Amusing Fire

I've moved

2011-01-27T23:05:00.000-05:00

Thanks for reading this blog and for all of the encouragement and inspiration. I hope you will join me over on elementallife.org -- the new site.

Living Inside Poetry Thanks to Hermes

2010-10-04T14:38:00.002-04:00

Moonday. Waning moon. Rain. Despite having meetings and things, I'm treating this day as a poem. Its all poetry from my ink blueberry smoothie to the "garbage truck's baptismal drizzle" on the street outside. (That phrase is by Audre Lorde.) I have no choice in the matter.

Prose won't come.

I'm humming inside mystery.

In love with luck-bringing Hermes.

He's taken me through the underworld again.

He's stolen Apollo's cattle again.

He's raced through my life on his badass sandals, beat the turtle drum, and cozened my tribe throughout the dark night. Again.

His snakes wrap around the inside of my skin to heal a long pain, the kind you can almost forget until you look in the mirror he made to remind you.

Oh Hermes, beloved son of the son of Time and the shy goddess Maia, I'm a muse or a fury running behind you. I'm a child in your cave hiding in sight. Catch me if you want to tonight.

For this Moonday, tell me something, anything-- in the form of a poem. It doesn't have to make any sense and might be best if it does not. If that's daunting, just give me three words that you like because of the way they sound.

Dancing Naked Man Sent (potentially) from God

2010-09-13T22:55:00.005-04:00

Almost fall Moonday.

It was a deep summer for me-- deep and low like a cello. A summer of bass notes and beets-- red ones the color of blood.

I love beets. I love all heavy, dark, underground things. But you know, sometimes its a bit much. The voice-over for the movie trailer of my mind can occasionally sound something like, "Step into Kate's mind if you dare. Its lugubrious! Its somewhat maudlin! It prefers multisyllabic words and its syncopated by the gnashing of teeth!"

I've been trying to lighten up. And its been hard. A friend of mine said I should just ask for lightness, just put the call out. So I did. (You know... to God, or whoever else was listening-- the angel of jokes maybe.)

And somehow I found myself at two burlesque shows this weekend. Another friend suggested the first one, at Joe's Pub-- Johnny Cash Burlesque. That seemed absurd. I like absurd, and so four friends and I went, even though I'm not exactly into burlesque and could write a long boring post about my thoughts on its cultural significance, the pros and cons. Luckily I won't.

When we got there two cheery hostesses told us that we would be given the best seats in the house-- the round raised mobster's booth in the front. They seemed delighted to see us. You've arrived! The show can begin! That's my version of the proceedings anyway.

The show was silly, stupid, funny, creepy, forced, hackneyed, spontaneous. 80% of the cast did a "full reveal" at the end while dancing to Folsom Prison Blues, which was worth the price of admission as far as I was concerned.

Still, I left shrugging. I didn't feel delighted, or particularly light. I was proud of myself for ordering a soda water with lime. I came home and went to bed.

The next day, Sunday, I walked my dogs to Tompkins Square Park humming Cash tunes in the drizzling rain, and smiling as I thought of the boobs and balls flapping to 'I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.'

The HOWL festival was going on in Tompkins all weekend, and there was something happening on the stage. It turned out to be a burlesque review called Low Life. Well how do you like that.

There was a surprisingly large number of people huddled under umbrellas to watch in the rain (numbers that a poetry reading would not have drawn. Ever.) The dancing was impressive-- real dancing.   It put the Joe's Pub show to shame. The theme this year was women in the beat scene, which happens to be a pet subject of mine.. happens to be the subject of my latest play, in fact. Hm.

The second to last act was by the king of "boylesque", simply named Tigger.*    He started out with a hilarious monologue in the character of a female hipster living in Paris. And then there was the dance. Oh the dance. It had that je ne sais quoi. It was set to a French song about what Tigger said was her/his one true love, Harley Davidson, (the song originally made famous by Bridget Bardot.) His repeated kick-start leg move flashing red panties under a tight black skirt had me gasping for breath.

By the finale he was completely nude! Performing jumping leg splits! In the middle of the day in Tompkins Square! It was truly a love song to the East Village, and warmed the cockles of my heart. That doesn't sound quite right somehow....

The moral (if I may use that word) of the story as I see it, is... I sought lightness, asked for lightness, and then had lightness thrust-- near me. I am changed.

Tigger

For this Moonday, my questions are-- is inappropriateness a requisite for humor? What's one thing that someone might consider 'wrong' that's made you laugh? Or tell me as story of lightness being thrust upon you. Or as always, leave a poem, piece of writing, link to music, etc. that inspires you in any way at all.

*As it turns out, I'm not the only person who thinks Tigger is brilliant-- he's worked with Margaret Cho, Penny Arcade, and Karen Finley to name a few.

Formula for Everyday Miracles

2010-08-24T17:53:00.002-04:00

Full moon in Pisces. Here in NYC we’re getting a taste of fall with a series of cool grey rainy days, which makes this time super for dreaming and turning inward. Last night I dreamt of a heart flame. An elder put kindling on my heart. Her soft fingers gently placed one tiny twig on top of another until the pyre was tall and firm. The fire ignited on its own from underneath. She blew over it gently until it became an illuminated pyramid.

I’ve just returned from the New England Women’s Herbal Conference in Vermont. To say that the well has been refilled and is running over is an understatement. The well has turned into a waterfall.

Before I left, I wrote about the threat to local community gardens and how I was having a hard time rallying to defend them. It felt painful to have to explain their value. It’s crazy that we have to explain it. It should be obvious.   But I went to the community meeting anyway.

Despite being a scorching August weekday morning, there was a huge outpouring of support from all over the city. Scores of people took turns at the podium giving heartfelt testimony on the importance of community gardens and their own deep personal connections.

It wasn’t frustrating. It wasn’t draining. It was invigorating.   I left with more energy to work on our little garden, knowing viscerally and not just intellectually that I’m not alone. Not at all. That’s what happens, almost invariably, when people get together for something good—something worthy and life sustaining. It nourishes us.

The New England Women’s Herbal Conference was like that cubed. I got to sleep on the earth under a canopy of pine, witch hazel, and birch trees. I was in the presence of over five hundred earth loving women from all walks of life. I dragged myself there on a bus that left at 3 AM with blind faith that my well would be refilled. I had no idea about the waterfall.

I could probably write 10 different posts about the conference, but I have to tell you about the bath. Curandera and ethno-botanist Rocio Alarcon initiated me and 31 other women into the art of spiritual bathing using the healing ceremonies of Ecuador.

I’m always trying to get my herbal clients to take baths in the plants. The skin is a huge organ.   Plant medicine can be easily absorbed through the skin through the medium of water. That’s the basic bit. Then there’s the nourishing-one’s-self consciously bit. Hugely healing. When you add in the spirit of the plants, the Divine, and make it a communal event… well. Its completely fucking miraculous.

Before the bath I was experiencing what in Curanderismo (Native Latin American curing traditions) is called susto. Heart sickness brought on by shock. My soul was a little outside my body somewhere.   On top of that, after an almost sleepless night of travel, I’d spent Friday using all of my powers to stay engaged and alert for the classes. I’d skipped the opening ceremony, opting for a 14-hour sleep under the trees on the open ground. I still woke up tired the next day, still contracted, my heart still ill at ease.

After the experience with the bath I became a skipping five year old. Heart feather-light. What I loved about Alarcon’s teaching was what I loved about the teaching of all of the elders at the conference. They all said the same thing. Its not about us. You can do this. You have to do this. Its too late for masters and gurus to be the ones with all the wisdom. Everyone needs to step into their own healing power. This time requires it. Everyone has to show up fully.

Alarcon gave us very little direction with the bath. She got us in touch with the nature around us and harmonized us as a group.    She showed us the plants, let us chose the ones we wanted for the group, adding some lovingly harvested and hand processed raw Ecuadorian rainforest chocolate, picked a week before, and told us to pray over the plants first and to massage each other with the water. We could strain the plant material or not. I can’t tell you about the experience exactly. Only that it was profound. Lots of singing. Laughter. Some tears. Profanity. Disappearing and reappearing pots. Oak branches.

When you put the healing power of nature and God (or whatever word you like to use for the Divine) together with the healing power of true community, miracles happen. It’s a formula. Simple. Hoping we all get it soon. More and more. The world is in susto. We need some everyday miracles.

word food

2010-08-18T23:57:00.007-04:00

If I had not read this poem as a teenager, its fair to say I may not have made it. It's by Alice Walker from her collection Revolutionary Petunias.

Additional info-- this was first published with only those 2 above sentences. I was talking about survival of spirit-- not literal survival. I have a problem with brevity. Brevity plus hyperbole= melodrama. Ah well. I'm sure I would have made it-- literally-- without the below poem. But I might have done something stupid (for me) like go to a good university with a real campus and become an English professor instead of coming to NYC to be a theater artist.

Be Nobody's Darling

for Julius Lester

Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.

Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.

Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
Or line the crowded
River beds
With other impetuous
Fools.

Make a merry gathering
On the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave words they said.

Be nobody's darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.

Is there some poem or song lyric that absolutely saved your ass when you were young? (Of course there is.) Please share.

Cake or Death?

2010-08-16T23:56:00.018-04:00

Image from Cake Wreaks.

Hot sultry Moonday. Tropics in Manhattan.

I had it from good authority this morning that I need to lighten up. As the song says, 'Its only life after all.' We may as well laugh. The problem is that I'm a gallows humor person. The stuff I find funny isn't so light and fluffy. No angelfood for me. I prefer fruitcake that could double as a weapon.

Later today I was on Avenue A walking the dogs, looking for little clues to inspire my writing when a pigeon was hit by a passing car. THUD. I stopped in my tracks and covered my hand with my mouth in horror. The pigeon wasn't dead. It was intact. Head on and everything. Blinking. Another car was coming and the pigeon wasn't moving.

A bearded man in dirty brown pants and a grime gray wife beater ran flailing at the pigeon. It flapped its wings a bit and flew off the street into a plate glass shop window near my head. THUNK.

I stood motionless watching. The pigeon peered back at me with something I took to be suspicion, and flew off again to muscle in on a finch who was pecking at a piece of bread in the road. The bearded man grimaced and leaned against a building.

If I were writing the scene in a short film what would happen next is that the horrified, idiotically gaping passer-by (me) would be killed by a falling toilet bowl accidentally pushed off a windowsill by a crazy old lady who was using it as a bird bath for the pigeons.

Please don't be concerned gentle reader. I'm leaving the city for a few days at the end of the week for some much needed time in the woods where my real-life crazy neighbor who has been trying to get me to bury her dead cat in the garden for two years can't find me.

For this Moonday, tell me what/who makes you laugh? I'm craving laughter. I'll take it from anywhere. Even wholesome sources.

Here's a link to Eddie Izzard's 'cake or death' for those of you in my camp.

You can't do this and care if everyone loves you at the same time

2010-08-13T23:54:00.004-04:00

When I was in college and listening to a lot of Tom Waits (I'm still listening to a lot of Tom Waits, btw) one of my roommate's many boyfriends commented that it sounded like a homeless person was singing out of a trash can. There is no one who sounds like Tom Waits. When he was young he wanted to sound like an angry old man, and now that he's getting up there he's sounding more like a cool old man. I love that he's always wanted to be an old man.

Salmon Rushdie has pronounced him the best rock poet since Bob Dylan. He's an actor, a raconteur, a composer, poet, musician, and pretty much seems to do what he wants to do artistically the way he wants to do it, and that changes often.

Have you ever found the perfect words?

2010-08-11T23:48:00.000-04:00

When the perfect words come, they are, as my grandmother would say, a hushing miracle. May they come to you, and may they come to me.

I can't go on. I must go on. I go on. Dealing with Defeatism.

2010-08-09T19:40:00.010-04:00

Moonday. New Moon. A good time to go inward and listen to what our deepest, wisest selves have to say.

As for me, I have no business posting today.

I'm overheated and surrounded by waste. I pick up garbage along the community garden fence as often as I can. Other neighbors do it too. More garbage blows by with every gust of wind.

When I throw away trash I feel it in my body. The landfill is part of me. This is true. Its part of all of us. We all have accumulated waste in our bodies that we can't metabolize, but that's another story.

I have chosen this. Chosen to love and defend this little corner of earth.    I'm sure the garden is necessary for my survival too.

Tomorrow morning at 11 AM there will be a public hearing to help determine the fate of community gardens in the city, which are imperiled yet again.

Why are community gardens imperiled? Why must people fight to save them?

I don't want to go to the hearing tomorrow. I would like to spend the time working on my business, or plotting an escape to the ocean for a bit of sanity and perspective. But I'm going to the hearing. Dammit.   Be the change etc. etc.

I'm reminding myself how grateful I am to all of the amazing people and organizations who work so hard for the earth, and therefore for us, the creatures who live here. All I have to do is show up tomorrow. How easy is that? Fairly easy.

Don't know if this rant is of any use to anyone else, but I feel better. So for this moonday.... RANT! Or better yet, dream. What is one collective change you would love to see in the world? What small (or big) thing do you do to make it happen?

For those of you in NYC, info about the hearing and pep rally starting at 9 may be found on the New York City Community Garden Coalition's website.

What do Sartre, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, & T.S. Eliot have in common?

2010-08-06T23:40:00.005-04:00

"Hell is other people."--Jean Paul Sartre
"Hell is empty and all the devils are here." --Shakespeare
"Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company." --Mark Twain
"Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections."--T.S. Eliot

Hell is an interesting place, and one I find myself contemplating frequently while standing on a New York City subway platform in August.

I've spent time in Hell, listening to poetry.

What do you imagine hell to be?

postscript: My neighbor read this and asked if I was alright, with a tone of voice that seemed to ask, 'are you going off the deep end?' I do not believe that I am. Its simply that hell is a very interesting place to contemplate-- in all seriousness, tongue in cheek, eyes closed, eyes open.... it has been obsessing the collective unconscious for a goodly time now. I was born in the late 1970's around the time of the birth of heavy metal. When I was three my dad watched the Omen with me. The Exorcist was a big movie in the early 1980's.... hell and the devil were big right about then, after the Vietmam war and into the Regan era. Now its all about vampire love affairs, so maybe we are collectively trying to make friends with our demons. Who knows?

flight paths of healing

2010-08-04T21:37:00.016-04:00

I’m eleven. I'm waiting for my mom outside of a nail salon in one of those cell block strip malls. It’s a hot day, but I can't stand the salon's muzak or its chemical smell, so I’m sitting on the curb starring into the parking lot, sweat dripping down my back.

I hear a frantic squawking noise and notice a little brown finch caught in a viscus tar-like substance poured in a black line between two cement slabs. The finch's feathers are becoming covered in black gunk as she frenetically flaps her stuck wings while the tar hardens. I kneel down, and as slowly and gently as I can, lift her up and out.

The finch is completely still in my hands. Then she trembles for a few minutes before suddenly flying away. In the car on the way home I tell my mom, who nods.

For years I couldn't understand why this memory is so important to me.

Recently I was re-reading Peter Levine's book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. The book compares the way that humans handle trauma with other animals, using research from the field of neuroscience and psychological case studies to explain how trauma stays in our bodies, not just our brains, and so we need to move in order to heal.

The first phase of trauma, where we feel frozen, is an involuntary physical response that takes its time, and is then overcome by movement. Human cultures often view the immobility phase as a sign of weakness, and so are unsupportive to people experiencing it, who internalize this feeling.

There is an immense amount of energy that needs to move through the body afterward, which also often has no good outlet. We can get stuck in the frozen feeling, reliving the trauma again and again. If we are allowed to let the energy move through our systems, we begin to heal.

I came across this passage in the book:

“A bird that crashes into a window, mistaking it for open sky, will appear stunned or even dead. A child who sees the bird’s collision may pick up the bird out of curiosity... or a desire to help. The warmth of the child’s hands can facilitate the bird’s return to normal functioning. As the bird begins to tremble, it will show signs that it is reorienting to its surroundings… If the bird is not injured and is allowed to go through the trembling-reorienting process without interruption it can move through its immobilization and fly away.”

The bird was me. In all those years of feeling stuck and thrashing in the tar, some part of me knew that if I could just feel the warmth of someone’s hands (being witnessed) and tremble it out (dance and move), I could fly.

We know the flight paths of our own healing. The maps are always inside, and there are always clues to find them.

This is an excellent interview on the related topic of PTSD, creativity, and healing. Thanks gorgeous healer Shamsi for the link!

photo by Dean Borcherds. You can buy a print here.

Song for Perdita

2010-08-03T14:47:00.006-04:00

Orphan, there is a door.
Look inside the hollow where your thumb meets your wrist,
or in your elbow joint in the center of the bend,
or under the armature of your left shoulder blade behind your heart.
Slide your hand down your back and feel it there.

The door is carved from a two thousand year old olive tree
that grew in the garden of Gethsemane.
Sometimes it is rattled open by desert thunder,
or by dry wind through a forest on fire.
Sometimes it is sealed with resin.

There is no light behind the door, nor darkness.
There are no swollen-eyed mourners or bloodied fists,
no wide boulevards or sand beaches.
No hunger. No dreams.
A wail will lead you to the door but inside there is no sound.

Only you can find it,
you, all the Perditas abandoned in all the storms.
It is never found in a grandmother’s garden
of carefully trimmed box and well-fed roses.

You have to walk instead to a wild lot
inside the footprint of a forgotten building left to crumble
and seeded by rubble growers—
fast thirsty greens
that bloom with spiraling ghost flowers under white skies.
Jimsonweed and bind.

Behind the door nothing is ever lost.

Slip in Perdita.

Slip in little lost one.

life is a dream

2010-08-02T20:02:00.003-04:00

Happy Moonday! It’s the third quarter moon tonight, equal parts light and dark. The weather is finally cooling down here in NYC, and the last few nights have been good for dreaming.

Treat dreams a little bit more like waking life, and waking life a little bit more like a dream. That’s some of the best advice I’ve ever received—maybe in general, but certainly in trying to recall my dreams more frequently.

Treating waking life like dreaming-- that is, looking for signs, symbols, layers of meaning in things-- also stimulates my writing. And its easy to do in the carnival of New York City.

I love picking up random pieces of paper I find on the street and imagining that someone wants me to read them like clues. Sometimes I find grocery lists, an occasional overwrought love-note, or most magically a single yellowed page from an old book sitting on the middle of an empty sidewalk.

This latest falls into the last category, a lone page from The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader. This is in part what it says:

“Meditation is a never-ending movement. You can never say that you are meditating or set aside a period for meditation. It isn’t at your command. Its benediction doesn’t come to you because you lead a systemized life or follow a particular routine or morality. It comes only when your heart is really open. Not opened by the key of thought, not made safe by the intellect, but when it is as open as the skies without a cloud; then it comes without your knowing, without your invitation."

What a gorgeous little reminder for me to open my heart on a cloudless summer night. Thanks Krishnamurti!

What treasures have you found in the street or in the woods/desert/jungle? Stories, wisdom, inspiration?

The more I dance the more I write

2010-07-30T23:55:00.026-04:00

If I could shimmy like my sister Kate 

Shake it like jelly on a plate 

My mama wanted to know last night 

How sister Kate could do it oh so nice 

Now, all the boys in the neighborhood 

Knew Kate could shimmy, and it's mighty good

 I may be late but I'll be up to date 
When I can shimmy like my sister Kate. 
I mean, shake it like my sister Kate.

