This last year has kicked my ass. I remember being so excited for the Year of the Monkey-- it’s the year I was born in, so naturally I thought THIS is going to be IT! This is YOUR year! You are going to use that monkey energy like a crazy witchy badass no one has ever seen the likes of before! Yeah, no. It was more like my head caught between the cymbals of the monkey with the stressed out psychotic zombie face. I just googled the ugly little thing, and funnily enough learned that it’s been used in horror movies mainly to denote when something bad is about to happen. Ha. Fitting. James Dean played with one in the movie Rebel Without a Cause (fitting also - because am I focussed yet or still causeless - TBD). It was also in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when it would start clapping if the aliens were coming. That actually sounds like a positive for me. Long monkey tangent there but if my brain has been stuck between those cymbals for pretty much the last year, I’ll try to hope and manifest that it’s because there is some kind of magic coming my way-- I know there is, I know there has been-- and this year has been the turning point.

Last January I woke up in the middle of the dark night and couldn’t sleep. It happens often enough when I’m not using anything to help me stay asleep because I’m a super light sleeper. Normally (and for awhile now) I’ve eaten a pot cookie and voila! magic, deep sleep. It didn’t happen easily that night (the cookies aren’t 100% guaranteed), and I was awake and bored so I went on Instagram and pretty much the minute it was announced that David Bowie had died I found out. I started to cry, my innards felt like they were being vacuumed by some giant hand in the sky, and even though I woke my boyfriend up to tell him, and he sleepily comforted me, man did I feel so very much alone. One of my people has died, I thought. My tribe is that much less. I’ve had a really, really hard time with the idea of Death this year (and seriously! So many greats have died!). For a long time the idea of Death was this energized mystery to me: another adventure! Excitement! But for some reason this year it’s been more of a focus on the fact that I deeply and heartily love my life, love the people in my life, love this crazy playground of a planet, and really feel like our span of time is much too short to get out all this energy and love and excitement before I am and you are...what? What are we next? I need proof damn it! Science is my (suddenly shitty) boyfriend. I must have known something subconscious about the coming year when I started finding people to help beef up my inner security: the team I’ve amassed includes a life coach, a meditation teacher, a couple’s therapist, a financial guru, a spiritual advisor, not to mention my wonderful coven of friends near and far...it’s been great to reference them and I feel like I’ve learned a tonne about myself and who I want to be in this world, but I’m tired as fuck. It’s been the emotional journey of a yoyo. Honestly though, this year has been the culmination of so much wandering, tasting, thinking, yearning...fitting once again that I find myself sitting here typing what feels like an intro to the many, many crazy, adventurous, emotional, transformational, debaucherous stories of my recent past.

Eating cookies to sleep (and get creative and clean your entire house and be the smartest, funniest, most productive version of yourself) gets a bit tricky when you’re

working for an airline and traveling as much as I do-- but lately I’ve been laying off the pot so much because about a month ago I had a bad trip on cookies my Mom had made (hilarious in and of itself considering she doesn’t drink or do drugs really--she’s more of a "let the doctor prescribe it" person--) and found myself in the middle of what I keep calling a psychotic break. I had flown over to Vancouver on my days off to visit my Mom and try to nip in the bud this growing divide I felt happening in our energies; we’re close in a way that I don’t think many families are. I haven’t physically lived near her for close to twenty years, but we see each other more often than some of my friends who live closer to their parents. And we normally talk on the phone or via email pretty often. She visited in the Summer and talked then about her moving to Toronto but the conversation got tense when she suggested living together in the same space-- all of a sudden I am living with my mom again? No, no I can’t do that, I thought, and back- pedalled furiously against the idea. I hurt her in doing that, because she has been so incredibly generous financially and I live a pretty great life thanks in good part to her (like, no one else I know has a more fun and free life than me), so to be this seemingly- greedy little asshole about possible new living arrangements together was not a good thing. I’ve had many conflicting viewpoints on it since the whole thing happened, but mainly have learned that I want to try to see everything from a standpoint of giving out love more than anything. When you’re as independent as I am, that’s not an easy thing to train yourself to do. But I’m not an asshole-- at least I don’t think I am, really. I’m strong-willed but not rigidly stuck in one direction. The monkey has movement.