misplaced mama

Mia. You are Six. Worldly. Wordy. Questioning. Sassafras. Kind. Rude. Bold. Brave. Pushy. Helpful. Stick your tongue at me 100 times a day. Name caller. Bed cuddler. Loud dreamer. Drooler. Baby lover. Greens eater (this week). Honey thief. Sugar stealer. Amazing singer. You- can’t- possibly -be -white dancer. A good friend. Intuitive. Totally of this earth. Ultimate beauty. Fancy. Fast. Faster. Fastest. In love with a good book. Family girl. Board game player. Family Fashion Consultant. Made me a mother. Cry baby. Big Girl. Listener. Storyteller. Discoverer. Sap-fanatic and collector. Drama Queen. Long legs. Kicker. Blonder than blond. Orange specks in eyes. Scar on your left check. All day long art maker. Messy but fantastic baker. Grandma lover. Swimmer. Rock licker. Deep sea dreamer. Viking warrior. Pirate slayer.  Skateboarder. Sand digger. Brave. Camper. Fair. Body aware. Not a biker (yet). Rollerskater. Fantastical. Feather finder. Bird geek. Fish expert. Slug saver. Fairy translator. Venus channeler. Mis-matcher. Headstander. Forever Young. Strongest. Gentlest. Girl.

My girl. Your own girl. Teacher. Healer. Sage Seer. Ordinary, everyday miraculous person.

{by the way i had to hand my crunchy mama card for the shade of pink you wanted.  you wanted pink, like REAL pink, like HOT pink, like DAY GLO.  So I pushed aside the beet juice and the smashed raspberries of birthdays past and bought the nastiest stuff I could find, most likely, filled with red and yellow #666.  but the look on your face when you saw your cake?  worth the toxins.  every last one of them.  happiness overides it and heals.  i am sure of it.}

Thank you a million times over.  Again and again.  I know you know I try.  I know you know I love you.  I know how hard you live. Sometimes you just feel cruddy and you tell me and we sit with it and sometimes you feel like you are high and we ride that swell. Watching you grow is an honor.  I am accountable because you see right through me and call me out when I’m a phoney and not present.  Every day I savor the lessons, our bliss, our struggles.  I savor it all, because all we have is this, right here.  Perfection.  Failure. Beauty. Insides turned out. A mess.  Lost socks.  Splattered paint on rental home wall.  A very wet kiss on my cheek.  An empty wallet but four hands full of hot cocoa.  A pile of books to read to eachother and a pile powdered sugar you spilled all over the pantry floor.  We have tantums and unicorn kingdoms.  We have eachother. 

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my divine flower.  truly the gift that re-minded me of the goddess of all things fabulous and sensual and beautiful.  My libra girl, I love you.

mama mary b. 

Good morning, Magic, One and Two. 7am and on a wire with a cup of coffee on my porch.

Hollyhock: fertility and ambition.  Giving good love motivation for creation.

my mama loves lavender.  so do i.  who doesn’t love it with the sun pouring through it and smell mixes with the salty air?

I’m happy for other people who get to cruise on a sailboat.  How nice.

a daughter.  a beautiful person.  a sunnyflower.

a perfect place to walk.

entrepenual {and insightful} neighbors. I get good tomatoes and Lucky gets to keep his house.

witness to meditation. inspiration jump starts.

Purple sea stars {and a daughter who peed next to them}

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Om Sri Durgaya Namah {thank you for your gifts}

Mama I want to go home. I want my house. I looked around and I forgot where I was, I thought I was at my other house and I wasn’t.

{immediate persuasion mode, the artless act of not validating}

Honey, this house is so much fun, though! There are more stairs! And there’s a doorbell! And look, look at the glowing ball of sun sinking into the sea behind us.

She turns to look. She sighs. So do I.

We’re always home when we are together, Mia. We are each others home.

