"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.)

Lively up yoself

I'm telling you, this song never ceases to put the cheesy sunshiney grin on my face, no matter what's going on. And it keeps showing up lately, yay!!

SAVED

Todo lo puedo en Christo says the tag on the back of the old Chevy beater with the barely there bumper straggling like its trying to catch up to the rest of the car. This is my favorite backroad in Caroline County, the one where the poetry comes through me most clearly, the one where the slaves call at me from the old Quaker homes and the marshy woods, the one that made me realize that whichever came first: human's delineation of the political boundaries of a land; or the land urging humans to delineate it first--regardless, places have a song, a Call all their own, a personality unique to the crying of its birds the moaning of its streets or how its trees find ease to sway.

I look at that bumber sticker and wonder if I know the Latinos inside that busted car. Then I think how merciless it looks, again and again, when I've been saved.

And then that's it, and the poetry's here...

And the song itself comes through me and out all busted, too, disjointed kind of like my latest dreams. Lines about Hondurans, their high, round cheeks and eyes deeper and darker then all the other countrysides and too their very light skin. Followed at once by the way the trees look early in the morning in the fading summer light, the green that changes on the bow how if your still, you know the slanted up way it has right now is because the light is actually coming from within... Or the wisteria, still glowing, but how she like a old sad lady surveying her faded skirts, is looking down...
Then Charlie, who's been dead almost a year, is speaking to me he is saying over and over again Lord make me an instrument of your peace and these are the same backroads I drove that night that I got the news about him. And what would happen if I pulled over the car of Spanish dudes and said, I'm it!! And so are you!! Christos esta aqui, conmio conmio and con ustedes, too!! Holding my heart, on the green backroads with the light green slant of trees and the long, long shadows on the other side. O! Mi Corazon!

Then I think how twice this week I've dreamt about her, the old friend that was most close to me all the way back then, the one I haven't spoken to or with in so long. And it clicks, how it used to trouble me when she'd show up in my dreams like that and make me want to scream, but that now it is good medicine. For there is nothing to figure out in her Second, Third or Fortieth Coming, other than Life, the thankless and the unanswerable, the humble sweep of the great fine hand. The way she sings deep in the utter boundless landscape of me of proof that I, that she, that Life will always be. And that's it, and that is all: certain backroads are where her bones lay and they feed the meat and juice of the land, and of all things that spring forward from those places to sing.

And this gave me peace because with others, too, that is how it shall be...

No more mantles for the myths of their flame

Only a graveyard, with a live ghost singing

& much as we are our ghosts

we are our friends

After that dream of her I dreamt of Cades and Walsh. They'd just gotten in after a long time of travelling and were tired, but ready and dancing behind their eyes was the simple clean need for some fun. I rushed to the kitchen and prepared a thoughtful stack of candied treats for them, and they took them, ate them, savored them, one by one, of a plate at my hands.

And then I think of Facebook, and how in the beginning all I ever did was look again and again at the wall and information about me. And what a narcissist I am and how that makes me laugh and grin most deliciously at me. And how hard it is to try to fake it that somehow that's not true. Walking up the sidewalk to the Family Support Center in Caroline County, the last of the words came through...

And if you dont get it I'm not going to bother to explain

to you words or poems make no more difference

than the rain

wait, mercury retro, again?? how did i not know this?

watch out it's about to take us skidding back over the landscape of our past three months. go see risa at nightlightnews.com, four paragraphs down (i haven't been able to get anything to paste to my blog for months now and i am too lazy to type it all out) and read about this mercury retro, starting sept 6th and going for three weeks.

and then let's stop using our heads so much! right now it's all about relaxing, softening the gaze and muscles and stance, deep breath so you can feel a smile emerge in your chest and permeate that rose light within. our bodies want to be sleeping more in preparation for the equinox and if we dont slow down now we'll end up sick. curl in to the burrow of you, and trust in the natural thrumming rythms that are loosening the heat under and just around your skin. let the boundary between you and the air goooooooo.... moon soak time, let those yearnings surface and re-begin...

list: random thoughts and change

1. i'm working A Lot these days it is fall semester re-enrollment time and all i do is get new students registered hola hola bienveindo or how are you welcome i'm going to test you but it's so i can help dont be scared. last week i passed my one year anniversary at this job.
2. bob dylan keeps singing to me i feel a change coming on. in life, this is all there is, change. perenial as the breeze.
3. i haven't written anything all week, except for friday poetry day the day i spent in pjs with books all day because the night before the calling moved in me sudden like it does which is when i so love it the most. so thursday night after i worked late i came home all charged and pumped and just kept moving got tea climbed in to bed, in to soft, cool, happy bed my sweet little nest of me pillows and softness and my precious sheets, my arms full of books my heart with the illustrious light. this little poem that came out of all that meat i come to bed carrying arms full of you and i love you every one, we will make love, arms full of us, all night, in the morning i will prop up and revisit you with a smile And how good that felt to wake up and do just that, and it's only a few days later but i haven't been writing or on the net at all, so i had to come here, and just let some of it download out.
4. it is fall out, how i love to lie still in the quiet air in the morning. i got home tonight and mat and pat or else ruth or the wacky neighbors to my other side were having a fire. o smoke smell that i love...sweet prayers that linger but go eventually above. and the air coming off the river is cool and with no balm. the peepers speak loud to the deep clear night and tomorrow is september's full moon. have you heard it, the first geese calls?
5. i want to blog about this, about passings, the earth walk, the time outside and our connections. i want to blog about my grlfriends and how they save my ass again and again. i want to blog about classism and seeing from the bottom up instead of the established and oft unquestioned view of the elite out, or down. i want to blog about memoirs and starting again and again and writing even though it makes your heart hurt. i want to blog about spiders and flowers and how that is the saddest part of fall when the flowers start to disappear. i want to blog about change and the difference one year can make, about last year this time and all that longing spent staring at the corn, hearing the paper stalks shake, seeing the fall sky spread, driving and driving the yellow backroads in the dry afternoons. how different it all is, how much has, and so of course how little has, changed. i want to blog about how i still cant believe and keep forgetting that i am 32.
6. the desiderata has been showing up again, and again, to me. it is so good, it's own magnificent prayer.
7. i'm taking a lot of new stuff on. creatively. it all lives in me and is always there, like air, even when i dont see it or cant remember it.
8. i'm tired of my job, there is no joy left in the chalky burnt ruin at the wick of me. the people that i work with i am posting pics of them to remember that before we are workers we are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, lovers, friends. they are shining stars.
9. i work hard. i try to do good work. we all do. and like me, we all let people down. we are all unique, and ascending, and all also so very much the same.