Taoslerium Tremens

Man Among the Living

2011-07-12T22:03:00.000-07:00

The moon shines happy in my bedroom window, growing bigger. It rained earlier and a little bit the last few days, so the air is mulchy and cool. A whole new July world has presented itself, sweatshirts without sunglasses and puddles in the dirt. I'm listening to a friend's sister's CD (actually in my iPhone so my statement is anachronistic)...not sure whether to go to bed or crawl out into the wet sage and talk to the rabbits. I'm busy, as they say, but it's so sweet and cool and my eyes don't hurt anymore. The smoke has been composted into the clay and maybe it'll bring new vegetables. A tough start to a summer, the toughest I've ever been part of...but a few days of afternoon clouds and the smell of raisin rain and it's all erased. This is the most hospitable place on earth, after the volcanoes spewed and the land upheaved...if you lived through that you're in the right place. My house is cool and I'll be able to sleep with a smiley face...I felt the smile at 4:43am last night when I rolled over to drink water and caught a draft from the dormer window. I reveled with the stink bugs, lizards and spiders strutting through my room with no issues. We all smiled into the big windows showing the blinking stars and listening to the quiet coyotes waiting until tomorrow for forage. I hear crying babies and slow cars with cigarette red lights spinning crazed into the Mesa for hot springs and campsites and people waiting for days. And I know to tell the soft nothingness here that I'm still around to witness and feel this in my gnarled feet. There's nothing else I'd rather be doing and nowhere else I'd rather be. Sad, yes, but with the taste of the Rio Grande in my teeth, and the sense that the thunderstorms love us and will give us what we need, man among the living.

Chilly Last of Spring

2011-06-20T09:32:00.001-07:00

I love this - it is June 20th and I'm wearing a sweatshirt, a slight shiver and purple hew to my lips and fingers. The clouds are low and it is raining in the mountains. We have not had rain since May 26th. It won't be much, maybe a few stray drops, but it feels good, smells like the coast. My black hoodie is bunched over my striped green, breezy, summery button down shirt. I have Jeans on my legs, and socks on my feet - rarities the past 4 weeks. Birds are singing, some swooning. They seem to like the cool and brooding. And my cell phone is ringing on my hip, not the sound of birds.

Back for the Eclipse with Pain

2011-06-15T19:34:00.000-07:00

It's been so long my friend. A gentle dusk on the desert on a day of full moon lunar eclipse in Sagittarius. The smoke from wildfires has dissipated leaving a peach clarity to the horizon, lifting up from darkness the pinons on the dinosaur mounds and cat back ridges. I can see into the bottoms of arroyos and catch black birds leaving branches on the escarpments. There is emptiness in my mouth where 4 hours ago a molar once rooted. With a hole in its hull that would have sunk it (and me), it now sits on my altar, a specter of the past, a notch of lived life, a symbol of mutation. It hurts in the bone above the hole and radiates with my heartbeat out toward my right ear. I let it hurt, waiting for the aspirin I'll take closer to my sleep. The full moon awaits out there, behind the Pueblo and it will light up my bedroom in the wee hours. I am tired and know I must sleep on my back. There is writing fluttering in my left ear, and stuffing my lungs. It longs for glistening green spinach and creamy pesto, mason jars of cooled Mate and bags of mixed nuts and berries. It stays quiet, mostly, not in apathy or timidity, but in wait, in breathing, in a slower beat, a half closed eye, a smoothed out foot. It is cocked, not loaded, a ghost limb limbering, a fastball not yet thrown. And it does not matter when the throw is made. We're at a tipping point - me and me, and you and you. I move about wondering less about the games going on about me, out there, in the crackling morning radio, in the faces of people stuck in traffic on the one road connecting dots on the vast high desert. There is still, though, outside of politics, partying, and my skin wanting to be touched, a hunt for security and a fleeing from some force, some hunger that smells metallic and sounds like an army of cicadas. I'm forgetting my face in the mirror, dropping more crumbs in my car, talking less and giving up more. And yet there is a bubble growing inside me that smells of spring laundry, and feels like sitting on a bench and just looking, and looking until I fall asleep without the fear of being slapped in the head. My face hurts where my tooth used to be and it's now dark in my house. Pain sounds like a conversation with myself, feels like rowing a boat in thick water. I think of money and fresh vegetables, and finding my soul in the hole left by a broken tooth.

Dusk Beyond Measure

2010-02-06T11:46:00.000-08:00

Spectral, the clouds spinning wraiths/
Sea creatures/
bottom feeders/
knots in the wood of clouds/
4 directions of immensity/
wind in curls/
clouds in curves/
the desert floats in the universe/
mountains kissed by lavender dragonfly wings/
soft clay underfoot/
humps of snow/
roads weakened by sun/
a blue over layers of cloud, silk lit, smoothed, singing blue/
a dog barks toward the mouth of the Rio Grande Valley/
the pregnant woman sleeps in the wind/
Two Peaks puckers/
a diesel truck chugs slowly in the mud/
no voices/
the sage jiggles/
Radiohead plays in my house behind tall windows of watery glass set into mud walls/
I am ringed by mountains, let out of the house to make love to these trembling layers of life/
I know you, I know you/
that lone tree on the wasted hill in Scotland, barren black rocks where sound is carried by the wind/
it is windy and getting colder/
the river is jade and frothy, blond grasses are exposed early while the snow piles deeper in the mountains/
nobody braves the mud at the road's terminus/
deep ruts and a struggling car/
rock-to-rock with lime green lichens/

This past week on Devisadero, I smelled the sugary sap in the pinons, and the dark dirt beneath the snow. And yesterday, the ocean filled the air, brine, a softness around the sting. It's okay, it's okay. The fiddler is making her way. It's different than last year. I know her and she will teach me. I hear laments from the desert, but the snow isn't as deep, the melting not as dramatic. I don't think the roofs are leaking. I don't know if we need a band?

Stopped on the Terminal Road

2009-11-20T17:00:00.000-08:00

A scarlet rouge glow at the edges of indigo smudged by finger circles of grape, a vibrant liquid sky skirted low by india ink molds of sleeping braves and pregnant women, nautilus ears and cat backs. I stopped at the top of a hill on the dirt road unable to understand my place in this. My windows were down, rapidly chilling air seeping in, but no sounds. Lights in kitchens glowing out into the sage from houses marooned like ships on the old sea bottom. No cars behind me, I felt my toes constricted in my boots and longed to be naked, to have tough enough feet to leave my boots and my car behind, to breathe out into the desert and find the canyon rim and follow it north to the river's source. A flood of dinosaur memories made me see myself low to the ground, my back arched to take weight off my hands. That smell of clay under a sky I can describe only as modern, more modern than technology, a screen for the movie of old stories absorbing into that blue, that butane cupping the long crescent moon, everything that has crept through this valley from Creede down to Mexico; big cats and mammoths, wolves and mastodons, hunters and rabbits. Down to Guatemala, up to Alaska, bright moons to guide and light the dark pumice rock. And I sat, paralyzed, looking west wondering about the water, feeling wrung, but knowing from the smell of sage that I could walk, just walk, no sweater or hat or coat with a hood - just me in my skin with my own fire and an internal compass to send me north.

Summer City

2009-09-03T08:38:00.000-07:00

Creamed coffee in a small honey jar,
the label still showing the beekeeper
bending gently among the swarms and
honeycombs
Two Ravens talking to a magpie
high in a cottonwood pale green
leaves jiggling among them like
regalia against a powder blue
late summer sky
The Magpie warbles like an infant
reminding me of beaches with
gray wet sand and bubbles
terrycloth bathing suits with
blue and white stripes
A tan father, unafraid of the deeps,
smelling of Coppertone #4
and almond sweat
Little sandpipers skittering along
the surf and big bosomed aunts
in magenta and purple bikinis
strolling like marchers with
elbows flung out for each step
Metallic skyscrapers in the last
sun of summer, looming over
the river, the silvered lattice
girders of the 59th Street Bridge
Sand falling out of hair and tickling
crotch, we hurtle into Manhattan,
a beachy, moppy haired family of
browns, sitting quietly hungry for
Italian food
The City is quiet, the train tracks empty,
the streets softer than I remember
hot dogs tingle the air, knishes
with mustard, soft pretzels smiling
in the steam.
Movie theaters hawk the titles of the early 70s
sad men on billboards in cowboy hats
Chinese men smiling, on black bicycles,
dark flattened gum on the sidewalks.
And still the ocean echoes in my ears
like a conch shell, the tide of me
moving in and out,
Nobody talking, and for once,
that is ok, that is what the beach
and Manhattan do to us.
My mother sees a friend on 32nd street
it seems odd, breaks the spell, but
as the two ladies, both dressed in saffron sundresses,
converse, faces close, I cling to my father's hip
and smell the day, my life.

Sunday Morning Ball

2009-08-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

A spearminty Sunday early morning. I awake with sad songs on the clock radio and a bounce in the air. I am torn up bodily by softball dives and slides on gravelly ground and apply salve and apply bandages to the most tender places. I am hungry and ready to run and swing and whoop, and maybe win a championship, maybe not. There will be a cookout in the high sun of late morning, the celebration of a season with a new group of guys, guys I've come to like, goofy and competitive, fiery and fiesty and ready to laugh at themselves. They love music and the cousinhood of jam shows, which reveals itself in the dugout and in encouragement on the field. I am not juiced enough with sleep, but I'm rested and ready to breathe the cool, squint into the blue gold sun, win a game in the morning, eat some grilled food, and then figure things out, maybe walk up high again, maybe just read, maybe just write, maybe just trace the big circle.

Hiding on the Desert

2009-07-13T19:11:00.000-07:00

I find myself on a dirt hill filled with burred desert weeds that scratch and tickle, looking to a mellow gold sun splattering light against a wide arc of thin clouds going vaguely lavender. High summer has the desert on a day with no storms, the softening of evening massaging my exposed skin, an invitation to sit and sip at lemonade, talk softly in the wind, keep eyes on the west as the sun melts into the low volcanoes. It is now, in this ease and spent, that I don't know anything, or anyone. The fast running thoughts of days are done, and I see pictures of things that spoke, heavy raindrops plunking leaves in a cool charcoal sodium light after a hailstorm and a dharma talk about freedom, of slipping out an upstairs window in the dark and floating among the oak trees in my childhood backyard, of walking tall in the dark talus under the pyramids of the high peaks surrounded by echoes of old times in other lives, of Liverpool streets wet and shining in a sliver of white sun before dusk and the feel of a tight blue suit and black leather boots. And I'm queasy from big bites of untouchable sun and drunk from too much motion and the gulf between me and community. Hiding on the desert, in the open in a low slung matchbox of pumice and coffee mud, silent on the green concrete floor, waiting for a knock, a ring, a calling voice, but shooing such notions away with a middle that flutters for fear of exposure, of reckoning, of spilling from its casing. What do we do with these lives? What is the promise in the wind that allows a breath so sweet and gives a caress so disarming that to die doesn't seem an ending but a float in a canoe on a calm lake? I'm asking questions and I don't need answers. I'm wading and when I walk outside and take in the desert with my eyes, the mountains in my groin, I lick the land and it seems small, moving from all directions to a single point. It is the saddest thing I've ever felt, the vastness, and the inverse. It comes on as love, cushioning and enlivening, telling me in whispers that it's already over, two seasons ahead, buried under snow. And I think maybe this is all I have to tell, sing-songy on the inside, wanting to cry, wanting to be devastated by beauty, to speak in a long language, loopy and hoarse with an endless acoustic guitar strumming in the background, laying everybody low. It is a song that I hear, that I feel, I tremble with it, and it has bits and pieces in it, fragments of blood and the call of the late night, which I know to be another call misinterpreted, a wild horn from the valley. I have walked (and run) with people and spirits, gaining streets and finding sunrises, looking and talking and telling truths that fade with the sea sickness of the day, and seem preposterous, or merely unreachable...until the summer evening, high desert wind, the heat turned to a lover with smooth, cool skin, skin to rub against, skin to dream on.

Breathing Notes of Summer

2009-06-24T20:29:00.000-07:00

The moon is a walrus whisker tonight, but light enough to give its round bulk illumination. Clouds in the late dusk take on smokestack puffs and black billows against the ringing dark blue above. This day had a streak to it, and endless motion, a bicycle pedal in circles. It is ending with a chunk of chocolate, my reward for meeting myself in the parking lot outside the Magistrate Court, and shaking my hand, apologizing from my still heart for my barking and serrated words, my slip in the mud. It felt like a bubble, a floating piece of myself liberated, leaving the rest of me airy, spacious, ready to keep moving without muscle flexes or jaw clenches. This day had rhythm, bit, bat, bijat, dat, dat, dat-tat-tat, bijat. Symbols in the sounds of wings when I stopped at a red light near the rodeo grounds. Looked like a redtail hawk streaking off toward the wonder of deep grass between town and the ridge of Blueberry Hill. Maybe it's harder to see the prey with the grass so high? But I see the arcs up there, the seeing, the scouting. They see me when I'm up high, circling my arms, trying to summon notes from my belly to see what they are, let them see who I am, hear them, be them, and release them to the ravens to take to the other side. Today there were smiles. Today there were cute old people, a little hunched, carrying things, but squinting bemusedly in the sun. Today they had things, to sell, to trade, to show in rows on blankets. And it is summer tonight, the bugs, though, staying silent, not done with the smoke after dinner, the nap after sex, the sucking on the green stalks that may never taste like this again. A map says that this place is brown and rocky, rugged like Mongolia, and yet the grasses of shangri la sway with crickets that crawl up through your drains and greet you in the morning shower with a hop and lick of their limbs. They do this with alacrity, and unlikely calm, with a studied crook of the leg, a veteran's poise. Venerable are these grasshoppers, hard kneed and agile, but in a way that strikes of age, of sage days talking to spiders and yippity rabbits, wiggling centipedes and tittering young birds, bloody worms and prairie dogs. Tonight all is quiet, no cicadas or meadow larks, or even magpies with their sing-song derision. It is easy, easy, dark with no breeze, promise of 29 days of moon cycle, at the end of which all may be different, all may be transformed into the high praise of the corn days, the pale blue of the ocean sky a thousand miles west, the sting of salt from sweat in the eyes of a hiker nearing the peaks, beating a thunderstorm up the slope, smelling the end. Already? A season ahead we live, maybe two, and where will we be then? It is ok to be in the quiet, only 3 days into summer, nothing to hold onto, nothing to shed. I can always smell winter and the bones of large animals, but the stew can wait, and I look forward to sleep and that walking I do, out and out into the boundaries, floating along the prickled ground, searching for the notes I keep breathing out.

From Chocolate to Family to Children to Change: A writing practice

2009-06-23T18:56:00.000-07:00

Because I don't want to, I am doing a writing practice. Right here, right now, or Write here, Write now! I must keep typing without stopping for 30 minutes. I can type slowly if I need to, but no corrections, no going back and deleting to be literary, hip, cool, smooth, smart, brilliant, rollicking, ballsy, irreverent, fearless, unfathomable, deep, and lustrous. Nope. And here I go, nowhere yet, not sure where to head. Writing practice, writing practice. An empty page (so to speak), and empty vessel. Hmmmmm, chocolate, 70% cacao, is in me, moving through, having passed the pleasure centers of the tongue, drifting choco smoke up into my sinuses and tingling my brain into a sense that I am both ok and wanting, into a slide, silky glide of my own milkiness, my own sense of slither, come hither, the nostrils flared for the soak of the sage outside, turning the desert to apples and mint. It is raining again, unexpected, but a fetch of clouds has swung low over the Mesa, dipping into the canyon above the river, threatening to unite with its kind down in the bottom, water to water, dust to dust, the insects hide in the rocks, waiting for the drips to clear the cups of the flowers that cannot stop opening wide, priapic, triumphant, Ella fucking Fitzgerald, A bald tenor, Go Tell it on the Mountain, Raindrops keep Falling on my Head, it ain't gonna stop, the deluge, the monsoon, big words for muddy roads, but not like in the lower elevations, not tropical but cool, the water shining with a bit of dark blue, a bit of lead waiting for the last rays of the sun to poke through the suddenly lifted edge of the western skin of sky. It's rose fest of cacti, delectable, edible, put in your salad dark red lusciousness, and sexy magenta of a woman just coming of age, just knowing how to sway, to take in a look, and to brandish and lavish. Soft dirt and clay, turning to pudding, years in the waiting, the one time these shapes take hold and horses have a hard time treading the land. But leaden drops calm the hooves, and we play volleyball with bouncing bellies in the bottomlands under the slopes, next to rotting cars with grass peering in the empty windows, and lost dogs tongues waving, smiling, dripping with hunger, stand close to our rippling legs, a low growl, a high whine, and nothing to grasp. It smells so good and we don't care about the drops, the lightning stinging the black volcanoes, the thunder ruffling our thighs, making us want ribs, chicken legs, meats of some sort although we have only heaps of greens and berries, and beer. It is the time of high light and it won't leave us hanging, blueberry skies mixed with the aquamarine of lost-at-sea youth, a color that used to cause creeping sadness at the thought of dinner when in the woods with smudge faced friends figuring out how to eat snails, and light the woods on fire. And it stays with us, giving us a chance, after romance, after the toilet bowl has emptied, after the early dreams have been composted and reshuffled, after the old songs have finally lost their meaning. There is still a chance. We remember bits and slices of times with family, around tables, food spilling over, bickering in the kitchen, hugs in the den, puking in the bathrooms. It is sepia toned as we might expect, doesn't matter if now or in the sepia past, past is sepia, the color of the astral floor, the color of blended muteness, the corroboration of your brothers, and sisters, and mothers, and fathers, and cute cousins, and the strange revelations you knew as a kid, among the elders, hiding in guilelessness, but listening and knowing you've been witness to the Titanic, and the Brooklyn Dodgers winning the World Series, and Man walking on the moon, and the terrible quicksand of the family legacy. Or maybe not quicksand, sometimes the blue-flame of life risen up in everybody, when remembering that their past is built on crenelated lives, hollowed from fullness, splinte3ed from their boughs, but they had heft, and they sprung, and spanked and spelunked through the caves for all of us. And we're doing that now. Me, on the desert, looking out at popping sage, so green it wants to be blue, battling my energies, trudging through late nights to get back to early mornings, feeling sadnesses born of my addicted cells, knowing that I can get back into the soft (yet firm) bed and arise christened new, bells bopping, words flying, breathing my bellybutton alive again. Seeing myself a child in the flower's faces. Seeing myself aloft in the cheeks of the people, pinched, reddish, like dolls, from the other night, tromping from place to place, desert to town, to houses filled with murals and the scent of sandalwood in the bathrooms, having fun, not ready to pay the price of tomorrow, never tomorrow, never tomorrow. And, hey, how did the dawn get away with the day....last night's always getting in my way - lyrics from a friend's song. Sometimes true. And yet dusk is hanging on through this clack, clack, and I hear the soft spilling of rain on my roof. Ravens, getting more plump with the bounty of wetness, shaking off the spatter, smiling and roiling around on the cliffs. People in tatters waqlking down the road, one-by-one, sometimes in gaggles, in groups, in trios, looking sad but found, blind and bobbling, but unboggled. Unimpeded, they keep moving toward the hot springs where they may find some warmth in the chilled rain. children of this earth, old time London backstreets urchins finding flowers to put in their hair,a nd to play drums to the weary, and wary, because they still have time, and time has them, and the world just may turn enough toward the sun that we'll all dry off with them. Music comes to me across the mesa, a sound of flutes and electric guitars, of fiddles and kettle drums, and the rain pounds harder now.

Storms and Roses

2009-06-16T07:54:00.001-07:00

First the storms, then the blooms. I'm just out of a weeklong Zen meditation and writing retreat. It's part of an "intensive" that lasts for the full year. These were taken during the week either at/near my house on the high Mesa or on the Devisadero trail in the hills behind Taos. It has been rainy and cool since mid May often with stormy skies and fat, cold drops of rain. The rivers are running high and although the seemingly abundant snowpack melted off quickly (due, we're told, to a high dust content caused by the windstorms of early spring which settled in the snow and absorbed the heat of the sun, liquifying the snow), the above normal rains have made up for it. Apparently, the Rio Grande, which supplies water to Arizona and Texas under water rights transfer deals entered into in the 70s and 80s (boo), does not have to be curtailed (through opening and closing dams) this year to supply the full allotment. This is good news for irrigators/farmers along the Rio Grande and its tributaries (and acequias) in southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico who will also get a full allotment. Since I've lived in the Taos Valley, we have had at least normal or above normal moisture (following 5 years of extrem drought), which feels sweet. Normal for this high desert ringed by 13,000' peaks, is 12 inches. Some years we've had close to 15". The Taos Ski Valley receives about 300" of snow in a normal year (with approximately 60-70" where I live at 7,091'). In contrast, New York City averages 42" of rain per year, South Florida around 65", Seattle approximately 40" (less than NYC, yes, but it drizzles more there), parts of the Oregon and Washington (and California) coasts, approximately 70". Somehow, it all works.

And can you believe the vivacity of these cactus flowers?! Crazy.

From Fight to Flight

2009-06-02T16:46:00.000-07:00

I'm ready to fight today. I'm a confused wolverine baring my teeth. I speak calmly, but I'm tired, not a sleep deprived tired, a mutant's tired, the exhaustion from having left myself and returned to a desolate, foreign, too bright place. And the mutant wants out. Me mutant hears false provocations and cannot make camp. He is impatient and hopeless; he is worried that there is nothing, no reason, no purpose, just random emotions. And yet my mutant's ego is strong; it obliterates everything but the light of morning. If I can write this, I think, there is still some light at the bottom of the barrel and the mutation can be dissolved (transmuted?). I am sitting and I am writing. I am expanding in the face of popping balloons. I have been crowded out for a while, pushed to the edge of the bed. And even as I write this, I am still close to the edge, my heart beats too fast, my belly clenches enough to weaken my legs, and my ego is dug in, defiant, making love to the mutant. It refuses definition or the notion that practice, consistent practice, is good for me. It bristles at its machinations being called addiction. It says it's all a big conspiracy theory. It defends its turf. It says I can drink and trip and snort cocaine in the quest for experience. Who could deny that who is not a loser, a wussy, a prude, a killjoy? It carves out spaces for me and even, I think, it is looking out for me, being a matchmaker, keeping me from being the lean loner on the desert. It's also spending all my money and losing my possessions. And who is the one who is hopeless? Who is the one thinking it's too late, it's no use? Who is the one worried about dying? Is that the ego, too? Is that part of the trap? I hear myself saying "don't you want magic? Don't you want to be able to dive through your navel into nothingness?" You're addicted to ecstasy (not the drug) and you don't know it. You'd trade a 7 year process of transformation for a 3-day concert filled with ionized air and one dance with the dark skinned girl in the short denim skirt with the green eyes lit by the setting sun and your seduction - the dance where you lose yourself, that crystal-clinking tingling in your groin rising up your heated abdomen and reaching your eyes where you now know she knows and although you probably won't say anything or do anything, you know you could, in that place that feels like the high mountains above treeline and smells like pine sap and sulfur and lands you in a painting with her on the mossy edge of a dark lake under a soaring granite ledge, your warmth all in your skin, the touching and clinging and clawed ass grabbing; it's a dream, the same dream it's always been. And she's there with you (you think, but does it matter?), this person you see at the three-day concert, between angled red rocks, 100 yards above the stage at the birthing of this gap, with the band in a runaway trance of twisting base and waving guitar, drumbeats picking out individual ribs, surrounded by 10,000 bobbing heads with open mouths, and, closer, by old friends and concert buddies swaying through their own fields of understanding, looking like family, reaching out for you both when they think you're lost, knowing it, too, and not judging but still pulling you back from the high mountain lake where you'll always make love, to make sure you don't because that girl's boyfriend is coming back from the beer stand. And as you come back, before you smile at each other like Adam and Eve, before the clank of the sound comes back as if someone opened the hatch of an airplane, you swim with her in that lake and you know you've known something larger, something you might remember on your deathbed. And then the boyfriend's there; he's new to the scene and he gives you his beer to sip. He's tripping, too, gleamy and amazed, a joyous stretch of flesh and bone, a jumping bean of kindness, and although the music is now loud and your ears have popped and you feel your bare feet sticking to the beer soaked blue tarp, you are in love, not with the girl, or the boyfriend, but with the organism, the whole undulating mass of people, the bats above against the indigo sky, the holy red hulks of rock pointing west, the blue lit city of Denver like Oz 30 miles northeast, and your round-eyed friends passing you a bag of Molly grabbing the meat of your shoulder, slapping your palms - you have made it here, you have made it, you are part of the organism and it loves itself into one piece, and you are nothing but the current that runs through it. Do you understand that place? Is it worth the week it takes to settle back into your body and function in time? Tell me.

