like little bells...

i laughed out loud at me and then came my cousin's laughter a sound that since we were kids reminds me of elflight and glistens my heart like little bells. i dont have words to describe that feeling, why i even said what i said, we were walking around Canton Square the light of the night was orange from the clock glow and the neon signed resteraunt glare and all the mist from the crazy summer thunderstorm made for a haze and proved first harvest in-between the worlds magic literally was on the air. we were supposed to go see the O's in the allyoucaneat section we were stoked but then it was so wet and hot and eery out so no. we drove around the city in the rain and laughed and ate then got to walking and talking and laughing some more and it'd been a long, long time since we'd hung cuzin Ry and i and it was gold, and good, and so pure...

10 years is what I said followed by some self-deprecating remark and as always it was the self-judging that made us laugh so hard but it's not true i realized later, it's not 10 but 11 years since i've been on the shore. which is the same thing that i catch myself doing, saying i'm 31 when really i'm 32. 32!!! and how that feels not only to miss a year and then to puzzle for a sec and be like o yeah wait, that's not true, but to be an age that inside your head you have an idea about while at once living the fact that that idea isn't really exactly true. and it makes me think of martha, beautiful glamourous melancholy martha with the stories and the wistfulness that would make my heart ache when we would sit together back of the bead store nye beach, oregon, and bead and thread and talk and love. and the mirror she would use to look at the lipstick she wore and how much she still, at 60, loved pink floyd. and it made me also think

of being 19 and going to the community college my baggy shorts and hotgrl shirt and talking to the lady and saying a social worker, that's what i'm going to be. and realizing suddenly, again and again, suddenly each time, that that used to be my dream. and that that is it, that is what i now am....and how good, and hard, that's been....

and thank god for back porch of ocean pines and talking this morning with uncle tim and aunt mary the porch as always still enough, like a dream. and telling them for the first time of all those years ago when i a first year teacher with the beauracrats and how i got so screwed. and how that hurt but it was part of the job and so i learned...and now this year and how much i've learned from kim and also from my dad, but hearing the importance of what uncle tim said managers do it the right way while leaders do what's right. and it's a hard thing to learn, how to be, to really be, and at the end of the day to be at peace with yourself anyhow cuz you are you no matter what and that's what counts and too, where can you grow and where do you just rest, and back off, and accept and learn to love? and this is life yes and wow, how far i've come. and at all i've done and where i've been....and who i am.

and the city she is beckoning. four straight weeks i've run to her to feel the street at one with my flow and she is yearning and swift and i am yearning to go. and godalmighty first harvest is coming first harvest is almost here, it is the greatest, truest, fullest swell of peace i've felt all year... it started when i woke up wednesday sweetness in me a smile on my face cozy and content in bed just me....and the fabulous rustle non-stop in the trees. the whole earth alive with the buzz just like when taurus moon is above i recognized that movement come on deep inside of me: first harvest is here i thought, first harvest or lunar llamas is already here. and sure enough the moon had moved from waning to half-on/half-off and so with that i knew it was true and exalted in what one cant pretend but can only just kow and then could feel the tugging, the great turning of the wheel of the year. of course there was an ear of corn out front in the street when i went outside to take the recycling, go figure. and that night later, a black cat waited, then crossed directly in front of ryan and me. when i told him wasn't it great he got to expereince my little pagan walking dreams with me he said oh yea just great cuz then pannomined a gun to his head then quik with his other hand a splatter of explosion coming out his ear then we laughed again the tinkling bell kind cuz he's a poet and got the inner song like me and moves to the same ol tide....

and that's just it, all that ends begins again and the beginnings are just endings, in disguise.

