relaxed at the spine and wide to the world

Little girl: "Does God have wings?"

Mom: "I don't guess so. He doesn't need wings to fly. God can do anything he wants."

Little girl: "So He can draw without a pen?"

My mind just opened like a glossy-photo, table-top book, pages sliding to their natural position, relaxed at the spine and wide to the world, crease of stress between plucked eyebrows finally smoothed. Infinite. Realizing for the umpteenth time that existence is endless and sometimes unimagined.

Old Chairs

Yes, I'm procrastinating.

Wilco does so many fabulous songs fabulously (you can quote me on that). "Reservations"- the lyrics are brilliant, but I am partial to the instruments at the end. As with many songs on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it's sounds like sonic randomness at first. But as you close your eyes and hone in, you can hear movement and emotion and visions.

Two empty rocking chairs, wooden, moving slightly in the wind. Sometimes the chairs belong to an old couple, empty because they are inside making a basil and homegrown tomato salad together, enjoying what they grew in the backyard garden. Sometimes, they have passed away and that low, muffled voice filtering through the creaks and moans is the ghost of the husband, telling his wife about that piano he wanted to buy for her wedding gift- a shiny, mahogany standup. No doubt the porch is weathered grey with time and rain, family gatherings and slamming doors. It looks out onto something vast and dry, Texan in the FarWest way- miles and miles for your mind to run down, nobody coming but that old Chevy delivering mail. Quiet.

Sometimes the chairs belong to a young couple, inherited from her grandmother. The deck is newly waterproofed and screened to keep the bugs at bay. They are inside now, discussing the color of yellow they should pick for the nursery, looking for the keys to the car, a trip to the local hardware store. Those chairs will stand guard for them... will cuddle that little girl coming in the spring, lull her to sleep when she has a nightmare, tilt dangerously as she tests her balance, rock wildly as she remembers her first kiss. And they will be there when this couple becomes old, whispering secrets of the past.

*creeaak* *chills* *creeeaaak* *chills*
Again, again, again, I have to hear it again...

lay me the garden/ Jack-Jack

February 6, 2008

The beautiful song below was playing in my ears last night as I cruised down the busy streets to trivia. A memory washed over me:

The same week the sixth Harry Potter came out, I found a baby jackrabbit. I thought he was lost after a recent flood; he seemed to be nursing on a cactus. He was so tiny but had these beautiful, long silky ears that stretched down his back. Allen and I were on a walk and after some discussion, we decided to take him home. A few months earlier I had nursed a three week old kitten for the Humane Society- Yoda, for the way his ears moved when he ate.

The vet said to mix Pedia-lite and goat's milk and administer it via bottle, so we tried that with this little guy as well, with Jack-Jack.

Touch is really important to all mammals and especially baby ones, so I held him next to my heart every chance I had. I'd lay on the couch reading Harry Potter and he's ride my breath up and down, twitching his nose, having his ears stroked. He came with me to church, to the store, on walks. I loved that Jack-Jack. It was so beautiful to see him grow and change- the first time he lifted his ears off his back, the first day he jumped across the Airstream, his first nibble of grass. He was moving from baby to rabbit right before my eyes. It was a miracle.

He usually jumped inside his box in the morning, but one Saturday there was no movement. It appeared he had emptied his stomach all over the blankets, his body was cool, his eyes tired, he couldn't muster enough energy to hop. I knew he was sick, but I didn't know why.

Was grass introduced too soon? Did I not wash the bottle well enough?

I lifted him up to my heart and held him there for all the morning chores. We had to run to the town for milk and I took him with me, laid him in the box for the ride, and covered him with a blanket. When we got to the store... I could just feel it. I slid the blanket over and he was smaller somehow, breath stopped, eyes glazed, ears sunken to the side of his body. His soul had left. I started wailing.

Allen, four steps from the truck, said nothing. Just about-faced, gently closed my door and drove me back home. I muttered tear-filled gibberish the whole drive back, completely inconsolable. There was something so wrong, so painful about the senseless loss of innocent life. There wasn't room in my heart to understand it, to take it all in. I felt guilty, hopeless, and so, so sorry.

