Thirty degrees feels different in March than it does in January.
Last night in the dark beside the bay the cold air didn't even sting my face, and the three inches of snow we got some time after the pubs and clubs closed and I got home melted by the time the sun was yellow and sky blue at one this afternoon. Mom and dad and I prepared food for the week all afternoon. Dad's lost 37 pounds. In the morning I watched the original True Grit on AMC then later switched to Sex and the City on E. The whole final season was on, I called Katie, we talked low Sunday talk while I laid under my redtent blankies laughing and listening to her, and Carrie Bradshaw, and periodic interjections from mom and dad.
Later they asked about my travel plans, we sat over dinner discussing my route or at least the places I see myself visiting, or feel in my heart is the right way to say. The Blue Ridge then Tennessee. The Gila's, canyonland, then Colorado. Cali and all of the Pacific NW. The mountains and the green green trees, all the stars. The mama mar, the 101. Traveling, just me! Ah god I can barely contain it all.
They're so good about it, mom and dad, and always have been. The easy to confuse life of mine that could be labeled slacker by those who don't know me or have different values. Dad gave me portions of his salmon for the week, his brown rice, roasted vegetables. I sat down and asked for their input: help me brainstorm what I need to put in order, what needs to be prepared and gotten done and what I need to get. By the time we were done the list, on small paper, was three pages long.
It was 2006, towards the end, I told them. When I prayed the terrible prayer and agreed not to just ask myself, but to patiently pay attention as I answered what it was in life I really wanted. It's taken til now to know most those answers, and it was that journey from then to now that helped shape and glisten the me that can fulfill those things, my goals and hopes and dreams. Mostly tho, it's taken til now to trust in the reality of my inside life, where the wild spirit and heart lives, and to pay attention to its guidance and listen to its nudges and calls. The wild inside place that most in the world don't revere or believe....Preparing to travel this time around is so different now because I know me and know most of all that place in me, I don't even blink when others show fear or awe, or incredulousness which is what I see, mostly, time and again. You're going to leave your job?
To follow my heart?
YES YES HELLLLL yes, I am.
It doesn't even matter what comes next, after I set out for the road, but yes for you reading with this concern: I do have a Plan B. There's a lot to get done now though and it's all written down, it spans from car tune up to credit balance transfers to purchasing camp stoves and rope, tarps and an ax that is the right size and cut for me to use. I am excited, but mostly, full of an enormously calm reserve. It's been growing and growing.
Like the fast melted overnight snow, I can feel it pooling. It's so soon to flow.
Showing posts with label cycles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cycles. Show all posts
March 27, 2011
April 10, 2009
Friday Reflections: Truslow Road
There were these tall pines that lined the back end of the land at Truslow. Tall, and with the sweet achy smell of the needles that make you remember a kind of inner quiet you never actually knew but secretly hope for in the woods. Tall pines, like the kind that at night blend in with sky so you are sure they are having a conversation up there in the dark with the clouds that are joking with them with their tender little caresses moving as fast as they do across the sky. Slow down slow down maybe the tall pines are saying to the night clouds, slow down and stay a while here in the dark with our sweet sweet smell.
It was November, the end, when we moved in there, to that 600-square-foot falling down asbestos run deadgreen shingled shack on Truslow Road, back of Truslow Creek edge of Kingstown, Queen Anne's County side of the Chester. A town as I always find them, without a zip code. We furnished that house with third and fourth-hand finds we bought at the local auction for $10, $7, maybe $6 the whole Lot. Once, that $7 bought me a brown banana seat bike from the seventies, a red paint-splattered stool, two brown wood foot stools, a pair of work boots and two quarts of oil. Every Wednesday for months we'd go to auction to see what we could see, neither of us having jobs or any belongings but campgear to speak of, having just ended our travelling days of living on the road. It was an auspicious return home, Full Moon night of Final Harvest, October 2005. Moon so big and pink and white it stuck us where our breath should be as it hung over watching Washington DC. We rolled in from the Mountains charging along Rt. 50 New York Avenue beside the Mall and I secretly sucked in when we got to the city and I felt the energy of the land all around of where I'm from and then, I saw the moon at once too and felt the longing inside give out Home....
Truslow wasn't planned, as so much of the big moves in my life rarely are. One day we just got sick of living with his mom. Ex-stepdad had this shitty little pad going down in the dirt and did we want to upkeep it, fix it up even, and care for the land? The land. It was November so that the land when we moved in was just one big patch of curled brown grass, but a whole-acre full, and with the tall tall trees in the back that never lose their leaves. And it had this dead-zone that vibrated to me: this huge matted mess of vines with prickers and thicket and undergrowth where some time ago some nice hedges or bushes must've been. That's where we will make this home I knew.
And we did: by February first seed we'd set about taking out that thicket just sort of stuck there in the back acre of our land. It covered a good 4 or 5 hundred square feet, almost as big as our house itself, and we worked at it, hard, sweaty in the cold February air but under the early that year sun. I wore work gloves and got tears and lines of red blood anywhere I had exposed skin and at the end of those days I felt for the first time what it feels like to cultivate something with your entire body, something sacred and precious as the eternal land. It was his idea to actually recess the fire pit we were putting in, so that the fire would actually warm from the underside of the ground. And by light/dark time of Equinox that year we had made our mark and called others in to join our Home: a community gathering advertised locally to all to join us for soul warming and music in celebration of grass-roots place-building and being true to as within, so without. I burnt a thick dried twig of sage and set a sacred circle around that fire pit as we completed it, walking three times with the smoke and the song on my breath and my heart open in love and thanksgiving--my friend Turtle Mike was there to help set up with the lights and he followed me round and round and round. It was the first night I ever met Walsh and heard her sing and of course this happened through Josh, and both of them played and stilled our hearts and many people, caught fully by the vibe we meant to capture and release in goodwill that night, had tears of gratefullness rolling down their cheeks. At the very end it rained a light light rain and this was the sign of release and blessing, and at once cleansing, which I was waiting for as omen of great harmony and success.
