Poetry Reading Palm Springs Weds 4.28

I'll be there along with the local Global Alchemy poetry/art members....reading poetry. Show starts @ 9 PM must be 21+. Space 120 in Palm Springs.

It's My Dad's Birthday

My therapist told me during our phone session last Friday that I should find the biggest rock I can find, and carry that around with me when I feel the burden of Phil's disappearance/abandonment/death/the whole thing, whatever you want to call it...and then set it down. An ancient ritual for those in mourning - to personify and articulate and validate the weight of such a thing....and the relief, inevitable, of setting the heavy rock down. So far, I only have a few big chunks of crystal that Phil had found on some of our recent desert hikes. They're not even close to heavy enough. They're too pretty, too white. I need a jag of concrete, I think, something uneven and ugly and brutalized. That or an elegant seashell.

Lots of coffee. lots of it, this morning and continuing until now. My mind must, must, must sharpen so I can sluice through my impressive workload today, tomorrow, for the next days on end through, pretty much, the end of May. Book presentations and signings, Palm Springs Library tomorrow night - poetry reading with Global Alchemy friends that I'll be at Weds night, also in Palm Springs, at a bar, Space 120(beer, glorious beer), Inlandia Writers Workshop in Riverside Thursday night, Mt. San Antonio College writer's conference on Saturday morning - I'm teaching a poetry of place workshop - and back to Riverside on Sunday for what will be a very cool desert writing workshop - I'm partaking - with multimedia artists and UCR MFA students, sponsored by the UCR CA Museum of Photography and the Sweeney Art Museum.
Diet coke and poring through bills, too. I was numb at the LA Times Bookfest last Saturday...signing books and chatting people up, an old friend from BLM firefighting days looked me up, that was great...was I even there.

How can this house weigh so much. Over 100 degrees today. I rode my bike in the mid-day noon for half an hour. My body feels like it's hauled firehose over a series of 12,000 foot passes in the high Sierras. Sucking on low oxygen altitudes. Chilled by snow, melted by high thin sun. Except there's no fun backpacking adventure in this one. I'm a beast of burden. The walls and windows close in with this kind of heat. Phil ditched out of the rocket ride right before summer cinched its tight belt around me. It was spring and flowers were alive. Now it's summer and it's only going to get hotter day by day, month by month until deep into 2010 fall. Anticipating fall. How much more of this can I go? I was burned out a year ago. Thought I had returned. It will be a rough fire season, I can tell. The tall weeds, mega-rain, are already brown and will burn too well. Again.

Mom comes by mid-afternoon. I'm staring at piles of bills. I'm struggling to get files for Solstice lit-mag to the printer so that the COD lit-mag can be printed up in time for a big event on campus for contributors on May 11th. I got it done. I need to email my creative writing students. I need to post new forum threads for English 1A classes online. They're writing a lit analysis of symbolism in Leslie Marmon Silko's novel, Ceremony. I was unable to teach the book last week - catching myself too imbedded and stung and impotent in the sickening irony of....a novel of a post-modern-era young man struggling with identity, mental illness, and inability to get his life together, suicidal. I told my students. This hits too close to home. The novel has a beautiful, healing motion to it. My life goes the other, wrong direction on this one, strange dry wash discourse, datcourse, not a course but is. Stay away for now.

Mom leaves. It's Dad's birthday. He cancelled our planned dinner at the Esmerelda Resort in Indian Wells tonight because they're getting ready to go to San Francisco for a brief getaway very early tomorrow morning. So I email him. Happy Birthday Dad. Have fun. I tell Dad in an email that I love him. I love you, Phil said. I really, really love you. He told me. A few days earlier. Hugged me extra long. We ARE going to be together, always. I see now. He was actually saying goodbye. How can a day, before the day, make so much sense, but only in retrospect. He knew that my #1 hangup in life was fear of abandonment. And he left. Imagine that. Is it possible to feel so left behind by someone 25 years old? Who I met and knew for the past three years...go ahead and tell me I lost my head. Yeah, and I'll say we just saw Alice In Wonderland after a hike to Tahquitz Waterfall, dinner at Native Foods. And it was good. Beheadings befell. And there was us two, digging the show. Caterpillar. Butterfly. I want only to sit him down and ask questions and get answers that aren't zen koans, impossible riddles that may or may not lead me to enlightenment. Cupid, you weren't in the movie. What sucker punch did you blow.

