Choptank: On acceptance, and Place

Oh, Chop.

I love it here. When I was little we moved in to a plastic-siding house on a plot of land backed up against a tobacco field. Dad put a swingset out back, first the aluminum kind with the poles that rose up out of the ground when you got to pumping your legs really hard on the swing, then a chic wood one with rope ladders and a see-saw. My uncles and the neighbors came over one weekend and put up a wood fence, the kind with two posts on either side and two going length-wise in 8 x 5 tracks all around the backyard. You could climb it easily, or sit on the top rung of it, and the wood eventually grew dusty and warped from the summer sun. We had a wide yard with grass that was yellow and crunchy and hurt your feet by August. Eventually mom and dad built a small screened in porch on the back of the place and we ate dinner out there and my favorite was cook-outs, which we had a lot off and which I still yearn for, and organize now in the summer all the time. It was the suburbs, we were the fourteenth house in that neighborhood in Dec of 1980 and when we moved a decade or so later there were close to three hundred or so. It sprung a pang in my heart, even young like that, to see the farms lost, or the spots in the woods where we'd sneak off to where the old streams and black bows of trees hung, the creeks with the rope swings that creaked when you swung, the old dirt roads that even then we knew had secrets, all that wild area coveted because it was off limits according to the grown-ups. It hurt a bit even then to see it get paved over and disappear. But we lived the burgeoning 1980's fast-money suburb dream and I was raised to not question it: first VCR, MTV, first microwave, wow convenience and American life sure was fun!

I'm not sure when my mind changed about all of that, or if change is the right word. College on the rural side of the Chesapeake Bay, amid the farm lands and all the little antiquated towns of history run along the backroads here had a lot to do with it. Anyhow I was talking to a friend last night about sense of place. Identity and belonging. I believe that where we are from, regardless our consciousness of it, holds so many clues to the whole of who we are. The consciousness or in other words the regularities of your way of life there, this is so shaped by the land, by the very landscape to which you've grown accustomed. And by landscape I mean in its sociological entirety: are your surroundings city streets, are they strip malls, are they well-manicured lawns with a cement driveway and two car garage? And grown accustomed isn't the right term either, more appropriately I would say taken for granted. As in born in to, never having the experience of knowing anything different.

This morning, out my backdoor, these were my surroundings:

I took my coffee out to the Pier it was so, soo still. The Choptank River. No matter what, she calls my name. Sometimes, when I come home late as I often do, worn to the bone from giving so much of myself to work, I get out of the car and in the dark what I hear is the quiet gentle lapping of her incoming tide. Sometimes, a day or two before a storm, she is so eerily like the ocean--fast-moving--that it puts a chill on me. And then, like today, she is calm and still, quiet, reminding. All is Well. I stood out there breathing it in, with no means of escaping the perfect quiet contentment in my heart. It rained a long, soaking spring rain yesterday and today it is delicious out, about 55 and by the afternoon with all the day's sun everything will be stunning green. How precious, this gift of life and the reminder of the circles. The regularity of the changing, passing tide. The periodic wild currents, the peaked stillness at times, the shocking moments when the water rides far, far out and the brown mud is exposed and the marsh grass grows dry. And I, I here, get to take it all in.

I saw three different muskrats this morning. Three at different times. In all my life I've only ever seen one. Here is the totem medicine of muskrat (from http://lowestoftspiritualcentre.co.uk/Animaltotum.aspx): Grace, keeping ones own counsel, silent observation. In the silence, after watching the third little muskrat float and surface again and again among the reeds, I was startled by a giant splash. Behind me an osprey was lifting out of the water with a squiggling perch speared in its talons. Life eats life, you know? It's how we go, how we grow. I am so thankful to be at this place, and this Place, in my own cycle.

Today is hopefully the final day of moving off the farm. And just so were clear, when it's all said and done and I am sitting out back at low tide with the white metal legs of my beach chair sunk deep in the mud, I will probably at some point jump up, drive an hour across the bridge to the other side, eat some fricken sushi and go to the mall. Cuz life is life, all of it, every blessed part. It's just so amazing getting to walk all of it, eyes opened as they can be to every part of the whole.

Best news yet...

New Moon Celebration

Well, if you visit here with me regularly or even semi-regularly you know that I am on the great serendipity kick of 09 right now. #seventeen-trionoron and gazillion (that's right, i am now making up my very own number system as means of catching the whole): half-awake and dreaming/waking for about twenty minutes or so this morning at, i can only guess, 4 or so. fully awake by 5 when i realized the fuzzydreamstuff had a flatline sense to it and that i must be transiting with the new moon. indeed, i lay there, cozy, warm in my soft sheets in the dark watching my thoughts run off like a kite and then grabbing them by their little squiggle tail just at the end, sitting in the clamor of the thoughts until the stillness emerged from within, and certain as i am sitting here before the sun is up getting ready to go to the gym--again and again in the stillness it was eminent

Time to rise up and be the change you've been striving for
Time to give yourself over to it
Time to greet with joy this new skin

Time to get out of bed was more like it, so down i came, trying out this new pattern of rising super early to start the day--and on the net to read about today's new moon.

