I put my patchouli away years ago.  But then came Nag Champa, basically patchouli's little sister in incense form, and so, moving out of the little yellow house in Tennessee, the kid who helped move the shrine room dresser exclaimed, This smells like straight-up hippie, and I didn't mind, because what are you going to smell of?  Arrid XX?  Febreze?  Or are you going to become the anti-scent zealot patrolling the the dojo and the Dharma hall for shampoo infractions?

Anyway, that kid seemed sort of pleased to be hauling incense-wafty furniture with his more straight-laced brother, the one who looked suspiciously at home with his father, playing a pair of Schutzstaffel dudes in the parish play.  The hippie kid was like, I myself do not mind a whiff of the ganga, of a tedious, humid Southern evening, and you, my lady, appear to be a surprising fellow aficionado of skipping the 12-pack of Natty Light & the fake kilts, and thusly remaining sane in Sewanee, TN, population 2311, not counting the 40% of ghost houses owned by the nostalgic but nevertheless quite absent rich.

{He was wrong - the few times I've been stoned have made me feel like a tranquilized cat - alert mind, trapped in sluggish body.  I let his inference slide in the name of bonhomie.}

Oh, Sewanee!   I remember riding back from a Bela Fleck African-roots-of-the-banjo concert in Atlanta, in a van full of students driven by a very thoughtful football player, who politely rued the day he chose to take the scholarship and come up to this haunted plateau.  As we drove down University Avenue, half-dressed, booze-addled students lurched out of the shrubberies at us.  What the fuck?  A preppy-zombie army.  Calmly taking evasive measures, the student driver informed me that we were being mistaken us for the all-night  drunkmobile.

One weekend, grading student portfolios, I looked up to see a line of frat pledges walking toward's the studio's wall of windows, unzipping their pants.  A student had told me earlier about working by herself late at night, when a group of frat boys had come to piss collectively on the window behind which she was working.  So, crazy logic being what it is, I was pretty sure what they were up to.  My response was instantaneous.  With a running start from across the room, I sent a flying kick into the window, which boomed satisfyingly, scattering semi-de-pantsed idiots, but luckily not shattering.  I was livid when I called the police, who promptly did nothing.  Later, the highly-paid, affable Dean of Greek Nonsense, himself a former Sewanee frat boy, told me that he was "committed to helping the Greek community make better choices," and that was it.  No penalties, though at some later point he did call to offer me a pair of streaking offenders as live models for my drawing class.  Was I interested?  Not so much.  

The firefighters in thequasi-frat dorm next door to the art building took to harassing students on their way to class.  They had McCain signs in all their windows - to the point that it must have been quite dark in there, in addition to beer-stinky.  On the triumphant bright morning after Obama's election, biking in to work, I wheeled squelchily right through an enormous pile of barf left on the sidewalk by some despondent young Republican.  A harbinger, perhaps, of Republican ressentiment in the years and months to come 

Sewanee was the perfect catalyst for me to  come to terms with some of my own nonsense and denial.  In a more hospitable environment,  I could have used unexamined coping strategies to construct a story I could live in, but the mutual incomprehension I encountered there demanded something new.  I returned to a consistent, daily meditation practice.  A friend who was dying of cancer - the sensible, kind woman who handled dispatch for the campus physical plant - asked people who offered help to say the St. Francis Prayer.  So I prayed daily:

I started to realize that not feeling at home in Sewanee was only part of the story, at that there was a lot for me to learn there.  My job offered tools that could facilitate what I needed to do in the world.  I asked for & received research funding to return to the Himalayas.  I found my way.  I picked up the patchouli again, and life has gotten more beautiful with each passing day.

The tower stands at the edge of the lake is the I Ching's way of saying Yes, yes - there's the quality of uprightness, and also the quality of sinking.  Perhaps you've encountered these in the body?  Perhaps you've noticed, in these last few days of taking steroids while also attempting to remain sane?  

I flick the little apricot pill out of the child not-safe bottle, and notice its bitterness under my tongue.  Please help me, I think.  Hives on the soles of my feet and palms of my hands is no way to be.  The pill goes somewhere and the prayer goes with it.  The hives stick around.

Repeat, day and night.  Morning of the fourth day, wake up wired.  Something has to happen, now.  Rise sure in the dark, shower the hives, sink into meditation.    Morning of the fifth day, the Something is now huge.  It's towering inside my body like the outer hives have come inside, becoming a kind of rage-spine that doesn't want to hear about sinking, ever.  Breathe.  Rage swirling.  Still clean the stove, metal scraping metal, scraping the other irritants too.  Laugh with rage.  

