it is weird today, writing the date in class, november 13 2006 and it has been exactly 30 years since the day i was born.  precious years full of strange and wonderful and alarming history in this time and place.  i never would have imagined when i was ten and dreaming of six kids and 60 acres of land that at 30 i would still be starting out and not even a grown up yet, and surely not an architect or archeologist yet.  such adventures await me!  unrecorded, undocumented, unimaginable mysteries. 

i will make every day new and beautiful.  i will be in the moment.  i will smile at everyone no matter who else needs to be cynical.  i will grow younger and older all at once...wise and innocent.  that is the glory of turning 30. 

i love my wrinkles, forehead worries and laugh crinkles.  my life has given me gifts that have made me me.  my heatherness is what i hold dear inside me and what connects me inextricably from loved ones, those who shaped me, my amazingly kind and crazy mom and dad, my older sister who is familiar to me as the wind and my own skin, my three brothers who lead me rollicking down mountain paths and storytelling, darin who is true heartlovebrother of my soul.  and all the others who are known and unknown yet to me who are forever connected to me in the mystery.  i sign with gratitude at the blessings. 

if you have time to read this amazing poem by dylan thomas, do.  if not, read it when you turn 30, or any glorious day of life that you have time to absorb such grace:

"Poem in October" - dylan thomas

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
     Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
        And the mussel pooled and the heron
                Priested shore
           The morning beckon
     With water praying and call of seagull and rook
     And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
           Myself to set foot
                That second
        In the still sleeping town and set forth.

        My birthday began with the water-
     Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
        Above the farms and the white horses
                And I rose
            In a rainy autumn
     And walked abroad in shower of all my days
     High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
            Over the border
                And the gates
        Of the town closed as the town awoke.

        A springful of larks in a rolling
     Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
        Blackbirds and the sun of October
                Summery
            On the hill's shoulder,
     Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
     Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
            To the rain wringing
                Wind blow cold
        In the wood faraway under me.

        Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
     And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
        With its horns through mist and the castle
                Brown as owls
             But all the gardens
     Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
     Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
             There could I marvel
                My birthday
        Away but the weather turned around.

        It turned away from the blithe country
     And down the other air and the blue altered sky
        Streamed again a wonder of summer
                With apples
             Pears and red currants
     And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
     Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
             Through the parables
                Of sunlight
        And the legends of the green chapels

        And the twice told fields of infancy
     That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
        These were the woods the river and the sea
                Where a boy
             In the listening
     Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
     To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
             And the mystery
                Sang alive
        Still in the water and singing birds.

        And there could I marvel my birthday
     Away but the weather turned around. And the true
        Joy of the long dead child sang burning
                In the sun.
             It was my thirtieth
        Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
        Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
             O may my heart's truth
                Still be sung
        On this high hill in a year's turning.

music plays always.  haunting songs designed to take you down every road you ever walked or drove.  past bushes that smelled like jasmine springtime, past trees that were tall hats on wizards, past sneaking cats and upturned racoon infested trash heaps and sailing moons.  i like making cds for people that remind of this.  the feeling of running wild when you are 18 or 23 or 29, down streets in some sad little town you called home once, or again, or forever perhaps. 

when halloween comes i long for festivities of yore.  bonfires in the streets and sacks of flour dusting every shadowy house's corners.  black cats and pumpkins and feathers and sashes and cat eye masks and hobos.  down with slutty girl costumes, whether they are nurse, barmaid, or cheerleader or anything in between.  i agree with adam that this new trend is sick and alarming.  girls show off their sexiness every day as it is.  and halloween is COLD! 

speaking of cold, i love that, how there's a dark wind blowing in the neighborhoods on halloween and you must wrap up in shawls and appear on doorsteps with rosy cheeks.  i want to howl in graveyards, or pray, or kiss.  it is halloween in california, so we can also celebrate dia de los muertos and get to our real roots, even past that, we can climb the great trees and blow kisses to our lost ancestors of this land, away, away on the wind.

communities open their doors and hang lights and set out decorations and silly jack-o-lantern faces to invite each other over.  come and see me and drink cider and dance in the purple light!

so it has turned fall and i laid on the grass this morning in my big green backyard and played with my cats. the sun is sweet and delicate now, and we turn our faces to it and are glad; and i know i will do this still when i am ninety-seven. 

last night the moon was full and darin said it was a wizard moon and the clouds were eerie and wisping by like ghostriders.  and i dream nightly of oshun, the goddess of sweetwaters and love, and erzulie, the haitian love spirit, and they are painting my dreams golden.

this is my assignment this semester:  daydream and dream of all your spiritual inspirations and let them come alive in you.  the things i am "studying" break my heart with their loveliness.  the mystic hildegard of bingen writes about "veriditas," the great greening force of the spirit.  the spirit is juicy, and the only sin is drying up. 

i am green and yellow and full of sky on fall days.  this weekend i will make plum and blackberry jelly with my mom and mikie will come to town and we will drink wine and dance and if i can get someone to drum for me i will show them the haitian voudoun dance of possession.  i will open my heart and body and soul to spirits this fall. 

