Truth is whole and living and malleable in our hands!

Lately what's in and out of my mind?  Discrepancies. Like in character.

I was living on the road in early 2012.  Hanging out learning magic AND practical ways of how to heal the earth. At a Tibetan Meditation Institute that hosts a bunch of starry-eyed heart-fueled pagans for a permaculture school for 2 and a half weeks every year.  This is up in the Cazadero hills, Sonoma.  I was both, still am, both a peace-full compassion junky meditator and starry-eyed earth-worshipper who believes in the magic fuel of an open heart and can get down in and with the transformative power that happens when we deal with the real deal: our own life-funk and shit. 

A man who was at that training said something like, his contradictions were the best part of him.  And that's it:  Permaculture, 101.  That life thrives the most at the edge, where two ecosystems combine.  Where new life can be let in.  And that's us.  Humans.  Our light part out in the open and our inner dark, our hidden shit.  The center where they combine.

One's not more real or important than the other, which some beliefs would have you worhsip.  The shadow is more real bc it's not persona.  The persona, which can be light-touched, "spiritually" touched, is more real because it's conscious.

Ok so yea, I tend to feel more whole and rich around a starry-eyed shadow-walker than a light-filled shadow-thrower myself! ;)

But to me neither side is true.  Or maybe each is.  Each is a part of the truth?

To me, rigid definitions of our self or each other can become the end of personal vitality.

As I write this, Dead Prez's rap "the cause of your ignorance, flaws in your discipline."   And I get that, the need for discipline, particularly as it arises out of self-introspection and contemplation.  But also--what if personal discipline includes shaking off dogma, includes shaking off any adage that professes because I am this thing I also must be this…?  Meaning, isn't self-discipline about self-honesty?  Isn't that the depths of it?  Honestly looking at what's real about us, shallow or deep or in-between as it possibly is?  

And also, I don't mean just looking at our selves.  I mean making room to embody it, to give how we're feeling in our heart embodiment by being it.  Experiencing it, experimenting with what's emerging.

This is a major issue with words, by the way.  How they are symbols for something we already associate.  Which means we will read them written by others and embody our preconceived notion of them instead of allowing the thought-function to drop us in more deep.

(Pardon that interjection…)

You know Gandhi right?  Most people do, at least because of that meme  you must be the change you wish to see.  If you study him, like really try to get down with the man behind his words…Read his autobio, read the critical readings that arose from that.  Gandhi's whole point was live what you believe, live it, embody it.  AND if, as you do so, it no longer feels exemplary of your soul, change what you speak to match what does.  Change how you be to meet what's true for you.  Be the change you wish to see.

Of course, this coming from a man who lived women as second class citizens and who also believed sex and sex energy was wrong to embody…

DISCREPENCIES.  Truth is whole and living and malleable in our hands!  That means changeable!

AND we can't see whole parts of our selves sometimes!  The shit is in the dark!  That means we can't see it!  Haha the best we can do is have compassion for this, understand we are half blind groping around for light and touch.  Each of us.

I have this buddy Justin who I love.  He said in December that he was worried about me.  That my mountain was blocking out my sun.  He was talking about grad school.

That's just it.  When you can't see--you can't see THAT YOU CAN'T SEE!

Have mercy on us, each.  May it begin, within.

Last week, I walk out to the driveway to get in the car and go to my favorite place, Mermaid Beach.  I wanted to, had to, go dive under the ocean green.  Crazed Kelly zeal.  A hummingbird catches my eye and mesmerizes me in the deeper way.  I drop in, meaning, I recognize that it stirred my heart to see that little bird, so I honor the stir.  It reminds me in that moment of a time in 2004 when I was living in the national forests and wilderness in this country. I lived the reality that it is possible to be able to interact with nature and to experience nature outside as reflective of your inner nature--follow me here, this is BIG mindbendy stuff--to Know them as one thing.   To embody nature as interactive with you, as reacting to you as you too react to it.  That this can happen if and when you deprogram your ideas that that's not real.  I think all this in an instant because those years of 04 and 05 is when that was my primary lesson, and it partially started with an experience while living in the woods with both hummingbirds and butterflies.

Hummingbird is a symbol for spontaneous joy.  I think of this driving to Mermaid Beach, let my thoughts of this symbol spiral me down more and more to the heart where living truth is.  Feel jamming and alive in the moment.  Yea, dude.  My JOY'S BEEN GONE.  This feeling of life inside me.  It's been so…FLEETING. I haven't been awake to it, because you know…Dark.

Next thing I know I am laying out my towel on Mermaid Beach and here flies up this sweet little hummingbird doing horrible unstoppable spirals at my towel unable to stop bc his or her little wing is hurt.  I mean she's freaking with the panic look in her eye.  She or he lands then at my towel and I scoop her or him up in my scarf and do reiki on the little creature, singing and loving it and very gently caressing the little sweetie, bc really, what else is there--that's all we can really do.

Then when the warmth passes and I can tell it's time to put him back on the sand, I do.  She sits about a minute or two and then flies off no problems.

So I get to heal a symbol of Joy.

So now here I sit, thinking about rigidity, and dead forms of things, and how our vitality can disappear easy as that.  And old systems of self-care, and giving too much because we think it's what were supposed to do, and how this is as rigid as it gets: "supposed to".  And how we don't see, cuz we can't see that we don't, til we do.  

If you're following ANY of this, good for you.  ha

Discrepancies.  Sid Hartha, Herman Hesse.  He wrote about it.  Everything is true including the opposite of the truth.  

So yea, seeing the shit!  Dark paradise, when finally on comes the light. What will I choose (the holiest discipline there is: choice.  And it's opposite too, deciding not to choose…a half-lined choice, itself) today to make alive?  Who do I get to be?

(and will it look like a long ass diatribe instead of my thesis, Ch, 3???)

From When I Was Wild. OC & Coming Home.

It was spring time I was fine you looked finer with your brown hair long then and the body you still took care of we were eighteen I had bleach in my hair and a checked blue shirt tied at the belly I wanted to say was gingham, but was not, we were suburb not country kids and you took me on a picnic under the power lines so I tried to play the part.  It was hot for the spring and the pot made it so we couldn't tell was that just the heat or was that melting in our minds.  You loved Jesus but wouldn't admit it, and late at night we'd get in fights because it was a misogyny thing afterall for you who secretly didn't trust his mom, who thought the world was going on fire because the women were aloud to speak again the weird thing is you an Only Man back then...only one never turned on me but loved me better when I got to use my tongue.  Voice people, this is about voice not sex.  But we did that too didn't we, the hot kind the teenage kind wicked and innocent out back in the car at parties or the church parking lot or the one time under the tree in the graveyard on acid our bodys seemed so big, then small, our arms wavery my breath its own language echoing off the red coming off the trees.

