misplaced mama

Three pills of melatonin. Two Tylenol PM’s.  Two cocktails down.  

Three hours later.  I am still up.

Insomnia is torture.

Tonight I might as well do something with my wakefulness.  I pull the laptop on the bed.  The room illuminates blue.

This has never happened to me before.  Once in a while, late in pregnancy, I’d wake to find sleep gone.  But that was usually cured by a handful of warm bowls of cereal.  But now, there is nothing, there is just a blending of my body and the darkness and i observe it all.

Tonight I said if this plagues me again, if I toss and turn and count the thoughts racing from my head and stare out into the window at the dark sky, memorizing the polka dots of constellations, if I found myself kicking my husband awake for company and the pure rage of someone being able to sleep, if I had one more night with open eyes and throbbing head, I was going to just turn on the computer and write until my eyes bled from screen daze and I until my lids dropped shut, heavy and hard.

And as I type I am so tired yet completely and utterly awake.  Wide awake, not alert or focused, my brain is malfunctioning with exhaustion, but I am awake.  I am angry and annoyed and scared and pissed at my snoring husband.  My baby is a timebomb tick, tick, tick, any moment she will wake up and want to nurse and I will nurse her until my nipples are sore and she falls asleep and I am still awake.  Awake.  Writing in this state is near hell.  I’d rather write with nipple clips on and staples through my fingernails and jaggermeister shots funneled into my mouth via beerbong.

As buddha said:  I am awake.   Is this some cosmic sign.  Some divine designer message for me?  Do I learn to rest in sitting up stillness?  Is awake my new sleep?  Is this a sign to go out and be a stripper, a vampire, a truck driver?

I am no buddha, and nobody wants to see me strip.  I don’t like to suck blood that’s not my own.  And I am night blind behind the wheel.  I am just a mama. Of three.  My days are filled with wakefulness, wide awakefull-ness.  Running around, rag in hand, sand in toes, hands in dirt, scribbling life notes on a dried out bum wipe, hoping to post theme hear someday awakefulness.  Tonight.  I need.  To sleep.

I have a four hour road trip to take tomorrow, just me and the girls.  The trip will be canceled if I can’t get to sleep in the next 20 minutes.  I can’t drive on three hours of sleep.  And apparently I can’t sleep on three hours of sleep, either.

* * *

The past two days have been glorious.  I swam in the ocean yesterday.  Collected seaweed on my calf, dried and peeled it off hours later.  That smell of puget sound, the way it wraps around each coil of my hair, comforts me.  My feet soft from walking on sand.  My nose pink and freckled.   My shoulders berry-brown.  Each little girl lightly tanned and happy and tired from tide pool playing and rock climbing and clam digging and crab chasing.  The oldest girl, her and I held hands and braved the waves, went under all the way and came back up spurting up water, hysterically laughing.  

We lounged on a  tapestry and munched on peaches and cherries and dried nori wrapped around slices of avacado.  We chomped on cucumbers and sipped cool lemon water.  We stayed at the beach until the tide came in close to us and then  we hiked out, through green forest.   A snake came out of nowhere and hissed with us for a while.  Mia got bit by some monsterous bug while  picking salmonberries. Then we went and got ice cream: rose flavored.

Today we went to a beach by a lake, closer to our house than the sea. We took our boy dog.  Pasta salad.  Shredded carrots and beets tossed with tahini dressing.  Plums.  Apples.   The girls jumped in the lake, the water cold and satisfying on a humid day.  They ran the long grassy beach and sang songs from Pippi Longstocking.  They swung on the old school swing set and made friends with other kids but bonded as sisters.  Sisters.  That is my gift to them, to each other.  Sleepy summer days as sisters.


This is why I am here.  Summertime and the mountains and the water; lake, rivers and sea, drippy ice cream cones and warm sunny faces.  Eagle accompaniment and tonight, sleepless, listening to a medley from the coyote pups somewhere out there, outside my window, in the woods.

*My eyes are still not tired*. hail mary mother of god what the F is wrong here?

All day long my mind is worked, calculating spending, negotiating who gets what toys, creating meals, figuring out way to entertain or put to sleep or explain the world to them.  But my body is not worked.  I am not sweating and running and twisting and climbing.  I am not doing this things because I don’t want to drag all three of them up the hills with me, the hassle is downright painful but I know I need the discipline to do this.

