This was driftwood.

I almost lined up with a place in Topanga Canyon. In Oregon the last day it rained all day long.   Soaking rain is what mom would call it, the kind we really count on back east in the late spring.  I was at Gretchen's in her cottage so close to the coast you can hear the sea.  We stayed in our pj's all day long, the pine trees outside bowing way down from the weight of the rainy wind.  She handed me her Ipad on our third or fourth cup of coffee and said c'mon, that's what we can do let's find you your place in LA.

On Craigslist under sublets I searched Topanga.  The only result was the exact place I see in meditation. At work someone said Mama you would love Topanga Canyon, Topanga's where you need to be.  Soon after that knowing nothing about Topanga came the vision of me at a white cast iron table on a patio, surrounded on three sides by potted flowers and trees.  That was the place Gretchen and I found on Sunday, exact pictures and all.  I say almost lined up with it because in the end I said no.  It was out of my price range.

Nikki assured me, as it was she that helped list the pros and cons, that this was driftwood.  It's not her original metaphor, yet it bares repeating.  If my heart's goal is an island, the paradise joyful island where I am heading, then little examples like the spot on Craigslist that I saw first in my head are signs from the island that my tide's moving me the right way.  Little signs, pieces of driftwood, from the island.  My enthusiasm was crazy high so applying practical decision making to this was hard.  Nikki's example really helped.

Before heading south to park at Gretchen's in the rain, Beth and I forged our own paths through the woods on Saturday to pick chanterelles.  The day before that we stood in the bead shop in Nye Beach where I used to work and get paid to make and sell jewelry.  Both times I felt so like myself that everything even looked lined and clear, more defined, somehow crisper.  Lit by light from my heart.

Driftwood.

This is my favorite part of the inventing process.  Scariest, too. When you can just barely, happily and anxiously, start to feel the tides starting to pull.

Right up through our feet.

There are certain nights here that bed sits like the ocean does--way out the far side of 101 past the trees somewhere near the sky. Tonight they're even trying to get Nicky to stay on the floor in a sleeping bag because that's how real and raw, endless, the vibe is--jam session in the low low light for two solid hours now. Excellent! I will take drumming and singing and dancing over pilates and yoga any single night of the week.

Someone garage-banded tonight, too, on their Mac...But listen, even if you heard it the candles and dancing, the endless black out the screens and the sage in your hair would be missing.  We dance and speak the sounds of the earth here.  Right up through our feet.

I'm back on the mountain, and there's a lot to say.

The feeling of coming home.

Beth and Ben have their computer hooked up to the tv making my work seem very important. Yes I call this, my seemingly mindless download onto the tv/computer screen/virtual world of the internet, work. Because it is necessary, it is relevant to the state of my soul and heart, it is creative discipline. I spoke it out loud to Beth: could it be true? Two years of pining for the time when I go away and just write, only write, no teaching no counseling no waitressing no energy healing no farm work no scheduling, just me. Writing. Administering in to words the Real Work. That, and that alone, for the first time? It feels surreal, could it really, really actually be real?

It's getting near.

I left the farm where I've lived and worked since October yesterday and headed north up the coast on 101. In Port Orford I called Beth to say I wouldn't be able to finish the drive, it was night by then and storming and whole pine branches were blowing so fast past my car they were only a blur of raindrops and green. Since I lived up here on the Oregon Coast in 04 and 05 it's always made me laugh. Weather that we'd call hurricanes back east they just eye-rollingly call winter storms. I pulled over in the parking lot to make the call and my car was blowing so hard you could actually hear the metal denting in and out. I was scared.

At the motel in Bandon the man tried to get me high. That's the second older man to come on to me in the past week, furthering my sense of being a woman on the verge of 35. Not sure why but I am really feeling my age: in the motel that was sweet like 1950's quaint smells like grandma's with a little kitchenette and a place to sit in the corner sweet, I caught myself in the mirror and was stunned a minute. There are no mirrors really on the farm, and there I was. Living out of my car in the mountains on a commune, travel-weary but peaceful and happy to be on the road. And turning the far corner of the year that will finish and make me 35.

