Imminent change. With the new year comes big change. I gave notice to leave the garden house. I ended my current love affair. I am seeking a new home for me and Miles. In the midst of all of these things school is still in full gear. I feel great. More independent then ever in my life, full of love. I feel strong, and confident. For the first time in my life I feel beautiful and capable of all the things that I aspire toward. I wish the same to all of those that I love. Sometimes life is so intense that tears poor out of my eyes and I reach up for the sky and dance all night. Could these experiences continue throughout my life? I hope so.

The country is on fire
one day soon there will be a war
of people who know and
those who don't want to believe
This shit is over
the white noise will stop
we won't be able to afford it
and people will hear silence
for the first time
and some of them will realize
what is going on

"In some respects (but certainly not all), the act of falling in love is an act of regression. The experience of merging with the loved one has in it echoes from the time when we were merged with our mothers in infancy.
Falling in love is not an extension of one's limits or boundaries; it is a partial and temporary collapse of them. Once the precious moment of falling in love has passed and the boundaries have snapped back in place, the individual is disillusioned. Real love (the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth) is a permanently self enlarging experience. Falling in love is not.
Falling in love has little to do with purposively nurturing one's spiritual development. If we have any purpose in mind when we fall in love it is to terminate our own lonliness and perhaps ensure this result through marriage. Indeed, after we have fallen in love and before we have fallen out again we feel that we have arrived, that the heights have been attained. We do not feel ourselves in need of any development. Nor do we percieve our beloved as being in need of spiritual development. To the contrary, we percieve him or her as perfect. If we see any faults in our beloved, we percieve them as insignificant-little quirks or darling eccentricities that only add color and charm.
If falling in love is not love, then what is it other than a temporary and partial collapse of ego boundaries? I do not know. But the sexual specificity of the phenomenom leads me to suspect that it is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior. In other words, the temporary collapse of ego boundaries that constitutes falling in love is a stereotypic response of human beings to a configuration of internal sex drives and external stimuli, which serves to increase the probability of sexual pairing and bonding so as to enhance the survival of the species.Or to put it in another, rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink and trap us into marriage. Frequently the trick goes awry one way or another, as when the sexual drives or stimuli are homosexual, or when other forces supervene to prevent the bonding. On the other hand, without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married would have retreated in wholehearted terror from the realism of our marriage vows."
-M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

I would like to request that all of you who care an inkling about the garden house, join our tribe. We hope to have more involvement by all of our friends. The food is all planted, the weeding is all done, we just want ya'll to help enjoy it. Events will be planned, and the tribe is a good way to let people in on preparation and planning. We have some new roommates moving in and want the old ones to stay near. I expect some new members in this tribe. And I expect some friends to stand by me. I love you all. Joni

Out of your dark heart comes songs
And in my nightmares you hold me
I know about tears you've cried
I've never seen one
One day we'll go to Mexico
And soak up the sun we've missed
On that day you'll smile at yourself
Your eyes will be open again
No one will know us
we'll know everyone
Songs will be sung in foreign tongues
We will know every word
And we won't know what to say
My heart will cry for the past
for the times when
your heart and mind did not speak
for the times when
words were harsh
and hands were soft
like love