Caroline Allen's Blog, page 2

Banking on Spirit: Healing Our Relationship with Money

How do we heal our relationship with money?

I’m not just talking about making more money or acquiring more possessions? I’m talking about healing our integrity with money. I’m talking about healing our relationship with the earth.

In my most recently released fourth novel, Water, I wrote a scene about a woman in a pub burning money. She does this as a joke, as an experiment to see how others will react. And react they do — no one is left unaffected. From the waitress to the drunk at the bar, each person is traumatized by watching a $20 bill burn.

We are addicted to money, obsessed with money, desperate for money, clinging to money. We marry for it, divorce for it, kill for it, steal for it.

While the world goes down with a global pandemic, while the forests go up in flames, while we poison our waters, we’re still obsessed with money and possessions. Or we’re desperate to make our rent or mortgage, to buy food, and pay the bills because our very existence depends on the existence or lack of small rectangular pieces of paper.

Why is that? What is going on? Is there another way to approach this?

About a decade ago, I decided to heal my relationship with money. For a few years, I read books and listened to podcasts but nothing stuck. As an indie novelist and visual artist, I’ve always struggled with money. Year after year I’d start and not finish a money journal where I’d look at my relationship with money through the history of my poverty-riddled family. Nothing seemed to change for me.

It was in my mid-50s that I decided to take it seriously. A friend leant me Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover CDs. I was also working with a therapist. I took the whole healing my money situation on as a project, I:

looked my debt in the face, every debt, every interest charge. I cried.
created a budget and began to stick to it.
started paying down my credit card debts and it started to work.
Explored how money was fitting into my core values.
began to heal lessons I learned about money from poverty-stricken ancestors
decluttered my house.
made a massive mistake, and with the fear surrounding the pandemic and loss of income went into debt again, but caught myself sort of in time.
Read woo woo books on money, Love Money, Money Loves You and The Soul of Money.
As my path to healing around money continues, I’ve learned a few basic things.

First, the healing is a mixture of spiritual (woo woo) healing, emotional healing, and very practical action steps. None of these things will work without the others.

Secondly, It’s actually not really about money at all. It’s about abundance. What do you really want and need for a good life? For me, it’s been more about what I don’t need. It’s been about getting rid of, letting go of, living with much much less. Which leads to the final and most important thing that I learned.

It’s not about money at all. It’s about the abundance we feel in our spirits, and it’s about the healing of the earth.

No amount of money can make up for a starving spirit. I know it’s a pandemic and we’ve just come out of a tough political situation, but even with that, do you feel joy every day? Do you feel a love for yourself and the earth? Are you excited to be alive?

No amount of money can fill you up. You have to fill the spirit. This is true abundance. What profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul?

Then there’s the healing of the earth. What difference does cash make if we can’t breathe clean air, eat clean food, drink clean water?

I was looking for images to illustrate this blog, and found many like this one — a plant growing from a pile of money. The message, I’m sure, is “You can make your money grow.” For me, I’d like to flip that message, “Let’s invest in making the earth grow, in healing our planet, or at the very least, leaving it alone to heal itself.”

What do I mean when I say healing around money is all about the earth?

You see all these social media ads for coaches: Make Six Figures Overnight. What good is it if all of our food is poisoned because we’re poisoning the earth? These are supposed to be caring coaches. Why are they just trying to manifest more money? Why aren’t we trying to manifest what’s so much more valuable, the healing of the soul, the healing of the planet?

I’ve seen so many people, even spiritual people, use visualizations to try to manifest “things”. Why aren’t we using our visualization to manifest spiritual healing for all sentient beings?

When we talk about healing our relationship with money, I believe it does begin with very practical steps surrounding our cash and debt. I also believe to truly heal around money, it has to involve understanding the fundamentals about the abundance of our spirits and the health of the planet. Or, truly, what the hell is it all for?

I’m a metaphysical coach and a book coach, contact me at info@carolineallen.com.

The Five Stages of Finding Purpose

I believe when you’re called to purpose, and when you answer that call, you become one of the healers of the world. As you align yourself with your higher calling, you become an example to others. Often the call we answer goes further than just finding ourselves. Often we’re called to go out and help others. I describe this call to purpose as I follow one protagonist around the world in the coming of age series I’m writing called The Elemental Journey Series, especially in the most recent novel, Water.

On my own path, and in my work as a coach, I see very clearly how following the call to purpose aligns with the five stages of grief:

Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

These are exactly what one goes through in owning and living purpose. There was a reason we put away our dreams as a child, and when we’re called to purpose, those dreams resurface and all of the grief and fear of “giving up on ourselves” rises to the surface. We want to close that drawer, not look at how much we’ve lost.

Read my story to get an even better idea of how these stages have played out in my life, in finding my calling as a novelist, visual artist and coach to others. Here are the five stages of grief as they apply to finding purpose:

Denial
The gods knock. If you ignore them, they’ll knock again, and again and again. And if you ignore that, their knocking will become the clash of mythological fists against the rock of your resistance.

You pushed her down into your belly, and now she wants out. At first, you put your head down and get back to your normal job, your normal day and pretend she isn’t wailing beneath the surface.

Many people know my story of denial. I was so unhappy. Depressed. Living in rainy Seattle, roaming around lost. I was given a tarot reading and was told: “You are a visual artist.” I snorted, chin in hand. There went $65 down the drain. Afterwards, I roamed the Capitol Hill district, smoking cigarettes, in a dark funk.

It would take five more years before I’d pick up a paintbrush and start my career as a visual artist. I was an artist as a little girl, winning awards almost every time I entered a show. I’d forgotten about her, buried her deep inside. My parents roared against the concept of me becoming an artist. What do you want to become a bag lady? It wasn’t stated, but implied. Art was something you gave up. Like hope. Like your heart.

Anger
With the call to purpose comes a rage so monstrous you cannot breathe. How dare I be put in a straight jacket for 30, 40, 50 years? How DARE you make me hate my life for so long, parents, school system, unfair economic system.

We are enraged with ourselves for wasting so much time, half our lives. We are enraged with parents who themselves didn’t follow their purpose, who didn’t have the courage to nurture themselves first, and then the wherewithal to nurture us.

Oh, how we’d rather not feel so much rage. Oh, we’ll self medicate, or use pharmaceuticals or play online games for hours, anything but to FEEL. We must honor the anger. It’s one of our best friends. It’s pointing the way to our transformation.

I’ll tell you, my rage was so epic it could’ve destroyed whole cities. I wonder sometimes if all the world’s rage doesn’t come down to this, all the war and crime and destruction: Are we so angry because we’ve been told we must lose ourselves that we’d prefer to destroy the entire planet than look at ourselves?

Bargaining
I gave up journalism to follow my path of bliss as an artist. I worked in newsrooms in Tokyo and London. People picked up when I called. I jet-setted around Asia and Europe. Doors opened for me.

When I gave up journalism, I gave up the perks too. I gave up London, one of my favorite cities on the planet. I gave up travel. I gave up seeing my name in print all of the time.

I didn’t know that exploring myself would be so hard. I started writing fiction and expected to have a book published in five years. Hilarious! Apparently finding one’s lost self takes a lot longer than five years.

So, fed up with how hard it all was, I got another job in journalism, at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Newspaper. I bargained with the gods: Just let me do this for a while, get my ego back, have a wild life like I used to. OK? Please?

