The Return of Sweetie Cream Cheese?

Marla's a friend of mine who works in radio.

I write that and as I do streaming through on my I-tunes live feed is WTMD outta Baldamore and they are talking about this event at the Rutger tomorrow night featuring Charm City Rollergirls and Gilded Lilly Burlesque performances and all I can ironically think about the music here at the beach is not exactly my kind of radio...but whatever works...

Guess who's back I tease her yesterday morning at work.  It is 6 am or so, maybe 6:15.  The orange light in the coffee shop glowing warm.  Peaceful.  I may hate, hate getting up that early because of the thin metal tiredness accompanying me at all times, but it is quiet in the morning there, waiting for the sun.  It is still.

WHO?  she scampers around in a whirlwind til she's turned sharp and petite in my direction and three espressos in, looks at me all Marla-wild.  I laugh I can't help myself, I love her so much and did immediately, she is one of those rare people who simply and unapologeticly is who she is.  She thinks I am referring to someone from work, one of our bosses or board members or some thing I can tell by the frozen way she stops.  Noooo no, no.  That's not what I meant!  I am smiling and full of ease. 

She calls me Feeney, as in Shirley Feeney.  Like from Laverne and Shirley because she is so brass and I am so often aiming for some unaimable tempering and calm.  Without realizing how, I've learned working with her that this is nothing to strive for:  it simply is who I am.  My nature to be loving and accepting, overexuberant and full of praise for all living or loving things.  It comes out so bubbly and innocent most of the time because I'm just being who I am.

I meditate, and have for years.  I practice several different techniques, from occultist trance to prayerful christian exaltion to tantric-mantra chanting to simple pranayama or minimalist buddhist watching.  The point is to go within, to be unfearful in confronting me.   The wisdom of Anicha, which is a sanskrit word I learned at a 10-day silent meditation retreat using the technique of Vipassana, means changing.  Change is the ego's, or self-talk always on rev and going going up there, way.  When our minds are full only of ego than the state of our consciousness is pliable, easy to be swayed.  AND, Anicha teaches that the state of our emotions and reactions are always in a state of flux.  So meditation helps us watch them but not BE them.  Hence, this too shall change, or pass...and therein: peace. 

Sweetie Cream Cheese I tell her.  Sweetie Cream Cheese is back!  Sweetie is the name I gave myself when she explained why I was Shirley to her Laverne, and the only reason I was even aware of Sweetie when Marla pulled out youtube clips and laughingly started calling me Feeney is because that particular day, after many that felt just like it, I was full of the dry, tired irreverence that is the underside of having Feeney-nature.  So I could see the fluffy cream cheese Shirley Sunshine part that day really, really well.

And that's the thing.  Changing.  I was driving along yesterday listening to Marla's radio station.  A hair-rock, one-hit wonder band was on it reminded me of Skid Row and Sebastian Bach (my first long-haired 1980's crush, followed by Slash of GnR ha!)  My ipod's battery was dead, my hair smelled that fabulous ripe smell of hormony sunshine because I was laying on the beach in 60 degree weather for an hour, I was on my way to cook dinner for Valentine's dinner with a girlfriend.  The sun was low in the sky and yellow in that burnt way that makes the clouds edges look bluer than they really are.  I had one of those moments--I've been exhausted lately, run down with the wintertime, and waiting for this phase of my life to pass.  But after several experiences that I had to make happen of quiet, of meditation and devotion to my own sacred-ordinary life, my perspective is centered again...until changing changing it isn't once more...!  Today I have the peace that is under it all, though.  The watcher's peace, the quiet ok.  It's all always changing, passing on by. 

Sweetie Cream Cheese, while maybe not so enthusiastic as she naturally is, always helps remind me that none of this, not one part of my funny random life do I ever want to miss.  It's precisely this cold, tired shit, these miserable 80's bands and me and Marla rolling our eyes at the watching eyes of bosses and board members and us sharing too much sugar and coffee amplifying our natures in the mornings that make me laugh.  And makes me get quiet, appreciative of it all.  Appreciating the burnt sun blue edges of all of it.  Sweetie Cream Cheese!? Marla screams in that loud funny way.  She slams her low-carb sugar-free but with one Splenda double shot 20oz drink she is not paying attention to me it is coffee and not smoking cigarettes on her mind.   Then she says I missed you Shirley Feeney and I am laughing again, life's not passing me by I am with it, with her and all the people I love and we are changing and trying to keep up or be still or work on moving on.

 

To believe in this living...

