The Magic Desert of Desertlandia...my new blog column for Riverside CA Press Enterprise

I'm glad that I was able to push through my "worried-about-pregnant-daughter-Tarah-and-Little-Guy" jitters today to pen my first Press-Enterprise "Inlandia Literary Journeys" blog, "Welcome to the Magic Desert of Desertlandia!" I'm part of a phalanx of terrific writers (and friends!) who writing for this project! ENJOY and feel free to (please!?) comment! Hurray!  Read more at this link: 

http://localauthors.pe.com/uncategorized/welcome-to-the-magic-desert-of-desertlandia/

Where Are All the Tipis? Agua Caliente Cultural Musem in Palm Springs challenges Stereotypes of American Indians with a new art exhibition

"Are there still Indians here in Palm Springs?" Yes. "So, where are all the tipis?"  There are no tipis in Palm Spring, and there never were....A new exhibition, "Where are the Tipis? Changing Perceptions About Indians" is a quirky, first-of-its-kind art show at the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum that was created in response to these oft-asked questions.

Film stereotypes exhibited at Agua Caliente Cultural Museum. 
Photo: Agua Caliente Cultural Museum.

According to the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum's Executive Director, Dr. Michael Hammond, inquiries about the Palm Springs area Indians, who are mostly of historical Cahuilla origins, and how to find tipis in Palm Springs, are the two most frequently asked questions museum staff and interpreters receive from the thousands of international visitors who stop by this small, but fierce, downtown Palm Springs museum.

The goal of the exhibition, according to former museum curator Dawn Wellman, who helped research and curate the show, was simple. "We wanted to answer tourists' questions, to dispel some of that and let people know that not all Indians are Plains Indians and wear feathered headdresses, ride horses or carry tomahawks," says Dawn Wellman. "It is an exhibition that is rich in humor and optimism, as well as historical fact."

Cartoon at Agua Caliente Cultural Museum exhibition. 
|Photo:Ruth Nolan

As a key feature of the exhibition, the museum commissioned the renowned artist Gerald C. Clarke, Jr., of the Cahuilla Band of Cahuilla Indians near Anza, who is also Chairman of his tribal council's board and Chair of the Idyllwild School for the Arts, to create art for the exhibition. Clarke's finished piece for the exhibit is comprised of two, life-sized cutout dolls of a Native American man and woman, with interchangeable, stereotypical clothing that ranges from bucksin outfits and headdresses to prison outfits to sloppy t-shirt and baggy shorts, images which are not accurately representative of our country's hugely diverse Native population. "Underneath these ridiculous costumes," notes Hammond, "are a man and a woman, free of stereotypes."

According to Hammond, in curating the exhibition, which is suitable for adults as well as children, "We touched on all of the major elements we thought should be included, and we tried to do so with a gentle sense of humor, so that people aren't totally offended, but do emerge from here with a new perspective" noting with a satisfied chuckle that many visitors leave the museum after viewing the exhibition, shaking their heads and commenting, with a new sense of awareness, "I can't believe John Wayne said that," in reference to a withering and historically inaccurate statement - posted on the wall as part of the museum's exhibition - made by the "cowboy" film hero about Native Americans made to Playboy Magazine in 1971.



Gordon Johnson, a Cahuilla-Cupeno and distinguished author of "Rez Dogs Eat Beans: and Other Tales," notes the value of the exhibition. "Exhibits like the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum's are important to dispel the stereotypes and wake people up to the fact Indians are evolving, they are not stuck in time," he says. "Many people form their impressions of Indian culture from watching movies -- old cowboy and Indian movies at that. It is surprising, even today, people expect and are disappointed when they don't find Indians riding horses and living in tipis. Many want Indians to live up to the romanticized 'noble savage' image they've been spoon fed by media."

In contrast to this expectation, Cahuilla Indians of the Palm Springs and surrounding areas traditionally lived in dome-shaped or rectangular type of structure, according to Cahuilla anthroplogist Dr. Lowell Bean, known as a "kish," up to 15-20 feet across and and by covering bent willow branches with palm fronds and other available plant materials. In addition, tipis, made from large animal hides, are largely traditional to our country's northern Plains Indians, who had, until the 20th century, ready access to free-ranging buffalo. In addition, in contrast to the elaborate, beaded leather clothing common to the Plains Indians, the Cahuilla dressed in little clothing -- made of palm fronds, deerskin and tule -- during the frequent warm desert weather, and in colder months, wore capes made of deerskin or rabbit fur to stay warm.

