The tracking of self

It is quiet as a cat steps, the gentle return to the self.  Delicate as this as well.

When I was growing up and we moved from the old neighborhood of Baltimore suburb sprawl to the country woods and backroads further south, my closest friend lived across the street from me in a house that was built at the turn of the 19th century.  It had kitchen stairs, which if you're from the east coast you know are the narrow shoulder-squeezing curvy steps meant for the servants or slaves to use.  Honing the return is always like this.  Knowledge of the secret passages crept and kept, how to use the quiet shadowed light to slip unseen through the house.  How to recognize when some part of your self has become subservient to an other.

And so it was I went away.  North on the 1, for many hundred miles.  Slept under canopies of trees so deep the green looked black and the sunshine wasn't so much as a yawn.  Spent hours of extra hours of travel time just to be able to drive the quietude of mountain roads.  As it always goes, I was not the same and more the same than ever before when finally I returned. Drove the Grapevine in panic up- down of body exhaust and got delirious on the man-friend for trying to get too close. It took me a full week to stitch it all together again, what all of that--the departure and return and rupture at the end--might've meant and still could mean.

Now, I move about the hobbit house on quiet cat-step toes.  Set the slow cooker to high after it sat on the counter for three hours ingredient-full but not plugged in.  Mistakes are made: I'm not wholly present, but know as much--can see at least that I'm not which is as close an assessment of the truth as can ever be seen.  I open books, close them, adjust the light.   Take notes. Miss movement in my body but know this is temporary, this physical time-out.  Feel certain of being on the verge of things.  A surety of witnessing: the stealth and knowing look of being so close to, and at once amid, the ever-endless circle of tracking and tracking the tracking of self.

It's just the beginning

It was a long weekend and I ended it hugging Gretchen with wet eyes, in front of a fish and burger shack under a white moon in a place called Summerland.  I drove her to Pacifica so she could see it and feel the silence there for herself.  Gretchen, who has stood by me through every bit of this year after year, back when everyone else thought I was senseless--the days of moving out of Chestertown because I was following my heart but didn't know towards what.  All I could think coming up to this weekend, it all makes sense now...all I could say again and again when we saw one another...I've only just begun.

Brian who's never written poetically once in his whole life texted There are two tragedies in life.  One is to lose your hearts desire.  The other is to gain it.  Some think the latter is worse.  They think once you gain your hearts desire, what you truly want, then life becomes pointless.  There's nothing left to strive for.  You become scared and fearful once you've gained it you will lose it.  Scared to give in and let yourself feel everything amazing that comes along with gaining one's hearts desire...these people are punks! They're wrong!  The tragedy of gaining one's hearts desire isn't the realization that this is all life has to offer.  That life is pointless from here on out....The real tragedy for some is once you've gained your hearts desire you don't stop and realize that it's just the beginning and NOT the end.  The beginning of something amazing we human beings get to feel.  A feeling that's intense and truthful.  A feeling that's painful and exciting.  A feeling that allows you to love someone or something more than yourself.  To be scared to give in to those feelings is where the tragedy lies.  I called him and we talked for an hour.  He is in love and she is afraid to lose her independence.  I called and talked to Paul almost as long, back to back phone calls about the exact same thing.  Dear Paul who is returning north to the hot springs to live in the forest again before Kalani.   I thought, how lucky am I to know these men.  Oh 2012. Time of new roles that never have been.  These two men loving like they never have before.  New roles everywhere.  Willing to love and getting hurt and keeping their hearts open the whole while.   How proud I am to know them who can be so brave.  It's not all golden in the Age of Female Wisdom.  All of us women and men we are struggling and learning every day. I am inspired by my brothers and try and learn from them.

I did laundry for the first time in a month.  The TV on the Radio station on Pandora rocks.  So does listening to sorta old school The Lonesome Crowded West.  My students are brave and beautiful.  I sat at my favorite beach Sleepy Hollow.  Had a taco from Loco's while I read the book I bought when Josh was here.  In other news while puttering around my house I pulled the salsa verde out of the fridge and was touched in that sudden, merciless way that brings unexpected tears to my eyes because I was so grateful to have a refrigerator, a closet full of lovely clothes.  Life is incredibly simple like that.  To see so clearly how abundant and blessed we are. There is so much for which to give thanks.  Life is ridiculous and complicated, too.  Intense and painful, breaking down defenses growing new roles. So it goes.  I've only just begun.

The enormity of quiet gratitude

The keys for my studio in Laguna were in my hand like a talisman, some octagonal  proof of all I'd been running towards, all I left behind.  When did it change from that to this, to heading towards from leaving behind...Every throttle and instinct that propelled me dangling on a quarter-sized metal ring.  Two little keys pushed me out of Anngar Farm, out from my six year love affair with the boy with the honey eyes, pushed Josh out the door that sickening Sunday at Choptank, pushed me and Brooks to leave the Talbot County Employment Center because we knew, we insisted, convinced the other even when we didn't believe it ourselves that it had to be the Muse holding tight to those two keys.  Pushed me around Oregon in Gretchen's beater pick-up, pushed then paused, sighed deep in me, nestled me under conifers big as cities, tucked me in the mists of the Cascades, bathed me naked with Beth as I vowed, as we vowed yet again start again.  Held me tight as it cooked me clean the year and a half I moved back to Ocean Pines.  I stopped with Jayden at Rudy's Shake Shop where it looks out over the Pacific just south of Crystal Cove those keys still in my hand like a dreamscape whose designer I'd finally, finally finally! just met. Arrival!  All I could think.   That's when I got the message I was accepted to gradschool. I have done it, I have finally, finally arrived! I just kept thinking you did it Kel, you finally got here.  You have finally made those dreams come true.  It was the oddest feeling, so plain but also still.  It was right about then, that very day, when aunt Mary went in the hospital.

