The tracking of self

It is quiet as a cat steps, the gentle return to the self.  Delicate as this as well.

When I was growing up and we moved from the old neighborhood of Baltimore suburb sprawl to the country woods and backroads further south, my closest friend lived across the street from me in a house that was built at the turn of the 19th century.  It had kitchen stairs, which if you're from the east coast you know are the narrow shoulder-squeezing curvy steps meant for the servants or slaves to use.  Honing the return is always like this.  Knowledge of the secret passages crept and kept, how to use the quiet shadowed light to slip unseen through the house.  How to recognize when some part of your self has become subservient to an other.

And so it was I went away.  North on the 1, for many hundred miles.  Slept under canopies of trees so deep the green looked black and the sunshine wasn't so much as a yawn.  Spent hours of extra hours of travel time just to be able to drive the quietude of mountain roads.  As it always goes, I was not the same and more the same than ever before when finally I returned. Drove the Grapevine in panic up- down of body exhaust and got delirious on the man-friend for trying to get too close. It took me a full week to stitch it all together again, what all of that--the departure and return and rupture at the end--might've meant and still could mean.

Now, I move about the hobbit house on quiet cat-step toes.  Set the slow cooker to high after it sat on the counter for three hours ingredient-full but not plugged in.  Mistakes are made: I'm not wholly present, but know as much--can see at least that I'm not which is as close an assessment of the truth as can ever be seen.  I open books, close them, adjust the light.   Take notes. Miss movement in my body but know this is temporary, this physical time-out.  Feel certain of being on the verge of things.  A surety of witnessing: the stealth and knowing look of being so close to, and at once amid, the ever-endless circle of tracking and tracking the tracking of self.

The Vintage Series.

You guys, I'm back.  YES, the Impulse Itself is vibing high and vital!  Screaming surging pulsing pressing to get out and witnessed, or at least not to just stay bubbling under the surface any longer.
Can a blog that started only six years ago be called vintage?  No haha and I am alright by that bc I dowhatiwant and also,  yes of course it can--bc in this high-wire frame of techno overdrive time blogging is as yesterday as MySpace so holllaaaa and whatev.  Who's gonna stick with what feels good anyway?

Ya.  Def this girl.

So for two years I worked out my esoteric witchy wisdom stuff over on Wild Women Wisdom.  I'm really hella proud of that project and how it informed me as a tool through which I could be self-taught.  That whole time, (and still) I was getting fed from the bottom on up by my education in depth-influenced counseling psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute.  For the past several months I have been behind the scenes, relying on the old persona of KadadaB to work it out for me as I begin to coalese the old with the new in order to focus actively on what will yet be!  So STOKED!

Wild Women Wisdom is slowly changing into the hub of my women's coaching practice.  I am focusing on self-empowerment, whole-bodied practical day to day meeting of yourself where you're at and learning to love and live your self, through whatever responsibilities and roles are alive and real in your life as a woman.  I am happy to work with men too!  I will also specialize in The Women's Work, or the Menstrual Mysteries, which is helping women to embody their personal tides until they are no longer mysteries!  A life's work, for sure…I offer Skype sessions right now, can see clients in an office space in San Juan Capistrano, and (especially for more ritual or sacred-based work) in my home.

Ultimately--and here's the exciting stuff to me!  The seeds of what yet will be!  Woot woot--I will be incorporating--ever so slowly, my goal of doing the Social aspect of Permaculture work.  SoCIal Perm. I'll be using Wild Women Wisdom to mostly work that out but you know there's no separating soul--so stay tuned on here to learn--WITH ME!!--more about what I mean by that.  We'll learn together, since that's always how I do this jam.

The Impulse Vintage Series will be alive-- again!  Horay.  Bc sure as I am living I need a place to express all the minute expressions of the holy mundane coming through me and that I'm out there relating to each day.  In this way, I re-Christen this blog, at the season of Samhain, holy celebratory tide of reverence for the dead.  From which comes all new life.

To Poetry, as a way of being, living, seeing.  Getting it all down~  holy act of self-creation.  Amen Amen Amen.

I love you guys!  Play on~

Your heart in the game

So the first thing that happened is this morning I woke up to a text from Brian.  He is my brother from another mother.  His momma Ms. Louise raised Sean and I up on bologna and cheese and snacks after school.  All those afternoons and tense mornings me and him were living with a single mom.

The picture was of a Ravens crab outside ESPN zone.  At Baltimore's Inner Harbor, downtown.  It marked my heart.  Sean my brother texted right after that: 'At the beach to watch the game with dad.'  I cried a little then but didn't let on when I called to talk with our father.  It is January, time of the soul that our wounds release.  Last night watching Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World I cried these hard and deep sudden tears when Kiera Knightly finally talks to her mom and dad, and then her new niece.  I thought I was crying because of the ritual with Sepi up in Topanga Canyon yesterday and what that brought up.

And I guess I was. Because the magic brought up yesterday weaved me back and forth across the soul map of me.  Made me look at what I have tried to avoid. Christmas was so, so hard that I put up a little wall.  A little boulder there to get through the whirlwind time.  Four days home and that was all.  I knew if I allowed my true emotions in I couldn't do it, so I had to go forth, soldier marching.  I am contented with where I live, of that there is no doubt. I love California and my life here with a realness that shines from my skin. I am settled with the choices I have made and wish to go forward.  But it's time I take part in my own wisdom, too.  Move aside the little rock.  

I miss my dad.  He taught me football in 2002.  It became our thing, and in many ways it's what taught us to love one another as adults.  That's what we did in January together the past five years.  When mom would go to Mexico.  Football was our thing, me and him.  My dad, the eldest of five boys, two girls.  My dad who storytells so richly that I can feel his legs peddling at eleven years old to deliver those papers.  Can feel the hair on my neck stand the way his did when he used that paper money to go with his dad, the Colonel, to his first game with the Baltimore Colts.  Him, the Colonol, and my godfather Uncle Tim.  In this way, football, I have gotten to heal my connection to dad, to home, to that part of my heart, to my own maleness, to men.

His birthday is Tuesday.  My brother is there with him today, my sister-in-law Jamie and niece, too.  Sean is taking Jamie goose hunting tomorrow for the first time and I am so proud of her.  Talk about experiencing maleness and the land of home.  My dad will stay home all day with the babe.

