Every morning I meditate in some way, most mornings it is a private event that would go unnoticed by other people. But Dory and Jon, and Mo and Alle and the others when they are around and our space is shared--I dont mind being my whole, true self in front of all of them.
I keep a little travelling alter, again most wouldn't recognize the trinkets and baubles as holy to me. But anywhere I have a space that is mine for more than overnight, I pull it out so my little corner can be alive, and "anywhere" becomes home. Because home to me means silent and sacred, and is really about what lives inside.
Some days it is discipline to approach and refind me, but others I can feel the deep inside place stirring with my own instructive wisdom and magic. Today was one of those days. The sun was shining hot on my legs on Jon's floor in Oakland, and outside the blue sky was so clear it was hard to tell there was a window-sill. I was sleepy and smiley and had a deep sighing stretch when the quiet place put forth a little vision to my consciousness. I was in the ocean, and a great monster wave, so mighty and long and also round, was preparing to crash down. It was slow coming but the kind that could panic me if I didn't react smoothly and all at once. I wasn't surfing, this wasn't about the endurance-teaching lesson of consistency you learn paddling out. This was just me, ocean-me of 30 plus years, and so in this flash of vision my body long and lean dove way, way down, and caught the under-rushing water and let it pull me completely under the wave. I didn't see myself when I came out, just the finesse of moving deeply at the bottom and all the way through. And more important I felt the natural assurance and calming feeling that comes with knowing how to move. How the force of going under pulls then surfaces you out beyond where the waves crest and crash, how then you can relax into the gentle updown rocking of the forming motion. Which is what I love the most in the ocean--way out there just floating on top.
I've done that a thousand times, maybe ten thousand, maybe more. In real life, in Ocean City, Maryland, in the Atlantic my teacher-sea. I love it, I miss it, I crave it like food. But most of all, I am honored that my deep wisdom used the mama ocean today for me to hear its call. Because this time in my life will pass me easily in to floating happily along if right now I just dive deep, deep down. Which is what mediation does, in fact it's exactly what I use it for: quiet time and space to celebrate my wiser self, by just meeting me where I am at every day. The sacred ordinariness, the consistency and instruction that comes as result from letting that daily meeting lead me deep inside. The happiness that is always present when I surface back out again.
Showing posts with label Medicine Stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Medicine Stories. Show all posts
October 2, 2011
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.
December 9, 2010
It's Been A Good Year (but dont make her lift her skirts or I'll be pissed!)
It's been a good year. I am sitting in conversation with this guy at the door of a coffee shop in this place called Severna Park and I have not seen him since no shit 1995 (oh my god, how funny I just remembered we were Class Partiers together in the year book, that's why he was explaining so bummedly and borderline apologetically about having to quit smoking! Holmes my dad's got lung disease c'mon! We're grown up now it's alright...) and all I can think is it's been a good year.
I am kind, and ground myself and remind myself to be present. It is genuinely good to see him: he is one of the only people from my high school, or the one near where I worked as a teen, that via facebook or some other networking means hadn't been found and labeled: Married, Divorced, Parent, etc and I tell him as much. I admit I do, now I can check him off in my head. Our funny little ways of keeping track of one another that get complained about but that at the end of the day matter, afterall. Me, I have a Mama-Soul as part of my spirit, and a tight-knit tribe of Family which marked me deep in the place that gets marked by how we are nurtured, so knowing where and how people are adds to my security. I grounded in this, and was happy to connect again to this guy.
But It's been a good year, and that is the line that has the little wick attached. It's the line that when gionng through my head while walking out of Brian's house this morning in desperate strides towards the nearest wifi-having local coffee shop, triggered the light inside to tell me the Muses are near. There is no other way to explain this to you if it is not your experience--the best I can do is what I always do when I sit down and write. Just tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth and follow that little feeling of light. I do not know when it started but I do know that it is real, it is the most real thing I know. It is a feeling that comes on inside that alerts me to the inner creativity the boundless place and my duty, my calling here on this earth no matter what else is to bring it to the surface, to midwife it and breathe in to it the life it needs to fly. And when I disregard it I get short and turn in to an asshole and so help me if you cross my way when I am in the middle of my dance with the Muse. So help me, that is, should you make her lift her skirts and high-heeled or bare-footed run away.
But what a superstition that is, too? Writing involves discipline and the most clear lesson I learned in the past two years is to not underestimate what happens by simple alchemy of action. Showing up, not bitching, and doing what the hell's got to get done, which almost always is what's right in front of me. It's more than just saying ahhh yea I will start with It's been a good year because that is where the little light is attached. It's also bringing in to the coffe shop two books that really turn me on and reading a while this morning, and even more it's about sitting down especially when the light hasn't or doesn't feel like it's going to come.
It's been a good year. In November it was the Harvest New Year and starting out--the first week of the new year!--my bank account was in the red. So what was in front of me was get a better job and get your finances re-ordered, no matter what. So I did because after the last two years of my life dont ever underestimate my hustle. Turns out now I get to manage this way hip, way mellow local coffee shop in the Pines where I live. It's brand new and the boss needed someone with experience in community building and coffee-shop culture, which has nothing to do with caffeine and everything to do with supporting and growing your local tribe. Even the business model functions that way and I brought to this my barista-ing for Peggy those years back at Play It Again in Chestertown, as well as the local art, food and music movement we grew around The Oregon Dialogue. So far sooo good. It overlooks the Bay and River on the west side of the inlet of Ocean City. I watch the sun come up every morning and breathe and exhilarate in how fucking rad it is to be alive.
And I am writing, and chilling a lot outside, and that is that. It's been a good year. In November 2008 I left my relationship of 6 years. Right after that Josh and I tried to be lovers after a decade of being Muse to one another. I still believe he was a true love, but we ended too because just because something's true doesn't mean it's meant to be. Losing him, and leaving Brandon and Chestertown and Anngar Farm all at the same time was the single most painful part of my life and from start to finish it lasted until around the middle of this summer.
It's been a good year.
I worked for Chesapeake College when I left Bran, I was one of four people who started the GED and community English program that now serves all five counties on the upper and mid Eastern Shore. I worked my fucking ass off while I was there, and stepped down in May after living in isolation for a year out on the Choptank River and licking my wounds. I was lonely and needed family and friends. I went on a month long sabbatical in the Pac NW in May and June and while there had more than one other-world experience of being Called again. I moved back to mom's at the beach after that and partied like a rock star all summer long and still found that I had one more hall to cross to transition my life from Brandon-Josh-Chesapeake to the one that lay beyond. This stuff cant be made up, you know? The light within is real, what if that is our only choice, to surrender to the myth of what could be and give it our all to bring it to life? How about learning that the only way to do this is to do it!? And what about the struggle of being a woman and feeling this is the work you're meant to do? This is subject matter for another post (or a whole damn book, ehem...) but what about that? I know plenty of artist men whose art is their main and only priority. What about when you're a woman with the same compulsion, what happens then? When the pain is that bad I know now that actually it's my only choice, to believe in this mid-wifing and keep breathing and trusting in the birth about to come. The pain is my spirit--not a religious thing I am talking about the place inside of I AM--calling out a red alert to listen the hell up.
It's been a good year. Tuesday night I watched Candace, Jessica, Shanika and LaShae walk in their caps and gowns and receive their Maryland State High School Diplomas. They were four of 43 graduates from Chesapeake in just the last six months! And at one time I held each of those girls hand in hand. I hooped and hollered from the audience because I dont work there anymore so now it's okay for me to be wild and exuberant and un-professional even if it seems I'm acting a fool.
It's been a good year. I dont live in fantasy anymore about a man who's love will finally change or set me free. I dont dream of someday when I get to do.....all these millions of different passion-fueled things. For the first time in my life I wake up now and just live today. Seriously. It's the first time in my life I've ever done that, you dig how crazy that sounds? The passing from then to now was long and great and so dark at times that I often forgot what path I was on. But I am me today and at peace with who I am. All I need to do now is trust in her day to day.
And pay attention to when the wick-light comes on, by listening and more, taking action on what's right in front of me. By practicing what I learned in those two years which is easy to say but takes a while to get the footwork right. It sounds silly maybe but what the hell is there other than saying yes ok, the next step is just be present that's how right now that I can Show up, and the peace is inside knowing that the rest will be what it will be.
I am kind, and ground myself and remind myself to be present. It is genuinely good to see him: he is one of the only people from my high school, or the one near where I worked as a teen, that via facebook or some other networking means hadn't been found and labeled: Married, Divorced, Parent, etc and I tell him as much. I admit I do, now I can check him off in my head. Our funny little ways of keeping track of one another that get complained about but that at the end of the day matter, afterall. Me, I have a Mama-Soul as part of my spirit, and a tight-knit tribe of Family which marked me deep in the place that gets marked by how we are nurtured, so knowing where and how people are adds to my security. I grounded in this, and was happy to connect again to this guy.
But It's been a good year, and that is the line that has the little wick attached. It's the line that when gionng through my head while walking out of Brian's house this morning in desperate strides towards the nearest wifi-having local coffee shop, triggered the light inside to tell me the Muses are near. There is no other way to explain this to you if it is not your experience--the best I can do is what I always do when I sit down and write. Just tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth and follow that little feeling of light. I do not know when it started but I do know that it is real, it is the most real thing I know. It is a feeling that comes on inside that alerts me to the inner creativity the boundless place and my duty, my calling here on this earth no matter what else is to bring it to the surface, to midwife it and breathe in to it the life it needs to fly. And when I disregard it I get short and turn in to an asshole and so help me if you cross my way when I am in the middle of my dance with the Muse. So help me, that is, should you make her lift her skirts and high-heeled or bare-footed run away.
But what a superstition that is, too? Writing involves discipline and the most clear lesson I learned in the past two years is to not underestimate what happens by simple alchemy of action. Showing up, not bitching, and doing what the hell's got to get done, which almost always is what's right in front of me. It's more than just saying ahhh yea I will start with It's been a good year because that is where the little light is attached. It's also bringing in to the coffe shop two books that really turn me on and reading a while this morning, and even more it's about sitting down especially when the light hasn't or doesn't feel like it's going to come.
It's been a good year. In November it was the Harvest New Year and starting out--the first week of the new year!--my bank account was in the red. So what was in front of me was get a better job and get your finances re-ordered, no matter what. So I did because after the last two years of my life dont ever underestimate my hustle. Turns out now I get to manage this way hip, way mellow local coffee shop in the Pines where I live. It's brand new and the boss needed someone with experience in community building and coffee-shop culture, which has nothing to do with caffeine and everything to do with supporting and growing your local tribe. Even the business model functions that way and I brought to this my barista-ing for Peggy those years back at Play It Again in Chestertown, as well as the local art, food and music movement we grew around The Oregon Dialogue. So far sooo good. It overlooks the Bay and River on the west side of the inlet of Ocean City. I watch the sun come up every morning and breathe and exhilarate in how fucking rad it is to be alive.
And I am writing, and chilling a lot outside, and that is that. It's been a good year. In November 2008 I left my relationship of 6 years. Right after that Josh and I tried to be lovers after a decade of being Muse to one another. I still believe he was a true love, but we ended too because just because something's true doesn't mean it's meant to be. Losing him, and leaving Brandon and Chestertown and Anngar Farm all at the same time was the single most painful part of my life and from start to finish it lasted until around the middle of this summer.
It's been a good year.
I worked for Chesapeake College when I left Bran, I was one of four people who started the GED and community English program that now serves all five counties on the upper and mid Eastern Shore. I worked my fucking ass off while I was there, and stepped down in May after living in isolation for a year out on the Choptank River and licking my wounds. I was lonely and needed family and friends. I went on a month long sabbatical in the Pac NW in May and June and while there had more than one other-world experience of being Called again. I moved back to mom's at the beach after that and partied like a rock star all summer long and still found that I had one more hall to cross to transition my life from Brandon-Josh-Chesapeake to the one that lay beyond. This stuff cant be made up, you know? The light within is real, what if that is our only choice, to surrender to the myth of what could be and give it our all to bring it to life? How about learning that the only way to do this is to do it!? And what about the struggle of being a woman and feeling this is the work you're meant to do? This is subject matter for another post (or a whole damn book, ehem...) but what about that? I know plenty of artist men whose art is their main and only priority. What about when you're a woman with the same compulsion, what happens then? When the pain is that bad I know now that actually it's my only choice, to believe in this mid-wifing and keep breathing and trusting in the birth about to come. The pain is my spirit--not a religious thing I am talking about the place inside of I AM--calling out a red alert to listen the hell up.
It's been a good year. Tuesday night I watched Candace, Jessica, Shanika and LaShae walk in their caps and gowns and receive their Maryland State High School Diplomas. They were four of 43 graduates from Chesapeake in just the last six months! And at one time I held each of those girls hand in hand. I hooped and hollered from the audience because I dont work there anymore so now it's okay for me to be wild and exuberant and un-professional even if it seems I'm acting a fool.
