For the last year the water in my dreams has been steadily rising.  Even when the dreams have been rooted in the sands and surroundings of this desert home, they have been messages speaking of the water's arrival.  The rising of tides.  The dry riverbeds of the arroyos flooding.  In this nightly realm, even when the speech and messages have spoken to the absence of water, they have spoken about the events that will occur upon its arrival. 

What of the last five years of my inhabitance in this desert landscape has been or has served a purpose of "drying me out"?  An evaporation or hollowing, a burning away of what is no longer needed or necessary for me to carry.  Old ways of thinking like ancient aquifers that no longer reach to the places in need of irrigation, baking in the sun to dry and crumble and once again return to the earth.  What if I have been training on how to survive and thrive in conditions such as these?

As of late, the liquid landscape of the dreams has been increasing in intensity.  Their message growing in strength, and speaking of a quickening.  What if the magnificent Ocean Mother has been calling to me?  Letting me know of our meeting or perhaps more appropriately of our reunion?  When I made the journey to this arid land that has been my home for the past five years I thought then that I would root here for the remainder of my life.  I had been called here in dreams by the voices of those whose legacies and lives have been seeped into this ground.  This beautiful, rugged, wild and carved landscape has taught me much.  She opened her arms and embraced me, and then, as she held me tight, she began her tempering.  One lesson after another...parasitic infestations...the plummet of financial instability...near death by carbon monoxide poisoning...lessons on love and betrayal...a touch with bubonic plague...boulders falling from mesas and destroying my transportation...a swarm of locusts devouring the fruits of the garden...the list goes on and on...

I wrapped my arms around her neck and held on tight, praying that she would change her embrace.  I prayed that she would kiss me gently, whisper in my ear and speak to me of our love for one another.  There were moments of such tenderness.  Moments when she and I held hands and matched our footsteps to one another.  But as a lover she would not marry her hand to mine.  As is the case with lovers who sometimes magically enter our lives, the passion and the desire for union was intense, beautiful, epic - they teach us much.  They hold a mirror of reflection up and we are blessed to see more clearly our own faces.  She has done this for me.  She has revealed pieces of my landscape that I had yet to know, that I could not see, that I refused to look at.

As the marking of time passed and the events and happenings of the previous year drew to a close, an unexpected man entered my life.  He arrived in this desert land with the whisper of the Ocean.  The smell of her wind and body carried magically and embedded in his skin, being, words and way of existence.  Recently I have found myself wondering if she had sent him to carry me in his arms to her.  The cargo is being prepared.  The route is being mapped and the sailing crew is almost assembled.  The voyage from this land of sand and sun will set sail on August 20th, making a voyage that will lead to the waters.

Mother, I am coming home to sit upon your shores and fulfill the promise that we spoke of in the watery realm of the dreams.

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The world of my dreams drips - rich in images, symbols and swirling paint. 

Many years ago I began to think of the dream world as a reality that formed or was in parallel with that of the waking world.  Dream visions and symbols began to pass through my being, the paintbrush in my hands, and onto the canvas that I painted.  In reverse, the same occurrence was also true.  Paintings that waited unfinished on the easel slipped into my dreams where the next layer of their becoming was revealed through symbols, events and other dream realm beings and participants.  This has remained an ongoing reality.

My dreams are the voices of ancient and unborn storytellers.  These storytellers read life back to me, reveal messages of what has yet come to pass and weave the thread of my life's story with images, symbols, colors, sounds and otherworldly happenings.  When the dreams sound their calling I have learned to listen.  When the dreams do not speak, their silence is deafening,  My body is the borderland where the worlds of dream and waking meet. 

It has been almost 20 years since I had the dream that was the impetus and inspiration for the painting that bares the title "Turquoise Soul" .  When I awoke to find myself in this particularly dreamscape I had not yet laid eyes upon this land and earth which would become my home.  It would be another eleven years before this waking world would move in tandem to the messages the dream had conveyed.  It would be fifteen years until the borderlands of my body would bring these two realities together and join them in paint, turquoise, beads, feathers, copper wire and the soil of this land.  But before I picked up the paintbrush and swirled the image of the dream into being, the experience of waking and walking in the dream world on that particular night was written in the pages of my journal...

 The dreams have once again begun sounding their calling.  Fresh paint is drying on the canvas in the studio.  The storytellers are turning the pages of time.  There is a new chapter which has been carved into the stones of memory.   I am walking between the worlds of what has been and what is yet to come.  

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It begins by  closing my eyes and allowing myself to  wander through the hallways of collected memories.  The hallways in this interior world of recall  are a dreamlike and misty place.  A place where doorways open into pockets of times passed.  When these pockets of time first formed, when they first occurred in their present moment, there was no way of knowing that they would form rooms and doorways constructed of their images, sounds and smells.  In their inception, there was no way of knowing that they would live beyond the doorways that appear in the hallways of my memories.  When I lower the windows that cover my eyes, I am searching for where you live inside of me.  I am searching for those pockets of time that have been etched into my soul, the place where your memory will always live and continues to move through me and my footsteps.