I am scheming to take a road trip next month to L.A., my foundation, my roots.   I haven’t told him yet, but I plan on spending a good week with my yoga teacher, the first one, the one who reminded me I was a teacher, that I owned my own spiritual space and that space,  if extended, could hold others.  I haven’t taught a real yoga class in years.  And I miss it.  But first I must remember that this is my practice, my health, my medicine.  I have to find the discipline.  To get up and breath and sit and stretch.  

Discipline.

I never really liked that word.  But I get it now.  My friend—a yoga teacher—and I were chatting today.  We were talking about being disciplined.  And how it’s not about getting things done, or feeling the pressure to succeed or creating a force for your children to live under.   It’s about giving yourself gifts, planting seeds so you can harvest the life you long to live.  I realized the only discipline my kids need is to show them I have the disciplined to live healthy; happy and joyful, flexible and open.  I am disciplined to feel the bliss of right now.  In this moment of total middle of the night sleepless exhaustion.  I am writing and somehow I have crept out of the scary drowning sea of insomnia and I am living the moment in creative exploration,.  My words short, artless, messy, but at least I am hear.  Showing up.  Doing something.  

I am going to try to sleep now.  Maybe all I need to do was stop fighting the wakefulness.  Inviting insomnia in because insomnia needed a voice, a space to express.  Okay.  I can feel that, I see that.  Insomnia, you are welcome.  Do what you need to do with me.  I am going to try to sleep right now because tomorrow I have to be coherent to drive my children.  If you still need your space I will continue to write.  But really, I’d like to sleep now.

Goodnight.

An hour later.

The veil at night is thin.  It’s spooky.  It just gets darker and darker and in between those cracks I can see things that aren’t suppose to be there; messy, static, ghost-like things.  Blurs of whites and blacks and shapes.  I smell things.  Like my grandmother’s perfume and my mother’s hand cream and dark beef broth with limes and roses and the smell of my grandfather’s hair, a minty greasy smell.


* * *

Four days later and about a total of six hours of sleep.  Except for last night.  The herbs finally kicked in.  Chinese herbs hand rolled by a Tibetan Medicine Man that was in town.  I take three at night, they make me shudder with their potency.  i take the ones at night with a dropper of whiskey. makers mark.  yum.   I sleep like a baby.

I don’t know what they are but they smell like frankincense and roses.  i feel like i am chewing up powdered essential oils, the petals of flowers, musky bark ground down to a healing essence. I pop them in, small little round pellets and I crunch them up and then I wash them down with a bit (and a bit more) of whiskey.  I don’t drink whiskey really, but I think I might start.  B says it turns him on that I do a shot of whiskey before bed.  I kind of like it, too.


* * *

We are moving.  Again.  Not really by choice.  But the days have been long and hard and to be in the country means to stay in the country, not drive into the city for school and food and work.  .  I am a community person, my dharma is to bring people together, to see them daily, to converse with them and connect with them.  Solitude is not serving us.  Otherwise I suppose we would have made this place work, the back breaking mortgage and what not.

Whatever I say is all bullshit.  I am sad.  I want to keep my home.  But I go with this flow, because to fight it only hurts.  There is blessings in everything.  i am quite sure of that.  lately i have to keep reminding myself of that.  things have been a whirlwind, a massive blast of creatively and destruction, just like all of life, i seem to keep the paradox theme alive.  In each creation something dies.  Whenever something dies, something is brought to life. amen.

 

 

[i am done with thinking this blog is a place for something other than a process like a result of a process.  this blog is the process.  phew.  how come it has taken me so long to remember that?]

* * *

I just took a small sip of something.  Enough to relax into my under-rested body.  There was a time when ujjayi breath  and forward folds were enough to unwind my spool.  Now my practice is a glass of vodka with a mango smashed in it.

 

 It’s a beautiful day.  Really, breathtakingly beautiful. I wake up to sunshine beating through the leaded windows.  It’s a white light, not white-white but yellow-white, a pale yellow white. It’s the color of New. I remember my dream:  huge explosion of reds and oranges and then Snap! Scene cuts: My family and I are happily in the jungle, but instead of legs, we have thick lizard tails.  I pet Mia’s and tel her it’s lovely, scales of greens of fuchsia.  That dream puts me into good spirits, it’s a sign.    The yellow light pouring in, lizard tails, it’s good. It’s a hopeseed in my heartcenter.  It has been a long time since I felt that seed.  

