Starting when you're an infant

It is spring out.   It smells like spring, like May in Maryland on Washington College's campus, like warm soil and thick juicy blades of grass and trees indulgently fat with cherry blossoms on their ends.  Like those big pink fluff balls that make the air in May look full of pink snow.  It smells like potential, all the time, buoyant and life-giving, and also like salt.  Like flowers dripped with dew of the sea.  Palm trees prattle, destiny leaves full of future's sound.  Whiny dogs fight it out every morning in a funny barking match, I live in the suburbs again but maybe they dont call it that when your downtown is a beach?  Out my window I awake to Laura's mourning doves.  One of them laughs, I swear to God I didn't know they did that, but look it up.  It does.

I sent Erika edits today after staying up til 11:30 with her latest book in hand, wrote about 600 words today on mine.  It's shy of my 2000 a day goal, but for easing in to what will become my routine...I'll take it.   Last evening it was Huntington's street festival, live music and vendors and veggies and stands, and when the night came on with that big ol moon I drove to explore a new section of my town in the direction of the library.

And then, for the first time since 2005, I got totally giddy and spinny over books.  So much so--and I am thinking of my 33rd birthday here when Katie had to lead me out of Laila Rowe by the elbow because of all the sparkly pretties--that I actually got breathless in the basement poetry section when I put the seventh book on the top of my stack.  And I had to gently, gigglingly, lead myself out.  It feels so good to be so nerdy.  I haven't lusted over library or books like that since Oregon in 2005.

It takes one full year to get settled in to a place, I've learned that as the years have gone.  In a year you can tell the seasons, the in-breaths and outs of the land, the tilt of the sky and what it means by certain winds.  I did yoga in the park today, made my first just-by-happening friend.  I am counting days already, eager to soak to soak it all in.  On the beach Sunday I introduced myself to the sand, to the ocean I said a little prayer.  I was always scared of the Pacific, it's crazy I get it, and I've begun to let that go.  I know the Atlantic so well I can tell her tides with my eyes shut, tell the weather just by feeling her swell.  That's what 34 years starting when you're an infant will do ya.  

But now, as I round out the last days of year 35, I'm hitting re-set.  Getting myself settled, letting life lead me much as I am slowly allowing myself to start to lead it.  Ready, but like a baby now.  And okay with it. Just setting myself down to breathe, to learn a while.  Willing to crawl way before I run, willing to learn really, long as it takes me, how it is that you walk this land.  Giddy and spinny, all the things I love close as my own hands.

The Adventures of Charlotte Bliss. California, poetry & tidbits.

~Sebastopol, 9/18/11

In California everyone knows what an Americano is, the light still slants the same dark yellow in the fall, and asada always comes with cilantro and lime.

~

I told you help me remember this the body has a body all its own
The poems are back again, little do you know this is truth about us
already written
how timelessness aches to find someone
willing to come to life
the song

~
I love spontaneous shuffled-ipod moments that sum it up.  that cant be planned.

12 song round-up, driving out Ukiah down the 101.

1. Home.  Edward Sharp...
2. Sweetest Thing.  The Waifs
3. Tree.  Blitzen Trapper
4. Below the Hurricane.  Blizten Trapper
5. Lie Detector Test.  Sage Francis
6. No Dough.  The Mamas and Papas
7. Wasted.  Brandi Carlile
8. Dreams.  Brandi Carlile
9. Oh Dear.  Brandi Carlile
10. Speed Law. Mos Def
11. That Hump.  Erykah Badu 
12. Tiny Cities Made of Ashes.  Modest Mouse

ahhh, poems~
masquerading as mere sound

~
Nobody wants you when you're old and gray, they'll be some changes made
~

Bodega Hwy, The Russian River...
so what i dont have money.  i also dont give a damn.
~

"In San Francisco, everything is more bohemian, and a good deal like Paris." --Alfred Hertz, 1910

~

9/20/11

You met me, I want to tell him, when I had my at-home body.  Might as well of been my winter-weight.  Comforting, taking of food and tv.  Low light of evening, settling sounds of night in the comfort of mom's home.  It falls so easy in to flopping. In to not taking care of myself.  I ran yesterday for 45 minutes, the whole time next to the sea.  I walked around town twice, once before that to the market and once later, in the afternoon, to the beach.  California is the active high-bodied vitality.  Of how to live.

~ 

It's not cryptic!  Some things I just keep private on here

~

the girl w the pendant of her grandmother's also has genuine, kind eyes. 

~

maybe she is a student?  probably.  i want to tell her.  hold tight to this freshness.  the vitality will try to disappear.  the maintenance of which will be all that matters in your times to come.

this is not california.  just, soul.  that which can not be taught.  but practiced.  well-practiced in to a disciplined gold.

~

i love coffee shops.

it's hot in Central California,

& who cares the boys club

I may never get in?

~

Sebastopol, finally~these are my ppl.

groovy as they come.

SponDown. On reaching goals, and hulahooping

The sunshine is what woke me, yellow light through the house and it was only 7 am.  I slept all night on the couch, which I almost never do and it felt like a treat because Tuesday is my Saturday morning one of the two days of the week that my alarm doesn't go off at 4:45 so if I want to stay up late playing sonar til I pass out in front of the TV I can.

Now it's gorgeous out, I was thinking I would go running before I drive to Salisbury so Chico can finish my tattoo. I spent almost three hours fucking around on facebook and the endless zoom of the intraweb, which felt good just letting my brain work it all out that schedule schedule discipline of working two jobs in the service industry hello hello how can i help you oh let me get that for you mam oh no thank you SMILE SMILE LAUGH GENTLE (take it easy) yep you bet, have a great day.

Tribe was the first song on my Pandora, I am full with the things that make me full.  I am heartened by the heart that makes me love, I am loving the loves that hearten my loving heart.  I am full with my life, it is not even mid-March, it is sunny out, there is good music there are great fun frieds who are wild and learning to be wilder still and the first part of my book is done.  The first part of my book is DONE!

