This really happened and I am still awe-struck

I couldn't figure out why the streets were chattering with that low Laguna glee but at Thalia seeing all the foot traffic heading towards PCH it hit me.  Art Walk or first Thursday was happening.  My glee was elfin and made of sea salt which I suppose is more mermaid then but if you're town bound after the setting of an orange sun you have to go with elf.  You need feet, is what I'm saying.  Hide the fins. That and also, Kelly J had an Elf the Movie quote on insta this eve so it's in my brain.

And that's my life, salt brain.  Sea-eyes.  I finally got fins and a mask and didn't even bother with the snorkel literally just ditched my towel and tossed my clothes and ran for the sea.  And it feels like I'll blow it now, trying to give words to what that was like, being finally able to see what I could feel for all these years?  To really see.  Most people it scares them to feel that large body living and breathing and pulling and pushing you all around but me I have nothing but intrigue.  It's an honor to dance with her, to be swept up in her moves. And I don't know how to make people understand which means I guess I can't which means I guess I just get to keep the smile of secret glee all to me.  Which is that I have a salt water heart.  Which means really and secretly I know the truth of the alchemy-romance between the ocean and the sun.

Holy god more than once I had to move my legs hard to get to the top again because I could've stayed down there forever-- but I mean you know, it's just--air. Because when I was far enough out above my head and dove under again and felt it, the pull--the livingness--I turned quick as I could which with fins is still awkward but I was looking for it, what I felt--and there it was and sure as I saw it well it also saw me, too--and this is the part I can't explain and you won't understand.  But the shock was enough for me to have to fast remind myself not to breathe in bc I'd a sucked sea.  Which I think I would've been happy like sorta it's finding Camelot under there, but also please don't read this the wrong way it's not like I want to drown.  What I am trying to say is there where the sunlight went under and was glistening with the water it was real, the livingness, like it was living, had presence. Was more life-full and emanating with the life-ness then the small skate that slid under me or the many many schools of corvinas I swam through.  And I knew it was real when I saw it bc I had to squelch my gasp.  Like it was animated, where the sun and water met, they made this other, this sacred precious third made out of them together.  Just like all great soul mates, that thing, their own third that is her and her or her and him or whatever combo of  two together--and the witnessing of the creation of sacred other, the Third.  Which is Their's.  Of them but not them.  Holier than as result of the combination.  Startling in its truth.

I have felt and swam and floated inside that presence, its come up and cradled me a million times so it was like for the first time ever truly coming home. To see it. Holy Sacred Third, divine created combo of Sea and Sun.  To have it react to and with me.  I am not being hyperbolic here or a creative writer.  This really happened and I am still awe-struck, in bliss.

It was cold tonight but I stayed out for a half hour or more.  I changed on the beach and laid a long time on my towel, watching the sun go down and stunned and still in stoke-awe.  I thought I'd cry.  Then dude with the blonde ponytail, the one the Coachella boys would call an old loc, he showed up and went out mask and hand boards but he took his piece.  To breathe.

And we've never met but always acknowledge each other since we often beach at the same space.  But tonight he came right to me when he got out, clearly enchanted too, said Can you even believe it out there eyes clear and wide and green-blue sparkling same as the sea.  And I had someone to share it with then, my slack jaw glee, my joy at the livingness unseen now seen.  Danny the ol loc who's been in the same spot above Taco Loco for 30 years.  Just livin and jammin on the magic out there.  We marveled over the sunset so clear you could see San Clemente Island to the left of Catalina.

I drove in circles when it was done confused by the foot traffic and bc I was thinking I'd raised Atlantis with the setting sun.  Now I am being creative.  The fact is though I had to park and made my way through my little town on its sparkle strung air by foot, greeting other ol locs and finally making my way to St. Anne's.  It was $5 enchilada night at Feast.  I had a lot to celebrate.

Like the fact that tomorrow I will get to do it again.

Amen.  Amen, amen.

The s-h coming-together-sound of the teaching sea

My apartment seriously looks how it used to when I was a drunk.

