As luck would have it

As luck would have it, it takes the end of the world for me to crawl out from under the rock I have been dwelling in. The sun is out and tanning my ancles. The tunes are softly blaring. The neighbors barbeque whifts throught he air and dances in the wind.
The fresh air recently washed by heavy rain stroms danced through the spoon wind-chime. Flower vines slowly creap up the wall by the kichen wondow and tomateos rippen in the sun. the perfume from the plants feeds me.
The words tumble awkwardly from my lips like rocks from a landslide proned cliff. Precariously perched only held by insignificant particles of sand until the wind blows or a bird perches just so, and then sometimes one at a time, or all together, tumble, crash roar… the one that takes down the hillside, no matter what trees or houses may be in the path.
My words, when they are held too long are not smoothly erroding. When they are held in they fester and grow into disasterous , rapid momlogues that can wipe out villages. For this reason I have begun to write… to ease the procecss and hopefully prevent tradgedy.
As luck would have it, it takes the end of the world to revive me. Even if this is the only day, or the last day it should be a good one. Every day should be a good one. I have forgotten that. And that is a slippery slope, one that I was on the wrong end of… either top or bottom, it is the wrong end.
So here I sit. Clean, fresh, walked, accomplished. The dog has been walked, the cat has been to the vet, The shower has been taken and lunch has been had.
As luck would have it the confession turns into a realization, more profound than the thing most longed for. So unexpected. And so right. As luck would have it, when a routine is broken new seeds spring up everywhere. I can see them sprouting already and in so many corners that have been neglected. It is like the dust there has nourished them and with a little like and rain they are blooming into rich plants.
Soon they will nourish me and shade me. I will rest in the soft grass below these new plants. Much better than being undere a rock, especially one of my ownmaking.
As luck would have it, the last day before the end of the world is my first in ages.

In Out

not for long.
Tik -tock.
In. out.
Tik -tock.
Another moment. Tik -tock.
Another day.
Tik -tock.
Another breath. Tik -tock.
And then another year.
Not for long.
Tik -tock.
In. out.

Estranged.

Estranged.
Strange.
It is more than being strange or feeling strange, it is about feeling something removed, out of place or missing. Unhinged. Unpinned. Undermined. Unbelieveable how the anima can, in one moment, be there, and in another moment be gone—to nowhere.
Something is strange. Something is missing. The tangible sensation of something out of place it biting. But what it is, or where it went is, at this moment, unthinkable. Like the souring of milk. It happens subtely, but once it has passed it is undeniable.
So my anima has slipped off, like a sheet in the night and this morning I rolled over without pulling back over me. I left the house bare and immediately noticed the difference, without knowing the cause. It is evening, as it always is when I settle down to write, and I have returned to look for what has been lost. But without knowing its dimensions, shape, color or origin, it is difficult to begin searching for it. I am also not sure where or when exactly I lost it. Yet I assume I must have lost it all at once; or at least that is what I am hoping. I fear any alternative—that maybe I have been letting it go, bit by bit, leaving fragments of myself, threads to blow in the gusts of wind and then get tangled on the bushes as I walk by. And so intent on my destination, or the act of getting there, or simply the ideas bouncing like atoms in my head, that I simply didn’t notice.
Like a gingerbread trail. Maybe I have been leaving myself a path backwards, just now to turn and see the crow who has been following me cleaning up my crumbs.
I am not cold, like my sheets have fallen off. I am not humgry as if I have run out of bread. But there is a bare, naked feeling. Voulnerable and imposible to cover, hide or envelop.
There is an empty feeling. It sounds better in spanish, because that is truly how I feel- vacio. Like my stiching has come out, like I am fraying. Like I am only a shell and the light from within shines somewhere else. Yes. Like a lantern, without the candle.
Nothing has changed. No more than usual. Everything has changed and continues to do so. That is always. But the change hasn’t changed. The change just keeps on changing and usually I do to, right along in step with the times.
But something has slipped off.
I want to find it, but I am not sure I wan to look for it.
Maybe this is what it means to be estranged.

Life in the Shadows.

the fabric of life ... sometimes frays at the edges
and it is all the little threads that slip away from us without even being missed
are the threads that hold us together.
when there are only a few, they go unmissed.
but then there is the one that makes all the difference.

