Sporadic Summer:

The Muse's News for Summer 2008

© 2008 Oona McOuat

Bundled up by the lake

Photo by Kmax

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Ava and her daffodil

Solstice Lava Moon

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Your Insights: A Place to Participate!

Your Insights

Spring 2008

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

A Chance to be a Part of Dream Deep Music

Career Directions

On Balance and Rebirth

The Muse's News for Spring 2008

© 2008 Oona McOuat

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Photos by Kmax

Move into the Mountain

The Muse's News for Winter 2007

© 2007 Oona McOuat

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Photo by Kmax

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Photo by Kmax

Of Dolphin, Deer,

and Harvest Moons…

Autumn 2007

© 2007 Oona McOuat

A harvest moon!
And on the mats -
Shadows of pine boughs.
Kikaku

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Photo by Kmax

Summer is a Comin' In

Summer 2007

© 2007 Oona McOuat

The Faerie Loop
Beltane 2006

© 2006 Oona McOuat

Photos & Collage: Leigh Hilbert

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

The Open Road

From the Muse's News for Fall 2004

© 2004 Oona McOuat

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Bunking down on the deck of the Alaska ferry

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Native Ice Fishing Camp near Fort Macpherson, NWT

Carol doing the sand fly hitchiking dance beside the Peele River crossing

Newsy news:

I am committed to and excited about recording a new music album this year. I am aiming for early September. A storytelling album will follow. I have posted the first chapter of my novel, The Rememberer, on my website. Click here: if you'd like to take a peak at it.

Musey News….

Summer dances in and out of presence this year. With the first warm days in early March I planted seeds, certain that an early, balmy spring would soon transform my garden beds into a fecund oasis of near self sufficiency.

But the warmth was short-lived. It's been a spring of wood fires, wool sweaters and toques.

My sister Carol and I sporting our toques

It snowed in April. It felt like it was going to snow last week with the weather going down to the low 40's Fahrenheit several nights in a row. The past two years I was lake swimming by May, but this year, the generally cool temperatures have made the thought of jumping in the water highly unappealing.

Meandering into a lake water nymph style a year ago

Photo by Kmax

I transplanted the first seedlings I planted into the garden in April. Only some of them survived. I then started a second batch of seeds which I put out in May….. A part of me just doesn't understand how the sun can be at its apex but nothing is ready to eat yet….. (Okay, I did eat some kale and arugula that had over-wintered pretty well, but that was in February!!) And surely, shouldn't the weather be consistently warm by now. I mean - isn't that how it used to be when I was a kid, or is selective memory and not global climate change at work here?

Photo by Kmax

Why does the weather matter? Is it because as humans we need to know there are some things we can count on? Do those of us living in a northern climate want a guarantee that we will get our fair share of light and warmth, enough to make the long, dark days bearable? This spring, a part of me resigned myself to always being cold or being prepared to be cold here. Except for on those sporadic summer-look-alike days that come like a blessing or a benediction and renew faith.

Photo by Kmax

Last night was like that. I went to a west-facing beach I'd never been to before with a friend and her three little girls. Off went the corduroy pants, wool socks and hoodie. Ah - bare skin, the ocean's edge, sunlight dancing off the water and kissing my head, my hands, my toes…. A little bit of that Hawaiian beach feeling enveloped me. The lazy reassurance that one can lie at leisure on the sand, not having to grab the nearest fleece blanket when the sun goes behind a cloud. Trust. I could trust that I would be warm. I felt the armor of winter, the part of me that has come to believe, or fear, that Canada is always freezing, cautiously begin to melt. I guzzled the setting sun's rays like I used to drink only-served-on-special-occasions ice cream floats, sipping so hard on the straw the fizz went up my nose. I imagine it's similar to growing up in a home where you are often hungry. When the fridge is full, you want to eat as much as possible just because you can.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

There were surfboards on the beach. Windsurfing boards without their sails to be precise, but large enough so that I could paddle out with the adventurous six year old Zama Rose on the back. ("Are we deep yet, Oona? Are we really deep?")

Zama Rose tenderly cradles a baby chick

Sea water seeping between my belly and the board, arms a little numb from the cold and from paddling, paddling, but oh, the freedom, the joy, the body's remembering of lying on my belly, paddling, paddling out to sea. Funny, but surfing in Hawaii was always a bit stressful for me - the reef, the big waves, the undertow, the currents, the risk of getting too much sun, the being held under and flipped a thousand ways and praying that you were heading up and not down as you grew short of breath - but now, my back arched in the just so surfer paddling position, the softness of the ocean as it resists the movement of my hands, I am at peace.
"Are we going to go swimming, Oona?"
"Yes" I answer. "Who should go first?"
"You," she says, then impetuousness gets the better of her and she jumps into the shockingly cold water, delight and panic co-mingling on her beautiful, open face. I lie ready to pull her out at any moment, but she dog paddles back and shimmies back onto the board, laughing and shivering with joy.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

I dive in. The water is clear and cold and greener than the Hawaiian Pacific.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

I swim a bit, reveling in the buoyancy, the familiarity of being lifted and carried by the salt and the sea. I climb back on the board, the blood rushing to the surface of my skin, my pollen sensitive sinuses flushed and clear, my body feeling like at last it is home. I dive in again, wanting to experience the life-quivering vitality that this chilly ocean mother brings.

