Sunrising

As I unravel myself from thought-patterns and abstractions
Tear off layers of unconscious emotional reactions
I long to lie naked so close to your sun
blending our warm rays permeating each skin cell
and feeling my mitochondria dance.
This vibration you sense emanating from me is a new one
An emergence of a new longing
A recent remembrance of a timeless past:
Can I be the fusion reaction driving you to shine brighter?
And the ocean of placid peace you dive into when you need a break from burning?

Tides

In ten years I hope I don't find you
at the ocean's edge pacing
collecting small shells and watching the horizon
for the perfect ship to swim to
and wishing all the same it won't arrive
so that irrevocable plunge and unthinkable distance
through choppy waters can be forgotten,
eventually.

~~~

Once I remember how your tide pulled me out
I rolled on your big waves mesmerized
I only behaved floating free-falling
Surrrrrrenderrr
Rendering me unconscious
To anything but your blue waters
A dolphin I glided to your depths
I leaped and giggled
And time passed and passed

Until the waves crashed overhead tore me thrashed as the tide came back in (like it always has).

I clamored ashore
collapsed on the sand
and lied there stunned as a fish
wondering how to breath without water
.
.
.
Finally I felt a breath and realized it was my own
I watched it a long while
In and out and In
Out and In
and Out and In and Out
Until I was sure I was not dead
Out and In and Out
and In
Until I felt the tide-force within me
the same motion as the great seas
washing our peaceful Mother, and yet my own
In and Out

Until the union appeared

In

I Am

Out

All




I forgave you. And later, in the same moment, myself.

Shelter

You don't need to prove yourself to me
You already are
Just inhabit your temple
Adorn it with
Loving kindness and gratitude
So if I choose to step in
One day
I will find your doors open
The sun shining brightly through colored glass
Casting kaleidoscope patterns onto the smooth wooden floor
Sturdy, well-worn, and cared for
By you, who time and again knelt in prayer
And bent to kiss your foundation

Red Roses in the Sand

My Puerto Rican host family and I are squished in the car again, headed to a beach on the southeast coast. The sun is nearly setting as we roll up and park under coconut trees on white sand. Raul tells us this is a good place to collect coconuts and pulls out a big sack. My feet soak up the lingering sun in the warm sand as we comb the beach hunting for the ripe coconuts that slosh inside when shaken. We heft coconut after coconut over to the sack until our future bellies are contented.
I turn to the ocean, the softly sounding waves inviting me to join their symphony. I run into the water and plunge into a wave before it crashes overhead. These waves are my favorite kind, big and rolling, three or four feet high that only crash close to shore. On these kinds of waves I float on my back, close my eyes and gently relax every muscle in my body until I am weightless and free. With water below and air above, I commune and surrender to a swirling, rocking, pulling world. No need to worry about staying on solid ground-- here all is constant change. The ocean gurgles, splashes, crashes, sighs, and sings, echoing the rhythmic chaos of my being. I turn onto my stomach and sink back into the rhythm, relishing brief adrenaline rushes at the bottom of each wave when a huge wall of water is all I see overhead. I trust the wave to lift me back up to its crest where the steady horizon line is revealed again.
After a timeless period passes I swim back to shore, stomach grazing sand and shells as I clamor back to land. At the western end of the beach the clouds are celebrating the passing of the sun by displaying pink, orange, and peach illumination above a hill of tropical vegetation. Walking east along the beach, I come upon a line of red roses stuck in the sand. A woman nearby says that once upon a time, a woman lost her seafaring husband to the waves. Each year, on this day, she returns to plant a line of red flowers at the place where the infinite waters greet the land.

Sometimes we need a horizon line and it’s not there. So we create our own: a line of roses, a string of beads, a gathering of stories, a dance of our experiences. At once we acknowledge the chaotic uncertainty of life and assert our own power as co-creators. There is magic here...

What if the simplest action is the most radical?