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Okay. So I’m a fucking liar because as soon as she said that I was thinking, HOLY SHIT. She is so right. We lost her house. WE lost THEIR home. And suddenly I panicked. We should have figured out a way to have kept it. He could have worked every weekend for six months. And nights. And I could have gathered all my talents and got a job stripping at the Big Beautiful Bush and Wandering Stretch Marks Gentleman’s Club two nights a week and rolled in the cash. She knows better, that WAS her home. And we lost it. Gone. Now all it is a vacant place with apple trees that need our hands and a 1400 square feet that need me to go and give a good final sweep through.

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Exactly two years ago, I was celebrating the sale of our first home as a family. And now I am mourning the sale of our second home. Good? Bad? Misplaced. There is no home for me. And all I do is search for it, for that cozy spot where all my family beings are a spit away and the walls are earthen and the air is clean and my words provide enough and the love lives so hard and wild our hairs never lay flat on our heads.

I talk to people who tell me I was living their dream; the falling apart farmhouse in the middle of nowhere where horses neigh and the cows graze and my kale went superfreak wild everywhere. But that dream ended like so many people’s in this country; kicking and screaming economy, shady mortgage deals, over-excited families with longing. I am no different than anyone else. It’s just ironic that we wanted to live rurally for simplicity and life got very fucking complicated very quickly. Simple means different things. 

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The city brings to me newness, much appreciated newness.  Magenta hues and smells of fennel growing from the cracks in sidewalks. It’s bikers, and vegan punks and dreads and fancy pants and patagonia and the smell of fishermen’s skin.  It’s barely using any gas. It’s walking. It’s drop-in friends. In a week our home as become a HUB and every night our red, gold and green totally gaudy porch chandelier lights the way for friends who come by with wine and logs of salami and big smiles, loving our new space as much as we do. I am not sure how it happened but the view, and I know I MAY have mentioned this before is FUCKING UNREAL and it feels good to just sit and drink and look and laugh and settle.

Last night we were walking the hills and noticing all the beautiful and lovingly kept Victorians, bungalows, craftsmen’s and modern oasis and we were like WHO LET THE RAGGAMUFFINS in THIS hood? We laughed our raggy asses up to the crest and breathed in the electric orange and royal purple and gave thanks. He grabbed my ass. I gave his package a quick squeeze. Home.

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But really. I want to go back Home. What does this mean? I don’t know. I am coming to understand that this earth is our home but we all come from beyond and have met here in these bodies to figure out how to love as fleshy bloody types, how to honor and cherish and open our hearts until they are just goo and they all ooze together and we finally can stop ripping each other to shreds and remember we all have ONE HEART. We all breath the same air. We are all made of the same water. We all disappear into Space sooner or later. I want my home to be with you. I want us to bask in the light. I want us to stop wanting. To need nothing but each others sparks exchanging on a walk along the shore. I believe we can do this. I believe WE ARE.

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And while I am being honest here. Let me say a couple more things about visiting with the whales that I didn’t say because I like to candy coat practically everything and make life into a warm fuzzy. Okay, here I go.

THEY ARE FUCKING DISAPPERAING. And I was one of those DESIRING types who has wanted to see them forever so that I can learn from them, experience their beauty, feel safe and free FROM them. And really what they need is US. They need us to say: You are okay. I know your food supply is all fucked up and the water is disgusting and vibrations from this world are chaotic, but you are okay and here, take some of me, pass me on your anxiety and fear, beautiful black and white creatures. You need and deserve it more than me. Your world is getting so small and just know you are loved and safe. You are home. The sea is your home.

I feel much better now.

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Some visions of home.

my bright lights.

zen shorts.

always reflecting back at me.

blessing the musical creation space with a dear old friend.

wondering and wandering and just enjoying the ride.

Really the best I have for this one is to say you had to be there.  I’ve seen a lot creatures in their natural habitat; wolves, coyotes, eagles, moose, big horn elk, pure white mountain goats trapped on rocky mountain ledges my by dog, tarantulas, unicorns, dragons, but nothing is like the Orca.  I can’t explain them.  But they opened some kind of portal for me, I got to step into a new place, one I had been waiting for, a waterworld of healing and sound and Freedom. These monster creatures slide through the waves and leap from water to air and back again so quickly that my fingers were cramping trying to capture in a moment their fluidity and grace, silliness and power.  Matriachs.  Hunters.  Show-offs.  Teachers.  The natives around these Islands call them the Sea Wolf, Guardian of the Cosmic Memory.  And I can see why, they hold tight to the secrets of the home we all return, and yet are generious with unlocking the joy, continuous and all prevailing.  Gifting those who ask with the presence of their medicine.

