coxcomb

dear friend, it is never enough to be anywhere. we are not satiated. we aren't meant to be. e v e r. do you think the universe stops wanting? wishing? living? dying? "tut tut," says its heart. you are meant to continyou.

we adore you. you adore you. you adore we. the house that dave lives in is the house that z lives in right now. does it matter that he built it? what isn't yours? what isn't you?

congratulations to waking work and play. you're living. what else could you be doing except dying and you're doing that too! Your youness teases me with deep affection. we need some time together.

It's an adventure. Miss you dear friend while simultaneously feeling you everywhere. Til soon, all my love and worship,

me

We love our strange beauty and amazing pain. We love our hungry soul and extraordinary games. We love our flaws, our gaps, our fears. We love our mysterious dazzling frontiers.

My friend writes,

Been spending an amazing time in a little town named Rico Colorado. It is a rustic little mining town with mainly dirt roads. A mix of run down shacks, and some really fine homes/buildings. We are staying here with friend of G's who has down well for himself by pure chance, he followed his passion for dodge power wagons. His name is D. and he is a really good guy, I like him. Was nervous to meet him, but it's all good now.

G. has some really good friends. People he trusts, people who are genuinely happy for him, people who know him and they tease each other with deep affection.

Here are some shots of his home:
I enrolled myself in a WD online course. It is $129. They recommend one lesson per week. I downloaded my first pdf of lesson #1, and as I read the glossary of terms, I began to weep.The initial phrase that got me was “Awakening: The lifelong process of realizing who you are in your totality and living your truth in whatever ways are natural for you. Awakening is the process of maturing into your own full expression as a divinely human creature. ”

I want to live my truth! And feel I am not living my truth So much, So badly, so SO SOOOOOO aaaaarg!!!!! je suis one passionate bump on the log who occasionally jumps off because it rains and the tide picks me up...
I do believe I will get my money's worth. I am putting my heart into it and am looking forward to m un-windings.

I went to Facebook, and was cruising around. I went to your page, I saw 56 profile pix..wow! I looked at this one,
and began to weep. Weep for you because I love you, I love exactly how you are in the world, the curve of your cheek, your athletic way, your laugh, your style, your sadness and your joy. And why is seeded watermelons so hard to find?

What am I gonna do with my life ("exactly what I'm doing" well, that doesn't help (why do you need help) it feels like I need help, the occasional arising tension in my belly tells me so. I AM the princess with a pea.

I love you, my wonderful dear sweet human friend passionate and giggly T!!!


Your Z girl in Colorado.

boxes inside boxes

Russian dolls, those little dolls within dolls fascinate our imagination. The big doll is the momma of the next doll and the next one and the next one. Like her, I am the daughter of the daughter of the daughter of a woman I don't know at all. Sons are the babies to the fathers who were once sons, babies who had fathers who were born babies.

Stories are stories within stories within stories; and no character was born in a vacuum. We do not live our own lives. We are always taking care of our historical mothers and fathers, having fights with siblings we don't even know. Enjoying the manna of a world more mysterious than the pictures outside our windows.

Literature is a source of inspiration and reflection for people. My friends are those who love a good story. Who doesn't love a good story?

Reading allows us to make sense and unsense of our lives. We do this well: making sense or making unsense of that sense. We identify with the lives of fictional characters. Sometimes their intelligence or wisdom guide us. Sometimes we are awed by the authors who write these stories. All of it is part of why we read.

Who are we not to wonder about our lives and making sense of them? What else are we supposed to do?
Paul Harding won a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel last year. Tinkers enlightens and entertains in equal measure. It's a short book so I read only five or ten pages before bed each night, without fail, to make it last. I am nudged forward by George's imminent death, 8 days away, as the story begins. He processes his life, making final connections between himself and his father before he steps into eternity. Both tinkers, these men sell the miscellaneous and the precious, thread, twine, tobacco to men and women before our time. We don't have their lives, but George and Howard, son and father, are as knowable as our own families since their story is not only theirs.

I'm finding gems like this: O, Senator, drop your trousers! Loosen your cravat! Eschew your spats and step into that shallow, teeming world of mayflies and dragonflies and frogs' eyes staring eye-to-eye with your own, and the silty bottom. Cease your filibuster against the world God gave you.

Have you ever noticed yourself engineering a filibuster against the world? Or thinking that you must stop the filibuster someone else has against the world?

Reading an interview of Harding, I fell harder for the novel because he admires Emerson, Whitman, Melville. If you know me, you know how I swoon at their mention. (Who does that for you? Who has you swoon and wonder and buzz?)