so it goes, same ol song, silence and crashing, chaos and laughing, all life, sweetness and nothing, all life long....blessed, precious precious song

prayer

make mine a heaven of boardwalks and smiles o inner cascade of relief where silence dwells,
people who roam and wander nothing owned but their own hell look pure-faced people looks in the neon flash of lights not of fright, but this, o ecstasy, o sweet, o common common, life

cotton candy on the tongue or vinegar pucker. and sweat along the hair line that gets wiped away, like tears. i know i am hard to please. o simple dog of life, simple all there is, grain of sand between the toe, how it feels to see the sea. man who's loves as rich as me

o, make mine a moonlit light greased food greased shoulders a shirtless back the endless sea. loud music and all those screams. vanilla ice cream colors so much smiles children clapping fatted hands and make-out kids with the metal sticking out, tornado of merciless love make mine stopless make all this as all this is, as all there is to see, to gain

update

i was journaling this morning. it was quiet in my space and sort of grey but everything was still and the outlines of the furniture in my room were strong and solid. it was the kind of morning where i was acutely senstive to my space. my scarves hanging all around, the color they add in the dull light through the shades. the books on my shelves. the flicker of the candle and the shadow on the wall: to and frow. i was quiet, and aware. contented in the peace that comes in recovery after you've worked hard to get to a new inner understanding, we call it having our side of the street clean. it's been a long process.

i noticed the date on the top line of the loose leaf in my journal and felt a tug of familiarity in my heart. july 27. 9 years ago today i woke up in the afternoon in my dark windowless room in ocean pines. i had a mean hangover and had to get to work in town. the phone was ringing: it was cuddy, from crofton. our boy fannon had died. fannon was my lover. he was my friend. he was someone with whom i'd grown up. he had a heart attack and was gone at 23.

fannon and me, all of us, we liked our drugs.

i'd been arrested for the third time just days prior. it too had to do with partying a wee bit too much. burying fannon was a blur. i didn't cry until 2 months later. i mean really cry, like really let it out. but on august 5, cuz they told me a i had to, i took my last drink. some months later, my last drug.

yea, so, 9 years after all of that and i can barely remember, barely connect in to that way of life anymore, or who i used to be that i needed that--those elixers, as a way to live.

this book i just did this wild and deep, deep work out of, read it. read it, read it, allow yourself to unfold through it. actually take the suggestions and do the work. cuz drinking and drugs weren't my problem, they were my solution. my problem was me and my so badly injured heart. and so many of us have that, the badly injured part, in common. and this book got in to those roots and then at once helped me build my own deep character on which to climb out. i am so, so thankful.

here is a poem in celebration. in celebration of what its like to be of dos mundos, or two worlds. the outside, day to day life. and the inner, more powerful and capable of being so fully awakened life of the heart and spirit. of the calling, of the impulse, itself...

For Alva Benson, And For Those
Who Have Learned To Speak

And the ground spoke when she was born.
Her mother heard it. In Navajo she answered
as she squatted down against the earth
to give birth. It was now when it happened,
now giving birth to itself again and again
between the legs of women.

Or maybe it was the Indian Hospital
in Gallup. The ground still spoke beneath
mortar and concrete. She strained against the
metal stirrups, and they tied her hands down
because she still spoke with them, when they
muffled her screams. But her body went on
talking and the child was born into their
hands, and the child learned to speak
both voices.

She grew up talking in Navajo, in English
and watched the earth around her shift and change
with the people in the towns and in the cities
learning not to hear the ground as it spun around
beneath them. She learned to speak for the ground,
the voice coming through her like roots that
have long hungered for water. He own daughter
was born, like she had been, in either place
or all places, so she could leave, leap
into the sound she had always heard,
a voice like water, like the gods weavng
against sundown in a scarlet light.

The child now hears names in her sleep.
They change into other names, and into others.
In is the ground murmuring, and Mt. St. Helens
errupts as the harmonic motion of a child turning
inside her mother's belly waiting to be born
to begin another time.

And we go on, keep giving birth and watch
ourselves die, over and over.
And the ground spinning beneath us
goes on talking.

~Joy Harjo

i dont know i dont get it

I thought sun breaking through Sangre de Cristo Mountains was enough

She was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company

Be inventive, even sneaky, if you must

The day stretched out before me--not as I had hoped. But not, thank heaven, beyond redemption.

to pure bone and shell

where ocean has carved out

Chiron, Neptune and Jupiter are attempting to neutralize all maya

Do you feel as if your on a cross, divided intensely between four ways, standing in the middle wondering which paths to conquer next?

