Snow, & Poems

Poem for the day, which was inspired by Tom who is skiing and memories of Lindsey and Darby and growing up in the woods. In honor of the snow which 18 hours later is still REALLY coming down, & my deep great desire to go sledding with red cheeks and smiley open fun. With the exception of being 16, with Briana and I all punkrocked, waiting on Larry and Scott and Lindsey to get there and being so, soo sweetly stoned, this is definitely the best snow day I have ever known

HILLS

There were power lines where I grew up:
hills.

At the end of the street behind the cedar trees
and calf-level thickets of clover and thorns.

We went there in our shorts and short-sleeves
took the back-way around through the woods
down to where Gumbottom Creek bled out.
Brave days we would make what otherwise
was a winter climb.
The muscle movement of puberty leg flexors
and misery of sweat, the tripped over grass-clusters
and rotation of sky against top of hill-land and also
breath: in and out in and out, up and down.

I really don’t remember mosquitoes
puckering our arms & later, in the mildew spring

when the earth was wet
and the thicket mats flat
from the rails of our sleds

we would lay our blankets down, and the sun still felt
damp, and cold on our skin

On a creative witchy mind

I dont know, this might be hard to relate to, but a friend of mine told me once that I am a spiritual archivist not just my own but for all of our friends. I was thinking of this tonight when I uploaded some pics onto my computer: 150 shots from Thanksgiving through this weekend. I almost never, ever wait that long between events to unload shots, but life has been hectic and I am walking along inside of it, tired but not weary, just moment to moment and wow have my moments been full.

And I do, I do: I keep track of the cycles of my self, and everyone around me. I dont just mentally acknowledge things, I mean I have a literal requiem storehouse on those that I count as tribe members, close friends and Knectors to my soul. I can't articulate this circuit board that goes on, but I am always filtering in the details, hearing their stories, processing their tales, then processing back for them the current myth or tide they are riding. I dont even realize it it's just what I do. I mark passings, and everyone's peaks and tides, by various means of traditional and non-traditional poles. Like today, the new moon, most powerfull tide passing time of year. All over the place people I know are witnessing: they are starting brand new goals; or taking pause; or hitting pinnacles in current circumstances; this is how we do, how we rise, how we flow, how we pass, how we current ever so swiftly or softly along. Somehow in my head I always easily see others big pictures for how it all easily is weaving together.

I guess what got me thinking about this was uploading these pics tonight, in that it'd been so long since I'd done so. I immediately caught myself nodding: ahhh yes, a quickening just occurred, I went through three whole weeks of straight archiving rather than also organizing and cataloging. My lens backed up and resharpened: in that time the poetry and magic and words have been flowing through me like mad. I've even been penpal-ing with someone the whole time: all of it, all those examples of capturing what is happening all around. A quickening, a quickening of the tide.

And the wind here, when it gets blowing, has been blowing like crazy just like last year on the last day of the calendar year. Winds so high the Choptank River and Elliot Bay both looked like the ocean at high tide.

Dont think it's a joke the old saying winds of change. Folk lore is some of the wisest medicine we have, yes? Everything at all times around us always is eternal reality of creative present moment. Our fates whisper in the wind sure as on the radio or in the trees.

Wild whipping winds tonight on the Eastern Shore.

Winter Solstice is coming: get it guys? Monday it all peaks, right before our closed--or if you're brave and learning to fight for it--at least half-opened eyes... What changes will come what changes are already half on their way?

Poetry vs poetry and First thought, best thought

Ever since the little river started or since I surrendered anyhow and agreed to jump in I haven't been sleeping well. As alluded to before, that can trip me out cuz for someone such as me who has psycho-mania in her catalogue not sleeping can be a dangerous thing. But it's not, not now, and that is the cool thing--I am awake at 4, or 2, or not sleeping at all--or only for two hours or so this week when I get home from what all week were 12 hour days and I'm like whatever, I'm going with it. It's like Bobby Ray the shaman said once years ago, it's only your fear that will keep you sick...

Anyhow since for me writing is Queen and blogging has become part of my practice, part of the discipline of my smithing away at this craft--in very much the first thought best thought style or what I've taken to calling spontaneous download--I thought I better jump on here and give some time to my practice. And then there's the act of writing poetry, different as I explained to a new writer friend just yesterday or no that was two days ago by now, than Poetry capital P which to me is an ethic, a tribe, or value--a state of not just being touched by the madness but alluring and living in it all the same: the saying of the Holy Amen. But as a wordsmith, as a practitioner of art actually writing poetry is different than say the practice of just first thought best thought, and also different than memoir writing. It includes it, but becomes too a strange cohesion of like, sitting in my boat on the river but keeping too a mild hand at all times on the oar. But not using it for paddling, more as like a rutter, that with the slightest touch does indeed effect the trajectory of surface gliding, but only in as much as a pebble might effect a ripple, and the water and the boat--the whole experience of the trip ultimately is of the same...

I wrote poems yesterday so that is why I am thinking so to speak aloud. No, that was two days ago--in the morning, five good poems that remind me a lot of that November in 03 when I was in my little room off my studio apartment on Mt.Royal. The poems and momentum that started my litmag Cantalma and also was the beginning of Fishing Rock.

Ahhh, hello little river. You fucking ho! Careful what you wish for sometimes? I wouldn't change it tho, wouldn't change it at all not even in exchange for the world...

Mike Cades: A Decade of Music

My buddy Mike and I met in college.  He's a musician. We met in college, he was one of a handful of folks whose intellectualism marvelled and intimidated me, and later, whose artistic sense inspired and provoked me.

Mike and I worked together this summer on some creative ideas that may or may not manifest in time to come. In the meantime, he started this super cool project that I think all music lovers need to check out. A Decade of Music is Mike's blog, and invitation to anyone to create(from his first blogpost)a mix of music created from 2000 - 2009 that influenced you as an artist, if you're an artist, or that you just loved the fuck out of, if you're a geologist or something awesome like that. It should be in chronological order but from your perspective (ie. If you suddenly discovered Kid A in 2008, you should place is thusly in the mix, as opposed to placing in the year it was released, whenever that was... everyone knows Radiohead is a pretty silly band without much of a future).

Totally, totally check this blog out. Especially if you're a music-lover, or even just a mildly music-interested geologist or something.

Now look, I love this. What's always cracked me up about that crew from college is how compared to them I came ass-end in to things, foraging the world a bit before college and only coming in to myself, my intellectualism and creativity, towards the end. It's my identity as an intellectual and artist that I've always struggled with, that I've spent the years of college, and after, trying to integrate. The things of the world outside always came easy to me, natural. These pals, their smarts came easy and were never questioned. It was the world that, post-college, challenged them to enlist their creativity in order to associate. So of course their music is smart, eclectic, emotional, hugely ranging.

For facebook I recently put together a list of artists that inspired and changed me through out my teens. For the better part of the 2000's I wasn't taking much new music in. Mike's blog made me realize my illiteracy in this area--the last decade of music. It delights me to see the variety on his blog, makes me realize the great accessibility of the Internet and what this era has done for art. At first I was quick to jump on board with the claim that the great milieu of info and variety out there really only made for a flood of crap, no way to find the great stuff. But I realize now that new standards are cut precisely when a playing field gets leveled.
I think people talented as Mike are the ones who will cut those new prototypes.

Decademix.blogspot.com

Shampoo My Planet & call me X

You know, it's late and I put in over 10 hours today and have to be back it at 8 tmrw. But I've been up blog rolling and living in the cyber dream of future days when I have my little shack & it's all tribe and art and self-education and off the books schooling of new generations of tribe and calling and new fearless ethics and Poetry as Real Work and so on and yea, it's late, and this little river, and, well you know...I could go on and on.

Anyway. Serendipity!? I got in to all this meat on Friday in my memoir, wrote for 5 and a half hours at the Panera, then took a break for dinner and convo for about an hour and a half, then got back to it, writing til well past midnite. I was writing a lot about the 90's, riot grl, coming up, tribes, death, the duende, imagnation and it's doomed demise.

Read this post! Yes! Not so much for the Pumpkins myself, but damned if Friday I didn't spend an hour in urging longing wistfullness over the first Lolla, & Janes Addiction, 1991....

