I will remember this: that
was the winter I ate only brown rice or
met friends for deals in town beside the
beach on weeknights. And listened to
Iron & Wine which is not like Neutral Milk
Hotel I think to myself bc in college when you
first listen to Neutral Milk Hotel
or Elliot Smith
you still think I’m the only one.
There was a group of us. This
group we worked together
it was in a restaurant.
And we made light out of one
another by going dancing and
drinking and sharing our likes of
certain music, sushi or fancy shoes.
It was a cold winter, it was dark
and that is what we will say: we
made light out of each other. For
each other, for our selves. We
became good at showing up to
shine on the other from within.
Years later I will liken them to
other groups. A single member who
maybe I will run in to at the club this
weekend while dancing or maybe next
time I’m home at the grocery store with
a cousin probably not tho hard to say.
Groups I used to drink underage with
get high bum smokes or sneak out. Groups
I listened to Elliot Smith with or sat under
bridges with listening to ourselves sing
the whole ordeal of getting clean. Groups
once likened to other groups long
gone other groups I once lived beside
the ocean with went barefoot with once took
short cuts through alley ways with laid on
our backs in the sand together
groups that years ago in the summer
when we didn’t need to make light
joined me after midnight so we could swim.
January 27, 2011
January 25, 2011
Our women, our men
There's a lot on my mind and a lot I have to get done and the best part is: nothing but time. I get home if I'm lucky the clock says 3 or even 2:45. If I'm not it's close to 4. Either way I've noticed the sun is still out and like today it was actually balmy and so easy to be motivated to get outside for fresh air. That and high high doses of vitamin B this year have kept me out of the dark as winter closed in and all around. Doesn't change the fact--I run to my car, I run from my car. When it's really, real cold anyway. Especially if the wind's blowing.
I talked to a friend I've known a while. Through most of her twenties, which no one tells you are the hardest fucking deal. All that figuring out who and what you are but doing so under the guise of what's alright and what's not in trying to figure out how just to get by. The whole jolt of being a twenty-something and zero guidance. Zero myths, zero heros, zero equals nothing at the end of the day and what's that leave you with all these legless twenty-something identity crisis messes. No one wants a career any more there is no middle class and no persuasion to give yourself the time to adhere to your special gifts there is no satisfaction if you're doing something menial, without reason, or that you dont somehow love or have made acceptable compromise on behalf of understanding with your self. Otherwise you just go to the bar every night and get drunk after work. All these twenty-somethings, the entitlement generation, no one can help it--American Dream shadow, this is what we've grown. Anyhow I've known her a long, steady while and I told her my secrets today she's one of the best secret holders I know. I remember the one time driving along in her pick-up truck, this was years ago right before in 2004 me going on the road and just knowing, she gets it, the deep knowledge. She gets what's always come natural to me. Just driving along and I had the clearest drawing in from my center, then release, and I understood. Teach her as much as you can about the wise women stuff she, she deep inside is ready to waken and know.
Tonight on the phone I said to her what I've said for years. We really are on the frontier of this stuff. Emotional autonomy. That whole-bodied way of being true to our selves by allowing every full aspect of who we are. Owning our whole full power. And learning to talk about it, to not be afraid or judge as weird our emotional and instinctual and intuitive natures. And of course the whole topic of men. The many different layers of this. The true bready friendships. I have two who are like that. And then the host of my brother's friends. Then the ones you cant get enough of, the ones who are potential, and the ones you have to ask of yourself the main and only question. To sleep with or no....and the painful truth how it sometimes only and all comes down to that.
I have a ton of single girlfriends. And we're all in one thing together: the focus we've learned/are learning to put in to the things we care the most about. It's 2011. The third wave of feminism is Gather The Woman oriented, teaching one person at a time how to value the qualities that in all humans for years have been oppressed. None of this single forever if single by 30 isn't it funny that that's actually indoctrinated? In the US? Or was? In response to this funny rooted idea I said: we are on the frontier and so are our men. What will that do for romance? When we be the change, own who we are and our full needs, how we give others around us permission to do so. This is Re-defining. Being with men when and if the time is right who have come in a whole autonomous way in to there selves. I dont for an instant buy my mom's generation's, my grandmom's eye-rolled men are men and will never change. IT DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU CHOOSE IS ACCEPTABLE. I think of some of the finest men I know. They are full-bodied, emotionally literate, masculine strong and sexy as hell, funny and witty and amazing to be around. They are real, they are true, they are willing to challenge themselves. I am proud of who we are. My girlfriends who are committed to this journey of self, my guyfriends who are committed, too.
When we hang up it's because the phone is dying. I have about five or six precious hours in front of me and three projects, all writing, laid out to be organized all over the kitchen table. The sun is down by now and it is cold in the house. I turn on youtube videos of Jane's Addiction to set me in the writing mood, then choose two things to get done for the night other than creative write on my blog.
It's a good life.
I talked to a friend I've known a while. Through most of her twenties, which no one tells you are the hardest fucking deal. All that figuring out who and what you are but doing so under the guise of what's alright and what's not in trying to figure out how just to get by. The whole jolt of being a twenty-something and zero guidance. Zero myths, zero heros, zero equals nothing at the end of the day and what's that leave you with all these legless twenty-something identity crisis messes. No one wants a career any more there is no middle class and no persuasion to give yourself the time to adhere to your special gifts there is no satisfaction if you're doing something menial, without reason, or that you dont somehow love or have made acceptable compromise on behalf of understanding with your self. Otherwise you just go to the bar every night and get drunk after work. All these twenty-somethings, the entitlement generation, no one can help it--American Dream shadow, this is what we've grown. Anyhow I've known her a long, steady while and I told her my secrets today she's one of the best secret holders I know. I remember the one time driving along in her pick-up truck, this was years ago right before in 2004 me going on the road and just knowing, she gets it, the deep knowledge. She gets what's always come natural to me. Just driving along and I had the clearest drawing in from my center, then release, and I understood. Teach her as much as you can about the wise women stuff she, she deep inside is ready to waken and know.
Tonight on the phone I said to her what I've said for years. We really are on the frontier of this stuff. Emotional autonomy. That whole-bodied way of being true to our selves by allowing every full aspect of who we are. Owning our whole full power. And learning to talk about it, to not be afraid or judge as weird our emotional and instinctual and intuitive natures. And of course the whole topic of men. The many different layers of this. The true bready friendships. I have two who are like that. And then the host of my brother's friends. Then the ones you cant get enough of, the ones who are potential, and the ones you have to ask of yourself the main and only question. To sleep with or no....and the painful truth how it sometimes only and all comes down to that.
I have a ton of single girlfriends. And we're all in one thing together: the focus we've learned/are learning to put in to the things we care the most about. It's 2011. The third wave of feminism is Gather The Woman oriented, teaching one person at a time how to value the qualities that in all humans for years have been oppressed. None of this single forever if single by 30 isn't it funny that that's actually indoctrinated? In the US? Or was? In response to this funny rooted idea I said: we are on the frontier and so are our men. What will that do for romance? When we be the change, own who we are and our full needs, how we give others around us permission to do so. This is Re-defining. Being with men when and if the time is right who have come in a whole autonomous way in to there selves. I dont for an instant buy my mom's generation's, my grandmom's eye-rolled men are men and will never change. IT DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU CHOOSE IS ACCEPTABLE. I think of some of the finest men I know. They are full-bodied, emotionally literate, masculine strong and sexy as hell, funny and witty and amazing to be around. They are real, they are true, they are willing to challenge themselves. I am proud of who we are. My girlfriends who are committed to this journey of self, my guyfriends who are committed, too.
When we hang up it's because the phone is dying. I have about five or six precious hours in front of me and three projects, all writing, laid out to be organized all over the kitchen table. The sun is down by now and it is cold in the house. I turn on youtube videos of Jane's Addiction to set me in the writing mood, then choose two things to get done for the night other than creative write on my blog.
It's a good life.
January 24, 2011
Spon Down. Glorious Day.
In the sunshine the coffee steam is the same as light rays and reminds me how I used to sit on the bed in the corner of Dave Williams' room the guys on guitar or drums and I'd watch the incense play. Complete, totally absorbed. Total absorption. I used to sneak in at night through the window in to his room. The metal feeling of rail scrape when I'd hoist my self over and through. That one time his mom waiting for me. That pic of Weibe with the beast in his hand, but it's from the mirror and the lights way down so the room looks yellow or orange. The instruction of smoke and still and wavering and blending and one becoming another becoming only one.
I am thinking about California and the sun. I am thinking about Paul in snow up to his knees. I am thinking what it would be like to study Anusara at Beth's feet for weeks. I am thinking about Kiva Rose and We'moon and poetry. I am thinking about the moon. My Pandora reset itself or for the first time ever I had to sign back in and my station La Luna, la mama de las estrellas was the only one left. It was just right for the morning, walking dad to the car still cold earth yawning. My blue soft bathrobe three sizes too big. Kissing him goodbye his two big bags of health food cooked up for the week. I felt like his wife and am happy to be how did we get so close, when, awww to grow up. I pick up my pen.
