This One's for True Love and Affection

“You yourself, 
as much as anybody in the entire universe,
deserve your love and affection.” Buddha

“Become a child again – 
because only with the child
will you be able to gain your spontaneity,
will you again become part of the natural flow, Tao.” Osho

The Only Life You Can Save is Your Own

Andre de Dienes Marylin Monroe Undated

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.
--The Journey, Mary Oliver

I Heart My Hometown

Discouragement can come easy. Deep dark, the deep dark, the voices and regrets. The breaking of hearts like pigeon wings. The deaths and the walking dead. All of it can come. All of it comes. All of it can stay and take up residence. But anyone who lives in my hometown is surrounded by unspeakable beauty on all sides--oceans and bays and ancient streets, oak trees hanging with Spanish moss, Magnolias blossoming, waves rolling at the oceans two, and welcoming arms if you can find them. This is the beauty that surrounded me as a child, and six years ago, I returned. I don't know how long I'll be here. But I know that this place--with its deep love for me--saved my life, wrapped me in its sea-salted breeze, and brought me back to a mind of fearlessness and love and abandon I haven't felt since I was 10 years old and afraid of nothing, and dinner was always at 6 o'clock, when the street lamps came on, and my brothers and friends and I ran home to glowing lamplight and parents setting the table. At our house the jazz played, and the laughter always rolled over the conversation. And many days, in summer, toward the time of the setting sun, my friends and I walked the bayfront, hung on the slanted Coquina leading straight to the bay, and watched the water and the tide and the tiny waves, and we could be silent there, contented, knowing each other the way only 10-year-old best friends can, the strangest, easiest, unspoken intimacy that comes from a smaller ego, fewer fears, hope stretched before us like the horizon we could see when we looked to the west. I've never tired of that water, that scent of salt, the glowing lights. Every time I glance down from the bridge or the bay front walk, I always stop, in awe and silence and just a quiet, quiet love, so familiar and ingrained I hardly even notice anything but the words repeating in my head. Beautiful. Beautiful. I am so lucky. So lucky.

The Seashell

Summer is ending. In Florida, that will mean October, for all intents and purposes. Nonetheless, I wrote a piece on bringing back the ocean to you wherever you are, by putting a seashell to your ear. Check it out right here on Art of Living. I also read at an open mic poetry event on Saturday. And I'll be reading at a bona fide event in a couple of weeks. I feel more alive than I have in years. Thank you, words.

I'm Back! And I'm Superbad! Watch Me!

Hello, old lover, old fried. I've neglected you, my lovely little journal, a place I feel more comfortable writing words. So? What have I been up to lately? Lots. But let me share with you all about the writing front. I've been having a lot of fun with my two Tumblr sites: Fuck Yeah Mary Oliver, a site dedicated to one of my favorite poets; and my own eponymous collection of images and some words and music called We Shall Not Cease from Exploration. I've also been documenting my desires on Pinterest, which is really fun. Let me know if you'd like an invite! This is the best place to look when you want to buy me a gift. To wit:

I wrote a piece called Speak, Memory that I'm pretty proud of for the wonderful Art of Living Guide: A Practical Guide to Being Alive. I am excited to be periodically providing work to the wonderful people who run it.

And my favorite pieces from the Synconation music site I'm proud to be a part of include a retrospective of women in music in 2010, titled The Ladies Who Ruled the Tower of Song in 2010 (Part One and Part Two and Part Three and Part 4!), record reviews of the latest works from Belle & Sebastian, R.E.M. and Lucinda Williams as well as some fun Top 5 missives, including ones about the eighties and poetry and protest. I've rested up on this amazing site for awhile, but be sure to check it out and read all the well-written, insightful work on Synconation. Because it shall be big. And you can say you knew it when.

In celebration of our reunion, I just want to share one of my favorite sentiments, courtesy of Walt Whitman. Let us all follow this cry for arms, for self, for soul, for an authentic life:

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants...have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with the powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."


xoxo Ama

Just Started Reading The Great Gatsby Again

 

It's such a slender thing, that book, but the world in it is infinite. These are my initials. The beginnings of my names. And I am reaching. Toward. What. Distant. God. Trying hard to believe.

