Hit It

If the roughly hewn timber and rock breakwaters of Port Townsend and Ketchikan were parenthesis, our adventure would not be contained in an aside. This was an exclamatory excursion and it would burst through any sort of manmade containment without apology. Hence our slamming and swirling encounters on our exit from and entrance into “safe” harbors, the start and finish lines. 

Save whirlpools and overfalls, hitting stationary objects (breakwaters, islands, docks) or being hit by other moving objects (containerships, massive logs, tugboats) was my greatest fear on boats. Losing an engine was high up on that list, too, as it would only contribute to such jarring opportunities for puncturing the hull. I suppose it wasn’t so much the hitting as the sinking that worried me. And not so much the sinking but the drowning part, gulps of salty sea and plankton through baleen-less jaws, a diving deep without a spyhop to follow.

I am in love with the sea, I am a mermaid, a shapeshifting flying fish, but the imagination of my heart can only go so far, breathe so deep under the edge of water.

Entering a race where the rules forbid even having an engine on board, where sailing and rowing and paddling (or peddling on some boats) are the only means of propulsion, where turbulent tidal rips and currents and whirlpools let you know that you are definitely not the one in control, well, it seemed a little nuts. Because hitting shit was inevitable. And hit shit we would. I pretended like I was OK with that reality but in fact I was terrified and I knew this was the very best reason for me to enter the race.

Even with tens of thousands of miles of sailing experience I felt pretty vulnerable and anxious as I boarded the ferry to Port Townsend where the Race to Alaska would begin. Walking down the street with a dry-bag heavy with emergency equipment over my shoulder, I watched the truck trailers sporting modified plastic kayaks and mini mono-hulls crawl towards the waterfront. When I leaned out over the rail overlooking the docks full of trimarans and hobie cats and tiny coffin-like boats, I cried.

Not out of fear but excitement and relief. These were my people! Nuts, every single one, some even more so than me! We were all coming together to push our limits, to challenge what was considered safe, to use our skills and stamina in ways we couldn’t yet imagine. I was soothed by the camaraderie, like a snug school of sardines finning past the gaping jaws of a shark.

Last minute preparations, repairs, modifications dialed up the frenetic energy on the docks. In less than 36 hours (and two beer-soaked parties later), we would all be squeezing through the narrow harbor entrance and pointing our bows towards Alaska. Well, those who could actually point more than 45 degrees into the wind would be doing so. As part of Team Onism on a 24-foot homebuilt trimaran with 25-year-old sails (and trampoline and hull), we would be pointing a lot of places along the way but rarely in the exact direction we wanted to go. Of course we didn’t know this when we started. We were very aware we didn’t know a lot of things about the boat. We went anyway.

We hit the breakwater in Port Townsend battling 20-knot winds on the nose with oars and paddles. (The oars and paddles were in the water, not in the turbulent air smacking that laughing wind on the snout, but sometimes our propulsion implements felt like they might as well have been skyward the progress was so painfully slow.) It was 5am, we hadn’t eaten breakfast or slept a wink as the halyards clanged and docklines creaked all night. To make the 6am start the 60+ boats started clawing their way out of the harbor before sunrise. Or perhaps the sun had already risen but was obscured by the angry black clouds overhead.

Before we had a chance to think about it (or have coffee. Damn!) the trimaran in front of us pushed off into the fairway. That meant it was our turn and god I wasn’t ready lets just take our time but now we’re being pulled forward by boyfriend and husband and father and now fuck we are in the fairway and now I am paddling and now my lungs are burning and I realize that paddling in a drysuit sucks and my muscles are now burning and suddenly I am yelling “Let’s do this ladies” like a gym coach on steroids because I am afraid if I don’t yell I am going to stop and cry but I keep paddling and Emily keeps rowing and Katy keeps steering and yells “Don’t stop!” and we don’t. There is a crowd cheering us on from the railing above but I can’t hear them with the blood rushing in my ears and we round the corner

we can see open water

we can see the other boats

we are almost there

but the wind still takes our bow a second before we can get the jammed staysail to unfurl and we drift more like slide more like plow towards the timber wall to port. Contact! That sounds so gentle but it is more of a crunch and we are sliding against the splintering wood and we think we will spin and end up on the beach where there is another fucking happy group of people cheering us on (DON’T YOU SEE WE ARE GOING TO CRASH?)

