Hmmmmm.
What to say?
What to say?
(I am doing a lot of letter writing. A lot, it is taking the place of the uber-personal nature of telling on my blog.)
What to say!?
(I am doing a lot of book writing. A lot, it is the most lively I ever feel.)
Blog! I miss you. You are always here for me and I just wanted you to know that. I wanted you to know that I love you! and no matter what you're the center of my heart and yes I wrote that the correct way--you are the center of my heart not in the center, but the center itself because I can always count on you no matter what you never ever go away, even when I feel lost I tell you just that I feel lost and guess what? There you are, words, sense of lostness, sense of heart displaced and found now! on the page. Blog I love you, thank you. What did they do? diPrima, her gals, Rich, Lourde, Shange. Shange! WHAT DID THEY DO? diPrima she said it all just mounted up. Swallowed them, all the work, all their creations, all of it, unseen. Without a button to hit labeled Publish Post. Without a stat counter, 27 hits, 42 hits, 16 page views 53 total hits today. Without anyone else to affirm: yes I hear.
O madness. O necessary need for me to like me enough to think I have something worthy to say.
The ocean is singing, hear it? I walked down on the beach and the surfers on 50th and 48th were angels with slick black neoprene skin. The sun was so shiny and the sand so right. I. Wanted. To. Swim. The ocean is blessing, hear it? The winter is coming in crumbly white cappy waves but it doesn't make any of it any less in love in fact it says I am here! I am here I am always, always here and, I am music. This is how I sing.
The ocean is blowing its ocean smelling wind in from the sea. It's the sea when it takes you places and the ocean when right out your door. What about La Mar? You say, well that's when she talks to the moon. 17th and Grand. No cell here. Good it's better that way. Girl with the cat-slit eyes in the coffee shop where I always go: dont close that door, I like the ocean blowing singing wind! The blessing's! On me. The blessing's on you, on we on us all. How could I miss this? How could I miss this all before?
I have been clean 10 years today.
I am holy, human, alive. Well. The sparkling sea. The rest of my life. The words. Vintage shoes in rose and brown snake skin looking leather. POETRY, poems told by the wind-singing blessing-giving ocean the far out way out sea. Blog you are my battery. White screen. Heart. Beating center. Of my life.
Thank you!
Showing posts with label The Impulse Itself. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Impulse Itself. Show all posts
November 17, 2010
October 24, 2010
"She's a mystic in the sense that she's still mystified by things..."
Luke Doucet is singing those words that terrorize my heart and that also make me smile meekly with a chest full of shine, like this dream I once had that I remember blogging about where the whole symbolism of the thing was me beating the shit out of myself, really beating my self up--I had all these missing teeth and a big cartoon sized swollen purple and blue eye but was dumbly smiling, and felt whole and shiny and free. This song, and that Sea Wolf one and the one by Sandro Perri all make me feel the same. Haha and Cardinal Song. They all played this morning, Larry was on my mind off and on all week and his new stencils also broke my heart in that free glistening way, and in all this there is the cohesive feeling like the end of October ought to bring. And yes it always does.
Things are changing, things that change must also virtuously stay the same. What is all this, and where are our choices? Do we choose or just pretend to by acquiescing or enjoying or bitching along the way? It all is choice. I took the cushiony fold-out chair on to the front porch, it's like the one grandma and pap had on their motorhome before gram's sisters died and they used to go to Florida all the time, and I sat in the sun there. No one ever sits there because that's where all the plants are in the summer, they are in the house now though because the frost at night has already begun to come. I sat in the sun, I did as told--soak in the sun, listen to the trees. When or if there is the sense of being numb this works, go outdoors find your back-breath, your second-half, and let this part just listen and relax. Store sunshine, for light. Happens all the time...
That is our choice, to go out through the doors...
So, do I need school for all of this or what? It is so funny to me how easy I am now with all these songs that I used to have to stay away from because of him. Every station turned his way instead and ok, god it's all so fucking good! At least there's no more dislike button all the time now at least I say the holy yes yes yes this is all true and that's not all the time. Nothing extreme in one direction or the other. Just is. So it should be, this is the time of the year of Hecate--wisdom of the underworld, a whole entire harvest year now past, all the blessings, all the gain, all the loss. And I am ok! Not looking for prophecy though no thank you. I am good, whole it feels nice to see myself in this way. It feels nice to be myself in this way. Ha, and writing like mad. In less than three weeks 12, 000 words. The story now telling itslef. It took me 14 fucking months of pressing the stones, carrying the rocks up the god damn hill with nothing to base it on but that decision made years ago that no matter what else this is what you'll do...I took yesterday and Friday off from the words, had waitressing to do, and tonight too, all it further proved that I am only really good when I have primary focus on just the one or two things. I didn't get to Chico's art show and I felt really bad. Just him having it has me thinking about Brook's and I and all our scene-dreams. I will be impresario scene-chic no matter who's in my life that I also know for sure. What next, what next what next is I will finish my book, that is all I truly know. Jotto and I sat out back at work yesterday waiting for tables to come in. What do you want? I asked my self. I was laying on the flat old wooden deck. White sun and the salt water smell. In order to dissect the fears from the truth at this crossroads. Acknowledging all, making room for all parts of the whole. Institution, I have such gnarly bad aversion to it. Had to sit in it, sit through it, I did this morning for over an hour also while in the sun. Money and taking out loans to become later one who has money seems so fucking counter intuitive. I am glad I will not be sitting with this decision for too long.
The moon came over the sea last night like magic. Soooo big and a yellow so faded and not bright it was like someone erased half of her. We sat far out on the peir and I listened to the ocean crash and just let the sound swallow me. I breathed the terror-glee of it and smelled the smell. Ahhh god I felt so clean.
Now if Danny Schmidt would just show up with my favorite song lyric ever this would be the conclusive end. To what? Just this one single prayer, which really is one small strand hard to say where it ends or where all the others begin...
Things are changing, things that change must also virtuously stay the same. What is all this, and where are our choices? Do we choose or just pretend to by acquiescing or enjoying or bitching along the way? It all is choice. I took the cushiony fold-out chair on to the front porch, it's like the one grandma and pap had on their motorhome before gram's sisters died and they used to go to Florida all the time, and I sat in the sun there. No one ever sits there because that's where all the plants are in the summer, they are in the house now though because the frost at night has already begun to come. I sat in the sun, I did as told--soak in the sun, listen to the trees. When or if there is the sense of being numb this works, go outdoors find your back-breath, your second-half, and let this part just listen and relax. Store sunshine, for light. Happens all the time...
That is our choice, to go out through the doors...
So, do I need school for all of this or what? It is so funny to me how easy I am now with all these songs that I used to have to stay away from because of him. Every station turned his way instead and ok, god it's all so fucking good! At least there's no more dislike button all the time now at least I say the holy yes yes yes this is all true and that's not all the time. Nothing extreme in one direction or the other. Just is. So it should be, this is the time of the year of Hecate--wisdom of the underworld, a whole entire harvest year now past, all the blessings, all the gain, all the loss. And I am ok! Not looking for prophecy though no thank you. I am good, whole it feels nice to see myself in this way. It feels nice to be myself in this way. Ha, and writing like mad. In less than three weeks 12, 000 words. The story now telling itslef. It took me 14 fucking months of pressing the stones, carrying the rocks up the god damn hill with nothing to base it on but that decision made years ago that no matter what else this is what you'll do...I took yesterday and Friday off from the words, had waitressing to do, and tonight too, all it further proved that I am only really good when I have primary focus on just the one or two things. I didn't get to Chico's art show and I felt really bad. Just him having it has me thinking about Brook's and I and all our scene-dreams. I will be impresario scene-chic no matter who's in my life that I also know for sure. What next, what next what next is I will finish my book, that is all I truly know. Jotto and I sat out back at work yesterday waiting for tables to come in. What do you want? I asked my self. I was laying on the flat old wooden deck. White sun and the salt water smell. In order to dissect the fears from the truth at this crossroads. Acknowledging all, making room for all parts of the whole. Institution, I have such gnarly bad aversion to it. Had to sit in it, sit through it, I did this morning for over an hour also while in the sun. Money and taking out loans to become later one who has money seems so fucking counter intuitive. I am glad I will not be sitting with this decision for too long.
