I haven't been posting much because for about three weeks now, those few times when I can get on Tribe at all, the best I can do is read posts in my public tribes. I usually cannot post at all. It does the whole doesn't-remember-me thing, which it is still doing despite claims on Twitter that that's been fixed. On top of it, I am so extremely and unexpectedly busy at work and at home that I rarely have the actual time to check in and see if it will work this time. So that's why I haven't been participating. I feel really fed up and am tired of having my chain yanked with the hallucination that I might be able to actually post something. Why it's working today I do not know.

I'm now mostly devoting my attention to a large and very active spiritual group that comes in my e-mail, all nice and neat, actually works, and doesn't make me feel like a Tribe orphan! I do miss you guys, and all the ones that no longer even try too.

I didn't want people to think I was staying away by choice. There's been so much of that.

At a yard sale on Saturday, I heard someone noodling around on a piano inside a Victorian-era house, and then they launched into one of my favorite songs ever from my own piano lessons: Fur Elise. Somehow it always sounds good and it never ever got old, and is one of the few things that I can probably still play today from memory. I felt such sweet nostaliga.

I don't play piano any more. After 14 years of bad lessons from poor teachers, and infrequent practice sessions, and despite my large hands, a famous pianist listened to me play once, by request, and told me there was no hope of my ever being good enough. He pointed out how my hands had formed, and that the ring finger knuckles dipped down, and that this was due to bad instruction and bad form and could not really be overcome at this point.

But it really was OK with me. I loved playing in the rehearsal halls late at night as a restless teenager, but I didn't want to continue with something that I was going to suck at (though I did get praise from my teachers for many aspects of my playing). After that I just quit, except for a couple of brief rentals while I attempted to write some blues numbers on my own. A big part of my life and then . . . like it never existed.

Now, today, after my Fur Elise delight on Saturday, I came across this, arranged for cat, loon, wood stork, cuckoo (and maybe a few other critters). I freaking love it!!!!!!! Yes, there are a few slightly painful moments, but keep going. It's really good. An excellent if bizarro arrangement. For your delight.

Here's the link. NOTE: YOu may have to hit Control + click to use the link -- I did.

switchzoo.com/music/fur_elise.htm

Above is a picture I took at high noon last week, lying on my back on the deck at home--still not far enough away to get the whole thing in frame. I've posted another pic in my photos which gives the straight-overhead shot. And these are exactly as the camera took 'em!!! I learned this is called a halo, and it's caused by cold stuff in the air, and we've had plenty of that to celebrate the SOlstice with.

Had so much fun over the weekend: my friend's birthday dinner Fri. eve at a great Japanese restaurant where for the first time I tasted taro root and lotus root, but honestly they were so mixed together with other things I still have no idea what they taste like on their own, but it was some very adventurous eating and we were a raucous crowd. My friend has this birthday ritual, for her own and everybody else's birthdays, where the people attending the party each take a little candle and think of a blessing they'd like to give the birthday person for the coming year, and light their candle, tell their blessing, and put it on the cake. Then when the cake is loaded with all the lit candles (you have to think and work fast for this), we do the incantation, while doing a stirring-the-cauldron motion, As we will it, so must it be! three times, louder each time until naturally you really yell it the last time and cheer, etc. Quite startled the other folks in the restaurant, hehehehe!

Then on Sat. I went for my 2-hour private technique class at my dance teacher's home studio. On the way I stopped at a yard sale and experienced instant manifestation -- exactly the kind of thing forecast for this solstice by many channelers. Fri. eve. I'd also done my shopping, and had gone to Wal-Mart and looked at their weights. I need a 20-lb. weight, or 25-lb., just one for my lats, so I was looking at separate weights and bars where you add different weights to make up what you want. Both versions cost more than I was willing to spend (given how much I'd just spent on my friend's gift, lol!) so I left. At this yard sale there was a business-like case with two of the weight bars and 30 lbs. assorted weights, so now I can do the 20, a 25, two 10s, whatever!!!! For $2.00!!!!

