Soap Lake

My dear friends, I am sorry to have abandoned you here in the cyber-space world. I know a few of your are tenacious enough to stop by every day and see if I have graced the Wordsandwich pages, but lately I have been most ungracious.

This past weekend my sister and two of our friends and I went to Soap Lake for a girls' getaway. The town itself is tiny and so close to totally abandoned it's surprising people still live there, but those who do are rallying to return it to the map. Its principal feature is the lake for which it's named, a lake of alkalinic waters whose minerals make it "more similar to space than earth", according to a brochure. Also, the waters are supposed to be healing.

Well, one thing's for sure: a girl weekend is healing. We went to dinner, soaked in mineral baths, colored in coloring books, and laughed without ceasing. Later in the night Carolyn read my Tarot cards. I let her because she does not use them to predict the future; my imagination is too powerful to mess with suggestions of the future. She does use them to highlight the present, so it was perfectly clear to me what it meant when I drew the Ten of Swords.

This card depicts a man flattened into the dirt by ten long quivering swords. I didn't have to read expert interpretations to get that image.

See, lately (and I'm not sure how long "lately" is...could be a while now) I have felt drained and over-worked, not in the labor sense, but like soil that hasn't rested and has become grainy and thin. It came to me, upon seeing that card, that I have too many competing interests haggling for my energy. Because all of these interests are legitimate and important, it's hard to draw the line. But what I realized is that for me it is imperative to carve out some privacy, some quiet, and some peace.

What I'm getting at here is that one of the things that has recently gotten the axe is blogging. I was spending hours (really!) on the computer posting, reading, commenting...whew. I have decided to keep my blogs, but I am not going to get hung up if I don't post for a while. I might. But I might not.