6 Days

2009-05-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

The past 6 days have been spent with friends, nearby, far away, some new, some old family, some grounding and being grounded. Kid energy, emergent, smooth, an inhabiting of self beginning to occur. There was a pinch of worry and a dollop of woe, a cleaving of the center, a heaving before the ocean went warm and glassy, a snorting from the top before the belly rounded. Some vanity before that storm faded east and left a scrubbed knowing like the desert becoming itself again after the wind. The field of possibility extended in good food, abundance rubbing off on me in loaves of bread, sun-dried tomato paste, an Italian accent full of bounce and circles, stinging grappa and lemon tart, a clean floor and emptied sink, the closed-eyed laughter of a sexy elf watching irises nod in a hail storm. There was a long hike in the rain down in the bottom of the gorge where the river overflowed into the hot spring pools, but not with menace, and not enough to deter two magic tadpoles with freckled legs who talk to faeries and nature divas and remember the river as a bubbling brother. Paintings of mallet-breasted women mixed with the spring and stir of basketball and the popeyed swirl of good whiskey. In the looking back, there is a whole circle. Mixed, mixed, mate and some coffee, deep, bitter greens and plum extract, lean red meat topped with silky mozzarella and long fried onions flecked with torn basil leaves, grilled zuchini and cob corn popping on your canines, slow swallows of quiet water at room temperature then a margarita soothed with a woven basket full of fresh limes. To bed before 11pm after a day of swimming and pine nut tea, the eyes of the children, green and indigo streaked with dusk sky and old tears, dotted around the irises with the points of sundials. 6 days is a long journey, to the peak of Chomolungma and the jungles of Laos, from my Lost China Sea filled with collapsing waves, to the cool, grassy valley of late spring where my masks are off, my clothing optional, my journey ended, again, where it always begins.

Time and Timelessness

2009-05-26T09:31:00.000-07:00

A raven said to me, "Don't forget this hiking is your meditation. Some people need to move to be still." Then he asked me, "What anchors you to time?" And I thought, "Shame brings me back to time; to guilt; to will in a degrading attempt to prevent dissipation." To create requires timelessness. To love requires space, a suspension of self-awareness. I am now tired, sleepy, but I know these things. The fear of wasting time, by definition, disappears in the open field. Without time, there is no measure, no comparison. It is never too late. You can throw your arms around the people you miss, you can ask why and what and listen. The veil lifts, the barrier melts, the pathology becomes meaningless. You can write with your wrinkles and sound like youth because there is no measure. Presence is the sound of youth to us who are anchored in time, when really it is the naked sound, unembellished, unselfconscious, unaware of anything but the muscularity and breeze of it. Those words like walking in the mountains, watching moist dust settle among desert volcanoes, seeing the mossy underbelly of the foothills in a silver-plated light thrown from somewhere behind a sprawling thunderhead. There is no time in that view, the bounce of feet on the rocks, the stray drops grazing a cheek. And then a bolt of lightning over Two Peaks sparks the thought, "maybe if I get hit it'll knock me out of time forever and my eyes will blaze with an indescribable fire." And then the next thought, "But will it hurt?"

Ordinary Man

2009-05-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

I'm in my cave like office, cool while the sun beats down through the leafing trees outside. Spring has come with layers of fragrance, lilacs and apple trees, dogwoods and astors, cherry trees and weeping willows in full blossom. Where there were scars in the peeling back of the snow in February and March, there is now cushy, dewy, color-mad life. It draws me out, the perfume, the skin caressing warmth, the thickening grasses. Yesterday, on Devisadero, the shoulders of the mountains gave blue-green healing to my computer-scattered eyes. An endless Moroccan blue sky, no clouds for a hundred miles in every direction, that green against blue like food, enabling deep breaths and nourishment. I expected people up there, but they must have hidden or I may have disappeared from view, vaporizing into the rocks I used as springs, miniaturizing into the insect on the dancing astors, their central yellow suns roundbellied. There in the shadows of khaki rocks the new flowers waved out of moss. Scrub oaks started to unfurl their little leaves, rubbery like any newborn, warm to the touch. Up on the ridge, the leaves were slower, still balled, waiting for a mild night. But the wildflowers were ready, waving, jumping, jiggling, so happy to be in the world that they'd give it all now, not worry about the future. I did pass one human, and she was a flower, too, a wide-jawed blond lady in reverie, off to the side of the trail in prayer, stretching her body skyward, making a giant circle of life with her arms, looking like I do on my altar rock. I was singing to myself, a song about an ordinary man, and I lowered my voice, but I did not stop as she was ok with it, two people in prayer, on a mountain, looking at the blue, listening to the birds. And the ravens played, rascally, riding backward in the wind, beaks facing west, gliding east, cigars in their mouths. They made me laugh and they knew it. I wondered about the fiddler, wondered if she wondered about me. I saw a fiddler weeks ago, snow still melting off the rocks, a woman I'd met before, but not the fiddler in green. She may be my teacher. The fiddler I'd followed and seen out on the trail and near the river is not my teacher, though I have things to learn. She is a lover and to know her I'll need to know how to play. The song I was singing yesterday had no fiddle. It was voice and guitar. My voice felt supple and rangy. It's a sad song, a reflective longing, a cautionary tale. "Just the son of an ordinary man/living his life in a gentle rage/living day by day by day/this is who he was meant to be/like taking water from a grain of sand/seeking sin in a pious age/wanting more but can't find a way/to disregard his destiny." It's 4:09 and I may have to leave the cave again. I have levitating to do. There are dinner parties and margaritas, women in sheer spring dresses dancing to ragtag blues looking for a shoulder to lean on. It is the time of the big wakeup. It is a hard time to stay on the trail, but that's where the magic is.

A Call to Pushups - The Battle

2009-05-04T18:30:00.000-07:00

I'm running hard, running like a clueless bull. I didn't think I'd be back here again, but here I am. It's 7:30 and I'm doing pushups every couple of minutes to drain the excess energy. I'm hungry although I just ate. I want to go to town and watch sports while sipping beers and then go outside and marvel at the mild night. I want to go to parties, insert myself into scenes. I want to drink coffee and pace, pump my legs up and down, scratch some shit into notebooks, phrases, words, things I should be doing. It's all pushing the dream away. Where is the late night cafe (one thing we're surely missing in Taos)? Where are friends to talk in circles with (they're out there, but I'm gunshy, wanting solitude as much companionship, a strange, tearing dilemma). Why did I not know about the vision quests at the Lama Foundation this past weekend? Why does everything feel so difficult? Why have a drifted from my writing intensive commitments? My teacher? This is the turning point. How do I keep or regain the discipline in spring and summer? How? How do I not berate myself and turn myself into an enemy? Who are or where are my companions in sweet discipline? I know it can be sweet. I've tasted it. 5 or 6 weeks of straying from the core and my nerves are playing the old jangled song. I'm capable of great expressions of exuberance, of profligate wastes of time and money and life force. That's what I need to remember. The commitment of life force to the need, the addiction, the capitalist/consumptive cells. They don't need that much, but they have fallen back upon asking. I am not going to give it. And yet I do not want to be a dictator to my soul. No. No. There is a middle road. Pushups, situps, running, climbing, biking...and then I can sit, and write and read (160 pages since mid yesterday...so not too bad). Yes, tucked back in, everything expanding, taking artistic chances, opening wide to people. That's what I know. That's exciting and calming. I'm getting those calls again from the vampires. They disappeared because I disappeared. But you reappear and your blood still tastes sweet. This isn't easy. This is confusing. I don't want this to be epic. I'm dramatic, but, man, if you could look at me pacing my house, dropping down to do pushups, opening and closing cabinets, circling, checking the computer, picking pennies off the floor, unloading the car. I have more energy than 10 men, and more exhaustion, too. I want to get off wanting. I look forward to again being sated, open, alert, understanding, empathetic, gleam-eyed, and slow. It won't take long. It's just underneath this buzzing. But the buzzing is hard to tune out. This has helped. I don't know if I'll publish it. It's rambling. It's jibberish and gobbledegook. It's real, though. I'm in a challenge. I want to be able to do whatever I want and at the same time I want discipline and ease of heart. When those things match, which they did there for a while during sweet winter, I am in the open field. Time disappears. Now becomes enough.

Caveman of the Bonzai Forest III: The Law of Least Effort

2009-05-03T19:13:00.000-07:00

"Your walk isn't the same as it was in the winter."

I hadn't seen Harris in a few weeks. I'd been traveling and biking, doing other things. He was sitting on the rock throne at the top of Devisadero.

"Whaddya mean?"

He paused for a minute, looking at the ground then up at me.

"You know."

"Dude, you act like you know me. I've seen you a few times on this trail and you live in a cave. You don't know me. I don't have to deal with this. I'm on a hike. I'm on my own. I don't know you; you don't know me."

Truth is I was glad to see him. No more than 10 minutes earlier I was craving human connection; thinking I was becoming too much of a loner. I could feel it in my stomach, no different than a deep hunger for food, but without the gurgling. I was also hungry for food. In fact, I was all hunger, seeking, needing and feeling sad at the emptiness, an abandonment. But I hadn't been abandoned and I'd eaten plenty.

Harris stayed quiet and neutral, letting my little storm pass.

"You're an athlete now, not a traveler."

"What?"

"You're powering up the mountain like you're in a race."

"I'm no faster than I was in February."

"It's not about your relative speed, it's about the lean of your body and where your eyes are. You're not seeing as much."

"And you saw this in my last 10 strides as I approached you here?"

"No, me and Great Wing have watched you coming up the front side the last couple of times. He knows you know he was showing off last week when he made the big circle around you using his wings as ailerons to hold steady in that gale. No wing flaps at all, right?"

"Yeah, I remember. Pretty amazing. He came within 4 or 5 feet of me and I could hear the wind against his wings."

"You may not know it, but you have a few friends up here. Great Wing happens to think you're alright. He's noticed that you're walking like you did the winter before last, all swinging arms, stomp-footed and mouth breathing. I wasn't here, but he told me."

"He told you. Cmon, Harris. I believe in a lot of things, but how can a bird tell you something."

"Keep coming here and raise your head up and you'll probably figure it out."

Like all my conversations with Harris, I half wanted to smack the guy and at the same time I knew what he was telling me was true and I knew I needed to hear it. It was always like a dream up there when he showed up. It didn't make sense. He didn't make sense...but he did.

"He did come really close to me that day and I thought I heard something, not a voice, but something that had meaning in it."

"The ravens on this mountain have a lot of ways to communicate."

"Seems like it."

Harris nodded and for the first time I noticed he had a green backpack on.

"That pack new?," I asked.

"A guy left it up here last week."

"And you took it? What if he comes back looking for it?"

"Then it'll be there for him exactly where he thinks it will be."

"Like my sunglasses?"

He smiled with his eyes cast down."

"I have to go find Mutton. I'll see you again."

I had no idea who or what Mutton was, but in the couple of times I'd run into Harris the encounters ended this way each time with the phrase "I'll see you again." Not "I'll see you soon" or "I'll see you around" but "I'll see you again." There was a certainty in it and there wasn't anything to say back so I nodded and knew it to be true.

On the way back down, I stopped to hug my brother tree. I stood in the soft dark dirt and leaned my third eye into the skinny branch that sticks out. With my arms around his trunk, I asked my brother for guidance. He made no sounds this day, no creaks or groans. But before I pulled back a memory floated up. I was in my car driving from Boulder to Taos a few years ago and Deepak Chopra played on the CD player. He was talking about the law of least effort. And then I saw the vision of Great Wing hovering in the wind, letting it take him, not moving his wings but for a subtle side-to-side adjustment, and then after floating above me for a minute, letting the wind propel him into a great arc out over the cliffs. He rode the wind. And it hit me that the phrase I thought of that day with Great Wing over me was "law of least effort."

I let go of brother tree and jangled down the trail, a little hungry still, but nothing that couldn't keep.

I Went Down to the River...

2009-04-28T19:15:00.000-07:00

I went to the river, rode down the ruts, curving through the sage and juniper hills remembering where I was and who I am. A purple dust storm spread its churn just below the sun and just behind the walking volcanoes like a ruffling curtain. Aquamarine sky, the peaks quiet and far away, snow spilling from the tops but starting to peel back, retreat, and I standing on a jutting talis rock letting the wind blow through me and realizing that spring had come, and when it had I was not looking. There were snows in March and April, four storms after March 21st, and there may yet be another, but I was whirling out there, traveling, surging, forgetting, leaving my mesa home in the dust. I stopped paying attention and became again the man who walks with Mr. Frodo, searching for a way to Mt. Doom to destroy that fucking ring. My gaze fell in upon my feet and no longer out the window following the moon and the ocean sky, no longer keeping watch for the fiddler in green. I stopped seeing rabbits except in the road darting across or frozen on the side, afraid to move. The dogs were gone, I was gone. My writing room was virtually emptied and abandoned for an office in town. Coffee crept back into the routine, joining the mate, and bars again seemed the natural follow to a power hike driven more now by the need to clear the computer glare out of my eyes and the fear of losing my leanness than to visit the ravens, my brother tree and absorb the magic at the confluence of the worlds. The house got dusty and the cupboard bare, but for mustard, an old yogurt and some rice pasta. I came home to a stopped up bathroom sink and an ashy wood stove flanked by piles of old newspaper and food packaging. It occurred to me that in the mornings the house was now colder, much colder, than it had been when I inhabited it nearly full time in December, January, February into early March. This owed as much to the higher angle of the sun as it did to the draft of my absense and the lack of fires before bed and early in the morning. It became harder to write at home (as you can see by the dwindling entries the past couple of months), the big wood table almost naked, the battered laptop sitting there with its screen hanging by one hinge. It was good enough to check sports scores and my email in the morning, but not inviting to create or even spew. "Where did my muse go?" I'd say to myself on the few nights I was here before dusk or darkness. And now I hear her saying back, "Where did you go, motherfucker?" And, of course, we both know. I went exit stage left to the office and the town draws, like an allergy, like an old itch that you forgot about for a while that you have a cure for at the bottom of some plastic bin under the sink in the bathroom. Six months gone from it and yet the same people were out there, Sam and Marky and AJ, Glenny and Fast Angie and Clyde, Alyson and Candy and Janet. Like family, they'll always be there to take you in. It's like you never left. And there's some solace in it, you know, but a month with that family and it's time to hit the road again, back home. I don't know. Again, I don't know. What I do know is that I was out there in March, sitting in the melting snow, watching it swirl around me, smelling spring in the caliche. I knew it was coming, and I wanted to see and feel the turn, but I missed it. At the river tonight, birdsong filled the gorge and the wind had no bite. It blew hard from the west but it caressed and bathed instead of cutting. Winter was gone and with it the snow that had lasted since November. Even the gullies were going green. I had some hugs out there in town, some moments of knowing the love in all the noise, the sass in the world, the altered, rednosed workshop of smudged saints, but I can't stay there. My workshop is here and my work requires everything I have. "Don't be dramatic" the muse says, "you'll need that family here and there." True, true, I think, but not now even though spring has this ram ready to butt and bang and jump chasms. It is time to create and to create I need abundant life force, and to have abundant life force I need to pay attention and to feel and to show up. Here I am again.

Home in Texas

2009-04-21T19:54:00.000-07:00

Hello, it's me, I haven't been here for a long, long time (credit to Todd Rundgren). A barnstorming couple of weeks that took me from the snowy 13,000' peaks and upscale but hollow carb infested town of Breckenridge to the sea level debacle of repeating chain(store) DNA that is Houston, TX. And now I'm back in a place so different from the rest of the USA that I am reawakened (again). I'm still staggering from the 16 hour drive from Houston to Taos that spanned Sunday into Monday, but something happened out there in south Texas. There is hill country that rises like green sea swells after the lushness and big muddy rivers of places like Flatonia, Iraan, San Angelo and San Antonio. Into a long, glowlit dusk after San Antone, I drove Montez into a rollercoaster of sandstone ridges and valleys where the air cooled and dried from the swampy oil slick of Houston, and frenzied birdsong echoed in the thick, lowset oaks, magnolias and mulberries. A talkshow station crackled in from Dallas, a woman writer of a Christian book called "Angry Conversations with God" bantered with two hip male Christian hosts about the book and her prideful, reckless foibles on the empty road until she wound her way back to God. It all made sense, what she said, and they had such a self deprecating, knowing hipness that me and my friend who was traveling with me, both of us pagan buddhist animists, were riveted and called them the Hiptians. But, as all good things do, the reception faded into the static scales of the engine's fluctuations and we went quiet as the dusk held on, orange and low flame blue with hints of cranberry and blueberry. And the road rose through cuts in the white sandstone where you could see the bone of the land, the layers of lifetimes piled up in wavy rows. I looked out to the north and the south and breathed into the trees knowing this place, it knowing me. South Texas, somewhere between San Antonio and El Paso, Mexico just a little farther south, a place I'd never been before, but I knew it, and it gave me peace, a crack in my heart to release the scent of home. My breathing went downward into my belly and I felt locked in, like I could drive forever. It reminded me of the Bonzai Forest, this place of hills and knobs and chilly, dry air. Darkness finally came springing loose the stars and, low on gas, I pulled off at the historic town of Sonora where I had to drive four miles to find the gas station downtown. It was a sleepy place with the leaves just popping on the locust trees and a pickup in every driveway. There were a few historical markers but I was too tired to read them. Strangely, the clerk in the gasmart had no discernible Texas accent, but then again, this place was nowhere and I knew it, so it wasn't necessarily Texas or the dot showing on the map. Like those mad singing birds filling the giant magnolia in Flatonia hours earlier, I, too, heard the hum of a place in my dreams and it just happened to be called Texas.

Showing Up

2009-04-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

Easter morning, April 12th. It is snowing heavily on Taos desert, the mountains shrouded, everything brought in close. I look up into a fall of feathers, it doesn't seem possible that snowflakes can drop thousands of feet, not when a small wind can blow them sideways in a crisscross pattern. It is 7am and the bridge looms over the gorge filled with bouncing snow, its road surface covered with a slick whiteness. It's at once improbable and expected, and as high desert dwellers are ready for anything, and love all weather, there are 70 people huddled under the open air wooden shelter facing the yawning gorge. People are layered up, hats pulled down tight, the dark haired heads of toddlers and infants swimming in giant parka hoods of blue and magenta. Older men greet me with crescent pouches under their eyes, smiling, not old as much as broken in. Some of the women are wearing colorful scarves wrapped around their hair; it reminds me of my childhood in the 70s when more women seemed to wear them, and project mystery and bright eyed destiny in the face of boredom. The reverend Steve Wiard, a Kansan with a broken voiced optimism, a cornfield skipping boy of 60 who loves the red sox and amber beer, paces before the huddled group in his red tartan blanket coat with charcoal crosses in subtle relief on front and back. He is smiling, his salt-and-pepper ponytail spilling and curling out of his blue baseball cap, and telling us that he does not know exactly what happened that day of Christ's resurrection, that it's a mystery. But he knows something happened that turned those people around that day. And he knows that showing up is the key. 70 people in driving snow, 27 degrees, singing songs of peace, and listening to a preacher with a sun faded blue red sox cap whose voice cracks with excitement and wonder and who injects the still unmarred buoyancy of a ten year old who knows anything is possible. You can't see the mountain today but you know it's there. And I don't know what it means, but it feels good to be around people at 7am listening to a guy with whom you'd trade baseball cards and drink beers while watching a ballgame. As he spoke, I looked out to the west to a lone cottonwood standing firm in the snowfall; a single, sturdy tree on a desert at the edge of a massive gorge allowing the snow to collect on it, at the edge of my visibility, nothing behind it but a field of gray while people sing and recite and hug in many colors also on the edge of that wide opening. Something? It reminds me that I read an article last night on David Foster Wallace, a great writer who killed himself months ago at 46. In his last novel, an unfinished work, he wrote of an IRS agent who found himself in the grip of such immense boredom that he thought he'd never recover without hurting himself, or hurling himself away. But he finds a way to stick it out, to be right in it, to use it as practice, and the boredom fades into another state where there is nothing but openness, and he is joyful. He doesn't know what this is, and it doesn't seem like anything but he is spacious. I took that with me as I fell to sleep last night, and I had it with me at the sunrise service in the snow. I don't know what it is, but it exists. Practice, showing up, even if it's mechanical, will lead to joy and peace. Believe me, I know how simple and even trite that sounds. And it doesn't happen right away, and maybe not for a while, but it happens. And I'm not preaching Jesus or any religion, but there's something about showing up. And there's something about being there. I don't know what it is, but it's something.

Starting a Howl

2009-04-11T20:08:00.000-07:00

Piles of tires
below a bridge
in New Jersey

A song on the radio
"What the world needs now
is love sweet love."

Nobody talking
the tires fading
from my perch
in the back
of the station wagon

On the way to Rockaway
the cousins,
mud in the backyard
from endless sprinkling

Dad switches the radio
to WNEW
a deep voice
recites the news

127 VC dead
only 4 Americans
there is movement
in the jungles
it is 88 degrees
in Hanoi

Brian, my counselor, is there
Colgate toothpaste and
Winstons taste good
like a cigarette should

Mom lights up
Dad rolls down
the window
my brother and I
choke in the back

The air smells of eggs
and leather
still no one talks
and the trees of Jersey thicken

Neighborhoods on the sides
dirty white and green houses
lean away
in the woods

I remember the tires
and see that commercial
of an Indian on the roadside
with a tear on his cheek.

Happy Hiker

2009-04-07T15:23:00.000-07:00

April 6, 2009 at 7pm: Back on Devisadero in Taos, snow melted, sunny and mild, no need for helmets, 5 layers, or blocky gloves. I'm watching ravens fly over the cliff 20 yards in front of me. The 3/4 moon, misshapen but bright, had already risen high behind me but I couldn't quite get my arm out enough to include it.

Postcards from Breckenridge

2009-04-07T11:47:00.001-07:00

We had mid winter conditions at Breckenridge April 3-5. It snowed about 10" on Saturday, after several feet during mid-late March. The temperature at 13,000+' when I took this picture was approximately 8 degrees with a northwest wind at 20 mph. Invigorating. It was, as they say, "hero snow" - powdery yet formed enough to keep you on top of the snow. I had not skied all season, but my ankle held up, and I was able to drop off the summit ridge and make turns on the steep bowls. It was so inspiring that I am getting a full pass to Taos Ski Valley for next season. I have to be up there, an ancient home for me. There is something at once immense and intimate above treeline. The world congeals into an atom up there. Although you can see for hundreds of miles, distance fades to a room made up of hushed strokes, sheer mountain walls flatten, and you live in the hollow smell of cold and the rotation of your knees.

Caveman of the Bonzai Forest II

2009-04-02T19:07:00.000-07:00

This day I was hurting. Something had sapped my energy. I wasn't sure if it was the food I ate, a bug, or having overtaxed my body over the past few weeks. No gas. Sore muscles. A sagging spirit. Also, I had no socks and it was chilly. I'd left them at home, on the bed lined up perfectly to be noticed by me before I took off for town, but I didn't. I wanted to wear sandals. It was sunny and my feet wanted to feel the breeze and the sun. Oh, well, I did have my climbing shoes and they're so old that the fibers have softened and formed to my feet. They know me well, these shoes, we've hiked thousands of miles over rocks, snowdrifts, downed trees, and scree. The wind got under my jeans, just a little, but not enough to bother me.

And so I went feeling a lament, needing someone to talk to but at the same time not wanting to. Sometimes I feel like a rack of bones and I can imagine someone or some force scooping me up and laying me down on the edge of a creek under tall trees cushioned by the sponge of moss and matted straw. And in that imagining, I submit because that is what I am, a rack of tired bones with no sinew left who wants to be left to rest in the softness, listening to the creek for a long, long time. But I kept walking as I always do, knowing that there are things up there that will wake me up, teach me who I am, and who I am not. The wind kicked hard from the west and two women passed me, one whom I knew, but she did not recognize me with my new sunglasses and black hat pulled down tight. I said hi to both, but did not betray myself as I didn't have the strength to chitter.

Once I wound up through and over the boulder-strewn gully that is a steep shortcut to the trail higher up, I was feeling better, not good, but good enough to keep moving. Still, I was in a state where I couldn't pay attention to much, I just kept moving, head bowed forward, eyes soft focused about 20 feet in front of me. I had my camelbak on, but the water, like everything else that day, did not taste good, it had a metallic tinge and I sipped some and spat most of it.

A long, wavy purple cloud, like a prayer flag being whipped west to east, reached toward Tinkantananda, and cut the wobbly setting sun in two. I stopped and took a picture with my cell camera, but it cannot deal with the sunlight and the picture looked like a nuclear blast or a supernova over the desert. I erased it and kept moving, twisting up into the heart of the bonzai forest where it flattens out and rides the ridges above the Pueblo.

Sooner than I expected, I was at my lower sacred spot, the one I stop at when I'm feeling lethargic. It looks out over the velvety juniper and pinon covered meadow of the Pueblo rising toward the base of Tinkantananda and its brothers. Also, to the west through the jiggling branches of the rounded pinons you can see the Pedernal, the flattopped butte sitting south of Ghost Ranch that Georgia O'Keefe made famous in her paintings. 70 miles away on the horizon, it looked like a chunk of dark chocolate covered with a thin layer of raspberry sauce. My hunger sparked for the first time in several hours.

