"An A-Ha Moment"

"And it's difficult for people to surrender to that depth of longing without trying to have a Band-Aid to fix it, something of the senses to cover over that horrible feeling of loneliness and despair. But it's inside of that longing that you'll find your true prayer."
---from Come Into the Light and Stay There, by Kalindi La Gourasana

A Gobble Gobble Haiku, or Three

time of thanks
gives meaning to black friday
consumerism cheapens democracy. --cc

Thanksgiving mall shopping
Products produced cheap in China
Technology-crazed teens.
by Louise

Flowing Movements Sync
Rhythm Stretches Old Bones Togetherness
With Equal Force.
by Julie

The Wake Up Call

“When darkness is at its darkest, that is the beginning of all light.” Lao-Tzu

“We fear the dark and death because the ego has demonized them and prevented us from exploring their depths. The ego always wants to swim in the shallow end of the pool. In truth, we need as much diving practice as we can get in this lifetime so we’re not afraid of the next. Death is just another dance, another dive.” Gabrielle Roth

It comes in many forms, - the dreaded call in the middle of the night from a nearby hospital where your just yesterday healthy and vibrant cousin has passed away from a brain aneurism; the sobering effect of realizing that the promiscuous behavior you had been wantonly participating in has produced not the liberation you were seeking but, rather, the confinement of a life long, re-occurring disease; the teetering on the brink of bankruptcy due to the high end clothes, car, and home, that take up space in your immediate surroundings while detracting zeros from your monthly income and years from your life; the philanthropic visit to a refugee camp in the Sudan where people, just like you, are missing legs, arms, and other body parts, due to an unchecked human ego. Or, perhaps, it comes in more opaque ways: the uncomfortable proximity of a thirty-fifth birthday; the regrettable loss of a relationship; an irresponsible regard for citizenship; or even say, the expiration of a passport.
However received, a wake up call has emerged from deep inside the bottomless pit of my gut, from the liquid hollows of the earth’s core, and from the vast, dark space of the cosmos, to shake me out of the stupor I have spent the past five plus years moving around within. As Gabrielle Roth so eloquently writes in her book, Connections: The Five Threads of Intuitive Wisdom,
“Burdened by our ego, our shadow partner, we move like tired old toads on a salt-parched desert. It weighs us down. Our ego prevents us from surrendering to the flow of chaos, from trusting our intuition and using it imaginatively. It wants us numb and anesthetized. Basically, the ego is a necrophiliac.”

