Here are some winter photos of my cozy cabin in the woods, taken in the last couple weeks after snow and ice storms.  You can tell the 2 ice storm photos from the 3 snow storm ones by how low very low the iced branches hung!  I am so grateful to be living here in this peaceful forest sanctuary, no matter the weather.

southern face of the cabin after the snowstorm

southern face of the cabin after the icestorm

western face of the cabin after the icestorm

western face of cabin after the snowstorm

south face of cabin after the snowstorm

My anxiety levels in general have been much lower in recent weeks, raising my HSP threshold for overstimulation, inspiring me to venture beyond my hermitage in recent weeks.  This positive shift in my mental comfort level has made it much easier and much more pleasant for me to visit that strange realm of places populated by more humans than trees.  I have been sober 13 years but in recent years had basically given up on AA meetings because my heightened sensitivity and anxiety had made such gatherings, once comforting, become painful.  Ironically, I had also given up on yoga classes for the same reason, as proximity to others’ energies shifted from neutral or beneficial to disruptive or upsetting for me.  But, in recent weeks I have been driving into the city on Tuesdays to attend first a yoga class at the YMCA (complete with luxurious hot shower) and then to an AA meeting.  Much to my delight, I am once again experiencing yoga class and AA as beneficial and positive!  And, in the AA meeting I had a happy reunion with an old friend from AA in Florida who unbeknownst to me had also moved here to Missouri!  

Not only have I had these successful forays out from my beloved sanctuary, but mental fog, angst, and depressed mood have also been keeping their distance recently which feels undescribably wonderful.  I continue to spend significant amounts of time out in the forest here each day no matter the weather and it has been such a sensuous delight.  We have had days in the 70′s interspersed that felt like early summer among cold snaps producing those glorious ice formations and an unusual but delightful 4″ snowfall.  Today I think it got into the 50′s, and very heavy rains from earlier this week had swollen the springs so that they gushed  generously forth, creating a magical babbling brook sound in the creekbed below.  It is always a miracle to me to see running water emanating from a bank of soil and rock.  Today May and I went to the site of the previously frozen waterfall and enjoyed the sound of water falling to the stone basin below while lying upon the soft breast of the earth warmed by the rays of the sun.  Birdsong and woodpeckers drumming and wind through the treetops were pleasant accompanied the sounds of moving water.  I lay on my stomach with my cheek on the earth and soaked in the earthy clean smell of the soil and fallen leaves and the sight of gloriously varied textures and colors of many types of moss and lichen just inches away from my face.  I feel endless gratitude at being able to be so fully embraced by mother earth.

Well, that cold snap we were having ended and it’s gotten up to 60 the last couple days.  I was surprised to see how slowly the ice formations I was photo-ing melted, but then, I was also surprised at how thick they were to start with.  I took advantage of the warmer weather to set stones in the little earthen/rock “stairway” I’ve been working on to prevent erosion from my “yard” to my trail.  Pictures will follow eventually.  I had dug some soil a while back and put it in a bucket to use when I was ready to set the stones and had covered it with some big flat slabs of rock fearing it might dry out too much, but apparently it swang the other way, turning overly soupy.  While it felt cold, it had a wonderfully satisfying muddy-clay texture that felt really good on my fingers so I mostly used just my bare hands to work it in, mixing in some drier soil as needed. 

While I was out there working, I heard rustling in the leaf litter that sounded more substantial than squirrels.  Despite the significant sound, it took me a while to spot the action, due to an excellent example of natural color camouflage.  Turns out it was one of those oddly-cute armadillos rooting around the hillside below me, apparently also taking advantage of this nice warm spell to come out of its burrow into the sun for a while.  I even watched it disappear just briefly into a burrow during its topside roamings, which I found delightful since I always wonder who, if anyone, is there inside those intriguing holes.  Sometimes I wish I was small enough to crawl in underground burrows and hollow trees to see what it is like in there and who is at home, but I doubt the residents would appreciate my nosiness.  Have they built nests in there, and if so from what?  What might they be doing or thinking, and are they in there alone or with companions?  Anyway, before long, I heard two other armadillos working opposite sides of the hillside above me, so there I found myself, surrounded by the little critters foraging about.  I decided there was a message for me here, so I did a little internet research on them to see what I could learn about them.

