Truth is whole and living and malleable in our hands!

Lately what's in and out of my mind?  Discrepancies. Like in character.

I was living on the road in early 2012.  Hanging out learning magic AND practical ways of how to heal the earth. At a Tibetan Meditation Institute that hosts a bunch of starry-eyed heart-fueled pagans for a permaculture school for 2 and a half weeks every year.  This is up in the Cazadero hills, Sonoma.  I was both, still am, both a peace-full compassion junky meditator and starry-eyed earth-worshipper who believes in the magic fuel of an open heart and can get down in and with the transformative power that happens when we deal with the real deal: our own life-funk and shit. 

A man who was at that training said something like, his contradictions were the best part of him.  And that's it:  Permaculture, 101.  That life thrives the most at the edge, where two ecosystems combine.  Where new life can be let in.  And that's us.  Humans.  Our light part out in the open and our inner dark, our hidden shit.  The center where they combine.

One's not more real or important than the other, which some beliefs would have you worhsip.  The shadow is more real bc it's not persona.  The persona, which can be light-touched, "spiritually" touched, is more real because it's conscious.

Ok so yea, I tend to feel more whole and rich around a starry-eyed shadow-walker than a light-filled shadow-thrower myself! ;)

But to me neither side is true.  Or maybe each is.  Each is a part of the truth?

To me, rigid definitions of our self or each other can become the end of personal vitality.

As I write this, Dead Prez's rap "the cause of your ignorance, flaws in your discipline."   And I get that, the need for discipline, particularly as it arises out of self-introspection and contemplation.  But also--what if personal discipline includes shaking off dogma, includes shaking off any adage that professes because I am this thing I also must be this…?  Meaning, isn't self-discipline about self-honesty?  Isn't that the depths of it?  Honestly looking at what's real about us, shallow or deep or in-between as it possibly is?  

And also, I don't mean just looking at our selves.  I mean making room to embody it, to give how we're feeling in our heart embodiment by being it.  Experiencing it, experimenting with what's emerging.

This is a major issue with words, by the way.  How they are symbols for something we already associate.  Which means we will read them written by others and embody our preconceived notion of them instead of allowing the thought-function to drop us in more deep.

(Pardon that interjection…)

You know Gandhi right?  Most people do, at least because of that meme  you must be the change you wish to see.  If you study him, like really try to get down with the man behind his words…Read his autobio, read the critical readings that arose from that.  Gandhi's whole point was live what you believe, live it, embody it.  AND if, as you do so, it no longer feels exemplary of your soul, change what you speak to match what does.  Change how you be to meet what's true for you.  Be the change you wish to see.

Of course, this coming from a man who lived women as second class citizens and who also believed sex and sex energy was wrong to embody…

DISCREPENCIES.  Truth is whole and living and malleable in our hands!  That means changeable!

AND we can't see whole parts of our selves sometimes!  The shit is in the dark!  That means we can't see it!  Haha the best we can do is have compassion for this, understand we are half blind groping around for light and touch.  Each of us.

I have this buddy Justin who I love.  He said in December that he was worried about me.  That my mountain was blocking out my sun.  He was talking about grad school.

That's just it.  When you can't see--you can't see THAT YOU CAN'T SEE!

Have mercy on us, each.  May it begin, within.

Last week, I walk out to the driveway to get in the car and go to my favorite place, Mermaid Beach.  I wanted to, had to, go dive under the ocean green.  Crazed Kelly zeal.  A hummingbird catches my eye and mesmerizes me in the deeper way.  I drop in, meaning, I recognize that it stirred my heart to see that little bird, so I honor the stir.  It reminds me in that moment of a time in 2004 when I was living in the national forests and wilderness in this country. I lived the reality that it is possible to be able to interact with nature and to experience nature outside as reflective of your inner nature--follow me here, this is BIG mindbendy stuff--to Know them as one thing.   To embody nature as interactive with you, as reacting to you as you too react to it.  That this can happen if and when you deprogram your ideas that that's not real.  I think all this in an instant because those years of 04 and 05 is when that was my primary lesson, and it partially started with an experience while living in the woods with both hummingbirds and butterflies.

