I was gone fifteen days.

Not really sure what happened other than I slept eight hours last night, almost to the exact minute, and felt clean and clear waking up in my bed in the loft in the canyon.  In the California mythos of sunshine-wintertime.

I was gone fifteen days but the truth is it was way, way longer than that.  On Friday Uncle Tim, who is my godfather by the soul way, called in the morning.  It was Ocean Pines gray out which is its own special prison that keeps the winter folk away.  The thing is with sock-in like that marsh gasses keep the soil tender-moist and smelling green.  So we took a four mile tall tree walk on a path he tends for the Rec department and I cried those hot soul-cleanse tears that are meant only for God-ppl and wise women, which of course are the same thing.  Helped me to take serious the karma I have between me and my own god-kids, too.  Later I found out about Derynne's brother and couldn't see straight again.

So Konan came through winding us up at Cork Bar downtown which in a million different scenarios if I had to hand-pick that would be down towards 9 hundred ninety thousand on the list.  But here's the thing, the Wild proclamation:  you just never know you know?  We wound up late night in WOC and that there was the only place in the world I needed to be, kicking it w his real home grls and seeing myself in them in a way I haven't seen me in Way. Too. Long a time.

The next day I stayed in pajamas til 7 pm and watched the Red Tent and ate the soup broth I'd made/been making since the first night at home.  Witchy bitches make witchy brew.  We watched the Ravens rock Pitt like we all knew was coming.  WILD card that's Baltimore, that special Baltimore one-eyed medicine some mistake as bad (false-pride).

And that's what's up, tracking home, the special tendencies that run the soul of who you are cuz of the land peopled through of from-where-you-come.  If you can read and track this, good for you.  If you can't you need help dark-seeing which means between the lines.  Linguistics.  Can't be studied. Someone should tell Pacifica that.

Point is this all happened or started back the night I went to HB to meet Yasi and Konan started blowing me up--that's the thing about WILD, all cards eventually come a calling and that's the thing about one-eyed medicine.  It's your duty to rise up when the reminder comes: you CAN see.

So now Humboldt makes sense, the long 101 journey home again to the earth and the tides that rise.  I come living back to the canyon, no food in my hobbit dwelling just coffee and no phone charger to keep me tied to time and ties and all that hell.  I write these words and The Light comes on which is Erin Mac back there in Baldamore making her next moves saying wutsup.  She comes through as WILD does, like I useta say and always will, Poetry is my only religion.



That is what's up.

I know Who I am.   I need little else than that.

Prayers that all ppl get right. Or Wild.  Either or is the same.  Go listen to some good music if you're dead!

I'm going for a swim.

The tears were gratitude, every one.

In my morning time yesterday I was done with the sitting and done with the journaling so I thought I was done, for good.  Ready to start the day.  Thursday's have been thesis writing days so my head was a tumble of forward motion towards that.  Words on a screen.  Losing time down the rabbit hole of books into thought into books into new next thought.  Like little lights in a row each of which transmits power to turn the next one onnnn.  I love it.  I have never before been so plugged in to my real life on every end.

I got down out of the loft and went for my phone.  I keep it plugged in downstairs where I can't reach it.   Or that's when I don't have clients in the morning or need for the alarm.  That way my precious first glance at me in the morning isn't consumed by that dastardly little electric machine!  Those high-wires they so easily infiltrate my brain.

When I got down the stairs and peeked the time it was only 8:30, I don't write til 10.  Sighhhh, morning time.  I made a fresh cup of coffee and climbed back up to the loft.

Hoagy Carmichael on Pandora brings up muscle-ey memories that catch in my chest and stir my whole body to rise.  Coloring in bed for the next hour is what I did.  It let my body transmit memories.  I was alive, at Church Street, which is the house in South Baltimore, Brooklyn Park, where my grandparents raised 7 kids.  This little two bedroom and an attic space, the living room ahhh god the kitchen, a space so living in my earliest reverie.  I spent a lot of time there.  It's a body memory of orange-brown linoleum and yellow walls and my grandmother's round squooshy bosom where her hug got you lost. And my pop, his records.  Porgy and Bess.



It was amazing to me.  I had this new experience of re-living the love-light of back then, and feeling so happy my eyes brimmed with wet tears at least for half the colored pencil ink pen time.  All I could think the whole time was wow, it's never really gone.  What a secret to comprehend!  That we can revisit love-past at any time.

It wasn't bitter-sweet.  The tears were gratitude, every one.  Meeting the Self is endless in its inward reigns.  It's playful, a living sacrament we each get to make unto our own spirit and soul whenever we choose, each and every day.  There's so much joy.  There's so much play and life.  There's so much and it's so endless and precious and easy to access when we just--do.

In the early morning pain in 1997 when Grammy died I dealt with it in customary McMullen forward motion.  Shuffled the girls with their clumsy arms and awkward puberty hair and squeaky voices and braces mouths in to my car.  There were five of them, my five girl cousin that all came in a year or so of the others.  They were in middle school by then, except for Sarah, the babe.  I was 20.

We drove 97 through the county towards where Jackie lived.  At some point the car radio played Total Eclipse and that is our song, to this day.  Endless.  Reverie.  Church Street.  The bemoans of the aching human heart.  An eighties song so legit during the interlude you actually hear blowing wind.  Uhhhh yea.

This morning, bc this is the way of the heart when we let her open and sing--cousin Erin's text was waiting when I climbed down the ladder from the loft.  A group text to all the girls.  It said, Total eclipse on the radio!  Love you all-- with a million exclamation points to try to express the inexpressible.  We live in Seattle, Buffalo, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Baltimore, California now.  It was to me a nod from life that the heart is still home, endless in its ways which lead us both in and outside.

The oldest just had her first girl, last week.  Of the six of us, half are parents now.  Life goes on.  The heart keeps us golden, connected.  It eclipses, too, hell yea.  And also, overflows of blessings always there, always living and beating, pressing us to look a minute and recognize.  To just, see.

SponDown. On reaching goals, and hulahooping

The sunshine is what woke me, yellow light through the house and it was only 7 am.  I slept all night on the couch, which I almost never do and it felt like a treat because Tuesday is my Saturday morning one of the two days of the week that my alarm doesn't go off at 4:45 so if I want to stay up late playing sonar til I pass out in front of the TV I can.

Now it's gorgeous out, I was thinking I would go running before I drive to Salisbury so Chico can finish my tattoo. I spent almost three hours fucking around on facebook and the endless zoom of the intraweb, which felt good just letting my brain work it all out that schedule schedule discipline of working two jobs in the service industry hello hello how can i help you oh let me get that for you mam oh no thank you SMILE SMILE LAUGH GENTLE (take it easy) yep you bet, have a great day.

Tribe was the first song on my Pandora, I am full with the things that make me full.  I am heartened by the heart that makes me love, I am loving the loves that hearten my loving heart.  I am full with my life, it is not even mid-March, it is sunny out, there is good music there are great fun frieds who are wild and learning to be wilder still and the first part of my book is done.  The first part of my book is DONE!

