A rare dark and stormy morning

It was a rare dark and stormy morning in Charleston.

August, like every other suffocating August in the small seaside city, had drawn on for more than the 31 days it had been allotted on the calendar. Each day passing had moved like a snail, lazily canvasing the steamy, boundless hours from dawn to midnight. Days drenched in salty humidity, Charleston's storied endless summer treated all organisms dwelling in the lowcountry to a non-stop, month long sauna.

But not this day. This day was different. September was tomorrow. A large depression manifesting out across the Atlantic had pulled a bunch of clouds up from out of the warm gulf waters, and then whipped them up into Hurricane Bill.

I had awoken before the sunrise, and could sense the heaviness of the sky outside my bedroom window. There was a different color to the pre-dawn. The mockingbirds were quiet. The crape myrtles were not gently tapping against the gutter. It was a still morning. It was the kind of stillness that all coastal residents understand as the prelude to the beating, battering winds of a waxing hurricane.

And so, the rare dark and stormy morning called me out into the world as the sun rose somewhere far above a thick cover of clouds. In the place of the oppressive August heat, a cool, steady drop of pressure fell down from sky and painted everything living in a more soulful hue. The oak trees were greener and grayer, the carolina wrens were browner and whiter, the crape myrtle blooms were a hotter hot pink.

The blue-on-blue; sky in ocean. The powerful harbinger of sheering wind; heralding the inevitable chaos created by ocean swells and the clash of warm and cold. The horizon was a visual masterpeice.

Dark, losing blue. Deep, swifting blue.

Ocean in sky. The birds did not take flight. A storm approached.

Montague to Rutledge, cross Calhoun

On the way to the hospital, she walked westward on Montague. Victorian house after pink-yellow-blue victorian house, sequential private gardens in waning September bloom warmly radiated with the subtle perfume of roses. Soft, blush pink petals littered the stone slab sidewalk. Sounds of a drill and someone dropping a large peice of wood startled a gathering of sparrows, and they flitted away into a shady row of unruly ligustrum.

She knew this street so well, she could have walked it blind-folded. Stepping over an up-ended block of gray slate, she thought about an article she had read the other day. Something about the gravitational wave detector GEO600, at Fermilab. Something about a theory that the universe is just a gigantic hologram. Anecdotally, this foggy notion of some crazy physics theory suddenly made a lot of sense. Afterall, it did seem like she had been doing the same things for years. Either working or being sick. One or the other, chasing each other around the loop of time, like two little butterflies playing in a field of dandelions.

The routine drive into town. The same 14 traffic lights. The same parking garage. The same winnowing rose bushes. The same cluster of doves. Sameness ruled her every waking moment. She may as well have been a hologram on this day, again walking alone to the hospital. Again chasing an unknown pain, following it to an unknown end.

As she entered Rutledge Tower, the claustrophobia-inducing smell of unwashed human flesh took her by surprise. An immediately pungent presence, it was made all the more so because it was experienced in such bold contrast to the fragrant smells of the neighborhood she had left outside the glass revolving doors.

Slate sidewalk slabs baking in September sun, radiating a sublime scent of warm iron. Rose scented September wind, tinged with salt, shrimp, and pluffmud. A building full of people who have not bathed, nor brushed their teeth, nor washed their hair - it was not a polite greeting.

Her gaze pinballing from one face to the next, to the wall, to the carpet, to the flourescent lights - she methodically scanned the lazy seascape of infirm bodies. The confines of the room were brimming with people who were aged, in wheelchairs, morbidly obese, walking slowly by with canes, scooting down the hall with walkers, falling in and out of consciousness while sitting, head bobbing, in a chair.

Infirmity pulled like gravity on everyone wandering the first floor, near the entryway. In the face of each diminished soul, she noticed with increasing panic, the tell-tale lack of the life-spark. That delicate glint and glimmer of electric, animal energy, erased from their eyes by the sucking forces of illness.

She felt distinctly not of them. She was not like them. She was there, in a state hospital, but she was not one of them. She was different. She was healthy. She was strong. She was very far from falling apart; far from falling to the earth in a helpless heap of ailment.