It switched then, my voice in my head.  Would only say this too, this too, this too.  Which is from Dani Shapiro.  I called my mom and sobbed then my dad and uncle Tim and did the same.  Then I talked to Aunt Mary, I wanted to be strong for her, I really did.  I wasn't.  It was bad I couldn't breathe.  My greatest fear about being so far from home, come true.  What happened from then to the end isn't so much private as it is a blur.  By Thursday I had a ticket home by Friday I was on the plane.  I never got to see her though, in our last conversation I was selfish and told her this sucks, exactly what I said was this effing sucks but I used the real word.  She was honest with me and direct about her pain and every little thing going on, which she knew I needed to hear because for so long she just lifted up from love and made me laugh on the phone or wanted to know about my life.  She knew I needed to hear where she was at though, to be able to have peace with her letting go.  At home it was my amazing cousins her kids who are stronger than I will ever be.  Erin my amazing sis.  Ed and Tim.  They are heroes and inspirations and I am honored they are my blood,  a testament, fully, to their mom. The pit bull in me wants to pummel something, some big shadow portion of life, for doing this to them.  I want to take them up like the puppies they are to my heart, I want to shield and shelter and take this all from them.  I am selfish and had to tell myself if they can do this so can you.  We all of us fell in line behind my uncle this amazing gentle man, we followed my dad,  they moved us gracefully through it all, we let the strength of  family lead us on.  What we've always done.  The Irish twins, eleven months between dad and uncle Tim they're calling themselves the Odd Couple since Mary's passed and it's only them in the house now, the Uncle Dad's.  Uncle dad!    All of my cousins and aunts and uncles every single one and every person ever touched by the enormity of love that comes from the combined McMullen heart.  It was homage to Aunt Mary's quiet steadiness, there and painting our edges with softness all those years, we could still feel her glow in the air.  The whole family together, all but Bernd who was unable to come from Germany.  It was the only family event since the 80's where everyone was there.  I am just so, so proud to see so clearly who I am, who I come from.  It's a hard way to come by it, but here, now, keys to Laguna and future in hand: it helps me so honestly and gratefully see where I will aim to go.

My aunt Mary was sick for three years and suffered silently until the very end.  She was an angel, the kind of person whose each day is a  triumph because she added to it the best of who she was.   She made manifest, daily, parts of the infinity of spirit within.  Irreverent but with the loving patience of a natural teacher's heart. So few rise up to that, few even try.  She did it her whole life, but especially at the end.  She raised me and my brother with her peace and easiness all those summers in Ocean Pines and those quiet nights at Shady Hill Lane.  The unconditionality of her and Uncle Tim.  She raised three awe-inspiring kids.  The safety.  They, she inspired in me absolutely some of the finest parts of who I, if I choose to step up to it, can be.  I can not take a step since she passed without seeing the footfalls left I feel now so compelled to trippingly try and fill.  When I got back here, used those keys to let myself in at midnight on Sunday, the boxes and bags packed but half-opened all around, I could do nothing but sit and soak in the shock.  Brooks said she was a Matriarch of the tribe and he told me you are, too, and when he said that it finally felt like someone got it the enormity of responsibility, the enormity of quiet gratitude at hand.  The loss.  I finally let out the twists of pain and shatter all stuck inside.

The days are passing now, will.  Life goes on.  Yesterday driving down Irvine on my way to the beach between my classes, I looked up and realized oh my gosh this feels like home to me.  Like in that merciless, taken for granted way.  This is my home, now.  I haven't said that about a place as an adult, not once, except for in Ocean Pines.  But that's what happens I guess when you walk through the open door.

Her true essence.

After yoga, which was with a different teacher tonight and one of the sweatiest, most energizing workouts I have ever had, my body was craving fresh veggie pasta with every vibrating cell.  I walked to Mother's and bought ingredients and came home and cooked myself a feast.  And decided I'm gonna chill and watch tv.  

So You Think You Can Dance.  It's the first time I've watched prime time in my house in Huntington but today on the phone mom said I needed to.  It makes me miss her.  This was our show.   When we lived together two falls ago she got me hooked.  I forgot how deeply dance moves me.  Good dance pangs my heart, catches my throat, covers me in chills.  Makes my eyes fill.   It makes me ache for Baltimore and home because Artscape, all that magnificent street art and dance, starts this week.

My kids are doing so well!  They are not kids by any means but some days like today when I give them a project and look up from my attendance book to see each of them concentrating I swell with something like parental pride and adoration.  In my eyes, it's true, they can do no wrong.  After school I applied for a second job.  It's a mile from my new house.  I can ride my bike, so I hope I get it.

My new house!  There is a hiking trail that leads up the canyon it starts in my neighborhood!  God I am thrilled.  Muller's coming down this weekend and Jason who I haven't seen since Kevin and I were 16 and 15-years-old.  Samba tomorrow night then Long Beach with Alison and who knows who else for dinner and dancing Friday.  Today is the new moon.  My meditation each morning has gotten more and more strong and the journaling has me really self-connected.  We were chanting in class tonight and my soul was so still, so engaged and filling up the vessel of me so presently that all I could think of was Hannah at Earth Activist Training when we did our New Moon ritual.  This was up in the Cazadero Mountains in January.  She said how connected she felt to the moon in her dark phase, when she isn't obliged to reflect the sun and can simply be her whole, pure self.  Her true essence.  That line came back to me on my breath tonight, it filled me whole with my self, it filled me strong as the two weeks of silence at Vipassana did, whole as Cazadero and the Permaculture kids.  I am feeling so sweetly quenched on the gratitude in my heart, on the walking blessings of my life, so excited to be here and on the verge of so many amazing changes.   So alive.  The checking in daily with me is paying off.

I am grateful, aware.  New moon sets a new cycle in motion, our own personal start anew.  Yes yes and thank you.

6 hundred thousand reasons

On fifth street I am happiest, there is a coffee shop less than a block from PCH and though it's a through-street people, mostly Latin kids with that clipped flavor in their voice and black t-shirted tattoo guys on skateboards or young blonds who are too skinny and dressed in ways I am sure their parents disapprove, or maybe that's 35-year-old me and my inner parent disapproving because I see 17-year-old me hot-assed and tight-titty-shirts in them, either way it's my favorite because it's Thursday night and all of them are milling around the street.  The pier is just a block from here too and that I love especially on a night like tonight when the sky is beach blue.

