Tag: 2020

The House Is On Fire

Jerked awake with the fire alarm blaring. You tumble out of bed, grab your family, your pets, and head for the nearest exit. You escape the fire with your loved ones, then you call the fire department and hope they can save your house. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? What if instead you and your family are running from the fire and you stop with the door insight, but you all start arguing with each other on what started the fire. Was it an electrical short, did someone leave a candle burning, was the stove left on, and your family begins to accuse each other of starting the fire while you’re still inside the burning house? Instead of escaping with your lives, you stay inside the fire and fight about whose fault the fire is instead of escaping.

You’re probably reading this and thinking, “Who would do that? No one would do that?”

Australia is on fire, literally(https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/australia-fires-deadly-wildfire-photos-2019-2020/). This is after California was on fire (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/california-wildfires). The Amazon was on fire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Amazon_rainforest_wildfires). Our house is on fire and we’re arguing whose caused the fire. We’re so busy pointing fingers and shouting at each other that it’s your fault, their fault, that we aren’t putting out the fire and saving as many lives as we can. Priorities, my fellow earthlings, priorities. Let’s put out the fires, lets figure out how to save the polar bears as the ice melts, lets save the bees and all the other insects. They’re food for birds as well as the major pollinators for our food crops. If we lose our insects, we are next, for so many reasons. But I’m not here to be all doom and gloom, I’m here to share some hope. We can do this. We can put out the fires both real and metaphorical. We can turn around or come up with new solutions for what’s happening to our planet, our home. I don’t believe that we have these great big brains for nothing, or that we have compassionate hearts for no purpose.

I’d planned on writing this blog last night, because the Australian government didn’t seem to be supporting their rural firefighters or rescuing the animals trapped in the fires. This morning the Prime Minister of Australia has promised two billion to support fire relief efforts (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/australia-commits-billions-dollars-wildfire-recovery-n1111021), so I thought I would skip this blog where I was going to list charities to send your money and mine to today, and then I realized that money promised isn’t money in the pockets of charities today. It’s a promise and eventually they will get the money, but no government gives out that kind of cash quickly. They want to be sure it goes to the right place, or where they think is the right place. The charities will have to jump through some bureaucratic hoops to get some of the funds, that’s just the way it works, so … here’s a list of charities. If you give a dollar today it will get to them quicker than the billions promised. If everyone who reads this blog gives a dollar, or five dollars, or whatever they can afford it will help.

See, there’s the hope to share. We can help each other. We can grab each other by the hand even if we are thousands of miles away and give hope and real help to each other. Give a dollar, send the donations that people are asking for, we are not helpless in the face of all this, if we work together to save each other and the other riders on this big, beautiful planet.

If we stop arguing about how we got here and start working to come up with solutions, we can all get out of the fire, and we can save our home, this planet at the same time.

These are Charites related to the fire that have been vetted by news sources, (CBS affiliated News) and the links are reputable.

These are vetted links to the fire fighters

https://www.rfs.nsw.gov.au/volunteer/support-your-local-brigade

https://www.cfa.vic.gov.au/about/supporting-cfa

https://cfsfoundation.org.au/donate

https://www.rfbaq.org/donate-to-rfbaq

Charities helping General

https://au.gofundme.com/f/fire-relief-fund-for-first-nations-communities

https://www.redcross.org.au/campaigns/disaster-relief-and-recovery-donate#donate

https://www.communityenterprisefoundation.com.au/make-a-donation/bushfire-disaster-appeal/

https://donate.vinnies.org.au/appeals-nsw/vinnies-nsw-bushfire-appeal-nsw

https://frrr.org.au/cb_pages/supporting_bushfire-affected_communities.php

https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/australian-wildfire-relief-fund/?rf=pr

Animal Charites

https://www.rspcansw.org.au/bushfire-appeal/

https://donate.wwf.org.au/donate/2019-trees-appeal-koala-crisis#gs.qwx2wb

https://donate.zoo.org.au/donation

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-thirsty-koalas-devastated-by-recent-fires

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-save-kangaroo-islands-koalas-and-wildlife

https://www.wires.org.au/donate/ways-to-help

2020, a decade, and a new bird

It’s that time of year again, time for the first bird of the year. It’s a tradition among birders, bird watchers that the first bird you see on New Year’s day will be a theme for the year to come. It can be the first animal you see if you’ve been up for hours and seen no birds, which happened to me two years in a row with squirrels. The moment I owned squirrel as my power animal for the year, birds appeared. It was like magic. Those two years were about trying to balance work and play. The last two years it’s been dove, and I was really hoping, praying that it wouldn’t be a third year in a row. Why, you might ask, because dove is about matters of the heart and coming to terms with Goddess energy, feminine energy for me. Learning lessons of the heart is never easy, always worthwhile, but never easy. I was ready to get a message from the universe that I’d done my heart and love work to a point where I could move on. My husband, Jonathon, and I are closer than ever and have hit that deep abiding, contentment where the fire burns low and high, but never goes out, and we know how to throw more wood on our fire and get sparks. Eighteen years of marriage and we’ve never been happier as a couple and as individuals; yay, working your shit!

I’ll mention it here before someone else asks, our other halves, Genevieve and Spike, requested to not be part of my public persona a couple of years ago. They found the “fame” part of things uncomfortable. They are private people and deserve to have their personal life be as private as they wish, yes it was a bone of contention for awhile, but if you love someone you honor their wishes, so I have. It has been difficult, because I blog from my heart, and write from heart in many ways, though I write fiction. It’s made blogging about my life very difficult and is one reason I almost stopped doing it. I don’t know how to edit my real life the way I edit my fiction. This has been some of the heart and love work of the last two years.

I’m happy to say that this year’s bird is, Dark-eyed Junco. It’s a type of sparrow, though you’d never know it to see the charcoal gray and white body, or the black upper body with a white stomach, or a mostly charcoal body, or – they are incredibly varied in their plumage. There are even different colors for different regions of the country that look nothing like the birds we see here. They are winter birds here, arriving between October to November, or even as early as late September. You know the term, snowbirds for people who travel to warmer climates for winter and then return in the spring that’s exactly what Juncos do here. We’re their winter vacation spot.

Jonathon and I saw a small flock of Juncos at the same time this morning as we made coffee and wrangled breakfast. He called out, “Junco!” I actually turned away as if he’d called it and so it couldn’t be my bird of the year. I even walked to another window and everything was hiding from me, just movements in the trees, until I realized that there was no rule, no calling dibs on a bird. Once I owned that we had the same bird of the year for 2020 then suddenly I saw the downy woodpecker and the white-breasted nuthatch on the trees and bird feeders. It’s been like that every year, until I own the first bird/animal the rest of the world is quiet, then boom – birds and other animals everywhere.

If you think that sounds too mystical, all I can tell you is that it works that way for me. Also, we’re Wiccan, as in yes modern day Witches, which is a nature based religion, so paying attention to birds and other wildlife is a part of our faith. God and Goddess speak through nature all the time if you know how to listen.

If squirrel’s lesson for me was balancing work and play, and dove was about love and the divine feminine, what does Junco mean? My husband and I aren’t entirely certain yet. We’ll be meditating and paying attention as time goes by, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with travel, maybe even moving. The Juncos were in a flock, so it could also be about group communications. Interpreting the lessons of nature isn’t always an exact science, but then most faith isn’t that simple, add magic and it can get a lot more complicated. So here’s to 2020, a new decade, and the year of the Junco!