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

I followed the sea to the river all the way to the snow

Sunset over the valley, Ashland.























Out back of my little suite.

Coming down the mountain, Crater Lake.

Crater Lake

North Umpqua River

Headwaters of the Umpqua

Winchester Bay, where the Umpqua empties

Winchester Bay

Oregon Dunes Monument

This is Banana Dog, he is my travel companion. Follows his adventures here

travelling down coast, between Yachats and Florence

I am way way south in Oregon, about 80 miles from California in a place called Ashland.

I love Ashland. It's like a bigger, happier Easton. And surrounded by green mountains. And a really big sky. And air that I am certain looks like rainbows.

I got here today and spent too much money on a little suite outside of town for the whole weekend. Dinner tonight was with a totally indulgent novel and a fine bartender who flirted with me just enough but not too much, in a dark corner at a high bartable with mosaic art and some latin influenced tapas. Little girls with painted faces dined across from me and kept getting giggled at or shussshed by their ma's. The air was so fresh and full it felt like it could bounce and the sky was orange and seriously, hot pink, when I left and I couldn't stop smiling. On grinbeam alone I am sure I was gliding, I glided along to downtown, to the river walk, to the park. I glided in to the chocolate shop. It was getting dark. I looked East Coast. I got several compliments on my bag. I bought a single piece of homemade dark chocolate with peanut butter and eating it took like three hours. Everyone kept smiling at each other. Even the punk rock kids, the blackeyeliner and metal faces, the dready hippies on the street. Especially the smiley little families everywhere. I love the houses, the cottages, all over the sidestreets of downtown. The flowers and little twinkling white lights. Ahhhhh god I am blissful, this reminds me of California.

Earlier today I was actually on the top west rim of Crater Lake. In the Umpqua National Forest, after following the Umpqua River in from the coast since Thursday morning. By the time I got up to about 4500 feet, about an hour and half from the top, there was snow all over the ground. I was so happy I think I might have been delirious.

It's weird. My friend died Tuesday night, and the poetry light's been crazy on inside me ever since. What's weird is that I woke up in Winchester Bay, at the headwaters of the Umpqua, on Thursday morning after 36 hours of on and off vigil for her and therefor crazy open consciousness, or at least a well-lit opening to the other side, and I went down to the harbour because like Sam said more than once she was a sailor, our friend, so it seemed appropriate, and I cried. And cried and cried, then wandered in to the dunes through the knobby sea pines and down to the rock slats built up against the coast for the fisherman to make safe passing through the harbor. I had handfulls of flowers and ribbons and a little boat I made out of a random piece of driftwood that I wrote prayers and poems all over in black sharpie. I put her candle on it and added an empty Pabst Blue Ribbon cap then scrambled down to the lowest rock I could balance on with the scratchy muscles bracing me and then me and her had our little goodbye. The rest of the tribe is gathering at Ben's on Sunday to say goodbye I get the feeling it's going to be pretty huge, this is where I used to go regularly, Ben's with the old crew, this is when I was in Chestertown. And even though I've been out of that crew for over a year now there was no question about it in spirit we are all together, I am with them and they are all with her. It's all a little surreal and yet just part of the experience of being out here. I finished crying and goodbying then went up to where the harbour meets the ocean and just breathed and took a ton of pictures of the driftwood and the sand. Then I got in the car which is actually an old chevy pickup truck with classic Oregon Coast rust, and decided I had to see where the water that fed the bay that surged to the harbour and out to the sea, where it all began.

So I headed east. Up the Umpqua, and it started to rain. I drove all day, but stopped alot to talk to the earth or the trees or the river or the rain. Which I guess is one of the main ways I pray. Outside Roseburg it was like 5ish, I stopped at a brandname hotel and got her down 25 off the original price but then something in me casted out just slightly, so I said no thanks and on I went. I decided I'd take the mountain road east out of Roseburg then south towards Crater Lake, mostly because I wanted to keep following the Umpqua, we had a special thing going now. And the river led me to the sweetest motel, the Dogwood, in a place I am sure without a zipcode called Idleyld Park I am sure it was the river who told me to go. I'd just been singing and talking to her and then it was like she waved the gold air inside me after I drove by and so without thinking at all I turned right around and they had one room left and it was for me. A log cabin with kitchen and the best little well-lit table where I could, and did and did, write...

