“Purity makes its prettiest rituals during decay.”

Fall wish list:

Soul music

rice pudding

san francisco

a trip with gramma

a special halloween

real time with real friends

to just rake what falls dead dry around me and let this new access to anger burn it up neat like dross.

to fix my window.

painted dreams.

regular tarot gigs, the monthly art booth, and all-around income — the b.o.l. keeps busy.

photos.

dancing.

healing for everyone around me who’s endured this crazy summer.

–

and then, there’s this list — which I found from two winters ago, when I was sick from the pressure change of suddenly surfacing after years of submersion, suffering static but seeing clear enough to know I was on the cusp of the biggest change. Maybe that was my sphinx time.

I remember: smoking a cigarette in the dismal january gray, huddled outside work in the rain, looking down at the damp riverbank, and talking to Mom on the phone. She was already fading, a month to live, but she was holding strength for me. She had been here, in the sphinx place, before me. She knew I couldn’t find myself, I couldn’t even find a spark, steeped in the darkness of only knowing what’s wrong. And she said, “Kaeti, sit down and write a list of everything you want.”

So I did. I couldn’t believe how hard and awkward it was. Just to say what I wanted. I wrote:

I want to be surprised.
I want someone to look at me with fire in their eyes.
I want to be able to explore my emotions.
I want my family.
I want new routines.
I want my old big laugh.
I want more than the bare minimum.
I want to love passionately and be loved passionately.
I want to speak freely.
I want to be taken dancing.
I want to stop being so careful.
I want my fire back.
I want someone to take pictures of me.
I want to feel sexy.
I want to explode.
I want to go camping.
I want to throw shit.
I want to be pushed.
I want to sing loud.
I want to tell of Chad.
I want to dive in a deep pool outside.
I want new food.
I want to touch souls.
I want to break through comfortable.
I want my voice, out loud.
I want offerings.
I want to be scary.
I want respect.
I want all the mes to come out and play.
I want new friends.
I want to be surrounded by people full of wonder.
I want poetry.
I want a beautiful house.
I want ghost stories.
I want to do this every day.
I want fun!
I want to be challenged.
I want magic.
I want whisky rage.
I want full range of motion.
I want to know what I say in my sleep.
I want memories.

The utterly flooring and grateful-making realization here is that there’s not a thing on that list I haven’t, since, in some way, achieved or been given.

Shesepankh

Things on my mind:

The isolation that comes with walking one’s way in the magic world, and the isolation that comes of being unable to utter yourself to someone who can’t see beyond their drama, however dear. The soothsaying joy that comes of being able to share that magical world. What constitutes friendship. Sphinx.

I am not in the sphinx place now — or rather, I am, but she is not hunting me — though I am witnessing something going down there. All around me, in fact. I was aware, once, of holding a kind of sphinx place for Kila, his voice hobbling across a continent of telephone wire, stripped bare to his festering riddles seeping questions I couldn’t answer for him, and he would beat against me with his words and I would sit with the phone pressed to my ear like living stone. Sphinx is what happens when in between you and your true nature is a terrible, terrafying question.

The word sphinx comes from the Greek Σφίγξ, apparently from the verb σφίγγω (sphíngō), meaning “to strangle”.

This name may be derived from the fact that the hunters for a pride of lions are the lionesses, and kill their prey by strangulation, biting the throat of prey and holding them down until they die.

The word sphincter derives from the same root.

However, the historian Susan Wise Bauer suggests that the word “sphinx” was instead, a Greek corruption of the Egyptian name “shesepankh,” which meant “living image,” and referred rather to the statue of the sphinx, which was carved out of “living rock” (rock that was present at the construction site, not harvested and brought from another location), than to the beast itself.

Ripe.

Last night a tagger was out on the railroad tracks below my window. I heard his spraycan knocking and looked out from behind my plants, watching him crouch in the dark and resisting the urge to yell down to him.

Today I set my chair by the window to do some reading in the breeze looking over the sunny rooftops and watching the pigeons and doves and sparrows and crows. Suddenly I remember last night’s graffiti! It’s there on the tall black pole in big sloppy white letters: RIPE.

A train rumbles by, a long silver platform that coughs up a dusty cloud at its end. Living here can be like living underwater, with trumpets and soot. I’m reminded of that Ann Carson line, “Her smile an underwater bell.”

