"Too Zen"

I walked in to work the week before last and much to my fabulous surprise encountered a buddy from Chestertown who is also a fellow tribe member (Compelled by the Calling). His name is Brooks and I've blogged about him before he's a member of the band The Took (see link at left of page.) Well he just started working in my office! And of course you know soon as noontime rolled around I was like Brooks let's go go go I'll take you out for sun, I mean lunch and out the backdoor we ran like teenagers cutting school. I love having someone alive from the inside there to relate with me now. So last Thursday we were walking--in the sun--to the Amish Market for the amazing freaking goodies this place offers. And somehow we got in to this conversation about Destiny. He kept saying that he felt like everything is meant to be. To which I was like well that's predestination, you know like a very Christian subtext. So what do you think then of free-will? And he's like no no I dont mean that things are scheduled in advance, I just mean they are meant to be because they happen. And of course me, ever the Queen of ruinous depths am like what, huh--I mean what's human implication in all of this thinking? Dont you think that that burdens the individual with more than a wee's bit of mite--to have the responsibility of "choice" on her shoulders? [This was all quite good-natured and high-spirited as we were both in fired-up sunny good-food moods and I for one was busy trying to sort out where I stand in the nature of said discussion.] I start delving in to the tenets of Creating Your Own Reality and so forth, to which he again is like No no no I mean it's meant to be cuz it just happens. Like if it doesn't happen it's not meant to be. And suddenly I stop in a bolt of silence and literal white light sunbeam exalt and am like, OH! I think I get it! You are clever Jedi Sensai!! You are saying the mere simplicity of the eternal moment of Zen. Purely truly nothing to figure out ahhhhh but the second you grasp it..... ahhh gone again. The most simple truth: If it happens it's meant simply because it did. No meaning. Just....experience. Just light simple eternal treasure pleasure of joy in this continuous ongoing moment. Ah, the Chink is in my presence.

Ah, tricky tricky!I Was So Delighted!! I punched him on the arm like a kid in third grade and was like poor thing, you with me, we equal Too Zen! Then we took off running for the back door of work cuz we were late, and didn't want to get in trouble.

Purity Of In-Bliss Eternal Moment May I Never Question You Oh Sacred Truth.

Ah that in recognizing and never wanting to question you are gone...again.....!
Eternal Flower
Eternal Crescent Mama Moon

Eternal Blue

Eternal Star

Eternal Art

Eternal Wild

Eternal Tricksters!!

50 Instructions: Imagination

1.Trust in deep sense, no matter what. Friends will doubt you, family will pigeonhole you. Trust harder.
2.Do not be afraid to cry. Cry a lot. Forget how not to cry. Wonder if anyone ever died of crying. Think you might die.
3.Wonder what you were trusting in in the first place.
4.Hate what you were trusting in in the first place.
5.Get furiously assheaded about trust. Realize, slowly at first, that all mistrust is self-mistrust. All hate is self-hate, all anger is self-anger.
6.Realize one day that instead of crying you are actually giggling. A little bit at a time. At your self.
7.Start to remember trust.
8.Forget a lot.
9.See the network of serendipity that is helping you remember. You are It, It is You.
10.Fall in to fear again. Think you have no energy left.
11.Be amazed by your strength.
12.Celebrate you. And your strength.
13.Realize the friends that are still with you. Celebrate them.
14.Start drawing.
15.Rediscover music and how it charges you from Within.
16.Start to note that the Coincidences really are endless. Celebrate coincidences as they are Imagination made real and revel in the reminder: Imagination is your religion.
17.Fall in love again with the earth. Recommune with the sun, sing long songs at night to the moon.
18.Start to eat your lawn. It is full of Imagination.
19.Start to trust what before seemed like absurdity. Absurdity is a code word for Imagination.
20.Slow your flow at work because it causes you to be blind by your own overdose of self-importance. Self-importance gets in the way of your Imagination.
21.Realize you are laughing a lot. For no reason at all. Laugh at your self. A lot. Laugh with yourself. Love laughter because you think it is the singsongy foreplay of Imagination.
22.Tell your DS (deeper self) you think you know what you love...
23.Notch an eyebrow when It responds are you ready to grow?
24.Find yourself awake for the third night in a row at 4am and finally get in to the Real Work your mentor’s been using to quietly challenge you.
25.Realize in wonder some several days in to the Real Work that all your ideas, all your several years of life-fretting, all your planning, all your wheel spinning has slowed to a sweet gentle hum. All these worries and silent demands and false necessities have been proxy to your Imagination. You can almost taste the richness of the most precious word: Halt. You are empty inside. Deliciously empty.
26.So this is what Gretchen’s words meant The Willingness to Insist Upon Nothing.
27.Celebrate! This is just where you’ve always wanted to be.
28.You didn’t even know this when you set out to head for here.
29.Continue this Real Work with nothing short of profound awe and revelry. Everyday it is something New!
30.Fall in love not only with this Big Empty but simultaneously with Choptank, or place.
31.Watch outside-self start to fall away.
32.Realize you have nothing to prove.
33.Find the weather to be resolute in glory.
34.Delight as you see some of the deepest parts of who you are become more and more commonplace in your day to day world.
35.Allow for others the room to honor them selves.
36.Be ridiculously, lavishly in love with Choptank.
37.Realize the earth loves to hold you in the most tenderest spoon.
38.Realize swimming in the Ocean must be just like being inside the moon.
39.Sit quiet at night outside under the stars.
40.Breathe with the land.
41.Need nothing more than this.
42.Trust in the Process.
43.The process is Grace. Grace is Within.
44.Grace is unestimatable, limitless.
45.Recognize the grandness of this.
46.Laugh at your self some more because you are so very grand that the only word for this is Small. Realize too that grandness is very different from self-important.
47.Continue to forget this a lot, but smile because memory helps you laugh more!
48.Keep doing the Real Work. Take lots of time out to Play!
49.Imagination is just a word grown-ups replaced with Grace. Grace is the only Reality there is.
50.Live this Reality, gently, openly, sparklingly, day by day. Remember to laugh when you forget.

