questions

here,
will the trees
never undress themselves
to wait for the snow?

where will my bruises go
when they leave my hips and my shoulders?

if the stars are pinpricks,
where are the edges of the fabric of the sky?

how shall i know what to listen to
when there are so many voices?

could we exhaust the possibilities
of how a human body can move?

where does the beauty of youth go
when one is no longer young?

can dirt come in through your pores and become part of your body?

what is it to dance?

is there ever an ant who lives alone?

if it is warm and sunny,
does winter come without claws and shrieks?

when will the rain come?

here's a little piece of crap i wrote on a piece of paper when i was in a car a couple weeks ago.............
driving through Santa Barbara oh my gosh
so much yucky California
whiteness sunshiney pueblos palms,
the sunshine here poisons,
it rots, spoils the heart
with entitlement
and self-satisfaction
fermenting

I'm not bitter,
I'm pissed.
that all these motherfucking white people
look at this land and see paradise--
sun, salt, surf, tanlines, SUVs,
colonial walks,

This state, and all it promises,
a sick joke,
only made more disturbing
by its reality
---------------------------=============+++-

back in oregon now and indeed my California Cough is gone... plagued me for weeks.!
im here in portland feeling as uninspired the likes of which i have not felt in months,
wtf? why am i here?
i am bleeding,
bleeding as of last night,
i find that my emotional template during these weeks (these irregular, when are you where are you i need you blood when when, weeks) shifts to joylessness
ugh
i dont even know what i stand on
i have not danced because it is winter, because people like to dance at night and i like to sleep with the sun
that is my excuse
this life does not work,
the life of living in a kitchen and listening to music, dancing singing,
getting on the computer to look for homes,
and getting sad
nope nope nope
when i see wy'east (mt hood)
or the moon moon
look at me from over there i say
hey
what?
oh
fuck





can i please be grounded enough to speak to this person from my gut
to be here with my heart
and say hi

and can i also be crazy fucked up enough
to glue feathers to my ass
strap on my heels
and burrow into the soil?

"something somewhere!" he cried out in his sleep

oh gee it's rainy in oakland

wet feet wet hems of pant legs dirty underwear gold candles

going through a matchbook to try and light a cigarette,

walking through a puddle to remember that my rainboots have opened their soles to rain

looking for a warm hole (bucket? pot of soup?) to dive into and curl up till

the rain stops,

thought i'd evaded winter but oh hello.

but when i think of it that way it's not so bad,

this time, this quiet, once i'm curled up to read-zine-reflect-ponder-talk to friends old and new-play bananagrams by candlelight

not what oakland's been so far

(does a home, a nest in some woods or a tree, ever promise to be warm and dry and stable all the time? are all and any things cold and wet "miserable?")

the cold air through the last few boarded-up windows and the dripping in the front hall

are boring

though

and other souls wandering through attracted like moths to our candles and

recent-found patched-up walls and stability,

quiet dreams of the wood-burning stove (not just a game we're playing, though that too)

bernard maybe leaving with their pile of zines and shame about their teeth and beautiful face in the morning, katrina maybe too to go be present in the northeast with some mending hearts and sighs of dying,

and more kids coming in

a reminder for me about how things change, slow and fast and always,

to see this house grow up in weeks like the bao did over years

like trees over decades

like rye grass roots in minutes (3 miles of root hairs a day! i read).

i am trying to keep myself happy for me and also for others

i find recently that being around loud people makes me quiet, stressful people very chill, perhaps being around sad people makes me rejoice in the small pleasures of oatmeal all the more:

raisins vila almonds cinnamon nutmeg real maple syrup flaxseed out the wazoo

i will sigh and return to pat califia, who has at this moment to say:

"at times like these, i remember the spanner case because it renews my faith in being out of the closet and fighting back. the american gay press ignored spanner, scared off by the thunderclap of spanking and the rattling of chains. but it should serve as a powerful inspiration and model for any group of people who would like to live in a sexually sane society.

it all started in 1987..."

(didn't we all)

& just gets better and better

things are not always as they seem

baaaah! [chirp chirrrup] [cluclucluCLLAAA] [phhhhhhhhhhh] [druh druhh druh] [flapflapflap] [breathe--in. breathe--out]
i find myself (over and over though some parts run faster than others crawl)
on a ranch out in fiddletown--
some things same old,
semi-retired corporate giant
turtlenecks and all food names in french or italian and
every story is a one-upper and he knows the best about everything
starts farm on some land with his womanfriend
then she leaves
and he invites wwoofers in to let the goats in and out to graze
to count the sheep
to feed the dogs
to wonder what the garden used to look like
to imagine artists standing on each others' shoulders to make these huge graffiti murals
at times beautiful and at times absurd among blood-vessel-manzanita trees and live oaks.

same old
community of a kind over cardune gratin and oxtail stew
some kind-of-friends over for dinner and
he's hopped up on vicodin
[he pulls me in to dance (/cuddle)]
and asks why such a beautiful girl is trying so hard not to look like a girl
and why i'm hiding my boobs
and why i cut all my hair
when i'm such a beautiful girl,
[he squeezes my knee]
halfway through dinner
he just wants to know, just one question,
do i like cock?
susan drops her fork and
shannon pours her vicodinified lover another glass of wine
trying to restore the thin veil that was pulled away from her lover's mind
and steve apologizes afterward
and swears he'll never have him over again
and i'm bored already

same old
wine-tasting in amador county and
maggie (the other wwoofer, who's a little depressed)
puts on makeup and i my suspenders and we put on our british accents
hailing all the way from sedgewick hop from red wine to red wine
all brewed in our honor
and i say in the car "you know, i find all these people quite boring"
and we're both tipsy with names of thick-skinned grapes floating in our ears

same old
i wake in the middle of the night, pry open my eyes to see if it's light
go back to sleep
start a fire in the morning that gets rained out by noon
surprise steve by trying the oxtail stew
an ox i never met raised and killed by steve's doctor who lives right up the road

same old, i start to think of moving
living on the land i start to think in seasons, years, generations, centuries,
the time it takes a tree to grow, an inch of topsoil to lie down in the forest,
my mind thinking in moments, tiny dramas, eurekas
my travelling body feeling in two- and three-day stints (it's been three here and i'm starting to itch for another life), months at the most

even after so little time here (in the scheme of a tree)
i'm leaning elsewhere, towards laughter and love and spirited vision, a new book of poetry, communities that celebrate and cook together, nourishing our foundations and not just living day-to-day,
wondering too what path i'm on, what the story is of where i'm going with bits of grass and mushroom slime on the back of my hands and a bag of zines and tinctures
when i'll meet up with my kindred (which are to be found in every tree but also today feel rather far away)--

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