Standard Daily Practice

I take freedom where it stands. Waking hours before dawn, sitting down here at my computer and working. I have an average of 242 words per day this year. I do best with regularity and routine, I fall into a natural rhythm and it fits down to the bone.

Writing daily is the same as diet or exercise, only words mush my brain and running makes my heart beat against my ears. Words make me sweat; sometimes, I sit here and the more I don't want to say something I sweat. It pours down my arms and over my ribs. Cold wet excited to be so honest on paper, it is thrilling. I started running 16 days ago. I am so fresh to the process that if I skip my routine for more than two days, my routine no longer exists and I will put off pulling on my running gear till it was a memory of a thing I tried to do a few weeks ago.

I run down along the river, through the dry creek bed that if this was a normal winter I am sure would be churning with water and sticks. I push through the wet grass and dodge sticks. I find a deep rhythmic breath and feel my hips rotate. I am moving and I am breathing and I am on adventure and I love that. I avoid pavement, cars, and people. I saw a bobcat; he saw me first.

Opposing Forces

I continue headlong through oblivion— itinerate rouge heart beating endorphin perfection

small birds with yellow beaks
scrabble scramble picking through pistachio skulls

hungry in the warm cold air chill behind the sun's february rays

Sinew, Bone

In the hours before dawn stars sing me awake.

Levers, pulleys, rope, rusted pipe, and broken windows; forgotten tools in abandoned barns, these are the materials of dreams. I find them when I run, exploring the forest trails with my heart in my throat and my knees to my chin. I run backwards through time to a childhood of pine, boulders, secrets hidden deep in the woods above my many homes. Time spins back. My legs pump hot blood through the smooth rhythmic striding of hypnotic silence. I am so much louder than my woodland companions, my legs and feet thrash through underbrush and ducking under branches I catch twigs in my hair. I am a noisy machine. The hillside is not entirely stable. I ascend slowly following deer tracks, I am an usurper and tread lightly in fragile ecosystems.

Three, maybe four, running down down down and far behind the house. Legs flashing over the soft red soil. The smell of early spring in the opening pine buds and the white shorts let my knees feel, finally the air of the world. Jumping high in the air, the trail long forgotten somewhere behind me, off an embankment and spinning twisting turning in the air to land and continue lifting and swinging my body through space. I was alone; quite suddenly the reality that I had left the cabin far behind and that I was not entirely certain how to find the trail, or home, or much of anything really made me stop my leaping and listen to the rush of blood in my ears.

The trees showed me the way home: I explore gently; I have never been lost.

The Big Ship

Fuck all and those words that so clearly defined this second.

and then this, this moment of clarity when everything was clear like the morning, long gone with the rising sun and expired like an exhale.

Against the grain my body steps into the wind and feels the thick air of spring boiling under the surface of the warming soil. The buds open and trees loose intoxicating pollen, I am drunk on the mind that blows on my arms, lifting the fine hairs and finding its way up and under my shirt. The sky shoots beyond the horizon.

Worth Waiting

I cannot say that it was easy; but after trespassing across three properties, climbing two gates, running through the forest, I made it to the top of the mountain. The summit has been luring me since my first morning in California, yesterday I ran to the top. Open, expansive dry creek valley bellow me, my eyes stretching across the valley to the distant ocean. There is a grotto in the forest. July's full moon and I have a date to meet at the top of the hill and settle into the summer grass. On a blanket I will moon bathe.

Porosity

Minerals and time fall through the night to land in my sleeping head. Amongst the stars, against the sky the filtered moon casts shadows through the vineyard. I step through the night; the mud, slick and red, beneath my feet—have eyes of their own and know the way home.

three to the left

The drive is east and a little south. Monolithic hills of chalk and stone, is this what makes the valley so damn expensive. The stone filters the water and the wine is complex?

The morning sun comes earlier than I expect, how quickly days gain minutes. Day and night are close to being evenly matched. Though I suppose that day always has a bit of an advantage what with having the sun and the sun rise announcing the coming day and the long lingering sunsets where the rays of day seem to hold fingers out and against the coming solitude of evening. Evenly matched.

Night has the universe on display. What with all those stars and galaxies and sh*t, night is the time to exhale to the edge of expansion. Stars incredible stars, without which how could we be here, yet that giant star that heats the soil and is sung into being each morning by doves is so bright and so close to home that my eyes burn and I cannot seem to remember that the universe is made of millions of stars, billions and countless particles of light.

Red Pine

I filter in and out of focus. The damp settles across the valley and rolls up my arms. This is not so much more than anything I should know, but rather something intrinsic that I've skipped until now. Stay out of it, my brain screams as I wind myself tight into knots and screws and open plains, this all happened, is happening right now. More important the ache in my bones is less. Less compulsion (is controlling compulsion a compulsion unto itself?) finds its way into every crevice of my mind. Settling into a trance before dawn I listen to the rain against the single pain window; the frog's soliloquy garners my attention. This is all not there or here as I have only one day to finish the book I started before christmas and I am not reading. I am sitting here trying to say that the moment has not yet passed if it can expand and exhale into a phrase that holds itself contained in the cloud's shadow chasing rabbits across the neighboring field and me too, I go with them on the wind that is unseasonably warm, thick against my neck, intimate yet impersonal.