* * *

Z and I are alone in the house.  This happens sometimes once a week, but usually only once a month.  We’ve been rocking out to Cat Power and she is blowing kisses out the window to the dogs and the horse.

I sit down to write.  And then a better thought comes through.

 Outside.   I get in the dirt and pull weeds and plant some flower starts and really try to open my third eye and heart center of All Belief so I can converse with green and white and pink and purple etches wildly blooming.  I still feel so funny, a phony.  After all these years of doing it, trying to truly communicate with the plant realm, I still feel like a crack head doing it.   Somewhere in my heart a tiny bit of me doesn’t believe I can.  This is my job, to erase doubt. Fully.  It’s about not fighting that air stream that invites me in, that vacuum of energy that longs for me to just be taken, to believe in it, to travel with abandon and authenticity.  To question it, to devour it, to hate it, to be angry at it, to savor it,  to love it until there is nothing there but love.  the dirt, the flowers, the sun, the baby.  doubt exits.

* * *

I sit down to write.  And then some not so good thoughts come through.

Somewhere along the way I lost the belief.  WHAT THE FUCK. 

Mirror, Mirror (aka that bitch): Pathatic idealist! You hold optimism to a fault! DUMMY!  How long did you live for the future and now you are here you don’t know what to do!  Typical.  Plus you are fat and have acne and dark circles and your hair is tangled in knots.  And most of the time not you’re so much fun to be around, booorrr-ring!  And what about this house thing?  When you gonna deal with that? Can’t you even figure out how to pay a fucking mortgage?

Me hammering mirror with a two by four until it’s in shards all over the floor:  FUCK YOU!  Motherfuckingdickfuck. Bitch.

Somewhere along the way I forget that there are no mistakes, there are no ‘what we should have done”. there is no salvation or redemption or prosecution.  there is only what we have and in that is  the exact amount of air we need.

I have been writing about this forever and really barely ever live it.  And as of lately not only am I not living in belief, I am living in utter fear.  Fear of the unknown.  Of what will happen.  Of what might be.  Of not being able to survive (literally and figuratively) where this particular thermal, spiral is taking me.  

And then DUH.   Spiral don’t go anywhere.  There is no beginning or end, no left or right.  There is only that air that carries to different levels, different worlds.  I watch flocks of birds; eagles, voltures, hawks, mainly, enter into thermals.  Each on a different level, spiraling upward, wings utterly still, not moving at all.  They travel by the warm air carrying them up through the cold, creating their own special pocket.   They go where it goes. The only choice they made was to believe it and fly into it.

* * *

The place is loud and packed and he is a chicano, close to 60, thick gray hair pulled back into a neat pony.  He’s up from a city down south  to hear Heavyweight  Dub Champions, the extraterrestrial music that surrounds us. 

where do you live? he asks.

off the valley highway. 

1979, it was 1979. he tells me.  I drove through before there was any logging,  fishing, no industry at all, untouched. .  It was the most beautiful place. Eden, whateverthefuck that is,  perfect. Hell, someday I always thought that valley would be my home. 

come up anytime.

hey I have a question for you, he says.  What are you doing with your life right now?  My brother died last week.  Puts things in perspective.  Are you doing what you need to be doing for you, for humanity?

i raised my beer to him.  i’ll drink to that.

* * *

I am here.  In this place, this perfect place.  Mountains are grand and towering, snowcovered magic watching over every shade of green in the book of green.  It is suck-in-your-breath and gasp perfect.  It reminds me how flawed and ugly I am, how needy and righteous and angry and lame.  How complainy and fucked in the head.  How jealous and greedy.  How ego-driven and entitled.  I look around and see perfection and i am like, wow, girl, you gotta just get with it, with this.

How can i come from such perfection, such heart-racing beauty, where rivers cleanse the body and the dirt offers up the most vibrant and essential nutrients and not notice that i MIRROR this perfection in every singe moment.  Even in Her scarred state: logged and cleared and milled and fished and built-upon, this Earth is gloriously, everything perfect, a perfect healer, and perfect planet and then how come i don’t see myself this way? i am not seperate from any of it.

* * *

I am writing in the warm breeze with sunshine pouring down over my shoulders like a liquid balm.  And I am so attached.  So attached to here, to this land,  to all these amazing people who surround me, to the little girls I get to love daily.  I am so attached to the lamb’s ear that grows on the side of the garage and the peonies that are beginning to bloom and the chive flowers that have exploded and the food that stirs just above earth in the food garden.   I am so attached to ideas and things and images and love. i am so attached to one particular pair of boots.

