Sharing some deep thoughts, as I’m known to do – and a slew of photos as I’ve not taken the time to check in for a couple weeks. Three years since getting my first phone and setting up this Facebook account, and I can’t say I’m really rocking it. Nor especially keen on it yet.

The last few weeks found me polishing up the proposal for A Long Quiet Ride. Now it’s time to kick it out of the nest and see if it can fly… time for magic and prayers… while I move onward, back to burnishing the rest of the manuscript.

What’s next?

For now, I intend to have my cake and eat it too but I’ll explain what that means when I figure it out.

What’s next? I don’t mean what adventure. What move. What I’ve got planned. Or even what horse. If you’re curious, ask me. Though I don’t know if I have the answers.

What’s next? What I want to share is that deeper thing. A thing about life, or rather, stages of life.

How’s this for a stage?

I read recently that menopause is going from taboo to trendy, so hang in there while I bring it up. (Still feels like forbidden fruit to me, and maybe just as dangerous.)

What happens after you step out of the stage of life that was the transformation from The Mother to… The Matriarch? Or is it the Crone? Or is it something else entirely?

Call it what you will, it happens. Thank God. You do leave menopause behind. At some point you look around, with an unfamiliar sense of brilliant clarity, and realize you slipped out of the sticky skin the She Dragon had enwrapped you in.  

And then… who are you now?

That is a lot of what ALQR is about – trying to figure out who the hell I am and the how the hell I got here.

We go through stages of life like that – stages that shake us up like an Etch-a-Sketch, and when we’re done, the screen is clear and it’s time to draw ourselves anew.

Am I there yet?

Do we ever arrive?

Where I am at is where I want to be. But here and now is ever changing.

If in fact we do only have this one wild and precious life, I intend to make it very wild and very precious. So far so good.

What do I choose? Do we have to choose? Either way I win.

And yet, I wonder why at nearly sixty I still feel so far from… what is it? Grown up? Together?  Settled down? Mature – at least in the way that word held meaning when I was growing up?

Well, at my age I can make my own definition, thank you very much.

I’m not much of a practical, stable, sensible shoe sort of gal. I color outside the lines.

At the same time, I look forward to being the old wise one – when I get there. The crone being the stereotypical model of that woman. Long gray hair, deep wrinkles, gnarled fingers, and soul seeped in her eyes. I am getting there. But I am not there yet. I am not her yet.

In the meantime, where am I? Who am I? What I see when I look around makes me smile. This is good.

Perhaps it is another stage. Or is it the time in between? The ever living Bardo of transformation that life seems to be.

There’s more to many of us than maiden, mother, matriarch or crone. Simplified by the triple goddess moon like the tattoo inked on my shoulder at a shop in El Paso when I was working at a midwifery clinic, where helping women birth brought it all together with pain and bliss and blood.

Whatever it is, it’s a good place to be. A good stage of life. And sure as hell beats the last one.

We are left to create ourselves and define our lives, beyond the constricting parameters of labels and title and roles. Define ourselves. Be ourselves. Not based on others opinions, judgments, assumptions, or social norms. I’ve never been big on normal.

Why must we be defined and confined? Rather than simply step from one neat and tidy box to the next, get messy. Have fun. Play around with your life. Kick the cardboard, set your spirit free, and soar beautifully. That’s how we each can make the world a more beautiful place.

Have the courage to create. Your self. Your dreams. Your life. Your way.

Begin and watch the universe unroll before you, welcoming you to your true nature, your highest and best self, the best you can show up with and bring to this beautiful world.

Until next time,

With love, always love,

Gin