I miss the big broad windows of Ojai. The open space. The secrecy.


I have ridiculously good news: I am coming back to myself. All things becoming clear, like someone wiped an open space in my foggy window.

To Do

Update domain.
Be grateful for jar of pens.
Buy a plant.
Read mom's book.

amen.

Coyote

I have rejected you, longed for you, lost you and sought you all in the span of a morning. I am finding you, now, again, in photos and memories and a song. At least I am feeling.

These morning hours of solitude are proving to be more useful than I originally thought.

Ojai, CA July, 2011

So much of you, and of us, is defined by the space that exists determinately between us. It is like the third person the two of us make. Always I am touching you, seeing you, hearing you through a veil, however thin, that hangs where I cannot get to it, can't tear it down. Sometimes the veil is lifted and I touch you soul to soul and look into your eyes and you are looking back. Like that time in the car, when you looked at me and let yourself be open. Then you got scared and lowered the veil again and I wait for you now, always, to come back. But I don't know. Maybe this is the human condition. To know that you are alone, no matter what, like Rilke says, that we would become guardians of one another's solitude. But I keep waiting. And sometimes, when my feeling for you is the most full, I am painfully aware of this thin separation and it seems like a gulf of lightyears. Sometimes it doesn't matter how thin it is, because it is a thousand miles high and a thousand miles wide in each direction and I never pass through it.

This morning on my way to school, I saw a coyote run out in front of me. I was just about to turn the corner to the long drive that winds its way to the art department when a great big crow flew out low and directly in front of me at the speed of light. Then, dashing behind it, was a coyote. It turned its head and looked at me as I stared, startled and transfixed. I was filled with so much electricity from seeing it, running, totally wild and totally unconcerned with me or with the city. Something in me shot up and was awakened. The coyote was lithe and light as air and seemed to me to be made perfectly well for all that it needed to be.

I ran after it and turned the corner but it was gone. The only strange thing is that all around was desert landscape, and I cannot image a single place where it could have disappeared to. Maybe it was a shaman like Don Juan and turned into something else before I could see it. Maybe so.

Later, after class, I sat down later next to a lavender bush to write about identity. I thought I might see you. I found a piece of rose quartz at the base of the lavender. All these things are stirring in me, big feelings like a flooding river or a heavy cloud. Someday they are going to break, and we had better have an arc to ride it out in.

 

I will keep waiting.

Vancouver

I have tried to eat the lumpy pears, they will not get ripe. I have tried to keep the freedom, but I can't seem to find the balance between the things I think I have to do and the things I really do have to do. I have been drinking vanilla rice milk, however, and never has it been more decadent.

All I want to do is walk, for hours, and lay down and write. There is no city for me to walk to from here. There is Culver City but it is less a city and more a movie facade of a Disney World-like town with pretend vintage street posts and cafes that are too shiny and too new. There is writing in me now, though, more than there was before. I have the small lino block we bought on Granville Island sitting on my desk, stately, on top of a pile of tiny notebooks, none of them perfect like those red ones with improper binding. I also did make lentils and brown rice, and I bought nutritional yeast. They were delicious. There doesn't ever seem to be enough. Enough time, enough work, enough food, enough writing, enough sky, enough distance to walk. For a few days though, there was just enough and not too much.

I'm trying to adjust to my new resident, my Chandelier, hanging, I am sure, uncomfortable from the the top of me. I wonder if it knows the important job it will carry out?

oh dear, the rice is burning.

Speed the Plow

Everything I write on here is so secret. Like little insects wrapped in their gauzy cocoons. Or like Simone's photographs of bare flesh and bodies hidden beneath surgical cloth. Maybe I write for myself, mostly.

I am up in Pacoima today. Or should I say, down in Pacoima. Down in the Valley where the smog hangs low and the swimming pools show the heaviness of the sky reflected in their glassy blue tops. I've been working on something lately, I've written about it in little bits and little pieces off and on and it's finally about to happen. I want to document it like I documented Ojai, especially because it is the fruit of that journey, the fleece at the end of the expedition. I've been sort of circling it low like a hawk trying not to show too much interest in case I spook the prospect. I've balked more out of fear though, than actual caution. Fear that it's too good to be true, fear that it's not possible that I actually could be, am about to be, as free as I think I am. Such a big change, such a big change in this world that is changing so much. Storms and out of season weather, the tornado's in Saint Louis and the great dragon that rocked Japan's shoreline and shook free the radiation from its concrete tomb. My mother told me Obama was on the air allaying people's fears about the radiation reaching our shorelines. It's not that bad, he said, just don't go outside. I never did look it up to see if that's what he said, but I believe her, I believe her. Everything feels like Speed the Plow, Mamet's play about the book that is about the end of the world. "All fears are one fear. Just the fear of death. And we accept it, then we are at peace."

I had a dream several years ago about the end of the world. I was 17 and in the dream was a map upon the earth and on the map was a dove, and the dove marked the places that would be destroyed. And the only safe place to go, was the highest place. I remember when Howard told me I would be a painter. I thought he was crazy. I am an attorney, a women's rights activist, an anthropologist, a politician. But paint flowers? You've got the wrong girl.