I can't believe I am going to say this because for some reason Jay-Z is my fave hiphopper to hate on which has nothing to do with him and most definitely goes back to funny teasy rivalry with my brother, soooo: D.O.A. and the guitar in it is siiick.   The serendipity of that is that it is a song against using the auto-tuner, which just lately I learned from my boy Ben is the mechanical device used to correct pitch and loop voice samples and so forth and that makes me sick, and is what I hate about contemporary music.  All the contemporary music shit and tv shit and so forth.  WHERE the hell is original thought original anything?  People are scared of originality (same ol boring ass story: people are SCARED of themselves.  People will always thusly fear what is sacred. ) I am mad in to rock and roll right now.  Last week we went to the Pub in town the one on 8th street which back in the day was sorta seedy but since the renovations is the place to be and the women rocked the shit out of that place and I felt so happy to be a grrrl, to be in to music as a grrrl hearing the grrrls who're also in to music and performance and their own bright shine, to be on top of my life, to have turned in 34 pages the day before to Erika.  That night kicked off four of running of lots of work and just little tiny snips of sleep.  My dad says "I'll sleep when I'm dead!" so maybe its an in the genes kinda thing.

Last night I told Terra I better get out of the way before I step on a small kid with my stilleto, we were at a baby shower for our friend and coworker and I had just set down the dip I made on to the table.  Stilletos and dip that's about what I have to offer a baby shower, that and the wise wild wisdom but it wasn't a gathering quite like that so I was just dressed up, clearly single, kid-less, and pretty in spring pink.  My other single gal friends were similar, on the outskirts, some drunk.  There are a lot of us and I guess the reason I am happy to be pretty and single in spring pink is because I went through this whole baby thing, after the marriage thing in the fall, this is because of course I am going to be an aunt, and each time some new tribal "next" gets tossed in to the ring I have to run the gauntlet of my self to make sure I am on the correct, or at least feeling mostly sure of the course in my life over which I am traveling, at least in this moment, being who I am. Thusly making happy the heart and loves of my life that equate what I "want."

And isn't that it, what we want, and it's funny little recipe made from what we love and who we seem to think we are or try to be.  After seeing Cindy the other week I was brought so clearly back to when I lived in Chestertown and was always, always on the go but not ever engaged in my daily acts, in my moments to moments.  Never having time to stop and chit chat head always running towards the next thing the next the...and most of all always with the underlying pressing feeling pushing me on gogogo by that feeling that there was something else which needed to get done, always this highwired tightness of not being able to relax and feel comfortable.  Never being able to find lasting comfort.  That is so, so gone now and I knew I've felt different for quite a while, peaceful and on solid ground instead of on the run, but it wasn't until my visit with Cin that I saw it for what it was.  That unsettled runningness comes up for peaked moments sure, when and only if I get in a self-hate frenzy of questioning where I am at right now or being too hard on myself.  But there is such adequate, simple relief found even in the challenging middle ground place between meeting and working towards my goals:   I have taken the time to identify what I want by being true to who I am and what I love.  So now I just take the time to engage each day moment to moment by being her.  I have goals and can relax and enjoy life as I be the woman bringing them to fruit.  It's so different, so real and bliss-full to live whole, right where you are.

It's a full life, my hours are busier than they probably ever were in Chestertown, but my energy is fulfilled and that's all the difference.  That is all to say about that now my head is sort of cleaned of original thought and also Dynamite by The Roots is on so I think I want to get up and hulahoop a while now.

Or the one you said you'd hold on to for dear life.

It's early--not early as it could be.

It's early like 7:30 early, I've been up since 4:45 Sam texted at 5:15 to bring my laptop in so she could play me new music.  There is weather coming no doubt, the water told me so.  It wont be much though the birds are still crying and yesterday there were squirrels running through the dead woods.  Tyler is here, Sam, me.  He hasn't slept since last night, fresh home from Bmore as of a half hour ago he rolls hard like I like to, we're talking TV series she's defending Lost, he The Wire and there is music on my laptop which I am taking in like gulps of air.  I had no comprehension of how cut-off I'd be from the Muse when she went down--my laptop that is.  No music that I love, no poetry no links no blogrolling and most of all, no room for Kel fast as I can to spondown and get it all out.  The journals, they're full, but nothing to fill me back up with no music.  It's a process.  Reciprocation.  I HAD No IDEA.  I sat on the bed for three hours just listening to Pandora and my ITunes, feeling the life come back on deep inside me.  The poems finally emerged then, I spondown'd on here then pulled out the leather back journal Erika overnighted (with her most recent adv copy Hem's Girl which I can't put down--word!!!!) that was waiting on my doorstep yesterday afternoon and I wrote a full, whole poem in that.  I am re-setting my ways as result of not having this my core sustenance.  I have learned something yet again the necessity of filling up, and the absolute non-negotiable:  having a place to fill with the words, a place that remains the same.

Sam played me her man's music he is Philly local soon enough I played her Josh just one song an old one it's the first time I'd done that in a very very long time and that was enough.  We work together Sam and me long hours ten hours at a time and so she is on to me as me to her: we hold the other's stories already, having known each other less than a month.  Some of them anyway, a single bone or two but skeletal-enough. So that with sparing details or so many that they come out in mouthfuls a few bursts at a time we know what flesh were giving the other, which bone on which to hang this part. This was a new twist.  This had new gold.  Little light flecks on the skin.  Long shadows from underfoot aura big as the aururaborelias in the western sky.

I'm seeing my friend Laura Walsh tonight I told her, I play her Walsh's music.

And soon enough there is the response, I feel the throes of the words from somewhere inside my chest and had to get on here it was a matter of health.  Sam and Ty humor me, roll silver and we small talk and cut sidemouth cracks on one another especially about me on the clock.  Here it is the skeleton I am yearning for the one o holy loss the lac of which leaves me with out structure or faith, and happy enough to deny that even a boneyard exists.   How Charles Simic said.  Who can not howl will not find his pack.

I am sick.  Being packless sucks.

Tribute. Los Que Saben.

Last night Brooks and I were on the phone talking process and art and inspiration for at least two and a half hours. 

He quit his job the day after I did in March, we both worked in the same office and the idea was we were both moving to the city to follow our dreams.  He is doing amazingly well, is the host beginning tonight of the Balitmore Song Writers open mic in Fells and this is among at least four or five other big deal things.  When we used to work in cubicles across from one another every week we would talk high-energy, deeply riveting "Narnia" talk (Narnia a reference he came off the cuff with last night, talking about relationships with "normal", un-arty people.  We need them, he said, "to help pull the ropes and lead us out of Narnia.") I used to grab him and yank him towards Narnia--literally take him hand and run us out the back door of the employment agency and through the hard parking lot in the cold light of the sun.  I'd make us walk on a patch of grass-slanted hill, the only section in that area of Easton not paved.  Eventually he caught on and would do the same to or for me.  Yank me out the door when my head needed a check and take me out for duende talk, food and sun.  Our enthusiasm, talking Campbell's bliss-talk and serendipity and inspiration--constantly quoting philosophers or poets or musicians musicians musicians--was unstoppable.