I notice odd things.  The kid behind the counter with the black plugs in his ears has nice teeth.  Wallace has nice teeth.  The woman in the accessory store today had a voice that reminded me of a wind-up doll.  The group of young dudes next to me must be Jesus guys because the only time a gathering publicly of that many different aged and kind people happens other than AA is for Jesus.  I was tight and shallow-breathing and disconnected, icky feeling when I got home.  Last minute care-package shopping after a movie with my students after school.  I paid bills on the Internet and was feeling sorry for myself.  The ocean is blocks away.

The ocean is blocks away.   I got in the car and came down here to make some calls.  Whenever I can especially if I need to I come not to look at but feel the sea.   I am drinking tea because caffeine will keep me up and a teacher's no good with no sleep.  I am thinking about all there is to know when you realize there is a lot that you do not know.  About people you think you know, about yourself.  I forgot the phone.  It's amazing that keeping fresh, even in paradise, must be a practice, become a discipline.  My friend is dull on his life after ten years of this, I see it in two months and the second I do I come to the sea.  Like anything else the rounds become our rounds so it is up to us to stay fresh, stay fresh.  Stay fresh.  Any given second there are at least 6 hundred thousand reasons to be grateful.  I pick one, I pick two, I move on.  We are finally exchanging again, I forgot my phone, there is lots and lots to say.   Erika my angel when I need one the most.  I come to do what I really came to do, to the coffee shop to write.  To the sea to give thanks.  To the page to reflect on what I think  I do and do not know.

If I came to you tomorrow and said let's run away

Today a week ago I was traveling freeway to freeway, smog traffic sunny heat, going inland to the base of the San Gabriel mountains.  There is a town there sweet as a nineteen fifties black and white scene.  It's surrounded by what looks to me like desert but lush enough for an every Friday night street festival and a flirty furtive smiling crescent moon hung big as the dream of a child in the setting sun sky.   Called Monrovia, where, after a gazillion hour drive from Seattle to Eugene to Socal, my friend Paul was after helping his girlfriend move.

That same morning I left my temporary home at Mike's in Newport Beach to move half my stuff in to my room in this sweet little boho home in Huntington Beach, a town away.  The other half I tucked between the surfboards and washing machine in Mike's garage, to be moved after my 24-hour marathon trek to Monrovia to see Paul and his lady, then Hollywood to visit my old homeboy from highschool Dave, then Hermosa to chill with Casey from my recent Ocean City life.  It was, so to speak, my last hurrah of a seven month grand hurrah called My Independent Gypsy Queen Road Warrior Days.

Weeks earlier, when I was still crashing in Sonoma County in my friend's cottage, I called Erika and unloaded about a month of instinct on her.  This was early February and the gist of my emotional out pour was me expressing that my gut was telling me it was time to leave Northern California.  I was absolutely fear struck, shrunk and constricted, terrified.  I had exactly enough money left to start a new life, create a home of my own somewhere special, but this was such a novel thought next to the open-road lifestyle I'd been living since August.  I did not want to pay attention to what my instinct was telling me, what my dreams and emotions were saying.  It seemed so foreign, so suffocatingly unknown.

At the end of my download Erika said one thing:  Call Mike Wallace.  He's lived here in Orange County since 2002, in fact, in my dream journal where I write my heart's goals, there is a note from  November 2008 when I left Brandon, our six year relationship, Chestertown, our farm.  It says: Beach, Sunny, Warm: walking distance.  Volunteer/teach ESL.   Write!  And then under it, call Mike.  This was 2008, November, me a week or so out of my six-year-shoulda-married-the-guy relationship.

My brother, Mike's best friend, called while I was on the other line talking to Erika and he literally said the same thing:  Well, did you call Mike?  Mike, breezy--Southern California--as he is, was like yea totally, no worries.  So that was that.  The urgency kicked in then, I followed this pressing movement in my blood to get here as fast as I could, and within 36 hours of my arrival had job and house potentials, both of which came through.  I finished my move this past Sunday, started my job Monday, just now got the last of my things:  my writing materials unpacked, set-up happily at my desk that came with my room.

Last Friday I was sitting on the freeway in standstill traffic on my way to see Paul.  I was tired, eager, a little shook.  The windows of my car were all the way down, my hair wild with wind, the sun hard and happy on my face and shoulders.  Seven months of on the road, and this was it: I was so ready for them to end.   The feeling of my life!  About, once more, to begin.  Anxious tired and excited, at that moment flooding my car came Scotty Avett from the i-pod scrounging out the opening notes of November Blue.  A live version from years ago, a song I haven't randomly heard in years.  Now The Avett Brothers, long before they played with Dylan and Mumford and Son on the Grammy's, used to play this little backroom bar in Chestertown we all loved called Andy's.  Those boys used to crash out on Bran's old floor on the corner of Kent and High after their shows...

Part of my January-February-passing, the emotions of it, the underlying wateriness really going on when I called Erika, was what it might mean to me to settle in to a home again, like I once had with Brandon and all our family-friends in Ctown.  To be happy.  And the thing is, the night before I moved out of Mike's to go see Paul, I got a call from Sam, who used to live in that old place with Brandon and Russ on the corner of Kent and High, circa 2001...Sam wanted me to know in case I didn't that Brandon is getting married.  I didn't.  So hearing that song, a song Brandon and I danced barefoot and happy to in the sidestage grass at Floydfest the year before I left, a song that to this day is my song full of regrets about my failures at love and not being able to stay, well it was Timing.  It was like Life saying Listen, no matter what, if you just Listen to your self than I promise you I got this.  Just listen, and trust, like you always have.

