To hug them, and live my thanks

There’s this stretch of the 5 that runs the vast central plains of California and it starts past the mountains that mean you’re finally out of LA and you drive it a long, smooth time and when you’re done you know now I’m in the corridor that marks the change between south and north.  Where the air, the trees, nothing smells the same.

I have lived 18 months of my life on the road.  More if you count the ten months I house-sat and the few I even paid rent to pause a minute and take breath once upon a time ago on the Oregon Coast.  That means my car or the earth has been my only address, it means surfing couches and beds and floors of friends, doing work in exchange for a place to rest my head.  It means the priority, the choice of showing up day to day flexible and open to the experience of only and just what Today will bring.  It means especially living and loving and learning the land.

Coming out of the San Gabriel foothills yesterday I felt so whole and calm you could’ve stretched me around the face of the planet all the way and back again and still there would’ve been more of me to give.  The power of the road:  to have no agenda.  To be in the moment.  The lesson of being here now which is also, as the tires run the pavement, the pure power of action with no stress.  The dichotomous Zen no thought: I am in control only of the fact I am out of control.

 I have been so utterly contented since second period got out yesterday in Irvine/Santa Ana/Newport at my university where those towns and sprawl all blur and seem to cross.  I filled up.  My phone was almost dead.  I turned it off.  Got on 55 and in minutes was on the 5 and here is the thing:  the-in moment-bliss, the magic of contentment with any and all.  The preciousness of it just hit.  That’s a grace thing.  It’s a deeper part of the spirit, of the unconscious part of me.  I have practiced a lot to cultivate it but it doesn’t always come.  But when it does, ahhh god it is right on time.

The oil smell in standstill traffic in LA while the sunroof lets the sun in to shine white on your skin.  The first moment that topographic transition comes and bushes green and round roll the mountain sides like the land is letting them show off their broad bumpy chests.   The circles of black birds etch-a-sketching patterns again and again above the brown mountains.  The 5, forever and ever two lanes all the way south, all the way north.  The easy glide to the passing lane then back again and the way the IPOD accompanies foot on the gas acceleration or foot off the gas slow down for full hours at a time.

There is nothing else like this, this simple bliss, in the world.  It has made me strong and supple in an adaptive sort of way, it has made me aware that the only one to confront, in truth, is me.  And the open-handed meeting of and reliance on others it’s equally taught me has instructed me more about relationships than any other chance I’ve had so far since I’ve been here.  Here, on earth I mean.  This great awing mystery beyond our living room.

I’m in bed at a Motel 6 off the 101 in Rohnert Park right now.   I’ve stayed here a lot, this very one. On my way to meet Bess, north of here by 20 minutes for a minute she let me live.   The smell of redwood last night was so fresh and stunning I felt like I’d been zapped by a starburst of light when I got out of my car.  I took that for granted last time I was here.  Last year in October during the first north rains I was going up the 101 and crashed and totaled my car.  It was terrifying.  It royally shook me.  I’d been living in my car.  And so I lost my last connection to things, to the “stuff” that connects us to what we think we are.   I met myself every morning in quiet time every day during that time and got through that.  It would be silly to try to explain here what, through losing, I was able to find.

I have not much to show in the form of bank accounts or hard assets. But I can describe for you exactly what route 50 is like in Colorado heading towards the San Juan’s.  I can try to help you understand that when the sky opens on 90 in South Dakota only then can you honestly comprehend the American association of West.  I can tell you without doubt that you will never be the same once you sleep on a mat of pine needles off a dirt logging road with not a single other human around.   I can put into words and images the specific curve of feeling, the exact encircling of homecoming that is different and precise for each individual spirit of every last one of my family members or friends.

I can not wait to get to Humboldt today.  To be surrounded by my spirit family.  They get the things I don’t know how to say.  I can not wait to be surrounded by the experience of trees that drink fog and give us back clean air.  To hug them, and live my thanks.  To celebrate the chance and choice to go up the 101 and to be aware of what that means.

The s-h coming-together-sound of the teaching sea

My apartment seriously looks how it used to when I was a drunk.

This is funny, happened in less than two days, is because the place is so hobbit-small and on my mind because I have a teleconference with Erika my writing partner today.  My 30 some pages of submission are creative non-fiction circa 95-96.  When I lived with and shared a room with Fannon or Kev or Kareen.  The days of sour boy stink on the air and layers of wet towels, insides of cigars, empty bottles to wade through on the floor.

Not that my floors are covered with blunts and empties now.  Today it's clothes and books.  All I own, all I came to California with and all I've spent my money on since I've been here, too.  Clothes and books, travel and food.  The essence of this girl.  Very little I need beyond a splotch of land, the words and close proximity to the sea.

