A Place to Land & Unravel

The New Year is really happening over here at Soulodge Ranch, where the baby calves are starting to be birthed and jump around like little hyperactive goats on happy juice. It’s cold and sometimes very bright, and this time of year is the very still and quiet time and also the time of new beginnings.

This will get a laugh out of you and anyone who knows a Virgo-my word is EFFICIENCY. It just smacked me when I realized that there are many neglected parts of my business. Business is one of the things I don’t talk about very much, because SouLodge is my life, my art, my way of relating to the world, and where I bring all of my thoughts and heart to the table to share. It’s like a big, open living room where people come and go, where we ask the hard questions, and connect with the ancestors and through prayer, light the candles, and hold hands. So business is not how I think of it.

As our containers and entities grow, there are more details, more stuff, more people to meet with and more decisions to make. More areas to ask for help and hire out the things I’m not good at- like payroll and budgeting, and making sure what I give away is going to a good place where it will be put to good purpose. This is where I’m looking to be stronger.

I get asked a *lot* to talk about what it’s like to be a working mother, technically a single mother, engaging in matters of soul and spirit while trying to manage the resources as best I can. It’s a juggling game and it’s really easy to have that feeling at the end of the day that I just wish I could have done more and with better organization. I live by day under a pile of legal pads all with different headers on floating clipboards, taking them outside and walking around with them (to mix business with pleasure and fresh air), pondering the many ways we humans suffer and what brings real relief and understanding while staying in it. Looking back over my shoulder, I see the ways of my people being so helpful in ways I’m just giving credit to.

One of the kindnesses my ex-husband graces me with from time to time is to notice that I’m always trying to figure out a better way for me so it will be better and easier for others. It makes me smile to hear it because it’s true, and I’m betting that you’re not too unlike me in that sense.

When folks out in the world ask me what I do, I usually tell them that I build communities. Everyone from the CPA to parents at school look at me quizzically because it’s not a job which was listed on all of those forms we had to fill out senior year, and no one really knows what it means.

Have you ever built/wanted to build a safe container for like-hearted souls? I build communities of women so that they have a sweet and comfortable place to go and be heard, and talk about the hard stuff, and also to remind them that their spirits can be found in the Earth right under us-that she is a mirror which shines our own likeness back at us in her plants, her animals, her rocks and trees.

Long ago when I was looking, there was no such comfortable place to land and unravel, dismember and put myself back together again. We have to make these places which we need so much, and trust that they will be filled with cleansing tears and laughter, with new babies and people who truly care.