NO!

I didn't want to write that last blog very much. I felt like it was more than I could really tackle well. Plus, I really like atheists, I think they are usually people who are sensitive and smart, who are really sad and angry about all the terrible things that happen in the world. They ask: how could god let these things happen????

I don't want to alienate any non-religious people who may be reading this. There are a lot of people I respect who have contempt for the spiritual and new age stuff, a lot of distrust for these things they see as exploiting people's hopefulness.

I would rather write about fun silly stuff, the cute things people say and do, what I like, what I don't like. My plants and my friends. The coffee here vs. the coffee there. That would be really fun. I would like to write 1,000 words every day about how much I love the olives from Fairway and eat as many.

The problem is too much weird stuff has happened to me, and the mystery of these things tugs at me all the time. Smacks the arrogant smile of my face. Puts me on level ground. Makes me cry. Pushes me to the limits of my heart and character. Makes a fool of me. Right out here in public. And tells me that we are all swimming in a sea of gold but can't recognize it because of what Black Elk called "the darkness of men's eyes."

The night after I was in Irma's workshop something weird happened with our window fan, when it seemed to surge and spin backwards, waking up AG and I at 4:33 in the morning. We both felt scared and confused. Naturally since I had been at Irma's wind horse workshop that day it had a familiar feeling. As I woke up I remembered what I had been dreaming. One of the most gentle male voices I've ever heard was telling me to write about the cords: the ones that Lucia, Jacinto and Francisco wore, the one wrapped around the pig in my dream, the ones we wound around the prayer sticks. When I was awake, the word 'restraint' seemed to be written into my mind.

So I got up and wrote about some cute things that happened to me. Felt clever but crappy. Later I wrote "yellow ribbons" and felt kind of relieved. When I've dismissed dreams before I've come to regret it. I can see that I didn't have the courage to carry them out. I doubted myself, rightly, because I know there are so many ways my choices fall short.

So if this turns into a God Blog from time to time, one written by a fairly ignorant person, and that bothers you, I'm so sorry. What can I say? Just know that I don't think that God is something we can conceive of with a human brain, we just wind up putting God into a box called by the name of any of the 10,000 (??) religions or some ideology. A box that makes us feel safe and cozy and supported by answers.