Being in the Now is radical: you no longer create pain for yourself and others. You no longer contaminate the earth, your inner space, and the collective human psyche with negativity. Being present breaks mind patterns that have dominated life for ages. It is a quantum leap in the evolution of consciousness.
(Eckhart Tolle)

Full moon poems

you laugh
flowers burst into bloom
they fade and die
you cry
your tears water the seeds
we grow again

<><><><><><><><><><>

send me thoughts like thunder
rolling
    soothing and strong
power in bunches
and empty in between

feel my lightning heart-flash
ecstatic
     pure white energy
power of presence
illuminating the edges

The Witch's Lipstick

           Raul, Ivonne, Joaquin, Carraya (age 5 months, Ivonne still carrying her safely in her womb), and I are returning from errands in the valley below their mountain home in central Puerto Rico, an hour’s drive south of the seaside capital of San Juan. It’s dark as we wind our way up the mountain. In the backseat, 3-year old Joaquin has his little warm hand wrapped around one of my fingers and the hard plastic of his carseat digs into my shoulder.

            “Hay una fiesta en Casas de la Selva. Quieren ir?” Ivonne asks into the silence. We are tired but all agree to at least stop into the party at Casas de la Selva (Houses of the Rainforest), a sustainable forestry organization started by John Allen and his team of genius hippy-adventurer-scientists in the early 70s. The same team birthed the enormous glass-domed Biosphere 2, an enclosed, self-sustaining mini-earth plunked in the middle of the Arizona desert that was inhabited in the early 90s by eight courageous humans and thousands of other plant and animal species.

            My Puerto Rican host family lives in trailers they rent from Casas de la Selva in this hot and humid tropical forest. There’s not enough rain here to be a proper rainforest but the Coquí frogs are noisily abundant, their exuberant calls of “Coquí! Coquí!” growing to deafening levels in enclosed spaces such as our 4x6 concrete bathroom, making my quick cold showers even quicker. Little lizards, butterflies, scorpions, and a large assortment of bugs also inhabit this land along with plenty of tropical greenery, groves of bamboo, and of course tropical fruit trees—mango, guava, soursop, orange.

            We drive down the long gravel road to Casas, park, and Joaquin squirms for freedom from his restrictive car seat. I’m not much feeling the party mood and I’m reluctant to socialize with 3T’s friends but she tells me one of them is a witch so I’m curious. We climb down three steps into a sheltered space lit by glowing Christmas lights, open on one side to the graywater garden and forest beyond and built into the hillside on the opposite. The food table rich with chips, dips, and fresh-baked bread beckons me so I wander over and fill a plate. For the past month my family and I have been eating the majority of our food directly from the garden we nurture. Eating has risen to a spiritual level as I start to feel an intimate connection with my food—each day we water, weed, save seed, plant, harvest. We carry onions, peppers, carrots, herbs, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes directly from the garden to the makeshift kitchen in the trailer. There’s a sink, a nice new stove and oven, a couple of feet of counter space, and metal racks above the sink where we like to place clean silverware even though we already know it will fall through the cracks and become dirty again. The small, round plastic table covered in a flowery tablecloth sits on the hand-constructed plywood porch outside the main trailer and serves as an extension of the kitchen counter, where I work at chopping veggies and making salads. When combined with store-bought rice, quinoa, cornmeal, or pasta, our vegetables and herbs become feasts to savor. Sometimes over dinner Ivonne explains the physiological parallels between humans and plants—when we rip a full melon from the vine, she says, we are allowing the plant to give birth and it experiences the same pain and joy that we humans do.

            Maintaining the gardens and manifesting three meals a day from its bounty gets exhausting though, however rewarding, especially when trying to earn an income. This is why I sometimes get giddily happy at the sight of junk food or when invited to a restaurant where I don’t have to pick and wash and chop and sautee and cook and clean up afterwards. Cut-up potatoes in a bag with oil and salt. Just waiting to be opened and eaten and the bag disposed of—what a strange, wicked, and enticing idea.