It feels so good to be home now.  Forgiveness, you know?  Forgiveness of your self, and what seems bigger than your control.  Letting the past, which really means regrets, go.  There was a moment that that happened, at Mike's before I moved out.  The kind of moment you cant manifest, you just have to let happen.  The kind of moment that surprises you because you've been waiting so long on it that you gave up the idea that it would ever really come.

So peaceful and fresh, so good it feels to stop moving.  And, to move on.  To begin, finally, again.

This time moving all the way through

It's so easy, the easiest way indeed, to be "depressed."  What I mean to say, to live inside that autopilot function.  I woke up this morning at Bebe's after a day of rain.  Rain like soggy riversides, rain on everything, trees made of rain, air-rain breath-rain rain in your speech.  Rainy Ravens rain day, we watched football and ate potpie at the local bar called Blue Heron.  I processed all morning first, rain cry, for the poet all things round the labyrinth again.  Chestertown a weepy sigh.  Bebe's house is made of magic, since I'd come then gone again she re-arranged so everything glows light now.  In the Cazadero Mountains I did magic for two weeks and you can not do magic with fifty people for two straight weeks and then not see the energy of all things when you get back.  So high so high.

I met two fairies they live in Cazadero tucked behind the woods.  They have friends with a cabin where I may indeed go.  Eager for warm potlucks under the deep redwoods.  The writing is ready, the hearthands of my skin digit processors are ticking.  I think about Jon at Vipassana so far south, I want to tell him his Giants made the Bowl.  I think of Gracy and my brother and sister-in-law both away at new job trainings missing the first mobile motions of their little girl.  I miss her it feels terrible but I am alright, alive, where I am meant to be.  Sad words reflexive, they are how I smile...

Meaning it could be easy to be but I'm not depressed. I'm brave enough to express all the way through!  Bebe helped me.  I learned so much at training, 9 hours of class a day and at times up to two of ritual, at least.  We'd learn then process by going out to play.  There was a time in my life when I had a home and a community and a partner, peopled through by what we'd built on our love.  Permaculture, holy permaculture took me back there again so for two weeks my heart is what my eyes were on.  Poor little closed door. I watched it surface then hide.  Surface tweaking then blocking reeling hide again.  How could I have let so fully go of who I used to be, where did the man go who helped so strongly grow these roots of me? I watched.  I kept learning and playing.  Trancing ritual praying. I am good at loving everyone, I am good at loving myself.  But my past, that bridge back there, back to me, I am good too at keeping that blocked.  Tight and closed.

O Bebe, who helped me.  Today I woke in her big sweetness, bed lush warm cabin hugging me and all the dripping trees and air outside.  I knew it was time, here I am circling again, this time moving all the way through by willing to go back.  I can open to let go, that's how to fuel the moving on.  I chopped kindling in the rain, added wood to the fire, heard it crack and cackle and came happy with the words and the morning back in to my whole life again.  This fire different here, not like the woodstove I learned when he taught me once years ago.  And Gillian sings, and Brandi sings, and these are words I eat whole to taste my own words yet unspoken but starting the first movements of dance in my mouth.  Sacred tongue.  Brandi, back again, and gillian O poet gillian poet women who I love...and I would really love to hear your voice sometime to close a little distance in my mind...


I'll go back to Cali where I  can sleep out every night...

O time.  Blessed time, the revelator.

I woke up thinking about sex and men

Day off here at camp and I woke up thinking about sex and men.

The most read post on this blog is about relationships, being single, being passionately alive.  It's gotten almost a hundred more hits than my next most popular.  Interesting.  Though I am deeply private about that area of my affairs it does not mean it doesn't compel me.  I think about it all the time! Which explains all the reads, I suppose human hearts and quiet passions are the one sure thing we all have in common.

My cycle just passed, meaning it's ovulation time.  At Eric's house yesterday I couldn't help but notice all the colts, all the twenty-year-olds unshaven, shirtless, shoeless.  Twinkling eyes.  The new guy/girl flirtations, the girl/girl couple meeting under a tree, the two tight fresh bodies of young people walking off for the first time holding hands.  There was so much frolicking in the air.  Last night during the mycellium slideshow it occurred to me that not once since being here have I wanted to join, to throw my flirty breath into the swell...

Further proving there is a transition I believe I am making.  A passing.  The worst consistent pain I've known flogged me for months and months--this was the time of muscle-ripping when I left my long-term boyfriend in 2008.   Grief is like that when it hits.  Dizzying, foundation shaking.  Nameless.  It was an ache that can still visit me, and the variety of griefs that got transposed on to that time in my life were griefs that had haunted me, unfelt, for years.  The deaths of friends, the loss of best friends, the agony of family traumas in my childhood home.  The shame I had yet to let go of of the years of my life in active addiction.  I made my passing though, lived in solitude for a year out on a river, dug out my injuries then worked to re-root myself deeply in to the strong soil of my family and friends.  When it was over I quit my career, and moved to my family home at the beach.  It was a maturity process that I took on consciously and worked at whole and slow.

After leaving my ex, I had two relationships.  Both within that first year.  After the second ended, because I wasn't ready, I threw myself in to the Game.  My obsession became having fun, and for the next two and a half years I met more young twenty-something hottie guys than I ever tried.  Twenty-something guys don't date, they "hang-out" or "talk" so I got good at that lingo, at having no expectations, at keeping it light, fresh, fun and funny.  Always remembering I was in the Game.  The host of female strength around me, of literal single gals out and also ready to have fun, grew and grew.  The most beautiful moments of all were in the center of my grls, realizing my belief in my self was doing the same.

There is still a great stigma around women my age who are unmarried with no beckoning promise of settling down. Married women are suspicious of us, married friends question us, relatives look on with concern in their eyes.  What I want the world to know:  we have our reasons, they are unique, personal, and real.  My new friend Irena, from Belgium, said yesterday that she doesn't know if she can have a relationship and live the adventurous life that makes her most happy.  She's tried both; like me the committed life left her unfulfilled. It is her fear, that she'll never find the balance.

