Wave Of Change

Moonwalker, Chapter 12

2010-01-10T21:21:00.000-05:00

The next day was my day off, but I was on my bike heading for the Brown Library before the first birds started singing. I couldn’t believe how loud they were on my block considering there were no trees or bushes for them to hang out in. There weren’t even any weeds besides that one the strawberry-blonde boy had drawn the heart around, and someone must have pulled it up because it wasn’t there anymore when I biked by.

Neither was he. Where did the birds hide out? I looked up hoping to see one cross the sky, but it was empty of wings. Maybe they lived in holes in the eaves of the dingy houses. They looked ramshackle enough.

Of course the library didn’t open for another four hours. I passed the time with the giant trees in the quad that was usually filled with students crisscrossing back and forth on their way to being rich, famous, or socially responsible, but since it was summer they were all off traveling the world volunteering or on Martha’s Vineyard. The trees were so spectacular they erased my bitter and cynical thoughts as soon as they appeared.

They were glorious, reaching up to touch the clear, blue sky untainted today by smog from all the cars that nobody in Providence really needed. The city was small enough to walk or bike, but everyone was in such a hurry. That’s what the trees advised. Keep riding that bike. My job at Chaos wasn’t going to buy me a car anytime soon, so it was easy to say all right.

A single gull drifted so far above I thought it was an eagle until it swooped down for the popcorn I had sprinkled on the grass around me.

When the library opened I headed for the science stacks. I could have looked it up on a computer, but something in me, probably the same instinct that made me buy records instead of CDs, made me want to discover the truth from an actual solid object like a book. Something that smelled organic like leather, that had once been a tree whose rings sang in a forest to roots and stars stretching themselves in all directions while staying true to the fire in their bellies.

By the time I finished, the sun was almost down. I hadn’t noticed it was close to getting dark. I didn’t care. Something had caught me up in its beak and was about to give me wings if I was brave enough to jump off the roof.

Here’s what I learned about Chaos Theory.

Chaos Theory describes the behavior of certain systems that may exhibit dynamics that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. (When I was a very little girl someone touched me. Down there. You know where. We didn’t have a name for it because nobody told us one. I had never felt anything so delicious in my life.)

As a result of this sensitivity, which manifests itself as an exponential growth of perturbations in the initial conditions (When I was a little older I lay in my canopy bed and fantasized about being raped.), the behavior of chaotic systems appears to be random.

(I was a wild thing in high school. I’d do anything, anything, anything for you, but no one could make my heart sing.)

This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future dynamics are fully defined by their initial conditions with no random elements involved.

( ) So there was no use trying to fill in the blank.

Also observed in weather, the paragraph concluded. I had a feeling the end was only beginning.

I started to dream again that night, which would imply I slept, but I’m not sure that’s what actually happened.
In the first dream Block Island became the new Atlantis after being wiped out by a tsunami. Everyone I knew drowned. I watched from my vantage point above the surface where I hovered on my tiger-striped wings before they got too waterlogged and I plummeted down, down, down into the heaving ocean where I bobbed with the rest of the survivors. I knew every single one of them because that’s the way it was on Block Island. Everybody knew everybody. We were usually good at coming together in a crisis, but there was nothing we could do for each other this time since none of us had the power to grant each other fins and gills.

It was a different natural disaster every night. Typhoons, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat waves, but there was one thing in common. Right before my eyes closed, or was it right before they opened--I saw it--the blue butterfly that had crossed the sky the moment Michael Jackson had told me I had to save The Man in the Moon.

It held perfectly still in the spell of its own silence, calling me to come closer. I did, wondering if it was dead and if it would be ok for me to collect its body and mount it under glass, the proper thing to do with the rare and precious things of the world that were in danger of extinction.

The silent song held me so close to its heart my own stopped beating. Wings I hadn’t known I’d had wrinkled and folded up, falling off my shoulder blades.

I was glad. This meant the world would be safe, even if I could never fly away from it.

Then it happened. The Man in the Moon started laughing. The sound of his laughter was the breath that became a wind that swept down toward the earth and lifted the dead butterfly’s wings. They flapped—just once--but I felt the reverberation in my own maimed body, crushed by memories, my bruised innocence bleeding across the Milky Way.

My last thought before I went under: my mother was right.

Moonwalker, Chapter 11

2009-12-12T22:44:00.000-05:00

Zoe hadn’t been joking. For dinner we ate salvaged bear claws and monkey bread washed down with the end of the day’s coffee we usually dumped.

“I love monkey bread,” she said, feeding Cally a ball of sweet and sticky dough, then licking her fingers. Cally licked her lips and said “Kiss me.” I gagged and tried to look like I wasn’t jealous.

The movie was The Butterfly Effect. It was horrible. I mean any movie starring Ashton Kutcher was horrible, but this one was especially bad because it wasn’t supposed to be funny and the three of us couldn’t stop laughing whenever Ashton got the most agitated. Cally kept Zoe’s promise and made an extra bag of popcorn with Bragg’s and nutritional yeast for the gulls.

“Tell them it’s good for them,” she instructed me.

“Yes, Professor Weiner.” We laughed so hard we spilled popcorn all over the floor where the three of us laid on our stomachs like little kids to watch the TV.

“You know Ashton is kind of cool,” Zoe said. “You can tell he really does love Demi and she’s fifteen years older than him. Maybe you should go for a younger guy, Minnie.” I knew she was trying to butter me up by not calling me Minerva, or nutritionally yeast me I guess I should say, but I wasn’t going for it.

“Been there, done that. Plus I told you I’m not going for anyone, especially someone barely out of diapers.” Especially not crazy-homeless artists, even if they did have surfer shoulders. It was bad enough I was straight without having them know I was generally attracted to derelicts that sucked me dry mentally, emotionally, and financially.

“That movie wasn’t so bad,” Cally mused. “I mean they really did a good job of demonstrating a sophisticated scientific concept. I wonder if Ashton knew the source of all his troubles?”

“I don’t think sophisticated and scientific are even in his vocabulary,” I said, “and what concept are you talking about?”

“Smarty pants,” Zoe kidded me.

“The Butterfly Effect,” Cally told us in her best professorial tone. “I was just talking to my undergrads about it this morning. That’s why I picked this movie out.”

“I was worried you were going to tell me you were going to dump me for a boy,” said Zoe.

“As if. You know I’d do anything for you.”

“Even take my name?”

“Maybe we could talk about that some other night when I haven’t eaten so much popcorn and might not puke?”

“What’s the Butterfly Effect?” I asked before the conversation veered too far into the surreal.

“It’s a famous phrase that demonstrates the primary principle of Chaos Theory. You know who James Gleick is right?”

“Hello? I went to art school?”

“Is he the guy that came up with the Gaia Hypothesis?”

“No, that’s Lovelock, but I bet they’re friends because they’re definitely on the same wavelength as far as the earth being a living entity with consciousness just like you and me.”

“And what about me? Can somebody fill me in or am I just too unconscious to have a clue what you’re talking about?”

“Jealous, baby?”

“No,” she said, sticking out her lower lip.

“Are you pouting? I can’t believe you’re pouting. I probably shouldn’t tell you how cute you look right now.”

“I don’t get it.” Zoe whined.

“Ok. Well, the Gaia Hypothesis is probably obvious to you since you’re a mystical free-spirited pixie artist. It just says that the earth is as conscious and alive as we are. The implications of this are that since we humans who live on the earth have become parasites capable of destroying our host it will most likely rise up and kick us off soon.”

“How’s it going to do that?”

“Oh, you know, Hurricane Katrina, the Asian Tsunami, global warming, all those tornadoes that keep slamming down on Kansas like the Wizard of Oz on continual replay.”

“The lunatic is in the grass……The lunatic is in the grass,” Zoe sang in a cockney accent. She had it down pat, as my mother would say. It was part of her twee act. “Have you ever seen the Wizard of Oz matched up with Dark Side of the Moon? It’s mind-blowing. I actually cried which I never did in the regular Wizard of Oz. I always feel so bad for the witch. Nobody understood what she went through.”

“What did she go through again?” I asked.

“Can’t remember, but I figure it must have been horrible to turn her into such a bitch.”

“Well we’re not in Kansas anymore. These days there’s no excuse. She should get some therapy.”

“Look who’s talking,” Zoe dared to say.

I stuck out my tongue. “Monkey bread is cheaper.”

“Sorry, I ate the last piece.”

“Hey, do you want to hear about the Butterfly Effect or not?” Cally reined us in, pushing back her long blond hair that crackled with static when she took her hand away.

“I guess so,” said Zoe.

“Gleick’s famous statement was that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could cause a typhoon halfway around the world.” Her voice was dull and dry, blasé, as if to test our attention. Were we really listening? Were we so jaded we couldn’t take in the enormity of what she was saying? Well, I couldn’t. I was lost with the butterflies flapping their wings in the waning sunlight. Zoe, however, still had human ears and a mouth that could speak.

“How could that be possible? Butterflies weigh practically nothing,” she asked her girlfriend, trying not to look mesmerized by the sight of her exposed neck, sinuous as a swan, one long arm draped across the back of the futon, the other crooked to support her head as she leaned back to watch our reactions, eyes half-closed.

“It has nothing to do with size,” Cally said, sitting back up and reaching for her computer. “Here, let me show you.” She typed into Google and pressed enter.

“Here. Let’s see...Butterfly Effect. Whoops, better type in Chaos Theory, too. The first entry that came up is that dumb-ass movie.”

“We live in a truly degraded culture,” I had to comment. Cally smiled and kept on typing. “You know you love it,” she said, giving me a look that caused me to swallow my words of protest. “Here we go. According to Wikipedia, ‘The Butterfly effect encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependencies on initial conditions in chaos theory.”

Zoe and I looked at each other. We could tell she was really excited and didn’t want to tell her we still didn’t have a clue, but one of us was going to have to do it because it might be important some day if we ever needed to know how to get out of Kansas.

She wasn’t my girlfriend, so I volunteered to be the one to burst her tornado.

“Ground Control to Major Tom,” I interrupted. “Ground Control to Major Tom.” Zoe laughed, but Cally kept going. I was going to have to sing to get her to pay attention. “Come on Zoe, help me out. Don’t do this to me.”

“It’s all yours. You’re the star of this show,” she said, reaching for the popcorn.

“Here are we sitting in our tin can,” I sang. “Like my grimace?” I said for Zoe’s benefit, Cally still wasn’t paying attention to us.

“I love when you caterwaul,” she drawled like Scarlett O’Hara.

“Far above the world. Planet earth is blue and there’s nothing we can do.” I stopped, surprised at how my voice sounded. It was much stronger than I remembered. It was almost like someone hiding in my vocal chords had decided it was safe to come out. I wondered what he’d been hiding from? Soldiers? Martians? Godzilla? I also wondered how I knew it was a he who’d been hiding when my voice was a clear soprano that rang true as a tuning fork, vibrating around the three of us until we got off our bellies and sat up straight. The cheap Oriental rug felt like a genuine magic carpet.

“Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you hear me Major Tom?” Zoe finally joined me. “About time,” I said as we fell silent, or rather silent with laughter. We were rolling on the floor at this point, laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe.

Cally closed her laptop by now and stood, sweeping her arms wide as if to embrace the cosmos. We sang the climax together, all three of us. I couldn’t believe I’d grown up to be such a dork.

Here are we floating round our tin can!

Far above the moon!

Planet earth is blue!

And there’s nothing we can do!

Dun dadun dadun dadundun! Dun dadun dadun dadundun!

And then the synthesizers took over and we were floating above the earth looking back at all we’d left behind….headed toward the moon with nothing to do and no desire to get there.

On the ride home, for the first time ever I laughed at my fear of the moon. Of course I kept my headlamp until I safe on my sofa, but I didn’t miss my helmet.

Moonwalker, Chapter 1, second time around

2009-12-09T12:34:00.001-05:00

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always searched for the meaning behind the meaning. I’ve always wondered where the drop of rain goes when it breaks the still water’s surface, and I’ve always reached in, searching for something to hold onto. I was born this way. I slipped into this world on a moonbeam, aware from the very beginning that everything we thought was solid—from the crisp, red apple, sweet against Eve’s lips before she took that first bite, to the bile she choked on when God punished her by making childbirth so painful it became a curse instead of a blessing—everything—was a reflection of something we couldn’t touch or taste or smell, something that would burn our eyes if we looked at it. There was a chance we could hear it, but it came by grace only, and with a price. We had to give up our voice so we’d never be able to tell anyone what we knew.

The meaning behind the meaning. The raindrop in the ocean. I was born knowing. I was born with a bitter longing to find just one thing to hold onto, yearning for a story where something—anything—a mother’s love, a diamond trapped in coal—shone all on its own.

All of this changed the year the butterflies found me, raining down on me like bright, amazed jewels--amazed at the light, amazed to be flying after knowing nothing but the darkness of the cocoon, amazed at their own beauty that had blossomed in that darkness without knowing it would one day dance across the sky with all the radiance of a rainbow! All of this changed—I’m rich, I sang as they landed on me!—all of this changed when I remembered.

I remembered, one summer day while filling the empty creamer at Café Chaos, the coffeehouse I had unwittingly ended up managing when all I wanted to do was follow orders, in Providence, Rhode Island, where I was attempting to plant myself to see if I could grow some roots after twenty years of chasing the sun. I hated the dark, cold winters that wanted to drag me under ground and freeze me with no promise that spring would come. I had what’s known as a mortal terror of them. The last one I’d endured I almost hadn’t made it. I told my mother I was in hibernation mode when I finally answered her call after a month of frantic messages, but it was really a bottle(s) of Irish Whisky and a bong that had gotten me through it. I had a prescription for Prozac I kept under my pillow in case things got really desperate, but I never came to that since I never sobered up enough to remember it was there. In those days, I was good at forgetting. I had a lot of practice at pushing things I didn’t want to remember out of my mind so that it was almost like they’d never occurred, or even existed. That’s why it was such a surprise when, lost in the motion of pouring cream from a cardboard quart into the insulated steel carafe that sat on the counter at Chaos in service to the light and dark preferences of our valued customers, I remembered the moon streaming through the blinds of my bedroom window, pinning my arms down so that I couldn’t roll away from it into the shadows where I could go back to sleep, sucking my thumb until my mother showed up when it was time for my 2AM bottle.

I screeched like a rabbit cornered by hounds. I slashed the impenetrable night to the bone. I pierced the dreams of the neighbors in our cul-de-sac in the Connecticut woods, tore a layer of skin off their illusions, left them bleeding in the open ocean as the sharks moved in to pick them off one by one, but no one came to help me. I lay there, flayed by the eye of the moon, my cries feeding the pocked holes on its blank face, mocking my cries, indifferent. The moon sucked the breath from my body. I began to collapse in on myself like a fish ripped from the ocean by a steel hook. I remember it all. I remembered, that day in Chaos when the customers assumed I was either drunk or having a nervous breakdown when cream flowed all over the floor because I didn’t realize the carafe was full. “Minerva, what’s wrong with you?” my co-worker Zoe said, walking out from behind the counter to see what all the fuss was about. “I’ll get a mop,” was all she said when she saw my face, escorting me into the storeroom where I collapsed on a coffee sack and started to sob.

My mother came running. Down the long hall to my room where I squirmed on my back, where I choked on my tears, where I struggled to breathe, almost swallowing my tongue. She came. She flowed toward me on a river of milky light that came from behind the moon, enveloping it as she lifted me out of my crib, cradling my head to her breast, soothing my downy head. I latched on.

The taste of her milk was sour and sweet, sticky with murmurs. She had white wings like a swan. She enfolded me in her feathers. In place of the moon—her breast, full and white. I remember the moment it became the entire world.

Why, I want to know now? I was already weaned. Already used to a bottle. How? Her milk should have dried up weeks ago. The meaning behind the meaning. The raindrop in the ocean and where it goes. Everybody’s got their stories to make sense of their world. Like most people, I got a bunch from my family and a bunch more from a therapist when I decided my family was the reason I was so miserable. That’s why the voice I heard as I poured cream all over the floor made no sense—forget it all—the voice said. I should have asked why, but by the time I thought to ask I was slumped on a coffee sack in the storeroom of Café Chaos looking for something which I could use to blow my nose. I’d cried so much I couldn’t breathe, which snapped me out of it like a good working girl. There weren’t any tissues in sight, so I settled for a dish towel, wiping my hands on my apron and walking back out into the café where Zoe was waiting, reading a book whose title made me cringe, The Man Who Fell in Love With the Moon.” I almost lost it all over again, “Put it away,” I gasped.

“Hey, do you need an inhaler or something? Do you have asthma?” She said, mercifully tucking the book into her backpack. “This book’s totally radical. It’s a bisexual, biracial revisionist retelling of the founding of the American West with these crazy Mormons who try to keep everybody done, but of course they fail because of course the sex is just too good. Oh, by the way, I closed for the day,” she informed me. “Can’t run the place on my own and you seemed like you really needed that meltdown.”

“We’re going to get fired one of these days.”

“Let’s hope so, Minerva. Let’s hope so.”

“Bye, Zoe. Thanks.”

“No problem,” she said as she got in her car. “I’d offer you a ride but…”

“Sure, I understand. I have my bike here anywhere. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to deal with her hysterical puddle of a boss anymore. Besides, I knew. It was time to go back to the beginning on my own. To face the hungry moon and see if I still knew how to breathe underwater. Beneath me, I could see the vague peaks of mountains as I drifted in opalescent tendrils, utterly seduced by just the word glow.

I can’t say when it was I started to follow butterflies—if there was an actual moment when I was entranced by the promises of broken flowers and fractured light. I can’t pinpoint when I was seduced by pollen and mirrors, or when I became hungry for the golden promises I glimpsed in still water to be fulfilled. I do know one thing for sure. From the very beginning, I was afraid of the moon.

Chapter 10, Moonwalker

2009-11-30T20:37:00.002-05:00

“Where’s your helmet?” Zoe asked when I rolled up to the back door of Chaos.

“Some gulls stole it.” I tucked my bike behind the dumpster hoping the anarchists didn’t think it was up for grabs and shuffled through my backpack for my keys. “Come on, we’ve got a lot of organic Ethiopian Estate Guatemalan Shade Grown Kona Mocha Java to brew. And you look super cute today, by the way,” I said, swiping her glasses off her face and putting them on my nose. “Can I wear these?”

“No,” she said, swiping them back. Not unless you want me get lost when I have to venture out into the jungle to fill the creamers.”

And that’s how we passed the day after I’d received my mission to save the man on the moon and saved a crazy, homeless-red-haired kid’s life with starlight that had streamed through my hands like the dollar bills we put in and took out of the register all day. I didn’t say a word to Zoe, but I could tell she wanted to ask me why I was in such a good mood, but didn’t want to jinx it in case I was manic instead of my usual depressed.

“You want to come over and watch a movie with Cally and me tonight?

“You mean leave my apartment two nights in a row? I don’t know about that. That seems pretty risky.”

“We’re going to make popcorn with Bragg’s and nutritional yeast.”

“Wow, you’re trying to lure me with the taste of fake cheese.”

“Would you prefer partially hydrogenated oil that stays in your body for the rest of your life?"

“Well, if you put it that way—sure, I’ll come over. But only if you give me any leftovers to feed the seagulls.”

“I thought they stole your helmet. What are you feeding them for?"

“They did me a favor. I should have ditched that thing a long time ago.”

“Hey, check this out,” Zoe said. She had a print-out in her hand someone had left on one of our tables. We had a few particularly zealous ones who casually “forgot” their propaganda in the coffeehouse. People left all sorts of crazy “information”--everything from pamphlets promoting the latest jungle superfood berry drink to articles about aliens who looked like lizards that were actually running the world. Supposedly George Bush was one—an alien. This guy saw his real lizard face one time when he smoked DMT. I would have left it around for someone else to read, but later he started claiming Obama was a lizard, too, and I just wasn’t ready to let go of that little ray of hope for the world he’d brought into my dark existence. Obama was not a lizard. There had to be something sacrosanct.

“It says here there’s a solar eclipse today,” Zoe said, pulling herself away from the article to look at the clock on the back wall that drove us crazy because it ticked off the minutes and neither of us could stand the sound of each second of our lives passing by in Chaos, even if it was just a café. Of course, when it was busy, we couldn’t hear it. We weren’t sure if that was a better or worse way to go through the day, which was a bigger waste.

“And it’s happening right now!” She ran to the door, peering out through the pane. “I’m too scared to go outside,” she whispered. “What if something gets me!”

“I don’t see anything,” I mumbled, pretending I had no idea what she was talking about. I wasn’t ready to decide if I was in denial about the morning’s events or just wanted to keep them as a secret to hold tight.

“That’s because you can only see it in Asia where they’re a lot more superstitious than we are.”

“You’re Asian,” I reminded her.

“No, I’m Chinese. We’re a continent to ourselves.”

“Well you have a rabbit foot key chain and cross yourself when a black cat crosses your path.”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t let anyone tell me I had to stay indoors all day so my baby wouldn’t get birth defects like they make women do in India. If I was pregnant, that is.”

“You’re talking about a country that burns brides.”

“Look who’s superstitious now.”

“Or prejudiced.”

“Wow, you really don’t have any pride left.”

“I’m too old to be pc. Let me see that.” I grabbed the paper out of her hands and scanned it, looking for some confirmation that I wasn’t crazy, that it was the eclipse’s fault, that the morning’s fantastical scene could be reduced to a scientific phenomenon and I didn’t have to worry about werewolves on top of the whole Michael Jackson thing.

Everyone knew how the brain responded to light. They’d done all sorts of experiments with rats and there was that sick Werner Herzog film based on a true story about a guy that grew up in a basement and had no memory of anything until one day he found himself stumbling down a street. Supposedly the actor that played him wasn’t acting. Herzog had cast a real lunatic in the part and didn’t even care that people condemned him for taking advantage of the poor guy. I’d just read an article about him in The New York Times “catching up” with where he was today. God, these ironic quotations make me sick. I make myself sick for using them in the first place, but how else can I express my disgust at the human race? He played the accordion on the street in Berlin. People stopped to gawk at him because he’d been in a movie. Nobody told him he played badly. You really just couldn’t trust anyone. Especially the sane.

I wasn’t going crazy. I was just feeling the effects of the eclipse on a biochemical level because I was extremely sensitive to variations in light. Of course this implied I was also sensitive to the dark, but I didn’t want to go there. Not today. Not when I ran the risk of giving birth to a deformed baby if I ventured out on the street.

“Did you get to the part where the astrologers predict a rise in communal and regional violence in the days after and a devastating natural disaster?” Zoe asked me.

“Skipped it. I like this part. ‘There’s no need to get too alarmed about the eclipse,’ I read aloud. ‘They are a natural phenomenon,’ the astrologer told the Associated Foreign Press.”

“Who said that?”

“Siva Prasad Tata from the Astro Jyoti website. He straddles the two worlds, you know. Or at least that’s what this article says. I don’t trust the internet. How do you know it’s a reliable source? It’s not like Deep Throat in Watergate. He had a real voice. He wasn’t some disembodied robot of a machine anyone can program to say anything.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

“Sometimes you treat me like such a baby! I can’t help it if I wasn’t born in the 60s. By the way, it’s also the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. Were you at that, too?”

“I’m not that old!”

“Not even in utero? Maybe you were conceived there?”

“I told you my parents weren’t hippies. They were in the army and a general caught me when my mother squeezed me out of her. That’s why I’m such a strict boss.”

“Talk about straddling dimensions. How many worlds does that guy in India straddle? I bet you’ve got him beat.”

“No shit. Just two.”

“I think both of us are straddling a few more than that. Wanna name some?”

“I’m having a hard enough time with this one.”

“There’s no cream left,” whined one of the customers.

“Back to work, peon,” I commanded Zoe.

“Yes, boss. Very good, boss,” she said in a bad Indian accent, bowing all the way to the ground to kiss my feet. The cream-deprived customer didn’t think it was funny when she got back up and informed him, “You know in India where cows are sacred you wouldn’t be allowed to put cream in your coffee. You could only have soy milk.”

“I should fire you for that,” I reprimanded her, holding in my laughter for the customer’s benefit for about three seconds. “Sorry, sir,” I choked. “We’re all a little crazy today because of an eclipse on the other side of the world. Your coffee’s on the house. Make that free for everyone!” I announced. The customers clamored toward the counter, tossing dollar bills in our tip jar. If I got fired it would be worth it at least, in other dimensions besides this one.

Zoe beamed at me. “You’ll be a dumpster diver yet.”

“What time is dinner again?”

“Dinner? I thought I invited you over for popcorn and a movie.”

“Since I’m not going to fire you and will probably be the one who gets fired myself, you two better feed me more than popcorn.”

“I’ll go see what’s out back in the dumpster.”

Moonwalker, Chapter 9

2009-11-15T20:26:00.002-05:00

Almost as if to spite me, the morning always showed up when it was supposed to. Sometimes the birds sang, sometimes they didn’t. When they stopped I knew the sun was over the horizon and it was safe to roll my bike downstairs and head off to work. It was downhill from Fox Point to Wickenden, and even though there was hardly ever anyone on the street I’d taken to wearing a helmet since I’d moved to the city, something I’d sworn I’d never do, but I figured if I really wanted to change my life I had to start somewhere, and maybe that somewhere had to involve not looking at all cool. As my mom said, “you’re not getting older. I mean younger.” And as my father had been saying since I left home more than twenty years ago, “You know, you really need to get health insurance.” If I got in an accident I’d be screwed. Now that I was officially middle-aged maybe it was time to be prudent, although Zoe said I looked cute when I pulled up at the shop where she was sometimes waiting for me to unlock the door. She was usually late because she knew I’d never tell on her.

“You’re such a nerd,” were her exact words. “I love nerds. They’re so enthusiastic.” She gave me a “We Are Traffic” sticker for my helmet the Critical Mass bikers wore. “You can ride with us, you know,” she said, as if riding a bike was something radical and not something I’d been doing my whole life because I’d never been able to afford a car.

As I said, usually I was the first to arrive at Chaos, but that morning after The Annunciation I had another odd—I won’t say disturbing just yet—encounter.

Providence didn’t have that many homeless people, at least not obvious ones. There weren’t a lot of panhandlers on the street with their legs stretched out covering half the sidewalk, people huddled in ATM foyers who pushed all their possessions around in shopping carts, or who slept over grates to keep warm when it was well below freezing like they did back in the 80s when Reagan was in charge. There were plenty of poor people, but they all seemed to have a place to sleep at night as far as I could tell, which didn’t mean they actually had a home come to think of it. Come to think of it, one of the things that freaked me out about Providence is how few people there were on the streets. People didn’t walk a whole lot in this city. Everybody drove even the shortest distances in their cars.

Which made the guy camped out on the sidewalk who I passed every morning even more noticeable. Usually he was sitting upright, back against the chain-link fence, legs stretched out, sometimes with his hands behind his head as if he didn’t have a care in the world. He seemed to be going to sleep as the sun came up, which meant he stayed up all night too, unless he just slept all the time like I did first semester of my sophomore year at Yale.

I wanted to stop and ask him how he managed to do it. How did he survive the mocking laughter of the moon and the werewolves howling around every corner, but the one time I did engage him in conversation, he kind of scared me. I told you about him before. He was the guy who’d told me that the Asians wandering the streets of Fox Point at dawn carrying five-gallon buckets with fishing poles on their shoulders were Hmong immigrants. “Do you know about the Hmong?” he asked that one time I slowed in front of him. He had a thick, red-blonde beard, so I wasn’t sure the voice I heard actually came from him, even though there was nobody else around because it was hard to see his lips. Besides, he just didn’t look animated enough to put more than two words together. “They’re fighting a Secret War,” he informed me. “They’re with the CIA. Watch out.” I was grateful I had just reached a hill so my bike could accelerate without it seeming like I was trying to ignore him. Now, I just went ahead and ignored him, but I always glided past with a good excuse playing through my mind, like Zoe didn’t have a key and I didn’t want her to break in and get fired because then our tips would suck in case he spoke again.

He always wore a wool hat, which was crazy since it was well over 80 degrees every day that summer, but then again, maybe he really was crazy and took it off in the winter. I didn’t know because I hadn’t lived through a winter in the city yet.

Supposedly most homeless people were mentally ill, so this wouldn’t surprise me. Sometimes he took his shirt off, which was a startling sight since with his clothes off I could see he wasn’t old and decrepit. In fact, he was totally hot. He had the shoulders of a surfer and defined abs that looked liked he’d spent hours paddling on his stomach.

I used to surf. I wondered if I’d ever caught a wave with him out on Block Island and considered stopping, or even turning around, but the momentum was always downhill. Besides, he probably smelled.

I was in no rush the morning after Michael Jackson’s revelation. In fact, I was going to be early for work since I’d been so restless I left the house well before the ten minutes it took me to bike down the hill to the coffeehouse. I’d actually left my apartment while the moon was still in the sky, waiting at the top of the hill to watch it set in the ocean I could barely see past I-95. Narragansett Bay was beyond that, and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean where Block Island waited for the butterflies to anoint it with secrets and lost gold. I missed that place, though I swore I’d never go back there. Not at least until I got a real job.

I was in no rush. I didn’t want to get to work too early. The morning, when the sky was shared by sun and moon, if I could stop from shaking, was actually beautiful. Only melodic birds were singing—no crows or cackling blue jays. I decided to get off my bike and walk a little instead of riding as fast as I could to the safety of Chaos.

First I saw what looked like a rattlesnake’s tail. Then a few stars starting small and growing larger as I followed them down the sidewalk. A weed growing up through the cracks was outlined with a big heart, another with a multicolored rose that looked like a cathedral window; yet another with a smiley face that made me smile as well, which rarely happened before my first latte.

The stars seemed to form some sort of wondrous pattern, but I couldn’t figure it out, and they weren’t white, but every blazing color you could imagine, including the ones on the spectrum we can’t see like infrared and ultraviolet.

Did you know black is the combination of every color and white is no color at all? A moth shot toward my face like someone had thrown it, white wings fluttering toward my nose. I batted it away, but could feel it caught in my hair. Its wings beating against my skull sounded like the whirr of a helicopter’s blades coming in for a landing to rescue wounded in a war zone.

The light exploded. I dropped to my knees and shielded my eyes from the shrapnel I knew must be flying around, but nothing hit me but the air from the blades, whirring quietly now, like wings resting on flowers. I opened my eyes to blackness and there they were in every color, a flock of butterflies sprayed across the sidewalk singing look down, look down.

Embarrassment usually would have kicked in at this point. I’ll admit it wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in a compromising position on a sidewalk. It happened more than once back in the days I was a drunk. I’d probably been mistaken for a homeless person myself. I even had some actual physical scars to prove it as well as the stories I’d told at AA before I’d dropped out, but I wasn’t embarrassed. I didn’t have time to be, because there on the concrete in front of me, outlined in fuchsia chalk, was a human body, except it had wings, which I supposed made it some kind of hybrid, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal if there wasn’t an actual body inside the chalk outline, hands folded over its chest like broken wings, the way they do for people in coffins.
It was the hot homeless guy, laid out like a corpse, body taking up the whole sidewalk, feet dangling in the gutter. The water beneath us rushed by without a sound.

One shoe was off. When I got close I could see it was hanging from the laces on the sewer grate. I picked it up before it could fall and put it on the pavement next to him, hoping he’d notice when he woke up.

No such luck. He was either drunk or dead, and from the angle of his neck I would guess dead. No one could sleep like that, although I had seen some drunks pass out in some pretty crazy positions over the years that you’d swear weren’t humanly possible. Damn, I was going to have to do something, I thought, just when I was almost starting to enjoy being apathetic.

Maybe he just passed out because it was really hot. Maybe if I took his hat off he’d snap out of it, which is what I did, grimacing as I touched the greasy wool, plucking it off his head and tossing it over my shoulder where it landed on the grate with his shoe. A couple of seagulls swooped over toward us from the direction of the Bay as if they thought there might be something worth scavenging besides the usual pizza boxes and bottles of malt liquor that nobody cared enough to recycle, even though it wasn’t a trash day and the bins weren’t out on the street. They perched on the chain-link fence and looked down at us.

“What should I do?” I asked them, glad it was so early and there was nobody around. People were going to think I was crazy too if I didn’t watch out. I half expected them to answer, but they didn’t, so I did the most obvious thing and looked down at the poor dead kid (I could see he was really young up close) who looked so vulnerable with his hat off I started to cry. How was I going to tell his mother? Maybe the police would, though I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. The police showing up at your door with that look on their faces you know from TV but can’t believe because it couldn’t really be happening to you because things like this don’t happen in real life, they only happen on television. I was going to have to tell her. I couldn’t do that to her, even though I didn’t know her yet and didn’t want to.

I took another look just to make sure I’d be able to positively identify him in the morgue. I had to be absolutely sure it was him before I told his mother the heartbreaking news. Maybe he was from Florida and I’d have to go back there after all.

He had strawberry blonde hair like Willie Nelson. Strawberry stubble on his cheeks, which was strange because it meant he shaved and I didn’t see when a guy who spent all day and night laying on the sidewalk would shave. Come to think of it, how did he eat? There weren’t any restaurants or stores on this block. People must bring him food, I guessed, and as far as going to the bathroom maybe he jumped over the chain-link fence and went in the abandoned lot. Probably thought he was fertilizing the weeds like a responsible anarchist.

I was aware that all these thoughts were rampaging through my head so I wouldn’t have to touch him. The closer I got, the less it looked like he was still breathing. Maybe he had the ability to hibernate like a bear or a frog at the bottom of a pond, or maybe he was waiting inside an invisible egg like a turtle, or a chrysalis like one of the butterflies he’d sketched in chalk on the sidewalk. I assumed it was him since the trail of stars and butterflies ended with the outline chalked around his body. I didn’t stop to ask how he could have drawn it around himself. When I got really close I saw how it glowed as if etched in stardust or something as precious and rare as the luminescent filaments on butterfly wings. Supposedly if you brushed them even the slightest the butterfly couldn’t fly anymore and died of grief and broken flowers.

I was afraid to cross over it, afraid to even reach over with my hand to put my hand up to his mouth to see if he was still breathing, but what if he was just bound by some magic spell that would break if I did?

After awhile you can only make so many excuses. At some point you’re going to get in trouble for not calling 911, even when it looks like there’s nobody else witnessing the scene. That’s why they always catch so many hit-and-runs. There’s always somebody watching from behind a drawn shade or hunched down in a parked car. I was pretty sure he was dead. I was going to have to be the one who declared an end to this poor kid’s fate. I reached my hand over the glowing line around his body and cupped my palm to his mouth.

Neither warmth or cold came from his lips, which were slack like a dead person’s, or like someone really relaxed like we did in corpse pose at the end of yoga class, though that had never really happened to me, but I knew about it because I was so not relaxed I never lost myself in the bliss of prana and heard every word the instructor said, judging myself of course for not being relaxed enough to get lost in it.

Without thinking about it, I moved my hand down to his heart. I didn’t touch it. I just let my hand hover in the air, drawing the glow of the stars and butterflies and smiley faces and hearts surrounding us into my own heart that I could hear now beating inside my own exhausted body.
I know it’s hard to believe, but the street started to drum.

Inside all of the shuttered houses there were drummers calling and answering each other back and forth across the pavement with ancient rhythms from Africa that told the story of how the world was born and how it would die.

It was a story about the emptiness in the center of the earth, a story of the black hole in the center of our galaxy. It was the story of the black hole inside each one of us, the vacuum where no sound exists that we dance toward, summoned by our beating hearts and the stamp of our feet on the red earth.

My hand was a calabash, a hollowed gourd. I turned it over and it was filled with water whose phosphorescent glow called me to look through its surface to discover what happened on the other side of the black hole. The drums gripped the back of my neck and pushed me facedown until my nose was beneath the surface. I closed my eyes until I heard a voice say open, and when I did I saw the lines on the palm of my hand were some kind of map I could follow if I wanted to really know the earth, but I also saw that if I followed them I would have to leave it too, or at least the safety of the earth I knew where it was only possible to live with death because we ignored it.

