It is pertinent as hell. Words.

I don't remember the year I spent at Choptank.

I don't remember anything specific, it just sits more as a memory of sense, gray and swirly with the occasional feeling of peace thrown in to the thicket of my reserve filed back then.

I moved from Anngar Farm the first week of November 2008, it was a Friday and I stopped my car at the edge of our 400 acres of feed-corn and soy to talk to two flannel-clad surveyors parked on the side of the road. The farm, they confirmed, had been sold. For all I know it happened that very day.

I talked to Brandon on the phone for about one minute. Then I called mom. I cried most of the way to 301.

Choptank was an hour from Chestertown by the backroads, which are the only roads I traveled back then, it was something about the soothing lay of the road against my tire tread. It was calming, all that farm country, all those trees, the changes of fall seizing the land. I was working for Chesapeake and had roughly ten sites in two rural counties spread out between well over 100 square miles. It was the something I could count on--I'd been on the Eastern Shore for a total of eight years of my life by then. I counted movement by the markers of farmhouses, wide turns in the roads and fields.

Besides leaving Brandon, I left behind a town of friends. A movement of local culture centered around both homegrown food and music, one that I personally worked hard to motivate and set within a momentum. It was sudden, to all of them, my departure. It was sudden and wrecking to him. It was like death, a numb whack of shock to the chest, to me. It was a miracle those first three months that I could even breathe.

I can say only that I was depressed back then and that is why I had to leave, and in a large way this had to do with being incapable of stating what I wanted. I knew what I loved but was too frightened to cultivate it or own it. I really believed it was something I did not deserve and so I went back on things all the time. My truth was changing because so much of my truth included lodges of fear, no dissipating no moving through, therefor no knowing for sure what I thought I thought for sure I knew. For months after I left Anngar lived in me with a filter of dull over it, but the fall is here now, the geese are calling and the trees have that certain subtle whisper in their departing leaves. I remember now so much. The fields that shivered purple at dusk. The yellow light on the barns and the half-there outbuildings and the way the birds carved the air inside. The sounds my kitties used to make in the high camelia bushes right out front. Old time records through the speakers at night, night after nights of dinners and the high chaotic laughter of our most amazing friends. Unannounced drop-ins from Sam. Coffee in the morning hot on the throat and cup hot on the hands, on the weekends the cool side-porch view of the shady hardwood trees against all that green. The quietness there with my love. Holding hands.

Last week, or maybe the one before that, I found my journal from the year I spent on the Choptank River, out in isolation renting a room in an 1800's farmhouse, talking to the water and laying in the grass. Over the years, since the early 2000's anyway, I've kept a practice called morning pages--writing three pages of longhand mental minutia download. Just getting the crud out of my head. It's something, a trick I've relied on with consistency that came my way via two different helpful books, that simply is the one true tool that's led me through. But I forgot about it: when I took up writing a novel morning pages were replaced with stronger doses of honesty on my blog. How I used my blog changed then, for sure. Literally this became the place of truth-telling, of writing my way through and thank god for it. It's helped codify the process, helped me shave down at the edges and in the great balancing act of writing for self versus convening with the audience, it's been the primary vehicle of me establishing how best to tell what I know. So it shocked me anyhow, discovering the hundred or two pages of writing my way through while at Choptank. Page after page of the same old horrible stuff, literally so much grief. Some of it ancient, some of it pity-pot, some of it contextual and some of it nameless in ways that kept me deep in the dark hole. Oh god the bravery it took for me to write all the way through! I had no idea, literally no recollection, of those pages being there.

There are loads of things I would different if I had the experience to do-over, and aint that the funny thing of it--I'd do it different now because of who I am now, but becoming who I am today had everything to do with going through those mistakes and casualties the hard way. Ultimately it comes down to that's just the way it goes. I stand poised in her today though, the woman who didn't know how to firmly say who she was or have the strength to stake her claim in the world. It is my own tiny miracle, my own heaven that is mine and mine alone and meant for only me to understand. It is pertinent as hell. It is the ground beneath me and it is the country of wild within me labeled not only what I want, but who I am. I hope the people that I hurt through it have forgiven. It has been a long hall, that one where forgiveness is gentle and blame retreats itself and lets open the next door, that one dark eddy of grave self-sin. I hope they all know how much love there is within. I am moving on from the chapter, the words falling like clean rain or leaves funny and quiet, but imminent, all the same. I am trying to convince myself in my most silent parts that the words are worth all I have, are at least as important when translated in to what I've come to give, from what I've lost and equally come to learn I own.