Opposite Direction is playing in the corner it's half-time the Ravens are up and Jotto's on her way to meet dad and I for half-price pubgrup and orange crushes for them. They are Sue and Rich's favorite a talented band that plays mostly 70's covers. Last summer they were here listening to the music every single Sunday. John Prine is on right now. My heart tweaks, I look out the zipped-up plastic window-side at the harbor, the big local fishing boats, the seagulls fighting just above the water of the bay. It is perfect blue and gold out. The kind of day that makes people just stare wistfully at the sea. It's November in West Ocean City and when the sunlight goes low and yellow across the dusk sky I walk to the top of the street past the fish hauls and wharf boats to where you can look directly across the water to the inlet, the roller coaster and water tower of downtown each high on the horizon, and I take pictures in my favorite light of the day. It's cold out, my hands get so cold I cant feel my fingers walking back to Harborside to meet dad.

My cousin Timmy turned 21 here, Sean and Jamie and some of us spent the Sunday after they got engaged here, two Christmas' ago Seanie when she walked to the ladies room sat at these exact highboys and told me he was going to ask Jame to marry him. We told her we were crying about our Pappaw when she came back.

It's nice, these little places we find ourselves when we happen to find ourselves "in-between." Jotto and I sit at the corner and watch enough of the 4th quarter together to know that the Ravens are going to win, then she leaves to get her son. I happily agree to help her paint her new apartment later this week and yet again, as I hug her to leave, this feeling of absolute gratitude washes through me. This sense of utter thankfulness that is translating today as satisfaction, just simple in-moment satisfaction, for the good things that exist in my life. It's the same exact way I feel looking out the window, listening to Sue and Rich's favorite band cover John Prine. When she leaves dad grabs my arm and gushes O sis! I love this song. It's Ventura Highway. We turn on our stools, rest our backs against the bar and jam with the band. I am smiling, not wildly happy or sad, just smiling. Content with me and dad, the outside water and light, the music, with what is...

If your heart is open and my heart is open...We beat.

She woke up humming to herself and then asked me who sings I Think We're Alone Now? She was futzing with her I-phone so I could only guess she was looking it up.

I dont know I answered. The Beatles?

In a minute it was on, coming through those mini-speakers of her phone all distorted. I stopped in the middle of the room to listen and I had to strain. But then the automatic motion of my body halted on the peak of my breath and demanded my awareness in that quiet inside way that feels like soft nudging or a sparkle--and then everything else fell in to place: everything stilled. The moment stopped. We were breathing, and listening to the music. Feeling every arc of voice every pause of breath and especially every word.

When it was done I just looked at her. Weepy, like we'd been since the night before. Wow, this is the song you woke up humming? and she just nodded wide-eyed. I always heard it as a love song I said, and she nodded some more than started to play it again.

We were surrounded by friends the night before, tons of friends, but in her animal head she was scurrying up the walls of herself spinning out because she felt so alone. She's a junkie but like me has been clean a long long while. When she finally talked about it the fear and self-hate I hugged her forever and told her the only secret that I truly know: that aloneness, it is what we all have in common, what binds us together as humans! It's what Buddha called suffering. But so many of us use that fear to alienate ourselves from one another when our real duty is to let it allow true compassion to grow. Because really, loving me and my tortured human parts are all I need to be able to learn to love you, and yours...

It was Sunday morning and like I said we were away on a road trip and partying with lots of lots of friends. And all I could think the whole time, the whole weekend, all I could clearly see the whole time was how much each of us, how much we all just want and need love.

I got home on Sunday it was late and I had to work Monday way early. The sun was out so blue and the trees were in that heavenly chorus that sounds so good and feels like breath on Monday afternoon and I was in Caroline County so I drove to the park in the woods and had a little visit with Chop. I took myself out to dinner, a lovely old-fashioned date with me. I brought Dani Shapiro's Devotion with me to finish, it's the story of a woman's crisis of faith and struggle for a working spirituality in her life and my writing partner, Erika, shipped it to me the week I quit my job even though she didn't know that that's what I was doing at the time. It has had me well-versed the last few weeks or so and I've been taking it in slowly the way I do chamomile tea or deep breaths of lavender oil in the bathtub. I got all weepy again, Monday night at the Italian restaurant, when I read:

The human condition--the knowledge of this--drives many of us to drink, to drugs, to denial, to running as fast as we can away from the truth of life's fragility. We think we can shore ourselves up. If only we work hard enough, make lots of money, are good and kind enough, pray hard enough, we will somehow be exempt. Then we discover that no one is exempt. What is to be done?

Wow. What is to be done? I thought about it and there are plenty of things that I do. Probably the most important of them all--I find time almost every day to sit quiet, and I have a special place--a chair that has come with me everywhere since I was 19--to do so. I just sit, and sigh, and relax and remind myself that so long as I can breathe and sink within then right now, in this moment, all is well. Sometimes all I can literally find is five minutes but even so I do this pretty much daily--so much so I almost forget to talk about it because I am so accustomed to this necessary me-time and so reliant on the results that I take it for granted. And I dont do it because I am disciplined or sacrosanct or because I feel like I have to in some rigid way...I do it because I crave the results. I Like Feeling Good. And it's made me convinced--I am the tool I came here with, and I am the only thing I'm leaving here with, so I and only I have the power to go inside me and find, or otherwise, effect my peace. To know and watch what's happening inside me, and to love all of it, which is the only way I might ever change. Love love love.