Anyway, she really worked me in this class. Simple things that looked easy I could not do at all. Complicated things that looked flat-out impossible, I could do, at least to some degree. She pressed down on my back and other bits during various stretches, evoking the most unique feeling, so strange, of stretches in places I've never stretched before. It'd be so convenient to have a small person on call at my house for this purpose, to stand on my inner thighs and increase my turnout (like they do in the temple schools of dance in India), and best of all to stomp up and down my back. When it was over I was floating high and not exhausted exactly, but moving very very slowly. I drove back to town like the most languidly stoned lowrider, half-lying in my seat. Really I could hardly be bothered to go 25 mph! Still in this state I stopped at the library, and took another side trip: my first letterbox treasure hunt!!! Got turned on to this by a post right here on Tribe and learned there are a bunch of these sites around my very own town, and others nearby--places I've been again and again, and never knew that somebody had hidden a little notebook and stamp pad somewhere secret on the premises for people who could follow the clues to find. I did find it. It was super easy! Put my own little stamp in there, and wrote in my little notebook "The Star-Bellied Sneetch" letterbox, #1. A new era begins.

I was supposed to go then to a big all-afternoon-half-the-night bellydance hafla at a friend's but I was too wiped out to consider anything but lounging and reading on the deck for several hours, but then I did dress up and go. And I played a dumbek solo for a solo dancer for the very first time, it was very cool!!!! She's so daring, and she came up right in front of me and locked eyes with me and I thought, OK, I can meet this challenge, I think!!! And tried to play powerful stuff for her and it was very exciting. Unfortunately I spent a bunch more $--but I got a real, custom-made flamenco skirt that fits like it was made for me. These things are extremely flattering, it's how they're made. There's no flamenco around, you know. This is an investment for a future manifestation. I must have flamenco!

Having slept little Fri. nite I couldn't stay up for the fire dancing but they're doing this whole event again on the 11th and I'll do it then. Even though I have no lessons in this, I've been promised I can give it a go. Plan: do not burn hair off. This is the entire plan, really.

Sunday almost was a concert in the park with dancing; the good music showed up but the dancing, sadly, did not, and so I left and went home like a good girl and did my watering and chores.

For two days I thought about how much I love and need the sun and the light and how this moment is the peak of the year for me. Yep, all downhill from here! In my idea of heaven, all days are as long as Summer Solstice.

as some kind of fundraiser for the high school, every year they have a Ducky Derby at the golf course, releasing hundreds of $5/duck ducks down the creek. The first 3 to make the finish line get cash prizes but the very last one gets the really big prize of a weekend on the coast. This year I was finally able to find somebody actually selling these tickets and so I got one, and headed off in great excitement on Sunday to see if mine would win, figuring there'd be hundreds of people and even more kids there, right? But no! There were like 3 people in addition to the actual crew, and the golfers kept playing golf quite rudely, even though the crew and I had to scramble rapidly all along the edge of the creek for this, ducking golf balls all the while. Still, it was good clean mild-mannered fun. Now normally the creek is still high at this time of year but this year it's almost empty due to the drought. So the poor duckies have a real obstacle course of normally-submerged rocks, sticks, tussocks, etc. And the crew kids this time had to actually get in the water with them and rescue them while we spotted from the bank just what clump of grass the pink lead duck had gotten hung up in this time. They poked and corralled them with oars and sticks while golf balls whizzed by, and so the normal 3-minute race took half an hour. There was one clear frontrunner, from the very beginning I knew he could be The One! He got in big trouble in the middle stretch, but then when all the ducks got in trouble in the grassy home stretch, he broke free and sailed at a glacial pace all the way to the finish line. A mile ahead of the others but I tell you, I could have knit a pair of socks waiting for him to hit the rope, and when he finally did get there, he stalled one inch in front of it while everyone standing in the water shouted encouragement and tried to blow on him, hehehehe. So above, the valiant Blue 71!!!

