oh not much

geez it is pouring out here in the west hills of portland and it sounds like the ocean crashing into the back of this mansion.

putting things in bags, this dance i have been dancing of touching things and shuffling papers,
scrounging for toothbrushes (i'm at 4 now)
flipping through books
sorting into piles
rolling up clothes
putting liquids in plastic bags.
oh geez home again home again jiggity jig.

headed to pittsburgh tonight on a bird that walks on clouds slurping gasoline
or something
it's funny to be excited about not paying rent
for a few weeks
in the house
i grew up in
for years

i'm hoping to find some ways that are satisfying for me and easy gentle for my sister brother parents to celebrate welcome acknowledge the solstice on the 21st and the full moon (the 28th?). lots of things. and a family reunion in tennessee. my mum sent out an email suggesting cabins for the "kids" based on gender and then another email suggesting instead a division of quarters based on "comfort."

yup yup,
it's portland,
everything's fuckin cute
even in the rain!
pink and purple narwhals,
uniporn,
restaurants with "toast" in the name,
splashy umbrellas,
tiny inventions
apps galore

it's been a whirlwind here, and really really fuckin lovely. lovely to walk around and say "oh i don't live here anymore!" (we just got officially "approved" to rent a house with a fruit room near wolf creek. mmmmmmhmmmm) also busy and wet and occasionally totally overwhelming.

all of these words
feel a little hollow
right now

i have a new tattoo!

nailed

and being the last to leave this time, after sacrificing leaving to the great fire at samhain.

that has meant: sticking around to see what happens, fighting my desire to leave prematurely, to make casual exits and smoke a cigarette on the way home, admitting when things feel really good, maybe trading rhizomes or roots or budding fungal networks for beloved light burdens and roadsnaxxx.

right here right now

soon headed to the bay

trading newfound comfort challenge falling-into for pilgrimages in the name of family

to return and to be returned to

and the integration of all selves isn't always comfortable

but i'm convinced there's something important in it.

yesterday i found a cabin in the woods and tried to get in through the chicken coop.

i have admitted that the moon is important.

i have told the sun that i miss it when it's not around.

i have come to remember cold fingers and cold toes and the pleasure of layers.

i am ready for something.

maybe that's all,

the mirrors in my life are shrouded for the moment

i trust that i am doing okay.

i repeat: our community is strong and resilient.

i repeat my prayer for strength and clarity.

i repeat: you are loved and needed

cause what i put out keeps on coming back

so i will collect my things, pull them out of boxes and cracks in the sidewalks

and put a shim in my heart to keep it cracked open

cause that's how the light gets in

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

dog-eared memories and waxy dreams

i have been full of dirt and cider,
memories and clean air,
rustling oak trees and adjusting to new folks.
i have been quieter than i know myself to usually be...strange. i miss playing and shouting. but it will come.
this place is beautiful
and i realized quickly that the grass is always greener somewhere else,
some waxier dream,
i am confused by having free time, no deadlines, self-managed tasks,
by having no projects i am heading up,
no zines underway,
only holes to dig, apples to cut, fences to fix, bunnies to pet;
i find myself missing theatre, graffitied walls, (structure?), good friends,
find myself struggling to feel joyful to be alive in a new way, without comfort or easy laughter or touching souls or everything shared,
aching sometimes, breathing deep sometimes,
opening myself to be affected by the people around me deeply, to cut away the shame that it is so easy to walk in with
without knowing i bore it.
remembering how to start.
remembering how to surface.
remembering to speak what i have come to assume...
i meditate everyday and feel glad to be alive and have a working body.
and as i begin to see how things developed here, i am not so ashamed of not being an expert,
not so stressed about soaking up everything--this place grows slowly, i am growing slowly here,
rhizomes tenatively crawling out, leaves not too withered and
i meet friendly soil. there are baos and games
there is curiosity and suddening into large questions,
there are parched awkward moments but there is plenty of food and roof and blankets to go around.
things do not stop in me, they start--
love does not stop, it starts--
a place can not be everything, but it is a home for now.