There's a mile of dirt road before the ranch and about a quarter in, I asked Allen to pull over. I had an uncontrollable urge to lay Jack-Jack in a patch of swaying tall grass, let him return to the earth just as he would have if I had never found him, had never touched him. Allen protested- there were so many good trees and special spots near our home- why here? I don't know. I just had to let him go this way. I laid his limp body right on the earth, let the weeds and blades of grass fold over him and said goodbye. I never saw him again, never could find the spot. I'd just wave on every trip to work and home, somewhere in his general direction, in the direction of all the wilderness I'll never understand, that I'll return to myself one day.

__________________
Garden
Gregory Alan Isakov
(Not entirely sure I got all the words right, but this is what I hear)

On the long road, we are just trees
Waving in the wind storm
We are slow wheels
We are potholes
And it passes
Just like lightening
When it's over
We remember nothing

Lay me in the garden
Lay me in the garden
So I can feed you
Lay me in the garden
And I may live beneath your skin

On the long road, we are tall weeds
Misplaced and misconceived
We are wind blown
I want to go with you
And there's too many streets and avenues
From me to you

Lay me in the garden
Lay me in the garden
So I feed you
Lay me in the garden X5
There's too many streets and avenues
Lay me in the garden
From me to you

at the end of 34th Street

November 29, 2007

There's a magical world at the end of 34th Street. I pass through it on every southbound journey.

You must cross over a little footbridge to reach this world. Underneath the bridge flows a creek, a growing mosaic of giant snowflake ice. On the other side lies section 8 housing, Boulder style. Big, newly painted colorful buildings with wide lawns and a soccer field. But the cars- Pintos, old Lincolns, minivans with broken windows- show the income. Makes me feel sane, not so cut off from the world.

At one end, near the creek, there is a cul-de-sac. It has two wonderous features. The first is a center median, filled with wildflowers. Today I saw a man with one arm chopping down their remaining stalks. The other is a little family of shopping carts from all different stores around the Boulder area. They change out almost every day, trading big ones for the little two-level jobs, trading Target for Safeway. I don't know their purpose, their tenders, or why there are at least 20 at a time, but I feel as though I visit a little mystery each time I pass.

My entry into this world is always an adventure; it's the only time I really go off road, riding down a steep dirt trail to the sidewalk. I love standing up and coasting down this short *wheeee!* Cul-de-sac mystery, and broken pavement requiring concentration and fair weaving leads to the end, before it meets Valmont; there are planted trees with low lying branches. Stand high and touch their leaves, or now, their bare arms.

This place has become haven for me. It's the beginning of the day and a re-entry to home. It's alive with people, children, someone working on their car, Mexican men with their low whistles. Boulder is, with it's very clean streets, new buildings, shiny exterior, quite nearly out of reach. But here I feel human, normal, almost home.

Poptarts in the treadmill

November 21, 2007

One of the perks of being three years old, from what I can tell, is the lack of artifical boundaries.

For example, I spent a good 20 minutes cleaning poptarts out of the treadmill last night.




Poptarts
Treadmill




These things don't go together in my head, but maybe there's just an artificial boundary between them. To Lanham, the question is not "why would you combine them?" but rather "why wouldn't you?" It makes great crumbs, a royal mess AND breaks expensive machinery. All good things.

(I got in a little trouble for laughing at this- apparently that gives permission and a bad response- "Mommy, it's not BAD, it's FUNNY.")

I'm noticing several such juxapositions, hanging out with him. Putting dinosaurs in a cattle truck, drinking soapy water in the sink, standing on the toilet paper. Maybe these things that seem so common sense are actually drilled into our heads as artificial lines in the sand.

It's a bit like traveling, I guess. You show up in a new country and have only a general sense of what's going on. I can't judge- I wore African lingerie in Madagascar for two weeks until someone told me differently.

Lingerie
Public

Didn't go together in their heads, but made perfect sense to me.

Such a fuzzy boundary between society and our minds.

that was fun!

December 23, 2008

My family and I went to the mall today to see choo-choos. Lanham loves trains- Thomas the steam engine is his hero and he can lable all the different types- box cars, diesels, steam engines, cabooses, other things I've never heard of. I was a bit nervous about this field trip for several reasons, most revolving around the natural ups and downs of a family holiday.

There were high points- my favorite was linking arms with my dad, Lanham holding his other hand and Christina, my sister, holding Lanham's. The four of us wove in and out of the crowds, sometimes becoming like a congo line, sometimes ducking and negotiating, but always staying linked. It was beautiful.