NEW MOON WISDOM

New Moon, Today: http://www.astrowisdom.com/thisnewmoon.htm

Or actually tonight. Like Johnny Cash says what's done in the dark will be brought to the light. As within, so without. Give yourself some quiet time today/tonight to align-up. You know, be about it...

And take it from me, there's nothing you "need to do." All this process ever looks like for me is a willingness to show up to myself. It usually includes some deep breaths in order to get grounded, relaxed, and feel from within. The rest just happens by allowing my own process of being to arise. And with the sun and moon and planet Mercury in Taurus, maybe one thing you could try is get outside with your feet down on Mother Earth. Trust me, I was born with a Taurus Moon, which means I find my inner-life most enlivened by hands-on experience of the earth. Either way, allowing yourself to explore your own personal connection between the natural rhythms and tides of the outer world to your specific inner one is where the real magic is, I promise you.

Go ahead, try....!

No Better Way

…This is actually a commitment to joy. When you feel momentary happiness, or you want to burst out laughing, or you smile for no apparent reason, you are glimpsing eternal reality. For a fleeting moment the curtain has parted so you can experience something beyond the illusion. In time these moments of joy will begin to knit together. Instead of the exception, they will become the norm. There is no better way to know that you are growing…
~Deepak Chopra

Adult Education: Little Explosions OR Beautiful, Amazing

Ok. So here goes me, keeping my perspective. I walked in to the middle school tonight where I was scheduled to do intake and the teacher of the fifth grade, whose room I use, must've had her students paste stickies on the wall with examples of metaphors. She was a great potato of a woman jumped of a post-it on the wall right at me and made me giggle. She was a great potato of a woman. Lumpy? Full of starch? Little eyes all over her body? What?


Here I am, same place I always am third Monday of the month. It's been a slow day--slow on new student intake for the GED program, lots of no-shows and actually even a couple of open time slots, which is nice, and also not normal. I am used to kicking it in to overdrive when I am on the clock for my job: going so fast that it's like a dance, muscle memory, peak experience. Rolled in to one. But today, well today has been lagging. Laborious even, with the clock on a slow honey roll.


Which is kinda the perfect description of my life since I finally completed my move off the farm. Slow and gentle, rolling ever so easily, taking it carefully with me. And I've been so aware of being in the middle of my process. It's as if there was this outter life that I was steady keeping up, and at once also this inner one that only I, and like a couple close friends or so, were truly aware. And basically what's been happening is I've been watching the inner life slowly moving up and out, and the outter one, who I thought I was or at least used to be, is sort of dismantling and fading back in to the surface, sort of composting and disappearing, like the water leftover when a wave crashes, how it seeps with a gurgle and a bubble in to the land. And this weekend I had nothing but quiet time to see the process, to really with open-eyes walk along and be so aware of it all unfolding.

