Away

Everyday feels like a goodbye.

I had moved to the Ohio boy house for the summer and danced in the festivals and the warehouse parties. Then Fall came and I found myself in a little home with Ryan and Whitney a block from Jackson's Corner with their terrible expensive salads and sweet cashiers.

And now, in less then a month, we will be gone to Europe.
Everyday feels like a goodbye.
Before he moved to Oregon from Ohio, Ryan told me in the last month everyday was a going-away party. He got on the train west with Arthur dizzy from the last night in Cincinnati.
"I kind of didn't want to leave. It was so fun."

I was eluding to never coming back. Now I keep eluding to July. I don't know what will happen. There is a lot of uncertainty and the best strategy is to give up as much as possible to prepare.

Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium. Who the hell knows. We are going. We are leaving for a spell. I just want to get away for awhile. Become uncomfortable in my own skin. Be scared and see with fresh eyes. I've been such a brat in the last few years, so comfortable and overly familiar. An old medicine, maybe.

(picture of birds)

The momentum picked me up. Last summer I got my waitressing job back and paid off a debt accrued out of living outside of my means and lack of creativity. Moved twice and moving again next week. Year of the Horse, such a strong steady rhythm.

You keep asking me if I'm excited. I've been tired of answering that question. I don't like to hear the same question more than once. I am excited to finish this zine. I am excited to hang the cardboard flags on the rafters and make the teepee for Gold Rust, Second Son and the Rural Demons to play under. I am excited for the Heat party next Saturday at the Circus Center.

Where I am going in unknown to me. Meeting a stranger for a first-date, I don't know if I'm excited. I wish you could ask me if I was ready to which I will respond, "no."

I'm going away and meeting all the people I need to meet before I go. The universe is overabundant in support.

I wish you would ask "Will you miss me?" to which I will respond, "yes."

Right now, I am here. In my sweet Bend, Oregon. My sweet little home with all my little friends. Today I ran into the Whistler, who congratulated me on winning the Hottest Teacher award in the Source. Last night at the show there were hands all over me, in my hair, on my back, around my shoulders. This town is an orgy of hands and names and familiarity. Today Joel and I warned people on the sidewalk to avoid the dogshit. Joel put up a notice in his accordion case (next to the sign requesting $ for a song) "$ for warning about dogshit."

When I am away I will see your face in Brussels and Oslo. No doubt I will find you in a pub in Reykjavik and a concert in Paris. No doubt, I will look for your face among strangers.

Goodbye for now. I will miss you so. Thank you for you kindness. I look forward to being again in your arms.

Nettle

March 2013

Jake took me to the nettle patch today.

My coat with only one button opened like cape as we rode our bikes along the river as fast as we could.

I can't tell you where the nettle is

I can tell you where the wolf berries are (in the alley near my old house). There should be enough again this summer for you and me if the bees are busy and the neighbors don't prune them away

But the nettle is Jake’s to share.

Riding, I tell Jake I figured something out. Gazing at Rinnah last night I got shy and looked away. I remembered when it was that when you kiss someone you stop looking away. When you admit your love, you feel like you're inside that person and they are inside of you.

Jake tells me I have women medicine and that I use my powers to help others.

He says the nettle is male and female and mate every. The root of the nettle feels masculine and warriors would consume the nettle to strengthen their blood

Along the Deschutes, we look around the brush. There is a styrofoam container, some crushed Olympia cans, a bottle of Old German which I put in my backpack.

Jake finds the nettle and we clear away a place in the thicket to crouch down. The nettle is going crazy in the valley but here in the high desert it is just one small plant.

I tell him every year I wish the winter to be so treacherous and miserable. I hope everything breaks and I cry every day because when the summer comes it feels like ecstasy

“When you touch the nettle it stings and leaves welts.

The Chinese use nettle in medicine. They lash the backs of elders with arthritis and it relieves their joints.” Jake says.

We touch the nettle to acupuncture points on our wrists

Within seconds the skin flares up and stings.

It's reminds us that pain is healing.

He picks a nettle for himself to put it in sushi for the family. He picks a nettle for me to make a warrior tea.  

Little Miami

"The sycamores have white bark only by the river," Ryan points out.

A jackpot of seeds I find burrowed in a fallen tree, he suggests might have been the hoard of hibernating squirrels. Filled my pockets with cold black wooded balls, slick pods, interesting bark, acorns, and walnuts. Brushing them on my pants before slipping them in my pocket.

