I’m happy about the journey. I was going to say “…upon which I’m about to embark.” However, I really feel like I’ve been embarked for a while now. Such immersion.

I stayed up late last night (late!) studying my map of the area that contains Glastonbury, Stonehenge, Avebury, Wells, Bristol and Bath. This map will be very important to me for the four days of my stay in Glastonbury.

I gathered up my books on sacred places in Ireland, and asked for my UK sacred places book back from my sister. I think they may in fact make it into my luggage.

And sad…More letting go around being a mother. Oy vey.

More later…

Blessed be.

Editing and massaging the checklist…I am going to offer my checklist to all travelers. It’s a gift from a friend (thank you Heidi!)  that I’ve now made my own and it’s awesome!!

Working!

Buying things to make my travel easier. GoToobs, travel cubes, compression socks (guess my doc’s advice about long flights and blood clots was good enough to follow; high on the mortification factor).

Researching like crazy. Oh, wow, good to know one might have knitting needles confiscated in Europe (different rules than here). Off to the knitting store again to buy bamboos. And packing waste yarn and yarn needles. Preparation on so many levels!

Giving effort required to make my jeans as comfy as possible (stretching over backs of chairs), and then having another friend (thank you LB!) help me choose the best-looking ones to bring. I can only bring one pair of jeans! Oy vey. I’m the world’s worst overpacker. This is quite a lesson for me…

And reading reading reading The Art of Pilgrimage by Cousineau. I recommend it to any traveler, on journeys long and short. It creates a beautiful context for being open to every miracle a journey can provide.

I feel so blessed and I am so grateful!

Practice the arts of attention and listening

Practice renewing yourself every day

Practice meandering toward the center of every place

Practice the ritual of reading sacred texts

Practice gratitude and praise-singing

I love these!!

I am so grateful for this blessed weekend. Celebrating a friend’s wedding. DJing and dancing at The Rent Party blues dance. Getting started on the design work for a new social networking travel site.

I am grateful for the health practitioners who enhanced my health this week: Chris, my acupuncturist and Vicki, my body orchestration genius.

I’m grateful that I decided to support my local knitting shop instead of buying yarn online. What a lovely experience. And what online shop will afford me the opportunity to wind my skeins into beautiful little balls? Think about it.

I got my fancy romano beans in; the garden is set for crop 2, season 2010!

I’m exceptionally grateful. The pile of stuff that I’m gathering for my trip is growing. I’m so excited!!!

Life is a gift for which I am very very grateful!

Bought a few Eagle Creek packing cubes yesterday; I’m organizing my packing, thinking if I can cram and squoosh stuff I can take even more stuff! Oy vey this is a big deal!

I am grateful for the wonderful experience I had dancing this weekend. Although I stepped on to the dance floor for only two hours (out of a whole weekend of day and night classes and dances), I had some quality dances. Nice. Very very nice. I love blues dancing!

I am grateful for ritual Friday night, celebrating Lammas with my Amazon tribe and time by the bay with my other coven sisters yesterday. I love my spiritual life and my deepening commitment to this work. To the goddess. To being a priestess.

I am a grateful woman and now it’s time for me to do some work.

Before that, though, I’ll go inside and pull out a gratlist.

I am grateful for:

friends
ritual
my upcoming journey
making sacred every moment of my life
health
sunshine (a rare commodity around here these days)
food from my garden: chard, kale, tatsoi, mizuna, beans, pattypan squash, beet greens, turnip greens
streaming the Stern show on my computer
mindful eating
technology that works
an open heart
generosity

I’m a grateful grateful woman.

Travel plans consume my every waking minute. Well, those not occupied with work, AA meetings, the garden, and the series of Rozan mysteries I’ve been reading.

Rozan’s Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mysteries are terrific! So nice to find a new author with good character development and interesting/compelling stories. What’s unique about her books is that some are written first-person with Bill Smith as the protagonist and the others are first-person Lydia Chin’s. The latter are the better, a little, for me, because they are woven throughout with the Chinese/Chinatown culture. Well done!

