5:02 a.m. I'm up before the anxiety. Light in the sky, but not enough put color into day yet. Just a few birds calling out their good mornings and I've already been in and out of the shower, thrown a load into the wash. Dog curled nose under paw and tail wrapped around, not quite snoring, beside me. All quiet from the bedrooms. Until I type all quite from the bedrooms and then, right on cue with the keystroke, a rolling over kind of sigh. Roxie narrates the night just like me. Talks out loud all through her dreams, but mostly just the bad ones. Lila's a quiet sleeper. Snugs her self in and once she drops off she barely moves again. These early morning birds are my favorite. Connection to the outside.With the high laural and the fence and no front of the house it's hard for the outside to make it's way into the place. Isolation. Makes it hard to hear myself.

Between Want and Waiting

I had a moment of inspiration a moment ago but I lost it to the Facebook. Not  Facebook exactly. To the restless grey not-my-holiday-anymore Christmas. Not restless exactly. Not unless I stop to think about it. Me on my orange couch in the back of someone else's house, no tree, no decorations, back to a lifetime of Christmas as it always was, Christlmasless, but not as it is for my kids. Daisy curled beside the couch and the holly outside my window swaying with the rain.

This is Yule.
Quiet in all ways.

Last night the annual Christmas-eve tree decorating party. Longest standing tradition my girls have known in a life where nothing stands for long, and the first real hours I've spent inside the old place since I jumped that ship four months back. All those rooms I put together. Shelves I painted and painted again. My furniture. My table. My spider plants hanging down over the mantle.

All this morning I read.  The rain comes down and down.. Granta, Marie Claire, the CareOregon provider directory. Pandora busts up the quiet with Schuman and Chopin and I peek in on your holiday while my neighbor vacuums upstairs.

The rabbit cage smells all the way into the living room.
I owe my dog a walk.

Caught between want and waiting. Folded up around myself in Roxie's bean bag at the dead end of my house.The phone gives me quick facebook hits of Christmas around the world, or at least around the constellation of my world. Soak up a little satisfaction (or something like it) from the joy pushing out of those stills. Picture of  the world just how we want to see it.

It's not there, what I'm looking for. And it's not here either. It's dripping down off the bamboo outside my window, inside my mirror. Sometime this morning, early, I lay myself down on the floor. Keep that knot tied up inside my throat when I'm talking to my girls. Let it slide apart in streams when the phone goes quiet. Alone is just a song we sing ourselves anyway. By myself is how I chose today.

Something's in this quiet.
Gently used gift  I'll force myself to find.
Sit here in it and in it and in it until I can unwrap.

Coming Around

Two things that happened to me this week:

1. I lost a notebook I'd been writing in for a good five years out at the Edgefield on the last Saturday in September. It was handmade and spiral bound with Roxie's little pink baby hand prints on the front cover. The two hands that left those marks couldn't have been more than about 18 months old. Inside the pages were three quarters full with lists and thoughts and hand scribbled notes for the slowest first draft of a novel ever penned. Weird stuff, but I like to run it all together like that. Shows how life was on all those days between.

Weird night, too.Full moon and all.  But that's a story for another time. Let's keep this here on point.

I walked into the show with the notebook, a sweater, my wallet and a ticket shoved down into my big old purple show going purse and I walked out with the sweater on my back, wind rippling up the leaves,  never noticing how light my bag was. Just a wallet and my keys left in there. I don't when I first knew the notebook was gone. Long past any place I could go back looking for it. Probably 4500 people on that lawn. One little notebook, no name inside, probably bagged up with trash and rotting. Why bother calling on lost an found.

Four days later, 5:20 a.m., leaving for my morning ride down the empty pavement into town for work and there's a little brown package on my doorstep. Tied up neat with a blue twine bow. My little notebook inside with a new entry on the first blank page:

A cartoon. Two fairies handing off I don't know what to a bunny rabbit with a little Thoreau beneath the frame:

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."


I do believe in fairies, I do believe in fairies. I do. I do. I do.

Now, I have my suspicions about how this book found its way home. All of them wrapped up in love. 

But I'm not asking. Let's just call it magic and let it be so.


