Flowing

Constellations in relief, black as night spinning and expanding in the void.
No clear edges on the individual, no clear boundaries on the bunch.
A universe creating itself beneath the sink.

I did not find the mold first. The water streaming down the kitchen floorboards was the countdown to exploring the space. I say ran down because the old house is slouching into the earth and in our lives carrots and cherry tomatoes and water runs east across the old growth grain. East towards the sloping garden, foraging turkeys, towards stretching trees and looming sunrise. The water seeped into the crack between the kitchen and porch taking an alternate route into the bowels of the house. This on a day when fall pranced into the room and shook its soaked body like a golden retriever returning from a glacial lake.

I am still in my pajamas as I tear the linoleum off the cupboard sole and twist open freeways of pipes warm and dripping. Bits of bloated food and indecipherable sludge coat the interior landscape. How much is hidden inside smooth white! How many indigestible, un-washable layers are represented here? I take each piece and soak it in vinegar (pipe pickles!) and scrub with an old toothbrush. I watch gunky enamel fall into the bowl.

I am disgusted and relieved. It feels good to clean this out.

Inside almost matches outside but the problem is not solved.

The water still tumbles over grain.

The problem is deeper. Underground.

I run a metal snake through the exposed arteries of the house and do not find a blockage. I find pig grease and human hair and an amalgamation of meals long forgotten but the snake’s mouth is hungry after a few grotesque pulls. A twist in a pipe, detritus accumulation, blockage I cannot reach.

I think about all that is flowing inside me. I think about the universe of love and dreams streaming through my life, mostly unobstructed. I think about the bends where half-digested ideas accumulate and block the passage out of all that is no longer needed. 

I am scrubbing, snaking, clearing. I am having trouble reaching the basement. This goes deep. 

How do I restore the flow without tearing the house down? 

Go outside.

My pajamas are soaked with grimy water. I go visit the turkeys in a dress over wet pants and wellies. I give the goats apples and collect eggs from the hens. I pluck cherry tomatoes from the matted green arms of the garden. Blackberries, plums, pears, apples fall onto the ground where I cannot catch my fill. Beets grow next to carrots and parsnips and turnips. Winter squash begs for space underneath popcorn eight feet to the sky. The flow of life and food is all around. Outside and in.

We will nurture the house back to life, heart in fiery coals, friends’ laughter beating strong, the stove's belly warm with plenty. The blockage is not permanent; it loosens with care and community

(and perhaps the healing of a plumber navigating the constellations and freeways and dark underground universe of the basement).

These pipes flow. The land absorbs. We all thrive.

Waking to Here

The trees shake the sky into lightness.

The bows sway, the roosters crow, the wind hits the Airstream aluminum and rumbles the quiet of the night into waking.

I am already awake. I can’t sleep. Again. Thoughts ricochet around what it means to love, how to communicate with truth and empathy, about the necessity of touch and home and safety.

I sigh.

He stirs. 

He turns his body over towards me and talks in his sleep. He giggles (not even laughs; it is a bright boyish giggle) and murmurs about games and flight. I smile. My hand crawls onto his shoulder from my side of the bed. I can't not touch him. He is soft underneath the sheets, his skin a sea of pale warmth and subtle movement. It strikes me that much of what I see and feel is no longer living yet still attached to beauty: this shock of unruly hair, those fingernails absently scratching at a chafing layer of dry winter skin. What is alive? I stare at the small smile on his full lips, at the line of his jaw underneath a scruffy beard, at the thick lashes caging in those flickering, dreaming eyes. 

I want to know this person so deeply and I am terrified I never will. 

I actually know I won’t. 

I can’t. 

I’ve tried before, with this one, with others.

I’ve failed.

I’m over here and he’s over there. Inches away.

I breathe in his discarded breath and feel the atomic exchange giving me life on a different sort of cellular level. My lungs may not appreciate what my heart absorbs in the warm scent of him. 

