Truth is whole and living and malleable in our hands!

Lately what's in and out of my mind?  Discrepancies. Like in character.

I was living on the road in early 2012.  Hanging out learning magic AND practical ways of how to heal the earth. At a Tibetan Meditation Institute that hosts a bunch of starry-eyed heart-fueled pagans for a permaculture school for 2 and a half weeks every year.  This is up in the Cazadero hills, Sonoma.  I was both, still am, both a peace-full compassion junky meditator and starry-eyed earth-worshipper who believes in the magic fuel of an open heart and can get down in and with the transformative power that happens when we deal with the real deal: our own life-funk and shit. 

A man who was at that training said something like, his contradictions were the best part of him.  And that's it:  Permaculture, 101.  That life thrives the most at the edge, where two ecosystems combine.  Where new life can be let in.  And that's us.  Humans.  Our light part out in the open and our inner dark, our hidden shit.  The center where they combine.

One's not more real or important than the other, which some beliefs would have you worhsip.  The shadow is more real bc it's not persona.  The persona, which can be light-touched, "spiritually" touched, is more real because it's conscious.

Ok so yea, I tend to feel more whole and rich around a starry-eyed shadow-walker than a light-filled shadow-thrower myself! ;)

But to me neither side is true.  Or maybe each is.  Each is a part of the truth?

To me, rigid definitions of our self or each other can become the end of personal vitality.

As I write this, Dead Prez's rap "the cause of your ignorance, flaws in your discipline."   And I get that, the need for discipline, particularly as it arises out of self-introspection and contemplation.  But also--what if personal discipline includes shaking off dogma, includes shaking off any adage that professes because I am this thing I also must be this…?  Meaning, isn't self-discipline about self-honesty?  Isn't that the depths of it?  Honestly looking at what's real about us, shallow or deep or in-between as it possibly is?  

And also, I don't mean just looking at our selves.  I mean making room to embody it, to give how we're feeling in our heart embodiment by being it.  Experiencing it, experimenting with what's emerging.

This is a major issue with words, by the way.  How they are symbols for something we already associate.  Which means we will read them written by others and embody our preconceived notion of them instead of allowing the thought-function to drop us in more deep.

(Pardon that interjection…)

You know Gandhi right?  Most people do, at least because of that meme  you must be the change you wish to see.  If you study him, like really try to get down with the man behind his words…Read his autobio, read the critical readings that arose from that.  Gandhi's whole point was live what you believe, live it, embody it.  AND if, as you do so, it no longer feels exemplary of your soul, change what you speak to match what does.  Change how you be to meet what's true for you.  Be the change you wish to see.

Of course, this coming from a man who lived women as second class citizens and who also believed sex and sex energy was wrong to embody…

DISCREPENCIES.  Truth is whole and living and malleable in our hands!  That means changeable!

AND we can't see whole parts of our selves sometimes!  The shit is in the dark!  That means we can't see it!  Haha the best we can do is have compassion for this, understand we are half blind groping around for light and touch.  Each of us.

I have this buddy Justin who I love.  He said in December that he was worried about me.  That my mountain was blocking out my sun.  He was talking about grad school.

That's just it.  When you can't see--you can't see THAT YOU CAN'T SEE!

Have mercy on us, each.  May it begin, within.

Last week, I walk out to the driveway to get in the car and go to my favorite place, Mermaid Beach.  I wanted to, had to, go dive under the ocean green.  Crazed Kelly zeal.  A hummingbird catches my eye and mesmerizes me in the deeper way.  I drop in, meaning, I recognize that it stirred my heart to see that little bird, so I honor the stir.  It reminds me in that moment of a time in 2004 when I was living in the national forests and wilderness in this country. I lived the reality that it is possible to be able to interact with nature and to experience nature outside as reflective of your inner nature--follow me here, this is BIG mindbendy stuff--to Know them as one thing.   To embody nature as interactive with you, as reacting to you as you too react to it.  That this can happen if and when you deprogram your ideas that that's not real.  I think all this in an instant because those years of 04 and 05 is when that was my primary lesson, and it partially started with an experience while living in the woods with both hummingbirds and butterflies.

Hummingbird is a symbol for spontaneous joy.  I think of this driving to Mermaid Beach, let my thoughts of this symbol spiral me down more and more to the heart where living truth is.  Feel jamming and alive in the moment.  Yea, dude.  My JOY'S BEEN GONE.  This feeling of life inside me.  It's been so…FLEETING. I haven't been awake to it, because you know…Dark.

Next thing I know I am laying out my towel on Mermaid Beach and here flies up this sweet little hummingbird doing horrible unstoppable spirals at my towel unable to stop bc his or her little wing is hurt.  I mean she's freaking with the panic look in her eye.  She or he lands then at my towel and I scoop her or him up in my scarf and do reiki on the little creature, singing and loving it and very gently caressing the little sweetie, bc really, what else is there--that's all we can really do.

Then when the warmth passes and I can tell it's time to put him back on the sand, I do.  She sits about a minute or two and then flies off no problems.

So I get to heal a symbol of Joy.

So now here I sit, thinking about rigidity, and dead forms of things, and how our vitality can disappear easy as that.  And old systems of self-care, and giving too much because we think it's what were supposed to do, and how this is as rigid as it gets: "supposed to".  And how we don't see, cuz we can't see that we don't, til we do.  

If you're following ANY of this, good for you.  ha

Discrepancies.  Sid Hartha, Herman Hesse.  He wrote about it.  Everything is true including the opposite of the truth.  

So yea, seeing the shit!  Dark paradise, when finally on comes the light. What will I choose (the holiest discipline there is: choice.  And it's opposite too, deciding not to choose…a half-lined choice, itself) today to make alive?  Who do I get to be?

(and will it look like a long ass diatribe instead of my thesis, Ch, 3???)