But the fluttering of a white wing saves us and pulls us into the wind. We are flying towards the rest of the (floating, sailing, safe) boats and we can breathe again. Yell with joy. We have not even officially started the race but we have started the journey.

We have hit shit. We are OK. We are more than OK. We are laughing.

We are on our way to Victoria and then Alaska. Alaska!

I am on my way to discovering who I am when the boat hits the breakwall, when exhaustion and steep waves and adverse currents will mix with bubbling shame, when the sight of fins and flippers will connect me to my briny blood.

When in the last moments of the race we are spun in circles inches away from hungry sharp rocks and we are able to laugh again and accept our pirouette of a finish as we guzzle beers and ring the brass bell and hug fellow racers when we finally make it to the dock in Ketchikan. 

I will finish with a smile on my face, arms strong, hands blistered, heart full.

We hit shit and we made it. 

Spun, rain-soaked, sun-drenched spirits
bursting out of whale bone cages to meet the yellow dawn

and the next

 )not-to-be-contained(

ADVENTURE.

Sweetpea

Sweetpea was the color of an Arizona thunderstorm, cumulus clouds of fur curling and shaking over a desert-flowered shirt. He held her close, a small smile perched on his lips, stubble sprouting from above and below the threads of his voice whispering to her. The bus filled with tourists and teenagers as we rolled down the hill of Queen Anne. Most passengers stopped to stare briefly at Sweetpea, at the man with a bunny on his chest, at the cage balanced precariously on a duffel bag on top of a plastic seat. He’d said yes to the picture that two women had asked to take of the furry heartbeat of a creature, all fluff and ears filling the frame. After the photo was clicked, he held Sweetpea out across the aisle. “You can hold her if you’d like. She loves people,” he said. The woman reached out and cradled the bunny in two hands, little gray paws trembling between palms. The bus bumped over asphalt. The woman held on more tightly. The man said, “She can feel your tension. If you sit back in the seat she’ll relax.” The woman did as she was told, settled into the subtly cupped backrest and exhaled. “You’re right!” she beamed, the small bundle against her shoulder like a baby. “How old is she?” she asked.

“She’s eight. She was abused. They killed her boyfriend, hit him on the head, threw him around. Both of them. These types of animals, people see them as disposable. They aren’t respected. So I make up for all that and love her up for the rest of her life. And all she wants to do is love. See, she likes you.”

After a few minutes the woman peeled Sweetpea from her chest and handed her back across the aisle. The younger woman asked, “Do you leave her at home alone?”

Sweetpea stayed still and silent back in the man’s arms as he tumbled his story into the aisle.
A cancer diagnosis in April. Lymphoma. An unexpected three days in the hospital without Sweetpea while chemicals swam in his body. Sadness and longing and obligation. Her inability to leave his side when he got home. “She holds it for six hours” he said, “if I fall asleep with her in my arms. I have to put her on the ground so she’ll go to her litter box, she won’t leave the bed. I have weekly treatments but I’m only gone for eight hours. But I’ll make it. I need to stay alive for her.”

He hadn’t heard when the older woman said at the same time, “Sweetpea’s there to take care of you.”

My back ached with emotions. I didn’t need to turn around to feel the tears in his eyes. Or hers. Or were those mine? Everything blurred. He was talking about his pet but he was talking about himself. The need for love and respect and a place to call home. To be healed. To be held and needed and missed. I thought of how we turn to animals for affection and give them love we cannot show to those of the human sort, to those who may hurt us. And by hurt us I do not mean throw us around like Sweetpea’s boyfriend. I mean leave us, lie to us, love someone else, change their minds, die. Just die. Bunnies can live for 16 years, he said. But they go, too. I wondered what this animal thought; was this affection unconditional love or simply a befuddlement about where all the other bunnies had gone and this warm human in the night would have to do? Either way, they helped one another. Acceptance, respect, easing of loneliness. That was their love. So be it.

The man was telling a story of his life to those that would listen, a small rabbit hole of words and images that ended with a dark nest in a crumbling apartment: a man with cancer in his veins and a silent bunny on his chest. Or was the image a sunlit meadow with a luminescent cloud of fur against of fuzzy, smiling cheek?

The bus jerked to a stop. Our stop.