It was March the following year that those tall pines and that space created in honor and awe and thanksgiving at their feet called out to me again so loudly. Spring herself came quieter that year, waiting to show little peeks of her face til well after first-seed, unlike February the year before. I had been through a long winter. A new position in Adult Ed under a threatening and domineering new boss was challenging me in ways I never before knew. I gave all my energy to it, the job, because I cared about the people and so if there are people involved that is what I always do. But I was dwindling away and miserable inside. In long hours of prayer and mediation I sought to follow the heart of, to transmute with the change, that I knew on my deepest level was attempting to begin. I hated it, though knew begrudgingly that time is time and the process must run its course. And so, in those weeks of March leading to Equinox and New Year for me, I felt called out by the land, by the deep healing energy of Home.
I carried arm loads of books: notebooks and poetry, and a Christian text by Oswald Chambers I was deeply in to, out to the land moist in her pre-spring roots. And sometimes I would read, and if the words started to come I would write and write, but mostly I just laid there, on the ground. With my body feeling the waking of the land. Recognizing a fine softening between my contour and its. And I would breathe, and it was like the first time I ever knew about and tasted air. I still remember quite physically what it was like to take those long healing breaths like that, like, in fact, I was breathing in the whole of that land, of those trees, of all that pulsing of music and light by fire that still I am sure lives right now back there, back of Truslow in the roots of the one time heart of our land.
Yesterday I came home from work and the sun was high enough in the sky to still get to soak in some strong white rays. I ran in to Teena's house, got some books and notebooks, and ran out with my arms full dragging a beach chair awkwardly behind. I didn't read at all, just sat in that deep breathing place of half-eyed slumber.
That last March at Truslow it was as if a great rest had come upon me. And inside that sleep there lived the quiet seedlings of personal truth I wasn't capable yet, and so therefor unready, to be. Indeed, in the time that followed those several weeks it turned out I would need all the energy that I stored during my great and blessed pause with the tall pine trees: by the end of that month we learned that we had to move, and so the adventure continued, and the deep seeds began to unfurl, as we made our way on to Anngar Farm.
Recently my friend Susan told me one of her favorite sayings is But the hallway's hell! As in when we are waiting for the promised window to open after our most recent door has shut, waiting in the hallway sure can suck. But I don't know. Maybe the hallway can be the best part. Maybe it's like the deep reserve of air we never knew we had.
It was November, the end, when we moved in there, to that 600-square-foot falling down asbestos run deadgreen shingled shack on Truslow Road, back of Truslow Creek edge of Kingstown, Queen Anne's County side of the Chester. A town as I always find them, without a zip code. We furnished that house with third and fourth-hand finds we bought at the local auction for $10, $7, maybe $6 the whole Lot. Once, that $7 bought me a brown banana seat bike from the seventies, a red paint-splattered stool, two brown wood foot stools, a pair of work boots and two quarts of oil. Every Wednesday for months we'd go to auction to see what we could see, neither of us having jobs or any belongings but campgear to speak of, having just ended our travelling days of living on the road. It was an auspicious return home, Full Moon night of Final Harvest, October 2005. Moon so big and pink and white it stuck us where our breath should be as it hung over watching Washington DC. We rolled in from the Mountains charging along Rt. 50 New York Avenue beside the Mall and I secretly sucked in when we got to the city and I felt the energy of the land all around of where I'm from and then, I saw the moon at once too and felt the longing inside give out Home....
Truslow wasn't planned, as so much of the big moves in my life rarely are. One day we just got sick of living with his mom. Ex-stepdad had this shitty little pad going down in the dirt and did we want to upkeep it, fix it up even, and care for the land? The land. It was November so that the land when we moved in was just one big patch of curled brown grass, but a whole-acre full, and with the tall tall trees in the back that never lose their leaves. And it had this dead-zone that vibrated to me: this huge matted mess of vines with prickers and thicket and undergrowth where some time ago some nice hedges or bushes must've been. That's where we will make this home I knew.
And we did: by February first seed we'd set about taking out that thicket just sort of stuck there in the back acre of our land. It covered a good 4 or 5 hundred square feet, almost as big as our house itself, and we worked at it, hard, sweaty in the cold February air but under the early that year sun. I wore work gloves and got tears and lines of red blood anywhere I had exposed skin and at the end of those days I felt for the first time what it feels like to cultivate something with your entire body, something sacred and precious as the eternal land. It was his idea to actually recess the fire pit we were putting in, so that the fire would actually warm from the underside of the ground. And by light/dark time of Equinox that year we had made our mark and called others in to join our Home: a community gathering advertised locally to all to join us for soul warming and music in celebration of grass-roots place-building and being true to as within, so without. I burnt a thick dried twig of sage and set a sacred circle around that fire pit as we completed it, walking three times with the smoke and the song on my breath and my heart open in love and thanksgiving--my friend Turtle Mike was there to help set up with the lights and he followed me round and round and round. It was the first night I ever met Walsh and heard her sing and of course this happened through Josh, and both of them played and stilled our hearts and many people, caught fully by the vibe we meant to capture and release in goodwill that night, had tears of gratefullness rolling down their cheeks. At the very end it rained a light light rain and this was the sign of release and blessing, and at once cleansing, which I was waiting for as omen of great harmony and success.