Hummingbird is a symbol for spontaneous joy.  I think of this driving to Mermaid Beach, let my thoughts of this symbol spiral me down more and more to the heart where living truth is.  Feel jamming and alive in the moment.  Yea, dude.  My JOY'S BEEN GONE.  This feeling of life inside me.  It's been so…FLEETING. I haven't been awake to it, because you know…Dark.

Next thing I know I am laying out my towel on Mermaid Beach and here flies up this sweet little hummingbird doing horrible unstoppable spirals at my towel unable to stop bc his or her little wing is hurt.  I mean she's freaking with the panic look in her eye.  She or he lands then at my towel and I scoop her or him up in my scarf and do reiki on the little creature, singing and loving it and very gently caressing the little sweetie, bc really, what else is there--that's all we can really do.

Then when the warmth passes and I can tell it's time to put him back on the sand, I do.  She sits about a minute or two and then flies off no problems.

So I get to heal a symbol of Joy.

So now here I sit, thinking about rigidity, and dead forms of things, and how our vitality can disappear easy as that.  And old systems of self-care, and giving too much because we think it's what were supposed to do, and how this is as rigid as it gets: "supposed to".  And how we don't see, cuz we can't see that we don't, til we do.  

If you're following ANY of this, good for you.  ha

Discrepancies.  Sid Hartha, Herman Hesse.  He wrote about it.  Everything is true including the opposite of the truth.  

So yea, seeing the shit!  Dark paradise, when finally on comes the light. What will I choose (the holiest discipline there is: choice.  And it's opposite too, deciding not to choose…a half-lined choice, itself) today to make alive?  Who do I get to be?

(and will it look like a long ass diatribe instead of my thesis, Ch, 3???)

A brand new chance

It's been a long day.  I just remembered that I left to see my first client at 7:30 this morning.  That feels like it was last week.

There are heavy, heavy things going on with people I love.

It makes me feel sad which I can handle but today sad is edging near lonely, which is the shadow side of appreciating a handmade life all your own.  That part doesn't feel good.

I had a meltdown about my thesis and feeling like there is no way what I am writing is good enough.  It is profound to me, the depths of self-doubt I have around raising my voice and valuing the Women's Mysteries as something real and valid and profound.

Erika of course came through with her wisdom and words.

This is the part where I pause and remind myself--feeling curled up around the edges is old self-care which means I have started to slide with managing my basic needs.  This can happen ten times a day.  And does.  To all of us.  Can we stay close and present when we see it?  That's the thing….

Saturday I spent at a beach clean-up then at Aliso Creek for snorkeling and sunset bonfire fun. There is nothing that relaxes me like the elements.  A long salt soak.  The way fire unwinds the muscles, makes the soul softly sing.  How surf pounds on the sand in the dark steadies the beat of your heart.

Sunday I acted a fool with Alison at Sharkeez from breakfast time til literally after the sun went down.  Somehow all that golden time of fun seems far off in the background now.

Brian writes and says he wishes we had smart phones when we were kids to have caught the goofy stuff we did.  Like our old renditions of Stand By Me.  That knocks me back to 6th grade, he woulda been in 3rd, when that was our major jam.  Somehow it is November again, the end of the year closes in.   It is time to shut this computer: STEP AWAY FROM THE SCREEN!  and let the day bring its quiet end.

Cuz then comes tomorrow, its new experience of present tense.  A brand new chance at joy and choosing love, once again~

You know, like from Peter Pan?

I left Jan's and had tacos then got Starbucks and got on the road.  On the 73 the veins in my forehead were so thick I think you could jump them like rope. Like tangle them out from underneath my skull bone or apart from the muscle up there and use them for sidewalk games.  That's what traffic feels like.  Trying to untangle the jumprope jarble from my brain.

