I was intrigued by the meme posted a few days ago by friend Halal.

I AM >> pretty damned happy.

I THINK >> I overthink things.

I KNOW >> that the universe is full of beauty, surprise and delight.

I HAVE >> occasional difficulty telling the difference between deep rest and plain ol' laziness.

I WISH >> health care in this country was in better shape.

I HATE >> giving energy to my fears of the future.

I FEAR >> never having enough money to retire.

I MISS >> being a kid and not having to think about work all the time (what did I think about all the time?).

I HEAR >> that things make more sense the second time around.

I CRAVE >> quiet at the end of the day.

I SEARCH FOR >> the next daily photo.

I WONDER >> what I'll be up to ten years from now.

I REGRET >> very little, actually.

I LOVE >> birdsong, breezes, comfy shoes, writing on the sidewalk in chalk.

I BELIEVE IN >> the ability of humans to improve their lot in life.

I SING >> quite poorly, and quite loudly.

I LOSE >> when I get worked up over nothing.

I ALWAYS >> appreciate moments free of interruption.

I AM SCARED >> that my parents will become invalids and require expensive medical care.
 
I AM HAPPY >> more and more as the years pass.

I'm just getting back in the swing of things after being out of town all week. The smell of clean sheets on my bed has never been more lovely.

I spent the weekend in southern Appalachia -- Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky. I was there to shoot photos and do grip work on a video project for an organization (Appalachia Service Project) that does home repair for poor families in the area.

I saw some things this week that shocked me. The poverty in this part of the world is just unbelievable.

We met a woman in Evarts, Virginia who lived with seven children in a one-room home (shown above). That sounds like such a cliché. It sounds like a set-up for a joke on a Jay Leno monologue. But these were real people. And I saw that one room they had lived in (remarkably clean, I have to say). The home repair client was building a two-room addition for her family so they could have more space.

We met a couple in Harlan, Kentucky whose roof was falling in. Ray was jobless and suffered from emphysema (naturally, this didn't keep him from smoking incessantly. I shook my finger at him for that). Judy harvested green tomatoes and turnips from their garden and fried them up for the work crew who was putting a new roof on the house. They were absolutely wonderful. The photo I took of her in her kitchen with the fried green tomatoes is one of my favorites from the trip. Maybe I'll share that later.

We met another family in Harlan, Kentucky who lived in a tiny trailer. The mom and dad were in their early 20s and they had four children. The children rambled happily around the yard in bare feet, completely ignorant of the broken glass and random auto parts littering the ground, completely ignorant of the raw sewage draining into the yard from their home.

It was heartbreaking. I can't believe people in this country live this way. Our producer, who has traveled to many poor parts of the world in Albania, Cuba, Ukraine, etc., said he had never seen poverty like this.

The redemptive part about the week was meeting some of the individuals doing the home repairs for these families. More than half the volunteers for the organization are youth group members from churches in Alabama, Connecticut, Maryland, and North Carolina. Many of these kids come from very privileged families. To see poverty like this probably rattled them as deeply as it rattled me. Some of these kids have been coming to serve for 3 or 4 summers now, and they keep in touch with the families they've served in previous summers. It warmed me to see how much affection these children had for the families they served.

It may sound strange to say -- but it was one of the best weeks I've had in a long time. Using my camera to try to capture some of what I saw was incredibly challenging and rewarding. I also learned somethings along the way about the nuts and bolts of video work. I really hope that the photos I took and the video we captured will go a long way toward furthering the organization's work, and pull in lots of donations that will help the hundreds of families in this area who need assistance.

I've been returning lately to my favorite contemporary book of mythology, Woman Who Run With the Wolves. This book was introduced to me a few years ago by a Jungian therapist, and since then I've acquired my very own copy, a battered hardback with a dust jacket that's splitting along the folds.

I'm trying to think like a wolf. It doesn't come naturally. I've been pacing the walls of this tiny little apartment with increasing urgency. After 3 years of living in this modified broom closet of an apartment -- seriously small living, eating, working and sleeping quarters -- I'm suddenly craving more space, craving more light. The desire feels weirdly primitive and intense. Maybe this is how the biological clock feels for other people? I don't know. Is there such a thing as a real estate clock? I feel shallow for even suggesting it. Yet I can almost hear it ticking.

A couple of weeks ago I toured a new condo development here in town. The units are reasonably priced, attractive, convenient, built with a thoughtful relationship to the larger neighborhood, and generally a perfect fit for what I am looking for.