Intensity and honesty are two requirements for literature (and people) for me. Highlighting was necessary here:

The distance between Howard and his house lengthened and, as it did, segregated him from his life as if it were time. The smell of the wood oil and kerosene from the wagon made him think of the rooms and stairways he already knew he would never enter again and he realized that what he sat upon, the swaying cart full of products for cleaning, scrubbing, patching, organizing, maintaining domestic life, was a house. I am perched on a house, he thought. He thought, God let us perceive that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his own work. God hear me weep because I let myself think all is well if I am fully stocked with both colors of shoe shine and beeswax for the wooden tables, sea sponge and steel wool for dirty dishes. God hear me weep as I fill out receipts for tin buckets, and slip hooch into coat pockets for cash, and tell people about my whip-smart sons and beautiful daughters. God know my shame as I push my mule to exhaustion, even after the moon and Venus have risen to preside over the owls and mice, because I am not going back to my family---my wife, my children---because my wife's silence is not the forbearance of decent, stern people who fear You; it is the quiet of outrage, of bitterness. It is the quiet of biding time. God forgive me. I am leaving. *from Paul Harding's Tinkers

Mesmorizing is the way Harding collapses boundaries between time and space. Readers are tempted by the way these lives mirror our own. What happened when and how does it influence us? My great, great, great grandfather, who was he? A man as parched by his marriage as Howard? Probably not, but I love the idea that I am living parts of his life that influence me in ways I cannot know. His mysterious hand tinkers in my life, and ah yes, this is life and I give up eschewing and filibustering against it.

Thank you Paul Harding.

eec kiss

e.e. cummings always gives more than he asks from the reader of his poetry.

13

being to timelessness as it's to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land

(do lovers suffer?all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad?only their smallest joy's
a universe emerging from a wish)

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness;
the truth more first than sun more last than star

---do lovers love?why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools,all's well



from 11

yours is the light by which my spirit's born:
yours is the darkness of my soul's return
---you are my sun,my moon,and all my stars

great expectations

spring is over, summer is here, and the tomatoes that others planted are ripe and ready. i hear that the asheville farmer's market sells a box of hybrid tomatoes for $7. how is that possible?
somehow it is possible and over the fourth of july weekend, i got to share one with reeves. yum, melt in my mouth, and a bit of nutritional yeast on it or brown rice vinegar. try it, you'll enjoy it on things you might not think to put it on, but please try it.

reeves' two community farmers shared with him lots of cucumber, and two kinds of squash:
i made some slaw with the squash and the vinegar (+ other ingredients) , and reeves ate a chicken that someone else made (with seasoning that made the house and scootie's nose notice).
we have great expectations of ourselves and our vegetables and mostly they come out great, though mostly there's something wrong, too. we can always find that there's something wrong.

but these great expectations keep turning out, and by golly, it's already the second half of the year and i know there's something wrong and maybe what's wrong is that i can't include what's wrong in what's right. except maybe.

maybe i have the perfect mix of right and wrong just like you! you who....thanks for reading!

FYI

- Natalia Rose-

"Since we cannot live for even a few minutes without oxygen, it's no surprise that shallow breathing leads to premature aging and even premature death."
-Albert Camus-

"In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
-H.G.Wells-

"When I see an adult on a bicycle, I have hope for the human race."
-A.Simms-

"At just twenty-two weeks old, an average UK citizen will be responsible for the equivalent emissions of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, which someone in Tanzania will generate in their whole lifetimes."
Invincible summer cherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrries!

it's our party

Friday night I attended a discussion about Transition Town Asheville, our local movement toward co-creating a sustainable Asheville beyond peak oil. A timely gathering with the torture of and in the Gulf continuing, the meeting was actually a talk given by a gentleman and self-proclaimed creator of sustainability Michael Brownlee of Transition Boulder. Passionate and grounding, moving and frustrating, I became more passionate about living in Asheville; more grounded in simplifying my life; moved to act; and frustrated with myself and my society for being where we are, forgetting our Momma and living vicariously through the Big names in Hollywood and Wall Street.

Transition Asheville is taking off in Asheville. The idea of moving toward local resilience fascinates me. Who would we be as a collective if we learned to look into each other's eyes and be honest and fair?

(This is what happened when I was away from home on Sunday.)

Our friend Albert Einstein once noticed that "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius --- and a lot of courage --- to move in the opposite direction." .........been drawn to the simple, the empty, the spacious, the natural. Putting things in garage sales; getting rid, dropping things off at Goodwill empowers, that's my experience. Why do we all have so much stuff? We're surrounded by stuff all the time!

Are you familiar with June Berries? They are sweet berries that resemble blueberries. There are two varieties familiar to me Princess Diana and Prince William. Seriously. On my walks with S, over the years in this neighborhood I call home/community, June Berries are around. Mike and his wife grow them; the Organic Mechanic planted them out front their newish building, and I just met the man who lives in the house with the perfect sized back yard with two bushes bursting with them.

I eyed these bushes a few days ago and I soon found myself Knocking on his door and Asking him if he knew of his very berries. He was well aware of them, having just come from picking some himself and agreeing to let me in his yard to pick some myself. He even handed me a catalog of fruit-bearing plants. Sweetness doubled and tripled!

I'm finding out how to be more honest with myself and in turn with you. Finding ways to look into myself and at the same time look into the eyes of the people around me and admit, there you are, and here I am and what can I do for you?

"Nothing succeeds like success" in this. I'm doing it when I remember to do it and reaping the rewards. There you are. Here I am. And What fun might having less control be? Not just fun, but subtle and illuminating and enrichingly sweet. I think of clouds and outta control puppies and trees blown by the wind. It's our party, this life, and it's always time to cheer for Heisenberg!