Wild Women Wisdom: De dos mundos. Which IS Life.

Erika and I met in grade school.  She was in band and I wasn't because of some bad shit going down at my home, that's all I remember about our real young connections.   Red and green plaid jumpers thick as cardboard, white button-downs peter-pan collars and cable-lined knee high socks that were soft kellygreen and that I used to collect the knits off of to make my own little version of fuzzball friends, because in the eighties they had these pom-pom stickerhead things on big feet that my Catholic School gave away once a year as some incentive for some scholastic long forgotten thing, and I thought they were the cutest little creatures ever.  By middleschool it was the words--stuffing sheets of frazzled loose leaf thin blue lines in to one another's hands under the desk in Ms. Fouse's class.  Maybe this only happened once and I remember it because of the adrenaline scar--doing something we weren't supposed to be doing in the back of class.  The trick light that put on in my eye.  Erika's large curly cursive and the characters with all the traditional old-fashioned names.  My loosely-costumed accounts of people we both went to school with, making stories out of the lives of people we knew.

I was a bitch as a teenager, suppose I still am or can be.  Erika and I were teens together too but I wanted nothing to do with her because of her friends.  I was doing drugs by then had pink hair and black cat eyes, purple combat boots.  I drove junk yard cards I'd buy from my granddad's brother for a hundred bucks and thought I knew more about real life than the pretty preppy girls that she was one of.  My dad lived in California and we didn't speak.  I was tuff.  At least to me.  

Every January I think about these things, I think it is because my parents sat Sean and I down in January and told us they were splitting up.  Dad'd been living in Manahtten by then for three months so really it was just about them having to say the words.   That was 1989.  It sucked.  In January the past several years my pop and I spend his birthday weekend together at the beach, except that for now I live at the beach and it is January already and mom is in Mexico for the month and so he and I have been together just us when he comes down every weekend.  We are watching the series Weeds together, the dvd goes in after the Ravens game ends and then we just scream and laugh and look at each other with shocked expressions slack-jawed speechless but in giddy commiseration the dark humor and insinuations in our eyes.  That's dad, who used to cover for me when I was a teen and he'd come home from Cali for the holidays or for the McMullen gatherings.  He came home this Saturday empty-handed after looking for a replacement pan of mom's that I burned up accidentally.  I didn't ask him to but he did it and we didn't need to discuss that it he was trying to find a new one so that mom would never know.  We cuss and laugh and shake our heads over what we see on the TV.   He's taking my suggestions about changing his diet.  As of last night he'd lost 12 pounds.  We bitch about not being able to eat steak and the fluffy breads and creams together and the sugars we love so much.  When he's not looking I sneak candy bars and fries, tacos with creamy melted cheese.  We are so alike.

There is a pyschic term that I first read in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book Women Who Run With the Wolves.  It is de dos mundos, or of two worlds.  And to me this term is about the angelic, the demonic acts of not only the holy creatives, but further and even more importantly of those who embark on the authentic path.  Which I guess really is the most creative thing one can do.  The older I get the more I realize it is this, this Real Work that matters most--all else, all acts of art and creation thus evolve out of the struggle for ourselves, evolve out of the substance of who we are and those strides we take towards that person.  To be of both worlds is to take the devilish plunge:  to walk through the day by day topside world of work, family, friends and to likewise be willing to, at the same time, go inside our burrows, the tired winter pockets of gnarly filth or snuggly warmth and pull back the boulders we put there and investigate the little chemical nightmares or dreams that wait with knowledge for us behind all of that.  The knowledge of our roots, of our healing, of our true-selves that inside of each and every one of us look like the devil sitting there.  Those sad or scary or numb or deadened spaces are full with vitality and angelic lifeforce if we persist persist persist to shed light on them and winkingly clean them out.  Erika is my writing partner now, my solace, my only shining angel lately and I told her last week on the phone--ever since Joe died the week of Thanksgiving I haven't been able to write.  I told her the stories of what was emotionally consuming me with each tired step I took as the holidays washed us over.  Erika too had hers.  We agreed, it is time now only for stillness and reflection, it is this de dos mundos, this Real Work that right now in the darkest part of our season truly counts. 