Armadillos have a small head with small eyes, short strong legs with long claws for digging, soft skin and fur on their unprotected bellies with the namesake “armored” plates elsewhere, a long scaly tail and a long sticky tongue.  When they are startled, or perhaps when they want to startle others like me, the armadillo can jump vertically 3-4 feet into the air; I have seen this feat myself and the first time I did I was quite dumbfounded!  I mean, they normally look a little clumsy and awkward like little tanks, but that was like seeing an armored ballerina jump lightly into the air!  They are primarily noctural but are sensitive to cold, so in the winter they are usually more active during the warmest part of the day.  They feed primarily on insects, but will eat some vegetable matter (including persimmon fruit which I have witnessed) and small reptiles or amphibians.  They really like water and can hold their breath for up to 6 minutes.  To cross bodies of water they can choose either to float and swim on top of the water or to walk underwater along the bottom!

Their average length and weight is 2.5 feet and 14 pounds.  When they give birth their litters are always made up of 4 same-sex genetically identical siblings from one single fertilized egg.  They cannot hibernate as they need to eat every day.  Their eyesight isn’t great but they can smell insects through 6-8 inches of dirt!  Their burrows are usually 2-3 feet below underground with the tunnel to their den can range from 2-15 feet in length, and they usually have more than one.  Other animals like rabbits, opossums, skunks frequently use abandoned armadillo burrows.  The armadillo is one of the oldest surviving mammals on earth, having lived here for 55 million years.  Many people complain because the burrowing of armadillos disrupts their fancy lawn or garden, but it does serve to aerate the soil and remove insects, and hey – who was here first?  Also, I feel compelled to point out that: The armadillo has lived here for 55 million years without significantly damaging Earth – we could learn a few things from this species about sustainable, low-impact living!

In Spanish, armadillo means “little armored one” which is an excellent
descriptor.  I looked up armadillo totem or medicine info and found
that many sites cite Armadillo as having strengths around protecting
one’s sacred space, setting healthy boundaries, empathy, and being
grounded.  For example, not allowing others to cloud our core purpose
or values; reflecting negative energies with flexible armor while
selectively allowing positive energies through to our more vulnerable
inner core.  Digging through the surface of things to see what is
beneath, discriminating what is real, discerning what is good.  Being
able to move intact through all elements and through other dimensions. 
When to focus on being open and sensitive and when to be more protected
and hidden.  Armadillo can help empathic individuals overly affected by
outside influences and energies.  Protecting the self without harming
others.  These are all lessons I can benefit from focusing on more as well!

Here is a photo of an armadillo foraging right in front of the cabin I originally posted with another entry on November 8, 2006.

My dog May who accompanies me on my woodsy wanderings…

And three more pictures of beautiful ice formations…

Nature in all her glory continues to astonish me every day.

Okay, so I like alliteration, I admit it.  You’ve probably noticed that if you’ve read many of my posts!  Anyway, here today is a tale about tresses.  I generally hate getting my hair cut, and here’s why:

1. All the little tiny hairs that poke me afterward and fall into my shoes until I shower and change;
2. Being in the hair place with all the chemical smells, and extreme focus on external appearance;
3. Spending money on my own external appearance, even though I usually like it better afterward;
4. Frequently having to insist, yes, I really DO want it that short, it grows back out again really FAST;
5. Frequently having to insist, no, I really do NOT want gel or mousse or styling, just comb and air dry;
6. Trying to figure out how much of a tip to give to not overspend but not seem like a cheapskate; and
7. Feeling like an oddball and awkward silence or awkward conversation (or both) with the hairstylist.

