Drawn by a Star

Status Photo / Video Offer, Event + This Week See All 6 Post Reach 4 Post Engagement · When I tried to figure out where to stay this summer, my own house having been rented for a year, to begin with, it was a nightmare. I needed certain things after the hip operation, like not too many stairs to climb to my bedroom… like not too far to walk from parking my car… the use of a kitchen so I could continue to eat almost all organic.. and where ever I would live, I would have to have access to a pool, any kind of a pool, so I could continue with the twice a day swi mming exercises. Finally the plans all fell into place, but I’d have to move every month . No problem I thought, and it hasn’t been. As well as starting a new book of travel stories adapted from my blog ( Breakfast with Llamas and other unexpected guests) , the idea is to weave 4 of the cancer stories in amongs...

Dear friends, Something ‘ important significant and necessary ’ happened yesterday. After waiting two days,   I opened the ancestry.com email and read my DNA   results.    I’d love to share this story with you. This happened   at 6.30 in the afternoon.     Outside, it was still fiercely hot.   I could smell the sandalwood incense by the swimming pool.   Evening was   still way over the mountain, invisible and far away, approaching   at its own pace.   I was cool inside my dimmed shabby chic small Spanish sitting room. After 2 months  waiting for the DNA   results, they had   arrived.   Disappointment immediately filled my whole body.     Strange as it may sound,  this was better than being completely, off the scale, overwhelmed.    I was afraid   I might have just exploded in a huge surge of emotion.   Where did   my father, ...

Week 3 at the farmhouse. Just one more week now. American poet Jane Hirshfield says: ' The best stories are almost myth like in their ability to support different conclusions.’   Maria Popova, creator of  brainpickings.org says: ‘The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations.  Without this essential stage of unconscious processing , the entire flow of the creative process is broken.’   Thank you Maria Popova. I agree, but had forgotten. I seem to have been doing a lot of unconscious processing at the farmhouse this week. Not much writing  has been done.  My spelling has gone nuts, and   as a result…I find myself questioning my body and especially my brain… are you really well?   What's going on?  But it's been an unusual week in many ways. How long do you allo...

Sucre Bolivia 2012 Hello dear friends from scor ching southern Spain,  I’m here at a  beaut i ful farmhouse  near Malaga editing and tweaking some of the  travel stories from my blog. Seven days have passed.  I 'll be here for a   month.   Lucky me ! It's paradise. There's even a salt water pool. The stories will be interwoven with a few of the cancer ad ventures.   Inner and outer journeys, as it were, to share my trust in the bigger picture of our lives.   I'm not religious as you know, but I so believe there is an amaz ing bigger picture at play for all of us.  Lessons in Loving never end, do they ? Lessons in Compassion are ongoing. I think it' s all about learning and growing and sharing all along the way. Here is a taster of the only true story I’m writing with hindsight. I've told it a few times but never written it down.  It's an extraordinary story of  trust, and what happens...