I wore dark purple lipstick then, or red, and had the hottest little body remember I used to show off my tatoos.

There were all those others at the beach, it was never easy for me to talk about that.  Part of it was how I hurt you when you and my one friend went off walking down next to the ocean.  That was the night, or more next morning on the boards yellow mist of sun trying to make up its mind am I heat making dry this water or light making clear this new day from the dark that I knew that I was different for good that I had made my choice, without meaning to.  Seeing what I was capable of.  As if you'd ever cheat on me.  You know that night--two of the four guys I was smoking with are dead now?  We were on acid then, too.  One of them I never even write about.  He was a mean little fuck, we used to get drunk and I'd run my mouth and the one night over in the Meadows at that one place when they were living with RayRay we had a flinching contest where I let him hit me hard as he could, as long as I got to hit him back, and again and again we hit one another and I stood and took it all 108 pounds of me thinking I was a man.  And that was the choice, there were always two in me la santa y la diabla, and that is the night I ran off with the devil holding my hand.

God damn did we have fun.  I heard from someone on the periphery back then this week--this happens enough, private messages thanking me for this blog--that I would say it happens regularly and so thank you all publicly for reading it makes me feel so, so good and this is a shout to all you private ones reading along, and a specific story just for him.  I remember you and some others were living uptown on 143rd doing the more mellow surf thing I only made it up there for example when Jesse or Kareem came to town because hidden in someone's wet suit was all the drugs!  And anyhow one day I was off or likely just on break from hot assing on the mic to Big and Meth and Tom Petty and The Dead up at the peir (Jerry still alive in the beginning of that summer, dead by the end and vigils on the boardwalk and the 9th street squatters house still there, near where the old, old old Chat Street used to be) and you walked in I think with Mike?  and we were in the middle of an all out indoor water gun fight, blue plastic dollar store beach sand buckets filled to the top with oozy automatics and us shooting water or late at night emptied-forties malt-liquor straight in to our mouths...The boys all shirtless only wore only baggies that summer that's how you knew the local rats downtown, so I was always like fuck it I'll just wear my bikini all the time!  You who was always on your own buzz keepin it so chill had the most shocked look on your face when you walked in the house--front door always wide open bedroom me and Fannon's then me and Kev's once Brian moved out always closed
--and then it broke, the shock and you smiled like I'd never seen before a light of joy and radicallness breaking out straight from your mouth.  You grabbed a seat way on the side of the room one of the bros tossed you a beer and then of course did we proceed.  That might of been, but likely was not, the same watergun fight that wound up across the street running the outdoor halls of the Americana sneaking around corners and hiding behind doors when I camped out upstairs at the dirty frat guys (I used to stand in the alley out back and cus those fuckers out all the time even back then clear to me down the center how we were different and stood on different lines) on their front porch and waited until Jeremiah gave up and then dumped an entire bucket of water on his head when we was walking back surrendered to the apartment.  Remember that shit?  We kept a baby wading pool out on our front porch to chill in and would add ice in the afternoon to keep all the beers more cold.

Hahahaha.  I live here again and barely ever think of that stuff, those times anymore.  Fannon gone, Kev.  Blugh Kev.  Phil... 

Una Santa, y Una Diabla.  The poetic imagination and living our own myths.  Last week I was chilling one night over with these friends of mine, hanging out with this girl from the county but who I never knew back then only met down here at the beach, an old friend's friend.  I got to telling stories and of course because I am writing so much again and also because I am a McMullen and all those all those all those late night convos as a girl, or around the table basement at Grammy and Pop's or any single one of the aunts and uncles the Jameson and laughter and warm remembering every time, because of all that and because of my myth, my heart my spirit where the saint and the devil collide I am a wild women, full of the spirit and the ancient forbidden gnosis which is just know-how which, common sense people is just know thy self,  this wisdom business that penetrates so deep within.  And so for all of that of course I am storyteller, La Cantadora she who knows.  And so chillin last Wednesday late night, and Saturday too I got to telling some stories of my own, I have a lot, and a lot of them some of the most important ones are from the beach they all, so much happened right here.

So without meaning to I am gathering bones again and doing it near the ocean in the northeast wind under the winter sky.  It is so important, this archeology, these bits and pieces scattered everywhere it is the real work it is the poet's work it is the work always always always of recircling the brave warm or coolly shadowed places we continually label or even disregard that when we are still live deeply, live on, within.  In the end these are known and called by that most powered word of words, home in the end I choose not to go with the howl scowl on my face but the wicked happy satiated smile of she who knows that peaceful all-knowingg grin, so right now today and tomorrow's today and each and every step I take I say Amen.  Amen Amen.  This is all real and really happenening, this is life it does and it did.

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

Decision, have I made you?!

There is a red flower growing up out of the brown mud in the canal in our backyard.

It is wild, and there is only one.

There is a flower growing up out of the canal, I have been watching it for the past month, it lives longer than all the others, it's color is passion red.

There is a flower in the yard, there is a coffee mug I always drink from.

It's feeling is stability, this mug in my hand.

This is the backporch where I love to breathe and feel the air and here is the fall, it is right there, it is everywhere, it is inside of who I am. I am up early and thinking of the words I will use to write back to Paul.

There is Diane diPrima reading in Mass the first weekend of October and a road trip I can feel my soul taking down mid-Cali 101.

There are men. It is always there, there is always so much having to do with men.

Lust and attention-seeking. Sexual preciousness and being. Alive. Being alive and instinct to procreate and great fear and great nesting drive to settle down. Unity of balance. Life love game and every gentle sweet-soaked step. Not lying to yourself best you can even when for a while the choice is to quiet your self down.

And then, there is cutting down to the core. The true bones that pre-exist all else. The life-frame meant to call upon, own and name, before the acts of fleshing out your life's true matter of things can really begin.

And of course, there is waylaying yourself, pretending you dont have a say!

All of this making decisions. Integrity. Being human. Dishonesty. O loving human. Humility. O human heart. Breaking: finding your own swing, yet again.

There is the time in-between when it's perfectly right, when there is reason to be astounded within and say yes to the slip-slide away. To say yes to the long retreat, the acquisition of your self by allowing yourself to disappear. For purposes of re-generation. For means of which to germinate, sprout, steadfastly throw down roots, and grow.