Later, I sit, blissful, on shore wrapped in a yellow towel. Two year old Nusha has taken an unexpected dunk and is crying. Eventually she says proudly: "I got wet", but for now she is snuggling into the warm and familiar curves of her earth mother's body.

Nusha's 2nd Birthday Party

Four year old Ava wades elegantly in her underwear, exploring, but not pushing past her comfort zone. Zama paddles back out, then comes to shore with a perfect sea weed hula skirt draped across the board.

"Look I found this. Would you like this little skirt, Oona? I think it will just fit."

Baby's First Luau

Painitng by CC Arnott in honour of her 1 year old Grandniece's birthday.

(Hawaiians believe it takes a year for the spirt of the child to fully enter the body and they celebrate the child's "arrival" with a big 1st year birthday bash!)

Mermaid momma Shellyse goes in the hard way, twice, the painful wade from shore, icy water moving from knees to thighs to waist to…. I can do it…. the plunge, the shriek. The gift of this body.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Summer comes reluctantly, in bits and pieces this year, but perhaps this helps us savour the moments we have with her; grab them passionately, with a child's enthusiasm, joy and vigor. Live now. Live big. Live beautifully. Celebrate and give thanks.

Blessed Be,
Oona

Epilogue

I am lying in a tub of warm well water, floating, rinsing last night's salt from my skin and hair. This tub has been my sanctuary, my connection to the water world that was once such an important part of my daily life. I am lying in a tub of warm well water and I am floating in the small warm pool off the shores of Pohiki. Sacred pool, mermaid pool, healing pool. Coconut palms silhouetted by a perfect blue sky. Sun filtering through their strong, symmetrical branches. Tiny, near invisible fish nibbling at my feet and fingers. My hair is a halo, my body weightless, the volcanically heated water a conduit for Pele to speak and heal through. So often, so much, too often, too much … E ho mai…. let it go, release, let it flow like lava to the sea.

Homage to Pele

(This image is time exposed, but untouched. On a full moonlit night I knelt & prayed, while lava flowed past me & into the sea)

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Please email me any feelings, insights or perceptions that my musings evoke for you at oonasong@yahoo.com and I will post excerpts here. I look forward to hearing from you! Let me know if you want to remain anonymous.

I wish to thank you for your beautifully written news letters which I have been receiving for a good number of years. You have a most wonderful way of expressing yourself, a way which is amplified in your music.

I have just moved from the winter wet of Vancouver Island to the pristine snowy conditions in south-eastern Ontario . Your news letters will keep the beauty of the west coast fresh in my mind. Keep up the good work. I’m sure that many are inspired by your messages and your songs.

Thanks again. Blessed be,

Ed Panchishin, Belleville, Ontario

Aloha from the Big Island. You touch me. All of me. My heart and soul, my mind and my physical body. My Spirit and All that is. Thank You for your Presence.

Iao, Kapoho, Hawaii

Checking email can be such a "to do" chore,
cause there is always more
"to do" on the internet ..
And yet ..
in the word crush and bit rush here
are your words, vibing in that place
the sound vibed in me yesterday
way down low like a
big fat whole note
or like that deep orange ball of
sun, i guess it is!
peeking in my skylight.
and on the one morning Hannah is
not here to say
momma momma momma
look at me, more important than that computer
i wish she was,
so I could share this with her.

S.L. Salt Spring Island

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

In a society where music has become a business often aligned with values that are not life enhancing, Dream Deep Music aspires to be a force of balance, cross-cultural collaboration and planetary healing. I am looking for patrons and investors to help me realize the "Dream" of recording an album of original songs and a CD of my stories told with the harp. Production is slated to begin late this summer. Donors of $100 or more will be thanked on the CD cover. This is an exciting opportunity to support Dream Deep Music from the ground up. Another way to support the project is to commit to pre-purchasing an album at $15.98 US shipping included. Please email oonasong@yahoo.com if you can contribute in any way.

