Cuz it's my favorite kind of meditation & it reminds me of Sammy G

First Day of the Hunt

The schools always close,
knowing we're so country
all our boys will skip anyway,

and the valley rises together before dawn—

daughters pulling wool caps
past fathers' ears, reciting the profound
and elemental list:

rifle, rounds, knife, rope,

only to send each heavy man to the woods
where he'll slump the day in drifts
of solitude and prayer

while most deer stay down, evading
the unlucky, the night spent

visiting cousins: stroking curves
of antler, lengths of blood-stiffened fur.

Every year it's the same
soft and deliberate snow prints,
the waiting—

as if mine could emerge from his last hiding
place and walk the evening,
empty-handed, to me.

poem for the day by Paula Bohince

Seriously, if you've never tried:
let's posit that meditation is simply a means of going within
or, let's not posit, let's visit dictionary.com:
meditate
verb, -tat⋅ed, -tat⋅ing.
–verb (used without object)
1.
to engage in thought or contemplation; reflect.
2.
to engage in transcendental meditation, devout religious contemplation, or quiescent spiritual introspection.

okay, so if that's the case, reflecting or contemplating, even devoutly religious or quiescent
(-adjective 1.being at rest; quiet; still; inactive or motionless: a quiescent mind. ) or spiritual introspection that involves the mind. well. i am obsessed with this experience, maybe, naw likely because as a teenager and thus when my identity schisms were being chemically cemented by way of the all mighty hormone, i was early engaged in conscious-changing experiments that always involved substances of some sort. so now, sans-substance of course, i really dig on what can still take me to more open, or heightened, or even Still levels of being from within.

try reading a poem, really connecting the movement of it to your inner state. as means of quiescent introspection. join me in the tribe of the holy yogic creatix: from ecopoetshaman gary snyder "The yogin is an experimenter. He experiments on himself. Yoga, from the root Yuj (related to the English \yoke") means to be at work, engaged." join me in this fabulous dance of self-creating, supplication, sublimation on into beginning and beginning all over again....

p.s. also, if you read this far. the poem above reminds me of my friend sam. who i want to mention bc i dig him so much, too. brandon told me last nite he was headed to sammy's for some of the overflow of venison he's got this season. it made me so full of longing for hard, cold earth days that you walk through gingerly but assured purely by the warmth of your friends. the pond out back of the corn pokes and over the hill at sam and tim's. the goose blinds there that always mildly disturbed me, til the nite same cooked us goose soaked in oj in the black cast iron top of his wood stove. how it chokes me to look back on those times. growing up together: knowing sam as this goofy lanky dude that one time was already up in a tree that i suddenly needed to climb. or the night, last january time of Cold moon and god was it cold, and we walked through the woods at anngar the air with its bluehue that reminds you of the ghosts there in the body and bones of the ancient old land--and we were so cold that all at once bran and sam and me looked at one another and ran, under the full moon with cold cheeks and air that burnt our runny noses, all the way back to the farm house, and scraped together a meal of what sam had brought--oodles of noodles, and what was left of ours--some veggies and a little cheese.

how this time of cold calls for warmth. for friends. or good poems. or surrendering, at rest, quiet, still, to within.

Poems Poems Poetry

When the winter wheat comes I will think of you

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



that is a poem for the day by me



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



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





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

ok that is all.

Three is One: Lessons from Mercury Retro

Wow I had such a long day today I feel like I lived a million different lives. At an open house at the college's Continuing Ed department where I work, some of the various aspects of me literally collided this afternoon. I was barely manning the Adult Ed station when I noticed the women next to me had a booth set-up about a Reiki One class she was offering. I introduced myself and we got immediately in to one of those peacefull, clear and heightened-conversations. Next thing you know, out of the blue appears Tai-Chi Wayne from Chestertown, and now the three of us are jamming and in our own little harmonic convergence. Big talks, lots of light. In the middle of all it I notice that the bigboss from the Maryland State Dept of Ed just got there--I knew I needed to get my head over to the crowd around her. Wayne, upon my excusing myself, pulled me in for a quik reiki-share as means of departing, at which moment I was caught red-handed as the freeflowymoonymama I am: there in my Calvin Klein bizness trousers and sharp black fitted-sweater with my college nametag on, the whole Adult Ed staff witnessed my huruguru wyld woman as they sought me out for the bigboss. I took it in stride.

It gets better.

