noticing

Today I notice my strength. I can separate a great work situation from a miserable living situation. I can even separate the wonderful living from the miserable living, and then again the sublime from the wonderful. I notice my strength, to remain with a commitment even as other commitments break apart around me. I can separate the commitments I want to keep from the ones to let go. Does it always take ill treatment to remember that we deserve more because we are capable of giving more? It isn't easy to listen to an inner guidance that so often leaves me solitary, because my heart speaks of nurturing through others, it speaks of love. Today I notice my strength. I'll get through and get by, and come September, I will never have been freer. Help me to dream bigger than I have. Tell me your pains and your inspirations. The really good words are failing me tonight, and I'm only good for noticing.

weavers

Long ago there was a story so great and huge and wonderful that it almost couldn't be written. It was a story that belonged to many people, that could belong to everyone. It was a web, with parts coming from here and some from there. Some smelled of leather, some of rose, some of oil, some of salt. Some parts came from different times, many years ago or many years from now. Each was a thread and each storyteller had so many ways that the thread could be lost or unravel. These storytellers mostly just lived their lives, not really knowing that there were so many others, not knowing exactly who out there had the words just before or after their own. But they knew something in the dusty bits of salt, rose, oil, and leather that wove in and out of their conscious notice. And over eons this web wrote a story so great and huge and wonderful that it almost can't be read. It will break your eyes, it will take your language. It will melt your heart. 

Do you see this as a warning or an invitation?

Add to it then, and be careful. Each electromagnetic beat of your heart is a sound that copies no other sound. Climb up and go. The long bones of your body want to show you why you're here. Make this body work for its meals and record the sounds of each day, put them together with the one before, or keep them separate and guard them. It doesn't matter. You will start to hear, you'll keep your eyes. Your truth sits at the center of a fire, cool and still. Your sacred part of the story has been here, written in your long bones, left white and bare by the fire of your life. Look down and read yourself, what's left of you after the offering has been made of embodiment.The threads of this story come together, great and huge and wonderful, woven from the still center of the storyteller's eyes. 

Can you read what I've woven?

May 27, 2013

feelings

Here I am with a little battery life left. There's a moth flying about while I try to warm up beneath the down comforter I'm so glad I insisted on traveling with. I just got off the phone with my mother, who guided my own hands into fixing a finger I jammed two weeks ago with a weeding tool. I managed to avoid being chased by a rooster today, but only because I'm driving my car two hundred feet to the barn where I keep my food to avoid having to deal with the beast. Although my frustration at having to do that is starting to make running him off with a rake whenever he looks at me seem more appealing. The air here is clean and the wind is fierce and this isn't any kind of story about anything today. Except that I'm keeping myself writing, even with no electricity, reception, or sanity. I had it come to me today from two different sources that we only know what we feel because we think we do. It went something like this...the buzz of human life is so full of lively energy that being out in a place of nature can feel heavy in comparison and that heaviness can feel depressed. And this...there is a feeling after deep meditation that can be called depressed, and it's a fine feeling, it just happens to contrast with that human collective buzz. See, I've been deciding that I really enjoy that slow, heavy feeling of land without people. And I'm imagining that the thing we call peace might be closer to the thing we call depression than we commonly give it credit for. And that there might be something marvelous there (Please see the writings of Matt Licata for a very poetic rendering of my own wonky night-thoughts).This land is green and, if I lie on it, it will envelop me entirely. I can feel gravity more here, but it's not gravity, it's something else. I was laughing with my mom about my newfound way of using a few sips of wine as medicine, since I've been here, since all things went into a kind of flux that I have to escape from just a little each day like letting a bit of air out of a balloon, lest I pop. We were amused by the idea that all of me wants to sink into the weight of this quiet place, and my pinot noir gives the part of me that's still running at high speed a chance to chill the heck out.  I felt forgiven for something I'm not even interested in judging myself for. I can hear the wasps chewing at the barn wall and I've got an hour and a half of daylight left to do nothing with.

the bakery

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.

May 31, 2013

commitment

I am a writer, shouldn't I write? Something wise that I could begin to live out goes something like, 

"Most of the pain in your life is born inside of the failure to bring your light forward"

Every day I'll come here again. Whether I feel like it or not. And I'll write elsewhere, push out into the resistance. Writing isn't THE way to bring my light, but it's a way, and I need something. Mostly I stop myself from doing by telling myself I'm not good enough, I might feel it but I can't let myself believe it.

See you tomorrow.