I woke up thinking about sex and men

Day off here at camp and I woke up thinking about sex and men.

The most read post on this blog is about relationships, being single, being passionately alive.  It's gotten almost a hundred more hits than my next most popular.  Interesting.  Though I am deeply private about that area of my affairs it does not mean it doesn't compel me.  I think about it all the time! Which explains all the reads, I suppose human hearts and quiet passions are the one sure thing we all have in common.

My cycle just passed, meaning it's ovulation time.  At Eric's house yesterday I couldn't help but notice all the colts, all the twenty-year-olds unshaven, shirtless, shoeless.  Twinkling eyes.  The new guy/girl flirtations, the girl/girl couple meeting under a tree, the two tight fresh bodies of young people walking off for the first time holding hands.  There was so much frolicking in the air.  Last night during the mycellium slideshow it occurred to me that not once since being here have I wanted to join, to throw my flirty breath into the swell...

Further proving there is a transition I believe I am making.  A passing.  The worst consistent pain I've known flogged me for months and months--this was the time of muscle-ripping when I left my long-term boyfriend in 2008.   Grief is like that when it hits.  Dizzying, foundation shaking.  Nameless.  It was an ache that can still visit me, and the variety of griefs that got transposed on to that time in my life were griefs that had haunted me, unfelt, for years.  The deaths of friends, the loss of best friends, the agony of family traumas in my childhood home.  The shame I had yet to let go of of the years of my life in active addiction.  I made my passing though, lived in solitude for a year out on a river, dug out my injuries then worked to re-root myself deeply in to the strong soil of my family and friends.  When it was over I quit my career, and moved to my family home at the beach.  It was a maturity process that I took on consciously and worked at whole and slow.

After leaving my ex, I had two relationships.  Both within that first year.  After the second ended, because I wasn't ready, I threw myself in to the Game.  My obsession became having fun, and for the next two and a half years I met more young twenty-something hottie guys than I ever tried.  Twenty-something guys don't date, they "hang-out" or "talk" so I got good at that lingo, at having no expectations, at keeping it light, fresh, fun and funny.  Always remembering I was in the Game.  The host of female strength around me, of literal single gals out and also ready to have fun, grew and grew.  The most beautiful moments of all were in the center of my grls, realizing my belief in my self was doing the same.

There is still a great stigma around women my age who are unmarried with no beckoning promise of settling down. Married women are suspicious of us, married friends question us, relatives look on with concern in their eyes.  What I want the world to know:  we have our reasons, they are unique, personal, and real.  My new friend Irena, from Belgium, said yesterday that she doesn't know if she can have a relationship and live the adventurous life that makes her most happy.  She's tried both; like me the committed life left her unfulfilled. It is her fear, that she'll never find the balance.

Here is my passing:  I dont want 20 year-olds anymore. I'm done with that nonsense of "hanging out."  I am strong, full of life with tons to give.  The Game never once afforded me anything meaningful, the one most recent actual my-age man who I thought offered potential ended badly because that's how we met: in the Game.  Today I am certain there is a man out there who wants openness and connection and happiness and also adventure just like me.  Certain.  Until  he shows up though, I wont waste my time and energy on less than that.  I'll choose the carload of gypsy single grls, I'll choose following my own light and life and dreams, continuing all this education and fun.  I'll be brave, and open.  The thing about passings are we dont know what's coming next.  We just keep the faith that we aren't the same as what once was.

This was all cement.

One of my favorite things is riding in the back seat of someone's car.

As most people, I am a recovering control freak.  I have several years of active recovery in this area, and one of the finest remedies for it has become a knack of mine:  I'm really good now at just showing up to the moment if other people or new experiences are involved, showing up and being open, and going with the flow.   Which is why I think that one of my secret joys is riding in the back seat of someone else's car with  no say over where were headed.  Just giving over to the moment, happy to be going wherever it is I am going. It is such simple fun. Five gypsy women, five thirty or almost thirty somethings riding in a car. Single, gypsies, funny, happy, wise.  DeVotchKa on, sun almost down, radiant plume-air and shadows of pine canopies twisting all around.

In September on a date with me I randomly found this town called Sebastopol.  I spent four hours there, in the buoyant sunshine of the market, on my knees in the used bookstore, smiling and milling on the sidewalks, grinning at strangers like they were friends I was about to meet.  Today I went there, me and four gypsies, and also me and forty-five others, to  our instructor's house one street away from sunny downtown.

"This was all cement" he said.  One third an acre is what he was talking about, tho whole of his land. All cement when he bought it, an old ratty lot.  We ooohhh'd and ahhhh'd.    Now a food forest Permaculture Neighborhood Center only three years later.  One of his six water tanks for rain catchment hold 4000 gallons of captured rain water, or the equivalent of drinking water for his family for three months.  We ate fresh veggie cob-oven baked spelt pizzas for lunch.  The awe goes on and on.

While he showed us his garden guild he paused at the nitrogen fixers and ran his hand through a literal stalk of sage.  It broke mid way down in the most gentle way, literally fell in to his hand.  He grinned and horay'd, it was white sage, what I and many other gypsy wild types love to burn for smudging.  The group accepted it to take back to camp, an offering from Eric's most amazing land.

