Kat's Wedding, Time w LDubb

WOW.

I am borderline freaking out right now. I just wrote this post, full w tons of links, about kesey and the merry pranksters and tripped out theories yadayada...and somehow just deleted the whole thing.

ughghh i feel sick.

Here are shots/thoughts from katherine's wedding festivities instead.

Kat, at the Bachelorette Party, officially

"sashed".

Ummmm, yes, so these red shirts say "Enjoy Katherine & Jacob, An American Tradition since August 16, 2008" Coca-Cola Classic Lettering, what could be more Americana than that?!

Awwww, lovely Kat. She is wedded in this pic, no more dragging rehearsals lasting hours or Southern-style toasts that kept us all up and weepy with laughter and light at the end of an already long day, well after dinner was served....

Wow, look at Laura Walsh and I. She doesn't wear anything, ever, but jeans and fitted t-shirts. How illustrious she is, how sleek and elegant and so otherwise hiding of her power-full powerfull ways....

So, the morn of the actual wedding, Laura and I were together at the Bridal Luncheon on this large historic estate on a creek that opened to the mouth of the River and gave a direct view of the vast horizon of the Chesapeake Bay. At meals end, we addled aimleslly about on the lawn, or the "green" perhaps I should say more fittingly, and found ourselves wandering through a tunnel cut in some hedges, English garden style. The tunnel led on to a peer which stuck out in the center of a dead-end finger of Langford Creek. It was all edged by hunched over tress with hangy vines in the limbs and lots of breathing greenery and the creek was brown and brought you to mind of the Mississippi and truly, it all really was a magical divergence of old country south and hints of English-style roots all in one. True divergence, as myth ought to be.... We sat there, sort of etherically lingering in the white sun while schools of fish splashed under us, talking deep talks shot through w our irreverant jokes and laughter, which is the way we do. And I prodded Laura at the end of it all, about how would we ever figure a way to get a big estate of our own. "Our very own Bohemian Estate, for all us artists to live authentic and surrounded by beauty. All Boho and walking around with parasols."

So which was better, Laura's shot of laughter at the irony of my vision, or the fact that later that day when we got to the wedding reception, held on Katherine's parent's estate edged by a space of water historically named Comegy's Bite, they actually handed out parasols...!

Dinner of course was exceptional--gazpacho w crab followed by the tenderest slices of juicy rare filet. But the best part, captured below (again in the ethos)...was the haunting experience LWalsh brought to the whole affair...

Yes, Epic. Mark another one down for my records of the Sutras...my archives of the Tribe of Us....

Sarah Ban B & Sacred Spots

I have this quiet place where I go. It's in my room. (Yes, Brandon and I, in addition to our bedroom, have our own rooms.) (This is probably the only reason that we've lasted as long as we have.) This idea of a quiet spot, which I actually refer to as my sacred spot, is not original. It came to me from the book Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach. I was 21 when I got that daily meditation book for my birthday in March of 98. And by the Fall, when I was moving my stuff in to the slant-walled wooden-floored attic-apartment on Washington Avenue in Chestertown, to start my first semester at a real four year school, I was sold on the ideas that Sarah Ban shares about personal sacred space. But my translation, back then, of seeking bliss within included bong hits to catalyze that written about state of quiet and rapture. In my first Chestertown apartment I sat on a big stuffed maroon pillow from Wal-mart in the center of my bedroom with my little pink "daybook of comfort and joy", a gratitude journal, and my Cabbage Patch lunchbox with the pink plastic bong and insence in it rested by my side. I sat cross-legged, lotus style like I'd seen all the hip wise ones do, and tried to tap open those doors of consciousness I'd heard so much about.

By January, 1999, my mom re-handed me a copy of the same book she'd gotten for Christmas. I was so out of my mind on script tranquilizers that I most strictly associated myself with a big amoebic blob. I felt sludgy and goopy and like I just sort of melted across the floor towards whatever I direction I was heading in rather than actually using feet to walk. And the floor was heavy: it weighted me down. My face felt large and pulled at the same time. The rest of my body felt spinny and without actual confines. And worst of all, I didn't really know it. My consciousness was so numbed I couldn't tabulate any vision of my real reality. Meds are like that, or can be, anyhow.