Of course, I don't have the cash to get serious with it right now.

After checking out the condo, I came home to my broom closet apartment and sulked. I wished to be wealthy, wealthy enough to buy the thing outright. I measured the dimensions of my apartment. 484 square feet from tip to toe. No wonder I'm standing up and pacing. There's barely enough room to lie down in here. The front seat of my car is almost as large as this entire apartment.

I consulted the Jungian therapist and told her about how much I wanted to just leap out of this old home. How much I wanted to jump into this sparkly new space. Clean and uncluttered and free of anybody's history, including mine. I was trying to get friendly with my calculator, trying desperately to frame up the numbers so that they would work in my favor. But really, they weren't. Not yet.

What we are doing here is braiding, she said. It won't work to make this decision with just a single strand, the practical, brainy part of yourself. You're going to need to braid together all the different parts of yourself. The artist, the employee, the manager, the child. This isn't about impressing your friends. It isn't about investment or security. It's about learning to approach any conversation, even a conversation about square footage and real estate, with every part of yourself intact.

From the very back of the book:

General Wolf Rules for Life
1. Eat
2. Rest
3. Rove in between
4. Render loyalty
5. Love the children
6. Cavil in moonlight
7. Tune your ears
8. Attend to the bones
9. Make love
10. Howl often

("Cavil in moonlight"! I had to look it up: "to raise irritating and trivial objections; find fault with unnecessarily." I don't even pretend to understand that, honey.)

So I'm saving. I'm easing up and giving my calculator a break. I'm doing what a wolf would do. Eating and resting and loving the children. Does a wolf have a way to express her wishes to the universe? I'm doing that, too. I have confidence in my ability to make a good decision here, to wait, to be wise, to build a home (den?) for myself that will be a perfect fit for me in the short term and the long term.

Maybe a year from now I will have a roof to climb up on, a moon at which to howl. I do look forward to that day.

I'm growing to truly enjoy the act of taking stock once every quarter and burning old baggage, usually on the date of the solstice or equinox, and usually in the company of my dear friends Halal and Fabulous Slice. The practice of burning old junk in the fire feels much like the rituals that dotted the year at the Orthodox church I used to attend. I always found some comfort in the rituals of confession, fasting and feasting in the church, and in these quarterly fires, I think I've found the rituals I want to carry with me into the future. The solstice or equinox is a beautiful opportunity to take stock, to look at the path life is taking, to appreciate what's working, let go of what's not working.

Fabulous was out of town on Friday, but Halal and her husband offered to carry on the tradition. They built the fire on their lovely back porch. By the time I arrived with Tom, the woods behind their house were glowing with fireflies and dusky light.

The fire was hot. I dropped some of good stuff into it. Wishes and desires and old junk to release back to the universe. Halal read some beautiful reflections on the passing of the season of growth. She served a glass of wine to each of us, and we sipped it slowly while watching the fire burn down.

I made my first move toward incorporating my freelance graphic design business this week, after a couple of years of deliberating about the whethers and whens. The legal requirements of the corporation I'm creating suggest that I should appoint a board of directors and hold quarterly board meetings. Sipping the wine in the glow of the fire, I suddenly realized that I was right in the middle of a lot of wisdom. Hmmm, maybe the solstice and equinox gatherings are the perfect time to hold board meetings. Hmmm, maybe Fabulous and Halal and some other wise friends would make excellent board members.

Truthfully, I have no idea how serious I need to get with the board meeting requirement. But if I am to take it seriously, I can think of no better board members than those whose company I enjoyed on Friday night by the light of the fire.

I went to my favorite yoga class today for the first time in several months.

Tomorrow is my 34th birthday. Am I reaching the age in which I should no longer publicly admit my age? List-making seems to come naturally at these times, when I am a bit more reflective than usual. Here are some lists I scratched out today.

Things I'm realizing that I would kind of love to do, but that I will probably never do:
- Introduce a son or daughter of mine to all of the poetry that I love. Sharing my love of poetry would undoubtedly be a splendid part of having a child. But this alone is not a good enough reason to have a child.
- Own a luxurious beachfront home. The kind you see in movies, with huge decks and stunning views of the water.
- Become a really, really, really good cook. Have killer knife skills, know how to make legitimate sauces, be able to just "throw something together" in the kitchen, etc.
- Design artwork for postage stamps.

