"It is play, not properness, that is the central artery, the core, the brain stem of creative life. The impulse to play is an instinct..."~Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I moved to Laguna because one day in May on a field trip my students and I hiked the canyon at Crystal Cove. That day for the first time since I'd been south I felt the mama impulse in my blood. That means I could feel the land rise and fall, it means that my breathe as if breathing earth particles caught then plummeted in silent then threshold spirit-plateaus. Like the earth was actually breathing me. I forgot how it felt to be so connected to the green, even though it was coming to me in my dreams. I looked on the map when I got back to my room in Huntington that day and saw the wilderness surrounding Laguna. In the most quiet place in my heart where I go when I get still or maybe where stillness goes when I get my heart I quieted then asked me, I mean spirit-me, what do you want and this little apartment here, that's what, when the silence parted, I could see. Fall has never had such a thrill.
The two first months here I ran in constant press in preparation for grad school which was between two major trips back east. It was not until Beth came the weekend before last that I could be here, now. Grief can be so hectic the way it pushes you around.
Tonight I made dinner then sat outside under my plants and twinkle lights the canyon walls above me houses constellating the ridge like touchable stars. Oh big California, oh rancher artist adobe houses on cliffs I could put 9 of my little apartments inside. 12 if you count your deck. 16 your garage and carport with the at least two antique cars....
In the last two chapters of one of my textbooks for gradschool I read about contemplative therapies. I was sitting in the crazy sun. I learned that Maslow and others have long issued what came to me those early months my first fall out of college, when I gave myself to poetry and meditation each and every day. That human consciousness, for most of us, is in its infancy. That with the mere mind and heart alone we are capable of sheer galaxies inside. I strapped in, alone, back then and have never stopped enjoying the ride. Since then it has been my only and final guide.
It's nice to be not so alone in that anymore. To know what this path has all been for, or to have one tiny clue anyhow. It's really nice to be outside at dinner, in the warm fall in California, the mama hush cradling me in her round green Laguna arms.
Past the flat side of the Eastern Shore, past the Bay, past the sprawl of the Route 2 corridor, past the cities and burbs where I'm from...
...Come the hills. Where the mountains start, Western Maryland where my brother and his lady and the sweetest ever little babe live. I slept so full last night, long sweet talks with Sean and Jamie til our eyes were part closed, then the peepers out my window, Carl Jung on my chest. Heee heee and baby cuddles all morning long....
I saw this unreal show last week. Elizabeth and the Catapult. My friend Jeff invited me. It happened at a venue that I can walk to from work--the coffee shop where I love to do my writing! Jeff's wife Susan is the reason I am a writer and now Jeff is the reason that I am amped for live music again.
Nite Cat's been redone to fit about 40 to 50 people in it's back room and Mangold Entertainment who books for Peir Six and Rams Head is bringing in the music. They added a corner stage, heightened the ceiling so that the timber frame is now exposed and painted it black. I am not one to know about acoustics and the effect that building aesthetics have on sound, but if I were I'd figure that the reason for the change. That, and it looks cool.
So, the band. At one point I looked around the room and thought, this must be what it was like when people saw Jenny Lewis play for the first time. Elizabeth's vocals and presence are both that good and the band, musically, is just the right trippy blend of circusy sound and entertainment, and raw but cohesive beauty that vacates the center of my heart in a hot breathy way and makes my blood run funny and fast, so that the swell just makes me move or cry with joy. God-damn did I come back in to me that night, it was the end of a long day of intake, end of an even longer week--and I'd been trippin that day a little over having to make some big decisions and so almost backed out of our plans. Next thing I knew tho there I was listening to the opener this singer/songwriter guy with great long folky lyrics and funny stories about his granpaw and a voice that actually sounded better without the mic. That part of me, the poetry in the middle of the night the mamamoon star earth worshiper who speaks and believes in the ancient tongue, in live fires and barefeet, in six or seven people sleepy in my kitchen for pancakes still punchdrunk with wildeyes, that inner spiral me lit up in a way it hasn't all year, and seriously, like I said, my breath quickened.