It is amazing to me how little we can know about ourselves, until some great event or some slow and consistent tapping, tapping etches away at the hard white shell that is the world and we finally break free. I suppose for me it's been a combination of the two, of the great events and of the slow tapping. For me it was a knocking. Something outside of this world, this shell, knocking on the door that is in the middle of my soul and it did not stop until I answered. Thank god for that.

I am moving to Santa Fe.

Judy Watson 

cypher

I know now what had been growing in me all that time. What I felt, so suspiciously, in the cavity of my chest. I remember how, even after the show and the residency and all that making, I somehow still felt full and unfinished. I felt like a carton of eggs with only one missing. I remember, too, how I wrestled with that feeling for months. The most awful sense, impending birth of something totally unknown. It was as if the sky was either about to rip apart or come together and I didn't know which or in what direction. The sleeplessness, the dreamlessness, the slow agony.

What was growing in me was subtle awareness. The eggs that waited in my cardboard carton where plenty, and they were fertile. You see, sometimes, when we are drowning, we get aboard whatever ship comes by. And we love it. But that ship might not be going where we intended to. And, if we are not careful, after a time, we will forget our original itinerary and be content to mop decks and play solitaire on sea-sick nights. And that is what happened to me. Ojai was the whale that rocked my ship apart and swallowed me whole. Only, instead of spitting my up on the shore of some far off land, it rather delivered me, piece by piece, back to myself. Like those bones I wrote about so long ago, it is the nature of something that belongs to come back to itself.

While I was aboard that rescue ship, I knew, I knew, that part of me was still drowning. I knew that something was getting lost in all that mopping. But great things carry with them great inertia and the ship that saved me was the greatest of them all. Ojai was just the beginning, and it was so big, and so different, that despite my weekly mandated journeys back into Los Angeles, it ripped up the soil long enough to drop seeds inside of me beneath the roots of foreign trees. Each seed, each vision I had up there, each dream, each word I wrote, each thought, lay within me growing and growing like different pieces of a puzzle. They got so big, first I had to make a small change, then another small change, then a bigger one, and then, at last, I made colossal changes left and right, up-rooting what did not belong and making way for the new, waiting to see what shape it would take.

Well, it's been almost a year. And the shape is clear.

But I'll tell you later....


goodnight.

Event horizon

Jingle bells. Jingle bells. A creature stirs, in the tiny dark spot beneath the floor boards. Suddenly there is light in here again. It's like a wide and steady swell, and I can see it, if I squint my eyes. It is the Future and it is worth having.

In my dreams these days there are lots of flying animals. Sometimes they dip into mirrored indigo pools at midnight and sometimes they circle around my drive-way with prey in their mouth. Always, though, I am watching them through a window, some secret peeking place. I am just happy to be having dreams again. Or to be writing again.

I am about to embark on a new adventure, but it is still a secret. It seems to me that great changes happen in my life in two year cycles. Someday I will make a map of this. Like a celestial map of the zodiacs, the different constellated phases of a journey.

Recently, I have been researching Einstein's Unified Field theory and the Coriolis effect. I find it very interesting. I am finding my cosmology again, the one given to me through Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. The one given to me through great and magnificent synchronicity.

I should go to sleep soon. A good day's work tomorrow.
I can hear my upstairs neighbor snoring.


Oh, and I went to Joshua tree. It was like fire that burned and ripped through the sky, and in the day time, snow capped mountains against desert landscapes reminded me of home.

goodnight.

I have a body that cannot be touched by caffeine. Or sleep, enthusiasm, or rest in any form.
I am helpless in the moonlight, like a bird falling through the air.

'till death do us part

My watch started working again today. It stopped, abruptly, the day I arrived in Ojai. No way to tell time, no way to track progress. Has everything I learned disappeared in the mire of re-entry? I never came back from Ojai. Not fully. There are parts of me left wandering around in the black and silver hills looking for white sage, looking for a way to tell time. Something steady to chart my passages by.

I haven't written in a long, long time it feels. I couldn't. I couldn't bare the feeling of the truth coming up from my body made of concrete and out my hot and living mouth. Words become real, they make it honest. They make me honest. But something in me opened up when I looked at my watch and it told the time - 1:43, Standard Pacific, something remembered, remembered the page and the voice and the story I'd been weaving. I think I'm on a long, long journey. Into some deep wilderness with no day and no oasis.

If I was a braid, tight and neat, a thousand strands separated into three, and woven back together again in a fish tail, then I have been unbraided. I've been pulled apart, and separated again, and again, putting things in and taking things out, undoing it all from me. Taking out the land, the animals, the love, the hope and possibility. Unbraiding from myself the memory of delighted expectation. Removing, one by one, the pieces of thought and memory, projected on the inside of me 1000 lumens bright. I lied, in Ojai, I lied. About the work and what it meant. That work was about abandoning self and choosing descent because of an inescapable love of pain. That work was about getting lost and no one comes to find you. It was about breaking a promise to myself, a promise of fidelity and chastity to my purpose. I broke my own marriage vows. It was about trust vested in those unworthy of it, and the terrible consequences of not following you're own inner authority. It was about how you can ruin everything.
Nothing in me believes that you love me anymore. Nothing in me believes in the future.