Had a conversation with a friend today about what makes people change. That big change.
He says, “Old people don’t change.”
I say, “How old is old?”
Quiet. Then, “I mean, you changed.”
He replies, “I’m not like other people.”

I see this and I don’t. I’m not like other people, too. Which cancels itself out — I’m like you, we who are not like other people, we who can change. We all have access to it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so heartbreaking when it’s offered a lifetime of refusal. What interests me is Change’s life cycle. Something inside grows RIPE for change…ripe for accident…and then it’s all in the approach.

–

Last night I dreamed:
5.11
I experience a kind of slowing blurring winding-down winding-together in my mind and in what I see…everything slows and slurs until my head goes gently forward, down. I think this must be what dying is like.

I wake to a dream of Gramma’s voice saying “Uncle __ died.”

My first contact was an immediate chat with a friend, and the dream came burbling out, and she suggested it has to do with a change in my sexual self which has been afoot recently, this uncle being my only gay (and rather secretly so) relative. I was surprisingly grateful for her thoughts.

Also last night, I dreamed:
5.11
After long work at a new fair, my boss Captain Tattoo gives me a little box open and overflowing with little treasures/creatures from the sea, shells and living germinations from the sea, a lithe little octopus glow-in-the-dark green, pale and luminous and flowing. I kiss his cheek in thanks.

“Well we have seen the other side and it is greener”

I got a bit tired of the studio over the last few months, but lately again and especially coming home tonight after five nights away, it is my own oasis and within these four walls utterly me, and I do love it.

San Francisco. The henna is still fresh and dark, my heart and body deeply rejuvenated from the trip and full of love, and now exhaling with gratitude to be in quiet solitude again. The last couple months were so driven and stressful, I feel I got spit out of a vortex to find the other side spacious and wholing and laughing, and honest in movement. Inside me and in the world, the first stirrings of the fabulous summer I’ve felt coming.

Kree, the henna artist from the fair last Summer, picked me up in Oakland on Friday morning and we drove to Sebastapol to stay with her brother and his wife. All afternoon there, I kept being surprised by reminders of Mom: they have the same quilted Hawaiian hangings; the same weird plates; the same painting in the living room as hung in Mom’s living room while I was in high school. The quilt on the bed I slept on was the same rainbow quilt of Mom’s that’s meant so much to me and is on my own bed, except bolder colors. That night, I had the first Mom dream in a while:

May 1
I’m with Mom, staying at a house like Gramma’s house on Pageantry. After a lot of busyness and commotion, we sit crosslegged and facing each other on a big white bed, talking. We talk about how glad we are, and I am, to be staying over with her. She says that something in my spirit just reached out and said — my arms flung wide, smiling — “Let me stay over!” I remember a scene from earlier in the afternoon, when I was sitting in the driver’s seat of a car. “Was that when you reached out and touched me through the car window?” Yes. My spirit reached out to her as she reached out to me from outside the window. Mom is pleased, moved to tears, her hands to her face. We embrace and hug each other close. My left had cradles her head, and my thumb rests in the hollow of her ear. There is a strong wind outside, through the window, and we start to remember things to do, things undone, things I have to show her. Still hugging, we start to feel an unsettling heat — I feel it strong at my lower back, growing stronger and stronger so that finally we pull apart, saying in a low rising wailing voicie, Fire….we kind of spin as we separate, and I look for where the fire is — there, a small fire in the corner on the carpeted floor.

About the thumb resting in the ear — at the airport in Oakland I was waiting in line to buy an iced coffee. The girl in front of me had piercings, a little silver ball nestled there in the cup of each ear. I said to her, “I like your earrings. They’re like little pearls in the shell of your ear.” She smiled and said, “Yeah! That’s the idea.”

–

After the festival, I made friends with a group of two guys and a girl about my age. The girl was supposed to help me find a ride back the next day, out of the kindness of her dear trumpet-playing heart. Instead, though, I fell into a beautiful fling with one of the friends, a beautiful boy, who happened to be driving back to Berkeley that night and possessed of a very big, very nice bed. Strong and smart and caring and a curly dirty blond with lightning blue eyes who knows how to dance. Yes please. And thank you (come again). He dropped me off at the gloriously sunny part in San Francisco and went on his merry way. The city was a solid day and night of warmth and food and charm and old friendships renewed and bright bay windows in the morning.

–

So for May Day, not only did I get a dream of fire, but a literal festival bonfire and a shining man to celebrate it with. How traditional of me.