I was two or so weeks out of the mental hospital and heavily overmedicated. I was diagnosed with a mental illness, a severe one, and put on gnarly doses of anti-psychotics, anti-seizures and anti-depressants to tackle it, to tackle "me". I swarmed around and around inside of me, sludging along on the outside. I dont remember much. But I do remember sitting down in the living room trying to read that book again. And it did not click. Those meds left my brain neurons, and all that life juice, just about two steps behind.

I dropped out of my second semester at Washington College to stop there at the Ward. One institution to another, how I've always looked at it. Is it dramatic to say the two aren't too terribly far apart? I'll never claim non-drama. So I didn't really have a room at my mom's then, when I came out of the hospital to recover. My room was vacant, in my little spot on Wash Ave with the pillow and scuffed hardwood floors. Which is why when I again went looking for a sacred spot, a place all of my very own, where I could celebrate me and relax and give permission to and better know me, I found myself crouched down on the floor next to the old pleather covered toy box that still sat in the corner in my brother's old room. And I took one deep breath and bowed my head there. And I whispered something--to something? I dont know what on either accounts but I am almost sure that it had to be something like help me. And then I heard mom's footsteps on the stairs, and I quick got up and zipped, or anyhow sludged away.
It was years before I was off the meds. And by then I had learned, from my own self and much due to regular daily pauses of reflection and time within, which just means true honest time with me, that I was not mentally ill but quite chemically sensitive--or in other words the medical definition of a drug addict. And who cares the nature of the drug--street or pharm--they all affect me different.

That book changed, or maybe saved, my life. To this day when I am funked I guarantee you it's because too much time has passed since I got to sit down a while with me. I had a great sit-down this morning. And a decent enough one with me yesterday, too. It had been a while. Again. Try it sometime.

Me, in my Sacred Space or "Meditation Spot" on Wash Ave, Spring 2002, sans bonghits, booze & most of all my "ideas"

Anicha Anicha

Well, the digital didn't show til yesterday. So here is my life, no job as of last night but a potential interview? waiting in the wings. And another restaurant gig as a good possibility, with a killer talented chef friend of mine--her dream come true!! tho the plans keep getting pushed back for the opening date. And me, robo-eating like these fricken doughnuts might catch me a buzz or help me forget the night or at least drop me some of my inhibitions and make me dance better, sure I dont want to wait tables for the rest of my life but confused as to any other move. We shall see...letting the river flow is what I say I am doing but the rib-grease on my face, if I consider too deeply, clues me in to perhaps some deeper feelings of untapped stress...

Getting ready for Kat's wedding this weekend. And instead of looking for jobs, just hoping on this one phone call and otherwise researching grad schools. Been a couple of years, and anti-institution as I am I still am having these moments where I catch myself, like, Seriously? Seriously are you thinking of getting involved in the dogma of academia again? Then I check my righteousness and my own common roadblock of me and remember with a breathless swing how much I love knowledge and NEED and CRAVE stimulation. Then I think about having a smoke. And laugh and roll my eyes at myself cuz I sure do change from day to day. Or minute to minute. Anicha Anicha, this is Sanskrit: Changing. Changing. The nature of all things....The river as it flows...

(Ughhgh too deep for me right now. Chips and salsa it is.)

Here are pics from my farm, followed by a brief poem by moi.


"My Tree"


Sunflowers in the garden







The Only Truth is Change

I have all

the whole perfect world

balanced

on this thin silver of

this tip

oh pencilprint

oh failure

oh searching

oh simple

several

masks of god

oh blessed blasphemy

of me

Parties, & Cycles & Life on the Farm

Kirsten Russel, Laura Scimeca


Equinox Bonfire and Fullmoon Jamfest, Seed-tending Time, Anngar Farm.
All photos courtesy of & brilliantly done by Geoff Demeritt




So, guess who finally, finally got a digital camera? Just in time for our next Farm Party! Tho I would never go back on hiring Geoff to photograph our last big Jam in March...

