The picture above was taken of me not long before my 50th birthday, in a garden that shouldn’t have been. It remains one of my favorite pictures of myself because I was so happy then.

My marriage had ended 5 years before and I was living in a little older townhouse around which the landscape was barren. The townhouse was part of a complex of several buildings and behind the older buildings in the back some of the people had made little gardens. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t supposed to since others had gardens and I was at a critical point in my life, learning who I was all alone. My unit was the one on the end facing the street and well, to say that I gardened with a vengeance might be putting it mildly. From just outside my front door all the way around the side of the building, a long way down, around the back and onto the little patio I made a garden people just could not believe. There had never been anything there. People from the neighboring units liked to come visit the garden, I would give them flowers, and we would talk. It was such a lovely time, until the letter came.

The thing I will never understand, nor did anyone else, was that the Homeowner’s Association never said anything to me for more than 3 years. They saw me creating this large, beautiful garden and they never said a word. I would work in that garden from 9 in the morning until 9 at night. Where once there had been nothing but hard barren earth and a couple of stands of pampas grass I created this. Here you see just a small part of the garden. The little windows were my kitchen windows.

Simply put in a barren land I had created an Eden, everyone in the complex loved it, but came the day that I opened my mail and there was a letter from the Homeowners Association that said the entire garden, front to back, had to be dismantled. Everything in pots, the garden art, ALL the plants, everything. I was given a summons. Get rid of it all or it would be bulldozed and I would be fined. To say I was devastated was an understatement. I was in shock, and the deepest despair. Something in me died in that moment.

Family and friends came to the rescue. They came with trucks and loaded every single pot, dug up and carted off everything that could be saved to plant in their gardens, everything that could be moved was moved. Everyone did what they could and then the Homeowner’s Association sent in a landscaping crew who took it all back down to nothing. Everything was destroyed. There was nothing left. I am still deeply shocked and saddened by what happened. The picture of me at the top of this post with the sunflower was taken in this garden.

This picture is heading into the pathway I made between the garden against the wall of the building and the front part that you saw in the picture above facing the street…

Coming in from the other side of the garden, an area which no one could see, was what I called my Secret Garden, and I would sit in that chair and write. It was my paradise…

I had come through a devastating time after my marriage ended and making this garden saved me. It brought me more joy than I can express and when it was destroyed I didn’t think I would recover.

Since that time, a few short years later I moved here, to my beloved Dragonfly Cottage, and I built a huge garden here. It was utterly amazing, but in the decade that followed the house burned down and it took nearly a year to rebuild it, and between that and a few years later with 3 hurricanes in 3 years, this garden was destroyed. And the reason I am telling you all of this is not to share a sad story with you but a story of survival. I have survived more in my life than I will write about here and at 67 I am still here, gardening again, on a much smaller scale (for me, a lot of people still think it’s a pretty good sized garden, ha ha ha!) and I just keep on keeping on.

Yes, I have survived but somehow, in the last few years, I kind of lost myself. Having grown more and more agoraphobic, and physically disabled, rarely leaving the house, having lost all of my resources physical and financial when the house burned down I just didn’t know how to keep on going, I didn’t know who I was anymore, or what was possible for me, but then in 2019, after a terrible year when Hurricane Florence nearly destroyed this town, things started to turn around. Molly came, and so did Maisie, and I started, just a little bit, to believe in myself again. And then last September I started, feeling very shy and afraid, my Patreon account which people had been suggesting to me for some time. I was afraid but I so desperately needed the financial support in order to do my work and if I couldn’t do my work what was I supposed to do? When people started signing up to be Patrons I was in awe, and the support I have received from this incredibly supportive, loving community of women has begun to make a life for me that I didn’t think would be possible.

What I know is this, I may be 67 but I have had a lifetime of experience in so many things. Writing for my lifetime, teaching journal classes for 40 years, mentoring women, and having a number of small presses. And my small press publications were the things I loved most of all. And so now, with the support of my Patrons at Patreon I am beginning again, I am creating a quarterly journal that all of my Patrons will receive for free (I will be selling them here on my site) and after the year’s worth of journals are complete I will compile them into a book. And I would like to continue to do that going forward. A year’s worth of journals eventually becoming a book. And I am podcasting again. This was a deep love of mine and I did a podcast I was really proud of for a number of years with a good following, people loved it, but when the house burned down I couldn’t continue. I am gathering together all that I have lived and learned and loved and I am starting yet again. In my 7th decade I still know that so much more is possible than we ever imagine when we are going through a hard time.

In the last several months when I have closed the studio down for the night I have watched different spiritual teachers that I admire on YouTube. I have made notes in my journal, things to reflect on, and hold close to see me through the days and whatever may come. And one night I got messages from 3 different videos that all basically said the same thing…

• Bring who you are to the world. Do it your own way. If not now, when? (This last bit startled me because I have asked my students for decades, and if you have followed this blog you will have heard it many times, “If not, why not? If not now, when?“)
• Go with the one thing you know you should do.
• Just get on with it. Build the new.
• And finally, a Tarot card was pulled that nearly made me fall out of my chair. I had never heard of the deck but it is the Earth Magic deck by Steven Farmer. The cards were just beautiful but the card that was pulled was “Dragonfly Emergence.” The message was “It’s time to come out as who you truly are.”

I have never believed in accidents, I do believe, and am routinely led by messages from spirit, but I tell you, to get all that in one night felt like being whopped upside the head. If I hadn’t gotten the message yet I got it that night. The next day, while I had already mentioned doing a “Days At Dragonfly Cottage” journal, I knew absolutely and clearly that it would be a quarterly publication that would become a book, a new book every year or two as long as I am able (Meaning still having my wits about me and being physically able.) And the day after that I opened an account with Buzzsprout and started my podcast again. The journal and the podcast go hand in hand and will encompass all that I am, all that I have been, and all that I do, the writing and art, the garden and the animals, the deep sense of spirituality that has long guided my life and days, thoughts on solitude and silence, living a contemplative life, and more. All that I am, all that ever was, and all that I will become. I have stories to tell and a message to share. I want to offer hope and help, love, gentleness, kindness, compassion and encouragement to the world, and I will do it through these modes of work I have expressed. I am bringing myself to the world, all of who I am. I have a lot to offer, as we all do. Isn’t it time we do just this? In whatever way you can bring all of who you are, your real, true, authentic self to the world around you, mustn’t you? If we’ve learned anything through this last year it’s that there’s no time to waste. We’ve got work to do. It’s time.

And… If not, why not? If not now, when? Indeed.