The Universe does work in the most splendid of ways, more so when we defer to it and take that proverbial action of taking our hands off the wheel and leaning into what is.  Here I am, in all that I am, blessed to orchestrate and sometimes just drop my fingers on a keyboard to write my first ever web-page based blog and looking for something from my world to tell me where to start.  Enter the aforementioned Universe and I see on the floor beside me a brochure for a local Community Foundation (Monterey) and on the cover is “Take Flight.”  I get to and I am, right here, right now.

I love that we live in a world where we don’t have one newspaper in town where we vie for one spot that holds the one running column to share our visions, observations and insights about life.  I’d like to make a peace offering to the print media and call my work here a “blollum,” and I’ll just do that for today.  Doesn’t have that “viralness” to it and that is just fine.  A few years ago I sent a 10 –piece column to my small Ohio hometown paper that was about the experience of growing up there and extrapolating that experience with raising children in the wild west.  I was poised and ready to go months on the topic, weaving parallels between my adventures in a thick, suburban forest to the quest to find a carved-out patch of grass called a park and find just as much to discover in the manicured plot of land poised with perfect, code-enforced play structures.  Alas, an email came back saying “we don’t have columns any more and we don’t have guest columnists.”  I felt so brave even asking and so sad that my creations would die for a lack of a second.  Fortunately, there was Face book and a page all set up for high school alumni from my town to send photos, make connections and even a place for documents!  Nirvana!  I sent them soon after and was pleased as punch to find, upon returning to my protected Midwest enclave for yet another reunion that in fact I had some voyeurs and a few fans.  One was all I wanted. Done.

I hope you can see that I’m not taking for granted that we live in this world where you can actually share your insights in the plethora that is cyberspace and you can even DIALOGUE with “your peeps.”  No, I was not born during the Great Depression; I’ve been percolating in my primordial caterpillar soup.  Apparently my gestation took awhile, aided by some of my own desire to stay a little longer to marinate.  But as God, the Universe and nature would have it, it also became time to break out, in the manner that only us true butterflies can, of the chrysalis and begin shaking off the old wings, flapping them around a little and seeing what the scoop is out here in the “exposed” world.

It sure feels new here, truly.  The first thing I heard out on my branch about this place out here was “You are a container for the goodness of the universe.”  I’ll be darned, is that so?  I thought it was going to be much, much more akin to marching orders: you will proceed to grow up too fast, achieve too much, try too hard, push beyond belief, acquire all that you can, go as high as you can, procreate and repeat.  So if I get this right, just from this moment, in this place, on this page of the universal script, I get to take this “container” of mine (which by the way, I saw my reflection of this post-chrysalis look I am donning and I AM beautiful!!!!!!) and fly around dropping off and taking in goodness all over the place? I’m so in!  Let me at it, you, all of it!  Thanks for sharing in this novitiate journey as a beautiful butterfly.  I look forward to many interesting stories and learnings here with you.  See you in the sky……. Jennifer