Love of me in my most raw and human condition. My most alone.

I sent my grlfriend the quote over email. It sounds so simple doesn't it? Love yourself. So simple but what's got us all on the absolute run.

Personal Agnostic Creed

by Brooks Long

I believe in the twin justices of peace and murder
I believe in the benevolence of my father and mother
As much as I refuse the truth of their failings
I believe in the one story, its depth and wonder and tragedy too heavy to escape the throat of one voice yet slips from every lip every day
I believe in the child whom can not be defined even after a lifetime
I believe that God looks after fools and drunks
(and there is no God)
I believe in the love of Jesus and the grand tyranny of a joke and its jester
I believe in the indignation following a tree and a rope and
No hate, only
the denial of love
I believe in myself twice daily
I believe myself always
I believe fiercly in the ballet of a junkie
I believe in the grandeur of harsh vernacular
I believe in pussy
I believe in the hush of a kiss
I believe in one American color: brown, yellow, black, red, white and blues
I believe in Rock and Roll, which most certainly exists
I believe in my grandfathers own church and pulpit
I believe in Fayette Street
I believe in a promised land
I believe passionately in calm rationality
I believe in the fist
I believe in the knife and the rifle
I believe in the atomic bomb, which most certainly exists
I believe in the survival of me and mine
I still believe in the twin justices of peace and murder
I believe that after life is death
And know nothing
Amen.

~~~

I dont know much, but I believe in love and santification through imperfection. And the holy light coming in through the least expected cracks in the cement and holes in the wall when you're too fucking tired and broken and dust-filled to even think or strain to look. This man has saved my life, again again again and once more again and again this year. So many times I could never quantify or possibly relate them back for you all to even try to make sense or comprehend. But where once there was none, there is love and light again--trust. Thank you friend travel well I so, so believe in you xoxo

list: LOVE

1. LIFE. I dont know if you're ever like this, but I often find myself, when in the center of some hella fun experience or touchingly beautiful situation or just like in tune with the moment and suddenly aware of my in-tune-ed-ness, skipping ahead and thinking to myself wow, I sure wish soandso or whoevermclala were here with me, right now. Which really is a super waste of the moment. So I happen to be dating life. Which is quite exhilarating and I dont mind at all if you wish to copy and borrow this idea, in fact I quite encourage it! It's delightful to walk outside in to the sunshine and the green bushy grass and the trees all breathy and gentle heaves of hello when you walk by and the gold clouds and yes, saying, Hello Love to all of it and indeed, being there, right there, in love with the moment which is being in love in that moment with Life. So, I am in love! Dating life. I am smiley over it.
2. SISTERS. Like my new sister-in-law to be! That's right, my little bro, about whom I've actually said I would marry if we weren't related, jetskied his grl out to a sandbar in the Bay just a beat from mama Atlantic over the weekend and wrote I love you in the sand while she wasn't looking and was down on one knee when she turned back around! Awwwwww! Hooray!!!!!
3. WOMYN & MAGIC. Wild magic moony crone womyn, like my mom's firey crew of hot bloods that welcomed me to lead a women's circle in honor of the Solstice. Love of tribe of earth and women, raised up power from within.
4. FRIENDS & FAMILY. Family reunion weekend with all the cuz's and KJ and Walsh and Cades as honorary Mc's, too, and steamed crab messy-handed eatin and dusk swimming and rollercoaster riding and backporch laughing and horseshoe tossing and and and...! There was so much shmoopycuzinbuddylovin that all I could do was beam.
5. PASSION. Like bookwriten, how it may as well be sex for all the fire that comes when you're in bliss and alight cuz whatever it is you're heart's fully engaged in has totally got you turned on. Yes! And sharing big ideas with big hearted friends...
6. ME. Being good to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, keeping a toe pointed forward but my feet planted in today. In love. Yay.
   

on the road: asheville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lovely Sentiments

Couple little serendipities that came my way in the last 24, worthy of sharing~~

'May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactlywhere you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinitepossibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May youuse the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that hasbeen given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way youare. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soulthe freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each andevery one of us.'
from Meggie, right on time last night.

ARIES (March 21-April 20): A sense of being in alignment occurs this month for everyone, but especially for you. As this occurs many ideas will make themselves known. Notice them for they are important and will stabilize your actions and self-identity in the coming challenging times. Careful with groups. Stand tall and courageous and remember that fear is simply a state wherein more information is needed. Seek it.
from nightlightnews.com last night. Good intentions for the Retro for me woohooo

'The power of love is infinite.' my ritual meditation of hot tea when i get to the office including this little mediation on the string today.

