Sunday Morning Ball

A spearminty Sunday early morning. I awake with sad songs on the clock radio and a bounce in the air. I am torn up bodily by softball dives and slides on gravelly ground and apply salve and apply bandages to the most tender places. I am hungry and ready to run and swing and whoop, and maybe win a championship, maybe not. There will be a cookout in the high sun of late morning, the celebration of a season with a new group of guys, guys I've come to like, goofy and competitive, fiery and fiesty and ready to laugh at themselves. They love music and the cousinhood of jam shows, which reveals itself in the dugout and in encouragement on the field. I am not juiced enough with sleep, but I'm rested and ready to breathe the cool, squint into the blue gold sun, win a game in the morning, eat some grilled food, and then figure things out, maybe walk up high again, maybe just read, maybe just write, maybe just trace the big circle.

Hiding on the Desert

I find myself on a dirt hill filled with burred desert weeds that scratch and tickle, looking to a mellow gold sun splattering light against a wide arc of thin clouds going vaguely lavender. High summer has the desert on a day with no storms, the softening of evening massaging my exposed skin, an invitation to sit and sip at lemonade, talk softly in the wind, keep eyes on the west as the sun melts into the low volcanoes. It is now, in this ease and spent, that I don't know anything, or anyone. The fast running thoughts of days are done, and I see pictures of things that spoke, heavy raindrops plunking leaves in a cool charcoal sodium light after a hailstorm and a dharma talk about freedom, of slipping out an upstairs window in the dark and floating among the oak trees in my childhood backyard, of walking tall in the dark talus under the pyramids of the high peaks surrounded by echoes of old times in other lives, of Liverpool streets wet and shining in a sliver of white sun before dusk and the feel of a tight blue suit and black leather boots. And I'm queasy from big bites of untouchable sun and drunk from too much motion and the gulf between me and community. Hiding on the desert, in the open in a low slung matchbox of pumice and coffee mud, silent on the green concrete floor, waiting for a knock, a ring, a calling voice, but shooing such notions away with a middle that flutters for fear of exposure, of reckoning, of spilling from its casing. What do we do with these lives? What is the promise in the wind that allows a breath so sweet and gives a caress so disarming that to die doesn't seem an ending but a float in a canoe on a calm lake? I'm asking questions and I don't need answers. I'm wading and when I walk outside and take in the desert with my eyes, the mountains in my groin, I lick the land and it seems small, moving from all directions to a single point. It is the saddest thing I've ever felt, the vastness, and the inverse. It comes on as love, cushioning and enlivening, telling me in whispers that it's already over, two seasons ahead, buried under snow. And I think maybe this is all I have to tell, sing-songy on the inside, wanting to cry, wanting to be devastated by beauty, to speak in a long language, loopy and hoarse with an endless acoustic guitar strumming in the background, laying everybody low. It is a song that I hear, that I feel, I tremble with it, and it has bits and pieces in it, fragments of blood and the call of the late night, which I know to be another call misinterpreted, a wild horn from the valley. I have walked (and run) with people and spirits, gaining streets and finding sunrises, looking and talking and telling truths that fade with the sea sickness of the day, and seem preposterous, or merely unreachable...until the summer evening, high desert wind, the heat turned to a lover with smooth, cool skin, skin to rub against, skin to dream on.

