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.