And!! And and and!! Please go to astrowisdom and read about the new moon in aries. i can't even believe the likeness of this mornings quietude, right down to the details of being, this very moment, just about to leave for the gym...

Lisa over there respectfully requests that no quoting or paraphrasing be done to maintain the integrity of her site, so please do your self a favor and stop by and check her, and the cosmos around you by which you turn, out

i wish you the most beautiful beginnings, ya'll.....

Long Dirt Road

Signs that I am getting better, # 1:

I was driving home tonight and Feist came on the radio. Pardon me if I am late with this, but I love this woman...and tonight, or this evening dusktime in farm country with the returning ospreys low swooping and the black trees against the mute orange and greys of the sky--Mushaboom came on. To say I was obsessed with song may be rather mild--indeed this past summer it was on constant reply in my head, an antagonistic message I couldn't quite grasp. (The words may indeed tip you off as to why, gentle reader, that is if you are at all a regular follower of these here words/this here life.) But I've never heard this song on the radio before. Well I lately only listen to pop music, silence or talk radio in the car because the slippery thin line between depression and real life for me is so subtle~~so fucking subtle but so MAJOR, you dig? And guilt, shame (which I've learned to re-identify for myself as self-judgment) and pity for me in the months since I moved out are a torturous landslide of boundary-less-ness, much like a brutal watercareening mudslide in a mean torrent of rain. There's just no way to tell once I've slipped over the slope and am stuck swirling within, no land to grab in sight. So tonight I'm driving along and on comes Mushaboom, contextually a song that would call up that ol tramp Melancholy and give her reason to let it rip. But tonight I drove along aware--aware you guys!! of the outline of my heart! You know, like blissing along with the music, aware of the tenderocity of life, actually feeling little tweaks in my heart but sure as those tweaks were one with the song they were one with the trees and those birds and that farmhouse over there, too. My sweet blessed broken healing heart, widened now and once again, even more softened at the edges. And thank god for the edges--that they were there and it wasn't just nebulous, patterned pain... If you have a minute visit this youtube video of her singing Mushaboom it's a trip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDZwThM7vAg
People do not do near enough choreographed dancing! I mean, cmon, I came from the eighties, you dig--the apex of MTV and the step step step kick and up, down and hands through the hair seductively and step and kick and again! Thank god for that, and thank god for dancing in general--which is probably sign # 2 I am getting better: I am doing an awful lot of bad pop song car dancing lately...

Anyhow. I read two excellent posts tonight, Serendipity number 6 zillion and twenty-two and 6 zillion twenty-three. The first, here, is a fascinating succinct read about body energy/the earth's energy, found on flip flopping joy. It took me a third of the way down to realize it was written by a man--there shows my clear gender bias, but his instinct on feminine/divine feminine patterns and injuries is so, so well done--and a full half of the way down to realize it was written about sex!!! Which just goes to show I am not always good at reading the titles. The second, here, is by my first writing mentor's husband, Jeff, and is in tune with my own recent re-discovery of the bliss of the great Mystery...

I have laundry piled up, literally, to my head. Time to go be a grown-up.

I did it my way

So, a brief little bit about serendipity, or synchronicity--just for fun. This is a term started by Jung, but studied well and introduced to common cosmology in a hands-on, follow your bliss way by Joe Campbell.

I'll start a few weeks ago, when I was home ill. I'd been feeling in a creative rut, and ethically confused. One seemed to generate the other, though I can't tell you which came first. What I do know is par for me, when my perception, or inner-awareness is changing and expanding, it always comes first in the form of discontent and break-down of the old. This is a dismantling that I am accustomed to in the winter. It's how I cycle. I think many of us creative, sensitive souls are like this. I also think we need to ban together. We are the myth-makers, out here on the periphery edge of things, in contact with the nebulous stuff of our souls. As all reality starts in this realm, consciousness of this task, responsibility to the "Underground" journey if you would, is necessary. So, winter is more than hibernation, it's coming in to creative union with the darkest, furthest out-there obscure parts of us.

I love right around February--whatever your myth--when first seed starts to spark in the subconscious. The first inner quakings, the first inside longarmstreches of bliss. For me this year there was a great inner conflict going on: I manage enrollment for GED students and students of English as a Second Language for two counties around where I live. I interview, assess, resource manage, advocate for and place all of these individuals. Roughly, that's well over 300 students a year. The toll of the economy, intensified by the clear line between those who come from middle to upper class backgrounds verses someone from working class or poor roots and the opportunities, and/or lac thereof, AND MORE, the narrow-view of bubbled reality that most mid to upper class folks live in was beginning to sicken me. Partly because my own awareness of myself as a well-meaning dogooder, but all the same an ignorant dogooder, was increasingly clear. But I've been a social radicalist for a long time now, ever since I was 14 in my purple riot-grrrl boots, to be sure. So yet again I was sick, outraged. And extremist in my initial solution-thinking, as often I am: I will quit my job because it is inside the system and the system is broke so it aint, ultimately, worth a hot damn and I will commit myself full-fledged to wild woman life, living native and self-sustained off the earth and practicing and learning and learning and practicing healing wisdom and sharing this naturally with whomever I am meant...