I've tried not to think about it at all and the proof of that fact is it didn't even come up in conversation last night, but my laptop is down and it is killing me. The hardest part of not having it is staring me down this morning--all scowling face and fang-toothed today.  And that's going on the road.  Ahead of me is lots of uncharted time, 6 days in fact of road trip, that would normally be cleaved in to long swaths at various coffee shops between Annapolis and Baltimore working on my novel and blogging and so forth.  The thought of being without that sustenance is making my stomach turn.  The other thing about not having my laptop is not being able to write poetry, too, which I am used to doing at least once a week propped up in bed on a lounge of pillows in the most comfortable place in my world, letting the words drop and flow and come and come.

This all happened in Memphis the week before last when I went to visit Sean.  He has this intercom thing that runs radio stations all through the house and we listened to Christmas music from the moment my family stepped through the door.  So I was in my guest room after a shower and turned on my laptop and turned off the intercom and typed in the address for Pandora.  I'm all for being festive but I needed a break and the myth is always upon me these days, the creative life flourishing there beneath the surface at all times and I believe I need to nurture it much as I can, I believe this can be done through music and reading poems and being present in the still cold winter air and also by being brave.  There were ads that kept popping up on my computer though, and a commercial for Wal-mart that wasn't even connected to a pop-up but that wouldn't turn off.  Next just like that my adrenaline was already going and my head full of panic and memories of the late nineties and the computer at mom's infested with spyware.  I quick turned my laptop off and pretended it wasn't happening and I numbed the part of me that needs that nurturing same as it needs air.

A few days later Justin from work texted me through trying to remove it on my own.  It didn't work.  Full-fledged denial kicked in, this was last week on Tuesday.  I have literally glossed over the reality that my laptop is unusable.  This weekend my dad was home, rendering the computer I am typing on at this moment--in his bedroom--unusable.  I pretended like the urge to write just wasn't there. This is similar, for those of you unfamiliar, to say not having a tongue but trying to pretend you are able otherwise able to eat and speak. I laid in bed with library books all weekend listening to the radio. My music is on my laptop, too.  I kept telling myself, this too shall pass.

And therein, the point of this post.

Thank god for Brooks, for Sam, for Erika. The ones who need the nurturing as much as air.  I lived for years denying that part of me, and then wondering why I felt so consistently deadened inside.  I am writing an entire book about this struggle.  I dont feel crazy, or like it's something made up, anymore.  In the past month I have had extensive conversations with each of those people about this very thing.  It makes me miss Laura Walsh, who I spent every solstice with for years, and our talks.  Laura who sat for hours and hours in the Chestertown coffee shop with me discussing this struggle as I bit by bit garnered the strength I'd need to change my priorities.  So this post is for them, the crazies.  For Laura and Kat, Erika and Kirsten.  For Molly, who lost the battle.  For Sam and Brooks, the two most kind and gentle, glorious magician men I have ever known.  This holiday, at the end of this good year, I am so, so thankful to have such tribespeople in my realm.

So long as I have pen and paper I will have to be alright.

And that is all I know to say about that.  

It is pertinent as hell. Words.

I don't remember the year I spent at Choptank.

I don't remember anything specific, it just sits more as a memory of sense, gray and swirly with the occasional feeling of peace thrown in to the thicket of my reserve filed back then.

I moved from Anngar Farm the first week of November 2008, it was a Friday and I stopped my car at the edge of our 400 acres of feed-corn and soy to talk to two flannel-clad surveyors parked on the side of the road. The farm, they confirmed, had been sold. For all I know it happened that very day.

I talked to Brandon on the phone for about one minute. Then I called mom. I cried most of the way to 301.

Choptank was an hour from Chestertown by the backroads, which are the only roads I traveled back then, it was something about the soothing lay of the road against my tire tread. It was calming, all that farm country, all those trees, the changes of fall seizing the land. I was working for Chesapeake and had roughly ten sites in two rural counties spread out between well over 100 square miles. It was the something I could count on--I'd been on the Eastern Shore for a total of eight years of my life by then. I counted movement by the markers of farmhouses, wide turns in the roads and fields.

Besides leaving Brandon, I left behind a town of friends. A movement of local culture centered around both homegrown food and music, one that I personally worked hard to motivate and set within a momentum. It was sudden, to all of them, my departure. It was sudden and wrecking to him. It was like death, a numb whack of shock to the chest, to me. It was a miracle those first three months that I could even breathe.

I can say only that I was depressed back then and that is why I had to leave, and in a large way this had to do with being incapable of stating what I wanted. I knew what I loved but was too frightened to cultivate it or own it. I really believed it was something I did not deserve and so I went back on things all the time. My truth was changing because so much of my truth included lodges of fear, no dissipating no moving through, therefor no knowing for sure what I thought I thought for sure I knew. For months after I left Anngar lived in me with a filter of dull over it, but the fall is here now, the geese are calling and the trees have that certain subtle whisper in their departing leaves. I remember now so much. The fields that shivered purple at dusk. The yellow light on the barns and the half-there outbuildings and the way the birds carved the air inside. The sounds my kitties used to make in the high camelia bushes right out front. Old time records through the speakers at night, night after nights of dinners and the high chaotic laughter of our most amazing friends. Unannounced drop-ins from Sam. Coffee in the morning hot on the throat and cup hot on the hands, on the weekends the cool side-porch view of the shady hardwood trees against all that green. The quietness there with my love. Holding hands.

Last week, or maybe the one before that, I found my journal from the year I spent on the Choptank River, out in isolation renting a room in an 1800's farmhouse, talking to the water and laying in the grass. Over the years, since the early 2000's anyway, I've kept a practice called morning pages--writing three pages of longhand mental minutia download. Just getting the crud out of my head. It's something, a trick I've relied on with consistency that came my way via two different helpful books, that simply is the one true tool that's led me through. But I forgot about it: when I took up writing a novel morning pages were replaced with stronger doses of honesty on my blog. How I used my blog changed then, for sure. Literally this became the place of truth-telling, of writing my way through and thank god for it. It's helped codify the process, helped me shave down at the edges and in the great balancing act of writing for self versus convening with the audience, it's been the primary vehicle of me establishing how best to tell what I know. So it shocked me anyhow, discovering the hundred or two pages of writing my way through while at Choptank. Page after page of the same old horrible stuff, literally so much grief. Some of it ancient, some of it pity-pot, some of it contextual and some of it nameless in ways that kept me deep in the dark hole. Oh god the bravery it took for me to write all the way through! I had no idea, literally no recollection, of those pages being there.

There are loads of things I would different if I had the experience to do-over, and aint that the funny thing of it--I'd do it different now because of who I am now, but becoming who I am today had everything to do with going through those mistakes and casualties the hard way. Ultimately it comes down to that's just the way it goes. I stand poised in her today though, the woman who didn't know how to firmly say who she was or have the strength to stake her claim in the world. It is my own tiny miracle, my own heaven that is mine and mine alone and meant for only me to understand. It is pertinent as hell. It is the ground beneath me and it is the country of wild within me labeled not only what I want, but who I am. I hope the people that I hurt through it have forgiven. It has been a long hall, that one where forgiveness is gentle and blame retreats itself and lets open the next door, that one dark eddy of grave self-sin. I hope they all know how much love there is within. I am moving on from the chapter, the words falling like clean rain or leaves funny and quiet, but imminent, all the same. I am trying to convince myself in my most silent parts that the words are worth all I have, are at least as important when translated in to what I've come to give, from what I've lost and equally come to learn I own.

