"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.)

IncantationOne SelfPhotographs Lessons

Crow lives sometimes in her hair. She tells her not to but she doesn't care.

The hot river is the dirtiest-clean smell she knows.

When the sun goes & the dark comes, the wind stops almost completely.

She is Joker. She celebrates as Witness the week of the Fool.

Not Easily When we get beyond beauty and pleasure, to the other side of the heart (but short of the spirit), we are confused about what to do next. It is too easy to say arriving is enough. To pretend the music of the mountain needs only to be heard. That the dance is known by the dancing, and the lasagne is realized by eating it. Not in this place on the other side of desire. We can swim in the Aegean, but we can't take it home. A man finds a melon by the road and continues up the hill thinking it is the warm melon that will remain after he has forgotten the ruins and sea of the summer. He tells himself this even as the idea of the taste is replacing what the melon tasted like.~Jack Gilbert

I had understood freedom and security. The need to rattle the foundation of habit. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to laugh. I felt invincible, untouchable, I had extended myself, and I believed I could now sit back, there was nothing else the desert could teach me. And I wanted to remember all this. Wanted to remember this place and what it meant to me, and how I had arrived here.~Robyn Davidson

She knows Crow is teacher, and holder of good medicine, too. Of course she forgets that sometimes{sometimes that forgets she}too

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