 Do you believe in Karma? Whenever I get up to my lake house after a school year ends so I can exhale among the stars, my mind often goes to philosophical ideas. It’s hard not to when surrounded by the beauty up there and the quietude. There’s just so much about the universe we don’t understand, CAN’T understand. And why do we have to? There’s so much written about being in the moment, but of course we can’t just BE in the moment, because it’s too fleeting. The next moment has already started before we can be in it and ends before we can take our next breath and so it goes, over and over. But we can be MINDFUL in moments. We can be mindful in what we eat. How we treat ourselves and others. How we speak to ourselves. How we temper judgement. How we pause to think before we speak. I sit on the beach and try to do just that. I look around me, and I see so much beauty, this moment of sun on water that seemed as if I had faked the photograph, the glitter on the water so surreal it looked like a trick of the camera. It’s hard not to pause at moments like that. It’s funny how at that moment I snapped the picture, I was battling with a persistent spider, none too large, I might add, and I know most would squish it…but I didn’t and rarely can. So what? It’s a spider and tiny and who cares, right? But it lives. As do all insects, the mosquito the only one I wage war with. And so, I let it be and marvel at its tenacity and strength as I will a few minutes later with the industrious ants whose homes will soon be destroyed by summer laughter and excitement in dancing feet.  I don’t know where or why I’ve grown to treat these infinitesimal creatures as if they’re human. I have a memory of a childhood friend’s mother who taught me about nature, who espoused often: “Spiders are our friends,” and I hear myself echoing that. No one had ever talked to me about those kinds of things before in my household. No one seemed much to care about that. Of course, there will be casualties, but my knee-jerk reaction isn’t to kill them. We need them more than they need us. For we are all connected with pollination and plants and oxygen and the whole lot of it. But I don’t do it out of some great cause or a belief in karma or fear that I might be a spider in my next life. No. And herein lies my question I posed at the beginning. Do you? Do you believe in karma? And does it only apply to humans in your view? I hear so much about karma. That what you do will come back 3x to us, as if that will somehow even the score and give us the motivation to do the “right” thing, to be kind. What a lovely thought to think, that if I just do right, good things are inevitable and even deserved. You can imagine, knowing me, what I think. I think it’s a load of rubbish. I don’t beat down those who believe that. Just as I don’t beat down those who believe in god or gods or whatever they have come to accept as true. But what I don’t like is that it presumes that when BAD things happen to people that it must be deserved. That’s the problem I have with these belief systems. They are so heavily unbalanced that it makes little sense to me. Certainly, the atrocities of the pasts, the Holocaust for example, tells us this simply is not so. And it bothers me. It bothers me a great deal, because people have tried to use those excuses to explain evil, even applying it in that case. And we’re better than that. I don’t care if there’s karma or a god or not. I live a life that feels right in my soul, in my conscience, in the pit of my stomach, my gut, whatever you want to call it. Whether I’m rewarded or not is of little consequence to me. I am not here to say I’m perfect. Please. Who is? But what I do believe is that there is intrinsic good that exists, outside of anything we can possibly understand, just as there is bad, not because of laws, but because it just IS. It has no beginning and it has no end. I feel it. And that’s all I need. I don’t care to understand or have answers to the rest. Instead, I think I’ll just be quiet, and continue to let this moment--head back, mind open, and face to the sun--be enough. 
