We Will Not Go Unchanged

    In the iron house, where the iron lady lives, she sits at her favorite window. The view from the window looks out unto infinity. The wheat and shrub outside run free. An animal in the distance meets her iron eyes. A graceful moment of recognition. A sigh commences in her lungs, replicating steel factory noise. There is no release here. This thankless place. She enjoys seeing the animals grazing far away into the distance. Their aliveness captivates her. A feeling of unique smallness grasps her. Unsatisfied, she knows her window is the only escape. A portal to a world awake and merciful. Bitterness pushes her out of the iron house and into the fields.

    The sun had possessed her this day. The soft, external world calls her by name. The cows move slowly, eating long strokes of grass, smiling inwardly. She runs to them.

"Do not distract us.", They say, "We are praying to God." 

    A smile forms on her inflexible face. Placing stiff hands onto the soft hide of an animal, she belongs to something for the first time. The cow lays its chin on her head and exhales. She cannot help but let out a whimper of love. All the iron begins to flush away, seeping into soil, giving nutrients to everything in its path. This leaves her exposed, thoughtfully laced with cells and flesh. She will never be the same after love. 

    

Breathing Dirt

     There's a lotus flower seated between my blue eyes today. Today is my day and I wish I could call Sotce on the phone. It is good to have guides and gurus, and it is also necessary to know that the answer waits patiently for you. Asking around can be helpful and yet only you can save yourself. I am imagining being in Greece today. That does not mean that I do not want to be here. In fact, here is such a good place to be that it hurts my bones. Last night we made spring rolls. My hands, road-mapped palms from millennia to millennia, rolling the ancient recipe. In my dingy 70s kitchen. Years go by and we do the same things. This makes me feel that I am exactly like everyone else. A comforting feeling. One of belonging.

    California never seems to change. Does it shift, taking on alternate shapes and beliefs, just in time to revert upon my annual arrival? I get the selfish sense that the land wants me to melt into childhood. To recall everything. When the plane dipped under thick cloud formations to expose those deep, green rolling hills I know so well, my heart exhaled. My shoulders released. My eyes closed in humble recognition of the Cajon Pass. Looking to the mountains and valleys that I asked my questions to for twenty years; I was brought to a conclusion that I could never be spiritually separate from this place. 

     It was a special visit home. On the flight there, my love and I weren't seated together. It felt silly that this made us miss each other so much. He finished Kerouac's On the Road, mid-flight and made his way to where I was sitting. He held my hands with tears in his eyes and told me that he couldn't quite explain how he felt just then. I understood exactly. Words can be such roadblocks. So bulky and finite. A look tells me everything I need to know. It would be pivotal.  He, going back to his seat. I, remaining and left to sit with that feeling. Mid-air. A brewing taste of future joy. 

    My cousin got married and she was the most beautiful bride I have ever seen. Like making spring rolls, we meet, we cook together, we promise to tie our futures together until we die. Cycles completing. Filling buckets up, pouring them out, passing them down. Under the wild and primitive desert night sky, Jake and I discussed what we foresaw. Fortune-telling and guessing. I felt far away from all my routines and usual mind-paths. The next day he bought me a book from an older hippie woman. She looked as though she breathed dirt her entire life. I mean this in an awe-inspiring way. I'm seeing this for myself, with a hopeful heart. 

    Getting to visit my faerie Bee was an overflow. Suddenly she was much older. My dear friend Caleb, too. A mother and father to a baby kitten and stewards to the first home of their own. The sun beat down on me, and I could have died of happiness. We got to watch Bee and Caleb try Mediterranean food for the first time and we laughed about the perfect mix of carelessness and divine protection. I was full of Baklava and melting with an overarching feeling of good karma present in all of our lives. Jake, Bee, Caleb, and myself. Bee and I used to sleep in the same bed every night, bong-kissed, with reality tv fog around us. We would sit on her carpet before winding down and talk about our dreams, all the weird boys I've dated (Bee has a much better track record), and laugh about things I cannot now remember. In those days, she was my big sister, my little sister, and my star twin. Now she seems to me just Bee. No better way to describe her. The name itself encapsulates everything. She is everything and will become everything. 

    Before heading home, we pulled the blue rental car over (blue cars being good luck as told by the rental car service guy Manuel) and took some pictures of us with some Joshua trees. In my Portuguese sandals and a flowing light blue shirt that Steve Nicks would envy, he took a picture of me next to my favorite tree of the bunch. I've always wanted to end up with somebody who is fond of detours. Once you find yourself open to detours, everything seems to equalize. 

    Maybe one day we can buy a small house out there in Joshua Tree. 

    I will never meet the view of my city from the plane with an even-paced heart. It strikes me with thunderbolts of love each and every time I return. The rivers, the towering trees, the millions of people just tinkering. Todo es un milagro. I finished Patti Smith's Just Kids that night in my familiar bed, mourning it instantaneously. Something in my heartbeat today, the one that is already longing to travel again, anhelando ser un extraño en un lugar extraño, is telling me that although I am like everyone else...some of this has got to be extremely unique. At least some of it. 