I can see it green and surrounding me

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

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

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

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

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

Fall Equinox. Season of bounty and light~Farewell

Yes it's the fall equinox tonight, overnight.  Making today the last day of the summer~

My heart's been terribly wistful.  I dipped down lower in fact than I've been in some time and damn do I not do well with that--unaccounted for fluxing in my mood.  Even though I am the one who knows and teaches Anicha, the wisdom of the emotional and mental life how it is fleeting and always will change, even that knowledge still didn't stop me from being really effing hard on myself in trying to figure out Whyyyy?  It started Monday, I walked the cliffside to the beach and lay in the yellow sun, light blue swells and diamond sparkles and Santa Cruz hippies and teenagers all around, so much smiles.  I sat a long, long time, just trying to be gentle with the discomfort of myself, in myself.

Here we are: the season of change. The wheel turns to the dark half of the year tonight, even if for now we are perfectly balanced.  And so at this state of in-between, it's time for reflection, gratitude, and above all listening deeply to your own soul's response.  I had the coolest, coolest fucking year.  My high time at the beach was ecstatic like little before I've known, the dancing, the sun, the surf, the good friends.  The immediate and consistent blessings of family all around.  This is not even to mention the time I've spent on the road, the harmony and serendipity and surprises that have come with all that.  I will spend the fall working in the mountains, and what comes then and after I can not know...

It was Erika, on Tuesday, who pointed out the birth of my niece and the outlying impact a baby always brings.  On the heel of that conversation it occurred to me, slowly, the deep grief I am feeling over moving forward.  Moving on from my life and times at the beach, back east, among the intimacy of the people who mean so much to me and a lifestyle I had whittled by choice.  There is little to do with this experience other than ride it, feel it, honor it.  And too, in quiet, dream more, dream forward, and trust in the power of my dreams and my heart to guide me towards the next harvest season to come.

In all things, we are right here, where we are meant to be.  Or like my brother Brooks has been known to say~She might come late, but she always on time...

...That's just what the mama wisdom has to teach us today.

On the road. Bear's Rock, WY. July 5, 2004.

It is nighttime here at the campground at the foot of Bear’s Rock, or Devils Tower as we know it, Bear’s Rock as it has been referred to for far longer than 1906 when this strange rock protrusion became the first US National Monument. Brandon wanders the prairie off to my left, the sun not a shadow in the grey & foggy night. There are 2 deer that edge the perimeter of our campground, just close enough to be curious but safe. There are also a number of tipis set-up here, on this long-held sacred spot of ancient and todays native’s land.



I am writing to overcome my complacency, to capture some memories before they become a final & swift blur & because I feel artsy & cramped & need to commune with myself.


The west has done some kind of # on my head. Left me far more perplexed than anything else—all while in such deep admiration of this country—literally: of the great & beautiful, exploited or rescued, gawked at instead of honored LAND. The question, nagging, ripping me up with its insinuations. American. What does it mean?

Back east we have the legacy of slavery that still smacks its physical presence, a generally unacknowledged & quiet pain all around the small towns still segregated. I claim open-hearted and mindedness but can’t, on some days, walk own the street in Chestertown without tromping along my own self part of the sludge of the violent & belittling white mans past. It is what happens to my mind without my consciousness—on days when I am unable to see and instead note the color of a person’s skin or the unchecked assumption of where they live. I, immobile in the vestiges of a history that continues to blind and bind our present day, terrorized by the truth of people still subordinate, suffering, deprived & most of all, unheard or seemingly unrecognized.


In utter disbelief of me of who I am I try unsuccessfully to break out of the sludge I challenge myself what is it like to be in the heart to have the blood of someone here who doesn’t have white skin.


Ahhhh, then to come west. First, the effigy mounds after crossing the Mississippi out of the charming pleasant Galena, Illinois original home of Ulysses S. Grant. An effigy mound, Ancient mounds built for honor and ritual by long ago native peoples, these relics some of which dating back to BC time and destroyed, many, by the settlers who thought A) Indians to be too primitive & savage to be capable of such construction & B) felt land to be much more measured by its profitability that its juncture of Still=Sacred. On the Big River scenic drive in Iowa there is history, some mounds still in tact, and me, this is me, part of My History. And all this, all this after the long drive across Route 3 in southern Canada, the truck stops every 5 to 10 miles Oh Ontario and your oldskool Americana your 50’s diner food, all this after the strange majesty of Niagra turned so cheaply in to plastic-replica amusements, cardboard-packaged preservatives expensive tourist toys and plasiticine goods. These mounds, my Americanism, I American Witness, American Aggressor of the cruel destruction, cultural obliteration, ohhh plastic-sided homogenization my Free Heritage, my all powerful all-American Hands.


From Michigan through the heavy traffic outside Chicago & the touching urban sprawl of a melting pot in procession on 83 & finally onto 22 where we stopped for a small time farmland carnival in the middle of the fields of Illinois. Onward across Iowa.


And camping in Crystal Lake off Route 9 & the gorgeous headwaters of Iowa’s great rivers against the fertile green rolling grounds. Effigies: beer can empties, candy wrappers, diapers and paper towels. Little lost wishes all about the campgrounds, at the far end a group of farm boys in jacked-up pick-ups, blared music, drinking beers, leaving their trash on the ground all through the night still there in the day times telling light.


We got in to South Dakota, Siox City that evening on 52. I treated us to Mexican in celebration of being out of Iowa. Out of Mitchell next day and now we switched to 90 highwaying it over the prairie & private ranches and now we were West. Grand sky & rolling country far as the eye could see. Rolling land, rolling America rolling American me. South on 83 to lesser known 44 W across the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Small badlands, yellow & brown now began to replace all the vibrant & rolling green.


And to know the land? TO KNOW the LAND is to be a true Native. True American, I take my nativity by the hand.


