Vena Debajo de Todo

   I am not surprised at my dropping back into my awe again. It always happens this way. Like a microwave's inner table spinning in cyclical bliss until the timer reaches zero. Until it all plateaus once again. The food must be heated later on. There is no need to overthink it. Your heart must resurrect. A time and a place and a time and a place and

    God is so good. Hearing people say things like this used to turn my insides out. Used to grant me judgement and often resulted in strange assumptions about what they mean when they say this. I wonder what others think when I say I love God. It could mean anything and to me, it truly does mean anything. How could there be a dogmatic approach to something so vast and unnamable? I think God is the Hindu deity Hanuman as much as I think God is my meanest customer of the day. I think God is the song I can't stop going on runs to as much as I think it is what is staring back at me above the bathroom counter. There's a lot of fun to be had in this I think. 

    Whenever God decides a hiatus is due and the aliveness of things doesn't quite catch the same weight- that's when I think about myself. A lot. That's when the convenience of duality kicks in and I decide that the mean customer crawled out of a pit of tar just to drag me down with them like we aren't the same thing. Like I'm not covered in tar, too. When God returns I laugh about this. In times like these I think I am someone. I think I am beautiful, promising, slightly aloof, kind, unsure. But I am not. 

    It takes one bird in the pond or one old man on a motorcycle smiling all big at me (with all the teeth in the world) or one pivotal book or anything so crucial in the way that it touches me- to slam me right back into my heart and suddenly God is everything in front of me. Sometimes if I can't find God I stare at my hands until they don't look like mine. I can't explain this further. All of that commotion and then God is back and I have access to the big throbbing hunker of a heart in me that gets me by. And the remembrance that I am nothing- that I am the ocean, or my little sister brushing her hair before bed, or the lipstick residue on someone's mug before work, or the bush dry grass on a desert lawn- is enormous. 

    The only reason I'm ever someone is because I love God. I love God and I am a disciple to the love that I know is the pulsing vein underneath all this walking around with eyes shut. People always bumping into each other unsure of who's really seeing things the way things are. I don't know and you don't either but I do know I love you. 

 

Not With My Mouth

    I don't hate this city. Even when it is all consuming and the water starts to fill over the edges of my brain- there's no way I could hate it. When the winter is bitter and moldy maybe I curse the pothole'd paths but I never ever hate it. Just because something is harsh and ugly a few months out of the year doesn't mean it's all bad. I have my volcanic eruptions but I'm a nice girl. This city deserves some slack. The sun is out and I get to leave it for a day. There are worse grounds to size up. 

    I love this city and I love to leave it. The ocean wailed like a mourning mother, reaching blindly for her baby. The pull of the sea air and the yearning toward the most silent beckon. I needed to get out and I needed it to be with someone who's so good that I'd pick their company over running naked to the coast alone. We ran together. It was better that way and I knew it'd be.

    I write about love so much because I'm just in it. There's no perverted morphing of my experience into anything other than what it is. When I am in love it is all love. The ocean singing for a pair louder than for a stand alone woman. All the starfish in the world have told me so. I've got my autonomy, my solitary visions, but I'm glad to have someone so good witnessing it, too. Saying that I'm a good way to be. Believing it. 

    I stood at the gaping mouth of the water and let the liquid run through my shoes. My breath felt wiser. Time tells me everything. I know I know nothing but love. Love of God and how they're there dancing in every drop. Love of Self even though that's nothing much. Nothing but something to lose. I love leaving the city and I love leaving myself. I'm not tethered to anything but an unitchable hunch that I've got something to say. Not with my mouth. 

Blackberries

    Blackberries are my symbol for spring. Freshly washed and atop my dollop of yogurt at eight in the morning. I'm shining and you're shining, too. The window is open. Exposed brick reflects the timid sun. The sun. Its dreary hiatus never lasts but on solemn, grey days, I wonder if this year will be a special case. But no, here it is and this same beam grew our blackberries. I'm smiling and you're smiling, too. 

    Our breakfast table seats are scooted up close together because we want to touch. Last night you played me the guitar for the first time. You wrote a song about taking a shower in a water fountain in San Diego. Tears streamed down my blushing face as I asked God, "How'd he end up here in front of me after all this?" God laughs and reminds me of the good I deserve. Reminds me to make room for miracles while I take my own hiatuses. I know and God's knowing, too.

