The silent prayer

The hobbit house is built in to the side of Laguna Canyon and for that reason at night with no heat it feels cozy and held by the earth herself.  I have a space heater Annie and Tony gave me when I first moved in and that's all it takes to stay warm.  With lots of soaking rain the soil is green and smells like life.  Even the morning mist-gray feels right in an atmosphere like this, one that sings Allliiiiive!

Damnit even if the Gods themselves gave me a paintbrush I couldn't of hand-created a life more exactly specific to what I love.  This I tell Serena to ensure her, this, this our hard fought independence, our always-there choice, to live. What Laguna Beach for us actually means.  She has done it every step of the way as I have and I admire her fiercely and devotedly for this.  We will always have this.  I laugh then and say because they did!  I took my brush right from the God's hands!  Said gimme that I will choose the life I live!  Serena laughs too, this our secret, what we treasure and hold dear in the other.

It has been a long road since she left the treehouse upstairs.  Life, which in living gives us what we need.  We are so blessed I also tell her, and yes, yes we are I know, she says back to me.  I feel a gulp in my heart and for us both feel-say the silent prayer.

I am always so wrought through with home and the ties that bind.  Spent two years studying the psyche of this, of these things, and am convinced more than ever of the continuum of earth, of how she uses her people to soul-speak for a place, and in this way keeps sacred the tides of the land.  There is so much life outside any door.  When I first got to California the best part was how new it was.  I vowed never ever to take you for granted Holy California and even though sometimes I start to, in the end I never do.  Or still haven't.  And that's what life is.  To keep waking up. Again.

I consider family, too.  Back east, here.  Derynne and Cam, the kids.  We buried her brother in what for her I know was a long whir of endless sad.  Pacifica family and blessing the sacred space for Eve and Kalen to wed.  Visiting with Atticus, seeing clients again, waiting on Jasmine to get back for school.  Through it all there are tacos at Feast, the hot counter in San Juan with the pounds of chilaquiles, the clerks at the market downtown who tell you they missed seeing you, there is mermaid beach and the other secret spots and burrito joints with surf boys covered in tattoos.  It is amazing how our tiny rounds from day to day connect us in, make life, see us through the daily passings of grocery trips and recycling and take-out Chinese food.  See us to the big ones. Death, marriage, birth, tears and laughter. The sighs in between where words can not fit.

So it life again.  I come back to you.  I let you in.

Muscles that are strong enough

The rain of course, which is a million different creatures depending on who you are relative to the space you inhabit.  This morning it is skeleton fingers on the sky light six feet above my head in the little loft where I sleep--reminding without it we are dust but with too much this canyon could wash away.  As life, a terror or a blessing as well as the washing fluid dance of every nuance in between…

So the rain wakes me at 3:30 on a morning when I need to rise at 5 to leave for school.  And it is peculiar, how the body remembers.  I lay here and for no seeming reason recall December in 2004.  I'd been asleep in my old bed at Ocean Pines.  My boyfriend at the time was in the twin bed beside me, we'd pushed them together to sleep close.  We were living in Oregon on the coast to make money after traveling for five months and had made a harried, stressful trip home for the holidays.

I remember waking up from the most saturated sleep and sighing and thinking, ohh, it was all a dream.

Then waking came, and reminded me that no, I had a return ticket waiting and the rainy season in the mossy Suislaw and the tides of the Alsea rushing in and out to the Pacific were where I would return.  I didn't have a job and neither did he.  We were in that in-between space that feels like life at any minute will bottom out, that panicky place of potential free-fall.

It was just on the other side of following through with everything we'd set out to do--travel North America and live on her land, sleep in the forests, honor nature as our host and our home.  We were faced next with Now What~and it didn't feel good.

Of course, as life does, it moved on and we did with it.  I got a job, so did he, it was hard to cut heart strings when the time came and we travelled on.  But that body memory.

The oh it's not a dream…I got to do this now and don't really know if I can, march all the way through.

How muscles that are strong enough to do the marching actually come from the journey, the steps you take one by one, to get you to move.

Movement itself is the conditioning, what makes you strong.

That's what the rain brought today.  Makes me wonder what's yet and about to come...