Today I started out again next to her, the North Umpqua, looking forward to a good long hike. There were two stops with hotsprings to hike in to along the way, and at least one with pictographs from anasazi and several paths with Old Growth. But the rain fell and fell so much it was hard to tell the sky from the air. So I changed my plans and settled for sure on Crater Lake, and by the time the elevation and the truck met high enough so that there was snow on the ground, the sun came out, too, and the sky went blue. I had no idea, NONE, that I would be in high mountain land today surrounded by snow. It made me so, so happy.

And now I am here. In all I imagine I covered at least 200 miles today, maybe more, and mostly on high mountain roads. The Winema Forest, The Umpqua, The Rogue, The Klamath. This little pickup Gretchen lent me runs like a dream. It's a manual, he grumbles and groans and spouts a lot but then really gets going and loves to go. I dont listen to music, most of the time, except for the tunneled classic and hair rock stations, or country which is my guilty indulgence, so popular out here. It's a...Nice Day for a...White Weddin....Yea rock out rock out scratchy tunneled pick up truck mountain rock!

This is the best thing I've ever done for myself. Life is good. I am blessed. Can you imagine, I dont have a fucking clue what I'm doing with my life when I get back home! He he it makes me giddy to think about it, if it is anything near like the journey I'm having so far I say bring it on.... <>

For Sam, and Ben. At Witching Hour, Winchester Bay, Oregon.

It was 11:37 west coast time when I knew it was soon time to burn the candle again. This is modern ritual and I do it so it lasts 7 days, the burning of the white candle that one may pass the bardo. But this is a new age, we are creating new myths, our tribe is our tribe and the new rituals matter only when so moved by one's own individual moment: therin, or where-in of course, is one's own truth. Which is why for Molly, the secret code words of power aren't Tibetan at all but live in poems. Make them read poems. She was a poet, and a painter, that's how she goes. Purity reigns here, reigns free, in poetry. These are power words then that will source her home.

We are creating new myths, here? Read this every one of you and scared, superstitious, alight, trust-full, heart of grief whatever you are trust that the choices you make matter. Raise your power, realize it is love. Love more. Think of love like fire. Fire transmutes, turns wood in to ash. Ash feeds earth, grows life again. Fire is like love, love changes things. Think of love like it's fire. It's a pure and real thing. Raise your love inside you start with the feeling in your heart of your own beam. Direct it at love, direct it at her.

From the back end of my eyes where the second sight lives I saw movement several times about my motel room here, it started an hour or more ago but it was 11:37 when it stirred in my heart. It must be close to 12 I thought when I felt the clear stir, bc no matter what midnight is a special time. The best name I've ever heard for the consciousness shift at midnite is, yes, the witching hour.

Everything is sacred, and profane. This is life. This is life god damn it! It's all sacred, it's all shit, that's the funny irony. She lived this. May her life be exemplary of this. As such, I didn't want to pray yet, Steven Colbert was on and I paid good money for this shitshack motel. I paid extra for wifi and still am stealing it on slow low one bar, unsecured, anyway. But then the time was right, it got closer to 12, I lit the candle and fell right in to prayer and she was here, in and out in and out of this room, more than once. I asked the Archangel Michael to be near, but as I write this Gabriel's name almost came out and so now, too, in that the candle's still burning I will pray to draw him near, as well.

Blessed be sister and friend. From the love beam place of grace that is the smile on her face I lifted up this prayer, I asked that she guide me in love to the poem/s she most wanted. I read aloud, I read fast, I read these leaves in and to the open air:

...O that man might take this secret, of which the world is full even to its littlest things, more humbly to himself and bear it, endure it, more seriously and feel how terribly difficult it is, instead of taking it lightly. That he might be more reverent toward his fruitfulness...Therefor, dear sir, love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. For those who are near you are far, you say, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you. And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very large; rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you, and be kind to those who remain behind, and be sure and calm before then and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not understand. Seek yourself some sort of simple and loyal community with them...

from Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, Worpswede, near Bremen, July 16, 1903

I asked that she guide me, smiles and love, and this was my favorite, for ecstat and ecstat love and I could feel her, feel her! beaming and near:

