All those people under all those little orange lights

The air on 28th street in Ocean City is warmer than the mountain air in Northern California.  Warm beach air, is there anything better in the world? It's December, when I got home to mom's it was rustling the branches asking hey come on where are your leaves?  I got out of the car and started to squat to pee.  Cmon, Kel, I had to remind myself, no more outhouse living you're not on the compound now.

I cried when I left the farm Tuesday night and mumbled something in to the neck of Monique like "Dont tell Jon I dont want him to know he was right."  He said for two days that I'd cry when I left, it's funny the things you think of when your emotions get the best.  I did cry, but not til after all my little moments, all my little private goodbyes, after I was walked to the car and watched them all walk back to the cabin led by their headlights through the dark. It was as I was pulling away, Mo ran back, knocked on the window, and then neither of us said anything.  Just started to sob.

It took 32 hours to get to Ocean Pines.  Lots of driving, a motel stop, more driving, a car drop, a shuttle then airport rigamaroll. In between it all that warm California sunshine.  Smiling and lots of I love my life.  My transfer flight outta Vegas was empty, I had a row to myself and slept a funny plane sleep that was never quite all the way.  I saw a shooting star out the window, right next to the big dipper which looked like I could touch it, or at least sing a song close enough for it to hear.  In Maryland I stared at the lights of Baltimore as we neared the ground.  I love to travel.  And I especially love to fly home, all those people under all those little orange lights, in the middle of the night.

My brother surprised me at 8 this morning.  He showed up at the Pines and laid my three month old niece on my belly in my sleep.  I was totally startled then in a rosy-warm-baby-blanket-glow.  All day I just kept looking at them, him and his daughter, thinking wow, he's really a dad.  Tonight I went with Jott and Schank, my ol Yacht Club girls, to Mother's Christmas Party.  The bartender from Peppers was guest pouring, Chico was there, Ryan was wearing a red tie.  Life goes on, things change, and also they dont.  All of it's so great, I feel like a spectator watching the peaceful way I get to enjoy myself.

We raised hell.  I love the way beach air feels, it still smells that good-same walking out the bar room door.  No tears now. It's rad, to be home.

Gone Sitting

~may all beings beeeeeeeeeeee happyyyyyyyyyyyyy~

woooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooooo!!

on the road: asheville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sky was so big the night you flew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For moments I belong
to the pure and poison ocean;

I am powerful, and helpless….

by Kathryn Lomer from the poem The way the world sleeps

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

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

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

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

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

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

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

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

Be Ing

I got this book yesterday called Fandango by Sandy Hill. I read about it in my Vogue and had one of those sensation-al juicy reactions that i am always craving for and so am very sensitive to when they hit. The book, to my best description, is this women's compilation of years and years worth of over the top entertaining--she believes that celebrating, as in life in general, is call to give your very very most. The full title is Fandango: recipes, parties and license to make magic. Of course the word magic in the title sold me, as i am a full believer that life itself is the miracle, and that we, fragile humans, are merely the blind fools with capacity to turn our own inner glow on at any given moment--and this is magic, alchemical, to me. Of the highest form.

So let's talk about this for a moment. I wandered in to our local bookseller yesterday to pick up the book, which I had ordered some weeks ago. One of the sales people shared that she'd enjoyed looking through the book, and I casually mentioned that I found out about it through "my weakness...reading the pages of Vogue...Or more, just looking at the pictures." I giggled I think kind of shy and then looked up at her. Wow, you'd of thought she swallowed poison by the look on her face, which she politely tried to cover. As if intellectuals can't be full-bodied, juicy persons? It got me to thinking: in the Spring of 2005 i was living in a trailer in an anonymous fishing town on the Oregon coast. It rained everyday and the midst in the air was indecipherable from the grey sky and the clouds that swirled in and out of the tops of all the luscious green trees. Our trailer had walls like papyrus and when it rained or when the wind blew the weather actually happened inside our house, too. Mold grew on the walls. And i was living there, waiting tables and bar tending and taking up smoking again for the trillionth time in a roadside steakhouse. And most of all, I was sorting out my life--or what I thought was sorting out my life, ignorant as we all are at times, and me at many times! to the fact that life is actually what's going on right now, while I'm in the midst of trying to figure it all out. I had just sold everything I'd owned, quit my "career" job and all its associations, and then lived out of a truck for five months in the national forests of this great land. I spent alot of time in quiet. I learned again to listen to, and to love, the sound, the feel, the heart of our precious giving earth. I emerged from this in an in-between place, quite sure I was not who I was when I left my old life, but not sure at all who I'd become. It was my first cognizant experience of realizing that I, we, are always in the pure infinite stage of be-coming. That it has to do with be-ing. In the beginning in that trailer I was in such distress and discontent: restless all the time. My 28th birthday came and went and I took me shopping, bought myself an amazing flowy pink skirt that made/makes me feel like a fairy whenever i wore/wear it. How alive it made felt! Then I realized, I had fallen in to a rigidity of thinking: that because I spent my weekends on my hands and knees in the wet detritus of the Oregon forest floor, that because I knew how to simplify and live a life of utility on the road, it somehow meant that I had to shun off the other sides of me--the glamorous, the sexy, the diva me's! I began a list of all the me's I know me to Be. (And to this day that's a practice I continue to revisit.) I spent days in my wardrobe dressing in various combinations, oh it was like coming home to me after a long, strained no-fun vacation: this is independent photojournalist traveller kelly. This is hippie moonmama magic maker kelly. This is cross between simple forest liver kelly and diva-lishous kadada b! It felt so good to stretch those soul muscles, to flex my wings that way!

