"And maybe that's why I love you-

...you notice those things and you believe me when I make them mythical." ~Davka

i just came through this weird nebulous sometimes friendship sometimes love affair and the whole thing is that he made me believe in me, made me believe in the story of me. the things that i hold most dear. which is wild because the reality of me and him was always mostly just a story in my head, one that i told myself. one that he, too, sometimes told me or we together tried to tell each other. there wasn't a whole lot of reality, just a whole lot of what both of us tried hard to want to see.

storytelling is so important. life is nothing if not mythology, and all us, all us broken broken people are just doing what we can to cling to some kind of, or shape what we can of, a meaning. something to hold it all, to string it all together like so many little twinkling, barely there decorative lights that you branch over the cedar tree next to the garden outside in the night in summertime. and sometimes it rains, and sometimes the lights get lost in the dark green, and sometimes you just forget to turn them on.

i was with my homey prandy the other day it's the first time i saw or talked to him since six years ago the day of his wedding, in that time since we've both been in and lost our own hard, hard love. i fell crazy in love with him when i was just 16. we've had a sometimes trippy, often simple, beautiful road together since and i am happy he is still my friend. and he talked a long long while and then it was my turn and when we were both done i told him, i was coming through the dining room this morning and saw myself in the mirror on the wall and thought, i look so old. we laughed cuz the truth was i had just finished talking about spending so much time with cuzin erin and how youthful and good for my summer soulnheart that's been. but the truth also was that it was true--and i said that next. prandy, how? how did we get here, to now, how did it happen that i am suddenly 32?

and that is mythology, and what matters, and also why my truest gift is my story-teller soul. because here, him and we, we spent the four hours we were able to make for the other totally handing the other our bones: the stories of our lives, the important pieces that we hold dear. not the answers, just the steps. the steps we've taken on our paths, which, without neccesarily saying so, held the marks of how much heart in each place we actually laid down. and that is what counts, our own journey. the hero's journey is our own, every one. and how beautiful to me are the people that keep track with us, that help us see the march we're on, every so often, for the bigger version of what it is. no matter the lies or the details that we are busy trying to tell ourselves, no matter the pain of the reality: my heart is beating and bleeding but sharing our bones reminds me, i can feel! I AM Alive!! and this is what counts...our stories are what we own, are all we have...and there is relief in the little bit of medicine of this.

i am so thankful for dear friends. for sharing on their paths. and so, so grateful for what they do to illuminate my own....and today what i honor most is my own right, my own right to my own story and the understanding that i am capable, and most of all responsible to that. that my story truly is mine and the steps i take are up to only me, and my own mthology up to no one else but me to own, how i see things, how and if i choose to look....i loved someone a long time for his ability to see the life in me and that sort of got in the way of me being able to do the same.

hmmm. good medicine doesn't come easy sometimes. that doesn't mean it isn't worth it, tho

dreams of churches

i woke up late except i guess it wasn't really late just super early--i had two text messages on my phone which doesn't mean anything except that i went to bed the first time really, really early which is to stay i didn't even wait up to see what they wrote back. i am surprised to have woken up so widely in the middle of the night because lately i have been sleeping as if for a loong loong time i'd forgotten but recently rediscovered how. but next thing i know it was 2am and i am laying there and i cant sleep and my mind is flat and sort of dull and i dont know i cant tell is that my mind or just the heat? and why, i ask my self, do i always live in places with no internet no air condition and no tv? i thought of what mike said brad told him which is it is a farce to lay in bed late at night when you cant sleep it's just your way of pretending still that your parents rule your world and that you are still, like, only 3.

i got up and chugged some water and laid back down but hated the sheets. they were so hot. soon i was crying this happens some times and tonight it happened next to the bathroom window screen. and it is near fall out and how i love the sound of all those peepers and even without my glasses i could see all the stars. and i wish i could say i was crying for the stars and for the roof right out the window and how it leaks and also for the grass that is grown so tall it scratches and tickles at the same time. but i wasn't, i wasn't crying for the confusion and the beauty of this life i was crying for him and for me, which isn't even to say i was crying for all the hims and hers and mes, tho i guess i was, but really i was just crying because sometimes for me there's still all this greif. and it was the thin kind that tells me there's nothing left and the kind of crying i do when i know there is something way way bigger just waiting inside. and try as i want to be bigger than i am it still always comes down to all about me.

