Come home. Write about it.

My old friend, with whom I was once in love -- he and I are back in touch.

I fell in love with him one night in my freshman year of college. There were many events leading up to that night, I suppose, but I remember distinctly the circumstances of the falling. We were at his dirty fraternity house. And I don't mean "dirty" like food on the floor and unsavory bathroom conditions. I mean "dirty" like loud music, cocaine, boys fucking girls and then hurting their feelings. (That's not what happened with my friend and I, exactly, but that's the kind of company he kept. Just trying to paint the picture.)

I should rewind, too, and tell you about the day earlier in the semester when our school flooded. It was the El Nino year, year of rains so torrential that an entire college campus infrastructure was overcome by water. The libraries flooded; important materials were lost. The day after the biggest storm, to all of our great glee, classes were cancelled. So my friend and I went on an adventure. He came and found me in my dorm and then we went to visit our french teacher. The sky was gray and the air was refreshing, moist, washed. We walked around our stunned campus that day. Spending time with him made me feel tentative and delighted.

He had this effect on me. He may have had the same effect on all the girls he hung out with, in fact I'm sure he did, because he paid such close attention. I always felt a little bit on edge around him, because he was, in fact, edgy. "Edgy" like you were never sure what he was going to say next. "Edgy" like he could leap across all boundaries of appropriateness with a single utterance. But he was also immeasurably sweet. People loved him. His frat brothers loved him. He clearly came from love, if not love and struggle.

And like I said, he paid attention. When I was around him I felt myself at a kind of tenuous balance point, teetering between a painful exposure, his piercing commentary peeling back layers before I was ready, and the surprising tenderness of being seen so clearly, with such generosity.

So, he kept after me in his odd way. Eventually, of course, we ended up making out with each other. And that night that I started telling you about: I don't recall if that was the first night that we spent together, but it was most definitely the night that the doors to my heart swung open. I remember him playing with me, locking me out of the room, and I remember how much I wanted to get back in to be with him. Then, back in the room: he rolling cigarettes, sitting at his desk, smiling at me.

I forget how exactly it happened but then there it was. The long, slow tumble towards another person, the heart's bright gasp of recognition. But it wasn't meant to be -- he fell away from me almost immediately in the ensuing days, in his maddeningly edgy and inaccessible way. I wrote him a letter demanding that he show up, be with me, let me love him . . . which, as you can imagine, was the death knell. We fell out of contact almost entirely for a long time after that.

But he found me again the following year, I think, and started reaching out to me again. And since then we've re-kindled something of a friendship. I've felt him kind of tracking me all these years, staying in touch one way or another, with a kind e-mail or a random text or chat. Our contact has been frustrating, compelling, loving. In the intervening time he got married to a beautiful woman and is achieving success as a producer. He could have gone in so many directions but he has triumphed, has chosen life. I see that and I am truly proud of him. We finally got together a few weeks ago for the first time in years, over lunch with another friend of his. It felt like no time had passed at all.

Tonight we chatted a bit online, and in our chat he wrote me something of a poem, that ended up cutting straight to my heart. It surprised me, but it also didn't, how swiftly I was transported back to our brief moment together, 12 years ago. The shock of being witnessed was as electric then as it is now, as veiled and elusive as the witness may have been. I was surprised, but I also wasn't, by the tears rolling down my cheeks.

Some living quality of our contact is frozen in time and space, caught, left behind. What has survived all the time up until now is just a piece of it, held at arm's length. But words like these cast light on the ice and melt it down. They're nonsense words, elusive, cryptic; nonetheless, they reach me. In being reached I can recall what's possible: gentleness at close range, ceasing to scramble away from contact and instead breathing quietly in its sight. And that gift yields a flood of further treasures. Later in the evening, after we chatted, I went to the dance and found myself opening up right to the edges of my body. Whirling through space I remembered trust. I remembered safety, my own; and perfection, the mystery's. I smiled wide and gave my life to Life, once more.

