Tiny Pockets of Perfect

Little precious moment of complete and utter luminosity in my day.

Small things but grand, full of beauty and quiet happiness.

An hour before work with my favorite person in the world having coffee.

Getting a car downtown to meet the family I nanny for and the baby falling asleep in the carrier, I sat and watched the children playing and was warm and snuggled up in a corner and basically got to be still for an hour and a half.

Oh.

I suppose that is not everyone’s cup of tea, but for someone like me, who often moves fast, slowing down is a grand luxury.

Going slow on my scooter and missing the rain that happened.

Although the streets were slick when I went into my internship, they had dried by the time I left and I got home safe and dry.

The best leftovers from a dinner I made last night for my best friend.

Delicious and it reminded me of our time together.

Time that is precious and valuable to me.

Human connection.

Love.

Having a client consult cancel on me and having a full hour to do homework reading and the best, the text is really interesting.

I was a little concerned when I saw that I had to read a 184 pages of a book for just that one class for my next weekend of classes, but the book is quite compelling and I knocked out 58 pages in the hour that I had with no client.

A really good session with another client to end my evening.

And now.

Some Yo Yo Ma playing Beethoven.

I’ll take it.

And tomorrow is Friday.

Oh sure.

It’s still a full day, but it’s payday, which is nice, not that I’m spending any money on anything right now, I am trying to squirrel away for a new car next month, but it’s still nice and I worked over time for the family and when that happens I get it in cash instead of taxed, which is a nice bonus.

So I’ll use that for my “fun” money for the next week.

I’ll work 9 hours tomorrow at work and then take two clients afterward.

But then the weekend.

Yes, I will have group supervision on Saturday and I will also have to sit through an additional hour of supervision since my solo supervisor was away on vacation, but it will feel like a day off, this Saturday.

A day to get in a yoga class, to go do the deal, to not be too pressured to perform.

Group supervision really is just marking time and I don’t have to get highly present for it.

Solo supervision is another thing entirely and that will feel like work, but it will be just an hour.

Then.

Maybe a manicure, maybe a coffee in a cafe, maybe some stickers.

Heh.

I do like my stickers and I discovered a small stash of stickers from Paris this morning when I was doing my Morning Pages.

I had thought I was all out.

It was nice to find a few more.

I have tons of notebooks still from Paris, but yes, the sticker supply is fast dwindling.

I will need to re-up soon.

I am such a girl sometimes, but I’m alright with indulging my inner child, she didn’t get much indulgence growing up and sometimes, hahahahaahaha, I’m writing this sentence and out of the corner of my eye I note my fashionable bunny slippers, I need to indulge her.

Hence stickers and um, ha, bunny slippers.

I did not have slippers growing up.

Hell.

I didn’t have slippers as an adult for a very long time, but man, when I finally indulged, happiness!

Especially now that the seasons are fully turning and it’s getting chilly out there.

I was a touch overdressed on my scooter today, thinking it was going to be colder than it was, but the days grow short, the nights grow long, and the temperatures have dropped.

And now the rain.

A touch of melancholy.

A soft stirring of sadness.

And I remember that I am allowed to hold more than one or two or three emotions.

I can hold many.

Even the painful ones that hide in the pretty ones.

Tender and sad and soft and sweet and let myself have them so they don’t stay stuck.

I can get stuck sometimes and the words don’t come out right and I feel tongue-tied.

All of that too.

Even in the starred days, in the ways that light affects me and the pulling at my heart as it wanders far above in the night sky.

Sings to me this lullaby.

Loss and sorrow and surrender and unmitigated love and struggle and joy all of it.

Perfect in my imperfections, still making mistakes and growing.

Pain, the touch stone of spiritual growth, I remind myself.

The way that I can see all the loveliness and feel all the joy because I have experienced the other side and have something to compare it to.

I made myself sad without meaning too.

And left adrift in my melancholy I will listen again to the sound of the cello, winsome and low against the piano and the story it tells me slides inside my heart and falls like the soft rain outside my door onto my face.

I am not always good at this.

Being human.

But I am always, oh so very.

Very.

Human.

Which is perhaps.

The most perfect of all.

Perhaps.

Bach Cello Sonata No.1

In G.

And 5 and 6 as well.

Yo Yo Ma.

That is what I am listening to.

It was an intense day and I feel it slowly easing out of my body and sliding to the floor in a big puddle.

I could slide to the floor in a big puddle.

When I need to calm down and unwind I like to listen to this in particular.

It is sweet and I find it wistful, God I miss playing the cello.

There’s a spot about 1:50 into the first sonata and I can feel the bow in my hand, I can see my fingers striding over the neck of the cello and I can feel it between my legs.

I can get weepy thinking about it.

One would suppose that I would be past it, this yearning, but somethings stay with me a long time.

I don’t know that I ever really got over the loss of playing cello.

And I have had it suggested too many times to count that maybe I pick it up again.

I think.

Yes!

Let me do that.

In what fucking time?

I could give up writing in the morning.

