The California sky

In gratitude

I am writing to you from the pink and golden sunrise of Northern California. My mother and I flew to Sacramento on Friday and moved into a beautiful home in South Davis for the week. We are going to have a Thanksgiving meal (no turkey, several pies) with her granddaughter, my niece, who is a student at UC Davis, then fly home early on Friday morning.

The first day, on our long walk into town, my mother said, “The air feels different here.”

“Yes,” I said. “The sweet California air.”

I looked down at the path we were walking, the cracks in the asphalt, and wondered if they were formed by earthquakes, a subject that comes up casually in conversation here - the exact location of the fault line, the acknowledgement of the big one that will, at some point, happen. We have friends in Davis whose dog barked all night, they said.

“Earthquake?” I asked.

“That’s what we thought,” they said, “but we think maybe it was a raccoon in the yard.”

Much like the earth itself, the world, this country, everyone…I haven’t felt well lately. My body has developed new pains and limitations, my particular blend of anxiety and depression has taken over. Getting on an airplane for a cross-country journey seemed insurmountable. I seriously doubted my ability to wear a mask for that long or my ability to remain calm as I jetted across the sky.

And yet, here I am. There were even other mask-wearers on my plane, which I did not expect. It was a smooth and easy flight. I watched Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret. I can fly again, I thought. I can leave my house.

I sat down this morning to write to you about these conditions we earthlings are inhabiting, the list of stressors we’re under, the search for peace, how travel heals us, but I’m realizing what I actually want to talk about this morning is something else.

First of all, I want to say thank you to those of you who are reading these words. I am the sort of person who works things out as I go. I write and then the writing tells me what to do. I dream and draft an edit in public. So you may well have subscribed to this thinking it was going to be one thing only to find out it’s another thing and the reason for that is, I myself don’t know for sure what it’s going to be.

I only know that I want to meet you here on the page. This page. Writing this feels alot like the early days of blogging, intimate and expansive. A friend I’ve known since early blogging lives in Davis and I got to see her and walk around a craft fair together and she shared the news with me, in person, that Rosalynn Carter had died. Our friendship is a real one, even though up until now, we’d not been in one another’s physical space.

I’ve done a great deal of walking here, on greenways, through underpasses, alongside the railway tracks, over I-80, and in the redwood grove in the arboretum where my niece, who was so recently a tiny baby and is now a woman, brought me to see the aromatherapy garden. I counted four hummingbirds, one with a magenta throat.

Have you ever touched a redwood? It’s worth flying across the country just to stand with one. Their skin is soft and their energy is like velvet. To be in the presence of redwoods and my niece and the hummingbirds all at the same time split my heart all the way open. I don’t know how to describe to you that in the midst of the redwood grove there was a pavilion with a piano keyboard, and a person sat there playing the most beautiful music as we walked through the trees. I don’t know how to describe it, but I would like to. I would like to give this to you.

I have shared my life and work online in one way or another for years, decades. It is second nature for me to do so, but recently I have pulled back from posting on social media and even my website. I have been re-evaluating who I am, what I do and how I do it, and where I want to focus my energy.

I have been thinking about who I used to be. I was once a small person who sat on my living room floor and watched my babysitter sing. She was by the lamp and the light shone through her blonde hair. I was once a passenger in the back seat of a car that slid off an icy road and into a ditch. I was once a young woman in a graduate school auditorium listening to a famous poet read a poem about a comet.

When I was young, I had no interest in making my art or my writing palatable or easy to take. I cared only about making it good. And true. I have decided to be young again. Oh, not my body. My body will do what it will do - pain in the hip, crepey skin, all the midlife atrocities. It’s the young heart I’m after, the way I used to write.

From this point on, it must be no when I mean no and yes when I mean yes and nothing else.

I have only a certain amount of energy available to me each day and I have stories lodged in my throat. I intend to use a portion of my energy allotment to coax them out. I don’t want to think of my creative energy as a hammer or an avalanche. Let my energy be a cup of honey I sip that allows the stories a passage out of my body and into the world. I want it to be honey, but if it is a hammer, then let it be a hammer, because it must happen that I open my mouth and allow it all to spill out.

I am writing to you from the dark blue starry California night sky in deep gratitude for my life. The persons I have been and the persons I will be. How extraordinary it is to have nieces. How magical to be a human being, to walk in redwoods, to say the phrase Bay Area and know that’s where I am, to eat Burmese food at a picnic table in November, to buy a painted ceramic moon in an art gallery and have it wrapped for safety so I can carry it home on an airplane back to Kentucky and hang it on my wall and remember time my mother and I came to California for Thanksgiving, to watch my niece, her granddaughter, lean in to lightly touch an aromatic plant and show us the beauty and the heaviness of the world that she lives with everyday in this place that values her brilliant mind and whispers to her of who she is and who she might become.