Happy Halloween

Train Station

Scheduled blogging is like scheduled sex. Delivery doesn't happen like that. Delivery needs space and magical factors. Even so, I follow all the linear steps to get there, half-hopeful that the train will come for me anyway. I sit down to relax, close my eyes for a second, and the phone rings. It's always something, someone needing, and I just can't respond this morning. I'm here and this is where I want to be. Everything else will have to wait. So much better than sex, really, this waiting place. Restoking the fires, invoking the muse, feeling into my own breath, masala chai steaming on the table.

I'm thinking about models and how much I have to say about that, medical models, social models, psychological models, spiritual models. Systems and stories, myths and more.....it's taking shape.

I answer the phone just to push the pushing back, and I hear the news that he got the wrong front door. I have the receipt in my wallet. I'm across town and Lucinda is oozing out silky wonders at my back. Dude, don't know what to tell you. I just leave it at that, hanging.

Models and how they collide into each other. States of consciousness, so apparently different. My job to weave the mundane into gold. But, jeez, front doors.....doors and tiles and lights and mortar and fixtures. Who cares, right? It's where I spend most of my time. That and running the potty upstairs and downstairs, making and remaking tidbits of food, picking up trails of toys. By the end of that day, I reach for People Magazine, and that fits perfectly with the little I have left.

I leave myself hanging all the time. Not this morning.

No time to write now, all the time just goes into being. Finally ready to begin and it's time to go pick up the girl. What to do....I miss you all when I'm not here. Stopping by for a short visit. See you soon.

Be The Change....

Be the Shift

Anam Cara

*note to reader: Due the limitations of language, please excuse the abrupt changes in space/time context. Loosen the lens and travel with me, several places at once. Past, present, future, and other dimensional visits, through the small box of English syntax.

Who drives twelve miles in the rain, bumper to bumper, with scarce time between drop off and pick up, for the new brew of choice: roasted coconut mate’?

You know who.

(“I don’t want to go to cool, mama, (I) want my (s)nack with you, want mama.”)

For this morning, to get me there, a yoga trance dance track. A melodic spirograph unfurls, the rabbit hole in sound, in vibration, in beat, and I slide down, happy. Happy to travel, better than sex, because the desire is so great and so satisfied.

(Every twenty minutes she screams in pain. I run from the kitchen and hit the floor, eye to eye, “I’m so sorry, baby, mama’s here.”)

I whisper through my headset, which, I suspect, is not so soft, “Let your shoulders down…” and she does. Holly's mouth moves, something about the times that Josie and Amelia awakened, to tell me that, really, she didn’t sleep. Bongos and keyboard strokes around my cochlea, I smile, “I got eight hours,” as if it’s a drug.

(Finally, four agonizing days later, she poops. Digging nails in my arm, bird tracks, “Push gently, River, breathe with mama,” but she just drops her brow to my bicep and cries. The cry behind all the other ones, and I hear something deeper and older. She's discovering more about human pain than she should, but I'm right there because that was my path, too, and I trust that the threshold for joy is widening simultaneously.)

Sleep is a drug, a seldom visit, and I’m strangely giddy.

Close my eyes, still with the conversation yesterday morning with Carrie. On the river together, side by side for moments here and there, and I’m grateful for that. Love the women in my life. Love to see them stand in the center of their lives and own it. Take it back. Decorate it. Flaunt it. Work it. Deliver it. Share it.

Sisterhood.

Piano sequence sounds just like rain. Follow me.

(I hand the phone to River to talk to my sister. Instantly she eeks out, “My mama mad at me, I cry….” I scan and search the past hours, days. Yesterday. Nap time. I look all over for her required sleep toy. Can’t find it. Can’t find it. Up the stairs, all around, can’t find it. “I’m sorry, I can’t find it! And I can’t take it, River, just go to bed, please, go to bed!” She cries.)

Releasing in the sound of music and rain and a women singing, like waves to the shore, part of the ocean, the stars up above, part of the sky, when I drift to you I dream of the river, of water so blue, wish I could live there….

I remove my headset and say to Holly: You heard it here. I’m finishing the book, opening my practice, and finding a house to rent so that we can all meet and do our work, see clients, teach, rent the space out for classes, workshops, and meetings. Central southeast.

I ask: what would you be willing to do to have the time to write in a space like that? I say: in 24hrs you could have a business card to coach in media relations, public relations, writing. Done.

Anam Cara, the name just comes a moment later. It was brought to my attention by another friend a few days ago, just a phrase glanced at in email. I know it’s right but I don’t know what it means yet.

Yes, the intention will named Anam Cara, or soul friend. Here’s a lovely explanation: Anam Cara.

