alone in the dark

solstice has passed. the christ consciousness has been born--as has the trickster--for there can not be one without the other. i am here, alone, in the dark of the poet tree house--in the heart of the open floor that is waiting to co-create paris. it is all it can be in the whirling yes of the unfolding now. i am here. we are here. this is here. we--the cats and me. the black hut is swirling with alchemy class plans and combining the symbolic process and alchemy acts through totem fruit, totem food selections. we will make and share a feast of processes--mixing and matching the buffet table as something comes whirling up. it is what we do--make things up--borrow from ideas and experiences we've shared and co-created and then whirl them out in a wider world. whirling out in a wider world. whirling out in a spiral of even expansion. whirling out in a time and tide of change. whirling out in the dark. i have an image of a lone dancer, dressed in black, with a whirling skirt, doing her dervish thing. it is funny and not. it is here and gone. it is sky pulsating with soundless sound sonic booms away. what am i saying? i am showing up again at the page--because i gave everything up to be able to and i have been avoiding the confessional of my own writing. i have been hiding. i have been wanting to make sense in the outside worlds and have, in my wanting, not been able to traverse the barriers between me and my fulfillment. a strange thing to say on the edge of entering the phd program, finishing the ma program, helping friends complete their thesis papers, and co-creating this venue for the expansion of community. i continue to co-create. i am not sure why these achievements ring hollow next to the big bass drum of family gone wrong, but they do. i am still reaching outside myself to achieve and achieve and achieve. achieve is different from ache. ache is different from ache. i am in the spin of thinking and not again. wanting to write something, yet not knowing what that something should be--what form that something should take. in the bookstore on fourth street today with bethany's family, i considered whether there are enough books already in the world? whether everyone who loves them buys some they never read? whether the ones that did not get bought in my journey around town will ever be useful to someone? whether any of those ideas in my head as a result of reading them, writing them, needing them or fostering them are really good ideas? authentic ideas? my ideas? what is it that language does and doesn't do with the feelings between people? how can those feelings turn back into what they once were? what they might be? what they could be again? what they will never be again? what am i writing now? it doesn't matter. i am writing now. here. again. and tonight, this is enough--to begin. again. again. at my beginning....

she called it sculpture

In the pay-what-you-can gathering where i previewed the format for the art of writing, sharing and performing poetry class i'm offering on thursday nights, 8-10pm, beginning the 14th, 4 thursdays in a row--she called it sculpture. she called it something there in the wet set of yest that makes itself whatever it is when it makes itself up. i am, what? exactly? thinking about editing. about organizing. about throwing things away. about making product. about making necklaces of story and sitting quietly on the ground and being myself, like mama tree, there on the sidewalks of san francisco, making and teaching and doing her unobtrusive thing. i am not brave enough for mama tree's life, but i am learning to be brave enough for my own. and this poetry offering is a beginning. and i am full of expectation and hope and possibility and joy and desire and willingness to grow for four thursdays in a row with the gathering tribe of willing participants edging toward sculpture. an elegant solution.

i wish i could want

i wish i could want it
the dissolution
i want
the freedom
i want
the courage
i want
the life
i want
i wish i could want it
more than wantlessness
floating on a salty sea
of expanding horizon
where
is the other side
of over there?
now that i have jumped
the fence
collapsed as it was
the barbed wire
not even ancient
but rusted just the same
fence post
laying
face down
in the muddy truth
of sacred ground.

i lay in the sand
face down to the tiny particles of
remaking themselves
bits
of dirt
and bodies
of crusted dead
shells and seaweed
and underwater worlds
of pure alive

why isn't it easier
to discern
who
the predators are
in my life?

how i can curl
up
into
sleep
and make the world
go away
for as long as i
can agree
to sleep
in this
peaceful state
of still dreaming.

i want something else now
what is it?

recovery

words
write themselves
on virtual pages
of non-existant
existing still
in the uttered unutterances
of throat chackras
full of unsaid things
unsayable even
in the day
of this night
of this day
of this night
of this day
of this night
so many string themselves together
distracting from the essences
of whatever it is that comes
from wherever it does
whoa
to finish the un
of not
what?
why
must i
put his
memory
in
the
metal
bin
of
thisturday
thaturday
what
makes itself
as offering
in the middle
of the
holy
knot
untying
its unbreakable
broken
promise?

12

i turned myself in on the same day she turned 12. i created the thing that will live in the library and represent my gradual school journey. i handed my thesis to the woman who became program chair during my tenure and we rejoiced a little in the triple goddess signatures that make up the norns of my dream team. i am done now. i am a bit of a thesis writer, it seems. i've been offering my witness and flow support for my colleagues and i really like the work. all the 12s are behind us now--and i have nothing to do but fit into these new jeans. i am five sizes smaller than i first started and so much bigger than i ever imagined i could become. life turns toward the unknown rising of the setting sun. i am here. she is 12. ta da!