The moon came over the sea last night like magic. Soooo big and a yellow so faded and not bright it was like someone erased half of her. We sat far out on the peir and I listened to the ocean crash and just let the sound swallow me. I breathed the terror-glee of it and smelled the smell. Ahhh god I felt so clean.
Now if Danny Schmidt would just show up with my favorite song lyric ever this would be the conclusive end. To what? Just this one single prayer, which really is one small strand hard to say where it ends or where all the others begin...
October 21, 2010
My status, this morning...
Kelly McMullen 1,299 yesterday. 1,727 Tuesday. 880 Monday. Get it started November.
11 hours ago Friends Only · ·And that doesn't come close to the 4,136 words I logged today. 7 hours of undisturbed writing? O yes, no plans on stopping now...
September 28, 2010
The Fall...again
As I sit in turmoil over my novel, scratching out the words like my fingernail's etching on a rock, quieting my madness in hopes of grace each morning in the sacred space over the what nexts...
As I labor away whole entire days in the back room of Ocean Pines cataloguing poetry and editing and envisioning this chapbook of mine...
Ha ha ha the Duende. Ah god the sacred devil, o here we go again anyway, in this epic eternal artistic creation and battle of self vs self...as always the descent brings, in the fall...
Last year around this time me and this guy were all jazzed up about the Duende.
Now Icarus, who's been in and out of my head as of late, shows up today on Mike's blog and the conversation starts again... It is this, the Duende, the descent-ion of Presence that so enraptures, no? That avowes us of the devotion towards the act of soaring. That in-moment bliss thing. But to get there yes we first must meet every flaming sword at the gate, every masked form of burden and challenge our egos devise and create as our selves in demon form. Fear is the Devil, as Erika has said...if only it were that simple? Which fixture do we operate from, is the golden medicine injested today, in front of screen, that which will make me yeild to the riches or poison me in my steps? Right now writing five fucking pages feels like pushing boulders through a peehole...so you tell me. What if the demon of self is pride? What if it's pride that says the answer is to not be fearful--conviction of knowing the answer... Then of course I fall before the sun. What if the demon is our angel, too? As me: self-awareness=Self-obsession.
It's all the same. I don't know the answer, I know only that I am born of this, to this, obsession. I want the grace that comes with yielding as much as it delivers the bliss of catching an upwell of wind: floating on the air because hard work suddenly made me hit that right curve with such divine precision that it all, every bloody cut step and bruise was worth it. But maybe not? Last winter was so intense, the introspection, that my dear friend Beth actually likened me to Campbell Scott's cracked-up character on Singles after they trash his supertrain plan and he loses Kyra Sedgwick and locks himself in his place for like three weeks and doesn't shower and only eats pizza off cold greasy flat cardboard boxends. Maybe it was all that snow? The lack of light? I dont know. My wings got singed. For suuuure.
Ahh, to soulspeak and the writing nuts. Ah to the crazy mad tribe. Ahh, to the circles, to a new ethics of fearlessness...? As it goes...and here we go...
Go Here
As I labor away whole entire days in the back room of Ocean Pines cataloguing poetry and editing and envisioning this chapbook of mine...
Ha ha ha the Duende. Ah god the sacred devil, o here we go again anyway, in this epic eternal artistic creation and battle of self vs self...as always the descent brings, in the fall...
Last year around this time me and this guy were all jazzed up about the Duende.
Now Icarus, who's been in and out of my head as of late, shows up today on Mike's blog and the conversation starts again... It is this, the Duende, the descent-ion of Presence that so enraptures, no? That avowes us of the devotion towards the act of soaring. That in-moment bliss thing. But to get there yes we first must meet every flaming sword at the gate, every masked form of burden and challenge our egos devise and create as our selves in demon form. Fear is the Devil, as Erika has said...if only it were that simple? Which fixture do we operate from, is the golden medicine injested today, in front of screen, that which will make me yeild to the riches or poison me in my steps? Right now writing five fucking pages feels like pushing boulders through a peehole...so you tell me. What if the demon of self is pride? What if it's pride that says the answer is to not be fearful--conviction of knowing the answer... Then of course I fall before the sun. What if the demon is our angel, too? As me: self-awareness=Self-obsession.
It's all the same. I don't know the answer, I know only that I am born of this, to this, obsession. I want the grace that comes with yielding as much as it delivers the bliss of catching an upwell of wind: floating on the air because hard work suddenly made me hit that right curve with such divine precision that it all, every bloody cut step and bruise was worth it. But maybe not? Last winter was so intense, the introspection, that my dear friend Beth actually likened me to Campbell Scott's cracked-up character on Singles after they trash his supertrain plan and he loses Kyra Sedgwick and locks himself in his place for like three weeks and doesn't shower and only eats pizza off cold greasy flat cardboard boxends. Maybe it was all that snow? The lack of light? I dont know. My wings got singed. For suuuure.
Ahh, to soulspeak and the writing nuts. Ah to the crazy mad tribe. Ahh, to the circles, to a new ethics of fearlessness...? As it goes...and here we go...
Go Here
September 27, 2010
What's Rad: Courier Knew
She was mad on my mind yesterday at work: I was lusting over Vogue and my imagination was getting so epically inspired... She lives in me because of poetry, because of poet-heart, because of the heart we therefor live within...
She keeps her own blog, it is snapshot style and concise, which is how she is. Close-fitting and circled-in which is what you get if you dictionary.com the word succinct for other words that mean the same. She frames things the right way with a quick glance, she is accurate each step that she goes and then she puts things together, later, frame by frame. Not like me who is one long spondown wind of abstraction trying to get to the final "right".
This is her blog, READ IT! or experience her snapshots rather, at Courier Knew.
Today is her birthday it turns out, of course it is...
We met in 2007 at Ben's, I guess. There are vague memories of going to his place for spaghetti one night after teaching ESL, me in my work clothes anyway. She was there, she was a blond no make-up ponytail girl which at the time was a tough road to tow around our allnaturalbeyourself (butonlyaslongasyourcool!) kind-of-friends. You know to not have a practiced paticularity about you or whatever. Sam and I danced tossy-style jitterbug together like we always did and also I looked at alot of Banjo magazines that night, if there is such a thing. I remember reading an article about the Clash.
Later, this probably would've been in the fall, we truly met the day I walked in to apply at the Blue Heron Cafe and go to work for Paul. Kirsten was vaccuming the floor.
I think of her every fall now, the way I think of diPrima and Libby, and what secrets are sitting in the trees. The way I think of trees.
That was the season I waited tables and wrote poems to Josh that were actually sign-markers to my self that I was trying to learn how to position, and hold. Poetry is like that, or can be, if you let it talk from your soul. Kir and I used to get over-caffeinated in the Blue Heron kitchen and talk and talk about art and poems and writing plays together and performing and mythic imagination and lying to your self and how this all happened and why did it happen and it did, anyhow, and it also helped the art and poetry to be internally conflicted and most of all, we talked about men. I was on the verge of myself in a new way that I had always wanted to be. In a way that scared me and instigated from me a flight-response that is classic Aries-Kelly of charging blindly ahead. Ramhearted as I am. She was getting her masters and on the verge of what next in career and all those weird creeks and spaces that that can cause. Her passion back then for fault lines and shifting ground. Most of all, also, there was nothing more in life that season than art and darkness and loving the art we were spiraling out of from that darkness within.
