To tame this head

The Eastern Shore is the rural, country side of Maryland.  It is flat but full of agricultural and watermen history, you can almost see its bias and charm in the fog banks that stack thick on a fall day like today.  The Chesapeake Bay divides the shore from the stretch of urban corridor between Annapolis, DC, and Baltimore where I am right now.   Over there, or  the other side is what Shore people call it here.

The last time I was here in this shop I lived on the shore.  I had edits due to Erika; her most recent submission of Hemingway's Girl.  It didn't have a contract on it yet.  She didn't even have an agent then.  In such little time so much can change.

My cousin Erin drove us to Annapolis this morning.  Last night sort of late we went to Ellicot City, my favorite place to go in the fall. Later of course it was Sex and the City reruns in her bed.  We parted ways this morning at her car, she to the State House where she works me to the Hard Bean where now I can write and study and be the Kelly that inside me really is and needs to be.  It's been a whirlwind, in San Antonio with mom and dad the Montezuma Cypresses hung over us on the river walk and talked low like they knew our names.  A Mexican man fell in love with me and spoke in Spanish about the true ancient heritage of my tattoo.  It made me laugh in a gentle way and turn red.  It's the first time anyone has done that, ever, in spanish Los Indios, Los Aztecos...not one of my Mexican friends ever knew, not one.  Coatalique in the eyes, lore of female divine still living in our unconscious but in the temporal from day to day she is dead.  In Austin I stayed on a ranch with 26 other McMullens for the weekend.  It was like being a child again at Gram and Pops at the beach.  People on mattresses on the floor and every couch bodied.  Kate looked like a Grecian princess in the times of the Goddess on her wedding day.  We made a circle around them and I couldn't stop the hot tears that ran the whole time.  Now I'm here, Maryland where I'm from, time at Uncle Tim's where I slept all night two nights ago, the first time I've done that since Mary went in the hospital.  Time with Brian my brother in Canton and my family in Pennsylvania, too.

And now time with me today, before I meet with my brother Sean and Aunt Sue, to write poems and sing this soul of mine back to life.  Out the shop front the boat show is setting up, years ago I worked twelve hour shifts at Pussers back to back because boat show weekend brings all the tips.  I lived here then and was going to marry a man named Joe.  Years after that I came here to the docks on my first date with Brandon, who I would spend six years with in a farmhouse deep in the country of the Eastern Shore.  Growing veggies and swapping music and fresh eggs.  Years after that I came up here to meet with Erika, begin this phase which has been all about the soul song, all about trusting that there is no arrival, just a path that presses and spirals, and cycles on.

Good for me to think on that today.  To tame this head that really wants to know about   ...Years from now...?  That really loves to wrap up in the different experiences of home.

I first found my some-kind-of-God driving over the Bay Bridge

...now the music just plays and the water goes and goes and sometimes so does the sun,
& my smile smiles like I cant stop...

Thunder, The County, Sean. Memphis. Rounded-out inside.

Wanna get breakfast? It's 6:25 am and one of the first things I say.

Well, not the first, I've already shared my upon waking deep thought for the morning about the big changes he's upon, and also greeted him a happy US-in-the-World-Cup Day.

Kelly you are a fucking dump truck he says and I say when I answer something like dude you have no idea, like you cant even comprehend the amount of food I ate on my vacation, or for that matter the canyon that must be in my gut it's got to be as big at least as one of those little ones in Colorado, you know like the ones next to a big mesa? I am laughing a little it is early but I am up inside, and the laugh is not the cry-ey laugh kind just a chuckle.

I dont get the irony of mesa meaning table til now.

Last night I think I was driving us both a little crazy. I'd been on his couch all day, and it was a big day, for him at least, and I was priming my self since 9 am to drive to Brooklyn and pick up my bridesmaid dress then make the final truck to the beach. Finally at like 8 at night or something I heard the thunder and went out to sit under the sky on his front step where I feel like I've sat a million times and had to take some time to make my case, which is to say just sit quiet a while with the Nature and me, which is to say the same thing. To sit quiet awhile, find the without, find the within.