 

 

Sunburn

    With great reverence I honor the days wherein the world seems to know, in its own clever way, exactly what it is that I need. Today was a day that my heart was aching for. Fidelity pumping from my muscle mass of love, I had an inclination, a petite idea, of what it is that I was melancholy for. What a work of miracle when you get what you need and then some. Cherries on top. Cherries throughout. Using a cherry as lip stain on the beach with a woman I don't know how I met so late in my timeline. Very, very sweet. Very, very obvious that it would be this way all along. 

    By the ocean with my dear friend, looking around at all of the spirit living inside of the hidden coves and cracks within the tidepools, I saw starfish and snails. A peaceful, yet dangerous existence. Always at the mercy of the sea. Violent or serene. Unbending or forgiving. Constantly at the will of God. It reminds me of the choices I have every day. To be merciful or full of pride. 

    The starfish, in their rubber gowns, latch to the rocks and let the ocean breathe inwards and outwards. I see it as surrendering to the blue mouth of knowing. The ancient home we've lost our thread of communion with. Starfish appear to cling without worry. If they are taken away with a tide too brutish- that is the end of the sentence. I have so much to learn from the ocean. So much to learn from the bygone push and pull of God's dream. 

    And what a joy to play. To call to my sister and point at another aspect of this life and say, "look what I found!" For her to gladly indulge my wonder. This is all very captivating. A beautiful family of surfers are camped out next to our makeshift beach house, a blanket and kombuchas really. The father smiles at Ali Lou describing her dream breakfast, told to me in great detail as per my request. The mother sleeps in the shape of a ball in the sun. The daughter looks out into the ocean with a pensive look on her face and fingers through her hair. The son struggles to get his wetsuit off. The dog chews on a piece of driftwood and no one says a thing. Maybe it's better that way. 

    Many times, this day, I found myself saying, "I have to paint a picture of this ocean. These colors. I know I have to paint this." If only I had supplies with me. I could have spent the entire day listening to the stories of my friend and wrapped up in the color of the water. Maybe it had just been a long time since I have flirted with the sea in such a way. The colors are burned into my heart. The dark blue gently seeping into the crystal benevolent green. Clear as the day I meditated on the California coast and promised the water that I would create a good life for myself. 

    Years later, I can't say how much of this I've had a hand in birthing and how much of it has been constant surprises and good fortune. God has been creating this whole time and I'm playing in tidepools, blinking stupidly at the miracle of the world like a blind man kissing nirvana. My heart has a sunburn. 

I Want to Go With it

    My legs happily extended into bicycle pedals for twenty miles and suddenly I am on the cold, concrete floor outside of the grocery store waiting for my boyfriend to buy me ice cream. He finds me there, sick and fatigued, with stars floating in a circle over my head and I ask him if he will break up with me if I get sicker. From my stomach to my skittish ears, I am one beer in and it's saying bad things to me. 

    I have been sick since last summer and I haven't written about it. This glob of ache and cartoonish demon lives in my stomach and loves when I breathe its name. It being a point of mine to be truthful about my state of feeling, no matter the polite situation, has left me talking about my discomfort routinely. But I don't write about it because this is my time for myself and my heart. I'm not letting that crazy guy in this bar. This bar is awesome. It's better that he stays outside. 

    However, I was sitting in the grass a week ago and thinking very much about the infinite feedback loop that is trying to mentally diagnose myself or figure out which food is going to destroy this problem, thus saving me forever, and I began to write in an attempt to make thought travel from mind to out of mind. I wrote: 

"I was up all night watching the movie Frida and throwing up the dinner I enjoyed. I miss Anthony Bourdain. Did he know illness like this? After all that fucking food he ate? I feel that I am in the middle of a losing game. Here, in a strange bodily limbo, I consider the mystification that is the experience of being unable to speak the same language as my own body. If I had one wish it would be solve this great enigma. Why do I feel so sick every single day?"

    Only days later would I find myself outside of the grocery store with tears in my eyes and a tiredness I wouldn't even know how to begin to describe to you. My poor, gentle boyfriend walked inside to get us some ice cream after a long day of being in the sun and biking, not knowing that he would find a girl-wreck waiting for him by the bike locks. I hugged him tightly and asked him if he'd leave me if I didn't get better. 

    My sickness seems to be a component of everyday life for us now. It is always something to consider and it has cancelled many plans. My heart feels energetic, healthy. My body scolds and punishes me when I take chances or push myself. I worry that it exhausts him. Of course he loves me just the same. My aches and pains are obnoxious to me but maybe they aren't so abrasive to him. Maybe he is just patient. Loving someone makes me strong but being loved can turn me into a scared dog. 

    I asked God to take me through all the oncoming forks in the road with grace and love. I was there in the sun with date pits in my stomach and a yearning to be under the warmth of Spring with an untainted body. I wanted wind to blow and I wanted to go with it. The world is so big and beautiful. I am endlessly starving for it but do I have the stomach? 

I have learned two truths recently: 

1. Corruption has an expiration date

2. Good karma gets you rich and happy (two things corruption falsely promises)