But it is hard to be here at the beach supposed to be writing, and not.    And it is funny to me, and maybe at the end of the day why I write is because life is just so damn miraculously-fucked-up-AND-amazing that I feel I need to mark my own holy amen proof of appreciation of it all--but here I am, January again kicking it with my dad at the beach in his home, laughing and living with him in the topside world.  And inside in the inner terrain circling back over the old old tracks with all the faces of him and me then, too, all the little demon-angels and angel-demons that live inside.  And this precious funny fusion.  Which is life... 

Poltergeist Love, the power-full prayer. & the hokey pokey.

Ha ha when the people say you're still writing?What's that book about anyway?  Yes I'm still writing yes I'm still writing what's it about?  Well what's life about?  Up to your own two eyes.  Human hearts and the poetic voice oh unfair unjust world.  Ha, the sun.  We rose up out of the primordial goop-funk amoebic then with gills then feet then thumbs.  Now voices.  Sing, speak, speak the earth the roots and the moon.  About this stuff.  That's what it's all about.  That's what all this is...

??

I walked in to my room two months ago with the vaccum cleaner in my hand and smelled the most real smell of him one of the many many hims in the long list of powerfull hyms oooops did i mean that, misspell of course of course (i have devil eyes!) i did.  I have poetry leading up to this.  I smelled him and laughed, there was a shadow on the wall this happens so often with the openness the other side of the creative wall that i laughed but also, angered, quick chased him off.  started to rerun the vacuum then had to tell someone so of course i told kel.   now this:

i have written so long, so long so long (nights at truslow first time back room paul asleep in sleeping bag down coated warmness of woodstove heat trapped inside tall pine trees at truslow spring-truth please those long, terrorizing days o would you come voice or death something, be raised all those terrible days at anngar farm.  o and let's not forget oregon?  the time first, knelt on my knees ordered a used computer over the internet came in a box banged up set it in the corner of the trailor on a small table barely a foot off the floor beach days so much sun tree afternoons so much rain and i would kneel there, write and of course pray) i have written and written and waited so soo long for this and now i am here, having written it out every step and abracadabra open sesame code it took to bring me this far.

erika printed out all i'd given her by the end of august 14 months of submish.  hundred plus pages?  nothing congruent.  now congruent as a dream! funny how that says as a dream as if in the sleeping sense with only one eye opened and not knowingly de dos mundos there is ever anything relevant to see.  as if sight is relevant without it too.

Finally, i am there, this is not a dream. i can smell pine strong as spirit it is real right here with me and on fb another stooopid sign, i say to the muses


ooo holiest of holy all things as one all dark and light all encompassed version of all things encircled and the encirclement of all that ever was and this voice and the outter that handles it, and ever on, and the still uncapsized moment prior to breath, o all love and creation and loss, set it all aside now as i poool from this flood as i pull under and go down to come up with all i have within, set is aside let me do thou work holy of all most especially of my name you have the quality just help me with quantity show up to the page

i am set up now, my ducks in a row.  this is fun, the most exotic strange poetic-practical place i have ever been.

RANT

We had a thunderstorm last night, a thunderstorm. I was walking home from this writer's gathering at a restaurant 2 blocks from here and the haze on the air was balmy--It's like Miami out here I shouted to the lady beneath the yellow street light walking towards the corner and her car, her name is Marty and she came the latest and was also a first-timer like me but showed up with a definite sweetness of self that settled right in. I was up late with the books and my own catalogs of catalogs of writing and then standing in the bathroom with the one low light on dim and the lace curtain started blowing then I heard the cackle of leaf-wind, and thunder, and rain.

Now it is gorgeous out the yellow morning sun on my back and it is Friday and the last place I want to go is to work which is where I soon have to be.

It was lovely to see Mike who organizes these meetings and how he gently directed the flow of information--the steering or trying to back to the topic of writing and writers rather than just an information exchange between charged and similar minds. He left though and then it was just us the women and we were off and soon it was my favorite topic of race on the shore and I posited mildly tho it's not mild when I talk about it and this is because as my cousin Collin says I care so inherent about it that I dont have to think, it just comes out and if you know me you know then it comes out all gold and fire--that racism is blurred with classism on the shore and that until the subject of race is addressed in this place that desegregated in 1969 the topic of class will always be underscored and so the divides will grow and community value, whole inclusive community value, to allude us and then next we were talking Ruby Payne and the light was on in me and I was pumped and ordered again from within and there it was...