It was March the following year that those tall pines and that space created in honor and awe and thanksgiving at their feet called out to me again so loudly. Spring herself came quieter that year, waiting to show little peeks of her face til well after first-seed, unlike February the year before. I had been through a long winter. A new position in Adult Ed under a threatening and domineering new boss was challenging me in ways I never before knew. I gave all my energy to it, the job, because I cared about the people and so if there are people involved that is what I always do. But I was dwindling away and miserable inside. In long hours of prayer and mediation I sought to follow the heart of, to transmute with the change, that I knew on my deepest level was attempting to begin. I hated it, though knew begrudgingly that time is time and the process must run its course. And so, in those weeks of March leading to Equinox and New Year for me, I felt called out by the land, by the deep healing energy of Home.
I carried arm loads of books: notebooks and poetry, and a Christian text by Oswald Chambers I was deeply in to, out to the land moist in her pre-spring roots. And sometimes I would read, and if the words started to come I would write and write, but mostly I just laid there, on the ground. With my body feeling the waking of the land. Recognizing a fine softening between my contour and its. And I would breathe, and it was like the first time I ever knew about and tasted air. I still remember quite physically what it was like to take those long healing breaths like that, like, in fact, I was breathing in the whole of that land, of those trees, of all that pulsing of music and light by fire that still I am sure lives right now back there, back of Truslow in the roots of the one time heart of our land.
Yesterday I came home from work and the sun was high enough in the sky to still get to soak in some strong white rays. I ran in to Teena's house, got some books and notebooks, and ran out with my arms full dragging a beach chair awkwardly behind. I didn't read at all, just sat in that deep breathing place of half-eyed slumber.
That last March at Truslow it was as if a great rest had come upon me. And inside that sleep there lived the quiet seedlings of personal truth I wasn't capable yet, and so therefor unready, to be. Indeed, in the time that followed those several weeks it turned out I would need all the energy that I stored during my great and blessed pause with the tall pine trees: by the end of that month we learned that we had to move, and so the adventure continued, and the deep seeds began to unfurl, as we made our way on to Anngar Farm.
Recently my friend Susan told me one of her favorite sayings is But the hallway's hell! As in when we are waiting for the promised window to open after our most recent door has shut, waiting in the hallway sure can suck. But I don't know. Maybe the hallway can be the best part. Maybe it's like the deep reserve of air we never knew we had.
March 27, 2009
Choptank: On acceptance, and Place
Oh, Chop.I love it here. When I was little we moved in to a plastic-siding house on a plot of land backed up against a tobacco field. Dad put a swingset out back, first the aluminum kind with the poles that rose up out of the ground when you got to pumping your legs really hard on the swing, then a chic wood one with rope ladders and a see-saw. My uncles and the neighbors came over one weekend and put up a wood fence, the kind with two posts on either side and two going length-wise in 8 x 5 tracks all around the backyard. You could climb it easily, or sit on the top rung of it, and the wood eventually grew dusty and warped from the summer sun. We had a wide yard with grass that was yellow and crunchy and hurt your feet by August. Eventually mom and dad built a small screened in porch on the back of the place and we ate dinner out there and my favorite was cook-outs, which we had a lot off and which I still yearn for, and organize now in the summer all the time. It was the suburbs, we were the fourteenth house in that neighborhood in Dec of 1980 and when we moved a decade or so later there were close to three hundred or so. It sprung a pang in my heart, even young like that, to see the farms lost, or the spots in the woods where we'd sneak off to where the old streams and black bows of trees hung, the creeks with the rope swings that creaked when you swung, the old dirt roads that even then we knew had secrets, all that wild area coveted because it was off limits according to the grown-ups. It hurt a bit even then to see it get paved over and disappear. But we lived the burgeoning 1980's fast-money suburb dream and I was raised to not question it: first VCR, MTV, first microwave, wow convenience and American life sure was fun!
I'm not sure when my mind changed about all of that, or if change is the right word. College on the rural side of the Chesapeake Bay, amid the farm lands and all the little antiquated towns of history run along the backroads here had a lot to do with it. Anyhow I was talking to a friend last night about sense of place. Identity and belonging. I believe that where we are from, regardless our consciousness of it, holds so many clues to the whole of who we are. The consciousness or in other words the regularities of your way of life there, this is so shaped by the land, by the very landscape to which you've grown accustomed. And by landscape I mean in its sociological entirety: are your surroundings city streets, are they strip malls, are they well-manicured lawns with a cement driveway and two car garage? And grown accustomed isn't the right term either, more appropriately I would say taken for granted. As in born in to, never having the experience of knowing anything different.
