A horizontal ray of sunlight opens my eyes again

To the floating second level of a palatial brick loft now flooded with pink.

Oil-painted clouds glow through six arched windows 

I walk naked through my closet, slip on navy silk robe, and float down the stairs to grind beans for our morning ritual

It is a long, luxurious stroll to the kitchen. 

Everything is perfect. Ready to be seen.

This old WW2 building is dusty. Possibly asbestos, we're told. 

We have floor cleaning robots and air filters for that.

The pipes are corroded and leaky.

We have an 8 step osmosis water purification machine for that.

Our dog has been walked. We have a guy for that.

In the quickly slanting light, my bearded husband is playing the cello naked

Our next door neighbor is an obsessive chef who stops by periodically to spoon feed me mouthfuls of northern lights. 

Tiny universes balanced on fork tines.

Everything is perfect.

I can't write.

I've "borrowed" my father's old records

We had the same taste in music

Now I can spend an afternoon with you thirty five years later

My mom tells me she wants me to return your records when I'm "done with them." 

Despite the fact she doesn't listen to music anymore. 

I place one on the turntable

I imagine each crackle a flake of your skin

You took good care of your records, Dad.

I hope that  maybe you worshipped music a little more than god.

Were you the last living soul to listen to these? 

Did you hear the small scratch in Tambourine Man? 

I try to hear which songs had the deepest grooves so I can guess your favorites. 

I want a song to help me remember where I came from.

...

I am not allowed to complain. Everything is perfect, after all. 

Almost once a week, in a cloud of cartoon dust, dozens of strangers pack up our every possession and move us out 

Equipment and lighting and strangers and sets and furniture and milk crates and bodies and costumes and props and celebrities and craft services and egos move in

So they can tell a new story

Sometimes they paint the walls and then paint them back again

Then when they are done and everyone is gone, they ask me if it is exactly the way it was before.

I say yes. 

Knowing nothing will ever be the same.

...

I don't want anyone to ask if I'm okay

As I drop my face into a nearby drinking fountain

And let it swallow my tears

I am alone. Sobbing in a mall.

My husband has stormed off to buy himself a Burberry wallet 

Nothing is good enough for me.

He can't stand to look at me.

It's my birthday.

Less than a week later I am on a flight to Austin

Sometimes we think that all we need is space

Even knowing that 99% of everything is just that.

What I really need is this backyard folk music 

What I need is to dance myself into existence

What I need is this sincere hug from a stranger 

To hold me together

I need to be cradled in the friendship of someone 

Who knows what it's like to have a little brother disappear

3 months after mine had slowly become a casualty of his own brain

The weeklong Search & Rescue, futile.

Dead in the water.

What I need is to know that some people make art 

Just to share it

What I need is this heavy summer breeze

I need fireflies.

I need to sunbathe on the banks of Barton Springs with a flock of poets and one communal notebook. 

I need to write a poem about something disgusting.

I describe the visceral trainwreck of a toothless old man on the subway 

devouring every dreg of a cup of yogurt 

without a spoon. 

I need laughter like music.

Back in Los Angeles, my husband forgets to pick me up from the airport.

He's not home when my car arrives.

That night, I am startled awake by someone lighting fireworks in the parking lot at 2am

And again at 3am

At 6am a crew of 60 barrel up the freight elevator

And begin a careful extraction of everything that is ours.

I don't have a chance to make the bed before they are dismantling it

I can't breathe.

I collect what is left of my bedroom and stumble past a famous person to my friend Cat's convertible. 

I can feel the storm gathering 

A thin metal taste as molten metal cools quickly in my chest cavity. 

The ball bearing lodged in the throat

The lead buddha perched casually on my sternum

Skin a wire brush.

Panic, an emotional eternity.

I land safely in the arms of friends

They spoon me in the dark while we count things around the room

Breathe, breathe.

I get a Xanax prescription.

They get me out of bed squinting into that same hopeful sunlight

And hold me weakly in their generous smiles

Eventually I re-materialize. Suddenly I am living in a fishtank in the sky I call Heaven

A time-warping bachelorette pad built entirely of wood, math, glass, and heartbreak. A midcentury modern monument with a plaque and a built-in couch and a panoramic view and a glass bedroom and everything.

The road to the house is a twisting single lane tributary through a verdant neighborhood of post and beam houses

Red brick stairs lead down through a mature zen garden of rosemary, fruit trees, flowers and hanging vines overtaking south african beer urns and broken red clay pots. 

Garden beds are separated by wood and stone slats and filled with river rock gravel, sorted by color and size, 

forming geometric shapes whose outlines echo the house's eaves and afternoon shadows.

Succulents and eucalyptus trees materialize uncoaxed from the sea-scented air.

A landlocked ocean front property.

On one side, a floor to ceiling glass door is the portal to a masonry patio with an immersive canyon view of the Downtown skyline to the Griffith Observatory and, 

Once in a Clear Day, a slick metallic strip of sea 

The freeway noise is breezed away. Ravens caw from the eddies. Coyotes yalp their war cries to Dodger Stadium as they descend upon the neighborhood housecats.