The Sudden Illumination

 (My Grandparents Kaler, 1920s)

The moments of happiness--not the sense of well-being

Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,

Or even a good dinner, but the sudden illumination--

We had the experience but missed the meaning,

And approach to the meaning restores the experience

In a different form, beyond any meaning

We can assign to happiness

{From T.S. Eliot's The Dry Salvages}

Love Bites

Fantasy love is better 

than real love. -- Andy Warhol

Love is nothing but luck and timing. -- Laura Esquivel

 (Isabella Rosselini) | (Fuck Time) |  (Marilyn by Richard Avedon) | (Water)

Post Secret

<3

{The ones I loved best,were never the ones I was with.}

(I am Here) I am There

 <3

 <3

I am not particularly religious. But I am human. An animal, to quote David Byrne, looking for a home. Sometimes I find that home--in many ways, most exclusively--in love--which is, by nature, inclusive, always. Isn't that nice? So this is not, to me, a Christian poem exclusively. I find it to be a love poem (and I think all poems are love poems).

 <3

It was among my dearly departed Gran'ma Jeanne's well-preserved mementos. It hangs by a clothespin on a line of fishing wire between my living room's two front, green-curtained windows--the curtains left open all day for my cat Bella's curious, possibly lonely stares out into the world. There's a picture of Smudge, my grandmother's childhood cat, a picture of my grandma at age 9, a picture of my Grandma Jerry enjoying a cup of coffee, leaning over the top of a car, outside, during a camping trip.

 <3

 <3

There's a lovely card stating "love always wins," from a dear artist friend. Pictures of angels and fairies. Other bright-colored things. But for the first time, late this evening, finally alone, at the end of this long, wonderful day in April, I read this piece, "I am There," for the first time. I love it because it meant much to my Gran'ma Jeanne. She saw life this way. She was connected, deeply, to this dirty and beautiful earthly domain. She was connected fearlessly to heaven and mystery and a perfect beyond. And I wanted to remember it, share it. So I'm writing it here. Seemingly contrived as it may be, I found the sentiment, and the words, very moving. And I felt my ancestors in my bones, felt my beloved grandmother in my spirit and my soul and my heart, comforted by the vastness and sweetness of this world and this life and whatever it is we don't see, something sweet, something benevolent, always cradling us, always loving us, always in us. Always. Without further rumination--for I tend to go on and on with words--here 'tis.

 <3

I Am There

Do you need Me?
I am there.
You cannot see Me, yet I am the light you see by.
You cannot hear Me, yet I speak through your voice.
You cannot feel Me, yet I am the power at work in your hands. 
I am at work, though you do not understand My ways.
I am at work, though you do not recognize My works.
I am not strange visions. I am not mysteries.
Only in absolute stillness, beyond self, can you know Me as I am,
and then but as a feeling and a faith.
Yet I am there. Yet I hear. Yet I answer.
When you need me, I am  there.
Even when you deny me, I am there.
Even when you are most alone, I am there.
Even in your fears, I am there.
Even in your pain, I am there.
I am there when you pray and when you do not pray.
I am in you, and you are in Me.
Only in your mind can you feel separate from Me,
for only in your mind are the mists of "yours" and "mine."
Yet only with your mind can you know Me and experience Me.
Empty your heart of empty fears.
When you get yourself out of the way, I am there.
You can of yourself do nothing, but I can do all.
And I am in all.
Though you may not see the good, good is there, for I am there.
I am there because I have to be, because I am.
Only in Me does the world have meaning; only out of Me
does the world take form; only because of Me does the world go forward.
I am the law on which the movement of the stars and the
growth of living cells are founded.
I am the love that is the law's fulfilling. I am assurance.
I am peace. I am oneness. I am the law that you can live by. I
am the love that you can cling to. I am your assurance. I am
your peace. I am one with you. I am.
Though you fail to find Me, I do not fail you.
Though your faith in Me is unsure, My faith in you never
wavers, because I know you, because I love you.
Beloved, I am there.
--James Dillet Freeman

Mister Freeman was lauded as "the poet laureate of Unity, " lived from 1923 to 2003, and...Jim's 1947 poem I Am There went to the moon with Colonel James B. Irwin on Apollo 15. Irwin left a microfilm copy of the poem on the moon. Cool.

 <3

Lately

Friday afternoon in April. These are a few things I'm liking or doing or wanting to do lately.

