2022 Begins with 2021 Ending – my letter to my fellow travelers began there:

Jan 7

Dear Band Members,

I’m out in the desert right now where it’s raining and dark, and all I can think of to do is write to you and tell you how much your support has meant to me this past year. Going into 2021 was like nothing I’ve ever done before and, I suspect, I am not alone in that. So much in the shadows, so little recognizable reserve in our individual and collective tanks. Fears of the known and unknown abounding, growing into monsters that sent many of us into hiding while others dove into the fray to be of service.

What a shit show.

And what an amazing time to be alive.

I’ve gotten to know aspects of myself that were not only hidden but forbidden. Surrender? Hah! Weakness? Over my dead and quaking body.

And so it goes. I’ve had to surrender, over and over. Cancel, reschedule, reconfigure, re- re- re-… otherwise my dead body would bear the evidence of my lack of practicing what I preach.

And you’ve all been part of that process, that re- re- re-… sometimes as the instigator and occasionally as the antidote. It turns out it doesn’t really matter which end you’re on; it’s all the same damn thing.

We ran retreats, we started new programs, we ended programs, we ran a fundraiser, we wrote and published a book, we upgraded our website, we launched a WOWMobile. We ran workshops and pop-up retreats. We connected with new organizations (Life Pieces to Masterpieces, Washington Parks & People, Nature Sacred) with whom we hope to build new options for spreading the word, that creativity will ultimately save our asses, that Our Words Matter!

And so 2021 drizzles to an end here in the WOWMobile in the desert of Arizona. I am thankful for the blessings. I am thankful for the lessons. I am thankful for its ending.

I am thankful for you, my band members, my tribe, my friends and lover, and my family. Neither I nor WOW would have made it without you.

With love,

Dulcie

Happy New Year!

And now it’s a new year. How many of us are holding our breath? My friend Steph sends hopes that 2022 is not the year where the world rolls another collective gutter ball. I like that vision – it’s kind of like we tried but we really blew it. Steph has had a rough year with illness and heartbreak and, you may recognize this from her visual, she is not one to be easily daunted. She’ll be back to bowl more frames.

My friend Rita says the lanes are increasingly crowned. She thinks the aliens are after her, and I think she might be right - in fact, I changed her name just in case they’re after me too. She and I were once renegades, flipping the bird at the threat of repercussions and consequences. Fuck off, health insurance. You aren’t the boss of me, IRS. And as for safety regulations and speed limits, they weren’t made for Rita and me.

But I got run over, and Rita got crippled, and then COVID came in and mopped up the floor with the planet, and now, Rita and me, well, we have a bit more humility when it comes to our place in the universe. Rita is more certain about the aliens running the show than I am but we’ve confirmed it — we are not in charge. For Rita, she’d have a lot more money, and her back would be replaced with a newer model if she was in charge. For me, if I was in charge, it would be more like this…

I would have our most precious commodity be creative energy. I’d have support systems for individual and collaborative creative ventures. I’d say, here’s the thing — everyone needs to contribute something because that makes us feel ourselves more clearly when we’re adding something to the mix. Generosity is contagious just as much as Omicron, maybe even more so. Wisdom and compassion can be the planetary value system. Equal means Equal. Education is dispensed for free, not loans to banks and corporations.

Health care is a given. Lest you think me to be an incurable bleeding heart liberal, I have my dark side. I continue to reserve the right to send qualifying humans to the Island of Useless People. There, the lot of them get to hang out with each other bitching about everyone else and how it ought to be and what happened to the good old days. They’re forced to put up with greed and dishonesty as standard fare in the well-oiled machines that, no doubt, they will re-invent with cleverness and industry, and then they’ll sell them to each other for sex and guns. They’ll need to buy both. I won’t spend more time on this now as I am just as susceptible as anyone to falling into the pit of despair at how crummy we can be. And I don’t want that to begin this new year with that vibe. Darkness, as the Indigo Girls told us, has an insatiable hunger. The more you feed it, the more it demands. And the suppliers amass wealth.

I want creative wealth. I want the joy of rising together. Of helping each other find just the right color combo or turn of phrase, all the while knowing others will be there for my band and me. I want writers, artists, dancers, and musicians to be revered as the purveyors of that which makes life worth living while the chefs, therapists, athletes, business owners, and firemen show us how. How to do it.