no longer home

i'm in my husband's house
where my children live
and i'm in the spin--the vortex--of how i felt before i left.
all those feelings are still here--still igniting and whirling and angry and gross and tired.
exhausted really.
and i consider opening all the doors and windows and sending those feelings on their long holiday.
and i get lost in the suburbs now.
i go on the endlessly long route to nowhere and use up all the gas.
i get lost on all the iterations of bollinger canyon road--
confused and turned around by the endless string of windemere parkways north and south, east and west
i get lost.
zoey spins, too.
enters the "i don't want to go to school if i can pretend i'm sick and be with you all day" dance.
and i meet her in it--
'cause we love playing hookey and eating crap and watching movies and doing what we can to get away with our day out of time.
i buy her bras.
we go to the dollar store and rent movies.
we buy crap--but it's a dollar--so somehow the crap seems like its worth it.
and i whirl and spin.
it is crazy making for me here.
there is no place that feels like me--like mine--
and yet everything that is here is half? mine? including the debt?
and so i whirl and roar and gurgle and sputter and freak out.
we put in "the lovely bones".
we watch the movie.
i notice, she notices, that it's symbolic language that connects the inbetween and the living.
there is a tree like the girl's supposed heaven on the opposite hill.
it was the woman who built this house--it was her heaven, too.
i walked there one day--talked to raven from under the tree--left offerings of gratitude for being the thing opposite me on the hill of my never once belonging.
it is gone for me--the miracles of this landscape--and yet i remember and love and want and long for the romantic ending to my whirling.
it isn't coming.
it will never come if the emotions i felt here can't get released from this house.
we talk about the paperwork in the middle of the unfortunate night.
we will file the paperwork.
i dream about getting a bike and a job at the mall by the water in alameda.
i want to wake up and go to work and get a paycheck for awhile.
this, too, will pass, i suppose.
i am not who i was and i am not yet who i will be and i feel like that damn child trapped in the inbetween.
i feel like i might die in this chrysalis--though it feels, too, like my wings are wet from the locust i've just become.
i consider the owls, who are back, bigger and more alive than every.
i am done with that spiral of underworld for the moment.
i want to come up for air and normalization.
find a twelve step group for my co-dependency and enabling.
start over, again.
or not.

i breathe on this red couch--and i watch this gorgeous girl child of mine in her headphones and sniffles, taking notes and connecting on line with some one or thing that makes her smile. i observe but do not investigate. she's doing math homework. it's 9:30. i'm so glad we stole the day.

sorting and sifting the gifted box

when i first arrived in the hallway, during my first? no. second offering--the one where i had empty matt boards and a long string and a map i found in the parking lot and an old bulletin board where i invited colleagues to find themselves on the map, tell the story of how the got to school, write what they were doing here, make something visible in the frames of space that were available for envisioning visibility, there, on a pedestal next to the beam that connected the floor to the ceiling, i had a box. it was my box. my messy box of pins and needles and tarot cards and string and plastic toys and funny giveaway possibilities of treasure.
it was a good box. i brought it to the early kaleo and elise classes. i offered up my part of the abundance and enjoyed when people sifted and sorted their way through the excess to retrieve their shiny, shiny.
over the course of my graduate degree i have learned how to sort a box.
i've learned how to take a box of anything and put it together in a medicine wheel or mandala or any of the other fancy spiritual names for a circle on the ground. i've learned the prayer of intentional placement. i've learned the feng shui of duality and integration. i've learned the ebbo--the cleansing--involved, always, in cleaning off the life left in a thing and setting it free to live. i've learned the power of placing ritual objects, the activation a little time, attention and touch can give a thing, the extraordinary ordinary miracles of stuff engaged with, enlivened, and then ordered neatly in a place they go--a home--a room or compartment or place all their own.
yesterday, i situated myself on a blanket by the bamboo in the garden of the foam god. i intended to weave--which is always what i do now--in no particular order--with no particular pattern required. robbyn came down, gave me a box, and it was my privilege to sort and sift and enjoy and make and play with all she offered.
there were love bird whistles, green, and lots of them.
there were shells collected from the oceans she had visited.
there were beads of plastic letters.
there were barbie doll heads and red cowgirl boots.
there were dominoes.
there were rocks.
there were dried roses and a wad of carnation.
there were glass vials.
there were glass vials filled with colored sand.
there was one clock.
there were tiles.
there were dreams and stories tucked in, breathing in a labored way for all that was stuffed inside the quiet of that treasure trove.
we all have these boxes--
and there were two yellow candles in purple glass caverns waiting to be lit.
i found virdell, asked her to light one, and then pass me the lighter.
i put my flame next to hers and set the center of the circle.
two candles separated by time.
the gold clock between them.
and then the birds in their paired up ways.
and then everything else sang out their place in the circle
moving in symmetry
and imperfection
and landing in relationship to the center, the whole, the guys right next to the piece ready to be placed.
and as i layed these treasures in a medicine wheel on that blanket on the earth--
and moved and danced between the objects in my counterclockwise way
and heard the whispers of what was wild alive
and what was ready and dead enough to burn
it was my joy
to put things in the fire.
to let what is dead go up in smoke.
to tell its story of having lived
in the curlicues of air
rising up and out of visibility
into the ether
of remembered
prayer.
it was my joy.
it is my joy
to know how to do this work--
of sifting and sorting boxes
and replacing contents
in their ordered whole
and giving life back what is still belonging
to this side
of the up in smoke.

and today, i come to work in the black hut and find myself doing the same ebbo with gifts for the studio/gallery space we house here in the common era, the c.e., the come explore space of becoming.

and i realize this is my work--the sum and point of all i do.
i find, receive, sift, sort, cast my gaze, bring my lover's touch to the life of the object, put it where it goes in me, thank it and all who labored to bring it all the way into being in my presence, honor it for its willingness to play with me, and put it all back where it goes.

this is what i do. this is what gets done. this is it.

thank you, dear robbyn, for your box of treasures.
i am grateful for the exercise
and recognition
of all i've learned
since offering my box...