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.

When the dark time of year gets here

This is the second Friday in a row I have spent with no agenda.  Today and last week included time on my little square deck that's built into the canyon wall.  I deeply soaked in to the feel of the land around me.  The trees, the exotic green, the breeze out of nowhere then gone again, the happy dance it did on my skin.  The sun, on its fall retreat.

Yesterday my cousin Erin called.  I was on my way to the grocery store in Laguna Woods, where everyone is over 70 and more than once I had to help an oldtimer pick out food or manage what was directly in front of them.  I followed my inner knowing it said cook something golden delicious and fatty for me that's what I so, so need.  Erin laughed, totally understanding and in the same spot.  She lost her mom three months ago.  Her mom Mary was young, a teacher, loved the sea and nature, loved her family and to be active outdoors.  In the last year of Mary's life much of those loves were taken from her--that is she had to give them up.  She raised her head anyways and walked with courage and grace through it all.  These past three months I've tried to do the same.  I've been so grief-struck though I couldn't even comprehend the grief itself.

Erin and I found one another on similar shores last weekend, having both finally stopped the ceaseless running, willing to slow down.  How significant  I thought, same weekend as the time change.  No fighting it a second more, and indeed we talked all last weekend in grateful surrender--we had to enter the season of the dark.  It was time.  My body, yesterday, begged for more of the same.  I cooked the most delicious verde enchiladas.   Baked my cousin Erin in.  Laid on my couch and ate them in front of netflix all night, with black cherry soda and red velvet cookies to wash them down.  I was seized, out of nowhere, by the most rapid tears in the middle of a movie of vignettes about different women.  I let them come out and snuggled deeper on my couch. The rain made fat airy sounds on the concrete from out my window screen .  This, this aloneness, this powerless over life's biggest swings and atrocities, this is why people fear the night.  In my Women Who Run With the Wolves book, since Mary died I've drawn the same thing.  The story about Baba Yaga, and the girl who because of her motherlessness must face the dark, hard sides of life.  Those are her psychic tasks, her work in her own personal inner or under world.  To confront the dark or fearfulness that lay within and gain the ferocity of strength that comes by completing that part.

This is what we do on a spiritual level when the dark time of year gets here.  We look at how we are human, often so connected to what we fear.  Tuesday in the afternoon the moon is new... it is Lunar Samhain, or Lunar New Year.  The dark moon after the final harvest of fall.  When we look if we dare at the kneedeep shit, all that detritus that will grow the new seeds in us through this winter's dark.  My gain and blessings this year have been enormous.  Because this is life: the way of circular, spiraling path, of the balance within of human and holy being kept--my loss and pain have also been profound.  I enter the dark hallow now--we all do.  I bless it all, surrender to the hard with the light and good.  It is not good it is not bad, it is rather the seeds of both from inside the same.  We are where we need to be, right on time.  The end, and also, how to begin.

With the mere mind and heart

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.

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~

Her true essence.

After yoga, which was with a different teacher tonight and one of the sweatiest, most energizing workouts I have ever had, my body was craving fresh veggie pasta with every vibrating cell.  I walked to Mother's and bought ingredients and came home and cooked myself a feast.  And decided I'm gonna chill and watch tv.  

So You Think You Can Dance.  It's the first time I've watched prime time in my house in Huntington but today on the phone mom said I needed to.  It makes me miss her.  This was our show.   When we lived together two falls ago she got me hooked.  I forgot how deeply dance moves me.  Good dance pangs my heart, catches my throat, covers me in chills.  Makes my eyes fill.   It makes me ache for Baltimore and home because Artscape, all that magnificent street art and dance, starts this week.

My kids are doing so well!  They are not kids by any means but some days like today when I give them a project and look up from my attendance book to see each of them concentrating I swell with something like parental pride and adoration.  In my eyes, it's true, they can do no wrong.  After school I applied for a second job.  It's a mile from my new house.  I can ride my bike, so I hope I get it.

