A page from the little book I made for my November dreamboard, and a chapter from the book I am drafting this month, tentatively titled something like Edge Dwellers: finding your way to a new kind of faith.

Introduction: Sea Change

There’s was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy
They say he traveled very far, very far
Over land and sea
And then one day, one fateful day he came my way
And though we talked of many things, fools and kings,
This he said to me:

The greatest thing, you’ll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved in return.

Nature Boy
Nat King Cole

Once there was a girl. This girl was a good little girl. She was a Christian girl. It’s true that she was a bit of a mutt, having been raised in a Lutheran church and sent to a private school run by the Pentecostals. The latter were rumored to be found swinging from the rafters. In proper religious circles this was just shy of snakes handling, but still, she made the cut. She had, after all, prayed the prayer and studied the catechism, filled her memory verse chart with shiny silver stars, and taken first communion. She got up at 6am to be a teenage prayer warrior and responded to altar calls in the school gym (for what reason she was never quite sure.) She even sang in the choir.

After a while this girl grew up. She went to more private Christian schools and got letters after her name. She met people who thought that the Holy Spirit was still afoot, and she learned about healing and prophecy and things that, frankly, acted a lot like magic and miracle. She met a wizened old man who everyone called a guru, but who called himself “Eugene.” When the girl talked to Eugene, his faced curved upwards into swoops because he smiled at the questions that only made other people look worried. He told the girl lots of stories, this Eugene, and some of them the girl seemed to remember like a mist in her memory. She thought she might have heard them once a long time ago. Only the stories were more interesting when Eugene told them. (When Eugene told them it was they were full of trolls and fairies, she was sure of it. There! Behind the sackcloth and ashes!). The felt she might be a part of these stories, and that maybe that everybody got to play, that things weren’t quite as scary as they were meant to be–or maybe they were more so–but the ending was even better than she had first understood, so the scariness of being in the story was worth it.

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My dreamboard book for November. Isn’t it charming. More pics here.

I’ve been working with life coach Jena Strong of Strong Coaching for the past few months and things are starting to break out all over. After years of driving Jen Lemen crazy with my whining, I’ve finally realized that the only thing left that’s keeping me from publishing is fear itself. Fear that I can’t sustain a book length project. Fear that I can’t get around to finsihing. Fear that I don’t have enough material. (In rational moments, that one really makes me laugh!) Fear that once I get something out there no one will buy it. Fear that once I get something out there everyone will buy it and I’ll be pigeonholed as the “girl who writes about X” for the rest of my live long days. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear.

As I wrote in one of my answers to the birthday questions, fear is the one thing I am working hard to shed from my self-definition. Instead, I’m ready to embrace whimsy, to do the impractical and live the impulsive life.

So, I decided to write a book this month. Yes, an entire shitty first draft in one wonderful month. And when darling Jena asked me what I was ready for this list poured out:

I’m ready to be seen as an expert.
I’m ready to get paid for my work.
I’m ready to publish.
I’m ready to embrace whimsy.
I’m ready to jump.

My former neighbor and soulful friend Claire Mack is an amazing artist, and I blame and praise her for introducing me to the playground that is mixed media art. (I’m just a novice, but she’s a real pro, as you can see here. I helped inspire the birdcages! Woot me!) When Claire went to Greece a couple of years ago she took a travel art kit with her and made a lovely little abstract book about her adventures. I’ve always adored it, so this month for dreamboarding, with the November Book Experiment on my mind and Claire in my heart, I made not a board but a book. Some of the pages are already filled with the things I need to get to bookville. Others are waiting for words. Every page is lovely. Every page is full of color, and life, and hope. (I’ve scanned them in here, if you’d like to see.)

I’m so enthralled with this charming little number — it kind of reminds me of those little dance cards women used to wear on silk threds around thier wrist in the era of Jane Austin, only with more chutzpah. It’s completely captured my fancy. I carry it around from room to room. Yesterday I even put it in a ziploc bag and carried it with me in my purse!

Sacred Suzie says that the Tarus moon in November is good for breaking boundaries. So here’s what I think. Let’s break the boundary of fear. What fear-free adventure will you dream into reality this month? What will you ask of the Universe? In the words of my beloved Joseph Campbell, “Jump!”

I’m working on a longer post about my dreamboard for this month. It’s a real juicy dreamboard and I want to tell you all about it. In the meantime, may this lovely dreamboard bring you some jollies today. Cate, age 8, always joins the dreamboarding circle. Here’s her wish for a sweet November.

You can find more of Catie’s masterpieces here or here.

This is my dreamboard for August as I pray/wish/hope for shalom in my physical self.

Last month’s dream of curtains and spotlights is still alive and kicking. I’m still playing guitar, and I’m working with a life coach to figure out what that mysterious phrase might mean for me.

For more information about dreamboarding click here. Good shabbat to you!

A dreamboard with milagros from Artchix Studios and lyrics from The Decemberists The fortune cookie paper at the top says, “Your curiosity may mean your success.’

Over at Suzie’s Sacred Space, Miss Suze has once again invited people to make a Dreamboard. Using the Full Moon as a reason to focus, and images and colors as a means to communicate, people join Suzie every month to make their dreams a little more concrete and to offer them up to — well– to God/ess, The Universe, their own internal strength and Divinity…(It’s flexible…you get the idea.)

This is my first dreamboard, made on the only painfree afternoon I’ve had in a fortnight. Realistically, I should have made something envisioning health. But instead I followed The Muse deep into my six month obsession with the lyrics of a song–determined that, somehow, I Was Meant for the Stage.

I don’t know precisely what this means, but I am very curious. Is it as simple as my newfound longing to sing and play at some small open mic for my 40th birthday? Or is it more subtle — maybe something about teaching and preaching again someday? I’m not sure.

All I know is that when I watch Alanis impart wisdom to the crowds, I weep at the wonder of it. And when I speak into my microrecorder for some tiny podcast, my heart soars. And that in addition to my longing to write, and write, and write some more; another lover stands patiently in the shadows. He looks like a mic-stand and a stool, and the dimmed lights of a room full of listeners. And in my better moments, when the pain and strain of day to day life makes way for dreaming and vision, I know in that strange clear stillness, that “I was born to raise these hands with quite all around me.”

So here it is, for what it’s worth, for God and the Universe. Amen, may it be so.

What are you dreaming into reality? Write it in the comments below, or make a dreamboard and link us up to it. Watch for an interview with Suzie this Monday or next in my weekly column at BlogHer.com.