The Hermetic Review

Yesterday I managed to make myself quite sick, drinking almost an entire bottle of cotes du ventoux alone after yet anoter brief but emotionally draining encounter with a boy. As a consequence I was asleep at eight and then awake from four until my alarm went off at six. I am not at work today, but I am feeling quite powerful.
Powerful reading Hemingway under the tree in Dolores Park in my new tapestry coat from the salvation army, covered in aubergine paisley; powerful climbing the twisted redwood by the Rose Garden to talk on the phone to my mother.

Today I woke alone for the first time in weeks, no sleeping dog or sleeping boy beside me, no friends curled on the floor beside my bed. They'd been visiting from nowhere, which is to say that they're travellers, even the dog used to her life on the road. Now they've continuted on their journey, towards Wyoming, and I am left again with myself. Our paths will all cross again back east, before the the end of the year.

The balance between solitude and companionship.

Today is my father's sixty-fourth birthday.

It is an important day for me.
I taught my first Yoga class at Laughing Lotus.

James and I had a reconciliation of sorts, riding together into Golden Gate Park, walking around for hours searching fora  druidic grove where a grizzly bear named Monarch was once kept.
We never found the grove,
but went together into the Rose Garden, which is my favorite place in San Francisco.

I love writing the name, San Francisco.

In the grove of redwoods in the valley behind the Rose Garden, we smudged each other with white sage and cedar, and cleared a circle in the sandy earth beneath a living bower, where he arranged a ring of branches and I swept the place clean with a leafy cutting.
He wrote the cardinal directions in a runic script, almost-invisible lines in the sand with his bone folder made from water buffalo horn.
I traced out the words of a mantra, filling the circle while he watched.

Asato Ma Sat Gamaya
Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya
Mrtyor Ma Amrytam Gamaya

(Lead us from illusion into truth, lead us from darkness into light, lead us away from the fear of death into the knowledge of our own immortality.)

Against a redwood stump, we held our bodies close to each other, aware of the fabric of our garments, the warmth between us against the cold.
The moon started wazing again.

Leaving, I stop in Maxfield's on the way home, alone.
I read Jhumpa Lihir and drank chai until darkness falls, crosslegged on the wicker couch, wearing my coat because the doors are open and it's cold here.

A year ago, I was at the wedding reception in Pennsylvania, dressed in silk and pearls, drinking, crying as I listened to Ross and Stacy playing piano in the great hall.
Maybe on the phone with my father under the white canopy in the rain.

Sitting outside the coffeehouse briefly, smoking and watching the palms in the chill wind across the wide empty street, I feel again the absurdity of finding myself in this place.
How has my life lead me here?

It's been a long time since I have written here.
Today is the first day of June, already.
The month of May passes quickly and full of events and emotions, as always.

I fell in love, sitting in green grass in the parks, laying in his arms on the beach during the heatwave. But I'm already back where I started, fighting off pride and loneliness, making plans to head back to New York City at the end of the summer.

I graduated from Yoga school in a sweet ceremony full of song.

Now I am twenty-three years old. I was sick in bed on my birthday, but my very oldest lifelong friend, my Godbrother, was visiting me, and we spent memorial day weekend riding our bikes all over this town, playing make-believe with the simple pleasure of our childhood, racing the fog inland from the ocean.

Yesterday I flew my yellow machine through the fog all the way to the Outer Richmond, taking my time through the Golden Gate Park, stopping to stroll through the gardens at the Conservatory of Flowers. Returning home through the long pacific twilight, I stopped in the rose garden and felt myself full of the smile of the flowers, my moccasin-boots deep in the thick green grass. The rose garden is my new favorite haven in this strange, colorful city, peach and pale pink and white, smelling like honey.

I wake early these days. I am filled with images of these hillsides, the sun and wind, the fog. I want more, and I want less confusion to come with it.
The morning in bed, red-filled room, the clack of the keys and Francoise Hardy, the feeling of seeking and of solitude. The laptop and the handmade quilt, the sheepskin slippers and the dried lilacs hanging over the mirror, where yesterday I wrote:
What does he know of love who did not have to despise precisely what he loved? Go into your loneliness with your love and with your creation, my brother, and only much later will justice limp after you. ~Nietzsche

Yesterday I also joined the Sierra Club at the special rate of $15 for the promise of a reproduction 1892 rucksack. Today I'm venturing back to the yoga studio for the first time since graduation, and going dress shopping at the boutiques on 24th street as a belated birthday gift from my mother.