On steroids, I am impossible, says my Buddhist friend.  My husband almost sent me home on a bus from Baltimore one time, because there was no dealing with me.  Another time, we had spaghetti for Christmas dinner.  Steroids are not for me​, she says.  

I think steroids can be for me.  The hives are gone, and on Saturday I experience a bout of whole-body stomp-dancing such as I haven't experienced since college.  Pure power, leaping discharge, the whole weight of being, being met.  Being, here.  Stomping, stomping, stomping for an hour means: no antidepressants for me, and even if I may have startled some children, absolutely no one was harmed.  Prison doors unlocking.  The tower's not for holding in - it's for seeing far.

​I am listening to Tsultrim Allione teach the Mandala of the Enlightened Feminine, walking the landscape of the five wrathful dancing dakinis.  Each of them carries her own tower: a staff of protection and grounding, an inner consort.  Walk in female form, carry your masculine side always, though not in such an obvious form.  The clarity of uprightness, the unobstructed channel, the pole that needs no stripping.  

Shiva trident
trident of the deep
chicken of the sea
nine-story tower holding birthright for whomsoever will dare to dance it

My student, Hayley, from Atlanta days, turned to art after falling from the top of a stripper's pole straight onto her head.  Whole body weight, young woman, full height, bad concussion.  She's the one who taught me about Skype - how to scry into the world for free.  She made beautiful paintings, and hopefully in the course of her art and her love, she found a way to carry her staff so that it never killed her again.  I heard she was doing well, after I left that money-sucking school of debts.

Atlanta at that time and probably still now was a hub for stripping, a misnomered mecca for Adult Entertainment.  The clubs boomed and busted, and new ones rose up.  You didn't have to go to them to know about them.  I knew through Hayley, healing her head, and I knew through Lisa Marie, who showed up at my house the night she finally did the obvious, going from money-at-the-pole to fucking someone for money.  It didn't sit well with her.  I know in the abstract that sex work is something people can do responsibly and consensually, but in practice, I think it can be really, really hard to pull off.  Some things' shadow is so vast, and you are so young, and so close to off your rocker anyway, and so few people seem to see your worth on any other terms than tits and ass, that you are going to fall off that tower, or be crushed under it, without the chance to see it's been your dakini staff all along.  That's what happened with Lisa Marie, or what was happening seventeen years ago.  I wish, that night, I'd known better what to say, and what to see in her.

I taught a night class in those years - beginning acrylic painting, to a friend's mother and her fellow real-estate agents.  They didn't love the class - so much mucking around trying to see the ordinary, when what they wanted was something pretty for over the couch.  Anyway, one night, they started telling me how, if you wanted to clinch a commercial real estate deal these days, you just had to take the client to a strip club.  
Really, I asked.  Isn't that weird?  
No, it's just like that.
That was their ordinary, and my wanting something pretty for over the couch.  

Then they started telling me about this one girl, she'd been a mortgage banker?  a member of the Junior League.  Her husband thought she was hot enough to try the Amateur Night at the Cheetah, and since (maybe) she was there all the time anyway with clients, and he was so turned on by this idea, she eventually said, Why not?  
The ladies' eyes gleamed.
She LOVED it!
She kept going back!
Then her colleagues saw her and they said, You have to choose!  You can't be a banker and a stripper.
So she got a boob job, and a Role in Striptease.
She divorced her husband and left the bank!
Made a billion dollars, got her boobs deflated so she could sleep on her belly again, 
and lived happily
ever 
after
And she had a chicken recipe in the Junior League Cookbook, and everything!

So.  The tower.  The lake.  Eating the tower in prednisone pills, and finding the staff through the soles of my feet.  Thumping out the contact of sky and earth and water and fire and space for myself as for all, dancing trapped and untapped through the variations of what we all must do.  

​Lisa Marie's crystal hangs from the curtain rod in my bedroom, and I think of her stories of walking around barefoot in southern California, eating sun-warmed avocados right off the ground.  Releasing the lazy mind of stripper's chicken and painters' triumph, I wish, May Lisa Marie and all beings find their way to safety.  May our uncanny voices sound into the most impenetrable layers of the world's wantings.  May we open, dance, and join, knowing inner consort, always here, everywhere.  

