What's Rad: Discover the Forest

I LOVE TREES!! go here

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...

I first found my some-kind-of-God driving over the Bay Bridge

...now the music just plays and the water goes and goes and sometimes so does the sun,
& my smile smiles like I cant stop...

I'm Making Something Special

...and it happens to be what I always envisioned myself making when, if, finally, I ever actualized authentic life as I saw it in my gentle laden sometimes madly wild imagination.

In addition to my novel, I am making a chapbook. I am mad excited about having a project to actualize before my book is even done. Wahoooo! Meantime I am in all my old journals, transcribing magicmaking loving every minute of all of this

from composition book 2, oct 09-june 10

5.31.10 Newport, Oregon Beth's House

the girl w/ one star in her eye

We talked long about generational heritage & the vegetable body: I told her that's my take on god, the other 93 or so %, the part running on involuntary. Proof. Proof is the wonder of mystery. She read to me out of a celestial goddess book which was pulled off the shelf to find a pic of Kwan Yen--who I paid homage to bc she called me to kneel down. Turns out she's the archetype of service, pure service, first thru the art of self care then that bares altruism to its fullest range & realm. But Kali Ma made herself known, too, & how happy I am to be here, on the coast, at home. Sometimes I still think & see him & a home meant for us. A place we will come to get away.

Kali Ma Kali Ma come to me again from way back when. She dark mother, she me she I crofton hoochie mamas til now--til then anyhow--Truslow Road when we used to cram the living room full of 20 heads. Oregon woods detritus of death--Kali Ma, dark mother. And this is the theme song the whole long time with Beth.

The underbelly--generations of wounds, subjugated, degraded, this unspoken darkness saddled to the necks, to the low backs, to second half--of us all. Dark mother--comes out in our broken sex ways, our broke ma's, broke pop's, our codependence & control. Kalima she is destroyer, great rebirther--she forces sight--

rememebers all.

So, too~the great turn. Also long talks of progress taking long, long times. Emily who I met thru Mark thru Ben thru Beth told a story of Maya Angelou speaking--she said how sorry, how very sorry she was to give children today this earth, this society, these contexts, yet

she said also, I promise you it's better this world we have to give than it was when I was your age--

& so it is & all things ebb & so they flow again--& now in time of greata ever loving western ebb is now for us peace makers, is time for us mythlivers, is time for us hearttrusters to again lay our seeds~

On Craft: Ferlinghetti & The Real Work.

Glad for the discourse, the go between that happens in the mythic when I engage myself creatively. The serendipitous alignment that entrances Brooks and I...couldn't get five pages of my novel done the other night so I blog rolled for inspiration and discovered Mike's post about Icarus. Dead-on time for me, because so recently I was feeling so good about having the vision for my book locked-in, but not being able to write had me fighting myself in such a gnarly way my wings definitely felt burnt. I write a response back, and link to a post I wrote last year about the Duende, and that post eyeballs me with Liz Gilbert's whole piece about creativity being a dance.

My job, do the work. Write the words, period.

Not my job: to figure out why or why not, how or when the Presence, the great Muse or Duende or Genie or Impulse or whatever else I call it, will show up and visit and it will all feel right and with the flowwww...

My job, do the work. Continue to educate, to read. To read to read to read, and to cultivate fresh, open mind. This is The Real Work--remember that? Literally, show up. & too, the intriguing relationship between showing up and taking in new knowledge and doing so in a non- prejudiced way. Let's take apart that word: non-pre-judged...My application of Real Work, to show up to your own life in a active way, courageously taking yourself on. Finding where you are programmed to beliefs, ideas or behaviors that are not authentically your own. Unselecting them.

Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First thought may be worst thought. This is Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Poetry as Insurgent Art. I love this. It is saying just that to me: question everything, including the what-I-consider-sacred. First thought=Best thought? Well, this is extraordinary, yes. Spondown works for me because I believe in honesty, writing the truest sentence I know. Which means I just sit down and Gooooooo with the words to get it all out, come what may. BUT--what if the first ten thoughts are fear-riddled, are examples of me lying to myself because it happens that the subject matter arises insecurities, and insecurities for me taunt out old defenses I picked up as a kid or something. First thought=truth in that scenario, but only in so much as Herman Hesse would teach. Everything is true, including the opposite of the truth...

So for today's lesson, kiddies? I'll leave us with us this, also from Ferlinghetti:

Dont be so openminded that your brains fall out.

& yet (fine, subtle nuance, funny little dissident line where ever-present newness of this eternal creative moment lives....)

Become a new mind and make it newer.