Photos by Kmax

I arrived in Ireland on September 11th, 2001 with the key to a friend's vacant cottage in my pocket. I was traveling to County Donegal to live like a hermit and write a novel. Never mind that I was thousands of miles from home in a world suddenly turned topsy-turvy, in a country where I didn't know a soul. My first morning at the cottage, I got up, wiped the cobwebs off the kitchen table and began to write. Three years and several bowls of oatmeal and blackberries later, I finished The Rememberer and I am now actively seeking a publisher or a literary agent for the manuscript. (Click here to read a PDF preview of the first chapter.)

Meanwhile, I am getting excited about two album concepts that are emerging and plan to record them both this year. One will feature my stories told with the harp for children of all ages, the second will be an album of original songs. I am sensing both recordings will be imbued with a wee bit of faerie magic

Last night I slept like a baby for nearly 12 hours, curled up in my comforters against the spring chill …. The kids I teach are coming down with whooping cough and scarlet fever and my body needed a good long rest to build its strength.

Yesterday was the Vernal Equinox - the point of equal day and equal night when the balance turns from the dark towards the light.

Sunball

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

I love the dark, the deep, rich mystery of the unformed. Although I often long for the sun and warmth, the turning inwards of autumn resonates with my soul. Since I was a teenager, spring has meant hay fever and a burgeoning aliveness that quickens my activity level and frequently sends me into overdrive. All of the springiness of rebirth can throw the plodding and methodical parts of me a little off balance. That's when it's time to get my hands in the dirt.

Plants have always anchored me in my body and the physical world. I remember the first spring I explored on my own as a child. I was old enough to bicycle solo into uncharted territory. I had just read Louisa May Alcott's "Under the Lilacs" and I was on a quest for lilacs. I would ride my bike past unknown houses and if I saw lilac bushes in the yard, I would creep up and bury my nose in their rich mauve, lavender, and deep purple glory. I don't remember sneezing…

Decades later I am living near the place where I grew up, striving to reclaim the grounded, gentle rhythm I followed as a child. It is spring and I've hardly sneezed at all! Perhaps I am learning to not take on more than I can peacefully accomplish as I temper my in-the world-self's tendency to mirror the quickening of nature. And so, last night, I slept for 12 delicious, restorative hours.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

As I was making the bed this morning I was reflecting on balance: equal day and equal night, the dark and the light, linear time and eternity, ego and essence…..I have jumped on the Oprah bandwagon and I am reading Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth" as I take the weekly online class. At first I registered because I thought I should be aware of what this potentially huge shift in global consciousness was all about. Within 10 minutes of being in class I knew it could help me grow. Eckhart's presence reinforces the peace inside me and encourages me to understand why and when I lose it.

So, I was making the bed this morning, ruminating about time. Last week Eckhart spoke of rooting ourselves in the eternal. I personally love floating through the unframed, unformed magnificence of eternity.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Yet there are things I want to get done here on earth. Do plants and animal know they are going to die, I wondered as I pulled the top sheet up over the bottom one. I doubt it. Is that why they can so purely surrender to their soulful and instinctual nature? Are us humans addicted to our day planners and Blackberries because we are afraid of dying? I started thinking about (I know, according to Eckhart thinking is ego based, but sometimes a girl's got to do it..), I started thinking about how anchored in linear time the cycles of nature are.

Crescent Moon

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

The Moon orbits around the Earth in 29 ¼ days; the Earth orbits around the Sun in one year. It takes 9 months to gestate a child, 6 weeks to distill a flower essence; it will be 6 moon cycles before the wheel of the year returns to the next point of balance. Our bodies are anchored in linear time; our spirits hunger for the eternal.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

I am still learning how to dance between these two points, how to live and create authentically and spontaneously while flowing down the "to Do " list like a river sure and true. I've recently decided I need to put my creative self on a schedule, dedicating consistent, structured time to her unfolding rather than letting inspiration alone dictate when I work. My free spirit balks at this, but I am so good at implementing meaningful distractions and putting more pressing commitments ahead of my personal projects.

The natural world around me moves through linear time with seamless grace. I let her ground and guide me. As I walk through the woods on a newly discovered trail that goes right from my backyard up Mt Maxwell (!) I gather young, brilliant green nettles. For five nights in a row I cook and eat them and feel wonderful. In a month or so, the nettles will be too "old" to eat this way. By autumn, they'll be gone.

I watch as the first brave snowdrops give way to tiny wild crocuses. A convention of sweet, heart-shaped leaved violets suddenly gathers under the elms. Birds whose names I don't know are arriving at my doorstep, filling the air with music. Soon the wild lilacs will appear. At Burgoyne Bay, a field of gorgeous daffodils miraculously sprouts up by the sea. I am reminded of the delight that flooded me at age four as I stood in my Nana's field of tall, yellow daffodils, surrounded by a large and happy family of flowers singing and bobbing their heads.