I make fun of hippies.  I really do.  But really, we have fun and love our lives and you can't make this stuff up, so fun is more than okay.

Me and White Sage

 Cob Oven

 yummmm

 Double Yummmm

Eric in front of soil remediation, or soil bringing-back-to-life

Go here to learn more, and see the before and afters of Eric's lot.

I cheated my way through.

Math and sciences were never easy for me.  I almost failed 10th grade chemistry, to pass in the end with a D.  Geometry that same year I cheated my way through.

But put me down in a garden, have me play all day under the sun and in the dirt.  Finish it with fresh foods and songs and rituals and music around the fire.  Now teach me the names of bacterias and fungis, tell me how to worship carbon renewal.  Make bioremediationnnnn the most sacred sound.  I will learn, I will cherish, I will thrive.  I will sing.

Suddenly life, all of it, is the most primal joy and easiest thing in the world to know.

One sacred inter-connected realm

At Buddha camp we couldn't look at each other.  Or speak, or read or write, or even for that matter eat after a certain time of day.  We just meditated, from 5 in the morning til 9 at night.  And in the evening watched lectures from a grainy vcr and old tv.

When I went back the second time it was as a volunteer, out of service, to cook for first time attendees.  That time I could speak, thankfully because the most important part for me turned out to be the community of consciously-minded attendees all back for their second or fifth or twelfth go-round.  It warmed my heart, does to think of them still.  To find people who really got my heart.

Now I am at Earth Camp, and the people here believe in the earth and communites and Nature as I do, all as one sacred inter-connected realm. It's such a joyful, fun atmosphere among these like spirits! Earth-worhsiping tree-huggers.  So many sacred smiles and light reverie.  I thought California was a place with minds and spirits like mine, that was before I came here:  I could never imagine such a similar-spirited tribe!  Men and women, old and young. Tonight we were led to recall the feeling in our heart of the moment we decided we would come here.

That was 2005, late fall, in the red and orange living room at Truslow Road.  I was desperate, certain I was on the wrong path.  On the stolen internet of one of my neighbors, I googled as I so often used to the words wild, and women, and wisdom.  That was when I found out about Earth Activist Training.

I've wanted to study with Starhawk ever since then.  Her books are pure muse to me.  And now here I am, finally.  Seven years, a full wisdom-cycle it took me, but that decision from back is finally coming true.  My next two weeks, here in the redwoods of Cazadero, Sonoma County,CA.  At EAT.  For my permaculture certification.  Camp for Wild Women at a Peace Institute run by Tibetan Buddhists.  And oh yes, for wild men, too.  Wild Men!  My path, it circles back time and again.

And already such a long inspired journey it's been...

Til I was just triggered enough

Life is a Carnival by The Band was playing when I parked the car, that music for a long time reminded of Brandon but in the past two years makes me think of my cousin Ed.  I love WRNR in Annapolis and have listened to it literally since the nineties when HFS first went corporate.  RNR repeats songs a lot and there are a lot of commercials, but the bands are independent or undiscovered or alternative, and the commercials are always local because that's what they rely on: local support to play real music.

I try not to be, but it's true. I'm a snob.

The thing about that song playing is that Eddie had just called me, I was in the parking lot at Marshalls waiting to hear from Amy when he did, and said he had the day off where was I?  Well I was getting ready to head to the coffee shop to write, where was he?  About to head to Annapolis, he said, to spend money on things he doesn't need and then hit a coffee shop to do some reading and writing.

Well, guess we better meet up...

Dad and I left the beach this morning at 6 am.  We drove to his job the whole way on 50, and  got off where the New Carrolton station is so I could have his car.  On Sunday he got me in Philly from the train and drove me to the beach.  Yesterday mom talked to me a long time about the magic I am trying to make in my life right now, and the luckiest thing in the world, in the world must be the conscious choice of the two people who made you fully supporting every choice you choose in making your self.

I am endlessly, emotionally, wordlessly thankful.

Amy has arrived unto herself, it is something I have had the pleasure of getting to watch and celebrate.  After hanging up with her I called up Jott, mostly to acknowledge the same thing in her.

My life is so good I often don't know what really there is to say...

In my backpack are two books snagged from Katie, they're both Kerouac and they both lit the holy light in me when reading the intros.  One by Creeley, one by McClure.  So I read in her kitchen in my pajamas,   drinking tea while the cold Connecticut air drafted through the window next to me.  I read til I was just triggered enough, then closed the books, tucked them in my pack, made a date in space with myself, in the heart of things, that meant-to-be place.

Because I'm up here where I grew up, because I drove 50 passed the exit for Crofton this morning, because of RNR, I've been doing a lot of remembering.  I left in 1998.  Homelessness, for years after, haunted me.  It's the clouds, the music maybe, the gray-blue of the sky.  The air, absolutely mean today.  For all my wordlessness there feels like a lot to say.

My in my space with my self space is the best.  It's made all and totally of love.  Eddie's not here yet, so as for my date, today's the day.