Garden Monk, Vermillion, SD

San Rafael to Park City

I was at least a day ahead of schedule when I finally gathered the last bits of clothing, still damp from the previous nights sprinkling, and forced them into the craggy spaces of my Subaru. It wasn’t as though I was having difficulty parting with my possessions, but I really didn’t want to take them half-way across the country for an undetermined time period. The uncertainty of my return to the coast, made leaving heavy and sad in a way I have never experienced. The weight of my possessions made it worse.  And then there was the business of taking leave of the people I’d grown close to in the 9 months I called Marin my home. It broke me up inside.

The scenery changed quickly from coastal hills to dry desert urging  an acclimation that made me restless. I couldn’t settle on music. I’d make it through 1 or 2 songs before searching again for the “right” music, in the same way you wait endlessly for the lines in a poem to directly describe your experience–your life.  Jesse uncovered an M. Ward I barely knew on our drive to Limantour Beach on Friday and declared it good for road trippin’. I tried that; it made me sad, WAY too sad. It wasn’t until I played the monks chanting with the Dalai Lama that I began to feel a sense of groundedness. I listened to the monks, called my dad, listened to Lucinda Williams, called Ellen, listened to Andrew Bird, checked in with Caleb, a couple missed calls–Cynthia and Amber, a few more songs from random cds and then Dinner. Dinner (Jesse Nathan and Chris Janzen) cornered me into the present and brought temporary reprieve from the heaviness inside. I rode the deep sound of Jesse’s voice, constructed a pastiche of of our time together made mostly of words and discovered I was 133 miles from Salt Lake  City. The resistance I felt toward leaving actually made the trip go faster. I had been in the car 9 hours and despite my restlessness, it felt like 3. I was trying to let go without losing it all completely…California–sweet, sweet lover of mine.

Park City to Basalt, Co.

I could have stayed in Park City longer. Being with Thea is restorative like Savasana. I didn’t really leave the house except once for yoga. Thea’s usual athletic pace was interrupted by a sewing project and Andy’s absence. So we hung out in the kitchen and told each other stories while she sewed. Because it’s only 11 hours from Marin, I decided it might be a nice place to write my application for UC Berkeley and I’d like to take the fall to do just that. 

During the drive from PC to Basalt, I started to watch the scenery,  let my cds play in their entirety and to feel less like I was leaving my life in Marin. I felt more like I was visiting all the places I called my own ; I marveled at the coincidence of having really good friends in day-spaced intervals between the coast and the Midwest. I wondered how far in any other direction I’d be able to do that if I tried. Scaling a line between places that belonged to me and leaving a place I loved was the difference between my disposition on this leg of the journey and the former. 

Casey introduced me to Chimay, a wonderful beer made by Trappist monks in Belgium. We ate food on the roof, watched the sunset and the Secret Life of Bees. Today we’ll hike in Aspen, then I’ll make my way to Boulder to Nadene and Janel.

Independence Pass to Boulder

I left Aspen with a full belly and dubious directions that would take me through the most scenic leg of my journey thus far, over Independence Pass and the Continental Divide. I stopped at the top to feel the cool air and to make a snowball. At 12,095 feet, Independence Pass is the second highest paved path over the Rockies. Music choices were easy: Old Crow Medicine Show, Wilco, Bill Monroe, Andrew Bird, Beck, The Alman  Brothers…you get the picture. I felt the weight of my possessions without acknowledging how they slowed me down on anything but a physical level. I knew I would need some things from my collection in Boulder. All day I held a space for another Monk reference, but none came to me. I made the mistake of going east on Highway 6 and found myself at I25. I called Nadene who exclaimed, “you need a GPS.” I was forever calling Nadene to direct me out of lost places. This practice started one late night in Idaho when I couldn’t find camping near Sandpoint.