Here is my passing:  I dont want 20 year-olds anymore. I'm done with that nonsense of "hanging out."  I am strong, full of life with tons to give.  The Game never once afforded me anything meaningful, the one most recent actual my-age man who I thought offered potential ended badly because that's how we met: in the Game.  Today I am certain there is a man out there who wants openness and connection and happiness and also adventure just like me.  Certain.  Until  he shows up though, I wont waste my time and energy on less than that.  I'll choose the carload of gypsy single grls, I'll choose following my own light and life and dreams, continuing all this education and fun.  I'll be brave, and open.  The thing about passings are we dont know what's coming next.  We just keep the faith that we aren't the same as what once was.

Date Weekend with Me, Ashland

Hey goodlookin, how bout a date weekend with me?
Sounds awesome!

downtown, Ashland

I have this ring that Katie surprised me with for my birthday. It is fabulous, strong, gorgeous. I. Love. It. It came from this store we were literally gaga over called Laila Rose, I got woozy and she had to lead me by my elbow out in to the mall. It was nothing but glorious sparkly girrrlie wear all over the place. They played vintage Madonna. They had bright pink knee-high rain boots and matching head-wraps. And the store was sparkle color-coded. Pinks, purples, yellows, light blue. Sections of ribbons and long dangling crystal earrings all the prevailing shade of that part of the store. Hand-painted bags, elbow-length ruffled gloves.The theme of turning 33 this year was The Jesus Year, or better in my friend Paul's words: the year of magical thinking. Truly, I believe I've lived ten lives already, and it's only been 2 months.

Ashland has been unreal. I followed a yearning to pay in advance for three nights here, thinking how great it would be to wake up and not have to go anywhere if I didn't feel like it. What I only sort of anticipated was how great it would be to just wake up, roll over, and decide for the rest of the day to stay in bed...until my evening date at the Shakespeare Festival. At about 3 or so that first day, laying here, writing, reading, watching tv, eating take-out, somewhere in between all of that it occurred to me: I put my resignation in the week before my birthday and then began the planning stages of ending that part of my life. Now I knew all of that as I walked through it, understood even as I was going through the motions that not only was I resigning from Chesapeake College, but too I was closing a chapter that for all basic summation began in 1998 when I moved to Chestertown, on the eastern shore, to go to school. 12 years, in other words, of living on the midshore was coming to an end. Age 21 to 33. 12 years of growing up.

I spent literally two months tying up those loose ends. Finishing what was obligatory at the job and packing. And in all, recognizing in slow pieces, as I recollected and reviewed it all, the woman I have become. I got sober in Chestertown, embraced my intelligence, accepted acadamia even as I stalwartly fought institution, I got a degree, then a profession. I fell in love. I started to grow up, and I started to grow away from myself. I fell out of love. I had to challenge myself to be a big girl and pull up my big girl pants. I moved out on my own. I got my heart broke. I became an adult. I learned that being an adult means being yourself, and learned that really learning to be true to you is a one day at a time loving and nurturing type of thing. A literal deeper and deeper experience of surrender to me, of saying yes to me by accepting how I am feeling and what I need each and every day. It was a hell of a lot to review in two months, and until Saturday, I literally did not have a single day off within that process.

So that yesterday, when I did finally just sit, propped against the pillows writing, reading, sighing, listening, breathing, easing in to me; it was just so simple, and so, so buoyantly sweet. The evening got here and I took my time showering and getting dressed, I listened to funk hop on my Shuga station on Pandora and danced slowly and smilingly all around this little suite, and decorated myself, and celebrated me. I am in Oregon, where I lived for a year with Brandon after we lived out of a truck in the National Forests all over the US for five months. I am here, on the road, on my own. I got seated in the front row of the outdoor theatre for Henry IV within two minutes of curtain. Let me say that again. The theatre, from the outside, looks like a normal theatre, but it has no roof: the ceiling is the sky. Can you even imagine the smile on my face when I discovered this? It was like 70 degrees out 8:30 pm and I could feel the breath coming off the top of the green mountains all around us. The riverwater has lithium in it here. I could here it sing. The sigh in my chest, as I settled in, I believe may have been the most contended moment of my life. I did it!!!!!!

Today I woke up late, called Beth, received a call from Amy. The three of us have been trying to talk since Wednesday. We talked about different things, we talked about the same things. Becoming women. Being ourselves, striving for authenticity, for integrity in this. We talked about sisterhood. They are both married, they are both mom's. I admitted to them each my fear, the one I am allowing to pass away now, that I couldn't be both. That somehow it wasn't possible to be true to myself, to be an independent woman and be in love. I understand now that all I ever really wanted was the faith, and the experience to back it up, of being me. It wasn't about being independant so much as just being given the time, and the room, to grow in to and get to know the true me inside. Sober me, out of school me, me with out man and seperate from job and identity shared with friends. And while I needed to own my Independence to do that, it's not something that I could ever have done alone. Being me is something I have the courage for, and have explored in powerful, feminine ways that I never gave myself permission for before. And as result I will feel the familiarity of knowing how to maintain, in any circumstance, from now on, even if I lose my grasp here and there. But I am redefining now just what "independant" means, maybe getting used to new ideas of it... I was hesitant to say all this until now, I guess because of that one fear of not being able to maintain this way of being and also being able to eventually fall in love again: of having the capacity for both. Being afraid was blocking my acknowledgment of the reality of how simple and peaceful a place I am in today, made it seem to good to be true. But really, there's nothing to have to do or be or try to figure out... I dont even know when or where or how exactly it happened... I am on the verge of my whole life, of anything I want to do when I get back home and recognizing that gave me clear, and almost staggering perspective, on where I just came from...I lived on my own in retreat out in nature for a full year, I lived on my own in a sweet apartment just my size where I could walk to work or to town any time of the day or night. I helped a small handfull of people undertake and innovate a large fantastic program for the community college. I became a strong woman on my own, and the relationships with the other strong women in my life is the number one thing I have likewise grown. I am so, so proud.