Within two months, I was sitting at the monitor in the newsroom, when both of my arms went dead. Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. It would take three months of intense physical therapy to be able to move my arms at all. It would take another 10 years to heal it. I would never work in a newsroom again.

Bargaining is when you try to go back to the boyfriend you broke up, and it all becomes much worse than it was before and you have to extract yourself again.

Bargaining is necessary. We have to learn the hard way, that there is no way out to the other side but through.

Depression
You want to follow your purpose, but it’s so hard. You don’t have any extra money, you’ve lost your old lifestyle, you outgrew people on your journey toward authentic self. You’re alone. It’s too hard. The world is so horribly messed up.

You’re right. The journey is difficult. The world is a mess. You’re depressed because it IS all depressing.

I believe in the darkness. I am not one of those people who asks people to deny their depression. I believe this darkness can be a very honest friend. It’s only when it goes on too long that it’s a problem. Only then do we need to get up, exercise our bodies, go to an art gallery, do whatever it takes to move the energy, so we can get on with the hard work of living our purpose.

Acceptance
How can you get to a place of acceptance? This is your path and you’re going to commit to it, despite the ups and downs and financial insecurity and loss of friends. If you’re like me, you cycled through anger and depression and bargaining for a long time. I want to accept this path fully. How? Shaking fist at the heavens. How?

The world NEEDS you. You’re a hero. You know it deep in your soul. This is what it means to be a hero. We’re globally flushing ourselves down a toilet, and we need you to find your way, so you can show others the way out of the whirlpool of destruction.

How do you accept this path? I have found re-scripting your life story into a heroic journey goes a long way toward acceptance. Look at the events of your life from the perspective of compassion for all parties. We’ve all been duped in giving up our souls. Have compassion for yourself: this is a heroic, epic journey you’re on, and nobody ever said it was going to be easy. Here are some examples of re-scripting:

My parents were so hard on me. “Look at how hard my parents were on themselves. They were so frightened of their own creative spirit. In healing myself, I begin to heal my family from this great loss of self.”

I can’t stand my job. “My soul so deeply wants to follow its authentic purpose, and the love for this call to purpose is so great, no ‘normal’ job is going to make me happy.”

I hate being so broke as I figure out how to align my passion with making money. “I am part of a new paradigm that is going to change the entire world, away from doing work we hate, to doing work we love. I’m part of that exciting new paradigm, and I’m working hard to find my way.”

My husband/boyfriend left me. “As I become more authentically aligned, I will outgrow people. This is why this is the heroic path. It takes courage to grow. I have tremendous courage.”

Of course, you won’t go through the above stages in linear fashion, and you won’t only cycle through them once. The good news is this: If you’re now answering the call to purpose and really going through it hard (most of us have found this to be the most difficult thing we’ve ever done), know this: It will change. You’ll still have the hard times, but you get used to it, you learn how to ride the waves. You start to see what a difference you’re making in your own life and the lives of others, and that gives you the boost of confidence and energy to keep going.

I will not diminish how hard this path is. But I will say: You are doing what you were put on this planet to fulfill. You are living a life you can look back on with deep pride and deepest gratitude. You are saving the world. And isn’t that worth it?

I'm a creativity coach and a book coach. carolineallen.com,

5 Easy Steps to Move from Anxiety to Creativity

Years ago, a journalist friend in Seattle came over to my apartment. She’d just returned from Afghanistan, where she was responsible for setting up a newsroom and training local journalists. When she arrived, she was so exhausted and drained to her very core, she could barely walk or talk.

I knew the feeling. I’d given up journalism a few years earlier because it had sucked me dry, too. And by going to Afghanistan, she’d experienced an intensity I could only imagine.

She went immediately to the sofa and lay prone, barely able to lift her arms or sit up.

I’m an empath. It is my natural tendency to want to help. I’m psychic, and it’s my natural tendency to go for the core solution. I knew somewhere deep down, like me, that Lisa was an artist.

I grabbed a long narrow canvas from the corner — my apartment was also my art studio — and placed it on the floor next to the sofa. I found a squirt bottle full of paint, and put it in her hand.

“What are you doing?” she said, barely opening her mouth to speak.

“Just squirt on the canvas,” I said.

“What?”

“It’ll make you feel better. Just squirt some paint.”

Without sitting up or changing position, she tipped the bottle and drew lazy lines on the canvas. Without moving, she painted.

Years later, she would become the visual artist she was meant to be.

My friend’s trauma reminded me of the kind of incapacitating grief, anxiety and depression that I went through years earlier. And it reminds me of the anxiety and grief many people are going through today because of the global pandemic, forest fires, race and gender inequities, death of loved ones…

I write about the dark night of the soul and the creative recovery I experienced in the 1990s in my recently released novel,Water.

* * *

When I awaken midmorning, the “fever” has broken. My bones are jelly; I’m cleaned out. I lie there in nothingness—no money, no family, no friends, no job. It is just me. I cross my hands over my naked heart. All I have is myself. All I have is my integrity.

Integrity is the word that remains with me. I struggle aboard it like a life raft. I promise myself I’ll hold onto integrity for the rest of my life, the only thing that floats in a sea of chaos.

I get up. In the junk drawer in the kitchen, I find the Post-it notes and a pen. Back on the edge of the futon, I write “Get out of bed every day” on a pink Post-it and place it on the window where I can see it.

“Make the bed every day,” I write on a lemon note. This too goes on the window.

“Brush your hair every day.” I take the few steps to the bathroom and place the lime note on the doorframe. My thick black hair is difficult at the best of times but now is hard, matted, and tangled.

I sit back down, tired. “Brush your teeth every day.” I put this sapphire square also on the bathroom doorframe.

“Did you shower today?” Orange, bathroom doorframe.

“Change your clothes.” Violet and on the closet door in the living room, which is also my bedroom.

A long, narrow hallway leads back to a small kitchen. I place at intervals along the hallway:

“Eat every day.”

“Did you have breakfast?”

“Did you eat enough today?”

“What food have you put into your mouth today?”

I pepper other multihued Post-its throughout the tiny apartment. “Clean the kitchen.” “Sweep the floor.” “Do laundry.”

I lie back on the futon. I cannot move for an hour. Finally, I reach over and grab a stack of Post-its, write “Get out of bed” again. On ten more Post-its I write “Get out of bed.” Still lying down, I reach to place them on nearby surfaces: bed frame, wall, side table, hardwood. I understand that this decision to live will take more than just an idea. I know that living will require concerted participation.

Later I wake up from a dream where I’m told to add one more note: “Drink water. Lots of water.” I write it on a powder-blue Post-it and put it on the fridge.

I look around. My home has become a rainbow of messages willing me to survive.

* * *

Even when you don’t feel like it, even when everything is falling apart around you, even if you take just the smallest steps, you can move from depression to creative recovery. Here are five super simple tips:

1. Start small. Not just small, but tiny. Do one tiny thing. Write one sentence in a journal. One word. Start on the sofa. Start in bed. You don’t even need to get up. Or take a notebook and ballpoint and doodle. Draw spirals. Don’t even write a word or draw a picture, just move the pen. Any movement is progress and will lead to more movement.

2. Look through an art book. Read short stories. You can do this from your bed or the sofa if you need to. In your mind, explore what you like in certain paintings and stories and ask yourself why. This will engage the creative part of your brain. Try it. It works. I promise.