It is fall out and things are falling. The sun retreats, turns yellow, puts its coat on but never truly says alright I'm out, I really gotta go. Just runs far away a while, to a sweet strung lonely corner where it can look its self in its own dim eye. All the while this is stillness, stillness the most complete, the most difficult, the most important of all the growing. These are the seasons. On the table there are flowers, cut and vased, and a checked yellow table cloth stained with summer's dirt. Mom has a broken foot. I have a cold that's moved to my chest and makes me strain with boxed pressure when I try to deep breathe. We all have duties to resume where they were left off, again. Always: again again again. My mom and I are so alike it makes me cringe and it makes me ache. This seed it goes on, this sun that shines sometimes it hurts my eyes.

A wedding is coming. Sean will be married in less than eight weeks. Less than seven, soon almost less than six. My stomach twists a little as I write this. I am selfish, jealous, human, imperfect. There is always this.

I thought I did. Want to be married. Thought I was looking for a man. I am, one to keep me company, have dinner with and be able to talk to and sometimes sit up all night in front of the tv. But it is true, I am not ready to settle down. It startled me, to come up with this, though I suppose I've known it all along. I thought I was, this is lonliness and giddiness of un-expectation? The truth, I've never not once not one time, not ever, seen a man with me in the when I've visioned the next stage in which I am about to take part. And the men know it first when we meet, when we're together, know it better than me. It always surprises me and shocks me and then the shock mildly turns me on when someone knows something of me better than I know it of my self. Which the reverb can then last longer than the initial passion itself was even worth. Which of course can be fun, or can be hurtful. Such is the game. That is the thing with openness, vision is better retrospectively. It's not always easy to see what you're doing when you want to be in the moment best you can.

And so there is this one last thing. All the plate clearing I've done, getting rid of everything so I can make my pick, my main and primary one.

All of this widening of vision, so that I could strictly funnel and tunnel it now and focus, with my own most direct and personal vision, my scope.

Kelly there is absoloutely nothing wrong with owning your own path, for you and just you, even if it looks solitary and you are 33! 33 is young today, kid. And I am a teacher, and youthfulness of spirit is so far the best way I've found to live.

And to live, what I finally and only know is that there is this. These words, sacred journeymates, sacred harbingers and detailed archives of my sometimes muddy soul. There are flowers, sometimes only one. There are roots, in the fall.

They get fed.

They run so deep.

Circles

It was like crashing chin first on boulders, coming home, and by the time I got to the Pines I was turned every kind of inside out and I knew it was bad when even the ocean didn't speak of home.

I felt myself falling down, too, which was the frustrating part, wanting so badly to hold on to something and knowing that it was the force of my grip complicating the motion, the vortex of energy, the circles, going around and around like a downtown highrise revolving door that all the fancy people walk through. Catalytic energy of my self, working against myself, and the anger at the whole damn thing unravelling simply because I didn't, I so badly didn't want it to unravel at all.

By yesterday evening the rain came though, and my soul was emptied by then and ready for the cleanse I was so soothed all the way through. I spent the whole day working peace, swirling circles, new circles of light at my room at the beach. All I originally intended was to set up my quiet spot, set up my candles and little things of magic and sacred and power in the corner in my room so I put the windows up to burn the sage and other oils and herbs so of course by then, by the time fire and all that summer air was involved it turned quickly, happily in to an all day affair. Mom got home in the afternoon and I was blessing herbs all over the counter and we laughed the crazy laugh when I caught her with her eyes closed, blessing them too. We were giddy, Chels was in the hospital about to bring Savanah in to the world and maybe that's what started it all, sending her reiki and peace and how powerfully psychic that early day opening made me, I literally felt the contractions in her back as I sung sweet quiets of peace from my spirit to hers. Sweet sweet peace I held her across the miles in my arms, allowing for the true steady and calm. Sean in the meantime texted he was at the airport waiting, having been bumped to a flight five hours later and they gave him $400 to wait, and so he ended up flying with his fiance on the flight her company booked for her and so at the end of the day serendipity, even on the east coast, the hard dismantled cement and gray and grease and ego-tapes of mean and goddamnits revving always in the people's head east coast, serendipity, light spirit, prevail. Sky's the limit I texted him and sent him the mind vision of us out front of his house in Columbia arms at the sky like Cindy always does chest open and hearts pointed at the sun. Laughing, laughing, laughing in knowledge of the wisdom truth that as the heart goes the Universe seeks to affirm.

The best picture ever came at 4:30 Grandma with the baby in her arms. By dinner my room was the fabulous messy of explosion that comes first whenever I clean or organize anything visual and magical as I am. Mom's health food tasted so great, the rains came in sheets, the sky looked yellow with hysterical late night sun battling the storm for its final chance to poke out. The McMullen reunion is Sunday, I start work Monday, tonight I hold Savanah for the very first time.

My laundry's almost done, Sean's folded in to the streets of Memphis, Dad is home early for the weekend from Lanham having graduated 130 students last night spouting anger and politics but I smile at him the face of quiet and the moon. Even though my homecoming was anything but smooth I myself am alighting again and maybe ready now to return all the calls and texts and messages that keep coming in. I love the moist way of muted morning light coming in through my room at the Pines. I love the magic of life, reverent, dirty, ebbing and crashing, re-surfacing again and again. There is a surfboard in our kitchen and out back the forest is full of summer green. My family is touching down in various different spectacular forms it is the reminder of stability, which is another means of saying the constancy of change change change.

More on Truth, and Following my heart

It used to be fall was my favorite season, but that seems to be the company I used to keep, too. Bonfire company, walking through the woods and camping company, peoplein flannels, that kind of thing. The truth of the matter is I love spring.

This bounty everywhere. I'm out on my walk and the forsythias are about gone--people think she's the first to show her delicate head but lemme tell you it's actually camellia, and oh is she grand how she bobs the branch all the way down with that deep brush of pink-almost-red--the bradford stinkass pears almost gone, but instead would you look at that? The neon green grass? The hot pink azaleas?! The most beautiful smelling lavender lilacs like little perfect stars waving high from the corner of some people's tailored lawn. The hollys with all the little white flowers of sex sweet breathing as you walk on by.

The first two weeks, when the dandys were everywhere at very first and no one had been out yet with their poison I took a couple walks to forage my favorite herbal weeds. Lawn tea, my own witchy specialty. There's so much I am aware of right now as I end my days perusing my town. So much I am captivated by, so much gentle sweeping light, fresh sweeping air. All I can think each time I walk is wow, how lucky and happy and thankful I am to be alive. And how much life is all around me. And how much there is this aligned well inside, this steeple of silence and peace.