I've long said that Sex and the City, the series and subsequent movies, gave permission to women beyond 30 to be more than what convention painted for them. More than just soccer moms or career women or harried modernists stretched between both. That Sex and the City gave value back to the grrrly parts we love the most, and did so specifically by emphasizing our sex. Our sex, as gender~us as women among women and planting that in Western consciousness as a real and valued and tender and important experience~and us as sexual beings, too. Sensuous beings. Not body sex, that colt-like perky curvy thing of giggles and high shrill of the late teens and early twenties, but intuitive, full-bodied, embodied sexuality, alive from within. Sex and the City gave women in common society permission for both. Today I saw a 2 o'clock matinee performance of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and wept. I mean wept. For people, for women and for men, for how twisted we are, how imperfect. Then I went out in the sun and glistened, and remembered, I have this moment, and I am, if I so choose, alive in it. I delighted in my power ring from Katie, one of my fabulous sister and best friends. I meandered around Ahsland, bought myself a gorgeous power necklace and laughed aloud when the woman read to me what kyanite the stone in it was, I smiled a lot at the sun and green mountains, treated myself to a ridiculously delicious dinner at an Italian restaurant reading a new book, then had an evening date with me, my gorgeous aliveness, and Carrie Bradshaw and the girls.

I am here, on my own, just with me~glorious me!!~and loving each and every moment of it!!! It isn't too good to be true at all, it's better than that!

What does a girl do when she gets to the top of Crater Lake? Well that's easy, she goes back down again. What does a girl do when she embraces herself, and then finds herself fabulously in love with the her that she embraced? Well that's easy, she just keeps showing up....No matter where she is, where she goes, no matter what happens. There she still is, in love. And with a cast of fabulous women all around, reflecting that new found love back at her again again and again from every glowing, precious direction. Wow, how cool is this? Who am I to doubt that whatever coming next could be anything less than totally, and wholly, blessed.

List. Cant you see the breeze is just a change in pace?

Song playlist of serendipity for a Saturday morning with nothing to do but stretch and feel the beauty of muscles and soft sheets and blue sky out the window and anticipate coffee, ahhh delight delight three tunes on RNR sooo dance-able and yes of course some days you should just fall out of bed, celebrating....

1. Southside of Heaven, Ryan Bingham
2. Strange Overtones, David Byrne and Brian Eno
3. Cripple Creek, The Band

Instructions for reclaiming wild sensibilities if its been more than 24 hours since you've breathed the sun

1. Barefeet
2. Get near something green that has roots and eats sunshine and air
3. Find your back breath: Recognize your feet. Be solid, but open. Recognize your belly breath. Next! Center. Breathe into/from back of neck, into back of shoulders and then to back of back on down. This is where wild-sense lives, dormant. You are part wild animal. You have rhythms that remind you and ache for you to run in the breeze. Breath these parts awake again. Re-connect.
4. Listen. Feel. Open. Breathe.

Poetry

1. Is a way of living which includes or perhaps is reliant on following what turns you on
2. Spanish turns me on
3. Words and stories turn me on
4. People turn me on
5. La mama: Nature and Life turns me on
6. Library has lots of poem books
7. Study introductions, especially if written by other poets
8. Lay in the sun on second hand sheet eating food you made yourself and drinking cream soda
9. Read poem a word at a time. Read spanish translations a breath at a time. Harmonize
10. Harmonize. Harmonize

Pay attention. If not now, when? Why not?

1. Beautiful friend in middle of great heartbreak/heartmending life change over delicious dinner under trees and starlight says forget about living each day as if it were my last. I AM LIVING EACH DAY LIKE MY FIRST
2. These could be just words. They are. They are also more.
3. Are they?
4. If not, why not?

Fear and sadness resign oneself to unconscious greed and acts of selfishness. Jealousy clouds vision. Inverse relationship of not owning self projects outter whirls of powerlessness on to everyone else. Matter is atomic. Everyone changes.

1. Be honest with myself fear and sadness are natural and normal as is jealousy a common defense
2. Be honest with my friends and the people on my path entrusted to help you care for your heart
3. Be still. All things pass, and later come again
4. Life goes on and that's just it: LIFE. It is the most affirming guide there is.

Carl Jung wrote that 35 is middle-aged. Is when one steps in to the afternoon of one's life....

1. I turned 33 one month ago
2. I for the first time in my life can actually say that I know myself, know with confidence at least some certain parts of who I am, and feel confident going forward trusting in the room and grace and space within that I've taken the long years to own and love in to light
3. I see this not as the afternoon. I am barely just now first breathing!! I am just now taking first steps, this is the First Day!

In meditation gentleness ease and non-judgment are encouraged. As is comfort of posture. Prepare for yourself a soft sweet inner place of silence and refuge where I and only I can always go. Be the warrior traveller of your own domain.

1. I meditate under a soft blanky, laid out straight chillin like I'm watching tv
2. Often it helps to remind myself to ritualize. So I start with time to center, let what I'm doing sink in. I put a tender smile on my face
3. Time is mutable
4. When found to be scattering up the walls of the monkey mind, begin again
5. There go the thoughts and there I go with them, ahhhh well, begin again
6. Begin again
7. It's ok. Be gentle. Begin again
8. Witness all thoughts and feelings without becoming them, without judging them
9. Ooooops, became them again. Begin again...
10. Metta is the practice of loving kindness
11. End all ritual with practice of loving kindness. Start with self. Then intend outwards towards all of Life

Great Change and Pendulum Swing/ Spiral Upward Of Is/Not Is Spiral Downward of Timeless Great DNA Helix Combo of All Things, upon us now, ever upon us, have grace IS mercy...

1. My last day of work is May 14
2. I will spend the week after that packing up 127 Goldsborough
3. Ladies, I may have lots of clothes to give away
4. Peoples, there may be lots of books up for grabs!
5. Great mama plunge to come then
6. Move stuff in to Maggie's storage place at beach and otherwise in to Ocean Pines
7. May 26 fly to Pac NW for one month
8. Beth, Gretchen. Oregon, aaaahh. Hippie retreat yea. Hotsprings. Tall trees. Ocean. Coast. Trains. Seattle. Larry. Cousin Kate.
9. Waiting tables at Yacht Club in OP
10. Indefinite trust of what is yet to be..................

