here in this now

on the edge of beginning to re-enter the world in a new way--an old way--a way from the somewhere in the sometime of once upon it.  i am here now.  i am here in this now looking at the universe beyond this window of words appearing as i type them--as i let them travel down my arms to my fingers poking at keys.  i have a keyboard again--a whole keyboard separated from a screen doing its thing there in that space and place where whatever comes into being comes.  i am here now.  i am here, clean butt in clean underwear on one of two chairs that still live here in this house.  i am leaving this house that is not a house.  i am leaving it.  when? under what circumstances? shall i wait for the authorities? just to see the eyes of my former friend as she looks pathetically in my direction? doing what she thinks she must? to make me, my ideas, my friends, my experience, my stuff, my willingness go away? i am here.  it is 4:49 a.m..  i am here and hoping for something...what is it? peace??? when one must leave, and one gets in one's car or on one's horse or even heads off into whatever landscape they imagine with their nap sack on their back--ohhhhhhhhhh--that's it.  i shall make myself a nap sack.  i shall head off into the sunset with a nap sack.  what are those made of??? sticks and handkerchiefs? a sandwich? what else??? here in this now, i am full of the fantasies of what will come when something does.  i am here in the moment of this unfolding now thinking about things that think themselves into being.  i am here, wording the way forward, where there is not one? where there is no thing but this thing in this life--this up early ness that manifests in words on a virtual screen that may never ever be printed on any single bit of former tree.  i am here.  i am writing.  i am here.  i am stringing the beads of words--one single letter at a time.  i am here with the san francisco cups for coffee and the expresso thing he gave me--lit by the glow of the big screen for this computer life he has invited me to live.  i am alive in connectivity.  i re-enter the space of work in the world.  i look at the burning tool that i've been using to etch my hearts into wood--smelling the stuff of burning--ever smelling the stuff of burning.  i am in the foundry.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, the found dry.  i am here in this place of what can become of this moment in this way of finding something--light and shadow? play? courage? water? wisdom? sunlight bouncing off the silver that made the waves of water on the big wall back when magick lived here.  strange, the magick.  seeing one's self in the seeing of one's self i find the scene of seen.  i hear the words of now.  i write them down.  they are only words, after all.  they are only the things that come out of the ends of the fingertips doing what they do to come out of the ends of the fingertips.  tipping the scales, i suppose.  words do that in their time.  they tip the scales of something--life? balance? balance over time? i am off to the hills that look like the hill i used to be entrusted with...forever shirking all that has been bestowed upon me, and never, it seems, knowing when to leave.  i stay too long in things.  i stay too long.  now, i am approaching the end of my stay, here, at the end of this space and place in time.  there is always the coming and going from things to things, spaces to spaces, places to places, story to story.  there is a public face and an unmasked place.  there is a world to word.  it shows up in the writing first--when i remember to show up.  here, it is, i am.  showing up, it seems.  5:am.  is there time for another dream???

three sentences that are not sentences...

It was one of those perfect nights.  My soul had decided I would be in the room—not knowing, as I often don’t, where the room was exactly.  There is something perfect, for my spirit, about entering the flow of joy and following it as it moves me along.  There is something wholly alive about living the the moments of perfectly taken care of in that way.  I am here now.  I am here in the hearing of this clearing and I am writing.  My fingers are doing their magic.  I am asking for something—for the bump and groove of the sand to trip its way westward and for me to wake up in my above the ground way of knowing, this, too, will yield its spicy delight as some time in tune with weather.  What am I writing now? Just writing.  Writing in the written sound of sounding out the courage filling its fulfilled places—here and now am i.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, what wants to be written is so hungry now for the eyes of the page.  Blogging ever onward, a life lives itself out in rhyme.  Perhaps.  Time.  Perhaps.  Miles of courage order themselves one sweet letter at a time.  I am here now, in this hearing.  I am here now, in this clearing.  There is cleansing, still, and always, to do.  There is something in the somewhere of what has come and gone before the here and now of this moment.  I am here.  I am here.  I am here.  Here in the hearing heard of what is always and only life living itself out in fingers reaching for keys--------oh.  Tell me a truth I don’t already know? I am a sham ashamed of something? What? What.  This life lives its quiet desperation out of longing—whole enormities of longing—and inside that, there is just this one thing.  One thing whispers on one sound of one story in one mind of this beginning.  Beginning here.  I am here, beginning.  What is the here and now hour of this song? Psalming itself out of time? Out of quiet tribes of wilderness longing toward wholeness? What? Courage? Is this? in this night? Of rainy day? I am here.  I must put the laundry in.  I must find the quarters.  I must take the next right step on the wider path of what is possible in possibility.  Why does she say there is peace in me now? When I am most afraid? Of what ground will make itself? Soon, there must be palo alto dreams of where to set up my things.  Things. Things.  How to start clean of things?

