A Shooting Star

 

The mid wife looked up at me from where my newborn child lay and asked, “Do you want to cut the cord?” It was a special moment in the living room of our little house. The doctor stood nearby and my tired but happy wife lay on her back with the baby on her stomach.

Doctor, at birth of Naomi

Morning light streamed in the bank of windows nearby. I took the scissors offered me and cut the cord—separating mother and child. About a foot of cord stayed attached to my daughter’s navel. I hardly could take my eyes off her, marveling at her perfection. The day: January 11, 1980. 

Newborn

Tomorrow would be her 41st birthday. Naomi died when she was but nineteen.

There are countless mysteries in life, and most of them will not be unravelled. I will have many questions when I cross over to the other side to reunite with Naomi and my ancestors. Then, as I stand in the light of truth and divine love, understanding will be given.

Colored pencil drawing Naomi made hours after learning of her cancer

One mystery that haunts me is the dream I had when Naomi was 12. I woke up with a feeling of extreme sadness and dread and then wrote the details down. It was a marvelous dream in all respect—full of awesome symbols of power and beauty—yet in the end the death of a child occurred. I could not understand its importance and even went to a psychologist to unravel the meaning. I made a painting using its images. Then, when Naomi was diagnosed with terminal cancer at age 17, I thought about the dream again. 

I will carry this mystery with me until the end of my days.

In the dream, which occurs at dusk, after witnessing an amazing flock of birds fly by, I ask for a sign and it is given immediately—a shooting star racing through the evening atmosphere, fiery, fast and bright—just above barren winter tree tops. More events unfold, before the sudden surprise ending that left me gasping when I awoke.

And so too, Naomi’s life was short and bright, for especially in the two years of her struggle at the end, she incandescently shed light as her life burned up. 

I am filled with a wonderful sense of happiness. It is an indescribable sense of utmost freedom and joy. When I am in touch with it I just think, Oh, God, thank you for this beautiful body and life. I have learned how to use THANK YOU throughout everything.
  —Naomi, age 18

The book I wrote about Naomi is available in print and digital edition: A Heart Traced In Sand

Anniversary of Transcendence

Today is the anniversary of the transcendence into the immortal spiritual realm of my oldest daughter. It was July 5, 1999, when Naomi, then 19, winged her way out of her physical cage. Before she left to soar with utmost freedom and happiness in the heavenly realms, she kissed this life farewell with tenderness and love. One of the last things she said was, “I love my body, it has been so good to me.” 

I knelt by her side as she lay dying, and with tears in my eyes told her I loved her and was proud of her. She managed to turn her head to look at me tenderly and say, “I love you too; times two!”

When we first learned Naomi had a vicious cancer in her hip and had little chance of survival, I began taking notes and writing, thinking her story would be a remarkable miracle of recovery and celebration of faith. She made a recovery of sorts and gave us hope she might survive. But this was only to grant her more time to gain greater powers of soul, for the Hand of the Creator was training her to be one of His great angels. Many pains, hardships, disappointments and cruelties came to her and she met them as obstacles to overcome. In the process I stood by her side in anguish, but also in awe and utmost respect, noting everything. 

Fortunately, Naomi was a keen observer from an early age. She began writing in diaries at the age of nine years old. She continued until her death, and all the books are safely stored away. I used her words often while writing her story, then in 2001, published A Heart Traced In Sand, Reflections on a Daughter’s Struggle for Life. It won two awards and has touched the hearts of many.

Now, 19 years after the print edition, the digital edition is available. (Come to think of it, 19 is  appropriate . . . a sacred number and also marks her duration on earth.) The digital edition, $3.95, is accessible as an EPUB—readable on many devices, and also as a pdf. It includes many links that reveal special pictures and documents that are not included in the print version, $14.95.

EPUB introductory price of 3.95 with 30% going to Miracles From Maggie, a charity for families dealing with childhood cancer.

Go to: A Heart Traced In Sand

A Marvelous Garden of Humanity

I take solace in the little garden Amy and I have in our front yard. The plants need care each day to establish themselves. The soil is poor by nature in these parts, the sun can be brutal, and to add injury cutworms and other pests arrive to attack the tender stems. 

I have a personal relationship with each plant. I have nurtured and supported each one, so when a death occurs I grieve a little.

The turmoil in our world today grevious. Covid-19 virus causing worldwide destruction, many wars and conflicts have killed and displaced populations, corrupt governments are in power while desperate dying people languish . . . and now in America the racial divide is coming into sharp focus with the video taped murder of a black man by a police officer in Minneapolis, MN, USA.