all the sudden i have a few days off and life's blooming again.  today i had time to make crafts and pet the cats and water the garden and cook crookneck squash and write my lovely friend carolann a letter.  to practice drawing animals and listen to my little brother joey's amazing music and to record two songs of my own with darin and to actually feel like it was fun and not stressful.  i do truly truly love to sing.  how i love singing together like we did with june madrona at the show the other night. how i love to sing in late august and the nights get a tiny bit cooler and the cats climb up the ivy covered stone hillside in the backyard and fuschia blossoms float in the swimming pool and hummingbirds and woodpeckers and white lights and clean laundry on the line.  feels like it could be many years ago and i wear my old apron and swirly skirt and feel like a gypsy wife. and i am feeling finally at home in this new abode. and ready for new adventures, because when i am in love with my home, i am in love with the whole world and grateful for those who keep it sweet.

me and my car got stuck in a mud ditch on the way to work.  it was fun.  i called darin and got out of the car and stood outside while i waited.  it was a strange gray morning and birds were screeching and there was mud all around me and under my feet and green trees dangling branches and frogs calling; it felt like the jungle.  my front tire was sunk down nearly half way.  the car was kinda sideways. i felt bad for her especially since i finally officially gave my car a name which is hillela, named for a character in a book by nadine gordimer.  a grand character she is, by the way.  so the neighbor came out and saw me standing there next to sideways hillela and asked, "are you stuck?" to which i replied, "yeah," kinda embarrassedly, and he said, "hold on and I'll go get the key to my tractor." which he did and proceeded to efficiently find a place to hook up the chain and pull us gently out back onto the road which is not, incidentally solid ground, but a sinkhole.  yeah, like quicksand.  darin showed up and another guy came out and it was a regular little neighborhood hoedown at nine a.m. with tractors and mud.  their names were kevin and sean.  kevin even invited me to pull into his driveway while he hosed my car off since it was caked in about a foot deep of thick gooey mud. 

so i bade them good-bye and drove onward to work and nearly annihilated a scurrying squirrel on highway 49.  i violently swerved as the little guy ran, paused, turned around, and ran again.  i barely missed him and watched, shakily, as he ran across the other side and another car barely missed him.  i praised the universe for letting him live.  it would not have been pretty if i had killed an innocent squirrel after the way my morning had been going.  i had to command aloud, "stop shaking, leg." because my right leg was shaking so badly as i continued on my drive to work.

and that was it.  an interesting start to the day before easter and it's been full moon and wine and vegetarian manifestoes and love and mary and zach and zack and rebecca and sylvan and a buncha love.  easter bunny love to all of you.

i have been missing the beauty and grace of women friends in my life lately.  friday night we gathered at carolann's and she served us warm chunky vegetarian soup and fortune cookies. and everyone brought old clothes to give away and made a giant pile of them on her living room floor between her typewriter and her little orange velour chair. sara auctioned off each piece of clothing (for free).  here's a lovely red gypsy dress with flowy sleeves.  here are tiny green hotpants (which i think i'll try on right now).  here's a black snakeskin skintight hooker dress which everybody will later try on and strut their stuff in.  here are soft worn in jeans, here is a blouse from southeast asia, here's a butterfly scarf.  we carried heaps into carolann's room and got naked and then pranced about in our new adornments and admired each other. i drove down with rebecca and sylvan.  the crazy thing was watching sylvan go from grumpy to ecstatic after eating little slips of turkey that matia cooked with pineapple and veggies. i love girls! how strange to see a roomful of smart and savvy ladies go kinda nuts over free clothes.  the fun thing was seeing everyone choose things that fit their personalities, like a brilliant blue slinky dress on bri with a shrunken wooly red sweater.  

anyway for once i took time out from homework and planning presentations and research projects and reading novels to just hang out awhile and it was so worth it even tho i had to work at 7 am and strut my bleary eyed waitressy self.  sometimes you just gotta breathe and look at it all and see the absurdity and smile a little and then flow forward once again.  on monday it was back to long classroom days.  i got my paperwork back from the english department chair - i'm done with my english requirements - hooray!  except now all i want to do is go on to grad school and get my phD in literature maybe or maybe not.  maybe i'll just quit this damn institutionalized education and move to calcutta for a year and make paintings or move to puerto rico and rent a pink room and type a novel or ride horses across new mexico.  