As I focus on the process of creation, I turn to nature to model how I can move my ego/mind self out of the way and let things take their course. My thinking self can step back in to edit, shape and form when needed, but how can a garden flourish if we are continually hovering over any new growth, pulling up anything we don't recognize and calling it a weed?

Sweet balance is helping me drop into, fall into, stumble into a place where life is full and rich and real - full of many cycles of death and rebirth, many letting go's and openings to the miraculous. Blessed balance is helping me know when to act - to say no to the garbage dump down the road or the horrendous situations in Iraq and Tibet, not because I am opposed to the horror, but because I hunger for and believe in justice, peace and beauty.

Photos by Kmax

As within, so it is without. Let me be and create what I believe in. As we work and play with, and love and heal ourselves, each other and the world, let us all remember the pure, eternal, unscripted joy of rebirth.

May Springtime, all time, fill you with a happy heart,

Blessed Be,
Oona

Carmel Point

by Robinson Jeffers

from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. © Stanford University Press, 1989.

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop
rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine
beauty Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. -As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Maybe it's the two week long flu I am recovering from, but as December passes, I don't feel the slightest stirring of holiday cheer. There is no deep or sudden urge to drink eggnog or make sugar cookies. I am relieved that Christmas will be at my Dad's this year so I don't have to decorate or get a tree. I'm lackadaisical about gift giving. Cards seem passé.

Could it be that the grinch has got me?

I don't think so. It feels like time is moving too fast. It's only been a few weeks since I finished picking blackberries and rosehips, and spent hours and hours slicing and drying the apples from my trees. Halloween wasn't even over and the shelves of the local pharmacy were decked out in red and green. The sooner they get us hooked, the more we'll spend.

According to National Geographic it would take $19 billion dollars to eliminate world hunger and malnutrition. Across the globe, we spend $18 billion dollars a year on cosmetics…. Food for thought. Or is that lipstick for food?... I'm lucky to live in a place with no malls and very few stores I can afford to shop in. There's no Ross Dress for Less to tempt me here.

Photo by Kmax

Bit by bit, winter is coming. We've already had two snowstorms. The branches of the trees are bare, scraping elegantly against a winter white or dazzling December-blue sky.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

On those frosty mornings when the grass and plants are glittering, hard edged diamonds,I put food out for the birds.

This fall, I've spent hours each day hiking up a nearby mountain. When I get near the top, to the place where the stone people tower over me like kindly grandparents and form caves where the Natives did their vision quests, I can feel cougars.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

One crisp morning, I heard twigs snapping behind me and felt I was being stalked. I looked at the ground and there at my feet was a pile of unidentifiable droppings. Without a second thought I grabbed a big stick, ditched the trail, and scrambled down the rocky mountainside to my car.

I am still learning about fear.

One day I climbed another mountain and told myself I couldn't come down until I had written a song. I made it out at dusk with an unusual set of elfin lyrics that seemed to come from the mountain itself. A new approach to writing, a new perspective in song, was born. Rather than rushing in to shape and order this newborn, oblivious to its holy, yet vulnerable state, (as futile as attempting to teach table manners to an infant) I decided to sit with this baby, this seedling, and see if it takes root.

This is a solitary time for me, this living alone in a one room cottage, learning to chop wood and befriend the deer and stellar jays that come to visit. I am putting aside my ideas of where I should be in my personal and professional life, while embracing and celebrating exactly where I am.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

So, Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat. Is it all about an excuse to overindulge? And what exactly are we feasting?

The Winter Solstice cannot be denied. The light will return.

The days will grow longer, but colder, until Imbolc when we'll be halfway to spring. A contradiction, perhaps, but I'm glad to know that nature has them too. It is hard now on planet earth, at this hectic, topsy turvy time of good vs. evil, us vs. them, to trust the light will return. The darkness is fairly well entrenched. Or seems to be. Perhaps this is just an illusion. Like the 40% off signs you see at the mall, or the way red Christmas lights reflected on snow make you think of fire.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Deep inside of us, big changes are happening. Beyond the world of Wal-Mart and online banking, newspapers and TV, monumental transformation is taking place. I can't name it, this subterranean flow of power and possibility, not yet, but I can sense it, buried like a patient bulb, hidden but not dormant, waiting for signs of spring.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

Perhaps we all take this time we have here on earth much too seriously. Recently, I've begun to understand what my father means when he says, "The older I get, the faster time passes." When my head is full of desires and disappointments, to-dos and not-to-dos, I crowd time with mental clutter and lose the moment. When I move into the mountain, listening to my breath huffing and puffing and my beating heart, I fall into the undefined and open spaces of my soul. She speaks to me, without words, of the soft green moss, the play of light on trees, and the subtle shifts of the season that I am a part of. She gives me a place of belonging, a place that lives outside of church and school, career and ideology, a place that is rooted in cyclical change and lives outside of time.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

I will celebrate the light's returning in my own small ways. Maybe I will cut some holly from the bush in my yard and hang it over the doorway. Or make gingerbread cookies that fill the house with the smell of cinnamon and molasses. I will wrap a few simple presents for friends and family. But mostly I will use these last two weeks before the Winter Solstice to burrow into the dark and understand silence, to sit with sister stillness and recognize her peace.

