Be Kind, Plato said

I was so dark and gnarly yesterday.

It was hella hot out, and I only got maybe an hour of complete sleep Thursday night. I had errands to run and other little life things I told a friend I'd help with yesterday morning, then lunch with mom and there's nothing that disappoints me more than paid-for bad food. Next was work at 3 and by the time I got in there I thought I'd fall over I was so miserable. Of course I got my period. Sometimes even the thought of PMA (choosing the positive mental) just pisses me the fuck off.

I have learned, however, to take myself--especially at my most foul--lightly. Be kind, Plato said, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. To practice this most effectively I have begun at home: compassion for my self.

There is a Sanskrit word for the Western understanding of Changing. It is Anicha. Anicha is the Buddhist quality of human nature: the flowing whimsy of the unswept mind.

Liken Anicha as a concept to a stream. You're chilling waterside, in the woods, watching the water go by. Ah it's so mellow, the air feels like dancing, the trees are sighing you can hear them. The stream sounds like a hushhh. The water is one body, but keep your eyes on one singular spot. Watch there goes a leaf floating on top. There goes a funny rivulet of bubbles....Now nothing but water but even it fuses and blends and seems to change forms, now a water bug floats along followed by a thin brown branch. Changing, changing. Anicha. The water surface changes and yet. It's always the same. This is the mind, the ego self. There too is the watcher by the stream. Quiet witnesser, where breathing lives.

And so this is the alchemy of magical thinking, Anicha. What 12-step rooms teach as This Too Shall Pass. (And come again, too) There was a time, a long time for me, that hopelessness of thought or emotion or physical slug trapped me, like Chinese handcuffs the harder I'd yank to get away the worse it'd take hold. Samsara is Sanskrit, too, and basically means those little mental loops we get stuck in, the ego with its roughian bloody jawgrip it takes hold, clamps down and causes the resistancy to growwww. Maybe your little loop of samsara is about paying a bill. Ah there it floats on by oh crap it's due next week... but that's when I was going to get my oil change too...Here's where you loosen up, you watch the thought without chomping down, ahhh there it goes. Or where the deathgrip grabs it, ego ego human control, takes hold. The looping intensifies. The loop track gets bigger. More and more fear and loathsomeness...What the fuck's the point? My always final absolute last bad thought in that miserable loop.

Somewhere in the center is compassion. For ourselves, our sick twisted imperfectly perfect little human minds. And oh the great joy of laughing at it, not taking any of it too seriously because why? If heaviness is just going to increase the misery flow? This is first axiom of those Eastern Wisdom Teachings: Life is suffering, because of addiction to the ego's flow. Detachment just means the wisdom of Anicha. And compassion is an action word, love and gentleness with ourselves....

What if all life was just about enjoying the flow, being open as possible to the nutty updown of the ever present moment?

What if Anicha gave you the power to choose for it to be so?

What if?

Or better~why not?

Mercury went Retrograde yesterday, nows a great time to practice lightening up on your self. Read all about here.

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....

Reminds me of hearts with wings

Wowed, again. Postcard from Vinyl Haven

Maybe it's getting old, if so I apologize, but this whole being-at-ground-zero getting to re-invent myself experience is just such a constantly enjoyable pleasure...

Right when I get to the siege part of over-shooting my range, right when I get to that overconfidence place that crashes me in to feeling like I blew it and have landed blindly in the forest again, right when I get baffled and anxious, full of totally not-trusting in the wild instinct and new treasury of openness, Life kicks in and doses me with inscrutable evidence of self-love and newness, gentleness and aha serendipity grace.

I love travelling, even when at first it totally stresses me out. Monday night I was up until 6am. Which was hella fun... But then I got up three hours later to work a double, the night time part of which included god-awful taco tuesday. After that I had to pack and drive over two hours to outside Baltimore from the beach. I was so resistant to the trip that I actually had to stop at a gas station on Kent Island and nap for 45 minutes at 1:30 in the morning. I got 3 hours of sleep that night at my cousin's house. Then we caught a plane to Boston, then we caught a scary much littler plane to the coast of Maine, then we caught a ferry to the Island where I am now chilling, in a Bed and Breakfast, three doors down from my cousin Jackie who's marrying a local lobsterman on Sunday. A lot has happened in my life since I was last here at Jackie's in July 2008, and I am comfied in my room here with my sister-cousin Erin, with whom I share the gift of never-feeling-judged-by, which is perhaps the most tender and invaluable gift of all. We slept 10 hours last night, stumbled out of bed for french toast by our host, then returned to bed and snuggled and talked til noon today, the Vinyl Haven fog out the window foraging more air more air more air to overtake and decidedly against burning off. At some point we dressed, listened to hip-hop, and walked the island with no agenda but to let the day greet us as it wished, and later met one of Jackie's bridesmaids-who-happens-to-be-a-guy at the dock when the 3:30 ferry came in. And then, can you say Lobstahrolls!?

The serendipity since we've been here has been endless, right in line with how I started off my week, my Monday-mantra, : Look ahead, for the Greatest Adventures are yet to come...True that. I found two books in the used bookstore today for a dollar each, one of them I just told the World over the weekend that I wanted to acquire. Mark Twain is following us around. I found two more books right in line with two original theosophy/social therories I am trying to intertwine in to my novel. My book (started fresh, no more memoir, now a fiction novel) keeps getting more and more vivid in my head. I am in the den of our B&B about to start writing. Brooks and Kirsten and Mildred all got in Baldamore touch within 24 hours of each other... Out my window there is Atlantic chilled and salty wind.

Hey blogoworld, can you feel me, my contagious smile?

Just wondering.