Tag Archives: home

peeling away what isn’t home

graffiti on cement sidewalk of smiling daisy growing out of a potGood morning, good morning.

It’s good to have a ritual, an opening, a way to say hello. I’m here in the quiet green room, the birds just percolating in the apple tree outside the windows, the sun spreading her thick, buttery smile over the top of the apartment building across the way. The garden is quiet (only the bees and cabbage moths awake), and home is figuring its way into my mouth once again.

Back from a few days on the other coast, in that place where I used to be from. I can’t call it home. I can’t lay any claim to it. Home is supposed to be the place where you were born, the place where your parents are, the place where there is a house you can return to.

How many of us actually have a home like that?

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what if home is and isn’t?

graffiti of butterfly shadows...I leave home to go home for a week (with only intermittent internet access!), and then leave home to come home again.

What does home mean, when everything is relative?

Robert Frost is supposed to have said or written, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

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singing and sleep away

graffiti fromm Istanbul: two yellow hands holding the strings of balloon eyesgood morning good morning good morning.

It’s hard to be chipper in the grey, isn’t it? At least, that’s true for me this morning.

I’m having a longing for true (i.e., Midwestern) summer. Someone brought deliciously deviled eggs to our Write Whole: Survivors Write potluck last night (we have a potluck on the last night of each workshop, a wonderful chance to share food and a bit more of ourselves as well) and I almost got teary with missing cookouts, family reunions, home food. Maybe this weekend I’ll make some ambrosia salad, of course it won’t be even remotely the same, eating it without all my cousins, my sister, my grandma there.

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a relationship with home again


Yesterday we hiked up a mountain — a small mountain, Tiburon mountain, sure, but when we came to the top, we could see the full body of that orange Golden Gate Bridge, hugged thick by fog, nearly weighted down. We could see the whole fog-heavy morning laid out in front of us.

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This week, the workshops begin again — tonight I’ll be meeting with a full Write Whole workshop, and throughout the day, I’ll be communicating with folks who’ve signed up for the online Reclaiming Our Erotic Story class. I’m making my first videos ever for the online workshop — I feel like we get closer to the ‘in person’ experience if folks can hear the prompt, rather than read it. We’ll see how that goes.

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more visibly messy than I already am

You know those times when something really big is happening in your life and all you can manage to do is just hold open the space for it to emerge? I’m pretty sure I’m in the middle of one of those times.

Something very important in my life transformed itself over dinner last night — which means it ended, and it’s about to begin again. It’s something confidential, and one day I’ll tell you more about it. For today, I’m in kind of a quiet mourning place, and a place of enormous gratitude. (Thank you & love you!)

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Amending my soil

Our cucumber plants -- and one curving cuke!This morning it’s dark enough at 5:35 am that it makes sense for me to have a little candle at my writing desk, which makes it feel more like I’m up with the “holy dark.”  It’d be quiet outside in my little San Rafael neighborhood if not for the loud industrial garbage truck, chewing and hollering its way through the early morning.

There’s a creek that I pass on the way to the bus stop in the mornings, it’s a block away, loaded down and over-banked with trees, and the water’s clearish enough that I can see that there are no fish there, very little apparently living in the water.  The mallards like the small sand bar.  It’s a tidal creek, which is something I continue to appreciate about so many of the bodies of water around here — the idea that they’re breathing with the bigger tides, are connected that way. Lake Merritt’s like that, would be shallower some mornings on my way to BART, and other mornings would be full up around the legs of egrets and herons.

Yesterday there was a turtle floating in the water, floating horizontal, head just poking out up into the air. I’d been looking for, hoping for turtles, wanted the little sand bars and side-of-the-stream rocks and logs to get cluttered with their roundness on hot days.  This is the first one I’ve seen, but I think I’m hopeful (could I be hopeful, do I want to be, after reading Derrick Jensen yesterday)? I think I’m gratified, I think I’m just glad. Glad that something’s living in the water, the water’s not dead.

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