I think the olive oil went straight to my head. My brain feels slippery and darkgreen gingery like the massaged kale salad I sucked down for dinner. Balsamic vinegar.

I love life. I walked a laberynth with my head down and my intention in focus while traffic zoomed by on the highway. When I looked up a friend, whom I hadnt seen for about three weeks, was above and to the left. I took a side trip on my journey and reached over the stone barrier to give him a hug. He vanished and I resumed my walk.

Then I went to an art gallery where the birth project was on display. There were russian dolls and blood and nails and stars and ovens and waterfalls. The diversity of human experience is fascinating. We're all doing the same thing- breathing, eating, talking, sleeping, having sex, reproducing, walking, dying- but the bubbles in our heads become filled with such different stuff. And it seeps out of our eyes, fingers, and mouths in such a wide variety of colors. textures. sounds.

After the walk Hattie, Gwen and I held hands and danced around in a circle singing ring around the rosie. We went round and round and then fell down at the end just as the song calls for. We just laid there in the sun for awhile. Dead. Then we looked at the different shapes of oak leaves.


I'm going to learn the thriller dance next monday, tuesday, and wednesday at practices that will last 1-2 hours. then on friday i will don zombie paint and paper and we'll (about 30 of us) crash lunch at the cowpie cafe.
At 3:00 that afternoon a different crowd of zombies will launch an attack on Bank of America. This will also be happening all over the United States. We will all shut down our accounts because we don't want our money going to fund COAL and BOA is a major financer of COAL extraction, mountaintop removal, and power plants. We will tell them to stop doing that.

You should too! www.dirtymoney.org

I got my new eyes today.



they are brown wide and round ovals with delicate plastic straps. The distant leaves have arrived. So have the wrinkles of brows standing accross the room. My eyes can tell when those of others want to meet mine. also when they don't.










the clarity reverberates through my body. i can move in novel formations. my limbs answer a novel rhythm, the intricacies of the air are alive with flavor i had never before noticed. new muscles ache.

I woke today at odds with my body in an antagonistic mind. I have been trying to shake it all day. Walks with plants have helped. learning more about oxalic acid, more about the intruige of poke and the nightshades, gypsum weed. Green juice this morning helped- even though we learned that it contained high amounts of concentrated oxalic acid which is now abducting the precious calcium atoms in my body. I shall eat yogurt when I go home. with blueberries. And there is much more to look forward to: When I weed the jungle beside the greenhouse tonight, I shall capture alegria. I will take it home and dry it and sprout it. Or sprout it and dry it. mix it with honey and pumpkin seeds. We shall have alegria all the time.

A raw cacao sprout ball is melting in my mouth.

I am exhausted.

But excited for another day chock full of body shouts, mental backflips, a whirlwind of hugs, and garden love.

Warren Wilson is blissful this fall.

I've been getting up every morning to do an ashtanga practice with two new sisters. It raises the sun.

The coop's coming together. This might be the most comfortable living situation I've ever had. I'm rooming with friends for the first time in my life- two - amazing ones that i still am getting to know better.

I sang tonight. And today. And harvested peppers, tomatoes, squash, 4 enchanting varieties of eggplant beneath sparkling rain drops. THE DROUGHT HAS BROKEN for now. Rain's scheduled for the next several days- weeks? great floods are expected.

Oh Kalamazoo
How I adore you.

This town is alive with good energy and sweet sweet people. Aliisa's house- the Heron Homestead- is my new favorite pocket of life. The gahden is huge and gorgeous and there are soo many berries- blues and razzes- and there's forest, and a stream and swimmin hole in running distance- and lots of instruments and cfriends and mint tea on the inside.

So I'm here and soaking up every minute in - but I've also got to let my mind float down to south carolina and back to my experiences there before they drift away...


My last few days there were filled with a flurry of activity- my last few weeks actually. I tried to squeeze as much gardening as possible into the last week though- as if to make up for the weeks before- but also because I missed the glare of the early sun burning off of the metal plot markers and pipes scattered around the garden plots, I missed meeting new volunteers who wandered into our valley, and the deafening buzz of the crickets (?) in the early morning. I was delighted to find that the new blooms of the mexican sunflowers enraptured clouds of black swallowtails and honeybees- each flower attracting two to three insects- each flower apparently profuse with nectar.

Thursday was wonderful- i arrived at the garden greeted by the hum o ... oops lj deleted a bunch here.

Goddammmn Grand Haven you are a beautiful place, and hold as many enchanting surprises as any. Last night surpassed all expectations i ever had for my stay here. I laid on the beach surrounded by my favorite locals, stars fell in our hair, streaked accross our eyelids, and slid down our throats. The air was cool but the fire warmed us. And lake michigan smiled around us, tranquil, lapping quietly, a mother's broad embrace, a guardian's presence. Sexism and the universe were topics of conversation.

I missed that bounty of fresh water. But after growing accostomed to the mountains, the skyline looks naked. Of course, naked things are pretty too.

The night I arrived, after a solitary supper at sunset, with my belongings still in boxes, I cried. For the same reason the word "birthday" kept popping up as I worked on August 2nd, though I swore it meant nothing to me.

There was no ceremony.

I don't know if its because I'm a leo, or if its because I'm still a child- or if its simply the nature of nature. But I love celebrations- I love the sunrise and the sunset, dancing, eating cake on anniversies, lighting candles for memorials, singing songs of the past, doing cartwheels.