Home, I lay them on the dinner table in a certain order, framing the seeds with the bark, spacing them carefully apart.

Donna, biologist, Ph.D, leans over and tells me the names. She tells me some are "pod seeds," the long shiny pod is from a black locust, the chipping bark in from a sycamore. What looks like a rotted lime is the casing of a walnut, the spiky seed is from a sweet gum, the rough moth wings are from a maple.

"The Kentucky coffee bean pod," she points out.

"A buckeye, or horse chestnut, bark from a birch tree, a sycamore fig."

One by one she introduces me to them.

Two questions spring up for everyone that is answered. The fundamental ones, back to the origins of everything, "how did these come to be?"

A question not asked enough, or not explored so thoroughly. It seems there is no questions one can ask that doesn't address the universe itself. And we are, the universe asking and responding.

Back to being five-years-old, on the lap of my cousin Summer who is drawing a face with me. Going over every feature we carefully and deliberately make the shapes. Eyes, squinting ovals, eye lids being a carefully drawn line above. Delicate strokes make up eye lashes, two black beads are pupils, the detail of black stripes within the color, the milky white surrounding, the pink softness in the corners. Features I don’t even have names for.

I think back to the old zine while back where I wrote about Natty and the mullein, how the moments when I'm open and curious are the greatest moments and the ones I wish to share in my writing. The moments that I need to flow through me. These are the small notions the universe answers that are beyond me. They belong to all of us.

"The seeds are black because they've been frozen," Donna tells me. We are unsure about the locket looking pod, maybe a milkweed.

"When a milkweed cracks open it releases little floating seeds like a dandelion."

Of the old lime she indicates, "That’s a walnut inside its casing. Don't try to peel it off or your hands will be dyed black. I had a friend who peeled them for a job one summer and his hands were completely black for a year." The mysteries of the plants revealed from the stories.

It reminds me of the afternoon with the nettle. 

Plants

Last year was about breaking cycles. I moved twice and realized the burden of the weight I carried with me.
Even now I feel the weight on the shoulders and the weight to come.
Ryan dreamt I sleep walked up a mountain towing a heavy cart. He followed me and when I woke up was unable to ask the question of why I was pulling the cart. Resting the cart down we continued up the mountain, quicker, I would imagine.
The days of unlimited strength are lessening - but nothing has changed, really.

This last year I wrote forty zines and sent them away without making copies to people I had put on a list. A person for everyday in September and October. At the end of it I threw a little party at the theater. Kolby came and even Scott, dizzy, cheerless and gaunt as he was in those days.

More Unity and Universe Blah-ty-blah

"The sycamores have white bark only by the river," Ryan points out.
A jackpot of seeds I find burrowed in a fallen tree, he suggests might have been the hoard of hibernating squirrels. Filled my pockets with cold black wooded balls, slick pods, interesting bark, acorns, walnuts. Brushing them on my pants before slipping them in my pocket.
Home I laid them out on the dinner table and put them in a certain order.  Framing the seeds with the bark. Placing them carefully spaced apart. Donna, biologist, Ph.D, leans over and tells me the names. She tells me some are "pod seeds," the long shiny pod is from a black locust, the chipping bark in from a sycamore, when looks like an rotted old lime is the shell of a walnut, the spiky seed is from a sweet gum, the rough moth wings are from a maple.
"The Kentucky coffee bean pod," she points out.
"A buckeye, or horse chestnut, bark from a birch tree, a sycamore fig."
One by one she introduces me to them.
Two questions spring up for everyone that is answered. The fundamental ones, back to the origins of everything, "how did these come to be?" A question not asked enough, or not explored so thoroughly. It seems there is no questions one can ask that doesn't address the universe itself. 
We are the universe answering the questions of the universe. 

"The universe pondering itself," Max had said (you remember?).

Back to being five-years-old, on the the lap of my cousin Summer who is drawing a face with me. Going over every feature we carefully and deliberately make the shapes. Eyes, squinting ovals, eye lids being a carefully drawn line above. Eye lashes, pupils, the black strips within the color, the soft circle around the color, the pink softness in the corners. We are asking, what makes a nose? What makes a chin?

"The seeds are black because they've been frozen," Donna tells me.
We are unsure about the locket looking pod, maybe a milkweed.