Simplify. I have zero capacity to cook anything beyond toast - which I did last night, eating the last of a loaf of La Brea Bakery sourdough, with avocado - I order a Z-Pizza, to be delivered. Last time I had Z-Pizza, just a few weeks ago, Phil did the ordering. Our usual, organic vegetarian, well-done. Like he did for most things domestic. Going to Trader Joe's last week for food - only when I was at less than zero for groceries - destroyed me. I even asked the cashier if I could get a blue balloon to take home. I ignored her questioning eyebrows. Clearly I had no small child with me. Only the one inside me: lost, sad, and unable to cry aloud in public, not quite able to be soothed by carrying around a blue balloon - biodegradable I'm happy to say - and it's still got air, smaller now, and perched on my kitchen counter. I ended up buying Phil treats: a box of cookies, and his own dark chocolate bar. One for each of us. We did things like that for each other. His cookies and mine. His candy and mine. And sharing.

What is it about the food thing, going to the store? I almost lost it in Albertson's yesterday.....when I saw his favorite chocolate chip cookies by the cash register. When I saw the cases of Fat Tire and Red Stripe beer in the cold case. Even buying beer right now feels stale and old. I can barely eat, let alone drink anything. Except for water. And I take two iron pills today, finally, doctor's orders, I'm anemic as hell. She told me, and that was weeks ago. I kind of forgot. Could be adding to my extreme, mono-like fatigue. I stare out the window. Watermarks. Desolation. Am I even here?

Now Tarah is here. She calls and comes over. After work. I'm now in my home office, staring at the computer monitor, wondering how to even begin to scroll through the formidable backlog of emails from recent weeks (nevermind the many, many phone calls I am obliged to return, both professional and personal). I'm starting at the monitor,staring out the window at hot, empty, late day desert space. Nothing has moved since noon. Frozen would be an apt adjective, yet ice can only melt here. Faster than you can keep it cold. The way a life can expire in a fractioned second, a bullet shell too fast for the hole. That was and is and grows larger with the pondering.

Tarah. Full of life and love. She brings a huge dish of pasta with four cheeses from Olive Garden, leftover from a drug-company rep who delivered the food to Dr. Younis's office today; it went mostly uneaten. I tell Tarah not to quit her job just yet. She gets incredible perks, working in a posh private practice here. You wouldn't get that anywhere else. The pasta goes well with the pizza. Perfect timing. Ice coffee now. A short break from an endless day, as I try to get as much done as possible tonight in this groundswell. Candle lit in the bedroom on a small pile of rocks. Wearing the hand acupressure t-shirt he gave me just a few weeks ago. It's soft and warm and it's better than anything else I can think of to wear right now. Last night I lay in bed, my mind just reeling: Phil isn't here. Phil is dead. How can that be? It just doesn't want to click. Let alone make sense.

Time to water the orange trees. The garden, with its lettuce heads and carrot tops and reach for the sky yellow flowers already taller than the wall separating me from neighbors next door and the swamp cooler sticking out of the wall that actually has weeds growing on it. I don't think I should tell them about it. The plants I tendered only a few weeks ago, tiny things burst into sturdiness, outlasting my care. All they need is water. The heat begs their thirst, and the tiny budded green fruits on the citrus trees are ready to grow. What bees made thee? A William Blake sort of thing. Ahhh, Sunflower.

They won't be ripe for many months, till next January. Good to see that the flower made it through to baby fruit. I will nurture them well, never mind what outcome it may bring. Water is good. I will be generous with my love, as always, and again, even if with my beautiful, concerned daughter who comes by to stir mom from her cement brick load walking for a short spell, to bring food, and wine, and hugs, and conversation and even a few jokes along with her. Like the shriveling blue balloon, I know I can still let go of this wrist-rope, and float for awhile. But not entirely away. I'm thinking Hamlet now, my favorite Shakespeare play to teach, (love the Ethan Hawke/Julia Stiles film version) and wondering about those slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Nobler of mind, tonight.

Ten Days Ago

it's been ten days since you killed yourself
in the hills behind San Timoteo Canyon
the private investigator calls me to ask questions
the sky is a pale easter egg blue, April, I say: it's
summer overnight. Warm wind stings my eyes, the air
filled with short lived flower smells, I can't tell
what color, the color of you, I guess. These things
should grow on their own, their story shouldn't
burst through me to be told, I am compelled.
I shop alone at Trader Joe's for the first time
in months, almost incapacitated as I choose avocados,
buy hemp granola - our favorite stuff - and
wander through the aisles, suprised by bustling life.
I even ask the cashier if she'll cut a blue,
biodegradable balloon for me, as she just has
for a little girl leaping out of her mother's arms.
I water the garden, contemplate pulling lettuce.
Ten days later, I hang a redwood calendar in the
empty room where you sometimes slept. This isn't
very profound but it takes a lot of courage to
share grief when all around me the prettiest spring
we've seen in years knocks me to the ground, others
I feel sure, would not want to know the deep truths
that water me, too much to ask, no one knows why.
Ten days ago, I touched you last, and I look for
strands of reddish-blonde hair in the bed, your pillow
touches mine. And I managed to throw out the rest of
the food that you bought eleven days ago, what's left
is no longer good, and I couldn't cry today. Something
about passing the single digits, this things is two
handed now, going on to feet and the trail dead ends
the balloon string is still tied around my wrist to
keep me near the ground, is this what you wanted to know?