He wasn’t talking to us but I heard him anyway. “Thanks for giving your attention. All Sweetpea can do is love. She is pure love.”

And we got off the bus.

Ready or Not

I barely remember the early morning over 13 years ago when J and I untied our little boat and set off into the darkness. We had shoved all the extra gear into whatever cubbies and lockers we could at midnight. We’d stashed the last few cans of tuna under bunks and topped off the 40-gallon water tank at one a.m. Our single side band radio was nestled in blankets under the settee next to a lifeless bubble-wrapped solar panel. The rigging wasn’t quite tuned, the outboard rarely started on the 1^st or 20^th try, we didn’t have charts for our entire trip and we sure didn’t know the waters. We’d only sailed on our boat Gitane a few times before embarking on a six-thousand-mile journey from Ensenada, Mexico to New York City.

We weren’t ready to untie those lines, we had dozens of more projects to complete, San Diego was on fire, family told us not to go. We could have used a plethora of excuses to sensibly wait one more day, but somewhere around 3am we slipped off those lines anyway and sailed off that dock.

As I get ready for a little ole race to Alaska on a boat I’ve only sailed a few times, Being Ready is on my mind. As is knowing deep down that Being Ready is not a Real Thing. It doesn’t matter how many energy bars we have stowed or how many rowing workouts I’ve done or how comfortable I am pulling up the jib on the tiny bow of this trimaran, I won’t be ready. 

And yet I am.

Ready is less a list of to-dos than it is allowance of forward motion. Instead of saying ready, maybe I should say willing. I am open to challenge. I am confident that we can handle what comes our way. And by handle I do not mean fight or defeat or stay alive, I mean that if I am willing (ready) to stay present in the moment (which the sea is extraordinarily wonderful at cultivating, that presence), I can trust that I can be in the flow of whatever happens.

Hoping that flow is not a whirlpool.
Yet that too. 

Not going, as has been suggested by dear caring souls with more arguably more sense than I, will not teach me these lessons of trust. Doing something that is wholly unknown (other than that sailing ocean birds sunset bioluminescence whales un-fucking-believeable beauty part- I know that) is a way to remind myself that every day we throw off the docklines and get out of bed. Or at least most days. We sail into the unknown with every conversation on the street or at the breakfast table and during every acceleration in the car catapulting us into the next moment, the next interaction. Nothing is fully planned and executed exactly. Planning is inherently ephemeral. Our dreams and expectations never quite line up with our reality.

We are penciled self-portraits blurred by the hands that draw them.

The bigger the decisions or the more outlandish the adventure, I’d venture to say that the chasm between expectation and reality widens more significantly, obviously, acutely.

Is that what I fear? Falling into that chasm of the unknown, swooping swallows and flying fish circling and slashing?

I realize that this is commitment. Commitment to getting out of bed in the morning and being in relationship with others and going on a crazy fucking boat trip for no point other than to do it. This is trust and love and life. Living. Untying what holds us back and sailing out of the harbor each and every day into the unknown and feeling every wave and wash of terror and gratitude. It can look like this trip or like marriage and kids and staying in one place for more than a year.

Adventure is relative.
It is trust.

Ready? Sure.
For blurred lines and whales breath and swooping swallows and presence.  
Willing to welcome commitment and contentment.
Open to the challenge of the unknown (so everything). Ready.

Beauty Way

A thick layer of composted manure hides the cardboard. Grass and chickweed yellow and wilt against crumbly dirt underneath. There is death and decomposition and the nourishment of the soil, but it takes time.

After a week we plant squash by shoveling through soggy cardboard and into the hardpan. A dusting of fish meal fertilizer and a handful more compost, a tucking in of roots, a blessing on leaves. Months from now (if all goes well) there will be butternuts and delicata and sweet pie pumpkins swelling in girth and stretching vines to far corners of the garden where the mint grows in clumps and the snakes lie still in the sun. The popcorn seeds will have outgrown their hulls, grown into the sky with dark tassels waving, waiting for specks of life to brush against silk and crawl into the belly of kerneled possibility.

Changed, all of it.

