Monday, March 12, 2012

here in this now

on the edge of beginning to re-enter the world in a new way--an old way--a way from the somewhere in the sometime of once upon it.  i am here now.  i am here in this now looking at the universe beyond this window of words appearing as i type them--as i let them travel down my arms to my fingers poking at keys.  i have a keyboard again--a whole keyboard separated from a screen doing its thing there in that space and place where whatever comes into being comes.  i am here now.  i am here, clean butt in clean underwear on one of two chairs that still live here in this house.  i am leaving this house that is not a house.  i am leaving it.  when? under what circumstances? shall i wait for the authorities? just to see the eyes of my former friend as she looks pathetically in my direction? doing what she thinks she must? to make me, my ideas, my friends, my experience, my stuff, my willingness go away? i am here.  it is 4:49 a.m..  i am here and hoping for something...what is it? peace??? when one must leave, and one gets in one's car or on one's horse or even heads off into whatever landscape they imagine with their nap sack on their back--ohhhhhhhhhh--that's it.  i shall make myself a nap sack.  i shall head off into the sunset with a nap sack.  what are those made of??? sticks and handkerchiefs? a sandwich? what else??? here in this now, i am full of the fantasies of what will come when something does.  i am here in the moment of this unfolding now thinking about things that think themselves into being.  i am here, wording the way forward, where there is not one? where there is no thing but this thing in this life--this up early ness that manifests in words on a virtual screen that may never ever be printed on any single bit of former tree.  i am here.  i am writing.  i am here.  i am stringing the beads of words--one single letter at a time.  i am here with the san francisco cups for coffee and the expresso thing he gave me--lit by the glow of the big screen for this computer life he has invited me to live.  i am alive in connectivity.  i re-enter the space of work in the world.  i look at the burning tool that i've been using to etch my hearts into wood--smelling the stuff of burning--ever smelling the stuff of burning.  i am in the foundry.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, the found dry.  i am here in this place of what can become of this moment in this way of finding something--light and shadow? play? courage? water? wisdom? sunlight bouncing off the silver that made the waves of water on the big wall back when magick lived here.  strange, the magick.  seeing one's self in the seeing of one's self i find the scene of seen.  i hear the words of now.  i write them down.  they are only words, after all.  they are only the things that come out of the ends of the fingertips doing what they do to come out of the ends of the fingertips.  tipping the scales, i suppose.  words do that in their time.  they tip the scales of something--life? balance? balance over time? i am off to the hills that look like the hill i used to be entrusted with...forever shirking all that has been bestowed upon me, and never, it seems, knowing when to leave.  i stay too long in things.  i stay too long.  now, i am approaching the end of my stay, here, at the end of this space and place in time.  there is always the coming and going from things to things, spaces to spaces, places to places, story to story.  there is a public face and an unmasked place.  there is a world to word.  it shows up in the writing first--when i remember to show up.  here, it is, i am.  showing up, it seems.  5:am.  is there time for another dream???

Thursday, March 1, 2012

three sentences that are not sentences...

It was one of those perfect nights.  My soul had decided I would be in the room—not knowing, as I often don’t, where the room was exactly.  There is something perfect, for my spirit, about entering the flow of joy and following it as it moves me along.  There is something wholly alive about living the the moments of perfectly taken care of in that way.  I am here now.  I am here in the hearing of this clearing and I am writing.  My fingers are doing their magic.  I am asking for something—for the bump and groove of the sand to trip its way westward and for me to wake up in my above the ground way of knowing, this, too, will yield its spicy delight as some time in tune with weather.  What am I writing now? Just writing.  Writing in the written sound of sounding out the courage filling its fulfilled places—here and now am i.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, what wants to be written is so hungry now for the eyes of the page.  Blogging ever onward, a life lives itself out in rhyme.  Perhaps.  Time.  Perhaps.  Miles of courage order themselves one sweet letter at a time.  I am here now, in this hearing.  I am here now, in this clearing.  There is cleansing, still, and always, to do.  There is something in the somewhere of what has come and gone before the here and now of this moment.  I am here.  I am here.  I am here.  Here in the hearing heard of what is always and only life living itself out in fingers reaching for keys--------oh.  Tell me a truth I don’t already know? I am a sham ashamed of something? What? What.  This life lives its quiet desperation out of longing—whole enormities of longing—and inside that, there is just this one thing.  One thing whispers on one sound of one story in one mind of this beginning.  Beginning here.  I am here, beginning.  What is the here and now hour of this song? Psalming itself out of time? Out of quiet tribes of wilderness longing toward wholeness? What? Courage? Is this? in this night? Of rainy day? I am here.  I must put the laundry in.  I must find the quarters.  I must take the next right step on the wider path of what is possible in possibility.  Why does she say there is peace in me now? When I am most afraid? Of what ground will make itself? Soon, there must be palo alto dreams of where to set up my things.  Things. Things.  How to start clean of things?



We begin wherever we do down the long hallway of truth seeking.  Here in this hour of now, the world begins its turning over again—and I become all that I become in this wisdom.



Love loves me.  This is precious treasure.  I am still here and alive.  This is gratitude overwhelming me.



Life.

Does

Indeed.

Go on.

Friday, February 24, 2012

spinning missing vulture

somewhere to write the words--that think themselves out loud when in the activity of moving the fingers across the keyboard--its a kind of truth serum, i suspect.  its a kind of wording of words that order themselves when the opportunity is made--when the intention is set for them to come.  i am here now.  i am here in this hearing and clearing saying what there is to be said.  i didn't know--didn't realize the real lies i was living.  so many still to fall away.  i am learning to tell the uncomfortable truths.  i am learning not to hide or apologize or pretend or take back any of the things said in anger--as they are finally said when the anger gets to live itself out.  like fire.  fire.  can you imagine telling a little fire to stay little--when it knows it is supposed to grow up and be a forest fire? to clear the landscape? to re-fertilize the earth? can you imagine, if that little fire was turned into a plastic candle? with a fake light? how did all the light in the world get to be fake light? what is this thing caging electricity has done to us all? do you remember when we had to protect the fire? to carry it with us from place to place inside a glass hurricane, sure it would live between us all the day long as we brought our spirits to the room of our togetherness and let loose all that would come unglued? why is it we glue down the most precious bits of ourselves? keep them carefully tucked away? oh, yes--so the ones who can't see won't.  and the ones who can see and would steal what is beautiful and make it dirty, lonely, ugly, bad, wrong, won't get the chance.  we keep what is beautiful.  we keep it tucked in forests and hiding in caves and buried deep in the darkest earth.  we keep what is beautiful in storehouses of locked away.  we keep what is treasured in chests so heavily laden with armor and locks and keys that the keys have all lost their way to the locks that unlock the treasures so buried inside the coffins of unbreatheable that live all the way away from what is whole and good in a living life.  i am here, in my living life.  i am here in my fashioned living room.  i am here, looking at all i have been a party to creating--things on a shelf, stuff in a jar, storehouses of wine and possibility, courage, loss, lost.  i am here.  on the precipice of now.  having witnessed, in my way, the changing of the guard, the passing of an era, the letting go of that which has let go of this life.  i am choosing my hallways carefully now--as that is where all the living is--the hallways of coming and going from destination to destination, chair to chair, futon to futon, life to life.  art to life to work to life to train to life to corridor and hallway of happenstance connection to holding chamber of teeth and tongue--if i commit to a schedule of performances at open mics around the bay will i be famous in a year? will i be a hack? hackneyed or hockneyed or lockneed or lock jawed or lonely? will i be lonely? if i let myself be alone? whitney took the pills and drank the booze and let herself slip into oblivion.  it is such an interesting slip, is it not? i am interested in tongues and slipping and the accidental honesties they tell alongside lies.  i can not find my vulture.  our vulture is missing.  was safe in the freezer and now gone.  i have interrogated the interrogatable--the one mind spinning in the mind spinning place of the up up stairs.  i am ready for that mind to leave.  it must take its body with it.  i want my vulture back.  i eat the pomegranate seeds covered in dark chocolate from trader joe's.  i prepare for my many meetings that take place this day.  i begin at my beginning to begin again at reclaiming my life, my things, my space, my stories, my work.  mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.  mine.  it is a mine--this life.  i am still and always descended from miners working the coal in newcastle digging up the first dark stuff of the earth.  coal lead to diamonds and diamonds to oil--but there is salt in there, too, isn't there.  there is always salt in the wounds of the earth.  can you feel it? taste it? perhaps it is time, again, to pay a visit to the sea.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, where is this life taking me? a boat, i think--my queendom for a boat and a moat and a castle when i want it and a draw bridge i can draw--follow directions--every day i write my book.

and here it is today again.