When one arrives there's a reflective sense that happens, and it grounds us in a very practical way into our current reality. I am not talking about physical arrival so much as some intuitive experience of satisfaction, and it's in me, I'm of it right now. It led me all morning, finishing my drive in the rain counting all of Oregon's endless shades of dark green and grey. There, the Umpqua Lighthouse, there the drab clapboards of Winchester Bay, there the Lamplight Inn, there the cement of Oldtown Florence, there in the distance the Five Rivers Bridge.  Little starbursts of recognition, little nods of yes and mmm-hmmm, the natural expansion in me I always get in Oregon that means only one thing: I have arrived again.  The feeling of coming home.

At Governor Patterson's beach I jumped out in my rain coat just so I could breathe the breath that only comes with the sea.

Later, Beth met me half-way through her doorway. We hugged. That pause there, that outbreath, felt like sitting down on the beach for the first time in June. That good.

It's Thanks-giving time, and I am grateful. To be so clearly where I am meant to be. To be so aware of it. I pray the same peace and settledness for all the hearts out there I know.

Happy and smiling by your side.

I was quiet most the day, with my headphones in, til in the kitchen while Jen was making dinner I got some texts from someone who used to me smile. We only get reception on the sill in the kitchen.  He still makes me smile which is good, and after that with him and with Jen I met the others and the mood had changed.  Biff Poundcake, Mike Hunt Pudding, Desert Cumming were all there.  Our trannie characters.  Our favorite passtime is coming up with storylines and characters.  We have care bear names, awkward dance troop names, rapper names.  Reggae names.  And settings and scenes of course to go with each.  The list goes on. They always include us, real us not alter ego us's of course, gasping and wiping tears from our eyes. Tonight in the time it took me to chat with Jen in the kitchen our trannie characters had turned in to assassins.  Making my drag alias, Rufus Lemonbar, the six foot tall James Brown-esque black man in a yellow leather tuxedo  and a feather in his hair, a dangerous killer.  Rufus-me lives in Detroit and with my new assassin capability I'm adept at using my dagger/cane to slice the throats of all who seek to repress the world of freakiness and getting down.  Watch out!

Maybe you had to be there.

In any case my time here, freaky and down as it's been is almost over.  I am distinctly aware of the fact.  I love these people, these hills, these trees.  The way it all smells, how it is in our little room in the cabin where we sleep.  I will miss it so much, and am caught with the longing also now to continue on.

I leave for good on December 13.  When the new year turns I will be living out of my new California-tagged car til I find my place to write in the sun.  This is my life.  This is my life!  On Tuesday I am going north to Oregon for the holiday and so maybe it's this, the 8 hours of 101 that beckon between here and there and the delight, the freedom, the lightness I know I'll feel when I get on the road again.   It brought flashes all day long of driving out here, from Maryland to here.  August seems so, so long ago.  August, when I had my Versa and my sunny Ocean City tan.  The million doors I've walked through since then.  All these people here.  Holy California.  This great big farm. After the tran-sasin's stories ended tonight and our laughter died down, after dinner was done and Em and Nick had gone, Jen put on one of her favorite songs.  I love to dance to it, I guess it's one of my favorites now too.  When we dance party in the big tent she always puts it on and tonight was no different, her Bebee and me.  Put it on and dance along.  Imagine me, Honey Bear me, Mama me, "Peaches" Christ me, Rufus Lemonbar me, happy and smiling by your side.

It'd gotten lodged

Jon's letting me use his computer, I bought a new car.  We have the internet again, yesterday we didn't, the day before yes, today yes, most of last week no.

My computer screen is all white.  My new car is 22 years old.  I came to California to live in my car until I could find a place next to the sea to write.  So far all I can do is laugh.

In the meantime, I connect in some new way with someone different each day.  Tonight it was me and Nicky a long time in the kitchen, energy work and long long talking and it was the only thing that brought my head out from my ass where it'd gotten lodged this morning.  Asshead makes me laugh at myself most times but a day like today, 11 people on a mountain and the rain.  It just made me feel bad.  Ahhh and so this too will pass.

Last week, because I am meditating and journaling a lot, reading poetry and diPrima and Women Who Run With the Wolves, I had a moment where I understood all this:  this time of great pause on the side of the hill.  There is a psychic state of passing, it looks like traction, can feel uncomfortable.  It's like the moving on from one form to the next, or the fitting in to the new skin.  Before all that can happen the new body has to be cured.  That's what's up, and I know it because I've been here before.  I'm holed up on the side of the mountain, with time for the old to pass away, being made ready for the new, being made in to my best new form.  Like much of our harvest had to be.  I'm being cured.