It's been a good year. I dont live in fantasy anymore about a man who's love will finally change or set me free. I dont dream of someday when I get to do.....all these millions of different passion-fueled things. For the first time in my life I wake up now and just live today. Seriously. It's the first time in my life I've ever done that, you dig how crazy that sounds? The passing from then to now was long and great and so dark at times that I often forgot what path I was on. But I am me today and at peace with who I am. All I need to do now is trust in her day to day.
And pay attention to when the wick-light comes on, by listening and more, taking action on what's right in front of me. By practicing what I learned in those two years which is easy to say but takes a while to get the footwork right. It sounds silly maybe but what the hell is there other than saying yes ok, the next step is just be present that's how right now that I can Show up, and the peace is inside knowing that the rest will be what it will be.
December 6, 2010
From When I Was Wild. OC & Coming Home.
It was spring time I was fine you looked finer with your brown hair long then and the body you still took care of we were eighteen I had bleach in my hair and a checked blue shirt tied at the belly I wanted to say was gingham, but was not, we were suburb not country kids and you took me on a picnic under the power lines so I tried to play the part. It was hot for the spring and the pot made it so we couldn't tell was that just the heat or was that melting in our minds. You loved Jesus but wouldn't admit it, and late at night we'd get in fights because it was a misogyny thing afterall for you who secretly didn't trust his mom, who thought the world was going on fire because the women were aloud to speak again the weird thing is you an Only Man back then...only one never turned on me but loved me better when I got to use my tongue. Voice people, this is about voice not sex. But we did that too didn't we, the hot kind the teenage kind wicked and innocent out back in the car at parties or the church parking lot or the one time under the tree in the graveyard on acid our bodys seemed so big, then small, our arms wavery my breath its own language echoing off the red coming off the trees.
I wore dark purple lipstick then, or red, and had the hottest little body remember I used to show off my tatoos.
There were all those others at the beach, it was never easy for me to talk about that. Part of it was how I hurt you when you and my one friend went off walking down next to the ocean. That was the night, or more next morning on the boards yellow mist of sun trying to make up its mind am I heat making dry this water or light making clear this new day from the dark that I knew that I was different for good that I had made my choice, without meaning to. Seeing what I was capable of. As if you'd ever cheat on me. You know that night--two of the four guys I was smoking with are dead now? We were on acid then, too. One of them I never even write about. He was a mean little fuck, we used to get drunk and I'd run my mouth and the one night over in the Meadows at that one place when they were living with RayRay we had a flinching contest where I let him hit me hard as he could, as long as I got to hit him back, and again and again we hit one another and I stood and took it all 108 pounds of me thinking I was a man. And that was the choice, there were always two in me la santa y la diabla, and that is the night I ran off with the devil holding my hand.
God damn did we have fun. I heard from someone on the periphery back then this week--this happens enough, private messages thanking me for this blog--that I would say it happens regularly and so thank you all publicly for reading it makes me feel so, so good and this is a shout to all you private ones reading along, and a specific story just for him. I remember you and some others were living uptown on 143rd doing the more mellow surf thing I only made it up there for example when Jesse or Kareem came to town because hidden in someone's wet suit was all the drugs! And anyhow one day I was off or likely just on break from hot assing on the mic to Big and Meth and Tom Petty and The Dead up at the peir (Jerry still alive in the beginning of that summer, dead by the end and vigils on the boardwalk and the 9th street squatters house still there, near where the old, old old Chat Street used to be) and you walked in I think with Mike? and we were in the middle of an all out indoor water gun fight, blue plastic dollar store beach sand buckets filled to the top with oozy automatics and us shooting water or late at night emptied-forties malt-liquor straight in to our mouths...The boys all shirtless only wore only baggies that summer that's how you knew the local rats downtown, so I was always like fuck it I'll just wear my bikini all the time! You who was always on your own buzz keepin it so chill had the most shocked look on your face when you walked in the house--front door always wide open bedroom me and Fannon's then me and Kev's once Brian moved out always closed
--and then it broke, the shock and you smiled like I'd never seen before a light of joy and radicallness breaking out straight from your mouth. You grabbed a seat way on the side of the room one of the bros tossed you a beer and then of course did we proceed. That might of been, but likely was not, the same watergun fight that wound up across the street running the outdoor halls of the Americana sneaking around corners and hiding behind doors when I camped out upstairs at the dirty frat guys (I used to stand in the alley out back and cus those fuckers out all the time even back then clear to me down the center how we were different and stood on different lines) on their front porch and waited until Jeremiah gave up and then dumped an entire bucket of water on his head when we was walking back surrendered to the apartment. Remember that shit? We kept a baby wading pool out on our front porch to chill in and would add ice in the afternoon to keep all the beers more cold.
Hahahaha. I live here again and barely ever think of that stuff, those times anymore. Fannon gone, Kev. Blugh Kev. Phil...
Una Santa, y Una Diabla. The poetic imagination and living our own myths. Last week I was chilling one night over with these friends of mine, hanging out with this girl from the county but who I never knew back then only met down here at the beach, an old friend's friend. I got to telling stories and of course because I am writing so much again and also because I am a McMullen and all those all those all those late night convos as a girl, or around the table basement at Grammy and Pop's or any single one of the aunts and uncles the Jameson and laughter and warm remembering every time, because of all that and because of my myth, my heart my spirit where the saint and the devil collide I am a wild women, full of the spirit and the ancient forbidden gnosis which is just know-how which, common sense people is just know thy self, this wisdom business that penetrates so deep within. And so for all of that of course I am storyteller, La Cantadora she who knows. And so chillin last Wednesday late night, and Saturday too I got to telling some stories of my own, I have a lot, and a lot of them some of the most important ones are from the beach they all, so much happened right here.
So without meaning to I am gathering bones again and doing it near the ocean in the northeast wind under the winter sky. It is so important, this archeology, these bits and pieces scattered everywhere it is the real work it is the poet's work it is the work always always always of recircling the brave warm or coolly shadowed places we continually label or even disregard that when we are still live deeply, live on, within. In the end these are known and called by that most powered word of words, home in the end I choose not to go with the howl scowl on my face but the wicked happy satiated smile of she who knows that peaceful all-knowingg grin, so right now today and tomorrow's today and each and every step I take I say Amen. Amen Amen. This is all real and really happenening, this is life it does and it did.
I wore dark purple lipstick then, or red, and had the hottest little body remember I used to show off my tatoos.
There were all those others at the beach, it was never easy for me to talk about that. Part of it was how I hurt you when you and my one friend went off walking down next to the ocean. That was the night, or more next morning on the boards yellow mist of sun trying to make up its mind am I heat making dry this water or light making clear this new day from the dark that I knew that I was different for good that I had made my choice, without meaning to. Seeing what I was capable of. As if you'd ever cheat on me. You know that night--two of the four guys I was smoking with are dead now? We were on acid then, too. One of them I never even write about. He was a mean little fuck, we used to get drunk and I'd run my mouth and the one night over in the Meadows at that one place when they were living with RayRay we had a flinching contest where I let him hit me hard as he could, as long as I got to hit him back, and again and again we hit one another and I stood and took it all 108 pounds of me thinking I was a man. And that was the choice, there were always two in me la santa y la diabla, and that is the night I ran off with the devil holding my hand.
God damn did we have fun. I heard from someone on the periphery back then this week--this happens enough, private messages thanking me for this blog--that I would say it happens regularly and so thank you all publicly for reading it makes me feel so, so good and this is a shout to all you private ones reading along, and a specific story just for him. I remember you and some others were living uptown on 143rd doing the more mellow surf thing I only made it up there for example when Jesse or Kareem came to town because hidden in someone's wet suit was all the drugs! And anyhow one day I was off or likely just on break from hot assing on the mic to Big and Meth and Tom Petty and The Dead up at the peir (Jerry still alive in the beginning of that summer, dead by the end and vigils on the boardwalk and the 9th street squatters house still there, near where the old, old old Chat Street used to be) and you walked in I think with Mike? and we were in the middle of an all out indoor water gun fight, blue plastic dollar store beach sand buckets filled to the top with oozy automatics and us shooting water or late at night emptied-forties malt-liquor straight in to our mouths...The boys all shirtless only wore only baggies that summer that's how you knew the local rats downtown, so I was always like fuck it I'll just wear my bikini all the time! You who was always on your own buzz keepin it so chill had the most shocked look on your face when you walked in the house--front door always wide open bedroom me and Fannon's then me and Kev's once Brian moved out always closed
--and then it broke, the shock and you smiled like I'd never seen before a light of joy and radicallness breaking out straight from your mouth. You grabbed a seat way on the side of the room one of the bros tossed you a beer and then of course did we proceed. That might of been, but likely was not, the same watergun fight that wound up across the street running the outdoor halls of the Americana sneaking around corners and hiding behind doors when I camped out upstairs at the dirty frat guys (I used to stand in the alley out back and cus those fuckers out all the time even back then clear to me down the center how we were different and stood on different lines) on their front porch and waited until Jeremiah gave up and then dumped an entire bucket of water on his head when we was walking back surrendered to the apartment. Remember that shit? We kept a baby wading pool out on our front porch to chill in and would add ice in the afternoon to keep all the beers more cold.
Hahahaha. I live here again and barely ever think of that stuff, those times anymore. Fannon gone, Kev. Blugh Kev. Phil...
Una Santa, y Una Diabla. The poetic imagination and living our own myths. Last week I was chilling one night over with these friends of mine, hanging out with this girl from the county but who I never knew back then only met down here at the beach, an old friend's friend. I got to telling stories and of course because I am writing so much again and also because I am a McMullen and all those all those all those late night convos as a girl, or around the table basement at Grammy and Pop's or any single one of the aunts and uncles the Jameson and laughter and warm remembering every time, because of all that and because of my myth, my heart my spirit where the saint and the devil collide I am a wild women, full of the spirit and the ancient forbidden gnosis which is just know-how which, common sense people is just know thy self, this wisdom business that penetrates so deep within. And so for all of that of course I am storyteller, La Cantadora she who knows. And so chillin last Wednesday late night, and Saturday too I got to telling some stories of my own, I have a lot, and a lot of them some of the most important ones are from the beach they all, so much happened right here.
So without meaning to I am gathering bones again and doing it near the ocean in the northeast wind under the winter sky. It is so important, this archeology, these bits and pieces scattered everywhere it is the real work it is the poet's work it is the work always always always of recircling the brave warm or coolly shadowed places we continually label or even disregard that when we are still live deeply, live on, within. In the end these are known and called by that most powered word of words, home in the end I choose not to go with the howl scowl on my face but the wicked happy satiated smile of she who knows that peaceful all-knowingg grin, so right now today and tomorrow's today and each and every step I take I say Amen. Amen Amen. This is all real and really happenening, this is life it does and it did.
November 11, 2010
Santa Fe. Stop and Say OK.
I got stuck in Santa Fe once.
It's a funny place to get stuck, you would think that there's lots of cool stuff going on but the reality is I'd been living in the woods and my clothes were dirty and in my hippy frock over my cut-off baggies and the bandanna wrapped around my dirty hair the fancy ladies in the art shops that I thought I'd enjoy downtown ended up tailing me the whole time cuz I guess they thought I was a thief. Every place more or less turned out to be like that--catering to wealth, and it pissed me off and when we tried to leave we got stuck, literally. The town is a circular lay-out, not a grid, so every time we thought we were heading the right way towards the desert and on to the highway towards Tuscon and a buddy of mind we'd end up circled back where we began. Santa Fe is bordered on one side by all these fabulous adobe houses on flat brown cactus land as far as the eye can see, and on the other by the the Sangre de Cristos and a National Forest. We didn't know about Taos then, the community and spiritual devotees around there, all we knew was that we hated our first experience in Santa Fe and were tired and wanted to get out. So after that first day we headed up in to forest where we could set up camp and stay.
Thinking about it now, I easily remember coming down across the mountains of the southern border of Colorado and coming around a great wide corner out of the woods and seeing the low land laid out before us and singing like a song, it swept me whole and sudden and clean inside and took my breath away, it stopped Brandon mid-sentence. That's the energy the shamans talk about, some swift but beautiful collusion between mountain elements and the dry and drastic desert flat-land that was so stunning it was almost visual.
That first night in the Santa Fe Forest some kids came up the forest road massively tripped out on drugs, the next morning this hippy dreadlock girl whose name I cant now remember came over to our tent to say hello and to make sure we made it through the night undisturbed by the kids that were freaking out. She was sad with a sad spirit and on her own, we talked a long time that morning over coffee it turned out it was the anniversary of when she'd given her child up for adoption. She gave me a turquoise necklace and I gave her a tourmaline because it helps with forgiveness of the self.
We tried to leave again that afternoon and got stuck again. Literally, traffic and double backs that made us lose our minds. We regrouped, decided to find a community center where we could shower, then decided to surrender to the flow and set up in the woods for a few days, hoping the stuckness would pass. The sunset that night after our shower put orange and sherbert light all over the dark greens and browns of the adobe'd plain. It was the most outrageous display of sunsettingness that I have ever seen.