Did Erika get on here I think? There is now a piano station on my Pandora it was prompted a gift given I say yes. This is how she writes. Piano she told me once at one of our meetings at her house. She is my hero. I let the piano music play it is what I used to listen to on my alarm, classical, when I was a very very little girl. In the room in the old neighborhood with the two kinds of pink on the walls. Where we lived with Brian and Little Sean. Janice. When we had hamsters and Sean and I would fight and also cuddle every morning. My toychest with the red painted hearts. The cabinet that kept writings and stickers not dishes or dolls.
I love coffee and bring some home from the coffee shop for the days that I dont work. When I do the real work the writing work the showing up the poetry and play only work that counts. Days like today fingers clicking in the light from the window the light the plants get first then me the gold light the light catching all the steam. I am happy. I will call grandma later when I sit in the driveway in my beachchair like I did all summer I will wear my long johns and sweatshirt and jeans and a beanie and gloves and sit under a blanket when I go out there today. My neighbor what will he think he takes cardio walks everyday smokes his cigars sometimes if he's really happy he even waves. He's known me I him since he first retired me in 8th grade tiny cutoff jeans perm in my hair and later that summer, sneaking out. He knows a lot more than he's ever let on, and far as I know never said word one to grammy back then to Tim or Mary or mom or dad. All the all the all the cars in the driveway over ohsomany years, the late night back porch noise sometimes music sometimes fights. Pungent smells ha the smell of weeds. When I see him today I'll wave maybe he will or wont maybe like me he's sun effective and will wave so much he raises a little from the earth enough like me to light up from within just as the moon.
The new song I discovered on my new reset-Pandora with the one station the same The Moon, mother of the stars is what I will today on my other blog. It is a theme song resplendent oneness, oneness of me here you there song separate but together us as one. Oh what a day, glorious...
I am thinking about California and the sun. I am thinking about Paul in snow up to his knees. I am thinking what it would be like to study Anusara at Beth's feet for weeks. I am thinking about Kiva Rose and We'moon and poetry. I am thinking about the moon. My Pandora reset itself or for the first time ever I had to sign back in and my station La Luna, la mama de las estrellas was the only one left. It was just right for the morning, walking dad to the car still cold earth yawning. My blue soft bathrobe three sizes too big. Kissing him goodbye his two big bags of health food cooked up for the week. I felt like his wife and am happy to be how did we get so close, when, awww to grow up. I pick up my pen.
Did Erika get on here I think? There is now a piano station on my Pandora it was prompted a gift given I say yes. This is how she writes. Piano she told me once at one of our meetings at her house. She is my hero. I let the piano music play it is what I used to listen to on my alarm, classical, when I was a very very little girl. In the room in the old neighborhood with the two kinds of pink on the walls. Where we lived with Brian and Little Sean. Janice. When we had hamsters and Sean and I would fight and also cuddle every morning. My toychest with the red painted hearts. The cabinet that kept writings and stickers not dishes or dolls.
I love coffee and bring some home from the coffee shop for the days that I dont work. When I do the real work the writing work the showing up the poetry and play only work that counts. Days like today fingers clicking in the light from the window the light the plants get first then me the gold light the light catching all the steam. I am happy. I will call grandma later when I sit in the driveway in my beachchair like I did all summer I will wear my long johns and sweatshirt and jeans and a beanie and gloves and sit under a blanket when I go out there today. My neighbor what will he think he takes cardio walks everyday smokes his cigars sometimes if he's really happy he even waves. He's known me I him since he first retired me in 8th grade tiny cutoff jeans perm in my hair and later that summer, sneaking out. He knows a lot more than he's ever let on, and far as I know never said word one to grammy back then to Tim or Mary or mom or dad. All the all the all the cars in the driveway over ohsomany years, the late night back porch noise sometimes music sometimes fights. Pungent smells ha the smell of weeds. When I see him today I'll wave maybe he will or wont maybe like me he's sun effective and will wave so much he raises a little from the earth enough like me to light up from within just as the moon.
The new song I discovered on my new reset-Pandora with the one station the same The Moon, mother of the stars is what I will today on my other blog. It is a theme song resplendent oneness, oneness of me here you there song separate but together us as one. Oh what a day, glorious...
January 20, 2011
More about fear of "God" & the authentic life
A friend from college Mike told me once that laying awake in bed in the middle of the night trying to force ourselves back to sleep is actually leftover childhood psychosis. Still subconsciously being reliant on the long-ago established inner-parent voice and our unquestioned compulsive adherance to the "right" way of behaving. We should, in the event of mid-night sleeplessness and according to my buddy, get out of bed and eat ice cream instead.
Wise words. And the idea has me pondering the continuation of my response to a different buddy of mine, this one's over at The Vent. Garret's working out his troubles with organized religion right now, and that my friends is territory where I've spent an enormous amount of time wandering.
I recently posted about the idea that human beings are afraid to be still with themselves (and thereby mostly unable to pull from their own essential power) because they are afraid of the programmed ideas lingering within that might arise. I claim that often at first stillness opens up in the form of bad feelings or fear or anxiousness. I went even further to claim that these anxieties are actually rooted in our programmed ideas, beliefs and essential fears about GOD.
So let's talk about Joe Campbell. He's the one who tagged the phrase Follow Your Bliss. He was a world renowned mythologist (and if you've never seen it, his PBS interview with Bill Moyers changed my life.) Myth is story, to keep it simple. And in Campbell's words (from the book Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation) "...I don't know what consciousness is. But I do know what bliss is: that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself. If you can hang on to that, you are on the edge of the transcendent already." Thick with simply explained instruction--he suggests that we cant get to our bliss until we are willing to investigate the "given social order" to which most of mid-America gives her or his energies. IE:
"He has a nervous breakdown--this is no joke; this is a phenomenon that the United States can document, millionfold: the man who thought he knew what he was working for. He was working to go fishing. Then he suddenly found that he was married, had kids, and had to work like hell, and everybody was sort of helping him get through this with the hope that someday he would retire and do the things he wanted to do...Or Mother; we all know Mother: she's given her life to us, she's given everything she has to us. Then the kids go away so it's an empty house. So it's an empty life, and on comes this fury to grab life again. She goes crazy; she becomes what's known as mother-in law. She's bringing up your kid, she's telling you when to shut the window, when to open it, how to fry eggs..."
Our solution? To tackle the mommy-daddy-as-god element within our psyche. And how to do this? To brave the big, the scary, the outward beliefs of the "given social order." The religion. To recognize how we internalize religious judgement by never questioning the psychological programming we receive from our very first gods: mom and dad.
Let's be clear now. Campbell's not bashing religion, far from it; and nor is he demonizing mom and dad. What he does instead is present a reasonable (okay powerful--as this was his life's work, his bliss) argument that actually all religions have at the core similar stories or myths, and it is those stories meant to be studied and applied to grow yourself as a unique human individual. And that this is actually the true moral calling of man, to evolve himself. To play the hero in his very own life.
Most religious instruction, if interpreted in a strict moral way, presents the idea that to be true to ourselves is wrong because it is selfish, godless, hedonistic even. Mythic instruction (applying the moral of the stories on which religions the world-round is based) actually says yes, yes, why aren't we being true to ourselves?
I'll tell you myself: because meeting the devil--your internalized ideas and self-judgements about right and wrong and "being" good or bad--is hard, hard work. Aint for the faint-hearted that's for sure. This, to paraphrase Joe Campbell, or Socrates, is THE trouble with God. The unexamined life. Not examining it doesn't mean it wont come to get you, you know? In fact, it's almost a guarantee that it will.
Dont let "God" be the excuse NOT to Follow your bliss. Owning what you absolutely must do to be yourself is the most holy thing there is, and the only one who can do for you is you.
Wise words. And the idea has me pondering the continuation of my response to a different buddy of mine, this one's over at The Vent. Garret's working out his troubles with organized religion right now, and that my friends is territory where I've spent an enormous amount of time wandering.
I recently posted about the idea that human beings are afraid to be still with themselves (and thereby mostly unable to pull from their own essential power) because they are afraid of the programmed ideas lingering within that might arise. I claim that often at first stillness opens up in the form of bad feelings or fear or anxiousness. I went even further to claim that these anxieties are actually rooted in our programmed ideas, beliefs and essential fears about GOD.
So let's talk about Joe Campbell. He's the one who tagged the phrase Follow Your Bliss. He was a world renowned mythologist (and if you've never seen it, his PBS interview with Bill Moyers changed my life.) Myth is story, to keep it simple. And in Campbell's words (from the book Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation) "...I don't know what consciousness is. But I do know what bliss is: that deep sense of being present, of doing what you absolutely must do to be yourself. If you can hang on to that, you are on the edge of the transcendent already." Thick with simply explained instruction--he suggests that we cant get to our bliss until we are willing to investigate the "given social order" to which most of mid-America gives her or his energies. IE:
"He has a nervous breakdown--this is no joke; this is a phenomenon that the United States can document, millionfold: the man who thought he knew what he was working for. He was working to go fishing. Then he suddenly found that he was married, had kids, and had to work like hell, and everybody was sort of helping him get through this with the hope that someday he would retire and do the things he wanted to do...Or Mother; we all know Mother: she's given her life to us, she's given everything she has to us. Then the kids go away so it's an empty house. So it's an empty life, and on comes this fury to grab life again. She goes crazy; she becomes what's known as mother-in law. She's bringing up your kid, she's telling you when to shut the window, when to open it, how to fry eggs..."