Cosmic Ruth and Phil

What can I say. Philip Andrew Helland, February 21, 1985 - April 9, 2010. AK to me and his friends as Phil Phonics, Lightbeam, Homie. And me. Red Arrow Gallery in Joshua Tree, March 26, 2010, drinking red wine, having fun at a poetry reading/art event, mingling with friends, Phil was stoked to meet a famous alchemist and founder of the LA Free Press, who now lives in the small town of Joshua Tree and just walked into the reading. And here it is. You can't always live up to your truth. Sometimes the best thing to do is to write your truth. Write all the way through it, falling star wish sky streak. Do it brilliantly with colors and do it well. And here it is.

The poppies, exploding orange on the Mojave Desert far below the airplane, just last Friday morning, a few hours before Philip took his life. On my way to give a presentation for No Place for a Puritan at the Western Wilderness Conference at UC Berkeley. I had been reluctant to leave. Phil hadn't been feeling well, said he had a virus or something, had been resting a lot on Thursday. I gave him a last kiss and hug and told him to take care that morning, told him to sleep in, I'd call him that night to check in. He said okay, and told me to do a great job at this prestigious and important conference, where I'd be meeting all kinds of famous environmental writers and movers and shakers, northern California style, the chance to bring the desert, the desert consciousness, to those who live in the green. Stuff Phil loved too. We'd talked endlessly about our summer plans, once the semester was/is finished at College of the Desert (where I teach), going to northern California and Oregon to check out organic farms and communities, visiting friends, networking, living green away from the weight of the summer heat soon to be upon us here.

I was astounded and moved beyond words and tones by the sudden rush of orange, near Palmdale, suddenly soothing my view of the wounds of the glaring, white hot dry lakebed I'd been absently staring at, Rosamond Dry Lake. And the poppy fields. What I knew. My immediate thought was to call Phil that afternoon and tell him we'd be going there to roll in the orange shouldered hills first thing on Monday. He'd love that, so would I. That, and the hike high above Whitewater Canyon, I couldn't wait to take him there, too, and he knew it. My phone calls that night went unanswered, and I felt uneasy. I had the worst dreams of my night that life, somehow I knew he had left me, but it didn't make sense at all. It was entirely out of synch, a rhythm gone wrong, a plane dropped out of the sky for no reason, poppies exploding more vividly in my head to take up the slack. Before I know.

Phil. My cosmic soulmate. Bringer of life, inspiration, companionship, frustrations, deeper, shared joys than I've experienced in my life. He was of so many worlds. We'd wake up in the mornings and say "homie hug," and eat organic cereal and hang out, reading vast and varied volumes of literature, go on long bike rides, take weekend adventure-trips all the time: Warner's Hot Springs, Indian Village sites in the Anza Borrego Desert, Tahquitz Canyon, Tecopa Hot Springs, hikes in the desert, hikes in the mountains, a shared spirit beyond words. A world of poppy surprises and psychedelic colors and Be Here Now and Bliss Now and deep, deep friendship. Phil was phenomenal and he had a brilliant mind, light years ahead of his years in earthly age. We had amazing intellectual discussions and also tons of fun.

He plowed through my extensive book collection, and was reading, at the time of his death, and simultanously, like I do, books by Jung, Schopenhauer, Huxley, Native American mythologies, books on medicine and alternative healing and cosmic consciousness, sociology books on globalization, poetry, and much, much more. We saw Avatar, we saw Alice in Wonderland, we saw Borat, we saw foreign films and documentaries on 2012 and sophisticated intellectual movies, too. We did it all. As much as any two friends could. All of the movies were his ideas, he hand picked them out. My netflix order list has about 200 movies ready to go, that he already pre-selected. He coordinated our weekend trips and hikes, too. He did the shopping. He ran the errands. He gave hug after hug after hug. He was my rock. He was a talented singer, musician, speaker, thinker, human being.

