Choptank: On acceptance, and Place

Oh, Chop.

I love it here. When I was little we moved in to a plastic-siding house on a plot of land backed up against a tobacco field. Dad put a swingset out back, first the aluminum kind with the poles that rose up out of the ground when you got to pumping your legs really hard on the swing, then a chic wood one with rope ladders and a see-saw. My uncles and the neighbors came over one weekend and put up a wood fence, the kind with two posts on either side and two going length-wise in 8 x 5 tracks all around the backyard. You could climb it easily, or sit on the top rung of it, and the wood eventually grew dusty and warped from the summer sun. We had a wide yard with grass that was yellow and crunchy and hurt your feet by August. Eventually mom and dad built a small screened in porch on the back of the place and we ate dinner out there and my favorite was cook-outs, which we had a lot off and which I still yearn for, and organize now in the summer all the time. It was the suburbs, we were the fourteenth house in that neighborhood in Dec of 1980 and when we moved a decade or so later there were close to three hundred or so. It sprung a pang in my heart, even young like that, to see the farms lost, or the spots in the woods where we'd sneak off to where the old streams and black bows of trees hung, the creeks with the rope swings that creaked when you swung, the old dirt roads that even then we knew had secrets, all that wild area coveted because it was off limits according to the grown-ups. It hurt a bit even then to see it get paved over and disappear. But we lived the burgeoning 1980's fast-money suburb dream and I was raised to not question it: first VCR, MTV, first microwave, wow convenience and American life sure was fun!

I'm not sure when my mind changed about all of that, or if change is the right word. College on the rural side of the Chesapeake Bay, amid the farm lands and all the little antiquated towns of history run along the backroads here had a lot to do with it. Anyhow I was talking to a friend last night about sense of place. Identity and belonging. I believe that where we are from, regardless our consciousness of it, holds so many clues to the whole of who we are. The consciousness or in other words the regularities of your way of life there, this is so shaped by the land, by the very landscape to which you've grown accustomed. And by landscape I mean in its sociological entirety: are your surroundings city streets, are they strip malls, are they well-manicured lawns with a cement driveway and two car garage? And grown accustomed isn't the right term either, more appropriately I would say taken for granted. As in born in to, never having the experience of knowing anything different.

This morning, out my backdoor, these were my surroundings:

I took my coffee out to the Pier it was so, soo still. The Choptank River. No matter what, she calls my name. Sometimes, when I come home late as I often do, worn to the bone from giving so much of myself to work, I get out of the car and in the dark what I hear is the quiet gentle lapping of her incoming tide. Sometimes, a day or two before a storm, she is so eerily like the ocean--fast-moving--that it puts a chill on me. And then, like today, she is calm and still, quiet, reminding. All is Well. I stood out there breathing it in, with no means of escaping the perfect quiet contentment in my heart. It rained a long, soaking spring rain yesterday and today it is delicious out, about 55 and by the afternoon with all the day's sun everything will be stunning green. How precious, this gift of life and the reminder of the circles. The regularity of the changing, passing tide. The periodic wild currents, the peaked stillness at times, the shocking moments when the water rides far, far out and the brown mud is exposed and the marsh grass grows dry. And I, I here, get to take it all in.

I saw three different muskrats this morning. Three at different times. In all my life I've only ever seen one. Here is the totem medicine of muskrat (from http://lowestoftspiritualcentre.co.uk/Animaltotum.aspx): Grace, keeping ones own counsel, silent observation. In the silence, after watching the third little muskrat float and surface again and again among the reeds, I was startled by a giant splash. Behind me an osprey was lifting out of the water with a squiggling perch speared in its talons. Life eats life, you know? It's how we go, how we grow. I am so thankful to be at this place, and this Place, in my own cycle.

Today is hopefully the final day of moving off the farm. And just so were clear, when it's all said and done and I am sitting out back at low tide with the white metal legs of my beach chair sunk deep in the mud, I will probably at some point jump up, drive an hour across the bridge to the other side, eat some fricken sushi and go to the mall. Cuz life is life, all of it, every blessed part. It's just so amazing getting to walk all of it, eyes opened as they can be to every part of the whole.

Best news yet...

New Moon Celebration

Well, if you visit here with me regularly or even semi-regularly you know that I am on the great serendipity kick of 09 right now. #seventeen-trionoron and gazillion (that's right, i am now making up my very own number system as means of catching the whole): half-awake and dreaming/waking for about twenty minutes or so this morning at, i can only guess, 4 or so. fully awake by 5 when i realized the fuzzydreamstuff had a flatline sense to it and that i must be transiting with the new moon. indeed, i lay there, cozy, warm in my soft sheets in the dark watching my thoughts run off like a kite and then grabbing them by their little squiggle tail just at the end, sitting in the clamor of the thoughts until the stillness emerged from within, and certain as i am sitting here before the sun is up getting ready to go to the gym--again and again in the stillness it was eminent

Time to rise up and be the change you've been striving for
Time to give yourself over to it
Time to greet with joy this new skin

Time to get out of bed was more like it, so down i came, trying out this new pattern of rising super early to start the day--and on the net to read about today's new moon.

