Yesterday felt like a rerun of my birthday four years ago when I spent the day worrying about a fire at nearby Camp Pendleton. That year the wind changed to a Santa Ana, carrying that fire away from us. But a few days later the Cedar Fire started, and burned 280,278 acres, 2,820 buildings (including 2,232 homes), and killed 15 people. About a year and a half before that was the Gavilan Fire, which came within 1/2 mile of my home.

When I was a kid I thought Santa Ana winds were sort of exciting, though even then I didn’t like the heat that came with them, or the dry air that made my hair crackle and my skin feel like paper. But now, after so many fires and worries, I’d rather be out of town when this weather kicks in. The humidity was in the single digits all day yesterday, and it’s every bit as dry today. I slept very little last night, spending most of it listening to the wind tear around the house, creaking the walls and whipping things around outside, and wondering whether all of Ramona (36,000 population) and all of Potrero got evacuated, and how far the fires would spread during the night and all that wind.

This morning I woke to a phone call from my sister, who’d heard on the news that there was a fire in Rainbow, about 5 to 10 miles from me. So today is a fire watch day, hoping the wind will settle down, hoping the air will moisten, and hoping our firefighters aren’t stretched too thin.

I turned 51 yesterday. I think I’m getting too old for this.

We had to say goodbye to our little gray cat Emily today. We think she was about 20 years old, but we’re not sure, because she adopted us just over nine years ago, appearing in our back yard to steal our puppy’s food. She had a lot of problems, resulting from having nearly starved on her own without front claws, and having possibly been abused. She was missing half her teeth when she found us, and we think she suffered the cat version of PTSD. But over time she warmed up to all of us and became an integral part of our family. We like to think we were able to give her a nice retirement here, after all her troubles. She helped us say goodbye to another dear cat friend, Merlin, in 2000, and today we said goodbye to her.

I’ll miss her purrs, her silky, silver-gray fur, and the gentle tap of her paw when she wakened me in the mornings.

Just a few nights ago, The Lord of the Rings trilogy played on television again. We didn’t watch, because I intended to watch our DVDs again soon, but we caught the tail end of Return of the King, and the final song.

For days that song has stayed in my mind, popping into consciousness at odd moments. Today it did again, and I wondered about it, because I couldn’t recall the singer’s name, the name of the song, or the lyrics. The music just kept haunting me. So I looked it up, and remembered as soon as I sat down to do a search that it was Into the West. Annie Lennox sang it for the film. I love this song. Right now it’s helping me say goodbye to Emily. I learned that it was partially inspired by the death of young New Zealand filmmaker, Cameron Duncan, and first performed in public at his funeral. That makes it seem even more appropriate as Emily’s song of passage.

Safe journey, little friend.

The song is available as part of the soundtrack from the film: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King [SOUNDTRACK]

My “Quickie” horoscope on Yahoo! this morning said,

“If you wake up feeling weird, just go with it!”

Hmm, okay, but I wake up feeling weird every morning, especially since I began working at home. I’m finally teaching myself to go with the flow, to let my days be unstructured and still get important things done. But now summer is here, the time of year when I wish I could hibernate and have someone rouse my half-baked body when it’s over.

I haven’t been posting as much because I’m in the midst of my yearly hot weather adaptation phase. That’s the excuse I’m going with. My dread of hot weather and my seeming inability to adapt make global warming and menopause at the same time feel like a horrid revelation that hell does exist, and I am going there. Go with the flow? I’m swimming upstream from the heat as fast as I can. This weather makes me miss the job at the office where someone else paid for the air conditioning, and paid me to be there in it. How cool was that?

I’m a slug this time of year. But last night, before I went to sleep, I thought it would be nice to wake up early and enjoy the cool of the morning. Apparently that set my mental alarm clock, and I wakened at dawn. This has happened a lot recently, deciding on a time to wake up, and waking at that time, without the alarm clock. It’s like a new super-power.

This morning was lovely, with the kinds of clouds I’ve heard called buttermilk skies, and a soft, cool breeze. I should use my super-power more often.

How do you go with the flow?

Sorry I haven’t been posting, but I’ve been having some lower back and sciatic problems that make it difficult to sit at the computer very long. I’ve decided to spend my time at the computer primarily on finishing my book, for now. See you soon!

I’ve had this image in my mind for the past two weeks. It was a Friday, and the wind gusted harder as the day progressed, which tends to make us all nervous, especially the dog. The dry weather alone was good for a little shock now and then, with the static buildup that makes a spark jump between one’s finger and any metal object, or even the cat’s tail. These twisting gusts stirred things up in occasional egg-beater bursts. At one point we heard something fall on the roof with a swoosh, and seconds later something else, so we went outside, and found a few dead palm fronds on the driveway. Presumably there were two more on the roof.

The uphill neighbor has a palm tree that stands 75 to 100 feet tall and hadn’t been trimmed, maybe ever, or at least not since it reached a height beyond what could be managed with the average household ladder. Its trunk was a shaggy column of dead fronds, attractive to nesting birds every spring. On the downhill side, a new owner has been renovating. He’s had people working every day for the past three months. That morning they’d poured a new driveway.