Bones & Love

Every night when I come home the first thing I see is the river. Or, what I ought to say: every night when I come home, the first thing I see through my windshield is the expanse of black above my head and the crazy mat of stars through the trees in the driveway. And I get out of the car, and the first thing I feel is the river.

No matter what my day's been like, no matter what is otherwise on my mind or bogging up my head. I pull into my driveway, ease the Versa far back near to the old boat that hasn't been used in more than a couple seasons, park and have the door open before I have time to think. And then, on impulse, as a matter of muscle memory and also, of something deeper programmed in me, some part ancient and respondent to firesmoke and the hush of trees, I breathe. I take a deep breath and let it all out and what happens is from inside me I get a soft smile, and I go still. And then, I can feel the river. I can feel her moving, can feel her in that place in my belly and on the back of my neck--same place where you feel when, say, a storm's coming on.

And for that brief moment, all is well. I know peace.

I moved here, to the town of Choptank with it's 20 or so houses, on the Choptank River, last November. I rent a room in an old house two up from the river. This house has modern painted gray-taupe siding but still looks old because it is. It was originally built in the 1830's. At night you can feel the life in its walls, all that it has breathed and seen. In the morning, where I come to the front porch to write, you can see the river out the window to my left.

At the time of my decision to move here to Chop, I lived in a six-bedroom farmhouse on a 400-acre-farm that grew soybeans and feed corn. That's a lot of land, a lot of space, a lot of air to breathe. I basically lived there on a deal with the owners to tend their property and upkeep the old place, the owners were distant inlaws of the magnificent man I was living with and was in love with and enjoying life with since the fall that I got out of college, in 2002. Brandon was my best friend, he was who and how I processed one of those strange times of transition that makes us humans so sketchy and uncertain: time of what-next or in-between. I loved him with every last blood inside my heart, I loved him so it was how my bones moved. A sweet, adoring love that saw nothing other than him, nothing else outside of us. He was all I knew, and all I ever hoped to know.

That same year my dad came back in to my life in a hands-on way because of a sad and serious depression at mid-life. And my mom sold our house, the one that me and my brother and her had always known, the one in the county between Annapolis and B-more. And she moved back in with my dad, first time in 15 years, to the beach.

Last night I was out late in the county. We met Brian, my brother Sean's best friend since they were five, and his little brother Little Sean, and their folks and our folks for dinner at our old favorite spot for crabcakes, Hellas. Their mom, Ms. Louise, helped raise my brother and me. It was her birthday last night, first time all of us have been together seriously since I dont know when. When we were growing up ma would drop Sean and I off at their place 6 in the morning on her way to work in the city. Ms. Lou would get us ready for school, breakfast, uniforms, carpool. Me and the boys would scream and fight or laugh and play. Nintendo and VCR movies on tv for hours. We were lucky, blessed, charmed-life kids. BMX bikes and kickball in the deadend when we'd come home from school. Anymore when I am home, like last night, I am so, so grateful. I am so aware of how good it was, and wistful in the most tender of grateful ways. And I miss it so much.

I was born in Baltimore City. I remember the market at Cross Street when I was only old enough to stand level with people's knees. I remember what Old Bay smells like on the salty Harbour air. I remember imagining how close the big boats were to the sea. I remember what it feels like, to have a river of living move under you, and that river be no more visible than the concrete at your feet.

It is hard to put this in to words. The bones of me, the true substantial life-time blood. I can say only that when the time comes to know you again, when the time comes to reclaim the flesh of who you are, you know it. You know it in a way that you will fight and pray not to recognize. You know it in a way that feels awful, like fear and hate and pain. In the most secret, darkest places in your brain, in the stomach tight breath that draws you awake at night, in the weight that sits just above your neck, you know it. And when you know something as distinct as Time, there is simply nothing else to know.