Subconsciously, I have been courting my ego for years now. Casually referring to a blatant cliché “We recreate that which we know,” I recently openly wondered about how many of my peers, who married young unlike me, will be divorced by the time I get around to marriage. After making this statement, the old friend I was chatting with minutely retracted his strong body. His simple, easy-to-miss action got me thinking about my words, and myself. I started wondering, “Am I simply referring to myself? Am I a byproduct of my own environment and upbringing?”
There is a lot to be said about the home from which I come, and the two primary caregivers that are my father and my mother. Like everything in life, the human emotions and traits within our household ran the gamut. From one opposite extreme of the continuum, joy, to the other, pain, and all of the anger, sadness, elation, fear, antipathy, anxiety, and homogeneity in between, our household was not short in the feeling department. It was not all bad, but it surely wasn’t all good, either.
As for my parents, though they have their shortcomings, they also have their individual strengths and character. I am honored to carry on their traditions, such as my father’s enjoyment for the small things in life, like finding golf balls out on the course, and his penchant for reading good books while curled up in his brown, leather Ottoman chair, and for my mother’s passion for her work, she has been a diligent and caring registered nurse for forty years now, and for the stories that she weaves from both fact and fiction.
They are two good people. They just aren’t two good people together.
What creates these conditions in which we find ourselves constantly complaining about and criticizing another while the other stupefies their self within the deep resonance of a beer bottle, the hazy plume of smoke, or the deafening call of an empty plate? How do we fall into this behavior, and why do we remain caught within its firm, life-demolishing grasp?
For years, I ran from intimacy. I cowered in the shadows of casual sex and unrequited crushes. I was deeply afraid of the storm that I knew was brewing, and laying in wait just underneath my demure composure. Free from the confinement of my parent’s home and from the small town that I had grown up within, I was emboldened to try on different identities. Like hats, I would haphazardly trade one in for the other, on the slightest of whims and without the faintest regard for what anyone else thought. Shaved head? Check. Exploring sexuality? Check. Not wearing deodorant? Check. Pissing on city street corners? Check. Defecating in public? Check. I was adventurous and raw, willing to discover life underneath every nook and cranny of existence.
As independent and righteous as I felt, I also understood that there were still hidden layers within my own being that I had yet to peel back. I knew then that the only to way to access these subcutaneous undercurrents was to dive in, backwards and upside down just as I always have done, into this thing called love. I just hadn’t quite come to understand that my subliminal understanding of love was based on my most primary of experiences.
Love between a man and a woman was not gentle, kind, or even remotely sensual. The woman bitched and complained, focusing solely on the negative, such as the household duties that were not taken care of. She roiled at the smallest of infractions, from spilled milk to a smart attitude, and she lashed out in physical and emotional abuse, expletives of “you lazy bitch” could be heard from down the hall. And the man just plodded along, working forty years at a job he was not necessarily passionate about but it allowed him frequent travels, conventions, and nights spent drowning his sorrow in alcohol. He held it all in, and let very little out. He was short on words, and his lack of communication was the distance the size of a football field between he and his three children.
To this day, my parent’s relationship still primarily entails her yelling at him, - verbally informing him of why he isn’t good enough and why he doesn’t have any friends. As for him, his drinking has hit an all-time rock bottom. Upon numerous instances now, he has fallen while drunk, hit his head, and caused it to bleed. This last time, after having driven himself home, he managed to pull himself up the staircase and into their bedroom where he shit and bled all over their matrimony bed. They still hardly touch, except on the rare occasion when something drastic has happened, such as a trip to the hospital, and a hug is called upon as the order of the day.
Don’t you ever wonder where I, this small, relatively young being, can put all of this heaviness? What do I do with it? Where do I stick the misery? How do I not carry this baggage around in this world and take it on as my own? Well, part of that wake up call is that I have been doing exactly this, - taking this horrible tragedy that can be this life and emulating it within my own meager terrain. I have simply been repeating the pattern.
I have consciously chosen, for over two years now, to be in a relationship with someone who has a very severe addiction. And, for almost as long, I have whined and moaned about him and his actions. I have been choosing to focus on the negative. Only days ago, I showed a really ugly side of myself that I had not seen in years. Frustrated over his lack of motivation, and the “laziness” that I felt I was picking up the slack for, I found myself ranting in a trance while verbally abusing him. I stopped dead in my tracks. “Holy fuck!” Right in that very moment, I knew that I was channeling memories of my mother and that I was subconsciously recreating life between woman and man as I had previously seen it, up close and personal. This is my understanding of what love is and what it looks like. How fucked up is that?