Good friends, good fam, good music art love and the sea....

Yay, Friday!!

And I'm going to the beach with Amy this afternoon. She lived under me my senior year of college. She was a "townie" with an 8 month-old baby, a barkin-ass dog and a hip-jut that scared most grown men and her and her life downstairs kept me tossing and turning and all tangled-up in my then 10-month-sober misanthropic mess of sheets. Ultimately, we kept each other sane that year. And we've each come a loong, looong way.

Amy hamming it up in our hotel room in Philly in November when we wenttoseeMadonna!!!!!


What I'm digging this morning: This AWESOME jewelry by Danita at Danita Art--or actually anything this folksy mama makes--see her link in my sidebar or visit her etsy shop where these gorgeous loveys are for sale


What I'm listening to: The Others. Out of Rome.

A little bit funny how dylan-esque the main guy is but funny like I like this in mysillyheartwayfunny not lame funny. And they remind me sooo soo much of early Eddie's Place days all greasy funk and pizza dough here some pot there some pot everywhere a puffpuff. I loved that garage-rock sixties screech sound back then it was my soundtrack and inevitably now, mucis with that flavor takes me back to the wide open feeling of potentiality that psychedelia first opened up in me--that wide-open, infinite late-night artist thing. Loving it.

Who I'm enamored with:

me and cuz, december this past year

My cuzin Erin, who is this phenom Gen Y'er who's worked for the World Bank and Peace Corps already (she's like 23? maybe?) and is as of late on a deeper tip of demanding from herself intuitive, inner-growth and responsibility. I saw the bloom of this aspect of her my self this summer. We've always lived together downabeach in the summer time, since she was a weeee thing that I held on my lap and used to love to make laugh. This year our souls k-nected, too. It's been rad watching her grow.

(Hey Er--if I didn't know any better, like if I were some moonymamawyldwoman tuned in to my deepdeeps, I might gosofar as to say that weekend in early May last year when we washed off the winter funk with our ceremonial cleanse in mama Atlantic well could have been your soul's little way of seeing to it that you got yourself a baptism...into a new, deeper way all your own. Believe it sister, our lives our infused daily with Myth, if only we take the time and love to See...)
You can follow Erin, now, too at Infinite and Endless
She has this precious, pure way about her that sets gold in your heart and melts and softens you a little...

PS if you didn't check out yesterday's (admittedly very long!!) post--please do!! Read at least the Esoteric Highlights, about midway down....as for me...I'm

OC BOUND!!

A Fine Weekend

Started out Friday at Ram's Head Shorehouse on Kent Island with the Chester River Runoff
Jazmine was there!! Haven't seen that girl in five years, at least!! How great to see her, Walsh, Bran and Brook, Sam, Marc and Ben, and Nate, too! To remember my tribe--my tribe: Us, Compelled by the Calling.

Then of course, there was the beach.... And meeting up with a whole other tribe..."The Crones" as my mom calls her crew of wise on-the-go gals that all live in and around Ocean City. These are exceptional women, and I am so thankfull for their impact in my life....

Finally, nothing like down-time with dad. People around here call him the Gov, cuz everywhere we go he knows someone. Like the Cactus Cafe, where we went for his bday din-din. Salmon and lamb shank, done spanish-style. We stayed for two and half hours, laughing and talking, and enjoying renditions of songs like the chicken dance from the joker mariachi man.....

Cuz it's my favorite kind of meditation & it reminds me of Sammy G

First Day of the Hunt

The schools always close,
knowing we're so country
all our boys will skip anyway,

and the valley rises together before dawn—

daughters pulling wool caps
past fathers' ears, reciting the profound
and elemental list:

rifle, rounds, knife, rope,

only to send each heavy man to the woods
where he'll slump the day in drifts
of solitude and prayer

while most deer stay down, evading
the unlucky, the night spent

visiting cousins: stroking curves
of antler, lengths of blood-stiffened fur.

Every year it's the same
soft and deliberate snow prints,
the waiting—

as if mine could emerge from his last hiding
place and walk the evening,
empty-handed, to me.

poem for the day by Paula Bohince

Seriously, if you've never tried:
let's posit that meditation is simply a means of going within
or, let's not posit, let's visit dictionary.com:
meditate
verb, -tat⋅ed, -tat⋅ing.
–verb (used without object)
1.
to engage in thought or contemplation; reflect.
2.
to engage in transcendental meditation, devout religious contemplation, or quiescent spiritual introspection.

okay, so if that's the case, reflecting or contemplating, even devoutly religious or quiescent
(-adjective 1.being at rest; quiet; still; inactive or motionless: a quiescent mind. ) or spiritual introspection that involves the mind. well. i am obsessed with this experience, maybe, naw likely because as a teenager and thus when my identity schisms were being chemically cemented by way of the all mighty hormone, i was early engaged in conscious-changing experiments that always involved substances of some sort. so now, sans-substance of course, i really dig on what can still take me to more open, or heightened, or even Still levels of being from within.

try reading a poem, really connecting the movement of it to your inner state. as means of quiescent introspection. join me in the tribe of the holy yogic creatix: from ecopoetshaman gary snyder "The yogin is an experimenter. He experiments on himself. Yoga, from the root Yuj (related to the English \yoke") means to be at work, engaged." join me in this fabulous dance of self-creating, supplication, sublimation on into beginning and beginning all over again....

