10,000 Ways

Smile...

There must be 10,000 ways to kneel and kiss the earth...

by Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th century mystic and poet who inspired the All Faiths Beautiful exhibit, in its final week at the American Visionary Art Museum, Bmore.

Go there! (but dont get caught snapping photos cuz the guard'll yell at you...)

My tribe, my art, my madness, my home

They say write your madness. Or specifically, your obsessions. Cuz that's what makes you a liver of this life, a qualified human being with your own unique something to say. It's true. Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones (read this book) tells us it's okay about our obsessions. Actually she goes as far as to say make a list of them, because when you get down to writing and having to be there, alone with yourself on the page, one of two things is going to happen. You'll either tunnel in and extol on and on all about those couple of things that whirl away most of your brain activity from day to day and at the very least be self-informed when you're done, or else your going to try to avoid them, and in doing so, either not write at all or else end up ONLY, with sort of neurotic blinders on, writing about the one thing that in every other waking moment of your life you spend so much time trying not to look at.

I am mad about my family--my tribe and friends and the people I seem to have come here with. Their karmic patterning and how they are reflected in me and we are all rooted up in each other. Knowing this, really getting in to the stink and the light of it, helps me better decode who we each are trying to be. I'm mad about my art, the self-expression of my madness, and of anything that prompts that or helps me digest it or want to pump it out of me. I am mad about my madness: my spiritual growth or anyhow the experiences of this here soul. Sometimes I am mad about people, certain people, but I chunk them in with the tribe thing. I am mad, I get mad, about this idea of one single word, about the digressions and assertions and the alertness and sensitivity and the conflicts of mine and everyone else's ideas about this one word God. I am mad about Home, and place. And Youth. Music. Soul. Nature. But these all come back to the same couple things, in no particular order--my tribe, my art, my madness, my home.

I want to go back and write about a couple of momentous experiences from this summer but I am also not sure where this will take me, and so it may take a couple days/a couple posts. Firstly, Artscape. The nation's biggest free public art festival--on the streets of Baldamore every year in July. Mom claims we went there to the festival alot as kids, up to the top of MLK in the heart of the city a block away from the hospital where she worked and sometimes got to go sit in the nurse's lounge and play. I do have a mass of memories from childhood labeled city. The physical fragments I recall are of half-way up stuff and commotion: from the knees-up of people in Lexington Market or the other one on Cross Street, the door-up of tall tall buildings in the commerce section where dad worked, the tires-up of fast moving cars on the grey corners and the light coming down the eyelevel alleys from the way-up sky. And the way the bay at the Harbour made you aware of all that sky. The towering sense of life all about you in little splotches of movie-slide detail: how the city brings all that life in a magnified way right on top of you as a kid and you can feel it pulsing there, wizzing on top of you and moving all around you and passing you ever so quickly by and how all that power, all those dizzy half-up visual moments are compounded in to the couple of memories the soft grey flesh of your brain was willing to stop and say hey, I'll take this one down. Mostly my memories are visceral: the cool feeling of the water that spritzed me and my three-year-old boyfriend Kurt when we walked under the misters at the Harbour after the Science Center or the Constellation or the Aquarium and my socks and my shoes got wet. The heat on my ankles that rose up off the street tar. The sweet smell at the Greek festivals that I will forever associate with sticky fingers and bahklava. Being a kid, being so close to real life there on the ground. And the music, the music brushing my ears and the magical feeling of grass in the middle of all that concrete, the music literally moving by my head on the air, through my hair and me with the grass and the late twilight heat of July and mom's artist friend Ellie: being a kid and the touching throb of life that is art and how as kids all that art which is life is still so natural a rhythm to us. Tired after a long day in the sun with all the half-up views at the festival that made mom's eyes twinkle in wonder and her breath go breezy: Artscape.