So sometimes (especially in the warmer months), I just shave my head at home and let it grow back out for many blissful non-haircutting months.  Otherwise, I tend to wait until my bangs obstruct my vision or I just feel too shaggy, and then I spontaneously stop by one of those cheap cuts places while in the city on errands; that way I don’t dread it beforehand.  While I often feel stylishly-challenged entering such places, it was worse than usual this last time.  It’s been so consistantly cold here for so much longer than usual that I had been skipping my winter kitchen sink bathing and hair washing routine.  When I first took off my hat
in the place that day I was still looking at the stylist’s face as she was talking, so I saw her eyes grow large in shock at the sight of my hair! 

[NOTE:  Since my dog and cat are quite oblivious to my looks, and I can go days or a week without seeing other humans, and I don't really have a good place in the cabin for a mirror, I can forget to observe the look of
my hair for days on end. 
On the day of the recent haircut, despite having been trapped under a hat during the
hour's drive to the city, my hair had rebounded remarkably well to stand straight up several inches tall in untamed glory upon removal of the hat.  It seems that enough hair oil had accumulated to act a bit like styling mousse, and I had been absentmindedly massaging my scalp and pulling my hair straight up periodically during the previous
few days -- unknowingly creating a full-headed mohawk effect.] 

Upon seeing
her horrified expression, I immediately looked into mirror and was QUITE shocked myself at the sight, but by then of course it was too late to mitigate it.  So, I tried to act nonchalant while recognizing that oddness of this encounter:  the un-fashion conscious woods-dweller in flannel, jeans, and hiking boots with nightmare hair meeting the highly fashionable femme with makeup, stylish attire and hair clearly coiffed by intention rather than happenstance.  I was quite embarrassed by the state of my hair, especially in such an appearance based setting.  I told
her the whole thing about living alone in the woods, and the cold-snap affecting my hair-washing.  She shampooed it twice in fact without my
asking her too; I’m guessing she has never felt it necessary to do that before!  By then, she seemed even more shocked by my
lifestyle than my ill styled hair, seemingly unable to understand that I live in a simple cabin in the woods by choice, imparting to me that she in contrast is
a natural urbanite, not a nature person.

But setting those obvious differences aside, I was surprised at how quickly we discovered common ground around feeling strongly about how much pets enrich our lives.  By the end I no longer felt
like she saw me as a freak (which I had sensed around the time of my
initial unveiling and lifestyle description), and I no longer felt
estranged by our obvious differences.  Beyond a much needed double-shampoo and haircut, this ended up being an excellent lesson for me in remembering that even with people who seem very different from us, we frequently share much more common ground than the basic underlying human physiology which unites all of us.  And a good reminder about how delightful it can feel making such discoveries and connections.

ps – I have a scholarship membership to the YMCA in the city, and got to take a lovely long, luxurious hot shower as a treat after the haircut.  Nothing like going without something like hot showers to really renew my gratitude for them!

I decided this year to try and figure out how much firewood I use, since I still don’t have a good sense of that yet.  So, I measured all I had to create my official starting point, and then periodically I can re-measure what remains to determine usage over time.  For this photo, I used a wide angle adapter to get it all in one shot, hence some fishbowl effect bending the larger trees towards the middle. 

Anyway, omitting the one super petite pile, here is what I discovered I had on hand:
the stacks have an average height of 4 feet, with a cumulative width of 58 linear feet.

I am particularly pleased that 50 of my 58 linear feet
of 4 foot high woodpile I was able to salvage from trees damaged or destroyed by the severe ice storm we had in January of
2007.  So many trees were destroyed in nearby Springfield, Missouri and were blocking so much infrastructure that the city’s mulch site was overrun, and they hauling tree ‘debris’ off to a rural site to burn en masse just to get rid of the ‘waste’ ASAP.  I was so struck by the sheer wastefulness of destroying all that fabulous firewood that I managed to break through my hermit’s shell sufficiently to go around
town knocking on doors of homes having ‘waste’ wood stacked out by the curb,
and 8 out of 10 were as eager for me to take it off their hands for practical use as I was! 