Friday, February 10, 2012

working it out: the presence of absence

here we are in the middle of this space and place of possibility--working out the willingness to do and not do what can be done and not done in this undone of doable what? i am thinking of daniel goldstein's sculptures and the presence of absence he talks about and the surrounding halo of medicine bottles and lumped glass and string and the architectural element of the grate or gird or grid that allows all the places that hang down to hang down and i begin at this beginning to wonder what happens in the happening bits.  what is this space and place of wonder? what is this hour of now? what is this courage? courageous? what is this real of real realing its reel of time--wound up in strings--casting into the endlessness of rivers not yet crossed--what can come of this? thisness? what can come of this place and way of waves? what can come of this coming? and going? what can be here in the now of this container that contains what? precious heart. pumping heart. bloody heart. inhale and exhale of breath.  wider dream.  worldfilled thing of things that thing themselves into being things that attempt what is human? is human any attempt at being it? is human the animal of itself? is human the component parts of itself? is there more compassion in a human once a pig's heart has replaced the broken pump of the human one? is there love? in this space? of trying? working? moving? dreaming? thinking into the feeling of something? love? wonder? life? intimidating life? feeling life? real life? reeling life? what is this place of thisness? what is this journey? what is this safety? what is this place? what is this courage? what is this courageousness? what is this hour of now unfolding across minutes and seconds of time in the mystery of what can not be mysterious in the something of spoken light.  in the unspoken shadows, there is still a place to stock and store the dream.  in the spoken light, there is exposure, visibility, seeing things that can be seen.  is this the way of it, then? is this the here and now of it? is this the wilderness of what was wild? is this the thing? that things itself? onto? into? courage? i am here, now, where i have always been.  i am here.  in this here there is the wilderness and wondrousness of love.  it is all and only love.  but it doesn't always feel like it.  the presence of absence...the absence of presence...the willing forgetfulness of what was once whatever it was that was what it was when it was what it was.  here is the now of it.  hearing itself speak up for itself in its own space of what lives.  here.  what lives here lives.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, so that is it.  what lives here lives.

this, too, is alive.  still.  in the now of this hour.  in the space of this time.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

i wake up

i am looking, looking.  i am writing, righting.  i am reading, reading.  here in this now, i am awake.  it is thursday.  it is quiet.  there is nothing going on but the rent? songs, forever spinning in my head from all of their playing on the radios of the past.  i don't have them now.  does anyone? internet radio stations while i read.  spotify, telling my facebook friends what i'm listening to...old cds...just one wine box kind of half full of music i bought in my lifetime before this one.  i hae been so lucky to live so many lifetimes.  it is hard to tell all their stories--hard to notice all the places where the places are--and then, not so much.  it is not so very hard.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh--a lost thing that wrote itself as fluid as water, gone to the switching between e-mail addresses and letting the world go the way it does in the gone of it all.  the gone of it all.  i am here now--after all the beauty of that flow having flown away.  isn't that the thing about flight? there is always the air to escape into--to fly out of sight with.  this is the way of that post--to have gone where it has gone as gone.  and now, i am not there anymore.  i am here.  i am here in the loss of that thing.

so fast, it happens.

she is helping someone die for money.  a dying woman is paying her to be with her until she stops breathing.  she is paying her to make her laugh, to see to her comfort, to feed her ice chips, to start and stop the flow of visitors, to allow for rest, to be present with her presence while she is still present.  it is the work of every priestess--to attend life.  to attend to the life of the living while the living are alive--and then to clear away the death, as fast as it must find a new place to go.  death lives in the air? but dies in the ground? is this how it works? or the water?

i consider.  i hang the garment brought as offering to me outside on the hangar of the altared book.  this woman's spirit--where will it go when it exits the body container? the body container? the body temple? the holy body of extraordinary life that lives itself out in story and mindset and mythology and reads itself wise in books and tells itself out in story and dances its way into air and beauty to the beat of a holy song.  collaboration is like this.  collaboration.  singing, dancing, storytelling, talking, being together in the together of being, making a mess of what can be made a mess of...art making. 

life continues the continuance of continuing.  it goes on.  stuff flows from natural fibers to makers hands to ships to ports to trucks to stores to sales to homes to garbage bags to trucks to goodwill to dumps to landfill to natural fibers of whatever grows in plastic from plastic.  what are the plastic trees ever going to give fruit to???  oh, yes, plastic fruit.  i am almost away from the things that have never been alive as anything but oil in the deepest ground.  when you take her wetness from her, she creaks about--bones and such.  life.  life.  life.  life is the most extraordinary thing--all green and unfolding, blowing in the winds of rain and wind.  i consider the air that has not been moving much except for the open door.  i consider the ways of this floor. i consider the space of making--the art of things re-thinging themselves in movement.  i consider flow.

flow.

flowing endlessly on. 

a kind of movement in the motionless space of here and now in sedentary time.  i am here and now in sedentary time.  it is sweet. 

good morning.