My new house!  There is a hiking trail that leads up the canyon it starts in my neighborhood!  God I am thrilled.  Muller's coming down this weekend and Jason who I haven't seen since Kevin and I were 16 and 15-years-old.  Samba tomorrow night then Long Beach with Alison and who knows who else for dinner and dancing Friday.  Today is the new moon.  My meditation each morning has gotten more and more strong and the journaling has me really self-connected.  We were chanting in class tonight and my soul was so still, so engaged and filling up the vessel of me so presently that all I could think of was Hannah at Earth Activist Training when we did our New Moon ritual.  This was up in the Cazadero Mountains in January.  She said how connected she felt to the moon in her dark phase, when she isn't obliged to reflect the sun and can simply be her whole, pure self.  Her true essence.  That line came back to me on my breath tonight, it filled me whole with my self, it filled me strong as the two weeks of silence at Vipassana did, whole as Cazadero and the Permaculture kids.  I am feeling so sweetly quenched on the gratitude in my heart, on the walking blessings of my life, so excited to be here and on the verge of so many amazing changes.   So alive.  The checking in daily with me is paying off.

I am grateful, aware.  New moon sets a new cycle in motion, our own personal start anew.  Yes yes and thank you.

Your irreverent wild women crazy laughing friends

Northeast out of Bakersfield it's green on the map.  The kind of green I learned a long time ago to give my attention.  I took off from Huntington by 10 expecting to be setting camp surrounded by sequoias by 2.  A road trip's a road trip tho--so it didn't happen that way.

I detoured off the 5 because of traffic just north of LA, did a bigass square in the desert and wound up in Tehachapi.  Tehachapi I hate you all your ignorant dust and heat.  When I go I will come back to haunt the dreams of the ones I have loved and I will do so in order to prove one thing.  Those windmills, those dreadful mechanical prisons those things are living dismal proof of aliens among us and that will say a lot, because open-spirited as people will remember me a conspirator I am not.  But they hardline me a panic that runs my blood and so Sierras your foothills with those mills I drove and all the whole time I did so I screamed.  Man screams to maybe get that fierce knowledge out of me.  Windmills are not of this time or land I know it in my blood aww, man.  Tehachapi you are not my love.

Kern River Canyon would have to be where I'd lay my head.  The camp host looked me through he said Alone?  You're sure?  I looked over my shoulder to my back seat, I poked at my purse next to me and checked under there.  Yep I said, I'm sure of it, just me.  I wanted nothing but quiet I just needed green and quiet and to feel the earth breathe.  But that's not what I told him when he said well what do you need? Just a place to sleep...We're full he said.  Then stared a long time at me, the joker in his eye.  Unless you want to go to the overflow.

He told me follow him and go slow.  We drove the canyon upstream.  When we parked I listened when he said get out of the car.  Pablo he called to a man supervising a small tent city being tucked against a yellow and saged earth wall.   This is Pablo this is his camp he says to me to him he goes this girl's alone and needs to be fed and taken care of.  I laughed at this point it was too funny and I didn't care what would happen.  Pablo shakes my hand and looks through my eyes to way inside too.  The host goes I been working these woods 20 years I know what people need when they come here.  Pablo and his family are good you can stay for free with them this weekend if Pablo says...and if you want that is.  Pablo nods then calls Maria!  And over comes the woman who will be my tia for the next two days.  If your tias like my aunts back east are also your irreverent wild women crazy laughing friends.  Who in one breath feed you homemade food that makes you cry it's so good and in the next drop cold in on the truth in your heart you only half-see or want purposefully half-hid.

I have many new tias now a whole familia in fact because that's what she wanted of me, la mama tierra madre when she used her green breath all this time to call me back.  We sweat together in the 100 degree heat in Kern River stream under canyon trees all twenty of us and I spoke spanish and them english and they fed me, and took care of me, indeed.  So the road yet again leads me home to me, in a twisted unexpected way when I let it, the road whose funny trickery always gives me what I need.

That's me, laughing at you

It's late to be blogging.  I know.  Especially because of the hard time I've had waking up to start work by nine the past several days.  I haven't.  Started by 9 that is.  I like my mornings, it's the only time I get quiet time, and peace.

Beth told me:  I was in the hot tub with Benj three or four nights ago listening to the wind blow.  I asked him do you hear how deep it sounds?  He didn't get it...

I smile when she tells me this, admiring of her wild wisdom.  The trees moved in constant rustle here for two days. Spoke tree-speak but the air didn't move at all close down to the grass on the land. I get it, I know what it means, know what Beth means.  I recognize when my soul, my "other 92%" (that awareness my brain chooses not to make me conscious of) beckons my attention for example by drawing me, reasonless, to the breeze.  I relish these bits of times.  I bless it as sacred for the tiny moment that it is.