1.11.11

1.11.2011
numerologist must see something I don’t
1.11.11 must mean something. And I have been so much in my own head today that I can barely get out of it. I feel that my soul might be leaking out of my ears at some moments soon so I have retreated to the solice (is sounds corny, but it is true) of my balcony. My cat has accompanied me, as she does now, not leaving my side since I went on vacation without her. Since my return she has lots to say and we carry on lengthy, if not intellectual, conversations. But I like her company. I thrive on it ,in truth. Her subtle companionship offers more to me than I am sure she knows. And in return I feed her, although lately that seems unnecessay. She is no longer the lithe kitten of her former youth, she and her stomach have settled in to her middle age. I suppose the same could be said for me. We were made for eachother.
The dusk comes quickly after the sun touches the hills, and the air is fresh. The song of a lone insect competes with the comforting constance of the river below. Some times it rages and some times it trickles, but it is always there. I wonder what the insect wants? I can’t seem to understand them. Sex probably, what else is there? Companionship? Food? He is probably not longing for a pension plan or a higher yield investment. Nor a bigger car, a companion insect with wing implants…
Colombia is an interesting place. And it feels more like home now than any place has in a long time. I was happy in San Franciasco, but really only remember it after I stopped working. I don’t think I was healthy there, and I wasn’t happy the way that I am here. The “manana” spirit that often drives westerners crazyis medicinal. I need an injection daily of that relaxed manner of this place. I seem to be the only person I have encountered in the last two years who has ever been in a hurry.
And so the light is gone, only the glowing screen, leading my fingers to the keys they know so well. In the nightly rhythm, The chant. The church that I alone worship in, the church that I create. A barking dog. A child’s distant laugh, the horny, hungry insect drowns out the rest. I cant hear the road a ways off. I can’t hear the car alarms; I can only hear the river if I listen for it. So we are alone. The cat, the insect and I.
Night has brought me to a better place. My ears will no longer leak, my head can hold its own and my breath has returned without my even noticing its absence.
I wish I knew what that insect wanted to say.
And I wonder how long I will be content with this life.
Right now there is no where else I would rather be, but I have given up so much to be here. So much that I will never get back. And I suppose that is the nature of life and choice. I can only hope that in 20 years I can sit with this same feeling of contentedness, maybe on a different balcony and feel the night air on my skin, and look around at all that I have chosen with confidence and comfort.
1.11.23 I will be a bit older, I supose we all wil be. I wonder where I will be, who I will be. I will be 44. What a concept. Time to make dinner.

Just another Day

It just so happens that when the sun shines the roads dry. And finally today the rains have stopped. While I speak literally, I wonder if it is more of a metaphor. The clouds have parted. and while the heavens have opened up and dropped all they have on us, leaving some of us wading, some of us washed away and some of us homeless, there are the few left untouched on high ground. Moral, or physical. I have rarely been on either, but I am neither floating away nor running for the hills. Slowly making my way to the sea.

Although I have always done this on my own, I have never been alone. No one ever really is. I fill my life with love in many forms and friends from all over. I wonder if there will ever be a river that leads me any where but where I have always been going. This is a river that flows as a stream past a cabin in the woods of my birth. It is the canyons of red stone where this river tumbled carving away centuries. It is in the ponds I swam in as a child, stranded on a rock stalked by a snapping turtle. It is in the puddles I splashed in with my pink rubber boots and it is in the rain that fell so gently over me in last night's walk with my new best friend (my chocolate Ice cream cone.) How could that rain, so gentle and romantic ripped away mountainsides, came crashing down on homes and washed away roads. It is the water in my life that guides me. When I think about the paths that I have chosen and the choices that I make, I imagine that I blaze these trails on my own. I walk these paths alone. and that I have some control over this river I am riding. Yet today I wonder why I have taken each of these turns, and why I continue to come back to some of the same streams and shores again and again.

Is it the sound the water make splashing over the rock, the way my toes are licked by the icy cold water, the silence in the dark pools under the trees where the stream bends. Or is it the sand that warms under the sun. Where ever there is water weaving and winding between soft shores, I feel at home. I was born next to a stream nearly 8 inches wide. I bathed in a river across the road, swam in ponds and looked out over a glimmering lake from the top of a hill for years. I lived along side the ocean and then by the bay. Then I ran from the mouth of the Yangtze river to follow a path that even I couldn't see. To where I now sit above a gorge that carries the rains from mountaintop to the valley below and then who knows where beyond that. It is there, in the unseen distance, around that next bend that my path lies... even if it keeps brining me back to the same places, the same places that I keep leaving.

words on the wind

With a hand-drawn butterfly net and leaping free from gravity the way only animation can permit I sweep and swat at nothing again and again depositing what i catch into a woven sack. With each gasp at nothingness I hold tighter the sack, for what does not exist in the wind has substance and weight in my hand.
Catching hold of what is not yet real and making it into something brings out the mother in my, inspires something that is not mine, but yet passes through me. These words on the wind, sometimes only a breeze and at others like a hurricane, wash over me, drip from my eyes and squirm down my face, tickling my cheeks. Dropping like tears for sorrows never felt and wounds never opened, when I let them words splatter the page and run.
Capturing what is not mine, making it in my image and then releasing it into the universe with shape and form, this is the only thing that makes me feel weightless, untethered. But as I drift I am often pulled back, a tugging at my ankle, like a mythological hand from below, I am returned to my sedation. I am not sure what is more comforting, the weight of my flesh as it contacts the earth or the lightness of my breath when I slow down to breathe in the wind of the ages.

Suffocating in most moments unaware of my bulk, by power and everything, I slide from definition to definition, relation to relation, hour to hour and nothing changes while everything is stuck, but time is walking in circles around me, stalking my movements and my oblivion. Only when I breath does life really exist.
like the butterflies in my bag, something out of nothing wrestles to be free. when my hand can no longer clench the cord that keeps them trapped safe inside, in a silent fluttering they return, invisible, to the wind where they belong, but now they are mine. Or I am theirs.

*Photo: Petra, Jordan 2010 SM