Our solution? To tackle the mommy-daddy-as-god element within our psyche. And how to do this? To brave the big, the scary, the outward beliefs of the "given social order." The religion. To recognize how we internalize religious judgement by never questioning the psychological programming we receive from our very first gods: mom and dad.
Let's be clear now. Campbell's not bashing religion, far from it; and nor is he demonizing mom and dad. What he does instead is present a reasonable (okay powerful--as this was his life's work, his bliss) argument that actually all religions have at the core similar stories or myths, and it is those stories meant to be studied and applied to grow yourself as a unique human individual. And that this is actually the true moral calling of man, to evolve himself. To play the hero in his very own life.
Most religious instruction, if interpreted in a strict moral way, presents the idea that to be true to ourselves is wrong because it is selfish, godless, hedonistic even. Mythic instruction (applying the moral of the stories on which religions the world-round is based) actually says yes, yes, why aren't we being true to ourselves?
I'll tell you myself: because meeting the devil--your internalized ideas and self-judgements about right and wrong and "being" good or bad--is hard, hard work. Aint for the faint-hearted that's for sure. This, to paraphrase Joe Campbell, or Socrates, is THE trouble with God. The unexamined life. Not examining it doesn't mean it wont come to get you, you know? In fact, it's almost a guarantee that it will.
Dont let "God" be the excuse NOT to Follow your bliss. Owning what you absolutely must do to be yourself is the most holy thing there is, and the only one who can do for you is you.
January 18, 2011
Yes I am a dreamer
...for a dreamer finds his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. ~Oscar Wilde
Oh god am I dreamer.
I never realized that this quality was significant. That'd be like recognizing a handful of yourself if you were the ocean, I dont think really it can be done.
I am totally a dreamer and therefor prone to long diseased bouts of utter funk of thinking, that false truth of disenchantment that Neitzsche or Sartre, one of them, talks about. Believing the reality that every other person buys in to has to somehow be yours, too.
I talked for a long time to an old friend last night. His mom helped raise my brother and me so when I say old, I truly mean that. We knew each other innocent: as kids. The kind of friends that are always there and taken for granted so much so that re-discovering one another adds unexpected newness to your own self. And indeed part of the reason you value that person so much is because you love the surprise of what it's like when someone holds your whole life in their own memory like that. He was telling me what it was like finding a group of friends that were outside the circle of the gang we grew up with as so many of them are married with children now. He talked about being 30 and finding a whole new home of friends in the city who are all in their thirties, childless, still single. How it was tough at first, but he got the swing of it and now it's totally him. He made his passing.
This has been an issue for me lately I guess--single, kidless, about to be 34, no prospects on the pink and gold line of my horizon of any special man. It was sort of tough for me for a while, like I went through this weird period that it was really on my mind around Thanksgiving and the weeks after. My large family saw lots of weddings this year, with several more to come, so I suspect that was a main factor. I had to sit with the loneliness until I realized it to be totally normal. I had to shake off the shame I associated with it. The truth is I'm pretty social and also sensual and very fly (seek ye modesty seek elsewhere, please~) and so of course there was credence to that kicky whiny voice of where is my man?? But I have to tell you, allowing that voice it's full strength eased me in to, as it always does, a new level of comfort and acceptance of my self. And in that I am good again, and so the desperation seems to have passed. Which feels a little scary--being alright as an independent single woman, being on the verge of my whole, unique life. It's like being suspended on the edge of a cliff in some bunji gear. Like I know I just have to find total trust in my harness but damn that's a wide open expanse just out to my front...!
And how amazing, how truly awing--that far, far off view. Recently my friend Jotto shared a quote with me. To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong. Yea, it's sort of like that. Losing the fear of experiencing the fears that maybe this path is wrong...so that then I can get back on my path and keep moving! The world is what it is because of dreamers like me. They're not everywhere, it's actually a very active part of my process--seeking them out, and doing so specifically so I continue to take action on my dreams, on the goldlit pink-skied passions that sing specifically to me. Driving to Easton to see Sam open for the Spring Standard's show, allowing that live music to enter in to me until I was so alive and jamming that we were all still dancing an hour later in the street. Big open talks with Laura Walsh and sharing songs in the car til 2 am. Telling the lead singer about sitting out my window when I lived in the apartment on Goldsborough, letting my feet dangle to rest on the roof and me and my cold breath talking to the moon.
Who does that?
Who tells the hot indy artist about that? And who talks to the moon, anyway?
Dreamers. Dreamers do, and we tell on ourselves so that maybe you will, too.
Oh god am I dreamer.
I never realized that this quality was significant. That'd be like recognizing a handful of yourself if you were the ocean, I dont think really it can be done.
I am totally a dreamer and therefor prone to long diseased bouts of utter funk of thinking, that false truth of disenchantment that Neitzsche or Sartre, one of them, talks about. Believing the reality that every other person buys in to has to somehow be yours, too.
I talked for a long time to an old friend last night. His mom helped raise my brother and me so when I say old, I truly mean that. We knew each other innocent: as kids. The kind of friends that are always there and taken for granted so much so that re-discovering one another adds unexpected newness to your own self. And indeed part of the reason you value that person so much is because you love the surprise of what it's like when someone holds your whole life in their own memory like that. He was telling me what it was like finding a group of friends that were outside the circle of the gang we grew up with as so many of them are married with children now. He talked about being 30 and finding a whole new home of friends in the city who are all in their thirties, childless, still single. How it was tough at first, but he got the swing of it and now it's totally him. He made his passing.
This has been an issue for me lately I guess--single, kidless, about to be 34, no prospects on the pink and gold line of my horizon of any special man. It was sort of tough for me for a while, like I went through this weird period that it was really on my mind around Thanksgiving and the weeks after. My large family saw lots of weddings this year, with several more to come, so I suspect that was a main factor. I had to sit with the loneliness until I realized it to be totally normal. I had to shake off the shame I associated with it. The truth is I'm pretty social and also sensual and very fly (seek ye modesty seek elsewhere, please~) and so of course there was credence to that kicky whiny voice of where is my man?? But I have to tell you, allowing that voice it's full strength eased me in to, as it always does, a new level of comfort and acceptance of my self. And in that I am good again, and so the desperation seems to have passed. Which feels a little scary--being alright as an independent single woman, being on the verge of my whole, unique life. It's like being suspended on the edge of a cliff in some bunji gear. Like I know I just have to find total trust in my harness but damn that's a wide open expanse just out to my front...!
And how amazing, how truly awing--that far, far off view. Recently my friend Jotto shared a quote with me. To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong. Yea, it's sort of like that. Losing the fear of experiencing the fears that maybe this path is wrong...so that then I can get back on my path and keep moving! The world is what it is because of dreamers like me. They're not everywhere, it's actually a very active part of my process--seeking them out, and doing so specifically so I continue to take action on my dreams, on the goldlit pink-skied passions that sing specifically to me. Driving to Easton to see Sam open for the Spring Standard's show, allowing that live music to enter in to me until I was so alive and jamming that we were all still dancing an hour later in the street. Big open talks with Laura Walsh and sharing songs in the car til 2 am. Telling the lead singer about sitting out my window when I lived in the apartment on Goldsborough, letting my feet dangle to rest on the roof and me and my cold breath talking to the moon.
Who does that?
Who tells the hot indy artist about that? And who talks to the moon, anyway?
Dreamers. Dreamers do, and we tell on ourselves so that maybe you will, too.
January 12, 2011
Cut the hippydippy horse**** . Tell the truth.
I want to write a little more about just what this means--authenticity.
I mean let's go ahead and immediately address all notions of Pollyanna perfection and sappy feel good emanations here shall we? Bc believe it or not Spiritual Kel cant stand being associated with any of that NewAge hippydippy horseshit. And as that is the case, it's a fine line I dare to walk on this here blog. Because I will gladly use touchyfeely words like "authentic-self" and "inner-life" and "emotional work". I will readily speak about sitting down and "finding stillness" and "taking quiet-time." However, it is precisely because I live daily with my own crazy fucked-up head piece that I value and emphasize these things.
What's that word mean when I use it anyway? I'm not even gonna lie, I'm not sure. I dont know the answer. Does it conjure someone who stretches long on the floor each morning doing her daily yoga moves or who allows 20 minutes of calming reflective time with her steaming cup of chamomile tea at night? Cuz it shouldn't, or at least not without the other side of the picture to make it entirely whole. That same tea-drinker deep-breather also leaves work gets in her car and starts screaming at the very top of her lungs (with the music turned up so in case passing cars or dog-walkers see her they think she is just trying to sing.) She sends text messages to her best friends that say I am sad and fucking lonely right now: WHY DONT I HAVE A MAN!? or Could you help remind me right now to treat this evil part of my head like the terrible crazy sock puppet that it is...
