home from being home.
from being called to sit down,
to settle,
without sleep, and rest in the bough of the stars.

watching as
the moon peeks up and slides herself
past the silhouette of a mountaintop tree.
dancing into the thin hours, fire soaked and free.
full,like a great hunting cat, fed.

we embrace the toil of giving and get carried over the coals, pulling on the cool of the stream through the soles of our feet.
Bear and buffalo stamp and stomp their imprinted memory in quick, thick strokes around the fire. eagle shifts his wing
and angles downward.
we are holding hands under the breaking layers of ice.
we are awakening to the hot blooded home of the heart.

in the valley of songs, the ancestors sing.
butterflies come here to change.
tears wind down from the clouds and the face of their mother smiles through the river.

everything has come to huddle around the hearth.
everyone has come to hear the old tales told, to tremble with laughter and to quiver with tears.
old hands carry the stones, young hands gather the feathers.

this heart pushes open the wind and ,in comes rushing, the rain.

and noone involved even considered that a photograph like this just might be a bit offensive, let alone....blatantly racist.

we have miles to go.

a circle of stones,
a red thread thinning,
a newsprint page of remarkable glyphs.

here stands a father, a husband, a son,
a footprint
worn in the sand.

I am afraid of the world and
of all the terrible things I know.

by rail or road
he departed and
each mile unravelled the coat of his homeland.
he arrived
naked and nameless. 

from blood and tea,
I am born unknown.
in a house with no doors, I am
holding a key.

a telephone rings
and a thousand angry birds shriek.
the world is divided by iron bars
of omission and ominousness.

history throws jelly jars headlong into the wall of the family room.
the future is a thin girl with a half smile, waving.
there is no now.

except for the belly of the sky, thick with rain,
no miracles are expected.
leaving home again,
we are running from the storm.

i am afraid of the world and the terrible things I know.

back to the bardo, bitch.
don't trip on your shit on the way down
stack your bones like bricks 10 layers thick
in the raw flesh of futility

it ain't where i wanna live no more
and i sure as shit don't wanna visit

find me found, instead
curled in some arm of an oak
strumming in the verdant breath of living,
soft with the muzzle of hope and
languishing in
the nettles of regenerative valor.

it's where i set my eye
and pull on the bow
and
let the arrow
fly

the choice is ever present
and the coin topsyturvys and cartwheels down gravity's arm
when we rise from the dream
when we rise from the waking
whose hands hold us in the flora,fauna and fire?

it is astonishing how large love is.

this little blue star rose in the middle of a new moon darkness. a night that love had left.
with all my weight, i refused her. refused to know the place in myself capable of expanding into something more than my own small sadnesses. I coveted the habits of being driftless, certain I had nothing to give, nearly sure I would fail.
A surprising static surfaced and I surrendered and sailed through a sea of lost baggage. Some old collision of water and sky flung the articles of years ragged around me. Suitcases of anger, stockings soaked with shame...all the tightly folded blankets of fear I hadn't known to let go........all oceanlogged and obvious surrounding me like a swarm of jellyfish, only dangerous when the wind blows my way.

and still, I answered and accepted the first nights of somnambulant doubt and the corner of the room where I squared off with patience. and somewhere in these weeks of selflessness, I have fallen headlong into the service of love. Feeling sometimes as grand as Ma Teresa in my willingness to bend and stoop and forgive. I am finding a lion pride and big bear mother inside this so humble frame of person and I am awed at love's giving in the most unusual ways. Surprised by the ferocity of my heart to burst and bloom over and over again.
And I am surprised at my surprise, for I have always considered myself a lover. But, I suppose, in these last chapters the heroine has been for sometime in the dark wood of winter. It has taken several spins of the sun to tender to this heart and I know well the roads Persephone rides and how deep the descent dives.

Now, I am prisoner to a joyful star streaking light across that black marble floor. I am witness to life unfurling in leaps and bounds. I feel if I blinked I would miss something precious. Her body grows with such speed it is almost possible, I think, to see the spaces in the joints widen, the stretching of the bones. Every morning I wake to someone new.

And I am that proud mother who is startled by my own fascination with the movement of the world.  I ride along with her wonderment and discovery and find similar glee in the erratic whirlygigging fireflies and  the stream of ants along a sidewalk.  Only, my joy at these small miracles lives in the visual and kinesthetic realm. I see and feel the magic of their beings.
For her, the world unfurls at her tongue. Everything is a taste and a smell. Everything she loves she loves with her whole mouth, much to the dismay of the fireflies and ants. It is a short lived affair in this way. But, it is true. A dog is the embodiement of love.
Her innate, unstoppable full speed love is what I have needed to jumpstart my own wild heart, to go over the edge, with my arms out wide, screaming and giggling, fearless, fierce and full of the force of love.

there's a  sunglinted song singing in my ear
and one station alone divines the answers.
we are fooled by our own obsession with fate.

but, sometimes it is only the fool standing when the smoke clears.
he is the only one blind enough to see  that love is limitless.
he is the only one dumb enough to know the truth.

the rest of us wander, war torn and weary, bruised by the battle of desire.
we are skiddish and scared by the long arm of love and her emboldened reach into the unnamed corners of our courage.
like lost birds, we shriek and scatter when she calls our name.

