Re-Entering the Body of the Mother: 5 wks in Zion and Grand Canyons & Sedona's Red Rock Country

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This overworked Gramma is hitting the road again. 10 hours a day on the computer, even for a cause as worthy as the women and children DR Congo, is killing. I am returning to the womb of the Earth to lose myself in her vast beauty once again.

For those who don't know me, in 1994, I lived in the woods of the Sierra Nevada foothills for an utterly rapturous year, unquestionably the happiest of my life. Walking the woods each night until 2:00, 3:00, or even 5:00 in the morning, I explored my own wild heart and abandoned myself, with Clarissa Pincola Estes as my guide, to "running with the wolves." I danced with trees, talked to the stars (and they talked to me), sang to the clouds,and stumbled like a drunken sailor with the ecstasy of drinking moonlight. Once, i jumped into the river naked, at dawn, after pouring my deepest prayers into burning leaves and tossing them into the water

When I moved back to Portland to help my daughter raise my granddaughter Aria. I wouldn't even let myself go back out in nature again. My grief and loss were just too confronting.

But no more! It is time to go home again to the wild. It is time to let the thunderous beauty of the earth and sky shoot through me once again... to taste the joy that only the sun and wind, the sights and smells and sounds of our ever-birthing Mother's body can unleash in me ... and to let them beat my heart into newness.

So I am traveling from Portland, Oregon to Boise, Idaho, where I will visit my long-missed friends Clay and Milena, and then head down to Southern Utah. I have found a family from whom I will rent a room (I cannot afford hotels and camping at my age, alone, in these mountains as winter approaches is out of the question). So a modest room in a lovely home in Washington UT (20 minutes from Zion National Park) will be my home base as I venture out to the Canyons. I will also spend a week in Sedona, AZ visiting my near-angel friend Cathrine and speaking to two groups there about Congo.

I can't wait (though I was 12 days late leaving town and have skipped my time in Hell's Canyon on the Oregon-Idaho border...I am actually on the road now). The view out my car window has already exceeded anything I could have hoped for.