I can't believe I am going to say this because for some reason Jay-Z is my fave hiphopper to hate on which has nothing to do with him and most definitely goes back to funny teasy rivalry with my brother, soooo: D.O.A. and the guitar in it is siiick.   The serendipity of that is that it is a song against using the auto-tuner, which just lately I learned from my boy Ben is the mechanical device used to correct pitch and loop voice samples and so forth and that makes me sick, and is what I hate about contemporary music.  All the contemporary music shit and tv shit and so forth.  WHERE the hell is original thought original anything?  People are scared of originality (same ol boring ass story: people are SCARED of themselves.  People will always thusly fear what is sacred. ) I am mad in to rock and roll right now.  Last week we went to the Pub in town the one on 8th street which back in the day was sorta seedy but since the renovations is the place to be and the women rocked the shit out of that place and I felt so happy to be a grrrl, to be in to music as a grrrl hearing the grrrls who're also in to music and performance and their own bright shine, to be on top of my life, to have turned in 34 pages the day before to Erika.  That night kicked off four of running of lots of work and just little tiny snips of sleep.  My dad says "I'll sleep when I'm dead!" so maybe its an in the genes kinda thing.

Last night I told Terra I better get out of the way before I step on a small kid with my stilleto, we were at a baby shower for our friend and coworker and I had just set down the dip I made on to the table.  Stilletos and dip that's about what I have to offer a baby shower, that and the wise wild wisdom but it wasn't a gathering quite like that so I was just dressed up, clearly single, kid-less, and pretty in spring pink.  My other single gal friends were similar, on the outskirts, some drunk.  There are a lot of us and I guess the reason I am happy to be pretty and single in spring pink is because I went through this whole baby thing, after the marriage thing in the fall, this is because of course I am going to be an aunt, and each time some new tribal "next" gets tossed in to the ring I have to run the gauntlet of my self to make sure I am on the correct, or at least feeling mostly sure of the course in my life over which I am traveling, at least in this moment, being who I am. Thusly making happy the heart and loves of my life that equate what I "want."

And isn't that it, what we want, and it's funny little recipe made from what we love and who we seem to think we are or try to be.  After seeing Cindy the other week I was brought so clearly back to when I lived in Chestertown and was always, always on the go but not ever engaged in my daily acts, in my moments to moments.  Never having time to stop and chit chat head always running towards the next thing the next the...and most of all always with the underlying pressing feeling pushing me on gogogo by that feeling that there was something else which needed to get done, always this highwired tightness of not being able to relax and feel comfortable.  Never being able to find lasting comfort.  That is so, so gone now and I knew I've felt different for quite a while, peaceful and on solid ground instead of on the run, but it wasn't until my visit with Cin that I saw it for what it was.  That unsettled runningness comes up for peaked moments sure, when and only if I get in a self-hate frenzy of questioning where I am at right now or being too hard on myself.  But there is such adequate, simple relief found even in the challenging middle ground place between meeting and working towards my goals:   I have taken the time to identify what I want by being true to who I am and what I love.  So now I just take the time to engage each day moment to moment by being her.  I have goals and can relax and enjoy life as I be the woman bringing them to fruit.  It's so different, so real and bliss-full to live whole, right where you are.

It's a full life, my hours are busier than they probably ever were in Chestertown, but my energy is fulfilled and that's all the difference.  That is all to say about that now my head is sort of cleaned of original thought and also Dynamite by The Roots is on so I think I want to get up and hulahoop a while now.

It's Been A Good Year (but dont make her lift her skirts or I'll be pissed!)

It's been a good year.  I am sitting in conversation with this guy at the door of a coffee shop in this place called Severna Park and I have not seen him since no shit 1995 (oh my god, how funny I just remembered we were Class Partiers together in the year book, that's why he was explaining so bummedly and borderline apologetically about having to quit smoking!  Holmes my dad's got lung disease c'mon! We're grown up now it's alright...) and all I can think is it's been a good year.

I am kind, and ground myself and remind myself to be present.  It is genuinely good to see him: he is one of the only people from my high school, or the one near where I worked as a teen, that via facebook or some other networking means hadn't been found and labeled: Married, Divorced, Parent, etc and I tell him as much.  I admit I do, now I can check him off in my head.  Our funny little ways of keeping track of one another that get complained about but that at the end of the day matter, afterall.  Me, I have a Mama-Soul as part of my spirit, and a tight-knit tribe of Family which marked me deep in the place that gets marked by how we are nurtured, so knowing where and how people are adds to my security.  I grounded in this, and was happy to connect again to this guy.

But It's been a good year, and that is the line that has the little wick attached.  It's the line that when gionng through my head while walking out of Brian's house this morning in desperate strides towards the nearest wifi-having local coffee shop, triggered the light inside to tell me the Muses are near.  There is no other way to explain this to you if it is not your experience--the best I can do is what I always do when I sit down and write.  Just tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth and follow that little feeling of light.  I do not know when it started but I do know that it is real, it is the most real thing I know.  It is a feeling that comes on inside that alerts me to the inner creativity the boundless place and my duty, my calling here on this earth no matter what else is to bring it to the surface, to midwife it and breathe in to it the life it needs to fly.  And when I disregard it I get short and turn in to an asshole and so help me if you cross my way when I am in the middle of my dance with the Muse.  So help me, that is, should you make her lift her skirts and high-heeled or bare-footed run away.

But what a superstition that is, too?  Writing involves discipline and the most clear lesson I learned in the past two years is to not underestimate what happens by simple alchemy of action. Showing up, not bitching, and doing what the hell's got to get done, which almost always is what's right in front of me. It's more than just saying ahhh yea I will start with It's been a good year because that is where the little light is attached.  It's also bringing in to the coffe shop two books that really turn me on and reading a while this morning, and even more it's about sitting down especially when the light hasn't or doesn't feel like it's going to come. 

It's been a good year.  In November it was the Harvest New Year and starting out--the first week of the new year!--my bank account was in the red.  So what was in front of me was get a better job and get your finances re-ordered, no matter what. So I did because after the last two years of my life dont ever underestimate my hustle.  Turns out now I get to manage this way hip, way mellow local coffee shop in the Pines where I live.  It's brand new and the boss needed someone with experience in community building and coffee-shop culture, which has nothing to do with caffeine and everything to do with supporting and growing your local tribe.  Even the business model functions that way and I brought to this my barista-ing for Peggy those years back at Play It Again in Chestertown, as well as the local art, food and music movement we grew around The Oregon Dialogue.  So far sooo good.  It overlooks the Bay and River on the west side of the inlet of Ocean City.  I watch the sun come up every morning and breathe and exhilarate in how fucking rad it is to be alive. 