All these issues are cathartic—but hopefully will lead to healing.

As my beloved daughter Naomi said when she battled her terminal illness at age 18, “Hardships can make us stronger. I don’t have complete evidence, but every situation has some good in it.”

My wife Amy particularly has been staying tuned to events in Minneapolis where severe rioting broke out in the aftermath of the police killing. She lived there from 1983 - 1992, was very involved in the community and had great success as an artist. Her sons are raising their families there now. Amy knows the neighborhoods that have burned.

I have lived in a city where race riots raged and buildings burned. In 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, swaths of downtown Washington DC had storefronts broken, then looted and burned to the ground. Black radical leaders were enraged and called for armed insurgency against an America that had double standards for black and white citizens. 

I was in high school then and in a neighborhood far removed from ghettos. Still, I felt the rage nearby.

Now, 52 years later, disparities remain.

Like plants, people need the same tender care from the beginning of life. They must have fertile soil to grow in, have equal protections against disease, blight and pestilence. Each must be watered according to their needs; some more some less. Then we will see a marvelous garden of humanity, resplendent in color and form, shedding its grace in the universe in which it thrives.

DICHOS de Nuestras Abuelitas

The bookmaking art is very satisfying. With industry tools at hand today, I find the process sometimes breathtaking. 

My first book, A Heart Traced In Sand, Reflections on a Daughter’s Struggle for Life, is about my daughter Naomi’s life and death. 

I self-published and created a publishing company—named after a phrase that someone said to me. 

Here is the story: 

A woman, Cecelia, worked behind the front desk at the hotel Naomi and I lived in while she was seeing a healer in San Francisco. The staff came to know and become fond of us. When I went back the spring after Naomi died, my room was decorated with flowers, with a lovely note. 

Cecelia welcomed me, and in an off-hand way described Naomi and I as Twin-Flames. The phrase stuck in my mind. 

A Heart Traced In Sand was published in 2001 and has won two awards.

Since then, in 2005  I published a book of artwork, called Hangups. It is an eclectic collection from a series of paintings I made of faces hanging from clothespins suspended on clotheslines. 

Being married to Amy Córdova y Boone, an artist, author and illustrator is a perfect partnership for publishing. Before we became a couple, Amy had put together writings and art for books, then set it all aside. Now I am resurrecting the material. The first is a little gem, DICHOS de Nuestras Abuelitas. I have been readying it for publication in a couple months. It is bi-lingual. In Spanish, dichos are sayings concisely written or spoken—expressions that are especially memorable because they are pithy and contain wisdom.

Page 13, DICHOS de Nuestras Abuelitas 

“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.” – Ursula K. Le Guin

Fists Against The Wall

Last weekend was the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the notorious German concentration camp in Poland where in just two years over 1 million innocent people were put to death: men, women and children. The anniversary comes and goes each year and there are memorial events at the former killing grounds that attract fewer and fewer survivors and many visitors. For some reason, this year I began reviewing more about what happened. In high school, during a period when I read dense and important world literature, I also read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer, (1245 pages). It is mostly forgotten in my mind after 50 years. 

Amy saw that I was studying and getting emotional about what had happened. She pulled a book off of her bookshelf, a small hardback. Saying nothing, she put it on my dresser. Within a day I had begun reading Night, by Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016). "In Night," Wiesel said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night.” ( In the above picture, he is in the second row, seventh from left.)

Simultaneously I looked online at pictures of the holocaust and the Nazi perpetrators. Photos of mothers and children being herded off boxcars to take them to the gas chambers, of skeletal forced laborers in horrid conditions, of despicable ghettos imprisoning isolated Jewish populations before being wiped out. I found myself getting angry and researching what became of the Nazi commanders, then seeing them hanged and thinking, “It serves you right.”

A page from Naomi's journal

“Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.” 

― Primo Levi, (Italian, 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987)  Auschwitz survivor

I grew up in a non-religious household. No mention was made of God or religion. My father worked hard as a social engineer, alongside Robert Kennedy and Sergeant Shriver. HIs time was spent constructing solutions to injustice and implementing them. Once when a teen-ager and I had recently found God, he quoted Karl Marx to me: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” I took exception, noting all the good that has come from Christian charity and the spread of principles of equality and love.

