"Too Zen"

I walked in to work the week before last and much to my fabulous surprise encountered a buddy from Chestertown who is also a fellow tribe member (Compelled by the Calling). His name is Brooks and I've blogged about him before he's a member of the band The Took (see link at left of page.) Well he just started working in my office! And of course you know soon as noontime rolled around I was like Brooks let's go go go I'll take you out for sun, I mean lunch and out the backdoor we ran like teenagers cutting school. I love having someone alive from the inside there to relate with me now. So last Thursday we were walking--in the sun--to the Amish Market for the amazing freaking goodies this place offers. And somehow we got in to this conversation about Destiny. He kept saying that he felt like everything is meant to be. To which I was like well that's predestination, you know like a very Christian subtext. So what do you think then of free-will? And he's like no no I dont mean that things are scheduled in advance, I just mean they are meant to be because they happen. And of course me, ever the Queen of ruinous depths am like what, huh--I mean what's human implication in all of this thinking? Dont you think that that burdens the individual with more than a wee's bit of mite--to have the responsibility of "choice" on her shoulders? [This was all quite good-natured and high-spirited as we were both in fired-up sunny good-food moods and I for one was busy trying to sort out where I stand in the nature of said discussion.] I start delving in to the tenets of Creating Your Own Reality and so forth, to which he again is like No no no I mean it's meant to be cuz it just happens. Like if it doesn't happen it's not meant to be. And suddenly I stop in a bolt of silence and literal white light sunbeam exalt and am like, OH! I think I get it! You are clever Jedi Sensai!! You are saying the mere simplicity of the eternal moment of Zen. Purely truly nothing to figure out ahhhhh but the second you grasp it..... ahhh gone again. The most simple truth: If it happens it's meant simply because it did. No meaning. Just....experience. Just light simple eternal treasure pleasure of joy in this continuous ongoing moment. Ah, the Chink is in my presence.

Ah, tricky tricky!I Was So Delighted!! I punched him on the arm like a kid in third grade and was like poor thing, you with me, we equal Too Zen! Then we took off running for the back door of work cuz we were late, and didn't want to get in trouble.

Purity Of In-Bliss Eternal Moment May I Never Question You Oh Sacred Truth.

Ah that in recognizing and never wanting to question you are gone...again.....!
Eternal Flower
Eternal Crescent Mama Moon

Eternal Blue

Eternal Star

Eternal Art

Eternal Wild

Eternal Tricksters!!

Politicin'....

Tonight I drank black cherry floats with Haitian-Creole refugees. One woman with a red badanna over her grey braids proudly showed me how she can now count to ten. The last time I visited we each had tears in our ears because she wrote her name for the first time in her fifty some years of life. The students from Haaay-tee ( I love the way they say the name of their country, it makes me melt inside) wear their jackets in class, heavy winter ones, even on days like today when it was sunny out and 60 degrees. I think this is because the climate is so very different where they're from and many of these folks haven't acclimated yet. In Caroline County you're driving along the backroads: farmfields, woods, farmfields, woods and swamp, farmfields. The swamps smell like sulfur and in the spring the farms are covered in cow shit. It doesn't matter though when it's bright out like today it still makes you smile where your heart is.

You're driving along, and then in the middle of a farmfield you turn right and then next thing you know you drive up on some projects. Lots of little kids out front, screaming and laughing and playing on the lawns and speaking fine english in the street in front of the Community Center. And inside their parents are in heavy winter coats drinking floats and learning to write their names.

Last night Jason, a coworker, sent this over email:

I was doing intake & assessment in Federalsburg today and when I asked the question "Why is getting your high school diploma important to you?" This person responded that it was because of something President Barack Obama said during his address to Congress in February. This person quoted word for word the portion of the speech in bold below. I included more of the text from that portion of the speech just to be sure it was not out of context and I felt it evoked an even more powerful response.

"It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship. But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country – and this country needs and values the talents of every American."

