The last Halloween on Earth

"I know bile intimately"


Pop culture is a crutch.

An excessive amount of animus


He's got a lot to prove. He left during patisserie week. 

You're trying to do art; a lot of stuff's bothering you 

Don't hold the pose; let the pose hold you


Am I the first one to think of that?


Hey chef Anna Maria, it wasn't a jambalaya contest. 


We're made of flesh.

Kaya is beautiful and I love her.



Mutated (surrounded by walls)

What if my dad is using doomsday thinking to cope with his own mortality



I believe in teaching that is accessible and practical at the same time that it is challenging, affirming, and uplifting



I can clearly see the flaming embers of hell.


I'm just going to weigh off some currants. 

"The only way to escape the corruptible effect of praise is to go on working."

  ~ Albert Einstein

Hawthorn Ham

So many writing ideas and also I'm so tired. I write for the love of it and I write more when I have concrete justification. Does that make me less of an artist? Maybe. I don't know. But a self-aware one. An artist who leverages her self-awareness to write more, because really that's what she wants to be doing more of, it's just that she's developed so many awfully unaligned habits


I miss our accountability


I had forgotten that I had agency over anything


I understand that our outsides can be a reflection of how we're feeling on the inside and also they can be a mask for it. I have not felt as good as it might look from the outside

I'm sad that none of my friends asked how I was doing when I was living alone.



I'm sad in general today, not sure why, or rather I have so many possible reasons why that I'm not sure which one might be today's driving force. Hanna is restless; we've been inside all day; it's the first day I've spent inside possibly all year. In half an hour I will press myself up off the couch and we will go hike the snow-muddied trails where coyotes prowl at dusk

Mountain lions, too, but they don't make noise or otherwise call attention to themselves. If they don't want to be seen they won't be. Picture the largest housecat you've ever met and multiply it by whatever integer zooms it up to 180 pounds and seven feet from wriggling nose to tail


The last time we were camping together she slept and I laid tense and breathless listening to a fox scream


The last time he and I were camping together our tent froze over in early July. Hanna pressed between us in her den of quilts and we triple spooned for warmth


Computer algorithms create fabricated synchronicities. Is it faith or capitalism?


Starting in 24 days I am really going to apply myself to something for an extended period of time

Also I already have been--for more than two years now I've been teaching something that I love


After driving with my partner to the woman-owned ski shop and laying down a credit card for performance boots so that I can learn how to downhill ski this winter and for the rest of my life, because I live in the mountains where I have since childhood felt I belonged, it occurred to me that in some ways perhaps I am leading an even more remarkable life than I'd expected

"How Wonderful" by Irving Feldman

How wonderful to be understood,

to just sit here while some kind person

relieves you of the awful burden

of having to explain yourself, of having

to find other words to say what you meant,

or what you think you thought you meant,

and of the worse burden of finding no words,

of being struck dumb . . . because some bright person

has found just the right words for you—and you

have only to sit here and be grateful

for words so quiet so discerning they seem

not words but literate light, in which

your merely lucid blossoming grows lustrous.

How wonderful that is!

And how altogether wonderful it is

not to be understood, not at all, to, well,

just sit here while someone not unkindly

is saying those impossibly wrong things,

or quite possibly they’re the right things

if you are, which you’re not, that someone

—a difference, finally, so indifferent

it would be conceit not to let it pass,

unkindness, really, to spoil someone’s fun.

And so you don’t mind, you welcome the umbrage

of those high murmurings over your head,

having found, after all, you are grateful

—and you understand this, how wonderful!—

that you’ve been led to be quietly yourself,

like a root growing wise in darkness

under the light litter, the falling words.

parallelism

Castanets clicking shoulders spasming stomach contorting the theme is exorcism the theme is embodied the theme is integration hear it Take me to the river dancing grief lakeside can't be me can that gold-bathed warrior really be chest broaden shoulders pull back I have healed my spine she/I walk regal through forest frog rabbits deer lions we pay our respects removes broadsword from sheath redacted swallows me

shoulders arms wrists hands twitching stomach contorting absorbing stillness happens when integration is complete. I found you. Tears roll. Dance in-outside grief exorcism castanets Amazonian warrior woman dressed in leather shining gold fighting for higher consciousness


I bow my blue-grey wings to the great blue heron. I bow my brown-white wings to the red-tailed hawk. I prostrate my woolen sides to the bighorn. I take honored to red-furred fours before the grey fox.


We howl



Like the coyotes before us, three or four on that rigdeline over there, sounds like an army, sounds like they're playing, sounds like they love each other, sounds like part of me anxious to go inside. There cooking peppers onions quinoa chicken and apple sausages on the electric skillet and the hotpot learning how to host we cook for him we listen to the Grateful Dead we laugh sometimes and exclaim over the color purple in paintings


Like an itch like a compulsion anxiety building until the release, get back to writing, you're on the right track, remember who you are


Today's extra hour spent cross-country skiing six miles into the backcountry, back down again knees ankles aching from forcing way through cold-hardened snow

Imagine how much easier in powder. Look how beautiful

From "Mind Wanting More" by Holly J. Hughes

But the mind always
wants more than it has—
one more bright day of sun,
one more clear night in bed
with the moon; one more hour
to get the words right; one
more chance for the heart in hiding
to emerge from its thicket
in dried grasses—as if this quiet day
with its tentative light weren't enough,
as if joy weren't strewn all around.

"Choices" by Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side

of the house to cut saplings,

and clear a view to snow

on the mountain. But when I look up,

saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in

the uppermost branches.

I don’t cut that one.

I don’t cut the others either.

Suddenly, in every tree,   

an unseen nest

where a mountain   

would be.

                        

                              for Drago Štambuk