Sean my brother said it ain't Artscape if it ain't a hundred plus fucking degrees. Yep, that's to be an adult at Artscape. We drove up from Chestertown and got there on Sunday, the last day of the festival, around 11 in the morning. We were laughing and rolling our eyes with tender family humor and had made decisions to go with the day because my mom and her family, her sister and brother-in-law and three of their kids were all coming up from the beach, too, and my mom's family likes to claim to plan things but really it's an excuse for them all to complain a little and at once laugh at each other I mean really laugh until tears come and then in private each one say something mildly injured but also always very funny. And the plans never ever go according to schedule and mostly just get lost or forgot and that is mom's family, and why I love them, how human they are, how imperfectly annoying but able to laugh so frolickingly hard at each other cuz at least they sort of partly see the imperfections and the laughter reminds us we all have that in common. But before I remembered that I just got alot of phone calls from mom and Sean, who was going to the festival to meet us with his new girl from his home in Columbia, about trying to plan and to meet and if there is one thing I cant stand it's going to a wide open place of Life and trying to manage or create the experience. So Bran and I did what we do best. We agreed to quiet. We started the day in the front lawn of our farm, corn rows all growing high above the street and us in the sun Thanking the Day for the Harmony it was meant to bring. With our arms up wide above our heads our hearts open pointed at the sky. Then we got in the car, drove an hour and fifteen minutes cuz I only know how to drive fast, to Lombard Street found free parking and had the best day we could have never planned...

The Wailers were scheduled to headline as the final wrap-up act and that was at 6. First we walked Mt. Royal on the right side and I relished in every single vendor stand that I came across. Right away I saw something that I wanted to buy. This guy doing little sculptures made from rail ties. The were small like the size of a fat grey Barbie doll and on a little steel stand. And they were so alive--enchanted! I loved them. They had little placards that said things like "The Morning After" with a railroad tie-made man perched over a railroad tie-made toilet. Or "Chiropractor" with a railroad tie patient getting his leg yanked above his head by a railroad tie doctor. They were so gloriously irreverent it was like they were smiling wryly at you and winking their non-existent railroad tie eyes. I wanted the waitress one. Immediately, art came alive and life spoke to me: the sacred mundane, ahhhhhhhh.

By the time we got to the top of Mt. Royal where the local music stage was we were hungry and wanted a snack. Best part of Artscape besides the free music and the street performers and MICA being open and the Symphony Opera House being open and Lyric being open for free shows all day and the many many vendors and the children's theater's and the hands-on displays is all of the all of the all of the very good food. This year they had a green/organic food court too but we never even made it there. Instead we split a big serving of chicken curry sitting on the curb listening to a funk/punk fusion local band. And when we were done we got up to walk down the other side of Mt. Royal and see those vendors when what do you know there was mom, Aunt Lori and cousin Mason and he was jamming with this short wiry dreadlocked black guy like they knew each other forever calling each other things like chief and smiling and sweating. We chilled with the fam awhile. Then here comes Sean and his girl, and of course we all found each other by happenstance there in the middle of the festival come together under the hot sun.
This is a card from a pack that the non-profit Art with a Heart gave to me after buying a craft from them. The image was done by a woman who lives in a shelter for homeless women and their children. Art with a Heart basically does programming throughout the city, empowering folks by giving them tools and permission for self-expression through all kinds of different art forms. Half the profits of what they sold at Artscape that day went to the artist, the other half back to the organization to keep it going. HOW EXACTLY IT IS THAT? A real live art co-op functioning in the midst of some of the most hopeless accounts that life can deal. I bought a decoupaged mirror from a fat-faced boy who shyly showed me his work and beamed when my heart jumped because the colors he used for his mirror are the vital colors of me in my joy essence. I bought it spot on out of sheer joy essence though whether it came from his beam or my love of the colors I am not sure. Support these people and this group.

The other thing I bought was a print by James Mayfield, out of New York, called Woman Grounded In Thought. His site is under construction right now, but when it is up if there is a link to this piece check it out. I love how this gals whole body has been shaped by the forces trying to move her, and how stalwart and solid she is in her conviction to stay right there. How you can tell that whatever reason she is standing there, veiled, being pushed by the wind but staying so still against it all the while, is deep enough a part of her that her very being will be shaped by it ever after, like water wearing on stone. That is me. Has been. Busy, stuck and grounded going nowhere. It made me melt a little inside and get a teenybit wet-eyed. Even though the very polite James' buddy grabbed my brother aside and pointed out that the reason he liked the print was cuz of the woman's "poppin booty".

