Feeling full and happy from my vegan meal …. I sit in front of the roaring fire…contemplating the dinner I just finished… I wonder…. What would my life be like if, as a baby, I was fed breast-milk from a healthy Mom instead of formula from a fearful one? If I was taught the joys of real, raw food from our own garden? If my ...

A friend, Willow Durant, is seeking stories of healing for a documentary project.  I am honored to support Willow in the project.  She is a loving, deep soul with a healing heart. --Beth   Seeking Individuals interested in sharing their healing stories   I am gathering stories and working on a documentary that ...

''I do not see this heart thing as abstract or esoteric.  Getting to, living in, healing from, being guided through the heart is an actual state that can be achieved. But it is not a state of mind.   It is not an attitude, or an affirmation.  Rather it is a state of being. The mind is the servant of the state of being in the ...

I am back from 10 days in the womb of Kauai....warm sun, lovely healing water, and surrounded by so many folks living aloha!  Right now HOPE is high in my heart, body and mind.  Some years ago there was a rift in my immediate family...between my son, Kip  and daughter, Shannon-Anakha.  At the time it was especailly ...

Submission to One Single Impression prompt: equals. Click on this link to visit a bunch of other poets' sites from around the world, all writing about this single prompt!  Thanks to KiteHorse for suggesting this week's prompt and especially for her keen poetic voice. sworn off aspartame glucose, fructose, succanot Equal=push ...

Submission for this week's  One Single Impression prompt: movement Turning the dregs and dung of broken relationship, prima materia, into the gold of unconditional love is the work of dreamers, mystics and alchemists. Glad we all fit into  at least one of those categories, or it would be a dreg-ful world.  The poem is what I ...

VTH Host note:  Welcome to a new blogger using a  pen name, the nom de plume of Dances with Loons.   Please let the blogger know by making comments if you enjoy the posts. 12.27.08   My daily burden is judgment, the ultimate duality.  Having fully absorbed and made my own the early religious teaching ...

'Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but rather a manner of traveling'--Samuel Johnson This post is an attempt to write with my left brain about a right brained experience.  It happened over 10 years ago now, so I have the right to call it 'my best day' as it's not the only day I can recall with my middle-aged memory--I have days to ...

SHOPPING FOR A BLENDER That day, I died of exposure, stuck in the tarof the blacktop outside the department storepinned in place by the stake of your criticisms,scorched in shame as people passed, glancing. When you were a boy in grade schoolyou took a magnifying glass on the playground.Your friends cheered as you made the ants squirmand burned ...

SHOPPING FOR A BLENDER That day, I died of exposure, stuck in the tarof the blacktop outside the department storepinned in place by the stake of your criticisms,scorched in shame as people passed, glancing. When you were a boy in grade schoolyou took a magnifying glass on the playground.Your friends cheered as you made the ants squirmand burned ...

GOODBYE CEREMONY   Your husband, your son and your daughter have left. Their disconnected legs are mechanical vehicles carrying sagging shoulders and slapped faces away to restless beds. Out the window, there is no thunder, no raven, no song. There is only the noise of this room, the lights buzzing and faucet dripping. I say, ...

Linda Kovolisky, psychiatric nurse practitioner in Central Oregon, asked me to post this info on the Virtual Tea House. The journey of being human is complex and in our early developmental years when we experience prolonged emotional or physical stress we develop strategies to protect our essential being or Core self. Protective strategies ...

  ''Whatever I have to see Whatever I have to feel Whatever I have to remember Whatever I have to go through... If it is for my healing and the highest good of all beings I agree to it.'' I had the honor this past weekend of joining a group of about 20 people, mostly from Central Oregon, for a workshop led by Jonathan Goldman.  ...

Today (December 4th) would have been my older brother Jay's 44th birthday. He has been gone almost 32 years now. On January 19th, 1975, my mother, in all of her rage and pain and grief, beat him to death. I think the saddest loss for me over the years is that I never really got to know him very well. I spent ten years with him in an environment ...

I'm such a '9'... I have this ever-eternal belief that everything will always work out ok.  I think that Julian of Norwich just might be my patron saint.  When I think of this, I think of Weebles... those toys from the 70's.  I don't know if they are still around.  I never had them.  As a TV kid though, commercials had a ...

  After I moved to Oregon from western Colorado and we were in the process of divorcing, this story came to me from my ex-husband, Tom, who speaks here of property in rural Western Colorado that we shared, and will both always love. We would sit on the back porch and watch the eagles mentioned soar over the valley, always ...