All because of a few silly words from an old friend.

Thanks, DOC.

~

i'll say this.

...

put your shoes on

the same way you did

when you were still under 20

and still excited to see something brilliant

or repulsive that defined you.

Come home.

write about it. You deserve the opportunity and command.

don't be so green.

You words may emit bad carbons.

or brilliant diamonds.

and that

exactly

is why it is so trying

and hard and sad

to be brilliant.

you are like you are.

there is a violin playing in my living room.

and a man speaking.

saying, "stand up"

but he is very young

and knows nothing of the world

like you

or I

which makes him so small

and you

and I

so big

and important.

feed your stream

of consciousness

and dance.

tonight,

you will not regret anything

except for not listening to yourself more

adding lamps to your bedroom

photographs to your wall

and removing the television from your home.

and of course calling me more often,

which makes me sad

because I always believed so much

in your capacity

to change the world.

and that, my dear friend.

...

is terribly sad.

the converse...

of your smile.

it is sad to wait there

and pass the last ten minutes of your evening

in something I wish i had a long time ago.

so sister,

please

live it out.

that is what the world needs.

the black and the white

the yin

the circle

the square.

and some dumb bastard to stop typing

when he's not getting paid to do it.

service and exile

A friend writes, on his blog: "the degree to which we serve is the degree to which we are no longer in exile."

This sentence resonates like the long note of a bell. Over the weekend I cooked in the discomfort of exile: after ingesting plant medicine, I found myself caught in a rushing river of thought which cascaded over all the events of my life, finding fault with each one and my role in it. Everything I've ever done is a horrible mistake, I "realized," and I am a horrible person for having done all those things.

This is not an unfamiliar experience for me, this shattering, devoid of self-kindness -- usually, however, it is a murky and subterranean unfolding, whereas I found it suddenly crystalline in the light of consciousness and my community's love. This weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and I spent several hours each day praying in synagogue with my community and then several more hours in precious moments of just being together. I found myself again and again in awe of the sweetness of sharing this life with those around me, so open-hearted and committed to growth and joy.

I'll spare you all the gory details of my personal process around this experience, and will just say that I had an experience I'd never had before in this particular go-round, which is that I felt for the first time able to share myself from within the experience and find myself received with unconditional love and positive regard by my friends. It was immeasurably healing, after having found myself guilty in the court of my own mind, to be guided back into the expansiveness of the heart by the love of my chosen family here (with a little help from Big Mama Ocean).

Today, at the Brower Center, there was a blessing ceremony for the building -- it's a new building (we all just moved in a few months ago), and today we gathered together to thank the ancestors for allowing us to be there and pray that our work for the healing of the earth would be good and successful. We stood in a circle as a beautiful Ohlone elder woman called in the directions and asked us each to speak about our work. It was a special ceremony, one that made me feel so blessed to be where I am today.

The photographer for the event was wearing a shirt with a quote from David Brower on the back: "Have fun saving the world or you are just going to depress yourself." It struck me, especially after my experience of going into my own shadow this weekend and then re-emerging into the light of love, that this is really the best thing that we can do. Love the earth, love one another, give everything. I am learning that I can heal myself when I give over all of myself -- in prayer and in action, when I offer my fullest heart, my fullest service to the need of the moment, my own experience is transformed.

I used to wonder what people meant when they say, 'the more you give, the more you have.' Wouldn't giving everything just leave me spent and empty? But I see it more clearly now, as I swim in the chaotic waters of creativity and collaboration, as I discover what it means to show up as a person in the world, being open to loving and being loved. Giving everything, having fun saving the world, is really the only way to go now. The alternative to having fun is depressing yourself. The alternative to service is exile. On this planet -- which could go up in flames soon if we don't all make profound changes, or possibly even if we do -- as scary as it is to be alive and do things and make mistakes and fumble and stumble on, what is the alternative? Safety, inertia, numbness. Exile.

