Red Cedar

got into los angeles 2 nights ago at 2:30 in the morning… after 3 days of hotsprings and a 10 hour bus ride. my friends here live in west hollywood, in a non-gentrified corner of a city so massive i can’t quite get a handle on where everything is.

there is a certain passing point reached once i’ve been in the united states for more than a few days – a line that demarcates patience from revulsion – where i am reminded over and over of the mean-ness and shabbiness characterizing so much of the small-towns, or the craziness lying just under the skin’s surface in the large cities. this is the border within myself, crossed on pretty much every trip south longer than 5 days – the farther south i go the more foreign i feel.

this country simultaneously produces in me a deep desire for radical action, and at the same time the nagging doubts of the futility of fighting a beast so large and self-involved. no doubt i find my hope (and my privilege) in a half acre and a rented house nestled within the cedars and firs of the northwest in a place no one down here has ever heard of. it is so far away, so safe, so not-america.

but still, i am glad to be here among friends, spending time with aaron who i have not seen for over a year – and plotting our escape to the desert tomorrow to see the rare desert-bloom (apparently the best in 10 years owing to all the rain they have had down here in the past 2 months). this camping trip will be a first for me, as canada provides only a single opportunity to experience true desert and it’s not the same in any case. i am hoping to get some good photographs and possibly some colour in my skin which is ghost-pale in this land of 365-day sun.

we have errands to run, and i have to transfer my clothes from washer to dryer – so this i where i will sign off for the time being…..

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.

i have been writing and writing since i left on friday – it seems a whole other world – to not have to get up to go to work today – to be in the united states. i am often reminded here that i just am not cut out to live in a place with this large of a population – too many people, too much need to be agressive (or at the very least assertive in a way that seems foreign to me). i am hoping at the end of this trip to have fodder for more creative endeavours – as there are moments within moments here that need to be written and photographed (not because of this particular country, but because of my peculiar friends)….

since i arrived friday, i have been staying in a tiny corner of the east bay area called – canyon (population 200) – on a squatted fifth of an acre that “belongs” to two friends of mine. i will post photographs when i am able to download my camera (probably not until i get home since i left the cable in roberts creek). since that time i have done some lounging about, gone for a hike, gone to church, driven up the coast to a town called bolinas, read books, gone to a poetry slam, cooked good dinners (and breakfasts) and generally done a lot of socializing with my friends kevin and jasmyn.

tomorrow i travel again and will not likely be near a computer for awhile… a brief hello to everyone and letting you all know i am safe and doing really well 🙂

yup – that’s right, gone on holidays. will post during the trip if i get computer access. will return sometime around the 1st week of march.