The noon church bells

The church bells on Forest in Laguna are my favorite part of Saturday stroll. I am sitting downtown, on a bench in the sun. Thinking about how only a 35 mm could capture the light in the fall

or the spring, or winter.  The special summer light of this town. The noon church bells made me stop, sit.  The kind of sit that is more a prayer.  I slept late so there was only half an hour left when I got to market. The man who sold me sundried peaches for my oatmeal hooked me up with cherries and pluton and apricots too. He charged me $3 which was half the price of what it shoulda been. I left there just now with the biggest grin.

It is noon now, in four and a half hours it will be dark.  I haven't even had my second cup of coffee yet--stopped to write on my way to refill.

There's so much right now that can slide on by...unseen. It's extra important to me, then, to just pause a while. In the sun.

My Last Post on The Impulse!

Well, no doubt a wondrous, if not overwhelming, several weeks.

Last Wednesday in the morning tulips arrived from my dad for Valentine's.  Tulips, which bloom back east around my birthday which is also the first days of Spring.  Wednesday was also my year anniversary arriving to Orange County.  I started as the ninth member of a long-held writing critique group led by the fabulous Barbara Demarco-Demeritt on Thursday, Happy Love Day to me!  And it couldn't have been more timely, or more eloquent, a celebration.

On Friday I talked with my bff Katie for three hours...she was snowed-in in New Haven, CT.  Me, I hung up with her, got out of bed (it was noon!) put on my bathing suit and went to one of the secret coves here in Laguna.  I luxuriated in the sun until it went behind a far west cliff.  Then I drove to Huntington for tacos from my favorite, Normita's.  The following day I cleaned my house, moved in quietude and touched all day long by that fabulous stillness of reflection that seems to strike from a magic place time to time.

I saw my first butterflies on Friday, a monarch and ladybug in the same moments on Saturday.  In this rapidly changing time here on earth, mother nature let it be known.  In Southern California, spring is here!

And for me, too.  This blog has been my fateful reflection for five years come April.  I am proud of it as it is a mark of discipline and self-reflection I can always look back upon.  It helped me grow.  Today, in continued celebration--I offer thanks to the Impulse, Itself, for always being there within and guiding me along.  I also am happy to announce that today is the last post here at this site.

My focus has always been self-honesty and creative-process here.  It has been a means in which I could establish, knowingly, my own creative tides, and eventually know how to mark them.  In 2008 when this began I lived on a 400-acre soybean farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore.  Through allllll the changes that led me eventually here, those inner rhythms have never faltered, and this space here on the web became my stability.

It taught me a lot, and I want now to combine my gifts of teaching and writing to help others understand the same.  The rhythms of their own soul impulse, within.

THANKS FOR ALL THE SUPPORT OVER THE YEARS!!  And may this greeting find you happy and open, alive and full of wonder...and may it remind you to begin within... and share with one another, too.

Keep smiling.

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.

To tame this head

The Eastern Shore is the rural, country side of Maryland.  It is flat but full of agricultural and watermen history, you can almost see its bias and charm in the fog banks that stack thick on a fall day like today.  The Chesapeake Bay divides the shore from the stretch of urban corridor between Annapolis, DC, and Baltimore where I am right now.   Over there, or  the other side is what Shore people call it here.

The last time I was here in this shop I lived on the shore.  I had edits due to Erika; her most recent submission of Hemingway's Girl.  It didn't have a contract on it yet.  She didn't even have an agent then.  In such little time so much can change.

