Created Friday, July 16, 2004. Updated as the Muse entices.

100 Things About Me....................................................................................................

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    1. I have three cats.
      • Bun spends most of her time sleeping on top of my monitor.
      • Bun sometimes falls off the monitor when she's stretching after a long, warm nap.
      • When Bun isn't on the monitor, eating, outside, or napping, she's hanging out here between me and the keyboard, demanding love. (Peach and Rutile know this trick, too.)
      • Rutile (black cat with streaks of tan) is sleeping on my chest as I type. He weighs thirteen pounds and leaves very little room for my arms to reach the keyboard.
      • The tiger is one of my power animals. My partner wouldn't let me name our orange tabby "Tiger" so we call him Peach.
      • All three of my cats came into this world as barn cats, so I have not been able to make them indoor cats, despite trying. My compromise with the other animals out in the world who are their prey: I keep them in between dusk and about 10am, the hours the bunnies and birds are most vulnerable.
    2. But my home life isn't all cats. My partner and I have been together for seven years; lived together for six!
    3. I always wanted to live some place beautiful, and now I do.
    4. I have a rose garden, an English cottage garden, a shade garden, and wildflowers growing in wild areas on three sides of my house.
    5. I live in a little village known regionally as a great place to shop for unique things: salt-glaze pottery, South American folk art, fine chocolates, garden sculptures, antiques.
    6. Did I mention humming birds in the bee balm when we're deep in midsummer? Snowdrifts in winter and snowmobiles across the frozen lake? Geese, coots, ducks, seagulls? Oh yes, and wildflower-filled springs and leaf-burning falls? In short: four seasons!
    7. My work history, in reverse chronological order: web designer, editor, free-lance desktop publisher, technical publications associate, office administrator, editorial assistant, secretary, district manager, manager, copy jerk, convenience store clerk, Teaching Assistant, recorder teacher, French Folk Revival musician and Maggie Mae's and RenFair performer, French tutor, news editor and feature writer, Math and English tutor, piano teacher.
    8. All my male best friends from junior high and high school, except one, have died of AIDS.
    9. My father died when I was 28. Lung cancer. He hadn't smoked in over 30 years.
    10. My mother died when I was 35; colon cancer metastasized to the liver. She was a chain smoker.
    11. My nephew died when I was 50. He was 18, beautiful, depressed, an addict.
    12. My mother had a near-death experience before I was born and forced me to practice ESP with her when I was little, and go out looking for UFOs when I was a teenager. She believed in reincarnation, too. How embarrassing!
    13. My dad loved good food, conversation, live entertainment, traveling -- especially out west.
    14. My nephew liked rap, blunts, and his home boys. I bought him a new boom box (major volume and woofer) and some CDs six weeks before he died.
    15. Since my nephew's death, my sister and I talk on the phone almost daily. That's long distance! (Texas/Wisconsin)
    16. My sister is 22 months younger than me.
    17. My sister's a music teacher now, but in her twenties she opened the jazz world to women instrumentalists in Houston, Texas, through long years of passionate obstinacy about playing jazz.
    18. My brother was a wildlife rehabber in his teens. Now he raises calves for slaughter for retirement money.
    19. My dad was a WWII vet, and my mom was a medical secretary at an Airforce Base. They met several years after the war.
    20. My grandmothers were named Lala (lay-luh) and Lalla (lal-luh). Lala's husband was called "Pop" and he was the favorite drunk of my hometown. Lalla's husband died of leukemia, about the time I was conceived. He was an alcoholic.
    21. I've co-parented three kidz and foster-parented (in the old Celtic sense) one -- my nephew spent summers with me until he got old enough to have summer jobs, or to have to go to summer school.
    22. I avoided the alcoholism that runs on both sides of my family, but I had a long, regular relationship with a sacred smoking herb.
    23. I moved to Wisconsin in 1993.
    24. I lived in France for one year ('76-'77) and in Texas for 39 years.
    25. When I lived in France, I got hit by a car while crossing a street in a town that was the home of a very prolific Inquisitor (Nicolas Remy, the French magistrate, while States Attorney under duke Henri II, became very unpopular by his severity against unfortunates accused of Sorcery and Witchery (1576-1591) and during a space of 16 years, he sent more than 800 of these to death or corporeal punishment, even having had children of 6 and 7 stripped and scourged while they walked around the stake used to burn their parents. The force he showed in exercising his functions in these cases got him the nickname of Tourquemada of Lorraine.").