Those were the lyrics to my first ecstatic dance. My dad played blues guitar and sang, and I’d shake and shimmy just as fast and furiously as my little three-year-old booty could across the ice blue carpet of our Florida living room. By the end of a jam session I'd usually ripped off most of my clothes and whirled around and around, my eyes streaming, to collapse in a heap. This dance had a name. I called it the widdy-waddy dance.

Since I was clearly not such a ballet type, my mother took me to tap class. I loved the tah-TAH sounds my shiny Mary Janes made the first time I put them on, and hated the thick white tights that slid down my hips to create an unpleasant basket effect around my crotch during class as the instructor’s grating voice shouted, “shuffle ball change, shuffle ball change". I crumpled. We didn't go back.

The funny thing about the shadow, all those parts of ourselves we aren’t comfortable acknowledging, is that we leave our love and passion in the dark as often as we leave our fear and anger. As Rilke says, “the darkness pulls in everything.”

After that one tap class I decided that I had a secret. My way of dancing wasn’t o.k. with the rest of the world, so I needed to hide it. The surest way to hide something is to bury it someplace where you can't even find it yourself, like a squirrel with an acorn. That's what I did. I told myself I wasn't interested in dance. I didn't even like watching it very much. I would still dance around alone in my room, but that didn't count. That was silliness. It wasn't dance. When I danced in the theater, that was acting. It wasn't dance.

The acorn stayed buried until I started developing my intuition during a terrible period of writer’s block.

The conversation with myself went something like this:

"I HAVE to get out of this block. What can I do? WHAT?"

"You are a dancer. Dance."

"What? I'm not."

"Yes you are."

"Sure you don't mean that dance will shake me loose-- that's all?"

"No. You are a dancer. It is a part of who you are. Find it."

"Really? If I'm a dancer I'll be able to be a writer?"

"Yes."

I didn't have anything to lose. I listened to that voice.

Within six weeks of my first epiphany I’d found my teacher, Dunya McPherson, and Dancemeditation. I watched her dance and thought, ‘That’s it. I can come out now. Its safe for me. She's such an amazing dancer, and... she's doing the widdy-waddy dance! She's moving just how her body wants to move.' I went on her website and fell in love with her writing too. Clearly perfect.

The writer's block took time to fully melt away; maybe a year of furious dancing within the healing context of Dancemeditation with its focus on awareness and respect for the body's innate intelligence.

When the block finally melted I thought, 'Well, maybe I got what I needed and now I can stop.' But of course its not like that. The more I deepen into dance, the more my writing deepens, the more I deepen. The body is a doorway to reality beyond the personality, the ego, which can hold us all hostage. It was my ego telling me I couldn't, shouldn't write. My ego was telling me to stay small, safe, and to avoid criticism at all cost.

I'm often scared. Dance is an art form that takes many years and hours to begin to master. It isn't about steps, its about learning how to move the body with more and more articulation and awareness. Five years and eighty days to earn my Dancemeditation teacher training certificate and I'm still near the beginning of that journey. The exciting part is that like studying nature, studying the body from the inside out is also a life's work.

At its core my dance feels strong. The widdy-waddy dance is intact. Its unfolding with greater variation every time I have an opportunity to learn technique, to discover more ways to move, different ways of seeing, feeling, of being in the world.

Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells

2010-07-28T23:49:00.004-04:00

I'm too inspired at the moment to write about it. It bursts out of me and needs alone-in-my-livingroom-dancing time. It needs waking-up-in-the-morning-and-starring-at-the-wall-time. It needs walking-deep-into-the-woods time. Then I'll be ready to share it.

I once needed permission to do those things, to require those things. So, just in case someone reading this needs permission to stare at the wall or dive naked into a waterfall or cut their hair or go on a walkabout as part of their artistic process-- I humbly grant it, as a person who has struggled with my requirements and come to accept them.

This poem is from the chorus of the play The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney about the story of the redemption of Philotetes, one of Odysseus' soldiers, who was abandoned on an uninhabited island because his wound, a symbol of his inner pain and separation from the Gods, stunk too much for the other soldiers on the warship to handle.

from The Cure at Troy

Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.

What are some of your artistic requirements? Do you accept them? Do you honor them?

I screama you screama we all screama for ice creama

2010-07-26T12:13:00.002-04:00

Happy pretty-much-full Moonday. The moon is in Aquarius, a fixed air sign. Its time to make dreams real and to be filled with inspiration and new ideas. Hurray.

As I’m typing this I keep glancing down at my left wrist that is encircled with a glossy yellow ribbon with sky blue lettering that reads, ‘I wish to find pleasure in things as much as I used to as a child.’

That sentence makes me think of the Fourth of July circa 1980 and ‘I scream you scream we all scream for ice cream’. I remember a hot sticky South Florida twilight carpeted by scratchy crab grass and graced by fireflies. I’m sitting at a picnic table next to my best friend holding an as yet unlit sparkler and chanting. Ice cream appears like magic in vats behind us, and a big sign is put up that reads ‘make your own sundaes’. The ice cream chant gets louder as we are joined by a horde of other kids and laughing, loopy adults.

I’m also reminded of one of my favorite films, Down By Law by Jim Jarmusch, when Tom Waits, John Lurie and Roberto Benigni are in a prison cell in New Orleans and Roberto Benigni says that he ‘has a scream’ and starts this chant which eventually takes over the entire prison ward. If any of us ever find ourselves in prison, may we be lucky enough to share a cell with Roberto Benigni, at least in our minds.

The ribbon on my wrist came from an interactive art exhibit now on display at the New Museum on the Bowery in New York City by artist Rivane Neuenschwander. On three sides of a room are thousands of multicolored ribbons with wishes on them. You choose a ribbon, take it out of the wall, and leave your own wish in the hole in the wall that the ribbon leaves. Neuenschwander writes that this is a riff on a Brazillian folk practice. The whole exhibit, entitled ‘A Day Like Any Other’ transforms the mundane—an empty room, a dripping bucket, a chewed plastic swizzle stick— into something with the significance of a dream or a child’s imagination, and turns our wishes into things of beauty in and of themselves. If you aren’t in NYC, you can still participate in the exhibit and leave a wish online.

I think the wish on my wrist might just be the secret to happiness. The other night there was a short summer thunderstorm. The air has been thick and heavy for weeks without rain so it felt a little bit like Christmas to hear those bellows drowning out the cacophony of the city and the hiss of a hard downpour on hot pavement.

I sat watching the storm from a seat on my windowsill, which is about a foot wide, glancing down at my yellow ribbon and remembering how when I was a kid I thought windowsills that you could sit on were about the coolest thing in the world. In the rare event that I found a windowsill wide enough, I’d hop up and sing ‘The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow’ pretending I was looking out at a grimy New York City street instead of someplace in pristine suburbia. How wonderful that was. And suddenly it is wonderful again.

How about you? What was a simple pleasure you enjoyed immensely as a child?

P.S. I know I haven’t posted in forever, or even been online at all in a millennium in web terms, but I didn’t want to start out writing about that. I had some exceedingly pressing business that I’ll probably write about soon. I’m back now, and have made a commitment to myself (and now to you, kind reader) to post every Moonday, Wednesday and Friday until further notice (certainly for several web millennia.)

Sometimes Kindness Involves Silver Shoes

2010-05-10T18:50:00.002-04:00

Dark Moonday. Waning crescent moon, also known as the balsamic moon, several days before the new moon. A good time for releasing habits, patterns, and old junk of all kinds. Pruning.

Recently I’ve been having one of those times that makes you think, “Was I actually happy a little while ago, and… did I really have energy to get things done? Will I ever have energy again?”

I spent last week visiting the critical care unit of a very good hospital five hours away from where I live, sitting vigil with my family around the bed of my aunt who is fighting for her survival.

I could feel the strands of my life slipping away until there was nothing left but the sterile hospital with pumps of antibacterial lotion at every door like mezuzahs, the efficient, rushing nurses, the buzzing, beeping machines, my aunt’s shallow breath.

I silently chanted ‘Ya Sha Fi’, a Sufi chant meaning ‘to heal’ or ‘healing’ for hours. It was peaceful. My presence seemed helpful, and it felt so good to be helpful.

Coming back has been harder. My aunt isn’t out of the woods, but her prognosis has improved. The older generation sent me home. They told me I'd be needed again soon, and in the meantime I had to take care of my own life. That’s the tricky part. Picking up those strands again after casting them aside so suddenly.

We have a very small family, and I adore my aunt. Part of me wants to stay in bed, pull the covers up over my head, and hibernate for the foreseeable future.

But that's not what I’m doing. I’m also not forcing myself, kicking and screaming, back to ‘normal’. I’m being patient with the part of myself that wants to hide under the covers forever more.

I learned this trick when I was quitting smoking. If you really want to shift a behavior, you have to be incredibly kind to the part of yourself that is resistant to the change.

Today I bought a pair of silver shoes I’ve been wanting for about a year. Just looking at them makes me want to dance, and certainly to get out of bed so I can put them on. I wore a silk dress because beautiful clothes help me to face the world. I gave myself small manageable tasks to accomplish with the understanding that I didn't actually have to get everything done.

I held space for how I’m feeling in my meditation practice. And I did my meditation practice.

I’m sure that I’ll have days where I fail, days where I stay in bed in ratty sweats reading a novel for hours, getting up only to eat brownies, and I have to be kind to myself on those days too. Tell myself its o.k. I’ll just try again tomorrow.

Because life is too precious to be spent beating ourselves up.

For this Moonday, I’d love it as always if you have some art or a poem to share of any kind. I’d also love to know what cheers you up? What do you do to encourage yourself when you’re feeling overwhelmed by life?

Its poem in your pocket day

2010-04-29T02:46:00.001-04:00

Calloo! Callay!

From the Academy of American Poets Website:

"The idea is simple: select a poem you love during National Poetry Month then carry it with you to share with co-workers, family, and friends (on April 29th)."

There are links on the site to local events celebrating the day.

Like all of us I have friends who will get funny little smiles on their faces and devilish glints in their eyes at the phrase "poem in your pocket"... but I don't care.

Since I'm such an exuberant poem sharer, maybe I'll fish out my old cargo pants today.

I just received this poem in a birthday card from a dear friend. (Thanks Gayla!) So this is one of the poems in my pocket. Its by none other than the always gorgeous Hafiz.

Come, let's scatter roses and pour wine in the glass;

we'll shatter heaven's roof and lay a new foundation.

If sorrow raises armies to shed the blood of lovers,

I'll join with the wine bearer so we can overthrow them.

With a sweet string at hand, play a sweet song, my friend,

so we can clap and sing a song and lose our heads in dancing.

What's the poem in your pocket today? It'll make my day if you share it here in the comments.

Learning to Give from the Overflow, not from the Well

2010-04-26T19:05:00.004-04:00

There is a wise Sufi saying, 'Give from your overflow, not from your well.' I interpret this as meaning give from a place of love, joy, and abundance, not suffering and self-deprivation.

Today in New York City its a rainy Moonday, which feels good. Its like a snow day for gardeners. I'm taking some time for myself after spending a large portion of the last two weeks working on a massive volunteer project. I'm the director of a kid's community garden on the Lower East Side called the Children's Magical Garden.**

Kids love worms. They get super excited whenever they find one.

Kids, teachers from the School for Global Leaders across the street from the garden, parents, other garden members and I have been putting in a rain garden, a small native wetlands that soaks up the water in the garden's lowest point. When the plants have grown up some, it will not only look like a wild, beautiful place, but will also create habitat for more song birds, humming birds, bees, dragonflies, and butterflies... increasing the wildness in the city by just a little bit, and providing an amazing outdoor classroom for kids and adults alike.

All of this warms the cockles of my heart and so I haven't minded all the hard work, even though it has involved digging three feet down into ground consisting of broken brick, brick dust, rusted metal and the like.

My hands look, to quote a literary friend, "very Pearl S. Buck" with the ground-in dirt (even after scrubbing) giving them a mottled appearance. On the upside, I can feel my hands getting stronger and think I would do alright in an arm wrestling contest.

This community garden is one of my greatest spiritual teachers. Sometimes its lessons have been frikkin hard.

Its a large unpaid undertaking and has the potential to suck up all available time-- very dangerous for an entrepreneur and writer with a penchant for procrastination. There have also been so many seemingly hostile elements to overcome such as--

Toxic soil. (Most NYC soil is poisoned with lead from paint and must be painstakingly amended or replaced with new, healthy compost.)
Endless rubble. (The garden was build on the foundation of a burned down building and has been sinking into that crushed foundation over the years.)
Ignorance. (Very few people have any gardening experience, and therefore greatly underestimate the challenges the space provides. They think it is simply a matter of planting flowers and watching them grow.)
Personal conflict/ toxic relationships. Toxic environments produce toxic relationships. It has been challenging to say the least to work through personal difficulties with other gardeners. In the end, however, it has also been deeply rewarding and transformational to all involved. These transformed relationships have made this next, more productive phase of work/play possible after years of two steps forward, one step back.

What I have strongly come to believe is that service, to be truly effective, must involve the concept of what my Dancemeditation teacher Dunya calls dynamic reciprocity. This means that the work actually feeds you. The work leaves you feeling joyful, inspired, re-energized, more creative, more full of juice for your own projects.

Forget selflessness. For most of us, its a trap.

Dynamic reciprocity goes beyond feeling good because you are "making a difference". That attitude of self-righteousness has the potential to slide into its own flip-side, an attitude I've felt many a time... martyrdom. "I'm spending all this time and not getting paid. My work isn't appreciated, and yet its now somehow just 'expected' of me by the community. The garden doesn't look beautiful yet and so people don't see all the hard work I've put in..." blah blah blah.

Then there is "Oh my gosh! Look at me with my big ego wanting credit! I'm not selfless enough! This is about the earth, the children..." blah blah blah martyrdom.

I decided that this year I was going to pull self-righeousness and martyrdom out by the roots and compost them. I've been planting joy and contentment in their place.

I've made it a point to focus on activites I adore such as mentoring a small group of local kids I've known for years who are committed to the garden and to listening/working with the earth. I'm learning to better delegate the tasks that I dislike, such as contacting the parks department. (I actually much prefer removing rubble by hand than organizing on the phone.)

I have also reminded myself that it is because of this project that I was sponsored by the community to go to school to become a permaculture designer, something that has dramatically increased my happienss.

The past two weeks I haven't had as much time to write, but all of the additional physical activity has magically worked out all kinds of kinks in the third draft of my play and first draft of my novel. My third eye feels very open, and I feel tremendously grounded and focused in my herbal consultations after working so intensely with the earth. Dynamic reciprocity is happening, and its truly awesome.

For this Moonday, I would as always love it if you have art/poetry etc. to share in the comments, and am also interested in where you have found dynamic reciprocity or rooted out self-righteousness/martyrdom in your own life...

**Children's Magical Garden website still under construction. Find lots of pictures of the garden on the facebook group, Children's Magical Garden Community and Supporters

Thanks to friend, fellow Dancemeditator, and novelist Karleen Koen who first introduced me to the phrase 'give from your overflow, not from your well'. I've been pondering it ever since.

Rainbow Jelly in an Underwater Passageway (a five-year-old named this blog post)

2010-04-12T14:13:00.001-04:00

Moonday. Waning crescent. Dark spring moon just before Wednesday's new moon. A subtle time. So many changes on the earth.

Last year in April, National Poetry Month in the US, I took the 30 poems in 30 days challenge. I posted them on facebook-- which felt both bold and terrifying, but I knew that if I didn't post them I wouldn't write them. Some days the poems stuck in my throat and twisted out of me, and other days they flowed.

After it was over I felt restored. I hadn't written poetry regularly in over ten years. I'd gotten my poetry mojo back.

But after the month of forced poetry I disappointed myself. I didn't keep it up the way I'd wanted to. I punished myself for needing that outside influence, the uncritical cheering voices of friends. Real writers don't need that.

Of course I know that's nonsense. Any artistic or creative enterprise requires a dialogue with an inner five-year-old, and that five-year-old needs a big cheering committee sometimes, especially when she's been living inside of a small box for too long.

Now the poetry is taking over again anyway, because who can stop from writing poetry surrounded by all these blossoms?

So I'll start the 30-in-30 challenge today, just before the new moon, and continue every day through the next new moon. Along the way I'll find ways to cheer for the five-year-old, and (with luck) keep it up this time after the 30 days are over. Will report back on the progress.

It isn't too late to join me. Never too late, actually.

Here is today's poem:

violet flower
stalk water-green,
translucent cells
rising in tiny spring spirals

deep purple petals
unfolding like a fan
in the hand of a flamenco dancer

inward wrist circling outward
down circling up
meeting the sun
for a half-life
of pure delight

In the comments I'd love it if you'd leave your own poem of course, and/or an answer to this question:

What or who encourages your inner five-year-old to be creative?

On breaking unwritten rules

2010-04-05T11:24:00.002-04:00

Happy Moonday. Its a waning gibbous-- three weeks give or take before May's full flower moon and an excellent time for spring cleaning and the release of worn-out habits before the new moon.

I've never been one to obey a rule or code if it strikes me as nonsensical or unfair. One that I simply can't abide is the unwritten rule that a woman should not be alone in city parks after dark. If 'bad things' happen, well, what was she thinking? As an intrepid city herbalist I find myself alone at night in city parks with some frequency. I do usually bring my dogs.

Sunset. I'm on my hands and knees on the ground in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, gathering a wild, abundant medicinal plant called cleavers, Galium aparine. I'm determined to gather enough to make a quart of tincture (a lot) because this is the lushest, largest patch of cleavers I've ever seen, and its a plant that I need for my own healing. I've been searching the park for hours, and have finally found it. But its getting late. The sun goes down.

When I make herbal medicine I thank every plant as I harvest, and I chant or sing as I go. On this, the first almost warm spring night, I'm chanting Ya-Hadi, a Sufi chant, ya (invocation) Hadi (the Guide or Guidance).

Even though its a dark moon and I'm harvesting by thin orange lamp light, I can make out the cleavers easily by their distinctive shape like successive Doctor Seuss umbrellas on a chain and the way they cleave to my fingers, as their name implies. Their stalks are rough like cat tongues.

I've long known about cleavers' reputation for soothing swollen lymph, and have taken it for this myself, but beyond that our relationship has been somewhat superficial until now.

As I'm harvesting, I'm intently 'listening' for what the plant has to say about itself. It gives itself up so easily. I feel that this is an excellent herb both for physical and emotional flexibility. (Its used to treat arthritis, as it turns out.)

I've almost gathered enough when the tall dead mugwort stalks I'm sitting under start to snap and I turn to see a large man looming over me. I let out the deep growling warrior's bellow my father taught me. The man jumps back.

He is not a threat, at least not to me in this moment.

I say, 'I'm sorry I shouted, but you know, you startled me.'

He replies, 'That scream... I know you are a macho girl. You have machisimo.

'Yes,' I reply.

'You are very lonely?' he asks.

Its important that the plants have good energy around them at all times when I'm gathering and making medicine, so after letting him know that no, I'm not lonely, not at all, I tell him what I'm doing, show him the cleavers, and explain some of their medicine.