p.s. also, if you read this far. the poem above reminds me of my friend sam. who i want to mention bc i dig him so much, too. brandon told me last nite he was headed to sammy's for some of the overflow of venison he's got this season. it made me so full of longing for hard, cold earth days that you walk through gingerly but assured purely by the warmth of your friends. the pond out back of the corn pokes and over the hill at sam and tim's. the goose blinds there that always mildly disturbed me, til the nite same cooked us goose soaked in oj in the black cast iron top of his wood stove. how it chokes me to look back on those times. growing up together: knowing sam as this goofy lanky dude that one time was already up in a tree that i suddenly needed to climb. or the night, last january time of Cold moon and god was it cold, and we walked through the woods at anngar the air with its bluehue that reminds you of the ghosts there in the body and bones of the ancient old land--and we were so cold that all at once bran and sam and me looked at one another and ran, under the full moon with cold cheeks and air that burnt our runny noses, all the way back to the farm house, and scraped together a meal of what sam had brought--oodles of noodles, and what was left of ours--some veggies and a little cheese.

how this time of cold calls for warmth. for friends. or good poems. or surrendering, at rest, quiet, still, to within.

yummmmmmmmmmm

god have mercy, i know i haven't posted in a while.

i haven't been right. tho by that i certainly dont mean i've been wrong.


just getting pure, by being in a dirty way. if that makes any kinda sense at all.


my homegrl katie is coming tomrw, hooray. and most of all i know i'm coming back to life for this reason: these jeans and how they made me go oooooooooooooooooooooo
or better, they make me go yuummmmmmmmmmmmmm. which is what my friend paul thought my yoga teacher was chanting once when he came to visit and we hit the wednesday nite free session she holds at the library in chestertown. it made him so happy.

yuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

find them at bonadrag.com

and o yea, happy friggen new year people

katie and kel wolfmother fairyqueens

Legends

I'm so lucky cuz for some reason Chestertown has this totally epic cult-like epicenter for crazy talented-ass musicians. I dont know why, or what it is that draws us all in our antic-questing to encounter and run in to each other out here in the middle of colonial drudgery under-your-thumb-imprinted-capitalistic-ruin perfect pinpoint micro image of the macro which is Chestertown out amid the middle of the farmfields, maybe it is as Tai-Chi way-out Wayne says there must be an aquafir or something...

But anyhow all the musicians at right are ones who wnadered past here, Kent County, good ol Eastern Shore. Some have stayed on if not for good at least for now and Marc Dykeman from Plans Plans is one of those cats. Turns out we used to not know each other but know those or know of those who knew each other back in my purple booted punk-rock riot grrrl days of dark firehalls garage bands and flannel shirts, outside Balitmore, USA.

He's kept that loud thing up. I sweat him for it. A hella lot. Also, his wife is a fairy princess and I think she's so rad and they throw the best parties, too.

Go check out his rock band Plans Plans tonite, in Baldamore, 1700 N Charles the Metro Gallery. It'll be worth it I know.

ps i just figured out how to copy soemthing off YouTube I stole that video above off of PlansPlans, I'm so proud of me!

The sky was so big the night you flew

So I struggle w my experience and how it relates to what goes on here. And by here I mean the Internet, and by the Internet I mean that pinhead of the pinnacle experience of what it means to be human: where culture-readily-creates-art and vice-versa, where art-creates-culture.

I've always hearkened more towards the art-creating-culture side. This is the rebel artist in me, the antic spirit that craves and comes alive at underground movements, at the change on the periphery edge that minutely, than wholly, affects society. The post punk-rock riot-grrrl in the eighties that preempted the nineties Decade of the Woman when I came of age; the Diane diPrima pre-beat fifties near the village and suffering outside San Francisco that grew Kerouac's poetic-expressive-BOOM; the black folks in country churches and a thousand nameless preachers who finally found their name in King and the movement of all movements that continues to this day; this experience, this movement through our words and our voices which is the force of Triumph, and all of the work that comes before the momentum is finally built and the people, thus Society, finally tips....The Underground stuff. The reason we keep the journey...

But I LOVE in a neurotic obsession kinda way the culture-creating-art thing, too. I mean let's be honest here and look at the art that we as dominant Western Society most venerate. It's easy found on TV--Access Hollywood, TMZ, Entertainment Tonight. I voyeur with my tongue hanging out, or contrastingly with my tongue tsking in judgment, but either way I cling on pop-culture's "edge" to the extreme. I may not go so far as to emulate superstars in my lifestyle choices, like who and how they vote or what their "crib" or "ride" looks like or if they are going green or whatnot but let me just tell you, my fashion-diva, that secret-hidden loud-car-singing inner-pop-superstar trapped inside me absolutely goes wild over the sexy fashions, the highlegged boots or lowback spaghetti straps that I see on TV or in the pages of the magazine...And I'm allright with this, I've learned how, in my adult life, to be loving of Kelly in all the different, if not funny and seemingly at times conflicting parts, that make me go....