Then, of course, there were sticky moments that aren't worth elaborating upon.

Lanham, in his wise three year old self, summed it up well. When we finally got to the train exhibit... the entry way, anticipation, excitement, overstimulus, lack of nap... something, really got to him and he started screaming bloody murder. So upset. He calmed down a bit inside, but Christina and Brad rushed him through so as to avoid another melt down. My parents and I came out 10 minutes behind them and found him happily sipping a smoothie. He looked up at us and smiled- "That was fun!"

Just like the holidays, I guess. Or childbirth, maybe. A bit rough getting through, but in hindsight, you remember the good points and think how fun it was, think how you might just do it again.

solar panel

I am sitting in a tank top and the sun is filtering over my friend's shoulder onto mine, my face, my hair, my book. And it is the sweetest absorbing- like happiness in light form. A tiny round rainbow spectrum is radiating from somewhere, following the words down my page,

"I have suggested that our quest for radical alterity shapes and is shaped by our conceptualizations of "cultures" as discrete, self-contained, self-reproducing universes of of shared customary practices and beliefs...."

Breathe

like liver/ hitting the bag- still workshopping

The more you mess with emotions, the more they fall apart in your hands, like operating on a liver... so I think I’ll just let her be...

It does her in
The difference in him
Between actions and words
It’s absurd
The weight she put in it
and now she sits
on the fence with everyone else
Hesitate at their belts
wondering if they’re the same, desire their game
Left her down and confused, feeling used as a prize set aside by pathetic lies,
Tried to be honest and bare, let down her hair,
heart on sleeve,
and she’d like to believe
She has the strength to burn again, keep a thin skin, take the pin out of the weapon
and throw it in the den
of another lion.
She’s trying.
She’ll take devils out with this punch
like numbers she’ll crunch in her head about the choices
emotions to the surface...
Love will never be perfect
What is she aiming for?
Even the score?

Or those patterns on the back of leaves
Their movement and grace
*breath* She’s shaking
Is it really worth taking
a heart out and looking at it?

Reassurance

Beat the hell out of the bag today. No bag gloves allowed for sanitary reasons, so I just used wraps. It started with shadow boxing in the mirror and a few form-oriented hits on the bag. Then, I don't know what happened. Lasted 5 minutes, maybe- free flowing thoughts of frustration and disappointment and upset and anger and all those things I haven't been feeling lately. They went through my feet, past twisting hips and out the arm, my shoulders lightly popping me in the chin as I blocked.

*right* *right left* *right left*
*right right right right left*
*RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT LEFT*
*LEFT LEFT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT!!!*

Stepped back a bit dazed and looked down at purple knuckles. I could feel slight cuts under the wraps. *whew* What the fuck?




Walked out of the gym feeling 10 pounds lighter. The emotions weren't gone- just brought at the surface to be sloghed off by radio cures and a cool night air. The moon was blinding.
Returning to study, I reread a poem I received this week.

Reassurance

I must love the questions
themselves
as Rilke said
like locked rooms
full of treasure
to which my blind
and groping key
does not yet fit

and await the answers
as unsealed
letters
mailed with dubious intent
and written in a very foreign
tongue.

and in the hourly making
of myself
no thought of Time
to force, to squeeze
the space
I grow into.
-Alice Walker

Tortilla Del Ray

Sitting the tortillaria I've been eyeing for days. It smells of compressed corn and grease- the tables garish blues and reds and yellows with raised portraits of catci and men in sombreros creating distorted tops. I've ordered my favorite- huevos rancheros con chili verde. The whole menu was in Spanish.

The tortillas are fresh off the press and they burn fingers. The green sauce gives my mouth a body high. It tastes like Oaxaca and that back street shop where I learned how to say "Sugar."

Before dreaming of my New Years escape to Mexico, I think of my friends who are traveling or who will be soon- all their back streets and new words.



Then it's to the balcony at some small hotel I hope to find, overlooking a colonial street echoing with laughing children and stray motorbikes. My feet are propped on the railing and my breath opens up the space between my shoulder blades. The waitress and tortilla pressman are teasing each other, yelling in Spanish over the mariachi music. I'm here but I'm gone.