Smoke and Flowers

Inside of what changes, which is everything, there are little things, too. These are the bones of who we are, what help us know how to comfortably flesh out and wear our real skin.The weather today is so fabulous that to mar it with words would ruin my experience.

I have a lot to process. I returned from my trip over the bridge last night. I was exhausted. I feel like there should be periods between each of those words. I. was. exhausted. I couldn't even talk to mom about all that happened, it was too much.

Eventually I gave her some of the basics. What I was able to say I had a still moment of clarity that was the exact same as the night I taught my first ESL class. Remember I called you when it was over? I remember every detail, sitting in my car that night on the phone with you. Knowing I'd stepped foot on a new, totally unknown path. The big, calm feeling of it. Yesterday, sitting in my car, was exactly like that. But even this morning in the sun in my torn salt-weakened beach chair barefeet in the gravel of the front driveway at the Pines, sitting still, I just wanted quiet. I relaxed in to the tight feeling in my jaw and the thick-creased feeling of crippledness in my shoulders and neck that scream money!?!? and sat inside the bad feelings until it all released. I breathed in the sunlight and fresh air. I returned to peace and happiness of today, this moment, the sound of tree-breeze. Nothing but this, only this, only this. My smile was big and I didn't even realize it.

My alt boys station on Pandora is nailing it right now. What's really on my mind, what I came here to write about, is friendship and familial ties. Mandy bought a house in Pasadena over the summer. I cross the Anne Arundel County line and freak out she said, she is talking about crossing in to HoCo and I laughed because I get it. We are sitting across from one another at her kitchen table. We are thirty-somethings. She has two kids now. She told this funny story (she's the best story-teller I know, pulls out no stops just gets ghetto with it and then pushes it even past that so much so that I've sometimes questioned if she makes them up they're so often that over the top) about her cousin who lives on the line between Baltimore City and county and I am secretly smiling the whole time because that's what I want, that life, those I dont give a fuck we'd never call the cops 'round here people. I think of my family roots all Brooklyn Park inside the edge of the city prideful and blind and righteous, working-class Catholically-arrogant and equally innocent all of us, scared to get out, and more scared not to, too. Being a kid on Church Street, in my memories from that young time the sun was always shining. There was always sunshine on the side of the house, on the cement sidewalk, on Grammy's tablecloth. On Pop's records and tea cup. My uncles were twenty-something, wild-eyed, like their sons now. I was a baby-grl, three, four, six, ten. Enraptured with it all.

Last year when Mandy moved home she and her mom and her brother and his fiance all got a house in Crownsville, which is this heavily wooded suburb outside of Annapolis where we moved when I was 11 and where I grew up until I moved to the Eastern Shore in 1998. I clung to that, to her house there, to walking in knowing where the coffee mugs were, where food was, what her mom would smell like (smoke and floral fragrance) when she received my hello-hug. I never thought it would mean something to me, I thought I needed to see the world and that was what mattered. Mandy said that too the other night, leaning against her dishwasher, adding to her grocery list. Talking about where we are from. Talking about how good it feels to be with people again who get her. The little things.

She tosses me a towel yesterday morning and tells me to shower in her bathroom. It lands next to my head. It's almost ten, she's been up for hours with her kids and already's dropped Derek off at pre-school. I am laying in her bed, we slept there together and talked each other to sleep like we used to the winter we were nineteen and lived in my basement at mom's in Crownsville. When we would sleep on the pull out couch with the metal bar in our backs or spoon in my twin bed. This woman knows the story of every man I have ever loved. I know every one of hers. We make decisions now for practical reasons. We are still wild as the wind. She ate oodles of noodles on Tuesday while we talked across her table. Just like back then.

I've always looked up to her. Always looked to her for direction, looked not to what she says but to how she makes decisions, what she does and the authority which she uses when I cant find my own. Last year she moved in to that house in Crownsville and spent time with her family and her family's--her brother's--friends every day. I took that sense of familiarity to the Pines and rooted in to my own. Tuesday I drove to Pasadena to see my cousin play soccer, then met a bunch more other cousins on Edmunson Ave in the city to eat grilled cheeses. Then went back home, Mandy's home her own home she owns in Pasadena, in the County, to be with her.

I can't imagine being any better--any more arrogant, any more innocent--any more aware, anyway, than this...

List: What's Rad. CarrotCore.

In my Book of Awesomeness in my imagination we are building a dream world of subversive ever-ongoing creative flourishment and this is the new reality, pre-dawn, ahead of always creating destiny, we are shapeshifters this our amusement and our only prayers... O imagination o imagination, o blessed holy sacred tribe of cool...
O only religion that I have...

Meet Carrot, from I'M NOT AFRAID OF WINTER. Look at this amazing poetmadness movie she done made!

Sammy and the boys

In my Book of Awesomeness kept meticulously in my fabulous imagination, one of the most recent gold-scripted entries is that Sammy and the boys played Falcon Ridge.

Just writing that fills me with Oregon dreams and gypsy wisdom and barefeet secrets....

But this post isn't about the guys, or at least not in total, it's also about a funny-ass blogger. Read all about Spencer in the City's report of her tender heart getting Sammed....Then go check out the Chester River Runoff, the coolest fucking guys around xoxoxo

Why haven't you heard of these guys yet?

Island culture & the tribe of cool

Patrick my cousin was laughing this morning at breakfast. He's still a little drunk I think, and so it's that glowy slap happiness that is funniest of all.

When he laughs his voice distinctly reminds me of a ladder, this ascending quality that in my cousin Ryan sounds like ringing bells.

You know what Chris told me? Patrick laughs out, stepping up with each word and giggle breath.

Chris is Jackie's soon to be husband in the Carharts and rubber boots with the thick sandwich of New England mouthed around every word he says.

What?

That if you want to find someone here on the island the best thing to do is to just go sit in there house and wait for them to show up. Resounding steps of chortle and coffee gulps after this. It is true tho, Pat and Chris are right, and the B&B owner comes in and tells a story of coming home from errands this week to find the friend of her teenage son lounging around on the third floor of the house, waiting for her son to return. I didn't know this was island culture, she adds, til I got a teenage son.

Not being connected--no cell service and many without even a phone as over 70% of the residents here are just summer folk--is so, so nice. You forget what it means, how easy it is, to just be out and about. To not wait for life to happen, but to make for it yourself...

It reminds me of 1995, living at the beach, pre-cell phone and none of us had landlines. You went on a whim, and let shit happen. In The New York Years diPrima writes wistfully about this, about the tribe of cool to whom I've always sought after, the existence of which predates written history and is, indeed, the reason for expansion, poetry, artistry and all forms of adrenaline~those on the subversive edge of things~how in Manhattan in the 40's this tribe was so in tune with one another and the undercurrent of pure Life imbibing them each that they actually called it swinging, how they lived. Swinging meant get your work done: the clean white line of purity which so tapped in to this force, then allow for, submit to the natural movement of the day. Regular encounters with one another were natural and occurred by virtue of this discipline: wrestling the creative spirit to its hard line, then releasing its energy to throttle the crew back together somewhere on the lower streets say of the Bowery and beyond.