I'd been so calm too--what the hell is all this red brake light on the toll road?  The whole damn reason they make an elitist toll system through the rich part of south county is so entitled brats like me don't have to deal.  Just eww.  No I didn't actually think that last part that's just me making fun of the southern cali-chick in me. Elitist.  Entitled. White.  Bratty-ass.  Chicken.  Me.

Anyhow.  I really do have issues with road rage but I haven't in a long time.  The way the 73 runs up and down the coastal hills is like a smooth finger along the backbone of the land and feeling her long slow in then out--up then down--breath touches me in that inside place that hummms with quiet rest.  The moon fat and white to my left. I love that stretch of road.  It's why I originally moved to Laguna. Almost three years ago now…or anyhow come May. I had to take the toll road for an ESL conference to San Diego and was wowed by the rolling canyon up-downs.  Green expanse this side of the 405 with no construction and dirt hiking paths?  Woah what is this magic land?  I didn't know a thing about Laguna.  I'd only been there once, and that was dancing.  And it was dark.

Jan said some stuff near the end of our session though and I guess it pissed me off.  That's the part that challenges me as a therapist.  My job isn't to tell you what to do, or how to think, or any of that.  My job is to help you feel understood.  Truly seen, witnessed for what's true in you.

In this way you get to become stronger in who you really are.

And my point today to my therapist was that Wendy, you know like from Peter Pan?  Wasn't just the mama in that story. She didn't just play the good girl role, in fact she got to explore never having to grow up, too.  She got to have all the same fun as the lost boys and Peter Pan.  And that's a hell of a lot fun…So it's not all just stunted, to be enchanted by Never never land.  It would be if Wendy didn't know all the subtleties of her role.

But if she does?  Does that mean Never never land is still in control? If Wendy is exploring parts of herself, a conscious choice of subversiveness?  I got all triggered because I didn't feel like my therapist heard my point.  I told her as much, and now I am sitting here wondering: so is it Jan's job to align and hear where I, speaking for me back then, as a wild grl Peter Pan teen, stood?  Or to challenge adult me now?

And is there truth in her point, since I'm pissed?  That I still love for the enchantment to take control?  And if that's a role she's gonna take with me, to challenge me--how do I feel about that, working with clients, challenging them?

Is it something I'd want them to leave with…to have bulging out their brains?  I trust her, a lot.  And am willing to ride this to see where it leads.  I drove to see my clients, with that rope-vein jumping like nuts outta my head.  I chose to just focus on a secret I know about, which is were all crazy, just working it out in our own ways.  And working it out or covering it up or whatever we each do looks different for us, each and every one.  All of us have our own very unique styles of crazy-management.  It's a wonder we make it from day to day.

Tonight I for one am happy that at least for today, I didn't ram in to the back of any cars.  I actually laughed at myself freaking over a couple brake lights, running those up-downs, grateful to have a bank account, a means to afford a fast track, the little unspoken gifts that made it so I wasn't in traffic on the 405.  And now, it feels good--I like how you're there waiting for me, like you used to be, sweet ol familiar blank screen.

Really guiding my way.

Siobhan sent a poem over our email chain.  She's in the gradschool cohort we all got blessed with. Our cohort, C, has its roots as the first cohort for In Depth Psych Counseling or so the legend goes, and since Pacifica is built on myth and soul and story I like that detail the best.  We are Ants--that's the medicine card we pulled our first session when some second year's came and got us and then led us out to the grass to have a little gnostic earth ceremony.  Ants: power of patience, persistence, working on behalf of the whole.

