Her true essence.

After yoga, which was with a different teacher tonight and one of the sweatiest, most energizing workouts I have ever had, my body was craving fresh veggie pasta with every vibrating cell.  I walked to Mother's and bought ingredients and came home and cooked myself a feast.  And decided I'm gonna chill and watch tv.  

So You Think You Can Dance.  It's the first time I've watched prime time in my house in Huntington but today on the phone mom said I needed to.  It makes me miss her.  This was our show.   When we lived together two falls ago she got me hooked.  I forgot how deeply dance moves me.  Good dance pangs my heart, catches my throat, covers me in chills.  Makes my eyes fill.   It makes me ache for Baltimore and home because Artscape, all that magnificent street art and dance, starts this week.

My kids are doing so well!  They are not kids by any means but some days like today when I give them a project and look up from my attendance book to see each of them concentrating I swell with something like parental pride and adoration.  In my eyes, it's true, they can do no wrong.  After school I applied for a second job.  It's a mile from my new house.  I can ride my bike, so I hope I get it.

My new house!  There is a hiking trail that leads up the canyon it starts in my neighborhood!  God I am thrilled.  Muller's coming down this weekend and Jason who I haven't seen since Kevin and I were 16 and 15-years-old.  Samba tomorrow night then Long Beach with Alison and who knows who else for dinner and dancing Friday.  Today is the new moon.  My meditation each morning has gotten more and more strong and the journaling has me really self-connected.  We were chanting in class tonight and my soul was so still, so engaged and filling up the vessel of me so presently that all I could think of was Hannah at Earth Activist Training when we did our New Moon ritual.  This was up in the Cazadero Mountains in January.  She said how connected she felt to the moon in her dark phase, when she isn't obliged to reflect the sun and can simply be her whole, pure self.  Her true essence.  That line came back to me on my breath tonight, it filled me whole with my self, it filled me strong as the two weeks of silence at Vipassana did, whole as Cazadero and the Permaculture kids.  I am feeling so sweetly quenched on the gratitude in my heart, on the walking blessings of my life, so excited to be here and on the verge of so many amazing changes.   So alive.  The checking in daily with me is paying off.

I am grateful, aware.  New moon sets a new cycle in motion, our own personal start anew.  Yes yes and thank you.

Normal never fit

Is it normal for a 35-year-old to practice the reject in her room in the morning in her too big snuggle pants?

No, it's not.  I laugh at myself.  I can pop, do Dougie arms--side to side swag or crazy arms--but not the hop back moves with my feet cousin Mason tries to show me every time.  And my moves will always be influenced by gangster rap hippie fests and DC GoGo.  Chuck Brown just died.  Chuck Brown!  I think of Dave Swann.  These are the thoughts, plus the laughing, that I catch me thinking when Rye Rye is on and I'm dancing this morning in my California bedroom.  This is my head when it occurs to me:  Is it normal for a 35-year-old to practice the reject in her room in the morning, in her too big snuggle pants?

Erika and I talked for 3 hours last night.  Talking is not the right word.  It's this high-motioned, bright-ringed fluidity so in real-time that for most it would be surreal.  We call it nous.  Brooks and I call it synchronicity.  He's been texting me all week with his own examples.  Erika and I haven't been engaged like this since late 2010.  She had to make her crossing in to the publishing world and I had to make mine, to California.

It was on Wednesday that I fully understood.

I have wanted, and seen, my whole life long, this image of me staring out at the sea.  What comes with that image is the sure sense of being exactly where I am meant to be at.  All along right there inside of me was this life I always was meant to inhabit, unringed by duty or constrictive what will I do with my life thinking--it is nothing complex at all, just simple, staring at the sea.  It's me in my autonomy and what I suppose I always knew but never acknowledged was what it included.  Allowing, finally, fully, for Poetry me.  That's what the sea is about, giving over to the tidal flows and retreats.  The whole blessed rounds of my creative self.  Owing my power once and for all.