I feel a road trip calling....Sometimes I wonder if it matters anymore *where* I am, if it's always in my own body, thinking my own thoughts, dreaming of the next spot on the map, the next town down the road.

ghost goodbyes

My ghost got married October 20th, last Saturday.

He doesn't get to be my ghost anymore and I want to say goodbye. Best of luck to you and your new bride, Larry Edward Magee. Wishing you all beautiful things in this world, and only the fullest life. Wrote this July 2006.

I just woke from a most distinct dream about you. I had snuck into some two story house you had been living in for some time. I was going to knock but you were in your old blue robe, talking to someone on a chair and I didn't want to interupt. I moved to a side room, watching TV and petting Chloe and you came in laughing at me, wanting to know what I was doing there, how my day had gone. You had braces and were a local high school teacher. Every time you tried to ask me a question about my life, I'd turn it back on you- I couldn't hear enough about what you were doing and how your life was going. Then the phone rang, and rang and rang and I woke up from your ghost, to the Airstream wrapped brightly around me, my hand petting Chloe on the bed. I was so mad at that phone, taking me from a moment with your ghost when he actually spoke to me, even if the information was false.

Usually your ghost just sneaks up silently, hovering around the passager seat of my car. He hides in songs, tons of them, even ones that weren't alive yet when we knew each other. Last weekend he was in Esquire magazine, in an article written about Teriligua. It was his voice, if not his words. If I were being honest, I'd say I see or feel him every day.

Every damn day.

I've stopped being angry with him for coming around and just expect him to pop up at odd times.

I miss you, Edward. I'm not asking to get back together. That, apparently, isn't right. We couldn't be in the same place and I wasn't mature enough to work through difficult issues. But I miss talking to you. I miss hearing your guitar. I miss your friendship, I miss your presence.

YOUR presence, not his. He's just whisps of memory.

I understand why you haven't written me back, that it's safer that way. I also know the last letter I wrote wasn't 'real'- I started to tell you about your ghost, but pulled back, afraid it would come across all wrong. I wrote draft after draft, and feeling like I was running out of time, finally just wrote the simples about my life. "Can't find the time to write my mind the way I want it to read" WIlco, Box Full of Letters. It must have seemed fake. And you don't have to write me back from this one. If you don't, then I'll know for sure our knowing each other is over and knowing for sure is a good thing.

I'm getting married, next June. We've been engaged since January. He's a good man- intelligent, handsome, loves music, is a little hippie, a little nerd, is laid back and, well, spoils me rotten. (He's of course more than that, but how do you fully describe someone you love?) We've lived in this Airstream together for almost a year and are making it just fine. I stick out our arguements, although all I want to do is run (sometime I still do, to the back of my head and pretend nothing's wrong- such a coward). He doesn't know what a big deal that is for me. He meets me halfway and tries to help me fulfill this long list of crazy dreams I store up over time. This September I'll spend a few weeks in Hawaii, surfing and working on an organic farm. And hopefully this time next year, we'll be getting ready to move to Boulder where I'll start graduate school in nutritional anthropology, he in either math, physics or engineering, whichever appeals to him most at the time of application.

I am waking from that dream now, and am again not quite sure what to say to you, not even sure I'll send this letter, like so many before. I know, though, if I have any hope of any friendship, it's time for me to be more bare, more honest. Somewhere over these last fews years, I've grown a stronger backbone, a better bluntness and I'd like to share those with you, to see what happens in return. But again, if there is no return, I can just accept that peacefully as the way it is. I hope this finds you well, Edward, and happy- moving forward in life and unafraid to take on the things you need to feel awake. My nephew is still in Dallas, and I still travel up to visit regularly- maybe a cup of coffee would be better than letters.

visceral remembrances

After Ray La Montagne on my iTunes comes Robert Earl Keen Jr., someone I don't listen to all that much. But straightening my room, I was slammed into an immediate memory: sitting on the floor of Ray's Bar in Marfa, staring wide-eyed and awed like a kindergartener at story time. Crosslegged at the feet of Robert Earl Keen and David Byrne, I watched them pound out "Amarillo Highway", singing, laughing and forgetting the lines. It was Terry Allen's wedding anniversary and he flew his friends out to Marfa to jam and reminisce. $5 cover change and it had nothing to do with us. We were just lucky-ass bystanders.