Stereotype exhibited at Agua Caliente Cultural Museum.
 | Photo:Ruth Nolan

The exhibition also showcases liquor bottles made in the image of war-bonneted "cigar store Indian," with photographs of some of the area's real Native American people. There is a screen with a continous loop of cartoons playing, including such longtime favorites as Bugs Bunny, that have perpetuated myths about American Indian people, and cartoons with characters that challenge these stereotypes. There are also depictions of cultural stereotypes that are still perpetuated through commercial culture, including a large rendering of the "Indian Princess" image that is found on the Land O'Lakes brand of butter, and a display of "Native American Barbie," dressed in buckskin, a war bonnet, and holding a baby in a papoose, as contrasted next to an Anglo Barbie, who is wearing contemporary clothing.

Other important parts of the exhibition include a list of the 600 federally-recognized American Indian tribes, along with the 229 Alaskan Indian Villages, all with their own language, its own beliefs, its own complex kinship systems, as well as a display referencing the currently-politically-charged issue of professional sports teams mascots, such as the Washington Redskins, which uses words and symbols that are highly offensive to many American Indians.

"It was a little bit risky to do what we've done," notes Ashley Dunphy, current acting curator at the museum, who also helped create the exhibition. "It's not common for Native American art exhibitions to include anything referencing the demeaning and two-dimensional caricatures of Native people that we've included in our exhibition. But we felt it was important to present some of this, to help people identify their prejudices, and then, offer alongside of that, an accurate representation to help them expand their awareness and understanding of the true lives and cultures of our country's Native Americans, including those with roots in Palm Springs.

Display at Agua Caliente Cultural Museum. | Photo:Ruth Nolan

Display at Agua Caliente Cultural Museum.
 | Photo:Ruth Nolan

Agua Caliente Museum acting curator Ashley Dunphy. | 

Photo: Ruth Nolan.

Political cartoon at Agua Caliente Cultural Museum exhibition. | 
Photo courtesy of Agua Caliente Cultural Museum.

You can read this article on the multi-award-winning KCET Artbound 
Los Angeles website at: http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/counties/riverside/indian-stereotypes-agua-caliente-cultural-museum.html

I Am A Featured Workshop Leader on Poets and Writers Blog...A Really Big Deal!

to say I'm floored and honored is an understatement... most of all, proud of and inspired by my brave, brave writers!

Ruth Nolan Encourages Workshop Participants to Speak Out About Suicide

Read more from Readings and Workshops

A blog from: The Staff of Poets and Writers

Posted by RW Blogger on 4.26.13

The (In)Visible Memoirs Project runs no-cost, community-based writing workshops throughout the state of California, with the aim of creating a literary landscape that pushes back on dominant literary discourse’s exclusionary practices. Between January and April, writer Poets and Writers supported writer Ruth Nolan taught an (In)Visible Memoirs workshop at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California. Project director Rachel Reynolds writes about the workshop.

The thing about invisibility is that there are real risks to refusing its cloak. Invisibility counts on these risks for its effective deployment. Anyone who has found their space at the periphery—which is more of us than not—knows how terrifying it can be to push back the curtain and demand to be counted. As the person at the helm of programming for the (In)Visible Memoirs Project, I am constantly awed by how many people—instructors, participants, and community sponsors alike—are ready to let their stories ring out.

According to the AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention), nearly 40,000 people took their own lives in 2010. In the same year, the AFSP identified nearly 460,000 attempted suicides. Tallied together, roughly half a million people navigated suicide directly in 2010. The lives of countless others were impacted too, as friends and family of those directly involved struggled to walk this terrain.

When professor Ruth Nolan responded to my call for new (In)Visible Memoirs Project workshops this past fall, she wrote, “All too often, suicide survivors become victims, too, of social prejudices and judgments, and having experienced this myself, I have come to realize there is a huge need to give suicide survivors a safe and productive space to write, identify, and heal.” We leapt at the chance to support her in her goal of providing the first-ever workshop for people who live in the Palm Desert region and have lived with the impact of suicide.

Ruth Nolan is a force. A professor at College of the Desert in Palm Springs, she teaches writing and literature in addition to advising the college literary magazine. She is a widely published poet and prose writer, and an editor to boot. Armed with both personal experience and the chops required to deftly usher writers into a carefully crafted safe space, we knew she would provide a transformative experience for her workshop participants. What we could never have predicted, though, was just how far she’d take them or how essential the space she held was.

Meeting with seven participants—who spanned a forty-year age range and various social and ethnic identities—Ruth discovered that many of them had either wanted or been invited to speak at public suicide awareness events in the region but then felt their story was too dark, or worse, been asked not to share it. Immediately, Ruth made space for sharing these stories a workshop priority. What began as a shedding of silence within the confines of workshop meetings gained momentum and bloomed into multiple readings at public events. As I write this today, Ruth and members of her workshop have just finished recording some of their work for radio broadcast. From silence to center stage in the course of a twenty-hour workshop—Ruth and her workshop participants are writers of the fiercest sort.