This is funny, happened in less than two days, is because the place is so hobbit-small and on my mind because I have a teleconference with Erika my writing partner today.  My 30 some pages of submission are creative non-fiction circa 95-96.  When I lived with and shared a room with Fannon or Kev or Kareen.  The days of sour boy stink on the air and layers of wet towels, insides of cigars, empty bottles to wade through on the floor.

Not that my floors are covered with blunts and empties now.  Today it's clothes and books.  All I own, all I came to California with and all I've spent my money on since I've been here, too.  Clothes and books, travel and food.  The essence of this girl.  Very little I need beyond a splotch of land, the words and close proximity to the sea.

And my little room of my own.  This I firmly believe:  a girl needs a small crafted space that's just hers, where she can have and relish her stillness.  Mine's a 2x6 spot only big enough for a desk on the back end of my closet!  But it's from this sense, the stillness and silence that a woman, that I, that she can be.

I've had little motivation to do anything these days then snuggle on the couch and eat or sit cozy in a coffee shop and write. Or to be quiet beside the sea.  My soul is wanton. Longing and turning flat if I try to ignore its mercurial wants.  I stress easily at any demands other than these.  It is winter:  this is the way.

So I walk a lot.  With Serena up the canyon to the Top of the World.  Around the curves and corners of  Newport's marshy back bay.  From the free parking lot on Forest all the way to Thalia Street on the beach.  Last Saturday someone shaped kelp in to a heart bigger by twice the size than my quiet little room.  It stilled me, gave me pause just a minute, glistened my own heart as it pushed me on.  When I got to Thalia I sat a long time watching the surfers there.  The water was aqua green even folded again and again by its rippy whiteness.  It was shadowed in spots by great seaweed blooms.  There are two breaks and I studied them and also just listened.  Listened and felt the sea. The sound of s and h come together.  This consistent noise that is hushhhing or rushhhhing depending on the state of the soul that hears.

That's how I feel, like there was one life behind me with it's own distant sound.  And that there's this other one I am headed towards but can not see.  I can almost feel it though, the way you do sometimes with a sound just before you get to hear.  And that's what I soaked in last Saturday on my walk to Thalia street. The s-h coming-together-sound of the teaching sea.

After Erika calls I'll clean.  Then relish a day to be quiet with me.  This is the in-between.  Being quiet and still, waiting.  The tide will grow and later move me forward towards the next me that I will be.

Repost: In Memoriam.

(original posting, september 2009.  So I can feel connected this far away from home during Hurricane Sandy)

Suzette had this raspy voice and a laugh entirely unanticipated. It used to shoot out of her mouth and hit you in your chest then explode up your neck and down your back, cacophonous echo blast of megaphone and hot air.

She worked the Fool the Guesser one stand up from me on the Pier.

In September the tourists went home, it all sort of started when Felix came in early August which was also the time I kicked Kevin out of the house for the PCP. This left us, Suzette and me or the hot Tico Kiki who was way older which then meant like 35, with lots of time to holler back and forth to each other on our mics. Hurricane Felix was a big one and I got on the local news screaming kooks go home--the reporter was on 9th street, three up from us where the old deadhead house was, we learned from them early on where not to buy our drugs. Jerry died that summer, it was almost omen-ic: Deadheads by then couldn't be trusted a lot of them were tweakers, everybody knew. I imagine the reporters edited me out, we didn't have a tv so I never knew. We didn't even know the hurricane was coming. I got off for my afternoon break and came home for a puff or jay and a swim or some food hopefully someone had some otherwise it was soft-pretzels from the Pier for free the only place I could surely get hooked-up. Sparky was the only dude around though, he was a squatter one of those 9th street kids. Besides Black Mike and Little Kid, the only ones still down to hang after I kicked Kevin out, there was Sparky. Sparky I never trusted cuz of the deadhead squatter thing but we still hung cuz my roommate thought he was the shit. He never had anything to offer he just came looking. We had nothing though since Kevin and the boys went, nothing at all. So instead me and Sparky just took a swim and it's the only time I ever remember the Ocean slamming me again and again like a hard wood board. I swam hard but never never got to a place where she was settled and smooth so I could just float and roll. Like I said the Hurricane was coming but we didn't know. No one else was on the beach though! Mom somehow got in touch with me and said to put all the stuff on the floor up so really that just meant my books and music on the lowest shelf. The pots and pans earlier in the summer, since we didn't ever wash them, all got thrown out.

