A Poet's Date, & Jealousy

I am jealous of him, and I miss him, in both the way a needy girlfriend craves attention and in the way you miss tossing your hair over your shoulder when it gets cut off or miss the outline between the trees of sky when suddenly the winter's gone. The way it is with that old cliche about not knowing how much you love respect appreciate etc something until you lose it--that is how I feel this week about him and I tell him this. Over text message, cuz it's the only way I can. You'll only have the number of real, true friends in your life that you can count on one hand is a line I was raised on, heard again again and again and so I value so strongly the connections I have with folks and understand what a brave and great gift it is to be "friend." If this exact axiom is true or not I dont know tho, it hasn't been my whole life yet or at least I hope not, but it is true that there are to me legit qualifiers for true friends. And so as men go, he qualifies, really currently he is only one of two men who do. My bro is the other one.

He texts about getting lunch and I agree because I know he is on Artist's Retreat and still was willing to reach out to the needy-girlfriend part in me. He's not my boyfriend we are not at all romantic we long ago discussed and then established that, it's just that he's filled such a huge role and taught me to trust again so maybe there's some of my possessiveness. We go to the Market where we always almost every Thursday go and standing in line I ask him to tell me about how it's going and that is when I realize I am jealous. When he talks about the songs he's completed, the songs he's writing, the songs he's going to record. When he starts talking about getting up at 8 and working all day.

What will it look like for me? Working all day? I found this quote from Rilke this morning.

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them. Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life: in understanding as in creating.

This confirmed for me what I am struggling to maintain belief in because nowhere, practically nowhere in the daytoday grind do I see this valued: the inner life, the spirit and surrendering to the rhythms of me again, the tides of my own soul. I am on an Poet's Date with me right now, and I stuck to it today as it was pencilled in. 3 o'clock Poet's Date with You. Which means time uncharted with nothing to do but follow inside of me what I yearn for. I am writing, I just read Neruda and got transfixed on the spanish differences in assumption that can be made versus the english tranlation. y que la edad escribe letras/con agua y piedra para nadie,/para que nadie sepa donde,/para que nadie entienda nada again and again until it rolled like washed pebbles with gemstones inside over and over on my tongue. Until the words confused me, the words confused themselves, the translation was one thing the words something else the sound they made too its own thing the heartfusionmomentofactiontransaction on the tongue a total other. The time to do this--to be brave and foolish and quiet and sighing long enough to raise and then honor the song. No place to go but here, with me, alight alight alive and in the moment with my spirit and its wants and its needs. I think of Oregon, I picture it in my minds eye and sometimes I am on retreat and it is just reading long books in bed, stopping trailside to write down the words, laying on my back on the hot sand the sun marking me and the combination brine and green buoyant sea smell of the Coast. But sometimes it is, it is writing all day. And to me both kinds of work, the action kind and the priming honoring the tides and spirit of me are equally important.

We are so sick with the lac of it.

We are so sick with the need for it.

I saw it, wordless in his eye today and want that, that fire that transpires to speak greater languages than I currently can, that writes itself on my skin with its words that makes it so I dont even need to speak them because it speaks for me so great from in my soul. I saw it in him today and made myself be happy for him We're in this together remember he reminded me last week so I chose to be happy and let my jealousy go.

Afterall I had a date with me today and here I am now and am swept whole in that clean deep sigh inside glisten way from listening listening and submitting to the rhythms and tides so he's right, and back I go....

So it's been one week exactly since I decided I needed to stop all plans and designs and literally, instead, spend one day at a time in deep, caring, blissful nurturing care and tenderness for me, me, me! Funny how unapalogetic I feel about it, too. I can't ever remember spending this long on vacation from daily stress and worry, concentrating instead only on keeping my mind and heart in a state of ease.

I am willing to take it slow.

So far the only thing I've wanted to do is be outside or to be in my bed--but not in a dramatic I'm hiding from the world way, more like in a cozy wow I feel so warm and gooood luxuriating like this under my soft covers and cozy soft blankies way. Also I am greatly pleased by the local top-40's radio station that I listen to in my kitchen. Really, it is the only station that comes in clear here at Chop: and it serves the Midshore. For those of you who dont know, Eastern Shore of Maryland, the quiet or "slow" side of the Chesapeake Bay, is track after track of farmland/boggy mudflatty swampy (ghost-stuck!) sulfury-stinky creek/farmland. Not much to it. Lots of old generation, conservative farmers--strugglin--watermen, drunks and poor people. And the rich upper-middles who bought the weekend homes and bring the money. And misanthrope wannabe's like me. Who comes from upper-middleclass people who came from working-class people but on my own and in my job I get down on it every day with the working-poor. And this weird station makes me feel I'm back in the County outside Ballmore but without the rap. But that's okay cuz in the decade or so since I moved from there rap got popular so now the top-40 stations are full of that hybrid spin-off hip-pop or pop-hop so I still mostly get a bit of what I love. Because I am a secret huge induglent fan of pop-hop and I believe all kids from the County outside B-more or DC (remember that used to be Chocolate City Baby before getrification happened and it used to be ok to call it that cuz it was a pride thing for people) are. Also the sad thing is that all the county kids are the ones who pushed the working-class or poor, which in Bmore and DC were porportionally black people, out of the cities so that makes me sad to be where I am from. And this is a nerve that strikes so, so deep with me right now--because I am working hard on adjusting my mental scope to concentrate on joy and bliss and harmony but historically whenever I do so I get really down and out because how cansomuch injustice occur and people not feel outraged and hurt and powerless over it. But in my cozy bed-nest recently, pondering this thought yet again but doing so as gently as I could be with myself, it occured to me how important it is to be grateful as I can for all the little golden spots of joy. Grateful as I can be. To see it all, all the hurt, pain, to see it All and not shy away (I work in the Unemployment Office and the UNDERFUNDED Family Support Centers people I got more broke-heart stories than I can usually bare and especially right now--you dig??) To see it all and to, as the writer/artist Sark puts it, to see "The grace in as much as you can see." This is choosing to be the change best as I can be, but more important, and for the first time, ever, for me--I recognize how not just life-preserving, but life-affirming this gentle, thankful thinking is for me. So my new favorite station makes me feel joy and light and also makes me smile without knowing it. It makes me like having dishes to do. I just wish that ALL people could get to focus on this kind-of power*full mental shift instead of having to just focus on where the shit their gonna find food...

Anyhow, I can make no excuses for who I am and where I am right now. All I can tell you is that my days look like this: Bless everyone in my office/work/job with love. Clean up after myself, lounge in my bed smiling a lot at how blessed I am to be in a cozy little nest that I love, and going outside to play. Ooo, and cooking myself good food. Tonight it was homemade macncheese and brocolli yummmmmmmmmmmm.

I am willing to believe that as I luxuriate in my own love and blessings they increase. And those I come in to contact with have a greater chance of feeling fired by one of these sparks.

O and PS, go outside tonight and talk to the moon. It helps a lot and it's wonderful. She's full and she likes it when you do this--go head, try. Also people need moonlight much as they need sun. Good for your pineal gland which in the ether or subtle body is the third-eye.

Kay, back to loving me I go.

That's my grandma and me on my little alter