Other than that my big moment of the day was seeing the Full Circle Dance Collective at the Lyric. They performed a shortened version of a piece called the Sacred Body. Exploring the various experiences of religious sublimity and such themes. I love to dance, to let my body go, and this was the first time that watching dance actually made me feel the same exact ecstasy as when it's me doing the moving. I was sitting there in the dark, during the first act called "Supplication", a very Christian theme which I at once struggle with and am enraptured by, and suddenly I was crying. Like sob stifled in my throat so no one could hear me crying. The Sacred Body was intensely religious for me, of the oneness in-bliss, truest kind.

All in all it was an amazingly flowing day. And ohtheirony, it brought me home to me, grounded in thought as I'd been, insistent this year on going my own way. Remembering the bit of good there is in every single side of how one looks at a thing.....

**

First Harvest just past. The birds outside our windows are crazy busy, making nests and gathering food and the noises they make sound like someone digging frantically through a box trying to find some lost piece of something in order to take with him back home before anybody sees it's gone. They flit around a lot. The sun is going further away in the sky. Things are turning. The birds know.


I am going to the beach today. Got a ocean of floating to do.

Be Ing

I got this book yesterday called Fandango by Sandy Hill. I read about it in my Vogue and had one of those sensation-al juicy reactions that i am always craving for and so am very sensitive to when they hit. The book, to my best description, is this women's compilation of years and years worth of over the top entertaining--she believes that celebrating, as in life in general, is call to give your very very most. The full title is Fandango: recipes, parties and license to make magic. Of course the word magic in the title sold me, as i am a full believer that life itself is the miracle, and that we, fragile humans, are merely the blind fools with capacity to turn our own inner glow on at any given moment--and this is magic, alchemical, to me. Of the highest form.

So let's talk about this for a moment. I wandered in to our local bookseller yesterday to pick up the book, which I had ordered some weeks ago. One of the sales people shared that she'd enjoyed looking through the book, and I casually mentioned that I found out about it through "my weakness...reading the pages of Vogue...Or more, just looking at the pictures." I giggled I think kind of shy and then looked up at her. Wow, you'd of thought she swallowed poison by the look on her face, which she politely tried to cover. As if intellectuals can't be full-bodied, juicy persons? It got me to thinking: in the Spring of 2005 i was living in a trailer in an anonymous fishing town on the Oregon coast. It rained everyday and the midst in the air was indecipherable from the grey sky and the clouds that swirled in and out of the tops of all the luscious green trees. Our trailer had walls like papyrus and when it rained or when the wind blew the weather actually happened inside our house, too. Mold grew on the walls. And i was living there, waiting tables and bar tending and taking up smoking again for the trillionth time in a roadside steakhouse. And most of all, I was sorting out my life--or what I thought was sorting out my life, ignorant as we all are at times, and me at many times! to the fact that life is actually what's going on right now, while I'm in the midst of trying to figure it all out. I had just sold everything I'd owned, quit my "career" job and all its associations, and then lived out of a truck for five months in the national forests of this great land. I spent alot of time in quiet. I learned again to listen to, and to love, the sound, the feel, the heart of our precious giving earth. I emerged from this in an in-between place, quite sure I was not who I was when I left my old life, but not sure at all who I'd become. It was my first cognizant experience of realizing that I, we, are always in the pure infinite stage of be-coming. That it has to do with be-ing. In the beginning in that trailer I was in such distress and discontent: restless all the time. My 28th birthday came and went and I took me shopping, bought myself an amazing flowy pink skirt that made/makes me feel like a fairy whenever i wore/wear it. How alive it made felt! Then I realized, I had fallen in to a rigidity of thinking: that because I spent my weekends on my hands and knees in the wet detritus of the Oregon forest floor, that because I knew how to simplify and live a life of utility on the road, it somehow meant that I had to shun off the other sides of me--the glamorous, the sexy, the diva me's! I began a list of all the me's I know me to Be. (And to this day that's a practice I continue to revisit.) I spent days in my wardrobe dressing in various combinations, oh it was like coming home to me after a long, strained no-fun vacation: this is independent photojournalist traveller kelly. This is hippie moonmama magic maker kelly. This is cross between simple forest liver kelly and diva-lishous kadada b! It felt so good to stretch those soul muscles, to flex my wings that way!