It’s no surprise that I have written my way back to one of my favorite topics – masculine and feminine energy. It has been a relief that I eventually moved on from the phase where no matter what I was writing, I would always end up with one of the females going crazy. And no matter who I wanted the protagonist to be, the crazy one would end up stealing the show. Mommy issues, I guess. And fortunately, I wrote enough stories of crazy mommy that I now have a choice at least.

But in the last 5 or 10 years, the slightest deviation off-topic and the words tumble into sentences about masculine and feminine energy. And there’s little I can do about it. It’s how I see things. There’s the creation and then there’s the manifestation. What, Why and How. And while none of these three are under the sole dominion of either masculine or feminine; they gain strength and balance from mutual admiration.

I don’t think I am different from most people in that I’ve lived through times in my life that I look back on and realize that I was not as honest as I thought. I wrote about that in one of the novels with a crazy mother, and I also wrote about it in my professional memoir. (there are the remnants of a crazy mother in that one too). When I was younger, I feared being a fake and, it turns out later in hindsight, it was for a good reason. My ideas of who I was and how I should be did not come from inside me. They came from outside me, from around me. From how I wanted to be, from who I wanted to be. I refer back to where I began writing this piece to point out the repeated awakenings that life has provided up until now where I can genuinely see and feel more of who I actually am and how that works with who I want to be.

And that includes a grande parfait of masculine and feminine energy. I like to think things up and figure out how to do them. And then, if it’s within my abilities, I like to actually do them. But not for long. I pretty much always want someone to come step in and keep things going while I move on to something else. I’ve still got work to do.

And where is that work heading? I can’t feel the answers to that yet, so I’m trying my damndest not to fill in the blanks with all my old favorites. Work. Start a business. Paint something. Spark a new retreat – I saw an amusing picture of these two donkeys in Florida, and now I want to do a retreat that includes people’s pets somehow. And away I go, aware that sometime up ahead, it will have to be faced about how masculine and feminine energy affects our relationship with animals.

So coming back to the beginning of this new year, this 2022, I’m really hoping to move gently. I’d like to notice when I auto-fill blanks and uncheck the autofill function. I want it to be okay not to know what I want to be when I grow up. Not to even know if getting grown-up is going to happen to me. I want to feed curiosity and wonder in myself and my bandmates, and I want to see what comes of that. Does the line of potential residents for Island of Useless People remain steady and growing all the time? Or does it begin to thin out as creative evangelists naturally spread the word, and disgruntled Earth Citizens consider another way to get through this life?

I don’t know what will happen this year, and I think that’s just that. I am more aware of not knowing than I ever was. It may be that by the time I get all grown up, I won’t know a damn thing.

But till then, I’m spending this month by myself in the desert. I brought some books I want to read and, as is so often the case, I’ve picked up a few more along the route here. “SPQR” by Mary Beard is one I brought with me with a renewed commitment to reading at least one non-fiction historical type book before I buy any more books. So there, I’ve said that here so you can hold me to it. “A Generation’s Worth” by Stephen Jenkinson is one of those books that I can only read in snippets so that I don’t gloss over all of the juicy contents in the interest of getting it done. I’ve started both “Shadows in the Sun” by Wade Davis and Ruth Ozeki’s “The Book of Form and Emptiness” and I kind of love both of them, so that will not be a painful commitment. There’s more but these are where I’m starting.

I also intend to go back to some of my previous writing. I mentioned a novel and a professional memoir. I want to bring them out and read them through – see what I think now. See where they might go.

And I’ve got this story that has been dogging me for the past few years. I won’t go into detail primarily because if I do, then I won’t know how to stop seeing as how it’s not written yet. Okay, I can say this much; there’s a woman named Carla who is crippled in some way, and she’s trying to find her way to something of more value than just recovering from her injuries. I don’t think she’s crazy and she’s a sultry, sexy thing who does not currently have much of a bead on her masculine self. We’ll see what happens when she stands up straight and lets go of the brace.

And as for me and WOW and the rest of the band, I continue to marvel at what happens when you have permission to love what and who and how you love. When you are encouraged and supported in expressing it. And when you go ahead and do just that.

Happy New Year to us!

Wide Open Writing

“We believe that getting away and connecting to nature and ourselves is central to the creative process. In this place of respite, we find our deeper truths. We purposely choose evocative settings where your adventurous spirit can come out to play with curiosity and wonder. Whether it’s desert or mountains, tropics or tundra, there’s always something sparkly to be discovered.”