second to last

Wide awake past midnight. Caffeine doesn't keep Chelsea from sleeping, but I think it is keeping me. I should be so tired, and I need to be up early tomorrow. Today, I mean. But my mind is busy turning over thought after thought, churning together all my nostalgia. It's an unavoidable process. It is being reacquainted with a once familiar smell, home, or path. The faces of all I admired and the paths I once followed so faithfully. 

Right now I want a chance to know myself. Or rather, to find someone who can really get to know me. At least get to know how I have become whatever it is I am now. Which feels an awful lot like who I was a decade ago. I am afraid I have learned nothing, although I tried to learn it all. I think I would like to find a good therapist. 

I don't know what I need therapy for... just that it would be nice to have confirmation of all that I feel can never be confirmed. My first attempts at relationships, platonic and intimate. My failures in college. My inability to steadily nurture life long relationships (maybe because I never could imagine my life continuing this far). Looks like I need therapy for depression, but fuck that. Life is depressing, and should be. Life is also joyful, as well it should. We all need to take the good with the bad. It does no service to yourself or others to deny any part of this world.

But then I wonder if all I ever needed were a few close friends to confide in with all my fears and doubts and crippling anxieties. I never did have such friends, though there was so much potential. Timing really is everything. So is place. Unfortunately my poor timing seems to be turning into a clinical condition. At least it seems I may be out there in some textbook, already dissected and studied and buried in peace, or so they may think. 

But there have been moments, long ones too, where I think I was in the right place at the right time. But was I right? To have ever met my ginger english teacher, rugged art teacher, or granola eating pig. Only more time and more places will tell. 

In a few hours I will have yet another undeserved shot at righting all my wrongs. Spend some more time with Chelsea, at an ll bean sale. Drive out to the bee farm and continue trying to carve out a tiny space to call my own, no matter how temporary. Try not to give in to all the negative outcomes my eyes cannot help but see before my heart.

I am going to miss my home on our hilly ridge, between two great river valleys and the scores of mountains who made our skies so brilliant. I will miss stepping out the front door at night and feeling such pervasive peace. No hums, distant roars, or ticks. Just enough points of light on the distant hill to make you not feel painfully alone. And then looking up at her most beautiful tapestry, the stars and the clouds with theirs seas of blacks and blues, purples and reds. The moon in all her masks and all the celestial bodies dancing through the divine court. I will miss being able to feel alone, and knowing I am alone. I will miss the purity of the season's sounds. The beats of the woodcocks, the hoots of the owls, the laughs of the coyotes, the silence of winter, the rustle of fall, the solo and the duet of the rains and the winds upon what was once our home and our hill. I will miss the sound of Martha coming and going. 

It is so noisy and feels so crowded now. And I am not even in LA.

winter moon's march

I am very tired tonight. Maybe the past few months without sleep have finally added up to the perfect toll, or perhaps the impending weight of the future is finally becoming tangible. Dreams and nightmares are both illusory visions of one reality whose substance is made of their intersection.

the moon marches through february's final night
coursing through shadows of fall,
a winter who was hardly here at all,
spits us into our next season
like the dirt road spits you into the ditch

countless branches does the moon cross
as the sap begins it's flow
and the frost become dew
it's a year of fortune's tossed
through the sea and the storm

the ladybugs are wandering
the bluejays are mocking
coyotes make their den
and it is the last gibbous moon
i shall see from my dearest home yet

whose dreams i wish i had been able to see
for myself
for the terror
the tribulation
and the good times

the moon's march is on

brushing teeth before bread

It's hard to remember where I woke up today. But it was at Chelsea's. I woke up in time to get to the farm for the interview, but I woke up after Max had returned from work. He must have immediately started going to town on his new girlfriend, because I could not get his attention to tell him that he was blocking me in. Half an hour later I find his keys in a box next to the front door, and off I go. It is a good test drive before my trip back to Cabot tomorrow, and like a madman I make it to the honey farm just in time. From there my mom and Harvey pile into my car and we drive 15 minutes to the prospective employer's homestead.

It is perched on top of a hill, nestled on all sides by other hills. The day is grey and rainy; this is March weather in February. Standing next to the pond the sky seems to surround the farm. They have over 100 acres and have plans to purchase another 100. There are pastures, forests, and springs all around. It is a modest building for a bakery, like a longhouse; it has a packaging room, a kitchen, and what seems to be a temple to the oven. They say it reaches 900 degrees and can take 72 hours to cool to 350. The walls of the oven are several feet thick and it looks like some sacred beast. It has a heart chiseled from an old church above its door.

First I meet Brian. He seems firm yet thoughtful. I soon discover he is a philosopher. We exchange life synopsis'. Then I meet Amy and I can now be relieved that neither one is as pretentious as other's I have known. We talk for about an hour and then go to look at the high tunnel greenhouse's which are for sale. It is fun to dream... and more fun when you can dream with a belly full of yummy bread.

After looking at the greenhouses we looked at one of the "shacks" which hires can live in. It is a simple yet elegant one room tiny home. There is a chair, a desk, and a bed. My mom says it is just like Van Gogh's room. Except there is one extra desk and the bed is a bunkbed. This would not be hard to change. But then I glimpse another "shack", but it is across the pond and up a small hill. It sits in a field of overgrown pasture and the treeline is just behind. I wonder what it looks like inside. Hopefully I can find out tomorrow.

I was invited to a second "interview" tomorrow morning for a bake. I am nervous, but maybe that is because I do not want to invite too much excitement. I am slow when raising my hopes. My sails are heavy, but ready for any storm.