Then I'm transported to a road trip with Edward, this song's on and I'm the girl in barefeet. Our Lonestar's waiting somewhere on the other end of things. We're flying out of Lubbock, headed to New Mexico, or maybe it was Austin, or Big Bend or Dallas, windows down, singing this song with all our might. He'll always be a ghost, that one.

I am hit with these mind-visuals, and I want to write about it but I can't pull out the threads. There's so much in there- emotions and touch, desires and satisfaction. Following one, I get to a tangled knot with another until all I can do is sit down in the middle and breathe it in. Like smell, these songs- visceral remembrances.

Miles said

"You need to know your horn, know the chords, know all the tunes. Then you forget about all that, and just play." Davis

the center of desire is bliss- 2 entries

juicing desire
October 3, 2008

Don't write fiction (yet) but if (when) I ever start, my first main character will be someone who always thinks about how great it would be to have things or pursue people but never fulfills her desires. She would follow her action impulses- climbing a mountain, admitting a love, dancing like a fool-things that have to do with expression. But action that aimed towards acquiring, she would leave outside her realm.

Because there's this thing about desire. It's naturally filled with an energy that has a powerful control over people. Eastern religion does a lot with that. Buddhism says "get rid of it!" The absence of desire is the presence of peace. Hinduism, specifically Vishnavites and Krsna worshippers say "harness it!" The love story of Radha and Krsna, especially in the Gitagovinda, brings this out beautifully. Krsna, player of all players, lures the cow herdesses out their homes at night with his flute playing. When they all assemble in the forest clearing, he splits himself into hundreds of Krsnas- one for each girl and proceeds to dance an erotic dance with them. And right before the culmination, right before the organsm, he dissappears. This naturally makes the girls crazy, and one, his favorite, Radha, has a special affair with him and experiences a special kind of separation:

"The down on her body stands on end and she draws in her breath, a hissing sigh;
She laments, she shivers, she swoons, she sinks into reverie, laughs and cries;

She closes her eyes, she starts up, she droops; and if you, a heavenly physician
Should calm down her high state of fever, O would she not live? or her wordless gestures too she will end!

Her body is wholly tormented by the heat of the flame of desire;
Her mind, when ever at times in thoughts of the moon and sandal and lotus,
Even then it is still exhausted, uncooled- most strange to relate!"

And he experiences the same apart from her. The whole poem contains some extremely sexy imagery:

"To whose act of desire accomplished the ankets upon my feet bejewelled;
Vibrated sounding, who gave his kisses seizing the hair of the head,
And to whom in his sweet passionate love my girdle sounded in eloquence sweet."

(I'm blushing),

But it's supposed to represent the desire for the divine and the pain of being separated from it, never truly able to unite with it in this life. This desire is seen as good, as in its own way. Yes, she is in pain, but she's also very much alive, feeling every breeze, hearing every bee, laughing and crying. I see this over and over again in myself and those around me- the desire to possess another, thinking about being united makes us so alive. (Whereas the actual uniting seldom carries the same kind of energy).
______________________________
itsastretch.blogspot.com

Music is throbbing and the whole room is moving in a sort of rhythmic trance. She's on a point system with friends- bum a cigarette 10pts, start conversation 5 pts, get a number 20pts, asked for a number 50pts, get the bartender to smile and show off his dimples 15 pts. She saw him the first few minutes after arrival. He wasn't there for anything but the music. By himself, drinking water, he moved like it was filling all his being, and not too badly either. Pageboy hat and a sweater, he was dressed for himself and no one else. He's currently taking a break, leaning an elbow on the tall, circular table next to him. "How many points if I get him to dance?" "40, at least." "Alright then."

"Hey, I know you can move, and I can tell you love it, so why are you just standing here?"

"I wasn't feeling it. Or I was feeling it, but not here." Points to his heart.

"That's the only place that matters, isn't it?"

"Yeah. I guess I was taking a break- like a thirty minute break- but just needed someone to come kick my ass."

"That's what I'm here for, as a kick in the ass."

He starts to move again and she takes a few steps back to watch. He looks like the lead in "Once"- strong European features, light scruff decorating his face. High fives from the group, but she knows that's not what this is about. It's about making a connection with someone who has their heart in something.

A few songs pass and he's moving less. She comes from behind, "On your next thirty minute break, I have a question for you."