I could play music for my morning spiritual fix.

I could not buy a car and buy a cello.

I could go over to Roland Feller and blow my heart out on a cello.

Roland Feller is the luthier for the San Francisco Symphony.

I went once, with a friend who worked out of the Burning Man offices when I was nannying there many years ago now.

He is a professional cello player and gigs about and plays with the San Jose Orchestra.

He gave me lessons for a while and one day took me to Roland Feller.

I would have never known that there was a luthier there.

It is an extraordinary nondescript house next to the Popeye’s Chicken on Divisadero Street.

There is no signage.

You have to make an appointment.

There is a gate and a call box and it looks like some cheap apartment, well, it’s in San Francisco so it’s probably not cheap, but the door opens into this gold mine of classical music instruments.

Violins.

Violas.

Stand up Bass.

Cellos.

Oh and the cellos.

I played a few different ones and I remember one in particular, it was luscious, the sound so rich, so vibrant, it made me quiver with delight.

My friend teased me a little that I was passionate and looked as though I might be having the sexy thoughts.

I had never had a cello quite that caliber ever before in my hands.

It was exquisite.

And one day.

Well.

I have written on this topic before, I will have another cello.

I’m not there yet.

But one day.

And in the mean time.

Well.

I have my Yo Yo Ma and I have Bach.

And Debussy.

And Chopin.

Oh the Chopin Cello Sonata in G Minor.

Oof.

So good.

The Bach is my favorite, but that Chopin is glorious too, passionate and brash and stupendous.

I love that I love classical music.

I don’t look the type.

Except, well, maybe that’s not true.

I feel like I might look the type, that there’s a brazen woman cellist in my heart.

Maybe she smashes herself on her music like I smash myself with my poetry.

Maybe one day the two will get back together again.

I don’t expect that I will ever be great, I never was great, but I had heart, yes, I had great big heart and I knew it and so did my most ardent supporter–my orchestra conductor, Mister Ziegler.

Where ever you are, you meant something to me that few teachers do.

He supported me, he was honest with me, he argued for me.

He brought in my mom and my step father, the fuck (egad, maybe I need yet another inventory on the man, christ), and sat them down and tried, oh how hard he tried, to convince them to not let me quit cello.

Quitting cello was not my idea.

It was my stepfathers idea.

We didn’t have enough money and my parents, god I can’t even say that, the man was never a fucking parent to me, he was a violent misogynistic sociopath, but not a parent, had bought a house in Windsor, outside the school system I was in at the time I was playing cello.

There was no thought of a tutor, I had one actually, that my conductor had arranged with the school and I was given said tutoring for free, but to move away from the school system I would lose that.

And the school that was closest to me, the one that I would attend, DeForest, well, they didn’t have an orchestra.

Oh sure.

They had band.

But no orchestra.

They had cut the funding for the orchestra.

You should see the football stadium though, a work of art that.

Anyway.

My conductor tried to argue that my parents continuing my tutoring or that I commute in to Madison for school and still stay with the cello.

Nope.

There were words, there was fire, I could see how hard my conductor was trying to get through to my parents.

My stepfather hated me playing.

He hated me practicing.

I got lost in the cello, I wasn’t there, I was gone, gone, gone, and he wanted me present and not in my fantasy world.

He also did not like that I read as much as I did, I shit you not.

What fucking parent doesn’t want their children to read?

When I was punished some of the worst punishments were being denied those things that I loved most.

Books and my cello.

Cello was first to go.

“Put it away and go clean the bathtub,” he said.

The the books were taken.

I don’t know what I did, I mean, I have absolutely no recollection of what I had done to deserve the grounding to my room one weekend, but he was diabolical.

I had no problem being grounded to my room, fine with me, I won’t have to look at you.

I’ll read, thank you very much.

But.

Oh my fucking god, the man had removed every single book I had in my room, everything was gone, it was stripped.

Thank God I had one underneath the mattress of my bed.

Fucking stashed my back up drugs thank you very much.

So.

It wasn’t much of a surprise, after the cello was taken and my stepfather and my mom left the orchestra room with me sadly in tow, that once we moved to Windsor I was to be denied academic access as well.

“She’s too proud, she needs to be humbled, she’s not allowed to do it,” he told my mom, who had tried in her own way to get him to give his permission to sway him.

I was trailing behind in the snow walking down Windsor Road in the middle of a cold ass night listening to them argue about me and the invitation I had been given to join an advanced English class-accelerated and an accelerated math class.

I didn’t care so much about the math, irony, I was actually able to attend that, I think my mom might have had a hook up or something with the math teacher now that I look back, but the English was resolutely denied.

I can feel rage in my chest when I think about that.

“Too proud, she’s just too fucking proud.”

And maybe I was.

Pride goeth before the fall.

I have been humbled in many ways, but I still like my books and I still love listening to cello.

And I am beyond proud of how I grew and became the woman I am today.

Despite the horrendous odds against me growing up.

I got out.

And you can’t put me down.

