11/19/11 cute kids

The most adorable kid in the world--my 4 1/2 year old nephew, coming to wake me up with his bright, conspiratorial smile at 6 am. Hi sweetie, I say, his little head at eye level where I'm sleeping in the basement guest room. I'm not ready to get up yet, but I will be in about an hour. Can you come back and wake me up then? And then he agrees, goes back upstairs. Puts me in mind of all the people I would do things for, any time of the day or night. Puts me in mind of all the bother that people create for each other, and how precious it is. How I would love being awakened at any time, for any need, for love. Of course, he plays with blocks or cars or something above my head, and things are dropping on the floor/ceiling and I'm ready to get up within ten minutes. And he laughs and he's happy and little and a small armful to pick up.

10/4/2011 - horse manure
Great honking piles of it, black and fly-ridden, at the Bunker Hills Stables, and the groundskeeper Jim opens the gates to the paddock and lets me in. Round, greenish brown and ripe-smelling, flakey, I scoop shovelsful into my plastic tote bins to haul home to my garden. Keeping all the car windows open, I drive home with my dark, delicious mess. Here's what I think of--the ripe, green mats of grass on the underside of lawnmowers, a little of the sweetness of shit, like that guy smelled in the outhouse scene in Ulysses by James Joyce...the end of a romance...and something else. As I'm driving home, it doesn't smell so awful, more like band-aids, and I'm wondering if that's just the perpetual dose of worming meds that horses have to take...smells like a cross between band-aid and cunt...innocent and forthright, like it can't help smelling like the inside of a horse's colon, and what all it's been through. Katharine's raspberries all tasted like a mild, fruity version of the horse's colon, now that I know the smell, cause she mostly uses horse manure. Sensible, it smells like (unlike the oratorical version of horseshit), and willing. Horseshit smells like a future garden like lettuces and parsnips and tomatoes yet to come, smells like the pieces of clay soil and humus that blend and melt with it. I love the compost, love the dark manure as much as if I had expelled it myself.

09/21/11 Trees that listen

It was one of the triplet giant cottonwoods in the backyard, the one that most often gets my attention. I wanted to meditate, and so I put my arms around the tree for that moment, to stop and listen. Stillness. Then because I'm singing a lot this week, I just started singing something...the tree responded immediately. I felt something "pop" inside the tree, and it suddenly felt like the tree was showing me its whole life, the fibers from below the strength with which it holds its trunk, the swaying of branches so high above us (it's a mature tree-over 40 feet, I'd guess), I even felt the fluids moving below its bark-skin...The tree heard my song, then i was feeling the tree move and flex its muscles.

9/20-1/2/11

The distant barking of a dog....is it mournful? Almost, but maybe just punctuation in the calm of the night...Are someone's chickens being raided? Not in this neighborhood. Does it sound like the percussion in the jazz album you're listening to? You betcha.

9/20/11 Trees that heal themselves

The siberian elms in the backyard, dozens of them, most years have bare scraggly fingers scraping toward the sky from the woodlot. But this year they reach (I finally noticed tonight) they reach with full, bushy, plump, leafy limbs, healed, I'm sure, by the boatloads of rains we've had this year. Really, you would have thought most of them dead, but they've only been dry. This year, lots of moisture.

9/19/11 A truly misty morning...

Little beadlets of moisture, you don't know where they come from, they hang on you, make the fading brown grass greasy, dust everything with these tiny moist pellets, like teeny beads, elemental and new.

8/25/11 The changing and important emotional lives of men

It used to be that I wouldn't pay much attention to men's feelings--either they didn't seem (to me) to have much, or they seemed to favor that one--anger, and I had to duck. Lately, I've been witness to a wider and wider range of sensitivity, self-reflection and tenderness from the men in my life. Recently helped a teen young man with a range of feelings over a breakup. At work, had a man dissolve to tears on the phone with me (among other things) and I had to apologize for being too harsh. Also, men my age on the dating scene seem to be reeling from the feelings they have around rejection and dishonesty from...women (??!!) they've encountered, and setting up certain boundaries for themselves. Go men!! Have those feelings!! Talk amongst yourselves!! Figure them out!! We can help each other!!

8/24/11 6-word life summary:

Firm footing in overflowing life stream.

8/15/11

Each step I take, braiding in the various colored strands of my life, each step I take in fulfillment of my own personal journey is weaving us all together in a whole, each step resounds throughout creation, brings us all closer to fulfillment, to wholeness. Each step I take that brings me pleasure and joy, in service, is an ecstasy. Each step is pure love.

