Mozart, Cecily and Mrs B.

I closed the shade on my window; released the string that holds in place the thin bamboo woven window cover. I can't remember the last time I did this because the view from this window of the branches of the black elm that reach far over the deck and the field often dotted with cows and calves and great blue herons and geese is so pleasing to me.

As the light from the window fell, a shift came over me. I was listening then as I am now, to Mozart. When the shade was up the music spilled through the window out past the black elm and into the field and like a stream found it's way northward to the Willapa Hills. With the shade down the music swirled around me, bringing me into place; stilling me so that I felt like a leaf floating at that quiet place where Coal Creek Slue no longer flows but comes to rest against reeds and canary grass.

I wonder if I dare believe I can live at the center of my own life instead of at its edges? I've lived at the edges for such a long time. But no more. There is no one to blame. I suppose with what I knew at the time I went willingly thinking it was my proper place. Flattening my back against the wall to make more room for others. Ah...more room for what and for whom?

Delightful questions. I wrote the following once because it came to me in one of those wonderful flash of knowing moments; "I won't live in the margins anymore. I will take up the whole page." I must have thought it because it was time to see it.

Perhaps we become aware of our higher knowing much in the same way we do when we approach, say, a shop window and see ourselves standing there; I mean we had to arrive first in order to see ourselves; we have to arrive at the place we need to be to become aware of what we know; what has always been there to know. We show up and we're there! I've begun to honor my life experiences as knowledge. By doing this wisdom grows. It makes such sense...because where would we be without fertalizer for our gardens? What has been digested and processed become nutrituous and feeds new growth.

When I wrote "The Immigrant Garden" play so many years ago now, was it in 1990? I was conversating with both my older wiser self and my young, frailer self; from that place of conversation came Louise Beauchamp and Cecily Barnes. When Mrs Beauchamp writesto Cecily telling her that she often carries on long conversations with her flowers. Cecily writes back. "You say you often hold lengthy conversations with flowers but tell me...what sort of things do flowers say?"

I love what Mrs B (as she's become known to me) answers. "Dearest Cecily you too have heard the voice of flowers. You have not forgotten you have only stopped remembering."

So, I am remembering. Just think...re-member-ing; putting pieces back together! Oh, the things listening to Mozart can do with the window shade down and no one in the room but you!