We nourish the soil for our own purpose, for this food that is growing that will fill our bellies in the winter. We nourish the soil around these little islands of seeds and stalks so that the ground will repair itself with microbes and worms. We nourish the soil to nourish the soil. I may not be here to reap the benefits of the latter. I may have moved house or leapt into the stars. It doesn’t matter. In this moment, with these hands, I am creating beauty and healing in this place.

When I first moved in it was difficult for me to look past the chipped paint and cracks in the wall and overgrown weeds in the garden. Why should we fix up land and a house when we are not sure we are going to stay? I stared at the crabgrass in the flowerbeds and the piles of dead blackberry branches and gnarled pear trees and felt hopeless and resentful. Why should I fix up someone else's house, why should they benefit off of my hard work? Why didn’t they do it to begin with? Why can’t it be exactly how I want it to be!

I was startled by the ferocity of my reaction. Where was this anger and resentment coming from? Aren't most of our waking hours spent doing things that benefit other people? What happened to the young girl in the family kitchen who only wanted to help for the sake of helping?

Out into the garden, out into the world is what needs to happen when that anger arises. I picked up pieces of plastic twine and bottles, chip bags and wire as I went along up onto the hill and deeper into the jungle of Scot’s Broom, entangled in my thoughts. Tiny purple flowers led me to a clearing underneath a pine where deer dream and squirrels chirp. Each step is connected with the past and future ones and they overlap with all the other beings that have stepped and slithered and floated onto this earth before. We are layers of being. Layers of beauty and destruction and care.We can leave the trash on the ground or pick it up to reveal the growth below.

It hit me.

Beauty Way. The concept seems simple: leave a place more beautiful than you found it.

It is that simple to do. It can be sweeping a floor or placing a rose in a vase. It can be leaving a piece of art by a trail or filling a bowl with water for the birds or changing a roll of toilet paper before it totally runs out. Beauty Way can also be amending the soil and planting and tending even when there is no plan for the future. The ‘why-should-I-bother’ sentiment disappears and an attitude of service fills in the void the more it is practiced. Why not make a room, a garden, a patch of land, a community more beautiful than how one found it just for the sake of beauty?
Why not give without asking to receive?

I’d like to think I’ve been doing Beauty Way all my life but...yeah right. On the scale of generous verses transactional I do believe my scale tipped towards the latter. That is how we often survive. And then, in a very short time, I was shown another way to live. I don’t think I was fully conscious of the magic and complexity of Beauty Way until staying at The Ojai Foundation where I learned how to be of service joyfully instead of with a sense of obligation or direct (or indirect) personal benefit. The transition was steep and I spent more than a couple weeks checking my watch to see when my three hours of “Beauty Way” chores were done each day. And then they ceased to be chores. And then I stopped checking my watch and instead started watching the birds play in freshly drawn water and felt the intense energy of the Beauty Way-ed land. I realized that sitting in Council circle with others, listening for the sake of listening, that was a form of Beauty Way, too.

It clicked that I was fully capable of choosing to live the Beauty Way instead of a life of begrudging obligation. I still forget this when the bills are due and 18-hour work days leave me exhausted or the weeds in the garden grow faster than the peas or I get pissed off for having to clean up somebody's mess. If I can breathe and switch gears, refocus on giving freely instead of conditionally, I am able to live in this beauty. It doesn’t always work, that’s for sure, but when it does I am filled with a gratitude that seems almost silly while washing dishes. And it is fun! Finding ways to nourish the land or a relationship with little notes and sweet gestures makes me realize that this life is a game. It is a choice to see that game as warlike or joyful.

Dishes for Beauty. Toilet Paper for Beauty. Squash and Cardboard and Manure for Beauty.

Life is beauty if we can just nourish the seed of playful generosity within us.

My Reality

 

A plume of salt and spent air and force crystallize the sky.

Inhalation. 

Focus on the curly edges of the kale leaves, I told myself (over and over) when she said, “You keep bringing emotion into this. Just stop. This is reality!” She listed off all the ways in which I was CLEARLY not within the realm of which she spoke. The leaves blurred into the wooded horizon as my anger and resentment welled up and overflowed in a tirade of words. 

 

This was not my intention.  

Teeth clenched, fins in motion.

I wanted to be calm, non-reactive, mature, but in the heat of the moment the thirteen-year-old in me leaped into (re-)action. The thirteen-year-old that was grounded for unfounded reasons and spent weeks writing dark poetry in her room. The girl that was told she was a spoiled brat for being independent and doing what she wanted. That was full of vitality and creativity and wide-scoped dreams and was (is) mocked for “being dramatic." 

