The cabbage butterfly

White wings skitter across my peripheral vision.

I am sitting at my desk at the window staring at a screen trying trying trying to let go and follow what I believe is my path.
Outside lies: a concrete patio, a planter full of soil and herbs and veggies, a pool, a strip of sand, the bay. To either side of me: buildings and streets and fake grass. In back of me: the asphalt streets of Pacific Beach span and cross and tempt Bud Light drunks to careen off speed ditches and wobble through intersections.

A winged body aerially circumambulates a Walking Stick Kale. She dips and flutters, landing for a split second on pale green leaves. She leaves tiny yellow beads which are actually eggs which will become tiny green worms. Worms! Worms that eat my kale and need to be squished! I don't want her on my greens but she is outside, I am inside, and I just watch her energetic dance.

Eureka, she says!

This little butterfly found my kale among all the concrete and sand and water and Bud Light cans. I haven't seen any other kale for miles around. (except for at trader joes but considering it is all chopped up and in a plastic bag I doubt that little butterfly would recognize it. I barely do.)
So how did she find her kale?
Was it a long journey fraught with wrong turns and mistaken landings?
Did she have to compete with other butterflies who tried to throw her off the trail?
Did it take her whole lifespan to find my solitary kale plant among the seaweed strewn beach towns and this action is done in her last dying gasp?

Or was it simple and effortless? She had no idea where she was going but she knew she'd get there. Her body knew where to go even if she couldn't see those broad pale green leaves from so far away. She trusted, if butterflies possess such a thing as distrust to make trust a truth for them, that she would find what she was looking for. And she did.

Here I am still "working on" that whole letting go/not trying/just being/landing exactly where I need to thing. I am envious of that butterfly's faith.
Yet when the words spill out on a page and I am not thinking of what will populate the next line anymore and my hands fly across the keyboard as if they are someone else's, I think I get it and I thank that little creature for the reminder.

I even promise not to squish those worms she flew to this food desert to hatch.
There's enough kale for all of us. For now at least.

An island in the concrete

These are the days I love.

I am in love with the rain clouds and drops falling on the dirt. I am in love with sweaters and bright pink beets and the lingering smells of mint on my fingertips and wet pavement under my boots. I am in love with long shadows at 4pm and coffee in the evening (the prospect of staying up all night writing and thumbing through my books). I am in love with myself with no make up and bright eyes tromping through the farm in a skirt.

I went on a planting spree today. Broccoli and chard revealed their gossamer roots, radicals punching down into damp earth, spindly green reaching above. I pulled tray after tray out of the greenhouse and shuffled volunteers past the kale and favas to the struggling beets and lettuce and basil. Interplanting (its all love), filling in (low birth rate), replacing harvested crops (the circle of life). We were dusty with fish meal and flax meal, fingernails encrusted in compost, knees damp from kneeling next to coffee brown beds.

It felt good to get things in the earth. The sirens, the horns, the white noise of traffic on the 5, the chattering of students, the tall buildings casting shadows across rows of radishes and corn were all still there but I could barely hear them over the flapping of butterfly wings, the squealing growth of the caterpillars on milkweed, the grumbling of branches and banana peels turning into compost.

Sometimes I forget that I am in the middle of a city. 

I am surrounded on all sides by concrete. 

There are still ribbons of man-made rock snaking through the farm. 

Yet I stand grounded and happy on my island of rich soil on a cloudy, cool, transplanting-perfect day.

Stars Words Sea

I saw a shooting star tonight. The light caught the edge of my dimming vision, the edge of my shooting thoughts. The sun had set an hour before, the clouds darkening from red to purple to black as I traced a path of incomplete half steps along the sandy shore. It fell so quickly, I wondered if it happened, if I happened to remember it wrong. But that is not possible. Memories are true no matter how much truth they contain. Just as journalism is the same as fiction, a day's happening and a dream are both real.

They say that Mercury is in Retrograde. I imagine a planet spinning backwards, pausing briefly to soak up the rays of the far off sun when in the neighborhood. I wonder if the stars falling through the universe towards me are affected by bouts of confusion, misunderstandings. If they are told not to start new projects (like burning up in the atmosphere of a far off planet) or not to even consider having "the talk" with their significant heavenly body other. But I guess the stars must be free of such constraints. They are to shine and hurl themselves without restrictions.

I've started the words already. They are flowing through the ether, through galaxies of procrastination, through the baffles of my editing brain. Onto a page or screen they go. Spoken to friends, stumbling on broken sentences, words tumbling past my lips without my knowing how they got there.

Mercury, retro all you want. It is time for stars and words and the sea (Always the sea...) where miscommunication doesn't matter because we are made up of carbon and don't make much sense anyway.

Sadness

She's not predictable, that one. I can hear her calling from my bedroom, window open, breeze bringing her song to my sun scarred ears, my forever windburnt nose. She lures me to her with heart open and foul weather gear at the ready. She shows me her secrets, her creatures, her calm.

Then she loses her shit. She foams and hits back. She rears up and deafens us with her saline screams. You can't even recognize this version of the glassy calm that was yesterday's sea.

The Bounty went down on Monday.
Off Cape Hatteras she sank to the bottom, her captain slid into the sea beside her.
They looked for him for days. They know where she lies.