This morning, out my backdoor, these were my surroundings:
I took my coffee out to the Pier it was so, soo still. The Choptank River. No matter what, she calls my name. Sometimes, when I come home late as I often do, worn to the bone from giving so much of myself to work, I get out of the car and in the dark what I hear is the quiet gentle lapping of her incoming tide. Sometimes, a day or two before a storm, she is so eerily like the ocean--fast-moving--that it puts a chill on me. And then, like today, she is calm and still, quiet, reminding. All is Well. I stood out there breathing it in, with no means of escaping the perfect quiet contentment in my heart. It rained a long, soaking spring rain yesterday and today it is delicious out, about 55 and by the afternoon with all the day's sun everything will be stunning green. How precious, this gift of life and the reminder of the circles. The regularity of the changing, passing tide. The periodic wild currents, the peaked stillness at times, the shocking moments when the water rides far, far out and the brown mud is exposed and the marsh grass grows dry. And I, I here, get to take it all in.I saw three different muskrats this morning. Three at different times. In all my life I've only ever seen one. Here is the totem medicine of muskrat (from http://lowestoftspiritualcentre.co.uk/Animaltotum.aspx): Grace, keeping ones own counsel, silent observation. In the silence, after watching the third little muskrat float and surface again and again among the reeds, I was startled by a giant splash. Behind me an osprey was lifting out of the water with a squiggling perch speared in its talons. Life eats life, you know? It's how we go, how we grow. I am so thankful to be at this place, and this Place, in my own cycle.
Today is hopefully the final day of moving off the farm. And just so were clear, when it's all said and done and I am sitting out back at low tide with the white metal legs of my beach chair sunk deep in the mud, I will probably at some point jump up, drive an hour across the bridge to the other side, eat some fricken sushi and go to the mall. Cuz life is life, all of it, every blessed part. It's just so amazing getting to walk all of it, eyes opened as they can be to every part of the whole.
March 13, 2009
Thank god for the sisters
The other night cousin Erin, from Infinite and Endless, texted me was I going to the Pines this weekend? Her and her grls were going down to see their fave cover band. I was like noooooooooooooooo, I wish tho.
Bran and I have to have all of our stuff out of the Farm by next weekend and needless to say, that's a hellatona work. I went to bed that night after she asked me only to wake up next morning with a terrible longing for the sea. So I made some calls, and tugged some strings, and next thing you know here comes Erin, and my poppa, to help me get my stuff off Anngar and into the attic at the beach.
So that's how I ended up with her, in the bathroom tonight putting make-up on and being fine. Erin has one of these lip/eye color pallettes with every shade of every shade that ever existed, I'm saying that's like a hundredthousandy shades. It was fun. I complemented her on her artistic abilities with the eye make-up, and she complimented me back...
So here we are, a week before I turn 32 in the middle of me sorting through the last six years of my life and all the scraps of all the different aspects of who you become when you are in a couple and also of who you are when you are in your twenties--and in varying states between repose and sensate overload, between joy and grief so I dont breathe, in silence and the quiet states you dont realize are edged with gold in-between--here we are, me and this girl, me and my family, at the Pines again being glamorous stars.
My family: her parents Tim and Mary my godparents. Teachers by heart and trade, same as so many of my aunts and uncles so that even though I didn't ever want to go in to it or study it somehow teaching is how I process, how I learn, it's really that deep anyhow in my blood. And they are here too and so is my Aunt Sue also a teacher, and me widing the round in some far out isolated-feeling corner on the track of my life, making a turn. Slow as, gentle as, I can. Questioning how I got here, loving my self anyway, and also, where do I go from here?
I go to the Pines for a day. Get my beauty on with cousin Boo. Remember that that is an important part of loving my self too: Fabulousness!
My life gets more and more marvelous every day. My life now gets more marvelous everyday. My life increases in marvelousness everyday.
I love so much, and am so thankful for, my increasingly fabulous life!
Bran and I have to have all of our stuff out of the Farm by next weekend and needless to say, that's a hellatona work. I went to bed that night after she asked me only to wake up next morning with a terrible longing for the sea. So I made some calls, and tugged some strings, and next thing you know here comes Erin, and my poppa, to help me get my stuff off Anngar and into the attic at the beach.
So that's how I ended up with her, in the bathroom tonight putting make-up on and being fine. Erin has one of these lip/eye color pallettes with every shade of every shade that ever existed, I'm saying that's like a hundredthousandy shades. It was fun. I complemented her on her artistic abilities with the eye make-up, and she complimented me back...And then reminded me: when we were kids--or when she was a little little girl that I could dress up like my own personal barbie--I would play Madonna really loud and wear oversized bulky eighties shirts and put ponytails off to the side of the tops of both of our heads and teach her how to put make-up on as only a twelve-year-old to a four-year-old can do.
So here we are, a week before I turn 32 in the middle of me sorting through the last six years of my life and all the scraps of all the different aspects of who you become when you are in a couple and also of who you are when you are in your twenties--and in varying states between repose and sensate overload, between joy and grief so I dont breathe, in silence and the quiet states you dont realize are edged with gold in-between--here we are, me and this girl, me and my family, at the Pines again being glamorous stars.
My family: her parents Tim and Mary my godparents. Teachers by heart and trade, same as so many of my aunts and uncles so that even though I didn't ever want to go in to it or study it somehow teaching is how I process, how I learn, it's really that deep anyhow in my blood. And they are here too and so is my Aunt Sue also a teacher, and me widing the round in some far out isolated-feeling corner on the track of my life, making a turn. Slow as, gentle as, I can. Questioning how I got here, loving my self anyway, and also, where do I go from here?
I go to the Pines for a day. Get my beauty on with cousin Boo. Remember that that is an important part of loving my self too: Fabulousness!
My life gets more and more marvelous every day. My life now gets more marvelous everyday. My life increases in marvelousness everyday.