Nope.

I will not be ground down.

I will thrive.

I am thriving.

I am alive.

Happy.

Joyous.

Motherfucking.

Free.

And yes.

Proud.

 

 

 

 

Sunshine

I’m listening to an old Mike Doughty album of covers, The Flip Is Another Honey.

It just seemed appropriate.

I feel sunny.

I had a super yummy day.

Literally.

I cooked some good food today.

I had a first stab at recreating a dish I had yesterday at Samovar by Yerba Buena Gardens.

I had gone there for lunch with a darling friend who I don’t get to see very often anymore, we used to meet up on a weekly basis and now, well, between my schedule and hers, it’s more like once every couple of months.

However.

Thanks to the time off from my day job, I was able to go with her to the MOMA yesterday.

We saw the Edward Munch show.

It was good.

Dark as fuck.

But.

Um, that’s Munch.

There were also some super sexy, lush paintings that I hadn’t really known were in the artists oeuvre.

I was impressed and it was a good show.

My favorite artist?

Nope.

But nice to have some exposure to his work and I love going to the MOMA.

We had coffee in the cafe and got caught up on life.

Then we went to the 7th floor of the museum and wandered through the sound installation, which was super intriguing, but made me feel bad for any kid that might wander through, the desire to touch and tinker with the little wooden machines and instruments would have been too much temptation for my little paws when I was younger.

I was, however, able to restrain myself.

The part of the exhibit that really got me though was a room full of video screens with a synchronized song that was being played by six or seven different artists in different rooms of an old mansion in upstate New York.

It was so well done.

I was stunned and moved and completely captivated by it.

I got the chills and was dreamy and in reverence.

I love art.

I love it when I am surprised by beauty.

I love music.

And the two were just the most elegant conceptualization and moving amongst the screens and seeing how well synched the videos were and the sound was arranged so that there were speakers not just for each screen but also in the ceiling above.

It was like literally being inside the song.

I get a little shiver thinking about it.

Of course.

I stood the longest in front of the screen with the woman playing the cello.

I have such a soft spot for cello and again it went through me, time, soon, when, I don’t know, but it is there, that longing, get a cello again, practice when, fuck if I know, but do it, get lessons, start again, start again, start again.

I have enough on my plate.

But I do dream on it once in a while.

I also recognize that I was so lucky to have had the cello when I had the instrument in my life, that I was given an inordinate gift beyond any comprehension that I can now just barely muster.

I got to play the cello for four sweet, stirring, amazing years.

How many people can say that?

It was a gift and I love classical music and Bach’s preludes can make me inflamed, like I have to go buy a cello NOW, as can the passion of Chopin, although I feel his music is more piano than string, and Debussy, ack, be still my heart, Claire de Lune?  Please.

Exquisite.

So much music.

So much joy.

That’s what I felt like today.

Suffused with joy.

Sometimes soft.

Sometimes furious with passion.

I am so alive.

Even the little mundane things I did today, laundry, cooking, making check in phone calls, taking out the trash, they all were filled with this light and I just felt a glow.

I also felt full.

I ate well today.

And my tummy seems back to normal.

Yesterday, as I mentioned earlier, I had a dish at Samovar that I replicated this morning.

It was their Salmon Egg Bowl.

Brown rice, smoked salmon, poached eggs, sauerkraut, and ginger soy dipping sauce.

I took a few liberties and made one mistake.

I over poached the eggs.

One of my liberties was to poach my eggs in Miso broth, which did not give me a clear broth and I couldn’t see the egg white form on the egg, I don’t normally time things when I cook and I should have just timed the eggs.

They ended up being soft/medium boiled.

Not horrid.

But I missed getting that super creamy yolk that would have pulled the whole thing together.

The other liberty I took was to add pickled ginger and sliced pickling cucumber, the cucumbers weren’t pickled, but just the tiny little ones they use to make pickles, so fresh they added a nice clool brightness to the salt brine of the sauerkraut and the richness of the salmon.  I also used turmeric spiced brown rice, to give the rice color and I thought the plate was actually quite pretty.

It was not great.

But.

It was good.

It will be better the next time I make it.

I also roasted some asparagus, still going through the asparagus my employer gave me last week, wrapped in bacon.

Mmmm.

Bacon.

That was breakfast.

A slight departure from my normal oatmeal and fruit and hard-boiled egg, but a welcome one.

Once and a while I get to shake it up.

For lunch I roasted a chicken with a salt and pepper crust and made brown rice.

Nice and simple.

And that’s what I had for dinner.

With, ha, um, some more asparagus.

Heh.

I think I will pull the chicken and shred it up and make a cream of asparagus soup with brown rice and chicken.

That will “kill” the asparagus.

Otherwise I don’t think I will be able to finish it up before it goes bad and its a shame to waste asparagus.

And in between the cooking and the tasks I saw people I love.

I connected with fellows.

I sat in a cafe in Noe Valley and reconnected to my people, two back to back.

And I had a really good therapy session.