I’m such a doofus know-nothing gardener. I committed to water every Friday so I dutifully show up in the garden to water this morning. Even though it rained yesterday. Even though the ground is moist. Even though the weather plugin in Firefox shows little clouds. Sigh. I just got a deserved smackdown by my landlady. Live.And.Learn.

I am grateful for this upcoming journey. I am humbled by the enormity of this undertaking. Thirty days overseas. I am now learning packing science. Have scheduled a field trip for this weekend to play with luggage organizers. I’ll haul my roller bag with me to REI and the local luggage store and see what I can see.

Tonight is our Amazon Lammas ritual. I crafted my Astro Report last night. Tonight also is the climax of the cardinal grand cross that’s been big news all summer. You can read the full report here.

My gratitude is bountiful. I mourn the sudden passing of my friend Keith, a young dancer who died in his sleep the other night. Keith, blessed be. What is remembered, lives. And you are well remembered.

I am blessed to be alive, present, sober, healthy, fit, wise, loved and loving.

Life is good and I am grateful.

[This is negative gratitude, gratitude for what has receded, is abating. Sometimes this is as good as it gets!]

I am so grateful that the headache and disorientation is abating after the assault Saturday night. Someone held a Rave around the corner from my house — maybe 200 yards from my bed — on Saturday night. Pounding techno music woke me a little after two. I called the police non-emergency number around 3. They said they’d send a car. I understand a squad car showed up around 5:45. Oakland! No budget for disturbing the peace calls. I’m actually surprised there was enough budget for someone to answer the phone!

The torturous thing about techno music, I now know, is that it has these resolutions and pauses, pauses long enough for relaxation to begin, and then BAM! it starts up again. Over and over and over and over…

I gave up and read for an hour, finishing a book. Then I finally resolved to use every meditation/breathing/relaxation skill in my repertoire, and managed to fall asleep again around 5:30.

Yesterday was a painful fog. I had a headache all day and night (it’s gone now, thank goodness!). And that weird disorientation where I would step toward a room, or a cupboard, and then stop and ask myself what I was planning to do when I got there! Foggy-headed.

I was enough of a wreck that I got sent home from Lammas ritual early (guess I wasn’t contributing much).

And there is plenty of positive gratitude here:

I am grateful for a beautiful full-moon ritual Friday night, positive and hopeful and delicious. Any time I get to drum with my sisters is a beautiful gift.

I am also grateful for the love of my sisters and loving them back.

I am grateful for the work I did in my little garden plot this weekend. Cleared the dead vines, weeded (ouch! serious weeding), and planted a new crop: yellow beans, romanos, string beans, snap peas, carrots, beets, three kales, tatsoi. I continue to be very excited about eating food from the garden.

I’m so grateful for my relationship with Ladybug and her family. I’m really enjoying getting to know Edward and Simon.

I’m very grateful that Iris likes the sweater I made. It felt so good to gift her with the work of my hands.

Here are some of the brilliant full moon pix Victoria sent over last night, to celebrate the full moon in Aquarius. You can see the rest of them here.

Blessed be!

Yesterday, I had set aside the whole entire day for the beach. Was gonna go with Ladybug and family to Half Moon Bay, but decided I didn’t want to do a full day. Instead, I had a lazy Sunday morning, and then went to Lindy in the Park and danced for an hour. Found a perfect parking spot, right outside the park, after circling the block just one time. This despite the fact that it was AIDS Walk day.

Great dancing, gorgeous weather.

Then drove over to Baker Beach, again easy parking. Brought the water that was blessed at Solstice for healing the oceans, created sacred space and gave the water back to the ocean.