And which is the Work that counts the most?

O, exhausting exhausting world of education and ethics and reform. O stumble stumble path as we turn again and again towards some kind of dirty version of walking heaven. O trying day in out this worrisome worrisome being the change? And this is Poetry? Inherant of living?

The Real Work.

I got home and the emails between these folks were already going and Mike wrote about Hem's Moveable Feast and the circulation of ideas and essentially the tribe that existed between them. And then, of course, I was off and it was all about diPrima and sacrificing everything to the clean line. Which brings me dear reader to the third time in a week that Rant, and the ethics, indisposable to which she and her peers held themselves and those hardline scrappy virtues indelible in this poem. Two weeks ago I read it aloud all firey jazz and crazy at 2am to Brooks we went to sleep with stars in our eyes and here it comes back again, a good morning surprise.

Sacrifice everything to the clean line. This was my twenties. Now I, in my little perch on the corner of life and Poetry and fabulous and outrageous and refusing to back down in my thirties, yet again challenge myself to Learn to Negotiate with the Vegetable body of the Poetic Mind.

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Happy Friday.

A February State of Mind

Friends friends friends

Some thoughts on where we be right now.

First, a definition: by WE, I refer to the collective We. And by collective, I refer to those folks impacted by current western seasonal/societal associations--yes, those of us hearkened by a deeper winter sense.

I am noticing a trend as of late, let's call it a case of the February's. Everybody I know is rushing around, myself included! allstrungout and agro, with far too much to do and fumbling and bumbling all over the place trying to get it all done. The word frenetic comes to mind. And indeed the stuff-to-do seems to be in the genuine form of responsibilities, within those areas of our personal lives that call for attention no matter what.

I've been witnessing the people, the WE, friends of mine, peers, family, work folk and other varieties of associations, all increasingly more tired and harried, simply put: exhausted, stressed out. And believe me, I speak for myself here.

I will share thus:

In my mind, my heart, my spirit, the wild nebuli longings of myself, deep and nameless as they are in those creative unbound mists and surges of the me to come I can feel my new aspects awakening. They haunt me, delicious, in the night--peaked spikes of quiet gleaming there at me with their long lean teeth. But when I go to create I am flat, dull, exhausted by the call of the common things of this world. So I am finding day by day a growing but subtle creative tension, this dark yearning in me to rebirth pitted against the world and its mundane measures that daily I must fulfill: work, family, friends, duty duty duty. And so it is on our final leg in the dark: when we meet upon the Devil, when it comes right down to that point by which we have to call him by name. This is the tenderest of tender times friends, and those duties that drag us and drain from us right now are indeed meant to weather us, yes; but only so that we might own the strength we've grown through out this long winter in the dark. The duties demanding your attention, those which drag you down, this is the final fight--the outter-world You meant to take You, the inner-wild creative and authentic You, down in the dark. Don't let this dis-owning, this shallow sucker punch, be the end. It's kinda like being on the crest of a great crashing wave: ride it, enjoy the ridebut may you not fight it, so that when you end up clobbered with a face-full of sand you still have the sensibility to dig the stillness there found in the rest and retreat. Remember why you were riding in the first place, dont let that crash suck or stun the light right out of ya....

And so too is there a greater fight going on right now, make no doubt about it. Each one of us individuals, should we so choose, might step up to the battle with love in our hearts and seek to be the change. With each passing year the world and all its temporal callings steady tries to take from us those wild-longings, that bit of magic and mist left in the morning still in your hair. Each year "time" speeds up and the pace we are "expected" to keep greatens.

You see it, whirling in madness all around you. Heck, if you are anything like me you barely see it because you're spinning so fast yourself you can barely slow down! It's ok, spin spin spin. But may it not take you, closed-eyes, unconscious, down the spout.

The most courageous act you can do right now is to keep your inner still amid this affront. And it's an action you can take, you have to take, in private, see: give time to your inner-process, these last few important gasps of breath to labor forth your new self are the difference between the life of imagination and dreams versus settling for the frenetic standards of Mr. or Ms. Stressy McStrungTheHellOut that life all around you seems to demand. No, you are not crazy. Yes, the answers are still in the quiet within. But the challenge--to stake your claim, your right, to go in there right now after them--is the most important thing there is.

Look ya'll, we got midwifing right now to do.

DONT
GIVE
UP---