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| July 2007 The staggering heat is here but so is the overflowing beauty blossoming my little uncontained container garden: Roses, verbena, kangaroo paws, pansies, day lilies, agapanthus, nasturtiums, lavender, sage, Shasta daisies, chards, Russian and black kale, bok choy, arrugula, dill, oregano, basil, cilantro, cherry and beefsteak tomatoes and strawberries. Pinks, reds, lavenders, purples, yellows, oranges, blues and greens of every shade flaunt themselves just outside my French doors. The wild meadow beyond is carpeted in tiny pale pink morning glory with scatterings of Mexican primrose and random spikes of bachelor button that are just beginning to bloom. A brilliant yellow and black Oriole hung acrobatically upside down from one of the perches on my hummingbird feeder the other morning. The level in the dish was too low for his beak to reach through the regular drinking ports, so he was running his beak along the seam between the dish and its cover searching for leaking drips of sugar water. I went that same day and bought a so-called proper Oriole feeder to celebrate this newcomer's arrival in my meadow. Well, the ants love it and proceed to drown themselves in it in droves, like lemmings rushing to the sea. The Oriole and his consort continue to prefer drinking from the hummingbird feeder (that has an ant trapping little moat in it). So, now I make sure to keep it full enough for their beaks to reach the liquid. A good part of each of my days is spent watering, dead-heading the flowering bushes, harvesting and washing veggies, filling feeders, sweeping up the seed scattered by the exuberantly feeding bird population, filling the sugar water feeders and of late, tending to the messes made around her litter box by my aging and now ailing kitty. Some days it all feels like a lot, like I'd be grateful to have a silent clone of myself around to share the chores involved in tending-the-temple. Other days, it's all simply the gentle, sweet flow of my small, slow lane existence. I cannot imagine how I could ever manage living an ordinary work life of 40 hours a week on top of all this everyday maintenance and the ministrations of my on-going self-care. I feel so blessed that I can live the way that I do and so full of gratitude for these blessings. The past two months since last I wrote have been an intense mix of joy, excitement and sadness and grief. Today I've been sobbing and wailing on and off for hours as I face the reality that my precious kitty companion of over 16 years is probably not long for this world. Ms. Pretty has been having health problems for the first time in her long life. Kidney, bladder and thyroid issues that probably had been brewing for some time began making their presence known in the past three months. The medications we tried made her so nauseated that she all but stopped eating. I've taken her off the meds I'd been ambivalent about in the first place. Now, I daily try enticing her with people food-grilled chicken or poached salmon, baby food chicken and turkey, the water from cans of human tuna, free range organic chicken broth. All of this along with dry food and occasional bits of canned wet food that I offer to her, by hand or spoon, several times a day in miniscule portions. Despite the weight loss and incessant drinking and peeing (mostly with blood from what they presume to be bladder stones) she's seems pain-free and happy enough doing her ordinary life napping and grooming herself in her favorite spots around the patio, garden and house. She loves the Reiki treatments I give her several times a day and actually comes to nudge me to do them. We cuddle a lot and I begin to prepare myself for her leaving while hoping that she can, without suffering or pain, stay a while longer. She's been such a dear and wonderful companion for so long, my closest four-legged friend ever. I promise her that I will help her leave when she lets me know it's her time. My heart is heavy and sad as I watch her fade away to a tiny, bony version of her former petite but robust self. Some moments I'm just with her here and now, others I imagine life without her and I cry and cry. Yesterday she seemed much weaker and refused all but water and tuna water. She sat for longer and longer times when she squatted to pee (though she gave no sign of being in pain). Yet, during two of the Reiki treatments she leaked bloody urine. With tears dripping I wrote up elaborately detailed new food and litter instructions for her Auntie Evelyn who's due to come by three times each day for the eight days I will be gone starting next Thursday. It's my dad's 91st birthday and then I'm going to be with my godson's wife for part of the next to last week of her very challenged pregnancy while he's in Spain for work. I feel so torn about having a trip come at this moment in Ms. Pretty's decline yet I can't find it in my heart to not make this particular trip. When I went for a walk after finishing the notes for Evelyn, as I was praying and asking Ms Pretty to either die before I left or else wait for my return, it occurred to me that perhaps I ought to euthanize her before I go. My greatest fear is that she'll pass a stone and wind up with an excruciatingly painful urethra blockage in between Evelyn's three visits; that's she'll suffer alone waiting a long while for help or release. I know this could happen if I were staying home, too-unless I didn't leave her side for a minute. I sobbed so hard