About mid-day today I got some news that I was expecting, that in my soul I sorta new already, but it still made time, and my breath stand still. Like the silence after a bomb when you can see everything blown to pieces but are aware of your own inner silence, and at once of each and every piece. There was a moment of great stillness, which in turn made me even more hyper-aware of each moment that came after it, right up til right now. Which is good, cuz the old me would've ducked and run.


Since none of my students were showing, I decided to sit in on GED class for Jason's lesson on elements and the periodic table. Dig this. Everything, everything in life comes back to being calm. Or what I mean is that the deal with atoms, see all they want out of life is to be content which in atomic terms means neutral. In its natural state an atom is perfect in equal positive and negative charge. But bang an atom with the same amount of protons up against a different atom with a different amount of protons and therefor different amount of electrons--and they're gonna start matching up, all those on and off charges, banging around against and reacting to one another, seeking neutral but likely causing chaos until they can separate back out again and be calm, be one again and natural in who they are. Because in the atoms most natural state, and compelled by the finest fundamentals of life, it is a perfectly equal number of protons and electrons, or positive and negative charge. And all of life is compelled by the fact that they always seek to return to that neutral stasis.

Edward Carpenter said All that you have within you, all that your heart desires, all that your nature so specially fits for you--that or the counterpart of it waits embedded in the great Whole, for you. It surely will come to you. Yet equally surely not one moment before its appointed time will it come. All your crying and fever and reaching out of hands will make no difference. Therefor do not begin that game at all.

It is thunder, and lightening out right now. At our most base substance is perfection, and the elemental code for chaos. It will all go and go, compelled by those most basic and fundamental charges. Amazing. Beautiful. The life of a potato: Saturday I put under the ground these spuds with eyes poking out. Eventually they will grow crazy mats of roots and great breathing leaves with fine white blossoms of flowers glowing atop the brown ground. And all that too, all that wild disruption of growth and life too will eventually fade back into and under the soil. Chaos. Peace. The hyper states in between.

And the process: getting to see it all....

Herbalism 101: This is What You Should Know

Hey Pals


This is what you should know: the green breathing earth is alive out there and waiting for your remergence! You know, emphasis on the merge. As in recognizing, or more aptly, remembering, the inborn harmony of this fabulous ecosystem called Life and the deep interconnection of which we are all equal part...

I am so, so loving life right now. Teena and I have yet to mow our mammoth lawn so it looks like I always wanted Truslow Road to look, like with the tiniest sparkly faces of wildflowers growing every which way and clumps of succulent grass thrusting out of the earth and smelling all fine. I counted eight different kinds of sweet little gentle wildflowers--or weeds--and at least three that I know of (though probably more) are medicinal! Which is rad since I am taking an online herbalism course offered by Angie over at The Herbalist Path. She also runs Authentic Mama, that's the sight where I won the book The Lost Language of Plants.

This past Thursday it was so blue sky clear here, and 60 degrees. The neighbor tilled a plot for me over the weekend so you better bet that on my work break I got ankle, literally ankle deep from all the rain, in mud as I lovingly sung to the land here at Chop to waken it up to me and I to it as I hoed in all the compost from the winter. I am going shopping for starts at one of the many little Eastern Shore back road country farm stands today woohoo I can barely contain myself! Here is my garden-o-gram.

Yesterday it was 70 degrees and I started the day in barefeet and my pjs and a floppy sunhat out in yard. By the afternoon I'd moved to a sundress and the dock, where muskrat hung out literally underneath my feet, chomping away on what I think is watercress woohooo! That was my second upclose--literally I mean two feet away--meeting with muskrat in the past 48 hours. if you recall from a few weeks ago, I learned that he brings spirit medicine of good omens, grace, and wisdom resulted from the seeking of inner counsel. My god if this is not what is happening in my life right now.

Delving deeply in to, and working to witness and clean out some old, outgrown emotional beliefs and tendencies has made all this room for joy, for natural quiet, for art and simple awakening. For my feet on the earth and living life connected, but more and most important, at peace with me beginning from within. And more than anything else in this life that I know from the walking it, I know that the world is interconnected(and therefor inner-connected!) and that indeed every solitary aspect of life is God--or however you define it--but that ultimately there is no separating any of it out. You are God, I am God, that air is God, that muskrat, all of it equal and interconnected and the illusion is we are separate, when in reality we are just merely playing out the landscape of God from day to day, each in various stages of waking up to this most basic of instinctual knowledge and humbling power of existence. This is magic and divinity in its most grace*full form. And I am gratefully and consciously each day tappping more deeply in to this resource and knowledge. And how delightful, as my nature deepens so too does my natural connection to the nature all around me.Whether it is marvelling at the effects, not only physically, of wild chickweed (full of sapopins which are fat emulsifiers) but emotionally and spiritually; or the ability of dandelion infusion to clear up my mysterious skin sensitivity and make me less foggyheaded after a carbs and lots of meat--I am feeling awash with inner walking awareness of the simple divine.