My cousin Erin drove us to Annapolis this morning.  Last night sort of late we went to Ellicot City, my favorite place to go in the fall. Later of course it was Sex and the City reruns in her bed.  We parted ways this morning at her car, she to the State House where she works me to the Hard Bean where now I can write and study and be the Kelly that inside me really is and needs to be.  It's been a whirlwind, in San Antonio with mom and dad the Montezuma Cypresses hung over us on the river walk and talked low like they knew our names.  A Mexican man fell in love with me and spoke in Spanish about the true ancient heritage of my tattoo.  It made me laugh in a gentle way and turn red.  It's the first time anyone has done that, ever, in spanish Los Indios, Los Aztecos...not one of my Mexican friends ever knew, not one.  Coatalique in the eyes, lore of female divine still living in our unconscious but in the temporal from day to day she is dead.  In Austin I stayed on a ranch with 26 other McMullens for the weekend.  It was like being a child again at Gram and Pops at the beach.  People on mattresses on the floor and every couch bodied.  Kate looked like a Grecian princess in the times of the Goddess on her wedding day.  We made a circle around them and I couldn't stop the hot tears that ran the whole time.  Now I'm here, Maryland where I'm from, time at Uncle Tim's where I slept all night two nights ago, the first time I've done that since Mary went in the hospital.  Time with Brian my brother in Canton and my family in Pennsylvania, too.

And now time with me today, before I meet with my brother Sean and Aunt Sue, to write poems and sing this soul of mine back to life.  Out the shop front the boat show is setting up, years ago I worked twelve hour shifts at Pussers back to back because boat show weekend brings all the tips.  I lived here then and was going to marry a man named Joe.  Years after that I came here to the docks on my first date with Brandon, who I would spend six years with in a farmhouse deep in the country of the Eastern Shore.  Growing veggies and swapping music and fresh eggs.  Years after that I came up here to meet with Erika, begin this phase which has been all about the soul song, all about trusting that there is no arrival, just a path that presses and spirals, and cycles on.

Good for me to think on that today.  To tame this head that really wants to know about   ...Years from now...?  That really loves to wrap up in the different experiences of home.

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~

Erika Robuck

This is a picture of Erika Robuck in April, 2009.  Taken at the high school we attended, after she read from her self-published novel Receive Me Falling. 

It was the first time I'd seen her in almost a decade and a half.

When we were in Ms. Fouse's English class, back in Catholic School together in the seventh grade, we used to pass one another loose-leaf with stories written on them.  Hand to hand beneath our desks when the teacher wasn't looking.  Hers had willful characters with tortured backgrounds and eloquent names like Victoria.  Mine were loosely veiled recaps of characters based on people we both knew.

Little has changed...as far as our primary interests and passions go, and the enthusiasm which we use all these years later in our continued sharing of the words.  Erika and I decided a month after our re-connection in 2009 to begin what has become three years of story-sharing and more importantly, life-creating with one another.  And I am beyond words now, truly, when attempting to best describe the experience of watching the world welcome her gifts.

What is there to possibly say to cover this amount of awe, and gratitude?

Hemingway's Girl, her first offering from Penguin's NAL hit the shelves today!  Erika writes historical fiction and brings Papa H to life in such a realistic way that I am whole-heartedly certain: she has made him proud. What a ride, and what great fortune I have to continue this relationship of spirit and words and heart and trust, of the ebbs and flows of creating and life.  I am honored, and hope you all will support her and her book.  Go here to read Erika's thoughts on this special day and here to purchase her first of many books.  With love and special thanks to Erika, and the nous, for so touching us both with its mystery and magic on this and all our days ~  To countless more my friend.

Breathe. Smile. Go Slow.

Yoga tonight, it was great, Derryne's mantra for practice was Breathe.  Smile.  Go Slowly.  On our last few rounds of sun salutations she really had us go deep in to our breath, which I would do all of class if I could (and wind up on my own endless bliss planet, Planet Kel.)   She said imagine you are moving through honey.  I did.  It made me smile, a lot.

Told my class today that the reason I call them my little chickens is because I am the Mama Hen.  I tried to explain what this meant.  Mama Hen doesn't translate so well.  I caught the Japanese girls calling me The Big Chicken.  With genuine affection in their voices.

This has made me laugh until I am wet-eyed no less than six times today.

Mom's birthday today, Beth yesterday, Paul the day before.   Season of Cancer, Mother Energy.  Talked to ma and grandma.  Thought about men, how I was raised to believe men behave.  What my experience has affirmed or changed of those ideas.  What ideas still need adjusting.