my new kitty daphne is trying to help me type, circling the keyboard with her fuzzy curiosity. she is very silly and beautiful and crafty and loveable. it is now february, and once again, like every february, i got the road trip itch!!!  i want to whisk away across green fields of south dakota, climb the badlands and watch the sunset and camp there in a tiny canyon wrapped in patchwork blankets and wake up to green tea and barefoot walks through groundhog villages.  then across the caves and valleys and wildflowers and magical springs of the ozark mountains, little artists galleries in the woods, mountains unrolling around me, and into tennessee.  i told joey all about nashville and memphis and eastern tennessee, the blue ridge mountains, the little log cabins and craft shops and smoke trails.  there is a tiny  bungalow an hour away from any town big enough for a grocery store.  darin and i want to go live there this summer.  bringing typewriters, cats, books, incense, tea and rosemary and blue robes and white flowers.  then a road trip to conneticut, massachusets, to see jack kerouac's grave and leave our delicate imprints like sweet drunken kisses, onward up to vermont, rich green land of natural childbirth and tiny white churches.. leaving all doors unlocked and all smiles unwary... then to maine, stay in a tiny cabin on the coast, swim out to the island, drink fresh lemonade, paint the hills and the sea, write our names out of seaweed....then across the mountains, and sit on wooden porches crumbling after two hundred years, and hear the wolfdogs howling and make up funky appalachia songs to hike into the hills by, while the slow pale moon slides southernly down like a drunken ghost off her slipping horse.  i want to pee on berry bushes in the midwest and wake up to see a rainbow creature peeking through the thorns, and follow her down into a mystical hidden underworld road in the heart of this strange land stolen long ago...i want to figure it out, and know so thoroughly that it is not mine, nor anyone's, and i want to roll up in its carpets of green grass and roll through denver past the haunted dead eyes of neil cassady's father in the graveyard and salloon, up and over the giant back of the sierra nevadas and into the sleeping goldminer valley on the back of a wagon like the donner party, in a bonnet waving hello.

i just feel like writing because it's almost a new year and i am ready for anything.

so today it is december 28 and the rest of the week/weekend for me is going to be hellishly jammed with MEL'S RESTAURANT FURY AND INSANITY.  you never know what will happen.  tidal waves of people and madness will be rolling through the doors and piling up around the entranceway in their ski jackets and girls with sexy sweat pants with kiss marks on the butt and everyone wanting soup and salad combos and hot tea and i will be peeing my pants with no time to run to the bathroom.  i am scared.  very very scared. 

but at the same time it is weirdly exciting to work in a busy restaurant during the holidays and the wintertime when it is blustery outside and things are so insane inside that all you can (me and my coworkers) do is look at each other and laugh.  or cry.  but it makes me giddy somehow and i get in a good mood, like a really good mood and everyone i work with things i take some strange pills. 

meanwhile i have seven or eight glorious new books i got for christmas and all i want to do is cozy up at home with my cat and read all day and night.

it is nice that everyone is home and people are gathering at my house tonight and i saw king kong and was swept away into that mad magical world and i fell in love.  here is everyone who went with me:  mikie, mom, dad, gabbie, mario, joey, martin, stan, amy and matt.  i love having everyone here in town and it being cold and windy and people are sick and snotty but laughing about it.

coolest event of christmas:  my dad watched grizzlyman the documentary and LOVED it!!!  and now he is all fascinated with werner herzog and wants to see his other films and i am excited at my dad's deep curiosity in the human condition and spirit.

"martin is an old timer.  they don't make old timers anymore martin!" quote from my mom which i misunderstood but i love it nonetheless and it's true. 

"don't say shut up to your mom" me talking to mikie.

 "did you know that yogurt goes good with spicy food?"  mikie.

"no.  well i'm gonna do that next time."  martin.

professor agosta, the passionate one, gave us this quote as a closing remark on the last day of class:

"the limits of my language mean the limits of my world."  by someone named wittgenstein i believe who i am going to research next.

i love agosta.  he is literally the youngest 57 year old i have ever seen or witnessed in action.  he prances around the classroom, throwing his hands about and leaping. he believes that because we live inside our minds and we create our own existence, our responsibility is to make our minds as capacious, large, beautiful and rich as possible.  i respect that.  his passion for poetry is so inspiring.  he taught me to "activate the text," in other words allow each word to take full imaginative reality inside your mind, to use your imagination to its fullest capacity in order to bring literature to life.

pater wrote that literature helps us burn always with that hard gem-like flame. 

i want to always be really alive.  i want to burn, burn, burn.  i want to make my world rich as the springful of larks moving like a cloud.  i just read dylan thomas' "poem in october."  i am almost to my "thirtieth year to heaven," and i too feel that the truth of our human condition is joy and that the mystery sings alive and that we need to be connected to nature and each other in order to access this joy.  i feel that cities and conquest and heirarchies and other human constructs take us far from that joy. 

the origin of suffering is ego:  greed and power and money and lust. or as blind boy fuller sings, "where taint no lovin, taint no gettin along."  ah, sho.  "if you see my pretty gal tell her i says hurry home." we know intuitively where the true beauty of life is: in love.  we all KNOW that already! 

and if the limits of language are the limits of our worlds, which i believe, that how better to fully experience love than to express it through language.  not just "romantic" love but love of dy leaves, love of cozy moments, hot chocolate and peppermint as kaitlyn says, love of christmas music and slide guitar and the virgin mary and sunshine and my sweet cat and cranberries and hot showers and a phone call from my sister and everything turning turning,  and me writing this instead of my final paper for shakespeare!  okay, i'm going now!