Quick, no one witness me. I couldn't bare the site of you seeing what I see. The hot feeling of your gaze on my broken and open skin. I am so ashamed.

Finally, my watch told the truth and so could I.

And they'll come home, wagging their tails behind them.

Psychoidal

Once upon a time I saw things
in my mind. I saw a heart inside of a ribcage, a woman who glowed in the dark, transparent. I heard a voice in the silence echoing in rooms filled with the images in my head.

Once upon a time I wrote these things down on paper and believed in them. My days were not so filled with activity and socialization. I had a lot of solitude. I do not know how to reconcile this.

If I was standing on a dark path and before me was a road that led to the East and a road that led to the West, what would be the way to go? How would I evaluate such a thing? It is at times like these that the little doll in my pocket becomes very handy. I can't hear her over my fears. I hope she jumps up and down and tells me which to go. I have a strange suspicion that she will tell me to look up, that no divergence exists. That there is only one path, and that path is the Secret Heart of things; not the reality of life, but the dream.

I hope my hands are almost all grown back now. There is so much mystery in what I write, only you could understand it fully. And maybe that is why I write. My rope, you know, around the North star. My bread-crumbs along the forest floor. You are the only one who knows the truth, the real truth. Please don't forget me.

The Secret Heart of Things

Every once and a while, I catch up with myself. It takes an awful lot of running, though.

In my mind right now there is the heat of Ojai, pale green shelves with bleached out deer skulls and sea-shells. My heart, I think it's half open, maybe broken, something is spilling out of it, contents, evidence. My limbs are bags filled with sand that is wet in some parts and dry in others. The sun either shines all day without rest into the night, or never rises at all and leaves me in the dark. I'm starting to get restless again, like I want to fly away from myself.

 I told Zanna how I'm feeling and she told me to pray, to pray in my bones. I like the sound of that. It sounds like the South, it sounds like Meaning. I think restlessness is a hunger for meaning. How could I have forgotten everything I came to know? God help me.

"Well, I saw straightaway that the lay was steep
But I fell for you, honey, easy as falling asleep
And that, right there is the course I keep

And no amount of talking
Is going to soften the fall
But, like after the rain
Step out of the overhang, that's all"

         - Good Intentions Paving Company, Joanna Newsom

True North

People are so complex. They are like many layers of something very fine and changing. Like baklava. Is everyone like that, or is it just you and me?

I had so many dreams about it all before this.

If my day was a pinhole photograph taken with one long exposure, would there be something steady and clear in the very middle, like the way the north star anchors the sky?

A moth flew into lunch today. He said, "An omen." His hair is brown and his skin is white with small yellow dots like confetti on his shoulders and a few on the tops of his cheeks and along the bridge of his nose. Something so changing as a man's face. I looked up at the moth and thought. "Transformation," I said, and he agreed.

Reality changes in the blink of an eye. Like a turning gel flash and everything is suddenly red, then suddenly green, then suddenly white again. The things themselves don't change, but their appearance does. This makes everything so complicated. He says there is the Great Reality, the ultimate truth, that we can't really comprehend or interpret because of the limitations of our humanity. But that the closer we come to this, the closer we come to sanity. I will pray, then, to the Great Reality.

In one of the dreams I had there was an ocean with great waves that came with strong surges and fell, invisibly, over us. Each one was poured through me with such intensity and release. In the other there was also a beach, and I a swimmer in its ocean.




People are so complex. Reality is so changing. Find something that can sit in the middle of the exposure and never move. Something to measure against.

Fire in the Skull

A terrible heat-wave has hit Los Angeles and Culver City has not been spared. My room is like a furnace and I am baked in the center of it on my bed, my great boat of books and pillows. I am likely to catch fire and everything will go up in a burning inferno and nothing will be left of me.

I guess there is evidence of my life extending beyond my body and these four walls, evidence laced in memories rooted in others. Others. God grant me a cool breeze and the ability to get out of here.

hot ashes

Displace:

4.

to remove from a position, office, or dignity.

5.

Obsolete . to rid oneself of

Mater

I am alive again.
Some great sage burns candles for me in a far off bathroom alter; marble and gold and white, white candle wax. My mother's tiny white feet with knees bent over feather pillows books in piles and reading glasses on. Hot tea everywhere and Dakini dancing on all four walls. Rescued me in the infinite blackness. Just one thread to pull through the needle, the tight weave, the labyrinthine cave. A Mother-light a Moon-shadow, a mighty space, a voice uttering in the dark by means of thought. Hundreds of prayers whispered in the humid night air.

thank you thank you thank you thank you.