Choptank, you healed my soul. I am the river of me again. It was a fucking hard and awful fight and I hated how many times I had to let go. But here I am, on the shore again. How can I ever thank you? How can I ever thank you, Life? How can I ever thank you enuff...?

~~~

The song that helped birth this post: Wharf Rat, The Grateful Dead. O, Jerry. I love you. I love your guitar. You touch the myth inside of me.

Solstice on the Chop

The tide of the Chop was so high this morning. Where's the moon? Teena said, a soapy bucket in her hand and spotted-winged deer flies clung to her--her chest, her forehead, her arms. She had an orange Teena shirt on, that's the color I know her for know.

She's full, that's why, I said. Er, on Saturday an Sunday anyhow. She brings the tides, right? In'at how it goes?

I figured Teena would know the old folklores and rules that abide the countryside.

She shrugged in return and sat on one of the osprey and duck-stained chairs that she'd initially come to clean. It was about 7:00 or so, she'd been up since the sun was yellow hazy and outside breaking on the land of her home. Delighting. I sat on the pier, legs dangling off water up to my mid-calves. But by now the sun was already fading, mist of grey clouds nebulous and growing, and over my shoulder I heard a dark low rumble. The sky to the west was blackgrey and spanning.

West sky steel like that means storm.

I slipped my clothes off and slid in to the river. Watched the black grow and slithered again and again under and under, and floated again and again on top. I hate how cliche it sounds, but god it was just like silk. She was just so full this morning, the Chop, and welcoming. I knew when I first stepped out the side door and saw her that my body wanted nothing more than to be with hers, melting and swimming, under and under, on top again and again contented to float.

We were ridiculous trying to pull me up and out of there. No ladder and no beach in a tide that high. We have this joke about the old guy who's taken to walking his dog every morning, right about the same time I'm out in my itty bitty night clothes on my knees herbcrafting and worshiping the morning and the sun. Where's the old guy and his dog now?! Teena cackled, throwing a towel around my clumsy nakedness, me hoisting myself chest first on to the pier, thwuck of mud saltwater and sea grass closing the void under me.

The Solstice is coming. Feel it? It was all over everything this morning: the river, the haze of sky, the air. How it all is so meaty feeling, salty, elemental: how the wind is full not just of air, but water and earth, too. Of sky. The tide is growing, meant at once to remind us of the pinnacle of things--ahh great birth and throbbing life--and so meant of course at once to tweak the longing of things, too, for even as great Life comes to peak so she is reminding us, and teaching yet agin: all things come in their time, and pass.

That longing now of what is yet undone, listen quiet to the whisperings in your soul. And be still, be still. There is lots to celebrate amid there. So too the bounties come, the seeds redistribute, all will grow up wild in celebration and thunder, and lay down in surrender to death again.

Amen, yes? Amen amen.

Photo Doc

Last night, I saw my first firefly of the season. Today, my first dragonfly. Walking up the dock here at Chop the river wind keeping things cool and light--white trumpet flowers growing in a mass of vines at the edge of the fragmite and water stopped me and grabbed my breath--the energy here, a mere yard from the river, was hot, and green. Summertime. Thick stillness, rich. Fecundity of surge and spirit. I. Love. It.

I am home from my road trip & taking pause to let it all settle in. Maybe I'll write more about it should the words move there way up and out...

For now here's a photojournal full with more shots than most of you could ever care to see. And this isn't even half of them!

Thank you Dhamma thank you road thank you path thank you Way....

Thank you Blessed Nature of my sweet sweet being.

For Teena

You know how I know poetry is here?

She shrugs, empties an enormous Tupperware full of frozen roasted vegetables in to a barely steaming pot. Both the Tupperware and the pot are bigger than any cookware I’ve ever owned. I could bathe in them; use one to bunch up naked in and the other as my awkward ladle. I don’t know how she does it: a call came from a mutual friend only moments ago; could she and her husband stop by for a visit? To the common eye our home has no food. Yet here Teena goes, preparing a feast of pork and Thai soup.

Because I want a cigarette, I answer. And some cocaine.

This barely grabs the response I am trawling for—some kind of dry laugh and a bit of witnessing, a hallelujah—even an eye roll of empathy will do. Her grin is sardonic enough, though, that’s just Teena’s general style. A huge part of why we get along: soft and hard in just right the places. She moves behind me to an industrial size catering trash bag and disposes of some packaging, laughs a teeny bit uncomfortably and states that Chop has a No Tolerance policy.