'It give me energy?' I say it will. 'Delicious?' I tell him no. Its bitter. Good for the liver, like all bitter herbs. He tries it anyway, and says nothing.

I turn away from him and continue to chant and gather. He stands and watches me.

After about ten minutes I've gathered enough. Earlier I had collected a small bag of silvery green spring mugwort tops for tea and wild dandelion greens for salad. I can't find the brown paper bag in the dark. I ask if the man will help me to look for it. We find the bag. I thank him and say goodbye.

'Be safe!' he says.

'You too!' I reply.

Cleavers definitely helps increase emotional flexibility. (And next time I'll bring my dogs. I'm happy to talk to curious onlookers, but don't want them sneaking up on me when I'm deep in a plant conversation.)

What is an 'unwritten rule' you sometimes (or often) break?

As its Moonday, I'd also love it if you would post poems or art of any kind in the comments.

Full Egg Moon: What Are You Hatching?

2010-03-29T02:53:00.001-04:00

Happy full Moonday! Today is the first full moon of spring, commonly known as the egg moon, which makes me think: what are you hatching?

The word that keeps coming up for me is freedom. Several years ago I opened a door to find a man holding a gun an inch from my chest.

After that experience I felt a kind of freedom I'd never had before. I lost all self-consciousness. I would wear rainbow socks and sing as loud as I liked. This faded after awhile, and I've been wanting to get that feeling back ever since without another gun.

Photo by Alan Houghton

On a recent light grey afternoon I went for a walk through the grimer part of my neighborhood on my way to East River Park, down by the Williamsburg Bridge which feels like a forgotten, liminal place.

I had been thinking about my grandparents house, a place I had adored, and how I hadn't gotten to say goodbye to it as the contents were emptied and the house was sold when I was in college.

I was thinking about that and about the movie Up, (which no one had warned me would make fat rivers shoot out of my eyes during the film's first 20 minutes), when I came across a room-sized open metal box.

Inside it was a broken table and chairs, lots of upholstered furniture, chipped odds and ends. Near the front of the box was an upturned, formidably sized television encased in an an ornate wooden cabinet with drawers. Upside down it somehow reminded me of Cyclops's eye.

And then there was a old wooden trunk like a treasure chest, big enough to hide in. Of course I had to open it. Inside I found yellowed newspapers that happened to be from the year I was born. There were some electronic parts, and sealed in plastic, a green rafia hula skirt complete with a carved out coconut husk bra.

The collection as a whole had clearly been the furnishings of someone's life. I stood back for a moment to witness it fully. Then I imagined my own apartment inside the box instead. I picked up the hula skirt. It weighed almost nothing. I took it.

When I got home, I found some hula videos on you tube, put on the skirt (the coconut bra didn't fit, sadly), some rainbow socks, and danced.

In the comments, I'd love it if you'd share what's hatching in your life... what qualities of experience-- adventure, freedom, love, forgiveness, mercy, etc... And as always, any offerings of art or poetry on this or any theme are greatly appreciated.

Slower and Lazier

2010-03-22T01:57:00.007-04:00

Sleeplessly
I watch over
the spring night--
but no amount of guarding
is enough to make it stay.
by Izumi Shikibu

----------------------------------

march sun
i dream of the farm
even during the day
as it was
as it became since
trees growing thick in fields
even the blackberries
once rampant
succumbing to their shade
i remember the call
the chill sun of that day
your hands
wet birds
your eyes cloudy clay
i miss the chestnut walls
sheltering hills
the trees dressing
for spring
softness of worn stones
found in
abandoned roads

by @ten_ten_ten on twitter. Here is his poetry blog. As far as I know he wants to be anonymous beyond this... (Just in case you weren't aware, twitter is a great place to meet poets.)

Late March Moonday. Its just after the Spring equinox, with a waxing crescent. Today on the south side of Tompkins Square park I noticed that the daffodils were in full bloom. I find it almost painful to look at daffodils because it makes me sad to see them crisp in the hot sun and fade. It seems to happen so soon after they bloom. Spring is ruled by all of these gorgeous, short-lived blossoms. We all deserve a holiday from our lives just to appreciate them properly.

As that hasn't been declared yet, my antidote is to go into Pooh bear mode whenever I can.

Be slower and lazier. I want to feel my spring.

Even in my 'leisure time' as a gardener I can get overwhelmed by the amount of work there is to do now-- all the pruning, readying the soil for planting, clearing away the dead brush-- but the plants grow without me. The mint grows around its long dead stalks, the un-pruned apple tree bore fruit for years without anyone's help but the sun and the rain.

So today I'm just taking it in.

In the comments, I'd love it if you'd share something of your experience of the spring-- this one or any other. Do you have a picture in your head that says 'spring' to you from yesterday, last year, or twenty years ago?

I'd also be thrilled if you shared poetry or art, yours or someone's who inspires you.

monsters, perfect dads, and Frida Kahlo

2010-03-15T03:04:00.003-04:00

Moonday. New moon. We are in the darkness before the light of spring which happens officially on the 20th of this month. Its an excellent time for going in deep. That's what I've been trying to do.

I've been having some trouble writing recently. I need to make some minor adjustments to my play before it can go on to its next phase, several other projects want more attention, and then there is this little blog I love that hasn't seen a post in a week.

I called up a good friend to talk about it.

'Well,' I said, 'I have a lot going on, but I think that what's really been stopping me are my limiting beliefs.' She laughed. 'Do I sound too psycho-babbly?' I asked.

'No,' she said. 'I just don't hear that very often. Its refreshing.'

'Oh!' It was like she'd pinned a gold star on my cardigan.

I told her what was stopping me. It was this thought:

Its too hard to make a living as a writer, so you shouldn't even try.

I know its origin. When I was a little kid pounding away happily on the electric typewriter, my dad sat me down. He told me that only two percent of writers make their living at it. I needed to find something else to do. Writing for fun was great, but find another job.

To my child's ears he meant that I would never be good enough at the thing I loved to do the most.

Many, if not most people have a version of this story, some way more intense than mine. There is usually some doom-sayer along the way-- a friend, a teacher, often someone with good intentions, and no amount of singing the Wonderful World of Disney theme song can shake them out of the mind.

'Its a monster' I said.

'What do you do with monsters?' my friend asked.

'First you turn on the light, and then... you help them.' I said, remembering one of my favorite Rilke quotes:

'perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something helpless that wants help from us.'

'How do you help them?' she asked.

'I don't know. That's the problem.'

What do you think your monster wants?' she asked.

'She wants a good dad. She felt abandoned by her dad.'

'You might have to be her dad,' my friend said. And then she said, 'Frida Kahlo. That just popped into my mind.' Its great having intuitive friends.

That was it. I love Frida Kahlo. I adore her work, her inspiring life story, and I love the way she would usually wear these timeless colorful skirts, and then show up in a suit.

I'm like that. I'm a bit of a princess with a dash of drag king. I live mostly in silk, but occasionally I lust after herringbone jackets, french cuff shirts, wide legged pants and fedoras.

So now I'm assembling my perfect dad costume for my monster. He looks good in a hat. His shoes match his belt and umbrella. But he looks comfortable, gentle, like an abused animal might follow him home. He's basically a mix between Johhny Depp, my super stylish and wildly encouraging college design professor, and my grandpa. My monster is delighted. My perfect dad tells her that she can be anything she sets her heart on. (Yes, like the Disney song says.)

*For the record, I have a pretty good adult relationship with my real dad now, and wouldn't change him, even though he still thinks that John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever is the pinnacle of style.

This moonday, I'm thinking about monsters and how I can help them. If you want to share a story, or some inspirational art, quote, or poems that help you to help your monsters... I would love to see/read them.
Happy Moonday!

a plant for peaceful warrior women and wise men

2010-03-08T15:51:00.006-05:00

This week's Moonday Post...

These last few days have felt like spring in Manhattan with brilliant blue skies and a carnival atmosphere on the streets of the East Village.

Yesterday I walked by children carrying bunches of cut daffodils and people dancing to jazz music in Tompkins Square Park.

I was on my way to a friend's house with my dogs, weighed down by bags of produce from the green market, when a man passed me a little too closely and shouted some rape-y comments. Really violent things.

That almost never happens to me. I have a pretty good force field, but it was down. I wasn't prepared after a winter of automatic shielding by the cold and layers of warm clothes.

What popped into my head was the chant we all learned in elementary school, 'I'm rubber and your glue whatever you say bounces off me and sticks onto you', which I muttered as I passed.

I'm blessed to know lots of men who actively discourage cat calling. I'm grateful too to all of the parents and teachers who work had to bring up boys with respect for women (such as my mother in law). But the most instantaneous way I've found to discourage cat calling is to change my posture, my attitude, my vibe. I don't allow it into my space.

Today I'm off to the park to restrengthen that force field. I want to see if artemisia vulgaris, mugwort, is popping her head up yet. Artemisia has the namesake of Artemis, Goddess of the hunt, the moon, protector of animals, the young, and the wilderness. Like the goddess Artemis, Artemisia vulgaris is a moon plant. The backside of the leaves are silver, like moonlight.

The plant artemisia is very subtly psychotropic (mind-altering) when ingested or burned as smudge. It can enhance the vividness and recall of dreams, strengthen intuition, and deepen a person's relationship to nature. It grows all over the world in various forms.

This plant has helped me to gain a sense of independence and inner strength. I've enlisted its (her) wisdom to help others also come to trust their own intuitions, their 'gut' feelings.

Its a plant par excellence for wild, fearless women and men, and I'd go so far as to say that its a remedy for cat calling. Artemisia brings out the peaceful warrior in women and the wise woman in men.

There is a fierceness about the plant that has nothing to do with aggression. Artemisia helps us to stand tall with our shoulders back while moving with precision, grace, and a steady gaze, effortlessly discerning when we can relax, and when we need to be alert.

Right now I'm imagining Mr. Rapey-Comments sitting in the park somewhere with a large clump of mugwort. He finds himself drifting off. He starts to dream.

In the dream he comes across Artemis. He was watching her bathe. She looks at him. He thinks, 'oh shit', his brain tunes into the collective unconscious and he remembers the part of the myth where Artemis turns a dude into a stag who is torn apart by dogs. Only this time she transforms him into a woman in Manhattan in the spring.

There are lots of men out whistling, shouting, and hooting at women on the street. He, now a woman, comes across himself as a man. He hears his male self speak violating, ugly words. They reverberate inside his female body.

He opens his eyes, changed. He has heard his words as a form of self-hatred, and with this knowledge he begins, slowly, to heal.

Do you have a good cat calling story? Some time when you were able to shift the energy?

Wishing you a wild, happy Moonday.

Herbal footnotes:

There's lots of fantastic info on the medicinal uses of artemesia vulgaris. Here are some links to great sources: Susan Weed,

Henriette's Herbal (a compedium of excellent articles)

When its very young, artemisia is a light mint green and tastes pleasantly bitter. Its used a lot in cooking and medicine in Asia. In acupuncture its burned as moxa. Like all bitters, its excellent for the liver and digestion, and so is a potent addition to the diet this time of year when our livers are all craving some t.l.c. after the winter.

Pregnant women should avoid it internally, though they can still benefit from its dream and intuition powers by sleeping with it in dream pillow or hanging out with the plant in the park.

Artemisia is everywhere, so once you know what it looks like, you'll always have a friend around.

Writing Myself Out of a Box

2010-03-06T01:11:00.002-05:00

I don't want to write a process-y post. I don't think that anyone will want to read it. But nothing else will come out, so here it is.

When I started this blog, I was in conflict. I think of myself as a writer, dammit. But I'm also an herbalist. I ~~wanted~~ felt like I should have an herbal blog on my business website, friendlyherbalist.com. But since it seemed to be stuck, I decided I'd just start a 'say anything' blog and see what came of it.

I didn't want to write-- exclusively-- about herbs. I didn't want to be-- exclusively-- an herbalist. I was afraid that somehow my artist self was going to be swallowed up by my herbalist self. I'd started my journey into herbalism when I was pretty creatively blocked.

By the time I wrote my first post here I'd worked my way out of the block, largely thanks to years spent learning about medicinal plants, and through them deepening my relationship to nature and my body.

When you enter into a relationship with a plant, learning all about it firsthand by touch, smell, feel, taste, listening to the sound of its leaves in the wind, and listening to your intuition about its healing medicine-- it changes you.

When you gather its flowers or dig its roots and make herbal preparations that then cure your ailments-- your aches and pains, your grief, your scattered mind, your brokenness; it gives you strength. Its incredibly empowering. So then of course you can make your music, or dance like no one is watching or... write a play. You can speak clearly. You can step into your power instead of giving it away. Having a relationship with the medicine plants is a portal into the sacredness of the earth and your own body.

Marsh mallow flower, wild harvested last July, Brooklyn, NY.

So, as you may be able to tell, I'm passionate about this stuff. And what's been coming up for me lately is that... I have to share it. More. Its needed. What's that line from T.S. Eliot? 'Hurry up now, its time.'

I love lots of things: Poetry, dogs, dancing-- even dog dancing. The theater has my heart. But the sacredness of the earth... that is what I know. That's the part of me that feels like a clear channel from sky to earth and back again.

So I'm going to write more about that. Not exclusively. Oh no. (Don't worry scared inner writer--I'm not boxing you in.) I think that I'm just ready to claim something. Some knowing. We'll see.

Feedback is good. Are these topics-- deepening relationship to nature-- sacredness of body and the earth--- hands on herbal medicine-- of interest to you? If you enjoy this blog, what would you like to read more about?

Moonday Experiment-- Unleashing Your Wild Creativity

2010-03-01T05:13:00.003-05:00

Moonday, just after the full snow moon last night. If this is the first you've heard of it, let me explain. This marks week 9 of the Moonday Experiment, designed to help me, and whoever else wants to play, to take a little time out on Mondays to celebrate the moon by doing something creative and/or wild despite the dominant culture's referendum on Monday wildness. Moonday is a day (or just an hour) to let loose creatively-- throw caution to the wind and be creative for creativity's sake-- ie. wild. The comments here are meant to be a place to share creative impulses and/or inspirations, meaning you can share your own art or links (poetry, visual art, stories, dance, etc.) or the art of someone who inspires you.

Image by Catrin Welz-Stein-- I adore her haunting, dream-like illustrations.

Personal update: I seem to be in a 'bubbling' phase-- not a lot of output, but lots of connections happening in my mind and body. Consistently giving myself permission to just have fun in the realm of art seems to be shifting something internally. We'll see if it ends up influencing my writing. I've been excited to get feedback from some of you saying that Moonday is helping to open up your creativity.

Last night while walking on East 11th Street, a friend and I came across a large pile of bright blue Encyclopedia Americanas with gold embossed eagles on their fronts next to a pile of garbage bags surrounded by the dirty melting snow. I picked one up from the top of the pile. Skin to Sumac. Copyright 1975. There are articles on Stream of Consciousness, Sonic Boom, Squaw-fish Squid, Stained Glass, Stalin... I can't wait to chop it up and make some collages based entirely on words and images beginning with the letter S.

I wrote about how collage helps me out of creative ruts and puts me in touch with my subconscious (also in the Encyclopedia Americana) back when no one at all was reading this blog. If you're interested, you can read it here.

So, join in, please? Post a poem (it doesn't have to be one that you wrote), a link to a story, art you made, art you love-- or play the stream of consciousness game, a verbal form of collage. Write down the first 10 words that come into your head when you read this word: fruitcake

Happy Moonday!

Moonday Salon-- Post your Creative Thoughts

2010-02-22T14:38:00.001-05:00

This is week 8 of the Moonday Experiment. A close friend of mine who actually reads my blog was confused by Moonday. She thought that there was only one Moonday post. So that means I haven't been clear enough. Moonday is my weekly response to Monday. It is me zapping the "do! do! do! go! go! go! hurry hurry hurry!" chant in my head with a different energy, Moon energy. Its a way for me to honor the intuitive and creative on a day that is known for being all about business. As I'm an artist who does my level best to do something creative every day, I use Moondays to do something-- at least a tiny little something-- uninhibited and for sheer love of the thing, without a thought to whether or not its good.

I've been encouraging people to participate in the experiment by sharing their creative ideas and outpourings in this supportive space in the comments. There haven't been many takers yet, but the ones who have shared something have been incredible and so much fun.

This Moonday I will be dancing at the Metropolitan Building at 7 PM (its free if anyone happens to be reading this and lives in NYC) with Dunya Dianne McPherson's Dunyati Alembic. The Alembic is meditative dance, Sufi practices translated for performance. Our director's instructions are simple but challenging: relax and breathe. Our job is to stay inside of our bodies, and not to think 'is it good, is it bad, do they get it?' just stay with ourselves and let the dance unfold. It feels profoundly healing to dance in this way with witnesses, and our hope is that its also deeply relaxing to watch. We've gotten some great responses that indicate that it is.

So that fulfills the Moonday quota! And this completely unedited post does, too.

I'd absolutely adore it if you'd join in. Post a link to your site with your artwork/videos/poetry/etc. Share some writing-- a thought, a poem-- in the comments-- it can be a quote that inspires you, too. Or a link to some art of any kind that inspires your own creative freedom.

That seems to be the theme bubbling up in me today. Freedom. Inner Revolution. So if you like, answer this question: When do you feel free? Where are you? What are you doing?

Happy Moonday!

doubt, prayer, and the healing power of beauty

2010-02-20T02:04:00.013-05:00

Sunset. Low tide.

Faith and prayer have never come easily to me. I’m a doubter. I talked to a friend about it once when I was feeling anguished on a meditation retreat, and she said maybe the most comforting sentence I've ever heard. She said, ‘Maybe God likes you that way.’

Recently I watched a loved one go through something hard, and I came to the realization that I'm completely powerless to help her. It seems that I’ve been given two choices: worry, or pray. I’ve had this short poem by Hafiz rattling around in my head for days now. I need to have it tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.

Now that all your worry has proved such an unlucrative business, why not find a better job.

So this is my prayer.

Sometimes time melts. Six hours spread out in our minds to reach the girth of a decade’s worth of memories.

My friend and I were fifteen and it was summer. Neither of us appreciated those facts much. Both of us had a parent with cancer and life felt full of snares. But we'd been graced by a trip with her family to a largely unspoiled island with the Atlantic stretching out on one side, and wide green salt marshes on the other. It was easier to breathe there with the salt air and all of the space just to be.

After dinner and some games of gin rummy one night we took our usual barefoot walk along the quiet beach. We could see layers of stars above the dark ocean, and little else except for the glint of foam at our feet under the half moon.

We walked a long way along the shore to our favorite place, a protected cove on the northernmost point of the island where the beach ended and we had to navigate through spiky reeds and armies of sand crabs to sit on some large rocks over the water. That night the sea was smooth and it was easy to imagine walking on it, out and out.

Still heat curled around our bodies and tickled drops of sweat from the backs of our necks before we slowly eased into the dark water. We walked in up to our chests, then dunked our heads and shoulders under quickly, shivering for a moment before adjusting.

We traced constellations in the sky, getting lost in endless layers of stars and distant galaxies. Shooting stars radiated over our heads, one after another. It was a meteor shower, a poem to bent time, end of time. It felt like a mystery that was outside of us, and somehow passing into us directly through our eyes.

