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I watched from the inside of my head, observing right side and wrong side up and down and inside out observing to understand. Allowing the paper, the ink, the lines strewn and crossing – do the sorting – add layers to the sense making.

Light flashing focus. Kids on the neighborhood elementary school basketball court rolling on skates – no, men bouncing hoops at dusk – no, they are all the same blur of childhood passing through the power lock windows with pencil and paper and business task lists scrubbed like an art project over the texture of steering wheel vinyl.

I wrote while talking to people on their bicycles who didn’t notice my busy hands through the roll down windows, with kids telling me to stop watch out pay attention. Up the sides and around the paper borders when I ran out of space – I could always find space. Full over spilling organization brain rushing space made for me to fit in. I wrote the how to. I wrote the plan, the budget, the operating protocol, training manuals and annual projection variants. Behind the wheel I wrote solutions and strategies, thank you emails and confrontation letters.

Ultimately I learned to write with my voice into a recorder, and to be okay with the sound of that voice and the many places my voice came from. I learned to pull over when it got too dark, and the other headlights too bright. On the shoulder, in the bus stop lane, the empty grass lots in the weeds and mud puddles I kept going. When I did pick up the phone, I doodled in the margins, moving, my hand unstoppable.

Later, years or days or hours, scribbled on the backside of utility bills and junk mail envelopes, on forgotten shopping lists torn with wrinkles rumpled and water stained I’d type it all out,

Here.

Gouging for the good bits, the entrails

Purging purging

Here

Here I am, now, still

Writing after I stopped. Writing on go. Filling in history.

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From my breasts I am fierce. I am wild.

I walk the mountain trail topless–just like the men sun tanning their bare chests–my bare feet step solid, pads on my paws built by clay earth bake into my soles.

I am tender and private. Solitary in the landscape of my mind. Travelers pass on the trail. “Right on” the woman says as the man averts his eyes. I go home, nurse my child, and paint a woman whose breasts cry a milky river.

It was a commissioned piece, for a book the client has only envisoned.

My breasts cried those milky tears. They cried a sour flood all over the bed sheets in pools that stained dozens of new futon mattresses.

I cried the war of man vs. nature. I cried the earth adjusting to the comfort under the human.

I held it crying uphill tears. I breathed it down to a calm so my baby wouldn’t drink it. My body and breath soft as the breast of earth while my mind battled in adjustment to my mans world.

Heuristic biases. The words stick out of something I read yesterday about design influences on culture running alongside our human inability to shift out of our comfort to see solutions from a different new old or timeless perspective.

My body, lying uncomfortably still, controlling my calm for one hour, two hours, so my baby would rest, wouldn’t stir, wouldn’t cry at my leaving her alone. I breathed and quieted and listened to the ancestors who saw more, sending wisdom.

From my breasts I am fierce, I am wild. I walk the landscape of my motherhood. I walk the ridge after dinner where the sun sets across the valley–where giant oil machines crane their steel necks, pecking at the land like stinging mechanical mosquitoes.

I cry a river of milk. It becomes a stream where the white wolves drink. It flows like a waterfall over the ridge cliff.

I was commissioned to paint her. In a red sari dress with her breasts spurting milk like wild faucets. Soaking the silk fabric like broken fire hydrants soak the street. Spouting more ferociously than any waterfall. Like geysers I cried for the war of man vs. Earth.

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The pen slows down to honor the mastery of language.

To trust the ink.

Call it practice—

The mindless calling in of words,

letters slowly arriving with grace.

In this very slow wing

a patient honor to voice who enters faster than a hand—

Deliberate, precise, chosen.

A mind most full when it is empty.

Mindfulness in the mindlessness

The clenched hand relaxes. It allows…

Itself to dance between subject and object concept and context.

Like touching texture, I read them

Out of the running water

Seeing their color dripping.

Washing like the fingers, okay to touch

To wet a dried loneliness.

I didn’t almost cry at the art gallery.

The children weren’t there just to tug “let’s go”.

I felt through my eyes again.

Jealouslessly, carrying my cherished story bundled.

A 20 year old infant dream waiting for the childhood years to pass

Or the parenthood years. Neither—

I’ve known from the start my whole artists life is all wrapped, swaddled, in this.

The calligraphers know of water and ink,

Where the unexpected emerges from a dance with precision.

From the tunnel of detail held inside-out

eternal as the blackness of holes.

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The children, each a world born of creation, would come to know my beloved art as their mother’s ultimate partner.

Before seven years of age, when the ego confronts, children do not question their very central point in their universes. The artist – that time where there is no time – is where she must go.

How can her love affair with her world have dinner at the table on time? She who eats from the banquets of the muses… She who feather touches the very flavor of mystery’s caress…

Suddenly in a wonder my invisible mouth was slapped open with just as invisible a kiss that hollered down my throat, vibrated my gut with the words “Just paint!”. Should I be afraid?

I’m in the car I’m driving I’m breathless I’m stunned with my lips swollen hanging on my open jaw. “Paint with what?” The strawberries in the grocery bag beside me in the passenger seat. The carrot juice. Where? Here? Now? On the asphalt the cement. The seatbelt across my chest under my neck my chin my shirt – holding me in, contained like food in the refrigerator. I crack the carrot juice open. I drink and let it run all down my face my clothes to my lap.

Daily canvas is this body. A double venture overlaid un-between life. I’m understood here by a lover whose fingers caress my blood inside their cells.

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I know as if every backroad I’ve explored in this life is backroad to another larger miraculous enchanted life – but it wasn’t life that was any different. I was the same adventurous one – seeking only what the land could tell me – sleeping with my ear to her soft earth. Her dust traveling into my head with all of the tiny pieces of ancient memory. I know every one of those particles as if they are the vast wildernesses where they came from. I’ve been inside of the pinecone. Her sappy scent has flavored my meals. I taste her sticking to my teeth my teeth as if my teeth are but fossils, small stones.

And I’ll sleep with a stone beneath my pillow, until the pillow turns over into a sail and lightens into a frail flag a feather. I am not lost at the sea of dream. I know where I am. I know each place on the map of memory that wakes to the next place and the next place. I’ve been all of there. It doesn’t look the same. I am not lost – yet I cannot find my way back.

There is a giant emerald lake beyond a little mining town in the high Rockies. When you go way way out on the water to it’s farthest edge it overlooks the San Francisco Bay. I know. I’ve been there.

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