If I came to you tomorrow and said let's run away

Today a week ago I was traveling freeway to freeway, smog traffic sunny heat, going inland to the base of the San Gabriel mountains.  There is a town there sweet as a nineteen fifties black and white scene.  It's surrounded by what looks to me like desert but lush enough for an every Friday night street festival and a flirty furtive smiling crescent moon hung big as the dream of a child in the setting sun sky.   Called Monrovia, where, after a gazillion hour drive from Seattle to Eugene to Socal, my friend Paul was after helping his girlfriend move.

That same morning I left my temporary home at Mike's in Newport Beach to move half my stuff in to my room in this sweet little boho home in Huntington Beach, a town away.  The other half I tucked between the surfboards and washing machine in Mike's garage, to be moved after my 24-hour marathon trek to Monrovia to see Paul and his lady, then Hollywood to visit my old homeboy from highschool Dave, then Hermosa to chill with Casey from my recent Ocean City life.  It was, so to speak, my last hurrah of a seven month grand hurrah called My Independent Gypsy Queen Road Warrior Days.

Weeks earlier, when I was still crashing in Sonoma County in my friend's cottage, I called Erika and unloaded about a month of instinct on her.  This was early February and the gist of my emotional out pour was me expressing that my gut was telling me it was time to leave Northern California.  I was absolutely fear struck, shrunk and constricted, terrified.  I had exactly enough money left to start a new life, create a home of my own somewhere special, but this was such a novel thought next to the open-road lifestyle I'd been living since August.  I did not want to pay attention to what my instinct was telling me, what my dreams and emotions were saying.  It seemed so foreign, so suffocatingly unknown.

At the end of my download Erika said one thing:  Call Mike Wallace.  He's lived here in Orange County since 2002, in fact, in my dream journal where I write my heart's goals, there is a note from  November 2008 when I left Brandon, our six year relationship, Chestertown, our farm.  It says: Beach, Sunny, Warm: walking distance.  Volunteer/teach ESL.   Write!  And then under it, call Mike.  This was 2008, November, me a week or so out of my six-year-shoulda-married-the-guy relationship.

My brother, Mike's best friend, called while I was on the other line talking to Erika and he literally said the same thing:  Well, did you call Mike?  Mike, breezy--Southern California--as he is, was like yea totally, no worries.  So that was that.  The urgency kicked in then, I followed this pressing movement in my blood to get here as fast as I could, and within 36 hours of my arrival had job and house potentials, both of which came through.  I finished my move this past Sunday, started my job Monday, just now got the last of my things:  my writing materials unpacked, set-up happily at my desk that came with my room.

Last Friday I was sitting on the freeway in standstill traffic on my way to see Paul.  I was tired, eager, a little shook.  The windows of my car were all the way down, my hair wild with wind, the sun hard and happy on my face and shoulders.  Seven months of on the road, and this was it: I was so ready for them to end.   The feeling of my life!  About, once more, to begin.  Anxious tired and excited, at that moment flooding my car came Scotty Avett from the i-pod scrounging out the opening notes of November Blue.  A live version from years ago, a song I haven't randomly heard in years.  Now The Avett Brothers, long before they played with Dylan and Mumford and Son on the Grammy's, used to play this little backroom bar in Chestertown we all loved called Andy's.  Those boys used to crash out on Bran's old floor on the corner of Kent and High after their shows...

Part of my January-February-passing, the emotions of it, the underlying wateriness really going on when I called Erika, was what it might mean to me to settle in to a home again, like I once had with Brandon and all our family-friends in Ctown.  To be happy.  And the thing is, the night before I moved out of Mike's to go see Paul, I got a call from Sam, who used to live in that old place with Brandon and Russ on the corner of Kent and High, circa 2001...Sam wanted me to know in case I didn't that Brandon is getting married.  I didn't.  So hearing that song, a song Brandon and I danced barefoot and happy to in the sidestage grass at Floydfest the year before I left, a song that to this day is my song full of regrets about my failures at love and not being able to stay, well it was Timing.  It was like Life saying Listen, no matter what, if you just Listen to your self than I promise you I got this.  Just listen, and trust, like you always have.

It feels so good to be home now.  Forgiveness, you know?  Forgiveness of your self, and what seems bigger than your control.  Letting the past, which really means regrets, go.  There was a moment that that happened, at Mike's before I moved out.  The kind of moment you cant manifest, you just have to let happen.  The kind of moment that surprises you because you've been waiting so long on it that you gave up the idea that it would ever really come.

So peaceful and fresh, so good it feels to stop moving.  And, to move on.  To begin, finally, again.

It's Been A Good Year (but dont make her lift her skirts or I'll be pissed!)