A short elevator ride to the sixth floor, and she found herself at the reception desk of the Neurology Department. After signing in, and nervously surveying the room for a clock, she slid into a chair, trying not to be noticed. It took a few minutes for her to realize the obvious defensive posture she was carrying around. Her arms crossed over her stomach, clutching her purse too close to her body, her eyes downcast, staring blankly, defiantly away from all the others. It took her a few minutes to recognize that her withdrawal was hurtful to the rest of them. One by one, the other patients eyes were darting to her face, and quickly away, back down to their feet. It was a sad game of hide and seek, in a room full of people wanting to be seen, needing to be heard.

Humble.

It is a humbling experience to be sick and not know why, nor how to fix yourself. Of all the people in that room, it was safe to assume, they were each suffering - wrestling with physical pain; but even worse, confusion. Fear.

When a person finds herself in the vulnerable position of being a patient in the waiting room of the Neurology Department at a state teaching hospital, she will instinctually find herself depending on the kindness of strangers. Without really knowing why, she will find herself depending on a smile, and the nonverbal acknowledgement that everyone present is in this together - that everyone present is in pain, and afraid, and that the reality each person is grappling with is difficult and unwieldy.

She will come to understand that, in this place of uncertainty, while yeilding to the sheer, brute force of nature upon an immortal soul quivering within a mortal body - this is where the human heart will grasp - with hands shaken by glee, gratitude, and abiding hunger - any amount of kindness, even if it is just a smile. The human heart will search the room, just for a smile.

A smile will be enough to tarry the fear for just one moment longer.

Swamp Thang

Here in the lowcountry, born-n-breds pronounce the word "thing" as "thang". It's just the way they roll, and you can't help but be charmed by it, despite your best efforts to the contrary.

Last weekend, I visited a cypress swamp. It is one of those places that is just splendid in every way. 9 years ago, in October, while I was working as a part-time bartender and server for an event planner, I worked a wedding at this swamp.

The bride's first name was Sarcanda. This is me, though, not Sarcanda.


They let us take a canoe out into the swamp to tool around. I love, love, love, the reflection of the trees in the water. To give you an idea of just how peaceful this landscape is, imagine lying under a tree on a warm, yet cloudy, summer day. Little yellow butterflies are floating around sparsely. You are miles away from any civilization. There is no wind blowing. You just had your favorite food for lunch, and maybe a beer. You're sort of sleepy, and you are drifting in and out of consciousness.

So quiet, so peaceful, incredibly beautiful.


Wildlife present: Aligators (pictured below) were swimming around in the swamp, uncomfortably close to where we were rowing. They weren't huge - 4 to 5 feet in length at most - but something about them is just instinctively frightening.



Pea Soup: this is my favorite part of the cyress swamp. The small leaflets of water plants (perhaps of the water lilly genus) that completely cover the water in some areas. Below is a photo of a magnolia tree branch hanging over pea soup. Magnolia blooms, open in June, smell like lemon chiffon. The swamp smells like brackish water and mud.

Notably absent: grizzly bears.

Needless to say, we were all quite pleased about that.

Watching Residual Waves

Hurricane Bill swifted his way up the Atlantic sealine last week. Hurricane season, while always a serious threat, rarely gets out of hand in Charleston. Instead, it is known around here as the only time of year that a surfer can really see what it is like to surf - because this is the only time of year when the waves that are substantial enough to carry a surf board for longer than 3 seconds before collapsing into the rubble and sand.


On this particular evening, the waves had been reporting to the bouys at 6 - 8 feet. Normally, they are about 2-3 feet. The difference, to a local like myself, was fantastically spectacular.

As you can see, the sunset wasn't all that bad, either.




It took me over an hour to finally give in to the seascape. As I've gotten used to having it always as my easy escape, I have begun take it for granted.

But, there is definitely something soothing and that-which-evades-the-concept-of-time-or-obligation about the ocean. The smell of the saltwater, the sting of its spray as the waves coil into themselves, the constant and loud churn; somewhere in all of that sensory experience, it is very easy to lose yourself.