We begin wherever we do down the long hallway of truth seeking.  Here in this hour of now, the world begins its turning over again—and I become all that I become in this wisdom.

Love loves me.  This is precious treasure.  I am still here and alive.  This is gratitude overwhelming me.

Life.

Does

Indeed.

Go on.

spinning missing vulture

somewhere to write the words--that think themselves out loud when in the activity of moving the fingers across the keyboard--its a kind of truth serum, i suspect.  its a kind of wording of words that order themselves when the opportunity is made--when the intention is set for them to come.  i am here now.  i am here in this hearing and clearing saying what there is to be said.  i didn't know--didn't realize the real lies i was living.  so many still to fall away.  i am learning to tell the uncomfortable truths.  i am learning not to hide or apologize or pretend or take back any of the things said in anger--as they are finally said when the anger gets to live itself out.  like fire.  fire.  can you imagine telling a little fire to stay little--when it knows it is supposed to grow up and be a forest fire? to clear the landscape? to re-fertilize the earth? can you imagine, if that little fire was turned into a plastic candle? with a fake light? how did all the light in the world get to be fake light? what is this thing caging electricity has done to us all? do you remember when we had to protect the fire? to carry it with us from place to place inside a glass hurricane, sure it would live between us all the day long as we brought our spirits to the room of our togetherness and let loose all that would come unglued? why is it we glue down the most precious bits of ourselves? keep them carefully tucked away? oh, yes--so the ones who can't see won't.  and the ones who can see and would steal what is beautiful and make it dirty, lonely, ugly, bad, wrong, won't get the chance.  we keep what is beautiful.  we keep it tucked in forests and hiding in caves and buried deep in the darkest earth.  we keep what is beautiful in storehouses of locked away.  we keep what is treasured in chests so heavily laden with armor and locks and keys that the keys have all lost their way to the locks that unlock the treasures so buried inside the coffins of unbreatheable that live all the way away from what is whole and good in a living life.  i am here, in my living life.  i am here in my fashioned living room.  i am here, looking at all i have been a party to creating--things on a shelf, stuff in a jar, storehouses of wine and possibility, courage, loss, lost.  i am here.  on the precipice of now.  having witnessed, in my way, the changing of the guard, the passing of an era, the letting go of that which has let go of this life.  i am choosing my hallways carefully now--as that is where all the living is--the hallways of coming and going from destination to destination, chair to chair, futon to futon, life to life.  art to life to work to life to train to life to corridor and hallway of happenstance connection to holding chamber of teeth and tongue--if i commit to a schedule of performances at open mics around the bay will i be famous in a year? will i be a hack? hackneyed or hockneyed or lockneed or lock jawed or lonely? will i be lonely? if i let myself be alone? whitney took the pills and drank the booze and let herself slip into oblivion.  it is such an interesting slip, is it not? i am interested in tongues and slipping and the accidental honesties they tell alongside lies.  i can not find my vulture.  our vulture is missing.  was safe in the freezer and now gone.  i have interrogated the interrogatable--the one mind spinning in the mind spinning place of the up up stairs.  i am ready for that mind to leave.  it must take its body with it.  i want my vulture back.  i eat the pomegranate seeds covered in dark chocolate from trader joe's.  i prepare for my many meetings that take place this day.  i begin at my beginning to begin again at reclaiming my life, my things, my space, my stories, my work.  mine, mine, mine, mine, mine.  mine.  it is a mine--this life.  i am still and always descended from miners working the coal in newcastle digging up the first dark stuff of the earth.  coal lead to diamonds and diamonds to oil--but there is salt in there, too, isn't there.  there is always salt in the wounds of the earth.  can you feel it? taste it? perhaps it is time, again, to pay a visit to the sea.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, where is this life taking me? a boat, i think--my queendom for a boat and a moat and a castle when i want it and a draw bridge i can draw--follow directions--every day i write my book.

and here it is today again.

