Words in Woods ... connecting with the writer of Wood Wife

Do you believe coincidences are accidental?

Today has been a good day among the days and nights that have been mine for 60 plus years of days and nights.  Our nights of sleeping in the screened tent are over, at least for the while, and perhaps the season.  They were incredible nights of being with the night sky and the passage of Hina across the heavens.  This morning, Venus was so close to Hina I was shocked to hear Pete say neither Venus, nor Earth has it's own light, so of course, it was the Sun that shone so brightly on the planet.  Really?  Onto the pages of this virtual page, I put the thinking that goes through me and the passage of time seems to include these recordings as if to comfort me with the promise that these tiny moments matter ... even as they pass and maintain no light on their own. 

It was Market Sunday at the Tilth, our once a week morning jaunt into joint ventures with farmers and neighbors setting up their summer stock of Romano beans, round zucchini, bushels of beans, tiny sweet blue corn and purple cauliflower.  Garlic and chocolate chip cooks sell without prices on them, and the day's entertainment set up there microphone stands and gather under the awning for music-making.  We clean the two restrooms making them a safe and chemical-free place to do what humans do, and raise the bamboo poles with colorful flags to beckon Sunday shoppers. 

Before and after the Market, I am here to write, blogging at one or the other of the spots that catch the scent and rhythm of a life that is affected in sometimes large and often now, less debilitating measure.  When it all started -- blogging, it was mostly a life affected largely by the illness.  Somehow, the blogging has been a perfect form of medicine.  This evening after I had watered my row of gorgeous green Blue Lake Beans who are climbing up a newly-fashioned trellis made from twenty-foot fir saplings thinned from a friend's near-by forest, I came to check on a another piece of writing.  Writing that collaborates with spirit, and a willing adventureess.  There was no reply on her end, so I sought the blog space of a writer who has tapped the mythic in me.  That writer is Terri Windling, and the book which did tap me was Windling's first novel WOOD WIFE.  After more than 5 years of not being able to pick up and read books, I did and was treated to the glorious world of myth in the hands of an artist who spoke from the cauldron.  The book sat on the FOR SALE shelf in my local library.  It was $2.00, printed in large print, and marked Discarded from the San Jose Library. I bought it, toted it home, let it air on my Gypsy wagon porch shelf, and within weeks (a very short time in my world) I was reading WOOD WIFE.  It was the perfect fit for a writer and keeper of story the first novel of Terri Windling.  Seek it out if you are in that place where real is fiction and fiction not quite the escape for your taste.

Today, this very good day in my life, I visited Terri Windling's blog and was treated to the latest version of this writer-artist's life.  A version that is somehow, not unlikely, it is a version that embraces the many fragilities possible in a life where words, art, media and worlds of here and there come together.  Today, I read Terri Windling's post entitled "On Blogging" and even before completing it, I am here to pen a connection and will publish it even before I sit to finish Windling's essay.  Blogging has brought me comfort, healing, bridges of transport and understanding across time.  It's why I can imagine illness as part though not all of a self; a piece of what creates a day, a night, one life.

Windling's post "On Blogging" which also includes reference to one of my other favorite artist-blogger Rima Staines can be found by linking here:  ttp://windling.typepad.com/blog/2011/02/on-blogging.html

Blogging may not be a beautiful word, but without doubt it is a word of transformative power ...