I
did not want to counter-act my resource conservation effort by burning excess fossil fuel driving back and forth too much as it is 60 miles each way.  So, I mostly just collected the wood one car-load at a time during my errand days
in town, typically weekly.  At first each individual car-load seemed a mere drop in
the bucket as I began stacking it at the cabin, and initially I wondered whether my efforts were really worthwhile.  But my goodness, the way that ‘bucket’ filled full over time with each additional drop totally astounded me.  As those wise ones might say, a 4 foot high woodpile of a thousand linear feet begins with a single log.  Any guesses out there as to how long this
much firewood will last?

Here are a couple more ice photos I took along an intermittent creek bed below the cabin.  The first is a one I took in a [water] losing stretch of stream bed.  The image shows a horizontal plane of ice with sensual swirls and openings intersected by leaves crossing the frozen plane diagonally both above and below.  Upon closer inspection, I inferred that this delicate layer initially formed as an ice skin atop a shallow pool with floating leaves.  Gradually though, the as-yet unfrozen water underneath was seeping down through the gravel bed into the invisible groundwater supply.  The result was this fragile ice platform suspended between leaves and stones over open air rather than over surface water.

This next picture I took while sitting within the creek bed immediately upstream of a seepage spring.  You can see how the water comes out at the lowest edge of the soil just where it meets the top layer of exposed bedrock, and then cascades down the rocky ledges.  Isn’t nature cool?!  I think I have said this somewhere here already, but seeing water emanating from Earth never ceases to fill me with awe and wonder and gratitude.

One very nice aspect of the cold weather we have been having here in the Ozarks recently is that some beautiful ice sculptures have been forming.  In a ravine below the cabin is an intermittent waterfall which is frozen, captured in the photo below.

Below is a close up view of the icicles in the lower right portion of the waterfall showing the varied textures formed.  These horizontal banding on some of these icicles in particular reminded me of stalactites, and I recently learned that when icicles grow to form a frozen connection to the ground they are then called ice columns.

[Note: I added content and re-wrote this Dec 18, 2007 post on Jan 21, 2008]

The wee hours between Dec 14 and 15 last week marked 15 years since the unexpected suicide of my partner when I was 20.  I was a junior in college and it was my first experience with death, as well as with suicide.  Losing her like that completely shattered my naive universe.  Within a matter of hours it had gone from life seeming normal and mostly benign to upside down and excruciating.  Without warning, the person I felt closest to in the world at the time was dead and gone.  Not even a chance for formal goodbyes first.  Much to my later appreciation, the woman tasked with telling me we hadn’t found her in time after all was kind, gentle, loving, and compassionate beyond measure despite having been a complete stranger earlier in the evening.  Rationally I understood the concept of death, knew it happened all the time, and that it would happen to each of us; but I thought, Eventually, not Now.  And certainly not without warning and adequate opportunity for goodbyes.

The suddeness and shock blocked my rational understanding of death, and her actual passing was something that initially eluded my comprehension.  Upon hearing the news, with torrential tears streaming from terrified eyes I kept shouting bewilderedly at that nice stranger: “Wait, do you mean that she died?  She DIED?  So she is Dead?  Actually DEAD?  Dead like never coming back, Dead?  DEAD dead?”  I was answered very patiently, repeatedly by this gentle stranger that yes, such was indeed the case.  My world had utterly stopped turning.  I was baffled to notice that life all around me continued on without any pause. The rain continued to fall, the stars continued to shine, and people went on with the basics of daily living. But the utter devastation, loss, emptiness, aloneness, and lost-ness I felt so acutely that night, and so strongly for many years thereafter, profoundly altered me as well as the course of my life.

The intensity of my experience of grief was so overpowering it moved me to leave the college I loved after my junior year. Until then, I felt comfortable and connected there, like I really belonged.  I felt proud to be getting my bachelors degree there. I loved the very liberal atmosphere and very liberal politics of our school, and being an involved student-athlete had become a major part of my identity.  I was ‘out’ and accepted as lesbian, I had developed a wonderful circle of close friends, and though only a junior I had been elected co-captain of the varsity field hockey team I especially enjoyed.  However, while I did manage to stick out spring term that year, I had found being there where I was surrounded by reminders of who and what I had lost was more upsetting than comforting, and I was still so raw and wounded and depressed that it was just too painful for me to go through with my senior year.