working it out: the presence of absence

here we are in the middle of this space and place of possibility--working out the willingness to do and not do what can be done and not done in this undone of doable what? i am thinking of daniel goldstein's sculptures and the presence of absence he talks about and the surrounding halo of medicine bottles and lumped glass and string and the architectural element of the grate or gird or grid that allows all the places that hang down to hang down and i begin at this beginning to wonder what happens in the happening bits.  what is this space and place of wonder? what is this hour of now? what is this courage? courageous? what is this real of real realing its reel of time--wound up in strings--casting into the endlessness of rivers not yet crossed--what can come of this? thisness? what can come of this place and way of waves? what can come of this coming? and going? what can be here in the now of this container that contains what? precious heart. pumping heart. bloody heart. inhale and exhale of breath.  wider dream.  worldfilled thing of things that thing themselves into being things that attempt what is human? is human any attempt at being it? is human the animal of itself? is human the component parts of itself? is there more compassion in a human once a pig's heart has replaced the broken pump of the human one? is there love? in this space? of trying? working? moving? dreaming? thinking into the feeling of something? love? wonder? life? intimidating life? feeling life? real life? reeling life? what is this place of thisness? what is this journey? what is this safety? what is this place? what is this courage? what is this courageousness? what is this hour of now unfolding across minutes and seconds of time in the mystery of what can not be mysterious in the something of spoken light.  in the unspoken shadows, there is still a place to stock and store the dream.  in the spoken light, there is exposure, visibility, seeing things that can be seen.  is this the way of it, then? is this the here and now of it? is this the wilderness of what was wild? is this the thing? that things itself? onto? into? courage? i am here, now, where i have always been.  i am here.  in this here there is the wilderness and wondrousness of love.  it is all and only love.  but it doesn't always feel like it.  the presence of absence...the absence of presence...the willing forgetfulness of what was once whatever it was that was what it was when it was what it was.  here is the now of it.  hearing itself speak up for itself in its own space of what lives.  here.  what lives here lives.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, so that is it.  what lives here lives.

this, too, is alive.  still.  in the now of this hour.  in the space of this time.

i wake up

i am looking, looking.  i am writing, righting.  i am reading, reading.  here in this now, i am awake.  it is thursday.  it is quiet.  there is nothing going on but the rent? songs, forever spinning in my head from all of their playing on the radios of the past.  i don't have them now.  does anyone? internet radio stations while i read.  spotify, telling my facebook friends what i'm listening to...old cds...just one wine box kind of half full of music i bought in my lifetime before this one.  i hae been so lucky to live so many lifetimes.  it is hard to tell all their stories--hard to notice all the places where the places are--and then, not so much.  it is not so very hard.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh--a lost thing that wrote itself as fluid as water, gone to the switching between e-mail addresses and letting the world go the way it does in the gone of it all.  the gone of it all.  i am here now--after all the beauty of that flow having flown away.  isn't that the thing about flight? there is always the air to escape into--to fly out of sight with.  this is the way of that post--to have gone where it has gone as gone.  and now, i am not there anymore.  i am here.  i am here in the loss of that thing.

so fast, it happens.

she is helping someone die for money.  a dying woman is paying her to be with her until she stops breathing.  she is paying her to make her laugh, to see to her comfort, to feed her ice chips, to start and stop the flow of visitors, to allow for rest, to be present with her presence while she is still present.  it is the work of every priestess--to attend life.  to attend to the life of the living while the living are alive--and then to clear away the death, as fast as it must find a new place to go.  death lives in the air? but dies in the ground? is this how it works? or the water?

i consider.  i hang the garment brought as offering to me outside on the hangar of the altared book.  this woman's spirit--where will it go when it exits the body container? the body container? the body temple? the holy body of extraordinary life that lives itself out in story and mindset and mythology and reads itself wise in books and tells itself out in story and dances its way into air and beauty to the beat of a holy song.  collaboration is like this.  collaboration.  singing, dancing, storytelling, talking, being together in the together of being, making a mess of what can be made a mess of...art making. 

life continues the continuance of continuing.  it goes on.  stuff flows from natural fibers to makers hands to ships to ports to trucks to stores to sales to homes to garbage bags to trucks to goodwill to dumps to landfill to natural fibers of whatever grows in plastic from plastic.  what are the plastic trees ever going to give fruit to???  oh, yes, plastic fruit.  i am almost away from the things that have never been alive as anything but oil in the deepest ground.  when you take her wetness from her, she creaks about--bones and such.  life.  life.  life.  life is the most extraordinary thing--all green and unfolding, blowing in the winds of rain and wind.  i consider the air that has not been moving much except for the open door.  i consider the ways of this floor. i consider the space of making--the art of things re-thinging themselves in movement.  i consider flow.