The sky was blue but wild pungent yellow behind the clouds. It felt so Maryland and in all, it was good, satisfying to be home. It's funny when you leave a while you come back and see all the subtle quiet things you take for granted. Sitting in the thunder heat with that yellowgreen sky put me in mind of Mandy, who I've seen sit like that a million times. Just watching, feeling the ripe. I had the shift feeling of light air happen then, like some ether layer of me rustling about then settling back in to me again, which actually is recognition, and realized yet again how many little things quantify a place. I went in after a while and looked at my brother with must have been that blank look on my face which is how we do, me and him, without knowing it when we are trying to cover where we've been. What we dont ever get is blank for us means the same thing as transparent and the only one in the world who can read that layer of see-through on me is him. And maybe mom. He laughed it is the laugh that always made me used to feel embarrassed because I always confused it as laughing at me, but I am older now and get that it is just laughter because he knows. Do you want some ice cream I said and he laughed some more and then said Kel, why dont you at least drive to Brooklyn and get your dress? Get out and do something at least take a drive you dont have to drive all the way home. We are afterall suburb kids, taking drives is what he know to do. He doesn't say that part about suburb kids that is mine for right here. Yea yea that's good that's what I'll do I said But you'll have to go right now just get in the car and motor before it's closed he answered and so that's what I did.

I touched down at BWI the night before, texted him I'm here, still on the plane. His car was waiting outside the black and metal mechanics of the baggage claim, under the cement that feels post-apocalypse underground and smells stale and like gas and where you cant even see a single plane. I love it there though and am happy to see him and Jamie waving at me, then I get in, and Jamie apologized immediately for being distant which I didn't notice then went on to say she just got a call from the Vice President of her company in Texas, he needed to talk to her ASAP about an opportunity. I wanted pizza so Seanie immediately drove us to the closet mall, it was near 9pm, and him and me ate pizza from a woodfire oven while she sat in the car on the phone.

Memphis is a long way away, and it all happened so quick, and I can write about it on here becasue in an hour or so from now we'll meet his friends downtown to watch the US soccer game and he will tell them then, and by this afternoon I'm sure most of the family will have found out becasue dad will likely have talked to uncle Tim. They are leaving Thursday, wont even be at the family reunion this weekend. Yesterday I didn't feel a thing today I feel a little like my heart is being taken from me, but all the same I know without any question that for them this is the exact right thing. It all happened so quick, Jamie is in Manayunk CraigsListing their apartment and doing all she can in 48 hours to tie up with her current clients there. He and I sat on his couch most of the day yesterday tightening his resume and other contacts and cover letters and stuff, and watching soccer on tv.

When I got on to route a hundred to head towards Brooklyn Park I couldn't shake that huge rounded feeling of something about to happen, but being in the calm right before it is to come. I knew this feeling wasn't about my brother, that this is more about me and his news was precursor of what's to come. Memphis is his big thing and what they've been waiting for and what we've all been secretely holding our breath in hopes that it wouldn't come, which is selfish but true. None of us knew they'd get transferred that far. I support him a hundred percent though, like I said some things are just right and you know it, you can feel it the way the tide of it fits curved and rounded, and retreats when the energy of it finally comes to fruition, and feels like relief and peace in your soul.

I drove to Brooklyn Park next to the biggest Maryland clouds, full of thunder and white scary lightening smelling ripe as cloves but never dropping any rain. Just passed the beltway where you pick up the harbor tunnel I got of to go south on route 2, and curving round the roundabout I had the most natural sensation of being on my way to visit Gram. It took me a full few seconds to realize, no, no she's dead now, has been a full 13 years and her house in Brooklyn on Church Street sold that summer, 97, first time I went traveling right after in fact I'd gotten home. And there was instead of the sweet ache just a settled feeling of mmm-hmmm, of acknowledgement, of all things passing, and for way more than the first time I had the sense again of much my whole time on the Eastern Shore seemed like a dream. Not the surreal, make-believe way, but in the way of waking so that you cant remember a darn piece of what went on the night before behind your eyes. And how you know it was important, you can feel it, but it's over now so may as well go on and greet the day. And how if anyone or thing could go ahead and show you, hit repeat on the dream button so that you could watch your dreams with the waking thoughts of day, how you wouldn't believe it was in all true, anyway, because the regularly conscious part of you slept all the way through. It's how I felt coming home, like home back to Anne Arundel county, like it's not been a day or more since I've been away--forget those 12 years on the shore. It's how I felt, foreign, when I unlocked my car.