At nineteen I became a Baha’i, a religion teaching the essential worth of all religions, and the unity and equality of all people. Established by Baháʼu'lláh , (Persian, November 12, 1817 – May 29, 1892) in 1863, it initially grew in Persia and parts of the Middle East, where it has faced ongoing persecution since its inception. 

A beloved Baha’i prayer by Abdul-Baha, the son of Baha’u’llah includes the exhortation, “I will not dwell on the unpleasant things of life, nor will I let trouble harass me .” But what if life itself is cataclysmic without hope? What if there is no pleasantness to enjoy? 

Certainly there were those in the concentration camps who had seen their loved ones marched to the gas chambers, had felt the sting of smoke in their eyes from the furnaces incinerating bodies, and lived without hope in wretched unthinkable existence. Some, like Job’s wife might have thought “Curse God and die!” They are forgiven. Wiesel himself, after surviving the death camp spoke in an interview: “Some people who read my first book, Night, they were convinced that I broke with the faith and broke with God. Not at all. I never divorced God. It is because I believed in God that I was angry at God, and still am. The tragedy of the believer, it is deeper than the tragedy of the non-believer.” (See https://onbeing.org/programs/elie-wiesel-the-tragedy-of-the-believer/ )

When my beloved daughter Naomi fell victim to cancer at seventeen, I had to watch her endure her own holocaust. Dreadful pain spread itself in her body. Doctors said she had little chance to live and she began torturous chemotherapy treatments, locked away from the world at large. Many times, during my own “dark night of the soul,” I found myself thinking, beseeching, how could a loving God allow this? Alone, I beat my fists against the wall and wailed. 

Naomi had to meet her own point of no return. Many times in fact. Did she not wonder perhaps if God had forgotten her? She once said, “I hope not to die a slow, painful death.” But that is exactly what God had in store for her. That was her fate. She fought hard for life, weeding out any semblance of negative thinking that might interfere with her healing. Yet the slow, inexorable death march toward the gas chamber continued. At one point, exhausted, she sought to take her life and be done with it. Like in the Jimi Hendrix song, Castles Made of Sand, where he sings: 

There was a young girl, whose heart was a frown,

'Cause she was crippled for life, and she couldn't speak a sound

And she wished and prayed she could stop living,

So she decided to die

She drew her wheel chair to the edge of the shore, and to her legs she smiled

"You won't hurt me no more"

But then a sight she'd never seen made her jump and say

"Look, a golden winged ship is passing my way"

And it really didn't have to stop, it just kept on going.

And so castles made of sand

Slips into the sea, eventually . . .

One fateful evening in Santa Barbara, California, Naomi swallowed pills, arrived to a lonely beach and walked into the Pacific Ocean to drown. She was saved when she saw a stranger walking and her conscience would not allow her to take her life in front of an innocent person.

She went on to live another seven months before dying at home with peace in her heart. Just before, she had a dream of being on a blissful cruise. In feeble handwriting she managed to write it down on a scrap of paper.

A number of times during the ordeal I found myself down on knees praying fervently for help. I could see the innocents being herded toward the ovens, clutching their little ones and asked, “Please help.” Several times the veils parted and to my surprise I saw angels, in complete tranquility, smiling. Over in a flash, I thought, “but how could you be smiling?” 

After Naomi died, we bathed and dressed her in her bed and put a ring on her finger. It is part of the Baha’i ceremony for the deceased. The ring says: “I came forth from God, and return unto Him, detached from all save Him, holding fast to His Name, the Merciful, the Compassionate”. 

And this is my belief, that this life is a sort of veil and it is lifted when we die.

For those millions who died during the holocaust, the experience was inscrutable. 

Death reaches us all. Some are born and live but a few moments, others longer, but in eternity, this life is but a blink of the eye for everyone.

On that glad night,

in secret, for no one saw me,


nor did I look at anything,


with no other light or guide


than the one that burned in my heart.

This guided me


more surely than the light of noon


to where he was awaiting me


— him I knew so well —


there in a place where no one appeared. 

Excerpt:

ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS, 16th Century

The Dark Night of the Soul

Fractured

Fractured is a theme I can relate to, having experienced much personal trauma and fissure in life. That's ok, I believe what my darling daughter Naomi said before she died, "Hardships can make us stronger. Every situation in life has some good in it."

When I learned that an important photography gallery in Santa Fe made a call to submit work with "fracture" as theme, I knew I had enough images of merit to enter. 

