For Shelter, the World

Lake, sky, mountain

Photo taken at the end of one of the rare clear days in the western Columbia Gorge during mid-March.

This 50-acre lake comprises the delta of a good-sized creek that flows out of the Cascade foothills into the Columbia River. During summer, the dam at the confluence of creek and river is closed, allowing the lake to fill. At the beginning of the rainy season in October, the dam is opened and the lake allowed to drain, leaving a big mudflat with the creek running through it.

As anyone who lives near a stream knows, the water level is extremely responsive to precipitation and snow melt. Over the course of the winter, the terrain within the lake bed changes constantly, depending on the weather. When spring arrives, chum salmon and other endangered fish species run up the flume at the creek mouth to their spawning grounds in the foothills.

Hovel

Painful it is indeed,
Passing through the world;
But in a hovel like this,
I live on in peace and quiet,
Winter rain falling.

-- Nijoin no Sanuki, 12th century Buddhist monk and poet,
as quoted in the Little Zen Calendar, March 31, 2009

While my home isn't exactly what I'd call a "hovel", this little poem speaks to me of simplicity and sanctuary, of dedication and determination. The hovel is not a place; to me it signifies an attitude of mind and heart. What is truly important? What are the essentials in my life? Can I let go of that which is not essential and does not serve me?

As the insanity and brutality and all-around noisiness of the world rages at fever pitch -- rather like that ten-day blizzard that came through during the Winter Solstice -- I remain safe and warm by focusing on the present moment and by not getting caught up in the collective grasping and raging. The more I stay grounded in the process of my own life, in touch with nature, with an attitude of acceptance and maintaining my boundaries, the more peacefully and effectively I will make my way through.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Little Zen Calendar quotes:

I go on walking
Higan lilies go on blooming

-- Taneda Santöka (1888-1940)

I've been through a lot in the ten years or so since I first read those words, enough to know now for sure: no matter what, I go on walking.

Boomers, part 1

A few years ago, I helped my elderly father locate an appropriate assisted care facility for my mother. While the places we considered varied in their degree of pleasantness, there was one thing they had in common: all of them were relatively quiet. You might hear a television in the communal lounge or someone playing the piano in the lobby, and people would be talking, but that was it.

Let's face it ... these Depression-era kids were into their adulthood before TVs became widely available. As to music, they were limited to either vinyl phonograph records played on a large "hi-fi" that was essentially a piece of furniture, or else playing actual musical instruments. Rather than relying on "canned" entertainment, they made their own, and they didn't expect instant gratification in everything. Growing up during a time when the provenance of their next meal was often in doubt, their main priority in life was not entertaining themselves. This was not what you'd call a generation of partiers.

Fast forward to the year 2020, when the residents will all be in the post-WWII generation. Walk down the hall in any assisted living community (or whatever they're calling them at that time), and chances are good you'll make your way through a cacophony of rock music blasting from every room. Probably the same songs we listened to in the '60s and '70s.

"I've been through the desert on a horse with no name ..."

It'll be like living in a college dorm all over again. Oh, the joy.

Out like a ...

Lion ... a little lion named Malcolm, to be precise.

The "throwaway" kitten I adopted last October has turned out to be a longhaired cat with a plush coat of dilute orange. He's developed a lovely ruff like a lion's mane around his neck, and has grown into his ears, which were proportionately larger than the rest of him last autumn.

Here he is, enjoying the first signs of spring, which include the birds and squirrels that come to visit the birdfeeder I got for the front deck.

Social networking gone awry

In the past few weeks, I've noticed that online "social networking" seems to be exploding, exponentially. For example, a year ago Facebook was out in the hinterlands, so to speak, and now it appears to be taking over the world. That may be just a slight exaggeration, but only just.

It's ironic, because after several years of sometimes intensive presence online, including owning and administering a message board, I've scaled back my own Internet socializing to a minimal level. When I do participate (by commenting on a blog or posting in a forum or contacting someone), I do so very deliberately. I'm at a point where I need to exercise more conscious control over whom I let into my life, and in what manner and to what extent.