Zines, bloggers & INVESTMENTS in love that I WANT YOU TO MAKE

Two of the grl bloggers I read both wrote this week about love.

Specifically, about how they dont blog about their love lives bc that part is private and they want to show respect for their lovers.

I was sitting in bed yesterday morning with coffee and quiet, writing poetry and listening and capturing this song that runs and runs so deep. I wrote, and wrote more and more and in slow-mo saw a circle I've been edging and rounding and sort of I guess repressing come through. And soon as I saw it, felt it snap closed.

Laura Veirs played Life is Good Blues and without wanting them to the tears started to come, then came hard. Cuz that's what happens sometimes to me when a soul-circle for me closes. It is relief, and also maybe sadness, and bittersweet thankfulness, over the awarenss that it brings.

And in bed there I had a witnessing, yet again: the ailment of my own human imperfection. How deep and personal this equalizing, impersonal pain can run. It hurt hard and I thought about not only things you aren't aloud to say, but the things you dont get the chance to, or dont know how.

It is true, there are things that will never be witnessed here. It's amazing isn't it? I have a blog that imports to facebook, that gets a decent number of regular visitors and even more random hits, and seemingly it's all right out there...But wow. This last year and my struggles with love...

I have a green hill of burial in my soul and only sometimes, when I am not expecting it, I kneel down there but there are no words; and too, a book with a poem that is endless and a vision I often now am too afraid to own. Like a child I submit to this, to this place of burial and to this holy poetic epoch of ruin, my arms upraised in soft acquiencence to the sun. I lay myself down. It is this wordless hill & this endless poem inside me that each teach of such imperfection, that submit me finally to the real and human me once again.

Maybe one day I will paint a picture of it, that green hill. Maybe one day I will make a Zine about it, that endless poem.

But in the meantime, I want you to go here and buy Carrot Quinn's new zine hunger, love. She is such a rich writer I love to indulge in her ramblings, how her tender quaking outlooks on this hard-edged imperfect world make it all a little better and often make me sigh and remember, oh yes oh yes it all is so okay.

At the Hard Bean

Is this Jack White I ask her and she says yes, and listens intently with a look on her face like to listen causes her a little strain. Then she says yes it is his second album, I am like his biggest fan. Is it mostly more lyric driven like this or does he rock out as much too I ask her and she says really it's a nice mix of both you should get it it's way better than Elephant. Better than self-titled I say and take my cookie from her which she just pulled out of the microwave and my mouth waters a little even though I am watching much as I can my sugar regimen since the holidays are over and there were many many days where I only ate chocolate chip cookies and drank coffee. Yes she says. Better than self-titled.

Then Modest Mouse comes on and I am happy I am here. They are St. Johnny's, both these kids: her with the red red lipstick and pale skin and sparkling ball in her labret. Him with his funny half-afro and terrible enourmous faux silver cross hanging on the chain link thick as the chain wallets we used to wear. As if to respond to my affection for Modest Mouse him with thescratchy broom switch switch switch on the old wood floors turns up the music in his earphones almost so I can hear it better than the stuff on the speakers.

After I sit down and the cold wears off I take off my jacket and think about the phone call I just had. About hearts and being nervous and how it is sometimes, when you're like me with great great doses of faith that are just inborn and live inside you there without any help just a gift. That to lose your asset; to lose your honesty if that's your gift or song if that's your gift well to lose your faith when that's who you naturally are how it makes it so you truly are the most hopeless person that you know. Inverse relationship of who we are and how we do. To be capable of great oppositte doses of exactly who we say we are and vice versa. How everything is true. Including the lie. Mercury is retro it's now that we have windows in especially to those funny little twists of self like that. What we think we take for granted about ourselves. O harkened shot of ego...Life is funny that's what it is, I know I know.

Erika will be here soon.

When I look up again the nerdy black guy with the half-grown afro is standing still as sand in the middle of the room reading his text. What could it say? I can practically hear him breathing. God all us humans. All us humans with all these hearts.

How do we possibly do it???

list: LOVE

1. LIFE. I dont know if you're ever like this, but I often find myself, when in the center of some hella fun experience or touchingly beautiful situation or just like in tune with the moment and suddenly aware of my in-tune-ed-ness, skipping ahead and thinking to myself wow, I sure wish soandso or whoevermclala were here with me, right now. Which really is a super waste of the moment. So I happen to be dating life. Which is quite exhilarating and I dont mind at all if you wish to copy and borrow this idea, in fact I quite encourage it! It's delightful to walk outside in to the sunshine and the green bushy grass and the trees all breathy and gentle heaves of hello when you walk by and the gold clouds and yes, saying, Hello Love to all of it and indeed, being there, right there, in love with the moment which is being in love in that moment with Life. So, I am in love! Dating life. I am smiley over it.
2. SISTERS. Like my new sister-in-law to be! That's right, my little bro, about whom I've actually said I would marry if we weren't related, jetskied his grl out to a sandbar in the Bay just a beat from mama Atlantic over the weekend and wrote I love you in the sand while she wasn't looking and was down on one knee when she turned back around! Awwwwww! Hooray!!!!!
3. WOMYN & MAGIC. Wild magic moony crone womyn, like my mom's firey crew of hot bloods that welcomed me to lead a women's circle in honor of the Solstice. Love of tribe of earth and women, raised up power from within.
4. FRIENDS & FAMILY. Family reunion weekend with all the cuz's and KJ and Walsh and Cades as honorary Mc's, too, and steamed crab messy-handed eatin and dusk swimming and rollercoaster riding and backporch laughing and horseshoe tossing and and and...! There was so much shmoopycuzinbuddylovin that all I could do was beam.
5. PASSION. Like bookwriten, how it may as well be sex for all the fire that comes when you're in bliss and alight cuz whatever it is you're heart's fully engaged in has totally got you turned on. Yes! And sharing big ideas with big hearted friends...
6. ME. Being good to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, keeping a toe pointed forward but my feet planted in today. In love. Yay.
   