I could barely breathe yet it seemed to be a right feeling if anguishing decision. Between times of lying by her side and doing cuddles or Reiki, I worked to clear the leftover frost-killed branches and debris from a beautiful wild corner of the property under an old pepper tree. I watered the ground to soften it so that I would be able, today, to dig a grave for her. Soooo sad, aching with grief, wailing my sorrow. I woke this morning to find her perkier than she's been in days and actually asking for food (albeit only a tiny portion). It felt like a definite “not yet” message from her. I was relieved but confused about whether or not it might become right time before I have to leave. In between our Reiki and cuddle times, I went back to the wild corner and dug a grave and planted a lavender bush nearby. Then, I drove out to the orange grove we used to live in to gather rocks to build a cairn over the grave when I bury her. More sobbing and tears and running nose. She is so peaceful and loving, her little motor running in her very discreet purr all the while. Talking to me with her dear little voice. How can I take these days from her? Can I let her choose her own time to die or trust that she'll let me know if it's time to help her leave? I don't know. I can only keep doing this moment-by-moment, praying for guidance, hoping I can be here for her passing, hoping I 'm not making her stay longer than is right for her. Evelyn and the vet are prepared to release her if she winds up in pain or incapacitated. The vet can keep her body until I return for it. I've lined all her favorite roosts in the house with thicknesses of toweling. I spend as much time with or around her as I can. And I sob and weep and feel incredibly sad as I anticipate life without my precious little pal who's so much a part of my everyday world. It's so hard to know what's right for her. So scary to risk her having pain yet so not right to euthanize her when she still seems at peace with her life. Sigh. * * * * * * It's yet another morning and she's still alert, willing to eat a little bit of baby food and a few crumbs of dry food before she wanders out to her early-in-the-day post in the garden and our first Reiki session of the day. Still no pain, so we continue to have another day together. I think about the fact that both of my other long-term kitties died in their eighth year just as each of my two long-term relationships were ending and new chapters of my life were opening. Ms. Pretty is getting ready to die just as a whole new season of my life may be beginning, though this time it's not connected with the ending of a long-term romantic relationship. Instead, it coincides with the dissolution of my relationship with the sweet woman who's ostensibly been my agent for the past two years. Two years ago I'd gathered the pieces of the website together into a manuscript, wrote an introduction for it and sent it off to an agent who, ten years before, had offered to represent me. After a few months she wrote to say that as a reader she'd loved it as much as she's loved the Rememberings and Celebrations Cards through the almost twelve years that she's been using them. As an agent, however, she was stymied about how to sell the manuscript in the current market. She asked if I had room to give her time to see if she might eventually come up with a “hook” to use with publishers. I had and she did. Over several more months there were many rewrites of the introduction as I tried both to tailor it to her provisional title and to incorporate her ideas. By June a year later, we had an introduction that worked for her. By August we had the last of the endorsements (blurbs) I'd been gathering for the book. Despite occasional emails to check in about when she might begin the next stage of doing what she said would be a hand sell to 10 small presses, it wasn't until this January that she wrote to tell me the packets were being prepared to go out in mid-January. By March I knew they hadn't and probably weren't going to go out and she hadn't responded to my latest gentle queries about what the hold-up might be about in her world. Through all the endless months, I'd trusted that the Grandmothers had a hand in the timing of it all. I hadn't a clear idea of what kept the book falling to the bottom of the agent's queue and despite occasional inquiries, she was never able to tell me how it played out at her end. Sometimes I'd feel very disappointed by the slowness of her feedback about the iterations of the introduction. Sometimes I'd feel a little frustrated with the not knowing. Still, I never felt the need either to push for movement or to reclaim the manuscript and take it elsewhere. The impatience several of my friends felt with the agent notwithstanding, I was certain that I'd know if and when it was time to move on. When in early May I'd recovered from the ordeal of helping my parents move home from Florida to Maryland, I realized that I was definitely ready to move forward with my book. It was clear that this would likely mean leaving the agent. I wrote her a kind letter letting her know that I suspected that the project was (as she had so long ago considered) not one that was right for her after all. That I thought, too, that she (for reasons I could not guess at) had been for a long while unable to find a graceful way to free her self from it. It took several days for her to respond. As I waited, I felt the first real irritation with her I'd ever felt. Her letter, when it