Monthly Archives: July 2017

20 Days Off (16)

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I’m going on holiday. Twenty days, more than I’ve taken in decades. It is blowing my mind. I’m not there yet. How do I wrap myself around almost three weeks of vacation? I want to stretch, slither, flick my tongue, grin. And not only that, but I have this big longing to truly feel like I’m on vacation. I’m saving crossword puzzles from my L.A. Times, just the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday ones, the easy ones before they get too hard later in the week. I’ll have six to do while I am whiling away my hours. I amuse myself thinking I will need to be present a great deal during this time, so I am always appreciating that I am on holiday. And isn’t life a romp?!? So do you think this yearning for the real feeling of being on holiday counts as a dream? Might I use it for a blog post this week? I am hoping, too, for a kind of writer’s holiday, all that public transit, all those good chances to write. Wakes up in me my dream of walking the camino. Watched The Way again last week. One of these years it will be me. I think it is the only “concrete” dream I’ve ever had. I want to walk 500 miles across northern Spain, from France to the sea. I want it like I want soft shoes in winter, down blankets, good goat cheese, an empty page and a favorite pen. I don’t know what year it will be, but I am hoping it will be more than one. I want to walk the camino again and again. I even dream of walking the camino front and back, or forward and backward. Shall I not only take my sweet time walking from France to the sea, but then turn right around and make my own sweet snail pace way back again all the way to France and beyond? Shall I watch the grapes ripening as I walk west in the late spring, see them crushing the dark fruit on my way back in the early fall? There will be nuts on the ground, too, late summer berries. It makes me squiggle. It makes me grin. One of these years. Yo voy. Yo vengo. I am coming.

Beyond Deserving (15)

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Something odd keeps happening to me. It is unexpected, feels a bit unreal, almost dreamlike. Again and again in recent weeks I am visited by sadness—swift, keen, quick to pass. I am washing dishes. Or I am walking to the bus stop, scarf over my bent head, concentrating just to move through the hard heat of a July afternoon in this desert town. It isn’t even as if something else sparks a thought of you, the more ordinary path. And I can’t tell if this might have begun because my book, this story about the two of us, is close to being finished, this third time a charm. (Touch wood.) Or if it might be only that the time has come all by itself, a natural ending, a kind of completion of big loss, even a final letting go. I know I began to write this book much too soon, have said this before. In what is happening now there is this flicker of feeling, this sense that now is when I might have more properly begun this book. Only now. Or maybe a little bit of time from now, when this time, too, has passed. What I do know is this sudden sadness comes, piercing, bittersweet, as though I am only just now losing you for good after all these years. It makes me want to buckle at the knees, fall to the sidewalk, cement hot against my shins, quick sword thrust of sharp grief. But at the same time, in a way that makes no sense to me but that my body seems to understand, the grief is fleeting, even quiet, softened, like the regrets of our youth at the end of a long and happy life, riches beyond deserving.

Darn You (14)

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I daydream about the two of us playing this greeting game. I begin because of the new big cup I bought for drinking my morning tea. I don’t start thinking about you, but you are evoked. Cocked head moment while these thoughts move through me and the mountains go orange with that first light of the sun. House finch, bougainvillea, the sliding glass door wide open. “Good morning, gorgeous,” I say. I read it from the side of my new cup. The birds are loud. I say it again and again, experimenting with the delivery. I say it like a dreamy 1930s MGM male lead and giggle. I am having fun more often, make myself laugh out loud. Somewhere in this reverie you arise, softened as I am toward you because of my book. I imagine the sleepy-voiced man who is still calling be gorgeous after decades together, like it’s all lovely and automatic. Darn the writing. Darn you.

Gladness (13)

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I live in the palo verde in the woman’s courtyard. I have waited seven years to be up in this green tree, high above the moist earth that was my home. I sing to summer, cicada sounds in me. Summer serenade, stealthy buzz, begin and end, sudden, sultry, magic. I am a magic cicada. I can turn summer into fall, drive humans from their beds, angry shouts in the night, the slamming of windows. So now I like to stay where I am wanted. This palo verde likes me in her arms, rocks me in the breeze. I am more than a little in love with her. Serena, the woman calls her. She says it like a word in Spanish. She asked the tree’s name when she planted her and saw the word in her head, scrap of paper in her mind, words from an old typewriter like letters from her father when she was a little girl, the name Serena popping out. I didn’t think I’d ever love a tree like this, much less a human. But the woman likes me. She really likes me. And after all those angry windows closed against me in the dark, it is like heaven, like cotton candy, like marbles in the moonlight to feel the woman’s pleasure when I begin to sing. Ah, cicada. I hear her whisper, feel her cherishing my song. If she saw my bug body, I don’t know if she would be able to embrace me as wholly as she does my music. But I know she would honor me still, protect me in every way she can, bug body and all. It makes me want to cry, sitting in Serena in the early dusk, so lucky here in the warm desert sky, feeling the woman’s gladness as I begin to sing.

[Editor’s note: This is a slightly revised version of an 11-minute writing in response to a Natalie Goldberg prompt to write a “waking daydream” that I wrote downtown with Stef on Wednesday in the late morning with the misters on.]

A Pilgrimage of Horses (12)

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I dream of a pilgrimage of horses. I stand at a crossroads of dirt trails where I can see them walking en masse. It is night, but I see them crossing through intermittent moonlight. Their movement is steady, quiet. I’m surprised to see some of them are saddled and bridled. There are no humans with them, only the horses walking, four or five or six deep on the two converging trails. I feel their sense of purpose, of clear intention, though I am not certain I understand it. I stand where I can watch them, among other people. I think I am in a foreign land or in “enemy” territory because I am aware I may be shot and killed. I am afraid, but I know this is important. I want to stand with my palms together, like namaste, like the Buddhist bow. Instead, I link my fingers. I hold them against my solar plexus, like in prayer, and bear witness, homage, to their quiet passage.

Two Working Dreams (11)

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I dream another of those dreams that weave through the whole of my night. It’s elusive, even as I wake from it, even though I return to it again and again. There is a clear glass sphere, fog-filled, suspended in the air. The message, too, is ephemeral but clear. We are to take risks, make ourselves vulnerable. No wonder I am afraid so much of the time, I think. I woke up anxious again five mornings ago. It’s as though I reach a tipping point where it all becomes too much for me. My peace vanishes. Not the deeper peace at my bedrock but the one that lives as ease in my body. In a second dream there are large, looming pieces that need to be moved, like office machines, huge pieces of furniture, a big dark pile. There is a sense of urgency. They need to be moved right away, and it is hard, heavy work. When I lift up the last piece, I find the silver lining. Copper, actually. Uncovered now is a shiny, new-minted penny, as if it has been waiting for me. If I were to lean close, I’d be able to read the year it was made, but I don’t try. It doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is the penny lies heads up for good luck.