I posted some more pics of the race.

luckily despite the general statis, dance is still thriving somehow for me -- despite the fact that the Saturday morning dance class I've religiously attended for 4-1/2 years straight (never missing except for Tribal Fest) has been cancelled, because the teacher's finally got a new love who is unfortunately a long drive away and so, I guess, she wants her weekends back. Damn!!!! Since the gym closed I've been working out at home, at first with fervor but lately . . . . um, hardly anything except the always-valuable pushups. I still have my step and sculpt classes, thank goodness, and my new dance class, but my pants are so tight now that Saturdays are over, I cannot tell you. The one good aspect of this is being able to sleep in on Saturday mornings, aaaaaahhhhh!!

-- So my new dance class is truly awesome and completely changing my relationship to my body and to dance itself. It's fusion again, but my teacher is extensively trained in several styles including Dunham technique (odd, arbitrary, difficult and rather cool), and she just does whatever the heck she wants and I follow. The class is semi-private or private, too, which is incredibly lucky. I've always admired this particular dancer, she is the best in the area without question, but had a small child and never taught except during work hours, until now. She mixes in all kinds of things, like mudras and little rituals, which makes it even more special. The class has brought me to sudden tears and heights of joy and depths of incompetence (turns and spotting, have I got baggage around these, OMG) - I dream about it! And she's really happy because she has somebody to dance with, somebody who actually can dance with her. We both will break out laughing when we look in the mirror and see, it's happening, look at that! there we go by, like chain lightning, yay! I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity. She was sick with this flu that lasts 2-3 weeks that's been going around here and so cancelled class for two weeks in a row and I was deeply paranoid, afraid that this wonderful opportunity, like so many others of late, would vaporize, but now she's well and we're back. And she is even considering adding a Saturday morning class at her home studio--bit of a trek but I am so there!

-- went to Tribal Fest as usual and went to a mindboggling workshop by Patricia Passo of Spain on gypsy flamenco. I've had some flamenco and I've been told also that dances we've done in that are gypsy. But no!! This is a whole 'nother critter, down and dirty mixed with the same lead-from-the-elbows focus, done barefoot too. I had no idea, and I really want to learn much much more, but I would have to go to Spain to get more. Literally. I learned so much from her: why the elbows thing --- what you're doing when you do that is take your energy field, hook it and move it with the energy coming from that elbow point. You gather it up and take it with you as opposed to moving within it as in so many other forms of dance. And she taught about freedom/not freedom -- you know how flamenco dancers are always giving that intense stare? (I learned this is called the Bull, BTW -- looking death and danger in the face and defying it, determined to fight until the end.) She showed that flamenco is moving between free/not free -- you reach your arms up and out and joy lights your face, you are free! YOu have built up your power and broken free!!! Then something from this world snaps you back and you turn in and down and you realize: not free, damn it not free! And you give it the Bull, and break for freedom again. Just magnificent. It's entirely about power, claiming it, claiming your life and your space, emphatically. (That's duende.)

Tribal Fest itself was great as usual, though I didn't see anything particularly new. I did see one Goth dancer called Marjhani who really impressed me, and I wasn't expecting to be impressed at all. Now there's a woman with power and intensity worthy of any gypsy flamenco dancer; when she'd make a rushing pass across the stage the power came off her in visible waves. Fabulous! The burlesque fad in full swing with cutesy 50s-sexy pinup poses and everybody dancing either in high heels or very large furry boots (talk about sweat, good grief). It was hard to sit there and watch with such great music and dancing going on. Some friends were there, as always happens too. I noticed by accident that there was a community free dance next door starting at 8:00 p.m., and so as soon as the acts I wanted to see were done, I raced over there, threw down my money and flew onto the dance floor with such built-up energy, it was amazing. Sweated buckets. This is the only time I do sweat, actually. Then drove the long drive home in a haze of endorphins and bliss. Took a sleeping pill immediately on arrival, as I intended to go back down there next day for more. The pill didn't actually kick in until the next morning, though, so no more Tribal Fest, just lay around hammered in place most of the day, lol!

Tribal Fest is the most wonderful little world -- every year as soon as I arrive I feel so at home and like there's been no time lapse since last time, that I've always been there and never want to leave.

Above is a picture of Patricia Passo. I want to be able to do it just like this.