I gotta say, it's really been slow-going for me, metrosuburbanite girl now living this crazy outsized life here on the farm--the sunflowers like trees bent down now to kiss the ground from where they come, the bob-white singing in the bows of the holly each morning, the shadows on the porch that make the greens so green and the light so white and gold. The wind like an ocean through the sycamore leaves. The corn, so tall and ripe, taller than the street from the angle that I am used to peering at the roads so that now I can't see who is driving through this little patch of country that we call ours. How funny that this computer I write on is only 9 months old, this online deal now only 8a way of life for me for 8 months? It feels like forever--and change, balance, transition, is so subtle in its various manifestations that we curse ourselves with missing how easy it goes by...complaining all the while how we're missing it.

Tommorow is Bran and I's last big summer party--summer, that is, if you're going by the school rotation of the year. But it is the perfect time to celebrate, with the earth waning as she does and already, here on the shore, so clearly expressive of her tides. I saw my first V of geese yesterday, already. On my back flush with the ocean and parallel completely to the sky, I rose up out of my saltwater bob like a magnet had drawn me only to see a formation of geese flying across the top of the westend of the sky. And I thought, what? They only fly like that at travel time, at season's change....then last night on my ride home from the ocean, just as I turned on to the back farmroads near where I live and stake my current claim, there they flew again, in the orange and near green pre-thunderstorm night. And the weather this moringing--it speaks of fall. Go outside and let your mind float--see to it that you, too, know this to be true...

So this party tommorow was meant to have some fine musicians taking the stage, but every band we scheduled backed out than recommitted than backed out once again. Hard to say who will come. At this point, the only official band we have on is Firey Steve and His Moosehead Friends, these way hip young dudes right out of C-town. I am amped and fully stoked to see these kids come on. Otherwise, there are slated to be a lot of single performers--friends whose bands can't come or aren't all able to play together etcetra. And so it should be, Harvest time is about the individual's gifts and and at once about collectivity--which is why the energy of Harvest parties always always bring out the best jams....Impromptu sessions to light up the night...

Here are a few of our far out friends, in their finest elements, making music and soul shaking back at the turn of light..Equinox full moon first day of Spring...



Chris and Josh of the Turnpikes,
Brandon Hoy
Josh Britton of The Sweetheart Parade
Laura Walsh of Forgetful Francis

Marc Dykeman of Plans Plans (forground), Mat Warrington of The Turnpikes



Sam Guthridge, Chester River Runoff

Timmy and Greg Parent, formerly of Astralyte



Leah and Brooke, of Blue Heron Farm and The Shuman Compound

My tribe, my art, my madness, my home

They say write your madness. Or specifically, your obsessions. Cuz that's what makes you a liver of this life, a qualified human being with your own unique something to say. It's true. Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones (read this book) tells us it's okay about our obsessions. Actually she goes as far as to say make a list of them, because when you get down to writing and having to be there, alone with yourself on the page, one of two things is going to happen. You'll either tunnel in and extol on and on all about those couple of things that whirl away most of your brain activity from day to day and at the very least be self-informed when you're done, or else your going to try to avoid them, and in doing so, either not write at all or else end up ONLY, with sort of neurotic blinders on, writing about the one thing that in every other waking moment of your life you spend so much time trying not to look at.

I am mad about my family--my tribe and friends and the people I seem to have come here with. Their karmic patterning and how they are reflected in me and we are all rooted up in each other. Knowing this, really getting in to the stink and the light of it, helps me better decode who we each are trying to be. I'm mad about my art, the self-expression of my madness, and of anything that prompts that or helps me digest it or want to pump it out of me. I am mad about my madness: my spiritual growth or anyhow the experiences of this here soul. Sometimes I am mad about people, certain people, but I chunk them in with the tribe thing. I am mad, I get mad, about this idea of one single word, about the digressions and assertions and the alertness and sensitivity and the conflicts of mine and everyone else's ideas about this one word God. I am mad about Home, and place. And Youth. Music. Soul. Nature. But these all come back to the same couple things, in no particular order--my tribe, my art, my madness, my home.

