Such challenging times I’ve had weaving through this past month! October seems to have been a most intense month for many people I know. Even more accelerated big challenges and big changes, some hard and some wondrous!

We’ve had our first rain this season! Early! A gentle, “woman-rain” that didn’t last very long at all. Still, it did wash away some of summer’s dusty carapace and released extravagant, pungent, jubilant smells of greenness!

Ojai‘s hottest summer days seem inevitably to run from late August into mid-September. As always, I spend the 100+degree days in utter hibernation. I curl naked or in a sarong with just the right pillows on my shaggy flokati rug, under the wonderful ceiling fan!

Mid-August in Ojai, as always, is a time of intensely hot, near or above 100 degree days, gentler, cooler 55-60 degree nights and the endless cornucopia of summer fruit spilling off the trees in the family orchard.

This has been a month of such extraordinary miracles both large and small! I am filled with such boundless gratitude for the endless ways in which I feel watched over, protected and blessed by Spirit/the Grandmothers.

After ten days of heavy ash-fall from the big forest fire just 10 miles away, I’m back, at last, to being able to float in my hot tub while doing my morning Reiki hands-on-body mediation.

The intense humming of bees still fills the valley all day. On this property, they’ve moved on from the orange blossoms that have now transformed into tiny green beginnings of oranges.

The Ojai Valley hums from sun up to sun down.

It’s an extraordinarily glorious morning, this second day of spring. Brilliant blue skies, fine wisps of cloud high over the mountains, three playful red-tail hawks calling to each other as they float their lazy spirals in the sky.

Spring is clearly beginning in Ojai. My body feels ignited by the energy of the new life erupting all around me. Yesterday the first fragile pink blossoms opened on the ancient peach tree just outside my desk window.

The way the Christmas holiday fell this year opened the space for me to have another eight days of retreat. This just a month after my ten-day birthday retreat!

We are having some real (for California) winter weather this month: cold days with gusty winds, dark clouds scudding and occasional soft, steady rains. At night, it’s been getting down into the low 30’s.

The clouds that have been missing here for most of the summer come back into our skies. Great, lush cumulus and stratocumulus build, gather and tower along the mountain ridges to our north. There are days of wispy mare’s tails to watch as they evanesce.

Such strange, troubled and troubling times these are, with as many ways of responding to the awful realities of these past weeks as there are people responding to them. My own earliest responses were kind of surprising and atypical for me.

Tuesday morning, when I came into my cottage from the screened tent that serves as my sleeping womb, there was a somber message on the answering machine from my early-rising friend Barbara: “Things are not healthy in this world you’re waking up to today,” she said.

In the heat of the days I am reading endlessly, napping prodigiously and dreamily drifting on my shaggy rug under my wonderful ceiling fan, in my hammock or on my swing (each under their separate trees).

With June and the approach of Solstice, Ojai moves into its season of extreme, dry heat and I move into a kind of semi-hibernation. Walking to my neighborhood creeks and hiking in the mountains become nighttime meanders by moon or starlight.

I’ve been resting so deeply all month: napping, reading, drifting in my hammock, walking in the mountains and through the orange groves at night to sit by streams in the starlight, sleeping longer hours.  It feels as though I’ve come home after a long sojourn in another world! 

This extraordinary valley in which I live is in the fullness of its springtime magnificence: the hills and mountains uncountable shades of green (born of the winter rains and destined to be turned, quite soon, to the browns and golds of summer); the wildflowers at their seasonal peak–poppies, lupine, mustard, monkey flower, wild hyacinth, ceanothus, nightshades, wild peony, and endless others whose names I don’t yet know.

It’s been such an intense January!!! I was particularly possessed with all my usual January “changing over to the new year” rituals.