Authenticity is about being honest. And honesty takes courage and that's all I know about that. I mean, once I avail myself to being true as I can to me, well. Then the Real Work truly does start. I already posted last week about the immediate complications that lay directly on the other side of such a decision. Ernest Hemingway sort of said it when he said the writer's job is to tell the truth. "I would write one true sentence," he said, "and then go on from there." Pretty immediately it gets tough because so often what's true means what we're feeling about something, and as I tangent-ed last week most all of us are walking around with the superwall inside built on the society lie that feelings aren't real or valid. Soooooo. How the hell are we supposed to keep it real if that's the confusing message we're still trying to decode.
This all comes down to a sneaking suspicion I have, and I am going to go ahead and put it out there right quick. And let me say here that credit for these ideas, or anyhow what prompted them are a buddy I'll call T3 who recently started his own blog. T3's first post got me really thinking and in response to what he's writing about allow me this--I think that the reason most people are scared of allowing themselves to sit with how they are feeling is because they are scared to feel fear. EVEN THOUGH FEAR IS THE MOST PRIMAL CHEMICAL RESPONSE THAT OUR BODIES KNOW HOW TO ILLICIT. And further, most people are terrified to feel fear because it almost immediately makes us question one inherently archaic premise: Life, plain and simple. Or anyhow our existence, and if there's any point. And this friends brings us face to face with the playing with our own bellybuttons issue of issues... (du du duuuu)...God.
And my oh my does he really exist.
Ahhhh head for the fucking hills! And while you're there, sit a while would ya? And ask yourself the questions that count. Dont bother with the freaking answers you know? Let them arise as they will when you stop fighting and trying to figure it all the fuck out. Just be brave enough to sit inside those questions even as they haunt you.
I got news friends. We're all spinning and sizzling and rocking and rolling across this crazyrad galaxy alone and therefor completely together--it's what we all got in common, answerless questions, afterall. What I know from my own keepin it real diligent adherence to living a life that is authenticaly fulfilling to Kell is just this: I am who I came here with, I am the only one going through this thing every step of the way with me, and I am leaving out of this place one day with me, alone, too. So I might as well do all that I can to be intimate as possible with me, this person with whom I am in charge of steering along in order to enjoy the hell out of my ride. And that means getting to know--consciously with my cup of chamomile tea, or batshitcrazy screaming my mentalmess at poor Beth or Katie over the phone--who I am in this moment by being honest and trying not to hide from myself. And the very next step I can take on this path--hey blogoworld--is then being honest with you.
I mean let's go ahead and immediately address all notions of Pollyanna perfection and sappy feel good emanations here shall we? Bc believe it or not Spiritual Kel cant stand being associated with any of that NewAge hippydippy horseshit. And as that is the case, it's a fine line I dare to walk on this here blog. Because I will gladly use touchyfeely words like "authentic-self" and "inner-life" and "emotional work". I will readily speak about sitting down and "finding stillness" and "taking quiet-time." However, it is precisely because I live daily with my own crazy fucked-up head piece that I value and emphasize these things.
What's that word mean when I use it anyway? I'm not even gonna lie, I'm not sure. I dont know the answer. Does it conjure someone who stretches long on the floor each morning doing her daily yoga moves or who allows 20 minutes of calming reflective time with her steaming cup of chamomile tea at night? Cuz it shouldn't, or at least not without the other side of the picture to make it entirely whole. That same tea-drinker deep-breather also leaves work gets in her car and starts screaming at the very top of her lungs (with the music turned up so in case passing cars or dog-walkers see her they think she is just trying to sing.) She sends text messages to her best friends that say I am sad and fucking lonely right now: WHY DONT I HAVE A MAN!? or Could you help remind me right now to treat this evil part of my head like the terrible crazy sock puppet that it is...
Authenticity is about being honest. And honesty takes courage and that's all I know about that. I mean, once I avail myself to being true as I can to me, well. Then the Real Work truly does start. I already posted last week about the immediate complications that lay directly on the other side of such a decision. Ernest Hemingway sort of said it when he said the writer's job is to tell the truth. "I would write one true sentence," he said, "and then go on from there." Pretty immediately it gets tough because so often what's true means what we're feeling about something, and as I tangent-ed last week most all of us are walking around with the superwall inside built on the society lie that feelings aren't real or valid. Soooooo. How the hell are we supposed to keep it real if that's the confusing message we're still trying to decode.
This all comes down to a sneaking suspicion I have, and I am going to go ahead and put it out there right quick. And let me say here that credit for these ideas, or anyhow what prompted them are a buddy I'll call T3 who recently started his own blog. T3's first post got me really thinking and in response to what he's writing about allow me this--I think that the reason most people are scared of allowing themselves to sit with how they are feeling is because they are scared to feel fear. EVEN THOUGH FEAR IS THE MOST PRIMAL CHEMICAL RESPONSE THAT OUR BODIES KNOW HOW TO ILLICIT. And further, most people are terrified to feel fear because it almost immediately makes us question one inherently archaic premise: Life, plain and simple. Or anyhow our existence, and if there's any point. And this friends brings us face to face with the playing with our own bellybuttons issue of issues... (du du duuuu)...God.
And my oh my does he really exist.
Ahhhh head for the fucking hills! And while you're there, sit a while would ya? And ask yourself the questions that count. Dont bother with the freaking answers you know? Let them arise as they will when you stop fighting and trying to figure it all the fuck out. Just be brave enough to sit inside those questions even as they haunt you.
I got news friends. We're all spinning and sizzling and rocking and rolling across this crazyrad galaxy alone and therefor completely together--it's what we all got in common, answerless questions, afterall. What I know from my own keepin it real diligent adherence to living a life that is authenticaly fulfilling to Kell is just this: I am who I came here with, I am the only one going through this thing every step of the way with me, and I am leaving out of this place one day with me, alone, too. So I might as well do all that I can to be intimate as possible with me, this person with whom I am in charge of steering along in order to enjoy the hell out of my ride. And that means getting to know--consciously with my cup of chamomile tea, or batshitcrazy screaming my mentalmess at poor Beth or Katie over the phone--who I am in this moment by being honest and trying not to hide from myself. And the very next step I can take on this path--hey blogoworld--is then being honest with you.
January 11, 2011
Give me a little corner.
It'd be nice if it were snowing is all I can think, warm and nestled bed and blankets around me deep and rounded as an acorn shell. Would they close the coffee shop if it were good and snowy out? Didn't I just fall asleep? It was 11:30 last night when I woke for just a sec to turn out the light Erika's book half across my chest and half-covered by my sheet. It's quarter past four now I've been awake a half hour could've fallen back to sleep but it would've been tough then, so tough to get out of bed when the alarm goes at 4:45.
When did this become my life? Dad asked what will you do Monday with your day off. I was laying on the sofa still in my softest pjs it was late in the afternoon on Sunday so late the sun was almost down I'd been there since pretty much the night before. 22 hours on my feet Friday and Saturday so tiiiiiiired.
Write I said back to him as if the answer duhhhh was summer and the question was what season do you prefer freezing cold winter with it's two hours of light or summer warm beaches and fresh air and swimming and 15 hours of daytime outside. I will write, oh yea that's what I'm doing here living for free at mom and dad's. Not making enough to pay rent anyway.
Ohhhhhhh here we are again. At least the bed at mom's is the most comfortable one I have ever slept in ever. It's my last thougt of the day also usually my waking one--ahhh god this bed is so amazing thank you so much. Yowza I so haaate being cold. Then I say a prayer for the people who are cold right now, hungry, sleeping on the frozen hardass street. Please please send them some tiny bit of ease. Thank you World for all the good and blessings in my life I choose to be open to you and the good and the blessings. I choose to wake with a happy heart just for today I choose to be gratitude in motion to show thanks for all the good in life I've got....Sometimes it's all I repeat again and again my mantra that leads me through the dark steepled house with the drafts and quiet in the corners and the floor that pads and creeks in all the same places each morning. Soon there will be smells of coffee beans and muffins baking and soon after that the pinking blush of sun over Ocean City on the horizon. The black marks of geese through the air.
Unless it snows, and then like yesterday it's me, happy. Me da um cantinho. Portuguese for Give me a little corner. I read that in Committed. And that is me, and the words and me. Maybe the book is not coming how it did but ohh give me a day to wake up and stay in my sweet bed and read all morning hot coffee nearby, literal stacks of books piled all around. Then writing for the rest of the day still propped up in my bed all the pillows my little village and my laptop and me and the words and me and getting out of bed just to shower or eat then put my softies on again and back in I go. Only other time I'm up is just to lay across my floor propped on pillows for a change of pace from leaning against the wall in bed. Poetry journals, litmags library books on and on. Atlas wide open. Imagination. Music on the I-tunes.
Facebook to take a break here and there.
Give me a little corner.
It's all I'll ever need.
