Santa Fe. Stop and Say OK.

I got stuck in Santa Fe once.

It's a funny place to get stuck, you would think that there's lots of cool stuff going on but the reality is I'd been living in the woods and my clothes were dirty and in my hippy frock over my cut-off baggies and the bandanna wrapped around my dirty hair the fancy ladies in the art shops that I thought I'd enjoy downtown ended up tailing me the whole time cuz I guess they thought I was a thief.  Every place more or less turned out to be like that--catering to wealth, and it pissed me off and when we tried to leave we got stuck, literally. The town is a circular lay-out, not a grid, so every time we thought we were heading the right way towards the desert and on to the highway towards Tuscon and a buddy of mind we'd end up circled back where we began.  Santa Fe is bordered on one side by all these fabulous adobe houses on flat brown cactus land as far as the eye can see, and on the other by the the Sangre de Cristos and a National Forest.  We didn't know about Taos then, the community and spiritual devotees around there, all we knew was that we hated our first experience in Santa Fe and were tired and wanted to get out.  So after that first day we headed up in to forest where we could set up camp and stay.  

Thinking about it now, I easily remember coming down across the mountains of the southern border of Colorado and coming around a great wide corner out of the woods and seeing the low land laid out before us and singing like a song, it swept me whole and sudden and clean inside and took my breath away, it stopped Brandon mid-sentence.  That's the energy the shamans talk about, some swift but beautiful collusion between mountain elements and the dry and drastic desert flat-land that was so stunning it was almost visual.

That first night in the Santa Fe Forest some kids came up the forest road massively tripped out on drugs, the next morning this hippy dreadlock girl whose name I cant now remember came over to our tent to say hello and to make sure we made it through the night undisturbed by the kids that were freaking out.  She was sad with a sad spirit and on her own, we talked a long time that morning over coffee it turned out it was the anniversary of when she'd given her child up for adoption.  She gave me a turquoise necklace and I gave her a tourmaline because it helps with forgiveness of the self. 

We tried to leave again that afternoon and got stuck again.  Literally, traffic and double backs that made us lose our minds.  We regrouped, decided to find a community center where we could shower, then decided to surrender to the flow and set up in the woods for a few days, hoping the stuckness would pass.  The sunset that night after our shower put orange and sherbert light all over the dark greens and browns of the adobe'd plain.  It was the most outrageous display of sunsettingness that I have ever seen.

Turns out there was a free speaker at the Masonic Lodge that we were meant to hear over the weekend.  We'd been, since around the time of full moon over Fourth of July when we camped deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota, sort of following these very serendipitous experiences based around growing knowledge of indigenous cultures living in unison with the land, and the deeper idea of the earth itself in its varied forms holding its own systems of magnetic energies called lay lines.  Now I remember, the first place that info came (in addition to Gary Snyder's writings on animism, but we brought him along) was in Maine which was literally our third stop, in Southwest Harbor by Acadia.  And then it just kept coming, from everywhere, in every direction.  The speaker at the Lodge stood there and tied it all together.  It was pretty amazing.

I dont have any money, none at all, to pay bills right now or much less to move to Baltimore and coming to terms with that has been real tough.  But I realized something the past few days and that's that sometimes for reasons you dont even know, where you are is where you're meant to be.  Even if at first it feels or looks maddening and kinda like your stuck.  My book is writing itself.  I have work on the horizon.  I'm gonna hang out in the forest a while I guess and be grateful for what's going on right now exactly where I'm at.

Dear Friends

Ben's Farm on the Chester, Fall Equinox 2009

Maybe the most important thing we might ever say about a person is I loved her, she was my friend.

Right now, a whole lot of hearts of people that I have at various times held extremely dear are gathering to say goodbye to our friend. The heart lives forever, and so too the experiences there, as part of the living breathing whole. If we let it. O god thank god I am open again, and letting it.

I am so, so grateful right now for my life, for my experiences, for my friends.