Revolutionary Letter # 49 (read loud and fast, see her smiling, whirling round)
Free Julian Beck
Free Timothy Leary
Free seven million starving in Pakistan
Free all political prisoners
Free Angela Davis
Free Soledad brothers
Free Martin Sobel
Free Sacco & Vanzetti
Free Big Bill Hayward
Free Sitting Bull
Free Carzy Horse
Free all political prisoners
Free Billy the Kid
Free Jesse James
Free all political prisoners
Free Nathan Hale
Free Joan of Arc
Free Galileo & Bruno & Eckhart
Free Jesus Christ
Free Socrates
Free all political prisoners
Free all political prisoners
All prisoners are political prisoners
Every pot smoker a political prisoner
Every holdup man a political prisoner
Every forger a political prisoner
Every angry kid who smashed a window a political prisoner
Every whore, pimp, murderer, a political prisoner
Every pederast, dealer, drunk driver, burglar
poacher, striker, strike breaker, rapist
Polar bear at San Francisco zoo, political prisoner
Ancient wise turtle at Detroit Museum, political prisoner
Flamingos dying in Phoenix tourist park, political prisoners
Otters in Tucson Desert Museum, political prisoners
Elk in Wyoming grazing behind barbed wire, political prisoners
Prairie dogs poisoned in New Mexico, war casualties
(Mass grave of Wyoming gold eagles, a battlefield)
Every kid in school a political prisoner
Every lawyer in his cubicle a political prisoner
Every doctor brainwashed by AMA a political prisoner
Every housewife a political prisoner
Every teacher lying through sad teeth a political prisoner
Every indian on reservation a political prisoner
Ever black man a political prisoner
Every faggot hiding in bar a political prisoner
Every junkie shooting up in a john a political prisoner
Every woman a political prisoner
Every woman a political prisoner
You are political prisoner locked in tense body
You are political prisoner locked in stiff mind
You are political prisoner locked to your parents
You are political prisoner locker to you past
Free yourself
Free yourself
I am political prisoner locked in anger habit
I am political prisoner locked in greed habit
I am political prisoner locked in fear habit
I am political prisoner locked in dull senses
I am political prisoner locked in numb flesh
Free me
Free me
Help to free me
Free yourself
Help to free me
Free yourself
Help to free me
Free Barry Goldwater
Help to free me
Free Governor Wallace
Free President Nixon
Free J Edgar Hoover
Free them
Free yourself
Free them
Free yourself
Free yourself
Free them
Free yourself
Help to free me
Free us
DANCE

by Diane diPrima

Amen, amen amen. I hold you all in my arms, our arms are heart long, heart strong.

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.

Newport. NE 10th Street & Ocean, just north of Nye Beach

It is raining and it will persist for days, I had this pang of yolk inside me that had to come here and take a big eyefull, big as I can manage, of the grey mist and white-capped sea.

Beth's yoga practice is so strong since I last was here, I tell her this but it is hard for me to vocalize it because the tears are raised in my chest. I haven't had a practice since I left, that was five years ago, too long to go that unrooted. She guides us to set an intention in the beginning of class and I almost laugh out loud because it is so clearly aimed at me~whether or not she meant it, she did. She is my sister, we speak that way. She is dear friend.

She knows what I came here with, what she took me to the labryinth with, what came out the other side. We haven't talked much of it, she hasn't forced or asked. She knows it's him.

And that's what it is, the difference. How strong her practice is, you can tell in her manner in class. It's all different: it's all shakti, it's all us as womyn, as grace as our selves full fruiting in our 30's, secure in our root system, owning what we have to own, what I mean when I keep talking to her all high about my obsession with full womanly ass. How good it feels to be my own. It's Anusara for her and watching her radiate as she comes in to her own. It's believing in roots, and truth, in reconvening with my vision, the willingness she eases me towards of letting go and the best is yet to be for me. I feel so good, so strong when it is done. So strong, but like she says and teaches soft, and open to what I was holding inside.

She gets off at two so I go to stare at the sea and wait. Drops of rain are all over the windsheild, drops of rain hit my face through the open pane.

What do you feel like doing?

Nothing, I answered myself. Listening to the wind.

Call you later, I text her. Going to bed, I need rest.