When did this become my life? Dad asked what will you do Monday with your day off. I was laying on the sofa still in my softest pjs it was late in the afternoon on Sunday so late the sun was almost down I'd been there since pretty much the night before. 22 hours on my feet Friday and Saturday so tiiiiiiired.
Write I said back to him as if the answer duhhhh was summer and the question was what season do you prefer freezing cold winter with it's two hours of light or summer warm beaches and fresh air and swimming and 15 hours of daytime outside. I will write, oh yea that's what I'm doing here living for free at mom and dad's. Not making enough to pay rent anyway.
Ohhhhhhh here we are again. At least the bed at mom's is the most comfortable one I have ever slept in ever. It's my last thougt of the day also usually my waking one--ahhh god this bed is so amazing thank you so much. Yowza I so haaate being cold. Then I say a prayer for the people who are cold right now, hungry, sleeping on the frozen hardass street. Please please send them some tiny bit of ease. Thank you World for all the good and blessings in my life I choose to be open to you and the good and the blessings. I choose to wake with a happy heart just for today I choose to be gratitude in motion to show thanks for all the good in life I've got....Sometimes it's all I repeat again and again my mantra that leads me through the dark steepled house with the drafts and quiet in the corners and the floor that pads and creeks in all the same places each morning. Soon there will be smells of coffee beans and muffins baking and soon after that the pinking blush of sun over Ocean City on the horizon. The black marks of geese through the air.
Unless it snows, and then like yesterday it's me, happy. Me da um cantinho. Portuguese for Give me a little corner. I read that in Committed. And that is me, and the words and me. Maybe the book is not coming how it did but ohh give me a day to wake up and stay in my sweet bed and read all morning hot coffee nearby, literal stacks of books piled all around. Then writing for the rest of the day still propped up in my bed all the pillows my little village and my laptop and me and the words and me and getting out of bed just to shower or eat then put my softies on again and back in I go. Only other time I'm up is just to lay across my floor propped on pillows for a change of pace from leaning against the wall in bed. Poetry journals, litmags library books on and on. Atlas wide open. Imagination. Music on the I-tunes.
Facebook to take a break here and there.
Give me a little corner.
It's all I'll ever need.
January 10, 2011
Wild Women Wisdom: De dos mundos. Which IS Life.
Erika and I met in grade school. She was in band and I wasn't because of some bad shit going down at my home, that's all I remember about our real young connections. Red and green plaid jumpers thick as cardboard, white button-downs peter-pan collars and cable-lined knee high socks that were soft kellygreen and that I used to collect the knits off of to make my own little version of fuzzball friends, because in the eighties they had these pom-pom stickerhead things on big feet that my Catholic School gave away once a year as some incentive for some scholastic long forgotten thing, and I thought they were the cutest little creatures ever. By middleschool it was the words--stuffing sheets of frazzled loose leaf thin blue lines in to one another's hands under the desk in Ms. Fouse's class. Maybe this only happened once and I remember it because of the adrenaline scar--doing something we weren't supposed to be doing in the back of class. The trick light that put on in my eye. Erika's large curly cursive and the characters with all the traditional old-fashioned names. My loosely-costumed accounts of people we both went to school with, making stories out of the lives of people we knew.
I was a bitch as a teenager, suppose I still am or can be. Erika and I were teens together too but I wanted nothing to do with her because of her friends. I was doing drugs by then had pink hair and black cat eyes, purple combat boots. I drove junk yard cards I'd buy from my granddad's brother for a hundred bucks and thought I knew more about real life than the pretty preppy girls that she was one of. My dad lived in California and we didn't speak. I was tuff. At least to me.
Every January I think about these things, I think it is because my parents sat Sean and I down in January and told us they were splitting up. Dad'd been living in Manahtten by then for three months so really it was just about them having to say the words. That was 1989. It sucked. In January the past several years my pop and I spend his birthday weekend together at the beach, except that for now I live at the beach and it is January already and mom is in Mexico for the month and so he and I have been together just us when he comes down every weekend. We are watching the series Weeds together, the dvd goes in after the Ravens game ends and then we just scream and laugh and look at each other with shocked expressions slack-jawed speechless but in giddy commiseration the dark humor and insinuations in our eyes. That's dad, who used to cover for me when I was a teen and he'd come home from Cali for the holidays or for the McMullen gatherings. He came home this Saturday empty-handed after looking for a replacement pan of mom's that I burned up accidentally. I didn't ask him to but he did it and we didn't need to discuss that it he was trying to find a new one so that mom would never know. We cuss and laugh and shake our heads over what we see on the TV. He's taking my suggestions about changing his diet. As of last night he'd lost 12 pounds. We bitch about not being able to eat steak and the fluffy breads and creams together and the sugars we love so much. When he's not looking I sneak candy bars and fries, tacos with creamy melted cheese. We are so alike.
There is a pyschic term that I first read in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book Women Who Run With the Wolves. It is de dos mundos, or of two worlds. And to me this term is about the angelic, the demonic acts of not only the holy creatives, but further and even more importantly of those who embark on the authentic path. Which I guess really is the most creative thing one can do. The older I get the more I realize it is this, this Real Work that matters most--all else, all acts of art and creation thus evolve out of the struggle for ourselves, evolve out of the substance of who we are and those strides we take towards that person. To be of both worlds is to take the devilish plunge: to walk through the day by day topside world of work, family, friends and to likewise be willing to, at the same time, go inside our burrows, the tired winter pockets of gnarly filth or snuggly warmth and pull back the boulders we put there and investigate the little chemical nightmares or dreams that wait with knowledge for us behind all of that. The knowledge of our roots, of our healing, of our true-selves that inside of each and every one of us look like the devil sitting there. Those sad or scary or numb or deadened spaces are full with vitality and angelic lifeforce if we persist persist persist to shed light on them and winkingly clean them out. Erika is my writing partner now, my solace, my only shining angel lately and I told her last week on the phone--ever since Joe died the week of Thanksgiving I haven't been able to write. I told her the stories of what was emotionally consuming me with each tired step I took as the holidays washed us over. Erika too had hers. We agreed, it is time now only for stillness and reflection, it is this de dos mundos, this Real Work that right now in the darkest part of our season truly counts.
But it is hard to be here at the beach supposed to be writing, and not. And it is funny to me, and maybe at the end of the day why I write is because life is just so damn miraculously-fucked-up-AND-amazing that I feel I need to mark my own holy amen proof of appreciation of it all--but here I am, January again kicking it with my dad at the beach in his home, laughing and living with him in the topside world. And inside in the inner terrain circling back over the old old tracks with all the faces of him and me then, too, all the little demon-angels and angel-demons that live inside. And this precious funny fusion. Which is life...
I was a bitch as a teenager, suppose I still am or can be. Erika and I were teens together too but I wanted nothing to do with her because of her friends. I was doing drugs by then had pink hair and black cat eyes, purple combat boots. I drove junk yard cards I'd buy from my granddad's brother for a hundred bucks and thought I knew more about real life than the pretty preppy girls that she was one of. My dad lived in California and we didn't speak. I was tuff. At least to me.
Every January I think about these things, I think it is because my parents sat Sean and I down in January and told us they were splitting up. Dad'd been living in Manahtten by then for three months so really it was just about them having to say the words. That was 1989. It sucked. In January the past several years my pop and I spend his birthday weekend together at the beach, except that for now I live at the beach and it is January already and mom is in Mexico for the month and so he and I have been together just us when he comes down every weekend. We are watching the series Weeds together, the dvd goes in after the Ravens game ends and then we just scream and laugh and look at each other with shocked expressions slack-jawed speechless but in giddy commiseration the dark humor and insinuations in our eyes. That's dad, who used to cover for me when I was a teen and he'd come home from Cali for the holidays or for the McMullen gatherings. He came home this Saturday empty-handed after looking for a replacement pan of mom's that I burned up accidentally. I didn't ask him to but he did it and we didn't need to discuss that it he was trying to find a new one so that mom would never know. We cuss and laugh and shake our heads over what we see on the TV. He's taking my suggestions about changing his diet. As of last night he'd lost 12 pounds. We bitch about not being able to eat steak and the fluffy breads and creams together and the sugars we love so much. When he's not looking I sneak candy bars and fries, tacos with creamy melted cheese. We are so alike.
There is a pyschic term that I first read in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book Women Who Run With the Wolves. It is de dos mundos, or of two worlds. And to me this term is about the angelic, the demonic acts of not only the holy creatives, but further and even more importantly of those who embark on the authentic path. Which I guess really is the most creative thing one can do. The older I get the more I realize it is this, this Real Work that matters most--all else, all acts of art and creation thus evolve out of the struggle for ourselves, evolve out of the substance of who we are and those strides we take towards that person. To be of both worlds is to take the devilish plunge: to walk through the day by day topside world of work, family, friends and to likewise be willing to, at the same time, go inside our burrows, the tired winter pockets of gnarly filth or snuggly warmth and pull back the boulders we put there and investigate the little chemical nightmares or dreams that wait with knowledge for us behind all of that. The knowledge of our roots, of our healing, of our true-selves that inside of each and every one of us look like the devil sitting there. Those sad or scary or numb or deadened spaces are full with vitality and angelic lifeforce if we persist persist persist to shed light on them and winkingly clean them out. Erika is my writing partner now, my solace, my only shining angel lately and I told her last week on the phone--ever since Joe died the week of Thanksgiving I haven't been able to write. I told her the stories of what was emotionally consuming me with each tired step I took as the holidays washed us over. Erika too had hers. We agreed, it is time now only for stillness and reflection, it is this de dos mundos, this Real Work that right now in the darkest part of our season truly counts.