It is a stark calculus for stark times, and the choice to serve requires constant sensing and re-calibration, like a baby learning to walk. But there's really no question about what choice to make, is there?

re:indigenous

During my second year of law school, I took a course called Law, Markets and Culture, taught by the only tenured female African-American professor on the faculty of the school. It was a ranging examination of the intersections of economy and jurisprudence, and the struggle for human thriving amidst these often-forbidding forces.

I wrote our 24-hour final exam in that class about Burning Man, analyzing the festival, in the context of Western culture, as an "alternative for structuring relations." I dug the paper out of my files as I thought about this blog post, and read through it with glee. I'd just returned from my first time out on the playa when school started, and suddenly I thought I had discovered the secret to fixing our poor, broken civilization. It was like I was in graduate school, or something: my Marxist-inspired critiques of the market economy flowed without pause into a discussion of race, gender, and morality. The final ingredient in this intellectual goulash was a statement on Burning Man's potential to revivify our humanity as we traded in goods and services:

". . . Burning Man participants bypass modes of market-based relations and their attendant alienation, and experience interpersonal interactions as holistic sites of creativity and growth. Festival participants spend each of the seven days of the festival in pursuit of joyful experience, creative self-expression, and basic survival needs; in these simultaneously common and radically divergent pursuits, participants interact not in service of the market, but in service of one another. This departure from traditionally limited, stifled and hurried relationships in the context of the market arguably allows participants to more fully reveal themselves and more fully witness one another, thus contributing to one another’s human flourishing."

(Yes -- yes, I did just quote myself in my own blog.) My main point, couched in all this clap-trap, though, was that Burning Man is a rare and valuable opportunity for urban-bound privileged folks to taste some form of indigeneity. How do we live on the earth together? This is the question that 50,000 people work to answer each year, albeit at the world's largest party, one utterly reliant on fossil fuel, from the gasoline in the cars to the plastic wrap on the Trader Joe's peanut butter pretzels.

I've been reflecting a lot on that tension in recent weeks, since returning from my own pilgrimage to the playa. Looking at other people's pictures on Facebook and remembering my own experience of all that wildness, all that tribal chic, all that effort in one great undulating paean to unpredictability, dancing with the flames of chaos -- I recognize the seed of remembrance of who we are. We go out there to lose our minds and find our way again. So many of the most magnetic Burning Man stories are stories of hearts cracking open, greeting the dawn in the arms of a friend or a lover or the mother earth herself, sobbing and rejoicing at the truth of our connection and the ultimate truth of the love that is everything. It is so easy to forget, but out on the playa, even in the midst of all the noise and excess, people can be reminded.

And that is really the project of our time -- the remembering that all of us are indigenous to this earth. We all live here, we all belong here. Martin Prechtel writes, "every human being alive today, modern or tribal, primal or over-domesticated, has a soul that is original, natural, and above all, indigenous in one way or another. And like all indigenous peoples today, that indigenous soul of the modern person has been either banished to some far reaches of the dream world or is under attack by the modern mind."

If we are to survive, we must remember.

I spent much of today lying in my cozy treehouse apartment in the rain, spending time with my mother who is visiting from Los Angeles. I was reading magazine articles by Prechtel, by an Ojibwe woman who developed www.fourdirectionsteachings.com to make indigenous teachings accessible, by Jesse Wolf Hardin of the Anima Center in New Mexico. I oscillated between these reminders of the immediacy and immensity of the challenge -- how we must utterly transform our way of being on this planet, grieve the failure of our culture, learn how to return home to the earth and to one another -- and work on the internet, punctuated by visits to Facebook.

I started to notice the difference in my physical feeling, even my own self-awareness, when I was reading Sacred Fire magazine and when I was scouring the web or looking through my friends' photographs. Connection and distraction. Remembrance and forgetting. A continuous loop.

