Leaving

You know it's legit when you gotta call mom.

Except that's not true I didn't call her, she called me, because it was Monday and that's what she does--on her drive from Ocean Pines to the county, to Anne Arundel where I'm from and where she stays every Monday night at a friend's house because she works at Maryland General, top of Howard Street in the city, every Tuesday in the operating room. She called and I was finishing up talking to Brenda at work and without thinking about it before I was even out of the cafeteria at the College where Brenda and I were, I called mom back.

Another important lesson you are learning is not to be afraid to start over. This is the chart of new beginnings...which there will be alot of....Your connection to God or the Source is extremely important and that is why you will continually need to be alone, make clear your intents and listen to your own inner council. Forced new beginnings probably seem to occur without rhyme or reason...However, when you learn to do what you want, what your passion is, finding those projects that charge your battery, as it were, you will find you will be instinctively attracted to those situations that will not let you down. Self trust is the most important lesson for you to learn.

I sat on a bench in a cement courtyard in the clear sun, the cold air, the green fields and sounds of route fifty traffic beyond the brick buildings of Chesapeake College. I sat on the bench and talked to my mother, and listened to her, and cried. I cried the way I cried when I first left the farm, the cry and ache of grief and goodbye. It was late in the afternoon, and the few students left on campus kindly went in different directions.

When I turned thirty Gretchen, who is wise woman and wolf woman to me, which is teacher medicine, (this link is where she works--an artic wolf sanctuary in the coast ranges of Oregon) gave me an extensive, 11 page single spaced reading of my natal chart that her long time wild woman friend of over fifty years did for me. I was living on Truslow Road then, had literally just started a line of intention and prayer influenced by Gandhi and Women Who Run With the Wolves based on the idea that I was discontented in life due to self-compromise and not following my heart. The birth chart was so eerily on point, so exact to the actual detail in more than one circumstance that I couldn't look at it again for three months after my first read. Self trust is the most important lesson for you to learn.

It took three years, til now, to come to a place where I can say I am willing above all to trust me, to trust in me and follow my heart and my inner power and guiding song. And this, this final departure of packing up my sweet little apartment on Goldsborough and Hanson here in Easton, where I've only been for 7 months, is breaking my heart. But it's not all of it. I'm leaving. I'm leaving -- Josh, Brandon! Katie and fun nights at Anngar, Amy and Megs and sweet afternoons in the yard! Late nights on cold cements and talks and talks and cigarettes and coffee. Magnolia trees and Play it Again Sams! The puffballs on campus in the spring oh god the geese calls in the fall. Chester River and so many swims and talks and the moon, greasy subs and potlucks, gardens and oh the hot ass dry ass choking ass Eastern Shore sun. Dust and tractors, woods and blackberry growing wild.

I'm leaving. And I am packing, and I dont have energy for this anymore, and greif feels like train tracks most overgrown by yellow weeds and thick grass clumps with no train there, and the tracks are laid down and part of you--and they hurt in your throat and feel like an incense uncurling on the air in your gut and after a while you just have to surrender to the uncurling....

And O god Kevin who went even tho like Konan said we were just waiting all those years to get the call, and saying goodbye to Brian and how just this past Friday I saw Hupman for the first time in a decade and we immediately cried to see each other and the first words out of his mouth were Fannon...because yes that's what happens after someone dies the crew falls apart cuz it hurts too bad to see one another, and jesus Mike you too and all those angry late night fuck yous after you chose the gun. How fucking much I hate goodbye. Realizing months later, after I was gone from Choptank how leaving Brandon and then losing Josh sent me in to something like ptsd where I was just stuck on loss and looping again and again through the anguish of sudden grief. And remembering Grammy coming to me those couple bad, bad times at Chop...Grammy who came to me again last night even tho it wasn't hella bad, just me and nuzzling under a soft blankey quiet and tender the tears out after talking to mom. Grammy was there, I could feel her near she has a certain way of softly filling my spirit that is specific and settling to her. And now Jenny Lewis is singing to me there but for the grace of god....and I am caught on my breath, and think of what mom said yesterday. I only know to tell you what your Grammy always used to say Kel. This too, shall pass.