Paha Sapa the following day & late in the afternoon in awe tears on the faces of Brandon & I, a herd of Buffalo grazing Buffalo National Grassland, at one time this country was home to 60 million bison, lifelines of all native peoples, today as we witnessed they occupy national parks in the west at numbers of about 160, 000, national parks in some cases which were established primarily to have sanctioned land on which to slaughter buffalo, Grant when he was president leading the task force to disparage the native peoples of their source of worship and food. Onto the Black Hills, sacred land to the natives until gold camps like in Deadwood were set up in the late 1890s to tear apart the inside of these sacred hills dark with ponderosa pines, with coyotes & bison & pronghorns & deer on the outside, whole cherished ecologies living on blood, whole American footprints of God, the Voice of all the lives made to be brought up from the land, us people only ones with consciousness to be her Voice, oh~ America~! American…Land…General Custer park with your namesake, here in the state with more racial profiling on its indian peoples than back east on its blacks.


And last night, me, we, us Americans so blessed—watched a privately funded fireworks display illuminate the rocks of Rushmore in celebration of our National Heritage, our Independence Day, Day of Religious Freedom We Finally Won From England. The fireworks display ignited not just the sky but the hills, the black ponderosa’d hills beneath Rushmore above Herney Peak where Black Elk saw his vision Everywhere is the center of the Universe, the hills of this America set on fire from the fireworks, smoke and fire burning the land on the fourth of July.


I am here, center of the Universe foot of Bear’s Rock, Wyoming. Tents, deers, tipis and me. My land, my people, my American night, my America dream…?

What's Rad: Alone in the Wilderness--Dead calm and zero degrees....

Dad and I are flipping back and forth between the Ravens game and Public Television, where they are showing Alone in the Wilderness.  It's a movie made of footage that a retired man named Dick Proenneke took in 1967 when he decided to move in to the remote mountains and hand-build a cabin and live for the next 35 years.  It's phenomenal, peaceful, reverent in its simplicity.  So much lately--as I've risen each day before the sun to go in and open the new coffee house here at the beach that I am helping create--I stand in the clear cold air and smell the trees and see the stars and I think about being outdoors in the fall, living on the road in the tall deep forests and high mountains.  How touchingly pure and wondrous that time of my life was, waking up in the tent, frost-covered, seeing my breath, coming back to life each day with the sun.  I hope Brandon knows about this film.  God did we have an amazing time living out on the road...  Anyhow Alone in the Wilderness is rad, the footage stunning and inspiring and the timing impeccable, as if meant to help me celebrate the wild spirit in me so happy to be outdoors and free to roam...

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Santa Fe. Stop and Say OK.

I got stuck in Santa Fe once.

It's a funny place to get stuck, you would think that there's lots of cool stuff going on but the reality is I'd been living in the woods and my clothes were dirty and in my hippy frock over my cut-off baggies and the bandanna wrapped around my dirty hair the fancy ladies in the art shops that I thought I'd enjoy downtown ended up tailing me the whole time cuz I guess they thought I was a thief.  Every place more or less turned out to be like that--catering to wealth, and it pissed me off and when we tried to leave we got stuck, literally. The town is a circular lay-out, not a grid, so every time we thought we were heading the right way towards the desert and on to the highway towards Tuscon and a buddy of mind we'd end up circled back where we began.  Santa Fe is bordered on one side by all these fabulous adobe houses on flat brown cactus land as far as the eye can see, and on the other by the the Sangre de Cristos and a National Forest.  We didn't know about Taos then, the community and spiritual devotees around there, all we knew was that we hated our first experience in Santa Fe and were tired and wanted to get out.  So after that first day we headed up in to forest where we could set up camp and stay.  

Thinking about it now, I easily remember coming down across the mountains of the southern border of Colorado and coming around a great wide corner out of the woods and seeing the low land laid out before us and singing like a song, it swept me whole and sudden and clean inside and took my breath away, it stopped Brandon mid-sentence.  That's the energy the shamans talk about, some swift but beautiful collusion between mountain elements and the dry and drastic desert flat-land that was so stunning it was almost visual.

That first night in the Santa Fe Forest some kids came up the forest road massively tripped out on drugs, the next morning this hippy dreadlock girl whose name I cant now remember came over to our tent to say hello and to make sure we made it through the night undisturbed by the kids that were freaking out.  She was sad with a sad spirit and on her own, we talked a long time that morning over coffee it turned out it was the anniversary of when she'd given her child up for adoption.  She gave me a turquoise necklace and I gave her a tourmaline because it helps with forgiveness of the self. 

We tried to leave again that afternoon and got stuck again.  Literally, traffic and double backs that made us lose our minds.  We regrouped, decided to find a community center where we could shower, then decided to surrender to the flow and set up in the woods for a few days, hoping the stuckness would pass.  The sunset that night after our shower put orange and sherbert light all over the dark greens and browns of the adobe'd plain.  It was the most outrageous display of sunsettingness that I have ever seen.

Turns out there was a free speaker at the Masonic Lodge that we were meant to hear over the weekend.  We'd been, since around the time of full moon over Fourth of July when we camped deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota, sort of following these very serendipitous experiences based around growing knowledge of indigenous cultures living in unison with the land, and the deeper idea of the earth itself in its varied forms holding its own systems of magnetic energies called lay lines.  Now I remember, the first place that info came (in addition to Gary Snyder's writings on animism, but we brought him along) was in Maine which was literally our third stop, in Southwest Harbor by Acadia.  And then it just kept coming, from everywhere, in every direction.  The speaker at the Lodge stood there and tied it all together.  It was pretty amazing.