He points to himself, pantomiming, eyebrows up, "Who, ME?!"

"Yes, you."

A few minutes later and he's leaning again.

"Okay, why do you dance?"

"I'm a dj at home. When I got into this scene years ago, in middle school, I couldn't get enough of it. It moves me."

"I can tell. You're the only one in this place who really wants to be here."

"Why are you here?"

"On a dare. But I like to dance, so it works out."

He looks offended, but she just smiles. Moving again, they share some beats and she fades back into the crowd.

______________________________________

She's seldom distracted from her book but feels it before he comes into view. He's on a the phone, walking very slowly, his movements mesmorizing, tantalizing. He glances up briefly and catches her eye then continues to walk past the windows. She knows he's coming back, not for her necessarily- just because he is.

A few minutes later he rounds the corner of the shop and joins the line at the counter. She stares as discretely as she can out of the side of her vision. The sentences in her book keep swimming and her heart re-pulses itself to the beat of his steps to the condement stand. She stares unabashedly now, watching how his shoulder blades move the muscles in his back, creasing and uncreasing his green shirt. When he turns his head, she catches sight of eyes in matching green, so contrast to his dark features. His hair is tosseled, scruff on his face, small, black gauge earings in his lobes, pants slung a little low with a studded belt attaching to a chain wallet. One of those lone wolves, probably riding with the motorcycles she's heard roaring through town. He puts the stirrer in his mouth and sucks out the drops of coffee.

He steps down out of the shop and wanders off slowly. She pulls out her pen and pad:
"The hottest man in Boulder just walked through The Cup. My eyes are watering, he was so beautiful. I wanted to eat him alive, like good chocolate. My heart is still beating hard. Dark skin, thick black stripes of tatooes running down the backs of his arms, gauged piercings in his ears, scruff, messy hair, wallet chain, hankerchief in his back pocket, black shoes with bright green laces. He moved slowly, deliberately, shoulder blades flexing muscles under a green shirt that lit up his bright eyes. I watched him walk away slowly, meandering; I loved that sensation of him leaving. He stopped to look in a shop window and I leaned out to catch one last glimpse- gone.
I know this sort of movement is of confidence shadowing self awareness, but damn- pheromones branching meters of separation. I got a sense of why animals mate without pretense."

Then rips it out, folds it in thirds, writes " 'Bar Fly' Ray La Montagne" on the outside, and puts it in her jacket pocket. She envisions coming up from behind on the ride home, and slipping it into his hand- so he could own his effect- taking one good look into green eyes, getting a sense of who he is, and riding away.
_____________________________________________________

"I don't write fiction (yet) but if (when) I ever start, my first main character will be someone who always thinks about how great it would be to have things or pursue people but never fulfills her desires. She would follow her action impulses- climbing a mountain, admitting a love, dancing like a fool-things that have to do with expression. But action that aimed towards acquiring, she would leave outside her realm.

Because there's this thing about desire. It's naturally filled with an energy that has a powerful control over people. Eastern religion does a lot with that. Buddhism says "get rid of it!" The absence of desire is the presence of peace. Hinduism, specifically Vishnavites and Krsna worshippers say "harness it!" The love story of Radha and Krsna, especially in the Gitagovinda, brings this out beautifully. Krsna, player of all players, lures the cow herdesses out their homes at night with his flute playing. When they all assemble in the forest clearing, he splits himself into hundreds of Krsnas- one for each girl and proceeds to dance an erotic dance with them. And right before the culmination, right before the organsm, he dissappears."
juicing desire, itsastretch.blogspot.com

the new rule

I was sent this recently... it was too beautiful not to share. The line about the moon changes things

the new rule

It's the old rule that drunks have to argue
and get into fights.
The lover is just as bad. he falls into a hole.
But down in that hole he finds something shining,
worth more than any amount of money or power.
Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.
I took it as a sign to start singing,
falling up into the bowl of sky.
The bowl breaks. Everywhere is falling everywhere.
Nothing else to do.
Here's the new rule: break the wineglass,
and fall toward the glassblower's breath.

Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
Your covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon
comes out now.
"I used to want buyers for my words."
Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.

I've made a lot of charmingly profound images,
scenes with Abraham, and Abraham's father, Azar,
who was also famous for icons.