A little nourishment for your belly a little beans for your bowl of white rice. Some sunshine in your spirit and last but not least, at the bottom of the box - what was it, Mama? Hope. A little bit of Hope, too.

and one tiny rose to remind you not to fall asleep -- for too long, my pretty.

inner space

I took a bath so hot, steam rose from my hand in the air like smoke. My skin is rosy pink, every inch of me is warm. I feel no pain. I am swimming. Inside myself.

I wrote this a few days ago.

Pain feels like death.
But pain is not death. Pain is life. Pain is reality so vivid it becomes unbearable. Once I was in so much pain, I thought I was going to die. I felt consciousness start to slip and, in spite of myself, something within me fought like hell to hold on. Something fierce willed me to stay awake. I would not abandon myself.
It was the will to live. And it was inborn.


Right now, I am warm. I feel no pain. Right now.

braided

I am at risk of falling asleep.

I put down my branches my berries my candle wax and marched to the drum-beat of someone else just so I could find a steady rhythm. I had to clear away the garden to see what would grow back.

Three things grew back in once voice now. I wish I was integrated. I am exhausted.

beadless wonder

I bought myself tulips. They are pink and white with long green stems and they perch happily in their glass vase that rests on my wooden table. Three tall candles sit next to them behind three seashells in a perpendicular row. I never returned after I left you last. I broke my promise. That night was too beautiful to write about, as if the writing of it would diminish its power like the telling of a secret. I wanted to keep it snug, wrapped up in the bowl of my mind, of my heart, the memories on file. In fact, I wanted to keep it until it dissipated into nothing but vague fogs of feeling and nostalgia because it was too beautiful to hold perfectly forever.

I have appointments to make, invitations to send, thank you cards to write. I have accountants to call, visits to cancel, and a grandmother to update. I have so many things to do but right now I can't stop thinking about the shooting stars and the Milky Way, and the owl that flew right above our heads. I can't stop thinking about the coyotes who howled when the world agreed nor my long white dress and the way the bright day turned black and swallowed everything whole in glittering starlit mystery. I think there were more stars in that one night than in all my 31 days in Ojai combined. I still don't feel like I'm finished with that work. It seems like I am waiting, still, for the thing to come and find me. Waiting for the egg to hatch or the acorn to open and grow into a tree. I feel like something is gestating, some dear notion knitting itself inside, one pearl at a time. I wonder if I failed.

Ojai rests obediently on the cliff's edge of my mind. It is suspended like a backdrop, there to remind me of the hills and the green places I have yet to go. To remind me of the magic and the secret questions I found in the pinkness of its mountains. Those places that call to me. What will happen to me if I get swept up into the business of making a life? What will happen to me if I get smothered by the literal and forget to breathe, to dream,  and I die wide awake? What will happen to me if I forget? It is possible, to forget, to lose one's way. I have done it many times. I told him today about the time I was 15 and left Canada to return to my father's home in New Mexico. I was worried I'd made a terrible mistake and I clung to my prayers wondering, if I have chosen wrongly, will God send a whale to swallow me up and spit me out on the shore of my destiny? I remember I was sleepless. I am not sure now what I believe about God and whales, but I do know that the choice I made was mine and mine alone and it greatly altered the course of my life. I have reaped the rewards and paid the consequences for it ever since. It's a strange thing to grow up. To see the moments pass and the experiences accumulate. To see myself walk through those things that seemed like they would never end. To see life begin again, sometimes making the same mistakes I've made before.

Part of me wishes to be alone again. The solitude. The singularity of things. The belonging to myself. The walks and the changing of the clocks. The sunsets, the roadrunner, the rattlesnakes. The photographs.

We will see what becomes of me, what I make of the moments. I know for sure that art and writing save me every time. They save me from the losses. Save me from distractions. I wonder if it matters to God what I do or what becomes of me.

If god is art - it matters.

retournee

My room is damp and feels like when I was a child and would nap and wake up in the moisture of Texas dusk. My skin feels sticky and the fan blows a thin breeze on my brow. Magic is alive and god is afoot. 

Last night all my dreams came true. I just didn't know they were my dreams. Dreams feel real and reality is a dream. What is it? A dream within a dream. I feel like I walked inside of a mystery. There is something mystical about Ojai. I can't wait to go back. Every time I am there something unexpected finds me. 

I have 80 pictures left to be imported from my show over the weekend. I can't wait to see the photos. I am resting before I have to leave again in half and hour. And then I will be back. And then I will write.

hypothesis

I woke today as though from a black cloud. Maybe my mother is burning candles on behalf of my soul on some alter a thousand miles to the East. Maybe it's the Vit C packet Ilya gave me that I drank before bed. Or perhaps it is the prayers I mumbled under my breath all night until I fell asleep. What ever did it, I feel like I am back inside of my own eyes looking out onto the world. It's so painful to lose that gentleness of self, that natural trust in the unfolding of things. I'm not sure what took over and possessed me -  my fever, my cough, my stress, some demon from my past or a complex triggered without my even knowing it - but it has loosened its grip and I can breath again, despite the pressure of infection in my lungs.