Writerly Things, Reflections: Eddie's Place, Crofton & Back in the Day

This man I loved greatly died in the winter when I was 19, about to be 20. It was January, something like the 18th or 19th when he went. I found out on Thanksgiving only two months before, his son Little Dave told tell me Kel, dad's got cancer. I was standing in the basement at mom's getting ready to leave for some kind of impromptu day after Turkey Day family thing like bowling or whatever somewhere in the county with one of the aunts or uncles and cousins. Little Dave showed up, walked down in to the basement with the weirdest smile on his face. You always remember where you are the moment news like that hits.

Eddie was Little Dave's dad, and he owned the pizza shop I grew up working in. The whole time my dad was living in Cali, and my mom and I were fighting like blood and daggers, and my dad and I not speaking unless we were hating and yelling, Ed was a Pop to me. Teasing me, hugging and smiling and also yelling and scaring the shiz out of us and keeping me right, best he could for us anyhow, keeping his look out.

A month later it was Christmas, I was at the community college, had just started waiting tables at a fancypants joint in downtown Annapolis cuz the GM from Jersey came down and fired me from Applebee's, which is what happens when you cuss out a customer. It was before gentrification and the uptown yuppy parts of Naptown weren't there yet, same like Baltimore and the Harbourside condos and three and four star restaurants--none of that was there, just projects and ghettos and old abandoned warehouses no "revitalization," yet.

I was trying to not touch drugs anymore because two things happened when I picked up: I was likely to spin out and go a little crazy, and simultaneously once I started I could not stop smoking or sniffing or popping or whatever else it was I had to do to keep using once I started, no matter what the hell was going on with my body and mind. So it was days before Christmas and I went to Eddie's house, with a poinsettia for him and a letter mapping it all out. What he meant to me.

It was the last time I ever saw him. When I left I smoked a joint and circled the Crofton Parkway, and all the Christmas lights clean and glowing, and how could all that be going on normal, all these everylive's, and Eddie's gonna be dead. My mind mindlessly looping I drove the backroads Underwood to St. Stevens and on and on and back and back and Eddie was gonna die you know when the cancer's got someone like that you can just tell and lemmee tell you, I was young still, and fucked up. About three weeks or so later I pulled in to the parking lot of the restaurant, Eddie's Place, for a Sat night shift because I'd volunteered to take shifts again when he got sick. And one of the teens that worked the kitchen like I did when I started a sub girl came running out and said, Did you hear? Eddie's dead.

I was mad at her because she didn't know him like I did and how could you just drop the news like this out here in the parking lot under the grey eyeless sky? She hadn't been there all those years. Soon Maura was there and Mark and I think maybe even Cuddy and Kristen, too, then Billy came up, and we all cried a lot and didn't know what to say it just all happened so quick, then Little Dave called me, and asked me to give a eulogy on behalf of all us, Ed's restaurant kids.

The day of the funeral, or memorial service which is more what it was, I had to miss the first day of my first creative writing class, ever. When I showed up on the second day my heart was locked heavy with grief and little did I know, my Prof Susan, soon to be my first writing mentor, assigned to me a key and essentially said, go ahead, unlock. Unload. We had to turn in a memoir at the end of the semester, an autobiography, responsible for a large part of our grade. The first page of mine was Ed's eulogy.

What stands most out to me that spring was this compelling energy, this literal river that felt real and loving and natural as gold and that I could feel, all the time, like a channel just moving along through me. All I had to do, my only job, was to show up in my boat and then be willing to go. I didn't even need an oar in hand.

I wrote like I'd never wrote before, every afternoon, sometimes starting at 11 in the morning when class got out and not stopping until well after mom had gone to bed. I wrote, and wrote and wrote. It was the easiest, and also hardest thing--when it got to the pain-parts, like wringing an already rung dishtowel sometimes--that I'd ever done. And it was easy, because it was so natural. I just showed up in my boat, like I said, and off I went.

Later, Susan wrote a recommendation letter to Washington College for me, and helped me prepare a selection of writing samples. By the fall of that year I'd moved to Chestertown--hellooooo Eastern Shore, and life of Acadamy, and Institution, again--and then well you know...Here I am and So it goes, so it goes....

That was 11 years ago and all I've ever wanted was that river again. A huge part of the power of that river is merely trust. Trusting the river, but you can only do this if you're strong enough to trust yourself, and your boat, too.

In Chestertown I got sober, and lost a lot of the gleam of who I am. The radical starry-eyed sassy warrior grl I'd always been. I let her go with sobriety because, like the first line of Ed's eulogy says, My name is Kelly, though most you of may know me as that crazy girl from Eddie's Place and funny as this was, it was also true. There's always been a stigma for me of crazy associated to life prior to getting clean because of, well, because of the plain and straight experiences of literally and totally losing my mind. Drug related psychosis and figuring out if it really was cuz I was mentally ill, and the long hard battle all that was back then.

Bit by bit, year by year, I've tried to rectify it. Time and distance and maturity account for a lot.

The Duende is scary because death and crazy are scary. And it is painful, because only the artist knows so intimately the mid-wifing required of creative growth. To have to confront these, to have to be willing to confront it if you want to be brave enough and strong enough to do the work you secretly think you're capable of. And is anything really worth that hurt?

This morning, I was lying in bed and thinking about trust. I thought, you lived like this once, in 98, and again in 02 for that teeny little bit of time til you shut it down becasue of shame. And then, why fight it, this pacing coursing energy you actually feel growing and growing these last weeks, why fight who you are? I started to get up, to come write more on my novel, and then my room, my living room with my bed in the corner so that my bedroom could actually be my writing space, stilled. I stilled, in a moment of discovery which I guess is just acceptance, again, on yet a deeper level.

Acceptance of self.

The gold channel, the river, there it was. There I was, in my boat, on its shore. A small little click of peace happened, or not a click, just more like a feather floating softly to land even less than breathlessly, on the ground. A quiet soft sweet motion of getting my feet wet. Of stepping in.

My river is back. My gold channel is here again, refound.

I've keep looking at my hands and I can't keep from crying these wonderful hot tears all morning long.

On Poems, & the Writing Nuts

My new pal Mike, this writer-buddy from here in Easton and self-proclaimed lover of running (Mike I had to edit that bc instead of writing running I originally wrote "funning"!), long-boarding and his kids and fam, who also is re-discovering his voice and source-creativity-power in motion of song and poetry and light, just wrote this post about the first poet that ever turned him on.

Sandburg. It's a great post read it. The poem he posted is a dream all charge charge gogogo.

Who was yours?

For me it was Emerson, tho, & as I should of paid attention to all the way back then, it was his prose/ethics that first stood out:

from Nature
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches....

I remember, sure as anything, the moment, dropping on to my desk my own handwrote wilted journal of softback poems with a soft thwush of its pages as it landed because my teacher, who had a funny long name I no longer remember, mentioned the Transcendental Eye. Holy hell I thought in wonder and looked at her dazed, mystical, like she'd just woken me from a dream and here I am surprised as I was to find that I was in reality. I never did my homework it was my junior year so her lesson was all new to me, my first AP class and mostly I was consumed with having gotten arrested over the weekend bc one of the upperclassmen girls in the class had ratted on me at the party after I left blowin up my spot. Yea it was me that left the seen of that hit and run. (It was a parked, empty car that I took the bumper off of, not some poor shmoe left to wail in the street...)

Here, here! this teacher telling about the Universalism's and Transcendentalism and for the first time, here, here is some work that gets my attention, here are some writers I can get my hands on and I want you to know I read him, and Thoreau that whole afternoon in the back of the locker room and later, instead of religion class with Ms. Bo.

Next of course it was Ginsberg and the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...which would come to me and come to me later as I taught in the jail and needed to show these young street savy black men how fierce, how true, how real Poetry could get it on. I still remember the ache and sizzle reading it aloud in that cold, dark and stale windowless room. The eyes and nods and caught breath, the looks on all their faces....

It was Snyder that helped me cross the threshold, tho. Now we're in college, I am clean, my brain for the first time harnessing and focusing and making real connections through and through. The Bath. I wrote a 10-page paper on it in three hours flat and it was the only A+ I ever got with not one mark or yea, but...feedback. It blew my mind, and my prof's, too. Read it. Read it out loud like Mooney taught me to do. Pay good attention to the comas, the indents, the natural pauses until the rhythm gets in to you, melds with you, the poem and you are it and become you, and bigger than you, too.