The show syllabus is as follows

“Today, our world can seem divided in a multitude of ways. Between debates over the climate emergency, corporations literally breaking our earth with fracking, families split at national borders and our divided political systems, concepts like societal unity and harmony feel like a distant hope. Even on a personal level, humans have the capacity to feel fissured, split, and incomplete in our thoughts and emotions. Shifts in perspective, breaks from tradition, and experiencing loss can all encompass the idea of the fracture. This concept can have both positive and negative connotations. However, acknowledging that something is broken is the first step in working toward healing. How can art be a platform for expressing, and ultimately bridging these personal and social divides? What role does the photographer play in observing, documenting, and healing the fractured landscapes around and within us all? “

I entered five images, gathered from extensive travels and street photography, as well as studio work. Camera photos I take are simply starting places because they go into my “digital studio”. Then I manipulate them to bring out a story poignantly. 

Sometimes I combine images into collages, and transform them with tools available in photoshop. 

I can't show the pictures included in my entry.

The one above is from Andalusia, Spain, in ruins of a home with my friend Pepa dressed in flamenco attire holding flowers.

Grace Of A Touch

Her words touched me and opened floodgates of memories. Profound recollections from July 5, 1999 and the three days immediately following my daughter Naomi’s dying at age nineteen. The article, Living With Death, by Maggie Jones, describes the social movement that helps families spend more time with the bodies of their deceased loved ones. 

The New York Times Magazine article of December 22, 2019 follows the life of a “home death-care guide” as she assists at the death of loved ones. She enables the bereft to keep a body at home for days longer than usual.

Naomi held out to the last. She had adamantly refused to leave San Francisco, having vowed not to go home “to die”. We had been inseparable during her two year struggle with cancer. Then her lungs failed and when I had to carry her on my shoulder up the stairs to her appointment with a healer for what would be the last time, I told her I couldn’t do it anymore and please, we must return home. She agreed reluctantly.

Four days later she died in her bed in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

As I sat bewildered with my wife in our living room, a friend gently tapped my shoulder and asked if we would like to keep Naomi home for three days. I had a moment of confusion, then said yes, but feared a bad smell. She promised all would be well—and so it was. Our family and close friends prepared her body lovingly, dressed her nicely, anointed and packed dry ice around her. We brushed her hair and created a halo of rose buds around her head. She lay peacefully in her room, amidst flickering candles and fragrant flowers. We were with her day and night. My ex-wife Jean Tobias visited her in the predawn hours and wrote this poem: 

Blessed be the angels sing,

With joy they guide you in a ring,

Like a halo ‘round your head,

Gently tuck you into bed.

To mighty realms your spirit flies,

Through puffy clouds and deep blue skies.

So sweet the peace within your heart—

With God’s love your journey start.

Many others came and went as well, saying goodbye and praying for her soul’s peaceful transition.  I had time to buy her gravesite and then with close family lay her to rest peacefully.

The grace of a touch on my shoulder and offer to help is forever remembered.

A Heart Traced In Sand

Full Of Opportunities

 

“This world is so full of opportunities that one can hardly keep up with them all. Life is so beautiful; I cherish it and want to be able to see every part of it.”

My daughter Naomi wrote these words in her journal when she was seventeen.  This was at the beginning of her intense, two year struggle with cancer that ended with her death.
As with so many of her thoughts she wrote during that period, they hold wisdom, especially since life turned cruel and painful for her but did not dim her love.

Now, nineteen years since Naomi’s passing, I find it useful and transformative to use the word “opportunity” as a mental concept during activities. Especially in situations that might be annoying or perhaps I don’t relish.

Here are recent examples:

I am sitting at the wheel of my car, stuck in traffic or at a red light that seems too long: Thanks for the opportunity to wait peacefully.
Cleaning debris and trash out of the back of my van: Thanks for the opportunity to do something simple and use my body to make the environment better.
Obey the Baha’i fast, abstaining from food or water from sunrise to sunset for nineteen days: Thanks for the opportunity to strengthen my will and offer my body joyfully to my Lord during these special hours.
Doing the paperwork to file my taxes: Thanks for the opportunity to be organized and see my transactions spanning the last year.
This practice can be used for everything—from doing dishes, to cleaning a yard, being in a crowd, lost, at the doctor—anything.