For some reason, when I was approaching the prayer spot, I had a feeling that I would find the sunglasses I had lost two weeks before and given up on. I knew I'd left them there, on a rock, while doing my prayers, but when I came for them the next several days, they were nowhere to be found, not hanging on a tree, sitting on a rock, or tumbled down the slope in the pine fluff. I was dejected for a few days by the image of somebody picking them up and pocketing them. That's not the etiquette or spirit of the trail. But, this time, as I came around the bend near the spot I started scanning the ground, the rocks, the branches. When I stopped on the rock where I do my motionless gratitude prayer, I felt my heart beat for several minutes and then turned left toward a tangle of dark dead branches that I'd looked at 5 or 6 times before with no luck. This time they were there, my sleek black Sunclouds, exactly where I originally thought they'd be. It was as sweet as seeing an old friend, and the fact that I'd just bought new ones that day (Sunclouds, too, but not as comfy on my nose), did not dampen it. A small miracle. Where had they been? Had I not been seeing?

I did my prayers and felt a bottom lip-protruding tenderness toward everything, a sense that things are "given back" or that they "never leave." I mean, I know these are sunglasses, but I really liked them, and they returned to me. It's hard to explain, but it was like forgiveness. It was quiet up there in the bonzai except for the wind. No animals stirred, the ravens were elsewhere. I was left with my heartbeat in my ears and the sun slipping under the purple cloud. I wanted to share this with someone, but it seemed ridiculous thing to tell. Then I thought of Harris, the guy living in the cave another 15 minutes up the trail. I had not seen him since that first time when he told me about the ravens. It had been weeks and I figured he'd moved on, maybe up the hills toward Angel Fire, maybe further east over the Pueblo. I wanted to talk to him. I had a feeling he'd put the sunglasses there for me to find.

The Sunclouds slid on like butter, giving me a synced feeling at bridge of my nose. It was getting dark, but I kept them on as I hit the trail down, and I found myself yelling up into the forest, "Thanks, Harris!"

When I got down, dusk was still hanging on and my legs were shaky. I went to the wooden bridge over the creek that leads to the South Boundary Trail and looked west along the water, listening, smelling the vapor, and noticing the tree shadows dancing on the young moss rising off the banks.

Seen/Heard today in Taos:

2009-03-30T11:13:00.000-07:00

Thorny tumbleweeds blown up against my door while isolated snowflakes whipped by, and the mountains stood snowy and blue-black against a chaotic sky of purples, grays and blues.

4 horses trotting north on the sidewalk along Paseo del Pueblo Norte, a chestnut, a white stallion, and two coal colored mares, eyes wide, scared, determined, heavy-headed, passing a line of traffic near Cid's, along the Valverde meadow.

People in the cafe talking about the downfall of capitalism (doesn't register), problems with unregistered cars in accidents (don't really know), asking me about bankruptcy and credit card debt (I wipe it out for people who file bankruptcy), asking me about military issue ammunition at Walmart (no idea), asking about the breadth of a US Passport (no idea). Others talked of yoga, releasing the hamstrings and so releasing the hips and so releasing the shoulders and so releasing the heart (inspiring, want to do it, need to hang and stretch my trunk today).

A long line of people at the electric coop paying their electric bills near shutoff time at the end of the month.

An elder man from the Pueblo, dressed in turqoise slacks, with rich, dark skin, smiled at me in line at the bank, and we talked about the cold and his new blossoms that may die tonight. When he was done with the teller, he turned to me, smiled again and told me to "be well."

Caveman of the Bonzai Forest

2009-03-29T19:31:00.000-07:00

I stopped in the cave on the north side of the Bonzai forest. He was there, near the entrance, squinting in the sunlight. Crows circled overhead, a murder and a half at least, maybe more. A brown knit ski hat, pulled down to his eyebrows, and bending backward in the breeze, comically, where there was extra material, space for a cone should he grow one. His face was vertical, a long nose, but also sturdy up around the muddy green eyes, muscular cheeks, all lines leading downward, a mouth covered by brindle beard, sandy, red undertones, gray creeping in and scraggling down over a sharp chin. His eyes were set wide, propped up by the points of his cheeks, and it was hard to focus on both at once. I could see him riding with King Arthur, or Ghengis Khan. He said his name was Harris, which didn't seem likely, but he was genial, and unfaltering, and, although slightly hunched in the shoulders, there was a strength to him, a sinew of having lived outside and climbed for thousands of days.

The first time I came upon Harris, I had dropped off the trail to pray to the four directions in a place where the Tinkantananda could see me. Her eyes were made by the outlines of two circular stands of spruce just below the final antler velvet hump of talis leading to the peak. He watched in silence, leaning against a tree. I didn't notice him until I had bowed the last time, to the north, and saw his feet in sandals, hardbitten toes with long nails, the little toe on each foot pried away from the rest at 45 degrees.

I rose and looked at him. He was wearing a black hoodie and shadow covered his face.

"I like your ceremony," he said.

"Thanks. What are you doing here?"

"I'm spending some time up here. There's a cave over there. I think bears lived in it a long time ago. It has some good ghost energy."

He pointed down the slope and to the north. I was annoyed, maybe a little spooked. It wasn't that he was menacing, or even out of place, it was more that I liked to be alone in the bonzai forest, with my thoughts, the crows, the rabbits and the groaning trees. And he spoke slowly with a smile that you'd have to call wizened. But Taos has a lot of people like this. They find their way here through the cracks and pipe through the streets and up into the hills, sometimes out in the sage on the desert. At times they speak brilliantly, other times in tongues, but there is a rosy-cheeked rogue quality to most of them. Things are bad, but they could be worse, and here they generally leave you alone to skip along the creeks, and hide out in the brambles. If you want to die out here, you can.

"How long have you been up here?"

"Can't say, but probably a month."

"I've been up here 20 times in the past month and haven't seen you."

"I know. I've seen you a few times. Really like this ceremony you do, especially the part when you circle your hands for abundance."

"You've watched me do this?"

"A couple of times. When you go to that rock at the top of that ridge," he said, pointing up to where I often do my ceremony. It's a place where a lot of people stop.

"That's messed up, man."

"Nah, I don't pay much attention, and nobody sees me. Your the first person I've talked to since I've been here. It's no different than those ravens up there. They're watching you, too. You don't have a problem with them, do you?

"No, but they're not checking me out."

"I don't know about that. I'm not checking you out, just observing nature."

I wanted to get going. Dusk was dropping down and I really didn't want to talk.

"Well, good chatting with you, man, I gotta get going."

"Harris."

"What?"

"My name is Harris."

"Got it. Good to meet you, Harris. Hope it works out for you up here."

"Did you see those two ravens the other day, the one with the wing missing a swath of feathers, and the other large one with the loud caw?"

I had and they'd made an impression on me. The bird with the proverbial broken wing, but it was still flying ,and it looked like the other one was playing with it, helping it.

"Yea, I saw them. I was amazed the hurt one could fly with that chunk of feathers missing."

"I saw you that day up on the rocks rotating your head to watch the birds."

"Dude, that's strange, you watching me like that."

"I was watching the birds, too, and you happened to be up there. The things is, I've been watching those two ravens since I saw the hurt one drop on the rocks above the cave. It's a young one, and the big one is its brother. I thought it would die, but when it couldn't fly several birds came by each day and brought it food, and one day the big one picked it up and brought it somewhere else. But then they came back a few days later and I watched as the big one put the hurt one on its back, spread its wings and like a plane towing a hang glider, it took it up high into the thermals and let it drift in the wind until it started faltering and then it would swoop under and catch it. It was amazing. But the most amazing part of it was the laughter. These guys were having fun. Ravens are magic and they heal with laughter. I know there are all these dark, horror stories with ravens, but really, they're goofballs, and they like to play all day. And I could tell you noticed the same thing."

"You could?"

"Yea, and I wanted to talk to you about it."

"Alright, man, I really gotta go."

"Good to meet you, ah...?"

"Alex."

"Alex."

We nodded and I started back up to the trail. I wasn't sure what had happened or if Harris was really living in the cave. Part of me hoped not because I wanted to be alone up there, but part of me hoped I'd see him again. There was something in his eyes. And the weirdest part was that I'd watched those ravens for a while and the thought had come to me, "two ravens healing each other with laughter." I wanted to write that down, but I didn't have my pad and I didn't want to put it in my phone, so I forgot. This time I wouldn't forget.

Dancing on the Point of a Needle

2009-03-29T13:20:00.000-07:00

It is Sunday and I'm in a new office in town. Nobody is here. There is a kitchen, a fridge, 4 bathrooms, freshly laid wood floors, supplies neatly stacked in cabinets, a copier/printer/fax/scanner that spits out 40 pages a minute. I just put up my giant pad of post-its so I can suss through where I'm at, my goals, my leavings, my bubbles, my awareness, small things floating on the ocean. Also, I hung a little painting by Michael Wojczuk, who was just in town with his wife, Niko, from Boulder. It is called "The Rabbi's Garden" and was painted in Girona, Catalunya, Spain (north of Barcelona). The walls are a little softer than they were when I arrived. I have rice pasta with pesto in the fridge, and a new container of Antonio's hot salsa for nosh. My right leg is pumping in its customary way, up on the toes, 120 beats a minute, maybe more. My forearms sit comfortably on my new desk, dark grained wood, smooth finish. I'm breathing well, in a way that makes me want to stretch my trunk, hang on a beam and let the ribcage expand. It's been a strange 9 days, some splurges after a six month cleanse, a reintroduction of comfort foods, a reorientation to disorientation, a celebration of spring, my exuberance, my excesses, my capacity to dance on the point of a needle in unbridled joy, not feeling the prick, face oblivious to feet, destruction in every direction, and yet the warm puppy tongue of life force licking me with devotion. I saw it all in 9 days, and I know what to choose, how to play, the changing rhythms, the song variations, the bodily systems that pump, feed, clean, sense, warn, throb, hurt, prickle, and power down with a sip of mate laced with Ume and honey, so that I again sense the earth under my feet. There is work on the table, more coming in, trips, writing to pour through, pour out, like the black mud after a spring snow. There was a red-cheeked joy on Thursday night, at 2am, in a blizzard of a crazed snow, directionless, spinning, spumes of it rising and darting off, Sahara sands of blown texture, a bicycle buried up to the seat, a car lost in the sea of it, and me with my green herringbone sportjacket on, an old yardstick in my hand, no hat, no gloves, searching for spots where I could accurately measure the snowfall and report my rapture to the National Weather Service office in Albuquerque. And I reported 13.5" at 2:12am. It was the best I could do. The drifts around my house were over the yardstick, and the sage was like an island chain of sandbars and trenches, at times thigh deep, at others swept off leaving starfish crystals on coffee clay. I was in and out, but I couldn't get enough. I watched the snow invade the light over the door, a swarm of it in sufi revue, and I had to feel it. So, I'd mount the wall and roll into the powder in the sage, crawl around on hands and knees so that the flakes filled my nostrils. Ahhhhhh, I said, many times repeated, ahhhhhhhhhhh, the kind of ahhhhhh that comes from the center below the bellybutton above the balls, and leaves you breathless, but not in need. And I came back in, finally, and wrote. I was still buzzed from the whiskey and my fingers were wet and numbed on the keys, but I road a flexible flyer of delight that I wish upon every sentient being. My love was full upon me, overflowing, out to you and it, this and that, a soft focus for it inclusive of everybody, and I wrote that it is "the moment I live for." And I wrote, "I love you." And yet I erased that the next day, embarrassed, hung over, my possibilities downsized, my love pocketed, my fears reawakened, my headmaster summoned. But I come to you today pockmarked and preached to, stretched out and bled, hieroglyphics etched on my forehead, an itch in my toes to hike up high, and I feel a pinch of affection for the bars I don't need, Chancy and Gil, and Blake, Joanne and Donna, people I don't see anymore, same old same old, but in that there's some light shining through; underneath the habits is the desire for connection, resurrection, reflection, endlessness, espirit de corps, fathomless, a return home fresh and bountiful (but something you need to put back in the fridge after you shake well and sip plenty), Rip Van Winkle-eyed, win-the-lottery grins, and shy smiled yuks with even the darkest hipsters in the room. It can't last, and it eats everything else in its wake, unsustainable, beat-your-brain-able, your Zen turned neon beer sign, your boat dry-docked until the next tide, your last tickets punched. Nope, can't do it, but you can't blame a man for seeking the headless, heedless joy of dancing on the point of a needle.

Before Work

2009-03-16T06:20:00.000-07:00

The desert is still and cold this dawn. A quarter moon, tattered at the southern edge, drifts alone in a soft blue sky. All the stars have retired into the light and there are no clouds to anchor with. Frost on my car windshield and my bicycle seat, but it will soon melt off; it is not the cold of deep winter, of early January, but a simple morning cold, settled down into the canyons, and walking slowly among the sage roots and grass stalks now fully free of snow. Winter still resides up high, to the north and east in the peaks, the blue gray snowfields above treeline spilling in tongues through the spruce forests. There is more up there than before, it snowed several feet in the past two weeks, and you can see it in the thickness of the white, a settled depth, something to last until late spring, something to give to the river and the streams. It snowed down here, too, but it did not last, the ground is warming, the days are longer, the sun higher, nowhere for frozen things to hide in the desert day.

I am busy with work, busier than my swirling energy likes; "I" burn off myself like fog, in wisps, off and out, into the air, not back in where I am left empty, making slack faces, not knowing, not sure, lost in an unattended space.

Last night I dreamed three dreams and my sinuses went dry, filling up behind my eyes to moisten the walls. My mom flew me over the coast in an open contraption, an ulta-light, over east shore road, toward bayville, a late season snow on the beach and the lawns of the coastal houses. My brother was down there somewhere, and I knew there was more snow on this coast than in the desert, and that bothered me, but my mom had to show me. She was instructive, maybe telling me that the teardrop shaped bay I grew up by is beautiful, as beautiful as anything else I've known. We flew over twice, one time during summer. I did not know the driveways and the people, the cul de sacs, and the seaweed colored water. Or maybe I did, but have forgotten.

I walked to high school along the streets of a city. My pace was fast and I had a bundle of hot dogs in my hand. I did not know where to put the hot dogs as I approached the school with its brick facade. It felt new, a place where I might run into somebody unexpected. I felt disheveled, too much stuff, the hot dogs cold and thick in my hands. In one version, I remembered I had a backpack and stuffed the meat in there. In another version, I walked the hallways with long, buffalo hot dogs in my right hand, protruding out like fat, bendy pencils.

In the last, I was walking with friends, a woman with a small child. We kept approaching a plaza, like the one in Santa Fe, springtime, buds on trees, pigeons warbling and strutting. I felt close to an understanding, not feeling bad, but still a tightness in my solar plexus, something not quite landed, not quite sure of itself, something still tied in a knot. She seemed to know and asked me how I was doing. I told her I was doing well, doing well, and I meant it, but the tightness remained and the moon was in my window. The clock said 4:47, but I was still in the dream. My friend, who knows me, said, "You look tired." And I knew this, knew the tightness had been interrupting my sleep. I nodded hoping we'd approach the plaza again and I would be less tired.

On Saturday, I hiked Devisadero and went to my brother tree on the way down. A raven played with me, riding the wind just above the canopy, crowing when it got out over the cliff. At the tree I put my forehead against the sharp, thin branch that juts out and put my hands around the bough. It was calm, no wind. And yet this tree swayed at its core and I felt its heartbeat, vibrations into my hands. I looked up to confirm that there was no wind. There wasn't. This tree moved for me. It waved its trunk and I could feel its life.

Everybody Haiku Tonight

2009-03-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

Still raven on sage
black on green waiting for snow
alone, muscled, wings ready

Canyon wall at dusk
echoing in my belly
boulders holding sound

An early darkness
turns the house to memory
of people not there

Of Tugboats and Crybabies

2009-03-09T18:23:00.000-07:00

Holy shit. Holeeeeee shit! I didn't think I had it in me, man. I didn't. But I had to get to the river. Down and up the dirt hills, snow squalls circling the desert, ringing the peaks. A lone light across the gorge, up on the Hondo Mesa like a tugboat calling me, an icebreaker in the caliche. Wind taking off from the west, down the cerros, up the broken hills. A sky of india ink spilled to the northwest, dark blue, then darker still, verging on purple, wanting to drip. I got there, not so bad for the front side of the ride. Alone in the ruts until the edge where an old red truck with a rust stained camper top sat in the depression at the outlet of the Manby trail to the springs. I didn't go there. I didn't look in the window. The bike dropped itself on the lava rocks and I clambered down a few to stare at the river. The water was a camouflage green, the jade overrun by mud, no sun to pick up a sheen. Wind rubberized my ears and I floated off myself with some vertigo, out over the junipers for a time. When I came back I looked to the east and the moon was full riding above the dark clouds. I was confused because last I saw la luna, she was little more than a slushy half. Where was I? On the gorge rim I thought of flying across to the Hondo side and searching for that tugboat, but my knees wobbled and I didn't have a superlight in my backpack. It was darkening and time to get going. I knew those first few hills going back are harder than those two long hills coming in. Steep and windy. I had some energy elixir in the cambelbak and that helped with the piston action on the first rise, but, man, that second one starting kicking my ass before I pushed a quarter way up. And this is the thing. I went from nose breathing to mouth sucking, chest heaving, but the legs were filling up with can-do muscle twitching. Halfway up that long and gnarly second rise I felt the crybaby singing to me. Head bowed, ass off the seat, biceps pulling, hands gripping, wrists twisting, tongue going side-to-side, I swallowed heaps of that solar-plexus drain swirl of lament, the no-no-no-no got....to....fucking....stop...legs not gonna do it...falling, falling, falling, fainting...want to give in, give up, let myself down, drop soft and pliable into the defeat of it...And yet I'm still moving, pumping, swaying shoulders, gaining the second half of that hill, seeing the top, and then...the...tipping...point, and I know I've passed the max torque requirement, it's getting easier, I'm going to top it and get to drift in the flats until those last long curved swales that are easier, much easier than these two fucking roller coasters. I'm sweating under my layers now, and at the same time the westerly blow is cutting through me and snow pellets slap my right cheek. It's almost full dark and the clouds have swallowed the moon. A car a few rises ahead, hovering in the near dark vastness, shows its break lights, two fresh lit cigarettes burning red in the snow. I'm on the decel, knowing that I've slayed the hills and it's all easy into dock from here; and also knowing and still tasting the crybaby who wants to give up, his wail, his willingness to submit, to be dropped off, to crumble knock-kneed to the ground and be picked over by strays because he deserves that fate. But the crybaby didn't have it so easy tonight because there is more, much more inside, and I know it, and I cannot reconcile the crumble, not now. And I've been through it, and I know that once past those hills it's easy, and that energy used on those rises is recycled, sloshing in the tank for a long journey, longer than I ever expected.

March Voices

2009-03-07T15:19:00.000-08:00

Like a lion March has swept in with winds so loud you become part of the roar if you stay out long enough. But with that wind has, thankfully, come some moisture, pebbles of snow and hail, lashes of rain against the pocked pumice walls. We're in a constant gale, windows rattling, sometimes curving in parabolas, the tips of the sage plants shuddering, closing their eyes against it. And that sage has, in the span of days, gone from olive and sepia to dusty blue-green and has kicked into the world the swirling aroma of late season grapes and a tenacious cleansing spearmint. I am drawn out from this desk into the unraveling cold, the serape-slapping southerly rip, into the crumbly, scarred yellow clay, where the whistle blows through my chest, and presses my temples. I am barefoot on the gray gravel, claw-toeing my way to the sirens, again to lay low among these plants that rise only a few feet off the pliable earth; snuggle in with the zephyrs diving, rising, puncturing, dancing back, hovering, fainting, and then pouring in on the back of a gray whale. It is snowing in the mountains, open bowled Wheeler Peak - which cannot be its real name, Tankwantanda to me - baptized at the highest reaches in a winter white thunderhead, spilling its riches onto the back ridges, opening a mouth toward the sacred mountain, Pueblo Peak, Tinkantookoto, to coat the still ice covered Blue Lake. Tall aspens shiver and sway in the narrow, winding canyon trail up toward the lake, rising over the folds of the mountain that show from below in shadowy triangles. An inner sanctum tucked deep in the kingdom of this mountain, a source, a birthing canal, a place where the ancients of this land can tell you where you are. I cannot go, friends tell me, although they sometimes tease, but in the not going, I am there. The bark of those aspens is familiar, the funneled wetness seeping off the high ground has reached me from El Salto, riding an easterly in the summer, and, today, in a tempest of this world-reflecting teacup, a battle of seasons at work in the sky just over me in the sage. I lay down on my back and close my eyes facing west and listen. It is late afternoon, March 7, 2009, a whole world of talking going on beyond my border, but here all I can hear is the wind and my toes are being tickled, they are not cold, and my right hand feels the sting of a cactus hidden in the clumped straw, and my ass feels nothing but easy ground giving up some moisture, but not much. There are people in the wind, voices and information, headlines and backstories, histories. Dust to dust is what I think, people in black huddled around a grave. Here it is, I'm sitting in that dust that has turned to clay and I also see little animal bones and ash, pollen drifts along the dark roots. It is late afternoon on March 7 and nobody is here, no cars, no dogs barking, no rabbits sniffing, just the blue rises and volcanic chimneys, clouds masking the sun, and the tilt of the earth toward the south.

Patience

2009-03-03T19:46:00.000-08:00

I didn't have any today. It was a ball rolling across my floors, rock on cement, moving north, wobbling, picking up speed, heading for the wood stove. Nostrils flared. 75 push-ups. Eyes sucked into the monitor, phones poised to ring, already ringing along my pelvis, permanently in those bones, even at the top of a mountain those bones ring, and they talk to my ears, and I reach for a phone that has been left in the car. But I know somebody is calling. I know somebody wants me. I know the other side of town is blinking with red lights and someone in a truck, stuck, window down, smoking, has a phone on her ear and is waiting for me. I'm up there looking for the fiddler, trudging, lurching, gulping air, looking for the dance step, the shuffle and spin; but not yet, it's not there, forward I go leaning into the mountain, heading into a need, a filling mouth, a call to arms, a siren for the wealth left behind and the fires ahead, a stumble on the rocks. And she is not there, or maybe she's up on top, looking down at my galumphing figure moving side-to-side in the trees, splashing mud puddles, and maybe she thinks I'm wounded and need healing, but that's not something she does. She keeps moving and I follow, but I know that following will not get me there. And the phone keeps ringing.

A Live Quiver in Solitude

2009-03-01T17:11:00.000-08:00

I'm in buzzes and swirls, heartbeats in my calves, congas in my ears. Stepping off the bicycle under a Uzilevsky sky of candied lines leaning red, rose, jolly rancher watermelon, and finishing west with a cotton-dipped Close Encounters mars-tinged saffron. Bending layers of velvety, rolling clouds spread east to west and lowering over the puckered camel hump of Two Peaks. Toward the gorge from which I came, there is a an eye-shaped sky hole of marine blue looking at my house. La luna, a thickening crescent with the hint of a nose sits high among shredded night clouds, leaving Venus well below in the building cloud wash. And I stand outside, listening to nothing, no sound, the houses settled, no cars, no planes, no wind, the gears not turning, the underneath at rest, the sky drifting, my feet pulling up a vibration, but not from the ground, from themselves, the soles summoning me, standing still, arms loose, a human liveliness in my skin, sore muscles figure-eighting from the exertion of the ride. I am alive in the midst of the immense quiet, energy running out through my fingertips, my teeth in pin-prick ripples, through my eyes that drop with the light toward the sage sitting without fanfare in a calm sea all around me. The ride is over, that last juniper tree on the west rim, a perfect spade, in silhouette, sits behind my eyes and reminds me of a similar tree on a hill in Boulder that always brought me back to early childhood, some knowing of loneliness, a wanting of it, to be a point on a horizon, a live quiver in solitude, something to sit under and gaze out from, nothing more. At the rim, the air rapidly cooling, I hopped among the lichens covered lava rocks until I found a wide one on the precipice, sitting above the still snow pocketed slope, above an over sized pinon where eagles sometimes perch. I looked down on the river, flowing thick in milky jade, early snowmelt swelling it up onto the matted west bank. Its roar from 700 feet below vibrating my shins and stilling my ears. I could sleep standing on that rock, on the edge of a long drop, hoping for mist to reach me. On the way to this point, riding the rutted road up and down hills, looking into the draws for snow patches, and lost horses, hidden tree thickets and bobcats, I waited for words to come, ideas, something from the parts of the New York Times I'd read earlier, from the NPR story on Hasidic rabbis molesting young students, from the week at Mabel's sitting in silence, listening to people lives, but nothing came, nothing but a sense of things bigger than myself, things that encompass all of the streams, things that leave the world quiet, the gears seized, the lone tree on the rim to suck in the last light.

