Jen and I keep talking about what our ideal home for this time in our life would look like. We thought sharing that vision with the universe and our friends would be the quickest way to get there – Thanks.
Jen’s updated vision:
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This is my vision of the house we want to be in – the morning smells like cool and coffee from my kitchen, smells a little briny and cow-y and clean. There are people sounds in the distance, cow or plane or car a little ways a way. There’s the smell of smoke on cool mornings. There’s smells of wet, a quiet quiet or a loud quiet, with birds’ songs and chicken noises on the other side of the house from where I’m writing or maybe on the same side – there’s a big window that looks out onto green and trees and transformation, birds and other life. There are runners who jog or walkers who walk past the front of the house but I can’t always hear them. I can look out into the morning and the sunrise over the cows’ fat. There’s a wide farmhouse kitchen downstairs, white wood, so many cabinets, a little rambling, my good old antique cookstove (could it be bright blue?) and color coming in from all sides in the windows. At the backyard it’s filled with green, fruit trees, flowers, the strength of possibilities, sweet pea, calla lily, nasturtium, zinnia, bachelor button, foxglove, lavender, sage, what’s the other one, purple chive blossoms, mint, oregano, fennel – there can be an easy morning walk though neighborhoods, human and natural, a few hand-waves to people and still so much quiet into the orchestra of morning.
Raised bread goes into the oven. Fire lit, stirred, in woodstove between living room and kitchen –upstairs bedrooms for resting, for guests, for work – backyard outside workspace/studio office/ later with computer books writing screen open and the birds all come swimming in with their noises. Please help me find this place. Cat padding around under butterflies and long song, dog sleeping by stove and then with me on our walk and then in backyard in-between chickens or in studio. Collecting eggs, threading into the garden. You keep showing me the visions I’m asking for. There’s rolling hills I can see from some windows every day and it’s like morning all over again always – four days I don’t get into a car. One out of three days I bake for evening workshop. Another I spend all day in writing and contemplation and good walk and garden. Every day blog writing. Every day walking. Every day the sea. Put your hand over your heart and say I do. The front porch has a wide place to sit a porch for two or four of us together and a raised railing to sit within or perch upon; we can wave at the neighbors as they drive or walk by.
I work the front garden, too, the flowers and edibles for the four bedroom farmhouse big enough for weekend workshops, two-four can stay at the house (the larger number if they’re willing to share rooms). And we can walk together as a prompt. There’s rest every night. There’s walking to town for fruits and vegetables and to coffee and others, there’s driving to our co-op meeting to pick up our bulk orders, there’s splitting firewood and weekend dance at the grange on in our own back yard, there’s weekly driving into the city for two days at my office, there and meetings and conversation and lunchtime connection, the beautiful drive in and the slow dark beauty if the drive back home, across the golden gate bridge on those days. How some of the days F! would be there and some F! would be home – spirit rock calls us periodically for walks, for love, for remembering. This is where our children love and grow up, this is where our anniversary parties settle in our delectable celebration. ((Why I do I think dubious – I’ll write it down!) Can I feel myself in it, how imaginable, the way the noise is the wind and the water and the birds aching into us, refilling feeders, I could have done this in Maine but I had not yet built what I needed to for this love, for this outreach, for this business – writing ourselves whole: San Francisco • Bodega Bay, or…? Can you show me? This has to be as passionate as it is physical longing. The book says this: “The famed dolphin researcher, John Lilly, MD, once said, ‘If you want to be an expert, create the territory.’”
This is where I try to find what I’m looking for. I see myself there, that much is clear. I see the sea, I smell the salt, I can taste the morning, in brine and salty mountain distillate and fennel croppings and cow motions. I feel that ease, the relaxing of our love against the grain, how much hope we always have for morning, for the next day, our relentless optimism in the face of every day’s, a lifetime’s, kickbacks. How much further? What else do we have? Space enough to breathe, that’s what I’m trying to tell you – expansive rambling front room and kitchen, the back studio that isn’t ** a workshop space but an office. Flowers – the tall spires of foxglove everywhere. Hollyhocks. Front room wide enough for a 10 person gathering.
What I feel is how my shoulders come down when we’re there. How we relinquish have-tos for our finally can we get to it our passions. After each of our lifetimes’ thinking we needed only to be in service to/of others to prove we were worthy of life and breath. Put down pen. Pick up. Start again. Drive sometimes when I have to go in to San Francisco, leave at 10 to get to my office where I can work, write, steady myself for an evening workshop. Drive down Monday Tuesday Thursday right now, since Thurs is when the AfR workshops happen. Drive through green and sing sin songs with the radio or recite poetry, mine, to memorize Practice. Come home over the late golden gate bridge, the orange and lights, through hills and clean air, over mountain passes, through fog or bright clean black. Walk to morning coffee or ride my bike again finally not on heavy trafficked city roads, on somewhat trafficked country roads or smaller town roads. Walk or bike to grocery store, to afternoon or evening workshops in town sometimes, to gatherings.
Flower. Settle. Unfurnish. Unfurl. Build a stability. Build a woodshed. Slip up the stairs at night to sockfoot to bed. Communicate over the phone with colleagues in the work, or over email periodically. Days offline, not on the computer except to type up writing or edit. Talk with people about my books. I stop because I fill with visions, possibilities, brainstorming, options, ideas, and breath comes shorter. You have an idea and you take a step. You weigh: is this it, or is this?
Can we find the town where the activists and the alternafolks are, the town where the voices are still speaking for truth and change and anti-oppression and our thick love? What else can I see? How we stop on the street and chat. How we check in with each other, we and neighbors – how we ride to the ocean or bay on the weekend, some mornings, how weekend and weekday begin to have less meaning, seasons take on greater importance and love, the phases and singularities of the moon, what is blooming flowering phasing passing over when?
I imagine vision a place, a gorgeous and peaceful place for artists retreats, for us to live at retreat, where city writers artists activists can come out and rejuvenate and recharge, our friends and community – where they can touch the sea and land, pick vegetables or not, weed or not, feed chickens or not, write or not, sing or not. This is a big part of my visioning of where we’re going – how we’re getting our community ready for the next phase, every next step, we two who have had such a hard time with self-care, with recharging ourselves. Casitas. And then our monthly house parties for ourselves and our friends, and stretches when no one is around but us – salons, love, art, joy, food, song, salubrious possibilities.
I hear music and quiet, songs of us watching sunset out one window like we could feel sunrise through another, and I do feel the bay close, I feel walks there, I fell the puppy at my feet, I feel the sense of enough and joy, I feel the cats exploring the morning sun, I feel the bliss of how our love has room to be together. I feel our writing. This strength, our voices fighting good fights close to home and further. I feel the books, the altar spaces, the magnificence of morning, I feel a joyful church. I feel our reckoning, new connections, new stratagems, new stretching. I feel income from workshops, from talks, from online classes, from writing, from rentals. From too new and surprising and blissful directions, the relinquishing of control. The faith that we are held and sustained. Fresh and Jen, Writing Ourselves Whole: San Francisco • Bodega Bay and beyond… do I have to see how exactly it’s coming? I just know that it is, that we are, that we are en-joy-ned to our visions. It’s that simple and remarkable.
I do have someone to help me with keeping the word up and out in the world, around SF and elsewhere, helping to schedule talks and workshops all around the bay area. I feel the word of mouth spreading. I see our spring retreats: yours and mine, and then others attending, too. I see us in love with summer. I’m up in our/this block all morning like joy is what we’re for.
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