Thoughts are with Erika.  My novel's moving.  Grad school apps are close to complete--ahhhhh and so instead of writing this afternoon when the rare Southern California rain showed up I laid down on my bed and got snuggly and listened to the way the rain sounds in the alley right out of my side window.  Just like I used to love to do in Ocean Pines, the smack noise of rain on tree leaves on to the ground.  Ahhhh.

Tiki Bar last night.  Dancing in the parking lot at midnight. Cute.  I love my life.  Breathe.  Smile.  Go slow.

Check in.

Being a girl

Ok, so I didn't do morning pages today.  Those are my first thought journal downloads in the morning, a process/tool that never, ever fails to plug me more in to me in a focused, realized way.   When I use it fairly consistently.  I didn't do morning pages today because I hit snooze FOUR times!!  I could barely keep my eyes open getting out of bed!  And I realized it's because I had no afternoon espresso or nighttime redbull this weekend.  Just my daily two cups in the morning.  My body was so unwound and deeply tired/sleeping this morning that I only had one cup today for breakfast and replaced my afternoon Americano with chamomile tea.  I want to listen to my body as part of this new direction.

Inbox full of emails by the time I was done teaching.  FAFSA, general application done.  Stopped at the Teacher's Union to see about loans through them.  Went downtown to write my 2000 words and start on my essays for the rest of the application.   Two paragraphs and my computer dies.  I thought I could throw myself through the glass window right now.  That is very dramatic I know.  But to look at my calm, centered face one would not likely think:  that girl she must be thinking that she'd like to jump out of that chair and hurtle herself through the glass window on to the streets of downtown Huntington.  Hmmm then what would the tourists say....it maybe is not so good to keep your tension bottled but then the computer dies.  What the hell else can you do?

I called Justin back home panicked but he didn't answer because he works a zillion jobs in the summer. So I talked to Samil at Dell for an hour and got it all straight.  Computer working again my momentum was gone though.  I came home on my bike it was too late for yoga. I left my mat at the yoga center a couple weeks ago and it's not there now.  Meaning when I get off my blog here I will practice on the floor on a sheet or tapestry.

Derynn's bbq was super fun.  Lots of great food and people and also bocci ball which I haven't played since I left Chestertown.  It made me really happy.  Tonight we are going out downtown and I invited a guy I met.  Tomorrow I will begin again.  Tonight I will put music on and shower and just tinkle around getting dressed and doing my hair and letting time dissipate a while, being a girl.  

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.

The Hallelujah that counts

I had the genius idea of coming to Bella Terra to write. I could see myself after a preliminary dose of poetry sidled down in the corner of the Starbucks in Barnes and Noble--remember when I used to hate Starbucks I think to myself , not unkindly--apologetic in my own judgment of humanity, how to be human?  Relinquish unto the aspects deigned most unacceptable. I think how liberals or new agers are some of the most judging righteous people I know and I check myself.  My own isolated sanctity's.  An amen that I at least recognize some of my own small vengeance's.  That I am not active in at least some of my worst prejudices any more.

The morning I spent in the coffee shop near my house.  Writing poems til it moved in me that it was time to leave, that my novel was ready to speak and in that...precisely why I had to come here.  On the way I followed the singing to a used book store.  Do you have Emerson's Self-Reliance I asked cheery and foolish for all he knew.  No he shook his head slowly but I didn't even listen and asked instead where the poetry was.  Beside the poetry was "Literature", it is a British voice that pronounces that in my head, silly as I am on a sunny Sunday...I scoured the Li-trit-chore section one by one as if with metal tonged comb.  Nothing.  He was right.  I surrendered and let my bag fall to the floor and cozied in to study the poetry books when the first one jumped off, surrounded by the hallelujah light, Emerson's Collected Poems and Works.  What a find.  I handed over my ten dollars.

Here at the Starbucks at Bella Terra the line was so long and people so many you couldn't even see the front door. Mos Def on the stereo maybe, hard to say.  I spotted a dirty crammed table with straw wrappers and some kind of sticky mess visible from as far as I was away.  I headed towards it, a little man with a beak-nose and a beard of Jewish grey slid in and pretended to ignore me.  I hated him so much in that moment before I remembered to laugh and loosen up.   Just wait and be I reminded myself and within the ten minutes it took for my drink a table in the middle of the room opened up.  I promised myself that if someone hopeless and wandering passes by I'll share my unused part of the table top and push a chair their way.