Deep buried resentments spy-hopped at the surface. An ocean of relationship rippled and shook.

Instead of breathing into the pain, doing my shadow work and all that woo (goodness), I yelled back, teeth bared. I accused, I cried. I’m not proud of this, but it happened. My head spun with all that I wanted to say, how I wanted to be understood. But how can you be heard if the other doesn’t want to listen? How can I keep my heart open to others who have closed theirs so tightly, especially when my throat is tight and my hands are clenched and I'm yelling and I really really really don't want to be but I can't seem to help it? 

And what the fuck is reality? 

I am breathing, feeling, living every day and every day is real. My dreams, thoughts, and emotions are real. Even my fanciful imagination is real. So when I am told that I am not living in reality, I am confused. This confusion has been happening my whole life. From theater school to traveling around the world to living and working on boats to living on an island and growing my own food, I haven’t lived a particularly mainstream life, but this has no bearing on whether or not it is real. 

I am real therefore my life is real. Reality.

Flukes in the air, diving deep into the dark, thoughts swim and circle around reason. 

After the pain and sadness slowly receded alongside the anger (not disappeared, but ebbed enough to breathe), I have been able to see this flood of emotions as a call to contemplation: what do I believe about myself and my world? I know that what anyone else says or thinks about me is none of my business, that accusations strike a nerve in this way only when there is doubt within myself about my skills, intelligence, about how I live my life. 

What a gift to have this brought to light, I say through gritting teeth and tears.

So. What do I believe? What is real to me?

Here is the reality (in this moment) that I create:

People are good. I don’t want to believe that everyone is out there to fuck me over. If that what is supposed to make me a good business person, then I don’t want to participate in that kind of business. I’ve built my businesses on love, connection, and beauty. There is no need to be nasty, just honest. If we could all just be honest about what we need a lot of the nastiness would be avoided. This is what is real to me.

I live in a place where I can grow a lot of my own food and buy/trade for the rest from neighbors. This is not an idealistic or a hippie lifestyle. I’m not sure what being a hippie actually is. I do wear dresses in the garden and have potlucks and craft nights on occasion. Does that make me a hippie? If growing your own food is hippie, I’m not sure what the opposite of that is other than co-dependent capitalistic matrimony (in which I am woefully still engaged to a degree). Growing one’s own food and buying locally is much more practical and sustainable than relying on the industrial food system for far less nutritious food. It is also far more “traditional” than how the majority of Americans live presently shopping at Target and Costco and buying strawberries in January. Growing food is not a luxury. It takes hard work and planning and effort. The callouses on my hands are real. The kale and garlic on my dinner plate are deliciously real.

I enjoy my work. Whether it is sailing or cooking for other people, I like how I spend my waking hours. Not 100% of the time, but much more often than not. I have worked hard and created this way of life for myself instability (flexibility) and all. Sometimes it feels like I just fell into these passions. I believe that is what happens when you say Yes to what you love. And it is not that simple and easy and the bumps along the way are reminders of this, but those bumps are meant for refinement and growth. I want to spend my time doing something I feel strongly about in the way that positively affects the world. For me, cooking with food from my garden and from smaller farms in my area is revolutionary. I start and join in conversations about nutrition, local economies, self-sufficiency through my job. And I eat well, too.

I am not in the camp that JOB must equal SUFFERING. This is my reality.

I love what and whom I love. I might not get society’s approval but I cannot follow what this society implies I should love. Or whom. Age, gender, profession, appearance…my heart chooses and I am learning to follow, to let the judgments fall away and keep my heart open to the infinite possibilities of love. Why impose restrictions when the world is infinitely generous? This is realistic.

My reality is based on love and emotion. This is what makes us real, just like we learned in the Velveteen Rabbit. This is what children inherently know. I don’t want to shut my heart off in order to be “successful” because in my eyes that is a very empty success. And unnecessary. I wouldn’t be able to write or connect with people or cook beautiful food without this love, without this openness for emotions. This is my reality.

