Feels like I’ve been away FOREVER.

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s certain blog suicide to talk about one’s posting or lack thereof, but dude. I’ve been conspicuously absent from my writing gigs, especially this one. Time to limber up the (two) fingers I use for typing, kwim? And get some grey matter out there splat on the page.

Summer has hit here in the chilly, damp, pacific Northwest. I should know, because I bought white jeans that don’t even cover my ankles. I know I’m the only person in the PNW who still wears sweaters and socks when it’s 70 degrees out (why aren’t I complaining about being “hot,” wearing tank tops and jumping into the bay like everyone else?), so it takes a lot of sun to convince me to bare my body, any part of it, to the elements.

Last week we drove north from Portland toward Bellingham and took the long way through some of the Columbia River Gorge and past Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier. Rainier, when seen driving south on I-5 past around Seattle, always appears magical to me, a floating mountain shrouded in white and a looming presence that must have figured prominently in ritual and presence years ago when people remembered their connection to the earth and the life upon it. I expected the east side of Rainier to have even more presence and meaning for me, but no. It was St. Helens that captivated me.

You could feel the earth humming at its feet.

I heard the mountain speak.

We crossed a small bridge over a river and I slammed on the brakes. “We’re stopping here,” I said. We got out in the cold wind of the altitude and found sand at the river’s edge, so we lay on sun-warmed sand next to the vibrating river. I felt alive. Warm. Filled.

Last night I drove to Vancouver and we biked down to Kits Beach to watch the fireworks amid thousands of people. The crush riding back was huge, like a slow tidal wave. I felt sucked into it, a part yet not a part of these people who all had homes to go to, cars to drive in. By the time we found space apart, away from the crowd, you still couldn’t hear the night-quiet that I love when biking alone after dark. There were too many of us escaping the crowds, using the bike-highways. I felt battered, alone, yet not-alone. I longed for a cool breeze, the sound of my single set of tires buzzing along the street, the exhilaration of riding in the dark when all the world is inside.

I think I’ll go for a ride tonight. It’s summer.

I’ve been BIZZY. RULLY RULLY BIZZY.

With cancer and stuff. Doctors who cut things and then cut things some more. With discovering that despite the seeming accuracy and convincing confidence of a surly fictitious television doctor, Vicodin is not the strongest painkiller money can buy or that people will let you have and still walk around all legal-like and stuff (though I am cautioned not to drive cars or operate heavy machinery). With finding out that FEET are the foundation of everything. It all comes from your feet. Start off on the right foot, my friend!

Ha.

I’ve been writing about all this over at my spiritual blog, but there are some things I can say here as well.

Pain hurts. Ow.

Friends are good. Who knew people would loan me wheelchairs, canes and crutches and bring me yummy soup, scrumptious organic out-of-season fruit and whole lasagnas? The friend thing can’t be underestimated.

I’m impatient. I know this is a Big Learning Moment and all, but jeez. Can’t it go quicker?

Short story:

Once there was a woman who had a thing on her foot. Side of the heel. The thing, let’s call it Spot, started looking different and the woman said to herself, “Huh. Looks like cancer!” But since the woman 1) had no health insurance and 2) had disgust for doctors who give you the runaround, she chose to let it go. Run, Spot, run! And Spot did. Spot grew and grew. A friend is forgiven for once saying, “This isn’t cancer (but you should get it looked at),” because the same friend later said “OMG! Cancer! Dude!” and of course the woman, having Free Will and all, always knew deep down inside what was up with Spot.

Eventually, and this is months of thinking a lot about Spot because gradually Spot grew and grew and took up way more than his share of room inside shoes and whatnot and one day refused to heal (heel?) any longer, the woman decided to Have Something Done About It. She went through the seven layers of acceptance for bad things that happen to you and envisioned possibilities like no longer having a foot and chemotherapy and all sorts of dire things. Finally she heard the word “melanoma” and read the pathology report, in which Things Did Not Look Good.

There was a lot of cutting out of a foot-piece the size of Kansas. Also some lymph nodes, just for fun.

Later, after the pain the woman has now partially forgotten ever happened, they took some of her own skin and stuck it to Kansas.

Things are getting better. Doctors have stopped using the word “amputation” and instead caution the woman about coveting three-inch high heels.

Pain prescriptions run out and it’s not a national emergency.

Things go on. Still breathing.

Oh, figuratively. Whatever.

So I brought my virus to my friends, who are cheerfully helping me either feed or quash the little buggers, I’m not sure which.

I have been in bed two thirds of the time I’ve been here. I am a great guest. Quiet, they say. Go ahead, invite me to your house and see.

