A Place Of My Own

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my apartment?

When I first moved in here all I did was sit around in wonder, with a pure-eyed peace-feeling stare. I loved the lines of the walls, the smoothness, the light. I used to open up the great tall window in front of my writing table and smoke cigarettes sitting on the ledge with my feet on the roof and my heart in the tree. I would talk to the moon, or just listen in a satiated way to the traffic going by.

We moved out of the suburbsprawl that had tangled its way down route 2 from Baltimore and in to a house in the woods when I was a pre-teen. We went from a neighborhood full of kids with rat tails and kickball games and swingsets and snowball stands and dancing under the street lights in driveways purple boomboxes pumping to no one, just Sean and me, and the woods. And Lindsey and Darby who lived across the street in this big old farmhouse that had secret cellar tunnels cemented off but that you could access through trap doors in the field. My dad left three months after that he moved to New York. Manhattan always terrified me and repelled me after that. I started smoking cigarettes then and stealing from the liquor cabinet they kept downstairs with the heavy-hinged door. I put a sign on the door to my room, it was a manilla envelope with a fake address and it said Kelly's place on it and I think maybe that is when it started, my need and ache to always have a room or place of my own.

Later, after I graduated college mom was selling the house. I stayed on in Chestertown where I got my degree and got clean, it was 2002, for what was meant to be only the summer. I was working three jobs, two in town and one two hours away at the beach. My dad's best friend died and my dad was suddenly back--just like that, 12 years later. I was an adult now or supposed to be so I made decisions like an adult should. He was depressed and didn't get off the couch at my grandparents and aunt and uncles little wood house at the beach. I worked there at the beach it was beautiful fall and pulled doubles at a seafood house uptown three days a week and tried to feed dad peanut butter and jelly but my father, who loves food second only to gin and golf, wouldn't even eat. Then I drove to Chestertown to be a coffee shop barista in the days and wear a button down tux top at a white linen the other nights of the week. At the coffee shop I fell in love with a quiet boy who had soft brown eyes.

He was from Chestertown and so it was that I stayed.

By December of that year they offered me a job teaching night classes ESL. I didn't want to I had no background for it but she kept pressuring so I agreed. The first night I was coming up one hall there were students coming towards me from another, I closed my eyes and took a breath and relaxed so I could feel my heart open then just said a prayer in my head: Direct my thoughts and actions. Help me to love. Hola! I shouted to the little Mexicans with strong bright eyes and they smiled so warm and that was it, eight years ago, I was done.

In November, last year 2009, I moved here to this place finally for the first time in my life, my little tiny place all of my own. I love to be here and revel in how much I've I enjoy my own quiet home. It took me a long time. On Friday last week I stepped down from my job. That two nights a week gig teaching ESL eventually led to full-time at a Community College, where I worked hours on end with three other people to establish the community english and high-school diploma program. I poured every last bone breath and blood in to that job since they took it from the public schools in 08. It carried me through one of the most difficult transitions of my life, but now I am through, through the change of being my own woman, being single, being strong, being alone. May 14 is my last day and then soon I will leave the Eastern Shore.

It's been a long, long time coming. Who knew all along I just needed a little tiny place of my own?

Why Not? On G.O.D.

I have a Higher Power. I call it that for lac of a better term, and because it is easier and less loaded than say God for example. Once, when I was a kid, I was just home from Sunday school one morning--I remember because I was still in a dress and maryjane shoes--I was probably 6 or 7, maybe 8-years-old. And I dragged my little desk, one of those blue metal things with the opening for your books under the seat and the desk welded onto an arm that came up on one side, over to my closet to stand on and reach something on the top shelf. And this feeling of incredible warm calm came over me and it was almost as if it said, I wouldn't do that if I were you. And I literally stopped what I was doing and responded with my own internal mind talk: Jesus, is that you?

I stood on the desk anyway, and, top-heavy it pitched me forward into an entirely nonsteady wall of clothes which did not stop my fall but certainly softened my landing. My father came clamoring up the stairs yelling because he was scared and I, not for the first time, learned the hard way.

