Tag / nature

Clothing is not allowed in the water.

Let’s hear it for mother nature.  Let’s have a round of applause for the still spectacular events that one can and can not imagine, powered by earth, wind, fire and water – better than the movies and a thousand times more original.

I fly a lot.  In my life, I’ve flown a whole lot.  But today it feels like I’m flying.  Two weeks ago to Vegas:  nope.  Three weeks ago to New Orleans:  not so much.  But today, we boarded in daylight, and from my window seat watched a flamboyant twilight cloak the shoulders of strong men loading the plane, signaling the traffic, rolling into the distance now just orange directional lights waving around in some secret code language.  Now dusk.  Now a dramatic jet-powered take off down a run way through Los Anglees.  Buildings I recognize pulling away, a left turn passing families, volleyball nets and piers at the beach.  Over the glorious ocean slapping against the rocky, natural Pacific coast and into an alchemical California sunset – purple, orange, red – mother nature really knows how to make magick out of human pollution.  Let’s hear it for these sunsets.

I know some hippies.  But I’m not one.  We have deeply much in common, but my heart is macabre and wholly busy balancing the Light with the Dark (even the Light can become an empire when it tries to take over).  I’m not a hippie, but I feel like one when I lift the arnica homeopathic pellets to my lips cause I got a tweak in the neck from goosing at this sunset so hard and so long.  I’m a lot like a hippie, that’s for sure.  A cultured, macabre, heavy metal, genius hippie – give me that.  My carry on is packed with loose shilajit, MSM and chia seeds.  Self-capped turmeric, wild enzymes and fermented B12.  A script printed out on the back of a script I already read.  My MacBook, iPhone, iShuffle and iBrain working wirelessly as external lobes.  I mixed my own clove, cinnamon and vanilla essential oil vial today.  And if you asked, I’d say I’m opalizing currently, by wearing lots of opals near my skin and next I’m moving towards labradorite, of which I am palming a sphere.  I’m tonguing a Jupiter spagyric.  Happy Winter Solstice.  I’m not a hippie.

Like a radical roller coaster ride, only a thousand times more massive, this plane accelerates into a turn and my window points almost directly up in a sky lit by a sun saying a magnificent farewell.  I feel like I’m flying this time.  This loop around quickly takes me over Los Angeles and I love how strangely calm it looks as I send good byes to the palm trees.  The city sprawls until it’s arrested definitively at the base of our first and sudden mountain.  Snow covered peeks, glowing gold ilke the pot at the end of the – this is beauty.  This is alchemy.  Mother nature does it again.

Obsessive predator.  The silence can feed.  Feed on the sound of nothing through bare trees.  Look for nothing when you fall through the top crust of icy snow.  In my vision, I attack on the island.  In reality, I don’t have a boat.

Meet me, then, in winter when we will walk on water.  Meet me, then, when tears are frozen to your cheeks.  Meet me on the island when the nights are dark and longest.  The ice can, but I can’t:  bear the wait.

And the ground gives way.

In one moment, you are on the path but not on the path.

And almost as suddenly the human machine – go, go Gadget Ankle – recovers and without injury

is in forward motion again.

I’m a little girl with no shoes on her feet. Hugging trees in the rain to hear their heart beat.

Five months in LA because I found something to love. Five months in LA because I found someone to love. Five months in LA is a grand commitment for me, proving my devotion to love, love …. love like a fire. Devouring brittle landscapes to fuel more me, to birth a new me. Insatiable and driven … my love like a fire.

Can leave a soul scorched without the rains.

Just one Michigan nite, washes five months beneath bare feet. Hugging trees in the rain to hear their heart beat.

This is your room, but I am in it. This is your bed, but I am in it. And somehow I expect this must be your moon, but through the telescope or through the window, I am in that, too.

The plants on the sill – I can name them. The colored glass on the shelf – I recognize it as once ours. The stories we relate, after six years of separation, are memories from a time we were children and in love.

Absinthe fireflies keep the mountain on the lucid side. Roadside phlox keeps the cave crickets paralyzed. The reason I loved you is why I will always love you. The moon dashes out of site, humid hillbilly paradise.

January is a break in the breath of the hibernating bear. A fleeting, but quantifiable measure of brain activity. The first realization that there is more than this comfortable dreaming homeostasis we’ve chosen to succumb to. There is something to hope for, be curious about, put your faith in.

But January falls right back to sleep.

I remember one winter I stumbled across January curled up in dirty coats and not smelling so good in the park. January slept like the dread locked transient man – with all her possessions under her head. January anchored to the frigid ground – so heavy, this ship wreck rusting under the sea. So I kicked her (a little bit by accident but not entirely) and catch stepped over an aroma of fermented grapes. The suggestion of Sonoma Cab Franc convinced me that if we were to invite January out this Thursday, she too, would have exceptional taste.

So I kicked her a good one. And after three or more minutes, I was about to search her pockets before sleeping beauty finally twitched and breathed and stretched out and rolled over. And …

That was about it. Fleeting, but quantifiable brain activity. Never to be heard from this season again.