    26. Later, I became a witch.
    27. During my year in France, I spent three months in Paris. Cultural and linguistic blast! I started learning French in high school. I said and still say that I learned it by osmosis.
    28. Before I left France I spoke French so well that even the natives didn't know I wasn't a native speaker.
    29. I did most of the coursework for a Master's degree in French, but never finished.
    30. I was a Kinko's Copies manager and district manager, in Austin, Texas, in the early Kinko's days. There were many things about that job that I really loved, especially playing the large Xerox production copiers like they were percussion instruments: jamming with the machines.
    31. I'm on work disability.
    32. I have fibromyalgia and osteoarthritis and things that come with those like chronic pain, limited mobility, easy exhaustion, flare-ups, occasional sleepless nights, crankiness, and other yucky things.
    33. If I could figure out how to do it, I'd live in water. I fantasize about a waterproof computer, keyboard and mouse.
    34. I play piano, flute, tin whistle, recorder, drums.
    35. I sketch and do computer art and web design.
    36. I don't know how I lived without beading, and I just started it in earnest a few months ago.
    37. I like multiples of three.
    38. Most of my art is based in the sacred geometry of the bees.
    39. I edit a Zine, MatriFocus. We've just finished our third year in cyberprint.
    40. I love building and tending bonfires.
    41. Goddesses who have called me in major ways: Sequana, Kali, Artemis, Neith, Don, Tara.
    42. The only god I really work with is Ganesh, though I occasionally invoke All-God-Buddha-Allah (my friend Tom's take on Dr. Bronner's All-One-God-Faith). I have a fabulous rubbing of the Maya Maize God in my studio, and he's working with me. But is he Quetzalcoatl? Hun Hunahpu (one of the Hero Twins)? Yum Kax? Yum Caax? Hmmm. I think I'm going to be working with Him....
    43. I read fiction predominately for the first 25 years.
    44. I read non-fiction predominately for the second 25 years.
    45. Now, I read both, but I've slowed down.
    46. I play Blogshares and bridge.
    47. I sing in a feminist choir.
    48. I'm a solitary replenisher, a KAV, an INFP, and a DYKE.
    49. I'm a proactive optimist, a good listener, a patterner.
    50. I study, teach, and practice Conflict Transformation. Emphasis on practice.
    51. I'm a founding member of the Taychopera Conflict Transformation Collective.
    52. I'm a Sagittarian, from whence my name: Sage.
    53. I read palms, cards, runes, and people.
    54. I learned to meditate in the swimming pool at Gordon's Country Club when I was 11 and 12. I went into deep relaxation under the water, hoping that if I could stay there long enough I would be able to develop my vestigial gills.
    55. The Hour Blue is my favorite time of daynight.
    56. In my twenties, I had many dreams about buying, renting, discovering a large house with many fantastic rooms, or about discovering rooms in a house I already lived in.
    57. In my thirties, I had countless dreams with this theme: finding large crystals of rose quartz -- in the ground, in dark shops in Mexico, in out-of-the-way antique stores.
    58. In my forties, cobras and tigers populated my dreams.
    59. Lifelong optimist.
    60. Reasonable balance between gullible, skeptical, logical, analytical, intuitive.
    61. Brainy, creative and still unlearning a behavior of apologizing for those, or hiding them.
    62. Most revolutionizing book I've read: When God Was a Woman.
    63. Most lyrical book I've read: Pilgrim At Tinker Creek.
    64. Most pagan-satisfying book I've read (#1): Prodigal Summer.
    65. Most pagan-satisfying book I've read (#2): The Mists of Avalon.
    66. Most pagan-satisfying book I've read (#3): Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution.
    67. Most cosmologically compelling book I've read: The Elegant Universe.
    68. When I was a kid, I liked to poke a hole in an orange, insert an uncooked macaroni noodle in it, and use it as a straw to suck the juice out. Kidz are weird!
    69. I also spent some amount of time trying to decide, if I were stuck on a desert island and could have only one food, would it be carrots or apples....
