Merry Meet and Blessed Be

"But paradise is locked and bolted… We must make a journey around the world to see if a back door has perhaps been left open."

 wet dream courtesy of libraryland

(what i got accomplished today.  go me.)

i grew up listening to willie nelson.  my father had all the lps.  a very clear childhood memory of mine is riding on my fathers shoulders, i was four maybe, and him singing Pancho and Lefty,  the Outlaw version.  i worked at a diner where i got to play Red Headed Stranger over and over again.  i married a man my father instantly named Willie, for his aspect similarity.  Willie is an american institution, and it will be a less perfect union when he leaves it.

 

 my heart gets all soft and mushy listening to Willie.  that entirely singular jazz sincerity.  that personal childhood familiarity.  the way Cowboy just ends up looking more and more like him every day, with a little Merle (and his M&M flip-top) in there for good measure.  you see Willie and Merle and it makes me feel the same way i felt seeing that photo of Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe.  the worlds within those men.  the lifetimes.  were all just dust and blood, an electrical current running through intelligent cells, and blessed to have these highplains philosophers to inspire us to be better than we are right now.  like Willie said, forgive your enemies.  it messes with their heads.  happy birthday, high priest.

"So far 1,698 Kindle users have underlined this passage from Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell: 

"three things--autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward--are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying."

 the whole electronic book thing escapes me.  im struggling right now with wanting the words to sound a certain way and just saying what wants said.  ive heard the Byrds cover of Wild Mountain Thyme twice this week, having never heard it before.  Beltane is a-cummin' in.  i remember you asking after my plans.  these photos taken in the creek houseby.  i dont want to hear ryan adams sing wonderwall for a long time.  went out and dug more dandelions, cool in the house hot in the yard.  i love the easy rumpled stinky human household have we.   the lighthanded laissez-faire living reached by silent consensus the day we rearrived.  its ridiculous, it might as well be fun, cf. yonder ruler rant.  my boys are so good to me, always smiling in my eyes, hands rubbing my heart like a bird in the hand, the faces i love more than any the eyes and hands that are all their own that i know them by.  sometimes altogether in the ship of night and how more perfect and beautiful can life be? 

"The Internet is full of old growlers, of course, and if you opine on public issues, you'll get anonymous mail calling you a baby-killer, torturer, tool of Satan, cat strangler and babbling idiot, which you accept as your due, like the static electricity you collect walking across a carpet. A slight shock, but it doesn't turn on any lightbulbs."

and when i said i didnt give a f**k i didnt mean id go around hauling off on everyone i just meant i cant bear laying down any more along the ruler youve got there to measure me up, assess my dimensions, if ill fit like a loveseat in the corner of the room instead of a ficus or whatever.  what i meant was im not even going to acknowledge the ruler whatsoever at all.  show me a straight line out in the wildwood.  show me a straight line on you, for that matter.  we are the wildwood and rulers are what oncelers make of our suchness after were cut down.  flowers in water are being deceived.

"Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them."

 ten for today:

1.  willie!

2.  this, definitely.

3.  trees!

4.  this ones for cowboy.

5.  this blog!
6.  ryan adams.
7.  wilco!
8.  liberation through major appliances
9.  coffee!
10. the shifting tide of consciousness

"In his Micromegas Voltaire has an immensely wise alien come to visit earth. He has dozens of senses and can thus perceive much more of reality than humans can. He comes from a race devoted to the acquisiton of wisdom and that lives thousands of years. On leaving earth, he leaves philosophers there a book containing all the knowledge that can ever be gained about the pure and ultimate nature of things. It has only blank pages."

"Now I caress him back, my shepherd.

Now I caress his curly hair.

Now I caress my faithful one.

Now I grant him a happy future."

healed by wind and water and blessed quiet you can hear the roar of air through branches on the far side of the valley.  the widows nut trees rise with wise constraint, only the faintest match heads to pressage bold growth in may.  wind blowing through me carrying lilac scent seducing the air only a mile from our own still witholding in dark virginal bud wind erasing scattered valentine of doe tracks down the road headed for sweet creekwater singing liberation song from hilltop melt and april rain.  wind and water blessed quiet nest and blossom home where green intelligence reaches up from wise waiting into frond and feathered forms every day is an awakening of infinite possibility.

