise, always, to hear these questions.

"Fine," I say.

"Better, thanks."

And, perhaps because I've been pretty open about all of this, the conversations quickly go below the surface.

"I was a bit worried about how you would be when you came home," a friend said today. "I mean, what a huge transition. To go away. To be so different. To come home and have everything the same. Especially when you feel so different. Sometimes you just have to go away to another place and just start all over."

Hmmm. That one caught me off guard. Most of these comments do. I don't feel guarded right now. Frankly, it'd be better if I was ABLE to be more guarded, I think. I don't hold much under. It bubbles out and there I am, pouring out again. And again.

I've been thinking about many things. Meditation. Being present. Silencing the inner critic. Grasping at bits of help wherever I see or hear it. Things are sticking and today I am feeling like I've climbed up a half a flight of stairs out of the dark basement. It's good.

I came home and started coming up with a storyboard for the video I am putting together. But GOSH that's hard to do. I'm much better with a slate that is not completely blank. This slate was BLANK. But now, many hours after starting, I am ready to go meet my friend who is the editor. I am excited. I think I have a story, flow, emotion, things that will captivate a variety of audiences. I'm also exhausted by it all, but in a good way.

This is going to be a good series of days. Friends for dinner. A bike ride. Work things. Two meetings with people to talk about writing. A dinner at work with some of our farmers. And getting to hear Anna Quindlen speak. Wow! Good stuff. A full, good time.

For now -
g'night. I'll post the video when I finish it.

Love,
Laurey

Home and work

I guess that it is only fair, if I am going to go on and on about not feeling centered and not feeling grounded and not feeling good, that when I DO feel movement toward the center and toward the ground and toward feeling good, I need to say so.

I'm saying so.

After crashing yesterday, letting fear take over, letting emotion run me, I felt in a better place today. There is no denying that things feel strained. Anyone with a radio or tv can hear the pounding bad news. It is really hard to stay up above all that. It is really hard to feel positive and optimistic when every single damn news story is heavy and dark and awful. I usually turn the thing off when it comes to all that. On the ride I was the one who came into the breakfast room and immediately turned the tv off. When I didn't everyone would come into the room and stop talking. Any hope of interaction was squelched by the gloom and doom.

Like the reference I made to being drawn to a car accident, I have been unable to resist glancing at the headlines or squeaking in a snip of the radio's disastrous news. It is insidious and takes a toll on me.

So today, after long conversations with friends, sisters, the people I most care for, I managed to grab hold and stop the slide. I hope. On the advice of Annie, sweet girl, sweet inspiration, I thought about good things, wrote them down, folded up the paper, and have carried it with me all day in my back pocket. She just sent me a box of postcards to send out and I wrote the reminders on one, the one of me holding my bike over my head at the Atlantic Ocean. Doing that made me feel better.

Tomorrow I cook dinner for a small group who are celebrating the 40th anniversary of two men's union. They never got married, wear no rings, never celebrated in front of other people. Tomorrow they will do that. The rings are ready. Simple words to each other have been written. A small group will gather to celebrate them and this life that has been shared for 40 years.

Many of their friends are no longer alive. Many of MY friends are no longer alive, victims of AIDS, unlucky enough to have gotten really sick just before the drug cocktails were developed. My best friend is no longer alive. He missed it all by a couple of years.

I look forward to being a part of their celebration tomorrow. I am the cook. And I'm excited.

Annie pointed out that I get to be a part of people's joy. She's right. We bring food to many occasions. Last week we were part of two funerals. This week, two more. For one we had a big banner made. And balloons will be delivered too. It'll be a party. And my dear friend Ken called to ask me to cook for his daughter's bat mitzvah in Ann Arbor in December. An occasion. A time of joy.

"Sure thing," I said.

I rode today. I have new tires and they worked just fine. Then I came home and took my pup for a walk. And then worked on my video for the ovarian cancer conference. More videos are in the works. A bike ride/fundraiser in Washington, a big day of the celebration of miracles at Jubilee, my spiritual community, will happen in August.

Yes, I'm almost home. The fog seems less oppressive today.

Thich Nhat Hahn said, "Breathing in I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile."