The drums wanted me to dance with death. The street was shaking and the rattle of the chain link fences dividing the paved yards shot through my legs like a jolt from an electric chair.
I had to get to work. Zoe had to be there by now and she’d be really dismayed if I did something as stupid as drowning in my own palm. With that thought I actually did inhale a nose-full. My head jerked up, spraying water all over the kid’s red beard. I noticed the seagulls were still perched on the fence above us, looking down with their yellow eyes and red-tipped beaks. They were silent as owls, unusual for such talkative birds.

“Give that back!” A ghost yelled.

His eyes exploded open. He leaped to his feet and slipped around me, running down the street after one of the gulls who was flying away with his hat I’d thrown over my shoulder.

“Ladrón! Get back here! You know that doesn’t belong to you!”

To my amazement, the gull turned around and dropped the hat in the middle of the street, the way they dropped clams on the blacktop on Block Island to crack them open. He picked it up and put it back on his head, reached into his pocket and threw the gull a packet of unopened oyster crackers which it caught and flew away with toward the Bay, the other gulls taking off after it to see if they could steal its score.

“Phew,” he said, “this is my hat from Peru,” jamming it back down on his head until it nearly covered his eyebrows. “They can digest plastic, you know.” He said to me without turning around to face me.

“I know.” I knew a lot about seagulls. I hadn’t lived on Block Island all those years and not learned a trick or two.

“You really should take off that helmet. It doesn’t suit you.” I wanted to say “turn around,” but decided to play it cool--if that’s what he wanted. The “Aren’t you hot with that thing on?” I managed to drop seemed blasé enough to convince him I hadn’t been scared to death when I thought he was dead on the street.

“Do I look hot?” he said, turning around, and because he turned I knew he was aware of the double entendre. A lesser boy would have ruined it by pushing the hat out of his eyes with a line like that, but he didn’t. Did he know I’d checked him out those times I’d passed by on my bike and he’d had his shirt off?

“I have to go to work now.”

“That’s all you can say after you just saved my life?”

“Uh-huh.” It appeared my eloquence and rapier wit had deserted me.

“Thank you.”

“It was nothing.” Disarmed by a seagull. “Just what were you doing passed out like that?” I asked.

“Did I scare you? I’m sorry. I had a rough night keeping the werewolves out of the neighborhood. For some reason they want to get in Fox Point more than anywhere else. I finally got rid of them by telling them there was a big frat party at Providence College, but some didn’t believe me and snuck back. Took a bite out of my leg—look.”

He rolled up his pants and sure enough there were teeth marks on his calf.

“Werewolves? You expect me to believe that?”

“No. I expect you to believe I’m a junky who shot up and passed out on the sidewalk.”

“Did you draw all this?” I pointed to the flowers and stars beginning to glow pink as the sun rose around us.

“That depends on who’s asking.”

“Like the cops?”

“Like girls who have wings but don’t know it.”

He looked at me and for a couple of seconds I swear I saw myself reflected on his black pupils. I was a white star in the center. I didn’t look like the self I knew. I can’t say what I looked like, only that I was present at the birth of something beautiful. Something unequivocally true--something that could never be taken away from me if I could only remember to remember it.
“The werewolves love this block. It’s where Fox Point ends and Wickenden starts. It’s always easier to cross over on the borders.”

“Border of what? It doesn’t look any different to me.”

“That’s because you haven’t learned how to be invisible yet. You could though. You noticed me when nobody else did.”

“That’s because everybody was asleep! This is a weird city, anyway. Nobody’s ever on the street it freaks me out."

“Wow. You really can’t see them, can you? Just me. Incredible.”

“Whatever. I gotta go now.” I turned to mount my bike. “What do you eat?” I couldn’t help asking. He pulled a goldfish net out of his pants and waved it in the air around his head. “Moths. Moonlight. Want some?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“No. You just don’t want to remember.”

“How I lost my soul?” I joked.

“No, how to find it.”

Of course I forgot all of this as soon as the first door opened on the street and a woman wearing gold earrings so big her Chihuahua could have jumped through them hollered out at us. “Hey, I thought I told you to beat it, kid! Go find some other block to stink up!”He laughed and waved at her. “Good morning! I could tell he really meant it. “You think those are real gold?” He asked me. “I hope so.”

“Me too.” The Chihuahua barked as if to say “me three,” but its owner must not have understood we were rooting for her to show us the way to lift us out of this leaden city where the sky was so heavy it was going to collapse soon.

“I mean you!” She barked. The little dog jumped out of her arms and cowered under her robe. “Beat it or I’m calling the police!”

“I guess protecting people from werewolves doesn’t mean anything anymore?” The kid sighed. “What’s a Dragonfly to do, but fly away?” He spread his arms out like wings and rolled his eyes in circles. The pupils fractured like a kaleidoscope into every color of the rainbow and then some. When he stopped they were blue once more and I could breathe again.

“Dragonfly?” I managed to say, dumbstruck by his multifaceted eyes.

“That’s my name. And by the way, you’ve got to change your name as well as get rid of that helmet.”

“’I’ve been told that before. Hey, you don’t think nerds are cool because they’re so enthusiastic do you?”

“Sure. I love nerds.”

“But you’re a surfer!”

“So are you. I’ve seen you out there.” So we had met before. “You really should get going,” he said. “Nerds are never late cuz they’re so enthusiastic to get to work.” I swung my leg over my bike seat and straddled the bar. “Flexible,” he commented. He put his hand on my seat. “Where did we surf together? Narragansett Beach?”

“No.”

“Watch Hill?”

“Definitely not. Too many rich people. I get arrested every time I roll into that town.”

“Black Rock?"

“Never heard of it.” But somehow I knew that that’s where I’d seen him. Offshore
the far side of Block Island, looking back at the faces of the old men etched in the bluffs by wind and rain, wondering if we’d ever go back to land, waiting for the first butterfly to float on the current of air sweeping down from Canada aromatic with the resin of pine trees high in the mountains of Mexico where the fractured light could be made whole again. He waved his net in the air in front of my face. “That wasn’t me. That was my brother.”

“He surfs too?”

“Yeah, but only when it’s sunny.”

“I gave my board away.”

“We can go back there and get it. It’s only a 45 minute drive to the ferry.”

“Not until I get a real job. I promised myself.”

“Well, then you best be on your way. Don’t want to get fired from the one you already have. Won’t look good on your resume.” I slid up on to the seat. He slowly took his hand away. “Careful,” he said, “You don’t want your pant leg to get stuck in your chain and make you crash.” He stooped down and rolled it up. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

“We do?” I leaned over as he began to stand back up. He didn’t smell bad at all. In fact he smelled like Sex-Wax, the coconut-scented balm I rubbed on my surfboard so I didn’t slip off. Or used to. I had given my board away when I left the island.

“You don’t think you didn’t save my life for a reason now, do you? Somebody else might have just left me for dead.”

“It could have been anybody.”

“But it wasn’t. It was you, whatever your name is going to be….It’ll come to me soon. Next time I see you.”

“When will that be?” I asked, even though all my danger signs were flashing. I had a feeling he could make me forget the man in the mirror who’d cursed me when he saw the broken glass all over his bar. “What the fuck!” he’d yelled. “Fucking crazy bitch!” Of course I’d just thrown a bottle at his face, covering us both with broken glass.

“Don’t worry, it’s almost over,” he said, his voice smooth as river water streaming over moss-covered stones.

“I’m not so sure about that," I answered, wondering how he knew, because he did know. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t erase those memories.

“The eclipse that’s about to start in a couple of hours. It’s one of the biggest in years. The moon’s going to block the sun for over six minutes.”

“It’s going to be dark in the day?” That was the last thing I needed.

“Only in Asia. Here we’re just going to act crazy without knowing why.”

“Isn’t that how it usually is around here?”

“Whadda you know. I think I’ve figured it out,” he laughed, waving his net around my head like a magic wand.

“What’s that?”

“Your name.”

“Tell me.”

“Can’t. You’ve got to give me something first.” He dropped the net over my head, leaned in close. There was only a thin veil of mesh between our lips that fluttered as our breath drew it back and forth between us. I wanted to kiss him but I knew if I did there’d be no saving me from the werewolves.

“Don’t worry. I’ll still protect you,” he said before pulling away. His eyes sparked and shot across the dawn to join the seagulls gathering to greet the sun at the edge of the Bay. “Catch you later!” he cried, releasing me with a push on my seat that sent me rolling down the street.

“My name!” I yelled over my shoulder.

“What are you going to give me!”

I unstrapped my helmet and threw it over my shoulder. He must have caught it, because I didn’t hear anything crash on the ground.

Moonwalker, Chapter 8

2009-10-30T17:03:00.002-04:00

About Providence. As in:

1. looking to, or preparation for the future, provision; as in
2. skill or wisdom in management, prudence; as in
3. a. the care or benevolent guidance of God or nature
b. an instance of this; as in
4. God as the guiding power of the universe.

Although I thought it was a cliché used by authors who couldn’t think of anything better, I wasn’t tired of it. I was fascinated by all the definitions one word can contain, so I looked up Providence in The Merriam-Webster, who, if Providence was meant to be truly
relevant to this narrative of my life, must be leaving some definitions out because:

1. I didn’t believe in planning for the future
2. thus my poor skills and wisdom in management which could be said to contribute to my imprudent lifestyle.
3. While I might agree that nature with all its bounty (all those coconuts in Florida) could be benevolent, there was still the issue of hurricanes, and of course, in the northeast, winter, so these instances weren’t infallible.
4. a. Needless to say I had serious doubts in God as the guiding power of my universe.
b. Even more needless to say was my serious doubt in the existence of God.
c. After a few drinks I had serious doubts about the universe, which hadn’t changed since I’d gotten sober.

So it was kind of a mystery how I ended up living here after all these years pretending I was a gypsy. Real gypsies don’t ever give up the road. They die on the backs of their ponies, their untamed souls straining to be free from their bodies like the sound of the devil’s violin solo. I tried telling myself I was following in the footsteps of Roger Williams, who’d bailed on The Massachusetts Bay Colony on a horse strapped down with books in the name of religious tolerance, but if I couldn’t fool myself with this excuse, I knew I wouldn’t be successful with anyone else.

Providence was really just the easiest place to go that was close to Block Island where I figured I could get a job and create some kind of more stable life for myself. I didn’t want to end up working in a coffeehouse, but I didn’t get one call back for a job interview based on the resumés I sent to Brown and RISD, various non-profits and private schools, an importer of exotic foods, a travel agent, a company that prepped rich kids for the SATS (I know I didn’t graduate from college, but my scores were stellar. I had a lot of promise in the beginning), a film production company (everyone kept saying the film industry in Providence was going to blow up soon), and an underwater salvage rescue crew. I figured they were my best shot because I was really good at snorkeling, even though they were looking for someone who was certified in SCUBA. They were the only ones who actually did call me in for an interview, but when I told them I thought SCUBA gave divers an unfair advantage over the fish they looked at me strangely and suggested maybe I apply for a job at Butler. I looked it up later and discovered it was the local mental hospital. When I sent in my resumé I got a phone call from admissions asking if I needed help.
When not even my last hope, Wholefoods, would take me (I had been told everyone who worked there was an artist, plus they had health insurance, which would have made my parents so, so happy), I knew I was in trouble and contemplated jumping back on that Greyhound that had taken me to Florida all those years ago.

Wholefoods was honest at least. They told me they didn’t think I’d stick around long enough to make it worth training me, which was probably right, but I was disappointed because everyone there did seem like they were having a good time even though all they were doing was stocking shelves and ringing people up on a register. And I had kind of wanted those health benefits. I hadn’t been to a dentist in 15 years and my mom told me I really should get a mammogram now that I was-one more time, probably not the last--40 years old, even though the thought of having my breasts squeezed by some metal machine terrified me more than the thought of getting cancer. Call me twisted, I'm aware my priorities are skewed.

Providence, Oh, Providence. I wanted the bounty of God or nature to help me plan for my future, but it just wasn’t working out until one day I wandered down from Fox Point to Wickenden Street, thinking to get a coffee at Café Chaos and there it was, the sign I’d been looking for: HELP WANTED.

I’d tried to promise myself I wouldn’t end up working in a coffeehouse, but I must not have really meant it. In any case, I was good at the job and was soon promoted to shift supervisor, which meant I got to boss Zoe around and take the fall if the creamers weren’t full.

I also tried to like the city (I knew love was beyond me), but despite Buddy’s efforts to make it more glamorous, Providence was dingy and drab as a dockside whore, not that there were any in the city. Oh, there were plenty of hookers, but they weren’t anything romantic like that. They were just plain old hookers who smoked crack, shot heroin, and generally went about leading as dismal a life as possible in this dismal city.

The East Side had some nice buildings if you were into brick. That’s where the Brown and RISD campuses were, but I wasn’t. Bricks made me think of ballast stones, of people moaning in the holds of cramped ships, of slaves chained to each other, dying in misery before being tossed by the feet to the sharks. Also, objects to throw through windows. If the revolution the anarchists said was coming soon ever made it to Providence there’d be plenty of ammunition for the overthrow.

“Actually, that’s not what we’re about,” said one I met out back of Chaos when I was hefting a bag of coffee grounds into the dumpster. “We don’t believe in no rules, we just want to make our own. Most of us are actually quite peaceful,” she said while grabbing the bag out of my hands. “Hey, don’t throw those away. We’ll use them for compost.” She was gone before I had a chance to ask her if I could be one too.

After that I just left the bags out back to disappear, feeling virtuous and with a little more hope about humanity, although the last time we came across each other in the alley she promised me she’d bring me some vegetables from their community garden which I have yet to see.

Also, I have a thing about trees. I hate to see them cut down. I mean, I really feel their pain. I don’t know what else we should build our houses with, but it shouldn’t be trees, which is a problem in Providence, because besides bricks, there’s a lot of fine, old Colonial wooden houses and churches being written up as treasures in guidebooks. When you look at them you can see how much older the trees were back then before they were harvested because the clapboards are so wide. I took a tour of the John Brown House once and had to leave, I got so sad from counting the rings on the floor. According to my count, some of those trees had been a thousand years old before they’d been chopped down so we didn’t have to step on the ground anymore.
Providence used to be one big forest. Impossible to believe now, especially on my block which barely had a weed growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk.

If I could stage a revolution it would be an uprising of trees. They’d push their way up with their roots through all the pavement of the world until we all fell to our knees and apologized for the ugliness we’d created, which you could really see when you left the East Side and ventured out into the rest of the city. Ugly lime green or beige aluminum siding and chain link fences seemed to be the preferred décor, although preferred would be pushing it as most people didn’t notice how anything looked because they didn’t care enough about anything. Poverty does that. And I’m not talking about the genteel kind that I lived in where I had the option to compare myself to starving artists like Van Gogh and Picasso because I knew who they were in the first place.

I don’t know where I got the idea that beauty is a virtue. Maybe it was Providence itself. I loved how the early settlers of New England were named after abstract virtues, as if being named Chastity or Prudence could summon those qualities to one’s self. Despite trying to convince myself otherwise by years of dedicated debauchery, I had deep Puritanical roots. I knew there was something severe about me that stopped me from fitting in completely with the truly debauched barflies I surrounded myself with in my heyday--some of them quite sophisticated—for those twenty years I chased the sun up and down the east coast.

I used to debate this with one of my bosses (in a coffeehouse, of course). He was the tannest person I knew without wrinkles. “I rub coconut oil into my skin every night,” he said when I commented on his youthful appearance. He never even bothered going north anymore and seemed genuinely happy. I tried rubbing coconut oil all over myself for a week to see if it would work its magic on me but just ended up with greasy hair and acne, and oil-stained sheets I had to throw out because they started to smell rancid.

“Don’t you think sybaritic is a better word to describe our lives than debauched?” asked that well-lubricated former boss of mine. And if you’re wondering what sybaritic means, you’d be amazed at how many really smart people sling coffee.

I knew. Sybaritic means pleasure—anointing yourself with oil and lolling luxuriously on a tropical beach. I knew all about this way of life, but I’d never truly enjoyed it. In the back of my mind I was always thinking about what I had to do, not to survive, but to make my mark on the world.
I knew I wasn’t truly sybaritic because I even drank with ambition. Almost every night I got drunk to get drunk, not because I enjoyed the taste of alcohol--and I was a connoisseur of drink specials, not of fine wines or exotic tequilas. I only drank top shelf if someone else was buying, otherwise it was whatever cheep vodka was in the well. At least I’d graduated from the Piels Light and Fuzzy Navels from my high school days is what I told myself whenever I started to feel bad about myself.

“Life’s too short to feel bad about yourself,” said my wise, Confucian boss. This was in the stage where he grew a Fu Manchu beard, pinned his long hair up with chopsticks like a geisha and served coffee in a kimono. We were living in Key West, so this mélange of genders didn’t seem weird at all. It was part of the daily pleasure of living in a place where you could do whatever you wanted whenever you wanted to. If there were no limits, wouldn’t you create the most fantastical, fun-filled life for yourself?

I tried to apply his sage advice to my flailing life for awhile, but I couldn’t talk myself out of the idea that I was wasting my time on earth. Twenty years of serving coffee, scraping paint, pulling weeds, and cleaning houses while analyzing my employers from a Marxist feminist perspective and wondering when I was ever going to get to reading Daniel Deronda had worn me down.
One day I looked in the mirror and saw, I was a shabby boat in need of a good detailing. My teak was chipped and peeling, my surfaces no longer smooth to the touch and shining in the tropical sun. I was working in a boatyard restoring trim at the time in exchange for a place to sleep, if you’re wondering where this metaphor came from.

Ferociously sweaty, I looked at the dull trim I’d been scraping for hours and saw the truth: my allure was gone. Even more surprising was the revelation that came with it: so was the allure of the sun. My bloodshot eyes longed for the balm of clouds, low and gray, blocking the horizon.
There’s something I kind of need to admit at this point--a confession that betrays those Puritan roots I hinted at earlier. Despite what I told Zoe and Cally, I did actually go to college. I didn’t like to talk about it because it’s one of the few things in my life I can’t spin as ironic.

I dropped out before I graduated--but it was Yale I went to. I’d dreamed of going there since I was a kid, and I got a full scholarship to study English Literature with a focus on Critical Theory, which was all the rage in the late 80s.

I was ok for the first year. I went to all my classes religiously, had a 4.0 GPA and was the darling of all my professors who all assured me I was going to have a brilliant career following in their footsteps. But something happened my sophomore year that was beyond anything I’d read about in books, aside from fairy tales, which I only knew how to analyze for what they said about the culture they came from. I had no clue what to do when I actually started living one.

In my case I guess it was Sleeping Beauty, except for the beauty part, although I did have raven colored hair, ruby-red lips, and skin white as snow like the princesses always did in fairy tales.
Anyway, right after daylight savings time in late October, as the days grew shorter, I stopped getting out of bed, meaning I slept all day as well as all night, meaning I also stopped reading books and writing papers, meaning I failed all my classes and would have been kicked out of Yale if I hadn’t quit. The last paper I wrote was on Daniel Deronda and was a total failure since I hadn’t read the book.

Deep in the winter of my discontent, it came to me—what I had to do to wake up. On an afternoon where I cracked my eyes open to find myself in a dark-paneled, Gothic dorm room drowning in musty light I heard the words that saved me: “This life doesn’t belong to you,” wafted into the delicate spirals of my ears by the wings of a butterfly who had slipped through the heating ducts, radiant with the promise of secrets revealed if I was brave enough to follow it.
I closed my eyes once, then again, to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, but it was there every time I opened them, my eyelids fluttering like its jewel-toned wings, kaleidoscopic with color that lured me away with the ultimate fool’s gold—the promise that I could really be rescued.

Of course at the time I didn’t really realize this. I just wanted to escape somewhere besides sleep. I managed to get out of bed to go home for Christmas break, but when it was time to go back to classes I got on a Greyhound instead and rode it all the way to Key West, where I started my new classes in debauchery and bacchanalia, sometimes drunk enough to try to excuse my behavior by declaring I was a devotee to Dionysus to people who saw triple on a regular basis.

When summer rolled around I headed back North, to Block Island, this tiny seven mile island off the coast of Rhode Island that most Rhode Islanders hadn’t even been to. It was also full of professional drinkers, though they were less sybaritic than their Key West counterparts since this was New England we’re talking about, but I didn’t mind because the money was good, the beaches glorious, and nobody judged me for not doing something with my life because none of them were either. Well, some of the people we served did, but we just made fun of them for selling their souls for money when we, who cleaned their houses and bussed their tables littered with lobster shells, were free, our souls untainted by corruption, though we started the day with a Bloody Mary so our hands wouldn’t shake in front of the customers.

Back and forth I went, year after year, listening to my parents say “you’re not getting any younger, you know,” but I didn’t believe them because I knew exactly when it was time to go. I left when the butterflies came.

They arrived on the first cool breeze from the north that drifted toward the island from Canada sometime around the end of September when the goldenrod was in full bloom. If you stood at the edge of the clay bluffs on the south side of the island and looked out over the open ocean toward Portugal you might be the first to see one. After that, you couldn’t miss them. They were everywhere—drafting on the breeze kicked up by the ferry, fluttering around the heads of the last holdouts drinking frozen drinks on porch bars; clinging to screen doors and windshield wipers; and of course, they had all the flowers covered, especially the goldenrod, which if you looked closely was where they slept, napping on the stems in the sunlight, wings tucked close to camouflage their flame color.

Monarch butterflies--flocks of them drifting on the arctic air to a legendary pine forest high in the mountains of Mexico. Well, a legend to me at least. One of these days I was going to make it there myself.

It was my favorite time of the year—that time between staying and going. That time was like the moment before you catch what you know is going to be a wave that will bring you all the way to shore. You see it out beyond a couple of waves you know could give you a decent ride and wait, turning into it and paddling head down in complete trust that it will take you. When it comes, you know it’s what you’ve been waiting for your whole life. You hear a voice that says, “Look up! Look up!” and you are no longer lonely, for there right next to you is one unbelievably, delicate butterfly, catching the wave on gilded wings that flash against the sea spume.

Some of them do drown. The wrack is littered with their waterlogged bodies, tangled up in dried rockweed, picked over by seagulls, jumping with sand fleas.

I tried not to think about that sight, but that night, after Zoe and Cally left, I couldn’t get the image of all those crumpled antennae and waterlogged wings out of my mind.

I hadn’t told them, but as well as being the anniversary of the Moonwalk, it was also exactly one year ago tonight that I quit drinking, except for that one little slip up with the bartender and his worm, which I couldn’t forget, try as I might. My palms were still scarred from the broken glass I’d gripped when the mirror had cracked underneath my fingers.

Getting “sober” they called it. I should have been at an AA receiving my one year
chip, but I’d dropped out after six months. I just couldn’t say “Hi, I’m Minerva and I’m an alcoholic,” without feeling like a liar. I’ll admit, I was a drunk, but I had too much faith in the power of words to keep labeling myself something I didn’t want to be for the rest of my life. Besides, I hadn’t been tempted at all by that shot of zambucca Zoe had wanted to buy me.

It was going to be a long rest of the night, I was thinking, when out of the blue the phone rang. It was my mother, calling to see if I was all right, which she never did, especially at two in the morning. Usually we just chatted about whatever had gone on at our respective jobs or what our friends were doing at our scheduled time every other week, so I was surprised she would ask me a direct question about my life.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked again before hanging up.

“I’m fine, Mom. Really. I just can’t sleep.”

“Must be genetic. I can’t either. It gets worse when you get older.”

“Doesn’t everything?”

After we hung up I was left with the ceiling fan and the refrigerator who didn’t seem possessed by magical bees or demons or whatever I’d convinced myself was out to get me. They were just regular electrical appliances draining the life out of the planet.

Did you know there’s no sound on the moon? It’s a vacuum. No sound, no wind, no erosion. Ghosts could speak and throw bricks around and you wouldn’t even know they were there unless you saw where they landed. They could terrify people by howling like banshees, warning them of their impending deaths.

The astronauts said they found no signs of life when they’d landed there forty years ago, but they could have been lying. They could have fallen under its spell. Or it could mean they just couldn’t see the life that was there because there senses were too dull. I know this is sounding pretty out there for a self-proclaimed, jaded cynic, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something just beyond the edge of my eyes the astronauts had missed, something silent that was trying to speak but couldn’t because it was trapped in a vacuum. Something that was trying to suck me into its hungry mouth, growing fat on my suppressed sadness, while I grew brittle and sharp as a sickle.

I walked over to the stack of milk crates where I kept my record collection to see if there was anything that would snap me out of this mood. I must really be freaking people out if my mom is calling me in the middle of the night. Zoe’s whole Sylvia Plath thing had me kind of freaked out about myself.

When I was a kid I loved collecting things—shells, stamps, feathers, stones. I threw them all away the summer I was sixteen, except the stamps which I stuck on postcards and envelopes for the next ten years in odd combinations that must have either puzzled or delighted whoever received them. I didn’t know. I sent them to people I found in the phone book. I felt kind of bad when I thought about them now. I hoped the shells, with the sound of the sea inside them, were still sighing wherever they’d ended up, that the stones hadn’t been crushed into gravel, and that the feathers had managed to drift out of the landfill and fly back to the clouds. Part of the reason behind my new collection was to make up for what I’d done to the first. I figured if I forced myself to collect what I was most scared of those things I’d thrown away might find a little rest and leave me alone.

I was hoping that listening to songs about my greatest fear would help me exorcise it, or at least understand the hold it had on me. I was also convinced this could only happen if I heard the songs on vinyl. There was something about the scratch of the needle when I dropped it in its groove, something about that moment before the song started where I came so close to understanding my fear I could feel it shiver through my bones that could never be replaced by a cold, slick laser that was also used to slice into eyes and other delicate organs.

It was a decent way to pass the night. I might even have done it now and then if I was normal and not an insomniac who had to find ways to pass the time besides agonizing about her own personal apocalypse and the state of the world. I learned so much about the moon from those records you might have said I was an expert on her moods. Sometimes she was benevolent like Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” sometimes cruel like “The Killing Moon” of Echo & The Bunnymen. I learned about moon shadows from Cat Stevens and how to moondance from Van Morrison, and how to walk on the moon from The Police. I learned what a little moonlight can do from Billie Holiday and how moonlight in Vermont looked shining on the sycamores, and how sad it was when your love proved untrue and left you blue under a blue moon of Kentucky.
I saw you standing alone there under a blue moon, too. You were even sadder than me, though not as frightened of being alone; though Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was the saddest of all, drowning in that melancholy moonriver.

When I got to this song I always broke down, feeling the weight of my unlived life—you’re off to see the world, there’s such a lot of world to see, Holly strummed on her guitar on the fire escape, still fooling us she believed she could have it all. But we knew. We knew there was a Bad Moon Rising and we’d never see her again. Not unless we surrendered to The Dark Side of the Moon. I still had a couple I hadn’t even played yet. “Sister Moon” by Sting and REM’s “Man on the Moon,” but I was done fooling myself and there was no one to convince otherwise. I couldn’t even make it back to the sofa. I lay down on the hard, painted floor. A weight settled on my chest, pressing all the air from my lungs. My ribs cracked, bells splintered the humid night, ice-cold. My blood would stop flowing soon.

The lunatic is on the grass. The lunatic is on the grass. Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs. Got to keep the loonies on the path. The lunatic is in the hall. The lunatics are in my hall. The paper holds their folded faces to the floor And every day the paper boy brings more. And if the dam breaks open many years too soon And if there is no room upon the hill And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too I'll see you on the dark side of the moon. The lunatic is in my head. The lunatic is in my head You raise the blade, you make the change You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane. You lock the door And throw away the key There's someone in my head but it's not me. And if the cloud bursts, thunder in your ear You shout and no one seems to hear. And if the band you're in starts playing different tunes I'll see you on the dark side of the moon.

You know what seemed really strange to me now, but which seemed normal when it was happening, was that I knew who Michael Jackson was talking about without him actually saying the name out loud. When he asked me if I knew who he was, he wasn’t asking me if I knew who Michael Jackson was. And when he asked me to save him he wasn’t pleading with me to save him from the overdose that had killed him, like maybe a ghost would have. I knew who he was talking about because I’d been waiting for him for forty years to finally catch up with me.
The Man in the Moon. The thunder in my ear. The someone in my head that wasn’t me.

He’d let me off the hook that first time--why, I didn’t know. He could have crept back in through the slats of the shades when my mom finally pulled me from her breast and left me squirming in my cradle. Now I saw I’d been spared for a reason. Now it was time for me to pay back the boon granted me forty years ago. The only thing I couldn’t remember was what would happen if I didn’t, but I had a feeling I didn’t want to find out.

Moonwalker, Chap. 7 (a short one)

2009-10-30T13:39:00.002-04:00

“Sooooo,” Zoe and Cally said as one.

We were back in my apartment in Fox Point. I was stretched out on my beloved sofa, they were snuggled together in the love seat my mother had given me, probably in the hopes I’d finally settle down and “find somebody” now that I had actually signed a lease.

I didn’t answer. It was so quiet in the apartment the hum of the refrigerator sounded like a freight train and the ceiling fan like a hive of swarming bees. These weren’t very interesting metaphors, but I was tired and past the point of trying to come up with something clever or useful. I was too shocked at what had just happened, although I think I’d blathered on about what had happened in the Accord on the way home, so by now they must both think I was a lunatic, which would be quite an accomplishment considering their standards.

“So?” Zoe finally asked again in one syllable, letting me know she was really worried.

“Minnie?” I knew she was sincere since she didn’t call me Minerva. “What’s with all the owls around here?”

“Non-sequitur. Stick to the point,” Cally reprimanded her.

“Like you ever do, Miss Mad Scientist. No, I’m really curious. How can you stand being around something you’ve told me you don’t like? Why don’t you just get rid of them?”

“It was my mom’s idea. House-warming party. My head is killing me. Did I do something I’m going to regret?

“You don’t remember?” Zoe said with a little too much eagerness in her voice.

“Remember what?”

“Falling into the moon like William Blake,” Cally informed me. “Or at least that’s what you said when you came to. It just looked like you passed out in the confetti to me.”

“Falling into the moon…” I remembered. I was just hoping they’d forgotten. “What else do you want to know about me and my owls?” I asked, hoping to lead them away from the gathering evidence of my insanity. “The housewarming party was really for my mom. She was so excited I finally got my own apartment she convinced me to have one. It was supposed to be kind of like a wedding shower where you get everything you’ll need for the rest of your life, only all of her friends couldn’t figure out what I needed. I think they’d all grown so used to thinking me of as impractical they couldn’t imagine I’d need a blender and a toaster. I ended up with a bunch of figurines.”

“Well here’s a potholder at least,” Cally said, holding up one my mom’s friend Mrs. Finkelstein crocheted herself.

Cally was really pretty, I thought, watching her put my dishes away from across the room. She’d make a good wife. Except she was a physicist. She knew way more than me about the nature of the universe. I’d have to ask her some questions when I woke up from this dream. Zoe was sleeping with a genius. I wondered if they were better or worse in bed than the dodos I’d been in love with.

She and Zoe always debated which last name they were going to take when they got married. Zoe wanted it to be hers because then Cally would have to go by Cally McCallister, which she thought was really funny. I know McCallister is a strange name for a Chinese family, but they’d adopted it when they moved to the States. It had been the name of their foster family assigned to them by the Catholic Church. To this day, St. Patrick’s Day was Zoe’s favorite holiday, she insisted. “Chinese New Year’s too loud. The fireworks burst my eardrums once.” Cally didn’t think it sounded very professional. “What happens when I win the Nobel Prize? It’s going to sound so ridiculous everyone will think it’s a joke and I’ll show up at the awards ceremony and they won’t let me in because nobody named Cally McCallister could possibly be a genius.”

“Well our other choice isn’t so great either,” Zoe sighed.

“You mean you don’t like Weiner?”

“We’re lesbians! We can’t be named after the tool of the oppressor!”

“But you like dildos.”

“That’s because they’re not attached to a male body.”

“Marriage is so bourgeois,” I sneered from the luxury of my couch.

“You must be feeling better,” Cally joked.

“Except for the bruises on my throat,” I said, touching the hollow where Michael’s fingers had choked me.

“Bruises? Let me see. You didn’t tell the cop that. Zoe, come look at this. She’s not making it up. Those are finger marks on her throat. Unbelievable.”

“So you didn’t believe me?”

“Well, Zoe told me you’ve been kind of depressed lately.”

“So I staged my own abduction and passed out in Kennedy Plaza in the confetti snowdrifts? You’ve got a high opinion of me. I didn’t know.”

“Sometimes depressed people act out. You know, do things to get attention.”

“Funny, I thought we just lay around on our couches.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You ever been to Madagascar, Cally?”

“What does that have to do with all of this?”

“That’s where the dodo bird was from.”

“Aren’t those the birds that were so tame they walked right up to the sailors who beat them over the heads with clubs?” said Zoe. Sometimes she surprised me.

“Tame or stupid?” I asked them both.

“What do you think?” They sort of answered.

“All I’m gonna say, is the dodo is extinct.” I walked them to the door and we hugged—a group hug, all three of us shoulder to shoulder, foreheads touching. They didn’t ruin it by saying “This is how the Maori kiss.”

Zoe turned back halfway down the stairs. I was still standing there, behind the closed door, but I didn’t answer when she asked, “How are you going to do it?” I wanted to tell her about the blue butterfly I’d seen traveling across the moon when I’d looked up and met his hollow, drugged-out eyes, but I knew if I did she might get sucked in too. All I had to do was follow it. I didn’t want her to follow me. It would be extinct soon.

“It was forty years ago today,” Michael Jackson’s falsetto blew through my burned out skull. “Forty years ago they first walked on the moon.” They were gone. Once again, I was talking to myself.

Forty years ago today, probably right about now, my mother was running down the hall toward me, her breasts leaking a trail of milk across my universe I was still following.

I fell asleep crying, wondering where the tin soldier wearing one sequined glove had ridden off to, where I would ever find enough flowers to satisfy the butterflies now that they were all gone.

Moonwalker, Chapter 6

2009-10-29T16:00:00.002-04:00

Waterfire is supposed to be a spectacle in the grand sense of the word, Providence’s own version of Carnevale in Venice, when masked revelers roamed the streets in thrall to the Lord of Misrule who encouraged them to trade their morals for licentious encounters in torch-lit, slippery alleys lining the murky canals. It didn’t quite translate. Even though Providence was a mob city, it was still New England. Not even the goombahs who supposedly kissed the “Pope’s” ring in secret, back-room ceremonies on The Hill (that’s Federal Hill, the epicenter of Italian epicurean delight which welcomed visitors with a neon golden pineapple at the beginning of Atwell’s Avenue), could maintain the illusion for too long. Eventually it became obvious that the mysterious masked courtesans were really strippers at The Foxy Lady pulling in a little cash before their next shift at the “Legs and Eggs” brunch. A couple of guys I’d known from my past life as a barfly clued me in, only because I promised not to tell anyone about what went on in the back of that limo they shared with a prominent city official who shall remain unnamed. I may scoff at the urban legends of what went on in those backrooms on Federal Hill, but even I had a healthy respect for the Pope.

Everybody at Chaos was always going on about how “magical” it was, but I knew it wasn’t really magic. The fires were gas and came out of metal burners that ran through the river like a giant stove.

Supposedly there were musicians and acrobats and all sorts of performers to entertain the masses, but I didn’t really know since I’d never gone, which means I just made all of the above up. I have a fertile imagination, don’t I? Zoe tells me I’m not a liar, I just spend too much time alone. “You have a special gift for storytelling.”

As I’ve mentioned a bunch of times already, I rarely venture out of my apartment once the sun’s gone down. I guess that would make me the opposite of a vampire, except I don’t sleep all night in a coffin. I lie awake on my sofa wondering if the bunny in the moon is going to nibble off my ears and toes.