This will have to be enough. 

I turn towards the light. I can see the trees clearly now, trunks reaching for frosty blue above. The birds orchestrate the early hours with song while we speak in whispers and gazes and touch. We eventually yawn and blink the day into being. Turn the insides out. I pull on my wool coat, my mud-crusted boots, a bag full of books and journals (unread, unwritten in the night before) and step down onto the dead-nettled ground.

“It feels like Maine!” I exclaim. He doesn’t respond, just stares at the brightening sky. 

A part of me shudders.  

I think he doesn’t understand. Doesn't care as I do. Doesn't know me.

Reminder: he doesn’t. He can't. He is not me.

I am over here and he is over there. Feet apart.

I constantly forget this. That this life I have lived can never be translated in a way that makes perfect sense to anyone else. That expecting anyone to fully know me (and me them) is as impossible as hearing and understanding every note of the birds' morning cacophony.  

And what the hell does that mean anyway, It feels like Maine? Because in this moment, right here in Washington, it actually feels like Washington. It can’t feel like anywhere else because this is where we are and that other place would feel different in a way that I will never know. That is what I think he would say even as he stares at the sunrise and maybe thinks of chickens and doesn't speak of Maine.

I am over here and Maine is over there. Thousands of miles away. 

I sigh again. I want to breathe in fresh winter air in a field of nettles surrounded by cedars and firs in the Pacific Northwest with a person I love, dammit, and stop my mind from spinning to different places and faces and times. Memories of memories. Quiet this mind that strives to identify and compare and quantify. Control.

This could be the most beautiful moment I have experienced in my life! And I could do that over and over again, every moment new and incomparable and inexplicably beautiful. 

(Is this what he would say next? Or is he still thinking about chickens? Nope, this is what I say next.)

I remind myself over and over that even if no one will every truly understand this inexplicable beauty circling in my heart I will keep communicating and continue to be curious about what is swirling in their hearts even if I will never understand the intricacies of their particular song. I will continue to bring my own version of this life into the world through words and images and voice. I will read and listen and ask questions to tease out meaning in what others carry and know that how I interpret it is unique to me. 

This is not pointless. This trying, this struggle, this unfolding of myself for others to see and feel even when I know no one will ever reach the core. I will live and dream and wake up at five in the morning to witness the sunrise of another day and I will try my hardest to be here, actually here in my own body next to another body, as the sun rises over the trees on a windy island in Washington. I will cultivate the curiosity to wonder at what the birds are saying and enjoy every mysterious and never-to-be-known note. And that is enough.

Stormy Weather

Trees shift and claw and heave down their bark, leave traces of wet on the sill. The wind screams up the valley, shaking the house, ruffling this heart. Branches break outside my window. I can hear and feel but cannot see where the destruction is coming from, I just see the chaos of movement. I am moving within. I scrape my limbs on the window, sigh at the storm raging inside, batter my mind with conflicting thoughts echoing of something I cannot name or touch. 

The rain begins. The surface of the pond is a million stars exploding, a million oceans created, a million exhalations of snakes and birds and me. I cannot see my reflection or the reflection of trees or sky. I cannot see anything but a disturbance of the surface, a lack of clarity, a texture of additions that cannot be subtracted. Is this seeing? Or not seeing?

The remaining branches bend and shake and lodge themselves under the eaves of the roof. I lay in bed all night listening to them scraping against glass, scraping the dreams out of my head. Dreams of sobbing myself to choking, dreams of anger and accusations and fear. Scrape and scrape awake. I can’t breathe, the pond goes dry. The branches give and break and fall to a ground far below. Crack and burst. I can’t see anything but the darkness and it blinds me to the possibility of light, of stars, of birds. 

This is what there is: a pile of branches and broken windows. A pond of unknown depth. My head and my heart and the hurricane within.

Dis/Integration

The breath long gone, the bones hidden. Deep green ferns under dusty pines, the road muddy and close. I check for feathers and beak, breakage and decay. 
There is nothing. 