I'm Not Ready

2009-02-24T20:47:00.000-08:00

This season is throwing me. I'm not ready for this warmth. I'm not ready to lose my winter muse, she, with La Luna, playing in the frozen strawberry daiquiri sky and dancing across the creamy snow out my windows. Those two, they called me to my home floating like a houseboat near the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge. I'm not ready for the social explosion of spring when my butt does not want to stay in a chair. I'm not ready for the gears to roll the soil and pop the buds on the tips of the branches. No. I'm still romancing the hulking, sharp-branched cottonwoods, gnarled fingers jiggling an accusation, the boughs yawning against the wind with sideways snow glued into their creases. I'm not ready to push the clocks ahead. For now, I come home after a back country ramble and the light drops; blueberries and pixilated cranberries and, sometimes, electric salmon snakes waver over the dark covered nipples and humps, pursed lips and haughty buffalo flanks of the caldera. I'm not ready to give up the mourning for the people I know who have not slept all winter. The vigil, in my bedroom, on the satin blue zafu, looking southeast, the light already poured into the building navy of night. Looking at the foothills and the snow-streaked rounds above treeline leading to the pinnacle of a circus tent that is Truchas Peak. Sometimes the stars shine like a Bunsen burner blue gleaming razor blade and allow me to see shadows against the snow, silver clouds from the west lit from behind by the moon. And you can feel somewhere in the bowels and down through the legs the echoes of an exodus that happened a long time ago, and gets played out through shadows on snow over and over throughout the winter; the dying of something large, the leaving behind of the story, the bending of time. I'm not ready for that story to end. I'm not ready for the caress of solitude to be driven from me by my tensing muscles, the thrust coming up from my feet and feeding my thighs. But it's coming, the end of this and the beginning of that. It is too early. I see as I hike Devisidero in the mid afternoon, the warm wind blow-drying the mud and decimating the snow. The Taos lowlands are back to burlap, that patchwork I wrote about in November, those last days I followed my green velvet fiddler up the trail. I heard her again in late January when the roads first turned to mud after a wet pacific storm ate away the bottom of the snowpack. Back then, we were all in our houses playing fiddles, guitars, mandolins, banjos, listening to the snow drip through our roofs into pots and tin cups. It was then that the rabbit man told me she was dancing in the mud, playing, barefoot, heading for the canyon. I knew this and felt her pull me, she was wearing green silk this time, and I was pressed to my window feeling the cold against my nose and lips. I heard all their prayers kneeling in front of fires, playing for her, playing for their own ears so they could know how mired they were. And the fiddler, my fiddler, skirted the kissy lips mountain they call Two Peaks and went off with the purple tendrils of cloud lurking over the desert, looking for something to cling to, anything. I'm not ready to give up the mire, the depth, the slog. It is too early to be sprightly, to be bright. That time is coming, and I will be with it, I will dance to that song. But still I want to mourn and I want to lay down in deep snow, die properly, peacefully, the wind kicking through the trees teasing me. I came home this winter, to die with my eyes open. I came to be buried in that snow and I am not ready to be revealed.

The End of the Ceremony

2009-02-18T07:59:00.000-08:00

Rumors among the tribe, being seeded by Tayo's old friend, turned enemy, Emo, that Tayo is living in a cave in the hills (which he is, in harmony with his medicine woman, Ts'eh, and looking after the resilient cattle he and his uncle had purchased the year before and he had tracked down as part of his journey/ceremony), and thinks he is a Japanese soldier, has the army people, the tribe (even some of the elders), and the BIA government people, searching for him to put him back in the hospital (or kill him if they have to). Emo, along with some of his other old friends, Harley and Leroy, are getting close. Tayo is holed up at the mouth of a closed uranium mine.

"He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that it's simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now, still surrounded by high electric fences and the ponderosa pine and tawny sandrock of the Jemez mountain canyon where the shrine to the twin mountain lions had always been. There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah's voice and Rocky's voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery's final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.

He walked to the mine shaft slowly, and the feeling became overwhelming; the pattern of the ceremony was completed there. He knelt and found an ore rock. The gray stone was streaked with powdery yellow uranium, bright and alive as pollen; veins of sooty black formed lines wit the yellow making mountain ranges and rivers across the stone. But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and they had laid them in a monstrous design, realizing destruction on a scale only they could have dreamed.

He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together - the old stories, the war stories, their stories - to become a story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.

He turned. The moon was rising above the last mesa crossed from the east. A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.

Arrowboy got up after she left.
He followed her into the hills
up where the caves were.
The others were waiting.
They held the hoop
and danced around the fire
four times.

The witchman stepped through the hoop
he called out that he would be a wolf.
His head and upper body became hairy like a wolf
But his lower body was still human.
"Something is wrong," he said.
"Ck'o'yo magic won't work
if someone is watching us."

Richard Hugo on Work and Luck

2009-02-18T07:43:00.000-08:00

From "The Triggering Town" on writing by Richard Hugo (p. 17):

"Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, "That's pretty lucky." Nicklaus is supposed to have replied, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get." If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work."

Darn it! Genius or no, it takes work.

The Lie - An Excerpt from Ceremony

2009-02-16T18:26:00.000-08:00

An excerpt from "Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko. This is deep into the book about Tayo, a half Laguna half Mexican, as he is tracking a herd of lost cattle owned by his dear deceased uncle in the central mountains of New Mexico. It is soon after he has visited a half Navajo half Mexican medicine man in the sandstone hills above Gallup, NM to cure his post-war "sickness." During this healing "ceremony", Betonie, the old medicine man, explains to Tayo that the destroyers who practice witchery are out to destroy the people, the world as it has been known, maybe the world itself. But it does not have to happen. The new world requires an evolved healing ceremony, different from what the people have known. The stakes are higher, the weapons more destructive, the agents of witchery more deceptive. But if you step through the five hoops, representing the 5 worlds, you will see again and the worlds will come back to you, and you will be able to continue. In this case, the white man is the agent of witchery unleashed by one of the destroyer gods, and is living, in most cases, the Lie that perpetuates the destruction of the other peoples, animals, the earth mother herself. But, Betonie, makes sure that Tayo understands that you cannot judge the entire race for the deception of the Lie, as they are deceived too and under the influence of the witchery. It is in the waking up and being present with the Mother, whether it be Indian or white or any other race or creed or mixture thereof, that unmasks the witchery and prevents the destruction (of everything). Although at once harsh and beautiful, and certainly an indictment of the history of the white race on this continent, it is also hopeful, in the sense that there is the possibility of waking up.

"The lie. He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself. The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed in lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what they were doing to each other. He wiped the sweat off his face onto the sleeve of his jacket. He stood back and looked at the gaping cut in the wire. If the white people never looked beyond the lie to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it in motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured the white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it."

Music Memory

2009-02-16T18:20:00.000-08:00

"Things are different now, things are different now” – strains of Robert Mirabal run through my head, and I pick up the bongos. When I listen to Indian music my internal landscape changes and I see a coyote leaping a low fence and crossing a dusty road under a full moon in the sage and boulder wash spilling out from the blue-bearded mountains. And when I open my eyes that actual landscape is there, but it’s not the same as when I daze out my car window on a weary trip back from Santa Fe, parallel worlds apart, white and sweater clad, shoes too tight, coffee too strong, talk radio keeping me company until droning static tells me I’m all alone along the Rio Grande. Then I turn on the Mirabal CD, at first resistant of the change I know will occur. But then the flutes that rise along the canyon walls and float like smoke through the branches of the bosque trees and out into the faltering blue above the red escarpments, take me back to a place where I must have been because it hurts too much not to be true, and it is this land that is that place. And what I know when I write this is that I have been buried here, in the soft sand along the river, at the foot of a mountain next to a boulder, many times buried and birthed. Then the guitars kick in and Mirabal chants in a witch doctor’s wail, a medicine man’s entry into the wound, and I am with him. The pain, I realize, is in stretching myself across these parallel walls in an unconscious state incapable of sewing up the space, collapsing the worlds, remembering they are one. And then I remember, and it doesn’t take much; 20 seconds of a song, and I soar with the bald eagles through the album, chanting along, banging on my steering wheel, looking out to the west as I crest the horseshoe to see the cut in the earth on the caldera, my ass feeling a horse beneath me, my eyes setting with the sun through a lone, leaning tree on the edge of the mesa sea. And I understand how hard it is to reach back through the killing times, the unfathomable loss of recognition and understanding, to the times when the sun just circled the sky. But, I know as I’m listening and looking that I have to reach back to be here, and not just once, but every day. And then the CD ends and I see the sign for the golf course. I’m 7 miles from home. I forget again.

Burn

2009-02-16T17:56:00.000-08:00

Blackened earth on the side of the highway in northern New Mexico. I get out of the car and breathe deep - sage and pinion and the sun on wood chips. Blanca Peak rises like rock candy to the north dominating the San Luis Valley. It is here when I knew I was home. It is here where I dropped to my knees and put my nose to the dry, prickly ground and brought the dust of the high desert into my body. It is here, looking to the dry, broken west - all the way out to the San Juans 100 miles away - where I came into my body for the briefest moment; where I inhabited myself for the first time since birth. It was 1995 - June. The wind blew from the west and clouds massed over the endless crest of the Sangre de Cristos. It was here when I knew I was alive. Life smelled like burning ground and distant cottonwood trees in an ancient streambed. And it tasted like antelope and buffalo long gone into that ground. The sky to the west was unrelenting in its blue - the crystallized New Mexico blue. How does the sky know what state it's in? Go With God - "Vaya Con Dios", the sign read. It was here when I knew I was a writer. And I knew also that I wasn't a writer. It was here where my eyes burned from tears and I almost turned around and went back to sleep in Boulder. It was hard to stand in that forever valley. It contained everything. I had vertigo. There was nothing to hold on to - no hooks in the sky, no trees to climb - only sage: sturdy, sweet sage fanning to the horizon beyond the burned hump of mountain in Sunshine Valley.

A Bargain at any Price

2009-02-16T17:06:00.000-08:00

A barker at a carnival talking out of the side of his big mouth over a set of Ginsu knives that the knife thrower will throw into the hollows under the arms of the long-legged, red-headed, roped-to -the- wall siren.
"A bahgin at any price! Lad, step up to the table. See these knives? See the blood stain on the stainless steel of the dagger? Ahhhhh, yesssssss. You're right. This knife was used in the Perfect Tommy's Massacre on 84th and Amsterdam in good Ole NYC back in 1989. Hmmmm, REAL Amercican killing steel...that's right. 4 dead with the same 4 inch dagger. But it was the last victim, John Amici, 24 years old. Lived around the corner. It was Amici who was stabbed in the heart - right in the center of the aorta. Aortic blood, the deepest, darkest of its kind. Stains stainless steel....see it right here? For you....$100....that's it. Right now. Tomorrow, I'll sell that thing in Chicago for a grand. That's right kid, one of its kind"

The kid walks away; not really a kid is he, about 24 himself. Deep hollows of yellowed purple under his eyes. A Kool in his hand dangling. A Kool? Who the fuck smokes Kools anymore? He's bored. He's walking, dragging his PF Flyers in the clotted dirt, clotted from cola and candy and maybe some of that aortic blood. He looks up at the top of the ferris wheel. It rocks back and forth stuck for the moment. 2 people at the apex banging on their
cage. He's thinking that they should just relax and look out over the water. The water looks endless from up there, stretching out into the night, calm, dependable, calling, but not too loud like his girlfriend. Well, was his girlfriend until last night. He heads over to the gambling tent where he won $50 playing blackjack with the firemen and Knights of Columbus. He spits and rubs the wad into the dirt with the rest of the effluvia. His head is down. He's sick of the jouncy carnival music cast out over the speakers hung on the tops of telephone poles. He smells the water...low tide.

Taking it to the Hole

2009-02-11T19:58:00.001-08:00

Tonight, being watched by a bloated, blousy-faced moon, I went to the gym to play basketball for the first time since September. I was ready. I ate well, had protein working in me, felt awake, was hydrated and the ankle was giving off fizzes of excitement to run, cut, backpedal, leap, sidestep, and just explode. Digging in the back of the CRV, I found my ankle brace and put it on over low athletic socks and pulled it tight. The hoop sneakers that felt too tight a few weeks ago, felt perfect, snug yet giving. Instead of athletic shorts, I put on my loose green "working" shorts, the ones with the creosote stains all over them from when I was hammering rebar into railroad ties last summer for the Taos Rock Garden Amphitheater. So ready. I stretched and then rotated the ankle, which was giving me more go-get'em feedback. Sweatshirt over gray tanktop, mushroom cap, navy blue sweats and I was ready to roll. Backing out of the driveway I slid out of the good ruts and ended up crunching into a rock hard snowbank, but Montez took it in stride and powered on. Onward, straining into a window of dried mud spray, Montez bounced and slid in and out of the tracks on Tune Dr., rocking me back and forth. It felt good, and like a driving game. In fact, the past couple of weeks have been a driving game out here. It's starting to crack me up, belly laughs, and hoots, like I'm bustin a bronc. Out to Hwy. 64, the stumbling moon with the double chin making it's way across the valley toward the river, tossed stainless blue light at the Taos Range pulsating in fresh white sheets laid down and stretched tight by yesterday's 10" dump. Moving at 65, sometimes near 70 (Montez is not a speed car), I hit the blinking light and made the ralph toward town. At First Community Bank the digital thermometer read 21, and the time 7:43. I was focused, not thinking of much else but basketball and stretching my muscles, even in the car as I drove. And they all felt good. It's not like I've been sitting idle for 5 months. Nope, I've been hauling up, down and around Divisadero 4 or 5 days a week, and usually on down the canyon to the river on the other days. So, my lungs are good, and muscles are fairly supple. I've been stretching my trunk every morning, hitting the heavy bag, doing a ton of pushups and situps. It's just been that the ankle has felt tinny, hollow, crunchy, and tight...until the past two weeks. So, here it is, the Guadalupe Gym, next to the Lady of Guadalupe Church. There's a bunch of cars pulling in, moving out. Seems like a good sign. Almost too many cars. Maybe the game is packed and it'll be hard to get in a game? Out of Montez, I go in and see that the Los Tigres boxers, the youth boxing club of Taos, are finishing up. They all depart en masse, and I'm left alone in the gym stretching. A guy comes out of the equipment room, 40s with long, dark hair in a ponytail and a thick fu manchu, wearing a Los Tigres windbreaker. He strides across the basketball court floor and looks at me. "Where are your cohorts, bro?"
"I don't know. It's my first night of the year. They're still playing on Wednesdays, right?"
"Most of the time, bro. But, eee, it doesn't look so good tonight."
"Guess I'll wait a bit."
"Enjoy, bro."
Nobody is showing up. I start running around the court, stopping short, changing directions, changing speeds, sprinting full out and tapping the backboard on each side. I backpedal (one of my strong suits...I can run backwards faster than most people and almost as fast as people going forwards). There isn't a ball to be found so I start making believe I'm dribbling. I move to the top of the key, throw a head fake, crossover my dribble and drive to the hole. I finish the layup by tapping the backboard. The ankle is feeling secure in the brace and giving me no trouble. I KNOW I'm ready to play. My air feels good, I have some quickness and my body is just jones'n for action. Still nobody shows. Just me, alone on the basketball court my sneakers squeaking and my footfalls echoing off the walls. I do a couple of suicide drills, 3x to foul line, half court, the other foul line, and the other end line, and then the same on the return trip. Good breathing. No sweat because it's probably 55 in there (it's always cold in that gym). I feign taking some shots from 3 point land. It all feels right. As I sit here and type, it's 9:32 and usually, I am wiped out. I didn't sleep well last night, but here I am with xray eyes, and my legs buzzing and twitching. They want to run, like a thoroughbred needs to be let loose to go through her paces. This boy needs to run! And jump! And hit a few shots, teardrops and jumpers, and running one-handers, even a hook.

But it wasn't to be tonight. Turns out the hoop posse was at the Taos Adult League championship game at a little school just around the corner. I hopped in there for a few minutes, but if I wasn't going to be playing, I had little interest in watching or talking to the people in the stands. So I snuck out and headed Montez back home.

All that not playing has made me ravenously hungry.

Spell Interrupted

2009-02-08T18:57:00.000-08:00

"He breathed the air outside the doors and it smelled like trains, diesel oil, and creosote ties under the steel track. He leaned against the depot wall then; he was sweating, and sounds were becoming outlines again, vague and hollow in his ears, and he knew he was going to become invisible right there. It was too late to ask for help, and he waited to die the way smoke dies, drifting in currents of air, twisting in thin swirls, fading until it exists no more."

- The narrator in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, Ceremony, about her half-breed protagonist, Tayo, who was just returning from the South Pacific theater after WWII.

"It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had."

"Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves."

Snow blew in from the west today, slanted, copious, chaotic. I was reading Leslie Marmon Silko in the window of a Taos cafe and walking landscapes of baked red clay and dust storms. The sun in the story made me squint and the nausea of Tayo, a survivor of the Bataan Death March, became my nausea. I couldn't finish my chicken pot pie. It was dark in the cafe, 3pm feeling like dusk. Although crowded with people, there was a sense of isolation, of hollow halls, of purposeless beings. The music was too loud, stomping on my ride on a reluctant, felt gray, skinbones burro down and up arroyo after arroyo on the way to a bar on Route 66 to meet other vets from the pueblos. But it was elegiac, melancholy, the vocals in echoing circles, like starving buzzards left with only the company of other buzzards. Emptiness with cold, metal walls. Automatons moving errantly, programmed for crisscrossing and leg shaking. Lost on the planet and in the time of this book. Smelling it's beauty, burning flesh, sentences so true you have to dig trenches with them. I did not want to lift up my head. I did not want to see the motion in the room, or break the 4th wall and talk to the characters rooting around me. Tayo choked on grief, stuffed from the forced meal of it, and my eyes bulged and watered. I tilted my head left, two ladies in red playing scrabble on the big corner table, and I wondered if they saw the glistening in my eyes. Not a page went by when Silko did not spin out a line of gristle, and smooth muscle sheath. "Yes, yes," I'm thinking. But it's not a yes of goodness or pleasantness or satisfaction from reading, but of yes, I know this and there is no answer for it. Yes, I know this, and it makes me want to disappear like Tayo's smoke. And then Dave the CPA walks right through the wall and thrusts out his hand. "What, you don't say hello to your old friends?"
"You shaved off your goatee. I'm lost in this book, man. Haven't looked up in a while. Can't break from it."
"Alright, Mr. literature, I won't interrupt. But I want to talk to you about a lady on Santa Clara Pueblo who needs to sue an oil company for sucking out the oil under her property from outside the boundary line by hooking the drill horizontally right under her. She already won $1.8 million settlement from the other oil company that was doing that."
"I do only small business law and bankruptcy."
"Right. Come talk to me."
"OK, in a bit."

Now I had to look around, stretch, make all of those moves you make when you think people are looking at you, when you're back in the world of contact and movement, of social acknowledgment. I looked out the window and saw my formerly muddy car turned into a box of furry whiteness. Fat flakes being driven south to north by a slamming wind. It took my eyes, and I realized everybody else was looking out the window. Snapped out of the story trance, my skeletal connection to the race grew some meat, and I joined in the weather-made delight. Taos is a place where people love the weather, the drama of it, the sweeping in of the cold front that augurs a return to active winter, to swirling fists of storms lined up from the Gulf of Alaska down to Southern California promising heavy snows to our Sangre de Cristos to augment the stagnant snowpack. Although we've had a flurry or two, the past month has been mild and sunny, only the early morning cold and retreating shield of snow to remind one of the ferocity and heavy chill of late November through early January. I had been thinking before falling into Silko that Taos, in the lower elevations and on out on the desert, was starting to look like the victim of a wreck who shows you her healing wounds too soon after the accident. Spoiled and mishapen shrubs, torn up mud, cloudy amber pools of melt, matted, stained hay grasses, and children's toys, broken and upended, emerging in front yards for the first time since November 28. Scarred with irrigation ditches, the fields flanking town looked like they'd gone under an unsteady knife. The snow had pulled back to the edges, in the trees, in the yards of houses along the outlines. It looked like a battle had taken place where the horses leaned down to search for magic shoots or old, dried grass with a speck of green left in it. That old end-of-autumn sadness hung out there, where the land is still soft but will soon be paralyzed and hardened and left on its own. The creamy, cold depths of winter, the early nights, the acceptance of dormancy, the dream of stillness in the covering of the landscape, the rounding of its features, all of this rolled back too soon and creating a no man's land, a desire to give up on the season and ask for the glories of the next, yet knowing that river cannot be forded, not today.

Silko and Tayo are with me, now in my house with huge windows slapped full of snow now frozen in a design that looks like dancing tulips and daisies. Once the spell was broken in the Cafe, I could not get it back. I gave up and went outside to revel. With the sticky, apple-smelling snow attaching to my eyelashes and goatee, I cleared my windows, and smelled again the winter I'd been missing these weeks. I got in and drove into the storm, windshield wipers on high. People in the other cars, when I could see them, had broad smiles and red-cheeked glows going. Out of the automaton world, and the knowing of emptiness, I propelled myself into the giant cookie of Taos being filled rapidly with sugar cream. I drove north into a funnel of snow and became the only car on the road as I curved southwest on the Mesa. Sliding down and up through the undulations of Tune Dr., near my house, I lost the car to the left, corrected in the direction of the slide, but still ended up in a full 360 that landed me in the mouth of a side road. No ditches or fences this time. Feeling my angels, I let out a whoop, backed a few feet into the road, and got back on Tune Dr. for another 100 yards and home.

From Divisadero yesterday evening. Shangri-la.

I Know Nothing

2009-02-05T17:35:00.000-08:00

Walking west on the caliche road, it was soft and somber, the half man half woman that is winter dropped her smooth belly on the valley as she has for most of the past month. Strange and out-of-body, I ran, then walked, trotted backward, weaved back and forth. La luna was up there high, bathed in blues. There was an entire family of blue to the east and north, sad but steady, calm and quiet. Alarms rang in my right ear, the only sound on the vast desert. It is a moment that leaves you alone, able to walk into the curtain of air, not a stir, as if on the glass surface of a leaden lake, no oars to rip the skin, no body to plow the depths. And I have no expectations. Things are good in some ways, trying in others. I'm never sure when I'm walking this road, and surety tends to the ridiculous underneath the baby sky of crisscrossing pastels to the west. The river is just over that hill and down that far wall of cliff, but tonight there is no destination or goal. I'm torn and deadened, hopeful and weary. Confused. Swimming in the cold water rises to me as something that would unmask me, unwind me, unravel the knot that disappears when I am in motion, and returns when the door to the civilized world reopens and I step back in. Calls to make, letters to write, psyches to juggle, spirits to caress, magic serum to deliver, work for money, work for hire, work for legitimacy, and spinning up and up we go; I gotta sufi myself the fuck out of here. You know what I mean? And breathing, a bubble inside of the chrome tube of time, sliding, looking for the end of the line where I'll be dumped out into the lake like a pearly waste product. Waste products floating on an unexpected lake, below mountains, near sharp nipples of desert bumps, afraid to touch anything or be popped back out into the hum. Human elements, darting around inside their amber lit houses, trying to reform, recollecting in a bathtub, listening to the sizzle and seethe of other elements in heat, wanting to reach out and find the floating device and slither under the door and out over things, stretched out, vast, unhinged, buttons popped, clothes slid off, swathed in today's newsprint as a time capsule bomb to be dropped when you land. I must admit that I know nothing. I am listening and I am empty, can't tell right from left, right from wrong, right from form. When I hit the point of the road where I knew I must turn back, I ran again, ran hard, harder and faster than I have since September 7th when I mangled my ankle sliding into first base, hung over, breathing heavy, stamping the loose dirt. 5 months. It is starting to feel supple. There is regret lodged on the inside, and that still feels hollow, the bone speaks to me in broken tones like a pen on spinning spokes. And it may always speak to me. But, still, it is almost ready, as am I, to explode, to launch as if I was wrapped in a thousand rubber bands and somebody slashed them from head-to-toe with long knife and I was slingshot. Dogs call from the distance, and the smell of crumbled and sloughing earth mixed with pooled water climbs my body to my nose and I want to crawl in there among the sage. Hmmmm, bury the head in the clay mud and let it be a sheath over all of me. Moon, should I? I don't. Instead, I continue down the road and the western sky doesn't give a shit that I know nothing, not one shit. It goes gaga and leaves me swallowing hard with feathers and swirls, waves and curls of first cranberry, then hot raspberry, then that occasional-if-you've-been-very-nice-I'll-thrill-you electric salmon (thanks Ivy). Clueless, I dig in my back pocket for my cell camera, and stagger into the mud ditch and up into the crunching snowdebris, looking for the everything shot. I take here, take there, pushing the button, capturing what you can't capture, breathing a little heavy, excited, threatened. It's all unexpected, but what the fuck did I expect. I'm not really happy, but neither am I sad, or disappointed or anything. The sky does not give up. 45 minutes has elapsed since I left my house. I wonder if I'm still in the bubble. I don't think so. My mind flashes to posters on the window of the World Cup. An Apache medicine man is doing a sweat lodge ceremony and giving spiritual guidance somewhere, soon. Bands with friends of mine in them are playing everywhere at the same time all weekend. A full lunar eclipse approaches and there will be a gong ceremony. Roses are being sold for Valentine's Day by an acting troupe of developmentally disabled magicians. A woman promises to help blocked artists flow once more. I want to do, and buy, and be everything. And I am nothing. I want to see movies, but first I want to learn to speak telepathically. Blogging is not nearly enough; neither is email or IMing or facebooking, or talking on the phone. None of these things can be done in the bubble. I want to get up way before dawn tomorrow and know something. The clouds of red make the sage stalks black, shaking silhouettes, and that is something. A bomb waits inside to lay waste to what has been me, and the aftermath is a man exhaling.