Turns out there was a free speaker at the Masonic Lodge that we were meant to hear over the weekend. We'd been, since around the time of full moon over Fourth of July when we camped deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota, sort of following these very serendipitous experiences based around growing knowledge of indigenous cultures living in unison with the land, and the deeper idea of the earth itself in its varied forms holding its own systems of magnetic energies called lay lines. Now I remember, the first place that info came (in addition to Gary Snyder's writings on animism, but we brought him along) was in Maine which was literally our third stop, in Southwest Harbor by Acadia. And then it just kept coming, from everywhere, in every direction. The speaker at the Lodge stood there and tied it all together. It was pretty amazing.
I dont have any money, none at all, to pay bills right now or much less to move to Baltimore and coming to terms with that has been real tough. But I realized something the past few days and that's that sometimes for reasons you dont even know, where you are is where you're meant to be. Even if at first it feels or looks maddening and kinda like your stuck. My book is writing itself. I have work on the horizon. I'm gonna hang out in the forest a while I guess and be grateful for what's going on right now exactly where I'm at.
It's a funny place to get stuck, you would think that there's lots of cool stuff going on but the reality is I'd been living in the woods and my clothes were dirty and in my hippy frock over my cut-off baggies and the bandanna wrapped around my dirty hair the fancy ladies in the art shops that I thought I'd enjoy downtown ended up tailing me the whole time cuz I guess they thought I was a thief. Every place more or less turned out to be like that--catering to wealth, and it pissed me off and when we tried to leave we got stuck, literally. The town is a circular lay-out, not a grid, so every time we thought we were heading the right way towards the desert and on to the highway towards Tuscon and a buddy of mind we'd end up circled back where we began. Santa Fe is bordered on one side by all these fabulous adobe houses on flat brown cactus land as far as the eye can see, and on the other by the the Sangre de Cristos and a National Forest. We didn't know about Taos then, the community and spiritual devotees around there, all we knew was that we hated our first experience in Santa Fe and were tired and wanted to get out. So after that first day we headed up in to forest where we could set up camp and stay.
Thinking about it now, I easily remember coming down across the mountains of the southern border of Colorado and coming around a great wide corner out of the woods and seeing the low land laid out before us and singing like a song, it swept me whole and sudden and clean inside and took my breath away, it stopped Brandon mid-sentence. That's the energy the shamans talk about, some swift but beautiful collusion between mountain elements and the dry and drastic desert flat-land that was so stunning it was almost visual.
That first night in the Santa Fe Forest some kids came up the forest road massively tripped out on drugs, the next morning this hippy dreadlock girl whose name I cant now remember came over to our tent to say hello and to make sure we made it through the night undisturbed by the kids that were freaking out. She was sad with a sad spirit and on her own, we talked a long time that morning over coffee it turned out it was the anniversary of when she'd given her child up for adoption. She gave me a turquoise necklace and I gave her a tourmaline because it helps with forgiveness of the self.
We tried to leave again that afternoon and got stuck again. Literally, traffic and double backs that made us lose our minds. We regrouped, decided to find a community center where we could shower, then decided to surrender to the flow and set up in the woods for a few days, hoping the stuckness would pass. The sunset that night after our shower put orange and sherbert light all over the dark greens and browns of the adobe'd plain. It was the most outrageous display of sunsettingness that I have ever seen.
Turns out there was a free speaker at the Masonic Lodge that we were meant to hear over the weekend. We'd been, since around the time of full moon over Fourth of July when we camped deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota, sort of following these very serendipitous experiences based around growing knowledge of indigenous cultures living in unison with the land, and the deeper idea of the earth itself in its varied forms holding its own systems of magnetic energies called lay lines. Now I remember, the first place that info came (in addition to Gary Snyder's writings on animism, but we brought him along) was in Maine which was literally our third stop, in Southwest Harbor by Acadia. And then it just kept coming, from everywhere, in every direction. The speaker at the Lodge stood there and tied it all together. It was pretty amazing.
I dont have any money, none at all, to pay bills right now or much less to move to Baltimore and coming to terms with that has been real tough. But I realized something the past few days and that's that sometimes for reasons you dont even know, where you are is where you're meant to be. Even if at first it feels or looks maddening and kinda like your stuck. My book is writing itself. I have work on the horizon. I'm gonna hang out in the forest a while I guess and be grateful for what's going on right now exactly where I'm at.
November 1, 2010
WATCH THIS. The Divorce Papers Between Us...
Facebook users, go here. My God and if you haven't yet, check out Brave New Voices...I literally watched the semi-finals on HBO totally awe-struck. I have hope again bc of these youth...
May 17, 2010
Long Letter to my Readers
Sometimes I want to start this blog the way I used to start my litmag Cantalma. Like I'm writing a letter. Dear Friends...Today it came out instinctively to write Hey Pals... so let's pretend that that's what I'm doing. Writing a letter to my readers, anonymous or otherwise, out there in the middle of the everchanging everthesame wide world of blogoland. Wherein I find comfort, and release.
Hey Pals,
It's something like 4:30 am. I woke up around 3 and couldn't get back to sleep, but didn't put the light on til a half hour ago. For a while I laid there, thinking the noises I was hearing are the giant fucking practically baseball sized roaches that have begun to show themselves at least daily since I started filling my apartment with cardboard boxes and all these magnificent little dark spaces for them to hide. God that ills me out blugghgghghghhgghgh but I am thankful for them because it's making it really easy to so want to leave this place. Then I imagined the bumping around was the ghosts of this old house that the across the hall neighbor Rebecca has seen, and often hears. In the end I turned the lights on to get some water and there were no bugs, and no haunts, at least that I could tell.
It was a long, sweet weekend. Friday was 12 hours long, I went in to my office for my last day and then up to the college for my exit interview which the HR person kept referring to in email as my Termination Interview. Which made me laugh but also mildly nervous to walk up there and turn my paperwork in, but wouldn't you know I came in and sat down and she said I hear you're moving home because your husband got transferred, I'm from Baltimore, too, Dunalk, hon. I explained that it actually is because really I have no friends or family here in Easton or on the midshore or a life really other than my job, and that I was originally from a town called Millersville outside Glen Burnie, that I am the exact oppositte of married and that first I am waiting tables at the beach to make money but before that going out to the PacNW for a month and then going to move home, then we got down to talking Hons. It was like talking to an old girlfriend that I didn't realize I missed even though Sue and me, the HR lady, had never really met before.
Later in the office trying to get my last bits of work turned in I finally gave up and just said I'd turn it in Tuesday when I have to return and give my work computer back. I was too excited and Mary's office on campus has too much of a blowing breeze. Soon it was almost five so Jackie the Executive Director of our whole department, and my immediate boss Elaine, and Mary they all drove me up to Kent Island for dinner on the water. Natasha came, and Carolee, and Jan all the way from Chestertown and some other teachers and of course Jason and Kim and Brenda, too. Then Cindy showed up, and she ended up taking me back to my car, where we sat and talked for two more hours while a nice round thunderstorm came through. Cindy is the woman I used to teach English with, nighttimes twice a week, at the elementary school in the country out near the Delaware line. This was 2006 and on. She also is the one who introduced me to Teena and had me do a catering gig for her back then, and Teena's the one who rented me the room on the Choptank River when I finally summoned the courage to leave Brandon and break his heart and move out and away to a place so isolated that even now that fast year I spent there still is surreal to me like a dream. Cindy and I, really, hadn't talked and really caught up since I very first moved out to Chop. We had lots, lots to catch the other one up on.
On Saturday I got up and couldn't get moving. I had to be in Pennsylvania first for a baby shower then a bachelorette party. The radio was danceable though and in moments it was so good and the sky was so blue, and I read this blog a long long while which I hadn't done in a long time. It made me feel good to have this, these archives of me because I, like all people, compelled as I am by my self and also very very deep, need to have a place to catalog and process me.
The drive up 83 especially was good. I listened to Rachel Sage and Ruut, both of whom I met last weekend when Brooks got to open for them. Rachel Sage especially is so deliciously good, and I thought how very much I like to hear the accordian. It makes me feel like a gypsy which probably is just to say it makes me feel more wild and whimsy and mystery like I really am. When I got to York I was proud of myself for knowing my way around even though my GPS got me lost at first, finally I just turned that bitch off and got there on my own instincts in the hot Pennsylvania concrete traffic and sun. I walked in to the basement at Aunt Lori's house almost an hour late and it was a huge commotion of people and when I walked in from the far side of the room I heard cousin Chels yell Wait where's Kelly? Chelsea is pregnant, and psychic like all the women in that family and I saw her in the corner and all the commotion was because she was about to open gifts. And I dont know how to put this part in words--that Chels, who's 19, is bringing our first grandbaby in to this world, or great grandbaby I mean, and my grandparents were both sick last year, but still are so robust. And when we are together, which we do more often now, mom her two sisters my brother and his fiance my grandparents and two cousins, we cry a lot and it is always hot and full in our chest because every breathing moment with them is awareness of life and how much we are blessed. So I walked in and Chels knew in her blood I just got there, and she waited for me to sit at her feet and then the gift opening began. Then a half hour later she goes Wait, where's Sean? and then of course we look up and he, my brother, walks in. We did well, Pap only really cried, which is what makes the rest of us bawl, really hard once and then we all were crying and gasping and laughing and wiping our faces with napkins and the other guests cried and laughed some, too.
Then I left, got out on to the rolling green hills and farmhouse lanes of Rt. 30 to drive to Fairfield right outside Gettysburg. My cousin Sarah on my dad's side, the Mc-clan, is getting married soon so next was to celebrate that. On Route 30 I got reminiscent but before it got overboard this song Lost in Pennsylvania came on and I laughed out loud, like really hardy belly laugh because Rt. 30 and me have history. York to Philly, Philly to York, York to Gettysburg and all that sky and green. I always always have such good reflection on that road and Saturday was no different. I was reflecting on the last time I made that drive and how much has changed since then. The last time it was July and Josh, who is the man that I fell in mad love with some years back and ultimately was the final reason I had courage enough to leave Brandon and follow me towards my own thing, called at the end when I pulled in to my cousin's driveway. I hadn't heard from him in like four months back then because of a hurtful falling out, and the thing about Rt. 30 is that's how I used to get from my grandparents over to his house. We always had that psychic thing too, Josh and I, among other connections, and so I was thinking back a lot on him. Next thing, over the glorious piano Ruut sings Lost in Pennsylvania and I'm like Whaaaaa? Did she just say lost in Pennsylvania because it was the first time hearing that CD. Then at that very moment mom called. Mom is from the PA hills and that was really on my mind, too, backroads and southern Pennsylvania and mom and her country people. She called to ask what I was doing. I told her driving and thinking about you and thinking about Josh and now cracking up becasue this lady is singing about Josh and I same time as me thinking about us. And mom reminded me of a time long ago going to work a bluegrass festival in those very hills and how she used to be in love back then with a well-known Nashville musician. Within moments I was at the very place, 8 miles east of Gettysburg, that the festival she was talking about is held. It was all so timely, and the conversation was good and sweet and I felt whole and clean, and happy to see Sarah the bride-to-be and the other cousins waiting to see me.
Now it is Monday morning, the birds are singing and Crow was just squawking, too. The sky out the window in my meditation room is blue and pink tinged so it's all resonant in that morning purple hue. Yesterday also was a long day and last night I wanted to finish uploading my old pics--late 80's through late 90's--on to my external hard drive so that when I move Wednesday and my couple things go in to storage that huge tupperware with all the old albums can just stay there. But I was tired, went late to Target to get a new swimsuit and that took a long time because for the first time in a long time I felt bad about how I looked which made me uncomfortable, but also grateful, because I almost never ever have to deal with that leftover teenage weirdness anymore. So when I got back home I went right to bed, didn't even keep my eyes open long enough to read my book.
I move Wednesday to Ocean Pines. Kelly Johnson, Sean, Bdubb and Brooks are going to help me. Thursday I'm taking Amy out for a pedicure to celebrate Maddie, her third child, due in July. Friday my cousin Timmy graduates college, Friday night we're all going dancing at Red Maple, Saturday's Eryka Badu. Then back to the Pines til Wednesday of the following week, when I fly to Oregon, and will be boundless, yet tall tree mountain coasts hot springs cities and hippies and Pacific ocean bound.
Yaaaaay!!!! When I get home it will be summer time and all that hotass Marilen mug. I'll be a waitress again, a writer for sure, babys will come, weddings will happen, and I will stare and smile a lot at the sea. I will swim. For now, I am sleepy, pals. Thank you for reading and always journeying along with me. Thank you all for the love and support even when you dont comment thankfully the blog counter tells me you still read. I am contented, awed, and eager because I feel certain the best is yet to be....
My wishes and prayers for the same to all of you xoxo.
Love, kel
Hey Pals,
It's something like 4:30 am. I woke up around 3 and couldn't get back to sleep, but didn't put the light on til a half hour ago. For a while I laid there, thinking the noises I was hearing are the giant fucking practically baseball sized roaches that have begun to show themselves at least daily since I started filling my apartment with cardboard boxes and all these magnificent little dark spaces for them to hide. God that ills me out blugghgghghghhgghgh but I am thankful for them because it's making it really easy to so want to leave this place. Then I imagined the bumping around was the ghosts of this old house that the across the hall neighbor Rebecca has seen, and often hears. In the end I turned the lights on to get some water and there were no bugs, and no haunts, at least that I could tell.
