Good Morning, I love you.

It was cold when I left and cold when I got back and winter, with a shock that felt like jaws snap-clamping together, I get it, you're here.

I've always avoided you before.  My muscles would start to clench before I even got out the door, my body on frigid lock-down against the cold.  Shivers would start the second I felt the air.  I guess I just figured if I squinched my eyes tight enough I could somehow will the weather away.

I dreamt of a hispanic man it was weeks ago he was short like most my favorite hispanics are.  He was helping me my mom and dad remodel the house I lived in and he took me aside and said you know you are a mole, this is your medicine.  I looked at him and said thanks, I looked really deep at him so he'd get I meant it.  Then I took his pretty hispanic girl to my side and hugged her til her heart was well again which I did by looking third eye to eye.  I didn't know her heart was bad but in my dream I felt it as soon as by my eye to eye hug it was made well.  This I did for him as thanks, then I walked back to him and said please come to me when I am not asleep and remind me of this mole medicine.  I woke and not long after remembered that dream and mole medicine is intimately connected to the earth and really needs fresh air.  We know the truth before it ever is seen...

So now winter, whatcha gone do?  I relish you, I go to the ocean or the woods everyday now and I walk and I breathe.  I dont shiver, I am awake.  In the morning when I open the shop as soon as everything is ready I step down on to the docks and I breathe the fresh air.  Good morning, I say.  Good morning, I love you.  And winter there's where you're a show off, if you were a man I'd a left you a long time ago for that song and dance so dazzling it's almost boring, so old.  Trying always to impress me like that.  How you poke your light through the grey shadows or flurries of snow.  How you wash the river with so much longing it is all I can do to not dive in.  I guess I am lying, huh?  Because show off as you are you still get me, everytime.

BBH confessions. A topic I dont share about very often...

So, maybe I'm not so good at relationships.

I dont mean all relationships. I'm pretty good at being a family member among family members. I have incredible girlfriends, the best you can imagine for real. And everywhere I go I make friends easily. I am social, I enjoy people, I enjoy getting to know them and hear about them and understand a little about their funny intricacies like why they like ketchup on popcorn or cant fall asleep if they watch horror movies before bed or about that miserable time that the neighbor hit a squirrel and how all these years later in the fall they buy seed just to see the squirrels gnarl away and get fat fat fat. I think people are so cool, you know? Every person has this universe of life inside them so ready to unfold. I've said it before: I fall in love a little with everyone that I know.

Which could in fact be the reason I have such a god damn time with the men.

Or boys. At my age, 33, it's a relative term.

I had someone tell me last night that he wanted to see if we could just kick it, just hang out and watch tv instead of making out all night. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? (Yea yea I'm 33 and I still make out. O goddess bless, may it continue!!)

And therein, the problem. I am too passionate about everyone, everything. I get too bored, too settled, too without the fire of newness to keep me alive inside...and baby, I'm ready to roll....

I wrote a poem once, when I lived in Oregon. The first line I was 16 my vagina ready to swallow the world. A little context people: they say young grrrls confuse sex for love. It's true, I did, but what I really believe I was busy learning about was sex for power. I dont know what's gotten in to me today to write so blatantly about this, especially now that my blog's back up on facebook for crying the fuck out loud, but hey. Past is past. I didn't sleep with a lot of guys, dont mis-read me here. What I am saying is that I was fascinated, and still am, by the twinkle concept. The life inside that brimmed out of people, and sexuality was it's easiest means of translation. Slippery kissing in the August heat outside of houseparty air and breath all mixed up as one big heat, styrofoam Eddie's cup full of pink wine and sprite. Sneaking out the basement and getting picked up by my high school sweetheart to go to the church parking lot and get in the back of his jeep. Kissing Kevin for the first time after nights and nights of all that thick context in the air. Allure and mystery rolled in to one, and the more it stays permanently uncatchable, the more fun.

I never wanted to be a man-eater I for real was just trying to live my life, to learn and be in the moment and have fun...

When you're young like that and a woman it's possible to be naive to the identity issues this can cause, the societal blame and shame people are going to expect you to carry. That kind of thing stores up, and it did for me, too. I demonized myself, loathed who I'd been as a young woman because of someone else's idea that it was wrong. When I got clean I had this backlog of guilt for my behavior, for my sexuality, for being passionate which does not mean the same thing as sexual, but for also being sexually alive, an organic and healthy, rhythmically wild and open creature. I got this new idea that commitment was the only "right" way and further, that love and marriage were the only "right" natural next steps. I twisted and contorted myself in to said form.

Six-years. I was in a six year relationship (marriage-free, he couldn't have that discussion and the truth is, for reasons I didn't then understand, neither could I) that ended because despite the fact that he was kind, funny, adorable, loyal, hard-working AND that we had lots in common, the last year and a half of life that I spent with him I was stuck in a low-grade depression. It colored everything I did. In hindsight, maybe I looked too much for him to fix me, looked too much for satisfaction in my own life through him and when those expectations didn't pan out I got harder and harder on him and on myself. Who knows? It's not escaped my awareness that I am hard to please. But a person can fall deep and forever trying to exhume what often should just lie still and let settle, so after a while I gained great peace in the fact that the freedom of leaving, regardless how bloody and painful it was, lightened me in ways I needed the same way one needs and takes for granted air.