3. If you’re feeling a bit more energetic, still staying right where you are: Look up the drawing of a simple object, like a tea cup. Don’t look up a tea cup, look up a “drawing” of a tea cup…it’ll be easier that way. Redraw the drawing in a notebook. Don’t worry about having fancy papers or pens, just use a notebook. This is the simplest way to get back into drawing. Draw a pencil. A book. A car. A face.

4. Rework something you’ve already done. Without the energy to create something new, I take what I’ve already done and rework them. An old short story you put aside — just read it. At this stage, you don’t even have to write anything, unless you feel the urge. Just read it. I take old paintings and repaint them. I also take old paintings, take their photos, print them out and create collages from them. Don’t create something new if you don’t have the energy. Rework something old.

5. Finger paint. Move your fingers around in paint. This re-engages the child artist within us all. This is a powerful, visceral exercise.
Take small steps. Any movement is movement.

Once you engage that creative side of your brain, watch for the parting of the clouds. Let it be. Don’t have expectations, just observe. See if you don’t have a bit more energy with each tiny step you take.

Many of us have gone through similar phases and come out the other side. You will get through this and come out the other side the powerful creative person you really are.

I’m a metaphysical coach. Check out more at carolineallen.com.

Diary of a Psychic Artist

7 a.m.

Dreams swirl around me as I roll out of bed. My dreams are a pivotal part of my creative life, informing my art, novel writing, coaching. They sink in and come out of my hands or through my voice in mysterious ways. For me, the night time is as rich as anything I do during the day.

7:45 a.m.

At my desk writing my middle grade novel, Maisie Grace. It’s about a girl whose best friend is a tree, a girl who has dreams that come true. Beside me on my desk is one of my 16 tarot decks. I’ve been collecting them for years. I can’t figure out exactly what I want Maisie’s friends Macon and Jack to say in one of the scenes, and pick the tarot cards up. I throw a three-card reading. When I read sometimes words come to me, but it’s more a feeling. It’s my job to translate that feeling into dialogue.

I spend the next three hours writing and using the tarot for prompts, to understand the characters, to hone the theme, to nail the plot points.

11 a.m.

My dogs Atlas and Baby and I go outside to play. We live in rural Oregon and are surrounded by land, trees, and sky. Baby is new to our family, a corgi who belonged to a friend who just passed away. Atlas is a lab/husky mix. The tiny legs of one and long legs of the other make for some hilarious play. The sky is brilliant with clouds. The colors and textures, the two goofy dogs playing, it enters me like music, and I know someday it will all become a painting.

12 p.m.

Vegan lunch of handmade spring rolls (carrots, tofu, rice noodles, peanut sauce). I make every meal by hand from scratch. This has to do with being a sensitive soul — even my lunch has to do with being psychic! Physical problems led me to dramatically overhaul my diet. Empaths like me are particularly sensitive to food. I had to learn this the hard way. After one level of diet change, I learned I couldn’t eat meat. I could feel how the animal had been treated in the factory farms. Ingesting that affected my physical and mental health, and so I became vegan.

With my meal, I drink a kombucha called “Love”.

1-3 p.m.

Clients. I’m a metaphysical book coach and life coach. Today I’m working with an emerging novelist in another country over Skype, discussing characterization, setting, plot, theme. We’re not sure how to develop one of the lesser characters, and I ask her if it’s all right to use the tarot. She eagerly agrees. We pull cards and come up with possible solutions. Tarot can be used for creative brainstorming. It doesn’t have to be predictive. The information is deep and meaningful, and I know we’ll both need to go away and ponder it before she’s ready to develop this secondary character.

After the book client, I have a tarot client. My focus in all of my roles as coach is to empower women. I give a reading to someone who has been dramatically affected by COVID-19. When I read tarot for clients, I try to back up and stay out of it. I try to let the information come to me and not impose my will upon the client or the cards. I’m Reiki certified, and in all of my coaching I imbue the sessions with healing energy.

3-5 p.m.

Time for the yurt! I have a yurt art studio 300 feet from my house in the woods. It was a gift to myself for my 50th birthday, six years ago. Atlas and I take the path through the woods to the yurt. (I have learned that with her tiny legs, Baby has a hard time walking long distances, so I let her sleep peacefully on her bed in the house.) The cats decide to follow us down to the yurt.

The walk itself is full of pathos. It’s like walking a bridge from the outside world to my deepest authentic self. I do not take the walk lightly. I can’t come here when I have too many clients — it’s just too difficult to return, too difficult to pull myself up and out enough to give to my clients. As I walk toward the yurt, as I leave my old self behind, my shoulders relax.

I open the door to the vibrant colors and textures of hundreds of paintings. This is the real me.

Today, I’m working on a Goddess Journal. I’ll write more about them in a future post. Someone has commissioned me to create a grief journal for a loved one who has died of COVID. I handmake the paper at the house because I need access to a sink, a fridge and a stove, but here I take a painting and adapt it for the front cover. I’ve already turned the painting into a print on handmade paper, and now I just need to paint it, put on the finishing touches, and shellac it. I have a few journals that are already finished, take them out, put them on the altar in the middle of the yurt, beneath the dome, light candles and sage, and bless them. It’s my dearest hope that whoever uses the journals will find deep healing within the pages.

I sit cross legged on the floor and throw a three-card reading for myself. This is my personal time for reflection. I record my thoughts and dreams in my own journal.

Afterward, I take out watercolors and watercolor paper and play. I like to do splashes of color, and see what emerges, draw and paint it in.

I feel so good when I’m in the yurt.

5-6 p.m.

More play time outside with Baby and Atlas.

6 p.m.

Made from scratch vegan dinner — this time I’m having a vegan sausage, carrots, ginger, and seeds stuffed into an acorn squash. Crazy delicious.

7-8 p.m.

Conversation with friend. We break out the tarot cards and do readings for each other.

8-10 p.m.

Vegging, taking care of details. I’m binge watching Medium again, fascinated this time with the daughter Ariel and how she is handling being psychic. I realize as I’m watching it’s informing my middle grade book. While I watch, I answer emails, do billing, communicate with someone who is rebuilding my website, market my recently published novel, Water, which is a fictionalized look at when I first learned the tarot cards.

I also work on the handmade journals, tearing the pages down to size, fitting the cover artwork, sewing the binding. Two years ago, I gave up drinking wine and smoking weed. I gave up all inebriates. Instead, now, I use my time and my hands creating beauty. I’ve never felt better.

10 p.m.

To bed. To sleep. To dream the dreams of a creative psychic. My favorite time of day is night.

I am a metaphysical coach, novelist, and artist. Read more at carolineallen.com. Contact me if you’d like a reading or book coaching.

Growing Your Gratitude Muscle

This article first appeared in Thrive Global on Dec 2, 2020.

I sink my toes into the wet pebbly sand. The tide of the Strait of Juan de Fuca comes in, covers my feet, splashes up my ankles. It’s cold, my toes are turning blue as I huddle in my coat and hat. I’ve taken off my shoes to do some “earthing”, a practice of keeping oneself connected to the healing properties of the earth. I need it now more than ever.

Nearby Atlas, my lab, and Baby, my friend’s corgi, roll and jump and pace. They’re excited to finally be out of the car. The two dogs and I are wildfire evacuees. We’re on Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, after nearly seven hours in my small car.

For every molecule of this sea and sand, I repeat low under my breath. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

Gratitude is needed now more than ever. Gratitude is the only thing that will save us. I pull on it for sustenance, for hope, for survival.