But it is hard to be here at the beach supposed to be writing, and not. And it is funny to me, and maybe at the end of the day why I write is because life is just so damn miraculously-fucked-up-AND-amazing that I feel I need to mark my own holy amen proof of appreciation of it all--but here I am, January again kicking it with my dad at the beach in his home, laughing and living with him in the topside world. And inside in the inner terrain circling back over the old old tracks with all the faces of him and me then, too, all the little demon-angels and angel-demons that live inside. And this precious funny fusion. Which is life...
January 7, 2011
Or the one you said you'd hold on to for dear life.
It's early--not early as it could be.
It's early like 7:30 early, I've been up since 4:45 Sam texted at 5:15 to bring my laptop in so she could play me new music. There is weather coming no doubt, the water told me so. It wont be much though the birds are still crying and yesterday there were squirrels running through the dead woods. Tyler is here, Sam, me. He hasn't slept since last night, fresh home from Bmore as of a half hour ago he rolls hard like I like to, we're talking TV series she's defending Lost, he The Wire and there is music on my laptop which I am taking in like gulps of air. I had no comprehension of how cut-off I'd be from the Muse when she went down--my laptop that is. No music that I love, no poetry no links no blogrolling and most of all, no room for Kel fast as I can to spondown and get it all out. The journals, they're full, but nothing to fill me back up with no music. It's a process. Reciprocation. I HAD No IDEA. I sat on the bed for three hours just listening to Pandora and my ITunes, feeling the life come back on deep inside me. The poems finally emerged then, I spondown'd on here then pulled out the leather back journal Erika overnighted (with her most recent adv copy Hem's Girl which I can't put down--word!!!!) that was waiting on my doorstep yesterday afternoon and I wrote a full, whole poem in that. I am re-setting my ways as result of not having this my core sustenance. I have learned something yet again the necessity of filling up, and the absolute non-negotiable: having a place to fill with the words, a place that remains the same.
Sam played me her man's music he is Philly local soon enough I played her Josh just one song an old one it's the first time I'd done that in a very very long time and that was enough. We work together Sam and me long hours ten hours at a time and so she is on to me as me to her: we hold the other's stories already, having known each other less than a month. Some of them anyway, a single bone or two but skeletal-enough. So that with sparing details or so many that they come out in mouthfuls a few bursts at a time we know what flesh were giving the other, which bone on which to hang this part. This was a new twist. This had new gold. Little light flecks on the skin. Long shadows from underfoot aura big as the aururaborelias in the western sky.
I'm seeing my friend Laura Walsh tonight I told her, I play her Walsh's music.
And soon enough there is the response, I feel the throes of the words from somewhere inside my chest and had to get on here it was a matter of health. Sam and Ty humor me, roll silver and we small talk and cut sidemouth cracks on one another especially about me on the clock. Here it is the skeleton I am yearning for the one o holy loss the lac of which leaves me with out structure or faith, and happy enough to deny that even a boneyard exists. How Charles Simic said. Who can not howl will not find his pack.
I am sick. Being packless sucks.
It's early like 7:30 early, I've been up since 4:45 Sam texted at 5:15 to bring my laptop in so she could play me new music. There is weather coming no doubt, the water told me so. It wont be much though the birds are still crying and yesterday there were squirrels running through the dead woods. Tyler is here, Sam, me. He hasn't slept since last night, fresh home from Bmore as of a half hour ago he rolls hard like I like to, we're talking TV series she's defending Lost, he The Wire and there is music on my laptop which I am taking in like gulps of air. I had no comprehension of how cut-off I'd be from the Muse when she went down--my laptop that is. No music that I love, no poetry no links no blogrolling and most of all, no room for Kel fast as I can to spondown and get it all out. The journals, they're full, but nothing to fill me back up with no music. It's a process. Reciprocation. I HAD No IDEA. I sat on the bed for three hours just listening to Pandora and my ITunes, feeling the life come back on deep inside me. The poems finally emerged then, I spondown'd on here then pulled out the leather back journal Erika overnighted (with her most recent adv copy Hem's Girl which I can't put down--word!!!!) that was waiting on my doorstep yesterday afternoon and I wrote a full, whole poem in that. I am re-setting my ways as result of not having this my core sustenance. I have learned something yet again the necessity of filling up, and the absolute non-negotiable: having a place to fill with the words, a place that remains the same.
Sam played me her man's music he is Philly local soon enough I played her Josh just one song an old one it's the first time I'd done that in a very very long time and that was enough. We work together Sam and me long hours ten hours at a time and so she is on to me as me to her: we hold the other's stories already, having known each other less than a month. Some of them anyway, a single bone or two but skeletal-enough. So that with sparing details or so many that they come out in mouthfuls a few bursts at a time we know what flesh were giving the other, which bone on which to hang this part. This was a new twist. This had new gold. Little light flecks on the skin. Long shadows from underfoot aura big as the aururaborelias in the western sky.
I'm seeing my friend Laura Walsh tonight I told her, I play her Walsh's music.
And soon enough there is the response, I feel the throes of the words from somewhere inside my chest and had to get on here it was a matter of health. Sam and Ty humor me, roll silver and we small talk and cut sidemouth cracks on one another especially about me on the clock. Here it is the skeleton I am yearning for the one o holy loss the lac of which leaves me with out structure or faith, and happy enough to deny that even a boneyard exists. How Charles Simic said. Who can not howl will not find his pack.
I am sick. Being packless sucks.
January 5, 2011
Wild Card Inside. (You Really Should Read This.)
There's this Feist song going through my head as I sit down to entertain the thoughts behind what will become this blogpost.
I feel it all, I feel it all is how it starts and what I want to write about is the potential recklessness of being as god-damned emotional as I am. I''ve begun journaling again and am trying to take much time as I can to resettle and recharge, too, an intuitive move that I've been drawn towards since November and which, I understand now that I've finally begun, is motivated by my deeper wisdom. What I call God (proof of either my pure faith or my true atheism: my GOD is the Vegetable Body, the other 92% or so of my body/mind/consciousness that keeps me going while I twiddle along and shit all over my mind with the piddly 8 or so percent of brain power I actually have or think I have competency over...) Anyhow. My deeper wisdom, ol VB settled in harmony around me in the kitchen this morning. I need to journal right now in order to temper and reign in my emotional life. I've tons of experience in the handiness of this.
It's how I've come to learn HOW to make good decisions.
Look, this is the Old World Western-Wound. I dont care who you are or where you live, if you've got six kids a monster SUV and a hub who wears a tie to work, a hippy bliss-head wearing few clothes with most your possesions in your backpack and a happy home built by hand in the woods or a high-powered heel-wearing bus-jumping city glam girl with two dates one at happy hour and one at eleven tonight when drinks are half-priced, the point is we all come from the same tribal thing and that is the unconscious presumption that our emotions are somehow BAD or at best SILLY THINGS.
I was in my mid-twenties when I learned the importance of how to name what I was feeling, when I actually was taught by someone that there was a range of inner-life deliveries other than good/bad or even happy/sad. And I'm coming on the end of my 34th year now, having just put behind me what I would say was my very first year of successfully living according to my own integrated rhythms. To illustrate:
New Years Day Katie and I were sitting slap-happy as hell and laaaaid-out in a nest on my folks couch watching movies. Classic sweatpants on Sunday style day. My boss called to talk over some issues at work. When I hung up I bitched for a few secs about one certain issue, in order to blow off steam and then resume movie-watching chill-mindedly. It happened that at that exact moment my dad walked in and proceeds to bark (my nice way of saying yell, as I've come to accept this is how he communicates: All reaction) Kel! What have I taugyht you! It's not personal! It's work! It's not personal or emotional it's just work!
Katie and I, as my brother and I so naturally do still, just looked at each other and than busted out laughing so hard and grimy that all we could do was immediately start making fun of dad and each other. Do you get it? Here's my father, emotionally screaming about me needing to learn to not be emotional when it comes to work.
And here is the tribal wound: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NOT BEING EMOTIONAL
Emotional lives are real as the chemical epicenters that trigger them. Indeed, when it comes down to it chemical response is really all they are. Doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman you've got chemical response centers. But not having emotional lives, and men in particularly and the devaluing of them and their emotional lives, and the resultant suppressing of women and ours because of that, is the lie that Western Society has so suppressingly cultivated over the years. It is responsible for all matters of power struggles. I have zero, that is ZERO friends with whom I've not commiserated over our mom's subtle victim/martyring ways and the demasculation of men at home that ultimately rotates out of all of that. And it is what it is, built on years of conditioned self-sacrifice.