Why is it I can flow so easily in so many sections of my life?  Why why why can I so easily open in to and happily contribute to the ongoing daily dialogue of the larger day?  And yet still want to force the littlest details, til I feel absolutely nuts?

Ask why, cuz you're gonna I told Erin on the phone this week.  But only ask that of yourself for one sec, don't waste too much of your time.  Don't focus on the why when it's the Hallelujah that counts.

Hallelujah, hallelujah.  Halllle freakin lujah, I say.

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.

And this is what I am trying to get through to him

Yes, teacher, yes... I believe you, he says, but I don't quit because we're not at his edge yet.  I go on, certain to keep our gaze fixed.

Good, I'm glad you believe it, now try it.  I promise if you practice your negatives you will be a better fighter. Understand?  I promise~

From his gaze on mine I feel his whole sphere encompass then retreat and I know I got my in--that he's heard me.  What he does with it is up to him, but without question what I have shared will sink in.  The seed it waters, that may come later...maybe back home in Brazil, maybe in conversation with his mother.  Who knows?  But the concept saturated, and that's all that matters to me in the end.

He is twenty-something, with achingly good looks, the kind you feel in your muscles. He's easy to like and uses the charm of his smile and eyes, these gifts that have given him many passes in life, to keep class light.  I like having him as part of the dynamic and so do all the ladies, which presents a whole other all the time behavior lesson of keeping male and female energies equated.  Human dynamics and being in the heat of it, I love this stuff.  I am a natural educator not by my trade but because I am always, all the time learning. If this is the case for you than you get it--you are all the time also teaching, too.

And this is what I am trying to get through to him.  Plasticity.  The stretchiness of the brain, literally.  How when we challenge ourselves to a new concept, mental, physical, emotional, the details don't matter, it's the "newness" or "challenge" factor that engages a chemistry change.  With practice, this new opening actually impacts all our current rhythms.  We can even change our muscle memory, re-establish all new patterns this way.

So what I want is for him to learn the negative forms of contractions--this area where there is a gap just subtle enough in class for only I to see.  He just quietly scoots around negatives, so that's the place I want his eyes forced open, and I am challenging him, and he is a cage fighter, obsessed with MMA, and obsession--passion--of any kind impresses and excites me so I know to appeal to this.  And I know, enough to promise, that what I am saying is right.  I hated grammar, hated it, the only reason I ever took english EVER was to write.  Now, step by step with patience and quiet I have to learn each rule so that my students can understand.  It hurts my head.   And it's made my writing so damn clean but is it that or my commitment to the new postures in yoga I am coercing my body to learn?  The connections are stunning and clear, as I write long hours away until the dark threads its rightness, its ease of night finesse right into my skin. I have whole stories in front of me or poems completed, and new ones charging to begin. This is yoga, and grammar, and human behavior lesson 101.  So I take aim and he gets it.  Learn your negatives.  It will help you fight.

When I drop his gaze he smiles a to the side smile and gives me a pound.  I get it I get it teacher...Open your mind.

He gets the concept, what he does now is up to him.

The ding of my typewriter bell

Thinking about living on Truslow Road, 2006. I'd ordered my boyfriend a 6 CD-set of folk songs from the Smithsonian Institute, which has archived recordings of every folk-movement you can imagine, and we were listening to it on our new record player, in our living room that had no television and furniture that we boasted was all second-hand.  We didn't have the internet. Or a laptop, yet.  I didn't even have a car.  Just rode a six dollar vintage bike everywhere, that I'd gotten at an auction in the middle of farmfields outside town.

It's because I am listening to Spotify, this nostalgia, to an Al Jolson and Benny Goodman playlist because Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris made me all romancy and wanting for the twinge of myth to sit in my hair.  But counter to the beauty of that film, the nuances of yesteryear and the wanting, the pure, lovely human wanting that it pigeons...what I am doing right now by thinking back is instead reveling in how satisfied I currently am.

