Void is Form

It is two minutes past noon and I am still alone in the office.  One colleague has called out sick, another has called in late due to fevery children.  The third doesn't bother with excuses anymore, as he never appears until he's been to the gym and had lunch.  My boss's Google Calendar says she'll be at something called "Moving Forward" until 3:00.  I don't mean for this to sound as whiny as it's coming out (there's a little self-righteous resentment yes, but just a little).  It's more of a lonely thing.  Ella Fitzgerald can't be helping... I'd never really listened to 'They Can't Take That Away' before.  And only 27 hours ago I was standing over the Snake River near Shoshone Falls, in the parking lot of a Michael's craft store, watching base jumpers leap from the Perrine Bridge.  My daughter is at the perfect age for everything and she squealed as each chute opened.

Mermaids can't be caught
Or they become like girls or
Fish, though goddelijk

I didn't get my little boy but I got my kindred spirit

Opium of the People

If it wasn't a cold digital reading and the push of a vinyl button

The nurse had found an errant blue-black seed in the crack between the driveway and her mother's vegetable garden

And warmed the soil so as not to shock the fragile thing, and misted it with a thoroughly rinsed spray n wash bottle

Each morning, bleary-eyed, sensing how many spurts might replicate a humid morning in  Bangledesh

And cradled its trailings as she transferred it to a larger space along the side of the house

Between the pottery kiln with the frayed power cord and the deflated basketball,

Would there be a pain justi....

I notice my thoughts have carried me away again and I bow to them like Jack Kornfield's tapes taught me,

Acknowledge the 7 year old Mennonite girl across the childrens section of the Kanab Library

Realize that I'd shifted my arm to obstruct her view of my more obvious arm tattoos without even thinking about it

All the universe
Teach us our true nature, we're
Ready to unlearn

Aslama

I pause my morning smoke and meditation to retrieve a bright blue pool noodle almost out the left-open gate.  Bed it safely back in the orange toy bucket against the chilly Autumn wind. Pandora is playing a song that meant a lot to me at one point. Exhale yet again and this is the one. This is the time when I truly let go and watch the memories drift with the frozen cigarrete smoke until diluted enough to not seem to matter.

The Mother

I think it's cause for celebration, in certain cultures... or eras, or species... something i think i've read.

Here and now I'm scared to acknowledge my own daughter's new ability to grow life. I'd hate to embarass her...

I've just decided I think my favorite thing about the seashore is not the smell or the air that lets your skin finally breathe or even the waves, never not interesting.

It's that for some reason, even though the gravity must be at least minutely stronger at Big Sur than high in my mountain home, the Pacific draws my feet and mind up and out.

How, I'll never know, which makes it all the easier to smile dumbly into the thinning mist and feel that childhood rapture, irrepresibly caught up in the onrushing unknown and recognizing that what is happening to you has never happened to anything ever before