I was gone fifteen days.

Not really sure what happened other than I slept eight hours last night, almost to the exact minute, and felt clean and clear waking up in my bed in the loft in the canyon.  In the California mythos of sunshine-wintertime.

I was gone fifteen days but the truth is it was way, way longer than that.  On Friday Uncle Tim, who is my godfather by the soul way, called in the morning.  It was Ocean Pines gray out which is its own special prison that keeps the winter folk away.  The thing is with sock-in like that marsh gasses keep the soil tender-moist and smelling green.  So we took a four mile tall tree walk on a path he tends for the Rec department and I cried those hot soul-cleanse tears that are meant only for God-ppl and wise women, which of course are the same thing.  Helped me to take serious the karma I have between me and my own god-kids, too.  Later I found out about Derynne's brother and couldn't see straight again.

So Konan came through winding us up at Cork Bar downtown which in a million different scenarios if I had to hand-pick that would be down towards 9 hundred ninety thousand on the list.  But here's the thing, the Wild proclamation:  you just never know you know?  We wound up late night in WOC and that there was the only place in the world I needed to be, kicking it w his real home grls and seeing myself in them in a way I haven't seen me in Way. Too. Long a time.

The next day I stayed in pajamas til 7 pm and watched the Red Tent and ate the soup broth I'd made/been making since the first night at home.  Witchy bitches make witchy brew.  We watched the Ravens rock Pitt like we all knew was coming.  WILD card that's Baltimore, that special Baltimore one-eyed medicine some mistake as bad (false-pride).

And that's what's up, tracking home, the special tendencies that run the soul of who you are cuz of the land peopled through of from-where-you-come.  If you can read and track this, good for you.  If you can't you need help dark-seeing which means between the lines.  Linguistics.  Can't be studied. Someone should tell Pacifica that.

Point is this all happened or started back the night I went to HB to meet Yasi and Konan started blowing me up--that's the thing about WILD, all cards eventually come a calling and that's the thing about one-eyed medicine.  It's your duty to rise up when the reminder comes: you CAN see.

So now Humboldt makes sense, the long 101 journey home again to the earth and the tides that rise.  I come living back to the canyon, no food in my hobbit dwelling just coffee and no phone charger to keep me tied to time and ties and all that hell.  I write these words and The Light comes on which is Erin Mac back there in Baldamore making her next moves saying wutsup.  She comes through as WILD does, like I useta say and always will, Poetry is my only religion.



That is what's up.

I know Who I am.   I need little else than that.

Prayers that all ppl get right. Or Wild.  Either or is the same.  Go listen to some good music if you're dead!

I'm going for a swim.

But anyway here I am

Before I went east the week before last I had slipped in somewhere, not sure exactly where but easy as a veil so sheathy you barely notice it being placed over your eyes it had happened, I was halfing-it.  Slipped in: to a way of thinking edged with doubt on the inside line of things. A tense feeling of having to try to figure things out, me fighting it and it gaining muscle because of my fight.  I knew I was fighting it too which is the worst kind of strain.  August, last year, when I got in my car with 800 bucks in a brown paper bag and my spirit full of good luck and set to head west it was a day at a time of bliss and wonderment that lasted almost entirely through til the middle of April. After living like that which let me tell you is a sweet and light way to live slipping in is painful.  Erin my cousin came for 10 days, this was April, I flipped right after that and never was quite righted.  A number of things in a row stacked up all at once all having to do with people back in Maryland I love.  Suddenly I was feeling like my decision to be here, however grace touched and true, was wrong.  So I was fighting the natural ebb of these doubts.  It was the fighting that made it way worse.

California has helped tremendously since I've been back.  The sparkle of the day when I flew in to John Wayne, Deryyne's smile and hug among all the fast cars and cabs that said so genuine I missed you!  My ride that afternoon on my bike next to PCH was the kind of ride where my bike feels like its being compelled by the concrete, like my bike itself has a place to go and I just get to be along for the ride.  The way the wind always is full of the sea.  The way it communicates with my skin.   That happiness of the light rolling around on the waves.  It just felt so right to be back.  Me and my book had dinner at what I know to be as the best little Mexican joint in Huntington Beach.  It's tucked away you have to live here to know it.  I rode to Deryyne's after for the Stanley Cup.  That night I walked in to my little room on Main Street so contented all I could do was celebrate me:  the journey I took and am still taking, the space of mine, my whole own little world animated by the tender small regularities of my Orange County rounds.