It all started eleven days earlier and hundreds of miles south. My best friend passed away. She was Baby’s human. She was found in the horse stall with her beloved Arabian. It was her happy place. It was the best place I can imagine for her to pass on. Just days later, as we were managing her house and her animals, as I was figuring out how to re-home her corgi, dramatic burnt orange clouds started to overwhelm the sky outside my office window. The wildfires that had haunted California were now consuming rural Oregon.

We had to run for our lives.

As I stand on the beach at Ebey’s Landing, my feet in the salt water, visibility is only about 30 feet. Just down the beach, a fisherman is lost in the fog as he casts his line. If you pretend, you can imagine it is fog. But it isn’t. The smell is strong and it sits like grit in the throat. It’s not just California and Oregon being consumed by fire. Washington state has it’s own wildfires, and winds have blown the smoke from all three states up north and over the island. Still, the smoke index is three times less here on Whidbey than it is back in my rural town of Estacada where I live. CNN and the New York Times have both featured my tiny adopted town (population 3,770) because for a few days it had the worst air quality in the world.

“Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” I repeat as we turn into the road that leads to our temporary home.. A good friend and a bit of luck landed us here at this empty rental cabin. It was open for two weeks between long-term renters and was given for free. It was exactly what we needed, surrounded by a garden, apple trees, open land — and only a few minutes from the strait. It’s not just that gratitude makes one feel better. Gratitude begets generosity like this.

Really, it all started decades ago, this gratitude.

In the late 1990s, I was going through a dark night of the soul, a phase I fictionalize in my most recent novel, Water. I went to see a healer. This excerpt from Water is what she said to me:

“…We’re going to reconnect you with your body. So you’re going to take a bath, and in the bath, you’re going to touch your different body parts and thank them and tell them you love then. Touch your toes. I love you toes. Thank you toes. Your feet, ankles, calves, all the way up the body. I love you scalp. I love you eyelashes. Thank you for what you do. That sort of thing. Can you do that?”

Even though the novel is fiction, this is real and it was the beginning of gratitude for me. Prior to this I’d been a journalist in London and I was jaded, enraged, a big brain on a too-skinny body. I wanted a different life, one full of hope and not hate. Gratitude changed my life. Gratitude began with my body.

As the years passed, I would go in and out of this gratitude practice. Righteously indignant at the toxicity of the world, sometimes I stayed in the rage. It made me sick. It made me unhappy. I so wanted a different life.

Only in the past seven years have I taken on the daily practice of gratitude. When I go to bed every night, I task myself with naming ten things I’m grateful for during the day. Then another ten. Then another. Let me be clear, I don’t mean being grateful for things that are not real, or faking it. I mean to really think: What felt good today?

I learned: You have to build the gratitude muscle so that it’s with you when you really need it.

When I lost my friend, all I could think about was the joy, and how grateful I was that we had those seven years. When the wildfires hit, I stayed in the now as much as possible, and at every turn, thanked the things right in front of me. The sea. A fresh picked apple outside the front door. A safe place to stay with the dogs. Meeting interesting and generous people.

We came home to a house that was smoke damaged, neighbors who had lost everything, and a small town in shock. Along the way, Baby and I bonded deeply and she became part of our little family. (Thank you!) Yes, I am grateful for the fact that my house and art studio yurt were spared by the fire. And I’m beyond appreciative for the numerous organization that have stepped in to help.

Something in me shifted with the death of my friend and the wildfires — I could no longer play small. I could no longer play by anyone else’s rules. It was time to fully own my wild, metaphysical, artistic self.

It’s taken decades to get here. How could I not be grateful?

Rejection? Don't Get Over It, Get Into It.

Artists and writers face a lot of rejection. People will tell you to “get over it.” They’ll say: “Who the hell cares what other people think?”

I say: Don’t get over it, get into it.

I’ve spent my life peeling back the layers to find my authentic creative voice. As a journalist in Tokyo, London, throughout Asia, and in Seattle, I focused on giving voice to the voiceless. A strong call to find my own voice followed, and I went on a journey of exploration that lasted years to uncover my authentic creativity. I’m now a novelist and visual artist and I’m still working to remove the layers of resistance to my voice.

Part of excavating our authentic voices as women involves intense emotional and spiritual healing. We’ve been told to shut up. We’ve been ignored. I was negated almost into invisibility as a child. I was a visual artist as a small girl and then forgot who I was. I had to go find that girl back again when I grew up.

I’ve gone to therapists, alternative healers, coaches, shamans, mystics, and to self-help books for healing. I spent years removing piece by piece the blocks to my authentic creative expression, and will spend many more.

Recently, I launched my fourth novel, Water. Amid loving reactions from my friends, one acquaintance of mine didn't like it.

“Who cares if people don’t like you?”

“Who cares what other people think?”

Friends gave me advice. It was all valid, but it didn’t shift the core of why I was so upset. I’m a coach, and I know the difference between true healing, and barreling through something, and “toughening it out”.

Let me be clear. This has absolutely nothing to do with the person who didn’t like my book. That is absolutely every person’s right — to like or dislike a piece of art.

It has everything to do with my reaction.

After I launched Water, I was sick to my stomach. So sick that I spent days clutching my gut and not sleeping. My reaction to the book’s publication, and my reaction to one person not liking it — that’s what this blog is about. That’s what I want to look at.

Don’t we often tell each other as artists to not care what others think of our work? Don’t we often use anger to get over the rejection (What the f#$ck do they know?)

What if we stopped doing that? What if we turned to ourselves and asked ourselves, why does this hurt so much? What is my gut telling me? Why is this affecting me this way?

I think this is like the #metoo movement. We stopped saying, “Boys will be boys,” or “Oh just get over it, that’s just the way boys act.”

We stopped, and said: “No, this isn’t OK. My psyche has been damaged by this behavior and I want to heal.”

As a coach, and for myself, I believe as artists we need to turn, look at ourselves, and get to the core of why rejection hurts us so badly. So many women artists have been negated for so long. So many girls around the world watch their brothers being nurtured, their boyfriends, their husbands, and they’re left with nothing but the scraps.

In Water, I fully own my path to being a mystic. As a child, I felt attacked for being so different. I felt a threat of violence if I didn’t get in line with mainstream Catholicism. I know it goes further back than that too, back collectively to women who were killed for being metaphysical.

My gut was telling me that I was scared of being attacked for speaking my mystical truth. My reaction to the person who didn’t like my book was my fear that yet again I was being attacked for my beliefs. Why is it so important to pinpoint the core of the issue? Because now, I can do healing around that still terrified little girl. I can reparent her so that she is surrounded by love and support as a mystic. I can help her grow up to a woman empowered in her creative voice. I cannot do that by just barreling through the pain of rejection.

So the next time you find yourself telling a woman artist who has faced rejection to barrel through it, the next time you convey, “Who cares what other people think of your work?” — stop. Instead ask them why they’re so triggered. Ask them who else wouldn’t listen to them, wouldn’t hear them, told them to shut up. And for once, and forever, BE that listener for one woman.

Almost all women artists I know can say #Metoo when it comes to having our creative voices ridiculed or ignored. It’s time we heal.

Swimming in the Waters of the Soul

Water, my fourth novel, opens with a dark night of the soul. The protagonist, Pearl, is 28 years old and has just repatriated to the States from living abroad. The relentless capitalistic, pragmatic nature of the U.S. has plunged her into despair. She feels desperate for soul.