In the beginning of the journey that Liz Gilbert goes on in Eat, Pray, Love she spends a month or more, I guess actually like 4 months, eating her way across Italy. It's healing to her soul. That's how I've felt, where I've been, from the first night in Yachats at the Adobe with Gretchen when she ordered us, literally, 4 entire enormous plates of food. We laughed and ate and ate and laughed the rest of the month away. It's felt so good to just eat. Good, savory, sweet, ethnic, rich, fatty, delicious food. It feels good, too, to be home.

Long Letter to my Readers

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

Hey Pals,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love, kel

Picture Prayer, for Maryland

I never, ever knew how much I love you.

Frozen water, old trees. City streets, winter light.

Bridges. So, many, bridges.

My first fiction story was set in Sharptown, on the Nanticoke River, in Wicomico County on Maryland's Eastern Shore. I had never actually been there and I lived in Annapolis when I wrote it.

The second fiction story I ever wrote was set enroute on 50 eastbound from Annapolis to Ocean City.

It featured lots of bridges: Kent Island over the Narrows, Vienna over the Nanticoke, Cambridge over the Chop, Ocean City over Assawoman Bay.

They are all love stories, to you.

Who knew?

On a creative witchy mind

I dont know, this might be hard to relate to, but a friend of mine told me once that I am a spiritual archivist not just my own but for all of our friends. I was thinking of this tonight when I uploaded some pics onto my computer: 150 shots from Thanksgiving through this weekend. I almost never, ever wait that long between events to unload shots, but life has been hectic and I am walking along inside of it, tired but not weary, just moment to moment and wow have my moments been full.

And I do, I do: I keep track of the cycles of my self, and everyone around me. I dont just mentally acknowledge things, I mean I have a literal requiem storehouse on those that I count as tribe members, close friends and Knectors to my soul. I can't articulate this circuit board that goes on, but I am always filtering in the details, hearing their stories, processing their tales, then processing back for them the current myth or tide they are riding. I dont even realize it it's just what I do. I mark passings, and everyone's peaks and tides, by various means of traditional and non-traditional poles. Like today, the new moon, most powerfull tide passing time of year. All over the place people I know are witnessing: they are starting brand new goals; or taking pause; or hitting pinnacles in current circumstances; this is how we do, how we rise, how we flow, how we pass, how we current ever so swiftly or softly along. Somehow in my head I always easily see others big pictures for how it all easily is weaving together.

I guess what got me thinking about this was uploading these pics tonight, in that it'd been so long since I'd done so. I immediately caught myself nodding: ahhh yes, a quickening just occurred, I went through three whole weeks of straight archiving rather than also organizing and cataloging. My lens backed up and resharpened: in that time the poetry and magic and words have been flowing through me like mad. I've even been penpal-ing with someone the whole time: all of it, all those examples of capturing what is happening all around. A quickening, a quickening of the tide.

And the wind here, when it gets blowing, has been blowing like crazy just like last year on the last day of the calendar year. Winds so high the Choptank River and Elliot Bay both looked like the ocean at high tide.

Dont think it's a joke the old saying winds of change. Folk lore is some of the wisest medicine we have, yes? Everything at all times around us always is eternal reality of creative present moment. Our fates whisper in the wind sure as on the radio or in the trees.

Wild whipping winds tonight on the Eastern Shore.

Winter Solstice is coming: get it guys? Monday it all peaks, right before our closed--or if you're brave and learning to fight for it--at least half-opened eyes... What changes will come what changes are already half on their way?