And also, amid all this: WHERE?! WHERE is my tribe? Where are the people of my generation, my peers, with the like-minds? Not just the hippie veggie growers or the long hair or tattooed musicmakers, but the activists? And not the DC urban game-players either, I mean the real street-pavers, the ones out there, too, in the funk? And well, don't you know, I was blog-rolling, and decided to look for Earth Path/Wild Women blogs. And there they were. To paraphrase my friend Kelly J: There is no separating out my spirituality from my activism. (Starhawk often has great and similar thoughts on this, too.)

So that's what was happening during my first seeding. Lots of revel around Power. The filling your self up from within kind, extended into a deep craving to extol this right for all people, for all humans: the right to self-empower. And the various -isms of humanity that keep you, or me, or whole groups of us at once, from doing or being able to do so. As result of my sickness, (and looking at the micro of my macro indications--that is, recognizing in my own life where I was giving my own power away) I decided to start treating myself with love and gentle, nurturing care each and every day. So began the synchronicity...

It started with recognizing that message in my illness, and then finding correlating information on a favorite website. Just a day or so later, one of my inner-rants about humanity's
-isms partially made it in on to one of my blog rambles. Later, that very same night, I got an email from a co-worker, Carolyn. She asked me to check out her daughter's online newsletter. I did so, but was far more intrigued by her daughter's webpage. And her youtube clip, (which seriously you must watch, I have a hellofa time embedding shit on here, my bad) which virtually gave words to what I was unable to articulate on my blog that day.

A few mornings later I was lying in bed journaling. I was, as now, in the middle of this perpetual move off of Anngar Farm and so trying to take it easy. After some time, I quieted. Then asked my wilddeepjoyme what do you need sweetness? And the answer from within came clear and resonating, Gardening. I smiled and whispered an intention to be given what I needed to make this bliss real. Moments later I was standing in the kitchen in Ocean Pines with the strongest feeling to blogroll. The first, first blog I clicked on led me to a link, which led me here, which led me here!! That very night I posted about the importance in my own life of using the inner, or higher power. When I turned my phone on after that post, I had a message from this women I've never met about reading poetry at a reading last Friday. I was hesitant, and Friday during the day was a bad, bad day for me. But I went that night and did it anyway. And more doors opened in the form of new connections. But most of all, the poems, once collected, clearly had a theme. And in conversation with Teena, my roomie, late that night we expounded on the glory of said theme: women uninterested in the priority of partnering for the long-term. Like romantically. After that conversation I wound up receiving a text from, then chatting on myspace with a friend entirely coincidentally, about the same exact thing.

Wow oh wow very cool. So. All I've ever wanted out of my life is to look back and say I did my soul's way, authentic. In-bliss. I am loving the serendipitous nods lately, affirming such connections.

Wow. Nothing short of miraculous. I'm like in dazed wonder, shaking at the stillness of reverie, when evry little thing literally quakes with the goodness. Vibrating of its own light cuz for a mere moment you realize all, of this lone eternal moment NOW, is perfectly right.

All I can say is that in the last 14 hours, I've definitely undergone a profound alteration in my reaction to life to quote a rather articulate, and often personally quite harmonic spiritual text of which I am rather fond. That line comes straight out from the definition of what a hands-on spritual experience of the living day by day and growing and knowing yourself kind is. Appropriate. Maybe in the nextday or so my thoughts and fire will align just so as to give words to my late (unforced, natural--Kelly!! perception changes, here on this blog.) To help me better understand my process, you know, by processing....

Today is the first day of light. I must be off to the farm to clean now, to move, throw. And celebrate. Hmmmm--what timing, a genuine good ol spring cleaning of sorts. May new things be let to flow....

A Poem, in celebration of the return of light

It Is the Rising I Love by Linda Gregg

As long as I struggle to float above the ground
and fail, there is reason for this poetry.
On the stone back of Ludovici's throne, Venus
is rising from the water. Her face and arms
are raised, and the two women trained in the ways
of the world help her rise, covering her
nakedness with a cloth at the same time.
It is the rising I love, from no matter what element
to the one above. She from water to land,
me from earth to air as if I had a soul.
Helped by prayers and not by women, I say
(ascending in all my sexual glamour), see my body
bathed in light and air. See me rise like a flame,
like the sun, moon, stars, birds, wind. In light.
In dark. But I never achieve it. I get on my knees
this gray April to see if open crocuses have a smell.
I must live in the suffering and desire of what
rises and falls. The terrible blind grinding
of gears against our bodies and lives.