“Metaphor is the missing legend. I’m living in a country that has lost its metaphor, its poetry, and without it, we are plunging into ugliness. The dream world is as real to me as your Starbucks, your children, and your husband who no longer wants to have sex. Metaphor is as real as reality. How many times have you seen a shadow and jumped or stopped driving, thinking the shadow was a thing that could tear your car in half? How often has a shadow been a dark pit in the middle of the road that you could fall into? Plato was wrong. The prisoners in his allegory of the cave were right. The shadows have meaning. The darkness is a thing. The dark dream is a thing.”

Pearl resists a call to own her metaphysical self. Such a calling is just too odd. But she does ultimately find her connection to metaphor and archetypes through studying the tarot.

I believe our lives have to be more than the practical accomplishments of daily tasks that the U.S. (and other countries) so prides itself on. I believe our daily lives are so devoid of soul and spirit that we are suffering from the boredom and ugliness. Lack of spirit is making each of us ugly. I believe we’ve lost our rituals that help us live in soul as a daily part of life. I believe we’re all searching for something bigger, some higher energies, some dimension of soul that speaks a different narrative that is more dimensional than the one we are living.

I don’t believe there is only one way of accessing that connection to higher energies. In Water, Pearl uses the archetypes of the tarot to engage it. Walks in nature, poetry, art, music — there are so many paths up the same soulful mountain peak.

It isn’t just “fortune telling” that results from Pearl’s connection to the tarot; opening the channel opens her to the magic of the soul.

“In a trance, I pull the Prince of Wands. The Prince comes alive in my hands. He releases one leg from the confines of the card, then another, and stands up. He prances to the edge of my hand, leaps, and hits the ground like a dancer. He looks at me and holds up both hands as if to say, “What now?”
I pull more. The Queen of Cups slips from my fingers in a billowing dress and twirls into form.
The Prince extends his hand to the Queen to dance, but she turns her back. He taps his foot, crosses his arms, and looks to me because he wants more. I pull. The Queen of Swords brandishes her blade and throws it down between my fingertips, and the tip embeds into the hardwood. She jumps with a thud to the floor. The Page of Coins follows, shy and unsure, rolling the coin in front of her like an old tire. The Jester has cynicism written all over his face.”

Each chapter of Water opens with a major tarot card, or what's known as a major arcana. A few nights before I was to finish the book and send it to my proofreader, I awoke and realized I’d missed an opportunity. There are 22 major tarot cards, each a significant archetype that speaks to the big ideals we all live through on our journeys to individuation. I had used tarot images as opening to the chapters, but not worried about writing 22 chapters, or making sure the progression of the overall novel narrative fit the progression of the archetypes. I knew that had to change. So I got up, and did the ninth full revision of the novel to echo the arc of the tarot. My hope was that the very energy of the symbols would imbue the entire novel with a deeper magic that might help my readers transform.

I believe everyone’s soul is magic. And accessing that magic is part of our personal healing and the healing of our world. We have to make a conscious choice to daily engage the soul. Soulful energies need to be where we live every single day, not just something we maybe do after all the housework is done. We “contain multitudes” and most of us are living a too-small version of ourselves. For me, and for my protagonist, the archetypes of the tarot were simply a doorway to access the magic. I access higher energies now in my art and writing, and not just through the symbols of the tarot. I’ve learned that if I can swim in the waters of spirit daily, many of my ugly issues fade away.

What do you use to access the inexhaustible creative energies that flow from the source?

Little Woman

Originally appeared in Blue Lyra Review, Feb. 2015 with the launch of my first novel, Earth.

The greatest gift I ever received was a book I never read.

The winter I turned eleven, I sat at the desk in the dormer window, waiting. We got the desk at a yard sale, and it was supposed to be for all seven of us kids, but somehow I’d taken it over. In the basement, I found a lime green bucket of paint and painted it and colored the knobs a canary yellow. I lived at that desk, studying my school books, writing in notebooks. I spent hours at that desk, pretending I was some kind of professor or a famous writer, or some other thing that wasn’t real for someone like me in that cold, hard place.

It was an important day. I’d already been waiting for hours, for years, for centuries.

From that dormer window, I could see so far, up and down Cochise, over the roofs of brick houses, across crabby cow fields, beyond beat-up dog pens. Kids were everywhere, whooping and hollering like packs of wild beasts, boot skating on road ice, building crooked snow people, getting bruised and bloodied by the physicality of the earth. This rural part of mid-Missouri was a vast place — the people fisted it up, but the earth itself was infinite.

Winter in mid-Missouri was a thin layer of ice, a cold crunch. A quiet and vast dusting, a white out of the soul. This place was rough, wild, dirty. Mean. Bitter and filthy. I never felt separate from this land. When I was little, my flesh was sassafras bark. Every crunch of ice, every frozen creek, every burr caught in my coat was me. I was the liquefied ice at the edge of the earth. I was the scratched and crooked roots that bore deep into that hardened Midwestern flesh.

Out the window, a Coup de Ville edged up to the curb. I didn’t move. It was important not to be eager, not to be excited, not to show how deeply you desired.

I watched as Jackie got out of the passenger side. She wore a coat that was too big, and a cheap red scarf that was too small. Her mittens were flowered. She didn’t match. In this part of Missouri, it wasn’t important to match.

Mac and the kid got out. I could never remember the kid’s name. He was beige, his skin beige, his coat beige and his hair was beige too. We had a whole mess of cousins whose names I couldn’t remember. All three ambled across the snowy front yard in awkward silence. This was a slow place. People walked and talked like the crops grew, sluggish, with not much showing on the surface. But below the soil, the roots were inflamed, vibrating with a pain that would smack you hard and fast, that would stab or shoot you when you turned your back.

I heard them enter the back door, heard mumblings downstairs.

Still, I waited.

“Carrie, get on down here now,” Mom finally called from the living room.

I jumped and rushed toward the door, before I remembered and forced myself to stop. Desiring too much got you smacked down. Desire was something a woman in that barbed wire place was not allowed. I paced myself going down the threadbare stairs. We had orange shag carpet, and for years all seven of us had been sliding down the stairs on our butts. Most of the stairs now were bald, with orange shag like old man hair at the edges. There were holes in the shag in the living room too. Dad worked in floor covering, but we never got new carpet.

On the sofa, Jackie sat folded into herself, like all her body parts were put together every morning in a different way. Mac had a handle-bar mustache. He had the tip of his ‘stache greased up with Vaseline to keep it in a perfect curl against his cheeks. He was fat, and he squished his face backwards as if he found everything distasteful. I’m sure there were kids running in and out, but I don’t remember them. This was my day.

Hanging behind Mac and Jackie was a bloodied picture of Jesus. It was one of those holographic photos that changed when you moved your head. His eyes were open in one view, and closed in another. I see you. I don’t see you. I see you. I don’t see you.

In the corner stood the tree. Lights glittered in peripheral vision like something close to hope. Every year, we’d take the truck a few miles to some forested field, trudge through snow to a copse of evergreens and use a hand saw. We couldn’t afford boots for all seven kids so Mom put Wonder Bread bags over our socks, and affixed them with a rubber band around our ankles. The snow was so deep it was higher than the Wonder bags. We dragged the huge evergreen behind us in the snow, carving a brushy path, leaving frazzled angels in our wake, ankles on fire with the ice that’d seeped in.

I stood in front of the adults. I was still healthy at eleven. The troubles hadn’t started yet. At eleven, I was still a force to be reckoned with. I was a runner, a vigor of muscle and will.

