I was hanging clothes on the line, barefoot as I like to be as much of the day as possible. I almost stepped on a garden snake. Oh, surprise!  I took a couple of deep breaths. I was glad that my foot just missed him and his reflexes were quick enough to slither away. Transformation, yes indeed. It is here!

I am living heaven on earth these days. My friend’s home is the garden of eden. I just ate an egg fresh from the chickens with some chard plucked from the garden, spritzed with a lemon from one of the many trees. Yum. My belly feels pretty satisfied as I am ingesting all that sunlight and cool sea air along with the food. Makes me feel a bit woozy as I contemplate it all.

I have put new bouquets about the house. I am in love with honeysuckle and lemon verbena and roses. Oh my! There are petals that fall and more to clean up but the joy is so full and rich from the filling of my visual and olfactory (strange word) senses. As I go to cut the flowers, they all call out, “Pick me, pick me!” I know some folks don’t believe in cutting flowers but they love to be brought in to be admired and to weave love light with me. Each one gets more attention and we all love to be seen.

It is Father’s Day today, and it brought with it a wave of love for my dad. He gave me the experience of dark and light from the earliest age. He was not the wonderful dad so many have the experience of, yet he was wonderful in some ways. Alcohol turned him into an unpredictable violent man. Yet there was a gentleness that could surface. On weekends when his shift work allowed, he took us out of our suburban neighborhood with a gin mill (that is what the bars where called) on the corner to the farmland where he grew up. We had woods and freedom to roam. Our neighborhood was made up of men who worked at the steel mill or the Ford Motor Company. All working shifts, heading out with their metal lunch pails that held the thermos in the top. For years, I made his lunches. I cannot imagine working 7am-3pm, 3-11pm, 11pm-7am for decades. How did his body adjust? Something that I never considered as a child but feel gratitude for now. He took us to museums, on road trips to national parks and forests with the pop up camper. We vacationed every year on a lake in Canada. We rented a cottage and we six kids all preceded to get burnt to a crisp within the first couple of days of swimming  and had to wear t-shirts over our bathing suits for the remainder of the vacation time. We would lie in bed with blisters on our backs, whimpering to one another.

Dad had a wooden boat that he shared with his brother and father that we used for outings, waterskiing for those lucky enough to fit into the skiis without your feet slipping out, fishing for those who had the patience to sit out there with our dad, or trips through the locks that allowed passage to other bodies of water where we went grocery shopping.

Morning mist flowing down the hill.

He picked mushrooms and cow slips (a spring green), and buckets of blackberries in the wild. He grew a big garden and composted scraps. He hunted for deer, rabbits, and pheasants that all were part of our diet and helped the budget. He turned off lights whenever they were not needed, frugality was a part of his nature. All things that inform my way of living.

I did not speak directly to him for most of my childhood, was surprised if he called me by name. He was the male who went to work, took us places, read the newspaper, imposed the quiet if he needed to sleep. Children and adults did not interact to much of a degree in our household. Yet he provided for us in all the physical ways. No mean feat with six kids.

We are all part of this circle of life. Our fathers flow in our blood as do our children.

The sun is shining and calling me outdoors. I am grateful for all the ways the divine masculine has grown. I look at my former hubby, now dear friend, my sons, their friends and feel the deepening and shifting that has occurred. They are present with their feelings, comfortable with their nurturing sides, open and exploring new ways of being a man, a father. We have come a long way. I am grateful to the generation before who lived such closed off lives in order to fufill a role given them as to what it was to be a man. How wonderful that my grandson will know and live a different way of being. We are evolving!