Hiked over to the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and back, as I always do, and on the way back, I saw folks pointing at the ocean. There were four dolphins, doing their cavorting dolphin thing. So cool! Turns out that July and August is dolphin-sighting time at Baker and I was blessed to get to see them! How very lucky!

What a beautiful beautiful day!!

Did some research into the practice of banging my bones every day with a heavy stainless steel brush. Looks kinda like the one pictured, which is made of bamboo. But the one I have is much heavier. It’s supposed to have a great effect on chi, marrow production, and strength. Now if it could only make my skin look more youthful, I’d be a happy woman!!

Found a couple of articles about this Shaolin massage. Here’s one, if you’re interested.

I do know that the ache in my upper arms and left hip has subsided some; incentive enough for me to continue the practice. Two rounds of t’ai chi every morning and then some bone banging. The banging feels good, and I’ll miss the practice when I travel in September. The brush is too darn heavy to make it into my luggage, though.

I am so excited about the trip!! I made a call to a pub in Kildare, where I’ll be staying in their B&B building for two nights. I love the Irish! The guy who answered the phone said, Hold on, I’ll find someone who will look after you. That made me feel so good!

I am a grateful woman and very very blessed.

What’s left to do to prepare for my trip?

Finalize places to sleep in Kildare and Cork
Figure out $$$ stuff: which ATMs to use, which bank will forgive the most fees
Print out all confirmations and maps, complete travel books
What to bring, what to wear!!
iPhone GPS or just low-tech paper maps?
Prepay bills for month of September
Set up date with someone with a manual transmission where she will drive and I will shift lefty from the passenger seat: practice for Ireland and UK driving!
and probably a bazillion more things; I need a travel coach/project manager/packer/coordinator!!

I am so grateful for the upcoming trip. It’s been an amazing thing for which to plan since March. I think I’ll do this again next year, cheaper, shorter but planned far in advance. Maybe a road trip… Okay okay come back to now!

I’ve got the sacred pilgrimage bug!

I had a wonderful time with my sisters Rowan and Ladybug yesterday. Rowan came over and brought tools for two projects:

Tracking down and caulking the ant entryways, which we blew off because the ants have stopped coming in her by the cupful to commit suicide under my windows. Hallelujah!! Go away and never return, ants! SMIB.

Sanding and oiling my beloved cutting board, restoring some smoothness to its surface

Ladybug joined us on my front stoop and we sat around and talked in the warm sunshine. And then we all ate together, the three of us and four kids, ranging from 15 months to 14 years. Family. Of choice.

I was thinking about this neighbor situation with Ladybug being right downstairs, and my mother. When we lived at 2261 Ocean Avenue, mom had a neighbor two doors away (that’s two apartment doors, about four feet distance). My mother spent as much time at Jenny’s (or Gunny as we kids called her) as she did in our apartment. And then when we made the big move to 2387 Ocean Avenue, mom bonded with Ida, this time an elevator ride away (we were on the ground floor; Ida on the 5th). My mom got a lot out of those friendships. As I do now. It’s a blessing.

I’m grateful for remembering my mother’s happiness. And blessing her memory. Mom, what is remembered lives….

I am grateful for working so diligently and happily on my business.

I am grateful for my t’ai chi practice. Two rounds and bone-banging every morning.

I am grateful for reliable technology.

I am grateful for new readers to this blog. Please, join in the conversation. Your comments mean so much to me.

It’s strange, how this personal practice of gratitude has morphed into a public statement. It is still personal; it is a critical piece of my daily practice of training myself to stand in love, appreciation and overall positivity. Which, as those of you who know me, is not my natural state of being. I like the way I’ve heard it stated: serenity contingent upon the daily maintenance of my spiritual condition.

And this is one of the bigger tools in my toolbox.

Blessings to all…

Only thing to do: grats

I’m grateful to be safe
No harm to body or car
I have the $ for the ticket
This has no power over my state of mind
It’s a beautiful day
I’m sober
Business is good
I am blessed with friends and family

Just sayin’