Around our shoulders and arms we found more stars. There were stars in the reflection on the sea’s surface, and yellow sparks inside the water too.

Phosphorescence danced with our movement, shimmered in our wet hair. We were crowned with stars. We were inside of them, two Queens of Heaven, two infants safe inside of Mystery, splashing and laughing, in love with the rise and fall of our sparkling forms, in love with everything until the sky grew light and we made our way home to slip into our beds by sunrise.

That night unfurls inside my spirit like a map to Source when I’m full of doubt and forgetting beauty.

I pray that my loved one who shared it with me can be comforted by the memory too, that if her pain ever becomes too big, she can remember that time, have it become one of her maps back to beauty. I pray that like for me, it will help her remember that the universe is vast, gorgeous, endlessly varied, always changing, always eternal, whole, and that somehow nothing is ever lost when we love it.

Sending Loving Kindness to Myself... Circa 1992

2010-02-15T01:19:00.004-05:00

Moonday. Just after the new moon, the start of the year of the Tiger, Valentine's and V day.

I feel the pull to turn inward, retreat. After some powerful healing work this week with my Dancemeditation community, I'm standing very close to a young me. Fifteen. She is full of self-hatred worn like thick dragon-scaled armor. She loves Rilke and the Bronte's. She likes to sit on the jagged brown outcroppings and stare at the roiling river, especially because she's not supposed to be there. Her chest is sunken. Suicide seems romantic. There are bars in her eyes. Her voice sounds shrill and brittle in her head.

Books are rafts. Dogs are guardian angels. Nature is Mother. Those things haven't changed. This is a poem she loves. Today I send her my love, laughter, and I'm listening.

The night is darkening round me
The wild winds coldly blow
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot cannot go

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow
And the storm is fast descending
And yet I cannot go

Clouds beyond clouds above me
Wastes beyond wastes below
But nothing drear can move me
I will not cannot go

O mother I am not regretting
To leave this wretched world below
If there be nothing but forgetting
In that dark land to which I go

Yet though tis wretched now to languish
Deceived and tired and hopeless here
No heart can quite repress the anguish
Of leaving things that once were dear

--Emily Bronte

(It goes on and on like that.)

If you have a poem, song lyrics, an image, or a thought that a younger self who could use a little TLC might enjoy, I'd love it if you'd share it in the comments, or any other Moonday artistry.

How very bad poems can heal the spirit

2010-02-13T20:23:00.016-05:00

I've been writing, lately, what my critical judging mind calls (very) bad prose poems. These are free verse, plain, and just for me. They've been helping me with my journal practice. I write in a journal every day in the morning as a way to ease into the day, get the writing muscle moving, write down my dreams, and get unstuck creatively. Only sometimes I feel stuck even in my journal writing.

The poems help me out of journal ruts-- when all I seem to write are lists of things I want/need/ can't seem to do, and lots of blah blah about my feelings. They help me to articulate large experiences in few words when writing in prose seems daunting.

Because I'm letting them be bad, and just for me, they aren't stuck, and don't take long. Usually they illuminate ideas or feelings. There is always more of a quality of witness about them. When I write prose, I'm in it-- mired inside the feelings, actions, ideas. With poetry, I feel freer. I feel more spacious. I don't feel compelled to explain or understand every thought, emotion, or turn of event. I simply write impressions.

I thought I'd share one of them, written soon after a Dancemeditation workshop at Kripalu with my teacher Dunya. We had been listening deeply to our bodies. Some of them are more story-like than this one. I'm sharing it even though I don't think its a 'good' poem-- (it isn't one that I label very bad, though. I'm not yet brave enough to share one of those) because it helped me, even though it is a 'list poem', which my poet friends mostly sneer at as a form. Hoping it will inspire someone else to write their own medicine.

Witnessing the Self

Grinding doubts inside my jaw,
heavy sacks of rain soaked sand.

Inflamed fear inside my face,
swollen passages
with doors on fire.

fingers and toes,
dried leaves possessed
in a windstorm.

Grief-- my heart, no more words for it.

Strong limbs,
ancient oaks unfurling green.

faith-- my breath,
open windows with white curtains
blowing into mystery.

My upper back,
wide oval lilies floating
on a glassy lake the hue of sky.

Passion-- my heart,
blood roses blooming
out of wet earth,

even with the grinding doubts inside my jaw,
heavy sacks of rain soaked sand.

Deep Dark Moonday

2010-02-08T02:12:00.002-05:00

Happy Moonday!

'Why, what's Moonday?' you ask. I'll tell you. This marks week six of the Moonday Experiment, designed to help me, and whoever else wants to play, to take a little time out on Mondays to celebrate the moon by doing something creative and/or wild despite the dominant culture's referendum on Monday wildness, in the hope that it will spark some of our own wildness and unbridled creativity.

Personal update on the experiment: I've been having a bit more fun playing around. Last Moonday I collaged a card in my journal. I decided that it was a note from my fairy godmother telling me that she had my back, used lots of glitter, and the next day I happened to find the perfect dress for an upcoming performance-- bippity boppity boo.

If you've been reading this blog for a little while, you might have noticed that I've been sort of play-challenged recently, and have had to go to some lengths to bring out my silly side. Celebrating Moonday every week seems to be helping me to ~~get over myself~~ loosen up.

Today's waning crescent moon is going into the darkest phase of a dark month. I shouldn't be surprised that I'm feeling internal, desiring to hole up. I long for a snowy cabin and silence. Spring is just around the corner, and for a gardener that means work. I have a lot more deep dreaming to do between now and then.

I've been thrilled by the stories, poems, and links to artwork in the comments each Moonday. They are fantastic. Worth checking out. Skip over my old Moonday posts and go right to the comments. I hope some of you will grace me with your Moonday inspirations again or for the first time this week. If you would share a poem, or links to artwork, stories, songs, dances... any art--in the broadest sense of the word-- that you want to share or that inspires you. No theme, just something that jazzes you up, that makes you want to dance, or bust out your crayons, a poem or scribble you made in a burst of exuberance or painstakingly crafted (though I am very pro burst of exuberance creating--- internal critics can go stand in the corner.)

Here's mine-- my internal critic wants to warn you that it may not be very good at all, especially as I'm making it up on the spot. Now I'm putting duct tape over her mouth. Ah. Better.

Slippery green snake
undulating in a bowl of twigs and dead leaves,
your back glistens with honey,
your forked tongue flicking in and out
for the delight of the feeling.

You ate the eggs last summer.
The birds have long since flown.
You are alone and sated
in a nest under a broken hive
honey-coated against the cold.

Fear

2010-02-07T00:07:00.009-05:00

I had no idea how much fear I hold before starting this blog. It has taken clear expression through words divided up into subjects for me to see it. I noticed, when I looked over at my list of labels, that I had written five whole posts about overcoming fear. I have hard evidence. Its a reoccurring theme with me.

I've always thought of myself as a brave person. There's my mother's story of the way I exuberantly jumped into the pool on my very first swimming lesson at the age of two while the other toddlers looked on warily. I stood up to bullies in elementary school. I managed to keep a level head while being robbed. I enjoy camping alone in the woods. Look how I'm listing these off like badges on a girl scout uniform.

And yet here it is again, this feeling of fear weighing on me. When I close my eyes and try to imagine what the fear is I see a shadow. I want to know what it is. I want to understand what makes me feel afraid. Is it fear of judgment? Failure? Success? Maybe its all of these things. The fear whispers to me to stay safe, keep my head down, don't make waves. It tends to start whispering the loudest when I'm about to challenge myself to do something I've always wanted, when I'm about to step out of my comfort zone.

Today I watched a video of a friend taking her first sky diving trip. She was so honest about how she was feeling. She didn't put up a front. When the videographer asked if she was scared she said 'I'm terrified. I hope I don't die.' Watching her in the air, completely exhilarated, and still allowing herself to be scared too, made me cry. She looked so beautiful and strong.

When I look at my fear directly, like shining a bright light, it diminishes. 'Oh, I'm just afraid. Its just fear.' Its like a parent switching on the light after a child cries out in a darkened room. 'It was just a shadow, see? Nothing to be afraid of.'

Maybe fear isn't something that I need to overcome at all. Maybe it is, instead, something that I simply need to accept.

Aphrodisiacs are the Drag Queens of the Plant World

2010-02-06T03:16:00.007-05:00

I'm preparing for the herbal class I'm teaching on Sunday on aphrodisiacs. My hands are smeared with raw honey, raw cocoa powder, rose powder, cayenne, cinnamon, and maca*. I'm making homemade aphrodisiac infused honey, for spreading on a buttery croissant or....

I started out a bit grumpy. I have a lot to do. I have to make an outline for the class so I don't ramble too much, even though I like rambling. I like chatting about medicinal plants like they're people. I am excited when scientists come back with findings that support the ways people have been working with them for generations. But science isn't what generally attracts people to aphrodisiacs. I need to bring out their fun side, without rambling.

I was wondering how I was going to do that, until I tasted my fingers. All of a sudden I was happy. Laughing. I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked hot. My lights were on. Yum.

Aphrodisiacs do have a 'serious' side, in the fact that most of them are also strengthening to the heart, reproductive, and/or nervous systems, many if not all are anti-depressive, and in general they make people feel happy, even giddy, which is very creatively freeing. They aren't "just" about sex.

What makes me happiest about aphrodisiac plants is that they prove a theory I've always had, something I've always felt. I wrote poems about it when I was sixteen, railing against, in my sixteen-year-old lingo, 'the priests and the pimps.' Sexual love is heart opening, expansive, joy bringing, juicy pleasure. Aphrodisiac plants are living poems to life force. They support the idea that life is pleasurable. What a simple, and yet somehow still radical thought.

Rupaul was on WNYC today, on the Leonard Lopate Show, promoting his new book called Workin It: Rupaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style. The interview sounded caned, but nevertheless I'm excited to check out the book. Besides trying to get Leonard to say that he remembered the hookers on 28th Street from the '70s, Rupaul said some interesting things. One, that we are all born naked and everything else is drag, meaning that we're all wearing a costume. And two, that Drag Queens in every culture teach us not to take life so seriously. I believe that drag is a sacred practice. Drag Queens and Kings are like aphrodisiacs. They encourage the rest of us (if we're open to them) to feel libidinous, empowered, and playful.

I like to work hard at the things I love. I'm often up late writing. I push myself, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Sometimes a well-meaning someone will say, 'lighten up. Have some fun. You're working too hard.' And I'm annoyed. This advice just points out that I'm rigid, stuck, without giving me a way to get unstuck. Aphrodisiac plants, like an amazing drag show, do the lightening up for me. They get me to laugh, to open my heart, to feel a little naughty, a little loose, a little more free. They turn on my lights and make me feel like workin it.

Kate's Ooh la la honey 2010
(The possibilities are endless. Use this as a guide and play with your own recipe.)

Raw Honey

Ground rose petals (about 1 part)

Ground Maca* (about 4 parts)

Raw Cocoa powder (about 3 1/2 parts)

Cinnamon Powder (1/4 part)

Cayenne Powder (pinch...to taste. )

*Maca is a supreme aphrodisiac for both men and women. Its actually a type of dried, ground turnip. Its also helpful for dealing with stress. Its fertility enhancing, so be careful if that's not what you want. Its a warming herb, helping the people to deal with the cold in the high Andes mountains of Peru. If you are someone who is prone to be 'hot'-- you have occasional acne outbreaks, anger easily, etc. , this might not be a great choice on a super regular basis, but I'm one of those types, and find that very occasionally having maca for its aphrodisiac purposes is fine, the way that eating a turnip is fine. Dried and powdered it tastes a little like pancake batter, and can be substituted for flour and mixed into pancakes.

On a plate, preferably with a lip, mix the powders. Power the roses with a mortar and pestal. If you don't have one, you can improvise with a mug and your fingers. Typically dried rose petals powder fairly easily. Make sure that you use petals that are meant for internal use, organic if possible. Commercial fresh roses are covered in toxic chemicals, sadly.

The measurements are very approximate. Experiment to taste. Spoon out a small dollop (about a nickel size) of the honey. Roll into the powders, forming a ball in your hands. It will be fairly sticky at first. The powders will seep into the honey. After the powders have seeped in, roll it in the powders again. They will seep in more. Roll them gently one last time, then place in a clean dry jar. Continue to do this until you have filled the jar with powder-infused honey. (You will see that more has seeped into the honey after time). Put the jar in the oven with the pilot light or another warm location overnight so that the honey and powders fully meld together. The longer you wait, the more it will infuse, but you can use it right away if the mood strikes you.

You can find the ingredients at your local herb shop. In NYC that's Flower Power Herbs and Roots on East 9th St., or if you don't have a local shop, here's a link to a good quality mail order place that carries all of these ingredients.

Measurments

2010-02-05T03:46:00.004-05:00

We all have strange little personal calculations in our heads. My guy and I were married four and a half years ago in June, and a month later we got our dog Tilly. She was around three and a half then, which would make her about eight now, with a birthday in the winter. Maybe she's an Aquarius. That would make sense. She loves the water.

The other calculation I've been working out, mostly as I walk the dogs, begins with the fact that I'm going to be thirty-three in a few months. I was thirteen when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, which means its been almost twenty years since her diagnosis. We talked about it on the phone today. She doesn't like to think about it most of the time, and doesn't feel triumphant. She's lost too many beloveds to cancer to feel like that. She just feels lucky. And she still gets nervous on her annual check-ups.

She had a scary prognosis. Two different types of cancer, one in each breast, which the doctors told us at the time was 'highly unusal'. They didn't catch it early, it spread to her lymph, and she had to undergo two rounds of chemo and radiation. At one point she was told that her chance of remission was very slim and was given six months to live.

She talks about how young my brother and I were when she was diagnosed, about how hard it was for us, especially without my dad around. She's right. It was hard. But it was also an enormous gift. I've never thought of my loved ones as invincible.

Her cancer taught me, in a visceral, body knowing way, that all we really have is this moment. I can't claim to have always lived that way, but I know it, and its helped me to soak up every gorgeous detail of some ordinary days like today washing my dishes, setting my wedding ring on the little hook above the sink, talking to my mother on the phone about the neighbors and my dance costume, air mattresses, and Angela Landsbury's new play on Broadway while the dogs whine and snort to go outside on a rare, sunny day for New York in February.

Happy Wolf Moonday!

2010-02-01T03:06:00.000-05:00

Happy Moonday! Its just past the full wolf or purge moon, which this year happens to be one of the biggest and brightest of the year.

This marks week 5 of the Moonday Experiment, designed to help me, and whoever else wants to play, to take a little time out on Mondays to celebrate the moon by doing something creative and/or wild despite the dominant culture's referendum on Monday wildness.

Personal update on the experiment: Lots of exciting creativity seems to be seeping into my life from all sorts of places. This is making me happy. Something is shifting...

Today is also my very dear friend Eve's birthday and so my Moonday offering this week is a poem about Eve the first in honor of both of them.

From Applesauce for Eve by Marge Piercy

You are indeed the mother of invention,
the first scientist. Your name means
life: finite, dynamic, swimming against
the current of time, tasting, testing,
eating knowledge like any other nutrient.
We are all the children of your bright hunger.
We are all products of that first experiment,
for if death was the worm in that apple,
the seeds were freedom and the flowering of choice.

Picture of Eve's Apple, sculpture by Edwina Sandys

I would love it (actually, I'm squeezing my eyes shut, crossing my fingers tightly, and holding my breath) if you would share a poem, either one of your own or another one that you like, links to artwork, stories, songs, dances... any art--in the broadest sense of the word-- that you want to share or that inspires you. May your day and night be peppered with unbridled laughter, wise foolishness, and unexpected delights.

Sourpus Gets Down

2010-01-31T00:41:00.000-05:00

I feel like I'm sucking on lemons tonight. I'm sour. I've been going and going and.... Mars is in the blah house, apparently. I've been told that my funny bone is broken. Its Saturday night and I was thrilled that there was only one other person at the laundromat. Actually, I resented his existence.

All day I've thought about JD Salinger's death, about how it makes me sad even though he hasn't wanted anyone to even think about him for the last 40 years. I have lots of estrangement in my family. I'm used to mourning people I haven't seen or talked to in ages. When they die it means that the reunion that probably wasn't going to happen is definitely not happening now.

I could take an herbal bath, or read some poetry, or go out dancing, or stay in and dance. Any of those things might get me out of my funk. Funk. That's what I need. That's the prescription for the night. Who can listen to Freak of the Week and stay sour?

Part of the Human Heart: Celebrating Haiti's Strength

2010-01-29T19:16:00.023-05:00

Last night I went to a memorial service/ benefit for Haiti. It was held at the Integral Yoga Center in Manhattan in a tightly packed meditation room where people sat on pillows on the floor. It was organized by my dear friend, yoga and Dancemeditation teacher Anita Teresa.

Anita led the group through a heart opening, expanding meditation and visualization. It felt like a way to honor the depth of loss, to wrap my mind around a tragedy so huge.

What came up for me is that fully experiencing grief takes some safety, some space. People in Haiti don't have that right now. What they do have is strength, and its incredible.

Another friend, dancer and Dancemeditation practitioner Nisaa Christie, has had questions come up in meditation around what the earth has been going through with the earthquake and aftershocks.

Anita invited her to dance. She let her body lead her through an experience of the earth, prompting me to ask 'Who will pay attention to what the earth needs, too?'

Her dance gave us a way to feel into the earth, to honor the process of shifting and change, beyond all human concerns, without denying the great tragedy to people and animals.

Later we were led in Kirtan by a group of beautiful singers and musicians. I felt we were not singing only to/with the Divine, but also directly to/with the people of Haiti, lending them our voices, our strength alongside their own.

I thought of children I'd read about in the New York Times the night before showing both resilience and extreme vulnerability after experiencing enormous loss, and I remembered being little, sitting on the floor in my preschool singing 'this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine'. When we were led in a version of that very song I imagined those kids finding their way to safety, finding the strength and comfort they need, inside and out.

There was some discussion about our collective experiences with the tragedy. People asked, 'why does it take this sort of crisis to come together? To give? To feel as one?'

A Viet Nam vet said that he had once seen a child shot, and witnessed the mother's grief, and in that moment he felt that he became that mother. His grief was that strong. He said that crisis has the power to shift us into a place of total empathy.

People talked about how issues of racism play into the U.S.A.'s relationship with Haiti. There were expressions of hope that this tragedy might raise consciousness about the cultural, religious, and historical gifts that Haiti has to share with the world, despite news coverage which seems to be focusing almost entirely on the negative aspects of Haiti's situation and history, without context or any sense of the U.S.'s historical role in Haiti's troubles.

For those of us outside of the Haitian community, there are lots of ways to feel more connected, not just to the tragedy, but to the people. Read Edwidge Danticat's Crick? Crack! and experience the Haitian people's perseverance through difficulty. See a production of Once on the Island (or produce it) and learn how Haitians are world leaders by being the first nation to be founded by people who were once enslaved and overthrew their oppressors. Read The Magic Orange Tree out loud to kids and be transported by Haitian folktales while being enveloped in their rich storytelling tradition. Ignore or actively refute news stories suggesting that Haiti can never overcome its difficulties. Watch some dance. Read some history.