As if something magic, something big, something at times so shadowed and at others glowing in illustriousness so much so the whiteness may burn you apart, was webbing us all together no matter what. Wrestled in to its course, or hugely enormous and pushing us along...

What McClure meant by Writ in Eternity~and what I find most sacred among us mad genius'~the fine alchemy of grabbing for that eternity in a harnessed moment of transcendence and union, in which we get to write, at odds til it blends perfect in to the the mystery, fine, alluring, terrifying, of being written equally by the reverb of our own personal movement of the quill.... The conflicting dual, within the mass whole.

Island culture, no doubt, has been very very good for me....

Family

Kelly? I can practically hear his thought after this: Is that you?

I am sitting on a bench, in the woods, on the side of a trail at the park. Almost to the end of my third lap, walking and enjoying the outside. There is a long stick in my hand and I am using it to organize broken pieces of a Corona bottle in to a pile, so that no one, barefooted like I prefer or animal on a leash, gets it stuck in their foot. I should feel more embarrassed, maybe, than I do getting caught out there, alone, seemingly drawing in the dirt with some wood.

It's my cousin Timmy, he is out for his morning jog.

He joins me on the bench and we chat for a while. The winkwinky part is that I had just been thinking about how good it was that even though there are all these outofstate people now who bring this funny new vibe to Ocean City, how great it is that places like this path in the woods still exist, and how not everyone knows about places like this. So it made me happy, of all people to encounter there, to run in to cousin Tim.

I spent the day yesterday with Aunt Sue. It was so hot at home that there was a haze on the bay between here and town, so much so you could barely see the buildings of OC on the horizon. We were nervous about how hot it would be on the beach and figured on spending most the day in the water, but la mama surprised us with the most fantastic off-shore breeze. We talked for hours took two gorgeous swims and a long walk that spanned at least 40 streets. Later, I texted her I made pasta come over for some and so when cousin Mat got out of driver's ed that is what they did.

Family has always held at least a little bit of contention for me, whether the immediate one at home or the larger, inclusive of aunts and uncles and cousins and more. It's just that there is so much of it, and also that the nucleus that raised me, the experience directly of mom dad and Sean when we were young was confusing and not too consistant much of the time. But then there was always the stability of the extended family, both on dad's side and mom's. So family is a huge definitive part of my identity: dad is one of seven and with only one exception, he and his siblings live close. Regular visits are a part of our experience and have been since before I even was a kid. And on mom's side for the past two to three years I've made a personal choice to delve more in to the dynamics of she, her parents and sisters by spending time with them that historically was equal to the influcence the McMullens for so long have had on me. As result I now understand so much more about who I quietly am and how I was raised.

On Monday night, late, I was driving us home from Deck Party in town. Eddie, eyes half-closed and jammin his head along to the music (Two Tickets to Paradise by Eddie Money, chosen with holy exuberance because, of course, Ed was the DJ) and Tim and Sarah all shmoop shmoop cute in the back. My window was all the way down, my arm hanging loose out in the green and salt summer air. I was so, so happy. There was nothing else at all I wanted in the world than that moment, with my cousins, my siblings, my friends. In the morning I leave for Pennsylvania, to see baby Sananah again and cousin Chels, then to take Rt. 30 across the state to Gettysburg for cousin Sarah's wedding weekend.

It has been so rich, of such deep value to me, growing my legs and blood strong by owning the history that grew me and runs in profound wordlessness to this day straight through all of me, and lands and floats in to the air around me and guides and graces, in both blessings and challenges, the me I get to become. I am proud of it, proud of me and my people, and more than anything so, so grateful for the gifts of self and love it's grown within.

"You can be inspirational in any part of the world...

...but not every part of the world can inspire you."~JTA, 5 sept 09

Me and cousin Joey to the far right. 1984.

Wow, I am so taking a little break from the madness of student files right now. Since yesterday morning it's been non-stop organizing of and placing ESL students by assessment levels. Making new student folders. Class lists. Lots of derangely exciting stuff, I mean real pulse-racing kind of activities...

My cousin Collin is sitting across from me, right now, I have one class left to go and then two GED classes and then I am done this drone of skull-numbing torture; he is working on an essay for his gened English first semester ever college class. For a book he didn't read. This summer. He looks at me with that great, eighteen-year-old dryness he is famous for and says "Cuz I mean, all my stoopid cousins kept coming up to me on the beach this summer, you know, trying to have fun and all..."

Saturday night I got up with my other cousin. He's in his late 20's, born in Africa, raised in Germany, educated at Oxford, working currently on his PhD in England. Actually worked a while for the UN in Liberia. Huh? He was the first of us, our generation, to marry and is now expecting his first kid. He's in town this past week and I drove two hours to see him at 10:30 at night. Because that is what I now love to do. Get out and about, find some action. I snatched him away and off we scooted to see friends of mine play muse-ac and catch up.


Damn, I miss him. It'd been two years and last time we were together he wasn't married yet but I surely was, or for all intensive purposes my lifestyle two years ago certainly looked a lot different and included a fine and gentle long-term companion. So cousin Joe and I had lots of lots of sharing to do. Which is what I've done all summer, kicked it with fabulous folks from back in the day and shined my heart clean again and again in their love.


It was the first time that I recapped all my own personal changes from this past year and didn't feel like I was partly trying to sell it, looking to be affirmed that I'd done what was right. Instead it felt real and understandable and as normal as anything else about my self I've come to accept and even take for granted. Say my cheesy high-school tatoos, or eyesight that's blurred. Joey is the kind of person that I have such an intrinsic organic connection to. So much so that without expecting it, merely by virtue of sharing my self with him and he as well in exchange, a greater part of the landscape of me clears a bit more, the horizon spreads and clarifies in to more natural view, something in the bedrock part of me just clicks. After talking a while about my job, telling him about working our everloving asses off this past year to build from scratch a program that now serves a thousand students--he responded with his own details of his most recent work and projects.


And then it clicked. And I felt so happy and full of love to be snaking the backroads with firesmoke on the air and Joe chugging water to sober a little bit up.


I was definitely a little salty but with the sass that night and so I did something I rarely do. I asked him specifically two questions, asked him specifically for advice.

And here was one of his answers, which came after a pause and some puzzlement, which might of just meant he was thirsty....Kel, I dont know what to tell you. But you know what I am thinking about, that you love to dance. And dance is a form of communication that is ancient, far older than words. And you love to dance, you naturally know how to communicate with this form. So I think tonight you should just dance, and listen to the language of your self. Now, seriously. The only other person who ever would have possibly said something like this is me! But with that European swiftness that some mistake as curt but really is just minus any bullshsit, and with the deep intellect that courses this guys blood--my freaking radass cousin Joe answered me with the best advice, ever. And it made me beam!!!!

And god, he's so, so right. I spent earlier that day in fact at a festival, with my barefeet on the earth, so it was kinda like he was just affirming what I already in fact did know...

What I am listening to: def and kweli, both new and old

blah. back to the books i go.

if i can walk i can dance if i can talk i can sing.

(amen, cuz.) (amen amen.)

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.
   