Monday, January 23, 2012

first sip

life is facebook for me--more and more.  more and more it is looking online to relate to people who are not in my intimate, physical reality--because there is not one.  and then, there is.  there is the coffee.  it is hot.  it has to be made or warmed up.  it  steams.  it lives in the cup offered by a dear one--the big purple cup with the black cat on it that had a plant in it when she gave it to me, that lives, if it still lives, outside.  outside is life.  outside is the wind and the palm tree and the rain.  i have installed myself on the gifted futon and look outside--rather than braving it.  i have been in for three days? since friday? leaving just to welcome my friend, venture with her for trader joe's party supplies, and then out once more for the friend and her love that came to the selfish portrait door.  yesterday, i stayed sealed inside this space and the front door never opened--not even for guapo.  when i am here--sitting in the space, i can see what there is to see of it and in it.  i can look at this long room.  i can watch it expand and contract with the bodies that come and go through it.  i can feel the stuck places and the piles of excess.  i can be in the stagnant chi, the still water, the undead of what is gone.  i think about staying in the stuck--and then i know, when i stay long enough something can grow.  i can root in a different way.  i can branch and leaf.  i can burn the drawing into the wood with the tool that makes everything smell a sweet kinship with not yet fire.  i am not yet fire.  the immolation fantasies i have have not been earned.  i am not ready--the decay has not set in.  i am not dead or undead or zombie like or shutting down or jumping off or any of those other sweet fantasies of flying, transforming, truly changing form.  i am not a caterpillar.  this is not my cocoon.  this is my blue bathrobe--a gift from my best friend for 30 years--32 years??? who finally allowed the his and hers fantasy of an unforgettable trip to the past--maybe even the future--but not the here and now.  here and now, the gift of leather jacket lays casually across the top of gifted dresser above the painting--one of the first--bought and then gifted back from a supportive friend.  the painting is tjombe's--my first artist--my first plane parking gay man who wanted to be an artist who whispered to me over drinks one night in such a way that my soul could hear what his soul was saying and i hissed back at him with my forked tongue, quit your job and do it--and he did.  i am always hissing back to the dreamers--quit your job and do it--and sometimes, the happiest ones, the most miserable ones, the truest ones, the most real ones--they do.  and they live.  and their life becomes their life.  and they grow up to paint the portraits of demi moore's kids--or at least that's what happened to the first one--there--in los angeles--sending tulips to my wedding.  there.  he is a story i have earned.  but me??? i long toward the life i have actualized, given to me by so many people who believed me when i said this is what i wanted, and i iterate so slowly--ever so slowly toward the actualization of my dreams--and then i realize i'm doing it again.  i'm taking away the accomplishments of actually having changed my life from a life where i could not recognize myself as me to a life where i am only and totally myself.  i play at cutting myself open in some sort of literal way so i can know the experience--and the knife is not sharp enough, so i try to sharpen it--so i can know the meaning of the words i use in some kind of actual way--so the actualization can take the power out of the metaphor.  i am unsuccessful.  i don't want to work that hard.  i want, instead, to take to the sword of word--the words of swords--to type them out in single letters strung together without spaces and pauses and breath.  i want to get all of the words out of me.  i want to speak them all into silence--but to know they have passed through my body while i was here in the speaking place--while i was here, co-mingling with the water before the part that is me gets shoved down under the part that gets to enter the desirous mouth of the drinker.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, the desirous mouth of the drinker.  drinking is going away for me.  i will always be a good one--but i am choosing water, coffee, soft drinks, juice--concoctions still--but not as many cocktails.  they have had their way with me.  again. it is time to turn toward the awakenings that come from some other substance--like breath? maybe? sounds? maybe? i hear the train in the distance of the not too distant place.  i notice what i am noticing.  i begin to consider.  yesterday, i made the offer of bringing back the press--to publish an anthology on a topic dear to a new friend.  am i learning discernment yet? i consider. i consider.  here is the now of this moment.  crossroads.  spinning.  spiders in the container garden by the upstairs window.  i am here, now, hearing my fingers type.  i am here, now, hearing the water go on in another unit.  i am here, now, breathing. i can hear myself breathing.  i like the feeling of breathing again.  i like knowing the air is still willing to travel way down in there--way down to the place where breath goes when it gets to come all the way in to a body.  i have been so stingy with my invitation for the breath.  i have been so shallow--letting it come in, only so far.  what is it about the pleasure--the deep, real pleasure of breath, that i have been denying my body? my spirit? my frame? what are the colors of these words? the taste? the sound? the smell? the feeling???? are they tender yet? it is my first sip of the new moon morning and i am alive again.  and i want a real job.  and today, it will be breathing.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

waking up

it's gray, again, from the inside of the labyrinth.  there is different weather outside the maze.  i am here in the heart of it, though, and happy for the space of having been met--having co created some kind of space for self and others in the salon idea of last night.  we've taken a turn toward the art making.  each time someone comes i offer more of the bounty that has been bestowed here.  it gets to go home with people.  it is too much, maybe--the not clinging to the stuff of all the stuff that has been imparted.  it goes endlessly on in the flowing river of stuff traveling on toward stuff that lives in the cubbies and closets of spaces and places crammed full of stuff.  i still have so much.  i keep trying to give it all away.  i keep trying to let it all go.  what is it to let it all go? i wonder? stuff.  i got to cast a mask yesterday--and send home a book and give away some supplies that felt right for this one.  i gave away paints that had been given and shells and beads and medalions and pendants--that's the thing about working in recycled materials--there is always an abundance of other people's excess given--because YOU might do something with it--might share it--might make it possible for other people to use this thing that wanted to be possessed--to be lived with--to be held on the shelf for decades--still wrapped in its plastic wrapper indicating its newness.  new.  new.  what is the coveted state of new? what is the pristine, unused state of still fresh from the factory--still sealed in the plastic--still preserved under glass? what is this constant state of coffin that everything seems presented in? what of the unruly future--thrown into garbage bags and left by the side of the road in the rain for the goodwill trucks, just like the garbage ones, to come along and collect what can be collected for the sorting and storage of others.  i live down the street from a great good will hub.  i am wearing the first shoes of my PhD journey that have been offered as gift--that i didn't buy from the good will.  good will.  good will.  what is that exactly? i live catecorner from the white elephant sale--and every year, the good women of the oakland museum board, have their best used stuff shlepped to this part of oakland they might not otherwise go to, and invite all their friends, and offer their things to the bargain buying others to raise money for the museum.  this is a beautiful oakland tradition.  a grand expression of excess and opulence going toward a good cause.  we've just passed the good cause season.  i'm still stepping over homeless people in the rain on the street when i come up from under the ground at civic center in san francisco.  i walk to my groovy school--past the new construction for yet another magnificent building--past the tourist busses filling and emptying and filling and emptying each week with a new group of lookeyloos making it to the mecca of san francisco.  it is mecca for some people--some people kicked out of their well meaning, holy homes with no where to go but the castro--from wherever they happened to be born.  we used to work with these kids--no--play with these kids--homeless kids who gathered at the lgbt center to free their minds.  and we'd show up with plaster and gauze and bandage them up and birth their new faces and watch them paint rainbows over what hardened--and then they'd head back toward their nights of offering head on the streets of san francisco for whatever comfort exchange that might offer the nobody's child sleeping on the grounds of city hall.  we didn't do it every day.  we asked to be paid for showing up.  we took the money they spent with us and put it in a bank and split it in half when we split up the partnership of what was never going to be able to make money if what we were selling was ourselves.  i am working it out in words.  i don't know where i keep making the same mistakes.  i can't make sense of the world.  i can show up, do what i say i will, open space, hold it open for others, offer my gifts and talents, take what's offered in exchange, and know it is all with the leftover excess that any good thing happens.  the leftover excess.  the icing.  my life is all icing.  i wish, for the sake of realizing the metaphor, that i could walk to the fridge right now, dip my finger in the depth of chocolate sugar, and suck the goopy pile of it into my mouth that knows exactly how that tastes.  so much is confounded, conflated and coordinated to come back to life in taste.  childhood tastes--in dreams, in coloring things, in possibilities unfolding into this here and now in time.  here and now, in time, i am waking up on a gifted futon, typing words on a gifted laptop, drinking chocolate and coffee concoction from a gifted cup.  i am gifted.  is there a class for how to give away the gifts???? ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, piles of excess still line the walls of everwhere i manage to find myself.  supplies are plentiful.  life begins? or ends? when waking up from dreams.....