And my little room of my own.  This I firmly believe:  a girl needs a small crafted space that's just hers, where she can have and relish her stillness.  Mine's a 2x6 spot only big enough for a desk on the back end of my closet!  But it's from this sense, the stillness and silence that a woman, that I, that she can be.

I've had little motivation to do anything these days then snuggle on the couch and eat or sit cozy in a coffee shop and write. Or to be quiet beside the sea.  My soul is wanton. Longing and turning flat if I try to ignore its mercurial wants.  I stress easily at any demands other than these.  It is winter:  this is the way.

So I walk a lot.  With Serena up the canyon to the Top of the World.  Around the curves and corners of  Newport's marshy back bay.  From the free parking lot on Forest all the way to Thalia Street on the beach.  Last Saturday someone shaped kelp in to a heart bigger by twice the size than my quiet little room.  It stilled me, gave me pause just a minute, glistened my own heart as it pushed me on.  When I got to Thalia I sat a long time watching the surfers there.  The water was aqua green even folded again and again by its rippy whiteness.  It was shadowed in spots by great seaweed blooms.  There are two breaks and I studied them and also just listened.  Listened and felt the sea. The sound of s and h come together.  This consistent noise that is hushhhing or rushhhhing depending on the state of the soul that hears.

That's how I feel, like there was one life behind me with it's own distant sound.  And that there's this other one I am headed towards but can not see.  I can almost feel it though, the way you do sometimes with a sound just before you get to hear.  And that's what I soaked in last Saturday on my walk to Thalia street. The s-h coming-together-sound of the teaching sea.

After Erika calls I'll clean.  Then relish a day to be quiet with me.  This is the in-between.  Being quiet and still, waiting.  The tide will grow and later move me forward towards the next me that I will be.

When the dark time of year gets here

This is the second Friday in a row I have spent with no agenda.  Today and last week included time on my little square deck that's built into the canyon wall.  I deeply soaked in to the feel of the land around me.  The trees, the exotic green, the breeze out of nowhere then gone again, the happy dance it did on my skin.  The sun, on its fall retreat.

Yesterday my cousin Erin called.  I was on my way to the grocery store in Laguna Woods, where everyone is over 70 and more than once I had to help an oldtimer pick out food or manage what was directly in front of them.  I followed my inner knowing it said cook something golden delicious and fatty for me that's what I so, so need.  Erin laughed, totally understanding and in the same spot.  She lost her mom three months ago.  Her mom Mary was young, a teacher, loved the sea and nature, loved her family and to be active outdoors.  In the last year of Mary's life much of those loves were taken from her--that is she had to give them up.  She raised her head anyways and walked with courage and grace through it all.  These past three months I've tried to do the same.  I've been so grief-struck though I couldn't even comprehend the grief itself.

Erin and I found one another on similar shores last weekend, having both finally stopped the ceaseless running, willing to slow down.  How significant  I thought, same weekend as the time change.  No fighting it a second more, and indeed we talked all last weekend in grateful surrender--we had to enter the season of the dark.  It was time.  My body, yesterday, begged for more of the same.  I cooked the most delicious verde enchiladas.   Baked my cousin Erin in.  Laid on my couch and ate them in front of netflix all night, with black cherry soda and red velvet cookies to wash them down.  I was seized, out of nowhere, by the most rapid tears in the middle of a movie of vignettes about different women.  I let them come out and snuggled deeper on my couch. The rain made fat airy sounds on the concrete from out my window screen .  This, this aloneness, this powerless over life's biggest swings and atrocities, this is why people fear the night.  In my Women Who Run With the Wolves book, since Mary died I've drawn the same thing.  The story about Baba Yaga, and the girl who because of her motherlessness must face the dark, hard sides of life.  Those are her psychic tasks, her work in her own personal inner or under world.  To confront the dark or fearfulness that lay within and gain the ferocity of strength that comes by completing that part.

This is what we do on a spiritual level when the dark time of year gets here.  We look at how we are human, often so connected to what we fear.  Tuesday in the afternoon the moon is new... it is Lunar Samhain, or Lunar New Year.  The dark moon after the final harvest of fall.  When we look if we dare at the kneedeep shit, all that detritus that will grow the new seeds in us through this winter's dark.  My gain and blessings this year have been enormous.  Because this is life: the way of circular, spiraling path, of the balance within of human and holy being kept--my loss and pain have also been profound.  I enter the dark hallow now--we all do.  I bless it all, surrender to the hard with the light and good.  It is not good it is not bad, it is rather the seeds of both from inside the same.  We are where we need to be, right on time.  The end, and also, how to begin.