And losing yourself, only to find this - well...that is what makes life bearable. The pristine beauty, the laser pink sky that holds the setting sun. The ocean wind pushing willowy tufts of grass, as if marking its path northward, star-bound.

This only happened metaphorically.

This bird, he had gotten himself into a bad situation. Somehow, when I opened the door, he flew inside, into the house. Attempting to gain quick relief from his new confines, he quickly mistook the window over the sink for the sky.

I heard a thud, then the soft flutter of feathers. Then another, smaller thud, then again, back to the sound of his wings in flight. By the third failed attempt at exit, I was able to scoop him into my hands.

His brown wings pumped ineffectively into my palms and he tried to bite me, but without teeth, it just felt like a small pinch of a less-than-vicious beak.

I scurried to the open door, out from under the carport, and into the sunshine. Then, I paused before opening my fingers, just to look at his feathery little head. The thought ran through my mind to cherish this moment, for it is rare to have the warm body of a wild bird struggling to be free of your grip, squirming around in your hands. It is rare to be close to such an ephemeral little woodland spirit.

So, I stood still for a brief time, looking down at him, studying the colors of the trees in his feathers. Then I let him go, and watched desperately as he took to flight, free, free, free!

Little did I know you were standing there behind me with your gun. Before he had time to disappear into the deciduous canopy, you shot him down.

The craziest part is that, when I asked you why you had just done such a thing, you denied having done it.

Meek Little Spider

At my office job, there is a door that you use to walk into the building. It has a knob. During the hours of 8:00 - 5:00, that door knob is always unlocked.

However.

1 out of 15 people (on average, I've been in this building for a year) who try to open that door cannot seem to figure out how to turn the door knob in such a way that it opens the door.

The problem is that the knob has a very small hitch. You can sense it when you are turning the knob, there is a slight stickiness to it. But, if you keep turning, even when you sense the small hesitation of the knob, you find that it continues to turn and that you did not break it.

Most people plow right through it. However, the 1 in 15...they just can't seem to bring themselves to try just a little harder.

It drives me bananas. There is little I loathe more in life than encountering a person who is an adult and is still afraid to exist in the world as a physical and autonomous entity. Never is it a male who is afraid to turn that door knob. Every time the would be enterer is stumped, it turns out she is female. Every time, she has been between the ages of 18 - 30.

Every time one of these girls can't figure out how to turn a door knob in order to open a door, I step outside onto the broad porch of my office, and instruct her to "keep turning the knob, the door is unlocked".

Every time, I want to place my hands on her shoulders, fix her gaze on mine, and gently remind her:

1 - Stop being so willfully invisible.
2 - Do not allow that man to wish you into silence were it that you would not laugh so loud in public when you are eating dinner.
3 - If some unsolicited injustice falls upon your path, do not swallow your rage, nor should you ever submerge your despair at the misfortune of others.

For the love of Christ, please just stop being so afraid to fail.

These are also things I tell myself on a daily basis. Because if there is anything that is true to the core about me, it is that I am afraid to exist in the world as a physical and autonomous entity. And I know that is just total bullshit, and I keep hoping I can change.

Mountain Girl

Whenever I look up at the night sky, I think of my dad. Sometimes, not in any intelligible way. Sometimes, I'll just sort of feel that part of my spine stirring, and I'll know that somewhere without words, I am thinking of my dad.

When I was young, he worked the hoot owl shift in the coal mine. Mine # 52, U.S. Steel. He was a shift foreman. He wore a white hard hat that had a light on it. He came home with coal dust stuck in his blonde eyelashes.

He loved the night sky. Not a formally educated man, he always wanted to know more about them. Once he bought a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica and poured over the sections about the stars. Then he would take me out on summer nights and teach me what he had learned. How the clusters moved, how, if we had a telescope, we could see one that is behind another.

I have the stars paired with ligtening bugs, coal, and diamonds.