8/13/11 The opportunity to use some rusty skills

You are just wandering through life, more or less following your path, when all of a sudden, you hear a request for help from someone. She needs help with something, and you realize that you have just the right skills for the job, but it would require reaching back through time, and dusting off the tools in a remote section of your brain. What do you do? Reach and dust and help. That's what. The other day someone requested that a little blurb be translated into French, and I just jumped right in. Wishing I had more descriptive language, finding that online dictionaries and idiomatic translations serve well. Now I'm translating a blurb a day, at about 40 minutes a pop, getting some experience in something I love to do.

8/6/11 Telling your wishes to the elements, to the trees
(Can't remember where I read this?)... There is another way of networking besides the WWW. It is all of the elements and elementals of nature. Simply tell your wishes, your desires for networking, for healing, for connection, to these beings, to a being in nature that you feel connected to already. These beings will spread word for you, bringing your desires back to you, to fruition. Talk with Gaia. She responds. I know, it's a book by James Endredy--2012 Beyond, or something.
I told 3 trees of a certain type of person I wanted more of in my life, and within a week or two, now have an abundance of that type of friendship. Activity partners.

08-05-11 Nightmares turning into dreams come true.
Nightmares of the past are coming back to haunt in deliriously delicious ways. No, not evil--there are others who do that, and I have done that in the past. Monsters and broken wrecks of ships and houses and buildings are showing up in nightly dreams and daydreams, with these beautifully haunting repairs. Lines drawn across where walls and doors were missing in buildings. Pixie dust. Shimmery orange. Gold. Instead of flimsy curtains or drapes, the windows are coated with this shimmery stuff. Beauty, iridescent nacre, only of light. People who were menacing are showing beneficent selves behind ogre masks, things that were monsters are dropping their cloaks, revealing partners in healing. All is glowing, all is healing, all is beautiful.

7/29/11 Healing dreams
You don't know what you're in for. Healing dreams. You're just thinking about healing, passing along the good information, the reflective thoughts. And then you lie down for a bit, for a little nap, a rest. And the rest of the world comes clomping and stomping in. The plant and animal kingdom...they tell you what to do, they tell you how to heal. And it's unconventional, it's different. But you do it and it works. You dream the healing techniques and they work.

7/28/11 Viny tomato plants 6 feet tall
They come up on you like a surprise, they slouch against their trellising and staking, they droop a little with the heavy rains and the summer heat. But these tomatoes have a survival instinct that won't quit--they already reach over your head despite their turns and kinks, and the thick vines, the thick vines are growing as robust as a good carrot. These tomatoes know how to grow.

6/26/11 Jokes inside your head
Everything is funny, isn't it? Especially your world and your observations, and all the clever and unmatched puns you come up with, and laugh hysterically at--inside your head. Today's gem, as I headed to a bookstore right before heading to the liquor store: I'd rather have a book in front of my than a frontal book out of me (you see, I'm a writer, too, and though the statement is not completely true, it did kind of describe a thing today).... Laughing at your own jokes. Laughing hysterically, on the inside.

6/25/11 A singer mismatched to the song

This is a beautiful thing, it's like the tritone--you hear it and you know it's meant to be in the universe, but it goes against all the rules and makes your ears go yowee!! Someone with a really smooth and sweet voice trying to sing the blues, like Jewel singing Have a Little Faith in Me (or Beyonce attempting Etta James), or someone with a really rough voice and a lot of life experience expressing sweetness. It's a challenge to our (the listener)s' powers of perception. What do you hear in the honey. What longings spill out with the gravel? Who are we and what are we trying to say?

6/24/11 How I hate to waste good food!!

It's all around us, it's everywhere. Fresh greens in the backyard, that I should be chowing down more of, If only I'd get off my butt and walk the 20 yards to the weed patch out back: nettles (missed the best of it--houseguests and graduation). But I still can get out and harvest new stuff coming up from the roots. Nettles, lambs' quarter, chickweed, dandelion greens. Fresh greens. An enormous salad ready for the picking every day. Nature provides us with the best food imaginable every day. It is only for us to learn about it, go out there and pick it, and enjoy with friends and family. Yum, I'm going out there right now.

6/23/11 The murmurings of crows

You wouldn't think they'd murmur and croon and purr like kittens, what with their reputation for harsh, caustic communications. But just listen to them in their nests, listen to their contentment on a midsummer evening. Everyone needs to relax and put up their heels and kid around when they come home from a day on the job. They whisper to their children like we do to babies, they sing little lullabies to one another, they compliment the chef on the night's meal. They talk about what they heard on the news. They discuss the weather, and they do matchmaking. Crows are us with dark wings.

