In creating this space what I hope is that you will enter in, settle in, and feel at home. Feel juicy awhile, have the embers of your passions stirred, or maybe your funnybone tickled. I also am hoping to create here a place for people to connect and maybe create together in some way–with ideas, feelings, hopes, fears. A place where people might come and read something and feel less alone, a place where in my own connecting I feel less alone. So I hope you will share here if you are moved to do so.

Two years ago (from the date I am launching this site), my home on the Chesapeake Bay, along with much of my old life, was swept away by the winds and water of a hurricane. This allowed something else to sweep in. I found a new home that has been moving me into a way of being that feels very rich, intertwining the physical and soulful. I am surrounded by acres of old trees, in a hollow filled with beautiful creatures, including brown thrashers, wild turkeys, and red foxes. I choose to spend much of my time in this place, soaking up the beauty and letting it flow out in movement, art, words. I also spend a lot of time doing what my friends sometimes call “thinking too much”. Which can mean anything from noting all the details of my dream the night before about an opalescent toad, to grappling with whether being alone is being selfish or just who I am, to pondering whether having flabby thighs feels ok and is just me nowadays or if my deeper desire is to move like the big feral cat that lives up the hill. Putting some of my thoughts and experiences here is my way of inviting you and more of the world to sit on my porch a bit and engage your senses and your heart and your soul.

The name “the sensuous broom” came to me one day as I was thinking of my aunt. Remembering when we visited her southern home, surrounded by trees like my home, but pine trees. Early in the morning I’d hear her voice drifting in my window on the pine -scented breeze, as I drifted in and out of sleep. Sweeping her long curving drive with her broom. In her shorts, her high-heeled sandals clicking and her red lipstick smudged from drinking her sweet iced tea, she’d be talking to her dogs (”ya’ll boys be sweet now” as they’d tussle, “Momma’ll feed you right soon.”) She’d also be feeding the birds, the squirrels, and the neighbor’s cats (and every other thing alive), fanning herself as she moseyed along, dabbing her face with the handkerchief she kept tucked in her bra. And now in the evening, as I swish my own broom slowly back and forth down the long drive, I know the same pleasure. And see how that pleasure goes out the window when leaf blowers come in. “Sensuous Broom” also evokes for me the desire for magic –to be transported, to fly. As well as the more humble uses of the broom - like chasing raccoons and poking the cats out from under the car when I want them to come in. And of course there is that powerful image in me of all that was swept away two years ago.

So, I hope you’ll venture into this forest and join me. Tell me a dream– I love moving through dreamtime. Tell me what you think and feel. Have a bit of something yummy to eat — my friend Rafe will be fixing something new every month, with my own offerings occasionally. ( I promise no grits.) And share a recipe of your own if you’d like.

Let something sweep through you that might be just what you long for or just what you forgot you needed.