Eyes for poetry, dialated and weeping!

Perched on my bed, surrounded by the dolls and busts and trinkets that make up this sentimental shrine to my short life, I am finally here, nuzzling the most wonderful cat this world has ever known and basking in the vibrations of a magical and loving place that will always be 'home' to me! Sweet sweet Sacramento, you are an unknown cave of wonders to this world! Beneath the solemn hum of kingdoms rising and falling and, in your way, a place not entirely privy to the ritual of days and years that we like to count, I am once again cradled in the warm glow of your womb...the stalactites are still wet and dripping with golden love and the soft echo of voices rises to meet me, even when I haven't spoken first...

Home! Home home home... if you say it over and over, it loses its meaning, but you can still feel it...

In my town, there is a little bit of everything that is wonderful in the whole world. It is a fractal of all of the things that exist in the whole universe, and no matter where I go, I will find the same things, though they might seem different. One is not better than the other, but this one is mine, and I will love it rawer than I love any place else because of that.

I woke up in the exact coordinates on earth that my body has occupied a thousand times before, after being mercilessly smeared and smudged across the globe. Its an incredible sensation! My heart is a fist clutching to one stationary patch of space with a grateful, white-knuckled 'hallelujah!' There is something that goes missing when you live life at the speed of light, and though I knew it was growing elsewhere, I was famished. But now, I am a bouquet thick with with the blooming brilliance of all that was not there before!

Its been a while since I've taken notes on my life, primarily because I don't have a computer right now, and its hard to know where to start when Now and Then are two separate continents and the water between is full of untold secrets!

We toured Spain, Portugal and France for exactly one month, and now it is all but a dream. It wasn't a time in my life, but more so a whole separate life that I lived in a snow globe equilibrium of love and adventure. It has changed me forever, like everything else does, except it felt deeper and stronger. When I close my eyes and think of it, I find that the smallest details left the weightiest impressions on me, and its so exciting to know that I am, indeed, growing and evolving and am not doomed to stagnate and crust and wither into an emotional cripple that isn't pained and thrilled by all that is around me!!!

I'm still rather jet-lagged, so all I've been able to do is get out of bed every other hour to do practical things like laundry and neighborhood strolling, but my eyes are truly full of stars and it is impossible for me to have a conversation with anyone today because I'm so awe-stricken by the loveliness of life... I'm not afraid at all for the first time in so long, but so very happy to be sad! For times like these, there are no words, and so I have no doubt that my symbolic and vain pursuits to share it translate into a trite, self-indulgent exercise in futility...but I suppose I'm the kind of person that always says too much for fear of saying too little.

I have seen a thousand new things that I must accomplish in my lifetime. I have suffered from the usual debilitating self-hatred that sets in when I'm on tour, but also exulted in the belief that I have chosen the best life possible. I have fallen in and out of love one hundred times or more, with all sorts of things and all sorts of people! In fact, I have considered love very deeply this month and have learned a great deal just by listening to my heart.

For instance, I think that we (or maybe just me...I'm not sure) fall in love not with a person, but with moments and pieces of people that resonate with us or show us our mortality in the most beautiful light. When you find someone extraordinary, it is because there are so many moments like that to be had and it gives you the sense that you must have all of them to yourself and that life will be second-rate if you can't experience as much of that stuff as possible. I do not get nearly enough moments from my most precious source, mainly due to geography...but I see now that the reason I cannot let go of it is because there is still so many more to come that I cannot live without, or live knowing that I am missing them! And my devoted obsession with the person I have the most extraordinary moments with doesn't hinder my ability to love moments with other people, and love them very deeply in instances that sometimes seem to stop time...

Something important has changed in me forever. I feel like a tree that has just lost its first leaf. There it is on the ground, so meager and only one out of so many...but the beauty and horror of it is that I feel as though this is the beginning of me watching myself die, somehow. I always knew that I was going to die, but I wasn't dying yet, and now the clock with my name on it is making funny noises...it changed modes when I wasn't looking, and now my time is more precious and more severe and more slippery than ever before... something that was always a part of me--always there--is now right in front of my face, and it will be there for the rest of my days... For the first time, I don't need a mirror to see it! But it has changed the colors of my world like a planet orbiting a dying star, and everything is orange and pink and red, and I am feeling things more than ever...

I hope that I can find the inspiration to write about my tour in more explicit detail this week, but it is hard to do things justice with language. I'm just hoping to rest and think and and pretend that there is nothing to do. There is a cd I've been listening to on repeat by a fellow named Matt Eliott...I think its been making me especially emotional. When I woke up, I started listening to it on headphones in bed, and as I watched all the dust in the room sparkle and rise slowly in a beam of sunlight from the window, I imagined that each speck had a soul, and they were all going to heaven.