And the changes, they are coming.  But first much will be moved gently away.  I talked about it all with Beth.  In preparation for what will change--what will come, what will end, what will begin again--I am up late, researching cars.  My rental is due back Saturday.  I've been on the internet every night now for three days, edmunds and autotrader and I can tell you all about V6's and 4 cylinders and why CVT's aren't good for the engine if you're looking at an SUV.  Also, side and curtain airbags.  They saved my life and are a necessity if the car is going to get anything more than a POOR rating for safety.  I try to walk the even line between being prepared but knowing I can't be in control.

Life!  You're funny.  That's me, laughing at you giggling at me.

I am looking forward to Thanksgiving, and seeing my family in Oregon.  I am also looking forward to getting paid.  And, I like the idea of seeing the path ahead unfold in a way that was first whispered to me from a steady California wind, high in the Humboldt trees.

More on Lunar Beltane. Divine Feminine Aspect.

So Beltane comes to us from the peasants, or country folk, all over Europe.

Pagan, or peasant or folk (of the people) religions centuries ago meant worshiping polytheistic, or worship of more than one God.  I think the reason I was drawn in my teens to learn more about Paganism was specific:  Pagans also worship female divinities or Godesses.  Mary, though present in my Catholic upbringing (if I tried hard I could still remember the words to her prayer) was never a female godhead to whom I, as a grl in the eighties and nineties, could readily relate.

Depending on the culture, and in this application we can span the whole world, folk religions in every single country as far back as anthropologists have dated venerate or make holy all kinds of Gods and Godesses.

There are corn gods, fire goddesses, snake gods, bird goddesses, elephant gods.  For every god there's a goddess you can find and likewise. It goes on and on and on and is a beautiful, traditional example of the everything is holy approach, that ever-present basic tenant of all great dogmas:  how you treat life is how you get treated...do unto others...etc. Joe Campbell, the pre-eminent mythologist of the last century, normalized the idea that the world was far more encompassing than Judeo-Christian myths or beliefs, and in his many books and interviews put it this way.  (I am paraphrasing.)  Iindigenous, folk cultures of old applied their religions as if everything in the world was a Thou.

Beltane was celebrated traditionally all over old Europe as May Day, time when the female aspect (the Lady, the Moon, or any one of many different Goddesses,) and the Male (the Great God, the Green Man, the Sun or any one of several Gods) came together to make life.  It was a celebration of the fecundity, or ever-re-creating fertility of the earth.  In those days the earth, and the food and fruit it provided, was holy because of the integrated relationship the peasant people had with their environment.  Literally, the earth and its harvests were how they lived and sustained. Beltane was when the first crops started to put forth, and it was this Thou which was celebrated.

The ancient world over, this earth holiday was celebrated in different and various forms.  You find history of it in Native American, Chinese, Roman and Grecian traditions as just a few examples.

Religious applications, as far as how the individual practices, vary and are as different as footwear is from person to person in one single pew at church on Sunday.  That said, a tenant of Paganism that I have always intimately enjoyed is the enlivening of the female aspect within Life.  I've never, personally, worshipped many different Gods or Godesses, though I do pray periodically to everything from trees to the ocean to Marilyn Monroe to Jesus to Kali-Ma, depending on how my spirit and heart move me.  Afterall, I believe in Thou.  But that said, as a poet who speaks in the first language of metaphor, or symbol, my studies of Paganism continue to inform me of a rich and ancient heritage that specifically embodies and empowers the feminine aspect of the Divine.  The moon often is a symbol of this energy.

Folk wisdom teaches us that the earth lives and dies and lives again in cycles (what the Old Sun-God did, every year.  As later the Son of God did, dying and being re-born right around Beltane, she wrote with an ironic wink...)

Personally, I just really like having a significant tide to tie my own inner-life processes, and outer-life growth and changes, to.  The parts of me that live and die and come back to life, too.  The moon cycles work really well for me to watch myself, it's an active, hands-on way for me to feel connected to this great, wide and holy Life as a whole.  The full moon is a time that life peaks, we are fertile, abundant, shiny.  You cut crops then, both because the moon helped the field workers see AND because the grow cycle, as all is connected, is at its peak.  Just google farmers almanac and full moon for more on these old folk ideas.  It's really beautiful and will undoubtedly connect you to someone in your family (we all come from agricultural roots in this country) maybe only a generation or two back.