If you live in the Washington, DC area, do plan to come ride with me on July 5th. I'll let you know more about it as the time nears.

Thanks for joining me in this journey.

In the bees

I smell like smoke right now. Smoke from my bee smoker. There will probably come a time when I don't use it, but right now it is a bit of a safety net for me. The ritual of lighting it, puffing the bellows, waiting for the paper to catch, waiting for the fuel to catch, and puffing the bellows again settles ME down before I head up the hill to the bees. They say that the smoke calms the bees down, or, shall I say, makes them run for cover. Thinking about them running for cover makes me know that there will come a time when I don't use the smoke. But right now I do.

Last year I was a nervous wreck about the bees. I was not sure if I was doing anything right. And I made the mistake of having three or four people I was asking advice from. The joke is that if you ask four beekeepers a question you'll get seven answers. It made me wild, balancing the discomfort and uncertainty.

I lost my bees this last year. Maybe it got too cold or maybe there was not enough food or maybe the colony was not big enough or maybe something else happened. I don't know. But while I was on the bike ride a local beekeeper brought new bees to my hives and they seem to be doing well.

At this time of year it is essential to make sure they have enough room to expand. If you don't give them enough room, they will swarm and leave and that's all well and good if your intention is to send bees out into the world. But if, like me, you want to have a strong hive right here, one that makes honey enough to keep the colony alive through the winter, well, you don't want them flying off in a not-enough-room swarm.

Today I looked to see how they were doing and to see if I needed to add another super to either hive. The hive on the left already has a shallow super stacked on top of the two hive bodies. The one on the right is not far enough along to need that super yet. And after looking I decided that they are okay for now. I'll check back in a week or so.

After I looked in the hives I sat in the rickety chair I keep up there and just watched. It's a magical, mysterious, miracle to get to sit that close to wild beings, watching them fly in and out, filled with pollen on their legs and with so much nectar that they sometimes miss the landing board and fall to the ground. We're in the middle of a good strong honey flow and the bees are very busy.

I am finding that belief comes slowly. Belief that this shall pass, that this path I am on is the path, not a detour or a dead end or anything other than exactly where I am supposed to be. That's a hard one to absorb, feeling so wobbly and foggy. But this IS the path. This, this right here IS the Golden Thread and that is the truth. The Golden Thread is not always light and breezy and fun and easy. But this, this harder time is what you need to be IN, fully IN, in order to get to that other stuff.

I think. I don't know.
I might be right. Or I might not.

I do know that bee smoke smells good and bees sound good and look good and calm me down. One bee walked around in my hair and when I noticed the tickle I brushed it off, thinking it was a stick. It was a bee and it flew off. No stinging necessary.

That much is what I do know. It's not a whole lot. But it is a start. If they make enough honey this year I'll ask them to share it with you. The Golden Thread. Beautiful.

Mornings

It rained last night. As I drove home the sky split open with lightning, huge streaks of light that made the entire world pink. That was heat lightning, though, and nothing came of it, right then at least. Later, in the middle of the night, the rain arrived. Yesterday was hot and muggy and close and I feel relief from the rain.

These are more flowers. Lychnis, or Rose Campion. They are in full bloom right now, right outside my door. I took the screen off the other day. I never ever closed it, and it seemed like it was about time to just take it off. I feel a bit exposed now, which is funny, because really, truly, that screen was always open. But the other part about no screen is that I see a lot more out the kitchen door than I did before. I can sit in the kitchen and look out the door and see my whole yard, including this Lychnis.

I planted a small pot full a few years ago in the upper garden bed which is surrounded by a dry-stacked stone wall. Right now there are three distinct clumps of Lychnis, all full, all lush, all healthy. One, the most healthy, is growing heartily outside of the stone wall's limit. I did not plant anything on the outside of the stone wall but there it is. Growing strong.

Lately I have had to pay someone to mow my yard because if I don't, I get stung by yellowjackets and get a big reaction. I like mowing my lawn but have had to let it go. The Lychnis growing on the outside of the wall has not been mowed. I like thinking about the lawn mowing guy avoiding this patch of flowers that is clearly not where it belongs.