flow.

flowing endlessly on. 

a kind of movement in the motionless space of here and now in sedentary time.  i am here and now in sedentary time.  it is sweet. 

good morning.

first sip

life is facebook for me--more and more.  more and more it is looking online to relate to people who are not in my intimate, physical reality--because there is not one.  and then, there is.  there is the coffee.  it is hot.  it has to be made or warmed up.  it  steams.  it lives in the cup offered by a dear one--the big purple cup with the black cat on it that had a plant in it when she gave it to me, that lives, if it still lives, outside.  outside is life.  outside is the wind and the palm tree and the rain.  i have installed myself on the gifted futon and look outside--rather than braving it.  i have been in for three days? since friday? leaving just to welcome my friend, venture with her for trader joe's party supplies, and then out once more for the friend and her love that came to the selfish portrait door.  yesterday, i stayed sealed inside this space and the front door never opened--not even for guapo.  when i am here--sitting in the space, i can see what there is to see of it and in it.  i can look at this long room.  i can watch it expand and contract with the bodies that come and go through it.  i can feel the stuck places and the piles of excess.  i can be in the stagnant chi, the still water, the undead of what is gone.  i think about staying in the stuck--and then i know, when i stay long enough something can grow.  i can root in a different way.  i can branch and leaf.  i can burn the drawing into the wood with the tool that makes everything smell a sweet kinship with not yet fire.  i am not yet fire.  the immolation fantasies i have have not been earned.  i am not ready--the decay has not set in.  i am not dead or undead or zombie like or shutting down or jumping off or any of those other sweet fantasies of flying, transforming, truly changing form.  i am not a caterpillar.  this is not my cocoon.  this is my blue bathrobe--a gift from my best friend for 30 years--32 years??? who finally allowed the his and hers fantasy of an unforgettable trip to the past--maybe even the future--but not the here and now.  here and now, the gift of leather jacket lays casually across the top of gifted dresser above the painting--one of the first--bought and then gifted back from a supportive friend.  the painting is tjombe's--my first artist--my first plane parking gay man who wanted to be an artist who whispered to me over drinks one night in such a way that my soul could hear what his soul was saying and i hissed back at him with my forked tongue, quit your job and do it--and he did.  i am always hissing back to the dreamers--quit your job and do it--and sometimes, the happiest ones, the most miserable ones, the truest ones, the most real ones--they do.  and they live.  and their life becomes their life.  and they grow up to paint the portraits of demi moore's kids--or at least that's what happened to the first one--there--in los angeles--sending tulips to my wedding.  there.  he is a story i have earned.  but me??? i long toward the life i have actualized, given to me by so many people who believed me when i said this is what i wanted, and i iterate so slowly--ever so slowly toward the actualization of my dreams--and then i realize i'm doing it again.  i'm taking away the accomplishments of actually having changed my life from a life where i could not recognize myself as me to a life where i am only and totally myself.  i play at cutting myself open in some sort of literal way so i can know the experience--and the knife is not sharp enough, so i try to sharpen it--so i can know the meaning of the words i use in some kind of actual way--so the actualization can take the power out of the metaphor.  i am unsuccessful.  i don't want to work that hard.  i want, instead, to take to the sword of word--the words of swords--to type them out in single letters strung together without spaces and pauses and breath.  i want to get all of the words out of me.  i want to speak them all into silence--but to know they have passed through my body while i was here in the speaking place--while i was here, co-mingling with the water before the part that is me gets shoved down under the part that gets to enter the desirous mouth of the drinker.  ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, the desirous mouth of the drinker.  drinking is going away for me.  i will always be a good one--but i am choosing water, coffee, soft drinks, juice--concoctions still--but not as many cocktails.  they have had their way with me.  again. it is time to turn toward the awakenings that come from some other substance--like breath? maybe? sounds? maybe? i hear the train in the distance of the not too distant place.  i notice what i am noticing.  i begin to consider.  yesterday, i made the offer of bringing back the press--to publish an anthology on a topic dear to a new friend.  am i learning discernment yet? i consider. i consider.  here is the now of this moment.  crossroads.  spinning.  spiders in the container garden by the upstairs window.  i am here, now, hearing my fingers type.  i am here, now, hearing the water go on in another unit.  i am here, now, breathing. i can hear myself breathing.  i like the feeling of breathing again.  i like knowing the air is still willing to travel way down in there--way down to the place where breath goes when it gets to come all the way in to a body.  i have been so stingy with my invitation for the breath.  i have been so shallow--letting it come in, only so far.  what is it about the pleasure--the deep, real pleasure of breath, that i have been denying my body? my spirit? my frame? what are the colors of these words? the taste? the sound? the smell? the feeling???? are they tender yet? it is my first sip of the new moon morning and i am alive again.  and i want a real job.  and today, it will be breathing.