In other writerly news, I want you also to stop by Erika's post today for a little bit of communion. God, this girl. I totally feel her, remember nodding out behind the cash register at Play It Again Sam's my senior year of college because I was working on my first and only fiction novel and was up all night long three, four nights, whole weeks in a row. Coffee infusions and lots of cigarettes. Sitting up out of dead drenched sleep with lines charging through me head. I cant wait to see where she ends up....

Happy weekend, friends. It's sunny out here on the ol EC, again! O sunshine my true and hope-full friend.

Dear Erika,

So this Duende thing. I bought this book, over a year ago, Garcia Lorca's In Search of Duende, because it's eyes turned on me in the aisle at the Barnes & Noble and followed me like one of those creepy antique portrait's, and was whispering, and so finally I said yes yes I see you and took it home. And tried once, twice, over again and to no avail. Then one day the other week on he is, on it turns and I soup him up like we were made from the same broth, and in moments all these other ideas collide and the secret cave door opens and like that, in I go. Lorca's Duende, same as Gilbert's (or the Roman's) Genie. Invoking of presence, and or descent-ion of presence. How Hem came to you that night in the dream.

Today I went walking on my break in the sunshine, I was supposed to meet Jason my work buddy for a hike but we had to cancel because of, well, work. So I stole an hour and walked in the sun and ended up blocks away at the Library. I dont have a library card and had no mail on me with my new address and my ID is old, too (they make it hard to use the free library) so I just sat in the back of the poetry aisle where the french section was and read Baudelaire. And guess what? Here it is again, the Genie, the Duende, the sweeping power. O imagination, in-road to the magic graces. But he calls it Guignon, "the evil spirit of misfortune & disaster!" And true, for him, then--to follow such Zest, to answer the call did bring him all matters of outcast status and leveling of home life and reputation.

Aaaa-I've been there.

What would Liz Gilbert have to say of that?

I feel lost out here grl, and at once so so at home. Afloat on this ocean and aloft on clouds I am spinning and the gold mists I am using to spin with are my own and yet a grace I am not able to summon but gifted at this time with which to use, able to evaporate or hydrate at my very touch. But if I focus on it, too much, like the Tao, it is gone. It is odd, this sensation of being alone, and home. On my own. What Jazmine my college roommate and first yogi I ever knew and I meant when we came up with Woman, Ascending. It's just how I knew it would be, so natural there are no words when it just comes as easy as this is, and at once so odd--like the sense of lucid dreaming, that moment, upon recognition, that you are dreaming, that sheer moment of wonder doubled, heightened, by the awareness of power. Responsibility. That surge sense of constantly being on the widening edge and not having control but just widening it with acceptance, and a smile...

I miss the men. My best friend who knew me better than anyone, and the other the best friend who compelled me more than anyone. And yet even that too has neutralized, is part of the common background that simply adds to the freshness of my ever increasing day by days. It's all so new, but yes, as I knew it would be. But it adds a strangeness to my status--a newness I've never before encountered. My creativity grows and as it, my intellectualism. New friends and men turn up, but I dont want to give away this new thing that I am finally, for me, just getting to own. My belief and faith returns to myself in a way I haven't before known, at least not since I put academy down in the back of Mrs. Scotts class all those years ago and instead picked up pencil, page and Poetry! When she favored the boys--remember--her love of Dominic and Matt Jerzyk? When she took me aside once, and, under her breath, told me you have a 98, the highest grade in here right now, do you know what that means? It was pre-SAT time and everyone was starting to talk about College and where they wanted to go.

I did know what it meant, but I pretended I didn't care.

I do! I do now! I do, again. Like I did the last time we last exchanged notes in class. 7th grade Ms. Fouse, underneath our desks those musty yellow basement rooms of Arthur Slade. Hormones boxer shirts and Brian Dietz!? The same year I started smoking and stealing wine coolers and booze. How weird it is for it all to come back round again, and for the themes all to be the same?

And that is the point of this letter, these Musings. This recap at the end of the NaNoWriMo thing. I Have So Many Threads. So many with which I want to weave. Letting the quantity come out rather than focus on the quality--well most of it was just shit. But little golden seeds ready to grow, too, in all that detritus! So many threads all coming out of, all re-creating, this great tapestry of me. So many threads I dont know which way to go and it is overwhelming and I miss you, who keeps me tethered and right. Riot Grrrl & Wise Women Ways, the instinct injured feminine self and epidemic of wounded youth as result=deadened imagination. The death! Death, of the Duende, of the Art, the Call. A new Ethics of fearlessness, like Liz Gilbert says. Reliance on the Genie. Faith in it All. Not Kicking against the Goades, as is my interpretation of the condition of Baudelaire's Guignon, but full-bodied acceptance. What, and you'll love this, Ms. Faback (sp?!) taught on my first day of religion in the third grade. That Amen means simply, to say YES.

Looking forward to our next exchange,
Happy Holidays and gratefullness to you,

xoxoo
k

I discovered TedTalks indirectly a few weeks ago when Erika sent me this link, and directly a week later at the first writing gathering I went to here in Easton.

This is so fabulous, a talk that really encompesses so many of the late night talks I've had with folks like Walsh or KRuss or Brooks. The idea of the Duende is in here, and of Ego and Narcissism, of Genius and The Impulse and The Calling and The Tribe, and the shadow and its various instincts and results...all those fabulous things that compel me when the sun goes low and the dark time is here....And Poetry!! Listen to 10:18 on about Ruth Stone the poet! Holy hell o sacred impulse. Get a cup of coffee or glass of wine and settle in.

Hunger & Ethics: Poetics

I am on, and on and on right now, in defense of or maybe more in definition, of Poetics.

Of my poetics.

O damn craving for self-education!

Scratch that. I am neither defending, nor defining. Nor even educating. I am discovering. giving words to...I am becoming. Battling. Staking claim.

But the idea of defense, and thus definition that I myself may know and claim just what it is I am striking out on behalf of--is pertinent. Because, as I've said and said again. Poetry is a lifestyle. It is not even a choice. It's, well like W.D. Snodgrass says in this interview, a lifelong thing:

If you can be happy doing anything else, do it. George P. Elliott once told me that. This is what he always told people. Everything pays better. Everything is more honestly rewarded.

But if you’ve got to do it, then you’re a life-termer.

I’ve had a lot to do with pacifist organizations. In one of their publications there is a story about a young pacifist who is thrown in prison. He is in on the main floor with all the new guys, and he’s cracking up. Some of the prisoners go to the warden and ask him to do something. They put the new guy up on the top floor with the life-termers, because they had nothing to win. They didn’t have to put anybody down. They were just there. And that’s how it was going to be, and they had to get along. In a few days he settled back down again and he was all right.

Yes. So what do you with a condition that Snodgrass, the "first" confessional, actually compares to being on the ward, cracking up?

You just, you know. Do it. Because it's the fighting it that causes the dismantling, the shaking break down, or worse, as you all artists know: the numb dumb condition. The struck thin and dusty on the inside because no how, no matter what, no matter what else you're doing, if you're not engaged in the work at your baseline You Are Unhappy.

So that it's not how and who you choose to be, as I've claimed in the past, but rather how and who you accept yourself as?

Making choice merely a matter of responsibility to this inherent condition...

Bringing me back round again to The Real Work. Gary Snyder's Zen of being in the moment in all that you do--an idea transferred from the act of meditating, and poem as means of meditation. Perfect in-moment form. Wat Joe Campbell calls peak experience. And to approach it with this placement of commitment, then Poetry becomes the political, too. The experience of being fully engaged.

Adrienne Rich so adeptly seizes us with this idea in her pocketsize pink-jacketed copy of the lecture Poetry and Commitment:

Antonio Gramsci wrote of the culture of the future that "new" individual artists can't be manufactured: art is a part of society--but that to imagine a new socialist society is to imagine a new kind of art that we can't foresee from where we now stand. "One must speak," Gramsci wrote, "of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality..."

In any present society, a distinction needs to be made between the "the poetry of false problems"--and a poetics searching for transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can be thought or said. For now, poetry has the capacity--in its own ways and by its own means--to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossesion, the subjection of women, torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom (italics mine)--that word now held under arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This ongoing future, written off over and over, is still within view. Its elementary condition is the recovery and redistribution of the world's resources that have been extracted from the many by the few.