I'm so tired of what I've been doing.

Then one image without form came,
and I quit.

Look for someone else to tend the shop.
I'm out of the image-making business.

Finally I know the freedom
of madness.

A random image arrives. I scream,
"Get out!" It disintegrates.

Only love.
Only the holder the flag fits into,
and wind. No flag

-rumi

ground

So I spent the day focusing on my breath when my thoughts ran off in all directions… and I moved my chores aside one at a time. Bought fresh fruits and vegetables at the Farmer’s Market- and a plant to hang on the ceiling hook I found this morning. Visited the Hospice and Human Society Thrift stores, picking up items to make my room into something... other than a disaster area. Bookshelves were key in that. Hit Target on the way home to fill in the gaps. I had to talk a bit, so as not to be rude.

“Where did you get that plant?”
“From that nice lady over there.”

“Would you like a pint of organic raspberries for $3?”
“Hell yeah!” (add to frozen bananas and strawberries with yogurt and cinnamon, you have a funderful smoothie.)

I finished the rest of the insurance paperwork, organizing receipts and creating one last spreadsheet, filed all my school paperwork, found the floor in my room. One key purchase: a cheap plastic cup. Filled it with water, opened my wallet and dumped both my credit cards into it. Placed it in the freezer and shut the door. Time to start living within my means.

Knocked out 100 pages in my bio core book about skeletons and took a hot bath. I have one more nostril breathing exercise tonight to make three for the day.

I don’t get to spend tomorrow in the same silent state. A friend of a friend traveled to Denver to see a boy; they had a falling out and she’s stranded until Tuesday; that's a difficult situation to be in. We’re going up high to see the aspens peak. Some things are more important.

Today was so short but it gave me something to aim for. Maybe long periods of silence are unrealistic in this current lifestyle, but little bits every day, or a few times a week are very doable. It was less not-talking and more a mindfulness of the silence, of not reaching out for the phone every spare second, not spending huge chunks of time returning every email- all these habits I've somehow developed since being back. It was noticing how the leaves in fall look like flowers, what my teeth feel like, touching, what smells accompany which beautiful scenes. Smiling as I ponder why The Sacred Heart of Jesus School was playing “She Talks to Angels” by Black Crowes during their Fall children's party. It was returning to the ground below my feet and being here now.

right there

I have been noticing my breath a bit more lately- mad puffs peddling up Folsom hill (mountain) every morning, the often unnoticed breathing that moves the stomach instead of the chest, this deep inhale that happens right before I fall asleep on my back, clearing out all bad feelings and thoughts from the day. I am on a silent weekend journey, feeling my tongue on the back of shut teeth, recentering. Time to add breath.

Try it together? Sitting on the floor, cross-legged, close your eyes and with either hand, place your thumb on one side of your nose, forefinger on the other. With the right side closed, inhale through your left nostril- as deep as you can go, starting with the deepest areas of your stomach, all the way through the tops of your shoulders. Now block the left side, unblock the right and breath out, starting from the top and collapsing your lungs, diaphragm, stomach. On the same side, inhale again. When you are full, switch fingers and exhale on the left. This is one cycle.

At first, the mind yammers away- there are four things that need to go in the mail, stop by the DMV, buy a plane ticket, oh don't forget to get your bike looked at and see if you can call your sister- thinking, let it go.

Where is your breath? Are you counting?

A few cycles in, the awareness changes- there’s a bird outside, the trees as rustling. Thinking, let it go.

The back is tight on the left side, hair is still wet. Thinking, let it go.

There are white and yellow spots in front of closed eyes, thinking let it go.

Ears are ringing, the spots have become one big purple dot... something is whole… peace flows in.

Shhhh. It’s right here in front of you.

One step at a time, one task at a time. “Be like the squirrel girl, be like the squirrel”. We can juggle as humans, but are naturally limited in our abilities to hold too many things in mind at once. When my counselor asked what I do to handle tough moments, I surprised myself by saying... look at the backs of leaves. It’s right there in front of me. Getting lost in those little patterns of life-roads delivering nutrients, taking light, I get pulled inside my home- in the tiniest things in the universe.

Taking a hike last night with my friend Aaron, he reminded me that we are minds of the Universe, thinking about itself. What are those thoughts? Are they as big as the moon, rising red over the horizon?