Standing on the little sundeck today against all the fat, full greens of the canyon it was that poem that came to me, the first line: Leave the dishes.  It is a poem by Louise Erdrich called Advice to Myself and it came when all us Ants were emailing about self and soul care.  I thought of it because after a week of school work new job work new job work study read quit teaching/work--well to be standing on the sun deck this afternoon about to sit and luxuriate and do nothing felt, for just that final second before sitting down, the tiniest bit indulgent.  Because the house is dirty, the dishes are piled up, the fridge needs cleaned out.  But I thought of that poem and sat down.  Way, wayyy down.

I am blissed out and quenched back up on my self and nice and relaxed now.  Full of California southsky sun.  Grateful in ways I can't speak because there are no words for the steady sobs of goodbye I shared with Chika or Loan, the tears of gratitude on the faces of Mayra or Yun.  My students who taught me more than they will ever know.  Dancing with the grls in HB last night for Annie's birthday.  Derynne about to move.  Me starting work, for myself.  And, maybe most of all, this other thing quietly going on.  How settled: I am dating, and not losing my self.

Which makes me see in my mind Krissy and I, also on the lawn at Pacifica.  Practicing empathetic listening with one another.  This was in October.  Not so far south sun.  I had told her about my time living in Ocean Pines with mom right before I came to California.  How I did nothing but wait tables and go out every night to have fun.  I told her how different that had been from the excruciating work at Chesapeake College being a Counselor.  The guilt I still had over this.  It's a large package I gave her to hold.  Her response was dead on--how I learned at the beach when I lived with mom really strong boundaries for myself.  When Krisssy said that I remembered: my motto back then was if it doesn't add joy I will cut it out.  I really did live that way, too.  With that much dedication to joy and having fun.

And so no effort is wasted.  That time at Ocean Pines I learned to carve out, and trust, my truest, brightest self.

Today I'm just sorta reveling...  She's really guiding my way.

It's just the beginning

It was a long weekend and I ended it hugging Gretchen with wet eyes, in front of a fish and burger shack under a white moon in a place called Summerland.  I drove her to Pacifica so she could see it and feel the silence there for herself.  Gretchen, who has stood by me through every bit of this year after year, back when everyone else thought I was senseless--the days of moving out of Chestertown because I was following my heart but didn't know towards what.  All I could think coming up to this weekend, it all makes sense now...all I could say again and again when we saw one another...I've only just begun.

Brian who's never written poetically once in his whole life texted There are two tragedies in life.  One is to lose your hearts desire.  The other is to gain it.  Some think the latter is worse.  They think once you gain your hearts desire, what you truly want, then life becomes pointless.  There's nothing left to strive for.  You become scared and fearful once you've gained it you will lose it.  Scared to give in and let yourself feel everything amazing that comes along with gaining one's hearts desire...these people are punks! They're wrong!  The tragedy of gaining one's hearts desire isn't the realization that this is all life has to offer.  That life is pointless from here on out....The real tragedy for some is once you've gained your hearts desire you don't stop and realize that it's just the beginning and NOT the end.  The beginning of something amazing we human beings get to feel.  A feeling that's intense and truthful.  A feeling that's painful and exciting.  A feeling that allows you to love someone or something more than yourself.  To be scared to give in to those feelings is where the tragedy lies.  I called him and we talked for an hour.  He is in love and she is afraid to lose her independence.  I called and talked to Paul almost as long, back to back phone calls about the exact same thing.  Dear Paul who is returning north to the hot springs to live in the forest again before Kalani.   I thought, how lucky am I to know these men.  Oh 2012. Time of new roles that never have been.  These two men loving like they never have before.  New roles everywhere.  Willing to love and getting hurt and keeping their hearts open the whole while.   How proud I am to know them who can be so brave.  It's not all golden in the Age of Female Wisdom.  All of us women and men we are struggling and learning every day. I am inspired by my brothers and try and learn from them.