The whole thing was the brainchild of the city’s disgraced mayor Buddy Cianci, who’d gone to jail twice (so far.) The first time for paying someone to burn the man who’d cuckolded him (isn’t that the greatest word?), as in put the horns on (where did that come from?) with cigarettes, the second for some kind of racketeering, which was pretty crazy because everybody knew that it was pretty much socially acceptable in Rhode Island to be financially corrupt.

Anyway, the city loved Buddy and Buddy loved the city so he came up with ideas like converting the old, abandoned mills from when the textile industry had been huge here into lofts for artists so the RISD students would stick around after graduation and make Providence into an “arts destination,” which had kind of worked. Zoe was here, and there were lots of students who stayed now instead of moving to poseur-filled, expensive New York City, although I had the sneaking suspicion that the reason was because they couldn’t make it there. You know how that song goes so I won’t inflict the grotesqueness of Frank Sinatra on you. Talk about the male gaze. The Rat Pack blows.

“I’d rather stay here where I can be the only one with Japanese kites painted all over my Accord.” Zoe had decided to turn her car into a moveable art project.

There were also lots of punks and anarchists burrowed into warehouses all over the city. They came and dumpster-dived behind the coffeehouse. I liked them and decided I wanted to be just like them when I grew up. My parents were going to be thrilled.

As I was saying, Buddy loved a good party. They say he didn’t stay home one night the entire time he was mayor. If he wasn’t invited to a party, he made one happen, and Waterfire was the crowning jewel on his tiramisu.

I’ll admit, it was better than something really lame like the Superbowl. I was glad Buddy hadn’t pushed for a major sports franchise in the city. Providence didn’t even have one team of its own. The closest thing we had was the Pawsox, the farm team for the Boston Red Sox in Pawtucket, the next dump over. And to give him credit--it wasn’t so easy to set the river on fire since almost everybody had forgotten about it in the first place.

Some progressive soul had gotten the idea at some point in the recent past before people cared about view sheds and quality of life, let alone the health of our planet’s water, to pave it over. Actually, I think it was when they built I-95 right through the city, forever destroying the downtown skyline and dooming its citizens to face a fire-breathing dragon who choked their dreams with exhaust fumes.

Buddy ripped the pavement off and freed the river. Too bad the “Free Buddy” campaign to have him released from jail early didn’t work, too. He served out his jail time in New Jersey somewhere, but was back now hosting a radio talk show. The Free Buddy t-shirts were collectors’ items with both hipsters and regular folks. I even had one myself.

There were also lots of Portuguese in Providence. I guess I should be embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t really tell the difference between Portuguese and Italians, but that’s what happens when you grow up in Connecticut. Supposedly my neighborhood Fox Point was settled by Portuguese and Cape Verdean fishermen, but I hadn’t seen anyone but a couple of forlorn looking Hmong wandering down toward Narragansett Bay with fishing poles, carrying a bucket between them. Now, they were easy to identify since they were Asian.

I knew they were Hmong because this crazy guy who sleeps on the street told me, but I’ll get to him a little bit later. I still have no clue what a Cape Verdean looks like. If it wasn’t for him I’d probably think they were Thai because there were a couple of really good Thai restaurants in the city I loved to go to for a cheap lunch.

Despite my best intentions, I’ll have to admit that my first reaction to the whole scene when Zoe and I finally found a parking space and joined the throngs on the sidewalk was that it was kind of romantic.

Well-groomed couples strolled with their arms around each others’ waists, some trailing delighted children behind them slurping Del’s Lemonade, the Rhode Island version of a smoothie that rotted your teeth and gave you brain freeze, but you didn’t care because it tasted so good. Clam cakes were like that, too. They sunk in your gut like lead tied to a fishing pole, but you didn’t care because you knew all the grease they were fried in would give you the runs.

Girls with big hair and high heels from Warwick who clearly hadn’t realized the 80s went out of style, well--in the 80s, promenaded to impress the boys with gel-slicked hair and collared shirts, no sneakers. That was the dress code in the hottest club downtown where they had go-go girls dancing in stage in giant birdcages. At least that’s what Zoe had told me. “I went down and filmed them one night with my friend for an installation he was working on. They did it for free. They all said they loved the gold body paint. ‘Gilded Cage,’ was the name of the installation.”

“How original.”

“He got an A. The professor loved it.

“Man?"

“Yup. Talk about the male gaze, right?”

As we strolled down the sidewalk I wondered if everyone thought we were lesbians. I kind of hoped so, as long as we didn’t get harassed or beat up or that some friend of my parents would see me and phone my mother, who was convinced I was one anyway. Just last week she’d asked me again if I had something to tell her, and I knew she wasn’t asking if I was pregnant, which was the big worry way back in high school. Now that it looked like she’d never get grandchildren out of me, I bet she wished I had gotten knocked up in 11th grade.

“Want a coffee milk?” I asked my adorable date. I needed a distraction from mulling over my failed life and coffee milk was one of my favorites. I shepherded Zoe into the corner diner we were just passing, famous for its Rhode Island culinary delicacies.

Coffee milk, also known as a cabinet, was something you either loved like mother’s milk or loathed. I have no idea why it’s also known as a cabinet, so don’t ask me. Sometimes it’s best just to surrender to the mystery, also applicable to clam cakes. It was best not to wonder just where the clams were in all that dough, especially best not to contemplate when they’d last changed the fryalator grease.

Whenever I drank that first sickly sweet sip I felt complete. After that I felt sick and usually threw the rest away, trying not to think about what my mother would say. She was a big one for making sure I finished everything on my plate. Not because it was a waste, but because it was good discipline, a remnant of her time in the army. After awhile, punishment and reward felt the same, which meant I had some pretty major food issues as well as being an alcoholic. See, I said it. Just don’t tell the doomsayers at AA. “Once an addict, always an addict,” was not going to apply to me. Future tense noted.

“Yuck,” was her gracious answer. “I can’t believe you drink that swill. It probably has high fructose corn syrup in it.” Zoe was a coffee snob and health freak, which kind of seemed like an oxymoron to me. I guess, working in a coffee shop, I was supposed to be one too, but there were some things in life I couldn’t give up or get over, whatever the case may be.

“Wouldn’t you rather stop somewhere with a little atmosphere and have an espresso with a shot of zambucca?”

“I don’t drink. Remember?”

“Oh--right.” She got that worried look on her face that said I forget sometimes how crazy you are. I knew she was thinking about that one time I had got drunk with her. I’d never told her what happened when I’d told her to go. I would make my own way home. “Well, you could just have the espresso and we could pretend we’re in Italy.”

I had to admit, if you squinted, or didn’t wear your glasses if you wore them in the first place, that the river at that moment did look a little like a Venetian canal. There were even gondolas plying its glowing surface, ferrying “lovers” up and down. I think some of them might have been actors, but some might have been real people out on a first date or having a special anniversary. There was even an old couple who looked especially romantic. They must have been actors, because nobody that had been married that long could possibly sit through a boat ride down the whole river without getting in a fight. The wife obligingly proved us right by whacking her mate over the head with her fan. “Hands off!” she shrieked.

“She’s only a bird in a gilded cage,” Zoe sang. Sometimes her whole “life is a cabaret” routine was pretty amusing.

For a moment I wished I had someone to go for a boat ride with besides Zoe, who wasn’t even single. Her girlfriend Cally was supposed to meet us at the Moonwalk exhibition. She was some kind of grad student at Brown. I wasn’t sure what she studied because I felt so pathetic listening to her career plans that I never asked, or just tuned her out whenever she started talking about whatever she studied, or developed, or whatever fabulous thing she was doing to make the world a better place for all humanity, which wasn’t to say I didn’t like her. As one of my two friends, I thought she was great.

“We are the World. We are the children,” hummed Zoe. “Hey, remember when his hair caught fire?”

“Who?”

“Michael Jackson! I mean honestly, Minerva.”

“Minnie.”

“I’ll only call you that if you trade clothes with me.”

“Not happening.”

“I wouldn’t want to walk around in that uniform you wear anyway.”

She was right. I kind of did wear the same thing everyday, depending on the season. Right now in summer it was a black tank top and dark gray “yogini” pants with a pair of Reefs. I may have moved to the city, but I still couldn’t give up the flip-flops I’d worn for the past twenty years on the beach, and I doubted if any real yoginis wore sustainable fiber drawstring capri-length pants, I think they practiced in saris, which I wanted to tell the pushy clerk in pursuit of a commission, but sometimes even I got tired of questioning every little thing. I justified the seventy-five bucks I’d shelled out for them by wearing them everyday, but I didn’t namaste her back on my way out. She came in the coffeehouse. She was a bad tipper.

“And we really should do something about your hair, too--maybe some layers or something.”

All of a sudden my long, black, one-length hair I’d flipped and let fall over my eyes, that boys had gripped and sniffed and run their fingers through, felt like the heaviest burden in the world. I must look like a crow, or maybe even worse, a vulture. No wonder I couldn’t get a date, although the idea of dating horrified me. I’d always been the kind to fall in love at first sight and move in with the guy the next day.

“Hey! Watch out!” Zoe exclaimed, grabbing me by the elbow and pulling me off the curb into the street. “What a jackass! He almost set your hair on fire!”

I had been trying to get a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the windows of the bar we’d been strolling past to see if I really did look as bad as I felt and had almost stumbled right into a fire dancer.

“It’s not his fault,” I said, stepping back up onto the sidewalk.

“Yeah, it was. He came right at you. It looked like on purpose to me.” Both of us walked to the corner and looked in both directions, but the fire dancer was gone.

“You almost caught on fire, just like M.J.!” Now that I actually hadn’t gone up in flames, Zoe couldn’t have sounded more delighted at what had almost happened.

“When did that happen again?”

“Back in the 80s. You don’t remember? You were in your prime then, girl.”

“I beg your pardon.” I said. Not that I didn’t think she was right. Well, maybe 1991 was the year I peaked.

“Do I remind you of a crow? I had to ask.

“Where did that come from? I thought you were into owls?”

“How many times do I have to tell you I can’t stand them?”

“Not enough, I guess. I’ll have to return the salt & pepper shakers I got you for your birthday.”

“My birthday’s not until December.”

“I like to plan ahead.”

“Yeah, right. Me too. And someday we’ll both have 401ks and health insurance.” We both laughed at that and kept on walking with the crowd down toward Kennedy Plaza where the Moonwalkers were supposed to converge for the big dance-athon.

“Ok, so I know I was the one who was in my prime in the 80s, but could you fill me in on this whole Michael Jackson thing?”

“I can’t believe you weren’t into Michael. Didn’t you even like The Jackson Five? Remember “ABC, Easy as 1,2,3?” How could any kid resist. We used to dance to it in gym class to help us learn our alphabet.”

“You went to a city school. In the suburbs we did the Hustle. There weren’t a whole lot of words. Anyway, I was more into The Partridge Family. I wanted to be a hippie. I refused to feather my hair like Farrah Fawcett and everybody made fun of me.”

“Wow, she’s dead, too, sounds like we’ve got some synchronicity flowing here.”

“Dream on. It’s all coincidence. Nothing means anything. And I promise I’ll cut my hair but you have to come to the salon with me and make sure I don’t end up with bangs above my eyebrows. None of that hipster shit for me.”

“Oh, yeah—so Michael was filming this commercial for Pepsi. It was the first time a celebrity endorsed a product like that on TV,” she continued like a newscaster back from a commercial break, “when his hair just exploded in flames. He was so into his dancing that he didn’t even notice until some other dancers or crewmembers, I don’t know, came running and started beating it out.”

“Is that where he came up with the idea for ‘Beat It’?”

“Omigod. That is so sick, besides being totally ignorant. Michael didn’t become The King of Pop until after Thriller and everybody knows “Beat It” is on Thriller. You really don’t know anything, do you!

“I know you secretly suspect me of not missing an episode of Entertaiment Tonight for the past twenty years, but I’ve actually been really busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Reading People Magazine.”

“That’s awesome.”

“So you believe me when I say I don’t have a clue about Michael Jackson?”

“No, but that’s ok because I like telling this story.”

“How many times have you told it this week?”

“Well Cally’s getting a little sick of it, so I guess that would probably mean about thirty.”

“She must have a high tolerance for pain.”

“You don’t even know.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Are you sure about that?” She and Cally were convinced all my troubles would fade away if I would only become a lesbian. They liked to freak me out with tales of lesbian escapades like fisting. They were probably right. It must be nice not to have to worry that some guy wasn’t going to tell you the reason he couldn’t keep it up was because your pussy was too loose. Sorry, sometimes I just couldn’t help the flashbacks from my life in a bottle.

“Well, a long time ago this beautiful black boy was born who could sing like an angel. He was proud of his heritage and grew his hair into an afro. His name was Michael Jackson and the world loved him so much they would do whatever he wanted, so these evil corporate demons who wanted to rule the world paid him a lot of money so he could build a place called Neverland where he could live and never grow up if he would dance and sing like Mr. Bojangles and convince the world that they didn’t really like Coke better, they liked Pepsi!”

“Amazing,” was all I could say. She was really getting into it now. She’d stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and people had to step around us. “Keep going.”

“Well he secretly blamed his afro for catching fire and burning his scalp and causing him so much pain. If it had been shorter and silkier instead of as wiry as a brillo pad that could scrape catfish skin of a grill maybe it wouldn’t have burned so crazy and he might have noticed it sooner before he had to get beaten on the head by a bunch of backup dancers. As he lay in the hospital drugged on painkillers, he decided he didn’t want to be black anymore so he started wearing silky wigs and weaves, he bleached his skin ever whiter year after year, and had cosmetic surgery on his nose and lips so he could look just like his soulmate Diana Ross.”

“I thought Elizabeth Taylor was his soulmate.”

“Aha! I knew you really did read People!”

“Well, maybe I’ve glanced at it a few times. Was it Elizabeth Taylor or not?”

“No, everybody thinks that but it was really that chimpanzee that he brought to the Academy Awards. What was its name?”

“Bubbles.”

“No comment. Or maybe Emmanuelle Lewis. That little guy who used to sit on Michael’s lap when he was like fourteen.”

“You mean Webster?”

“We’re gonna get in trouble!” Zoe laughed. “I think we better stop going there before someone overhears us and beats us down. Come on. I want to see the Moonwalkers. I bet they started already.”

I linked my arm in hers and we flowed back into the crowd flooding into Kennedy Plaza.

“You know, nothing’s ever hopeless,” Zoe mused as we strolled along. “As long as our imaginations are free we can create whatever we want. I think that’s what Michael was always trying to say.”

“He was?” Maybe I should have paid more attention to him. I’d kind of tuned out after “Beat It” and the misogynistic “Billie Jean,” but come to think of it, Paul McCartney had been friends with him and I loved The Beatles. They’d done that song together—“Ebony and Ivory.” Oh wait--that was Steview Wonder. Screw that theory. Anyway, I liked that song. I wanted to live in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano keyboard. Who didn’t, besides skinheads and Republicans. Oh Lord, why can’t we? I thought, suddenly looking forward to seeing the Moonwalkers. Maybe there was some magic afoot tonight.

Well, Zoe and I were feeling it at least, arm in arm as we walked down the first level of stairs into the plaza. Even though we were there to celebrate a dead guy, the mood of the crowd was upbeat. Cally stepped out of the ring of people and skipped over to us. She may have been a grad student at Brown, but not even she could resist being twee. She was tall and blonde, but somehow it worked for her, too. Both my new friends knew that being cute would get them much farther in life than being gloomy like me.

“Look at all The Michaels!” Callie crowed in delight. How come when she crowed it sounded cute instead of the croak that came out of me?

She and Zoe were always so happy to see each other, even when they’d only been apart a few hours. They had this annoyingly endearing habit of standing forehead to forehead and rubbing noses. “This is how the Maori kiss!” They’d say in unison. People just melted when they saw them, even homophobic ones I bet. They were very non-threatening lesbians. Of course, if I crossed over to their side I would end up with a bull-leather-dyke as a girlfriend who would terrify everyone so even less people would talk to me. I’m not even going to go into the boys that I’ve dated over the years. Notice, though I’m 40, I don’t say men, because I’m pretty sure I’ve never dated anyone in that category.

“Come on. They’re just about to start.”

Zoe and Cally and all their cuteness weaseled a way right up to the front of the crowd. I tried to follow, but ended up stuck in the middle where I couldn’t see anything. Annoyed with myself, I decided to assert my right to see the Moonwalk and began to elbow my way toward the front.

“Excuse me,” I pushed, glaring at anyone who tried to protest. “Hey, Lady!” said one guy with a trophy girlfriend dangling off his arm.

“Hey what?” I challenged him back like I was saying something really threatening. To my surprise he let me pass. It hurt when he called me lady, but I told myself the sting was going to be worth it when I got to the front and had the best view in the crowd when he couldn’t even see past his girlfriend’s fake boobs. I don’t know why women wear high heels. They’re ruined your feet and you end up towering over your shrimp of a boyfriend. Then again, maybe I should reconsider, but if my feet were ruined, I wouldn’t be able to run away.

I’ll have to admit, like those few moments when I’d watched the gondoliers on the river and thought I was in Venice, that the whole scene we’d just entered was a little wondrous. There were big white globes on all the street lights with cutouts of the moon’s face and they’d passed out sparkly silver confetti that everyone was tossing in the air. There was so much it looked like it was snowing and already the ground was covered in swirls of silver. Some kids and even a few grown-ups had lain down and were making snow angels.

In the center of the circle we’d formed, were all varieties of Michael Jacksons. Male, female, short, tall, young, old. A guy in a wheelchair. A fat lady with an afro. Hipsters in leisure suits from Savers who knew that Off The Wall was by far the best of his records. Little kid Michaels (black and white, another good M.J. tune), even a girl dressed up like The Scarecrow from The Wiz. Her boyfriend was Diana Ross as Dorothy. She even had a fluffy little dog under her arm playing the part of Toto. I laughed when I recognized one of my customers from Chaos under a wig, face painted kabuki-white, eyes lined in black, lips in scarlet, with that five-o’clock shadow Michael sometimes had that was so confusing. He was wearing one of those military jackets with the gold epaulets Michael wore at his peak, and of course the one glove. Lots of people with one glove. I kind of wished I had one. Of course, being America, there was a guy selling them, but I wasn’t going to spend my hard earned money on something as frivolous as sequins, even if I was feeling a little dizzy with delight.

As I watched them all start to dance--some of them pretty decent, most of them not-- it came over me, remembering those videos in high school—yes, despite what I told Zoe, I did watch MTV— Michael Jackson could really groove. I mean, he was an amazing dancer, almost right up there with Fred Astaire, though I don’t think Michael could dance on the ceiling like Fred in “Royal Wedding.” Neither could Lionel Richie, who was the favorite entertainer of that high school boyfriend I mentioned earlier who got me to do whatever he wanted by bribing me with fuzzy navels. Not to say that I could dance on the ceiling, but I did hang from a fan the night he serenaded me with “Stuck on You.” He wanted to see just how stuck he could get to a certain part of my anatomy. It might have worked better if he hadn’t been standing on a waterbed that remarkably didn’t pop when we both went flying. Besides, videos were all special effects. Fred had real magic, we had bong hits, booze, and sometimes cocaine we snorted from mirrors in the locked room at parties which nobody mentioned, but everyone wanted to get into.

It was almost like Michael wasn’t really here on earth--like he was just floating over the surface--and I saw suddenly, that that was what the Moonwalk was all about. He was showing us his soul when he did that dance, just a few backwards sliding steps that showed the world that even though he was stuck in a body like us, he could escape whenever he wanted.

Well, maybe not quite. Or maybe he just forgot when he left the stage.

He wouldn’t have needed all those painkillers if he’d remembered. I thought about that zambucca with espresso Zoe wanted me to drink with her earlier and wondered if it would have kept me up all night or put me to sleep, if it really would have been Ok to have just one shot.
I also saw, watching the little kids dance around, that there was no way he was a child molester. Peter Pan would never have allowed that to happen in Neverland. He and Wendy would have vanquished any molesters before they messed with Tinkerbelle just like the way they threw Captain Hook to the crocodiles. It was ok not to want to grow up. The earth made no sense at all, while everything in Neverland did. In Neverland the butterflies had an infinite supply of flowers to eat and Peter and Wendy never looked at each other with the longing I had seen on my own face for so many years now I closed my eyes when I looked in the mirror. I was never going to fall in love again--at least until I learned how to Moonwalk and could truly escape.

As the crowd grooved along with the Moonwalkers, I found I couldn’t hold still myself. I actually forgot where I was for a few moments until I looked up and there was this guy trying to dance with me. He seemed really familiar, but I couldn’t place him. It was hard to get a look at his face because his hat was pulled down over his eyes. He’d cut out two holes for his eyes which sparked at me before shooting away across the plaza. Before I could figure out who he was he was gone and I was trying to scream, but nothing came out of my mouth but dried moth wing’s and moondust.

Someone was dragging me down the stone stairs that led toward the bus stop that took people to the airport. Elbows pinned to my back, wrists held in one hand, the other on the back of my neck. I stumbled, head down. “Minerva,” a voice said. My name fluttered in the air between us then dropped to the ground where it disintegrated.

“You know who I am, right?”

I nodded.

“You know it’s your job to save me?”

I nodded.

“You know what will happen if you don’t?”

I nodded.

“One small step for man, one giant step for mankind. They never think about who they’re stepping on, do they?”

And then I dropped, too. Falling into the mouth of the moon like William Blake.

BLAKE: Pray, Mr Taylor, did you ever find yourself, as it were, standing close beside
the vast and luminous moon?

TAYLOR: Not that I remember. Mr Blake: did you ever?

BLAKE: Yes, frequently; and I have felt an almost irresistible desire to throw myself
into it headlong.

TAYLOR: I think, Mr Blake, you had better not: for if you were to do so, you most
probably would never come out of it again.

When I woke up Zoe and Cally were explaining to the police that I hadn’t had anything to drink. “I did try to get her to have an espresso with zambucca, but she’s not a boozer.” Zoe was rambling on, charming the cop with the old-fashioned word for drunk, “All she wanted was coffee milk.”

“A cabinet,” Cally added as if to assure the officer of her credibility.

“Where did you say you work again?” the cop asked, checking their IDs. I couldn’t blame him because it seemed hard to believe one of them worked at Brown, though who knows what he made of Zoe. Most of the locals thought RISD students were rich, spoiled brats, but she was pretty hard to resist, especially when she talked in her squeaky voice. “Brown University, physics department,” Cally answered, which answered my question as to what she studied, which I remember thinking I needed to remember because I really liked her and it wasn’t pc to be jealous of intelligent blondes as I drifted back to sleep in the confetti that had now formed deep drifts in Kennedy Plaza.

“Well, you girls just take her home now and let her sleep it off,” the cop said, releasing us. I’m sure we were entertaining, but there must have been real criminals out there for him to catch, like the man who had almost scared me to death. The man who sat side by side at the piano keyboard with Paul McCartney, who must have been wearing a wig because his hair had burned, who lined his eyes and wore lipstick that highlighted his five-o’clock shadow. The man with epaulets on his shoulders, who had pinned my arms with one hand, demanding I save him with his other on my windpipe, crushing the air from my throat until I passed out. He left behind one sequin-studded glove to remind me: Don’t try to escape. I’ll be looking down.

Moonwalker, Chap. 5

2009-10-26T22:30:00.004-04:00

“Boy am I glad you answered, Minerva. I was just about to send the firemen over to break down the door of your apartment.”

“You could just climb up the fire escape and come in through the window.”

“I know, but I get nervous I’ll find you with your head in the oven like Sylvia Plath. You’ve been in such a bad mood, lately.”

“Wow. That’s either an over-exaggeration or an understatement. I guess I better start practicing mood control."

I just couldn’t get off the sofa. It was the first one I’d actually owned in my life and as I mentioned before, I was forty. I even slept on it because I didn’t have a bed yet, just a blow-up mattress on the floor in the “bedroom,” whose quotation marks reproached me every time I said the word. My life was pathetic, especially to a twenty-two year old who had her whole future before her. I wasn’t sure why Zoe wanted to hang out with me so much, especially since I hadn’t said yes once to one of her invitations. I just thought most art was either bullshit or disheartening and had enough of both in my life. I even told Zoe what I thought, but she was convinced she was going to convert me into a hipster.

“You just need to loosen up and stop taking everything so seriously,” she informed me.

“But that’s what all these so-called artists do!” I protested.

“See, you have more in common than you thought!”

“Minerva,” she declaimed in her most inspirational oratory tone, “Goddess of Wisdom, I summon you to my side tonight to walk through the sacred fire of Delphi where our futures shall be revealed!”

“I think you’re confusing me with the Pythia, Zoe,” I replied. “She’s a snake goddess. I’m the goddess of wisdom, not some crazy oracle. Owls, not snakes. Hoot, hoot.”

“Sssssorry,” she hissed back. “I just work in a coffee shop,” our favorite inside joke. It came in handy whenever a customer tried to cross the line and ask us what we were going to do when we graduated. When Zoe said it, it was still cute because she had just graduated, although her RISD degree in textiles hadn’t exactly attracted job recruiters to her door. Still, she was a pixie and people were willing to excuse her impertinence. I just got bad tips and indignant looks. It was impossible to be cute at forty, although Zoe assured me I was “ageless,” without saying what we both knew, ageless was another way of saying I could look any age at all. I’ll let you be the guess of which end of the spectrum I fall on.Whatever else could be said of me, I did not look ironic. More like tragic. I had black hair and skin that was so pale it didn’t tan, even though I’d spent my whole life so far in the sun without sunscreen. I was so pale people sometimes called me Snow White and hummed Someday My Prince Will Come when I got that glazed look on my face which made me seem like I wasn’t paying attention to what they were saying. (I wasn’t) Zoe and I were a regular Magic Kingdom because she looked a lot like Minnie Mouse. Of course she was going for the look, which clearly worked for her. Cute got you a lot farther in than life than tragic.

She wore short little skirts, hand-painted with polka dots and cat-eyed glasses, though she drew the line at ears, which were only for special occasions like sushi dinners and karaoke. Zoe was Chinese, but for some reason she wouldn’t explain, was obsessed with Japanese culture. “I keep telling my parents I must have had a past life as a samurai,” she confided in me the first time I met her, “but they insist I’m just trying to rebel. I tell them it’s about time somebody in our family did. They say quiet, you’ll kill your grandmother, but I figure if she survived Chairman Mao, she’ll survive me. Don’t you think so? I mean, she was a part of a real tragedy. What she went through puts Sylvia Plath’s misery to shame. Sylvia should have been embarrassed to kill herself. What’s a little psychological abuse? Nobody tried to actually kill her.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“Sorry.”

“I didn’t say that was a bad thing.”

I hadn’t felt tragic all these years, just slightly unglued. It was like gravity didn’t have the same affect on me that it had on the rest of humanity. I told myself I had gypsy blood, which was a great way to seduce guys to go upstairs with me and get it on in garishly lit bathrooms at parties of people I didn’t know. This pretty much guaranteed that nobody I seduced was going to stick around, which was fine with me. I preferred to travel alone, which meant I wasn’t a real gypsy because they never left the tribe and those shaggy ponies that pulled their carts from town to town. In my solitude, I was more like a pilgrim on a quest, although I had no idea what I was looking for because I had no destination.

What was tragic was the gander I got of myself in the polished chrome reflection of the espresso machine as I steamed and foamed milk for the unapologetically exuberant and youthful students who stumbled down Wickenden each morning before heading off to class. My face was no longer thin, it was gaunt, and worse than that, I had wrinkles. You can call them crow’s feet or smile lines, but after awhile it becomes undeniable: I was old. Fortunately Zoe took orders and rang people up most of the time, so our tips were still pretty good. Providence was a cheap city, but it was still hard to make a decent living getting people high on sugar and foam. I should have been a bartender, but that would have meant going out at night, which as I’d begun to mention, was a problem. Plus, I kind of had a “history” with alcohol I was trying to rewrite, so working in a bar didn’t seem like the greatest life plan at the moment.

“Well then—hoot!” Zoe laughed into the phone. “Don’t you at least want to know the future?”

“Not really.”

“Oh, come on!”

“When you get to be my age you’ll understand why it’s best not to know.”

“That’s your excuse for not having any fun!”

“You call milling around while a bunch of horny, sexist guidos check us out fun? I told you. I’m over being objectified by the male gaze. I just don’t want to deal with that shit anymore.”

“Are you sure you didn’t secretly go to college?” I had spent long hours explaining feminist literary theory to her. She found it hard to believe that I actually read Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan without being forced to.

“Remember, you went to art school. They’re not supposed to teach you anything useful. That’s what artists are for—to be useless.”

“Somebody’s gotta do it."

"Why’s that again? I can’t seem to remember anything these days. Must be because I don’t use my brain in any useful ways.”

“Yeah, deconstructing everything that comes out of my mouth definitely isn’t useful.”

“Especially since you don’t give a shit about the male gaze. I wish I’d been born a lesbian and never internalized these stupid cultural expectations in the first place. You’re lucky.”

“Shhhh, don’t say that out loud, my parents might hear you.”

“You still haven’t come out to them yet?”

“Nope. They think Cally is my ‘roommate.’”

“You’re going to have to tell them eventually. Do you really want to live with the pressure of them not knowing? What happens when you get married and have those raisinheads you’re always sentimentalizing?”

“Raisinheads?”

“Because they look so shriveled up and wrinkled when they come out.”

“You’re so cynical! Kids are cute!”

“You obviously didn’t baby sit much growing up. Once you change your first 100 diapers you’ll realize they’re nothing but little, squirming tubes of poop and puke. Are you just not going to invite them to the wedding?”

“Well, considering we still live in a barbaric society where gay marriage isn’t legal I don’t have to worry too much, do I?”

“Yeah, but that’s going to change soon.”

“May wonders never cease. Do I detect a note of optimism in your voice? This calls for a celebration. Waterfire here we come!”

Zoe may have joked, but her parents had scrimped and saved for years to send her to the college of her choice and were none too thrilled with her decision to be a textile designer. I knew the pressure to please them had to affect her because she kept giving them hope by telling them she was going to audition soon for Project Runway.

"They love Heidi Klum,” she told me. “She so tall,” my mother say, “So blonde. Why you not marry blonde American, Zongying?” Zongying was her real name, which, in that great American tradition, had been butchered by the Ellis Island of grade school. Zoe made fun of her mom, but Zongying was dutiful, calling three times a week at the assigned time after her mother’s mah jong tournament, before her father’s evening stroll around the block in the suburb of Detroit where they’d finally bought their dream house after years of living in an inner city apartment.

“One of these days I’ll do the right thing and make her proud of me,” I actually heard her say once beneath the sound of steaming milk. “I wonder why they left China in the first place? Life would have been so much easier. My sister never would have heard The White Stripes and shaved her head and bought me that first dildo. Did I ever tell you it was a rabbit? The ears rub on your clit while you fuck yourself with the body.”“Too much information, Zongying.”“Sorry. I forgot you’re still a virgin. If we’d stayed in China my sister and I could have saved our poverty-stricken parents by becoming Wal-Mart factory slaves because we wouldn’t have known any better. They couldn’t be disappointed in us then.”

“What’s your sister up to these days?"

"She’s a junkie in San Francisco.”

“Are you serious?”

“No,” she said, but I wasn’t sure if I believed her.“I wonder if they wish we’d never been born?” she continued. I thought of my own parents probably sitting down to eat dinner in front of Charlie Gibson right now. Once I’d left home they’d stopped eating at the table, which I didn’t miss at all the couple of times a year I visited them, except for Christmas, which was an ordeal I approached with the enthusiasm of a soldier being sent to the front lines. Christmas was a minefield where we all lost a limb every year. Sometimes an eye or an ear, too. It was a wonder we were still walking and talking, but maybe that’s how it goes if you just deny your wounds.

“Minnie, come out with me,” she pleaded. “It’s Waterfire tonight. The fires are really bright and sometimes people light sparklers, and there are even fire-eaters and hot guys spinning poi, not that I care cuz I’m a lesbian thank goddess, which is probably why I don’t care about the stupid male gaze you’re always blathering on about.”

“Not always!”

“Well, just sometimes, but you’re always staying in your apartment when you could be out having a good time meeting someone.”

“I don’t want to meet someone.”

“Whatever. Everybody wants to meet someone. I don’t care what you say. I’m making you get out of that apartment tonight. I mean there’s going to be a special demonstration of Moonwalkers in remembrance of Michael Jackson. How could you miss that? Don’t you want to see people walk on the moon?”

Like probably everyone else on the planet, I was aware that Michael Jackson had died a month ago. Even though I didn’t have a TV I still knew an amazing amount about pop culture from working at Chaos, where pop culture was ironic, therefore cool.

“I can’t stand Michael Jackson.”

“Oh, come on,” she pleaded. “How can you hate Michael?”

“You didn’t have to listen to him in the 80s. I mean “Beat It,” and that stupid “Thriller” video that was on MTV all the time. Anybody cool was into Duran Duran back then.”

“Uh—I find that hard to believe, Minerva.”

“Well, ok, anybody cool in my lame town.” Zoe had been lucky because she had an older sister who was a lesbian first and started a punk rock band. She even gave her her first dildo when she turned “sweet” sixteen. She’d been into The White Stripes, an actually cool band, before anyone outside Detroit knew who they were, which, by the way, was another line I’d heard used countless times to convey hipster credibility. You know. “I saw them back when they played so and so dive before they sold out and got famous.”It was always cooler to be into someone before they hit it big. Anyway, the point of this diatribe is to let you know that even though I hadn’t been a Michael Jackson fan in the 1980s, my love for Duran Duran’s “Reflex” and “Rio” was a clear indicator that I wasn’t ever cool.

“Oh, come on. I know you cried when you first heard ‘We Are the World.’ You told me that one time I managed to drag you out and get you drunk.”

“Is that that song where Bob Dylan lowers himself to singing in the same song with Kenny Loggins?”I had told her that. It was the last time I’d been out of the apartment past dark. Bad idea. I’d been so scared I couldn’t resist the shots of Patron the bartender kept pouring, laughing when I howled at the worm right before I swallowed it. Later that night, fucking me up against the mirror behind the bar, he panted in my ear, loca, loca, as my reflection shattered in my fingers.

“We are the World. We Are the Children,” she sang. Loca, Loca. I had to forget or I would be crazy. I had to be crazy to forget. I won’t tell you how the limp worm tasted on my tongue. You either know, or you don’t. Zoe definitely didn’t know. Listen to her, trying to lure me out of the oven, convinced I was as possessed by my demons as Sylvia Plath. If I wasn’t half convinced myself, I’d take it as a compliment.“What’s the next line, Minerva? If you tell me, I’ll let you wear my polka dot skirt.”

“I don’t want to,” I whined.

“Speak up. I no understand English so good.”

“It’s time to make a better world, so let’s start living?” I grumbled. Emphasis on question mark, spoken, not sung. I would have referenced James Bond, but I had a feeling twenty-two year old art school lesbians didn’t know or care squat about martinis or Moonraker.

"Giviiiiinnnng. Not liviiinnnng. One mo time Missy!”

“Can’t you get in trouble with your people for making fun of them like that?”

“What? Speak up! I no understand English so good. We meet on dark side of moon, right?”

That was a definite wrong if I had anything to say about it, which it seemed I didn’t. Zoe sang like a little kid who doesn’t know and couldn’t care less how bad she sounded. “There’s a choice we’re making. We’re saving our own lives. It’s time to make a better world…”

I couldn’t resist. She was just so damn cute. I opened my mouth and my vocal chords expanded to swallow the rising moon as it came up over the horizon on Narragansett Bay which I couldn’t see from my window—the bay that is—the moon could stalk me anywhere without my knowledge. I expected to die at every moment, which might have been why I let the words pour from my mouth.

"Just you and me!"