Intuitively, I'm talking in the very membranes of our cells, in the ancient DNA composit memory of our very life we are a part of the earth and it of us. And when we give ourselves, even sparingly at first, to the world around us, I mean feet on the earth, in the river or the concrete of the city block or the high high lawn and most especially to the people, in the form of first from our heart and then from there to theirs, this connection re-livens itself from within.

Night time dreams crispen. Daytime dreams and goals bolster and clarify themselves more naturally. Our very step gains buoyancy. The spirit awakens because we are connecting once again to our most inner and inherent roots. I believe, no, I know quite simply that any place the world is as recked a place as it has become it is because the people living on top the earth, attempting to dominate the wild naturalness of which we falsely believe we are separate from, have lost that inherent connection to the vast and natural rhythms and cycles of growth that emanate in their cells, and beyond to their souls.

Further I believe, and have spent my life to this point learning through the walking of this inner instinct of knowledge, that artists such as myself find creative vibrancy in the form of fine and acute self-awareness when we take the time to rekindle our connection to the earth and her awake and teaching cycles. The cycles of of movement, grace, allowing, letting go, and learning to grow. Thus of the balance of solidity verses fluidity. Going with the flow... There is a literal bounty of life lessons just waiting to be harvested by the heart right out your backdoor!!


So there you are gang. A public service intention for you, my hopes that you may enjoy, as I am remembering to do, the chance of your life-given urge to grow....

Politicin'....

Tonight I drank black cherry floats with Haitian-Creole refugees. One woman with a red badanna over her grey braids proudly showed me how she can now count to ten. The last time I visited we each had tears in our ears because she wrote her name for the first time in her fifty some years of life. The students from Haaay-tee ( I love the way they say the name of their country, it makes me melt inside) wear their jackets in class, heavy winter ones, even on days like today when it was sunny out and 60 degrees. I think this is because the climate is so very different where they're from and many of these folks haven't acclimated yet. In Caroline County you're driving along the backroads: farmfields, woods, farmfields, woods and swamp, farmfields. The swamps smell like sulfur and in the spring the farms are covered in cow shit. It doesn't matter though when it's bright out like today it still makes you smile where your heart is.

You're driving along, and then in the middle of a farmfield you turn right and then next thing you know you drive up on some projects. Lots of little kids out front, screaming and laughing and playing on the lawns and speaking fine english in the street in front of the Community Center. And inside their parents are in heavy winter coats drinking floats and learning to write their names.

Last night Jason, a coworker, sent this over email:

I was doing intake & assessment in Federalsburg today and when I asked the question "Why is getting your high school diploma important to you?" This person responded that it was because of something President Barack Obama said during his address to Congress in February. This person quoted word for word the portion of the speech in bold below. I included more of the text from that portion of the speech just to be sure it was not out of context and I felt it evoked an even more powerful response.

"It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American."

Jay goes on to point out that he is not a Democrat and didn't vote for Barrack. Which, though we've never discussed it I think I already knew from mild comments he's made before. Now politically I try to stay the hell out of it, part of this is because my politics would likely fall so left of radical that they’d circle back around again to the right and this sort of confuses people. But mostly because I think the system, so long as it is motivated by money, will never be based in integrity. So I consider it ethically, thus fundamentally, flawed, and find that debate usually is only ever about making oneself look mighty at the expense of debunking another's right to their own beliefs, and often never really about open-minded discourse. In fact, I find that once a person finds out a couple of my own beliefs they usually then assume they know me downright up and down, and so goes polarity and the lac of bridge-gapping. And in truth, most us humans want the same things, love and security, safety and wellness, to be treated kindly and with respect. I dont know it's all so sad to me sometimes, even though this pigeonholing, I do it, too, believe me!