After Felix it was all different. Like I said, then it was just Black Mike who slept on the couch every night and also suggested we each sleep with a little switchblade under our mattress. Which is funny to me now, cuz like cousin Joey says a weapon will end up getting you in even more trouble if you dont know how to use it. And I for one, didn't, no one ever taught me how.

But luckily we never had trouble. Kevin moved out, he and his boys trashed our house broke windows and the outside porch lights and tagged all over all our shit, then Felix came and after that everything changed. The alleys were more quiet, there was a lot more of the large grey sky. And when the sun was out it was ethereal again, funny yellow glow. I didn't know it yet but that was the summer I first started to learn: there are tides that come and they move as one and they bring a certain power all their own, and they effect us all.

And the earth is where and how we learn.

By September it was cool already I had the greatest snaked Hoodie I lived in with holes down at the edge for my thumbs. Everyone was gone. Just 14 years ago, that's all, but OC didn't have the condo weekenders it's so full of now. Even my aunt and uncle and grammy who lived summer here were gone, they had to go home to the county to teach school.

Which meant we ditched 6th street for my family's house at the Pines, the girls and I, because it scared us being alone like that with just the beach rats who were hating on us and the ghosts that we heard again and again--no lie, the old fashioned player piano music or loud foot steps upstairs on the outside deck when for sure no one was there, or even the radios in our house that would go on without reason sometimes. Local folklore said the Broadripple on 14th, and our place too on 6th, were the original Bordellos from back in the day. It was mid-1800's that the town came to be. But Wikipedia says the original Pier burned down in a fire in 1994, which isn't true, the fire happened in the winter of 1995, winter after Felix, I remember because we drove over that winter to see. The fire took Morbid Manor and the waterpark, too; I smoked pot everyday in Morbid Manor in 95 then got to ride the water rides for free since I worked there, ran a betting game for the same guy who did Fool the Guesser, Suzette Kiki and me. And that fire took everything, all that, down. 1995 last of the Pier and the Manor, the Riptide Park and Jerry, too.

So me and Chrissy who worked Morbid Manor and loved a guy, Johnny, started hanging at the Pines. It was cool and vacant in town and I learned all at once to love September, the sheet clear blue sky, the white clouds puffy and bright as a smile. The way the water looked suddenly so navy blue. September, goddamn I learned to love you.

Suzette invited us over for for spaghetti that's how I found out she was into selling and smoking crack. She got arrested later that winter which I learned the same night as I heard about the fire at the Pier. It sucked cuz she had a little one, I dont remember his name anymore he had brown hair with flints of yellow curl, he was three-years-old. Guess he'd be 17 now hope he's not in jail. That night over spaghetti when I first found out about her drug of choice, it was the first time I ever got that gut-twisting sweaty-necked premonition-chill. It was September, the streets were flat and empty but she lived all the way downtown so the air from the inlet was coming off the water and was damp with a terrible cold. The sky was low and hung with thin grey clouds.

Addiction is a hell of a fucking disease.

In September now I come here every year weekend after Labor Day and have a reunion with old friends. Last night we were up to 3, boardwalk, dancing, talking, laughing and lots of quiet on the cool, white sand. Round 2am I walked past sixth street, Kevin is dead, I'm 9 years clean.



Everything is changed. And also, September, the clean earth and shushing sea, is just the same.

Summer skies stars are fallin all along the injured coast

My coffee in my hand and the sky a colorless balm 6:30 am I was ready.  Then at my car Nici texted nothing out there.  Which I was like shit I know but it says glassy and where we surf midway between here and HB is this sweet small break that is perfect for me who cant surf but is obsessive about learning.  Knee high Kelly waves!!  Boo.