The yellow brittlebush soothing me as I drove through the hills Phil grew up with near Moreno Valley, knew intimately, and loved, as I did with my own desert mountains in Apple Valley. The Box Springs Mountains, filled with huge rocks and hidden springs. Yesterday, driving to his funeral and final resting place overlooking Lion Head Hill. I can imagine him directing his mother and brothers to select that spot, where into eternity he can look at the rocks, and the hawks circling over, and imagine himself at the top, getting the cosmic view of all that was around. Phil lived at the pulsing center of so many people, so many things, so many interests and talents, and so much like me, kept it together for everyone else, on a friendship level and artistically and poetically. Connecting the dots and harmonizing the blend: that was and is me, that was and is him. He inspired me, he healed me, he knew me inside and out. As I did him.

I could feel Phil comforting me with a nature hug, yesterday, and it made me cry. The narrow road through the hills. So close to the major freeways, the merge of 60 and 91 and 215, pulsing with traffic, thousands of people pouring through rushing here and there. And just to one side, behind one small hill, another world. A world of me and Phil. Yellow flowers, purple flowers, it's a beautiful spring, we had so much rain, and the light was hawk light, it was lion light, it was a walk in beauty. Phil and I walked in beauty. It was our habit, it was our life, it was our thing. Today a volcano explodes out of its frozen respite in Iceland. Planes are grounded. Ash is falling from the sky, flooding the face of land. Forever altering the familiarity of earthly things. Opening new corridors of the human soul. Like a lightbeam. Like Phil. The force of this volcano grounds planes continents away, and decides when they will fly. Like Phil. And maybe leave jet flame trails across the darkest skies, as Phil did, Phil does, Phil will continue to do.

Joshua Tree Writing Workshop, Reading, Film Event!

Saturday, April 17, 2010
Focus on Joshua Tree:
Desert Writing Workshop, Author Reading,
& Joshua Tree Film/Photography
Twentynine Palms Inn, 29 Palms, CA www.29palmsinn.com
FREE! OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

4:00-6:00 p.m. DESERT WRITING WORKSHOP
Led by Ruth Nolan, M.A., Professor, College of the Desert
Join us for a desert-focused writing workshop focusing on composing poetry and prose by interacting with our desert surroundings and engaging the senses and creative spirit to capture the power of place in this unique setting.

6:30-8:30 p.m. DESERT AUTHORS READING:
DEANNE STILLMAN and RUTH NOLAN
• Deanne Stillman, “Rolling Stone Magazine” journalist and award-winning author of Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West, the bestseller Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave,” and Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango.

• Ruth Nolan, editor of No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California’s deserts and author of Wild Wash Road and Dry Waterfall.

• Escape to Reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps: Joshua Tree Film and
Photography screening: desert photographs taken during the 2008 and 2009 UCR-California Museum of Photography Joshua Tree National Park UCR-California Museum of Photography.

For more information on the April 17 workshop/reading/film screening at 29 Palms Inn: runolan@aol.com (760) 964-9767

All events are presented in conjunction with the UCR- Museum of Photography Joshua Tree Photo Shoot 2010: Flash Flood: a three-day interactive photo/writing event in/around Joshua Tree National Park April 17-19, 2010. Sponsored by Sweeney Art Gallery, UCRiverside, UCR CA Museum of Photography, the Inlandia Institute, College of the Desert Solstice Poets/Writer. Thanks to the 29 Palms Inn!

Palm Springs Life Magazine - Feb 2010

PSST! - Word Association - February 2010

"No Place For A Puritan" - Desert poems, stories, and essays.

No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts (Heyday Institute) demonstrates the danger, refuse, and lure of the desert in a collection of poems, stories, and essays by more than 80 writers. The anthology was edited by Ruth Nolan, a former Bureau of Land Management firefighter, an associate professor of English at College of the Desert, and a Palm Desert citizen.

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This article appears in the February 2010 issue of Palm Springs Life

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Where glamour and glitter, famous and pedestrian, meet! Chaucer would've loved it. Bring all to the table with yr stories high and low, regal and vulgar, in the name of the future Shakespeare, or was that Marlowe?

Midwest Book Review...two thumbs up!

amazon.com book review....exciting!

An excellent read, February 15, 2010
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)http://www.midwestbookreview.com/

The desert, barren, devoid of life, but home to some great stories. "No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts" is a collection of literature in many different formats. From excepts from novels to poetry, to short fiction and more, Ruth Nolan compiles quite the read for any who doubt the power of the desert, invoked for its mysteriousness, its hopelessness, its remoteness, and so much more. "No Place for a Puritan" is an excellent read for those who doubt the literary inspiration that is the deserts of California.

--thanks--!!