on the road: asheville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Fine Weekend

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

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

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

Legends

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

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

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

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

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

Fall, oh splendid Fall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parties, & Cycles & Life on the Farm

Kirsten Russel, Laura Scimeca


Equinox Bonfire and Fullmoon Jamfest, Seed-tending Time, Anngar Farm.
All photos courtesy of & brilliantly done by Geoff Demeritt




So, guess who finally, finally got a digital camera? Just in time for our next Farm Party! Tho I would never go back on hiring Geoff to photograph our last big Jam in March...

I gotta say, it's really been slow-going for me, metrosuburbanite girl now living this crazy outsized life here on the farm--the sunflowers like trees bent down now to kiss the ground from where they come, the bob-white singing in the bows of the holly each morning, the shadows on the porch that make the greens so green and the light so white and gold. The wind like an ocean through the sycamore leaves. The corn, so tall and ripe, taller than the street from the angle that I am used to peering at the roads so that now I can't see who is driving through this little patch of country that we call ours. How funny that this computer I write on is only 9 months old, this online deal now only 8a way of life for me for 8 months? It feels like forever--and change, balance, transition, is so subtle in its various manifestations that we curse ourselves with missing how easy it goes by...complaining all the while how we're missing it.

Tommorow is Bran and I's last big summer party--summer, that is, if you're going by the school rotation of the year. But it is the perfect time to celebrate, with the earth waning as she does and already, here on the shore, so clearly expressive of her tides. I saw my first V of geese yesterday, already. On my back flush with the ocean and parallel completely to the sky, I rose up out of my saltwater bob like a magnet had drawn me only to see a formation of geese flying across the top of the westend of the sky. And I thought, what? They only fly like that at travel time, at season's change....then last night on my ride home from the ocean, just as I turned on to the back farmroads near where I live and stake my current claim, there they flew again, in the orange and near green pre-thunderstorm night. And the weather this moringing--it speaks of fall. Go outside and let your mind float--see to it that you, too, know this to be true...

So this party tommorow was meant to have some fine musicians taking the stage, but every band we scheduled backed out than recommitted than backed out once again. Hard to say who will come. At this point, the only official band we have on is Firey Steve and His Moosehead Friends, these way hip young dudes right out of C-town. I am amped and fully stoked to see these kids come on. Otherwise, there are slated to be a lot of single performers--friends whose bands can't come or aren't all able to play together etcetra. And so it should be, Harvest time is about the individual's gifts and and at once about collectivity--which is why the energy of Harvest parties always always bring out the best jams....Impromptu sessions to light up the night...

Here are a few of our far out friends, in their finest elements, making music and soul shaking back at the turn of light..Equinox full moon first day of Spring...



Chris and Josh of the Turnpikes,
Brandon Hoy
Josh Britton of The Sweetheart Parade
Laura Walsh of Forgetful Francis

Marc Dykeman of Plans Plans (forground), Mat Warrington of The Turnpikes



Sam Guthridge, Chester River Runoff

Timmy and Greg Parent, formerly of Astralyte



Leah and Brooke, of Blue Heron Farm and The Shuman Compound