I wake up in a funk from a dream about my friend’s boyfriend. He’d shown up at my house asking me to help. He was crying. I don’t know what to do for her, he said. I was sitting across from him at a wooden table, discussing a plan of action when the dog jumped off the bed and woke me up.

I lie there mindless and shallow breathed for seven minutes before rolling out of bed, turning on the kettle and heading to the lu. I pee, brush my teeth, my hair, and pull a pair of jeans out of the half full laundry hamper. The tea water boils. I grab my travel mug, my car keys, and Calvin’s ratty leash from the hook beside the door.

Dunk rock road runs parallel to the interstate highway before branching off and making for the mountains. Follow it for fifteen minutes and you’ve connected up with a series of deserted roads to dried up oil wells and campsites. On the weekends, it’s busy - people with their dogs, mountain bikers taking central routes to makeshift paths and courses. On a Monday like this though, all but one parking place is empty and I can snap the leash off the dog and let him run ahead without fear of retribution.

The first ten minutes of a walk are the most revealing. In them my entire mental state is made clear. Sometimes, when shit’s really bad, I’ll call Calvin back, turn around and drive off - anything to avoid an hour plus of sandy footsteps and my mind. But today we’re ok. The sun’s out and I’m crunching along, not thinking about thinking, just putting one foot in front of the other.

We follow the flat for a while, Calvin trotting up ahead, lifting his leg on every other rock, tree trunk, bush, and me pushing up dips and inclines on the balls of my feet. The path starts out paved but peters out into gravel and dust somewhere you don’t notice until it’s behind you. Owl scat is everywhere. Little white bones mixed up with fuzz and what looks like seedy entrails. Calv pisses on each pile we pass. I think about that time about a month back when we were out walking after dark and an owl swooped down over us, trying to nab a doggie dinner. I’ve dreamed of teeth and talons since. The way Calvin lifts his leg so casually over the remains of his predator’s prey is like a little fuck you and I love him for it.

Tires roll over lose rock and sand. Voices follow and we’re passed on the left by two boys on dirt bikes, their helmets askew. They crunch by, standing on their pedals, their bikes flip flopping beneath their bony butts. I whistle Calvin closer.
The boys hear me and crane lanky necks over bony shoulders, thinking I might be signaling them but seeing Calv instead.
I like your dog, the tall one calls out.
Thanks, I say.
I do too, the other says.
Thanks.
They coast onwards before skidding off on a narrow path that dips down into a cavern, making their bobbing helmets buoy-like last traces of them.

I wonder what adventure they might be on. Wonder what they’ll find out here on their own. We found a tree house, Lara and I, the last summer we spent together before her family moved and my parents split. It was nestled in the woods behind her house, abandoned and rotting but a treasure if only because we’d not seen it before. If only because to find it we had to traverse a series of slippery logs strung together over swampy water and reeds. It seemed out of a story, that treehouse and we claimed it like some shining proof that magic did exist. It was in books that children struck out on rafts, found fortresses in the woods, hidden doorways through time. The treehouse was our first realization that fiction and life might be mirrors.

I moved to New York when I was eighteen. That first year - walking through the city on summer nights, listening to Tupac on my ipod, waitressing in Soho, living alone in a seedy studio on third avenue- that was the loneliest I’ve ever been. I don’t think I knew it then but I remember myself as small and uncontained; loving with a fiercesome resolve the city ‘s blurred yellow and blank stares, not yet knowing that it would never love me back. And I remember with a wincing clarity the a single bedroom where I’d sit after waitressing, waiting for a boy who never came; and the scraped up palmful of change I’d count out in the space market on University Place to buy some soup to take home to that single room. But sometimes on those nights, Saturdays usually, I’d shower and zip on my skintight Elizabeth Taylor sheath and strut around the city as if I had some place to be, like maybe I was a movie star, or a girl somebody loved.