So now I laugh a little when someone makes me stop in judgement of Me. And I sadden a little when I recall how quick I used to be to judge someone for who they currently are be-ing. (Oh, those jeans didn't come from second-hand? Oh, you like labels?). Now I recoil a little when someone gives me the idea that theirs is the only way to Be. Because I don't know much, but I am sure enjoying knowing and be-ing me. I relish, I crave for that juicy feeling of alive-ness. I want that as much for you on your own terms as I demand it for me. Carl Jung and Joe Campbell and talking about archetypes, which is nerdy and boring for many I know! does that juicy aliveness for me! So do the amazingly hot stiletto strap-ups in my coworkers Anthropologie catalog. And so does dancing dirty and barefoot against the shadows thrown by the flames coming from my own handmade fire barrels out onto our trees and in my head and my heart and my soul and also against the sky. Or the sunflowers growing all simple in my garden. Or chatting w a girlfriend on gmail. Or the taste of melty creme brulee after a delicious salad feast.

Juicy. Making magic. Be-ing me.

Maine Vacay

So. What a trip!? Revelations are funny—how they come so that you don’t even realize you’re experiencing revel, even when you’re right in the middle of it. I am a closet vintage-junkie and particularly when it comes to anything John Watersy Baldamore hon value worthy (think Killer Trash circa old Eastern Ave)--so when we happened on a tumbled into discovery of a shop our first night in a small town on the Southern coastal tip of Maine called York where there was a vintagey photo/poster shop galore, budget or not I had to at least get something. I love it.
Later that night, after checking out the rest of town and me also getting a beaute of a sundress for practically nothing in another little shop, we checked in to the last available cabin at Birchwood Cottages on Rt. 1 in Cape Neddick. Only nite we used the credit card, too, go us.


Later that night (after an early dinner of Lobstah rolls at the first joint we could find the moment we got to York--and of course the proprietor had been to Chestertown) we found a take-out sushi place w rolls for like $4 a piece. Spicy tuna and salmon yummm. We walked York's beach at dark, bought some ice cream and Bran some beer and some cards cuz we forgot ours, then took our sushi back to our cottage, above. Next morning, on suggestion from Lannie Parks at our local bookstore in town we checked out world famous Flo's HotDogs, also in Cape Neddick on Rt. 1.

Check out Gale and her little red shop by the side of the road. She now owns Flo's after taking it over from her mom-in-law (of the famous namesake.) The 61-year-old hotdog stand will be on Samantha Brown on the Travel Channel on July 24 at 10:30 pm. Thanks Lannie. Before hitting Flo's, as an apetizer if you will, we had a pork rib each from the Cat & Nine Tails also on One in Cape Neddick, just because it was already almost 11 am and we were so hungry from our early morning chillychilled swim in the Maine Atlantic and we couldn't wait another second to get to Flo's! Seriously, Maine has rib joints all over the sides of the road. And this little convenient store's goods were SOOOOO good all the same...Next we headed on up 95 to Acadia for a day or so...on the way on Rt. 30 outside Belfast we stopped at the Liberty Trading post to use a port-o-john that you had to "Close your eyes, drop your drawers and back out of" according to Brandon. However, they had the best fresh out of the oven chocolate chip cookies and for love like that I am such a feign. Ended up a little later at Blackwoods campground where a very happy Brandon discovered us a big ol pile of wood just waiting for a fire...

