Posted on by d

Spider

There weren’t that many spiders in New York. We were used to cockroaches but spiders were cause for alarm.

I finally left and moved to portland (i know, original). I moved there during the fall, one of two seasons in which spiders explode in population. I knew people who kept a broom on their front porch so you could sweep through the webs on your way to the sidewalk.

I would forget sometimes.

In time I grew to marvel at them, from what became a shorter and shorter safe distance. Contact was still beyond my abilities to handle, and then I was bit by one. A bad one.

I was healed by Chinese and indigenous South American medicines.

That following year and some of the next I spent wandering around Mexico and Guatemala, mostly, and my dealings with spiders were on another level altogether. This time i knew how to ask one to comfortably share a room. It all had to do with where I was coming from.

My last month in Mexico was spent on the desert floor of a mountain range in northern Mexico. The area was known to bring people seeking communion with a cactus that grows wild there.

I was there for that, too. But first the place made me soak in it – everything from the horror to the stark beauties of it all. And when the medicine and I finally found each other, it was with Its help that I noticed, finally, the colony of black widows I had been sharing space with that past month.

They were there, and they had left me alone. Now that I knew they were there I had to be more conscious to return the favor.

They were still there the next day. So was I.

So now I am living at the base of a mountain in far Northern California and I live in a house of spiders – there are spider plants everywhere, and at least three or four different kinds of actual Arachnida dwelling here along with us all. I found a black widow in a closet and begged it for days to relocate, and eventually it did. I could not think of the alternative. I had made a promise.

I have not seen another black widow since, and so I examine the rest from a safe distance. I check my daughter’s clothes and shoes before she puts them on, and I check my own shoes, too. I look at the sophistication and varied techniques in their webs, study their body structures and watch their patterns – some build squat, thick webs they appear to sit on, and position themselves in the same place for days. There are two such as this that I am observing at the moment along with a myriad of the long-legged wispy ones, and I am ever on the lookout for the brown recluse.

The spider, she keeps me conscious and aware.

Posted on by d

Taste.

Was just looking more deeply into my travel itch (paloma and i got our passports done/renewed and they are on their way) and envisioning going somewhere awesome with her, somewhere both of our senses of wonder are equally exploding with the juicy joy of life. i am good on the road. depth comes easy there. and clarity. I throw myself into change and scenery because it is easy to grow in that process and place.

I love my current project but it is a means to a different kind of end, for sure, something that will give my daughter and i a home base somewhere chill and cheap. Somewhere to stop and make decisions and bask in a sense of home.

right now that goal is pretty all-consuming and leaves little time for an explosive sense of wonder that is easy for me to come by. Oh, therein lies the rub, and the work is clear, digging for joy in every moment (which reminds me, mostly, of a few miserable days of digging out what felt like miles of acequias in southwest new mexico and which, of course, i now look back upon with romantic fondness).

but jeez… Make it easy here and there, just for kicks, okay? Brief little moments are perfect, just enough to leave me with a touch of ache and yearning. It is such food for the journey.

Posted on by d

thunderstorm

There is nothing else

like the slow, cool entrance

of a thunderstorm

or the feathery breath

of my infant daughter

asleep in my bed,

lying there,

a tiny temptress who knows

that the proper thing to do

when a thunderstorm makes

his slow, cool way in the door

is to simply lie back and enjoy it

for all it’s worth

but i am not so easily wooed anymore

not so quickly swayed by slow and cool

and so sometimes i forget

to simply lie back and enjoy

and instead i hold out

a little while longer

until soon, his breath is on my neck

and his hand grips my arm

until i feel his force

and his flashing eyes.

but these are things

she’ll learn with age

how to draw out the pleasures

(and sometimes the pain,

because sometimes

he explodes

pelting me with

millions of hailstones

and pounding on the windows:

LET ME IN).

better to savor the innocence

of new experience

as long as possible

i will teach

and she will help me

remember.