When we returned to the honey farm I cleared out a space in one of the barns for my stuff. It felt good. Restoring order to chaos is so satisfying, even if it involves sweeping rotten fiberglass and buckets of raccoon scat. But now I have one small corner in my new life to call my own, even if it is just a dark corner in some rotting barn's attic.

complete the following...

When I look at the sky at night I see through clouds thick and thin, past moons and planets and stars, at the light behind the furthest galaxy. I try to see through the light towards that first night.

When I think of my mother I can only hope to make her proud, because I cannot make her happy the way I knew her when we were still a family. But our broken family lived on and now is bigger than I ever remember; also she is very happy, even if it is different, even better than I remember.

From the time I was born I have wondered about the world and become lost in thoughts sometimes very deeply. My wonder will continue until I am dead, and then my thoughts will be lost to even me. At that point I may keep wondering why.

Sometimes I like to think about all the futures which the past has kept from us. All the turns I took which diverted me and led me to my current path. It is weird to be leaving the NEK, and even weirder to be looking forward to returning to the salt city.

In the middle of winter is when I cradle beauty all around me and try to warm my heart with thoughts and plans for the first glimpse of spring. I sew my hopes into the frozen soil.

When my father saw me trying he probably could not help but relate, because in the absence of ever really knowing my father I conceded to trying to see my father in me. I now have many more than one father.

If I were able to tell you it would be okay, it would. But I do not always know this. I have only ever been so lucky.

At times I wish I could do it all. I know I could. But there just is not time enough for all my hopes, heaped upon my heart, to be fulfilled in just one short life.

When someone who loves you realizes they are not in love with you, that is okay. Love is happy by itself, but with a friend it grows.

A person feels wonderful when they feel truth. The warm rhapsody of finally knowing brings such serenity. Like seeing every star in the night at once, a bright flash.

In the woods I found her. She is secret, but so radiant. She is mother and father, animal and plant, sun and stone. She pulls at the compass needle and turns her tides with no regard to man's carnal endeavor. She is everywhere, and always will be.

At night when the fire is lit I sit and I guard its warmth, feed and nurture its tender flame. I am a firekeeper.

I could be happy if only I could accept the suffering I glimpse all around me. Many times happiness ripens into guilt, like entering a secret garden and tasting forbidden fruit. Such fruit is unbridled joy.

Standing on the beach feels like standing on the edge of all eternity, the infinite on either side is vast and formless; only where they meet does life take shape, a spiral of exquisite detail down to the quantum level.

People are lucky when the times are kind, but the luck is sweeter still when fortunes forebode. Luck hides around every corner in life's labyrinth.

a tiny end, another beginning

After our conversation that one night last week I found a peace seldom felt these days. Before the lullaby of our breaths and heartbeats had carried us to sleep, it came. I had you so perfectly cradled in my arms you could not wiggle. And you did, but my embrace is steady from patient years spent practicing for these moments. Your desires had you uninhibited. When your body wants something you do things you do not understand, it is just a feeling which must be indulged. But the moment revealed to me a great vision when you finally let yourself go. You brought it to me when you returned from a leisurely splash in a green sea. Your salty waves carried lost lust ashore.

This vision had you laying upturned upon my chest, and I was the foundation for the comfort you were furiously nurturing. Since we were already pushing such fresh boundaries I felt to free to talk, and the truth in the words I found were of our great peace which had risen and fallen. I had never known peace until I had met you. I talked to you about the moments we had shared which were most dear to me. From the chaise lounge to the nest, in war and in peace, through travels, chairs and tables, our tiny moments of purity had really followed us everywhere, I had thought. But now I must wonder where it was lost.

In your peaceful afterglow, we froze and I was finally able to remember amidst the calm after all our recent battles. One story I had forgot, a tale from our antiquity. Genesis. It begins like waking from a dream. Remembering a wet summer night who lingers in the morning's feverish fog. It happens swiftly. We sit in limestone pools and feel the cold stream's current rush through us. We are not alone, but what we shared was only ours no matter who was there and what was told. You are virgin soil, beauty so natural that it inspires imagination. Yet seeing you left nothing to imagine; the glimpse gave only longing.

Water is draped around us, quickly trying to cool us. Our bodies flirt with the cool cascades. We are so cool. We enter the wet prism of Buttermilk's forbidden stream, and the black striped lines of Ithaca's curved geology frame us for our shot at love. The water falls around your neck and shoulders like a dress, with showers of pearly beads sprinkled upon your chest. But your eyes are open bright and as the scene all around us fades we join together in a spotlight. There are looks. There is touch. Below the shadows of the water's dark mirrors there are two creatures who desire. We give in and slide down into the next pool, together. This is how desire moved us. This is how time changed us.

Our story ends and the scene is about to change. May this young heart's folly never rest.

Thanks to Existence...

I enjoyed the weekend past, it was enriching. I brought so many books but didn't read any. I don't think I needed them. It's important to know when you need something, similar to knowing when you don't need something. Some call it moderation, yet it can be mistaken as something selfish.

My dad should be arriving today. I found more Chanterelles and even more black berries. There's a mixing bowl in the fridge half full of berries. I'm used to filling it with pop corn. Yum yummy. I only wish there was a replacement for corn starch as it is one of the only industrially processed ingredients in my blackberry pie crumble.

My smiles are now waves and I can only thank the existences for my present state.

Began a Love Story

Today I begin a love story. It's pleasant with the breeze and the sunshine flowing into the green. The Chanterelle's are up - the earth must feel like mid-summer although we are but one week in. My heart is very rusted from the past couple months, don't know why I'm still rusting in the absence of the snow. Probably is related to record rainfall. My smiles are still rippling.