Lately I have missed the heavy perfume of the mountains. The deciduous trees in late August are as green as emeralds. Their gray bark breathes out a scent that is floral and masculine, and it sort of smells like Coco Chanel. In West Virginia, where I'm from, the trees far out number the people. They are sometimes much more enjoyable to be around - the way they catch the swifts, the swallows of wind as clean, fragrant air rushes over East River Mountain.

Every morning, in the winter, thick clouds pour down the mountain. They are the color of lavendar flowers mixed with snow.

Conventional Wisdom

He said that magic haunts the edges of the everyday. I totally believe that. That is, as much as any thirty year old single, childless woman can believe that magic haunts the edges of the everyday.

There is a lot of talk out there, people like Oprah, or my counselor - well basically it's common cultural knowledge nowadays - that you can control how you interpret what happens to you in your life.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and disagree. Completely.

While it is true that you can try to tell yourself a different story about what really happened, you will never believe it. You were born as a wilful animal, and that is what you will stay. And by wilful, I mean that your heart rules your head, and your heart is hard to convince of anything other than that which is pure, brute, inmaleable, real.

I am inherently rebelious. Even with the most stupid of things, my immediate response is to rebel. For instance, I refuse to address strangers on the street. No I will not say hello to you because I do not know you and your rules confine me I NEED FREEDOM FROM THE TYRANNY OF YOUR NEED TO SAY HELLO FOR NO IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZABLE GOD-DAMN REASON.

So maybe that's it. I just can't change this animal nature. If so many people had not offered the advice to try to change my perceptions of reality, maybe I would have tried it on my own. I dunno. But now, it's too far gone. I'm too wiley, too contrary. Eff you, I say to all the wiser men and women of the world. Eff you. No matter what I tell myself to think of my circumstances, it does not change the cold, hard fact that I can barely pay my mortgage and still afford to buy food to nourish my body.

I don't know how to change that interpretation of reality without literally losing my mind.

Conventional wisdom is, as it turns out, really, really stupid and not at all useful for people who are out here on the margins.

Tin Foil

In the evening, all the birds are singing

deep purple rolls accross the horizon

and the weather man is talking of tornadoes,

funnel clouds and hard-candy hail

I look up at a striking ray of light

solid like a shining platinum sword

beaming down onto the street

burning out from beyond the rounded belly

of a pregnant, black cloud

up ahead, there are two skies

the blue sky

and the violet sky

divided in stark contrast

by a veil of heavy rain

Things I should say, but then I don't.

It is one of my most firmly held reasonings that, when someone has been a harbinger of beauty in your life, the right thing to do is tell him so.

You were a part of my life at an important locus.

I was busy living, and a day was approaching - a day that marked an important thing that should have happened, but didn't because fate reached in through the fabric of space-time and did what fate will do. Fate blew the whole thing up, tore down the house, stole all of the diamonds and pearls; some call it creative destructionism. It's just the way of the world.

I knew I couldn't avoid my own notion of time, and how it passes, nor how certain latitudes, specific longitudes, will pull back, aim, and shoot a straight and true arrow right through my heart.

Somehow, it happened that you were there at that point in my life. I spent some time listening to you, asking you about your life. You are quite remarkable, and somewhat terrifying. But that time spent with you put me in touch with my most authentic self. You were gracious and you allowed me to be the person who is still enamored with the poetry of mundane things, like humid summer nights, and grapes off the vine. You were magnanimous, and welcomed my discussion about the things that people normally don't talk about. Death, the meaning of life, the evasive search for joy or peace.

You took my heavy, dark atmosphere in stride, and you made me feel confident that, along with all of my other qualities - well, this part can be tolerated, or even accepted as an ecentricity that is partially endearing, and unwittingly disarming. You allowed me the space to be as big and deep as I really am, and not a lot of people will put up with that.

Most people want everyone around them to be small, confined, and easy.

*** Wait, who are you? ***

That is quite a spread you have there, it's like I can almost see the fabric of the universe bending around your mass.

Maybe I am imagining things. Maybe you were just telling me what I wanted to hear.