Nobody said much. In this part of Missouri, it wasn’t done. The silence went back generations. Nobody told stories. The hush wove its way into sinew and bone. When I left that bloody stump place, when I became an adult, I had to teach myself how to speak in social situations. As a kid, I only learned how to keep the words locked up tight in my shoulders, pushed down in my gut.

Jackie looked at me hard and forceful, her eyes blue and cracked, like she was trying to see into my soul. I tried not to look back at her. I was worried about what I might find there. When you saw too much, it could be a terrifying burden. In my hometown, seeing too much was a weight that could bend you in half.

I looked at my mother. All my life in that gritty place, I never found a woman I wanted to be. Married at eighteen, hauling packs of kids around like sacks of potatoes, following the men, always following the men. The only person who was even close to my way of thinking was my older sister. She was an artist. She could make magic out of trash. When she walked into a room you could cut her energy with a knife. She was also a drunk, even back then, even as a girl. My life involved hauling her off the bathroom floor, blood running from her ear where she hit the toilet on the way down. My life involved punching and kicking men as they tried to pull her into their trucks, where she was willing to go, always willing to go. She was my only reflection, my warped and cracked mirror.

Jackie had a gift next to her on the sofa. She handed it to me. Every Christmas, she and Mac drove around Missouri seeing kinfolk. I was their god-daughter. The gift was wrapped in cheap red Christmas paper, the kind you buy in bulk from Walmart with tiny Santas on it. It felt damp in my hands, like someone had dropped it in the snow.

Something hard and raw like sauerkraut wafted in from the kitchen. Food was no small thing in our house. The creatures in the forest were our food. The roots from the sassafras were our food. The gooseberries in the thicket by the garden were our food. Pheasant, duck, squirrel, cabbage, russet potatoes, corn.

With Jesus’ eyes closed, I tore the paper in front of the four adults. Last year it was a Lite Brite box. Another year, it was a big box of colored pencils – art supplies in mid-Missouri! You cain’t live on no art supplies. You cain’t eat no art supplies.

The damp wrapping paper didn’t tear with a whistle but disintegrated with a mush. I let the paper drop in a torn heap on the torn shag. I went ice cold when I saw what it was. If you didn’t know me, you would’ve thought I was unhappy. But I wasn’t. I went cold when something was too big to react to, when any reaction couldn’t possibly cover the situation. In that family, I went cold a lot.

It was a book. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I had never owned a book before. Ever. The only books in the house were a King James Bible and the farmer’s almanac. When I was nine, I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom every night and read the Bible page for page, just for something to read. One of my older brothers caught me coming out with the good book under my arm. He lifted his fist. “You think you’re real smart, don’t you.” He punched a bruise into my upper arm. “You think you’re something special.”

Mostly, though, I was ignored. It was good to fall between the cracks. It was better when no one took notice of you. These people could hurt you with their attention. These people were known to destroy your life with their repeated attention.

I stood there and stared at Little Women as if it were far away, as if I were sitting in the dormer window looking out, and the book was far far below. I think I left my body. I moved. Jesus’ eyes opened. I fell back into my body. I stared at Aunt Jackie — those laser eyes. When I met her gaze, we flew into each other’s souls. I swear we both left our bodies and flew off the planet. We became two stars dancing in the black universe, just the two of us in some far off place where anything, just anything, was possible.

I’m sure I said thank you. I don’t remember. I found myself slipping upward on the carpet, up and up. I could feel Aunt Jackie’s eyes on my back, begging. For what? Pleading. To whom? She wanted something from me, but I didn’t know what. Some spark of hope or possibility in our threadbare world; was that it? I had to keep moving, to get away from the eyes, up and up the stairs, until I was safely behind my bedroom door, until I was back in the dormer window. Until I was alone again, and hidden.

The book was a blue, glossy, hardback. I put the binding up to my nose and breathed it into my flesh. It smelled like glue. I worried the texture of a single page between my fingertips. I turned it over in my hands and put my palm flat on the glossy cover. I rubbed my hand over and over that book – for minutes, for years, for centuries, reading it through my palm.

I better not think I was too smart with all that book larnin. Real larnin’ happened when you used your hands for labor. You cain’t eat no books. You cain’t live on no books. Real larnin meant knowing how to shoot a beast through the eyes, tear off their fur, and yank out their guts.

Sometimes my older sister would bring home tattered searing saga bodice rippers. I’d tear at the paperbacks as if with my teeth, voracious like an animal. I’d salivate as I bore through the story, devouring three hundred pages in one sitting. I was starving for story.

I never read Little Women. To this day, I have not read the book. I couldn’t. How could I? Every time I opened the cover, I could barely breathe. If I tried to read all of its pages, I would surely suffocate. The book was like a mirror, and if I opened it, I’d see my own face. I wasn’t ready to see my own face. My first book. My only book. A book. For me.

I slept with Little Women. I ate with Little Women. I took Little Women to school, to track practice. I threw it in the back seat of my Ford Pinto when I turned sixteen. I ended up taking Little Women to college. I broke the binding sleeping with it so much. Finally, the pages started falling out like the hair of an old woman, and I had to let her go.

When I turned forty, decades after I left Missouri never to return, when I was estranged from all things Missouri, after a career all over the world as a journalist and then as a fiction writer, I wrote Aunt Jackie a letter. She was still a nurse in Missouri. I told her that I was a writer now, and a visual artist. I sent her paintings. Not stories. I didn’t want to open the door to the stories. There were reasons for the silence. I’d spent a decade opening my own door to my own stories, and all hell had broken loose. I didn’t want to evoke the caged beast that rattled behind that mid-Missouri reticence. I was learning that some people needed the silence. To survive.

I realized I still hadn’t read Little Women. I found a copy in a two dollar bin at Barnes and Noble. I sat on the bed, opened the cover and started sobbing. I couldn’t see a word. I couldn’t stop sobbing.

For weeks, every time I opened the book I’d break down in tears. It was hopeless. The book stayed on my bed. I didn’t move it. As I slept, it lay there at the foot of the bed. How long would the binding last this time, as I tossed and turned and had my Little Woman dreams?

I decided enough was enough. I had to get the DVD and just watch the damned thing. This was ridiculous. I was forty years old!

And so, I watched Little Women, one night by myself on a tiny TV. I sat there in shock. Jo’s story was my story. Both the story of me as an 11-year-old, and the story of how my life would evolve, as a tomboy, somebody hot-tempered who would travel, someone who was a writer.

I wailed watching that movie, bent over at the waist. My whole world cracked open, as if I were a beast of the forest, and I were being butchered, fur torn off, guts rifled and studied like some beastly oracle. Raw. Exposed.

Jackie had seen me in that unseen world.

Those eyes. I thought back to those eyes. Jesus eyes. Jackie’s. My own seeing. As a child, before I traveled the world, when the travel happened in my soul, I would look out that dormer window, and fly on blistery winds above our property. I’d soar over the scrappy vegetable garden and cow fields, beyond the twisted barbed wire, over the iced-over dog house where Buck was chained all day, his life never more than a circle of dirt. I would ascend over Missouri, above fields parceled out like a rag quilt. I’d soar beyond the state, along black bulbous skies, over rocky and wild mountains, across oceans, to foreign lands. Even when I was a kid I could see so far.

What could Jackie see? My mother? These hidden women.

This battered. This divine. This feminine.

What were their veiled dreams? How far can each of us see, deep into the soul of the world? In that house where women fell between the cracks.

I see you. I don’t see you.

I see you.

I see you.

I see you.