Saturday, January 21, 2012

here, today, in this now: wind, rain, and walking reflections

rain on the skylight.  nothing dripping in.  wind, blowing the stars around--but it is not a hot summer night on the hood of a car laying out, looking up, getting a moon tan--it is 10:39 am on a saturday--a selfish portrait saturday--with art to be moved around and wind blowing the palm leaves and the studio window full, full, full of cold and blowing bits.  it is cold and blowing--huffing--puffing january wind.  and i am here, inside, watching it--under covers--with the glow of the skylight--the grey white skylight filtered rainy day light dripping its windy drops splattering on something overhead.  i am here.  i am inside.  yesterday i was outside.  walking in new shoes.  gifted for the shoe project from my friend, virdell vonstrologist.  i wore them sockless--these kind of platform mary jane's that seem like a defiant impossibility--how will i wear them down?  the kenneth cole conservative oxblood brown heels from the good will, one plastic heel much shorter from than the other, such that i walked like one leg was longer than the other, until i began to feel it in my spine--these met their death in the round bin beside the grand grandmother of a what kind of tree is it when the bark curls and falls off in long sheets of hair? i have helped them cross over.  it is all what it is now.  yesterday i walked the first blisters into arising from the new shoes--pain, always a part of transition--and i loved the wet walk from one friend to the next in the rich discovery of the hills and concrete steps of the san francisco experience.  i am encountering the city.  i am moving through it from place to place.  i am arriving.  i am departing.  i am learning how to disembark.  i am learning how to let go of things, people, practices.  life is interesting--as it travels in the new shoes.  new hair is growing from my same old head--but that head, the shape of that head, the skull of that head, the eyes in the skull of that head--these are seeing the same things differently.  differently seeing same seeking what? exactly? the differently seeing same.  i suppose.  differently abled seeing.  i have been gone a long time--on a long, strange, totally real trip of tripping in and out of wow.....

we cut up the tree.  we hack off the branches and talked about what needs talking about between us and he bundles what has been cut off after i place the shaft of unbranched tree in the bathroom, next to the bat of maureen--next to the space of time and place and life and love and wonder. we walk the excess to the trash cans.  we put tree parts in the garbage.  we put boxes in the recyling.  we continue.  i carry a broom with me to sweep.  it feels good in my hands.  i sweep down the staircase--it is the first time in may, june, july, august, september, october, november, december, january, february, march, april, may, june, july, august, september, october, november, december, january that i have done it.  i did other things.  what were they? organized spaces.  manipulated objects.  changed the shape of things in the air.  provided the weather in predictable intervals.  every three weeks i am an extraordinary bitch in a way i have never been so free to be in my whole life.  menopause.  i am not having a very easy time of it--nor is anyone who lives with me in these menstrual months of madness. 

i scooped up the excess--the needles and the cat hair and the dirt worn into the grooves of the cement floors of this place.  i put them in the box.  i threw everything away. 

in the outside world the sun is shining, the rain is drying from the sidewalks heating up the asphalt under the pounding sounds of wet.  now, the skylight is lit with half shadow--but no more sounds of wetness are coming down from the ceiling.  no crazy, wild, oya wind is blowing the palm tree branches.  what is done, is done.  the hatchet has been buried in the stump of what is no longer tree, metaphorically at least.  i am here now.  now, i return to the words that type themselves out of my fingers.  i put them down--these strings of symbols glistening in the eyes of an unknowable reader.

the writer, it seems, at best, can only know herself.  and then, only through writing.  the writing makes the written visible and then can be encountered as exhale--as out of the body.  the reader is forever drinking in.  what sprit are they drinking? wines and spirits.  can you taste the choices of hemmingway? i never read anything he wrote all the way through.  i can't drink his drink of man and war and blood and endlessness.  what drink was that, exactly? what was jong drinking? i can drink her in all the way through.  and i can drink in anzaldua and ee cummings and for the time being and whatis her name, anyway? the bookshelves are always the telling places.  i love bookshelves, of course.  my library dwindling, dwindling as i give my books away.  what happens to fiction when writers stop drinking? when they trend toward bottled water declaring its purity.  what is this reeses peanut butter cup eating woman ever going to say that isn't full of refined sugar and its after effects?

i am here.  typing strings of symbols.  sounding like sounds that get tapped into endlessness.  a keyboard is important to me.  i need something to press myself up against--even if it is one keystroke at a time, it is still touch.  there is touching going on. i am touching something.  my fingerprints are leaving themselves on the hardened oil beneath them.  one fingerprint of endlessness poking down on whatever letter the letter is.  ohhhhhhhhhhhh, to receive real letters.  today, perhaps, i shall try and write some. 

i love what i miss most of all.  the missing pieces are where all the longing lives.  it is something to ache toward what is remembered as whole and real and funny. i construct such thick pieces of plexiglass to separate my before and afters.  how does it work? to break down walls in such a way that something and someone can still get through....

where are you that makes me laugh???? like laughing???? not like cosmetics?  oh, sweet laugh lines, do your precious thing.  there are worry lines from scrunching scorn and swallowing pride.  i never liked to swallow, but spitting out i liked even less.  where does the excess go to when it is no longer planted in holy ground?

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

postponing the inevitable

the living thing that's going on in the space i inhabit right now is what? words.  words are my only living thing.  words and strings of words and dream catchers made on long walks picking up bits of discared by the side of the road making webs of endless connections connecting to things, ideas, dreams, courage, willingness, freedom, forgiveness, stories.  or not.  the famous or not clause at the end of every foot.  sharp.  claws.  clawing. things clinging to what falls out of the sky and onto the ground as feather.  claws are harder to get.  one must actually pick up the dead animal--take responsibility for its remains--and play surgeon on its parts to part them from it.  i don't do this work.  i had a collaborator who did this part of the disection when i felt the need to bring him dead things i found in trees and other places.  i still find dead things--i just don't always know what to do with them now.  i always knew what to do with them when i was in collaboration with the river of life.  the river of life knows what to do with life.  knows how to flow with life.  knows how to stand still and allow mosquitoes to grow when that's the crop that's needed to do the bloodsucking transformation required to change life, raise bumps, extract things from things that need to change.  i need to change.  still.  often.  i need more change.  i need to have change changing all the time.  i need to change back to who i used to be just enough to be who i have become in another way.  ways are always waving from their places of diverging paths.  paths diverge in the woods and someone has to take the one less travelled by and someone has to forge a new one, with a machete sometimes, cutting at tall grasses that make for extraordinary roofs over new houses built of mud and luck and decorated with dreams.  i need something--but it is not a thing.  a practice of content.  a practice of contentment.  a practice of showing up, sitting down, watching things, breathing, being in the quiet of the still here long enough to summon up the courage to change.  to change.  to transform.  to be something wholly other than the caterpillar self of before.  cocooning room--that's what this space under the stairs seems to be.  and i wake up and write in it.  and i go to sleep and write in it.  and i drink things and cook things and laugh and make up stories and be fine in the finding of what is here now, in this hearing of tapping on keyboards and sound.  there are great sounds of water in this space. i can hear all of the flowing going on above me.  here, there is ground.  groundedness.  molten floor in the foundry of here transformed into the artist's lofts of now.  i put color on the white boards.  i put color and covered the white--the clean white--with the red and the pink it turned in the thick paste of glittered promise.  i am making little things now--little carvings of small frames of what can be drawn inside the smallish space of contained space that used to be orange.  i am here in this hearing.  i am clear in this clearing.  i am where i live.  i live here.  i am alive here.  i have plants and things and books and clothes and one pair of shoes at a time.  one pair of perfectly chosen collaborators on the walking journey of this moment.  when there is no telephone, i write.  when there is no best friend who likes to talk on the phone every day, i write.  when there is no collaboration game, i play with art supplies.  i play.  all i wanna do is dance.  no, that's not it.  girls just wanna have fun? no, that's not it.  what are all the songs about playing? isn't play an okay way to get through the day anymore? play.  what feels like play.  ohhhhh, plays! yes! and it was so much joy helping the kids walk to their space of organizing sets and standing up flats and cramming things that need organizing in a space that needs containers--there's that word again: need.  need.  need.  what about needs and hoarding and things and having and life and unfolding? what happens when a leaf wants to arrive? what happens in the stem of something? when a leaf wants to unfurl? ferns are my favorite things to think about unspiraling.  unspiraling.  hmmmmmmmmm--okay.  i found it.  what is it to straighten out the spiral? to make it back into a line? perhaps this is the quest and question for this day.  i shall endeavor to unspiral the line.  hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