i got on facebook and read people's info again and again, and really, i have some very, very clever friends.

we are all so good, so pure and whole in our brokeness. i love us, all. i love us as much as i do the sun, the river, a night full of wet heat and dry stars. if i could write a book with my heart instead of my words i would just write pictures of all of you and it would light up the page with castles and wine and goblets filled with rain. and our smiles would be diamonds and chandeliers and our pain would be brilliant scales on our arms beautiful as dragons and glowing emerald green.

i am whisking me now and making meals out of myself. it is august the heat is here and for the first time this summer, which for some is almost over but for me is just where it ought to be, i am wishing hard for rain.

ARTISTS take New Moon note...

By the time you read this new moon in leo-sun will already have apexed and passed~~it is round 3 tonight eastern time, but as you know retrospect is the way i like to go so go here to lisa's page(which NOOOOO it looks as if she is discontinuing a harsh bummer but soon enough there will be a blog to follow, good) and read up on tonights voidofsoulcalling. it's good shit and far as creativity goes, of art and using your soul-light and gifts, it is indeed right on time. like tonight after the lameness of those assmunch's in the coffee shop today with their ages upon ages of lifetime wounds it was me at work hanging out with the guatamalans and el salvadorians at the church of god and laughing like the way i only when i'm with them do, then followed by cigs with kim under the hush of the pinetrees--i was moved to give her reiki, and to make of myself more alight by serving and lifting her up. and then we talked long about cycle five in the life of womyn the identity one important cycle of evolution and being the change and i shared with her my own spiral walk and encouraged her to look on her life with much the same. and prandy tomorrow and the last time i saw him was at his wedding six years ago or in the seventh now anyway and this is a cycle unto itself, as well. it will be fun to see him and like coming home.

new moon tonight, and so much stars. i have redeyes from blogpost reading and a heart as big and full as the sky.

Dont read this if you're not up for a little Fire

o my god, i soooo dont get life. i am having this weird thing happen right now and i dont get it. i mean as i speak, or anyhow as i write tap tap tap go the keys here i am trying really hard to flow with it and experience it and not close my self and my full-bodied, full-feelinged life off from it. IT'S HARD. without boring you dear reader, because indeed it is quite detailed, i can only say that i had an experience on sunday that sort of, no, that resolutely made the past not year (which has been the most hectic and full-of-change-and-challenge year that i have EVER, EVER had) but actually 3 YEARS all come together. and that moment of understanding opened up in me like a chasm i've since been readily trying and trying to ignore.

there are two men sitting behind me, directly behind me, at this very moment, in an otherwise empty coffee shop. they are christian. devotedly so. they continue to reference the son and the almighty christ. ok, no prob there, to each his own. but one is talking about the davinci code and how threatening it was to the word of christ. and the other laughs it easily off, reminding his friend it is fiction.

ok, so my digression: sunday started off as normal a day as any. well, that is if you can make room for the fact that my normal at times does mean waking up on a floor where at least seven or eight other people are still passed out, sleeping. it was morning after at my bro's house, day after he and his fiance brought together their wedding party to get to know one another and celebrate. and celebrate we did, until the wee hours, and every late night dancing laughing wild cell of me was fully satiated as result. i went to bed smiling like a worn out but totally satisfied queen of the ball. i awoke with peace and calm and also full of sunday light. i drove my date home. i called two other pals with whom i'd mentioned perhaps having breakfast with, and neither were down to meet so i, noting the gloriously fabulous glow of blue sky day chose instead to drive straight to the beach.

i found parking on 24th, changed in the street, and made my way down the boards and across the hot sand to the waters edge. i took my jewels and adornments off and dove in. i floated and swam a long, long while, washing out the late night no sleep tabacco lunged worn feet and tired legs funk. then i settled down to do what i've spent most of summer doing: staring at, listening to, and breathing the sea.

after a long while of this, when my soul was settled and my spirit at full peace, i picked up the book i recently bought. by an author i like, it's actually a memoir, and i thought i'd read it at erika's suggestion in order to "research" memoirs written by writer's i admire. you know, since i'm writing my own right now. turns out sue monk kidd's memoir, "the dance of the dissident daughter, a woman's journey from christian tradition to the sacred feminine" was all too near to this past three years for me.