Nature is a curious thing. What causes my perceptions of things? What is the actual reality? I think sometimes that we do not live in reality, but that there is a state that we collectively agree upon as being what's "real" and that's the "real world." But it's not so real, I bet.

Mothe in the Logan 5/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

before bed

There is a bee trapped in the living room. It is inside of a beautiful honey-comb colored lamp made of mother of pearl and it sounds like a motor or an approaching storm. The lamp shade magnifies the sound like a cave or a seashell.

I wonder if this is a reference to my first days at the center when I said I would swarm low like a drunk bee and collapse on the floor and sleep for an hour or two. I am tired today like I was then. Tired and hot with sun on my face and my shoulders. I have to clean the kitchen floor before I go to bed. That, and finish sorting through the footage for Kevin and call my darling mother. Tonight I am in my home and my eyes feel dry and red and my even my tongue feels raw. But I am home and all is well.

Sometimes I pretend to be just a girl. With just a smile and just a face and a mouth that opens wide and beckons with white teeth and curling lips. But it does no good. Everyone knows. Everyone knows I have a basket of dreams and thoughts that do not belong to this world.

or do they?

Rose and Gold Ojai, CA 4/10 Lucy Madeline

The camera on my iPhone has broken. The shutter won't open. It just sits there and stares at me like a closed eye or a silent mouth and it will not budge, despite my prayers and petitions. So many things in life are like that. So many things.

me temo que

I have to tell you a secret.
The secret is that I have a Secret. It's small and white and sometimes looks yellow and it has a tiny beak that's also an eye or a mouth or an open hand. Its name is hidden under its eyelids and you have to kill it to find out. You kill a secret by telling it.

There's a strange scent of sulphur in the room at the moment. At least I am writing. But I do wonder where the smell is coming from. It takes a fair bit of distance and little bit of resolution to really get at something. Or at least it takes honesty. The secrets I keep creep out on lined pages kept in red notebooks and eventually they sneak out of my mouth and into the ears of friends, like bowls catching falling fruit or dying birds in flight.

My eyes are heavy again. My head tightening. Tengo miedo.

Tengo miedo.

settled

Sunday, May 16th is considered the most auspicious day of the year in the Vedic Calendar to start new initiatives, the Day of Lasting Achievements. 


Working at last. It's such a beautiful feeling; to be surrendered to something. A pot of pinon roast coffee, final cut totorials and David Lynch behind the scenes. Life is beautiful today. And it is beautiful because of this.

Sealing Plaster - Beato's Studio 4/10 Ojai, CA 

My Studio 3/10 Los Angeles, CA

bootless

Mood changes so rapidly. Exhaustion permeates every moment every movement. I haven't written in days. I fear the worst.

Time is different here. There is no doubt about that. Tasks accumulate in lists that never get looked at, nothing checked off. Words are different. I forget how to say things. I can't find sounds that stand straight up, poised on the end of my tongue. There's nowhere to be but always somewhere to go, something to do. My heart feels like a little tiny bird trapped in a cage with the door wide open. Little tiny bird about to have a heart-attack.
Maybe I'm the canary in the cole mine.
Something like that.

I want to do some body casting. I want to lie down and be cryogenically frozen. I want to go to bed.
I've had too much coffee. I think I'm dying.

I wish I could blame it on L.A. I wish I could blame it on Time and Place. Maybe there is no answer for these things. Everything seemed so much clearer before.

Deer Skull Lucy Madeline Los Angeles, CA 3/20/10

1. Record the sounds I need
2. Edit the video
3. Ask Kevin about the interview footage
4. Relax
5. Email the woman about WOMANHOUSE
6. Be grateful
7. Remember to look at this list

oh, and
8. I will not have anymore coffee today

keeping fast

I saw a rope by the side of the road. I thought it was a snake. And as I got closer it wasn’t a rope it was a branch and the branch was black and it twisted
and curved
pointing its small head

Up

Towards the sky

I remember

Ojai

I remember the roads and the snakes

And the black sky.

Wednesday

Mercury is in retrograde again. Yesterday, the steering wheel was so hot, I couldn't touch it.

I miss this place.

How many words does it take to tell a story? And how many hours of sleep do I need so that I can face the day anew?

A lot, said the Cat. A lot.

Shaman

two pieces

The writing, the writing. Always in the writing. If there’s anything I got back in Ojai it is my process of writing. That, and color. My all-black wardrobe has been smothered out in bright pinks, whites, and blues like the kind on Topa Topa mountain. And the voice, it has come back like a light that’s been lit inside of my torso, my rib cage, the cavities of my heart, and it shines brightly. It makes a sound and the sound is like the clicking of the keys on my laptop, like my mother always wrote about.

I am back in Los Angeles. The sounds here choke me out they come down on me like a thousand angry birds and drown out the voice, put out the light. I miss Ojai. I miss it. I miss it in my teeth in the length of my hair and the roots of my eyelashes. I miss it in the backs of my legs and the bottoms of my feet. I miss it so bad I am dying. I feel like a sage bundle hung up to dry out. I feel like I got shot in the head.