PS

PS

if i learn any damn thing from this, if it's just one damn thing, may it be how to listen compasionately, with no sense of feeling like i need to tell another how to do or fix or get better or be. because sometimes i think that's all a person needs, some one will listen, just listen, to the quiet sometimes whispered bouts of pain and silence and fear and also the tearful giggles joy and light that are a part of grief.

....So that's what it is...or, F ur anus

So, welcome welcome Spring. Who's outside right now doing a fiery sun dance?

When the vernal equinox comes, light and dark are equally aligned. The sun is poking frisky through the funkin muck. Right?

Little bolts of light, little pokes of bright and joy. But still the whirl of madness and fraught of dark there, not even behind us but equal in part! If we're anything alike though, then winter does it damp dance on you, no matter what.

I am an Aries, cusp of Pisces. Born on the new year, first days in the ruler of the first house. First house rules the self, the individual. So I am dominated by this--the fiery one wrought through by sense of self. And!! Read on....

Uranus in your first house indicates that you have to be your own individual at all costs. If you're unwilling to cooperate or compromise with others, however, one of those costs will be your intimate relationships. Your self-will and need to have your own way is so strong that you may feel isolated from others until you let some of it go. You're often seized by sudden impulses, which neither you nor others understand, but which you feel you need to follow. In general, you and your life are full of surprises. Somewhat nervous and restless, you may find your way through a group or organization. You can be tactless unless there's a fair amount of water or a strong Neptune in your chart. Very intuitive, you tend to be eccentric, unconventional, and spontaneous in appearance and mannerisms. The spirit, not the form of things is significant to you, so you have your own standards of right and wrong. (from http://www.myastrologybook.com/Uranus-in-the-first-house-1st-house.htm)

and...

With a First House Uranus you are likely to seek individual freedom of expression through an inherent need for constant change, new experience and adventure. Personal freedom of action is all-important to you. Unusual, eccentric, versatile, restless, intelligent and intuitive you have a stimulating affect on others, although, at times you may be regarded as odd, peculiar, eccentric and many years ahead of the times. You are likely to be attracted to such subjects as astrology, occultism, hypnotism, spiritualism, psychic research, New Age healing, telepathy, Free Masonry, inventions and electrical gadgetry. Many changes of residence and occupation are likely. Various strange and unexpected personal crises will promote life-experience and character growth. (from http://www.astrology.com/aboutastrology/interpreting/houses/house1.html)

Oh, freakin hoooray.

I gotta tell you, too. I am what, like two weeks in to taking care of my mental/emotional self above all other. Nurturing and loving. And for a while I was doing so by watching with love my thoughts, being gentle and silly with me--separating out from the stress or dismay that is continuous right now, just trying to watch it and be gentle with it, instead: I am moving my stuff off of Anngar farm. The accumulated worth of one life--all my shit in total from 32 years, wrapped up and tied by the unraveled ethical bow of here is the man with whom I will make my future and create the rest of my life because spiritually/earthily/One-nessily we see eye to eye. And of course, that one thing, that one constant that I could count on internally changed too. For a full year and a half I ran from the truth of that change, too. For those of you confused: Yes, I moved to Choptank five months ago. To be quiet and with me, which is all I wanted, to try to confront my longing, my inner-discontent. To challenge myself to be still. But all my stuff--ALL OF ME, remained back at Anngar on the farm. On the land which I had grown to know as me and love as one. So now I am moving, for the third weekend in a row, or more realistically, getting rid of almost ALL of that stuff, cuz where the hell else can it go?

This being gentle with me, the affirmations and what not--see the way energy bands or personality patterns, however you want to see it, work--they are powerfull and subconscious. That's the tough part of unprogramming...the affirmations of course are inauthentic and banal til you can really cut to the core of things. And I do them becasue they work, and right now I need something, anything to get me through. But I'm sick the fuck of it. Tired of even practicing the most gentle first step of softened self-acceptance: the proverbial I'm not all right! Of course I'm not! I get that! I got that when I was so sick weeks ago. Frankly, I'm about ready to call it a day--to go to the beach somewhere and live in the sunshine and let my joy, each and every day, barefoot in the sand body soaked by the salt of the sea, be my own act of daily prayer.

No more working my ass off because I am compelled to save this broke ass allbeit beautiful world. No more worrying about serving others and challenging my self to be kind and loving and giving at work, stepping up to the next level again and again of growth or being the change or whatever the hell else huruguru bullshit I am currently feeding myself in order to subvert the fact that I am tired of being almost, but not quite, "through". No more trying to figure out what comes next and what the hell went wrong. All these pieces of me and others that I care about, of my life and love and joys and work and all of it, the daily giving it away and aligning myself with the warmth within to live the best I can just through today...?! You know what, fuckabuncha bullshit, there is nothing easy about it so why not give in to myself and just go somewhere, and play!? Affirmations that work or not, serendipity that my life is indeed full of, for sure--how the hell about some music and love without expectation good food good eating good friends who dont peacethefuck out on you and travelin and singing and dancing good times....

