4.27.2011 -- 8:00 pm. | Journal 1 - "gypsy woes"

"gypsy woes"

in the last 20 minutes of ambient light - the heart of dusk, i sunk into the bath; melting myself to the scalding water and gentle push. it took me on like a champion. I, the weary warrior and fragile beacon; like the last leaf of november.

it's here i swear i could hear ghosts whisper & the earth talking in every bellow and resounding crack. it murmurs:

"ash, you have no patience anymore and winter was too hard on you; too long for the girl in dresses..."

the light is only silhouetting the window and the tips of my limbs.

i pull on this morning's washcloth with my toes, and move my legs

my hands

my mind

around,

and to.that.point.

where it

drops off;

where i can

pretend that i'm a mermaid or a leaf and can float as free as either, though my body remains rooted and resolute - 8 days from it's 28th birthday.

and it's becoming quite apparent that i'm torn between almost everything, except the desire to break free with the simplicity of tomorrow's offering: heading east and onward on the dirty open road.

these letters will comprise the rambling & imagery of the next 30-some days. they either mean nothing or everything, and i've got my pen & polaroid folded like treasures into my backpack.

so, we'll see...

see you in chicago.

ash x

ps. to my retreat attendees: today i got each of you something over 100 years old. can't wait to give them to all of you.

the novelty candle & the field.

"Letter 3" | 1.11.2011

"the novelty candle"

Mom swivels her chair w/ the stack of heaping christmas cards, peeling them open like promises, and reads aloud a solstice quote:

“The darkness can show us the light’ and it comes with a candle that someone far away had spun and sent in novelty. It’s the kind you can’t blow out.

The collective sentiment drips from everyone’s wagging, holiday tongues and then washes away with the sherry. Maybe that’s it, though. It’s been falling to dark so early these days; getting harder to see whats gone sleeping ---

And that’s when I knew what had happened.

The jolt hit me hard – dragging me back again - no mistaking the weight of that heavy heart of yours; melding me to the memories with mortar for its grooves…

Back to when I reeled in bed from the heartbreak that Winter; three whole months in the same vacant expression; chapping lips & sleepwalking about a mission bed; a whole season when I only awoke to the toll of those dreams, where all things shook tremendously, in a world crumbling; as I would teeter and dip amidst the burning ruins, deep in the trenches we found; where I held your pretty little forest fingers – vines for limbs, even bolder than mine; and the shifty hearth still churning the ashes of the aftermath; and catching my dress in that torrid wind that sentenced me to forever chase the last few fleeting, burning words, forever - never catching.

And the thought of it leads me to other questions now, like: ‘why do the fireplaces stay standing like that?’ If it was all just meant to burn as it did, why didn’t the whole place just go? Why do the pots still hang from their nothings?

I want flowers in those plots, cuz I could grow them to the moon, but I’ve got those old foundations and their fires just consume.

Are they a novelty candle?... cuz I’ve been sifting so long now and it’s all I can figure.

---

It reminds me of the old man I see when I drive that old backroad; stitched to his chair as he peers from rise to set, span to span, against that massive, lone tree in the oceans of wheat - commanding the winds like a beacon.

Father time wanders so close to his eyes that I bet that old man hears him breathing sometimes, and it always makes me wonder, with intensely heavy sighs as I bite my little lip... Had it happened to him too? Because I know he’d be there now. That man never moves.

If I shut my eyes long enough and revisited that place – where the beams still smolder; where your eyes still reside [and not a day older]… and if I took a trail or two I never had wandered, back when I wandered – would I meet him in a clearing - chasing his own last fleeting, burning words, forever, never catching?

Did he spend his life reeling in bed? Is he sleepwalking now, and brave enough to do it outside? Are these fields his ruins? And were they ever his heyday? Is this the aftermath or a holy consolation?

And my mind begins thinking of abstract things: Is HE a novelty candle? If I ever stopped my car, cracked the door and wandered over, would he be a man or a mannequin? Would he be another trail to the fever? If I stepped from that road and down that ditch, onto that giant heap of blowing wheat where time doesn’t move when the rest passes by it, would he melt into the wind and scream for me to follow?

Would HE be the last few fleeting, burning words, forever, never catching?

******

"The Field"

******

I hope you have been enjoying these letters.

plenty more to come.

- ash

the twelfth dream & the canyon.

~ Letter 2 | 12.5.2010 ~

"the canyon"

I want to say to him that I’m tired tonight in this far away land that he’s come to know so little of;

ask if he remembers the day in the canyon where I didn’t need to talk when I was tired; because I know he’d remember the canyon - all the muddy splendor that ruined his boots, or the way it sounded when he screamed until he woke the ancient grotto, stirring the oldest beasts; how he scaled a mountain without looking back and took less water than he needed; that he was bold in the face of nature and that nobody could ever really tame the eyes of caged lions. He might remember (might) that he married me that day and that I wore a wreath of webs and a simple dress of clay; and that I filled up an entire interval without labels.

I want him to ask if I remember the day in the canyon, so that I could reminisce in the deep end of my heart; those foreign shapes that we wrote on balmy rivers when it was all we could find to write on, and that nobody but the fireflies knew; Full fledged in the echo of 100 foot drips that reached down down down like honey; and that we drank from them all with the invincibility of youthful hearts; two orphaned seeds, we. I’d remember it because the earth never posed visiting hours & because I loved a giant; in that murky place where he grew me an oak that would stay an endless summer through all the winter months – just for me; and that I could keep it in my pocket for days that I needed to sleep beneath my hundred acre woods.

I want to say to him that that was all there really ever was, in any day, and that I walked that trail too; holding his hand as he conquered a land that couldn’t be conquered; that I heard a murmuring symphony played by ghosts & sirens; that we sipped on a tap root that grew us together, as we lingered deep into the dark hours, that committed us there far beyond our bodies; beyond those hours that would lead his feet on and lead me home.

back home.

back home.

------

"The Twelfth Dream"

------

happy holidays everyone. be warm. be safe.

thank you, each, for the endless support in helping me continue to cultivate, create, and realize my dreams...

ash | x