It was amazing to go east my soul needed it to feel calm.  I had to see Mandy to look in her eyes, and dance with Jott for both of us, and I needed the green of the east coast hard wood heady hardy trees.  I needed to sit a long time and just hush with my mom and cuddle with Erin and hug her mom, I needed to hear the high-pitch Grammy laugh of surprise come out of my dad.  I really needed to be close to my niece, and sister-in-law, and especially my brother the new dad.  I really needed to hug my grandma again.

But anyway here I am.  It's so good to be home.

Island culture & the tribe of cool

Patrick my cousin was laughing this morning at breakfast. He's still a little drunk I think, and so it's that glowy slap happiness that is funniest of all.

When he laughs his voice distinctly reminds me of a ladder, this ascending quality that in my cousin Ryan sounds like ringing bells.

You know what Chris told me? Patrick laughs out, stepping up with each word and giggle breath.

Chris is Jackie's soon to be husband in the Carharts and rubber boots with the thick sandwich of New England mouthed around every word he says.

What?

That if you want to find someone here on the island the best thing to do is to just go sit in there house and wait for them to show up. Resounding steps of chortle and coffee gulps after this. It is true tho, Pat and Chris are right, and the B&B owner comes in and tells a story of coming home from errands this week to find the friend of her teenage son lounging around on the third floor of the house, waiting for her son to return. I didn't know this was island culture, she adds, til I got a teenage son.

Not being connected--no cell service and many without even a phone as over 70% of the residents here are just summer folk--is so, so nice. You forget what it means, how easy it is, to just be out and about. To not wait for life to happen, but to make for it yourself...

It reminds me of 1995, living at the beach, pre-cell phone and none of us had landlines. You went on a whim, and let shit happen. In The New York Years diPrima writes wistfully about this, about the tribe of cool to whom I've always sought after, the existence of which predates written history and is, indeed, the reason for expansion, poetry, artistry and all forms of adrenaline~those on the subversive edge of things~how in Manhattan in the 40's this tribe was so in tune with one another and the undercurrent of pure Life imbibing them each that they actually called it swinging, how they lived. Swinging meant get your work done: the clean white line of purity which so tapped in to this force, then allow for, submit to the natural movement of the day. Regular encounters with one another were natural and occurred by virtue of this discipline: wrestling the creative spirit to its hard line, then releasing its energy to throttle the crew back together somewhere on the lower streets say of the Bowery and beyond.

As if something magic, something big, something at times so shadowed and at others glowing in illustriousness so much so the whiteness may burn you apart, was webbing us all together no matter what. Wrestled in to its course, or hugely enormous and pushing us along...

What McClure meant by Writ in Eternity~and what I find most sacred among us mad genius'~the fine alchemy of grabbing for that eternity in a harnessed moment of transcendence and union, in which we get to write, at odds til it blends perfect in to the the mystery, fine, alluring, terrifying, of being written equally by the reverb of our own personal movement of the quill.... The conflicting dual, within the mass whole.

Island culture, no doubt, has been very very good for me....

Circles

It was like crashing chin first on boulders, coming home, and by the time I got to the Pines I was turned every kind of inside out and I knew it was bad when even the ocean didn't speak of home.

I felt myself falling down, too, which was the frustrating part, wanting so badly to hold on to something and knowing that it was the force of my grip complicating the motion, the vortex of energy, the circles, going around and around like a downtown highrise revolving door that all the fancy people walk through. Catalytic energy of my self, working against myself, and the anger at the whole damn thing unravelling simply because I didn't, I so badly didn't want it to unravel at all.

By yesterday evening the rain came though, and my soul was emptied by then and ready for the cleanse I was so soothed all the way through. I spent the whole day working peace, swirling circles, new circles of light at my room at the beach. All I originally intended was to set up my quiet spot, set up my candles and little things of magic and sacred and power in the corner in my room so I put the windows up to burn the sage and other oils and herbs so of course by then, by the time fire and all that summer air was involved it turned quickly, happily in to an all day affair. Mom got home in the afternoon and I was blessing herbs all over the counter and we laughed the crazy laugh when I caught her with her eyes closed, blessing them too. We were giddy, Chels was in the hospital about to bring Savanah in to the world and maybe that's what started it all, sending her reiki and peace and how powerfully psychic that early day opening made me, I literally felt the contractions in her back as I sung sweet quiets of peace from my spirit to hers. Sweet sweet peace I held her across the miles in my arms, allowing for the true steady and calm. Sean in the meantime texted he was at the airport waiting, having been bumped to a flight five hours later and they gave him $400 to wait, and so he ended up flying with his fiance on the flight her company booked for her and so at the end of the day serendipity, even on the east coast, the hard dismantled cement and gray and grease and ego-tapes of mean and goddamnits revving always in the people's head east coast, serendipity, light spirit, prevail. Sky's the limit I texted him and sent him the mind vision of us out front of his house in Columbia arms at the sky like Cindy always does chest open and hearts pointed at the sun. Laughing, laughing, laughing in knowledge of the wisdom truth that as the heart goes the Universe seeks to affirm.

