This month is always interesting for me. It is the first month I feel like Fall is an inevitability given the weather’s somehow overnight switch to brisker winds and sun splashed landscapes. Denver in October is like a warm impressionist painting, all golds and crimsons sometimes crisping the outside of fleshier melon centers. Those are more the ash trees, but there are elms, oaks, maples and cottonwoods and linden trees to complete the circle. It is beyond gorgeous to go flying down University, I’ve realized, both in car and by foot, given the spray of watered down citrus colors blending into each other over the inky trunks and branches.

Ohh…yes. The silence. My adoptive mom was in town last week, and with my birth mother (Babs) living just a spread of houses down, let’s just say the stress was almost palpable. Given it was also a full moon and I am on that full moon cycle, let’s just say my rationale was out the window and I was crying when I wasn’t hanging around with my mom and causing all manner of emotional problems for myself when I wasn’t occupied with relative (meaning literal relatives) distractions.

I have been building my TopSecret dating website. Well, it’s not exactly top secret given there is a literal handful of people with the url…but let’s just say the basis of it is in beautiful things mined of experiences online. I feel like every interaction I have ever had has given me wonderful things, expanded my knowledge of people, exploded my own horizons, and beautified my life. Even with the presence of my own online disasters, I have been able to appreciate the beauty of people while seeing them at their worst. Without the black there can be no white, and certainly without the presence of the other is the inability for the shades of grey, the kaleidoscopes of color in between.

Sunday was a lovely experiment with my girls, two of my lady friends I met at the writer’s retreat. We are 10, 20 and 30 years apart at the biggest spread…and being around them gave me a peace of mind, a simple sense of harmony that I wasn’t all out of sorts with the world. Yoga gives me the same experience, allows me to literally pull my spirit outside myself, be aware of the magic I have to give…

Oh yes, and here are some shots from back in the day…man I have aged pretty fucking well, I have to say. Friday I will be 35. Yes. 35. And I am virtually wrinkle-free and more in shape than I have ever been in my life. There will be plenty of pictures, see, because I am going to Arizona to see my birth father and family…and my cousin and littlest sister are there. Both can drink, so debauchery is inevitable. And when I return? A party. To celebrate my neighbor’s and my birthday…

That one was a flipped image…my water is my left arm, see.