We didn’t think much of the fallen fronds, just that the wind was unusual, tearing at things that had hung around undisturbed for so long. It didn’t appear to be a great day to finish new concrete, with debris blowing everywhere, so we sympathized with the workmen. Back inside the house, we heard more sounds, and the gusts grew more frequent. Minutes later we heard a different sounding crash and returned outside. Even more palm fronds littered the driveway, one on the hood of the car, which must have made the new sound, another hanging from a power line that leads from the street to the house. (more…)

My sister emailed me about my post, Interconnections, parallels, and epiphany. She got me to thinking about how individually we process things that happen in our personal lives through our writing and artwork. (Aside from teaching yoga, Helen paints and does collages. You can see some of her artwork at her website, Your Yoga Voyage.)

Working with people in non-fiction-related activities has fed into my fiction quite a lot. That was especially true when I worked in an office. I don’t mean anything as obvious as basing a character on a real person. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. Working with people helped me understand better how we interact, provided observations about life, and helped me train my ear for how people talk. In fact everything I experience while away from creative activity tends to feed into it. This includes all the trials, lessons, emotions both powerful and subtle, and all other information and events that life sends my way. In creative expression we have the opportunity to turn dross into riches, or one form of richness into another.

I think perhaps creativity is 50% input and 50% output, or maybe it’s a form of breath, inhaling one thing, processing it, then exhaling something different. The inhalation has to take place, or . . . you run out of air, you suffocate. It follows that the exhalation must also take place, which may be why people who experience trauma sometimes wind up with post-traumatic stress (PTSD). They have no opportunity or ability to process, honor, and exhale what that trauma creates inside them. We can get stuck in grief, too, whether it be grief for a loved one who’s died, or something else in our lives that has moved on or faded away.

Of course what we breathe in is critical to the process. But fiction and art are so eclectic, almost anything will feed them, depending on our willingness to shape the product of our creativity to fit what must be expressed.

There are times when we attempt to create but haven’t gone through enough inhalation to sustain the process. I suspect that’s the cause of many blocks we experience, except when they’re caused by our unwillingness to face whatever in us we must face to fully process it as creative product.

Now that I spend more time at home, even a walk or a drive to the grocery store and talking to the clerks or people in line can be part of that inhalation process. The same goes for reading, listening to music, poetry, interacting with neighbors or my pets.

Fiction or art — or any creative activity — is where we can take in the confusion and chaos that the world dishes out and make sense and order out of it. Creativity doesn’t have to be engaged in with the hope of making money. Perhaps in many ways it’s more satisfying when it’s not. Many people enjoy needlework, cooking, gardening, decorating, woodwork, or photography. Even self-grooming and assembling a wardrobe can provide an important outlet. I don’t think of that as vain, I think instead of hunter-gatherer clans in which self-decoration is a primary creative endeavor.

I put my own peculiar stamp on whatever I take in before returning it to the world. We all do. We might as well do so creatively, constructively, lovingly. It could be that we need this as much as the air we breathe.

It wasn’t exactly sunrise, but the sun’s debut for the day.

After a soft, steady rain all night and continuing into this morning, I got up to raise the heater setting and found the dog curled in a tight ball in the back corner of his bed. He didn’t stay outside very long either. We are all wusses here in So. Calif. when the temperature dips. It dipped to 35 or so degrees F last night, outdoors.

When the sun first peeked through the clouds in the east, rain continued to fall, and the sun outlined everything in sight with silver. I’m sure there was a rainbow. I couldn’t see it from my window. The world was brilliant, shiny, a jewel, in those few minutes. Of course it’s always a jewel. We just tend to let our view of it get dusty.

The wind keeps us awake, the past few nights. It blows little black berries off one of the palm trees (they’re too small for me to call them proper dates — though they are as sticky as dates), and they hit the back deck with a surprising amount of force. The fact that it’s these wild gusts instead of a steady wind unsettles me. Just when I doze off, something rattles or whooshes outside and I wake up. And dry — the moisture has sucked out of Southern California, to make snow elsewhere I suppose. We do not have a semi-arid but a fully-arid climate today.

Last night when I took the dog out for his final walk of the evening, I saw a shooting star. You’d have thought the wind blew it, except it moved in the opposite direction. It was there in the eastern sky (slightly southeast) for an instant, slanting in almost horizontally northward, a golden yellow flame, brilliant and burning, soon extinguished.

I thought of the Sara Teasdale poem, The Falling Star — after I made a quick wish.

Was it a late Leonid, or an early Geminid, or something in between — maybe a Puppids-Velids? Or just a stray puppy, for that matter? I don’t know, but I feel lucky since seeing it. Lucky to have seen it, lucky to be here, lucky the wind hasn’t blown the house into the Land of Oz. Luck is good.

Today left our region hot and dry with gusts of wind, movement and change allowing for a promise of cooling moisture in response to it, even the slightest hint of autumn-toward-winter chilling — as far as things ever chill here, though they cool quickly when the air is this dry. Dissipating smoke enhanced the golden autumn light, and a pink sunset lightened the colors of bougainvillea against hazy green foliage, under a hazy blue sky. My backyard at sunset today made a sight I wanted to memorize, or paint. Even a deadly fire leaves some beauty behind.

Fire season in Southern California. The sky is yellow, smoke lingering like fog in the sky, the sun orange, and our windows closed. A wildfire burning in Cabazon, near Palm Springs, has killed three firefighters. Santa Ana winds have blown much of the smoke in our direction. This creates a surreal world in which we’re not sure from one minute to the next whether the fire is still far up in the neighboring county, or a new one has flared up in our own neighborhood. I try to keep my mind off it, but the smell has seeped into the house, and it’s difficult to ignore — a constant reminder to pray for the firefighters.