–

I come home full of love for Amy and all our sharing, and as soon as I tell her about my fling I can see by her smile that in her queenly fashion she is actually happy for me. She smiles at me like I’ve always wanted someone to smile at me. And we go on our merry way.

Not even that the way is merry, but deeply loving, and to find that deep love reciprocal out in the world and be able to share it at home has me feeling gratefully merry for now.

On not writing

and trusting it.

–

The biggest bit I’ve written was the wedding speech. Up on an unlit stage, amidst rudeness and unspeakables and bruise-colored beauty, I summoned love. In the interest of posterity, here it is:

–

Welcome to the reception!

I’ve known the bride for twenty years. For a long time I’ve thought of her as a sister. Ever since the 3rd grade talent show, when she dressed up as Marilyn Monroe and did a full rendtition of Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend, and I got my first taste of that mix of …….weird…. and YESthat’sEPICandAMAZING, that’s pure R. I was hooked. She introduced me to hairdye, Madonna, cannibal island barbie, and how to survive middle school. As my honorary sister she’s graced me with her courage, her devotion, her wicked laugh, her always-open art sanctuary, her sense of drama, her passion, and her encyclopedic opinions. I know and I want to honor how hard she’s worked to be here today, and how lucky J is to have won her powerful, beautiful heart.

I’m not gonna do the thing where I give advice about the little things and tell you to take care of her. I don’t know shit about married life, and if you haven’t figured it out by now God help us all. I’m gonna give you some advice about big things. This girl deserves big things. Make room. She had Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend memorized by 8.

Make room for champagne hot springs on the beach under a full moon meteor shower. Make room for red carpet and eight course lobster dinner. Make room for cabana massages and jungle medicine. Make room for life-size bamsters and sleeping in paint and flying with your feet on the ground. Make room for glaciers and panthers and la bufadora. Make room for Vivaldi opening for Shakira. Make room for gelato affogato under a Florentine dome looking out over all of history while David Bowie serenades you on roller skates and sexy lady-ninjas fetch campari, and more gelato.

Before I make my toast I want to share some words by Krishnamurti I first on their bookshelf earlier this year while staying with the couple:

Love, and don’t be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you love, everything will come right. Love has its own action. Love, and you will know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority who tells you what love is and what it is not. No authority knows; and he who knows cannot tell. Love is something that is new, fresh, alive. It has no yesterday and no tomorrow. It is beyond the turmoil of thought. It is only the innocent mind which knows what love is, and the innocent mind can live in the world which is not innocent. Love, and there is understanding.

So here’s to tonight, and here’s to love.

Broken Snowshoe Moon, Soon I’ll Make it Hot Moon

Do you like it this way? I wanted to see my words on white for a change. This will do for now.

Yesterday morning, Barbara sent me a dream in which she was working my old gig at the henna booth, and felt encouraged to ask if I could make that happen / put in a good word for her.

That afternoon, my boss from the henna booth calls. For the first time since last Summer. Everybody wins: Barbara can work while I’m at school and weekdays. I can work Friday, Saturday, Sunday and play in the sun and listen to bad pop for twelve hours and psychologize from the gypsy booth and make stupid amounts of CASH MONEY for just being me.

From this bog of busyness the making memory of Summer was a sudden ray of enthusiasm, giddy and glowing. Today, my brain may be a slow and thawing weight of woven obligations, but I can feel warmth and promise of another place just there, nearly here. It feels like this piece of a dream:

3.31.10
I’m in an Orange County freeway tunnel, taking a shortcut. The tunnel, a traffic tunnel full of both cars and people, it slants upwards — it starts to collapse. It starts to disintegrate — cars crash and pile at the top, start to slide back down toward us from gravity — water slides down, too, eroding little rivulets in the pavement. The whole scene a horrific disintegrating pile-up, people scream and hang on and try to keep each other from falling and being crushed. It’s very dark. I see a little window in the side, to the right, and it’s light out there. I pop out and I’m just where I need to be, a rural place with tall pale-gold fields of wheats or grasses, filled with sunlight of that same pale-gold shining.

Rhapsody.

SHOULDER TO SHOULDER AROUND THE FIRE MOON (Wishram).

Come.

FISH-RUNNING MOON (Winnebago)

Slippery salmon-pools of joy in my heart.