What begins as discordant is balanced and harmonized through love and cooperation. It just happens

The most radiant woman in the room is the one full of life and experience.

Schedule "home" on your calendar and commit to it

Be open to the unexpected

we educate ourselves, the veil drops, transparency appears

Reminder Kel

kim just called, just like in my dream. take solace in this: every one who you encountered today is grappling with the same things. what secrets in their darkness lay. tomorow is new moon, final dark seed before First Harvest. Of course. Winter Solstice i look at you at the seeds dropped then, where i have been wrong, where have i been true? now is the time that these come so intuitive, if painfully, in messagry to you dear soul. i am looking, we all are, at what we are beginning to reap now that the harvest is half way through.

o god words come to me

this still makes me sick, and stuck because even tho there's nothing left it still feels like there's something i must be able to do. there is nothing to figure out i tell my self and your head is not the place to cram with results, those random imaginings how they morph in to fear and corrupt all which you can not see. it makes me sick so deep in me tonight i will read all my work to one who i love, she will help me see? it's been so much, so much deep work all i can do now is share it and then let it go. move on, away from here. all this guilt. it is summertime, july, i once had so much love.

where did you go?

these graces, my furies. katie once said to me why, kel? there is no why it's just because it's your blessing and your curse. please, please god help me keep going, please help it look different than it does right now

taurus moon in my SIGN is making love with me

i love it, i love when the moon is in my sign. my moon the one i was born under when mama moon happens on by taurus the bull in me lays down and there is nothing like the fawning feeling of to submit.... i love the sweet quench of luna-taurus in my blood, in my air, in my full lungs, how i breathe. how the trees come alive to me, how the earth moves in union with me my heart and feet and how magically it just slows me down slow enough and intuned enuff to be one with its song, how the air last night and the low dark how thick it hung and the orange peach sky and my foot out the window of the versa, how it all was so hot and thick and so sweet. that lovemusk smell of burning firewood and campers somewhere in the dark trees near vienna and then the precious smell of fruit sweet on the bows, o summer and the world is making love. i love it, i let it make love to me....

and i slept good the sleep of good sweet peace the kind that only comes at grandmas or the Pines. and i didn't mind at all when mom's phone woke me at 8 this morn because it is friday i got all my work for the week done i am at the beach my aunt and uncle and me and the cuz's the people who i love. and my dreams one of a love lost a dear friend gosh there've been so many it is funny and precious to me all these loves they all come back i just keep their pics with honor lined up in a row. the recurring dream site of party with stairs and electric no one around and me looking for them and with that charge feeling with so much energy like the bull. and then i found him he was upstairs on a bottom bunk i tried to go to him he was cool with hard stare and pushed me off of him and i sulked away but with no less pride just a bit of honest pain. then next i was on a jet train over the water going to some place tropical it would only take me a minute to get there but it was still in essence a long trip and i was uneasy about leaving at all, i put my shoulder on my travel partner it was my dear friend paul who i honor at top of all for his willing heart to be the change, and he kept directing me to look over at the tropic beach to keep me calm but i still put my head on his shoulder to hide my eyes when the train took off and it felt like we may fall. and marc dykeman who is always in my dreams later he was there, too. also kim was there with a peacefulness when we were talking i dont remember where or about what now only the peace when i awoke and it all came back to me: my spirit in those first waking moments when you have still within you the power of Sleep, in review it smiled and said see it is all always okay....

and love lost and dear friends are always with me because the heart is timeless and where they live.

and it is summer and i am done the real work andalso my work for this week and this is life and peace and love is sweet and today no matter what else i love it all and surrender to it all which is how i always end up letting it make its love back to me.....

elemental

I carried them all, tried to set them free.
Burned her away in the sun, wore cloud,
escaped the walls, was lovely for them,
but fell for me.