Also up in Noe Valley.

I was supposed to have a client after all my meetings and sessions in Noe, but it was cancelled by the client and I found myself able to quickly zip up and over the hill and hit the Inner Sunset and get right with God at Irving and 7th.

Such an unexpected gift.

Ran into some folks I hadn’t seen in a while and got my God on.

A damn fine day.

I really, really am.

The luckiest girl in the world.

Seriously.

Going Dark

I have been scrubbing my Facebook page of all my blog posts.

It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

It was actually an interesting little trip down memory lane.

It was good to see the pictures and posts and the blogs and to see how steady I have been in my pursuit of this endeavor.

I suspect that as of this blog the readership will go down.

Down  a lot.

But so be it.

It’s the price I pay to get to continue doing this, my little love, my bunny, my pet project for the last seven years.

I will happily sacrifice readers to keep doing the writing.

I was talking with a friend and my words ran away with themselves.

I got so excited about writing and poetry and I just started gushing.

My heart raced.

Words get me all crazy.

I’m not a crazy cat lady.

I’m a crazy poetry lady.

You should have heard me reciting Shakespeare earlier.

I got all kinds of excited.

Ah, Old English you do me so well.

Heh.

Today I actually had time for poetic pursuits, not so much writing it, but perusing it, looking up some old favorites and wondering to myself if it weren’t time to go replace some books of poetry that I used to have in my small library.

When I moved to Paris back in 2012 I sold off all my books.

All of them.

It still hurts to think about a little, some tenderness there, but I wanted to throw myself at the Paris experience and I knew I wasn’t going to pack a bunch of books up with me and carry them across the pond.

No.

I sold them.

I stored a few personal belongings of my own, small framed art works and pictures, my notebooks, my own writing, in a friend’s garage, but aside from that I got rid of everything else.

Books.

Clothes.

Shoes.

Everything but my bicycle and some clothes in a roll on suitcase.

I came back with that same roll on luggage and my bicycle.

And.

Ten dollars.

I don’t regret it, but yeah, I did have a moment today when I realized I had sold my copy of Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets.

That I didn’t have my complete works for Shakespeare, leather-bound from my undergraduate days.

Or.

Sigh.

My collection of TS Eliot.

Also from undergrad.

And.

Oh.

My OED.

My Oxford English Dictionary.

I sold that too.

I think this may be the first time I have ever admitted that in writing in a public forum.

It was a graduation gift from a set of girlfriends in Madison who were my best friends for years before I moved to San Francisco and became a raging drug addict whose friends wanted nothing to fucking do with her whatsoever.

I managed to keep that damn dictionary through years of moves and geographics and even pretty damn far into sobriety.

But.

I decided to let it go.

It was for God to have.

It was always Gods.

I went into Alley Cat Books on 24th Street a few months ago to see if the OED was still there, I was on my way to an appointment and really did not have time to stop in and look, but the last time I had been in there, the dictionary was still there.

Granted that had been over a year and a half ago.

I didn’t see it, but they had re-arranged the store and I was too shy and pinched on time to ask the clerk if they still had it.

One day I’ll replace those words.

And one day these words will be replaced.

All words are infinite.

All moments meaningful, lustful, alive, here and present and a live and loved in my heart.

I don’t have much contact with any of those old girlfriends, but they live in my heart.

And I won’t ever forget what it felt like to get that gift at my graduation party.

I can still feel the weight of it in my hands and I knew the moment it was set in my arms what it was.

I was blown away.

To be seen for what I love is important.

Although not important enough for me to have to do it, the writing or the reading, all good writers have to read too, I love an audience, but I don’t need one to write.

God is my witness.

My heart is my muse.

I am a channel and I don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going to go.

Only that it will.

These words.

Into the ether.

Into the void.

From out my fingers, from out of my heart, with passion and providence, into the universe.

Perhaps the words will fill the voids between stars, the emptiness that needs be filled by poetry until all the worlds are seemless and held in beauty, together under the great bounty and soulshine, the light will cover the dark.

Or not.

I don’t know.

I can’t ever really know.

I will just keep writing and trying and falling and stumbling and getting up again.

I believe I will fly one day, if not this day, then the next.

And every word I put down an attempt at faith in something so much bigger than I, a tiny glimpse, a sliver of honey and lavender crystals, a shining cello note, a sting pulled, a plucking, a bewitching, an enamourement, a leap,  and love tossed I jump.

I don’t need to know where I land.

The leaping.

Well.

It is enough.

It always is.

 

Happy Dance

I just did my little soft shoe Converse shuffle of joy.

I mean I busted out some serious happy dance moves.

I jumped up.

I wiggled around.

I giggled like an insane person.

Then.

Just for the fuck of it all.

I did it again.

I’m happy.

I have been given so much.

It blows my mind.

It really does and I can’t express it and I can’t believe it sometimes and the joy of it makes me burst out dancing like, well, like no one’s watching.

Because.

Um.

No one was.

Heh.

If I could dance for you I would.

