PD PD Rain

Yes, you heard it hear last. It is pouring down pissing down rain. My peonies have given up. They are splayed on our sidewalk. The poppy petals are folded up like little orange umbrellas. The Old Oak and Old Maple are swaying with the wind, the rhodies, too, perhaps enjoying these spring showers. I go out and I feel wind-whipped. Yes, I bow down to you, Wind, and will do whatever you like, whatever you want.

Something so beautiful about watching the clouds move across the gorge, down low, in a slow dance, oblivious to me. Do they know I watch them in awe?

Yesterday I saw an old friend I used to work with. We were together five days a week for seven years and then we weren't. She has been one of my favorite people for as long as I've known her. She had such a positive optimistic spirit. Then she get fibromyalgia. And a year ago her mother died. And she lost faith. Got depressed. I can relate. When did I lose faith? Shall I count the times?

I have had a such a fortunate life that it feels stingy to be faithless. And it's not like I don't believe in anything. I believe in the Wind, the Moon, Stars, the trees, bears, coyotes, the rhodies, poppies, bees, the love of my sweetheart. On good days, I believe the divine is in everything and everything is divine.

How do I define divine? I don't define it as a god with dogma. I don't define it as god at all. What I'm talking about is indefinable. It is the creative flow that trickles, roars, surges, floods through all of us. Godus.

Anyway, my friend and I talked about how much these deaths in our lives have affected us. How it is difficult to have faith in anything when you watch people suffer and die. And yet we have to allow the sadness. Perhaps it keeps us from doing anything too drastic. Like throwing off this life for another one.

It was so great spending time with her. I was getting dressed near the end of our visit to go out to dinner with Mario and Marcus, and it was fun to have a girl around to tell me if this was too tight, if this color looked all right, talking about the weight we had gained, knowing who we had been and who we are now. Both of us wondering: Where are the women we were? It is strange when you look in the mirror and don't see yourself, when you see photographs and wonder, "Where did I go?"

I hope it isn't another year before we see each other again.

I've been dreaming. Did I say? Dreamed I was a wordlord, like a landlord only with words. And I keep dreaming specific words. Jessup. Mallard. Last night it was Chip. Chip was the name of an androgynous person who was helping me find my way. He was a she who then was a male. Or seemed female and then was male. He was so sweet. So young. We were going to run off together and I asked him his age. "Thirty-three," he told me. I thought, "Well, he's only ten years younger." (In my dreams!) As we were about to leave together, I told him I was married. So he left me. When I woke up, I felt as though I had lost someone very dear to me. When I told Mario, he said, "Well, if it doesn't mean you're getting ready to run off with some young stuff, it's probably about mourning your lost youth." Geez. That's pathetic. I looked up what the word meant. The name Chip is a rare nickname for Charles which means free man. But more likely, chip is part of me: a chip off the old block. Funny how all the words I'm dreaming are male: lord, jessup, mallard, chip.

Mario and I went with our friend Marcus into Portland for dinner. Much fun. Afterward we came home and Mario did the dishes while I sat by the heat and Marcus found us something to watch on TV. We finally settled on the movie Snakes on a Plane. It was funny. Of course my eyes were averted for about three-quarters of the movie, but it was good to see Marcus and Mario laugh. It's always fun to be with people when they're laughing, isn't it?

Now it is midmorning and I haven't gotten any work done. I'm going to start writing on I, Assassin again, I think. I've thrown out 166 pages and all the characters and I've started anew. I've only written a page, but I already like this woman much better than the other one. Her name's Tess Connelly.

OK babydolls. Time for me to go commune with nature and my own creations.

May You Spin in Beauty!

p.s. They fixed my computer. Yeah!