Art is our Activism

"Pandemic, death of a friend, wildfires, elections -- let nothing stop you in the pursuit of your creative purpose. Art is activism!"

In the past few months, like everyone else globally, I’ve been sideswiped by the pandemic. Isolation from friends, the lack of external entertainment, the fear of death, the fact that the people we usually rely on for emotional support do not have it to give -- it’s been trying for all of us.

Then my best friend died, suddenly. Not of COVID, but of natural causes in her horse barn, next to her beloved Arabian. I took in her corgi. Then a few days later, the entire West Coast of the US went up in flames, including the area where we live. I was evacuated with four animals for two weeks (see earlier blog: Diary of a Wildfire Evacuee).

In the middle of all of this, I was preparing to launch my fourth novel, Water. I’d spent four intense years writing it. I’d revised it six times from start to finish. I’d had my editor look at it in November, revised it again, had her copy edit it in June, and then did another full revision. The night before it was meant to go to the page designer, I realized it needed one more full rewrite, which I did. I’d commissioned the cover. I’d sought out pictures of tarot cards to adorn each chapter. I’d commissioned two, then three book trailers. If you haven’t published before, you have no idea the amount of intense detail that goes on for many months prior to publication. Finishing writing the book is just the beginning.

The sudden evacuation happened just as I was getting ready to upload the book to Amazon, and establish a marketing push to get the book out there.

Even at home, such a task is time-consuming and exhausting. I found myself on an island I didn’t know, evacuated to a cabin without WiFi, sitting in my car with two dogs at an internet cafe, paying people on Fiverr to do all of the work for me. It was a logistical juggling act, and one made even harder by a mind befuddled by wildfires burning down forests, and houses, and communities of animals, plants, and humans.

Why not just postpone the novel launch? It’s a legitimate question. Why not wait until the fires are over, until I am home (unless, of course, my house had burned down, which I didn’t know for a long time during evacuation)? Why not get settled, then publish your novel? My answer: We have no time to wait! It’s now or never. We have to step up.

Writing is my activism. I’m also a visual artist. Art is my activism. It isn’t something you put off. It’s what makes the difference in a world out of balance.

Global warming, rampant depression, higher suicide rates, deaths due to a mishandled pandemic -- this is all because our world is out of balance. Our relationship with the earth is out of balance. I address these issues in my novels. My art is not separate from what’s going on in the world. My art is my passionate plea for humanity, and for myself, to wake up and make a difference. My art is my activism.

As a book coach and creativity coach for 20 years, I see how fear has shut down creatives across the globe.

Are you a creative? A writer, artist, dancer, musician, maker? Are you not doing your work because of all of the chaos? You are needed now more than ever. Our creative spirit is an antidote to the destruction. Tired, upset, losing it? Use that in your writing and your art. Step up! We need all creative hands on deck. Now! You are the answer.

Diary of a Wildfire Evacuee

(I was in the middle of launching my novel Water when I was suddenly evacuated from my home in the epicenter of some of the worst wildfires in rural Oregon. This is my diary.)


September 8, 2020

3 p.m.

I’m sitting at my desk in my home office working on a client project. Outside the window, fat dramatic of burnt orange and deep purple float on the horizon. Earlier I’d been outside filming the shift from blue sky to lavender and burnt citrus cloud cover. It looks beautiful and scary and other-worldly. I’m not overly worried. We’ve had this in the past, smoke from a nearby forest fire floating over our homes. We are 30 miles from Portland, Oregon, and 50 miles from Mt. Hood in a town known for its river, hydroelectric dam, and miles of forests, farmland and Christmas tree growers. I assume the fire is the one they’ve reported on Mt. Hood and that’s far away, so I go back to writing the back of the book text for a book client. I feel confident the firefighters are getting it under control. Besides, since a fire five years earlier, I’m signed up to receive text alerts and none have come through. There are three levels to a fire evacuation, yellow, green, and red. Level 1, yellow, requires one pack a bag. Level 2, green, is a notice to be prepared to go. And finally, Level 3, red, is an order to “Go Now.” I haven’t even received a Level 1 alert. So I keep working.

3:30 p.m.

Out the office window, there’s a striking intensity to the heavy dark and red clouds. I think: Should I really be just sitting here working? In the living room, I plop on the sofa and casually look through hotels that will take pets, just in case. I don’t have family nearby, and with a 100 lb hyper Lab mix, I don’t want to overwhelm my friends. At any rate, many of them live nearby, and if I’m going to be evacuated, they’re going to be evacuated.

3:45 p.m.

My neighbor texts me frantically that the fire is close. I start to get scared. But we haven’t received any alerts! I’m renting a small house on 80 acres and have a yurt art studio 300 feet further into the woods. My neighbor and his wife have a beautiful house and horse property, and have to think of moving large animals. I live alone.

I find on my phone that there’s another fire, that these ominous clouds marching across the horizon aren’t from Mt. Hood, but from something much closer, a blaze they’re calling the Riverside Fire.

5 p.m.

I spend over an hour trying to find a place to board my cats. Nothing is available. I figure I will keep my dogs with me, and find a hotel. I sob to one vet tech, and slam the phone down on another. I think of my own vet. They’re eight miles away, and I know on one level they’re the best bet because they know my cats and on another, that they too may be evacuated. I just cannot conceive of bringing two dogs and two cats with me in my small car and trying to find a hotel. It feels too overwhelming. Outside the sky is worsening, the air is thickening, it’s getting harder to breathe. Still no level 1 alerts.

On the phone with my vet, a staff member tells me they close at 5 p.m. I look at the clock. It’s 5. They’ll open again tomorrow at 8 a.m.
“So, if I’m evacuated, I’ll just sit with four animals in my car in your parking lot all night.
“Sorry,” she says.
“Look, this is an emergency. You guys need to change your policy and step up.” She keeps getting off the phone to go ask someone else. I’m standing up, bent over my phone, tense.
“OK, if you come now, I’ll wait,” she says. Later, I’ll learn that they end up remaining open to wait for many people in the same predicament as me.

5:05 p.m.

Luckily my cats are in the house. Usually they’re roaming the acreage, dragging newly killed wild rabbits half their size in to lay at my feet like some prize. I run to get their carriers out of the closet, stuff them inside, and rush them into the car. Still, there have been no alerts, so I figure I have the time to drive the eight miles into town, drop the cats off, and come home, pack a bag, prepare my dogs, and wait for the alerts. Meanwhile, my sister Whatsapp from Costa Rica. I quickly send her a picture of the sky.
“Evacuate,” she cries.
“I haven’t received any alerts.”
“Get out of there,” she wails.
I get on the road with the cats, and as soon as I turn onto the highway, I realize I’m in trouble. The usually empty road is backed up for miles with trucks and horse trailers, people trying to move their livestock and horses.

5:35 p.m.

I still haven’t reached the vet. I’m only halfway there. Miles in front of me and miles behind me are cars, trucks, campers, trailers. Police scream by in the other direction, sirens blaring. This is a sleepy town, population 3,000. I’ve never seen anything like it. I realize with horror that I may not be able to get back to get my dogs. Everything is changing so fast, and I can’t think. I decide to make a U-turn and speed home. The sky is so black now it’s like it’s the middle of the night. I’m using my wipers to move ash off the windshield.