Today I logged into my Yahoo email account several times, and each time I'd get several "pop-up" messages that said "[username] wants to add you as a contact." They were all from people I haven't spoken to in quite a while ... mostly the kind of situation where I've moved on and expected that they had as well. One of them was a member of a message board I moderated a few years back, a person whom we had to ban, so I'm fairly certain he wouldn't actually want to chat with me. Yet here he was. Here they all were, asking me to be their chat friend.

I use my Yahoo address as my Windows Messenger ID -- that's for MSN Internet relay chat, IRC for short -- and apparently today Yahoo did some sort of big push to get people to switch to their own version of IRC. I'm not sure exactly how Yahoo presented it, but it looks as though many people are simply instructing Yahoo to mass migrate their contacts; in other words, to send chat invitations to everyone on their MSN contact list, without bothering to check and see who that is. There are people I used to chat with who told me they have hundreds of people on their contact list, so very likely they don't have any real idea who is on it. Maybe they don't care. I guess it's not surprising that they wouldn't want to make the effort to go through the names and choose, but ...

The nearest analogy I can come up with is this scenario: one year, you decide to outsource your personal holiday greeting card-sending, so you give your address book to the person you've hired to handle it. Even though your address book is the same one you've used since you were ten years old, which means that many of the people have long since departed your life -- some under not-so-pleasant circumstances -- you tell the person, "Oh, I don't have time to go through it. Just send a card to everyone in there."

Actually, it may not be the lack of time or desire to bring one's list current. It almost looks to me as if our new cultural motto is, (s)he who dies with the most 'friends' wins.

"Friends" not meaning actual people you spend quality time with, unconditional love and all that jazz, but names on your Facebook or MSN chat or Yahoo buddies lists. I've heard about similar things on Facebook; people from the far past (such as grade school classmates) appearing out of the blue after 40 years and wanting to be buddies.

Being of a mystical inclination, I am aware of the fact that we're all connected, we're all part of one whole, similar to branches and leaves on the same tree. I'm speculating (hoping, perhaps) that this latest trend in social networking may have to do with some sort of spiritual evolution of the species, where that concept is reaching the mainstream human consciousness, and that this is how it's initially being translated into "real world" practice.

To describe it using another metaphor, you can't run before you can walk, and you can't walk before you can stand up, and you can't stand up before you crawl. And preceding all of that is the desire to walk and run. So maybe we're now experiencing the desire to know our connectedness more fully, and this is our first enthusiastic but clumsy attempt to do so. It's not being done with much awareness of what we're doing, or with any sense of boundaries, but at least we're on our way.

Revolution / Resolution

A random chapter of the Tao Te Ching for this rainy St. Paddy's Day:

36

If you want to shrink something,
you must first allow it to expand.
If you want to get rid of something,
you must first allow it to flourish.
If you want to take something,
you must first allow it to be given.
This is called the subtle perception
of the way things are.

The soft overcomes the hard.
The slow overcomes the fast.
Let your workings remain a mystery.
Just show people the results.

Pot of gold

It's been a rainy and cold weekend. If winter lasted only 24 hours, this would be the hour before sunrise ... still dark, but with the slightest hint of light in the sky and the sounds of birds beginning to stir.

Speaking of birds, I've been leaving birdseed in the hollow of the apple tree beside my front deck -- a mix of oats, millet, corn and black-oil sunflower seeds -- and the wild birds have been having a feast. I can hear some twittering out there now. And that's not the online social networking kind of twittering, but the kind that says, "Wow!  Black-oil sunflower ... my favorite!"

A tangle of blackberry vines has taken over the azalea bushes next to the road. Blackberries grow wild and abundantly in this part of the world. I love watching the berries turn from ruby red to deep purplish-black in the autumn; it brings back childhood memories of blackberry-picking in the country (well, technically what we had down South was dewberries), followed by berry shortcake or, even better, a simple bowl of fresh, ripe berries in milk with a bit of sugar.

However, after a full season of growth, the vines out front have stalks three-quarters of an inch in diameter. The thorns on a mature blackberry thicket are wicked. So late this afternoon, I got out the loppers and leather gardening gloves. I must admit it was rather satisfying to locate the parent vines and chop away to separate them from the ground. Maybe the old hunter instinct coming out in me.

Around 5 o'clock, the clouds began to lift and the sun came out. Just as a freight train rolled by, I looked out of the picture window and saw this.

Behind the rainbow, you can catch a faint glimpse of mountain through the mist.

