I am just an East Coast girl living in a West-Coast-orientated world. Although I *do* dream of California canyons, I dream equally of coastal cottages, little mountain manors nestled deep in the hills with neighbors like Raven and Wolf, desert nights where the stars are so clearly seen without the pollution of light. And I am still a *girl* even though this girl’s aging parents and the other vagaries of life itself have expanded the bands of silver at my temples. I’m trying to deny my age, I guess, but I’m thirty-something without all the trappings of a typical thirty-something. My children are my fabulous furbomb kitties, Astrid and Sunny, and my life is my own, although the apartment isn’t.
I am always writing something in my head. I’m a media junkie, and also a thrift store junkie, and I have a thing for color so I guess that means I’m a color junkie too. I never leave the library without a minimum of five new books; seldom does a day go by where I don’t have a lightbulb moment with a creative idea; the idea usually isn’t as interesting the following day, and hence I start lots of things but only finish a select few. It is in the idea-generating that I am most alive, and so I wish I could make a career out of it! And I love creative challenges — online ones and otherwise. They are often the only thing that gets me to finish something, like when I met my 50,000 word goal for the first time doing NaNoWriMo in 2006. This seemingly small accomplishment has led to many, many more accomplishments over the years.
The bonus of getting older is being further and further removed from the “what’s cool” game. I am not afraid that my Last.fm profile will give away the fact that I listen to the first Tiffany album and copious amounts of the wonderful Dan Fogelberg alongside The Killers and Regina Spektor, or that my Netflix queue may be full of Waltons episodes co-mingling with the latest Wong Kar-wai movie. I read as many self-help books as I do fiction ones (often more) and I’m trying to find the Goddess within. That means I have rocks and crystals in my house, I sometimes wear feathers, and yes, I talk to the Moon. I also talk to St. Anthony, St. Jude, the Two Marys, and my groovy big brother Jesus, even as I pat the bellies of my house Buddhas and read Siddhartha. If I could live inside poetry, I would crawl into a collection of Rumi poems, or I would set up shop inside Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”, where the soft animal of my body would be free to love what it loves. And I’m not going to apologize for any of it, because I would never make you apologize for being you. In fact, I would celebrate you and me and the Sun and the Moon and the Stars and everything, each minute that we have, which is finite and therefore sacred.
