Smoke and fire tinged but still posting in San Diego

Well I guess I really needed to create content. I had yet to experience the full Southern California experience, which includes of course, wildfires. The price for living in the near perpetual sunshine and low humidity I normally value so much.

The north county of San Diego where I reside has been ravaged by these fires. My town was a little less scathed, except by the smoke and ash, being near the ocean and in a pocket that the flames didn't reach, but a mere few miles away their were active flames and too many and vast to be controlled. A strange claustrophobic feeling, needing to stay indoors in a place where you spend so much time outdoors, year round, due to the terrible air quality.

A good friend living a few miles inland was evacuated in the middle of the night and had to flee to Los Angeles to a friend's home.

I kept wondering about all the animals, domestic and wild, that were affected.

It was an unfortunate week for my daughter to pick to visit from New York. We had one good day on Sunday, weather in the 80s, playing on the beach, before the winds spread the fires Sunday night. It was her birthday a couple days later and the air was unbreathable here, so we drove up to Laguna Beach where it was still clear. On the drive back the hills were on fire south of San Clemente.

Mother Nature is terrible and beautiful in her power, and it's so easy to forget the very air we breathe is by her grace alone, she can take it away with a deep exhalation and a shrug.

San Diego in Winter

Celebrate Yourself - Whitman - select lines

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to
you,
And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,





Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with
linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by,
after all.)

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten
million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer for my
sake!

Far-swooping elbow'd earth - rich apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes.
Prodigal, you have given me love - therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable passionate love.

You sea! I resign myself to you also - I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me,
We must have a turn together, I undress, hurry me out of sight of
the land,
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.

What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.
This minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
There is no better than it and now.
What behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such
wonder,
The wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an
infidel.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!
Whoever degrades another degrades me,
And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
touch'd from,
Through me forbidden voices,
Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,
Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.
I do not press my fingers across my mouth,
I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and
heart,

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me
is a miracle.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am
touch'd from,

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my
faintest wish,
Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the
friendship I take again.

They (animals) do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their
possession.
I wonder where they get those tokens,
Did I pass that way huge times ago and negligently drop them?
Myself moving forward then and now and forever,
Gathering and showing more always and with velocity,
Infinite and omnigenous, and the like of these among them,
Not too exclusive toward the reachers of my remembrancers,
Picking out here one that I love, and now go with him on brotherly
terms.
A gigantic beauty of a stallion, fresh and responsive to my
caresses,
Head high in the forehead, wide between the ears,
Limbs glossy and supple, tail dusting the ground,
Eyes full of sparkling wickedness, ears finely cut, flexibly moving.
His nostrils dilate as my heels embrace him,
His well-built limbs tremble with pleasure as we race around and
return.
I but use you a minute, then I resign you, stallion,
Why do I need your paces when I myself out-gallop them?
Even as I stand or sit passing faster than you.

Bisexual's Parents Half-Understand

Friends are your sturdy life raft on rough waters

And I have definitely been sailing some rough waters this past year, I had to hold on sometimes to keep from capsizing, but with the support of some wonderful women, I am more than ok. Bless you beautiful, wonderful friends everywhere, I love you!

Doing and Changing

Well, I've been dormant on content creation for a few weeks -- a blogging no no. But one does need to occasionally go out and create some content, otherwise known as living, periodically.

I had tivod a show called CBS sunday morning and the moderator interviewed several so called remarkable 80 plus year olds. The one who struck me most was Norman Lear. He still had a lot of the fire and purposefulness in him that often seems absent in the older. The interviewer asked him his secret for staying so engaged. He replied, ''well I take every day as thought it were a production - so I would say, write - but then to write, you need to do. Just do.''

I kept hearing that in my mind, ''do.'' Live.

I can spend (waste) considerable time on activities that may be momentarily distracting and pleasurable, but are of little consequence. Then today, in lovely piece of synchronicity, I came across a book in a used bookstore here in town on ''soft addictions'', such web surfing, tv, gossip, overgrooming, shopping, etc, and what those are really standing in for ( a need to be seen, heard, loved, touched, have community, primal human needs that so often go begging in our culture).

Nice. Just the cosmic smack on the rear I needed at this time, when I was considering cutting off my directv.

My ears are always pricked up for older people who can show me this aging thing can be done in some kind of way that is semi palatable.

I don't want to be one of the ridiculous women here in overly juvenile clothing, puffed up lips and looking so clearly like someone who can't accept the obvious (I know I know -- I probably DO like that sometimes now and then!).

I heard Julia Roberts once say something so apt when she was asked about her very young costars Julia Stiles et al in one of her movies, how that made her feel as the ''older woman'' in the cast. "You can't outkitten a kitten.'' She replied bemusedly. I loved that.


There's so much to let go of as we get older, a series of dropping offs, letting gos, and transformations, that all began at the beginning. It feels so solid and permanent in young adulthood, then rapidly rapidly after 40, it changes, the sense of being in a rapidly running river.





A good time to let the size of one's ego diminish while the expanse of one's consciousness expands.