So this morning I feel like writing and reflecting just a bit. New for me, since for the last few weeks I haven't really been looking very deeply. It's darker in the mornings as the season progresses into fall. Today is the Fall Equinox, this evening sometime after 9pm pacific time.

Mo is sleeping still. Molly wakes at 4:30 and needs to go out, so of course everyone else, including the cats, simply go back to sleep, but me? No, of course not. So here I am.

I just had my 61st birthday. Somehow 61 seems a lot older than 60. I'm really IN my 60's now, not just getting there. Sixty was closer to 59 and 61 is closer to 65. Go figure.

Usually I write about my year sometime around my birthday, try to reflect and remember and think of all that the previous birth year has brought to me. This birthday is momentous in that it actually represents the very last vestiges of my Death year, and the last of my 10 year cycle in the Emperor. All the male stuff, the integration of my own personal power, my inner male, outer males in my life. Done. Finished with my first experience of a Death year. I always say that Death isn't about real physical death, but is about transformation. Ha. Interesting to me how we dance around the death thing with fancy words about transforming. It may be transformation, but it is still death. My Death year was marked by the death of my soul friend, and my birthday is marked by the arrival of her ashes in my mail box. Funny timing. She told Jerri that I was to have her ashes because I would know where to take them. Shera died last February, and only now was Jerri ready to let go that much. So they are in a box, a white cardboard box filled with a plastic bag. Geez. Today I will make some kind of a funnel and put them in a container that at least seems a little more respectable. I do have a lovely gourd, painted black with images of goddesses around it and feathers and beads at the entrance. A very small entrance, hence the funnel. Such a passage.

Weather has finally cooled. Now it's in the mid 80's during the day and while that feels warm to me, I just have to remember those 115 degree temperatures to realize that it really has cooled. Mo and I have been working on house projects in the midst of me going to work every day, but today I am off, and will be home for the next three days while we finish up all that we can together on the house. Last weekend was for play time and this weekend is for working.

Last weekend I actually went to Yosemite and over the Tioga Road. A nice return to a place I grew up loving. Incredibly, the air was a crystal clear and fresh as I remembered from my childhood. There's a quality of light in Yosemite that seems unparalleled anywhere else. I thought it might have something to do with the granite, the whiteness of the granite and the way it looks almost blue in the shadows. And there is so much of it, and so much sky. Maybe it had to do with the nearly 10,000 foot elevation over the pass. It was a blessing, a dream, hiking to a high mountain lake, as pure and pristine as anything I have ever seen. A lovely way to spend a birthday.

The year really did bring some rather incredible changes to me. Most significantly, the loss of my friend, the move to Sonora, the first trip overseas, my grandson in Iraq. Other small milestones were everywhere, but these were the big ones. Again, in the midst of it, there doesn't seem much to write about. It's just a life progressing, going through shifts and changes, and as I look back, full of surprises and unexpected turns and twists. Maybe it's the end of the cycle and the next few years will not be so full of surprises, and then again maybe it's just the nature of life and the unexpected things are what make it interesting.

I know I am not bored. Not even close. I am challenged every day with the demands of my work, my new job here in Sonora, with the differences of living here, challenged every day in ways that keep me from ever thinking I am bored. That's a good thing. I think I could find lots of people in their 60's who might be tired and bored and not doing much that is very different from their old patterns. I'm trying to stay away from that place. I want to create stability in my life but I also want to keep it fresh and interesting, full of enough challenge that I am stimulated, but not so much that I crash and burn. A fine line.

Enough for today