Things I'm realizing that I would kind of love to do, and that are still within the realm of possibility:
- Adopt a happy dog or cat (or both) from the Humane Society. Give them really great names. Take the dog for walks through the graveyard.
- Learn how to make pottery on a wheel.
- Buy and become extremely conversant with a really delicious high-quality film camera (e.g., Bronica, Hasselblad, Leica, etc.).
- Visit the Philip Johnson Glass House in Connecticut.
- Plan and grow a flower garden.
- Live in a smaller, quieter city with a smaller, quieter lifestyle.
- Own a beautiful home with tons of natural light that would double as a photography studio/art gallery.
- Go on an extended walking tour of some other continent or country.
- Take a long vacation in Ireland.
- Produce the best and most creative work of my life.

I'm proud of some of the things I've done since my past birthday. Here are some things that I'm glad I did:
- Freed myself from the clutches of a dreadful dead-end job at a massive soul-eating corporation.
- Went on a women's retreat that really opened up my thinking about who I am and what I want.
- Had a photo selected for a juried photography exhibit.
- Landed a freelance contract that is allowing me to do good work that I care about.
- Climbed Mt. LeConte in NC (...and barely lived to tell the story).
- Stepped up to receive some really great teaching. I've been gobbling up Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth. This feels like a significant development.

Here's hoping 34 is half as happy as 33 was. I'm a very blessed woman.

On Friday I drove down to north Florida for a rendezvous with my friend Kathy. Kathy and I were sisters-in-law until 2005, when my marriage to her brother hit the skids. Despite the divorce, she and I remained close through the entire process and are still very close.

We met in a little town in north Florida, with the plan to do some kayaking on the Suwanee River.

What I loved:

 -- Meeting the owner of the B&B where we stayed. A retired schoolteacher, she moved alone from Arizona to Florida two years ago to purchase the B&B and fulfill her lifelong dream of living in a beautiful Victorian home. Growing up, she was not close to her father, who was a military man and a notorious philanderer. He was never present in her life in any meaningful way. Doing a search on the internet a few years ago, she discovered that her father had had many "wives" -- and that she now had 14 (!) half-brothers or half-sisters scattered across the country. She made an effort to reconnect with some of these siblings and discovered that they had been searching for her for a long time. A lonely retiree found a brand new family. Her half-brother Phil jumped at the chance to leave New Jersey and live with her at the B&B. He helps her with maintenance around the home. They seem like two happy soul mates who discovered each other at a critical time in their lives. (The thought that a person might have a family out there searching and praying for them is completely fascinating to me.)
 -- Renting kayaks and paddling with Kathy down 4 or 5 miles of the Suwanee River. I'm not much of a water bug, but I loved this adventure. The water in the river is very smooth and quiet. It was so peaceful, floating along and listening to the birds call out from above. I hope to go for a kayak trip again very soon.
 -- Talking with Kathy about every subject under the sun.
 -- Going with Kathy for a long meandering drive through scenic country back roads to find a restaurant for dinner.
 -- Finally meandering our way up to Valdosta, hungry and tired and ready to eat something. The first restaurant we tried was completely booked, so we wandered on. We discovered an utterly charming coffeeshop/bookstore associated with a wonderful Episcopal congregation that meets downtown. Browsed their invigorating religion/spirituality section while grazing happily on our sandwiches. Kathy picked up a gorgeous collection of Hafiz poetry, and I discovered a very delightful photography book. What a lucky stroke that we were turned away at the first restaurant.

Feeling sunburned, tired, happy and thankful for friendship.

My camera has been very quiet lately. It's not like last year, when I carried my camera around with me constantly and shot something every day. That was surprisingly hard work, and surprisingly rewarding. It's probably just a matter of time before I get back into that discipline, because I miss it.

Even though my camera hasn't been seeing much action lately, my subconscious and conscious brain have been thinking constantly about photography. This is how I know that photography is more than just a hobby with me. I think about it all the time. And I dream about it constantly.

Usually when I dream about photography, I'm behind the camera, taking amazing photos. I'm almost always shooting people. It's usually some wonderful portrait of some wonderful person in magnificent light. I wake up from these dreams with a profound sense of loss -- oh, man, I bet those photos were going to turn out great! But I never get to see them.

Two nights ago I had a different kind of photography dream. In the dream, I saw a handful of photos displayed on a wall. The display was unique. The prints were arranged in an unusual way, in a way I've never seen in real life. It suggested a visual storyline, a sequence of events, kind of like an old-fashioned film strip.