I’ve seen January make an ass of herself and sleep walk. She tries to get up too quckly and loses vision momentarily – . falls like an inebrieted animal back to the frost carpet ground. Where she belongs. You can not rush January. And she’ll never remember her dreams.

I hear she dreams in all shades of grape.

The downstairs neighbor’s car windows were still open.

It was 7am on a Sunday morning and I don’t know, for the life of me, what I was doing awake that early, besides waiting for the Hollywood and Vine farmer’s market to open, but I’m glad I was awake or I might have missed it.

A strange noise, like a parade of tap dancing elves taking over the residential street. A disconcerting feeling of correctness overtaking my entire being. Something special and simple and easy to miss if you are sleeping like the rest of the neighborhood is at this hour.

Just me on the sidewalk. And that guy being walked by his dog. And the local recycling man with his shopping cart, personally going through every dumpster to collect any CA deposit beverage containers that might have been inadvertently thrown away. He had just jumped out of the dumpster behind my house and we made eye contact as we both headed to the street.

I always remember that I am the ultimate water proof container. It just slides off of my skin and I don’t even rust or short out or anything.

I walked around the block and felt like the banana tree, suddenly so much prouder, so optimistic and swollen – every pour opening up to absorb this goodness which brigns me out to the street. We have both been waiting over three months for this. We have both been covered in greasy film from the LA streets, we’ve both been feeling a bit dry.

I think of gardening in Hollywood like a package of instant oatmeal; “just add water.”

The sprinklers still sputtered two manicured lawns down the block. The downstairs neighbor’s car windows were still open. It didn’t matter much, though, because me and the banana tree didn’t get even enough rain to wash off or feel clean. The July rain was less like a shower and more like a … parade of tap dancing elves. On a very short holiday. With very little stamina. Over before it began.

But there was a rainbow. And now it is 8am. Farmer’s market ready for business.

I remember poking my grubby little girl fingers in. When it was hot enough to boil the pavement, I would risk permanent stains on my shorts and the soon-to-follow maternal scoldings to pick pop puncture the tar bubbles with my grimy miniature finger nails on the Dead End street where I grew up. My five year old mind thought I understood something about being a dinosaur. I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

The asphalt is boiling in Santa Fe today. I can smell it. A black toxic perfume trapping me in the heat, like a dear in headlights, like a lizard in hostile consideration, like a white skinned human in the high desert, 7,000 feet up, experiencing lack of oxygen, sun stroke and heat exhaustion as record highs are recorded at 94 degrees Fahrenheit and she pauses, still … unable to move for fear of a relentless climate’s demise.

To peril by dehydration. Oh, to have the life sucked out of you. The water is the life and I am a bored, rebelling teenage raisin huffing chemical fumes for the sheer headache of it. I drink more water again and my skin splits open in various places – a washed up movie star with plaster of Paris cosmetic foundation and flakey glass shard lip implants. Maybe I do understand dinosaurs after all.

I entertain myself on this New Mexican sidewalk curb by observing heat waves making optical illusions on the horizon – bending light – literal time travel. Can you imagine the visuals we will get if global warming continues, or if we were suddenly in the lava path of an active volcano, or if some kind of Bikram Yoga class went arry: Standing Bow like a dish of Jell-O, gyrating yogis and fun house mirrors. Hallucinations based on the retina. Upsidedown and hitting the back of my parched desert brain.

Something silent lives here. The same thing that lives in the monk’s cave, I hear – I hear nothing. The silent thing lives here.

He wore big boots. Carhart overalls. The season’s obligatory orange hunting cap. Not boldly fashionable, but effectively functional: a good hunter would never aim at something orange. Unless they take a “sound shot” aimed at whatever-made the-noise. But then, that would not be a good hunter, now would it? Obligatory orange communicates without words.

Deer are colorblind.

My footprint fit once and a half inside his big boot print and sunk six inches deep in the drifting snow. Southern Michigan’s winter began early this year and quietly glistened across 130 acres of grampy’s farmland – my mom’s dad, my grammy’s husband – this leather skinned man wearing an orange hat.

He wore big boots and he stood silent and still for long periods of time – tracking animals by the shape, depth, snow cover, and direction of their stride. He followed: four very large deer that had calmly strode through this morning. I followed: my grampy, placing little footprints inside bigger ones. If a deer were tracking us, what would she think?

When we got to the back woods, we sat in a homemade hunting perch without a gun because after grammy died, grampy just couldn’t see ending another creature’s life. Quiet still, we perched, just like the hunters, in case the buck comes. Or a tree falls with us in the forest. Or a snowflake hums heaven’s hymns all the way down.

I’m sure all of this happened, but it happened in silence. As did my weight shift, my conversation, my thought, my ego – and every other method I have of avoiding dissolution. It all was vacuumed, sucked straight away as food for the something silent I am trespassing. To enter the fairy tale all sound must be offered with generous genuine sacrifice.

I understand, in falling snow, following tracks, perched in stillness, how many of my sentences, so predicatable, begin with the word “I”. And how sacrificing that word makes communication broader and more enveloping. Like: instead of using all these tiny specific words, there becomes only one with infinite entendres, that encompasses everything. And then even the one word has no sound.

Something silent, something infinite, lives here.