I want to go back and write about a couple of momentous experiences from this summer but I am also not sure where this will take me, and so it may take a couple days/a couple posts. Firstly, Artscape. The nation's biggest free public art festival--on the streets of Baldamore every year in July. Mom claims we went there to the festival alot as kids, up to the top of MLK in the heart of the city a block away from the hospital where she worked and sometimes got to go sit in the nurse's lounge and play. I do have a mass of memories from childhood labeled city. The physical fragments I recall are of half-way up stuff and commotion: from the knees-up of people in Lexington Market or the other one on Cross Street, the door-up of tall tall buildings in the commerce section where dad worked, the tires-up of fast moving cars on the grey corners and the light coming down the eyelevel alleys from the way-up sky. And the way the bay at the Harbour made you aware of all that sky. The towering sense of life all about you in little splotches of movie-slide detail: how the city brings all that life in a magnified way right on top of you as a kid and you can feel it pulsing there, wizzing on top of you and moving all around you and passing you ever so quickly by and how all that power, all those dizzy half-up visual moments are compounded in to the couple of memories the soft grey flesh of your brain was willing to stop and say hey, I'll take this one down. Mostly my memories are visceral: the cool feeling of the water that spritzed me and my three-year-old boyfriend Kurt when we walked under the misters at the Harbour after the Science Center or the Constellation or the Aquarium and my socks and my shoes got wet. The heat on my ankles that rose up off the street tar. The sweet smell at the Greek festivals that I will forever associate with sticky fingers and bahklava. Being a kid, being so close to real life there on the ground. And the music, the music brushing my ears and the magical feeling of grass in the middle of all that concrete, the music literally moving by my head on the air, through my hair and me with the grass and the late twilight heat of July and mom's artist friend Ellie: being a kid and the touching throb of life that is art and how as kids all that art which is life is still so natural a rhythm to us. Tired after a long day in the sun with all the half-up views at the festival that made mom's eyes twinkle in wonder and her breath go breezy: Artscape.


Sean my brother said it ain't Artscape if it ain't a hundred plus fucking degrees. Yep, that's to be an adult at Artscape. We drove up from Chestertown and got there on Sunday, the last day of the festival, around 11 in the morning. We were laughing and rolling our eyes with tender family humor and had made decisions to go with the day because my mom and her family, her sister and brother-in-law and three of their kids were all coming up from the beach, too, and my mom's family likes to claim to plan things but really it's an excuse for them all to complain a little and at once laugh at each other I mean really laugh until tears come and then in private each one say something mildly injured but also always very funny. And the plans never ever go according to schedule and mostly just get lost or forgot and that is mom's family, and why I love them, how human they are, how imperfectly annoying but able to laugh so frolickingly hard at each other cuz at least they sort of partly see the imperfections and the laughter reminds us we all have that in common. But before I remembered that I just got alot of phone calls from mom and Sean, who was going to the festival to meet us with his new girl from his home in Columbia, about trying to plan and to meet and if there is one thing I cant stand it's going to a wide open place of Life and trying to manage or create the experience. So Bran and I did what we do best. We agreed to quiet. We started the day in the front lawn of our farm, corn rows all growing high above the street and us in the sun Thanking the Day for the Harmony it was meant to bring. With our arms up wide above our heads our hearts open pointed at the sky. Then we got in the car, drove an hour and fifteen minutes cuz I only know how to drive fast, to Lombard Street found free parking and had the best day we could have never planned...