Making Poetry, aside from a dedicated act of pen and paper, too an ethic.

Which brings me just a few steps closer on the path of my search to the necessity of, as I used to teach my ESL students in order to understand and assimilate, la lengua del gente. The folk lore. Tho in this case not meant literally, but meant as the on the side in the countrysides scribes and tatters of paint and pen. The language of the people. Not anti old white authoritarian, (o fuck dont even get me started on the Cannon, Bloom...) but at least Other than...

(It's not revisionist, afterall, if it's reality?)

And so then, of course, there's the Duende. (Jesus, for pure tru lifeblood O Mighty Poets get your hands on Lorca's essay The Deep Song paragraphs 17-19.) Duende originally what Federico Garcia Lorca is speaking of when he lectures on the value of preserving the cante jando, or deep song, a style specific to flamenco Andalusian music of Spain. After time spent in the juke joints and jazz stops on the east coast of the States in the early 30's, however, Lorca, (like that other tipping pointer of note who found his voice in the same haunts and so influenced whole generations as result--Keroac) assimilated his idea od Duende to include it as a quality: The great artists of the south of Spain, whether Gypsy or flamenco, whether they sing, dance, or play, kow that no emotion is possible unless the duende comes. They may be able to fool people into thinking they have duende--authors and painters and literary fashionmongers do so evry day--but we have only to pay a little attentio and not surrender to indifference in order to discover the fraud and chase away their clumsy artifice.

And I hate to be exclusive, folks. But I gotta say. I know about that. About the duende. And it is this, this quality, I care most about.

Few. FEW have it. But you know, you know when you come across those that do.

Icould go on and on. But will end with this~

My own belief--experiential which you all know is what matters most to me--that on the short end of Dunede lay the distinct and personal in-road to serendipity, to the fine fire of consciousness where in Poetry, as motion, as pure force energy, as nebuli waiting for form, quakes and breathes. And this archetypal draw brings in to cohesion all levels of serendipity, of synchronicity, to see to it that the inroad not only be cultivated, but remained as pure power force, and utilized. Entelechy. Humanism=Source Spirit, in motion. For example:

I am writing right now at the CoffeeCat in Easton. Midway thru this post, a guy who I met weeks ago at a show sat down with me. We met through KJ, who's one of those tipping point people. Tom, the guy, made me promise aloud as he pulled out a chair that I wasn't working. I told him I was, but that I was working on the only work I really cared about. And of course! this guy turns out to be a writer, too. He was published in this e-zine and is currently working on his first full selection of short stories.

I want the tribe I want the tribe I want the tribe. Cuz I need the ones who know. Who get what it means to be on the verge of crack-up anytime you go too long denying who you are...

Rush hour on the Eastern Shore

Dad called at 7:15. Who in the hell is calling me this early I thought which proves I was still mostly asleep since dad's the only one on the road at that time that would think to call while he's sitting in rush hour and he does this periodically so of course, really I knew it was him.

I had been laying here there since 6 anyway, partly awake, partly asleep, mostly listening to traffic. I am not used to so much noise in the morning and it wakes me up everyday the workers going to work in this large small country town, this busy little town road on which I live. Gives me body memories of Seattle and Larry's old place four blocks from the Pike Market, the shrill mechanics of the idling trucks and the air plunging gear shifts that woke me up every morning, and the smell of deisel fumes and the immediate waking craving ahhh sacred hunger for carbohydrates from the market and the fresh seagull air of the Sound.

I worked 12 hours yesterday enrolled close to 20 new students that's a half hour an ESL learner and three each for GED. I make it so the hours overlap but even so, when you have a day like yesterday where four of my six GED learners were disabled, two undiagnosed and two with IEPs, it's all that additional time on the phone and tracking down records and knowing, and hoping you know, who to call. I got home late and for the first time my apartment is whole, unpacked, and clean.

It was so quiet, and so empty of "stuff", so void of projects I didn't know what to do.

I thought about all the spinach in the fridge and how good it would be wilted with garlic and olive oil and sea salt over noodles and some mozzarella cheese. But it was near 9:30 already and so I wound up with some trisquits and soon before I knew it I was out, asleep and snuggled on my own soft couch. I awoke with the most tender feeling of love and awe for me, and my life. So aware sometimes and with the wonder because of the awareness at how precious, how frail, how soft this sweet little flash of a human life.

How grateful I am how grateful I am. I've never ever lived in a place so quiet, uncluttered, so mine--so noisy with the traffic and life and at once, so still. Mama's in the trees and moon right outside my window and thank goodness there's no screens cuz at Chop I got so used to stepping out to the earth barefeet and sweet green, breathing, and saying hello.

Hello, hello, hello.

Morning

The funny thing about wearing glasses? What do you do in the morning when you cant see to find them?

After three weeks at Easton today I am unpacked FINALLY and instead of the place looking like a confused whirl of clusterfludge it just looks like I need to clean up.

I've gotten up blogging two mornings in a row and wanted to again today in my window in front of the sun and grand magnolia tree.

Thought I'd put on my Itunes and when I turned the computer on Fisherman's Blues started

in my head. I hit scramble and guess what was the first song?

Aaaa, fabulous. So it shall be that kind of day...

RANT2

This little girl named Nas and me got so high one night in Caroline County doing her intake to get her registered for classes to prepare for the GED.

It was during the part where the interview happens and I asked her what she loved and if she could have any job in the world what would it be and she said, Poetry.

Then I asked her, do you read? Do you have a library card cuz most of these country kids dont.

No, no she did not, I told her you need to get one and here's why I need for you to read Song Yet Sung by James McBride. Told her you know it's written here, grl, on the shore, Caroline and Dorchester Counties are like characters you dig? It's all about the Underground Railroad and those important parts of our history around here that we dont otherwise get to see, and then she was on and I was on and I had the scrap paper out and she was writing it all down.

Zora Neale? You dont know about Zora Neale? O god ok, so she was a writer in the Harlem Rennasaince and her gift to us was introducing vernacular, which means how people, common people, talk. She changed the voice of literature, pushed the edge the what's accepted she pushed it out she changed and impacted it what it is today. In its most recent changed and being made amd impacted form. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Write it down.

Naz is in jail now or last I heard. But after I told her about Zora Neale that night we grabbed arms cuz both ours each were covered in chills. And she said, See that, that's called Confirmation. Owww, yikes, yea. Wow and the tears were in my eyes and hers were wet, too.

Mike wrote me last night or some time about wishing he didn't throw his first years of schooling and college away. I feel you friend I was red wine dumbed or through the smoke fog and worse with the chemical highs most my way through, what a waste of precious heart and soul and cahs! What a fucking waste of my precious ass resources and time and space now all that money it was that I am signed to that I am put down for all that time under the thumb now for me to "chill?" It was just that final one, my senior year that I was clean and so all of this, the diPrima piece Snyder O'Hara the other night Octavio Paz, that all came later, after college. Upon making that decision you know. To be a writer and follow that line wherever it go.

Self-education, self-education and in depth study of the hungers of self. This is that everlasting source this is that Confirmation this is the information and education that counts.

I found a new blog this morning and was reading his old longings for Poetry and he quotes off another blog and these are Portland people and all that magyc out there and this morning I am missing the left coast and my heart hungers and so it hurts. But read what he quoted this grl saying about Poetry aaaaaaaah Confirmation, and the wet eyes and so good is life with this good kind of hurt...

RANT

We had a thunderstorm last night, a thunderstorm. I was walking home from this writer's gathering at a restaurant 2 blocks from here and the haze on the air was balmy--It's like Miami out here I shouted to the lady beneath the yellow street light walking towards the corner and her car, her name is Marty and she came the latest and was also a first-timer like me but showed up with a definite sweetness of self that settled right in. I was up late with the books and my own catalogs of catalogs of writing and then standing in the bathroom with the one low light on dim and the lace curtain started blowing then I heard the cackle of leaf-wind, and thunder, and rain.

Now it is gorgeous out the yellow morning sun on my back and it is Friday and the last place I want to go is to work which is where I soon have to be.

