sanguine meander

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.

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.

May we never hunger
and may we never thirst
may the shoes we walk in
occasionally be those of another
so that we may gain
compassion and understanding
and may we also enjoy
the unfettered joy of bare feet.

may we never mourn
without gaining strength
may we never cry
without grasping the catharsis
may our hearts never break
into too many pieces
without faith in the skilled labor
of a higher power.

may we consistently adore
the familiar and comfortable
the warm and intimate
the human and animate
may we ever explore new sensations
and add them to our repertoire.

may we make peace
love and music
may we bake cake and
may we eat it, too,
each bite a thanks for
sweetness and abundance.
may we pray, groan and sing
with the pleasures of life
may we hope, moan and dream
and may we do it
with much deep breathing
and sighing

may we play hide and seek
with freedom and win
may a long life not mean
a long list of rules
nor an air of apathy
but a glorious celebration
of our own individuality
and its place in the world,
may it be a relieving knowledge,
a book of poems and stories
read aloud by our beings.

may the bliss of our bodies
be ours to have
may our gratitude for this gift
be an understanding of
our human purpose
which we are thankful for –
a cycle of gratitude in which
the greater it gets
the greater our reverence
and the greater it gets
even still.

may we be creative,
alive and expressive,
may our lives be encouragement
may our expressions be
inspiring and inspired.

may we be blessed.
may we be thankful for this blessing.
may our humility in constant gratitude
be peaceful and gracious,
joyous and free.

amen.

“Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words “make” and “stay” become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.” – Tom Robbins

I was known for leaving in the middle of the night. It was never personal. It always had everything to do with me (no seriously). I left before I was disappointed or before attachment set in. I left in order to breathe myself back into wholeness because I hadn’t yet figured out the give and take. But I had loved, oh, had I loved, because that’s what made it so good. Sometimes they left, too – I filled their absence with something else and got used to it. I didn’t blame them for it, because I understood how genuine it could be, for a time.

I remain outlaw, to hold in highest regard and to follow by example the ultimate law. Love is both the law and the ultimate outlaw (which means, apparently, there’s not a whole lot wrong with being an outlaw, wouldn’t you think?)

Yes, I will love you for free. I will love you wildly and without limits. We will see if we can handle each other.

this was a contribution to a collection of sexy portland stories. characters marginally based on people I knew (in a Biblical sense or otherwise)…

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For our meeting I chose a bar within walking distance to my house in case I needed to get back there quickly, efficiently, and without police interference.  It started to rain as we munched on greasy bar food and I grilled my brain, trying to cook up more topics for conversation in order to avoid the uncomfortable silence that occurs during a dreadful mismatch.

I went on this, and subsequent boring dates, in hopes of calming my own ardor a little. I’d been spending time with a bass player I began touching moments after meeting him. His smell, or something, bypassed my conscious altogether; climbed right on over any pretense of shyness I might claim and announced my status as “woman in her prime”.

I loved him dearly though I believed only half of what he said and considered the rest a product of a vivid and beautiful imagination. We came together like vinegar and baking soda; whatever he said, as soon as he went down on me I ceased to care. He was kinky, too – what I got to do to him was just as arousing. I came so easily with him that I started holding back, done in by the minutes-long toe curlers that did not abate, left wet spots on the bed and me awash in hormones for days on end. The more I got and gave it like that the more I wanted it; unleashing that on one person could only serve to terrify.  Thus, what I referred to as ‘diffusion dating’ began.

In the beginning this plan mostly backfired.  My boring first date at the bar a few blocks from my house offered a ride home. I agreed, giving him a wide, toothy grin as I got out of his Subaru and ran upstairs to freshen up, then ran off to the bass player’s house.  I arrived on his doorstep around 11pm and a few hours later we fell asleep in each other’s arms. I woke up the next morning as bad off as I ever was.  Worse.

The first real, heady distraction, and the first addition to my band, came in the form of a tiny patched-up anarchist who maybe not so ironically wore dickies boxer briefs and played guitar. She was a delightfully masculine pixie of a woman; I got horny as we sat next to each other and talked in that bar just a few blocks from my house and decided to explore it the only way that made sense. I moved a little closer to her. When I saw her shake I seduced her.