It is no longer a question, though, in my mind, that remembering is the great task of our time. And how does this work take place? Another article I read today suggested that it ultimately requires a releasing of all thought, all preconceived notions no matter how grand and carefully-wrought, and instead allowing for listening. Listen to the earth, watch what is going on around you, and be with the web of life that will emerge before your eyes. Find your place in that sacred web by witnessing the living points spanning around you and beyond you.

Maybe the world wide web teaches us, in some way, how to think in a web -- how to intuitively track the thread leading from one node to another, how to recognize interconnection. Maybe it is our unique position at this time in history to re-indigenize even that gift, so that we can again find sight of our link to the life that exists around us, inextricably connected to us, and remember how to be with it now and into the future.

dusty and exalted.

I can barely stay awake right now but I am bound and determined to keep writing on this blog, so let me provide you with just a few highlights from my week of bacchanal.

First and foremost, methinks, was the moon. We got to see her wax into fullness, then start to wane again -- one night she even wore a halo. It is rare for me to be that intimately connected with the night sky, the night wind, the night earth. I let myself feel what moon light feels like, and it is somehow reminiscent of the feeling that I had at the saltworks in Moray, Peru -- dense, quiet, intimate, snowy. The moon was a silent and unwavering beacon for me, a reminder of the place within, which brought me to centeredness again and again amidst the noise and pageantry.

Next, of course, the community. The homies, the peeps, the familia. The big, sweet love. Not to mention our camp was more tightly-organized and smoothly-run than ever, with a separate kitchen tent, shade cloth over all of our personal tents, and a separate lounge structure. The gravitational pull of home and family, especially in the heat of mid-day, was hard to resist. I remember with fondness and bemusement my first year, basically all by myself out there, when all I had was a tent and a few cans of tuna fish. The co-evolution of person, friendships and city, to be sure.

Cannot fail to mention the airplane ride. A friend of a friend was in the skydiver camp, and she got us tokens to ride up in the plane as "fireflies," or passengers. Three things to say about this, primarily. Thing one is that I had, and still have, a good deal of trouble wrapping my head around the fact that four people, seemingly otherwise sound in mind and body, leapt out of the airplane in order to hurtle towards the ground! I myself did prefer to remain IN the plane. Thing two is that immediately after the divers dove, and the door closed, the pilot turned the plane essentially on its side. Pure, adrenaline-coursing exhilaration at that, as we ourselves made a relative plummet towards the earth again. And thing three is of course just the view of the city from above -- not only the place itself, but the beautiful rift valley in which it sits and the mountains on either side. Truly breathtaking to take such a bird's eye view.

Then, the WORK. I got some good ceremonial work done out there, people! Did some healing, moved some energy, opened some doors, released some long-awaited sobs, created some alignment. As a result: shift. 'Nuff said.

And of course: the flow. Somehow, not having any expectations this year, just intentions, made it really easy to drop into the glee/ sweetness/ gravity/ juice of whatever moment I happened to be experiencing. The more I allowed it, the more it astounded me -- my favorite was on Friday night, when my original buddy and I parted ways early in the night, and I kept flowing from beautiful interaction to beautiful interaction (including a serendipitous pee-squat next to a dark RV with one of the skydivers from our experience that very day!), until finally I found four or so of my favorite people from Women's Herbal Symposium. We brought in the dawn out at the trash fence, with a visit to my friend's beautiful installation of four five-foot wooden feathers, painted black and white, in flight along the orange netting. I asked her what it meant and she, woman of few but evocative words, said, "they're finally free." Ah, yes.

On the walk back to the city, the sun newly-emerged and the full moon sinking into the cradle of the mountains, we saw two black birds in flight. My friend, the artist, found a black and white bird feather on the ground. Mind you, there's no wildlife to speak of out there.