As said, I've always always had great love for her. This time last year I sent her an email at random after months of no contact to say hey why dont you come see Brandi Carlile play with me. We both needed Brandi, it turned out, I for coming to terms with moving on and she for the same: yes, always about the men. Brandi played at Rams Head Live and threw a pick in to the crowd and it bounced off Kir's broken heart and landed on the ground. All the lesbians battled for it but Kir just bent down put her hand in to the mass of feet and legs and retrieved the momento easily and handed it to me. A totem now, I keep it in my writing bag with all my USB's.
She is happy, in Canton now, with birds in her hair and our funny man hearts, wink wink Kir my dear friend. I check in on her energy when I quiet and pray or trance or meditate just like I do all my k-nnected friends. But she will always be above most the rest bc of the poetry in her, and memories of starting over in the fall. Starting over, how it comes from reflecting on the bounty of who and how and where and what you been as you root down to take hold and turn over fresh again.
She is friend, who makes me better at me. I am thinking of her today, today birthday today fall today collecting here collecting me collecting her today today today...Today, celebrating You! Gratitude gratefullness grace and space and place for this, poetry and hearts of the matter, Dear Friend...
September 1, 2010
Helllo, Lover...September September & ALL that I love...
Remember the Sex in the City when Carrie's walking down the street and in the window sees the pink Manolo's with the ruffles? When Miranda has Brady and Big leaves for Cali and they have that great dance scene in his empty apartment....but before all that, on the street in Manhattan, remember that fine epic moment of first sight, when it's just Carrie and the shoes...
Remember? Helllo, Lover...
I get that. This term came to me this morning, actually just now. First Sight. Here's what I mean--by first sight--and by the simple, breathy eloquence of Helllo, Lover when it comes to something seemingly unremarkable in the scheme of things, like a pair of shoes.
I believe that we all, inside the deep secret mystery of ourselves, have our secret visions. I believe we all have that feeling of, or picture of, who we are in our truest way, of how or who if ever the circumstances would just line up to accompany and support us, we are or would be at our most free. At our most happy, or content. I believe that most of us associate this idea of the inner contented self with things, with the house, or the right car, or outfit, or job or profession or relationship or city to live in or whatever it may be. And I also believe that it's this mistake, associating the secret inner dream with things or stuff that leads to endless discontentment.
But most of all, I believe in the importance of that inner dream, in that vision of happy. And I believe that on the road map of who we are it is those things, that stuff--ruffly, pink Manolo's on thin black stiletto heels that make your breath go woozy and your chest fall a little shallow on First Sight--that best help us approach who we are in that inside place. That best arise the inner reverent place of YES, this is ME. It's not, in other words, the shoes that count. It's the inner response of Aha, yes, amen! that does. It's the little guideposts to being true to ones self, to uncovering and being I am...
So that was me, this morning, first day of September. I finally, finally! Have two days off in a row, which hasn't happened since I got home from cousin Jackie's wedding in Maine on August 10th. I woke up. I am off today and tomorrow, my first submission of my novel is due to Erika today. The light was coming through my window, split by the chokes of the blinds, moving on my bed to the luxury of the leaf movement in the trees. It is that dark yellow light of fall, which has been here since mid-August and grows in momentum each day. And I woke up, and my eyes opened, and my spirit was singing with a literal inner smile I could feel~~Helllo Lover!! Ahhh, yes...Hello, Fall!
It's hooot out today, but that doesn't matter at all. Because September, same like Poetry with a capitol P, is something I associate with, something that directs me towards the inner vision of me. It's nothing I can own, just a sense of life, of vitality and emergence that counts. 2001. September. Second week of my senior year in college. I'd been clean for 10 months and was hanging in Ocean City with some friends. It was a Sunday, football was on and the air coming in the screen of the oceanside condo I was chilling in felt flirty like it was twirling the ends of my hair and whispering against my skin and also it smelled like the sea. And I was on the couch making out with someone for hours, and I left with a surfboard under my arm and I still remember the pavement on my bare feet and the soft way my longsleeve tee caught the twilight seabreeze. I picked up chinese food to take home and wrote for hours in my journal that night and showed up late for class the next morning, having stayed at the beach til the very last moment I could. It wasn't the beach, or the football, not the air or the late light, not making out with Joel or the surfboard or the luxury of affording take out Chinese. It's none of that still sitting with me now--it was the freedom of life that I loved, freedom of in moment living that is sweet as Fall Beach Air that makes me reminiscent, and most important: that holds me to the inside me of all that is still possible in the endless stream of I Am...
Mythic Imagination. Mythic Imagination, the only true thing (follow this link!!!! Click on Number 13!!!!!! LISTEN!) Mythic Imagination. The Only Truth. Constant Potential Source Capacity for Creation. It starts in stillness. Stillness is necessary to being awake. Being awake is how to recognize what stirs you. It has nothing to do with what you own outside yourself, and everything to do with what you say yes to within. It is why I devour my Vogue page by glorious page even though I doubt I'll ever own a single designer name. Mythic Imagination. The only truth we have, the only true tool that matters. First Sight. What stirs you? What says yes, makes you gasp or makes your breath fall short or your inner thermal rise? That's your first sight. First Sight is only so good as the innocence of staying yes to it than allowing to let it go as to say yes again! As Zen Masters teach with the Beginning Mind. Let it pass then Return Again, return again, return again. Let it arise and pass, anicha anicha changing changing. Let nothing dampen or grey this vision, this inner stir. Let it remain always Me, in my quest to be me~ that holy sacredness of Ahhhh, ohhh, Helllo Lover. That inner sacred harmony vision of the First True Sight of Me. Guidepost to all and Who I truly am, and can be...
Remember? Helllo, Lover...
I get that. This term came to me this morning, actually just now. First Sight. Here's what I mean--by first sight--and by the simple, breathy eloquence of Helllo, Lover when it comes to something seemingly unremarkable in the scheme of things, like a pair of shoes.
I believe that we all, inside the deep secret mystery of ourselves, have our secret visions. I believe we all have that feeling of, or picture of, who we are in our truest way, of how or who if ever the circumstances would just line up to accompany and support us, we are or would be at our most free. At our most happy, or content. I believe that most of us associate this idea of the inner contented self with things, with the house, or the right car, or outfit, or job or profession or relationship or city to live in or whatever it may be. And I also believe that it's this mistake, associating the secret inner dream with things or stuff that leads to endless discontentment.
But most of all, I believe in the importance of that inner dream, in that vision of happy. And I believe that on the road map of who we are it is those things, that stuff--ruffly, pink Manolo's on thin black stiletto heels that make your breath go woozy and your chest fall a little shallow on First Sight--that best help us approach who we are in that inside place. That best arise the inner reverent place of YES, this is ME. It's not, in other words, the shoes that count. It's the inner response of Aha, yes, amen! that does. It's the little guideposts to being true to ones self, to uncovering and being I am...
So that was me, this morning, first day of September. I finally, finally! Have two days off in a row, which hasn't happened since I got home from cousin Jackie's wedding in Maine on August 10th. I woke up. I am off today and tomorrow, my first submission of my novel is due to Erika today. The light was coming through my window, split by the chokes of the blinds, moving on my bed to the luxury of the leaf movement in the trees. It is that dark yellow light of fall, which has been here since mid-August and grows in momentum each day. And I woke up, and my eyes opened, and my spirit was singing with a literal inner smile I could feel~~Helllo Lover!! Ahhh, yes...Hello, Fall!