i actually had a moment, sitting there feet in the sand slouched way down in my blue beach chair, that i was shaking from the hot tears rolling down my cheeks. it's like i'd forgotten, and indeed i did, how all this, all this: choptank, my job, leaving brandon, all of my Life, got here to what it currently looks like in the first place. see, i'd gotten caught up in the details, the relationships and struggles, the job, the where i live and what i am going to do stuff. and forgot about that day, not last fall, or even the one before, but three whole years ago, when in a moment of absolute desperation i beseeched whatever higher power was out there to put me on the path where i belonged, because i knew i was living the wrong one. one that was flat, without depth or quality of authenticity. and so these years later, this past sunday, sitting there, reading this woman tell my story, i understood in a seamless way how all that's happened since has simply been a deeper and deeper experience of my own grasping for, giving name to, and ultimately claiming my inner-spirit and my own unique humanity insofar as i am a women.

and it is the most vital and true part of my experience, and the hardest thing for which i've ever had to fight, or give words to. and too, it is where i continue to falter when it comes to writing- through in my own memoir. so here i sit today, in the coffee shop, reading monk kidd's memoir again, taking notes and voraciously scribbling my own random confirmations all over the sides of her pages in much the same way an avid researcher would o yes, aha, aha aha...when finally my own juices start to move and twirl and ticktock across my tongue and what do you know in come these two assholes right next to me with their very opinionated ideals. and NOT to say the davinci code was some kind of well written book or that it was even based in fact. no i am not arguing that at all. the symbology of that book to me is what matters, the uncoding so to speak, in our culture of the oppression of, and thus permission for a relevant female mythology is to me the significance of that story. a mythology not to temper or even balance but to complete the dominant male psychological underpinnings of the religous contexts of our society. the tale of patriarchy that exists and how it is only half the experience of this life but one so wholly validated by judeochristian themes.

so here i am, all stoked to get in to my own journey, in to this deep and complex experience of female spirituality and authenticity, and here come these two guys!!!!! as if to manifest my own very real cultural demons. that the value of a very real, very unconscious but powerful feminine archtypal equivalent within our human spirits is FICTION

LIFE
I
DONT
GET
YOU

needless to say, i've gotten no memoir writing done, but at least now i've blown off some clearly pent up steam........which i suppose is what that chasms been all about, anyway.

thanks, assholes

when i'm talking to the great all and giving thanks to Life tonight, i'll be sure to give jesus a big what's up for you~~

"You think you can't write....

...but the truth is, you can't tell. the problem is, no one likes a snitch." ~betsy lerner

so, i'm writing a book.

it's fun, and also very weird. i've written two other ones, both were for college and back then in the face of institution the facts were that i never really gave a fluck. which means i've got in my catalouge one memoir from community college (responsible, simultaneous to a guy who used to drive a red chevy truck and broke my heart, for my very impulsive choice to go to washington college and Write--o love, o sacred music, o one who hears those bells and cries and cries and draws sweet meaning by and by.) that memoir was a virtual tell all of suburban funk and foolery in the eyes of a just barely finished teenager, one who by all definitions partied down and clearly was armed with the arrogance of honesty that a young one without knowledge intuitively calls upon. i had NO inhibitions and for the purpose it served me well. the second was fiction, was my thesis at wac, a novella written a year in to my sobriety and full with the demons and pain of addiction and most particularly the loss of my good friend and homie fannon to the lifestyle. my advisor back then just kept saying how it was very raw it was.

it was, those wounds were fresh and beaming as gold.

it's been seven years since then, almost eight if you count the fall that i first gave vision to my advisor of that fiction. lately i keep thinking about a quote i read by salinger, back when i used to teach in the jail. "there will be a story you want to tell for no better reason than because it matters to you more than any other. you'll stop looking over your shoulder to make sure you're keeping everyone happy, and you'll simply write what's real and true...one day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say to about you. that's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of."

