Category Archives: Daily life

Oceanside (18)

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Today I take Amtrak to Oceanside. According to some schematic of the Peaceful Warrior, this year for me is about adventure. (Last year was stability.) Unwilling as I am to leave the cats for long, I am determined to embrace the small adventures, day trips across town, across the state, over the border. When this one is complete (I am about an hour and a half away from Palm Springs as I type this), it will have been a 12-plus hour trip for two and a half hours in Oceanside, but it is worth it. I spend travel time writing and working on my blog, my breath caught short when I first see the ocean through the train window.

Colorful beach umbrellas north of Oceanside and small shining wave

I talk for a long time to a man with a Catalan accent who lives blocks from me. In Oceanside the tide is in, so I can only walk for a short stretch on the beach, but I relish it, the untamed rush of water that splashes my thighs, the frolic of my fellow beachgoers, bright umbrellas clustered everywhere. I love every minute of walking through the town. The air is clean. I study each street as I walk, dream about living in the old apartment building with the tangled bottlebrush lining the sidewalk, windows thrown open to the sea only a short block away. I am not here long enough to get a sense of the community, but nothing rubs me wrong. Already it feels like a new friend, that first blush. I look forward to more visits, to the getting-to-know-you process, to finding the warts, discovering the underbelly. Back in Riverside County in the middle dusk, the fresh sea air and the shimmer of sun on water seem like a dream, like a thousand miles ago. But it’s a good dream, the kind of dream you want to wake up from slowly, the kind you want to savor, wet sand beneath your bare feet, the warm air salty on your tongue.

Everywhere but Here (17)

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I wake from deep sleep after 8am. Good dreams drift away like fog before I can wrap my hands around them. I look out the window, and joy rises in me, full and light. It is the eleventh day of my 16-day holiday. I stand beside the kitchen sink and know I have fully returned to myself. Have I been gone for weeks? Years? It took ten days to shed the angst of having to check in throughout the day to answer questions. Even during the times of year when I take weekends off, it is not long enough for me to stop “feeling” people out there needing me, students and educators both. Now on Day Eleven I am free of it. I can feel the difference as the day unfolds. I am not in a hurry. I feed the birds, haul buckets of collected water from the sink and tub out to the young bougainvillea. I make my “liver flush” drink, lemon and garlic and olive oil in the blender, brew my fenugreek tea, feed the cats al fresco. I sip my drinks in the courtyard, talk on the phone for a long time to dear old friends who summer in San Francisco. I slide in yoga, too, quiet and easy, before I need to leave. I stay mindful, don’t rush, eat yellow melon and Brazil nuts from my purple glass bowl. When Audrey drives up, I bring my breakfast with me and eat it in the car. When she brings me home again after we have run around in the hot, humid afternoon, I eat gazpacho and slices of tofu on the patio and let myself read my Valdemar novel while the sun lowers in the sky. I water and feed the birds again in the almost dark because I am leaving early in the morning. A huge frog hops across the pavement, and I hope he is the same one I met before, am cheered to think he may have survived since spring. Later, I even take the time to make garlic and beet goat yogurt dip, and after my shower I eat it with potato chips and watch Parenthood until midnight. I can’t say how good it feels, how grateful I am to have come to this point. The difference is subtle, wordless, impossible to define. But today I have more room inside my skin, and being present becomes effortless. Why, I wonder, would I ever want to be anywhere else?

Lazy Summer Day (16)

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mexican birds of paradise through the open louvered windows