It's hooot out today, but that doesn't matter at all. Because September, same like Poetry with a capitol P, is something I associate with, something that directs me towards the inner vision of me. It's nothing I can own, just a sense of life, of vitality and emergence that counts. 2001. September. Second week of my senior year in college. I'd been clean for 10 months and was hanging in Ocean City with some friends. It was a Sunday, football was on and the air coming in the screen of the oceanside condo I was chilling in felt flirty like it was twirling the ends of my hair and whispering against my skin and also it smelled like the sea. And I was on the couch making out with someone for hours, and I left with a surfboard under my arm and I still remember the pavement on my bare feet and the soft way my longsleeve tee caught the twilight seabreeze. I picked up chinese food to take home and wrote for hours in my journal that night and showed up late for class the next morning, having stayed at the beach til the very last moment I could. It wasn't the beach, or the football, not the air or the late light, not making out with Joel or the surfboard or the luxury of affording take out Chinese. It's none of that still sitting with me now--it was the freedom of life that I loved, freedom of in moment living that is sweet as Fall Beach Air that makes me reminiscent, and most important: that holds me to the inside me of all that is still possible in the endless stream of I Am...
Mythic Imagination. Mythic Imagination, the only true thing (follow this link!!!! Click on Number 13!!!!!! LISTEN!) Mythic Imagination. The Only Truth. Constant Potential Source Capacity for Creation. It starts in stillness. Stillness is necessary to being awake. Being awake is how to recognize what stirs you. It has nothing to do with what you own outside yourself, and everything to do with what you say yes to within. It is why I devour my Vogue page by glorious page even though I doubt I'll ever own a single designer name. Mythic Imagination. The only truth we have, the only true tool that matters. First Sight. What stirs you? What says yes, makes you gasp or makes your breath fall short or your inner thermal rise? That's your first sight. First Sight is only so good as the innocence of staying yes to it than allowing to let it go as to say yes again! As Zen Masters teach with the Beginning Mind. Let it pass then Return Again, return again, return again. Let it arise and pass, anicha anicha changing changing. Let nothing dampen or grey this vision, this inner stir. Let it remain always Me, in my quest to be me~ that holy sacredness of Ahhhh, ohhh, Helllo Lover. That inner sacred harmony vision of the First True Sight of Me. Guidepost to all and Who I truly am, and can be...
Me, with the Advanced Copy of my writing partner Erika Robuck's next book!
Woooooooooohooooooooooooooo!!!
August 24, 2010
BBH confessions. A topic I dont share about very often...
So, maybe I'm not so good at relationships.
I dont mean all relationships. I'm pretty good at being a family member among family members. I have incredible girlfriends, the best you can imagine for real. And everywhere I go I make friends easily. I am social, I enjoy people, I enjoy getting to know them and hear about them and understand a little about their funny intricacies like why they like ketchup on popcorn or cant fall asleep if they watch horror movies before bed or about that miserable time that the neighbor hit a squirrel and how all these years later in the fall they buy seed just to see the squirrels gnarl away and get fat fat fat. I think people are so cool, you know? Every person has this universe of life inside them so ready to unfold. I've said it before: I fall in love a little with everyone that I know.
Which could in fact be the reason I have such a god damn time with the men.
Or boys. At my age, 33, it's a relative term.
I had someone tell me last night that he wanted to see if we could just kick it, just hang out and watch tv instead of making out all night. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? (Yea yea I'm 33 and I still make out. O goddess bless, may it continue!!)
And therein, the problem. I am too passionate about everyone, everything. I get too bored, too settled, too without the fire of newness to keep me alive inside...and baby, I'm ready to roll....
I wrote a poem once, when I lived in Oregon. The first line I was 16 my vagina ready to swallow the world. A little context people: they say young grrrls confuse sex for love. It's true, I did, but what I really believe I was busy learning about was sex for power. I dont know what's gotten in to me today to write so blatantly about this, especially now that my blog's back up on facebook for crying the fuck out loud, but hey. Past is past. I didn't sleep with a lot of guys, dont mis-read me here. What I am saying is that I was fascinated, and still am, by the twinkle concept. The life inside that brimmed out of people, and sexuality was it's easiest means of translation. Slippery kissing in the August heat outside of houseparty air and breath all mixed up as one big heat, styrofoam Eddie's cup full of pink wine and sprite. Sneaking out the basement and getting picked up by my high school sweetheart to go to the church parking lot and get in the back of his jeep. Kissing Kevin for the first time after nights and nights of all that thick context in the air. Allure and mystery rolled in to one, and the more it stays permanently uncatchable, the more fun.
I never wanted to be a man-eater I for real was just trying to live my life, to learn and be in the moment and have fun...
When you're young like that and a woman it's possible to be naive to the identity issues this can cause, the societal blame and shame people are going to expect you to carry. That kind of thing stores up, and it did for me, too. I demonized myself, loathed who I'd been as a young woman because of someone else's idea that it was wrong. When I got clean I had this backlog of guilt for my behavior, for my sexuality, for being passionate which does not mean the same thing as sexual, but for also being sexually alive, an organic and healthy, rhythmically wild and open creature. I got this new idea that commitment was the only "right" way and further, that love and marriage were the only "right" natural next steps. I twisted and contorted myself in to said form.
Six-years. I was in a six year relationship (marriage-free, he couldn't have that discussion and the truth is, for reasons I didn't then understand, neither could I) that ended because despite the fact that he was kind, funny, adorable, loyal, hard-working AND that we had lots in common, the last year and a half of life that I spent with him I was stuck in a low-grade depression. It colored everything I did. In hindsight, maybe I looked too much for him to fix me, looked too much for satisfaction in my own life through him and when those expectations didn't pan out I got harder and harder on him and on myself. Who knows? It's not escaped my awareness that I am hard to please. But a person can fall deep and forever trying to exhume what often should just lie still and let settle, so after a while I gained great peace in the fact that the freedom of leaving, regardless how bloody and painful it was, lightened me in ways I needed the same way one needs and takes for granted air.
There were other factors that led to our end, too. Emotional affair is a term that's come up lately in several conversations the past few days and the general consensus was that this can be worse than the real thing. Yea, so I had one of those. It's hard to say how that starts, where the line gets blurred between love-connection and friend. It's risky business, for sure, but perhaps this, this line blur is the one best illustrating the heart of my relationship commotion...as said: I. Dig. People. The fact that a single little glimmer of originality in someone's spirit can hook me on to them is in direct contrast to the idea that there is one, and one only, man out there for me. Not to say that there's not, and not, by any means at all, to say that I dont crave that. The soul mate... Sometimes I crave it so bad that it is a physical ache. But I've been there! I know how the whole fall in love make a life together thing works. There are a million little moments, a million and a half that you get the chance to look the other way...and or to re-take the chance of re-committing to your love, to the power of the connection that you initially had with the person. You have to make choices, again and again day after day that confirm the chance you're willing to take. To confirm the decision to stay connected. That fire dies, it can die. It dies slowly long work shift after shift and dinner in front of the tv. It dies quickly over a miscommunication when you finally try to talk but the words come out wrong and too late. It dies and so too does the passion for your self, for your very life, go with it. Maybe some people are contented, maybe lots are, with companionship and small talk. But that's not me, will never be. I am hungry, you know? Voraciously. It's part of my nature, how and who I am and fighting it only brings misery. I also know that love, love between partners, boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife or any other coupling one has can be flamed again, it can be fanned, rekindled and grown. There are choices, there are and I know this, I know about it, I believe in it. But for real, last week two of my cousins, TWO MORE OF MY twenty-something cousins got engaged. And all I can think is it will take a special man, a hell of a man, match the size and strength of my passion and spirit, to be big and bold and broad enough, not to mention mature enough, to recognize and make those choices again and again, year after year, with me.
