For a while now we've been seeing chickens in a large grassy field on our way home from shopping.  At first there were just a few chickens, but as time went on there seemed to be more and more of them each time we went by.  There was a sign saying "farm fresh eggs," but nobody seemed to be there.  However, the other day we finally saw a car parked in the driveway and decided to check the place out.

A warm and friendly man appeared and introduced himself, saying that he kept running out of eggs by late morning so he kept ordering more and more chickens.  It was heartening to learn that there is such a demand locally for eggs from free-range chickens!  He now has 400 chickens, several different breeds, and they are such a pleasure to watch!  The owner, a doctor, showed us where the refrigerator was and explained that he used the honor system - we could help ourselves any time and leave the money in a box by the refrigerator.  Amazing!  We bought two dozen.

We make a big effort to buy locally or organically (preferably both) grown/raised food whenever possible, out of love for Mother Earth.  And it is generally accepted that true free-range chickens do produce more nutritious eggs.  One study claims their eggs have one-fourth to one-third less cholesterol; one-fourth less saturated fat; two-thirds more Vitamin A; twice the Omega-3 fatty acids; three times more Vitamin E; and five times more beta carotene.

Up until now we've been buying eggs from so-called free-range chickens at the regular grocery store, and paying more for them, too, because of our consciences.  But now I understand that "free-range" can mean "that a commercial animal has access to the outdoors for just minutes a day, with their diet regulated by their producer."  Now that's disturbing...

So, I went home ecstatic now that I can see with my own eyes the truly free-range chickens who lay the eggs we'll be eating from now on!

In the past few years the month of September has brought major changes to my life.

Three years ago, my body-mind came out of the Dark Ages with a visit to a compassionate neurologist who started me on a medication regimen that got my migraines "under control" for the first time in my life.  I'm still getting used to a life without unrelenting pain.  After three years it still feels foreign and new.  Knowing that I'm still triggering migraines but that I can abort them within an hour with some Zomig has made me very grateful for Science.

Two years ago my husband survived a heart attack and triple bypass surgery.  Even more gratitude for Science and the kindness of doctors.  But there was a negative in this, too.  Even though we had (and still have) expensive health insurance, it didn't cover much when all was said and done, and if it wasn't for the kindness and generosity of my father and Tim's aunt helping us out we might have lost our home to pay our medical bills by now.  We could have been like the thousands of others President Obama hears from every day...  This makes me uneasy because with his heart disease Tim is likely to have another heart attack sooner or later.  And even with prescription coverage we still pay about $200 a month for seven prescriptions between us.  When will people understand that public insurance and health care is not to be feared?  That it can coexist with private insurance the way public and private universities coexist?

One year ago I found Gaia on the internet!!!  I never had to become grateful for Spirit, but I've become so grateful to have found so many kindred spirits here!!  Friends from all over the world who have quickly become very dear to me and who I never would have met otherwise!  Friends who have introduced me to Reiki and who love quotes and believe in synchronicity, intuition and magic...  What a beautiful, safe, wonderful place this is!

And now this September we're rearranging our condo!  My sister spends several nights a week here because of her job and sleeping arrangements have been complicated and unsatisfactory since Tim's heart attack - it's a long story involving snoring and heating and air conditioning and constantly changing schedules and trying to accommodate everyone's health problems and requirements for a good night's sleep.  The past few days for some reason the three of us just started brainstorming and have come up with an amazing plan!  (And wondering why we didn't think of this sooner...  Sometimes people can get so overwhelmed by a situation that they just keep muddling along feeling powerless to do anything about it...)  There will even be a place to set up my new Reiki table.  Our son Nate is coming over tomorrow to help start the process of moving furniture - every room in the house (except the bathroom and the laundry room!) will be very different when we're done and it will probably take a few long days of hard work.  When we're done improving the functionality I'm looking forward to the pleasure and challenge of redecorating with a new focus on Spirit!

"Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds."
~ Arthur Eddington

In the past, too often from the wrong place, from dogma or doctrine, whether religious or scientific.  More often lately from my inner-knowing, intuition, and synchronicity, which I've finally learned to trust.  And I've also come to accept and be content with what Thoreau so wisely stated: "A good question is never answered."

And as Barry Lopez said: "There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."

For some reason this poem popped into my mind this morning...   It's a bit of nostalgia - I fell in love with Edna St. Vincent Millay when I was a teen.  Years later I found a statue of her in Camden, Maine...  Seems appropriate for this time of year.