There is a place housed within my body and in close proximity to my heart that always begins to tremble and shake when I know I am moving in these hallways and I am approaching  where you live.  I always know I am getting closer when I begin to  hear the echo of your laughter.  I never knew that part of what I would long for and hold so dear would be the sounds your life made.  Like a beautiful old vinyl record complete with the sounds of crackling and ambience created by time's passing.   The passing of your days and life have left a soundtrack. 

If I close my eyes and wander through the hallways  of my soul there is a door which opens upon a scene from my early childhood.  Did you know?  Did you know that when you would disappear into your bedroom and I heard the latches on the guitar case clicking and opening that some part of me began to dance and sing inside?  Did you know that when I would place myself on the floor at your feet and I would stare up at you, watching and listening to you play your guitar and sing?  In those moments I was a girl, a daughter at peace.  I did not have words then for what I now understand.  From my spot on the floor I would look up and wonder how the fingers on your hands could work.  How hands that had been marked by a life of hard work, holding tools, stained by years of  grease, carved in cuts and old wounds made by the engines and parts of thousands of cars could begin to move and allow for that sound to wash over me.  That thought would fade as I watched your fingers press down and glide over the strings and as the sound that you made with your hands and your voice changed your face.  I knew you to be happy then.  I knew some part of you opened and existed in connection to the clicking and unlatching of that guitar case.

If I close my eyes and wander through the hallways of my soul there is a door from which the sounds of waters flow.  I still hear you in the movement of water.  The sound a fishing pole makes as it cuts through the air and lands upon the surface of a lake.  There is a connection between the image of your hands turning the steering wheel of a boat and the sound of the water parting in rhythm to the actions and choices of your hands.  I can still see you standing at the window looking out over the lake.  Your stillness and silence was a conversation with that body of water that was in so many ways your home.  For me, you and your memory will always be tied to the song of the water.  The sound of your laughter will always bounce upon ripples and waves.

As time passed and you and I both grew older the sounds that marked your place in my world began to change.  The last time I made the journey home did you know?  Did you know I was watching and listening to you?  I watched you as you put your sandals on over your socks - no longer comfortable walking on bare feet whose bones had contorted with the passing of time, age, and a life lived.  In the early morning hours I listened from my bed when you were being so careful not to wake me.  I listened and memorized the shuffling cadence of your sandal covered steps.  Tears would slip from my eyes.  I knew then that I would not have the chance to hear you pad past my door again.  If I close me eyes and wander through the hallways of my soul there is a door from which I can hear you softly humming and singing a song as the sound of your sandals shuffling past can still be heard.

You never had the chance to meet in person the man whom I would come to call my husband.  The two of you would only pass each other in this world for a short time.  Held within that time was a shining moment.  On the day that he asked you for permission to take my hand, your daughter's hand, you spoke to him of wild horses.   You spoke about how you can tame a wild horse but how you cannot ever keep it down.  I wept after that phone call.  Until that moment I never knew you understood this about me.  I never knew that you saw and understood me to be as I knew myself to be.  If I close my eyes and wander through the hallways of my soul there is a door that opens upon a field where the sound of a wild horse's running hooves are connecting with the earth.  You are standing on the edges of this field and you are smiling and laughing.
 
If I close my eyes and wander through the hallways of my soul, there is a doorway that exists and through which I cannot clearly see.  It is the doorway of my passing.  The doorway which holds what will come to pass when I am no longer in or of this world.  I have thought about what lies beyond this doorway and I have often wondered if I will become part of the images and colors of this world when I am gone from here.  Will I become the painter of the sunrises or sunsets when I walk in the other world?  Perhaps I will become the colors themselves - the vibrant green of a newly spouted seed, the magnificent cerulean blue of the water's deep.  

The last time I heard the sound of your voice, the last time I spoke with you...it was not said....but we both knew...it was the last time.  In what was not being spoken, everything was being said.  The last words and sounds that I heard from you were, "Be good to each other.  I love you."  I have heard those words every day since the day you passed.   I hear you in the sound of the water's movement.  I listen for you in the whir of engine motors.  I hear your shuffle in the passing of sandal covered feet.  Your laughter lives in the jokes and stories told when family gathers together.  In your passing from this world, you have become part of the beautiful rhythms and harmonies of the song and soundtrack of mine.

But perhaps where you exist most for me is in the sound of the unlatching of the guitar case that I carried home and in the sound created as I press  my fingers down upon the strings.  I am once again a girl, your daughter and I am at peace.  This song is for you...