waking up

it's gray, again, from the inside of the labyrinth.  there is different weather outside the maze.  i am here in the heart of it, though, and happy for the space of having been met--having co created some kind of space for self and others in the salon idea of last night.  we've taken a turn toward the art making.  each time someone comes i offer more of the bounty that has been bestowed here.  it gets to go home with people.  it is too much, maybe--the not clinging to the stuff of all the stuff that has been imparted.  it goes endlessly on in the flowing river of stuff traveling on toward stuff that lives in the cubbies and closets of spaces and places crammed full of stuff.  i still have so much.  i keep trying to give it all away.  i keep trying to let it all go.  what is it to let it all go? i wonder? stuff.  i got to cast a mask yesterday--and send home a book and give away some supplies that felt right for this one.  i gave away paints that had been given and shells and beads and medalions and pendants--that's the thing about working in recycled materials--there is always an abundance of other people's excess given--because YOU might do something with it--might share it--might make it possible for other people to use this thing that wanted to be possessed--to be lived with--to be held on the shelf for decades--still wrapped in its plastic wrapper indicating its newness.  new.  new.  what is the coveted state of new? what is the pristine, unused state of still fresh from the factory--still sealed in the plastic--still preserved under glass? what is this constant state of coffin that everything seems presented in? what of the unruly future--thrown into garbage bags and left by the side of the road in the rain for the goodwill trucks, just like the garbage ones, to come along and collect what can be collected for the sorting and storage of others.  i live down the street from a great good will hub.  i am wearing the first shoes of my PhD journey that have been offered as gift--that i didn't buy from the good will.  good will.  good will.  what is that exactly? i live catecorner from the white elephant sale--and every year, the good women of the oakland museum board, have their best used stuff shlepped to this part of oakland they might not otherwise go to, and invite all their friends, and offer their things to the bargain buying others to raise money for the museum.  this is a beautiful oakland tradition.  a grand expression of excess and opulence going toward a good cause.  we've just passed the good cause season.  i'm still stepping over homeless people in the rain on the street when i come up from under the ground at civic center in san francisco.  i walk to my groovy school--past the new construction for yet another magnificent building--past the tourist busses filling and emptying and filling and emptying each week with a new group of lookeyloos making it to the mecca of san francisco.  it is mecca for some people--some people kicked out of their well meaning, holy homes with no where to go but the castro--from wherever they happened to be born.  we used to work with these kids--no--play with these kids--homeless kids who gathered at the lgbt center to free their minds.  and we'd show up with plaster and gauze and bandage them up and birth their new faces and watch them paint rainbows over what hardened--and then they'd head back toward their nights of offering head on the streets of san francisco for whatever comfort exchange that might offer the nobody's child sleeping on the grounds of city hall.  we didn't do it every day.  we asked to be paid for showing up.  we took the money they spent with us and put it in a bank and split it in half when we split up the partnership of what was never going to be able to make money if what we were selling was ourselves.  i am working it out in words.  i don't know where i keep making the same mistakes.  i can't make sense of the world.  i can show up, do what i say i will, open space, hold it open for others, offer my gifts and talents, take what's offered in exchange, and know it is all with the leftover excess that any good thing happens.  the leftover excess.  the icing.  my life is all icing.  i wish, for the sake of realizing the metaphor, that i could walk to the fridge right now, dip my finger in the depth of chocolate sugar, and suck the goopy pile of it into my mouth that knows exactly how that tastes.  so much is confounded, conflated and coordinated to come back to life in taste.  childhood tastes--in dreams, in coloring things, in possibilities unfolding into this here and now in time.  here and now, in time, i am waking up on a gifted futon, typing words on a gifted laptop, drinking chocolate and coffee concoction from a gifted cup.  i am gifted.  is there a class for how to give away the gifts???? ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, piles of excess still line the walls of everwhere i manage to find myself.  supplies are plentiful.  life begins? or ends? when waking up from dreams.....