At home, our sticky thighs intertwined and breasts squashed into each other. I left my underwear on simply for the (oft-repeated) visual of her little hand sliding down into them. She had hers on, too, those white dickies, but when I reached for her she moved away, sat up and, all serious, asked if she could enter me.

I gave myself up for that one. Holy genderfuck. It was physically and psychically demanding and the first time I ever ejaculated, and as the penetrated one in this particular alliance I amazed myself with the very ‘maleness’ of my response to the way we were around each other afterwards – women were too intense. I ran in terror, hurt her feelings, and moved on immediately.

Until she left town late that summer I’d see her hanging out in front of a neighborhood coffee shop smoking or playing guitar. Every once in a while I’d join her, smiling sheepishly as I got a drink and sat down.  Then I’d sit too close to her for too long and we’d begin to stare intently, mouths falling open, eventually getting to my place where she’d kneel between my legs in her white dickies. After a while I’d soak my sheets and her face and then I had to avoid her for weeks all over again.

I decided to expand the band.  I met a singer at one of the bass player’s gigs. He was ten years younger than me. We stood outside the bar and smoked a bowl, then he looked at me and sang a song about sexual tension. I felt it in my pants, and the braless tank top on a balmy summer night hid none of the rest of his effect.

I harbored just enough concern about our age difference that I asked the universe for some advice – I’d grown accustomed to the dexterity of lesbians and kinkier, older men and had a clearly-defined path to getting where I could go. Would I scare the shit out of him? Oh, blessed experience, it was up to me to get what I wanted from this one.  I undressed and presented myself to him as an instrument, capable of perfect response in the hands of a skilled musician. I showed him how to play my notes and he played them back to me, adding some of his own finesse, and I loved him for it, loved myself all the more for being okay to drive.

I’m not claiming it’s the most creative of analogies – the music and sex thing is time worn and common but clichés are that way because somewhere in their past they were actually, truly defined. For some, it is hard not to attribute the effect music has on them to the person who’s making the music itself. A musician takes a thing and makes it elicit sound.  He does this, mostly, with his hands and his lips. The instrument she plays gives hint as to where she will display grace elsewhere – stamina and ability to keep a rhythm, the way her fingers stroke the keys and pluck the strings, how the pelvis moves or the lips blow notes or the way he sings, if he starts at a whisper and ends at a deep, soul-wrenching wail…  It’s all there in the music.

My multi-instrumental fantasies included horn sections, hand percussion, maybe even a cello or a theramin player. Reality spoke a slightly less extravagant truth.  To have a good solid band I still needed a drummer, at least, or maybe a horn or two, but my plan to spread the energy amongst several wasn’t working; suddenly it seemed I had no time to myself. I wanted them all terribly, and less.

The universe and I collaborated. The singer lived in a different world I stepped into now and again, . I spent a lot of time with the bass player and stopped going to the coffee shop altogether.

“It’s okay if we’re flakes,” he told me one night as we avoided a social event.  “We’re allowed to be flakes right now.”

We stayed home and fucked a lot, snacked and watched movies in bed. Whatever it was we were doing, it was fun and comfortable and undefined. When the word “love” did enter the picture it was in the same sentence as “jumping off a precipice”.

Happy doom, one or both of us secretly invoked it – bittersweet love never went out of style for storytellers.  It was romantic and kept us nailed to the present, ever aware that both of us had things that were more important to us than each other, but the love was nonetheless bliss. It was unsustainable if it went by anyone else’s definition but ours.  It was also a lot of body fluids and steamy afternoon quickies.   Oh, sweet edge, how I clung to it.

Eventually I got tired. I begged more assistance from the universe and awaited response. The bass player went on tour. Then the singer did.  I returned to the coffee shop thinking maybe a few guitar riffs might do me some good but she’d found someone new, someone who was less of an asshole.

I started to feel alone in the middle of a bunch of people I knew, packed up the truck and left town for a while. I headed south toward the sunshine, wondering what Austin , Texas might be like. I knew a singer there…