Happy and free and silly and overwhelmed with gratitude and love.

With the shape of the moon half full floating in the sky.

With the sand dunes curling down to the sea.

With the smell of pumpkin pie spice and the glow of candles.

I would dance and stomp and twirl.

I like to dance when I am happy.

I have on some good French house music.

The Kungs.

And the internet hasn’t dropped me, yet, sometimes it’s hard to get the wifi down here in my little hobbit hole and when I want to hook up my phone to my Ihome speaker, it can drop and I won’t have my Spotify.

But tonight.

The wifi knew I wanted to dance.

To make photographs in my heart of my feelings.

Channeled with love, hollowed out glories of memories yet to be made and wanders where I capture all the joyousness in my life.

I feel seen and loved and cherished.

I feel special.

And lit up.

It is a sublime feeling.

One that I capture and hold, in the burrows of my bones, in the skein of my soul, in the stretch and uplift of laughter on my mouth, in the way it curves in a smile, perpetual and open, lifted and lightened.

I am feeling good.

You may surmise.

Your summary would be correct.

I have so much.

I can hold it in my hand.

The weight of it.

The heft of it.

Hewn there.

The glory of images and moments, succulent, sweet, piled up like persimmons harvested from the bins at the farmer’s market.

Excuse me.

Dance break.

Damn that is some good music.

Ah, music, you fill me up.

I was sharing with someone earlier about a time in my life when I lost the cello.

It used to sadden me, make me rumpled with remorse, with loss, with sorrow, with regret.

Not that there really was much I could have done or changed about the circumstances.

My family moved from an urban school system to a rural school system, both were public, that did not have an orchestra.

I was bereft.

I had been playing cello for years.

It was my passion.

My solace.

My retreat from the world.

I really had believed I was going to grow up to be a cellist in an orchestra.

Mister Ziegler was adamantly against my parents decision, my conductor, he was aghast when my family decided to make the move and I was no longer going to be able to play.

We were too poor for me to continue private lessons.

The school I was in loaned me a school cello, a beautiful full-sized lion of a cello, golden and burnt orange, I actually had two.

One that I kept at home and one that I practiced with at school.

The one I kept at home was the beauty and I was loath to part with her.

The school had not only been supportive of my cello playing–it was unheard of for a student to have access to not one but two stringed instruments–they also, I have no clue who cleared it, again, probably Mister Ziegler, for me to have once a week private lessons with a cellist from the UW Madison orchestra.

He was beautiful.

And his fingers stunned me, so long and tapered and elegant, they way he held the neck of the cello and his bow hand.

Shut up.

Amazing.

I had a good bow hand, but his was impeccable.

He had dark hair and dark eyes and was pale as blue shadows on ice.

I remember the other girl who got lessons, her parents paid for them, Susie, she was the talented one, the one with the really expensive cello, the girl who would become first chair.

At least that’s what Mister Ziegler predicted.

“You Carmen, you’re not going to be first chair, or second, maybe third, but let me be honest, you’ll probably be fourth if you’re lucky,” he told me one day as the orchestra emptied out and the students headed off to classes other than the annoying one that their parents were pushing them into.

The girls who quit because they wanted to grow their fingernails and date boys.

The guys who dropped to play football or soccer or baseball.

And me.

I was hurt, at first when he said it, I was not expecting to hear that, I knew, oh how I knew, like you know when you love someone but they can’t or won’t love you back, I knew that I was not first chair material.

But.

Fuck.

Not even third?

That hurt.

Then.

He stopped.

He looked down at me as I straddled the chair with my cello laying against my leg, took off his horn rimmed glasses and polished them absent-mindedly with his shirt tail, “but you will always have a place in an orchestra Carmen, always, you have something that an orchestra desperately needs, you have heart.”

I had tears in my eyes when he told me that.

I have tears in my eyes now.

“You won’t be first chair, but Carmen, you will play, you will have a job, you can make a career out of this, you can, you have soul and passion and heart and no orchestra can survive without that.”

He tucked his shirt in, put his glasses on his nose and ran his hands through his hair, it was a wild nest of just beginning to fade red curls that on a lessor man or a slightly different face would have called to mind Bozo the clown, instead of this passionate, eccentric, oddball man full of handsome charm and charisma.

“I’m going to talk to your parents again, see if maybe we can’t figure something out,” he padded to the front of the room in his sock feet, he had a habit of conducting in his socks, and took the music off the podium, “scat kiddo, get to your next class.”

He did have a conference with my mom and step father.

It was for naught.

I lost the cello.

But I did not lose the joy.

I did not lose the love.

I did not lose my heart.

It broke open.

Got bigger.

It got some more love on.

Tonight it overflows with it.

And.

I am not sorrowful for that loss.

Rather.

I am grateful for the time I got to have with the cello.

It was a blessing.

Grateful for all the gifts in my life.

All of them.

I am the luckiest girl in the world.

I am.

I am.

Happy.

Joyous.

Motherfucking.

Free.