As I'm greeting the MSDE bigboss, here comes my bigboss, the head of the college's Cont Ed Dept. She wants me to meet her daughter, whom she has always claimed is just like me from looks on in. So off we go across the building to the conference room where her daughter is teaching a class. I meet her daughter hello hi hi hello. And then who should appear behind the daughter but Brandon's mom, who is taking the class because it is a farm management class for women. I've not seen his mom but once since I moved off Anngar farm.

Talk about convergence people.

I literally felt like, in those ten minutes time, I was in a revolving door and each time an opening passed it was a window in on my life. And more, for the first time in ever, I understood, like in me!! In my heart not my head!! that life, plainly put, IS NOT segmented. Which was exactly what me and Dena the Reiki Lady and Tai Chi Wayne were talking about: the web of life, the ecological truth of the wholeness, or interconnection, of all earthly things. That there isnoseperating any of it out, how same as run-off effects the river effects the ocean effects the fish effects the humans effects the air effects the stream...So too am I that same example of autonomy, at once functioning within the larger flow of all that effects me and that I effect. As the me who shows up for "real life" and my job is the same me that creates, is the me with the writing as a hobby that keeps me sane. Is the me in love, the me in need of me and Independence, the me who has a community, the me that is alone. And maybe it's true that all of those parts speak in somewhat different forms, but it's still the same voice I use, all as one.

The funny thing is I felt like I should have felt overwhelmed to swallow all of that all at once. And I did, in all honesty, cut out of there hella quik and get on the phone to my friend in Oregon...but I had to be somewhere else anyway. And what counts is I saw it all.

Which brings me to mercury, in retrograde right now. Reviewing reviewing reviewing. An excellent time to let life run its course and sort of just sit back and watch the stream float past, like little picture windows open but with nice screens and open breeze. To try not to get too connected to any of it, any thoughts or ideas or experiences or circumstances, as right now we are literally in soul review prior to first seed of spring. Think of it as a seasonal inventory. Time to take stock, once again, of within.

Anicha. This too shall pass. Anicha. The nature of all things is changing. Anicha. Changing. Anicha. Changing. All things rise. Anicha. All things fall. Anicha. All things pass.

Anicha. All things circle back, and by and by, again. Anicha. So it goes. Anicha. So it goes. Anicha. So may it be.

Teruah

Jesus do me this favor people: check out this band they're simultaneously out of NC and NYC. They're called Teruah. In certain alternative realities at certain right times of myth and moon I've known these guys. Realities like Love Myth Tribe or Farm Dirt Dust or Play. I think you might find you know them: there songs or souls, on some level, too.

Teruah

Seriously, since I moved down here one of the things I've spent time doing is re-getting in to music again. And the new songs by Teruah truly have at least a couple of the finest moments I've come across since then...Check out In a plane o'er the Niger this dig has the totally irrational complexitiy of musical continuation that makes me love and admire outsider musicians so the fuck much!! And the message in Edward Receives a Letter...is so subtle against the folky intro it sears my heart. Get on them, NOW! http://www.myspace.com/teruahmusic

To Dream

Weekends at Choptank...

Teena's Vietnamese and Thai infused pho with influence of Normandy Chicken!

I am sitting in my big blue bathrobe, front porch of Choptank in the corner near the heater, the only place I get wifi here on my own secret spot on the shore. I'm indulging in leftover ghiradelli peppermint bark from christmas--yummy breakfast just for me and also the only best part of this past commercial holiday season far as I'm concerned. Went back to work Monday after two full weeks off and woah--socking me in the face with a brick would be the closest reality to how that felt. I forgot how damn much energy I give to adult education. My heart and soul. That's it tho--how I do my life. With my whole heart and all my soul.

Weekends at Choptank so far are usually spent in my pajamas, so it felt good to put my foot down and choose not to go in to the office first thing today and instead take this morning in full lounge mode as I've grown accustomed. Teena cooks a lot when she's here; a lot of good, rich, enduringly satisfying and savory foods. I wear my robe, sit by the river, read, take pictures, write a lot. I cry, I pray. Soak in moments. Feel myself, my life, coming in through me. Through some block that I didn't even know had grown so strong and cold there. Sitting there just underneath who I used to be, who I currently dont know I am, who, in quivering moments, I know I have the potential to become...on the underside of it all there lay the instinct of my life, the force of me so raw at times that the pure alluring surprise of it startles me to tears.

It is incubation time. Time for the earth to draw herself long inwards for time-full and quiet rest. So too we find ourselves doing the same--tho perhaps wide awake at night, passion-felt and full with the waking dreams of what, of who, of how we could be. Take light of this waking felt in the night, this startling sense of suspended animation, of instinct towards joy and flight tempered regularly by dark and futility. So should it be. The whole purpose of a long sleep is that one may dream.....