I would give all my time

This dreary exhaustion is like a dream.  Maybe I will open the journal I have started for my Carl Jung class as school.  I will look on the pages where I track my nighttime dreams and the cycles of my month and the moon.  I will see my day written out in funny scrawl.  It will be illustrated here and there in colored pencils and on the side in magnetic yellow: highlights of the theme.  I will think this is my day?  My day to day living or this was last night's image on my mindscreen?

Maybe I will not know the difference.

This is numinousness.  The seeds of the new life the momentum of their growth to come vibrating around them in a visceral humm.  You can feel it but not see it yet, the pulse of energy stronger than anything yet seen.  On the sundeck eating a ridiculous burrito reading about Jack Kerouac.  He skipped classes in school to read forbidden plays and books bc college in NY brought him closer to such contraband.  I feel better about myself.  Clear my phlegmy throat pull my sunglasses down. Put off the four papers that I put off until today.  Dyad in the morning go introduce yourself to the director at the site where you hope to get your supervised internship before noon.  I work for myself get that in, too. Grateful that the need for money is met by something that stimulates my mind and spirit in the way Kerouac and burritos do, and the sun.  Off to Starbucks to write for my submission to Erika also due.  Nicci writes the girl from GRO lets start a girl's surf reskill.  I would give all my time to that and the words and sacred dreams...O wait, that's just what I'm learning to do:  Climb the rock stairs up to Serena's in the canyon chill and dark.  Snuggle on her couch in our pj's discuss business plans.  The lady in Corona about the writing critique-group emails.  They are giving me the last spot, spot number 9.  I'm in.  It's all happening.  Funny dream.

Write a blog not to procrastinate more but to download it all out.  Make room by getting it all down.  This time last year I slept on a couch in Sonoma.  My belongings all in my car.  Red woods trees in the fog dripped through offerings.  I sat stunned over what next in life at Goats Rock.  Never imagined the sea could pound waking out of a life partly asleep. Watched the full moon rise flat disc, white.  Lived on homemade toffee, eggs and Indian food.  Chopped wood and built fires in a woodstove it took an hour to light.

Go write your papers Kelly.  I'm trying, I want to get it all down.

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

From day to day

Reinvention.  It takes time.  That's what's going on:  I am concentrating on where all the rubble has landed.  This is not a bad thing.  Just, concentrated.  And a lot.

Found out that I didn't take out enough money for grad school.  And missed the due date for the minimum deposit.  The strings, when they unravel--even if the grand purpose is to re-ravel them in a more lovely, fitting way--they are wispy and numerous.  Quite a lot to keep track of.  So I have sat down in the middle of it all: the unfurled mess springing out from every direction, just to do what is the next priority from day to day.

Tonight I will apply for more loans and figure out the cheapest way to buy books which are not covered by loans. I am trying to be different then I am.  Not anti-institution and seeing red over the minuscule crap.  I keep perspective by laughing a lot and thinking about how grateful I am for the beach and sunshine and following through with what I always said I'd do.  Wow.  I think of surfing a lot and thank life in my head.  It makes me feel the smile in my heart--this is it, my life.  The only one I've got, I am dealing with the choices I made.  That keeps it all in check.  Mostly.  Also I have friends that listen to my foul mouth and laugh while I blow off steam.  I value that they value that side of me, too.

Trying not to think only of my new surf board and my book.  My book is yelling for me so loud that my morning meditation is actually aligning with my Ipod day after day.   My surf board's named Wiss.  After my aunt.  Monday morning was her inaugural ride and from the line up I popped up then sunk the side and fell right off.  This happened three times then Chelsea who's eleven was like is that board a little tough for you?  Yea I said I'm definitely wobbly and I took the next wave in to shore break.  Nici hollered little tips for the next hour.  The board is a full foot shorter then anything I've rode.  Finally she pointed to a spot to put my right foot and I did and was up just like that.   White water warrior again and again I never went back to the line up just told Nic I'd be out soon then eventually went and got a burrito instead.  Haha California when did you happen?

Grad school syllabus has hundreds and hundreds of pages to read each month.  Surfing writing reading repeat.

Lots to tie up before I get to that, tho~

How amazingly rad.

It felt good to take a breath--my roommates did a 48-hour crusade to Chicago and back and having a house to myself was just that.  A big long breath out.  Steel Pulse was so fun. Major surprises there, too.  Barefeet on the lawn dancing and the moon.  At 6:30am Saturday my phone started buzzing Nici wanted to surf and Derynn wanted to know if I was going to the Open with her boys.  It went on like that for an hour me laughing all the way.  There was nothing like cruising across PCH at the pier that morning.  I had that sense about my life, of fresh and at-one-ness at once and this is really happening.  That hasn't happened in a while.  We got to the Open and the boys had to stand on line for an hour to get their passes to swipe so they can win prizes all week.  Last year Jayden won hundreds of dollars worth of stuff.  Just in the first ten minutes we'd gotten hats for free.