"A milkweed cracks open in the Spring, releasing little floating seeds."

Of the old lime she indicates, "that's a walnut inside its casing. Don't try to peel it off or your hands will be dyed black. I had a friend who peeled them for a job one summer and his hands were completely black for a year." The mysteries of the plants revealed from the stories. 

It reminds me of the afternoon with the nettle. 

Cincinnati

Puma's house was falling down the street. Ryan could only be in for a small amount of time before he got vertigo. We laid on our backs in the kitchen to see if our inner ears could detect the slope, if the blood in our head and limbs would be pulled the way it did when we'd lay on the slope of the earth. Placing an empty bottle on the floor we watched it roll without suggestion, towards the bathroom, towards Megan's room where Bailey the pitt bull peeked around the corner, nervous at new guests. 

From Puma's window, three and half flights up, out the window, I looked out at the drop. 

"One day the whole house is going to slide off its foundation into the street," Ryan told me. Puma's bed near the window on the top floor would be the first out. I told Puma to tether himself to the wall on the opposite side of the room in case it happened. 

I heard the other day of a failed suicide attempt from a three story building. Whoever it was, jumped, got back up, and jumped again. Glancing at Puma, the cornfed Ohio boy, with stronger tethers to family then he might a rope to a wall, would land gracefully on his mother's prayers alone. 

The buildings in Cincinnati are tall and thin, willowy like geriatric ballet dancers. Sometimes I think, so much of what is holding it all together is faith. I know this is silly. There are things in between, beams and balance 

In the Bill Nye, Ken Ham debate the sacredness of faith was utterly lost. Bill Nye on the science side, Ken Ham defending Creationism. It's silly to draw conclusions from absolute truth, but faith itself is not silly. If faith is not intended to grow it is a poison. 

Time has been moving softly and quickly ever since the solstice. Like Rip Van Winkle, I feel like I could wake up one morning and see myself a hundred years older in the bathroom mirror and wonder where the time went. Sleeping, waking, reading - I look up from my painting and see three hours has passed. How was it so? Little mysteries revealed in the time, not the shaking revelations that come with effort. They amount to the same satisfaction within myself. ]

Students

The boy with the ice-eyes is in class today. From across the room I catch him in the corral of bright colored balls.
He is so kind. We play a game. Putting the same colored balls in a basket. Red. Green. Blue. He calls Yellow, "Low." His favorite color is blue. He is two. He fits my need for order.

Been falling in love with my students lately. Spending all my days thinking of what to do with them and then throwing it all out the window and just listening to their stories. It has yet to come to anyone's attention how terribly under qualified I am to teach writing. I don't believe my employers know what I do.
This is my third year working at the Nature of Words and only now am I settling into it. It is because of the students.
Tristan, pixie-cut wandere who invented her own compass that points only to the heart when she is lost. She could probably point out the North star but follows the direction of Orion - spinning round and round, finding the stories most kids her age never find. This evening on the sidewalk she pulled a cigarette out of her mouth and hid it, slight of hand, while saying goodbye. Walking away with Erica who looks like Scarlet Johanson and starts her drawings with the eyes. Puppy haired Canon who confessed tonight they call him "Guac-Boy" at the Mexican restaurant he does dishes at and is sixteen years old. In the blanket fort, Canon played a spoken-word bit on the tinny iphone speaker, "We all have different abilities, thought processes, experiences and genes. So why is a class full of individuals tested by the same means?" Then we dismantled the blanket fort.
Jeremiah was helping me with blankets and bags when we all parted ways.
"Tristan hid her cigarette from me," I mused to him, "she doesn't want me to know she smokes."
"I smoke cigarettes. And I smoke pot. I'm a closet nothing."
Jeremiah is going back to Marshall High School, the alternative school. We applauded him earlier when he made that announcement.
Maybe I am qualified to work with these students. No degree, but a chest full of old notebooks since Middle school. I don't know if the students know what a scared kid I am. How I feel just like them. Judged and
Once at a weekend intensive in Sisters at Caldera I cowered back with my student assistant, Marlee, the germaphob graphic novelist. Admitted if I was a student I would hide in the back with my notebook rather than teach the class. Just a scared kid teaching other kids that are much louder and braver.
The first time I met Tristan I was terrified of her. It was years ago and I watched her put a then, fifteen-year-old Canon in a stunned silence. I told her to write something on my hand and she wrote "For those who favor fire," from the Robert Frost poem. She told me she might not stay. Might run out of the room crying and I told her to do what she needed to do. But she stayed through the entire class.
Last week we both accidentally brought each other presents. Mine, an old Pollyannas band t-shirt and hers, a tiny terrarium in a jar with a christmas light.