I am with you all in spirit, in heart, and in love.

I Love You, Molly
The funniest thing I ever heard about Molly happened while I was in Colorado, visiting our mutual friend Mika. Mika was living in Boulder, it’d been two years since she’d been back east with any the crew from college, and longer still since she’d really lived the life of a college student, partying on Kent Street having a good time. So it was natural that seeing Mika in Colorado in 2005 would make her eager for news of old friends and the going-ons in Chestertown. We got down to telling stories, which of course led to more stories, which eventually led to stories from college days. Mika told this story of getting up one morning after a late night on Kent Street to come out in the hall and discover that Molly had drug a tree, a whole entire uprooted tree, in to the house. Molly was no where to be seen, but the tree, dirt-covered roots and wild branches and green leaves, was propped there, as if the most normal thing ever, against a wall. To this day when I think of Molly, I remember that story and I laugh out loud.

I love you Molly. I love you for having a spirit alive enough to want to live with that tree. I love you for saying why not, when the rest of us so often merely shrug our shoulders and ask why?

I love you for the vintage wrap-around skirt you had on the first day we met, I love you because it only cost you two dollars at the Nearly New. I love you for the Bob Dylan songs you had, behind the counter with me my first day at Play It Again Sam’s. I love you for how blue your eyes are, how they danced with poetry when we exchanged names back and forth of our favorite Dylan songs.

I love you for getting naked, pasty white Maine skin, first. Showing Brandon and me with a simple why not how crazy and fun it would be swimming in that freezing cold stream, 50 degree grey August day on the Maine coast wind and rain, I love you because you said why not, raced to get your clothes off first, and jumped in. I love you for putting sea weed on your head and being a fish goddess mermaid, I love you for taking me to the tidepools, for the wonder and childlike joy that was your grace, I love you for the word Perriwinkle, for teaching me the names of barnacles and snails, for showing me what bravery looks like out on the edge of the sea. I love you for making words like bivalve, whorl, cone, and mollusk come alive, and for infusing them with proof that youth is a timeless quality in any heart.

I love you Molly. I love you for laying in the grass at Truslow Road and painting on wood scraps with me. I love you for the books you’d show up with, the print outs of poems and essays, the whole file you gave me on Outsider and Folk art, for giving me literacy around this. For the passion and love you brought to it, to art of the people how you were contagious with it, how you birthed it deep in me. I love you for your poetry, for being the only one, the one woman in the crowd, to stand strong and speak poems back to me. For believing that this was how we could and would save ourselves. I love you for being that strong, for heeding to the wild impulse, for loving the rebel moon, for following the crazy night-lit sky. I love you for dancing at midnight and wanting more wine. I love you for believing in the power of art, for making this the example of your life. For always going back again, in and in again, to create to create to create and give vision or wild reason to live and to keep creating, for giving light with your each and every birth. I love you for the suffering that you put on the page or in color, I love you for the permission it gave me, the permission for poetry and the permission for pain, the powerful permission to say yes to life and to be.

I love you for the afternoon in May on Truslow Road, on the phone, when I told you the things I thought you needed to stop doing in your life, when I told you I thought you should change. I love you because of what you told me. No you said, no I’m not interested, I will never change, and it’s my life. I love you Molly for being so true.

I love you O Molly, O Sacred Scary Sea Goddess Molly, O Fearless Sailwoman Molly with the Green Mermaid Hair and Snail-eyes of Perrywinkle Blue. I love you Molly, O Ecstatic Witnesser of the Whole White Pure Moon. I love you Molly, Soulsiseter Poet, Rebel Artist Painter, Folk Singer Wildhearted Grrrl and Friend. I love you Molly, good Molly, bad Molly, sweet Molly, crazy Molly, precious Molly who was too alive for this world, you live now forever in my heart where all love ought to be, Molly in that place you will always be so, so true. Molly now you will never end…..

June 5, 2010
Ashland, Oregon
In memory of a dear friend