So life goes...as does the heart.  I am thankful they are with him this weekend.  I am thankful, so thankful for my life and all its funny ways.  I am thankful for change and being brave.  And I am stoked for my hometeam to fight hard.  That's got nothing to do with getting the win.

It's all about having your heart in the game.

Love and thank yous

As soon as I saw on Facebook that Igor was sick I knew I was going to make him soup.   But it didn't occur to me that I was doing for him what my wise women teachers taught me to do by doing it for me over all these years until later, standing in Derynne's kitchen tonight.  Her friend, who I've never met til tonight, said 'that's really the best medicine, the vitamins and minerals cooked in from the whole foods.'  Then she took a sip from a plastic red cup of wine that already had her lips joker purple. And she grinned and added 'and all that bright white light~'

It made me raise my brow with my own little grin because indeed as she said that I was adding the last little dash of flavor and also putting blessings of so much love and thank you all over that soup.  This was the first thing she'd said to me directly all night.  I don't know if she saw my smile.  We'd been packing D's house for their move on January 2.  They are going back to the dessert where Cam's tattoo shop is.  Packing laundry boxing taping labeling drinking wine drinking wine making chicken soup.  And dumplings. This gal's either got drunk second-sight or is wild-intuitive.  Either one totally natural.  One homemade pot was macaroni noodles with broth just like Judy taught me to make way back even before I lived on the farm.  To that pot I also added kale and chard-pot like Teena used to make to heal me, when I lived in sabbatical with her those many long days at Chop.  Also tons of oregano because Igor's sinus' are sick and for sick sinus', well that's one of the first things I ever learned working with herbs.  Also back in the days that I used to salvage Judy's herb garden out on the side of her river house.  And cloves and cloves of garlic.  And other secret dashes and smiles.  The other pot was homemade chicken dumplings, the way grandma taught me all those different times standing behind or beside her or out of her sight but her not out of mine.  I didn't make hand-pressed noodles Pennsylvania-Dutch style though, but, with Grandma's recipe and a combo nod to Judy again, little butter dumplings that turned in the broth and before the roux to the warmest, fluffiest balls.  That pot I made for Laura another student of mine, or rather as I don't teach them now, for Laura a woman I know who's far away from her mom's countryside home in Romania.  My students, I mean my friends, so far away from family, during the holidays.

It is cold and clear the night before the last day of the year.  Pon Pon walked me to where I was parked on Adams.  He lives with Igor and Gustavo.  And Bob, who I've met several times through them, and Leo too.  Igor was in bed sniffling and laughing his wonderful Igor laugh.  I made all of them take emergenC's and zincs the way Maria did back when I was first learning to teach and got so sick right after Christmas that year.  Back when Judy first made me homemade chicken soup and showed me how.  And her, and Maria my mentor teacher, how both those good women took turns stopping by to give me care.  Pon Pon handed me a bag of Brazilian chocolates at my car and gave me a million kisses on my head.  We could see our breath.  I live in Southern California, it was almost midnight, I have a sweet artist's studio in the canyon that was calling me home.  All these darling Brazilians.  My sister D and her dear kids, moving away.   I made soup or dumplings for everyone who took care of me this year, for all this precious family here who helped me find my way.  My cherished friends.  I am eating a bowl now.  Thinking about the year that just passed.  Sending cosmic soup with thanks to Mike, my dear friend, on vacay in the BVI.  Remembering how in February in a panic I called him, then drove the Sonoma coast not sure what would be around the bend. Readying myself to leave and come here, all the way South.  The hand-cut life I've glistened up down here since then.  Crafted on nothing but pure love.  Love and lots of help.

Love and thank yous.  Which always work whenever you remember to cook them in.

The s-h coming-together-sound of the teaching sea

My apartment seriously looks how it used to when I was a drunk.

This is funny, happened in less than two days, is because the place is so hobbit-small and on my mind because I have a teleconference with Erika my writing partner today.  My 30 some pages of submission are creative non-fiction circa 95-96.  When I lived with and shared a room with Fannon or Kev or Kareen.  The days of sour boy stink on the air and layers of wet towels, insides of cigars, empty bottles to wade through on the floor.

Not that my floors are covered with blunts and empties now.  Today it's clothes and books.  All I own, all I came to California with and all I've spent my money on since I've been here, too.  Clothes and books, travel and food.  The essence of this girl.  Very little I need beyond a splotch of land, the words and close proximity to the sea.

And my little room of my own.  This I firmly believe:  a girl needs a small crafted space that's just hers, where she can have and relish her stillness.  Mine's a 2x6 spot only big enough for a desk on the back end of my closet!  But it's from this sense, the stillness and silence that a woman, that I, that she can be.

I've had little motivation to do anything these days then snuggle on the couch and eat or sit cozy in a coffee shop and write. Or to be quiet beside the sea.  My soul is wanton. Longing and turning flat if I try to ignore its mercurial wants.  I stress easily at any demands other than these.  It is winter:  this is the way.

So I walk a lot.  With Serena up the canyon to the Top of the World.  Around the curves and corners of  Newport's marshy back bay.  From the free parking lot on Forest all the way to Thalia Street on the beach.  Last Saturday someone shaped kelp in to a heart bigger by twice the size than my quiet little room.  It stilled me, gave me pause just a minute, glistened my own heart as it pushed me on.  When I got to Thalia I sat a long time watching the surfers there.  The water was aqua green even folded again and again by its rippy whiteness.  It was shadowed in spots by great seaweed blooms.  There are two breaks and I studied them and also just listened.  Listened and felt the sea. The sound of s and h come together.  This consistent noise that is hushhhing or rushhhhing depending on the state of the soul that hears.

That's how I feel, like there was one life behind me with it's own distant sound.  And that there's this other one I am headed towards but can not see.  I can almost feel it though, the way you do sometimes with a sound just before you get to hear.  And that's what I soaked in last Saturday on my walk to Thalia street. The s-h coming-together-sound of the teaching sea.

After Erika calls I'll clean.  Then relish a day to be quiet with me.  This is the in-between.  Being quiet and still, waiting.  The tide will grow and later move me forward towards the next me that I will be.