Yes, I sang. And I actually felt that exclamation point as it exploded between my lips like the worm I’d said I’d forgotten a month ago.

“Ok, Goddess Minerva. Pick you right up. Wait for me on the street. I can be in Fox Point in ten minutes.”

Moonwalker, Chapter 4

2009-10-24T17:59:00.003-04:00

“Minerva?”

“Yes, Mom,” I droned. I knew I should have been more polite but I just didn’t have it in me to hear another lecture about how I needed to get down to Mr. Sleep and check out the mattress and box-spring sale that was about to end soon.

“Don’t you think it’s time you stopped sleeping on a futon on the floor?” she asked just about every time we talked on the phone.

“Those sales are always just about to end,” I muttered. I sounded sullen even to myself.

“I just thought you might like to get a comfortable night’s sleep for once,” she said, close to tears.
Shit, I’m an asshole, I thought--my standard reply to myself. My mom knew I had trouble sleeping. I didn’t bother telling her it was the moon that kept me awake. She’d just try to convince my to take Prozac like when I told her that Block Island was going to be flooded by a tsunami and everyone there was going to drown. I’d dreamed it one night when I had actually managed to sleep, so I knew it was true. That was the basic difference between us in a nutshell. I loved that phrase. Whenever I saw it I saw a world just like ours inside a walnut waiting for the right person to crack it open and realize it was just as real as this one right here where I was about to get in another pointless argument with my mother.

“I just want you to be happy. I don’t know what to do.” That’s how all our conversations ended.
“Neither do I,” is how I usually ended the conversation, but today I said, “Mom, I bought a sofa. I’m sleeping a lot better, I promise. It’s really not that bad here.” Which wasn’t true. I wasn’t sleeping and I hated Providence, where I’d finally decided to “settle down,” mostly because I was too depressed to get another job now that the island coffeehouse where I’d worked for the past ten years had been sold to a rabble of Del’s lemonade slurping semi-mobsters who only hired people in “the family.” I wasn’t sure if that meant actual relations, or people in the mob, but wasn’t about to stick around and find out. It may have only been a coffeehouse, but the Providence mob was notorious, at least in reputation. Nobody I asked could tell me anything the mobsters actually did besides go to strip clubs like The Foxy Lady and eat rare steaks and raw oysters on Federal Hill, but if they were anything like the mobsters on TV I thought it was best not to get tangled up with them, even as a peon. Also, I had my standards. I only worked for Bohemians whose focus was on the atmosphere, not the money, though I was always the first one to count the tip jar. I just made sure I looked really casual while doing it and not desperate to pay my rent which was the actual truth. Actually, it was true that I’d bought a sofa, so I wasn’t totally lying to my mother.

I felt bad for my parents. I always had. I remember being a kid and wondering what they’d done to get stuck with me. I may have looked like a typical four year old, but there was something as ancient and patient about my little face upturned to the clouds which cast a shadow on my forehead in the only photo I’ve kept from my childhood. Some kind of unexplainable, earned wrinkles like the ones around the eyes of a Galapagos turtle waiting in the crater of an extinct volcano for Darwin to make it to the top and claim its wisdom as his own without a protest, or even an attempt to defend myself by crawling away to hide behind a stone. Maybe I just wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t remember. All I know is that when I look at that photo I saw two things--that girl knew things I don’t know now and needed to remember, and that I don’t in even the most remote way feel connected to her at all. I could be looking at some other kid or a baby orangutan, who was probably a lot cuter.

Something had slipped under my shell and sliced it right off, leaving my tenderness exposed. I lay there on Darwin’s ship, flipped on my back, legs wiggling in the salt air on that voyage into the unknown. My tears fell upside down toward the sky, even though they appeared to obey the laws of gravity in which water falls to nourish life on the ground.

So here I a, at 40, trying to settle down, still arguing with my mother about stupid little things that represent the gigantic disappointment I’ve turned out to be, still with no clue who I am and why I’ve been dropped on this planet, wishing I’d be transported off to one where there is no gravity and we are weightless, hovering above the surface without a care in the world. That's the world I want to live in. I bet that's where I’d be able to find myself.

It certainly isn't in the boxes my mom insisted I finally get out of her basement. The one time I opened them I had no recollection of having lettered in field hockey or of winning an Easter Bunny coloring contest sponsored by a toy store in third grade, of starring in a play as King Pythias in fifth, and I had definitely blanked out going to the prom dressed in a silver lamé puff-sleeved gown like an 80s Cinderella.

I definitely didn’t want to remember having sex with my boyfriend in a white tuxedo who posed with his hands on my waist like he owned me, which he did. I did whatever he wanted, fueled by cases of Piels Light and fuzzy navels. He thought it was him I couldn’t resist, but I knew it was the Peachtree Schnapps. I had to tell myself this, or I wouldn’t have survived the dead zone of degradation that spawned me, an eighteen year old existentialist already expert at sliding off a barstool.

Now, looking at the one memory of my childhood I wanted to hold onto—that photo—I see another story. The shadow between my brows that branded me as a seeker, that part of me that couldn’t be caught in time but shifted across my skin which hadn’t yet freckled after years of unprotected sun exposure. The shadow that told the world I would never be satisfied to settle down. The mark of the beast, I laughed to myself when I saw it. I’d been branded from the very beginning.

Not with anything as obvious as the devil’s 666, not with anything harsh or ugly, nothing demonic or even bold like so many of the tattoos my generation had etched into their skin to mark their identities in the world, I bore the weight of wings, both heavy and delicate, traced in light between my eyebrows, rising just above my unfocused eyes, tilted toward the clouds.
I don’t know if I was unaware of the camera or running toward it. All I can see is my longing to take flight and the belief that it was possible.

That’s what I need right now. I need to know if I can fly above the banal mess I’ve made of my life and get away from it all. I have a feeling if I don't, I'm going to wither away into dust the old lady in the apartment below me will sweep up and dump out the window.

And I need you to help me. Help me remember who I am and why I ended up in this apartment in Providence, Rhode Island with the blinds down. I’m inviting you to look into the eyes of my soul etched on my forehead along with sunspots and two lines between my brows. I’m saying look, here’s a butterfly just emerged from its silk cocoon, flapping its wet wings as the light streams down through the gaps in the green glow of the leaves it ate as a caterpillar, before it had wrapped itself in darkness without knowing it would be able to find its way back out.

My eyes, still unfocused sometimes, still shine green as those long-lost leaves. And they know a thing or two about jungles, which surprises me, since I’ve never been south of the equator. How did I learn how to wait in a tree through the day’s heat until the tiny deer whose back legs are longer than its front steps down to the river? How did I learn to puncture its brain with one bite so it died without knowing what I’d done? How did I know where to bury its body so no one else would find it, and to fall asleep in a tree afterwards, letting brilliant, blue butterflies land on my black fur? Who painted eyes on my wings, turning me into a waking dreamer?

In that photo, I am reaching toward a light I don’t remember. What I do remember was the shadow my daisy-clad body cast on the clover behind me, caught in time by the camera. I wish I could remember who snapped that photo so I could ask if that butterfly had been invisible or waiting all these years for me to find it.

If I ever found that person--when, I corrected myself, lying on my couch with the blinds pulled tight against the moon--I would ask for the reason beyond the reason--what broke the light? Where did the flowers go?

Moonwalker, Chapter 3

2009-10-22T11:46:00.000-04:00

That uphill ride was good for my imagination. I found it was much easier on the thighs and lungs if I let my mind drift somewhere else. Pedaling downhill was another matter. To begin with, I didn’t pedal, I just coasted, sometimes with my feet off to the sides, other times no-handed. Downhill was when the daredevil side of me came out. Zoe was always amazed when I arrived in one piece. She was usually waiting for me on the porch to let her in because she only lived a block away and actually liked getting up before the sun rose.

“Hello? Earth to Minerva. You’re supposed to be in charge here, remember,” she said to me.

“The creamers are empty again and you forgot to tell me to fill them.”

“Oh, sorry, right.” I came out of my reverie much faster than I wanted to into the jangle of jazz and caffeinated nerves that was Café Chaos, to face a bemused customer, although he may have actually been annoyed that the creamers were yet again empty. Bemused may have been an optimistic assessment on my part, but my expertise at avoidance put him at ease as I filled the creamers myself. I still hadn’t gotten used to being a manager after years of being a peon, but somehow when I’d applied for this lastest in a long string of coffeehouse jobs I’d ended up an authority figure. Granted, my staff consisted of one wholeheartedly bemused twenty-two year old art-school graduate named Zoe, but it was still quite a step up according to some people’s standards, namely my parents who where thrilled at how I was rising up in the world. I’d worked in coffeehouses so long we weren’t called baristas when I started out, we were counter help. Even though I thought the new title was pretentious I didn’t mind since baristas got way more tips.

“Uh, Zoe, can you brew some more Monsoon Malabar?” I told her. Some of the new names were absurd, too, but I had to admit it was more fun than just saying boring old Colombian all day long, although I’m sure Colombians aren’t boring at all. I’d actually heard it was a great country to visit these days now that the crime rate was somewhat down, although I had met a guy who’d told me he’d been stabbed in the back by guerillas with a machete when he was hiking in the jungle. But he’d survived and had the time of his life when he finally made it to Cartagena. Showed me the photos on his digital camera. The glare of the white sand hurt my eyes so much I had to stay out of the sun for a couple of days, which was unusual for me. I’d spent my whole life trying to avoid bad weather, migrating from north to south with the seasons like a brightly colored bird.

“Yes, boss,” Zoe said. Not only was she wholeheartedly bemused, she was wholeheartedly ironic, like most of her generation. She was Y to my X. We Generation X-ers had missed out on the bemused part, which I was kind of mad about. I think I would have had a lot easier time if I’d been able to laugh at myself and this entire, ridiculous world. I secretly thought she should be my boss because I could tell I had a lot to learn from her, but the owner had been thrilled when an “adult” had applied for the job. Those quotation marks around “adult” are ironic because even though I’m forty years old, I’m far from grown up. Just ask my mother and father or anyone else who’s watched me flounder through life for the past twenty years.

“You go back to daydreaming. That’s more important than any old monsoon.” Zoe and I had quickly developed a rapport based on obscure associations that nobody else understood unless they’d worked in a twenty-first century coffeehouse.

“Right, good job,” I told her. “I trust you.” That was saying a lot for me. I didn’t trust many people. I drifted back into that bubble where for one whole summer the neighbors’ son and I, separated by age, but somehow closer than anyone else on our oak-shaded block, stretched out on our twin beds listening to green acorns drop, suspended in the sadness spun by those two weary songs he played over and over again on his record player, lifting up the needle with the one finger he had the energy to move.

I thought he was an old man, but he was probably all of nineteen, which now that I’m 40 seems absurdly young. How could he have known all that he did at that age? Or maybe, like me, he was born knowing and had to forget it all.

At the end of the summer he disappeared with my childhood. To everyone else I still looked like a four year old kid running barefoot through clover in my daisy-print party dress, playing red light, green light with the other kids on the front lawns of the neighborhood. I came into bed when my parents called me even though it was still light out. I let them tuck me into bed and kiss me good night, but under the covers where I listened to the crickets chirp and then go suddenly silent, watching the moon move across the empty walls of my room, my childhood was gone. I don’t know how to explain it. One day I was dancing in the sun, the next I was hiding in the shadows, lost on the dark side of the moon.

“Where do you go when you get that look on your face?” Zoe asked me as we took out the trash just before we went home.

“Nowhere,” I answered. I’d been lost so long, I didn’t want to be found.

Moonwalker, Chapter 2

2009-10-20T12:47:00.004-04:00

“We didn’t study Vietnam in school. Pretty much all I know is from Life magazine. That picture of the girl on fire running down a dirt road—you must have seen it?”

One of our favorite customers had just left the café, although he wasn’t exactly a paying one. He was bi-polar and basically homeless, smelled to high-heaven like b.o., wet wool, (why did homeless people wear wool in summer? I just couldn’t fathom how they could stand their own smell, let alone how I felt about it) and dread locks, which could smell kind of alluring on hot Rasta-guys, or even hippies who sometimes bathed, or at least doused themselves with patchouli. He sat in the corner all day most days, at the same table, and I let Zoe give him free coffee.

“He’s a Vietnam vet,” she told me. “We should give him free coffee.”

“Did he tell you that?” I’d never heard him speak.

“No. But it’s obvious.” I

wasn’t sure how it was obvious, but I felt sorry for the guy and let him drink free all day. Better here than a bar, I thought. Besides, he had a habit of rearing up like a fire-breathing dragon whenever anyone really snippety approached the counter, someone who you knew was going to hassle us for the attention, those types that viewed anyone who served them as someone they could dump their thwarted anger on. Anyway, Zoe had got me to thinking about Vietnam, which led to my asking her if she knew that picture from Life.

“Never seen it,” she answered, throwing back her thirteenth espresso shot of the day. She always shot for thirteen because that was her lucky number. I wasn’t supposed to let her have more than three a day, but I wasn’t very good at bossing anyone around.

“I keep forgetting you’re only twenty-two, probably because I can’t handle that we have the same job.”

“You’re my boss.”

"When’s the last time I bossed you around?”

“How old are you again?”

“Forty.”

“Whoa.”

“Exactly. It’s a pretty famous picture. Are you sure you haven’t see it? Just what do they teach you these days in school?”

“I wouldn’t know. I went to art school.”

That was Zoe’s stock excuse for just about everything. I’d only known her a month but I’d heard her use it at least once a day since we’d started working together. It was kind of frustrating, but I had to admit useful. I kept meaning to come up with a stock answer myself for why I was a 40 year old barista, so I wouldn’t seem so sullen whenever someone asked me what I was going to do with my life like serving coffee wasn’t doing something. Since when did you become so concerned with the deeper meaning of life, I wanted to say to them with a sneer. Do you realize that coffee you’re drinking was probably harvested by a child slave and that cup you’re going to throw away when you walk out of here is burying our planet? We supposedly only served organic fair-trade, but I had my suspicions. I didn’t trust anybody. There was no excuse for the disposable cups. The owner kept saying he was going to get biodegradable ones, but I don’t see what difference it would make. It was too late. The world was choking and even if somebody figured out how to the Heimlich maneuver on Planet Earth, we’d just end up polluting space with all the junk we’ve consumed and thrown away.

“My parents were in Vietnam. They met there. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a doctor. Pretty crazy, right? My mom got pregnant with me right after they got married so she could get out of the Army. They made you quit back then when you were pregnant. In the good old, sexist days. Way better than now. Now they make women shoot people in Iraq.”

“I don’t think they make them.”

“Well, let them then. What a way to prove yourself.”

“Come on, those girls are defending our country!”

“No comment.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Do you want us all to be communists?”

“Wasn’t that your government’s plan? That girl in the photo looks a lot like you, you know.” Zoe was Chinese, not Vietnamese, but I thought this would get her attention, loop her back into our storytelling, the only real pleasure I found in working in a coffeehouse. She drifted off easily due to her habit of looking at herself in mirrors she didn’t even pretend to hide. “Look at me. I’m so cute,” she liked to tell herself. My insult didn’t work. She had her earphones in and was on her way out the door.

“Bye,” she said, too loud because she couldn’t hear herself. I flipped the lights off and locked the door, stepping out onto the uneven cobbles of Wickenden Street where I’d locked my bike to a lamppost. Somebody was going to steal it one of these days—I only had a cheap lock that could be snipped with wire cutters, but so far, so good. Nobody would want my bike anyway. It was a clunker—a beach cruiser from my former life covered in stickers from all the bands I’d seen when I was younger and thought it was fun to ride home drunk at three in the morning. Pedaling it uphill to my apartment in Fox Point was brutal.

Despite how little I knew, the war was the shadow I played in as a child, even though it looked like I was just counting clovers under the rhododendron in front of our raised ranch house. My ears pricked up a like a dog’s anytime I heard the word “Vietnam” on the radio, or on the TV, which I was only allowed to watch if I’d cleaned my plate like a good girl of Shake ‘n Bake or Hamburger Helper. An only child enamored with the large Brady Bunch, I developed a hearty appetite for the artificial, and though they thought I was too young to be affected by the images on the CBS Evening News, I knew that when Walter Cronkite came on each night to announce the latest body count, that there was something seriously amok in the world.

And when our next door neighbors’ son came home from “overseas,” not to come out of his bedroom for the rest of my childhood, I knew my parents had secrets they weren’t telling me, secrets that must have been so terrible there wasn’t a manual on how to tell them. Not even the authority figures could figure it out.

My parents’ bedroom was on the other side of the house. They couldn’t hear his record player like I could through my open window, so they never understood why my favorite songs were “Where Have All the Flowers Gone? and “One Tin Soldier.”

I’ve retained this taste for melancholy melodies to this day and I still will only listen to music on a record player. I scour thrift shop bins for songs about the moon that I play all night, hoping I’ll figure out what it wants from me so I can finally sleep. I’ve never forgotten those hours when the space between me and the neighbors’ son was filled with lost flowers and a tin soldier riding away from hope. I leaned on the windowsill, looking to his window where the white gauze curtains never moved, even when it was windy. I wished he would open them and look back and tell me we were going to find the flowers, but when he finally did I took my wish back.

His face was so gaunt and pale I thought it was a skeleton at first. He had ripped the curtains off. It lay on the ground beneath his window like an empty ghost. The only prayer I knew was “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep,” but I knew that wasn’t enough to keep me from the truth I saw in his eyes, ice-blue like a wolf’s, shadowed by black lashes and bruised by an exhaustion that couldn’t be relieved by sleep.

I wouldn’t understand what I saw until I was much older. Snakes and chains, young girls burning; bodies facedown in mud, fertile with organ-blood and brains. A world without singing or music of any kind, shocked into silence, afraid of the sound of its own heartbeat.

Eyes wide open, seeing everything I wasn’t supposed to see. This is what “Vietnam” meant. No wonder my parents kept silent. So did I. I became afraid of the sound of my own heartbeat. I might have disappeared from the world right then if it wasn’t for him. I don’t know why he did it, knowing what he knew—how the stories really ended, but he opened his mouth and a song poured out. It was a song that could be seen, not heard. I saw the notes become images of children clustered around the feet of a storyteller in a village where all the houses were made from gingerbread like in a fairy tale—a beautiful woman whose hair flowed free like a hippie’s to her waist. She wore bells on her ankles, feather earrings, and her long skirts brushed the ground.

She sang:

Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago,
“Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley-folk below.

On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stone,
And the valley-people swore
They’d have it for their very own.

I didn’t learn any of this in school, I wanted to tell Zoe, but she was already out of sight. She and her girlfriend only lived a block away and said the neighborhood was great. “All our friends from college still live here.” I didn’t have any friends from college, or any from anywhere else really, and I didn’t know my neighbors, who I don’t think wanted to know me. I lived on a block that was so quiet it felt like everyone was hiding from snipers or vampires, although it was probably the police. There were a lot of pit bulls and four-in-the-morning screams followed by silence, that was unnerving, to say the least. I even heard a gunshot last week, but didn’t tell anybody, especially my mother who was so happy I’d finally signed a year-long lease.

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgment day,
On the bloody morning after…
One tin soldier rides away.

There had been a soldier next door, but no kings or mountains in my suburban neighborhood, or treasure I was aware of, which didn’t stop me from wondering if there was one buried in the swamp behind our house; and there wasn’t a valley filled with greedy people, just normal Americans trying to make a living. It was just a street of raised ranches in the Connecticut woods, still quiet enough the other side hadn’t yet been developed. I wasn’t allowed to play there, and I didn’t. I was a good girl.

Moonwalker, Chapter One

2009-09-23T17:10:00.002-04:00

I can’t say when it was I started to follow butterflies--if there was an actual moment when I was entranced by the promises of broken flowers and fractured light. I can’t pinpoint when I was seduced by pollen and mirrors, or when I became hungry for the golden promises I glimpsed in still water to be fulfilled. I do know I was afraid of the moon from the very beginning.
This is how my mother tells the story:

Each month, as the moon swelled, I cried in my crib in the room down the long hall where I’d been banished from her breast after one month. Nobody breastfed back then except hippies and my mom was definitely not a hippie, even though she sang along with the Mamas and the Papas on the radio. She was in the Army and didn’t know that Bob Dylan was the voice of her generation until I told her, and I’m pretty sure she’s never smoked pot, although I’ve never asked because then she’d feel free to ask if I had. Even so, I’m aware that I could have chosen the less emotionally charged word wean instead of banish, which conjures up images of orphan girls expiring on snow-covered stoops like the poor Little Match Girl. Well, at least it does for me, but my imagination might be more fanciful than yours, although I prefer to see it as more mythically attuned because that makes me seem special instead of paranoid and damaged.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always searched for the meaning behind the meaning. I haven’t found it yet, which could account for my lifelong depression which everyone else I know has medicated or explained away with therapy. Call me crazy, but I know it’s more than just a chemical imbalance that’s caused me to sleep through a good two-thirds of my life, instead of the usual half of the rest of the population. Then again, I don’t see sleep as the proverbial waste of time you always hear people saying it is, because sleep is when we dream, and in dreams I pace the top of a tor in a swan-feather cloak that catches the breath of the moon that lifts me off the dense earth to soar on currents of starlight that I know will carry me to the truth—the reason beyond the reason that has called to me even before I was born.

Of course I always come crashing back down because like everyone else on earth, I have to breathe. The one therapist I saw (I was forced to go in high school when I got caught crawling up the front stairs drunk) said I must be afraid of death, but I knew it was life I feared. I didn’t tell her this, because I was afraid of her, too. She said I had “mothering” issues, which might be attributed to the fact that I wasn’t breastfed. She actually told me that one month was probably worse then no boob at all, because at least if I hadn’t had it I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. This didn’t come close to satisfying my curiosity to know the reason beyond the reason. I took her prescription for Prozac and never filled it. When she called to ask why I hadn’t kept my appointment I didn’t answer because I was in bed and didn’t plan to get out for at least a month.

Really, it was strange she breastfed me for even that one month. It was even stranger that I remembered. I even remembered how she cried as much as I did because her breasts ached and overflowed. I asked her why once--why she stopped--and she said because that’s what everyone did back then. I never asked her why she started, which was the really interesting question.

My mother was a southern belle who’d grown up in the segregated south who’d entered the Army after high school and served in Vietnam, although she didn’t talk about this phase of her life. She’d go on for hours about her favorite childhood dog that ran away and was never heard from again, about how she and her friends dressed up like Beatniks and had a party that scandalized the neighborhood, about the time Robert Mitchum came to town to film a movie and hit on her BFF who was only fourteen years old, about how her mother used to make her father flip over rocks and shoot the imaginary snakes she were sure were lurking there—you know—the usual stuff which makes up a life, stories we tell over and over until they become the myths that define us. Most of us don’t realize the gods and goddesses are no different than us. They don’t want to look too deeply into why they blasted a village off a mountaintop with a bolt of lightning or sank a flotilla of ships with a tidal wave. Not to say my mom killed anyone in Vietnam. She was a nurse. She was supposed to heal people who’d almost been killed. I’m sure some of them died, but she didn’t talk about the bullet holes or amputations. She liked to start the day with Good Morning America and a bowl of Honey-Nut Cheerios.

The only thing I knew about her time in the Army was what I could glean from the photo hanging on the den wall of my dad swearing her in. She’s wearing her white nurse’s uniform with those starched white caps nurses used to wear that made them seem both more risqué and more professional than today’s nurses dressed in floral print scrubs and crocs. You can clearly see what my dad is thinking as he administers the oath.

Within a month they were married and she was pregnant with me a few months later. Her only reference to the war that carried them overseas to the mythic jungles of Vietnam was, “Those were turbulent times. We made decisions that may have seemed a little rash.” I always wondered if I was one of those rash decisions, but didn’t have the heart to ask. I was here, that’s all that mattered, but I couldn’t forget the sound of her crying as her breasts overflowed.

I remembered. I swear I did. I remembered my mother wriggling out from under my father’s arm and running down the hall to my room. There she found me, pinned on my back by the moon, pierced by white light, slashed to the bone.

She picked me up and unbuttoned her nightgown, cradled my head with her hand as I latched on to her nipple, even though she wasn’t supposed to. I still remember the taste of that milk, sticky and sour on my cracked lips. I still remember the moment my mother’s breast became the whole world. I forgot the months of weeping as I lost myself in suckles and murmurs, eyes wide open to the glow. I emptied one breast, then the other as my mother finally got some rest too, nodding off as the moon sunk beneath the earth’s horizon and the sun rose to trace the outline of her cheekbones, and the shadows which had gathered there as she’d listened to me weep. I remember this. I bet if you try, you can remember things like this, too.

We went through whole lifetimes together, watched the sun cast shadows on our surface as we waned in the sky which didn’t seem so empty any more, played with the rabbit and the man who lived there who passed his time holding up mirrors so the stars could see how beautiful they were.

We accepted we were half of what we once were; then a quarter, then a crescent, then a sliver of ourselves, until finally there was nothing to us. We couldn’t even reflect the sun anymore. It was a relief to let go of mirrors.

And then, the mirror broke, shattering the peace between us, ripping us back into the instruction manual which said I was supposed to be weaned before I could walk so that I could grow up to be strong and independent like the astronauts who that very night—July 20, 1969--walked on the moon.

Riding the Vision

2009-07-26T16:25:00.001-04:00

Why do I feel like I have to wait till I have something really important to write here? Is it perhaps, due to the public nature of the blog format? Is it because I feel like I should only write when I have something important enough for public consumption? But isn't that the whole point of a blog? To share information and thoughts with the public? Or at least your friends who are interested or pretend they're interested to "follow" you?

These are rather neurotic thoughts and not really what I want to express in the world. However, I think it's sometimes necessary to move through these thoughts to get to the truth on the other side of them. The truth is always much quieter than these loud thoughts which take up so much space in our minds until we release them. Quieter even if they are really loud, like ocean storm waves. A friend who I sent some poems to recently gave me what I consider the ultimate compliment. She told me that I had bypassed the intellect in my new poems. I felt such a sense of accomplishment because, now, looking back at the poems in my last book, Apocalypse Diary, what I don't like about them is the voice--how chatty and brittle it sounds. I know it sounds that way because I was brittle, and that chattiness was a defense, a pose that the reader was supposed to move beyond....and some of the poems do go there (the ones no one ever comments on. The strange poems dealing with past life memories from soul retrievals!). I suppose this voice bothers me so much because it is no longer my voice. Like all humans I have an ego to help me forget the part of myself that is divine, and that ego wants to be "truly" seen, not mistaken for someone else! I guess I just feel so close to everything I create that I assume everyone else will assume that the poems are me--which they were, but since that's not the case I am neurotically worrying that anyone who actually comes across the book now will think I am still that brittle, wounded voice.

My point here as I prattle, is that sometimes you need to move through the intellect in order to get to what really wants to be said. Not what you want to say.....although sometimes the two intersect and that is when the most beauty is released into the world like the hatching of a bouquet of blue morpho butterflies. Truth and Beauty are abstract, best known in images. What are your images of truth? Of beauty? How does your voice want to be known in this world?

I may have begun writing this blog thinking I had nothing important to say, but as always happens when I surrender myself to words, my voice (the song beyond words) manages to rise up through the cracks in my intellect and entwine itself around the beams of my house, pushing its way out the windows and growing up and over to cover the roof with a soft, green canopy of vines and moss that is the perfect nest for butterflies and birds. I lay in my room in CT, still recovering from this illness and listen to the birds and wonder if butterflies in their cocoons can hear them. What's more important than that? Tell me. I really want to know. I suspect your answers will involve moments where trees whisper to you, where peaches moan in pleasure just before you take a bite, where you walk into the ocean at dusk and welcome the rising moon into your body.

It may be a crescent moon, it may be full, but it's always a reflection of the light within us all.

I want to finish by saying how excited I am about my new manuscript The Secret Language. I look forward to sharing the poems with you when it's finished, which is still a secret to me. I don't have a plan for anything these days, let alone for how to manage and control poetry! I was advised by a wise sage f a teacher last year (Fran Quinn for those of you who know him), that I was riding a wild horse of a vision and the best thing I could do was stop worrying and just hold on! The poems would take care of themselves if I could do that.

Well, the thing about riding a vision that I've discovered, is that you can't predict how long the ride is going to be. The trip may just be a few hours, but the way it plays out in your life afterwards is impossible to predict. I am referring to both psychedelic trips here and to the experiences in your life that just happen without ingesting psychotropics, which is pretty much all the time once you cross a certain threshold.

This can be a good thing, or a scary thing, depending how you roll with it. i had no idea my experiences with ayahuasca in Peru two winter ago would still be affecting me so deeply, but I can clearly see now that this past winter on Hawaii was a deepening of the vision I received in Peru. Madame Pele, goddess who destroys in order to create, tore through my body. I know that this illness is a gift from her that will completely purge me of all the negative (wounded) emotions that have stopped me from sharing my full radiance in this lifetime--if I can ride it all the way out. Right now it is a fine line between medicine and faith for me. I feel like the medications are stopping me from fully surrendering to the faith that I am the authority of my body and all I create, but I'm afraid, for numerous reasons, both physical and social, to stop taking them. I'll admit, now that I've come close, I don't actually want to die now. I'd like to keep it at a metaphorical stage--a beautiful image of a deep indigo butterfly disintegrating into a sky big enough to contain the silent song of its wings.

What is your song? Where are you flying?

Descent to the Underworld

2009-07-11T18:15:00.001-04:00

One of the greatest teachers in my life has been the island of Hawaii, the largest of the seven in the archipelago, and the only one with a volcano that is still active. Right now as I write new land is being created near Kalapana where liquid fire from the earth’s core is flowing into the ocean whose cool touch soothes and sculpts it into a landscape that mirrors the chop and heave of a stormy sea. Though this land looks like water, anyone who has walked into a lava field knows that, unlike water, which gives way when we fall into it, here there is no mercy. This is raw land, razor-sharp, not yet worn down by wind and wave erosion, and the mind, if one is open to this land, becomes equally sharp, manifesting its intentions with the same focused flow as that lava who will not be stopped from reaching the ocean.

And so I find myself again here on Hawaii after fifteen years, not expecting to be on this particular island, since I swore to myself that I would stay on Maui this time--but Maui—who could complain about Maui? Maui--was too soft and mellow and a little moldy from all the rain that made the flowers grow, as well as covered in a far more substantial swathe of concrete than when I was last there. So my abhorrence of Walmart and Costco combined with my fear I would molder, caused me to flee Maui within a week of arriving, flying over to the Big Island, secretly acknowledging that it was the reason I came here. It had been calling me back, and I had answered. I was afraid, but I had to go.

Fifteen years ago I wandered around this island as a hitchhiker taking rides from random strangers and ending up wherever there cars wanted to go. I had a vague and secret intention of finding a story—something I could write about, not believing that my suburban Connecticut upbringing, a fairly tame sojourn in Paris as an au pair (although the hedonistic month in Greece I tacked on at the end of that sojourn was certainly fertile territory), and four years of college where I read so many books I ended up with a major and a minor in English Literature before abandoning my one attempt at a real job (college professor) by dropping out of grad school before the semester even started because I realized I wanted to be a poet, was enough to write about, or at least nothing special. I had no concept of my inner landscape because I had no feeling for it. Without going back to the source of it here, I can only say, in short, that I was completely numb, though I had a flare for drama that made me seem I felt more than everyone else.

This numbness, an inability to feel, is a spiritual disease that has become a cultural epidemic manifesting in the form of addictions of all kinds, physical, mental and emotional. In my mind, addiction is a substitute for ritual. The soul must be fed and the spirits must be acknowledged, maintaining our connection to the earth’s cycles as our own. Since the Industrial Age, these connections have been severed, although the desecration of the feminine aspect of ourselves occurred long before that, somewhere around the time that written civilization arose around 5,000 years ago. If we don’t feed it, the starved soul, craving sustenance in the form of reverence for the gift of life in a human body, and devotion to our own inner growth, begins to devour us in a desperate attempt to make us notice it. Addiction becomes a substitute for ritual. Instead of feeding our souls and the unseen with prayers or offerings of tobacco, we are driven compulsively to alcohol and a host of other mind-numbing drugs: to sex, food, violence, television; and the mental addictions that keep us trapped in cycles of thinking that manifest in an endless feedback of negative experiences which convince us we are not in control of our lives. Addictions are emotional as well, such as addiction to romance/love, which keeps us seeking over and over for someone to fill the holes in our sad and tired bodies that we can only satisfy with acceptance, gratitude, and self-love.

My journey to these realizations began on Hawaii. Fifteen years ago, thumbing my way towards a story, however passively I was going about it, I encountered a force in this land that was far more powerful than anything I had ever experienced before. One of my rides brought me in a circuitous manner to Waipi’o Valley, the mystical home of many Hawaiian kings and warriors, where people still talked of beings like the Night Marchers and the menehune as if they were real. I was enchanted by this place where people talked about mythical beings in their everyday conversation and resolved to go live down in the valley, which was only inhabited by a few taro farmers who mostly drove the mile back up the one-lane road after work. I would have the whole place to myself.

In about two days I had a Hawaiian boyfriend through whom I slipped into local culture, an invitation not readily extended to many haoles (white-skinned people with no breath, no mana, or spiritual force). I have written about our story at length other places, and continue to do so as I am more able, year after year, to express what I went through in that valley, so I will not elaborate on it too much here. Through him, I witnessed firsthand the degradation of spirit and culture that has occurred to the Hawaiians as a result of the loss of sovereignty experienced when they were annexed by a cabal of businessmen backed by the U. S. Congress who turned the guns of their warships on Queen Liliuokalani’s palace. The Queen, rather than seeing her people die, surrendered, though the loss of spirit had been well under way for the century before as the whalers and missionaries streamed toward the island with their different, but equally exploitive visions.

However, this is not a tirade about victims or a call for political sovereignty for the Hawaiian people. It is a call for anyone reading these words to accept that each one of us is responsible for the reality we create as individuals and as a collective force. What mystics have always said has now been proven by scientists, providing us with the proof necessary to convince a materialist world that we are creatures of spirit first. Our physical realities are created by our thoughts, and most importantly our feelings. If this seems impossible to accept consider that many--maybe most of these feelings are unconscious and that we are unaware of them--all the more reason to focus our attention on them so as to create from a place of clarity in order to receive our heart’s desire and reveal our path of service in this lifetime.

But there is also something else at work here—the soul’s desire, which is often at odds with what the ego wants. The soul, our link to the divine, must annihilate the ego, the part of us that has forgotten it is divine. In our materialist paradigm, it is logical that this annihilation will occur at the material level—that we will be stripped of our possessions, beaten or abused, struck with cancer, or by lightning, lose our loved ones in mindless, wasted deaths through war.

These are difficult ideas to accept if one is in an abusive situation, but in my case, it was just this that led me to an awareness—through many years of suffering after the actual experiences occurred—that I wrote myself into a story where I was physically, sexually, emotionally and mentally abused; in which I allowed myself to be degraded and violated my own belief in the sanctity and goodness of life in ways I never would have thought were possible, or that I was capable of.

In a culture stripped of ritual, the most important one being that of initiation, my soul guided me to do it on my own. Viewed from my current perspective, I think I couldn’t have chosen any wiser. Waipi’o Valley is literally known as the gateway to the Underworld in Hawaiian tradition. In the safe container of conscious community, facilitated by elders who have been through the process, the descent into the underworld, while dangerous, and very often painful, is one from which most initiates return. In our time, many do not. They are lost, like many I have known, to heroin or alcohol, dying on bus station floors or alone in apartments with the shades drawn on closed windows. I, too, came close.

Our parents usher into this world, but it is up to us to rebirth ourselves as fully embodied souls who take on the role of maintaining the links between the spirit and material world that create healthy communities of people who abide by the Hawaiian principle of pono, of integrity; who want to live in balance with all of creation and make decisions based on the greater good of all our relations: animal, mineral, plant, here on earth, and with our star families beyond it.