So that was what it was, and so much more . . . I still feel a kind of lingering momentum, an explosiveness, a desire for further and ever more dizzying expansion. So much of the magic of the playa is around What Could Be. The sense of possibility we find from walking amongst evidence of unadulterated human creativity, from being free to express ourselves freely together, from touching extremes of experience and witnessing our own awe in the face of all that exposure -- that sense is unique to the playa, and the inevitable passage of this yearly ritual brings a bittersweet taste. But -- but -- it just began! We were just anticipating it, a week ago! Amazing, how it all unfurls and then retracts upon itself, with nothing but an empty, dry expanse in its wake.

But really, words can't do it justice. If you want to know more, you'll just have to experience it for yourself someday.

three seasons in one

I'm pleased to report that the fluctuations and vagaries of my spirit and soul have conveniently corresponded to the months on the calendar this summer.

June was all festivalia and flights of fancy. I danced on more than one huge lawn, swam naked in more than one body of water, and found myself being courted by more than one eligible bachelor. I had a peaceful, easy feeling that snowballed right up until the end of the month, when it went splat and melted in the July heat.

July saw me break up with the man I was dating (which, let's be honest, was a welcome relief), return from my herbal apprenticeship backpacking trip covered in mosquito bites, and gain back some of the weight I'd lost. Turns out I can't just cross my fingers and hope that an unhealthy pattern will somehow heal itself. The work still has to be done and I'm still the one who has to do it.

On the road home from the mountains I picked up a dead bird on the side of the highway, and once home discovered that it was a perfectly intact owl. I wouldn't have gotten a gift like that if I wasn't worthy of it . . . so essentially, I'm in trouble now. The last weekend in July I participated in a fire ceremony that spun me out into the deep recesses of my shadow: disconnected, alienated, alone.

And almost immediately across the border into August, a shift: this time, a roller-coaster ride along the spiral of life. I officiated my oldest friend's wedding; spent a week on the road with my father; served as a kind of doula at my friend's birth; and got word that another friend and teacher, a true luminary, has died. Niall and Rivka's baby dropped into this world like a sheer miracle just a few days before Frank Cook, legendary plant teacher and wisdom holder, passed out of it, well before his time. I'm still stewing in the many hard and breathtaking truths of these past few weeks, as I rest here on the cusp of a journey to the world's strangest neon desert bacchanal.

But I notice an awareness, a lightness in me that I have never known before. A sense of being quietly awe-struck, holding a reverence for the meaningful meaninglessness and the meaningless meaningfulness of life, the world and everything. Some veil has lifted and I find myself viscerally aware of my power to choose at every moment, and the possibility of landing, over and over again, in the present. I am smiling into the mystery and in so doing find a tenderness, a forgiveness for myself that is entirely new. Facing darkness enables me to allow light in, as it turns out, and this bemusing and wondrous reality is the seed of my practice now.

Onward, into the dust . . .

spoils of the weekend

It's Sunday afternoon and my dining room table is overflowing with apples, blackberries, figs, tomatoes, calendula flowers, and seaweed. The apples, a bit bug-bitten and bruised, will eventually emerge as sweet and leathery rings from the dehydrator, a perfect snack. The blackberries stained my fingers purple, and there's a streak of tomato juice and seeds drying out on my cutting board. The figs are just perfect. And the seaweed was a trade for three or so hours of my enthusiastic saleswomanship at the Grand Lake farmer's market yesterday, hawking my friend and teacher Trish's mineral-rich wares from the sea.

The calendula flowers? Harvested in front of my friend David's apartment in Berkeley, before we drove up to a farm in Sebastopol this morning for a four-hour plant medicine class. We got there a bit early so I got to spend some time plucking blackberries from the bramble and picking apples off the ground.

During the class I sat with a living stand of calendula flowers for a long time. It's a simple, strong plant that wakes with the sun and sleeps with the night, a renowned topical healer. I talked with it for a while. Just open yourself to the world and shine out your light, it said. Don't question your choices. Just live, love, give your healing gift, rest when the night comes.