            As I’m munching away contentedly I’m forced to notice a large, full-bosomed, middle-aged woman in a wheelchair spilling her glass of red wine little by little as she sloppily yells in the direction of a hesitant young Casas volunteer with “please help me” eyes. Curious, I wander over and immediately get sucked into her vortex of drunken blabber. She hollers for another glass of wine, sparking a debate between 3T and her friend. Her bright red lipstick is prominent on her fleshy face, she is full of life and lavishing her time in the spotlight. “You are from Wisconsin!” she declares to the bewildered girl standing above her. “And you, your grandfather, a loss really, and you have problems with your kidneys, the moon is above us so bright, your kidneys yes…” I soon realize she is mixing up the girl with me but she gets the facts right: I am from Wisconsin, did have kidney trouble, and recently learned my grandfather has Parkinson’s. Finally her sloshy brain registers that she’s never met me and she asks my name and says I’m from Delaware and may experience heart failure. The volunteer, her face now panicky, confirms that she is indeed from Delaware.

      I tell the witch that my name is Avalon. “Avalon,” she repeats, “Avalon…AVALON...AVALON!” her voice grows louder and louder and now she is stuck on repeat, her whole body chanting my name over and over. I start to get nervous and a bit dizzy, and now the whole party is suddenly dead silent and Joaquin is still swinging on the hammock and starts calling my name as well. Now they are both going “Avalon” “Avalon” and I’m being called to slip back, so easily and quickly back, back to my old reality where my path is obscured and chaos prevails. Suddenly the odd thought occurs to me that unseen forces are trying to entice me and I am a bit fearful. All I know how to do is stay present, so I watch, I notice the Christmas lights glowing in the darkness and I go over to Joaquin and push him on the hammock and watch him swinging up and down and he stops calling my name, satisfied to be hanging free in the air again. Now the witch stops too. Conversation resumes as if nothing ever happened and I can almost convince myself that nothing out of the ordinary just took place...except for those fleeting moments where I felt spirits calling me from some other side and I felt the somehow familiar dark pull, a slipping into a timeless swirling darkness, a silky blackness calling,

            “are you sure you want to stay here? it’s muchhh nicer, easier to come back here….all you have to do is close your eyes and when you open them all will return to normal…”

               As I try to leave the party the witch stops me, her wheelchair stationed firmly at the bottom of the stairs. She tries to pull me back into conversation but I say “sorry, I’m really tired, I’m going home now.” Out of her purse she pulls her bright red lipstick, uncaps it and pushes it close to my face. “I’d like to put some lipstick on you, I think you could be beautiful,” she says forcefully. For a split second I giggle and almost comply, but I snap into focus just in time, lifting my left hand in front of the approaching tube, feeling the red slick smear across my skin. As she tries to apply more I draw back and make my escape up the stairs. Back home before I crawl into my tent I wash the lipstick off, shivering a bit as red water runs down the drain.

My offering

Hi! My name is Avalon. I’m on a twisting roller-coaster that has plunged me to ocean depths, sped me through dark forests, and hurled me out into the cosmos. Somehow part of me has recently been spit off the ride and emerged blinking and shaking into the light. I inadvertently buckled myself into this ride about a year ago after graduating from my quaint liberal arts college in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts. Since then I’ve traveled from my home city of Madison, Wisconsin to the forested mountains of Puerto Rico, across the ocean to the Dominican Republic, up volcanic peaks and into deep caverns of Guatemala, back to Wisconsin, to an intentional special-needs community in rural New York and now to a center for conscious living north of New York City where I am currently writing.

I am in the process of combining, chewing up, and digesting my experiences so they are nourishing instead of confounding or even terrifying. I hope to chronicle some of my adventures, expand on some ideas central to recent transformations and learn from others willing to share theirs. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all on this roller coaster so we might as well throw up our hands and scream together!