So, how's this for cool? Over in Bass Harbor, on the far side of Mt.Desert Island, ME, there is this old lighthouse that ran, with a living, flaming light and someone there to tend it the wheel of the day/night around and around for 106 years, non-stop. Keepers changed from every six to ten years or so. Holy hell. That's from 1858 to 1974. Wowowow. So this got me to thinking, and it was probably that night that the revelations slowly began (I'm always always better at this spiritual/self-discovery stuff in retrospect...) to impart themselves like a fog settling, but also breaking at the same time. And I realized this relationship that I have with a friend in Philly had been on my mind all day long, and there, on the edge of the sea, the foghorn blasting and clearly a big storm setting almost in...I couldn't help but realize what a lighthouse does. It guides shipwreck-fearing sailors home from the sea. And there are people out there who tend to that light, day after day, night after night, even when they themselves can't even see the sailors for all the fog or for the huge swallowing sea. So like the Waifs said, Sometimes we need a Lighthouse for our own...And I got this image of a lighthouse there in my emotional shipwreck sea of a heart and soul that's been drowning me on and off for a year or more, and I realize I've got this track of poetry that's sort of been my charting maps through the haze of all this stuff. And this friend of mine who's been like my torch-holding port cuz for some reaason when all this lost stuff started happening so did poems to him, and to all the friends I sort of know through him. Which are more poems to me, the lost me in all of us. It made me, for the first time in months, realize, and have faith again, in my own anchor. The fog started parting. It did me good...going to the Lighthouse, see?

The storm came with the the night and the salty air from the sea and we only got to use about two hours worth of that wood and it was okay, cuz we needed a good long snooze. The next day was the fourth, we were due up to Sorrento that night for Levi's wedding, and had some hiking and swimming first to do. Started out in Southwest Harbor at Cafe 2 with split dishes of Juevos Rancheros and Blueberry Pancakes. Then on to the Farmer's Market, which happens in Southwest Harbor on Mt. Desert Island on Friday as from 9 to 1pm, next to the community center. It was small, but for 8 bucks we got some killer artisan pesto bread, fresh made chipolte goat cheese and a big bag of organic arugula, which fed us snack-style intermittently for the next two and a half days. Hiked Acadia Mountain Trail, swam and snacked at Echo Lake then busted on to Rt. 3 for a stop at a Lobster Pound(these places rip you off as far as I'm concerned, we never did find the "right" one and maybe the right ones don't exist like they did when we travelled in 04. Maybe the whole market for seafood is too commercialized now. Who knows? Maybe back then we just got hella lucky) before heading onward a half hour or so to Three Pines, our Bed & Breakfast in Hancock, ME.
It was about this time that I set down The Vanishing Point, a novel by Mary Sharratt, in favor of my heart's pulling me towards Paulo Coelho's The Witch of Portobello. The poetry, incidentally, had been just pouringpouring out of me. Coelho's book was, as revelations are always meant to be, the right way to go..... As would be the wedding, and most of all, the visits w family and friends to come....the details of which are on their way in a day or two...

Thank you stranger

It’s one of those days when I have to just buck-up and power through everything—we are leaving for Maine in the morning around 6am. Bran’s old homie is getting married in an itty town on the Coast called Sorento. My WhiteHouse/BlackMarket steal of a dress is still at the dry cleaners, I haven’t packed, haven’t even considered what poetry/books/writing materials are coming I am on a double shift today and its been a long minute since I sat in my room lit my candles and just went still. Good thing vipassanna is a tool that travels.

Bran checked out his uncle Jerry’s new downhome walk-in spot yesterday for country cooking and local steamed crabs. If your coming through Galena check them out: Jimmie Dicks Cluckin Chicken: 410 648 5670, open 7 days. He’s a rockfisher and married to a great cook, they know their stuff.

Anyhow I am in to reading blogs, following links to new stuff etc. I haven’t put a list of my roll up yet but will soon. One of the ones I check out periodically is Confessions of a Young Woman and last night I found this quote on there. Check her out please, because it’s my way of giving props back to someone who gave me some much yearned for light, without even knowing it, when I was deeply in need….

"Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves liked locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer." - Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

Made me remember one of my very fave quotes, a perspective-keeper, how Zora Neale starts out Their Eyes We’re Watching God:

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” Not only a soul-sigh quote, but too a good trick as to identifying a good read. Check out the first paragraph of the book, if you are magnetized it will keep you through a good read. Has worked for me evreytime.

So I’m off to Maine. I’ve got some open-hearted living of questions to do….