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.

Something new and beautiful

In front of my house where I park my car on the street there are two towering trees one is a pine and one is a palm.  I always said I would live at the beach with pine trees in my front yard.  When I pulled up tonight I got out of the car and had that unglued feeling, not a bad one, just this sense of not being connected to the moment, like there was a barrier between me and the edges of things.  I paused in the yard, its many shades of dark almost-black greens.  Checked myself, I wasn't just peaceful, not just content.  I actually feel happy, deeply satisfied.  Why were the outlines such a blur?

You got in your car and drove to California and now you live in Orange County and teach for a living.  I literally said this to myself, standing there, laptop in one hand empty coffee cup in the other.  The night blue sky.  Then I laughed, sort of out loud, because I forget sometimes that that's what I did, so caught up am I in the life I live now.  That was 9 months ago...it feels like an entire other world.

And so what happened tonight, out there in the yard after subbing for the evening class at school, was me catching myself in between phases...the old life and who I was behind me now, the forward and what will be entirely on the verge.  And me, for a millisecond, aware that I am in between.  Changing again, in a soft and gentle, entirely real way.  Changes that on a personal level I wasn't even aware had to be made.  Mom said to me today on the phone just look at all you've done in the past year, look how far you've come.  I used to be able to see, to see that rearview really easily.   But it's blurred now, and I am creative, and thoughtful, and layered in the richest ways.  I dive deep within, so that I can not see myself from the middle--unable as we are to look in on what we're looking at because we're busy looking.  Right!?  Periodically I dip and dive under and into myself, I resurface with something new and beautiful, or recycled and valuable, re-earthed from the endless depths of the cycles and processes of me.  It's so common for me to bridge both these inner and outer experiences of my self that full months will pass without me noticing that that's what's going on.  It is the most beautifully natural thing in the world, it is human, it will never end, and I am thankful I got a glimpse of it tonight.  I am at it again.  I can't see where I am at or where I am going.

But I know for sure I'm on my way.

My first house

It's one of the girl's birthdays, on Facebook my students arranged a hilarious broken-english thread arranging the details of yesterday's surprise party.  Hilarious because they get jokes not because of their misused pronouns and verb forms.  Getting jokes says a lot when you are learning a language.  It is cheesy I get it but that's my first focus, we speak heart in my class.  Lots of laughter so that even if the words don't translate the spirit does.

We are all homeless I am thinking when I walk through the door of class and see the hopeful looks of the two Japanese girls in the corner decorating Maiko's chair with gifts and streamers, they are relieved to see that I am not the birthday girl.  What is a home?  Is it the knowledge that, say, you have to be turning on to Fairfield by quarter of if you want to walk in to class five minutes before class starts?  Is it the way your bed feels on Friday mornings, pillows stuffed with the zion of sleep and still cushioning your awareness when you settle back in with your first cup of coffee and books and blank pages?  Is it the way the air, through the screen when the sun is almost down and you are drying your dishes, reminds you that there is life outside?  How it makes you grateful, reminds you to pay attention?

There was sad news from the East Coast that came after other sad news from the East Coast.  The kind of news that jolted my routine and knocked me off balance for a while, after already being a tiny bit off balance because my cousin was here for ten days.  I had to pause and be firm enough with myself, my sleep was a mess, my caffeine intake off the chain.  My diet for shit and no yoga.  But totally obsessed with writing and studying, so really the past two weeks have been a madness of the poetic kind.  Frenzy.  The Poetry finally came back to me the night before last.  So I am proud of myself.  The golden tail tried to slip away under the door.  I went after it.  Wriggly little bastard.  I mean seriously, I didn't let up.  My poem muscles must be so lean and strong now.  Poetry sounds like palm trees and feels like the sea.  Or big bright magical flowers that only live in California and must have sparkle names.  It feels like the bald light of the moon.  Like the way that light must put invisible magic on your skin.

We're floating through space Brooks reminded me, a long talk under the palm trees them witnessing me letting him be my witness through the sun roof of my car.  I sat under my purple mexican blanket because it was cold out and night but I needed the fresh salt air.  That's when I felt the untying, when he said that.  That's what made it all good...this is life is what he was saying.  Which was enough for me to say, ohhh yea and I get a choice in the matter, to make it holy.  To make it holy with my own special sunshine and rain.

We are all homeless and speaking a second language.  I make a home my own home.  I do it for us, using language, my first house.  Also I don't really know what I am doing.

There is beauty in the knowing that no one really does.