Writing from the Home Cafe

My absence from the digital discourse is evidence of how engaged I’ve been in the world of events in the past month. I left the farm on the first of December, my favorite day for travel. I hugged the boys long, calling them my padawans and promising that the force was with them. I went to Grasse, where my Friend came to me and helped me remember how to converse in my mothertongue. We ate pizza and salads dressed like dandies, we spent an afternoon at a course in perfumery at Galimard, certified as apprentices by the end of the day with our own creations to show for it. We traveled and laughed and took photographs of our shadows on the walls of the hotel room, where the sun rose through the East-facing window where we could see the rooftops of the town stretch all the way down the mountainside to the Mediterranean.

We took the TGV to Paris and went to see the dancing horses and the horse-dancers at Zingaro, which filled my world with a new kind of light. Gabriel Arce-Yee crossed the channel and joined us and we wandered, talking about heartbreak of all kinds. We spent rainy days in museums and on bicycles an in markets and at cold picnics under the Louvre arcade. We gave and recieved four-handed massages in our tiny hotel room in the 11th arrondisment. We got drunk on red wine on the Left Bank and drew obscene exquisit corpses and walked more than necessary to find busses that would take us anywhere and let us look at the lights.

In London, JBR and I spent a day or two recovering in Gabe’s beautiful row-house flat, reading aloud to eachother as the grey light flooded in the windows. We met Gabe outside his office and picniced on sandwiches at the Barbican. We went to Stonehenge one week before the Winter Solstice and read the Tarot, cold in the damp grass.
Ewan McGreggor played in Othello at the Donmar Theatre, and an early morning of waiting in line got us standing room tickets for the show that Salman Rushdie happened to attend. The Jedi himself scribbled his name on my playbill and suffered me to profane his cheek with a touch of my lips.
On a train from Greenwich, the boys and I laughed so hard that my tears rolled down my face.

On the last day, I went alone to my Godbrother’s cousins’s cousin’s house in Kent. She took me to the Canterbury Cathedral, where I lit candles and prayed Lord look after my traveling companions!

On the airplane home, I dreamt that I was with them in the airport. The pure friendship I felt between us all pulled me back into the social world full of trust and love.

Pictures of our adventures are here.

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Now I am home in Marietta. Quiet, constant, comforting Marietta.
I spent Christmas with my family. I spent a ritual night in the wheat field on the Solstice with three other young women and wanted to purge the sorrow from their lives.
I walk at the mountain battlefield with my three dogs, my parents. Sometimes I run. I like to be under the trees. I like to wake in my bed and see the branches against the sky outside my window.

[Last night I dreamed that awful secret-wish of the rekinding of failed love, and woke crying, feeling that I may or may not have faced something I had thought myself to be finished with.]

I have been accepted to the Yoga Teacher Training program at Laughing Lotus in San Francisco.
I have a one-way airplane ticket for January 31st.
I have applied for a job as a legal assistant at Google.
I do not have an apartment yet.
I have my fingers crossed about Berkeley.
I have excitement in my chest about driving up to New York again.
I have calm and open eyes for this road, always unfolding.