5/24/11 They show up

The plants that you dream about, the things you love in the world. The garden full of riches and abundance. They show up, the plants, just as you imagined them, when you stopped imagining cars and boats, and started imagining greenery and play and laughter. They show up, these shoulder-high companions, green and open-hearted.

5/23/11 Nature walk

Not just that you are out in the green and brown and camouflaged and delightful, but that the more you are out in nature and mindful of it, the more you feel a part of it, that you are just another stem, and though you are able to pick up your roots and move them around easily, you are another in the bouquet.

5/22/11 The early morning walk

Before work, before tea, before breakfast. It feels like the beginning of creation, with cool moisture still on the air, like blooms that have just unfurled and still have their dew-sap on them. Like the beginning of creation. Each day in the morning. Feels like that. An exotice remembrance.

5/21/11 A high school track meet

It's like they know they're on display, they are healthy, athletic, strong, and they don't mind flaunting it. They stretch and practice their starts all up and down the midfield. They practice their hurdling form in lines of five like can-can dancers. They steal each other's sweatshirts and pack other stuff in it to make themselves look fat. They borrow each other's money, shirts, gum. They are sweet and young and playful, and it reminds me of a seal rookery and we are the grown-ups in the stands, the aluminum bleachers, but they, the young people, are down there like baby birds, like silly overgrown puppies, like new blades of grass swaying in the wind, Like cottonwood fluff, blowing about, looking for its ground.

5/20/11

that loving feeling.

5/19/11 Herbs that appear from out of nowhere, part II

Okay, there are probably many more examples of this, but just two weeks ago, I noticed that the back little patch of woods at my house was just filled with elder shrubs. How could I have missed them? All with these little white flower clusters, and a delicate fragrance. There must be dozens of shrubs back there now. I thought maybe I'd make some tincture with the berries, so I found a video on that on Youtube. Then, a few days later, I got a touch of something, some kind of cold and flu, and looked up uses for elder flower. Here's this herb that I've never used before, really, and it's abundant and literally right out my back door when I really need it. Elder blossom tea four times a day, and a very short course of whatever that cold-flu thingy was.

5/18/11 Healing plants that appear seemingly from out of nowhere at your time of greatest need.

The first time this happened, I had an icky flu while visiting Ireland as an overseas student. I was staying at a youth hostel in Killarney, had cut my caffeine consumption by about 90% from my several daily "Express!" cups at brasseries in France, was dealing with the dilute Irish coffee, as well as tea. So my head was swimming with the caffeine withdrawal symptoms, and here was this guy in the youth hostel's kitchen, coughing and sneezing all over everything. Within a day I had caught it, and as I was pedaling a rented bike in the wooded park there, felt miserable and achy and stuffy. So I cried out, in the middle of that Irish national park, that was covered in holly and ivy over that winter holiday. I cried out to the unfamiliar Irish grasses, to the unfamiliar hills in the distance, to the unfamiliar grey Irish clouds on that day, I cried out in the middle of the field, because I knew somehow that plants everywhere speak the same language, that everywhere plants respond to our request, if made in love and harmony. I cried out in the field, and looked around and was about to give up and go back to the hostel and suffer again. Then I noticed a familiar plant, a raspberry shrub in the middle of the field, with a few dried leaves and berries still clinging to the withered stalks. I recognized the plant, and I knew that I had seen raspberry listed as an ingredient in herbal teas I had had, so I knew it was safe. I picked a few twigs off that dried shrub, and took them with me back to the hostel, and brewed up some tea with them.
And here's the thing: Raspberry is not commonly an herb used for colds and flu, but that raspberry, that tea, helped me feel better.

May 17 2011 Daily spring rain

Little clear disks that keep dropping, lenses on the world that magnify everything that goes on around them, making the green trees larger, the green grass taller, the sky greyer, the flowers healthier. Little magnifying lenses.

5/16/11
The way the sun tumbles to the ground from the northeast on an early May morning, the haphazard light of a northern climate, the celebratory yellow as it sets to work on the scrappy grass, overgrown nettles, frowsy straw bales waiting to be mulched.

3/19/11 the first day of spring

A world of gray and white and faded brown is melting, melting, the colors already growing robust, hearty. Trees--how do they do this?--when warming show more brown, darker brown, as if they are shedding a hoary barrier they wear throughout the frozen months.