Monday, January 16, 2012

"celebrating" martin's birthday: the day after hangover

it's not like getting wasted--and then the body has to recover, drink water, be still.  it's like being in a really good dream--and not, no matter how you try, being able to re-enter that state.  i'm awake now, after the weekend whirlwind with the kids.  it was a gift being a supported mother--looked after, groceries provided, car paid for, all i had to do was be nice to the nice people and get through it.  i couldn't do it anymore, though.  i couldn't be nice.  i couldn't smile and pretend.  i couldn't just let it be.  i couldn't stop feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeling all i was finally feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeling for all the ways i was beginning to let myself feel.  today, i feel each of the steps we took.  i feel the wearing down of the shoes story.  i feel the drying up of the cold sore story.  i feel the hackles unhackling that rose up when that woman on the bart train told my daughter to put her feet off the seat in the tight lines of her wrinkled mouth--and then, again, when she told the young man eating funyons not to eat on the train--pointed out the signage--rose in defiant exaltation and strode confidently to the tattletale phone at the back of the car and pronounced the "african american" was eating on the train and she wanted to call the bart police.  now, i always get riled when i see people exercise white privilege in such a bitchy, cruel, stupidly entitled way.  and i get further riled when the creepy person is riding in the same car as i am, taking her well intentioned bullshit out on others in ways she feels totally "right" with doing by the signage littering each car.  she called my daughter and i idiots for helping her remember that it was martin's actual birthday yesterday--and today is just the day we celebrate it as a nation--calling attention to the holiday so many songs were written to co-create.  leaders were assassinated for speaking truth to power--even when they were the power.  something ugly motivates human beings to hide behind the rules--something about cleanliness and purity--something about entitlement--something about some kind of bullshit that rises up inside a person and causes them to get animated all the way to the tattletale phone.  this woman was in her sixties, maybe.  she had lines dug into her face from pursing her lips.  from following the rules.  from slamming otherwise unknown others by telling them to follow the same rules that make her so entitled and unhappy and gross.  gross. i attempted to engage with her using compassion but it turned to curses by the time i got off the train.  zoey, safe to engage after i opened the door for her to, was, in fact, the most eloquent stateswoman i have had the opportunity to witness in quite some time.  the woman was successful in bringing the young man to justice and humiliation and the bart police were summoned and we stayed with the young man while he called his mother to tell her he was being arrested for eating funyons on the train and i implored the police officers to recognize the woman is the one with the issues and the young man was simply being a young man.  i wrote my e-mail testimony late last night.  i thought the shit would shift itself over the dreams of night and the day of time--but i am still here, still processing the energy that encounter visited upon my daughter on the birthday of martin luther king.  it is something to get to sit down on the bus when one is tired.  it is something else to get to sit in the presence of an embittered, angry old consciousness expressing itself as white woman acting out her inculturated fears and resentments on my child and this young man at the back.  because i am a mother of african american men, i am particularly interested in how this "rules" bullshit is inflicted on men of color.  zoey talked with me about all the ways things are fucked up.  i taught her to curse around me early--so she knew she could.  it's the most vulgar of the languages--and the most accurate--and the most precise in its ability to express what is otherwise incomprehensible.  perhaps one of the things i am hating in my academic pursuits of late is the hiding of bullshit in big words no one understands.  no one--maybe one--maybe one percent of the entire legal and illegal populus in america holds one of these special degrees that hide bullshit in some kind of power over vocabulary.  this woman--i wish her all the things she wishes for.  i wish them to happen instantly and overwhelmingly such that she can find the satisfaction that can exist among her life with cats (she doesn't have children she remarks, she exclaims she has cats!)!!!  i wish her all the wonderful her life can handle--such that she can let a young man eat a funyon without having to tell the train conductor.  i am hoping to be able to appear at his hearing, should the matter get that far. i am engaging in my civic responsibility.  standing up to interrupt potential gang fights on the bart train a few months back--and imploring the officer called to understand these were just kids being kids.  standing up to defend the right to put your feet up when you want to and to eat a funyon when you've got one.  and yes, i see the signs.  and yes, i like clean public spaces.  and yes, i think kids should get to be kids.

i don't know what to do with all this energy i have about people who make rules and write them down and defend the industry of plastic placques--text--calling out "thou shall not"s in such a way that entitled embitterment can still prance the dance of the tattle tale and kids can be intimidated into following the stupid things. 

anarcy? is this my avocation? i am not a very interesting anarchist...but i do think this rule making, rule following bullshit is immoral. ohhhhh, but if i am not a very interesting anarchist, i am an even more less interesting moralist.

and still, and so, and on and on it goes...

Sunday, January 15, 2012

here and now with them

they're here.  they are each taking their showers and getting ready for their day.  we will go to lafayette in the immediate future and he will go to BAM practice and she and i will go to the library.  she'll do her homework.  i'll read my book for school.  so funny--the life i gave up to live the life i've lived--and the return to this kind of joy--this kind of rich and beautiful joy of simply being with them.  we eat junk food when we're together.  we sit in one place and be within the orbits of each other.  my nervous system is balanced by their presence.  every thing seems right with the world.  but.... and.... life is but a dream.  i notice.  the dream of them when we're together--and the joys we share--and the laughter and the stories.  i miss watching them come alive in their simplicity--their unfolding--like watching the roses bud and grow off the patio that has been foreclosed upon.  like the ants and the mites--like the life that feeds upon the life.  we lit a candle and burned it all the way out last night.  we watched the whole life of the flames rise up and dance as we let ourselves fall deeper into dreams.  we found our time and our timing.  we took our long walk across the length of the island.  the width is easily done.  what is it i have been doing? trying to do? proving? trying to prove? that can not be done by attending to these creatures? they are each such beautiful examples of putting themselves together.  yesterday, my boy child, freshly quaffed head, went back to the barber that took his hair and let him shave the excess with a straight razor.  i watched as the tatooed man took care to lather the face of my child, and pull the sharp edge of the knife up, against the grain of his growing hair, and carve an exquisite line.  it is something--to watch and love this moment.  i couldn't at first.  at first i could just walk the forgotten hallway.  next to the out of place barber shop--all graffittied and tatooed--hidden in the bowls of a walnut creek shopping center off the main of main streets, was a wig shop full of post masectomy pleasures.  i considered my no longer bald head.  i considered the millimeters turning into centimeters growing like a thick black mold (though not slimy in any way) (but no longer spiky either).  this mold is growing out of my head.  this length of dead skin cells doing their growing thing.  i can still rub up against the edges of the hardest parts to cut--but i can feel the softness settling in.  i can feel the smooth wanting to smooth everything out.  my lipstick, still red, is starting to bleed out of the tight container of the line of my lips.  i am more and more and more and more scary clown looking each day.  it is fine, i say to myself--because when i am with my children--and they seem to agree to be with me more--everything feels right in this world.  i am mother identified.  i identify as mother.  being a mother to my own children--this is the thing i feel best and worst doing.  i feel, always, that i exist, as a mother, to give them something interesting to say in therapy.  i feel, always, that i exist, as their mother, to witness their unfoldment, to offer them shelter, to continue to be a presence they can consult or rub up against or fight at will.  it is important to have something to fight against, i suppose--to prove right or wrong--to endeavor to learn.  i consider these things.  i consider the ways these things fold and unfold.  i consider these taking outs and putting aways.  i consider these children--most precious.  and all the things i have done by myself of my own accord to limit my availability to them.  it is strange, coming to this moment here in my now.  it is strange and wonderful and tender and real and precious and encouraging and full of angst.  we will be ready to go soon.  we will go out into our day and the time between us will elapse and then i will return to this space we have made so alive with our aliveness and i will want to move everything around.  i will want to change the nature of the energy that will linger here as a hauntingly good time.  i will want to change it--so i can be in the now that is then without missing the now that is now.