The best picture ever came at 4:30 Grandma with the baby in her arms. By dinner my room was the fabulous messy of explosion that comes first whenever I clean or organize anything visual and magical as I am. Mom's health food tasted so great, the rains came in sheets, the sky looked yellow with hysterical late night sun battling the storm for its final chance to poke out. The McMullen reunion is Sunday, I start work Monday, tonight I hold Savanah for the very first time.

My laundry's almost done, Sean's folded in to the streets of Memphis, Dad is home early for the weekend from Lanham having graduated 130 students last night spouting anger and politics but I smile at him the face of quiet and the moon. Even though my homecoming was anything but smooth I myself am alighting again and maybe ready now to return all the calls and texts and messages that keep coming in. I love the moist way of muted morning light coming in through my room at the Pines. I love the magic of life, reverent, dirty, ebbing and crashing, re-surfacing again and again. There is a surfboard in our kitchen and out back the forest is full of summer green. My family is touching down in various different spectacular forms it is the reminder of stability, which is another means of saying the constancy of change change change.

I stalk myself on Facebook & other dear dear musings

I dont know how long this will last.

Mars is in retrograde and of course mercury, too--which will end soon--tomorrow in fact, or maybe friday i dont remember and am more concerned, this cycle, with the new moon tomorrow/tonite anyhow bc it is january, time of super intuition for me so with this new moon it is that lovely suspended place of breathless truth that surfaces sure as air in a empty tin can.


When mars, which is my main ruling planet, retros if you're thrillseeking and dramamama and gogogo and ambitious and tempestuous and sexual and all those firey, extroverted things that a mars-full personality embodies then suddenly all that mellows, it reverses, turns its eye within. And anything no longer organically brimming with the fire of your nature dies. I mean, all of us, we're all in that kind of review right now quite naturally wandering away from old passions no longer quaking or meant to quake from inside. The planet responsible for war and fire and passion is holding still, its aspects in us are caught cradled in the spinning spindle ebb of in-this-moment time right now. Get it? All you have to do is look.

So yea, i dont know how long this will last--any of this, this blogging here, this living here, this job here, this sweet romance with the writer teacher astrology guy, this projection of all that i love in to you dear future. Cuz I want to I want to blog I want to write, I want to download about Kate and her fellow and DC and quite farms in Talbot County and 3D glasses and ESL departments and international writers and music and my crazy stupid friends. But I am as a narcissist in the depths of the inverted mirror right now so aware of the necessity of the un-necssity of self-obsession. i laugh at me. who knows what will come?? Dear dear future, dear time that i hold precious as i hold me near. Dear writing retreat by the sea. Dear one way ticket to the PNW that still has to be. Dear cousins, cousins cousins leaving, living on islands, getting married, having babies dear family so much family to get to love. Dear brother how i pray. texas? PA? I pray once that you will not then once more for peace wherever you will go. One way ticket anywhere, but so much family to show up for. My typewriter, dear typewriter you called at me all fall long and now your gone? All that, all that fucking poetry and what and where to do. Dear Baltimore, dear dear Baltimore, underground. Dear, dear home. Dear Memoirs. O holy dear Memoirs, at least those words i know. i know i know sure as the story keeps coming.

At night I dream of typing on you and wake up with the same feeling I used to get from Josh. It is chokey and fills me with delightful edge. My brother, who might be moving. Money, so much obligation to things. ESL programs and departments meant to grow. Careers. Whoever would've thought I'd make a fucking career? And Poetry, how i turned you the fuck off again but here, from my trail-side view i see your eyes and nose poking over the hump of that cabin over there, just up the hill. Dont watch me like that, haven't you at least learned by now i never buy the bullshit lie you're dead....

God help me in all the stillness O Holy War Crown of Mars Blessed Beeeeeeee Queen i will swallow blood by my own hand before I fall down dead of the dehydrated disease....