Blame it on (the) Rio

2009-02-03T19:05:00.000-08:00

Here she is, my friend, my guide, my cold-hearted yet hot skinned Rio Grande.

19th Nervous Breakdown

2009-02-02T18:08:00.001-08:00

A late afternoon coffee, an iced one, leaves me completely lost and befuddled this evening. I mean fucking daft, disconnected, rolled over, strung out, jittery, unfocused, lazy, apathetic, and swimming for safety. I had some inspiring conversation today with my buddy and biz partner, Dan, a musician, about the moments out here when you notice, even if it's for 30 seconds, that everything stops, caves in and stretches out, rises and collapses, is pulled tight like a drum, but remains silent, no birds, no dogs, nothing stirring but the sky and the dark peaks take on dynamism, and move hunchbacked as if on water, stealthy, maybe rumbling from some underneath, the skin of it all broken apart, dots in your eyes, and you forget yourself, your awareness covers you like a shroud so that there is nothing left to perceive, nothing...at...all. And you are left standing there, alone and nothing, and forgetting and leaving, drifting, unburdened, weightless, green, unaware, needing water to sprout. And then your heartbeat, slow and relentless drums you awake, in the ears, in the eyes, yes, the backs of the eyes, it tickles, but you have vision you did not know you had, able to scale the black anthills and reflect the dirty copper sun, and gain in strength, the kind that makes you flare your nostrils in an understanding of invincibility, immortality, endless capacity, and you know you are in the superhero realm and can picture breaking bricks with your forehead, 10 wooden planks with your chopping hand, you can throw a ball of water in a whirlpool of sonar and awaken the fish to your cause, and then you see a woman in tight black leather, head to freakn toe, red lips softly pursed, and that's the moment you know, you know, know, know, you'll have to wake up, for real, or start laughing out loud because c'mon, this can't be real, can it?

So, I'm super frazzled, and I come across this picture of Mick Jagger, long-haired and contemplative, blown out. It's in the New York Times online in a box where there is a link to a story about a man who bought a Scottish castle after the sellers rejected Mick. Rejected Mick! And, man, he looks rejected in this picture, but it cannot be recent. He is soft-skinned and lightly lined, not craggy with deep creases that can hold whole tears. His eyes, though, are heavy, weighted, bagged, dull coal inside. He's wayward, staring out into the middle distance, woken up in the winter afternoon with one hour left of sunlight. He is old before his time (which is when?), frustrated, whipped by the journey, beleaguered, forlorn, he's lost some measure of love, he may have a song to write, but first he'll have to drop his head, and he's not quite done it. Almost, almost. Too much, he thinks. Keep it simple. Break me down. I'm black before dark. She is gone and I don't remember her. I've been doing this for too long. When will the wheels stop turning? When will I know?

New Friends

2009-01-31T17:04:00.000-08:00

Barking dog, red hued horizon, the moon up over venus, boots muddied past the ankles, nose running, fingers stinging from standing in the frozen mud on the rim of the gorge talking to new friends, Sioux Matt and Greek Jessica, as the sun dropped below the canyon walls. They fed me artichoke dip on fancy melba toast, and we caught on fast. A jug of merlot was passed, but I told them of my cleanse and Jessica said she was a nurse, and somehow the conversation turned to colonics. In just a few minutes we covered our work (Matt is an artist with a gallery in pretty little Dixon 20 miles south), my burgeoning brewery (that sparked a flurry of conversation), Jessica's two marriages, the improbable length of the intestines, Matt's Sioux/Irish mix ("I'm the token Indian." "Really, in a place with thousands of Indians, you're the token?" "Well, for now, in this crowd." "Gotcha."), Jessica's nursing, foot cleanses, beer brewing, evil lawyers, music, Colorado, mutual friends (my friend, Anderson Khee, a Navajo artist, knows Matt well), the super bowl (consensus: Arizona), our instant likability, our astrology (me Aries, Matt Sag, Jessica Leo - a ring of fire!), our ages (we all look younger than our chrono numbers), the hope of Obama, the hard life of artists, costume psychedelic music shows, and how it would be nice to hang again sometime. How cool is that? Standing against immensity and shimmering color, the sound of a rushing, jade river 700 feet below us, the moon overhead, the hills showing their outlines, the noses, lips, foreheads and bellies, shadow raptors slow-winged and swooping over the mouth of the canyon, hovering, and the sweep of the Sangre de Cristos, with the rose petal blood of Christ lighting the snowfields under the vibrating pixie grape of the sky. New people, a circle formed without lines, a heart dropping into a cradle, faces becoming more beautiful each second we melt from the outside, as if we are being lit by the candle of the world, it's light emanating from below the horizon surrounding us. Top of the world, where the grinding of the gears tickles your feet. Sharing food, and smiles, and leading me to understand again this eden. Moments before I'd been standing on a lichens covered boulder on the north facing canyon trail, a last look at the widening river, it's blond grasses matted on the south facing side where the snow had melted off. I asked for guidance, radiated gratitude, felt for a rounded abundance, and a flow of health through my atoms. Asked for the ability to stand my ground in firm kindness and yielding peace, and to ask for what I need. And then I trudged through the ice, and then the plocking mud, mucking to my car sitting on top of the bluff, next to Matt and Jessica. Breathe deep the gathering peace, see light rise in every crease, do not fear the moody blues, for new friends can come in twos.

Couldn't resist that last part.

Afternoon Radio

2009-01-30T12:18:00.000-08:00

a longing on the radio
the still young voice
of an aging singer
who broke us in the 70s

a piano and strings
I can't catch the words
but the sun by the couch
asks me to sit and stop

a dog from down the road
smiles at the open door
waiting for my touch
looking, wagging

he comes in on a nod
delight and wonder
and I can't resist
being a dog, too

so I grunt and wrestle
flip him over
playing on the floor
upending the coffee table

and the radio plays Seal
then the new Springsteen
as the dog sniffs around
my kitchen garbage

the songs are all sweet
and lonesome, but still
filled with old love
that never disappears

Sleepwalking in Snow

2009-01-29T19:20:00.000-08:00

Venus blows a french horn to the rust-edged moon hanging upside down,
and the moon returns a wavering, old fiddle stroke, holding out a hand.
They are close tonight, in earshot, low to the west, riding the river,
and I find myself leaving the warm space of lights, no hat or gloves, out the door and over the wall onto the petrified snow that holds my weight even as I hop. It is like a frozen beach, textured sands blown through the centuries, down from the mountains and up the wide sage valley to the buttes and crags of Colorado. A sea of satin white waves shows as ink spilled by the stars, and the shadows of blood willows purple the pueblo slopes leading to the hidden gardens and lakes where the piping leads my heart. But I can't really hear it tonight. I look back to the moon and venus behind me, still together, lowering early, early, soon to be lost to the other side of the planet. The mountains call tonight, the dark ones that will take me in, and I keep walking, no jacket, no hat, no gloves, but walking past the place where the dogs go, no coyotes, a tiny wind on my numbing ears, and I know it is cold, but it doesn't mean anything. Past the strewn houses, into a place in between things, a non-place, there is a circle of open snow where the sage doesn't grow. I don't know where this is, and I've forgotten my house. The moon is dipping a tip below the curve, it is a Japanese red and venus is blinking back tears, she is sinking, bathed in crimson, so unlikely. And I lie down with my head to the west looking straight up to the Big Dipper and other spills and swirls of light, feeling the mountain between my legs. My head pushes into the hardened old snow and I arch back to catch one more look at that cherry ristra moon, but she's already gone. So soon. Venus, now small and wobbly, a pinprick of blue light without her playmate, crosses my eyes. I get up and dust off the ice grains and trudge a snaky line among the sage, colder than I remember, but closer to the fiddler in green.

Protecting the Kill

2009-01-27T19:13:00.000-08:00

This will be short. I'm feisty, not in that moon spell, waters rippling from a raindrop outward to evermore. Nahhhh, I'm home, no TV, nobody around which for 5 minutes I think is good, then the next 5 I feel like a hermit freak wasting my time. I did get out of my asylum for a jaunt, late afternoon, and busted up Divisadero. It turned slap-face cold today and my fingers stung inside my crap gloves. No mud, all frozen dirt lips and glass shard snow. It's 8:19 and I'm wide eyed, too much energy to tame. I have gourmet fries in the oven, 425, the olive oil and basil baking in, hitting their point of crisp perfection. I'm hungry, so much so that I ripped into a ham shank with my bare hands (after the knife and fork failed me) and started gnawing on it like a desert wolf, the lobo. And I caught myself baring my teeth when I looked at it on the plate, trying to figure out the thickest part. Here I am in front of my computer, 7 o'clock at night, craving meat after a day of eating apples, snap peas and jalapeno jack, and I have a lamb shank, already half eaten, but cleanly so, shaved with a knife for use in a morning scramble, and I'm moving my head up and down, side to side, eying that shredded shank like I'd killed it myself. And I notice my elbows are out to the sides and my back is hunched, the muscles alert. Fuck, I was protecting my kill. Who knows what other animal, some Facebook foe or IMing hyena, would pop out of the big screen and snatch my flesh? No fucking way. So I found myself with the shank in my mouth, scraping with my front teeth and incisors, chomping, but having a hard time finding the thick payoff. It felt lousy, sloppy, crummy and my right cheek was smeared with a white streak of chilled fat. I put it down, disgusted, although the aftertaste was sweet and I thought of cubed ham, or a much larger ham I could slice into with an electric knife like lamb on a skewer for souvlaki. And then I looked around my big, minimalist-style house, and remembered I was alone, and I laughed a little, and thought as I walked the long plank to the kitchen that I'd never have man-handled a ham shank like that if I'd been with a woman, and that maybe that was the problem...you know, not being yourself. If you're a ham shank devourer, a face in the gristle motherfucker, then be it, man! And I had it resolved right there in the kitchen that I'd be that guy in my next relationship. Yes, that would make it work and lead to fat streaked sex all over the house, and especially the kitchen. But, then I realized that that was the first ham shank I'd ever eaten, indeed maybe ever seen. I'd bought it on a lark, when I was hungry, looking for something to kill and there it was at Cid's, in the refrigerated meat section with the specialty products. And I lifted it and it had heft. I looked at the price - $7.59. Hmmm, steep but it had bulk and it felt meaty. But there you go, it was my first, and I was mistaken, it was mostly bone, maybe better for hambone soup. I really have no idea. So, now I'm sated, and feeling sheepish about my ham shank, and that revelation in the kitchen is long gone, and I hardly ever eat pink meat, maybe a Denver omelet here and there. It was a one-time thing, and it's not that I'm so neat and clean and civilized with my eating, indeed I've felt the filling mouth crumbs on goatee sloppiness a lot these past years, but ham ain't my bag, really. That said, I am a wolf and I do need more kills, so I think I'll head to Cid's tomorrow, probably after my hike, and stalk the meat section, but this time with an eye toward something sliced or pounded and wrapped up tight.

Pregnant Woman

2009-01-26T17:01:00.000-08:00

Lonely pyramids greet me
as I walk the clay road
a striding gait
into a winter wind
gray upon gray moving
over the pregnant woman
on the other side
of the black cut
where the river runs
at the bottom
feeding the trees
that knead her belly
remembering hawks
who saw the men
in skin paints
on warmer days
etch circles
in the granite
and look up
knowing
keeping
telling
spinning
fading
out

Top of Divisadero

2009-01-25T18:12:00.001-08:00

I'm Lichen It!

2009-01-25T18:10:00.001-08:00

Gone Muddy

2009-01-24T16:33:00.000-08:00

We've entered a land of low country and water, oceanliners sitting in the mist the ropes cut, about to drift off the pier as people with hats on, wiping tears wave before turning their backs to travel out to the country. Dirt roads gone overnight from searching white tongues rising up blue slopes, to bubbly mires of coffee mud leading to spring. Jordy said the Rabbit Man told him spring'd be here early, but that the low drift of amphibian clouds would leave us splashing in the muck for months, and even the snow flakes that'll still come will get swallowed up in the brown. It makes no sense, Jordy said, not to have a train running through this sloppy desert, as the sage gives off its wet, cool tang, and the pines over town throw a stingy raisin bucket into the mix. No sense at all as the guitars in darkening dens start to slide, lamenting the melting earth, threatening to remind everybody of their lost babies wrapped in black scarves on city blocks, smiling in a different light while these players kneel before fires, tin cans catching leaden snow droplets through the roofs. Whispered lullabies to the rusty glow giving the western horizon hope, a break above the crown of clouds clinging to the volcanoes, a place for sound to reach the galactic friends who left years ago. They play on giving you a gunny sack on the shoulder, head lowered into the black canyon where the green river is rising. She walks down there, and smells the new earth, while you keep expecting that long whistle whine you heard sometime in the past, in the high grass of some summer, when it was already over, when she'd already left. But the train isn't there, hasn't been since 1902, and clouds walk the hills and spill over the desert, silver-edged and burning, asking for more than guitars. Jordy says, Didn't you know a fiddler once? And I think of her, Kelly Joe Phelps accompanying me, green velvet hips splatted with mud drops, her fiddle up high, eyelashes licking cheekbones, too close to touch, bow pointing to a dogs lemon smile, her tongue studded with Venus, her voice hushed and talking to all of us in our dusky rooms, calling us forth to dance, without boots, in the mud. But I want to meet her alone, and I tell Jordy so. And he says, You ought to be able to, she was your girl. But I don't know this, and I never did.

Sound and No Sound

2009-01-22T06:26:00.000-08:00

What a sunrise I witnessed! Long, subtle, at turns dramatic and quiet. It took me by surprise as I was making my bed to the sing song litany of the news on NPR through KRZA in Alamosa, CO. Today, it seems, the nation with Obama at the helm, is walking in rhythm. And it may be announced later that the plans are set to close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year. The stock market hadn't opened yet, but the futures were bright. For me, a third straight night of good sleep has left me feeling almost right, good energy but still one or two physical oddities that I'm going to have to check out.

But I digress. A glance over my right shoulder revealed wavy layers of blueberry and strawberry jam clouds over the bluebeard foothills to my east. Ms. Moon plucked a sad note at her apex, above the colorful fray, pale, shivering in the old navy of night, frail to the bone, not enough left to hang on to. She stayed up there, visible, even as the powdery aqua mists drifted up the Rio Grande Valley and tried to hide her. And all of this, the moon's acquiescent curtsy and the rumble of curlicue clouds below starting to form a circle of light above the sage still prisoner to the crusted snow, each plant a being stuck in an endless advance to the north buried up to the chest and stymied, moving only along the tips in circular salutes, all of this happening without sound. I went outside and jumped up on the adobe wall, scanning like a periscope risen out of the deep, and what I noticed more than the building light and the Close Encounters kineticism of the sky, was the embracing calm, the courtesy of the cold to remain unstirred, the quiet from a billion years ago settled into this vast valley, not even the emanating hum from the core of things that you sometimes hear out on this desert. All action blended into nothing. And again, similar to that sense, that memory in the deep, dry ice blue snow of the foothills that me, my molecules, atoms, the parts that reflect as me, can be let go, can be dropped into the snow, collapsed, quieted with the quiet, melded, meshed, infused, suffused, disappeared into a sleep that lasts billions of years. That is solace. That is love.

I compare it to yesterday, when I hiked Divisadero in the morning, still icy, the cold sounding in my mouth and ears like a high pitched piano note. But the sun was climbing quickly and the frozen mud and snow crunched under my boots like eggs and bacon frying on an iron skillet. Each bend brought the sun onto my face and I stretched out my neck, pushing my head, eyes closed as close to the source as I could, just like the trees surrounding me. I had no water, but I knew that the sun, with the snow around me, could divine what I needed. And when I got to my sacred spot and relieved myself in the triangular hole that is still there, no longer 3 feet deep, more like a foot, I stopped and looked at Taos Mountain. In my prayers for guidance, gratitude, health and abundance, I could not help but hear my body vibrating with the ramble and machine buzz coming from town. It filled up my bowels, insinuating itself in such a way that it can't be ejected. I stood and listened, let it fill me, squinted my eyes when I was startled by the gurgly groan of an 18-wheeler moving down Highway 68. It hit me in the solar plexus, in the ass, in the places where an amped up bass hits you. But this thing sounded like a pig in a poke, sniffling, grunting, snarfling through the muck. And then the supersonic sound of a jet, splitting the air, a doppler-atic push of baritone, in and out, coming and going, the sound circling around my head. This sound used to bring smiles to my face growing up because it reminded me of being at baseball games at Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, where the planes from LaGuardia Airport flew over every few minutes. But not now. Now it made me feel like a lost, useless part of the big machine, rooting through the valves and chambers to find my purpose. Too many things moving and making unnatural sounds. It made me feel as if man did not trust the movement that already existed, the sounds of the world, and he had to create his own, movement, and sound. And that, in itself is ok, that can be art, that can be part of the planet jiggle, but there came a point of recklessness where convenience and luxury (whatever that means) replaced the art that requires the spell that requires the sound, and no sound, of the core of the earth, and the walking of the mountains, and the doip and thunder of water. And even writing this I feel like a useless, discarded part of a machine and I don't trust that machine and within it I do not trust myself. That's what I heard, saw and felt yesterday on the mountain.

PISD - Post Insomnia Stress Disorder

2009-01-19T06:35:00.000-08:00

I am impressed by insomniacs. After another night of doing a groaning, flatulent, fire-breathing battle with the agents of change inside of me, I am stumbling and bumbling around my house, with purple eye pouches, wearing too tight hoop sneakers (has my foot grown? are my toes swollen? how did I ever play ball in these?), dreading the climb of the sun up into my windows. A fucking horrible night, and yet, and yet, I'm actually mad on the rise, more energy than I've had since last Tuesday (still stumbly, bumbly and pebble-eyed, but grooving with it). It feels like I've been lying down too much, been too prone. My body doesn't like it. Things get trapped, gasses, liquids, thoughts. I could not find comfort last night. The heat was in me, and, worse, the ball of tension in the solar plexus, magma hot at the center and strangely cold on the edges, like Mars. My heart beat too fast, too long. It's supposed to go quiet at night, but this was heart work for running away, chasing, heroic effort, the fear of the Fall, the frustration of the failure of my body system. And I was mind writing through all of this, the turning over, the coughing, the hot sandpaper feeling of breathing the desert air which has become so dry over the past couple of weeks that my mouth and the top of my throat feel like they are being singed during the nights. Talking to myself, talking: "Chill. Relax. Breathe slowly. It's ok. It's ok. Fall back into yourself. Fall in. Cmon. Cmon. CMON! FUCK! Geeze. This fucking blows. What the fuck. What the fucking fuck!" Miserable. There were only two stints, maybe 30 minutes, maybe an hour, when I fell away and dreamt. An old town, water towers, factories on a river. A group of people, friends, one guy in particular, tall with a white undershirt loose over jeans. He is wary of me, looking at me like once we were buddies but now he doesn't trust me. It's uncomfortable. I walk up a paved hill on a narrow street between buildings. It looks like Italy. Later, I'm in my Oyster Bay, with friends in a cab going to a bar. People mill in the street. We're happy to be there, just milling around, a lot of shadows from the street lights, a green sky. But I come back to my body and I'm still breathing fire and that goddamn ball of friction is still there. No change. I can't fall back in. It's 4:30 and I think of writing. I have it in me, but I just add that threat to the battle going on and turn on the radio instead to the BBC Report. They're talking about the King of Thailand punishing people, foreigners, sometimes being lenient, like with a Swiss man who was caught tagging his portrait, and somehow pleaded for mercy. Maybe because he's swiss and neutral? He was sentenced to 10 years, but the king reduced it to 6 months. Some other guy, a Turk, got 10 years for something I can't remember (spitting on someone?)and he's still in prison (maybe a makeup call for the infamous Turkish prisons immortalized in Midnight Express?). Fucking Vanity. And up next: the Taliban blowing up schools in Afghan towns where girls are attending and terrorizing the girls. Fucking reverse evolution! How is this species going to survive? Oh, and then they go into the worldwide economic meltdown, bank bailouts, etc., etc., followed by the fact that the US Army has had an amazing 15 months of recruiting due to the lack of jobs available. They've surpassed all quotas. Great, great, soldiers that's who we need more of so that we can go to places with weapons and kill people to make sure everything's alright because that's how the world works, and we live in a dangerous world, and there's a terrorist next door, and Osama bin Laden is still out there, and we have to spread democracy all over the world because it will allow people to get rich like us by being part of the vast network of smoothly operating capital markets? And why else? Liberty? Oh, and because of the war on drugs. So I had to shut off the radio and the waning moon was up there smearing the stars, and even that pissed me off because the Big Dipper is always right there in the first big window, my own personal dipper. But the moon's light fucked it up. And I'm rolling around talking to myself about the absurdity. Repeating things over and over, being absurd myself, wondering what it will take for fundamental change to occur. Breathing fire and repeating things in my bed at 5:06am, but underneath all of that thinking that with Obama coming in

- oh, and I forgot to mention earlier, another part of the BBC Report was how much money people are making selling products with the image of Obama...it is quite a phenomenon, get yours NOW! before they sell out! -

there is an opportunity for RADICAL change. I'm talking really getting/going green, no more torture, leading the world in kindnesses, waking up to putting our energy into community as opposed to consumption...you know, all the stuff, healing ourselves, the earth, universal health care, good, wild education, experimentation, supporting artists, tribalism. And I get excited, for a second. But at the same time I can feel a gremlin inside of me ready to pounce on Obama for not being the change he's been waiting for. Hey, but I hardly slept, remember, so the world has some sinister edges, you know. Ahhh, but not really. The truth is, I am inspired whether O is the man or not or somewhere in the blah, blah middle. In fact, I felt in my grains a while back that government as we know it is anachronistic, and at this point, stunts the evolution of man. Maybe Obama feels the same? I'm not advocating overthrow, having pizza with anarchy parties at my house, I'm just saying that we all need to grow from the inside out, reach to each other from the inside out, mingle and create with the people around us, including the earth, stop the fucking vanity about we are this and we are that (the days of johnny jingo are over!), and we deserve this and we deserve that, and we're the fucking best man...if I hear another person start to talk with the sentence, "America is the greatest country in the world" I'm going to throw a fucking dart at the radio. What does that mean? And who determines this? Is it based on Ms. World? I don't think we've won that in a while. Is it based on education? Sorry. Is it based on manufacturing? Woops. Is it based on principles? Hmmm, tough one if you read a book or two. Why isn't Sweden the best country in the world? Or Morocco? It's all ridiculous. There was a time when it was important for the development of the world to have nation states and war was a part of that system. We're beyond the usefulness of this system. Man, you can get mired in this stuff, huh? I'm in a wormhole with it. But, again, I'm optimistic and hoping to be part of the fun of rallying with everybody to do things like share, and prop each other up, and dance, and grow food, drive cars that spit water, and even more radical stuff like forgive people and, if we have to be a unit of example at all, let's be for sharing all the wealth (with ourselves and the entire world) and not worrying what anachronistic political label that is associated with. Alright, I may just be awake enough to wring out the last drops of sarcasm laced with the gooey aortic blood of the eternal optimist.

Sickie Quickie

2009-01-17T18:06:00.000-08:00

There was a time when nothing was ever enough, everything a prelude to the ultimate moment. This is not to say small things went unnoticed or didn't matter, indeed, they did and I was obsessed by them, but, still, only prelude. A change has occurred, maybe a combination of getting older, shedding a skin, seeing more, talking less. I spoke to good friends tonight and I am full. 48 minutes, my throat gone dry and achy, my energy sapped, chills coming on (but in a good way, you know, when you give in to them and bundle up under the covers), and the call of the Ski Valley is faint. Again, I am full - the helix of friendship and understanding, cultures mixed in the distillery - it is dark, and I can ease to bed (after a few movies ;-)). What it means is that I've always been full, and what I always did was make my cup runneth over.