As for my partner, you may be wondering what love looks like to him. As far as I can tell, for he does not really divulge his innermost thoughts and his heartfelt feelings, he was abandoned by his biological mother, and then physically and emotionally abused by his stepmother. His first partner, like mine, was emotionally abusive and down right bitchy. Unfortunately, during our first year spent together, I allowed him to walk all over me. I didn’t stand up for myself, - I played the doormat just as my father has spent a lifetime doing. Eventually, it dawned on me that I was repeating a pattern. I knew then that I had to start taking a stand for myself by shoving all of his crap right back on to him. Only now, the pendulum has swung in the extreme, opposite direction. In a way, he has forced my back against a wall and he has pushed me into a corner. He, too, is subconsciously creating love in the only way that he knows it.
Last night, after somewhat talking and somewhat arguing, an anguished sob shook my lithe frame. In all honesty, images of me, alone and careening down mountain slopes on a snowboard, turned on that flowing faucet. It isn’t that I am afraid to be alone. For I have spent years in solitude, and I know that I am quite good at it.
Rather, it was the thought that these issues are mine and that, until I have created a new vision of what love is, what it looks like, and how it acts, nothing will change. Until I start celebrating all of the amazing little miracles of the here and now, such as: the way he grabs me and swings me around, both on a dance floor and in the privacy of our own kitchen; the way I can truly be who I am, - in all of the glory of torn, fading shorts that are a few sizes too big and the wretched stench of my noxious gas; to the way we share movement as a medium, and intuition as a guiding force, then no matter who the partner is, I will still be choosing to writhe in the stench of my ego.
As for him, he obviously has his own issues to deal with. Hopefully, someday, he will stop hiding behind his addiction and start looking at his own darkness and grief. The best I can do now is to support him in his own process of becoming. The best I can do now is to try to love and accept him. To give him attention and affection, and to hold his inner child who was never gently rocked and told, “It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.” The way I see it is it is a little like his literacy. He has a fear of anything school related, he hates reading, and he is a horrible speller. My ”education” intimidated him. Although I initially allowed that to hinder my own actions, I would plant a small seed, here and there, while supporting him and simultaneously wishing that he would come to see the value in the written word. That day has come, and he now credits me with having taught him how to read, for he says, “You simply modeled the behavior.”
Perhaps, that is where and how I can begin again. I still don’t know what love looks like, how it talks, or how it moves, but I surely know what it doesn’t look like. And, for the most part, it doesn’t look like much of what I have written above. I do not know what is going to happen between he and I, for I do not know what the future holds. I just know that, for now, we are trying to move into forgiveness and, some kind of, understanding.
As Alice Walker put it in her The Temple of My Familiar,
“Keep in mind always the present you are constructing, for it should be the future you want.”
For five years now, if not longer, I have held on to fixed notions of who the person is that grew up at 3586 Ridge Road, just north of my current dwellings here in San Diego, California. I have been hooked on a fixed outcome, by subconsciously recreating my parent’s story, I have fated myself to that which I know yet do not want. I have clung to fixed identities, - among many are the traveler, the countercultural college student, and the beautiful girl, and I have desperately cradled memories created with old friends, rarely making space for new acquaintances and comrades. I have even clung to fixed fantasies of earning a graduate degree, creating a non-profit, finding a life partner, and being stable by the time I am thirty-five.
That wake up call, has me throwing my arms up in the air, and saying, “Alright. I surrender. I do not know where I am going, or how I am going to get there. But, finally, I am going to stop fighting. Finally, I am going to take off the mask and step out of the shadows. Finally, I am ready to lay the girl to rest, and let the woman take over.”
For, really folks, that is what this is all about, more than anything else - the painful process of growing up. I could turn away in embarrassment and say, “Yeah, I’m a thirty-one year old child.” Or, I could commend myself for not being married or having children, and thus not exposing innocent others to my instability. I could cheer myself on and, with a pat on the back, recognize that maybe after all, I am on that path. Maybe, I am headed in the direction that I ultimately envision. Maybe, now that I know that I am lost, well perhaps I am found after all.
My dance with death is not coming to a close. Really, it is just beginning. Instead of grabbing hold tightly to past experiences and to future daydreams and “becoming something rigid in a universe that is moving” (Roth, p. 88), I can instead try to let go of everything that I think I am and that I think I am supposed to be or do. I can finally embrace chaos. I can fall backwards with my arms spread wide and a grin on my face. I can move past my fears, and take to the stage again. I can take new risks, like following up on a business opportunity and rediscovering my love for film as a medium for celebrating dance, life, and community. Sure, I am still afraid, for I do not know how I am going to land, on what path, or where, but I am again going to start trusting my intuition. I am again going to allow it to lead, while the little girl goes down for a long nap, and the woman in the driver’s seat kicks her feet up and coasts in cruise control.

