"You can be inspirational in any part of the world...

...but not every part of the world can inspire you."~JTA, 5 sept 09

Me and cousin Joey to the far right. 1984.

Wow, I am so taking a little break from the madness of student files right now. Since yesterday morning it's been non-stop organizing of and placing ESL students by assessment levels. Making new student folders. Class lists. Lots of derangely exciting stuff, I mean real pulse-racing kind of activities...

My cousin Collin is sitting across from me, right now, I have one class left to go and then two GED classes and then I am done this drone of skull-numbing torture; he is working on an essay for his gened English first semester ever college class. For a book he didn't read. This summer. He looks at me with that great, eighteen-year-old dryness he is famous for and says "Cuz I mean, all my stoopid cousins kept coming up to me on the beach this summer, you know, trying to have fun and all..."

Saturday night I got up with my other cousin. He's in his late 20's, born in Africa, raised in Germany, educated at Oxford, working currently on his PhD in England. Actually worked a while for the UN in Liberia. Huh? He was the first of us, our generation, to marry and is now expecting his first kid. He's in town this past week and I drove two hours to see him at 10:30 at night. Because that is what I now love to do. Get out and about, find some action. I snatched him away and off we scooted to see friends of mine play muse-ac and catch up.


Damn, I miss him. It'd been two years and last time we were together he wasn't married yet but I surely was, or for all intensive purposes my lifestyle two years ago certainly looked a lot different and included a fine and gentle long-term companion. So cousin Joe and I had lots of lots of sharing to do. Which is what I've done all summer, kicked it with fabulous folks from back in the day and shined my heart clean again and again in their love.


It was the first time that I recapped all my own personal changes from this past year and didn't feel like I was partly trying to sell it, looking to be affirmed that I'd done what was right. Instead it felt real and understandable and as normal as anything else about my self I've come to accept and even take for granted. Say my cheesy high-school tatoos, or eyesight that's blurred. Joey is the kind of person that I have such an intrinsic organic connection to. So much so that without expecting it, merely by virtue of sharing my self with him and he as well in exchange, a greater part of the landscape of me clears a bit more, the horizon spreads and clarifies in to more natural view, something in the bedrock part of me just clicks. After talking a while about my job, telling him about working our everloving asses off this past year to build from scratch a program that now serves a thousand students--he responded with his own details of his most recent work and projects.


And then it clicked. And I felt so happy and full of love to be snaking the backroads with firesmoke on the air and Joe chugging water to sober a little bit up.


I was definitely a little salty but with the sass that night and so I did something I rarely do. I asked him specifically two questions, asked him specifically for advice.

And here was one of his answers, which came after a pause and some puzzlement, which might of just meant he was thirsty....Kel, I dont know what to tell you. But you know what I am thinking about, that you love to dance. And dance is a form of communication that is ancient, far older than words. And you love to dance, you naturally know how to communicate with this form. So I think tonight you should just dance, and listen to the language of your self. Now, seriously. The only other person who ever would have possibly said something like this is me! But with that European swiftness that some mistake as curt but really is just minus any bullshsit, and with the deep intellect that courses this guys blood--my freaking radass cousin Joe answered me with the best advice, ever. And it made me beam!!!!

And god, he's so, so right. I spent earlier that day in fact at a festival, with my barefeet on the earth, so it was kinda like he was just affirming what I already in fact did know...

What I am listening to: def and kweli, both new and old

blah. back to the books i go.

if i can walk i can dance if i can talk i can sing.

(amen, cuz.) (amen amen.)

50 Instructions: Imagination

1.Trust in deep sense, no matter what. Friends will doubt you, family will pigeonhole you. Trust harder.
2.Do not be afraid to cry. Cry a lot. Forget how not to cry. Wonder if anyone ever died of crying. Think you might die.
3.Wonder what you were trusting in in the first place.
4.Hate what you were trusting in in the first place.
5.Get furiously assheaded about trust. Realize, slowly at first, that all mistrust is self-mistrust. All hate is self-hate, all anger is self-anger.
6.Realize one day that instead of crying you are actually giggling. A little bit at a time. At your self.
7.Start to remember trust.
8.Forget a lot.
9.See the network of serendipity that is helping you remember. You are It, It is You.
10.Fall in to fear again. Think you have no energy left.
11.Be amazed by your strength.
12.Celebrate you. And your strength.
13.Realize the friends that are still with you. Celebrate them.
14.Start drawing.
15.Rediscover music and how it charges you from Within.
16.Start to note that the Coincidences really are endless. Celebrate coincidences as they are Imagination made real and revel in the reminder: Imagination is your religion.
17.Fall in love again with the earth. Recommune with the sun, sing long songs at night to the moon.
18.Start to eat your lawn. It is full of Imagination.
19.Start to trust what before seemed like absurdity. Absurdity is a code word for Imagination.
20.Slow your flow at work because it causes you to be blind by your own overdose of self-importance. Self-importance gets in the way of your Imagination.
21.Realize you are laughing a lot. For no reason at all. Laugh at your self. A lot. Laugh with yourself. Love laughter because you think it is the singsongy foreplay of Imagination.
22.Tell your DS (deeper self) you think you know what you love...
23.Notch an eyebrow when It responds are you ready to grow?
24.Find yourself awake for the third night in a row at 4am and finally get in to the Real Work your mentor’s been using to quietly challenge you.
25.Realize in wonder some several days in to the Real Work that all your ideas, all your several years of life-fretting, all your planning, all your wheel spinning has slowed to a sweet gentle hum. All these worries and silent demands and false necessities have been proxy to your Imagination. You can almost taste the richness of the most precious word: Halt. You are empty inside. Deliciously empty.
26.So this is what Gretchen’s words meant The Willingness to Insist Upon Nothing.
27.Celebrate! This is just where you’ve always wanted to be.
28.You didn’t even know this when you set out to head for here.
29.Continue this Real Work with nothing short of profound awe and revelry. Everyday it is something New!
30.Fall in love not only with this Big Empty but simultaneously with Choptank, or place.
31.Watch outside-self start to fall away.
32.Realize you have nothing to prove.
33.Find the weather to be resolute in glory.
34.Delight as you see some of the deepest parts of who you are become more and more commonplace in your day to day world.
35.Allow for others the room to honor them selves.
36.Be ridiculously, lavishly in love with Choptank.
37.Realize the earth loves to hold you in the most tenderest spoon.
38.Realize swimming in the Ocean must be just like being inside the moon.
39.Sit quiet at night outside under the stars.
40.Breathe with the land.
41.Need nothing more than this.
42.Trust in the Process.
43.The process is Grace. Grace is Within.
44.Grace is unestimatable, limitless.
45.Recognize the grandness of this.
46.Laugh at your self some more because you are so very grand that the only word for this is Small. Realize too that grandness is very different from self-important.
47.Continue to forget this a lot, but smile because memory helps you laugh more!
48.Keep doing the Real Work. Take lots of time out to Play!
49.Imagination is just a word grown-ups replaced with Grace. Grace is the only Reality there is.
50.Live this Reality, gently, openly, sparklingly, day by day. Remember to laugh when you forget.