Month of Purification and Renewal (POWAMUYA / Hopi)

Yesterday was a sudden-grief day which turned into a day of purge and liberation. Systole / diastole. Literally blood, sweat, and tears. When I went to the ocean to let it out, just where I sat I looked up to see a big family of dolphins playing in the waves. They moved slow and kept my crying company.

ICE IN RIVER IS GONE (WAPICUUMMILCUM / Agonquin).

This morning I dreamed of a story-place, mountainy green with deep pools of old, cold water. Driving inland to work from my coastal morning, I was appalled at how green the hills are! When are they ever this green?

The floral delivery took me up into Orange Hills.

No Snow in Trails Moon (Onon u’la’ukwamme / Zuni)

Of course I couldn’t bring myself to drive back down the mountain. Not surrounded by so much green! So I drove up the mountain, put gas in the tank, got a nice hot bev, rolled up a spliff, and pulled out as it started to seriously rain.

PATTERING SHOWERS (KAKA-KANO / Valley Maidu)

Mmm. Roll down the windows, and entertain the possibility that the sound of your wheels in the rain on the road is your voice.

TRAIL BREAKS OPEN (BO-EKMEN / Mountain Maidu)

Orange County, you been keeping secrets from me, because I didn’t know you could do this kinda green. Up outside of the basin there are ranges and ranges of tender, fleshy, virgin green, radiant against the gray. I oriented, past Silverado, past Modjeska, back again. The rain came in waves, like yesterday’s big surge. I put down the windows to have nothing but wind and water between me and that green.

Then it was time to go down the mountain. But look at those other green hills over east! And there’s a rainbow! Quick right — and I can see where the rainbow touches the hills, ahead. The road snakes through little valleys towards it. The angle is just right so that as I drive, I round a bend and now the rainbow ends just there, on the highway. Now it ends on the hood of my car. Now I move through it! And now it’s gone, behind me. I drive through the next bend, struck with the import of having moved through a rainbow. And as I feel full of its meaning, there’s one sudden lightning flash, shocking and brilliant.

The only lightning of the storm. Then I realized I’d gotten on a toll road, sans cash. That’ll cost me a long bureaucratic phone call. Then onto the 91 West to cruise through the downpour and traffic back into the sprawl. Full of light, doubly clean from yesterday’s saltwater (ocean, tears, bath) and today’s rainbow lightning extravaganza. Carrying that green back with me.

Makes Branches Fall In Pieces Moon (Piaôdagos / Abenaki)

Also, at the beach, unprecedented amounts of driftwood.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

coyote moon (Isha-mea’ / Central Shoshoni)

Rhapsody:

1542, “epic poem,” from M.Fr. rhapsodie, from L. rhapsōdia, section of an epic poem, from Gk. rhapsōidiā “verse composition,” from rhapsodios “reciter of epic poems,” from rhapsōidein, to recite poems, from rhaptein “to stitch” (see wrap) + aoidē, ōidē, song.

I can idealize myself well enough, thank you.

Valentines Day:

I dreamed There’s a storm — it’s not dark, but there are great powerful winds. Nevertheless I’m going to the bridge, to cross the bridge. Some female figures are concerned. I’m going to the East side, over maybe Burnside bridge. First we stop at Michael Goldsheft’s place in a big down town building, maybe his is on the 4th story, we look up at it from the cold snowy street. There is some concern about slipping or blowing over the side of the bridge. I feel the risk of it but am calm and confident, feel also the necessity and rightness of it, a rightness with joy inside.

After my night of talking with Chippy I feel very much like having come through this dream. And where am I now?

Freeing from emotional entanglement.

Over and over I choose the Now that flies in the face of desiring expectation, and speaks its piece honestly, and feels and means at the same time.

I choose the Me free of need
to control or carry but who trusts
Love as it comes forth.

It is not my own but I do give it, and give it freely.

The center dissolves.

And who am I in the world
and what do I want to bring?

This is not decided by any beholden reflection or in pursuit of any expectation but is fresh and urgent,
A joyful fountain me, with its slippery source.

That is my own.

It is not the frantic passionate place.
It is not even a hot place.
It is the rightness of the cold clear windy bridge.

—

Today:

Clearing difficult thoughts.

And swimming!!

Things which are not said.

Upon that point, says Dante,
where two circles intersect

God’s unwavering gaze is fixed,
it so inspires His love.

-Mary Barnard.

Thank God for poetry

The feeling of being so close to what my heart so yearns for, and knowing it is not my time.

