It’s just so gorgeous this morning. Perfect coolish temp for sitting and gazing and sipping coffee and just being. The breeze stirs the trees to life — shifting shades of green, deep as a zucchini, bright as a Bartlett pear. Fall is my soul’s favorite season, I think, or maybe my heart’s. Summer is my body’s favorite, hands down. But fall stirs in me something that is delicate and complexly beautiful, tinged with sadness. It’s harder to describe my feelings about it than my feelings about summer or spring or winter. Summer — love the heat, how it warms my body, like the earth, making me loose and pliant, also sensual/sexual. Spring just lifts the heart with its fresh new beauty. Winter mostly sucks, except for being snug and cozy in front of the fire, or making fragrant stews and breads. But fall — not so simple. Not the robust steaming sweaty roaring pleasure of a workout in summer. Rather, the image is of sipping it in — like the finest crisp white wine. Sipping in the gilded light, the scent of fallen leaves on the cool air. There isn’t that exuberant, bursting-outwards-in-joy feeling of spring. Rather, there is a bittersweet feeling of folding gently inwards, complex folds of luscious velvets — eggplant, cranberry, persimmon. The sadness is there in constant counterpoint (complement?) to the pleasure. Which is probably why I resonate so to it. As much as I love the unadulterated joy of spring, it feels a bit foreign to me. Whereas fall is like an old friend.

I guess it was good that I screwed up my server connection. After I finally gave up on it yesterday, I was able to just enjoy the glorious day. Had a really complex bodywork session. Slipped into some kind of weird stuff with the eyes and face. Like my eyes — and it felt like the muscles attached to them, going way back into the head — were doing unwindings. I don’t think I can even describe it, but it was a very odd feeling, kind of creating this altered state. It also was kaleidoscopic — the room was broken into pieces that were repeated around a circle, or there would just be a hazed sense of the room. When it finished, my face muscles had let go so there was not emotion or motion there, and I was aware of how rare that is. Usually you are smiling or looking serious, or have a listening look or whatever, but rarely the flatness of nothingness — like in a catatonic state. And I wondered what it would be like if you had someone there, both of you just staying in that state and gazing at each other. No smiles, no “I am listening” facial movements, just complete letting go in eyes and face. Gazing, gazing. I think it would be weird, uncomfortable. But interesting, I bet if you could hang in there.

I also from time to time, as I moved, sensed a masculine presence near me. I say “sense” , not as in I think someone invisible was there that I was detecting, but “sense” as in I had the experience of it, could feel myself moving in relation to masculine energy, engaging it. I could feel that dynamic. It enriches the movement when that happens ( which it does, from time to time).
I do wonder if it would be the same if a real flesh and blood person were there. I wonder if two people could let go of their personas, their issues/stuff, their agendas, and just be the masculine and feminine (or feminine and feminine, etc) moving in relation to each other.

Was just reading some entries from right after the hurricane. It still really makes me feel weird to read them. The feelings come back so strong. The fear, but also the love. I felt so intensely raw and alive, once I got past the intial numbness of shock. Like every day was this heightened technicolor experience. No wonder some people get addicted to chaotic and dangerous lifestyles in order to stay constantly stimulated that way.

I can’t find the first few entries made at Susan’s house. I remember sitting on the floor of her spare bedroom downstairs, my back against the bed’s iron footboard, a candle and a flashlight for writing, the cats on the bed, and a bag of Lays sour cream and onion potato chips accompanied by a glass of vodka by my side. Writing in jagged phrases, barely able to string the words together. Writing on scrap pieces of paper because my journal was still unrecovered at the house. Writing about how frightened I was, but also about how loved I felt, like a child being taken care of by my friends. Kathleen the first insane two days — the dramatics of the night it happened, when after my hysterical evacuation we sat on her futon drinking Scotch and listening to the wind scream and trees crashing down. The surreal sight the next morning of the huge waves crashing into the street in front of my house as we tried to get to it, wading in chest deep rushing water. The little care package she gave me when I left with Katherine for Susan’s house (body lotion, band-aids, antiseptic, toothbrush, comb). Katherine taking over and helping me get some essentials out of my muck-filled devastated house and then following me to Susan’s to make sure I got there ok. How when she left me there, alone for the first time in days, I felt like a kid dropped off at boarding school. Susan graciously fixing dinner that first night on her gas grill — shrimp with lemon/butter sauce. Ambrosia. How I was shaking all the time — physically and in my psyche. I remember sitting on that floor writing that I didn’t know how I was handling it — if you’d told me this was coming I’d have been sure I’d collapse. Thinking of how just a few nights before I’d been sitting in my own house on the bedroom floor, also with a candle, cats and martini. Listening to the wind scream and wondering if I should stick it out or go to Kathleen’s. And then the horror of trying to get out when I’d waited too long — the water outside my door suddenly hip deep. So many vivid details. Like the first night I cooked, rather than eat fast food or chips. Alone because Susan was working late, me and the cats sauteeing yellow squash and mustard greens for an omelette. How that simple act grounded me. I remember the evening that I was standing by Susan’s sliding glass doors, looking out onto the back patio, when a large bird appeared, a peahen, gray in the deepening dusk. I felt hallucinogenic, flashing back to a dream I’d had before the flood, where a bird flies to land atop a high building, a peahen, gray in the deepening dusk, but then she becomes a phoenix and bursts into flames. I look at the peahen in front of me and believe maybe there IS a god or goddess out there somewhere.

I remember the first morning I awoke when the panic wasn’t so huge — the morning after I’d signed a lease on a house. That was the biggest thing for me — to know I had a home. A big old rickety isolated backwoods spider-inhabited home, but a home. I loved that place so much once I got to know it. It is a magic place, and I was so sad when I left it that I could not be the one to stay and take care of it. And now, here I am, in my own home again. Feel sad somehow, writing all this.The flood forced me and others to move outside our comfort zones again and again to connect with people, create with people. It is easy after things calm down to retreat again.

Saw a cardinal this morning, making its little “chip chip” noises. They’ve been gone for quite awhile — up the hill and out by the dirt road coming in , I think. That’s where all the berries are. So my buffet of sunflower seed is not quite so appealing. But I think they’ll be back. In fact I see another one in the rhododendron right now. She is making this lovely little series of sounds in a soft liquid voice — I didn’t even realize it was a cardinal. It’s almost like she is talking softly to herself. Cardinals returning, winter coming — soon I will have experienced a complete cycle of seasons in my new home.