Ready for Foot prints!

Footprints in the Snow.

It's a cold January day and I'm sitting beside the fire watching it snow. Is there anything more peaceful? It's just beginning to mound on the sleeping flowerbeds and coat the bare limbs of the oaks and poplars beside the lake. The lake is covered in white back here in my cove and there's one lone goose perched on an upright log by the shore.
I have a couple of questions. It doesn't seem the right time to bring them up, surrounded by all this beauty as I am, but then cold January days are for reflecting.  
A friend of mine recently lost a close friend to suicide. He was in physical and mental distress but no one knew how bad that had become and he must have been too deeply into the indigo of depression to see his way out or to ask for help.
Why can't we see these things happening? How often do we hear, "I had no idea!" or "If I'd known, perhaps I could have helped..." Probably not, I think. Don't you think that by the time anyone realizes things are that bad it's too late for anyone to help? We comfort ourselves with that thought, and then another one pops in. "I could have helped if I'd known he needed help sooner. If he'd only reached out..." My thinking is that it's unlikely that most of us realize how much pain another human being is in unless they reach out and not many of those in trouble will reach out - perhaps because they don't understand the slippery slope they're on. And by the time they do - well, they're too far down the mountain.
Here's what I think about suicide. My belief is that we're all spirits. Long before we took on the mantle of human beings, we were spirit. We still are. Underneath the heavy cloak of earth, we're spirits. I also believe that we came to earth of our own free will, excited to try it out, confident that we could handle this school of very hard knocks.
Many of us can. As hard as this life gets, we plow on to the finish line.Some of us, it seems, may have jumped the gun. Perhaps we're impulsive beings, perhaps we're very young spirits, immature beings who once they arrive here find out this isn't what they had in mind! "Oh my God! Look where I've landed. Will someone please get me out of here?Help!
I think that sometimes this world we live in is just too damn hard. And for some of us there's no making it better. Some are just too tired, too sad, too disappointed and dejected to stay. They had some chances, some good times, but the bad times were just too much for them to handle. So they left. I believe they tried. They were not weak - just overwhelmed. Talented, many of them. Highly intelligent in some cases. It's much easier being pure spirit. And now they are.
Whatever happened, it's nobody's fault.We all have choices to make. We do the best we can. We all have free will and again, we do the best we can with that too. 
Sometime all we can do is to love one another. To make things a tiny bit easier on this old earth plain. And if we fall down on that sometimes, well, there's still time to make amends. To pick up and start again on a brand new day.
There's a brand new world outside my window. Pure white and unblemished. The snow is draped like fondant icing as far as I can see. I can't wait to step on it! It'll be like stepping into a whole new wonderland. How will  I mark it? I hope that the brand new foot prints I leave are better than the ones behind me. Maybe I'll make an angel - we all need angels. Everyone of us!

Dream Taps - Hellooo!

I think a lot about dreams with messages.
If you're like me, you'll dream a lot sometimes, or a little sometimes, and the dreams are either pretty lukewarm, straight forward flashes of pictures with landscapes and people and actions. Some make sense and some don't.

But every so often you get one that really grabs your attention. It's so real, so vibrant, rings so true that you know in the deepest part of your being that This Wasn't a Dream! And you don't care who says it is, you KNOW that you were there, in the middle of that dream, involved with the people and the dream action. When these dreams happen, I try to figure out what the message was. Usually it's pretty clear but sometimes it take a day or two to sink in.

Four or five night ago, I was sound asleep, minding my own business when one of these dreams dropped in. I was in the presense of two old friends that I had seen or spoken to for months, maybe as long as a year. I'm sure they crossed my mind at some point but it was a very busy time and sadly, I'd neglected them.

But there they were. The wife stood directly in front of me, her husband a little behind her and to one side. "We'll get through this," she was saying and as she spoke I had the real feeling that whatever they were "getting through", had to do with her husband. And then they were gone. The dream ended.

I thought about it a lot the next day, thinking I needed to call and say "Hi" if nothing else. So two days later I did.

When I asked, "How are you guys?" My friend said they were "okay". There was something in her tone (and the dream) that made me say, "Just "okay"?

"Well, not actually," I heard her say. "We're stressed out. But we'll get through this!" It turned out that her husband was going into hospital the next day for some pretty extensive surgery.