Photo:L to R: Darlene Arciga, Tim Johnson, Kimberly Martinez, & Ruth Nolan. Credit: Ruth Nolan.
Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets and Writers.

April, Me, And A Common Poorwill.....

It's April 2013, and just as I have in many an April past, since I've lived in the exotic desert climate in one of California's hottest deserts, in the Coachella Valley,  I hear tonight the chirping, mid-night mating song of a lone bird, known as a Common Poorwill, indigenous to this part of the desert.

There's one here in my neighborhood - just one in this desert block, which seems right on the mark, since this is a bird that claims a wide territory, room for only one bird, and it's not clear to me if its a female or male. It's been one year exactly since I heard the midnight April song of this very same species of bird, the song of another long-flyer making its dark, cheerful song,  one year since  I moved out of my house on California Drive in the Palm Desert Country Club, a nice, open ceiling, tile-floored house I owned for ten years. And it sort of feels like I got a divorce, or like I'm reminiscing over the bittersweet territory of a lost, long-term love relationship, with all is good and bad components entwined.

Last April, at this exact time, before the dogs and cat and I were learning to negotiate life in the much-smaller, one bedroom duplex that we are living in now, I was spending every minute of my week-long spring break from my teaching job, as well as a few extra days on either side of that week, packing, sorting, renting a Uhaul, gathering moving help, doing the hard physical work of lifting, loading, unloading and cleaning, and generally wondering if I had completely lost my mind, or if I was making the wise passage  into a new, lightweight and creatively transformational phase of my life (i.e., carving out more time to write, something I'd been dreaming of for years; freeing myself from the financial burden of a steep monthly mortgage payment; making a clean break with a tricky and fairly troubling chapter of my life, and so forth.)

Most people I mentioned this house-selling thing to weren't exactly enthused. Most grew quiet, and I could see the look of sympathy cross their brows, even if they smiled and said "what a wonderful change!"  Many came right out and asked if I was in foreclosure; I could tell that most assumed, even when I assured them otherwise, that this was an unfortunate thing; that it probably had to do with me not being able to afford the house anymore. Not the truth. It was never cheap, it was never easy, but it wasn't cheap. Owning a house! The American Dream! And for a single-parent, single woman! Almost a miracle!

So why did I sell my house, and was it the right thing to do?

My house. It wasn't my dream house, but it was my house, as good as any and the pleasant place of many good hours of sleep. Most of all, it was my sense of security: the satisfaction of making a commitment to my first long-time home; the safety of knowing, until the whole world changed, that I had a terrific financial investment I could draw on when the time was right, my back-up plan, should all else fail.  the problem with this American Dream is that it did fail, and it failed hard. Not only once, but several times, in a slow-sequence, slow-rewind type of repeat, something I'd never dreamed was possible, until it was in my face. Like so many others, I lost my investment - although grateful and fortunate that I hadn't invested a down payment in the home -, and sadly had to accept that the considerable nest egg I had relied on in my mind could no longer sustain my sense of financial security into old age.

I also had to face the facts: for far too long, I'd been sinking far too much money into a high monthly mortgage, an investment that now had no viable return for what I was putting in out of my hard-earned wages.  I'd done everything right: I could afford it, and my interest rate was fixed at a terrific low rate, but it was still squeezing far too much money out of my earnings, even as I was losing side work I'd relied on, teaching workshops and other side gigs in addition to my full time job as a professor,  due to a tight economy. In addition, the house needed work. I'd bought it almost brand new, but after ten years, it was time for costly repairs. It seemed like I was always consumed by something or other: removing the spent-out dishwasher, and living with a gutted-out-hole under the counter for a year, after deciding I didn't want to invest $500 on a new one; fixing a broken drawer; and replacing the front gate to the tune of $700 when the old wooden one finally caved in. I even ended up cutting down (with expensive, hired help of course), the three giant, needle-armed palo verde trees in my front yard. One split in half one night and fell across the driveway; another blew over in a rogue windstorm; the third was felled by a termite infestation. As a single woman, struggling to keep home ownership together by myself, financially and physically, it all just got to be too much.