The Trappings of Ego

spirit empty
body heavy
unhappiness weights a soul.

bereft of any desire for change
tortured from the inside out
stuck in a desolate wilderness
a pear-like shape crashes to earth
it plunders in impatience and fear.

touching upon this before
timidly, fingers have traced an outline
wearily, a mind has detected a nuance
a small fragment of something grander.

gracefully, i dance around the issue
running from it, i have hidden in the shadows
of looming institutions, and places to be
of pedestrian choked sidewalks and stale airport terminals.
i have masked it, in the everyday
of my mother’s love and the attention of others
of 9-5 school, work, family, celebrations, and death
i have pretended that the light is on
i have been faking it all along.

what is this
this great freedom of being
that with it comes chains
cold, steel links of slavery,
shiny, rose tinted illusory worlds,
and a confinement of thought?
what is this,
this deep, weeping wound that bleeds
out of every crevice, nook and cranny?

i have rolled it up and tried to smoke it
i have peered into a bottle and tried to drink it
i have kissed it wholeheartedly and made love to it on a bed of nails
i have eaten it until my stomach felt close to bursting
i have drank its wine and pissed its stench
i have read about it, talked about it,
sat in parishes and prayed about it
i have gotten down on my knees for it
i have even jumped out of an airplane for it
still, it persists and it pervades

this existence


it is numbless

it is unknowingness

it is the division of a whole
in the depth of the gut
it exceeds all definition
all words on paper
all emotion
all expressed feeling
what is this?

what is this when even in the midst
of all of the rehearsals, plays, and performances
in the midst of the finals time, and the first days of classes
in the midst of travels to foreign destinations and exotic locales
even in the midst of new friends and flirtatious romances
a nameless void festers?
i would prefer some temporary sort of contentment
in exchange for this gnawing, aching, endless nothing

it is the why and how obesity is reached
baggage to be pulled along in this life
it is the accumulation of material goods
the ball and chain of civilized life
it is the busy-ness of soccer practice, piano recitals, and part-time jobs
it is the cutthroat world of advertising and sales,
it is the eat shit and die, fake ass smiles of politicians and bureaucrats
it is the harbingers of new sciences
it rings in medical breakthroughs and it smashes through the glass ceiling
it originates in this immensity.

pleasure found
in watching babies grow
in seeing dogs bound from sea to shore after a beloved stick
reminds, but fades away
for i always return here, to this state, to this great country
of lack and servitude.

a lighthouse on a distant shore
i cannot locate
and although i know that i can best access that revolving beam
when i am fully present in the moment
when my skeleton is moving through this spacetime warp
i still somehow refrain
from dancing
i still somehow
forget to sing
to free my breath and allow it the chance
to dance with angels
to frolic with demons
to be pure energy
and to be free of the trappings
of ego.

