Shaky beginnings, living with the questions, and a camping trip
September 2023/ Nightmares & Morning Pages
8/26: Pacing while the dough rises, while the night yawns, while the rain is less like a sob and more like a sweat. Today and I, we were running a little late together. We were once scorned but now we feel sweet. I am wearing the pants that Monday gave me (vintage from the window) and leaving lights on behind me (my quiet dough in my quiet house). I’ve spent a lot of today wearing headphones & looking for proof, killing bugs on windows & doors. scratching bites on legs & back. Everything blue, grey, green, August moody, August eager.
It feels like my friends are here. I take a photo of the chairs out back facing each other knowing we were in them last. I know plans change & days have a feel about them. I know the next time is soon. Hello my friends, do you feel like you’re here too? One last loop around & I drop to my knees on the rough & wet. I kneel before my bedroom window, all orange on a blue night. I thank her for holding us. I thank this house for being more than it had to be. I thank parking lot parking spot plantain lilies & fireflies, mushrooms, bats, neighborhood cats, weeds overgrown in the garden. I try to think of the last time I felt certainty & I go inside instead.
8/28: I am witnessing growth and still asking for proof. I have no opinions about it and am calling that freedom. I’ve been using the threat of time, the threat of body & time, as motivators. The more my hips ache the more I want to dance. The more my hand cramps the more I want to write. The more my knees hurt the more I want to keep on driving. The more I forget the more I want to pay attention. These are resources I take advantage of, am learning the language of. The body, the great manipulator, the truth screamed at the end of the hall.
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8/29: I ask the change in the air Are you the change I’ve been asking for or something I’ll have to move around? I’m still reminding myself of the many answers - of Yes & No living together in a small apartment, brushing their teeth together in the shower.
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8/30: My boundaries have to reflect the importance of my tether to creation - at every level of creation. I’m at a point in the journey when I’ve come to a clearing in the bright day after a dark night. To art I want to give it all away.
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8/31: This flesh is amazing in its changing - baking like bread, goosebumps rising like new life, lapping for warmth. I haven’t taken myself seriously in a long time. Luckily for me, taking myself seriously means giving in to delusion, means playing fast and loose, means Why not? Why not? Why not? on repeat.
I’ve noticed it’s hard for me to lay down w/ my spine straight. I’ve noticed my hips need stretching regularly. I’ve noticed my hands age & age & age. This is how I sit side by side w/ my fears. Wear long tee & long skirt & know the body is simple underneath, this love thing we are learning to trust, this love thing that eats the ego thing.
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9/1: Funny how the center of all, the grand center, our sun, makes us feel like the center - seen, sought out, warmed, burned, like eye contact, like biblical angel. Even my hunger is for fun today. September first, smooth as silk (as sirens start to flare, police & fire engines & ambulance, more a little further down, I can’t believe the timing. At least I can hear them, at least I haven’t tuned them out. I appoint myself as abstract witness, wondering who else is listening to sirens and who is left waiting for them. Who wants a scribe in the apocalypse?)
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9/2: Whenever the Art Book Fair is in town, I think of New York again - the way it’s got voice, grating and egoic, the way it becomes crowded & hard to move, the way everything for sale, everything for sale where art goes to sit and wait wait wait, all art ever does it wait. The art does something to the world and then the world does something to the art.
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9/3: Took this morning writing on the road, next town over parked by the pool before work. I’m finding a spot in the middle, telling jokes to the sun, listening for laughter in late summer cicadas and a light breeze through the trees. Summer, quick & thoughtless like pissing outside. Because I can becomes an energy, one we can learn to harness. Freedom when it is small. Freedom when it is easy. Freedom when it is a child beloved in the sun.
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9/4: What a sensation aging is - all in our bodies, more and more by day & time, day & time, these things crack from change, by impact, changing by use. This gift useful, the animal useful, full of life. Life is like this: (sensational, sensitive, short & long & short & long) Creation for the sake of creation. Community for the sake of community. Changing & cracking for all that comes after. I believe this.
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9/5: Where is live truly lived? Is the answer simply everywhere? It must be. I must still be sleepy. I order the Jimmy Buffest margarita, it is bright red, maraschino, like the sun sometimes when there are fires in the West. I wonder, will I feel the days more fully through this practice? Will life slow to the pace of observation? Will the worship begin naturally w/out me even noticing? I hope so. hope so.
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9/9: On the road by 5:55, love being a passenger when T is driving, love seeing the moon and sun pass each other in the hallway. How this planet asks to be felt (always, always) and not just witnessed (me too, me too).
We turn to the sun instinctually or w/out trying or w/out choice. We drive onward, the future revealed slowly through the fog or blotted out by the sun or told to us just at the time we need it. The highway, the only trustworthy storyteller here. My boy, he works to make sure the story holds, makes sure the cracks give way to lasting years. And now, light touches all in that gentle way.
On road trips, I know to slip slow, coffee slowly clearing the fog on the road, just enough to leave a little mystery & get a pen in my hand. Empty stomach otherwise; I will eat when the sun eats, closer to her morning peak, when she takes another dry bite of us & the black crow flies & the song changes to something we can chew through, yeah, a beat w/ an up and down and swallow rhythm.