There were also other factors. I went through a string of wild-eyed, completely enthralling and then debilitating love relationships in that house, that left me depleted and more alone than I ever could have imagined I'd be. My only child grew up, got married, and moved away. More loneliness and a sense of abandoned grief. I endured, for more than five years, vicious, hating, harassing neighbors from across the street who took every opportunity they could to yell at me, scream *fuck you*, call the police on my barking dogs and many other imagined things, and even throw eggs at my car, and friends' cars, when left in the driveway. California Drive was also a busy street, a sort of thruway cutting through a neighborhood between busy avenues, and the constant traffic, as well as the heavy traffic noise from a nearby 6-lane boulevard, always made me feel a bit on edge. Right before I put the house up for sale, too, there was a drive-by shooting in the street in front of my house. Increasingly, it felt like a scary place to live, especially by myself.

My house. At 76530 California Drive. It was a house built of stucco, a house with a red tile roof, a house with a wall around the back and side yards and most of the front, a house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a two-car garage, a nice patio and a pool. It was my house, and now it's not.  In a short, six-month period, the first half of the year 2012, I went into an all-too-familiar downward de-mobilizing of living circumstances and business status, like millions of other Americans have also done since the stock market crashed in September, 2008. It was something I'd never imagined; like all others such as I from the tail end of the Baby Boom/leading edge of Generation X crowd (born in the early to mid 1960's), I'd only ever known the sharp, ever-steady curve of upward mobility my entire life, and jumping blithely into owning my first home at age 38 had seemed so easy. Agonizing about whether to sell or not to sell, during a three-year period, and finally deciding on doing a short sale,  was anything but easygoing. It cost me many tears, many sleepless nights, and lots of pages of what I see now as completely unnerved and on-the-edge poetry that I wrote during this time.

This year, I often find myself missing what still feels like my home. As oppressive as owning that house had become  - the list of repairs and problems is endless - the carpets were thrashed and needed replacing; the pool pump was shot and the hot tub heater was broken; I had been enduring a horrific citrus rat invasion that I couldn't curb, no matter how many instant-zapper traps I set out during that last summer that I lived there (22 rats dead in three months, and more still coming!) it was still my home, and a part of my is in deep mourning for what I willingly parsed away. Another part of me is in a sense of all-too-buoyant relief - the kind of relief you get when you've been carrying a heavy backpack uphill on a hike, and put the pack down, and almost spring out of your socks from the release of the weight. it's a sense of freedom, lightness, but it's almost too much to bear, like staying out in the sun at the beach far too long, knowing you're getting sunburned, far more than the tan you thought you deserved.

I miss a lot of things. Things that I'll never get back. Loss, and losing things, was the reason I sold the house, made a run for it - as fast as a person can do, when negotiating what to do with ten years of accumulated things that had added up between my daughter and I....I miss my daughter, of course. It was the house she grew up as a teenager and young adult in. I miss the pool parties, I miss the citrus trees and palm trees that I nurtured and watered; I miss the garden I cultivated. I sometimes think about the Christmas tree that I planted outside the living room window after the holiday season in 2004; it was only five feet high and easily managed when I planted it, and over 30 feet high and still covered with my loving decoration of permanent outdoor ornaments by the time I moved. I miss the bare-boned palappa, a wooden-framed structure over my old patio, which had at one time been completely covered with palm fronds; with every big windstorm, a few more fronds had blown off. By the time I moved, there were only three withered fronds left. 

I miss the *fuck you* that I scratched into a bedroom wall one night in an angry-at-a-missing-lover rage, and I miss the holes I kicked into the stucco walls the few times I had bad news I couldn't bear. Like the time my partner, who was living with me for a good two years out of that latter ten, committed suicide, leaving one day with a gun, never to return. Like the time my daughter told me she'd had been date raped by a boyfriend, months after it happened and the perpetrator long gone. Like the time a man who romanced me and asked me to marry him (I said yes, in a loving blaze) disappeared on me without a trace. I had a stalker for several years, necessitating a restraining order and a good measure of fear, as well.  But I lived life in that house, and I lived it long and hard, I lived it with people, with lovers and family and friends, I lived it in quiet peace and in raging arguments, I lived it alone in tears and overwhelming feelings of abandonment, I lived it in the giddy uplift of a poem well written, of a book edited, published, and praised, and no one can ever take that away. Even though it often felt, and still feels, like ghosts now haunt me down, the way they rabidly search for the spoils of Halloween, there is something firmly rooted in my memories of the house on California Drive, good times, loving times, hopeful times, and all of the stuff in between, the stuffing and bits and pieces that life is actually, and richly, made of. Sort of like an awkward, but tenacious and tough, bird's nest, the place where the tired songbird goes to rest at dawn, after a full-throated night.