It was a long, sweet weekend. Friday was 12 hours long, I went in to my office for my last day and then up to the college for my exit interview which the HR person kept referring to in email as my Termination Interview. Which made me laugh but also mildly nervous to walk up there and turn my paperwork in, but wouldn't you know I came in and sat down and she said I hear you're moving home because your husband got transferred, I'm from Baltimore, too, Dunalk, hon. I explained that it actually is because really I have no friends or family here in Easton or on the midshore or a life really other than my job, and that I was originally from a town called Millersville outside Glen Burnie, that I am the exact oppositte of married and that first I am waiting tables at the beach to make money but before that going out to the PacNW for a month and then going to move home, then we got down to talking Hons. It was like talking to an old girlfriend that I didn't realize I missed even though Sue and me, the HR lady, had never really met before.
Later in the office trying to get my last bits of work turned in I finally gave up and just said I'd turn it in Tuesday when I have to return and give my work computer back. I was too excited and Mary's office on campus has too much of a blowing breeze. Soon it was almost five so Jackie the Executive Director of our whole department, and my immediate boss Elaine, and Mary they all drove me up to Kent Island for dinner on the water. Natasha came, and Carolee, and Jan all the way from Chestertown and some other teachers and of course Jason and Kim and Brenda, too. Then Cindy showed up, and she ended up taking me back to my car, where we sat and talked for two more hours while a nice round thunderstorm came through. Cindy is the woman I used to teach English with, nighttimes twice a week, at the elementary school in the country out near the Delaware line. This was 2006 and on. She also is the one who introduced me to Teena and had me do a catering gig for her back then, and Teena's the one who rented me the room on the Choptank River when I finally summoned the courage to leave Brandon and break his heart and move out and away to a place so isolated that even now that fast year I spent there still is surreal to me like a dream. Cindy and I, really, hadn't talked and really caught up since I very first moved out to Chop. We had lots, lots to catch the other one up on.
On Saturday I got up and couldn't get moving. I had to be in Pennsylvania first for a baby shower then a bachelorette party. The radio was danceable though and in moments it was so good and the sky was so blue, and I read this blog a long long while which I hadn't done in a long time. It made me feel good to have this, these archives of me because I, like all people, compelled as I am by my self and also very very deep, need to have a place to catalog and process me.
The drive up 83 especially was good. I listened to Rachel Sage and Ruut, both of whom I met last weekend when Brooks got to open for them. Rachel Sage especially is so deliciously good, and I thought how very much I like to hear the accordian. It makes me feel like a gypsy which probably is just to say it makes me feel more wild and whimsy and mystery like I really am. When I got to York I was proud of myself for knowing my way around even though my GPS got me lost at first, finally I just turned that bitch off and got there on my own instincts in the hot Pennsylvania concrete traffic and sun. I walked in to the basement at Aunt Lori's house almost an hour late and it was a huge commotion of people and when I walked in from the far side of the room I heard cousin Chels yell Wait where's Kelly? Chelsea is pregnant, and psychic like all the women in that family and I saw her in the corner and all the commotion was because she was about to open gifts. And I dont know how to put this part in words--that Chels, who's 19, is bringing our first grandbaby in to this world, or great grandbaby I mean, and my grandparents were both sick last year, but still are so robust. And when we are together, which we do more often now, mom her two sisters my brother and his fiance my grandparents and two cousins, we cry a lot and it is always hot and full in our chest because every breathing moment with them is awareness of life and how much we are blessed. So I walked in and Chels knew in her blood I just got there, and she waited for me to sit at her feet and then the gift opening began. Then a half hour later she goes Wait, where's Sean? and then of course we look up and he, my brother, walks in. We did well, Pap only really cried, which is what makes the rest of us bawl, really hard once and then we all were crying and gasping and laughing and wiping our faces with napkins and the other guests cried and laughed some, too.
Then I left, got out on to the rolling green hills and farmhouse lanes of Rt. 30 to drive to Fairfield right outside Gettysburg. My cousin Sarah on my dad's side, the Mc-clan, is getting married soon so next was to celebrate that. On Route 30 I got reminiscent but before it got overboard this song Lost in Pennsylvania came on and I laughed out loud, like really hardy belly laugh because Rt. 30 and me have history. York to Philly, Philly to York, York to Gettysburg and all that sky and green. I always always have such good reflection on that road and Saturday was no different. I was reflecting on the last time I made that drive and how much has changed since then. The last time it was July and Josh, who is the man that I fell in mad love with some years back and ultimately was the final reason I had courage enough to leave Brandon and follow me towards my own thing, called at the end when I pulled in to my cousin's driveway. I hadn't heard from him in like four months back then because of a hurtful falling out, and the thing about Rt. 30 is that's how I used to get from my grandparents over to his house. We always had that psychic thing too, Josh and I, among other connections, and so I was thinking back a lot on him. Next thing, over the glorious piano Ruut sings Lost in Pennsylvania and I'm like Whaaaaa? Did she just say lost in Pennsylvania because it was the first time hearing that CD. Then at that very moment mom called. Mom is from the PA hills and that was really on my mind, too, backroads and southern Pennsylvania and mom and her country people. She called to ask what I was doing. I told her driving and thinking about you and thinking about Josh and now cracking up becasue this lady is singing about Josh and I same time as me thinking about us. And mom reminded me of a time long ago going to work a bluegrass festival in those very hills and how she used to be in love back then with a well-known Nashville musician. Within moments I was at the very place, 8 miles east of Gettysburg, that the festival she was talking about is held. It was all so timely, and the conversation was good and sweet and I felt whole and clean, and happy to see Sarah the bride-to-be and the other cousins waiting to see me.
Now it is Monday morning, the birds are singing and Crow was just squawking, too. The sky out the window in my meditation room is blue and pink tinged so it's all resonant in that morning purple hue. Yesterday also was a long day and last night I wanted to finish uploading my old pics--late 80's through late 90's--on to my external hard drive so that when I move Wednesday and my couple things go in to storage that huge tupperware with all the old albums can just stay there. But I was tired, went late to Target to get a new swimsuit and that took a long time because for the first time in a long time I felt bad about how I looked which made me uncomfortable, but also grateful, because I almost never ever have to deal with that leftover teenage weirdness anymore. So when I got back home I went right to bed, didn't even keep my eyes open long enough to read my book.
I move Wednesday to Ocean Pines. Kelly Johnson, Sean, Bdubb and Brooks are going to help me. Thursday I'm taking Amy out for a pedicure to celebrate Maddie, her third child, due in July. Friday my cousin Timmy graduates college, Friday night we're all going dancing at Red Maple, Saturday's Eryka Badu. Then back to the Pines til Wednesday of the following week, when I fly to Oregon, and will be boundless, yet tall tree mountain coasts hot springs cities and hippies and Pacific ocean bound.
Yaaaaay!!!! When I get home it will be summer time and all that hotass Marilen mug. I'll be a waitress again, a writer for sure, babys will come, weddings will happen, and I will stare and smile a lot at the sea. I will swim. For now, I am sleepy, pals. Thank you for reading and always journeying along with me. Thank you all for the love and support even when you dont comment thankfully the blog counter tells me you still read. I am contented, awed, and eager because I feel certain the best is yet to be....
My wishes and prayers for the same to all of you xoxo.
Love, kel
May 3, 2010
This one thing... Telling the truth.
This is Erika, quoting Hemingway in my head and it's what happens to me any time I sit down and start to write and cant get started. Tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth. Usually it's followed by me asking myself Kelly what are you trying to say?
There is a song it just came on as I finished that last paragraph and it made me smile and pull the comfort sheets of my self up tight around my heart because of the tweak it put in my chest the second I heard it start and the immediate smile and hush of breath it drew. It is one of those serendipity songs and one that always no matter what makes my spirit emerge from whatever tight little haunt of me in which it's hiding. It's one of my fighting songs, and it is the song of songs that would of course in this instance speak to me.
I thought that pain and truth were all that really mattered but you cant stay here with every single hope that shattered. Big Country. Oh this song. The one that Kelly J put on the CD when I sold my shit and went travelling in 2004--it played as I pulled out of Chestertown and left my disillusioned past behind. The past. The past? Let me say this to the past. It becomes you, shapes the you you become. For many months I have worked to heal my associations of me, and my patterns of my past that became patterns long before I had the mind awareness to know any better. I have begun to live motivated by one idea: we regret not what we've done, but what we have not. I have had to ask myself again and again, and sit quiet surrendering to me, to the long inner road towards peace and silence within to hear the answer: years from now what will I look back on and say because I did not do this one or two or three things, I regret? It is in this way I've submitted to me, to following my truth and being brave and strong enough to stand in and go towards who I really am.
There is one area--love, men--where I have a backlog of mess. I am in the context, here, now, ongoing, of forgiveness and peace in that area, it's a constant motion thing for me. And as to this, as to regret, and to telling the truth. There was one, a single real regret that clung to me and went something like this:
I should've been true to myself. The moment, the second I knew I was in love with him--and no longer in love with the one I was with--I should've been honest with myself and with everyone involved. I was so in love with him. I should've gone forward and to him, and not looked back.
I should've. But that's not what happened. And so how does life unfold--how does it mark you, and push you along when there is indeed this one thing that you look back on and did not do?
What happens is you quantitate, you consider. You loop over and over again in yourself and become lost in your self and hate and even further have more and awful disbelief in yourself. You become deeply deflated, hopeless even and don't know why, because often times regret hides itself if you are lacking in a certain capacity for self-honesty in some areas in your life, so that's what happens: if you are like me and you have hurt in a certain area of your life, old hurt, old covered-over pain from long long ago before you even really were you yet, than being true to yourself in that area comes out all slanted and sideways because to really be true means first to have to re-live through the old pain that's still there. And that's fucking hard. Especially when that part of you's always been broke.
Then, one day you wake up. It's a half-waking, but I'm a fighter, so you grab for it. And you realize god damn it, this is my life. This is my life. And perhaps this regret was the one, the one key to the door that is finally, for real and completely, going to make me own me in my entirety. That is going to make me stand up, and be true as I can to myself.
You start to get honest then, about your wants, your needs, about your past. About who you are.
I've identified the things, the couple of them. And I'm going whole-hearted after them. BUT MORE IMPORTANT. I get it, I get me now. I know me, and love me, all of me. I know how to be true to my self. Get it? I know now how to be honest to me. And to tell the truth, and not miss opportunity. I have healed from the early fucked up shit and abuse, or at least have self-awareness that is full and complete, and real. Not sideways and slanted and blind or numb in some parts. I have broke parts you know, who doesn't? But those are now the places I learned to nurture and be gentle with myself instead of denying and hating and refusing, because of denial and numbness and self-hate. Those are the places I have medicine, real virtue now. Where I can be even more gentle and loving towards me, and others, as result.
I am real now. I am whole.
This is my life. And I guess that one regret is no longer on my list because the gift that came from it is absolutely nonexchangeable. I hope that he--the lighthouse guy, the one who led me here to this deep and dark well of my self, the one who suffered at my hands and who I ultimately pushed away and forced to walk away without his own looking back--I hope he is well. I hope he is well: is full, is whole.
I am being true to my self, to my heart. It's all I ever really wanted to learn how to do. That part I don't regret, not at all.
There is a song it just came on as I finished that last paragraph and it made me smile and pull the comfort sheets of my self up tight around my heart because of the tweak it put in my chest the second I heard it start and the immediate smile and hush of breath it drew. It is one of those serendipity songs and one that always no matter what makes my spirit emerge from whatever tight little haunt of me in which it's hiding. It's one of my fighting songs, and it is the song of songs that would of course in this instance speak to me.
I thought that pain and truth were all that really mattered but you cant stay here with every single hope that shattered. Big Country. Oh this song. The one that Kelly J put on the CD when I sold my shit and went travelling in 2004--it played as I pulled out of Chestertown and left my disillusioned past behind. The past. The past? Let me say this to the past. It becomes you, shapes the you you become. For many months I have worked to heal my associations of me, and my patterns of my past that became patterns long before I had the mind awareness to know any better. I have begun to live motivated by one idea: we regret not what we've done, but what we have not. I have had to ask myself again and again, and sit quiet surrendering to me, to the long inner road towards peace and silence within to hear the answer: years from now what will I look back on and say because I did not do this one or two or three things, I regret? It is in this way I've submitted to me, to following my truth and being brave and strong enough to stand in and go towards who I really am.
There is one area--love, men--where I have a backlog of mess. I am in the context, here, now, ongoing, of forgiveness and peace in that area, it's a constant motion thing for me. And as to this, as to regret, and to telling the truth. There was one, a single real regret that clung to me and went something like this:
I should've been true to myself. The moment, the second I knew I was in love with him--and no longer in love with the one I was with--I should've been honest with myself and with everyone involved. I was so in love with him. I should've gone forward and to him, and not looked back.