There is a gift for each of us hidden here in the womb of winter if we risk unwrapping it. Deep inside ourselves we find the sparkling filament that is our individual genius and our collective truth. We find the Star of Wonder that sings to us of Love.

Bright Blessings,
Oona

Epilogue

Despite yesterday's somewhat Bah Humbug tone, today, as the snow fell, (snowstorm number three!), I decked the halls with boughs of holly and "fa la la la la-ed" a stanza or two for good measure.

Photo by Kmax

I didn't plan for this to happen. It was not on my "to do" list. Spontaneity and inspiration struck …spontaneously! Yesterday after writing the above, I dressed as a forest dweller and sat in the winter cave - a shimmering world of ice and crystals, of candles suspended in silver globes as if mimicking the sun - and as magical Shelby, who created this world, tossed her waist length poinsettia-red hair, adjusted her bejeweled crown and crinoline, and told stories to the children who sat and listened in wide-eyed wonder, I played the harp.

I wished I could have sat there longer - till the end of February at least, but at the end of the day as the magic world was dismantled, I returned home with a carload of boughs, wreaths, and swags to be recycled for my upcoming winter solstice show.

"Just keep them on your porch," Willow advised. Suddenly my cottage was infused with holiday spirit. Today, as I hung boughs from the porch railing, and watched a flock of hungry birds scour the yard for food, I decided that this year's Christmas tree would be for them. I stood a large fallen Douglas fir branch in a bowl of white stones. As snowflakes fell, I decorated it with rosehips that looked like slightly shriveled red bulbs; I covered its cones with peanut butter and bird seed, and felt joy.

Photo by Leigh Hilbert

As Bill McKibben says in his article, The Problem with Christmas: "….the second you … break out of it - the second you become one of those that exchanges used books at Christmas, or decides to follow St. Francis' Yule tradition of wandering the park and throwing seed so that the birds too can celebrate, or makes it an annual custom to serve turkey dinner at the homeless shelter- then you start sharing in the deep human secret that consumer society is set up to obscure: the things that please us most are almost always counterintuitive. We need to be out in the cold air, we need to think about others, we need to serve."

Photo by Kmax

Photos by Kmax

As we sit poised between the Autumn Equinox and the Harvest Moon, a time that sings of bounty and balance, beauty and decay, I, like all good Northerners, prepare for the descent of the great Canadian winter - harvesting and conserving food, replenishing the woodpile, pulling sweaters and warm blankets out of the cupboard where they were stuffed last June… In all honestly, I do so half-heartedly, disbelieving that the cycle has come full circle again, that already the days are growing cold and dark.

Perhaps it was more than a coincidence then, that on the first day of Fall, I took a fall as I picked pears on a rickety aluminum ladder. I had an inkling it was going to happen from the get-go, but my rational mind told me I had once picked fruit for a living, clambering up and down ladders with effortless ease. Why the trepidation? But as I got near the top, I felt a strange lightheadedness, a sense of being off balance.

In the end, it was the ladder that toppled, not me. I managed to spring off the metal rungs, holding my bucket of pears in one hand, pushing off with the other, landing on the ground on my hands and knees as the ladder crashed like a just-cut tree beside me. ("Timber!") I wasn't hurt but I was shaken as I wondered, did I fall because I feared I would? Or did I blatantly disregard the inner voice that was warning me this was going to happen in the first place?

The truth is, I am a little scared of the dark days ahead. Summer was too fleeting. The air and the lake have gotten so cold so fast. I need a more gradual transition. I need to feel like I have a choice. But the seasons will change, regardless of my will or desires, and so I am doing my best to make the best of what's happening around me.

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Today, I picked the accident-inducing pears as well as apples, the last of the plums and blackberries, harvested some rosehips and planted a winter garden. I put kale, bok choi, gai lan, arugula, gem marigolds and winter lettuce seeds in the ground, not quite believing they will sprout and grow at this point in the year. It would have been better to have done this a few weeks ago, but today was the day and the sun will encourage upward growth until November 10th I hear. After that it's really only a hop, skip and a jump to winter Solstice…. Then it might be time for a winter vacation….