Soothing Sounds

For this Sunday.

I have felt off kilter all weekend.

Could be that it was my first weekend “off” in some time and the need to get out there and do something was in fierce competition with the need to get the fuck caught up on my reading for class.

I did actually get out of the house today but it was not a success.

And.

It was a total success.

I met friends in Cole Valley and we went to Free Gold Watch and played Street Fighter and Addams Family pinball.

It was fantastic.

Then we walked to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.

Which I shall now proceed to call Hardly Strictly douchebag.

I just can’t handle the crowds.

I want to.

But.

I can’t deal with the jostling, the open containers, the copious pot smoking.

I didn’t even make it into one of the proper stages having started to get freaked out by the closeness of the people and the fact that we didn’t really go at the festival with a strategic entry point and I had left my scooter parked at 7th and Irving.

By the time we had crossed Crossover Drive and were still a way to go I thought I was going to start hyperventilating.

It didn’t help that I had not navigated my timing with meeting up with my friends and lunch and there was a tiny bit of miscommunication and the next thing I know I’m miles away from my scooter, in a big crowd of people, hungry and anxious.

Yuck.

I got my friends to the festival and turned around and started walking back to my scooter.

I tried.

I really did.

I also tried to now beat myself up too much as I got on the phone and called my person and sobbed a little about being overwhelmed.

I have just been tender and I know a lot of it has to do with further changes with my job and negotiating that and feeling unbalanced.

I like structure and my job has become, well, weird.

I’m now helping out the other family twice a week and interviewing this week with a referral from the mom of my original family and it feels a little enmeshed and strange and I am frankly over it.

I just want a clear-cut job.

I also know that my boundaries around job stuff are pretty rigid, I think it gives me some sense of self-control and control over the situation and lends to a false feeling of security.

The change that is happening.

Is.

Well.

Happening.

I can’t actually change that, I can roll with it or get rolled over by it.

I can also get out of it.

And I’m aware that I need to broaden my perspective and see that what is happening, this change-up, is not necessarily a bad thing.

It’s in fact.

A good thing.

But it is change and I’m not always, like never, comfortable with that.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this line of thought, just got lost in the cello music I’ve got on –Yo Yo Ma playing Bach sonatas.

Soothing Sunday sounds.

Other soothing things today.

I made chicken soup.

I made a fresh bed with clean sheets.

Two loads of laundry washed, dried, folded, put away.

And despite my consternation in regards to going to the park for Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, I did get a nice walk in the park, the sky was blue-the brief rain fell early in the afternoon and passed quickly–the sun was out, I saw two red tail hawks and loads of flowers.

When I got home I took my Family Therapy reading and sat on the back porch in the late afternoon sunlight and read for an hour until my friend called to let me know they were at Java Beach.

I went down and sat outside in the last waning minutes of golden sunset and talked about Paris with them and going to Decompression next Sunday.

Decompression is a lot of people too, but not 100s of thousands, more like 10-15,000 and the venue is comfortable to me and I know people there and I know where I can go to chill out and the space is also smaller.

Anyway.

I shouldn’t get overwhelmed with the crowds and I will see folks that I haven’t seen since the event.

It will be a nice way to wrap up the summer for me.

This week will be lots of work, work interview for more work, and a meeting with my school advisor that I was supposed to have this past Friday but had to reschedule after I dropped my phone in the toilet and had to get a new one Friday before work.

I will, fingers crossed, do a lot of reading.

I have a paper to write on Saturday.

Then Decompression with my friends.

I think that’s how it’s going to be, show up, work my ass off, meet up with friends at least once a week and do something, even if it’s small.

I don’t have to go see a huge festival to feel a part of, if anything I usually feel more isolated in a crowd than I do out of one.

I have felt unaccountably sad in spots this weekend and I’m not sure what to attribute that too, but I’m grateful as well for those feelings, ah feelings.

The good news is I get to have them.

The bad news is I get to have them.

At least I’m alive to feel.

And there is so much goodness in the small, sweet, simple acts of self-care that I have done that I’m ok with the sads, they happen, then the happy will happen and all the others in between too.

The sound of the cello soothes me and I soften towards this place, this being, this quietness of self that is fine just exactly how it is.

I don’t need to fix me.

Just accept me.

That’s all.

That’s it.

Pretty fucking simple when I look at it like that.

And.

Easy.

If I let it be.

Easy like Sunday morning.

 

Bow Hand*

Bow Hand

 

Speak to me in the language of cellos. Brush the kiss fluttering on my collar

Bones made of sharp starlight softened with dead time. Remember the waltz?

The shattering sky a spray of poetry whistled out the mouth of God. Holler

Mountain coffee in the cup, cinnamon dusted strawberry on my lips, Gestalt

Binaries and stimulation from early awakening upon REM sleep, I push crust

From my eyes and stretch heaven ward, then swan dive down, down, the torrid

Coast of love last found curled under my bed with a rasher of candied maple lust.