Breathing Notes of Summer

The moon is a walrus whisker tonight, but light enough to give its round bulk illumination. Clouds in the late dusk take on smokestack puffs and black billows against the ringing dark blue above. This day had a streak to it, and endless motion, a bicycle pedal in circles. It is ending with a chunk of chocolate, my reward for meeting myself in the parking lot outside the Magistrate Court, and shaking my hand, apologizing from my still heart for my barking and serrated words, my slip in the mud. It felt like a bubble, a floating piece of myself liberated, leaving the rest of me airy, spacious, ready to keep moving without muscle flexes or jaw clenches. This day had rhythm, bit, bat, bijat, dat, dat, dat-tat-tat, bijat. Symbols in the sounds of wings when I stopped at a red light near the rodeo grounds. Looked like a redtail hawk streaking off toward the wonder of deep grass between town and the ridge of Blueberry Hill. Maybe it's harder to see the prey with the grass so high? But I see the arcs up there, the seeing, the scouting. They see me when I'm up high, circling my arms, trying to summon notes from my belly to see what they are, let them see who I am, hear them, be them, and release them to the ravens to take to the other side. Today there were smiles. Today there were cute old people, a little hunched, carrying things, but squinting bemusedly in the sun. Today they had things, to sell, to trade, to show in rows on blankets. And it is summer tonight, the bugs, though, staying silent, not done with the smoke after dinner, the nap after sex, the sucking on the green stalks that may never taste like this again. A map says that this place is brown and rocky, rugged like Mongolia, and yet the grasses of shangri la sway with crickets that crawl up through your drains and greet you in the morning shower with a hop and lick of their limbs. They do this with alacrity, and unlikely calm, with a studied crook of the leg, a veteran's poise. Venerable are these grasshoppers, hard kneed and agile, but in a way that strikes of age, of sage days talking to spiders and yippity rabbits, wiggling centipedes and tittering young birds, bloody worms and prairie dogs. Tonight all is quiet, no cicadas or meadow larks, or even magpies with their sing-song derision. It is easy, easy, dark with no breeze, promise of 29 days of moon cycle, at the end of which all may be different, all may be transformed into the high praise of the corn days, the pale blue of the ocean sky a thousand miles west, the sting of salt from sweat in the eyes of a hiker nearing the peaks, beating a thunderstorm up the slope, smelling the end. Already? A season ahead we live, maybe two, and where will we be then? It is ok to be in the quiet, only 3 days into summer, nothing to hold onto, nothing to shed. I can always smell winter and the bones of large animals, but the stew can wait, and I look forward to sleep and that walking I do, out and out into the boundaries, floating along the prickled ground, searching for the notes I keep breathing out.

From Chocolate to Family to Children to Change: A writing practice

Because I don't want to, I am doing a writing practice. Right here, right now, or Write here, Write now! I must keep typing without stopping for 30 minutes. I can type slowly if I need to, but no corrections, no going back and deleting to be literary, hip, cool, smooth, smart, brilliant, rollicking, ballsy, irreverent, fearless, unfathomable, deep, and lustrous. Nope. And here I go, nowhere yet, not sure where to head. Writing practice, writing practice. An empty page (so to speak), and empty vessel. Hmmmmm, chocolate, 70% cacao, is in me, moving through, having passed the pleasure centers of the tongue, drifting choco smoke up into my sinuses and tingling my brain into a sense that I am both ok and wanting, into a slide, silky glide of my own milkiness, my own sense of slither, come hither, the nostrils flared for the soak of the sage outside, turning the desert to apples and mint. It is raining again, unexpected, but a fetch of clouds has swung low over the Mesa, dipping into the canyon above the river, threatening to unite with its kind down in the bottom, water to water, dust to dust, the insects hide in the rocks, waiting for the drips to clear the cups of the flowers that cannot stop opening wide, priapic, triumphant, Ella fucking Fitzgerald, A bald tenor, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Raindrops keep Falling on my Head, it ain't gonna stop, the deluge, the monsoon, big words for muddy roads, but not like in the lower elevations, not tropical but cool, the water shining with a bit of dark blue, a bit of lead waiting for the last rays of the sun to poke through the suddenly lifted edge of the western skin of sky. It's rose fest of cacti, delectable, edible, put in your salad dark red lusciousness, and sexy magenta of a woman just coming of age, just knowing how to sway, to take in a look, and to brandish and lavish. Soft dirt and clay, turning to pudding, years in the waiting, the one time these shapes take hold and horses have a hard time treading the land. But leaden drops calm the hooves, and we play volleyball with bouncing bellies in the bottomlands under the slopes, next to rotting cars with grass peering in the empty windows, and lost dogs tongues waving, smiling, dripping with hunger, stand close to our rippling legs, a low growl, a high whine, and nothing to grasp. It smells so good and we don't care about the drops, the lightning stinging the black volcanoes, the thunder ruffling our thighs, making us want ribs, chicken legs, meats of some sort although we have only heaps of greens and berries, and beer. It is the time of high light and it won't leave us hanging, blueberry skies mixed with the aquamarine of lost-at-sea youth, a color that used to cause creeping sadness at the thought of dinner when in the woods with smudge faced friends figuring out how to eat snails, and light the woods on fire. And it stays with us, giving us a chance, after romance, after the toilet bowl has emptied, after the early dreams have been composted and reshuffled, after the old songs have finally lost their meaning. There is still a chance. We remember bits and slices of times with family, around tables, food spilling over, bickering in the kitchen, hugs in the den, puking in the bathrooms. It is sepia toned as we might expect, doesn't matter if now or in the sepia past, past is sepia, the color of the astral floor, the color of blended muteness, the corroboration of your brothers, and sisters, and mothers, and fathers, and cute cousins, and the strange revelations you knew as a kid, among the elders, hiding in guilelessness, but listening and knowing you've been witness to the Titanic, and the Brooklyn Dodgers winning the World Series, and Man walking on the moon, and the terrible quicksand of the family legacy. Or maybe not quicksand, sometimes the blue-flame of life risen up in everybody, when remembering that their past is built on crenelated lives, hollowed from fullness, splinte3ed from their boughs, but they had heft, and they sprung, and spanked and spelunked through the caves for all of us. And we're doing that now. Me, on the desert, looking out at popping sage, so green it wants to be blue, battling my energies, trudging through late nights to get back to early mornings, feeling sadnesses born of my addicted cells, knowing that I can get back into the soft (yet firm) bed and arise christened new, bells bopping, words flying, breathing my bellybutton alive again. Seeing myself a child in the flower's faces. Seeing myself aloft in the cheeks of the people, pinched, reddish, like dolls, from the other night, tromping from place to place, desert to town, to houses filled with murals and the scent of sandalwood in the bathrooms, having fun, not ready to pay the price of tomorrow, never tomorrow, never tomorrow. And, hey, how did the dawn get away with the day....last night's always getting in my way - lyrics from a friend's song. Sometimes true. And yet dusk is hanging on through this clack, clack, and I hear the soft spilling of rain on my roof. Ravens, getting more plump with the bounty of wetness, shaking off the spatter, smiling and roiling around on the cliffs. People in tatters waqlking down the road, one-by-one, sometimes in gaggles, in groups, in trios, looking sad but found, blind and bobbling, but unboggled. Unimpeded, they keep moving toward the hot springs where they may find some warmth in the chilled rain. children of this earth, old time London backstreets urchins finding flowers to put in their hair,a nd to play drums to the weary, and wary, because they still have time, and time has them, and the world just may turn enough toward the sun that we'll all dry off with them. Music comes to me across the mesa, a sound of flutes and electric guitars, of fiddles and kettle drums, and the rain pounds harder now.