When the dark time of year gets here

This is the second Friday in a row I have spent with no agenda.  Today and last week included time on my little square deck that's built into the canyon wall.  I deeply soaked in to the feel of the land around me.  The trees, the exotic green, the breeze out of nowhere then gone again, the happy dance it did on my skin.  The sun, on its fall retreat.

Yesterday my cousin Erin called.  I was on my way to the grocery store in Laguna Woods, where everyone is over 70 and more than once I had to help an oldtimer pick out food or manage what was directly in front of them.  I followed my inner knowing it said cook something golden delicious and fatty for me that's what I so, so need.  Erin laughed, totally understanding and in the same spot.  She lost her mom three months ago.  Her mom Mary was young, a teacher, loved the sea and nature, loved her family and to be active outdoors.  In the last year of Mary's life much of those loves were taken from her--that is she had to give them up.  She raised her head anyways and walked with courage and grace through it all.  These past three months I've tried to do the same.  I've been so grief-struck though I couldn't even comprehend the grief itself.

Erin and I found one another on similar shores last weekend, having both finally stopped the ceaseless running, willing to slow down.  How significant  I thought, same weekend as the time change.  No fighting it a second more, and indeed we talked all last weekend in grateful surrender--we had to enter the season of the dark.  It was time.  My body, yesterday, begged for more of the same.  I cooked the most delicious verde enchiladas.   Baked my cousin Erin in.  Laid on my couch and ate them in front of netflix all night, with black cherry soda and red velvet cookies to wash them down.  I was seized, out of nowhere, by the most rapid tears in the middle of a movie of vignettes about different women.  I let them come out and snuggled deeper on my couch. The rain made fat airy sounds on the concrete from out my window screen .  This, this aloneness, this powerless over life's biggest swings and atrocities, this is why people fear the night.  In my Women Who Run With the Wolves book, since Mary died I've drawn the same thing.  The story about Baba Yaga, and the girl who because of her motherlessness must face the dark, hard sides of life.  Those are her psychic tasks, her work in her own personal inner or under world.  To confront the dark or fearfulness that lay within and gain the ferocity of strength that comes by completing that part.

This is what we do on a spiritual level when the dark time of year gets here.  We look at how we are human, often so connected to what we fear.  Tuesday in the afternoon the moon is new... it is Lunar Samhain, or Lunar New Year.  The dark moon after the final harvest of fall.  When we look if we dare at the kneedeep shit, all that detritus that will grow the new seeds in us through this winter's dark.  My gain and blessings this year have been enormous.  Because this is life: the way of circular, spiraling path, of the balance within of human and holy being kept--my loss and pain have also been profound.  I enter the dark hallow now--we all do.  I bless it all, surrender to the hard with the light and good.  It is not good it is not bad, it is rather the seeds of both from inside the same.  We are where we need to be, right on time.  The end, and also, how to begin.

Repost: Wistful and grateful on the night before I go to grad school to become a therapist...

(original posting 5.13.2009
Choptank, MD)

About a month or so ago I went to try therapy.

“Let’s see,” she said. “So you started using drugs regularly at 15. I am sure you have heard that whatever age you start using is the age that you basically stop growing. So we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s time to grow up. You are still, essentially, 15.”

Hmm. Maybe it’s possible that this woman, who for the first 45 minutes of our meeting did not allow me to talk except to answer her pointed questions, somehow missed the part where I mentioned that for over eight years I’ve been on a committed path of recovery and self-help, learning to take responsibility for me and aiming for emotional maturity.

Of the “adult” skills I’ve actually focused on, one has been the willingness to allow others room to be heard; so normally this helps to curb any immediate reactiveness to asinine fucking comments like the one above. But that day on the therapist couch the blood curled around my neck even as I smiled graciously at her opinion, oh, uh-huh, mmm-hmmm. It was later in the session when the radical, albeit kind, honesty kicked in.  When she tried to tell me that my wanderlust and great passion for traveling too were indicators that I needed “to grow up.”

One of the other adult skills I’m really working on is learning to integrate information from various different sources and in the end use them to supplement my own views with all the regularly outputting stimulus of the world. I am learning, in other words, how to trust myself.

Needless to say, therapy, this time, didn’t quite work out.

I was 15 when I first found myself saddled up with my bags and my trinkets, my combat boots and cigarettes, scowling from low down in the passenger’s seat of the blue hatchback my mom behind the wheel, my brother’s perpetual chirpiness behind us his head in the middle between the seats. Up the Baltimore beltway then down 295, on our way to Dr. Lessey in the city. He had an office on Park Ave. On the corner was a soul food joint with bars on the window and a yellow sign for Lake Trout. Across the street and to the left was a store called The Leather Underground.

I had my learner’s permit, I was almost 16, it would soon be my regular, weekly route. Soon enough it was just me in the car. I was never brave enough to try the soul food. The bemused gay men in the bondage store, however, eventually knew this pink-headed purple-booted riot grrl by name. It was the early 90’s and hard to find places like that were ahead of the soon to come piercing trend. Leather Underground was the only place that I knew of that you could go for a belly button ring, and they used a 10 gauge cow-ring, not a bar, and there was nothing girly or petite about it.

Dr. Lessey was soft and gentle with gold spectacles and a sandman peace about him. I always pictured him with a nightcap on, the kind that triangles down one side of the head with a little cotton ball on the end, you know faded cotton-white with light blue stripes. And a candle in his hands.

It was six or eight months that I went to the city to see him. I was touched in a way that I couldn’t get my words to say, I was touched by the kindness of this sweet, quiet little man. I never told him about the pot I was smoking or the drinking that was edging beyond exploratory. I kept us occupied by tales of the girls I hated at school and this new, daring guy who showed up one day by my side, grinning down at me delicious in his eyes, walking me up the stairs to my homeroom. He had just gotten kicked out of public school. I was entranced and a month or so later when the same guy got locked up at Harbour Hospital in South Baltimore, Dr. Lessey encouraged me to go see him. I trusted the good Doctor. I used to bring my friends there to meet him, my brother, my boyfriend even (the boyfriend that I had secured as result of a visit paid to him at South Baltimore’s Harbour Hospital mental ward.) Dr. Lessey looked on in amazement, the only adult who didn’t judge and seemed uniquely interested, when my friend Briana showed up with me in his office sporting her knew Leather Underground navel loop. I loved how much he seemed, simply, to care.

