“We don’t live for ourselves; we are interconnected. We live for the earth, for Texas, for the chicken we ate last night that gave us its life, for our mother, for the highway, and the ceiling and the trees. We have a responsibility to treat ourselves kindly; then we will treat the world in the same way.” Natalie Goldberg
Amen. And god bless, goddess bless, Namasté. These are sentiments I would, do, did, mutter to myself when I read this, or anything like it. Such words are my way of acknowledging the little present flutter of joy that moves in my heart naturally as means of saying yes, yes, I get that, too! I live for such feeling, such acknowledgment. It’s been stuck in my throat lately, though. That’s what happens when I, as an artist, feel that little flow or aha and stop my natural progression of opening to it. It takes so damn much of my energy to do so, to halt that flow and not allow it to come posturing out in the form of a poem or writing or in a simple lightness of being that I end up feeling numb. Then the shame—self-judgment—comes. And then I really rally against myself. What are you doing with your life, where are you going, what’s the point, why why why? And then I don’t, I haven’t, gotten a damn thing done.
Initially this started when I paused in my writing and blogging to have a friend help me with building a website. I gave myself an excuse: oh I’ll just quit writing til we’re done, til we get my blog fed in to my website. Of course this led to me spending far more time day by day in my head, trying to control and manage all my little life details up there. My energy, transfixed before I knew it, stuck on creating life how I want it. My heart doomed with the terrible sucking feeling in the morning because nothing at all is happening for me and yikes, the great paradox being that indeed nothing was happening because I was so drained by all my energy focused on nothing happening! And maybe this is what I hate the most, what I’ve learned the most in the 9 months since I quit teaching to focus on writing: it requires that I write. And for this artist, writing requires discipline. Which sometimes looks like drudgery: sweatpants and dirty hair and forcing myself to sit in this hardback chair drinking acidic coffee and stopping to have to get the damn laundry done. Which is the exact opposite of my vision of the ecstatic moonbeam worshipping sultry sleeky earth-goddess dark diva zipping and lala laughing and loving her way easily through life and love and art with a magic touch and a Done!! No, discipline is not an easy task for me, but one worth the hard long fight. And actually, I like the way the warm sun feels on my stretched-out arms, the yearn in my heart as I weight the clothes-line with the heavy wet towel or my work uniform knowing my work is upstairs waiting mid-sentence for me. The sound of the cows in the distance. The hum of my computer. My cat on her back spread out legs hanging off the chair she’s cozied up in, funny look on her face like I’m the strange one. All the empty coffee mugs and tears of paper on my desk. The yearn in my heart for this all. Discipline takes me back to these things, to my life. Back to my art, to the nature of things.
In recovery from alcoholism you learn about that funny little twist of mental obsession and how it dominates you and sucks you lonely and bedraggled through your day. You learn it is part of the disease of alcoholism. Chief among the disease is the ego and its Napoleaonic governing and how it confuses you with delusions of how much you actually think is in your control. The ego uses its loud chatter to accomplish this, the ways it has of talking at you, and you at it. You drink to relieve this mental strain, this burden of the mentally anxious always obnoxious wrestling match in your own brain. This time it will be different and so on…Thus drinking isn’t actually the problem as much as it is the solution. But I think that this tendency towards mental looping and strain isn’t limited at all to alcoholics. I am convinced that it is simply the human condition. Sick and stuck on our fears and our own ambitious beliefs in the common little wart we all share, our dastardly egos. My shaman fried says the ego can not exist in the present moment, it can only be activated by our worries about what the future will amount to or by our judgment of our past. So our judgments or speculating in any given moment amount to the sum total of joy we are experiencing Right Now. In other words, if you can be present, in the present, Conscious of the moment and your breathing nose or mouth, your beating heart, your blinking eyes, the way the tree leaves move the wind across the street or the field, how the light blinks off the grocery cart wheel or how that little child looks right now with chocolate smeared across her fat cheek…in this way you can love, you can be the moment connected not in mind but in Being with all else. You can live the ecstatic ordinary and this is all there is…
So that’s why I write. Got that Kelly? To capture this, this sacred moment, to experience in-union, to dance together as the words come rushing out, to feel the spark, that joy flutter, to share what lay in my heart and in doing so, to lay down what matters upon your own.
Poem for Today
My friend Mike’s birthday was last week, so was Leah’s. These are fantastic, original people who inspire me to live the same way writing does. They are farm people—Mike by birth, right here in Kennedyville not two miles from Anngar Farm, with the dust and manure, the cow droppings and moans outside on the wind making up his everydays. The dry corn husks fluttering across his playground, brought down every season by the fall. Leah came to this life, to this type of farm life, with her pensive esoteric Christian punk rock husband, who I unknowingly grew up with in the suburb complexes of counties stretched out between Baldamore and DC at the same punk rock shows in the same firehalls with sticky bathroom stalls and black gum stains on the floor and stale grease smells in the dark halls. Fugazi. Nope. Mustard Seed Magic….Her and her husband now in a strung together farm house in Queen Anne’s county held up by her baubles and scrumpy cats and their love. I still owe her a flowered crown for her birthday….We have potlucks together, celebrate birthdays and the passings of seasons and the moon. Leah and her husband and the rest of our hodgepodge band of pop-culture-gone-rural country crew. Mike doesn’t come to these gatherings because he lives in Manhattan now but steamed crabs, in Maryland, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore where he’s from outback that old farmhouse of his in Kennedyville, is how he’ll celebrate his birthday this week, how he celebrates it every year. Details. The classic details of our miniscule existences, how we humans are gifted with the power to transform every living day in to our own kind of tiny miracle.
Happy Belated Birthday friends.
Amen.
Long poem for
Mc Ades
What is this madness? I only seem
to Know. I only claim.
My only.
The beauty of this world.
The beating & the fueling
the fucking
of all things
keeps us Alive.
The beating wings of that animal flap
The thrashing of those others in the garden
The associations we draw forward
from that
to that
This is ALL pure, man.
The light
The light there, in your eyes
is in mine.
Transfixed gleam.
( )
The city tops, the city steps
Where you sleep
Where your gun falls down
Where you drop
to your knees
Where, on some leveled street labeled Paradise
your queen, your vicious vicious Queen
returns & you
you Masquerade
torrents of beauty dance
you spin & turn what beauty in this dance
what madness this Quest ahhhh all this confounded
Wondering. Wonder-Ing ahhhh hhh Wonder
Your Soul the Clown, friend
Your soul on which the fire breathes.
White heat red flame transfigures, white ash. Transfixed heat. Transcends.
The Beauty. The Simple marvel Beauty. Of this.
¨
On this farm, this form
which you gave Me.
You are always in my backyard?
Which means when we turn we are the same
within. You’re on my land, I am on yours, this
Great consequence of Life only means a thing if we
Garner Nothing To It. I Know.
The fire, the fires Burn Bright
Chinese Elm out back. Great Fire Barrel Sam procured.
The choking back, the choking on, the delicious smoke.
The dust I brought, you brought
Home. How you rejuvenate reinvent Cleanse.
How you Bath Yourself. To be made Clean.
The dust settles. Great cities of Paradise yearn in you again.
Long car ride, home.
I’ll share a cigarette with you,
anytime my friend.
*
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