Why all this bargaining? Why am I valuing the light and the warmth more than the coming time of rest and stillness? Is it all those years I spent in Hawaii? Am I dreading the cold or am I frightened of the inwardness it breeds - the soft, anchored-in-self focus that could lead me to the next place on my path? Are my dreams of prolonging summer - the lake swims, the picnics, the bare arms and feet - simply an exercise in avoidance?

Photo by Kmax

Despite my doubts, my less than open (and covered) arms, the magic of autumn unfolds around me. Every night a stag comes and munches apples that have fallen from the tree beside my window. I marvel at his appetite and the way he rolls the whole fruit around in his mouth as if savouring its juice before enthusiastically devouring it.

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

One night, he ate from 9:00 pm 'til 2:00 in the morning as I sat at my desk typing on my laptop, just two feet away from his feasting, listening to him crunch and munch and fart - yes - deer fart. Every now and then he would cast me a meaningful glance through the window as if to say "I'm okay with this if you're okay. Can't believe you let all these apples fall to the ground and that you're not out here eating them too. That little box you're sitting in front of must be really delicious..."

I begin to feel with this deer the kind of quiet kinship that happens with well-married couples. We are engaged in our own worlds yet offer each other steady companionship. We are separate, yet deeply connected.

I flashback to swimming with Pearl in Kapoho Bay, Hawaii, a few weeks ago… Pearl - the jewel-backed Great Grandma of all sea turtles. She is moving gracefully, slowly below me, flapping her fins like baby angel wings. I move my arms in unison with her flippers and pretend that I am flying. Pearl - a gentle, steady presence; no chatter, no discord, just waves of deep peace. It is so easy to find my sense of inner balance as I swim with her.

Dolphins are a different story. It is our first morning at Ho'okena and we stumble out of our tents to a bay full of them. As I swim out, I am bathed in a cacophony of squeaks and whistles. I am immediately flanked by two of the male scouts or elders - Cookie, who has cookie cutter shark bites on his dorsal fin and tail and Rumplestiltsken, who has a rumpled-looking scar on his left side. I send them love and they stick with me for a long time, keeping about 5 or 6 feet between us.

Suddenly, they vanish and I am surrounded by the mother and baby dolphins, enveloped by them. They are so close, I cannot move my arms, or choose my own direction; I can only swim in synchronicity with them, a part of the pod. One of the adults rolls over and shows me her silvery white belly and genital slit.

Spinner Dolphins
Photo: Leigh Hilbert

I begin to feel crowded by the dolphin on my left. For the first time ever, I want them to spread out, give me some room, but they seem oblivious to my need. My mind jumps to the sign my headlamp flashed on the night before, the one posted by my campsite with the picture of the dolphin with an open mouth and very sharp teeth that warned "Marine Mammals can be dangerous."

"What if it's true?" I think, a part of me not believing that I could even entertain such a notion, "What if the dolphin beside me snaps and tries to bite my hand off?" I know my fear is sad and ridiculous. I've been having peaceful, beautiful, life-transforming swims with dolphins for years, but on a primal, unconscious level, it persists.

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Earlier, before the fear surfaced, I had been thinking it would be fun to see some dolphin bubbles. As if she had heard my thought and now hoped to appease me, a dolphin begins to blow clouds of little, cheerful bubbles under my fear-filled belly. At last, the group of dolphins moves away and Rumplestiltsken and Cookie reappear.

"What was that all about?" I ask them abashedly.

"This is your work now," they answer, "to notice when you are responding with fear to things that could nourish or bless, heal or delight you; to notice how this fear limits your joy and the depth of joy you allow into your life and reap from your experiences. We just wanted to point this out to you… By the way, your need to be in control of things stems from this deep-rooted fear of the unknown. The way to heal it is to focus on the joy and beauty in your relationships and in your experiences. Be with them in the moment instead of trying to second-guess the future or hash out the past."

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Do dolphins talk? In my world they do and they have. And so, I sit and watch a deer munching apples under a near full harvest moon thinking about fear and balance, about welcoming the gifts of the descending darkness as I navigate my own internal world of shadow and light. I think about the stag. Does he trust me, or is his desire to devour my sweet, fallen fruit so strong, that it overrides or perhaps transforms his instinctual fear?

Food for thought….

I think about Pearl and the dolphins, the blessed wild creatures that have welcomed me into their world and taught me Great Love. I think about being underwater, immersed in an interplay of dark and light, the sun's rays illuminating me from above as I swim into the depths of the unknown. Perhaps autumn is a transition time, a time to gently prepare ourselves to move beneath the surface to discover our true selves.

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

May your journey be bountiful, gentle and good.
Blessed Be,

Oona

Photo by Kmax

Something different for my near Summer Solstice Newsletter - a link to a simple picture story I created on my fledgling Facebook site today.