Poems Poems Poetry

When the winter wheat comes I will think of you

It is now that we cast long looks
at the setting sun,
remember;
we are privileged. We take stock,
assessment of the jobs we have done.
The winter wheat will grow soon
where the corn stood in rows.
The green meat of the tips of those
tender stalks will in vibrating shadows
lift voices to the heavens—
So swift, so soon will be the color
laying there
all force will draw out from us, from this
our unifying center
where, ah
with catched breath
we will realize we are waiting
and have been,
since the fall.



that is a poem for the day by me



i think part of the reason i am writing so much lately, besides this sleepfull time of year always being sooo creative for me, is that i am reading a ton a ton a poetry. that and with all the changes i personally have undergone in the last three months, now with the retrograde my head is freakin goingoingoin. so it's easy to catch some automatic voices up there and channel um on to the page...



here's who i'm really in to today:





obviously you can't click to look inside. but you can click here to check her out. it was one of those total on instincts grab and buy. entirely by the feeling, the swell in the heart area when i lifted her off the shelf.

ok that is all.

Brandon

In the fall of 2002 this was what my life looked like. I was 25 and about to be two years sober. It was mid-October. I was four months a college grad, my mom was in the process of selling the house I grew up in from 12 on and my dad had just quit his corporate-American lifestyle, sold his condo in Ruston "Sillicon Valley of the East" Virginia and moved back to the beach, prompted all at once by the slow, then final loss of one of two of his best friends to cancer. Dad stood by, and took care of his friend Richard who he'd known from Brooklyn, Bmore, since they were in their twenties, every day those last months until August when they said goodbye. Richard died right about the time that it became clear that Chuck, Dad and Rich's other best friend from that same early-twenties hellion-time, was also going to die. Cancer took to him with a vengeance, too. A week after Richard died my dad completely left his own life. He went to the beach so he could, for a while, hide. And heal.

It was the most courageous thing I'd ever seen him do.

I mention this because I was there, at the beach, for part of that time. I was confused, caught in that horrible juxtaposition of blindness: complete inexperience at adulthood coupled with vague awareness of my glorious, terrifying Independence. It was far too real, and raw and wide-open, to really see! It took me 7 years to get through college and during that time I think my total monthly bills were, maybe, $400. Maybe. Suddenly I was a college grad, with a writing fricken degree?? Paying rent to a lovely girl in Chestertown for a room in her sweet Victorian house, and my student loans no longer covered my monthly needs. In fact, in addition to rent I now had to start to pay back my student loans! So I was barista-ing at the local coffee shop, waitering in a tux-button down at the local white linen, and the other three days a week I pulled double-shifts at a high-volume seafood joint on the Northern-most edge of Ocean City. And I watched my dad, during that time, emotionally fall down.

It sucked. For all of us, my mom selling our home, my lost and desolate dad who up til then had physically been absent for most of my "adult" life, and my brother Sean, who also had just graduated and who also was living at the beach waitering at the same seafood joint(which, during a lot of those day-shifts during that slow and sunny September meant keeping his eye on the fishing rod propped off the back deck of the restaurant and in to the Bay), it sucked. I think we were all in that place that us humans hate to be in: the in-between place. Or better, how I like to call it: Through. As in the only way out....

So yeah, I was working weekend days at the coffee shop, weekend nights at the Hotel in my button-down, and then driving to the beach to stay with dad, immobile on the couch, and go pull doubles in town. I had very little sense of what I wanted my future to be like. I knew one thing for sure, had decided it, just as sure as if I decided to drive to the post office or to make my bed, I was going to be a writer. I was on my bed in the lovely girl in Chestertown's Victorian home, the bed had high cold metal posts that were meant to look brass but the paint was thin and instead they were chipped white so they just looked old and even black in some places too, and I had scarves tied around them and blankets over the ornate curled cold metal at the foot and the head. And I was on the bed and I was writing in a journal and it was this very week six years ago because I was writing about my baby Amy who was just about to turn, back then, one-sober-year-old. (Happy 7 years Amy!) And the writing about/to her became very poetic and the candles and the incense that had prompted the boyfriend of the lovely girl in Chestertown in whose home I was living to think I was a witch were burning with the warm orange light and the warm orange smells and I all of a sudden, just like that, understood deep and real: I am going to be a writer. And I understood: this means nothing, nothing at all other than the commitment, unabashed and unafraid, to follow the inner impulse. To follow it, whenever, and to wherever, it meant to take me.

Oh, I was sad. I was sad, for my dad, my mom and her empty-nest, for my life that had no semblance or order to it, for my old life of partying that no more offered solace or an answer. The friends I had lost to all that. I was confused, disoriented, working like a dog, and, like I said, I was pretty damn sad. But mostly, cuz it was the best I could do, I was numb to all that sadness. And so I began to write. To write my way through....

And then not a week later, in he came. This young guy with these big, I mean big brown eyes. With these lashes that reminded me of honey. And this river, this river that he did to my heart.

Brandon worked at the coffee shop with me and I always used to flirt with him. Tell him if only he were old enough, how I'd rock his world. He was 20. A baby to me then! And so, so cute.

The lovely girl with the Victorian house also worked with me, she set us up after getting tired of seeing us swoon. She invited him over, made us dinner, her boyfriend built a fire, rented us a movie, and then together they quietly and with sneaky smiles and smarmy charm left us alone for the rest of the night...After that first night it felt like a linebacker socked in to my heart: I never knew it could open, and take flight, like that before. It's like I never even knew that love existed. And then, after just one moment, I suddenly did.

It is six years since, this week. We are, so to speak, going "through" some things right now. I know how now, I've learned better how to do it, the making your way through thing. But it's hard, it's not easy, it plain sucks. Especially cuz I still so love those precious honey eyes.