Around the time that I really did start to make changes and work to get my life cleaned up, this would be roughly the spring of 2001, I entered in to another therapist relationship, this time with Father Ed. His was, I think, the fourth “couch” I’d been on by then. He was supplied to me for free by the uber-conservative liberal arts college that I’d already by then dropped out twice from, both times as result of drinking and drugs. Father Ed had me do things like hold fake conversations with the air; the air of course was always a character and usually someone close to me in life. I had to hold pillows tight and close and pretend that they were me. He was the first therapist I ever cried in front of and lord did it make me feel so, so clean. I loved him, Father Ed, for the same reason as Dr. Lessey, he truly seemed to care. That, and one clear, new thing: I was capable, or at least so beginning, of being honest. Truly honest about me. No more hiding the extracurricular’s that were so much a part of my life it wasn’t that I was even purposefully hiding them before, just that I took them so much for granted as a part of how I lived my life. The drugs and the alcohol were, plainly, part of me, of who I was, as natural as air or water or food when it came to the things I did each day. I just never questioned any of it, no matter the consequences or miserable thin vein of fear that seemed to increase with each passing year, feeling like ice in my blood and a cold wall at the base of my heart, steadily growing.

The honesty made all the difference. Clarity is a mixture of willingness, or at least a capacity, to be honest with myself and then trusting me enough to know that my own truth is the one that counts. The therapists that I’ve gained the most from over the years, as I’ve sorted through and grieved out my humanness and wounds, are the ones who’ve made it clear that they care and you can’t fake that, caring is a quality that is or isn’t. I know when it’s true, and more, affront when it is false or faked. In an atmosphere of care one feels safe, and safety is what is required, at least for me, to get to a place where I am willing to get honest with myself—on whatever level, at whatever risk of responsibility it means that I am going to have to take. And good therapy, for me at least, has been no more than the process of showing up to witness that allowing. Good therapists ask the right questions and then let the process of discovery guide its self. I always end up being the one who sees what I need to see just by having a safe place to say it out loud.

So if I’ve learned anything at all over the years, it’s that the answers are indeed within; and that especially it’s not a sign of weakness to sometimes need another’s help in order to get them out. In fact I’d say that empowering oneself like that is all about being Brave. But that other person doesn’t get to tell you what to do. They definitely don’t get to yield control over your ideas. Self-trust is the goal to me, and so it was that over a month ago my life started to turn around at its darkest point: what I thought would be the beginning step in self-discovery when I took the plunge on to a new couch turned out actually to be the exercise I needed to affirm the ending of self-doubt. And now that I am here, doing the Real Work with a book and some close friends as my guides, I am realizing that the two concepts are actually one and the same.

With the mere mind and heart

I moved to Laguna because one day in May on a field trip my students and I hiked the canyon at Crystal Cove. That day for the first time since I'd been south I felt the mama impulse in my blood.  That means I could feel the land rise and fall, it means that my breathe as if breathing earth particles caught then plummeted in silent then threshold spirit-plateaus.  Like the earth was actually breathing me.  I forgot how it felt to be so connected to the green, even though it was coming to me in my dreams.  I looked on the map when I got back to my room in Huntington that day and saw the wilderness surrounding Laguna.  In the most quiet place in my heart where I go when I get still or maybe where stillness goes when I get my heart I quieted then asked me, I mean spirit-me, what do you want and this little apartment here, that's what, when the silence parted, I could see. Fall has never had such a thrill.

The two first months here I ran in constant press in preparation for grad school which was between two major trips back east.   It was not until Beth came the weekend before last that I could be here, now.  Grief can be so hectic the way it pushes you around.

Tonight I made dinner then sat outside under my plants and twinkle lights the canyon walls above me houses constellating the ridge like touchable stars.  Oh big California, oh rancher artist adobe houses on cliffs I could put 9 of my little apartments inside.  12 if you count your deck.  16 your garage and carport with the at least two antique cars....

In the last two chapters of one of my textbooks for gradschool I read about contemplative therapies. I was sitting in the crazy sun.  I learned that Maslow and others have long issued what came to me those early months my first fall out of college, when I gave myself to poetry and meditation each and every day.  That human consciousness, for most of us, is in its infancy.  That with the mere mind and heart alone we are capable of sheer galaxies inside.  I strapped in, alone, back then and have never stopped enjoying the ride.  Since then it has been my only and final guide.

It's nice to be not so alone in that anymore.  To know what this path has all been for, or to have one tiny clue anyhow.  It's really nice to be outside at dinner, in the warm fall in California, the mama hush cradling me in her round green Laguna arms.

Summer skies stars are fallin all along the injured coast

My coffee in my hand and the sky a colorless balm 6:30 am I was ready.  Then at my car Nici texted nothing out there.  Which I was like shit I know but it says glassy and where we surf midway between here and HB is this sweet small break that is perfect for me who cant surf but is obsessive about learning.  Knee high Kelly waves!!  Boo.

So I am blogging because that is the second best way to unfurl my muscles and soften my stress and relax my bones.  It does not cease to amaze me:  the effect the salt and sun have on my soul.  This is not just hippiedippie as it sounds it is also true.  It is the solitary reason I moved here, all the way away from my family and friends and the land that raised me and the sea that is my own.  Because I need the elements in a bodily, active, daily way.

I am listening to Paul Simon on Spotify, The Rhythm of the Saints.  So remedying for the poet in me and it's been a good year or two since I've started a day with the glory of The Obvious Child.  Should I not have the ocean this morning, I shall instead have this the other tide that moves me.  Words, and muse, which is its own flow all the same.  oooo aaa ooo aaaahhh Summer skies stars are fallin all along the injured coast...In the sixties he just let it out the words the flight the heart of America he moved us on.  I am backstepping now because of all the new which there is to start and it feels scary and huge and insurmountable when it wakes me up in my new bed in my new loft with the peepers chirping out the window their nighttime canyon song.  Surf I don't have to think about.  Just feel and float then rock that shit along.  Just be and let the do happen.  Naturalness surge easy flux of retreat, be still, now move on.  Again, again, yet again.