In this time of massive transition on our planet, as the old paradigms of control collapse, we each have the opportunity to become sovereign, in control of our own boundaries, conscious co-creators of a collective vision founded on reverence for life, and devotion to the soul’s path growth toward full realization of its divine origin. To this day I am amazed I survived my unconscious descent into the underworld, and that I made it through the many years after where I numbed the pain of that time with alcohol, food, drugs, and many other mental and emotional addictions like depression, vacating from the present moment, and co-dependency. Over time, as I became aware that I was going through a process of initiation on my own, I was able to let go of my addictions, which, is far easier than these simple words sound. The years of self-abuse, then recovery and healing after my descent in Waipi’o were in many ways more difficult than the original trauma I experienced in the depths of the valley.

It is my hope that those of us who went and survived these traumatic self-initiations will speak out now and share their experience and wisdom with those on the brink of descent into their own underworlds. Not to stop anyone from descending, for this terrifying descent is a necessary part of the journey to becoming a fully embodied human, but to provide markers, breadcrumbs on the path, say, for little lost birds in need of a sustenance so they can keep flying.

2009-03-28T06:01:00.000-04:00

Haven't written here in over a year. I feel like I'm writing to myself.....maybe I am and I could just act naturally and share my secret self. Here on the Big Island on the lovely Hualalai, in a house in the trees, land sloping toward the ocean where the dolphins hunt all night, and they will swim in to Kealakeakua Bay in a few hours as the sun comes over the ridge and warms the mountainside. And I will roll down the hill to meet them. That's about all I have to say. Life is simple here, or maybe it's just beyond words like this.

Sea Change, A Journal of Reflections and Waves

2008-02-20T18:19:00.000-05:00

Full fathom five, thy father lies,
of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding dong, Hark! Now it hear them.
Ding dong, bell.

William Shakespeare, of course, sung by Ariel, I believe, in The Tempest, one of my favorite of his plays. For those of you who know the quote well, I'm aware that the punctuation is a bit off. Perfectly functioning keyboards are a bit of a rare commodity in Peru. This one doesn't do anything but type arrows when you try to use the upper symbols on the keys.

In any case, I can correct them when I return home next week to the States! Hurray! The exclamation point works at least!

I had the idea last spring to start a journal called Sea Change, A Journal of Reflections and Waves that would focus on the subject of change on Block Island. I want to include all aspects of change, both the good and the bad. How it affects our life and how we want to affect change on both a personal and collective level. For me, specifically, I see this as an opportunity to focus our intention on our ability to create the world we want through our emotions, on both a personal and political level. I am interested, as Martin Prechtel puts it, in awakening the indigenous soul of Block Island. You may remember the Manifest Manisees Manifesto I created last winter. Some of you were in the beautiful ceremony with me at Jill Helterline's house last Lammas....Groundhog Day.....where we spoke our wishes for the island aloud as if they had already come true. In case you want to review it, or to read it for the first time, go into the archives on this blog for Feb. 2007. It can be read there. And if you have anything you would like me to consider adding, please leave your suggestions in the comments or write me personally at jenlighty@hotmail.com.

Why Sea Change....

Well, obviously, we live on an island and are surrounded by the sea. There are few places on the island where you can't hear it, unless the wind is very still, which happens rarely. We sleep to the sound of the sea. We don't need lullabies, or we are haunted by the sound, kept awake, confused by our dreams. I want the journal to be a call to clarity. A place where we examine the different reflections that death takes in our lives, and a place where we envision reflections we would like to see. We live in a paradoxical time, participants in a dying culture that is also coming vibrantly to life. My recent experiences with ayahuasca have helped me to actually go through the process of death. It was both terrifying and beautiful, peaceful and full of contentment, a quality I find is missing so often in contemporary life. To be content with change.

And what does Shakespeare have to do with all this....

In this little song from The Tempest, Ferdinand's father is dead. The father is associated with the patriarchy, a system controlled by men based on domination of the feminine earth which scholars say has governed most of our planet for the past 6,000 years or so, I believe, replacing the matriarchal cultures, which some other scholars say, was more peaceful and egalitarian. This is misplaced thinking in my mind which continues to place the blame for our current ecological crisis on someone other than ourselves.....each of us is responsible for what we have created through our emotional bodies, whether we be in a male or female body. Truth be told, my teacher Maria opened my eyes to this erroneous and accusative way of thinking, turning my whole thought process around when she informed me that all of acts of creation are female. All acts of creation include the atomic bomb and chemical weapons. It is time to look within ourselves and heal the schism between the male and female which has caused us to project our unresolved anger onto a world that is patiently serving our needs.

I don't believe the world is in crisis. Dead eyes become pearls and bones become coral, which is a living organism, filled with thousands of miniscule polyps sharing space like a colony of undersea bees, working together to sustain life in all its wondrous mystery, rich and strange. And sea nymphs, of course, are notorious for their ability to seduce. That great explorer Ulysses survived them only by strapping himself to the mast so he wouldn't throw himself into their arms when he sailed past on his way home to Ithaka.

It is time though, perhaps, to throw ourselves into their song. To let ourselves die and be reborn as naturally as waves breaking on a shore who are pulled back into life by a force they can't see, something beyond eyes, something hidden but fully known the way a pearl inside an oyster is sure of its own beauty.

See Change. It didn't even occur to me until after I'd come up with the name for the magazine. So obvious it slipped by me, through the song of my unconscious to my fingers who began typing, letting the ideas come in clear currents that will take us home when it is time for us to get there. It doesn't matter when, really. That bell that's always tolling isn't doesn't have to be marking time past, or time remaining. It could be the siren's have decided against drowning, or maybe they want to teach us to breathe underwater, to bring the darkness into the light and let them play, rolling on the surface like otters.

What do you see......

Southern Cross

2008-02-19T14:00:00.001-05:00

Wherever I go in this country I keep meeting people who tell me (or imply) they know more than me, like the woman this morning who told me the poverty here doesn´t bother her because the poor, like all of us, are choosing their own reality.

I feel you stirring within me, the rage that wants to lash out and tell her she´s full of shit and I don´t believe for a second she´s as disconnected as she claims to be.

Also, I am tired of people telling me I must become more unattached and that I should ¨do¨more ceremony, as if surrendering was as easy as taking a pill or a drink, or a weekend course on shamanic healing taught by a wrinkled old man who wants all of your money, and I understand that I am attracting the old women who keep following me around asking for money, like the one the other day who followed me halfway up the mountain I wanted to walk alone because she knew I would give her money just to get rid of her.

I just want to be seen by these women and by the cabdriver who keeps trying to sell me condor feathers I suspect are fake. I haven´t seen one condor in this country. How can there be so many feathers for sale? They are either not from condors, or the vendors are killing the giant birds to get them, because I know, as a feather collector, that there are just not that many giant feathers lying around on the ground waiting for cabdrivers to walk by.

I suspect vultures in every sense of the word, surviving off the dead, though there´s nothing wrong with that, or with killing to eat. It´s the deception I object to. I want someone to tell me the truth in this country. Then I get angry at myself for attracting all these negative experiences and want to smack the smug new agers who tell me that is what I am doing.

One thing I am good at is feeling. I feel the judgment coming at me. It is not a projection of my own feelings, although it is a reflection...I feel what people are thinking and it hurts me. I have also been attracting people who say hurtful things to me in a passive aggressive way. Like it´s funny to tease me about how sensitive I am.

I know my reactions are my own and are what I need to grow from right now, that I need to learn how to respond instead of react, but right now I am lost in the hurt and don´t know how to get out of it. Part of my personality is to admit my weaknesses in conversation. I think I genuinely want to talk with people, but I keep attracting people who judge me when I do this, so there must be something I am missing here. Maybe it is just that I, who admit my weakness, am stronger than I think.

I don´t want to ask my feelings to leave me alone, but would like to transform them into something a little more serene.

I could resolve all this with some fakery. Call in a condor to drop his feather´s at my fet, but I want you, right now, to see me. How ugly I am in the middle of all this beauty. Green mountains and fertile clouds seeding the fields of maize.

Medicine Poem

2008-02-14T12:18:00.000-05:00

This is the beginnings of a poem I wrote after my first ayahuasca ceremony on New Year´s Eve. I thank the plant for the insights it gave me and offer my words back to it in gratitude for the beauty and knowledge it shared with me.

Medicine Poem

In the round room

with our backs to the red adobe walls

we prayed to our own darkness,

flowers torn apart by fear

and the losses caused by the lies we´d been told

and all the betrayals necessary

on the path

to becoming whole.

Gunshots cracked above us

like blessings from the king of lightning

on the earth below

who held its breath and wondered

if our prayers would be enough

to keep the darkness between stars

turning.

It was New Year´s Eve,

most of the world stumbled

under fire

in celebration

but the dogs knew the bombs

weren´t far away

barking as the sun flamed

in the black sky

and then collapsed in a fan of colors

that tickled their closed eyes

when they fell to the ground who shook

with fear at our blindness

unable to understand why we wanted

to give our eyes away.

And the fire fueled itself

with shattered eardrums and severed fingers

while the water waited to see

how we wanted it to fall

ready to answer our prayers with drought

or drowning

flowing toward open mouths

with all the answers

and more questions to keep us spinning away

from the sound

then toward it

so close to God

we forgot ourselves

rushing past our ears
like waterfalls.

My death happened

without my knowing

the shape of my life arcing like a rainbow

between two black holes

a raindrop held by a leaf

that breaks as it falls

crushing butterflies and demons

with their own blindness

reborn on the other side

equal and unknown.

A leaf falls, releasing the song held

in a raindrop

and a woman gives herself away because she knows

she is always full

and the silence after is as gentle as an old doe

at dusk

who bends to drink at a mudhole

torn apart by love

immersed in the dark between stars

greeting the wolves.

Tsegihi ( Navajo Cantinela Noche)

2008-02-14T11:58:00.000-05:00

This is my translation of the Navajo Night Chant, recited in the ceremony of the same name of the Dine´. I translated it for my new friends who live at Alonso´s. They are very interested in the prophecy of the eagle and the condor and in North American indigenous culture.

If the phrasing seems awkward, it is because I followed the phrasing in the translation from Navajo to English by N. Scott Momaday. If anyone who knows Spanish better than I catches any glaring errors, please let me know! And last, but certainly not least, Walk in Beauty, as the Dine´say.

Casa hecho del aurora,
Casa hecho de la luz velada,
Casa hecho de la nube oscura,
Casa hecho de la lluvia masculino,
Casa hecho de la neblina oscura,
Casa hecho de la lluvia femenina,
Casa hecho del polen,
Casa hecho de los saltamontes,
La nube oscura es a la puerta.
La trocha irse de este nuba oscura.
El relampago zigzg se levanta alta le sobre.
¡Dios masculino!
Una ofrenda de tuyo yo hecho.
Yo prepare´una fuma para ti.
Restaura mis piedes para mi.
Restaura mi cuerpo para mi.
Restaura mi mente para mi.
Restaura mi voz para mi.
Este dia mismo saca el hechizo de tuyo para mi.
El hechizo de tuyo se aparta para mi.
Tu le sace´ para mi;
Lejas se fue.
Con la felicidad, yo recubro.
Con la felicidad mi interior se pone fresco.
Con la felicidad yo se voy.
Mi interior sentiendo fresco, puedo caminar.
No mas largo doloroso, puedo caminar.
Imerpemeable al dolor, puedo caminar.
Con los sentimientos animados, puedo caminar.
Asi´le ser hace mucho tiempo, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, con las nubes oscuras abundantes, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, con los aguaceros abundantes, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, con las plantas abundantes, puedo caminar.
Con la felicidad, puedo caminar.
Asi´le ser hace mucho tiempo, puedo caminar.
Puede ser hermoso delante de mi.
Puede ser hermoso detras de mi.
Puede ser hermoso abajo de mi.
Tal vez es hermoso sobre mi.
Tal vez is hermoso por todos lados de mi.
En la belleza se termine´.

Sea Squad South America

2008-02-02T17:00:00.000-05:00

To my esteemed fellow members of Sea Squad, and future members, I am pleased to report from Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the world. The lake it truly immense, and when on it, seems like an ocean, complete with rolling waves, although no tides or surf breaking on its shores.

I am currently writing from Puno, the largest city on the lake, which is the home city of BI honorary member Aymar Ccopocatty. Aymar, being from North America a well, is highly aware of the pollution problem that is developing here and is documenting the algae blooms due to nitrogen overload close to Puno, caused by dumping raw sewage into the lake, on film. He is doing his best to educate his people about this problem, but reports that it is frustrating because the people don´t really have a concept of pollution yet. I am happy to report that the pollution only seems to be in Puno. After a two day excursion on the lake, I can report nothing but pristine water and thriving cultures on the islands I visited.

Becky Hogan and I set forth from Puno with an international motley crew on a boat that looked like the one from Gilligan´s island. Our goal, Amantani, the island of the magenta, bell-shaped Kantuta flower, 15 miles out from Puno. First, however, we made a stop at one of the legendary islands of the Uros, a pre-Inka people who escaped into the totora reeds when the Inkas came to conquer the area. Eventually they began to build rafts to survive on, and the rafts became islands. Today there are still many people living on these floating islands with a unique language and culture. Many of them subsist on tourism, so it was a bit depressing to visit because there were many requests for money, but some are anchored deeper into the reeds and do not receive visitors. The totora reed, like our native cattail used by the Manisses and other New England tribes, supplies them with many building materials, including reed houses and boats. We took a ride in a reed boat which was quite stable, although some of my fellow passengers seemed a bit nervous that we were going to tip. All the island children jumped on the boats with us and entertained us enthusiastically with songs in Aymara, Quechua, Spanish, English, French, German and Japanese! They passed around their hats after, of course, but I was happy to give them a couple of sols. Our guide mistakenly told us that one of Sea Squad´s heroes, Thor Heyerdahl, learned how to make reed boats from the Uros, but I didn´t correct him, not wanting to appear to be a know it all in front of the very attractive and hip Uruguayans. Heyerdahl did learn the technique from some legendary Aymara boat builders from the lake, however, and proceeded to sail them on the Ra Expedition which began in Egypt, I think, and went on to Asia? Any Sea Squad members know? Our guide also informed us, correctly, that another Sea Squad hero, Jacques Cousteau, discovered the worlds´ largest frogs when he explored the lake.

I wasn´t lucky enough to see any frogs, but I was lucky enough to spend two nights on the stunning island of Amantani. While there I was privileged to dine on one of the four native species of fish remaining in the lake. The other 32 have been wiped out due to the introduction of trout and kingfish. The fist looked like silverfish and were fried whole, which means they had eyes to look at us. I didn´t mind the eyes so much, but Hogues did. I, however, was not so keen on the taste. The remaining fish were quickly scooped into napkins and carried down to the lake as an offering to Neptune. Hopefully the seagulls had a party. We were staying with a local family and felt it would be an insult not to eat the fish, especially because our host was so proud to serve them up.

Amantani was an inspiration in so many ways, and we on Block Island could learn much from the way tourism operates there. The island is about the same size as BI, but has no cars. Everyone walks up the very steep stone pathways, often carrying heavy loads, to work in the terraced fields of potatoes, corn, beans, and quinoa. The island operates communally. A 5 sol ($1.50) fee is collected from all tourists which is distributed equally among the 4,000 residents, and tourists are rotated among the families on an equal basis so everyone gets a little income, although I think in Peruvian terms it is probably not so little. Of all the rural places I have seen so far, Amantani has the highest quality of life. All the houses were large in Peruvian terms, with tin, not thatched roofs, and had beautiful gardens and bright green outhouses out back. Also, the town had a windmill and many houses had solar panels for electricity. With no cars, no dogs (and their wastes), no internet, and no phones, Amantani is the most peaceful place I have ever been. Becky and I hiked up to the two highest points on the island, Pachamama and Pachatata, where there are shrines to mother and father earth, and also circumnavigated the island during our stay. I know that I will treasure those two days there for the rest of my life and feel so lucky to be sending this report to my fellow members. See you in a couple of months when the water is warming up and the stripers are starting to run!

Whitewave

On the Bus

2008-01-30T18:47:00.000-05:00

Riding the bus is quite an experience in Peru. Becky and I decided to leave the Cusco-Sacred Valley area for Lake Titicaca a couple of days ago. We decided to take a tourist bus because it would be more comfortable than the local bus, but somehow in the confusion at the station in Cusco, ended up on a local bus. Local bus means dirty. Local bus means you can´t go to the bathroom for 6 hours or so. Local bus means lumpy seats. And strangest of all, local bus means anyone who wants to sell something can jump on the bus at anytime and do so.

The first was a teenage boy who played a scallop shell like a washboard and sang some songs for us. He then walked up and down the aisle holding out his shell for money. Next stop he got off and on came a very clean and well dressed young man who proceeded to stand in the middle of the aisle halfway down the bus and address us passengers with great powers of elocution about the problems of alcohol abuse in Peru, and of how important it was to talk to your children, explaining that many parents never talked to their children because they worked so hard, and encouraging them to talk for just 15 minutes a day. I thought he was a Bible thumper, but he never really got too into Jesus into the converation, although it turned out one of the things he was trying to sell was mini Bibles, good for using when you needed something to talk to your children about. He also had a cd and booklet for kids with educational material in them and a book of ideas on how to make money. The very quiet and polite man next to me bought all of his stuff (10 soles, about 3 dollards) and I looked over his shoulder at the kids´book, which looked quite good and interesting. It made me remember how my friend in Lima told me that Peruvian schools were really bad, so maybe material like this is really needed. For awhile I thought the schools were so bad the kids were never in them until I realized they are on summer vacation now!

All kinds of food vendors jump on the bus when it stops, selling bread, empanadas, choclo with queso (corn on the cob with hunks of cheese), and sometimes popcorn. They yell out the name of what they are saying over and over as several of them push up and down the aisle, riding for awhile and then jumping off at the next town. I had seen a lot of sellers like this riding the bus in the Sacred Valley, but had not yet encountered a woman carrying an entire roast pig onto the bus until this trip. She and her friend, who looked to be about 20, got on the bus in the most obscure town, way out in the middle of nowhere with the pig which they proceeded to hack into pieces with a cleaver and sell to hungry passengers along with potatoes. They were also selling apple juice in plastic pags, but I couldn´t figure out how to drink it without spilling it all over myself! In any case, more liquid was not a good idea since going to the bathroom was out of the question.

Last, but certainly not least, was the very well dressed, very clean, very handsome young man who got onto the bus (wearing a tie!) and proceeded to address us about the nutritive benefits of maca, an Andean plant that has caught on big as a supplement in the US. I think Becky and I might have been the only people on the bus who knew what he was talking about, which was one of the points he made. I was very impressed with the way he spoke and with his political awareness of how important it was for the people from his culture to know what treasures they had, and to use them for themselves. I thought it was interesting that he had to explain the medical conditions he was explaining the plant was good for, like osteoporosis, and gave him a lot of credit for jumping on that bus trying to sell his maca powder. I was thrilled to buy some since I have been under the weather, but he didn´t seem to sell as much as the Bible guy.

Finally, we were approached by Oligario who was touting hostels on the bus. I hate to say that I´ve become wary of people trying to sell me stuff, but I have, so I was kind of discounting him until he pulled out a pamphlet for a really nice looking hotel and told us we could have a special deal. It seems like my aloofness payed off. He thought I was trying to bargain! When we got to Puno he found us a cab and escorted us to the hotel, which is quite nice . We are paying ten dollars each for a room in the US that would cost about one hundred. Puno, while rundown, and lacking the colonial charm of Cusco, is interesting to walk around in, cheaper, and filled with very friendly people. I think most tourists spend only a brief time here before jumping off somewhere else, so we have the city to ourselves as far as gringas go.

Off to the island of Amantani tomorrow for two days, then back to Puno for the Festival of the Virgin of Candelaria, one of the biggest of the year!

Feeling the Silence

2008-01-22T11:35:00.000-05:00

I drank ayahuasca again last Sunday in a very beautiful ceremony. I was much more prepared mentally for the experience, although I was still scared before the ceremony began. Alonso, the ayahuascero, said he is always scared before every ceremony, which makes sense, and which makes me respect him even more. At this point I can say which makes me love him even more. He is such a beautiful being who lives from his heart, who sees from the eyes of his heart and from what I have experienced, acts from his heart.

A friend of mine from Block Island came to the ceremony with me, as well as two other people I have met here. It was small this time, only the four of us, three apprentices of Alonso´s, a man from Taray, Alonso and his wife, and their one year old son. Before I went I wrote down the things I wanted ayahuasca to help me with, although I was prepared to experience whatever I needed to experience, since one of my intentions was to surrender to the divine I AM presence inside me, which sees beyond the needs of my ego to what my soul wants for me to grow into a deeper being.

One by one we knelt before Alonso and drank, then walked back to our seats on the ground in the same round room as the last time. Alonso began to play his music, which is so sublime. I settled into the ground and breathed and let my mind relax as the music washed over and through me. I could sense the medicine moving through my body, and then after about an hour it started to affect my consciousness. It is hard to describe what I saw, or at least what the ayahuasca dimension looked like, but if you have ever seen ayahuasca art with its geometric patterns and swirls and colors, then you can get a good idea of what I was seeing. However, the feeling of being in contact with beings from another dimension, very powerful, benevolent beings, divine entities, was more powerful to me than the way things looked, up until a certain point when I felt one of these beings "operating" on my third eye, one of the things I requested. This was not painful or scary, I just felt pressure in my forehead and knew that this being was helping me and I thanked it. From that point on I remembered that my friend Aymar told me that once you become experienced with the medicine it is possible to direct the journey, so I continued to ask the entities to assist me. All of the things I asked for were addressed as best as the plant could do at that point for me. One of the particularly painful things I asked to be released from was not resolved as fully as I wanted it to be, but the message I got from the ayahuasca was that the result I wanted was what my ego wanted, not what my heart wanted, or what my soul knew was the truth, so that I was going to have to continue to accept this condition and learn to open my heart despite the pain that it causes, and it is true, I know, that pain is one of the most powerful ways to learn about love, that I was being given an opportunity to fully accept all the ways that love can live within us without the attachments we so often insist on as conditions or definitions of what love is. All these messages came through me in images and feelings, very beautiful feelings of love. I was crying silently almost the whole ceremony at the beauty of what I was experiencing and at the love radiating from Alonso´s music, and from the others in the room. I had a powerful vision of Jesus Christ, and then a vision of myself with him in a past life. I also had a vision of a North American Indian man dancing who I knew was my husband in a past life. I asked to see myself with him, but looking back, I think I didn´t because I was looking for myself how I look now, not how I did when I was with him. I had many visions of animals, and also an incredible energetic transference from the earth in which I received energy streaming up into my first chakra.

The medicine also worked on us as a group as a whole, bringing up a social issue that is difficult for me. I was feeling uncomfortable and responsible for the people who I brought with me, which was also the case the first ceremony. Both times I actually only asked one person to accompany me, and the others just sort of came along, although I told them to call Alonso to make sure it was ok they came. Anyway, one of the conditions of participating in the ceremony is that you cannot leave until it is officially over. While we were still in the dark, someone came in with a flashlight and went up to Alonso, who stopped playing his music and came over to me and said that one of the people who came with me not exactly invited was leaving because their was something wrong. Alonso´s son had discovered him and came into tell his father. Alonso asked me to accompany him outside to talk to him. Needless to say, this was very disrupting to the energy of the group, both because the circle was broken, and also because the lights were lit at this point. I walked over to the house with Alonso, amazed I could and asked this person what was wrong, if he was ok. His answers were terse and fairly rude. Out of respect for his experience I do not want to reveal them here. Alonso asked him to come in for just an hour more. We told him we were worried about him and I asked him to come sit next to me and try to sleep, suggestions that were not met well. Finally Alonso told him that he had made a commitment and needed to come back in, which he did. I was able to walk back in and recenter myself as Alonso continued to play, and to my surprise, I realized that no one in the room was holding me responsible for this person´s behaviour. Alonso asked me to go because I spoke English and because he thought I would want to help my friend, which I did, even though he rejected my help. So he came back, although he left after about 20 minutes, before the ceremony was over. The rest of us continued on listening to the beautiful music by candle and firelight now, meeting each others´eyes and hugging each other until Alonso closed the circle and people drifted home to sleep, although I slept there on the ground again. I think what happened to this person was that the ayahuasca, which he had drank many times before, worked on his dark side and brought it out into the light, maybe in a way that he didn´t expect, because it sounds like his medicine ceremonies in the past were more hallucinatory in nature. I think this is a testament to the power and purity of Alonso´s use of the medicine, however. The disruptor was angry because he wasn´t tripping hard enough, which I think might have actually been the medicine he needed to bring him into a state where his dark side came out and he had an opportunity to integrate it within the ceremony in a way that he might not have expected.

In the end, it is surrender that is required, and surrendering to the heart, as I¨m sure many of you know, can be very painful, because our wounds must be faced, and felt again sometimes. I feel so grateful and blessed by the beings that helped me in the ceremony and for all the humans in the room with me, and grateful for having the strength to go back for another ceremony.

Many of you who read this appeared to me in the ceremony, everyone shining and in a state of love and grace, and I prayed for all of you and for the earth who allows us to walk on her belly, and for my Uncle, who has crossed over into the stars, too. I saw his face so clearly as he was in life and felt his peace and contentment with wherever he is. I thank all of you for journeying with me and look forward to deepening our connections as we all grow into what we need to be.

Las Turistas

2008-01-19T13:03:00.000-05:00

I´ve been a bit of a tourist lately. A friend from Block Island has arrived in Pisac and we´ve been touring the Sacred Valley sites, which is good since I was getting in a bit of a rut here in Pisac. Paz y Luz is great, but it is hard for me to get in a creative flow living around people--my issue--I know that if I really want to create then I will raise my fear and move myself to a place where I can get in the flow that writing requires. I have been considering my willingness to live in this repressed state, wondering what it is inside me that is willing to tolerate the very uncomfortable feelings that arise when I don´t create. Is it that I don´t believe in myself enough? Could it be that I am scared of where my creativity will take me? The rut is safe. It is an easy place to be. Could it also be a message that a part of me is still willing to sacrifice myself for others by being too accomodating to their needs? Probably it is all of these things and definitely I should get out of my head and just be for awhile....

Which is why it is good to have Becky here, as she motivated me to change my scenery and shift my mood. We went to Cusco last week, in the car with Gray and Eva. There aren´t a lot of priate cars here, mostly buses and taxis, so it was fun to drive around in a big American SUV. Cusco is an international cultural tourism oasis, which means it can either be fun or horrible, depending on how you choose to see it. My first time in the city I was enchanted by the way it looked, but horrified by the hardsell to the tourists. Everything from fingerpuppets to massages. The second time, with three friends, I like the city more. We ran errands for Paz y Luz and bought cheap bootleg cds an ate Indian food and walked up to San Blas to eat dark chocolate--hard to find here as all the Peruvians seem to eat is milk chocolate.

A couple of days later Becky and I traveled down the valley to Ollayantaytambo, a very quaint town off the carretera that is still built on its Inka foundations. Becky toured the ruins which required a ticket, while I, who had alreay been there, walked around the quiet streets of the town, different from Pisac, which is all adobe or concrete and built by the Spanish as a grid. On the far side of the town, opposite the main ruins, I noticed a little sign pointing up to a path that ascened up toward another set of ruins, which I followed and had to myself high above the town. I sat on the ramparts and watched the people below and the waterfall pouring through the town towared the Rio Urabamba and felt quite content and impressed with myself for climbing up there, although I am finding the altitude much easier to handle.

Afterwards Becky and I met and had lunch at The Two Hearts Cafe, run by a 76 English woman who arrived in Peru with two suitcases and hasn´t left. She runs the cafe as a charity to help indigenous women and children in the area. She runs a kindergarten and a health program, which seems to be sorely needed. According to doctors who recently visited the school, all of the children were malnourished and all had parasites due to drinking infected water, and many of the women had severe gynecological problems. I have particularly felt the difficulty of the womens´s lives here. For all the talk about Pachamama here (mother earth), the women are treated like work animals and seem exhausted and from what I can see, not very happy, although this of course, is my perception and not necessarily true. The talk of Pachamama is definitely for the tourists sake and not embodied in the daily life of the people who I have seen, which is also evidenced in the lack of respect for the earth seen everywhere in the form of garbage in the rivers and sewage emptied into the sacred river. Becky witnessed a dead dog being thrown in the river the earth the other day.

I am aware that we from the ¨civilized¨nations have infected this culture with this disease, but this does not mean that we cannot all be held accountable for choosing a different way of relating to the earth. The infected and the spreader of the disease are in a relationship together, much the same as an alcoholic and a co-dependent. We all work together to create our individual realities an collective lives with every choice we make. Perhaps our task as the infector is to show(not tell) the infected how to live in harmony, thus spreading a new way to live, while at the same time learning from those we have infected, cocreating through the intellect and the heart, as the prophecy of the eagle and condor says we must do to reestablish harmony on earth.

The pain of the women was really brought home hard to us yesterday as we drove down from the Inka ruins of Moray, on the rolling mustard yellow plains above Urubamba. Once again in the giant SUV, we stopped to pick up an old Indian woman who flagged us down for a ride. In obvious pain, she was on her way to Urubamba below to have her last tooth pulled. She could barely speak Spanish, just Quechua, and when she showed us her tooth to explain what was wrong she started crying. Her pain and exhausting was overwhelming in the backseat with Becky and me. She was so tiny in her skirts and bowler hat, her face etched deep with wrinkles. Her whole presence just hurt so much. She kept wiping her eyes with the hem of her skirt an when Becky offered her a sip from her water bottle she very carefully wiped her mouth on her skirt first. We dropped her off halfway down with a Qyechua woman who said she would get her down to Urubamba as we were going on the salt mines at Salinas, but after that it was hard to enjoy anything, and I was having a hard time being in that big car with a bunch of chattering, well meaning people...I don´t know if it is that I am too sensitive, but I just kept sinking and sinking and not wanting to be anywhere, letting the past affect the present, but maybe I was being called so strongly to change my present reality that I could not, and should not have resisted this feelings-

Which sums up how I am feeling in general after being a self-indulgent tourist for a few days. If I am going to be here as a privileged person, at least materially, I have to work, to follow the call of my heart with discipline, whatever that call may be. I thought this meant I had to volunteer at an orphanage, or some such thing, but really when I feel my heart the call is to write, even if no one reads what I am writing. It is my call, the way to open my heart to be of greater service, and I feel such gratitue that I am in a position to be able to follow this calling, a feeling magnified by seeing how most of the women live in this country. Who knows what goes unexpressed in the lives of the women, and the men, in this country? I know from Peruko how hard it is to be different, how hard it was for him to follow the call of his soul to be an artist in a survival culture, and I admire him even more seeing where he came from.

So there are mountains to climb and rivers to praise, and there is work to do on the physical and spiritual planes. Both are vital if we want to live in harmony.

Day by Day

2008-01-11T14:18:00.000-05:00

Lest you think my life in Peru consists only of scaling mountains and drinking medicine, I must reveal that most of the time I am simply enjoying the pleasures of being human in a beautiful place, surrounded by sympathetic and inspiring people who share a similar desire to explore the depths of our souls, as well as living in cooperation. Currently at Paz y Luz, there is only Eva, my incredible mountaineering Swedish friend, who at the age of 53, after giving birth to 6 children, put me to shame on our hike to Viacha--although she is far too kind to look at it that way. She just keeps telling me it is just that I am not used to the altitude, and Grey, from California, who is the new manager now that the owner has gone on a two month vacation to Argentina. The three of us have formed quite a little family already, sharing food and shopping duties, and enjoying each others company around the fire at night. It is wonderful to be around such positive people who share similar desires, something which has been lacking for me for a long time on Block Island as I have moved through letting go of my various addictions, first physical, then mental and emotional.

So daily life is full of ease and pleasure, although I can feel the mystical in it all. It has been interesting feeling the effects of ayahuasca on my thoughts and feelings since the ceremony eleven days ago. For example, it was very clear that ayahuasca wanted me to write that last blog describing the ceremony. However, I dont feel possessed by any entities. It is more like I have formed a relationship of mutual beneficence with the plant. It helped me with my need, which was to open my heart unconditionally to the experience of being human, and I in turn help it by spreading its message of forgiveness through my words and by embodying this quality. Of course it is a constant process. I am far from perfect, but feel myself moving into greater awareness of the pattern of my own thoughts everyday more and more, noticing how my judgments limit me, becoming aware of who or what irritates me and wondering what the underlying reason for these feelings are, seeing everything as an opportunity to grow.

One of the things that has been difficult has been reconciling the knowledge I have received of this spirit within the earth, a spirit of the underworld, where the past lives, with the energy I have been working with through the Ascended Masters for the past two years. This energy comes down from spirit, not from below, and is far different in vibration than the earth energy. Ive been wondering how they can all coexist, they seem so alien, but I know from my experience, that ayahuasca, too, leads to love, so I am following that love as it unfolds in such a beautiful and now, gentle, remembering. I have been very drawn to stones. I bought a turquoise ball and rose quartz egg, and I have my Manissees hand tools from Block Island with me, and when I hold them, I feel their energy working on me in even more powerful ways than before. In the past, I wanted to know what was happening when I held stones. Now, I am just grateful that something is happening. This shift feels like such a relief==not to long for something more all the time. Whatever comes to me is what I am supposed to know, although I will keep fulfilling my calling by working, by developing my own medicine powers in order to serve....

Yesterday I made sopa de quinoa, walking out into the rain to pick chard and cilantro and parsley from the garden. The mud here is thick and red and I had to scrape it off on the grass, and even then it didnt all come off so that I had adobe feet when it dried. Eva and I walked into town to buy fruit and bread and fresh yogurt, and stopped to chat with Francisco, a shopkeeper here who makes flutes and is an incredible musician. He is going to custom make a quena for me with a low tone, and he and I are going to trade music for English lessons. The quena is quite difficult to play as the mouthpiece is totally different to the bamboo flute that I now play, but Francisco assures me I will be able to learn if I practice, which is true of everything I suppose. He is quite suave and infatuated with Eva, which isnt so great since his wife just gave birth to their fourth child three weeks ago. He told her that he heard Swedish women were legendary lovers and wanted to know if she was interested in a dalliance with him. Fortunately he does not seem interested in a dalliance with me. Eva says she and her friends have goddess names for themselves back home, and she is Aphrodite, which makes sense considering the sexual attention she attracts. I suppose I connect most with the goddesses of the underworld==Persephone, Isis, Ishtar. Not so many are interested in dallying with death and the transformation it requires, which is just fine by me. I prefer to pass unnoticed until I choose.

A friend from Block Island just wrote and said she is actually in Pisac right now. Seems so strange and unreal. Off to find her now, and I wish you all well. I just looked at the new site for the Block Island Poetry Project, which is going to be extraordinary this year. Have a look at the site www.bipoetryproject.com, and I will see you there in April.

Ayahuasca Medicina

2008-01-06T08:30:00.000-05:00

Ayahuasca..........the name has the sound of serpent within it, a creature of beauty and ancient, instinctive terror for many, a poisonous creature who can kill, who can wrap its body around ours and strangle until their is no air left in our lungs, who is total annihilation......a creature who waits under rocks, who blends in with the trees, a creature who is sliding toward you right now in the long grass or in the muddy brown water, a creature that wants you.

Ayahuasca is known as the vine of souls, the vine of death. It is a potent medicine from Amazonia that has been used by jungle shamans as a medicine to heal the soul. Ayuahasca is a spirit that speaks through a plant. Ayuahasca is the medicine of forgiveness deeply rooted in the consciousness of the earth, the underworld where our past wounds are stored until we retrieve them, forgiving those who wound us, forgiving ourselves for being wounded, forgiving the wound because we know that it was necessary for us to realize we are whole. Ayahuasca has been calling me for several years now. Calling me to shed my skin. Calling me to reveal my shining beauty in the sun on a warm, flat rock, unafraid to be seen, calling me to awaken the serpent energy within to connect earth and spirit in the middle realm of my body. Ayahuasca, ayahuasca, ayahuasca......the name a rattle on the mountain, the hiss of a forked tongue, a shaman's rattle in a round, dark room.