came, was poignant. It expressed her shame, guilt and distress that she had not been able to find the vision needed to sell the project even as she believed in its worth and wanted to be able to midwife it. She apologized for having so long been stuck and unable to acknowledge this openly. We had a caring interchange in which I told her how much I'd learned in the process of working with her, how grateful I was that she could release herself now that I was at last ready to begin working on the manuscript again and how much I hoped she'd forgive herself for having been stuck. In truth, her being stuck has given me the time I needed to get to my own next step. I've spent the past weeks since that exchange with her immersed in returning to, re-editing and reorganizing the manuscript. I came back to it with a new eye/ear because of the endless work at re-editing the introduction with both her feedback and that from my friend A. I've been trimming and tightening, getting rid of useless redundancies and many of what I now see (thank you, Ms. A.) as my verbal tics: the excessive proliferation of adjectives and the endless repetition of certain words and phrases. As I reorganized the sequence of things, I've integrated newly edited versions of the longer tales that had been relegated to appendices in the first version. I've pared the introduction back to its earlier form now that it no longer needs to fit with the agent's title. And, I have a new provisional title: Making Peace with Our Selves; Healing Tales for when it's Being Hard to Treat Ourselves with Loving Kindness. (A mouthful for sure but all that I could come up with at this time.) It's been an absorbing, exciting often-joyful process, all this reworking of the tales. Sometimes, as I've reread the stories I've felt heartbroken, sad for those earlier selves of me, for all that they suffered and struggled with for so many years. When I originally wrote the tales, I felt as though I were reliving the experiences described in them. This time, it was more as if I were outside looking in at them. The pain was of a different sort and was accompanied by amazement at the life I've been able to build for myself out of those painful ashes. I feel quite pleased with the book as it now stands, pleased with myself for the new level of commitment I brought to refining it in this round of editing. As I began this re-editing process, I sent to my friends a book-update email copying the whole interchange with the now former agent. My friend A, a well known, much sought after and much beloved writer and speaker of considerable note wrote back distressed by the agent's failure to do her job over such a long period of time. She'd decided, she said, to do the agent's job and get me connected with a publisher if she could. It was an astonishing offer since her name is an “open sesame” in the publishing world. In a creatively generating phone conversation she described her vision of a special boxed gathering of my mommying aids that she would have liked to have to use to introduce my work to the people with whom she might connect. Having her in my corner this way was an awesome blessing. The prospect of trying to manifest her excitedly generated fantasy vision of this box felt an equally awesome burden, a whole lot of work. I felt so cranky after I got off the phone: blessed and put upon all at once; knowing that anyone else would give their eye teeth for such an actively committed endorsement, feeling upset over being so upset by what was feeling like the price I had to pay for the blessing. I grumbled about the house for a couple of hours not sure if or how I could do this thing. Then I went to the Ojai art supply store for clay to make more Mommy-in-your-Pockets and Femiaries which I would need for my inventory no matter what I was to do about the box. While searching for the Sculpy clay in the overstuffed closet of a shop that is our Ojai Creates! art store, I stumbled upon a candy jar filled with sets of mini-felt marking pens. Grumbling I gathered a couple of them. With them in hand I found mini-spiral sketchbooks and took a couple of them. (Part of A's vision had included mini art pencils and art pads for the Little Ones to play with.) I still wasn't sure about the whole project, but Spirit was making its presence known. Long into that night and through the early part of the next day, I was in manufacturing mode. I made and baked 36 Mommies and 14 Femiaries, stitched over 40 velour pouches for them and for the Loving Care Kits as well as a dozen sage-stuffed hand-painted satin Mama Loves Me Pillows for the Care Kits. When I finished the assembly line production, I realized that I'd have to go to Ventura to a huge craft supply store to get the mini-teddy bears I'd need to complete the Care Kits. Still, I wasn't sure about making the box A envisioned. At Michael's (the craft superstore) I found a new and much better kind of teddy bear than I'd used in the past. As I wandered around the store I was drawn to an area where they have boxes of every conceivable description. Suddenly, I saw the Mommy Box! There were a great number of different sizes of this box with a watercolor painting of the back of a relaxed, graceful woman sitting in a beach chair in the sand looking off to the not-too-distant ocean: a mommy watching her just out-of-our-view children at the water's edge. It was an electrifying moment. I was hooked into sourcing energy. The Grandmothers were leading me around the store, deciding for me and