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.