Ocean Pines

In 1975 my grandparents pop and grammy, my folks Karen and Don, and my godparents Uncle Tim and Aunt Mary bought a three bedroom house some five miles outside Ocean City, Maryland. The house was one of three on the street, the street one of several hundred just like it. It was the barely-there community of Ocean Pines: mostly saltwater canals fluxing in and out from Assawoman Bay, tall tall pines quiet and peaceful, second-growth softwoods and saltgrass and every so often the dotting of a new wood-sided home. Ocean City didn't go beyond 60th street then, it was still natural dunes even after 30th. My grandparents were retired, my godparents teachers who were off in the summer, my dad well on his way to the material success implicit of the American Dream. Today there are no empty lots on our shaded street, the bike trails through the woods and the secret bayfront beaches all us kids used to know are gone. The "Dream" quite literally has come home.

My dad is the oldest of seven brothers and sisters, a Catholic working-class family from South Baltimore. He was 28 and just married to my mom when my retired grandad, a Colonel in the army, a fierce liberal and a carpenter by trade, discovered the wooded community that boasted a new golfcourse where he and his two oldest sons could play. Then men in dad's family define themselves in relation to sports. Either played, coached or fans of, this is their common language, a bond that themes them together throughout life and subsequent communion at family gatherings that have occurred since long before my childhood days of listening to the weighted air between the intermittent static of the O's game on the transistor radio on the backporch at Ocean Pines. We didn't have a television here in the summer when I was a kid, and what I remember is the importance, the feeling of anticipation, hoping for the success of the home team.

I was the first grandkid to come along and I came to be at the end of a generation unconsciously dictated to be the change: to bridge a gap between what was and what will be. Fate has a funny way of working out evolution, the consciousness of a people shaped at once by the stakes they claim as well as by the circumstances that initially created the need to claim them. I come from the memory of immigrants, thus in my genes exists the struggle and the ethics of what it means to need to survive: The father of dad's dad an Irish-born immigrant who worked the coal mines in Western Pennsylvania; the mother of dad's mom a WASP from Massachusettes who refused to speak to her daughter when she decided to marry the pigshit Irish-Catholic soldier that she met in France during the war. We hold tight to these stories, my family and I, tight to this history and how it makes us brave.

In 1996 in June I was 19-years-old. I lived in a single-room apartment on 2cnd street and St. Louis in Ocean City with a guy named Kareem. All my boys, the homies from Ocean Pines, lived there, too. We called it the Drifthood. It's since been torn down. My room had a set of bunkbeds, a mirror, dresser and a sink. It was dingy and dark and always freezing: Kareem liked it kept at 55 degrees so there was a bolt of ice that hung perpetually off the AC-unit from the only window in the room. It smelled frozen, of mildew and dust. We had a communal bathroom at the end of the hall that no one ever used because the the tub was filled with piss and the discarded ruins of cigars, or what we called blunts. That's the summer that I first knew I was addicted to drugs, or that something was going on that I didn't have words for, just a gutfull of dread: when I took the first hit of anything I lost control...I didn't know where even the first puff of a joint or pull on a blunt would lead me, good or bad. Just about all our apartments were run through with the guys from Snow Hill who brought with them what in my eyes were mounds of cocaine. They were notoriously bad mutherfuckers, and cool and tough as I tried to be it scared me. Kevin, my boyfriend the year before and a long time late night flirtatious summer love, had one of the good apartments in the Hood: his had two bedrooms and a kitchen and bathroom on the ground level and it opened up to a courtyard with cement and dead grass and a brick grill we filled with bottles ahses and cigarette butts. He was dating a new girl now also named Kelly who later would get popped for running prostitution out of the Hooters restaurant uptown. At night though downtown I worked at a pizzashop on the boards near the skateshop where Kevin and his boys all worked and partied and hung, he would occasionally when drunk before getting dusted or smacked out come lingering around and tell me of his eternal love... We had a number of under the moon beside the sea kisses that summer and they are the last memories of him tender and sweet...The table in Kev's apartment was covered with marker tags and slick with the grease of old and dirty and one day I went in to his pad to pee and there was a syringe and long piece of rubber on top. And this dude Randy a real soulfull Rasta dude who always put me at ease was sitting there and I remember looking at him and thinking I can not keep faking like I am too cool to care.

I finally got kicked out of there for not paying the rent. I ran back to Ocean Pines, to Tim and Mary and my very sick Gram and my cousins and cuddles on the couch in front of whatever movie was playing in the VCR. I remember afternoons stepping in to the Pines house terrified, sure the life I'd left behind in town had followed me, only to find the house quiet: Gram on the back porch in the middle of a nap that must've smelled to her like honeysuckle and old wood; Uncle Tim smiling quiet over his glasses in his hands a good book. The cool calm, the consistency. What would I have done if it weren't for Ocean Pines?

About 20 or so years ago they put an addition on the house here: two new rooms; one for my brother Sean and I and one for Tim and Mary's kids yet to come. And they lengthened the backporch. Every summer, right around the Solstice, my family, all 7 of my aunts and uncles and all those cousins, come to the Pines for a reunion. We kick it off with a crab feast on the back porch. The back porch that is decorated with sports memorabilia and long enough to sit all 35 of us comfortably. On Sunday we go to the park, where dad's cousins, the sons and daughters of the brothers and sisters of that Pigshit Irish Catholic boy from the coalmines of PA, all bring their sons and daughters and their sons and daughters, too.

I think about this driving up Philadelphia Street yesterday, the Junebug beachweekers everywhere music and energy and little bikinis, tattoos and muscle shirts and drunk kids screaming. All this delicious energy, I was so happy to be home. People hate it here, dirty downtown OC. It's so loud and upfront: life unhidden, humanity in your face. I reclaimed my room here this past spring: the stuff from my move off the farm that didn't fit in to Chop wound up in the attic or on the walls here at the Pines. My mom lives here now, my grandparents have been gone over ten years now, my dad funnily enough lives with Tim and Mary in their house in the county outta Bmore and they all make it down on the weekends. This, Ocean Pines, is what is left of a place I can still go to and call home. My cousins Erin and Tim, Tim and Mary's kids, live here with my mom and bartend at the big local restaurant. My dad's youngest sister Sue, also a teacher, lives a street over from us and her son Collin is a lifeguard at the local pool.

All those years of loudcalling wild fun in OC. All those years of mess and destruction. So much peace, so much longing. Hours and hours of sea. It's funny, home. Tom Waits says if you kill your demons your angels go, too. Is it supersappy then to say that getting to know your demons might be the best way to invite your angels to just stay, stay stay....?

on the road: asheville

So it was blue skies and seventy driving down the bypass Thursday outta Easton on my way south to the mountains and the big skies and most importantly the open road. I stood in the parking lot of the employment office beaming, arranging my luggage and putting a little blessing on Georgie my car and then standing in the parking lot the drug kids up the corner form me standing outside of their “classes” on a smoke break; me in namaste prayer position saying whatever form of the words that day that came out natural as they did: abandoning myself and my life to whatever the road and my soul folding outwards in front of me was supposed to look like for the rest of the day and the days to come.....

I got in the car and the music was right and the sunshine too and on the bypass just like the girls in the old Aerosmith video who first prompted me on how I wanted to live changed my work clothes while driving down the road, though I stopped short of tossing them out the window.