And behavior is modeled when it comes to how we influence one another.
So therein, the deceptive nature of being true to ourselves. Emotions suppressed, much like in Feist's video when she tries to bang out the fire sparks, will jackknife out in the most caddy-wampus directions. The truth is lies in this case, as it is when we react or make decisions based on a charged feeling in the moment. So learning to not react to them willynilly but also to honor them, feel and integrate them and the messages they inherently deliver MEN and WOMEN, proves to be our generation's most endeavoring order. I read Committed by Liz Gilbert in the fall, and weeks later a blog post by an old friend in which both mentioned the pure luck of birth that so many of us landed in middle-class lifestyles in the West. Meaning our problems, no matter what, are motherfuckin high-bottom. And I will be the first to say that is true, that my people are no longer dominated by establishing compulsion: struggling to put food on the table or keep a roof over head. My ancestors by and large progressed that for us/me--and with wisdom and more resources comes responsibility. Period. Poetry is political, you're life is how you be. And we're all in this together, afterall.
Suppression is suppression and personal power, and oppressing it through de-, and/or over-valuing our emotions by only ever reacting to them, is a behavior that we can either model, or undo. The results are never-ending.
Word.
FB users go here
I feel it all, I feel it all is how it starts and what I want to write about is the potential recklessness of being as god-damned emotional as I am. I''ve begun journaling again and am trying to take much time as I can to resettle and recharge, too, an intuitive move that I've been drawn towards since November and which, I understand now that I've finally begun, is motivated by my deeper wisdom. What I call God (proof of either my pure faith or my true atheism: my GOD is the Vegetable Body, the other 92% or so of my body/mind/consciousness that keeps me going while I twiddle along and shit all over my mind with the piddly 8 or so percent of brain power I actually have or think I have competency over...) Anyhow. My deeper wisdom, ol VB settled in harmony around me in the kitchen this morning. I need to journal right now in order to temper and reign in my emotional life. I've tons of experience in the handiness of this.
It's how I've come to learn HOW to make good decisions.
Look, this is the Old World Western-Wound. I dont care who you are or where you live, if you've got six kids a monster SUV and a hub who wears a tie to work, a hippy bliss-head wearing few clothes with most your possesions in your backpack and a happy home built by hand in the woods or a high-powered heel-wearing bus-jumping city glam girl with two dates one at happy hour and one at eleven tonight when drinks are half-priced, the point is we all come from the same tribal thing and that is the unconscious presumption that our emotions are somehow BAD or at best SILLY THINGS.
I was in my mid-twenties when I learned the importance of how to name what I was feeling, when I actually was taught by someone that there was a range of inner-life deliveries other than good/bad or even happy/sad. And I'm coming on the end of my 34th year now, having just put behind me what I would say was my very first year of successfully living according to my own integrated rhythms. To illustrate:
New Years Day Katie and I were sitting slap-happy as hell and laaaaid-out in a nest on my folks couch watching movies. Classic sweatpants on Sunday style day. My boss called to talk over some issues at work. When I hung up I bitched for a few secs about one certain issue, in order to blow off steam and then resume movie-watching chill-mindedly. It happened that at that exact moment my dad walked in and proceeds to bark (my nice way of saying yell, as I've come to accept this is how he communicates: All reaction) Kel! What have I taugyht you! It's not personal! It's work! It's not personal or emotional it's just work!
Katie and I, as my brother and I so naturally do still, just looked at each other and than busted out laughing so hard and grimy that all we could do was immediately start making fun of dad and each other. Do you get it? Here's my father, emotionally screaming about me needing to learn to not be emotional when it comes to work.
And here is the tribal wound: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NOT BEING EMOTIONAL
Emotional lives are real as the chemical epicenters that trigger them. Indeed, when it comes down to it chemical response is really all they are. Doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman you've got chemical response centers. But not having emotional lives, and men in particularly and the devaluing of them and their emotional lives, and the resultant suppressing of women and ours because of that, is the lie that Western Society has so suppressingly cultivated over the years. It is responsible for all matters of power struggles. I have zero, that is ZERO friends with whom I've not commiserated over our mom's subtle victim/martyring ways and the demasculation of men at home that ultimately rotates out of all of that. And it is what it is, built on years of conditioned self-sacrifice.
And behavior is modeled when it comes to how we influence one another.
So therein, the deceptive nature of being true to ourselves. Emotions suppressed, much like in Feist's video when she tries to bang out the fire sparks, will jackknife out in the most caddy-wampus directions. The truth is lies in this case, as it is when we react or make decisions based on a charged feeling in the moment. So learning to not react to them willynilly but also to honor them, feel and integrate them and the messages they inherently deliver MEN and WOMEN, proves to be our generation's most endeavoring order. I read Committed by Liz Gilbert in the fall, and weeks later a blog post by an old friend in which both mentioned the pure luck of birth that so many of us landed in middle-class lifestyles in the West. Meaning our problems, no matter what, are motherfuckin high-bottom. And I will be the first to say that is true, that my people are no longer dominated by establishing compulsion: struggling to put food on the table or keep a roof over head. My ancestors by and large progressed that for us/me--and with wisdom and more resources comes responsibility. Period. Poetry is political, you're life is how you be. And we're all in this together, afterall.
Suppression is suppression and personal power, and oppressing it through de-, and/or over-valuing our emotions by only ever reacting to them, is a behavior that we can either model, or undo. The results are never-ending.
Word.
FB users go here
January 3, 2011
The Authentic Life. Begin Again.
The authentic self is the soul made visible. ~Sarah ban Breathnach
Upside down the view is touching and real as anything going on when my feet are on the ground, in fact, life felt most open, most real, most expansive and in touch with what my insides crave from that exact perspective. I was naked as the day is perennial, floating inside the earth in hotspring mineral water that came from deep inside the belly of the land. My head was leaned way back, resting on a rock, staring up at moss then roots then the trees arched over me then beyond. And me close as I could be to deep, deep under the Cascade Mountains, Northern Oregon, USA.
My friend and wise woman Gretchen had her buddy pick me up in Portland and drive me the three hours to her and the cozy room in her cottage on the coast. Gretchen lent me an old beater pickup and for three weeks I went where the wind wanted to take me. I spent a lot of time with her, my wise woman friend, and with Paul my brother in rebel-peace-making who I met working in a roadhouse steak joint on the Oregon Coast in 05, and also with Beth, my friend with the Lungta-Spirit and Anusara-calling.
I called my mom crying after the first week, saying how much I had ached to be there with people who I intrinsically considered my tribe, how very much alive and like myself I finally felt again. Beth and I floated in those hotsprings and slept in the cold, pointed night in Paul's tent in the lush evergreen woods. We hiked the coast range and communed deep with the well of wise woman wisdom which is found easily and naturally within when we take the time to still, and listen. And what I told them, Beth and Paul, again and again when they asked what was next for me was that I was giving my spirit all the time it needed to answer that question.
No time-frame, is what I said.
I had weddings and family obligations back at home, and a job waiting, and a room at the beach.
This morning, in that very same room, I thought a lot about the past year and about the importance, the commitment, of always returning back to our selves. This is the wild woman wisdom, the intrinsic trust in one's own connection within. I was 21 when my aunt gave me the daily meditation book Simple Abundance, and it is that book that I credit for Confirmation. Confirming the yearning. The natural and legitimate siren ring from inside myself that felt like propulsion and being stuck at once that was pressing me towards hand-creating a life that was meaningful, and real, to me. And that life has always begun first with settling in to find "me". I handed that book over to a young wise-woman to be this week, knowing well that it landed in the right hands. And in the mean time, I returned to my quiet space today, answerless still, but with a clear knowing sense from cultivating that connection: My next move harmonious to my spirit is soon to present it self, so long as I continue a day at a time to show up to me. To show up and begin again after for example 8 days of living out of my car through the tangled holidays stretched along the Baltimore-Annapolis corridor, to be willing to sit back down and begin again.
January 2, 2011
The Reverse Side of Diplomacy.
I feel a bit sorry right now for the people who love me.
On December 31, 2009, I was standing in Trump Casino in Atlantic City with Laura Walsh and Katie. Neon lights and the low white-noise dinging of electronic bells, the splintered salt-wrecked boardwalk under the black sky with fast grey clouds and the ocean rectifying itself over and over right outside. The moment all the drunks and the lushes hurtled out their bellowed cries of HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! this enormous sense of relief washed through me, one like I'd never known. I was so, so naturally thankful that 2009 was finally over that my spirit reacted with such intrinsic, unanticipated peace. This year, at Seacrets in Ocean City, my four inch platform heels dug deep in the sand, Katie grabbed my hand at 11:59 and said Let's Pray. And we did, and my prayers were all about giving thanks, and this time at the turn of the year with the sloppy tourists and bemused locals on-looking all around, what happened was a great flexed openness, a widening that felt like a smile inside of enthusiasm. This time I was so, so very excited not about the end of my year but about the good things to come with the beginning of a new one. Which is why it was so strange that the rest of my NY Eve was full of this deep feeling of having my heels dug in, a feeling so primal and rooted it felt almost like anger. It's how I've been feeling, or did, for most of the last month of the year.