I hope to learn some of Haiti's sacred dances. Dance is the way that I feel closest to people. I want to celebrate the people of Haiti. I'm awed by them for letting their light shine, even in the face of terrible tragedy. I want to hold space for that light.

A Month of Moondays

2010-01-25T03:09:00.002-05:00

I officially started the Moonday Experiment a month ago. The idea is to take a little time out every Monday to celebrate the moon, as the day was originally dedicated to this heavenly body. Our culture currently has an implied ban on merry making and wildness on Monday. 'Good T.V.' after a grueling day of work and commerce is the dominant trend.

The Moon has long been associated with creativity, intuition, and wildness. It makes me sad thinking of how disappointed the moon would be if it could look down and see how we spend our Mondays. I've wanted to see what would happen if some of us do something creative and/or wild on Mondays to celebrate the moon. I decided that on Moondays I would do something creative just for fun. Meeting my writing goals doesn't count.

So far I've seen a subtle shift in my attitude towards Monday. I've noticed that the busy list-making part of my mind that wants to get the work week started with a 'bang', isn't in complete control. Sunday I found myself actually looking forward to that art time on Monday, despite also needing to get some nagging tasks accomplished. Thus far celebrating Moonday hasn't stopped me from going to the bank and the post office, but it has made me care a little bit less if I get everything on my list accomplished.

On Moonday I will reflect on wildness,' I thought to myself on Sunday. 'Maybe I'll even find a way to be a little wild.... Hmm. And I'll take time out to read poetry and do some art-making, just for fun....' Yay Moonday! You are so much more fun than Monday.

I've asked everyone who thinks it sounds like fun to join me in this experiment and celebrate Moonday in your own ways, as well as to post stories of wildness, links to art of all kinds including dance, theater, visual art, poems, etc. To write about your dreams, your thoughts on wildness... If you haven't been spelunking in the comments you've missed some inspiring stuff, so here, here, and here, are the links to the previous three weeks posts. Just go straight to the comments.

I'd love it if you would share something, anything that you like, but here are some questions if you want a prompt: The moon is often associated with insanity. In an effort to take back that lunar intuitive wisdom, the question is, what is one of the most crazy/brilliant ideas you or someone else has ever had? Or an idea that seemed at first to make no sense, but somehow was just the thing.... For me, it was deciding to take up dancing when I was very stuck in my writing. If I hadn't, I truly doubt I'd be writing this sentence now.

Happy Waxing Gibbous (nearing full ) Moonday!

How to Kick Fear's Ass...Lovingly

2010-01-24T02:09:00.004-05:00

Things are intense right now. I've been experiencing grief and joy, excitement and fear. Life is always like this, its just that the intensity has been cranked up a few more notches lately. I have a long list of recent and ongoing personal crises, along with exciting but overstimulating triumphs. I could write at least a five pages of the things I want/need to do yesterday and next week, and the laundry is rising like a prehistoric monster out of the bin. More house guests ~~pile in~~ arrive tomorrow, and.... breathing in.... and out.

Last night I got out my big guns.

After a Dancemeditation practice, I took an herbal bath. Oh happy day. Of everything I've tried, this was the most fabulously successful method of making me relax. I went in with a feeling of contraction. Life is a razor's edge we have to navigate. I came out feeling expanded. Laughingly I thought to myself, 'Love kicks fear's ass.'

As an herbalist, I often tell clients about the healing power of herbal baths. They work because our skin easily absorbs the water soluble properties in the plants, and they work because they're a conscious way for us to take care of ourselves. Its hard to be very distracted in the bath. This time I chose two plants that are excellent for both the skin and the nervous system: oatstraw and linden flower.

I eased myself into the experience. First I simply sat in the bath, sans herbal infusion, reading a bit of Pema Chodron's extremely comforting When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.

When I felt calm enough--- meaning, ready to be with myself without any distraction--, I put down the book, poured in the herbal infusion, lit a candle, and turned out the light. I soaked in the water for over half an hour.

I felt an almost instant surge of happiness as the linden and oatstraw infused water slid like velvet over my body. Linden's bright yellow, honey bee attracting flowers help us to get in touch with our laughing, childhood selves. Really. Its amazing stuff. Oatstraw is like a gorgeous, Meryl Streap type older woman who knows exactly what to say to make us feel better.

I let my thoughts wander for some time, while gently reminding myself to stay in the present, and found that the longer I soaked the easier this became. Eventually I was able to focus on my breath entirely.

Now of course you may think that my mood shift happened by simply being in the bath with a candle, and having some meditation experience. Just plain old water may have done the trick. But plain old, wonderful water and conscious breathing, combined with the heart strengthening delight and sense of well being that linden engenders, and the cooling, soothing calm that oatstraw evokes felt nothing short of miraculous.

How I do it: About 4-8 hours before I want to take the bath, I get out a half gallon mason jar. (If I only had 1 hour, I'd do it the same way. It will still be good. It would also work in a pot with a tight fitting lid, or a large french press, though a mason jar works best.)

I put about 3/4ths cup of each herb in the bottom of the jar.

Then I fill the jar with boiling water, letting the water absorb into the herbs for a minute or two.

I top the full jar off with more boiling water so that there is no air between the jar and lid.

Then I seal the jar, and let it stand on the counter ideally for 4-8 hours, and at least 1 hour.

Just before the bath I carefully strain and squeeze the herbs by hand over a pot with a strainer.

Then I rinse out the jar, and pour the strained liquid back in. This is your herbal infusion, (If you are going to leave it for any length of time, put the lid back on, too. The strained herbal material can't be used again, but it makes great compost. ) The 'work' to make an infusion from start to finish is about 10 minutes. 5 minutes on each end.

I get the bath to the exact perfect temperature, and then I pour the herbal infusion into it. As last night I wanted to take a hot, detoxifying bath, I brought a pitcher of water and a glass with me, and because I love linden and oatstraw tea so much, I also reserved a cup of it to drink.

Linden and oatstraw are both moisturizing and incredibly nourishing to the skin. Today my previously dry winter skin and hair feel soft and supple, and my heart is once again open to all of the beauty and terror that life has to offer. I feel strengthened, nourished, and blessed.

You may be able to find linden and oatstraw in your friendly neighborhood herb shop. In Manhattan they can always be found at Flower Power Herbs and Roots on East 9th St., or you can find them at a large selection of online resources. You can find sources I recommend here.

*YouTwitFace is a Conan O'Brien invention

Better Git It In Your Soul

2010-01-22T00:36:00.003-05:00

If I had to choose just one favorite song, the answer would probably depend on how I'm feeling. Today (and many days for many years) I'd say its Better Git It In Your Soul by Charles Mingus. It gets me out of a foul mood faster than chocolate ice cream. The title itself is a gorgeous poem. Listening to it makes me want to dance, write poetry, hug someone, and turn up my inner flame when its getting too low.

Do you have a favorite song-- of all time or this moment? What is it?

Who Inspires You?

2010-01-20T23:52:00.007-05:00

I just finished a phase of a big creative project. I directed a staged reading of a play that took several years to complete. Today I've been itching to write, but also feeling listless, creatively drained, and antsy, so I scanned my shelf of poetry books, and found myself reaching for Edna St. Vincent Millay. Don't you wish you knew Edna St. Vincent Millay? If you've read any of her work this is a rhetorical question. I love my little Dover Thrift addition of First Fig and Other Poems. This is how it starts:

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends---

It gives a lovely light!

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:

Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

**image of Edna St. V. Millay by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It is actually for sale here. (clearly she uh..inspires him too.)

Years ago I found myself at an outdoor flea market on Canal St. in Manhattan. There was a big pile of old books that looked slightly moldy and partially burned. Of course I had to check them out. I found this amazing old pocket dictionary. I don't know the year it was published because the cover was missing, but in the back, written in pencil in a beautiful hand was this: 'Collop Monday, Pancake Tuesday, Fritter Wednesday, Maunday Thursday, Good Friday Hot cross buns. ' There are so many great words in this dictionary-- depauperate v. : to make poor. Mayling s.: a gathering flowers on May Day.

Then I came across this charred blue book. I opened it up and on the first page was this inscription in a small, tight hand: From your two friends with loads of love, Mina and Edna-- July 26th, 1937. And below it in a much broader, more florid hand: Hope you like it-- I worked hard on it-- Edna St.--

It is a first addition of Edna St. Vincent Millay's play, Conversation at Midnight. I love that inscription, 'I worked hard on it.' I found the book when I was deep inside a blocked writing phase, but the sentence rang in my ears. It was like Edna St. was shouting through time at me, 'work hard! work hard!'

I imagine she did work very hard on it. Conversation at Midnight is written in gorgeous verse. Its funny, philosophical, both deep and silly.

Here are a few lines that make me think: Carl: "...the English primrose pressed in your copy of Wordsworth means nothing to me, And it is nothing more. God, I'm so sick of the smell of faded personal tokens fluttering out from between the leaves of second hand books! Oh, let the dead past cremate its dead, I say! We have no room here even for its bones in these city blocks that must house the living world!" I totally get it, Carl. But all the same, I'd never part with my copy of Edna St.--- I like to imagine that she's my mentor, and right now, in my tired, antsy, keyed up mind I hear her shouting, 'Work hard! work hard! as I watch her dance down a West Village side street, drinking wine and laughing with her poet friends.

Is there a person from the past who inspires you creatively? I'd love to know...

Happy Moonday! The Moonday Experiment Continues on MLK Day

2010-01-18T15:34:00.001-05:00

Happy Moonday! This marks week 3 of the Moonday Experiment, designed to help me, and whoever wants to play with me, to take a little time out on Mondays to celebrate the moon by doing something creative and/or wild despite the dominant culture's referendum on Monday wildness.

Today is the U.S.A.'s observation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, and a holiday from work for many. What Dr. King has in common with celebrating the moon is simple. He had a dream. Dreams are by their very nature wild, uninhibited, from the place of the intuition and the heart.

In his great book, The 3 'only' Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination, Robert Moss writes, "We dismiss dreams, yet the word dream has magic. We use it to describe experiences that are hugely important, things that stir the soul and can change the world. I have a dream. Martin Luther King may or may not have been inspired by a night dream; by his earliest account, the numinous moment came when he was leaning over a kitchen sink in the middle of the night, close to despair, and felt the presence of a greater power blessing him and propelling him forward. But we all know what he meant. The phrase still sends shivers of recognition through us."

I love all dreams, be they silly, strange, terrifying, or illuminating. Daydreams and night dreams compel me equally. Dreams are doorways.

Dream door collage I made this summer.

In the comments, I'd love it if you want to share your own poem, links to your poetry, someone else's poetry that you adore, art, photography, links to videos, to stories of wildness, or just answer this question: What is one of your wildest dreams? This could be a night dream, or a day dream.

Mint and Mangoes

2010-01-14T02:57:00.008-05:00

Mint

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the backyard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in the green valleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenseless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our disregard.
--Seamus Heany, from The Spirit Level

That line-- my last things will be first things slipping from me-- always gets me. I thought of this poem tonight sitting in my tiny Manhattan kitchen eating a mango that I've watched ripen for a week. I cut it carefully, and as I ate it I closed my eyes and savored it, trying not to be greedy for the next bite and the next, which was almost impossible.

When I was very young I lived in Florida. We had a mango tree in the back yard. I was the only one in my family who was not allergic to the skins and so from a very early age it was my job to pick and peel the mango for everyone. I treated it as a sacred ritual. I remember that my mother would hold me up to the tree because I was too little to reach the ripe fruit, and then I'd pull as hard as I could with both hands to get the fruit off its stalk and into her basket.

I almost never eat them now. We moved to Virginia when I was five. Seeing them all green and uniform under florescent supermarket lights still seems like sacrilege. But when I'm sick I crave them. There's good medicine in mango.

Eating that mango tonight, peeling it carefully, sucking on the juice from the pulp around its core, put me in touch with my grief. There's my small, personal grief, honoring my losses, remembering my first things, thinking about my last, and then there's grief over the earthquake in Haiti. Mango trees represent the largest tree population in Haiti. Its a country full of mangoes. Environmentalists have been using mangos and other tree crops as a way to both repair the damage done to the earth and at the same time improve the nutrition and earning potential of the people. In my mind I see a tree on its side, uprooted, its fruit smashed and scattered. I think of a child. Those small hands. I think of my last things, slipping away from me.

Milestone

2010-01-12T01:56:00.004-05:00

Don't tell anyone, but I'm having a staged reading of a play I've been working on for awhile. I decided that I wanted to write this play five years ago. I scaled back on my directing gigs in order to write, because I knew that in my 'heart of hearts' I had to do it, even though I had no idea how to sit down at the desk with enough regularity.

Somehow I kept the story alive, but at a snail's pace, writing in fits and starts. It took a good three years to figure out how to get my butt in a chair often enough-- actually that isn't quite true-- I adopted the Truman Capote method and do first drafts by hand in bed. In the meantime I was busy becoming a fierce herbalist, which is the only work I love to do that is not writing, and then it took two more years to actually get the thing written.

Anyone who says they don't believe in writers block should add the words 'for me' after making that statement. I'll work hard to never ever ever have that kind of a block again. Its why I write every day, even if I have a fever of 103. Even if I'm just making lists of words I like, and words I don't like. (As it turns out, this is a very fun game. Besides being revealing, when I'm feeling stuck at some time in the future, I can turn to the lists and try to write something incorporating all of the words.)

I have a kick ass cast but I can't tell you about them, or advertise the reading due to union rules, but if you email me it means that we are friends and I can invite you for free to the reading at a famous Greenwich Village theater.

I think its kosher for me to share this much:

All the Devils are Here

Hallucinations, jazz cats, dancing demons, and the Mad Bomber set the backdrop for a journey through the Beat Scene of Greenwich Village circa 1958. Welcome to the dark roots of the soul.

Written and Directed by Kate Temple-West

Monday, January 18th, 8 PM

RSVP katetemplewest at gee mail.com

Happy Moonday! The Moonday Experiment Continues...

2010-01-11T01:56:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite wise, wild women, JK Lilith Canepa, said 'Let the Wildness begin!' when I told her about my Moonday Experiment. The idea is to take some time on Mondays to honor the moon on her day by making art, poetry, or dance, and/or to indulge in some wildness, even though its Monday, which the modern world has dubbed manic, busy, full of work, chores, and generally not fun.

I've been thinking all week about wildness. In the warmer months its easy for me to be wild. I go into nature. But right now with the winter wind blowing full blast I've been enjoying coming home to my warm apartment, making soup and curling up with a good book.

My wildness is mostly inside of my dream life now. I've been obsessed with dreams and dreaming for as long as I can remember. Real healing has come from my dreams. I also once dreamed up the plot of a novel. I'm writing it now, so its too soon to know if its actually any good or not, but its definitely true that cultivating my dreams-- actively trying to remember them, writing them down, and then working with the images and ideas that come out of them has been incredibly creatively fruitful for me.

Here's a poem I wrote recently after dreaming about a long ended relationship. We didn't end it with any sort of closure, and even though I've been in a very happy relationship since then, thoughts of this early train-wreck-complete-with-a-fireworks-car romance have haunted me. After this dream I woke up with the phrase 'my cup runneth over' in my head. I felt full of love, gratitude, and forgiveness which lasted all day, and it seems that something has permanently shifted in me, as I feel at peace about that old relationship now. Sharing this feels scary, which counts as wildness too, I suppose.

Unsent Letter

In the dream I meet you outside of time.

There is no past or future, no open wounds or expectations.

In this place we are not lovers, but Love.

You breathe and I listen to your breath.

The rise and fall of my chest slows your heartbeat.

Our love is the same as ever, light like cotton down,

that abundant and ephemeral.

Our fingers touch and turn to quicksilver,

fleet-footed Hermes broadcasting

reparations to our trapped, troubled hearts

in the cold ragged waking world.

In the comments, I'd be thrilled if you want to share your own poem, links to your poetry, someone else's poetry that you adore, art, photography, links to videos, to stories of wildness, or just answer this question: What makes you feel truly wild?
Happy Moonday! Awoooooooo!

Lazy

2010-01-10T01:14:00.000-05:00

"Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out."
---Ryokan, trans. Stephen Mitchell

My life is the opposite of this poem at the moment, but reading it is like a mental hot bath. Aaah.

Happy Moonday!

2010-01-04T18:56:00.001-05:00

0 Lady Moon, your horns point toward the east;
Shine, be increased:
0 Lady Moon, your horns point toward the west;
Wane, be at rest.

From Sing-Song by Christina Rossetti

Here's an interesting bit of info in case you didn't know:
"The Helinistic seven-day week was essentially astrological, linked to the stars, an amalgam of astronomy, astrology, and math of the great scientific cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece. The days of the week were associated with those (seven) heavenly bodies that could be seen with the naked eye: the sun, the moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.... the English weekdays come from the Anglo-Saxon translations of the planets as well as the god/goddess in whose honor they were dedicated." ~from Celestially Auspicious Occasions: Seasons, Cycles, and Celebrations by Donna Henes. (A fantastic book)

So what day does the moon, that most feminine of heavenly bodies, associated with Isis, Artemis, Oshun, with art, women, wildness, and mystery get? The moon gets Monday, a day known in the modern world for its drudgery after the fun of the weekend. Even though I work for myself, and could theoretically make Monday mean anything I want, I often get pulled along by the 'get to work!' vibe, doing my banking, going to the post office, and don't find myself honoring the moon much on manic Monday.

I want this to change. I wonder what a little conscious, weekly honoring of the moon will do for me. I think it may do great things. I'm excited to experiment. So to help me in this venture, for the foreseeable future I'll be posting bits of art, poetry, and stories of wildness here on Mondays, and invite everyone to share any art/craft/ or bit of wildness here in the comments-- post a whole poem, or link to your site with artwork of any and all kinds. I vow to make art for art's sake on Monday-- write a poem, make a collage, dance, sing, and/or to get out in nature and howl at the moon a bit. Hope you'll join me.

2009-12-31T01:50:00.004-05:00

I am finishing Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge with a whimper. As a recovering perfectionist, this is an opportunity to practice a little messiness (I suppose. Grudgingly.)

I appreciate anyone who may be reading these hastily written words at the end of what I imagine is a very full month for everyone. I have to get to sleep as I am going to ring in the new year with a full day of meditation. Hurray! I hope to come back to some of these questions in the following week, as I've been blogging them in my mind the last ten days as I've been immersed in holiday fun, travel, and a little holiday trauma too.

December 21 Project. What did you start this year that you're proud of?
So many things... This was a year of starting and finishing. One of those things is still a secret, but it involves a pact to actually make money writing, as well as an opportunity to collaborate with some brilliant women, and to (I hope) write something that helps people.

December 22 Startup. What's a business that you found this year that you love? Who thought it up? What makes it special? 1) Emc2 Emmett McCarthy see 'best shop post'.
2) Grand Street CSA (my CSA) Community Supported Agriculture. So grateful to be a part of this movement to eat slow, local food. It isn't a fad. Its an enormous improvement on the grocery store for my health, the health of the planet, and my wallet too.

