Copies of Siren available

I haven't written in a couple of days. I guess I've been kind of depressed. I hate to admit it after being so charged up about permaculture and how I'm going to change the world one day at a time, but I sunk back into my usual cycle of self-defeating behaviour and thinking. A lot of this is because winter is just so hard out here. Most of the time it is grey and most of the time it is windy. There is nothing green growing. I probably would feel better if I could go out and start a garden, but that won't be possible until May. I am also missing the daily contact with likeminded people I had at EAT. EVen though I am pretty solitary, I still want to have daily contact with people who are engaged in the same struggle that I am--people who are aware of what's happening to the earth, and who are doing something about it. It seems like a lot of the people I know are engaged with personal healing,(or are trying to get to that point, which usually means they are lost in depression and addiction) but haven't reached a point where they are ready to heal our culture and the land. And then there are all those people I dont' know at all, and even though I know there is no way for me to really know what's going on in their minds, it seems like all anyone is concerned with is daily survival. Getting up in time to go to work after tying one on at The Albion last night. Making it to the end of the week, until payday, when the boss will reward their wage slavery so they can guzzle shots of Jagermeister. Or there are those who own and control the island, who don't seem to care at all about the land here. They don't think about how the watershed's getting polluted or consider the toxic materials they use to build houses for rich people who only use them for three months a year. What I'm saying is I'm lonely! I wish I was back in the magical circle on Black Mountain singing to the full moon, raising a cone of power. I just have to tell myself that that energy is still there for me. I know that I will ride this period out and find it again. I am just tired of this cycle and wonder what I'm afraid of--because I think there is still something in me that doesn't believe I can get out of it, so I keep sabotaging myself. I know that my thoughts create my reality, and that there are so many factors which go into creating them, including physical things like what food you put in your body, which I definitely struggle with. We don't even have access to organic produce here beyond a couple of items, and as for buying locally, there's nothing growing in New England in February. Basically I know I need to make some big changes in my material life and I don't know how to go about doing it. Well I do, there's just nothing I can do about it right now because I'm broke and depressed, which you know is a bad combination if you've ever been there yourself.

I just finished Starhawk's incredible book The Fifth Sacred Thing, and found myself wishing to live in a collective in San Francisco with people dedicated to preserving the four sacred things. Even though the book is really scary, there was something about it that brought me a feeling of relief. It had that quality I have been seeking all my life--the characters were faced with something so huge they had no choice but to engage with it if they wanted to survive. I've always loved books like this--The Lord of the Rings, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy, the books of Madeleine L'Engle, The Wayfarer REdemption series, by Sarah Douglass. When I read these books, I live in them. They are far more appealing worlds than the one I find myself in when I finish the book.

As a culture, we in the U.S. are so disconnected from our wild minds and our wild bodies. Any time I have read books where the survival of a world is at stake, I am sucked right in. I don't know if this is because I am connecting to something that will happen to us, a prophetic impulse maybe, that these books act like blueprints for what I must learn when the time comes when our world is unequivocally at stake, or if I am just overwhelmed by the amount of choices available to me. All I know is that having a world of choices hasn't made me happy, although I give thanks as a woman to have them at all. I just wish I lived in a society like the San Francisco of The Fifth Sacred Thing--a place where my vocation was valued and supported--both psychologically and financially.

Which brings me to my current dilemma, one that has been dogging me for almost twenty years. I live in constant fear of not being able to support myself. I have always known that I wanted to be a writer, and I've pretty much designed my life around this call, working seasonally on Block Island, using the winter downtime to develop my craft, believing that it would eventually "pay off" one day. Well it hasn't. I've written three novels and two poetry books and I've definitely spent more money on them than I've received. I've even tried to compromise commercially, but it just made the books worse. I've had so many crappy jobs I can't even count them all. Basically I've reached a point where I will go insane if I have to take another one. It isn't worth it to me, especially now that I see how all those jobs are damaging the earth--poisoning the water with toxic chemicals from housepaint, filling up landfills with styrofoam take-out containers, polluting people's bodies with hormone filled meat. I Can't do it anymore! As I was biking into town today I prayed to the Goddess to send me some meaningful work that will support me financially, because within two weeks I'd say, I am going to be completely broke. I am so used to thinking in terms of survival because there are so few jobs out here to begin with, that my fear of poverty limits my thinking. The stress and shame, because even though I know that I shouldn't be ashamed, I still see myself as a failure sometimes, especially when I think about how I am disappointing people I care about who don't understand or agree with the way I have chosen to live my life. It is just really hard to have faith that there is enough when I am surrounded by others who have completely bought into the survivalist mentality, or who own so much that they don't have to worry about it. I just feel so overwhelmed when I think about all there is to do--and wish I knew others out here who felt the same way so that I felt there was actually hope to make a change in my lifetime. But I tell myself that someone has to be the first, and maybe that's why I'm here. Although I would much rather join something that is already in place, I may have to be the one who starts here, and I know this will be hard, because the odds are so against me. I must let go of resentment that I have to struggle so much and keep saying that permaculture maxim to myself, the problem is the solution. The earth wasn't formed in a day, people say. I can't expect everything to change over night. I must think in terms of the seven generations in front of me. My life may have to be a sacrifice so that they can live in harmony.

If anyone would like to help in sustaining me, I have copies of my poetry book Siren for sale for ten dollars. Send me cash or a check at P.O. Box 1566, Block Island, RI 02807. Thank You.