***

There were actually two of these "drop in" message dreams. The other happened the night before the one I've told you about. In this one I found myself again with three people, my sister-in-law, her deceased husband and me. He was climbing a ladder getting up onto the roof of a building. He had his back to us. She stood directly in front of me and said something I can't for the life of me remember. But I knew there was a message. So I called her.

She was fine, she said. And she sounded fine so I didn't press it. Then she told me, she actually had a terrible case of shingles. I sympathized with her, hoped she'd be over them soon, and she said she doubted it because they were TERRIBLE!

Try as I might I couldn't find the message here - but it was a message dream I knew. Then, about a week later, lying in bed early one morning I got it. About a year before my sister-in-law lost her husband, he was at our house helping my husband and son shingle the roof of our new garage! That's why, the the dream, I saw him climbing a step ladder up to the roof of a building.
There it was.

So pay attention to these dreams that feel so real that you know deep down they're not really dreams. They have messages.

Sweet dreams, everyone!

Happy New Year!

Christmas always comes before New Year's Eve. It's a fact. The more things change the more things stay the same. Yup. We can rely on Christmas coming before January 31st.
Well, this gave me a problem this year and it makes me wonder why we can't celebrate Christmas after January 1st.
Here's why: I was invited to a New Year's Eve Ball on the 31st of December and found the most divine sleek, classical black satin gown (strapless) for the occasion. All it needed was a choker of classically chunky diamonds to set it off as the last word in high fashion. Little pause for thought there as my bank account couldn't quite stretch to accommodate a set of Fink's chunky diamonds, but no problem, rhinestones work quite well, and you don't have to worry about highway robbers. But I digress.
 The dress fit like snakeskin - sleek, smooth and satiny with tiny buttons down the back disguising a zipper that would presumably keep it all together and hold everything up. Trouble was I first tried it on two weeks before Christmas and it fit like snake skin. Four weeks later, after a few Christmas parties, a sip of eggnog here and there, a martini one night and Christmas dinner combined with a trip to San Francisco and more than a few sips of Sonoma and Napa wines - not so much.
 I began to worry about the dress on the way home from San Francisco. I got onto the plane with my hand luggage bulging with left over truffles and chocolate Santas and my jeans bulging - with me. How could this be? These jeans used to be the most comfortable pants I owned. Did the California water shrink them? Probably not.

When I got home, I couldn't look the skinny dress in the face without daggers of guilt piercing my  bulges and did my best to avoid eye-contact with it as I anxiously finished up the chocolate I'd unpacked and started on the Virginia Peanuts and and leftover walnuts in the fridge. This was not good - but the more I thought about it, the more I munched 'til on the morning of the big dance I came to my senses and raced off to Zumba to loose five pounds in one hour. Didn't happen. I tried starving myself all day and at the last moment I took the dress down and tried it on ... drum roll...
Twenty minutes later, with two people tugging and sucking and squeezing, the zipper shot up my back. "Yessss!" I squeaked, because that seemed to be the only sound I could make. I tried to let out a sigh of relief only to find out that sighs are driven by air and I had precious little to spare in my lungs which appeared to be somewhere in the vicinity of my Adam's apple. Or was that my boobs? Whatever, they were quite spectacular in this trussed up mode.
 But breathing was definitely a source of concern. I rode to Roanoke to the dance, flattened out in the front seat of the car like a python who's eaten too much - go figure... stretching my lungs out to help with inhalation.
My emergency dress was in the back seat. 

The emergency dress was in the back seat in the event that the Old Year went out with a Bang! and I popped out of my sleek black satin like a watermelon pip sometime during the evening.Or worse still, that the zipper split and that silky smooth gown slithered elegantly down my legs pooling in a puddle of elegant black satin around my feet.
"We'll just tell everyone you're part of the entertainment," My date Jim said. "We'll say we couldn't afford a cake so you popped out of your dress instead."

Bad joke. I could feel myself hyperventilating. Smelling salts - I needed smelling salts. Jim didn't think CVS carried them.

***

I needn't have worried about any of this, as it turned out. My posture was perfect (had to be or - Pop!) as I tottered into the ballroom on Jim's arm. The chunky rhinestones sparkled, and I took small wispy breaths and everything was fine.
 I must write a note to the 3M company (or whoever makes these wonderful zippers) thanking them profusely for their craftsmanship and wishing them a Happy New Year.

Happy New Year to you too. Let's all hope that 2013 exceeds all our best hopes for a really good New Year. The blog is coming back and when it does, there are two new books to tell you about. In the meantime, Love, health and happiness to us all! Chocolates are out for a while, though.