As you walk the redwood hallway, you are struck by the most absurd thing. That same ocean breeze, delivered express from the Pacific to my naked wet body emerging from the shower. 

I hosted activist meetings, a feminist book club, celebrity photo shoots, television productions, BBQs, cocktail events, and countless one night stands.

I called it my Redwood Spaceship. My wooden hug, my sanity, my all-natural Xanax.

I took LSD with a be-dimpled delight of a man, tall, handsome, virile, and knew it to his bones, gave me a Soundgasm inside the bedroom now dubbed Brainforest One, when we both witnessed the same auditory hallucination:

It was the sound of metallic Tetris blocks falling rhythmically into their logical geometric positions, echoed by a transcendent clicking of his human tongue and the subsequent mathematical vibration of my libido.

We discovered god in the form of a Redtail Hawk named Gary who lived in the towering eucalyptus with his wife Marsha. 

And sometimes if I jumped in a cold rushing river

Or noticed the fractals in the clouds

Or dared write a petty thought into existence

Or made the first move

Or did not shrink from fear

Or snubbed meaning and embraced absurdity

Or counted myself among the stars or the pebbles of sand

Or surrendered to the relief of not knowing 

I would feel okay for a moment

I string those moments together like pearls

one after another after another after another

following my desires like beacons,

facing my fears like lovers in the darkness

I smoked weed with my best friend in a flamingo sanctuary in Vegas on a warm beer-scented evening.

I wanted to visit the downy rose dreamlands where they tucked their heads

I drank beer on the rim of Horseshoe Bend with three beautiful souls, bare feet dangling over the towering depth as the color drained from the landscape

I escaped on a 2 week coastal camping trip with my sister, brother, and nephew, ending up at a music festival in the woods that felt like home.

We mountain biked through swamps teeming with chirping marsupials

We sprinted down avalanching sand dunes.

We camped on pebbled banks.

We skinny dipped in a river until a tourist speedboat zipped by, we smiled and waved, safe inside our birthday suits.

We howled at the moon.

One day, I sat with friends on a hay bale beneath a canopy of redwoods 

listening to an ugly man with a beautiful voice and a woeful accordion sing, 

"Everything you know, melts away like snow. 

Everyone you love, grass will grow above. 

Big black starry night, makes my day look bright.

Never comes the day, keeps the night away

New green grass will grow, folks will come and go

Everything you know, melts away like snow." 

I sent a text, saying "I couldn't be happier."

In that same minute, I received another text: 

A close friend Zach had died quite suddenly from a rare cancer - 

a diamond of death.

Bliss and heartbreak in a single moment.

Open arms and warm, wet shoulders.

How would Zach want me to react?

He would say, "Finish your beer and enjoy this life."

So I did.

When I got home I was lonely again. 

I went on a date with a real life Reality Show Pirate

The kind who saves whales from whalers

We awoke to another beautiful morning in my Redwood Spaceship

Sipping coffee on the patio, absorbing the view, listening to the hawks cheer. Everything is perfect.

A flurry of texts.

A close friend Aaron had commited suicide on the beach

With his father's shotgun

I cried into the pirate's tattoos, and never saw him again.

Two weeks later, my best friend, an effulgent Canadian, came to town.

He stayed for a week, held me up, we took Los Angeles by the ears.

Then four more long distance friends converged on my oasis and we barbequed and foraged mushrooms and danced and forgot to think

I could not have been happier to see them.  

Then, another text. A cousin in Canada had accidentally overdosed and had been found alone in his Vancouver apartment.

...

When I was ready, I returned to the loft to collect my my old dead life. 

My dad's Dylan record and my wedding dress had at some point disappeared into the chaos

Or had been absorbed by an inflated ego.

Or never really existed in the first place.

But the past seems dusty, obsolete.

A steamer trunk of palm pilots, laserdiscs, and fax machines. 

I'll travel light from now on.

"YOO-GEHN/ n (Japanese): An awareness of the universe that triggers emotional responses too deep and powerful for words."

       There is no sunrise today. The sky is a dense canopy, dimly backlit. I am on auto-pilot after another sleepless night as I begin my now almost daily 5 mile run down the beach. The ocean’s orderly chaos - Fibonacci clockwork waves and glassy infinities - have been calling, demanding my reverence. I start by counting steps to stave off my escalating anxiety, always just below the surface but as predictable as the sunrise.

    I’m still finding my stride but each impact of rubber on wet sand only serves to rattle loose snapshots of last night’s insomniac fever dream. In it, my youngest brother Nik had died and grown into a bonsai tree. I’d open my eyes and realized that the last time I’d recognized him had been almost a year ago, after his first brain surgery. Beneath his half-shaved hair, swollen forehead and slumping eyebrow, there was a flicker of Nik in his eyes when he sat up, woozy and smiling, unknowingly scrambling his words and said, “Everything is puppy again.”