The only thing I am not attached to are these words.  I let go of them so freely, I let them grow, from some kind of love, scattered with fucks and magic and mother-business and then I let go of them, and only hope they land in the heart of exactly where they are meant to be.  These words can never be bound, organized, situated, planned.  They can never be part of a system.   They are the essence of me and this world and once the are breathed, like vibrational compost they transform into something fertile and fresh and nourishing.  I don’t know where they go, but they don’t belong to me.  Never did.

* * *

and then i get it, when i look at them, i just GET IT.

this is truly her energy, ethereal in strut.

felt crown queen at the beach.

papa rocks baby

mia and her soulsister.

nothing but hope.

hippy hula hooper.

 

glowing fuzz head.

three sisters.  i must have done something right somewhere to be trusted with them.  

om. om. om.

Naked. Both of them.

Hair the exact color of bread and butter corn. Hair so close to the color of Malibu sand soaked in sunlight.

Lush soil, fluffy, soft enough to comb through with your fingers, as dark brown as dark brown can be, coconut shell meets espresso bean. Leafy stipped purples, wide green leaves, twisting vines growing up a wire fence.

The little one chases the big one with a hose. The big one runs and squeals. The little one is crying. She chases out of revenge.

* * *

there is no sun quite like this sun, who hides from us from us day after day for so many months, appeasing us with intermittent moments of light; day hikes, beach combing, park picnics, ferry rides. But dark months are dark months for a reason. We never doubt it’s existence, but we wonder what it feels like, what it would be like to draw it down from behind those harrowingly dark and low, marine clouds. There were days when I would reach my arms up try to grab the clouds, separate them with my hands, crack them a apart just a bit, just to say hi sun, missing you.

It’s out of hiding. The past is the past. Life is lived outside now.

* * *

mia: dada, will those sugar snap peas get bigger and bigger?

dada: The’re going to get real big.  especially if we take care of them.  water them.  sing to them.  give them a lil dance.

mia: As big as the world? will they get as big as the world?

dada: wow. That would be big, wouldn’t it?

mama: did you know the world was so big that it never ends, ever?

mia: I know it’s so so so so big. We don’t even need another one! It’s so big! It just keeps circling and circling and getting bigger and bigger.

mama: yup.

mia: mama we could plant another world.

mama: how do we do that?

mia: well we get the specials seeds from chrystal world fairy then we plant them and they grow beautiful trees and houses made like flowers and animals, cause they grow animals too, these seeds grow everything.

mama: cool. Where could we plant those seeds for a new world?

mia: I know! I know! The perfect place! We can grow it at that cupcake place by the bookstore that could be perfect! That would be a wonderful new world home.

* * *

Indeed. Perfect. Cupcakes. And a new world.

* * *

“ Dream-travelers, there is no path, paths are made by dreaming.”

-antonio machado.

i have long loved this woman (www.starvingartistink.com) her sweetness is like sugar on a day full of kale salad.  her photography is my favorite kind, loose and tight, bold and bright, dreamy and whimsy.  sometimes even a little sad in a happy kind of way.  her journey is nurishment.  she reminds me to love the life i have, to hold those Three Sisters tight.  she likes to inspire the uninspired.  she wants us to share our dreams.

my dreams today:

to have community, like really, really have it. 

to know what i mean by the above statement.

to curl up cozy with the girls tonight and watch a movie and eat chocolate chip cookies.

to heal.

to heal.

to heal.

to release the energy that is trapped in the top of my head.

to take some time for myself to buy some pants that fit.

to lock eyes with my lover for an hour.

to write with abandon.

to write with honesty.

to write without shame.

to write with spirit moving through me.

to sell the writing i just finished to the right people.

to fully tell my stories so that my girls can create their own stories.

to let go of my parents story to i can fully create my own.

to climb the mountains of life without carrying too much weight in the backpack.

to travel without the fear of flying.

to go to peru. alone.

then to go to peru with my girls.

to be part in creating ceremony for my sisters and brother.

to let go of our house [if this is the path] with ease and grace.

to find another place, affordable, easy, weightless.

to see my partner more and more with the light in his heart.

to go hear music next week and dance until my thighs throb.

to watch cloudy the horse go into labor and her baby be born.

to know in my bones that the shifts in the world can only bring us happiness and a fuller life [as L said to me today: the universe is conspiring to bless us]

to remember to keep dreaming.