This too
this too
this too shall pass. I just want for you to be peaceful Kel mom said. Not to have to struggle so much. No shit I answered, the struggles been all about learning to hold my own reigns ma. I'm there, now. This is what I've been struggling towards these past years.

Getting to be set on the ocean, the wide open calling ocean of me. And trusting the direction of the breeze, the tides, wherever they will take me, will flow me. Being at one in surrender and trust. The ocean the breeze the wide open calling, all of me...

Right. Good reminder, and now I recall in the time of vision at the end of Harvest last year, in that space of timelessness at Halloween when I moved here to Easton. And knowing that more than anything my month in Oregon would be one great rest. Just juicy, and savory, and replenishing from within.

O fucking god amen amen amen.

When the women get together...

We laugh until we are crying. And often the laughter is from the grotesque, or bizarre, the banal, made by us delirious, and profane. We laugh until we are gasping for air and yelling at one another so hard because ultimately someone has started gagging from laughing so hard, and this will have a chain effect on us all, and then we will be laughing and gagging each of us, and tearstained and sweaty, and praying in the thinness of breath left to us that we dont get kicked out....

These are the women, my women, the women from whom I came. My grandma, her daughter Karen my mom, Karen's two sister Coni and Lori. Lori's daughter Chelsea, my gorgeous cousin.

In our family, it is the women. The men are periphery, we take care of them. We feed them, we house them, and at times it is clear the approach is that we simply put up with them. I never understood this tolerated approach, but I didn't have words or sight for it, either, and took it for granted. But this year I spent the time, and listened, to get to know why, how this started, where it came from, who we are and where we came from. Where I am headed.

In my family it is the women, and we sustain. We raise children and table the home full of food. The men come and go. When they are present they take center, become large enough to not see us chaining things together, keeping it all moving. Rising and falling in our natural undercurrent. We keep things warm. And while we break the air always with our laughter, we also dont raise our voices.

I think back to my quiet writing room in the slanted attic at Mt.Royal. The time in the fall, just prior to creating my little litmag LaCantalma, that I came out of mediation to the St. Francis feel and rosewood and frankincense smell of my grandmother, dad's mom, the smell and buoyant feel of silence and peace and rosaries that she took on when she would come to me after her death. The fall, time of ancestors and memory. And I stayed quiet and from within said, what would you want from me, Grammy? And she said sure as a whisper on my own breath Your job, Child, is to be heard...

In Gram's family it is the men, five of them, my dad and his brothers. Two sisters, one in Germany far away as she could get, and the other the youngest, the baby, married to her sweetheart from 16, he the man the tribe took very early in. My uncles used to coach him in school, and teach him history, and phys ed.

I've always known the McMullens, the overarching Patriarchy, the men.

But this year, the blessed, the broken, the laughing til were sick, the distinct: the women. The women are who, is Who and How I've learned.

The women that shape the other half of who I am.

Later, after that Fall when Grammy came and reitiated my Call, I was coming over the Mexico border in to California when my mom called to say Grandma's sister Mary died. I had befriended this Irish dude Cahall and he wanted to see the Hopi Indian territory and so he was riding along and it worked out because Aunt Mary was from just south of Sedona, and so we drove to Arizona. And Grandma, as I told her of my travels and the spirituality guiding and gracing me--Crow and the Medicine come to me in Colorado, Durango and Mesa Verde--she grabbed me to her chest to say goodnight and held me, she was chesty and her grasp, tight. She whispered in my ear KellyAnn you better write this all down.

The women the women the women from who I Am. That plain straight dicey humor I get from them. That unanticipated eyeroll of sharp wit. The seeing it all, and letting it pass.

I'm going to Gram, Grandma. I'm staking out and finding my self now. I've been watching and listening, laughing and praying for a long, long time. I've been voiceless and crying, too.

