Of two worlds, my brother Sean and I

Today I am reading Maloutas.  The Whole Marie.  She slips me effortless as a stream in to the poetry, the poetic dream.  The inside-imagination place stunning as it is sacred, the place where it all is: what could be.

It is an ordinary day, like all others that mean something to me:  I exhibited choice. Choice not just in my approach to the day but also, for Wednesday is my Sunday, my last day of my weekend, in what I would do.  Not just how and who but what.

Today I will be poet, I get to be one hundred percent me-poet-me. Engaged in the act of the dream, engulfed.  The poet dream, the miraculous consciousness.  In bed.  Today, I will not get out of bed.  The books the blank page the candles and oils burning the cozies the blankies the coffee, o the coffee, and me.

I've been out of bed five times.  The poet's life is tough, this is the silver grain, this is the seed that falls from the grail.  I love to be engulfed!!  I only ever want to be engulfed!  Even if it hurts to pull myself out again.  Even if Narnia and the traces of her magic wands linger in the fingerprints left on my work apron, my work clothes, my work tucked behind my ear up in bobbypins hair.  The fingerprints how they pain me.  This is the gentle, furtive discipline.  Knowing when to say when--knowing when to say it is time to give to the seeds, to palm them in repetitive warming, to crack them from the hull, to till their bed-ground, to lay open.  In 2008 at this time I thought the dream Craziness, illusory, not real. Thought myself half-mad and on my way to proving insanity wasn't worth it by fighting it every step of the way.  YIKES.  No one tells you the dream is what you give to it, the madness what you take away, or refuse.  You have to define that landscape for yourself.

The half and half.  I've been out of bed five times today, up for three hours and yet to write, til now.  When I first woke the waking was whole and real. With the inside peace, that all-knowing perspective place of knowledge, that round calm room easy to see as a door, opened.  The understanding, congruent feeling there sometimes is upon waking, the creation of which we have no control.  In the middle of the night I dreamt of my brother, it was raining out and what woke me in the center of the dream was the most delicious, monstrous thunder and flashes of lightening outside white as a beam.  Our first spring thunder storm. This part was real, not a dream.  Then when I woke from the thunder-sleep the rain in my dream had washed out the side of the house, and Sean and I were falling down the side of the rain-wave, floating, waving to the other, laughing at the oncoming crash.  Why haven't you talked to me? I was asking him.  Then I was awake it was morning and I wanted to write, nothing more in the world was there except to write, and not my book but from the poetryplaceallllday, but also there were all my dreams and I had to talk to Sean.

He texted this morning Nate Dogg died.  Turns out he dreamt about me too and in his dream he asked me wutsup with you how come we haven't been talking which of course meant we had to talk, and now.

I love him so much, my brother.  We are very, very different.  He is in a corporate job and in June of last year he and his fiance moved 2000 miles away in order to pursue the growth of her corporate position.  They live in an enormous brick home in the suburbs of Memphis the kind with interior decoration and an inground swimming pool, they married this past fall in a huge fancy affair, they are now expecting their first kid. And this is it, the half and half.  None of that lifestyle is part of me, but that life and those who people it are, and so on my slip-slide in to the poetry dream this morning I called him back because this is what it is to be de dos mundos or "of two worlds", the first world is the inner, the poetic dreamworld where myth is real, and reality bendable, and world number two is where most the other people always live, the topside world of responsibilities, obligations, where also our relationships and heart-ties lay.  I have an enormous amount of relationships and have always put a lot of myself in to my work.  It is a hard walk to keep the line of--being of two worlds.   I talked to my brother strongly, clearly, he is the only one now that I've told about all the inner quiet things happening.  The hopes, the action.  The topside realities blended with the inner poetry visions, the alchemy.  The blending of both worlds, the manifestations of my true dreams.  For most I dont have the energy or clarity to speak it all out, but I told it best I could to him, I told it all.  Likewise my brother, the man I admire and look up to most in this world, told me his. 

