The other day I was thinking about my childhood. (The older I get the more I enjoy this.) I was a hider.  I liked to be by myself, thinking my own private thoughts and dreaming my own private dreams. Inside my head I was not hampered by the outward reality of a gawky too-tall girl who thought she was smarter than most of the other kids but not smart enough to keep this to herself.

I had many hiding places. One of my favorites was a large grey rock that was hidden from the house and prying adult eyes by the blackberry vines in the back yard. I made a tunnel through the vines, a secret thorny tunnel impassable by adults, which led to the back of the rock.  The rock stood higher than my head and the back was wide and smooth and more massive than my father. It had a large shelf halfway up just long and wide enough for me to lie full length upon. Here I was completely hidden by blackberry vines, surrounded by thrumming bees, protected by thorns.
 
I pressed my stomach down on the cool surface, and flung my arms above my head. I spread my fingers and pushed my hands down, flat and hard, to feel the tickling of tiny grit on my palms. I pushed my nose down, I squashed it flat, and sniffed deep of that dusty, rocky smell. The blackberry vines gently brushed the backs of my bare sunburnt legs. 

I was hidden, safe. I was silent. I laid my ear against the face of the rock shelf, sealing out all outside noise. I listened to the rock's voice. It sang like the hollow boom of a large drum beat very softly. It hissed and burbled as it breathed. I was soothed to find a rhythm so like mine.

I forget where I’m going sometimes because I’ve been in such a hurry all my life I’ve never  been able to arrive anywhere. I forget the real meaning of life because it has rushed by in a blur – oh horsefeathers, the meaning isn’t rushing by, I am.  If I wasn’t rushing, would I know the meaning of life?  I remember writing on the beach and while my fingers were busy rushing, my eyes saw a seagull flying high above with a clam in its mouth. The  seagull dropped the clam on the rocks below, squawking its shrill triumph to the crows, who were playing in the shallows, ruffling water through their feathers and dancing in the cold winter air. I forget where I was going with this, but I think I saw a piece of meaning – death for the clam, victory for the gull, exhilaration for the crows. If I hadn’t slowed down to watch those birds (and let’s not forget the clam), their world of meaning would have passed me by too, never to be remembered.

Here's a strangle little piece I wrote as a warm up exercise using the phrase "I stand" as my first two words. Who knows where these things come from? I have no idea what to do with this; I hope it will fulfill the function of compost and somehow, somewhere, fertilize something.

I stand on a cliff overlooking the sea, foaming green around hidden rocks. My feet are bare and I feel the prickly summer grass, dry and yellow, tickling my toes. Nevertheless I am not safe. I feel the presence of a dark dark bogeyman creeping up behind me to push me off the cliff. He is wearing a black ski mask and has an icepick in place of a heart. He is like a crazed but effective CIA man, and his goal is to rid the world of me, even though he doesn't know, or care, why. He will laugh when he sends me tumbling into the green abyss below, and he hopes that the sharks that frequent this coastline will eat my flesh and even crush my bones into dust.

Well, I'll show him because he doesn't know that I am Gumby Woman. I have elastic limbs and prehensile sticky toes, and when he at last reaches me and shoves — thwack his fist into my back — I fall, yes, but my toes anchor to the cliff and my legs stretch, stretch, stretch, Gumby Woman at her rubbery best. I stretch all the way down to the rocky beach below and pick up a jagged rock, and I spring — boing! — back to the cliff top and the CIA bogeyman, who has taken off his ski mask, and has his mouth hanging wide open in shock. I smash the rock right into his gaping mouth and knock out all his teeth. Hah! the CIA is no match for Gumby Woman.

I don’t know who the hell makes all the rules, but someone is to blame. I don’t know the meaning of life, all of us are here for something but whether it’s to pick cherries or save the whales, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except the love we have and the love we bring and the love we show – at least that’s the metaphysical brand I buy, but what if I’m out to lunch and my brand is wrong? I don’t know the truth and sometimes I can’t catch all the slimy lies. I don’t know if it’s better to be a pacifist for every season, or if there are some people so far beyond the bounds of love that they are irredeemable and should be treated like rabid dogs. What do you do with an Adolf Hitler or Ted Bundy or Pol Pot or Gary Ridgeway or on and on and on and on through the catalogue of evil doers? Are they too dangerous to live, or should they be studied like plague germs, under a psychoanalytic microscope? These questions bother me, a liberal pacifist who should know what I believe and what is right, but right now I am a liberal pacifist who just doesn’t know.