I wanted to make this connection. I needed to make this connection. I moved toward this connection with instinct and inevitability like a river winding its way through thousands of miles of dense green jungle to the open air of the light anointed ocean. But I was afraid of ayahuasca, afraid to alter my consciousness because my beloved guide Maria had advised me that it was dangerous to do so, and I had stopped using substances to alter myself five years ago. No alcohol, no marijuana, no LSD, no mushrooms, and no real desire for any of them but ayahuasca, the vine of the soul, the medicine of forgiveness calling me to South America, to the land of the emerald hummingbirds to shed my skin once again.

But I have grown much stronger in the past five years through my work with Maria, both less and more vulnerable. Less vulnerable to having my consciousness overtaken by other people or entities, more vulnerable in the sense that my heart has grown deeper. I have more compassion for myself and others, and more clarity. I knew that it was my heart that was calling me to ayahuasca, not my mind, which I have seen is often the case with people who are not content with ordinary consciousness. They become spiritual thrill seekers, "trippers" who live for the next vision, and if they are not careful, they lose pieces of their soul bit by bit. It is necessary to have a strong container, a guide, a round basket to hold the snake while the music to awaken it gently enters the dark space with an invitation to dance, the energy slowly building to the moment we all want to know, the moment of the birth of our soul, the moment where the Milky Way is born, the moment where the universe uncoils itself, and the moment when we drop through the black hole in the center of our galaxy, the relief of death, the reassurance we know in our bones of its aweson and utter beauty.

I found the container through a friend in the U.S. His name was Alonso del Rio, an ayahuascero who I knew I could trust to guide me as soon as I heard his beautiful songs on a CD I bought from my friend, who frequently journeys to Peru to work with Alonso. On New Year's Eve I made my way to his home in a gulch not far from Pisac, where a waterfall pours off the mountain in a great torrent, cleansing and blessing the land and its people in a continual flow. At six o'clock I took my place in the round adobe room with a conical thatched roof. There were close to forty of us. A huge number for a ceremony. There was an altar built of adobe in the center of the room lit by candles. One by one we prayed our heart's desire and walked toward Alonso and knelt, who handed us a small glass of the medicine with reverence. I drank it, nervous, and walked back to my seat to lean back against the earthen wall. When everyone was done the doors were closed and the candles were blown out. We were in total darkness with nothing to hold onto, but we had Alonso's songs, which permeated the dark as the spirit began to wind through my blood and cells.

I had prepared my body by eating very little for four days before the ceremony, and for fasting on the actual day. Ayahuasca is a purgative. Its medicine works by causing one to purge negativity, or shadow energy. Sometimes this happens on a physical level. I was afraid of throwing up, of losing control of my body. We were each given a little bucket which I set in front of my feet to vomit in if the need arose. I was afraid, but sure I would not vomit. I would not lose control.

My intention was to open to being fully human and grounded in the earth. To experience unconditional love for the state of being human and for all humans themselves, something which I have struggled with my whole life as a sensitive person who has so keenly felt the imbalance and sickness of our world.

Alonso's guitar and voice sang his heart and the hearts of us all, and the hearts of the hummingbird and of the waterfall. He sang of shattered souls and of broken mirrors, and within his voice was the promise that all could once again be whole. I felt myself beginning to lose control, the medicine rushing through me like lightning, like a locomotive, something so strong I knew I could never control it and I began to panic a little, and wonder why I had done this to myself. I could hear, very close by, in my left ear, the voice of a very ancient woman speaking in a language I did not know, and then...... I was somewhere else, on the other side, but still in the same room, listening to Alonso sing and feeling the journeys of everyone around me. I felt peaceful, no longer afraid, and I realized I had thrown up on myself, but it was only the ayahuasca, a reassuring wetness on my chin that let me know I was still human.

To be human, that it was I had asked for. For the rest of the ceremony I sat in the dark filled with love, allowing Alonso's songs to soften my heart until I had no needs left to be fulfilled. I could tell the people around me were having far different journeys, seeing the visions I had expected to see, and my disappointment faded, too. After about two hours, Alonso lit a sparkler and said Happy New Year to everyone! The light was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, until his wife relit the candles, until the fire in the center of the room was kindled and we could see each other in the circle, cleansed, having forgiven whatever each one of us needed to become a little more whole. The music continued, more from Alonso, and from the people in the circle. Gentle drums and flutes, a song from Sweden, laughing songs, birdsongs, whalesongs, humansongs. I have never been so content in my life.

As I listened to the songs, more clear and lucid than I had ever been in my life when I had expected to be more confused, I felt so glad that I had overcome my fear and come to this ceremony, and so proud of myself for asking what was in my heart, instead of what my mind wanted, which was more knowledge. I felt an ancient, tribal connection to everyone in the room and remembered what it felt like to be at peace with myself and the earth, remembered what it felt like to have knowledge of the whole world without leaving the safety of one room because I was connected to everything outside of it, as were all those inside with me connected to all of creation. I felt such love for everyone there, and a little shy in my loving, like a young deer tentatively walking out into a field from the cover of the forest, called by the love within her own body.

Maybe I am not one who is meant to see visions, but to feel them instead, and to embody them in all of my actions from taking a breath to buying bread or smiling at a stranger when I walk down a street I don't know. I slowly allowed my body to sink down onto and into the packed earth floor as the circle began to grow larger, people walking out into the night, heading for home. My friend who had told me about Alonso was there that night, but we couldn't speak or make eye contact as he was on a month long retreat, but he knew I was there, and we fell asleep on the ground next to each other in the womb of the mother, and I felt his peace become a part of the peace that I was, and always will be, even if I forget. Ayahuasca, medicine of forgiveness, vine of our soul.

There are many here in Pisac and its environs who drink ayahuasca regularly, and who were ready for the next ceremony, and there were those more experienced than I who said to just listen if ayahuasca was calling me, then I would know when the time was right to drink again. I felt right afterwards that I did not want to drink again soon, maybe never, and slipped back into the fears of the mind right away, wondering if it was my fear that was stopping me, my own self doubt that has stopped me for so long from wrapping myself in the mantle of power that will allow me to be of best service to the world, a power that comes from the heart, truly earned. For about a week I went through these ups and downs, wondering if I wasn't strong enough, questioning why I didn't see visions, connecting with some of the beautiful people in the ceremony when I saw them around town, all the time calling on my own divinity to guide me to make the right choice. Last night I knew that it was not necessary for me to drink ayahuasca again right now, but I was also told that I could work with the plant in the spirit realm, that I didn't have to go through the violence of the physical ingesting of the plant in order to go deeper into my soul. I realized that I have already done so much work in the lower realm, or underworld, with Maria, much more than I know, and was able to see that many of those who needed to drink on a regular basis were doing the work that I had done with her in this manner, putting back together the lost pieces of their souls. I also received an invitation from ayahuasca to transmute the energy of the earth, to allow the plant to use me as an instrument to purify the darkness which is no longer needed in such great measure on earth because we are entering a time where we will no longer need to learn through contrasts, to return it home to the light.

We have learned so much from the darkness, but it is time to release this way of being on earth. We no longer need to suffer or sacrifice to learn. This does not mean we don't have to work, only that, if we are in alignment with our souls, that the work will be a pleasure, something that feeds us and others as well. My work today is to write these words to you, to share the medicine of forgiveness and the peace in my heart, and to show you my vulnerability, the tenderness inside me for each one of you, my compassion for myself, my ability to love my wounds and yours, my intention to embody the unconditional love that Jesus seeded on Earth two thousand years ago, which if flowering now within all of us. We no longer need a savior, we are the light, the flaming heart, the waters of forgiveness, the air beneath the wings of the eagle, all contained within these bodies whose feet are welcomed by the giving and forgiving Earth.

Ayahuasca, allow me to continue to let go with grace, to shine, to know, to love, to be an ambassador of peace. Mitakeye Oasin.....To All My Relations. I honor you. I love you. I am you.

Voyage to Viacha

2008-01-05T14:36:00.000-05:00

Hi Everyone,

So much has happened since I left only a month ago for Peru. I miss you all and thought I would write a little about what I have seen and experienced here so as to share with you and to process all I am learning about a very different way of life.

I am now in Pisac, a small village of about 2,000 people a little less than an hour from Cusco. Pisac is in the sacred valley of the Incas, carved out of the spectacular green Andes by the Rio Urabamba, and there are spectacular Inka ruins above the town.

Anyway, I got the idea when I was on top of the ruins that I wanted to visit the tiny Quechua village I saw in the distance across the air on top of another mountain. I was hiking down (in the dark without a flashlight, another story) I could hear people blowing on conch shells high above us and became even more determined to visit.

A couple of days later my new friend Eva told me she had met a man in town who lived in one of those villages and invited us to stay there for a night with his family. Eva´s friend Otarunga (Jaguar!) who owns a small and very special store in town featuring shamanistic products told us we must bring gifts for the family and that we could pay them by buying their handicrafts when we got there. He told us we should bring flour, sugar, oil, candy for the kids, and a lot of coca to pass out to everyone we met.

We set out early in the morning with heavy backpacks for our rendezvous with Saturnino, but he was not there. Otarungo informed us that this was normal, not for him, but for people in general in Peru, so we decided to start hiking up the trail toward Viacha ourselves. About 15 minutes up we ran into Saturnino and his son Freddy on their way down to meet us so we all turned around and started hiking up again. I figured the hike would take us about an hour and that I would have no problem at all, even with my heavy backpack, but as I am learning quickly, the distances in teh mountains are far greater because you can´t get there in a straight line, but have to switchback across the mountains and that the trails wind around and around until you can no longer see where you started or where you think you are going! Also, the Peruanas always underestimate how far distances are. They either really want our money, or don´t realize how hard it is for us who are not born in these mountains to hike the way they do.

Pisac is at 10,000 feet, the ruins at 11,000. Once we got to the height of the ruins I started having a hard time breathing. We stopped at a little hut where Saturnino´s father lived, totally alone, with a burro tied up in the hard next to the house. All the houses are adobe with thatched roofs in the mountains. The inside was a total hovel littered with garbage, and I will have to admit that I was horrified that he lived there. We gave him a fat bag of coca leaves which seemed to make him happy, but he seemed a very unexpressive person. WE could only tell he was happy because he began shoving handfuls into his mouth. I figured since we had reached his father´s hut that Viacha, Saturnino´s village wasn´t much farther, which Saturnino and Freddy confirmed. However, not much farther to them, was much much farther to me, who found it increasingly harder to breathe as we ascended. Also, it began to rain quite hard and the paths, which are always rocky and uneven became slippery. I discovered that the best thing to do was not to look at anything but the path, definitely not down! I was breathing so hard I lost all pride, my breath so loud little Freddy became concerned for me and wouldn´t leave my side. I don´´t think he had any concept of altitude sickness and thought I was having a heart attack. We stopped a lot and they showed us many medicinal plants along the way, and finally Saturnino said he would carry my pack. I refused at first because he was carrying a pack, too, but he said he was used to carrying very heavy loads, especially since he was a porter on the Inka trail, and he was not exaggerating, for he seemed to have no problem at all with the load. Eva, who has been here longer than me, had no problems with the altitude, or so I told myself! On a side note, Saturnino told us that the work conditions of the porters on the Inka trail are very poor. Very little food or sleep and terrible pay, so if any of you who read this ever go on the trail, please remember to tip the porters as generously as Saturnino treated us.

Up and up, we walked, far past the original villages I saw from the Pisac ruins. It got rainier and much colder. Even without a pack I could barely walk for about the last hour of teh three hour trip. I had to literally go one step at a time, getting lost in the rocks and the plants and just wishing we would get there and it would all be over!

Finally, we reached the village of Viacha. Freddy had run ahead and told his mother Luisa we were coming. The house was a bit of a shock. I knew they were poor, but to be inside a very poor person´s house is different than looking at it from outside, which has been hard enough for me in Peru. The house was about the size of a small cottage, with two semi-walls dividing kitchen and two other areas. We went into the kitchen and unpacked our gifts and met Freddy´s little brothers Javier and Alex, who made a mad grab for the lollipops and stared at us in utter amazement. It turns out we were the first people to ever visit their house! I don´t think the little ones spoke much Spanish, just Quechua. They were very shy, unlike Freddy who was quite an extraordinary person, I could tell. He had one of those personalities that would flower anywhere, I think, bright and funny and so kind, as was the entire family.

The kitchen was also the home of 15 cuy, or guinea pigs who scrambled all over the floor and competed for space by the hearth with a couple of cats and two lambs. We drank mate de coca and they made us a delicious thick soup with vegetables and beans and we warmed up a little before exploring their beautiful garden and the plain where they lived. Freddy was thrilled to show us the plants he knew and picked munu for us to make tea with (mint) and told us that tomorrow he would take us up even further to the lakes at the very top of the mountains. The views were absolutely spectacular. We could see many lush green mountains as far as the eye could see, with mist weaving in and out of them. The clouds were just above our heads! I think we were at about 14,000 ft.

After dinner Saturnino played his flute and Freddy accompanied him on a drum made out of coke bottle. When it was time for bed, they tried to give us two beds for ourselves, but considering their were only three total for the seven of us, we refused. Eva and I took one bed, a twin, the three boys another twin, and Saturnino and Luisa the other. I was glad to sleep with Eva as it was very cold. I kept hoping that we were the only ones who felt the cold because we were´n´t used to it, but they were cold, too, because they huddled up to the fire shivering, especially the two little boys. I kept wondering why they didn´t build another fireplace in the sleeping room. It didn´t seem like it would be expensive, since everything is built with adobe from the mud around them. Maybe they could only use firewood to cook with, as there were no trees around except for some eucalyptus further down the mountain. I don´t know, but it seems to me that many of the people are somewhat defeated by their poverty and the legacy of violence they experienced at the hands of the conquistadores, combined with the current racism they experience now. I can see how much of an American I am in my solution oriented way of thinking, in my belief that there is always a creative solution to any problem, and also how privileged I am to be white and American, even though I am at the bottom of the economic scale in the U.S., it is by choice, not because I have no choices or education.

Needless to say, it was very hard to sleep, accustomed as I am to comfort and privacy. Even worse was the fear that I would have to go to the bathroom in the night, which would require a trip out to the muddy yard in the pitch black darkness, in the rain. When Eva asked where the bathroom Freddy pointed to the yard. We thought he was joking at first, but then realized he was not. I would have been fine with an outhouse, or even a hole in the ground, but they really did go wherever they wanted, and no one used toilet paper as far as I could tell. Actually, I don´t think it was a common thing for anyone to ever remove their clothes. I understand now why the women always wear skirts.

In the morning, Freddy, Eva and I headed up towards the lakes. I, however, knew that I could not make it, and told them to go on ahead. I was exhausted and needed to be alone. I fell asleep on the ground and rested finally and woke up to the most beautiful silence. I don´t think I have ever been somewhere so quiet in my life. Even the cries of the burros and sheep seemed a part of the silence. I walked up to some great rocks risng out of the groudn and watched the animals walk up the hill toward me, slowly grazing. Llamas, alpacas, sheep, and burros. A woman shepherd came by with a baby on her back and another child in tow, spinning wool in her hands as she followed them up the mountain. She seemed shocked to see me. I really do believe we were the first foreigners to come to Viacha. I was feeling so sad there. I don´t know if it was the altitude or the lives of our new friends, but it hit me strongly. They live such a hard time. Saturnino and Freddy walk all the way to Pisac and back every day to work and hardly make any money. I turned belly down to the earth and asked Pachamama to absorb my sadness as fertilizer, as I read the Quero shamans advise, and I really felt a surge of energy move through me as I lay there. After awhile Eva and Freddy came down from the lake and we left for Pisac after buying some beautiful bags and mantas and belts they had made. They invited us back for Carnival in a month to dance with them, but I honestly don´t know if I have it in me emotionally to go there again. It was just so sad and hard to be there, which I think is the case because they seem to know hard their lives are, too.

I forgot to write that Eva and I became godmothers to Freddy and Alex! There is an Inkan custom that when visitor comes to the house they must cut the hair of the children and give gifts (now a little money) for their future and education. I cut Freddy´s hair and Eva Alex´s with some very bad scissors and the hair was put on a plate with many flowers and 10 soles each (three dollars) and wrapped in a manta. The children were so thrilled and I really did feel like Freddy´s relation afterwards. He and his sister who was so shy I never learned her name walked us back to Pisac, which was almost as hard as walking up because of the leg strength required, although this time I could breathe. The sister picked handfuls of munu for us the whole way down so that when we stumbled into town we had it stuffed in all our pockets and smelled quite fragrant!

It was an incredible, eye opening, and most of all heart expanding experience and I feel such a combination of emotions when I think of it all. Gratitude and sadness, and an awareness of how fortunate I am, and of how much I desire to be comfortable. I realized I am not as strong as I thought I was, which is good to know. I have so many other thoughts and reflections about this experience, but am tired of looking at this screen now. Perhaps if some of you write me back, either privately or on this blog, I can discuss more, but for now I say I miss you all. Suerte! Jen

How to Heal Toxic Thoughts, by Sandra Ingerman

2007-11-16T12:10:00.000-05:00

I thank Sandra Ingerman for sending me a copy of her excellent book, How To Heal Toxic Thoughts, to review. As many of you know, I have undergone a huge transition over the past several years. At the core of this transition is healing the toxic thoughts that were limiting me from being content with who I am, from loving myself, and from fully participating in the joy of creation. I was fortunate (and still am) to have a wonderful guide in my life, but for those of you who don't, I recommend this book.

The especially great thing about Ingerman's book is that it is so simple. So many self-help books are overly complicated and give support to the illusion that we must go through years of hard work and suffering in order to come back into balance. I have found that many spiritual texts from the past operate the same way. In the old paradigm, knowledge of our divinity was hidden in an esoteric way for the "true" seeker. We are fortunate to live in a time when this is no longer the case. The truth of our existence is available to all. In fact, it is our moral obligation to recognize this truth within ourselves, and, as Ingerman writes, to shine this truth outwards in every-widening circles. The beginning of our healing our planet is to heal ourselves.

I send you all love and gratitude on our shared journey.

Manifest Manisses

2007-02-14T15:14:00.001-05:00

Manifest Manisses

Manifest Manisses envisions an island culture based on sustainable values and the cultivation of joy. A heart-centered, visionary place where we use the power of our collective intentions to create abundance and radiant health for all who dwell on Block Island--people, plants and animals.

Our hope is that our embodied vision will have a ripple effect, moving through all who set foot on Block Island, spreading our message of positive affirmation of life across the entire globe, just as the waters of the ocean touch every shore.

We will use our collective will to transmute the destructive energies that have poisoned our land and bodies, remembering that we are created of these elements. In our remembering, we will awaken others.

Manifest Manisses knows that fear is a tool to open our hearts further to love, and embraces fear, giving thanks for the lessons being offered.

We know we are the creators of physical reality, the custodians of Earth, and take responsibility for our individual and collective creations.

Manifest Manisses adopts a position of non-judgment, knowing that every contribution is important and essential to growth--each one of us is a mirror for the other--we are all one, and the more clear we become about this, the more clear our reflections will be. Our creations will radiate Source energy as we remember our higher purpose here on earth as individuals and as a species, preparing to become multidimensional beings able to access more levels of reality that will enable us to lead richer lives, founded in love for ourselves and all of creation.

Manifest Manisses is dedicated to helping everyone uncover their sou’s purpose and channeling that purpose for the greater good of all beings.

We celebrate our return to awareness and welcome the joy to be had in every moment as we walk through our fears into fields of praise, waves of love and gratitude moving through the water that surrounds us, and into the air as it evaporates. With every sip we take, we give thanks.

Manifest Manisses invites all who are ready to remember into our circle with open hearts, grateful for the gift of life. Dedicated to the moment, we sink into the earth, lift our eyes to the sky. We know we that heaven on earth exists right here, right now. We remember our own divinity and give thanks.

Musings on Abundance

2006-12-07T16:19:00.000-05:00

I'm in a funny state, really believing in the law of attraction, that I, through my thoughts and feelings, am the creator of my reality, but unsatisfied with what I am creating. It is winter on Block Island and I am once again broke and without prospects. I am in a different state than in any of my other 9 winters here in that I have lots of enthusiasm and ideas of what I have to offer the community, except that nobody out here is interested. Well, a few are interested, but they are not willing to pay me for my efforts. Maybe it is not working out for me monetarily because our financial institutions are going to collapse soon, and I am being guided away from participating in capitalism so that I will be less affected when it fails. It really is a Catch-22--I am doing my best to feel abundance, but when it does not come my way I can't help but feel my lack, which keeps me in a state of non-abundance! It is exhausting, stressful and humiliating to be poor and I want to change this state, but it is hard when nothing around me supports my belief that I can change this state through the power of my intentions. I am searching for the block within myself that is keeping me from allowing abundance into my life, trying to come back to the moment over and over again by asking myself what my vibrational offering is on a moment to moment level. Do I want to vibrate stress and fear or love and hope? All I can do is keep trying and keep asking for guidance, I guess, but I will admit to being discouraged and feeling unsupported, for the most part, by my community. So I call my community to me now! Reveal yourselves to me! And I call the land to which I belong to call me.....

Give Me Liberty

2006-11-05T13:36:00.000-05:00

This is the first poem in my new book, Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary. www.lulu.com/jenlighty

Give Me Liberty

It began on a Saturday night
when I took what I wanted.
I was a drunk, so I had no problem
saying hi, you wanna come home with me?
I kept meaning to be a vegetarian,
but the food at the bar was free.
Barbecue ribs and buffalo chicken wings,
licking the preservatives off my fingers
by instinct. I've heard pigs will eat anything
that lies on the ground showing no sign of life.
It wasn't his fault.
I was just bored with everything.
I pushed him off and faced the wall.
It was finally ready to speak.
Yo, ho, ho, the wall laughed at me.
You brandish your drink like a buccaneer
from the seventeenth century,
when you've really been waiting
for the highwayman to sweep you off your feet.
You don't care where you are going
as long as it's at a gallop.
You think you are Cathy
sobbing on the moors of Wuthering Heights.
My sister Emily loved the moors.
Flowers brighter than the rose
Bloomed in the blackest heath for her;
out of a sullen hollow in the livid hillside
her mind could make an Eden.
She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights;
and not the least and best loved was--liberty.
I have wandered the moors of this island,
stripped bare and bleeding--
(really I was drunk and lost in the bushes
on my way home from a late night.)
How did I end up an outlaw,
hand cocked on hip,
brandishing a cutlass
at all who dared to look at me?
What did I seek in the shadows,
drawing violence toward me as if
there were no limits to what I could take?
For years I hid behind a can of beer,
wearing a coat of smoke I refused to shed,
even when it was hot enough
to melt the ice cubes
in my Stoli raz & cranberry.
I laughed too loud.
I thought my teeth flashed brazenly.
In the mirror that's behind every bar
the truth careened toward me.
The truth tied me to the stake.
When I reached the calm center
at the heart of every blaze,
I cut my own throat,
so I could finally speak.

New Book!

2006-11-04T13:20:00.000-05:00

Hello friends,

I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book of poems, Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary. Five years in the making, The Apocalypse Diary documents what I call my internal apocalypse--a process I went through, triggered by fear of a global apocalypse.

I dreamt a tsunami swept over Block Island. I felt the earth beneath me weep. I was haunted by the ghosts of the trees who once covered Block Island.

And I surrendered to my fear, letting go into it until there was nothing more to hold on to.

When I passed through, I found myself in a place of peace, and I am doing my best to stay there.

I have found that I am a "mover," someone who has to move physically to stay grounded and connected to Source energy. I discovered this through Toni Bergins' JourneyDance, which I first experienced at Kripalu. I fell so in love with JourneyDance that I became certified to teach it this past October! I am currently looking for the perfect spot to teach on Block Island and am confident it will appear soon. I am interested in teaching JourneyDance workshops anywhere they are needed, so contact me if you want to dance!

To order my new book go to www.lulu.com/jenlighty. I thank you for your support and hope you find sustenance from my journey! I love you all!

Jen

Shamanic Journeying

2006-05-31T11:00:00.000-04:00

I would like to recommend a book by Sandra Ingerman called Shamanic Journeying: Beginner's Guide. Ingerman addresses an issue that sometimes comes up in journeying--the idea that what you are experiencing is all in your head.

My shamanic teacher said this exact thing to me the first time I journeyed with her. She said that one of her recent students dismissed the places they went as being a product of the mind, therefore not real. This is the same thing people say about the psychedelic experience, which in my experience is simply contacting other dimensions of reality.

I have come to the point where I believe that the shamanic journey is just as "real" as traveling to another country like France, and probably actually has greater impact on the self and society than a trip in the material realm.

If we change our thoughts, we change our material reality. Shamanic journeying provides us with a tool to travel through time and into other dimensions to heal our individual and collective wounds.

What could be more important in this time of crisis on Earth?

Journey Home

2006-04-04T15:19:00.000-04:00

I went to New Mexico to the desert and all I wanted to do was walk by the blue green Rio Grande. The best thing about the desert is the smell of sage, and the houses made out of the earth. Low, brown houses who say we will all sink back into the earth some day. And Taos Mountain, sacred to the Pueblo Indians. I understand why they don't allow my people (Anglos) to set foot on it, but I wanted to. But after awhile of looking at it I realized I didn't need to walk up it to commune with it. It saw and knew everything about me.

When I came home I fell more in love with Block Island than ever. The peepers woke up from the mud while I was away and the robins are building their nests everywhere I look. And I saw a golden eagle soaring above the Hodge property when I was driving Georgia home the other day. I knew for certain, that right now, this is my place, and was grateful to finally have this knowledge.

This past weekend, while listening to the poet Marie Howe read, I felt my heart swelling, growing in joy instead of in pain. Thank you Marie. Thank you to everybody who has helped me on my journey home. May I return the love you have given me.

Reflections on Receiving

2006-03-04T13:31:00.000-05:00

I haven't written here lately. I haven't been motivated to do much lately, which has really been botheing me. Winter has traditionally been my most creative time of the year. Sometimes in summer I can't write at all because there is so much going on out here///so many social events and the money has to be earned and the ocean is so glorious who could stay away from it? Today after I finished writing I was in the shower and I realized in one spray that it was the feeling that writing gave me that was more important than what I created. I've always had a hard time of letting go of poems, books, etc., feeling I had to keep working on them to get them to a point of perfection where they can be read by others, hopefully published. I know people are always saying create just to create, don't worry about the result or what people will think, but we have been so conditioned to achieve that it is really hard to get beyond this as an intellectual construct and feel it,especially when one's ego identity becomes involved in what one is creating. Well today I did just this. I was jubilant when I finished writing and for a moment I thought how great what I was writing was and how I couldn't wait until this book was published, but then the water washed that thought down the drain and I felt all of a sdudden, dove back into the feeling. I can share this feeling now, people don't have to read what I wrote in order to know who I am, to know what's inside me, to see what I have created. What I have created is me wherever I go......and it's a feeling, not a book. And I don't have to be around people to communicate this feeling. I can share it with the gulls, with the waves, with my sofa, with dust molecules and mites, with whatever comes into my awareness--with California, with whales breaching off the coast of Maui! Alleluia I say! One of th egreatest sounds ever uttered! Wow. This is what happens when one lets go and receives....which is what my inability to do anything was trying to tell me. I usually associate not being able to act with being depressed, and beat myself up for not being strong and centered enough to resist the slough, but the other day I chose two Medicine Cards to see reflections of what I was receiving and giiving. In my left, I drew the black panther, reversed. In my right, beaver, reversed. I have felt very lonely lately (a normal state). I have felt for along time that I will be lonely as long as I resist being lonely, but when I saw that upside down panther in my left hand it all came together for me again as a feeling....panther signifies the mysteries of the void. Reversed, it means one is struggling against the void. I understood that. What I hadn't understood, is that the void is a blessed state--there is nothing to do, nothing to achieve. Exactly what I want. Being alone is the closest we come to being back in the Void! The beaver signifies activity, building. Reversed it means one is either not doing something one should do, or in my case, meaning one should stop trying to do. So I took a few days off from work and set my intention to receive. The earth was blanketed in a surprise snowstorm. I read and took baths and stretched like a cat on the blue rug. I felt grateful for the house I've been allowed to live in. I didn't try to do anything until yesterday when my friend Abby and I walked through Rodman's Hollow . The first humans to do so in the fluffy snow, but we were not the first to pass through the trails. We followed deer tracks and wondered about all the other tracks we saw--were they birds? Rats? Feral cats? Wondering at the secret life of the island we couldn't notice usually, too focused on our own minds to perceive.....and twice I saw an actual live rat scurrying off to the side to disappear in stone cracks. Amazing, to be able to disappear in a stone. Amazing, to finally receive, to feel, to mindfully walk and breathe.

2006-01-19T12:00:00.000-05:00

Excavation in Dreamtime

I. Chamber of Wounds

This time, the bird has black wings.
You’ve been following it for centuries,
a woman crawling
on numb hands and knees.
The sun rises every day,
and every night when it sets,
you beg it to stay.
You are always hungry,
but never stop to eat or drink.
You leave a trail of blood behind you,
but never stop to bandage your wounds.
Once you’re search had meaning,
now it’s as worthless as the moon,
a cold, dead body that no longer gives off heat.
You curse its glow, you know it’s
mocking you. Choking on dust,
shrapnel shoots from your eyes;
teardrops bomb craters in the desert.
You crawl past bodies leaking cold blood
on to the impassive ground.
Even the ground has
turned its back on you.
You never once gave it
a word of thanks.

Blood, which by day
pools red as sun’s rays,
trickles silver and self-contained
like mercury across the barren landscape.
Over time, the craters fill.
Poisoned, choking, marching
to the beat of your rattling bones,
you’ve made it to the edge of enemy territory
without drowning.
All you have to do now is drag
yourself across the border to be safe,
but when you reach the rim of the last crater
you look back--the bird with black wings
hovers above the surface of the blood lake
and lands on a dead tree shaped like a gibbet.
You see hanged men rotting at the crossroads.
You watch the black-winged bird pluck its eyes out,
two dull stones.

How can the heart go on beating?
How can we expect her to turn back
when she’s so close to relief?
The bird dives in.
Ripples scream across the surface of the lake.
She has no flesh left on her palms,
her knees are scraped bare like a
wind-pummeled mountain peak.
Now that her eyes, witness to the
rapes of a thousand mothers and the
deaths of a thousand sons
have been stolen, she wants to see.
Deep beneath the surface
the bird’s wings flap like fins.
She doesn’t hear taunt or plea
in its cawing, she hears a memory,
a severed limb calling out to its body.
She finally understands
why the heart has to break.

In the heart of every wound
a dream of a seed germinates.
This time, she feels everything,
but now pain is a bursting pod
rising up through the soil
that will open itself again to the sun,
a crimson poppy
which has already forgotten
its birth pangs.

II. Chamber of Contracts

You close your eyes.
The river is always the same,
the words always waiting.
Do you know what is written
on the walls of the tomb
where your broken heart waits?
Finally, you realize the crows
circling the dead tree
waiting in the field you pace
when you need to put your mind at ease
have been calling your name.
Lightning, a flaming arrow shot straight
from the center of a nightmare
pins you to the ground like a
butterfly in a specimen case.
For one second you see
you’ve always been asleep.
Who wrote the book of laws
by which you live out your allotted days,
the scholar writes in a dusty volume
that nobody thinks to read.
The question has been waiting
in the crook of the dead tree.
Your eyes open to the lies
that have led you to this place,
grasping for the banks
as the river sweeps you away.
You find yourself facedown in sand,
skin unmarked as snow at daybreak.
When you look at your reflection,
you don’t recognize your face.
The water is both clear and opaque,
shifting as you struggle with the
burden of centuries.
Only gravity gives weight,
the butterflies say.
The butterflies believe you can fly,
but for you, crawling’s the only way.
You grip the sand grains until your skin gleams,
polished by pain.
As the flock beats its wings
on the walls of the tomb, you don’t panic,
and you don’t wonder if there
will be enough air to breathe.
They are carving words on the walls
that will set you free.
Your lungs fan a flame so you can read:
Love Pain.
Only too well, you think.
Then you see yourself crawling
across the battlefields, wanting only
a jug of clean water to drink.
A wounded man reaches out to you.
Your enemy.
Blood pools around you,
its color leached, this bleak vision
etched in black and white.
You raise your knife to kill him--
but something makes you hesitate.
Blood from your wounds
staining the ground red again,
the earth quakes in grief.
You know if you don’t drop your knife
there will always be an enemy
laying in wait.

III. Chamber of Grace

This time I didn’t need to follow anybody.
I lay down in the river heedless of the cold,
not caring that rocks dug into my tender places.
I knew their flint could strike a fire in my bones
that would burn away the web binding me
to a body defined by drought, beyond tears,
a fire to cleanse the charred remains of a woman
who has lain in the dirt and been raped,
who has watched soldiers slash her son’s throat
then thunder away.
Tonight the wind carries homeless memories through
open French doors and offers them a place to sleep.
Lay down, I tell them. The sheets are clean.
Once, I thought the insects surrounding my house
were an army, a squadron about to invade.
Now they’re a chord plucked out on a harp
by a hand I can’t see. Or is it mine,
tracing an outline of sound on the edge of a cliff,
about to fall off into a swell that can’t be contained
within these black marks traveling across this page?
I am both underground and flying,
my wings are fins, and the secrets I’ve sought
opens to me like the lips of the cowry I found once
on an island I traveled to in search of words,
not realizing they were already inside me.
Now, not even an iridescent butterfly can
seduce me away from the sight of my three-year old self
spinning through a field of daisies.
When saltwater scours the goldenrod,
you’ll know it’s not the sweetness of honey you need,
but the bitter taste that can only be accepted through grace.
The outline of sound I traced on the edge is filled with
particles too small to be seen by the human eye.
They can only be felt.
Once felt, the body becomes free to accept
the soul’s need to stand at the edge and leap,
knowing space is not empty, but a web of light
waiting to catch us when we dare to fall.
The ghosts who haunted this poem at the beginning
have crossed over into the arms of patient angels
lowing us all to sleep.
The sheets are clean, a voice whispers.
It’s time to dream.

Lucid Dreams

2006-01-18T11:14:00.000-05:00

Seals dream on the rocks right outside my window. I have moved to Spring Street for three weeks to take care of Quincy and Noah, two feline friends. The house is only about 50 yards from the ocean. When I lay down at night it feels like I'm on a ship, and since the house is old, it feels like a seaworthy vessel that has weathered many storms. The seals on the rocks are a delight to behold as the sun dries their fur. I wish I could swim with them, but they have learned to be afraid of humans. For humans, seals help us in lucid dreaming. Do seals dream the same way we do? I have been thinking a lot lately about what animal consciousness is like? It is obvious that animals have ways of communicating that are different from ours. Anyone see March of the Penguins? When the father penguins come back and cry out to their chick--and the chick calls back--and they find each other out of hundreds of others who look the same. The narrator says the chicks and fathers identify each other by their particular call, but they all sounded the same to me. It is not the call that links them, but some other way of communicating that we can't recognize because we either have not developed it in ourselves or we have forgotten how to use it. My teacher had an interesting take on the penguins. She interpreted their role on earth as demonstrating to us how little we value the desire to love and have a family. We value these qualities so little that we have created a creature with our thought forms that has to go through so much just to do just that. I really recommend this film if you haven't seen it. It is not anthropomorphized at all. The feelings of love between the penguins are real--please see it if you haven't and remember to ask the animals you come in contact what they have to teach you. I read recently that when some animals dream, they go visit their home planet, reconnecting with their source. Do we dream the same way and just dont' recognize what we are seeing? It is all so fascinating. The more I let go the more I feel myself floating through space--the more funny things are, the more beautiful, and I feel gratitude to have reached this point where I am aware of being able to witness what's going on. What do the seals dream of?