It's been a year and a half since I first set out to "follow my heart" whatever that means, to learn to be true to myself as an adult woman. All I had back then to guide me was the most brutal dose of confusion and discontentedness, and this sense of acquiescence that had sort of settled over like a low fog. I didn't know it at first but that ill all the time dull feeling and always upset, that was a signal of the purest kind. There was a lot I had to learn about self-honesty. A lot of little tied up parts of my heart and spirit that were stuck and didn't translate so well. A lot of driving on auto-pilot and a lot of continued confusion, and also at times a lot of pain.

But bit by bits I've gotten stronger, I've learned to trust myself. That's what it is, what I'm trying to explain right now. Knowing that I can trust deeply in me. And practicing from day to day the truth of my current personal matter--how I'm feeling today. Not disavowing myself of that expereince, of my own reality as it is going down right now. Ah, yes the truth is mutable it's true. Just like they taught at Vipassana--changing changing changing moment to moment. But why do we think we need to force it, force away how we are in this exact moment? What the hell is that instinct injury all about? I am at worst when falling to the hand of my own stunning rigidity...

Right now a re-cap of SNL is on and it is hysterical. God I love to laugh, and I love to be moved to a moment of reverant reflection, stilled, too. I love to experience life. They showed Paul Simon's rendition of the Boxer just a bit ago. It was from the Saturday immediately following 9/11 and watching it instantly made tears well up in my eyes, but then right after there's Amy and Will doing a Little Mermaid act that literally made me belly laugh. Maybe my favorite part of SNL has always been watching the actors try not bust up at each other--or try to do their individual jobs so well that the goal is to make one another bust up? Same thing I remember that used to make me lose it when I was a kid and mom and I would watch Carol Burnett. Wow you know? Life. Mutable truth? In so much as we, at times foolishly, take reality as we see it from moment to moment via our limited perception to be all that is--and hoplessly so, no truth never changes. Autopilot has to do with shutting down our impulses and instincts from a place of fear. So that we experience recurrent patterns, ridges or grooves in our consciousness. Learning to feel, literally healing my sensate life has been such deep remedy to that. My truth has been mutable, and when I aim to love every part of it, the good bad and ugly, then it is Visionary, too. Then I truly have power in the matter, I am aligned. I get all flumuxed though when it comes to thinking you, she, he it are changable according to me and my needs and feelings and sensations. That is always a big challenge for me and I guess so long as I am living I will have lots to experience and lots to challenge that feeling-life, but the last year and a half of devotion to my own heart has paid off in so much that I get it--it's up to me to own me and that's what it means, being true to me--no matter what.

Years ago, in my early sobriety, driving with my friend Amy who herself at the time had about 10 months clean The Boxer came on a tape we were listening to and chills covered my body, and then hers, and then both of us had that eye-sheen of spontaneous confirmation-tears. Wow. Life you know? Me and my precious beating heart, the only thing I'm ever guaranteed to truly know...

That girl

Lately I've been hanging out a lot with this girl. She's kinda tough and I forgot how sharp her edges are and also how fricken quick she is. There's a lot going on inside that she's trying deeply to protect. It's summertime in this shot above, near the end. 1994. Labor Day Weekend to be exact. Her and her then best pal Lindsey used to take pics like these at the end of every summer. Immortalization. She absolutely balks at fraud and authority. Balks, actually, is probably not the right word. Bucks is far more accurate.

She is grounded in this picture because of a three-day house party that she threw in July. It went like this: Her and her long time on-again off-again thugg of a boy-man were sitting in the air condition one stickyhot Marilen day watching MTV and making calls to get some weed. It was hard to find the acid was everywhere but barely no bud. Her ankles were both busted from the first song, first set, first band to play Lollapalooza that year which was Green Day. The pit erupted like mad and it was heat and it was sweat and it was fierce and her too big MaryJanes didn't do enough to secure her feet in the rushing and pummelling her way through. She went down and ate a face of dirt before a hand was thrown to pull her up but it was too late by then the ankles both were twisted and sprained. He was shirtless and fat and stank and got beer on her the guy who landed fullweightdown on her feet and calves and the quiet there just for a minute of ohnowhat'snext but then that was okay, too, the acid made it not that bad and then he was up and threw her his hand. So two almost broke ankels rest of the day at the festival and somehow she used this and work as an excuse to stay home when mom left with her bro for the beach the next day. So house empty, a party was planned and it was a shittonnafun and worth every late night that she had to feign work as a greasy sub girl at the pizza shop in order to still get out and about and around her mom's imposed restriction. This is one of the first shots of her learning. Learning how to be her. June, 1992. Ocean City, Maryland, down near the pier. These are the first days of the Immortal series. 93's shots and the ones in 94 will be taken at Labor Day, a means of marking the course that she by then has learned she runs. Summer is the prime time of exploration. She didn't know it then, but this shot is the beginning of Cataloguing, and so takes place in June. Archiving. Life of Journeyer. Purveyor of Soul and Experience. Search to be made, or to prove what is, Real.

My father moved to California the day before this picture was taken. Mom took us all to the beach that same afternoon. Moment of linger in the driveway home from the airport and then a sigh and nothing, let's grab our bags and head for the beach. I got caught that weekend again with cigs mom found them in my purse but me and Linds didn't get caught sneaking out the side room at the Pines beachhouse to cross the ditch out back feet all muddy and 15-year-old pissy on light beer at Todd Johnson's houseparty through the woods.

It was the first time she ever really snuck away.


It wouldn't be the last.

"Too Zen"

I walked in to work the week before last and much to my fabulous surprise encountered a buddy from Chestertown who is also a fellow tribe member (Compelled by the Calling). His name is Brooks and I've blogged about him before he's a member of the band The Took (see link at left of page.) Well he just started working in my office! And of course you know soon as noontime rolled around I was like Brooks let's go go go I'll take you out for sun, I mean lunch and out the backdoor we ran like teenagers cutting school. I love having someone alive from the inside there to relate with me now. So last Thursday we were walking--in the sun--to the Amish Market for the amazing freaking goodies this place offers. And somehow we got in to this conversation about Destiny. He kept saying that he felt like everything is meant to be. To which I was like well that's predestination, you know like a very Christian subtext. So what do you think then of free-will? And he's like no no I dont mean that things are scheduled in advance, I just mean they are meant to be because they happen. And of course me, ever the Queen of ruinous depths am like what, huh--I mean what's human implication in all of this thinking? Dont you think that that burdens the individual with more than a wee's bit of mite--to have the responsibility of "choice" on her shoulders? [This was all quite good-natured and high-spirited as we were both in fired-up sunny good-food moods and I for one was busy trying to sort out where I stand in the nature of said discussion.] I start delving in to the tenets of Creating Your Own Reality and so forth, to which he again is like No no no I mean it's meant to be cuz it just happens. Like if it doesn't happen it's not meant to be. And suddenly I stop in a bolt of silence and literal white light sunbeam exalt and am like, OH! I think I get it! You are clever Jedi Sensai!! You are saying the mere simplicity of the eternal moment of Zen. Purely truly nothing to figure out ahhhhh but the second you grasp it..... ahhh gone again. The most simple truth: If it happens it's meant simply because it did. No meaning. Just....experience. Just light simple eternal treasure pleasure of joy in this continuous ongoing moment. Ah, the Chink is in my presence.

