The day we woke up at four a.m.

We drove to the monastery only to find that the main gate was still closed / Napped in the car in the pre-dawn dark / Had breakfast at a diner lit with the first slanting rays of daylight, where our waitress told us to have as much hot tea as we liked / Listened to a glorious remix of a song we both love / She guessed the combination to the gate by pure luck / We drove up high into the North County hills / And over a speed bump with BUMP OF MINDFULNESS painted on it / Where we met a young Buddhist nun with a laughing face and shaved head who called to us, Good morning, sisters!

Sweet hands in the evening

White girls dreading each others' hair in the woods.

Empty mornings in the cabin

I did not speak to the first group of cabinmates much. They were underclassmen and knew each other already, and I am quiet with groups of new people. The fact that I dropped my first class halfway through meant I was the only one remaining in the cabin after breakfast. I slept, cleaned, and felt restless and desperately bored. The quiet and empty space and morning light pleased my eye, though. Looking at the things my cabinmates had left out on their dressers, the way their sheets wrinkled, I felt I knew them in a strange way from these small things.

Studying by the shore

I'm back in California, my friends, and I have two rolls of 35mm from Wisconsin to share. We students returned to the Chicago area on Saturday, and I took a few days there to see my friends. And that was so lovely that now I'm kind of sad that I'll be away from them until October, even though San Francisco is the city I love.

These I scanned in the living room of the apartment where I slept, which belongs to a beautiful dreamy Christian sistren. (Sistren, yes, it is a word! I was pleased.) Their place reminded me of some of the things that second-wave feminists wrote about the need for women-only spaces, about the potential of communities of women; they had realized some of that on a small scale in their apartment.

But now I'm in California, and looking towards another summer class, and I've promised to buy myself a certain amazing and expensive book [this] once I find a job. And here for the next few days, there will be Wisconsin scenes.