What all this comes to is the fact that I want to be edgy here. On the Internet where I, like trillions, have something to say I want to be cool and looked at on this blog w the same eyes that look so lustily, either in judgment or covetousness, at pop-drama. I want you to come here and for me me to have the latest scoop on the flyest site for vintage fall mini-dresses and brand new wayout leather boots and I want to cue you in first cuz I'm the hippest to the best underground house that's on at all the Baltimore parties and throw a thing or two in there about how the same stuff is being touted right now in the lounges of Berlin where, by the way, suchandsuch is the best tapas food that they are currently eating... And Politics! I want to be smart and funny and savvy and one step ahead of the latest convictions to subscribe to and showing off what an activist's heart and intellectual mind I've got and also I want to be able to name drop and lead the way among the who's who with the what what from within the scene. I want my sassy redhot spirit seen and to be known!

But ahhh, I the Fool. I have to remind myself that the edgy choice I can make HERE is to be honest from the truest parts of me, and write about my Truth, about what I believe matters. And trust in my voice both gaining and giving strength to the Authentic Function of Things as we go on....

All that said, my friend Charlie died last night. I loved him. And he is done suffering now. Five years ago in the middle of a doghot summer I was all fucked-up one night cuz my holmes Mike had just committed suicide. This guy, Mike, he used to tell a story so good that it made you laugh out loud again later when you were looking back on and recapping the night. And his stories were always full with lies. So how could any of us have known that it was true what he said that he was facing real prison time for violating probation the second time he supposedly got caught w lots of drugs...Hell we thought the first time he supposedly got caught coming "through from Eugene with all those dirty hippy heads" was nothing but a juiced-up story anyhow! So Mike killed himself instead of prison. It took me years to get through that, survivor's guilt. By the time Mike died I'd been clean three years and was trying to learn the boundaries of good friendship while being protective of my sobriety, too. With him and I, at the time of his death, it wasn't going so well. So he died and I tortured myself and ran from that torture and hurt a whole lot. That same week as his suicide, this man Charlie who, while I was getting clean, had become like a grandfather-mentor to me, saw me out one night and took me aside and said here, I got this for you. Charlie didn't know about Mike's death but for some reason he called me over and tucked in my hand a little metal token that had an angel on one side and the following on the other: Guardian Angel Protect us all, Giving Strength When we might fall, Watching, guiding, Lighting the way, Thru the night, and every day. I couldn't cry yet when Charlie gave that to me cuz Mike's death was super fresh and I was still stunned and with shock and partly with the anger but later when I cried a ton I put that token in a medicine bag and hung it around the rearview mirror of Bran's truck and that's what guided our way when we went travelling, and I running, in 2004.

About a month ago, a little more, I found that token again when I was insanely cleaning my house and sweeping cobwebs with kittyfur from the hardwood floors and out of the corners under the beds in all our upstairs rooms. The token was under my bed. It was the same week that I had to accept that cancer was going to take Charlie, my wise and more, my wisecracking mentor and stable guide and friend.

I don't understand Life and what works and how it all goes and how life is life but life dies but also how Nature shows that all that dies, grows. What I do know is that grief breaks your heart but only so that your heart can grow even bigger where the hurt broke out. It's how we flesh out and become even more whole, even fuller versions of our self. My experience in this life is it's not what we say, or what we like, or even what we claim. It's how we be. And also, that there is this big force, not apart from me but of me and I of it, this force which is steady there and which also creates me and I it. Life. I believe in this force. I found some good words for it just today:

For moments I belong
to the pure and poison ocean;

I am powerful, and helpless….

by Kathryn Lomer from the poem The way the world sleeps

I love life. I love this sacred mundane experience, love it so much that I love it on TV, I love it in my friends, in hot fall boots that I shake and get all inside lusty over, I love it in working too many hours in a new job that never seems to end. I love it in the corn getting cut down and the music on the radio and the obscure music and shows I find on the web. I love it sobbing on the backroads of the deep shore of Maryland with dark trees and an orange sky. I love it. I love that I get to live it. I love that I get to write about it and that writing about it makes me love my love even more.

Here is what Charlie asked me to read when his life is honored and remembered and he is officially laid to rest on Monday. It is called the Prayer of St. Francis.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy;
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

God bless you my friend! You did so good. Travel well my angel. I love you. Amen amen amen.

Retrogrades @ Harvest Time