I would love to hear some big band on a nice static sounding turntable, have no doubt.  I would love the tinkle sound background murmur of cocktail drinkers and laughter.  But I am equally thankful that my other option--internet streaming Spotify--brings a similar magic to my life.  The aesthetic is different.  For example, why I am willing to drive 25 minutes to Long Beach to buy medicinal herbs in bulk to make oils and teas and salves, instead of just settling for the already made stuff at the organic markets here in town.  There's an intuitiveness to that for me, the hands-on steps, the moment to moment allowing of the instinctive nature to lead the process.  In the same way I'd love to own a record player, breathe the dust of the paper album slip, feel the grease smudges on the cardboard while fingering the choices one by one.  Feel the easy way the vinyl latches on the spindle.  Hear the sound dust makes, settled between the grooves.  If I could, I would be typing this by twinkling lights on the grape arbor in my own backyard in this sweet small town.  That noise that just echoed...?  Permanence.  The ding of my typewriter bell.

But that means I'd miss the music right now, how it lightens my mood so that I have a small smile. The simple, practical beauty of writing right now, the discipline of using my craft, spending time with the words by just letting them out.  Hitting a button and instant audience.  The enticement of this.  Or the way the air from the open window on the skin of my forearm feels right now--dewy, cool, like the grass does at dawn--and too the way it smells just as sweet.

And that's the difference between now and then.  I struggled endlessly with being where I was, whatever that meant.  And much as I struggled with valuing the joy of the present, I too pitied and even righteously resisted change, and especially technology, which is what made me think tonight of back then on Truslow Road.  I was classically extreme, believed still as youth will that to be one thing entirely eliminated my capacity to also be something else.   Those folkway recordings--songs that were over fifty years old, on CD--were some of the only CDs, other than EPs released by our friends, that we listened to that year.  The funny irony, to be to snobbish even about CDs!  Everything was on album.  That to enjoy inspiration, to be moved by aesthetic or moved with a process, I thought it also meant I couldn't enjoy what was available through convenience.

Definitely not the click of enter on Spotify anyway.  I actually have an IPOD now!  Even if I'd been in Woody Allen's time travelling roaring twenties car and I came forward by just a few years and peaked my future myself, I NEVER would've believed that back then.  An IPOD would've meant losing my edge!  Ah, to value the integral overlaps of my own inner diversities.  This act of being still, present, to the all the parts of who I was and who I am.  It opens to movement and eases me naturally along.  This is delight, right now, in how I converge.

Your soulspeak companions

Lindsey, my dear sweet friend from way back then, confirmed that meeting in San Diego for the night wouldn't be feasible because her work load was so intense--she's been in town for five days but we couldn't make anything happen.  After she texted I left the 99 cent store, where I seem to visit once weekly for creative accouterments to aid in teaching, and cruised home.  The sun was burning the wildest poetic orange. The palm trees looked black against the nightening sky. I hit a left on Ellis from Brookhurst and whadya know, Ellis is the street that turns to Main which is where I live.  This I did instinctively, body knowledge, and when I realized it sitting at the light I had the most satisfied ease.  I have lived here going on four weeks.  I have slowed down, given over unto myself, allowed for the creation of my own rounds.  And so I begin to feel lovingly contented with my self, with this sweet little hand-crafted life I am whittling out piece by piece.

Laura and Clay eat dinner together every night, they were just finishing the ritual with their customary evening commentary on current events when I walked in the door.   He was a dj on college radio in the late sixties and again in the mid-seventies so his musical sensibility when it comes to soul and in general roots music is unstoppable.  Makes me wish my love Brooks was here because him and Clay would stay up musicing til well past the palms went black til well past them going blue in the moonlight all the way past, for sure, when they turn orange pink again in the earliest morning sun.  That's what happened, unexpected, with us tonight, we got talking music and the conversation had me so lit up I was on spotify with the finest Ray Charles play list I believe I have ever heard, back and forth back and forth to the rocking boat rhythm of some of the sexiest music alive.  Music that made my veins sweat on the inside, music that made me want to squat low on my haunches and let the very earth itself sway me side to side.  Music that made me think of Brooks, of dancing like no one on the planet dances because that planet made of soul is invisible it's one you can only feel through your feet someplace cosmic where they brush on the floor of your shoes it's a planet you inhabit from within, this the planet where Brooks and I live, and so Clay brought him near and Laura too, who brought Erika near by telling me she channeled Fitzgerald while writing this afternoon.