The only other time that happened this summer was when Brooks played me his solo stuff on his Ipod.
By the time Elizabeth, whose head from behind the piano and under her fedora kept bobbing up and down like a muppet at the end of the show when the grand performance in the big hall came on, and who also had the widest sexiest smiling eyes that closed and opened just right the kind with a secret and laughter in there, started really singing that fabulous loud voice smooth as the curve of quiet night sky, the words came to me and the poetry was all bubbling up and I was, a couple times, so touched I was laughing out loud.
Ahhh, muse-ic. What you do to my soul.
The next night I wondered back in, just to see if anything was happening... And got to watch Charlotte Martin perform. She was good, a lot like Tori Amos which I admire the beauty and talent of but not enough to listen to multiple songs in one sitting cuz they just start to sound the same. I was happy I went tho, it was a great way to spend Friday night and at one point she asked the audience who there was from Easton or the general area and only me and two other guys raised our hands. It was packed house. I was impressed. The guy that opened for her, Matt Duke, was equally good in an intense I just pricked my finger on a stickerbush kinda way and it hurts and I dont want to look but have to...He disturbed me but made me laugh too, the best thing he did was cover you are my sunshine which makes me think he's tender and actually hasn't found his comfortability with this, yet? I'd see him again if he headlined.
I'm going on vacation tomorrow for 10 whole, sweet clean days!!!! I am seeing three shows, too, at least...! I'm thinking a lot about when I was little and used to dance in my tights in the driveway to the boombox Lisa Lisa or Prince or Miami Sound Machine, then in middle school at the sock hops on Friday afternoon god how good was Rob Base!? and then later still when I was teenagy and pissy and would throw myself brutally in to the middle of the pits at the old firehall shows. Fishkiss Mustard Seed Magic or S.Q.U.I.D VRKOLAKA (i looooved the drummer!) of course the PeeTanks, too. Sonic Youth at Michael's. The Beasties too many times to count. The HFStivle when it was only $6 for ten or 12 bands!? Getting Veruca Salt's autograph when they played the second stage. Stars in my eyes....Flannel shirts and Doc Martens.
What it's like in the winter to stay long up late, with poetry and paints and witching hour muse-ic all fluent and braided and what I have in common with the most eternal space.
It's Wednesday in October in Choptank, I've been up on and off since 2am. The fog is lifting, there is a great pale blue sky coming on the West horizon. I have 24 days left here. I am alive, shining.
In 2004 in October I was living temporarily on my buddy Larry's floor in Seattle. This was after five months living in the mostly undeveloped sections of the National Forests across the US. There was a fierce and bitter election going on, and I felt more at home living in the woods. It's the most patriotic I have ever been: connected as I was to "my" land. After all those days of dirty corduroys boots and bathing with a plastic bin, Seattle was a good time. We went to China town everyday, took long walkabouts that lasted for hours and hours along the Puget Sound and between the red brick alleys and up the long, long steep hills with the yellow leaves falling over the streets. At night we brought back harvest foods for dinner from the market. First time I ever tried honey crisps and homemade apple cobbler was our desert most of the nights I was there.
After about three weeks of that the land was calling us again, so we planned a camping trip in to the Olympic Mountains. It was glorious a blue and green day and clear mountain air when we ferried over the Sound and got on the road to Port Angeles. I was ready. We hiked 21 miles in 2 and a half days I had what felt like the most heavyass pack on my back since it was the gnarliest uphill back country trail I'd ever done. We gained several thousand feet each day on switchbacks but the alpine meadows and icy streams, the ponds and the fresh pine smells made me happier than I'd been the whole trip, all five months. I felt like what I was doing, step by step slowly slowly slowly uphill, was reviewing the whole of my time on the road. Conquering the path before me just by picking up and putting down one foot in front of the other, over and over, again and again. When I finally got to the summit I sat with the most satisfied, satiated exhaustion that I think I have ever felt.
