Letting go

I am surrounded by beauty, I know this, I feel it, and yet these days it seems I am unable to be present with it all.

I am back with my family after two and half month apart and yet what I crave most is solitude.

I find myself looking for peace alone in a hammock staring into the woods.

I feel the constant hum of nature all around me, and it is there that my soul goes these days.

Arriving back here from Denmark and the time with my father I felt a deep peace, a sense that I had successfully completed a circle with him, and yet now that I know my sister and my mother are sitting at his bedside simply waiting for the last breath to arrive, I feel a ripping at my insides, and an inability to let go of this man that has always been there for me, a rock and a compass always guiding me towards the very best inside myself.

I believe in eternal life, that he will always be with me, within me, all around me, that there really is no separation and still my heart aches and my soul hurts unlike any hurt I have ever felt before.

I realize that I am in the middle of the worst pain right now, that it will move through me and leave me stronger and more alive than before, yet at this moment I am struggling to let go, 

much as my father might be in his bed at this very moment I imagine.

And as I work on my own letting go, I wish for his letting go to be complete, and that this journey be the greatest of all his journeys yet.

~Blessings~

For the love of frogs, mud and bunnies.

The children have for as long as I can remember had a very special love for frogs.

There has always been the awareness of their singing at dusk, their spring time mating in our ponds or blow-up pools and there has always been the catching of them followed by their release back into the wild. We usually always keep an observatory for all the little creatures that the children find, much love and attention goes into the keeping of the observy, as we lovingly call it, and it changes frequently between earthen, dessert and watery world.

When I arrived back from Denmark it was an earthen home and housed a baby tarantula and a lizard, the children would catch and bring bugs to the little creatures for as long as they kept them in captivity.

The frog in these pictures is called Camelia, and from what the children tell me she keeps coming back, they release her and she finds her way back to them within a few days. The observatory was changed into a watery world filled with rocks for Camelia and her friend another tree frog, who quickly escaped.

After a day in captivity Camelia was released back into the cenote. 

 The observatory before it was changed for Camelia.

Cleaning the cenote, as is currently happening,  has the added benefit for the children that as a last step in the process a big pump is used to vacuum mud and sediments from the cenote floor onto the gardening area, and is there anything nicer on a hot day than to submerge 

yourself into the slimyness of mud, and then to jump into the cool cenote water to rinse off?

Finally we had yet another burial, this time of a bunny.

Keenan's favorite bunny who he had called Black Beauty escaped from the bunny corral at the beginning of last week, he was extremely touched by the escape and feared for the bunny's life in the wild. His grief was intense for about half an hour then he let it go.

5 days later he found Black Beauty outside the fence of the bunny corral exhausted, he died in Keenan's arms a few minutes later, and Keenan went through the grief all over again,

heartfelt tears for the loss of the little bunny's life.

We buried him in the garden next to Vampira, a bat the children had found wounded while I was away, and had not succeeded in bringing back to health.

I love to observe the children and their honest emotions; their grief so intense, their compassion so real

and yet they naturally allow the feelings to pass through them, feel them fully and then release them.

~Blessings~