Beautiful Green World

I've been letting the days slip away, enjoying the rain and the green, gearing up for the trip to Santa Fe. We leave tomorrow for 5 days. I'm looking forward to relaxing and exploring. The past week has had some nice peaks: India has recovered quickly from her surgery and has her smile back, Rob and the girls have nurtured a lovely mess of seedlings out on the back deck and we are continually charmed by a sinuous gray squirrel building a nest in the trees near our kitchen window (this morning s/he actually jumped onto the sill and peered curiously in at us buttering toast). I've been able to put in some good time at the studio, had a few epiphanies about future work and began a Jitterbug class. Rosemary Gladstar (the original she of Rosemary's Garden fame-our local center of herbal wisdom and purveyance-who now lives back east) contacted me again wanting to use Green Man (as well as Mother Tree and Full Moon Flower) for this year's International Herbal Symposium, since the latter was so well-received at the last conference. That feels really good. I've also gotten a few beautiful letters of appreciation which always gives me a boost. (They usually pop in "out of the blue" when I'm at a low ebb). I've been in gratitude mode for our lovely neighborhood, with it's endless array of tangled yards loaded with flowers (the roses especially are in full glory) and the first signs of "hay bales in the hood" as conceived by folks inspired by City Repair. (The idea is, wherever you spy a bale you know it is offered as public space and is an invitation to sit a spell, so...yesterday we rested on one set up quite nicely in a corner garden under an immense redwood). Most recently, we spent Earth Day hiking about Sugarloaf, enjoying the fat moss, swollen streams and thick grassy contours of a rain-saturated landscape. I'm more used to being out there when it is cicada-buzzing hot and sucked dry so that was a treat. All in all, pretty tame days but good. More news when I return from the Southwest!