I dont have any money, none at all, to pay bills right now or much less to move to Baltimore and coming to terms with that has been real tough.  But I realized something the past few days and that's that sometimes for reasons you dont even know, where you are is where you're meant to be.  Even if at first it feels or looks maddening and kinda like your stuck.  My book is writing itself.  I have work on the horizon.  I'm gonna hang out in the forest a while I guess and be grateful for what's going on right now exactly where I'm at.

WATCH THIS. The Divorce Papers Between Us...

Facebook users, go here. My God and if you haven't yet, check out Brave New Voices...I literally watched the semi-finals on HBO totally awe-struck. I have hope again bc of these youth...

"She's a mystic in the sense that she's still mystified by things..."

Luke Doucet is singing those words that terrorize my heart and that also make me smile meekly with a chest full of shine, like this dream I once had that I remember blogging about where the whole symbolism of the thing was me beating the shit out of myself, really beating my self up--I had all these missing teeth and a big cartoon sized swollen purple and blue eye but was dumbly smiling, and felt whole and shiny and free. This song, and that Sea Wolf one and the one by Sandro Perri all make me feel the same. Haha and Cardinal Song. They all played this morning, Larry was on my mind off and on all week and his new stencils also broke my heart in that free glistening way, and in all this there is the cohesive feeling like the end of October ought to bring. And yes it always does.

Things are changing, things that change must also virtuously stay the same. What is all this, and where are our choices? Do we choose or just pretend to by acquiescing or enjoying or bitching along the way? It all is choice. I took the cushiony fold-out chair on to the front porch, it's like the one grandma and pap had on their motorhome before gram's sisters died and they used to go to Florida all the time, and I sat in the sun there. No one ever sits there because that's where all the plants are in the summer, they are in the house now though because the frost at night has already begun to come. I sat in the sun, I did as told--soak in the sun, listen to the trees. When or if there is the sense of being numb this works, go outdoors find your back-breath, your second-half, and let this part just listen and relax. Store sunshine, for light. Happens all the time...

That is our choice, to go out through the doors...

So, do I need school for all of this or what? It is so funny to me how easy I am now with all these songs that I used to have to stay away from because of him. Every station turned his way instead and ok, god it's all so fucking good! At least there's no more dislike button all the time now at least I say the holy yes yes yes this is all true and that's not all the time. Nothing extreme in one direction or the other. Just is. So it should be, this is the time of the year of Hecate--wisdom of the underworld, a whole entire harvest year now past, all the blessings, all the gain, all the loss. And I am ok! Not looking for prophecy though no thank you. I am good, whole it feels nice to see myself in this way. It feels nice to be myself in this way. Ha, and writing like mad. In less than three weeks 12, 000 words. The story now telling itslef. It took me 14 fucking months of pressing the stones, carrying the rocks up the god damn hill with nothing to base it on but that decision made years ago that no matter what else this is what you'll do...I took yesterday and Friday off from the words, had waitressing to do, and tonight too, all it further proved that I am only really good when I have primary focus on just the one or two things. I didn't get to Chico's art show and I felt really bad. Just him having it has me thinking about Brook's and I and all our scene-dreams. I will be impresario scene-chic no matter who's in my life that I also know for sure. What next, what next what next is I will finish my book, that is all I truly know. Jotto and I sat out back at work yesterday waiting for tables to come in. What do you want? I asked my self. I was laying on the flat old wooden deck. White sun and the salt water smell. In order to dissect the fears from the truth at this crossroads. Acknowledging all, making room for all parts of the whole. Institution, I have such gnarly bad aversion to it. Had to sit in it, sit through it, I did this morning for over an hour also while in the sun. Money and taking out loans to become later one who has money seems so fucking counter intuitive. I am glad I will not be sitting with this decision for too long.

The moon came over the sea last night like magic. Soooo big and a yellow so faded and not bright it was like someone erased half of her. We sat far out on the peir and I listened to the ocean crash and just let the sound swallow me. I breathed the terror-glee of it and smelled the smell. Ahhh god I felt so clean.

Now if Danny Schmidt would just show up with my favorite song lyric ever this would be the conclusive end. To what? Just this one single prayer, which really is one small strand hard to say where it ends or where all the others begin...

What's Rad: Paul Suplee

I love cooking in the fall.

Root vegetables are my favorite, but I suspect this affinity goes back to the days of Brandon and I living in the trailer in Waldport, Oregon, with no jobs and zero money. We foraged the floors of the Suislaw National Forest for chanterelles; I roasted root vegetables we got on sale at market stalls for literal pocket change. I got very good at baking goodies that called for apples and we ate fried green tomatoes several times a week--because both were coming in out in the backyard. The food pantry supplied us with flour. I made dumplings, wontons and pizza from scratch. That was the fall I studied Harold Bloom and the Canon and Brandon was emulating Lew Welch. My only other regular read was Moosewood Cookbook, the original which came with the house we were renting for $200 a month. We hiked the forests, cooked from scratch food that was in season. In general life was a feast. An authentic, humbling, beautiful feast.

Today I made lunch for mom and I, surprised her. I-tunes going just right. Dancing and prepping veg's. Roasted butternut squash stuffed with mashed sweet potatoes, covered in caramelized red onions and Gorgonzola. It just came to me, sort of while mom was watching Rachel Ray. Cooking is such an art form, I have crazy respect for people who use it as their expression or palette.

Which is why you need to check this guy out over at Quips of a Rambling Chef, a new food blog by Paul Suplee (Paul's also got a website, found here.). I had the honor of working with Paul some this summer, and in addition to being a great writer (clever and conversational, a combo of both my faves) and a teacher working with more than your average troubled type teens, he's most important a stand-up guy of the kind that I actually hold up to as a standard for who and how other's can aspire to be. The best kind of teacher, he teaches by being. Also, once he gives hip-hop a chance his music taste will be pretty perfectly right on, too~

List. Cant you see the breeze is just a change in pace?

