Photo Doc

Last night, I saw my first firefly of the season. Today, my first dragonfly. Walking up the dock here at Chop the river wind keeping things cool and light--white trumpet flowers growing in a mass of vines at the edge of the fragmite and water stopped me and grabbed my breath--the energy here, a mere yard from the river, was hot, and green. Summertime. Thick stillness, rich. Fecundity of surge and spirit. I. Love. It.

I am home from my road trip & taking pause to let it all settle in. Maybe I'll write more about it should the words move there way up and out...

For now here's a photojournal full with more shots than most of you could ever care to see. And this isn't even half of them!

Thank you Dhamma thank you road thank you path thank you Way....

Thank you Blessed Nature of my sweet sweet being.

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.

No Better Way

…This is actually a commitment to joy. When you feel momentary happiness, or you want to burst out laughing, or you smile for no apparent reason, you are glimpsing eternal reality. For a fleeting moment the curtain has parted so you can experience something beyond the illusion. In time these moments of joy will begin to knit together. Instead of the exception, they will become the norm. There is no better way to know that you are growing…
~Deepak Chopra

I took my Joy back

So, in preparing pictures for my weekend in review, I thought about this thought I've wanted to blog about for the last several days: It is really hard trying to be a grown-up.

I mean, at the risk of sounding whiny--does anyone else find this to be true? Like, it's really stressful. Showing up day after day to your job, keeping schedules, paying bills on time. Am I right? I swear to god were so damn busy "keeping up" that we've lost all the natural wild instincts that keep us connected, cyclically, rhythmically, to the pure effervescent nature of things. Which means, to me, that we're dangerously close to losing our joy....

This really hit me when I threw my hands up on Friday, in the middle of my head practically spinning off my shoulders cuz the hamster up there was running so fricken fast trying to keep up with all the things I had to do--and I said to myself That's it. I'm done, done for the day. And I decided then and there that I was playing hookie with the rest of my day. I was sitting in traffic at moment of said decision and wrote a poem to celebrate. It was good, a long rhymey one that was honest and full of simple truth.

Then I drove to Newark, DE, and had a fabulous afternoon in the unprecedented 55 degree January sun, laying on a bench on the campus at U Del pretending to be carefree as a student again. Then I bought these fabulous glasses:

and this fabulous bag:

and a delightful present for a sistah a mine by the Portland, OR designer responsible for these gems, above, all at the dishy little boutique that is yuuummmmmmmmmmm, bloom.


Later that nite I dug The Took, formerly The Big Picture, at Andy's in Chestertown. Really I forgot how freakin jammin these guys are. And how kind Ian T is. Also got to hang w my grrrls. Had some fun.

Brooke me and Laura

Today dad and I drove up and met my bro, his girl and my mom at my grandparents. How fricken lucky am I to have all of them?

Me and my bro Sean w Grandma and Papaw over xmas

Finally, I've been thinking a lot lately about what I care about. You know, like what really matters to me in the heart of things. I read once in some book that our time ought to be spent on what we value in order to live a fulfilled life. Well intrinsically this presumes that one knows what s/he values. Is that true--do you?

It made me clear about a truth of my self in a deeper way: how much I value the commitment to Real Life, living from the inside out, as authentic as possible. And why I love art/music/writing/
poetry etc so much: the essence of processing this human life we all have. And I clearly understood why I am so supportive of all these phenomenal musician friends I've always had around me. Yesterday afternoon I used myspace to discover a tona music the way that I've been using blogger to dig new writers/artisans for a whole year now. This myspace thing kept me busy for at least an hour. Which reminded me how important it is
A)to live what I speak
B)to speak what I care about:
Support Independent Music People!!
what I'm listening to right now: maggie at the grand piano
YUUMmmmmmmmmmmmm