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As the old rocking chair continued making its grooved motion back and forth and I thought of all that had recently come to pass...how those tectonic plates of my foundation had shifted and come to rest in new and previously unknown locations I wondered.  I wondered, did I have it in me to rise one more time?  My life and story have kept time and space with ancient creatures and their multitude  of representations.  The Phoenix.  Dragons.  The Ouroboros.  The threads of their mysteries are woven throughout the images of my artistic and spiritual practices and the worlds in which I inhabit.  Like the ancient snake circling around to eat its own tail (tale), was I ready once more to let go of what needed to fall away and shed my skin?  Like the magnificence of the firebird, was I ready to step from the ashes of what had burned and what remained into a new form and spread my wings to fly?  Those who have known me or who have witnessed my story's unfolding have at times spoken about the colorful and seemingly dramatic rhythms of my life: the glorious rises, the plummeting falls, all the mysterious events that seem to move through the passage of my years. 

In my newly found willingness to share my stories and thoughts with the world beyond my own skin in a written form, I offer my deepest vulnerability.  Please allow me a moment for further explanation as to why it is important for me to say this out loud.  I am a painter.  As I mentioned in my last communication this identification and knowing, this act and process of painting, well...this is my terra firma...my solid ground.  I do not question it.  I never have.  Whether or not a painting sells, or whether or not I receive affirmation or acclaim for the act of painting or the corresponding result in many ways is inconsequential.  For me there is no choice.  I was born to hold a paintbrush.  I was born to swirl colors into formation and images.  It is as essential to my being as breathing,  I do not mean to say that I do not embrace or welcome the monetary benefit that could result from the engagement of painting.  Nor do I mean to convey that when a person witnesses or is moved by one of my paintings it is not appreciated or beneficial.  What I am saying is that if those factors ceased to exist you would still find me holding a paintbrush and mixing paint.

In this act, the process of painting, I am incapable of lying, withholding, or telling someone what they desire to hear or see.  Painting is my truth.  At times this truth is raw, beautiful, ugly, not easily understood (even by me), simple, complex...whatever it is...it is a piece of my internal landscape, my mystery, my magic, my soul, my story.  At times people have suggested that I paint images that are more easily understood or embraced  by a wider public.  These suggestions have come with the best of intentions and perhaps a desire for those who care about me to have the joy and experience of seeing a lifetime of work begin to "pay off".  I understand this logic and reasoning and yet I am incapable of doing so.  To do so would be a lie and a coercion of some core part of my existence.  I know for some this will sound dramatic, but it would be the beginning of the death of a part of my spirit. 

So why?  Why do I share this with you?  Why do I share with you this insight regarding my feelings and thoughts around what it means for me to bring an image onto the canvas?  Because the same promise and process exists within my commitment to sharing these written words.  The truth is I have been writing for years.  There are books upon books, pages upon pages of my thoughts.  I have been asked by numerous and various people to share them before but it has never felt right to do so...until now.  Perhaps it has always been too close to the bone. 

And so...back to that glorious old rocking chair.  Back to that moment when I rocked back and forth and I asked myself the question - Do I have it in me one more time to rise?  You see, as I rocked back and forth I honestly did not know.  This time it was different, everything seemed different.  The driving energetic force that had always propelled me forward had shifted along with those tectonic plates.  I kept rocking back and forth and a thought began to creep in.  What if...what if instead of shedding my skin and feeling as if I had to protect that oh so tender new and exposed skin, the skin I did not yet know...what if instead of rising from the ashes of what remained into a new form...what if I chose to step fully into the skin that had been being formed around my blood and bones?  What if I  began moving from the inside out?  Perhaps this seems easier for an outsider looking in to realize, but for me it was revolutionary.  In that moment, in the rocking of the old chair, I understood that I had to think about it differently.  This time I could not shed or rise.  This time I needed to step into and inhabit who I am becoming. 

The old rocking chair made the sound of of its bones creaking as I continued to move back and forth and I believe the friction of its' moving sparked a small and delicate flame.  That flame flickered and I was moved.  What if like a painting, this was an offering from my soul...what if I shared the experience of my inhabitance with you?  You who might be interested in what I might have to say.  In that moment I made a decision to fully inhabit my skin and a commitment that I would share what I had been previously unwilling to do so.

Here is my promise to you whose eyes are moving over the formation of these words - I will be honest and I will paint now not only with images but also with words the picture of my soul.  The same rules will apply...I will not make a portrait of myself that is easier for the masses to embrace or one that is an inaccurate depiction of who I am or understand myself to be,  I offer you me, as honestly as I am capable of seeing myself as I begin consciously inhabiting the skin around my blood and bones.  I have always believed that we grant each other permission.  What do I mean by this you might ask.  Well, I believe that the more capable you are of being truly and authentically who you are and the more you live or inhabit this authentic truth, the more you allow or give permission for others to do the same.  What I have to say and what I will write is in many ways an invitation and one I offer with and in the deepest of love. 

So...it is time for us to pull up our beautiful, old, creaking rocking chairs and let us sit side by side.  Let the stories begin.