Here I am, first day of spring gloryfuckinghallelujah irreverence thanks life i know i know we give each other our very best.....

The best of me may still be yet to come? I can't even swallow that right now. If it's in my nature to be self-centered and self-serving, destined always for unusual eccentric versatile restlessness....ughghgh than maybe full throttle self-indulged hedonisticness is all that's left.

Why the hell not??

~~~

What I am listening to: mia and jonah. melancholy music for people stuck on change!?

Why Not? On G.O.D.

I have a Higher Power. I call it that for lac of a better term, and because it is easier and less loaded than say God for example. Once, when I was a kid, I was just home from Sunday school one morning--I remember because I was still in a dress and maryjane shoes--I was probably 6 or 7, maybe 8-years-old. And I dragged my little desk, one of those blue metal things with the opening for your books under the seat and the desk welded onto an arm that came up on one side, over to my closet to stand on and reach something on the top shelf. And this feeling of incredible warm calm came over me and it was almost as if it said, I wouldn't do that if I were you. And I literally stopped what I was doing and responded with my own internal mind talk: Jesus, is that you?

I stood on the desk anyway, and, top-heavy it pitched me forward into an entirely nonsteady wall of clothes which did not stop my fall but certainly softened my landing. My father came clamoring up the stairs yelling because he was scared and I, not for the first time, learned the hard way.

I dont know if it was Jesus. I'm saying, if that's what you want to/like to call it, more power to you, though I've never been comfortable identifying it, or I guess I should more aptly say limiting it by giving it a personality or name, at all. In highschool marijuana was a the placebo that got me to more or less trust in that inner "hunch", and I called it It then. In the years of partying and hanging that came after that I literally followed the coincidences into the gnostics, info on mysticism, paganism and more. By college I had taken to meditating, or preparing my mind for that quiet guidance to grow. And around that time I got turned on to the Celestine Prophecy, and Simple Abundance, and as result grew encouraged about actually owning, and using, and growing my own access to the inner-calm or guidance.

A year or so ago, maybe a year and a half now, I was laying under a tree at Anngar, under my tree (animism is also a tenet I live, again I can't say believe here because I project this onto my subjective reality, so there is no way for me to say it's merely a belief as I live the Oneness) and I was talking to the Higher Power and feeling the receptivity of my tree and my body relaxing into the earth around it. And I said to HP I just really feel like I need some time alone. My next thought was that I was due in town for something at 5pm. At which time I met a random stranger who invited me (I was between jobs at the time) to come to a 10 day, 10 hour a day meditation retreat happening at a camp right outside town, for free. We weren't allowed to talk the whole time. I went. And sat Vipasanna, a form of stringent Buddhist meditation, for those 10 days.

At Vipasanna retreat the guru was very clear that we were not to invoke any higher power or god, no praying or anything like that was allowed. That was tough for me, as I start my day, everyday, with a prayer, and usually (after coffee at least!) settle in for a minimum of 10 minutes of open meditation to align myself with my own inner calm, and then focus my mind on my gratitude and intentions for the day. Vipassana was amazing. I clearly saw the direct connection between somatic emotional wounds and our otherwise unconscious reactive thought patterns that all humans hold. I fully realized the absolute alignment between these unchecked beliefs and illness. And the experience of sitting Vipassana was an amazing challenge, the validity for which I fully understand: utilizing the inner "Watcher" to unkink our patterning, or samsaras, by witnessing rather than running with them, thus disavowing these patterns of ego attachment and thus of their power. But here's the deal ya'll, when I meditate, before I sat that 10 day period, and since, I always first give thanks and then ask that my own Higher (or, to be more factually precise insofar as how I feel it, my "Inner" or "Deeper") Power to be "on."

And here's the point of this whole post: It works. Perception changes, clear healing of thought patterns or un-"kinking", unthinkable coincidences, serendipity like you wouldn't believe. And usually all I do is witness the movement of my mind with love and non-judgement, after having asked my "Power" be turned on. And after a while of that I seek to clear out the inner-noise and sit in peace and thanks-giving. I really try to feel it, to make it warm and gold-feeling inside. Then, and this is key for me, whatever it is that I think I can't do--like empty a six-bedroom farmhouse with my hatchback and no plans for assistance--I say ok HP (or Great Love, or Holy Mystery, or Grand Mama, Deep Power or whatever whatever) take this ****** (insert exhausting life detail here), and thanks for taking care of it in my own highest good (with blessings to all involved etc etc.) Or whatever whatever... (insert grateful expression of faith who cares the semantics here.) And then I really do let it go, and I gotta tell you, always, always the details easily take care of themselves.

It's all a matter of aligning my heart with my faith in that power. Of not needing to know, just trusting. Of recognizing I, the Ego-I anyway, am not the end all. And in that, for me, the Power is vital. No matter how I define it, the words I choose to use or what I call it. It's using it, really with my heart using it, that counts. I believe that this is vibrational. (For one unsciency follow-up on this idea, click here; for a sciency one, here.)