I did laundry for the first time in a month.  The TV on the Radio station on Pandora rocks.  So does listening to sorta old school The Lonesome Crowded West.  My students are brave and beautiful.  I sat at my favorite beach Sleepy Hollow.  Had a taco from Loco's while I read the book I bought when Josh was here.  In other news while puttering around my house I pulled the salsa verde out of the fridge and was touched in that sudden, merciless way that brings unexpected tears to my eyes because I was so grateful to have a refrigerator, a closet full of lovely clothes.  Life is incredibly simple like that.  To see so clearly how abundant and blessed we are. There is so much for which to give thanks.  Life is ridiculous and complicated, too.  Intense and painful, breaking down defenses growing new roles. So it goes.  I've only just begun.

Repost: Wistful and grateful on the night before I go to grad school to become a therapist...

(original posting 5.13.2009
Choptank, MD)

About a month or so ago I went to try therapy.

“Let’s see,” she said. “So you started using drugs regularly at 15. I am sure you have heard that whatever age you start using is the age that you basically stop growing. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s time to grow up. You are still, essentially, 15.”

Hmm. Maybe it’s possible that this woman, who for the first 45 minutes of our meeting did not allow me to talk except to answer her pointed questions, somehow missed the part where I mentioned that for over eight years I’ve been on a committed path of recovery and self-help, learning to take responsibility for me and aiming for emotional maturity.

Of the “adult” skills I’ve actually focused on, one has been the willingness to allow others room to be heard; so normally this helps to curb any immediate reactiveness to asinine fucking comments like the one above. But that day on the therapist couch the blood curled around my neck even as I smiled graciously at her opinion, oh, uh-huh, mmm-hmmm. It was later in the session when the radical, albeit kind, honesty kicked in.  When she tried to tell me that my wanderlust and great passion for traveling too were indicators that I needed “to grow up.”

One of the other adult skills I’m really working on is learning to integrate information from various different sources and in the end use them to supplement my own views with all the regularly outputting stimulus of the world. I am learning, in other words, how to trust myself.

Needless to say, therapy, this time, didn’t quite work out.

I was 15 when I first found myself saddled up with my bags and my trinkets, my combat boots and cigarettes, scowling from low down in the passenger’s seat of the blue hatchback my mom behind the wheel, my brother’s perpetual chirpiness behind us his head in the middle between the seats. Up the Baltimore beltway then down 295, on our way to Dr. Lessey in the city. He had an office on Park Ave. On the corner was a soul food joint with bars on the window and a yellow sign for Lake Trout. Across the street and to the left was a store called The Leather Underground.

I had my learner’s permit, I was almost 16, it would soon be my regular, weekly route. Soon enough it was just me in the car. I was never brave enough to try the soul food. The bemused gay men in the bondage store, however, eventually knew this pink-headed purple-booted riot grrl by name. It was the early 90’s and hard to find places like that were ahead of the soon to come piercing trend. Leather Underground was the only place that I knew of that you could go for a belly button ring, and they used a 10 gauge cow-ring, not a bar, and there was nothing girly or petite about it.

Dr. Lessey was soft and gentle with gold spectacles and a sandman peace about him. I always pictured him with a nightcap on, the kind that triangles down one side of the head with a little cotton ball on the end, you know faded cotton-white with light blue stripes. And a candle in his hands.

It was six or eight months that I went to the city to see him. I was touched in a way that I couldn’t get my words to say, I was touched by the kindness of this sweet, quiet little man. I never told him about the pot I was smoking or the drinking that was edging beyond exploratory. I kept us occupied by tales of the girls I hated at school and this new, daring guy who showed up one day by my side, grinning down at me delicious in his eyes, walking me up the stairs to my homeroom. He had just gotten kicked out of public school. I was entranced and a month or so later when the same guy got locked up at Harbour Hospital in South Baltimore, Dr. Lessey encouraged me to go see him. I trusted the good Doctor. I used to bring my friends there to meet him, my brother, my boyfriend even (the boyfriend that I had secured as result of a visit paid to him at South Baltimore’s Harbour Hospital mental ward.) Dr. Lessey looked on in amazement, the only adult who didn’t judge and seemed uniquely interested, when my friend Briana showed up with me in his office sporting her knew Leather Underground navel loop. I loved how much he seemed, simply, to care.