That's the Weather Channel's assessment of the air quality here today.  Add a high pollen count and it looks like another day inside.  Augusts are never easy for me...

But I'm making the best of it.  Yesterday while doing my Reiki I started thinking about a book I bought at the Book Barn a few months ago, Wellsprings of the Deer by Montague Whitsel.  On the cover was a picture of a stag standing in a winter forest with a body of water behind him, no doubt a wellspring, and since Deer is my animal spirit guide I judged the used book by its striking cover and brought it home.  But I've been too busy and overwhelmed to read it.  So yesterday I started reading it between loads of laundry and had a hard time putting it down to get back to work.  I know nothing about Celtic spirituality, but I was delighted to learn that deer represent seekers!  And wellsprings are "symbolic of hidden psychic treasures and the spiritual depths of life itself."  And so I begin my exploration of another segment of my spiritual journey.

It seems there is a potential new threat to our forests here in Connecticut, especially for the maples, birches, elms and willows, and our governor has designated August "Asian Longhorned Beetle Awareness Month."

"The Asian Longhorned Beetle has no natural enemies and there is no effective insecticide to control it.  Once a tree is attacked by the beetle, the only remedy is to cut it down.  It has the potential for more damage than infestations by gypsy moths, Dutch elm disease and the chestnut blight combined.  It has already been discovered in neighboring states so we must all be extremely vigilant and take the necessary precautions to prevent the spread of an infestation. We risk losing one of our most precious and beautiful resources if this destructive insect takes hold."
~ Gov. Rell

http://www.aphis.usda.gov/plant_health/plant_pest_info/asian_lhb/index.shtml

Gov. Rell didn't mention another insect pest, the hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae), also from Asia, which has been slowly and steadily killing so many hemlocks across the state, including a large percentage of the trees surrounding my dad's house.  I was lucky to grow up in th woods, and it's been sad watching this gradual devastation take hold.  It's been years since I've seen the gentle snow-covered hemlocks of my childhood winters.  Just skeletons of these once majestic trees remain standing there, stripped of their beauty, for a few years until they finally fall and finish dying.

When my kids were very young I well remember the gypsy moth infestations.  One of my sons spent a lot of time doing what he considered to be his civic duty, jumping on and squashing the ones crawling on the ground.  We used to have to check and scrape off his sneakers when he came inside.  Not sure how that plague disappeared - it didn't kill the whole tree, just ate all the leaves in a bad year, and the tree could recover next season.  I think the weather affected the gypsy moth caterpillar population explosions.

My grandparents treasured their elm tree, a rare survivor of Dutch elm disease, in their yard out on Cape Cod.  And my dad found a few chestnut tree saplings while visiting relatives in Pennsylvania.  He took one and brought it home and planted it near his bedroom window.  It's as tall as the house now and he loves to tell us over and over again how he came by it.  I'm glad it's there to comfort him in his decline.  We decorated it with flower garlands for Midsummer and brought him outside in his wheelchair to enjoy if for a while.

What would Connecticut be without our forests?  I can't even imagine it.  I hope the vigilance and precautionary measures that Gov. Rell is urging upon us will be followed...

I think I'm insatiably curious about certain things, like who my ancestors were or why people act a certain way and make the choices they do.  I'm very curious about what others think and about where different spiritual paths lead.  I'm curious about the wonders found in nature.  But I'm not at all curious about how a car engine or a computer works, just very thankful that there are people who are curious enough about them to keep them in working order!

to make clumsy attempts to move or regain one's balance
to move or act clumsily and in confusion
to struggle to move or obtain footing
to proceed or act clumsily or ineffectually

The above definitions perfectly describe our lives the past five weeks.  This morning it hit me: I'm floundering...

Everyone needs a break from the routine, but right now I desperately need a routine from which to take that break!!!  Tim's lucky to have a job so I shouldn't be complaining, but he's kind of dangling between two jobs and his hours have been wildly unpredictable and erratic.  Night shifts, day shifts, half shifts, a few hours here, a few hours there, or even fifteen hours, a little of this job, a little of that job...  He seems to have permanent jet lag.  Must be what it's like being married to a doctor!  Things are supposed to settle down soon, when they fill his old temporary spot, and I might believe it when it happens, but even then I'm not so sure...  It's been hard to know when to do what, like preparing a meal.  Chicken and brown rice at 6:00 a.m.?  Well, all right then, but I need some warning and an hour to pull it off!  Yesterday I wound up taking two three hour naps during the daytime.  Honestly, I don't know how much longer we can keep this madness going...