I love so much, and am so thankful for, my increasingly fabulous life! March 8, 2009
Message in my bottle
There are common concerns I've heard, and usually shared, about moving up the time change and thereby forcing the start of spring. Screwing up our Circadian Cycles and what not. I am born one day after the equinox, and I mean to write it that way: I Am Born, recognizing this time of year always as a time of great rebirth for me. I am one day in to the start of spring, and my whole life, or long as I can consciously remember being aware of "within", I have cycled with the seasons. I am a sunhead, drawn to the light, but born under a Taurus moon, so ruled inwardly by the night. So I flow gently as I can allowing the seasons, and my own deep and personal experiences of them, to inform my soul. I'm born at the Equinox, a baby of perfect union of dark and light. I think these are the marks I came in to this world with, and I seek the balance of allowing them to inform me but only insomuch as trying recognize the "intuitive"-born pathways in to my soul.
Last year at the timechange I remember feeling like Milly the Mole: someone turned the lights on too quick!! I was surrendered to my burrow, in deep hibernation doing an awful lot of resting. I wasn't ready to come out yet from my hole. But this year. Woah. I. Am. So. Ready.
This sickness I am just coming through--and by the way, thank you so much all my well-wishers who commented on this blog or facebook or via email, it meant a ton, truly--it was so much more than just a physical thing. I believe in the oneness of the body: the physical and the chemical and hormonal body, effected fully by the mental or emotional body, the subconscious body and the intuitive, the subtle energy body and the spirit. I believe in the full picture of all of these, and I can tell you for sure that my illness was symptomatic of far deeper imbalances than merely fluid in my ears. I was forced during that time of sickness (and time of snow-hostage!) (oh, and during all that, in case the message WASN'T LOUD ENOUGH, my phone got wet and stopped working!) to surrender and to fully hear me. And what I was saying was what I, my deep quiet voice within, has been saying for so, so long. 
I moved on to Anngar Farm with Brandon over a year and half ago, in fact in June it will be two years. And strangely, the moment we got all our stuff in to that castillo--or castle--which is what my Mexican friend Santiago called the six-bedroom farmhouse that Brandon and I were literally given in exchange for caretaking the several acres of landscaped lawn that came along with it, I began to experience a deep and nagging discontent. I had no words for it, but it kept me up late, woke me up in the dark with blank stares, and caused me endless bouts of un-named melancholy worsened by my own refusal to just listen to what was Within. I kept telling my self just to shut-it, and be grateful for all the gifts you have why don't you?! By October of that year, some four or so months after we'd finally settled in, I had at least allowed myself to hear my inner message: I just want some time to be alone.
It made no sense to me. But intensified monthly. Now, here's the thing you need to know about me. I believe in our own deep Authenticity. That we each are alit with gifts specific to our own souls, unique to our own form of song. And it is our duties to listen and align with them and draw them out, and indeed this is how to evolve in to our best selves and serve this world. I believe in constant change, the power of intention, positive thinking and the law of attraction. And most of all I believe that we all are engaged by the same unifying energy, and that that energy exists in vibrations, and that everything, from a thought or intention to the rising-tide, the full moon the equinox a winter's snow or bad news from your best friend, vibrates at a certain level. And at any given moment my being, my holistic whole-bodied being vibrates according to all these many factors of Oneness. And my job is to stay the Conscious Witness so I can align and offer up those vibrations that are unique to me...I believe that in this way Harmony is possible...if even at times it looks like and feels like Divine Chaos. 
So in this Oneness of things, all movement has it seasons. And finally it came time for me to surrender to that deep yearning: it was all I could do to not scream it at the top of my lungs I just need to be Alone! It logically made no sense but I couldn't fight it anymore, and in fact, I often wonder if fighting that instinct for as long as I did instead of exploring the message of it contributed to the pain that it has greatly caused between me and Brandon. I literally was beginning to fracture inside, to feel depressed and more. And by the time I could take it no more what was left was letting down the person I loved most in the world. And frankly, I had no real reason to give to him.... 
But there is absolutely no denying that when I surrendered to the deep inner calling and said Yes to it--doors opened immediately. First a new job that afforded me enough money to live on my own, then a home in the vicinity of the new job. The first night I was here at Chop I was busybusy moving all my packed bags off my bed when something suddenly shook me and I stilled inside, and in the utter quiet of those surroundings the inner voice said: Do you hear it? This, this deep silence is what you wanted. And my friends, it is so, so quiet here.