It was a temporary respite. When I began typing this, the clouds had lowered again, rain began to fall, and I could hear the windchimes outside my window. But by the time the photo file had finished uploading, the rain had ceased. Now I can see the mountains clearly, with a bit of snow on the highest peak, although some pretty good gusts of wind are blowing.

Fits and starts. It's early spring now, in the turn of seasons. Everything is important, and nothing is for keeps.

Doorways

It's been a long winter, a long season on an even longer road, but it feels as if a corner has been turned.

So many days over the past few months, I've awakened feeling depressed or anxious, sometimes to the point of panic, without knowing exactly why. I learned a long time ago that if I just get up and get moving, and not get caught up in believing that to be my "truth", I'm usually able to move myself out of that state. Some days recently it's felt like being on rollercoaster of emotions and energy levels ... up and down, all over the place, from one moment to the next. Lately I've found myself going through periods of great irritation, where I don't feel comfortable inside my own skin and where nothing seems to work right; where everything feels cumbersome and out of kilter.

From what people are telling me, there are a lot of us experiencing this. The usual inclination in this kind of circumstance is to reach out for something to grab onto -- some belief or goal, or a category to stick the experience in, or some thought or activity familiar and comfortable -- but that doesn't seem to work very well now. I've felt kind of "floaty", having let go of so much of what I identified with, in the midst of moving into new ways of thinking and relating to myself and the world. Sometimes I find myself stewing about it all, being so far out of my comfort zone but knowing that I can't (and don't want to) go back.

Then I hear a voice inside saying, "it's cool. Just let it be for now." The only reliable ground I have right now is inside myself, what I know and feel. And isn't that great? What a wonderful place to be. Maybe that's one of the many gifts this time has for me (and I know I'm not the only one): to meet that point of trust inside of myself, that I've finally accessed because I got to where I had no choice.

I just came across this quote. Boy, did it bring back memories of the time when I first heard it, in the excellent "Power of Myth" series of interviews Bill Moyers did with Joseph Campbell in the late 1980s. There's been a lot of water under the bridge since then, literally and figuratively, but it is still as inspiring today as it was then. Since Campbell first said it, the phrase "follow your bliss" has gotten to be something of a cliché, but doggone it, it's true. Maybe we need to hear it, and hear it, and hear it some more. It's helped me through the last 20 years, that's for certain. And here I am again.

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know there were doors.

--Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Tao Te Ching

Quite often I post quotes from the Tao Te Ching here on my blog, and I've had some comments and questions about it. The Tao Te Ching, pronounced something like "Dow-duh-JING", is one of the classical texts of the philosophical system known as Taoism and is purported to have been written by the legendary ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tse (also spelled Lao-Tzu or Laozi).

As with many legends, there may or may not have been an actual person named Lao Tse, in the same way as there may or may not have been someone named William Shakespeare. But as with Shakespeare's plays, the work speaks for itself, having been written in a time when the "cult of personality" wasn't as important as it is now. (Well, I'm assuming it wasn't.)

There are many reasons why I am attracted to the Tao Te Ching, and to Taoist philosophy in general. One of the main ones is that it is based on the natural world ... the rhythms and cycles of the life process, as it is reflected in nature, and as a metaphor for human existence and creativity. Much of my own poetry is written from this standpoint, using allusions from nature. And with the current chaos and constant change in the world, I find that the more I can stay grounded and in touch with the Earth and its energy, the more balanced I am.

The version of the Tao Te Ching I quote and link to is this one, maintained on the Brooklyn College/City University of New York website, based on a modern interpretation by the eminent scholar, poet and translator Stephen Mitchell. There are numerous other translations, most famously the more traditional 1972 version, re-released in 1997, by Jane English that is illustrated with the wonderful photography of Gia-Fu Feng.

Stephen Mitchell himself has a new book out, entitled The Second Book of the Tao, which just arrived in my P. O. Box from Powell's Books.

Escape!

Well, we had a bit of excitement at my house this evening.

Here we are, getting ready to go onto Daylight Savings Time, and another winter storm is moving through tonight and tomorrow. After a mild and sunny day yesterday, it was overcast and misty today. During the afternoon we had a brief spate of hail, not unusual in the springtime here.