Super-cool modernist doll house bookshelf via the NYT.
********************

They're streaming their brand-new album because it leaked, perhaps.
********************

It felt good to donate to this beautiful, long fight (fought by Jen Lemen -- to learn how more about this story and how you can do one small thing to send your love into the world, visit Jen Lemen's link above) toward the glorious, almost there mother-and-child reunion all the way from Africa to the West Coast of the United States. Photo of Odette's daughters Grace + Lilian by Stephanie Roberts.
********************

I cannot wait to read this book, How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly by one of my favorite of favorite authors, Connie May Fowler. Seeing her read and getting my book and the book for a friend signed at The Book Mark in Atlantic Beach, FL tomorrow from 7 to 9 p.m. Read this review from Joseph Books Blog, republished courtesy of the New York Review of Books.
********************

Looking forward to a new bra fitting at Intimacy tomorrow, too. My girls have shrunk, and I need a couple of beautiful new bras to lift me up and lighten my, er, load, and my heart.
********************

The end. Hope to be posting more frequently for the few of you so sweet enough to follow this little journal of mine. Spring is here, and I feel like I have light in my hands.
********************

Everyone Does This -- Oh, Rumi

Today, I inflicted myself, purposefully, compulsively, with personal memories and projections and assumptions, of a love lost, and the spiral-like destructive fantasy that I have nothing and that other, that lost love, has everything.
Thanks to the words below, along with the listening, the open ear and heart of a friend, I felt whole again, well again, better again, reminded again, of how far I have come since then. How I have risen, cliche as it may sound, like a phoenix from the flame, from a shadowy underworld into a world of imperfect light. So tonight, this cold, cold night of clear starry skies, I may sleep enfolded, and dream the dreams of a princess, rescued from the cold and ice of frozen sirens, from the charming piper headed toward darkened alleyways, from the handsome king offering me sweet fruit for a price.
These words were the opening, the opened heart was the unfolding. This was my night's magic spell, unfurled from these words of Rumi:

I am part of the load
Not rightly balanced
I drop off in the grass,
like the old Cave-sleepers, to browse
wherever I fall.

For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust-grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched, time -and-space cross,
this waiting room.

I walk into a huge pasture
I nurse the milk of millennia

Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live,
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere, or during the day,
in some absorbing work.
And this one:

A Tender Agony of Parting

A craftsman pulled a reed
from the reedbed, cut holes in it, and
called it a human being.

Since then, it has been wailing
a tender agony of parting,
never mentioning the skill
that gave it life as a flute.
Life, indeed, is beautiful.
----------
Image 1: We Heart It; Image 2: We Heart It; Image 3: We Heart It ; Image 4: We Heart It; Image 5: We Heart It; Image 6: We Heart It; Image 7: We Heart It

The Sweet In Between

{Just one last post on my grandma Jeannie. Promise to pick up the pace and lighten the mood asap. For now, here's what I wrote on the plane to OKC.}

It began the moment my dad carried his heavy face to my house, pulled out that daiphragam-deep voice from his heart and shakily, with a heavy nervousness, said that our precious Jeannie suffered a swift, massive stroke--a stroke like a bolt of lightning, like a freight train.

She was gone, vented, on a morphine drip, sweet body breathing by machine. I screamed. Then we held each other, held ourselves in check, cried, cleaned ourselves up, and walked to the Cathedral Basilica downtown. We walked straight down the center aisle, crossed ourselves in the name of the father, the son, and the holy ghost, turned to the right, made our donations, lit two two healing novenas, and knelt in front of the Virgin Mary. Daddy did his Hail Marys, his Catholic recitations. I did my own prayers for her freedom, for her peace, her joy, her release.

Tears abundant. Tears already a thousand falling.

We took a trip to the sweet comforts of Plaza Verde, a French atelier next door to the Cathedral. French perfume, cologne, lotions, soaps. Shaving creams, shaving supplies, silver razors, chess sets, fine old knives, sweet smelling soaps, French linens and tablecloths, Japanese teas and incense, heavy pens of glass, and India ink. A respite of beauty, of pushing at bay, away, the idea of our adored Jeannie vented, spirit flown, on a morphine drip in an Oklahoma City hospital bed.