I should've. But that's not what happened. And so how does life unfold--how does it mark you, and push you along when there is indeed this one thing that you look back on and did not do?
What happens is you quantitate, you consider. You loop over and over again in yourself and become lost in your self and hate and even further have more and awful disbelief in yourself. You become deeply deflated, hopeless even and don't know why, because often times regret hides itself if you are lacking in a certain capacity for self-honesty in some areas in your life, so that's what happens: if you are like me and you have hurt in a certain area of your life, old hurt, old covered-over pain from long long ago before you even really were you yet, than being true to yourself in that area comes out all slanted and sideways because to really be true means first to have to re-live through the old pain that's still there. And that's fucking hard. Especially when that part of you's always been broke.
Then, one day you wake up. It's a half-waking, but I'm a fighter, so you grab for it. And you realize god damn it, this is my life. This is my life. And perhaps this regret was the one, the one key to the door that is finally, for real and completely, going to make me own me in my entirety. That is going to make me stand up, and be true as I can to myself.
You start to get honest then, about your wants, your needs, about your past. About who you are.
I've identified the things, the couple of them. And I'm going whole-hearted after them. BUT MORE IMPORTANT. I get it, I get me now. I know me, and love me, all of me. I know how to be true to my self. Get it? I know now how to be honest to me. And to tell the truth, and not miss opportunity. I have healed from the early fucked up shit and abuse, or at least have self-awareness that is full and complete, and real. Not sideways and slanted and blind or numb in some parts. I have broke parts you know, who doesn't? But those are now the places I learned to nurture and be gentle with myself instead of denying and hating and refusing, because of denial and numbness and self-hate. Those are the places I have medicine, real virtue now. Where I can be even more gentle and loving towards me, and others, as result.
I am real now. I am whole.
This is my life. And I guess that one regret is no longer on my list because the gift that came from it is absolutely nonexchangeable. I hope that he--the lighthouse guy, the one who led me here to this deep and dark well of my self, the one who suffered at my hands and who I ultimately pushed away and forced to walk away without his own looking back--I hope he is well. I hope he is well: is full, is whole.
I am being true to my self, to my heart. It's all I ever really wanted to learn how to do. That part I don't regret, not at all.
May 1, 2010
April 25, 2010
Reminiscing. Play it Again Sam's.
The door of the CoffeeCat is heavy wood and you have to push it in the center of the handle with a certain amount of compact umph for it to swing easily open. This morning and without any anticipation upon the push of the door I got struck in the gut with the most endured sense of wistful longing, an immediate and aching clutch on my heart the moment I stepped inside.
It was the tunneled noise of the milk-steamer that did it. And the warm bouancy, from all the rain outside, inside on the air.
I scanned the room for a recognizable face and there was Liz, the barista I got to know first when I started coming here last year. She is in her senior year of highschool and an athlete so I rarely see her anymore.
Just that little familiarity added a certain tweak to my heart.
Sometimes, with the least amount of expectation or warning, this happens to me. I am struck by sudden and complete awe for life. For its fleeting passing. For all the little moments that are all the time sliding us by.
This morning it descended upon me in a memory so physical I could've stepped back in time. I worked as a barista in a coffee shop in Chestertown my senior year of college. 2001 and most of 02. Mornings in the winter each step on the cold earth I'd pound closer to downtown my breath would grow more severe--I'd clutch whatever thin little sweater I was wearing harder across my chest and see my knuckles redden by the chill. It seems it was always gray that winter. The door, when it pushed open, rang little bells and my glasses immediately would cover in steam and my nose fill with the most alluring savory smell of the homemade muffins, Comfort Food, that Natalie Comfort was busy baking. One of the other baristas, almost always, was already at work steaming themselves a morning wake-me-up drink.
I dropped out of college twice from drugging and booze--the second time it was in order to get clean. The year I worked as a barista, my senior year, was the only year I was clean while in school, and it's really the only year that I remember with any sort of clarity. And they are sweet, specific sensory memories. The inborn joy that bubbles out of Katie that would jolt my heart every Thursday afternoon when we would meet and walk in to poetry class together; the tweak of enjoyment seeing the new outfit or wig that Libby would have on when I would turn the corner on High Street and see her in front of the coffee shop on her smoke break; the peace, inherent, of the way Jazmine moved across our apartment--the way one person's nature can wordlessly inspire you to want more from yourself. Dear God did I relive the collective experiences of that time in a mere instant this morning~and oh did it make my heart cry out in longing over what used to be.
It made me think quite instantly about other times in my life that are no more than memory~other times and whole other groups of fabulous, wild, hysterical, ridiculous people that are actively no more to me today than, if I am lucky, a facebook status update. Crofton, the pizza shop, 6th street, Ocean Pines Beach Club, the boys from the beach. I guess what ultimately this experience did was force me in to the reality of what I've quietly been witnessing and coming to terms with in the past few months: that too, Chestertown, the people there and memories, Play it Again, Andy's, Truslow Road, Anngar....all those too will pass away. Have already begun to, and how the aspects of this have hit me with a surrendering that is much like grief.
There is no other way to put it than that. I am looking forward, in great joy and enthusiasm, towards this next unwrit chapter of my life. It thrills me to no end the great, raw power in this~of choice and faith when mixed together. The pure alchemy of it. Yet the picture would be incomplete without the other...the saying goodbye. I have learned that all things pass, and yet somehow come again~that this is the thing about life. Most experiences merely change form, whether they are relationships, aspects of our selves or each other, the work we do, the family we spend time with, the ways in general we spend our time. There is at work always a greater thread that is weaving us and nudging us and it is part the tapestry--and part our choice of the stitches me choose to make, that make up all of life. I am lucky today to still have close, amazying friends that span all parts of my journey, and too grateful as hell for social sites like Facebook because even if we dont actually talk or see one another--knowing for example that Jess Singleton is happy and has a dog and a job she enjoys out someplace in Arizona, or that Ryan Muller is surfing and chilling in Florida gives me infinite peace.
I am in the Coffee Cat right now, preparing to work on my book. A warm-up as Erika would say. Sweet sweet Erika from all the way back chorus and basketball practice at Arthur Slade.
In less than a month Coffee Cat will no longer be my regular haunt. Once, my senior year of college, the poet Li Young Lee came to speak to our Contemporary Poetry Class. He was asked about faith, and his belief in God. He could not answer specific to a godhead, or even to faith, but what he did say was that LIFE is in this moment, and this moment is also always changing and passing on by. I make practice, he said, of centering myself much as I can throughout my day and then in that centered moment, reminding myself by saying Thank you, Goodbye.
Ahhhh, reminder to be present. Thank you, good bye.
It was the tunneled noise of the milk-steamer that did it. And the warm bouancy, from all the rain outside, inside on the air.
I scanned the room for a recognizable face and there was Liz, the barista I got to know first when I started coming here last year. She is in her senior year of highschool and an athlete so I rarely see her anymore.
Just that little familiarity added a certain tweak to my heart.
Sometimes, with the least amount of expectation or warning, this happens to me. I am struck by sudden and complete awe for life. For its fleeting passing. For all the little moments that are all the time sliding us by.
This morning it descended upon me in a memory so physical I could've stepped back in time. I worked as a barista in a coffee shop in Chestertown my senior year of college. 2001 and most of 02. Mornings in the winter each step on the cold earth I'd pound closer to downtown my breath would grow more severe--I'd clutch whatever thin little sweater I was wearing harder across my chest and see my knuckles redden by the chill. It seems it was always gray that winter. The door, when it pushed open, rang little bells and my glasses immediately would cover in steam and my nose fill with the most alluring savory smell of the homemade muffins, Comfort Food, that Natalie Comfort was busy baking. One of the other baristas, almost always, was already at work steaming themselves a morning wake-me-up drink.
I dropped out of college twice from drugging and booze--the second time it was in order to get clean. The year I worked as a barista, my senior year, was the only year I was clean while in school, and it's really the only year that I remember with any sort of clarity. And they are sweet, specific sensory memories. The inborn joy that bubbles out of Katie that would jolt my heart every Thursday afternoon when we would meet and walk in to poetry class together; the tweak of enjoyment seeing the new outfit or wig that Libby would have on when I would turn the corner on High Street and see her in front of the coffee shop on her smoke break; the peace, inherent, of the way Jazmine moved across our apartment--the way one person's nature can wordlessly inspire you to want more from yourself. Dear God did I relive the collective experiences of that time in a mere instant this morning~and oh did it make my heart cry out in longing over what used to be.
It made me think quite instantly about other times in my life that are no more than memory~other times and whole other groups of fabulous, wild, hysterical, ridiculous people that are actively no more to me today than, if I am lucky, a facebook status update. Crofton, the pizza shop, 6th street, Ocean Pines Beach Club, the boys from the beach. I guess what ultimately this experience did was force me in to the reality of what I've quietly been witnessing and coming to terms with in the past few months: that too, Chestertown, the people there and memories, Play it Again, Andy's, Truslow Road, Anngar....all those too will pass away. Have already begun to, and how the aspects of this have hit me with a surrendering that is much like grief.
There is no other way to put it than that. I am looking forward, in great joy and enthusiasm, towards this next unwrit chapter of my life. It thrills me to no end the great, raw power in this~of choice and faith when mixed together. The pure alchemy of it. Yet the picture would be incomplete without the other...the saying goodbye. I have learned that all things pass, and yet somehow come again~that this is the thing about life. Most experiences merely change form, whether they are relationships, aspects of our selves or each other, the work we do, the family we spend time with, the ways in general we spend our time. There is at work always a greater thread that is weaving us and nudging us and it is part the tapestry--and part our choice of the stitches me choose to make, that make up all of life. I am lucky today to still have close, amazying friends that span all parts of my journey, and too grateful as hell for social sites like Facebook because even if we dont actually talk or see one another--knowing for example that Jess Singleton is happy and has a dog and a job she enjoys out someplace in Arizona, or that Ryan Muller is surfing and chilling in Florida gives me infinite peace.
I am in the Coffee Cat right now, preparing to work on my book. A warm-up as Erika would say. Sweet sweet Erika from all the way back chorus and basketball practice at Arthur Slade.
In less than a month Coffee Cat will no longer be my regular haunt. Once, my senior year of college, the poet Li Young Lee came to speak to our Contemporary Poetry Class. He was asked about faith, and his belief in God. He could not answer specific to a godhead, or even to faith, but what he did say was that LIFE is in this moment, and this moment is also always changing and passing on by. I make practice, he said, of centering myself much as I can throughout my day and then in that centered moment, reminding myself by saying Thank you, Goodbye.
Ahhhh, reminder to be present. Thank you, good bye.
February 27, 2010
BURNT UP
The first thing that happened is I chose to let my house start to go.
By that I mean my apartment, of course. But it's the first time since I moved in and got unpacked that I stopped picking up after myself at least every third day. And I watched in a madness that was rimmed mostly by delight as the order around here, bit by bit, started to whittle away.
I knew all along. This is a need to have some control: when it gets real bad, when it's real bad I'll know and then I will open the windows and go gangbusters in here and get to clean up and feel like I have some sort of power over this place.
I have poems accumulating again, lots of them and I have started to want to post them, but I wont. Bc there are some things I get about myself now, about my voice, about how I write. And to post them would mean to change the formats, and the formats are good because they are intimate to me. My artistry. I am 33 woah no I'm not but I almost am--I am soon 33 and have been writing poems in spiral backed books since I was 14. I am 33 soon and I know me now, know my voice really for the first time and I've never before now felt good about that. I have been writing as my first religion since the choice I made on the steel-posted squeaky twin bed I fell in love with Brandon with at Libby's old pad on Wash Ave: This is it. This, writing, this is what--no matter what else--I will do. "This" to quote my fave line from a poem back then, This, all I ever had to fall back on. So I am for the first time in my life secure enough now, secure in my style choices--affect on the rhythm and cadence of things--in voice choices for reasons I only just recently fully got are political to me, in content and theme that arent choices but that compel and create and are simply born of me much as I turn to and motivate them.
And so it is February again, that bone-haired last week of February that always singes me to deadened discretion on the inside. I am an assault pariah when it comes to that silly toss of the head term Winter Blues. Blues aint the half of it. But I keep going I keep going I keep going the words take me there and write me all the way through. And I refuse to substantiate the society claims, the impartial explanations: it's just chemical, merely the result of lac of light. Of course! But we dont get what we mean when we say that because most of us dont get IT'S ALL LIGHT. IT'S ALL, AT OUR ESSENCE, ABOUT LIGHT. This is soul stuff we're talking about. This is the twinkling nebulous of mythos that glistens on the inner wall of tramps and blue bloods alike. What are your darkest secrets, those rat-teeth gnaws that have you crawling the walls of you in there, especially when the Great Everything with preened deliverance is making us all East Coasters--where the deep blood of societal injury cellularly and in the very earth remains--sit still from snow again and again? Think not of dead-ends but reasons--those are the motivators: The Divine Hungers. The ashes that linger are deceptive, we forget they are reason and once were bone tissue and scars and are meant to feed the later-coming new life of things.