It was lovely to see Mike who organizes these meetings and how he gently directed the flow of information--the steering or trying to back to the topic of writing and writers rather than just an information exchange between charged and similar minds. He left though and then it was just us the women and we were off and soon it was my favorite topic of race on the shore and I posited mildly tho it's not mild when I talk about it and this is because as my cousin Collin says I care so inherent about it that I dont have to think, it just comes out and if you know me you know then it comes out all gold and fire--that racism is blurred with classism on the shore and that until the subject of race is addressed in this place that desegregated in 1969 the topic of class will always be underscored and so the divides will grow and community value, whole inclusive community value, to allude us and then next we were talking Ruby Payne and the light was on in me and I was pumped and ordered again from within and there it was...

And which is the Work that counts the most?

O, exhausting exhausting world of education and ethics and reform. O stumble stumble path as we turn again and again towards some kind of dirty version of walking heaven. O trying day in out this worrisome worrisome being the change? And this is Poetry? Inherant of living?

The Real Work.

I got home and the emails between these folks were already going and Mike wrote about Hem's Moveable Feast and the circulation of ideas and essentially the tribe that existed between them. And then, of course, I was off and it was all about diPrima and sacrificing everything to the clean line. Which brings me dear reader to the third time in a week that Rant, and the ethics, indisposable to which she and her peers held themselves and those hardline scrappy virtues indelible in this poem. Two weeks ago I read it aloud all firey jazz and crazy at 2am to Brooks we went to sleep with stars in our eyes and here it comes back again, a good morning surprise.

Sacrifice everything to the clean line. This was my twenties. Now I, in my little perch on the corner of life and Poetry and fabulous and outrageous and refusing to back down in my thirties, yet again challenge myself to Learn to Negotiate with the Vegetable body of the Poetic Mind.

click here

Happy Friday.

We have always been beautiful

We have always been beautiful.

We have always been beautiful, fabulous. Even when those weren't the words we were using.

We are timeless, yelling, awful, loud, excitable, on fire. Flaunting. Laughing. Long shadows against the night sky, neon of the flashing traffic lights and yellow and then red. The only sound the swish of air that cuts as you twirl your bag around and around. We are hip-py, how we move at the waist, and talk with our eyes. The noises the men make from the taxis that drive by. The sound of horns, and the click of the heels of our boots, the dampness left late in the night on the city streets and the mist that only sits on the air of this specific city, this specific way.

I come home to a lone dwelling it is the first time I have truly lived alone, in my life. Why are there ones who would ever give me the idea that this is wrong, bad. Why, for one minute, would we ever question this: our beauty, our lives. Why would anyone, anyone be worth giving over this loveliness, why would anyone ever convince us, mildly, wordlessly, specifically, jokingly--to lay this beauty down, or to give it away.

The best thing we can do is gather, be there, tell our stories in our words with our laughs in our eyes our hips or silly games, our flying hands or fists. The way we scream, and shout, and sleep against the glass on the door on the long drive home. The way we remind each other there's more to it...and also, there's only ever this...

We are beautiful, and we always have been. We always will.

Download, on a Saturday, with lots of Coffee and my sweet sweet Ipod

God, you know what? I dont even know. Who used to say that all the time Duuude you dont even KNooow? Kevin James. My old homeboy from the beach and second starlight lover which is to say second man or boy back then who I loved and who loved me cuz of the myth we made in each other. God did we love each other crazy. He's dead now. It was years since we'd talked when he died, too. He came to me in my bathroom at Anngar the week I found out about his OD. Stood there sad and silent in front of me just like I could see him Typical Kevin come to me when I'm naked I thought then cried a terrible cry from somewhere tucked deep and wild and hidden in my gut. It was the same energy him standing there that I used to feel when he'd be so flyed out of his skull wacked on dust or just hella drunk that his eyes would be zombied, this weird wall of grey and hurt in the heart.

Wow I am limbo right now, limbo for sure. Today is the first Saturday I got to wake up in my own little bed in my own little pad and had nothing to do. See the thing is with me I am such a damn perfectionist and especially one of those action-doer people, but also I am very go with the flow like to chill accept the moment and so be deep in peace or joy. And I've found over the years that the two attitudes aren't neccesarily conducive, so I've had to be willilng to be fleixble with my self to learn to maximize and integrate these two great and fine apsects and gifts of self. Which means that while I was up unpacking my office/writing room/sacred space til past midnight last night and dead ready to jump out of bed this morn and finish the project, all I really could do was get some coffee in me when I finally groggied my ass out of bed and then sit down in front of facebook and blogger and so far haven't got off the couch. It's like 11 something now. Sam and the boys are coming down Easton way for a matinee show so eventually I will get up and go do that. I want some pancakes but will settle for chocolate dognuts. By the time the shows over it will be late afternoon I'll need to get fancy to go over the bridge to see my ol grrrls and pay a visit to an old friend of ours from back in the back in the day who opened a downtown premier spot in Baltimore City. I hope he's there tonight it's literally been years, and I've known this cat since 3rd grade.

Really, I just want to chill. I am so fucking tired of packing and moving and moving and packing and unmoving and unpacking and so much tiredness in my bod. This teacher I work with, three weeks ago when our second term was starting and I had to not only pack and move but also place over a hundred new students and meet with all thier teachers and call all of them on the phone Hola hola buscando para Antonio, ooo ooo Antonio soy Kelly de programma de ingles, recueda? O si si hola hola que pasa como estas?? Ahhhh bien bien gracias bien...This teacher during our meeting in her sweet little Minny Mouse voice was like Whaaa? You're moving, again? That's the third time this year!

Right, right. I know.

Mom and dad came down last Sunday after we were up to Grandma's and Pap's on Saturday for this great fundraiser thing put on in the Jefferson hills where you eat plates and plates of Pennsylvania Dutch-Style homecooked food that literally a hundred volunteers have helped to prepare for you and if you dont know what eating like this, this kind of food, is than I certainly cant tell you but please someday be sure to go to Lancaster County and check out for yourself the Amish markets and country stores. Anyhow folks came down and within ten minutes of them being here mom doing my dishes and cleaing my kitchen and trying to be helpful and me stressed and feeling compacted and tight and like an ingrate at the same time, dont you know the fucking closet shelving which means ALL MY CLOTHES all fell down AND the tv stopped working. Within 10 minutes of them being here how funny is that? Thanks to them in fact because within the hour it was all fixed and put back together, and if it'd happened when I was here alone that shit would've been the final factor and I would've melted down and guess what, no it still wouldn't be fixed...

That night I finally got a bed. The next night I was getting ready to leave work and come home and just chillllll and by the time I got to Easton it was dark, which it already was when I left the college and God do I have a hell of a time with the no light thing in the winter and IT's ONLY been two weeks...blaahhhh...and there's Brooks waiting unexpected for me and only last night did I finally get around to taking the sheets off the couch. We were up until almost 3 listening to tapes! Which seriously you would not figure on how fun that can be--it actually makes you really engaged in the process of music listening when you have to search for it like that, finger on the rewind button and all. I have this dub I made off the radio 92Q and oldskool V103! the day Biggie died and I hadn't listened to that in years and years and we listened to it late night well past witching-hour in its almost entirety not talking much just smiling low and rapping along here and there and eyes closed and nodding our heads.

He's the shit.

Next day he had to go to Wal-Mart to buy a new dress shirt and tie so the people in our office couldn't tell he slept in his clothes. I haven't been right since that night and now it's caught up with me: the fact that the winter's here, it is dark, I am alone. Alone in a new place and no one, no love by my side. Most times I am thrilled by that but other times too it's just dark, and quiet, and scary, and alone. Blguguhghg. I am writing and making my space but mostly, for real, I am just looking forward to rest and sleep and back to nothing to nothing to nothing to do. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

There is this house full of youngish thuggish boys across the street from me who remind sorta of Kevin James and the ol beach crew in that they're more punk-hard than thug-hard and sometimes I sit on the roof half out my window and look over at them and sometimes, like right now, they sit on their front porch and look up at the window like they're looking in at me. Every time I look over my shoulder they're down there, smoking cigarettes, looking up. O, Easton, and all this rain and grey. O tired heart and bones and boxes still left to unpack. O everything, that passes away. Ahhh sacred ipod and new songs cuz I just got paid.

La la la de da.