Almost any occasion can be turned to advantage when we see it as opportunity.  Naomi did. Even her end was an opportunity. Having lost her battle to win the “acres and acres” of life she so longed to have, then suffocating as her lungs failed, she said to a friend who stood behind her wheelchair massaging her shoulders, “I love my body, it has been so good to me.” Naomi took her last moments as an opportunity to give thanks before leaving her physical frame forever.

Nineteen

The nineteenth anniversary of the death of my nineteen year old daughter Naomi is nearing—July 5, 2018.

After she died I thought of the meaning of the number nineteen. It is made of the numerals 1 and 9; the beginning and end of all single digits. It includes all the rest of the numbers, so symbolizes unity. Adding one and nine makes ten: 1 + 0 equals one. Oneness.

It was not an accident that Naomi completed her life at nineteen. I often thought she was burning through lifetimes rapidly. Like a shooting star, she shone brilliantly through intense experiences, shedding brilliant light in a short burst before suddenly disappearing. Naomi burned the dross of existence through intense suffering and redemption. She said, “Hardship is something that will make us stronger. I don't know if I have complete evidence of this, but I think that in every situation there is good in it.”

The day we went to a doctor and he gave us the terrible news that she had Ewings Sarcoma, a virulent cancer, I realized this world is shifting sands and not permanent, yet I wanted with all my being to know we could trust her life would continue here on earth. It seemed impossible to think otherwise.
Knowing she had cancer that most certainly would destroy her, the first thing Naomi did on arriving home from the medical clinic was to make a beautiful drawing using colored pencils. A serenely peaceful figure garbed in a beautifully embellished blue gown seems to be listening in meditation. A halo is around her head and her hair streams in rivulets like sun rays in all directions within the orb. A SPIRIT being stands upon a butterfly wing at her shoulder within the halo, seeming to talk to her. A necklace around her neck holds a feather. Behind, two seedlings are growing and blossoming. From below, a tender green shoot with leaves and tendrils grows up and out of the top of the picture. No sign of fear in this artwork, only peace, light and signs of Divine guidance.

And this is what Naomi became before kissing life goodbye and embarking on her journey in the next world.

 

My award-winning book: A Heart Traced in Sand, Reflections on a Daughter's Struggle For Life

No Pain, No Gain

"Man's fate is according to his pains." -Robert Herrick, (English, 24 August 1591 – 15 October 1674)


Is fasting like weightlifting? Yes. They both abide by the dictum, “No pain no gain.”
A body builder must push his muscles to greater exertions in order to build them. In the process he feels pain. Microscopic muscle fibers tear, only to be rebuilt stronger with greater mass.

The other day, on the sixteenth day of my nineteen day fast, (see previous post), I was leaving my gallery, riding my bike to the lot where I park my van. I felt lightheaded, and realized hunger and thirst in the background of my activities. Turning a corner, I took hold of the distress. I had the feeling of being able to lift it up like a weightlifter; as if I were exercising spiritual muscles. I felt stronger by stressing my body—same as working out. But inasmuch as this effort is aimed at relying upon the pleasure of God, a much more lasting result is achieved by building spiritual character.

The road to achievement runs through hardship. My daughter Naomi Boone (January 11, 1980 - July 5, 1999)  knew this. She was diagnosed with cancer, which ultimately took her life at the age of nineteen. In the beginning of her ordeal, she wrote in her journal, “Hardship will make us stronger. I think that in every situation, there is good in it.”

Long Love Letter

Steven's writing

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
—Jean Cocteau (French: 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963)

My oldest daughter Naomi began a diary when she was only nine years old—and kept writing until she died at the age of nineteen. As her father, I did not know she was being so attentive about the intimate details of her life until she was seventeen. She kept her journals private.

After she passed away, her personal writings were indeed like receiving a long letter from her.

I wrote during my youth as well—but not so early in life. My first diary began when I wrote on my seventeenth birthday. I would use the little cloth-bound book as a record; “So that the sentimentalist I think I might be in the future can look back and remember the person he once was and the changes he went through.”

Naomi's writings

Naomi, at age nine was simply taking delight in life and honoring it by writing her observances, dreams, thoughts and feelings. Her first entries are full of incorrectly spelled words—she was terrible at spelling until almost high school. She would try and get her notions down on paper and guess at word spelling. For instance she wrote when 12: “We were playing with the new puppy, (we are thinking of naming her Soffy or Sophia). We were playing tug-of-war and then Sarah put the tug-of-war thing in her mouth and so I grabid it and both of us tuged a wile and Sarah’s tooth ended up gone! I feel really bad about it and stuff!
Just a minute ago I found her tooth!
She lost and I found it!”