Estuary Gone 5/1/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

For the past few days I’ve been writing, silently in my mind, over and over, the things to say, the things I was seeing in my last days there. But I couldn’t pull myself away from the land long enough to sit down and write. I finally got footage of the swallows building their nests. And on that very last day, something beautiful found me. A gift from Happy Valley.

I woke up early, took a shower, made some tea, and prepared to leave for the morning. I walked up the long hill to where my sage grows. I had decided to make several bundles before I left as gifts and as tokens of remembrance. I made my way up the hill and saw that the estuary pond, which was full when I arrived, had dried out and left a brilliant green stain against the landscape. As I walked, I looked for a rattlesnake because, as they say, if it happens twice it will happen a third time. I moved carefully and found a patch of cleared ground right at the top of the hill before the path divides into two golden lines that curve down out of sight towards the sage-lined trail. The ground called to me and I lay down and felt my body sink into the dry hard earth beneath me. The sun was bright and the air was warm with a slight breeze. I could hear all the sounds that I love and that have become a part of me. The low drown of the bees on the wildflowers, the robins with their flute-sounding song, the cawing of the crows and the occasional call of a hawk. I could hear the wind and the tall golden grasses blowing; I could hear the earth itself in her moaning, beating, waiting and holding; the sound of life growing, up, and wild and into me. Life that spills and sounds and echoes forever and ever because it will never stop. Life Is. Life simply Is. Even back here in this loud city Life Is and Life Will Be. I have to hold on to that. Life is bigger than I am and goes on beyond me. And I am a part of that sound, that endless Sound of the universe.  The song of Time.

Hawk on Road to Besant Hill School 5/2/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

I gathered my sage to make my last few bundles, evidence, captured and wrapped of my time there. Preserving the magic after the ritual has been performed, like shamans painting on cave walls. I had spools and spools of embroidery thread, feathers, turquoise, silver beads, needles, purple and yellow wildflowers, two kinds of sage, and two kinds of lavender scattered out on my work table in front of two laptops, cameras, and my other equipment. All that nature swallows up all that technology. This is how much wildness I need. 

Man and Woman 5/2/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

I sat and wrapped and thought how funny it was that I had indeed not seen a rattlesnake on my walk.  I considered for the first time that my saying was wrong. I was contemplating how profound this new information was to me when Susan, Kevin’s friend who was running the center while Kevin was away lecturing, came into the studio to see what kind of work I was up to. She told me she had just found a rattlesnake. It was right outside, against the wall of my studio. She asked me if I wanted to come see it. I grabbed my camera and went.

At first we couldn’t find it. Walking behind past the rose bushes to where the kilns are located, we peered into the corner behind a large water heater. “He must have moved, I guess. Or she.” Susan walked closer to get a better look. My heart was beating. My finger on the trigger of my camera. “Oh! There it is, it moved.” I walked closer to where she was pointing and the blackest most beautiful snake was coiled and coiled and coiled with a diamond shaped head resting on top with two slits cut out for eyes. The coil was fat and got thinner as it moved up. Its tail, or bottom half, was stretched out and resting on top of a hose. It was big. I walked closer to get a better shot. It was like my blood turned to ice and fire at the same time. Something very primal happens when a snake like that is so close. So much death and poison, sleeping. So beautiful and so dangerous. Totally wild. There is no reasoning with a rattlesnake.

Susan wanted to see it move. I moved back a few yards and she threw rocks at it. Small pebbles that hit the wall and gently tumbled down. Then I went over to look. I realized the stupidity of this. But something compelled me. The snake had tucked its head away. We went around the other side of the building to come at it from a different angle and I saw that in fact there were two snakes. Two snakes with alternating patterns lying together in the shade. The lighter colored one moved slowly, slowly, up to the other one and put her head right next to his. It was mythic, like DNA or the double snake or yin and yang. The two, always the two. Two horses two snakes two sage sticks.  I had to zoom in all the way so it was hard to get a steady shot, but I took some more photos and we left them there. In peace.

So I finally got my rattlesnake picture.  It was my going away present from Happy Valley and from Beato. And that reminder of the rattlesnake: take off your sunglasses and pay attention to the path you are walking on.  

Everything feels different now. Different but good. It feels good to come home to a life. It is my life and it is a stable life. My survival is not dependant on the emotional and mental stability of any person. I’m not coming home wondering what the mood will be of the person waiting. There are people I love, and I love them. But they do not compose the bedrock upon which I have build my foundation. I am safe and I am secure. So I am happy. I waited and worked so long for something like this. Something real and beautiful. My room with my Indian print curtains and my little doll from Mexico, her hair made out of sunbeams. My Tibetan shawl hanging on the wall behind me, my wooden furniture my metal bed my art my bowls my incense my magic. My life.

