The Gateway Through the Enchanted Forest

After almost my first full week spent driving through the desert (in all its beauty AND manotony!), I watched the terrain gradually begin to change from flat and brown, short plants, to hills and green trees, flowers and wildlife.

Welcome to The Hill Country of Texas and Rainbow Hearth Sanctuary and Retreat Center.

My first ever random on line search for neat places to visit along my path revealed this place to me before any other. And it os obvious to me in many delightful and intimate ways that the Spirit and energy of my beloved husband led me here.

The viel is especially thin in this place held sacred by the two-legged's of this land for centuries. And here I find myself in a beautiful blue room above the tree tops overlooking a huge lake full of herons and cardinals and constant yellow butterfly's. It is called the Sky Loft and of course! He loved to play on words. So of course he would guide me to this place and meet me here, in a loft in the sky!

Because here, as in Misty Glen Cabin in the Smokies, I have found a portal to communion. And that somehow has allowed for a more soulful kind of grief, making its perfect way to a new and more peaceful level of acceptance,and understanding... even letting go.

But most of all.. I can hear. I mean in a totally new way. Dare I try to explain? Suffice it to say that the wisdom of this astounding earth, in all her beauty and mystery in this fairy land forest;

along with my willingness (and readiness I guess) to open to a whole different level of receptivity,

AND the way this strange and vibrantly alive forest, with its sacred medicine rock, enchants and whispers and calls for ceremony... I can hear it! And I like it, a lot. And I'm somehow different. I am reverent and overwhelmingly grateful.

Please visit the website http://www.rainbowhearth.com/ and share it with friends. Come here, come home. This place ROCKS! The land of this retreat is a place originally visioned and purchased by Mariah. Then, over 28 years, she and her husband Richard co-created it to what it is today. These two are such kindred spirit's to both North and I- Mariah and Richard. Richard died from cancer last year, as North did. I imagine the two of the great friends of endless conversation and philosophising; high winging each other over just how good we are doing! Mariah and I have had great conversations and immediate conection. I'll be back.

Poetry has been on the edge of my pen since I got here. But each time I sit to write I find myself simply trying to document the countless bits of synchronicity and delightful finds and sights and sounds in the woods.

So I wandered the library here and my hand landed on this small hardback book -

Rilkes Book of Hours, Love Poems to God.

As I sat down to another fabulous meal overlooking the water I let the book fall open as it would. The words on the page stole my breath from me and blew my mind even wider open. So I'll do as my beloved often did, I'll let a poet from the past speak my heart and my journey for me as only poetry can. And I'll share it with you, those who read this. If nothing else I've written about this "process" I've been in... I think this brings it home and helps you (and me) to better understand.

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another’s life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

Rilke – From “Love Poems to God”