Wednesday I came walking out of the library knowing that I was walking in to a new life.  I just spent three whole months in a curative gestation.  I read and wrote and studied so much, every lit soppy bit meant to feed and nurture the vegetative creative body deep in me. That's always what the sea was about, that's always so exactly all that I really want.  That's the happiness everyone keeps saying they see on me.  What Mike said was so visible it actually is a change in my skin tone.  Me, in awe that another dream has been realized.  Ready to rely on the momentum, the steady coasting magic of all in the past year that I have done.

The laughing whimsy gratitude of it all has got me giddy as a child.  Too bad it's not normal for a 35-year-old to be so free.  Thank god normal never fit on me.

Morning Dance Song for packing and cardboard boxes

Today is my second to last day at work!

(Insert wide-mouthed picture of me here with cartoon question marks all about my head.)

My house is 49.777654ribbonstrinketscardspaperscookbooksohhhsomuchclothes% packed.

There are lots, lots of empty boxes kindly donated from the Acme all over my bathroom bc that's the only place there's room for them.

My office is the opposite of cleaned, organized, or even a teeny bit packed. (if you know me at all than you know my office is aptly decorated with yes, ribbons, trinkets, cards and books.)

But hey, today! Hello today! My fave morning dance song by Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros which I've posted here before greeted me when I got out of the shower. Followed by Bowie, Sound and Vision!

Yaaay morning dance songs and smiley out of the shower place half packed dancing. I mean, cmon. So long as we can dance, right...

PS
Today's New Moon, tonight anyhow around 9pm. Quiet thoughts in the void of what yet can be...

Morning Dance Song # 2

Man, was I punchy silly groggy this morning making my coffee and This song was half-way through when I realized how much fun I was having dancing. It occured to me most times I dont even reaize I'm dancing it just happens, and now that I've written about it twice will it change the experience hopefully not. I'm a lonely frog he he. Good morning world, happy love! I'm spending the day w my momma I hope you get special time with those that you love today too, xoxo.

"You can be inspirational in any part of the world...

...but not every part of the world can inspire you."~JTA, 5 sept 09

Me and cousin Joey to the far right. 1984.

Wow, I am so taking a little break from the madness of student files right now. Since yesterday morning it's been non-stop organizing of and placing ESL students by assessment levels. Making new student folders. Class lists. Lots of derangely exciting stuff, I mean real pulse-racing kind of activities...

My cousin Collin is sitting across from me, right now, I have one class left to go and then two GED classes and then I am done this drone of skull-numbing torture; he is working on an essay for his gened English first semester ever college class. For a book he didn't read. This summer. He looks at me with that great, eighteen-year-old dryness he is famous for and says "Cuz I mean, all my stoopid cousins kept coming up to me on the beach this summer, you know, trying to have fun and all..."

Saturday night I got up with my other cousin. He's in his late 20's, born in Africa, raised in Germany, educated at Oxford, working currently on his PhD in England. Actually worked a while for the UN in Liberia. Huh? He was the first of us, our generation, to marry and is now expecting his first kid. He's in town this past week and I drove two hours to see him at 10:30 at night. Because that is what I now love to do. Get out and about, find some action. I snatched him away and off we scooted to see friends of mine play muse-ac and catch up.


Damn, I miss him. It'd been two years and last time we were together he wasn't married yet but I surely was, or for all intensive purposes my lifestyle two years ago certainly looked a lot different and included a fine and gentle long-term companion. So cousin Joe and I had lots of lots of sharing to do. Which is what I've done all summer, kicked it with fabulous folks from back in the day and shined my heart clean again and again in their love.


It was the first time that I recapped all my own personal changes from this past year and didn't feel like I was partly trying to sell it, looking to be affirmed that I'd done what was right. Instead it felt real and understandable and as normal as anything else about my self I've come to accept and even take for granted. Say my cheesy high-school tatoos, or eyesight that's blurred. Joey is the kind of person that I have such an intrinsic organic connection to. So much so that without expecting it, merely by virtue of sharing my self with him and he as well in exchange, a greater part of the landscape of me clears a bit more, the horizon spreads and clarifies in to more natural view, something in the bedrock part of me just clicks. After talking a while about my job, telling him about working our everloving asses off this past year to build from scratch a program that now serves a thousand students--he responded with his own details of his most recent work and projects.