and let me tell you that’s not a hell of a lot.

i sat down to write here tonight because i really wanted to, i wanted to connect with this space and my words and who ever you might be.

and nothing came out except a storm full of complaints and desperation to be put of of my misery.  something along the lines of how being a mother of two still felt really sexy, new, exciting and how being a mother of three feels like the green slimy shit i squeezed out of the kids bath toys last night.  you know, one of those kind of days where if you asked me if i was happy i would very simply tell you no.

and so i sat there with some words i wrote down and i looked them in their i’s and o’s and u’s and asked if they were my truth, where they the shape of myself, my life and my kids. was the sarcasm and witty delivery and the two paragraph description of my feet resembling an old homeless man’s who i am now or then or ever?  i don’t know. i hope not.  i hit delete.  and instead this is what i know and what i like. it’s what they like and what they know.

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she likes to waddle outside and pee.

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she likes to eat clovers fresh from the land.

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she likes to hang out down by the water and write her name with her toes in the sand.

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she likes to daydream about a land far, far away where little children sleep in until 9.

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she likes to gather stones.

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and then eat them.

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she likes to hang out with horses, talk to them and whisper secrets in their ears.

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she likes to take photos of herself inside mirrors, checking to see if her baby belly has went down at all and to examine the color of her hair.

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she also likes to chomp on oatstraw.  [he just loves them, loves them so much].

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she likes to make my heart skip a beat.

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she likes to climb apple trees [he like to help her]

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she’s learning to just be with what she sees.

 

 

 

How utterly extravagant..

How dare I do this.

I can’t afford this.

To do yoga? Seriously.

A babysitter?

Neglagent.

Should be buying food for dinner.

Should be home sorting laundry.

She be working on The writing.

Should be able to lift…foot…a…little…higher…and…twist…just…a…touch…deeper…

Should be breathing deeper.

Should just shut up already.

And than an exhale in competition with a lion after a bloody, satisfying feed, and it was all gone. My body limply melting into nothingness. For a moment.

Those mountains, those pesky words, those seemingly judgmental mind-fucks that try to interupt my body stretching forgotten corners and tacky tissues and lubricating dried up joints and free up blocked meridans, how often I want them gone for good. But really, in my practice today, I honored them. They are mere mountains to climb, each emotional snag is a place to stop and check out the ethereal scenery: the where, why, what, who and how. And then I can choose. Keep it or release it.

And as I was twisting in Bound Triangle, deciding if I wanted to go deeper, lingering in my comfort zone, contemplating floating around there because, well, it’s comfortable and there wasn’t a lot going on, I could space out on the easiness of it all. And right when I thought it was safe my teacher says, go on, go deeper if you need to, if you need to feel more. All we’re looking for is something to feel, right? We all just want to feel.

What she didn’t say was feel good. Or on the flip, feel bad. She just said feel. And it hit me, I’m not on the mat for any other reason but to feel the yoga to then feel what it’s like afterward and to even feel what’s it’s like not to practice month after month, to feel a body that is compressed and a spine that has shrunk and breath that is shallow.

I suppose this is why for all those months when any normal individual was experiencing post partum episodes like I was they would have gotten some pharmaceutical help and yet I refused. I wanted to feel it. Every last bit of it, I wanted to feel it until I didn’t need to feel it anymore. Time does seem to heal and specific blessings entering my life (new people, new practices, the owl that swooped down and pretended it was going to fly directly into my windshield late that once night but instead, like magic, lifted up past the roof of my car) can slowly change a course, physiological and otherwise. But to deny the feelings to emerge and live not just inside me, but as me, would be doing my self a great injustice. At least that seems to make sense.

And as I type this now I remember a question someone asked me a while back when I mentioned I was going to start attending Sweat Lodges. Why on earth would you want to be trapped in a pitch black little hut with a pile of volcanic rocks hot smoldering inches away from you?

I dunno. I just want to see what it feels like.

And for many years I heard the question why on earth would you want to give birth without pain meds?

And the same thought would pop in my mind. Not that it’s better for the baby or that drugs just ask for more intervention. No, none of that. I wasn just thinking no way in hell am I going to miss out on feeling that happen to me.

And as I type this, I am trying to feel this day. All alone and swamped with writing to do and grocery shopping and a dinner to prepared for friends and nettle to be harvested before the dinner because it’s going in the dinner. I am feeling lonely for the friend up north and the friend down south. I am feeling annoyed with the media. I am feeling hungry and tired, but that’s nothing new.