      The succulents clustering their ways down the hillside lazily gather spheres of dew, evaporating diamonds refracting tiny, inverted seascapes. I had been spending a lot of time here since getting the bad news. After tossing religion, I became obsessed with reality and began educating myself with a bit of light reading on the beach. Scratch that, if light could not escape from it, I was head-first in it. The existentialists, the absurdists, the ecstatic physicists, the transcendent cosmologists, and the magical realists, Nietzsche, Kafka, Kant, Camus, Spinoza, Jung, de Sade, Dawkins, Hitchens, Feynman, Einstein, Sagan and Quantum Physics for Dummies. Try searching for meaning at the quantum level - it's fun! The deeper you go, the more impossible the possibilities.

    I continue counting steps, but my brain won’t shut up. It’s on a rumination spiral, bargaining with reality all the way down.

Anxiety: Soon he will be nothing but “My Brother Who Died.” His entire identity reduced to his (glaring, irrefutable) absence. I shake off this thought like it’s water in my ear.

Inner Mindfulness Coach: 81, 82, 83…

Rational Brain: According to the laws of thermodynamics, energy cannot be destroyed. But he will cease to exist as he is.

Inner Mindfulness Coach: Shh!! 89, 90, 91…

Anxiety: You’re not helping. He can’t be gone.

Inner Mindfulness Coach (interrupting): Attachments are the root of all suffering. The past is gone. The future is an illusion.

Feet: Slap, slap, slap…

    Blinded by the reflective surfaces of eight sweaty thighs, I overtake some tourists precariously balanced atop rented beach cruisers. A driving beat commandeers my headphones and I am flying.

Rational Brain: Why does this speed feel so good? What am I running from?

Feet: Slap, slap, slap...

Anxiety: Death?

 I glance downward just in time to avoid stomping on a sun-dried squirrel carcass. I leap sideways erratically and directly into the path of an approaching lifeguard truck. The driver slams on his brakes and looks at me like I am a ghost. I laugh, turn red, point apologetically at my headphones, and continue. 
Feet: Slap, slap, slap…

Anxious Mind: HOLY #&$% YOU COULD HAVE DIED.

Rational Brain: You could almost die again tomorrow.

Feet: Slap, slap, slap…

Inner Mindfulness Coach: The beauty is in the brevity. Death is Oneness. Be here now.

    I am now sprinting. Sometimes I am sprinting on the outside, sometimes I am sprinting on the inside. When I am feeling this way, heart and head like a hummingbird, I recognize some vague existential yearning only worsened by distraction. A lurking reality. A truth without words. The sky behind the clouds.

  I am leaving my thoughts behind in a salty vapor of ocean air. I become nothing but the wind on my skin and my rhythmic impact with Earth.

Feet: Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap…

A dead jellyfish sits jewel-like on the sand, the sun fracturing within its flesh. Sand-pipers dash toward receding waves to harvest escaping alien diggers, then turn and flee the ever-encroaching tides like a flock of screeching toddlers.

    I sigh and slow. I remove my headphones and a rushing white chorus of mist fills the air. I collapse, cross-legged, on the sand to catch my breath. My eyes relax and lose focus while I gaze at the nebulous horizon. I breath deeply.

    Violent and abrupt, an enormous bell curve erupts into an intricate filigree and suddenly collapses, announcing its Name with a thunder so ancient that it makes me forget my own.

    Now. The sky fades to sea fades to sand fades to grey fades to sea fades to mist fades to me. The breeze feels like time moving without me. Now ego dissolves into the fog. Now a benevolent peppermint gust freezes time, and now billions of neutrinos are slicing through me, unfazed by my lack of neutral density. 

    For one sacred, untouchable moment, I have no border. I am elemental - my teeth are seashells, my blood the sea. Words and worlds are unborn again. I am matter. I am my dying brother, my unborn niece, and my twin. I am sea spray but for the invisible opposing forces holding my Self in balance like a ghost mother - somewhere between positive and negative, past and future, space and time, particles and waves, matter and energy, ego and bliss, sanity and neurosis, creativity and insecurity, beauty and bleakness, life and rot, memory and forgetting. I am sun, starstuff, air, fire, pelican and acorn. I am rushing through space, microscopic, indefinable, serving no apparent purpose, sometimes putting too much thought into the color of my socks. 

    My heart pounds as my breath tears free. Words return, uninvited. A synchronized chain of pelicans skim the glass heights, wings tipping ceremoniously through the salt-clouds, and I no longer fear death. I open my pocket notebook and write: 

        “'If matter is the ocean, I am but one liquid mound heaving up from the vastness. Life is our moment to be rise up and be astonished. To grow, claim our shape, be witness, fall, and dissipate. Ripple, splash, or tsunami, remembered or forgotten, we are all silently absorbed by the sand to start the cycle anew.

    'The waves will come. The wind will blow. Time goes on and let it come. Follow your curiosity, find and bear witness to beauty, even when it comes in the form of pain, for to feel great loss is to have truly loved. See that it is all beautiful. Pain, the impetus of art. Grief, the equal and opposite reaction of love. Explore your consciousness like your life depends on it. It does. Embrace entropy, our one true constant, it is elegant and straightforward and fair. The lonely evidence that unlike space, time moves in a single direction.'"