So I am blogging because that is the second best way to unfurl my muscles and soften my stress and relax my bones.  It does not cease to amaze me:  the effect the salt and sun have on my soul.  This is not just hippiedippie as it sounds it is also true.  It is the solitary reason I moved here, all the way away from my family and friends and the land that raised me and the sea that is my own.  Because I need the elements in a bodily, active, daily way.

I am listening to Paul Simon on Spotify, The Rhythm of the Saints.  So remedying for the poet in me and it's been a good year or two since I've started a day with the glory of The Obvious Child.  Should I not have the ocean this morning, I shall instead have this the other tide that moves me.  Words, and muse, which is its own flow all the same.  oooo aaa ooo aaaahhh Summer skies stars are fallin all along the injured coast...In the sixties he just let it out the words the flight the heart of America he moved us on.  I am backstepping now because of all the new which there is to start and it feels scary and huge and insurmountable when it wakes me up in my new bed in my new loft with the peepers chirping out the window their nighttime canyon song.  Surf I don't have to think about.  Just feel and float then rock that shit along.  Just be and let the do happen.  Naturalness surge easy flux of retreat, be still, now move on.  Again, again, yet again.

There is a bonus track called Thelma on Spotify this is re-released, a nice surprise.  I will get the hang of this,  work and school and so on.  I am quite good at in-between I remind myself alot that's what all this is.  It just feels cramped and like I can't move.  That's so not me.

Gratitude goes a long way a day at a time tho.
See~!

The grls,: Annie, me Nic and D in HB

Gray's 10th bday party 9/9/12 xo

Let the earth find them whole again

Full moon mama in me all spirals of nag champa hippie oils lavender and sage...The sun was out yesterday morning in yellow single beams only for an hour.  It cut between the steel hanging of the marine layer the sky the color of dolphins,  the dolphins so close to Nici and I on our surfboards that I could see the shine and divots of their skin.  I could not contain my sounds of glee.  I got pummeled when I tried to catch a wave and came up smiling with some crazy headless determination.  I say headless because the white waves aren't good enough I want to ride real waves and it has nothing to do with fixated mentality, it's a total body thing.

Just like the draw to the ocean always is, my whole life.  It's a peace that satiates me from a wordless place inside but that I can feel run through as real as I can feel the tides of the moon.  And I am living in it now, like that feeling is one big orb I have stepped into, or am born out of.  From deep inside.

Today's the first harvest, holy holy sacred life blessed be.  Me and my religiousity.  My contempt for it, too.  I taught a private english lesson last night that had me jazzed way after it was done.  I watched Kelly Slater surf the men's heat at the Open and stood it awe, I listened to Best Coast on my phone last night, laying in bed.  We are taking our students to the Fair.  I live on the beach in California like I always saw and felt only this is real not the inside bliss feeling that was only a dream.  This morning it strummed in me, my book again, and I told it ok I am coming thanks for letting me know.  I want to worship this earth and her rounds on my knees, I want this majesty of gratitude to pour out in dusted gold ribbons and magnify the love of all the people that I know.  Let their love light the way around the hearts of those they love let the whole world kindle on that flame.  Let the earth find them whole again finding her let them have reason to be grateful under sky.

Lunar Lammas again, we turn we turn, these are my thanks. I'm Amazed~

Normal never fit

Is it normal for a 35-year-old to practice the reject in her room in the morning in her too big snuggle pants?

No, it's not.  I laugh at myself.  I can pop, do Dougie arms--side to side swag or crazy arms--but not the hop back moves with my feet cousin Mason tries to show me every time.  And my moves will always be influenced by gangster rap hippie fests and DC GoGo.  Chuck Brown just died.  Chuck Brown!  I think of Dave Swann.  These are the thoughts, plus the laughing, that I catch me thinking when Rye Rye is on and I'm dancing this morning in my California bedroom.  This is my head when it occurs to me:  Is it normal for a 35-year-old to practice the reject in her room in the morning, in her too big snuggle pants?

