June 12, 2010,
I have reappeared! As if out of nowhere, I am back in this dream-space called the "Blog"/box. It's a big space, I suppose. Lots of room to wander and explore...This is my exploration this morning: Now it begins to feel like summer with the morning heat and coolness a mere thin highlight on its surface while outside the gardener's machines sing loud, the lawn mower's staccato crescendos and sudden diminuendos searing the silence... I slept until ten this morning finally getting some rest after three nights of sleeplessness, and wake now to many paintings waiting to be touched-up or begun. (For those of you who do not know about this fantastic turn in my life, I have become a painter! But more on that another time.) Silver-bellied swallows veer and dip and rise right outside my window. The hollows of the hills turn buff-white and dry, and the Spanish moss, too, has turned light gray rather than being its usual lettuce-green. Flies and tiny gold moths flit here and there on the air. All is summer-still but I would not call it serene because there is a vague agitation encasing the quiet. An egret, white wings a glowing ivory, climbs the sun lit air higher and higher into the powder-blue horizon. The trees tremble a little being tickled by a tepid breeze, lime-green and emerald leaves smile at the wind's attentions. The agitation below the gorgeous summer scene is due to the intensity of the growing heat with its threat of fire. As I write those words down I see all the trees nod their leafy branch-heads in agreement with my observation. "Do something to appease the gods!" they seem to plead. Prometheus, Shiva. Yahweh/Elohim, Binah, Kali! I beg of you, spare this gorgeous globe of life---Your creations. And that's all I can do this morning: make prayers and feed at this trough of words. Like the sleek sienna horse grazing in his pen down in the valley, I graze on these words and taste the morsels of consciousness, savoring the banquet of my mind's images: fantastic flowers on so many canvasses and millions of letters and sentences on the hundreds of my journal's pages---the offerings to my God, the gifts I can give gifts that are evidence that life is worth celebrating---the cerebral flight of the mind flies with Divinity. O' yes! June is a green bride, hot and sometimes dangerous but always blessing us with the seeds of transcendence as well as immanence; an ontological princess throwing her bouquet of fertility to all who stand around poised to catch her multitudinous blossoms of creation. And now to lift-off, too, like the egrets, into my day of paint, photographs, and, always, poems...

Good morning new day! If there is anyone out there who doesn't know me, you should know that when I speak I am a great bumbler and stumbler with words, therefore---I write. Therefore, I have always wished that every single person on this planet wore notebooks and pens around there necks or wrists or waists (take your most comfortable pick) so that when encountering another person, be it family, friends, or strangers, one would have to write their communication with one another---because, of course, writing forces one to slow thoughts down as well as to see exactly what one is saying. Or, like me, one would speak/write in poems to each other. This is a long and round-about way of saying, I take-in and experience my world through poetry. And this morning, this new gorgeous California morning, arrives in my mind through that, exactly. Here is this new day as I see it, at the moment, with eyes open but still, I am sure, dreaming.

The Morning Before Going To New York For The First Time In My Long Life

Chill winds blow and tomorrow I go to New York.
Tall green-gold grass blades toupeed
in tight white-gold seeds
shimmy and bob in the hard breeze.
Tomorrow I go to New York.
Violet-gray-bottomed clouds
hang over the far mountain
and the vultures and swallows
veer round my house like WW II aircraft
bombers. All of the redwood trees shiver
in the light and shadows.
Tomorrow I go to New York.
*****
Bon Voyage!...and I'll be back on Friday!!!

Virgin-Blogger-No-Longer!

Here I sit staring out my window on Thursday afternoon, Suzanne by my side teaching me how to "blog" my life! But where to begin, is what I'm wondering, secretly---who am I speaking to really? What "people" am I to imagine are reading these words? I have written words all of my life. (I'll be 55 in a few days!) I have hundreds of journals on the shelves behind me. And yet, this process terrifies me---who am I speaking to? Does it matter if I know? What do I want to share---all I can think of at this nervous moment are the words I wrote last night at about two in the morning. (Much of my writing is done at that time as I'm a hopeless insomniac.) So here is what I wrote before goin to sleep the morning before the morning that I was and am writing my very first blog---to you whoever you are!---gracias...

A spider comes, fat, black, and fast out of the darkness, and scuttles down my comforter. I leap! On the verge of sleep, I let him chase me out of my bed. Still in darkness, and trying not to disturb my husband, gathering my gear I leave both the spider and spouse to sleep in the abandoned room downstairs. The child's old room, room of the girl who's gone forever, having been abducted by the woman who lived with her all along, from the day of her birth until the day she left for college. There are no spiders that I can see here in this room, just bears on the walls - posters of polars, a stencil of a swallow in mid-flight, a sky blue whale stuffie, a hippopotamus, a moose, and a duck stuffie, too. And baby books, "Pat the Bunny," "The Very Bumpy Bus Ride," and of course, Dr. Seuss. Finger puppets, a wind-up metal clown on a scooter, a music box and Star Wars figurines, a glass globe with a lily-white angel in the middle, and underneath the gone daughter's pillow, the straggly remains of what was once her favorite blanket, the rag she still holds when she comes home for a visit and sleeps in this, her old bed. But now, as on most days, it stays buried in its cushiony cave like all the memories of daughter that are stowed away in this room waiting for -- I no longer know what. Will the little girl ever come laughing back to our house? No, the little girl won't come back, but a young woman will. One whom I love and admire. I have run from the spider as if to protect myself. There is no way to protect oneself this time.