Song playlist of serendipity for a Saturday morning with nothing to do but stretch and feel the beauty of muscles and soft sheets and blue sky out the window and anticipate coffee, ahhh delight delight three tunes on RNR sooo dance-able and yes of course some days you should just fall out of bed, celebrating....

1. Southside of Heaven, Ryan Bingham
2. Strange Overtones, David Byrne and Brian Eno
3. Cripple Creek, The Band

Instructions for reclaiming wild sensibilities if its been more than 24 hours since you've breathed the sun

1. Barefeet
2. Get near something green that has roots and eats sunshine and air
3. Find your back breath: Recognize your feet. Be solid, but open. Recognize your belly breath. Next! Center. Breathe into/from back of neck, into back of shoulders and then to back of back on down. This is where wild-sense lives, dormant. You are part wild animal. You have rhythms that remind you and ache for you to run in the breeze. Breath these parts awake again. Re-connect.
4. Listen. Feel. Open. Breathe.

Poetry

1. Is a way of living which includes or perhaps is reliant on following what turns you on
2. Spanish turns me on
3. Words and stories turn me on
4. People turn me on
5. La mama: Nature and Life turns me on
6. Library has lots of poem books
7. Study introductions, especially if written by other poets
8. Lay in the sun on second hand sheet eating food you made yourself and drinking cream soda
9. Read poem a word at a time. Read spanish translations a breath at a time. Harmonize
10. Harmonize. Harmonize

Pay attention. If not now, when? Why not?

1. Beautiful friend in middle of great heartbreak/heartmending life change over delicious dinner under trees and starlight says forget about living each day as if it were my last. I AM LIVING EACH DAY LIKE MY FIRST
2. These could be just words. They are. They are also more.
3. Are they?
4. If not, why not?

Fear and sadness resign oneself to unconscious greed and acts of selfishness. Jealousy clouds vision. Inverse relationship of not owning self projects outter whirls of powerlessness on to everyone else. Matter is atomic. Everyone changes.

1. Be honest with myself fear and sadness are natural and normal as is jealousy a common defense
2. Be honest with my friends and the people on my path entrusted to help you care for your heart
3. Be still. All things pass, and later come again
4. Life goes on and that's just it: LIFE. It is the most affirming guide there is.

Carl Jung wrote that 35 is middle-aged. Is when one steps in to the afternoon of one's life....

1. I turned 33 one month ago
2. I for the first time in my life can actually say that I know myself, know with confidence at least some certain parts of who I am, and feel confident going forward trusting in the room and grace and space within that I've taken the long years to own and love in to light
3. I see this not as the afternoon. I am barely just now first breathing!! I am just now taking first steps, this is the First Day!

In meditation gentleness ease and non-judgment are encouraged. As is comfort of posture. Prepare for yourself a soft sweet inner place of silence and refuge where I and only I can always go. Be the warrior traveller of your own domain.

1. I meditate under a soft blanky, laid out straight chillin like I'm watching tv
2. Often it helps to remind myself to ritualize. So I start with time to center, let what I'm doing sink in. I put a tender smile on my face
3. Time is mutable
4. When found to be scattering up the walls of the monkey mind, begin again
5. There go the thoughts and there I go with them, ahhhh well, begin again
6. Begin again
7. It's ok. Be gentle. Begin again
8. Witness all thoughts and feelings without becoming them, without judging them
9. Ooooops, became them again. Begin again...
10. Metta is the practice of loving kindness
11. End all ritual with practice of loving kindness. Start with self. Then intend outwards towards all of Life

Great Change and Pendulum Swing/ Spiral Upward Of Is/Not Is Spiral Downward of Timeless Great DNA Helix Combo of All Things, upon us now, ever upon us, have grace IS mercy...

1. My last day of work is May 14
2. I will spend the week after that packing up 127 Goldsborough
3. Ladies, I may have lots of clothes to give away
4. Peoples, there may be lots of books up for grabs!
5. Great mama plunge to come then
6. Move stuff in to Maggie's storage place at beach and otherwise in to Ocean Pines
7. May 26 fly to Pac NW for one month
8. Beth, Gretchen. Oregon, aaaahh. Hippie retreat yea. Hotsprings. Tall trees. Ocean. Coast. Trains. Seattle. Larry. Cousin Kate.
9. Waiting tables at Yacht Club in OP
10. Indefinite trust of what is yet to be..................

Dreams

I'm dreaming again.

It happened last moon cycle, too. I woke up at 6:39 this morning to the traffic on Goldsborough, barely squinted through one eye at the clock and sighed and covered myself up deep under the covers and was out again almost immediately--but fell asleep with this light, laughing sense remembering the dream I'd just had. A bonfire with old friends from Catholic school in the rubble driveway in the woods at Ocean Pines. It was very pagan.

Then I had a second one, with my brother in it and Jamie, his girl. There were turtles, big ones, they were happy for the snow wanted us to see they were still there but scrambled over this funny scrappy wall Sean made and was proud of, of wood posts cross-hatched and leveled in this very crafty way. The turtles made sure we saw there big bodies flop over the wall. On the other side of the wood wall the turtles covered them selves in leaves. You could still see them, but at the base of the fense the snow had melted, the soil was super moist and the leaves generated enough heat to act as a thermal for them and they were happy to be covered there. The leaves and snow, the cycles, it all was a good thing.

There are bluberry muffins in the oven, I am squeaky body-tired and my consciousness is hairy, lots of little crevices in there where I've been slipping all day. Some days are just like that. Some days I miss things, I am tired, I get full of doubt. I have to work at noon today and then tonight and it will be all new students new students new students Hi dont be nervous You can do it Relax relax it's not a test it's so we can help and also Bienvenido hola, he-llo. Ugh I am so tired--and I was off for the snow a full week last week!! I will come home tonight, hopefully before 10, then Erika and I have a phone date to discuss our latest submissions to each other.

