manifestation

Pulled from my notebook:

24 June 2011, I make my living riding, training, working with horses. This work is deeply meaningful to me and I am consistently amazed at the possibilities that continue to offer themselves to me. I work with a trainer who challenges, motivates (and may I add, respects) me. They are kind and generous with the animals in their care. The relationship is mutually beneficial.

At times I make a practice of writing out exactly what I want so that my subconscious brain and the universal id that makes shit happen line up.

Pulled from life:
12 August 2011, Offered the chance of a lifetime to work in a classical dressage barn in Healdsburg, CA.

Now, I am overwhelmed with all of this manifestation. On my list of physical things that I needed were living off the I-5 corridor, a better climate, living near a small town; my mental and emotional list be a horse monk; be able to bring my horse; be able to live on the farm; respect, value, love the people I work with and for; have a living stipend; have enough time to take it all in.

Every item on that list is covered, every damn one. When does that happen? overwhelming gratitude

Ticking Clocks, Off Time

In a previous life as a sensitive ticking clock phobe, this house would have driven me mad. There are no less than two ticks in the room where I sleep, three in the living room, one in the kitchen, and others scattered aesthetically through out the rest of the home.

This cacophonous din became white noise as I slept: through people arriving late in the night, through dreams disjointed dreams, through the anonymity of waking without a name to attach to myself the clocks remained vigilant. Waking as the sun cracked the eastern rim of the sky lighting the dew, the horse's backs, the spark behind my eyes.

I wake and feed the animals, make coffee, the air is damp and clear as I pick the manure from their paddocks. Tomorrow, I will ride before dawn.

Poison Rattles

I was three when I dreamed of compassion; I was four when I learned the cold hard truth of life; I was five when I knew that compassion and humanity are not happy bedfellows; I was five when I was kicked out of kindergarten for fighting.

The Rogue River was close to the place we were living in late spring of 1985. I saw dead salmon in that river. Huge teeth and a long tapered jaw, its teeth were black and yellow with age and rot. The salmon must have been spawning; it was bigger than me.

There was a mama duck. I found her nest in the cattails; I didn’t touch the eggs, she was my friend. I was fascinated with her concentration as she sat on the next but after all of the eggs but one hatched, I was so sad that I didn’t like watching her living ducklings because the one egg in the nest just sat there lonely abandoned dead.

I saw a lot of death that year. The worst was when the creepy Jesus Lovers killed the rattlesnake in the drive way. I was four, almost five, and we lived a studio above a garage in Grants Pass, OR. It was the first time we lived on a street, had a sidewalk, or neighbors. Our neighbors were also our landlords; they hosted revival style meetings in the garage on Sunday mornings. They would bang-bang on drums and sing to heaven about sin and salvation. I was pretty sure that everyone was their neighbor's landlord, right on down the block to the very end to the last house next to the park and those people were in charge of the park, that way everyone had someone to watch over them and keep them safe. Some boys lived next door, they had a grape arbor and taught me to swear with the biggest four letter word. I learned that if you say fuck your mother will swoop in with a bar of soap and teach you that words are so powerful that you have to eat lye to absolve their hold over you.

One day the landlords drove up with some of their friends. I stood up in the window watching them as they pulled a styrofoam cooler out of the back of their Lincoln. Tipping the cooler gently onto the baking driveway, the all stood in a circle as a snake twisted hissed coilded in the sudden light. In a flash, one of them had a jack knife. Running for the stairs, wailing nooooooo I burst through the door and into the daylight. The majestic snake in its final death twitch blood pooling. I ran at them and tears and mad and fists and why why why did you kill it? They told me, so that it wouldn’t get me first. But, they had trapped it and brought it home and slaughtered it right there for an eight ring rattle. That was their prize, and I’ll bet that they shook that rattle early sunday mornings as they worshiped Jesus and all his creation.

a fruit once plucked will never ripen

The tub was small, deep
and round, rather than
long and coffin like.
The water, pulled from
a cistern then sun
warmed, hid our legs below
the murky surface.

Upstairs, our parents smoked
joints
on the futon listening to
records. A narrow
window stretched from the
roof to the basement,
connecting
us. We shared a view
of an old gnarled

apricot tree. In
the green tiled tub our
toes turned from raisins
to prunes as scarlet
and fucia flamed,
a fire of sunset.
The fruit, still hard, green,
sour, hung silhouetted
in twilight ripening—
waiting to be eaten.

five years of stories, mostly lies

and as the note I wrote to myself (I leave notes for myself, so I don't forget to remember) says: mix truth with fiction, real with imaginary, to explain why I am here.

Here, There

The small bead pressed against the mound of her clitoris. He rolled the smooth and round ball over the tightening vessel. She broke against him, loosened from her body one fraction before she retracts; as a wave onto the shore, the edges of her being fell over his in an awakening; that forgetfulness of form carried them onto the sofa.

"As one drop this rain fed the root of my spine, and I, now more awaken, more livened, can step further from the bough and harbor my scent in a bottle."

"It will crash through walls and shake the sky. There is little to contain if not the wind of our minds, this breath already passes."

"Oh, union of senses! The breath inhabits none, the breath inhabits all: it is no more a limiter of time than that of the iron in our blood."

"Push onward now and return to the base sense of mortality, this is nothing, the invisible world of void and shadow dreams too far from this field I hold you, too, as the night moves perpendicular to day."

"Loneliness presses people, solitude taunts their substance; there, that the temptation for contact, charges them headlong to live in boxes with strangers."

"Friction creates heat and the bodies too closely packed flair personalities and discourage calm thorough thought."

"Feet on the sidewalk deafen the canals of ears and the heart beats too close to the throat."

"When nervous I feel the pulse in my sternal notch, it calms me, to know that my heart beats when my mind detaches and searches outside the room for respite. With the first two fingers of my right hand I count the push against my fingers."

"The sense in the fingers is not of the organ, nor the organ of the fingers, but that which is perceived lies in their union."

"My soul lifts and before making its journey across the firmament it moves between the mist and between clouds."

"I press a small bead against the raising notch of your clitoris as the first two fingers of your right hand touch the base of your throat and you shutter against me."