Now, I'm in a small place, a very nice part of town, paying half the monthly payment in rent as I was straining to pay on my former mortgage. I'm  in a much quieter neighborhood than where I was before.  I'm still not used to it. Half of my things have been in storage for the past year, including my extensive collection of books, which is becoming more difficult to do without. It feels so strange to have to call and negotiate with a landlord when I need something fixed, although a relief. Before I moved here last September - to a part of Palm Desert I lived in when I first moved here in 1999, prior to buying my house -, I spent several months living first in a one-room studio, and then a month staying at my parents' condo, dogs and cat and all, while they were traveling in Europe; during all that time, I basically lived out of a few suitcases. The thing is, it felt good to live like that, and I had a sense of adventure and forward momentum I hadn't experienced in a long time.

This feeling has faded, and I admit it's been a rather strange past seven months. It's April 2013, one year exactly after I moved out of my house on California Drive in the Palm Desert Country Club, a house I owned for ten years. I still don't feel grounded, and I still don't feel settled in and packed. I still don't see as much money saved as I had hoped for, and  I'm feeling restless and even isolated here; I still miss my daughter, who is in Washington and expecting a baby now, a wonderful bit of news that makes me feel even more restless, dislocated, and on edge with anticipation and the depth of the many miles between us now.

And while the Common Poorwill of this neighborhood sings its heart out in the desert tonight, a new April, behind my new, temporary home, sounding identical to the one I listened to last April at my former house,  I'm still in a holding pattern, and still don't know where home is, but while I continue in my mid-life drift, my memories of my ten years in the house on California Drive endure, and no one can ever take that away from me. I'm rooted there, just as that place is rooted forever and firmly within me.

My New Story....Exact Opposites...on KCET Artbound L.A.

Not a Wasteland after all! The California Desert: A Place of Life, Magic, and Heartfelt Music!! Straight out of the remote California Desert town of Blythe! These guys are my friends and former creative writing / poetry students at College of the Desert....feeling and sharing the love all-around on this one!

Exact Opposites' Desert Hip Hop Radiates From Arid Blythe

In the past decade, April has become the season of music festivals in the California desert, particularly the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, an annual three-day music and arts festival headlining some of the world's most famous musicians and bands that takes place each spring in the City of Indio at the lushly landscaped Empire Polo Fields. However, the most ardent fans of music might want to take a drive a little farther into the easternmost stretches of Riverside County, along Interstate 10, into the land that Southern California almost forgot, to the tiny town of Blythe (population 21,000), situated at our state's border with Arizona at the Colorado River.

For those of us who have passed through with barely a nod (except to get gas in the long, six-hour journey across the desert from L.A. to Phoenix and back, and stagger from extremely hot temperatures that often reach 120 degrees in the summer,) it might come as a surprise to learn that fertile artistic roots have flourished here, 100 miles in each east/west direction from the nearest small town, and much farther than that from an urban center -- but they can, and do. The hip-hop, genre-bending music group, Exact Opposites, comprised of three Blythe natives and one member from Coachella Valley, not only celebrates the remotest nuances of their hometown, but create original, transformational music with a style all their own, drawn from their lives in this unlikely desert mecca.

I-Fit-The-Description, Meccanism, and Jae Rawkwell.| Photo: Courtesy of Exact Opposites.

Exact Opposites is a collective of musical talent drawn together to create quality music with a unique style. The band currently consists of Daddy Fat Strings (bassist), Jae Rawkwell (turntablist), Meccanism (vocalist & drummer), and I-Fit-The-Description (vocalist). And, in a somewhat unusual mix, members of the group are African American, Mexican American, and Anglo American. According to co-founding member Taurean Wright, who grew up in Blythe, "Positive music is a community effort; we strive to be grounded and concerned with today's topics. Our music forms our response to our community's concerns -- such as racial tensions and a high rate of crime and violence, as well as drug abuse and poverty -- and our community has reciprocated with a respectful appreciation for our music."

Wright, along with best friend and Blythe native Marx Moxon, emphasize they are proud of their roots in Blythe, and work to celebrate the strengths of life in their small hometown. For example, their first single and video, "Fertile Roots," from "Manufactured," is their ode to Blythe, and pays tribute to the small town that gave them their strong roots and celebrating a spirit of racial unity. Citing musical influences such as the Roots, an American Grammy Award-winning hip hop/neo soul band, and Mos'Def, aka, Dante Terrell, an American actor and MC, Exact Opposites is distinguished by a strong stage presence and a soul sound, along with poetically-driven lyrics and, as they say, they "make an intention to produce positive, boundless music" that both embraces and defies some of the basic musical tenets of hip hop, soul, and rap.