Friday, January 13, 2012

growing hair

i have practiced pithy things to say while i'm growing my hair.  i am obsessed with growing my hair? it is something i have not noticed--not ever having been obsessed with my hair--having it always grow, thick, beautiful, long eventually--even after i cut it severely when i am ready or not ready for the next adventure.  hair.  hair.  dead strands of cells.  i have a lot of dead hair around.  i have the hair zoey cut from my head in the pat allen class all those years ago now.  it is all those years ago, now.  now, it is all those years ago.  it is not fresh from my head.  it is in the black hut conglobmeration--yes--new word--yes--slip of the fingers--yes--it is some kind of power i let her cut from my head.  and then upstairs, in the buddha's arms is the rest of my power.  my power is resting.  my resting is power.  how does this thisness do its thingness in the art and miracle of here and now? i am never sure.  i am here.  i am tucked under covers in with my back to the window that lets the cold in.  i have put the black hut nest across from me--finally installing what i was too afraid to install when this was the poet tree house.  too polite.  to still trying to be sane.  too concerned about what others thought or think that do not think about me, really.  and now i can see it.  i can look at the water on the table.  i can hear the seeds sucked out--pits--no, not partners in training from the ruin of a different enterprise--but pits--sucked from olives? maybe? will they sprout into tree? and i have avacado number two--its promising sprig of life--growing toward the mirror of something.  i am here in the basement again.  it is not a basement in california--because they don't have basements in california.  in california, it seems, there is no more room under the ground.  the buried indians are taking up all that space.  space to conquer with colonial intent.  space to gentrify with whitenss.  space to take across landscapes of gone in the here and now of what can not be forgotten--i type here.  in this place.  i put these letters down one fingerstroke at a time.  what was he telling me about fingertips? i forgot to write it down. 

content.

he gave me content i was content with. 

now, my bird is gone.

i wear the bell around my own neck now--no one to call down from the upstairs when i am here behind the desk attending to the no one of the on-lookers that do not look at what i think is brilliant as brilliant any more.

i cut my hair after every love affair.

is that true?

queer.

what is that exactly?

an interesting life--that is the life i have now, i suppose.  an interesting life.  an interesting life.  an interesting meandering of circular mind and what kind of soul? unfolding soul? origami configurations of birds made of folded paper--ohhhh, peace cranes, maybe? maybe peace? in making cranes? in ribboning the blues of the past in the ballons of the present. 

why must i be pleasant?

i am not so good at being pleasant?

pretending has gone the way of something else.

i am here now.  sitting with my back to the window in the smoking corner of this room i could have--i should have--given.  i lay here now in some strange attempt to find the part of me that wants to smoke.

i am a drinker, though. of any substance.  not any.  i am always so bold and brash in my announcements.  i am a drinker of any liquid--water, tea, coffee, 7-up, bad wine (cheap), and when someone brings it to me or offers it to me or buys it for me, as an offering, as a way in to my secret lair, then tequila, vodka, rum that tastes like sun tan lotion.

i am here in this now.  i am surrounded by options.  i am not drinking any of them.  i am becoming more tightly wound around my need to manipulate objects instead of people--art supplies instead of young minds.

where is the how of this unfolding now? what begins it? what becomes of it? who decides how anything should be folded? or where away is when it is time to put it....

i am growing hair now.  hair is now growing.  the feel of rubbing against the grain has become less satisfactory than it first was when the bristles were still sharp enough to rub back.  now even the hair wants to lay down.  the fighting has become less fun. 

what is the right balance of life? how much is too much? how much is not enough?

i went in search of an endless pursuit of enough and i keep finding too little or too much. 

new piles of excess have been gifted to this space.  i have accepted them with less grace than i could have expressed--and now, bubbling over is still bubbling up. 

i am here now. 

with cold sores sore-ing and fingers tapping and words wording and periods perioding and things making themselves up as possible inside possibilities that keep expanding on the way to endlessness.  something is pinging--a connection i've left open.  i leave this now to go there.

goodbye.

Friday, January 6, 2012

new stuff

new stuff stuffing its way into becoming who it must be as it emerges under blankets of not snow.  there is something under the f.  there is something keeping the f from pronouncing itself in the space of sentences.  there is something. there is something.  what is that something? here in this now of time i am under blankets preparing to revisit the paper storm of the last century--okay--last year--and i am not yet ready in my readiness to find what i have found.  what? i am writing to write.  i am waking up to put my fingers to the keyboard and move them up and down and around and to the side just like i was taught in perhaps the most useful class i ever took--typing--in high school--at shawnee mission northwest--there, off the mall of places to sit on concrete benches in the new looking early eighties architecture of the place that i lived.  why is that back in my consciousness? the need to drive away from it--to leave it--to let it go where it has gone by way of over.  i am here now.  i am here under the blanket of this white gift and i am bald--peering over the laptop with my blue eyes and round head.  i have a very round head.  who knew? and now, because i can, i am considering making breakfast and eating drippy yokes and sopping them up with white bread toasted to a kind of crispness that leaves lots of lovely crumbs.  lovely crumbs.  i am considering this life of mine--already up, already painting--already re-arranging old works to tell new stories--already feeling alive in the feeling aliveness of this time out of mind.  time out of mind.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, how i love time out of mind.

and in the here of this now, i am doing something--what? writing words, so that i can cast the shadow of black marks on the white page.  virtual.  white.  i am starting again, bald and white.  gifts from the roommate--of white clothes for the journey of white stories in this white year.  white.  i am covering planks of board with white gesso.  i am carving women and trees into the thick icing of the stuff.  i am layering it on with a kitchen spatula? is that what that thing is called? the thing that spreads icing on cakes? i am using that. 

i realize in this moment that laying out art materials is my very favorite thing to do.  it is my feast and banquet table.  that no one can eat them is of no consequence.  they are the things that keep my hands busy and nourish my soul.  someone else will always attend to the food for the body--and in the circles i travel, they will attend to this food mindfully, intentionally, organically, vegetarianally.  i am not any of those things about reeses peanut butter cups and cheap wine.  but it takes all kinds of us, i suppose, to make a world.

i am here now.  hearing the something of a hairdryer for the people i live with who still have hair.  i am out of the band now.  we thought, for a moment, we'd form a hair band. 