This time is a wrestling time, this coming home surrounded by lovers

and I feel alone.

This is right. I do grieve, and the perfumes of other humans are all over my clothes, but this is right.

Echoes: “Kaeti, please don’t be afraid to be alone.”

I feel dry, and above ground. And soothed, to know that somewhere there is a dripping fountain that cries all the time, that cries for me while I sit here unable to cry, that cries for me while I am laughing and buoyant on the ocean of tears inside me, that cries for me while I learn a way that doesn’t melt into the waters but crosses the drawbridge and looks man in the eye.

I am growing a different kind of skin.

[Edit: I just put on Pandora, and the first song it gives me: Secret Fountain.]

I Can Hear You

Alamikos (Abenaki): Greetings Maker Moon

I felt this moon coming for a few days. I don’t know how to describe it, except as a swelling hum inside me, stronger than I remember ever feeling it. Finally I heard that it was the brightest clearest full moon of the year.

Northern Arapaho: When the snow blows like spirits in the wind.

Yesterday I stayed in all day, loose ends of schoolwork, spent a long time in my picture books, and found myself motivated to do a bunch of sprucing. I got a Brita, so water flows freely now rather than bottle by bottle. I cleaned and remade the dolmen, above which I hung Mom’s alphabet she stitched for me when I was a baby. I took care of my plants, moving grown ones into bigger containers, and hung a paper lantern outside the window that dances happily every time the train rolls by. It sounds small, in words, but it refreshed the whole energy of my place.

I finished a novel whose end just utterly destroyed me. Maybe it was only a catalyst for emotion I’d felt swirling around without an outlet for days…but:

“I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like the hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to. My mother was as brave as stars at dawn. She too was from this place. My mother was like that woman who could never bleed and then could never stop bleeding, the one who gave in to her pain, to live as a butterfly. Yes, my mother was like me.”

It goes on, but as you can see, that’s quite a catalyst.

And I cried as hard as I ever have, cried like I did a year ago, cried so much there were no more tears and my body just clenched and clenched, kept crying and there were tears again and all of me was drenched in them…my brother came to the door holding a large pizza, and with the other arm he gathered me in and hugged me into my body again, and his eyes were very bright.

PAAMUYA (Hopi): Month of Life at it’s Height

This morning, I dreamed:

Amy is gone, as in death, but I know I will meet her again in this world, she will come back, although it will take a long time. I talk with Ali, who regrets that she couldn’t meet her.

Dad dies. Mom says we need to call Uncle John, that it’s been a few days and it’s normal not to think of him because he’s not been very involved with us, but still it’s time to call and tell him. I see Dad, alive, and I hug him. As he holds me I remember the sheer warm comforting size of him, his strength and love wrapped around me safe.

I go out front to take a phone call. It’s John Cleese. He introduces himself, “This is Monty Python,” which is a radio show he says I might be familiar with. I tell him that I’m actually in L.A. now, and as I look out over the hills and houses below I can hear his voice as its vibrations and radio waves move through the air above the city, whose currents I can almost see. “I can hear you,” I say, meaning not through the phone but directly, his voice in the air in my ears. He tells me to say it again. I do — “I can hear you.” “Louder,” he prompts. “I can hear you!” I yell, loud, aware of how my voice flies out and joins the air currents of sound waves. “Louder!” He yells. “I CAN HEAR YOU!!” I bellow, as loud as I can make my voice, thinking all the while that it’s not very loud, but it’s as loud as I can, I can feel my throat strain. It’s very helpful for me and for John. I tell him about my people dying. He says kind soft words. I tell him I’m glad I took his random call.

Mom’s gone now, too. For a while I wander in this building, feelings of disorientation and loss but also knowing and love. I can’t do much else but this. We crouch low to the ground as Kristin holds me while I cry and cry. I say, “All my people are gone, there’s no one to hold me.” She says, softly and with heartfelt love, “Shut up.”

mkokisis (potawatomi): month of the bear

Bear images have indeed come up. Not the least of which is Mom’s turquoise Bear Medicine pouch from Arizona. This isn’t really when they come out, so it makes me wonder why this should be month of the bear…or “bear hunting month” as another name put it. Maybe they would find the dens and kill em in their sleep. Doesn’t seem very sporting. Maybe because all the people were scrawny and hungry, while the bears slept warm and were nourished off their own body.