And I am writing, and chilling a lot outside, and that is that.  It's been a good year.  In November 2008 I left my relationship of 6 years.  Right after that Josh and I tried to be lovers after a decade of being Muse to one another.  I still believe he was a true love, but we ended too because just because something's true doesn't mean it's meant to be.  Losing him, and leaving Brandon and Chestertown and Anngar Farm all at the same time was the single most painful part of my life and from start to finish it lasted until around the middle of this summer. 

It's been a good year.

I worked for Chesapeake College when I left Bran, I was one of four people who started the GED and community English program that now serves all five counties on the upper and mid Eastern Shore.  I worked my fucking ass off while I was there, and stepped down in May after living in isolation for a year out on the Choptank River and licking my wounds.  I was lonely and needed family and friends. I went on a month long sabbatical in the Pac NW in May and June and while there had more than one other-world experience of being Called again.  I moved back to mom's at the beach after that and partied like a rock star all summer long and still found that I had one more hall to cross to transition my life from Brandon-Josh-Chesapeake to the one that lay beyond.  This stuff cant be made up, you know?  The light within is real, what if that is our only choice, to surrender to the myth of what could be and give it our all to bring it to life?  How about learning that the only way to do this is to do it!?  And what about the struggle of being a woman and feeling this is the work you're meant to do?  This is subject matter for another post (or a whole damn book, ehem...) but what about that?  I know plenty of artist men whose art is their main and only priority.  What about when you're a woman with the same compulsion, what happens then? When the pain is that bad I know now that actually it's my only choice, to believe in this mid-wifing and keep breathing and trusting in the birth about to come.  The pain is my spirit--not a religious thing I am talking about the place inside of I AM--calling out a red alert to listen the hell up.

It's been a good year.  Tuesday night I watched Candace, Jessica, Shanika and LaShae walk in their caps and gowns and receive their Maryland State High School Diplomas.  They were four of 43 graduates from Chesapeake in just the last six months!  And at one time I held each of those girls hand in hand.  I hooped and hollered from the audience because I dont work there anymore so now it's okay for me to be wild and exuberant and un-professional even if it seems I'm acting a fool.

It's been a good year.  I dont live in fantasy anymore about a man who's love will finally change or set me free.  I dont dream of someday when I get to do.....all these millions of different passion-fueled things.  For the first time in my life I wake up now and just live today.  Seriously.  It's the first time in my life I've ever done that, you dig how crazy that sounds?  The passing from then to now was long and great and so dark at times that I often forgot what path I was on.  But I am me today and at peace with who I am.  All I need to do now is trust in her day to day. 

And pay attention to when the wick-light comes on, by listening and more, taking action on what's right in front of me.  By practicing what I learned in those two years which is easy to say but takes a while to get the footwork right. It sounds silly maybe but what the hell is there other than saying yes ok, the next step is just be present that's how right now that I can Show up, and the peace is inside knowing that the rest will be what it will be. 

Date Weekend with Me, Ashland

Hey goodlookin, how bout a date weekend with me?
Sounds awesome!

downtown, Ashland

I have this ring that Katie surprised me with for my birthday. It is fabulous, strong, gorgeous. I. Love. It. It came from this store we were literally gaga over called Laila Rose, I got woozy and she had to lead me by my elbow out in to the mall. It was nothing but glorious sparkly girrrlie wear all over the place. They played vintage Madonna. They had bright pink knee-high rain boots and matching head-wraps. And the store was sparkle color-coded. Pinks, purples, yellows, light blue. Sections of ribbons and long dangling crystal earrings all the prevailing shade of that part of the store. Hand-painted bags, elbow-length ruffled gloves.The theme of turning 33 this year was The Jesus Year, or better in my friend Paul's words: the year of magical thinking. Truly, I believe I've lived ten lives already, and it's only been 2 months.

Ashland has been unreal. I followed a yearning to pay in advance for three nights here, thinking how great it would be to wake up and not have to go anywhere if I didn't feel like it. What I only sort of anticipated was how great it would be to just wake up, roll over, and decide for the rest of the day to stay in bed...until my evening date at the Shakespeare Festival. At about 3 or so that first day, laying here, writing, reading, watching tv, eating take-out, somewhere in between all of that it occurred to me: I put my resignation in the week before my birthday and then began the planning stages of ending that part of my life. Now I knew all of that as I walked through it, understood even as I was going through the motions that not only was I resigning from Chesapeake College, but too I was closing a chapter that for all basic summation began in 1998 when I moved to Chestertown, on the eastern shore, to go to school. 12 years, in other words, of living on the midshore was coming to an end. Age 21 to 33. 12 years of growing up.

I spent literally two months tying up those loose ends. Finishing what was obligatory at the job and packing. And in all, recognizing in slow pieces, as I recollected and reviewed it all, the woman I have become. I got sober in Chestertown, embraced my intelligence, accepted acadamia even as I stalwartly fought institution, I got a degree, then a profession. I fell in love. I started to grow up, and I started to grow away from myself. I fell out of love. I had to challenge myself to be a big girl and pull up my big girl pants. I moved out on my own. I got my heart broke. I became an adult. I learned that being an adult means being yourself, and learned that really learning to be true to you is a one day at a time loving and nurturing type of thing. A literal deeper and deeper experience of surrender to me, of saying yes to me by accepting how I am feeling and what I need each and every day. It was a hell of a lot to review in two months, and until Saturday, I literally did not have a single day off within that process.

So that yesterday, when I did finally just sit, propped against the pillows writing, reading, sighing, listening, breathing, easing in to me; it was just so simple, and so, so buoyantly sweet. The evening got here and I took my time showering and getting dressed, I listened to funk hop on my Shuga station on Pandora and danced slowly and smilingly all around this little suite, and decorated myself, and celebrated me. I am in Oregon, where I lived for a year with Brandon after we lived out of a truck in the National Forests all over the US for five months. I am here, on the road, on my own. I got seated in the front row of the outdoor theatre for Henry IV within two minutes of curtain. Let me say that again. The theatre, from the outside, looks like a normal theatre, but it has no roof: the ceiling is the sky. Can you even imagine the smile on my face when I discovered this? It was like 70 degrees out 8:30 pm and I could feel the breath coming off the top of the green mountains all around us. The riverwater has lithium in it here. I could here it sing. The sigh in my chest, as I settled in, I believe may have been the most contended moment of my life. I did it!!!!!!