Take medicine or get drunk or stoned or mean fucked-up, or, the best, lie to your self lots and all you want. I'm booted at this now--a soldier who knows the cadence of the diligent rhythm ellipses of her own soul. So I know the truth of me this time for sure: I am burnt out. Going over the same exact chart of this same exact time last year--when my ailments manifested truly in dis-ease. I literally remember standing in the back office at a family support center this very time last year, way out in the country looking at all the bureaucratic broke ass stuff I was required to do, feeling so hopeless and powerless, Haitian refugees literally crowding the door in the shy way they do when they dont speak the language and also dont know you yet. And being on the phone with someone else from work and her laughing about all the excess: the numbers of numbers of students out in the sticks we are responsible for/to. And I felt that same thing break, and it happened, the same thing but not nearly as deep a break or elemental, again this very week. My job is one fit for a liar contented on kicking the ashes. So much of society stays content on this, on the look-down at your feet neck-stuck cramped stare. There are eyes I suppose that must stay most-way closed because to open them up, and I know this, takes a lot of willingness and mostly can be an awful, awful lot of pain and grief. Dealing with reality, at first, often is...
But my eyes are opened, and have been.
My voice, carrying crying laughing learning loving seiging destroying but all the while leading me through, and fighting for my own ability to trust in it all along, is the reason why.
By that I mean my apartment, of course. But it's the first time since I moved in and got unpacked that I stopped picking up after myself at least every third day. And I watched in a madness that was rimmed mostly by delight as the order around here, bit by bit, started to whittle away.
I knew all along. This is a need to have some control: when it gets real bad, when it's real bad I'll know and then I will open the windows and go gangbusters in here and get to clean up and feel like I have some sort of power over this place.
I have poems accumulating again, lots of them and I have started to want to post them, but I wont. Bc there are some things I get about myself now, about my voice, about how I write. And to post them would mean to change the formats, and the formats are good because they are intimate to me. My artistry. I am 33 woah no I'm not but I almost am--I am soon 33 and have been writing poems in spiral backed books since I was 14. I am 33 soon and I know me now, know my voice really for the first time and I've never before now felt good about that. I have been writing as my first religion since the choice I made on the steel-posted squeaky twin bed I fell in love with Brandon with at Libby's old pad on Wash Ave: This is it. This, writing, this is what--no matter what else--I will do. "This" to quote my fave line from a poem back then, This, all I ever had to fall back on. So I am for the first time in my life secure enough now, secure in my style choices--affect on the rhythm and cadence of things--in voice choices for reasons I only just recently fully got are political to me, in content and theme that arent choices but that compel and create and are simply born of me much as I turn to and motivate them.
And so it is February again, that bone-haired last week of February that always singes me to deadened discretion on the inside. I am an assault pariah when it comes to that silly toss of the head term Winter Blues. Blues aint the half of it. But I keep going I keep going I keep going the words take me there and write me all the way through. And I refuse to substantiate the society claims, the impartial explanations: it's just chemical, merely the result of lac of light. Of course! But we dont get what we mean when we say that because most of us dont get IT'S ALL LIGHT. IT'S ALL, AT OUR ESSENCE, ABOUT LIGHT. This is soul stuff we're talking about. This is the twinkling nebulous of mythos that glistens on the inner wall of tramps and blue bloods alike. What are your darkest secrets, those rat-teeth gnaws that have you crawling the walls of you in there, especially when the Great Everything with preened deliverance is making us all East Coasters--where the deep blood of societal injury cellularly and in the very earth remains--sit still from snow again and again? Think not of dead-ends but reasons--those are the motivators: The Divine Hungers. The ashes that linger are deceptive, we forget they are reason and once were bone tissue and scars and are meant to feed the later-coming new life of things.
Take medicine or get drunk or stoned or mean fucked-up, or, the best, lie to your self lots and all you want. I'm booted at this now--a soldier who knows the cadence of the diligent rhythm ellipses of her own soul. So I know the truth of me this time for sure: I am burnt out. Going over the same exact chart of this same exact time last year--when my ailments manifested truly in dis-ease. I literally remember standing in the back office at a family support center this very time last year, way out in the country looking at all the bureaucratic broke ass stuff I was required to do, feeling so hopeless and powerless, Haitian refugees literally crowding the door in the shy way they do when they dont speak the language and also dont know you yet. And being on the phone with someone else from work and her laughing about all the excess: the numbers of numbers of students out in the sticks we are responsible for/to. And I felt that same thing break, and it happened, the same thing but not nearly as deep a break or elemental, again this very week. My job is one fit for a liar contented on kicking the ashes. So much of society stays content on this, on the look-down at your feet neck-stuck cramped stare. There are eyes I suppose that must stay most-way closed because to open them up, and I know this, takes a lot of willingness and mostly can be an awful, awful lot of pain and grief. Dealing with reality, at first, often is...
But my eyes are opened, and have been.
My voice, carrying crying laughing learning loving seiging destroying but all the while leading me through, and fighting for my own ability to trust in it all along, is the reason why.
January 22, 2010
...I will tell about it...
Two days ago the doctor, in less time than it took me to turn off my car in the parking lot of the walk-in clinic and unbuckle my seatbelt, told me I had infected tonsils.
An infected tonsil looks pretty gross.
This morning when I woke up I felt like I'd been holding my breath, my whole body clung frantically to a rock, with gnarly whitecap tumblers breaking over top of me all night long. I couldn't tell: was it my tonsils or had I just slept wrong?
But by the time I was up and out of bed that certain headache that comes, the one that sucks my whole breath from me, was fast on its way. I only get those kind of headaches when I've been clenching my jaw in my sleep.
Then I remembered: I dreamt these funny, peaky-feeling dreams all night long. The half-pulled curtain in my consciousness was throwing fresh images: me, with bruised and bloodied, swollen faces--several, like a series of comic book characters, shots of me--all in varying different proportions of having been beat-up, and each with a doopy grin on my at times toothless face.
On Tuesday night at the funeral for sweet Meggie's father, my buddy Ronnie and I talked forever--Meggie tucked safe the whole time, near the casket, in the corner of our eyes. He told me tales and tales of his family, all based around the coal mines of West Virginia. Two nights before my friend Tom went on about where he's from and the lifestyle that influences society there: the coalmines of North Central PA. Driving home, or to my cousin's home, from South County where the funeral was, a song bittersweet like a sourpatch kid on the tongue caught my attention from the IPOD: Coalminer, by Mia and Jonah.
My grandpop. How'd he come to Baltimore? I dont know. I should know this. His dad, Orlando, came here from Ireland. Had 11 kids. Worked the coal mines in PA til he died.
I got up this morning with this binging headache trying to start. I drank lots of water, ate some cheerios then took some Advil. Then I put two hours of work in from home, and then cancelled all my other plans...
Infected tonsils, according to Louise Hay, indicates creativity stifled or repressed emotions.
Does it really mean that? What if it doesn't?
What if it does?
All I know for sure is that I believe, I believe with out question in the deep life, the deep inner world and those inner lights being made real, and shining my way day to day. After those dreams, and the connections about Pop, and my flightiness over some decisions I've got comping up, what I did for the rest of the day was take some much needed quiet time. I got gentle as I could with me and gave myself, in my sacred space, long uncharted time to just be with me, and listen.
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it...Our myths are our lives, as magical and myth-filled as we let them be, as we choose to make them, as we choose to believe...I choose to believe in the magic inside, and the signs without. In my We'Moon calendar the forecast for Aries for the year said to take the quiet time to seek the voices of my ancestors.
I am sitting down to write late in to the night on my Memoir.
I hear you, Pop!
An infected tonsil looks pretty gross.
This morning when I woke up I felt like I'd been holding my breath, my whole body clung frantically to a rock, with gnarly whitecap tumblers breaking over top of me all night long. I couldn't tell: was it my tonsils or had I just slept wrong?
But by the time I was up and out of bed that certain headache that comes, the one that sucks my whole breath from me, was fast on its way. I only get those kind of headaches when I've been clenching my jaw in my sleep.
Then I remembered: I dreamt these funny, peaky-feeling dreams all night long. The half-pulled curtain in my consciousness was throwing fresh images: me, with bruised and bloodied, swollen faces--several, like a series of comic book characters, shots of me--all in varying different proportions of having been beat-up, and each with a doopy grin on my at times toothless face.
On Tuesday night at the funeral for sweet Meggie's father, my buddy Ronnie and I talked forever--Meggie tucked safe the whole time, near the casket, in the corner of our eyes. He told me tales and tales of his family, all based around the coal mines of West Virginia. Two nights before my friend Tom went on about where he's from and the lifestyle that influences society there: the coalmines of North Central PA. Driving home, or to my cousin's home, from South County where the funeral was, a song bittersweet like a sourpatch kid on the tongue caught my attention from the IPOD: Coalminer, by Mia and Jonah.
My grandpop. How'd he come to Baltimore? I dont know. I should know this. His dad, Orlando, came here from Ireland. Had 11 kids. Worked the coal mines in PA til he died.
I got up this morning with this binging headache trying to start. I drank lots of water, ate some cheerios then took some Advil. Then I put two hours of work in from home, and then cancelled all my other plans...
Infected tonsils, according to Louise Hay, indicates creativity stifled or repressed emotions.
Does it really mean that? What if it doesn't?
What if it does?
All I know for sure is that I believe, I believe with out question in the deep life, the deep inner world and those inner lights being made real, and shining my way day to day. After those dreams, and the connections about Pop, and my flightiness over some decisions I've got comping up, what I did for the rest of the day was take some much needed quiet time. I got gentle as I could with me and gave myself, in my sacred space, long uncharted time to just be with me, and listen.
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it...Our myths are our lives, as magical and myth-filled as we let them be, as we choose to make them, as we choose to believe...I choose to believe in the magic inside, and the signs without. In my We'Moon calendar the forecast for Aries for the year said to take the quiet time to seek the voices of my ancestors.
I am sitting down to write late in to the night on my Memoir.
I hear you, Pop!
August 22, 2009
"And maybe that's why I love you-
...you notice those things and you believe me when I make them mythical." ~Davka
i just came through this weird nebulous sometimes friendship sometimes love affair and the whole thing is that he made me believe in me, made me believe in the story of me. the things that i hold most dear. which is wild because the reality of me and him was always mostly just a story in my head, one that i told myself. one that he, too, sometimes told me or we together tried to tell each other. there wasn't a whole lot of reality, just a whole lot of what both of us tried hard to want to see.
storytelling is so important. life is nothing if not mythology, and all us, all us broken broken people are just doing what we can to cling to some kind of, or shape what we can of, a meaning. something to hold it all, to string it all together like so many little twinkling, barely there decorative lights that you branch over the cedar tree next to the garden outside in the night in summertime. and sometimes it rains, and sometimes the lights get lost in the dark green, and sometimes you just forget to turn them on.
i was with my homey prandy the other day it's the first time i saw or talked to him since six years ago the day of his wedding, in that time since we've both been in and lost our own hard, hard love. i fell crazy in love with him when i was just 16. we've had a sometimes trippy, often simple, beautiful road together since and i am happy he is still my friend. and he talked a long long while and then it was my turn and when we were both done i told him, i was coming through the dining room this morning and saw myself in the mirror on the wall and thought, i look so old. we laughed cuz the truth was i had just finished talking about spending so much time with cuzin erin and how youthful and good for my summer soulnheart that's been. but the truth also was that it was true--and i said that next. prandy, how? how did we get here, to now, how did it happen that i am suddenly 32?
and that is mythology, and what matters, and also why my truest gift is my story-teller soul. because here, him and we, we spent the four hours we were able to make for the other totally handing the other our bones: the stories of our lives, the important pieces that we hold dear. not the answers, just the steps. the steps we've taken on our paths, which, without neccesarily saying so, held the marks of how much heart in each place we actually laid down. and that is what counts, our own journey. the hero's journey is our own, every one. and how beautiful to me are the people that keep track with us, that help us see the march we're on, every so often, for the bigger version of what it is. no matter the lies or the details that we are busy trying to tell ourselves, no matter the pain of the reality: my heart is beating and bleeding but sharing our bones reminds me, i can feel! I AM Alive!! and this is what counts...our stories are what we own, are all we have...and there is relief in the little bit of medicine of this.
i am so thankful for dear friends. for sharing on their paths. and so, so grateful for what they do to illuminate my own....and today what i honor most is my own right, my own right to my own story and the understanding that i am capable, and most of all responsible to that. that my story truly is mine and the steps i take are up to only me, and my own mthology up to no one else but me to own, how i see things, how and if i choose to look....i loved someone a long time for his ability to see the life in me and that sort of got in the way of me being able to do the same.
hmmm. good medicine doesn't come easy sometimes. that doesn't mean it isn't worth it, tho
i just came through this weird nebulous sometimes friendship sometimes love affair and the whole thing is that he made me believe in me, made me believe in the story of me. the things that i hold most dear. which is wild because the reality of me and him was always mostly just a story in my head, one that i told myself. one that he, too, sometimes told me or we together tried to tell each other. there wasn't a whole lot of reality, just a whole lot of what both of us tried hard to want to see.
