I'm thinking of the Grateful Dead, and of the many fun concerts of theirs I enjoyed attending in past years -their song, "What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been."
Well, I feel that way about this year. It feels like we've been visiting The Day of the Dead for many months. I started 2008 New Year with a big party at my house, lots of people, the pool heated. I had a boyfriend. By the end of the year, now one year later, drastic changes have occurred. My boyfriend broke up with me not long after that party, but we have remained steadfast working partners and friends, although it's been a rocky damn hike in the desert badlands between us, as well as a joyous stroll through some wonderful literary terrian - see: Ocean Park Small Press, where Petroglyph Books was THE hit of the day; the Palm Springs Book Festival, where we had a kick-ass open microphone reading; and more than anything, the hard work on the forthcoming California desert literature anthology from Heyday Books (fall 2009.)
Since that party, my life seems to have been an "on"-"off" switch. This has been the year of my life coming completely unglued and crumbling, one weird hinge at a time, in ways I could not have anticipated nor prevented. It's been the year of amazing experiences as well as an intensification of "empty nest" symptom that has made me go more than a little off my rocker. I entered into a new relationship with a much-younger man and fell deeply in love with him, and came to cherish my time spent with a live-in housemate, the intimacies of day to day life, until it all came crashing down and suddenly he was gone. The love never left, and pain and sadness walk hand in hand with my strong feelings for him and for his absence. But this experience seems to magnify my understanding that I have changed dramatically this year, too, and it's time for me to leave home. Summer, 2009 will mark my 10th year here, a fine time to leave. THE time to leave. Tarah was turning 11 then and entering 6th grade. Now, she'll be turning 21 and is thinking marriage and career.
It's as if, to borrow and reshape the phrase of a friend who recently ended her longtime marriage, "my life grew up and left home." The clothes in my closet don't seem to be mine anymore. I suddenly feel trapped and claustorphobic in what once made me proud, owning my own home, taking care of the yard and dogs - it's all added stress now, and I'm irritated at anything and everything that takes me away from my fledgling, but burgeoning, hard-earned writing and literary career. I have the urge to downsize and simplify - in this retro-20-something feeling of where and how I was before my daughter was born - I lived in a small adobe cabin with very little. I long to return to that simplicity now and sort my life out. I came to Palm Desert in 1999, having just been hired at COD, knowing nobody, and I will leave here feeling like I've spent the past few years getting unplugged.
I'm ultra-aware, as the year comes to a close, that my life as I once knew it has run its course here in Palm Desert, in owning this home that once sheltered magnificent and ancient sand dunes and now cowers in the shadow of an obnoxious country club whose landscaping has eradicated my mountain views - not to mention the sand dunes and all plant and animal life once thereupon. A live-in lover has come and gone, my daughter comes and goes, depending on when her boyfriend is home from college, and I sit here alone and alone, re-gathering my shredded garments and figuring how to pattern the new. The places I visit feel ghostly. Walking the halls at College of the Desert haunts me. My semester began with violence and agony and asking my lover to move - and I am still reeling from the loss and pain of that. I'm not over him and don't know when I will be. His absence magnifies the emptiness of the house that once felt so much like home, and I can only find myself planning how to get out of this burden now.
I also realize, like all other Americans in the U.S., have watched with horror and shock as the economic crisis has gripped our country and the globe this year. How hard to digest that my house value has fallen $60k or more, since I refinanced my house in March. What I felt was a soft cushion of investment, in my house and 403(b) has now become half or less of what it was, and I admit I've fallen into fear and worries that I wish I didn't have to think about. But there are other bizarre and unexpected changes and losses too. A longtime friend who attended my New Year's 2008 party is no longer a friend, due to an unfortunate professional falling out which pains me greatly, as a colleague and friend. (His choice to cut me off for reasons I'll never fully know.)