O, coffee life....

thank life for you coffee cat, even tho when you changed from coffee east how i hated your name. thank life for you erika, and your practical approach to things. thank life for you date book: and the hour and half penciled in three times a week assuring i come here, sit down, and do just this....

thank life for you and all these young people, for rob and kj in seperate frames here on the walls. thank life for you funny aching beautiful minimal songs by huskyvoiced fellas and breathy womyns--i was a senior in college when i added to my agenda "barista" and worked a year at the local spot in chestertown, the one you learned to avoid if you had to get somewhere on time. because everyone there you know, and everyone you know is always there.

easton is bigger, the country surrounding her more spread out. (yes yes where ctown was a man, sweet easton is definitely a woman. i can hear it at night in the silence of her streets and how her trees and flowers sing. a chorus of sweet, while chestertown was always so flat, or thunderouosly barritone...o shamanmamaearthofmineheartandsoul, thank life for thank life....) and so while the poverty here is more spread out, and class in general more specifically profound, there is a far greater sense of lower middle class around here....o eastern shore, o employment office and family centers where i call my home, yes these too, thank life for you

why did i avoid it here so long? so much of my good times of the last 10 years have come out of coffee shops the late night dc ones after the clubs or meetins, all those all those 49 west nights, and o chestertown, where my moments came together for more than one love and now on to this one, center of a far larger town, all the people with smiles like they already know me, all the people who i'm sure really do already have me figured out...o writing life, o coffee shop opened til 10... with Rob and KJ on the walls how their local heroism delights and joys me and cracks me up, o faces here and the music i've never heard of but always always makes me groove....i am so gloriously glowing right now i dont know quite what to do....

what i'm listening to: gwendolyn

Herbalism 101: This is What You Should Know

Hey Pals


This is what you should know: the green breathing earth is alive out there and waiting for your remergence! You know, emphasis on the merge. As in recognizing, or more aptly, remembering, the inborn harmony of this fabulous ecosystem called Life and the deep interconnection of which we are all equal part...

I am so, so loving life right now. Teena and I have yet to mow our mammoth lawn so it looks like I always wanted Truslow Road to look, like with the tiniest sparkly faces of wildflowers growing every which way and clumps of succulent grass thrusting out of the earth and smelling all fine. I counted eight different kinds of sweet little gentle wildflowers--or weeds--and at least three that I know of (though probably more) are medicinal! Which is rad since I am taking an online herbalism course offered by Angie over at The Herbalist Path. She also runs Authentic Mama, that's the sight where I won the book The Lost Language of Plants.

This past Thursday it was so blue sky clear here, and 60 degrees. The neighbor tilled a plot for me over the weekend so you better bet that on my work break I got ankle, literally ankle deep from all the rain, in mud as I lovingly sung to the land here at Chop to waken it up to me and I to it as I hoed in all the compost from the winter. I am going shopping for starts at one of the many little Eastern Shore back road country farm stands today woohoo I can barely contain myself! Here is my garden-o-gram.

Yesterday it was 70 degrees and I started the day in barefeet and my pjs and a floppy sunhat out in yard. By the afternoon I'd moved to a sundress and the dock, where muskrat hung out literally underneath my feet, chomping away on what I think is watercress woohooo! That was my second upclose--literally I mean two feet away--meeting with muskrat in the past 48 hours. if you recall from a few weeks ago, I learned that he brings spirit medicine of good omens, grace, and wisdom resulted from the seeking of inner counsel. My god if this is not what is happening in my life right now.