I moved on to Anngar Farm with Brandon over a year and half ago, in fact in June it will be two years. And strangely, the moment we got all our stuff in to that castillo--or castle--which is what my Mexican friend Santiago called the six-bedroom farmhouse that Brandon and I were literally given in exchange for caretaking the several acres of landscaped lawn that came along with it, I began to experience a deep and nagging discontent. I had no words for it, but it kept me up late, woke me up in the dark with blank stares, and caused me endless bouts of un-named melancholy worsened by my own refusal to just listen to what was Within. I kept telling my self just to shut-it, and be grateful for all the gifts you have why don't you?! By October of that year, some four or so months after we'd finally settled in, I had at least allowed myself to hear my inner message: I just want some time to be alone.It made no sense to me. But intensified monthly. Now, here's the thing you need to know about me. I believe in our own deep Authenticity. That we each are alit with gifts specific to our own souls, unique to our own form of song. And it is our duties to listen and align with them and draw them out, and indeed this is how to evolve in to our best selves and serve this world. I believe in constant change, the power of intention, positive thinking and the law of attraction. And most of all I believe that we all are engaged by the same unifying energy, and that that energy exists in vibrations, and that everything, from a thought or intention to the rising-tide, the full moon the equinox a winter's snow or bad news from your best friend, vibrates at a certain level. And at any given moment my being, my holistic whole-bodied being vibrates according to all these many factors of Oneness. And my job is to stay the Conscious Witness so I can align and offer up those vibrations that are unique to me...I believe that in this way Harmony is possible...if even at times it looks like and feels like Divine Chaos. So in this Oneness of things, all movement has it seasons. And finally it came time for me to surrender to that deep yearning: it was all I could do to not scream it at the top of my lungs I just need to be Alone! It logically made no sense but I couldn't fight it anymore, and in fact, I often wonder if fighting that instinct for as long as I did instead of exploring the message of it contributed to the pain that it has greatly caused between me and Brandon. I literally was beginning to fracture inside, to feel depressed and more. And by the time I could take it no more what was left was letting down the person I loved most in the world. And frankly, I had no real reason to give to him.... But there is absolutely no denying that when I surrendered to the deep inner calling and said Yes to it--doors opened immediately. First a new job that afforded me enough money to live on my own, then a home in the vicinity of the new job. The first night I was here at Chop I was busybusy moving all my packed bags off my bed when something suddenly shook me and I stilled inside, and in the utter quiet of those surroundings the inner voice said: Do you hear it? This, this deep silence is what you wanted. And my friends, it is so, so quiet here. 
So, I'd love to tell you that I've just honored that quiet since then. And certainly in my own little regular ways I have. But I've also quietly been trying to plot and plan my next move, and then getting frustrated when I can't seem to force those changes. Ping-pong, ping-pong. The more time passes, the more frustrated and full of plans I get. Only to feel exhausted and more confused that ever. I like Louise Hay's term for this--Divine Discontent--and here-in lay the message of my illness: to slow down and just do what I came here, what I quite literally was led here, to do. Be Quiet. Take time to be quiet, in silence, and alone. And trust what will come from within will come in its right time. As all things come as and when they should... Like a foot of snow after you've been home sick for four days. Or the vibrant buds of purple crocus' who so needed some snow melt to grow grow grow... Ahhh, what balance to continually learn and relearn how to strike: balance of the light of knowledge versus faith that in what you can't always see ahead of you in the dark...So it goes so it goes and so it goes..So might it be....
Inside Great MaMa Magnolia, Who Breathes Silence, late-night witching hour with Laura Walsh, Chestertown
February 17, 2009
A February State of Mind
Friends friends friends
Some thoughts on where we be right now.
First, a definition: by WE, I refer to the collective We. And by collective, I refer to those folks impacted by current western seasonal/societal associations--yes, those of us hearkened by a deeper winter sense.
I am noticing a trend as of late, let's call it a case of the February's. Everybody I know is rushing around, myself included! allstrungout and agro, with far too much to do and fumbling and bumbling all over the place trying to get it all done. The word frenetic comes to mind. And indeed the stuff-to-do seems to be in the genuine form of responsibilities, within those areas of our personal lives that call for attention no matter what.
I've been witnessing the people, the WE, friends of mine, peers, family, work folk and other varieties of associations, all increasingly more tired and harried, simply put: exhausted, stressed out. And believe me, I speak for myself here.
I will share thus:
In my mind, my heart, my spirit, the wild nebuli longings of myself, deep and nameless as they are in those creative unbound mists and surges of the me to come I can feel my new aspects awakening. They haunt me, delicious, in the night--peaked spikes of quiet gleaming there at me with their long lean teeth. But when I go to create I am flat, dull, exhausted by the call of the common things of this world. So I am finding day by day a growing but subtle creative tension, this dark yearning in me to rebirth pitted against the world and its mundane measures that daily I must fulfill: work, family, friends, duty duty duty. And so it is on our final leg in the dark: when we meet upon the Devil, when it comes right down to that point by which we have to call him by name. This is the tenderest of tender times friends, and those duties that drag us and drain from us right now are indeed meant to weather us, yes; but only so that we might own the strength we've grown through out this long winter in the dark. The duties demanding your attention, those which drag you down, this is the final fight--the outter-world You meant to take You, the inner-wild creative and authentic You, down in the dark. Don't let this dis-owning, this shallow sucker punch, be the end. It's kinda like being on the crest of a great crashing wave: ride it, enjoy the ridebut may you not fight it, so that when you end up clobbered with a face-full of sand you still have the sensibility to dig the stillness there found in the rest and retreat. Remember why you were riding in the first place, dont let that crash suck or stun the light right out of ya....
And so too is there a greater fight going on right now, make no doubt about it. Each one of us individuals, should we so choose, might step up to the battle with love in our hearts and seek to be the change. With each passing year the world and all its temporal callings steady tries to take from us those wild-longings, that bit of magic and mist left in the morning still in your hair. Each year "time" speeds up and the pace we are "expected" to keep greatens.
You see it, whirling in madness all around you. Heck, if you are anything like me you barely see it because you're spinning so fast yourself you can barely slow down! It's ok, spin spin spin. But may it not take you, closed-eyes, unconscious, down the spout.
The most courageous act you can do right now is to keep your inner still amid this affront. And it's an action you can take, you have to take, in private, see: give time to your inner-process, these last few important gasps of breath to labor forth your new self are the difference between the life of imagination and dreams versus settling for the frenetic standards of Mr. or Ms. Stressy McStrungTheHellOut that life all around you seems to demand. No, you are not crazy. Yes, the answers are still in the quiet within. But the challenge--to stake your claim, your right, to go in there right now after them--is the most important thing there is.