Today I woke up late, called Beth, received a call from Amy. The three of us have been trying to talk since Wednesday. We talked about different things, we talked about the same things. Becoming women. Being ourselves, striving for authenticity, for integrity in this. We talked about sisterhood. They are both married, they are both mom's. I admitted to them each my fear, the one I am allowing to pass away now, that I couldn't be both. That somehow it wasn't possible to be true to myself, to be an independent woman and be in love. I understand now that all I ever really wanted was the faith, and the experience to back it up, of being me. It wasn't about being independant so much as just being given the time, and the room, to grow in to and get to know the true me inside. Sober me, out of school me, me with out man and seperate from job and identity shared with friends. And while I needed to own my Independence to do that, it's not something that I could ever have done alone. Being me is something I have the courage for, and have explored in powerful, feminine ways that I never gave myself permission for before. And as result I will feel the familiarity of knowing how to maintain, in any circumstance, from now on, even if I lose my grasp here and there. But I am redefining now just what "independant" means, maybe getting used to new ideas of it... I was hesitant to say all this until now, I guess because of that one fear of not being able to maintain this way of being and also being able to eventually fall in love again: of having the capacity for both. Being afraid was blocking my acknowledgment of the reality of how simple and peaceful a place I am in today, made it seem to good to be true. But really, there's nothing to have to do or be or try to figure out... I dont even know when or where or how exactly it happened... I am on the verge of my whole life, of anything I want to do when I get back home and recognizing that gave me clear, and almost staggering perspective, on where I just came from...I lived on my own in retreat out in nature for a full year, I lived on my own in a sweet apartment just my size where I could walk to work or to town any time of the day or night. I helped a small handfull of people undertake and innovate a large fantastic program for the community college. I became a strong woman on my own, and the relationships with the other strong women in my life is the number one thing I have likewise grown. I am so, so proud.

I've long said that Sex and the City, the series and subsequent movies, gave permission to women beyond 30 to be more than what convention painted for them. More than just soccer moms or career women or harried modernists stretched between both. That Sex and the City gave value back to the grrrly parts we love the most, and did so specifically by emphasizing our sex. Our sex, as gender~us as women among women and planting that in Western consciousness as a real and valued and tender and important experience~and us as sexual beings, too. Sensuous beings. Not body sex, that colt-like perky curvy thing of giggles and high shrill of the late teens and early twenties, but intuitive, full-bodied, embodied sexuality, alive from within. Sex and the City gave women in common society permission for both. Today I saw a 2 o'clock matinee performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and wept. I mean wept. For people, for women and for men, for how twisted we are, how imperfect. Then I went out in the sun and glistened, and remembered, I have this moment, and I am, if I so choose, alive in it. I delighted in my power ring from Katie, one of my fabulous sister and best friends. I meandered around Ahsland, bought myself a gorgeous power necklace and laughed aloud when the woman read to me what kyanite the stone in it was, I smiled a lot at the sun and green mountains, treated myself to a ridiculously delicious dinner at an Italian restaurant reading a new book, then had an evening date with me, my gorgeous aliveness, and Carrie Bradshaw and the girls.

I am here, on my own, just with me~glorious me!!~and loving each and every moment of it!!! It isn't too good to be true at all, it's better than that!

What does a girl do when she gets to the top of Crater Lake? Well that's easy, she goes back down again. What does a girl do when she embraces herself, and then finds herself fabulously in love with the her that she embraced? Well that's easy, she just keeps showing up....No matter where she is, where she goes, no matter what happens. There she still is, in love. And with a cast of fabulous women all around, reflecting that new found love back at her again again and again from every glowing, precious direction. Wow, how cool is this? Who am I to doubt that whatever coming next could be anything less than totally, and wholly, blessed.

Long Letter to my Readers

Sometimes I want to start this blog the way I used to start my litmag Cantalma. Like I'm writing a letter. Dear Friends...Today it came out instinctively to write Hey Pals... so let's pretend that that's what I'm doing. Writing a letter to my readers, anonymous or otherwise, out there in the middle of the everchanging everthesame wide world of blogoland. Wherein I find comfort, and release.

Hey Pals,

It's something like 4:30 am. I woke up around 3 and couldn't get back to sleep, but didn't put the light on til a half hour ago. For a while I laid there, thinking the noises I was hearing are the giant fucking practically baseball sized roaches that have begun to show themselves at least daily since I started filling my apartment with cardboard boxes and all these magnificent little dark spaces for them to hide. God that ills me out blugghgghghghhgghgh but I am thankful for them because it's making it really easy to so want to leave this place. Then I imagined the bumping around was the ghosts of this old house that the across the hall neighbor Rebecca has seen, and often hears. In the end I turned the lights on to get some water and there were no bugs, and no haunts, at least that I could tell.

It was a long, sweet weekend. Friday was 12 hours long, I went in to my office for my last day and then up to the college for my exit interview which the HR person kept referring to in email as my Termination Interview. Which made me laugh but also mildly nervous to walk up there and turn my paperwork in, but wouldn't you know I came in and sat down and she said I hear you're moving home because your husband got transferred, I'm from Baltimore, too, Dunalk, hon. I explained that it actually is because really I have no friends or family here in Easton or on the midshore or a life really other than my job, and that I was originally from a town called Millersville outside Glen Burnie, that I am the exact oppositte of married and that first I am waiting tables at the beach to make money but before that going out to the PacNW for a month and then going to move home, then we got down to talking Hons. It was like talking to an old girlfriend that I didn't realize I missed even though Sue and me, the HR lady, had never really met before.

Later in the office trying to get my last bits of work turned in I finally gave up and just said I'd turn it in Tuesday when I have to return and give my work computer back. I was too excited and Mary's office on campus has too much of a blowing breeze. Soon it was almost five so Jackie the Executive Director of our whole department, and my immediate boss Elaine, and Mary they all drove me up to Kent Island for dinner on the water. Natasha came, and Carolee, and Jan all the way from Chestertown and some other teachers and of course Jason and Kim and Brenda, too. Then Cindy showed up, and she ended up taking me back to my car, where we sat and talked for two more hours while a nice round thunderstorm came through. Cindy is the woman I used to teach English with, nighttimes twice a week, at the elementary school in the country out near the Delaware line. This was 2006 and on. She also is the one who introduced me to Teena and had me do a catering gig for her back then, and Teena's the one who rented me the room on the Choptank River when I finally summoned the courage to leave Brandon and break his heart and move out and away to a place so isolated that even now that fast year I spent there still is surreal to me like a dream. Cindy and I, really, hadn't talked and really caught up since I very first moved out to Chop. We had lots, lots to catch the other one up on.