Other Bloggers I Want You to Know

O jesus, this fucking day. Remember all that stuff I said this morning about fighting for it? Well, equally important is sometimes to just throw your hands up, ring the mercy bell, hail the dark heaven then let yourself crumble to pieces beneath, or with, the falling sky.

I LOVE GENIUS's and here are a few. The first saved my ass today because for real when I came in to the office I had this mean woman waiting for me she is bitter and hard-hearted and has yelled or gotten not just a bit bitchy but rude and challenging with me not once but twice on the phone while I'm here trying to do her son a favor by bending some rules to help this kid from the ruin that his life could be for the next several years. And she has me going, and hot as hell before we're even to my cubicle. And what the fuck why do I work in a cubicle in the first place for rude assholes like you!?!? And then it happens I drop hard as hell like how it happens to me sometimes straight flipswitch I will kill a bitch and I cant even see straight the adrenaline and blood is coursing so hard behind my eyes and I have to go Brookes' cubicle I am shaking so hard almost choking on my tongue and he sits me down and doesn't say anything because he doesnt have to because he knows there is nothing at all that can be said I just have to wait it out. And that is it the rest of the day just starts and goes on from there but of course I have students testing and interviewing and counseling with me--with me!? Crazy as hell as I am and they are counseling with me and I remember my job is to serve to lift them up to make at least this little bit of an hour or two of their time a bright spot in their day so at least I am laughing again and able to laugh at me and take it all in stride. But the day has been marked and by the time my last appoitment walks in at 5:45 I want nothing more to do with it so I blog roll, and I want you, dear reader, to stop by and get to know the life and times of Carrot Quinn she is one of the only mythmakers I've found out there on the blogospere crafting her life sure as she is crafting, a day at a time, her song. God she can write. They are long posts I only check in on when I have the time to give to them and attention for the soul craft she is sharing and so today, she saved my life. Or made it at least the triumph that I ache and crave for it to be.

There is this other grl blogger called Davka and today she claimed she cant write shit which is funny cuz this girl doesn't ride the pain of life but blends in as one with it and so transmutes it breath in to fire in to action on the page so it springs up in to and makes your heart leap then hurt then say, oooh, whoah~Which to be able to do that Shaman-style even just once is a gift and a grace but to be able to call that your gift. Well. Her even being out there in the world does my heart well.

Read them, please.

Finally. This guy emailed me today he's walking around Easton with a bag full of books and notebooks that all are also on my about me list on my profile. He is a writer here in Easton, evidently there are more of us than just me and him and the winter is here and this is when we take our power off to our sneaky haunts the funny creaks and lofts of our hearts where, if we are true to what lie there, the periphery the nebuli the slanted changing edge around things, changes. Changes, changes is changing, we the Artists, Who have that power.

So we subsume....

9 Songs: Mix Tape for a Rainy Ass Morning

Here's what I've learned.

I remember the exact moment it was concretized, too. It was the end of this past February, I was snowed-in at Choptank, my phone fell in a cup of tea and short-circuited so I was fully isolated, my heart was slithered and sliced which is a bitter and hideous thing worse than just being broken, and I was coming off five days of a terrible fever and ear/sinus infection that literally had me delirious on and off.

It was a dark, dark time. And then I had a moment, when I was literally laying on the floor in the living room thinking there was no lower I could go, when I realized. Well, I could just get up, and go pay bills.

And damn it if that's not what I did. I got out of my dragged down ludicrously depressed hopeless and numbed out nebulous swirl of funk place and got my bills and all this paperwork that had stacked and felt gnarly consuming and slowly, one by one, centered myself on getting through each piece of it.

Then I got a shovel and started to dig my way out of the driveway, which is when Life met me halfway and the neighbor plowed me out.

So, that's me. how I'm wired, Shit piles up and I feel victimized and bitter about the whole damn mess. Till I remember: just get your miserable pathetic ass up. And go pay the bills. Or, as this morning: and go do your dishes, then go to work and finish your damn LWIS and get your new students registered. This attitude, to Just show up, and be willing for life to meet me half-way, is my interpretation of the old Irish axiom that, especially through the winter, is my motto:
IS THIS A CLOSED FIGHT< OR CAN ANYBODY JOIN?

I'm saying, so long as I'm breathing, I got a fighting shot for the joy and the beauty, the heartaches and the pain...

Which, more or less, is what this morning's special little mix fired-up in me...

1. Cygnet Committee, David Bowie
2. Complimentary Me, Elizabeth & The Catapult
3. The Cool, Cool River, Paul Simon
4. Sonic Teenager, The Took
5. Last Dance, The Cure
6. Slow Down Gandhi, Sage Francis
7. Ball & Bisquit, The White Stripes
8. The Story, Brandi Carlile
9. Take It In, The Waifs

Listen to those three links for some wailen, fighten theme music

Things

Things that relax me:
~the fireplace at Panera, the way the heat feels like a warm gold ball rolling over me like in gym class when we were real young and gave each other massages with the red rubber dodge balls
~jazz, especially Miles and Coletrain; and Old-time, like Count Basie and Billie
~taking a long soak in my own hot bath
~the luxury of a whole hour of morning quiet time now that I am only minutes from work
~hot, homemade soup
~the warm feeling of anticipation that comes from thinking about toasty winter nights with close friends
~the quiet angles of my living room, how simple and appealing, and quiet and right it is
~laughing. a lot. til the muscles of my gut are all crunched up and I have smile wrinkles deep in my face. ("Stardust? Is that you?" "Yes, fair maiden. Lo, I have come from beyond to spread the goodliness of sissyhood...")

Things I forgot about:
~how quickly the grey seeps in to me, the real and dulling effect of how the sudden shrink time of sunlight impacts me
~my certainty of how closely we All are affected by that. I had over half my new students cancel or reschedule on me today. It was so grey today that the color actually seemed to hang on the air like rainforest mist or desert dust.
~what writing does for me. AND HOW HARD it is to force myself in to writing without stopping after I've gone ahead and stopped for a while

Things I'm so grateful for:
~my writing partner, who is all about NaNoWriMo and watching her forge forward and break through her own defenses has made me both so inspired and, at once, given rise to that friendly ol marauder Competition, thereby forcing me to get on my damn game. Which makes me just sooo, soo freakin thankful for Erika and so in awe of how life, after 20 years, circled us back around to each other again. Really, when I get quaked with this much warmth of emotion, I have no words.
~my little apartment. Have I mentioned this lately?
~the unforeseen
~my friends and family. It is November, I am soon to be 9 years clean and sober and the time of month to count thanks is almost here. Amen Amen Amen, there is just so much....

Where it led

Wow if today wasn't one of those days so much back and forth at work how do we maintain and be mature adults again? I haven't written--other than this one project I am working on which is not my novel (and for that side-project I only wrote for 15 minutes, yesterday) since last week. For a person like me accustomed as I am to feeling the muscles loosen--as my old pal Lara says--after I write, well. Trust me when I tell you a week was faaar to long and so I needed to jump on here and doooooownlooooad.

I am here, in my new digs! And very little is unpacked which, everyone continues to assure me, is just how it goes. I dont have a bed yet and am sleeping on a thin magnet pad on the floor. The first night sucked, but each night since I've slept like a dream and am finding my back less and less tight as result. Today I walked to work, then walked home at lunch to put soup on in the crockpot, the gorgeous blue sky singing heaven and the leaves rustling and whispering and cheering along. I love it here, I love my half-open barely emptied boxes strewn all over every possible inch of floor space, I love my walk-in closet with the ridiculous Diva poster of me and KRuss that I've finally had the nerve to hang, I love the 12 foot high windows and morning sun, I love the window I can open all the way and sit half way out to talk to the moon. I love walking to my office or for my coffee or to have dinner with a friend downtown.

I love my cable tv.

Last night I got off work and was actually at the college when I left, so was quite near the outlets. The moon was high and except for some thin lines of grey clouds that seemed to curve against the north sky its cozy lover or sweet soft naptime sheet, the night was clear. It was silent out, and cold. The kind of cold that gets under your clothes. I was doing paperwork which is my least favorite job of all and my eyes were burnt and tired from staring at the data screen under fake light all night. But I got out, in the air, under the sky, and I was so, so happy. I drove to the outlets very nearby and pretended like I was so full of wealth I could buy whatever I wanted and my heart sang at the pretty silk dresses and stiletto shoes. All I really could afford was a hot-chocolate and so I treated my self just before my drive home.