storytelling is so important. life is nothing if not mythology, and all us, all us broken broken people are just doing what we can to cling to some kind of, or shape what we can of, a meaning. something to hold it all, to string it all together like so many little twinkling, barely there decorative lights that you branch over the cedar tree next to the garden outside in the night in summertime. and sometimes it rains, and sometimes the lights get lost in the dark green, and sometimes you just forget to turn them on.
i was with my homey prandy the other day it's the first time i saw or talked to him since six years ago the day of his wedding, in that time since we've both been in and lost our own hard, hard love. i fell crazy in love with him when i was just 16. we've had a sometimes trippy, often simple, beautiful road together since and i am happy he is still my friend. and he talked a long long while and then it was my turn and when we were both done i told him, i was coming through the dining room this morning and saw myself in the mirror on the wall and thought, i look so old. we laughed cuz the truth was i had just finished talking about spending so much time with cuzin erin and how youthful and good for my summer soulnheart that's been. but the truth also was that it was true--and i said that next. prandy, how? how did we get here, to now, how did it happen that i am suddenly 32?
and that is mythology, and what matters, and also why my truest gift is my story-teller soul. because here, him and we, we spent the four hours we were able to make for the other totally handing the other our bones: the stories of our lives, the important pieces that we hold dear. not the answers, just the steps. the steps we've taken on our paths, which, without neccesarily saying so, held the marks of how much heart in each place we actually laid down. and that is what counts, our own journey. the hero's journey is our own, every one. and how beautiful to me are the people that keep track with us, that help us see the march we're on, every so often, for the bigger version of what it is. no matter the lies or the details that we are busy trying to tell ourselves, no matter the pain of the reality: my heart is beating and bleeding but sharing our bones reminds me, i can feel! I AM Alive!! and this is what counts...our stories are what we own, are all we have...and there is relief in the little bit of medicine of this.
i am so thankful for dear friends. for sharing on their paths. and so, so grateful for what they do to illuminate my own....and today what i honor most is my own right, my own right to my own story and the understanding that i am capable, and most of all responsible to that. that my story truly is mine and the steps i take are up to only me, and my own mthology up to no one else but me to own, how i see things, how and if i choose to look....i loved someone a long time for his ability to see the life in me and that sort of got in the way of me being able to do the same.
hmmm. good medicine doesn't come easy sometimes. that doesn't mean it isn't worth it, tho
July 27, 2009
update
i was journaling this morning. it was quiet in my space and sort of grey but everything was still and the outlines of the furniture in my room were strong and solid. it was the kind of morning where i was acutely senstive to my space. my scarves hanging all around, the color they add in the dull light through the shades. the books on my shelves. the flicker of the candle and the shadow on the wall: to and frow. i was quiet, and aware. contented in the peace that comes in recovery after you've worked hard to get to a new inner understanding, we call it having our side of the street clean. it's been a long process.
i noticed the date on the top line of the loose leaf in my journal and felt a tug of familiarity in my heart. july 27. 9 years ago today i woke up in the afternoon in my dark windowless room in ocean pines. i had a mean hangover and had to get to work in town. the phone was ringing: it was cuddy, from crofton. our boy fannon had died. fannon was my lover. he was my friend. he was someone with whom i'd grown up. he had a heart attack and was gone at 23.
fannon and me, all of us, we liked our drugs.
i'd been arrested for the third time just days prior. it too had to do with partying a wee bit too much. burying fannon was a blur. i didn't cry until 2 months later. i mean really cry, like really let it out. but on august 5, cuz they told me a i had to, i took my last drink. some months later, my last drug.
yea, so, 9 years after all of that and i can barely remember, barely connect in to that way of life anymore, or who i used to be that i needed that--those elixers, as a way to live.
this book i just did this wild and deep, deep work out of, read it. read it, read it, allow yourself to unfold through it. actually take the suggestions and do the work. cuz drinking and drugs weren't my problem, they were my solution. my problem was me and my so badly injured heart. and so many of us have that, the badly injured part, in common. and this book got in to those roots and then at once helped me build my own deep character on which to climb out. i am so, so thankful.
here is a poem in celebration. in celebration of what its like to be of dos mundos, or two worlds. the outside, day to day life. and the inner, more powerful and capable of being so fully awakened life of the heart and spirit. of the calling, of the impulse, itself...
For Alva Benson, And For Those
Who Have Learned To Speak
And the ground spoke when she was born.
Her mother heard it. In Navajo she answered
as she squatted down against the earth
to give birth. It was now when it happened,
now giving birth to itself again and again
between the legs of women.
Or maybe it was the Indian Hospital
in Gallup. The ground still spoke beneath
mortar and concrete. She strained against the
metal stirrups, and they tied her hands down
because she still spoke with them, when they
muffled her screams. But her body went on
talking and the child was born into their
hands, and the child learned to speak
both voices.
She grew up talking in Navajo, in English
and watched the earth around her shift and change
with the people in the towns and in the cities
learning not to hear the ground as it spun around
beneath them. She learned to speak for the ground,
the voice coming through her like roots that
have long hungered for water. He own daughter
was born, like she had been, in either place
or all places, so she could leave, leap
into the sound she had always heard,
a voice like water, like the gods weavng
against sundown in a scarlet light.
The child now hears names in her sleep.
They change into other names, and into others.
In is the ground murmuring, and Mt. St. Helens
errupts as the harmonic motion of a child turning
inside her mother's belly waiting to be born
to begin another time.
And we go on, keep giving birth and watch
ourselves die, over and over.
And the ground spinning beneath us
goes on talking.
~Joy Harjo
i noticed the date on the top line of the loose leaf in my journal and felt a tug of familiarity in my heart. july 27. 9 years ago today i woke up in the afternoon in my dark windowless room in ocean pines. i had a mean hangover and had to get to work in town. the phone was ringing: it was cuddy, from crofton. our boy fannon had died. fannon was my lover. he was my friend. he was someone with whom i'd grown up. he had a heart attack and was gone at 23.
fannon and me, all of us, we liked our drugs.
i'd been arrested for the third time just days prior. it too had to do with partying a wee bit too much. burying fannon was a blur. i didn't cry until 2 months later. i mean really cry, like really let it out. but on august 5, cuz they told me a i had to, i took my last drink. some months later, my last drug.
yea, so, 9 years after all of that and i can barely remember, barely connect in to that way of life anymore, or who i used to be that i needed that--those elixers, as a way to live.
this book i just did this wild and deep, deep work out of, read it. read it, read it, allow yourself to unfold through it. actually take the suggestions and do the work. cuz drinking and drugs weren't my problem, they were my solution. my problem was me and my so badly injured heart. and so many of us have that, the badly injured part, in common. and this book got in to those roots and then at once helped me build my own deep character on which to climb out. i am so, so thankful.
here is a poem in celebration. in celebration of what its like to be of dos mundos, or two worlds. the outside, day to day life. and the inner, more powerful and capable of being so fully awakened life of the heart and spirit. of the calling, of the impulse, itself...
For Alva Benson, And For Those
Who Have Learned To Speak
And the ground spoke when she was born.
Her mother heard it. In Navajo she answered
as she squatted down against the earth
to give birth. It was now when it happened,
now giving birth to itself again and again
between the legs of women.
Or maybe it was the Indian Hospital
in Gallup. The ground still spoke beneath
mortar and concrete. She strained against the
metal stirrups, and they tied her hands down
because she still spoke with them, when they
muffled her screams. But her body went on
talking and the child was born into their
hands, and the child learned to speak
both voices.
She grew up talking in Navajo, in English
and watched the earth around her shift and change
with the people in the towns and in the cities
learning not to hear the ground as it spun around
beneath them. She learned to speak for the ground,
the voice coming through her like roots that
have long hungered for water. He own daughter
was born, like she had been, in either place
or all places, so she could leave, leap
into the sound she had always heard,
a voice like water, like the gods weavng
against sundown in a scarlet light.
The child now hears names in her sleep.
They change into other names, and into others.
In is the ground murmuring, and Mt. St. Helens
errupts as the harmonic motion of a child turning
inside her mother's belly waiting to be born
to begin another time.
And we go on, keep giving birth and watch
ourselves die, over and over.
And the ground spinning beneath us
goes on talking.
~Joy Harjo
May 18, 2009
I lay me down
I used to call them babyfaces. Not so they'd hear me, but in my head lived a slew of them: I could let their names drop out of my mouth easily and endlessly as falling rain. And with the girls I sometimes would. They all, punk rock or thugged out or beach hood, had one thing in common: a bright, boyish face and that light in their eyes.
I wanted to, want to, save every one of them. These boys, these sweet angelheaded boys I want to save and will by any means necessary. I will save them by taking them to my bed. I will save them by taking them to my mom's table, or late late in the night in through the back siding glass door.
I will save them loud and quiet, I will save them when they show up sweet and I will save them when they dont show up at all and forget to call. I will save them a million nights, and a million different mornings. I will save them best when they come with the weeds and so drunk that they're part crying but cant even tell.
When did this happen? When did I trade my purple boots and flannel shouts for dubsacs and dime bags, blunts and nickel hits a coke? When did I rush to trade me in to save nightmares posed as a dream?
Today there were three of them. I forgot, I'd long forgot, that they used to be my means. Why tonight, why tonight to come back to me? I had to doublelook at the birthdates, they looked SO young, the sparkling freshface, sweet skin and shiny eyes. One continues to put Miss before my name even though I tell them all, call me Kelly. How could two of them already a been locked up? Already done time? Sweet little babyfaces not one a day over 19.
They want to get their GED's. Two will by July, the other, if he sticks around and doesn't go back to jail, could by the end of the year. Why tonight?
Because one of them I know he doesn't get it, and I have to tell him, cuz if I dont no one else will. And then it's back, it's all back because the I inside that I kept tucked away deep has been blending in lately with the Me that I used to be, and together this dynasty of I's and Me's are surfacing and merging and growing out again not from how I used to be but comfortably as one now within the whole of Who I Am.
So I tell him. Look, maybe no one's ever told you this before but these scores you got tonight, it takes someone special to come in off the streets and do this well, I want you to know how much potential you've got, I want you to seriously think about what you've always secretly thought of doing in your life. I want you to think about it and meet with me again on Wednesday so we can talk more.
Then, to get his attention, I lean back and say you know why I think most young people drop out of high school?
And he stops looking at his shoes and looks up with a twinkle in his eye, why? Cuz their too smart for high school and they're bored. And also they think that it's a waste of time cuz their extracurricular life, you know the one out on the street, is way more real. And they want the real life. They're insulted by how fake school and that whole scene seems.
He smiles wide. Yeah, yeah.
I stop. Sometimes I go on and tell the story about me and my dean the one where three weeks before my high school graduation I chased him around the desk in his office threatening him but luckily Dean Perry liked me, which is exactly what he told me later, and had been telling me for years, and also why he decided to cut me a break. I had just been suspended for skipping a week before. He liked me because in the 9th grade I was making my own zine, or independant magazine, fashioned after the riot grrrl zines that were steady influencing me, my music choices and lifestyle opinions at that time and I was eagerly selling it at school. All the Queens Men was my zine and in addition to it I had several photocopies of Fantastic Fanzine and whatever latest copies of Riot Grrrl I had in my possession. As was the punk rock grass roots way I was giving these zines away to whoever showed mild interest in what they had to say. Some time after lunch one day I got called down to the Dean's Office and I was all quivery inside, flushed and redfaced and ready to launch a defensive attack, and sort of out of control with the frenzy of adrenaline same reaction like I get even to this day. But more, inside what I remember is a staunch and quiet strong feeling of injustice. A simple how can he stop me from distributing these, speech and expression about real life is my right.
The very same real life that can so insidiously make you lose your power. The real life that can without warning or seeming reason slowly shut you up.
Dean Perry condemned me for peddling smut: these were the first days of female musicians using their thrash heavy music to take political stands. Rape, incest, prostitution and freedom of sexuality was all over the pages of both Fantastic Fanzine and Riot Grrrl; by comparison my All the Queen's Men was tellingly more tame. But I stood up for it, I defended it, I stood calm as I could while unfalteringly standing my ground. In the end I was reprimanded for selling goods during school hours. And regardless the hell I would raise and raise from that point on in my good Catholic school, Dean Perry made it clear that he respected me from that day of our very first encounter for my little showing of my own self respect.
That, and he knew I was way too smart for my own good.
When did all that change? All that pride and stalwart conviction in what's right? All that self-respect and belief in me. The grl power and Revolution Grrrl Style Now when did it turn to the men, the men the men the babyboys all wrapped up in tangled meaning in my cusps.
Babyfaces. Babyfaced. With eyes of a fool.
Why tonight? Because why not? Because two years ago this week Kevin finally went to the drugs. My prince, sweet fucking Kevin babyface beachboy love with the sharp sharp jaw. Like my old buddy Konan said when he told me all about it, it was kinda good though, you know? At least his parents didn't have to wait anymore to get the call.