~~

If you spend any time on Urban Dictionary or listening to anyone who a) has a sleeve tattoo or b) is under 30, you’d know that “sick” has now taken on new meaning. Tell that to the Brits who think it’s a synonym for throw-up. But no, sick now means awesome, which is a word that no one who a) has a sleeve tattoo or b) is under 30 would ever say. Because it’s been replaced. So pay no attention to the arbitrary age screening devices here, it’s nothing personal.

Words are sick.

~~

There’s something awesome — er, sick — about being comatose in a strange bed where people are plying you with strange substances. You give up ownership of your body, your outcome, and just flow with the go. Like turning a dream inside out.

Highly recommended, though maybe with less coughing and nose blowing. Also I would like my sense of smell back, please.

~~

There are still deals to be had at the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show. To you it might be a bunch of rocks but to me it’s pieces of the planet.

Sick.

The pendant said yes.

My questions tumbled out in a heap, and the pendent hung quivering, black cord taut. I calmed down and breathed and asked my questions slowly, one at a time.

I’ve been so tired. Tired and not caring and not sleeping. Not doing. Keeping the blinds closed, especially on sunny days where the slap stings — wasted sunlight? how dare I? — and I close my eyes and sink into the next hour and the next. Some days I eat, and some I don’t. Google calendar tells me when and where I must go, when it is absolutely necessary that I do.

I’m starting to avoid things, like Tai Chi. And people.

Someone who didn’t know me would point diagnostic fingers at me and hurl prescription meds in my direction, but I know myself. This isn’t that.

Last week I freaked out a little about the future and dependency and the next day 100,000 people just perished, just like that. The smoke of 100,000 hearts wisped up into the air while the dust of buildings and crushed bodies and  hopes of today, or tomorrow, or even the sun were blotted out in an eyeblink. And people texted money and wrote and got on airplanes and did something to keep from feeling the WTF and the OMG. And that day I knew that my day-before freakout was a premonition, a getting-ready, and I thought fine, well, you’re done now, you can get back to normal.

No.

I told my pendent-pendulum to get me the hell out of here. I’m done, finis, finito, kaput. Please.

Not that a pendulum that isn’t even a pendulum has any power like that.

Today I went to the beach. Sorry, not a sandy warm, sunny beach. My beach, one of them, is a tumble of lush volcanic flow, suspended in time where it once met the edge of the water. Rock, meet water. Water, meet rock. Hi. The sun was waning but still evident. I squinted at the sea birds rafting on the water’s surface, and closed my eyes and held my face to the light. Breathing. All the while, cells in my body are multiplying, changing, readying themselves for The Next Thing.

The next thing.

The woman lay on her back with eyes closed and mouth open, her body slight under the quilt. Her breaths came hard, ragged, with spaces in between. The sound of her labors filled the room.

We quietly arranged ourselves on chairs we had brought for the occasion, facing the woman in the bed. She kept on with her breathing.

One of us whispered. “We’re here to be with you on your journey.”

Hearts lifted in song, quietly, softly.

Out. In.

Above her body, the woman greeted us, smiling, welcoming. We sang.

Others gathered above the woman’s body. A boy she had played with as a child. Family, friends. All her selves through the years. They crowded in above her, waiting. We sang.

Out. In.

We watched for the fall and rise of her chest, our notes matching a dwindling cadence. The people waited.

“I’m glad you’re here, ” the woman said to me. “No one else here can hear me.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “This can be time. Look, they’re here.”

Out. In.

Our repertoire complete, we gathered our coats and chairs and left the now crowded room.

Out.

7.0. OMFG. I’ve been in a 5.5. I know that 6-point-something is pretty damaging. Every point-something is a factor of 10 in magnitude. So this 7.0, in a country where most people are painfully poor and (I imagine) live in the kind of rickety shack housing I’ve seen elsewhere in the Caribbean, is huge.

And it is. According to what little I have read (and I avoid TV news like the plague), 100,000 people could already have died. And the inevitable deaths from disease due to damaged water systems, lack of food and shelter, could raise the figure precipitously.

I am trying to figure out how I feel about this. What I feel.

In 2001, when we all saw surreal footage of airplanes flying into tall buildings that had become part of an iconic skyline, I felt something. That night I lay in bed and imagined helping herald 2000 confused souls into a warm light-filled embrace, and helping tens of thousands more through those first days of shock and outrage. In the days that followed, it became easy. All that shock and outrage got funneled into hating someone and something that someone else decided we should be hating anyway.

That’s how wars start.

But how do you hate an earthquake?

We can’t hate the earth, because it’s our home. It sustains us.