Nadene, Boulder

Nadene and I ate a late dinner at The Mediterranean and walked to The B-Side Lounge for post-modern jazz with The Jacob Fred Odyssey. I had a conversation with a guy named Ian about Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson, Billy Crudup and writing while I waited for Nadene to dance. On the way back down Pearl Street we slipped into Seven for a tribute to Michael Jackson set. Everybody on Pearl Street, it seemed, wanted something from us–bus fare, a light, a smoke or a word. Typical late night Pearl Street scene. For some reason I felt grateful to be there the evening of the day that Michael Jackson passed away.

Boulder to Vermillion and Beyond

Beck accompanied me all the way home. I listened to: Mutations, Guero, Sea Change and Modern Guilt. I tried to invent the monk and thought I found him in the landscape urging a silence in me. I decided maybe he was going to help me find solace there. My ideas were flowing like crazy and I was working on three projects simultaneously: a story about Bird and Bear, a installation incorporating word and image based on the bird and bear story, and a sort of women’s salon where my women artist could gather and draw portraits of one another.

At home here, Caleb, Beau and I have been working in the yard and the enormity of my life overwhelms me like crazy. The other day while weeding, I encountered a little statue beneath the clematis vine. When I turned it round, there was my monk. He and I met for the first time face to face. I’m not clear about his significance in my life, but the past and future keep doing a dance around me. For now, it feels right and good.

From September to January I walked to school. I walked 4.5 miles to school over a nice sized hill. Many of those days, I spent my best moments getting to school. I had been walking to school since the first day. My route took me past Landsdale Station and down a little lane of a street (San Anselmo Drive) before temporarily attending to the morning rush of traffic while crossing Sir Francis Drake to Butterfield which would take me past many moms, dads and kids on their way to school towards Fawn Drive, up and over Sleepy Hollow, arriving finally in Terra Linda and eventually to the Montessori school. By the time I arrived, I was usually ready to be there.

I maneuvered my way across Sir Francis Drake with the assistance of the charming crossing guard, Rosanne. You have conversations with the morning crossing guard when you are the only one waiting on most mornings for a very long light and when you take the walk every day. One day while we were standing and waiting for our green light, I noticed what a glorious spot Roseanne had; how the sun shown directly on her corner and I remarked on her view. She admitted it was “the envy of all crossingguards” and I felt a new admiration for her and the serious way she approached her task. I’ve never been interested in posts that require that you to be responsible for the lives of others–airline pilot, doctor, counselor, but crossing guard looked good to me that day, in the same way that mail delivery person looks like a fine occupation until it rains or snows or a big growling sharp-toothed dog appears.

Sleepy Hollow  preserve only spanned 10 of the 50-60 minutes it took to get to school. It wasn’t even the highlight and sometimes I even felt a tinge of envy for the people merely out walking their dogs and not going to work. By the time I reached Sleepy Hollow  my workplace lay only 15 minutes down the road.

One of the discoveries I made on these walks was the wonderfully eclectic details on the houses and in the gardens. Such a mixture of elements more finely crafted than I am used to seeing in similar neighborhoods in other towns of this size I have lived, exists.

I constructed my Halloween costume on those walks to school, collecting for two weeks all the bits of  plants that would make me a wood nymph. There was such a variety of species I had never seen. Some of the children remember the day I granted them an earth wish in my costume. I still tell them that was the real me and the one they see every day is just a partial version of myself.

Just before the beginning of the new year I considered changing my path to school. Someone suggested to me an alternate route with the promise of delivering me sooner into nature. Before truly considering this option, I began exploring the route on my days off because a change this radical needed testing. It is only when I considered changing my route to school that I began to feel a sense of nostalgia for my former (and it was still present) route. Considering a change made me aware of my attachment to those walks and how I had become accustomed to the routine.

Now I live in a different neighborhood and there is no convenient way to walk to school, but I think about Roseanne,  the vegetation, the deer, the grapevines, the weather, the smells and the part of myself that lives in all those things.

