moments.

these are brief excerpts from my notebook since friday – largely unedited – they might not make a whole lot of sense – but the whole passages they come from make less sense… and until i have time to make a coherent post, they will have to do….

friday – airport gate

i look at my hands – which look nervous – why? is it because i have crossed that line into a place where i have no rights – or some other line not yet defined inside of me? what fear of mine is so imprinted as i enter this country or is it just the fear of giving up control? something about airports and checkpoints always makes me feel disorganized – having to produce the same papers over and over again, fumbling documents in front of sentinels defending their borders.

arriving

when you arrive at a place you’ve not been before, long after dark, the other senses are forced to work overtime to suss out the new surroundings. getting out of the car at the fork in the road, i am overwhelmed by the smell of eucalyptus which runs from the skies in the damp evening air – the road scrubbed with heavy rain, gives a satisfactory suck as the mud grips at the soles of my boots – the sound of water and small critters restling in the underbrush are a greeting… to this yurt perched on the edge of a landslide in a community no one has heard of.

lowbaggers and thieves

it really feels like a double life sometimes – that i can simultaneously be one thing and another seemingly opposite. at home in my surprisingly straight surface life, but feeling like i am coming home in the world of lowbaggers and thieves – like a memory almost forgotten but always tugging at the corner of who i am – a curtain pulled back to reveal who i might be instead.

this yurt in the hills of a rainy northern california winter, moulding despite the heat of a woodstove, is neither surprising or loathsome in any way. i think of ways to fit this into my present life – but am stumped because the way to do both hasn’t been mapped yet, and may not even be a possibility. but then, that is the whole of how i have lived in any case – unmapped in a territory yet unstaked in a world yet unbound with a deep and terrifying desire to be free. what body this soul belonged to before i do not know, but i wonder if it was always this much of a puzzle, or outlaw desiring. if so, did i not learn from that – or does this essence belong to some future yet unimagined?

soap

his soap smells like bay laurel, mine like red cedar – we from different ends of the same coastal spectrum and i am kneeling in a cold porcelain tub with a shower nozzel in my hands – warm water cascading down over my forehead, hair dripping with the scent of forests near and far.