    So I reluctantly leave the immortal feeling of a morning. It takes us a long time to depart from each other. There always seems to be one last joke to make. One last fleeting thought or look of adoration. It's spring. There are blackberries. I'm in love again. My bike is extra blue and especially heavy as I heave it along the apartment building stairs down to the street. Although the sun is out, my hands freeze in place on the handles. I'm too lit up from the morning to crease my brow about the weather today.

    The day that follows is really just a day. Biking, reading, working, pushing, pulling. Mechanical things. Redundant, not depressing. I carry out my day in graceful motion even if the most exciting thing was waking up. The morning is the divot of time where things are as they are. Later into the hours, I make calls and pretend to be older than I am. But the mornings lately are melting like goop over everything. It's because I'm happy. I really just am. Blackberries are growing. I'm growing, too. 

Eggs

    Not many people at my work enjoy the task of making eggs. You're cramped in a back room; it's hot, solitary. Highly repetitive. If you're at odds with your mind that day, you won't have much fun performing this task. There's too much time to meander over it all and I always end up dropping an egg on the floor. Always one. 

    Today was not an unenjoyable egg day. I rode my blue and recently tuned-up bike to work and the sun casted a spell on the entire city. The trees were singing, the bushes were moaning and bursting with baby pink blossoms. The sky was dancing and swiping clouded creations across the dome of the Earth. I flew through the street and felt as though not even making eggs today would pour gasoline on my spirit.

    I stood in the back and performed my duty absent of any seriousness. The holy thing about egg making on such days is that you can play your music as loud as you wish. I chose to sing and take dance breaks. There was so much joy in that back room today because the sun is a crazy thing when she takes her hiatus and then returns. While dancing and gleaming and working, I had a flashback to a time I stood in the same place with a very different sentiment.

    Months ago, I made eggs with heavy tears rolling down my face. I remember seeing the tears fall into the yolk of an egg beneath me. It mixed in with the mucosa and laid still. For an immeasurable amount of time I watched my sadness float into the egg. In my mind, the entire egg was consumed by my confusion, my hopelessness. The egg and then the room and then the universe. It was entirely riddled with the bleakness of my insides. This was one of the worst days of my life.

    Time wiped egg covered destruction away and the sun came out. Meditating on this memory today while standing in the exact same place, I felt stupidly lucky. My favorite feeling. The worst of times, of heartache, the worst of anything will fade. I held that memory of my sadness in my pockets for the remainder of the day. Thanked God in all the sweet happenings that served as a contrast to that season of my life that has finished out. 

    What an exhausted piece of advice that pain passes and that nothing lasts. I don't always find in helpful in the thick of dogshit but when it all came full circle for me today- I could not help but return to the lesson within such phrases. The water has settled on my wounds. The salt has been flushed out and the rain has left me with the cleanest pool of knowing. To know peace right now, to have answers! God, I could just make eggs like this forever. 

    What are you cooking these days? 

I hope you see me like this, too.

There seems to be more to experience and less to say these days. I've been sleeping well and calling my sister. Two telltale signs of goodness in my life. There's been pozole and kissing, too. 

At the same time every evening, the crows on my street scream for exactly one hour in unison. Do you know how much better we'd all feel if we allowed ourselves the same conjoined release? Sometimes I long to join them. Today in particular. The last two days were sunshine, joy, and lipstick. Today feels like the part of winter where you watch the clock and dream of swimming naked. Yearning like a lion with fresh meat on a platter outside the cage.

I went out dancing the other night and I felt like a wild animal. Touching the floor, clawing at the air, screaming the lyrics. It didn't matter that I had a life outside of the dancefloor. Really it never does. Both inside and out of my dreams I've been feeling very primitive. I never used to pay attention to my instincts in the way I have these last few months. Just how much of being a proper citizen is abiding by rules and how much of that is laying like bricks on my crazy free bird heart? I want to be good but I more than that, I need to be free. 

When I close my eyes and imagine myself- there's a horse running through a desert. It's fast, phantom-like, and with love in it's eyes. I hope you see me like this, too. 

Loving would be pitifully easy absent of a brain.

I'd be so brave unaccompanied by a mind. 

A dusty candle ignites upstairs and I countlessly make the trek to arrive

inhale

and do away with the fire. 

I had a dream that I screamed, lungs full of passion and lethargy. 

In that liminal happening

Boiled down to a wild animal, wounded and brave.

Why can't I scream in waking life?

Do I secretly yearn to?

Are the trees waiting?

Living has been a constant process of unclenching. 

Can I be a love that just is? 

Is a scream brewing?