I've worked hard, in slow subtle ways over many years, to integrate diplomacy in to my character because as a younger woman it was an area I was greatly lacking. Self-introspection has helped me to refine this, particularly by learning to practice how to let you just be you. That has happened by first learning how to lovingly accept me for who and how I am being or behaving right now, by becoming conscious of this and of what's motivating my thoughts, moods and reactions. Accepting me helps me not expect you to be anyone other than you, with your own set of thoughts and motivators and feelings and reactions. And indeed finding room to accept you for who you are and how you're behaving right now is liberating because it frees up my focus: your actions aren't all about me. It's very peaceful not having to take things personally. I truly believe I've made good habit out of meeting you where you are and the the cool bonus feature is that folks tend to dole me the same kindness in return. Meeting the world where it is from moment to moment can be a tremendously gratifying experience.
Until it's not.
At times you can appear very stubborn and selfish in relationships. You will give over 100%, but once you reach the halfway mark in giving OR receiving, a herd of elephants could not push you further if you feel the other is not coming up with his or her fair share... When angered you can be almost warlike, as if you were a general plotting a strategy.
This excerpt comes from my friend and mentor Gretchen who gave me an 8 page single-spaced print-out of my stars when I turned 30, and it was so eerily spot-on at the time that the experience of reading it was like watching a supernatural movie that totally covers you in chills. I actually had to put it away and couldn't look at it for several months because it mapped me out so accurately. That said, it's served over the years as a guidepost for my growth and has provided answers, insights and soul-breath where otherwise none has been. Which is why the segment above was running through my mind in bed yesterday morning New Years Day, with the following visual images waking me as if I'd awoke mid-dream.
In my head thick steel doors were literally slamming down and vaulting shut. Each door had a person or experience attached in a feeling-way to it, and with each closure I felt my self literally filling with vitality and a free-flowingness. Literally, I was laying there suddenly awake, with clarity but in a half-dreamy state. And doors were vaulting closed, and this feeling of absolutely NO MORE was filling me. NO MORE being taken for granted or exploited in my going-ons with other people was an awareness from deep within, and it quickly started to settle-up in direct vision for me and my own self-understanding. Suddenly my perhaps seemingly arrogant or selfish not-budging-even-for-a-herd-of-elephants-behavior of speaking-my-mind-directly-and-with-no-remorse over the past several weeks made sense. To be clear: since Thanksgiving, when I started my new job, I can site (but will not in detail right here) at least eight different specific work, social, familial, friend and/or romantic/sexual examples of me standing up in a fiery but clear-minded way and speaking my mind about behavior or decisions or treatment that were unacceptable to me. Examples of me being abruptly vocal or making choices in which I did not budge and did not feel apologetic at all for stating where I stood. And yesterday it was like the great reckoning occurred: I got the importance of being clear and clean within my boundaries, for myself.
The thing about it is that in the wake of this month or so I feel my actions or the times I've expressed myself could well have come out so blatantly that maybe they seemed brutal, or almost warlike. In every instance it's happened almost despite myself. Regardless of the quiet time, meditation, group-activities, being of service or other practices I've employed to try to somewhat yield this behavior. After more than once dropping straight ghetto on New Years Eve and telling it how it was, I finally just surrenedered. Fuck it, I figured. I am who the hell I am. There's really no escaping me.
And then it was New Years Day, and the clarity was with me about all these areas where I need to reassess what for me is ok and what's not. Because truly, who wants to have to be pushed to the warlike edge? Like someone once told me, it's okay to be honest but it doesn't mean you get to be an asshole...And I apologize if at all that's how I've come off!! Here I am, it is a new year, my focus having been re-aligned, reigned back in and me grateful for it, reflecting on these lessons and on what's to come with this new wisdom I've gained. I only hope that the people who love me, especially in the past month, can practice on me what I've really truly tried to lovingly apply over the years with them: accepting me for who I am and letting me be where I am at.
I guess I've got decisions to make that really aren't at all about any of them.
On December 31, 2009, I was standing in Trump Casino in Atlantic City with Laura Walsh and Katie. Neon lights and the low white-noise dinging of electronic bells, the splintered salt-wrecked boardwalk under the black sky with fast grey clouds and the ocean rectifying itself over and over right outside. The moment all the drunks and the lushes hurtled out their bellowed cries of HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! this enormous sense of relief washed through me, one like I'd never known. I was so, so naturally thankful that 2009 was finally over that my spirit reacted with such intrinsic, unanticipated peace. This year, at Seacrets in Ocean City, my four inch platform heels dug deep in the sand, Katie grabbed my hand at 11:59 and said Let's Pray. And we did, and my prayers were all about giving thanks, and this time at the turn of the year with the sloppy tourists and bemused locals on-looking all around, what happened was a great flexed openness, a widening that felt like a smile inside of enthusiasm. This time I was so, so very excited not about the end of my year but about the good things to come with the beginning of a new one. Which is why it was so strange that the rest of my NY Eve was full of this deep feeling of having my heels dug in, a feeling so primal and rooted it felt almost like anger. It's how I've been feeling, or did, for most of the last month of the year.
I've worked hard, in slow subtle ways over many years, to integrate diplomacy in to my character because as a younger woman it was an area I was greatly lacking. Self-introspection has helped me to refine this, particularly by learning to practice how to let you just be you. That has happened by first learning how to lovingly accept me for who and how I am being or behaving right now, by becoming conscious of this and of what's motivating my thoughts, moods and reactions. Accepting me helps me not expect you to be anyone other than you, with your own set of thoughts and motivators and feelings and reactions. And indeed finding room to accept you for who you are and how you're behaving right now is liberating because it frees up my focus: your actions aren't all about me. It's very peaceful not having to take things personally. I truly believe I've made good habit out of meeting you where you are and the the cool bonus feature is that folks tend to dole me the same kindness in return. Meeting the world where it is from moment to moment can be a tremendously gratifying experience.
Until it's not.
At times you can appear very stubborn and selfish in relationships. You will give over 100%, but once you reach the halfway mark in giving OR receiving, a herd of elephants could not push you further if you feel the other is not coming up with his or her fair share... When angered you can be almost warlike, as if you were a general plotting a strategy.
This excerpt comes from my friend and mentor Gretchen who gave me an 8 page single-spaced print-out of my stars when I turned 30, and it was so eerily spot-on at the time that the experience of reading it was like watching a supernatural movie that totally covers you in chills. I actually had to put it away and couldn't look at it for several months because it mapped me out so accurately. That said, it's served over the years as a guidepost for my growth and has provided answers, insights and soul-breath where otherwise none has been. Which is why the segment above was running through my mind in bed yesterday morning New Years Day, with the following visual images waking me as if I'd awoke mid-dream.
In my head thick steel doors were literally slamming down and vaulting shut. Each door had a person or experience attached in a feeling-way to it, and with each closure I felt my self literally filling with vitality and a free-flowingness. Literally, I was laying there suddenly awake, with clarity but in a half-dreamy state. And doors were vaulting closed, and this feeling of absolutely NO MORE was filling me. NO MORE being taken for granted or exploited in my going-ons with other people was an awareness from deep within, and it quickly started to settle-up in direct vision for me and my own self-understanding. Suddenly my perhaps seemingly arrogant or selfish not-budging-even-for-a-herd-of-elephants-behavior of speaking-my-mind-directly-and-with-no-remorse over the past several weeks made sense. To be clear: since Thanksgiving, when I started my new job, I can site (but will not in detail right here) at least eight different specific work, social, familial, friend and/or romantic/sexual examples of me standing up in a fiery but clear-minded way and speaking my mind about behavior or decisions or treatment that were unacceptable to me. Examples of me being abruptly vocal or making choices in which I did not budge and did not feel apologetic at all for stating where I stood. And yesterday it was like the great reckoning occurred: I got the importance of being clear and clean within my boundaries, for myself.
The thing about it is that in the wake of this month or so I feel my actions or the times I've expressed myself could well have come out so blatantly that maybe they seemed brutal, or almost warlike. In every instance it's happened almost despite myself. Regardless of the quiet time, meditation, group-activities, being of service or other practices I've employed to try to somewhat yield this behavior. After more than once dropping straight ghetto on New Years Eve and telling it how it was, I finally just surrenedered. Fuck it, I figured. I am who the hell I am. There's really no escaping me.
And then it was New Years Day, and the clarity was with me about all these areas where I need to reassess what for me is ok and what's not. Because truly, who wants to have to be pushed to the warlike edge? Like someone once told me, it's okay to be honest but it doesn't mean you get to be an asshole...And I apologize if at all that's how I've come off!! Here I am, it is a new year, my focus having been re-aligned, reigned back in and me grateful for it, reflecting on these lessons and on what's to come with this new wisdom I've gained. I only hope that the people who love me, especially in the past month, can practice on me what I've really truly tried to lovingly apply over the years with them: accepting me for who I am and letting me be where I am at.
I guess I've got decisions to make that really aren't at all about any of them.
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