It was glorious. I had done what I came to do, and there was nothing left now other than to carry on with the path ahead. I reveled in it, in that quiet settling peace that encompassed me and everything about me. It was the kind of satisfaction that sinks in without you knowing it and becomes a larger part of who you are.
A week later I was home on the Atlantic Coast to visit my mom. She took me to the beach so I could say hi and take a swim. It was gray, the end of October and only the surfers were out. It was colder than I remembered, but nothing like the feeling of freezing that numbs your toes on the North Pacific Coast. I changed on the beach and jumped in.
The Atlantic raised me. I love her the way I love inner calm. I've always, since I was small, ritualized my first swim of the season--it's the kind of info that my brother and I call one another with just to affirm the specialness--Had my first swim today--you been in yet? Usually I mark the end of the season with tears, just a few, but they always come. That year, right after my hike, and after spending months away from my Mama the Atlantic, and my mama, at home, what I needed was to reconnect, to bathe in something eternal and sure to me as me. What I needed was to take the plunge, to rinse it all off, to remind that at the end of an uphill climb what comes is rest and rejuvenation.
Every fall now I try to take that plunge, and today was the day, and sure as I am sitting here now at the Pines, I believe today was the most glorious beach day that I saw, all summer long. It started out with thick fat fog. Grey-white and the dark line of the ground.
Season's over, I am clean. I am at the summit, looking all around. I am contemplating, getting ready to take the next step but in which direction? From here I can see, all around....
i'm working A Lot these days it is fall semester re-enrollment time and all i do is get new students registered hola hola bienveindo or how are you welcome i'm going to test you but it's so i can help dont be scared. last week i passed my one year anniversary at this job.
bob dylan keeps singing to me i feel a change coming on. in life, this is all there is, change. perenial as the breeze.
i haven't written anything all week, except for friday poetry day the day i spent in pjs with books all day because the night before the calling moved in me sudden like it does which is when i so love it the most. so thursday night after i worked late i came home all charged and pumped and just kept moving got tea climbed in to bed, in to soft, cool, happy bed my sweet little nest of me pillows and softness and my precious sheets, my arms full of books my heart with the illustrious light. this little poem that came out of all that meat i come to bed carrying arms full of you and i love you every one, we will make love, arms full of us, all night, in the morning i will prop up and revisit you with a smile And how good that felt to wake up and do just that, and it's only a few days later but i haven't been writing or on the net at all, so i had to come here, and just let some of it download out.
it is fall out, how i love to lie still in the quiet air in the morning. i got home tonight and mat and pat or else ruth or the wacky neighbors to my other side were having a fire. o smoke smell that i love...sweet prayers that linger but go eventually above. and the air coming off the river is cool and with no balm. the peepers speak loud to the deep clear night and tomorrow is september's full moon. have you heard it, the first geese calls?
i want to blog about this, about passings, the earth walk, the time outside and our connections. i want to blog about my grlfriends and how they save my ass again and again. i want to blog about classism and seeing from the bottom up instead of the established and oft unquestioned view of the elite out, or down. i want to blog about memoirs and starting again and again and writing even though it makes your heart hurt. i want to blog about spiders and flowers and how that is the saddest part of fall when the flowers start to disappear. i want to blog about change and the difference one year can make, about last year this time and all that longing spent staring at the corn, hearing the paper stalks shake, seeing the fall sky spread, driving and driving the yellow backroads in the dry afternoons. how different it all is, how much has, and so of course how little has, changed. i want to blog about how i still cant believe and keep forgetting that i am 32.
the desiderata has been showing up again, and again, to me. it is so good, it's own magnificent prayer.
i'm taking a lot of new stuff on. creatively. it all lives in me and is always there, like air, even when i dont see it or cant remember it.
i'm tired of my job, there is no joy left in the chalky burnt ruin at the wick of me. the people that i work with i am posting pics of them to remember that before we are workers we are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, lovers, friends. they are shining stars.
i work hard. i try to do good work. we all do. and like me, we all let people down. we are all unique, and ascending, and all also so very much the same.