An Anatomy of Shorts

Navy blue and nylon, they are sewn together along the inner recesses of invisible thighs. At the apex, at the center of the crotch, fine threading has twice before been sewn. Begging yet another go at it with a needle, a dime-sized hole slowly pulls the fabric apart. The tenuous opening casually flirts as fingers gingerly probe the six-year old piece of clothing. Young hands gracefully glide over fading material while a mind conjures up images of past travels and nostalgic tribulations.
A bottom hem falls just above vertically challenged knees. An elastic waistband is stretched beyond recognition, retaining the contour of a voluptuous shape once worn like a scarlet letter. These days a plastic, blue button, with the emblem of two women sitting back to back, and a Velcro fly, struggle to keep the shorts up. A white and black label at the back reads “XL.” Random stains, a yellow dot on the rear, left thigh, pay tribute to the life of a struggling artist. Stitching is coming loose along numerous lines. On the right butt cheek, the cloth was once torn and then stitched back together using royal blue thread. What remains is an L-shape, which is also pulling apart at the seams.
Washed into the layers of silky fabric, the sweat of a time now past. Ground into the highly resistant textile, the dirt and soil from spills taken and adventures pursued. Today, even after having purchased the infamous pair of shorts from a department store in a suburban neighborhood of Lake Geneva, six summers ago, I don the gym-like garb and I wear it with a mix of pride and melancholy.
A bumbling twenty-four year old, I worked as a camp counselor for an American company based out of Switzerland. The first six weeks of my sojourn had been spent on an amazing landscape. Living in a tent and sleeping on a cot, I was privy to the southern, rolling hills of France’s wine region. I spent weeks underneath a canopy of limestone caves while learning how to perfect the j-stroke as I attempted to guide Canadian canoes down the river Ardèche.
Meals were spent out of doors. Media and mirrors were few and far between. On nights off, I would drink red wine by the glass full, oft times alone and sitting beside an ambling river. From the get-go, I did not know how to canoe even though it was my job to lead children on such an excursion. My peers, like-minded college aged folk with a penchant for both travel and experiential education, all but rejected me. I was certainly tolerated, just not accepted. The feeling made for an uncomfortable first few weeks yet somehow, as painful as this was to my ego, I was galvanized and invigorated. While the others were entranced by videos and television during their meager time off, I was out of doors, teaching myself to juggle, picking up the guitar again, or riding a bike up undulating, narrow roads and over to the singular nudist colony on the river’s banks.
I found solace in strolling along country roads and over to neighboring village castle ruins. Once, while returning home from such a journey, night had fallen and a strange grunting sound began emanating from the dense bush to my right. Initially humored by what I mistakenly thought were humans, I employed a singing voice after my laughter had dissipated and fear was quick to replace it. Pleading with whatever large creature was foraging nearby, I sang that I was just a harmless human out for an evening stroll. The tune soothed my panic and I high-tailed it over to a play structure where I found refuge up off of the ground. With my composure regained, I quickly walked back the few remaining steps to camp.
Weeks later, while in the office of a photographer who captured our descents down a specific rapid along our canoeing route, I gazed at framed photographs that lined a wall. In a few of them, large, waist high, feral pigs were fording the river. Finally, I had discovered the source of my earlier cause for concern.
As summer approached the riverbed began to recede, and along with it the judgment of my peers was also giving way. I had proven myself. While the majority of the male staff would help beach the canoes and carry all of the gear up the hill, only then to prepare their own campsite for the night and rest for a period of time, I along with a few other women, continued to prepare the campsite and meals, and then play with and keep the children occupied until night had fallen, stars were overhead, and we all fell into an exhaustive heap on our sleeping bags. Not to mention, my paddling skills had improved 100%. I was, at last, accepted.
With my acceptance, came less alone time. I joined the crowd, in drinking red wine by the river, in rock diving, and in skinny-dipping. One day, I even borrowed the camp cook’s moped and attempted to ride it over to Vallon-Pont d’ Arc, the nearest commercial village. Desiring to show off after first sitting upon the vehicle, I accidentally rode into a wooden beam adjacent to the camp’s recreation room. I then cruised the two-wheeler over to town. On my way back, I somehow, again, pressed on the accelerator, instead of the brake, causing the bike to rear up, and my rear end to fall off of the seat. Humorously, I tore a hole in the back of the orange pair of name brand board shorts that I had recently purchased. With borrowed thread, I had to sew up the mistake prior to the next week’s canoe trip.
