and now you are and i am now

some time has passed indeed! i have been on the road, traveling mightily quick-n-slow-sometimes...i left ethan and steve (the other post-windward buddies) on an early cold morning in seattle and trekked out to federal way to pick up my first ride at a freeway ramp in federal way in the rain. [magical thing #1:] after a couple offers to take me like 10 miles a young pre-med student eager to flout her parents' authority by buying me a train ticket to portland; i got there in the pouring rain and talked to jbird on the phone and extended my ticket to eugene.

spent a couple days with alma and declan in their cozy eugenian world, town of co-ops and a sweet infoshop and freeschool and a volunteer-run foodbuying locallovefest called grower's market [magical thing #2 was being starving and wandering with alma in the rain trying to find the grower's market and stumbling upon some free incredible poppy seed onion things that led us to the market]...


eugene was wandering biking-in-the-rain, excited to make connections and follow up and find things to do, was a vegan cornbread stand and travelerpunk kids reading on the sidewalk,

[magical thing #3:] i visited the maitreya ecovillage (in eugene) and happened to run into a friend(sortof) from high school...while we weren't quite friends then, our paths converged now and wow dang what a good feeling, somehow; these days when people ask where i'm from there are so many layers of recency to pull back that i don't often get back to pittsburgh, to those days and that sphere and the people i knew then.

[magical thing #4] was shooting an email out to a rideshareperson just before leaving to hitch and hearing back from them immediately--jan jim june jed?--and then she picked me up and ended up driving me all the way to mount shasta, down through medford and mountains and trees and into a snowstorm. i rode on a mattress in the back trying not to put my smellysockfeet anywhere and listened to her and the other woman she picked up talk about amma, the hugging-guru-spiritual-leader they were both heading down to san ramon to visit.

[magical thing #5:] arriving in mount shasta, a solid foot of snow on the ground and i'm trudging through the snow with all of my stuff wrapped around me and snow peeking over the top of my rubber boots, trying to sneeze and roll a cigarette at the same time in some snowflake-free shadow of my body and someone stops a few feet away and says "hi." we end up standing in the snow for an hour talking about myths and lostness and where beauty is to be found and her name is amanda and i never see her again but she gives me her phone number and promises she'll try and find me a place to stay.


i sit outside the co-op for a couple hours with a sweet sign that reads "new travel buddy!" plus some other stuff and end up spending the night in the living room of david, this older white guy drummer who is thrilled to have someone to bounce his ideas about communism-capitalism-ascendantmasterdom-spiritualgrowth off of.

hitched down i5 to 299W across to the coast and then south on 101, thumb out
surrendering myself and hoping some friendly feelings of humanity would carry me to willits
and this process, of putting myself in a situation where i had no other way out of my situation except to rely on someone else
or some concept of a human family somehow,
(and through that discover a kind of interdependent independence--
a paradox that feels pretty alive.)

made it from shasta to willits in a day (magical things#6-10) and stayed with az (old friends! new goats! new songs! lukewarm baths and sprouted sunflower 'yogurt'! wheeee what delight...magical things abounded, probably at least up to #20) until thanksgiving we gave thanks and got in the car to go visit amma (the guru of hugging, saint of unconditional love--a rather cultish figure) down in san ramon--

san ramon to berkley to oakland (what a magical city sf/oakland/the bay is--
#21 free food in peoples' park
#22 wandering into the albany bulb artpark spectacular
#23 accidentally hitching
#24 meeting bernard from madison in berkeley
#25 unintentionally finding a place to live for a new friend
#26 happening to talk to someone kind of cool-looking who ended up becoming a fast friend and unlocking the infoshop for me
#27 glittercity and hilltops
#28-#35atleast more magic)

...to davis
and tomorrow to sacramento to fiddletown to safan ranch! i'm excited to be back in the dirt and among trees, a bit more quiet and i can unpack my stuff for the first time in a while. i dream in maps and trajectories.
doop-da-
maybe this is boring, sorry, full of small details,
moving fast singing on repeat, eschewing plans except where necessary,
making decisions from my heart and my stomach-gut region (somewhat difficult to understand sometimes).

i have been reading kirschenmann, this great farmer-philosopher-fellow
a moment where he says something like,
prayer is paying close attention to something, so closely attending that you forget yourself (your ego) for a while. not so different from coming to love, for instance, soil...really seeing all sides and processes inside & out, beyond and behind it, being in touch with the cycles of which it is a part, appreciating its past and future lives.
thinkin about that as i dig beds today and bumble around this quiet very white house...work that is a prayer, invisibly rewarding and transcendant of its mundanity. mmm.

love to all as
we are
and we are among mysteries that will never happen again,
miracles which has never happened before
and shining this our now must come to then