All had not been totally smooth in my life until that fateful night, but that trauma was enough to push me over the edge of tolerable angst and grief into a dangerous dance with depression that in turn brought me frighteningly close to suicide myself.  So, the next year in the interest of survival I sought the solace I needed by backpacking for several months on the Appalachian Trail.  Simplifying my life to focus on the primeval rhythms of walking, eating, and sleeping while remaining immersed in the nature that nurtures my soul was what I needed to begin restoring my spirit and start my healing journey.  During that year I also got sober, and thankfully remain so still.  When I came off the trail I settled back in the place my parents called home and transferred my college credits to a school there.  As I was able to focus, I gradually took courses, finally finishing my bachelors there 5 years after the death of my partner.

One thing that continues to puzzle me is that despite years upon years of conventional therapy and a rainbow of alternative healing therapies, I continue – and not infrequently – to have extremely vivid dreams where I go back to my first college on a quest to complete the bachelors degree there that I began there.  While at the time remaining on campus for my senior year seemed to be beyond my ability, in choosing to leave I felt a great loss around giving up my world there.  I know a part of me died when my partner died, and I think another part of me died when I left my life there.  It was ten years until I felt ready to return for a visit, and in doing so at that point I reconnected with some old friends (including the kind and gentle stranger who had since become a dear friend), roamed the campus, and thought I had made my peace with my past there. Some I’ve shared about all this with think it odd that I have these recurrent dreams about returning to complete my bachelors there since I finished it elsewhere. And yet, the dreams have continued.

In the dreams, it is as though my having already completed the degree elsewhere is irrelevant, or that it was not valid — that somehow it just did not “count”. In some of these dreams I am 35 (like in my waking life) and all the students are strangers to me and so very young, and I feel really old and like an odd outsider who no longer really fits there. In others, many of the students I had been friends with are also back there, yet I still feel like an outsider since I was so altered by traumatic grief and they had remained quite unchanged.  Sometimes in the dream I have chosen coursework to complete my degree that is quite different than what I actually took at college, and it either feels uncomfortably foreign or exciting to chart a new course of study there.  Sometimes the coursework feels too hard.  But most commonly in these dreams I feel very surprised and disappointed to discover that my prior sense of self and the belonging and connection I once felt so strongly there is now absent, and I feel sad and lonely and ashamed and have a lot of anxiety about being there, yet I still feel compelled to stay there and try to finish anyway.

Occasionally, I dream about returning to high school years later to complete a requirement that I somehow missed, or I dream about stressful jobs I once had and discover much to my distress that I am thrust back there once again, or even dreams where I have to completely re-make the moves (geographic relocations) I’ve already made (the actual packing and unpacking and goodbyes, etc).  But those are infrequent while the dreams I have about my college situation are far more common. In them, feeling like an outsider where I once felt such a sense of belonging seems to be a major recurring theme, and the focus on the degree is prominent, as is awareness of and sadness over how different I am from who I was before the death. I have wondered at times if I have some subconscious need to literally return to campus to complete the degree there to close an unfinished circle, but it seems more likely there is a more symbolic meaning I still haven’t really resolved and still can’t quite grasp after all these years.

Just a few days after Dec 18 (the date I originally wrote this entry) I had
some sort of emotional/ energetic/ anxiety episode in the afternoon which left
me feeling quite unsettled.  Then later in the middle of the night I then woke up vomiting violently with no other discernable physical illness until my stomach was quite empty, with no subsequent vomiting.  Two
days later I went to an energy-worker/ healer/ massage-therapist friend I’ve gone to upon visits
home for many years, and his observation about our session was that I let
go of and cleared out more dark stuff that day than I had in all the years he
had known me.  Also interestingly, since that physical and metaphysical purging I have not had that dream again.  I
don’t know if I ever will or not again since only a month has passed, but I like to think it is possible that the impromptu and synchronistic dream-writing/ vomiting/ clearing process has laid to rest that recurring dream!