There were other factors that led to our end, too. Emotional affair is a term that's come up lately in several conversations the past few days and the general consensus was that this can be worse than the real thing. Yea, so I had one of those. It's hard to say how that starts, where the line gets blurred between love-connection and friend. It's risky business, for sure, but perhaps this, this line blur is the one best illustrating the heart of my relationship commotion...as said: I. Dig. People. The fact that a single little glimmer of originality in someone's spirit can hook me on to them is in direct contrast to the idea that there is one, and one only, man out there for me. Not to say that there's not, and not, by any means at all, to say that I dont crave that. The soul mate... Sometimes I crave it so bad that it is a physical ache. But I've been there! I know how the whole fall in love make a life together thing works. There are a million little moments, a million and a half that you get the chance to look the other way...and or to re-take the chance of re-committing to your love, to the power of the connection that you initially had with the person. You have to make choices, again and again day after day that confirm the chance you're willing to take. To confirm the decision to stay connected. That fire dies, it can die. It dies slowly long work shift after shift and dinner in front of the tv. It dies quickly over a miscommunication when you finally try to talk but the words come out wrong and too late. It dies and so too does the passion for your self, for your very life, go with it. Maybe some people are contented, maybe lots are, with companionship and small talk. But that's not me, will never be. I am hungry, you know? Voraciously. It's part of my nature, how and who I am and fighting it only brings misery. I also know that love, love between partners, boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife or any other coupling one has can be flamed again, it can be fanned, rekindled and grown. There are choices, there are and I know this, I know about it, I believe in it. But for real, last week two of my cousins, TWO MORE OF MY twenty-something cousins got engaged. And all I can think is it will take a special man, a hell of a man, match the size and strength of my passion and spirit, to be big and bold and broad enough, not to mention mature enough, to recognize and make those choices again and again, year after year, with me.

So until then, society, what the hell's so wrong with a girl just having some fun, going dancing, and wanting to make out a lot in front of the TV?

Rush hour on the Eastern Shore

Dad called at 7:15. Who in the hell is calling me this early I thought which proves I was still mostly asleep since dad's the only one on the road at that time that would think to call while he's sitting in rush hour and he does this periodically so of course, really I knew it was him.

I had been laying here there since 6 anyway, partly awake, partly asleep, mostly listening to traffic. I am not used to so much noise in the morning and it wakes me up everyday the workers going to work in this large small country town, this busy little town road on which I live. Gives me body memories of Seattle and Larry's old place four blocks from the Pike Market, the shrill mechanics of the idling trucks and the air plunging gear shifts that woke me up every morning, and the smell of deisel fumes and the immediate waking craving ahhh sacred hunger for carbohydrates from the market and the fresh seagull air of the Sound.

I worked 12 hours yesterday enrolled close to 20 new students that's a half hour an ESL learner and three each for GED. I make it so the hours overlap but even so, when you have a day like yesterday where four of my six GED learners were disabled, two undiagnosed and two with IEPs, it's all that additional time on the phone and tracking down records and knowing, and hoping you know, who to call. I got home late and for the first time my apartment is whole, unpacked, and clean.

It was so quiet, and so empty of "stuff", so void of projects I didn't know what to do.

I thought about all the spinach in the fridge and how good it would be wilted with garlic and olive oil and sea salt over noodles and some mozzarella cheese. But it was near 9:30 already and so I wound up with some trisquits and soon before I knew it I was out, asleep and snuggled on my own soft couch. I awoke with the most tender feeling of love and awe for me, and my life. So aware sometimes and with the wonder because of the awareness at how precious, how frail, how soft this sweet little flash of a human life.

How grateful I am how grateful I am. I've never ever lived in a place so quiet, uncluttered, so mine--so noisy with the traffic and life and at once, so still. Mama's in the trees and moon right outside my window and thank goodness there's no screens cuz at Chop I got so used to stepping out to the earth barefeet and sweet green, breathing, and saying hello.

Hello, hello, hello.

dreams of churches

i woke up late except i guess it wasn't really late just super early--i had two text messages on my phone which doesn't mean anything except that i went to bed the first time really, really early which is to stay i didn't even wait up to see what they wrote back. i am surprised to have woken up so widely in the middle of the night because lately i have been sleeping as if for a loong loong time i'd forgotten but recently rediscovered how. but next thing i know it was 2am and i am laying there and i cant sleep and my mind is flat and sort of dull and i dont know i cant tell is that my mind or just the heat? and why, i ask my self, do i always live in places with no internet no air condition and no tv? i thought of what mike said brad told him which is it is a farce to lay in bed late at night when you cant sleep it's just your way of pretending still that your parents rule your world and that you are still, like, only 3.

i got up and chugged some water and laid back down but hated the sheets. they were so hot. soon i was crying this happens some times and tonight it happened next to the bathroom window screen. and it is near fall out and how i love the sound of all those peepers and even without my glasses i could see all the stars. and i wish i could say i was crying for the stars and for the roof right out the window and how it leaks and also for the grass that is grown so tall it scratches and tickles at the same time. but i wasn't, i wasn't crying for the confusion and the beauty of this life i was crying for him and for me, which isn't even to say i was crying for all the hims and hers and mes, tho i guess i was, but really i was just crying because sometimes for me there's still all this greif. and it was the thin kind that tells me there's nothing left and the kind of crying i do when i know there is something way way bigger just waiting inside. and try as i want to be bigger than i am it still always comes down to all about me.

i got on facebook and read people's info again and again, and really, i have some very, very clever friends.

we are all so good, so pure and whole in our brokeness. i love us, all. i love us as much as i do the sun, the river, a night full of wet heat and dry stars. if i could write a book with my heart instead of my words i would just write pictures of all of you and it would light up the page with castles and wine and goblets filled with rain. and our smiles would be diamonds and chandeliers and our pain would be brilliant scales on our arms beautiful as dragons and glowing emerald green.

i am whisking me now and making meals out of myself. it is august the heat is here and for the first time this summer, which for some is almost over but for me is just where it ought to be, i am wishing hard for rain.