There is a bonus track called Thelma on Spotify this is re-released, a nice surprise.  I will get the hang of this,  work and school and so on.  I am quite good at in-between I remind myself alot that's what all this is.  It just feels cramped and like I can't move.  That's so not me.

Gratitude goes a long way a day at a time tho.
See~!

The grls,: Annie, me Nic and D in HB

Gray's 10th bday party 9/9/12 xo

Let the earth find them whole again

Full moon mama in me all spirals of nag champa hippie oils lavender and sage...The sun was out yesterday morning in yellow single beams only for an hour.  It cut between the steel hanging of the marine layer the sky the color of dolphins,  the dolphins so close to Nici and I on our surfboards that I could see the shine and divots of their skin.  I could not contain my sounds of glee.  I got pummeled when I tried to catch a wave and came up smiling with some crazy headless determination.  I say headless because the white waves aren't good enough I want to ride real waves and it has nothing to do with fixated mentality, it's a total body thing.

Just like the draw to the ocean always is, my whole life.  It's a peace that satiates me from a wordless place inside but that I can feel run through as real as I can feel the tides of the moon.  And I am living in it now, like that feeling is one big orb I have stepped into, or am born out of.  From deep inside.

Today's the first harvest, holy holy sacred life blessed be.  Me and my religiousity.  My contempt for it, too.  I taught a private english lesson last night that had me jazzed way after it was done.  I watched Kelly Slater surf the men's heat at the Open and stood it awe, I listened to Best Coast on my phone last night, laying in bed.  We are taking our students to the Fair.  I live on the beach in California like I always saw and felt only this is real not the inside bliss feeling that was only a dream.  This morning it strummed in me, my book again, and I told it ok I am coming thanks for letting me know.  I want to worship this earth and her rounds on my knees, I want this majesty of gratitude to pour out in dusted gold ribbons and magnify the love of all the people that I know.  Let their love light the way around the hearts of those they love let the whole world kindle on that flame.  Let the earth find them whole again finding her let them have reason to be grateful under sky.

Lunar Lammas again, we turn we turn, these are my thanks. I'm Amazed~

All those words I can't contain

Once Erika (click on that link!  watch her book trailer!!!) started an email with What a day, what a day...

It's a line from an Erykah Badu song.  In the frenzy of  my response, all those words I can't contain--I don't know if I ever got to the part of mentioning how often I find those words singing through my own head.

Under the palm trees in the dark, sweet breeze tonight.  In my car, sunroof open, just past 11.  On Instagram, which I tool around with at the strangest times....like standing in the middle of my room after a bike ride next thing for 10 straight minutes everything else but this damn dumb little phone dissolves like my brain has wires hooked to it, or I'll be on my feet in the kitchen ignorant to the dogs or my roommates me on my phone screen waiting for tea water boil.  In my car, after the longest most eventful day ever, in the front seat after the lights and engines are off tonight.  Smelling the cool, sweet breeze.  Hearing the palm leaves fan.  Tooling around on Instagram.  Thinking What a day what a day.

Sometimes, it just feels nice to turn your brain off.  To hit a button and then space.   My ears were wet after Shavasana tonight.  Seeping little leaky tears.  D rang the gentle chime to pull us from meditation and I realized it was my last class with her here in Huntington, and I thought of when I started in March and my intentions for healing my body and strengthening, and how strong I am now.  I laid there feeling my heart open from the center, feeling my energy running up and down the course of me smooth as if my spine were train tracks in a long looping line.   Mandy's wedding invitation came in the mail.   And this too, this too.  So much else.  These sisters of mine.  Me, single, alone.  Not at all alone.  Them.  Never at all.  This too, this too my god this too.  I can not even register today.

Life I thought, yoga tears wetting my face.  I don't get you.  Happy, grateful tears, and compassionate tears.  Some of each, so close to the same.  This too.  So many different this-es, so many, many too-s.

What a day what a day~

The only ones who get it

The week after next will be one year since I got in the car to drive to California.  With no place to live and no real plan.  I arrived at Mike's in Newport Beach on the 8th of August.  I had my first breakfast with Mo on her backporch in Santa Cruz on August 15.  Days later she took me north to farm and meet Em and Bebe and Nicky and Jon and everyone.  These people who became my precious family in SoHum.  I have messages saved on my VM  that make me smile or grateful...Erika saying she's closing in on a book deal.  Erin shhhmrrring....My brother repeating the word farts...  My sohum fam, one from Em and one from Jon each calling me Mama in character, with a tone of voice that immediately draws laugh-based tears.  That was one year ago.  On August 15 this year I will move in to my own studio apartment in Laguna Beach.  A mile up the canyon, surrounded by green trees.

I haven't had my own place since I officially left behind Easton, my job at the Community College, and the final remnants of life I'd created in Chestertown in May 2010.  The next two years were intermediary.  A long, major crossing.  I went to my then love Brandon in April 08 and said I want to go to California for grad school. Four years later my application is now in, same school as the grad packet that was in my hands all the way back then.  I am waiting.  Awaiting.  Primed to move, to lock things in.  This next step so timely, and so long in coming.

One night this past week I watched the sun go down with Jott on the other end of the phone.  I cried a lot and put some things to rest.  Her friendship one of the prime bounties that came from those two years in-between.  I talked to Gretchen another night and laughed the wild laugh the whole time.  This women who continues, again and again, to see to my rounds.  Bebe called Thursday and I lay on the ottoman in my room, my back half-hanging down, in the lavender-smelling orange-lit candled-air.  My fan turning, Bebe and I in communion over the passing of her mom.  Sonoma, my life with her, just one corner ago--just January--but so much living this year that it feels so long ago.  I did little this weekend other than sleep on the clear blue beach.  I swam, alot.  Finally.  I feel whole, rhythmic, much as I can connected and whole to the many different parts of all of who I am.  

In Starbucks now a dad holds his baby girl on his lap in the most tender, devoted way.  It's just the same gesture as my brother with his baby girl on Skype this morning.  Not one part of me considers my life any differently than it is right now.  Wishes that it had gone any other way.  Here I am, with me, about to go whole-heartedly after me.  My place, my book, my students and teaching, my avocation.  The beach and bike rides the sun and palm trees.  I am quiet, not in awe, just still.  I wanted everything on the shelf.  Every cake and muffin every tart and scone.  Every last treat so I helped my self.  A cookie and a donut.  Sometimes a girl deserves more than just the one.