I wonder if I am meant to find another rattlesnake to lie in the shade with? I wonder if I am meant to walk this path alone, or if that is even possible? I think my heart’s broken, or no, I’m pretty sure of it. I cried in my sleep last night. A white wild rose with nary a thorn, with her wild red heart in two pieces torn. I’m not sure what broke it or when. I’m not sure why or even what to do about it. I miss my Ojai, my other home, my wilderness my rattlesnakes. But I know I will go back.

Ojai Foundation - Night 4/30/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

The drive home was short and dark. I listened to my music and thought about the last 30 days. I felt manic and hungry for something I didn't know what. But slowly this peace starts to pervade, no matter what. It's a good feeling, a calmness that comes with no explanation.

I’m on my bed again, my great boat, my office, laid out with camera equipment, art supplies, books, and more thread. Two of my sage bundles need mending. Something in me needed mending, too. I think that’s what Happy Valley did. It mended me back up. All the broken out and disjointed pieces. All the adjustments I made to my natural order to fit into the world. I am still raw from the sutures, but I know I’ll be up and well in no time. California feels good, the sunlight. LA is still bright and Culver City still smells like the ocean sometimes.

Kevin says, “Even if you have to leave the real world, and go back to work and life in the city, I know that Happy Valley isn’t quite finished with you yet.”

I hope he’s right.

Art Spirit

If the Angel deigns to come

it will be because you have 

convinced

her, not by tears but by your

humble

resolve to be always beginning; 

to be a beginner. 

- Rilke

yin and yang

I have found the perfect tea. It is called Black Sash Tea. Here are the ingredients:

1. Oolong orange blossom.
2. Reishi mushroom.
3. Tibet wild lavender.
4. Holy Basil.
5. Lotus leaf.
6. Organic raspberry leaf.

When I opened my window this morning, this is what I saw. I shot these through the glass.

It is a beautiful day today. And I am on my way to see the River Bottom.

Love always,

Lucy

dead\line

It is April 30th. I have not written in 4 days.
It's felt like a tourniquet was tied around my tongue.

A few nights ago, I drove back home into the valley after 10pm. The mists were so thick I couldn't see in front of me. I was driving with my brights on. I heard my friend's voice in my head reminding me not to use high-beams in the fog. I turned them off and suddenly a clear path separated itself out for several yards, a few feet below my headlights. I drove home, three yards at a time, until I reached my front door in the diffuse darkness.

I've been talking a lot more about time now to people. Every time I say it out loud I see something I didn't see before. Last night I decided what time is for after all. I decided last night what the purpose of all this is, all this remembering.

I have been haunted by two things all of my life: my memories and my fear of the future.

The future stretched out before me in an invisible timeline that I have carried with me since I was a child. I have an idea in my head of where I'm supposed to be at a certain time in the future. By 15, 16, 17. Time was something to be feared, to erase, to deny, to avoid. Something lorded over me like impending doom. Time was not my friend, I raced against the clock, watching it, hearing it, ticking, ticking. The sound of the clock was like someone banging on my door abre la puetra are you done yet? Are you there yet? Better hurry, better hurry. I hated time and time kept moving like a river that wouldn't flow downstream. I have watched each year as another age passes and another birthday goes, and I miss deadline after deadline after self-imposed deadline.

I have to ask myself now, here in this timeless place, this Happy Valley - where do these deadlines come from, from what sources have I built my timeline, culturally, socially, biologically, familialy?

The admonition of my American culture is to deny time: erase it from your face with surgery, makeup, better lighting, lie about your age, hide it, cover it, conceal it at all costs, do not recognize it. Mourn it and its passing if you must, but most of all ignore it and spend all your energy suppressing it. Dream about living forever, eat raw and never die, drink bluegreen algae, get facelift acupuncture, even meditate the years off your face, off your body. Don't ever "date" yourself by revealing that you've been doing something for 20 years, do not show your experience or the breadth of your life knowledge.
Stop. Time.
And if you can't stop it, pretend that it is not happening.

But Time will not be denied. It so patiently, patiently passes on into the second and final acts until the curtain call. How can I live in peace with such a hostile relationship to the most inevitable and unflinching fact of existence?I always thought that time was the evidence that I am behind my fellows. Time is the marker that proves I will not make it because I have not made it yet. My memories are the way that I relive this truth again and again in my own mind.

In the last 26 days, I have come to a new understanding.

I wrote earlier, Time is the measure of change and exists because we remember. If we did not remember, we would not count, record, take note of the changes in the seasons, the light of the day, the birth and death of others. But why? Why remember when remembering is painful? Why not live in the constant bliss of the present moment with no past and no future, no measuring and no measuring up? No failing and no falling short?

Because: Time exists as memory so that I may benefit from the experiences of those who have gone before me. So that I may pick up where they have left off. Time is a gift to me, it is my gift. Memory is how I re-member the broken pieces of the lives past and pull them together into the fabric of today so that the story goes on. In this way, the object of the game cannot be to succeed, it cannot be to arrive at the right place on the timeline. It has to be to take personal responsibility for each moment I have, to learn from the past in the choices and mistakes of myself and of others to try again a different way, or to keep doing what's working. My faculty for remembrance is a Great Gift to me and to human kind. It is through remembrance that the universe is articulated and expressed. It is good to be older, to grow. To change and develop. It is like a second chance. Without remembrance there can be no creativity. Without remembrance there is only error and inevitable tragedy with no chance of rebirth. No passage. No diatoma. No transcendence.
Without remembrance, there can be no life.