"You will do many foolish things.  Do them with enthusiasm."

open letter, s.o.c.:   looking back it was a reset button.  like tilt on the old pinball games maybe not sure what tilt was about but the jeep had reached that point where gravity takes over.  and you climb out the passenger window and the mangled innards are smoking and glunking fluids toxic rainbow rivulets and youre not in the least interested in jacking the shit back upright.  you walk.  and the world is more real without the cage of what went before.  and i sincerely dont give a f**k what y'all are thinking.  ye without sin and all that, dig.
this is carte blanche tabula rasa chapter one chapter and verse of whoever it is i am and dont ask me.  one ticket.  keep this coupon.  those last seven breaths remember theres no do-over.  live.  what did goethe say had magic in it?  i for one from now on plan to live my life.  laugh and dance and one hand waving free, all that.  the mojo hat of wendy rover.  shooting stars.  for me breathing is a goddamn miracle and i plan to treat it that way.  y'all looking at me down your clean noses.  who are you?  why are you wasting your life judging me?  thats another thing.  like sister becky say.  no judge.  no judge.  any of you catch me judging you call me on it.  i find myself intact after this neardeath crash and burn of everything that meant anything to me ever and im going to sanctify this second act with all i got.  so if theres no smile on your face when you and i behold then ill just walk on by.  you have every right to choose how to honor the blood and breath and vibe of your life.  if its safe behind walls, i hope you paint them prettier on the inside than they seem on the out.  i got this here man and he chose Love.  he took a damn deep bet on me and for that i am grateful, ever and after.  maybe not on me, but on something out there over the wall take a chance on.  open your heart.  ride til gravity takes over and realize the worlds worth more with you in it.  blessed be.

"I know that for thousands of lifetimes,
you and I have been one,
and the distance between us is only a flash of thought."

as the splendid orb of the moon begins her wane, theres a palpable relief within the bounds of this form.  as if the power oppressed me, a lunatic, my waters drawn against skin unbearable bloat of the drowned.  some lunar manacle unlocked, blood feeding starved steppe of flesh spring rain relief inhalation cessation of frustration and disgust.  of late felt so unwell, and this morning find the incubus fled on ragged stinking wings the sunlight bright across the broad bedframe allowing me a lightness far too long foreign from me.  inspired enough to dig dandelions from the the garden, life seems entirely manageable again, or for once.   and a sign of the turning tide last night the appearance of my lost witches star, lost before i left, another sign of folly fate even Charlotte had something to say.  after weeks the windows open again, late april winds through the rooms the smell of blossoms and grass, occasional scarves of smoke from small sweetwood brushfires or the deep ripe of manure (consider for a moment the beautiful perfect earth clockwork of a cow).

"Salvation does not come through simplicities."

"The relative immortality of the very large and very small serve as a stable stage set for us. Compared with stars and atoms we are the briefest of candles, temporary patterns of peculiarly organized matter, blinking on and off upon the surface of a huge planet bathed with steams of steady high-intensity sunlight with bodies composed of super-stable atoms that can be rearranged to create me, or you, then a soil bacterium, and then, say, a traditional symbol of ephemerality, the Japanese plum blossom in the spring."

"To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn’t everything."

 i was thinking i should write something else and then realized hey thats just another shoulda im enforcing.  letting go is a second by second enterprise.

" """Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck."

ten for today:

1.  thank you, Charlotte.  ill take this as a sign.
2.  this
3.  feeling good again
4.  this
5.  Cowboy
6.  a fine walk and looking forward to more
7.  "we must live our own experience.  we cannot inherit it."
8.  the endless insight of the blogosphere
9.  the things i thought looking at this
10. this.

 

from Beautiful Revolution

"There’s a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they’d eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn’t true."

"It is characteristic of him that he especially recommended a glass of Guinness as a medium in which to scry."

grateful.  every time you call.  the sound of water in the creek.  the dust and madness, wide margin.  

the sun rises on yarrow elfwand, oak leaves and squill, a happy home. 

bell of awakening, windchime, a lintel of roses.

when the words dont come, dont drag them from their hiding.