The full moon in May, known as Flower Moon or Taurus Moon, is also known as Lunar Beltane.  It's time to celebrate the growth aspect--union of man and woman and the converging fertility as result--but with the moon as your starting point.  The moon lights up the dark.  The feminine aspect, as the Chinese teach with Yin, is the flow aspect inside every person, it is that which cant be contained.  It is the dark or pureness of void-potential, or to my liking, where the light of gnosis or Knowledge makes its entry point.  Yang, the male energy in each person, is solid, concrete, manifesting.  To this one person's way of thinking, this application is how to capture just some of the celebration of Life using old folk holidays as a guide.  We use our consciousness or doing-aspect of Yang to find the Stillness in there, the moving beating constant of presence which is Yin.  At the conjuct of Yin-Yang is your own Holy Thou in the center.  My intention from there is to be happpppyyyy about Life, and that all of Life may Beee Happpyyy, too.  As within.  So without.  Amen amen amen.

What's Rad: Discover the Forest

I LOVE TREES!! go here

MAGIC In The Air Today...

Happy first day of fall!

The sun enters Libra tonight at 11:09 pm, eastern. This is the autumn equinox, time of light and dark in balance.

It is also the full moon tonight, or early tomorrow, at 5:17am eastern.

The moon is in Aries, initiatory fire sign of impulse, action and change. The sun moves in to Libra, initiatory air sign. Air signs rule consciousness and creative energy.

Aries and Libra are both cardinal, meaning they bring energy of change. That is what the spring and fall are about...changing. Aries in the spring is fire which transforms, Libra in the fall is air which, like breath, creates from the depths of who we are.

The equinox is the time of balance at harvest--so to harness this energy we take time to reflect on the season that has just passed, and with reflection allow what we learned about ourselves to take hold. It is this new knowledge that will now initiate for us, and initiation will really permeate if we take the time to be grateful. The season of gratitude and blessing counting, of going within with knowledge of our light, begins now.

Happy Fall! Blessings to all, amen amen amen...

First Harvest is here

Today is Lunar Lammas, the first full moon in Leo. First Harvest. First Harvest is here!

I began celebrating on Friday when the tide moved then settled on my soul like a sigh. Before my double that day I went out in the front yard under the soft quiet pines and harsh hot sun and grounded, and asked my spirit and body both what did I need? And asked too, how can I celebrate~~and the answer so clear when it came to me because it caused poignant yearn....moonlight, I need to sit under the moon.

So that night I sat on the beach with my cousin for three hours in the white moonlight on the white sand. I told her about my life, here, since I've moved in to and settled at the Pines. I soaked in great doses of moonlight, as important to the body, the mind and soul as sun, actually more important as we move forward as a people concerned with holistic experience on this earth. Moonlight is a direct vehicle for the subconscious, regulates the pituitary gland, and enters the anima through the ether at the back of the neck. It is essential to the inner-connection, to the health of our wild rhythms as humans, to sit and soak in the light of the moon. It will help too in sturdying and growing the organic connection to the earth, where sacred wisdom sits in the stillness of a breathing plant, the detritus dna in the dirt, the emanations transmitted through the sand.

First Harvest is the holiday (holy-day) that we give thanks for the abundance of the year. We become aware of our bounty, the blessings on the various levels of us that our lives have grown. Major changes will likely have shown themselves by now, so too will seeds start to show themselves towards what our spirit is seeking in quiet to cultivate for the upcoming seasons during the rest and renewal of fall and winter. And that's my favorite part of this holiday, the time out to witness the tide-changing. In reverence of the passing: summer has peaked, the growing season at its height, and from here out comes the wane.

It was important to me to soak in the moon and re-connect to nature so that the riches of my year would more easily and naturally surface for me to witness, and show gratitude for. I got alot of that tender light: Friday all night on the beach with Erin, and last night again, at the peak of her fullness (hanging out with Chrissy and a bunch of her B-more girls next to the Bay under the empty sky and white lunalight in the salt breeze at a hightop in the sand at Seacrets.) Today I sat in my sacred space, burnt my candles and made my circle and sunk deep in to me, and the blessings were exorbitant, and the seeds I could vision were so, so easy to tend. I knew exactly my intentions for the dark season, for the tide next to come.

This is a time of rest, reflection, and reverence. A time to count bounty and be grateful, but in a passive way: watching the fruits grow heavy on the vine in time for last picking in the fall. A time to see what grew well, what ought to be composted, and what fruits put off seeds for next year. Mostly just a time to be aware, to sit in the long lasting sun, see the shadows starting to grow long, anticipate life in the stillness before it rounds the circle towards change yet again. To revere, and to love, and to in stillness, with gratitude, await.....

Happy Lunar Lammas. This tide will stay around for the next week or so, as traditional Lammas is August 1. Be good, be open, be present to you~~

What hungers you. In quiet.