Sometimes I could bask in the stares, the catcalls. Sometimes I could store it - the Liz Taylor afterglow - away and feed off it for a week or so. I could be wrong but I don’t think I need to be looked at anymore. Maybe that’s what made me ready to leave New York. Maybe I just figured out the difference between being seen and known. Maybe not, but I’m walking along with this crusty little dog, wearing these crusty old jeans and not imagining myself as I imagine someone else imagines me. I don’t picture myself in space the way I used to - like I was watching a mental movie of myself constantly and without compassion.  I’m sure it’s been like this before because I remember walking each New Hampshire night to the middle of the half mown field wearing muck boots and pajama bottoms. In it, hay bales spaced out from each other by feet looked like cattle ghosts and I’d lay on my back over a round one and watch six million stars reveal themselves, slowly at first, across the wide navy sky. I remember doing this and thinking how alive I was.

The path is dipping now, sloping downward and up again. The dog traverses it first, trotting at an even pace, his ears flopping with the force of his descent. I’m easing my way down, arms stretched out by my sides, sneakers slipping slightly over patches of lose gravel. Once I make it to the basin of the hill, I push up the other side, still thinking about time before I defined myself inside it. About barn chores on Wednesday nights, trudging up Wentworth road at sundown with three horses behind me, jostling, shoving and glancing my heels with their steel toes. I am eleven years old. With the hay shaped imprints on the backs of my legs and the splifs of wet grass stuck to my sneakers.  I am a fraction of the size of the three beasts behind me and nervous they’ll bowl me over, though I’d never admit it.

I didn’t think about moving then. Didn’t consider my body in space. How much room it took up. How small a space it filled or how it looked in comparison to other spaces, other bodies. Those nights after riding and walking and hauling and throwing, we piled into the cab of truck. Four little girls, four sets of chubby arms and bony knee caps and one large woman, one dog. We were one atop another, wedged into place by the woman’s body, four times the size of one of ours.

In periods of limbo - of forced or uncontrollable stasis, there’s this drive to move forward through space. The winter I moved out of New York I spent in the attic apartment of mother’s empty house, stuck in the dark rhythm of sundown and sleeplessness. Stuck in patterns I perfected to help myself
out of dealing with the unknown. I went to the beach most days, running up and down the waterline until I couldn’t breathe then walking, rapidly at first, until I reached the tide break. I stood out on the rocks like a character from a book. I howled at the wind like a love lorn heroine. I wished to be seen. Or more likely, I wished to be known.

I used to wonder about my own strength. I’d imagine my heart
stopping, my brain shutting down. And sometimes I forgot to breathe. Once in a while I still do, mostly because Mom went and made me aware of how fragile we all are and how it could all be over with the quick slip of a sneaker on a gravel path, the thin screech of an owl overhead. But more and more my memories of her illness bring deep breaths, not short ones.

It’s hard work, climbing this hill. Even the dog has slowed to a walk now. I feel my breath squeezing from somewhere below my sternum. But I push on anyways. When we summit, it’s to a purple vista, overlooking ugly tract houses wedged like shoeboxes into the hillsides. But beyond them it’s all snowcapped mountains, clear and blue the way I didn’t think they came in California. And beyond them, it’s a sunset moving across the sky in waves of orange and pink the way I imagined it those afternoons I sat in the windows of New York Starbucks watching people pass by and hoping for a slowing down of time, a clearing of some space to breathe in.

I got what I wanted. Coming out here, the West with its dusty paths, it’s screech owls, it’s slowness so seperate from the movement of Manhattan, was a stripping away of perfected patterns. Patterns of perfection. Elizabeth Taylor dresses. Imagined men and their imagined gazes. And maybe I’m not yet known out here, but somehow I know myself better.

A few months ago, when I first arrived, I started practicing at a nearby yoga studio. I’ve been going almost every night. It’s a routine now, a dependable point in each day. It’s there I slow down, if only for an hour and fifteen minutes.
It’s all about the breath, my yoga teacher says, here is where we feel tangibly our bodies at work.
She also tells us that if you aren’t following your breath, you aren’t practicing yoga, you’re just mindlessly moving. The breath, the effortlessness of it, is what connects us to spirit.