This is a whispery post, because it’s a long ramble born of having been thinking lately about how sometimes life takes shape in the form of the dreams and visions you keep pushing out. You know, one of those times where you feel yourself changing and taking stock and evolving. There are things like my career. Which is great. And which I think about. But lately I’ve found my life thinking returning a lot to the concept of community.
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Growing up in a small lonely town in the desert, I had lots of time and lots of visions about my future. I wanted a life full of beautiful people and love and strong relationships and art and music and gorgeousness and thinking and writing and creating. In my mind there would always be an eclectic mix of types of people and lives and locations involved, there was always a bit of a gypsy thing. One day - now twelve years ago! - I packed some bags, hit the road in a car and set out to create this thing from scratch.
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In the last month or so, the result of that dreaming and that related gypsy piecemealing has really been on high visibility. Most recently I thought of it in a small occurrence that just struck me as something of a symbolically great accomplishment around creating the type of life I’ve always wanted.
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I do have lots of beautiful, brilliant, passionate and creative people in my life, of all stripes in all locations. People who I met in a spark of realization that there was something good there going on, and despite our roads and some of our gypsy ways, we have somehow (or, quite purposely!) become longterm partners in this crazy life journey. And the vision has expanded to get these diverse collections of wonderful people to overlap and weave together something of a larger community, across geographic space, time and different lifestyles and backgrounds.
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So the lady in the pic above, if you read this blog regularly, you know I love love. In the last month our gypsy selves have found ways to cross paths over a magical weekend in Austin, in a post rock show dressing room Lucinda Williams git lesson session in DC and, in that pic, causing some good times in LA last week, over margaritas.
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K is on a long tour with her band and taking in the country along the way. After LA she headed north, to play San Francisco’s Filmore on Stevie Nick’s birthday. I was there just the weekend before, bouncing between the city and the beauty of wine country and redwoods.
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After their show, K and her crew
drove up north, following the 101 and then a winding road into a small town and up a hill, into redwoods, up to a gated little house of two dear friends of mine.
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So Jackpot and Lady A are a married lez couple/my older sisters. We celebrated their marriage again when it briefly became legal pre Prop 8. I flew into SF, en route to the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver, and they said their vows in City Hall before we limo’d over to champagne and celebration, followed by all the legal battles and life that occurred afterward. We’ve collectively seen each other through all sorts of good times and bad.
Their house is one of my favorite most grounding, warm and centering places in the world to return to. We sit on their back porch, and all you can see are miles and miles of redwoods and hawks circling and we drink wine and tea and smoke cigs and play music and talk through all sorts of mornings and nights.
Over the years, this lez couple in a small town in California’s wine country, and these rocker friends of mine from New York, have had cause to cross paths enough to get know each other a bit. At a rock opera in New York, at a spontaneous honky tonk session in SF, in DC, various places along the way, slowly weaving together the strands of life that I love.
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And so, after their gig, this band showed up at my favorite house in the woods and crashed with my friends for the night and shared breakfast in the morning, before heading back on the road with their tour. Favorites of mine gathered on a favorite back porch, surrounded by redwoods. I had to fly to the east coast while all of this goodness took place, but some piece of me was floating over those redwoods and that good music some miles away.
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This is just a whispery sentimental post. But while busy and being gypsy and taking stock of my life and where it’s at and where it’s going and all the goodness and love that has been created along the way, well, this little story made me feel like maybe I had done a little bit right in creating the type of life that little girl in the desert, oh so many years ago, used to dream of. Gypsy tribe of beautiful people, going together through the good and bad times in life, creating art, making things better in this world, finding ways to always meet along the road, enjoying the small moments where we get to pause and sometimes take it all in.
