Dear Friends

Ben's Farm on the Chester, Fall Equinox 2009

Maybe the most important thing we might ever say about a person is I loved her, she was my friend.

Right now, a whole lot of hearts of people that I have at various times held extremely dear are gathering to say goodbye to our friend. The heart lives forever, and so too the experiences there, as part of the living breathing whole. If we let it. O god thank god I am open again, and letting it.

I am so, so grateful right now for my life, for my experiences, for my friends.

I am with you all in spirit, in heart, and in love.

I Love You, Molly
The funniest thing I ever heard about Molly happened while I was in Colorado, visiting our mutual friend Mika. Mika was living in Boulder, it’d been two years since she’d been back east with any the crew from college, and longer still since she’d really lived the life of a college student, partying on Kent Street having a good time. So it was natural that seeing Mika in Colorado in 2005 would make her eager for news of old friends and the going-ons in Chestertown. We got down to telling stories, which of course led to more stories, which eventually led to stories from college days. Mika told this story of getting up one morning after a late night on Kent Street to come out in the hall and discover that Molly had drug a tree, a whole entire uprooted tree, in to the house. Molly was no where to be seen, but the tree, dirt-covered roots and wild branches and green leaves, was propped there, as if the most normal thing ever, against a wall. To this day when I think of Molly, I remember that story and I laugh out loud.

I love you Molly. I love you for having a spirit alive enough to want to live with that tree. I love you for saying why not, when the rest of us so often merely shrug our shoulders and ask why?

I love you for the vintage wrap-around skirt you had on the first day we met, I love you because it only cost you two dollars at the Nearly New. I love you for the Bob Dylan songs you had, behind the counter with me my first day at Play It Again Sam’s. I love you for how blue your eyes are, how they danced with poetry when we exchanged names back and forth of our favorite Dylan songs.

I love you for getting naked, pasty white Maine skin, first. Showing Brandon and me with a simple why not how crazy and fun it would be swimming in that freezing cold stream, 50 degree grey August day on the Maine coast wind and rain, I love you because you said why not, raced to get your clothes off first, and jumped in. I love you for putting sea weed on your head and being a fish goddess mermaid, I love you for taking me to the tidepools, for the wonder and childlike joy that was your grace, I love you for the word Perriwinkle, for teaching me the names of barnacles and snails, for showing me what bravery looks like out on the edge of the sea. I love you for making words like bivalve, whorl, cone, and mollusk come alive, and for infusing them with proof that youth is a timeless quality in any heart.

I love you Molly. I love you for laying in the grass at Truslow Road and painting on wood scraps with me. I love you for the books you’d show up with, the print outs of poems and essays, the whole file you gave me on Outsider and Folk art, for giving me literacy around this. For the passion and love you brought to it, to art of the people how you were contagious with it, how you birthed it deep in me. I love you for your poetry, for being the only one, the one woman in the crowd, to stand strong and speak poems back to me. For believing that this was how we could and would save ourselves. I love you for being that strong, for heeding to the wild impulse, for loving the rebel moon, for following the crazy night-lit sky. I love you for dancing at midnight and wanting more wine. I love you for believing in the power of art, for making this the example of your life. For always going back again, in and in again, to create to create to create and give vision or wild reason to live and to keep creating, for giving light with your each and every birth. I love you for the suffering that you put on the page or in color, I love you for the permission it gave me, the permission for poetry and the permission for pain, the powerful permission to say yes to life and to be.

I love you for the afternoon in May on Truslow Road, on the phone, when I told you the things I thought you needed to stop doing in your life, when I told you I thought you should change. I love you because of what you told me. No you said, no I’m not interested, I will never change, and it’s my life. I love you Molly for being so true.

I love you O Molly, O Sacred Scary Sea Goddess Molly, O Fearless Sailwoman Molly with the Green Mermaid Hair and Snail-eyes of Perrywinkle Blue. I love you Molly, O Ecstatic Witnesser of the Whole White Pure Moon. I love you Molly, Soulsiseter Poet, Rebel Artist Painter, Folk Singer Wildhearted Grrrl and Friend. I love you Molly, good Molly, bad Molly, sweet Molly, crazy Molly, precious Molly who was too alive for this world, you live now forever in my heart where all love ought to be, Molly in that place you will always be so, so true. Molly now you will never end…..

June 5, 2010
Ashland, Oregon
In memory of a dear friend