And if your doubting right now, allow me to question: have you ever tried it, really tried it, your self?

Thank god for the sisters

The other night cousin Erin, from Infinite and Endless, texted me was I going to the Pines this weekend? Her and her grls were going down to see their fave cover band. I was like noooooooooooooooo, I wish tho.

Bran and I have to have all of our stuff out of the Farm by next weekend and needless to say, that's a hellatona work. I went to bed that night after she asked me only to wake up next morning with a terrible longing for the sea. So I made some calls, and tugged some strings, and next thing you know here comes Erin, and my poppa, to help me get my stuff off Anngar and into the attic at the beach. So that's how I ended up with her, in the bathroom tonight putting make-up on and being fine. Erin has one of these lip/eye color pallettes with every shade of every shade that ever existed, I'm saying that's like a hundredthousandy shades. It was fun. I complemented her on her artistic abilities with the eye make-up, and she complimented me back...

And then reminded me: when we were kids--or when she was a little little girl that I could dress up like my own personal barbie--I would play Madonna really loud and wear oversized bulky eighties shirts and put ponytails off to the side of the tops of both of our heads and teach her how to put make-up on as only a twelve-year-old to a four-year-old can do.

So here we are, a week before I turn 32 in the middle of me sorting through the last six years of my life and all the scraps of all the different aspects of who you become when you are in a couple and also of who you are when you are in your twenties--and in varying states between repose and sensate overload, between joy and grief so I dont breathe, in silence and the quiet states you dont realize are edged with gold in-between--here we are, me and this girl, me and my family, at the Pines again being glamorous stars.

My family: her parents Tim and Mary my godparents. Teachers by heart and trade, same as so many of my aunts and uncles so that even though I didn't ever want to go in to it or study it somehow teaching is how I process, how I learn, it's really that deep anyhow in my blood. And they are here too and so is my Aunt Sue also a teacher, and me widing the round in some far out isolated-feeling corner on the track of my life, making a turn. Slow as, gentle as, I can. Questioning how I got here, loving my self anyway, and also, where do I go from here?

I go to the Pines for a day. Get my beauty on with cousin Boo. Remember that that is an important part of loving my self too: Fabulousness!

My life gets more and more marvelous every day. My life now gets more marvelous everyday. My life increases in marvelousness everyday.

I love so much, and am so thankful for, my increasingly fabulous life!

So it's been one week exactly since I decided I needed to stop all plans and designs and literally, instead, spend one day at a time in deep, caring, blissful nurturing care and tenderness for me, me, me! Funny how unapalogetic I feel about it, too. I can't ever remember spending this long on vacation from daily stress and worry, concentrating instead only on keeping my mind and heart in a state of ease.

I am willing to take it slow.

So far the only thing I've wanted to do is be outside or to be in my bed--but not in a dramatic I'm hiding from the world way, more like in a cozy wow I feel so warm and gooood luxuriating like this under my soft covers and cozy soft blankies way. Also I am greatly pleased by the local top-40's radio station that I listen to in my kitchen. Really, it is the only station that comes in clear here at Chop: and it serves the Midshore. For those of you who dont know, Eastern Shore of Maryland, the quiet or "slow" side of the Chesapeake Bay, is track after track of farmland/boggy mudflatty swampy (ghost-stuck!) sulfury-stinky creek/farmland. Not much to it. Lots of old generation, conservative farmers--strugglin--watermen, drunks and poor people. And the rich upper-middles who bought the weekend homes and bring the money. And misanthrope wannabe's like me. Who comes from upper-middleclass people who came from working-class people but on my own and in my job I get down on it every day with the working-poor. And this weird station makes me feel I'm back in the County outside Ballmore but without the rap. But that's okay cuz in the decade or so since I moved from there rap got popular so now the top-40 stations are full of that hybrid spin-off hip-pop or pop-hop so I still mostly get a bit of what I love. Because I am a secret huge induglent fan of pop-hop and I believe all kids from the County outside B-more or DC (remember that used to be Chocolate City Baby before getrification happened and it used to be ok to call it that cuz it was a pride thing for people) are. Also the sad thing is that all the county kids are the ones who pushed the working-class or poor, which in Bmore and DC were porportionally black people, out of the cities so that makes me sad to be where I am from. And this is a nerve that strikes so, so deep with me right now--because I am working hard on adjusting my mental scope to concentrate on joy and bliss and harmony but historically whenever I do so I get really down and out because how cansomuch injustice occur and people not feel outraged and hurt and powerless over it. But in my cozy bed-nest recently, pondering this thought yet again but doing so as gently as I could be with myself, it occured to me how important it is to be grateful as I can for all the little golden spots of joy. Grateful as I can be. To see it all, all the hurt, pain, to see it All and not shy away (I work in the Unemployment Office and the UNDERFUNDED Family Support Centers people I got more broke-heart stories than I can usually bare and especially right now--you dig??) To see it all and to, as the writer/artist Sark puts it, to see "The grace in as much as you can see." This is choosing to be the change best as I can be, but more important, and for the first time, ever, for me--I recognize how not just life-preserving, but life-affirming this gentle, thankful thinking is for me. So my new favorite station makes me feel joy and light and also makes me smile without knowing it. It makes me like having dishes to do. I just wish that ALL people could get to focus on this kind-of power*full mental shift instead of having to just focus on where the shit their gonna find food...