Posted on by d

on pathfinding…

i see life as being about choosing my own adventure.

if this is the case, then life is not about finding my path, it’s about choosing it. there are paths all over the place. i can take any one i want to. each one will lead me somewhere. eventually, they will all lead to somewhere, and then that somewhere will grow so big as to meld with the great nowhere/everywhere. with this awareness, the journey is always stimulating.

this is, as i said, how i see it. i feel pretty secure in seeing it this way – it doesn’t make me unwilling to discuss things, nor does it make every day a breeze, but it does relieve a lot of angst caused by lack of awareness (or lack of practice of awareness) by reminding me, constantly, that if my current present is not suiting me as it should, i can choose to change it, walk down a different path, and take notice of any poisonous plants or medicines along the way. there are no guarantees of avoiding pain in the process of life but with awareness i will find more than enough relief knowing that should i run into trouble, i am also provided with the tools to heal myself. i must say i believe i have found freedom.

this awareness of the journey is also confidence. the confidence fuels the strength required to accept change and then pursue and create it on purpose, with purpose, to further awareness. by process, it has become the most important part of walking a path. a destination, see, is guaranteed, leaving me to enjoy the stroll.

by enveloping change as an ultimate process of the universe, i am free to be it as well. i no longer have to wish for it, or dream of it. i have chosen to be it, and i can be nothing else, and it has freed me.

Posted on by d

owls have different voices.

when i used to live in new mexico…

Watching and caring for the chickens and ducks obsessively has tuned me in to the slight variances in each bird’s voice and personality. I can tell whose egg is whose. I can differentiate between Roy’s morning crow and that of the neighbor’s identical bird. Our two ducks are inseparable – the gray one is loud and obstinate, the black one soft and quiet, but I can tell when one can’t find the other, and which one is more disturbed. Each of the hawks and falcons that hunt over the orchard next door have their own shrieks and preferred trees – I have always checked them, now even more so as I ask them daily to leave our chickens alone. I am maybe home too much, or I am maybe developing a deeper awareness of my surroundings. The three owls calling to each other tonight have their own breathy hoots, too, discernible by just the slightest change in pitch.

I am in prayer pose. There are a few days each month where I cease a regular, twice-daily yoga practice. They center on the new moon – I crawl into myself, aching and swollen and ripe with darkness and then, suddenly there’s a glorious release of all this and I can unfold and realign. And it’s in this beautiful, bloody state of redemption that I am in prayer pose listening to owls call back and forth.

It is a night of quiet – the wind isn’t yet blowing, the dog isn’t yet snoring (like everyone else in this house she has an active dream life). Michael has ceased chanting in the living room. I have assembled my pocketful of meditation accessories – pipe, lighter, candle, crystal, pillow and a five-year old, well-traveled chunk of palo santo, its smoke and scent a sacred eraser, its effect burned into my brain during some of the most intense and encompassing experiences I’ve ever had (so far, at least). It is these items, consistently arranged, that come out at night as I unfurl my yoga mat and face myself, seated beneath an expanse of stars.

It is silent, all of it. The wind waits with my breath. I listen to the owls acutely. God is watching this, hearing the prayers of one little human with her forehead on the floor. My tiny beseechings are puny and pathetic and god hears them anyway and sends angels to laugh at my needless desires. It is in this humbling way that I know I have been heard.

It starts with one single whine and then the coyotes kick up their chorus. It is never long enough but tonight, face down in gratitude I listen to this twilight symphony, to these wild and wily predators that see in the dark as they serenade outside my window. Interspersed with the coyotes’ yips and howls are the owls, still quietly differentiating themselves. God speaks to me with wind and tricksters and birds of prey. And it is also that god isn’t speaking to me at all – I am just here in the presence of this, and a part of it.

It is over nearly as fast as it begins. It is just enough for me to realize I’ve been provided with a map through this dark place, that I have a song of wild freedom to sing. It lasts only as long as it takes for me to realize I am giving thanks for both the experience and the ability to remember.

The coyotes slink back into the shadows as the dusky calls of the owls continue on into the night. I fall asleep to this, and the next night I fall asleep to the wind. It, too, is singing the same hoot and howl, this primitive, natural chant.

I leave the window cracked an inch. My flute, as it turns out, is propped in just such a way that the wind, given that hairline chance, will come in and play it for me. there is something about this sound, this oooooooooooo, ooooooooooooooohm, hoo hoo hoo whoooooo, like the sound of a concentrated, cleansing exhale, a sound of juiciness, pleasure and satisfaction. It is an ejaculation, an ululation, a wilderness song. A wildness song of joy and full expression in the midst of darkness, or perhaps even because of it.