Beginning Againing

After the rush and buzz of the holidays (an eleven day road trip with puppy in tow), I came back to Kentucky with a new sense of my weird self. Not the sense of self that says, “I’ve got this figured out,” but rather the one that says, “Oh, right, I have no idea what I’m doing.” I learned a lot about how I want to live my life, what I want out of it, who I want to spend it with, what my next journeys will entail, and so forth. In the fall of 2010, I quit my job, and despite having fallen in love with someone, moved home to the Valley of the Moon where I tried desperately to write a novel. Now, it’s 2012. I live in Kentucky with my man. I have finished the fifth draft of my first of a novel. We have a dog, and we go for walks, and write, and drink bourbon, and wine, and tea. I freelance copywrite from my home office, which keeps me in touch with New York and the advertising world, and all in all, I am, (say it, or as Elizabeth Bishop said…(Write it!), happy.

And yet still there are days when I am not. When I am full of fear and self-loathing. Full of envy, greed, or hurt. The days where the beast inside of you rails against your softer water-sack on the soul and screams that you are doing it all wrong, making a mess of things, carpooling one too many bad ideas to and from the office of regrets. It’s fascinating to me.  Still, as I enter 2012 with a still-not-done-probably-80% there-book-I-never-thought-I-would-write, and a life I never thought I would have, despite my occasional blues and mean streaks, I am pressing onward with some absurd belief that everything’s going to be alright. In the meantime, these are my resolutions that I will make here to keep me sane and grounded. (Some of these, I already do, and this simply serves as a way of recommitting to them.)

1. Walk in the “great outdoors,” every day, even in the snow, (even with the blues).
2. Meditate every day for at least 10 minutes.
3. Write every day. No matter what it is. And emails (unless they are long love letters, or epic personal stories, or writings on the craft) don’t count.
4. Practice yoga, Pilates (it still bugs me that I have to capitalize that), or at the very least, some stretching every day. (I sit at my desk and write all, people who do that also need to work out a lot.)
5. Connect with my friends more (call or video chat more). Make phone dates and stick to them. These people are my lifelines. They have always been my lifelines. Don’t forget it.
6. See my family more often. Travel, video chat, call, write, send gifts, to the people that made me and the people that helped me be a better person all along the way.
7. Be as honest with myself as possible, while still dreaming extraordinarily big. (Fly? I can do that. Watch me.)
8. Stop beating myself up so terribly when I make a mistake. (I hate failure, I keep forgetting that it makes me better. I hate you when you tell me I fail. But trust me, I hate myself more. This cycle must end.)
9. Save more money. (I don’t need everything I see. Except for that, right there, just this once.)
10. Use my time more wisely. (TV is not wise. Unless it is. Then it’s awesome.)
11. Answer the phone when it rings, unless I am already with someone. (I’m never going to do this, but I’m putting it here to make my phone feel better.)
12.  Read more. (This includes the lovely stack of New Yorkers that have piled up like intellectual bills in our living room.)
13. Listen more closely to people, hear what they need. Be a better friend because I’ve listened, not because I’ve said something.
14. Tell him all the time how happy he makes me. Make sure he knows how impossible this good love can seem sometimes, and how grateful I am that he is my incomparable partner in crime.
15. Play guitar. Learn some new songs.
16. Write a new story (whatever this means).
17. Finish book of poems number four. (It’s on its way.)
18. Explore, appreciate, and connect to the town where I am living like I’m a happy tourist. Whatever town that is.
19. See more live music. Nothing compares to the elation of my ears.
20. Practice gratitude, and acceptance, and joy. (Ah, you know…easy.)
21. Take care of myself like I would a friend: Eat well, drink well, comfort and calm myself.
22. Teach our dog some new tricks. And by new, I mean, some. (I know Mr. Cesar Millan. It’s me, not the dog.)
23. Give more. Volunteer more. Do things for others.
24. Never underestimate the power of the art we do.
25. Begin again. And again. And again.

The Constant Come Back

After a quick Southern California trip to see my grandparents, we arrived safely (puppy and all) in the home valley. It's colder than I thought it would be, but just as pretty as always. We're looking after friend's dogs in a house perched on top of a mountain while finishing up work. As the copy work dwindles for the holiday and the novel work begins again, I'm watching a German Shepherd, a Catahoula Cur, and a much-fiestier-than-she-looks pug try and play nice by sharing bones and patrolling the grounds together. The fine and difficult art of sharing time and space with other animals. Oh the complexities of building a new society. Oh the homes we make out of rocks and dust. 

Everyone is going home. Or so it seems on the interwebs. I like that. A returning. A coming back to each other. A brief pause in the middle of all our private and political disasters. I always think of one of my favorite Robert Hass poems, "Faint Music," where the ending opens up so beautifully. "I had the idea that the world's so full of pain/it must sometimes make a kind of singing./ And that the sequence helps, as much as the order./ First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing." Now, we get to sing.

I'm looking for Thanksgiving poems to share at the table on Thursday. My non-believer way of saying thank you, my little atheist prayers. 

(Some people have home teams, I have home trees. This is my most cherished tree-teacher. "Good things come in trees." I know the California state tree is the redwood, but sometimes I think it should be the oak.)

(From the top of the Corridor Ridge trail where I came with my labrador when I was little, we walked in the late afternoon. This time, with my new favorite dog by my side.)

(Who says we don't have seasons in California? This is what we call the Sonoma "color.")

I think of the coming back we do to our roots and of Kay Ryan's "A Certain Kind of Eden," with the lines: "Even the one vine that tendrils out alone/ in time turns on its own impulse,/twisting back down its upward course/ a strong and then a stronger rope,/ the greenest saddest strongest/ kind of hope." 

What needy things we are. What greedy things. How generous of the earth to put up with our endless coming home, our own weird gravity of belonging somehow, somewhere, to some part of the forgiving land, we unwittingly try and call our own.