Let's journey together from Spring to Summer, from possibility to full bloom... Just click on this link to receive Beltane's Blessing:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=6356&l=eb8f8&id=696580924

Click on the first image in the album, then hit the blue "next" in the upper right hand corner until you return to the first image you looked at. Then click here and follow the same steps outlined above:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=6358&l=4bc3b&id=696580924

to journey with me from Springtime to Summer. Yeah! Summer is a comin' in. My favorite season is almost here!

May yours be filled with good books and cool shade, strawberries, (any berries), corn on the cob, picnics, green lakes, sand between your toes, bare skin, verdant gardens, lingering sunsets, stargazing, frozen delights, music, sweet music, and time to just be!

Love,

Oona

Photo by Kmax

I know I have been silent. It's been a winter of tremendous change. I feel like Rip Van Winkle, like I've been asleep for 40 years, and am only now awakening to see the fresh, green leaves upon the trees.

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

My life changed last November, with the passing of my mother. I played my harp for her and sang and she left us with a smile on her face. Then I decended into sorrow and loss - a still and quiet place - a womb of a different sort.

As winter's turned to spring, the mist of grief and dream-like displacement I've been experiencing has slowly lifted. For the first time in a long while, I can feel the music of the natural world around me.

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

Today I went for a walk in a wooded area bordered by meadows. There was such a simple, undisturbed order to this place; I sensed I was the only person around for miles. The forest smelled of dry fir needles. A stag peered at me through a cedar bough, then went crashing off into the shadows. I moved out towards the pasture, sidestepping boggy areas bright with young skunk cabbage. Grazing lambs stopped and stared. An eagle circled overhead.

I walked towards the sea. The grass by the water was warm and inviting, all dappled green and mossy softness. I lay down on it and dreamed.

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

When I was ready to go, I decided to take a different route, a clear wide path that appeared to be heading in the right direction. I thought it might help me avoid the mud. And that is when I fell into the Faerie Loop.

I was following that clear wide path, when I noticed a trail off to the right. It was going the same direction as the path I was on, and my feet were eager to take it. As I stepped onto the trail, I was enveloped in the aroma of butterscotch and willow. I stopped to rub the leaves of a cluster of bushes to see if I could find the source of the scent, then continued on the trail in a straightforward direction. It led me up onto a rocky knoll and down again, then past a small hut used to shelter sheep. It meandered between the woods and the meadow and over the ruins of a cedar log fence, until it intersected with the wider path I had originally been on. I continued on this path for a minute or so until I saw a trail off to the right. It was going the same direction as the wide path I was on. Once again, my feet were pulled to it.

I stopped again to smell the sweet aroma and crush some leaves between my fingers. I climbed up a rocky knoll and down again, and passed a sheep shelter. It was all looking uncannily familiar. I walked between the forest and the meadow until; once again, I saw the very same trail going off to the right. My feet started to take it. With effort, I made them stop. I had a sneaking suspicion that I would be walking that trail forever if I didn't change my course.

I decided to stay on the wide path, but it seemed to be heading in the wrong direction. The sun was almost setting and I couldn't sense the ocean. Befuddled and disoriented, I started getting nervous. I climbed up onto a big rock to get my bearings and saw some power lines in the distance. I began to walk towards them. As I rounded a corner, a family of huge, longhaired bulls with sharp, curly horns blocked my path. They looked like woolly mammoths, but seemed docile enough, except for the one making a strange growling sound in his throat. But there was no turning back. I hurried past them and eventually made it back to the road, my car, and home.

Later, as I mused on the Faerie Loop, I began to see it as a metaphor. This past winter I've struggled with the sensation of having been misguided. I've hungered for the sweet and seductive familiarity of the Faerie Path. Even if it wasn't going to take me to where I truly wanted to be, its beauty intoxicated me. I wanted to be enchanted.

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

But Life had other plans.

"Wake up!" She called, "If you don't have the gumption to choose a new path, I'll do it for you."

And so she lead me to higher ground and reminded me of my power. She tested me by placing a herd of bulls in my path.

With infinite grace, she lead me home.

Oona

Photo: Leigh Hilbert

There is something about a blank page that sings of the open road. I stare unseeingly at the parchment screen of my laptop and my mind gently drifts northwards. Conical, lichen-strewn hills are silhouetted by an endless sky. A bumpy strip of gravel twists further than the eye can see and I am standing with my sister, packs mercifully off our backs, thumbs ready for the cloud of dust approaching on the horizon. Another vehicle is heading our way as we hitch towards the Arctic Circle. A semi chugs to a halt, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from the trucker's lips.

“Wher’ya headin’?” he yells over the engine’s grunts and shudders.

“Wherever you are!” my sister Carol smiles, and I look at her with admiration, this sometimes cautious schoolteacher turned avid adventurer before my eyes.