3/17/11 The loving heart
When you feel challenged, discouraged, or strung. Thinking of everyone as your assistant, your guardian angel. Thinking of each person as his/her higher self, each person as loving you to their capacity, as Buddha teaches. Knowing that in living this way, you become the loving heart, you love.

3/15/11 The geometric freeze of a late winter night
It comes out all angles and knives and shards and flakes. Flagstones of ice in angles on the puddles from yesterday's melt. Encasing plastic bags, papers, the curb, a bus-stop gutter. The kind of ice that's so gratifying to crush with your shoes, gingerly, to avoid getting them wet. Spring almost here, night freezes almost gone.

03/16/11 A voice from out of nowhere
It was morning, I was distracted, coming down with a cold, waiting at the corner of 4th and Marquette for the walk signal to come on, so I could run, late, to the doors of my building, my job. Suddenly there was a voice at my ear, smooth as velvet and cocoa and twice as friendly, speaking, "Good morning, Evelyn. How are you today?" In a tone that you would use with a kindergartener. I flipped my switch and whipped my neck around to the source of the sound---and burst out laughing immediately. I was surprised--pleasantly--to see this guy who works in the office, who really walks around with the most meditative, mellifluous, friendly voice I've ever heard. He was immediately apologetic about startling me, and between giggles I had to explain, "No, really--I love when voices come from out of nowhere to wish me good morning!!!"

2/15/11 A request for psychic advice
Also on the photocopy machine at the library was a letter addressed to Madam Anastasia Star, requesting psychic advice on an older gentleman's financial state. And while I don't mean to make light of financial woes of the elderly, I am absolutely delighted that someone has finally acknowledged my psychic ability, and my common sense in dealing with the world. I'm equally delighted with the new nickname, though I'll only assume it temporarily, in case someone else needs to use it too. Of course I consented to giving him advice, and here it is:
Dear James, I have consulted with my spirit helpers, and this is what I see: Good energy always draws good energy. Being grateful for resources that you do have can set you on the path to happiness. Try to be busy every day, as a wise friend of mine says, and perform generous acts each day. Help someone, call someone and offer your emotional support, help a neighbor clean their house if you are able to. Grow some stuff in your yard, your garden this year, if you are able to. Try to do five generous things each day. Your deep desire to heal your financial woes can be a shining beacon for others. You could be the center of goodwill and resources for your neighborhood, for example. The more you do for others, without expectations (in other words, truly giving), the more the universe will recognize your bright soul. You might not have a lot of money, but you will have all you need.

Sincerely, Madam Anastasia Star

2/14/11 An unexpected Valentine
Was expecting to spend the day handing out pumpkin bread at work, photocopying a song for my set list at the library at lunch, and exchanging bland, platonic Valentine greetings with co-workers. Check, uh-huh, and check.
But on the photocopy machine at the library, was this fabulous Valentine from a true romantic to his "illicit lover." ME, of course.
My anonymous lover reminded me that I had his deepest esteem and excitement,that his feelings for me are passionate, genuine and credible, and that "our intercourse" is "hot like the newest Porsche." Aaaah, romantic love. Just when I had taken a break from you, you show up as if by magic, pledging your heart and giblets.

2/5/11 Mist
Mist, endless mist today, from the snow that melted and floated back up again yesterday. Maybe we’re mistaken and the most natural state of water is as mist, drifting, smoking, lines and forms through the trees, limning the twigs in white. Maybe it’s as a liquid that water is heavy, clunky, mistaken, out of shape. Maybe the liquid form of the water planet mistakes and misrepresents the true healing form of water—as air, the translucent, enwrapping, insulating, thick, drifting, evanescing mist.

1/26/11 Finishing the poem
Even if it's going to be torn apart and re-written a half-dozen more times, even if it's ridiculous and makes no sense and is so terrible--or not. Even if the other people in class obviously have more experience and wisdom and insight and everything than you do, even if you can't yet turn a phrase....you finished the poem. You wrote it. It's done and on the page. You can use it and re-use it, you can do anything you like with it. Be satisfied. Be ecstatic. You have finished writing a poem.

1/25/11 A blind man, running
...across the Government Center Plaza to catch a train. His white cane, not the tapping kind, but the kind with a dog-leg and a crook, but colored white with a red tip, still, the cane waving in front of him like the nose of a swordfish. I love reckless aplomb. I love when people make a way to do something difficult. I love when people surprise you by jumping out of typecasting. I love that this guy ran and caught his train!

