Staff wake up thinking is it FIRST MONDAYS or SECOND  MONDAYS?
When asked about scheduling massage events in offices, I recommend Mondays.  Staff really look forward to that day and it makes their Sundays even better!  The week gets a surge coffee just can't compete with.

Many folks prefer the table over the chair as it allows for easier receiving of care.  When I use the magnificent electric massaging tool, everyone just oohs an ahhhs as their pain and tension are just melted away so easily and quickly right through their shirts and dresses.   Then I use my hands to bring caring relief to those overused muscle groups so many have at desk positions.

As a Reiki practitioner, the quality of touch is very mindful to meet each person's needs.  One person recently said, "Just your holding the tops of my shoulders felt like a warm hug inside me and helped me relax."

To book a group event click here: massage-in-your-workplace

Just working on James Ochoa's ADHD Top 12 Strategies video series.  He is a dynamic counselor in Austin with a great vision of ADHD management.

Repatterning uses muscle testing to identify what is limiting an infant, any aged person, group or even animals. I have helped repattern cats, dogs, and even a moth infestation that would not go away for a client.  More soon...

i've been playing with gold oil paints and acrylic gold and metal leaf.  The reflective nature gives so many possibilities for expression.  I've found the leafing  process to reveal dynamic dimensional effects when used as an undersurface to oils.  

Suddenly becoming a young widow is like falling off a cliff.   Except sometimes it takes years to land. You imagine the crash again and again as you race towards it.  At the same time, your reaching for the dead one doesn’t bridge the gap. The fall is so long that you stop screaming after a while.  You stop being scared. You look around to see who is with you as you release the one you can’t see anymore.  The wind rushes by you and you finally start to feel it, you never even noticed it before.  Your descent starts to slow and you realize you’ve grown wings.  The red wings only a heart can grow after it has been ripped open.  They are made of what pours out of that opening. They are strong and they carry you now.  

Grief in its many forms comes with loss in its many forms.  There is no right way to grieve or get over it.  Death is something we all share.  It is our birthright.  How uncomfortable we all are with Death’s unwelcomed visits. How strange it is to welcome death in the life of our loved ones who suffer greatly. 

Lay your thoughts down here.  Let this be sacred ground we share. Let the solitude you find yourself in as you comment here be like a quest.  Cry out to your creator and creation. Allow your ancestors to gather with you to support you. 

At some point loss will not define you anymore.  You’ll stop measuring time by how many months or years it has been since you began this journey.  Mine started ten years ago, July 3, 2003, when my husband Micheal Copeland died suddenly of a heart attack.  I was 36.  With four young children. With no life insurance.  With a unbelievable community of support. 

Let’s share resources here.  I’ll share how surreal, beautiful, terrible or messy it got and how elegant solutions came through those around me. 

You may be the one who is supporting the griever.

This is for you too.  We all can grieve together even though we all grieve alone.

We can reshape our life after our loved one’s death right now.

Approaching the equator, I am flying over a desert unknown to me, I can not see it from above yet I feel its magnified light radiating upwards. Like a bird in a warm wind funnel, I spread my heart’s wings and rise upward in the pillar of warmth.  I call on the spirit of Gaia Sophia below me and send my roots down from the plane to the earth’s core, I call above me “eh Christo” and open the lightening wand that is my spine.   Between heaven and earth I rise and balance in the eternal pull of both directions.   It is glorious to feel a heavenward hover in my heart at this height near Tamanrassat.  After a fear filled day of acknowledging that I am ill-equipped to help my kids further their education, and of feeling the panic of moving from my Spicewood country home to the city of Austin, it is a relief to have peace in the air at least for these moments.  I sit on the edge of my airplane seat, an upright nail asking god to hammer me home.  Plunge my point back into the earth. 

Where am I to land?   Where am I to land?  I’ve been flying for 10 years now away from a day I never wanted to see.  A day I foresaw that branded a mark so deep and searing into my soul that I thought perhaps I shall never recover.  I shall never want to recover.  I will be stuck in a mighty pain of loss that I can use to define my wretched self-pity as something nobler, as a widow.

To call myself a widow can be to cling to some badge of honor.  Look world, I have loved and it was a mighty love.  So mighty that I shall never recover.  I shall work myself to death raising our four children alone and it will be enough work that I shall build an impenetrable shell around the ashes I call a heart.  My love for my children shall smoke from me.  I pray it doesn’t choke them as it does me.   A phoenix cannot rise from here.  I will pull every red plume as it manifests.  Plucking the very life that tries to breathe again before it can exhale.  No. Only inhales allowed here.  Nothing but smoke can come out. 

