Moles

The outside world is far away though only feet outside these walls

Beaming and hot with the flashes of passing cars

Blowing trees, rising suns

Sweet and green with the smell of lawns baking in the afternoon

As running shoes clump softly by on stained pavement

A haze of smog drifts in from the buzzing freeway and the churning seaport downtown with its oil tankers and banana boats and cruise ships.

I am here in the dark

Brooding, clicking and pointing, scratching and scrabbling

In my box-shaped cube

An abstract concept to the glaring outside world

A mole in a dark burrow

Chewing on roots

Plotting and planning forays into the world

For choice nuts, juicy bugs, perhaps an apple core

Blinking black shiny eyes, passing time

Sending out furtive calls, grunts and squeaks

To the others

As we scurry and coil in these lonely dens

What will become of us at the end of this darkness?

Will we halt and freeze under the glare of all the relentless light and boundless space?

Will we be hypnotized mid-stride

Crushed like possums on the median?

We must pounce and spring with no hesitation,

run with determination,

alert with our wild tails waving

at the very moment the light hits our faces.

Being Wrong About All of This is Fine With Me Too

A couple of weeks ago it struck me how amazing Jack and I can be together sometimes (and by tradeoff, how aweful at other times)… preparing for some visitors, we had spent the whole weekend (him more than me) completely rearranging and cleaning and organizing our house, top to bottom. He emptied out the den and turned it into a lounge using mattresses where people could hang out, read a book, make out, sleep… no more officey cluttery mess. He dumped unwanted books, sorted random crap, and tossed loads and loads of old junk mail and other clutter. Mid-throes, he went upstairs and attacked the bedroom, rearranging the bed and making the entire room seem twice its former size. Suddenly sorting the laundry, putting away our clothes,and just hanging out got way easier. While he grunted and shoved and hoisted, I polished up the new den with fuzzy blankets, pillows, and fabric, vaccumed the whole house, and trucked clutter to proper cubby holes, trash cans, and recycling bins.  By the end of the weekend, we had a whole new house and all our things suddenly seemed much nicer — almost like we had new stuff too. Oddly, for the first time in months we both wanted to stay home rather than venture out to do wonderful things.

Then just today, I had a similar little wow-moment: we’ve been making all sorts of neat things in my new “sweatshop” (what used to be the spare bedroom) and preparing for Burning Man. Its starting to feel like every spare moment and thought is about the upcoming event/vacation, and we can see it stressing out and yet exciting everyone we know who is going. Wonderful things are happening to these people, almost as if the event has pressed some sort of creative “Go” button… folks who I know usually just go to work, party, and maybe go outside once in a while… now have a whole project they are working on that is keeping their minds chugging along like well-oiled machines at all times.

While doing some research to figure out where to find all our amazing Burner buddies at the event, it occurred to me, wow, what amazing thing this is, that so many many many of us shining, wonderful people, from all over the place, are all doing the same thing: spending an exceptional amount of time, energy, and money being terrifically creative and magical and gathering up and modifying and creating all sorts of things to bring hundreds and hundreds of miles out with us into this extreme desert landscape. All at the same time, we will all be experiencing this one-week Mad Max city in the desert, burning our trash, sunburning, and burning off anything we no longer want to spend our time on.

I’d be fine if every precious thing I pack is destroyed by the desert, up in smoke, vaporized, poof. All the fancy costumes, the elaborate camping gear, the checklists and sticky notes and precious things gathered in bins over months and months, the plastic bags from Walmart and Home Deport and Costco… used up, trashed, gone, in a landfill somewhere decomposing. Fine by me. I’d be fine if I even came back to an empty house like that Australian couple who gave away literally everything in their lives so that new things could come in. Totally OK by me.

Despite all this expenditure, I know that this is much more than just some lavish “taking up space” sort of thing. Its not like we’re preparing to just go get drunk on Lake Havasu, or ride ATVs on sand dunes with our cracks showing, or mindlessly cycle up and down a ski lift, or “get away from it all” and hide from the crowds down some long hard empty backcountry trail.This is a totally different kind of a vacation. Its going to take something out of all of us to make it happen. There will be personal sacrifices. There will be precious belongings lost or destroyed. There will be relationships tested and possibly broken. We will see everything we want to, and everything we don’t. Things will not work out. Things will also be miraculous. Every little thing will count.

All for a payoff. There will also be tremendous feats of engineering, artistic breakthroughs and accomplishments and inspirations that would never happen in any other setting, personal discoveries and journeys that could not be accomplished any other place on earth. I’ll be pedaling along on my own with nowhere in particular to go and I’ll find something someone created, a sculpture maybe, and I’ll be standing there in the middle of the Nevada desert, boiling under the desert sun, going, “Wow I never thought of that, now I have to go home and make ____.” Freakin’ awesome.

Forget about doing the same thing over again, its not going to happen. It might be impossible, in fact, for anything to be routine or predictable again… and yet, this is not about “tuning in and checking out,” or being some sort of blissed out love-drunk hippie, or about walking out on the normal parts of everyday life. This is about making all those everyday things richer and more unique, about making the mundane special again. And with all my Virgin Burner freshness, I’d like to think that its not going to happen ever again. I don’t want to be jaded, I like my naivetee.

But I know, nothing is what you think it is, and its never what you expect it to be either. Being wrong about all of this is fine with me too.