How can a 180 foot boat go down like that? 18 ft seas, 40 knot winds? I've been in that (a lot worse than the video above). It sucks, but how can such a large boat succumb to a gale? What was the wave period? Maybe it was confused or so close they got knocked down. Were the sails up? Did they fill with water?  I find myself asking these questions when I know full well that it isn't necessarily the conditions that make a situation. Boats can sink in dead calm, sea flat, wind nill.

Engine and generator failure. Old boat. Relatively small crew. Cape Hatteras. Fucking crazy hurricane that would devour New York and New Jersey.

It twists my stomach thinking about the last days of the ship, the crew. The fear, the hope, the horror. That could always be me slipping off the deck or pulled out of the sea.
Yet I am always drawn back. I feel most at home when I am not totally safe.
I crave the discomfort, the fight for life, the constant awareness. 

She's not predictable. That's why I like her.
That's why I hate her.
True love, it is.
Dysfunctional, beautiful, addictive love.

I am filled with sadness for the Bounty and her crew.
Fair winds on the other side Cap'n and Claudene.

Dance of ages

Wispy blond hair barely reached the nape of a pale neck. Big blue eyes rimmed with black lashes showed no differentiation, definition of gender. I was jealous of the pure androgynous beauty. Everyone stared at him and smiled.

I first saw him on the dance floor, in another woman’s arms, the expression on his flawless face mystified and delighted. I envied the love apparent between them.

Later he sat drumming with the rest of them, on the floor, on throw pillows, on a peopled couch, African drums competing with Armenian music blasting from the speakers on a candle lit table. The hardwood floor was slippery in socks. I went outside for a moment of air and he was up and dancing by the time I returned to the room of sweaty, swaying bodies. I joined in, jumping, turning, stomping as he dominated the inner circle.

Then I was alerted to the puffy sleeves, a detail I thought a touch sexist, but suddenly he was a she. Maybe a little older than one year, her stomped steps uncertain, her whole body engulfed in the beat, her tiny body was electrified with life. Two other kids circled around her, gyrating hips and spinning on their tushes and spasmodically jumping and swaying and throwing their heads back to laugh.

We adults didn’t stop to stare and say ‘how cute’ and pick up a toddler when they fell over laugh-crying. 
We danced. We couldn’t not dance. We filled the room with love and heat and the joy of being able to jump and touch and clap. The kids ran in and out of the party, they ran around the dark backyard watching fire dancers and the moon. Adults of all ages did the same. For a moment I forgot how old I was. I saw the little girl in front of me clapping and swaying and she was me, I was her, we were sisters, I was her mother or she was mine. There was no age or time. Just the flow of music ebbing over us all. Sure it sounds New Agey. It sounds all hippie. It sounds like I was drunk or stoned or crazy. 
I wasn’t. I was just in my element. In my people. Young, old, and everything ageless in between.

Here nor there

I sat in the darkness, drawn to thrashing at the shore (the bay was calm as glass). I sat on the sand and held a lifetime cradled in my thoughts and spoke through salt water streams and tried to sniffle back years.

My love shuffled through the grains worn down from tumble after tumble, my love tripped on kelp and plastic figurines, my love made its way into the sea where fishing boats sat on the horizon like bobbing supernovas. When snot and tears and grief had their fill I brought a handful of ocean (all that life!) to my face and doused my closed eyes with that familiar comfort. 

I crossed the sand, pockmarked with other people’s steps, back to the path home. A block away from the ocean, standing on a sandy sidewalk, it was quiet. Not totally silent as Pacific Beach could never be totally silent in that smart ass in the back of the class sort of way, but the crashing of the waves were muted, muddled behind surfboard clad bungalows and the rumble of Escalades down Mission. I walked a half mile towards an eventual sunrise before the waves made themselves known again. Reverberating against the buildings along the bay, skimming the water with that white-noise noise carried from a butterfly flapping its wings (or a fish swishing his tail?) thousands of miles away. 

Up close or far away, the sound is dominantly present. But when one is in that border region, that limbo of neither here nor there, it is hard to hear anything clearly.

Standing right at the waters edge looking into the tumult you hear it loud and full but the constant barrage of sound deafens you to the details. 
Giving the sea ample space to foam, to twist into itself, to reverberate the thunder of water crashing on grit you hear the nuances of each wave wrestling with the shore, but you can no longer see the water. 

In between, one can neither see nor hear anything clearly. 
There is always a choice. 

Lichen it to life

You see it before you see the host.
It clings to the bark, tendrils of bright green reaching for the sky, swirling towards stones, whispering neon thoughts to the pinecones nearby. The lichen is not shy about its takeover. Like a 13 year old cheerleader in a flourescent pink bodysuit, it does everything it can to be noticed while trying to seem really subtle. If lichen had hair and fingers it would twirl it's strands innocently while doing a backflip.
The thing about lichen that is even more startling than it's incredible hue is that "it" is not an "it." It is two "its" acting as one. Like an identical old couple holding hands and smiling on a park bench, fungus and algae combine to make one mutualistic organism. They in turn live on a third organism like a tree (or on a bench like the old couple. Or maybe on the old couple if they sat long enough.). Fungus helps keep algae hydrated, algae photosynthasizes like a mo-fo to help fungus along with morphogenesizing into it's free flowing form. It's a perfect party relationship.
But back to the color! I know florescent is in and all that. I'm not a huge fan of day glo sneakers. I always thought it looked artificial. But now I have been reminded that Mother Nature probably loved the 80s as she's been rocking the color spectrum for, um, like, ever.