Erika, who just got the best news news that made me smile smile smile, Erika who on days like these makes me swoon to remember 7th grade Catholic school in the mildew basement where we could see people's feet on the concrete parking lot out the vented windows near the ceilings top of some of those rooms. Sr. Francis's class and we were all afraid, Ms. Fouse's class and under the desks Erika's long scrawl, on fringed loose leaf, characters even then seeped deep in the history of another time. My precious friend who holds roots in there, the way plants and trees are connected deep under ground in ways we will never, by the light of day, ever see.

O mama if I could I would write and laugh and cook all day breathe the smells of your frozen earth my face in the tall window here in your sun. I would smile, happy to remember all my dreams. I would talk to the maple tree let the crevices inside grow wide and whole until they weren't cracks anymore but simply whole new landscapes of me.

what i am listening to: The High Strung

Snow, & New Moon

I've been trying to keep it mellow, but where I live right now is getting absolutely pounded with snow. My town got over two feet this past weekend, while my brother, over on the other side of Baltimore City where they're prone to the foothill mountain patterns got over three feet. Last night it sleeted all night and now it's been snowing all day. I've been in my pjs, frumpin, sleeping, snuggly, considering getting up to get a book to read but mostly just loving being this lazy. The college I work for is closed ALL WEEK! Sean my bro just sent this picture, of him on his front walk, with snow up to his shoulder!! Five feet! All over our state municipals are in emergency phases meaning it's illegal to even go outside! Oh Mama--you are something you are something you are something...!

Anyhow. I am safe, and thankfully warm and with my power still on. Tomorrow night is the New Moon. I woke up at 3 in the morning with the February blankness that comes to me. I slid right in to meditation, thankful for the technique of Vipassana I once stumbled on and got to learn, how it helps me keep the edges clean on my mindfulness when I need to sink deep within, remaining equanimous and accepting, just witnessing in deeper and deeper ways the levels of my emotional self. In there, in the deep quiet within, I sat in the February fear that is always lingering and hanging out...the February stunned blankness, easing in to a loving posture of myself much as I could all the way through. Then the Mama, the deep voice was there: all that self-gnowledge that is laying under the demons at our own inner gate waiting, if we want to, to be heard. This new moon is still full of Imbolc energy, and one of the most powerful times for prophecy/reflection/intention setting of the whole year. Now my fears are on the forefront, so I am happy to be being tender as I can with myself today. Loving loving snuggling frumping, and warm and safe, too.

Good time to be snowed in, to get to be still...

Just sayin.

Wild Women Ways: Imbolc Celebration

Tonight is Imbolc, or the festival of the Goddess Brigid, patron Goddess of the Hearth and Poetry. Celebrated traditionally on Feb 2, this ancient holiday is today recognized as Candlmas, Tu Bi-Shevat, even Chinese New Years. The point is, all traditions are moved by the same earthly rhythms, no matter what the society or culture defines it as. Now is the time of mid-winter; classified by the Aquarian Full Moon. It is the time of first light. Winter Solstice marks the longest night of the year and too the return of the sun with solar entry into Capricorn. Capricorn is an earth sign, its energy is initiating, which means ushering in of change, of a new tide. So at the peak of darkness, in comes new energy in earthly--or physical form. The alchemy of the darkest time--and all the darkness peaking, bursting forth with the initiatory energy of Capricorn births new levels of consciousness within us. Now, at Brigids Day, or Candlemas, or Imbolc--emblazoned by the peak energy of Aquarius with tonight's full moon, that energy is given full light. In our quiet time, now is a powerfull, powerfull time of intention setting, prophecy, and empowering our new ideas. Aquarius is an Air sign--a mental energy with ties to our etheric or spirit selves. It is Fixed, meaning what is energized now in our spirit or ether form will between now and the summer solstice come to full fruition.

Take the time to be conscious, whoever you are, whatever you celebrate, about this!

In honor of my own Intentions, and with perfect love trust and gratitude over the tides that have flowed me to just where I am at this time of year, here is a poem. It appears in this years We'Moon, and is reprinted with permission by author Pesha Joyce Gertler, recipient of Seattle's Populist Poet Award for 2005-2006. Ms. Gertler was so very, very kind in our emailing--thank you Wise Mama, thank you!! This was the poem opposite the page of my birthday this year!

The Limping Goddess:She-Who-Survives©1983
She limps into the room
bent with the cargo of rape, battering
single-parent mothering and bureaucratic neglect
if she is fat or gay or nonwhite or Jewish
the pains multiply;
she has carried them all.

Her lotus feet have trudged this planet
for aeons; torn tennis shoes tell
how far she’s traveled. She hunches
against the winter wind, her second-hand
coat like a blanket she wraps around
her golden body. Occasionally, she flies
over buildings, lands on tree tops,
is mistaken for a fat bird.

And occasionally, she falls,
intensifying her limp. But make no mistake;
that golden skin was mined in the black earth,
her feet, though limping and calloused,
are the lotus feet of She-Who-Survives.
A broken yet shining forgotten deity
returning, and there are millions
like her, multi-colored, limping
Goddesses returning to lay down our cargo
and reclaim our own.

Rush hour on the Eastern Shore

Dad called at 7:15. Who in the hell is calling me this early I thought which proves I was still mostly asleep since dad's the only one on the road at that time that would think to call while he's sitting in rush hour and he does this periodically so of course, really I knew it was him.

I had been laying here there since 6 anyway, partly awake, partly asleep, mostly listening to traffic. I am not used to so much noise in the morning and it wakes me up everyday the workers going to work in this large small country town, this busy little town road on which I live. Gives me body memories of Seattle and Larry's old place four blocks from the Pike Market, the shrill mechanics of the idling trucks and the air plunging gear shifts that woke me up every morning, and the smell of deisel fumes and the immediate waking craving ahhh sacred hunger for carbohydrates from the market and the fresh seagull air of the Sound.