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

i've been locked-up, put-out, broke-up, raving-mad contemptously sad a wise crazee earth womyn lost a hella bunch angry as a wasp and at times sharp as hell. i've made and kept and also lost some phenomenal fucking friends. i've run around in circles where i've actually been known as "spiritual kel". i mean, cmon. when it finally comes down to telling the truth, the real truth is there's not a damn thing you can do to keep your soul from practically forcing it all the way out...

for a person like me in fact, it's the only way to make it through

my friend lara once wrote this excellent piece about how just a few moments of writing after a self-imposed dry spell and she can actually feel her muscles melt loose away from her bones. now, that's it, isn't it? that's fine, fine showing and that for me is just the way it is.

which DOESN'T make it easy, not at all. it just proves my point about how some of us, no matter what, are at the end of the day simply compelled by the Call. and should we refuse it, take no note of that inner longing or worse work to deny our most divine, most sacred hunger? well i know, this i know for certain: there is no misery more severe.

so. tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth.

i will flesh out my experiences now, or shall continue. shall flesh out the Me i hold most dear...

what i'm listening to now, cuz i woke up with it playing in my head:
dylan's ring them bells

On the shoulders of Giants

Being a human is hard, right? There are no instruction manuals on this thing, this great big boundless craft we're all busy trying to navigate, encompassing-as-all, this engine of Life so raring to go that sometimes it's sweet enough just to feel the wind through our hair, and then others, ooooo the rotten goodness of stagnation or of storm....I love it, right? But it's hard, too.

Relationships are hard, being yourself and then allowing yourself and others room enough for the same. Like how bout when your close with people in that intimate way so that they know you even for your ingnorant parts reserved typically for mom and dad, sis or bro or your kids. And you know the same of them. And not judging anyway. Not having expectations. I wish I could say I was always loving enough. Ah, but human as I am that's just not my case. I get confused, too, youo know all the what's right and what's not, what calls for standing up for yourself, what's the total tao of easing back, being still, or letting go. Gosh for me this is a lifetime of defining work, I walk it and learn through it and drive my craft along in my professional life, with close friends, with casual friends, with family, in my material life, my consumer life, my emotional life, of course with love. I dont know if I'm doing the right thing. At the end of the day I just try to recollect, be thankful, keep my eyes open in review. I used to be a hard ass and an asshead. Today I try to just keep these things in check.

Who knows at any given moment how truly well I do??!

I did dishes today, cleaned out the fridge, my car, did my bills. I made some important calls, did an itty bitty thing for work. It's amazing what taking a little action will do. I caught up with two old friends, too. It's funny how with some people it's so easy for me to be at peace and, even after big chunks of timelapse, contented with take me as I am. And with others how I fall in to certain roles--Voice of Wisdom or of Hope, so god-damned close to know it all? How these relationships always make me question myself. If it's true we're all mirrors of one another, just playing out our scripts of soul and growth through the vantages of these roles--than I am always teaching what I need to learn.

Later today I took a long luxurious swim and reveled over the Mystery of this Life. The blessed simple peace of everyday. I did loads upon loads of laundry. This is something that, during the years that I would use the laundramat in town, used to make me resent the hell out of life. Can you imagine!? A thing simple as cleaning up in a regular way after myself. Being human is so simple, so funny, so strange... I am sitting at the coffee shop in Naptown now, on a date with, in full glorious revel of me, and in all today and as now, I keep being humbled by the repeated experience of this is it, This, this is my Life, no place to get to but here, and I keep smiling in a sweet inner way just to me.

Here is a song in Celebration and Serendipity. For the little things, for Erika's post today quoting the same thing that my morning mediation did--Hemingway's line about writing the truest sentence you know, the meditaiton itself reminding us that artist's are charged with living life in truth, no matter what the truth of the current moment is, challenging ourselves to be brave enough just to live, in order to, by virtue of that Life, have the natural fodder from which to create. And for hearing this week, a week when I really needed it, from not one, not two, not three, but ALL FOUR of the people that I consider to be spiritual giants in my life, whose shoulders I to this day give thanks for the oppurtunity to stand on. I mean, I haven't heard from two of those people in over a year, and the other two in months...and at random each of them on their own just happened to shout out for one reason or another to me this week.
They remind me right now that we never know the greater picture of this tapestry in which we are so blessed to be getting the chance to together weave...Bless them each, bless me...