On Saturday I got up and couldn't get moving. I had to be in Pennsylvania first for a baby shower then a bachelorette party. The radio was danceable though and in moments it was so good and the sky was so blue, and I read this blog a long long while which I hadn't done in a long time. It made me feel good to have this, these archives of me because I, like all people, compelled as I am by my self and also very very deep, need to have a place to catalog and process me.

The drive up 83 especially was good. I listened to Rachel Sage and Ruut, both of whom I met last weekend when Brooks got to open for them. Rachel Sage especially is so deliciously good, and I thought how very much I like to hear the accordian. It makes me feel like a gypsy which probably is just to say it makes me feel more wild and whimsy and mystery like I really am. When I got to York I was proud of myself for knowing my way around even though my GPS got me lost at first, finally I just turned that bitch off and got there on my own instincts in the hot Pennsylvania concrete traffic and sun. I walked in to the basement at Aunt Lori's house almost an hour late and it was a huge commotion of people and when I walked in from the far side of the room I heard cousin Chels yell Wait where's Kelly? Chelsea is pregnant, and psychic like all the women in that family and I saw her in the corner and all the commotion was because she was about to open gifts. And I dont know how to put this part in words--that Chels, who's 19, is bringing our first grandbaby in to this world, or great grandbaby I mean, and my grandparents were both sick last year, but still are so robust. And when we are together, which we do more often now, mom her two sisters my brother and his fiance my grandparents and two cousins, we cry a lot and it is always hot and full in our chest because every breathing moment with them is awareness of life and how much we are blessed. So I walked in and Chels knew in her blood I just got there, and she waited for me to sit at her feet and then the gift opening began. Then a half hour later she goes Wait, where's Sean? and then of course we look up and he, my brother, walks in. We did well, Pap only really cried, which is what makes the rest of us bawl, really hard once and then we all were crying and gasping and laughing and wiping our faces with napkins and the other guests cried and laughed some, too.

Then I left, got out on to the rolling green hills and farmhouse lanes of Rt. 30 to drive to Fairfield right outside Gettysburg. My cousin Sarah on my dad's side, the Mc-clan, is getting married soon so next was to celebrate that. On Route 30 I got reminiscent but before it got overboard this song Lost in Pennsylvania came on and I laughed out loud, like really hardy belly laugh because Rt. 30 and me have history. York to Philly, Philly to York, York to Gettysburg and all that sky and green. I always always have such good reflection on that road and Saturday was no different. I was reflecting on the last time I made that drive and how much has changed since then. The last time it was July and Josh, who is the man that I fell in mad love with some years back and ultimately was the final reason I had courage enough to leave Brandon and follow me towards my own thing, called at the end when I pulled in to my cousin's driveway. I hadn't heard from him in like four months back then because of a hurtful falling out, and the thing about Rt. 30 is that's how I used to get from my grandparents over to his house. We always had that psychic thing too, Josh and I, among other connections, and so I was thinking back a lot on him. Next thing, over the glorious piano Ruut sings Lost in Pennsylvania and I'm like Whaaaaa? Did she just say lost in Pennsylvania because it was the first time hearing that CD. Then at that very moment mom called. Mom is from the PA hills and that was really on my mind, too, backroads and southern Pennsylvania and mom and her country people. She called to ask what I was doing. I told her driving and thinking about you and thinking about Josh and now cracking up becasue this lady is singing about Josh and I same time as me thinking about us. And mom reminded me of a time long ago going to work a bluegrass festival in those very hills and how she used to be in love back then with a well-known Nashville musician. Within moments I was at the very place, 8 miles east of Gettysburg, that the festival she was talking about is held. It was all so timely, and the conversation was good and sweet and I felt whole and clean, and happy to see Sarah the bride-to-be and the other cousins waiting to see me.

Now it is Monday morning, the birds are singing and Crow was just squawking, too. The sky out the window in my meditation room is blue and pink tinged so it's all resonant in that morning purple hue. Yesterday also was a long day and last night I wanted to finish uploading my old pics--late 80's through late 90's--on to my external hard drive so that when I move Wednesday and my couple things go in to storage that huge tupperware with all the old albums can just stay there. But I was tired, went late to Target to get a new swimsuit and that took a long time because for the first time in a long time I felt bad about how I looked which made me uncomfortable, but also grateful, because I almost never ever have to deal with that leftover teenage weirdness anymore. So when I got back home I went right to bed, didn't even keep my eyes open long enough to read my book.

I move Wednesday to Ocean Pines. Kelly Johnson, Sean, Bdubb and Brooks are going to help me. Thursday I'm taking Amy out for a pedicure to celebrate Maddie, her third child, due in July. Friday my cousin Timmy graduates college, Friday night we're all going dancing at Red Maple, Saturday's Eryka Badu. Then back to the Pines til Wednesday of the following week, when I fly to Oregon, and will be boundless, yet tall tree mountain coasts hot springs cities and hippies and Pacific ocean bound.

Yaaaaay!!!! When I get home it will be summer time and all that hotass Marilen mug. I'll be a waitress again, a writer for sure, babys will come, weddings will happen, and I will stare and smile a lot at the sea. I will swim. For now, I am sleepy, pals. Thank you for reading and always journeying along with me. Thank you all for the love and support even when you dont comment thankfully the blog counter tells me you still read. I am contented, awed, and eager because I feel certain the best is yet to be....

My wishes and prayers for the same to all of you xoxo.

Love, kel

This one thing... Telling the truth.

This is Erika, quoting Hemingway in my head and it's what happens to me any time I sit down and start to write and cant get started. Tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth. Usually it's followed by me asking myself Kelly what are you trying to say?

There is a song it just came on as I finished that last paragraph and it made me smile and pull the comfort sheets of my self up tight around my heart because of the tweak it put in my chest the second I heard it start and the immediate smile and hush of breath it drew. It is one of those serendipity songs and one that always no matter what makes my spirit emerge from whatever tight little haunt of me in which it's hiding. It's one of my fighting songs, and it is the song of songs that would of course in this instance speak to me.