At the spring season’s conclusion, I spent the following week traversing the Heidi-like mountainsides of Andorra, a principality that lies between France and Spain. Supple, rolling hills; rushing white water streams; wildflowers of every shape and hue; wild horses grazing in verdant meadows; slanting, scree slopes; towering granite peaks, - the Pyrenees has it all. Like a Billy goat, I leaped and jumped from one stone hut to another. (A series of 25 huts, or stone refugis as they are called, dot the Andorran countryside. These shelters are free of charge and well tended to.) For days on end, I swam in chilly, fresh water streams and I sunbathed on snow-patched mountaintops, attempting to make snow angels in the evaporating, white matter.
Again traveling alone, I was greeted by numerous other trekkers including hunters, hikers, and even a few rogue revelers. I had arrived into Andorra late on an inauspicious evening, not knowing a soul, and bedded down behind a sandy rock formation in the back of what appeared to be an empty ski chalet. My trip had included the stashing away of cumbersome clothes, on the hillside and in a hut, and the escapade of making friends with four Belgian men who had backpacked in cans of red bull and a bottle of vodka, marijuana in numerous forms, and mushrooms and ecstasy. During my last night there, I had a gentle make-out session with a Catalonian boy who could not have been more than twenty. I awoke only a few short hours later to ask him the time (which was a difficult task, for he spoke little English and I did not speak Catalan whatsoever). After realizing that it was 5:30am, I jumped up with anxiety. I had a mere hour and a half to run down the mountain and make the bus that would carry me back to France and, eventually, on to Switzerland.
With only minutes to spare, I bounded down and onto the main thoroughfare just a few short blocks away from the bus stop. After boarding, I fell into a seat with relief and quickly dozed off. Seemingly only minutes later, I was awoken with a start. A French policeman was shaking me awake, inquiring as to whether or not he could check my purse, which I had haphazardly tossed into the seat to my right. Immediately, I knew that an action from the night before, of moving a small metal pipe and a remaining tiny nugget of hash that I had on my person, stashed in a front pocket of a Mt. Hardware fleece jacket, and into the dainty bag I wore around my shoulders, was a mistake. “Pipa,” the man cried out. “Le pipa,” he alerted his co-workers. I sank down further into my seat, as they ransacked my bag. I was escorted off of the bus, while the driver patiently turned the engine off, and into the back of a marked police van. A minor strip search was conducted. (I had to take my shoes and socks off, and they searched my larger backpack for more paraphernalia or illegal substances.)
With my passport noted, a fine paid (50 French francs, I believe it was), the pipe and hashish confiscated and, essentially, a slap of the hand, I was loaded back onto the bus to continue along my journey. I refused (and, still to this day, refuse) to be ashamed of my enjoyment for smoking marijuana. However, I was a little embarrassed for slowing down the other passengers’ and the bus driver’s morning commutes. Nonetheless, I had a new job, and another foreign destination, to get to. Thus, again, I and we were off.
The excursion was marked with continued mishaps and stories in the making but I eventually arrived to the Auberge, a small hotel, bar, and restaurant that would serve as “home” for the next month and a half, located in a suburban village town just due east of Lake Geneva (or Geneve, as the locals call it. Also, the lake there is, actually, called Lac Leman.) The newest set of employees, fresh off the boat from their teaching stints and other day jobs in primarily the States and Canada, were already gathered and mingling. They were excited by the journey that they were embarking upon. Meanwhile, I was physically exhausted from being smack dab in the middle of my own exploits. I retreated early, to the comforts of my own bed in a room that I shared with three others, to write and contemplate. This behavior remained consistent throughout our short time together.
The day-to-day of summer camp life quickly came to emulate a pattern that I had only been too eager to escape. Monday through Friday, at 8:30am, we were to be outside and ready to hop on a short bus for the quick ride to the Chataigneriaz (the school grounds where our summer camp was held). Usually, I skipped the bus ride and walked up the hill along fields of sunflowers and lines of grapevines. Over Monday morning breakfast, which was comprised of cereal, yogurt, or bread with jam and Nutella, talk usually centered around the weekend just had, - a quick trip to Italy; our group celebration of the Swiss independence day; or the time spent partying down in the streets of Geneve. By Wednesday, conversation had already lapsed into what the up and coming time off had in store. The monotony quickly wearied my being, and I was acutely and sensitively aware that my life had segued from living in close commune with the land to a life further removed from it.