Over my time out there today I felt myself slowly coming into a human pace; my frenetic heartbeat smoothed out. Getting in the car and driving back to Oakland felt like a contraction.

I live in this city because this is where my life is, my community, the people I choose to experience life alongside, and who have similarly chosen me. I live here because my work is here, because I learn so much from the urban-based eco-intelligentsia's discourse on the environment, the world scene, the self and the spirit. I live here because it's fun and interesting, with great music, varied cuisine, and sexy people.

But when it comes down to it, I use that word "live" pretty loosely. When I am in the city, I do many things, I grow, I learn, I enjoy, I work and I play. When I am on the earth, though, I live. What's the difference? The best way that I can describe it is to say that when I am close to nature, my heart feels like it can open up and smile with life. Here in the city, the rushing and the fear tend to close my heart, or even break it.

That sounds dramatic, I know. But last weekend I got to witness part of a birth; I was there for about six hours while my dear friend labored, and then I was there the next day when their beautiful, miraculous baby girl was just a few hours old. The experience brought me into a visceral awareness of our fundamental embodied-ness, our fundamental animal-ness. We are mammals! We're given life by the waters and the plants and the sunshine around us. Women's bodies even cycle with the moon, which cycles with the tides, which cycle with the seaweeds, which bring nourishment to the community. We're part of this earth and when we deny that, there is always pain, however subtle.

It is when I am out on the earth that I feel the pain of this exile, when subterranean longings surface and come into sharp focus.

When am I moving to the countryside, you might ask? Not anytime soon. For now, I remain compelled to seek love and fortune within the urban grid. So I continue to eat wild foods, learn the plants, practice listening to the world, slow down every day. And give thanks for all of the abundant blessings that grace my life, including the greatest blessing of life itself, each day no matter where I am.

*In memory of and in gratitude to Frank Cook, master plant teacher, who left this world too soon*

OMG girl, where have you been?

The truth is, I've been scared to write.

Lately I've spent a lot of time looking back at all my old stuff, grimacing, wondering how I could ever have thought any of it was any good at all. It's purple! It's self-important! It's predictable! All I've had for myself is a panoply of distaste.

But today I had lunch with a friend, actually an ex-lover. We sat in the sunshine and conversed in the way that only ex-lovers can converse -- sweet, ranging, full of recognition. She asked me if I've been writing and I said I hadn't, that I'd been stuck in self-critique. Snap out of it, she told me, you're a great writer. Just start writing again, so you get the hang of it.

It reminds me of being in high school at the always-dramatic Young Writer's Retreats, which took place every year up in Lake Arrowhead or some such place. Watch what happens when you get 100 high school students from L.A. with a penchant for angst together for four days of writing instruction! A pot-fueled hook-up fest, that's what. But I digress.

I'm reminded of something that one of the teachers said to us, one morning in that big bright lodge. She read to us from an essay that was actually entitled "Shitty First Drafts." Oh, were we titillated! But she pressed on because the message was important. "Don't think, write," she read. I remember feeling distinctly giddy upon hearing this, and I remember the way it affected my writing immediately: I was suddenly liberated to just put words down on the page now and worry later about how they looked, sounded or tasted. Just find your big block of stone first, and then you can carve it into whatever fanciful shape you choose. Amazing! There's no room for self-critique in such an approach; it's actually against the rules.

So I've decided to start a practice for myself of writing in this blog at least once a week. To prime the pump, keep the wheels greased, make sure the ol' hamster is running in the wheel. You know? Keep the words flowing out of the chute. And stop fretting so much about how the words land on the page, that the chute breaks down for six months at a time. Keep 'em coming.

So that's what I'm doing! That's my commitment. So please expect to hear from me a lot more often, and perhaps in more experimental forms. And if you don't, please feel free to come check on me, and even nag me a little (but only a little) if I'm gone too long. Deal? Thanks.