I believe in deep and vigilant personal responsibility. Insofar as ethics go I believe this, if practiced, extends naturally in to social responsibility. Inner-principal-values walking, or ethos of matreo-centred agroegalitarian deep voodoo, (haha ooops there I go again confusing people.) But anyhow. Here is this guy, this buddy at work Jason, who openly admits he's not a democrat but who works vigilantly and committed and for stoopid piddly compensation as a student advocate. He is without question the number one resource in the county at least that I know of for social service referrals, and is this gentle easy-going teddy bear of a guy who is absolutely adored by his students and committed to what he does. But my favorite thing about him, now, would be his walking ability to totally bust my own extreme lines of political stereotyping and illusion just by being the change he wants to see. Card officially, though gentely, pulled. I am grateful. His walking fires in others the ability, the courage to do the same, as this email above states. And he's mellow as hell, too! Thank god for this, for people like him and our pal Kim, who keep it going and going. I can't say I'll do this forever, but so long as there's black cherry floats involved, and students who can quote their president, I'll get in the ring at least one more day.

And that my friends is as political as it gets.

Waxing Poetic Will Never Kill Me Enough

I seem to find the taste of this air
sour, the face of this plain
as his eyes
quick-changing as the wind

The tide moves in the same direction
home, flagging
and backwards it
never wins

Just keeps on going
on. I must practice caution

if poetry's come back to me
to be my friend.

~~
Good god isn't this always the way? These words they flow like rubble--I mean that, too--like little freakin pebbles out of me sometimes and it is such a struggle to just allow them the motion of letting go. Because--why? Because it hurts if, when, it ends? Like above. I'm walking out of the damn house on Friday to go the beach and they just start coming. I was fighting them, for sure, I knew once they started off I'd go and who knows where I'd get to or just when I'd be back. I've been fighting them a lot. I jotted down just enough, just what's above, got out just enough to let the surge pass so I could get out the door. Got those little bitches of words out like you might, I dont know, force up a long SoCo drenched Saturday night. Retchingly with sore ass knees. If you will...

Ugh I'm having such a bastard of a time committing to me. This is it, I guess, my last little stretch, my last little dusty basement catnap before I step out in to the sun. What I mean--well, here, Jung said it about people like me: "Perhaps alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, that perhaps alcoholism is a spiritual disorder, or better yet, a spiritual condition." Yes it's called ravage. Ravage hunger for life and rapture. Fucking poetry. You bitch-slap me every time.

Perhaps I am being vague. Apologies dear reader as you climb this my mental Jenga topple along with me in my head. (Metaphor tribute to Sarah over at Moleskin Dreams, thanks thanks thank you) What I am thinking about is this--as Jung saw it alcholism, addiction, is a sacred disease. We compelled by its claws either thirst too greatly for life and love and all its bawdy passion and beautiful hard parts and thus drink to settle this ache, or else drink to create it. Either way what a taileating snake are we. But Jung's greater, deeper implication of the disease is the aspect of recovery--finding deep within the wreckage of one's own mass calamity the very seeds with which to regrow. It is the case of he who knows the dark is who shall most value the light. And true true true to form this is my great medicine of Crow--the Value of Truth, or, to paraphrase Herman Hesse, how Everything is true including the Lie. The funny little dichotomy of tiptoe-ing or even outright booty dancing a while with fear, anger, laziness, obsession, dishonesty whatever....that the triumph over these parts is not just a full gaping swallow of the flaws of humanness, but at once the transcendent power deep within the human to overcome herself and her blocks through acceptance of herself and her blocks, when finally she stops fighting herself and sees it she herself causing all the pain. Ahhhh, that we might all bask in this eternal conflicting growth circle of beautiful fucking misery-laden joy...
!!!
Which brings me to poetry. How I live and die I swear to you at the end of the day it is sometimes the only thing that sees me through. And I think that this has everything to do with the actual ethics of poetry, which to me is a very real and personal thing. Ethics meaning the principle of it. Poetry to me is not just words on a page or even mystical deepwetfeelingurges that partly cause me to almost scream. Poetry is a lifestyle choice, a calling, a certain commitment to attitude of reverie and awe, a commitment to taking it all in with a big painful swallow, a commitment or a way to approach life. It is a belief, the truest one, in magic. It is the Art of self-creation. It is the Art of self-deception. It is, at the end of the day, the Art of Self, and Living.

So my last challenge, whenever I get this way wound-up--cuz oh, believe me, I been here before--is reckoning poetry with, to put it contextually, what I know of Jung. The ability, finally, to surrender to the final unknown. To say, okay the cord I am bent all the way around is actually the cord of me, and I need now to let go. I need, ahhhhh okay I'll say it, to let go of this control, or at least this illusion of being in control...