Around 6:30 PM, the teenaged neighbor who mows my lawn during the summer knocked on my front door for a chat. Right after that, I decided to run out to the little grocery store on the highway. By the time I got back, the sun had fully set and the rain had started, mixed with a few flakes of snow. As I drove up the steep driveway, I noticed that my front door was ajar. Apparently, it hadn't latched completely, and when I'd gone out the back door to the garage, the change in air pressure pulled the front door open.

I immediately took a head count ... 1, 2, 3 ... and oops, where's No. 4? Ms. Tink, the plump and sturdy brown Mama cat who came with me from the Gulf Coast and will be ten this summer, was unaccounted for. (Her story can be found here, here and here.) I don't let my cats go outside, because between the coyotes, bobcats, geese, moles and assorted neighborhood pets, they could get into some serious trouble. So I picked up a flashlight and went out into the cold and rainy night to look for her.

Tink's gotten out only once before, a long time ago when we lived in Mississippi. I knew from experience that she wouldn't have gone far and would probably be disoriented when she "came to" in the midst of her big adventure. I also knew that because she was confused (or maybe just being ornery), she might try to run if I approached her. My house is surrounded by wooden decks, so I figured she might be in the crawlspace underneath one of them. But she's brown, and the crawlspace floor is bare earth (brown), and it was dark out besides. I searched and called, looking for a cat's eyes reflecting the flashlight, but ... nothing.

I put some dry cat food in a dish and took it out to the front deck, shaking it to make that wonderful "chow time" noise, hoping to lure her out. Then I got my walking stick and prepared to search the neighborhood. As I headed down the driveway, I looked toward the front deck steps, and there was a familiar little brown critter, looking just a tad lost, not to mention wet.

*phew*

And here's the sweet miscreant now, warming up after her escapade, in her favorite spot next to the wall heater.

Needing ground

March came in like a lion ... here's hoping it goes out like a lamb.

I'm feeling rather weary today.

Random chapter from the Tao Te Ching:

7

The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.

The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.

Lenten moon

Moon - Venus Conjunction at 15 degrees of Aries (tropical zodiac)

Friday, February 27, 2009

as viewed from southern Washington State, USA

The moon in its waxing crescent meets up with the soon-to-be retrograding Venus, on its way to the last Full Moon before the Spring Equinox.

Ooops

It's been a cold and windy weekend, with rain arriving this afternoon, so I thought I'd give the fireplace another workout before winter's end. But I forgot Fireplace Rule Number 1.

We've had 50 MPH wind gusts coming from the east through the Gorge, and when that happens, it usually blows the fireplace damper open. I don't bother to close it because it will just happen again as soon as another gust comes along. There was a lot of banging and clattering in there this weekend, which led me to believe the damper had come open. But I didn't double-check to make sure before I lit the tinder.

Oops.

*cough*

In the interim

Random chapter of the Tao Te Ching:

22

If you want to become whole,
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up.

The Master, by residing in the Tao,
sets an example for all beings.
Because he doesn't display himself,
people can see his light.
Because he has nothing to prove,
people can trust his words.
Because he doesn't know who he is,
people recognize themselves in him.
Because he has no goal in mind,
everything he does succeeds.

When the ancient Masters said,
"If you want to be given everything,
give everything up,"
they weren't using empty phrases.
Only in being lived by the Tao can you be truly yourself.

Wild hearts day

Late this chilly afternoon, I bundled up and took a drive up the Gorge to the recycling transfer site (fancy name for the town dump), and got so carried away ogling the scenery it's a wonder I made it back home in one piece.

The sun had come out, spot-lighting snow-covered nooks and crannies on the cliffs high above the river and glowing through the clouds that clung to the peaks. As the clouds formed and re-formed, the interplay of light and shadow constantly shifted. Fog wafted around in the little valleys between the peaks and floated out into the Gorge. The wind was calm, so the river's surface was still and reflective ... mirroring the deep green of the Douglas firs on the mountainsides below the snow level, the glistening white snow above, as well as the patches of blue sky that peeked out here and there from behind the clouds. I passed numerous stands of birch, bare of their leaves, like ranks of silvery-brown skeletons.

There was an invigorating wildness to it, and yet at the same time it seemed peaceful and orderly.

