Making space for voice

This spring in the woods I am wearing electric blue boots (waterproof, winter boots) with fuzzy orange lining and trim of that same vibrant color. My feet are short and wide and my ankles need extra support so shoes are a challenge. When I find a style and brand that works I go for it! The first winter in the woods I found a pair in a size and width that suit me; I've worn them 24/7 for three years. The backs of the boots are frayed from the many ins and outs as I put the boots on, take the boots off. We don't wear shoes or boots inside and to get from one room to another in our world one must go out into the woods.

Those electric blue boots are getting their initiation during the first days of June. Strange time for initiating a pair of winter boots, but they work just fine for me and I say, "thank you." Back inside with my feet bare and my toes freed up I'm happy to be blogging again. The break has done me good and the little gray cells and my navigational tools for crossing borders of the imagination are ripe like the salmon berries. I gobble the ideas like hungry Robin Woman and pin the energy of salmon berry magic to the page to remember them, and pass them along here.

When I was little one of the toys I relished as a girl was the phonograph. We didn't own one but my cousins did. My cousins would visit and sometimes spend the night while their mother worked. She worked at a record store, Thayer's Music in Honolulu. Along with a phonograph my cousins brought records, story records. Records, music and story easily transported me into worlds not yet known. I imagined and though it would be years before I found my own, I would learn that I had a voice. Those early records, and the time spent listening, really listening was priming me.

Writer Terry Tempest Williams said this about receiving her first voice lesson. In a talk given in Bellingham, Washington, Williams spoke about her parents and their influence on her (and her brother's) life. Williams was addressing the audience and speaking about her book When Women Were Birds. The link below takes you to the presentation. She says about her mother's influence as voice teacher "Mother had her own intensity but it was contained." Williams then describes how she and her brother sat in front of the phonograph and listened to the orchestra and narration of Peter and the Wolf. "We were introduced to the distinctive voice of each character...Within those 30 minutes I receized my first tutorial on voice. All of us has one, and each voice is distinct."

In a serendipitous connection with Terry Tempest Williams (whose books I admit to not yet reading) I inhaled the common influence of music ... making space for voice. Knowing how music can feed us the oxygen of inspiration. The mana necessary to grow where we are planted at the time to make use of space and transcend it, and time as well. Reopening my blog feels like freedom to me. Freedom opens up space in my lungs and fuels my heart to feed me 'ea ... sovereignty. The voices of fiction that tinker with my imagination love the feel of my feel in fuzzy orange lined electric boots. In those boots, my feet are ageless and agile. "Reality is what it is, but perception is King," my astrologer Satori wrote that the other day and I love repeating it. "However you frame reality creates your experience and the mind and senses are key."

And the electric blue and orange boots ... What you think?

Terry Tempest Williams http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suPndViGWko