Around the time that I really did start to make changes and work to get my life cleaned up, this would be roughly the spring of 2001, I entered in to another therapist relationship, this time with Father Ed. His was, I think, the fourth “couch” I’d been on by then. He was supplied to me for free by the uber-conservative liberal arts college that I’d already by then dropped out twice from, both times as result of drinking and drugs. Father Ed had me do things like hold fake conversations with the air; the air of course was always a character and usually someone close to me in life. I had to hold pillows tight and close and pretend that they were me. He was the first therapist I ever cried in front of and lord did it make me feel so, so clean. I loved him, Father Ed, for the same reason as Dr. Lessey, he truly seemed to care. That, and one clear, new thing: I was capable, or at least so beginning, of being honest. Truly honest about me. No more hiding the extracurricular’s that were so much a part of my life it wasn’t that I was even purposefully hiding them before, just that I took them so much for granted as a part of how I lived my life. The drugs and the alcohol were, plainly, part of me, of who I was, as natural as air or water or food when it came to the things I did each day. I just never questioned any of it, no matter the consequences or miserable thin vein of fear that seemed to increase with each passing year, feeling like ice in my blood and a cold wall at the base of my heart, steadily growing.

The honesty made all the difference. Clarity is a mixture of willingness, or at least a capacity, to be honest with myself and then trusting me enough to know that my own truth is the one that counts. The therapists that I’ve gained the most from over the years, as I’ve sorted through and grieved out my humanness and wounds, are the ones who’ve made it clear that they care and you can’t fake that, caring is a quality that is or isn’t. I know when it’s true, and more, affront when it is false or faked. In an atmosphere of care one feels safe, and safety is what is required, at least for me, to get to a place where I am willing to get honest with myself—on whatever level, at whatever risk of responsibility it means that I am going to have to take. And good therapy, for me at least, has been no more than the process of showing up to witness that allowing. Good therapists ask the right questions and then let the process of discovery guide its self. I always end up being the one who sees what I need to see just by having a safe place to say it out loud.

So if I’ve learned anything at all over the years, it’s that the answers are indeed within; and that especially it’s not a sign of weakness to sometimes need another’s help in order to get them out. In fact I’d say that empowering oneself like that is all about being Brave. But that other person doesn’t get to tell you what to do. They definitely don’t get to yield control over your ideas. Self-trust is the goal to me, and so it was that over a month ago my life started to turn around at its darkest point: what I thought would be the beginning step in self-discovery when I took the plunge on to a new couch turned out actually to be the exercise I needed to affirm the ending of self-doubt. And now that I am here, doing the Real Work with a book and some close friends as my guides, I am realizing that the two concepts are actually one and the same.

Enjoy. Settle in.

All these marvels jigsawing across the floating screens in my head.  It is two weeks since I've blogged but that doesn't stop me from composing in my mind.  From wanting to tell you, funny computer page, about the yellow fall light it's different not for its bright but its shadows, how a dark edge can make the radiance so much more succinct   Understand, if you can, the way the brown earth rises from the sea at Crystal Cove, how the crowns of land remind me of low tide on the Choptank River where I used to jump from tump to tump, where the fragmite grows.  I want to tell you that my friend is on the road in canyon country and that talking to him made me see the Anasazi riches and how the gnosis of that energy once lived me deep and whole on that same land.  Made me smell the high-nosed sugar of the black-green pines, made me exalt Coconino coconino...ahh Kaibab.  O to truly live off the land.  Enchanted.  Poet wanderer on the road, any person on the road.  And me, for the first time, the first ever when talking to such a person, did not yearn to move, felt no ache no pressing that said go get out go be and allow, no hard thin line in me with no words but an urge that says must go be simply in the flow.  Do you get it white page?  What that feels like, the outbreath?  The exhalation of these roots, straight down are meant to grow?