Where am I to land, OH God!  I pledged full compliance, surrender and yet I take it back all the time.  Surrender.  Grab.  Surrender. Stab at life like a rock climber.  I just want a handhold, a foothold in this precarious, nefarious cliff I must scale.   I cannot see the top, and I feel the luxurious resting place waiting for me if I fall.  I will not look down.  It sickens me.  To look up dizzies me.  To stare at this rock and search for holes big enough to fit me is my course.  My children hang from my waist at different lengths, with different weights.  They are beautiful as I see their freedom following us around, illuminating our way.  I can imagine their futures as fatherless children.  As brave, bewildered beings finding their way, remembering to play and to pray.

Can I have the same?  Can’t I play again?  Am I too old now with too much responsibility to know the joy of time spent not getting anything done?  Can I find playmates?  Can I not ruin our fun with my sorrow that grips each joy unlived?

“If I am not afraid to die, then you should not be afraid to live,” said my oldest sister Linda.  She has been living through Stage 4 cancer for three years now.  She lived longer than they predicted.  Her death soon is certain.  Daniel, her son who lived with me at age 15 when my husband died, is now beside her. And this early initiation into death’s company is well suited to his present call of duty.

Now a 25 year old soldier, soon to be college student, Daniel is the one entrusted to my beloved sister’s care.  His “street smarts” have given way to “heart smarts” that grow from laughing through dying.  He grew from his “Uncle Mike’s” sudden death, and then from volunteering for bedside dying care the next year for Servando (our Adopted Apache Elder), as he traveled about and eventually became a national guardsman and his dying mother’s companion. Hospice helper’s have charted Linda’s journey for Daniel to carry out like a mission. He said he is ready and so is my sister.  I try to be ready.

Truly I am half a world away from her softly colored bedroom where I hope she has hung the Callalily painting I gave her for Christmas. Her home is in Kansas right now and I am flying to South Africa after a visit to Amsterdam. I departed from this Dutch world with an image of my childhood with Linda.  The dutch were previously only known to me (and by “known” I mean “in my fleshy presence seeing and feeling,” different from knowing by studying) by the little Dutch girl painting Linda painted from a quilt I think.  There on this present trip, I saw in the old and rusty bicycles sauntering around the canals (with many a child on the back) the dusty road she and I traveled by bike in Laredo. My adult eyes peered into the darkness lit by Rembrandt and into the light colored by Van Gogh’s darkness.

What is the right action to take from here?  “LIVE Rosita” Linda would shout. Would a postcard of a penguin make it to her before…well you know… before she can’t open her eyes anymore?  Before her earthbound soul opens from dying’s naked dignity to pure majesty.  I will pick a penguin postcard and send it .  I will take a lot of pictures of them and send them too.  

Linda created a wooden penguin for my family to hang as a winter decoration.  She painted it with the peaceful, loving detail one can only find in a rare corner of a craftshow.  Each painted stitch on it marches along as an unhurried, tiny, orderly ant.  Its humorous expression delights me every time I spy it.  Because it cheered me so, for many years after Mike died I couldn’t put it away after Christmas, even late in spring it still hung with its painted face smiling at me.  She never knew how such a humble, handmade gift could reach into a world made crazy with grief.

Painting would return again as my comforter years later.  Linda is my earliest memory when I smell oil paint or turpentine.  We both loved it.  Precariously, she regularly gave me a pump on a bike to my first oil painting lessons when I was six and she was fourteen back on the air force base in Laredo, Texas.  My scabbed knees and her fair, sunburned cheeks kept a steady pace on the bike in the searing heat. It was really too long of a ride to lessons as I remember, yet we ventured on and in my innocence I recall her chiding me to keep still and not knock us off balance like I did two years earlier getting my left foot stuck in the spokes going downhill on another air force base in California --back when I was learning to read and pondered what it could mean to read silently like Linda.  I would pretend to read silently with my finger tracing the words.  Now in Laredo I felt so special to have permission from the art teacher to join the high school aged class.  Linda so graciously allowed and even hauled me along, teaching me to paint by her side, opening my vision to a form to express itself through.   Even then I could see and portray light and shadow.

Light and shadow.  The edge of one defines the other.  To know light is to know shadow.

My ankle still carries the scars of that bike wreck.  Her ankle carries the tattoo of the phoenix.

POST NOTE: Linda passed over later that week.  I love you Linda!!!!!!

Getting this book written is my new goal!  It will have my art in it. 
Young widowhood came suddenly, and with it came simple words and beautiful acts from those who carried me & my four children through loss. As I complete my book collecting this journey my family traveled, I hope this sharing can help anyone who knows someone traveling through the elegant journey from loss DEFINING us to loss INFORMING us.  While much of these last nine years was painful and messy, the times when offerings from others seem to be the perfect solution, when one simple change made all the difference--these stories bring me the most joy.