March very quickly blurred into April and by the time I realized I hadn’t done any reflections it was almost time for April reflections soooo I’m combining them. I’ve been working diligently on a memoir I’m writing so I apologize that my blog has been a bit neglected. I’m hoping to be done with a rewrite by the end of May, which will hopefully free up new writing time.
Photo Review:
I found this great raven in Sedona during our Christmas vacation there. It’s done by artist, Henry Dupere. We have several of his pieces. Next on my wish list, his hanging bats.
We remodeled our downstairs floors from carpet to hardwood floors due to Eden’s allergies. It has worked beautifully and she wakes up with a lot less congestion. Well worth it! 
During school, a friday dinner tradition, no matter what month it is. 
Snuggly, sleeping on the stairs.
Just depicting the amazing fashion sense of my son….He gets it from his father.
Easter hunt with cousins
I don’t know what kind of moth this is, but thought it was a beauty.
When you take selfies on Mom’s iphone, this is what happens….it gets posted.
We had a marvelous hike with lil e’s class on the San Juan loop hike.
Wild Cucumber
Sunset reflected in the window 
Quotes Worth Remembering:
Your destiny shifts when emotional experiences open you up to yourself. You attract different energy and you put a different energy out. You are not controlled by unseen emotions: you have choices. — Dr. Claudia Luiz http://www.elephantjournal.com/2014/08/why-you-should-try-psychoanalysis-before-you-die-dr-claudia-luiz/
Give Sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break. — William Shakespeare, Macbeth
We can hardly bear to look. The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived. Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!!! The neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self. — Marion Woodman
“…the essence of a therapeutic relationship: finding words where words were absent before and, as a result, being able to share your deepest pain and deepest feelings with another human being. This is one of the most profound experiences we can have, and such resonance, in which hitherto unspoken words can be discovered, uttered, and received, is fundamental to healing the isolation of trauma — especially if other people in our lives have ignored or silenced us. Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatized.” — Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score
The following three poems are from Ruth Stones, What Love Comes to: New and Selected Poems
What to Do
In someone else’s house
you are not exactly at ease.
It’s a matter of protocol.
That is, sequence.
There are unspoken rules.
Some of these rules are
under the rug –
so to speak.
You employ
a mechanical mouse
to investigate.
Gone
Now fragmented as any bomb,
I make no lasting pattern;
and my ear, not cut off
in the logic of a van Gogh,
an offering of angry love,
is merely blown to bits
in a passing wave of violence.
Therefore I hear such fragments
as make no meaning.
A theater of the ridiculous,
beyond the absurd
and beyond that, scattered –
not like stars, but like the coalescing
weight of gravity; thin and meaningless,
until, tenuous, like the finest web
stretched out, it collapses and carries all
into a single disappearing zero.
Monetary Problems
The widow goes to the bank.
She needs a new roof,
or a new house; whichever.
Janet, the young woman in loans,
gives her the forms to fill out.
The print is small.
The spaces are small.
The widow tries to feel confident.
Social Security isn’t much
but it’s certainly something, she says.
Janet is busy, busy,
but she takes the ninety-seven
for the appraisal.
After a month the bank inspects the place,
Substandard, the bank says,
keeping the ninety-seven.
No fixed income.
Too much of a risk.
Perhaps if the widow had a brother
or a son-in-law to cosign.
That was just a gender suggestion,
of course, the muse says.
Silence helps us drop beneath the superficiality of our mental constructs to that place of the heart that is deeper in its reality than anything the mind can capture or express in words. It is a place of longing and desire and reaching for that which we do not yet have. In this wordless place the whole of our person turns itself toward God and waits to be addressed by God. This kind of prayer is standing in the presence of God with the mind in the heart; that is, at the point of our being where there are no divisions or distinctions and where we are totally one. There God’s spirit dwells and there the great encounter takes place. There heart speaks to heart, because there we stand before the face of the Lord, all-seeing within us. (pg. 78) — Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Solitude and Silence
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
–Rainer Marie Rilke Letters to a Young Poet
Songs on Repeat Mode:
I Don’t Want Your Love by Five for Fighting
Parachute by Train
Dream by Imagine Dragons
Believe by Mumford and Sons
Chains by Nick Jonas
At the Cross (Love Ran Red) by Chris Tomlin
The Hurt & The Healer by MercyMe
Books on My Nightstand:
What Love Comes to: New and Selected Poems by Ruth Stone
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der kolk
An Invitation to Silence and Solitude by Ruth Haley Barton
May you have a blessed month full of spring! What new beginnings will you find?