but now, i'm out.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

i n s p i r a t i o n

paintings, two--found orange boards--little--started on the edge of the dresser sticking out in the vestibule of possibility i've made for myself--for my supplies--for the supplies entrusted to me by my teachers.  i am here now.  here in this space of possibility, having watered the plants and showered already--shedding the white long underwear i bought for the year of wearing white.  this is a return to 2009--where i almost shaved my head before--though i paid someone else to do it--and i walked across the bridge with my collaborator who became all kinds of things--best friend, teacher, divine love.  divine love.  what is it, but divine love? the kind that lives in friendship? i am here on the other side of that hair growing stretch--a full two years later? no? three? 2009, 2010, 2011.  yes.  three. and i have balded myself on purpose.  the hair--that hair--now in the arms of the buddha in a kind of installation for selfish portraits at the jinglefruit studios experience.  are you experienced? that was jimi hendrix, i think.  and here, and now, and in this moment, and in this time, and in this place, i am preparing to make my actual, beyond the family of the courtyard, baldness debut.  i will go to work later today.  it's still an isolation--it's school--i work where i go to school--but i will see people who are not my family--not my courtyard--some of the "not my but still my" beloved community members and i will or will not be asked about the drastic nature of my change in state.  this is my neurosis, not my inspiration. i started wanting to write about inspiration--and not really having it, but giving itself its place to show up--by showing up.  i am showing up here in this virtual page--typing out the story that comes to the moment--in the moments of its coming.  is it automatic writing? perhaps? i will look and spin with this in a bit.  last night? yesterday? i found the wikipedia entry on not a lot of work done on inspiration--and then my brilliant friend sent me links to books he'd found and said maybe they weren't right--and so i consider.  i blink hard with the wave of pain that just arrives and leaves my left temple. i think i shall begin drinking water--and lots of it.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  this becomes one of those entries about the not really about anything.  about the wasting of a reader's time? really? wasting? i wonder.  i wonder about the crap i've read this morning--even accidently--even after shielding my life from television and other distractions.  even after taking the rhythms of "normal" out of my life.  i can still be caught, through this device--this microsoft enabled pc--this gift.  i can be caught in the whirlwind of news stories i didn't google for--and i can see the pain showing through the pain filled life there is out there in iowa caucus land and knowing who the candidates are and mt. ranier shootings by ptsd soldiers, so young, returning back to this strange base where lots of people kill themselves and others.  war.  what is it good for? absolutely nothing, say it again. war. what is it good for? i heard holly near yesterday--spotify--some new music tracking device built into the algorithm of the brain of the exposed nervous system of the grand experiment called facebook.  i am listening to it--and things on it--and hearing what gets heard as i remember i might want to listen to artists i've loved but not really listened to.  until spending time in the black hut, i didn't really have a role for music??? is this true? beyond the country music of my youth and the radio of that time back there--i am not a concert going, record buying, music listening kind of vibe worker--but yesterday i did listen.  and i really listened.  and i heard the sanctimonious tones of holly near--and loved her anyway--for the words--for the story--for the sound of the sentiment rolling a little sentimentally out of the purpose for her incarnation--which was, of course, to sing.  to come out. to love a woman.  and to sing.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh--i am putting the periods in all the wrong places.  i am not letting that make me any crazier than i am in this moment.  i am here now.  i am looking at the glow around my bald head that casts both shadow and aura onto the white wall behind me.  i think about the word "sanctimonious" and wonder if it is a mean one.  i will look it up.  wikipedia.  i think about the other kinds of meditation there are--the ones where this mind chatter does not get immediately expressed in the pressing of the "publish post" button.  but then i let that go.  this is my mind.  this is my chatter.  this, again, is my way of showing up for inspiration.  inspiration.  i think about the space i put between each letter--each symbol--strung together to form the one big world of the word.  i n s p i r a t i o n.  i think about this life and light between the cracks.  ithink about this space between the parts that make the word.  it is the empty center of the circle that contains the mystery of the all who collaborate to co-create it.  circle.  wholeness.  totality.  inclusion.  room.  enso.  beginning and ending--never every one made the same--and that circle living, totally alive, as a spiral--as a thing that ravels forward and back, up and down, travels i meant to punch in--but ravels--unravels--ravelling--these words are interesting bits of magical ability.  twining in and out of time, i find the web, the reasons for it, the string of words every being pulled from my own ass.  this has already been done--scroll.  this kind of pulling out of the body in a room full of witnesses--the art of what can be written down, rolled up and stuck inside for decades.  i suppose, for these remaining days that continue to order themselves over time, that the long thread of loneliness will continue to letter itself as space taken up on a page.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, there are so many words in my meditation.
there are so many words in my i n s p i r a t i o n.
a silent mine of minds....
hmmmmmmmm.
i shall contemplate this.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

okay--two, no three cheese sandwiches and 3:03 pm on 1/3

i finally found it.  i didn't wake up with it like i did yesterday--and there was no real call for it--my coming into inspirational being--so i just continued on looking through all the video interviews with all the women chronicling their time in history at the women's building. otis.  my friend is going to go to otis--because our fates, it seems, are no longer intertwined at this particular juncture.  i am here now, writing.  i tripped into wikipedia--which is my favorite way of finding words about words written to illuminate with ideas those things that have been written about and refered to by others throughout this long journey through time.  ohhhhh, the long journey through time.  and i found this phrase at the bottom of the wiki article on inspiration that says it is not really studied in psychology or anywhere else and i wondered why? why is it so easily attributed to two thousand year old divinity--this idea of inspiration that caused each precious word to be put down in some biblical, qu'ranic, or otherwise sacred order, such that what was included was included. how did runes get to become the ruin of the world? or shells? or beads? or bits of string theory that cast the ordered pattern of some universe to unfold as dna in a hymn of hers sung from the mouts of unuttered something.  i have a bald head staring back at me now.  i am as bulbous as it is.  round and doughy with no hair to hide under or masquerade as not.  i am free of what has been grown since 2009 when i did this last time.  it takes two years, then, to grow a luciousness.  2014? my youngest child will be 15.  hmmmmmmmmmmmm.  life and time and what lays before me as possibility and probability re-factored in the unending book of unwritten mess of unstilled heart--distilled? unstilled? beating, still, here on this bed under these covers under this fabric left behind, i find mysel here.  here.  still here.  i am still here.  i am hearing that click of fingertips on keyboard and clicking to make the fffffffffs stick less in the spaces of this inbetween of some kind of unfolding thing that thinks itself here out loud.  thoughts made visible in more than pithy bubbles.  what is this vibration? it took 'til 3:03 on the third day of this new year to find the rhythm in these keys keying themselves into song.  song.  psalm.  i am here, without solomon, not singing my psalms or songs.  where is the holy book? i have a bed framed with all the masterpieces of my pieces of mastered and piles, too, for the words that i didn't read in the brain that can not hold all the gluten free things there are now--floating about on a rhythm of unread, untasted, unbetrothed.  free.  free.  gluten free.  glue free.  hot glue gun given away to a could be art maker entrusted to me by her goddess mother as someone who might make things--life--space--possibility--kindness in the wider world of a whirling world swirling itself along.  what does one want to learn from learning? what kind of schools do fish swim in? what kind of flights do birds fly? what kind of quiet is possible within the sound of these fingers finding themselves pushing patterns onto no page.  patterns onto no play.  here, in the hearing of this moment filled with now--a resounding what whats itself off the patterns of not played.  there is so much, still, to give away.  away, there is giving.  and this is all i know.  here, in this here of having heard myself.

here, i stay in the darkness all day, under the warm covers, shielding my head from the sky.  i am growing hair this year. 

this year, i am growing hair.

now, i have something to do.

this seems like a kind of good fun.

i rub my stubble in the yummy directions of spirals.

it is the first time i remember, ever, massaging my head.

i'm dizzy some these days--and my sight is blurry--and last night i had a fierce kind of pain in my head on the left side.  i don't remember ever having headaches before this now.

i imagine all kinds of possibilities for these symptoms of no inspiration to write until 3:03 on the third day of january.

but now, it is 3:18 and i have completed all the confessions and stories that spin themselves for this missive.  fifteen minutes--that was a good run of inspired, i suppose.