Pick up time, gotta run and roll and reel and swim through the clouds, south to my river.

The Muse

meme (plural memes)

1. Any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity.
2. A self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene (the unit of genetics).

Writing
1. I am being written by the muse in the meadow.
2. The muse is a voice without words; she saturates my senses.
3. Senses converge in salutation. I wait and listen.
4. Opening eyes inside, I see patterns of becoming
5. And I become that vision

Tagging Go Mama and Believing Soul...

Streaming...

I'm streaming in from a disparate night channel, where I was left this morning at the edge of my bed, edge of water, edge of something that knows me when I have forgotten myself. And it's good when after hours of struggling to wake up, to wake up others, to find our way into the day, that fifteen miles across town when I sit at a table, random, look out the window, lost, Holly walks in, smiling, "Thought I'd find you here," as she unpacks her laptop.

This table, our buoy, we sail side by side. Eight stories due this week, she’s cranking, and when I look over to catch the shape of her movement, I see. She’s alive. Over the top of silver screens, I say, “You look alive now.” She nods, scribbles notes, we don’t have to complete sentences. Thank god.

If I could write I would say that I’m falling apart. I’ve always been falling apart.

Days ago, my sister says when I was born it was all so touch and go, life and death. The door swung back and forth, back and forth, no one knew if I was coming or going.

It's always a kaleidescope, me falling between shifting colors, dimensions flowering and decomposing, second by second. Day by day. Between cereal and euphoric glimpses, one turn. Between black holes and crumbling cliffs, another turn.

“Dad worked long hours but every night he went to the hospital to be with you. Even after mom came home, late at night, night after night, he returned. ‘That’s my girl, I gotta go,’ he’d tell us, dropping us at grandma’s. As soon as he left she made us get down on our knees. Lacking faith she still commanded, “Even horses drop to their knees, you can do it, too. Come on, let’s pray for that baby.”

“In the din of incubators, the wet nurse held you to her breast, while you held dad’s pinky finger. You fit in his palm, that’s how small, that’s how unsure we were. When you finally came home it took awhile, nothing was fully formed.”

“Don’t you see? You were a gem…”

********

In an old Christian church I listen to the Gayatri mantra. Deva Premal haunts the walls with Sanskrit syllables and it’s perfect. The looming, stain-glass figured Jesus leans from the ceiling and blesses the holy wave, he parts the waters of convention and tradition and practice for his old friend, Indian devotional song. I hold my face in my hands, feeling Jesus in the warmth and smell of flesh, my own breath against all that mercy, full of thanks, full of relief, emptying all the tension of opposites. I listen to the reverb at the core of vocal strands, each impulse of love pushing molecules so beautifully they strike like a match, strands dissolve into the harmonics of chords, my body, from my body, the wave lifts to meet her……and, finally, through all the anger, I let it in.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I can’t open my eyes. I can’t part from the space of light, delicate respite. But I have to eventually open to receive how the reds weave with sound. My Tibetan rug holds all the musicians. I wonder at the sight – just what these rugs were made for, to honor worship, to adorn the practices, to behold what cannot be seen and make it flourish with pattern.

Jess and I lug the rug into my car at 1am the night before. Candles, vases, plants, shawls, silks – I walk around the house and remove them from their place. I don’t know why, but I know I’m being called. I know the call.

We’re setting up the stage, preparing the space, welcoming. I wait for Jess in the basement. Deva Premal walks in and straight for me. She opens long arms twenty feet away and I feel the space gathering, and then the embrace. I look behind me to find someone else, but she's coming for me. She enfolds and doesn’t let go. And doesn’t let go. I want to let go and she whispers, “Thank you so much for being here.” I can't let it happen, “I’m here because of my rug.” She releases enough to see my eyes and smiles, “Oh, it’s much more than that.” And then I’m telling her that I listened to her chant as I wrote the book, during that entire year, blasting beautiful voice in my headset, eyes on my baby, writing. I had forgotten, but it’s as if she hasn’t forgotten. “Your book is important. Do your work.”

(to be continued...)

Bones

1. River is allergic to dairy, gluten, soy, goat products, with a few fruits and legumes thrown in
2. We are caught in the mortgage crisis that's all over the news, it's a sinking ship
3. We have no income to speak of
4. I don't know when to start packing since we're moving into a house we can't afford to complete.
5. I've had another string of bladder infections, which the doctor told me this morning is related to grief and loss (and I almost laughed out loud)
6. I pass my husband in the hallway, sometimes
7. I spend the majority of my days at Home Depot and Lowe's
8. For some reason, I can't write.......