It's quiet, sometimes, the little marks and occasions that pass.  How we are the only ones who get it, who really know.    

Sometimes it's suntime

The jasmine here is delirious.  Some day it will be normal to say well back when I first came to California I remember smelling the jasmine. It comes on right when lightening bug season comes on in Maryland and I would smell it riding my bike around the little beach town where I went to live and write in the sun like I always said I would.  I would smell it and wonder what godly gypsy-scented air is that so high and full in my nose, even more flowery sweet than honeysuckle is?  I would smell it and almost gag and think my god earth we get it, you're here!  With your fertile sticky yellows and greens.  I would smell it on the way to cut loose at the beach for just an hour between grading exams and writing and on the beach I would smell the seaweed and feel so in love with my moment to moment life it felt like there was a halo in my heart.  Or I would smell it at a light in Corona when the white sun so fierce as it grew more and more close shone down on my head through the sunroof of my 20 year old car and I would pretend I was in a movie about California driving PCH in a convertible driven by a scarf wearing 1950's actress glamorous as she was innocent.  So much whimsy it's serious, or is it the other way around?

That will be someday.  For now I am in that funny place that happens to me right before I get truly comfy.  Reviewing all the reasons to split.  Which is not so much review as it is thinking of all the amazing other things going on in all the other places I could be right now.  Eeeek.  There are permaculture havens in Equador.  There are tribes of aloha spirits in Hawaii and in one week the Big Island came to me three different times.  This is what happens.  I get to the footwork part of actualizing what I really want and then this wild card I have inside me flips.  Which is why I will go to the woods to feed my spirit.  It's funny Ed Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros literally just sung 'sometimes said its suntime let the sun shine on my mind' and it seems to fit.  Exactly.  There's all these million needs we need.  But really, they come down to just a few.  I need the sun and the sea and sand.  I need the green breathing trees.  I need poetry and relationships and love and to move my body.  I need to say yes to my spirit when it asks can you hear.  Sometimes it's suntime....

That's not a lot.  Why's saying yes take so long to learn though?

I can see it green and surrounding me

It's curious to me, the search words that bring people to my blog.  Tonight there were three different google hits   in which a person was clearly looking for a post I'd written in the past, so it makes me wonder who's thinking of my words, and why?

I like to know that people read.  Writing is my discipline, my religion, my way to relax and reflect and no matter what I will always do it, but the instant audience thing sure had helped a lot.  It's a different world for a writer even since 2008, when I first started this blog.

That's wild to think--2008.  I was living on Anngar Farm then with an asparagus patch shooting off three to four grocery bags of stalks every day this time of year.   Now I am in Huntington, up late doing professional development for school and getting my student's semester exams ready in piles all over my bed.   And listening to the earth, who talks to me, first as a light draft in the back of my spirit til I say yes, then into buyount ways I feel balloon in my chest.  It's the roundest sweetest longing, the earth calling me back.  I'm an Earth Mama, a beach girl child spirit, a poet, a Wise Woman.  Through and through.

I can see it, green and surrounding me like being able to wear tree breath.  It is a plant that I see, so ripe it looks wet, an image tucked deep in the base of me.  It's been three months since I came to Socal, three months so fast but full I could put a foot on each darling day and walk my life through like it were a long set of stairs.  And now I am entering a new phase, and there is the traffic of Main Street every moment out my window, the stir of my roommates in the kitchen, the barking of suburb dogs and pitch of suburb kids.  I think of my fall in Humboldt, I think of the Sierras, where this vision of the earth is calling me, I think of the deep quiet inside that clings to wilderness for peace.

Summer's here, the earth talks to me, I've learned the necessity of listening.  After three months of preparation, I'm writing my book.  I'm planning a trip.

Something new and beautiful

In front of my house where I park my car on the street there are two towering trees one is a pine and one is a palm.  I always said I would live at the beach with pine trees in my front yard.  When I pulled up tonight I got out of the car and had that unglued feeling, not a bad one, just this sense of not being connected to the moment, like there was a barrier between me and the edges of things.  I paused in the yard, its many shades of dark almost-black greens.  Checked myself, I wasn't just peaceful, not just content.  I actually feel happy, deeply satisfied.  Why were the outlines such a blur?

You got in your car and drove to California and now you live in Orange County and teach for a living.  I literally said this to myself, standing there, laptop in one hand empty coffee cup in the other.  The night blue sky.  Then I laughed, sort of out loud, because I forget sometimes that that's what I did, so caught up am I in the life I live now.  That was 9 months ago...it feels like an entire other world.

And so what happened tonight, out there in the yard after subbing for the evening class at school, was me catching myself in between phases...the old life and who I was behind me now, the forward and what will be entirely on the verge.  And me, for a millisecond, aware that I am in between.  Changing again, in a soft and gentle, entirely real way.  Changes that on a personal level I wasn't even aware had to be made.  Mom said to me today on the phone just look at all you've done in the past year, look how far you've come.  I used to be able to see, to see that rearview really easily.   But it's blurred now, and I am creative, and thoughtful, and layered in the richest ways.  I dive deep within, so that I can not see myself from the middle--unable as we are to look in on what we're looking at because we're busy looking.  Right!?  Periodically I dip and dive under and into myself, I resurface with something new and beautiful, or recycled and valuable, re-earthed from the endless depths of the cycles and processes of me.  It's so common for me to bridge both these inner and outer experiences of my self that full months will pass without me noticing that that's what's going on.  It is the most beautifully natural thing in the world, it is human, it will never end, and I am thankful I got a glimpse of it tonight.  I am at it again.  I can't see where I am at or where I am going.

But I know for sure I'm on my way.

Maybe we should just get married

Dear Huntington Beach,

If I haven't told you yet, I think you're so cool.  I get a little silly-hearted over you and I'm thinking, maybe we should just get married...?  Since I always want to be near you and already need your breath to breathe....