I spent last fall in the mountains under the tall trees.  I watched magic manifest. I am here now, fall again, a different setting, just as blessed.  I am plugged in to this, am plugging in now, to my real life.  To what I want to build, to grow, powering on and in to the best parts of who I am.  Or can be, or become.  As recently as (my most recent) trip east I was near that quitten point, with the drain-strain of exhaustion nipping at my heels and running tapes in my head. The only thing worse than regret is doubt and I believe the two shadow box from an arm with two fake fists.  Thankfully the lesson of retract curved me in its hand, I remembered the heir of patience which is acceptance, blends to compassion, softens in to loving tenderness with my self.  Is the gentle loving hush that sings Slowww down.  Sink down.

Enjoy...
Settle in.

Like we were fairy blue

I don't know why it happened here but an outbreath just left me feeling soaked in and comfortable, almost relaxed, for the first time in over a week.  This is the coffee shop I used to ride my bike to all the time when I first moved here to Southern California back in February.  I remember the first time I sat in this comfy chair, with a poem book in my lap to put the peacock light on inside me (to reference--for Erika--Millay.)  Maybe that's why my soul nudged me here today.  Because it feels like a home base.  Where a keystone is set so that I can take pause.  And try to...breathe.

That was the most intense several weeks I have lived in a really long time.  Moving then Mary dying, getting accepted to school, then trying to prepare for school and beginning to teach at night, then school.  School.  Woaaaah school.  What the hell just happened?

In our group process session on Sunday I got all fidgety and couldn't sit still in my seat, next thing I was standing under the rafters out back of Pacifica where the whisper breeze lingers then stops with these two women in my group. Sobbing.  This feels like a blood clot, all I could think, a little spot of purple rot stuck in my heart trying to get out my throat, and it went all the way back to when I left my job at Chesapeake, that deep and devastating burn out.  We have to log 3000 hours of internship before we get licensed, meaning non-profits and the system all over again, and I could barely take it, the misery and reality of this.  And like that I was on the phone with Gretchen in April 2010 fumbling on my words admitting with my fool heart to her all that time I believed I could change it.   Feeling so embarrassed to say this out loud.

So that's in-depth, soul psychology.  Recognizing all change happens only within.  Woooooaaaah and here I go.

I swam Saturday night in the dark of the Equinox, the balance held.  For the first time on the West Coast, a night swim!  With my new friends from grad school. Covered in moonstruck phosphorescence like we were fairy blue. I am so grateful, already, for them.

Fly to Austin in less than two days.  Cousin Kate, ohhh!  Cousin Kate.   Then on to Maryland to be in Mandy's wedding, to officially celebrate the union of her and Dave.  I miss my family with a tremendous ache.  Doing all this, this commitment and follow through, is taking all of me.  My support system is back east and that's really hard.  I don't know what else to say.

And dance

Three weeks ago I decided it's time for me to see more live music again.  I was hanging out with this cutie lifeguard watching some surf punk band with a horrible drunk wannabe Morrison lead.  My company was far better than the band.  Since then I've seen Matisyahu and tomorrow Steel Pulse.  Steel Pulse!!!  Haven't seen good reggae since the old Sunsplash days.  Next week at the Surf Open Best Coast, Toro y Moi and TV on the Radio. Free Best Coast on the beach!  Tonight I'm going with Annie and like 10 girls to see a No Doubt cover band.  I am looking forward to a deep-fried avocado since we'll be at the fair.

To the hell yea.  I rode my bike forever today.   The headwind on the way back was hilarious. So much resistance that's the first time a  bike ride on the beach path made me sweat.  Like always I get a big smile when I ride, which makes everyone smile too.  Which makes me happy.  And smile more.  The Open started today, meaning even more than normal little skaters everywhere and all the registers now accepting money at every concession stand.  I don't think surf events happen til Saturday.  Jayden and I have plans to be down there at like 6am...I'm going to watch a lot of surfing and not move much other than bike to beach to water to sand.  Back to bike again.