When I got here it was after 9 and I sorted through my books, the hardest of all I own with which to part. I laughed at mindless TV and was so, so happy and full with peace.

When I'm done my soup and this blog I'm gonna stroll down the block to the Night Cat and catch the show that's getting so much hype.

Can this really, really be my life?

Such simple steps. A long walk, simple steps with no sight beyond each footfall of what came next. Simple, but not all easy.

I am loving where it's led...

Blessing of the Beans at Halloween

Well, it's here! My FAVE-orite time o year...and I am hyped to report that I am today's guest blogger over at Manbait, the foodblog run by my ol friend Kelly J. Please check her out and stop by today's post for my oldest and most heartened ritual, in honor of this New Years Weekend (aka, Halloween): The Blessing of the Beans. And thanks Kel for the oppurtunity to get to share.

Packing: 100% on the go

...and then, she begins to dance. She's practicing. A sense of mastery comes out of her, like a strong shiny shoot, because she's been watching carefully and she knows the shoot is going to flower. And she is going to dance, dance hungry, dance full, dance each cold astonishing moment, now when she is young and again when she is old. ~Anne Lamott

You're hard to get a hold of, he says. He's told me this before. And on cue, anticipating my coy defense, he continues: It's not a bad thing, you're out there on the firing line. Living life. 100% in the game.

I start to protest, to offer a rebuttal. To use my words somehow to make light of but still identify for him the 12 whole months of silence and alone, of nothing, doing nothing but sitting quiet, listening, crying dreaming writing screaming praying, alone. Way out there on the river, way out there with just Choptank, way out there with no TV and shoddy stolen Internet and often the ringer turned off on my phone. But he cuts me off again.

No no, I mean I know you go home and do your thing and find your silence and take your time to regroup and find your self, but you do it so you can get back out there to do your thing. To get back out there in the game. You like to go, you like to do you like to be. You dont want anybody who's gonna hold you back or down. It's awesome.

I am stopped, stilled a moment within which says a lot because we've been drinking coffee like the caffeine gods are about to go out on the picket line, I mean we've been slamming the stuff like shots all morning. And this is why I like him, why I've always liked him, cuz he's a witness--good at seeing people for what they are, for all of who and how they are. And he calls it like he sees them.

He's a bone collector. A gatherer strong inside and meant for good, deep things. He's always looking for food and women and song and money because he too is hungry, hungry as hell, like me.

We spent the day together while I should have been packing but sometimes that is the best thing you can do: shine the funny light on your otherwise darkened bones. Be with the people who breathe the life over you, whose air energizes your sinew and wraps you in muscle and makes you more whole.

When I got home I made kale pot and chicken broth which is like a chemical thing, or something, deep in the substance of me: it's what Teena fed me the first two months I was here. When I would come home cold and find hot liquid full of nutrient simmering on the stove. It was late when I was done and climbed in to bed, and early, and dark, when I found myself awake and up and ready to fill the boxes. Ready to pack. Ready to move.

I have this creative warehouse of stuff that's gone largely untouched throughout the year I've been at Chop: boxes with papers and card stock and markers and pencils and pastels and paints and canvas and fabrics and ribbons and stickers, brushes, sponges cardboard and glue. I have a filing cabinet and three bags, two boxes, and one shelf on my bookcase full of journals and writings and datebooks and research and facts. Archives. And six boxes of books. And these are the essentials, what survived after the farm. This is something I have always seen as my great problem: my inability to properly categorize and organize my creative "stuff." Thus, my inability to get up and go.

But I get it now, or at least for today. That that's just me, the unorganized which translates as that which is not meant to be contained. Same as the girl jetting over the bridge to Baltimore out late then up at 10 to kick it in Annapolis all day with a friend. Somehow, right now, one thing totally has to do with the other. Right now, they are one and the same.

I am laughing, smiling, quiet. Dancing. My life is spinning stillness, filled with song.

Starry Like Me: Meditation on the Final Harvest

Hoooooray!!!

Pagan New Year is here, or, at least that is according to me. And if you'll mind me just a while I'll explain (otherwise scroll all the way down!):

I was born a good Catholic girl from blue collar, solid working-class roots. We went to St. Rose of Lima in Baltimore with Grammy and the Mc's when I was a little little girl, and later, to St. Athanasius, literally the church at the end of Church Street where Grammy lived in Brooklyn Park. I still remember the hard concrete feel of the church steps out the side door when I would sit awaiting the adults and look out over the bay to the Key Bridge. And I remember the sound of Grammy, depressed from the loss of her husband, Pop, the Colonel, as she literally started crying with joy on the phone when I called to sheepishly tell her I got awarded one of the scholarships to Arthur Slade Catholic School in the fourth grade. I grew up in uniforms that showed my knees and thighs when I got too tall during pre-puberty growth spurts, and later in uniforms that I rolled at the hip to show the edge of my boxers or thigh-high socks.

It was around that time, high school Archbishop Spalding knee-high trouser socks and maryjane doc martens that the witchy sense kicked in. Mom had it all along, would beg me not to go out certain nights because of a feeling in her gut, only to have me come home escorted by the cops, you know, arrested or car-wrecked or in trouble for smoking weed or some such thing. When it started, that sense, to arise in me I took it for granted, blamed it on the weed or LSD. In general at a young age I thought it separate from me, outside of me--as I'd been taught God to be. Which, ultimately, is how you learn to fear something. If it is separate, other than, or outside of your self.

I was "over" the Catholic thing by puberty (I had no room at the time for a system with such harsh dictates. I was a riot grrrl, and doing lots of experimentation that was "sinful" then, tho it's clear now that what was actually happening was my aversion to anything dogma or stringent institution beginning to show form.) I was a firm and dedicated "aetheist". Which is a lie I was telling myself.... I mean my earliest memories are swept gold at the fringes: mystical marvelling in the basement at Grammy and Pop's, or at our townhouse before my brother was even born, in the backyard at New Cut Farms where we moved when he was an infant. Memories of being stilled from the inside, then revelling in wonder over a deep and boundless inside sense that I remember choosing to just call Jesus back then. At 16 I read Tom Robbins for the first time, this correlated with my teacher, Mr. Keisling, introducing to me Joe Campbell's work on mythological thinking and the Hero's Journey. Acid was making me want to believe in a world magical and within. And specifically Robbins rambled on in such delightful boundless and resonating ways about white people in the Western World, who settled over everything indigenous and natural with a conquering mentality because we were severed from our true roots: of agricultural, pagan ancestry. I really, really liked this!

So it makes at least a little sense that, at age 17, in late October, with little other information than a head full of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Keisling's ditto run-offs on Joe Campbell and the purpose and necessity of myth, that I would get out of my car late one night, feel a sense of breathing or life coming out of the woods, and proceed to mark a four-cornered square off in the drive way by walking to and nodding to each corner, than placing myself within the square. I remember clearly daring myself--to trust what I was doing and to further trust that the woods, or presence of them, wouldn't make themselves known to me unless it were meant to be. And that is it, the one thing that as long as I can remember has been part of my make-up--what I used to call Jesus when I was little. An ever present line of peace and sweet that, tho not always available to me, is still somehow always there. A simple and real ground within that can only be described as I know.

I dont know when or how I fully surrendered to this path, but the thing is: it is mine. I take little bits of info from wherever I go, I take what fits, or what challenges me, because that too is a piece meant to fit--and leave the rest. I subscribe to no specific belief system other than the oneness of things at the base level--energy is neither created nor destroyed, only changes forms--and this is enough for me. I pray to Jesus because I believe archetypes are real, which is also why I find peace in the inner-realization exercises taught by the Buddha, and the reason I pray to the Mama and sit in the wisdom and light of her moon. Mostly I joy and revel and trust fully and wonder in the Great Unknown. I talk to trees and the earth and the wind and fire because of dakinis, or orishas, or elementals, but mostly because I believe archetypes are real. I worship the patterning of things, and at the end of the day beleive my only true Calling is the Hero's myth of my own and my own Divine Becoming as Joe Campbell teaches. The entelechy of potential. Being of service to others entelechal value through this. I believe in patterning, in entelechy, because as I said if I believe in the oneness than I believe archetypes are real. I believe in the power within and getting quiet to captivate and access this power. And I believe poor is the man who cant sit a while, or sees no value in doing so, amid the presence of his own self. The only thing he can know for sure...