But it's not important, because in this story I've got going on in my head, you were a harbinger of beauty in my life. You were a witness to something magnificent, and you didn't even know, because it was all invisible.

This old heart of mine, though, had a brief reprieve from grief. And I just think you ought to know that I am so very thankful that you were kind to me.

A Very Old Lady

This is the Angel Oak Tree on Johns Island, SC. She is said to be around 700-1000 years old. (In SC, we don't worry about being too scientific, what's a few hundred years difference?)

As you can see, she is pretty large. She also has crazy branches that twist, and look as though they are writhing very, very, very slowly.

Live oak trees have unusual branching habits. They grow toward the sky, but after a certain point, they start heading back toward the ground. The Angel Oak is a perfect example of this wonderful tendency, as many of her dozens of coiling branches snake accross the leaf-littered earth underneath.

Live oak trees are evergreen. Their leaves are about one inch long and shaped like an almond.

This is one of my favorite places in Charleston. Admission is free. You can bring a notebook and draw or write poetry, and people actually leave you alone.

The kind of people who visit this tree are my favorite kind. They are secret naturalists. They are mystified by the simple green world that surrounds them. They whisper to each other because you can hear the Angel Oak softly swaying and breathing, and it just makes you want to be quiet and listen.

The Angel Oak lives on a barrier island of the Atlantic Ocean. Can you imagine how many severe hurricanes she has survived?

Many iterations of the concept "lost"

there is a large distance
between any two given people
songs have been written about it
"You say toe-may-toe, I say tah-mah-toe"

you and I are like the rest of them
we lie side by side in the dark

in a relationship that involves a bed
there is a cycle, easily demarcated

at first, the two lie entertwined
so happy, at last, to not be alone
welcoming dreams, eager for morning

eventually, though, the two end up
back to back, gripping a soft pillow
or nothing at all, dreading day break

if I had a genie in a bottle,
who would grant me just one wish,
I would wish for the kind of love that,
even through the test of time,
would not find the two of us
back to back

when instead we could spend the spinning silk of each black, starry night
locked in a kiss

If I could go back in time

If I could hold her close and kiss her, I would do it so hard, and so fast, and so fully, she wouldn't know what hit her.

I would wrap my arms around her and squeeze her tightly, and I would hold on for too long - far too long.

In the best part of myself, I imagine love as a shimmering, sunset-colored, melted metal. I can pool it in my hands and throw it into the air, and it splashes all over the object of my affection. It isn't too warm or too cool, it's perfect, and it tastes like cane sugar.

Sometimes, love and it's remarkable essence can be a moving, aurora type of vision. Gently dancing on the horizon, no matter where I direct my gaze. It's like the Mona Lisa, it follows you wherever you go, and it makes you happy, although you couldn't exactly articulate why.

I would tell her to hold on tight. Prepare to scream, full lung, full voice, full from the belly - scream and be heard, don't be frail, don't be invisible, don't be without your voice and your breathe. Say what you need to say.

The people who love her will be paralyzed with fear. It will enrage her. It will also break her heart because she will see, in their inability, just how much they love her. But I would tell her that she should not let their fear silence her, because she will be the one who will live, day-in-day-out with the consequences of her choices. Or lack thereof.

She will be the one who will wake up with peices missing. She will be the one who will not understand why her spine can't catch up with her brain.

I would tell her to try to hold onto her own vision of love, no matter how ethereal it will become. Because sometimes, it will be the only thing that makes sense anymore.

Love for the brutal, beautiful world that holds her captive, her feet never more than a few inches from the earth - her lungs never free from oxygen chains - her heart never free to stop moving.

When I woke up with part of my skull gone forever, it changed the animal part of me that I didn't even know was there. I woke up and I found myself walking on a tenuous wire, high above a vast and gorgeous and trecherous canyon. I've not found my way off of it yet.

But I learned something very important. I learned to recognize the love I have for the brutal and beautiful world. The brutal, beautiful world. A gift and a curse that I lived through it, to be left incomplete, but somehow enhanced.