Did the ants cart away red and black morsel by morsel? Did the coyotes drag apart the small bits of flesh and hollow wing? This body that I took from the side of the pavement, crushed between bright yellow dandelion-matted hill and jagged fence, this body I carried in cradled palms after the brief thought of premature dismemberment, this body I lay down on the damp forest floor, is gone. Disseminated into the world, disconnected from its form to form bits of other beings and places. 

Dis-integrated. Integrated into nothing. Integrated into everything else.

Each night I let go of dreams of the day, letting the real work of the night take their place, the truthful side of my eyes alight with color and motion. I stand at the periphery of whom I once was, marveling at the pieces floating and bumping together, swinging in wide arcs, ricocheting apart. I lift my arms to gather these fragments but they dissolve and disappear through fingers aching to cradle what they cannot hold. The parts become so small and rearrange themselves in such a way that I cannot see them with my eyes, I can only swim through the bright white of memory and possibility. 

Re-formed, re-integrated moment by moment, in this space and now. The puzzle pieces re-modeled, molded into the present. My wings re-membered in the flash of old man’s smile. The flesh of my yesterday’s being re-directing the subtle motion of a stream. My liminal thoughts re-appearing as an elephant on the page of a child’s notebook. 
 
I stop searching through the ferns for a glimpse of feather and beak. I empty my hands of yellow flowers, I breathe in the pine and moss. I step into the song of the birds, the dance of the clouds, the gliding stillness of my fingers against the air. Integrated into it all, the boundaries fall away and I walk further into this all encompassing self called world.

Swaddled

 

I swaddle myself in blankets of ocean, in a tightly knit fabric of trees and earth, in the solidly spun threads of community.  

I swaddle myself tightly to calm these flailing arms that keep grasping for shadows, reaching for comfort. 

I fight as the restrictions descend, fists to chest, heart beating against my thumbs. 

I wail and cry for freedom. 

I kick and squirm and chomp toothless jaws for perceived independence. 

Yet, has all that swimming through the nothing ever brought happiness? 

That feeling of falling through space- is that what I desire? 

So I swaddle myself tighter with words and rooms and smiles knowing I will feel comfort in the closeness like a seed in the soil. I will germinate and grow within this container of the Universe. 

The fabric holding me is nothing but spinning atoms and intention.

I am held by nothing.
And everything. 

I am soul and fabric and universe, all spinning and swaddled and comfortably infinite.   

Under A Harvest Moon

The quilt holds us in the moonlight. 

We stretch out and sing loud and lay tangled in a nest of strong bodies, heads on hips, fingers woven into each others hair, shoulders against bellies. 

We howl at the harvest moon and plink hawthorn berries into tea as we whisper of letting go, of love, of growing our hearts open.

We laugh and strum and growl and lay silent and waiting for the light in the darkness to tell us something. 

We listen. 

We write our own stories as we stumble across the rocky earth, we draw the others in with our voices clear and joyful. 

We are each others heartbeats. 

We (I) don’t want the moon-bathed night to end.

I fall asleep under the trees alone in my nylon cocoon. 

I hear the coyotes and chickens and trucks and oak leaves create a symphony of the valley around me.

I leave tomorrow.

Another full moon, another place, another life awaits. 

I will bring my quilt, I will bring my big ole heart, I will let the seeds germinate and grow and create lives of their own. 

I will sip tea and think of these (us) souls on top of a hill in the moonlight, singing, howling, comforting, being. 

I will love and cry and laugh and break open.

I will carry this gratitude with the rocks and shells and notes and tiny flower buds in the cracked mason jar of this one infinite home.

Slow is Beautiful

Blown out hair and Paris Twilight nails. Frozen eyebrows and painted penciled lips. Suitcases stuffed with Lulu Lemon stretchy pants and coolers full of expensive juices. Spike heels and belly tops.

