Tammy Vitale’s art displayed at Transient Crafters’ Garden Room, Charlottesville, VA

Hello Dear Readers!  Thank you all for your visits and comments during my pre-posted absence.  It is wonderful to know that there are connections even when we are apart!  (but then everything is connected, right?!).

Retreat was lovely.  Awesome.  Inspiring.  Rejuvenating.  Clarifying.  and more, I’ve just run out of adjectives.  Should any one of you get the opportunity to join a Christine Kane retreat, especially if you are in search of a next step, a current space, or just some room to think, give yourself a gift and go.  Don’t think about it.  Just go.  Did I mention this is my birthday gift to myself?  I turn 59 on March 22 and I can’t think of a better way to treat myself.  If you can’t get to a retreat, read her blog.  And by all means by her music and listen to the words.

Walks and multiple Artist Dates to Asheville, Biltmore, Black Mountain – NEVER have I seen such spectacular art just scattered everywhere.  A Gallery on every corner.  Energy swirling.  Ideas percolating.  Mountains.  Streams.  Quail.  Birds.  Horses.  Dogs.  A sky so dark the stars look close enough to touch.  Sharing space with amazing women.  One of whom shared my birthdate! only 4 years younger.  Great food.  Quiet. Space. Dreaming.  Intention.  First steps to what comes next.

Of course I am playing catch up with everything else – all good.  But in order to give everything its time and space I must make this short.  Here’s a promise of things to come:  muvees of Asheville, art, Bend of Ivy Lodge.  Worth waiting for! And another – I’ll be around to visit all your wonderful blogs and comment within the week – I can’t wait to start catching up!

thought for the day:  Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you.  You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is.  The fact is;  You don’t know what it is.  you have only covered up the mystery with a label.  Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable.  this is because it has unfathomable depth.  All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg.

Underneath the surface appearance, everything is not only connected with everything else, but also with the Source of all lie out of which it came.  Even a stone, and more easily a flower or a bird, could show you the way back to the Course, to yourself.  Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth:  Awakening to your Life’s Purpose