The Duchess was floating around again.  Up!  Across!  Beyond dusty drapes, or the slightest inclination to see them clean.  The Duchess enjoyed seeing her possessions unmoored.  Little yapping Meissen spaniel - poof!  Heavy walnut sideboard - poof!  The Duchess enjoyed leather-bound tomes dissolving their weight with hers.

She wore only dresses that allowed of slithering, and shoes that slipped off smoothly.  Nothing to chafe her scales or bind her tail.

Rahr.  Time for a moss-bath.  Float right out the dining room window, over the lawns, into grey soft morning.  If anyone saw, what they saw was a wraithing mist; if anyone smelled, what they smelled was leaf-mould and closet-musk.  But no one saw, and no one smelled.  The Duchess floated dragonly to the edge of the woods, glad as ever to see each century's growth.  Writhe the plane tree's scaly span, spreading crownier year by year.  Slink the redwood's scruffy trunk, and pillow the pockets of needles at each crux.  Tickle the ginkgo dropping stinky fruits.

The Duchess rolled and nibbled, slid her way squirrely back to ground, magnetized a deep patch of peatmoss.   Squeezed herself, water slicking her coat, sprinkling her whiskers.  Deep, deep - many years of tiny growth.  Rahr!  Moss-bath.  Pleasure duchessy dragon drip roll slither.  Belly, back, belly, back.  Belly.  Creaking out every creak.  Jeweled, sated, smoke curling gently.  Snout-smile.  Smiling.

​And what does such a beastie eat?  Not kibbles, not air, not crumpets.  How does she tend to herself, how is she tended, between the hollow way, and the empty house?  She sniffs out mushrooms - the fusty ones oranging flakily out of locust trunks; the spongy ones morelling under oak leaves, the puff-balls big as fat rabbits, tumescing from plainest plane of grass.

Mushrooms that would kill anyone else.  Great angel-white phalluses, black death's heads, tiny virulent umbrellas at the spicy end of the subterranean spectrum.  The Duchess ingests them delicately, sparing the roots, articulating her teeth one by one, dance of ivories above and into.  Snick, snick, snick.

Also, a terrier or a mini-schnauzer, now and then.  Poor things!  Too bound up in their leashes and blind territories to understand the vastness of these woods, or her appetites.  Furry treat for her, liberation into bliss-body for them.  Fair enough.  She wishes people would stop feeding their corgi-foo-foos teriyaki jerky.  

Many months without a small dog or a mountain-biker.  Living at the hinge of the world turning means less needing, more time to swim, slither, climb, nibble.  When change changes, it's clear who wishes to make a dragon's banquet, releasing fear and wanting into her great maw.  So much sweeter than decades of petty drinking, or the lingering intubations of the hospital.  These ones glimpse the Duchess, and they know, I am for  you, and you for me.  Proto-Bodhisattvas with an agreement that works out for everyone.  Dragons don't need merit, and weekending adventurers earn plenty, giving their flesh and bones to What Is.  

The Duchess, the Duchess.  She knows the neighborhood, all right.  As it is now, as it was when the glaciers retracted, as it will be when yucca and saguaro prickle forth.  She knows mushrooms and mosses, riders and walkers, foxes and newts, all the trees, and also the root-beings of the world.  Old Root-Breath, for example, and Lady She-Voice.  Those two are epic: interbeings whose bodies don't differentiate.  Bam!  That old stone mile-marker's a tooth, that storm-pattern coming from the North is an in-breath, and the river's spate-waters breathe out.  

Old Root-Breath and Lady She-Voice take turns, slide around each other, fuck in aeons, make cities, erase them, build millennial dunes, crush them back into mountains, open the ocean floor, and raise Iceland.  Like that.  The Duchess isn't quite like that herself, having still some use for daybeds and shot-silk gowns, but her mind's uncluttered enough that she can tune into their channel when she wants to.  She can let go into She-Voice and Root-Breath when she's in-between, which is pretty often.

The Duchess has given up on being appalled.  What's the point?  She sits behind the circulation desk, seeing anything anyone can find to want in this world, and she hands it over with a smile and a nominal due date.  No fines, no questions asked.  Now what will you do?  Burn all the books you want.  Dream enormously.  Misquote everyone, and carry on.  

​Your dragon-nature is mine, and my dragon-nature is also yours.