Sick on the Desert

2009-01-16T16:55:00.001-08:00

Cherry red, mixed with rust and lemon on the horizon at the end of dusk. Hills of old volcanoes walking the desert like felines, backs raised, spinal spikes like pyramids ready to lift off again. It has to be known. It has to be felt. Dirt roads somehow still choked with snow despite the relentless sun, houses floating, Noah's ideas waiting for the next flood. Castles made of cans shimmering into the oceanic blue green surface of sky. Places to live that speak to and listen to the sun, self-sustained, simple, with space melting from internal to external. Little separation between being and it. Mountains to the east and north, dark greens leading to the inviting whiteness above treeline, my old home. People up there after a sunny ski day looking darker than Peruvian hill pipers, white teeth blaring while my friends play their Caribbean rhythms in the ocean liner of a bar stuck in a Swiss-German mountain village in New Mexico which used to be part of pueblo lands, part of Mexico. I am sick, head and chest filled and swollen, a rare occurrence and tearing me down day after day, but the end of dusk drew me to my writing room, Venus sparking to the east. I don't know what I think today, it is gone, wasted, recycled, swirling and slightly tense like a rope being pulled gently. Writers speck the starry distance, filling my shelves, and the worries of everything start to feel ridiculous. In the outside is organization, slow movement, the fear of physical and spiritual destruction, but the inside is wild, reflects what's really out there, freaking abundance. There has been a lot to write about the past few days, and my notes scatter across legal pads, envelopes, post-its, and last year's day planner pages. I'm too wavy to be specific, all I want is to feel. There was a too skinny woman I know who I saw in Smith's. Too skinny, pale, no ass, sunken cheeks. 30 years old. She said she's playing the cello and singing, really making it happen. She married a much older man. I've met him, he's a softened tough musician, haggardly easygoing now, gray mustache and two day ghost shadow. He's bought me a drink or two over the last years. And I think he has some kind of garage wisdom and kindness and has placed his poncho over her. And at the same time I think he is leading her to the valley of the shadow of death. He's 60 or more, double her. After talking about the cello and singing, she asks me if she has any blow on her nostril. She doesn't, but it's red-embered and pricked with capillaries. We used to do some together so she's comfortable asking me this. It's a code, a courtesy like offering a fellow smoker a cigarette. I tell her I've been sober for 4 months and she says she's happy for me, always liked me, wishes me well. All the time she's looking away and when I do catch her eyes, I realize the once gambling table green with coffee edges has dulled to the wrong paint mix, pink thrown in where it shouldn't be. She has three kids, all beautiful, smart, talented, but she lost custody a long time ago. Got it back once when she cleaned up for a year and her cherry tomato butt returned, her cheeks filled, her hair became golden-edged, and the eyes were a wonder of swimming mermaids. I walk away with my own sniffling and I think she hasn't seen the kids lately, not even for Christmas, and I don't know whether she is walking slowly in the rain toward her end under that poncho, or whether she is incubating in some church. I hope she really is playing that cello.

5 minutes, go...

2009-01-13T21:49:00.000-08:00

Where did the time go today? I saw the sunrise, perkier in the west than yesterday, the moon setting again, this time in a buoyant cranberry zizzle. The east clear but for a magenta feather boa looping over the Weimer hills. Cold again, 1 degree, but it didn't penetrate. So much going on all of a sudden that I became the swirl of it all, and got sucked into the hourglass with the rest of the sand grains. But moments stand out, still. I saw writing friends at Cid's, both making their livings at it, and talked about the road to teaching at UNM Taos. More client work developed and good connections were made. My face felt vibrant in the afternoon after a coffee and a shave, and the brace of sun and cool air. I bought a real pair of shades, rose colored lenses, as my eyes were being pulverized by the UV rays. They felt great on my face, snug to the nose and just a smidge off the eyebrows so I can make my array of expressions without resistance or discomfort. I drove to the Divis trailhead, taking advantage of the 20+ minutes of sunlight we've gained since the Solstice. Saw my friend, Matteo, at the bottom. We talked, briefly, about the Boston Celtics, and then went our separate ways. I busted it up the front and began to notice webs of paper thin ice stretched over rocks. Amazing formations, watery, cracked, furrowed, scrolled, the rock sitting underneath, yellow brown, like a specimen in a lab in a petrie dish. Strange, but happening all over the mountain. The heat of the sun warming the rocks from under the snow, and that heat melting the snow around each rock until the last layer, but that last layer made it late enough into the day when the sun fades and the temperature quickly drops below freezing. And, voila, a spider-webby, how-could-that-possibly-have-happened stretch of frozen liquid over a rock, clearly visible beneath. Like looking through slightly beveled glass. The phenomenon will be gone tomorrow, the rocks will have finished the job so they can bask fully in the splendor of the New Mexico sun.

I tried to take a picture, but my phone ran out of juice as I pushed the OK button. Rats, but memory works, too. On the way down, I saw that somebody had made a Zia (4 points, four directions), the New Mexico state symbol, in the snow and had also created wafers of hard snow and created a mini Stonehenge next to it.

Ode to Summer Lovin

2009-01-12T19:56:00.001-08:00

Alright, so I've been talking reverently about the snow and cold, the insane skies, the silenced landscape. Well, today I was cold. I'm not sure why, but it started in the toes during a cloudy sunrise at 0 degrees. I had the chill-inspired turettes, making loud, gutteral sounds to vibrate inside my chest, and then actually beating my breast with my open hands. It all helped a little but my toes remained icy. So, after posting the pictures of today's sunrise, one toward the fiery east, one toward the big moon still hanging in the sky to prehistorically somber west, I'm going to post another picture, taken on the summer solstice, of two of my friends, part of the family, getting married by a tall preacher under a towering, priapic cottonwood, in front a cool, lazy creek, at the bottom of a grassy hill after weeks of afternoon monsoons, and recite the little write that they (and Widespread Panic)inspired. It was written the next weekend at my kitchen table in my previous house on San Antonio St.

So, pictures please:

And, now, summer (ah, my toes are warming up):

Imagine there are 100 people dressed to the nines, summer style, beginning 10 feet from that microphone stand.

At my house alone surrounded by smiling faces over bodies in motion to music blasting from strips of dark, undulating speakers 50 feet tall and 200 feet away. And more smiling faces in tall grass under giant, stout cottonwood trees surrounded by a deep set, slow creek snaking and slurking - people in suits and hot pink dresses, asses slightly bubbled in happiness, reverence and just enough cockiness at the beauty being reflected back. And a tall dark preacher towers under the tree that grew up without a branch for 60 years. And he sings a rumbling love-aby for the couple exchanging vows steps from the creek in front of a family of muscled humans who look at them in silence and, occasionally, in the intimate heat and insect hum, look at each other with shy smiles knowing each is together with the one they look at, blurring lines, riding the little pinprick waves, forgetting themselves in the preacher's low crackle and secretly waiting to lie naked in the creek.

Evidence of a Nap

2009-01-11T20:31:00.001-08:00

Mountain Madness

2009-01-11T20:09:00.001-08:00

Before and Now

2009-01-11T20:04:00.000-08:00

Bird Tracks: Which Way to Go?

2009-01-11T20:02:00.000-08:00

Kryptonite & Cookies

2009-01-11T18:32:00.000-08:00

I sit here at my desk watching the silver dollar moon turn the desert tundra into a shadowy, dusty blue that presages the earthshaking steps of giants. It also looks like the snowfields are an expanding inland sea that will lap at my windows, turning my house with its huge windows into an aquarium. And that is how I feel inside my head, water sloshing and soaking, dousing, suffocating. La luna, I love her, and she is also my kryponite. Triple fire I am, and she the moon, closer to me than she's ever been, has slipped me a mickey, shaken me when I needed stirring, dropped a depth charge in my super food. It happens every time, month-to-month, more and more, and, although I can fight it with the determination of the Man of Steel or Captain Kirk, really I am reduced to the desire to crawl on a padded floor, to some corner filled with pillows where I can burrow my head and wiggle my shoulders before sinking into the floor of a deep slumber. My feet are vibrating inside my boots, my lips loose and slightly opened, my ears ringing in a high C, my heart beating in my armpits. I am not heavy, but disintegrating, changing states, solid to liquid. I want to run out of myself and flow without effort, give up to my mistress who excites me with her grand entrance, the light preceding her behind Taos Mountain as if she has an army spread across the San Luis Valley holding up flood flights and pointing them south toward the Taos Range. I imagine the people of this vast valley, in the hills, mountains, out on the mesa like me, running to their east windows like trained mice and making noises, ooohs and ahhhhs, and then moving across their houses to other windows as La Luna climbs higher and turns the knock knock world into the realm of the stainless steel knights, blowtorch blue, riding their hard-snorting black steeds, trailing serpents of vapor from wet nostrils; ghosts of the old ways, of all the races that have spilled on this dirt. And we know this world, we know it, and some of us are drawn outside by a red thread pulling from just below the navel, into the snow, the temperature down to 10 deg., just as in a dream, when you're not sure you want to go, but your astral body is hitched to what is out there, the red thread upon touching the moonlight revealed as a silver lariat comprised of three interwoven strands that undulate into the dancing charcoal dust floating above the snow. A thundering is felt just above and below where you strain to hear, and in it are all of the things, the people, the hopes and strivings and, above all, the knowings, the wisdom, and the Great Need to bow to and embrace what is "out there" so that you can go back inside, the red thread returned, enter the bed and learn again to swim.

And I am going to do just that.

But before I crawl away, I want to say that a little girl, dark haired with gigantic round chestnut eyes, and a pearl button nose, maybe 4, maybe 5, came to my table at the Mondo Kultur Cafe. Her mom was just getting off of work, and the little girl and her redheaded, freckled friend were going to eat cookies. The place was packed, all tables filled, but many, like mine, with single people spreading out over a table for 2 or 4. This little one, without hesitation, pulled out the chair next to me, looked me in the eyes with the presence of a tree, and told me without words everything I needed to know. She sat on the chair (on her knees) and patted the seat of the chair next to her for her friend to come sit. I was madly in love with this little person treating me like a fellow tree exhaling oxygen into the world. Me and her, just trees hanging in the same forest. And then her mother called her, not angry, but with firmness and fear, looking at me with apology. And I said, "No, no, it's okay. They can sit here with me, I'm just reading." "No, no," she said, "we're going to go." The little tree got off of her chair and pushed it back in then looked at me and said in a froggy voice, "Thank you, we're going to eat the cookies in the car." And she smiled a little tree smile that made me happier than I've been in a long, long time.

The Show Goes On...

2009-01-09T18:52:00.000-08:00

This is for my friend, X, a man of the Jicarilla Apache Nation, whose dad just passed away. It is meant to float up like smoke and disappear into the sky, as it is not something to talk directly about. This man, 6'4" of lankiness, fought 6 different bouts with cancer, and, back in the day, was a lawyer with his wife during the power days of the AIM, and saw some amazing and horrible things come to pass.

Bpae TuaaH
(deer meat)

There is no doubt
That we all belong to each other.
There is no doubt
That one day we will face off with ourselves.
Point cold, heartless handguns to the face.
As we both pull the tiny triggers, ever so slowly; I am you.
You can be me.
No doubt.

Like an old time, romantic, black and white movie playing
Across the screen;
The end credits are rolling on the plaintive theme,
"We are over;"
Progressing into curious, unknown,
Shadowy fragments of a decaying body,
Lying on sepia-toned melting snow,
A quaint picture show,
Walking together to the dead end.

We are older; stretched;
Strung like a new bow,
However with the same gut string;
Pulling, pulling; until the evil,
Heart-breaking crack.

In the distance a bald eagle is soaring,
Airborne above an outlying thicket of juniper trees,
Circling to see the remnants
Of a curious deathblow;
Dry blood, wet with the thawing snow.
I have no doubt.
Soar like the eagle.
Have no fear.
Die vivaciously.
Give way to the tumbling departure,
The degeneration.
Back to the most wet, moist, merciful earth.
I have no doubt. We will all end up there:
Uneventfully.

Our movie is one of pathetic, prophetic love.

- Reyes Kristina Wind

I climbed the foothill today, the snow on the south side melting into the slope, into the rocks and tenacious bushes, cholla plants, and willows. It was warmer than it has been in a while, the sun disappearing behind velvet gray and purple clouds. Slushy in the bottomlands, hard-skinned higher up with softness underneath. Hardness broken, something collapsing all around, tired, ready to give in. There was nobody on the trail today. The only humans I saw were at the bottom, a woman, Shira, with a silver nose ring, had backed her white Subaru into the deep snow of the parking lot at the trailhead. I pushed the back of her car while a craggy, dark-skinned man with the tell-tale Taoseno lilt hit reverse in his big, white pickup, and chained to the Subaru, pulled it out. She offered me a heaping salad in a plastic dish, pepperoncinis piled on top, but I said my fridge was full and maybe the truck guy needed it more. She thrust it out to him and he snatched it quickly, a brief smile passing his lips. She thanked us and he nodded holding out the salad like it was a prize and I rubbed her jacketed shoulder. "No problem."

With the lower light and thinking about X, I curved around the west side of the mountain and saw the sun setting in the clear slit on the horizon. It spread a peach and green light on a shelf of snow leaning up off the trail. This spot is well below where I do my prayers to the mountain, but I was feeling logy, and the snow looked too good to pass up, so I lay down, breaking the hard surface and forming the snow around my ass, legs, back, shoulders and head. I had to do it. No wind. No birds (birds don't stir at sunset here, they watch in reverence, too). My head looking straight up to the curve-tipped clouds sliding west to east. Mmmmmm, I felt in my chest, good breaths, deep ins and slow outs, pauses in between. Other than a creeping, cool wetness through my jeans into my butt cheeks, I felt disappeared. I closed my eyes thinking that I could easily spend the night right here and be woken with new snow on my nose and an elk bending over to lick my forehead. The icy granular snow woke me when I made a natural turnover move, flipping from my back to my right side, my right cheek looking to nuzzle the pillow and finding ice instead. It was still dusk, but barely. I didn't have my backpack with the headlamp, so I had to shake it off and boogie on down the trail. It wasn't hard as it was still warm, the clouds keeping the temperature from dropping, and I cut off large swaths of the trail by bushwacking through the switchbacks.

There's a knot in my center as I write. I'm drifting. I see green water and white caps spilling over the tops of waves. I listened to NPR on the way home when I should have listened to Radiohead, or nothing. Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, a terrible fire in Karachi, Pakistan. People killing, dying. It reminded me of being a little child and listening to the daily body counts from Vietnam on my Sony transistor radio and then on my mom's faux wood-paneled radio in the kitchen while eating my cereal and english muffin. Even then I couldn't understand why. Even then I wondered what was the use. One of my camp counselors left after the summer of '71 and did not come back the next summer. The flag was at half mast for the 3 or 4 years I went to this camp. It was normal, and it wasn't. Body counts on the radio. Not so different now.

Where am I my going with this? It's 8:58 and I'm sad. It was a good day, things are happening, being accomplished, being given and received. I have loving friends coming over tomorrow to hike down to the river and dip in the hot springs along the edge. Great projects are moving forward. My head is clear and I'm living in circadian rhythm. Yes, and I woke thinking of my friend, X, and his distant voice last night. This is not something to talk about. This is not something to dwell on.

For My Brothers and Sisters of the Ram

2009-01-08T20:46:00.000-08:00

The first "super-moon" of 2009 takes place Saturday (Jan. 10) and strikes the match, lights the candle and illuminates a path of self-discipline, sacrifice and ultimate achievement for the Ram. Somewhat challenging but long overdue and actually welcome, this fortuitous opportunity comes from within and blossoms as a time of great potential progress and personal productivity. Embrace the change.

AMEN!

MONEY

2009-01-08T19:32:00.001-08:00

Today was a good day. I got up early; not as early as I intended, but that's something I'm working on. I can shave an hour off of when I get up and that hour is crucial to getting off to a dedicated start. What I didn't do today was hike, and that hurts. I was outside a bit, looked at the sky, marveled at the dawn, licked the feathery top layer of the snow glitter-balled by the first rays of the sun as it wobbled over the pueblo. For a few minutes, under the immensity of that cranberry aquamarine, standing in the snowmush driveway, I was visited first by three rabbits, inquisitive sniffers who, one by one, nosed the same sage plant tips sticking out of the snow like the tentative tentacles of an amphibian, and drunkenly lunge-hopped through the drifts, and then three dogs, the amigos, the ones that now know me (and know I have no pork chops - yet), who, one-at-a-time brushed their coats against my legs, and smiled up at me, waited 3 or 4 minutes, tails wagging, and then buttswung themselves back out to the road and trotted north toward the large quonset houses. That was my moment: cold but still, the sky drum much softer than in the dusk, a lower hue, watery, sounds traveling from miles away, tinks and tonks and sageward yelps, swooping hawks stirring the air, the curious rabbits and incredulous doggies, all moving on their way, greetings, departings, living and let living going on in all directions.

And I won the lottery...he almost hits the exclamation but stops. Yes, I won, $15, got the powerball number and the power play was 5x. Hey, I come from a gambler and have fought that dragon, trained and caressed her to be my friend cum companion, but I've been feeling lucky (the "cky" in the back of the throat, breathy at the end), and I've been seeing numbers, baby. This is my second "win" in two weeks, so I'm up $14. I'm rubbing my hands together and they feel like moneh...that's right M-O-N-E-H, Moneh. Seriously, though, I have that feeling. The moon is getting bigger, venus is winking at me, red ole mars, ruler my ruler, is sliding back over the mountains, and big bopper jupiter, too - say it ain't so red sisters! There's your exclamation. Big, big, big, that's what's happening. No biggie smalls, no smally balls, this is play time.

Speaking of dragons, all kinds of good things were going on today. My timing was slamming. Work situations, flirtations, Moneh, unasked for favors, good books to read on the can, a fridge full-to-burstin with goodness at home, what, what, what more can you want? Well, I'll tellya, first, 5pm hit and I was still talking to this lawyer woman who owns a building of offices (one of which I'm renting tomorrow). When I left, dusk already sprouting without me at my perch on the mountain, I knew that deal was done. So, with a crease in time, my mind, well, more my solar plexus, the dragon's lair, sent up a thought, well, more an urge, that had the clacking of phenolic resin balls in it, and the slide of smooth wood across the slot of skin between my left thumb and index finger. Pool, at the Alley, was in my solar plexus. I had some time, it was happy hour, I didn't need to drink but could hang around with the peeps in the back room and shoot some stick, you know? I got in the car with that intention, my trained dragon straining against its yoke, but a funny thing happened. I slid around the parking lot skating rink and rolled up to the muddy lip leading out to Paseo and instead of banging a louie, I leaned right and by the time I straightened her out passing the Taos Diner, I knew I was on my way home....but was I? Not quite. At the blinking light intersection - straight takes you to Questa and then the kingdoms of Colorado, right takes you up to Arroyo Seco and then up up and away to the Ski Valley, and left takes you toward the gorge where I live (and, if you go further, to the remote mad max outpost of Tres Piedras) - I compromised. Since I was wrestling my suddenly tongue-wagging dragon, Dixie, I decided to take her out for some pizza. So, we went right, toward the ski valley, but pulled off a couple hundred yards down the road at Pizanos, owned by some good friends. Me and Dixie got ourselves a personal pizza with mushrooms, green chile, onions, and black olives - upstate NY style - made some good time with the girls behind the counter while we waited, a lot of smiling and "where you been, honeys," and then busted out to gorgeville. And that we did. I gave Dixie a slice on the way to chill her the freak out, and when I got home, I plowed that thing down to one slice. Man, it was like I hadn't eaten in days. They use good ingredients and all, but still, this is pizza, heavy wheat, meat, tongue tickling spices, thick cheese, and garlicky tomato sauce (see fingers to the mouth in a kiss). So I ate Dixie and the pizza, too, and that was that. I've been a bobblehead Gman since. But, BUT, I'm good, you know? I ate 3 tangerines after the pizza and I am sated like a mofo. It's 9:27 and I'm ready for Mirabal in my bed (the book, ok).

That's all I have. I wish I had more because one of the servers at Pizanos said to me, "I grew up down the street from 'Make Believe World.'" One of Walt Disney's buds built a house on 300 acres and then turned the place into a phantasmagorical town. And she lived a few houses down. There's something there. Right? No matter, buenos noches al mundo.

I'm too spent to write...

2009-01-07T20:29:00.000-08:00

Venus is just sparkling, dancing, pearling, bejeweling the western sky tonight. Before I go, and I will not go very far this evening, I must say that I am fully spent in body, mind and spirit. A good and friendly ghostly spent, but if I were a ghost I don't think I'd feel the heat-burn in my quads and big toes born of an early rise, the sudden emergence (in some cases re-emergence) of 6 or 7 projects, more snow shoveling, and another wondrous hike up into the bonzai forest. It is 9:34 and I laugh as I think "already." Was a time when 9:34 was, as my friend Sal and I used to say, "Early days, early days." And I'm sure it will be again, but in this winter of creamy snows and early darks (w/no lights to deceive), the social jones quenched in an avalanche of meditation, reading, pacing, writing, talking to myself, dancing in my shadow, building and massaging fires, cooking meals spread out across massive counters, hunching and slowly unfurling under two layers of covers while watching movies (tonight: Whale Dreamers), converting toxins into magic endorphins, and dreaming, both lucidly and in sleep, about people and animals who then show up on cue, I am "being my spentness." So, I will not write tonight about the coyote who followed me along the rim of the Rio Grande Gorge last evening, fumble-legged in the deep snow, as the slushy half moon rose over the spider silk weavings of blueberry clouds against a cracked turquoise turned indigo sky. Nope. And how I ran along the now packed down old stagecoach road up and down the swales, my nose hairs freezing and my mustache hardening, my ankle, 4 months after the ligament damage, finally holding my bouncing body and feeling stretchy, ready, maybe, for hoops. And that I looked back and the coyote still followed, now sidestepping and keeping its head down. Nope, not going to write about that trickster following 20 steps behind, huffing in the thin air, letting out an occasional muted trumpet of despair, or pleasure, like a woman I recently slumbered with who sent warm chills through my body every hour on the hour when she turned over and coo-sighed. No, I'm too tired to write about the vastness and stillness of the dusk out here, how it feels like being part of the skin of a drum, and carries a taut effortless weight to the center and zephyrs from the points of the hips to the heart in a revolving triangle, oh man, oh man. It's too much, too much. The surface of the snow unbroken and sparkly, undulating, the stuff of dreams, the filling of every cookie that ever existed, and the mattress of all gods. I can't do it. It's everything I've ever craved. I mean, look at me:

I love it so much I have to take my clothes off and "feel" it. :-)

That's me and the bonzai trees with the sacred mountain behind me over the pueblo (the sun is already down).

Off to bed and the other world.

Turning Over an Old Leaf

2009-01-05T18:41:00.000-08:00

A cottonwood leaf fell out of the writing tablet I am reassembling for a friend. It was on the ground on 14 October when I wrote in the park, sitting on the cold, dying grass looking up at the last clinging leaves spinning on their stems. I had just hung up with another friend, weariness from all the shoveling and pushing, and seeping, cold wetness from the thigh deep snow slowing my thoughts. It is still gold, and smells raisin sweet like it did that day 3 months ago. Preserved in the book instead of decomposing under the weight of the snow. It sits on my words, frayed edges throwing a short shadow on "detritus" "fucking" "clay" "cold" "fused" "New Zealand." The curving stem, firm and lifted swims over "green" "elevations" "quivering." What strikes me, while I can still articulate, is that the shape is a tree in itself, and the veins in the leaf another tree, branches curved up, receptive, like a menorah, the tree of life. The leaf reflects the tree and is the memory of the tree back to itself. Closer still, the veins are interconnected through a network of tiny red capillaries, like the flushed cheek of an aging man, and these capillaries, when you move tighter, are also in the shape of trees. It never ends.

Snowbound (sort of)

2009-01-05T12:01:00.000-08:00

I am stuck. For the first time since I can remember, my car, all wheel drive and all, cannot find the purchase it needs to move from the middle of the driveway where I left it last night at the height of the storm. I have been digging and attempting for two hours; moving a prodigious amount of snow in the process. Still not enough. I'm in a rut. The right wheels are on a slight decline and those tires are now dug into the old, hard snow creating smooth icy arcs with hollows for the tires to spin in. I tried trusty old cardboard sections. No go. They just flew into the air. I tried digging more around the tires but that's just making it worse. Now I'm eating yogurt and breathing (and typing). I feel like a nap. There's a creeping sense of defeat, but I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, like wedging towels under the tires, think that might work. I'm way out on the Mesa. Nobody around. More than two feet of snow on the ground and it just started snowing again. Oy. It's not the end of the world. Indeed, I love it. My house is warm and I can do a bunch of work right here. People who can help me will be home later. 2 minutes, or less, of pushing and I'd be out. Zippity quick. Ok, think I'll do the towel thing before I throw it in. If that doesn't work, consider it nap time.

Cherry Pie

2009-01-04T21:18:00.000-08:00

Eating cherry pie
what I remember
is her right index finger
curled around mine

It's child warmth
and tenacity
clinging to me
over her shoulder
her face turned away
in the red pillow

Drinking green tea
I try to reassemble
how we came to be
naked in my bed
and that moan and wonder
of moles and nipples
mirrored

But I can't
her finger has me

Scattered in the Snow

2009-01-04T09:55:00.000-08:00

An early darkness
turns the house to memory
of people not there

I think of water
of a tide filling a mouth
old buildings in mist

Friends on a river
bearing cold rain in low water
a lifetime away

As a snowstorm drives waves of slanted flakes into the sage sea, I think of my frequent visits over the past year to Kit Carson Park in the center of Taos. It is where I watched and felt the seasons change, in the grass and trees, the sky and air, and the people. I'm going back through a tablet I've recently completed. Now, in full winter, is a good time to look back at what was present then, and what was anticipated (this).

