Land Is Land

One thing I've noticed, traveling around this planet of our as much as I've been able, is that everywhere I go, the landscape is home. Surely, different parts of the world wear different colors, and sometimes the shapes and scale are unique and surprising. There is always something new to see, around the corner, if you are curious enough. But the land is brown and green. The sky is blue and white. The sun shines yellow and pink. The stars and moon glow silvery against black and purple. Traveling through winter, the land faded to sketch and monochrome, every tree is shadow-brown, all small plants are in their quiet tan pajamas, and everything else is dusty white. I could be skirting Chicagoland, nearing the foothills of the Rockies, crossing upstate New York. But I am racing though Bavarian countryside, and this blizzard could have followed me from Stockholm, or it could be a stranger from Russia. I haven't done much traveling in the winter (some part of me has always been too skeptical to allow for possible frostbite on a lonely train station) until now. I love the spherical intimacy of it, the land in focus only nearby, the colors subtle. From a train, snug and speeding, the familiarity of the landscape has a special magic all its own.

It's only when we cross into the acreage of civilization that shapes begin to look Foreign. The different ways different people use hills, or roofs, or the edge of their claims. The little towns crowded into Black Forest valleys, vertical like a tapestry painted on silk, never minding perspective. Switchback roads and yellow faces and linear yards of crenelated edging, mirroring the pines above and causal river below. Steep tiled roofs in drainage undulation or dragon scale. Tight and idyllic, efficiently antiplanned, like a bird's nest.

And around the bigger cities, where we might have a Fitchburg or an Urban Sacrifice Zone, there are summer gardens. Little plots of land where urbanites, missing nature but unendowed with a summer home, can tend a bit of earth and fly a flag. Which I guess is another kind of sacrifice. The cute crowds of small fenced yards and sheds are always along railroad corridors, so I'm not sure what they garden. Summer memories. Even in winter, they look tidy and happy, some terraced and some wreathed in years of wisteria vines. Miniature national/natural dream colonies. Every bit of land is a door to all of Earth.

Some Things I Know For Sure

1. Madison is home, and when I am here I am home, home, home without question. At home moving through these streets and grasses, the layers of memories and familiarities so thick it's like a dense white noise relieving the twitch of my reptile-survival brain. So easy to be here, building edifice against boredom becomes the lifestyle of choice, and I do my days gathering resources to do my nights of constructing more awesome.

2. Full-impact living for me, please. For the past couple of months, I've kept myself busy. Really busy, 11-hour-doing days, full-time-job-then-4-more-hours, "it's not an obsession, it's a community art project" busy. I've loved it. It's well and truly kicked my ass. And I've made beautiful things, big and impressive things, felt enormous emotions, deepened my insight into the intersections of synesthesia and empathy, forged closesness and love, and moved about so thoroughly my body is every cell comfortable. I started keeping myself busy to keep my mindself occupied and keep doubt at bay. Somewhere in there, I got pulled up short and slapped with a reminder that Power must be met with Presence. You are a bright light for reminding me I am always playing for keeps, darling, thanks.

3. I am moving towards the awesome. What started out as joking mantra has become concrete compass-rose, a real guiding star. A real, simple decoder-ring decision-making strategy: Does the thing in front of me move me towards the awesome? Yes? Okay, let's do. No? No thanks, nothing doing. I move towards what makes me happy, as often as I can, in word and action. Simple as that. Good work, good food, interesting conversation, kind people, more experiences. Moving this way also brings me towards Success, and Health, and Home -- in the inner-world-is-strong-and-well-lit sense of the word.

4. I don't always need to be home.

Gifts of Love

All through the mid of January I threw myself into designing a bittersweetsweet workshop. Fusing my two great loves in the world of wellbeing; the female and the aromatic. I had a two-hour window to perform a conjuring of living, breathing, healing sensuality, and I meant to make the most of every second. Figured it would mostly attract women in the night of winter, curled up inside woolen selves, missing sunshine and skin. Well, figured there'd be more like me out there. And I'm speaking now from the other side, from 4 weeks of steeping myself in sandalwood and jasmine at night, brewing honey into syrup with roses, vanilla, sweet wicked damiana by day. And remembering that, while it's our roots that place us deep in the world (like our crowns keep us hooked into the inspiration of the cosmos), it's that second chakra that keeps us solid in the world of the human (just as that third eye translates celestial inspiration into every day's insight.)

Which is certainly not to equate being a woman immersed in aromatic medicine with some kind of ambulatory womb, but is to say; if this life is about being in this body, and the thing that differentiates this body from others is skin and sensation and a particular sweetness of anatomy -- okay.

So I took all the time I might have to look outwards to perfect recipes and stretch the variations, to make little altars every day to the idea and flavors of intimacy in friendship, solitude, fantasy and memory. And it's good I think that I've been alone in this room, on these sharp winter days, to do this magic. It's gotten a little tangled, a little humid, like a dense sponge quietly living. The other, meatier side of solitude. Not the windy, heady heady satisfaction of the single mind, focused at leisure on a single point. More the deep silk and quicksand sensorium of this singular body, and the participatory insight of physical being. More incorporation, more direct experience, more living in nouns.

St. Valentine's, Modern Day of Consensual Acknowlegement that Love is a Powerful Thing We All Thrive Within, is my second-favorite holiday. I have not, for many many years, passed it without an Other to shower with all the gold of my imagination. I wrestled with that while I infused, composed and created the little labors of love with which others with shower their Others this year. And it's good now. Open hands, steady feet. And this wide gold mirror before me.

Incorporation - Bringing Into the Body

Today is the first time since returning home that I've been able to go, alone, into the land, into the woods, and be.

To think about where I am, today, and where this new year might take me. To think about where I've been, and how to bring that inside me. In the desert we spoke of this, of incorporation, of digesting the lessons and the learning, of the slow unstoppable seep of growth. I kept the walkabout sun shining on my skin and in front of my eyes for two months, carried floating, glad and full. Now my sunny skin is fading, and my eyes are full of the simple white of winter, and I am learning to wear this sun within.

This is a thing I know: I will be comfortable in any house. With a bus pass and a water bottle I am confident in any city. With a backpack and any vehicle I will find adventure. And when I step outside all these, into air and rock and the fragrant living world, I am free.

Home is There

Give me a backpack for a house and a good pair of hiking boot wings, and I'll be happy with the sunshine and the starlight. Give me a blank book and a properly weighted pen, and I'll entertain myself for days. Street food and the odd wild blackberry and my belly's glad, as long as there are noodles somewhere in it's future. And it turns out a rolled up tarp or nearly empty laundry bag makes a fine pillow.

All the world is a bowl of pleasure and care, and there is still nothing so fine, precious or incomparable as watching the sunrise in the park you have loved since childhood, the gold light of late Wisconsin summer, and warm freshpicked tomato sandwiches with cheese from folks who kiss your cheeks at the farmer's market.

The road is huge and beautiful, and home is always at its end.