There was been plenty of ceremony in honor of my current departure. Special dinners, sweaty dances, the arrival of my parents, repiling items into boxes, sweet whispers and soft kisses. And, as tradition calls, I am awake at 3am still sorting, organizing and reorganizing, unable to simply pile my stuff into boxes and call it good. I actually take quite a bit of pleasure in it. I don't often become as intimate with the items that litter my living space as I do when I pack. Its relaxing- a pause in life. A chance to shake out the wrinkles, take note of the stains, and refold it for the next wear. The next chapter.


I will miss this room a lot- all of my housemates- wearing DEET to bed (the fleas came back)- the low ceiling-


but hey- in about 16 hours I'll be in Michigan.

Current Music: ssooofian

Let me make a quick record of the warm sunshine fuzzy feeling that's lining my insides before I zap myself back to the harsh reality of the world with a healthy dose of democracy now..

I have been pampered beyond belief in the last 24 hours.. Mind you, it doesn't take much to make me feel like a princess.
I woke at 7am on the first day of my twenty-first year thrilled to jump straight into the garden's compost pile with a big shovel- but my excitement dwindled as soon as I remembered the event that would have to preceed it. A giant flea bomb. In my bedroom. So I spent the first two hours of the day boxing my belongings, wrapping the herbs that had been swinging freely in the breeze, and throwing sheets and newspapers over anything that may be potentially damaged by the chemical explosian, all the while catching whiffs of pancakes being cooked below. I had forgotten to tell Brett and Diana that it was my birthday.
It was 9:30 by the time I got to the garden and the sun was beating its fury flame. I toiled until well after noon (as joyously as possible) and returned home exhausted.

I recieved my first happy birthday in phone message form aannd that's when the day started turning around & upside down. Jackie took me to the arboretum & we skipped around bonsai trees and butterfly bushes and quilt art and the world's largest okra and superfragilistico pizza and awy away awawy. & then we went to her cottage in the mountains and there was a banana cream pie and beer and white russians and hungarian fried apricot dumplings and friends in sailor costumes and the joker playing the banjo and batman dressed in a doilie and fireworks and a firefairie spurting bonfire on a hill and a smattering of stars and more friends nad ...

a hummingbird greeted me this morning as the sun rose over the hill. She told me she loved me and poured a warm rasberry syrup down my throat. She kissed me all over and flitted away and I've felt like million wild flowers ever since. We ate eggs and truffles and wandered around the city until it was time to go home.

& here I find a room with clean shining floors- the fam swept up the mountains of dusty diatomatious earth -that have been lining my walls for the past three weeks- for me & MOPPED! & i can sit here on my spinny computer chair without a single flea jumping on my legs. I am the luckiest girl ever.

Tonight I hosted Black Mountain Community Garden's first community potluck/worknight (a ripoff of Growing Matter Garden's) and it was SWEEET!!! I was a little nervous going into it because I didn't know if twenty five people would show or nobody and living alone this week has me in my head a little more than usual. But, I snapped out of it quickly with the onslaught of middle aged community gardeners and sticky children. Somewhere in the last couple years the word 'potluck' has become synonymous in my mind with attractive crusty young adults, lots of humus and corn chips, and sitting around on the ground. Even though I've gotten to know this community pretty well over the past four weeks, the folding chairs and coleslaw still caught me off guard. I don't know where I was expecting the collage students to come from from- I guess subconsciously by putting the word 'potluck' out there i assumed they would all come running- how could i forget that 'potluck' is also well known to wrinkly white church ladies, hotdog baked beans, and styrofoam cups? My first hundred potlucks were actually very similar to this.

Well this potluck fit neither of those descriptions- though it was intergenerational and it did end with chocolate caramel soy dream. Jean and Dan Franklin came, the owners of a bookstore downtown, John and Tony James- 50 yr old new agists who moved here from Miami 10 years ago and started their first garden this year, Nancy Williams in her purple flowered dress, the Wynard- Tamara, Gerald, 10 yr old Owen, and 5 year old Vivian- and the other college student volunteer- Lisle. So it was great- we ate and ate and shared stimulating only slightly awkward conversation and then did lots of WORK and Nancy showed me her plans for a sweet potato patch just beyond her buddah statue and Vivian watered the the corn from piggy back position on Lisle and the sun shot pink streaks over the mountains in the background.

I came home to an empty house again- as its happened every night I havn't crashed at a couch at Wilson this week (minus 3). The family's chillin at the beach in South Carolina and I'm hangin here with the kitties. and the fish. and some truffles Diana left me.. i really can't complain.

Current Music: mason jennings

True awoke again this morning in bad spirits. His cries and distressed footsteps began vibrating through the thin walls of this little house around seven.. and they've only just subsided. There has been a consistent pattern of similar scenarios since his third birthday, a week ago.

I've decided to take it slow this morning with some reading, doodling, and stretches. We have a group of 25 highschool kids coming to help out at the garden today, but they won't show up until around 11. From my attic chamber, yellow with morning light, I've witnessed the little drama unfold below.

The last word from Diana was 'True, I'm not afraid of you!' She repeated it several times, like an incantation. He immediately erupted into another explosion of sobs, but slowly stopped. It is quiet now, except for a few soft gurgles and babelings.

Are there not many instances of a fear of children in various human cultures? What an interesting dynamic, especially between mother and child. But natural I think. They often seem so foreign to us- to adults- smaller versions of us but with very little experience of our planet. We have no idea how they're interpreting our world- they've only just begun to be able to articulate it. And with such strange manerisms..