It was really intriguing. There was more to the dream than that. I'd say more, but I don't want to (a) give away the idea I got from the dream, and/or (b) conclude that the dream was completely silly.

I woke up from the dream. Drowsily, I told my boyfriend about what I had seen. I wanted to tell him about it right away so I could test-drive the idea that the dream had presented. Sometimes dreams that seem deeply significant on waking just melt away when you have fully entered the day's consciousness. But the more I talked about the dream, the more it seemed to hold up. I got into the day, kept thinking about it and put down some notes in my journal about what I had seen.

Will this dream ever amount to anything? I have no idea. But I am tempted to try to take some photos around it. The kind of photos I would have to take would be different than what I usually do. But I am intrigued enough to try it. I've thought about the idea enough over the past couple of days that attempting to take the photos I saw in the dream feels like a wonderful answer to my subconscious. An expression that I am ready for what it would like to say next.

Lately I've felt very accomplished at work.

My primary client is a small company that employs only 5 people. Each of us are called on to serve multiple roles. My role often involves navigating tricky relationships with clients or vendors, thinking ahead, anticipating problems, and asking the questions that will help us complete our job and thrill the client.

I've done this kind of work for years, but for some reason, doing it in this context, for this tiny company, I have felt a deep sense of satisfaction. In this group, I'm often the only one who knows what questions to ask and how to get the answers I want. After foundering around in various jobs over the years, the sense of accomplishment I get from applying my expertise to our clients' projects is really quite pleasant.

Last Christmas, my friend Kathy gave me a copy of the documentary Rivers and Tides, about the work of Scottish environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to get around to watching it. I'm so glad I finally did.

At first blush, this documentary is 90 minutes of footage of a man playing with sticks, snow and rocks. Beneath the surface, this is a very compelling and beautiful story of a man who has found his life's work making beautiful sculptures from the elements. His work is designed to be ephemeral -- he'll spend a day or two or three developing a piece of art, only to see it melt, thaw or be carried out with the tide.

His work offers a window into the transcendent in nature and illustrates the extreme fragility of the world around us.

Something about this documentary touched some pretty deep chords in me. After sitting down somewhat skeptically and watching the documentary with just one eye over the first ten or fifteen minutes, I got completely drawn in. There is so much that I admire about what this man is doing. I rewound certain parts and watched them again and again. I got out the second DVD and watched a bunch of the additional footage, the kind that certifies your standing as a bona fide fan. And I had to stop halfway into the video and get out my journal and write:

"Here's a guy who is basically doing pure art. He's working in deep connection to a landscape and he seems to be working for no particular audience. The elements are so pure. Water, sun, earth. He is doing it to achieve a greater understanding of the transience of life. It's not about scoring xyz gallery or spinning his grant application in the right way with the right phrases. It is about pleasure, learning and beauty."

Over the past couple of years I have noticed the increasing volume of drumbeats in my head. The drumbeats calling me to The Great Work. This Goldsworthy video was another wakeup call.

I'm not even sure what I mean by The Great Work, and I feel more than a bit foolish talking about it here. But the idea isn't going away, so it's probably time to try to poke at it some more.

What it's not:
This is not about spraypainting my name ("Class of '92!!!!") on the caves of Lascaux. This is not  some Salieri-esque dream of immortality. I don't wish to be famous or rich. I don't care about making some mark on the artistic world that will never fade away.

What it is:
It's a desire to create something larger and more honest and more direct. It's a desire to bring more truth to the table. It's what Mike Scott was getting at when he wrote a song called "The Big Music" for The Waterboys 20 years ago:

I have heard the big music
And I'll never be the same
Something so pure
just called my name

Why fill your life with hundreds of your dumb snapshots when you can take three or four or just one really good photo. I think that we have the opportunity to speak more truth, we should.

(For me, "truth" is still a word that has a lot of sticky Christian tentacles attached to it. Certain Christian groups talk about the world's "truth" and about Jesus's "Truth," and about how the only enduring Truth is that found in Jesus Christ. I don't believe that anymore, and I'm trying to reclaim the concept from the church. Truth is turning out to be something much more beautiful and powerful and startling and life-giving than I was ever able to see before.)

In all of its breathlessness and recklessness, Annie Dillard's Living With Weasels grabbed me by the scruff of my neck about fifteen years ago and it still hasn't let go:

"We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't 'attack' anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot part you. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles."