Photo Doc

Last night, I saw my first firefly of the season. Today, my first dragonfly. Walking up the dock here at Chop the river wind keeping things cool and light--white trumpet flowers growing in a mass of vines at the edge of the fragmite and water stopped me and grabbed my breath--the energy here, a mere yard from the river, was hot, and green. Summertime. Thick stillness, rich. Fecundity of surge and spirit. I. Love. It.

I am home from my road trip & taking pause to let it all settle in. Maybe I'll write more about it should the words move there way up and out...

For now here's a photojournal full with more shots than most of you could ever care to see. And this isn't even half of them!

Thank you Dhamma thank you road thank you path thank you Way....

Thank you Blessed Nature of my sweet sweet being.

Gone Sitting

~may all beings beeeeeeeeeeee happyyyyyyyyyyyyy~

woooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooooo!!

on the road: asheville

So it was blue skies and seventy driving down the bypass Thursday outta Easton on my way south to the mountains and the big skies and most importantly the open road. I stood in the parking lot of the employment office beaming, arranging my luggage and putting a little blessing on Georgie my car and then standing in the parking lot the drug kids up the corner form me standing outside of their “classes” on a smoke break; me in namaste prayer position saying whatever form of the words that day that came out natural as they did: abandoning myself and my life to whatever the road and my soul folding outwards in front of me was supposed to look like for the rest of the day and the days to come.....

I got in the car and the music was right and the sunshine too and on the bypass just like the girls in the old Aerosmith video who first prompted me on how I wanted to live changed my work clothes while driving down the road, though I stopped short of tossing them out the window.

Inside the bubble of that prayer I understood: even though I am still on the shore and not even to 66W all that happens from here on out is magic because I have opened myself to it and therefor so will it be so....Ahhh, road trip magic: It is as it is. Magic of reality in moment and flexible harmony. So after the bridge I get off the phone and the radio goes off and it is til the other side of the Potomac, Virginia, before I finally turn the music on again because up til them I am beaming in silence and watching the charge charge charging of my mind and mentalness go go go~~as if all the past months are curving up the sides of me fast and whole in big clean chunks all the persons and personas and places and things rushing past some gate that they know I am eager to have them ext right through... I drive til the orange lights of the sky go on against the folded hills of the land down there and stop in Front Royal expecting to camp but the closer I get to the National Forest my head is pounding and more, my stomach tying, too, and I have to go through the whole conversation with myself to talk myself down and mostly get to a place where I can trust: not only is camping not what I want to do right this second, it also feels totally wrong. So I follow the local road back to 66 and soon enough I am in the Shanandoah and the drive is right and the night is right and then later the gold hand pulls the curtain inside me just a touch enough so that I know to follow it and I get off the exit in Staunton, VA, find a brokedown room with a big comfy bed for the $45 I’d budgeted to spend and of course Sex in the City just starting when i get settled in.

And the next day it is blue vibrant and I am quiet and whole and just go go go and the country in Virginia is so good I want cowboy boots. And the girl in the drive thru coffee klatch has shaved punk rock hair and a septum ring and she is so shiny and youngfaced and looks right at me and says You’re so cute! And I say so are you and this is fine and this is right and immediately we are talking about the hardcore band that she is in serendipity nod to me--for in my latest weeks of self-discovery and Real Work as I go in to the teenage graveyard and re-inspect the buried treasures behind my grove of little alters I find that not all of that was meant to be buried and thrown away...

Now I am mountainous--the magnolia breeze and wild roses in through the window then Credence is on the radio Born on the Bayou and I am dancing and driving and beaming and playing hiway games with the other drivers and I am the heartbeat: primal earthy flow in me that dirty primal feeling of roots that I associate with the South that whole sense of to be whole is not to be right or wrong not to be light or dark, just delicate human angel aware of and content with both. And I am dancing and let me tell you the smell of the sweet is so pure I am sure it is just the smell that moment of dark death when the alchemy of birth most finally is able to steal its waking chance...

Then I am to Asheville and me and Kel we hug a long time in the drive way, and soon enough we are again on the road.

And Atlanta and all the tattoos & mohawk hipster yo’d out kids the music and the messages, the reminders and the peace, catching up with my ol girl Michelle and all else....for only me and me to know...

And even though I came to do it alone what I learned so far is that I really needed to just be around my tribe this weekend and more this morning in Kel’s kitchen making pancakes after a late late night laughing and with the joy. Then Kel’s in the shower and I got Paul Simon’s preemptive singing School Yard on the phono in the other room haunting me and reminding me that the poet shaman has always existed and the poet shaman has always got the power. And then of course in the bliss of this moment of getting Me~~well of course this is when Katie calls.....

And now we are back from thrift store pillaging and it is time for to continue on the road.....

Afoot & lighthearted, I take to the open road...