Leslie Harrison

i will call him poppa for he is my religion

"Sitting is the act of looking in. Meditation is fundamental, you can't subtract anything from that. It's so fundamental that it's been with us for forty or fifty thousand years in one form or another. It's as fundamental a human activity as taking naps is to wolves, or soaring in circles is to hawks and eagles.

Now the completion of this is understood very clearly in the Tibetan tradition when they speak of the three mysteries: body, speech, and mind. The three things that are closest to us--our bodies, our minds, and our language--are the three things we know least about, that we pay least attention to, that we use as our tools throughout our lifetimes to various relatively limited end, including survival, but there's very little attention to the fact of existence of this in its own right. A simple message of the teaching is that much of the pain, suffering, confusion, and contradiction you encounter in your own life is simply caused by not paying attention to what you have closest to you from he beginning and then using it well: body, speech, and mind.

For myself I personally all I would add to that are some very ancient and to me beautiful and useful ways of handling things: attention to place; gratitude to the physical universe and to all the other beings for what they exchange with you; good health, good luck, good crops. Basic old-style religion.

And, proper attention to your dreams, fairy tales, and myths, as a kind of ancient universal, human psychological lore that you can and do contact."

slow

She's been in treatment 75 days a friend tells me talking about someone she cares deeply about It takes what it takes i say, gentle as possible then try to give the words to what that is like, the subtle realizatoin that recovery is a life time thing, about how til you get this you may as well still be in denial

a lifetime thing is not so easy to get because you're never truly going anywhere it's just you and there you always are, there is no pinnacle or final max you're always always in the middle somewhere. and especially now, how it takes different forms. i started on salary june 1 it was the day i got back from ten days of the road and meditation when the real work come to me in actual physical form, i had before then totally decided to slow my flow but when june 1 got here and i got back from vacay and back to the work of 9 to 5 but for me in my job that's never what it looks like, they the institution not just the college one but the larger one beyond, they really do they have me cuz now for the first time cuz they foot my bills

i never realized when they say job security the security part is actually a real thing

and how change always sends me loopty, trying again to assimilate to the balance within

anyhow i went out this morning and stood in the sun calf-deep in the lawn so green and the air was light and felt like the most gorgeous dress i could ever own. and all i've done since june 1 got here is work on close-out, year-end paper work every waking day and when i've had even a second to spair i've been healing in the saltwater floating along on the miracle glorious of the ocean's bob. lots of lots of salt to heal.

momma and i had our own thing and dad too but he doesn't know it and never will. and finally yesterday two things happened, i finished looking at my side completely in the Real Work it was a long and intensive process and for all those weeks i had to be correspondingly 15, 16, 17, 12, 3 and 32. and it was hard so hard i even forgot what i was doing. and also, yesterday i finally closed out the paperwork for all my students this year, five whole weeks it took me 21 classes so much so much so much of my time. and today i owe my first 20 pages to erika, and am excited for it, cant believe this looks like "When..."

it takes what it takes i tell myself. i stand earth deep and feel the breeze, eyes closed let the sun sink deep in to me. i am opening, i am doing it, this is what it looks like, my time to heal. to open whole and deep like that is two feel as much as you can. i dont like how this feels, all the selfhate i been running from, the mama all about me a salve to cleanse my wounds gentle gentle now precious daughter you can do it i believe in you... i dont like it at all and sometimes it's easier just to numb, soldier marching, and force your way through. it takes what it takes. i miss my friends.

til june 1 it was all tapestry unfolding and resolute awareness: Me! then the whir the heaviness the fast kicked in.

i am slowing down, again.

"Our lives are at once

...ordinary and mythical. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand."