Monday, January 2, 2012

rachel rosenthal is famous for her bald head

i managed it.  i met my childhood friend at the BART and walked the uncomfortable walk from there to where i live and managed the interactions of being out in public under wraps with my shaved head.  and then my table of friends, who are also neighbors, came out to our courtyard and witnessed and offered clippers and showed me what spots i missed and we all just relaxed into the new year togetherwith everything strange finding some level of normal.  and it was good.  and we were good.  and i was good. and the new new year began in this way.

and then this morning, as a kind of reward for living authentically, and doing what i needed to do, and being in the now of this moment, i found the otis series on the feminist art movement and art made at the women's building and watched the incredible rachel rosenthal otis interview and thought, "oh, that's it.  it's shero worship." and now i can add to the list that is forming, yet another reason i have shaved my head.

i'm making the list out of fear? out of wanting to practice an answer? out of a need to prepare myself for encounters before they arise? out of discomfort? i find i want to order and number my "why i shaved my head" responses, so i can"arm" myself with them--not meant in the military sense of arm, but rather to arm myself--meaning to add arms to myself--like the hindu mother goddess. 

and then, the stories of women in the feminist art movement play behind my meanderings of mind as i write these words and i get off it.  i will meet the moment, the critique, the story, the individual energy in the moment it is offered and i'll say whatever is true then, in that encounter, and i don't need to practice anything or prepare anything--i can just be in that moment then, when it occurs, and say what is so when i get there.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

this is the deal.  to arrive in life as it lives itself.  to do what there is to do.  to say what there is to say.  i shaved my head so i could know what it feels like to grow my hair.  i shaved my head so i could be present in the miracle of seeing my selfish portrait--my selfish choice--to know what it is that i look like wihtout hair.  i shaved my head so i could wake up and see rachel rosenthal's bald head and to find this otis series of interviews and know that i am on an authentic path--my authentic path--and that the beacons that have always been mine--the lighthouses casting their searching beams into the waters i am still alive in--are still casting their searching beams--not by searching--but by beaming.  beaming.  she is beaming for me, just as she did that first night in that grand opening of highways all those years ago when i was there with my cousin charlie--with my mother's cousin charlie--being the serving girl for the opening night in the mobile image offering of the electronic cafe back when the world was new to the world wide web that they helped establish as real.  i don't like full stops.  i don't like stop signs at the end of sentences or streets.  i write without periods, because no one should ever have more periods than they need to have given the intensity of menstral cycles.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, i am finding my self, my strength, my voice again.  i am arriving again in my moments of being myself.  i am on a well travelled path of real voices alive in still living women who forged this trail.  i am here. i am learning.  i am alive. 

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, i am alive again.

who knew shaving my head would give me such a new lease on unleashed????

Sunday, January 1, 2012

i shaved my head

i shaved my head because i said i would.  i shaved my head because it is a spiritual tradition in many faiths.  i shaved my head because i wanted all the memories that grow in hair to leave me for a moment.  i shaved my head because i wanted to demarkate the end of my married life and the beginning of whatever part of this life i am in now.  i shaved my head so that i could know what it is to start all the way over with something that is all mine.  i shaved my head so i could know what it is to be without hair.  i shaved my head to get rid of blonde and black and red and bleached and gray. i shaved my head to know stubble.  i shaved my head by myself, for myself, so that i could know the image i saw in the mirror when i finally looked at myself after all the cutting and the shaving was over.  i shaved my head so that i could be free.  free.  freedom's just another world for nothing left to lose--thank you janis joplin, for still singing in my hairless head.  i shaved my head so that i could learn to wear a scarf.  i shaved my head so that i could know the shape of it.  i shaved my head so i could feel, again, that place at the top where the god comes in.  that place that's left open in the skull--that sweet round soft place--i can feel it again.  it was some kind of strange joy to find it--to feel it under the razor that i took to my own head in the bath.  my razor--after shaving my legs and my underarms and all the places that one, when one shaves, shaves--after all that i took it to my head.  i had cut it down to the bone as close as the scissors would let me cut.  i haven't yet taken the knife to my head to pull back the bits of stubble and get to clean skin--i have seen that done--but i have not yet done it.  i have never done this before.  i have had others cut away to skin--but usually just the back of my head--with floppy bits on top left for me to hide one eye behind in some 1980s kind of nod to asymetrical.  here, i am something else.  a blob of skin in rounded bits of bulging under a hairless dome that no longer gives my huge cow eyes anything to hide behind.  what am i doing? what am i doing?

it is done, anyway.  there is no use asking "what am i doing" what what i have done is all the way done.  it is strange, this pursuit of symbols of spirit.  it is strange and strange and strange and strange and strange.  none of the goddesses i know of have shaved heads--and none have ordered me to do this through prayer or dreams or invitation of any other sort.  this is a purely willful act--my will--and i have done this thing.  if i were not so aligned with calling myself an artist, could i have done it?

i think about the women i know who've shaved their heads--NONE.  i think about the women i admire who shaved their heads for reasons of their own--sinead o'connor, rachel rosenthal--goddesses of a sort--living out there in the interconnected web of knowing something like nothing about them.  their what kind of aura? their artistic emanation aura--that reaches all the way to me across waves of pictures and sounds and i can claim to know something about something they represent.  rachel--as the grand damme of performance art who was the first, actually, to initiate me into some kind of knowing that *that* was the kind of art i make when i saw her performing at the grand opening of highways, judy chicago's old dinner party studio, in santa monica.  it was 1989? turning into 1990? i think? if i can remember?

i shaved my head so i could stop remembering. 

i shaved my head so i could demarkate the old life from this new one here--so i could let go of all the ways of knowing my hair, constantly growing from my head since somewhere inside the womb, could find its way to the buddha at the top of our jinglefruit studios stairs.  and i did it.  i did it to myself.  in the after midnight, post kisses all around but none of them too deep ways of the first moments of 2012, i took the courage of the unlabeled bottle mixed with whatever fuzzy peach juice we had around, and i grabbed the dull scissors off the collage table and i made the first cut.  the dyke bang cut.  judy calls it like she sees it.  i made the too close, one half inch left of perfect hair--the hair caroline colored blue that then faded out to bleached that was then growing in as whatever color my hair is under all the colors i've been asking it to try. 

i shaved all of that off my head last night--in the first new hours of the last new year.  this is the last one? really?

all year we'll be dillydallying with what the mayans meant when they made their elaborate calendar that comes to a close before the end of this year.  and the mayan i know--the sweet gift giver who has been feeding me coffee and giving me rides home in the later than the bart runs night will go back to his beloved home in the mountains and i will be here, still, under the stairs, in this space of time and  life called "recently shaved head" time.

recently.

the do is 8ish hours old now.

it is nice to count the hours of life.

i remember in the early days of both my birthed children how i used to count the hours of their magnificent breath of beautiful new life.  i am doing it for myself now.  i am birthing this bald head of mine out of the hair it had to grow and pass through, in order to arrive here in this moment of this time of my own rebirth.

oh, yes.  god.  writing does save my life, doesn't it? i shaved my head to rebirth myself.  symbolically, actually, in this way of perfect knowing i did it and i have done it.  and it doesn't undo any of the great things that have come from the growing of all that other hair.  but this new year and the hair i grow inside of it--this new year of new growing of new hair--this is my doing.  and i will see my progress and know its length and contemplate its natural color and learn to love myself through all the spiky ugliness of uncooperative new growth.  and it will come out of my head.  and i will learn, along with it, how to live this new, strange life of growing.

ohhhhhhhhhhh, this new strange life of growing.

this, i love.

i am conscious of the place i like to stop in the writing now--in the place where i find that one phrase--that sweet set of words that give me a whole days worth of worthy to contemplate.

i love being worthy of my own writing and my own words.  these, unlike all the books i wrote before, are for me.  to encourage me.  to keep me moving.  they are selfish portraits, too, in their way.  word stories no one might ever read.  one day, will i write for a reader? will i love for a lover? i think not.  this life is a selfish pursuit.  i am, it seems, doing it all for me.  loving, leaving, losing, letting go.  attachment disorder? anyone????

okay--funny--there--i give myself this place of loving and then take it away from myself in language.  this is a fascinating working of an inner mind.  hairless.  white.  pink.  sweet hands.

i miss miss sophie.
i shaved my head.
why is all this missing following me?