From Sirius Rising

This festival has been an annual milestone for me for many years. This year is no exception. With my wife and daughter at home, my usual yearning to be there with them is more intense than ever. Still, I have done some good work here at Sirius over the years, and I suppose I have a somewhat superstitious sense that it would not be a good idea to break this tradition.

I could tell that I was having a lot of resistance because it took me so long just to pack my car and get on the road yesterday. The six hour long drive did it's usual work of gradually shifting me into an altered state that deepened further when I arrived and set up my tent. I had promised my lovely & talented wife, Patricia that I would make good use of the time away from her and Meghan, so I began sorting through my plans for how to make the most of the next few days.

This morning I folded brochures, made notes for my workshop and missed my girls at home. What I had not reckoned on was that persistent state of altered consciousness we sometimes refer to as "festival space." It's a light trance that doesn't really make its self known until you try to function as if you were in ordinary space. Then you run into the trance haze and have to slow down and become very deliberate about each task. As I packed things up for my workshop today, I made sure I had the brochures, the video camera, my marked up copy of Dance of Stones along with a box of 40 copies (unmarked).

Almost as soon as we started the video camera battery died, but otherwise things went well, though I only sold one book after the workshop. Just another opportunity to let go of my lust for results and recognize that I am doing my best – even when it doesn't accomplish as much as I would like.

And I have managed to drive back into town this evening and find a place with free Wi-Fi to make my blog entry, so . . . not bad!

Post Holiday Catch-up

A lot has happened over the past few days (weeks?), some of which has excellent entertainment value. It was great having Lisa visit from Germany. It had been six years or so since we had last seen her, and eight since she had last visited here. So she got to meet our new house and many new friends. We had some of those friends over for dinner and I overheard one of them saying to Lisa, "Oh! You're Soli!" to which she replied, "no - I'm not. I'm Lisa." Her tone was quite deadpan, but I wasn't too surprised when I later heard her threatening to write her own version of our trip through Europe and come up with her own version of me as a character in her book. Now THAT could be entertaining! (See if you can pick out Lisa in the photo above.)

As I said though, it was great to have Lisa here and we were sorry to see her go. It's hard to really keep in touch over such distances, but you can tell the real friends by the way you can pick back up even after so many years and have such comfort with each other. I hope it won't be nearly as long before we have the opportunity to spend some more quality time together.

It is clear that I've had a bit of writer's block - again. This time

it took out the whole of the holidays - from solstice all the way through New Year's - pretty impressive. So now I will do my best to make up for lost time -and maybe even make it worth you're while to keep checking back in for updates. 

We really enjoyed Lisa's visit, but we are far from her only friends here in the states, so we had to share her with her good friend Marcie down in Tennessee, and then with Tyler and Gary in New York. She took a bus down to Tennessee about a week after getting here, so the jet lag had worn off by then. On the way back she was serenaded by a group of girls singing Christmas carols. Unfortunately they didn't know all the words and so the woman sitting next to her would chime in over her knitting with the final verses. 

I will throw in a quick announcement here too that Patricia and I are officially expecting a girl to join the family in late May. So far, her name is "Peanut" but that will probably change at some point . . . then again.