I dont know if it was Jesus. I'm saying, if that's what you want to/like to call it, more power to you, though I've never been comfortable identifying it, or I guess I should more aptly say limiting it by giving it a personality or name, at all. In highschool marijuana was a the placebo that got me to more or less trust in that inner "hunch", and I called it It then. In the years of partying and hanging that came after that I literally followed the coincidences into the gnostics, info on mysticism, paganism and more. By college I had taken to meditating, or preparing my mind for that quiet guidance to grow. And around that time I got turned on to the Celestine Prophecy, and Simple Abundance, and as result grew encouraged about actually owning, and using, and growing my own access to the inner-calm or guidance.

A year or so ago, maybe a year and a half now, I was laying under a tree at Anngar, under my tree (animism is also a tenet I live, again I can't say believe here because I project this onto my subjective reality, so there is no way for me to say it's merely a belief as I live the Oneness) and I was talking to the Higher Power and feeling the receptivity of my tree and my body relaxing into the earth around it. And I said to HP I just really feel like I need some time alone. My next thought was that I was due in town for something at 5pm. At which time I met a random stranger who invited me (I was between jobs at the time) to come to a 10 day, 10 hour a day meditation retreat happening at a camp right outside town, for free. We weren't allowed to talk the whole time. I went. And sat Vipasanna, a form of stringent Buddhist meditation, for those 10 days.

At Vipasanna retreat the guru was very clear that we were not to invoke any higher power or god, no praying or anything like that was allowed. That was tough for me, as I start my day, everyday, with a prayer, and usually (after coffee at least!) settle in for a minimum of 10 minutes of open meditation to align myself with my own inner calm, and then focus my mind on my gratitude and intentions for the day. Vipassana was amazing. I clearly saw the direct connection between somatic emotional wounds and our otherwise unconscious reactive thought patterns that all humans hold. I fully realized the absolute alignment between these unchecked beliefs and illness. And the experience of sitting Vipassana was an amazing challenge, the validity for which I fully understand: utilizing the inner "Watcher" to unkink our patterning, or samsaras, by witnessing rather than running with them, thus disavowing these patterns of ego attachment and thus of their power. But here's the deal ya'll, when I meditate, before I sat that 10 day period, and since, I always first give thanks and then ask that my own Higher (or, to be more factually precise insofar as how I feel it, my "Inner" or "Deeper") Power to be "on."

And here's the point of this whole post: It works. Perception changes, clear healing of thought patterns or un-"kinking", unthinkable coincidences, serendipity like you wouldn't believe. And usually all I do is witness the movement of my mind with love and non-judgement, after having asked my "Power" be turned on. And after a while of that I seek to clear out the inner-noise and sit in peace and thanks-giving. I really try to feel it, to make it warm and gold-feeling inside. Then, and this is key for me, whatever it is that I think I can't do--like empty a six-bedroom farmhouse with my hatchback and no plans for assistance--I say ok HP (or Great Love, or Holy Mystery, or Grand Mama, Deep Power or whatever whatever) take this ****** (insert exhausting life detail here), and thanks for taking care of it in my own highest good (with blessings to all involved etc etc.) Or whatever whatever... (insert grateful expression of faith who cares the semantics here.) And then I really do let it go, and I gotta tell you, always, always the details easily take care of themselves.

It's all a matter of aligning my heart with my faith in that power. Of not needing to know, just trusting. Of recognizing I, the Ego-I anyway, am not the end all. And in that, for me, the Power is vital. No matter how I define it, the words I choose to use or what I call it. It's using it, really with my heart using it, that counts. I believe that this is vibrational. (For one unsciency follow-up on this idea, click here; for a sciency one, here.)

And if your doubting right now, allow me to question: have you ever tried it, really tried it, your self?

Prayer for the Day

I want the body of myth
alive in me
This body of life
of words and art
To glisten
the sparkle of royalty
May my words take flight
in measure
O, blessed poetry
May myth be the blending
--the belief & the walking--
Thus paramount: This
This Life We Lead