1/24/11 Time
What does it feel like--how do we spread things out in this line of divisions and counting? Is time like the field of snow outside my sliding glass door--vast, grey-white-yellow-blue and sparkling in the sun, surrounding with a soft but severe presence everything that exists? Is it a grid that we could draw on the field of snow? Is it the individual snowflakes, each a unique, feathered, crystalline moment? Is time this field, with buckles and wrinkles and furrows that we flop around in, making of our life a messy, tangled dent in the fabric, like a fly caught in a web?

1/23/11 Canyon of light, city morning
Beauty is something that has to be known, felt, honored, to be perceived. I don't often walk through the streets near my job thinking, oh this is beautiful, this is ecstatic (but maybe I should start to).
Yesterday, the sun was at the right angle to shine nearly horizontal through the clouds of exhaust on 4th street. Traffic backed up--trucks, cars, minivans with their taillights winking red in the dark hulks of their silhouettes. The buildings four and eight stories tall along the street, a skyway (walkway on the second floor) bisecting the rays down at Second Avenue. Figures in overcoats hurrying one way and another on the sidewalks--edges of this canyon of light. Grey-white street, part snow, part asphalt was the canyon's floor. And the curls and wisps and limbs of vapor rising from the cars idling at the traffic light--dreamsicle pink and peach in the sunlight, white-blue sky behind.

1/22/11 More snow
It's consistent anyway. More snow. Here, there and everywhere it seems. It's what it's supposed to do in winter. Relentless, comical, beautiful, pure. It comes down, and it comes down more. It's winter snow, and you know you love the way a winter is supposed to be. Daily dustings. Fluffy froth on everything. A cheery, light lacework on the front steps and the windshield.

1/21/11 A passionate friend
Don't you just love people who throw everything, every ounce of themselves into everything they do? I was reminded of this tonight by a friend who, well, who overwhelms me sometimes. Where some of us would have aches and pains, she has life-threatening illnesses, family members are in crisis everywhere, and this person is feeling it all in her marrow, drubbed by it, acutely committed, dedicated to her people, her groups. It's like she's lit on fire by the world, grabbing and swinging it by the tail at every moment, and it's swinging her at the same time, and the blood rushing to her head, and her not able to stop it. Feeding her family--cookies, roasts, salads. Volunteering in her community, with local board meetings and seminars organized halfway around the country, cleaning the cupboards before breakfast and seeing her kids to and from school. I admire her, she exhausts me. She's passionate about everything.

1/11/11 a girl named Rose

I see her at work sometimes, the young woman with the calm, shy manner, dark hair that is sometimes braided, and a generous sense of humor. The kind of person who makes you curious, but about whom you like the mystery too.

12/23/10 Drama

Nothing like a fair piece of drama in one's life for grabbing one's attention. My car was towed. It was fine I was looking for it and remaining calm at home, but didn't realize the extent to which my feelings were jangled. And in the middle of it, realized, I don't do drama. Life doesn't really have to grab me by the throat and shake me to get me to change my mind. So I had to look at a situation where I was more conciliatory to a potential friend than I wanted to be, and I ended up compromising my feelings and my time. And parking in the lot of a hostile business. And getting towed. And losing a lot more time than I should have. Drama. It's far-out, weird, creepy, interesting, helpful, and you gotta pay attention to it and set boundaries. I decided not to talk with the person any more.

12/22/10 the inspiration of birds

They are so delicate, their parts and features so light, airy like the element they (flighty ones) live in. Feathers. What other invention is so ingenious--little vanes and vanelets and hooklets and strands and they can be messy but then be preened into order. The feathers can hold you swimming or flying, or I should say also dreaming. And the bones the superlight bones with little structural lines all in them. Airy, cavenous bones, bones to fly. And my little belly bits, if I were a bird. A crop, short stomach, small organs. All to make me more compact and fling-able. I can fling myself up,over, around and down. I can fly, so compact and then stretchy. I love to stretch.

12/21/10 Re-reading a classic

My choice is Don Quixote. Only because there was a phrase I heard someone say once about Quixote's horse, and I wanted to check it out for possible inclusion in a poem I'm writing. I have a vague memory of reading this novel in high school, the black and white paperback cover with the inky smear of a pair of riders with a blotchy windmill in the background. I know I didn't understand it well, and probably didn't finish it back then.

But it's so nice to come to a piece of literature after so many years, and to understand the feelings in it, the odd satire, the comfort with a life lived fully, the understanding of the complexity of human emotions and morality and actions. So nice to come to the work having endured so much of the stuff of life, to have survived such complexity oneself, to be on one's own quest. Re-reads are easy. Literature is easy. And complex.