Jay goes on to point out that he is not a Democrat and didn't vote for Barrack. Which, though we've never discussed it I think I already knew from mild comments he's made before. Now politically I try to stay the hell out of it, part of this is because my politics would likely fall so left of radical that they’d circle back around again to the right and this sort of confuses people. But mostly because I think the system, so long as it is motivated by money, will never be based in integrity. So I consider it ethically, thus fundamentally, flawed, and find that debate usually is only ever about making oneself look mighty at the expense of debunking another's right to their own beliefs, and often never really about open-minded discourse. In fact, I find that once a person finds out a couple of my own beliefs they usually then assume they know me downright up and down, and so goes polarity and the lac of bridge-gapping. And in truth, most us humans want the same things, love and security, safety and wellness, to be treated kindly and with respect. I dont know it's all so sad to me sometimes, even though this pigeonholing, I do it, too, believe me!

I believe in deep and vigilant personal responsibility. Insofar as ethics go I believe this, if practiced, extends naturally in to social responsibility. Inner-principal-values walking, or ethos of matreo-centred agroegalitarian deep voodoo, (haha ooops there I go again confusing people.) But anyhow. Here is this guy, this buddy at work Jason, who openly admits he's not a democrat but who works vigilantly and committed and for stoopid piddly compensation as a student advocate. He is without question the number one resource in the county at least that I know of for social service referrals, and is this gentle easy-going teddy bear of a guy who is absolutely adored by his students and committed to what he does. But my favorite thing about him, now, would be his walking ability to totally bust my own extreme lines of political stereotyping and illusion just by being the change he wants to see. Card officially, though gentely, pulled. I am grateful. His walking fires in others the ability, the courage to do the same, as this email above states. And he's mellow as hell, too! Thank god for this, for people like him and our pal Kim, who keep it going and going. I can't say I'll do this forever, but so long as there's black cherry floats involved, and students who can quote their president, I'll get in the ring at least one more day.

And that my friends is as political as it gets.

grace of movement

Yeah, so really, I've never been good at balance. Seriously, I mean the great quest to land the right combo of caine and wine, or weed beer and ex--these were fastidious choices i so thought would educate me in the wide wide world of what it would mean to be adult.

it doesn't work so good--trying to achieve that state of balance, some elusive chemical equilibrium, by messing around w the wiring like that in your head.

sometimes i think it took me the first five years of sobriety just drying out--like just to get some air, come up to breathe, make things not re-wire but un. dont know why this is on my mind--maybe cuz i got to spend some great time w those homefries that did me so good in the early days of what it meant to be clean, and young.

either way, here i am days and days since i wrote out loud!! as does this format of blog deliver me--and all bc i am pulling crazy long, and late hours at my new job. haven't seen the potlucking crew in ever, too.

but the miracle--i know that this is part of the pendulum swing, and i am standing, perched there on the edge, my feet steady hard stuck in but also dangling off just a little and the ground moving fast past me as i swing there, steady even, too and fro.

maybe balance has nothing to do at all w standing still?

perhaps its the perfect movement, the grace of the swing--the inner awareness of where you are being exactly how you are making it through, how there is no next step w out the one on the other side, that came before---

and guess what? i like my new job--i actually do. how cool--

Angel Moves

Wow. Lots going on. The MGY gang just left--hosting this conference for young ppl recovering from drugs and booze is a loooot of work!! but enjoyable work, and we are officially at t-minus 17 days and counting until the big event. i am wowed and awed by the simple, powerful preciousness of bringing hearts together for a common good. two of the ppl on our committee have been clean and sober for one whole year! this week, it is like a room full of sunshine to see the smiles on their sweet faces as they celebrate themselves and anticipate the conference that they dedicated this whole past year of their life to, too.

i am blessed.

(you are too.) (believe it.)

listen, if you want to see something beautiful that absolutely tears at your heart strings, go to this link and watch "Cameron Dances." it's my "baby" amy's baby doing those angelic moves....
http://www.youtube.com/user/keithojensen

i am working like a maniac at my new job, and getting ready for this conference, and loving fall and in general showing up and believing in life. that's really all it takes sometimes, huh?

may you, too, believe....

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...