rainsong

I drove home today through the mountains. I didn’t want the rain to ever stop. I rolled the windows down and let it fall against my face. The air smells like ground like wet wood like the forest floor. Driving into Los Angeles is a funny thing. 

I’m standing now on a balcony in West Hollywood looking out at the streets below. This is the city I live in. It is a grey city filled with ash and sidewalks. But it is also lush and green and mysterious. Last night I had a dream and the dream said, “Pray: Thy will not Mine be done.” I’m looking at you, God. I’m looking at you and I’m handing it all over.

The moon will be half full tonight. Half of its faced shrouded in darkness. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And just because I can’t see you or speak to you doesn’t mean I don’t feel you and hear your voice in my dreams guiding me, telling me what’s next. The moon doesn’t wane or wax it absorbs and reabsorbs into itself, into the night sky that holds it so perfectly above me.

Mobile Upload 4/21/10 Lucy Madeline Ojai, CA

I think the worst thing I can do right now is stop. Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t take the impulse to take a photograph or write a paragraph as insignificant. Fill every page that calls to you and when it’s time to sleep, sleep then, and don’t wake until it’s time again. I made three pots today. Only two of them came to term. The other, in anger, was aborted. But that one is like the moon. Just because I can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there, that it was never made. It just got reabsorbed back into the potter’s wheel, back into my bucket of slip.

Last night I went out onto the hill just as the sun slipped down over the mountains and out of the valley. The valley is like a bowl of black sky and a sea of stars and I’m at the very bottom with my tiny light and my heart full of prayers. I brought an offering, of myself and of something magic.

I think there is something to this. This ordering of things. I have primitive images dancing in my mind of figurineson cave walls in torchlight. I see the moon in all its phases. I see fire and swallows building nests of clay and beating their wings in the air. I see sage, thread, dirt, rattlesnakes. I see my body on the ground. I see time, moving, passing, stones in a circle. A clock. What is it? I see the ring of robins in the field of wildflowers. I see the students at the school. The pathways. The agony and the surrender. All the pictures I have taken and the time. The time that has passed so slowly so dearly into the walls of space and matter.

The Moon on 4/22/10 

Last night I realized there is nowhere to buy espresso after 5pm on a Tuesday. So I drove a few miles out of town to a Starbucks and ordered a tall double mocha. I am sorry to say it did not do the trick. But maybe the dreams I had did. We’ll see.