But I found Her, the voice, my voice. And the deep Voice, s/he the great I Am.

I found Her. And I'm writing it all down.

So it's been one week exactly since I decided I needed to stop all plans and designs and literally, instead, spend one day at a time in deep, caring, blissful nurturing care and tenderness for me, me, me! Funny how unapalogetic I feel about it, too. I can't ever remember spending this long on vacation from daily stress and worry, concentrating instead only on keeping my mind and heart in a state of ease.

I am willing to take it slow.

So far the only thing I've wanted to do is be outside or to be in my bed--but not in a dramatic I'm hiding from the world way, more like in a cozy wow I feel so warm and gooood luxuriating like this under my soft covers and cozy soft blankies way. Also I am greatly pleased by the local top-40's radio station that I listen to in my kitchen. Really, it is the only station that comes in clear here at Chop: and it serves the Midshore. For those of you who dont know, Eastern Shore of Maryland, the quiet or "slow" side of the Chesapeake Bay, is track after track of farmland/boggy mudflatty swampy (ghost-stuck!) sulfury-stinky creek/farmland. Not much to it. Lots of old generation, conservative farmers--strugglin--watermen, drunks and poor people. And the rich upper-middles who bought the weekend homes and bring the money. And misanthrope wannabe's like me. Who comes from upper-middleclass people who came from working-class people but on my own and in my job I get down on it every day with the working-poor. And this weird station makes me feel I'm back in the County outside Ballmore but without the rap. But that's okay cuz in the decade or so since I moved from there rap got popular so now the top-40 stations are full of that hybrid spin-off hip-pop or pop-hop so I still mostly get a bit of what I love. Because I am a secret huge induglent fan of pop-hop and I believe all kids from the County outside B-more or DC (remember that used to be Chocolate City Baby before getrification happened and it used to be ok to call it that cuz it was a pride thing for people) are. Also the sad thing is that all the county kids are the ones who pushed the working-class or poor, which in Bmore and DC were porportionally black people, out of the cities so that makes me sad to be where I am from. And this is a nerve that strikes so, so deep with me right now--because I am working hard on adjusting my mental scope to concentrate on joy and bliss and harmony but historically whenever I do so I get really down and out because how cansomuch injustice occur and people not feel outraged and hurt and powerless over it. But in my cozy bed-nest recently, pondering this thought yet again but doing so as gently as I could be with myself, it occured to me how important it is to be grateful as I can for all the little golden spots of joy. Grateful as I can be. To see it all, all the hurt, pain, to see it All and not shy away (I work in the Unemployment Office and the UNDERFUNDED Family Support Centers people I got more broke-heart stories than I can usually bare and especially right now--you dig??) To see it all and to, as the writer/artist Sark puts it, to see "The grace in as much as you can see." This is choosing to be the change best as I can be, but more important, and for the first time, ever, for me--I recognize how not just life-preserving, but life-affirming this gentle, thankful thinking is for me. So my new favorite station makes me feel joy and light and also makes me smile without knowing it. It makes me like having dishes to do. I just wish that ALL people could get to focus on this kind-of power*full mental shift instead of having to just focus on where the shit their gonna find food...

Anyhow, I can make no excuses for who I am and where I am right now. All I can tell you is that my days look like this: Bless everyone in my office/work/job with love. Clean up after myself, lounge in my bed smiling a lot at how blessed I am to be in a cozy little nest that I love, and going outside to play. Ooo, and cooking myself good food. Tonight it was homemade macncheese and brocolli yummmmmmmmmmmm.

I am willing to believe that as I luxuriate in my own love and blessings they increase. And those I come in to contact with have a greater chance of feeling fired by one of these sparks.

O and PS, go outside tonight and talk to the moon. It helps a lot and it's wonderful. She's full and she likes it when you do this--go head, try. Also people need moonlight much as they need sun. Good for your pineal gland which in the ether or subtle body is the third-eye.

Kay, back to loving me I go.

That's my grandma and me on my little alter