Sausalito

I’ve been in the new place in San Rafael for 09 days. I like organizing for more mobilility. You have to purge and pause and wonder how you managed to collect things in so little time. I wonder if any one will notice the things I left behind placed throughout the house and garden. I visited Morton Lane today to pick up my mail and peeked in Beth’s (my former) room. She had painted it freshly and moved some things around. She kept the apron to my Halloween costume I pinned up on the window above the bed. I liked that.  Her space had a sense of earthiness and I liked that too.

For the next 7 weeks I’m staying with a co-worker in a lovely craftsman style house in San Rafael. I have to find new places to visit and new ways to make adventure. Just walking out the door with Ellen in the old neighborhood was an adventure. The walks near the house where I am staying in Gerstle Park are similar to the walks in San Anselmo. I guess once you get up in the hills, the demographic is the same and the vegetation certainly is. From the hills near here, you get a view of San Rafael. Night walks are nice; the town glows in the distance below. Ah California, ah Marin. Such a gift I am frequently grateful for.

I need more time to figure out my plan, but things are starting to come together. School is less of a struggle and I am becoming aquainted with two people through yoga. I sense the forging of new friendships.  I sense the importance of being and staying connected. We are going to need each other to do the work. Song and dance would be nice too.

Caleb and I have plans to work in the gardens in Vermillion and to do some grouting and painting and whatever else needs tending while I am there. I would also like to re-paint the dining room and furnish two rooms to be rented. We plan to discuss ways to make the downstairs bathroom more a communal space. I want to take some things out of the house and to re-locate some things. I can imagine my house here, or maybe just me living in it; the best of both worlds. I will be home during July, but plan to drive back to California at the end of the month. More than that I cannot really say for it equals only speculation. Trust that things are getting juicy. Plans are getting ripe.

I cut my hair again and it seems just right though I identify strongly also with the longer haired version of myself. Myrtle told me that some little pearl earrings would go great with my hair and she was spot on! She is five. I’ve been listening to kids more and laughing a bit more too. I want to write a grant to bring a yurt to our school in Terra Linda and I think I can get a committee to support and help me. I have lots of good ideas, but sometimes fear being as good as I can at something. Maybe its universal that we are not our potential. That’s why is called potential. Once you arrive, its called something else or maybe it has no name as it exists in a realm beyond words. I dont want to go there quite yet. I like being on earth…in fact, I dig it!

Dillon Beach, Sonoma Coast

On Saturday, Ellen and I drove to Sebastopol to visit Mandy and there were coincidences too numerous to mention, but I felt like I was living my life the way it was intended. I have been on the fence lately in terms of making my life here work and finding refuge in, and building on to my life in Vermillion. The first of May I vacate my spot here in San Anselmo; this makes me feel uprooted on the one hand, but I also long to get back outside in nature. Working is difficult because it changes my life in ways that feel seemingly beyond my control. But the past weekend gave me a chance to construct my life in more creative ways, at least in my head to start.

coral reef and Ryan

Jena and I decided on Thursday we would go to an art opening on Friday and we invited Ryan and Ellen along. The space  Art Works  in downtown San Rafael was amazingly inspirational. The showing was of the resident artists living in the apartments in the building which occupies half a block. There are plans to build a restaurant in the space too (Odalisque) in the near future. There are 17 apartments for artists (and a waiting list), so I filled out an application to live there. Jena took me aside and said “I’m feeling really grounded and ready to make art; I want you to be ready too; don’t fear it–BE AN ARTIST.”  The words inspired all sorts of observations I made in the days to follow.

Ellen and Mandy

In Sebastopol, Mandy, Ellen and I ate at Peter Lowell Cafe. The food was good and the space also really nice. We sat outside adjacent to the yoga studio and across the parking lot were newly constructed (green) work/live spaces so I asked for a tour.