O, coffee life....

thank life for you coffee cat, even tho when you changed from coffee east how i hated your name. thank life for you erika, and your practical approach to things. thank life for you date book: and the hour and half penciled in three times a week assuring i come here, sit down, and do just this....

thank life for you and all these young people, for rob and kj in seperate frames here on the walls. thank life for you funny aching beautiful minimal songs by huskyvoiced fellas and breathy womyns--i was a senior in college when i added to my agenda "barista" and worked a year at the local spot in chestertown, the one you learned to avoid if you had to get somewhere on time. because everyone there you know, and everyone you know is always there.

easton is bigger, the country surrounding her more spread out. (yes yes where ctown was a man, sweet easton is definitely a woman. i can hear it at night in the silence of her streets and how her trees and flowers sing. a chorus of sweet, while chestertown was always so flat, or thunderouosly barritone...o shamanmamaearthofmineheartandsoul, thank life for thank life....) and so while the poverty here is more spread out, and class in general more specifically profound, there is a far greater sense of lower middle class around here....o eastern shore, o employment office and family centers where i call my home, yes these too, thank life for you

why did i avoid it here so long? so much of my good times of the last 10 years have come out of coffee shops the late night dc ones after the clubs or meetins, all those all those 49 west nights, and o chestertown, where my moments came together for more than one love and now on to this one, center of a far larger town, all the people with smiles like they already know me, all the people who i'm sure really do already have me figured out...o writing life, o coffee shop opened til 10... with Rob and KJ on the walls how their local heroism delights and joys me and cracks me up, o faces here and the music i've never heard of but always always makes me groove....i am so gloriously glowing right now i dont know quite what to do....

what i'm listening to: gwendolyn

my heart grows bigger

the heart is a good, and plenty, and bountiful thing. i am so blessed with its consistancy, in all things up and down, all things concentric on this spiral path so round and round, for every time it pains me it lightens me equally, what would i do without you o wellspring of life, o precious window-light of me? i bless you kelly and spin gold around everything you have been and all that you so beautifully yet will be, i walk you round this path sure as the river, the earth, that blessed thunder and sun in the morning sky of birth sing well and long to me....

fall is coming and the full moon is here

i woke up this morning after the deepest, most satisfying sleep i've had since i moved to chop. and it was only a three hour long sleep because just before 5 i awoke with a pillow hugged to my chest in the middle of an intense dream, which is the only time i can ever remember awaking on my back hugging a pillow. and i got out of bed realizing that i have been dreaming the same recurring dream since the weekend and puzzling over what it might mean. then i turned on the window fan got back under my soft sheet and in the grey morning light lay there an hour half-awake. until the next thing i knew it was 9 am and i was sleeping but waking slowly and feeling so, so satiated from my deepest depths within. like i had been wrung somewhere on my most essential level entirely clean.

and i had no thoughts of angst over work and my future, over where i am going to live next, over any of it. merely i felt complete, and settled in a way that i actually forgot is possible because its been absent for so, so long. i almost giggled out loud, and thought of the most random, exciting things: i love over-medium dippy eggs with whole grain pancakes with fruit cooked in and to eat them in front of the tv with regis and kelly. or to make jewelry because of all the different pretty colors and styles of the beads. i love fashion and exploring clothes that are just right for me. i love the quiet beach in late yellow september. i love to be in the woods, to swim in wild streams, camping. i love camping. i love to cozy cozy read books in the morning in bed when i've got no place to go....

and then it struck me, fall is here--or so i mean that on the wheel of the axis of the year, the preceding week or so has been the quickening of the tide of the change...tonight's full moon is traditional Lunar Llamas, the apex, the surge of bounty...we celebrate lunar llamas the first full moon when the sun is in leo and it signifies for all of us the passing of the year. intuitively we reassess what we've accomplished this year, what our harvest has brought to pass, what we didn't do to well at growing, where we have been fertile, futile, full of meat or just of bones.... oh god oh god life i love you so, so much!

sure as we are here people our cells, our dna move with this ever changing earth, and sure as this movement is tracked only by the sun there is a rightness, a depth of completion and union to it all in that it never truly ever ends, simply slows or quickens, and begins again. take heart, take stock...life recycles, we turn within, we radicalize, dive down deep, come to birth again....

Man Bait

I so, so luckin fove this grl. She is gorgeous, talented, and full of fire and love, which she is now generating in to absoloutely excellent yummmmmmmmmmmmmms. I know, her solstice present to me this past december was a batch full of baked goods, which kept me full all those quiet creepy first nites at Chop....Rubbin her tum...............Read all about it: Man Bait and grow to love her as much as i do