Just for cigs though, right? Not cocaine?

To relax her I go immediately in to a brief update on my recent recovery-process. Really even though it doesn’t look like it, I am doing something all those afternoons and mornings out in the yard or on the dock in the white sun or even under the clouds. With the journal and the books at my side, the intermittent moments on my knees gathering or at least identifying, and well, yes, conversing with the herbs; or else sprawled out on my blue chair seemingly staring at the sky or the river or the sun, arms hung over the sides chest opened wide; or laying gentle as I can on the purple tapestry curled up and cuddled with the earth so soft beneath me, the tapestry that, even with a dozen washings still smells at once like dust and the chemical that everything that comes from India smells like. And the wild, homecrafted herbal tea at my side, really I am doing something when I am out there. It doesn’t show probably but inside of me, I can promise you, this work is the most real and probably toughest that there is. I am being gentle, going slow as my spirit demands.

But I don’t need to put any of this in to words for her. Teena does know. She kneads at me here and there by joking about all that nothing I’m doing. We both know though. Just to assure her that she’s not gonna have some relapsed junkie terrorizing her home I do go on to explain about my most recent little bout of serendipity that came in the form of a phone call from Vermont last week. How the timing was succinct with the toughest part of my Real Work Inventory. This is what we do, Teena and me. Mingle irony at our individual lives, mocking one another gently as we mock ourselves because the pain that has rimmed this house this year is enough for a city of sleepwalkers, a whole morgue of zombies, to eat their way out on and grow whole on death and when you live like that only on death eating on the dead and living on the dead it is hard to see your way out sometimes, hard to remember your way back to life. But we have, we are, we do. It’s what we’ve together, somehow, done. Our own little mostly silent means of resurrection. So the jokes, which used to come in the form of relief, like spring rain, come now more as touchstones, reminders. And they corner with the reality of individual triumph, the sharing of serendipity that grounds us each in our regular, and growing, personal moments of peace.

What happens if you don’t give her any attention? Teena says, she is talking about Poetry now. Will the words wait or will they go away?

They’ll go, I say. And if I give over to them, they may not stop for the whole day, which would suck to be in my office with all that crazy paperwork and Poetry stuck on taking me away.

Maybe you could do your paperwork at Chop? She says and even with her back to me I know there’s the grin.

I laugh and know too that the Devil’s got my eyes now. I’m gonna go upstairs, I say over my shoulder. Teena is stirring her pot. Give Poetry a half-hour or so, maybe that’ll be enough…

I pause then, when I get almost to the stairs. Poetry, you’re such a demanding little bitch! I cry, just loud enough.

And even from the stairs I can actually feel Teena’s smile.

Facebook gives me clarity tehe

I just realized that I wrote the following in a facebook message to a friend tonight. She and I haven't seen one another since summer:

i am finally getting that alone time/retreat i always wanted just for me. lately i am looking on this time with my heart wide open, so aware that i will look back on this as one of the most precious times in my life.

Wow. Who woulda thought my retreat, that deep alone time I knew I needed, was meant to look like this?

Sweet.

Choptank: On acceptance, and Place

Oh, Chop.

I love it here. When I was little we moved in to a plastic-siding house on a plot of land backed up against a tobacco field. Dad put a swingset out back, first the aluminum kind with the poles that rose up out of the ground when you got to pumping your legs really hard on the swing, then a chic wood one with rope ladders and a see-saw. My uncles and the neighbors came over one weekend and put up a wood fence, the kind with two posts on either side and two going length-wise in 8 x 5 tracks all around the backyard. You could climb it easily, or sit on the top rung of it, and the wood eventually grew dusty and warped from the summer sun. We had a wide yard with grass that was yellow and crunchy and hurt your feet by August. Eventually mom and dad built a small screened in porch on the back of the place and we ate dinner out there and my favorite was cook-outs, which we had a lot off and which I still yearn for, and organize now in the summer all the time. It was the suburbs, we were the fourteenth house in that neighborhood in Dec of 1980 and when we moved a decade or so later there were close to three hundred or so. It sprung a pang in my heart, even young like that, to see the farms lost, or the spots in the woods where we'd sneak off to where the old streams and black bows of trees hung, the creeks with the rope swings that creaked when you swung, the old dirt roads that even then we knew had secrets, all that wild area coveted because it was off limits according to the grown-ups. It hurt a bit even then to see it get paved over and disappear. But we lived the burgeoning 1980's fast-money suburb dream and I was raised to not question it: first VCR, MTV, first microwave, wow convenience and American life sure was fun!