Talked to Josh last night forever and it made me feel whole and clean.  That's been happening more often with him.  And so things move on.  The admissions counselor at Pacifica emailed me today, they presented my application to the board, I am freaked out.  And happy.  Sometimes there's nothing else than Wait.  This feels really good to me.  


A prayer now for Derynne, for what is to come.  What is to come, what has been, and the sacred in-between.  Which is a great time to go get Stefani on, dance and dance and dance...and be.

I can't get enough I can't get enough

I was trying to think honestly about moving from Huntington.  To be closer to work.  The realization hit me last week that it would be hard to leave the library here. I know it's as silly to me as it is to you.  Today coming up the concrete stairs it became my reality though.  I simply may love this place too much.

And here, on the lower level five feet from a fountain, another fountain and grassy woodland park out the floor to ceiling wall to my right, I know it's true.  And I get why.  It is quiet here, an indulgent, reverent, human quiet. This is the best library in the world.  Full with the sound of literally hundreds of bodies choosing to be silent, to be still.


Out my window on Main Street cars run all day and night long.  Dogs bark from the back yards.  That all the time whir and buzz has its effect on people.

Here at the library the downstairs study rooms are open-aired with two overstuffed comfy couches in the center.   In whichever study room you enter those cozy chairs always have people laid out like Jesus on the cross with their head all the way back and eyes closed.  And today, I got it.  The sacred sound, they like me come here to soak in it.  The aching, conscientious quiet.

I can not get enough of it.  That's not even to mention the satisfaction of the forever long bike ride all its hills and concrete, or the basement where the poetry stacks are and I can go and completely lose my mind its dimensions so opened that a library basement is my quaky heart drug.  I go there for the bliss,  I can't get enough.  I can't get enough I can't get enough.

So here's to my third daily check-in.  Got my morning pages done today, located my backpack finally (dear Dell, does the warranty cover damage done from transport in a bag with a bottomfull of sand?) and now here I am, at the library.  To finish my essays.  I talk with Erika about my latest submission tonight at 6:15.

Last night was super fun, too even though I wound up not chilling with Derynn and them.  I'm stoked to do it again~

A way back

So I am going to try to blog more.

(Got that Kelly, here it is, in contract!)  I told Erika over email I will check-in on my blog as much as I can.  I will rely on the only thing I've ever fully committed to--writing--as the frame to help me commit to the other new changes on the helm.  Writing, which I once wrote is my tool, and my reward.  How it keys me in, cuts my trail in to my inside.  Then leaves an archive map, a way back, to who I am just behind.

Summerland on Friday was so rad.  When I used to sit in my room in the Pines and relax and breathe and listen to my poemas de la luna on Pandora over and over again I would feel where on the map in California that I belonged.  And it was always Ventura.  All along.

Not that I'll move.  Just, I can't wait to have this reason to go there where the trees breathe and the coast is quiet once a month.  This reason, this commitment to myself.  In a book I got at the bookstore at Pacifica on Friday it says They need to mature before they will be able to protect themselves.  The book is about unfolding the sacred in women and the quote refers to symbology in the dreams of  the two writers.  Symbols speaking to the burgeon of understanding they were growing of their individual spirits.  And I read this, and knew communion.  And thought yes, yes.  These next steps are about that.  I know where I am heading, always have.  But I must go make this deep passing now.  I need to mature my vision so that I will know how to protect it.  And in protecting it, allow it its process to grow.

Nick and Norah's was great.  It made me want a boyfriend to run around in whimsy with taking random roadtrips up PCH stopping to eat ice cream and singing really loud out the windows.  It made me relish the youth in me.  Going to Derryn's today for a BBQ.  Looking forward to yoga and a long bike ride in the sun.  Talking to Beth tonight.

There.  Check in, number 1.