After my teen years I stopped keeping a diary. Instead I kept a dream journal. It filled quickly and then tapered off when I did not remember them often. Then, as my life as a visual artist came to the fore, I married, had children and gave up writing.

Naomi fell ill with cancer at age seventeen, and I began keeping a record of her struggle. I wanted to write about her success in beating her disease. I kept writing until her death, determined to tell her story of courage, grace and spirit. It became the story of her soul and how she transitioned into a magnificent spiritual being. The writing took three years and produced, A Heart Traced In Sand, Reflections on a Daughter’s Struggle For Life.

During her last two years Naomi wrote her observances of life and her surroundings, and was gaining wisdom: “Today I saw myself in my English class dancing with joy because I was cured. I saw myself telling people that the most important thing in life is to bask in it with all of its glory. Hardship is something that will make us stronger. I don’t know if I have complete evidence of this  but I think that in every situation there is good  in it. I feel so much wisdom and I know that I will learn more!”

Naomi wrote many affirmations, picturing how she envisioned her life. She also wrote her fears and sometimes anger. Life was becoming painful and short. Close to the end, she wrote of her pain, anxiety, and a nagging doubt that was with her. Once, she thought of somebody reading her diary after her death and was angry, writing she would rather burn her journal.
The last writing Naomi did was on a small piece of paper two nights before her death. “Dream of a blissful cruise. I don’t remember much of it. I just remember glimpses of it. I am happy.” The note was on her bedside table when she died.

Soon afterward I made my first journal entry: “It has been sixteen days since Naomi passed away. I am still sorting out the pieces of my life. At the studio; I was here yesterday and could not manage to begin painting. Here again today . . .  I will try and begin again.”

My stack of writing books

Eventually, I became single and felt Naomi’s spirit encouraging me to live life fully without fear. Since then I have been around the world twice and lived in many lands. My stack of journals is tall. I write this blog every week and have 587 posts. There is one little book that is special. It is only for my notes to God. Here is an entry from September 25, 2009: Dear God. To look in any direction is to see miracles. Above is the endless sky, and below is mother earth. On every side is mystery. Even the senses I use to perceive my world are miraculous gifts I do not fully comprehend.

Someday my end will come and I will go to be with Naomi again. My writings will be left behind. Sarah, my surviving daughter will find them and read them as a long love letter to her and life.

Surrounded By Spirits

I am surrounded by spirits, and that is the feeling of the Lord.  —Naomi Boone

I love this simple sentence written in my daughter's journal when she was seventeen. She had learned she was dying of cancer.

She felt the power of angels—emissaries of God, sent to strengthen and guide her.

I am practicing remembering the feeling of the Lord as I prepare to go on another extended journey across continents, leaving everything behind to go into the "flux" state I so love. I will "let go". I thrive with the feeling of falling like the little bird pushed from the safety and familiarity of it's nest. A miraculous and hidden power informs the moment so what is needed occurs—to fly.

SPIRIT can take a flock of birds and direct them to determine Earth's magnetic field so they navigate using true north. During the day time they are guided by the position of the sun. Are they doing this mentally? Birds sometimes fly while sleeping during non-stop trips that can take weeks. No, they are not thinking; SPIRIT moves them to arrive unerringly to their destination.

And so too, I hope to leave the mental arena and go into what I call the zone. Like the falling bird, I go from the familiar into the unknown and rely on trust. Surrounded by spirits and guided by them, barriers fall away and I am no longer separate from my surroundings. In oneness, I enter THE DREAM, where miracles live and occurrences become fantastic.

I leave Santa Fe on November 1. First stop is Washington DC, (where I grew up,) to see my brother Wade and his family. I especially relish spending time with my young niece and nephew who barely know me. After four days I fly to Paris, France and book into a hotel on the left-bank for another four days. Time in the streets and museums, being inspired,  shooting photographs and going with the flow . . . day tripping to Versailles. Next I arrive in my favorite place . . . Venice. For a month. It is easy being creative there . . . making paintings, writing and photographing. Next is Egypt. In Luxor I have Egyptian friends that make a place for me in their family. After that it gets fuzzy: but most likely I will go and find the Masai people who had such a big impact on me. They are in Kenya and Tanzania.

I do not have a return ticket. SPIRIT and THE DREAM will direct me and that is how I like it.

Everything will be okay, because God is with me no matter what.  —Naomi Boone