Starting in 2006 and with just two microphones and a turntable, I.Fit.The.Description, Meccanism and D.J. Rawkwell toured Coachella Valley and Los Angeles as they structured their vision and foundation. They cut their teeth in the rough-and-tumble realms of underground hip hop, and emerged wiser, more balanced, and with a destination in sight. Like so many hip hop acts before them, they decided to go it alone. In the DIY ethic that spawned punk and early rap, they got to work on their own. Since 2008, the group has released four albums on their own label, Sonata Orchestration: "Manufactured" (2008); "Sonata Average Mixtape" (2008) "The Amazing Adventures of Quick Draw McGraw and Huckleberry Hound" (2010), which serves as somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek jab at the sharp contrast between the Wild West typified by Blythe and the urbanity of its closest Southern California metropolis connection, Los Angeles. "The Learning Experience" (2012), the group's first live LP, catches their spitfire lyrics and flow at their most raw.

Since that time, Exact Opposites has played dozens of shows throughout Southern California, from Blythe to Coachella Valley to L.A., and has earned high praise from various music critics, who have compared them to musicians and groups such as J. Cole, Mac Miller, Atmosphere, Wale, Macklemore. Music critic Blackmilk of Soulified.com says, "The more I listen to Exact Opposites, the more their music gets reminiscent of a classic Wu Tang album with a west coast twist." The group has firmly planted their foundation in today's music scene by opening up for Blackalicious at the Key Club in Hollywood to performing at the legendary Whiskey A Go Go and each show in between with names like Del Tha Funkee Homosapien, Planet Asia, The People Under the Stairs, Yelawolf, and the late GURU of Gangstar.

"Staying true to our roots, and trying to give back to our community; we want to build community and send a positive message through our music" says Wright, who recently organized a student aid fundraiser show that the group played at Cal State, Long Beach, as well as a show benefiting students at his and Moxon's alma mater, Palo Verde High School in Blythe. For them, Blythe isn't just a place you pass through; it's home. Stark and otherworldly as it may be, their hometown is the center of their world. It's the magnetic North by which they orient their path ahead. "You've got to know where you come from in order to know where you are going," he says. "It's our goal to embrace what many people perceive as the dead-endness of Blythe, and to find the strength of people, community, and ordinary lives, and build on that, and share that, through our music, and that is what Exact Opposites is about."

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Top Image: Exact Opposites | Photo: Courtesy of Exact Opposites.

"I just want to be wonderful"

I don't even think I breathed in 2012. Sold my house on California Drive after owning it for 10 years. Short Sale. Put most of my things into storage- what I didn't give away straight out.  Lived on IPA beer and Junior Mint candies for awhile, living in transit -- first in a hotel room in Palm Desert, then bouncing around until I finally landed in a small duplex in South Palm Desert in the vintage mid-century architecture neighborhood of Silver Spur. Where I am now. Just got home from visiting Tarah and Alex, who are now living at Fort Lewis, Washington, and expecting a baby boy in August. The cat soothes my lonely night, curled up by my feet. I've re-posted some older postings from 2010. I don't know why they popped up as being posted *today*, April Fool's Day 2013, but here they are, out of sequence but always right on time.

I'm wrapping up teaching a workshop for the nationally-based Memoir Project non-profit writing organization....the theme I'm working with as I facilitate a group of 6 wonderful writers is *suicide*.  I selected the topic myself I read for Valley Voices of the Muse this Friday, April 5 as the featured poet in Palm Springs. Saturday, I'm a featured poet at 100,000 Poets for change at a big, three-day international festival in Santa Rosa....I'm in the lineup with poets representing Grito Mujer, a women's rights organization.

Tarah is too damn far away. Every trip to and from Seattle fills my heart and then exhausts it as I return to stone-cold walls. I never could have imagined how hard living alone would be. I realize that I've only lived alone, really, until now, for short times. At 19, it was fun - for a short while. Now, living alone symbolizes losses and changes and 9.0 earthquakes in my personal life that I didn't ask for or want or even expect or have the capacity to conceive. So many rugs have been pulled out from beneath my feet in the past few years. It's a wonder I still stand. But I do.

Drinking green juice and playing with my house pets, and picking up my love for hiking again. I love teaching creative writing at College of the Desert this spring, as I did this past fall. Fabulous class. Great students. I weep at every invitation, even if some envelopes remain unopened. Thank you for thinking of me. Pass the superglue, the self-stick postage stamps.

Faster than words

So my mind and life are moving faster than words. Faster than cathedral bells reach the outposts of village life, faster than love can knock a person down, in all its incarnations, celebratory and shattering. And finally I sit in front of my blog. The desert is kind of a church of its own, as is all of nature. It's what we have in the American west. Lacking visceral history of, you know, those shrines to Christianity - we uneasily sprout temples and mosques here - nature somehow for me works best. It's a place of imagination rather than a surface of insanity. A template for metaphoric understanding. That I have to intuit on top of all this mess.