Look ya'll, we got midwifing right now to do.
DONT
GIVE
UP---
Some thoughts on where we be right now.
First, a definition: by WE, I refer to the collective We. And by collective, I refer to those folks impacted by current western seasonal/societal associations--yes, those of us hearkened by a deeper winter sense.
I am noticing a trend as of late, let's call it a case of the February's. Everybody I know is rushing around, myself included! allstrungout and agro, with far too much to do and fumbling and bumbling all over the place trying to get it all done. The word frenetic comes to mind. And indeed the stuff-to-do seems to be in the genuine form of responsibilities, within those areas of our personal lives that call for attention no matter what.
I've been witnessing the people, the WE, friends of mine, peers, family, work folk and other varieties of associations, all increasingly more tired and harried, simply put: exhausted, stressed out. And believe me, I speak for myself here.
I will share thus:
In my mind, my heart, my spirit, the wild nebuli longings of myself, deep and nameless as they are in those creative unbound mists and surges of the me to come I can feel my new aspects awakening. They haunt me, delicious, in the night--peaked spikes of quiet gleaming there at me with their long lean teeth. But when I go to create I am flat, dull, exhausted by the call of the common things of this world. So I am finding day by day a growing but subtle creative tension, this dark yearning in me to rebirth pitted against the world and its mundane measures that daily I must fulfill: work, family, friends, duty duty duty. And so it is on our final leg in the dark: when we meet upon the Devil, when it comes right down to that point by which we have to call him by name. This is the tenderest of tender times friends, and those duties that drag us and drain from us right now are indeed meant to weather us, yes; but only so that we might own the strength we've grown through out this long winter in the dark. The duties demanding your attention, those which drag you down, this is the final fight--the outter-world You meant to take You, the inner-wild creative and authentic You, down in the dark. Don't let this dis-owning, this shallow sucker punch, be the end. It's kinda like being on the crest of a great crashing wave: ride it, enjoy the ridebut may you not fight it, so that when you end up clobbered with a face-full of sand you still have the sensibility to dig the stillness there found in the rest and retreat. Remember why you were riding in the first place, dont let that crash suck or stun the light right out of ya....
And so too is there a greater fight going on right now, make no doubt about it. Each one of us individuals, should we so choose, might step up to the battle with love in our hearts and seek to be the change. With each passing year the world and all its temporal callings steady tries to take from us those wild-longings, that bit of magic and mist left in the morning still in your hair. Each year "time" speeds up and the pace we are "expected" to keep greatens.
You see it, whirling in madness all around you. Heck, if you are anything like me you barely see it because you're spinning so fast yourself you can barely slow down! It's ok, spin spin spin. But may it not take you, closed-eyes, unconscious, down the spout.
The most courageous act you can do right now is to keep your inner still amid this affront. And it's an action you can take, you have to take, in private, see: give time to your inner-process, these last few important gasps of breath to labor forth your new self are the difference between the life of imagination and dreams versus settling for the frenetic standards of Mr. or Ms. Stressy McStrungTheHellOut that life all around you seems to demand. No, you are not crazy. Yes, the answers are still in the quiet within. But the challenge--to stake your claim, your right, to go in there right now after them--is the most important thing there is.
Look ya'll, we got midwifing right now to do.
DONT
GIVE
UP---
February 7, 2009
Goodnight Chop....Goodnight me...
What a fulfilling day. The weather was warm enough for a hike at Adkins Arboreatum and the air, the trees, the breath of all the decaying leaves--it said spring, spring. Lunar Imbolc starts tonight, through the next 24 hours aaaaahhhhhh. And being outside under sky feet on earth, hard and frozen as it all still was, it was so clear to me in an inside way all the little wakefull bursts of life that could be felt. But ahhh, to be in February.....time to sleep, most important time of all for sleep in fact. Feb is like that last hour before waking when your dreams are most electric--this is crucial time for incubation. Everyone's sick right now, too--all your energy is hauling together towards jestation time. So if your all caught up in the temporal day to day chances are you're probably ill or with cold right now. Cuz your soul needs its time....
So sleep, sleep,it's sleeptime to finalize the dreams within....
January 21, 2009
Cycles & Wisdom & Sometimes Getting to Know
In my wyld and at times crazed round about head there is lately an almost daily flash of new thought or insight that I am noticing floating on by.
It's always a wonder to me the way that my thought process, thus my growth goes: how I'll spiral along with these little randoms of new passing thoughts, fresh and clean as a classroom at the start of September. How they delight by my mind's eye dancing from all different slanted and quik-passing directions, til BAM, along comes one of those days when the fluid is so flow, when everything is so right that it all falls together in a tapestry of perception and oneness-of-living that it so brand new and fresh that it is clear that my soul, big and bright, and my subconscious have been busy at it making sense of things for me all the while. How on those BAM days I can be moved to tears in joy over the simple serendipity and obvious blessed harmony of things.
How I want that, all the time. What a sucker I am, you know, for feeling good...
And so what's on my mind today: how I am aware of being in one of those upturns of my own cycle right now. New growth and taking things in. And since I can see it, little flashes of original thought here and there, and have seen this before--I know that it will eventually culminate in a whole new understanding of things. Which increases my amped-ness to know what is on the way....