The Wailers were scheduled to headline as the final wrap-up act and that was at 6. First we walked Mt. Royal on the right side and I relished in every single vendor stand that I came across. Right away I saw something that I wanted to buy. This guy doing little sculptures made from rail ties. The were small like the size of a fat grey Barbie doll and on a little steel stand. And they were so alive--enchanted! I loved them. They had little placards that said things like "The Morning After" with a railroad tie-made man perched over a railroad tie-made toilet. Or "Chiropractor" with a railroad tie patient getting his leg yanked above his head by a railroad tie doctor. They were so gloriously irreverent it was like they were smiling wryly at you and winking their non-existent railroad tie eyes. I wanted the waitress one. Immediately, art came alive and life spoke to me: the sacred mundane, ahhhhhhhh.

By the time we got to the top of Mt. Royal where the local music stage was we were hungry and wanted a snack. Best part of Artscape besides the free music and the street performers and MICA being open and the Symphony Opera House being open and Lyric being open for free shows all day and the many many vendors and the children's theater's and the hands-on displays is all of the all of the all of the very good food. This year they had a green/organic food court too but we never even made it there. Instead we split a big serving of chicken curry sitting on the curb listening to a funk/punk fusion local band. And when we were done we got up to walk down the other side of Mt. Royal and see those vendors when what do you know there was mom, Aunt Lori and cousin Mason and he was jamming with this short wiry dreadlocked black guy like they knew each other forever calling each other things like chief and smiling and sweating. We chilled with the fam awhile. Then here comes Sean and his girl, and of course we all found each other by happenstance there in the middle of the festival come together under the hot sun.
This is a card from a pack that the non-profit Art with a Heart gave to me after buying a craft from them. The image was done by a woman who lives in a shelter for homeless women and their children. Art with a Heart basically does programming throughout the city, empowering folks by giving them tools and permission for self-expression through all kinds of different art forms. Half the profits of what they sold at Artscape that day went to the artist, the other half back to the organization to keep it going. HOW EXACTLY IT IS THAT? A real live art co-op functioning in the midst of some of the most hopeless accounts that life can deal. I bought a decoupaged mirror from a fat-faced boy who shyly showed me his work and beamed when my heart jumped because the colors he used for his mirror are the vital colors of me in my joy essence. I bought it spot on out of sheer joy essence though whether it came from his beam or my love of the colors I am not sure. Support these people and this group.

The other thing I bought was a print by James Mayfield, out of New York, called Woman Grounded In Thought. His site is under construction right now, but when it is up if there is a link to this piece check it out. I love how this gals whole body has been shaped by the forces trying to move her, and how stalwart and solid she is in her conviction to stay right there. How you can tell that whatever reason she is standing there, veiled, being pushed by the wind but staying so still against it all the while, is deep enough a part of her that her very being will be shaped by it ever after, like water wearing on stone. That is me. Has been. Busy, stuck and grounded going nowhere. It made me melt a little inside and get a teenybit wet-eyed. Even though the very polite James' buddy grabbed my brother aside and pointed out that the reason he liked the print was cuz of the woman's "poppin booty".

Other than that my big moment of the day was seeing the Full Circle Dance Collective at the Lyric. They performed a shortened version of a piece called the Sacred Body. Exploring the various experiences of religious sublimity and such themes. I love to dance, to let my body go, and this was the first time that watching dance actually made me feel the same exact ecstasy as when it's me doing the moving. I was sitting there in the dark, during the first act called "Supplication", a very Christian theme which I at once struggle with and am enraptured by, and suddenly I was crying. Like sob stifled in my throat so no one could hear me crying. The Sacred Body was intensely religious for me, of the oneness in-bliss, truest kind.

All in all it was an amazingly flowing day. And ohtheirony, it brought me home to me, grounded in thought as I'd been, insistent this year on going my own way. Remembering the bit of good there is in every single side of how one looks at a thing.....

**

First Harvest just past. The birds outside our windows are crazy busy, making nests and gathering food and the noises they make sound like someone digging frantically through a box trying to find some lost piece of something in order to take with him back home before anybody sees it's gone. They flit around a lot. The sun is going further away in the sky. Things are turning. The birds know.


I am going to the beach today. Got a ocean of floating to do.