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Hello in there... before I speak of other things crowding our hearts and minds, I want to share with you that my Mother and I had the most beautiful trip to Wyoming together. I'd been invited to play there and given a chance to help out a local organization doing such powerfully good work in my old home town, work which offers shelter and advocacy for victims of domestic abuse. Mother had voiced a desire to see Sheridan again, so we made it happen!

We met in Billings, Montana, and drove south across the high prairies, crossing the Little Big Horn where Custer met more than his match (ah, hubris!), and on to Sheridan nestled at the feet of the beautiful Big Horn Mountains. So far as I know, no place I've seen yet can make my heart sing like this place. It's my Home-sweet-home. Mom and I visited all our old friends, and home places, perhaps most importantly, our old ranger station up in the mountains where our family had lived through many glorious summers, and where we had been very happy. We saw, as if of old, a cow moose and her calf, skittish at the sight of a car in a place of no people... less even than when we lived there long ago. It was magic seeing these creatures there, as if to say, some things do remain the same. This trip was important for me as I retrieved some broken pieces of my life which I had left there, and dwelt for a few precious days in a wonderful mother-daughter reunion. It's my place once again, sacred and familiar and Home.

I write this from the colony of Washington, DC, where no one is home in the White House, our House, the people's House. I heard recently about a woman in New Orleans who floated on a fridge for three days. She saved herself, not with the help of anyone, but with the help of an appliance. An ordinary thing saved her life in an extraordinary circumstance. The blame for the neglect -- the long history of neglect in this country -- is shifting back and forth, like those fetid waters, moving here, moving there, and carrying so much poison through the chaos. Eventually, some heads will roll, will be piked, but there's some sort of Teflon coating on these people in power... nothing seems to stick to them, no sense of responsibility, just a desire to escape through the loopholes they've so carefully constructed for themselves. The rest of us have to save ourselves. I guess that's the lesson in so many ways, eh? We have to save our Selves. We the People... could not this horror show happen to you and to me? You bet! Most of us are doing what we can to staunch the flow, but something leaked out. Maybe it's the secret that it may happen that no one will come when we call for help... only our neighbors, our families, our kin. Certainly not the people we pay to be our representatives. Bless the people who did help, to continue to help, who really do care, who do come when the cry for help rises up. I trust those in "authority" less and less, if truth be told. In the '60's, we developed that first real suspicion of "those in authority", and I was reminded of that all over again the other night as I watched a film about those days. I alternated between pride and pain as I watched us... the betrayal of peaceful people, the murder of our much-loved teachers and leaders, the protest of a war then as we protest it now, the refusal to listen by those to whom a mandate was given... the pain of it all is still with us. We were so young, so idealistic, and so full of hope that we could change the world. That betrayal broke our hearts, and we as a generation have never fully recovered, nor do we easily trust elected authority. Authority has within it the word 'author', and it reminds me that we must continue to be the authors of our own destiny, in every way possible. Edward Abbey said: "A patriot must always be ready to defend (his) country against its government." How shall we gather ourselves together? As Lucian de Crescenzo tells us: "We are each of us angels with only one wing; and we can only fly by embracing one another." Let us, therefore, widen our embrace and continue to be the loving people we were meant to be. Blessings on us all...Cris