I am still in my pajamas. I am still in my pajamas and my breath is the breath of someone who spent a day long laid-out on the earth in the sun. That sun is going down now--I am blissed and calm and mellowed beyond words.

This is good, that love affair with self I am so committed to. Not the selfish kind, but the courageous kind, embolden by solitude and knowing when to listen to your own cry. The Elizabeth Gilbert When you fill up your own skin with yourself that alone becomes your offering kind.

I sat long outdoors today, under my favorite trees. Brandon in the hammock part of that time, me chest opened to the sky and also at times chest folded over my knees. I sunk in deep to me and let the feelings of inadequacy from my new job, the fears and insecurities prisoned-up in my heart rise and pass. I read poetry til the song moved in me and tears wet-up my eyes. Seriously, for a day of doing Nothing, I got a lot done.

It is harvest time, the geese are arriving back from their summer stops. All the greens from the summer garden were today brought in--and new-bloomed fall crops, too: turnips and radishes and the last of the apples from the highest branches in the tree. Tonight we are having our friends over to feast on the season and sit by the bonfire in the cooling Autumn night.




It is also Mercury Retro right now. In her book We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For Alice Walker talks about the periodic times in life that call for a natural pause. She uses the time right after college as specific example, but goes on with her own poetry to exemplify the richness in spirit, the natural ebbs and flows of the human-spirit experience as the essence of, and at once the reason for this nessecary phenom. Here is what I know: Mercury Retro comes four times a year, once always during Harvest time. This is the time to do Nothing, Nothing w the capitol letter N kind. To take, in Walker's words, the great Pause. Time to give yourself, to your Soul or your subconscious or your physical health or your mental machine or however you see you in your finer undefined essence, time to Breathe. To just stop. And watch. Maybe to gather, or to reckon. To go within.

If your running around crazy that's because your fighting your self and the cosmos and the earth's right now natural flow. Get outside. Eat a late bloom apple, drink some harvest wine. The earth in her infinite changing expressions of oneness is teaching: Your Nature is Her Nature. This I know. So get your toes and heels down on her and watch your mind go and go until it realizes you see it and it has nothing more to do. Unwind. Real-ize. That flow is of you and you are it and now it offers you a real chance to witness, and to grow.

So love a little. For us super-scared humans taking time to learn to love the passings is the least (if not the best) work we can do.....

Smile Kel, it's almost 6pm and you're still in your pj's!

Warty and Peanut Punkins & Harvest Corn Dollies

Angel Moves

Wow. Lots going on. The MGY gang just left--hosting this conference for young ppl recovering from drugs and booze is a loooot of work!! but enjoyable work, and we are officially at t-minus 17 days and counting until the big event. i am wowed and awed by the simple, powerful preciousness of bringing hearts together for a common good. two of the ppl on our committee have been clean and sober for one whole year! this week, it is like a room full of sunshine to see the smiles on their sweet faces as they celebrate themselves and anticipate the conference that they dedicated this whole past year of their life to, too.

i am blessed.

(you are too.) (believe it.)

listen, if you want to see something beautiful that absolutely tears at your heart strings, go to this link and watch "Cameron Dances." it's my "baby" amy's baby doing those angelic moves....
http://www.youtube.com/user/keithojensen

i am working like a maniac at my new job, and getting ready for this conference, and loving fall and in general showing up and believing in life. that's really all it takes sometimes, huh?

may you, too, believe....

Fall, oh splendid Fall

I don't know what it's like where you live right now but where we are, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, on farmland and surrounded by fields and fields of dead dry corn, it is breezy and light and the mornings are cool and require soft cotton long sleeves and cause me deep and lustful intermittent aches for fall....

That's not to say that by the afternoon there isn't the glare of sweat and furrow on my brow, but I gotta tell ya, our first First Harvest Jam back on the 9th ushered in a glory of sweet cool air and long shadows, a sense that the sky was growing and stretching to send the sun back nigh to the furthest ends of the horizon almost to the all the way below...and I am amazed at this! My heart buzzing, how close and real the actual seasons are following the old marks of season's treads on cell memory in our blood currents and primal memory in our hearts and in our souls. We discussed this at our potluck the week past, how cool the night was, sweater weather and how we all remembered (except for Dykeman, who disagreed, but he was in general in contention w Sam that night, and besides, for all us humans isn't memory just a turn away from imagination anyway...) that it used to be when we were kids that the cricket air at night in August chilled us on our neck and put shivers down our back when we were done with hide and seek or private clubhouses next to the swing set or whatever. And this is true, the seasons did used to be so much more of a mild rolling, near enough that our generation of Xers on the corner of Y can still remember...