Storms and Roses

First the storms, then the blooms. I'm just out of a weeklong Zen meditation and writing retreat. It's part of an "intensive" that lasts for the full year. These were taken during the week either at/near my house on the high Mesa or on the Devisadero trail in the hills behind Taos. It has been rainy and cool since mid May often with stormy skies and fat, cold drops of rain. The rivers are running high and although the seemingly abundant snowpack melted off quickly (due, we're told, to a high dust content caused by the windstorms of early spring which settled in the snow and absorbed the heat of the sun, liquifying the snow), the above normal rains have made up for it. Apparently, the Rio Grande, which supplies water to Arizona and Texas under water rights transfer deals entered into in the 70s and 80s (boo), does not have to be curtailed (through opening and closing dams) this year to supply the full allotment. This is good news for irrigators/farmers along the Rio Grande and its tributaries (and acequias) in southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico who will also get a full allotment. Since I've lived in the Taos Valley, we have had at least normal or above normal moisture (following 5 years of extrem drought), which feels sweet. Normal for this high desert ringed by 13,000' peaks, is 12 inches. Some years we've had close to 15". The Taos Ski Valley receives about 300" of snow in a normal year (with approximately 60-70" where I live at 7,091'). In contrast, New York City averages 42" of rain per year, South Florida around 65", Seattle approximately 40" (less than NYC, yes, but it drizzles more there), parts of the Oregon and Washington (and California) coasts, approximately 70". Somehow, it all works.

And can you believe the vivacity of these cactus flowers?! Crazy.