Delving deeply in to, and working to witness and clean out some old, outgrown emotional beliefs and tendencies has made all this room for joy, for natural quiet, for art and simple awakening. For my feet on the earth and living life connected, but more and most important, at peace with me beginning from within. And more than anything else in this life that I know from the walking it, I know that the world is interconnected(and therefor inner-connected!) and that indeed every solitary aspect of life is God--or however you define it--but that ultimately there is no separating any of it out. You are God, I am God, that air is God, that muskrat, all of it equal and interconnected and the illusion is we are separate, when in reality we are just merely playing out the landscape of God from day to day, each in various stages of waking up to this most basic of instinctual knowledge and humbling power of existence. This is magic and divinity in its most grace*full form. And I am gratefully and consciously each day tappping more deeply in to this resource and knowledge. And how delightful, as my nature deepens so too does my natural connection to the nature all around me.Whether it is marvelling at the effects, not only physically, of wild chickweed (full of sapopins which are fat emulsifiers) but emotionally and spiritually; or the ability of dandelion infusion to clear up my mysterious skin sensitivity and make me less foggyheaded after a carbs and lots of meat--I am feeling awash with inner walking awareness of the simple divine.

Intuitively, I'm talking in the very membranes of our cells, in the ancient DNA composit memory of our very life we are a part of the earth and it of us. And when we give ourselves, even sparingly at first, to the world around us, I mean feet on the earth, in the river or the concrete of the city block or the high high lawn and most especially to the people, in the form of first from our heart and then from there to theirs, this connection re-livens itself from within.

Night time dreams crispen. Daytime dreams and goals bolster and clarify themselves more naturally. Our very step gains buoyancy. The spirit awakens because we are connecting once again to our most inner and inherent roots. I believe, no, I know quite simply that any place the world is as recked a place as it has become it is because the people living on top the earth, attempting to dominate the wild naturalness of which we falsely believe we are separate from, have lost that inherent connection to the vast and natural rhythms and cycles of growth that emanate in their cells, and beyond to their souls.

Further I believe, and have spent my life to this point learning through the walking of this inner instinct of knowledge, that artists such as myself find creative vibrancy in the form of fine and acute self-awareness when we take the time to rekindle our connection to the earth and her awake and teaching cycles. The cycles of of movement, grace, allowing, letting go, and learning to grow. Thus of the balance of solidity verses fluidity. Going with the flow... There is a literal bounty of life lessons just waiting to be harvested by the heart right out your backdoor!!


So there you are gang. A public service intention for you, my hopes that you may enjoy, as I am remembering to do, the chance of your life-given urge to grow....

Cuz it's my favorite kind of meditation & it reminds me of Sammy G

First Day of the Hunt

The schools always close,
knowing we're so country
all our boys will skip anyway,

and the valley rises together before dawn—

daughters pulling wool caps
past fathers' ears, reciting the profound
and elemental list:

rifle, rounds, knife, rope,

only to send each heavy man to the woods
where he'll slump the day in drifts
of solitude and prayer

while most deer stay down, evading
the unlucky, the night spent

visiting cousins: stroking curves
of antler, lengths of blood-stiffened fur.

Every year it's the same
soft and deliberate snow prints,
the waiting—

as if mine could emerge from his last hiding
place and walk the evening,
empty-handed, to me.

poem for the day by Paula Bohince

Seriously, if you've never tried:
let's posit that meditation is simply a means of going within
or, let's not posit, let's visit dictionary.com:
meditate
verb, -tat⋅ed, -tat⋅ing.
–verb (used without object)
1.
to engage in thought or contemplation; reflect.
2.
to engage in transcendental meditation, devout religious contemplation, or quiescent spiritual introspection.

okay, so if that's the case, reflecting or contemplating, even devoutly religious or quiescent
(-adjective 1.being at rest; quiet; still; inactive or motionless: a quiescent mind. ) or spiritual introspection that involves the mind. well. i am obsessed with this experience, maybe, naw likely because as a teenager and thus when my identity schisms were being chemically cemented by way of the all mighty hormone, i was early engaged in conscious-changing experiments that always involved substances of some sort. so now, sans-substance of course, i really dig on what can still take me to more open, or heightened, or even Still levels of being from within.

try reading a poem, really connecting the movement of it to your inner state. as means of quiescent introspection. join me in the tribe of the holy yogic creatix: from ecopoetshaman gary snyder "The yogin is an experimenter. He experiments on himself. Yoga, from the root Yuj (related to the English \yoke") means to be at work, engaged." join me in this fabulous dance of self-creating, supplication, sublimation on into beginning and beginning all over again....