A return to this and yet a swift reminder for me: the toxic details are still all around. Dead corn, only harvestable this year are bushels of 70 or so a stand, far less than last years average of 120 and our drought last year was awful-bad. (The mild season's return hasn't done a damn thing for our lac of rain.)

(Anyhow.) The new moon is coming this weekend--the full in Leo sun was two weekends ago and this is strong strong time of year. Subtle discontent is actually your soul's way of seeking harmony, listen to the message the deep tune in you is trying to send, actually surrender to the flow of discord. Or to the glory and grace in moments of solitude right now--these are the guideposts singing to you of the unity, these are reminders to know gratitude for the cycle of all that is.

My first harvest full moon on the 16th was wowed by me--that week I returned again to quiet time and have ever since seen the physical details--material level, you dig--of my life easily and seamlessly clicked right in to place. New job etc. Harvest time, as it should be. At once too is the calm cool of seeking peace within myself again--giving over to the realm of KellyLove inside me, the only grace I'll ever need that power deep within my soul...

I feel so good to connect once again to the cycles of our earth. And happy at the little coincidences that affirm and push this connection along....Check out my new blogfriend Tim at This Being Human, I love the new techno version of sage counsel--how it comes from linking and linking and random comments to strangers to help the flow of what seems right.

Anyhow Autumn Equinox is fast coming. Reminder that all things pass us by. Connect to yourself now, get outside. Go, Be, still.

And also, check out my new favorite song which is playing on livestream right now, BenFolds and Regina Spector duet "You Don't Know Me"....

Detours, windows, doors & light: this week around kent county

Well, so i got a job. it all happened very fast and i am not feeling, say, fluent in the language of my new life just yet. and yet, it seems so right, so somehow as if i am finally, after a long long detour, stepping in to the facts of my life as if my soul just snapped open like an old 1980's blind and windowed me in on things: this is how it is meant to be--these are your moments, 'writ in eternity'....

i was of course waiting tables--slinging grease is what always goes in the back of my head when i say that, which is true regardless the level of white linen affair in which one is involved. it's all grease, it's all over you at night's end, it's all always in your hair and lingering not so much as a coating on your skin as a smell, or a sense, or a flavor of the over-processing of your life that ends up going with you, that you end up carrying around with you and wearing like a form of yourself not so true but also that you quietly can't seem to rid.....
it is the function of this life, no? to carry these skins of us on our back and at once deep within, and to try not to struggle when they are slow to come off, and try too not to force the transmutation...?

oohhhh, so i am an intake counselor, a liason for students of Adult Ed once again. but now sooo far to drive to my new job each day, so far to drive from my home. yet this feels so good to me, exhilerating and also stunning at the very same time.

ohhhh! and my eight pairs of ohsogorg trouser pants some wide-legged some high-wasted all so demurely chic and debonair hanging there on the new love affair i have which are my legs... literally make me quiver. that's right, i got hired by 11 and was shopping shopping shopping and remembering my body by 2....

in other not as fashionable news, but good to remember--authentic and just as true: coming out of my detour this week coincidently corresponded w touching down on so many lovely parts of our home land here in kent and queen anne's county...

sammy g

sammy g, bran and i were out on the chester monday eve. ran in to timmy p and greg down at ben's dock taking a swim before pearl creek's band practice. this is where we all go for relaxing dips, down the very end of blue heron farm lane--i wonder does ben know how often the all of us, at varied times, are there swimming even if he's not around?

our swimming hole at ben's dock

tuesday nite was ladies nite out--laura leah and i surprised brooke, who's getting ready to move, on her own, back in to her historic 13 bedroom unfinished hotel-house outside tolchester w the brand new wrap-around porch. we went out and about in naptown, our way of saying go on grrrrrl and also each quietly getting to remember that we are none of us ever alone...

brooke, laura, leah

then, thursday nite we all potlucked at mark and andrea's place out to rock hall. (you love the vernacular i know go ahead and sweat it) mark is this funny easy too come across as shy guy but so quik w the dead-on sharpheaded wit once you've been around him enough that you literally get moved to cry w your laughter...i know, it's happened to me way more than once. and andrea is his baltimore-living girlfriend who weekends it at their work-in-progress farm house here on the shore. he's a wash coll alum, so is she, like many of us. he's working now for the college on oyster restoration and other local sustainability grant and projects, taking whatever is handed to him and going along with it in his steady kind of mark walk-run. he, too, worked at the resteraunt w me. we quit the same week.....















mark's front porch & stairs, under construction

mark and andrea

their way cool bathroom door, handcrafted by mark!!

(probably i should have taken more pictures of the finished rooms--their lovely warm kitchen or the study upstairs. but guess that's for another potluck....)

and lastly, this morning, in our bedroom. how very good, still and clear the light can feel sometimes...