Precious body there, good sweet spirit flown fast and high and gone--the silver chord cut, severed, and that pure good soul free, gone--filling up her best beloveds on this earth, meeting her sweetheart once again, her sister Martha, her brother Jim, her Daddy, her Mom.

I pray now for her peace, for her freedom, for her joy--to send her with love, no self-pity, no regrets--into her heaven, for that is surely where she shall be--here, unseen, the same as she ever was--out of sight, right around the corner, filling my body body and my cells with a love unlike anything my earth-bound mind can fathom.

Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.

The sweet in between, the quiet escape of that gloomy Sunday when we got the news--where we filled the day up with distraction--French food, French perfume, a cocoon of television, the warmth of lamplight and disbelief, the hope for a miracle of her return.

All that will have to wait for a later date.

The sweet in between time of disbelief is fading. Soon this plane will land in Oklahoma City, where I will not find you waiting. Soon the viewing. Soon the wake. Soon the funeral mass. Soon the burial. Soon, the sweet in between time will end.

And all of your brood will gather--shuffling, unbelieving, shocked, shattered, our moorings lost at sea. And you will hold us inside and out, with the light of a thousand suns, filling us, carrying us, laughing in our ears, your wonderful voice in our minds now, in our dreams now--always, always, always--but especially when we, as your Joseph Michael said, when we need you most.

And we will always, till after our bones are long since turned to ash--need you.

May you laugh. May your sweet Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and God himself hold you and your sweetheart ever in the palm of his hand. I'll leave the rest up to you. I think you'll do just fine--with that wink and smile all of heaven will be as in love with you as PJ--but he's the one who'll get to hold you all through eternity's long nights, and give you sweet kisses under the stars, and gaze adoringly at you on the rolling green hills, amid the breezes sweet like jasmine, beside a crystal blue lake glimmering and shining. On and on and on.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

{All Images Found on We Heart It, Save The First Two, Which I Took on My Phone.}

In Memorium: Jeanne Reynolds, 1926-2009

All Is Well

Dearest Gran'ma Jeanne Maxine:
I hold a vigil inside my head,
though you aren't yet not quite dead.
Nothing has changed.

Everything has changed.

Death is nothing at all--Henry Scott Holland

Death is nothing at all,
I have only slipped into the next room
I am I and you are you
Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

Call me by my old familiar name,

Speak to me in the easy way which you always used

Put no difference in your tone,

Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow

Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.

Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.

Let my name be ever the household world that it always was,

Let it be spoken without effect, without the trace of shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.

It it the same as it ever was, there is unbroken continuity.

Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?

I am waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near,

Just around the corner.

All is well.

Nobel Prize to a Working Class Hero

1.) In honor of John Lennon's Birthday, listen to Marianne Faithful do a great version of "Working Class Hero." (It really is something to be).



2.) Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for Diplomacy. Rock on, Obama. You are my hero. From NYT: "OSLO — The Nobel Committee announced Friday that the annual peace prize was awarded to Barack Obama just nine months into his presidency, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The award cited in particular Mr. Obama’s effort to reduce the world’s nuclear arsenal. “He has created a new international climate,” the committee said. Here's what Obama said...diplomatic, real, honest, humbled, and a statement of being undeserving. Honored that he is our president.



3.) And in the vein of peace, Imagine...



4.) Peace to you and yours this soft October day, and best wishes for an inspired and relaxing weekend.

The Sweet Transparent Truth

Sober Song by Barton Sutter

Farewell to the starlight in whiskey,
So long to the sunshine in beer.
The booze made me cocky and frisky
But worried the man in the mirror.

Good night to the moonlight in brandy,
Adieu to the warmth of the wine.
I think I can finally stand me
Without a glass or a stein.

Bye-bye to the balm in the vodka,
Ta-ta to the menthol in gin.
I'm trying to do what I ought to,
Rejecting that snake medicine.

I won't miss the blackouts and vomit,
The accidents and regret.
If I can stay off the rotgut,
There might be a chance for me yet.

So so long to God in a bottle,
To the lies of rum and vermouth.
Let me slake my thirst with water
And the sweet, transparent truth.

"Sober Song" by Barton Sutter, from Farewell to the Starlight in Whiskey.
© BOA Editions, 2004. Printed with permission on Writer's Almanac.

Photo by Stephanie Jones via {frolic} who found it on flickr right here.