p.s. also, if you read this far. the poem above reminds me of my friend sam. who i want to mention bc i dig him so much, too. brandon told me last nite he was headed to sammy's for some of the overflow of venison he's got this season. it made me so full of longing for hard, cold earth days that you walk through gingerly but assured purely by the warmth of your friends. the pond out back of the corn pokes and over the hill at sam and tim's. the goose blinds there that always mildly disturbed me, til the nite same cooked us goose soaked in oj in the black cast iron top of his wood stove. how it chokes me to look back on those times. growing up together: knowing sam as this goofy lanky dude that one time was already up in a tree that i suddenly needed to climb. or the night, last january time of Cold moon and god was it cold, and we walked through the woods at anngar the air with its bluehue that reminds you of the ghosts there in the body and bones of the ancient old land--and we were so cold that all at once bran and sam and me looked at one another and ran, under the full moon with cold cheeks and air that burnt our runny noses, all the way back to the farm house, and scraped together a meal of what sam had brought--oodles of noodles, and what was left of ours--some veggies and a little cheese.

how this time of cold calls for warmth. for friends. or good poems. or surrendering, at rest, quiet, still, to within.

Fall, oh splendid Fall

I don't know what it's like where you live right now but where we are, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, on farmland and surrounded by fields and fields of dead dry corn, it is breezy and light and the mornings are cool and require soft cotton long sleeves and cause me deep and lustful intermittent aches for fall....

That's not to say that by the afternoon there isn't the glare of sweat and furrow on my brow, but I gotta tell ya, our first First Harvest Jam back on the 9th ushered in a glory of sweet cool air and long shadows, a sense that the sky was growing and stretching to send the sun back nigh to the furthest ends of the horizon almost to the all the way below...and I am amazed at this! My heart buzzing, how close and real the actual seasons are following the old marks of season's treads on cell memory in our blood currents and primal memory in our hearts and in our souls. We discussed this at our potluck the week past, how cool the night was, sweater weather and how we all remembered (except for Dykeman, who disagreed, but he was in general in contention w Sam that night, and besides, for all us humans isn't memory just a turn away from imagination anyway...) that it used to be when we were kids that the cricket air at night in August chilled us on our neck and put shivers down our back when we were done with hide and seek or private clubhouses next to the swing set or whatever. And this is true, the seasons did used to be so much more of a mild rolling, near enough that our generation of Xers on the corner of Y can still remember...

A return to this and yet a swift reminder for me: the toxic details are still all around. Dead corn, only harvestable this year are bushels of 70 or so a stand, far less than last years average of 120 and our drought last year was awful-bad. (The mild season's return hasn't done a damn thing for our lac of rain.)

(Anyhow.) The new moon is coming this weekend--the full in Leo sun was two weekends ago and this is strong strong time of year. Subtle discontent is actually your soul's way of seeking harmony, listen to the message the deep tune in you is trying to send, actually surrender to the flow of discord. Or to the glory and grace in moments of solitude right now--these are the guideposts singing to you of the unity, these are reminders to know gratitude for the cycle of all that is.

My first harvest full moon on the 16th was wowed by me--that week I returned again to quiet time and have ever since seen the physical details--material level, you dig--of my life easily and seamlessly clicked right in to place. New job etc. Harvest time, as it should be. At once too is the calm cool of seeking peace within myself again--giving over to the realm of KellyLove inside me, the only grace I'll ever need that power deep within my soul...

I feel so good to connect once again to the cycles of our earth. And happy at the little coincidences that affirm and push this connection along....Check out my new blogfriend Tim at This Being Human, I love the new techno version of sage counsel--how it comes from linking and linking and random comments to strangers to help the flow of what seems right.

Anyhow Autumn Equinox is fast coming. Reminder that all things pass us by. Connect to yourself now, get outside. Go, Be, still.

And also, check out my new favorite song which is playing on livestream right now, BenFolds and Regina Spector duet "You Don't Know Me"....