More inspiration on this gloriously elemental Valentine's Day:

Wild woman resides in the guts, not in the head. She can track and run and summon and repel. She is the Life/Death/Life force, she is the incubator. She is intuition, she is far-seer, she is deep listener, she is loyal heart. She encourages humans to remain multi-lingual; fluent in the languages of dreams, passion, and poetry. She whispers from night dreams, she leaves behind on the terrain of a woman's soul a coarse hair and muddy footprints. These fill women with longing to find her, free her and love her.

-- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

February in the Gorge

Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) railroad tracks, Columbia River, and cliffs on the Oregon side, showing the erratic snow level of this week's winter storm.

Looking downstream in the Western Gorge an hour before sunset. With the strong east wind blowing, "the surf was up" on the river yesterday.

(Click on the photos to view full-size images.)

For a different view of the scene in the second photo, taken two years ago, go here.

Integrity and deep truth

The PlanetWaves February "Eriscope" for Pisces, written by Eric Francis:

This is one of the most visionary times of your life -- or perhaps one when you've never felt more trapped inside of a vision that you cannot manifest. I can say this: you're a lot further along in your process than you imagine. If you're developing an idea for how you want your life to be (and I do mean your most passionate erotic and creative life), then keep your focus inwardly. You have yet to discover the tipping point where what you align with in your internal world expresses itself as a tangible development in your outer life. This really is a matter of connecting deeply with the truth of who you are, which is often the first thing that we deny or evade. Let yourself be drawn to the strange, the unruly and mostly to the unknown. Gradually enter the space of the unspeakable. Make eye contact with others as you do this. Look for the people whose eyes seem to be questioning you back.

One of the most fundamental things I've noticed about my life, from a very early age, is that what's inside me often doesn't translate to the outside. There is a dissonance between the reality and the appearance. This has resulted in much frustration for me. I've found myself living a somewhat marginalized existence, meaning that I am experienced by others as something other than what I am, and I have been reluctant to push the issue, mainly because I can feel their need for me not to do so. It has contributed to numerous relationship miscues because I'm not necessarily who or what people expect me to be, as well as to a sense of isolation.

This is not a physical isolation, since I'm engaged in the world, but is at the level of wanting deep connection and not getting it. Hmmm ... this is a bit difficult to put into words. The deep connection I have with the world does exist. Being an empath, I have always known that connection, as a matter of personal experience. The problem is that it has not been reflected back to me, not acknowledged by the world, and in fact is often denied or actively resisted.

There's that dissonance again that I spoke of, which borders on paradox ... I feel so connected and so isolated, at one and the same time.  It's as if I know about a beautiful dance that we are all participating in, and that I want to experience openly with everyone... but we're not dancing. Or more accurately, people are dancing while at the same time insisting there is no dance going on.

I've thought it was just me who had that problem, but on reflection, I suspect it's pretty common ... perhaps even part and parcel of the "normal" human condition (at least as we've known it up to now.) Maybe I'm just more aware of it, or less able to go along and contentedly play the game everyone else in the world seems to be playing ... or something. People often remark on how "independent" I am. That's true, but there's more to it.

There's got to be a reason for the abundance of New Age "affirmation-visualization-create your life the way you want it" seminars and books, and I think this has a lot to do with it. People are reaching for something beyond what has been presented to them as the normal way to live, while they feel unsatisfied or even thwarted in living fully. Another culturally-typical way of handling (or denying) those feelings is through our addictive behavior ... alcohol, drugs, food, smoking, shopping ... anything to avoid getting out of the illusion and facing reality. That includes the reality of our deep needs and desires, the deep truth of who and what we are, individually and collectively.

Our culture teaches us that wanting to live happily and creatively is an option, not a necessity, and that it's even self-centered or frivolous. But I think it is essential for our basic integrity. "Integrity" means more than simple honesty. Think of the structural integrity of a building, which makes the building whole and sound, and fit for human habitation. Integrity is not a luxury, at least not any more. The survival of the human species depends on it now.

(By the way, for those of you who know I'm a Sagittarian and are wondering why I'm posting a reading for Pisces: in using astrology most effectively, it's important to consider your rising sign as well as your Sun sign. In some ways, a reading for your Ascendant (rising sign) can be more accurate than one for your Sun sign, because it takes into account your time of birth.)