Maybe I needed a good dose of floundering to gain some appreciation for the monotony of routine!

We had a wonderful time at Tim's family's gathering in Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.  Tim's stepdad died in December and somehow his widow, Liz, planned this beautiful memorial and get-together out in nature for his children and their families.  (He had two stepsons and four sons from his second marriage and four stepdaughters from his third marriage - and  all ten of them were there, including the two sons who live in Europe.)  It turns out that my "stepsisters-in-law" love hiking in the woods as much as I do and we were in blissful awe of the majestic mountain beauty surrounding us.  Skyland Resort (3,680 ft.) was more like a summer camp that a resort!  I was also impressed with the eco-friendliness of the management.  The bathroom had frequent visitors - spiders, the likes of which I had never seen before - and I was amused to read in a pamphlet, the day before we left, that there was an "Integrated Pest Management Team" I could have contacted to "take care of the situation."  I saw more deer each day than I had encountered in my whole life, and on one hike we were blessed to cross paths with a bear!  He was busy looking for food, overturning rocks for grubs, etc., but I finally got his attention and he looked right at me!  I was thrilled!  That wildflower in front of him we looked up; it's called fly-poison, a literal translation of "A. muscaetoxicum."  It's in the lily family and was blooming everywhere.  There was also a 33 acre meadow we visited twice.  Mid-day it was full of butterflies, but at dusk it was full of grazing deer for as far as the eye could see.  We hiked 1,000 feet down Whiteoak Canyon and it took us twice as long to get back up!  We flew kites, played croquet and darts, and talked with relatives for hours on end.  Tim & I were so exhausted from the excitement and activities that when we left for the 10+ hour drive home we were too exhausted to drive safely, so we stopped after a couple of hours at a hotel on the Maryland/Pennsylvania border and started out again the next day.  The mountains are spectacular, but it was good getting back to sea level and home again!

A week ago I drew a card telling me that my ancestral spirit guides were offering me guidance now and to pay close attention to signs and omens from them.  Three things have happened in the past week that seem like signs to me...

One morning my sister, who lives with my father, called and was quite upset because when she went in to get my father up for the day, he seemed to be disoriented and asked her to go get my mother, who died 18 years ago.  He had seen her and was convinced that she was in the next room.  And he totally refused to get out of bed that day.  My sister didn't know what to do.  But I'm thinking he probably did see my mother, as I sense that she's been around since my doe visited me in November, and had recently begun to think that part of the message she may have been trying to deliver to me was that she would be taking care of my father now.

Another morning my sister gave me a letter that had turned up out of the blue while she was cleaning house.  It was written by my grandfather to all of us, and was postmarked 25 days before the day my mother died.  It was a creative story about his model train village and what was going on there, written probably to cheer up my mother, his only daughter, who was dying of cancer.  He couldn't come to visit her because he had to care for my grandmother, who had dementia and was not yet in a nursing home.  It made me realize now how torn he must have felt between caring for his wife and his daughter.  Perhaps even similar to the way I feel now, torn between helping to care for my frail father and staying home to support my husband, who hasn't had a chance yet to fully recover and change his lifestyle since his heart attack a year and eight months ago.  It's been a painful choice to make, but I think now my grandfather helped me to make it, and I'm happy to report that my husband and I are now getting walks into our routine and pills taken on time.  His doctor has referred us to a dietitian, too, and I know none of this would have happened if I was still running up to my father's several days a week.

Yesterday, another sign.  My sister and I are excitedly planning our third annual Scandinavian-style Midsummer party in her garden.  Last year a Luna moth made an appearance for the event.  This year I thought we might try a frozen vodka.  (You freeze a bottle of vodka in an empty milk carton surrounded by flowers suspended in water, which should look pretty when removed from the carton...)  I went to the package store to get a bottle of vodka and there, to my surprise and delight, all by itself on the shelf, was a blue bottle (my favorite color and I collect blue bottles) of Christiania vodka from Norway.  I am most drawn to my Norwegian heritage and our 5th great-grandmother's name was Christiania!  (She was born about 1748 in Brevik, Norway.)  Maybe in time I will understand if Christiania has a message for me too...