The final final softening that comes in a great gasp when I come down off myself and ask for help. The giving up. At my wits end and my final door, the final Demon guarding the gate is poetry, she just wont let me through. And how long will this dance go on, seeing as how I know it is she who will turn in to my Angel, too?

She's so glamorous with her whistles and her ribbons and her bows.

Ahhh, sacred hunger.

I hate this part....I always forget right here, this last step to the threshold, who I am and what I'm all about. Oh oh oh... "I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." (Aldous Huxley) But you can't change by trying to force change. Ahhhhhhhhhh oh god I'm just about there, I swear I can feel it is this me beginning or just getting ready to almost begin....??

Anyhow. This post was inspired by a marvelous freakin piece over at The Curiosity Shop that had me up with wheels rolling last night. The writing is so fine, but the intelligence is clearly a craft in its self. If you're anything like me you might get why Kelly's post prompted this somewhat random response. And I swear I'm not propping her cuz she shouts me out. Or at least that's not the only reason why....
!
What I'm listening to: DeVotchka. These freaks are my freakin fave.

Here I Am

Today's one of those days. I woke at 4 or so and could not get back to sleep. Which at the time was fine because I got in to this book that my friend and sort-of mentor recommended I read. Indeed, it was eye-opening, all about co dependant tendencies in relationships and identifying said tendencies in your self. For all my own self-awareness, it was really informative and full of little aha moments. I followed up with decent enough quiet time: I got to have my first coffee wrapped in my warm fuzzy blue robe sitting on the side porch, it was just me, the earth's mists, the glorysounding morning birds and first rays of orange sun. And then got meditation time in in my sacred spot, too. And went to Zumba at 8 am, which, for this dancing queen fond of hiphopshakingit in my Michael Jackson moonboot-style weighted exercise shoes, it doesn't get much better than Zumba to start your week....In fact, I had a quote and pics to post about my journey over the past several months of committed body awareness.

But you know what, that'll have to wait.

Remember the other day when I wrote about the hallway being hell but that I for one was enjoying the breathing room? Well, I surely dont want to fully Pollyanna this piece out~right?? I mean would it really be me without an ironic nod of blatant irreverance once in a while?! I mean, let me just tell you. I left Zumba in high spirits and was to work by 9:30, at a local church registering spanish speakers for English classes. It was great, full of joy as it always is. Then on to my office, and a lunch break later during which I got to walk in the sun and under the flowering cherries and dogwoods to the local healthfood store. And right now I'm sipping a dark chocolate mocha at the local coffee shop before I need to go to another local church for more ESL student registration tonight. I mean hell, life, if accounted for in measurement of quantifiable experiences of quality, should be grand. But look. It's just one of those days.

I feel tired, and sort of blue. My friend Gretchen, the mentor you know from above, she's quick to remind me not to be hard on myself...with all the great changes in the last five months of my life, well these little dips are to be expected. And I have lots of blessings, dont get me wrong, I mean I see them all around. But it doesn't change the fact that I am where I am. And I thought I ought to write about it, since honesty for me is crucial to my day to day experience of living this human life as authentically aware and open as I can. And basically, as Gretchen's helped me realize, living spiritual when the going's good is easy. It's showing up when it's hard that counts.

Here I am.

Happy Easter, Happy Spring!

Happy Easter!

Happy finally getting outside cuz it's Spring!

Happy celelbration of the renewal of the eternal spirit!

My favorite thing about the stories of Jesus is that he was a man of the people. Kept company with the livers of real life, valued the differences between all the various classes and backgrounds of people and never made any one out to be better then. Taught by walking it how to forgive, how to walk with integrity standing true in your beliefs, how to walk with courage in your truth, how to walk with faith despite the most challenging difficulties. And Jesus was a political radicalist, too. As my own readings of his stories and myths go, I think he was a pretty rad dude. Whenever I need to practice the actions of true compassion, understanding, tolerance, or forgivness I find myself envisioning him, striving for the warmth of those feelings in my heart as I set my intentions for the day.

I got to celebrate with my family~mom, dad, bro and me together just the four of us~for the first time since 2002. Wonderful.

The pictures of us turned out with too much backlight tho. So much for the easy setting on my digital.....

I even got in a fine walk down the beach today, too. I went for reflection, stillness. And ended up mostly all shiny, full of sun and joy....