It's been a good year.  I am sitting in conversation with this guy at the door of a coffee shop in this place called Severna Park and I have not seen him since no shit 1995 (oh my god, how funny I just remembered we were Class Partiers together in the year book, that's why he was explaining so bummedly and borderline apologetically about having to quit smoking!  Holmes my dad's got lung disease c'mon! We're grown up now it's alright...) and all I can think is it's been a good year.

I am kind, and ground myself and remind myself to be present.  It is genuinely good to see him: he is one of the only people from my high school, or the one near where I worked as a teen, that via facebook or some other networking means hadn't been found and labeled: Married, Divorced, Parent, etc and I tell him as much.  I admit I do, now I can check him off in my head.  Our funny little ways of keeping track of one another that get complained about but that at the end of the day matter, afterall.  Me, I have a Mama-Soul as part of my spirit, and a tight-knit tribe of Family which marked me deep in the place that gets marked by how we are nurtured, so knowing where and how people are adds to my security.  I grounded in this, and was happy to connect again to this guy.

But It's been a good year, and that is the line that has the little wick attached.  It's the line that when gionng through my head while walking out of Brian's house this morning in desperate strides towards the nearest wifi-having local coffee shop, triggered the light inside to tell me the Muses are near.  There is no other way to explain this to you if it is not your experience--the best I can do is what I always do when I sit down and write.  Just tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth and follow that little feeling of light.  I do not know when it started but I do know that it is real, it is the most real thing I know.  It is a feeling that comes on inside that alerts me to the inner creativity the boundless place and my duty, my calling here on this earth no matter what else is to bring it to the surface, to midwife it and breathe in to it the life it needs to fly.  And when I disregard it I get short and turn in to an asshole and so help me if you cross my way when I am in the middle of my dance with the Muse.  So help me, that is, should you make her lift her skirts and high-heeled or bare-footed run away.

But what a superstition that is, too?  Writing involves discipline and the most clear lesson I learned in the past two years is to not underestimate what happens by simple alchemy of action. Showing up, not bitching, and doing what the hell's got to get done, which almost always is what's right in front of me. It's more than just saying ahhh yea I will start with It's been a good year because that is where the little light is attached.  It's also bringing in to the coffe shop two books that really turn me on and reading a while this morning, and even more it's about sitting down especially when the light hasn't or doesn't feel like it's going to come. 

It's been a good year.  In November it was the Harvest New Year and starting out--the first week of the new year!--my bank account was in the red.  So what was in front of me was get a better job and get your finances re-ordered, no matter what. So I did because after the last two years of my life dont ever underestimate my hustle.  Turns out now I get to manage this way hip, way mellow local coffee shop in the Pines where I live.  It's brand new and the boss needed someone with experience in community building and coffee-shop culture, which has nothing to do with caffeine and everything to do with supporting and growing your local tribe.  Even the business model functions that way and I brought to this my barista-ing for Peggy those years back at Play It Again in Chestertown, as well as the local art, food and music movement we grew around The Oregon Dialogue.  So far sooo good.  It overlooks the Bay and River on the west side of the inlet of Ocean City.  I watch the sun come up every morning and breathe and exhilarate in how fucking rad it is to be alive. 

And I am writing, and chilling a lot outside, and that is that.  It's been a good year.  In November 2008 I left my relationship of 6 years.  Right after that Josh and I tried to be lovers after a decade of being Muse to one another.  I still believe he was a true love, but we ended too because just because something's true doesn't mean it's meant to be.  Losing him, and leaving Brandon and Chestertown and Anngar Farm all at the same time was the single most painful part of my life and from start to finish it lasted until around the middle of this summer. 

It's been a good year.

I worked for Chesapeake College when I left Bran, I was one of four people who started the GED and community English program that now serves all five counties on the upper and mid Eastern Shore.  I worked my fucking ass off while I was there, and stepped down in May after living in isolation for a year out on the Choptank River and licking my wounds.  I was lonely and needed family and friends. I went on a month long sabbatical in the Pac NW in May and June and while there had more than one other-world experience of being Called again.  I moved back to mom's at the beach after that and partied like a rock star all summer long and still found that I had one more hall to cross to transition my life from Brandon-Josh-Chesapeake to the one that lay beyond.  This stuff cant be made up, you know?  The light within is real, what if that is our only choice, to surrender to the myth of what could be and give it our all to bring it to life?  How about learning that the only way to do this is to do it!?  And what about the struggle of being a woman and feeling this is the work you're meant to do?  This is subject matter for another post (or a whole damn book, ehem...) but what about that?  I know plenty of artist men whose art is their main and only priority.  What about when you're a woman with the same compulsion, what happens then? When the pain is that bad I know now that actually it's my only choice, to believe in this mid-wifing and keep breathing and trusting in the birth about to come.  The pain is my spirit--not a religious thing I am talking about the place inside of I AM--calling out a red alert to listen the hell up.