I don’t go to yoga this morning. Instead, after I water the front I weed the bed with the tecoma bush. The Mexican bird of paradise there has taken off. It’s taller than I am. When I begin weeding, I know I’m not going to yoga. I want the luxury of being able to putter, to not rush through my morning chores to hurry across town. I do the rest of the watering, and then I end up clearing away all the things that have collected on the floor, the ice chest and remains of our picnic a week ago, the cans of tuna and cat food from Trader Joe’s. I wash the bamboo plates and spoons. (Yes, I am terrible. They have sat there for a week wrapped up in flowered cloth napkins, crusts of hummus on them.) I take a photograph of the birds of paradise through the open louvered windows with the morning sun falling on them. I talk to my friend Meri on the phone for a long time. In the early afternoon, I reread three chapters of Natalie Goldberg’s latest book about writing. I eat Brazil nuts and a big bowl of cherries. The mourning doves are eating fallen seeds. Sable is still outside with me, so every now and then I wiggle my foot or wave a pillow at them to get them off the ground. “There’s a cat,” I say. I point to Boo snoozing in the shade under the honeysuckle. The birds watch me, expressionless. (Who is this crazy person? What is she saying?) The flies annoy me, insisting on touching my face, my calves, landing on my ears. I want them to go away. Cicadas buzz from my neighbor’s tree. They are one thing I love about summer in Palm Springs. I have a goal now to make a list of more things I love so I’ll remember not to hate summers here. After I write I’m toying with the idea of excavating the tabletop, maybe finishing assembling the shelves so I can remove the tall stack of books from the kitchen chair. I have not yet figured out how to live in 340 square feet. Maybe, I think, I will even wash the floor today. Or maybe I will make scrambled eggs and turn the misters on and sit here reading my latest novel about Valdemar. It’s easy to call the odds for this one as soon as the idea surfaces. But you never know. It’s Day Three of my holiday. Anything can happen.

Mudballs (15)

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It’s crazy hot. I’m dripping with sweat but reluctant to go inside. I’ve become attached to reading Natalie Goldberg and doing my “morning writing” on the patio, even on days when morning becomes late afternoon. Today she talks about being lonely, how Katagiri Roshi says we must stand up in it, not let ourselves be “tossed away.” I think of Bernardo. I saw him on the creek path last week. He told me how lonely he is, how women won’t engage with him because he is not wealthy, because he is short. I talked about how we often don’t get things we are too attached to wanting. It’s the way the universe works. I used my writing contests as an example, how I may be too attached to wanting to win. But my heart went out to him. Today my horoscope says that empathy is underrated but much needed, great for actors, parents. Teachers? Writers, too. But it isn’t always an easy gift. Empathy hurts. I know deep loneliness. Maybe without knowing I learned to stand up in it. I made my peace with it. Bernardo hasn’t, I don’t think. He’s hoping someone will come along to make it go away. It’s why I’ve always felt uncomfortable in our exchanges even though I like him and enjoy our talks. I sensed this, a kind of energetic grasping. Of course, there’s a hunger for connection, for physical closeness, too. It’s different from loneliness but a close cousin, all fruit of feeling alone in the world. Feeling connected to the planet helps. I miss walking every day for that, for the big picture connection. But even here in the courtyard I have my mountains, our palo verde, the birds, the moon, the wind that picks up now as I write, wanting to be included on my list. I feel lonely, yes, but not like years ago. Bernardo’s is a deep ache. I ache for him, for all of us, stumbling along being in bodies, saddled with the illusion we are all alone and separate, our odd human condition. We fumble, tumble into each other, mudballs all—stars inside us.

Long Way Back (14)

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The hot air is thick with unfallen rain. My body feels too heavy to fly, so I walk along the creek. I see three white egrets. One is standing on one leg in the shallow water at the creek’s edge. The other two walk together. One keeps looking at the other. It feels like they are deep in conversation I can’t hear. I stop in the middle of the footbridge and face east. I can’t see the egrets now. But I hear a few frogs, just starting up in the early dusk. The crickets are singing, too, and I hear the buzz of cicadas in the cluster of smoke trees on the south side of the bridge. I run both hands along the sides of my face, my forehead, across my shorn hair, pushing back sweat. I take a deep breath, close my eyes and reach for that spot inside my skull. Nothing happens. I am trying too hard. “No, sweetling. Don’t push.” I can hear Kira’s voice as if it were yesterday and not two decades ago. She smiles, shakes her head. “Hold the thought—touch the place, but do not try to force it,” she says. She forms her words with care. English is not her native tongue. “Let it come,” she says. I blow breath through my lips and let them vibrate, make noise. I sound like a horse, I think. And then, horses can’t fly. I reach again, coaxing, gentle. The spot responds, thick and alive in my head. My feet leave the ground. I lift up, then falter and almost touch the bridge again. But I stroke the space inside me, that dense unseen thing, and I steady.