Friday Reflections: Truslow Road

There were these tall pines that lined the back end of the land at Truslow. Tall, and with the sweet achy smell of the needles that make you remember a kind of inner quiet you never actually knew but secretly hope for in the woods. Tall pines, like the kind that at night blend in with sky so you are sure they are having a conversation up there in the dark with the clouds that are joking with them with their tender little caresses moving as fast as they do across the sky. Slow down slow down maybe the tall pines are saying to the night clouds, slow down and stay a while here in the dark with our sweet sweet smell.

It was November, the end, when we moved in there, to that 600-square-foot falling down asbestos run deadgreen shingled shack on Truslow Road, back of Truslow Creek edge of Kingstown, Queen Anne's County side of the Chester. A town as I always find them, without a zip code. We furnished that house with third and fourth-hand finds we bought at the local auction for $10, $7, maybe $6 the whole Lot. Once, that $7 bought me a brown banana seat bike from the seventies, a red paint-splattered stool, two brown wood foot stools, a pair of work boots and two quarts of oil. Every Wednesday for months we'd go to auction to see what we could see, neither of us having jobs or any belongings but campgear to speak of, having just ended our travelling days of living on the road. It was an auspicious return home, Full Moon night of Final Harvest, October 2005. Moon so big and pink and white it stuck us where our breath should be as it hung over watching Washington DC. We rolled in from the Mountains charging along Rt. 50 New York Avenue beside the Mall and I secretly sucked in when we got to the city and I felt the energy of the land all around of where I'm from and then, I saw the moon at once too and felt the longing inside give out Home....

Truslow wasn't planned, as so much of the big moves in my life rarely are. One day we just got sick of living with his mom. Ex-stepdad had this shitty little pad going down in the dirt and did we want to upkeep it, fix it up even, and care for the land? The land. It was November so that the land when we moved in was just one big patch of curled brown grass, but a whole-acre full, and with the tall tall trees in the back that never lose their leaves. And it had this dead-zone that vibrated to me: this huge matted mess of vines with prickers and thicket and undergrowth where some time ago some nice hedges or bushes must've been. That's where we will make this home I knew.

And we did: by February first seed we'd set about taking out that thicket just sort of stuck there in the back acre of our land. It covered a good 4 or 5 hundred square feet, almost as big as our house itself, and we worked at it, hard, sweaty in the cold February air but under the early that year sun. I wore work gloves and got tears and lines of red blood anywhere I had exposed skin and at the end of those days I felt for the first time what it feels like to cultivate something with your entire body, something sacred and precious as the eternal land. It was his idea to actually recess the fire pit we were putting in, so that the fire would actually warm from the underside of the ground. And by light/dark time of Equinox that year we had made our mark and called others in to join our Home: a community gathering advertised locally to all to join us for soul warming and music in celebration of grass-roots place-building and being true to as within, so without. I burnt a thick dried twig of sage and set a sacred circle around that fire pit as we completed it, walking three times with the smoke and the song on my breath and my heart open in love and thanksgiving--my friend Turtle Mike was there to help set up with the lights and he followed me round and round and round. It was the first night I ever met Walsh and heard her sing and of course this happened through Josh, and both of them played and stilled our hearts and many people, caught fully by the vibe we meant to capture and release in goodwill that night, had tears of gratefullness rolling down their cheeks. At the very end it rained a light light rain and this was the sign of release and blessing, and at once cleansing, which I was waiting for as omen of great harmony and success.

It was March the following year that those tall pines and that space created in honor and awe and thanksgiving at their feet called out to me again so loudly. Spring herself came quieter that year, waiting to show little peeks of her face til well after first-seed, unlike February the year before. I had been through a long winter. A new position in Adult Ed under a threatening and domineering new boss was challenging me in ways I never before knew. I gave all my energy to it, the job, because I cared about the people and so if there are people involved that is what I always do. But I was dwindling away and miserable inside. In long hours of prayer and mediation I sought to follow the heart of, to transmute with the change, that I knew on my deepest level was attempting to begin. I hated it, though knew begrudgingly that time is time and the process must run its course. And so, in those weeks of March leading to Equinox and New Year for me, I felt called out by the land, by the deep healing energy of Home.

I carried arm loads of books: notebooks and poetry, and a Christian text by Oswald Chambers I was deeply in to, out to the land moist in her pre-spring roots. And sometimes I would read, and if the words started to come I would write and write, but mostly I just laid there, on the ground. With my body feeling the waking of the land. Recognizing a fine softening between my contour and its. And I would breathe, and it was like the first time I ever knew about and tasted air. I still remember quite physically what it was like to take those long healing breaths like that, like, in fact, I was breathing in the whole of that land, of those trees, of all that pulsing of music and light by fire that still I am sure lives right now back there, back of Truslow in the roots of the one time heart of our land.

