I don’t even remember what the words feel like when they move through my body anymore. Instead, I feel the memory of them which is alive in me like some vine whose roots are cement.  The stopped growth is wagging in the almost not blowing air and can’t move at all in its base. This horrible, dusty longing.  I feel their absence, the words, how a creek bed must be, exposed, uncertain in its devastating shrinking, abandoned when in the summer height all its been left with is dehydration. When I first started going to Santa Barbara every month my biggest fear on Sunday was burn-out.  Sundays we used to be divided in to small groups and then we would process our lives, our weekends, our process of trying to avoid or understand our process.  I ran out one of those very first Sundays, to avoid what I didn’t want to see.  I got outside and was breathing heavy up and down, scattered vision scanning all directions to the left and right of me.  There was no place to go and next I was standing with the arms of two women wrapped around me.  I barely knew them. Even then I was pressed by my own mythology: I martyr, I who will be the one.  With my very life I will lead, I will learn, so will I teach~We were there learning how to be authentic and present, vulnerable.  So under the awnings I let them in. I told them what I hadn’t even admitted to myself.  All those years teaching in Maryland and then working for the college had burnt me out, I was so terrified it would happen again.  Vicarious trauma. It happens. Again, again, again. What will make you feel alive again is if you get off the couch and go walk the beach.  Open a book and find poetry. –I have no energy to get up That is because you won’t get off the couch. This snake eats its own tail.  It has been a year and a half of Sundays.  I healed PTSD, and started it again? I was a drug addict I was a teacher I was a lover I was a leader …way back then… Crow croaks in the difference and laughs at me.  Bounces on second sight feet.  I can see. The words move my fingers move the words.