...Healthy, free, the world before me,
I myself am good fortune....~Walt Whitman, 1900

Inverse Relationship Between What Travelling Can Teach of Life/What Life Can Teach of Traveling, Part One:

1. Make plans to attend allout outrageous gathering of likeminds and souls in downtown Hotlanta Memorial Day Weekend. Take off work 10 whole days. Trust that the money will take care of itself because when you trust it always does.
2. Sit or stand, dont wobble. Trust yourself, your instincts, first.
3. Believe in the good forces of all at work behind the scenes. Be about it, expect a miracle waiting to be encountered around the next bend for no other reason than why not?
4. Find those who are there with you engaged by movement and together celebrate and sing. It is no coincidence when, for example, your cousin who is the closest blood you've got to a sister ends up on the road--a continent away--at the same time as you, too. Your knected souls are out for dual adventure.(Really, when you're done reading this, go over to Erin's page at Infinite and Endless and follow her European Adventure with her) Trust in your energies blending and sourcing one another.
5. Blessed be your grlfriends. The earth mothers and time keepers: how we who live deeply always seem to merge our courses at just the right time. Like the sistersoul homegrl you haven't kicked it with in over two years who just happens, same week as your road trip together is planned, to find herself in life circumstances exactly reflective of your own...
6. Trust in the earth and maximize the glory of who you are when you are alone. Add camping, by yourself for the first time ever! in the Great Smokey's to your itenerary. There is nothing a quiet breath in the woods and a night under the raw stars in front of a live fire wont clarify and heal.
7. Anicha, anicha anicha. Everything is changing. Test this: sit still. Close your eyes. Quiet your mind. Find your watcher, the one inside aware that your eyes are closed. Use this watcher to watch the fact that your mind is always a rattle...changing, changing, changing. Sit still long as you can.
8. Stillness is changing. Sign up to sit Vipassana Buddhist Meditation the last few days of your trip to revel in the glory of absolute attentive nothingness.
9. Everything is vibrating, literally humming, with the core energy of life.
10. Tap in to it and dance. Run out the door with three places to be but no agenda at all other than that. To be alive is the hardest choice, and greatest miracle of all. Celebrate and dance, dance your ass off!

Yea! An I'm out...see you in June!

Poems

You let go of me I could feel it but really that is because I am used to my feet they feel like wheels. So when you let go it wasn’t the pounds that I felt unload it was more just a breeze, a breeze and a feeling of certainty at the direction in my feet.

At night I watch the geese fly over the parked combines there are prisms there that circle under their wings. You can’t see them as usual in the night but if you try you sure can see them in the wind.

I wish it could have been different. The holly trees are freezing but still there is green on the limb, and in the white sun and the blue sky even winter can’t steal the red berry away from the pointed leaf. I wish it could have been different I wish this could have been a long walk and the holly trees and pines and parts where the geese flock overhead could have just been our alone parts not when we had to say goodbye.

**

There was a music machine out there in the field I tried for days but couldn’t learn to work it. It wasn’t going to be right without you. It never would have been right. Wait as I did for days it could have played if you had joined me but I get it, that was a long walk for you and also I know how you don’t like it when you have to be cold.

**

Try as I may for days I never know how to say goodbye. It is an instinct in me unnatural as loons in the dark their lone spooky haunted cry. Please, please say no. Please don’t make this when we have to go. Go somewhere instead inside a cave for me and wait; pray, draw pictures, cook for yourself a stew over the open fires. Let me just get the words right heaven knows I don’t want to have to go.

**

Why couldn’t it have been different?

The blood that pains me is just the blood of the berries from the tree. For some it is poison, but for others it is just exactly the right juice that life needs.
12/09
-------------
It was without poetry that she left
It was without poetry that she left him
It was without poetry that she left him
home
alone
Dying
Dying the deaths that death dies without a shape or cause. The vulture’s death, the death of courses, the kind that eats the eyes the eyes that see first before they burn. Burn the burn of burning done, done without expectation without vexation without sight. Because they forgot sight and they didn’t have far to go. Fallen out like rockets burned, just the fuel burst and black smoke left and the smell of petrol on the air. Burnt rubber. Eyes fallen out like rocket holes in the sky. Like holes in the sky eyes. The rocket eyes like fallen horses horses fallen out of the sky, horse hooves beating the ground a soldier’s march a sound of death of death brigade of soldiers marching along the horse hooves pound. The horse hooves pound that echoes in the sky, the skyeyes of wide, widened hope, of new eyed horizon and wizened direction of turbulence. Of turbulence the measure is the sky, the rounds you take, the rounds you take before they come and before they remind you that they are here to take you home. God-damned death bastards pretty as, plain as stone. Burdened, this home this homecoming this tramp walking and this road that they will go. The thunder, the thunder noises of snakes sound, of hooves pound, of eyes blink blink opening reminding she’s still got far left she’s still got to go
4/09

I lay me down

I used to call them babyfaces. Not so they'd hear me, but in my head lived a slew of them: I could let their names drop out of my mouth easily and endlessly as falling rain. And with the girls I sometimes would. They all, punk rock or thugged out or beach hood, had one thing in common: a bright, boyish face and that light in their eyes.