I began to question myself and whether or not what I was doing was of meaning. As the sole gymnastics coach, I ran the ‘Gymnasie de Cara’ with a solid hand. Managing all of the hundred plus children as they moved around the apparatus, from the floor, to the beams, to the mini-tramp, I was simultaneously coaching my peers on how to spot while trying to learn a few French verbs. The depth of the experience was cemented when, one night, while languishing around the Auberge, I decided to take a bicycle that a co-worker had found (deposited along the side of the road, it had been headed for a landfill), for a dusk lit ride. I rode east along the curvaceous, lake road and towards the nearest large town, Nyon.
In Nyon, ancient Roman columns are crumbling on an overlooking hill. At night, these relics of a civilization past are lit like beacons, brightly displaying the opulence of western thought. I rode around, enchanted by the sights my eyes were consuming while my thoughts danced merrily in stony daydreams. I headed towards the commercial district, where cars were forbidden, and I continued to steer in the direction of a sign that read “Do Not Enter” for I was a bicyclist and a privileged American who had the right of way (no matter what). A woman’s deep gasp alerted me to my folly.
I went flying, head first, over my handlebars, while my womanly thighs slammed into the gearshifts. I had attempted to ride between two cement pillars, across which an eight-foot long, black chain link was suspended. My training, from a lifetime spent in gymnastics, dance and other movement classes, kicked in and I instinctively tucked my chin to my chest. I performed a dive roll, jumping up at the tail end of it with my hands in the air. “Ces’t bon,” I exclaimed. “C’est bon,” (“I am good”) I tried to assure the on-lookers whose jaws were agape as they stood staring at the stunt. I picked up the bicycle, hopped back on it, and rode back home while the adrenaline pumped its way through my body, and my heart beat out a loud, rhythmic “holy fuck.”
The following day, while recounting the tale with my comrades, I had deep, purple bruises in the middle of each thigh. Corporeal reminders that what I was actively teaching to the kids, day in and day out, was a skill that could one day save their very real human lives, - just as it had mine on that very memorable occasion.
In the time that has since passed, the navy blue, nylon shorts have continued to play an integral role in my life. As a graduate student, they accompanied me to my first residency at Goddard College, in Plainfield, Vermont. While rubbing elbows with artists of every craft and medium, I fled from the typically scheduled cabaret, an evening of live music, dance, and theatre, performed in a refurbished hundred plus year old barn, for a quick respite. Under a warm August sky, I climbed the metal roof of a greenhouse. While careening back down, the shorts caught on a metal bracket, thereby ripping and puncturing my behind. With my ass partially visible, I wandered back into the event and proceeded to get my groove on as our local hip-hop artist and beat boxer spun the records (or, er, pressed buttons on his computer’s keypad).
Weeks later, after having returned home to San Diego, I was again out in public in these same shorts. Still torn, and still refusing to wear underwear underneath, I gallivanted on a Pacific beach with a dear playmate who was quickly becoming more than just a friend. We tossed a Frisbee disc to and fro, I in the torn shorts while also wearing a tank top, without a bra, that read, “Put the Fun Between Your Legs” (it had an image of a bicycle drawn in between the wording). Meanwhile, he had taken off his jeans and was running around catching the disc and flinging it back at me in nothing more than boxer shorts (which, he initially realized, he had forgotten to button). Indeed, we were a sight for sore eyes.
When we tired, we began to play in the sand, - creating sculptures out of found materials and objects. Bent at the waist, I was not afraid to raise my head and offer a “Hello” to the lifeguards as they drove by in their jeep. We capped our lovely afternoon off together by enjoying a meal of sushi at a local restaurant. Still parading in the fading shorts, I moved around with a little bit more apprehension as I ambled in and out of a black, leather booth.
That was two years ago. Today, the shorts hang from a 31 year-old waist. They hardly stay up, yet I cannot bring myself to part with them. My partner, the same man from the story above whom I now live with, scoffs whenever he sees me in them. Still, as old and failing as they are, they represent more than just an item used to cover up shameful body parts. The thinning remnant is a hint at a body embodied, - it is a historical artifact of lived experience. Stories are woven into the very makeup of the precious fabric. Parting with them would be like turning the last page on the chapter of my twenties and I guess, well, I guess that I am not quite ready to do that yet.