But, our misery is misguided.
were we to open like a sky and let all the weather change us,
what miracle might arise?

afraid to know, we play pretend with our past and call our memories "sweetie-pie", wanting only what we paint on the mirror.
wrapped tight with conditions and certainty, we call ourselves held.

Love laughs at the insinuation of a plan.
she holds hands with Fear and they run reckless down the boardwalk, tapping strangers on their shoulders.
They whisper all the wrong directions in their ears, because they are right.

The willingness to dance with Fear is the invitation to be danced by Love.
Rocking back on your heels and growing roots into the wall is no way to live.
The strobing lights are low, the disco ball is spinning....

I am only here a short while, so I will dance.

today's banner read.
i do
i do.

when the light burns out, the stars come on.
all this white, glowing underbelly comes surfacing like some great blue whale.
for all the curving and folding around that bucket of soft stones,
the raw interior is the garden of honey in a land carved from salt.

in the dark,
i see.

i am a nocturned flower, bruised by the sun.
in the hollow of night, i am tendered into a warm voice; an easy rest.
my tribe,scarred and colored with initiation, laughs large with the moon and her wisdom.
we open the doors of the basement, link arms and step down,
bright with the light of living.

Scream it.

I AM BEAUTIFUL!

again.....

I AM BEAUTIFUL!

and  mean it.
I am.
in my sleep deprivation, with my back flush to the wall, with my new puppy pee all over my cozy comforter, with my dirty clothes and my fresh washed clothes strewn all over my room, with the dishes in the sink, with my4 months of unbalanced bank statements, with my creative projects begging at the door, with my mudsplashed legs mucking stalls, with the fear that rises like the sun, with the intermittent sparkles of bliss, with my hibernatory hiding and my inexplicable extroversion....

I AM BEAUTIFUL!

even though, and because I'm blogging the muse when I should be working and my muscles are tight and I feel like I'm 90 until I start to dance and then I feel like I'm a bird or a fish or a hot bowl of noodle soup....I am beautiful.

even though and because I took a brassy leap and fell flat faced into a dustcracked canyon of egosmackdown and took a bruisin' to this wild ol' heart o mine.... I am beautiful.

 even though and because alot of the most of the some of the time (all of it) I can't decide if I love this life or loathe it and I am some embodiement of taran-toola fragility(ouch, don't drop me I will break) and ferocity and strength (see how much more than my body weight I can carry, climb in these shoes, baby)...I am beautiful.

even though and because I keep getting smacked in the head by all those curve balls, dang I keep stepping up to bat and hell if I know why, most of the time I'm smiling, if not laughing my way to the plate.....I am beautiful

I'm hopeless, lonely, sad, angry, afraid, stuck, frustrated, clueless, naive, fortressed, guarded, cautious, wounded, paradoxical, spinning my wheels, going nowhere, back at square one, in the middle of nowhere, invisible and obsolete and ......HELL YEAH! I AM BEAUTIFUL!!

I'm full of hope, autonomous,whole,  liberated, joyful, wild, precious, fearless, moving, doing it, flowing, trusting, allowing, surrendering, thanking,  risking it, brave, courageous, bold, sassy, brassy, me me me me me me me!, dancing, singing, painting, writing, riding, swimming,  stepping up, stepping in, saying yes yes yes, riding the waves like a seaborne animal, authentic, raw, vulnerable and real and .....HELL YES! I AM BEAUTIFUL!!


I       AM      BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


**I was driving into town this morning. Every morning for the past, oh I don't know, maybe 5 days or so, there are some awesome sunshadowed figures standing on the highway overpass with handmade banners that send some message for the day. Like highway fortune cookies, I think. I love these people and their soulfullness. I imagine they share dinners and gather in someone's house and brainstorm the epiphany for the next day, then pull out their tempera paints and laugh hard about something that happened that day,  while they scroll out the 11th or 12th commandment. Today, I waved and screamed back at them. Well, they suggested that I do it. So, I did. It made my day.
"SCREAM:    I   AM   BEAUTIFUL!!"

Little things make the difference.

i have come to the edge of the world where the wind blows hollow and the sand stings the skin. there is no sound
but, soundlessness.
all is emptying.

the rising mylar terror is driftless and seeping from the heat.
the carnival spring is passed.
summer is burning the flowers.

i retreat and warble in the wave of fire and water, finding meaning in smoke and wave.
in my cage, i sing lullabies.

all sorrows thin and starve.
all griefs grow sleepy.
even fear is an old matinee and I would rather melt on the grass by this lake.

Love is another drive by
and I am tending to the surprise.

and here, with no thing but space,
no weight or want,
no ground for landing,
the hopelessness of hope carves her bones into a key

down to that layer of thick black sludge, into
the primordial reckoning of memory collapsing and heaving it's
dark ship onto shore.
the revelation of past, the recalcitrant history of bone.

once tangled, the challenge is set.

at the breakwaters, life bursts.
colors unimaginable break into the sky.

hold the bones in your heart.
drum the life out of death.
cry the eulogies, tender the sites of blindness,
untangle the shame from the song.

and sing.