Last night I decided the Future is not something to be feared. My Memories are not something to try to forget. They are the map. And the map leads to freedom. It is cyclical and never ends. It is a spiral that ascends and it is worth it. I will not hide time anymore. I will not fear the sound of the clock or the evidence of my birth and my passing age. Because Time is the point. I won't make a choice or not make a choice based on how much Time it will take or how old I'll be when I finish. This is my response to Beatrice Wood and Annie Besant. And I do it in remembrance of them. Because without them, I would not be here today. Without them, I would not have remembered.

I think I have to make a great change. It's like these winding roads up here on the way into the valley. Those curves so sharp you can't tell if you're turning or turning around. But each one is practice for the next. And then, finally, a real turn comes, one that changes the direction I am headed entirely. I think such a turn is upon me.

"And time, itself, the magic length of god."

careful

I feel like roadkill.
My hair is full of sticker burs and I'm sunburnt. It feels good. I laid out on the hill and let the sun and the wind bleach everything out of me and make me new again. Heaviness, and fullness.

I have a friend who is full of broken bones. It will take time, but slowly, if undisturbed, they will knit themselves back together again. It is the nature of something that belongs to come back to itself.
All there is left to do is wait.

from Latin, Memor

Infinite; the measured and the measureless.
Is time infinite, does it exist?

Time measures the movement of matter through space. Whether we are counting it or not, matter moves through space and matter changes. Galaxies collide stars die planets form atmospheres. Time measures change. But what if there is no one there to see the change? To remember: "That was when Orion was born, when Mars died, when Jupiter got a moon. When Earth birthed her oceans." Time exists only where there is a witness. Time exists because we remember.

The swallows are building their nests behind the wire mesh now. It was designed to keep them away, out of human traffic. The swallows don't know this. They only know that somewhere in them, so deep it is imperceptible, is the understanding that this is where they are supposed to build their homes. It is so true to them it is fact unnoticed. They cannot speak it, even if they could speak. They cannot think it. They remember.

My copy of the Nag Hammadi library arrived today.

From Three Forms of First Thought:

"For I shall tell you a mystery of this age and tell you about the forces in it. Birth beckons birth, hour gives birth to hour, day gives birth to day. Months inform the month, time goes around following time. This age was completed in this fashion, and it turned out to be short, as a finger releases a finger and a joint separates from a joint."  

This morning when I woke up, there were people around, I could hear them. Moving and speaking, voices. Telephones. Footsteps. I worked late and slept late. It takes so much energy to surrender.
That's the humor of it. And this is my vocabulary today:

Memory:

The length of time over which the recollection of a person extends.

So as to keep alive. 

Record:

To take to heart. 

To remind.

To bare witness. 

Remember:

To bear in mind. 

To think of or recall with some kind of feeling, intention. 

Recollect:

To collect or gather.

To bring back again. 

Light is the means by which matter becomes conceivable, and can be remembered. Collected. Again and again. 

Speaking of time: I can't believe the coffee shop closes at 5. What kind of people can live in a world where there's no coffee shop after 5pm?

Not I, said the cat. Not I. 

through the looking glass

midnight

Tonight I can't get my thoughts straight. They're all mixed around like egg whites.
I put on my blue and white striped espadrilles and my black fur collared sweater and walked outside to talk with the moon.

Lights from the neighboring ranch diffused through the thick mist in the valley like a soft white blanket. The moon is so big and so bright I can see the ground in front of me.  No creatures, all clear. And when I turn to look behind, nothing but stars and blackness. There is a chorus of a thousand frogs echoing in the night. I feel better out here. Out here everything feels clear.

It's an unusual night. There are no boogie monsters. Only some noisy rats and dreaming quail. But everything keeps its distance. I am utterly bathed in moonbeams.

I think the important thing to remember is that, ultimately, everything is going to be okay. That is so hard for me to believe. But it is a mistake to think otherwise. I have a very tender heart.

Today I talked with Robert for a long time. Or at least it seemed a long time, anyway. I listened while he talked about life, the various variety of religious and psychedelic experiences, art, art school and love. We talked about what women have to do or give up if they want to have children. That's never actually seemed real to me before and it made me afraid. I want to have children. I won't give up art. Or love. Or would I? I can't believe in the counting anymore. That there's only one equation.

You say that 4+1=5 but so does 3+2. That's more like it.

The owl is right outside my window hooting.

She says, "Everything is going to be alright. Get some sleep, you'll see."

I believe her, I believe you.
please let it be so.

You and Me

1. Into or in a condition of unity,compactness, coherence.

2. Formed or produced by the uniting of things. 

3. Taken or considered