And so it’s been my practice the past few mornings to ask myself that question as soon as my eyes open to the (finally!) bright sunshine through my window while I lay in bed. How do I feel today? And then I go from there.  And then I extend it on to the girls and I honor what they have to say.  I am getting that feelings are like our own inner-journalist, telling us the news about where we are and what we may need. 

 

(a love letter to all the lovers who walk in the truth)

 

Last night I only sort of meant to hurt you, just the tiniest, most subtle passive bit. But for the most part it was to hurt me. You know how that goes. And I won’t say that love is funny like that because that is not love. Love fades every moment I slam that door in the middle of my chest shut. I feel it pound to the back of my tired body and to the pit of my gut. That is abusing myself, to shut out love. Love is the source of my life. Of Life.  So the hurt lays in here, too. We both ache in pain, ripped up to shreds inside. We walk with a wall between us and it has just gotten so easy. So easy to keep slamming. It may seem crazy to want to rip down the walls, especially the ones between the kitchen and the bath and the ones that hold up the stairs, but it’s not crazy, really. Let’s just tear them all down. See how it feels. Exposing all the beams and the mold that grows on them and maybe even a mouse turd or two. So what if you’ll be able to watch me pee while you fry an egg. I have nothing to hide from you anymore. Let’s rip down the walls. Sometimes when we become that open and aired out things hurt a bit less.

While I was dancing with our daughter, the youngest one, a thought came to me. Maybe it’s because she was smiling so big as we bounced up and down, lightly and liberated, reviving the roots that grow on the bottoms of our feet so that they can stick to the earth again, like we used to be able to do. It came to me because for a second I really saw you in her, a flicker of transparency within her sea of matte ebony. I saw your charm and mystery in the curved little joker smile she wore for me while Reggae Joe sang to us, one of the songs you picked to carve in the stone, engraving sound into matter. I saw you and I was inspired by how perfectly she is each of us, and neither of us, all in the same spark that is only her. The graveling voice that first sang the song back in 1968 brought me to the  hours when she made her way out of me. A true transformation from life to death to life and death. And I see now how that birth should be my guide as a lover to you, and how grateful I am to be taught to rise up from my own burning body. My first thought was how I must thank you, immediately, for sharing all this with me, for somehow ending up as my other half, my best friend, my babydaddy, my soulseeker my karmic companion, my domestic partner. Thank you. [sorry about the 47 missed phone calls in a row. Where were you? On a ferry? An Island?]

And that thought brought me to here and that here brought me to this:

Not wanting

to want

to not want

 

those questions

like the hurricane in your eyes

are why

you are my heart

my art

my blood

no.

I would not still be with him now.

Or maybe ever

since I am sure

I have always been with you

from before

and even before that

and then some.

Let’s just fill up

on this Love

that sits

waits

knocks

patiently

right here

on the verge of getting offended

but always forgiving and never in misery

A gift.

 

 

Oh goodness.

Here are the next 27 places of gratitude, just because I find it impossible not to finish what I started.

1. Cloudy the horse. If we squint just right at here when she is eating clovers in the field we can see that she has a horn coming out of her lovely white forehead.

2. Oranges halves with sprinkle of brown sugar and a (big)splash of Jack Daniels

3. Planting little seeds like strawflower and queen violet and hyssop. Digging in the dirt so much that my hands are a wonderous color of earth, brown skinned and cracked. Talking to the roots of each starter planting with my daughters, giving thanks to the possibility of the food that will grace out tables.

4. Sunshine. Here in the pacific northwest west I am learning that another word for hope is sun.

5. my husband singing songs he wrote, into a microphone, in the next room.

6. My daughter Zaida’s love for standing on the stool in front of the sink and washing dishes for me.

7. My daughter Mia’s words: mama, sometimes when I am running with the wind and when I say hi, he answers so me back. Or she. I can’t tell if it’s a he or a she.

8. Finding family tucked across the street along the creek. Knowing my dreams of community living are manifesting.

9. Yurts.

10. Living in a state of shock. It’s good to be shocked. It’s life electricity. It wakes up some sleepy part of you that you didn’t mean to put to bed for good.

11. Being withour internet or cell phones for quite some time. It makes me be here. Now. Nowhere else.

12. My little ibook that only holds my writing. There is nothing else on it, no other program to use but Word. And so it goes that without distractions I actually can write something from finish to end.