I've begun to hike again. Yesterday, I circuited one of my longtime favorite hikes to Pushwalla Palms not far from my house, a longtime Cahuilla and other desert Indian usage area. A beautiful day, warming to 70 degrees, a respite from the recent several weeks of intense cold that have gripped the desert - the cold, an enjoyable novelty, and what a pleasure to see our mountains as thick with snow as they've been for the first winter since 2005-06. I also hiked a portion of the new Hopalong Cassidy trail that flanks the Cahuilla Hills near Palm Desert - I'm mixed on my feelings for this trail, as a lot of pristine desert has been cut open for this, and the trail wasn't really well planned out - already, water and flood damage is intense on parts of it. I'm also annoyed that other trails I've loved have been blocked off, such as the Bump n' Grind and Dead Indian Canyon, the old trailhead to the Art Smith Trail, as well. Not to mention that from many of the views, the desert floor looks like Irvine - ie., golf courses dominate the place. Blessed be the winter months, for as you know, if you've read my blog since July, we suffer from intensive heat here for weeks and weeks for half the year.
And I've begun to mark the walking with introspection - looking deeply into myself once again, and asking the hard questions - how can I find the joy and inspiration for my writing? I've had such an intense fall semester at the college, all the while battling loneliness and an anxiety disorder with a whammy of depresssion that nailed me all of Christmas week. Thank goodness for the love and support of my family, who helped me cope with that. Exhaustion caught up with me big-time. I enjoyed my creative writing and poetry classes so much, with wonderful writers, and produced an amazing desert literary magazine, Phantom Seed, which has been very successful so far and generated a lot of enthusiasm. I'm amazed, myself, that I pulled this off and hope I can keep the ball rolling. I have worked endlessly on the desert literature anthology, hours and hours and days on end pulling it all together, and a lot of work remains to be done, though there is a lot of light peering through the end of this thing. I've given numerous poetry readings, put together and hosted events, and taught various seminars and lectures - I enjoyed presenting at the California Indian conference in October, and also the California desert Indian literature class I taught for Desert Institute in November. I also networked wonderfully with the Desert Committee, and made a lot of new friends and connections who are involved in working with many issues and stories of California desert conservation and literature. I also have published more poetry and have a number of wonderful events coming up, such as a new creative writing class I'm teaching at the Riverside Library starting January 8th.
I can't question things too much - just go forward with my instincts. I have to let go of a lot of what I did in 2008 and who I did it with. I have to calm myself down and remember that love is always coming from every corner of the universe - it's being open to listening to it and embracing it and not giving too much attention to the fear and darkness that's overwhelmed a lot of us, understandably. Sure, I'm hurting because I feel I've lost a lover who once admired me and inspired me, and I feel foolish to keep hoping I can win him back, but also know I have to be brave and keep my heart open to all possibilities, and to courageously move forward with my plans to pursue my writing career. Which seems far - the clothes in the closet aren't mine anymore, and this house feels big, bulky, odd. I want to shed it all, and reach for my laptop and write my heart into words. I want to leave behind my ghost job, and the ghost town that this life and town have turned into, for me, and move on - to what? I'm not quite yet sure, but I do know that it's my only recourse, and hope I have the courage to continue to do so, even while feeling so very alone.
Here is to 2008 - a very fruitful year, but one that's taken a lot of labor, a lot of tears and sweat on my part - but so necessary, no other choices but the ones I've made. Some good, some awful, some inevitable, and much, too, beyond my control. One more day to this year, and I will be creating a whole new paradigm, a fresh start. I hope my spirit, creativity, and energy endure, because so much of what I feel we're all collectively facing sags heavily on the heart. How to continue to believe I have a right to pursue my dreams and lovers, when the economy crashes all around us, and we're driven to what is most fundamental - though in there, I know that my dreams and lovers are among the top priorities. What else do we have, when systems fail us?
The grapefruit are yellow and weigh down the branches on a citrus tree in my yard now, with oranges soon to follow. An entire year it has taken them to ripen, and it's intriguing that they come to the point of harvesting now, in the dead of winter - oh, pink fruit, my hands are open to the bittersweet of your offering - full of vitamin C, and probably the last year I'll take from your tree - next to the huge, but once small, live Christmas tree I planted, which will survive and endure when I'm gone, and touch the sky a little bit more each season, for no particular reason that that you are blessed with the will to live, and grow, and stretch your arms higher and higher, savoring and transforming every bit of rain with a new sprig of pine needle. Like you, I'll continue to unfold tight fists into widening limbs, even when drought and heat wear me down; I'll savor the joy of a thunderstorm and spread my branches wider, just, because, that is what we do, those of us who live on earth and weather storms and welcome wind and stoic silence with our fullest embrace. The evergreen tree, in the desert - so much possible in this paradise.
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