I thought that pain and truth were all that really mattered but you cant stay here with every single hope that shattered. Big Country. Oh this song. The one that Kelly J put on the CD when I sold my shit and went travelling in 2004--it played as I pulled out of Chestertown and left my disillusioned past behind. The past. The past? Let me say this to the past. It becomes you, shapes the you you become. For many months I have worked to heal my associations of me, and my patterns of my past that became patterns long before I had the mind awareness to know any better. I have begun to live motivated by one idea: we regret not what we've done, but what we have not. I have had to ask myself again and again, and sit quiet surrendering to me, to the long inner road towards peace and silence within to hear the answer: years from now what will I look back on and say because I did not do this one or two or three things, I regret? It is in this way I've submitted to me, to following my truth and being brave and strong enough to stand in and go towards who I really am.

There is one area--love, men--where I have a backlog of mess. I am in the context, here, now, ongoing, of forgiveness and peace in that area, it's a constant motion thing for me. And as to this, as to regret, and to telling the truth. There was one, a single real regret that clung to me and went something like this:

I should've been true to myself. The moment, the second I knew I was in love with him--and no longer in love with the one I was with--I should've been honest with myself and with everyone involved. I was so in love with him. I should've gone forward and to him, and not looked back.

I should've. But that's not what happened. And so how does life unfold--how does it mark you, and push you along when there is indeed this one thing that you look back on and did not do?
What happens is you quantitate, you consider. You loop over and over again in yourself and become lost in your self and hate and even further have more and awful disbelief in yourself. You become deeply deflated, hopeless even and don't know why, because often times regret hides itself if you are lacking in a certain capacity for self-honesty in some areas in your life, so that's what happens: if you are like me and you have hurt in a certain area of your life, old hurt, old covered-over pain from long long ago before you even really were you yet, than being true to yourself in that area comes out all slanted and sideways because to really be true means first to have to re-live through the old pain that's still there. And that's fucking hard. Especially when that part of you's always been broke.

Then, one day you wake up. It's a half-waking, but I'm a fighter, so you grab for it. And you realize god damn it, this is my life. This is my life. And perhaps this regret was the one, the one key to the door that is finally, for real and completely, going to make me own me in my entirety. That is going to make me stand up, and be true as I can to myself.

You start to get honest then, about your wants, your needs, about your past. About who you are.

I've identified the things, the couple of them. And I'm going whole-hearted after them. BUT MORE IMPORTANT. I get it, I get me now. I know me, and love me, all of me. I know how to be true to my self. Get it? I know now how to be honest to me. And to tell the truth, and not miss opportunity. I have healed from the early fucked up shit and abuse, or at least have self-awareness that is full and complete, and real. Not sideways and slanted and blind or numb in some parts. I have broke parts you know, who doesn't? But those are now the places I learned to nurture and be gentle with myself instead of denying and hating and refusing, because of denial and numbness and self-hate. Those are the places I have medicine, real virtue now. Where I can be even more gentle and loving towards me, and others, as result.

I am real now. I am whole.

This is my life. And I guess that one regret is no longer on my list because the gift that came from it is absolutely nonexchangeable. I hope that he--the lighthouse guy, the one who led me here to this deep and dark well of my self, the one who suffered at my hands and who I ultimately pushed away and forced to walk away without his own looking back--I hope he is well. I hope he is well: is full, is whole.

I am being true to my self, to my heart. It's all I ever really wanted to learn how to do. That part I don't regret, not at all.

Too high too far too soon

INSPIRED

artwork by Nikki McClure

copyright Nikki McClure

Thoughts on Love, Addiction & Be-ing the Change

I fall in love easy.

Sometimes all it takes is a certain look, or lilt of the voice, and then that's it I'm all rosy-chested and sparkling.

I'm addicted to it--but (I feel like I've been quoting Buddha a lot lately) addiction is the human condition so this is me non-demonizing. We're hooked on feeling good or feeling bad, in general we're hooked on feelings and it is that reliance, and the anxiety created by wishing those sensate states would remain, that is the root of suffering. We are attached, essentially, to our self. But this isn't about suffering or Eastern theology other than perhaps experimenting with personal and varying applications of such... Really for me today this is about love, and people and humanity. And doing, according to my own spirit, the right thing.

What I am getting at is that I am in love with almost everyone that I know.

Guy, girl, old, young. Doesn't matter. In general, I think people are amazing and really the only thing that I've found that can instantly, and I guess permanently, turn me off is ingenuity. Any really abrasive signs that you dont think for yourself. But even that quality or immediate projection I've learned to try to be gentle around though, I've begun to learn to practice love-ing anyway. If I am around you and you are at ease in yourself, then pow. Watch out. Now we're in love!

I also am baptized again and again in synchronicity and so look out for it, especially in the subtle ways. I heard this guy tell a story--he was making fun of himself because as he related it he went to the beach to be alone and find silence and maybe the grandness, too, and it turns out there was this crying ass kid going nuts just a couple hundred yards from him. So the guy starts totally bugging out because damnit that kid stole his peace, and then he thought maybe that kid needs help? And he turns and inspects the scene more closely and what he finds is this mom of three, struggling like with a capital s, and this little kid's ball in the waves. So the guy goes and gets this ball for the little one, and the little one's like thanks and stops crying and through his little snifflysniffles beams. And the guy he realizes, holy shit. There's always a million little ways to better the world. He thinks, it all comes down to paying attention.

He wonders, deeply. Am I paying attention?

Well isn't that just it, in any given moment, am I paying attention? Where can I give or practice love? Practice, as in the principle, open-heartedness? Am I paying attention?

So stay with me here. Am I paying attention in my own life? In the past few days again and again the same message has come to me in different forms, and it has to do with staying away from negative people. Now I am not too sure how I feel about this. At first, I was like o yea, yes yes that is it. But really, is it?

If we are trying, really trying to be the change we wish to see than do we purposefully stay away from negative people? In that I am someone who falls in love with everyone I know, it means that I have had to learn good inner boundaries. In other words, making sure I am not seeking from you something I need to fulfill in an inner way myself, and/or giving too much of myself in a way that depletes me and disempowers you from your own personal stance of filling your self up from within. So the question is, in the presence of someone negative isn't it our duty to really let loving actions and thoughts shine through? Isn't it than up to us to double down and really stand true to who we are and could be? True, at times there have been some people who are so stuck on there own downer trip and going further and ever down more and more that I have had to limit my time around them. There are others still that threaten my inner-security and how I feel about me, and too I've had to honor that. So I know the necessity of self-protection, but all the same. I'm wondering....