2. I asked the cat from my "ask the cat" deck what I most need to know about my writing right now.

That cat just said: "Wake up!"

Deja Vu

5:51 a.m.

Almost like mid-day. Been listening to the fan click its way though the hours since 3:38, keeping time to the crazies in my head. Here in this bed it's hard to keep my fingers on the keys. I want to scatter my thoughts out over the laundry and the dishes and the facebook. Across the kitchen floor. Not think them at all.

This whole past year spinning by in broken shadows cast out from the fan. But I'm still here. Still trying to figure out where here is, too. New digs. This light green room and the constant of my futon bed hard beneath by hips. Let it blow over my bare skin, light and cool from the ceiling down. Culture shock changes keeping me up at night. And my girls bunked next door, stacked one above the other in their dreams.

I got my life in boxes all around again. Dog at my feet. The curtains pulled open wide with the night coming in. I got some lovely flowers in the patio out back, but no front door. No street view, horizon pulled in tight around me. Hunkered down in the back of someone else's life. Strangers.

Nothing to see at this hour anyway. Just night pressed black against the windows, keeping still until the sun comes. And like a friend once said, I wan't watch it come to see how light emerges from darkness, remind myself: now and forever light always emerges from dark.

I don't want to share my daughters. There. There's the truth. I said it. I don't want to send them back to him for half the week and half the year and half their lives. No, I don't. And I don't care about fair. Who's to say what's best anyway.

There's fresh made chicken soup in the fridge, my first, and smoothies leftover from last night's new blender. Damn right, it's different this time. And still the same old change and change and change. Right here where it always is. Constant culture shock. Reset the compass. Re-calibrate and go again.

1:04 a.m.  Halfway under too much comforter, hot and cold and pushing myself toward I don't know what. All the books piled up beside me can't say. Sleeplessness is just the place I go in the middle of the night. But we got hours to go before the middle of the night comes into this here Camp. Sunset still burned across the insides of my eyes. Head pounding how it does, down the the tight spots in my jaw, up where the hinges tie in behind my check bones. So this is 42. Not so far shy of 43. And nothing feels so soothing as that train whistle hauling far off on its way to somewhere. No such thing as poetry without motion.

two more things

Every now and then the spambots latch on to an outdated post from my old, decaying blog and bomb the shit out of it. I have no idea why this happens. The logic of it, I mean. The pattern. Has to be a pattern, right? Some SEO equation my brain can't calculate. A word that's trending tucked down in there somewhere.

Why now? Why 20 nonsense ads posting to the comments of a five-year-old post in less than three hours? Me being me, I can't look away and I can't let it go and I can't pass up an opportunity to scream synchronicity.

But I don't even have to raise my voice. It's all right here, a shout out from me to me, circa 2007, from the end of the journey I'm starting again.

I gotta believe I got new wings sprouting.

Thanks spambots! It's good to be reminded.

Originally posted Oct. 27, 2007:

two things

 The front of the card says "Faith is believing that one of two things will happen," SHE SAID. "That there will be something solid For you to stand on -- Or that you will be taught to fly."

My mind catches first on the sound of the words and how she said changes the rhythm changes the sentence. Changes the resonance.

 How SHE SAID is brilliant because She Said Makes this: Faith is believing that one of two things will happen. That there will be something solid for you to stand on - Or that you will be taught to Fly.

 Hallmark card

into This:

 Faith is believing that on of two things will happen. SHE SAID. That there will be something solid to stand on - Or that you will be taught to fly. She said has that little roll of an up down wave with the water breaking on you will be taught to fly.

I read it three, fours times listen to the sound of every word hitting the next. I'm a nerd like that.

I go to the meaning that faith is knowing you will be ok. And my mind takes it apart. Beleiving one of two things will happen. Something solid to stand or be taught to fly. Standing or Flying? Ripped up that way I read a choice in it.

 Stand or Fly?

 For two days I pick the card off the bookshelf and read it as a question. Ask, ask, ask myself. Which one would I chose?

The Ground or the Sky.

 I look up to remember clouds know all the answers.

Like tea leaves and old gypsy women.

and I think, me, I'll take the sky.