But then at once such anticipation also births the awareness in me of what it is to be dull: in the lax period, the time of quiet or void that feels like to me nothing but mud, to be with confusion and no dreams...and how this always pre-empts a period of great wonder and new lease, and also always follows a new level of heightened perception and increase.
This sounds manic-depressive, yes? I know I know. But the truth is I believe this to be quite naturally the cycle of the Creative. And I am heartened at how this triumph, this great seizure and breath of life itself, then the inevitable exhale and release so naturally and rythmically follows the world. The earth itself, the flux and flow of the seasons, the living and dying of every breathing detail, of even the moon. My god even the economy, the stock market, it all goes up, and, what the market-eyes will tell you: so too will what goes up come down.
It is Anicha time right now. Time of Great Changing. The time the earth dreams long of what she soon will grow. In this dreamtime is the unmanifest energy of all that you shall be in the year to come. Feel it, magic and subtle as breath passing by your hair. All artists can feel it right now. Unless they're drugged or drunk-numb...(it's hard at times to trust all that sizzle of magic! hell this I know for sure)...You're sure you feel just behind the air--it's almost like a tingle on your skin. The Dreamtime in your subconscious...the slight rush deep within.
Mercury retro will pass at the end of the month and then Imbolc will come. And then, all us earthly people so consumed with our daily lives will, if we are in a place with Winter, forget that Spring shall come. February will hit us hard with the hurt and we will forget: that our daily acts of living indeed are our only form of prayer. Trust this friends and trust yourselves, trust the natural ebb of quiet and rest for what it is--the downtime before the great release. And it follows naturally this spellbound rush then gone, rush then gone, sometimes electric sometimes Still, time of January when your soul-stuff is letting off little glimmers of all that it deeply dares you to Dream.
It's always a wonder to me the way that my thought process, thus my growth goes: how I'll spiral along with these little randoms of new passing thoughts, fresh and clean as a classroom at the start of September. How they delight by my mind's eye dancing from all different slanted and quik-passing directions, til BAM, along comes one of those days when the fluid is so flow, when everything is so right that it all falls together in a tapestry of perception and oneness-of-living that it so brand new and fresh that it is clear that my soul, big and bright, and my subconscious have been busy at it making sense of things for me all the while. How on those BAM days I can be moved to tears in joy over the simple serendipity and obvious blessed harmony of things.
How I want that, all the time. What a sucker I am, you know, for feeling good...
And so what's on my mind today: how I am aware of being in one of those upturns of my own cycle right now. New growth and taking things in. And since I can see it, little flashes of original thought here and there, and have seen this before--I know that it will eventually culminate in a whole new understanding of things. Which increases my amped-ness to know what is on the way....
But then at once such anticipation also births the awareness in me of what it is to be dull: in the lax period, the time of quiet or void that feels like to me nothing but mud, to be with confusion and no dreams...and how this always pre-empts a period of great wonder and new lease, and also always follows a new level of heightened perception and increase.
This sounds manic-depressive, yes? I know I know. But the truth is I believe this to be quite naturally the cycle of the Creative. And I am heartened at how this triumph, this great seizure and breath of life itself, then the inevitable exhale and release so naturally and rythmically follows the world. The earth itself, the flux and flow of the seasons, the living and dying of every breathing detail, of even the moon. My god even the economy, the stock market, it all goes up, and, what the market-eyes will tell you: so too will what goes up come down.
It is Anicha time right now. Time of Great Changing. The time the earth dreams long of what she soon will grow. In this dreamtime is the unmanifest energy of all that you shall be in the year to come. Feel it, magic and subtle as breath passing by your hair. All artists can feel it right now. Unless they're drugged or drunk-numb...(it's hard at times to trust all that sizzle of magic! hell this I know for sure)...You're sure you feel just behind the air--it's almost like a tingle on your skin. The Dreamtime in your subconscious...the slight rush deep within.
Mercury retro will pass at the end of the month and then Imbolc will come. And then, all us earthly people so consumed with our daily lives will, if we are in a place with Winter, forget that Spring shall come. February will hit us hard with the hurt and we will forget: that our daily acts of living indeed are our only form of prayer. Trust this friends and trust yourselves, trust the natural ebb of quiet and rest for what it is--the downtime before the great release. And it follows naturally this spellbound rush then gone, rush then gone, sometimes electric sometimes Still, time of January when your soul-stuff is letting off little glimmers of all that it deeply dares you to Dream.
January 15, 2009
Poems Poems Poetry
When the winter wheat comes I will think of you
It is now that we cast long looks
at the setting sun,
remember;
we are privileged. We take stock,
assessment of the jobs we have done.
The winter wheat will grow soon
where the corn stood in rows.
The green meat of the tips of those
tender stalks will in vibrating shadows
lift voices to the heavens—
So swift, so soon will be the color
laying there
all force will draw out from us, from this
our unifying center
where, ah
with catched breath
we will realize we are waiting
and have been,
since the fall.
that is a poem for the day by me
i think part of the reason i am writing so much lately, besides this sleepfull time of year always being sooo creative for me, is that i am reading a ton a ton a poetry. that and with all the changes i personally have undergone in the last three months, now with the retrograde my head is freakin goingoingoin. so it's easy to catch some automatic voices up there and channel um on to the page...
here's who i'm really in to today:
obviously you can't click to look inside. but you can click here to check her out. it was one of those total on instincts grab and buy. entirely by the feeling, the swell in the heart area when i lifted her off the shelf.
ok that is all.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)