Ok so I'm gonna say it. What would Jesus do? Jesus, who hugged the lepers and broke bread with the whores. Now that of course begs recognition of a primary difference: those folks were socially stigmatized NOT negative; but truly, what is the inherent lesson, the principal taught in that?

For me I know the answer that resonates to my most current truth. When I am true to myself, to being who I can be when I am out in the world and to as much as possible caring for and loving the inside broken, or twisted or funny and also glorious and unique and beautiful parts of me, then I can better do the same with whomever I come in contact with. And more, my path seems to naturally connect me to those who most easily resonate in a true way with me when I am flowing according to my own truths and rhythms, too. In other words, when I am good to me and practicing love, all else sort of takes care of itself. Look, back to last week--it is a fucked up unfair world. BUT if I am alive and loving than inherently I say yes to all of it, right? And do the best I can to love anyway even if it hurts.

Hurt passes. I stay in love. Maybe the message isn't to stay away from negative folks. Maybe the way I'm going to practice it is to work to be around the positive ones.

If your heart is open and my heart is open...We beat.

She woke up humming to herself and then asked me who sings I Think We're Alone Now? She was futzing with her I-phone so I could only guess she was looking it up.

I dont know I answered. The Beatles?

In a minute it was on, coming through those mini-speakers of her phone all distorted. I stopped in the middle of the room to listen and I had to strain. But then the automatic motion of my body halted on the peak of my breath and demanded my awareness in that quiet inside way that feels like soft nudging or a sparkle--and then everything else fell in to place: everything stilled. The moment stopped. We were breathing, and listening to the music. Feeling every arc of voice every pause of breath and especially every word.

When it was done I just looked at her. Weepy, like we'd been since the night before. Wow, this is the song you woke up humming? and she just nodded wide-eyed. I always heard it as a love song I said, and she nodded some more than started to play it again.

We were surrounded by friends the night before, tons of friends, but in her animal head she was scurrying up the walls of herself spinning out because she felt so alone. She's a junkie but like me has been clean a long long while. When she finally talked about it the fear and self-hate I hugged her forever and told her the only secret that I truly know: that aloneness, it is what we all have in common, what binds us together as humans! It's what Buddha called suffering. But so many of us use that fear to alienate ourselves from one another when our real duty is to let it allow true compassion to grow. Because really, loving me and my tortured human parts are all I need to be able to learn to love you, and yours...

It was Sunday morning and like I said we were away on a road trip and partying with lots of lots of friends. And all I could think the whole time, the whole weekend, all I could clearly see the whole time was how much each of us, how much we all just want and need love.

I got home on Sunday it was late and I had to work Monday way early. The sun was out so blue and the trees were in that heavenly chorus that sounds so good and feels like breath on Monday afternoon and I was in Caroline County so I drove to the park in the woods and had a little visit with Chop. I took myself out to dinner, a lovely old-fashioned date with me. I brought Dani Shapiro's Devotion with me to finish, it's the story of a woman's crisis of faith and struggle for a working spirituality in her life and my writing partner, Erika, shipped it to me the week I quit my job even though she didn't know that that's what I was doing at the time. It has had me well-versed the last few weeks or so and I've been taking it in slowly the way I do chamomile tea or deep breaths of lavender oil in the bathtub. I got all weepy again, Monday night at the Italian restaurant, when I read:

The human condition--the knowledge of this--drives many of us to drink, to drugs, to denial, to running as fast as we can away from the truth of life's fragility. We think we can shore ourselves up. If only we work hard enough, make lots of money, are good and kind enough, pray hard enough, we will somehow be exempt. Then we discover that no one is exempt. What is to be done?

Wow. What is to be done? I thought about it and there are plenty of things that I do. Probably the most important of them all--I find time almost every day to sit quiet, and I have a special place--a chair that has come with me everywhere since I was 19--to do so. I just sit, and sigh, and relax and remind myself that so long as I can breathe and sink within then right now, in this moment, all is well. Sometimes all I can literally find is five minutes but even so I do this pretty much daily--so much so I almost forget to talk about it because I am so accustomed to this necessary me-time and so reliant on the results that I take it for granted. And I dont do it because I am disciplined or sacrosanct or because I feel like I have to in some rigid way...I do it because I crave the results. I Like Feeling Good. And it's made me convinced--I am the tool I came here with, and I am the only thing I'm leaving here with, so I and only I have the power to go inside me and find, or otherwise, effect my peace. To know and watch what's happening inside me, and to love all of it, which is the only way I might ever change. Love love love.

Love of me in my most raw and human condition. My most alone.

I sent my grlfriend the quote over email. It sounds so simple doesn't it? Love yourself. So simple but what's got us all on the absolute run.

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...

A Place Of My Own

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my apartment?

When I first moved in here all I did was sit around in wonder, with a pure-eyed peace-feeling stare. I loved the lines of the walls, the smoothness, the light. I used to open up the great tall window in front of my writing table and smoke cigarettes sitting on the ledge with my feet on the roof and my heart in the tree. I would talk to the moon, or just listen in a satiated way to the traffic going by.

We moved out of the suburbsprawl that had tangled its way down route 2 from Baltimore and in to a house in the woods when I was a pre-teen. We went from a neighborhood full of kids with rat tails and kickball games and swingsets and snowball stands and dancing under the street lights in driveways purple boomboxes pumping to no one, just Sean and me, and the woods. And Lindsey and Darby who lived across the street in this big old farmhouse that had secret cellar tunnels cemented off but that you could access through trap doors in the field. My dad left three months after that he moved to New York. Manhattan always terrified me and repelled me after that. I started smoking cigarettes then and stealing from the liquor cabinet they kept downstairs with the heavy-hinged door. I put a sign on the door to my room, it was a manilla envelope with a fake address and it said Kelly's place on it and I think maybe that is when it started, my need and ache to always have a room or place of my own.

Later, after I graduated college mom was selling the house. I stayed on in Chestertown where I got my degree and got clean, it was 2002, for what was meant to be only the summer. I was working three jobs, two in town and one two hours away at the beach. My dad's best friend died and my dad was suddenly back--just like that, 12 years later. I was an adult now or supposed to be so I made decisions like an adult should. He was depressed and didn't get off the couch at my grandparents and aunt and uncles little wood house at the beach. I worked there at the beach it was beautiful fall and pulled doubles at a seafood house uptown three days a week and tried to feed dad peanut butter and jelly but my father, who loves food second only to gin and golf, wouldn't even eat. Then I drove to Chestertown to be a coffee shop barista in the days and wear a button down tux top at a white linen the other nights of the week. At the coffee shop I fell in love with a quiet boy who had soft brown eyes.