It's been a good year.  Tuesday night I watched Candace, Jessica, Shanika and LaShae walk in their caps and gowns and receive their Maryland State High School Diplomas.  They were four of 43 graduates from Chesapeake in just the last six months!  And at one time I held each of those girls hand in hand.  I hooped and hollered from the audience because I dont work there anymore so now it's okay for me to be wild and exuberant and un-professional even if it seems I'm acting a fool.

It's been a good year.  I dont live in fantasy anymore about a man who's love will finally change or set me free.  I dont dream of someday when I get to do.....all these millions of different passion-fueled things.  For the first time in my life I wake up now and just live today.  Seriously.  It's the first time in my life I've ever done that, you dig how crazy that sounds?  The passing from then to now was long and great and so dark at times that I often forgot what path I was on.  But I am me today and at peace with who I am.  All I need to do now is trust in her day to day. 

And pay attention to when the wick-light comes on, by listening and more, taking action on what's right in front of me.  By practicing what I learned in those two years which is easy to say but takes a while to get the footwork right. It sounds silly maybe but what the hell is there other than saying yes ok, the next step is just be present that's how right now that I can Show up, and the peace is inside knowing that the rest will be what it will be. 

What's Rad: Alone in the Wilderness--Dead calm and zero degrees....

Dad and I are flipping back and forth between the Ravens game and Public Television, where they are showing Alone in the Wilderness.  It's a movie made of footage that a retired man named Dick Proenneke took in 1967 when he decided to move in to the remote mountains and hand-build a cabin and live for the next 35 years.  It's phenomenal, peaceful, reverent in its simplicity.  So much lately--as I've risen each day before the sun to go in and open the new coffee house here at the beach that I am helping create--I stand in the clear cold air and smell the trees and see the stars and I think about being outdoors in the fall, living on the road in the tall deep forests and high mountains.  How touchingly pure and wondrous that time of my life was, waking up in the tent, frost-covered, seeing my breath, coming back to life each day with the sun.  I hope Brandon knows about this film.  God did we have an amazing time living out on the road...  Anyhow Alone in the Wilderness is rad, the footage stunning and inspiring and the timing impeccable, as if meant to help me celebrate the wild spirit in me so happy to be outdoors and free to roam...

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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.

Poems

You let go of me I could feel it but really that is because I am used to my feet they feel like wheels. So when you let go it wasn’t the pounds that I felt unload it was more just a breeze, a breeze and a feeling of certainty at the direction in my feet.

At night I watch the geese fly over the parked combines there are prisms there that circle under their wings. You can’t see them as usual in the night but if you try you sure can see them in the wind.

I wish it could have been different. The holly trees are freezing but still there is green on the limb, and in the white sun and the blue sky even winter can’t steal the red berry away from the pointed leaf. I wish it could have been different I wish this could have been a long walk and the holly trees and pines and parts where the geese flock overhead could have just been our alone parts not when we had to say goodbye.

**

There was a music machine out there in the field I tried for days but couldn’t learn to work it. It wasn’t going to be right without you. It never would have been right. Wait as I did for days it could have played if you had joined me but I get it, that was a long walk for you and also I know how you don’t like it when you have to be cold.

**

Try as I may for days I never know how to say goodbye. It is an instinct in me unnatural as loons in the dark their lone spooky haunted cry. Please, please say no. Please don’t make this when we have to go. Go somewhere instead inside a cave for me and wait; pray, draw pictures, cook for yourself a stew over the open fires. Let me just get the words right heaven knows I don’t want to have to go.

**

Why couldn’t it have been different?

The blood that pains me is just the blood of the berries from the tree. For some it is poison, but for others it is just exactly the right juice that life needs.
12/09
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It was without poetry that she left
It was without poetry that she left him
It was without poetry that she left him
home
alone
Dying
Dying the deaths that death dies without a shape or cause. The vulture’s death, the death of courses, the kind that eats the eyes the eyes that see first before they burn. Burn the burn of burning done, done without expectation without vexation without sight. Because they forgot sight and they didn’t have far to go. Fallen out like rockets burned, just the fuel burst and black smoke left and the smell of petrol on the air. Burnt rubber. Eyes fallen out like rocket holes in the sky. Like holes in the sky eyes. The rocket eyes like fallen horses horses fallen out of the sky, horse hooves beating the ground a soldier’s march a sound of death of death brigade of soldiers marching along the horse hooves pound. The horse hooves pound that echoes in the sky, the skyeyes of wide, widened hope, of new eyed horizon and wizened direction of turbulence. Of turbulence the measure is the sky, the rounds you take, the rounds you take before they come and before they remind you that they are here to take you home. God-damned death bastards pretty as, plain as stone. Burdened, this home this homecoming this tramp walking and this road that they will go. The thunder, the thunder noises of snakes sound, of hooves pound, of eyes blink blink opening reminding she’s still got far left she’s still got to go
4/09