Erika and I talked for 3 hours last night.  Talking is not the right word.  It's this high-motioned, bright-ringed fluidity so in real-time that for most it would be surreal.  We call it nous.  Brooks and I call it synchronicity.  He's been texting me all week with his own examples.  Erika and I haven't been engaged like this since late 2010.  She had to make her crossing in to the publishing world and I had to make mine, to California.

It was on Wednesday that I fully understood.

I have wanted, and seen, my whole life long, this image of me staring out at the sea.  What comes with that image is the sure sense of being exactly where I am meant to be at.  All along right there inside of me was this life I always was meant to inhabit, unringed by duty or constrictive what will I do with my life thinking--it is nothing complex at all, just simple, staring at the sea.  It's me in my autonomy and what I suppose I always knew but never acknowledged was what it included.  Allowing, finally, fully, for Poetry me.  That's what the sea is about, giving over to the tidal flows and retreats.  The whole blessed rounds of my creative self.  Owing my power once and for all.

Wednesday I came walking out of the library knowing that I was walking in to a new life.  I just spent three whole months in a curative gestation.  I read and wrote and studied so much, every lit soppy bit meant to feed and nurture the vegetative creative body deep in me. That's always what the sea was about, that's always so exactly all that I really want.  That's the happiness everyone keeps saying they see on me.  What Mike said was so visible it actually is a change in my skin tone.  Me, in awe that another dream has been realized.  Ready to rely on the momentum, the steady coasting magic of all in the past year that I have done.

The laughing whimsy gratitude of it all has got me giddy as a child.  Too bad it's not normal for a 35-year-old to be so free.  Thank god normal never fit on me.

6 hundred thousand reasons

On fifth street I am happiest, there is a coffee shop less than a block from PCH and though it's a through-street people, mostly Latin kids with that clipped flavor in their voice and black t-shirted tattoo guys on skateboards or young blonds who are too skinny and dressed in ways I am sure their parents disapprove, or maybe that's 35-year-old me and my inner parent disapproving because I see 17-year-old me hot-assed and tight-titty-shirts in them, either way it's my favorite because it's Thursday night and all of them are milling around the street.  The pier is just a block from here too and that I love especially on a night like tonight when the sky is beach blue.

I notice odd things.  The kid behind the counter with the black plugs in his ears has nice teeth.  Wallace has nice teeth.  The woman in the accessory store today had a voice that reminded me of a wind-up doll.  The group of young dudes next to me must be Jesus guys because the only time a gathering publicly of that many different aged and kind people happens other than AA is for Jesus.  I was tight and shallow-breathing and disconnected, icky feeling when I got home.  Last minute care-package shopping after a movie with my students after school.  I paid bills on the Internet and was feeling sorry for myself.  The ocean is blocks away.

The ocean is blocks away.   I got in the car and came down here to make some calls.  Whenever I can especially if I need to I come not to look at but feel the sea.   I am drinking tea because caffeine will keep me up and a teacher's no good with no sleep.  I am thinking about all there is to know when you realize there is a lot that you do not know.  About people you think you know, about yourself.  I forgot the phone.  It's amazing that keeping fresh, even in paradise, must be a practice, become a discipline.  My friend is dull on his life after ten years of this, I see it in two months and the second I do I come to the sea.  Like anything else the rounds become our rounds so it is up to us to stay fresh, stay fresh.  Stay fresh.  Any given second there are at least 6 hundred thousand reasons to be grateful.  I pick one, I pick two, I move on.  We are finally exchanging again, I forgot my phone, there is lots and lots to say.   Erika my angel when I need one the most.  I come to do what I really came to do, to the coffee shop to write.  To the sea to give thanks.  To the page to reflect on what I think  I do and do not know.

When she's ready to speak

The sea has its own language and if you know how to listen the trees give hints of when she's ready to speak.