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 Yesterday in The Nu Romantics, I asked a question about the color red. It went something like: Look wherever you are and find the closest thing to you that is red. What is it? And what does it say about you? and I discussed my red bag and its "baggage," both literal and figurative. It was fascinating to read everyone's responses, and those of us who embrace red; and those of us who do not. It says a lot more about us than we think. (Join our Facebook page to read everyone's responses). And at first, I thought it might be a fun activity, just to see what kinds of things people have around them, the small, the big, the deep and the superficial. And really, it sort of turned into a philosophical idea for me. In an earlier post this year, I wrote about the color pink (See Post Here), in the sense of breaking the stereotype about pink, that pink is not necessarily a “girlie” color, and that even if it were, what’s wrong with being a girl or feminine and embracing all those traits that come with it, like empathy and sensitivity for instance? And then, after I conducted the exercise in The Nu Romantics, I began to ponder the very fact that I own a lot of red accessories. Yes. I love fashion. If you’ve been following my new page and Fashion Fridays, you know that already. And I own a ton of scarves and shoes and funky jewelry so that any outfit can suddenly become spectacular, even when it isn’t. But I’m realizing something else about this. It’s really not that at all. Like pink, red comes with its own symbolic value. While pink equates to love and feminine traits by all accounts, red equates with a vibrant energy, one that is tied to sexuality and even lust. Read more on color and symbolism.  I am a very sexual person –what was it I wrote in a poem the other day? I have a "broadhead’s sexuality"? (My poetry page)…and perhaps that is partly why I like the color red on my body in the form of clothing, but not so loud that it overtakes me. It’s just a "pop of color," right? Perhaps, too, that is why I love to wear lipstick in all shades of red, even naming my first poetry collection Ruin My Lipstick for goodness sake! I used to think it was because “it looked good with my complexion.” But really, doesn’t it simply match what swollen lips look like after a night of passionate kissing, our cheeks the same rosy hue during and after the heat of love-making? So okay. Red is a sexual color. And I am a sexual, passionate person. But why then only a pop? Why not go all out?  We know why. I have repression issues. 😊 Don’t worry. I’m working on it. Perhaps I use it like a sign to let people know. Hey! I may seem sweet and innocent…but…you see this 'pop'?...
All kidding aside. I have psychoanalyzed it further. (Why? Because that’s how my mind works!) And so, it’s much more than sexual energy sneaking its way into my world. It’s a life-long stifling from parents and society. If pink is my favorite color, is it because I think it should be? I’m a girl. Girls should act a certain way, right? WRONG! But growing up, that was the case. Couple that with a mother who told me: “You’re not a boy. Stop being loud,” I became a rather shy gal, easily embarrassed, that embarrassment I’ve written about before, where I can feel it right on the outside of my ears. And so maybe red, to me, doesn’t only mean sexuality alone, but instead, maybe it’s my way to rebel, to let go a little, to scream without screaming, you know? And if red is rebellion, then guess what? It’s starting to work, because I have never felt more alive and "seen" than I have these last several months. And so, as I get ready to re-release my Natalie’s Edge series, Edge of Torment (Title voted by you--thank you again!), why should I choose any other color than red for my cover? It’s bold. It’s powerful, and damn it, I don’t want to be quiet about it. I have ditched my first concept, because, for a change, I want to be completely and utterly red, proud, and out loud, for all to see.  I think of all the years she protected me and to be kneeling now, taking the flowers out of my hair to plant in front of the soil of her grave, I worry the stone’s shade can’t protect them for long. Tears and sweat mix to blur my eyes from fully being able to read the engravement: Loving mother, wife, and Nana. I look up and watch a cloud, like my mood, move to the left to cover the sun, and the weight of my sadness imprints deeper into the earth. But then I think: Maybe she’s just trying to protect her flowers now. I smile. That would be just like her.  Call today's post my closure on my mom’s death, something I think I had been avoiding…but have somehow found this weekend in a cloud. Yup. A cloud. All kidding aside. Nature does that to me. It speaks to me in this very strange way. I’m not sure if it’s because I stare a lot at it--a tree, the sky, the earth--but my mind goes “limp” in a way. It relaxes, like being in a hypnotist’s chair and being told to stare at a spot or a dot on a paper. It serves the same purpose, but it’s more organic. It’s us reflected in IT. I somehow have come to believe that. Maybe Emerson’s “Transparent Eyeball” really does exist. I certainly felt that way this weekend, and that poem came out above. I’m sure there’s not one of us here who hasn’t lost someone to that crabby and persistent dude called Death. It’s really just a fact of life. Like light and dark and good and evil and pleasure and pain and any other opposite, so too, we have life and death. But here’s the thing. Are they opposites really? What happened with my cloud was supposed to be a bad thing, but talk about opposite! Do you think death is a bad thing? A sad thing? It hurts, because we’re living still, especially if we loved that person, and they’re not. It’s almost a selfish thing when I think about it. That’s where the pain is. In our void. That we still have to live without them. We also don’t like to talk about death, and yet we must. We must plan for it. For everything else we plan for--retirement, saving money, etc.