Go Gratitude

2006-01-03T13:06:00.000-05:00

Last year we had a tsunami that destroyed many lives, this year we have the opportunity to experience a different wave. Join the experiment in spreading a wave of gratitude worldwide at www.gogratitude.com. The intent is to link one million people in love and gratitude in order to shift the energetic balance of the world from despair to hope. We can do it! Don't be scared by prophecies--they are only a blueprint of what could be. Nothing in the material world is irreversible. All we see is a reflection of our thought forms. If we alter our thoughts (which are reactions to our emotions) then we can alter the world.

Happy Birthday

2005-12-26T13:39:00.000-05:00

A year ago I awoke on my birthday to the announcement on the TV that a terrible tsunami had struck in the Indian Ocean, killing thousands of people. I remember feeling, since it occurred on my birthday, that it was connected to me in some special way--that I had something in particular to learn from it, although I guess you could say that we all had something to learn from it. At the time, I believed that cataclysmic earth changes were a result of our arrogance and indifference to the earth--the tsunami was a way for the earth to strike back at us in order to get our attention so that we would stop mistreating her before it was too late. By too late I mean, before she wiped us off her surface. I also saw the tsunami (and the New Orleans flood) as a cleansing of the energies of greed which have caused us to mistreat our planet. As they year progressed, I went through an "internal tsunami" which I have written about here on this blog. (posts are archived in April and May). This channeling of apocalyptic energy through my being was also a cleansing. I can now see that the earth was not, is not, and will not, strike back at us for mistreating her. It is we who are lashing out at ourselves through flood, flu, and hurricane. The cataclysms are thought forms--a product of how we feel about ourselves and what we have created. They are indeed a cleansing which we have called upon ourselves because somewhere beneath our confused and scared egos we know that we need it. However, they do not have to be cataclysmic and violent, as we have witnessed this year with the Asian tsunami, the Pakistan earthquake, and Hurricane Katrina. Until we break the cycle of war and violence upon ourselves, upon the earth, until we realize our oneness with all, the earth (ourselves) will continue to cleanse her/ourselves in cataclysmic ways. However, as soon as enough of us realize and feel in our hearts the bliss of no separation, the cleansing will be as peaceful as inhaling clean mountain air, as drinking water from a spring, as soaking in the sun on a white sand beach as the waves lap at your feet. A year ago I believed we were in control of nothing. Now I feel and know we have infinite potential to create our reality, and I rejoice that every day I am choosing to experience gratitude, pleasure, and joy. What a difference a year has made! The greatest transformation in my life.....thanks to all who have joined me on this journey. Namaste. I honor the light and dark with you. All that leads us to peace in our hearts, the center of the earth steadily beating.

The Light is Reborn

2005-12-21T16:08:00.000-05:00

Silent night, Holy night
All is calm, All is bright
Round yon virgin, mother and child
Holy infant, so tender and mild
Christ the savior is born
Christ the savior is born!

Today is the solstice.
The birth of the Sun King.
The rebirth of the sun in our hearts.
The birth of Christ in our hearts.
We are one--land and spirit, spinning in space.
I found a white feather in a field today with downy edges.
From a fledgling. A bird just learning to fly.
A white tailed deer leaped away through the brambles
and the chickadees chirped among the winterberries.
All is well. Peace in your heart on this holy day...
and always........

love, Whitewave

What The Moon Sees

2005-12-16T20:04:00.000-05:00

What The Moon Sees

Tonight, on every continent of this
war torn planet, there are still people
laying in wait for their enemies with guns, grenades,
knives, stones, bare hands, thoughts, words, feelings.
Terror reigns in dead-end allies, and behind walls,
both real and imaginary.
People still strap bombs to themselves
and board buses carrying schoolchildren, young lovers,
and old women tired from searching the city for bread and meat.

Tonight, on every continent of this
starving planet, millions of people went to bed
without enough to eat. Women shoo flies
from the lips of their dying children.
If they’re lucky, they fall into a dreamless sleep.
High in glass towers, some feast on
wild animals who may soon be extinct.
It's hard to believe they’re unaware of
what goes on down in the street.

Tonight, on every continent of this
overburdened planet, prophets of doom
dressed as anchormen cast fear in our hearts
in between commercials for frozen pot pies
and pills to improve our quality of life.
Bird flu, bombs, nuclear waste, they recite.
Not even money will keep you safe, they say,
but we still keep buying.
Mountains of garbage ring our doomed cities.

Tonight, on every continent of this
traumatized planet, there’s an ocean of pain,
but everyone’s denying the waves.
Some drown in bars, some sink to the bottom
with a needle plunged into their veins.
Some of us are so used to its texture
we can’t feel it scraping our skin raw, even when it bleeds.
We swim in the undertow, despite being warned it isn’t safe.
We stumble into dark allies to be beaten and raped.

Tonight, on every continent of this
laboring planet, some of us are beginning to see.
We take the boards off our windows and walk undefended
into enemy territory.
The moon calls us to the rooftops of our shell-shocked cities.
Face to face, we can’t tell friend from enemy.
Past and future fade away.
We turn to the sky and remember: a star, a child, wise men
kneeling with the beasts.

Providence Journal Article

2005-11-30T07:36:00.000-05:00

Poetry column: From the safe harbor of academia to the storm-tossed self
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, November 6, 2005 by Tom Chandler

The twisty road to the writing life has no guardrails. There are plenty of off-ramps but very little signage.
Jen Lighty has wanted to be a writer for as long as she can remember. She grew up in Connecticut, writing poems all through her childhood. After high school she still had the itch, but decided to pursue an academic career because it seemed safe.
So she went to George Washington University, where she earned a degree in English, and gave up writing poems because she had by now convinced herself she wanted to be an 18th-century scholar. Like most English majors, though, she realized she would need time and experience to find her true calling, and so traveled for a few years after college, living in Hawaii, New Orleans, Colorado and California.
Jen worked her way back toward poetry by enrolling in the Breadloaf School in Vermont, where she received a master's degree. She went on from there to Warren Wilson College's MFA program in poetry writing, but still felt unable to commit to a future of poverty and obscurity, which seemed to her the fate of contemporary poets who try to make a living outside of academia. She says now it was probably that she was more afraid of uncovering who she really was, that "poetry was the path to my soul, but I was afraid to walk down it."
She finally ended up spending a winter on Block Island, a place that had left an indelible impression on her since she had spent her first summer there at age 5. Jen has now been a full-time resident for nine years, and has at last come to see that Block Island has truly been her greatest teacher.
Since settling in, her poems and stories have appeared in such journals as The North American Review, Seneca Review and Birmingham Poetry Review. Her first collection of poems, Siren, was published in 2002.
Of her poem "Animal Speak," Jen had this to say:
"The events in the poem actually happened, and I wrote it at the beginning of what some would call a 'breakdown,' but which I (now that I am on the other side) call a 'breakthrough.'
"I came face-to-face with those deer in the poem, and lay in the sand beneath the fallen watchtower on the southwest corner of the island. This was the beginning of my spiritual emergence (not emergency). On that day, I surrendered to the island and feel that I have been a voice for this piece of land ever since."

"Animal Speak" was first published in Poet Lore.

Animal Speak
This could be the last full moon before the end of the world,
said the two deer who crossed my path last night.
When I came upon the buck and doe in the goldenrod haze of day,
they froze in my gaze.
Fear exploded like the cock pheasant rattling across the sky as I write.
If I had a gun, they'd be hanging from a tree
so their blood wouldn't stain their meat.
They had weeping willow legs,
their withers trembled like an earthquake.
In the not so distant, the hounds bayed.
With a bow and arrow I could have
pinned their hearts to the ground,
but a spring rose up through the clay at my feet.
An arrow flew from their eyes and sank into
the black hole in the center of mine.
I saw I had always been blind, and I knew
why I'd always been thirsty.
I pressed my stone heart to the ground and took a drink.
The clay was cool, cracked and worn away by wind and feet.
It knew better than anyone how to receive.
I gave the earth my shame.
All the arrows I had flung without thinking whom they would meet.
I asked the earth to punish me, but she said come this way.
The doe walked into the west, the buck followed.
Some of my teachers have led me astray,
but they were all leading me to these tracks on the beach,
the hoofprints that I followed,
knowing my life had finally found me.
All I had to do now was keep walking,
but the sand stung my face like a swarm of bees.
For hours I fell through the glass,
wading up to my knees, to my waist, to my ribs and lungs,
I knew my heart would break.
I finally lay down and asked the sand to bury me,
but I choked on the words, spitting out grains
because I still wanted to breathe.
I was blind now.
The wind pulled me to a fallen watchtower
where my ancestors had waited to be destroyed.
I heard the planes close in and submarines rise.
And when my ears were clogged with sand, I cried.
Even the wind had abandoned me.
I had thought my ancestors would greet me,
but there was nothing in that empty space.
Finality may be as unrecognizable as the sperm and egg
that set you upon this path in the first place.
Heaven is the first house you come upon,
after six hours of walking the edge of an island
scoured by waves.
You are shocked that heaven is lit by electric lights,
but you enter their orbit because by now
you'll accept any embrace.
So this is why they stand frozen -- the ache.
-- JEN LIGHTY

Reflections On Consensus

2005-11-22T12:06:00.000-05:00

Reflections On Consensus

by Jen Lighty

Consensus is a way of making a decision within a group that honors the individual contributions that each member has to make. It is process oriented, rather than focused on achieving a product or result at all costs.
Most of us who came of age in 20th century America have been raised in a society that values the product at all costs--whether it be chasing down a client, getting a big tip, achieving a perfect body, relationship or child--we tend to judge ourselves on winning, rather than on how we play the game. As you know, the most competitive players are usually the ones who win--those who come out on top.
We call this a hierarchy--a social system where people compete for their position on a vertical scale. Generally, the more dominant and aggressive traits of the human personality are the most valued, as they enable the person who possesses them to grab control and rise to the top. This behavior is often justified by comparing it to the animal kingdom. This attitude--that it is the fittest who survive and prosper, is one of the paradigms that shape our consensual reality. It is systemic in all aspects of our existence on earth. Not only does it reflect our attitude toward every aspect of our personal and public relationships, it mirrors the way we think about the earth--as something under our control, to be dominated and used.
Before I go into the problems with this mode of thought, I would like to identify it as just that--a way of thinking that is based on separation, a firm belief that the material world exists as something unchangeable outside ourselves. However, as discoveries in quantum physics have shown, consciousness can alter physical reality. If enough of us are able to feel and think a different way of being, than the physical world will reflect our thoughts, creating a new consensual reality. In other words, it is our choice. Do you want to live in a world where only the fittest survive, or in a world where everyone is allowed to flower without fear of being devoured by wild beasts?
Back to the problem. The problem with hierarchies is that they are not sustainable. They demand infallibility--when one weakens, one falls and looses one’s authority. When one can no longer perform, one is expendable. This way of thinking has been taken to its extreme. It reaches into all aspects of our consciousness, including the way we relate as a society to the earth. By constantly expecting the land to perform for us, we have exhausted its resources and created a situation where there now seems that there is not enough for all to share. This is a lie based on fear created by those who are invested in the hierarchical system! We have the choice to co-create new paradigms based on respect and sharing. When enough of us decide to do this, we will embody these values, and since our bodies are physically no different from the earth, it will change as well.
Consensus is a way for us to re-create ourselves based on mutual respect. It recognizes that we all have unique contributions to make, and that we all serve as mirrors for each other, enabling us to learn our own strengths and weaknesses as we go through the process of determining the best way to achieve our desired result. Above all, consensus is a way for us to recognize that we are here to learn from each other--that earth is a school--and that the emotions which arise when working in a group are the most important lessons. If we only value the qualities which enable us to most efficiently grab control and win (the capitalist model), then we risk losing the many opportunities to fully develop ourselves provided for us by working in a group.
My experience: I learned about consensus at Earth Activist Training, a program combining permaculture, energy work, and social activism. We worked in small groups on permaculture design projects using the consensus method.
In my experience, consensus can be frustrating and exhausting, but the rewards of learning about myself as I learned to listen to the needs of other people were far more rewarding than presenting our final product. Unless the group is really adept at self-organizing, a good facilitator definitely helps. Someone who can bring out the best in everyone. Accustomed to being overlooked in a hierarchy, quiet and shy people often don’t speak at all. It is the role of the facilitator to give them space to be heard, and to moderate the more dominant types without quelling their enthusiasm. A major part of facilitating (and of being a member of a group) is to look for what’s going on beneath the surface of what’s being said. This is where emotional wounds fester, wounds which have the potential to erupt at a later point, often making it difficult for the group to cohere enough to present the best that they can for the common good.
As a decisive person blessed with the ability to create an overall vision with ease, it was difficult for me to sit back and give the less decisive room to let their thoughts ramble where they needed to go. By sitting back and listening, I learned the value of patience, and the pleasure to be found in piecing the vision together from detail to detail. The experience can be likened to following the tracks of an unknown animal over the landscape one step at at time. When you finally discover what you’ve been following, the thrill and sense of satisfaction will be much greater than if one knew at the beginning.
Ego insecurities will most likely come out in consensus. I noticed in our group that most of us had been conditioned to want approval by the authority figures (although not by the teachers at EAT!). The fear that we would fail and not have a project that was good enough to present to the group hung over us the whole time and brought out the aspects of our personalities that needed refinement.
One other problem that can arise, is the inability to make a decision. I found that nobody in our group wanted to step on anyone’s toes. Nobody wanted to be seen as trying to grab power by finalizing everything. We had all internalized such negative messages about capitalism and the hierarchical models of organization that we suppressed our leadership abilities, and even our creativity to some extent. It is hard to flow with one’s creative energy others in the group are mulling over process points. This is where splitting into subgroups can be handy. Identify what people are best at and have them report back to the main group. The main thing really, is for everyone to just let go and recognize what they are best at, and for everyone in the group to realize that every task has equal value. Being able to locate paper and pens is just as important as being able to draw.
I found the mechanics of the process awkward and stifling--having to make proposals and then having to vote on each one before doing, but I could see how it was a necessary step in retraining a group of people who had been taught to forge ahead toward a goal no matter what the cost. Once I realized this, I was able to let go of my ego needs and enjoy the energy dynamics of the people I was privileged to work with.
Finally, when meltdowns occur, consider that these moments of uncontrolled emotion may be far more important than getting the project done. I’m not sure this happened very smoothly in the group I worked on--at least not right at the time they happened--although they were addressed afterwards in private. I think a little steamrolling may have occurred at the end when the group decided (without speaking the decision out loud) to just forge ahead despite the hurt feelings or frustrations of those who were still stuck emotionally. Maybe this was the action that needed to be taken for the greatest good--I’m not sure. In creatures like ants, who, from the human perspective, seem to work as a group mind with ease, the boundaries seem a lot more clearly defined. But we are not ants--we are humans, blessed with the gift of emotions. We get to choose whether or not we want to let go and fall into the arms of the universe, and if we do, we are able to see that nothing is out of order at all. We are always in the right place at the right time. It is in moments of realization like this, that compassion for others, and most importantly, for one’s self, is born. And in my case, gratitude for the lessons learned.

The Soul Gets To Choose

2005-11-16T17:35:00.000-05:00

Sacrifice leads to bliss...

Forgiveness is the path to unconditional love...

These are two of the dominant paradigms that have shaped human cultures all over the planet for the last four thousand years or so. Both of them imply that we live in a fallen world, that life on earth is a punishment for a sin against God, that because we sinned, we must be punished by learning through pain.

For example, I first felt unconditional love through being betrayed over and over again. Finally, after the most painful of all the betrayals, I realized my own role in creating the situation where I felt so much pain. This occurred because I was able to see beyond what my ego wanted for my life, and what my soul was trying to teach me. When the soul chooses to incarnate somewhere, it has to adapt to the rules of the domain where it appears--that is how it learns, how it becomes aware of itself (this is how I see it at least). On earth, as the ego experiences pain, it is giving the person the opportunity to make a choice: choose to realize that you attracted the experience of betrayal. When I realized this, my heart was filled with so much love for the person who betrayed me. I was able to see how I had been only using such a little part of my heart, keeping the rest safe because I didnt' trust in the divine plan of the universe. One can also choose to shut down, to sink into the pain until there is no separation between it and you. You embrace your identity as victim and your heart closes down. I don't know why I finally decided to realize that I was attracting the experiences of betrayal. I don't think there is a rational explanation. It was not an intellectual choice. I think my soul just knew that it was time for me to learn this lesson--divine intervention occurred, what we sometimes call grace.

Now to my next point, the one I am really excited about! I believe the two paradigms I listed at the beginning of this post are relics of the past. The energy on earth no longer supports them. We are now in a time where one does not have to sacrifice in order to experience bliss, and where one does not have to experience painful betrayals in order to experience unconditional love. Forgiveness is no longer a necessary part of the process because we will no longer be learning through pain. Although the world may look like it is falling apart, this is the last gasp of those who will not let go of the control they exert over others, a control based on fear, and on the paradigm that life on earth is one of suffering that will be redeemed in Heaven.

I don't have any facts or evidence to back this up, but my heart knows this is true, and I trust my feelings over anything else. Another thing I learned from being betrayed--one's feelings are usually right, not what one knows intellectually. This gives me another reason to thank all those who have betrayed me!

So what will our new paradigms be? For me, poetry is the language of feeling, but I wanted to sketch my ideas out here to provide the images I feel coming some structure, and to ask all of you what you think. What do you think human life on earth will be like now that we don't have to sacrifice, now that we don't have to be redeemed, now that heaven will be here on earth, now that we don't have to protect our hearts because they won't have to be damaged so that we can learn to forgive to re-open them to the limitless glory of divine love?

Read The Land Of Curving Water: A Mythological Memoir

2005-10-31T16:39:00.000-05:00

I have decided to post the book I have been working on for the past eight years or so on the web. It is called The Land Of Curving Water: A Mythological Memoir. The book deals with my experiences in Waipi'o Valley, on the island of Hawaii. I have had enthusiastic responses from a few agents, but no one would take it, saying it is not commercial enough. As you can see from the title, I have invented my own genre. The book is mythological in the sense that it deals with the making and mythologizing of the self. It also has a few Hawaiian myths woven into it that parallel my story. I thought about self-publishing it, but don't have the money right now. I thought posting it on my blog would be a good way to let it go, enabling me to move onto new creative endeavours. To read the book, click here. This will lead you to the book, hosted by my friend John at www.blockislandfactor.com. Thanks John! Thanks to all who have been a part of my journey as I wrote this book.

Thursday, Nov. 4 -- I made an important discovery today I want to add to my words above. I realized that a part of me was hoping I would find a "real" publisher for my book by posting it on the internet. Real, as in the sense that they would pay me for my work. The shift in my thinking which occured today can be attributed to someone telling me that The Land Of Curving Water must have been a real labor of love for me to work on it for 8 years. I replied, it was not a labor of love, rather a labor of learning to love my self. For the past few years that I've been trying to get the book published for money I've been telling myself it doesn't get accepted because it's too non-traditional, ahead of its time, not mainstream, painting myself as a victim of the publishing industry like so many other misunderstood and unappreciated artists before me. Now if there is one thingI've learned in the past four years it's thatI am not a victim of anything--I create the situations I need in order to fulfill my soul's needs. Ironically, that is the major theme of The Land Of Curving Water. So what does my soul need to learn from not getting published? In my old way of thinking I would say my soul needed to go on no matter what happened, to learn to be strong, to find joy within and not rely on approval from others. However, I have been learning about reframing lately. As we move through this energetic shift on earth, our old ideas and concepts based on lack are falling away. We have lived in a world that defines existence as something based on suffering. Everything I am being taught, and directly experiencing, tells me that this is no longer the case. Human existence will be based on the joy of creation from now on. The Land Of Curving Water is a book about suffering. I saw today that the reason I was guided to post the book on the web was because I was meant to give it away. Who would want to make a profit from suffering? As I give my suffering away, I allow you to let yours go as well. Yesterday I watched two golden eagles soar on the wind. This morning a young bald eagle hovered twenty feet above my head. Eagles balance water and fire. The island of Hawaii is being born as I write these words--molten lava pouring out of the heart of the earth, taking solid form as it encounters the sea. We can live in balance. We can give away our pain. Aloha means to give without expectation of receiving, but I suspect the more we give the more we'll receive. I was given the gift of eagles at my window, the sun radiant on their golden wings.

Jen

Soul Age, Part Two

2005-10-25T13:42:00.000-04:00

I would like to point out that soul ages should not be rated hierarchically, as we are accustomed to doing with age. It is tempting to claim spiritual superiority if one identifies with the mature soul category--but looking down on a baby soul who needs dogma in order to function will not enable one to move into becoming an old soul. I think I forgot to mention that the goal of all souls in an earth incarnation is to experience unconditional love for all of humanity. As a mature soul who often feels belittled by adult souls, I am tempted into thinking myself superior--but know that this will only hurt me in the end. As Rumi said, "I ignore anything which insults my soul."

With Dignity And Grace

2005-10-24T19:17:00.000-04:00

I wrote this poem about my friend Padme, who I met last winter at Earth Activist Training. Padme is a very beautiful spirit who freely gives of herself...she gave the best hugs! Right now she is in Algiers, Louisiana, across the river from New Orleans, working with the Common Ground Collective to help victims of Hurricane Katrina help themselves. She and the others in teh colective are helping community members self-organize to provide for their needs--since the government has failed to meet them. This is an example of the permaculture principle "the problem is the solution" in action. The failure of the government to compassionately meet the needs of the people of New Orleans is giving people the opportunity to create a system of self-governance that reflects their needs and their beliefs, to take charge of their lives and to regain dignity, instead of what the U.S. government wants to give them in the name of charity. Padme is in charge of counselling relief workers and people just coming back to their homes for the first time. She is of course giving lots of hugs! I send these words out into space hoping they nurture her. Thank you , Padme.

In The Green Fields Of Iowa, Padme Crowe Weeps

In a white clapboard house
down a dirt road that used to be a stream,
Padme Crowe weeps.
Sparrows twitter at the window for sunflower seeds.
She sprinkles them on the sill knowing
they’ve been poisoned by cropdusters
who bomb the fields surrounding the house everyday.
She’s afraid to breathe,
but someone must sing to the green corn
rising out of the furrows,
plowed by steel teeth so fierce
no stone can chip or crack them.
It’s not your fault, she sings.
It’s not your fault poison runs through our veins.
She tilts her head back and reaches with her tongue for the rain.
Just one drop is all she needs.
Look at that crazy girl, the farmers say.
She’s in our way.
Even the crows have deserted the fields,
scattered like buckshot,
headed toward a stand of trees
rumored to be holding out in the next county.
Padme’s voice soars above the bombs, the spray.
She takes a deep breath and lets her faith out,
the hymn in the seed.
The crows fall silent and drop back to earth,
watching the bugs flee the corn,
running from the conflagration
like the Vietnamese girl in the famous photo
from Life magazine, her young body aflame.
Flame is the enemy of innocence
as well as its revealer. There may be nothing
more brutal than to be a witness to pain.
There may be nothing more necessary.
The bugs never make it to the road
where they might have had a chance
to be caught up by a wind that would carry them
to a planet in another galaxy
that has not yet been pillaged and raped.
The crows don’t close their eyes.
Neither does Padme.
Together they open their mouths
and release the last drop of rain.
OM MANI PADME HUM.
OM MANI PADME HUM.
OM MANI PADME HUM.
If you lean in close to these words
you’ll see the black sheen of their feathers.
A blank reflection.
Everything.
See the lotus blooming in mud.
See the black diamond in the center of its petals.
See all your delusions be carried away
by a bright gold beak.
See the dignity of men as they go about
the day’s killing.
See the beauty of each swelling kernel.
Harvest the truth that is budding within you.
Their is nothing but this song that won’t end
when my voice whithers away.

Blessed Be

2005-10-19T22:56:00.000-04:00

Blessed Be

On a day when breathing was sweet as wild strawberries,
when air soothed my lungs like a cool drink from the spring
pouring out of the iron pipe to nurture watercress and jewelweed
rejoicing at the edge of the pond where I found a box turtle once
who I picked up and took home to live with my family for a week,
a pond ringed by cattails who filter out the toxic waste that casts a blight
on my hope that one day the child who wants to be born through me
will walk without fear of contamination by pesticides, bombs and radio
waves, at this pond where ducks nest in the tussocks, where I’ve heard
frogs sing, where once I ate the sweetest blackberry I’ve ever tasted
in October, long after the rest of the berries had dried up, been baked
in a cobbler, or plucked by a bright-eyed bird’s beak, god finally spoke to me.
I’d been expecting to find the red feather for weeks since the cardinal
flew into my heart the afternoon I asked for help to dissolve the doors
locked tight in my brain. I knew about hawks and owls, birds whose
symbology had me soaring high above the earth, or delving deep
into my shadows. The red feather didn’t say anything to me when I
asked it to speak, so I put my field guide away and rode my bike
like a horse until I could move across the surface of the earth like
I was being chased by a wall of fire, my heart a panicked rabbit
that knew it wasn’t fleet enough to escape incineration. I looked to the sky
to save me, praying for rain, but all I saw were stars, sometimes falling,
but still balls of swirling flame raining sparks that set my hair ablaze,
hissing like a den of venomous snakes, or relentless waves that wouldn’t
let time stop for a moment to breathe, charging across the universe,
a herd of horses there was no way I could break.
I surrendered before they could trample me.
When the numbness finally arrives it’s a relief after the shock
of the sting, a cold ice cube on skin that just wants the pain to go away,
forgetting that life can’t sprout from ground that’s been frozen unless the sun
arrives in spring to thaw the layers we can’t see, and that it’s possible to turn
one’s face away so far from the sun that the ice reaches bedrock,
where no seeds can sprout to feed the soul, who’s starving.
I didn’t know I had left her behind in that valley were waterfalls blossomed
after heavy rain. I thought she had walked out with me and taken her seat
on the plane that flew back across the Pacific Ocean to the desert where I
started walking toward this moment, following a trail of boulders,
then pebbles, and finally grains of sand, until they ran out and I reached
through the hourglass and took my heart in my hands, when I held my
broken self to my heart and soothed her aches as tenderly as the shadows
the boughs of a weeping willow make on the green grass embroidered with
dandelions and clover, where a rabbit nibbles in peace, letting dogs and cats and
women charge by on bikes, knowing it has nothing to fear from the oncoming storm,
what appears to be a squall of unquenchable emotion, but is really just
a wheel doing what comes naturally, guided by gentle hands who mold the rising clay
into righteous shapes, beauty revealed as each turning point is embraced.
I wept with my abandoned self and she forgave me for leaving her.
I forgave her for making me want to forget in the first place.
We dissolved into each other in waves that I now knew weren’t
relentless, but the echo of eternity giving us as many chances as
we need to reach down and pick up the red feather dropped by the
cardinal as it fed on the suet ball coated with sunflower seeds
hung by a kind-hearted woman from the branch of the pine tree
she can see from her bay window when the butterfly bush isn’t
blooming as riotously as it was today when I rode my bike to water
her garden where pink cosmos currently reign, taking their share
of the sun in full knowledge they will let their petals drop to the ground
when it’s time to release, knowing all must change, and even more,
that all should change, the seasons of the heart as explosive as
wild strawberries, the sweet flame I expected to be unbearable,
until I accepted its embrace.

Soul Age

2005-10-19T10:04:00.000-04:00

I learned a fascinating way to determine soul age recently and have been mentally applying it to people in my life. I believe it is from the channeled entity known as Michael, a comglomeration of a 1,000 or so souls. There are books from Michael if you want to read more.

baby souls are concerned with issues of survival

infant souls need dogma in order to survive

adult souls are concerned with achievement, both material and immaterial

mature souls are concerned with relationships and have a lot of emotional drama

old souls see things from the broadest perspective possible and are less interested in playing the material game

I would catergorize myself as being on the brink between mature and old. I have tons of emotional drama, but am aware of it when I get caught up in it, and am generally able these days to get out of it be identifying what the drama is trying to teach me.

The world today seems to be controlled by adult souls. I thought it was kind of funny that the adult souls often look down on the mature souls, who since they are so caught up in their emotional dramas, can't get it together enough to achieve much of anything! Here on Block Island, the town is controlled by adult souls, but there are many mature souls who have been blown here like migrating birds.

I have met very few old souls in my life so far. I think one of them is my teacher Maria. The Dalai Lama is another one, but a less obvious is my brother Steven. He and I share Hawk medicine. Hawk is the messenger bird who sees the earth from a broad perspective. Steven does not often get caught up in emotional drama, but he does not judge those who do. So thanks for being such a great brother, Lightnin'!

For those of you who struggle with emotional drama, remember you can call upon the power of the hawk at any time to lift you above the muck. Emotions are classes in earth school. Now that I have managed to fly a little above my current emotional drama, I can see whay my latest emotional drama is trying to tell me: I am still vulnerable to having someone come in and totally take over my life. In other words, I need to work on my boundaries. This doesn't mean there is something wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with being open-hearted, but somehwere along the way I developed a need for love that is so great that I am willing to surrender my whole identity or order to have another person in my life. This is also called co-dependency. I recommend the book Co-Dependendt No More, if this sounds familiar to you. However, just as I no longer identify with the word alcoholic, I can do the same with this other label. My point is, that if you keep telling yourself over and over again that there is something wrong with yourself, then you will never shift onto another spoke of the wheel of life.

Offering on A Rainy October Night

2005-10-10T20:01:00.000-04:00

You Can Learn From A Tree How To Exist In Ecstasy

My friends are so in love they don’t hear
the tin can rattle of our dinner conversation.
Even though I know I should look away
as they stand up from the table to embrace,
I can’t.
I balance on the edge of this island I’ve chosen
as the bride and groom drive away.
They have no shame, but I do, looking at the
bottles of wine on the table and thinking
maybe just one drink would be OK.
In addition to wine, there is starlight.
The table is laden with grilled chicken
and charred zucchini, left on too long
because the cook was so excited to dance,
he forgot we expected to eat.
I want to say the food was divine
as my friends merged with the dune grass
shivering with the first touch of the breeze off the ocean,
and it may have been,
but all I tasted was the ashes as it blew away,
taking my parched tongue with it,
leaving me with no way to speak the words
I was too afraid to invite to the table.
Words that might have set my heart free
from the lead sinker dragging it into the deep
where no one could see its wounds
except the bottom-dwellers
who had somehow found out a way
to generate their own light.
A tree makes food from light,
but I’m not a tree, I’m a ghost
haunted by the waves caressing
the beach on this sultry August night
where I wish someone would randomly appear
to seduce me, so I wouldn’t have to
honor the call of the ocean
who is demanding I get up from the table
and humble myself to its need.
I knew this day would come soon
because I’ve listened to the waves for so long
I don’t hear them.
Birds twitter in the beach roses to the beat of the moon
as it ripples on the break.
I try to look away, but I’m drawn by instinct
like horseshoe crabs on the one full moon tide in May
when they can breed.
My friends are fused now like the roots of two trees
who have grown together in a forest that has always
met all of their needs.
They have no fear they’ll be torn from the earth by a hurricane.
Their bodies are broken levees.
They drift downstream, calling out for me to join them,
but I cling to the rooftop, still believing some unearthly force
is going to drop down from the stars to rescue me.
As I watch them drift away, I realize what the ocean wants from me.
Its voice pours through the hole in my heart which blossoms
as the scabs that protect it are torn away.
Do you remember how the breeze ran its fingers
up and down the curve of your waist?
Do you remember the way sunlight tastes,
the salt on his skin you scraped clean like a cat
until all your edges were as smooth as the stones on the beach
beneath the bluffs, where the waves thundered
with the force inside the seed?
Do you remember how, after, he brought you a glass of water
and held it to your lips so you didn’t have to get up to drink?
Do you remember how you saw god in your own face
when you looked in his eyes, your reflection so open the world fell away?
Do you remember the joy of sinking into the ground
in full knowledge it would someday be your grave?
Do you remember what it feels like to hear only the waves?
Do you remember knowing that even when the time came for you
to drop your leaves, deep inside your heart you’d still have
the root of this memory,
stored away for the day ocean cried out,
so tired of breaking.

Coffeehouse Musings

2005-09-30T09:04:00.000-04:00

I started off the day with organic darjeeling instead of coffee. I started off the day to feed Quincy and Noah, two cats who are under my care. Rode my bike, noticed all the chrysanthemums planted, marveled at maroon flowers. My point is that I started off the day with the resolve that I went to bed with. I resolve all day to open myself to god. Last night I was told I was not listening, that I was missing the message god was trying to give me. I was also told I was not fully committed to hearing the message--that's why I'm not hearing it. All I can do is surrender to the moment, the pleasures of the day and the trials. Right now writing has shifted from being a pleasure to a trial because I am in JuicenJava and some people are having a loud conversation about New England prep schools and I keep hearing them mention Middlebury, and because I went there I want to join in, but I'm also annoyed at their elitist name-dropping, which makes me annoyed at myself that I am judging them, and also that I am distracted. Maybe the message is that I am spending too much time in coffeehouses! This is definitely true. Since I don't go to bars, this is the only place I can go to push my loneliness away. Maybe the message god is trying to give me is that I must enter what I perceive as loneliness to realize I am not alone. So I am going to do that....now.

Apocalypse Picnic

2005-09-29T11:27:00.000-04:00

When are we most ourselves? Walking alone at dusk on a path on the edge of a bluff, guided by yellow goldenrod, watching hundreds of butterflies flutter from flower to flower? I am most myself when I swim in waves as tall as small mountains at Black Rock. I need the immensity. I am most myself when I am forced to pay attention or I will be drowned. I am most myself when I sit on the beach afterwards around a fire and play my flute. I was myself the other night as I did yoga in a field and watched two deer feed on the hill a hundred yards away. They knew I was there, but decided I was no threat. We were all gentle with each other. It is is hard to be gentle around other people. We have to put up so many barriers just to make it through the day. I am rarely myself around other people, only a version that they want to see, and this is something I want to change. I want to be as gentle and trusting as those two deer on the hill. I want to be as fully alive as I am when I swim with the great waves. That night on the beach after swimming was especially amazing because there were other people around the fire. Surfers, exhilarated from riding waves. I played my flute. It was dark, but they could still see me in my song. I wasn't afraid to be seen. Some campers had abandoned a whole campsite on the beach. Pots and pans, a grill to upt over the bed of coals, a cooler of striped bass and a keg. Even lemons and salt and pepper. Jack cooked the striped bass and we ate it with our fingers. We called it the apocalypse picnic, joking that we were the last people in the world. When everything does collapse, I know we will be ok. We will come together and make the best out of what we can salvage, and what we create will be far more authentic than the illusion we live in now. The more I surrender to the will of god, the more I am able to be myself. I pray that we may all walk in beauty.

I Will Wait For The Will of God To Speak

2005-09-27T20:50:00.000-04:00

Two books have greatly influenced my thinking lately--Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and The Magic of Findhorn, by Paul Hawken. Both suscribe to the power of positive thinking to shift the fate of our planet from the destruction that seems imminent to a vision of heaven on earth. Although it is hard to see this in action right now, I can attest to the power of the mind to change reality, if only on a personal level. The key is to visualize how you want to feel, not just what you want to see. I wrote the following essay for my application to Hedgebrook, a writer's colony on Whidbey Island, in Washington. Wish me luck!