I lift up to the tops of the trees and hover, still hesitant. I have not been able to stay aloft for the past seven days, and I am afraid. “Easy,” Kira’s voice whispers. I remember to breathe, and I let myself drift east above the creek bed. I see the egrets again—they’d been hidden by a small palo verde. They look up but don’t react. The birds here are used to us by now. I turn over and stretch out my arms like a kid floating on her back. I am over the old golf course now, so I adjust my height to clear the tallest of the palm trees. I hear a grackle near where the pond used to be. It makes me happy. I haven’t heard a grackle here in a long time. Maybe we really are turning things around. Maybe it isn’t too late. I hope I’m right. Desirée doesn’t think so. We argued about it again last night. I can still taste the angry words in my mouth, still see her flying away from me as though she couldn’t leave me fast enough, moonlight on her back. Most people believe her. They think it’s too late. We are stupid and wasting our time. I only know a few who think like I do, who believe what we’re doing matters. Lisa. Shawnee. Verdis. But how could we not try? How could we live with ourselves if we didn’t? I begin to sink. My thoughts are making me too heavy. I’ve flown far. It will be a long walk back.

Become Big, or When I Write (13)

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Natalie Goldberg says in Writing Down the Bones, “Become big and write with the whole world in your arms.” I love that. I love the way it makes me feel. When I write I am my mother who cleaned the house every Friday when I was little. Daddy brought home Bob’s Big Boy that night for dinner, the combination plates, so she didn’t have to cook. When I write I am my 4th-grade self walking down the hallway in my stepfather’s house in East Granby, Connecticut, when I heard the radio saying Kennedy had been shot. When I write I am big like the San Jacinto mountains that right now are diminished by the smog between us, but I am big like their massive shoulders, big like they are when the air is clean and you think you can reach out and stroke the ridge line like a sleeping bear. When I write I am the African on a crowded raft hoping to reach Italy alive. I am lost treasure at the bottom of the sea beneath him, gold doubloons among the old white bones. When I write I am the breeze that moves across my skin and still cools me in the early summer day. I am the wind that breaks my green umbrella. When I write I hold the field of sunflowers in my arms beside the path to Santiago de Compostela. When I am big I write with Hitler and George Bush (the son) and Glinda from The Wizard of Oz—they are all in my arms. And Toto, too. When I write I am clouds, streetlights, 4711 cologne, Stalin, Ray Bradbury, Natalie Goldberg. I hold rain and starlight, yerba maté with coconut milk and honey, exhaust fumes from the diesel truck my neighbor drives, eggshells in the trash wet with the whites I have syphoned off for the egg yolks I fed the cats. When I write I hold you and Aunt Doris and Huckleberry Finn in my arms. I hold myself in my arms. I learn to be tender with myself. When I write, I hold you, too, and try to be honest and kind.

Just as I Am (12)

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auqua aura pendant on black cord

Going to the dentist makes me vulnerable. When I lived in Sebastopol I endured a long stretch of dental work. After each visit, I walked to Putto and Gargoyle. (It is now P&G Art.) I would breathe the sweetness and whimsy of this airy shop, take home a fat round mug or a big glazed candlestick to comfort me after my ordeal. It became a tradition. So when I had pre-crown work done earlier this month, I went to Crystal Fantasy and bought myself a pendant, an aqua aura, clear quartz infused with gold. They gave me a black cord, so I can wear it around my neck. Today I do my sun salutations in the courtyard. When I hold plank pose, the aqua aura dangles below my face. It has never looked so blue. I wonder if it’s picking up the sky, or if it’s the way the light reaches it when it hangs free like this. I move to downward dog and the crystal comes to rest against the tip of my nose. I want to giggle. I am a little kid with a magic stone glued to my nose. When I surrender to chavasanah I’m in tears. I am crying and laughing at the same time. It comes to me that I am doing good work. I know I am okay, even though I didn’t get up early to weed the tecoma bed beside the road, even though I still haven’t started my fall prep. I am crying and laughing because these things are true and still I know I am okay. I am doing good work. I am finding small ways to be easier with myself, kinder to myself. And maybe all my tiny efforts have added up to this small window of knowing I am enough just as I am. I sit up on my knees, my feet tucked under me, hands together in front of my heart. “Namaste,” I say. I touch my forehead to the mat, bowing to the light in each and every one of us. After, I roll up my yoga mats, and I am singing. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine,” I sing. My voice is quiet, tender, dear to me. I am enough just as I am. I keep singing. “Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”