Tarah comes over today, actually I pick her up en route home from Victorville, where I spent two evenings, along with Brindle and Shasta, but not two days, since Saturday. Tarah and Alex are ensconced in their new studio apartment in Palm Springs, and I'm happy for them having their own place again. I've decided to get the hell out of here on weekends, because weekends - the whole summer - have been hell and I think I can out-drive hell at least some of the time, because I have a good car and southern California is intricately knitted, each unique pocket of diversity, from desert to oceanfront to neighborhood to suburb to cityscape, in a wrinkled mirror pattern all its own that I've yet to entirely, far from ever fully exploring and knowing, with a freeway system that can transport even the most cynical and weary among us into a zen of river-transport that eases the soul from the worst of it. Even as we cross, on perilous, multi-layered "clover leafs," atop massive gashes of sand known as "dry washes" that sometimes perilously flood. But not very often. Waterways without water do the job, for those of us here. That, and the freeways, with their endless opportunities to land along some offramp somewhere entirely new. "Anywhere but here."

And most of all, getting the hell out of here at the end of a work-week helps to soothe the phantom pain, the ebb and flow of the memories I don't want to have, that I never dreamed would haunt me now. Last September, this exact weekend. We were blasting Break On Through to the Other Side, Jim Morrison, eerie and concise Doors, while driving up the Grapevine, heading to Big Sur. Redwood magic, mist-sun on one of my favorite beaches - with the blowhole - soothed by a hike to a waterfall, magnificent pictures that I sobbed over at the funeral, that I made a visual poem from....slightly foggy morning and deer on the lawn....our first weekend back together, really back together. One year ago. This time. Where do I go? From that. The house is emptier than a lightning-scored log. Reminding of some violent moment in the forest that no one saw, a force so violent and secondary that it felled and gutted a giant, ancient redwood tree and knocked it down, a sinkhole and gash so magnanimous a line of Volkswagens could be packed inside of it. Growing ferns, and new limbs, towards the sun. Unstoppable, unsinkable. The way life in the deep places somehow goes on in some ancient ritual of ceremony, a will of its own, and we measure our small progress alongside of it, and mark fragments of time that will someday be entirely overgrown. That is us. You and me. The lot of us. The forest is bigger than I thought, how ignorant was I, and you've been swallowed while I look towards the cathedral rays of light to find my way back to something I once thought. Water brims over the tall rocks. One year ago. You and me, our private time and thoughts. Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now, and the comparative literary treatise by a Princeton professor on Jim Morrison and the French poet Rimbaud. One year ago. We alternated those two books in the Big Sur Lodge. It was a perfect mix. And I hope you didn't lose the book on Rimbaud. I need it now, I think I can read his poetry in French once again.

Tarah comes to help me as a personal assistant and I'm so relieved, and joyed to have her here: my instant-muse, inspiring me into desert writing and book consciousness. IV drip for dehydrated mom, after a long, strange, suffocating, intensive care kind of summer. Spending this afternoon in our own brand of ironic humor, instant understanding of one another, many laughs, shared lunch, and most of all, back to helping each other out - priceless and teary for me. Much more often than not, in recent months, the world has felt much more hostile than safe for me; much more jagged than smooth; more alone and isolated than I've ever felt.....ever. As my therapist tells me: you walk through hell - one step at a time and just keep moving ahead. Literally, symbolically. This summer has been one inferno I never could have dreamed. Flames lick southern California still, and if it's any small relief, the suffering of dreadful searing summer temps has been more intense in L.A. than here, unheard of. But the burden shared, somehow, it makes me feel a little more connected and understood, if by proxy: I'm not the only one in the sun's glare. And it's late September and the sunflowers are still flowering yellow and it has to cool off, we've already had a few cool licks in this strange, strange grief of song.

Tarah helps me sort through stacks of papers and scattered papers that have accumulated for months and months. I see that the more recent the notes, the more scattered, frantic, and discombobulated is my writing. Even last January, February, March, I was keeping neat, logical notes. Frenzy has been my theme since then, since that lopsided day in April when my world, my spirit, my body, my life, was torn apart - although there are patterns emerging: scrambled messages from the interior of the insanity of grief, and all kinds of phrases, phone numbers, jottings, words, for writing ideas - from poetry collection titles to metaphors to intriguing language clips I've heard or innovated to new writing project ideas, including three short stories I'm trying to baste enough nerve together to write. For some reason, I'm terrified. To the point where, when these stories are at the knife-edge, I gather the dogs, the dog food dish, the bag of dog food (some eaten by crickets already), a box of various books (Puritan, Slouching, Dry Waterfall, Phantom Seed) and the big yellow writing notepads and drive to the high desert, not much cooler but offering a bed in the slow, quiet, safety of Aunt Jeanne's house, with a big yard for the dogs. Tarah. She laughs at my insane pile of sticky notes, reads some of the poem fragments out loud, and laughs in a nice way.....Mom. You are trippy. And it's okay.

