My grandmother is my heart.

My Love and I argued about nothing.  It was so about nothing that it infuriated me and I erupted.  My grandmother has been in the hospital in a serious condition and so the space I hold since has been tender and anxious.  My grandmother is my lineage.  I understand her and when I am with her I know I come from her heart and her life blood.  I know why I am touched so strongly by this world.  I know why the earth kingdom is my most precious treasure and why it has always been.  My grandmother is fire and beauty.  Skin of our powerful Sun and heart of Space, vast and ever present.  Last when I was with her I would just hold her hand throughout our hours and hours of meals.  Her hand, so warm and strong, with painted nails, always.  I have actually never seen her not in color and to me she is Color, the living of life tangibly and intangibly.

So this is where my night, 24 hours ago, began.  My uncle sending updates about my grandmother and me holding them in my heart, feeling my love for my grandmother so deeply and sorrowfully and appreciatively.  Back to my eruption.  I have been anxious since yesterday and am anxious now below everything.  Life is precious as my grandmother is reminding me and has told me many times.  I don't want to waste my life on nothing arguments.  I want to be love.  I want to be completely offering love all of the time.  I am serious, all of the time.  I am going to do this and it is beginning now.  This is my work and not the work of another soul.

Presently, I am putting attention to my mind's workings.  Even for the little things that others do, that I seemingly do not find fanciful, I find understanding in their actions.  I am seeing myself in what others do.  It's worth the energy and I already see so much more empathy for others.  It feels good and I feel good.  What a relief!

I wrote this last week and now a week has passed and my grandmother has gone from the doctors thinking she had one more day to live, to her possibly living a complete life.  She is a strong woman.  After she came through the tunnel of darkness and came back out to the light, the doctors! even said she has the nature of body and mind of someone 20 years her youth and were startled by her rebound.  I am inspired and smiling, even if they say this to everyone! I'll take it.

May my grandmother continue to be stronger than she was before her physical system weakened and may all beings in need of better health and more breath be in peace and in love.  

To the preciousness of life.  

Right Here is Where it is At.

I have been contemplating what to write for my botanic medicine course.  I had wanted to focus on ceremony as I would like to be able to offer my friends, family, clients a source for ceremony.  We do not have much sacred ceremony in our culture, minus in religion, but often times many of us do not connect with these rituals.  Ceremony allows time to experience a process and to experience our sacred world.  To take time to do something carefully from beginning to end.  In that time we are able to consciously experience where our attention lies.  We are a part of the subject being explored.  And often in ceremony we participate with others and in that our need for connection is satiated.  Through ceremony we create tradition so that a community can form and feel supported by the seasonal expression annunciated.  These ideas have attracted me to the study of ceremony.

So I have begun researching, in particular herbs used globally for ceremony, specifically in the areas of birth and death.  Yet it has not felt right. I have not felt invested in the topic and I have only begun.  My traditional chinese medicine teacher has been extremely generous with his time, allowing me to blabber my brainstorms to him.  After many ramblings, I looked outside and realized I need to understand my home.  That is the person I am.  I like to have my hands touching leaves and branches, drawing images of what I am seeing and learning through this physical study, and then through text and historical reference.  My work (life) is tied into land.  I have wanted to step out of this ordinary connection and to open my mind to more cultures, but perhaps I am not ready.  Perhaps I need to see the magic in the ordinary before looking further out.  And so, I am going to study the land of my home:  good 'ol New England.  I'm not sure how wide my boundaries will go, if it will be all of New England, but I want to start with what I actually see and feel.  I want to draw my specimens, and create a book on my home medicine. And within this context, I hope to find ceremonial herbs as well.  

We have the capacity to fly anywhere in the world.
There is value in being worldly.
Often the moment I feel as though I can not do something, I want to do that something.
I have never been in one place as long as I have been here these past few years
and it has allowed me to feel deserving and needing of flying anywhere

Yet the richness of my present scape is extraordinary.  
How fortunate and grateful I am.  
The truly present world is always fresh and always shocking.
Thank you world. 
And I look forward to seeing you.


May all beings see this universe and all the moments and details that surprisingly exist






Whether you care to communicate with it or not, the magical strength and wisdom of reality are always there....By relaxing the mind, you can reconnect with that primordial, original ground, which is completely pure and simple. Out of that, through the medium of your perceptions, you can discover magic, drala. You actually can connect your own intrinsic wisdom with a sense of greater wisdom or vision beyond you.

You might think that something extraordinary will happen to you when you discover magic. Something extra-ordinary does happen. You simply find yourself in the realm of utter reality, complete and thorough reality.    

-CTR