The tracking of self

It is quiet as a cat steps, the gentle return to the self.  Delicate as this as well.

When I was growing up and we moved from the old neighborhood of Baltimore suburb sprawl to the country woods and backroads further south, my closest friend lived across the street from me in a house that was built at the turn of the 19th century.  It had kitchen stairs, which if you're from the east coast you know are the narrow shoulder-squeezing curvy steps meant for the servants or slaves to use.  Honing the return is always like this.  Knowledge of the secret passages crept and kept, how to use the quiet shadowed light to slip unseen through the house.  How to recognize when some part of your self has become subservient to an other.

And so it was I went away.  North on the 1, for many hundred miles.  Slept under canopies of trees so deep the green looked black and the sunshine wasn't so much as a yawn.  Spent hours of extra hours of travel time just to be able to drive the quietude of mountain roads.  As it always goes, I was not the same and more the same than ever before when finally I returned. Drove the Grapevine in panic up- down of body exhaust and got delirious on the man-friend for trying to get too close. It took me a full week to stitch it all together again, what all of that--the departure and return and rupture at the end--might've meant and still could mean.

Now, I move about the hobbit house on quiet cat-step toes.  Set the slow cooker to high after it sat on the counter for three hours ingredient-full but not plugged in.  Mistakes are made: I'm not wholly present, but know as much--can see at least that I'm not which is as close an assessment of the truth as can ever be seen.  I open books, close them, adjust the light.   Take notes. Miss movement in my body but know this is temporary, this physical time-out.  Feel certain of being on the verge of things.  A surety of witnessing: the stealth and knowing look of being so close to, and at once amid, the ever-endless circle of tracking and tracking the tracking of self.

You know who's outta here?

Yaaa--

This grl.

See ya other side of Big Sur.  Travelin mercies and harmony blessings, for all~

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 Adventures of Charlotte Bliss. Bliss.

At night we laugh until our faces freeze red and there’s no sound left because we’re out of breath. Usually it’s cause Yalle is hanging out on the dating sight and she’s writing outrageous and shocking off the cuff responses to the unsuspecting dudes brave enough to email first. The rest of us are living through her. My favorite wine is whiskey. There’s one guy she really does like so those emails take at least an hour to write. We don’t have tv but there are lots of movies on dvd and also Mo figured out how to stream Jersey Shore. In the morning the sky is always blue and the redwoods are so tall I can’t see the dark tops from my bottom bunk when I first start to wake. I always can hear the music of the wind though, the orchestra of air moving through the high up bows. This is so, so good for me. I tell my friends here: for years I could see this wooded mountain place with yellow light and soft air on my skin. I could feel the deep rounded peace and how it was the mountains and the ocean was near. I get choked up periodically, especially in the mornings, doing yoga on the back deck of the cabin under the trees. Because this is it, I am here.


The woman who runs the house loves to cook and it’s joyous every night the way she feeds us all. She has a funny looking dog all muscley who behaves as if he’s really tough but curls in a ball on her chest whenever he can. Farm work is fun, the hours are long and the weather so fine, the company amazing. My body is always edged out, satiated from the regiment strength I give to this land and its bounty here, always pushing beyond what I think I am prepared to give. I sleep so well as if sleep is a brand new gift that I get to use as much as I can. The music, our music always plays. It echoes in the valley and the stories, then the silence…then the music then the sun-wind-music made by the trees. It all echoes, one lends to the other, it goes on and on. The stories. These people. The mountains and the sun.

This is so, so good for me.

TAoCB. NorCal.

So, the grls in the north Cali woods have adequately blown my mind.

I mean, I just love when life contradicts your expectations of it. I am surrounded by majestic Redwoods, dark green pines far older than our Constitution, the Eel River is ribboning along side the soft quiet of the land. There are buckets of sunshine and a sky so blue it sings, men who talk about creating your own reality and the vortex of your own loving soul and women with uncut dreadlocks sixteen years long in tie-die skirts. The music never ends. People use composting toilets, at the farmer’s market way down the hills are cucumber lemons that you eat like an apple, in the outhouse there are crayons next to the toilet paper so you can draw on the walls while having a seat.

Now. Add to that, should you be able, the sight of two long-haired mellow hippie mamas rapping every single word to Kanye’s Monster. I mean all of a sudden out of nowhere first we were hula-hooping then they’re full-out rapping gangsta rough-neck style as if they never left the projects whaaat?? I was so off the chain with down to earth glee, so utterly delighted by this little bit of city in my temporary mountain home, so headchecked by such unexpected burst of spontaneity-keeping-me-on-my toes-ness of it that I still can not stop grinning. And as result, I now have two new grl-heros in my life, and so thank you Life for never letting me down, and thank you Bess and Ehm… This one’s for you~