I'm not sure when my mind changed about all of that, or if change is the right word. College on the rural side of the Chesapeake Bay, amid the farm lands and all the little antiquated towns of history run along the backroads here had a lot to do with it. Anyhow I was talking to a friend last night about sense of place. Identity and belonging. I believe that where we are from, regardless our consciousness of it, holds so many clues to the whole of who we are. The consciousness or in other words the regularities of your way of life there, this is so shaped by the land, by the very landscape to which you've grown accustomed. And by landscape I mean in its sociological entirety: are your surroundings city streets, are they strip malls, are they well-manicured lawns with a cement driveway and two car garage? And grown accustomed isn't the right term either, more appropriately I would say taken for granted. As in born in to, never having the experience of knowing anything different.

This morning, out my backdoor, these were my surroundings:

I took my coffee out to the Pier it was so, soo still. The Choptank River. No matter what, she calls my name. Sometimes, when I come home late as I often do, worn to the bone from giving so much of myself to work, I get out of the car and in the dark what I hear is the quiet gentle lapping of her incoming tide. Sometimes, a day or two before a storm, she is so eerily like the ocean--fast-moving--that it puts a chill on me. And then, like today, she is calm and still, quiet, reminding. All is Well. I stood out there breathing it in, with no means of escaping the perfect quiet contentment in my heart. It rained a long, soaking spring rain yesterday and today it is delicious out, about 55 and by the afternoon with all the day's sun everything will be stunning green. How precious, this gift of life and the reminder of the circles. The regularity of the changing, passing tide. The periodic wild currents, the peaked stillness at times, the shocking moments when the water rides far, far out and the brown mud is exposed and the marsh grass grows dry. And I, I here, get to take it all in.

I saw three different muskrats this morning. Three at different times. In all my life I've only ever seen one. Here is the totem medicine of muskrat (from http://lowestoftspiritualcentre.co.uk/Animaltotum.aspx): Grace, keeping ones own counsel, silent observation. In the silence, after watching the third little muskrat float and surface again and again among the reeds, I was startled by a giant splash. Behind me an osprey was lifting out of the water with a squiggling perch speared in its talons. Life eats life, you know? It's how we go, how we grow. I am so thankful to be at this place, and this Place, in my own cycle.

Today is hopefully the final day of moving off the farm. And just so were clear, when it's all said and done and I am sitting out back at low tide with the white metal legs of my beach chair sunk deep in the mud, I will probably at some point jump up, drive an hour across the bridge to the other side, eat some fricken sushi and go to the mall. Cuz life is life, all of it, every blessed part. It's just so amazing getting to walk all of it, eyes opened as they can be to every part of the whole.

Goodnight Chop....Goodnight me...

What a fulfilling day. The weather was warm enough for a hike at Adkins Arboreatum and the air, the trees, the breath of all the decaying leaves--it said spring, spring. Lunar Imbolc starts tonight, through the next 24 hours aaaaahhhhhh. And being outside under sky feet on earth, hard and frozen as it all still was, it was so clear to me in an inside way all the little wakefull bursts of life that could be felt. But ahhh, to be in February.....time to sleep, most important time of all for sleep in fact. Feb is like that last hour before waking when your dreams are most electric--this is crucial time for incubation. Everyone's sick right now, too--all your energy is hauling together towards jestation time. So if your all caught up in the temporal day to day chances are you're probably ill or with cold right now. Cuz your soul needs its time....

So sleep, sleep,it's sleeptime to finalize the dreams within....