I can not count the good people I know who to my mind would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers... (M.F.K. Fisher)

Dawes is up there singing.

The only thing scarier than dying is not dying at all.

There is wetness on my eyes, I have been in a place for the past two weeks of protection and keeping close ties on my heart, trying to be with it as it goes through its ups and downs, and now I am delivered. I am in my heart again, of it: the drum pounds the bass keep my beat and courses out in my blood all the way through to the nerve endings, the guitar's my spirit stretching out past my body. Taylor Goldsmith's totally American boy singing is finally giving me words.

It starts to go through my head, it's just a muscle. The heart. To this I can submit, I can revel in the beating wonder of getting to feel it. To just feel it, the greatest gift of all. This is wisdom: to know I'll look back on this time with gratitude and reverent longing.

My girlfriend whispers to me during set break. She tells me after her last relationship she'd completely lost all of her music interests but didn't even realize it. Her man criticized, or at least disapproved of the indy stuff that turned her on...so she let it go. Who knows how that happens? Silently, in little increments. That's how you give you up your soul. How you turn your self off. Piece by piece. Until you're so absent that you're used to feeling like your taking part but not really, only just a little. Dull, sort of looking in from the outside.

The band is less than five feet from us and I am relishing the show. I forgot how much this spot defined that time for me of naming, of recall. The time just behind me in Easton, in my first and only glorious space all of my own, when I called myself, bit by bit, detail by detail, hunger by blessed sacred hunger back to myself. The Nightcat, its black high ceiling with the exposed beams, the way the air runs in light circles back there, the red lighting. I was grinning all day in anticipation of seeing Sonia Leigh and Dawes, but I forgot how gratifying the venue is. How important place. The intimacy of the fifty or so of us having such visceral experience together. The catalogue of signed indy CD's, the pictures, I have to show for it. How much music is was and continues to be a map that's drawn me back to my own life.

In the parking lot I hugged my girlfriend goodbye and stayed extra long in my cousin Collin's arms. It was cool out but still so you could feel the weight of air. He is mind-blown, totally, by the show. Earlier, over dinner, he told me that he wants to move to Brooklyn Park where our Grammy lived, where his grandparents on his dad's side still live. He's been canvassing on a political campaign there all summer, dust and sweaty and I envision him, freckleface, blond and golden, is he in a button down? I am reminded of our hike in the fall, me and him, and talking so fervently about the GED and English students I served. About the unquestioned nature of class that so securely underpins racism. About my belief that many of our GED students I was certain had undiagnosed learning disorders, because the money for those resources just wasn't there in their neighborhoods when they were young. He said to me then that though his major was government he was thinking of focusing on education policy. Because when I talk about government I have to think about it, but when I talk about education it just comes right out of my heart. I remember my footing when he said that, stepping over the wet dark dirt, feeling my heart bottom out over the wisdom of this teenager who I've known since literally birth. Last night he talked about moving to Brooklyn, impoverished, crime-ridden Brooklyn. Brooklyn, because that's where the people connected with his heart when he bangs on their doors. They are the ones who made him feel equally fired-up.

When I left Collin and my girlfriend I met the girls from my old work for a late night catch-up. It was already 11, but the server at Applebees let us close the place down. We literally stayed til 1, cackly screaming laughter, the greasy food, couple of tears, the updates on Adult Ed and on my own life (I read a lot, I sit on the beach. Poetry--big self-conscious grin at this--I'm writing a lot of poetry. Tomorrow I will sleep late. My stresses include I wonder if my table needs more rolls...Coffee? Coffee here? And hmmm do I have another little black dress as sexy as the one I wore last week?) It was all put wholly, and gratefully in perspective for me. But I realized too how passionate I was for Adult Ed. It was a justice thing for me. Making opportunities available where they weren't before. It turned me, greatly, deeply, on.

In all things there are tides, and I for one am quiet and amidst a tide of great still. Life's cycle right now is on the long slow retreat and how I so love this time of year, the thick buoyancy, the savory greens, the dark yellow slanted light. The shadows in contrast. The feeling of heavy breathing that makes you so aware of the intermittent shafts of air to highlight the stillness. I have been submitting to it, which is not easy for me this Aries full of fire and passion and heat. Humbling myself again and again to the larger nature of things, allowing the silence, the stillness, trusting towards the inner-listing, the tiny hungers, to in stillness eventually speak their fisted minds. To become the palm, flat-opening. Allowing. It is hard. But that sweet unanticipated space, that wild curve within, fleshless and still, is there. And this is as beautiful as anything else: this does not mean what hungers one is missing. It means only that in full satiation there is quiet in the bliss. There is message in the silence, when one surrenders to wait and hear.