In the passenger seat, I wait for the softened edges to go sharp as reality, wait for the contrast to deepen, wait for black to be reintroduced to the tucked away spaces, all the colors going to work. It is Saturday, don’t forget. Persistent moisture, this drooling crying summer.
I’ve been thinking about what my body needs and telling different stories. I’m thinking about limited options, dirt & grime, salt & pepper. Oh, the cast iron grate where we impose our needs onto fire! Oh, nylon & tin, leather, wool & nontreated wood! I am up for anything in the sense that there is nothing. I am nothing here, part of the free choice pack. Here, subject to the changing weather & gods of the wilderness of Northern Maine.
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9/11: Everything up front here seems dry enough, considering. I’m pretending the backseat isn’t full of dirty soaked nylon and all our trash, my own toothpaste spit out and dripping down my passenger side door. It’s been fun being filthy.
Yesterday the rain was with us early but we were allowed breakfast first. Soft peppery eggs & avocado, maple sausage, pads of cheddar cheese, instant coffee, feeling time stretch along its wheel. We took to the rocky wet backroads of the park. There was a lake around here, somewhere, and falls. I choose not to learn how long a mile is because somebody else will know and I can ask again. The car was full of laughter as the woods stretched on, children again.
The trees in some areas were so skinny & tight they left no light in. I thought of the blanket of conifers like tufts of fleece we saw from the top of the mountain, that cool emerald green under the fog. We were somewhere in there now, driving on an unseen road in the carpet.
A wet walk in and we tried to find the falls, small, rushing down from its mountain onto rocks that make you believe in Pangea, everything shifting and shaking for centuries. More leaves down here at the bottom, browns and yellows already, sharp crimson patches. So much of hiking is looking down. I yank my head up at the root to see around myself, trailing down the middle, rain slickers & boots the only options.
We heard the rush before we saw the water, wild in our wet September. We hid the few dry clothes under the wet ones and waded topless w/ the chill. The falls bubbled in drama, even warmer where the action was. We swam closer to the source of power, washed our faces in the freshest water on Earth. When it started to rain harder, when the shivers couldn’t be held back, when something in the foamy sky darkened. We rushed out. Everything wet but worth protecting. Remarkable wet planet! I am sensitive to your slipping finality! If I try too hard to hold onto this moment, I will miss the next! I can be here now! I will be happy to miss it all in the future!
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9/12: I am reminded that sitting down to write is a luxury ( I will not think of wasted time, I will not think of wasted time ). Magic can be straightforward and even routine. All my art is allowed to be bad. I am allowed (welcomed!) to live like this.
9/13: This morning feels like the heel of a boot stepping on my working hand. I write it down, not to nudge the boot off but to write regardless.
The rain slick & relentless, falling like a curtain between where I am & where I had hoped to be. I watch it turn solid earth to mud, slippy & sinking, and I try to learn synthesis. Nothing silent in the rain, everything being touched at once. The crows are gathering on my roof this morning, cawing & crying out. Five at a time. I am always getting messages, it seems, that I am not paying close enough attention - zoomed in too close or zoomed out too wide - that I am missing what is right in front of me under the shadow of Right Now. I will give Presence all her credit, as I sit hanging onto this book in my lap, telling myself that if I need to cry now, I can do so softly & w/out needing to fix anything.
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9/18: I am sharing my porch w/ the storm, saying out loud, I must be some kind of devil.
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9/22: The bees are more antsy in September, collecting all they can before the cold sets in. I love when creatures become a little more fiendish - I feel the same way when I circle my hips around. It is not soreness we should fear but stiffness - this is true in every example I can think of, like most truths about the body. The body, a mirror & metaphor to our world - we are earthen things after all.
We are sensitive now, not to birth but to futility, the ending of things saturated in our time. The endings of things always at the beginning of things. The ending in every bite of life - swallow, digest, shit it out - I tell you we are earthen things, friend, and it all hurts going down. Life is a game in the sense that you don’t have to be good at it to enjoy it.
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9/23: Energy calmed & Saturday, just something we get so many chances at. Everything alive wants love & food & something fun to do. Where is the art in this? Inherent. What is worth telling? All of it.
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9/26: I am #29 at the long table to the left at the show of life - the overpriced hotel next to where I work on Commercial. I’m thinking about hospitality again, the generosity & the industry, everything gold or gold plated. Strangers in my city, I sit among you. You don’t know the difference. I don’t really either. Maybe we could get to where difference doesn’t matter. We have a responsibility to this, to learn about each other, to find commonality & uniqueness, to find community. It will be so important soon.
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9/30: Thinking about how life just keeps going on and on, how we choose happiness and almost nothing else. My idealism is mighty and disorientating. It can play here in these pages where it is black & white & fun to read, where it is safe from my day to day, where I can both plot & put down. My reality is here and now. The day is wrapping up in this scene and the spiral goes on. My life will be extraordinary no matter what. I do not have to force my hand or show my ass. My life will mold to me better than I could manipulate. I look forward to more fullness and I look forward to trusting it when I feel it.