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 boundary waters.

I remember the first time I visited the northern most stretch of Minnesota, when I was a young girl...

The deep forests were stark – full of pine & birch; a land full of canyon lined rivers and rugged boulders, covered in wet mosses and polished agate; deep green marshes knee deep in moose and loon, who called out by dawn and twilight; valleys full of gliding eagles whose shadows would linger in my wild, youthful eyes; fresh wolf and bear tracks lined the gravel back roads, each leading further into the wilderness - hinting that its first inhabitants were still abound if I wandered off the path; sometimes, even in midsummer there was a crispness in the air that I couldn’t shake no matter warm or cold; so rich it would permeate my skin; so thick & palpable, I could actually draw sustenance from it.

The shores of the great Lake Superior were rugged - born of rock & driftwoods; The horizon line, a gorgeous sweep of heavy blues that lulled my eyes further and further into its cold and ship wrecked waters; air tasting of minerals across my tongue.

And then came the night, with the warmth of a radiating campfire; popping like fireflies in and out of existence; the scent of evergreen and ash woods, burning away, and built from our own hands - cut only a stone’s throw from the woods that sheltered us. I would wrap in my sweaters as the night began to cool, and laugh with everyone who would also be wrapping themselves in their own sweaters; taking in the earned smiles on aging faces, whose aging hands would sometimes be wrapping the little crests and resting breaths of a sleeping child; everything in harmony with the night; living whole where we were. We’d all seemingly glance up at the same time, somewhere late into the hours - as we would endlessly talk in a thousand trailing conversations, that would weave in and out of each other, forming others; And our words would cease as the cosmos took the stage, like shimmering diamonds, every one of them visible against the darkest backdrop that only exists in the middle of nowhere; the sound in those nights – a pure silence, beyond the cascading waters and the wind that hummed from trembling branch to branch; a profound silence; the kind that offers up the deepest breaths and truest healing; and once every few years, when we’d wander the muddy trails to a nearby road – only as bits of echoes & laughter gathered by the night… the lot of us would lay down on the dirt road & look up to find the aurora borealis forming, for which (at 27 years of age, and many many many visits later) I’ve still no words to describe what it means to see it; To have been witness to the moment the earth reminded me that i was alive. None.

As morning would commence in its buttery, irrepeatable light, we’d peel ourselves from our warm beds, as the weather would suddenly turn from sun to fog to rain to sun to rain to fog in a matter of minutes, over the sweeping, unapologetic valley views and endless lakes the north woods are renowned for; everything so full of an irreverent and uninhibited beauty; repeating itself day after day, and forever.

[this is all i wanted to post over here | you may read the full - related article here - for which this was written]

- ash

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