Different strokes, wonderful folks

I'm thrilled to say that my back is pretty much a non-issue now. It's healed to the point that it is not restricting me and hardly twinges at all! I was even able to use the Nordic Track and ride the recumbent bike yesterday for the first time in 9 days. I'm SO happy about that!

I finished putting together the Winter 2005 Rising Times (newsletter) today. I've been working on it since at least a week before my last blog entry, and quite intensively over the weekend. Even though I really love writing it, it feels really great to get it behind me. It is now in the hands of Tony, my aforementioned wonderful web guy, who will format it and get it ready for posting on the site and emailing.

My new buddy, designer Ellen Kennon, and I are continuing with our online meetings of The Mutual Admiration Society. I have featured her and her paints in an article for Rising Times, and she is talking about Recreating Eden in the opening of her own winter newsletter, Living Well. (She read it and LOVED it—wait till you read the cool stuff she has to say about it! Yay!) That reciprocation was not planned at the conscious level, but came about very synchronistically (not that big a surprise considering the way I first connected with her!). I was sitting here one day, week before last, thinking how, in my newsletter, I’d like to include an article on color therapy by her, excerpted from her newsletter archives. At that very moment, an email came in from her saying she’d been cogitating for awhile over her own next newsletter, and knew there was something else that needed to be in it, and that it had just dawned on her that it was supposed to be about me and Recreating Eden! As for my part, instead of just linking to one of her articles to include in Rising Times, I decided to write about our interesting connection and about the uniqueness and power of the paints themselves. It’s a fun article that I hope you’ll read when the newsletter comes out—hopefully, early Wednesday morning if all goes well. If you haven’t signed up for the newsletter, don’t delay!

I don’t think I’ve mentioned lately that Matty, who I talked about in the November 24^th and 29^th blog entries—you know, the one whose online journal I got hooked on—and I have kept up a nice, loose correspondence. It’s really been interesting to see how alike we are and at the same time, how very different. She is living a fairly high-adrenaline, vagabond spiritual warrior’s life, because apparently her soul needs the drama and thrill of living without a tether and frequently leaping off cliffs without a net. Me? I do my own versions of untethered and leaping but it just doesn't look quite so dramatic from the exterior. I feel like getting up everyday and announcing to the world my vision of Heaven on Earth is about as close to the edge as I can get! I’ve often wondered if I was stoned to death or crucified or killed in some other grisly way in another life for being a very vocal, radical threat to the status quo, as it sometimes feels heart-thumpingly dangerous to say the things I say. I realize they’re not nearly as outrageous-sounding as the teachings of many new age folks, but for a girl who spent her whole life doing what she could to fit in and be thought of as “normal” in hopes that no one would notice she was very different inside, coming out of hiding and saying stuff like “when you raise your frequency to a certain level, you’ll become invisible to others vibrating at a lower frequency”—and saying it to some pretty mainstream folks—it seems quite risky! So does putting your heart, soul, 9 or 10 years, and a huge chunk of your fiscal resources into one small book and trusting that, with enough nurturing, it will take on a life of its own and prove to be a gamble that was worth it with no clue if it will actually ever have a heartbeat (I see now that it does--hooray!), much less, achieve its mission. But it sure is fun living vicariously through Matty—especially since she’s so open with her thoughts and her heart. She’s got new journal entries online now, by the way. If you’re paying attention, you’ll see some philosophical differences between us, too. Her latest journal entries about these tumultuous times, and my newsletter article on the same topic called “Changing the Channel on Fearful Prophecy” are in pretty big contrast! That’s part of the beauty of this amazing family of humanity we’re a part of. We can have our differences and still experience sweet soul connections!