I’m sailing to Alaska in a month and, I admit it, am scared about dying. About my life changing. Of leaving a comfortable farmhouse for rough seas- what's the point? This is what is bringing me alive in this moment. I am immersed deeply in the contemplation of my life, realizing what is most important to me, accepting who brings me alive and who drains my vitality and how I can release the latter. I could die, this is the reality, but this is also the reality every single (safer?) day of my life. Or your life. My question is: can I die with an open heart, whenever and wherever that may be? Death is real.

I surface again, nicked fins, broken teeth, full belly flopping into oncoming waves. 

I am in love with my magical, fantastical life. It hurts sometimes, too. But I choose to believe in the full range of feelings and possibilities, that we are here to create and love and play and swim through it all. This is my reality. 

What’s yours?

A journey into the depths

I breathe in deeply and hold, letting the tendrils of tingly sensations unfurl from my lungs into my limbs and settle deep into my brain. Snuggled into myself, I know I am home. 

I want to live in this place, this shadow of full life, this feelinged crevice of distant limbs

and

slowed 

down

time.

I exhale through my nose (as I was told to do even if the instructions seem so far away now). 

There are deep vibrations of sound ricocheting under my skin, teeth shaking with pitch and presence. 

There is a bright white circle of light overhead and I close my eyes and dive deep into a space of floating stars and thin tapping thoughts. 

There is a pull of silent words from inflated lips and they are swallowed inward settling in the back of my throat.

I breathe in and hold because I don’t want this to end.

Love. I feel love so strong and bold and naked. I think of my sweetheart, my sweet loving beautiful boyfriend and suddenly I am overcome with a broken (open) heart with the realization that one day he will die and that is the reason that I am so scared to love him fully and this is the reason that I hold back, with him and before and I am determined to crack my heart open even more, to allow it to shatter in order to feel this love, this love that I am feeling right now in this chair as he works in the garden, him there me here, I am going to share this love unconditionally for the rest of my life and now that I know this I am free to do so! Full of love. This is how it will be from now on. With everyone. Every single blessed person in my life. Forever. 

Love. Expansiveness. I am there. I am floating in it. I am swimming and yet I am still. 

This is fucking amazing!

My feet twitch and I breathe in deeply in case they notice and cut me off.

They don’t.

I breathe in deeply again.

There is a tear rolling down my cheek but no one can see it. My eyes are hidden behind dark glasses; are they open or closed? Because now I’m not sure. Thoughts are coming in and out of focus. Kind of like their faces. I am hoping if I stay quiet and don’t raise my hand like they told me to in case of distress, that they will increase the dose and I will sink even further into this vinyl chair surrounded by drills and suction and women in face masks prodding at my oh so very numb mouth. If I can just stay quiet about the fact that I am fucking high as a kite in their dental chair, maybe they won't make me go home. Maybe this will become my new reality like the Matrix and I can just ponder life from inside. The oral hygienists will buzz around the new fixture that is the Contemplative Wise One, that is me. They will set up an IV and I won't need to eat with this mouth that is now perfectly white and cavity free. I will just sit and think of wise things and if I can actually feel my fingers I will write them down to share. Because in this glorious glorious state my mind is spinning with gems of wisdom and I am invoking memory tools (first finger is love, second finger is death) so that if they bring me back, I will remember the revelations. 

This shit is important work, that is clear. 

Another deep breath in. I need every molecule of nitrous I can manage to absorb in order to figure this out. This life thing. I wonder if my dad huffed in between patients in his oral surgery office to find the answers. I wonder if this is the place he was looking for when he drank to unconsciousness. I wonder if this is the place I have been looking for when I’ve drank to unconsciousness. I understand him in a way I never have. That makes me tear up again, this understanding, this release of grief.

I am here and I don’t want it to end.

Then it does. And doesn’t.

“How are you feeling?”

I watch her form the words with her lips, hear the sound tumbling from above and landing on my paper bib covered with saliva and metal shavings, but I am not sure how to answer. And so I don’t. I sit still and am peaceful. That's not true. I am pretty annoyed that my cavities are filled and I have to go home. My face is numb and my mind is blank and so I sit. And I sit. Even in my liminal state of cognition I feel the doctor is concerned. She tells me to sit until my head is clear. Take my time. Fifteen minutes (?) later I move to the waiting room to scribble the revelations (Moses!) and hope that I will be able to drive home soon because suddenly I need to be outside and not trapped in the magazine-stagnated holding pen if they’re not going to give me more or clear me up. I hear a patient in the next room refusing Nitrous. Fool! And yet I wonder for a moment if she knows something I do not about brain function and cell asphyxiation and IQ.