13. My own personal bravery. Sometimes I really think I am so fucking brave it makes me howl and yelp and dance.
    

14. My daughter Sula who told me she loved me yesterday because I was a “curious old lady.”

15. Making flower essences. I used to to do this back in the day before I had the girls and was re-inspired by a muse that lives up the street. The flowers in my valley are wildly laughing from the earth and some of them just shout out to me, hey, take me. I’m hear for healing.

16. The muse that lives up the street. Her black wings transport me to my own magic and her grounded feets show me the walk.

17. Dark beer.

18. Miatake mushroom extract.

19. My writing group. Five women splitting open to form liquid truth on the page to one another. There is just something to be seen and heard while hashing out one’s thoughts.

20. I am thankful right now that I may not be as rooted as I once planned on being. I am thankful, for whatever reasons, to be going through financial hardship. I am thankful because it once again forces us to re-think our values and lifestyle, refining it even more. There is no need to be stuck in a moment, a record skipping. Sometimes the Uinverse provides hardship so we seek easyship.

21. My town. It is so unbelievably uncool that it’s almost the coolest place on Earth. I come driving down my highway, through the garden of eden green and the heavenly blue it presents and I sigh a relief. After spending most mornings in Bellingham, the cool place, I love heading out to my country spot, where the pigs squeal and the hen’s cluck and neighbors hold 24 hour karaoke parties while BBQing their pigs and chickens.
    

22. Jenny Lewis with the Watson Twin’s album, Rabbit Fur Coat.

23. my mother. I don’t aspire to be her nor please her. And she doesn’t expect me to and for that I am grateful.

24. I am so grateful I came to this lifetime as a writer. It really is so much fun. Everywhere I go and everything I do becomes a story in my head, a chance to figure ou how to explain and describe and create and pass on.

25. Those people who hold me while I write the specific project I am working on. You have been there, not asking too many questions or giving advice, but you have been there to listen and inspire and to not run away from the largeness and, well, utter absurdity of it.

26. Tap dancing.

27. Slot machines.

I think that makes thirty.

Maybe not thirty straight days but I achieve my goals in an out of the ordinary manner. Always have. Always will.

In gratitude: Hollywood.

My daughter finds them deep in a box while playing hide n seek in the bottomless closet under the stairsway, a spooky kind of kid haven.  They lived wrapped in a an old silk scarf dotted with remnants of a moth feast.  It was mixed among too small and discarded for another day bathing suit bottoms and old hand made cards smeared with wax and pastels and the bags of old photographs we found in the abandoned apartment in Harlem. Ohhh, Mama, I like theeeese. And she puts them on.

Of course she would. They’re shiny and red and gold and large and absolutely fantastic. They came from Venice Beach. Fifth sunglass hut down on left. Circa 1999.

Even though the light was low and the air carried a gray drizzle as thick as oil, I had to snap some photos of her wearing them. It’s like they were made for her.  Maybe they were.

She hops up on the window ledge and sticks out her thumb. Through the camera lens I can’t tell exactly what’s she’s doing. I thought for a moment she was making a ‘gun hand’.

Are you shooting me?

No Mama! She giggles. I’m trying to get a ride…to…to…where is that place I was born again?

Hollywood.

Yeah. Hollywood.  I’m trying to get a ride to Hollywood, Mama. [I won’t mention the gulp of fear and discarded faces of vile predators that swallowed me up whole when she sang that out. just a minor snag in my parenting evolution].

I am thankful for Hollywood, mama!  That’s where I came from!  [a bit earilier we talked about gratitude, what that particular day’s gifts had been and who we were thankful for.]

Me too, Mi,  I am thankful for Hollywood, too. She’s a good old town.

And all you New Yorkers out there in your perfectly black pencil skirts and your noses in the air, take a step back.  We all know what city is The City.  And all you San Franciscans, I can hear you laughing with your recycled messenger bags all the way to the Mission, and fine.  Let’s just leave it at that.  And if you are from like London or Tokyo, then l got nothing on ya.

* * *

Thank you Hollywood. It seems like such a mess of a place to be thankful for, and let’s face it, my deepest graces go unsaid: health, food, shelter, breath, love. The ones I have to dig a bit deeper for tend to be wildly obscure, and sometimes even brought to the surface by a five year old.  But today it’s without a doubt. Hollywood. 