10/22/08 4:15pm
I'm in the park again, here because I'm impatient. My ass is on the cold grass, no longer all green, but a mix of straw and still green blades. Children set up for soccer practice dressed in multicolored sweatshirts and hats. A coach in jeans and a black fleece, green and white ski cap and sneakers, has his hands in his pockets as he kicks the ball. It's around 40 degrees and the sky is overcast. A wind ruffles the thinning leaves, some still gold, most verging on rust. Other adults cross arms across chests or thrust hands in jacket pockets. There is no sun to ease the chill of 7000' elevation. We're naked to the cold. It will be 15 degrees tonight. I'm here. I'm here.

4/18/08
What do you say green blowfish? It's sunny and I'm barefoot on the grass of the park. The world is inviting, soft and fragrant. The wind tickles my toes and children squeak and grunt kicking soccer balls and fielding grounders. Winter yesterday. Spring Today. People inhabit the grass. Humans are out, moving and happy. The doors are open, the windows down. Cars drive by with crooked arms resting comfortably on the window's edge. Meat cooks somewhere in the neighborhood on the other side of the trees. A lone drummer beats in the glade to my north. A young Pueblo couple sits in the deeper grass under the Christmas tree blue spruce, elbows touching, hair mingling. Dark and dark. She looks leonine from here. The humans look relaxed, connected, moving as an organism. It can be this way even if NPR says the economy is bad, even if this country is at war, even though we are near Los Alamos. It can be this way and deep down the humans know it.

5/30/08
A frail, nibbling rabbit just broke my heart like a warm infant in my arms. Birds squeak in the trees in back of Cafe Tazza, reopened last week by friends, the sweetness of the backyard the same as when I moved here 5 years ago today. 5 full years of tumult and hurtling of hermitage and torpor of prayer and dashing of love and mourning. Earlier I was lamenting the loss of the magic and wonder I had 5 years ago. Where did it go? It felt irretrievable, but it's right here as I'm broken again, a soft breeze about my neck, jiggling plants at the edges, birds and crickets singing easy, no clouds to mar the blue, friendly clicker bugs hopping across my pages and the aspen across the road shimmering gold. Whaddyagonnado? It's a world of blue and bookstores and curvy women and ancient rumblings you can feel and don't need to discuss, of battered purple mountains with swervy snowfields melting into the dark creases, of pinon scented air filled with volcanic dirt and river bottom clay. It's too much to grasp, so I let go, again, and the magic returns.

Winter Voices

2009-01-02T19:25:00.000-08:00

The afterbirth,
a raft in tropical waters
leading away from the volcano,
approaching backward
the delta pliant with new growth
swaying, moist, mossy.

The snow covered lake in the trees
another life,
naked in the piled crystals
snow angels
left for the fish
the blessing shielding the soreness
of a long winter
now being shed,
in the doip
of the drip
from the wooden oars.

"She's gone," She's gone,"
rings in my ears
Another season past,
another reason composted,
a possibility to be recycled.

"You can't kiss it,"
I hear now,
as I lean
toward shore,
rocking the boat,
ready to fall in
before I reach land.

Run Amonk

2009-01-02T17:59:00.000-08:00

The moon has climbed way over Venus in the past week, and is fleshing out into its quarter form. Waxing, waxing. At one point it was an open mouth or arced arms drawing Venus down to it. Now it is above and moving to the east, its ass, curved yet closed, snubbing low-riding Venus. I'm still attracted to the dance up there, but it's not as intimate or delicate as it was just after Christmas. And I'm in my house on a Friday night, looking out the big windows. Being on the mountain is lighter, my body disappears, I don't feel the ringing bell in my knees. But I'm here, I'm here. And I don't think I'm going anywhere. I'm weary, I think. I've made it through the Holidays and the darkest time of the year and it feels like I need a recharge. I haven't partied in months, but I've fought all sorts of maladies for 8 weeks, my body adjusting to life without alcohol. Today, at LOKA, an acquaintance asked me if I've been feeling good since I stopped drinking. I took a moment, and squinted with thought. "No, I haven't. In fact, I've been sick several times...but I think I'm at the threshold of that vitality, that organ hum that I knew eventually would assert itself. And I've paid the opportunity cost of 100+ days; paid the price an old girlfriend told me I'd pay one day if I stopped partying for long enough to let loose the toxins that the alcohol and drugs have forced into covert operations. The thought of that warning was always with me and often I used it as a rationalization for the partying - "It keeps me young, you know? Just enough of everything, right?" But now that I've gone through this gauntlet - if a doc had told me that I'd get stomach viruses, tooth infections, earaches, GI tract meltdowns, and energetic malaise, I'd likely have prolonged my procrastination - fuck if I'm going to miss out on feeling insanely, unstoppably, uncontrollably, ridiculously good. You know? But, still, it's a Friday night and I don't know what the fuck to do with myself. I got a text from Crystal who's rallying people for her 25th birthday. That'll get ugly. I got a text from little, crazy dancing Sarah that Unstrung Heroes are playing at El Monte. That ought to be a good stomp and grind, but that place is way too bright and perky and garish and I know the bartenders too well. It's not that I can't deflect the drinks they'll instinctively give me (yes, "give" me), but the bridge from sitting here at my desk in my warm house to rallying without alcohol or drugs, driving 12.5 miles into town, and peeling back the curtains to enter that stage...I don't think I have that mojo. But that worries me. I'm torn between the thought that "hey, I've put this guy through a lot the past couple of years, hell the past 20 years, and now I'm listening to my center and my center says hang out, write for a bit, drink water, stretch, and then get under the covers and watch a good movie, read yourself to sleep and dream, fly, heal as long as the system says so" and "hey, what's wrong with you, dude? You're low energy, hiding from the people...maybe you're depressed? Maybe there's a natural gas leak in the house? Maybe you have serious colon problems and they're leaving you all woozy because you're diseased?" The hypochondriac "don't want to miss out" guy versus the "give myself a break/I've done enough/ there will always be parties/listen to my intuition" guy. The latter is winning, no doubt, and the later it gets (now 7:39), the easier it is to give in and shut'er all down.

The battle of evermore. I have to set myself up for balance. My pendulum has swung toward hermitage. There will be a correction toward the middle, though I dream of being a monk. But monkdom, in this life, will be amonkst people. I know this. What that means is that I will write and publish (even if I have to do it myself), and act, and mcee, and drum, and bartend, and teach, heal, learn to play the fiddle, sing, take devastating pictures, take yoga classes, bullshit at cafes, tucker myself out with acts of creation and kindness ("Good Deed'n" as my old friend, Marc Batyr, would say - and do!), and, as often as I can, get my body up into the trees and above to the crags, where I disappear in what I know is my ancient homeland.

Ahhh, now I can eat some chocolate, take off my clothes, pop in a DVD, and chill the freak out.

The green door may be unlocked, but we'll leave entry for another day.

Blueberry Hill

2008-12-30T19:41:00.000-08:00

I had a long day, waking well before dawn to drive to Albuquerque to take care of some business, and just now getting back. But, the day was worth it right from the start, as the sunrise pulled me out of the window of my car while surfing Blueberry Hill, taking the backroads out of town. Not only was there this (see above), but the Taos Valley was filled with a gray-blue, freezing fog that mixed with the snaking woodsmoke of nightlong fires to create the daily "you-gotta-be-kiddin-me" moment. There's nothing like the colors of winter in the high country...this high country. I'm a lucky bloke.

Before and After

2008-12-29T20:36:00.000-08:00

Part I - Before Hiking up Divisadero

Hyperventilating. Sitting heat pounding my head in the window of the cafe. I'm overdressed for sun. Snow deceives in all its creaminess, and piles, banks, ice flats in the shade, frozen sandy grains mushed around on the sidewalks. It has been so cold that 33 degrees with unfiltered sun, high desert sun, feels pleasant, temperate, relieving; the thermal underwear washed and put away for the next run of snow and frigidity. Something is bothering me. The sun is not enough. The Holidays do not remove the underlying sense of obligation, the runaway, the knot, the fear, the disengagement, the clutter, disorganization; the failure of the light to linger long enough to allow me to breathe, the taking away of that breath, or what's left when the snowy world is squashed into darkness, no moon, two planets teasing. I'm rendered weak, heavy-hoofed, incredulous, doomed, wondering if I'm infected, if my house has toxic air, if I'll ever again feel vibrant and quick-minded.

Part II - Post Hike

I saw the sun dip behind Ogelvie's on the Plaza and knew there was no time to lose. A rush of tourists came in the World Cup as I gathered up my book, notebook and New Yorker and ducked out, saying goodbye to Genvieve. The coffee went down, so luxurious, velvety and supercharged. My eyes had that Popeye pop so I felt I could saw things apart by just looking at them long enough (and not that long). I got in the Honda and zipped around the Plaza taking Ranchitos to the light at Paseo and through the one-way at Quesnel over to Kit Carson. The horses who inhabit the open field of sage behind the usually muddy but now snowed over municpal parking lot huddled along the fence line sticking their noses out to the road. Going east into the world of massive, ancient cottonwoods, I noticed the snow getting deeper, slopped high on picnic tables and abandoned cars (mostly old Lincolns and Dusters). Up and up into the first line of foothills, I wound around and above a heavily wooded narrow valley filled with old stone and adobe houses, and abandoned log cabins. Passing the junction (Santa Fe south, Angel Fire east), I entered the national forest and two bends down the road pulled a U-ee and parked behind a 4-Runner in the compacted ice-snow just in front of the trailhead for Divisadero. It was already evening down by the creek in the bottom of the canyon and the cold air was settling in. But I could see the fire-yellow sunlight against the pinons and granite outcroppings halfway up the frontside slope. That was my first goal, get up into the band of light. I took off at a fast trot, my Sorels digging in toe first in the tamped snow of the trail. The footing was better than I thought it would be. Uneven, stucco ice had reformed on the surface where the top layer of snow had melted in the intense sun of the mid afternoon. I moved quickly, my legs and lungs excited to be on the trail, more excited than for anything else I had done or thought about all day. Coming along the first shelf of the trail, I noticed that the snow had melted off of the south facing rocks sticking out of the chest of the mountain. I put my face against a smooth rock and it warmed my cheek. Amazing how the sun penetrates beneath the snow and into the heart of the rock so that it radiates heat out to the surface and melts the snow as if it were a griddle. I thought about how the good builders who work with the earth and its elements face houses to the south, windows picking up the sun, adobe and pumice-filled walls absorbing the heat and passing it inside while also melting a swath around the house. Even at 9,000' elevation, you can grow root vegetables and lettuces into October, through the early snows, as long as you plant them on the south side of a house sitting on a ridge or in a meadow open to the full brunt of the sun. It made me smile, thinking of carrots and onions and redleaf lettuce. Moving on, I passed a few people on their way down, everyone smiling with the vigor and chill. A little higher up, after the first bend that overlooks Taos, now looking like Whoville with its smoke-spewing chimneys and it's white cloak covering what was just a month ago a tattered burlap patchwork, I ran into a woman who runs a writing group that a friend had invited me into. It was fate, and we chatted, me introducing myself as a friend of a friend, and she smiling broadly, saying she was going to be traveling but that when she came back she'd love to have me write with the ladies (it's, for now, an all female group). Good, good. I always meet writers on this mountain. It is the writer trail. It is the one John Nichols hikes every day, and others, no less diligent although lesser known. Now my nostrils are flaring, and I know that that coffee and that moment in the window, burning up, writing the burn, the discomfort, and that gaggle of tourists Texas-two steppin into the tiny cafe, drove me out to get on this trail and move my ass, see a writer, feel a rock, flex my calf muscles, breathe and snort, and just disappear back into the bulk and fling of it. And my mind is thinking in my body, where it's supposed to be, where I understand what I can't reach when I'm jotting down "to do" lists, worrying about phone calls, thinking about the lottery, feeling the lack. Next thing I know I'm in the sunlight and yet it's getting colder, it's the last, faint rays, but that doesn't matter, what matters is that I know I'll have enough light to get up to my sacred spot. The crows aren't around, I notice. I'm looking up where they usually circle; nothing but darkening blue sky. Up near the top of the knobs you can see that the snow hasn't melted at all, it's all powder, and a bluish color due to the depth. I get to the spot and drop into the bonzai pinons, the bases drifted around with tufts of snow, and I find a compacted hole stepped into by others earlier. The edge of the hole is above my knees, but it's the perfect open view spot for the sacred mountain now turning aquamarine. I take off my hat, my jacket, my sweater and underlayer, and do my prayers for guidance and gratefulness to the mountain, stretching my trunk left, middle and right, and then bowing deeply in prayer to the four directions. There is no cold on my skin, I'm heated like the rocks from inside and it takes a while for the skin to lose its warmth. I stand there after the prayer, deep in the snow, only the sound of a tiny breeze in the trees. Before I feel any cold, I put the layers back on and I'm heading down, the sun already below the horizon. The sky is vibrating like liquid with neon being shone from the bottom of it, like celluloid. When I get back to the front side of the mountain Venus sparkles to the south holding the paper crescent moon on a string, a 45 degree angle, Venus up, the moon down, and they softly tingle in the pixelated crangrape of dusk. It's getting darker, darker, but the eyes can see everything, maybe more than in the full light; my eyes are dancing, they are in the zone like legs can be when you're in a running rhythm and the endorphins are madly releasing. I see that the snow is now the color of a licorice Necco wafer, with a hint of dusty purple over slate. I'm dancing, turning in circles, hopping off of rocks, sliding down the snow to cut off the switchbacks. I'm thinking that the snow is luxurious and inviting. I am drawn to sleep in it. I've always been drawn to sleep in the woods, parallel to the moon shadow of an oak or a birch or an aspen, in powdery snow, deep, deep, cushiony and quiet. It hits me that it is about death. It is a way that I would want to die, and it would be ok, there in the snow, in the soft, being absorbed into that womb. And I think that there are a lot of people who come to Taos, some unhinged, dancing their own dances that they've danced for so many miles, for so many people, and they've come here to die, not immediately, but eventually. And it doesn't always end up well, softly in the chosen snow, or by a running creek in the soft weeds, but nonetheless it is ok, they are here to launch and they are not judged for it.

The Alley Shuffle

2008-12-27T23:59:00.000-08:00

It's late for me these days, 1am. The Alley Cantina on a night with the temperature outside at 6 below zero (right now). My friends' band playing a unique and hypnotic amalgam of afro-coastal-americana-latin-grass. In the french and spanish it's meant to be in, the phrasing and intonation dead on. A bone cold night, but in that post Christmas pre New Years zone , with tourists enthralled at the 7 foot base at the ski mountain, native Taosenos visiting from all over the world reunited with their peeps, and locals just out because they know the Brent Berry Band will cause ass-shaking and indoor humidity. I helped kick off the dancing with an undulating group of voluptuous women I know, while all the men lubricated on the sidelines. We swayed and alternated between samba, two-step, shimmy and hillbilly stomp - sometimes doing all at once. They passed me around like a Gary doll until a new, too country tune fractured the dance floor and sent most of us into the corners. Once I was out of the gyration, it started to feel claustrophobic. The Alley is a much smaller space than anyone thinks. I filled up my cran and soda another time, and talked to a few people I hadn't seen in a while. An energy surge was accompanying the critical mass of people, shots were being downed all around the bar, in the pool room, in the lounge, in the shuffleboard room. I was bearhugged by a burly guy with an Abraham Lincoln beard, a guy I'd partied with a few times over the summer. "Hey, man. Hey, man! It's fucking great to see you, man. Can I buy you a shot? What are you doing later?"
"Nah, man." I couldn't remember his name. "But it's great to see you, too. I have to get going."
"Alright, cool. But next time, man. And happy freakin New Year, too!"
A beautiful, shining woman with dreds and the smile of a biblical prophet, the band leader's girl, whispered in my ear that she respected my non-drinking and that it must be hard in this scene. Also, that taking the time to know myself, as a man, as a person, instead of running away, was what real women noticed. Depth seeks depth, as water will continue to flow into descending space. Her voice was like a massage, bringing me back to my breath. A couple more goodbyes and a short chat about homeopathy with a chef, and I was shuffling across the ice of the parking lot to my CRV.

Now I'm home dipping thin matzo in sundried tomato pesto and getting sleepy. Back to the Mirabal and dreams of warm, moist breezes and floating in turqoise water.

Chasing God

2008-12-27T09:47:00.000-08:00

I could have disappeared
in the snow,
but I turned back
and slept
I could disappear now
in the new blue
but I'm here,
listening
God is out there,
she's fiddling,
on a black hill,
as I rest
for the chase

Tsee-Lee bpie (red chili)

2008-12-26T16:35:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Robert Mirabal's book and I'm starting to fall into the spell. It is all about the Taos Pueblo and the tendrils of the culture outward to the world (including Town of Taos) and back. I wonder if people who do not know Taos or have been touched by Pueblo people and culture will enter the spell? No matter. The structure of the book includes poetry at the ends of some sections and the beginnings of others. Today, I was reading in the window of the World Cup, surrounded by the comings-and-goings of people all bundled up against the snow and blustery cold. Most were tourists, but some were those I know, and others visiting on school breaks and talking about people I know. I was in a cocoon facing outward toward the Plaza. Other than helping a friend finish her crossword (Clue: Gator Bowl. Answer: Moat), I fell deep into the book cuddled by the patter of people all around me. As my fingers are palsied by the chill at my desk, I am going to transcribe the poem at the end of the last section of I read today. It warmed me in the window (as it captured the cold and misty gray of these past weeks), so I'm hoping it will warm my fingers as I type it:

Tsee-Lee bpie
(red chili)

What do I know of loss?
I have not found 'me' yet.

The snow-covered mountains show assurance,

They show promise every year,
Unfolding adventures for those that will receive them.

From the Rocky Mountains, deer and elk evoke
Cold, mysterious clouds, so they can safely, in the fog,
Travel into the valleys.

Overcast sky above provides the backdrop
For the coffee-colored pueblo walls,
Misty, gloomy, smoke trails
From families that still burn the pinon wood;
Going up, straight up.
High above, the smoke travels like a snake
Coming out of its adobe home, with no wind to steal its secrets.

Only time can reinvent you,
you can never urge your angels too far without their demon partners.
Your time and your demons play a child's game of frozen tag.
With every moment that we refuse to challenge ourselves,
We freeze with no one to tag us free.

Everything that you are now,
May not be considered necessary in your future.
So what do I have to gamble with?
What in my process will I die for?
Who is my opponent? Where are the playing fields?
What do I know of loss?
What do I know of lost?

I will return quietly,
along the narrow, hoofed animal trails,
Lay claim on the misplaced valleys in question,
Stomp at the frozen, open ground,
Looking for my reward;
Knowing that gift may be Death.

What do I know of lost?
I have not found me, still.
Passing away is a good enough start.
So I will bleed on the snow;
Make myself known;
Descend into the wide open field,
Lie down; watch the steam of my breath
Silently flow, reach into the misty gray;
Mixing myself up in the questions and among the answers.

I will die; that's what I know of loss,
There I will find me yet.

This poem, for me, represents one of those moments when a writer captures exactly how you feel (even when you cannot articulate it to yourself). I had to blink back tears in the window and I shook with the effort.

God Bless You, Man

2008-12-25T19:21:00.000-08:00

No choice but to continue on in the vein of cold. I can sit here for 10 minutes until that timer rings, I know I can. It's snowing out there again and the brunt of the last storm in a long series of storms will hit toward morning and through tomorrow. It's Christmas and things seem quiet out there, although I didn't stop in anywhere to find out. I'm melancholy, but the cold makes it hard to sustain; melancholy seems to need some warmth to feed it. Right now, there's too much survival instinct to sink far into the simmering, syrupy soup of it. I felt it in the car when the heater was cranking, slowing me down, snow slanting sideways in the streetlights of the main drag. Even the dusty blue lights of police cars reminded me of times when I was behind the lines, unseen, unheard, uncared for by the strangers around me. But now that I'm home, tending the fire trumps. And I think of the couple that flagged me down in the Plaza as I was slurking around, looking for something to snag me. The guy was carrying a big cardboard box and the woman yelled at me. I thought they were pissed off because I drove too close to them, and I was pissed off that they were pissed off because they were walking right in the middle of the road. But some pull underneath made me stop and lower the window. "Hey," the blond woman in cowboy hat and tight jeans said, "can you give us a ride my Dodge truck is broke down?" My stomach was tight, I was in the skin of my own slightly agitated world, and I didn't want to. I said, "I'm pretty much where I was heading...but..., sure, where do you need to go? The guy, big shouldered, mustache, goatee, sunglasses, very smooth, pearly skin, but wide-faced, maybe half Mexican or native american, said, "God bless you, man. We're heading down to the Sagebrush Inn." I leaned back and moved my laptop and computer bag over to make room for him. She sat next to me. They smelled of wet wool and cigarettes. She had battered brown suede cowboy boots, gray-blue eyes and a mouth that had extra slack in the corners. Her hair was yellow straw and curly. They seemed like country musicians and sounded like Texans. I asked where they were from and she said, "Houston or close by." She did most of the talking and I found out she once lived in Roswell and did a bunch of camping and hunting in the Lincoln wilderness. This was their first time in Taos and they were skiing, getting high, meeting people. She said she used to sing in a band, but "fuck it, that shit is crazy." She said her friends from Texas were afraid of New Mexico because "it's too wide open, too exposed." I was pretty quiet, but I liked these guys. He chimed in with a "God bless you, man" a few times, but not in a religious way. She asked if there were a lot of rich retired people here. And I said, "not that many, I mean it's not a retirement community, but there are some rich older people building big houses that sit mostly empty." He said, "Yep, the white man wastes. It'll come back to haunt 'em." I said, "There're a lot of people who could use housing and those places just sit there empty 3/4ths of the year. They should have to give up the space for housing." She said, "There should be a serious tax for that." When we got to the Sagebrush, he asked me if I wanted to come to their room and smoke a bowl. I told him that would be great, but I was off smoking, drinking and anything else for a while. On a cleanup period. He said, "Too bad, man, but God Bless. Let me give you some money." I said, Nah, man, no need." He reached into his wallet and pulled out a $20. "Take it, man, really. Merry Christmas." I took it and thanked him. She said they'd be hanging out at the hotel bar later if I changed my mind. Three months ago, I probably would have, but I couldn't enter their world, not right now. I couldn't even enter my world. So, there's my Christmas story. It felt good meeting them, Karen and Steve, and I took that $20 and went to the movies.

Mountain Man Mockery

2008-12-22T18:22:00.000-08:00

Hunkering down at the desk. Hat pulled tight on my head so I look like a mushroom with facial features. Shoulders hunched and tight. Upper abdominals tensed along with the glutes. Knees together. Nose cold enough to shock the back of my hand when I run it across to check for runnings. A little bit, yes, a little bit. I have thinly sliced yams in the oven turning to my new favorite snack chips (with a peppering of garlic salt). My toes are marble on a chilly Miami morning, tucked too tightly into my Sorels, which have trudged through too much snow to gather the firewood for tonight. Unfortunately, the fire is about 50 steps away at the exact opposite end of this house. Bucking the rustic, I've given in to placing an electric space heater next to my right leg. It isn't doing much - I have it on a low setting - but I don't want to use too much energy and I know heating requires more amperage than most other appliances. So, I'm tensing and squeezing and letting my nose run. It's not like this is Minnesota or anything. Yes, the snow is pouring down, and it's around 20 degrees, but it's not below zero with howling winds. My inner mountain man demands a lot more from me than this radiator-shaped space heater filled with oil (the only satisfying aspect is hearing the oil roil and pop as it heats up). I just checked and the wood stove is quaking with a cedar log blaze. It's gotta be 10 degrees warmer in the great room with that stove fire and the oven at 350. Whatever...it's winter, right? And the weird thing is that I'm excited that the snow is coming straight down, an abundance of small flakes steadily, steadily. That's accumulating snow. That's the sign of a dump. I'm going to wake up like a 7 year old on Christmas, before dawn, convinced I've heard Rudolf and Donner and Blitzen (always those three, no others) prancing on the roof, and wondering what gifts lay under the tree (I don't have one, but...we're dreaming here). But, really, I'll be waking up with a snow globe of dancing fairies in my stomach anticipating a snow so deep and creamy that it undulates halfway up my bedroom window so that it reaches my chin as I kneel on the bed and squint into the heavy, humming gray density. And I'll say to myself, "holy shit, holy shit, it's that fucking high. It is that fucking high!" And the greenlit digital alarm clock will say 5:26, and I'll turn on the radio to see if the NPR lady in Alamosa is talking in quiet tones about the record blizzard currently buffeting north central New Mexico and that the town of Taos and its outlying areas (me!) are getting the brunt of it. "Steve at the El Pueblito church called in a few minutes ago and said he measured 43" a mile and change north of the Taos Plaza. And he says it's coming down so hard he can't see the Chevron station across the road. Well, I hope everyone in Taos has his Christmas shopping done because folks, the highway department is urging everybody to stay put. We'll keep you posted on road closures." And with that I would loosen, knowing my work is done, and that I can sleep another couple of hours with the sweet thought of being snowed in, and that I'll have to don my snowshoes (ooops, meant to buy them at the Taos Mountain Outfitter Christmas party at 40% off) to bring milk (Silk) and juice (Superfood) to my neighbors who live on the top of a sage swell about 1,000 yards east of me.