My mother bought me a burial plot for my 50th birthday, right next to the one she bought for herself. My mother will be buried in the Camellia Garden of Floral Hills Cemetery, and before she lost her mind she liked to visit it and admire the tiny square of grass where her body would lie, thinking about me on one side and my infant son on the other. My mother didn’t believe in cremation, and as for a green burial, she’d never heard of it. She picked out a pink casket and a marble gravestone for herself, simultaneously appalling and ridiculous.  My mother makes me so angry sometimes, but then I see her small shiny scalp all pink under her thinning hair, and her trembling hands laid upon my own, and I watch her searching desperately for words of love, trying to snatch them out of the Alzheimer fog, and all my anger drains away and turns to shame. I hope that Alzheimer’s has allowed her to forget all the mean words I ever said or thought about her, and that she does not realize that my dead body will never lie in a concrete vault in Floral Hills Cemetery. Alzheimer’s, a strange kind of grace for her, and a hiding place for me.

I smell a rat, a long lean rat with a rubbery tail, lurking in the corner of the woodpile in the garage. I smell the rat but I don’t see him, he’s well-hidden so smelling is the only way of knowing he’s there. I smell, but not nearly as well as my beagle, who can smell the fleas on the rat, and even what those fleas had for dinner (well, blood) and maybe even if the fleas are angry, sad, or jubilant. I smell that rat and it reminds me that I will die someday because the most powerful scent I ever smelled was a corpse of a rat who got into our house somehow and died in the basement during a hot summer the year I was 14.

I’m going “long in the tooth,” which is a metaphor for aging, because your gums recede as you get older and your teeth seem to grow deeper into your head and reveal portions of themselves formerly hidden. Now that I’m long in the tooth I can reveal the truth – I hate dentists. I hate being constrained in the dentist’s chair, strapped in by tubes running into your mouth with the dentist looming over you. I hate the uncomfortable position they make you assume –  head too far back, poor leverage making escape difficult – there’s no way you can get out of this unless you are willing to make a huge scene and reveal yourself to be a coward.  When I am in the dentist chair I close my eyes and run a beautiful scenario through my mind. I see myself ripping the tubes out of my mouth, kicking the dentist in the groin, and sweeping all the implements onto the floor. Then I leap out of the chair and scream “F&*(* You” except my lips are numb so it comes out “Fuboo” while saliva dribbles down my chin. But they know what I mean, and then I run from the room and sweep past the receptionist and all the other poor souls trapped in the waiting room. And I never ever go back to the dentist again. I’m a grown-up now. They can’t make me.

They say green is the color of jealousy, but I think jealousy is a sickly yellow, like diseased urine. Green is the color of American money, but money isn’t what I think of when I think of green. Green is the thousand different layers on the earth – fir needles and maple leaves and dark cedar branches and soft pale lilac leaves. Green is the fire at the heart of an emerald. When I’m green I am healthy and alive. When I’m green I dance around a group of standing stones, and the sap of a thousand lifetimes courses through my veins. I would paint green spirals on my skin and hope for love in my next infinite lifetime. I wear a green turtleneck and I am powerful beyond time, standing rooted to this earth, my green living home.

The Summer Solstice, also known as Midsummer or Litha, marks the longest day and the shortest night of the year. Since ancient times, people have gathered to celebrate the summer and honor the Sun. The days are warm, the flowers are blooming, and light reigns. Summer Solstice has also long been associated with fairies, those strange wee folk who play tricks and give gifts, according to their moods. (Think of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.) Therefore a good way to celebrate the Summer Solstice is to make a fairy house. Construct a tiny house out of anything you want — paper, twigs, leaves, cardboard, even plastic. Decorate it, furnish it, and hang it in a tree or hide it in a bush in your yard. Put an offering of tiny cookies or seeds in the house. See if the fairies gather. If they do, will you let me know?

I go to Cornwall in England and sit on a rugged crag overlooking the wild sea, and I think I hear the mermaids calling me. I go to Cornwall to walk on Bodmin Moor, an even wilder place where ancient magic still lies thick, floating in the air like pixie dust. I stand in the shadow of the Cheese Wring and I touch the Men-an-Tol for good luck and long life. I poke in the gorse bushes and find the jawbone of a long-dead sheep, gleaming yellowy-white against the olive drab thorns of gorse. The sheep doesn't need it anymore so I take it with me when I go home to America. I go through customs with the sheep's jawbone wrapped securely in my middle-aged underwear, because perhaps it is illegal to transport animal bones and I don't want some officious customs agent taking it away from me. I go home to my studio where I clean and scrape and polish the jawbone until it is purely white, no yellow left, and then I paint it with deep blue spirals and make it into an object of holy mystery. I go to my altar and give the jawbone a place of honor between a rock shaped like a breast complete with nipple, and a hawk's feather I found in my herb garden. I go there to meditate when I feel that life is just too much to understand, and the now-holy jawbone comforts me with its message of art after death.