December 23 Web tool. It came into your work flow this year and now you couldn't live without it. It has simplified or improved your online experience. Thanks to a good friend, I now have technology that is up to date for 2006! I have a phone that is also a blackberry type device. No more bulky filofax.

December 24 Learning experience. What was a lesson you learned this year that changed you?
Someone tried to take credit for my work. I stood my ground and got the credit I deserved. Don't mess with a Taurus.

December 25 Gift. What's a gift you gave yourself this year that has kept on giving?
Through meditation I've been developing the witness self. This is the best present ever ever ever.

December 26 Insight or aha! moment. What was your epiphany of the year? Too many. Today's insight was that I have looked at my writing as something that people sometimes admire (really-- it isn't all choppy and full of awkwardly constructed sentences when I write more than a first draft), but I had not seen it as anything that could have the potential to be truly healing, even though I've written things (especially poems) that people have expressed thanks for receiving. Its time to look at my writing as part of the medicine I have to offer. It can be that. Why not?

December 27 Social web moment. Did you meet someone you used to only know from her blog? Did you discover Twitter? Yes I discovered Twitter. I discovered it-- or more like I chose to join in-- because when my dad's secretary had to leave suddenly he was left completely helpless, having stubbornly refused to learn basic things about technology over the years as a private practice lawyer now in his 60's. He used to refuse to 'learn how to use the google'. He is learning now, but its a steep curve. So basically I was frightened into jumping into the fray for fear of being left behind, and I'm very glad I did.

December 28 Stationery. When you touch the paper, your heart melts. The ink flows from the pen. What was your stationery find of the year? Danielle LaPorte's cards are gorgeous. They are even more beautiful in real life than they are online, as the paper is thick and luscious, and the fonts are just so big and juicy. I gave the fanfuckingtastic card to a friend starting a new business. My friend cannot swear. She says that she'd like to, but her mom put a curse on her and she can't get the words out. She put the card where she can see it every day.'This is IT!' she said when I gave it to her. 'This is THE CARD! I'm putting it on my altar.' I love cards, I give them to friends all the time, and I've never gotten a reaction like that before.

December 29 Laugh. What was your biggest belly laugh of the year? I have heard that jokes are some of the hardest things to remember. I can remember laughing until I was screaming and pounding the floor on many separate occasions with three beautiful people. What we were laughing about I can't tell you. But it was very funny. I'll have to do better next year with remembering these things.

December 30 Ad. What advertisement made you think this year? I'm a fan of AdBusters magazine, and was fascinated by their corporate logo/ leaf shape test. There are two black and white squares on the page, one filled with corporate logos, the other with leaf shapes, all just in outline. I was able to name most of the leaves, but also all of the corporate labels. Most of the people I showed it to could name all of the labels and few of the leaves.

December 31 Resolution you wish you'd stuck with. (You know, there's always next year...) I'm pretty good at sticking to resolutions. I think it is the confidence that comes with being an ex-smoker. Somehow, doing that made me feel that I could do anything I set my mind to. This year I stuck to my writing every day resolution, which was major, as well as some smaller ones. I did say that I wanted to have more parties, and I had exactly one, which was one more than the year before. This year I'll be taking a page out of Gretchen Ruben's book and have more 'laid back gatherings', which are less overwhelming.

Happy New Year. I'll be blogging again at least twice weekly starting next week. It has been such a pleasure discovering great writers and fascinating people through this community that Gwen Bell has been fostering. Yay Gwen! Yay bloggers!

My Young Heros

2009-12-21T03:31:00.007-05:00

Post inspired by Day 20 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge:

Who is your unsung hero of 2009?

I'm smiling right now, looking at this picture of two of the kids I mentor in a children's garden in New York City. They are planting tomatoes we grew from the seeds of the previous year's crop for our communal 'pizza' vegetable garden.

When I tell people about my work with the kids, the reaction is often something like, 'Oh, that's great. What a good thing you're doing for those kids, etc.' While I truly appreciate the cheerleading, because its unpaid and often unnoticed work that takes precious hours away from my business and writing, I want to tell people, 'No. It isn't what I'm doing for those kids. It's the other way around. Those kids save me.'

The two little girls in this picture love the earth. They worry about what's happening to it the way I worried about nuclear war when I was growing up. The older one told me that when she sees trees that are being 'mistreated' she cries. She said that she cries at night sometimes thinking about what's happening to the planet.

The kids feel incredibly proud when they plant trees, make compost, watch the seeds they planted grow into sunflowers. They are delighted by worms, by dark rich soil, by finches nibbling crab apples and mason bees dozing on coneflowers. Their delight is infectious to anyone who is open to it.

They are learning how to be advocates for the earth, and they inspire me every time I see them.

Best of 09 Catch Up Post

2009-12-19T00:41:00.010-05:00

These prompts are from Gwen Bell's December Blogging Challenge. I'm playing catch up after a very full week of artistic output on my play, energy spent on my herbal biz, dancing in a performance, and in case that sounds like too much fun, really thrashing out a tricky situation. Here online I was getting carried away with reading everyone's amazing posts and noodling around on twitter at all hours of the night.   I had to chose between blogging from midnight until 4 AM or sleep, and sleep won out. But maybe I can learn to both sleep and blog. Yet to be determined.

Rush of the year:
Hearing the play I worked to complete for five years read aloud for the first time by an actor.

Best Packaging:
Glass milk bottle. Elegant. Completely reusable. The milk tastes infinitely better.    There used to be one type of milk that I could find in a glass bottle here in NYC. Now there are two kinds readily available in my neighborhood, Ronnybrook Farm and Milk Thistle Farm. My hope is that the glass milk bottle craze will sweep the nation. It tastes so good, the reusable bottle gives you a happy feeling, and you can pretend you're on Mad Men.

Tea of the Year:
I'm an herbalist, a.k.a. a tea-ologist. I'm known for my tea blends, and I own 4 teapots of various sizes and actually use all of them regularly. My very favorite tea isn't a blend, though, its Linden flower I gathered myself from the trees in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. You know in June when all of a sudden the air smells like honey as you pass under these enormous shade trees often buzzing with bees? That's linden. I love it so much that I named my dog after the tree Tilia, the Latin name for Linden. Its not cultivated in the U.S., though its highly medicinal (studies have found it lowers blood pressure) and is also relaxing, as well as simply delicious. You can buy it from Mountain Rose Herbs, though its imported from Eastern Europe, where it has been a beloved tisane for centuries. Proust writes about Linden tea with his madeleine in Swan's Way.

Word or Phrase:
2009 was... transformational. 9 is a number of change. After a run of some (10) entropic-feeling years I finished my play, wrote 30 poems in 30 days, started a novel, danced a solo in front of an audience, began the process of founding a not-for-profit, expanded my business, and finally made homemade mayonnaise.

Best Shop:
EMc2 Emmett McCarthy
Emmett McCarthy's designs are timeless, current, sophisticated, and a little tongue-in-cheek. What Holly Golightly or a young Elizabeth Taylor would wear today. Michelle Obama has caught on. Emmett uses beautiful fabrics in both neutrals and deep jewel tones, with exquisite tailoring done right in New York City where his boutique is located. One of his winter coats boasts a silk lining.   Those kinds of luxurious details make me feel both dressed to kill and also completely comfortable. I have one of his gorgeous coats now, and plan on adding another piece to my wardrobe just as soon as I can.

Best Car Ride of the Year: the subway.

I understand driving a car really fast. Driving makes more sense to me as a sport than as a mode of transportation. For the latter I'd rather walk, snowshoe, ride a horse, a bike, or in the city take the train. I love the fact that if you live in Manhattan you don't have to own a car.

This summer I took a long road trip with my partner, and we drove through bizarre little towns north of Highway 2 in Minnesota. It was a glimpse of what driving must have been like before highways. We got a feel for which towns were wealthy with their freshly painted Scandinavian inspired gingerbread moldings on the buildings, and which were not: 'Spooner Blows!'. We drove through brat days and past spaghetti dances. We goofed, laughed, listened to good jazz, but unlike when we're sitting by a lake having a great time, or at our kitchen table, I felt slightly queasy and stiff from immobility. So ultimately I left the car knowing that I'll always need to live somewhere where I don't have to drive because no matter how much fun driving can be, its still driving.

Even though the MTA has been really shady lately with their fare hikes and service cuts, I'm so grateful for the New York City Subway System.

Here's my favorite ode to the train: Duke Ellington & Ella Fitzgerald, Take the A Train.

What's the best change you made to the place you live this year?

2009-12-14T03:39:00.006-05:00

Post inspired by Day 13 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge

I live in a very small apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Its not the smallest apartment, that would be this one, but it isn't a lot of space for two people, two dogs, and frequent house-guests. I have to purge about twice a year, or I'll go insane.

I've been inspired by the great de-cluttering posts on Communicatrix's blog, as well as her book recommendation, Clutter Busting by Brooks Palmer. I also love Karen Kingston's Clear Your Clutter with Feng Shui. Both books give insight into what goes on emotionally when we hoard stuff.

The often arduous process of finding new homes for my underused things has made me more conscious of my purchases, and even of the gifts I accept. I've pared down a lot.

The deepest purge I've ever done was this last one. I took a look at my bookshelves and thought, 'I can't possibly get rid of one more book.' But I didn't have space on the shelf for the box that stores the first handwritten draft of a novel I'm working on. I was subconsciously telling myself that my own writing didn't belong on a bookshelf. A bunch of books found new homes.

The moment I started this purge, my outworn relationships began to shift too. I found myself letting go of some people, reconfiguring my relationships with others. The process is still going on, and is likely to take awhile, but the new found clarity in my relationships feels even more freeing than the extra three feet of space available for yoga asanas.

How about you? What was your best change in the place you live this year? If you are part of the Best '09 challenge, I'd love it if you'd leave a link to your blog, and if not, write your answer in the comments.

Goblin Fruit

2009-12-13T03:02:00.005-05:00

We must not look at goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits:

Who knows upon what soil they fed

their hungry thirsty roots?....

'Nay, hush, my sister:

I ate and ate my fill,

Yet my mouth waters still...

~ Christina Rossetti from Goblin Market: a Tale of Two Sisters

I adore this ballad by Victorian poet Christina Rossetti. Much has been written about the meaning behind Goblin Market. The author herself said that it was meant as a simple fairy story, though not for kids. I think it has many layers, like dreams. The words and images are as rich and sensuous as almost anything I've ever read. If you don't have your own paper copy, I suggest printing it out and reading it when you are lounging and eating delicious fruit. Maybe in the bath.

Post inspired by Day 12 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: What was your favorite new food 09? (still haven't tried goblin fruit, but know I'd love it.)

Reimagining Home

2009-12-11T21:22:00.014-05:00

Go where you will.
Take the long lashes
that guard your eyes
and sweep a path
across this earth....

there is no fixed place
on earth for man
or woman...

Alice Walker from Revolutionary Petunias

There is no place called home.

The place where I spent many years growing up still exists. My mother still lives there. The land she's been cultivating for over twenty years is mature now with tall trees shading her moss garden, accented by purple flowering hostas and lacy white hydrangeas. Large fuchsia rhododendrons put on a show every Spring. There are vistas of Black Eyed Susans in the summer, and roses that bloom from April till November. One night this year I dreamt that the garden was gone, that I would never see it again. On my next visit I crept outside at night and hugged every tree, thanked every corner of the garden for being there.

Soon after I'd gotten back to my apartment in the city, my mom called to tell me the apple orchards at the end of the block had all been cut down. A new subdivision was being built. My mother's boxwood has been browning. Box is very sensitive to air pollution. We know this story. Its the same all over.

In her heartbreaking book 'The Place You Love Is Gone' Melissa Holbrook Pierson writes about what it means to grow up surrounded by nature, and then to have it destroyed by development. It takes a toll on us psychically, even after we've moved away.

I live in Manhattan now. I volunteer in a community garden designed to help city kids connect with nature. Its threatened by development, and I've spent countless hours organizing to save it.

I've dreamt of having my own garden, a place I don't have to fight so hard to keep from being destroyed. But I hope that when I'm finally sitting in the garden of my dreams I remember that it is really always all around me: the parks, the street trees, community gardens, dandelions in the cracks in the sidewalk, rain forests, glaciers, wetlands, orchards. They are all my responsibility, to a smaller and larger degree, to protect and to tend. Everywhere is home.

(above photo is of purslane, a very nutritious wild plant growing on Delancey St., L.E.S., Manhattan)

Post inspired by Day 11 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: What was your favorite place in 09? (the earth)

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Instant Eternal: 5 Peace Band

2009-12-10T23:02:00.009-05:00

Day 10 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: What album rocked your world in 09?

This year I got to see John McLaughlin and Chick Corea play together at Jazz at Lincoln Center, forming the group 5 Peace Band with Christian McBride, Kenny Garrett, and Brian Blade. McLaughlin and Corea hadn't played together since Miles Davis' Bitches Brew back in 1970. They are masters and innovators whose contrasting compositions made for an exciting night.

Saxophonist Kenny Garret's playing blew the roof off of Lincoln Center, sending some subscription holders fleeing, while the rest of us talked in tongues as we rolled on the floor. (Not really, but almost.)

5 Peace Band is nominated for a Grammy in 2010. Eventually I'll check out the CD. Sometimes when I see live music that shakes me to my core I can't listen to anything recorded for awhile. For days after the show I just wanted silence and the memory of the performance.

I wrote the following poem for a friend I hadn't talked to in ages who would have loved to hear them play. I was thinking about the way we can be altered forever in an instant, while at the same time some fundamental part of us, the most sacred part, never changes. That's what the music brought up for me.

Instant Eternal

I must shoulder stones
to connect with this old friend.
The years form a cairn
between our doors.

So much has happened since even this morning.
I woke up vibrating still from the concert.
The union of sacred geometry
and raw divine love twining between masters,
spiraling from Fender to Steinway to alto sax
created a flying cathedral
that oscillated through the cosmos
on wings built from the heartwood
of an ancient forest.

My friend has a child I have not met,
though I imagine every moment spent with such a creature,
wise eyes starring at the undulating drapes
on the first warm night,
produces a cellular shift.

When we knew each other
we were full of dissonance
bouncing off of hard parallel surfaces
booming with echoes.

Now the liquid self
laughs at an absence
as timid as the flick of an eyelid.

He would know the sound
of that saxophone,
the Beloved round inside every note.

Defeating My Red Knight: Best Challenge 09

2009-12-09T23:30:00.007-05:00

Day 9 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: Best Challenge 09

In Terry Gilliam's film The Fisher King, Robin Williams plays a homeless man named Parry who cowers in mortal terror at the sight of an imaginary red knight, the embodiment of his fear. The film consistently blurs the line between imagination and reality, suggesting that the line is not that important. It doesn't matter whether or not the Red Knight really exists, it matters only that he be defeated.

My greatest challenge of 2009 was imaginary. It was all in my head, and it was as real to me as the Red Knight was to Parry. 2009 hasn't been the easiest year. There were deaths of people I loved, break ups with friends, job losses, but nothing was more difficult for me to handle than this:

After much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth, on a sweltering day in August with my back sticking to the leather desk chair, I proofed my script one last time before dripping through streets radiating with thick white haze blooming with sulfur, to get to Kinkos. Then I handed my packaged script to a kind Fed-Ex worker after checking the address one last time.

That was it. Red Knight defeated. Heavy iron armaments fell off my body and clattered onto the concrete. It was the first piece of writing I had sent out in over fifteen years. It didn't matter whether or not it was accepted. I had sent it out. I would send out more work in the future. I was free.

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Finding Moments of Peace and Presence Through Dancemeditation

2009-12-08T23:52:00.032-05:00

Day 8 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: Prompt: What was a moment of peace for you this year?

I don't need to fly to a beautiful tropical island to find peace, as Gwen Bell convincingly argues in her post on the subject. But time spent immersed in meditation has made it easier for me to find peace everywhere, even on the streets of New York City.

One day I was walking up Sixth Avenue on my way to my Dancemeditation class, quietly chanting the Peace Prayer, 'Let me be an instrument of thy peace, where there is hatred let me sow love...' when everyone on the sidewalk froze as a man punched another man in the face, hard, and the other man swung back. No one moved or spoke. In a deep, authoritative voice, I found myself saying, "Quit it."

The men paused. One turned and began to walk away. The other ran after him. "You!"I said. "Stay there. You. Go." They did as they were told. After the first man had disappeared into the subway I went on my way. A small woman in a ruffly silk skirt, I'd taken charge in the moment because I was fully present. I have my Dancemeditation practice to thank for that.

I’m a long talker, but when I get back from my yearly two week Dancemeditation Movement Monastery in June and friends ask me how it went, I tend to respond, ‘great.’ Period. I don't have the desire or the ability to say much more. If they ask for details I tell them about the simple food, the Victorian mansion where we sleep, the old mill where we dance, the rushing waterfall behind the mill.

Its a rare gift to have two solid weeks to focus on embodiment, to sensing, moving, and breathing; exploring the space of the body, the space around the body, the space inside the body.

Going into this deep inner place with a supportive community is like paddling out to sea on a big raft. We can go farther when we navigate through the waters together. We get to places we could never find alone.

By the end of the retreat I stretch like a cat, enjoying every sensation. I'm learning anatomy and physiology from the inside out, articulating movement I wouldn't have thought possible several years ago.

There are usually some hard parts, times when my brain won't shut up, or my dancing feels leaden, or there is some drama about kale. Sometimes painful emotions surface. But the hard parts are forgotten after periods of oneness….. of actually getting to leave the experience of my ego/story for awhile…. These moments are sustaining. They shift me in subtle, fundamental ways, and they support me when I'm back in the hectic world. There are typically all sorts of little personal epiphanies along the road too.

These words feel entirely inadequate.

Here’s a poem I wrote on my very first retreat in an attempt to capture something I couldn't express through prose. Incidentally, it was the first poem I had written in years after a long block.

I am in the sea
sinking under Love
past razor junk fish
through light and shadow.
I have begun to understand gratitude.

No words come for it.

I can say only
that it feels right
to push my head and heart
to the sea floor.
It feels right
to take off my face
and let the water seep inside,
shifting my organs with the sand.

Blood and lymph
bathed in salt tears
become thresholds
for spirit to slip
back into my bones.

Waves lift me,
rock me,
press me into crevasses,
fold me over myself
until there is nothing
but the folding,
pressing,
spanning,
sinking,
lifting
motion creating space between the cells.

I want to become these waves,
foaming into coral,
sliding through the sand,
rising up inside the sky
to shudder down again.

For now I breathe through them,
chest under the blue green water,
head above their purled crests,
until they send me,
charged and weighted,
to the shore.

Best Blog Finds '09

2009-12-07T12:06:00.003-05:00

Day 7 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: Best Blog Finds '09

Its the end of the first week of this blogging challenge and I can't believe how much great writing I continue to find. Its inspiring. I'm happy to have the chance to share three of the blogs I'm always grateful to read.

My friend and fellow Dancemeditator*** Karleen Koen, author of Dark Angels, Now Face to Face, Through a Glass Darkly, and the upcoming Before Versailles, writes an exquisite blog called Writing Life, making small observations about the world around her that have reverberations far and wide. I look forward to each short entry.