And!! And and and!! Please go to astrowisdom and read about the new moon in aries. i can't even believe the likeness of this mornings quietude, right down to the details of being, this very moment, just about to leave for the gym...

Lisa over there respectfully requests that no quoting or paraphrasing be done to maintain the integrity of her site, so please do your self a favor and stop by and check her, and the cosmos around you by which you turn, out

i wish you the most beautiful beginnings, ya'll.....

Long Dirt Road

Signs that I am getting better, # 1:

I was driving home tonight and Feist came on the radio. Pardon me if I am late with this, but I love this woman...and tonight, or this evening dusktime in farm country with the returning ospreys low swooping and the black trees against the mute orange and greys of the sky--Mushaboom came on. To say I was obsessed with song may be rather mild--indeed this past summer it was on constant reply in my head, an antagonistic message I couldn't quite grasp. (The words may indeed tip you off as to why, gentle reader, that is if you are at all a regular follower of these here words/this here life.) But I've never heard this song on the radio before. Well I lately only listen to pop music, silence or talk radio in the car because the slippery thin line between depression and real life for me is so subtle~~so fucking subtle but so MAJOR, you dig? And guilt, shame (which I've learned to re-identify for myself as self-judgment) and pity for me in the months since I moved out are a torturous landslide of boundary-less-ness, much like a brutal watercareening mudslide in a mean torrent of rain. There's just no way to tell once I've slipped over the slope and am stuck swirling within, no land to grab in sight. So tonight I'm driving along and on comes Mushaboom, contextually a song that would call up that ol tramp Melancholy and give her reason to let it rip. But tonight I drove along aware--aware you guys!! of the outline of my heart! You know, like blissing along with the music, aware of the tenderocity of life, actually feeling little tweaks in my heart but sure as those tweaks were one with the song they were one with the trees and those birds and that farmhouse over there, too. My sweet blessed broken healing heart, widened now and once again, even more softened at the edges. And thank god for the edges--that they were there and it wasn't just nebulous, patterned pain... If you have a minute visit this youtube video of her singing Mushaboom it's a trip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDZwThM7vAg
People do not do near enough choreographed dancing! I mean, cmon, I came from the eighties, you dig--the apex of MTV and the step step step kick and up, down and hands through the hair seductively and step and kick and again! Thank god for that, and thank god for dancing in general--which is probably sign # 2 I am getting better: I am doing an awful lot of bad pop song car dancing lately...

Anyhow. I read two excellent posts tonight, Serendipity number 6 zillion and twenty-two and 6 zillion twenty-three. The first, here, is a fascinating succinct read about body energy/the earth's energy, found on flip flopping joy. It took me a third of the way down to realize it was written by a man--there shows my clear gender bias, but his instinct on feminine/divine feminine patterns and injuries is so, so well done--and a full half of the way down to realize it was written about sex!!! Which just goes to show I am not always good at reading the titles. The second, here, is by my first writing mentor's husband, Jeff, and is in tune with my own recent re-discovery of the bliss of the great Mystery...

I have laundry piled up, literally, to my head. Time to go be a grown-up.

I did it my way

So, a brief little bit about serendipity, or synchronicity--just for fun. This is a term started by Jung, but studied well and introduced to common cosmology in a hands-on, follow your bliss way by Joe Campbell.

I'll start a few weeks ago, when I was home ill. I'd been feeling in a creative rut, and ethically confused. One seemed to generate the other, though I can't tell you which came first. What I do know is par for me, when my perception, or inner-awareness is changing and expanding, it always comes first in the form of discontent and break-down of the old. This is a dismantling that I am accustomed to in the winter. It's how I cycle. I think many of us creative, sensitive souls are like this. I also think we need to ban together. We are the myth-makers, out here on the periphery edge of things, in contact with the nebulous stuff of our souls. As all reality starts in this realm, consciousness of this task, responsibility to the "Underground" journey if you would, is necessary. So, winter is more than hibernation, it's coming in to creative union with the darkest, furthest out-there obscure parts of us.

I love right around February--whatever your myth--when first seed starts to spark in the subconscious. The first inner quakings, the first inside longarmstreches of bliss. For me this year there was a great inner conflict going on: I manage enrollment for GED students and students of English as a Second Language for two counties around where I live. I interview, assess, resource manage, advocate for and place all of these individuals. Roughly, that's well over 300 students a year. The toll of the economy, intensified by the clear line between those who come from middle to upper class backgrounds verses someone from working class or poor roots and the opportunities, and/or lac thereof, AND MORE, the narrow-view of bubbled reality that most mid to upper class folks live in was beginning to sicken me. Partly because my own awareness of myself as a well-meaning dogooder, but all the same an ignorant dogooder, was increasingly clear. But I've been a social radicalist for a long time now, ever since I was 14 in my purple riot-grrrl boots, to be sure. So yet again I was sick, outraged. And extremist in my initial solution-thinking, as often I am: I will quit my job because it is inside the system and the system is broke so it aint, ultimately, worth a hot damn and I will commit myself full-fledged to wild woman life, living native and self-sustained off the earth and practicing and learning and learning and practicing healing wisdom and sharing this naturally with whomever I am meant...

