I have skipped a few weeks of blog entries (our intent is to send one out each Monday) because I’ve been immersed in a moving moving process, slowly and lovingly ending my nearly 7 years in a “hobbit house” apartment in Saratoga. I have lived amid three generations of a wonderful, inspired family that has for years nurtured a magical property. The human relationships and activities (such as Thursday lunch salon and impromptu Sunday afternoon musical soirees in the “great hall”) and the natural ones anchored by giant oaks and the creek have fed me and, I dare say, encouraged me to become a different person.
This subtly altered me has now arrived at another sweet cottage—this one in a pine woods just outside Nevada City, a two-minute skip to the house where my 8-month-old grandson lives with his amazing parents. I deeply feel the rightness of the move, even as I feel the blessings of the place I have left behind.
This new place, in the Sierra foothills near the mighty Yuba River, carries for me the flavor of Native American origins, pioneers, gold miners. The land is more pristine than the Bay Area, yet clearly searches for its own balancing. What will the nature spirits have to say about it? And how will I cultivate the relationship that will allow me to hear their messages?
I have already found a hairdresser friend here, and when she was making her noble contribution to the new “me” I told her about helping Barbara with the gnome blog. She said, “Do you believe in gnomes?” I blurted out a “yes!” and then explained that I haven’t really seen any but believe that others do and am ever opening to the possibility that I can learn how. I confessed that when Barbara suggested I write the blog under my own name I began a process of coming out of the closet as a gnome-believer. So, even though the blog doesn’t have many readers yet, there’s no going back now.
However, I have to say that I have been having a little struggle getting back into this world of nature spirit possibility, with skeptical specters drifting through my head, like that of my oldest brother, the geo-physicist of ultra-scientific mind. Then this morning, a friend of my daughter and son-in-law, visiting with his family from Taos, told a story about repairing a strange violin for a friend and walking across the mesa to deliver it, playing as he went. He suddenly found himself “channeling” music that was totally strange to him, and it seemed to be coming from someone who had played the instrument before. A golden eagle hovered overhead. This fellow is a biologist, ornithologist, firefighter, BLM law enforcer—no one woozy at all. So I came back to my cottage and started to write, the air cleared again for the intuitive, remarkable path.