Which brings me to pagan new years, or the last moon cycle of the harvest year. I doubt you'll find what I am about to share anywhere else, and that is because I have taken some generalized teachings from astrology, esoteria and paganism and applied them to my own personal experiences in life. I spit them back out know as much for you as for me because teaching/writing is how I better process and learn, how my path continues to open up before me. The New Moon is tomorrow and to me this is the most powerfull moon of the year. Traditional pagans celebrate Samhain, or New Years, at Halloween. It is the time when the "veil" is the thinnest.

In my own life this "veil" correlates to the waning amount of sunlight and the circadian effect it has on sleep and subconscious levels. Which for me, as an artist/writer/poet/shaman/witch is important, because the subconscious level is the place where my dreams happen. Where the details of life, especially that 90% that my brain is busy registering while I'm unaware and just doing my ol thing, get processed and integrated. This is also where Jung believes the reign of archetypes exists in full, our collective unconscious or memory. And so now we have greater access to this place. Likewise, new moon is when literally, the nighttime dark is darkest. So to me, and in my own life again and again, when the dark place comes it is the time of pure subconscious, a time to watch dreams AND especially what issues or joys, what fears or little nags surface in the day to day. Esoteric astrology teaches that a seed thought is dropped during the new moon--at the darkest part of the night the subconscious place aligns too with a archtype, or pattern, meant in an etelecholigical way to grow out of and become you. By the light of the following full moon your subconscious will have brought this seed or pattern more in to fruition in your day to day actions and expereince, and more to the light of your mental awareness.

Agricultural peasants of Europe took advantage of the extra light at October/November's final full moon to crop the last harvests and to put up the seeds that yielded from that year's produce. Rituals were actually harvest times in the field! This is why it is pagan new year: the end of the agricultural bounty for the year, thus time to look forward, to larder up the pantry and batten down the cellar with the bounty for the cold time to come, and as well anticipate next years harvest rounds. Also time to give thanks to the pantheon of Gods, or archetypes, that ruled the fertility cycles of the earth. I believe in our collective unconscious, as well as in the DNA memory of our cells, we still rise and fall according to the the tide of these old agricultural patternings. Later, we came to call this imprinted tradition Halloween.

Personally I have, again and again, experienced it to be true that the new moon preceding the Final Harvest Full Moon is that time during which I can glimpse the fruits of my entire upcoming year to come, because hints of them are so close to the surface of awareness within me. It is such a fabulous time to celebrate our yeild!!!!

So friends, take heart, take stock, be joyful and with gratitude and may you, this weekend, seek the quiet guidance of your Own.

As for me--my little bro's coming down the beach tonight with his beautiful fiance. We are having a fire for his bday--which, AUSPICIOUS auspicious hooray hooray--is also on the holy high day of last harvest new moon!!! What a year my bro must have to come, Woo hooooooo!!

And may you be blessed
and your blessings endings
that circle back to begin again
by this moon may your blessings enlarge
and circle for you this
holy cycle of samhain

harm to none &
blessed be!


O life. I love you.

Mix Tape 2009: Recap!

Sometimes, you put it on shuffle and every other song sucks.

Other times your whole with your self and it's almost like Magic, or, if your me,

it is.

1. Disintegration The Cure, Disintegration

2. Time to Pretend MGMT, Oracular Spectacular

3. Hypnotize The White Stripes, Elephant

4. In the Cold, Cold Night The White Stripes, Elephant

5. Sunset in Your Soul Mia and Jonah, Shine I

6. How the Poet Goes Po'Girl, Deer in the Night

7. Relief Next to Me Tegan and Sar, The Con

8. Leaves That Are Green Simon and Garfunkel, Live from New York

9. Chinese Handcuffs The New Year, The End is Near

10. Tiger Mountain Peasant Song Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes

PS

The Harvest Year's almost over (last moon cycle starts Fri)!

Do you know where you are??

The Impulse, Itself

Mom and I watched Grey Gardens last night, the one with Drew Barrymore that HBO did. I never knew about it, the two Edith Beale's their relationship to Jackie Bouvier or the 1970's documentary about them. The madness of a woman, or women, when dreams get deferred.

Creative madness. Genius. How it levels you, pummels you, brings you to your knees--your knees the only place, of course, and credit here to Erika for the reminder--that, so humbled, you may find your redemption?

The Impulse to me comes on in many different forms. Which is to say, despite the Muse or not, life shutters me sometimes it just does. Ahhh god and to feel that shutter. To feel for that shutter! In meditation It said that is true desire. Photos that capture the lines of distinct, but wordless. Longing or wonder, or boredom. Sacred human fucking boredom! Colors, no matter what form or aesthetic: clothing, a painting, a tree dropping leaves or the grand fall sky. Music that makes me feel like a bullseye by what, or how, it's said. (Right now in fact that would be Cant You Hear Me Knocking by the Stones) Certain people. Conversations. Late night fires. The way the air breathes. Kir and LDubb do it for me a lot of the time. For a long time it was this guy, his name is Josh, he still does it for me but it hurts to feel him gone so most times I just dont know what to do with that. I told my mom today that I remember being 15 in the Goodwill, the smell of the books and the way the little blue corduroy jumpers from the 70's made me feel Like I actually heard the little bells ringing, the spheres of heaven grind in unison on axis' gold in their tilt, I mean the soft moths of my heart fluttered aloft--the Goodwill closet!! I'd discovered myth! I found me! Being on my moon, that too is Muse, or sacred certain Impulse, to me. Being so fervently swelled when my Moontime is here. I mean there are times, like today, that I actually talk like that!

And more, I do things like I did tonight, with a vintage apron on that I found last week and a scarf around my neck that I bought today at an Antiques/Bookstore located on the dusty bottom floor of someone's old farmhome, I waltzed around the kitchen. The scarf is the most gorgeous shade of ivory that I have ever scene, it makes me feel royal, or sophisticated and that is because it is made of lace. It is from 1962. I got it for a ridiculous cheap price. And the paisley apron still had the original tag on it. Mom came in and there I was dancing with the arms of my scarf up off my chest and in the air in either hand. She grinned at me, me back at her. Then we were laughing our asses off cuz, my god, were like the two Edies? That cracked with the madness or the love?

No no, I've been there before. Cracked with the madness. But when it comes from disruption, fear. Repression. I mean I been there. It's like Joan Burroughs said Either you know now what I know (and dont ask me just what that is)...or you just dont. And that's the thing I hate how long it's taken me to trust what I know. I mean, for years creativity was struck up by madness to me, the bad, scary might not make it back kind. Period, it just was. That's what happens when you really follow that clean kissed line far, far out there. Sometimes, it's amazing, but you dont get all the way back. Or safely that is. And then, if like me you do make it back, you do get let down from that lone tree well ever-after you struggle: do you walk the clean Safe line rather than the kissed one? Cuz then like a stubborn ol asshole you still pride your self on your aesthetic, on your discipline, but at the end of the night unwittingly you court the madness anyway cuz you're not being true to yourself and besides no one wants to be a asshole. For me it was never so stable, I had to fight for it, have to. Just for the conviction of kissed. It's easier now, I trust it. Trust the conviction. Trust the moony witchy psychic thing, too, just as much. For me there's no separating either of it out. I can trace back to when I first came to the gate, face to face to claim my own conviction in a open-eyed way. Can look back to the fall of 2006 and a car ride to Baltimore with Patty who gave me the book that I studied on Christ and our conversation about Gandhi. A party in Philly. A night all night long with the poetry it was Fishing Rock still in those days and my friend Paul asleep in the next room all the way from Oregon. A conversation with Kelly Johnson and a prayer, specific, beseeching on my knees. The spiral way I've revisited that lesson of then, of conviction at the far side between the gaping space at the end of my hand, again and again since then.

And that's it. Miserable clean KISSED line. How very fucking hard I've fought to take the kissed, golden, one. How I'll fight for it, now that I'm actually starting to live it these three turns of years flick flick swish goes the page, these three years later. How I'll fight, and surrender, and fight again to surrender, just to keep up now, and maintain....

I'll fight, smiling, even. Gladly!