Ah, tricky tricky!I Was So Delighted!! I punched him on the arm like a kid in third grade and was like poor thing, you with me, we equal Too Zen! Then we took off running for the back door of work cuz we were late, and didn't want to get in trouble.

Purity Of In-Bliss Eternal Moment May I Never Question You Oh Sacred Truth.

Ah that in recognizing and never wanting to question you are gone...again.....!
Eternal Flower
Eternal Crescent Mama Moon

Eternal Blue

Eternal Star

Eternal Art

Eternal Wild

Eternal Tricksters!!

Waxing Poetic Will Never Kill Me Enough

I seem to find the taste of this air
sour, the face of this plain
as his eyes
quick-changing as the wind

The tide moves in the same direction
home, flagging
and backwards it
never wins

Just keeps on going
on. I must practice caution

if poetry's come back to me
to be my friend.

~~
Good god isn't this always the way? These words they flow like rubble--I mean that, too--like little freakin pebbles out of me sometimes and it is such a struggle to just allow them the motion of letting go. Because--why? Because it hurts if, when, it ends? Like above. I'm walking out of the damn house on Friday to go the beach and they just start coming. I was fighting them, for sure, I knew once they started off I'd go and who knows where I'd get to or just when I'd be back. I've been fighting them a lot. I jotted down just enough, just what's above, got out just enough to let the surge pass so I could get out the door. Got those little bitches of words out like you might, I dont know, force up a long SoCo drenched Saturday night. Retchingly with sore ass knees. If you will...

Ugh I'm having such a bastard of a time committing to me. This is it, I guess, my last little stretch, my last little dusty basement catnap before I step out in to the sun. What I mean--well, here, Jung said it about people like me: "Perhaps alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for the spirit than others, that perhaps alcoholism is a spiritual disorder, or better yet, a spiritual condition." Yes it's called ravage. Ravage hunger for life and rapture. Fucking poetry. You bitch-slap me every time.

Perhaps I am being vague. Apologies dear reader as you climb this my mental Jenga topple along with me in my head. (Metaphor tribute to Sarah over at Moleskin Dreams, thanks thanks thank you) What I am thinking about is this--as Jung saw it alcholism, addiction, is a sacred disease. We compelled by its claws either thirst too greatly for life and love and all its bawdy passion and beautiful hard parts and thus drink to settle this ache, or else drink to create it. Either way what a taileating snake are we. But Jung's greater, deeper implication of the disease is the aspect of recovery--finding deep within the wreckage of one's own mass calamity the very seeds with which to regrow. It is the case of he who knows the dark is who shall most value the light. And true true true to form this is my great medicine of Crow--the Value of Truth, or, to paraphrase Herman Hesse, how Everything is true including the Lie. The funny little dichotomy of tiptoe-ing or even outright booty dancing a while with fear, anger, laziness, obsession, dishonesty whatever....that the triumph over these parts is not just a full gaping swallow of the flaws of humanness, but at once the transcendent power deep within the human to overcome herself and her blocks through acceptance of herself and her blocks, when finally she stops fighting herself and sees it she herself causing all the pain. Ahhhh, that we might all bask in this eternal conflicting growth circle of beautiful fucking misery-laden joy...
!!!
Which brings me to poetry. How I live and die I swear to you at the end of the day it is sometimes the only thing that sees me through. And I think that this has everything to do with the actual ethics of poetry, which to me is a very real and personal thing. Ethics meaning the principle of it. Poetry to me is not just words on a page or even mystical deepwetfeelingurges that partly cause me to almost scream. Poetry is a lifestyle choice, a calling, a certain commitment to attitude of reverie and awe, a commitment to taking it all in with a big painful swallow, a commitment or a way to approach life. It is a belief, the truest one, in magic. It is the Art of self-creation. It is the Art of self-deception. It is, at the end of the day, the Art of Self, and Living.

So my last challenge, whenever I get this way wound-up--cuz oh, believe me, I been here before--is reckoning poetry with, to put it contextually, what I know of Jung. The ability, finally, to surrender to the final unknown. To say, okay the cord I am bent all the way around is actually the cord of me, and I need now to let go. I need, ahhhhh okay I'll say it, to let go of this control, or at least this illusion of being in control...

The final final softening that comes in a great gasp when I come down off myself and ask for help. The giving up. At my wits end and my final door, the final Demon guarding the gate is poetry, she just wont let me through. And how long will this dance go on, seeing as how I know it is she who will turn in to my Angel, too?

She's so glamorous with her whistles and her ribbons and her bows.

Ahhh, sacred hunger.

I hate this part....I always forget right here, this last step to the threshold, who I am and what I'm all about. Oh oh oh... "I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself." (Aldous Huxley) But you can't change by trying to force change. Ahhhhhhhhhh oh god I'm just about there, I swear I can feel it is this me beginning or just getting ready to almost begin....??

Anyhow. This post was inspired by a marvelous freakin piece over at The Curiosity Shop that had me up with wheels rolling last night. The writing is so fine, but the intelligence is clearly a craft in its self. If you're anything like me you might get why Kelly's post prompted this somewhat random response. And I swear I'm not propping her cuz she shouts me out. Or at least that's not the only reason why....
!
What I'm listening to: DeVotchka. These freaks are my freakin fave.

Here I Am

Today's one of those days. I woke at 4 or so and could not get back to sleep. Which at the time was fine because I got in to this book that my friend and sort-of mentor recommended I read. Indeed, it was eye-opening, all about co dependant tendencies in relationships and identifying said tendencies in your self. For all my own self-awareness, it was really informative and full of little aha moments. I followed up with decent enough quiet time: I got to have my first coffee wrapped in my warm fuzzy blue robe sitting on the side porch, it was just me, the earth's mists, the glorysounding morning birds and first rays of orange sun. And then got meditation time in in my sacred spot, too. And went to Zumba at 8 am, which, for this dancing queen fond of hiphopshakingit in my Michael Jackson moonboot-style weighted exercise shoes, it doesn't get much better than Zumba to start your week....In fact, I had a quote and pics to post about my journey over the past several months of committed body awareness.