That's the dream. I have a enough food for several days. I have my 'net, my radio, my phone. I have hundreds of books and, for now, electricity. There is running water from a good, deep well. I have two space heaters and 2/3 a cord of wood. My mountain man laughs at me. It's 8pm and I can already feel sleep in my legs. I'm giving in, that's what I've been doing lately. I've dragged this body over so many hills, and, in the last bunch of weeks, through protozoa and bone-splitting infections. I did not stop, but now I can. Weariness in the points of the hip bones, in the coccyx, in my right temporal lobe, just above the knees, in the Aquaman pit of my solar plexus, in my big toes, in my still healing left ankle, in the middle part of my spine, and in my eyes, the bottoms of the sockets.

There are more notes in me, but they will have to keep and play in the astral. The TV is in my bedroom and I will watch a movie and, if that is not enough, I will dig deeper into Reyes Wind in Robert Mirabal's book. That's that. It's 8:11, snowing hard, and I'm off to put a few more logs on the fire.

Love Your Ass Off

2008-12-21T10:26:00.001-08:00

Have you ever heard anyone say, "I loved my ass off last night"? or "I loved my head off" or "I loved so hard I burst a blood vessel" or "I loved my brains out" (we've all heard "fucked my brains out") or "I loved myself silly"?

Ooh, ooh That Smell...

2008-12-21T09:53:00.000-08:00

Do you know the smell of the late night? It is metallic in liquid form, melted from the people that walked earlier in the light, plying the "daily life." And that smell, that air, is filled with genies, they dance and swim in circles, and they want more; they've been rubbed out of their hiding places. Some are affable, some bent on destruction. These genies are everywhere, freeze dried, in spores, spilling from ceilings and crawling out of couches. They are smart and protozoan, just looking to latch on and suck nutrients. The later it gets, the colder they smell. Only a warm touch can neutralize the odor.

Union of Truth Digging

2008-12-21T09:29:00.000-08:00

I'm digging for the truth, but I take a lot of breaks. It feels good, the digging, makes muscles, increases lung capacity. But I'm used to breaks. Just as I hit my rhythm, as I'm about to be lost in the task, gone like the jiggling tips of sage plants, like the clouds in their dusk shapes, like people making love locked in dreams, unrecognizable, on the edge, of falling or flying, it occurs to take a break, to be found again, to agitate, to loaf, to slouch, to move about awareness, to taunt it and then to feel guilty.

Ze Moon

2008-12-20T18:43:00.000-08:00

I live out on a desert where snow and ice lay thick on the caliche, and I am weary looking at red, perky Jupiter out my writing room window. I want to listen to my body. It's voice has been in my ears and in my eyes forever, and I have heard, but rarely have I listened. On the doorstep of the solstice and I am alone. I remember little Jack, on a years ago solstice at Virginia's house on Valverde, looking out the window at the late, late moon rise, and intoning "ze moon, ze moon. Look, look, ze moon." A 2 year old mophead, smudge faced and naked, stalking around a bunch of beached, shroomed up wee hour revelers strewn about a room filled with couches, sleeping bags and piles of people's belongings. Somebody was stroking a guitar in the other room, and the scent of brownies and pinon logs filled the air. I sat on the couch under the big window with Jack and reached out addicted to the texture of his baby skin, those elbow dimples and that face of exploding delight. I bounced him around, got him all giggly and hoarse. It had snowed a lot that night, but the sky cleared late and the moon crossed the front yard above our snow-hatter cars and the leaning telephone poles. It took it's time and Jack was transfixed. The room was dark, but for the orange fireglow, and l could see la luna wobbling bright on Jack's amber irises. That was the solstice, right there, in Jack's eyes, on the couch with the rest of the people lying on the wood floor propped on elbows, heavy-lidded and happy, knowing that the longest night of the year was almost behind us. The moon slid toward the southern edge of the window where it began to disappear behind the neighbors' house. This time Jack asked, "ze moon?"

Part of the Circus

2008-12-16T20:16:00.000-08:00

Writing is hard, man. That's not what I came home to say, but that's the first thing that comes to mind. It's snowing, the darkness has hardened the frozen slop on the roads, and another fetch of moisture is streaming in from CA and AZ as we speak. A little while ago, I was in town, getting a package out through the virtually empty post office, dumping some garbage in a dumpster behind a place I used to live (and, by virtue of that, still lay claim to dumping rights), and having an easy chai at the World Cup where I found myself talking to a retired economics professor from the Univ. of Tulsa about identity theft and the blind trust that inhabits the other side of that coin and is essential for the human community to function. Usually, I avoid conversations with this guy, he's one of those black holes, a nice black hole, no dark energy anti-gravitational force, but I'm living "out there" now and he was the first being I spoke with today who inhabited the same time and space (I think). It was pleasant to converse. And then, with a little time leftover from the no-line post office transaction, I went over to Robert Mirabal's store in Yucca Plaza; walked through fat flakes over the sidewalk mushy with mashed potato snow plowed off Paseo. It was calm and moist, mild-feeling with all my layers on. Mirabal has just published a novel, autobiographical, called "Running Alone in Photographs" where he writes of Pueblo life through a female protagonist, Reyes Wind. I wanted a book for myself, and two as presents, and I'd been shut out when he sold out in 10 minutes at Moby Dickens bookstore last Saturday. Tonight, I got there right at 5:30 when the selling/signing was to begin. There were only 2 or 3 others there when I came in the door, my computer bag full of books and notebooks slung over my right shoulder (no room for the computer). A scruffy man in an orange cap with a salty and peppery five O'clock shadow, a bulbous nose and bursty bright energy, introduced himself to me as Dean and told me that the food would be ready in a few minutes and I should eat. Then I saw Robert. He came across the room with those wonder-lit eyes, somehow shining through the flourescence in their coal-and-white combo, long pontail, Levi's jean jacket over a brown suede vest over a buckskin shirt, faded jeans tapering to snow boots of fur and leather. When he got to me he gave me a peace hand-grasp, then a hug. He doesn't know me well, but he knows me, and vice versa. We connected a few times 5 years ago when I was hanging with his striking and skittish cousin, B. The one time that stands out was at the Taos Inn's Adobe Bar, on a snowy night, when I came to meet B and she was hanging in the far corner of the bar, against the wall, with Robert, her usual 9pm smirk on and a shot of tequila in her hand. Mirabal had one, too. I joined and we got to drinking. We each had 5 or 6 shots of Commemorativo, and the conversation turned to creation, the need, the heart of it. B floated out into the other room and we just talked about art being like breathing and food and exercise and religion and love, and the endless need to do it, or "do this", the drinking (which he said he doesn't do much of - and by his prolific creations in music, painting, instrument making, acting, writing/storytelling, you know it to be true). And without going too far or getting too reverent or sycophantic, or just plain cheesy, we fucking bonded, as artists. We hugged on it and he gave me eye-to-eye support and told me he knew I was a writer and creator whether I was doing it or not (at that time very little), and in that is the memory that stands, the communal bond. But it was more, too. It was a welcoming to this place where I now live on a level in the dirt and rocks beyond the people screaming me off my bicycle from their trucks, or the macho challenges in the bars. This is when I first lived here, before I was sure-footed enough and rooted in the history of this place to stand comfortably on its skin. And B was his family, and he was ok with me and her, although he did warn me that she had "the old Indian blood." So, when I saw him tonight, all of that was there. And that's not all of what I mean to say. What struck me tonight, in his store, was a sense of celebrity, the excitement of being around a person who creates in what seems like fearlessness, and that I am part of that circus commune of people who channel and entertain and spill and tell. And all of this is sounding cheesy to me, but what's more and at the core is that I feel this here about a lot of my friends and acquaintances. I'm in this humming, hodgepodge world of actors, writers, poets, acrobats and circus performers, chefs, performance artists, painters, potters, healers, filmmakers, monologists, extreme athletes, sculptors, musicians, toymakers, creators and interpreters of everything - and I freaking know them...they are my people. We are fugueing together. And I'm dumbfounded that I get to be part of it. My skin tingles. I'm forever a little kid invited backstage to meet the actors at a Broadway play. It's ridiculous. That's what it's like living here. And I feel like this about so many people. When my friends in a band play onstage (even when I'm the MC), I can't believe my good fortune to be part of it, in the organism, just in. It's hard to describe, because the ego of it is gone most of the time, friends are friends, but still, still...they are talented and creating and blowing people away, making them move, weep, leap, remember, fall in love, change their course....so much it dribbles into a puddle. And I'm not saying they are good, bad, better or worse than anyone else, it's just that it's a tribe, a traveling band of people, mixed and matched and mismatched, too, but all with that eye-to-eye support from whatever is the thing that drives creation. And I got that from Robert Mirabal tonight. Eye-to-eye, full person to full person. He who now has an oscar, a touring band, is in a movie about Georgia O'Keefe coming out next year, makes flutes, writes childrens stories and now novels....all of this is inspiring. And, at the same time, it's ordinary. Maybe that's where my sadness bled in as I left his store after listening to Mirabal talk to Ted Egri, a 95 year old sculptor who still sculpts (who looks like he has years left to go, smiling, sharp, clear-eyed and moving his walker along smoothly) and saying goodbye to a couple I know who run a fitness center (the guy acts, writes, plays and writes music and is a super athlete). I was walking back to my car in the darkness and I thought of various friends, their faces floating in front of me, and realized that I both love them in the most ordinary way in the soil of us as people, and also I am captivated, motivated, titillated and inspired by them, and feel lucky, giddy, a holy-shit-I-am-part-of-this grin in my solar plexus. And maybe that means I am home.

Blue Dream

2008-12-12T18:57:00.000-08:00

Waiting for the phone to ring in a blue dream, a full moon floating out the window. It may have rung, you feel a conversation and it leaks about you the next day, maybe for years. A fiddler in green satin with her chin poised to play takes up residence in snowdrifts, and empty houses, in airports, and in the bare orchard along the river of the canyon that you keep driving by, always wanting to stop and look around. You're slow in the waiting, in the listening, not sure if you've heard, or seen, or felt...anything.

Rabbit Redux

2008-12-11T11:39:00.000-08:00

A rabbit rooting dawn today out here on the high Mesa riding the white-capped waves of old volcanoes. No clouds with 2 below on the window thermometer, the caldera silenced, a subtle cherry haze made of woodsmoke and yesterday's snowmelt drifting over town way in the eastern and southern distance. Out here aboard the Watership (upside) Down, I skim along with rabbits, plump ones and stringy, sinewy, demon-eyed jacks, lured out of my warm nautilus into the newly bright world, stalks of dry grass glistening like Christmas tinsel. Those rabbits, the rotunds, sniff the Tiffany-glittering surface of the snow for rabbit food and don't mind my first, heavy gulps of frozen air. I walk in my rubber and leather insulated Sorel's (bought, I must relate, for $80 at the Boulder Army store in 1994) in the direction of a dark juniper covered hump topped by a kissy-lips peak. I'm hoping to find the rabbit city and enter that world, whatever size may be required of me. But once I start moving with purpose, they skip into the dark tunnels of sage, and I turn back to my vessel. Only one remains in sight, a tall jack thinking it's a kangaroo, bounding as if on a pogo stick, along the south side of the dirt road, keeping up with a sherry red prius going 30 mph in the direction of the gorge.

Nearing home I am halted by three dogs, a bony malamute, a shorthaired, lean-muscular african looking pup, and a wylie-faced collie-shepherd mix. They move around and in-and-about me like water, sniffing and smiling, rubbing and panting. I'm soft among them, nobodied, and wish to enter like Gumby into their world. But there's the house, and they see it, too, and it brings back memories of the former tenant lady who, I'm told, used to feed them porkchops. I've no chops, and realize that I don't know what to feed them. I've been petless my whole life other than Dannie, my friends' Newfoundland, who I lived with for 4 years, and had been trained to feed. I tricked myself for a minute that they were just happy to be with me as a being among them, but they wanted the goods and they knew I could, or eventually would deliver. And I will, but still, I'm left with a lingering sadness from this morning; the disappearance of the rabbits at my clodding steps, and the heads-turning-in-unison departure of the tres amigos, noses tuned to other gastronomical possibilities up-mesa. I stepped back into my house, still toasty from yesterday's sun, and sat to meditate, thinking that maybe one day I'd crawl out into the sage and find Alice's wonderland.

Jumble-aya

2008-11-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

On my bicycle. A Sunday, last day of November. Sun and clouds, clouds starting to win. Wind picking up from the north, the bottom of a Colorado storm nipping into the top of New Mexico. Flakes about to fly. I'm in shorts and a sweater, a smart wool cap and sunglasses, gliding by the still dark dirt of the fields of Taos' lowlands, sugary snow sprinkled into the furrows and between the toes of the cottonwoods edging the potholed road. Abandoned adobes look shut up and shivery, waiting for spring and new mud. No other bikers on the streets, save the two stick-thin boys with long blond hair wearing t-shirts and loose jeans, glistening red lips and laughter, doing wheelies off the curb of the main road near the do-it-yourself car wash. We had a nod passing in different directions.

There's a smell of burning pinon logs throughout the neighborhoods. I've a heavy backpack on and pass what was an overgrown field in the summer, filled with insect hum and ground dragging critters, but now looks like a place I could roll into if I had to, hide myself under the tentacled limbs and stiff stalks, put on my jacket and sleep on my pack. You think of these things on a bike, on a cold day with a pack on your back; where can you dismount and rest, sleep without freezing or being rousted as a trespasser or startled by a wild dog in the middle of the night? And it feels good to think that you can. My goatee is now thick and long, and keeps my chin and neck warm. Although I'm still on antibiotics, I have enough strength to pump the pedals and feel warm enough from the exertion. When I hit the shadows again, under the sprawling trees of Ranchitos, the road is icy and I remember seeing John Nichols yesterday on the trail, smiling as always, his body dancing jauntily like a puppet as his hands thrust out his hiking poles for purchase. Showing up. He's always there, on his way down as I make my way up. Always with a hello and those rosy cheeks, and clockwork happiness knowing that he's just warming up for a good night's write. He's committed, completely committed to the writing life, down to the cells. It seems like the only way to do it. I remember John, who is prolific and punctual, and hearty after several heart attacks, because he is the symbol of the antidote to the wanting of last evening. It is the battle of evermore and he has been winning it. I'm sure the battle raged harder for him 20 and 30 years ago, in fact, I know it did. No matter, he still wrote the night through virtually every night of his life and still found the time to hunt and fish and hike, befriend the locals, understand the customs, the flora and fauna, the history of this place. He enmeshed himself in the dirt and the changing clouds, the light. I see enjoyment on his face, not the need for the preciousness. It's all around us here. And I know I'm idealizing John, but I see him all the time, and he doesn't know this, but he is a guide for me. There's this part of me, and he shouts very loudly, that I will be giving up too much to settle into my writer self. That was the battle last night, and that is the ring, which must be destroyed. There is an excitement in me, an ardor for the life of words and breath and sending on the sensations and understandings that happen as I live. It's a jumbled soup and in frittered times the jumble lives upon itself and cannot be untangled because it takes a sitting, a walking, a contemplation of sky and heartbeat and the nexis of everything. The jumble of it all being too much. You can pick up the Sunday Times - and don't think that wasn't my first thought today, before meditation, before I watched the yoga instruction on PBS, before I read an article in the New Yorker, and then lolled on the bench at the World Cup - and in that newsprint you can read the jumble, a puzzle piece at a time, and even read it cover-to-cover, which for me requires being ill, and I doubt it will coalesce without the sitting. John Nichols sits. There are others I know that sit, or they teach yoga, and they have a gleam in their eyes that is muscular yet effortless, eyes open wider than most, not in surprise but wonder.

But I don't want to get too far into that. I'm in the jumble (welcome to the jumble?) without the Times, post-its littering my kitchen table, about to move, a football game to watch in an hour, a tooth to be pulled tomorrow morning, a list of attitudes of mindfulness staring at me, a caffeine buzz keeping my left foot jiggling, work beckoning and a sense of disorganization pervading. The bright side is I could be darting around my house right now accomplishing nothing, over-breathing and waiting to hit the proverbial wall. But I'm here at the keys typing, inspired by a bike ride, and John Nichols, and feeling like I'll make it to Mt. Doom and destroy this fucking ring if it takes me this entire life.

Hiking with Mr. Frodo

2008-11-28T22:17:00.000-08:00

All is quiet on the glassy streets of Taos on the Friday night after Turkey Day. I saw not one car as I made my way home from the Plaza. Snow coated the trees and cars, and melt water dripped from canales and slid down the streets by the curbs. A moonless affair, vaporous clouds bellying down near the tops of the still, dark stained trees. Not yet hard winter, but thick with moisture, a mulchy scent of sweet decay kicking up from my boots. My cheeks are cold to the touch, and the bubaha of scattered talk still rings in my ears.

And now it's the next evening, Saturday. I'm down from the mountain and still feel its heartbeat in my ears. My fiddler, I looked for her, in the red willows, and snow muddied trail, in the mineral smell of winter, and amber dipped tops of the trees spraying out their tips to the western light, in that glistening at the tips, in that whir of wind, in the frosted wheat covering of the green humps that lately had fed my eyes, in the pump of my own calf muscles, the outside strength and inner frailty, the snapping twig of my ankle, and finally, in my prayer, shirtless yet warmer than when dressed with my heat coiling around me, to the four directions, but especially the North, my compass. And she was not there, not in sight, or in skipping, no more dipping shoulder. The lullaby went in, and I could hear instead the ahhh, ahhh of wind rising up the pinon forest and swirling at the ridge, and the shhhhhh, shhhhhh, of its downbreath. I scanned in all directions and in all I saw worlds different. I wanted them all; wanted them bad. Give me brush and give me pen, give me sticks in the dirt; don't let me forget. I must have it. And like Frodo and the others, I fought with myself up there, alone, in the trees, the sun melting into a lavender serpent skirting the desert. All of those colors, those clouds, the spiked peak defiant and suddenly white, the semi-circle of mountains turned blue by the snow, the snow squalls crossing the desert and entering the canyons, some in bendy funnels lightly touching the land, some in wide brushes dropping down in bulk to sweep and wipe, and all of this lit by the westering sun throwing light on the sheer layer of cloud above me to create a depth of blue of both darkness and light, of royal and robins egg, periwinkle and indigo, and, improbably, powder, all of this, and ridiculously much more. I wanted it and wanted it, and felt the obsession take me, like hunger, I was hungry, literally, could eat a bowl of pasta as a substitute, a big heaping fucking bowl of pasta with thick cheese melting into it, and sausage chunks to be found deep in the tangles. But that wouldn't have done it, and either would a shot of bourbon or a line of good cocaine. And I thought of those things, too, and why I'm not doing any of that now, and what that really means, if anything. I realized I don't fully know, that I'm on auto pilot that has some kind of listening to it. All of that was happening just as I was putting my layers back on and remembering the cold. I remembered, too, the nudge by the girl at the world cup, that young blonde one from many late nights who knows those people, it was more of a squeeze; a birthday, she said, someone's birthday and I should give her a call tonight. I thought of that up there. Not that I'm interested in her in her tight tights and frosted lips, but I wanted all of that she represents; the wildness, the abandon of the alcohol and then the drugs, and the possibilities and the 360 degree array of people and the turnons they engender, the teeth-clenching, nostril flaring, flanks rustling, freakin stallions leaning over the glass table and then finding their way to the back rooms, unexpected rubbings leading to madmaxed eyes, and a pairing up of people gone all frogs-legs on each other, and I could be one of them (or both of them, or all of them!). And I wanted that, but I was up there in the woods with the Elvish and Kate Blanchette showed me the mirror, she knew I'd just prayed for guidance to the four directions, and I saw it and felt it; the day after, the come down, the low down, the lost man, the bereft motherfucker, and I was blown back on my proverbial ass, a cough and a gag, and still holding the fucking ring. So, no going there, Mordor; "too bad that" I heard in some parts of my Kansas, but I made it through Dodge City, and, fuck, maybe I'll go back, but I don't have enough oreos right now. And I'm back to looking and wanting that view for myself, to keep, to tell, to show, to rub myself raw on the misty mountains, take that little red bush on the side of the trail home to sit on my coffee table, sniff that briny, piny, cidery scent and can the motherfucker. Yes, I was getting scatalogical, not an uncommon state, even to myself. And I was laughing, too. I'm a funny motherfucker, mostly to myself, but some have seen and felt it. It's all ridiculous, and even that word makes me laugh. But back to whatever this is - things were calming down, the bowl of pasta polished, the stallions passed by, the hardon letting loose. "Let go, let go, let go. Just fucking let go." That's what I heard. The crows had been silent the whole friggin time, leaving me with my own personal Tolkien when I was feeling more like Chekhov or even Tom Robbins, for chrissake. But the Tolkien was the bigger, the more fantastical, and that's what I'm about right now, fantastical. I see worlds in everything, the rocks, the sky, the desert ocean. And it's an epic, a full on mad epic. And here I am still on the top of the mountain and it's getting dark, time for the epic to get the fuck home and eat some real pasta with chicken, not some metaphorical meal to keep me from thinking about doing drugs and how this New Mexico sky has so much in it that it reflects every little and big thing, and that it is a drug to me right now, and I'm obsessed by it. And I want it too much, and I have to let it go. Everything is reflecting everything, right? It's too much, so I'm snapped out, just in time, not by Frodo or Aragorn or Sam or whoever Kate Blanchette was (she was gorgeous.......alright, stop, stop...), but by an ambulance way down below in the realm of man sound. It's sad, that warbling sound, and grating, and doesn't riff well with the wind, but it gets me on my way, down and down, feeling ok, in myself I guess, and still hoping the fiddler will show up, maybe on a warmer day.

Thanksgiving Infection

2008-11-27T12:10:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving day with the sun battling hard against the slumping gray belly of sky. A few spits of drizzle slick the streets as Taosenos dream of plump sugary snow fairies still asleep in old leather valises piled over with pilled sweaters. My food is cooked...for a gathering of friends down the street, down a hill, in a thicket of old-time trees. My antibiotic is killing the infection up the root of my wisdom tooth, lodged near my jaw flexor, streaming pounding messages up into my ear, my temple, my eye socket and cheek bone. And it's killing any motivation for being sociable. But I gotta go. It's getting late. It'll be dark in a few hours. I'll say what I'm thankful for. It's a lot, I know, but I'm going through something right now. A meditation would be nice. A thought sorter for Christmas would be great. I want to be in touch with the world, and then, again, do I? Why not tomorrow? I have a story to tell about this latest medical system interaction, but I don't have the edge. Maybe I sit down for 30 and it'll all be better, eh? Maybe I get the love out to all sentient beings, and a few peeps from Jersey and Brooklyn, too? Ahhhh, books to read, soups to spoon, early mornings to feel an ocean of possibility. But, time to eat and commune. I'll write something tonight...this is what I got right now, alright? Alright.

Fiddler on the Hoof

2008-11-19T19:05:00.000-08:00

I follow the fiddler up into the pinons, trimmed by god like bonzai trees. Out of the shadowed bulk of the front side, I emerge into the quivering blue. My movement is strong, long strides. Fiddler is a woman silhoutted in the wobbly sun as it drops toward the Abiquiu butte. She moves with skipping steps and dipping shoulders up and up, into the umbrella of trees smoothing the rolling humps like velvet. I weave up the trail, switching back and forth up the steep pitch. She's lost me around a bend, but I know I'll catch her. I'm gaining strength again, my breath dropping back into my stomach like food. And there she is, where the sunlight drips through a slit in the rock, and splatters the trail around her black feet. She's playing notes that slow my pace, draw my eyes through the glade toward the upswell of wooded land on the Pueblo. I know in my heart that winter is settling in the aspens and cottonwoods leading toward Blue Lake. Fiddler won't be around much longer. My head swivels back toward the first foothill peak where I can see that the sun has not given us up. I'm slow-skipping behind my lady who alternates between a dirge waking up the ghosts, and an old-time soft-boot jaunt. Coming upon the highest knob, I'm turned with the trail back to the hills behind me and see a forest in Brazil. Can't be. I'm losing her, she's steadily moving. Her notes soften, lengthen and swoon low before piercing me on the up-pitch as I curl around the throne of rock that is my sacred spot. All I find on the throne are three small rocks piled on each other. I take a sip of water from my kamelback, and then remove my sweater and underlayer. She's gone, but has left me with silence and friendly ghosts, and a town a thousand feet below that starts to twinkle, one light at a time.