And also, amid all this: WHERE?! WHERE is my tribe? Where are the people of my generation, my peers, with the like-minds? Not just the hippie veggie growers or the long hair or tattooed musicmakers, but the activists? And not the DC urban game-players either, I mean the real street-pavers, the ones out there, too, in the funk? And well, don't you know, I was blog-rolling, and decided to look for Earth Path/Wild Women blogs. And there they were. To paraphrase my friend Kelly J: There is no separating out my spirituality from my activism. (Starhawk often has great and similar thoughts on this, too.)

So that's what was happening during my first seeding. Lots of revel around Power. The filling your self up from within kind, extended into a deep craving to extol this right for all people, for all humans: the right to self-empower. And the various -isms of humanity that keep you, or me, or whole groups of us at once, from doing or being able to do so. As result of my sickness, (and looking at the micro of my macro indications--that is, recognizing in my own life where I was giving my own power away) I decided to start treating myself with love and gentle, nurturing care each and every day. So began the synchronicity...

It started with recognizing that message in my illness, and then finding correlating information on a favorite website. Just a day or so later, one of my inner-rants about humanity's
-isms partially made it in on to one of my blog rambles. Later, that very same night, I got an email from a co-worker, Carolyn. She asked me to check out her daughter's online newsletter. I did so, but was far more intrigued by her daughter's webpage. And her youtube clip, (which seriously you must watch, I have a hellofa time embedding shit on here, my bad) which virtually gave words to what I was unable to articulate on my blog that day.

A few mornings later I was lying in bed journaling. I was, as now, in the middle of this perpetual move off of Anngar Farm and so trying to take it easy. After some time, I quieted. Then asked my wilddeepjoyme what do you need sweetness? And the answer from within came clear and resonating, Gardening. I smiled and whispered an intention to be given what I needed to make this bliss real. Moments later I was standing in the kitchen in Ocean Pines with the strongest feeling to blogroll. The first, first blog I clicked on led me to a link, which led me here, which led me here!! That very night I posted about the importance in my own life of using the inner, or higher power. When I turned my phone on after that post, I had a message from this women I've never met about reading poetry at a reading last Friday. I was hesitant, and Friday during the day was a bad, bad day for me. But I went that night and did it anyway. And more doors opened in the form of new connections. But most of all, the poems, once collected, clearly had a theme. And in conversation with Teena, my roomie, late that night we expounded on the glory of said theme: women uninterested in the priority of partnering for the long-term. Like romantically. After that conversation I wound up receiving a text from, then chatting on myspace with a friend entirely coincidentally, about the same exact thing.

Wow oh wow very cool. So. All I've ever wanted out of my life is to look back and say I did my soul's way, authentic. In-bliss. I am loving the serendipitous nods lately, affirming such connections.

Wow. Nothing short of miraculous. I'm like in dazed wonder, shaking at the stillness of reverie, when evry little thing literally quakes with the goodness. Vibrating of its own light cuz for a mere moment you realize all, of this lone eternal moment NOW, is perfectly right.

All I can say is that in the last 14 hours, I've definitely undergone a profound alteration in my reaction to life to quote a rather articulate, and often personally quite harmonic spiritual text of which I am rather fond. That line comes straight out from the definition of what a hands-on spritual experience of the living day by day and growing and knowing yourself kind is. Appropriate. Maybe in the nextday or so my thoughts and fire will align just so as to give words to my late (unforced, natural--Kelly!! perception changes, here on this blog.) To help me better understand my process, you know, by processing....

Today is the first day of light. I must be off to the farm to clean now, to move, throw. And celebrate. Hmmmm--what timing, a genuine good ol spring cleaning of sorts. May new things be let to flow....

A Poem, in celebration of the return of light

It Is the Rising I Love by Linda Gregg

As long as I struggle to float above the ground
and fail, there is reason for this poetry.
On the stone back of Ludovici's throne, Venus
is rising from the water. Her face and arms
are raised, and the two women trained in the ways
of the world help her rise, covering her
nakedness with a cloth at the same time.
It is the rising I love, from no matter what element
to the one above. She from water to land,
me from earth to air as if I had a soul.
Helped by prayers and not by women, I say
(ascending in all my sexual glamour), see my body
bathed in light and air. See me rise like a flame,
like the sun, moon, stars, birds, wind. In light.
In dark. But I never achieve it. I get on my knees
this gray April to see if open crocuses have a smell.
I must live in the suffering and desire of what
rises and falls. The terrible blind grinding
of gears against our bodies and lives.