Too fucking smart for our own good.
Because here I am and I didn't even realize it? Still laying my body down. Convinced I can save them all...
Ocean City 1995March 23, 2009
I did it my way
So, a brief little bit about serendipity, or synchronicity--just for fun. This is a term started by Jung, but studied well and introduced to common cosmology in a hands-on, follow your bliss way by Joe Campbell.
I'll start a few weeks ago, when I was home ill. I'd been feeling in a creative rut, and ethically confused. One seemed to generate the other, though I can't tell you which came first. What I do know is par for me, when my perception, or inner-awareness is changing and expanding, it always comes first in the form of discontent and break-down of the old. This is a dismantling that I am accustomed to in the winter. It's how I cycle. I think many of us creative, sensitive souls are like this. I also think we need to ban together. We are the myth-makers, out here on the periphery edge of things, in contact with the nebulous stuff of our souls. As all reality starts in this realm, consciousness of this task, responsibility to the "Underground" journey if you would, is necessary. So, winter is more than hibernation, it's coming in to creative union with the darkest, furthest out-there obscure parts of us.
I love right around February--whatever your myth--when first seed starts to spark in the subconscious. The first inner quakings, the first inside longarmstreches of bliss. For me this year there was a great inner conflict going on: I manage enrollment for GED students and students of English as a Second Language for two counties around where I live. I interview, assess, resource manage, advocate for and place all of these individuals. Roughly, that's well over 300 students a year. The toll of the economy, intensified by the clear line between those who come from middle to upper class backgrounds verses someone from working class or poor roots and the opportunities, and/or lac thereof, AND MORE, the narrow-view of bubbled reality that most mid to upper class folks live in was beginning to sicken me. Partly because my own awareness of myself as a well-meaning dogooder, but all the same an ignorant dogooder, was increasingly clear. But I've been a social radicalist for a long time now, ever since I was 14 in my purple riot-grrrl boots, to be sure. So yet again I was sick, outraged. And extremist in my initial solution-thinking, as often I am: I will quit my job because it is inside the system and the system is broke so it aint, ultimately, worth a hot damn and I will commit myself full-fledged to wild woman life, living native and self-sustained off the earth and practicing and learning and learning and practicing healing wisdom and sharing this naturally with whomever I am meant...
And also, amid all this: WHERE?! WHERE is my tribe? Where are the people of my generation, my peers, with the like-minds? Not just the hippie veggie growers or the long hair or tattooed musicmakers, but the activists? And not the DC urban game-players either, I mean the real street-pavers, the ones out there, too, in the funk? And well, don't you know, I was blog-rolling, and decided to look for Earth Path/Wild Women blogs. And there they were. To paraphrase my friend Kelly J: There is no separating out my spirituality from my activism. (Starhawk often has great and similar thoughts on this, too.)
So that's what was happening during my first seeding. Lots of revel around Power. The filling your self up from within kind, extended into a deep craving to extol this right for all people, for all humans: the right to self-empower. And the various -isms of humanity that keep you, or me, or whole groups of us at once, from doing or being able to do so. As result of my sickness, (and looking at the micro of my macro indications--that is, recognizing in my own life where I was giving my own power away) I decided to start treating myself with love and gentle, nurturing care each and every day. So began the synchronicity...
It started with recognizing that message in my illness, and then finding correlating information on a favorite website. Just a day or so later, one of my inner-rants about humanity's
-isms partially made it in on to one of my blog rambles. Later, that very same night, I got an email from a co-worker, Carolyn. She asked me to check out her daughter's online newsletter. I did so, but was far more intrigued by her daughter's webpage. And her youtube clip, (which seriously you must watch, I have a hellofa time embedding shit on here, my bad) which virtually gave words to what I was unable to articulate on my blog that day.
A few mornings later I was lying in bed journaling. I was, as now, in the middle of this perpetual move off of Anngar Farm and so trying to take it easy. After some time, I quieted. Then asked my wilddeepjoyme what do you need sweetness? And the answer from within came clear and resonating, Gardening. I smiled and whispered an intention to be given what I needed to make this bliss real. Moments later I was standing in the kitchen in Ocean Pines with the strongest feeling to blogroll. The first, first blog I clicked on led me to a link, which led me here, which led me here!! That very night I posted about the importance in my own life of using the inner, or higher power. When I turned my phone on after that post, I had a message from this women I've never met about reading poetry at a reading last Friday. I was hesitant, and Friday during the day was a bad, bad day for me. But I went that night and did it anyway. And more doors opened in the form of new connections. But most of all, the poems, once collected, clearly had a theme. And in conversation with Teena, my roomie, late that night we expounded on the glory of said theme: women uninterested in the priority of partnering for the long-term. Like romantically. After that conversation I wound up receiving a text from, then chatting on myspace with a friend entirely coincidentally, about the same exact thing.
Wow oh wow very cool. So. All I've ever wanted out of my life is to look back and say I did my soul's way, authentic. In-bliss. I am loving the serendipitous nods lately, affirming such connections.
I'll start a few weeks ago, when I was home ill. I'd been feeling in a creative rut, and ethically confused. One seemed to generate the other, though I can't tell you which came first. What I do know is par for me, when my perception, or inner-awareness is changing and expanding, it always comes first in the form of discontent and break-down of the old. This is a dismantling that I am accustomed to in the winter. It's how I cycle. I think many of us creative, sensitive souls are like this. I also think we need to ban together. We are the myth-makers, out here on the periphery edge of things, in contact with the nebulous stuff of our souls. As all reality starts in this realm, consciousness of this task, responsibility to the "Underground" journey if you would, is necessary. So, winter is more than hibernation, it's coming in to creative union with the darkest, furthest out-there obscure parts of us.
I love right around February--whatever your myth--when first seed starts to spark in the subconscious. The first inner quakings, the first inside longarmstreches of bliss. For me this year there was a great inner conflict going on: I manage enrollment for GED students and students of English as a Second Language for two counties around where I live. I interview, assess, resource manage, advocate for and place all of these individuals. Roughly, that's well over 300 students a year. The toll of the economy, intensified by the clear line between those who come from middle to upper class backgrounds verses someone from working class or poor roots and the opportunities, and/or lac thereof, AND MORE, the narrow-view of bubbled reality that most mid to upper class folks live in was beginning to sicken me. Partly because my own awareness of myself as a well-meaning dogooder, but all the same an ignorant dogooder, was increasingly clear. But I've been a social radicalist for a long time now, ever since I was 14 in my purple riot-grrrl boots, to be sure. So yet again I was sick, outraged. And extremist in my initial solution-thinking, as often I am: I will quit my job because it is inside the system and the system is broke so it aint, ultimately, worth a hot damn and I will commit myself full-fledged to wild woman life, living native and self-sustained off the earth and practicing and learning and learning and practicing healing wisdom and sharing this naturally with whomever I am meant...
And also, amid all this: WHERE?! WHERE is my tribe? Where are the people of my generation, my peers, with the like-minds? Not just the hippie veggie growers or the long hair or tattooed musicmakers, but the activists? And not the DC urban game-players either, I mean the real street-pavers, the ones out there, too, in the funk? And well, don't you know, I was blog-rolling, and decided to look for Earth Path/Wild Women blogs. And there they were. To paraphrase my friend Kelly J: There is no separating out my spirituality from my activism. (Starhawk often has great and similar thoughts on this, too.)
So that's what was happening during my first seeding. Lots of revel around Power. The filling your self up from within kind, extended into a deep craving to extol this right for all people, for all humans: the right to self-empower. And the various -isms of humanity that keep you, or me, or whole groups of us at once, from doing or being able to do so. As result of my sickness, (and looking at the micro of my macro indications--that is, recognizing in my own life where I was giving my own power away) I decided to start treating myself with love and gentle, nurturing care each and every day. So began the synchronicity...
It started with recognizing that message in my illness, and then finding correlating information on a favorite website. Just a day or so later, one of my inner-rants about humanity's
-isms partially made it in on to one of my blog rambles. Later, that very same night, I got an email from a co-worker, Carolyn. She asked me to check out her daughter's online newsletter. I did so, but was far more intrigued by her daughter's webpage. And her youtube clip, (which seriously you must watch, I have a hellofa time embedding shit on here, my bad) which virtually gave words to what I was unable to articulate on my blog that day.
A few mornings later I was lying in bed journaling. I was, as now, in the middle of this perpetual move off of Anngar Farm and so trying to take it easy. After some time, I quieted. Then asked my wilddeepjoyme what do you need sweetness? And the answer from within came clear and resonating, Gardening. I smiled and whispered an intention to be given what I needed to make this bliss real. Moments later I was standing in the kitchen in Ocean Pines with the strongest feeling to blogroll. The first, first blog I clicked on led me to a link, which led me here, which led me here!! That very night I posted about the importance in my own life of using the inner, or higher power. When I turned my phone on after that post, I had a message from this women I've never met about reading poetry at a reading last Friday. I was hesitant, and Friday during the day was a bad, bad day for me. But I went that night and did it anyway. And more doors opened in the form of new connections. But most of all, the poems, once collected, clearly had a theme. And in conversation with Teena, my roomie, late that night we expounded on the glory of said theme: women uninterested in the priority of partnering for the long-term. Like romantically. After that conversation I wound up receiving a text from, then chatting on myspace with a friend entirely coincidentally, about the same exact thing.
Wow oh wow very cool. So. All I've ever wanted out of my life is to look back and say I did my soul's way, authentic. In-bliss. I am loving the serendipitous nods lately, affirming such connections.
August 14, 2008
Sarah Ban B & Sacred Spots
I have this quiet place where I go. It's in my room. (Yes, Brandon and I, in addition to our bedroom, have our own rooms.) (This is probably the only reason that we've lasted as long as we have.) This idea of a quiet spot, which I actually refer to as my sacred spot, is not original. It came to me from the book Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach. I was 21 when I got that daily meditation book for my birthday in March of 98. And by the Fall, when I was moving my stuff in to the slant-walled wooden-floored attic-apartment on Washington Avenue in Chestertown, to start my first semester at a real four year school, I was sold on the ideas that Sarah Ban shares about personal sacred space. But my translation, back then, of seeking bliss within included bong hits to catalyze that written about state of quiet and rapture. In my first Chestertown apartment I sat on a big stuffed maroon pillow from Wal-mart in the center of my bedroom with my little pink "daybook of comfort and joy", a gratitude journal, and my Cabbage Patch lunchbox with the pink plastic bong and insence in it rested by my side. I sat cross-legged, lotus style like I'd seen all the hip wise ones do, and tried to tap open those doors of consciousness I'd heard so much about.By January, 1999, my mom re-handed me a copy of the same book she'd gotten for Christmas. I was so out of my mind on script tranquilizers that I most strictly associated myself with a big amoebic blob. I felt sludgy and goopy and like I just sort of melted across the floor towards whatever I direction I was heading in rather than actually using feet to walk. And the floor was heavy: it weighted me down. My face felt large and pulled at the same time. The rest of my body felt spinny and without actual confines. And worst of all, I didn't really know it. My consciousness was so numbed I couldn't tabulate any vision of my real reality. Meds are like that, or can be, anyhow.
I was two or so weeks out of the mental hospital and heavily overmedicated. I was diagnosed with a mental illness, a severe one, and put on gnarly doses of anti-psychotics, anti-seizures and anti-depressants to tackle it, to tackle "me". I swarmed around and around inside of me, sludging along on the outside. I dont remember much. But I do remember sitting down in the living room trying to read that book again. And it did not click. Those meds left my brain neurons, and all that life juice, just about two steps behind.
I dropped out of my second semester at Washington College to stop there at the Ward. One institution to another, how I've always looked at it. Is it dramatic to say the two aren't too terribly far apart? I'll never claim non-drama. So I didn't really have a room at my mom's then, when I came out of the hospital to recover. My room was vacant, in my little spot on Wash Ave with the pillow and scuffed hardwood floors. Which is why when I again went looking for a sacred spot, a place all of my very own, where I could celebrate me and relax and give permission to and better know me, I found myself crouched down on the floor next to the old pleather covered toy box that still sat in the corner in my brother's old room. And I took one deep breath and bowed my head there. And I whispered something--to something? I dont know what on either accounts but I am almost sure that it had to be something like help me. And then I heard mom's footsteps on the stairs, and I quick got up and zipped, or anyhow sludged away.
It was years before I was off the meds. And by then I had learned, from my own self and much due to regular daily pauses of reflection and time within, which just means true honest time with me, that I was not mentally ill but quite chemically sensitive--or in other words the medical definition of a drug addict. And who cares the nature of the drug--street or pharm--they all affect me different.
That book changed, or maybe saved, my life. To this day when I am funked I guarantee you it's because too much time has passed since I got to sit down a while with me. I had a great sit-down this morning. And a decent enough one with me yesterday, too. It had been a while. Again. Try it sometime.
Me, in my Sacred Space or "Meditation Spot" on Wash Ave, Spring 2002, sans bonghits, booze & most of all my "ideas"
July 29, 2008
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.
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.
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