Thanks for the banner week...Spring came, all the prophecy and vision with the Equinox and how it turns.  My heart is moving my muscles in all new ways with my yoga practice...I turned 35, on a new moon.  It started a whole new wisdom cycle for me, too, according to the wise woman ways.  Cycle 5.  I can't even believe it and hope such beneficent fortune is here to stay...

To celebrate your delirious flowers and countries of sand and palm tree wind...and the timing of it all...
I published my first e-book of poems.

5 Poems, available here   


It's dedicated to Erika, but was inspired by you.  I like being available on Amazon, and most of all I like this momentum, its slow steady build.

Thanks, Huntington, for this, for the poems and mornings in bed, the street fairs and yogi bliss, your library and the beach in my hair.

I love you forever,
kel

To the pace of my body

There was green glitter all over my forehead when the popping noise sounded off and Laura started yelling for Clay.  I was trying on St. Patick's Day adornments for class tomorrow, sparkle hat and glasses to match, and the cornbeef and cabage had overflown and was running a thin stream in to the front burner.  Laura's stove is the original from 1950.  There were yellow flashes of electricity when I got to the kitchen.  And so I short circuited the oven's electrical wiring in my new house.  Because already I love my students so damn much.

It's been a long, full day and now I am up waiting for the corn beef to slow cook in the crock. I feel bad about the oven but Laura's boyfriend, who lives with us and dotes on her in a way that makes me want to be taken care of, assured me it's "not a biggie."  I still feel like a doof.  The good news is the food will flavor nicely in the crock, though my body wishes I was crawling in to bed right now.  Monday night I slept fine as a light wine that scents the side of the glass it's so rich, finer than I have in years.  I mean years.  I was asleep by 9:45, hours earlier than I usually turn the lights out, and didn't even blink until my alarm went the next day at 7.  It felt amazing.  And since then, since Sunday really when I refused to get out of my pajamas for the day, my life has been slowing down.

Slowing down to the pace of my body.  I lost my keys in plain sight Friday night, this was divined, my hike started and I had to cancel on attending because I didn't find my keys until in the meantime a ghost from the past called, I was meant for this call and we talked a two hour talk me and the ghost of me and him and the ghost of him, a talk writ by the fates, the accordance of my heart since then...since then and when I found out about Brandon...well.  I am three weeks in to my life in California and for the first time since I left Anngar Farm in November 2008--I am not walking away from something.

I am instead still, planted.  Hand-choosing.  Picking what I want for my life, plucking it like the sparkled jeweled fruit it's meant to be, right and clean out of the air. Except it's not from the air, it's fruit ripe from three years of growing strong and growing long underground.  And I watch as the swirls of land and dirt and funk and past in which this lovely orchard so painstakingly hibernated and grew, I see it backwash and swirl and swish away...I feel it loosen and fall.  Departing, I let the hulls go, I let the seeds break from me as the ground I am, the ground I was, the ground I can be.  Who I am meant to and still able to become mere mini blossoms now, soon to drip with fragrance fat with celebrated juices hung low on this thick and dusky and also taught and new ground.

It all falls away, it all is one.  Present as I've ever intended to be, my body asking me slow, still, quiet, rest.  My dreams dancing from me NOW NOW NOW .  I read yesterday the first pages of a novel from Aunt Sharon by Jed Rubenfeld.  He said "happiness" is living in the moment--overcoming the haunts that command us from the past, while "meaning" exacts something entirely different.  It is reinhabiting the past in order to live for our future.

I have both.  I am not lucky.  I chose this route.  Popping sounds and green glitter forehead, ghosts once inhabited swirling away, fruit and sleeplessness, seeds and all.  I will let my body be my lead, trust her as the deeper source of me, my body not so much stuck in the center but the actual center, taken for granted as it is.  Loyal always as I've moved through every stage and especially all the many times I do so only half-awake.  I will trust the timing of this body, as pure memory of the timing of all these seconds of this one little life that have led me to right here.  Dreams quaking and fruit-juicy as a birds chest in spring, surely breathing in and out doing in this moment the exact right thing.

Gather the Women, Save the World

International Women's Day was yesterday.

The first time I heard of the day was 2006, I was living in Chestertown--Kingstown, actually--just across the river past the bridge.  With Brandon in our asbestos green house once called the Pod with the pine tree forest firepit and singing angel garden yard, a place he and I tagged Truslow Road.

Just before that, Brandon and I spent 18 months living on the road, it was a journey my spirit felt compelled to and we lived from his truck in the forests of this country, and followed serendipity signals around the nation that led us in connection with the earth and her rhythms, and we lived the idea that this connection alone held the secret to our futures, to all of humanity, to life sustaining itself happily in the years to come on our planet.

Our last stop on that trip was in Boulder, at our friend Mika's for 10 days, we went with her friends and worked and played on different organic farms.  We soaked in mineral springs in the mountains and laughed and laughed and laughed some more, and on the way out of town I picked up a Mind-Body-Spirit mag with a small little press release about Gather the Women.  This was October, we were heading east again, and Gather the Women was having an international meeting--small little circles of women gathered, circle by circle, around the world. In a month it would happen, with one to take place in DC.

I went.  With a Renaissance woman named Natalie from Chestertown whose homemade blueberry muffins we used to sell in the coffee shop there, and to this day they are the best I've ever had.  Gather the Women was, and still is, about gathering as people to connect on and share the values that women intrinsically bring to this world.  As women with these inner qualities of instinct, compassion, patience and understanding, strength, care-giving and unconditional motherly love, it's about how to use our inborn gifts to literally unite the world.  We do it a moment at a time by being who we are within, by teaching all people, starting with one another, how to value our innermost selves.  And it's so, so important to teach it to, to love and help heal, our men.

It's an action, for sure, political as it comes and like all actions with the most lasting change, it's one that is always, always going on just underneath it all, living room to living room, fire circle to circle, kitchen table over tea. Urgent Message From Mother: Gather the Women, Save the World is a book that came out after the movement began and it gave words to the heart-breaking and re-finding experience I personally had with Brandon those years on the road.  On the road, on an indistinct path for a deeper, more significant meaning in my life, a meaning that didn't include but was defined by my inner-connection with all of Life, with all the people and places and experiences it brings.  I recommend this book for all, women and men.