I worked 12 hours yesterday enrolled close to 20 new students that's a half hour an ESL learner and three each for GED. I make it so the hours overlap but even so, when you have a day like yesterday where four of my six GED learners were disabled, two undiagnosed and two with IEPs, it's all that additional time on the phone and tracking down records and knowing, and hoping you know, who to call. I got home late and for the first time my apartment is whole, unpacked, and clean.

It was so quiet, and so empty of "stuff", so void of projects I didn't know what to do.

I thought about all the spinach in the fridge and how good it would be wilted with garlic and olive oil and sea salt over noodles and some mozzarella cheese. But it was near 9:30 already and so I wound up with some trisquits and soon before I knew it I was out, asleep and snuggled on my own soft couch. I awoke with the most tender feeling of love and awe for me, and my life. So aware sometimes and with the wonder because of the awareness at how precious, how frail, how soft this sweet little flash of a human life.

How grateful I am how grateful I am. I've never ever lived in a place so quiet, uncluttered, so mine--so noisy with the traffic and life and at once, so still. Mama's in the trees and moon right outside my window and thank goodness there's no screens cuz at Chop I got so used to stepping out to the earth barefeet and sweet green, breathing, and saying hello.

Hello, hello, hello.

Monday Morning Reflections

I'm writing right now to bring my self in to my life this morning because work beckons and with it like always on a Monday the steel wall inside my heart and that is no way to start the day. And it doesn't matter that in bed today like most days I began by sighing and smiling and centering and quiet and talking almost immediately to the Powers that be: carressing my self in to the transition of morning, quieting and alighting that deep electric, that inner quiet line of harmony and free, my ritual check list of what I am laying there, grateful for...Simple as it is by the time I am content and in the kitchen aware of me, waiting on coffee and reviewing the day to come, my body well-slept and the outlines of the room surrounding me, the fresh sight of clean that comes in the morning when one is grateful but gratitude is more part the tapestry then it is of surprise, what is there is simple sunlight, dust and shadows, and me, and another same old day.

And I think yesterday I had the most amazing hike, it is September, fall has been coming since the first Harvest Lunar Llamas showed its earliest signs and that was all the way back in July. What she needs now, the earth what she is now and therefor what we find inherant of ourselves as well in either fight or fright, surrender grace or strain, is to call forth from within a big, big rest. A huge reflection. And further, what this means, great! anticipation over what is stirring there, what is being prepared, what is yet to come....

And mercury comes out of retro tomorrow and this review has been so great for me, so clarifying and healing, like how high fire burns away the imperfections. And on my hike yesterday what I thought of was, this is it, thank you thank you for the witnessing. O time of great passing, merc will turn this week and most people wont even know why by the weekend they will feel cleaned-up and better versions of themselves as if just come out of slumber with the cozy haze of sleep and magic still fuzzy on their shoulders and sparkling their eyes. And life will be different, and fast-moving because that is how it happens, the change of the tides.

And next week I will go away for a while to the PacNW and when I return it will be a new time, a season full of new. Thanksgiving suddenly will be here and then of course the darkness, the season to renew. And as she is showing us now, be prepared for a long, lowdown night. And I am glad for it, have fought hard for this peace, and am resolute now in the changes that are absolute, and sure to come.

My First Time

Suzette had this raspy voice and a laugh entirely unanticipated. It used to shoot out of her mouth and hit you in your chest then explode up your neck and down your back, cacophonous echo blast of megaphone and hot air.

She worked the Fool the Guesser one stand up from me on the Pier.

In September the tourists went home, it all sort of started when Felix came in early August which was also the time I kicked Kevin out of the house for the PCP. This left us, Suzette and me or the hot Tico Kiki who was way older which then meant like 35, with lots of time to holler back and forth to each other on our mics. Hurricane Felix was a big one and I got on the local news screaming kooks go home--the reporter was on 9th street, three up from us where the old deadhead house was, we learned from them early on where not to buy our drugs. Jerry died that summer, it was almost omen-ic: Deadheads by then couldn't be trusted a lot of them were tweakers, everybody knew. I imagine the reporters edited me out, we didn't have a tv so I never knew. We didn't even know the hurricane was coming. I got off for my afternoon break and came home for a puff or jay and a swim or some food hopefully someone had some otherwise it was soft-pretzels from the Pier for free the only place I could surely get hooked-up. Sparky was the only dude around though, he was a squatter one of those 9th street kids. Besides Black Mike and Little Kid, the only ones still down to hang after I kicked Kevin out, there was Sparky. Sparky I never trusted cuz of the deadhead squatter thing but we still hung cuz my roommate thought he was the shit. He never had anything to offer he just came looking. We had nothing though since Kevin and the boys went, nothing at all. So instead me and Sparky just took a swim and it's the only time I ever remember the Ocean slamming me again and again like a hard wood board. I swam hard but never never got to a place where she was settled and smooth so I could just float and roll. Like I said the Hurricane was coming but we didn't know. No one else was on the beach though! Mom somehow got in touch with me and said to put all the stuff on the floor up so really that just meant my books and music on the lowest shelf. The pots and pans earlier in the summer, since we didn't ever wash them, all got thrown out.

After Felix it was all different. Like I said, then it was just Black Mike who slept on the couch every night and also suggested we each sleep with a little switchblade under our mattress. Which is funny to me now, cuz like cousin Joey says a weapon will end up getting you in even more trouble if you dont know how to use it. And I for one, didn't, no one ever taught me how.

