June 28, 2002

June Martinis...

Hey there.

It's your jet girl again - the one that's so hot she had to take off and still can't hear a goddamned thing from the control tower, so she's just about figured they all went home and the airspace is pretty much hers for the taking. She looks up...engages the throttle...

It's Friday. Not much has changed on this end. Well, that's not entirely true. Everything has, but it still feels the same. How DOES it do that?

We went to the bank yesterday, the guys and I. I'm not going to be closing an escrow this month. Sigh. But things are in motion - slogging toward the culmination of the next beginning. DT Suzuki and his beginner's mind was a shoe-in for the I-know-what's-gonna-happen-next sweepstakes; it's truly always beginning something, somewhere, isn't it? It's almost funny, is what it is...

How are you? I miss writing to you, but I figured you were ready for a break or something - it was just getting too darned surreal, with all the near misses and such, and I determined that - well, heck, I don't know what I determined, but I decided something that led to an end of the writing energy...

Can't remember what it was, and it's Friday, and I've had two martinis and some delicious something called a Golden Manhattan, designed to make truly professional mistakes in the rest of my evening's accounting, so I suppose the best dodge is another note to you. It's always worked in the past.

I saw Nick today at the martini party and it made me think of you. Not that I don't pretty regularly, but Nick always brings you to the frontal lobe area.

It's almost my birthday. I don't have much planned except for a run over the cascades in good ole Buck the Truck - you sat in him, and I'm stretching him out a bit to see if he'll be Playa worthy, for I'm headed to Burning Man this year with my camp of 50+ twenty-something indigo ravers...

You'd laugh for sure. I'm just having the time of my life, in the oddest, most unexpected way imaginable. No, THIS was *unimaginable*. Definitely outside the pale.

Buck and I are probably headed for a Wyoming run at the end of July. Haven't decided for sure, but I've friends who've loaned me a cabin in Casper, and I'm pondering a trip. It all depends.

I'm still playing music - just started arranging several tunes I've always wanted to do: "Deep Purple", "Stella by Starlight", "You Don't Know What Love Is". Not singing so much, though I never do much performing in the Summer. I'm a winter rain early evening blue note girl...I wonder where I'll be this winter? Still don't know. Possibly still here.

I'm still in Complexity school - getting ready to blaze new trails in the math arena. AND I'm really pushing along on the Chasing Spring Story. I met (shared this with you) a FUN and interesting Burning Man fellow named Dan Henklein who's a range ecologist - his specialty is vegetation change - and connecting with him has fed a LOT of ideas about how to move (or not move) a forest across a continent.

What I've really begun to tune into is the idea of a desert as a kind of climatic wildfire - nature's austerity program that enforces a rigid adherence to a central prime directive that revolves around the distribution of water, and plant forms as the means of storing water. It's a fire that travels slowly. It's a fire that's useful to prevent or divert when possible, for its cycle is long and relentless. It's a fire that burns water, not air, and it smoulders for centuries at a time...

Oh, there's so much. Too much to write here and now. I mostly just wanted to post another tale - a mini-one, because I'm too many martinis down for anything coherent - and share a "hello" with you, and a reminder that I'm still around, and send good thoughts your way now and again.

I do hope you're well. Be in touch if you'd like.

Pax,

Cynthia -- cabeal@efn.org http://www.skymind.org

"...What doesn't kill us only makes us stronger(Nietzche)/weirder(Barlow)/real(Beal)"

: :: : : : ::: : : : : :: :

-- Anonymous, June 29, 2002