Prayer for Life, in the wind. Storms come, road trips. Come together, ppl. Dreams.

Mandee told Gretchen the storm would be here soon and would last for 36 hours, and it made me laugh and reminisce on how I used to describe Oregon Coast weather when I first left here and moved home to Maryland in 2005. Coast storms? We call them hurricanes back east...

It was steady the rain, all night. I took a long, long lavender and Epsom salt soak in Gretchen's tub reading til past midnight and the rain by then had already taken on a soothing rhythm, like someone was steady going over and over the roof with a giant rolling pin. Now, outside my window the only thing that cuts the rolling hum is the counter beat of splats from the gutter overflow, and the tweet of some soaking wet birds. I woke up to the heaviest dream, heavy in content but also like sludge in my muscles that's how deep the sleep was. Jamie my brother's fiance was sedated and in my care which felt odd and irresponsible to me, it was her wedding day, we were all running late, I didn't have my dress and felt awful, my brother was detached and sad, we all were wandering the desert in fancy clothes trying to get there on time. But the last thing, before the dream switched and varied between Amy and Rudy who kept morphing to Jasper and back, was this sense in the desert that no matter what happened between Sean and Jamie with the wedding it all was ok, and they knew it, because they had each other. I saw it underneath the blankness in their eyes, there was the seed of shared heart beam. I wanted that myself, and chose to serve them out of respect for it, instead... I opened up my eyes eventually, and looked at my cell phone expecting the time to be around 8, thinking that I'd slept late since the time difference has me up by 7 am. Instead, it was almost 10. Gretchen was in bed, awful sick with a stomach flu that came in the night, I checked my phone and got a message from Sam, and called right back because I know what news stands behind messages like that. And the news from the east coast was startling and sad. Funny how much can change in the night...

Now I am in bed again, it is almost 12, waiting on my laundry to finish. We called Mandee again and found out this isn't even the big storm, with all this rolling rain and occasional wind. So I will start down coast today before it gets here, take Gretchen's little pickup south. I wont camp, I cant in all this rain I dont have the gear, the constitution for it or the desire. Thankfully, as timing does, my state taxes came today so motels and cabins it will be. I am going driving with the sea. I am going road-tripping, for the first time in my life with no destination at all, and with the only passenger: me. When the time is right, I will go in to the mountains. Tell ppl to burn white candles for her, I texted Sam. Tell them to send prayers of healing and light, and burn white candles, that's what she needs to return to her source she is loose right now, wandering but not free. I'll find a mountain side somewhere, some lake or stream, make offerings for her of flight and peace and make offerings for the tribe back home. Death scatters, but is the door through which we each, and especially the ones left behind, must go through alone in order to make whole, too.

The rounds they come, the rounds the rounds they go. We are always in some part of our own round. We are always in some part of our own journey to from or returning home.

I will go now to the road with the passings that came to urge me on in the night.


Prayer for Molly with White Candles, in the wind

Writing of fire on the slab of jade,
the cleft in the rock, serpent-goddess and queen,
pillar of cloud, and fountain struck from stone,
the nest of eagles, the circle of the moon,
the seed of anise, mortal and smallest thorn
that has the power to give immortal pain,
shepherd of valleys underneath the sea
and guardian of the valley of the dead,
liana that hangs at the pitch of vertigo,
climber and bindweed and the venomous plant,
flower of resurrection and grape of life
lady of the flute and of the lightning-flash,
terrace of jasmine, and salt rubbed in the wound,
a branch of roses for the man shot down,
snowstorm in August, moon of harrowing,
the writing of the sea cut in basalt,
the writing of the wind upon the desert,
testament of the sun, pomegranate, wheat-ear,

a face of flames, face that is eaten away,
the adolescent and persecuted face
the years of fantasy and circular days
that open upon the same street, the same wall,
the moment flares up and they are all one face,
the procession of faces of this calling,
all of these names are unified in one name,
all of these faces are now a single face,
all centuries are now a single instant
and throughout the centuries of centuries
the path to the future shut by these two eyes,

there is nothing before me, but a moment
recovered tonight, standing against a dream....

excerpt, at random by the heartcandledlight, from Sun stone (Mexico City, 1957,) by Octavio Paz. Italics mine.