I am in shock. I tug at my skirt dirty with compost and oak leaves, wipe my face with the back of my hand and hope I sucked all the kale greens from my teeth. My fingernails are black with soil from the farm, my arms and face brown and freckled from living and working outdoors.

I help load a cart to help one of these LA yoga retreaters up the hill. She insists on pulling with me, a refreshing change from some of the others who call us porters or girls, their Om t-shirts and Namaste greetings thinly veiling impatience and a distant questioning about room service. 

I breathe in, ground myself, ask where are you from, how was the drive, have you been to this semi-wild land before? She is steps ahead of me, pulling pulling pulling and the cart starts to wobble with the disparity. “Am I walking really quickly or is there something wrong with...the cart?” she asks me. “You are walking pretty quickly,” I answer. She doesn’t slow down. I sense her frustration. But I am not going to speed up. I am quietly laughing to myself, not at her but because I am astonished with myself; I am usually the one who is pulling the hardest, glaring at the slow movers, wanting to get things done done done. 

But on this land I have slowed down and want to welcome that pace in others. How else can you notice all this beauty? I wake with the sunrise with roosters crowing in the valley below after the coyotes have sung their final verse. I move and write and sip and read. I wander through the oaks and wild buckwheat and stop to notice the scrub jay on a branch or how the lizard moves over the dusty clay road. I have time for two-hour meals and take even longer to chop, blend, press, preserve all those farm vegetables I picked this week. I have time to ask, “How are you doing?” and not mean it as a Hey. I actually want to know, want you to talk with me, want to hear your stories and dreams and what you cried about all morning in your tent or why you've been singing love songs all afternoon.

And I don’t want to go back to a place, a space where this isn’t normal.

I lead her to her sleeping space, this woman in a hurry to meditate, to retreat. She loves the view of the orchards in the valley, the rustic beds in the yurt. She wonders about finding the bathroom in the night. I say you can always just go here, motioning to the leaf-littered ground. 

She looks confused. 

I don’t explain. 

I leave her to unpack, feeling a strange pause, knowing that she wondered for a moment about tipping me for my help. I walk away, dragging the cart behind me. Slowly meditating on how I would explain to her that this is my service, this is my way of making this land a more beautiful place by welcoming those who may experience the magic too. That generosity with time and help is not a transaction here. It is an offering. An invitation for connection and interaction, with the people, with the animals and plants, with the everything. 

It took me weeks to get to this unwinding, slow, deliberate point. To the point where I am shocked at this group of “mindful” people and depleted by the searching superficiality I sense in so many of these yoga-fit bodies. I don’t want to judge; I’ve been there too and perhaps am better able to recognize this desperation because of my own struggles. My own weekend retreats (Fix me! Fix me! Give me peace and love in my heart by Sunday, goddammit!), my mala bead groping on the stern of a yacht (dissipate my anger! Maybe one more chant will make me see the good in these people!), my stack of expensive spirituality books (one more paragraph closer to enlightenment). 

I still have a long way to go. 

I am grateful for how far I have come.

I look forward to seeing the transformation. To seeing the woman who brought only heels barefoot on the land. To seeing clean, unvarnished faces sweaty with hope and motion. To seeing the inner workings rise and the chaos of LA fall away into the spaces between the flagstones where the bobcat preens and stalks. I don’t want to have too many expectations, to harbor too many dreams for this bunch. But why not? Between the moving and writing and sipping and reading, why not cast out dreams of healing for these wanderers? That is my service, that is my unbinding contract with the transactionless universe. That is what the land has given me: hope, dreams, and a heaping cart full of love that I can slowly pull and disperse as I go. 

This is what I will take with me when I pack up my car in a couple of weeks. 

This is what I will remind myself of when I slip on heels and brush on mascara and play Big City with the rest of mankind.

This is the space to which I will always return now that I've tasted it. 

Not necessarily to this location, 

but to this groundedness, 

this sacredness, 

this wholeness, 

this living.