From Fight to Flight

I'm ready to fight today. I'm a confused wolverine baring my teeth. I speak calmly, but I'm tired, not a sleep deprived tired, a mutant's tired, the exhaustion from having left myself and returned to a desolate, foreign, too bright place. And the mutant wants out. Me mutant hears false provocations and cannot make camp. He is impatient and hopeless; he is worried that there is nothing, no reason, no purpose, just random emotions. And yet my mutant's ego is strong; it obliterates everything but the light of morning. If I can write this, I think, there is still some light at the bottom of the barrel and the mutation can be dissolved (transmuted?). I am sitting and I am writing. I am expanding in the face of popping balloons. I have been crowded out for a while, pushed to the edge of the bed. And even as I write this, I am still close to the edge, my heart beats too fast, my belly clenches enough to weaken my legs, and my ego is dug in, defiant, making love to the mutant. It refuses definition or the notion that practice, consistent practice, is good for me. It bristles at its machinations being called addiction. It says it's all a big conspiracy theory. It defends its turf. It says I can drink and trip and snort cocaine in the quest for experience. Who could deny that who is not a loser, a wussy, a prude, a killjoy? It carves out spaces for me and even, I think, it is looking out for me, being a matchmaker, keeping me from being the lean loner on the desert. It's also spending all my money and losing my possessions. And who is the one who is hopeless? Who is the one thinking it's too late, it's no use? Who is the one worried about dying? Is that the ego, too? Is that part of the trap? I hear myself saying "don't you want magic? Don't you want to be able to dive through your navel into nothingness?" You're addicted to ecstasy (not the drug) and you don't know it. You'd trade a 7 year process of transformation for a 3-day concert filled with ionized air and one dance with the dark skinned girl in the short denim skirt with the green eyes lit by the setting sun and your seduction - the dance where you lose yourself, that crystal-clinking tingling in your groin rising up your heated abdomen and reaching your eyes where you now know she knows and although you probably won't say anything or do anything, you know you could, in that place that feels like the high mountains above treeline and smells like pine sap and sulfur and lands you in a painting with her on the mossy edge of a dark lake under a soaring granite ledge, your warmth all in your skin, the touching and clinging and clawed ass grabbing; it's a dream, the same dream it's always been. And she's there with you (you think, but does it matter?), this person you see at the three-day concert, between angled red rocks, 100 yards above the stage at the birthing of this gap, with the band in a runaway trance of twisting base and waving guitar, drumbeats picking out individual ribs, surrounded by 10,000 bobbing heads with open mouths, and, closer, by old friends and concert buddies swaying through their own fields of understanding, looking like family, reaching out for you both when they think you're lost, knowing it, too, and not judging but still pulling you back from the high mountain lake where you'll always make love, to make sure you don't because that girl's boyfriend is coming back from the beer stand. And as you come back, before you smile at each other like Adam and Eve, before the clank of the sound comes back as if someone opened the hatch of an airplane, you swim with her in that lake and you know you've known something larger, something you might remember on your deathbed. And then the boyfriend's there; he's new to the scene and he gives you his beer to sip. He's tripping, too, gleamy and amazed, a joyous stretch of flesh and bone, a jumping bean of kindness, and although the music is now loud and your ears have popped and you feel your bare feet sticking to the beer soaked blue tarp, you are in love, not with the girl, or the boyfriend, but with the organism, the whole undulating mass of people, the bats above against the indigo sky, the holy red hulks of rock pointing west, the blue lit city of Denver like Oz 30 miles northeast, and your round-eyed friends passing you a bag of Molly grabbing the meat of your shoulder, slapping your palms - you have made it here, you have made it, you are part of the organism and it loves itself into one piece, and you are nothing but the current that runs through it. Do you understand that place? Is it worth the week it takes to settle back into your body and function in time? Tell me.

6 Days

The past 6 days have been spent with friends, nearby, far away, some new, some old family, some grounding and being grounded. Kid energy, emergent, smooth, an inhabiting of self beginning to occur. There was a pinch of worry and a dollop of woe, a cleaving of the center, a heaving before the ocean went warm and glassy, a snorting from the top before the belly rounded. Some vanity before that storm faded east and left a scrubbed knowing like the desert becoming itself again after the wind. The field of possibility extended in good food, abundance rubbing off on me in loaves of bread, sun-dried tomato paste, an Italian accent full of bounce and circles, stinging grappa and lemon tart, a clean floor and emptied sink, the closed-eyed laughter of a sexy elf watching irises nod in a hail storm. There was a long hike in the rain down in the bottom of the gorge where the river overflowed into the hot spring pools, but not with menace, and not enough to deter two magic tadpoles with freckled legs who talk to faeries and nature divas and remember the river as a bubbling brother. Paintings of mallet-breasted women mixed with the spring and stir of basketball and the popeyed swirl of good whiskey. In the looking back, there is a whole circle. Mixed, mixed, mate and some coffee, deep, bitter greens and plum extract, lean red meat topped with silky mozzarella and long fried onions flecked with torn basil leaves, grilled zuchini and cob corn popping on your canines, slow swallows of quiet water at room temperature then a margarita soothed with a woven basket full of fresh limes. To bed before 11pm after a day of swimming and pine nut tea, the eyes of the children, green and indigo streaked with dusk sky and old tears, dotted around the irises with the points of sundials. 6 days is a long journey, to the peak of Chomolungma and the jungles of Laos, from my Lost China Sea filled with collapsing waves, to the cool, grassy valley of late spring where my masks are off, my clothing optional, my journey ended, again, where it always begins.