Less than two weeks ago I channeled information about people — many people — choosing to exit their earthly lives this year. In working with this kind of information, I try to remain a little distant and not feel the pain and grief associated with such an eventuality. When just one person dies, many grieve. I’ve protected myself from feeling that on a grand scale. My fear is that I’d be overwhelmed by the immensity of such pain on that large a scale. Many people transitioning? There are 7 billion or so on the planet now. A few thousand here or there doesn’t make much difference overall. Many people would have to be … many.

People.

100,000 beautiful, alive, loving people in Haiti died yesterday, ending lives that had love and pain and laughter and tears. And it wasn’t an ethereal Rapture, where they simply got lifted up into some alternate reality. No, a good many of these people likely died in pain. That’s twice as many people as live in the small city that is my home, and it’s pain that I am afraid to feel.

What is compassion?

I think about Haiti, just as I thought about the Christmas tsunami a few years ago. I hear a big ‘should’ in my head. I should be feeling this, because I can. It’s my job, my livelihood, to tap into a global consciousness, or into the energy body of a single person. To me, it’s all the same.

And yet, I don’t.

Last night I approached a woman, older than me, who I knew had been having some physical issues. I asked how she was. I could see how she was, could see where there were energy blockages. I asked her permission to touch her, and I briefly touched points on her shoulders and down her back. I asked about her feet because I could feel immense pain there. I wept, not from the pain but from the sense of it.

I can feel pain without feeling it. Strange, that.

And yet I don’t go to Haiti. This makes me smaller somehow, less human, I fear.

Last night I also wrote a column in which I cried about some of my fears. Fears of my own fragility. In the light of the new day I can see that this was, in some way, an expression of my response to Haiti. I know we all process everything that comes into our being — from near or far, it’s all the same — through our personal perception lenses. That’s not being selfish, it’s being human. We can’t help it. So I transferred the cries of tens of thousands of throats into one cry from a single throat, crying, “Who will help me when I have need?”

I could rationalize that just as children are better off when you let them make their own lives and their own mistakes, that I should keep my virtual hands off Haiti and let things transpire there as they will. I am not Atlas and I cannot hold the world on my shoulders. I have trouble some days with my own piece of the world.

At the risk of sounding trite, or incomplete, I can love. In the end, that’s all any of us can do. For some, love will be a $10 donation to the Red Cross. For others, it’s being airlifted along with dogs and rescue teams to pull people out from under buildings. For still others, it’s prayer. And for others, it’s a blink in the daily crush of living. Who am I to determine which facet of love has more merit?

We walked through a boatyard. Two signs: “Empty” and “Full,” with no other explanation, were posted on the side of the building. Instant art. We went around to the bayside after standing and studying the hundred-years old dog-drowning pool where Padden Creek meets the bay. No dogs now. We crossed the tracks and step-crunched mussel shells on the empty beach, singing improvised Irish drinking songs. I flipped the mitten-ends of my fingerless gloves over my fingertips against the cold coming off the water. An empty cruise ship stood in the bay.

Neighbors stoked the fire in the coffee house across the street when we came in bringing the cold of the bay with us. We watched the flames flare up and then die back down again while we talked in a sine wave of unremarkable connection.

Inhale, exhale.

I found myself drawn outside, though. Late-season blackberries still dotted the tangled vines marking the steep trail down to the beach. Beaches had to be walked. Driftwood and mollusk shells had to be examined. Photos of texture — some rocky, some pebbled, some wood-grained — had to be snapped. The ocean’s calm waves had to be gazed at. Forest trails had to be run through.

And I ran through the forest, marveling that every trail felt like it went downhill. I stood under tree canopies, with rain dripping gently over me through a leafy filter. I shuffled through ankle-deep drifts of maple leaves the size of dinner plates. I knelt reverently under the One Tree, its wide trunk belying its wisdom. I drank in the love of trees, of the forest.

Trees and forests like this don’t exist in Pennsylvania, where I was living at the time. After my ten days in the Pacific Northwest forest, I went back to PA and looked at the Blair Witch trees there. It wasn’t the same. My heart was with the tall mossy firs of the wet west.

Now I live a short walk from the forest. I ran the nearby trail the other day, taking in the heady scent of fallen leaves that reminds me of the smell of pumpkin carving, remembering. My forest runs are meditational. This one was filled with color — gold, deep crimson, and moldering deep wet green-black. An artist neighbor who makes colorful banners that decorate this part of the city with unexpected waving splashes of color made a banner in those colors exactly. It waves on a bamboo pole just opposite my livingroom window next to the wide tree across the street.

Matthew’s house is not far from another magical forest. We go there at night, when the walls become the world all around and the trees disappear into time. We sit under a big tree, melting into the rough bark, remembering when trees were our world, and feeling the slow sap heartbeat awaken within us. I hear whispers in that place, and the tall trees bend their branches down, inclining their regal heads, remembering.