Inside the bubble of that prayer I understood: even though I am still on the shore and not even to 66W all that happens from here on out is magic because I have opened myself to it and therefor so will it be so....Ahhh, road trip magic: It is as it is. Magic of reality in moment and flexible harmony. So after the bridge I get off the phone and the radio goes off and it is til the other side of the Potomac, Virginia, before I finally turn the music on again because up til them I am beaming in silence and watching the charge charge charging of my mind and mentalness go go go~~as if all the past months are curving up the sides of me fast and whole in big clean chunks all the persons and personas and places and things rushing past some gate that they know I am eager to have them ext right through... I drive til the orange lights of the sky go on against the folded hills of the land down there and stop in Front Royal expecting to camp but the closer I get to the National Forest my head is pounding and more, my stomach tying, too, and I have to go through the whole conversation with myself to talk myself down and mostly get to a place where I can trust: not only is camping not what I want to do right this second, it also feels totally wrong. So I follow the local road back to 66 and soon enough I am in the Shanandoah and the drive is right and the night is right and then later the gold hand pulls the curtain inside me just a touch enough so that I know to follow it and I get off the exit in Staunton, VA, find a brokedown room with a big comfy bed for the $45 I’d budgeted to spend and of course Sex in the City just starting when i get settled in.

And the next day it is blue vibrant and I am quiet and whole and just go go go and the country in Virginia is so good I want cowboy boots. And the girl in the drive thru coffee klatch has shaved punk rock hair and a septum ring and she is so shiny and youngfaced and looks right at me and says You’re so cute! And I say so are you and this is fine and this is right and immediately we are talking about the hardcore band that she is in serendipity nod to me--for in my latest weeks of self-discovery and Real Work as I go in to the teenage graveyard and re-inspect the buried treasures behind my grove of little alters I find that not all of that was meant to be buried and thrown away...

Now I am mountainous--the magnolia breeze and wild roses in through the window then Credence is on the radio Born on the Bayou and I am dancing and driving and beaming and playing hiway games with the other drivers and I am the heartbeat: primal earthy flow in me that dirty primal feeling of roots that I associate with the South that whole sense of to be whole is not to be right or wrong not to be light or dark, just delicate human angel aware of and content with both. And I am dancing and let me tell you the smell of the sweet is so pure I am sure it is just the smell that moment of dark death when the alchemy of birth most finally is able to steal its waking chance...

Then I am to Asheville and me and Kel we hug a long time in the drive way, and soon enough we are again on the road.

And Atlanta and all the tattoos & mohawk hipster yo’d out kids the music and the messages, the reminders and the peace, catching up with my ol girl Michelle and all else....for only me and me to know...

And even though I came to do it alone what I learned so far is that I really needed to just be around my tribe this weekend and more this morning in Kel’s kitchen making pancakes after a late late night laughing and with the joy. Then Kel’s in the shower and I got Paul Simon’s preemptive singing School Yard on the phono in the other room haunting me and reminding me that the poet shaman has always existed and the poet shaman has always got the power. And then of course in the bliss of this moment of getting Me~~well of course this is when Katie calls.....

And now we are back from thrift store pillaging and it is time for to continue on the road.....

On Tribe, and Remembering

So my cousin Erin posted this really great piece last night over at Infinite and Endless. She is a dream. Here is a story:

It was end of June and I was eight-years-old an age still young enough to not really know time. Therefor June equaled one thing and that was Summertime which equaled one thing and that was Infinity. Long days of playing with the neighborhood kids and the hot melty tar of the driveway burning our feet.

Or, the beach. The beach the beach the beach, hot sand on my tender feet and the cold at night in my parents room under the window air-unit that made my sunburned aloe-face feel so smooth and cool. Satiation: when all is right with the world. How salt and sand for me have so much to do with this. We lived in the summer in a house crowded on the floors at night by the blow-up mattresses of all my aunts and uncles. My Pop, "The Colonel", was still alive then and these were the very ends of days that I did not know then were instructing me. Filling my life with my own inner quest for understanding of who I am. And how, for some very few of us, when we live the definition of something ambiguous as identity the knowledge of the details of this at once fulfill us, and challenge us. It's like the more I gain awareness of my outline the more I consistently find that the very next step, for a person like me, is to expand it. So I'm 8, it's summertime 1985. My grandparent's house at the shore is overloaded with family and we are loud, throat-pitched people and game-players and story-tellers every one. The nights are full with poker and smoke and though I am close at 8 to too old I still want to sit on dad or Uncle Kevin's lap if I'm allowed when it's late enough that they talk that funny low sidetalk out of their mouths and I get to laugh like I get it with my eyes on the ice melting in their glasses. In the daytime I have Barbies which I'm also near grown out of by now and also this glorious little baby cousin Esther she is fatcheeked and nubby with a scrunchy diaper and laughs when I retrieve her pacifier for her only to throw it across the room again and again. And also, there is electric in the air that reminds me of ice cream: the babies. The babies are coming, the babies are here.

Esther was first, in September, which made her near a year that June. And then Jackie, oh Jackie. My Grandmother's high-pitch panic sound when they brought her through the front door of the beach house in the car-seat Uncle Bill carried with both hands. That beam of his, definitive deliciousness of a face light-up specific to Uncle Bill: the light and flash around his broad teeth and Irish eyes. It was a surprise to Gram that they were even coming with the new baby so young, and like everything new Grammy took it loud and wrong at first. When I looked to the adults to understand what was wrong: in a hush from woman to woman, the secret. Jackie's only two weeks old. As if this should have explained everything. To this day this is the way of the McMullen. The unspoken drama that enwrapped certain things, the look in an eye over glasses or the intone of the fold of the words. The subtle emotional infliction that went with the late nights, the crowded kitchen mornings full of food, natural as all other parts of who we were: the seriousness of Life, edged as it could be with tragedy. That whole old-world post-immigrant thing, protective of the what-could-come and the unseen. That pigshit way some of us have that rebelled in the face of such unspokens. Existent today only in sighs or flickers in the eye, or if you're like me in a flash that reads Challenge.

So Esther and Jackie have arrived, not just to the Pop and Gram's beachhouse at The Pines but to the world! And too, the excitement of the Mary's: Uncle Tim's wife, pregnant-out-to-there, so you could see her belly-button buckled out from all the pressure through her shirt. In the kitchen, on the cool linoleum Tim's Mary stood back of Uncle Paul's Mary, redhead of curls down the shoulders of Paul's Mary and those big oversized rose glasses and that smoky husk of her laugh there even then. The power of her, that energy that used to surround her--and Katie, the baby inside who would come in October, already outsized like her mom.

It was barely a week or so later that Tim's Mary went. We were home now, respectively: all the Aunts and Uncles and kids tucked away in their plastic-sided houses in their burgeoning suburbs splayed out this way and that from Grammy and Pop's South Baltimore--Church Street--home. Making it. It was July, the first week, and hot so that my legs stuck to the grey leather of dad's caddie in the little bit of time it took to open the backseat door and get my seatbelt clicked. We were on our way to Tim and Mary's house ShadyHillLane. I remember even then the magic that surrounded the very words of that place. Maybe it was the pine trees that put a softened haze over the bricks of their house and muted out the rest of the world. Whatever it was,whatever it is, their house still has a magic effect on me, one of peace, to this day. And here is what I remember, walking in and the muffled sound of adult and adult talk, then dad saying to me you can't go up right now sis you're Aunt Mary's breastfeeding. And then the softness that for Uncle Tim has always passed as his way, uncharacteristic, of pride. No, it's ok, Kel can go up.

