Jaime Mathis and The Words

Some of you may have noticed a flurry of nature photos on my Facebook page over the last five days. Water, moons, horses, trees- all of this adds up to an explanation. I was set free into the wilderness of the San Juan Islands to seek out the sound shaman, Tom Kenyon and a Tibetan healing wizard simply known as Amchi-La. A bit more detail, please? But of course. Every Autumn, it seems that I find myself on a personal pilgrimage to reclaim the singular experience of life as me. Just me, not in relationship to or identifying as, anything other than Jaime. Not Jaime the mom. Not Jaime the wife. Not Jaime the Mathis. Just gloriously anonymous, completely undefined, moi. Usually this involves some kind of travel and learning, since that's what fires up my imagination. And this particular Fall, my pilgrimage retreat took me to the misty isles of the San Juans and the particularly winning, Orcas Island . Fate was conspiring with me. Last year at this time, I found myself h

It may have been the whiskey the princess and I consumed after he boarded the plane. Maybe the parting words he whispered before stepping on the escalator, “You always take my jokes seriously and laugh when I’m telling the truth-what more could I want?” All these tiny sub-plots shacking up together until our destinies were a tangled mess of co-dependent probabilities.  We were made for loss, the three of us. The opposite ends of the globe conspired for eight weeks to fuse our skins until geographical impossibilities ripped them into separate humans again. A line of happy paper-dolls forced to face the world as flimsy individuals. The universe never holds its breath.  So we ricocheted back across oceans, finding places where the booze ran free and our lungs recognized the air. Still, the ache. Memory became an angel that tortured and sensitized.  The princess faded like Sleeping Beauty, letting silence lull her into a dreamland where everything floated in suspended animation.  He and I