Creative Arts and Healing
AUTUMN! 
At last! The breeze comes through the open window, i'm actually wearing a light robe, and I'm back talking to you, welcome guest!

While the summer seemed endless, as summers down south tend to be, now it seems to have wooshed by, because of course now is the present moment, and the leaves are scattered all over my back hill, no mistaking the season.

I'm happy to report that I am the proud mother of 10 Singing Bird Chapbooks: A Dream to Ride On (Selected Poems); If I Live to be 100 (mini-essays); The Millenium Poems (written during Y2K); The Odin Stories (Tales of an Enlightened Cat); 3 short story collections age 15-23, 34-45, and 52-70); Inn at Stone Cairns (a novella); In the Beginning was The Word (selected essays), and "Free Your Sister, Free Yourself" - The Women's Liberation Years. The labor was sometimes smooth and sometimes challenging, but it was so worth it, and has provided me with an unexpectedly moving Life Review. Every poem and piece of prose, every photograph and autoharp song, has a story beneath the story. I lived it, I created it,
and now it shall be archived, so as to sum up (if one ever can) the life of one woman.

I should add that eventually UMass (The WEB DuBois Library) will also receive my 500 or so journals. Can you see scholars of the future diving into my deepest secrets? I hope they do, and I hope what they find is how I intersected history (herstory), how my story is both
totally original and unique, but also the story of an American, who lived through the 40's, 50's 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, into the new millenium and beyond -- an Aquarian, teacher, healer, mother and wife, a gardener, dancer, lover (to be sure), a beach bummess, scrabble player, visionary humanitarian, a human being of quirks and foibles, who left her trace on the great fabric of time. whew!

What's coming up this season??? More chapbooks (the order still to be determined),
a trip or two to the beach, more wednesday evenings with the women's spirit-group i have been privileged to be part of for more than a year, a Lifestories women's group I've been attending for a decade! (it pays to stay in one place long enough to be able to say this); more adventures with husband and daughter (Alana, as you recall, lives in Tallahassee and works as an architect at a local firm), more Haiku poetry, more planting and reaping, more dreaming, more connecting up with far flung friends and pen-pals (including four prison inmates I correspond with), taking me up to the end of the year... with many surprises in store, I'm sure, and would i have it any other way?

Thank you once again for being part of my story, my life, my evolution. Even if we have never met in person, our paths, through these words, has crossed. I hope to know you better. You are a mirror and a gong, to reflect and wake me. Let's continue our pilgrimage together....

And let us, as we journey, bring peace to the troubles of the world, let us visualize a world without violence, based on respect, creativity and compassion. Each of us, one day at a time
...

Katya










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