All is right with the world when your housemates, decades ahead of you, bring to you your husband and wife of the creative element, your soulspeak companions three thousand miles away.  When things are so aligned they meld that well to your inner atmosphere.  I love my life.  I love putting my energy in to exactly what I care about, exactly what turns me on.  I do so and it feeds me back at me, in this power surge of soul music over dinner and Fitzgerald wander lust fettering in and out.  I want to yell to Erika, yell to her a quarter-stretch across the globe The Duende The Duende it's alive it's well, but I don't need to because she is my sister my wife in this soul land so she already knows.  Tomorrow I meet Derynne for the Huntington Beach Street Fair   then we are going to an Equinox Bonfire also here in HB.  She too one of this tribe... I danced the best fun dancing with sweet Wallace and his friends this weekend they actually helped themselves to taking over the dj stand, I wrote poems all day on Friday and read in bed most the day long yesterday.  To feed the soul, any who would ever label this selfish how sad!  How much they miss out, how this life by very design sees to it that we serve others just by serving our own true self, that we empower others from the genuine source power when this is what we do.

Ah and for me?  This time, this quiet gentle precious time.  It's been a long time coming.  Life is good.

Starting when you're an infant

It is spring out.   It smells like spring, like May in Maryland on Washington College's campus, like warm soil and thick juicy blades of grass and trees indulgently fat with cherry blossoms on their ends.  Like those big pink fluff balls that make the air in May look full of pink snow.  It smells like potential, all the time, buoyant and life-giving, and also like salt.  Like flowers dripped with dew of the sea.  Palm trees prattle, destiny leaves full of future's sound.  Whiny dogs fight it out every morning in a funny barking match, I live in the suburbs again but maybe they dont call it that when your downtown is a beach?  Out my window I awake to Laura's mourning doves.  One of them laughs, I swear to God I didn't know they did that, but look it up.  It does.

I sent Erika edits today after staying up til 11:30 with her latest book in hand, wrote about 600 words today on mine.  It's shy of my 2000 a day goal, but for easing in to what will become my routine...I'll take it.   Last evening it was Huntington's street festival, live music and vendors and veggies and stands, and when the night came on with that big ol moon I drove to explore a new section of my town in the direction of the library.

And then, for the first time since 2005, I got totally giddy and spinny over books.  So much so--and I am thinking of my 33rd birthday here when Katie had to lead me out of Laila Rowe by the elbow because of all the sparkly pretties--that I actually got breathless in the basement poetry section when I put the seventh book on the top of my stack.  And I had to gently, gigglingly, lead myself out.  It feels so good to be so nerdy.  I haven't lusted over library or books like that since Oregon in 2005.

It takes one full year to get settled in to a place, I've learned that as the years have gone.  In a year you can tell the seasons, the in-breaths and outs of the land, the tilt of the sky and what it means by certain winds.  I did yoga in the park today, made my first just-by-happening friend.  I am counting days already, eager to soak to soak it all in.  On the beach Sunday I introduced myself to the sand, to the ocean I said a little prayer.  I was always scared of the Pacific, it's crazy I get it, and I've begun to let that go.  I know the Atlantic so well I can tell her tides with my eyes shut, tell the weather just by feeling her swell.  That's what 34 years starting when you're an infant will do ya.  

But now, as I round out the last days of year 35, I'm hitting re-set.  Getting myself settled, letting life lead me much as I am slowly allowing myself to start to lead it.  Ready, but like a baby now.  And okay with it. Just setting myself down to breathe, to learn a while.  Willing to crawl way before I run, willing to learn really, long as it takes me, how it is that you walk this land.  Giddy and spinny, all the things I love close as my own hands.