"the woman i love."

floating

elementary forces

dancers

branches

play neighbor at the table for a few, practice listening, laughing, tentative connections, tendrils like spring stretching across my recluse heart to reach and recognize the humanity i in a thousand ways welcome and prepare for, my own.  still cold but the sun shines across a blue sheep pasture wide as the valley considering thinning the herd and thinking again, my naive heart hoping for the best.  put together a cornbread for cowboy, getting that now familiar itch waiting for my boys to return to me, watching out the window wandering the rooms remembering the seedlings in the shanty greenhouse going out to water and the zinnias are up already plump succulent little leaves and the garden getting too familiar with the spring weeds, a dense border of dandelion at which my get-go quails. 

the away was so strange.  a breakdown a disconnect it all got pound to nothing nothing held no wall no net it didnt matter what made sense what great mistake was made there was nothing and i walked into it like a hole.  and by the grace of my good angels am i allowed to return to try again to resuscitate love and learn something sustaining, retaining, like muscle and skin.  i dont worry much how it looks on the outside they werent there on the inside when my heart broke a billion times over.  i read today that the world needs my authenticity.  i dont even know what that is and its all i have left to give.

(what is up with this?)

in this season of bloom and expansion i feel hibernate and cold, an old englishwoman on the beach at blackpool in march woolwrapped a thermos of twinings, custard creams.  dont vex me let me lie here in the desolation comforted and unthinking.  maybe its because im understimulated.  im keeping myself away from things but why?  blame it on this spring cold, but its shame, and the deep relief of just being here.

now theres two of you out there, him and her, that i wonder after, one lost before i left and one lost in the leaving.  both blank spaces in my heart, doors closed on rooms to which i set an ear walking past but nothing.  she, couldnt you forgive me?  and for what should i be forgiven?  for being exhausted?  for desiring quiet?  well i have my quiet now in the room where sun comes through a window bricked with leaves and the big bed is full of us again.  i didnt listen, Zu, and left but now im back im only human and broken mad at that, learning to love the light that shines through the cracks in my heart onto my hands that hope one day youll return to me in some form whatsoever, bits of paper, pecans, sequins, stories ive yet to drink the nectar you gave me it sits shiva to what lived only briefly between us.  i wish i was worth more than not knowing.

the oxalis taught me a lesson today.  after a month of living in pale fluorescence i thrust it back into a southern exposure and it quailed, pale and petals decidedly unwell, true light a relentless glare.  but strength returns to stalks and streaked leaves and new growth not knowing any less, fills out the space made from away.

ten for today:

1.  our watchwork universe
2.  this article, which explains a lot
3.  this picture which followed me around the blogosphere today
4.  full moon in scorpio
5.  T.
6.  my home
7.  learning to cut slack
8.  coffee and cornbread
9.  breathing easy
10.  hoping for the best, after all.

"It’s very dear to me, the issue of gay marriage. Or as I like to call it: ‘marriage.’ You know, because I had lunch this afternoon, not gay lunch. I parked my car; I didn’t gay park it."

 

“You know when Robert Johnson said ‘you gotta move’ — I figured that out. It’s like, you’re happily floating through nothing– you know, nothingness.  All of a sudden, a big giant fish, they way I picture it… grabs you and… puts you in a form, and slams you on the face of this veil of tears, and says– You’ve gotta move!"

‘Everything is not enough

Nothing is too much to bear

Where you been is good and gone

All you keep is the getting there.’

rain.  rain and sleep and some kind of cold or just me wanting to hide, to curl the shell of sleep around my tender center, push off from the waking world in my coracle bed away from the shore of a hard restless elsewhere.  ive always undervalued my emotional experience and something isnt letting me anymore.  a lifetime of evasive contortion i begin to stretch away from, the miracle of soul and bone and will illuminating what was forever a shadow troughyard of hungry ghosts.

"My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there—and then bolt across the chasm between you, before the bridge collapses."


while we sleep Mother Nature tats the lace of april leaves and hangs them like fairy lights on the bare branches of trees.  with the rain painting wood a deeper shade the contrast of dark and light is a delight to eyes having subsisted for months on white and grey (despite the sauce of winter sunsets).  everything opens.  the dry seed swells and bursts and tongues of life rise into stronger sunlight, sweeter breeze.  these tiny motes of life in my palm that when exposed to the dark of earth, the wet of rain, the heat of sun, explode from their deceptive chrysalis into fragrant forms bearing food, flowers, fruit.  were it so easy for us to grow into our true natures, to allow with earth and light and water the natural unfolding of our selves.  how thwarted we are in our  growing.  this struggle is a gift, however.  to recognize ourselves as vessels for the journey of our souls, that there is a path, a purpose, an evolution in which to participate, is a blessing and the one for which i am most grateful.