And then it clicked. And I felt so happy and full of love to be snaking the backroads with firesmoke on the air and Joe chugging water to sober a little bit up.


I was definitely a little salty but with the sass that night and so I did something I rarely do. I asked him specifically two questions, asked him specifically for advice.

And here was one of his answers, which came after a pause and some puzzlement, which might of just meant he was thirsty....Kel, I dont know what to tell you. But you know what I am thinking about, that you love to dance. And dance is a form of communication that is ancient, far older than words. And you love to dance, you naturally know how to communicate with this form. So I think tonight you should just dance, and listen to the language of your self. Now, seriously. The only other person who ever would have possibly said something like this is me! But with that European swiftness that some mistake as curt but really is just minus any bullshsit, and with the deep intellect that courses this guys blood--my freaking radass cousin Joe answered me with the best advice, ever. And it made me beam!!!!

And god, he's so, so right. I spent earlier that day in fact at a festival, with my barefeet on the earth, so it was kinda like he was just affirming what I already in fact did know...

What I am listening to: def and kweli, both new and old

blah. back to the books i go.

if i can walk i can dance if i can talk i can sing.

(amen, cuz.) (amen amen.)

Long Dirt Road

Signs that I am getting better, # 1:

I was driving home tonight and Feist came on the radio. Pardon me if I am late with this, but I love this woman...and tonight, or this evening dusktime in farm country with the returning ospreys low swooping and the black trees against the mute orange and greys of the sky--Mushaboom came on. To say I was obsessed with song may be rather mild--indeed this past summer it was on constant reply in my head, an antagonistic message I couldn't quite grasp. (The words may indeed tip you off as to why, gentle reader, that is if you are at all a regular follower of these here words/this here life.) But I've never heard this song on the radio before. Well I lately only listen to pop music, silence or talk radio in the car because the slippery thin line between depression and real life for me is so subtle~~so fucking subtle but so MAJOR, you dig? And guilt, shame (which I've learned to re-identify for myself as self-judgment) and pity for me in the months since I moved out are a torturous landslide of boundary-less-ness, much like a brutal watercareening mudslide in a mean torrent of rain. There's just no way to tell once I've slipped over the slope and am stuck swirling within, no land to grab in sight. So tonight I'm driving along and on comes Mushaboom, contextually a song that would call up that ol tramp Melancholy and give her reason to let it rip. But tonight I drove along aware--aware you guys!! of the outline of my heart! You know, like blissing along with the music, aware of the tenderocity of life, actually feeling little tweaks in my heart but sure as those tweaks were one with the song they were one with the trees and those birds and that farmhouse over there, too. My sweet blessed broken healing heart, widened now and once again, even more softened at the edges. And thank god for the edges--that they were there and it wasn't just nebulous, patterned pain... If you have a minute visit this youtube video of her singing Mushaboom it's a trip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDZwThM7vAg
People do not do near enough choreographed dancing! I mean, cmon, I came from the eighties, you dig--the apex of MTV and the step step step kick and up, down and hands through the hair seductively and step and kick and again! Thank god for that, and thank god for dancing in general--which is probably sign # 2 I am getting better: I am doing an awful lot of bad pop song car dancing lately...

Anyhow. I read two excellent posts tonight, Serendipity number 6 zillion and twenty-two and 6 zillion twenty-three. The first, here, is a fascinating succinct read about body energy/the earth's energy, found on flip flopping joy. It took me a third of the way down to realize it was written by a man--there shows my clear gender bias, but his instinct on feminine/divine feminine patterns and injuries is so, so well done--and a full half of the way down to realize it was written about sex!!! Which just goes to show I am not always good at reading the titles. The second, here, is by my first writing mentor's husband, Jeff, and is in tune with my own recent re-discovery of the bliss of the great Mystery...

I have laundry piled up, literally, to my head. Time to go be a grown-up.