Excerpts from book [I}....

Rest

I live here on earth. I make my coffee here, pour milk in my hash browns and time my toast. I set the alarm clock here, worry my brains out, eat whatever’s in front of me and walk the Burke Gilman trail amongst the butterflies down the Fremont canal. When I daydream I leap to the sky, stretching my mental possibilities, turning the geometrical shape of my thoughts over to see the other angles, brushing off the debris of assumptions too long held in tact. When I feel passion there is gun powder in my veins. I spark at a smile, rage at a misunderstanding and expel like slow fireworks with realizations as they hit my mind, volatile in its hunger for the idealistic newness of a thought first discovered. When my emotions pour in, I am part of the waters, falling, rushing, melting, smooth ripples over every surface. I have no self definition because I am out to sea, gazing at constellations undiscovered. I am watching a storm come in with lights flashing in colors. I hear a voice that tells me to hold onto the mast when the surf crashes onto the deck, to strap myself there if I have to. I do believe I’ll drown if something isn’t done smartly, so I listen when I am told to force my head upwards and hold my eyes open no matter what.

Why? Because the monsters are flying around. The Wicked Witch of the West is pedaling on her bicycle. The awful things I’ve been trying not to think about are looming towards me taunting me to do things which I think are destructive.. There is a white bird rising along the waves in the spirit of grace and behind her are the all my helpers in forms of animals, dancing creatures and the unshaped essences of the hinters. They give their clues silently and smoothly. They ignite curses from the monsters who know that they are losing. All around me there are mesmerizing trails of sparks, droplets, crystals, star flies and shards of perfect silver glass, reflecting through their majestic sheen the truths of my own life. That is why I am in this storm of howling and confusion, under torrents of rain, screaming in a high pitched tenor. I am here to see truths, because my life cannot go on without new information to mix up the picture. It has become stuck and I must unstuck it.

Sometimes when I come into this storm, the revelations come easier.

“If I had kept up with myself”, I tell myself “this place would not be a raft in a storm, but a still pond at night with an mutual exchange of gifts between me and the Star Woman,”

but I have been too busy, entranced in the entertainment of the everyday, worrying about things that can take care of themselves.

Then all disintegrates and I am hit. Blackness. I buckle in reflex to the undeniable force, offer myself to the wave. There is nothing else to do.

I come to, aware of myself, in shock, comfortably paralyzed and relieved to be still. Death, with it’s stolid comfort permeates through my bones, pinning me to the other side. A thick wall of prickly inaudible humming distracts my focus, keeping me from sensing in the regular way, but I know there is also a presence of quickening, quite awake, moving in my psychic state. I know that pieces of me are being rearranged, set out of the way, arranged prettily to allow their shapes to blend. The memory of the tiger roars in my mind and I remain open, watching, asking it what it has been wanting.

I sleep, and then awake again. In the crescent curl of knees, hips and shoulders there is a heat that wraps itself around me when I stretch. It makes me smile and I feel “mother” as I gaze at the ceiling-one part the mother that bore me and a more encompassing, universal softness. I lie cradled in the trustworthy palm of compassion, refreshed. My apartment appears the same as I left it but I feel my responses have changed. I am not made up of all the same material I was before. I will need to understand as much as I can about it if I am to go any further than I have already been, but for now it is time to get up.

As I look for boots, check my wallet, feed the cat, lock the door, there is a sense of peace in my movements. I remember my shower, minutes before and flash, there is the tiger, making itself known in my waking world. I already have identified one ribbon of his mood in myself and another in an aspect of a lover, years ago. The tiger is a he. He seems to be saying to me, “I am your passion. I am your life.” I’ve got to go.

“That‘s not what I thought what my passion was”, I am thinking on my way down the steps to the sidewalk towards the morning day.

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