helping me create the box for A's vision. Little Kraft paper boxes appeared for the Mommies, Femiaries and Care Kits; so did beautiful mulberry tissue paper to line the boxes, natural raffia to tie them, and little candle holders for votive candles that would be included. I was buzzed, soaring. Once home I began packing the little boxes and then filling the Mommy Boxes with the little boxes, sketch books, felt pens, a deck of the Rememberings Cards and a cassette of me reading the Cards. Everything fit just as if it had all been measured. There was room still for a CD I remembered that I had and could copy: a demo that Karen Drucker and her partner had recorded several years ago of four of the song/chants I'd learned while hiking in the canyons and had sung to my Little Ones. In a whirl of creative energy the next day I was drawn to the computer where the Welcome to Your Mommy Box Booklet flowed onto the screen; so did a CD cover for the Songs My Mother Couldn't Sing For Me, a new refined cassette cover for the reading of the Rememberings Cards and a cover for the Mommy Box Booklet. For the first time in an awfully long stretch, I was joyfully swept into spiraling in an intense creative vortex. When I went to the studio in town that does CD duplicating the next day, I discovered that he could transfer the cassette reading of the Cards onto CD via one of his computer programs. He and I created wonderful labels for the CDs and I was off to the copy shop printing and binding the Booklets, printing the little inserts for the Mommies, Femiaries and Care Kits as well as all the CD and cassette covers. I printed all of it on the same lovely lightly speckled cream colored recycled paper or card stock; everything in natural colors and all printed in the font of my own hand printing. By Tuesday I was set to mail one of the four Mommy Boxes to A while leaving the other three on my altars. Alas, my CD guy's computer was down, he was waiting for a tech guy and he wouldn't have the last CDs until Wednesday. When I hung up from his call I realized that Wednesday would be two years to the day from when I'd originally mailed my first version of the manuscript to the agent. That seemed a magical omen. The next day when I mailed the Mommy Box off to A, there was a package slip in my mailbox at the post office. The package turned out to be the return of everything I'd sent to the agent that same day two years ago. Definitely a whoo-whoo moment. Ms. A emailed in a couple of days to let me know the Box was perfect. A few days later, she emailed a copy of a knock-your-socks-off amazing letter about me, my work, my writing and the Mommy Box, a letter that she was about to send to two contact people in the world of publishing. Two weeks later we heard back from the editorial director at what seems like a perfect house for the book. The woman had been at a convention for 10 days and apologized for her delay in getting back to A. She wrote saying how touched she was by A's letter and by her own time visiting my web site. She asked to see both the box and the manuscript. The box went out immediately, the manuscript she asked me to hold for her return from vacation on July 16th. She expects to have time to consider it in the third week of July. It's astonishing to have something so definite sounding after all the hurry up and go slow of the past two years. After I finished the rewrite, I went through and polished the presentation of the collection of supporting documents I had originally gathered for the agent: resume, lists of published writings and invited talks given, my artist's bio, a bio I give to people to use to introduce me, flyers for the series of free talks I give from time to time, web traffic reports and sample emails from web site readers through the seven years that the site's been up, a financial summary of the mail order business over it's 15 years of existence, copies of the mail-order catalog and the collection of a dozen note cards and the endorsement/blurbs I'd gotten for the book. vc I made folders for all these pieces and a directory for the folders. The whole of it presents with so much more grace than it had two years ago. I've been elated during the long process of refining all of it, exhilarated by the prospect of having it read by a potential publisher. Packing everything into a mailing box, I added my cover letter and saged the package before putting it on my South/Child's altar to rest and be blessed. (I'll put it in the mail as I leave town next Thursday.) And then, I sagged into the sadness of post-partum. Done with my part now, it would be back to waiting and wondering again. It was remarkable to have A so generously make this connection for me. But, now, because of all the waits and disappointments of the past two years it's hard to be enthusiastic about the possibilities until there's some concrete response from the editor. I know that the book is ready now to go out in the world, it just a question of how, where and when that will happen. My faith in the Grandmothers' investment in it and its timing is unshakable and my gratitude to A for being the doorway for Spirit is enormous. We'll see! There's been so much magic in the way all of it has been unfolding so far. Please keep a good thought for the project and even more, keep prayers for Ms. Pretty to go gently from this life. Thanks! To visit the Bulletin Board Archive Table of Contents Site Directory (for non-frames viewing)
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