Anyhow, I can make no excuses for who I am and where I am right now. All I can tell you is that my days look like this: Bless everyone in my office/work/job with love. Clean up after myself, lounge in my bed smiling a lot at how blessed I am to be in a cozy little nest that I love, and going outside to play. Ooo, and cooking myself good food. Tonight it was homemade macncheese and brocolli yummmmmmmmmmmm.

I am willing to believe that as I luxuriate in my own love and blessings they increase. And those I come in to contact with have a greater chance of feeling fired by one of these sparks.

O and PS, go outside tonight and talk to the moon. It helps a lot and it's wonderful. She's full and she likes it when you do this--go head, try. Also people need moonlight much as they need sun. Good for your pineal gland which in the ether or subtle body is the third-eye.

Kay, back to loving me I go.

That's my grandma and me on my little alter

Moony Mama's Unite. Papa's too.

So, there's this moony/astrology site I really love. It is simple and helpful and extremely informative as to how to use the symbology of astrological archtypes in a personally applied way. Which I love! And I especially, especially love that tomorow's full moon is in a sector that highlights the spiritual/psychic/emotional messages in current physical illnesses, health concerns or dietary issues. So, if you read my spiel yesterday, than you know I just marked another one down for those blessed unseen magic hands...

For anyone who's counting, that's:
~Serendipity: 1 zillion and why not keep going...Verses
~Mundane Life: too many to count, but on the rapid decrease...

Go check her out, Lisa at astrowisdom.com and learn more about all the little miracles at work each and every day

Message in my bottle

There are common concerns I've heard, and usually shared, about moving up the time change and thereby forcing the start of spring. Screwing up our Circadian Cycles and what not. I am born one day after the equinox, and I mean to write it that way: I Am Born, recognizing this time of year always as a time of great rebirth for me. I am one day in to the start of spring, and my whole life, or long as I can consciously remember being aware of "within", I have cycled with the seasons. I am a sunhead, drawn to the light, but born under a Taurus moon, so ruled inwardly by the night. So I flow gently as I can allowing the seasons, and my own deep and personal experiences of them, to inform my soul. I'm born at the Equinox, a baby of perfect union of dark and light. I think these are the marks I came in to this world with, and I seek the balance of allowing them to inform me but only insomuch as trying recognize the "intuitive"-born pathways in to my soul. Last year at the timechange I remember feeling like Milly the Mole: someone turned the lights on too quick!! I was surrendered to my burrow, in deep hibernation doing an awful lot of resting. I wasn't ready to come out yet from my hole. But this year. Woah. I. Am. So. Ready.

This sickness I am just coming through--and by the way, thank you so much all my well-wishers who commented on this blog or facebook or via email, it meant a ton, truly--it was so much more than just a physical thing. I believe in the oneness of the body: the physical and the chemical and hormonal body, effected fully by the mental or emotional body, the subconscious body and the intuitive, the subtle energy body and the spirit. I believe in the full picture of all of these, and I can tell you for sure that my illness was symptomatic of far deeper imbalances than merely fluid in my ears. I was forced during that time of sickness (and time of snow-hostage!) (oh, and during all that, in case the message WASN'T LOUD ENOUGH, my phone got wet and stopped working!) to surrender and to fully hear me. And what I was saying was what I, my deep quiet voice within, has been saying for so, so long. I moved on to Anngar Farm with Brandon over a year and half ago, in fact in June it will be two years. And strangely, the moment we got all our stuff in to that castillo--or castle--which is what my Mexican friend Santiago called the six-bedroom farmhouse that Brandon and I were literally given in exchange for caretaking the several acres of landscaped lawn that came along with it, I began to experience a deep and nagging discontent. I had no words for it, but it kept me up late, woke me up in the dark with blank stares, and caused me endless bouts of un-named melancholy worsened by my own refusal to just listen to what was Within. I kept telling my self just to shut-it, and be grateful for all the gifts you have why don't you?! By October of that year, some four or so months after we'd finally settled in, I had at least allowed myself to hear my inner message: I just want some time to be alone.It made no sense to me. But intensified monthly. Now, here's the thing you need to know about me. I believe in our own deep Authenticity. That we each are alit with gifts specific to our own souls, unique to our own form of song. And it is our duties to listen and align with them and draw them out, and indeed this is how to evolve in to our best selves and serve this world. I believe in constant change, the power of intention, positive thinking and the law of attraction. And most of all I believe that we all are