As a person who talks to dead people and who has tended toward disembodiment herself, I have some different words to add to the celebration and mourning pouring out for Judith Kitchen --

• Wife, mother, grandmother.
• Cofounder, with her husband, poet Stan Sanvel Rubin, of the Rainier Writing Workshop (the MFA program from which I graduated).
• Writer in every genre, with a style both limpidly readable and fiercely intelligent.
• Superbly influential critic, mentor, editor
• Supernaturally gifted "matchmaker" of mentors and students, and so inaugurator of many valuable and productive literary relationships
• Founder of Ovenbird Press; champion of fine writing in a changing literary culture
• Someone who never suffered folly gladly, but who never made a fool out of anyone

I create this to be a writer-friendly and writing-friendly blog. I hold space for interest in writers and what they write, and in all aspects of the writerly life. And from the get-go, I intend this to be a writer-positive  blog.

I run into the same challenges as any other writer. And rather than commiserate-commensurate, I take the above-mentioned advice from Shakespeare and reframe--how am I looking at it? Can a  challenge be exciting instead of disheartening? YES!

Since it's full moon today, I want to share a bit about this month's Sufi new moon meditation. That's not as illogical as it sounds: I've now had two weeks, since new moon, to practice the meditation and harvest something to say about it!

The meditation is a variation on alternate-nostril breathing, commonly used in yogic disciplines. It seems appropriate that a practice that involves harmonizing our own two reflecting hemispheres be associated with the moon, whose daily existence in our lives is an enactment of the subdivisions of a sphere.

This morning I woke up with blanket. Blankets plural, actually. All the blankets I own were piled on top of me, folded double, and I still hadn't slept well for being goose-bump cold. It's getting into the 40s at night (and I'm a very chilly girl). And yet the sun shines by day, it warms up enough that I cling to leaving the windows open wide, letting the air dance through the little house.

Yesterday I finally, reluctantly, closed my back door. Save during a couple thunderstorms, it's been open the whole time I've lived here up to now.

It's November, after all! In Alaska, I'd be wearing multiple layers all over; it's snowing there.

Happy Monday!

Moon day: today's moon is waxing gibbous 89% visible. "waxing"=increaing in size; "gibbous"=convex, protuberant (i.e. more than half full)

I feel it's a good idea to know what the moon's doing, and Monday being moon day being start-the-week day it's a good reminder to invoke that lunar energy into the flow of work and life.

I have an intention to be open to synchronicity. It happens all the time anyway, so why not ask for it? Yes, I'm aware of the objection that I'm autosuggesting it, that we see what we want to see to some extent--but why on earth not? If I whisper a prayer to see a message about peace and then find a message about peace on my way to the grocery store, my prayer is looking for peace, and finding it! 

Sometimes I make specific requests, sometimes I just put an idea out there in a more general way. Lately, I've been thinking about doing a parasite cleanse, probably a couple weeks from now when I finish the current diet (which is a red-orange-yellow-white-spectrum-focusing diet whereby I don't eat any green/blue/brown/black food; I have eleven days left of 45). I'd been assembling the herbs that speak to me for such a cleanse. Then I found myself at a park, totally by chance, looking at what I thought were black walnut trees! 

If you read my old blogs, you won't be surprised to find musings about words themselves here quite often.

Today, I woke up with "deadline"

• It's Halloween, the Eve of All Souls' Day = Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos.
• I have a slew of deliverables for different jobs, due soon.
• If I miss my deadline, nobody dies! True fact! And yet I'm not alone (am I?) in experiencing the exhilaration of pushing the deadline, the value of this in making sure something gets done.