Ahem.

This may or may not be true.

But in visiting my house, there are a few things you should know.

1. Anything that touches or may possibly touch my naked or sleeping body (or the naked or sleeping body of anyone whose body may at some point touch any portion of my own), including but not limited to sheets, blankets, pillows, duvets, towels, and clothing of any kind (unless obviously dirty and therefore unwearable), may not also touch the floor without a complete tour through the entire laundry cycle.

2. Toilet seat lids shall stay down lest some wayward item befall a watery death, having instantly been rendered forever untouchable.

3. Hands that touch any part of me shall ideally have been washed within at least the past hour.

4. Cabinet doors, drawers, etc must be kept closed, not left standing open unless in active use.

5. All horizontal surfaces must be kept free from clutter, debris, and should ideally be lickable. However, lickable horizontal surfaces must immediately be cleaned after having been licked, should that occasion occur.

6. “Clutter” shall be defined as “anything not belonging directly to me”.

7. Floors shall ideally be vacuumed daily, or at least be free from discernible crunchy pieces that may be felt when stepped upon. Portions of floors left unvacuumed because they are under furniture may be left undisturbed at my discretion. Anyone other than me wielding a vacuum must of course leave no floor surface undisturbed.

8. Uncontained liquids (including but not limited to water, overexuberant cleaning splashes, and bodily fluids) in the bathroom or kitchen shall not be tolerated, especially on the floor or other horizontal surfaces.

9. The act of dusting shall not occur or be discussed except at infrequent and sporadic intervals, prompted by a suddenly obvious need to have all surfaces free from accumulated dust, in which case the dust freeing process must be completed immediately.

10. Foods descending rapidly and accidentally, if in the amount of a single bite or less, and especially if consisting of chocolate or anything crunchy and salty, to the floor and residing there less than six (6) seconds may be consumed, especially if no one else is present, at which occurrence the time constraint may be extended at my sole discretion. If this act is performed by someone other than myself, I reserve the right to prepare a facial expression that could be described as “mild sneer” and also to utter the single syllable “ew.”

See? No big deal, right?

Every day, I see the same people walking by. Sunglassed mothers pushing jogging strollers. The old woman in the plaid shirt-coat who walks as if she’s recovering from a stroke. The Steve Martin lookalike who wears the same royal blue shirt and iPod earbuds every day. The runner who sprints upright down the middle of the street, first this way and then that way, stopping at the end of the block to check his time. The Tuesday night dancers who gather to West Coast Swing across the street in the dance space at the coffee house there. The Wednesday morning family who picnics under the wide maple tree across from my living room. The Friday-night students carrying pizza and beer home to their apartments. My-neighbor-the-artist walking the howling dog-next-door.

And all of them see me, I imagine. They glance over at my window. I sit, writing, inside. My blinds, like my eyes and heart, lay open to the world.

It hasn’t been easy. I have darker moments, moments of doubt and fear, that cause me to twist my blinds closed. I want no one to see me, to see my pain, to know the twisted ugliness that lives inside me in those moments. I cringe at the sunlight outside, knowing I am wasting its preciousness by remaining hidden indoors, and knowing too that its brightness would expose my flesh to the elements and strip me bare, leaving my bleached bones in a dusty heap on the sidewalk for people to politely and hastily step over.

I had a dark time recently. The blinds remained closed for two days, or three. Sunlight blared outside, evil tendrils daring to enter through the cracks. Cars came and went. Mocking footsteps echoed from across the street where happy shiny people played and worked and loved. My heart swam in blackness, my thoughts oozed self-doubt. At last I could hide no more. Something outside called. I slunk invisibly to my car, sure to feel safe in its steely black embrace, and drove off. Immediately the assault began — sunlight! people! open space! — and immediately knew why some people become afraid to leave their homes. I was vulnerable. My powers of invisibility wouldn’t work. I was no longer safe within walls and was instead part of the wide skies. My body flew apart in a million directions, one limb, one cell at a time. I screamed in pain and then wept.

As the tears dried I could feel my body reforming. My hands were still on the wheel. I glanced in the mirror and saw a different face. I pushed on the gas pedal, feeling with quiet resignation my acceptance of the world around me. The walls came down. I was open again. I breathed the world in.

I sit now, observing the life outside my door. Mike, the mailman, just left something in my mailbox. The firetruck from around the corner just went by on its way back to base. A string of Buddhist prayer flags flutters in the tree across the street. In a moment I’ll go out and feel the sun gently warm my body, feel the wind on my face. Feel alive.