I would tell her these things, and she wouldn't understand until after it happened, and then she would be too far on her own journey to be soft about it anymore. Battling it out each day, her survival, suffering desperately, to abate the lonliness and isolation, the fear and bitterness.

She will end up fighting savagely to hold on to the glimmering love she sometimes will feel for this brutal and beautiful world.

Where the milk thistle grows

To say that she has gotten used to living with lonliness is not exactly right. There is a place of nowhere that she goes to when it gets too dark, too terrifying, too bleak. She disappears, that is the right term. She disappears instead of being lonely.

There are certain experiences that change the make up of a person. A lot of wise men throughout history have claimed that people don't ever really change. But sometimes, that is not true. Certain things can happen that will shift the composition of a human soul. A generally out going, glass-half-full kind of person can shift into the kind of person who wishes for invisibility.

That is what happened to her. A long chain of losses, and then she fell through fifty thousand feet of clouds, into a new version of herself. Someone she is still trying to understand, fighting to overcome.

They diagnosed her with post traumatic stress disorder. But, really, it is just a medical term for what your grandmother would call a broken heart. Or, a broken spirit. Her mother told her to try to find God again. Her therapists told her to meditate, focus on the good things, that all of the sorrow is a learned habit that can be unlearned. The internet told her to manifest her dreams, in a technique called "The Way".

She thinks they are all full of shit. They don't know what it is like to watch your lifelong held view of the world suddenly shift, and be pulled out into the universe like saltwater taffy. All new colors, unrecognizable shapes, unintelligable languages - they don't know what it is like to become an alien in the world that made you.

Every day, she greets the morning, as it carries with it a basket of sorrow and says to her, "Here you go. Here is the sunshine pouring through your windows. Here is the hunger in your gut. Here is your bottomless sense of loss. Do what you can with it."

She wishes for a quiet field of wildflowers, high in the mountains, the one she knows is there, where she was born. She thinks of high noon, and a warm, dry wind. Away from the lowcountry, the salt air. Away from people everywhere, watching. She wants to go anywhere but nowhere. Anywhere but here, today, right now.

All I need are my feet and the ground.

No one has ever taken a photo of me running. But it is something I do on a daily basis. I average 3 miles a day, 5 days a week, which over the course of a year comes out to around 720 miles. I have been a runner since I was 15, so that means that I have run over 10,000 miles so far in my life.

Running is a major part of my life. Running is something that almost all other activities in my life are scheduled around. Running has not only improved the quality of my life, it has saved me (over and over again) from my natural-born self-destructive tendencies.

Obviously, as someone who has been an avid runner for 15 years, I am familiar with self discipline.

When you run 700 miles a year, you come to realize that not all of those miles will be rewarding. Sometimes, the run is painful, monotonous, and completely without joy. Sometimes, you feel too tired or too hungry to run. Sometimes, you would rather be lazy and drink a beer while watching Family Guy. But, when you have spent thousands of miles in a constant struggle for breath, you have learned that you are never as tired as you think you are. You have learned that within less than a minute into the run, you don't feel tired anymore - you feel strong and free.

You also learn that the Corona tastes so much BETTER after a run, when you are very, very, very thirsty.

After 30 years of being alive, I have learned how to stay physically fit and still be able to eat chocolate. I'm pretty grateful for that, because I have zero will power when it comes to sweets.

What I wish I could do is transfer that strong self discipline, success, and confidence into my professional life. If I could just learn how to be a runner in my career, I could maybe move on to the next level of my life.

The thing I love most about running is that it feels slightly like you have grown wings and can fly. I love that no matter what happens in the other parts of my life, nobody can take my run away from me. All I need are my feet and the ground, and I can escape.

Sometimes, I like to imagine what it might be like to go to Sudan or Liberia. Somewhere terrifying and hard. Somewhere that I could be put to good use. Somewhere that would teach me how easy I have it here in my little life in the states. And I like to imagine what it might be like to run barefoot in the village, maybe with some teenagers. I like to imagine how fast they would leave me in the dust.