I feel like I am growing outside my own boundaries too. Some seeds fell on the other side of my wall and here I go. I'm not as big as the Lychnis yet but I am planted. The curious thing is not knowing where I'll grow. Or if I'll get trimmed or moved back or if a seed will get carried away by some bird or bee and I'll be in a completely different place. It's one more thing I don't know right now.

Faith

I look at these buds and think about faith. I've actually been thinking about faith a lot these days as I work through this re-entry stuff, which slams into me sometimes, knocking me flat.

There are times when I wonder if I'll ever feel better, if I'll ever just feel ho-hum, la-di-dah, rosy and light. My friend Jennifer, as I said, counsels living in the gap as a place that can be amusing. And Annie calls it "interesting." Ha. Amusing it is not. Interesting, perhaps, in a glimpse of clarity, perhaps, in a glimpse of, "this will pass" "this will go away" "you WILL get through this time." Mostly I do not feel interesting or amusing or anything other than slammed.

My friend Connie sent me some words from an author who, after rowing across the ocean, went through a time of deep introspection, a difficult re-entry. Today, talking to my friend the baker at the tailgate market, I heard about a friend of his who had an enormously difficult time after finishing hiking the Appalachian Trail. I keep thinking I'll wake up perky and chipper and I AM feeling better and more like myself, but there are times when I really do not.

So today, just now, I came home. I have to go back to work in a little bit to run a meeting, but I am home for a spell, a short bit. And there in my garden are these daisies. They are huge. A big fat bunch. Three times bigger than they were last season, or the season before, which is when I planted them. Right now that whole garden bed is green. Lush and lovely, to be sure, but all green. By next week it will be filled with color. White, in the case of these daisies, and pink for the Echinaceas. The Daylilies will pop out in orange. Who knows what else is in there. I plant things and then forget about them.

So when I planted them I didn't know what would happen. And now, here they are. Now here I am too. Seeds, plants, have been tucked in or shoved in, or, without my knowing it, snuck in. I do not know, right now, much of anything. But these plants remind me that something is growing, whether I can name it or not. And faith is trusting that.

So I shall try.

Things ARE happening. Just now more slowly. Now is the time to stop and let the revelations wash in, let the buds open - when they will.

Big deep breath.

Love,
Laurey

Living in the Gap

This bombed out house is in Tuscany. When I first saw it I fell head over heels nutso about it and felt like it was the answer to all my prayers. I wanted to buy it, fix it up, move into it. I tracked down the woman who owned it in Switzerland and went so far as to make plans to meet her. And then it all fell through, once I realized it was outrageously unrealistic. I keep the picture on my computer and look at it all the time. I still remember that first sighting. But I also know that when I went back and really looked, and saw that it was in the middle of a busy dirt road and that it had no privacy NOT TO MENTION the fact that it has no roof or walls or floor or, well, anything, it was not a smart thing to pursue.

Which has nothing to do with what I have been thinking lately, but I don't have many photographs on this computer at home so there you go, a cool picture and a little story, unrelated to the gist of my night's thinking.

Living in the Gap. This, as I understand it, is the place we find ourselves when our minds have moved on and our bodies are still in the place we were in before our minds moved. Clear?

I feel changed by this ride and by the experience of it. It was easy, it was enormously hard, it was fun, it was awful, I miss it dreadfully, I'm so glad it is done. All at once. Mostly, though, I feel that I am in a different place and I want to be doing different things AND YET I still am at work and I still have things to do, things I want to do and things I need to do. And, at the same time, I want to have moved ahead to be living this other, transformed life.

How to do both? Bridging this gap is not easy. I'm feel torn, crazy, frustrated, berserk sometimes, wanting to KNOW how it's all going to go. Wanting to BE different, to live differently, to have it all figured out. No such luck.

My friend Judy did this ride a few years ago and we talked yesterday about the challenge of coming home. She told me about her experience of homecoming and equated it with "pentimento" that painting technique whereby layers of old paint are removed, revealing a new painting underneath. Who KNEW it was there? And who knew, or knows, how to remove those layers?

I have been feeling tension in this gap place. It does not feel easy or even good. But my guide suggested I look at it with humor. And my girlfriend suggests I call it "interesting." Those are good suggestions.

For now, I carry on. Bridging the gap.
I'll say more when I can figure out more.

Good night.
Laurey