Snow on daffodils

Another little winter storm has come through, coating everything with an inch of snow. The temperature is right above freezing, so in a day or so it will have all melted away. This is the wet kind of snow, with big, smooshy snowflakes. You can see several in mid-flight in this photo, including one below the lowest tulip leaf on the left.

I love daffodils.

Rather than go into a big discussion of daffodils in February, I'll let a verse from a poem I wrote a while back speak for me ...

Oh, yellow daffodil

Your brave face shines

In the midst of winter

Turning toward the sun

I touch you

And you take my breath away

Pushing the "age" boundary

Now this is inspirational:

56-year-old becomes first woman to swim Atlantic

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) – Jennifer Figge pressed her toes into the Caribbean sand, exhilarated and exhausted as she touched land this week for the first time in almost a month.

Reaching a beach in Trinidad, she became the first woman on record to swim across the Atlantic Ocean — a dream she’d had since the early 1960s, when a stormy trans-Atlantic flight got her thinking she could don a life vest and swim the rest of the way if needed.

The 56-year-old left the Cape Verde Islands off Africa’s western coast on Jan. 12, swimming about 2,100 miles (3,380 kilometers) through strong winds and waves of up to 30 feet (9 meters).

[...]

My God, this woman is a year older than I am. You go, girl! (Well, I guess she did.)

This reminds me of how the Boomer generation has continually redefined what age and aging mean. Sometimes I think we're "the generation that will never grow up", in terms of a certain less-than-mature self-absorption, but there are good aspects to that as well. We have consistently refused to accept prior rules and assumptions about what is proper and possible. Say what you will about us, we're true pioneers, and probably will continue to be until the day the very last one of us bites the dust.

When I first began experiencing menopause symptoms eight years ago and sought out information and resources, it was all so "hush-hush". I've had numerous friends in the generation ahead of me, and none of them ever talked about menopause. I don't think it was just because they thought I wouldn't understand. It simply wasn't something you discussed openly. 

In 2001 when I went into bookstores or health foodstores, I felt awkward asking about menopause ... but I did, and spoke about it to all sorts of people as if it were just another topic of conversation. Which ultimately it seems to have become. Nowadays, there are menopause message boards, and mainstream media advertisements for remedies, and books galore on menopause, whose authors appear on the Oprah show.

I remember when I was in my late thirties, feeling quite ancient by the then-current standards of "youthfulness", and watching the 1992 Winter and Summer Olympics. There were numerous world-class athletes over the age of thirty, which at that time was really pushing the limit of what was considered possible.  Seeing them compete helped me past some limitations I had started to place on myself. In 2009, thirty seems so young; it's no longer a big deal to see someone in their thirties or even forties competing seriously in sports.

My first inclination is to think, "But that was when I was in my thirties. I was still young. I'm in my fifties.  It's different now." And I hate to admit it, but that's the mindset I've found myself sliding into lately.

And then someone like Jennifer Figge comes along to remind me, "Nope. You go, girl."

New skin

Snakes, as well as many species of invertebrates, such as crabs and turtles, grow until they reach a point where they must either shed their skin or die. The process of molting the old skin and then growing and hardening off the new one can be uncomfortable; and while it's going on, the creature is quite vulnerable. Once it's complete, of course, the creature is stronger and more mature, able to move freely and interact naturally with its environment. The world itself is undergoing this process now, I believe, as well as many of us individually.

When I first revived this blog during the summer of 2008, I started working on a custom banner and page design. The story of how that went is here. I ended up using a pre-made design provided by TypePad, my blog host. That design (TypePad calls it "Zen Midnight") was nature-oriented and fairly simple, which was exactly the point. It gave me space to breathe and experiment.

I'm ready to move into a new skin, one that provides a container for my words and interests without overwhelming them but which also allows me to display a little more personality. I'm playing with the idea of creating a page design wherein the basic layout and graphic elements remain the same, but where I can adapt the banner from time to time to incorporate images from my photography.

In the meantime, I've chosen to use another pre-made design provided by TypePad. This one has a banner image created by designer and photographer Li Kim Goh and is called, appropriately enough, "New Life". The moment I saw it and previewed it for my blog, I knew it was a fit for where I am now. It is another nature-oriented theme, with a bit more definition and pizazz.