So until then, society, what the hell's so wrong with a girl just having some fun, going dancing, and wanting to make out a lot in front of the TV?
I dont mean all relationships. I'm pretty good at being a family member among family members. I have incredible girlfriends, the best you can imagine for real. And everywhere I go I make friends easily. I am social, I enjoy people, I enjoy getting to know them and hear about them and understand a little about their funny intricacies like why they like ketchup on popcorn or cant fall asleep if they watch horror movies before bed or about that miserable time that the neighbor hit a squirrel and how all these years later in the fall they buy seed just to see the squirrels gnarl away and get fat fat fat. I think people are so cool, you know? Every person has this universe of life inside them so ready to unfold. I've said it before: I fall in love a little with everyone that I know.
Which could in fact be the reason I have such a god damn time with the men.
Or boys. At my age, 33, it's a relative term.
I had someone tell me last night that he wanted to see if we could just kick it, just hang out and watch tv instead of making out all night. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? (Yea yea I'm 33 and I still make out. O goddess bless, may it continue!!)
And therein, the problem. I am too passionate about everyone, everything. I get too bored, too settled, too without the fire of newness to keep me alive inside...and baby, I'm ready to roll....
I wrote a poem once, when I lived in Oregon. The first line I was 16 my vagina ready to swallow the world. A little context people: they say young grrrls confuse sex for love. It's true, I did, but what I really believe I was busy learning about was sex for power. I dont know what's gotten in to me today to write so blatantly about this, especially now that my blog's back up on facebook for crying the fuck out loud, but hey. Past is past. I didn't sleep with a lot of guys, dont mis-read me here. What I am saying is that I was fascinated, and still am, by the twinkle concept. The life inside that brimmed out of people, and sexuality was it's easiest means of translation. Slippery kissing in the August heat outside of houseparty air and breath all mixed up as one big heat, styrofoam Eddie's cup full of pink wine and sprite. Sneaking out the basement and getting picked up by my high school sweetheart to go to the church parking lot and get in the back of his jeep. Kissing Kevin for the first time after nights and nights of all that thick context in the air. Allure and mystery rolled in to one, and the more it stays permanently uncatchable, the more fun.
I never wanted to be a man-eater I for real was just trying to live my life, to learn and be in the moment and have fun...
When you're young like that and a woman it's possible to be naive to the identity issues this can cause, the societal blame and shame people are going to expect you to carry. That kind of thing stores up, and it did for me, too. I demonized myself, loathed who I'd been as a young woman because of someone else's idea that it was wrong. When I got clean I had this backlog of guilt for my behavior, for my sexuality, for being passionate which does not mean the same thing as sexual, but for also being sexually alive, an organic and healthy, rhythmically wild and open creature. I got this new idea that commitment was the only "right" way and further, that love and marriage were the only "right" natural next steps. I twisted and contorted myself in to said form.
Six-years. I was in a six year relationship (marriage-free, he couldn't have that discussion and the truth is, for reasons I didn't then understand, neither could I) that ended because despite the fact that he was kind, funny, adorable, loyal, hard-working AND that we had lots in common, the last year and a half of life that I spent with him I was stuck in a low-grade depression. It colored everything I did. In hindsight, maybe I looked too much for him to fix me, looked too much for satisfaction in my own life through him and when those expectations didn't pan out I got harder and harder on him and on myself. Who knows? It's not escaped my awareness that I am hard to please. But a person can fall deep and forever trying to exhume what often should just lie still and let settle, so after a while I gained great peace in the fact that the freedom of leaving, regardless how bloody and painful it was, lightened me in ways I needed the same way one needs and takes for granted air.
There were other factors that led to our end, too. Emotional affair is a term that's come up lately in several conversations the past few days and the general consensus was that this can be worse than the real thing. Yea, so I had one of those. It's hard to say how that starts, where the line gets blurred between love-connection and friend. It's risky business, for sure, but perhaps this, this line blur is the one best illustrating the heart of my relationship commotion...as said: I. Dig. People. The fact that a single little glimmer of originality in someone's spirit can hook me on to them is in direct contrast to the idea that there is one, and one only, man out there for me. Not to say that there's not, and not, by any means at all, to say that I dont crave that. The soul mate... Sometimes I crave it so bad that it is a physical ache. But I've been there! I know how the whole fall in love make a life together thing works. There are a million little moments, a million and a half that you get the chance to look the other way...and or to re-take the chance of re-committing to your love, to the power of the connection that you initially had with the person. You have to make choices, again and again day after day that confirm the chance you're willing to take. To confirm the decision to stay connected. That fire dies, it can die. It dies slowly long work shift after shift and dinner in front of the tv. It dies quickly over a miscommunication when you finally try to talk but the words come out wrong and too late. It dies and so too does the passion for your self, for your very life, go with it. Maybe some people are contented, maybe lots are, with companionship and small talk. But that's not me, will never be. I am hungry, you know? Voraciously. It's part of my nature, how and who I am and fighting it only brings misery. I also know that love, love between partners, boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife or any other coupling one has can be flamed again, it can be fanned, rekindled and grown. There are choices, there are and I know this, I know about it, I believe in it. But for real, last week two of my cousins, TWO MORE OF MY twenty-something cousins got engaged. And all I can think is it will take a special man, a hell of a man, match the size and strength of my passion and spirit, to be big and bold and broad enough, not to mention mature enough, to recognize and make those choices again and again, year after year, with me.
So until then, society, what the hell's so wrong with a girl just having some fun, going dancing, and wanting to make out a lot in front of the TV?
August 7, 2010
Island culture & the tribe of cool
Patrick my cousin was laughing this morning at breakfast. He's still a little drunk I think, and so it's that glowy slap happiness that is funniest of all.
When he laughs his voice distinctly reminds me of a ladder, this ascending quality that in my cousin Ryan sounds like ringing bells.
You know what Chris told me? Patrick laughs out, stepping up with each word and giggle breath.
Chris is Jackie's soon to be husband in the Carharts and rubber boots with the thick sandwich of New England mouthed around every word he says.
What?
That if you want to find someone here on the island the best thing to do is to just go sit in there house and wait for them to show up. Resounding steps of chortle and coffee gulps after this. It is true tho, Pat and Chris are right, and the B&B owner comes in and tells a story of coming home from errands this week to find the friend of her teenage son lounging around on the third floor of the house, waiting for her son to return. I didn't know this was island culture, she adds, til I got a teenage son.
Not being connected--no cell service and many without even a phone as over 70% of the residents here are just summer folk--is so, so nice. You forget what it means, how easy it is, to just be out and about. To not wait for life to happen, but to make for it yourself...
It reminds me of 1995, living at the beach, pre-cell phone and none of us had landlines. You went on a whim, and let shit happen. In The New York Years diPrima writes wistfully about this, about the tribe of cool to whom I've always sought after, the existence of which predates written history and is, indeed, the reason for expansion, poetry, artistry and all forms of adrenaline~those on the subversive edge of things~how in Manhattan in the 40's this tribe was so in tune with one another and the undercurrent of pure Life imbibing them each that they actually called it swinging, how they lived. Swinging meant get your work done: the clean white line of purity which so tapped in to this force, then allow for, submit to the natural movement of the day. Regular encounters with one another were natural and occurred by virtue of this discipline: wrestling the creative spirit to its hard line, then releasing its energy to throttle the crew back together somewhere on the lower streets say of the Bowery and beyond.
As if something magic, something big, something at times so shadowed and at others glowing in illustriousness so much so the whiteness may burn you apart, was webbing us all together no matter what. Wrestled in to its course, or hugely enormous and pushing us along...