My path has been one with many, many big and little pieces of change, and it has always been about this.  Connecting to others, to the earth, the tides, to the hearts of friends and strangers alike, it continues to be my single most focus.  It is reverent to me, what it means to be really alive.  It's how to stay awake a day at a time, and how to wake others up to the same.  Our inner selves, the part that authentically counts. Gather the Women gave to me, to my path, a name.

There have been countless ladies, and men, living these innermost values.  I can not list all the ones who've so impacted me since then, but what I can say is that I am in a time in my life when living those innermost values, more than anything else in the world, has opened me up to my own true happiness and bliss.  It has impassioned and inspired me, given me endless strength where again and again I thought there was none.  During a time on our planet when what you have on the outside is what appears to count the most, the people whose hearts, and how they are willing to live openly with them, those people out there who've happened in to my life because of their own process of waking unto them selves, they have made all the difference.  They are the guideposts along the way.  As I've gone along, I have certainly gathered a host of phenomenal women and men.  We are a tribe world-strong.

I've come a long ass way since I started with Bran back then.  We all have~staying put in your own little neighborhood, or out there somewhere uncharted on the road~

Just how far can we still go?

If I came to you tomorrow and said let's run away

Today a week ago I was traveling freeway to freeway, smog traffic sunny heat, going inland to the base of the San Gabriel mountains.  There is a town there sweet as a nineteen fifties black and white scene.  It's surrounded by what looks to me like desert but lush enough for an every Friday night street festival and a flirty furtive smiling crescent moon hung big as the dream of a child in the setting sun sky.   Called Monrovia, where, after a gazillion hour drive from Seattle to Eugene to Socal, my friend Paul was after helping his girlfriend move.

That same morning I left my temporary home at Mike's in Newport Beach to move half my stuff in to my room in this sweet little boho home in Huntington Beach, a town away.  The other half I tucked between the surfboards and washing machine in Mike's garage, to be moved after my 24-hour marathon trek to Monrovia to see Paul and his lady, then Hollywood to visit my old homeboy from highschool Dave, then Hermosa to chill with Casey from my recent Ocean City life.  It was, so to speak, my last hurrah of a seven month grand hurrah called My Independent Gypsy Queen Road Warrior Days.

Weeks earlier, when I was still crashing in Sonoma County in my friend's cottage, I called Erika and unloaded about a month of instinct on her.  This was early February and the gist of my emotional out pour was me expressing that my gut was telling me it was time to leave Northern California.  I was absolutely fear struck, shrunk and constricted, terrified.  I had exactly enough money left to start a new life, create a home of my own somewhere special, but this was such a novel thought next to the open-road lifestyle I'd been living since August.  I did not want to pay attention to what my instinct was telling me, what my dreams and emotions were saying.  It seemed so foreign, so suffocatingly unknown.

At the end of my download Erika said one thing:  Call Mike Wallace.  He's lived here in Orange County since 2002, in fact, in my dream journal where I write my heart's goals, there is a note from  November 2008 when I left Brandon, our six year relationship, Chestertown, our farm.  It says: Beach, Sunny, Warm: walking distance.  Volunteer/teach ESL.   Write!  And then under it, call Mike.  This was 2008, November, me a week or so out of my six-year-shoulda-married-the-guy relationship.

My brother, Mike's best friend, called while I was on the other line talking to Erika and he literally said the same thing:  Well, did you call Mike?  Mike, breezy--Southern California--as he is, was like yea totally, no worries.  So that was that.  The urgency kicked in then, I followed this pressing movement in my blood to get here as fast as I could, and within 36 hours of my arrival had job and house potentials, both of which came through.  I finished my move this past Sunday, started my job Monday, just now got the last of my things:  my writing materials unpacked, set-up happily at my desk that came with my room.

Last Friday I was sitting on the freeway in standstill traffic on my way to see Paul.  I was tired, eager, a little shook.  The windows of my car were all the way down, my hair wild with wind, the sun hard and happy on my face and shoulders.  Seven months of on the road, and this was it: I was so ready for them to end.   The feeling of my life!  About, once more, to begin.  Anxious tired and excited, at that moment flooding my car came Scotty Avett from the i-pod scrounging out the opening notes of November Blue.  A live version from years ago, a song I haven't randomly heard in years.  Now The Avett Brothers, long before they played with Dylan and Mumford and Son on the Grammy's, used to play this little backroom bar in Chestertown we all loved called Andy's.  Those boys used to crash out on Bran's old floor on the corner of Kent and High after their shows...

Part of my January-February-passing, the emotions of it, the underlying wateriness really going on when I called Erika, was what it might mean to me to settle in to a home again, like I once had with Brandon and all our family-friends in Ctown.  To be happy.  And the thing is, the night before I moved out of Mike's to go see Paul, I got a call from Sam, who used to live in that old place with Brandon and Russ on the corner of Kent and High, circa 2001...Sam wanted me to know in case I didn't that Brandon is getting married.  I didn't.  So hearing that song, a song Brandon and I danced barefoot and happy to in the sidestage grass at Floydfest the year before I left, a song that to this day is my song full of regrets about my failures at love and not being able to stay, well it was Timing.  It was like Life saying Listen, no matter what, if you just Listen to your self than I promise you I got this.  Just listen, and trust, like you always have.

It feels so good to be home now.  Forgiveness, you know?  Forgiveness of your self, and what seems bigger than your control.  Letting the past, which really means regrets, go.  There was a moment that that happened, at Mike's before I moved out.  The kind of moment you cant manifest, you just have to let happen.  The kind of moment that surprises you because you've been waiting so long on it that you gave up the idea that it would ever really come.

So peaceful and fresh, so good it feels to stop moving.  And, to move on.  To begin, finally, again.

I cheated my way through.

Math and sciences were never easy for me.  I almost failed 10th grade chemistry, to pass in the end with a D.  Geometry that same year I cheated my way through.

But put me down in a garden, have me play all day under the sun and in the dirt.  Finish it with fresh foods and songs and rituals and music around the fire.  Now teach me the names of bacterias and fungis, tell me how to worship carbon renewal.  Make bioremediationnnnn the most sacred sound.  I will learn, I will cherish, I will thrive.  I will sing.

Suddenly life, all of it, is the most primal joy and easiest thing in the world to know.