Thus here i meet myself again at this well of me, hypersensitive to this life of me, to the living of me, the daily runnings of in and out, the overflowing, how scary to confront this me all alone, literally, in the dark...how self-centered i am!! we all are! only that the artist knows enough to tell on herself, or else to pretend with one eye shut that it's not true but only claim as much for the funny peep-hole belief, the lie we tell ourselves! that beneath the guise it's for the good of all things, ahhh and so arrogantly call it our Work. and me with the dastardly fights and excuses near the end, aaah pity for, pity of self-obsessed infinitely transmuting me. blessed self-obsession verses self-relief. o world, i dub thee Gold and Bought and Boundless, precious excess of unexamined extreme

thursday

i crept in to your room through your window one night you didnt know it your back was to me mine was to the roof you were looking at my pictures and didn't know that i was there

i saw what you were doing

the moon sees all the city how she moans and sleeps her eyes are always open in the morning i wrote you a poem it ended in grief why's life always like a mourning song? the river is warmer and sweeter for this pain

without him
without any of the hims
or even shes or
what could be's

Mama, i love you,
dance with me

On The Makings Of A Book

erika i would call you but i know you are carolina by now.

and vacation is important and from the looks of it you are getting what you need and thank you so much for the message beneath the moon. your sons look like you especially the oldest one he has an energy of you that i could tell even by looking at a picture from behind

i wrote pages on pages, it turns out it was introduction~good clean stuff too about ghosts but that's not really what it was about it was real, non-fiction and sharp with no nonsense about the points and i was proud of it and up til one every nite this week

then last night my computer it just died on me.

and of course i didn't back any of it up which really i know better it was just so late the other nite and my eyes were so bleary with the tired

i was on the phone with dell for one hour this morning before i got cut-off, then 16 minutes when i called back on hold. and it is not usually my style to yell but i did and with the articulate cut in my voice that i have seen shrink people at their knees. finally i hung up without getting anywhere and with the angry that is so sad there is not even any crying.

i drove all the way to town to the employment office to get my work computer to keep going. i cant quit now, it is all i have. i cant. quit. now.

as to my blog every nite late after i write i see this new blog it is black with pink screen and it is a way for me to let out the primal flow that curves and ribbons through my soul that time a nite after i been so long writing, how it just continues to come and come

i am smoking cigarettes again. and staying up late, so late

after all i've lost, poetry, what would there be if it weren't for you?

Baby Steps

So, maybe this'll sound weird unless you know me. I was walking up the front steps of the porch a day or so ago at Ocean Pines and looked down and had this random thought: I need that picture of my foot to put on my blog. Then the part of me watching me is like, whaaaa? First, I barely have been blogging lately and second--my foot?? Well. It's true that feet have been something of the basis of a life metaphor for me lately--Feet dont fail me now, practicing Standing in my truth, as in sit or stand, dont wobble, and also I have been grounding a lot lately, a meditative practice that has to do specifically with the focus on the feet. Sooooo......(....sorry dear reader you know me and how i digress when it comes to serendipity...)

Earlier this eve I was enjoying an impromptu din-din with the neighbors. They have this killer spot of peace in their backyard. We were sitting in a triangle under a great shade tree watching lightening bugs and sharing sorta sad tales when surfergrl Pat heaved in all big and loud then yelled Check out the moon! Which was alive and lovely there over the sea reeds and us with the startled stuck place in our throats which happens when you forget for a second about life going on all around while you're all busy living....

Which reminded me, tomorrow is our full moon. I came home and checked out astrowisdom's moon messages to hear what medicine mama luna has for us all right now. And all I can say is holy serendipity...The past 48 hours have been a crash test for me in humility. All in the love department. That's all I will say about that other than to express once again gratitude to LIFE and LOVE which are GOD to me for affirming through the moonwisdompage that all is just as it is meant to be. Serendipity has a way of saying When....and after two long days of that experience myself, I read her message on there and felt my spirit go ahhhhh. And most of all, the part about baby steps stood out. And self-love being active, not just an idea. It was a good affirmation, a nudge and nod about how loving ones self means owning all of your self, the good and the not so good stuff you dont want to see....

Be well dear friends. Beeee happpyyyyyyyy. Be luna-lushous.

I'm so blessed. So are you. Read about it and see in to your soul. Then go out and get a soak in the moon. And practice your own little footwork towards love and truth.