I have also been deeply moved by the writings of playwright Callie Kimball (@calindrome) on her Deroraroo blog, specifically the pieces entitled This is Not a Memoir about her journey with depression. The disease has been a part of my own narrative, and I've gained an enormous amount of insight from reading her stories, as well as simply taken pleasure in her words.

***I'm lucky that my meditation teacher Dunya McPherson is also a talented writer. Her posts provoke, encourage, and guide me back to my practice. Her poems are jewels.

What Costume Does Your Fear Wear?

2009-12-07T00:52:00.021-05:00

Day 6 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: Best Conference/Workshop/ Jam Session '09

The other day a friend of mine told me that she's trying to scrub this phrase from her mind forever: 'Its nice to be important, but its more important to be nice.' Its humbling to recognize that this bon mot has been lodged in my gray matter too, because I've been a strident feminist from the time I was a little kid in my Annie Oakley costume twirling my two b-b gun revolvers.

But looking at the life I've chosen thus far, its fair to say that I've worked harder at being nice than I have at being important. I started taking a closer look at that hard truth after the group firestarter session with Danielle LaPorte in September during which about 20 women and 1 man were inspired to pursue our entrepreneurial dreams and plans. Over on A Design So Vast the author writes that part of Danielle's core message is: 'You have to ask for what you want. You have to meet grace halfway.'

Recently I learned that in all the years former Fortune editor-at-large Patricia Sellers worked at that publication, not one woman asked for a raise, though plenty of men did. I'd like to think I would have bucked that trend, but it probably isn't true. I work for myself, and when people ask how much I charge I tend to squirm and apologize.

Although I love what I do, up until now I've been happy laboring in obscurity. I had tricked myself into believing that this was somehow the way to be authentic. That doesn't make sense. Lots of the people who have touched my life through their teaching or art have been outwardly successful. If they hadn't been I would never have found them.

The unexamined belief: 'to be noncommercial, anti-commercial in fact, is noble and produces the best work' was really a mask for fear to hide behind. But what is the fear?

I realize that, as much as I hate to admit it, I've wanted to be loved more than I've wanted to risk being shunned for standing out, because being loved and standing out are mutually exclusive. Obviously.

Before asking for what I want, I've had to allow myself to want it in the first place. The next step is working with the fear of actually getting it. I don't mind if the fear is in the room, as long as it isn't blocking the door.

Have you dealt with the fear of success? How do you work with it?

Naked Man's Naked July All Free

2009-12-05T21:31:00.018-05:00

Day 5 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: Best Night Out '09

I’m sitting on an inflatable bed with a bunch of strangers. Some are blindfolded. We are eating stringy black seaweed from a pile in the center of the bed that a dancer has recently been wearing on her head enclosed in an amorphous turban. The dancer, in spiked heels, black ribbon, and little else, has taken off the turban, simulated birthing it, unwrapped the seaweed, and placed it ceremoniously on the bed, nibbling it a bit before pulling people out of their seats to join her feast.

I had no idea that this would happen tonight, and as it’s happening I’m thinking to myself, ‘I feel oddly comfortable.’ The salty seaweed tastes good, the moaning, angsty, seemingly endless song the rock musicians are playing is relaxing.

Earlier in the night I was with my husband and his family from out of town. My husband’s aunt and his fresh faced blond haired, blue-eyed 18-year-old cousin are from North Dakota, now living in Florida. This is their first time visiting New York City. They have crammed into the front room of our tiny one bedroom tenement apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for… five nights. Exhale. Yes, five.

They are excellent house guests: kind, excited to be here, and not at all put off by our humble accommodations via another inflatable mattress and an over-sized chaise.   An iphone minimizes the amount of hand-holding they need in order to maneuver around the city.

But the cousin wants to explore New York: the T.V. Show. She makes a pilgrimage to the Seinfeld restaurant, then to Carrie’s stoop from Sex in the City. I can’t get her to pay attention to our neighborhood, the East Village, until I mention the Life Café from Rent. Its not her fault. New York is a living t.v. and movie set. But the movies and t.v. shows never quite capture the city's raw, living heart.    Spontaneous strangeness is what I love most about the city.

So this is what happens. We go out to dinner on Clinton Street, Frankie’s 17. My husband’s aunt requests the plainest thing on the menu, linguine with garlic and oil.   She loves it. I taste it. Its delicious. We leave full and happy.

Next-door is the new home of the Living Theatre, a downtown institution. We gawk at people wearing flat, Dali-esque masks sitting by the theater door. They hand us flyers that read: Come right now to Naked Man’s Naked July with optional naked audience members. All Free!

Before anyone has a chance to think, I pull them down a narrow flight of stairs into the black box theater. Disappointingly, no one is actually naked. There is a rock band, a chanteuse type singer moaning into a mike, and lots of projections on the walls that profess to be about filtering reality, the way things get filtered through the television news, how we see things in a commodified way, how we are told to see them.

The audience and the stage are evenly lit. Projections wrap 365 degrees around the space. There is no real off stage. Audience members roll into the playing space and start to dance. A camera person films the audience in their chairs from the center of the space.

My husband’s family is uncomfortable. They fidget. They look bewildered, then frustrated. The performance goes on. People start to leave, and in a fit of boldness the family stands up and rushes out through the curtained door, projections rippling in their wake. Its a dramatic exit. There is no other choice.

I stay. My husband will take care of them. The performance ends when everyone in the audience has walked out or is sitting on the bed full of seaweed. Somehow this feels like home.

Scrumtious Sentences: Best Book 09

2009-12-05T01:33:00.006-05:00

Day 4 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: Best Book '09

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

This was one of those books where, after reading a few sentences, I thought to myself, 'I'm in love. In love. Where have you been hiding, Angela Carter? I mean, there must be a road named after you somewhere, right?'

While reading The Bloody Chamber, her book of short stories based on famous fairy-tales, I wanted to eat her words, smear her beautiful sentences all over myself and lick them off one by one.

If you love Thomas Hardy, as I do, you'll love Angela Carter. Like Hardy, she writes prose with the exactitude of a poet. Her stories are full of vivid imagery, but they are also plot driven. There is nothing flowery or excessive about them. They keep your heart racing. Most of the stories in The Bloody Chamber are recognizable but twisted up in all kinds of fascinating ways, probing at the psychological and mythological depths of fatal attraction. The title story, based on the Bluebeard tale, is chilling with a bit of wicked humor. Puss-in-Boots, in contrast, is a naughty romp.

Angela Carter died of cancer in 1992 at the height of her powers, which might at least partly account for why she is not more widely known outside of Great Britain.

Salman Rushdie was a friend and huge fan. Here's a link to Rushdie's tribute, which gives a nice overview of her entire body of work: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/27/specials/carter-rushdie.html

Rushdie suggests that Carter's fame might snowball after her death. I hope it's happening. She deserves it, and the world needs her tremendous gifts.

Spider Alchemy

2009-12-04T22:56:00.014-05:00

Day 3 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge: Best Article '09

The earth is sacred. I remember this when I'm standing on the street at dawn under a Bradford pear tree bursting with birdsong as the sky slowly turns from silver to peach or I'm watching a rose bloom in the snow.

But what about when I'm running late for someplace, talking on my cell phone in the back of a fossil fueled cab? Do I remember then? When my life seems to be speeding out in front of me, racing away from the natural world, sometimes a dramatic reminder of the profound beauty and alchemical power our earth possesses can bring me back into a state of wonder.

This really exists: Golden silk threads that are 5 to 6 times stronger than steel and as soft as cashmere, created by large spiders in Madagascar. The shimmering golden silk would make Rumpelstiltskin proud. Scientists have been trying to emulate the material for use in NASA, and have failed to be able to do it thus far.

Fishermen in Madagascar have been using the thread to weave simple nets for centuries, but the silk webbing is too time consuming to extract (painlessly and harmlessly) from the spiders to consider using it commercially.

Still, two European men became obsessed with the idea of weaving with this spider silk and, with local women doing most of the real labor, they spent 5 years creating a large tapestry, which is now on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City until February ‘10.

The men spent half a million dollars of their own money to do it. They were called crazy. Maybe they are. But it is a crazy that I understand. To me, the tapestry is like a visual poem, a ballad from and to the earth. It is singing, ‘Look how amazing the earth is, the creatures of the earth! Just look!’ It takes my breath away.

Here's the link to the fascinating New York Times article that inspired me trek to the museum and then wade through all of those old dioramas to see it for myself. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/arts/design/23spiders.html

Oh, and I'd like a side of bigotry with that too, please

2009-12-03T03:17:00.005-05:00

Day 2 of Gwen Bell’s December blogging challenge. The prompt for the day was ‘Best restaurant experience ‘09.’ I was going to write a post tonight about a cavernous, Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome type restaurant in New York City. I had avoided going to this place since its opening several years ago because I’d told myself that I don’t like big flashy restaurants. I like intimate quiet ones. I live inside the spectacle that is Manhattan and don’t crave more of it. But then one night the stars aligned and I found myself there in the middle of fashion week no less, packed with designers and models in neon stilettos.

It was an amazing night. My friends and I joined a birthday party full of Londoners on holiday at a long communal table, and ate delectable dumplings dripping with exotic sauces while being expertly cared for by friendly staff. There was none of the cool, sneering attitude I had expected to find in a place designed to see and be seen.

Then I remembered that I knew the guy who had probably made most of the restaurant's final hiring decisions. I had worked with him as a waiter years ago. He had the rare ability to bring up both the morale and the efficiency of an entire crew of jaded, exhausted performers, misfits, and immigrant restaurant workers. He'd thrown me several life rafts of encouragement during my first wobbly weeks of working at a big midtown restaurant fresh out of school and freshly dealing with being just another waiter/aspiring artist in the city.

Kindness was clearly valued in the staff here. Wow. (I hadn’t let on that I knew any managers, so the kindness couldn’t be chalked up to deferential treatment).

I'd cut myself off from ever going to this big restaurant before because in a blanket statement I'd decided, ‘I don’t like restaurants like that’. This is what I was going to write about, but then the news of the New York Senate’s vote 38-24 against the gay marriage amendment came in, and after dinner tonight I crawled into bed and turned out the light. My body felt weighted down by lead balloons.

I had stupidly thought that my beloved New York recognized the immense contributions of its gay and lesbian constituency. Doesn’t every straight identified person know a gay couple, a gay family? The anti-gay rights people are cutting themselves off from hundreds of thousands of loving families. It's like my bias against the restaurant that turned out to be my “favorite restaurant experience ‘09”. I had assumed that I knew what it was all about without ever having set foot in the door. The no voters and the people they represent are stuck in straitjackets of rigid beliefs.

Over time, the 38 no votes will be seen to be on the wrong side of history. But in the present, there are families who are denied health and life insurance from their partners’ employers, and there are citizens and commitments that are not being honored with the respect they deserve. It just so happens that the manager of that great restaurant has a long-term same-sex partner, and they have a child together. Today New York has said to them, and to countless others, ‘we don’t care about you’. This has to change.

Carolina In My Mind

2009-12-02T00:30:00.010-05:00

I am stepping up to the Best of 09 blogging challenge put out by the wonderful social media maven & yogini Gwen Bell. Each day in December she gives a prompt. It is a great kick in the pants to get into the habit of blogging more frequently, as well as a way to give thanks for some amazing experiences, people, and things that have been part of my life this year. My goals: 1. Don't bore people who might read it. 2. Answer each prompt. 3. Inspiration--give it & get it. December 1st is Best Trip 09.

I tried writing a prose piece about this trip, but the experience didn't lend itself to it. So, in a really surprising move for me, here's a poem-y kind of a thing.

an island somewhere off the coast of South Carolina

no t.v.
no cellphone
no laptop
no ipod
no commercials
no catalogues
no billboards

salt air perfume
bones melt into warm sand
the waves steady exhale
an invitation to do the same.
pick up a book
or put it down
read poetry or gossip
stare at the shifting clouds
lie in a hammock
sit in a grey cedar rocking chair
and watch the sunrise
listen to someone play the guitar
or walk silently through the surf under the moon

laugh with loved ones
beloved conspirators.
stirrers of inspiration.
acolytes in the church of beauty.

share simple food
fresh tomatoes
fried okra
boiled shrimp
caramel cake
conversation
about important things:
dreams especially.

ride the waves
play like otters
or runaways

sit on the dock at sunset
creekside lowtide
the green grasses deepening
against the fuchsia sky.

Dead Days

2009-10-31T21:00:00.003-04:00

release of what is not
was not
could not be
what is over
get down into the dirt
back to the earth heart
the worm core
that center place
where all things blossom
blue fungi blooms
around the heart wood

there is life inside of death
the spider creeping over white eyes
terrifies because it is so gentle
the way the rain is gentle
as it seeps into the mud
creating momentary sculptures
mud people first people
a frothing pulsing hot birth
bursting through the carapace.

It is not the birth we expected.

lovedrunk freewrite in which I do something that scares me

2009-10-06T02:57:00.016-04:00

I have no idea what I am going to write about. None at all. I am writing about the blank page.

The last hour or so has seen me flitting around on twitter, peeling at my cuticle, reading the New York Times Sunday magazine, and thinking about working on the novel. A procrastination snarl. I am fairly famous for them. They feel usual.

This is unusual, though, this blogging 'off the cuff' about nothing when I have at least 10 blog ideas in my mind.

What is really interesting me right now is my novel, and the play I am getting ready to workshop, and the opera I am dramaturging.

And this. I've been thinking about my spiritual path. I'm a Sufi. To me, this means a seeker who is lovedrunk-- not just with the Divine, but with the world.

It has taken me four years of deep practice to define myself as Sufi. A novice. Learning slowly. Its great, this slowness, learning something that takes many years to deepen into instead of something I'm supposed to 'master' after some six week course.

But I'm not very comfortable with labels, and I'm even less comfortable discussing my spirituality. That said, something has shifted and it feels innate. Permanent, somehow. A part of my core self.

To be lovedrunk is just what it sounds like.

Let's say I find myself holding a grudge. For example, a woman I respect belittles a child in a crowded room. I'm too shocked to respond before the moment passes. I want to forgive her, but I simply can't. She's made me feel powerless. I can't shake it. I want to shake her instead.

Then one night I have a glass of wine, and another, and maybe one after that. My heart is like a singing bird. I happen to think about the person and find that the grudge is gone. The love has returned.

Tipsily I dial, the phone is miraculously answered, I gently tell her how I felt and we make up.

Sufism finds ways to get to compassion, forgiveness, and love without the actual wine, and eventually embody those feelings not just in ecstatic states, but always.

The process is not always pretty or pleasant. It can feel tough, though it can also be blissful. I am a Sufi. I needed to say that.

Now to work on the novel.

*painting by Pakistani artist Shafique Farooqi

A Fabulous Hat or How Limitations Can Increase Creativity

2009-10-02T17:40:00.017-04:00

I used to tell myself, 'I'll write when I have more time'. The opposite is actually true. The less time I have, the more feverishly I work. There is no time to second guess myself. Deadlines are genius. I love other constraints, too. They push my creativity in directions I wouldn't think to go.

The hat in the picture recently won first prize in the Garden Club of Virginia's 2009 rose show, category creative. The constraints were: make a modern creative arrangement using roses as the predominant flower and involving a hat. Take inspiration from the life of Richmond philanthropist Grace Arents, 1848-1926.

There is a haunting, ghost-like quality in arrangement's use of negative space. The choice to use a metal mesh hat form with a cloche shape evokes a bygone era, but the sweet pink roses and silvery leaves hint at something enchanted and hopeful. This hat tells a story.

It was made by my mother, Rosanne Temple-West Jones. She says that she wanted to invoke a sense of spirit and memory.

I'm giving myself one week to make some art involving this hat. I invite anyone else who feels like it to do the same, or make up your own constraints. Write a story, poem, painting, etc. and I will post it on the blog. Thanks for the inspiration, Mummy!

Rilke, Limbo, & Snakeskin Leggins or: How Do I Make a Living Doing What I Love?

2009-10-01T14:24:00.011-04:00

I want my job to pay my rent and a plane ticket to a meditation retreat in Bali. I also want it to be ecstatically satisfying, and this desire has had me holding every failure, success, regret, and thought pattern up to the light for scrutiny.

I’m getting there. I love what I do, but I’ve been trying to incorporate more of my artistic self into my herbal business because bringing out people’s creativity is a core piece of who I am, I’m great at it, and many of my clients tell me that they want help in this area of their lives. However the mystery remains; how to make it happen?

Rilke says that we need to love the questions themselves. I’ve been a Rilke fan since 14 and he’s always been right. But with my burning question searing a hole in my head, I decided to sign up for a group firestarter session with Danielle LaPorte, the author of Style Statement, and White Hot Truth, a blog that has been helping me get to the heart of the matter. Danielle is genius at inspiring entrepreneurs to fuel their businesses and lives with true passion.

About 19 women and one relaxed man gathered in the beautiful home of novelist and blogger Aidan Donnelley Rowley, to learn how to capitalize on work we love. I walked in fairly terrified, intimidated by thinking of entrepreneurs leap years ahead of me, but mostly made sleepless and queasy by the feeling that I was on the precipice of some deep change. Change is scary to me. It helped that everyone in the room radiated excitement and warmth.

Danielle was reassuring without being cloying. She spoke of the Bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist word for the liminal states of being: in-between places, limbo. I relaxed then. I reminded myself that I’m fairly comfortable with limbo. The first prize I ever won was for limbo queen when I was three. The one I’m experiencing right now in my business is normal. Deep exhale.

Danielle, like Rilke, believes in questions. Here’s a sampling:

If you dropped acid and wrote your business plan, what would it look like?
Write that first. Then write your business plan.
What are people interested in when you talk?
What do people thank you for?

Danielle was also very full of practical advice about how to increase your blog’s subscription list, how to budget time efficiently, etc. Her attention to the aesthetic and spiritual aspects of business (i.e. truth and beauty are as important as the bottom line) resonates with me deeply, so she’s a perfect teacher. And if (the boss of me) artistic self would rather hear it from a dread-headed philosopher in a grey cashmere sweater dress and green snakeskin leggings, then I’m very lucky such a one exists.

By the end of the three hours, with the help of some of the other wise ones in the room, I began to see where I’m headed.

** Awesome image found on Max "Bunny" Sparber's site

Evesdropping at the Theater

2009-09-27T18:49:00.017-04:00

I love going to the theater alone because I don't have to wonder whether or not someone else is having a good time, and I get to eavesdrop on strangers. On most recent solo trip to BAM's Next Wave Festival I was typically running late, and didn't have to apologize to anyone as I breathlessly took my seat after sprinting from the subway.

After the show it was fun to listen to audience reactions without having to participate in the debate myself. I wrote down my thoughts (not what I do when I'm with friends), and was probably clearer in my writing than I would have been if I'd been talking.

The show was In/I, a dance theater piece starring Juliette Binoche and Akram Khan. I loved it. You can read my review here.

A Book That Will Get You In The Mood... to Birth Freaky Brilliant Brain Children, a.k.a. Lynda Barry Rocks!

2009-09-04T14:29:00.029-04:00

Last fall my fantastic friend Simone and I went to the New Yorker Festival and listened to Matt Groening and Lynda Barry chat about the artistic process. Simone and I walked away high on ideas, clutching our newly signed copies of Lynda Barry's book, WHAT IT IS, to our chests, clicking our heels all the way home.