The metronome swings, tick, tock, tick, tock, measuring out, dolling out fevered

Visions stolen from sleeping doll hearts; while my head, perennially in the clouds

Languishes on my chest, a sudden dropsy of narcolepsy and I somnambulate, tip

Toes curled under as though channeling Degas graphite sketches on paper shrouds

Twisted crinolines, long legs point, feet flex, a sudden flutter, the ballerina’s hip

Scant weight against the palm of my desire. I shut the music box, silence concordant

With chandelier spattered light and the remembrance of you, my heart now dormant.

 

 

*Listening to Bach Cello Suite #5 in C Minor performed by Edgar Meyer

 

You Have Changed So Much

He said.

“You are so beautiful, look at her,” he said to the man sitting next to me.

Thank you.

I have grown up a lot.

My heart so tender today that I would rather not write tonight for fear that if it, my heart, were any more on m sleeve, it might burst.

Just the ache that fills me when I look at the ten pink Gerber daisies my boyfriend left on my scooter for me to discover when I got home tonight is enough to make me want to stop writing.

I know the only way through this is to grow through it.

That was not a typo.

I really have to grow more.

Just when I think I can stop stretching my arms toward the sun I find myself needing to reach even harder toward that warmth and light.

The sunlight of the spirit I need more than ever now.

I still feel so new at this thing called living.

I still find myself trying to find my voice.

Last night as I was heading to bed I played the Bach cello Sonatas again that I had been listening to, one in particular that reverberates within me when ever I hear it, Cello Suite in G Menuett 1 & 2, and I cried.

It just filled me with grief and joy and sorrow and gratitude and awe and I was astounded that I could feel so very much, that I could hold all those emotions at one time and feel them each and every one.

Painfully so.

Gratefully so.

I held him in my arms and kissed his hair and said, “shhh, I hear you, I hear you, I hear you, it’s ok.”

He sobbed like the two and a half tired toddler he was, overwhelmed with the sugar from a rice crispy treat and a trip to his older brother’s pre-school class for a family share day.

He was inconsolable with feelings.

He wasn’t able to express, without screaming in frustration what he wanted.

He wanted it all.

And he could not find the words to ask for everything he wanted.

I am forty years older than him and sometimes I feel like that too, the words get stifled in my chest and I cannot find the way to have you hear me, to express myself, that my heart is tender, that you have touched it, that I feel you, even when you retreat again and leave me here to stare at pink flowers on an aquamarine table, next to a bunny night-light from Paris, tears well up and then down.

I breathe.

I held him and calmly spoke to him and let him know he was heard and it was alright and he didn’t need to do anything but breathe.

“Take a big deep breath,” I told him and inhaled through my nose and exhaled slowly.

“Again.”

“Baby, try again, you can do it, I’m here, I’m here holding you, you are safe.” I said and held him and swayed next to the sound machine.

It took some time.

It always does when our hearts are so full and there is so much to say and no words to express all the feelings but to holler in a scream, NO!

NO!

He screamed.

The tantrum lasted about 20 minutes.

It felt longer and all at the same time timeless, effortless, the screaming, the heart wrenching holler of a frustrated child.

And when it was done, a snuggle, a story, a song, lullaby my baby, down to sleep.

A two and a half hour nap and it was like the world was a brand new place and yes!

Let’s go to the park and play fire engines and slides and hide and seek and tag and please, more shovels, and diggers, and sand, yes.

Feelings they pass and when I am overwhelmed, I remind myself, this too shall pass.

And.

To thine own self be true.

So I do what makes sense, I make a cup of tea, I arrange flowers in a Mason jar and smile that I have once again been given so much more than what I asked for and that, yes, I am allowed to ask at all.

I don’t have to be a quiet wallflower.

I can keep changing.

I am not the same woman.

I am this woman.

Alive, imbued with emotions, all allowed, intelligent, funny, sweet, beautiful, hopefully more on the inside than the outside–that’s where it counts, really, physical beauty fades, but heart beauty, that which is inside, that only grows deeper in beauty and fullness.

Rich.

That is what this life is, full of flavor and spice.

Salt and pepper, smoked paprika, grated nutmeg, golden turmeric, spicy ginger, sultry cinnamon, spiky mace, sweet Cicely, clove, anise in all its wild glory.

So much.

Tonight as I was riding home through the park, just past the end of the Pan Handle where it ends at Stanyan, I rode by a patch of the park that smelled so pungent I was bowled over with memory.

Wet, dark, damp, sweet, the smell of soft rotting nectarines and the wound of a night-blooming jasmine melded my heart to the here and now and the little girl I was so many moons back.

I did not perhaps have that same comfort and soothing that I was able to give the littlest boy I take care of, but I could connect the woman I am to the girl that I was and see how far I have come and see how tender I can be to that part of myself and know that no matter how open and vulnerable I feel, that I really won’t be hurt be letting others see exactly what there is to me.

All of it.

I am as see through as the pink of a bunny rabbit ears.

Have you seen that?