After a while we went to Tower 8 and Nici was in the water and after another while she convinced me to go out.  I was like no way not a chance am I surfing California for the first day at the kick-off of the US Surf Open.  I felt like a big kook but she forced me and turns out she's an awesome teacher.  I was up in the white water in an instant and like that my whole pulse for it was back.  I rode white waves for a good bit til she forced me to paddle all the way out and in the line up she was teaching me all kinds of little great tips, confirming my original instinct all the way back to last year that I needed a woman to teach me.  After an hour I was whipped and was like I'm going in and started to paddle and next thing I knew I was right inside the wave and it moved me right and then I was up and rode it all the way to when it reformed and still was up and going, and it felt like yoga, that union, and I saw how to be in control and let it happen at once.  It was RADICAL.  I hope to start going with her in the morning before school.


 Der and I tried to go to the movies later but that didn't work out so instead I made us dinner.  We wound up at Barnes and Noble on the floor of the poetry section reading the little hymns out loud. I slept well then was up early again and got all the errandy house things out of the way which always makes me feel at peace.  Today I spent the day with a cutie which was rad.  Finally talked to Erin too so I feel connected again. Erika tagged me on Instagram with a picture of a Crow on the beach in NC.  Fannon's anniversary just passed and  this is the final loop before the season begins to round out.  Meaning Crow made good sense. My interview at Pacifica is Friday.  I am going to jam out at the Open all week.  I have a date tonight.  I want to write an essay on being a woman for Holly.  Book, no worries, I'll soon be back.  


My life is becoming what I always saw in my heart.  Part of this is because I was willing to let go of a lot of ideas jammed up in my head. 


How amazingly rad.

On Writing. Technique. And Learning to Commit.

Spon Down, when you see that referenced or titled here, is short for spontaneous download.

It is the unedited depositing of minutia out of my head on to the screen, and an idea that came first to me via the daily meditation book Simple Abundance.  In it she suggests morning pages, or the discipline of three unedited longhand pages when you awake.  That book changed my life, but that's for another deposit.

I write one of two ways on this blog.  I either catch the words or I spon down.  By catch the words I suppose I am referencing the Muse, that undefinable shiny momentum...how the words will just roll by, a sudden sweet chug of auditory illumination.  If I happen to be in-the-moment astute enough, disciplined or paying attention, I will grab a pen and jot them down.   From that, a blog post will often, on the mere embryo of a couple lines on a napkin or receipt, birth itself full and fleshy here for you to read.

Otherwise I get on here and spondown.

Somewhere in the center I suppose the two techniques have evolved, and taught me.  Ahhh, sacred process.  I am dipping the cup with the tool of SponDown, the first thought best thought aesthetic the Beats popularized that suggested Life as the prime perfect substance and that is happening in this exact moment, unedited.  The discipline of showing up, committing again and again to write whether or not the zest of the muse is throwing echos in my mind, is what's taught me that spondown can lead to the words coming on their own.  And then there is the importance of the edit: in the end I am the one responsible for truly finessing the subtleties of my Voice.  Editing is how I hone.

The only way to write is to write, to just do it.  Over and over, again and again.  A lot of it is shit.  So what?  So's a lot of life.  Recently, to focus and move my way forward through a psychological stall in my book, I took up the technique of morning pages again.  That, and surfing, are the main reasons I've not been on the blog.  I needed the accurate privacy of only my own eyes.  I needed to shake lose the debris growing up there along the high ridges of my mind.  I needed permission to sift.

It worked.  I have not only begun again--but I have successfully moved through subject matter that felt at once dense and dull.  Impossible to traverse.  As result, I now also have chapter outlines for the center AND end of my book ANNND!!!  Last week in the shower the Muse came on, and delivered me the last three lines of my story.

IF YOU WRITE, YOU KNOW THIS IS FREAKIN HUGE!

The other thing I realized?  Last fall I decided I wanted to surf, like really learn and get good.  I hadn't been on a board since the mid-nineties, and never regularly.  The whole story of that process is awing and super-cool, but also for another post.  The point is, it's writing that's self-taught me:  just show up.  Keep going, keep going, keep going, even when it isn't good.  Writing, like with surfing, is a practiced discipline.  One part letting it out, one part keeping an eye on what you're holding in, one part always willing to fine-tune, and all parts paying attention so you're certain, no matter how frustrated, not to quit.