I don't want to write today, that's the only reason I am.  This is discipline, what Beth and Amy have helped me learn with repeated reminders: No effort is wasted.  I woke up yesterday from a nap in the afternoon and could hear the tree-talk, the way the palm fronds were enlivening the air.  This is different from hearing them move in the wind.   It was raining, then it wasn't, then it was, then no.  There was a cloud-line of grey and gold light. There was dance on the air.  I got up, sad, unsure, didn't even comb my hair.  Just got my shoes and purse then drove to the beach.

I took pictures from PCH, thought of Aunt Lori.  Talked to Mandy in the spirit way.  Took off my flip-flops with my toes and walked down the stairs in to the sand.  And then there was stillness, and ocean-speak.  I just sat a long time and listened, the way the ocean noise is sometimes just like breath.

On Monday before my cousin Erin left to fly back to Maryland we took our annual dip in the sea to cleanse us of the winter funk. This is the first time it happened in the Pacific.  There will be more. After we got out, a pod of dolphins flipped and played in the ocean straight out in front of where we were.  Dolphins, who play just to play.  We laid there a long while, sang This Little Light of Mine, let the memories of her visit saturate.  We had burgers at a burger shack and then I drove her to LAX to say goodbye.  

There is nothing easy about this, it keeps saying in my head now, days later.  She reminded me of a memory in 1997, on the day our grandmother died.  Erin was about to be 12.  I was 20.  We were driving. I was driving--her, our four other girl cousins in my car--the oldest was 13, and Total Eclipse of the Heart came on and I explained that that's what happened.  Our hearts went dark just for a minute when Gram left, but now every time we hear that song it would be her saying hi and bringing her light.  I cried, fat funny tears sitting in the diner on Sunday, when she reminded me of that.  We both did.

It's amazing how family will always keep us tethered to who we truly are.  It's amazing how easy this is, and also how hard.

Maybe ten thousand, maybe more.

Every morning I meditate in some way, most mornings it is a private event that would go unnoticed by other people.  But Dory and Jon, and Mo and Alle and the others when they are around and our space is shared--I dont mind being my whole, true self in front of all of them.

I keep a little travelling alter, again most wouldn't recognize the trinkets and baubles as holy to me.  But anywhere I have a space that is mine for more than overnight, I pull it out so my little corner can be alive, and "anywhere" becomes home.  Because home to me means silent and sacred, and is really about what lives inside. 

Some days it is discipline to approach and refind me, but others I can feel the deep inside place stirring with my own instructive wisdom and magic.  Today was one of those days.  The sun was shining hot on my legs on Jon's floor in Oakland, and outside the blue sky was so clear it was hard to tell there was a window-sill.  I was sleepy and smiley and had a deep sighing stretch when the quiet place put forth a little vision to my consciousness.  I was in the ocean, and a great monster wave, so mighty and long and also round, was preparing to crash down.  It was slow coming but the kind that could panic me if I didn't react smoothly and all at once.  I wasn't surfing, this wasn't about the endurance-teaching lesson of consistency you learn paddling out.  This was just me, ocean-me of 30 plus years, and so in this flash of vision my body long and lean dove way, way down, and caught the under-rushing water and let it pull me completely under the wave.  I didn't see myself when I came out, just the finesse of moving deeply at the bottom and all the way through. And more important I felt the natural assurance and calming feeling that comes with knowing how to move.  How the force of going under pulls then surfaces you out beyond where the waves crest and crash, how then you can relax into the gentle updown rocking of the forming motion.  Which is what I love the most in the ocean--way out there just floating on top.

I've done that a thousand times, maybe ten thousand, maybe more.  In real life, in Ocean City, Maryland, in the Atlantic my teacher-sea.  I love it, I miss it, I crave it like food.  But most of all, I am honored that my deep wisdom used the mama ocean today for me to hear its call.  Because this time in my life will pass me easily in to floating happily along if right now I just dive deep, deep down.  Which is what mediation does, in fact it's exactly what I use it for: quiet time and space to celebrate my wiser self, by just meeting me where I am at every day.  The sacred ordinariness, the consistency and instruction that comes as result from letting that daily meeting lead me deep inside.  The happiness that is always present when I surface back out again.