The translucent light, pearled and pink with blood and the white of a fur softly ringing the tender skin, that shines through a rabbit-ear.

That is me.

Tonight anyway.

Tomorrow?

Let’s not go there, shall we?

Just let me sink, soft, and unbound into the sound of cello rasping away into the evening as the stars shimmer over the woods, deep, wild, and omniscient in their tangled ramble toward the sea.

 

Next Ten Years

What is up the Universe’s sleeve I wonder.

Not that anything other than the next action in front of me is ever revealed, it’s entertaining nonetheless to let myself ponder it.

I suspect that there will be more travelling.

I want to go down soon to Chula Vista and see my grandmother, it’s been really too long.

I want to go to Atlanta in July.

Yeah, I know, that’s like, um going to Anchorage in December, but hey, when an international group of like-minded fellows decides to be in a certain place at a certain time, then, well, I’lll see you in Atlanta in July.

Outside of that, further down the line, another trip or three to Paris.

I just got the bug man, I don’t suppose I ever will get rid of it.

I’m currently listening to Edger Meyer playing a double bass cello to Bach Cello Suite #2 in D Minor and while I was in the shower I saw myself in front of the window of the luthier in Paris on the Left Bank near Shakespeare and Company.

I saw myself walk in and ask, “combien sa coute?”

How much does that cost?

Of course I would add s’il vous plait to that request and then I see myself touch the caramel color wood of the front breast of the cello and smell the rosin and I am handed a horse hair bow and invited to sit and see how I like her sound.

It’s a fantasy, yes, but stranger things have happened.

In the next decade I propose that I will be picking up the cello again, actually I see that happening sooner rather than later.

I was googling Roland Feller today at work while the littlest guy napped.

Member, Entente Internationald des Maitres Luthiers et Archetiers d’Art.

Member of the American Federation of Violin and bow Makers.

Roland Feller is a luthier here in the city that a friend who works at the Burning Man offices took me to one fine day about 8 years ago.

He had been lending me his cello, he plays out and has more than one cello, I wasn’t using his orchestra cello, but it was still nice.

He wanted me to see what a real luthier looked like and took me to Feller’s atelier in the NOPA.

Unless you know what you are looking for you would miss it.

It is a second story shop in a grey nondescript house squeezed in between the Popeye’s on Divisadero and a mom and pop grocery/liquor mart.

There’s a heavy metal gate and a dirty ATM in the base door way of the stairs.

There’s a camera mounted to the top of the stairs and you buzz to get in.

The gate swings out and open and one climbs the rickety worn carpeted stairs and arises into stringed instrument heaven.

The smell.

Oh.

The cellos.

I noticed other instruments, sure, I did, but the cellos were so stupendous and bright, lustrous, enraptured with late afternoon light and gold glowing wood.

My soul felt soothed and I felt not enough all at the same time.

I also recall feeling wildly jealous of a family with a young daughter who was picking out her first full size cello.

She’d grown into the big girl size.

I think I am ready to do the same.

This is not like surfing to me, I’m not interested in finding a guy to teach me so that I can go on a date with him.

This is not like downloading all the Muddy Waters albums because you danced with me to Hoochie Coochie Man in the soft light of my room.

This is not like playing frisbee golf in the snow because your my man.

Nope.

This is a desire and passion all my own.

And since I am not being quiet about my passions and desires, I desire to get myself to the luthier’s.

“Doll, instead of putting more ink on that beautiful skin of yours, why don’t you invest in a cello?”  He said to me over the table at the cafe.

I looked him straight in his blue eyes and said, “I have $1800 in my savings account, I could go get one this weekend.”

Granted, I probably won’t.

I have plans.

And the tattoo is part of them.

Unless something ridiculous like a meteor of cocaine hits my house and smashes itself up my nose and somebody ties me down and pours a beer into my mouth, I’ll be ten in three hours and I am going to get that tattoo.

But, he was right, my cafe confidant, I do need to get a cello in my life.

Where I will squeeze it in?

Who knows.

But squeeze I will.

A minute here.

An hour there.

Oh.

To sit in the sea salt air in the sunshine on my back porch and practice the Bach preludes.

Oh.

Now that would be something else.

I had been planning on saving that money for a new laptop and I will still need to get one before graduate school starts.

Oh yeah, that’s going to happen.

Whether I get into this program or I do another, I see a Master’s degree in my next ten years.

Abso-fucking-lutely do.

It’s a few months off, fall of 2015, so I think I could look into getting a little cello action in my life for sure.

Besides, when you say yes to the Universe, it takes a 1,000 steps toward you.

I am saying yes to playing cello.

Yes to more travel.

Yes to graduate school.

Yes to staying sober.

Yes to service.

Yes to love.

All love.

There is so much life to live for me yet.

I am so young and so ready to keep moving forward.

I am so overwhelmed with gratitude and the deep and knowing knowledge that my life is really just starting to bloom.

All that work, all the shit, er fertilizer, has finally kicked in.

Life is miraculous.

I am stunning proof.