We also visited the OAEC plant sale at Occidental and then drove down the 101 back to San Anselmo. The California coast is wildly inspirational and I have only begun to explore her.  Three aspects of living here inspire me a great deal: the diversity in nature, California style (architecture) and California groovin’. I desire to find a way to mesh the observations and experiences of living here in a visual series. I am attempting to leave space for that and at the same time hang on to what I have cultivated in Vermillion. I need to figure out how to work less and make more, but I am finally feeling inspired after what seemed to be a rather long drought.

Oh, and I had a Birthday and I spent it with Ellen and Jena, and Samantha and Christina and Cesar and Ethan in Berkeley.

Jena, Ellen, Christina, Sam

Some people, like memories, never leave you. Even when you think they have left your conscious mind, their essence deposits like sediment on the walls of your cells to infiltrate the tiny grooves of your being in order to re-visit you at unsuspecting times. I had a dream about a yoga slacker last night. Sometimes I think that the people who appear in our actual lives, in our fantasies, or in our dreams, bring messages relevant to living meaningful lives.  This one I think was moon induced.

When March arrived this year in California, I started recalling the early morning runs I had taken while the yogaslackers were snow kiting across the state of North Dakota for 3 weeks. I had to check the dates to find out that I was having these recollections exactly one year later but under very different weather conditions etc. It made me wonder if somehow the experience had not been an imprinted cycle, like the rings of a tree. The impetus to run in sub zero temperatures at 6 AM had been the 2XTM journey, but my own will locked into a sort of machine when it came to the actual running. I was also having lucid dreams and fantasies and some of these dreams brought insights and details that I otherwise would not have known. In one particular dream Jason was part of a sort of traveling circus where characters morphed into machines. I also remember feeling insecure (in the dream) about how I would measure up physically, the very deepest part of my actual psyche expressing itself. Outside the dream, I knew I was no match for the yoga slacker physically, but was delighted that he met my need to have an engaging, clever and intellectually energetic writing partner. Because we did not know each other and only wrote to each other, he satisfied a desire to live my actual and dream lives in delightful unison.

During yoga class I became annoyed when the instructor attempted to replace the imagery of my dream with other images. In the dream we (the yoga slacker and I) were physically in one another’s presence, but the connection extended beyond that realm, like it had in so many of my dreams about him. I can only liken it to an effortless feeling of perfection and of being one with something beyond the physical– a fantasy, a dream or a desire to live in the flow of grace. I reeled in this realm for the better part of the day as Andrew Bird’s Lull played over and over in my body.

Being alone
It can be quite romantic
Like Jacques Cousteau
Underneath the atlantic
A fantastic voyage
To parts unknown
Going to depths were the sun’s never shown
And I fascinate myself
When I’m alone

 So I go a little overboard
But hang onto the hull
While I’m airbrushing fantasy art on my life
That’s really kinda dull
Oh, I’m in a lull

I’m all for moderation
But sometimes it seems
Moderation itself can be kind of extreme
So I join the congregation
Join the softball team
I went in for my conformation
Where incense looks like steam
I start conjugating proverbs
Where there once were nouns
This whole damn rhyme scheme’s
Starting to get me down…

Oh, I’m in a lull
I’m in a lull

I’m rambling on rather self consciously
While I’m stirring these condiments into my tea
And I’m so lame
I bet I think this song is about me
Don’t I, don’t I, don’t I,

I’m in a lull
Oh, I’m in a lull
Oh, I’m in a lull
Oh, I’m in a lull

Today I did something I never thought I would. I let a 62 year old man cut my hair. He was amazing, wielding a pair of scissors in each hand and chop, chop choping; swaying in time to his artistry. There were so many things I wanted to ask him but I didn’t want to interrupt his artistic trance. I have never seen anybody move like that or scissors fly so quickly around my head. He followed my hair, as he followed my head, its shape from top to back–jawline to neck. As the curls and natural inclinations of the strands revealed themselves, they were incorporated into his creation. As I sat there thinking about how his eyesight was probably not what it used to be, I realized it didn’t matter, he called upon an intuitive sense. He didn’t speak, he just cut. I did find out a few things, however: he was born and raised in San Francisco (North Beach), he had been cutting hair since 1969, his best friend moved from Ohio to California inspired in the 1970s by the song California dreaming, he is Italian. When it was over and I walked to the desk to pay, he must have fumbled for something on the desk because he declared, “I have a hard time acting cool around pretty girls.” He also said what a nice and pleasant surprise it was that I walked in the sudio and when I turned the knob, his “Arrivederci Bella” ringing in my ears, I knew that the pleasure had been all mine. I had spent the afternoon with Tito, the mad scientist hairdresser, in Tito Salon.