And I spend Sunday at West Hollywood Book Fair where I run into several friends - Gayle, Chrystine, Cheryl - and chat with people at the PEN writer's booth, make new writer connections, Red Hen Press, Book Soup, and eat a giant blue snow-cone. It's the little things that soothe, and I give into them. Free bookmarks. Childhood-favorite treats I haven't eaten in years (the snow-cone.) I pose for a headshot that will be photo-shopped into a scene from a classic novel for part of a photo series to be featured on the PEN website (a scene from the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, when Atticus Finch is on his way to kill the "mad dog.") The free Urth-Cafe reader/author backstage lunch area (well, I did do a live reading for Guerrilla Reads, and all online-journal of video clips.....let's see, Ghost Flower, Friendly Fire, Wonder Valley, Ochoa's Farm and I forget what else....) then, on to Pasadena for the annual southern California Haiku Society's publication-reading, this year, the 10th anniversary edition, titled this year, "Island of Egrets." I have five haiku published this year, based on a haiku walk I led through the powerful, transformational Andreas Canyon in the oases of Indian Canyons, on Cahuilla Indian land in Palm Springs. So I read my haiku aloud and did it barefoot, in a new dress, because my shoes were hot. The event was on an outside patio. More friends, lots of them. Debbie, Kath Abela, Mike, Oleg, Naia, Marcyn, Billie, and more. Nice people. A safe day. Indian food afterwards, lots of it, and ice cold beer, with some really nice people and bless them, they made me laugh with many jokes and good humor. Lots of dark freeway driving after that and I didn't feel so addicted to the tabloids this weekend, or to a wrenching day of nonstop crying, as I did last Sunday. I even had to buy a pack of cigarettes - Native American ultra lights - at a Palm Desert liquor store (plus Perrier, large bottle) and I don't even smoke, but I was so upset just the act of buying cigarettes calmed me down. Today, Tarah disapproves: Mom, are you smoking? No, the pack is unopened, see? I was really upset last weekend....so I bought them. Tarah knows me well, so she doesn't ask. Her mom, the quirky poet. It's beautiful and wonderful to be understood and not judged.

Time to take Tarah home. I run her by Bank of America, but not until we stop at Coffee Bean for two large size (one for each of us) ice Japanese cherry-green teas on crushed ice. It's nice that one of my creative writing students is working there, and we chat with him for awhile. I write Tarah a check and pay her an advance for 20 hours of work she'll be doing for me in the next few weeks. She is wearing a beautiful red dress that looks very cute on her. Her hair is long and dishwater blonde, and her eyes, today, look light blue-gray. At other times they are smoldering green. I hold back tears as I wait for her, call and order a vegan dinner to go (for one, me) from Native Foods, which I'll pick up in Palm Springs just before I take her home. I want to go the long way, on Highway 111, so I can keep her with me just a few minutes longer. She chats about finding one of her middle school friends on facebook, a girl with a famous uncle (Mario Lanza, the singer) and talks about the time she went with her friend to Disneyland in a limo in the 6th grade, about how some of her super-rich Palm Desert friends are now living: brand new sports cars, parents who own global corporations - really - those who are all over Europe having fun - and she sighs. And says, but I'm happy, really happy, because I'm married to someone I love, and I'd rather have that than all the money in the world without love.

You were married in one of the town's most beautiful cathedrals. I'm good at driving on the freeways. My aunt lives in a neighborhood subdivision in the flanks of the massive, ancient Mojave River where an entire woolly mammoth skeleton was found not long ago. On Grand Mammoth Lane, near Grand Triassic Road. Some things endure. Some things, endure. Even if we have to imagine them because they're gone. Like you. It's all changed but somehow the road winds back in on itself again, and I've been driving or driven along these freeways, and earlier incarnations of them, since I was a little girl. A snow cones with blue syrup on a heat-shocked day. A lot of the ice melts into a blue mess before I can finish it. Catholic weddings, cars going too fast. It feels like home, a single long sigh of relief passing through a heart that is somehow always out of place. Tarah is living in Palm Springs, on a street named for one of the desert's giant lizards: Chuckwalla Road.