So now I laugh a little when someone makes me stop in judgement of Me. And I sadden a little when I recall how quick I used to be to judge someone for who they currently are be-ing. (Oh, those jeans didn't come from second-hand? Oh, you like labels?). Now I recoil a little when someone gives me the idea that theirs is the only way to Be. Because I don't know much, but I am sure enjoying knowing and be-ing me. I relish, I crave for that juicy feeling of alive-ness. I want that as much for you on your own terms as I demand it for me. Carl Jung and Joe Campbell and talking about archetypes, which is nerdy and boring for many I know! does that juicy aliveness for me! So do the amazingly hot stiletto strap-ups in my coworkers Anthropologie catalog. And so does dancing dirty and barefoot against the shadows thrown by the flames coming from my own handmade fire barrels out onto our trees and in my head and my heart and my soul and also against the sky. Or the sunflowers growing all simple in my garden. Or chatting w a girlfriend on gmail. Or the taste of melty creme brulee after a delicious salad feast.

Juicy. Making magic. Be-ing me.

On Poetics and Diane diPrima

I'm working obscene amounts of double shifts lately. obscene. so yesterday i forced myself in to the obligatory doing absolutely nothing. the night before the prospects of no plans no calls no errands no nada to have to do seemed great, but actually going through with it was a little tough. made me feel less than worthwhile. have always been in to identifying the mean teeth of doubt in my consciousness, the terms of which like a tape looping i or one plays over again throughout the head without really separating out from and seeing, and so take for granted. so i'm programmed to think that taking time off is lazy or gluttonous. go figure--of course i am.

anyhow hell yeah let's hear it for 8 episodes of the first season of SexintheCity woooohooo and also Knocked Up and the very stupid Walk Hard. and front porch time and, oh yes, an hour and a half lazed in bed w my new Vogue and a cup of hot mint tea. got my rest, got my soul full again, got my juices flowing--which was necessary if i want to get a blog in before today's 12 hour shift...

***

So the afternoon before last Laura Walsh and I drove to Newark to U Del to check out the original manuscripts (oh god my heart beats faster and the water tingles in my mouth whenever i say that) of Diane diPrima's Freddie Poems. What is of interest to me here is a fine, exact example of my take on poetics. Firstly, her Freddie Poems, far as I'm concerned, is one of diPrima's clear transitions, visible within the poems themselves, into her experience of poetry as an alchemical function. Thus we witness her own self-transition and initiation, in the alchemical tradition, of go-between if you will, of she who transmutes self and journeys between the outer and inner worlds, or between the levels of consciousness. Secondly, in the exact tradition of this and in a very personal and real way, this piece of diPrima's work specifically impacted my own life many years later. This is a prime function of poet-(or artist)-as-shaman, as Gary Snyder explains in his Real Work interview with Paul Geneson of the Ohio Review (Fall 1977): "For the poet in particular, a sense of the need to look at the key archetypes image and symbol blocks and see if the blocks are working. Poetry effects change by getting at the archetypes and getting at people's dreams about a century before it actually effects historical change..."

You see, diPrima wrote this collection while in the midst of grieving the loss of her close friend to suicide. This was nearly fifty years ago. I discovered the existence of the Freddie Poems when reading her memoirs in the Fall of 03. At that time I too was in the midst of grieving the suicide of a close friend, and keeping a journal to him which would eventually become my first complete collection of poetry. I was actually calling that project the Mike Journal then! And likewise, the experience of chronicling my process of grief and understanding was my induction in to the tradition of poet as journeyer through other forms of consciousness by mere means of creation.

Wow, I am so wholly took by this concept of poetry, or any art for that matter, as means of transcending our ordinary incidences in life by penetrating to a more intuitive and in-depth, in-bliss experience. Seeing the Freddie Poems for the first time, and in their original form! was so powerful for me. I still do not, and likely will never, have words to give justice to how rich an opportunity this was. What I can do, rather, is defer to Snyder again. Reading those poems, finding the eternal echos of archetype and symbology that diPrima encountered, and nodding in recognition that I too found those same rhythms, themes and postures in my own poetry to Mike was a home-coming of the purest sense. It was affirmation of the the most primal patterns of our humanity, of the never ending cycles of lifedeathlife, and it made me beam with love to have this opportunity to exist. It was acknowledgement in my own soul, a deep-breathed sigh of comfort and relief, and mostly of pure elated satisfaction and awe.

From Snyder:

As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. Whatever is or was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious through meditation…the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past.