What McClure meant by Writ in Eternity~and what I find most sacred among us mad genius'~the fine alchemy of grabbing for that eternity in a harnessed moment of transcendence and union, in which we get to write, at odds til it blends perfect in to the the mystery, fine, alluring, terrifying, of being written equally by the reverb of our own personal movement of the quill.... The conflicting dual, within the mass whole.
Island culture, no doubt, has been very very good for me....
When he laughs his voice distinctly reminds me of a ladder, this ascending quality that in my cousin Ryan sounds like ringing bells.
You know what Chris told me? Patrick laughs out, stepping up with each word and giggle breath.
Chris is Jackie's soon to be husband in the Carharts and rubber boots with the thick sandwich of New England mouthed around every word he says.
What?
That if you want to find someone here on the island the best thing to do is to just go sit in there house and wait for them to show up. Resounding steps of chortle and coffee gulps after this. It is true tho, Pat and Chris are right, and the B&B owner comes in and tells a story of coming home from errands this week to find the friend of her teenage son lounging around on the third floor of the house, waiting for her son to return. I didn't know this was island culture, she adds, til I got a teenage son.
Not being connected--no cell service and many without even a phone as over 70% of the residents here are just summer folk--is so, so nice. You forget what it means, how easy it is, to just be out and about. To not wait for life to happen, but to make for it yourself...
It reminds me of 1995, living at the beach, pre-cell phone and none of us had landlines. You went on a whim, and let shit happen. In The New York Years diPrima writes wistfully about this, about the tribe of cool to whom I've always sought after, the existence of which predates written history and is, indeed, the reason for expansion, poetry, artistry and all forms of adrenaline~those on the subversive edge of things~how in Manhattan in the 40's this tribe was so in tune with one another and the undercurrent of pure Life imbibing them each that they actually called it swinging, how they lived. Swinging meant get your work done: the clean white line of purity which so tapped in to this force, then allow for, submit to the natural movement of the day. Regular encounters with one another were natural and occurred by virtue of this discipline: wrestling the creative spirit to its hard line, then releasing its energy to throttle the crew back together somewhere on the lower streets say of the Bowery and beyond.
As if something magic, something big, something at times so shadowed and at others glowing in illustriousness so much so the whiteness may burn you apart, was webbing us all together no matter what. Wrestled in to its course, or hugely enormous and pushing us along...
What McClure meant by Writ in Eternity~and what I find most sacred among us mad genius'~the fine alchemy of grabbing for that eternity in a harnessed moment of transcendence and union, in which we get to write, at odds til it blends perfect in to the the mystery, fine, alluring, terrifying, of being written equally by the reverb of our own personal movement of the quill.... The conflicting dual, within the mass whole.
Island culture, no doubt, has been very very good for me....
July 21, 2010
What hungers you. In quiet.
I can not count the good people I know who to my mind would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers... (M.F.K. Fisher)
Dawes is up there singing.
Dawes is up there singing.The only thing scarier than dying is not dying at all.
There is wetness on my eyes, I have been in a place for the past two weeks of protection and keeping close ties on my heart, trying to be with it as it goes through its ups and downs, and now I am delivered. I am in my heart again, of it: the drum pounds the bass keep my beat and courses out in my blood all the way through to the nerve endings, the guitar's my spirit stretching out past my body. Taylor Goldsmith's totally American boy singing is finally giving me words.
It starts to go through my head, it's just a muscle. The heart. To this I can submit, I can revel in the beating wonder of getting to feel it. To just feel it, the greatest gift of all. This is wisdom: to know I'll look back on this time with gratitude and reverent longing.
My girlfriend whispers to me during set break. She tells me after her last relationship she'd completely lost all of her music interests but didn't even realize it. Her man criticized, or at least disapproved of the indy stuff that turned her on...so she let it go. Who knows how that happens? Silently, in little increments. That's how you give you up your soul. How you turn your self off. Piece by piece. Until you're so absent that you're used to feeling like your taking part but not really, only just a little. Dull, sort of looking in from the outside.
The band is less than five feet from us and I am relishing the show. I forgot how much this spot defined that time for me of naming, of recall. The time just behind me in Easton, in my first and only glorious space all of my own, when I called myself, bit by bit, detail by detail, hunger by blessed sacred hunger back to myself. The Nightcat, its black high ceiling with the exposed beams, the way the air runs in light circles back there, the red lighting. I was grinning all day in anticipation of seeing Sonia Leigh and Dawes, but I forgot how gratifying the venue is. How important place. The intimacy of the fifty or so of us having such visceral experience together. The catalogue of signed indy CD's, the pictures, I have to show for it. How much music is was and continues to be a map that's drawn me back to my own life.
In the parking lot I hugged my girlfriend goodbye and stayed extra long in my cousin Collin's arms. It was cool out but still so you could feel the weight of air. He is mind-blown, totally, by the show. Earlier, over dinner, he told me that he wants to move to Brooklyn Park where our Grammy lived, where his grandparents on his dad's side still live. He's been canvassing on a political campaign there all summer, dust and sweaty and I envision him, freckleface, blond and golden, is he in a button down? I am reminded of our hike in the fall, me and him, and talking so fervently about the GED and English students I served. About the unquestioned nature of class that so securely underpins racism. About my belief that many of our GED students I was certain had undiagnosed learning disorders, because the money for those resources just wasn't there in their neighborhoods when they were young. He said to me then that though his major was government he was thinking of focusing on education policy. Because when I talk about government I have to think about it, but when I talk about education it just comes right out of my heart. I remember my footing when he said that, stepping over the wet dark dirt, feeling my heart bottom out over the wisdom of this teenager who I've known since literally birth. Last night he talked about moving to Brooklyn, impoverished, crime-ridden Brooklyn. Brooklyn, because that's where the people connected with his heart when he bangs on their doors. They are the ones who made him feel equally fired-up.
When I left Collin and my girlfriend I met the girls from my old work for a late night catch-up. It was already 11, but the server at Applebees let us close the place down. We literally stayed til 1, cackly screaming laughter, the greasy food, couple of tears, the updates on Adult Ed and on my own life (I read a lot, I sit on the beach. Poetry--big self-conscious grin at this--I'm writing a lot of poetry. Tomorrow I will sleep late. My stresses include I wonder if my table needs more rolls...Coffee? Coffee here? And hmmm do I have another little black dress as sexy as the one I wore last week?) It was all put wholly, and gratefully in perspective for me. But I realized too how passionate I was for Adult Ed. It was a justice thing for me. Making opportunities available where they weren't before. It turned me, greatly, deeply, on.
In all things there are tides, and I for one am quiet and amidst a tide of great still. Life's cycle right now is on the long slow retreat and how I so love this time of year, the thick buoyancy, the savory greens, the dark yellow slanted light. The shadows in contrast. The feeling of heavy breathing that makes you so aware of the intermittent shafts of air to highlight the stillness. I have been submitting to it, which is not easy for me this Aries full of fire and passion and heat. Humbling myself again and again to the larger nature of things, allowing the silence, the stillness, trusting towards the inner-listing, the tiny hungers, to in stillness eventually speak their fisted minds. To become the palm, flat-opening. Allowing. It is hard. But that sweet unanticipated space, that wild curve within, fleshless and still, is there. And this is as beautiful as anything else: this does not mean what hungers one is missing. It means only that in full satiation there is quiet in the bliss. There is message in the silence, when one surrenders to wait and hear.
July 7, 2010
Poem. Silence.
Let us not speak
too softly yet of the outcome
of this terrible thing. Let us
not submit just yet
to the hazy blue of quiet
dawn. You have
known me, I’ve been laid down
by
within
the nativity of your two
hands. What is next?
My father held me as a child,
held me as a child holds her
parents finger, held me scared
and sweet-breathing
against his quieted chest.