The way I know it needs me

My favorite place to write is Panera.  Maybe it's silly but I figured it was an East Coast place so I didn't even bother looking for one last week.  It's where I used to go at least twice a week when I moved to Easton, after my year sabbatical out in the country at Teena's 1800's original farmhouse on the Choptank River.  Easton was my first place of my own, my only place all my own.  I loved it so, my own little sweet kitchen where I used to wile and dance every morning.  My own comfy couch and extraordinary windows that let in the best yellow sunshine, the magnolia out the kitchen that I knew like an old friend.  I could walk to the best local coffee shop and music venue in the world from that little pad with the light purple bathroom and the bedroom that I turned to my studio with the wall length book shelf. The coffee shop there was my all time favorite, but people like Rudy and KJ or my students showing up at random, just like how it's supposed to happen at the local place, made it hard to get my work done.  So Panera out on Route 50 used to feed me, next to its gas fireplace, it kept me caffeinated and with my heart in the work and the work in my head all winter long.  These were the days of the earliest drafts of my novel.  Imagine my great happiness driving to the strip mall in Newport today only to discover a Panera Bread right next to the Ross.

That's where I am now, hoping a coveted outlet opens so I can sit and get in to chapter four the way I know it  needs me to, gnawing at me to gnaw at it.  I'll warm-up a minute on this blog here, eat my salad and Vermont-cheddar-mac-n-cheese, get the facebook-spacing out of the way.  By this day next week there will be my very own room with a beckoning call, a perfectly fit desk against the front left wall.

There is nothing better in the world than knowing what you love and living it.  It keeps me grateful, and my feet eager to be on the ground.  It's true what they say anyhow, to thy own self be true...when I'm out there stumbling and adventuring around I always know I'll like what I get to see.  It's what happens, because I always remember to bring along me.

Really real and finally here

A long weekend and all of a sudden it feels like summer, that light, smiley, that quick.  Amazing what 70 degrees will do.

Friday night we danced at two different places in Laguna.  Mike knew everyone at the first place making it even more surreal for me.  The djs were good and different enough for me than club dancing in OC.  From the sounds of it dancing's not a common way to spend a night for Mike or his friends but without doubt they had a good time.  I know I did, I got to drive my magic bus, always what I like.  I needed it, it was a long week one that saw my reality go from dark greens and shades of mist and moist to full technicolor, like on a 3-D screen.  We rode bikes around Newport yesterday after I laid on the beach for two hours eating an entire delicious cheesesteak and reading Vogue.  That's how unhippie I went.  Later, I drove us to Disneyland.  We saw G-Love and I laughed harder at Mike's friends than I have with any group of people since I left the hill.   It's nice to feel family, and I feel that in any home where there's a brother-heart with friends that dont care if I wear my pajamas all day long.

Saturday I will move in to a house in Huntington Beach.  Antique furnished room, desk.  Tiled bathroom hand-done by the owner's artist friend.  Best part, one mile from the beach.  The writing madness is up on me, in a way that I can feel run through my whole body like long spider hands, like some kind of haunt playing the nerves of my skin, like angel wings fluttering out code that I am meant to feel than make in to sound.  It is so good, to have that AND the beach all in one great round.

This is something that I've said I've wanted since the night I left Anngar Farm in 2008.  Go to the beach somewhere it's always warm.  Live on my own, write. Teach ESL.

I have my teaching interview on Tuesday.  It's hard for me to get used to the idea that this is real, that this is all really real and finally here.

I do it for my health

Blue skies like this mean one thing, I have to be outside.  Makes me think of Larry in Seattle telling me back when I crashed his floor that the reason for him living there was because he could be an artist and work inside and not feel bad because of the weather.

Blue skies there and a mountain shows up, so I know what he means.

I drove to Guernville this funny little valley town minutes from me where the trees surround in their tree-orchestra stadium-seating-way.   You can hear them sing.  Mexico drinks the most soda out of any country in the world, in homage to this after I was done walking all around I stopped at the food truck for carnita tacos $2.50 and a Jarrito for just as much.  Yummmm.

Now I am at the coffee shop, warding off isolation which is the writer's betrayer-friend.  Betraying because you get close to being alone and use it to create but inside of alone is a private blurry line which always gets crossed it turns in to lonely.  That happened yesterday but my town-trip, the sun and tacos and the blue sky, was good remedy for that.