But you know what, that'll have to wait.

Remember the other day when I wrote about the hallway being hell but that I for one was enjoying the breathing room? Well, I surely dont want to fully Pollyanna this piece out~right?? I mean would it really be me without an ironic nod of blatant irreverance once in a while?! I mean, let me just tell you. I left Zumba in high spirits and was to work by 9:30, at a local church registering spanish speakers for English classes. It was great, full of joy as it always is. Then on to my office, and a lunch break later during which I got to walk in the sun and under the flowering cherries and dogwoods to the local healthfood store. And right now I'm sipping a dark chocolate mocha at the local coffee shop before I need to go to another local church for more ESL student registration tonight. I mean hell, life, if accounted for in measurement of quantifiable experiences of quality, should be grand. But look. It's just one of those days.

I feel tired, and sort of blue. My friend Gretchen, the mentor you know from above, she's quick to remind me not to be hard on myself...with all the great changes in the last five months of my life, well these little dips are to be expected. And I have lots of blessings, dont get me wrong, I mean I see them all around. But it doesn't change the fact that I am where I am. And I thought I ought to write about it, since honesty for me is crucial to my day to day experience of living this human life as authentically aware and open as I can. And basically, as Gretchen's helped me realize, living spiritual when the going's good is easy. It's showing up when it's hard that counts.

Here I am.

las photas

Dudes, soooo much snow. Talk about shell-shocked: schools were closed yesterday for the second day in a row and I ran back to work anyway, just to see a real human face. (That was four days I was home alone sick and then another for snow. Which I prayed for!) Even for this queen of take time to yourself, six days was too much. I was forced to accept A Lot. I have no doubts, I got what I needed, and when the snow came I even went out to make snow angels and revel in the reminder: there is always at work a far larger flow. (When we forget will she ever remind us!) And I am always in the process of fighting it and so fighting myself, or surrendering to it and so letting go into steady movement with the groove.

I've never been ashamed to admit I'm a fighter. It's just tough sometimes to really see the one I'm fighting is always that image right there in the mirror...

Queen for the Day: List 2

If i were queen for the day, you all would be subject to the following mandates:

1. NO CELL PHONE USE IN RESTAURANTS OR STORES. Obnoxious cell phone use is Western entitlement at its best. I don't care if its your sister or Aunt Jodie calling just for a sec get off the phone and focus on the task in front of you. Also, you are in full right to not call people back if you are currently involved in something else, even if that something else is the very important necessary for your soul mandate of DOING NOTHING. This stress and always being busy and worry of us and our culture is compacted by the insane idea that just because we all have cell phones now and Gen Y never knew any different that we all have to call each other back right away! Or feel guilty for it if we don't. No. Engage in the life in front of you without deluded expectations. When it is time to be on the phone, then be someone fully engaged with your friend or loved one or business person or whatever on the phone. No excuses.

2 . LEARN TO BE ALONE. QUIET. BY YOURSELF. I don't care who you are, I am suspicious of anyone who can't sit a while doing nothing but sitting a while in the presence of their own soul. Take mandatory quiet time or time-out time with you and you alone. This is different than doing nothing. Though it is, after the initial restlessness dies down, a genuine relief to take a big breath and say to yourself, No, no, there is nothing left to do right now other than just be me with me. Make it a custom. Explore the world you are unto your self. Should the Death face come today, or the hangman or the angel and It stands there and says to you what good did you do, you can say to Yourself, I knew quiet. I surrendered to what I came here with, to what I'll go out of here with. What more courageous thing could there be?

3. HOLD DOORS OPEN FOR PEOPLE.

4. SMILE. On both number three and four: The following is perhaps the most simple principle there is, applicable to or perhaps even relegated by the beating heart. We like to feel good, we don't like to feel bad. We ALL have this in common, even the birds and the deers and my cat and your dog--just for them good is food and bad is danger of predator. Feeling good is a contagion as is feeling bad--literally, the chemicals behind each of these emotional reactions do nothing but stimulate more of the same chemicals. Chemicals are the body's ensured unconscious response to see to it that those good experiences are enhanced and repeated and those bad are feared and avoided. There is great , great power in this. So do your part! Make a small difference every day. Help people feel good. It will make you feel good, too.

5. BE CONSISTENT. Stick to your word. Do what you'll say you do and don't say you'll do something if you can't or you wont or you have to drag your feet about it because secretly it makes you feel bad or stresses you out or drains your energy. If you change your mind don't fear the consequences or make excuses. Simply see to it that your actions now stick to your new word.

6. RECOGNIZE WHAT YOU RESIST PERSISTS. Simply put, wherever you go there you are. What you don't want to deal with will constantly nag and drag you down all quiet or loud until you are forced to confront it in an explosive manner. Be good to yourself--have courage to look at your nagging good or bad feelings even if initially scary and running you down. This is called preventative action. Or personal responsiblity. Be easy on yourself when yet again you slow down only to find, oh damn, my eyes were closed again.

7. TRAVEL. I don't mean go to hotels and restaurants for 7 nights and 6 days. I mean get out on the road in your own state or in a foreign country and find the things and try the things the locals do there. See a new part of the world with new eyes but with the same precious sky and earth and sun. Keep yourself fresh, vital. Come home and see how very alive and boundless you're able to feel in your own little home corner of routine and regularity. PRACTICE THIS.

8. REMEMBER INFINITY. At its base level the world, our whole universe in its entirety is nothing more than endless amounts of protons neutrons electrons and that odd space in-between. The very base level application of this: anything is possible. ANYTHING. That makes everything ordinary extraordinary, and everything extraordinary actually quite ordinary. Modern science itself is a mere hundred years old! As recent as the late 1800's people actually believed that the size of one's skull actually determined not only their intelligence but their superiority--making women and non-whites "scientifically" incapable of certain levels of intelligence and inferior as well. Stay open. Don't settle.

9. TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT. Be brave enough to try something different for the sake of your own infinite human spirit. The most dangerous thing isn't conformity, it's unconsciousness. Recognize the world for the series of opposites that it is. Whatever action you take throws equivalent energy in the opposite direction. So if your a peace lover go militant for a day. A godlover go totally nihilist tonight! A warrior soldier sit passive attentive Zazen all morning, action of non-action. Counter-balance yourself. Stay fresh--open yourself to the content of this--avowing yourself to the experience of the present, not a dictate of your own reactive unconscious measures.