Now, as I sit
unarmed on the porch of his house
unable to rest
I wonder to what else I will
have to learn to submit. What else
is in this acquiescence, nothing
which I haven’t already left.
It is not homecoming which is
the marvelous battle, not the
mere occasion of return that counts.
Rather, it is the glorious upraising
of tear-wet face.
It is how one decides
gives way and starts
again on the stairs
how the door opens—far-flung madly
or
the most delicate calm—and allows
the moving light to guide the steps
back once more
in to the house.
too softly yet of the outcome
of this terrible thing. Let us
not submit just yet
to the hazy blue of quiet
dawn. You have
known me, I’ve been laid down
by
within
the nativity of your two
hands. What is next?
My father held me as a child,
held me as a child holds her
parents finger, held me scared
and sweet-breathing
against his quieted chest.
Now, as I sit
unarmed on the porch of his house
unable to rest
I wonder to what else I will
have to learn to submit. What else
is in this acquiescence, nothing
which I haven’t already left.
It is not homecoming which is
the marvelous battle, not the
mere occasion of return that counts.
Rather, it is the glorious upraising
of tear-wet face.
It is how one decides
gives way and starts
again on the stairs
how the door opens—far-flung madly
or
the most delicate calm—and allows
the moving light to guide the steps
back once more
in to the house.
June 29, 2010
I, Miscreant. List: love.
I hit the karmic reset button, gave total permission to myself to let go of every single idea I had about my life.
Moving to Baltimore, my novel, staying on the east coast. Savior syndrome and retreats and poetic love. Family, friends, tribal associations and unifications. How I even say my name.
In all that, I grew a total and almost complete aversion to all things electronic, save pictures. I have emails, weeks old, still unread. Facebook's become a foreign land.
Then I got on here, this morning, and thought of Bona Drag. And Erika, and my blog. The little wonders of truth that come with Love.
REASONS I LOVE TO BLOG
1. duh, because of spontaneous download~holy wonder alchemical power of submission to the impulse, itself
2. My writing partner, over at Muse. She has continued her work without me knowing well I was in the forest a while. "For your travels, on the road, and to bring you home. My writing pal." For how much I am looking forward to resuming our work together, now that I've touched down.
3. Bona Drag. Just go there and slurp a while on her delicious aesthetic.
4. Carrot. Over at I AM NOT AFRAID OF WINTER. We ran out of gas together.
5. Davka. At davka: deer girl medicine. Who also hit a reset button, which I knew she was doing before she even posted about it.
6. Kelly Johnson. Over at Manbait. Her post Home Food from Sunday June 6. About place.
I haven't sat and blogrolled in a month. But this morning the poetry was a slow wave breaking, right at the moment the white crashes over the peak and the clear upwell becomes topside and the water behind it is perfectly clear and see through, and makes everything above surface shine with prism light. And above the surface was the spectacle of color these voices are to me, so bright.
Read them.
Moving to Baltimore, my novel, staying on the east coast. Savior syndrome and retreats and poetic love. Family, friends, tribal associations and unifications. How I even say my name.
In all that, I grew a total and almost complete aversion to all things electronic, save pictures. I have emails, weeks old, still unread. Facebook's become a foreign land.
Then I got on here, this morning, and thought of Bona Drag. And Erika, and my blog. The little wonders of truth that come with Love.
REASONS I LOVE TO BLOG
1. duh, because of spontaneous download~holy wonder alchemical power of submission to the impulse, itself
2. My writing partner, over at Muse. She has continued her work without me knowing well I was in the forest a while. "For your travels, on the road, and to bring you home. My writing pal." For how much I am looking forward to resuming our work together, now that I've touched down.
3. Bona Drag. Just go there and slurp a while on her delicious aesthetic.
4. Carrot. Over at I AM NOT AFRAID OF WINTER. We ran out of gas together.
5. Davka. At davka: deer girl medicine. Who also hit a reset button, which I knew she was doing before she even posted about it.
6. Kelly Johnson. Over at Manbait. Her post Home Food from Sunday June 6. About place.
I haven't sat and blogrolled in a month. But this morning the poetry was a slow wave breaking, right at the moment the white crashes over the peak and the clear upwell becomes topside and the water behind it is perfectly clear and see through, and makes everything above surface shine with prism light. And above the surface was the spectacle of color these voices are to me, so bright.
Read them.
May 9, 2010
Taking a stand.
You've heard this axiom before, right? Stand for something or fall for everything?
I agree, but still am particularly cautious about what I stand behind. Because with wisdom comes responsibility. So to take a stand for something, in my opinion, implies responsibility to whatever you are claiming.
And responsibility is inherent of our behaviour--not who but how we be. Thus, being responsible becomes a character thing, quite legitimately being the change.
It's the end of mercury retrograde. That means that most of this week I've spent in review, not writing much because of all the watching. Lots of troubled stuff and lots of mundane, the samskaras surfacing. This is happening for us all right now, this is one of the inner mysteries it just is. Much as possible I've tried to merely witness what my spirit is showing. Allowing the automatic surfacing to guide me deeper into my experiences in life as a conscious, open person.
The review is almost over now though, it is Sunday, I have one week left of work then five days before I start my move! I am excited, terrified, and eager for it all. I am trying to stay perched on the edge of my life, of my daily experiences as a newcomer to the world: open, engaged, in awe.
Which brings me to the beach yesterday, Ocean City, a storm coming up. The way it moved caught me in that place of wild women, of wild sacred spirit: The sacred inner S/HE/IT. That tension of compulsion how sumptious it is. The authentic struggle, listing between the tides of self and inner speak and passion and the real day-to-day walking in the world of job and friends, places to be and stuff to do. In that center place, in the Great Still where the wild yowl of potential and passion surrender to the practical every day--in there the ocean air engorged with the thunder air coming from the north and I literally felt my rebel yell echo against a curve in the Atlantic sky.
That echo. A reminder of the power of the unseen magic of the world.
It was Mandy, Shannon, me. Two, then three, then four of Shannon's other friends with us. Not a lot of talking, just sitting, and some laughing in the sand and let me tell you nothing in life feels like a thunder storm moving in over the ocean and when it came the ocean turned the weirdest, most melancholy green. Then it was black all over the sky, and then the first flash and we got up to go. It'd been hot up til then but the night before outside the club the air was coming off the sea. And then yesterday the storm came and was followed by perfect blue sky, but by last night the wind was blowing like mad, the weather'd shifted, the humidity that brought the lightening and thunder is gone and in Easton today I have to have a sweatshirt on over my tee. And most of all, that place in me, the center place is awakened and charged~engaged by the magic that the natural world rooted in me.
I am taking a stand. It came around this morning after a spontaneous talk with Rudy-Satva, after remembering the impression of Shaman Bob last night in the middle of my deep, deep and otherwise dreamless sleep, after remembering that alluring reminder of magic behind the thunderocean wind. The veil over this world, the power of the unseen. It is real it is real it is real but it is up to us to walk that reality in to being. And so there is the one thing to which I am taking a stand, putting my responsibility behind. All else, the book, the boarding house, OC, Pac NW, Baltimore or Mexico, Hawaii or Crownsville, travelling or staying still~is secondary to this one thing.
Opening up to the Power inside. The deep, unyeilding power within. Being responsible to it, being responsive to it. Recognizing as within, so without. And from within, from that inner spot where I own myself and open up to the world of who I am, so too do I converge with the outter world and the day to day. It is this power that connects me to you, and to her, and to him, and to the earth and to the thunder and to the sky and to the sea. Elemental, because atomically none of us are any different and atoms react to the energy of other atoms. Get it? Within is my duty, yes, but the the living of it day to day is what matters most to me. Being struck and awed by the outter expression of thunder and electric which too is inside of me. Being struck and present in the exchange with a stranger on the street, or with mom on the phone. Being aware of my reactions, responsible to them. It is what I believe we each are charged with doing. Illuminating ourselves, and living this light, one person to one person to whole groups at a time.