"We won't let exam results decided our fate."

Take time loving me

Med

She had just had her heart broken and was moping and you told her to smile.
And I told her, "don't you dare."
And I pulled you off to the side and told you, "don't you ever tell someone to fake it."

What do they say? It takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile.
It takes no muscles to make no facial expression at all.

Lying burns more calories than telling the truth. I made this up.

Smiling causes happiness. So it goes.

Cussing reduces physical pain. So it goes.

Don't fake it.

Pills like baby teeth
I break them apart
I am weaning.


There is something more than happiness that needs to be discovered in this life. 

"Sometimes people need to walk a dark path," Ryan tells me.

Another night

I can't do it
I tell Ryan
and he drops his bike, leans it against the truck
Walks towards me
and puts his hands on my shoulders
tells me
"Do what you want
I love will love you no matter what
I don't see you as a person on medication
Don't do anything you're not ready for"

So I'm breaking my pills in half.
Half of 20mg
Half of 10mg
5 mg a day.

I used to go without. Gave myself a month here or there.
Last winter, my eye twitched. My brain felt like it was floating in the sea.
And I had just forgotten to take them
And I slept in
My routine was distrupted.
I did it all wrong.

I start splitting my pills in half after Ryan and slept that night in the daisy field.

Last summer, Mom asked me if I still thought about suicide. 

When I had told her I was on medication she rolled her eyes. Disappointed. I didn't bother to tell my Dad because I knew it would be worse. I told my brother and sister over a fire a few months in. 
My brother told me, "How can I judge to for taking medication when I have no idea what it's like to be you."

I told Mom, " I didn't think about suicide." 

She told me she read an article about depression and that kids that stayed up really late when they were young tended towards suicidal thinking when they were older. 

"Remember when you would stay up late working on your projects?"

Way past when everyone else had gone to sleep. 

I poisoned myself. 

Dave and I called it our  "human pills." He had submitted an article to my compilation zine, Fighting With Demons, about being on medication and for years growing up in a fundamentalist church.
"I grew up believing that my anxiety and sadness were deficiencies in faith."

The patient is a 22-year-old female, 9-week into her pregnant. She does not want the doctor to turn the monitor to show her the ultra-sound. A volunteer has offered to be nearby during the termination procedure. When the procedure is over patient cries so the volunteer believes she is not a monster. Patient does not believe monsters should have children.

The patient is a 24-year-old female. She remembers feeling different when she was 5-years-old and stayed in from recess. She has chronic thoughts of suicide but has never acted on them. Patient is wracked by guilt over an abortion she went through years ago that she never told anyone. She doesn't know how to explain this to others. Patient works compulsively. When projects are complete patient does not feel a sense of accomplishment. Patient lacks empathy and when issues arise in relationships she abandons them. She feels if she is not beautiful and happy she will not be loved. Patient feels great anxiety when thinking about travel and while traveling. 

Patient does not like herself. Patient feels guilty for being sad. 

Patient is 25-years-old and coming off medication. She has the support of a friend who gives her space to talk about what she is going through. As the medication leaves her system, she stops being able to explain what she was going through. Patient resents her friend for not being able to fix her. Patient feels guilt for not being able to be ok. With a feelings of worthlessness and guilt, suicidal thoughts return. 


Patient is 27-year-old female who has been on medication for more that three years. She feels the spectrum of emotions that she imagines other people feel. Patient expresses anger, sadness and happiness. Patient works compulsively. Patient feels accomplished when completing a project. She does not have chronic thoughts of suicide.

Patient is a 27-year-old female who is taking herself off from medication. She is scared. The guilt she has felt for being on medication is exacerbated by the lack of medication in her system. She is beginning to feel raw, like the buffer between her and the harshness of the world is flaking off. 
She is afraid she will not be able to connect to others soon. She is afraid she will not want to be around children. She is afraid of having chronic thoughts of suicide. She is afraid she won't like herself anymore. Patient is starting to believe she is ugly and no one likes her.