I met my sweetie in Hollywood, back in the day before it was in the least bit a cool place to live.  At that point you could live in a quintessential Sear’s Craftsmen for little to nothing without really having a job or a purpose.  It was cheap, the food was good, the beaches a bit north were phenomenal, the music was roaring and the streets were filled with odors that only an artist could really appreciate.  The day I fell in love with my man, it was just post-sunrise and I was frolicking on a [now formerly] nude little beach also known as Zumerez.   I was writing in my journal with just my bottoms on.  He had just caught what would be my fish dinner that night.  He used a long stick with a spear coming out of the end [for the fish and me] I never looked back. 

Hollywood gave me Science, and JuJuBeats and Nocturnal Wonderland and dub lab and Jamaica Gold and Dub Club and that fantastically deboucherous dancing freedom of leaving a club drenched in sweat and stepping into the misty air of a city built along the ocean.  The grainy saltiness of smog infused sea air around 3am after dancing for 5 hours on the look for some spicy falafel is ingrained in me forever as bliss.

Hollywood gave me Squaresville (best vintage clothes) and Cafe Tropical (best cafe con leche) and Erehwon (best local market) and Lola’s Chicken and Waffles (best chicken and waffles EVER) and the Hollywood and Taft building (best electronic music culture PR job in there) and Self Realization Fellowship (best silence) and Runyan Canyon (best city hike) and Laurel Canyon (just a cool spot filled with musicians) and Topanga Canyon (God hangs out there) and Naader (my yoga teacher) and Space (my yoga studio).

Hollywood gave me Jack Grapes, my first real writing teacher and the best advice on writing I have ever heard: write like you talk. If you wouldn’t say it that way, don’t write it that way. It was there, in his classes,  I first learned to say I am a writer and meant it.

Hollywood gave me many kicks in the ass and a night in jail and sexual harrassment and the opportunity to experience honest to goodness assholes and black boogers from really dirty air. Hollywood gave me a good schooling in street smarts.

Hollywood gave me really.bad.coke.[which also gave black boogers].

Hollywood gave me a large and well loved fashion boot collection.

Hollywood gave me five tattoos and a few piercings.

Hollywood gave me so many hassles and such anxiety and heartache that I had to leave for a year and go live in a cabin on a river in the Sawtooth Mountains to just breath and lay in the grass and talk to god.  And when our lease was up there, Hollywood called me back and I was ready for her.

Hollywood gave me earthquakes. and mudslides. and fires.

Hollywood gave me prenatal care atop a mountain with views that go on forever and homebirth support and it was in that city that I rode the wild birth of my first daughter, who arrived in our moldy, yet cute one-bedroom apartment in Silverlake. It gave me sunny morning walks with my new baby girl, snug in a sling, me as a new mama, proudly wearing bright red sunglasses and sneakers and a carrot juice in hand.  It gave me early morning yoga classes taught with my baby girl strapped to my chest and mid afternoon rides to the beach to introduce my daughter to the ways of the ocean.  Hollywood watched me as I went from a girl, to a woman, to a mother. 

Hollywood gave me mural art and traffic jams and wild mushroom tamales and almost an MFA.

Hollywood gave me Watts Towers and La Brea Tar Pits.

Hollywood gave me Griffith Park and The Getty and LACMA and Mann’s.

Hollywood still gives me family, friendships that are magic, age-old sisterhood, endless and boundless. Hollywood hold her hand down on the bench next to them, saving me a seat forever in the foothills of her hips and waist.

Hollywood put me in a academy award winning movie (no shit! and I only had to smoke about 75 cigarettes in one day for the part!)

Hollywood gave me an invitation into Nickerson Gardens and Imperial Courts, the housing developments where I was able to do some of my life’s most fulfilling and frustrating work.

Hollywood has always been my muse.  She poked me when I wouldn’t get out of bed and she tempted me with her grime and and her guts.  She ignited in me the fire of my evolution and looked me in the eyes and said grow the fuck up now. I can say all this, looking back with such sweet spot nostalgia and no regrets as I sit here in my land far, far away.

I bow down and give big thanks to that absolutely immoral, materialistic hijacker of common decency. I bow down and say thank you to the vibrancy and technicolor hilarity at it’s finest. There will always be a connection there, it’s the home I love to hate.  In my heart and body and closet, there will always be little bit of Hollywood and that I am proud of.  And no matter how country I get, it will at least shine through in her: