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.

Writing Commandments from Henry Miller (I've Already Got Adding No More Material to Black Spring Down!)

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."
3. Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can't create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it -- but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

White Light/White Heat: Writing Tips from Jack London

Jack London Was Hot!

You wrote your story at white heat. Hell is kept warm by unpublished manuscripts written at white heat. Develop your locality. Get in your local color. Develop your characters. Make your characters real to your readers. Get out of yourself and into your readers' minds and know what impression your readers are getting from your written words. Always remember that you are not writing for yourself but that you are writing for your readers.

– Letter to Ethel Jennings, aspiring writer, 1915

• Don't quit your job in order to write unless there is none dependent upon you.

• Don't dash off a six-thousand word story before breakfast.

• Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story rather than dissipate it over a dozen.

• Don't loaf and invite inspiration: light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

• Set yourself a 'stint,' and see that you do that 'stint' every day.

• Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers.

• Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.

• And work. Find out about this earth, this universe ...

What I'm Writing About

Have been so happy to be writing for a couple of very different and wonderful blogs. Check out my piece on Lucinda Williams on Synconation and have a read of Speak, Memory (With Apologies to Nabokov) on The Art of Living Guide. Love, Ama

Pop, Rock and Lock

Pink, Bunny Rabbits, and Florence.

I wrote my second piece on music ladies of 2010. This time it's about dance music and indie rock. Read it on Synconation. I'm having fun now.

Synconation: Old-Fashioned Music Bloggery

Records and Players=Swoon.

WILD FLAG

I'm very excited to be a part of what our editor is calling a brand-new music blog that will make each contributor (myself included) LEGENDS. We can have audacious hope, can't we? Mainly, it's a labor of love put together by a bunch of wonderful writers who are incurable romantics when it comes to music. Diverse, funny, touching, and fun, Synconation is definitely a place you can visit to learn about great music new and old, complete with live reviews, top-5s, songs of the day, featured articles and song battles. I'm honored and excited to be a part of it. My first piece will run November 12. It's about this great new band, WILD FLAG. I'd love it if you checked it out.

BFFs Give a Shout Out to Our New Mama

Karen, Kelly Rae, and Ama

We've been friends for almost twenty years, and our dear Kelly Rae recently gave birth to her first baby--Baby True. Karen and I guest posted on her blog, sending her our love and stories and wishes. Here's mine. Here's Karen's. We love you, Kelly.

Oh Pack Up All My Care and Woe

Here I Go, Swinging Low/Bye, Bye Blackbird...Bye, Bye.

 

 

 

 

Decided? Not sure. But I want to tell those blackbirds bye-bye. These last months, especially August, my birthday month, I can jokingly say, have provided me with some priceless writing material. However, right now, the material doesn't seem worth the cost of the moment--which is blackbirds flying riot in my heart. They want out? I'm again unsure. They peck and flurry and fly at the blue-red muscle and haven't escaped. Maybe they like it in there, the racing. Pump, pump, pump. Punch, punch, punch with soft small heads, almost like baby kicks, almost like babies, unsure if they want to burst into the air of this grey, sunshiny, complicated, impermanent world of sun and sky, rock and stone, harmony and discord, trees of sorrow and a sunrise's uncomplicated hope. I guess, right now, I'm not too certain either, that I want them out, entirely. Oh, but my heart seems to scar, first from bloody punctures. It seems to open to veins traveling this way and that, across muscle, bone, nerves, spine. A little too much room for the allowance for this fist-sized source of lifeblood to burst entirely apart. So. I'm looking for the courage, to, as that gorgeous song says so joyously..."Oh pack up all my care and woe/Here I go/Swinging Low/Bye, By Blackbird/Bye Bye..."

{Blackbirds}

The Word Made Flesh

This book looks amazing and comes out October 12, 2010. I may have to finally get a tattoo. After all, says the Buddha, "Nothing is Permanent.

Charles Bukowski

ee cummings

{bluebird in my heart tattoo :: not even the rain tattoo}

The Art of Living Guide--Come Visit!

Upon Awakening on a Weekday Morning at Three-Years-Old - The Art of Living

Double-Sunrise Shell {A Tree Grows in Brooklyn}

{With Apologies to Anne Lindbergh, Betty Smith, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Cohen and Chris Lopez}

For Karen and Ralph on Their Wedding Day
August 22, 2010 ~ Full Moon Resort | Catskills | New York

One does not often come across such a perfect double-sunrise shell. Both halves of this delicate bivalve are exactly matched. Each side, like the wing of a butterfly, is marked with the same pattern; translucent rosy rays that fan out from the golden hinge binding the two together. I hold two sunrises between my thumb and forefinger. Smooth, whole, unblemished shell, I wonder how its fragile perfection survived the breakers on the beach. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

:
Brought in by the waters of the sea, she is, quite simply, bright and dark and deep, borne from Italy to land-locked states to the Atlantic Ocean and now to the green-laden, tree-lined streets of Brooklyn--warm as the waters of her childhood summers, she is equally powerful, equally generous, equally beautiful. Forever presenting new things to be known, she swims and swims through the waters that carry her. Eternally bouyant. Eternally bright. Always moving.

::
What is love? It is this. Mermaids calling. A siren song unheard. Waves pushing those Prufrock waters white and black. When the singing comes, answer it. It's not as common as you might think. You have to know where to look. It is unusual. A gift from the unfathomable sea. You have to know how to call. It is hard work to sing out, swimming along the seawaves white and brown, to arise in the listener the idea that yes, I am singing to you.

:::
But when the call is heard, a double-sunrise shell, delicate, curious, freely given, loosens itself from the waves, rests waiting on golden sand, given to you by a kind stranger who expects nothing in return. One does not often come across such a perfect double-sunrise shell, both halves of the bivalve perfectly matched. This is love.

::::
He is earth, fresh air, soil beneath his feet--as rich and promising as a sunrise. The earth he sows is dark, like chocolate cake between the fingers and sweet--a thousand kisses deep. He is also light, like the air that grows nourishing sustenance from the soil--air light as an apple blossom's petal.

:::::
Her water pours into it all, so they grew and they grow--like The Giving Tree, the Joshua tree, live oak, magnolia, pear, orange, apple--and The Tree that Grows in Brooklyn--these two halves made of themselves, one.

::::::
So the love burst. So it pushed. Up through and into the sun, from water and earth and light. And it is simply, the light of a thousand suns.

:::::::
My wish for these precious two, my wish for you, is equally simple, equally dear, and comes from all the love in my powerful heart--a love as long as the clouds and the rains and the seas and terrains--simply, a sweet and happy life--just as it is today, right now, in the bow of the sun--among the people we impossibly, luckily, unimaginably, graciously, completely, and simply--love.

{Karen and Ralph (photo by Victor Aguilar); Double-Sunrise Shell;  Swimming; Mermaid Girl by Esther Lester;  Shells Given; Sunrise Boy, from Sore Thumb; Kissing from LoveTrains.Blogspot.com; Take me to Neverland}

Ralph Waldo Emersonisms

{Sunshine | Give All to Love   | There are No Days  | Be Silly 

 | Do Not Go || Happiness is a Perfume | Be Yourself  | Laugh Much}

But It Won't Last Forever

weheartit

Will we ever be whole again? Will we be all right? The weather was grey, grey, grey all day, and rainy, but the leaves of the trees were green, birds sang, water sluiced off tiny blades of green, green grass. Ides of March two days ago. Saint Patrick's Day today. Today, I miss my Irish grandmothers. No one loved St. Paddy's Day more than they. Except maybe my oldest brother. Anyway. Blues have hit on this green day, and it doesn't feel like Spring. It's another one of those in-between times. One of those times when everything feels wrong. But I've finally learned that the black clouds will pass. After the rain.

You're a Genius All the Time

It's Jack Kerouac's birthday today.

One of the best parts of my day was getting this message from my old friend Karl, so moving to me that I must post it here on my little virtual scrapbook, for mine eyes, and anyone else who cares to see. Plus, wanna get the book. From Karl: Some of my favorites from Kerouac's 30 Essentials in Belief & Technique in Modern Prose:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
5. Something that you feel will find its own form...
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language &knowledge
29. You're a Genius all the time



Now the Full Version:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr wife
5. Something that your feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the hold contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr monrning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazzier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored Angeled in Heaven
as ever,
Jack
[By Jack Kerouac, exerpted precisely as published [sic] from a letter to Don Allen 1958]

So now, I can't get that great 10,000 Maniacs song out of my head, a song a discovered about the same time I read On the Road. Favorite line? "Hey Jack, now for the tricky part/When you were the brightest star/Who were the shadows?/Of the San Francisco beat boys you were the favorite/Now they sit and rattle their bones/And think of their bloodstone days..."



You went away without saying goodbye.

It's a Small World, and You've Grown

Not every night. Not at the wrong time. Not in the wrong way, the longing, regretful way, but some nights, especially late winter nights, if you're in the right state of mind, and the starlings have been flying lightly in great waves of movement from one bare tree to the next against the gray sky and blustering wind and falling rain--and that sight tugs your heart not with sorrow but with swelling love--it's okay, just for a little while, to revist the past, when love is only there, thankfulness is there, and your head is straight and you know you were right to leave. That the gracelessness of your years from then to now were necessary, and it's okay to be alone. The light is warm inside. And those songs are yours again, both of yours, and forgiveness comes closer, feels complete. I learned from him many things, many painful things, learned the breadth and depth can be stretched deeper and wider, ever wider, ever deeper. And that love is just not enough. And that love comes again, and its expansion is a much harder but more rewarding thing, is deeper and wider than anything at all. So, tonight, this music is mine, is another place, another time--and like the song from that time says, I can say to myself, "You are alone. It's a small world, and you've grown."

Inappropriate Hope

A thin yellow light spread out and all the sorrows which sat in her seemed suddenly to lift up and fly off and were replaced by the most inappropriate hope.
{Susan Minot from the Must-Read Novel Evening...Image via WeHeartIt.}

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.}

Each Day is a God

Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk, a husk of many colors spreading, at dawn fast over the mountains split. I wake in a god. I wake in arms holding my quilt, holding me as best they can inside my quilt. Someone is kissing me – already. I wake, I cry “Oh,” I rise from the pillow. Why should I open my eyes? I open my eyes. The god lifts from the water. His head fills the bay. He is Puget Sound, the Pacific; his breast rises from pastures, his fingers are firs; islands slide wet down his shoulders. Islands slip blue from his shoulders and glide over the water, the empty, lighted water like a stage. Today’s god rises, his long eyes flecked in clouds. He flings his arms, spreading colors; he arches, cupping sky in his belly. He vaults, vaulting and spread, holding all and spreading on me like skin.
--Annie Dillard (Holy the Firm)

I think Annie's got my engines running again. I feel a tumult, a sickening, a shove. I have to do what I was made for. I must. I must tell my stories. Annie Dillard's wonderful account of her childhood, An American Childhood, was the biography I chose to do a book report on when I was all of 15 precocious years. It is a part of my body, my blood, my soul. One of the books that made me want to write.

She wrote about the shadows entering her bedroom at night, those mysterious lights that arc from one wall, to the ceiling, to another, moving like smoke. She wrote about how young and tender and beautiful and funny her parents were. How their beauty was earned, astonishing, and powerful--whereas a child's beauty is more elfin, a free gift. She wrote about how when everything else is gone from her mind--the faces of her children, the names of her lovers, her own name--what would remain would be the topography, rivers, rolling hills, and green lushness of the grass that was her hometown of Pittsburgh.
I didn't know anyone else had seen those mysterious shadows at night, which today are barely noticed, aware as I am, too aware, of the logistics of space, and light, and time, and that those terrifying monsters and ghosts visiting you alone are merely cars passing in the night.


I didn't know that other people played with and marveled at the wonders of aging skin, loose flesh, veins, and diamonds on the skinny fingers of the people who were my world--my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my parents, and all of their many friends. I didn't know that my childlike beauty was elfin, a gift--while the glorious adults shone with a light of beauty they had earned with the hard work of living, of life, of breaking apart, and putting yourself back together again. I didn't know other people remembered their tender mothers napping, and were agog, hours later as their warm, sleepy mothers walked from their bedroom doors transformed into the sweetest-smelling, shining, most beautiful things we had ever witnessed.

I didn't know. And she told me. She's telling me again. There is enough.
There is enough room for me, for the singing in my bones, the untold stories and poems that make my heart race in existential terror, that made me once upon a time try to kill them and myself as I manically downed vodka, popped pills, smoked a thousand cigarettes, screamed at suitors, terrified my friends, and made an art out of romantic rejection. You could line around the block all the good and loving men I sent away, artfully, like suicide, like anything else.

This painting, "Strong," is by my one of my dearest friends, Kelly Rae Roberts, whose journey to telling her own story and finding amazing success in the risk of TRYING, has been a major shove at my heart, telling me, NOW. Not later. Now. She's one of the many women dear in my heart who I GREW UP WITH. The real growing up. The real heartbreaks. The losses. The joys. The weddings. Births. Divorces. She is a part of my chosen family. And me of hers, and I am so grateful that we all chose so carefully, so wisely, at our tender ages of 14, then 18 and 19 and 20 and older.

And now no less than 15 years later with some, 20 years and more with others, we still hold fast to one another, hold that KNOWING and LOVING that comes only from watching each other fall, watching each other be fools, watching each other be cruel, and stupid, watching each other's hearts break apart--even more than the risings, the transformations, the joys, the soul-sustaining laughter--this shadow-self knowledge, this witnessing of it all, makes us hold ever more fiercely, love ever more deeply, and remember, one to the other, what we once were, where we once were, and who we are, now.

"Only connect," E.M. Forster, said. And so we have, over and over again. Only love, only connection even in the midst of dry spells and bitter hearts. I have a circle of these people in my life. And if I did anything right in my life, I chose these people as my family. And they me. Though one name was mentioned, I am incredibly lucky to have at least 30 of these people in my life. Right now.

Even as they stepped back as I tried to throw myself, headlong, so wasteful and selfish, over the edge of a real and beautiful and joyful world. They are my bedrock. And they came back. Were there when I woke up, and are here, scattered over the mountains split, as I try to pull myself, one day at a time, out of the darkness that once was my only home.

They are telling me something, these stories my body holds. They are telling me to pick up a pen, get a wooden lap desk, smoke a thousand cigarettes, and sit in early morning light all the way to dark, and set them free. Because, with apologies to T.S. Eliot, there really is not enough time. No time for you and for me, for the taking of toast and tea. Not time enough for decisions, visions, and revisions which a minute will reverse. Every minute someone dies. I will die. My life grows longer. The pages blank. I have dallied long enough.

I will not throw my head in the oven. Won't go out on a cocktail of barbituates and booze. Won't hang myself from a noose. Won't stuff my dress pockets with stones and drown in the river of an English countryside. Won't wear a smile plastered upon the face of a dying, dying heart. Not me. I'm gonna set those neglected stories loose on the world, and for a little while, we'll all be the better for it. I promise.

{Image Sources: 1.) Oprisco via Rose Coloured Rain 2.) Erik Jacobs for the New York Times; 3.) We Heart It ; 4.) Rosie Hardy Flickr ; 5.) Heart It via Bits of Beauty; 6.) We Heart It; 7.) We Heart It; 8.) Small Magazine; 9.) My Grandma Gerry; 10.) Oprisco via Rose Coloured Rain; 11.) We Heart It; 12.) Strong by Kelly Rae Roberts; 13.) We Heart It; 14.) Kat, Me, Tanya, Karen; 15.) We Heart It; 16.) We Heart It; 17.) Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours; 18.)Happiness Fort: My Life as a Sugar Lander via You are My Fave}