Have you heard of one of google’s new features; it provides protection from drunk typing? It’s called mail goggles. When enabled (late nights and weekends), it presents you with a series of complex math problem you must complete before your email will be sent, preventing your from doing the email equivalent to drunk dialing.

I dont mean to be an alarmist, but, does anyone else hear those sirens?  It reminds me of a story Thea once told me. When she was in high school in New Jersey, they held an assembly to discuss the problem of students doing donuts in the parking lot. At some point she became frustrated (she probably wanted to get back to Dance or French class), got on stage and simply stated, “look, if you didn’t do donuts, we wouldn’t have to have this waste of time assembly.” She was booed and hissed off stage by her peers. I recall her incredulity that they couldn’t see she was on their side; that she didn’t want to be patronized by the administration either. At the age of 16, my friend was asking for what she felt should have been obvious: social responsibility. But, that is exactly what we don’t want…don’t want to be responsible for our behaviour, our  health, our own waste, our children, our communities, our economic or environmental problems. We might be able to save ourselves from sending that drunk email, but can we construct a matrix complex enough to keep us from viewing the size of our garbage heaps? Certainly the irony is that we celebrate the assistance we get in never getting very close to our problems. If we become the adolescents encouraged by these devices designed to protect us from ourselves, don’t we also ultimately lose the ability the make conscious, well meaning choices. How many of our innate survival muscles do wish to atrophy?

Isn’t it through discipline that we truly come to know freedom? Isn’t the system of yoga designed around this insight?

What has the world come to? First we get the Internet (designed by the military for those of you who didn’t know) and finger-tip access to all kinds of information and now someone has invented a device to keep our computers off the Internet (or at least make it a hassle to get on) so that we won’t be distracted by what’s out there.

Freedom

Freedom is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal.

Freedom enforces freedom; a reboot is the only circumvention of the Freedom time limit you specify. The hassle of rebooting means you’re less likely to cheat, and you’ll be more productive. When first getting used to Freedom, I suggest using the software for short periods of time.

Suggested donation $10.

This is rather bizarre, but in a bizarre sort of way I understand how we need to be protected by our greatest inclinations. I like the circuitous path of the world wide web and the idea that I can have so much information at my fingertips. Sometimes I think I live the most interesting part of my life here, researching obscure facts, reading Emily Magazine,  trolling the lives of my friends and objects of my interest and affection (or obsession). If  I need a break from it, well, I can just close the lid and get off, go for a walk. Don’t we all have that “freedom?” Like Emily said, it’s called “self-discipline.” It doesn’t cost $10 either.

Alice, Laurie, Raymond

When Jena and Ryan introduced me to Rock Band, I wouldn’t go near any of the instruments. You see being a perfectionist and an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) means not wanting to make any mistakes or a fool out of yourself. But one night while Caleb was visiting, I mustered up the courage to sing, then try the drums, the bass and the guitar. Its awkward at first, but worse if you allow yourself to start judging yourself and most of the others are concentrating on their own beats so much that they barely notice if you make a thousand mistakes and in a way it’s okay if you get booted, because they can show their serious moves and save you.

Somehow working through your insecurities and rockin the bass gives you a sense of accomplishment. When everything else seems like heavy metal, gathering with really good people and channeling the performer in you is really just plain old fun.

Caleb left on Monday morning. Life got a little harder then.

My dreams have been odd.

I saw Andrew Bird live, Amazing.