Not the best portent eh? Certainly reflected my state of mind before I began the trip but the drive to this point had started to clear my head and fill my heart.  The first song of the journey?  Galileo from Rites of Passage by The Indigo Girls. Three hits to the heart son and it’s poetry in motion…  Yeup, that was me. Job loss, relationship loss (I knew it in my heart even though it didn’t happen officially until I returned), leave of absence from coven, funeral…

The views were lovely if more appropriate to early autumn (which it kind of is but I need summer right now)…

The further down I got the more sun I saw… Devil’s Punchbowl

Waldport, the town where I stayed for 3 nights had sun the first full day and no others. I did fully enjoy the beach and loved this bridge which made me think of dinosaur spines.

I got some sketching in for a work in progress, a large wood box that I will burn and paint. More on that in a future post.

More fog as I begin traveling further south. Mind you Seattle was in the middle of a heat wave in the very high 90’s (Seattle is a temperate rain forest so temps in the 90’s is unusual and always worth commentary). I went on this vacation to find sun and as soon as I left Seattle, it got sunny there and foggy and cloudy on my trip with rare exception. The day I got back to Seattle?  The clouds came in and we’re expecting rain this weekend. Guess the sun isn’t going to come out for me for awhile.

Yachats Oregon is my favorite coastal town from 35 years ago and it still is. I didn’t actually like many of the towns along the coast. The bigger towns were ugly to my eye and lots of evidence of serious recession shows it’s dreary head in Oregon towns these days. But Yachats still charms me and attracts many wonderful artists too. I purchased a small water bowl for west and a new cup, both items for my solitary practice when not in coven space. My first trip to Yachats we stayed with a potter and I made a couple of bowls myself, if I still had them I’d use them, they’d be perfect.  So this was in honor of that memory and of my budding artistic expression.

The surrounding landscape was what I was there to see thankfully, not the towns…

Took lots of photos of Vetch, a wild sweet pea, one of my favorites. Very inspired and this might be showing up in my work in the not too distant future…  I don’t have photos but saw much wildlife on the trip. On the way down every time I started to think about job woes a raven, an eagle, or a vulture would fly out of the trees right in front of me. Still pondering that one. On a walk with my friends, 4, count them 4!!, snakes crossed my path. They’ve lived there 15 years and never had that happen. As much as snakes give me the complete phobic body twist, I am well aware that they are one of my totem animals and have much to teach me. FOUR. I saw 2 gray whales and one of them gave me a high spout. Elk, deer, pelicans, wonderful. That said, the snakes and the ravens and vultures were really speaking to me this past week…

Thank you to my dear friends who made this trip possible, who showed me lovely locales, and treated me very well when I was so fragile.

The wind is so intense that it can hurt the ears, especially if you are musician who now has ear troubles… It wasn’t cold, just windy.

The music on the way home?