Sean and I were suburb brats raised in a coosh lifestyle, playing 'intendo and crossing the swingset and riding BMX bikes and hanging with the many other kids like us in the neighborhood.  Kickball in the deadend and playing games I'd make up like murder mystery or war games that would take us for hours out and about on foot.  Just miles away was Baltimore City, hon, its highrise projects and kitschy thrift-lovin stoop-hons and blue collar factory workers corner to corner from the other.  In the early 90's hiphop gave way to gangsta rap, 92Q and V103 out of the city were hot and here is the miracle of how poetry, the poetic dream does. I was becoming a drug addict then, just starting, and Doggystyle was Sean and I's shit and it felt so real!  All that funk us white kids were nodding our heads to, without even knowing it was the very soundtrack miles away in our own city.  Playing out from the bathroom boombox, shaping us and shaping me and our popular culture sure as we shaped it.   I watched 8 mile last night for the first time in a while, the battle at the end gives me chills.  That movie was supposed to be 95, the year I graduated highschool. Biggie and Mob Deep are all over the background while they drive beater cars and puff blunts and dream of some day.  I did that same shit in 1995.   But I went back to my coosh life at mom's at the end of the day.

I love that Nate Dogg, all these years later and from way different places, is where my brother and I meet in the middle of those two worlds.

Here is my fave most recent clip of Nate D. Be sure to check it out, 1:28. Listening today I realized what I always loved most about him, how his baritone voice was low enough to serve as a baseline interlude.    Ahhh god just hearing him makes me hottt

Also, for good measure.  A little Snoop Dogg, original shiznet for dat ass~
RIP Nate D (fb users go here)

Nous. The Creative Process, the Light of the Mind...

Erika introduced the term that overlays our 'relationship' which is so much bigger than just two woman who've known one another in one way or other for a very long time.  It is mine with her and it is me as I see her and see me through her, her with me and how she see me and sees her through me, than of course us together and then finally me with her work and her with mine, as well of course as it is Us with the Work. In that, it is all inseparable and so in lay the heart of the significance as I see it of the word--Nous.  To me it has always suggested the creative process.  Derrived from the Greeks, it goes back to that heady philosophical time when it was right and just to discern the big questions of god and life and soul and ethics and such.  It basically means original knowing, what I call the deep wisdom and what the Greeks said was higher mind.  On Liz's table receiving riveting energy and cranial sacral work it came clearly to me: Erika and I's calling to one another was for more than just the words.  It was fabric, essence stuff.  As you create, so too are you created.  The artist's most primal dance, to bend and break, to break bones, to submit, to finesse, to raise up, to create ash, to use the ash as dust the dust as paint and too, to paint again in to being once more.  Nous.  That was February 2009 getting that energy work done when it said how crucial she was to me and I to her spirit, we didn't start submitting til that summer.  She'll be signed soon.  It makes my eyes dance with love.

Nous.  diPrima wrote

intellectus means "light of the mind"
it is not discourse it is not even language
the inner sun

the polis is constellated around the sun
the fire is central

wiki says
Nous (pronounced /ˈnuːs/, Greek: νοῦς or νόος)^[1] is a term from Greek philosophy referring to a particular aspect or faculty of mind that is generally translated into English as intellect (from the Latin word intellectus, which is the Latin translation of nous^[2]). However, nous does not refer to the discursive or reasoning aspect of mind but rather is a faculty of direct 'knowing' that discerns truth directly.

The bigger gift.  Our selves.  That is what it all is, this creative dance.  I am so honored to be in this movement with her.  SO proud, and inspired from deep within the very light of my mind over where she's going, because together we've been defining said steps by fleshing out who we are and where we've been. 

This is on my mind, gestating.  This idea of nous and process, intellectus and light of the mind.   I'm at 21st in the belly of The Grand, it is the most stunning of almost spring days.  I will finish Ch. 8 today thereby completing Part 1 of my book!

ahhhh, Sacred nous....

Stay tuned....

Wild Women Wisdom: De dos mundos. Which IS Life.