    70. I always preferred vanilla to chocolate as a kid. Now, it's Hagen Daz coffee ice cream, Godiva chocolate ice cream and white chocolate anything.
    71. When I was a kid, brussel sprouts were one of my top-five gag-me foods. Now, one of my top-five food dishes is brussel sprouts, in season, with butter and Ume Plum Vinegar.
    72. I still have a crush on Doris Day, left over from all those 60s movies.
    73. I saw Michelle Shocked live in Austin, Texas. Great concert! More memorable than kd lang, and wow!
    74. I've experienced emotional neglect, physical and verbal abuse, incest, therapy abuse, clergy abuse, sexual harrassment, discrimination, oppression. I've known deep love, wonder, joy, and delight. Despite a desperate plea to the heavens, made in my early twenties, to work out all my karma in this lifetime so I would never have to come back, I find now that I'm willing to venture another round on the Wheel of Life. I also find I'm not willing to take back that plea....
    75. I wonder things like "Why hasn't there been a Susan Sarandon / Harvey Keitel movie?"
    76. Ok, why not. GRE: 1390.
    77. Goddess Religion saved me from doing a Ph.D. in psychology.
    78. My last two homes have been in places with lots of wildlife in the yard. I love that.
    79. The last home I owned in Texas had a fire-ant problem. Four-tenths of an acre covered with them. They're hard to get rid of; they resist death by toxic chemicals and boiling water -- and besides, I just didn't want to spend energy giving death. So, I "prayed" to the fire ants to share my yard with me by moving off to one corner of it and staying there. It took two years of prayer/meditation/visualization/psychism, but it worked! It was reading Machaelle Small Wright's Peralandra book, Behaving as if the God in All Life Mattered, that prompted me to "work with" the fire ants.
    80. Believe it or not, my favorite colors are not green and purple.
    81. I never wore dresses much, and when I was 39 I gave my last dress away with a vow that I would never have to wear one again. I was never "me" in a dress.
    82. I once read a novel while driving from Kansas City, Kansas, to Paris, Texas.
    83. A motorcycle was my primary mode of transportation for about three years around my first Saturn return.
    84. When I was at Brownie Camp, three girls were bitten by three different snakes as we were walking to a covered shelter to practice our end-of-camp skit. I wasn't one of them....
    85. My moon's in Taurus, so I like beauty around me (nature and artifice), and I have way too many things.
    86. I'm stubborn, cantankerous, gentle, and compassionate.
    87. I learned, the long and hard way, that an altar only works (at least for me) when it's on a north wall.
    88. Protection magic is the most important, and most neglected, skill and practice for witches and pagans. (Learned that the long and hard way, too.)
    89. I've participated in and also created and facilitated a lot of public rituals. I've been in three private covens. I find solo magic the most satisfying, though my partner and I are growing skills at couple's magic and I like that, too. The only thing that really entices me about large group magic these days is drumming and workings for the planet and to effect political change. Those kinds of workings don't surface a lot in large public rituals.
    90. If wanting to explore and appreciate several sides of an issue makes me a contrarian, well.... (My partner's comment: You're a multitudinarian.)
    91. I'm working on improving my health. Drinking more water, taking supplements daily, and exercising regularly are tops on my list. I struggle with all three of them, though over time I see wee, steady improvements in each.
    92. I listen to talk radio by choice when wanting extra noise in the car.
    93. I keep trying to get friends, colleagues, and strangers to blog.
    94. I believe it's possible for our species to grow up and quit messing in our sandbox.
    95. I believe our species won't make it if we don't. I think it's going to take a shift in consciousness and an understanding of the role of cooperation in the evolution of our species if we're going to grow up.
    96. Feminism and women's mysteries are not anti-male, though certainly some very few feminists and a small handful of women practicing women's mysteries are androgynists (but my gosh they're not alone; I find that straight women of all religions are the ones who most complain about men). I think sociopolitical, cultural and individual misogyny and their consequences far outweigh any female chauvinism. I also think "the patriarchy" has damaged men at least as much as it's damanaged women; maybe more
    97. I believe in the G spot, female ejaculation, a woman's choice, and wild, wild women!
    98. I believe in the power of the creative imagination!
    99. I think blogging is the bee's knees!

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What does my spirit need?
Where is the flow? What wants to happen right now?