21st Century Human

i climb a mountain,
and meet a blind man, together
we sing refrains,
favored cat stevens tunes
while our bodies feast
on clear san diego skies
and our moonshadows dance
out and over
an azure pacific.

i miss the warm presence
of a certain bald monk
who would read to me
the centuries old prose
of rumi
while we laid under
arcturus
on dirt dusted driveways
in recently washed workclothes.

i dig in soil in my mama's dress,
my hands,
reverberate
on the land, together
our pulse becomes
one. slowly,
a yard that is not my own
becomes.

i dive in backwards
and upside down
i wash with strawberries
and chocolate syrup
i hold conversations
in sound and words
in music and meaning
in dance and action.

i love a man whose tongue
is not my own
whose words can cut
like a seven-inch blade
and whose behavior can sting
like a good gin and tonic
i acknowledge that he is my/shadow
my counterbalance,
the darkness
i had been running from.

i crave connection
i seek humility
i desire nothing
more
than to reach out
and touch.

i feel desperately
alone
confined
trapped within
skin and bone
muscle and memory
nostalgia and fear.

still, it is the adventure
that keeps me
moving forward
walking new paths
pursuing electric connections
exploring fruitful ideas
and excavating
deep seeded emotions.

9-5
monday-friday
24/7
365
65 years of this
then what?

death
is written in these numbers
and figures which figure
nothing
into my well being
into my depth
of spirit.

success is living
life as adventure
journies taken
relationships pursued
and the pageantry of drama
spelled out explicitly.

life as adventure
is more than just a tenet
it is more than just some ten cent philosophy
that one can pick up
down at the local barber shop.

life as adventure
is not found in the hum drum
of the unconscious
it is not discovered
at the bottom of a beer bottle
in a broken down old bar stool.
life as adventure
is lived
in the rawness of your humanity.

i have stripped myself bare
right down to a bald noggin
with a disregard for panty wearing
and a preference to bleed
without a barrier without
some stupid piece of cotton
stopping me up like a dike.
i have laid down
on some god's marital bed
without a band
and with the only wish to steal
a mere pittance
from the riff raff's jean pockets
in the morning.

i have been caught
transporting hashish
across a foreign border.
i have spent upwards of 36 hours
in an american jail
listening to the tale
of a woman who smuggled crystal meth
via her vagina.

i have bedded down in the shadows between
a boardwalk and a beach
in the darkened corners
of a city at night
and behind sandy rocks
on an elementary school's property.

i have made friends with street urchins,
beautiful, young men who would sell
even their own bodies
just to earn a few disappearing dollars
together, we would throw a beloved toy,
a frisbee disc, around the gardens of a harare park.

i have come to understand
that there are not any actions
that are either above
or below
for my uncle's fate
of calling the streets of los angeles home
for the past twenty years
could just as easily be my own.
i have learned that there is nothing
that separates heaven and hell
from earth.

for i am mammal, flesh and blood
cut from the very same cloth
as my other earthly neighbors
i am homo sapiens
descendant of homo-habilus
wielding tools of milenia past and creating
nothing new under the sun
for i am the son, i am atom,
child of that revolving star
of brilliance and great magnitude
found at the center of our solar system
and i am the father, my seed will beget
more suns, to continue along this great march
of time, for i am also spirit.

i am 21st century human
i live in the future
i have lived before
and i am of the living now.


"and if i ever lose my land,
lose my plow and lose my hand
said if i ever lose my land,
oh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh
i won't have to work no more.
and if i ever lose my legs,
oh i won't moan and i won't beg
said if i ever lose my legs
oh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh
i won't have to walk no more.
and if i ever lose my eyes,
if the colors all run dry,
said if i ever lose my eyes
oh eh eh eh eh eh eh eh
i won't have to cry no more." --cat stevens