Erika and I met in grade school.  She was in band and I wasn't because of some bad shit going down at my home, that's all I remember about our real young connections.   Red and green plaid jumpers thick as cardboard, white button-downs peter-pan collars and cable-lined knee high socks that were soft kellygreen and that I used to collect the knits off of to make my own little version of fuzzball friends, because in the eighties they had these pom-pom stickerhead things on big feet that my Catholic School gave away once a year as some incentive for some scholastic long forgotten thing, and I thought they were the cutest little creatures ever.  By middleschool it was the words--stuffing sheets of frazzled loose leaf thin blue lines in to one another's hands under the desk in Ms. Fouse's class.  Maybe this only happened once and I remember it because of the adrenaline scar--doing something we weren't supposed to be doing in the back of class.  The trick light that put on in my eye.  Erika's large curly cursive and the characters with all the traditional old-fashioned names.  My loosely-costumed accounts of people we both went to school with, making stories out of the lives of people we knew.

I was a bitch as a teenager, suppose I still am or can be.  Erika and I were teens together too but I wanted nothing to do with her because of her friends.  I was doing drugs by then had pink hair and black cat eyes, purple combat boots.  I drove junk yard cards I'd buy from my granddad's brother for a hundred bucks and thought I knew more about real life than the pretty preppy girls that she was one of.  My dad lived in California and we didn't speak.  I was tuff.  At least to me.  

Every January I think about these things, I think it is because my parents sat Sean and I down in January and told us they were splitting up.  Dad'd been living in Manahtten by then for three months so really it was just about them having to say the words.   That was 1989.  It sucked.  In January the past several years my pop and I spend his birthday weekend together at the beach, except that for now I live at the beach and it is January already and mom is in Mexico for the month and so he and I have been together just us when he comes down every weekend.  We are watching the series Weeds together, the dvd goes in after the Ravens game ends and then we just scream and laugh and look at each other with shocked expressions slack-jawed speechless but in giddy commiseration the dark humor and insinuations in our eyes.  That's dad, who used to cover for me when I was a teen and he'd come home from Cali for the holidays or for the McMullen gatherings.  He came home this Saturday empty-handed after looking for a replacement pan of mom's that I burned up accidentally.  I didn't ask him to but he did it and we didn't need to discuss that it he was trying to find a new one so that mom would never know.  We cuss and laugh and shake our heads over what we see on the TV.   He's taking my suggestions about changing his diet.  As of last night he'd lost 12 pounds.  We bitch about not being able to eat steak and the fluffy breads and creams together and the sugars we love so much.  When he's not looking I sneak candy bars and fries, tacos with creamy melted cheese.  We are so alike.

There is a pyschic term that I first read in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book Women Who Run With the Wolves.  It is de dos mundos, or of two worlds.  And to me this term is about the angelic, the demonic acts of not only the holy creatives, but further and even more importantly of those who embark on the authentic path.  Which I guess really is the most creative thing one can do.  The older I get the more I realize it is this, this Real Work that matters most--all else, all acts of art and creation thus evolve out of the struggle for ourselves, evolve out of the substance of who we are and those strides we take towards that person.  To be of both worlds is to take the devilish plunge:  to walk through the day by day topside world of work, family, friends and to likewise be willing to, at the same time, go inside our burrows, the tired winter pockets of gnarly filth or snuggly warmth and pull back the boulders we put there and investigate the little chemical nightmares or dreams that wait with knowledge for us behind all of that.  The knowledge of our roots, of our healing, of our true-selves that inside of each and every one of us look like the devil sitting there.  Those sad or scary or numb or deadened spaces are full with vitality and angelic lifeforce if we persist persist persist to shed light on them and winkingly clean them out.  Erika is my writing partner now, my solace, my only shining angel lately and I told her last week on the phone--ever since Joe died the week of Thanksgiving I haven't been able to write.  I told her the stories of what was emotionally consuming me with each tired step I took as the holidays washed us over.  Erika too had hers.  We agreed, it is time now only for stillness and reflection, it is this de dos mundos, this Real Work that right now in the darkest part of our season truly counts. 

But it is hard to be here at the beach supposed to be writing, and not.    And it is funny to me, and maybe at the end of the day why I write is because life is just so damn miraculously-fucked-up-AND-amazing that I feel I need to mark my own holy amen proof of appreciation of it all--but here I am, January again kicking it with my dad at the beach in his home, laughing and living with him in the topside world.  And inside in the inner terrain circling back over the old old tracks with all the faces of him and me then, too, all the little demon-angels and angel-demons that live inside.  And this precious funny fusion.  Which is life...