engaged by the same unifying energy, and that that energy exists in vibrations, and that everything, from a thought or intention to the rising-tide, the full moon the equinox a winter's snow or bad news from your best friend, vibrates at a certain level. And at any given moment my being, my holistic whole-bodied being vibrates according to all these many factors of Oneness. And my job is to stay the Conscious Witness so I can align and offer up those vibrations that are unique to me...I believe that in this way Harmony is possible...if even at times it looks like and feels like Divine Chaos. So in this Oneness of things, all movement has it seasons. And finally it came time for me to surrender to that deep yearning: it was all I could do to not scream it at the top of my lungs I just need to be Alone! It logically made no sense but I couldn't fight it anymore, and in fact, I often wonder if fighting that instinct for as long as I did instead of exploring the message of it contributed to the pain that it has greatly caused between me and Brandon. I literally was beginning to fracture inside, to feel depressed and more. And by the time I could take it no more what was left was letting down the person I loved most in the world. And frankly, I had no real reason to give to him.... But there is absolutely no denying that when I surrendered to the deep inner calling and said Yes to it--doors opened immediately. First a new job that afforded me enough money to live on my own, then a home in the vicinity of the new job. The first night I was here at Chop I was busybusy moving all my packed bags off my bed when something suddenly shook me and I stilled inside, and in the utter quiet of those surroundings the inner voice said: Do you hear it? This, this deep silence is what you wanted. And my friends, it is so, so quiet here.

So, I'd love to tell you that I've just honored that quiet since then. And certainly in my own little regular ways I have. But I've also quietly been trying to plot and plan my next move, and then getting frustrated when I can't seem to force those changes. Ping-pong, ping-pong. The more time passes, the more frustrated and full of plans I get. Only to feel exhausted and more confused that ever. I like Louise Hay's term for this--Divine Discontent--and here-in lay the message of my illness: to slow down and just do what I came here, what I quite literally was led here, to do. Be Quiet. Take time to be quiet, in silence, and alone. And trust what will come from within will come in its right time. As all things come as and when they should... Like a foot of snow after you've been home sick for four days. Or the vibrant buds of purple crocus' who so needed some snow melt to grow grow grow... Ahhh, what balance to continually learn and relearn how to strike: balance of the light of knowledge versus faith that in what you can't always see ahead of you in the dark...So it goes so it goes and so it goes..So might it be....

Inside Great MaMa Magnolia, Who Breathes Silence, late-night witching hour with Laura Walsh, Chestertown

las photas

Dudes, soooo much snow. Talk about shell-shocked: schools were closed yesterday for the second day in a row and I ran back to work anyway, just to see a real human face. (That was four days I was home alone sick and then another for snow. Which I prayed for!) Even for this queen of take time to yourself, six days was too much. I was forced to accept A Lot. I have no doubts, I got what I needed, and when the snow came I even went out to make snow angels and revel in the reminder: there is always at work a far larger flow. (When we forget will she ever remind us!) And I am always in the process of fighting it and so fighting myself, or surrendering to it and so letting go into steady movement with the groove.

I've never been ashamed to admit I'm a fighter. It's just tough sometimes to really see the one I'm fighting is always that image right there in the mirror...

Whatever it takes

So, while I was home sick for what seemed like at least a short millenium, I oscillated between bouts of fevered melodrama that felt intense and yucky and mildly crazy--tossing in bed in weird fits of half-sleep--or else wandering stir-crazy around the house with a head full of pressure and nothing to fix my focus long enough for my liking. Except for these couple of things, each of which literally made me laugh out loud.

First, this picture of mom and dad, which I put on my screensaver about a week ago, perhaps in preparation for getting sick and needing to feel comfort nearby? I swear to god, still whenever I look at my computer screen I giggle a little crazily and feel like they are watching me. Is that weird?

Next would be this song, by Fat Joe, which during one of my Aleve-fueled myspace overdoses I uploaded as the number one song on my playlist. Which makes me wonder if the fever really was knocked out by the Aleve. Either way all week long I kept visiting my own myspace page just to hear the first couple bars of the song--and experience my inevitable chessy grin that came with it.
(click on image to go hear the song) pic from hiphoplead.com (consider yourself warned: the lyrics are more than PG)

Then there's this youtube clip, which features Animal in a drum-off with Buddy Rich. I laughed til I cried when Animal finally gives in and just starts yelling. Also, did anyone ever question the fact that they kept Animal chained up when we were young? Again, the hilarity for me was fevered.



Finally, another laugh out loud was it the fever or was it the stir crazy ness who could tell, this youtube link found over on Flame Like Me. Same thing: the funniest part is the all out waillllllll that this little kid lets go...

http://flamelikeme.blogspot.com/2009/02/its-fool-who-plays-it-cool.html

Anyway it snowed out last night, lots. I am still trapped inside, but feel sane and quiet at least today. Still, would someone PLEASE get me to a beach, quick.