I run into the house and grab the leashes, leash the dogs and get them into the car. They won’t fit with the cats. I take one cat out of a carrier and stuff her in with the other. They protest with hissing and scratching. I throw the other carrier into the house. I decide to leave the front door unlocked. I have no idea why. I run around the house. I need to take something with me, but what? Sweatpants? A sweater? Dog treats? My passport? My sleeping bag? These are the only things I can think of. My mind is blank. I jump into the car. As I’m driving up my long gravel driveway, the only alert I am to receive bings on the phone.

Level 3: Go Now!

If I’d waited, I’d be in traffic when the alert came through. The fire, or roadblocks might have stopped me from getting back to my dogs. I pet Baby beside me. She isn’t really my dog. My best friend died suddenly 10 days ago, and the police asked me to pick up her Corgi. I’m weepy.
The vet calls. “Where are you?”
“On my way. Please wait. Please.”

6:25 p.m.

I drop my cats off at the vet. I drive for 20 minutes along the highway out of town, the road toward Portland. I’m just so glad to get out from under that ominous, other-worldly cloud of smoke. I pull over to use my phone to find a hotel for me and two dogs.

I’ve lived in Tokyo, London, Boston and Seattle, and assumed until I moved to rural Oregon that most hotels didn’t take dogs. But I soon learned that in Oregon, animals are a big part of life. By the fifth call, I start to panic. Rooms are being snapped up faster than I can dial. First the closest towns nearby, then the next towns after that, then the next, and the next, and finally I’m calling Southeastern Portland, and finally north Portland, toward the border with Washington State. A clerk at Best Western Hotels say she has a room but can I wait, she’s very busy with people coming in the door.
“No,” I scream. I’ll take whatever room you have for me and two dogs, and I have my credit card ready. Book it for a week.”
She books it. I get my hotel room.

September 10, 2020

I last three days with two dogs in a hotel room and an air quality index in the 400s. To borrow a phrase, “I can’t breathe” in more ways that one. The grit and smoke in the air, even this far north, sticks in the back of your throat. I feel the toxins in my gut, and feel sick all the time.

The outpouring of support during those three days is nothing short of miraculous. The way Oregonians come together will stay with me for years. People send me gift cards. Best Western hotel waives my pet fees and lowers my room rate. Everywhere people step up, offering food and clothing and shelter to people all over the state.

Still I have to leave. I’m close to Interstate 5, which goes north to south along the entire U.S. West Coast. All I can think of is that I want to get on I5 to go as far north as I can get to get out from under this suffocating cloud. I call a friend in Seattle and ask her if she can put out word for me. I need a place to myself to manage the dogs. Atlas, the lab mix, is used to running wild on 80 acres, and is going stir crazy.

With minutes, someone responds. They have a rental on Whidbey Island, 230 miles north of Portland, 20 miles north of Seattle. The tenant moved out early. I can have it for free until October 1st. I call the owner and she offers to bring over an air mattress and sheets. I thank her for her kindness (In the States, rentals are often unfurnished.)

The night before I leave is sleepless. My friends are dispersed, all of them evacuated to different areas, and it feels somehow like I’m abandoning them by driving so far north. This fire, all of the fires dotting the West Coast, they seem like monsters to me and burn up my dreams.

Then there are my cats. Already, the vet has had to evacuate all of the animals they’re boarding, and they’re now in a dojo in Damascus, Oregon. All night I toss and turn. The woman who owns the rental doesn’t want to have the cats, and to go get them means braving Portland traffic at a time when everyone is frantically escaping the fires. I’m terrified I’ll be stuck, terrified the fires will worsen; already they’re creeping toward SE Portland. Fire lodges in a primal fear place in the body, it erodes one’s sense of safety and one’s mental health. I meditate and meditate and keep getting the message: The cats are in the best possible hands.

All over Oregon, people are stepping up to save the animals - livestock, horses, pets, wild animals. On social media, people post offers to go into the fire with a trailer and pickup and rescue horses or a lone cow. It’s this level of commitment to animals that reassures me.

As I drive north on I5, for the three plus hours it takes to get to Seattle, I realize there’s another reason I’m making this journey. Once a journalist in Tokyo, London, and Seattle, and now a novelist tucked far away from the world, I need to see the magnitude of the events taking place.

Thick heavy, back-of-the-throat smoke follows me for about an hour and a half. It decreases by a good 60 percent after that, but still the landscape is enveloped in white mist. Worse, the once green drive toward Seattle is now yellow and withered. I’ve made this drive dozens and dozens of times, and I can’t recognize the landscape. It is so dry. Seattle is called The Emerald City because it’s always been so green, because of the rain. But now it is yellow. This shocks me almost as much as the fires.

It is only hours later, when I’m waiting for the ferry to Whidbey Island at Mulkiteo, 22 miles north of Seattle, that I start to begin to glimpse a hint of blue sky behind what could be mistaken for fog. The island itself is misty but relatively clear, but this will change over the next two days as winds blow the smoke over Whidbey, and far into Canada. Still, the air quality index is 150 here, 189 in Seattle, 470 in Portland, and off the charts in my small town.


September 13, 2020

Over three days on Whidbey Island, I’ll hear that our sleepy town of Estacada makes national news on CNN as the epicenter of the Riverside Fire. I’ll watch fire maps as the fire inches closer and closer to the dojo in Damascas and my cats. I’ll watch a video of a house close to mine going up in flames. I’ll hear conflicting reports about the destruction of my own home. I see post after post about rural vigilantes with guns roaming around to protect houses from looters, and they’re shooting at innocents. I wonder again what the hell I’m doing living in this country.

I live in a rental and am not attached to most physical things. As an expat for years, I often had little more than a suitcase. I am not horribly worried about my house burning. I do have a yurt art studio 300 feet further into the woods, and am grief-stricken with the possible loss of hundreds of paintings, easels, and art supplies it’s taken me years to collect.

And of course we are all mourning the loss of the forest, and of the animals who live there. This is a mourning that is primal, a reaction that still searches for words.

6 p.m.

A friend from a nearby town sends me pictures. For some reason, she risked danger to drive to my house, taking backroads to get around the roadblocks.

“Your house and yurt are still there!” she tells me. She’s scared, though, and wants to get out quickly. The air is unbreathable.

“Don’t put yourself in danger,” I cry.

I’m grateful, but I know when they allow us to come home, we’ll all be returning to a pit of smoke damage. And it’s hard to be too happy as I watch dozens of my neighbors’ houses burn to the ground.

I sit on the blow up mattress, and prepare to launch my next novel. Twenty years ago, a book series downloaded into my psyche called The Elemental Journey Series, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Ether. Water is set to come out in October. It’s all about one woman’s search for purpose in a world falling apart due to climate change.

I think we all know we’re going to see more crises like these. Scientists have been warning about “compound disasters” for years, the convergence of extreme events as a direct result of climate change. It’s happening now.

My friends and I question what we can do. I was called to write novels about it. Most of us have spent the past few years preparing by getting healthy, working out, eating organic and often vegan, doing yoga, meditating, quitting drinking and smoking. At least if we’re healthy, we can be of more use during a crisis. I know my own health craze has helped me maintain my sanity through all of this in ways that would’ve been impossible just a few years ago. In our work as coaches and healers, artists and writers, we directly address the issues of climate change and finding purpose. We’re activists. We’re fighting for changing outdated systems. We’re growing our own food.

If there is no way around the continuation of such dramatic events, of pandemics, and forest fires, of flooding and earthquakes, what can we do? We can, of course, vote for more aware politicians, that’s a given. But we can also opt for presence. We can focus our energies on physical and emotional presence. We can face what is.