And walking in, and seeing Erin being drawn away from Aunt Mary's swollen chest, the baby so tiny and wrapped she was barely there, and then her being offered out into the air to me. Their big high bed so tall to me then, the nights and nights of giggles and laughter my brother and I had shared with Tim and Mary tucked in those sheets. How it all seemed so different in that moment as they settled me in against the pillows: the curtains pulled so that the room was with a subtle roseyellow glow. The warmth, the pure delicate coziness of the those sheets and that bed. Getting pulled in to that, encirlced by that wonder, that fine gentle bliss of moment to moment allure: awareness of fragility, ohh, of Life and tender birth. And holding her, my little cousin, for the first time. I was eight years old, wispy blond often red-faced bossy but so easy to be embarrassed and extra sensitive, and also a wee thing, bony and small. And the baby, Erin a little-bit of a thing, so small, so small! The perfect size for me, she melded right in to my arms and against my heart and close in to my chest. This was, for the first time, what it was to be inside of something so very big that even then I realized bigness has to do with being small.

Anyway, Erin, if you don't mind a public post rather than a comment in response to your blog: I feel you, sister. This call towards Life, this inherent sense that we should be enlarging the nest. And at once this conflicting perplexed sense, uncatagorized, a nameless feeling of unquenched calling. So potent it's as if it's of our blood. Yes, how it strangely seems to come from that very same nest. So it goes my sister, my friend. So it goes!!

Amen amen amen.

Me and some of the cuz's, Nov 08, or as cuz Pat calls us: The McMafia

A Fine Weekend

Started out Friday at Ram's Head Shorehouse on Kent Island with the Chester River Runoff
Jazmine was there!! Haven't seen that girl in five years, at least!! How great to see her, Walsh, Bran and Brook, Sam, Marc and Ben, and Nate, too! To remember my tribe--my tribe: Us, Compelled by the Calling.

Then of course, there was the beach.... And meeting up with a whole other tribe..."The Crones" as my mom calls her crew of wise on-the-go gals that all live in and around Ocean City. These are exceptional women, and I am so thankfull for their impact in my life....

Finally, nothing like down-time with dad. People around here call him the Gov, cuz everywhere we go he knows someone. Like the Cactus Cafe, where we went for his bday din-din. Salmon and lamb shank, done spanish-style. We stayed for two and half hours, laughing and talking, and enjoying renditions of songs like the chicken dance from the joker mariachi man.....

Legends

I'm so lucky cuz for some reason Chestertown has this totally epic cult-like epicenter for crazy talented-ass musicians. I dont know why, or what it is that draws us all in our antic-questing to encounter and run in to each other out here in the middle of colonial drudgery under-your-thumb-imprinted-capitalistic-ruin perfect pinpoint micro image of the macro which is Chestertown out amid the middle of the farmfields, maybe it is as Tai-Chi way-out Wayne says there must be an aquafir or something...

But anyhow all the musicians at right are ones who wnadered past here, Kent County, good ol Eastern Shore. Some have stayed on if not for good at least for now and Marc Dykeman from Plans Plans is one of those cats. Turns out we used to not know each other but know those or know of those who knew each other back in my purple booted punk-rock riot grrrl days of dark firehalls garage bands and flannel shirts, outside Balitmore, USA.

He's kept that loud thing up. I sweat him for it. A hella lot. Also, his wife is a fairy princess and I think she's so rad and they throw the best parties, too.

Go check out his rock band Plans Plans tonite, in Baldamore, 1700 N Charles the Metro Gallery. It'll be worth it I know.

ps i just figured out how to copy soemthing off YouTube I stole that video above off of PlansPlans, I'm so proud of me!

Detours, windows, doors & light: this week around kent county

Well, so i got a job. it all happened very fast and i am not feeling, say, fluent in the language of my new life just yet. and yet, it seems so right, so somehow as if i am finally, after a long long detour, stepping in to the facts of my life as if my soul just snapped open like an old 1980's blind and windowed me in on things: this is how it is meant to be--these are your moments, 'writ in eternity'....

i was of course waiting tables--slinging grease is what always goes in the back of my head when i say that, which is true regardless the level of white linen affair in which one is involved. it's all grease, it's all over you at night's end, it's all always in your hair and lingering not so much as a coating on your skin as a smell, or a sense, or a flavor of the over-processing of your life that ends up going with you, that you end up carrying around with you and wearing like a form of yourself not so true but also that you quietly can't seem to rid.....
it is the function of this life, no? to carry these skins of us on our back and at once deep within, and to try not to struggle when they are slow to come off, and try too not to force the transmutation...?

oohhhh, so i am an intake counselor, a liason for students of Adult Ed once again. but now sooo far to drive to my new job each day, so far to drive from my home. yet this feels so good to me, exhilerating and also stunning at the very same time.

ohhhh! and my eight pairs of ohsogorg trouser pants some wide-legged some high-wasted all so demurely chic and debonair hanging there on the new love affair i have which are my legs... literally make me quiver. that's right, i got hired by 11 and was shopping shopping shopping and remembering my body by 2....

in other not as fashionable news, but good to remember--authentic and just as true: coming out of my detour this week coincidently corresponded w touching down on so many lovely parts of our home land here in kent and queen anne's county...

sammy g

sammy g, bran and i were out on the chester monday eve. ran in to timmy p and greg down at ben's dock taking a swim before pearl creek's band practice. this is where we all go for relaxing dips, down the very end of blue heron farm lane--i wonder does ben know how often the all of us, at varied times, are there swimming even if he's not around?

our swimming hole at ben's dock

tuesday nite was ladies nite out--laura leah and i surprised brooke, who's getting ready to move, on her own, back in to her historic 13 bedroom unfinished hotel-house outside tolchester w the brand new wrap-around porch. we went out and about in naptown, our way of saying go on grrrrrl and also each quietly getting to remember that we are none of us ever alone...

brooke, laura, leah

then, thursday nite we all potlucked at mark and andrea's place out to rock hall. (you love the vernacular i know go ahead and sweat it) mark is this funny easy too come across as shy guy but so quik w the dead-on sharpheaded wit once you've been around him enough that you literally get moved to cry w your laughter...i know, it's happened to me way more than once. and andrea is his baltimore-living girlfriend who weekends it at their work-in-progress farm house here on the shore. he's a wash coll alum, so is she, like many of us. he's working now for the college on oyster restoration and other local sustainability grant and projects, taking whatever is handed to him and going along with it in his steady kind of mark walk-run. he, too, worked at the resteraunt w me. we quit the same week.....















mark's front porch & stairs, under construction

mark and andrea

their way cool bathroom door, handcrafted by mark!!

(probably i should have taken more pictures of the finished rooms--their lovely warm kitchen or the study upstairs. but guess that's for another potluck....)

and lastly, this morning, in our bedroom. how very good, still and clear the light can feel sometimes...