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.

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.

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.....

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?

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.

"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...

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.