Cruising the Dempster in Jimmmy's semi

Without even weighing the risks of second-hand smoke, we heave our packs in tandem up to the trucker overhead and climb into his sleeper, relieved to be on our way after a strange night and a late start out of Dawson City.

I was posing for a snapshot in front of Klondike Kate's when a small, dark woman shuffled towards me, dragging her over-laden shopping bags on the ground.

Klondike Kate's, Dawson City

“May I help you?” I asked, moving towards her as if an invisible thread was pulling me to her aid.

“Oh, yes! Where please is de Cath-olic Church?”

I recognized her accent and her desperation. In 1986, after spending two years in war torn Nicaragua, I returned to Vancouver to work with refugees and went through my own throes of culture shock. I didn’t need to hear her words to know her story.

“I will help you find the church,” I answered in Spanish and felt a great weight roll off her shoulders and hover over mine.

Never mind that this was meant to be a night of celebration. We were honouring the 25th anniversary of my original Yukon expedition – my first taste of freedom at age 16. I hoped this trip would help me reclaim the sense of possibility I'd first felt here in the north and offer a fresh perspective on the unanswered questions that were surfacing in my life. With any luck, this journey would put me solidly on a road I could navigate for the next 25 years. My pilgrimage was slotted to begin with a night spent gambling and carousing at Diamond Tooth Gerties and now someone who’s life seemed even more muddled than mine was plopped right in the middle of my path.

We'd hoped our night at Gertie's would be like this one at the Red Onion in Skagway, Alaska

“I am lost,” said Rosa as she looked bewilderedly at Dawson’s unpaved roads and painted wooden storefronts and shivered as an unseasonably early frost turned the bleached wooden sidewalks to silver. I shifted the bulk of her Webster’s Atlas of North American Roadmaps in my arms. We were heading to the priest’s house, situated right beside the Catholic Church.

The priest wasn’t home, so we settled her in a warm alcove of the unlocked church and went to track him down. We were told we might find him at Gerties; he often went there to watch the cancan show.

It’s hard to enjoy the licentious debauchery of a gambling hall when the purpose of your visit is to look for a priest. I’d planned on savouring my return to this spot where I’d tasted my first Tang screwdriver and reveled in being the bell of the ball, but I’d made a promise to Rosa. Soon, all of Gerties staff knew her story – a Mexican woman who’d traveled for 6 days by bus and inadvertently arrived at the very last stop – Dawson City. She’d thought she’d find work here, make a bundle to send back to her family in Vera Cruz. A different sort of gold rush had her in its grasp and it was clear that her long anticipated destination wasn’t at all what she’d expected.

Eventually we brought Rosa back to Gerties, bought her a slice of vegetarian pizza, (“Pork and beef do me damage,” she’d confided in me shyly) and then I ventured off alone into the frosty night to see if the priest had made it home yet. I found him in the church changing a light bulb, less than sympathetic to Rosa’s plight. I returned to the casino, disillusioned and defeated and learned that the coat check girl had offered Rosa her couch.

It was nearly 2:00AM when my sister and I, knowing Rosa was safe and warm for the night, took the boat across the river and crawled into our tent. The light of the full moon was obscured by a haze of smoke. I was cold all night.

The next morning we couldn’t pull ourselves out of our cozy sleeping bags until nearly afternoon. As the sun tried to break through the blanket of smoke and make it feel like August instead of October, we packed up, had breakfast, took the ferry back across the Yukon River and patiently hitched out of town. It took us until 4:00PM to get to the start of the Dempster Highway. So when the trucker stopped and offered us a ride we were ecstatic. Surely no one else would be starting the 7-9 hour drive towards Inuvuk at this time of day. We lurched along, breathing in second-hand smoke, and I felt a strange mix of gratitude, vulnerability and unchartered bliss as we headed up the highway towards the Arctic Circle.

The intrepid hitchikers make it to the ArcticCircle in record time

Like I said, I’d been here before. Twenty five years ago, the first summer the Dempster was open, two high school friends and I met a couple of German fellows in Dawson and they crammed us into the back of their Volkswagen bug, along with 5 packs, camping gear, food and a couple of spare tires. The vehicle had no shocks. I vaguely remember sitting on Karen’s lap, jerking up and down like her legs were springs. Finally, we’d had enough.

“Let us off here,” we cried somewhere north of the scenic Tombstone Mountains. “We’re too squished! We’ll find another ride!”

“Here?” they asked dubiously, with raised eyebrows.

“Yes, here, it looks like as good a place as any to hitch a ride,” we announced as we pulled our well-lodged body parts out of the car.

Three days passed without a single vehicle in sight. Toula started to worry.

“Isn’t