10. FORGET WORDS. Forget words, forget lists, forget all you've read. Words are words. Yes, they are the first form of contractual obligation of action. Yes they harness the power inside of you in sound form given out to the air and to ears or the eyes and to the breath and the water and the fire of the sun. They are the first tangible form of action after your thoughts. But action is every step you take. So forget words, this list, all you've ever read or heard. Touch down within yourself until you realize, until you know for sure that who you are is how you be. Make your own list. Be your own King, Queen.

11. BREAK THE RULES, every one, on your own list. Remedy your unconsciousness. Don't be afraid of it. If you are accept you are. Then love yourself, forgive. And open again, again, again. It's the surest tool you have to bring you closer to other human beings or breathing or living creations.

12. CLOSENESS IS A BEAUTIFUL THING. Realize the choice is yours: closeness could be the very reason that you're here.

Poetry

Reminder
To Me from Me

Can you read a man’s poetry
can you reconcile the difference
play conscientious objector
in your own life?
The art, the nature or our own innate draw
the silly coward way of human nurture
The nature of art is the grand scheme
marshaled by the merits
of awareness
Life is the great art
the grand operatic not how you choose but if you choose to sing

Poetry is the option not the objective
Greatness is a technique based on a quality
of courage
& simultaneous fury-feeling abruptivness of sudden

Action
1.20.08 op,md
*

Little bit of a poem for the day
from Octavio Paz's Sun stone

I search where I come face to face with daylight,
search without finding, I search for a moment,
for a face of lightening-flash and thunderstorm
running among the enormous trees of night,
face of all rain in a garden of shadows,
insistent water that flows along my side,

I search without finding, and I write alone,
No one is here, and the day ends, the year ends,
I have gone down with the moment, all the way down,
The road is invisible over all these mirrors,
They repeat the days, the moments pave this roadway,
I step upon the thinking of my shadow,
I pace my shadow in search of my one moment,

I seek the day live as a live bird....

*
Thank you Octavio. Getting ready to go to Maine on Wednesday. Ahhhh quite whisper of tall pine trees....

Gardens and bunnies, corn and metal

I like little bits of broken things. There is this knob of metal on the driveway, small like a robin’s egg, easy to be mistaken or just mixed in with the dirt and rubble of stones and busted concrete there, but on closer look it has an hourglass shape and is made of copper. I like it. I will put it on the alter in my garden, where heels of old glass bottles, shiny stones seashells and busted pieces of porcelain grow reverence. Most of it I dug up in the garden either here or on Truslow Road. My own little tribute to the earth, who sees all things grow. And helps them or holds on to them as they pass away.

Our garden is growing strong. Zuchs and squash are coming on and so are our first hearty green tomatoes. The broccoli, still! is sending off shoots. My Parsley and Basil are doing well and so are Chamomile and Milk Thistle. And oh, the sunflowers are waist high already! But my St. Johns, White Sage and Lavender don’t look like they made it. I heard Lavender and St. Johns don’t go well from seed, and as for my White Sage I got lazy when it came to weeding.

Gardens need watering and priming, weeding and so forth. Thank god for Brandon cuz I just ain’t been with it this summer. I look out on the sea of shiny green leaves of corn in every direction. Slow growing but woah—fast enough so when I go away for a week I am stunned to come home and laugh at myself talking to them, to these stocks of stand after stand of GMO corn rows, who still glisten the gold dusk energy of dancing shimmer on the air at magic time every night anyway when the sun goes low and casts gold on everything and you can see between the zones, there they are all gold even tho the humans have been fucking with their gene pool—Myyy my babies! Look at how tall you’ve grown! Then I stand there with this life pull inside me humming, and I look at all this corn, and I think, there must be something for me, too…It is a prayer of sorts? And also, it is mildly depressing. So usually instead of the garden and all the perpetual growing all around me I go inside. And write. Or do laundry. It feels like we always have a lot.

Bran showed me around where he tilled this morning. It was like a dream when he said, “Have you seen the baby bunnies?” then grabbed a hoe and moved a pile of hay, snuggled tight among a nest of weeds and my Chamomile, aside. There were like three, or four, little lumps of fur curled together under there. Little shut-tight eyes. Soon they will eat what’s left of our bitter lettuce and I will yell and shoe them off of our watermelon shoots. I love them silently and gently and humbly with a weird absolution and tears in my eyes.

Oh garden, just to watch how you grow.

Potluck tonight, curry theme. Thank god for us, us people, confusing things. Us friends to each other, trying to make sense of it all. Hope you like zucchinis, guys.

List

1. I have all these big dreams. They look like:
   *Write a chapbook that becomes a hit underground success. It is on the discontentedness of youth, nay—the American experience. It should look like an experiential guide of how the artist blazes her own trail instead of “following” where society thinks she ought to go
   *Make great pieces of art with paints and papers, ribbons and the woods
   *Hold poetry/self-expression conventions
   *Bring people together for music, for good, fresh food and people/idea sharing and celebration and true real martyrdom of our each and every individual very good thing
   *Stop being so god-damned self-obsessed
   *Reiki circles of charm and healing the earth, starting here in our own little community under the stars
   *Live by the sea
   *Know mountains, and the herbs and brush that grow under and through them
   *Know the earth, and help others to know her and help sing her song
   start a foundation, for the young, the women, the people of great discontent. A foundation for all those of little means, harness all that, make something beautiful out of all our unfounded dreams
   *Do something with my life. Worthwhile. Be a good friend, be an honest woman. Be someone not afraid of following her own big dreams.
   *Set out to and travel about the world
2. I get caught in circles. I can’t avoid it. I get sad, angry, lazy, lethargic. I stop believing. I am dull inside. It is anger, anger aches in me. It runs so deep I secretly believe it is actually harmonic.
3. I wait tables, I hate it, it is a dream gone sour. I keeps me from gatherings at nighttime, from organizing, from living a life I thought I could imagine.
4. I make excuses.
5. I believe that if I have any other job there wont be enough creative time to do the things I say I should. I am good at waiting tables.
6. My time has come!
7. I hate Chestertown because there are no god jobs. I hate Chestertown because there is no way to employ myself other than waiting tables or working in a local non-profit or government run social service agency and that makes me hopeless and perpetuates my belief in the futility of the current system and all its fouls and no goods. I want to be someone strong enough powerful enough to believe in her own vision but I look around and see no out. I try to be grateful because that’s what they, people, my network, recovery, tells me I should be and I am grateful just look out the window on to my farm! But that doesn’t change the scope of things. That doesn’t help me to rest or feel settled or not come undone.
8. My man doesn’t understand but doesn’t judge. That makes it so hard to talk to him and even harder not to judge.
9. I love places other than here. Doesn’t matter where, a small shitty town dirty by the sea. A mountain organic land full of like minds and dreams. A Mexican village of poverty and no means.
10. I get angry at myself and feel like my problem is within, must change my perception, must be someplace inside me free of ego and of blame. Angry that I can’t just be grateful. Fearful that I will always be miserable and in some stage of trying desperately to get what I want. I see this aspect of myself and am instantly convinced that the real problem is my insatiable ego telling me I want what I want and have to have it now. So I work on taming the ego instead which how do you do that!!? Fix your own broke human head with your own broke human head!!? And before you know it I get consumed with all-knowing spiritual righteousness and self-criticism and damn it Kelly why can’t you just be well? Then I am immobilized, I take no action because all the great traditions tell me peace is in this moment. That should be enough, shouldn’t it? Right?
11. Fuck that.
12. “You just need a good job and some money to make you comfortable. To feel like you’re worth it.”
13. I am worth it.
14. I want to be great, to do great things, to share this knowledge inside and to not be so afraid of my extremes. I want the willingness to insist upon nothing but don’t believe in that in my own heart of things.
15. What if I’m crazy?
16. How can people not be voraciously hungry for what is deep down inside of them?
17. That is me. I am. I make no excuses for it.
18. Except for sometimes, when I do.
19. I am crazy, no? At the end of the day at least I got that, and that is nothing to blame or to try to be or figure out or to stop or to know. I am crazy, hungry. And thank god--grateful as hell.
    