But I am still full of love and wisdom and calm and so I chuckle at her loss.

Until I do not. 

I am at home under the quilts, curtains drawn, jaw a wad of play-doh.

I feel like what’s her name in that one movie where she gets an ice pick shoved up into her brain and jostled around until she cannot find any sense of herself, good or bad. And I wonder if in between fillings and lovely thoughts my brain cells were sucked out with the saliva I somehow had no capacity to swallow, a pool in the back of my throat, the uvula a tiny shark of me drowned in the waves. 

I shouldn’t have driven and I shouldn’t have said yes to drugs and now all I can do is lay in bed and read about orcas. Sharp teeth and echolocation. Sensations and a vision we can only dream about. And I do. I wonder if I will be able to talk again. Maybe I too will form pictures with sound. And I wonder if I have lost my mind along with my mercury infused fillings.

And I kind of like the feeling. OK, love it. Like really. A lot. 

And really don’t.

This lack of control, this abrupt dislocation of identity and time and space. This is how it was there and how it is in this place and I am between worlds even when I am now breathing the proper mix of gases and I wonder what is real. 

Limbs still twitching and the sun bright above, I work outside to clear my head. Clear view of chickens and tall trees. Muddled view of distant mountains and the scant smell of the sea. The thoughts pile up and I am unable to process them all and I know I am changed. No different from any other day just that much more sensational and loving and bright and frightening. 

And loving. Did I say that? 

My head might not be clear but my heart is. And that is overwhelming and staggeringly beautiful. 

I am back, I have gone nowhere, I am changed.

All because of sweetness and rot, altered molecules inside, this dream of life. 

Just like every single breath of every single day. 

Even in plain old normal air. 

Floorboards

The floorboards have given their grain to women on knees, scrub brush in hand, skirts dragging and tripping toddlers. I can hear the humming of chore songs as I sweep carrot tops and chard stems into a dustpan, into the bucket, into the garden. There is history in each fallen fiber, each worn plank speaking stories of pioneers, of fishermen and farmers on an island in the Sound. 

I can feel ridges of time when I sweep.

The kitchen slopes to the west and I know I am at home (for now, for now), my galley sloping towards the fields instead of the sea but listing nonetheless. The wainscoting up a narrow flight of stairs twisting into the wooden shoulders of the little pale green house takes me to Maine, takes me to memories forgotten under quilts and jelly jars. The sandy soil of the backyard garden sifts through my hands like it did in San Diego. 

I am made up of places, stacks of maps build my body, oceans run through my heart and veins. This place collates the corporal remembrance into a home of all the places I’ve ever been and will ever be. All the generations that I have been, the stars of the universe falling as dust onto the swollen grain swept back and forth, back and forth, handles manipulating bristling scotch broom or plastic. 

I am on my knees, sweeping and scrubbing and wondering how these pieces fit together. I am wondering if the women in their long skirts and pale torsos, bonnets and rough hands, if they ever dreamed of being back on the wagon train. 

I wonder if they woke in the night with the movement of wooden wheels underneath scratchy boards long after the wheels had ceased spinning and dissolved into the front yard under the apple trees. 

I wonder if they stared into the sky and remembered long days of nothing but motion toward a home they had yet to build, one that filled up their dream space with longing and hope for warmth and comfort. 

I wonder if they laughed to themselves in their disillusionment or sighed with contentment, grounded and growing. 

I imagine her standing at the doorway, staring at the rising sun to the east, figuring what to cellar for the winter, retracing paths taken years prior through prairies and rivers and night. 

I sweep the stars into the dustpan and walk through the vibrant weeds to the compost pile. I catch glimpses of my garden where arugula sprout tender half moons and the peas will soon need to be trellised. 

I have arrived out west and made a home. The floorboards are swept and lovely.

And yet I can’t seem to stop them wheels from turning even when there is nowhere west to go but the ocean.

(And then there’s that.)

Shall I take up my skirts and run into the waves or take the wheel?  

Or go with the grain and sink my seeds into the earth, one by one, day by day, love by love until the tugging ceases to pull me west?