I wanted to, want to, save every one of them. These boys, these sweet angelheaded boys I want to save and will by any means necessary. I will save them by taking them to my bed. I will save them by taking them to my mom's table, or late late in the night in through the back siding glass door.

I will save them loud and quiet, I will save them when they show up sweet and I will save them when they dont show up at all and forget to call. I will save them a million nights, and a million different mornings. I will save them best when they come with the weeds and so drunk that they're part crying but cant even tell.

When did this happen? When did I trade my purple boots and flannel shouts for dubsacs and dime bags, blunts and nickel hits a coke? When did I rush to trade me in to save nightmares posed as a dream?

Today there were three of them. I forgot, I'd long forgot, that they used to be my means. Why tonight, why tonight to come back to me? I had to doublelook at the birthdates, they looked SO young, the sparkling freshface, sweet skin and shiny eyes. One continues to put Miss before my name even though I tell them all, call me Kelly. How could two of them already a been locked up? Already done time? Sweet little babyfaces not one a day over 19.

They want to get their GED's. Two will by July, the other, if he sticks around and doesn't go back to jail, could by the end of the year. Why tonight?

Because one of them I know he doesn't get it, and I have to tell him, cuz if I dont no one else will. And then it's back, it's all back because the I inside that I kept tucked away deep has been blending in lately with the Me that I used to be, and together this dynasty of I's and Me's are surfacing and merging and growing out again not from how I used to be but comfortably as one now within the whole of Who I Am.

So I tell him. Look, maybe no one's ever told you this before but these scores you got tonight, it takes someone special to come in off the streets and do this well, I want you to know how much potential you've got, I want you to seriously think about what you've always secretly thought of doing in your life. I want you to think about it and meet with me again on Wednesday so we can talk more.

Then, to get his attention, I lean back and say you know why I think most young people drop out of high school?

And he stops looking at his shoes and looks up with a twinkle in his eye, why? Cuz their too smart for high school and they're bored. And also they think that it's a waste of time cuz their extracurricular life, you know the one out on the street, is way more real. And they want the real life. They're insulted by how fake school and that whole scene seems.

He smiles wide. Yeah, yeah.

I stop. Sometimes I go on and tell the story about me and my dean the one where three weeks before my high school graduation I chased him around the desk in his office threatening him but luckily Dean Perry liked me, which is exactly what he told me later, and had been telling me for years, and also why he decided to cut me a break. I had just been suspended for skipping a week before. He liked me because in the 9th grade I was making my own zine, or independant magazine, fashioned after the riot grrrl zines that were steady influencing me, my music choices and lifestyle opinions at that time and I was eagerly selling it at school. All the Queens Men was my zine and in addition to it I had several photocopies of Fantastic Fanzine and whatever latest copies of Riot Grrrl I had in my possession. As was the punk rock grass roots way I was giving these zines away to whoever showed mild interest in what they had to say. Some time after lunch one day I got called down to the Dean's Office and I was all quivery inside, flushed and redfaced and ready to launch a defensive attack, and sort of out of control with the frenzy of adrenaline same reaction like I get even to this day. But more, inside what I remember is a staunch and quiet strong feeling of injustice. A simple how can he stop me from distributing these, speech and expression about real life is my right.

The very same real life that can so insidiously make you lose your power. The real life that can without warning or seeming reason slowly shut you up.

Dean Perry condemned me for peddling smut: these were the first days of female musicians using their thrash heavy music to take political stands. Rape, incest, prostitution and freedom of sexuality was all over the pages of both Fantastic Fanzine and Riot Grrrl; by comparison my All the Queen's Men was tellingly more tame. But I stood up for it, I defended it, I stood calm as I could while unfalteringly standing my ground. In the end I was reprimanded for selling goods during school hours. And regardless the hell I would raise and raise from that point on in my good Catholic school, Dean Perry made it clear that he respected me from that day of our very first encounter for my little showing of my own self respect.

That, and he knew I was way too smart for my own good.

When did all that change? All that pride and stalwart conviction in what's right? All that self-respect and belief in me. The grl power and Revolution Grrrl Style Now when did it turn to the men, the men the men the babyboys all wrapped up in tangled meaning in my cusps.

Babyfaces. Babyfaced. With eyes of a fool.

Why tonight? Because why not? Because two years ago this week Kevin finally went to the drugs. My prince, sweet fucking Kevin babyface beachboy love with the sharp sharp jaw. Like my old buddy Konan said when he told me all about it, it was kinda good though, you know? At least his parents didn't have to wait anymore to get the call.

Too fucking smart for our own good.

Because here I am and I didn't even realize it? Still laying my body down. Convinced I can save them all...

Ocean City 1995

Getting Rid of it All

Cleansed again of a season of funk by the Great Mama, this is our ritual now

Amen. Amen amen amen!