Are you paying attention? Am I paying attention? To the faintest inner stirring, to the thunder rebel yell, to the conversation, to the image in the dream? Am I telling myself it doesn't matter, or am I opening up unto the mystery, and encouraging the open moment with what could be.
Consciousness, for lack of a better term and in order to make no religious association. What I am standing for, being alive, being awake, being conscious to me. What if none of it matters.
Sure that's probably true. But what if I decide it does? What if by virtue of that decision, of that one thing to stand for~it does?
Then what?
Then I take my stand.
I agree, but still am particularly cautious about what I stand behind. Because with wisdom comes responsibility. So to take a stand for something, in my opinion, implies responsibility to whatever you are claiming.
And responsibility is inherent of our behaviour--not who but how we be. Thus, being responsible becomes a character thing, quite legitimately being the change.
It's the end of mercury retrograde. That means that most of this week I've spent in review, not writing much because of all the watching. Lots of troubled stuff and lots of mundane, the samskaras surfacing. This is happening for us all right now, this is one of the inner mysteries it just is. Much as possible I've tried to merely witness what my spirit is showing. Allowing the automatic surfacing to guide me deeper into my experiences in life as a conscious, open person.
The review is almost over now though, it is Sunday, I have one week left of work then five days before I start my move! I am excited, terrified, and eager for it all. I am trying to stay perched on the edge of my life, of my daily experiences as a newcomer to the world: open, engaged, in awe.
Which brings me to the beach yesterday, Ocean City, a storm coming up. The way it moved caught me in that place of wild women, of wild sacred spirit: The sacred inner S/HE/IT. That tension of compulsion how sumptious it is. The authentic struggle, listing between the tides of self and inner speak and passion and the real day-to-day walking in the world of job and friends, places to be and stuff to do. In that center place, in the Great Still where the wild yowl of potential and passion surrender to the practical every day--in there the ocean air engorged with the thunder air coming from the north and I literally felt my rebel yell echo against a curve in the Atlantic sky.
That echo. A reminder of the power of the unseen magic of the world.
It was Mandy, Shannon, me. Two, then three, then four of Shannon's other friends with us. Not a lot of talking, just sitting, and some laughing in the sand and let me tell you nothing in life feels like a thunder storm moving in over the ocean and when it came the ocean turned the weirdest, most melancholy green. Then it was black all over the sky, and then the first flash and we got up to go. It'd been hot up til then but the night before outside the club the air was coming off the sea. And then yesterday the storm came and was followed by perfect blue sky, but by last night the wind was blowing like mad, the weather'd shifted, the humidity that brought the lightening and thunder is gone and in Easton today I have to have a sweatshirt on over my tee. And most of all, that place in me, the center place is awakened and charged~engaged by the magic that the natural world rooted in me.
I am taking a stand. It came around this morning after a spontaneous talk with Rudy-Satva, after remembering the impression of Shaman Bob last night in the middle of my deep, deep and otherwise dreamless sleep, after remembering that alluring reminder of magic behind the thunderocean wind. The veil over this world, the power of the unseen. It is real it is real it is real but it is up to us to walk that reality in to being. And so there is the one thing to which I am taking a stand, putting my responsibility behind. All else, the book, the boarding house, OC, Pac NW, Baltimore or Mexico, Hawaii or Crownsville, travelling or staying still~is secondary to this one thing.
Opening up to the Power inside. The deep, unyeilding power within. Being responsible to it, being responsive to it. Recognizing as within, so without. And from within, from that inner spot where I own myself and open up to the world of who I am, so too do I converge with the outter world and the day to day. It is this power that connects me to you, and to her, and to him, and to the earth and to the thunder and to the sky and to the sea. Elemental, because atomically none of us are any different and atoms react to the energy of other atoms. Get it? Within is my duty, yes, but the the living of it day to day is what matters most to me. Being struck and awed by the outter expression of thunder and electric which too is inside of me. Being struck and present in the exchange with a stranger on the street, or with mom on the phone. Being aware of my reactions, responsible to them. It is what I believe we each are charged with doing. Illuminating ourselves, and living this light, one person to one person to whole groups at a time.
Are you paying attention? Am I paying attention? To the faintest inner stirring, to the thunder rebel yell, to the conversation, to the image in the dream? Am I telling myself it doesn't matter, or am I opening up unto the mystery, and encouraging the open moment with what could be.
Consciousness, for lack of a better term and in order to make no religious association. What I am standing for, being alive, being awake, being conscious to me. What if none of it matters.
Sure that's probably true. But what if I decide it does? What if by virtue of that decision, of that one thing to stand for~it does?
Then what?
Then I take my stand.
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.
February 23, 2010
Mad Vision
Remember when Dylan did that Unplugged thing on MTV? Same one Lauryn Hill did that caught her a ton of flack, sort of gave her her final docking papers? I was never crazy about Unplugged after that, after the way ppl couldn't get down with Lauryn un-pared. I loved her, the bones sans flesh feeling of the whole thing. But that spoiled me on MTV for good for the ill media hype they gave my grl.
But Dylan. He did this version of Knocking on Heaven's Door. He was aged, you could tell, it was before the whole tumor thing tho bc I remember seeing him preform after that and that happened later. But still, you can hear it. The age, which, much as age is wisdom it too is doubt, remorse, the looking back. You can hear it in his voice but it's all alright bc most of all you recognize that the hoarseness, the spine crunch of deliverance, the throaty almost about to break in there is the aged expression of Devout Hunger itself. His very voice, always such a part of his epic-ness, his whole persona and legend specifically because IT was inherent to his artistry, I saw so clearly how human that instrument really is. What fuels it then? What powers that Epicness?
I dont know what year it was released or made, but on the Peir in 95 peddling cassettes and CD singles as the prizes for a betting game that I worked the mic for, Dylan Unplugged was one of the many tapes that themed my days. Rolling up the tarp side of my game stand in the early morning breeze the sea glittering all tinseley, sick with no sleep and chemicals behind my shades but always lighted up on the inside in that slappy happy day-after-still-drunk-way that the sun and salt always did for me. The blue sky and the ferris wheel looming high above, spreading, big as hell, big as the world, big as heaven had to be. I dont know why I got to thinking of it this morning--maybe cuz Muller, whose dad owned that betting game we both worked for, just showed in my life all these years later. Or bc I saw Notorious for the second time over the weekend down the beach, or at least part of it before the cable went out, and Ready to Die dropped so huge that year and the CD single for One More Chance, with Meth and Big doing The What on the B side, made us all say we were getting FTW tatted on us by Chico that summer. Which makes me think even more of of Legend and Epicness and Hunger. Big and Puff. And what makes the difference. And what you regret.
It's not what you do but what you dont that you regret? That's what I've heard anyway I dont know tho. I would say it's all a matter of, all part of the being Epic. Torture is what you sign your bones too, what you hang your clothes too, what you name your song. What you love is always what you regret because if you're like me it's all you're ever truly willing to lay down for. And no matter what, laying down will always have a quality of recklessness to it. Frenzy-inducing. It's what we call Hunger. Why so many of us are scared to live.
The crazy, unadulterated full surrender.
I got changes coming, Mad Vision. What I used to bemoan bc I always used to fight my Epic tides, the ones that propel my indefinite forward motion. I'm stoked now tho. Fueled and fired, ready to go.
Destiny's not something that happens to you. It's something you step in to if you're brave enough to seethingly grasp at the Holy Amen.
Amen. Amen amen amen!!
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