I make friends with everything, so I never have to be alone.

This is discipline, this blog here, same like taking vitamins or sleeping every night I do it for my health.

Busy cafe and sunshine hippie way-outs in Guernville, my triple Americano waiting now it's time to get to work.

What else could I do?

It took almost three times the amount of time that it took to get there to drive home from Santa Rosa tonight.  I drove the mountain roads pretending like I knew what I was doing.  Finally, driving down in to a valley with a night sky to the left that I could just tell was near the ocean, I pulled in to a Whole Foods.

The Whole Foods alone was enough to know that I was far from home.  I got out my GPS and wound up going the long way, down the creepy all black magicy feeling Bohemian Highway and finally back to the cottage in the woods.  It's funny to me, I live right now 100 yards from one of the sunniest corridors in Sonoma County; the river across the street is a fork off the Russian several miles away, and driving along side that river through the pastures and rolling hills is one of the sunniest delights I've ever seen.  Sonoma Scenic Route 116.  But where I am, 100 yards away, under a tall redwood canopy, I sit in the breathless waterfall of the trees busy drinking up their fog.  It is always cold, and I am getting expert at building fire.

Friday I hiked an hour along the coast.  Yesterday I went to the beach late in the day.  I have seen water explode over rocks in ways that make me want to fall to my knees.  But I have never seen water explode on a shore, merely from the force of its shallow undercurl break, the way I witnessed yesterday.  The blast was so powerful it shook the ground and my breath had trouble going all the way in to my lungs.  The ocean was so fiercely, repeatedly slamming itself that it was churned to a froth thicker than shaving cream.  Here's the thing, driving along the coast highway looking all the way down to the water, the sets were perfect timed tidy rollers.  In the ten minutes it took me to switchback all the way down then walk over the dunes to the sand, that's how quick it changed.  It was awing, I stood a long time motionless.  Probably my jaw was hanging a little down.  That's how much I was in utter trance to the sea.

On my way, later, back up the mountain towards the coast highway there was the white moon, in the blue sky.  Night blue sky, that lovely dusk blue.  Deer were pitched all up and down the crags of rock, having little grassy chews.  Two times different deers looked right at me.  I smelled like salt and my cheeks burnt red from the salt air and late sun.  I walked a long time up the beach both ways, I watched children, I watched lovers, I listened to seals, I watched the ocean, I heard the waves.  I read what Eudora seemed to have prepared just for me to read.  Today I wrote all afternoon in a cafe, tonight I drove to Santa Rosa for a movie and enjoyed getting lost on my way home.

I am satisfied.  It's an odd feeling, to be so subsumed in the experience of fulfillment, of actually doing it.  Gratitude goes unsaid, I am quenched in it.  It spins off from me, it's the light step I have, the contentment in watching, listening, feeling the sun on my arms, the mark of charcoal on my jeans.  It's more like, wow, I did it, what else could I do?  There is wondrous stillness knowing that there will never come a day that I may say I sure wish I had taken the chance and just gone after the artistic life I think I might love.

So, wow, what else could I do?

Thank you life

The fire that's burning has been burning for 6 hours, I'm real proud of this and if you had to work this wood stove and could say the same about your fire then I'd be proud of you, too. Kindling has to be thin practically as a pencil.  There is no flu so it takes lots of slow burning starter then adding on layer by layer wood in teeny degrees of bigger size.

I split wood and love how it feels to swing the hatchet. It smells so good out there and from where I stand in the valley it is always moist and the stream runs in earshot, all of it makes me happy.  At night my muscles are sore from it, and my back too from sitting in the chair writing all day and so I soak in the hot tub, feel the power streams and look through the fog channels in the sky.  And revel.

This is my life?

The thing is it's hard to say well yes, yes it is, and certainly things are going happily according to plan.  Because when you do what I did, set out in your car with just enough money to get you all the way across the United States, with one goal in my mind, there really is no such thing as "plan."

So it's not as practical as yes, yes this is my life going according to plan.  It's more like

WOW, this  is my life!  Thank you life, so, so much.