    

God in Truth is Lies

I have faith in God. But ugghhghg, even as I write that it seems so lame. I have faith in God—in every lasting miracle of life of which life itself is a breathing example of —look outside, just look beyond your nose, or else stop a while, feel the air at the bottom of your nose, the way the dryness passes among the hairs there in their little rows. Look out past wherever you are this moment, this gaping fillhole of experience that calls to you: look at the air between the you and the other, look at the candle in the holder on the counter the bronzed statue of the roman on his knees melted wax dried dripping down his back, the toy poodle on the beige throw rug at your feet the way his head cocked to one side looks confused like trying to figure out why you are looking down at him, the crumpled tissues next to your laptop on your desk, the pot of coffee across the room gone cold. I have faith in life, see—in the very miracle—wondrous, mysterious, of existence going on about me, and I do not shy away from calling that my own reasonable belief in god, which to me is all things.

The god of my understanding—tho I suppose it isn’t “a” god at all. It is funny to me the way people—myself included, I often do it—cast judgments based on our own perceptions or ideas or applications of a word. I do it all the time, that word, God, it still makes me cringe. With an eye roll I’ll look on, incredulous inside myself if someone I don’t know well brings that up that word and starts going on. Like the funny looks I get from people who don’t know me too well when I talk about going home and needing to pray! I don’t know about this god-head thing: I struggle with my own old trapping of a god-head, of some figment out there in the midst looking over at me, silent-talking and creepily laughing at all I say and claim and think and do. These old Catholic remnants of my childhood come up and all the mores of society that wordlessly perpetuate such norms. But if I am going to lay claim to this belief in a godhead that I struggle with than at least I will be strong enough to make it my own—because it is in fact, my own internalized belief, my own rigid system of self-judgment and denial. I’m too intellectual to believe fully in such a framework, but my intellectualism is so counter-alloof it perpetuates it: what I mean is the idea of a god-head is so complex, so deep down in me and well a part of me that I unknowingly function in the preexistent framework of it all the same, no matter what I do. So I find myself walking around with the judge in my head, always in some varying degree of verdict and blame placed on myself and my own drama of trying to think my way out of it.

It’s not as awful as it sounds. But it is the dictate of a stronger that normal conscience because admittedly I am a woman of extremes. My real belief, in the oneness of things, informs me that it is just me doing the judging and the blaming, hauling the call of guilt all around. Just me and my perfectionism, busy creating god in an image, judgmental, of the darker shadow sides of me!! When my fear is great I am too blind to be in my bliss, I get strung-up and stuck in my head and stop listening to my own myth and stop following my own heart. I stop trusting in the lightness and life of this current moment. And when I stop trusting, when I stop having faith in my own current, working conception of what God experientially has proven to be in my own life, then I pick up my old God, my old tortured systems of belief and being.

Ughghg, god bless this sacred neurosis! This funny human way I have of being.

Anyhow, my faith is with me today, along with my laughter. It feels good. It’s nice to look around with joy in this moment, to look around with faith enough simply to be still…..

Poem today (involving neurosis…)
for Josh

"Little Joke" or
"My Ways"
or "Digressions are how I get there"

I’m sorry,
I’m sorry for my drama. These funny witchy ways
About me. These ways of making consequence
against me
of
It always comes back to me &
Figuring things out. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for my ways.
I truly Am
I feel like-- for a thousand years I’ve tried
to tell you this.

But? That’s just me again, Drama? The self-inflicted (get it?
Self—that’s
My Way
making
little joke

my eyebrow notch, bravery or
mockery
whatever me my way
reckoning—recognizing
myself (oooops there I go again
truth is not true
My Self—joke again))

drama of art is my Nature These energy swirls I get caught in—avoid? And then I think—about me—it can’t be true again? Guilt, fuck fuck guilt again?
Then there’s

Avoid the dance? Me? I’m sorry—

Never. It is new moon, I am
Wiling against myself again—
You are on the run.
(you are. check—)

I am home, moon
Moonface, dark gun. Or
dark, sweet fruit dripping down the sides like Rum
Or No thing Nothing, the blank stretch
of this misery, how it tastes so sweet
fun
to those in love
like me, how much we LOVE
the ride! The ride is what
the blank stretch the whole of life presence blank, unfestered or even recognized
unto its self...the ride is what? (Monogamy is pointless we all know that.
Has nothing to do w that.)
we come here for some kind of reckoning w
Our Power. Our lies being told. Not meant to be mean
just me eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ahhhhhhhhhh

**
I am sorry. I am sorry for this
For this, for my ways, for lasagna. Tastes so good
On my farm, in my garden. Read Diprima about me
Take action, ride a bike, plant a garden
Watch tv or buy a god. Find god. It will still
All be the same and I will be sorry
Feasting a while, always to come back come back again
(circle [spiral circle] Circle) spiral
--The light is like gold --
and I will come back again always to this gold, golden grain
--there is knowledge in this,
alchemical let it inform You
(we are smarter than
our selves)—
in this pain, the most mild
& gentle elixir

I will be chief among these to go. I will always be. And
I am sorry—
I will always take you with me. Even to death
& beyond. A thousand seas have bent before me
a million clouded skies. This is our Code. I have it

broke before

your eyes

Sorry I AM for this

**

But not really