 

"We are all
made of honey and butter and one of us has a yellow
school bus which we board from time to time
for a field trip that involves riding in circles
and falling asleep, which involves
all of us being ponies in a meadow.
The sea and sky are made of grass.
It can’t last. It lasts."

snow this morning.  dragging my skirt through puddles, socks wet at the heels, wind at my cheeks like november.    this incessant sneezing forces me to miss sunsets and the simple act of being in favor of unconsciousness.  maddening.  i feel shallow as a plate and as bare.  the smell of woodsmoke guides me home to tea and dogs the phone rings and im happy to answer it since youre the only one that knows the numbers to press in their secret order from wherever you are across the valley thinking of me.  o mary oliver give me strength.  infuse my very soul with insatiable hunger for lifeforce and revelation.  while i wallow in gruel purgatory waiting for the words to fall through the top of my head like one would wait for daylight.  but this is just a part of the cycle.  neap tide, exhale, aphelion.

ten for today:

1.  Cowboy

2.  Townes

3.  this blog

4.  tea
5. T.
6.  tom tomorrow
7.  dictionaries
8.  sleep
9.  my quiet neighborhood
10.  NPR

happy birthday to the man who said:

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

"Behind the cloud, a rainbow formed, with a soft ghost of itself below.  This double bridge followed the storm until darkness dissolved it."

earnest spring.  women making choices, watching stars.  i doubted the existence of demons, believing them to only be entities unaware of their own divinity.  we must be teachers.  we must be the light.  

a long quiet walk with the cowboy both of us just breathing, being, relieved.

such chi in the leaves with the late light behind them, sapfull of snowmelt drawn up from deep roots and sucking green from the sunlight.  deertrails and whistlepigs dandelions still yellow and the sound of water.

no words, lots of space, a craving for quiet and tenderness ive been feeling fragile lately or maybe just now acknowledging my fragility.

it must be that spring has softened me, a thaw.  open hand, i kept repeating, an open hand.

started seeds tomatoes, tulsi, parsley, collards, cosmos.   sit near the garden in the afternoon letting the dandelions do their thing, wondering at all the empty space in the perennial bed as the grass encroaches.

as sweet water reaches for the tops of the trees so am i trickling out of my secret spring, water rilling into water, trying to connect, smiling tentative hopeful.  but fragile makes me tired, seeking soft balm of sleep in babys loving arms.  fragile leaves me open even more, so much emotion, intelligence im overwhelmed.

i long for paint but have no energy.  i long for poetry but have no words.

it is a blessing to know that my home is here, where i am also.  it is a blessing to know that whatever lessons are left for learning, they can be learned here.   a fire came through the forest of my heart and from the soot and cinders rise sweet strong shoots of return. 

 

ten for today:

1.  becky

2.  springtime

3.  seth siro anton
4.  little wing

5.  shady grove

6.  little martha

7.  wild horses

8.  black horses

9. dogs

10.  home

"When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye
(So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands."

l

"We shouldn't think that the self is something that is originally there and then eliminated in meditation;  in fact, it is something that never existed in the first place."

green and red and a waning moon.  morning in the desert.  what would i say?  she changes everything she touches.   love and time.  earth and sky.   these are things i need to bring into me.  these are the lessons i need to metabolize into wisdom.  wisdom is what i need to know right now.  standing still and letting it settle.  stop poking at it with a stick, pricking it with a pin, picking at its fringe.

home, rice with butter in salt from a bowl fashioned by a lord of the faerie himself.  gray on the way, bright blue back past acres of farm and country.  right lane radio rumble strip bags flapping petrochemical apocalyptic warnings back!  ill choke your axle and frighten the children, under the teacozy at the thruway station i fancy myself a low-rent out of season snowboarder but come off meth somehow and dont even notice it (how is that possible?) and you told me in the truck and you know, it dont confront me no mo.   its all good.  i  give blood and am on the list for marrow donors.  i was Forgiven at a farmstand by a man the next town over.