--death is really the only sure thing. Have you thought about what you’d like your funeral to be? Do you want to be buried? Cremated? I know. Morbid. But why does it have to be?  I realized something about my mother’s death this weekend. I hadn’t dealt with it. Not the way I thought I had. In fact, I realized I hadn’t really gone through the proper stages of grief at all. It wasn’t denial. That is not it…it was just so compartmentalized that I didn’t deny it, I just didn’t want to look at it, face it, think about it in any way. If you read my share last week about my mom, you know why.: The topsy-turvy relationship between mother-daughter, between traditionalist and free-spirt, between stoic and emotional, between proper and wild. But I also realized something else. My mother planned everything. Her plot was bought, funeral paid for, her spot on my dad’s stone just waiting to be engraved, also planned. Everything was a blur, as if my body went through all the motions in a dream I watched from a safe distance, but wasn’t really happening, not to me. I hadn’t really had to do anything but show up and cater it…(that’s not entirely true, I realize, I did), and as I stood in front of her grave this past weekend, planting flowers, I finally saw her death and I somehow let go of so much guilt and resentment and fear and what-ifs. I exhaled it. Quite literally. Right out into the air. And now, I finally have the closure and peace of mind I’ve been searching for these last couple years. It's okay. We must learn to forgive ourselves. Life isn't a game of villains and heroes. It's much more real than that. And grey and all its shades, as my cloud taught me, can be a beautiful color too.   We all dream. That much is a fact. But do you remember your dreams? Do you write them down after? Do you think there is anything to them? Is it our subconscious surfacing, or as Freud said, our unconscious minds, that are giving us our deepest answers to our true selves? Or is it complete imagination that has no bearing on, or connection to, our ‘real” existence? Is it actually an alternate universe, where we live for as many hours a day as we allow ourselves to sleep? And what of nightmares, the ones where you wake up in a cold sweat, struggling for air and breath, remembering and not remembering? What the hell are they? As a child, I always had the same recurring nightmare until I outgrew earaches. Gruesome and frightening nightmares, I’d rather not talk about. And last night, I woke, panicked, to believe that my significant other was having an affair with…wait for it…Britney Spears’s sister, a la Zoey 101. Gasp! It felt so real, so true, I woke, breathless, ready to give him a piece of my mind, until I began to howl in laughter. Really? Zoey 101? What the hell goes on during slumber?  We all know the childhood urban legends about falling in our sleep, that we’ll die if we crash and actually hit the ground. Or the grandmother who told us that guilt is the cause of vivid dreaming and nightmares. Or the dream dictionaries that have specific meanings attributed to specific things, like if your teeth are falling out in your dreams, x, y, and z are true. Or even more difficult to swallow, that perhaps we live out our past lives in our dream world, which then, of course, would beg the question of whether or not you believe in past lives. In an article from Psychology Today, it states that basically all this talk, from ancient Egyptian beliefs of mystical revelations to Freud and Jung espousing the secrets of ‘self’ to today’s ‘online dream dictionaries,’ has been deemed very unlikely, that while we think we can unlock “secret codes” to glean meaning into our dreams, essentially there is NO secret code, but instead that dreaming is rather random.  What do I think? Like many things, I’m content to say I don’t know. I’m not ashamed either. When my mind really goes down the path to make sense of it, I start envisioning Richard Bach’s novel One, of myriad alternate lives we’re leading, each choice, a new path. Or I begin to think that we live two lives and do not know it, the one that is me right now, and the one in slumber. Or that we don’t exist at all really, but that we’re just energy with no beginning and no end. And then, my brain just hurts. What is wrong with just saying: I haven’t a fucking clue? And in admitting that, I can find a semblance of peace…just as long as I never have to dream about Jamie Spears again. 😊  For further reading, click here: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/supersurvivors/201801/do-dreams-really-mean-anything
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I LOVE to write and read. I particularly enjoy reading erotic romance that has tons of emotion in it. I hope you will ask me questions and share your favorite authors and novels. I welcome all feedback.
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