But luckily we never had trouble. Kevin moved out, he and his boys trashed our house broke windows and the outside porch lights and tagged all over all our shit, then Felix came and after that everything changed. The alleys were more quiet, there was a lot more of the large grey sky. And when the sun was out it was ethereal again, funny yellow glow. I didn't know it yet but that was the summer I first started to learn: there are tides that come and they move as one and they bring a certain power all their own, and they effect us all.

And the earth is where and how we learn.

By September it was cool already I had the greatest snaked Hoodie I lived in with holes down at the edge for my thumbs. Everyone was gone. Just 14 years ago, that's all, but OC didn't have the condo weekenders it's so full of now. Even my aunt and uncle and grammy who lived summer here were gone, they had to go home to the county to teach school.

Which meant we ditched 6th street for my family's house at the Pines, the girls and I, because it scared us being alone like that with just the beach rats who were hating on us and the ghosts that we heard again and again--no lie, the old fashioned player piano music or loud foot steps upstairs on the outside deck when for sure no one was there, or even the radios in our house that would go on without reason sometimes. Local folklore said the Broadripple on 14th, and our place too on 6th, were the original Bordellos from back in the day. It was mid-1800's that the town came to be. But Wikipedia says the original Pier burned down in a fire in 1994, which isn't true, the fire happened in the winter of 1995, winter after Felix, I remember because we drove over that winter to see. The fire took Morbid Manor and the waterpark, too; I smoked pot everyday in Morbid Manor in 95 then got to ride the water rides for free since I worked there, ran a betting game for the same guy who did Fool the Guesser, Suzette Kiki and me. And that fire took everything, all that, down. 1995 last of the Pier and the Manor, the Riptide Park and Jerry, too.

So me and Chrissy who worked Morbid Manor and loved a guy, Johnny, started hanging at the Pines. It was cool and vacant in town and I learned all at once to love September, the sheet clear blue sky, the white clouds puffy and bright as a smile. The way the water looked suddenly so navy blue. September, goddamn I learned to love you.

Suzette invited us over for for spaghetti that's how I found out she was into selling and smoking crack. She got arrested later that winter which I learned the same night as I heard about the fire at the Pier. It sucked cuz she had a little one, I dont remember his name anymore he had brown hair with flints of yellow curl, he was three-years-old. Guess he'd be 17 now hope he's not in jail. That night over spaghetti when I first found out about her drug of choice, it was the first time I ever got that gut-twisting sweaty-necked premonition-chill. It was September, the streets were flat and empty but she lived all the way downtown so the air from the inlet was coming off the water and was damp with a terrible cold. The sky was low and hung with thin grey clouds.

Addiction is a hell of a fucking disease.

In September now I come here every year weekend after Labor Day and have a reunion with old friends. Last night we were up to 3, boardwalk, dancing, talking, laughing and lots of quiet on the cool, white sand. Round 2am I walked past sixth street, Kevin is dead, I'm 9 years clean.



Everything is changed. And also, September, the clean earth and shushing sea, is just the same.

my heart grows bigger

the heart is a good, and plenty, and bountiful thing. i am so blessed with its consistancy, in all things up and down, all things concentric on this spiral path so round and round, for every time it pains me it lightens me equally, what would i do without you o wellspring of life, o precious window-light of me? i bless you kelly and spin gold around everything you have been and all that you so beautifully yet will be, i walk you round this path sure as the river, the earth, that blessed thunder and sun in the morning sky of birth sing well and long to me....

fall is coming and the full moon is here

i woke up this morning after the deepest, most satisfying sleep i've had since i moved to chop. and it was only a three hour long sleep because just before 5 i awoke with a pillow hugged to my chest in the middle of an intense dream, which is the only time i can ever remember awaking on my back hugging a pillow. and i got out of bed realizing that i have been dreaming the same recurring dream since the weekend and puzzling over what it might mean. then i turned on the window fan got back under my soft sheet and in the grey morning light lay there an hour half-awake. until the next thing i knew it was 9 am and i was sleeping but waking slowly and feeling so, so satiated from my deepest depths within. like i had been wrung somewhere on my most essential level entirely clean.

and i had no thoughts of angst over work and my future, over where i am going to live next, over any of it. merely i felt complete, and settled in a way that i actually forgot is possible because its been absent for so, so long. i almost giggled out loud, and thought of the most random, exciting things: i love over-medium dippy eggs with whole grain pancakes with fruit cooked in and to eat them in front of the tv with regis and kelly. or to make jewelry because of all the different pretty colors and styles of the beads. i love fashion and exploring clothes that are just right for me. i love the quiet beach in late yellow september. i love to be in the woods, to swim in wild streams, camping. i love camping. i love to cozy cozy read books in the morning in bed when i've got no place to go....

and then it struck me, fall is here--or so i mean that on the wheel of the axis of the year, the preceding week or so has been the quickening of the tide of the change...tonight's full moon is traditional Lunar Llamas, the apex, the surge of bounty...we celebrate lunar llamas the first full moon when the sun is in leo and it signifies for all of us the passing of the year. intuitively we reassess what we've accomplished this year, what our harvest has brought to pass, what we didn't do to well at growing, where we have been fertile, futile, full of meat or just of bones.... oh god oh god life i love you so, so much!

sure as we are here people our cells, our dna move with this ever changing earth, and sure as this movement is tracked only by the sun there is a rightness, a depth of completion and union to it all in that it never truly ever ends, simply slows or quickens, and begins again. take heart, take stock...life recycles, we turn within, we radicalize, dive down deep, come to birth again....

Reminder Kel

kim just called, just like in my dream. take solace in this: every one who you encountered today is grappling with the same things. what secrets in their darkness lay. tomorow is new moon, final dark seed before First Harvest. Of course. Winter Solstice i look at you at the seeds dropped then, where i have been wrong, where have i been true? now is the time that these come so intuitive, if painfully, in messagry to you dear soul. i am looking, we all are, at what we are beginning to reap now that the harvest is half way through.

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.