Barry is an acclaimed comic strip writer and novelist, best known for Marlys from Ernie Pook's Comeek, as well as a playwright. I hope that sooner or later she will be just as well known for What IT IS, because it is one of those rare books I want to give to everyone I meet.

What excites me about the book is Barry's understanding of the interplay between visual creativity and writing. Like other mammals, humans tend to think, imagine, and remember in images, and yet when we write, we often forget about that. Playing with images helps us remember. The book is part graphic memoir, part creativity workbook, part exploration of the nature of art. It is impossible to read the book and not feel inspired.

After reading it for a bit I wanted to pick up a glue stick and some images and dance a little jig and then do some writing. It reminded me just how much fun the creative process can be. Whenever I open it, it feeds my desire for stories and fresh ideas while my eyes feast on Barry's deceptively simple ('I can do that too!') artwork.

It feels wrong to flatly state the shimmery ideas inside the book, presented like treasure in a child's pirate game. Here is something from my journal that I was inspired to write in watercolor, without stopping to think, on Barry's suggestion.

'I bought a blue rose on Avenue A today with Eve.
It was expensive, but I was thinking about...making friends with death.
How to do that?
'Blue roses' reminds me of Tennessee Williams, of course,
and my grandmother
who lit her hedges with blue lights
in honor of Mary, goddess of the sea, at Christmastime.
It is clearly unnatural, this blue rose.
I carried it with me,
poking out the top of my green shopping bag
unconcerned, like it was somehow tougher than other roses.'

Here are some of the questions Barry asks in the book:

When images come to us, where do they come from?

Does your imagination know what year it is?

What is the past made of?

When we imagine things we don't want to imagine, why can't we stop ourselves?

She expresses many of her ideas obliquely through her graphic memoir, suggesting fun games to strengthen her readers' imagistic powers in the fourth quarter.

Lynda Barry has a website that has said it is 'coming soon!' for at least a year. There are some great images of What IT IS on her myspace page, but I find that format really difficult to navigate.

She typically teaches writing classes at least a couple of times a year, and I hope to have the chance to take one sometime for the hit of inspiration I know I'll receive.

And yes, I know I'm frothing at the mouth about her, but she and What IT IS are worth the froth.

An artist who is infusing your world with beauty, whether you know it or not.

2009-08-17T02:22:00.031-04:00

My celebrity heartthrob is a man who died before my parents were born. Federico Garcia Lorca, in addition to the eye candy, is arguably Spain's greatest playwright and poet. I was lucky to be introduced to him in 5th grade Spanish class where I first fell in love with his poetry.

When I'd get drunk in college I'd start scribbling letters to Lorca on bar napkins, shutting out the rest of the world unless they wanted to listen to me recite his poems. He has that effect. In Spain he is rarely referred to as Garcia Lorca. It is usually just Federico.

Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and Leonard Cohen are some of his devotees, cultivating that elusive, fiery earth spirit called duende that Federico passionately describes in his brilliant treatise on the subject. It is a must-read for any performing artist. L. Cohen talks about how he first discovered Lorca in a bookshop in Montreal when he was a teenager. He says, 'I stumbled on a book by a great Spanish poet and in this book he invited me to enter a universe of ants, crystals, arches, minnows and flies that slipped away like herds of tiny fish. I entered that world, and I am so happy to say I never left it.'

Federico was also a talented composer, actor, theater director, and visual artist. The worlds he created are full of music, imagery, and raw emotion. They envelop. He is as much a great teacher (he would hate to be called a muse) as he is a writer, inspiring important works of music, dance, poetry, film, theater, and visual art in his time up through the present day.

Federico set Spain on fire for flamenco, heightening the prestige of this homegrown gypsy art form so that it could be seen as a jewel of Spanish culture throughout the country and around the world. He was a champion of the rights of gypsies and women, coming from a place of privilege and power, even as his open homosexuality may have cost him his life.

I spent a couple of months in Spain making a pilgrimage to all of his beloved places, as well as a somber trek to the dusty little town outside of Granada which contains what is believed to be his unmarked grave.

On August 19th, 1937 at the age of 38 he was murdered by 'nationalist militia' during the Spanish Civil War. The details of his murder are still obscured, and his death is an open wound. But while the anniversary of his death is a reminder of how much we lost that day, his writing and spirit are bathing the world in passion and beauty every minute.

Casida IX (translation below)
De la palomas oscuras

Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas oscuras.
La una era el sol,
la otra la luna.
Vecinitas, les dije,
donde esta mi sepultura?
En mi cola, dijo el sol.
En mi garganta, dijo la luna.
Y yo que estaba caminando
con la tierra por la cintura
vi dos aguilas de nieve
y una muchacha desnuda.
La una era la orta
y la muchacha era ninguna.
Aguilitas, les dije,
donde esta mi sepultura?
En mi cola, dijo el sol.
En mi garganta, dijo la luna.
Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas desnudas.
La una era la otra
y las dos eran ninguna.

Qasida of the Dark Doves

Through the laurel's branches
I saw two dark doves.
One was the sun,
the other the moon.
Little neighbors, I called,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun.
In my throat, said the moon.
And I who was walking
with the earth at my waist
saw two snowy eagles
and a naked girl.
The one was the other
and the girl was neither.
Little eagles, I called,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun.
In my throat, said the moon.
Through the laurel's branches
I saw two naked doves.
The one was the other
and both of them neither.

(trans. Catherine Brown)

A Pop Culture Loss that Stings

2009-08-11T01:01:00.019-04:00

I was startled by the appearance of a pretty English boy dawdling at a green market stand in NYC recently.

He was so pretty that he looked like an alien. His eyes radiated blueness and his blond hair gleamed. His teeth were so white that they made the sound of a struck metal triangle when he smiled.

As it turned out, he had recently been hired to act on Guiding Light, the oldest running television show in existence, which had just been canceled. The hearty gal at the farm stand had little sympathy for his despair over the lost gig, but I did, because I am sad to see the show go.

I remember watching it with my mother and grandmother in my grandparents' place when they still got away with calling me 'wee Kate'.

I'd sit on a little embroidered stool drinking tea out of a porcelain cup and eating smiley faced cookies (the best, which also don't exist anymore) while we watched Phillip and Beth's impossible love unravel as evil, evil Roger schemed.

I remember flipping on the T.V. in college to learn that Beth was coming back from the dead yet again. The storylines recycled themselves infinitely.

My family was made up of British ex-pats, and as Guiding Light came on at tea time that was the soap we watched.

My great grandmother had listened to it on the radio whenever she was in the States. My grandmother had picked up the habit, as had my mother.

I guess I dropped the ball. I got complacent. I didn't watch. I thought that it would always be; like the sun. But the show's symbol was a lighthouse, and lighthouses are always being torn down.

El Hai

2009-07-05T23:44:00.011-04:00

After my meditation retreat (dancemeditation.org) I have fewer thoughts in my head.

I care for the slightly licorice taste of basil and the pungent salt smell of ripening tomatoes.

My deepest fears feel somehow like surface patter in comparison to the heady summer scents washing over me.

My home is full of fresh chamomile and drying linden, blooming gardenias, yellow sweet clover, with an undertone of Paul’s tobacco and the dogs.

Earthy, moving smells rich in their beings.

That is how I feel.

The Best Advice Ever

2009-06-05T03:42:00.012-04:00

With that Moon Language

Admit something: Everyone you see, you say to them, love me.
Of course you do not do this out loud,
Otherwise someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this,
This great pull in us to connect,
Why not become the one who lives with a full moon
In each eye that is always saying
With that sweet moon language
What every other eye in this world
is dying to hear.

--Hafiz

Collage for creativity and self-understanding

2009-05-30T03:27:00.024-04:00

I love to collage. Its a way that I get unstuck creatively. I don't consider myself a visual artist, and so collage isn't something I do for 'work'. Its all just fun, and so I can love my collages in a way that I find I can't love my writing-- that is, completely uncritically. My collages are like letters sent to me my by my subconscious. 'This is what you're into right now', they tell me. Sometimes startling patterns emerge.

The key for me is not caring how it turns out. The collage doesn't need to be pretty, or sophisticated, or even interesting. Its a game.

When I'm feeling miserable about something, the images help me to discover what else is happening in the murky backwaters of my subconscious. It may be that a part of me finds the situation funny or exciting, and I am not as pathetic as I'd assumed I was. Collaging helps me to break out of feeling habits by scratching beneath the surface.

I find words and ephemera from old magazines, newspapers, books from the street, whatever flotsam is lying around that grabs my attention. The only rule is that I can't stop and think about why I like a word or image until the collage is finished. (Although I'm always breaking that rule.)

I collage when I can't write, when I'm raging, overwhelmed, confused, depressed, elated, blissed out, flummoxed. I explore my dreams, ideas, or stories I'm creating when the writing feels tight and airless.

I collage often. After taking words and images and pasting them on paper, I can usually make my way back to the pen or the keyboard. I've listened.

Green Angels and Jabberwocks: Overcoming Fear

2009-05-22T02:55:00.022-04:00

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms my beamish boy!
O Frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
He chortled in his joy.’
--Lewis Carroll from ‘Jabberwocky’ in Through the Looking Glass

A woman who is an actor, screenwriter, ex-cop, and lesbian once told me that she had no fear. ‘Really?’ I asked, trying not to sound too incredulous. ‘Nope,’ she answered.

This made me think. I’m not afraid of rats or snakes or spiders, and when I was held up at gunpoint I was able to focus on the robber’s scrawny shape, wide-set eyes, and large ears so that the cops got a good description. But I do have fears, deep and strange ones.

At one point I was writing a story about a woman who becomes unhinged. I used material from my own nightmares, family traumas, skeletons in the closet, hauntings. The first draft was difficult. I found myself experiencing the emotions of the character as I wrote. I know that suffering for art is a silly notion, but my pain seemed to prove that I must be doing ‘real’ work.

The despair and hopelessness that had racked me as a teenager began to resurface raw. I confided in a close friend, who later told me she was so worried that she had almost called my family; afraid I might take a dive off a high pier. I put the story down for a few months. In the second draft I glossed over those scenes, working instead on the less emotional material.

I wasn’t sure how to approach the piece. I wanted to do it maturely, with my center intact. I thought of a successful, grounded novelist I know through meditation work. She must have a method, I figured. ‘Maybe I should ask her’, I thought one night before bed. Then I went to sleep.

My novelist friend showed up in my dreams that night. She read two poems. One was about her cat, entitled ‘Green Angel’. It felt like an exhalation, an unwinding. The other was about some past trauma. I remember colors: bruise purple, jaundice yellow and cut red, a water color of pain that was rich but contained. I woke up feeling like I had a plan.

A mutual friend of ours had recommended a book by Alice Hoffman several years prior to this dream reference entitled Green Angel. It is a young adult novel written in simple, elegant prose that chronicles the journey of a girl named Green after she loses her family and the world as she knew it in an apocalyptic event.

I had picked it up in a bookstore once, putting it down again quickly because the subject matter seemed too depressing. But the day after my dream I found a copy and devoured it. The story is an inner map for healing the psyche written as a modern-day fairytale. The girl Green must find a way through her grief or else die of despair. She gradually begins to grow again after taking in a thin white greyhound who becomes her guardian.

That was it. I remembered that the ‘Green Angel’ poem in my dream had been about my writer friend’s cat. The dream’s message seemed to be that I couldn’t go into the nightmare realm alone. I needed a guardian. Luckily, I have a pack of dogs. There are the two bright-eyed waggers who whine for their dinner every night, and then there are other beloveds from earlier times who still show up in my dreams when I need them.

I know something about the special ability of animals to nurture the soul. Mired in my own depression soon after September 11th 2001, I found a ghost white, ancient, starved down dog in the New York City subway system who led me and my life partner slowly back to daylight.

I named the dog Beamish Boy from Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky because though his frail body and thin white coat revealed battle scars, he had made it through his ordeal, triumphantly snuggling into our arms. The three of us lived together for almost four years before Beamish passed away, very well loved.

I put a picture of him by the computer as I began the task of tackling my scary (to me) story. I asked my two waggers to watch over me too. The dogs sat on the overstuffed chaise, studying me carefully as I typed. I was able to write that difficult material without being overcome by emotion, feeling instead a flood of compassion for my character. With the help of my guardian dogs I had slain my Jabberwock.

2009-05-16T22:45:00.019-04:00

The Lost Tribes of New York City from Carolyn London on Vimeo.

I love animation and NYC street inspiration. This seems to be a riff on Nick Park's brilliant Creature Comforts. If you haven't seen that and like this, check it out.

I live for spontaneous street parties. When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs I would stare out my window into the empty cul de sac, listening to 'Feel the Beat and the Rhythm of the Night...' on the radio, and imagine the quiet dead end street transforming into a giant dance party. I thought that was what New York City must be like all the time.

I'm Still Standin (yeah yeah yeah)

2009-05-15T23:06:00.004-04:00

What do I think I’m doing,
staring at a computer screen late at night
watching Elton John cavorting by the sea
with men dressed in rainbow body paint and loin cloths?
This is what it has come to.
This is how I find my inspiration
when it has been set down, casually, on the street outside a taco shop.

You’re not a real poet, she said.
You haven’t attended a poetry workshop at a Seven Sisters school,
or been published recently in a prestigious literary journal.
You haven’t won a Slam or even dared enter one.
You are just like me, she said.
Not-a-poet.

I’ll admit it stung.
My inner sixteen year old,
clutching her pencil,
writing about spiders and death
and the twisted way sex is represented in culture,
buckled her knees and sucked in her breath.

But-- I –will—still—write—a—poem.
I will find my poem inside Elton’s jaunty cap.
His cane comes flying out of the sky
to land in his hand like the wand of a b-movie wizard.
Fawning dancers with their Fosse-for-dummies choreography
jut their hips and snap their wrists;
take synchronized smooch sessions under beach umbrellas;
float their balletic bodies through each others arms across the sand.
How could I have missed this splendor all my life?

I used to be serious.
Loved songs about the apocalypse.
Attended the right protests.
Read the New York Times
but often skipped the arts section
unless there was a review of End Game or Homecoming,
some play about life in a dustbin
or the inherent violence underlying all human exchange.

Now my protests are in the form of ecstatic dances
and peach trees grown with children out of garbage dumps.
I wear pumpkin socks and stretch in frog pajamas.
I read cartoons when the newspaper words swirl and blur.
Swine flu rhymes with Xanadu.
Strategic strike with baby dyke.
Missile defense with swingin gents.
I say things like thank my lucky stars, as I do thank them,
for beaming Sir Elton,
sauntering in a white suit and boater on the Promenade des Anglais,
into my computer when I needed him.
And I don’t care,
not really,
whether I'm a real poet or not.

The Deadly Shoulds

2009-05-09T01:56:00.004-04:00

Let them go
All of them
Do not let
one shadow
remain
of the shoulds
the deadly shoulds
Scrap them
Burn them
Trick them
Vomit them up and out
They will try to snare you
with their wheedling whining pleas
their antiseptic perfume
their weighted compliments
their prickly handshakes
They will grey your flesh
Cover you in dust
File you under undone
They will rifle through your dream machine
Put red rubber stoppers on all your gaskets
Plug up the exhaust system
Chase out the fairies
Choke out the magic plants
and leave you trussed
vacant
and full of lists.

Painting Pumpkins and Bananas

2009-05-07T02:00:00.006-04:00

I am having trouble letting go of the play I’ve been working on for a few years. It is the play that has taught me, finally, how to sit at a desk for hours and write.

I tell myself that it doesn’t matter if it is any good. What matters is that I started it, and I finished it all the way to the end. But I want it to be good. I want people to like it. I am afraid that they won’t; that it isn’t.

I also fell in love with my characters. Right now their world is my own secret realm, shared with no one except for one loan, steadfast writing partner who keeps her comments brief.

So it is time to paint some bananas. Actually any vegetable or fruit with a hard fleshy skin would work, but as it is spring not many things like that are in season. I learned this trick from the kids in my local community garden who paint sugar pumpkins at our annual Halloween party every October. They ornament the pumpkins with wild strokes of electric blue and hot pink and canary yellow non-toxic tempra paint, embellishing with poofs and squiggles of glitter glue.

We try to send the kids home with their art, but when they are finished they clamber onto the see-saw or line up to have their fortunes told. They forget about the pumpkins, leaving them to wash clean in the next rainstorm. Then the bare gourds are cooked into delicious late fall soups.

It is good for me to remember the pumpkin's journey when I am finished with a project and trying to let it go. I don’t want to put my pumpkin at the foot of my bed, staring at it every morning until it begins to rot. No. I will eat my pumpkin. Or in this case, my banana. And by this ritual I hope to gently remind myself that the fun part is in the doing. So it is on to new pumpkins, or bananas, or plays. Soon.

Poetry in Hell

2009-05-02T23:52:00.006-04:00

I used read my poems, the ones I wrote incessantly, at a bar in Adam’s Morgan, Washington D.C. called Hell. It was in the basement of a club called Heaven, which I never visited. The walls and ceiling of Hell Bar were painted red with Halloween zombie hands sticking out of the light fixtures. The place felt safe: part womb, part pirate hideout. I made certain to be there every Sunday night.

The bartender would turn off the heavy metal screaming from the speakers. I would sit at a tiny round table nursing a beer and let the poems wash over me.

A rumpled balding man played the dulcimer every week as he recited long poems about herons. A Capital Hill type guy in pressed khakis and shiny loafers read acidly funny treatises in the persona of Wile E. Coyote.

I nicknamed a Courtney Love-esque punk girl the cum poet because she recited her opus on cum at least once a month. I’d smirk in a dark corner as she spoke, clutching my Sam Adams, a grown-up beer, something a teenager would never order, I calculated, because I was in high school and there illegally.

I usually kept to myself. I listened to the poets, read one to three short new poems that, to quote the founder Greg Gerding, I ‘soberly, painstakingly, worked on’ during the week and left as soon as the heavy metal resumed to catch the last metro train back to Northern Virginia.

But I felt connected. Over time the hell poets became my congregation. Greg’s poems inspired me to write on bar napkins. We were all there for the love of the word, small w. Clapping at the end, no heckling, and a generous time limit for each poet were the only rules.

When I got to New York to continue my study of theater at NYU, I went to the Nuyorican and was lost. Some of the poetry was phenomenal, but it was all so…. DECLARATIVE! I didn’t see a place in the Slam world for depressed middle-class suburban girl verse full of gentle sadness and a love of the small. Where was the equivalency of Poetry in Hell? The anything goes kind of place? My studies took over; I never found it. I stopped writing poetry.

This lead in part to a toxic writer’s block which leached beyond poetry into everything else I tried to write. Poetry had been my first church. Time unwound; meanings were illuminated; my deepest self was given voice. Without it I was silenced in ways I hadn't anticipated.

The block lasted from age 19 to 29. I twisted, cajoled, bullshitted, wept and fasted, wept and prayed my way out of it, along the way finding new congregations of actors, dancers, seekers, gardeners, and herbalists. But I think that I may have bypassed years of struggle if I had simply sought out other people who wrote poetry. ‘They’re doing it. I can do it too.’ I need conspirators. I know this now.