Grander than grand, HUGE, two resident pods let me watch them for at least an hour, I lost time, it vanished completely.  Babies and mamas and papas and an old, old grandmother, too.  Family.  Spyhopping! It was about family, community, taking care of and protecting.  They are about pure fun and adventure.  They are slick and sexy.  FASTER THAN FAST. HUGE. They are creativity and transformation.  Gatekeepers of Eternal Good Times. Did I mention they are HUGE? I felt like the child I am when I was with them.  I practice it now,  being the child I am.

{eating a cheese and avacado sandwhich WHILE holding binoculars to her eyes} MAMA?  They are magic.  Orcas are magic, like magic from the sea.  I love them, mama, they are perfect.

Ok, so I guess you can say having to short sale your house sucks.  I mean, a year an a half later I am packing again, weeding out, lifting, cleaning, saying goodbye and hello all in one breath.  As I look closely inside that seed of suckiness I recognize it’s worth in weight though, for what it really is.  It’s not that loved that house so much.  I didn’t.  It’s not that I even LOVED living completely rural, as a matter of fact, it was getting old, especially not doing it the way I always planned; off the grid and bio-dynamic.  Instead we were living in an ineffecient farmhouse and driving more often than a suburban communter.  I won’t gloss over the fact that it’s complete after-life state of gorgeousness out there, because I have never lived anywhere more beautiful or full of vibrating life.  The bottom of a bowl-like valley basically at sea level is powerfully profound living.  The apple orchard alone on my old property is a kalidescope of health and magic.  But the drive and the isolation were at times debilitating, depressing for me.

But what sucks?  The attachement to an idea, a system, a belief.

The first being attached to the cultural idea that parents of three children should not be losing houses and moving again.  I am attached to the idea that smart people don’t let this happen.  And that is BULLSHIT, and yet, I can’t help but link in so closely to that system, that system that makes you scared of risk, of floating, of not knowing, of not caring.   And then being attached to my sub-cultural system as well, that I am suppose to be living in the country, with nothing but the land, communing with nature, teaching my children the laws of Earth.  Tha my kids will thrive with tons of outdoor space and nothing to do but play with sticks and river rock.  But that is total bullshit, to.  Kids thrive when parents thrive.

And so really, I am attached to some dream that I thought I was trying to live but really it wasn’t even my dream.  Talk about being force to get really clear on what you want, or what you have or what you shouldn’t even try to get.  And that is what I am sitting with right now.  Letting dreams go.  Letting them fly away with the wind.  I don’t navigate my dreams, and if I do they kick me in the ass.  like anything else that permiates with creative life, they have to be released.  Instead, I think I better let them carry me.  I’m just here for the ride.

And then, in the end, we got a place that when I lay in my bed when the sun is about to go down and look to the left, this is what I see.

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The sea lulls me into deep sleep.  And of course, I have had to come face to face again with this fear.  And it’s good.  It reminds me to not get to attached to this stellar view and these fir floors and vintage pink and brown wallpaper.  Water, at any moment, can take it all down, washing us away down to the bones.

And so we are settling in.  Not close to moved or unpacked, but still enjoying the new place, the proximity to water and the ‘city’ and people everywhere.  We are eating mush for breakfast, taking walks out on the pier, pooping pink crayon filled poops (Mama. Pinkpoop.  Mama.  Poop.  Pinkpoop).  We are eat the Dungeoness crab and juicy and meaty plums gifted to us by new neighbors.  We picking our favorite cozy spots, writing spots, playing spots, garden spots.  We fall asleep listening to the swish of water and the caw of seabirds and the enterance of the Alaskan ferry. 

I can’t help but feel it, that in each moment, the blessings are abundant, sometimes they just come as monsters we presume to be scary.  But when I let my ideas go, I can begin to see the godly light in even the most frightful of eyes.