Yesterday I came home from work and the sun was high enough in the sky to still get to soak in some strong white rays. I ran in to Teena's house, got some books and notebooks, and ran out with my arms full dragging a beach chair awkwardly behind. I didn't read at all, just sat in that deep breathing place of half-eyed slumber.

That last March at Truslow it was as if a great rest had come upon me. And inside that sleep there lived the quiet seedlings of personal truth I wasn't capable yet, and so therefor unready, to be. Indeed, in the time that followed those several weeks it turned out I would need all the energy that I stored during my great and blessed pause with the tall pine trees: by the end of that month we learned that we had to move, and so the adventure continued, and the deep seeds began to unfurl, as we made our way on to Anngar Farm.

Recently my friend Susan told me one of her favorite sayings is But the hallway's hell! As in when we are waiting for the promised window to open after our most recent door has shut, waiting in the hallway sure can suck. But I don't know. Maybe the hallway can be the best part. Maybe it's like the deep reserve of air we never knew we had.

Seed Moon, or Wind Moon

The Full Seed, or Wind, or Pink Moon (after the shimmers of pink buds now spreading over the spring ground.)

A good time for setting new intentions or goals, identifying what is sacred and time to grow in your soul...

Mama mama, wow. I asked her after my still time tongiht to smile for this shot...

moonymama

Hey pals.

It's full moon tomorrow noontimeish on the ol EC. Which means she's apex tonight. Which means you know, what the hell are you doing in front of your computer. Get out there and get some moonlight. Same as the sun, it's good for your soul.

http://www.astrowisdom.com/thisfullmoon.htm

Sweet Messages...

...from my nest

Remember This

We are wordless, wide,

and wise byond time.

Within us is a flame

of truth that never dies.

from Poems from the Heart of Yoga

Go In & In by Danna Faulds

Also, here is a great meditation, seredipity, for the day. Posted by my friend Tim at Tao 1776. He's the best.

I have a date with me me today. Yipppeeeeee!

IncantationOne SelfPhotographs Lessons

Crow lives sometimes in her hair. She tells her not to but she doesn't care.

The hot river is the dirtiest-clean smell she knows.

When the sun goes & the dark comes, the wind stops almost completely.

She is Joker. She celebrates as Witness the week of the Fool.

Not Easily When we get beyond beauty and pleasure, to the other side of the heart (but short of the spirit), we are confused about what to do next. It is too easy to say arriving is enough. To pretend the music of the mountain needs only to be heard. That the dance is known by the dancing, and the lasagne is realized by eating it. Not in this place on the other side of desire. We can swim in the Aegean, but we can't take it home. A man finds a melon by the road and continues up the hill thinking it is the warm melon that will remain after he has forgotten the ruins and sea of the summer. He tells himself this even as the idea of the taste is replacing what the melon tasted like.~Jack Gilbert

I had understood freedom and security. The need to rattle the foundation of habit. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to laugh. I felt invincible, untouchable, I had extended myself, and I believed I could now sit back, there was nothing else the desert could teach me. And I wanted to remember all this. Wanted to remember this place and what it meant to me, and how I had arrived here.~Robyn Davidson

She knows Crow is teacher, and holder of good medicine, too. Of course she forgets that sometimes{sometimes that forgets she}too

Spring, O "Ancient Tongue"

It is so sunny and yellow-delicious and blue out, it is so Spring out.... And today is the slotted day to finally go through the spareroom here at Chop and organize and get rid of or somehow repack and hide somewhere the overflow excess of "stuff" from Anngar. Poor gracious Teena allowing her house to become the cyclone that hit it since I started cleaning out/moving stuff out of the farm.

But it's so nice out.

In honor of a day like today that makes my feet ache to be mud-deep in turned-over soil, go visit Kiva-Rose over at The Medicine Women's Roots. Her wisdom and MotherGnowledge it what I aspire deeply for in myself. Back in Sept 07 when I first was reeling in my own discontent, I contacted her about wanting to go stay a while at her Anima Center in New Mexico. It fell through, I opted for a trip to see my girl Mandy's infant son in Texas instead. Either way it was a time of re-claiming me. But anyhow, read this article, and let the sun, the ancient language of the land and its roots, the poetry of the air out there move you today.

Pardon my repose....

.....but I'm feeling rather quiet, lately