"He stumbled out into the street, and because he was terrified that that shock might have ruined his voice, he began singing."

"How he submitted --.  Loved.

Loved his interior world,

his interior wilderness,

that primal forest inside him,

where among decayed tree trunks

his heart stood, light green..."

luminous crown, ocean opal heart, hungry nestling, serenity and the fire of peacebelly.
beautiful night.  bright rind of moon and emergence, so much light
backstoop hotmilk nightcap with dogs and stars.

"Keeping yourself in a tight, narrow, little box, trying to live safe from hurt, pain, illness and loss is the coward's way out and a living death."

franti said if you want to scare away the vampires you need to lead them into the light.  the card warned of hungry darkness and to combat malignancy one should Be the Light.  light there came with the Lady.  green oak black raven red rose the peace of the white moon upon her her energy soft as starlight. 
the woman who came for the recycling found my amber earrings in the gravel drive.  i helped her load the husks of cargo recently imported from where i have recently been.  we all have had these lives full of stories.  will i ever learn to listen?  from the Grail flows the Now, microscopic pearls liquified into light spilling beginnings. 

"You are going to die;  and when you do, you will take nothing with you but your state of mind."

Say Yes plays.   its a beautiful day in april.  fire opal and aventurine, the root of creative change and the open gamble of my heart.  resting rather easy in limbo, external manifestation of internal reality, the poles harmonized to the stasis before a turn in the tide.  

after black coffee and Mr. Lucky i go out and consider the garden briefly. 

first turning tonight, its been left too long.  too late for peas but too early for tomatoes, so theres time for me to tend and get some lettuce in the ground.  i go out in the afternoon to breathe and the world smells like mown grass and hope.

ten for today:

1.  Little Wing, as played by Stevie Ray

2.  the Parting Gift

3.  Spring in the Valley

4.  Cowboy

5.  Uncle Jamie

6.  Ani Pema

7.  Steve Earle (cf. Loretta)

8.  scrambled eggs

9.  My Boys

10.  The Lady

"...with mad, dynamic precision the way that imbalanced yet brilliant people talk when they try to talk about everything at once..."

mothsilk and burr in the wool.   as a craft i can see the sane hesitation but what a life, a birth.  wrestling with the angel, music with no words black coffee seasons every minute i am healed violets grape hyacinth velocepides you carried the stone all the way home and it seemed happy to be holding your hand.  life is meant to be lived at a walking pace.  where does the green sock summer from its station on the cross?  daffodils give the well away.     

extraordinary light.  beautiful here with you and the first leaves like minnows a million spined lights among the ironwood the wave of Life along the hill, a ripple if you stood long enough you would see, the rise of it all, the Light that animates every cell, that is all and everywhere, shuddering with celestial electricity point to point a timelapse of april in the valley but from The Beginning to Now.  and the Life Energy revered, the circle made sacred, this late understanding.  this great shift, and everything is better and entirely possible. 

for the enormous effort of mast the nut trees sleep in, but fruit trees allow for green filaments made flamepoints in long afternoon sun.  sumac boneclawed birch tree hellebore and the white rose broomstick dipped in moonlight.  i rise further from the weave and believe it makes a pattern.  believe in the weavers craft.   believe in the mathematical certainty of perfection, that the world is only a mirror for some infinitely greater impulse is only one single cell animated in a Being broad as the loom.  

 a series of becomings, pearls on a string.  wider to light and revelation, deeper to understanding.  think more.  think more in metaphor, matrix, metamorphoses.  open curious breathing smooth the face of the water.
occupied by an angel itself.  someone/thing desperately curious about the world, fallen into the blackhole of my surrender.  some extraordinarily bright, strong presence filtered through a glass darkly and completely innocent of egoflesh drive.  so its let the dog drive but behind the dog behind the wheel is an angel, after all.

theres a point, i believe, where the blackhole becomes a wormhole and its at that event horizon i desire to arrive.  its nothing short of rebirth, resurrection, for me.  this ironmaiden of grief, self-loathing, despair. take the thorn out of the lock and let the light into the holes.