Long ago there was a bakery and a baker in a tiny town on the side of a volcano and the volcano was also an island in the middle of nowhere, or maybe not really nowhere since the ocean has no land but still must be a "where". The bakery was kind of a loud place even though it was small and the writer, even though she longed to write there, couldn't seem to harmonize her own creative vibration with the rest of the tourists and locals who came and went. The coffee really wasn't prepared very well and nothing was organic and she was surprised by this a little each time, reminded that she was in a land where doing whatever she had done before could produce such wildly unexpected and sometimes incomprehensible results.
But there were bright spots because on the days that she forgot not to write there, she could write about the people who were real, observing them just there at the next table, instead of writing about herself. They were tourists mostly, at any given time. Often wearing bathing suits even though they were three thousand feet up the mountain. They wore their suits under sarongs with sketchers sneakers and baseball caps. They wanted to know how to pronounce where they were, which the writer could empathize with. And they were always in twos and fours, looking a tiny bit shell shocked. There were the two men in the "more Aloha, less litter" tee shirts. One old and one young, the grey haired old man carrying out a giant piece of carrot cake (three layers!) with a look of anticipation that this writer only sees on the faces of old men and very young boys.
The locals stream in, all men, all in the somewhat grubby state that's the norm for this island. They must work outside, and start early in the morning because they came in for lunch at 10 or 11 and put away huge plates of food very quickly. What is the aesthetic here? Printed t-shirts and trucker caps and Locals. Southern hick meets the Red Hot Chili Peppers on a farm in the tropics. After over twenty months here this writer may finally be getting used to it a little, knowing that there will always be a division of vibration between her and all this, until that no longer even matters. And then everything will transform. Really the best thing for this writer's creativity might be the isolation that comes with not being in a coffee shop, no matter the lovely man this morning with a bottle of Bud and a pack of Newports in his sleeve who told her that his day was "very good, indeed" now that he'd seen her.
Even so, is there much difference between here and the park? Can the mystic push through even here? Oh, Los Angeles. Oh, Santa Fe. This writer misses you, and all the places between where things are bare and dusty and organic, where everyone knows that the food you eat is an offering to God in the Temple, where good coffee makes itself, where pride is taken in honest, and dishonest, work to the maybe millionth degree. But right this moment, the writer loves her isolation, even when that love feels hard and tears come when it's pushed on, which is often.This separateness forces a complete inward focus that is foreign, a surrender interrupted by reruns of Who's The Boss and The Golden Girls.
Right now it exists in order to look hard for all the ways that the inside of the writer births every bit of the surroundings. She is looking for the root of every material beauty and beloved she has known, looking for the roots inside herself because that's what this place in the middle of nowhere has revealed. It's all nowhere without her.
But there were bright spots because on the days that she forgot not to write there, she could write about the people who were real, observing them just there at the next table, instead of writing about herself. They were tourists mostly, at any given time. Often wearing bathing suits even though they were three thousand feet up the mountain. They wore their suits under sarongs with sketchers sneakers and baseball caps. They wanted to know how to pronounce where they were, which the writer could empathize with. And they were always in twos and fours, looking a tiny bit shell shocked. There were the two men in the "more Aloha, less litter" tee shirts. One old and one young, the grey haired old man carrying out a giant piece of carrot cake (three layers!) with a look of anticipation that this writer only sees on the faces of old men and very young boys.
The locals stream in, all men, all in the somewhat grubby state that's the norm for this island. They must work outside, and start early in the morning because they came in for lunch at 10 or 11 and put away huge plates of food very quickly. What is the aesthetic here? Printed t-shirts and trucker caps and Locals. Southern hick meets the Red Hot Chili Peppers on a farm in the tropics. After over twenty months here this writer may finally be getting used to it a little, knowing that there will always be a division of vibration between her and all this, until that no longer even matters. And then everything will transform. Really the best thing for this writer's creativity might be the isolation that comes with not being in a coffee shop, no matter the lovely man this morning with a bottle of Bud and a pack of Newports in his sleeve who told her that his day was "very good, indeed" now that he'd seen her.
Even so, is there much difference between here and the park? Can the mystic push through even here? Oh, Los Angeles. Oh, Santa Fe. This writer misses you, and all the places between where things are bare and dusty and organic, where everyone knows that the food you eat is an offering to God in the Temple, where good coffee makes itself, where pride is taken in honest, and dishonest, work to the maybe millionth degree. But right this moment, the writer loves her isolation, even when that love feels hard and tears come when it's pushed on, which is often.This separateness forces a complete inward focus that is foreign, a surrender interrupted by reruns of Who's The Boss and The Golden Girls.
Right now it exists in order to look hard for all the ways that the inside of the writer births every bit of the surroundings. She is looking for the root of every material beauty and beloved she has known, looking for the roots inside herself because that's what this place in the middle of nowhere has revealed. It's all nowhere without her.
May 31, 2013