riding this bell curve into the treeses

today my heart and my bones are a little heavy--
it's a rainy sunday-long morning-eggs and toast and damp kinda day.
writing speed, distance, long steps and rotating wheels and flying heads,
displacement of thought, new forms of intimacy,
i'm breaking up with the world so we can figure out some other way to relate.
wait, nevermind.
i haven't been writing much so i'm a little scattered in my head; i've been thinking a lot about the past couple years, what i've become, the worlds i've brushed up against and chosen, transitioning into myself, the length and strength of relationships i'm starting to miss hard.
it's good to miss. it's good to miss. it's good to miss....
this new world is rich with food that grows on trees, grass like shag carpet and art hiding in the woods. everyone is harvester and cook and eater and sleeper alike, and we are all not so different than the marmots and the prairie dogs that dig their homes to curl up in each others' warmth.
it's funny being in a new Region, the pacific northwest, adjusting to these trees and the sea and the not-flat-ness that feels homey but also not quite like my home yet. i don't know what klickitat will be like. a new community of people that will be mine for a little while and then i'll move along, waiting for something else to snag me. pulling away from all the people and places that have snagged me in chicago, in the past, has left little holes in my sweater so i hope it doesn't get too cold here or i'll have to sew buttons back onto t.rex's flannel.
and summer...? summer? my feet are getting soft and white wearing socks all the time and as my biceps grow my arms get pale--what a tradeoff. i've been wearing the same three layers for the past three days. i've changed my skin a couple times though.

and what am i looking for and will i know when i find it?

here's a little gem i encountered today, though who knows if this is what you´re looking for--

"Life is hard" signifies a certain degree of fatalism, it must be admitted. But as an all-purpose saying, "La vida es dura" soaks up a variety of meanings, a range of nuances. The vagueness and abstraction of "life" is set against the concreteness of "hard." Most certainly, such a phrase is the simplest possible strategy for linking the particular to the general, the personal to the social. But is this equation an assertion that things must necessarily be so? Or does it not carry the possibility, the implication, that things might be otherwise? As a coda set to the rhythm of life's frustrations, this maxim can relate the duress of social and economic crisis experienced as personal conditions. It marks, too, the duration of the crisis that renders life so very hard. Its pessimism, its fatalism, can plainly serve as a sort of alibi, and excuse that relieves the individual speaker of the consequences of his own actions...at the same time, this proverb can bring to light the strength and endurance of the people who survive life's hardships. It marks, by turns, the banality of suffering, the intimacy of power, the comfort of resignation, and the resilience of the oppressed. (from p. xvi of "Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua" by Roger Lancaster)

oh and me, i was stranded on an island yesterday and today i'm back in a town that, given the options in this country, feels pretty familiar--
becoming-familiar like sweaty shoulders and bug bites
becoming-immune to bug bites.
i go in and out of being uncomfortable with being on vacation. so many feelings (always feelings!) about white tourists, whether anything in my pockets would serve a too-skinny begging boy well (chapstick receipts bandanna..?)...
it's probably been good to become reacquainted with boredom, to miss, to commit wholeheartedly or at least mostheartedly to sticking around for the flourishing of a little familial culture, to think and think about projects i want to be working on without a pen to write anything down--
what is traveling for, again? and am i heavier or lighter now, and does it become easier or harder to recross a border once-crossed? and how much am i seeing, and how much do i want to see?
anyway, little bubbles of thoughts and loves have been flourishing in this faraway,
little messages that aren't quite drowned out by the market flies
relearning rethinking pride and humility, probably not through seawater
but i did see a BRAINCORAL and a blue fish. (life is hard, and not so hard.)

anyhows, i'm missing the sticky sweaty communtarian raw-haven of the bao, looking forward to seeing some of you tomorrow evening and most all of you in my dreams.