He was from Chestertown and so it was that I stayed.

By December of that year they offered me a job teaching night classes ESL. I didn't want to I had no background for it but she kept pressuring so I agreed. The first night I was coming up one hall there were students coming towards me from another, I closed my eyes and took a breath and relaxed so I could feel my heart open then just said a prayer in my head: Direct my thoughts and actions. Help me to love. Hola! I shouted to the little Mexicans with strong bright eyes and they smiled so warm and that was it, eight years ago, I was done.

In November, last year 2009, I moved here to this place finally for the first time in my life, my little tiny place all of my own. I love to be here and revel in how much I've I enjoy my own quiet home. It took me a long time. On Friday last week I stepped down from my job. That two nights a week gig teaching ESL eventually led to full-time at a Community College, where I worked hours on end with three other people to establish the community english and high-school diploma program. I poured every last bone breath and blood in to that job since they took it from the public schools in 08. It carried me through one of the most difficult transitions of my life, but now I am through, through the change of being my own woman, being single, being strong, being alone. May 14 is my last day and then soon I will leave the Eastern Shore.

It's been a long, long time coming. Who knew all along I just needed a little tiny place of my own?

slow

She's been in treatment 75 days a friend tells me talking about someone she cares deeply about It takes what it takes i say, gentle as possible then try to give the words to what that is like, the subtle realizatoin that recovery is a life time thing, about how til you get this you may as well still be in denial

a lifetime thing is not so easy to get because you're never truly going anywhere it's just you and there you always are, there is no pinnacle or final max you're always always in the middle somewhere. and especially now, how it takes different forms. i started on salary june 1 it was the day i got back from ten days of the road and meditation when the real work come to me in actual physical form, i had before then totally decided to slow my flow but when june 1 got here and i got back from vacay and back to the work of 9 to 5 but for me in my job that's never what it looks like, they the institution not just the college one but the larger one beyond, they really do they have me cuz now for the first time cuz they foot my bills

i never realized when they say job security the security part is actually a real thing

and how change always sends me loopty, trying again to assimilate to the balance within

anyhow i went out this morning and stood in the sun calf-deep in the lawn so green and the air was light and felt like the most gorgeous dress i could ever own. and all i've done since june 1 got here is work on close-out, year-end paper work every waking day and when i've had even a second to spair i've been healing in the saltwater floating along on the miracle glorious of the ocean's bob. lots of lots of salt to heal.

momma and i had our own thing and dad too but he doesn't know it and never will. and finally yesterday two things happened, i finished looking at my side completely in the Real Work it was a long and intensive process and for all those weeks i had to be correspondingly 15, 16, 17, 12, 3 and 32. and it was hard so hard i even forgot what i was doing. and also, yesterday i finally closed out the paperwork for all my students this year, five whole weeks it took me 21 classes so much so much so much of my time. and today i owe my first 20 pages to erika, and am excited for it, cant believe this looks like "When..."

it takes what it takes i tell myself. i stand earth deep and feel the breeze, eyes closed let the sun sink deep in to me. i am opening, i am doing it, this is what it looks like, my time to heal. to open whole and deep like that is two feel as much as you can. i dont like how this feels, all the selfhate i been running from, the mama all about me a salve to cleanse my wounds gentle gentle now precious daughter you can do it i believe in you... i dont like it at all and sometimes it's easier just to numb, soldier marching, and force your way through. it takes what it takes. i miss my friends.

til june 1 it was all tapestry unfolding and resolute awareness: Me! then the whir the heaviness the fast kicked in.

i am slowing down, again.

list: LOVE

1. LIFE. I dont know if you're ever like this, but I often find myself, when in the center of some hella fun experience or touchingly beautiful situation or just like in tune with the moment and suddenly aware of my in-tune-ed-ness, skipping ahead and thinking to myself wow, I sure wish soandso or whoevermclala were here with me, right now. Which really is a super waste of the moment. So I happen to be dating life. Which is quite exhilarating and I dont mind at all if you wish to copy and borrow this idea, in fact I quite encourage it! It's delightful to walk outside in to the sunshine and the green bushy grass and the trees all breathy and gentle heaves of hello when you walk by and the gold clouds and yes, saying, Hello Love to all of it and indeed, being there, right there, in love with the moment which is being in love in that moment with Life. So, I am in love! Dating life. I am smiley over it.
2. SISTERS. Like my new sister-in-law to be! That's right, my little bro, about whom I've actually said I would marry if we weren't related, jetskied his grl out to a sandbar in the Bay just a beat from mama Atlantic over the weekend and wrote I love you in the sand while she wasn't looking and was down on one knee when she turned back around! Awwwwww! Hooray!!!!!
3. WOMYN & MAGIC. Wild magic moony crone womyn, like my mom's firey crew of hot bloods that welcomed me to lead a women's circle in honor of the Solstice. Love of tribe of earth and women, raised up power from within.
4. FRIENDS & FAMILY. Family reunion weekend with all the cuz's and KJ and Walsh and Cades as honorary Mc's, too, and steamed crab messy-handed eatin and dusk swimming and rollercoaster riding and backporch laughing and horseshoe tossing and and and...! There was so much shmoopycuzinbuddylovin that all I could do was beam.
5. PASSION. Like bookwriten, how it may as well be sex for all the fire that comes when you're in bliss and alight cuz whatever it is you're heart's fully engaged in has totally got you turned on. Yes! And sharing big ideas with big hearted friends...
6. ME. Being good to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, keeping a toe pointed forward but my feet planted in today. In love. Yay.
   

Gone Sitting

~may all beings beeeeeeeeeeee happyyyyyyyyyyyyy~

woooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooooo!!

Good Therapy

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.

Facebook gives me clarity tehe

I just realized that I wrote the following in a facebook message to a friend tonight. She and I haven't seen one another since summer:

i am finally getting that alone time/retreat i always wanted just for me. lately i am looking on this time with my heart wide open, so aware that i will look back on this as one of the most precious times in my life.

Wow. Who woulda thought my retreat, that deep alone time I knew I needed, was meant to look like this?

Sweet.