Last night I wrote "I will wait for the will of god to speak" at the top of a blank page. I had reached a point where I knew if I didn’t cross the threshold into the room without walls I had seen in my dreams, I’d collapse. After years of struggle, I felt no closer than I had at the beginning. I was so tired from running in circles all I could do yesterday was lay in bed, hoping some course of action would come to me.
"I will wait for the will of god to speak." Not action, but surrender. I fell into a dreamless sleep and woke up to write this essay. This morning, I see another possible meaning to the words I received. Maybe it’s not that I’m meant to wait for god to speak, but rather that I must wait for the will of god to make itself known before I speak.
Day to day life is full of so many distractions we forget the power of words to shape reality. We toss them aside as carelessly as crumpled newspapers. I do my best to turn away from the onslaught of negativity the media spews forth daily, but I’ll admit I often fail. I give into the lies that keep us from finding freedom within our hearts. These lies have the majority of us convinced that the system by which we live is the only way, a system based on domination of the earth and its creatures--on ownership, manipulation, on capitalization which demands capitulation of all that the human spirit desires in the dark of night when all defenses are stripped away. These lies keep us from being loved and fully loving, they make us think the earth can’t provide for all our needs. I know we have only to choose words that create a sustainable vision instead of one based on shortsighted greed.
I would like to come to Hedgebrook to quiet the voices of doubt that keep me from fully embodying my truth. I have agonized over the state of the earth. I have let my horror at the war humans have been carrying on against themselves and the planet for so long blind me to believing there is another way. I have let this horror wound me, and I almost succumbed to it before I learned the greatest lesson of my life. I learned to love my wounds by forgiving those who had wounded me, and I realized this applied to everyone and everything on earth. I realized that forgiveness is the path to unconditionality. I learned to have faith in the wisdom of my feet, that they had never led me onto a path where I wasn’t supposed to be. I learned to see the flowers on the side of the freeway.
I would like to see how deep I can dive into solitude, how long I can hold my breath underwater, and who else is swimming with me. I would like to offer my blind faith in the universe. I would like to bring my awakening heart to a place where others can witness its fledgling beat. I realize my reasons for wanting to come to Hedgebrook may not appear to have the ability to have an obvious impact on the world. All I can say is that the more I embody my vision, the greater affect I will have on others, whether they read my poetry or stand next to me on the street.
What I can offer is my commitment to experiencing all my emotions as fully as possible in order to understand what they are trying to teach me, and my commitment to creating a political consciousness that moves beyond fear and anger into unknown territory. I believe we will find the solutions that will enable us to create harmony within ourselves in the unknown, a harmony which will resonate through all beings.
I can offer my heart which is learning to open the way each moment unfolds, without question, trusting that all is as it should be. I can offer a sense of wonder at the web of life, and gratitude for my role as weaver. I can offer the truth found in grace.

Never Give Up Hope

2005-09-20T11:16:00.000-04:00

Why? Because the universe works on the law of attraction. Physicists have proven that matter and energy are the same.....we are waves of sound and light, we create with our vibrations. If we vibrate despair then we will create a world where despair reigns. If we vibrate optimism, we will create a world where things go well--the trick with visualization is not just to think what you woudl like to see, but to feel it. A little harder to do than just picturing something, but possible if you actually surrender to your vision. I am aware that this is a very unscientific description that can easily be picked apart by those who want to believe the world is merciless, that earth is meant to be a place of suffering. For a scientific explanation check out Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics. While I think scientific materialism is a useful tool to prove to the doubters, I trust in my intuition above all else. If something feels right to me, than I consider it the truth. However, I am aware that this is the truth to me, that my truth may not be the same as everyone elses. What we call reality is really a consensual agreement--and the reality currently governing the United States is, in my mind, a mass hallucination designed to keep people from realizing they are free to create the lives they want to live, lives of freedom and peace. While I do believe there is a conspiracy of the elite to keep people oppressed on our planet, I see this conspiracy as part of the larger cycle necessary for the growth of both our individual souls and the soul of our planet. "All the world's a stage," Shakespeare said in As You Like It. We all play our parts with different degrees of self-awareness. It is easy to lose hope when faced with local issues--by local I mean both what happens in one's community and also what happens to one personally. Here on Block Island we have come face to face with the greed that is intent on destroying the planet in many ways, most notably with the expansion of Champlin's Marina into the Great Salt Pond. Many of my well-informed friends are convinced the CRMC is totally corrupt and will not be swayed by the heartfelt testimony of the islanders against this expansion. I, however, have hope that the language of the heart will be heard, that there is always room for cracks to appear, and that when they do, the dry earth will be filled with life-giving water. Seeds of hope will sprout and soon we will have a tree we can climb, a tree that rises up through the clouds, into the stars. We will find ourselves drifting on a river of starlight. We will recognize ourselves as citizens of the Galaxy. We will know we are not alone.

Block Island Needs Us

2005-09-15T10:15:00.000-04:00

I am sending you this message because I felt you would be interested in joining the Sacred Circle I have called to show our love and respect for the water and land of Block Island. On Friday, the final CRMC hearing in regards to the expansion of Champlin's Marina into the Great Salt Pond will take place. I encourage everyone to show up at the hearing from 10-3 at the Empire Theater. It is important to make our presence known politically--but there is also another aspect of activism that I want to bring into the mix here--by forming a circle we can give energetic support to stopping this expansion. We can also hold the energy in a peaceful way for those who might become angry or upset at the short-sighted greed of those behind the expansion into the Pond. If we who are opposed to the expansion act out of anger, we will only be reacting to the system which we oppose. The only way to break this cycle is by refusing to use the tools and methods of the oppressor, which means we must create our own system. I would like to see a world based on sharing resources, a community based on the common good of all--which includes plant and animal life as well as human. This is my definition of morality--what is most beneficial to the common good. If you agree, please join me on Thursday at 5 PM at the Beach House. If enough people come I would like to do a spiral dance. If not, we will call in the elements and offer whatever comes to us as we join together in reverence and peace. Please come, Block Island needs you. This is an opportunity for us to act responsibly, with reverence for all the island has given us. It is time to speak out and do what we can to stop the exploitation of our beautiful island by offering an alternative vision! The circle will begin at 5 PM, at the Beach House on Corn Neck Rd. (across from Sharky's). Rain or shine! If Hurricane Ophelia hits us we will work with her. We will listen to what she has to say. We will use her fury to transmute our own anger so that we can transmit love to all involved in this conflict. Remember--Ophelia was the tragic heroine who drowned herself when Hamlet rejected her. If we take her as an aspect of the goddess, who has been spurned and denied for so long, it easy to understand her anger, easy to see how she would want to strike back as the water has done in New Orleans. This is an opportunity for us to welcome back the angry goddess in all of us, to tell her it is time to break the cycles that have limited us since civilization pushed her underground four thousand years ago. Civilization is devouring itself in Iraq. The earth is cleansing itself. The circles and cycles are so immense it is hard for us to see them--but if we form our own small circles I think it becomes easier, and we will carry this energy within us wherever we go, bringing more people into our circle, people who want to live in harmony with the earth in a sustainable way. It was Starhawk who taught me that there are 5 sacred things here on earth. By sacred, she means that which cannot be bought or sold--four of them--earth, air, fire and water, are already commodities. It is in the fifth where hope remains--the spirit. However, the spirit needs to be fed, needs to be nurtured and loved. The spirit needs to be heard, or it is in danger of becoming a commodity as well. Is this the legacy you want to leave the earth? I end this request for unity with words from the Hopi Elders--"WE ARE THE ONES WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR." If you cannot make it to the circle in person you can join us energetically. And please, forward this email to all who love Block Island, or to anyone you feel needs these words. I thank you all for sharing this journey with me here on earth, and I honor the light and dark in each one of you.

2005-08-23T15:00:00.000-04:00

I am exhausted. Looking back at past entries here, I'm not surprised. Having an opinion outside the mainstream attracts contempt and ridicule from others, all of which has been directed at me, even though I know there are others who feel the way I do--I was the one who publicly spoke out. I don't know about this whole internet thing energetically. I am connecting with all these people I don't know who have a reaction to what I say. If it is positive, then I get the benefit of their reaction, but if it's negative, I get that too. What to do when you just can't stand the way things are anymore? I started this blog to communicate my vision of the world in the hopes of becoming the change I want to see, and in helping others shift toward creating a sustainable earth. Maybe angering people is just one of the steps on the way, but I am demoralized by the negative reactions my words have received, especially when I have tried to communicate with a peaceful heart. I fear there must still be some anger in me. I am beginning to suspect that words may not be the path for me--that action is necessary. My teacher has said that it's a waste of energy to butt heads constantly with the dominant society which is invested in maintaining its power. One has to just go on, creating the world one wants to live in even though it looks like the one one does live in is about to collapse at any second. I keep not learning this lesson. I keep reacting. I keep spinning on the same spoke of the wheel. Why can't we humans change as easily as the seasons? Or is that an illusion too? Maybe the leaves suffer as they whither and fall to the ground too.

Do Unto Others

2005-07-09T10:20:00.000-04:00

As you would have them do unto you. This exhortation from the Bible was beautifully demonstrated by a story told to me by a woman who had read my latest letter to the editor in The BI Times. Once, while rushing to get to the ferry in Pt. Judith, she noticed a large snapping turtle ahead of her. Oh no! she cried to herself. She only had 8 minutes left to catch the boat. There were four lanes of traffic the turtle would have to cross to make it to the other side. She pulled her car over to the shoulder and walked out into the road, stopping traffic. Cars cheered her as she walked behind the turtle until it was safely across. The dockhands held the boat and let her on, completing the cycle and giving and receiving when she pulled her car over and stood before those cars to say stop. I thank her for this story. I thank the turtle for letting us build a home on its back.

Abundance Is Our Natural State of Being

2005-07-07T16:43:00.000-04:00

Last night I saw so clearly how off track I was again and knew that if I continued on at this frantic pace I would crack again. Although I am relieved to have found a way of earning a living that I don't hate, I know that gardening is not the reason I came to earth. I am here to communicate, to weave a new reality with words, and while I can do this wherever I go, with whomever I meet, I am not fully expressing all that I have to share by the work I am doing to earn money, and my soul will not tolerate this any more from me, whoever I am--so I am not taking on any more jobs. The ones I have are enough. Yes, I could earn a few hundred more a week if I "hustled" but I will pay the price with my sanity. My friend Roark, a fellow writer, put it in perspective last week when someone asked him what his job was--"writing." When asked what he did for money he said he'd live on almonds and water if that was all he could afford. The REAL WORK has to come first for everybody. The jobs we take to keep ourselves safe are a distraction to keep us from the truth. Don't ask me who is keeping us from seeing the truth or why they would want to do this because I haven't figured this out yet. All I know is my own path, my own truth, and I can recognize when someone else is living their truth. To everyone dancing, singing, playing, biking, swimming, growing, all over the world, to everyone living with integrity, I say thanks, and promise I will honor my commitment to myself over the commitments I make out of fear from now on. Starhawk defines the sacred as that which is not commodifiable, the earth, air, fire, and water which give us life--all of thse things are for sale in the present day world, and our leaders are meeting right now in Scotland at the G-8 to decide who gets to make the most profit from the sacred elements. Today I read the police ringed my friends in the eco-camp in so they couldn't protest--but that public outrage turned against the police and they were allowed to leave the camp to speak up for the earth, for those of us who want to share resources instead of control them. No more lies. To myself. To others. Please join me. The fifth sacred thing is not yet for sale--our spirit--undefinable yet with us every moment, even when we sleep. We've been asleep collectively for a long time on earth, but more and more of us are waking up. There is nothing to be afraid of! The earth has everything we need, enough for everybody--please tell everyone you know there is enough for everybody. Blessed be.

Turtle Island

2005-06-27T23:40:00.000-04:00

Turtle Island was the name for Earth according to many Native American traditions. Or should I say is the name--these traditions are still alive, even if the the actual people who created them and sustained them for eons are gone. They are being sustained by people everywhere who want to reconnect the earth--people like me who are reconnecting and wanting to teach others how to do the same out of a desire that is sometimes not easily understood. Does it matter on the cosmic level if the earth is saved or not? Everything decays and dies--I say what matters is how this decay and death occurs. All of us wish a good death, free of illness, in our sleep at a ripe old age after years of loving and learning. Don't you think the earth would wish the same? One of the things that Turtle teaches us is that all things ripen slowly over time. If we push the river the banks will collapse, the fields will flood, there will be nothing to eat. Important lessons for me this week as I resist being caught up in the summer rush to make money that captures Block Island's soul this time of year and puts it in a shark cage for a few months. The shark cage is what the locals jokingly call the jail here. I want to be free to live without fear. This may mean I will displease a lot of people who are expecting me to come through, to perform, but it is my own fault for capitulating to the system. Is it more important for me to make a hundred dollars or to write the following letter to the editor of the Block Island Times about the carnage I have noticed on the roads as I bike to my job sites? The earth does not need to be saved, in the sense that we are all already saved, but I do believe that we should act from good intentions, that to spread positive energy, to give voice to those who can't speak and who need to be heard, is part of eradicating the fear that keeps us in the shark tank, afraid we'll be devoured alive if we venture outside the bars. As the dimensional shift approaches,we have the opportunity to create much good karma on an individual and cosmic level by making conscious choices that show our respect for the bodies we've been given, and for our home Earth. I pray every day for the strength to act with right intention in all matters. I ask that my fears about survival be dissolved. I felt lighter after writing the following letter. I know people will laugh at me, but I also know I did the right thing.

To The Editor,

While riding my bike on Corn Neck Road over the past week I have noticed a blackbird, a box turtle and a goldfinch, dead - smashed or stunned by cars. I have also heard of two island dogs killed by cars in the past month. Many will say the dogs should have been tied up, or that the birds and turtle were in the way, but this doesn’t change the fact that these animals would most likely be alive if the drivers had been more conscious of what was in front of them, perhaps in less of a rush to get to the beach or to work.
The turtle, its shell cracked down the middle, was particularly upsetting to me. According to Native American teachings, Turtle is the oldest symbol for planet Earth, a symbol of the eternal Mother who provides us with all we need. With its slow pace, Turtle teaches us to be grounded, to stay connected. The smashed turtle - and this is not the only one I’ve seen – makes it apparent how easily disconnected we become from the island during the busy summer months.
While my heart aches at the current state of our planet due to our rapacious need to conquer and consume, I have hope. More than once, I have seen people stop to help turtles across the road. I don’t expect everyone to abandon their cars for bikes, but I ask you all to show respect for the creatures of the island, and thus the earth, by slowing down. The gifts you’ll receive by connecting with nature will be manifold and renewable. No act is too small to rebuild a sustainable Earth.

With respect for all creatures great and small,
Jen Lighty
Corn Neck Road

Summer Solstice

2005-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

Today is the longest day of the year, tomorrow we will begin the descent into darkness again--yet winter seems so far away as summer begins, the blackberry blossoms and wild roses blooming frothy white as I race past the stonewalls on my bike. The sun enters Cancer today and we have a full moon in Capricorn, a union which asks us to try to balance our inner and outer worls. "The world is too much with us, getting and spending we lay waste our powers, " wrote William Wordsworth over two hundred years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, before capitalism became the world's religion. Still, I try to find a moment where I resist every day. I noticed goldfinches flashing by my bike and the ripple of moonlight on the duck pond on Old Town Road as I rode home from my catering job serving sailors gourmet meals for a week straight. Half the food gets thrown in the trash at the end of the night and none of the bottles are recycled. No one notices or cares about the waste except for me, but I don't care enough to go back and recycle all their bottles. All I can do is not take jobs like this I guess--or when I do realize it is a test. An opportuniyt to look beyond judgement, to let go of my resentment of the rich, to further my dedicaiton to serving humanity by transforming our world.....my worms are churning in the bin out behind my yard. Worm tea to make tomoroow, when it is supposed to rain, and I can retreat to my inner life, regroup and reconnect with who I am in stillness. Blessed be.

Letter To The Editor

2005-06-13T09:20:00.000-04:00

I wrote my first letter to the editor to the BI Times last night. Actually, it's my first ever. I thought I would share it here with you. Note the application of problem is the solution thinking.

To The Editor:

This letter is in response to Bicycle and Moped Safety Commission member John Leone’s statement in the June 11 edition of The Block Island Times that there is no opposition to the proposed town ordinance mandating that all bike riders on Block Island be required to wear helmets.
While I am wary of placing myself in opposition to anyone, especially the Police, who will be handing out $40 tickets to those in violation if the ordinance passes, I feel that this proposed ordinance reflects larger cultural issues in regard to our personal freedoms, freedoms which are rapidly eroding under the Bush administration under the guise of our supposed need for protection, a need created by casting a cloud of fear over all our daily activities, over a simple pleasure like riding a bike. I believe we have reached a point where this fear is so pervasive that most don’t even realize they are being controlled by it, certainly hardly anyone questions the need for its existence in the first place.
While I acknowledge that accidents do and will happen, I don’t feel it is the obligation of our government to regulate the personal choices of its citizens when the results of these choices will primarily harm only themselves. I realize the ramifications of not wearing a helmet effects members of the dedicated rescue squad and the personnel at the Medical Center, but do we suggest an ordinance banning diners at island restaurants from eating burgers and fries because they cause heart attacks? And we as a community, certainly avoid looking directly at the hordes drinking themselves into a blind stupor in the island bars.
Instead of giving the law further control over our lives, I suggest we apply some creative thinking to the problem by viewing the problem itself as the solution. Bikes aren’t the problem - it’s the presence of too many cars that creates accidents, cars often driven by people under the influence of alcohol. Instead of penalizing carefree, environmentally-conscious bikers, we need to come up with creative solutions that will reduce the number of cars driven on the island during the busy summer months, as well as address the issue of drunk driving, which I fear is often ignored in this community.
While this issue may not seem important in comparison with the larger political issues of our day, or just not important at all to those whose prime concern is capitalizing on the brief tourist season, I think it is worth examining on a deeper level in order to determine why we feel the way we do as members of a society who has elected a federal government that feels we need to enact more and more laws to protect us from ourselves. The traumatic head injury this proposed ordinance is supposed to protect us from is indicative of what I see as an injury to the collective brain of the United States itself. We are a brain-damaged nation numbly accepting whatever our government tells us instead of a union of self-empowered citizens able to determine what is best for us on both an individual and collective levels according to our local needs.
I considered not writing this letter in the hopes that the Police would let the ordinance, if it passes, slide for locals, but know that this attitude reflects the hypocrisy I wish to dissolve on all levels of our society. It’s true that we must think globally and act locally if we want to create a sustainable society based on respect and cooperation instead of fear. No issue is too small or undeserving of our attention.
I encourage the Town Council and members of the various town commissions to think creatively instead of on a reactionary level that creates the potential for hypocrisy in its citizens. As we examine our collective decisions, no matter how trivial they may seem on a global scale, I think we’ll find that the truth really will set us free.

Joni Mitchell Morning

2005-06-02T09:48:00.000-04:00

Today my sadhana included listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue, speaking the words love and gratitude over the water I drank, water doused with lavender, skulkcap, and st. john's wort to soothe my nervous system, summoning the spirit of those plants to aid me (I read recently that we don't even need to ingest the plants to enlist their aid, all we need to do is ask. Amazing), practicing several rounds of the Swimming Dragon, a form of tai chi I taught myself from a book when I was 22 and which I was surprised to discover Maria also practices, saying fading away as I breathed in and thank you, as I breathed out, as taught by poet Li-Young Li, a brief series of shoulder and back stretches and four rounds of sun salutations, after which I recited the mantra given to me by yoga teacher Jeff Davis and recited the Tube of Light as passed on to me by Maria. Afterwards I mixed ultimate green food powder with some O.J. (green food powder oxygenates the brain and is good for depression), ate some whole wheat toast with soy margarine and drank a gourd of organic yerba mate. Then I sat down and starting writing this litany, with which I complete the daily goals I set for myself with Maria the other day: To meditate and do yoga daily, to eat one organic thing, and to express myself creatively. I have done it all in the first hour of being awake! There are probably lots of days when I do this, but I am not mindful of it, rushing to get to work instead of giving myself credit for the work I am always doing. The work of being good to one's self in small ways is very important. I tend to become so focused on the larger goals of how I want to be that I give up on my daily practice, my sadhana slides into the dung heap and I follow it, wallowing in my self-perceived filth. I am part of a culture that knows deep inside that the way of life it is promoting is wrong, a culture that lies to itself, which means it is not authentic. However, I have the ability through my choices to separate myself from that culture. This is not the same as rebelling, which requires an antagonist. In my heart I am at peace with those who go along with the mass hallucination, although in my mind I grow frustrated sometimes and perhaps speak words that people are not ready to hear. This was an issue that came up in my soul retrieval. One of my wounded soul parts was an Amazonian woman who was trading some sort of fiber from her tribe to white colonialists. She paddled her canoe alone to their settlements. She saw what the white people were going to do to her people and spoke of it, but the men wouldn't listen to her. She even came up with a plan to expand their trade so that they would be more self-sufficient, but they wouldn't listen. They weren't ready to hear about their imminent destruction. One day as she was paddling, her canoe overturned and she became tangled up in the fibers and drowned. She died angry and feeling unheard and as her soul has traveled, finally entering my body, this need to speak and this anger has traveled through its new hosts. During the soul retrieval Tomma, the shaman who performed it along with Maria, went into the water and saved the woman. Tomma watched her go back to the village and live out the rest of her life. This time she stayed silent because she knew that her people were not ready to hear what she had to say. She had respect for where they were at, she operated from a place of non-judgment, which is much more difficult that judgment because it requires letting go of fear. Non-judgment means one accepts whatever happens as what is meant to be. Non-judgment means one dies in peace when the time is right and accepts the death, even terrible violent untimely death, as part of a pattern that must play itself out in order to balance dark and light. Tomma blew this healed soul part back into my heart. I am not surprised that this issue of speaking out when I should be silent is coming up so forcefully for me now. Integrating a soul part takes time and practice, and as sages so sagely say, things are often at their worse right when they are about to be released.

So I have had the sublime Joni Mitchell as my guide on this gray looks like it will rain morning. She is the ultimate musician to me. She sees right into my soul and sings it, unafraid to be naked and bleeding. In her new book the critic Camille Paglia says Mitchell's song "Woodstock" is one of the great poems of our era. She's right. Sometimes when I read contemporary poetry I think it is dull, has its head in the sand like an ostrich when it should be looking at the stars, that its antenna aren't working, that they arent' picking up the signals shooting across the galaxy, that most poets are so dulled by processing their own grief that they can't see the full spectrum of the possibilities available to them about which to write. Maybe that's the function poetry serves for us now--poetry as therapy--and that is well and good, not to be lamented, just accepted. Those who see beyond the word as therapeutic, who see it as a multidimensional tool to create reality, we can invent a new art form. We don't have to call it poetry, just as Jeanette Winterson says she doesn't write novels. She writes books. I don't write novels either, which is probably why my books don't sell. I have recenlty decided to call the book I wrote about Hawaii a mythological memoir. Just calling it a different name is enabling me to break free from the structural constraints of the novel, of what I thought it was supposed to be, and express what the book needed, my wild mind snarling like a tiger in the sugarcane.

Eat one organic thing, meditate, express myself creatively. The day has just begun. Who knows how many more times I will be able to do these things? But if I don't, it's ok. I kept my commitment to myself and can spend the rest o fthe day doing what needs to be done. However, I have a feeling that this commitment, if I stick to it, is going to open doors into new ways of being, that will enable me imagine my life richly, as the Lakota (and Jeff Davis) say.

Troubled Water

2005-06-02T09:45:00.000-04:00

Troubled Water

Who told you?
Did you see it live on TV?
The surf finally came that day
after a flat summer.
I had just learned to look
beneath the surface of the waves
I’d been riding since childhood days.
Peace reigned in the kingdom of striped bass
who patrolled the borders of our island,concealed behind rocks and curtains of seaweed.
Sometimes, when I came upon them,
I could have sworn they were asleep.
I shot them through the eyes to prove
they were alive, holding my breath
till my lungs almost burst.
I drove my spear
until it pierced the socket
and came out on the other side.
It’s just instinct--
fish don’t feel pain,
was the general consensus
of everyone on the beach.
I wanted to believe anything.
The surf finally came that day
after a flat summer.
I sharpened my spear tip with a file
and cursed the waves
which made the water cloudy.
I didn’t want to ride, I wanted to sink,
but I swam out to meet them anyway.
We watched to see if clouds of smoke
would blight the sun.
We weren’t that far away.
You might have thought we were crazy.
Our hair was matted and our wetsuits chafed.
You might have thought we should be locked away.
Some of us joked we lived in the mental hospital already.
All of us knew there was no escape.
A year later, we were ready
to defend ourselves
from the Second Coming.
We had clams.
We had lobsters.
We had bunkers
of Budweiser.
None of us thought
the attack would come
from within
our own ranks.
Did you hear?
The counter girl asked
when we rolled into town,
laughing and hungry for sushi.
There must have been
a raw silence
that rose up to meet her
when she leaped.
Most of us thought
bridges were built
to carry us across
the water.
She really believed
there was no escape
from the falling tower.
Someone should have told
all of us are crazy.

Growing Wings

2005-05-26T23:54:00.000-04:00

It's rare that I find a contemporary poem that seems absolutely necessary to my existence. A poem that makes "the top of my head feel like it's going to explode" to paraphrase Emily Dickinson. I came upon this Robert Bly poem in a flyer for The Great Mother/New Father conference on the sale table at the BI Poetry Project. I knew immediately that I'd found exactly what I needed--what I'd been searching for for months. I felt like the poet was not only speaking to me, but that it was written for me. These are the best poems I think, for they enter our bloodstream and our breath. The become part of us; they link us to a continuum it is all too easy to forget.

Growing Wings

It's all right if Cezanne goes on painting the same picture.
It's all right if juice tastes bitter in our mouths.
It's all right if the old man drags one useless foot.

The apple on the Tree of Paradise hangs there for months.
We wait for years and years on the lip of the falls;
The blue-gray mountain keeps rising behind the black trees.

It's all right if I feel this same pain until I die.
A pain that we have earned gives more nourishment
Than the joy we won at the lottery last night.

It's all right if the partridge's nest fills with snow.
Why should the hunter complain if his bag is empty
At dusk? It only means the bird will live another night.

It's all right if we turn in all our keys tonight.
It's all right if we give up our longing for the spiral.
It's all ri ght if the boat I love never reaches shore.

If we're already so close to death, why should we complain?
Robert, you've climbed so many trees to reach the nests.
It's all right if you grow your wings on the way down.

----Robert Bly

Building Bridges

2005-05-25T14:27:00.000-04:00

Believe it or not, I've been asked the question, "So where's the bridge?" by people who want to come to Block Island. I worked for years in a B &B and had to answer all the mundane questions of people who were so obsessed with the details of planning every minute of their holiday, it was obvious they were in need of a vacation. One of the best things about living on Block Island is that there is not a bridge! Islands like Jamestown, RI or Key West, islands you can drive to, are just not the same as one's you actually have to try to get to, islands that you can't get to on some days (today for example, the boats and planes are canceled due to high winds), or that you can't get off. This is a good test if you're an island person or not. If you get stuck on Block Island and are glad, you are an island person. If you fret and curse the weather, you're not, or are just not ready to be one yet. What are island people like? John Donne famously wrote "No man is an island," meaning we are not alone, that all of us are connected through our mortality. No matter where we go, we end up in the same place, a place we can't see with our physical eyesight (yet.) An island person knows one has to build bridges between people in order to survive. Many island people also have a deep propensity for solitude, a feeling that one is actually an island, separated from the rest of the world from the thousands of moods of the sea. How to live with this conundrum? I will admit this has been difficult for me. I have removed myself from mainland reality because I could not cope with the mass cultural brainwashing I saw taking place. This was not a conscious choice at first, just a natural resistance, a preservative instinct. I wanted to generate my own images, not be told what to see. After many years of connecting to myself, of exploring who I am and why I am here, of taking internal risks while playing it safe on the outside (many island people could care less about "careers." We know that what you do is often a cover up for what you're doing inside), it is time for me to build the bridge that will connect my vision to a larger reality, to be of service in whatever way I can.

In 2002, Suzi Brown, a girl who grew up on Block Island, killed herself by jumping from the Newport Bridge. Suzi jumped the day before the first anniversary of 9/11. I remember sitting on the beach that day wondering what the waves would bring, knowing that something was going to happen again. I never thought it would be something from within our community. Like most of America, I thought it was going come from outside.

In 2003, Rachel Tonner, another island girl, overdosed on heroin and died in the Port Authority in New York City. I view her death, which the whole year round community witnessed, as a slow form of suicide. Throughout the writing of Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary, I felt deeply connected to these two. I began writing the book the week Suzi died. I knew Suzi a little bit, and Rachel was a good friend of mine who I loved. You know the saying that deaths come in threes? Well I felt all along as I wrote the book that I was the third person in this trifecta. I was aware that what I wanted to achieve was a spiritual death that would help me bridge their deaths for other people--I never wanted to physically die. I wanted to examine why they chose to die--what their souls were saying to us by making this seemingly unexplainable choice.

However, when you ask for a vision, you sometimes receive more than you bargained for. As I went through this process, I lost my way. I was scared and my fear made me confused that I would physically die too. Yes, one could say that my biochemistry was screwed up and made me go over to the dark side (I just skimmed the totally reductive Against Depression, by Peter Kramer, and disagree with his assessment of depression as simply a physical disease that can be treated like any other. Why? Because I don't believe that any disease is simply physical).

All I can say is that the intensity of the experience was what was needed to complete the book--this is what was wanted from me. This is what my soul needed. I know what my soul needs from how powerfully something grips me. When I am drawn towards something so powerfully that to resist feels like I'm dying, I know I have encountered what my soul needs, which is so often contrary to the needs of my ego, sometimes of my body itself. It doesn't matter if anyone reads Bluebell, because I embody this journey now, but I do plan to publish the book at some point in the near future so I can share my journey directly--telling the truth is important and a necessary step in healing.

Healing is a word I have had some issues with recently, since to me it implies that there is something wrong in the first place. If you believe, as I do, that everything one experiences is something one attracts because it is necessary for the soul's growth, then there is no such thing as sickness. Just an imbalance that needs to be corrected in order for the experience to be fully integrated. So I have been trying not to use this word lately, since, if you believe, as I do, that our words create our reality, that using the word healing will stop me and others realizing that we always receive what we need.

There are many bridges to build--forgiveness is a key material in the construction of them, and acceptance is a key component in the construction of forgiveness. I do my best to accept where others are in their lives and ask the universe that they do the same with me. (I ask the universe because sometimes asking actually people doesn't go over well. One has to be "on the same page" as they say sometimes in order to not be misunderstood, thus creating more anger.)

ne of the bridges I am building now is a writing workshop based on my alchemical journey. I will be teaching this workshop next April at the Block Island Poetry Project founded by my friend Lisa Starr. I will also be offering it at some point at a wonderful new bridge being built on Block Island right now. My friend and spiritual teacher Maria DeMarco has brought her non-profit Concordia, Inc., to the island. She is transforming the Beach House B & B, the home of the amazing Ccopaccatty family, into a center for health and art. I am incredibly excited about what she will bring to the community through Concordia, and am looking forward to participating in the center. The first thing I will be doing at the Beach House is a permaculture site analysis. Maria and the Ccopaccatty's want to turn the property into a permaculture site! For someone with no hope of buying property on this island, this really proves that dreams do come true, that to imagine one's life richly, as the Lakota say, will bring your dreams into fruition.

The Internal Tsunami subsides

2005-05-20T11:18:00.000-04:00

I apologize for upsetting people with my blog about my suicidal thoughts. For some reason I am being pushed to be as honest as possible. Some people might wish I would just not talk about the way I feel maybe, but I had really reached a point where I could not do that any longer. Transparency has always been a word that comes to mind when I think of how I want to be. No secrets. An open heart. As for feeling suicidal, it is not abnormal as some have said to me......it is something that many people I know feel, most of them artists or activists who are deeply engaged in the processes the earth is going through. I agree, the death of this cycle we are going through is exciting and intellectually I am curious to see what is going to happen, but emotionallly, this is not so. The thing that separates artists from other types of people is their emotional engagement with the world. It is hard to separate the feelings one has from one's self. I became my feelings to such an extent that I lost objectivity. I am not sick. I do not have an illness. I may have a disease--as in "dis-ease," or a lack of ease....but I am only a symptom of the dis-ease the earth is suffering right now. Artists are teachers. Have you ever had a teacher tell you write what you know? I took that to heart.....I had no other choice if I did not want to be insane--which I define as being off-balance. Being insane is just as valid a reality as any other, it just makes those who are more balanced, or off-balance in another direction uncomfortable. All diseases are diseases of the mind. They may manifest on the physical level, and we can treat them on the physical level by rebalancing our bodies--which I recommend doing wholistically rather than through the medical model, which does not even believe in the world I live in. So yes, when asked to admit I had a mental problem, I had to say yes, even though I knew that my definition of a mental problem was not the same as the person who asking. My mental problem was that I, in full knowledge of the power of the mind, could not find the strenght in my mind to bend my thoughts toward balance. I think what I'm goign through may be akin to the alchemical process--in order to make gold the alchemist burns the dross off lead---the dross was my negative thoughts. I think I took this on to such a large extent that I did actually internalize the tsunami that was predicted. If so, then I saved thousands of lives possibly. (I'm sure there were others involved. I'm not that egotistical.) I have also been thinking,based on a vision of a green serpent that appeared to me in meditation, and on some other factors, that I am in the beginning stages of the awakening of kundalini. This awakening also requires the burning off of negative thoughts and energies, a process which I've read is far from pleasant. As a Capricorn, I am a person who has incarnated to bridge the material and spiritual realms. Also, a person who is tested often. Capricorn is ruled by the Devil. Not to say the Devil is evil, it's more like the Devil is the voice of doubt that stops one from being one's fully self, from living authentically. Again, I apologize for upsetting people. It is especially hard to know that even these words of explanation may not be understood by some who love me, that they will make people think I am even more delusional and insane, but I offer them in the hopes that they may create a bridge of understanding between my side of the see-saw and theirs, in the hopes that we can find balance.

Creative Recovery

2005-05-19T10:04:00.000-04:00

The following words are from The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, a book that teaches the art of creative recovery, loosely based on the principles of 12 step programs. I came upon them in an old journal and wanted to share them as something that helps me--the key to contentment is all about remembering--who we are and why we came here. All of us are creators of the dreams that we lead. All of us are Gods.

I am a channel for God's creativity, and my work comes to good.

My dreams come from God and God has the power to accomplish them.

As I create and listen, I will be led.

My creativity heals myself and others.

I am allowed to nurture my artist.

Through the use of my creativity, I serve the goddess.

My creativity always leads me to truth and love.

My creativity leads me to forgiveness and self-forgiveness.

There is a divine plan of goodness for me.

There is a divinge plan of goodness for my work.

As I listen to the creator within, I am led.

As I listen to my creativity, I am led to create.

I am willing to create.

I am willing to learn to let myself create.

I am willing to let God create through me.

I am willing to be of service through my creativity.

I am willing to experience my creative energy.

I am willing to use my creative talents.

2005-05-16T12:16:00.000-04:00

The wave didn't come yesterday. Well, there were lots of waves touching the island, more than anyone could ever count, but The Wave is of another sort. It was supposed to wash us all clean, to sweep us all away, to leave behind those who were meant to be here now on earth to embody the new consciousness that has been birthed here in the energetic realms. I'm still not sure what would have happened to me if the wave had come. I still don't feel like the earth is my home. I still dont' know if this makes me a failure or if I am just supposed to accept that I have no work left to do here and move on to somewhere else. All my life I have felt an exile. A lone wolf. A former lover, also an artist, says that's just how all artists feel. We represent that feeling of exile and go through it for all of humanity, who feels it to some extent, just not as strongly. All I know is that I have reached a point where feeling like an exile is unbearable. Nothink makes me feel at home. Not even my art. My words just take me further out into to the open sea, but the sea is not the right metaphor, because the sea, while alien, is of the earth. My words take me into the complete unknown. Into black holes. Dark matter runs through my veins, not the hot red blood I know would gush out if I took a knife and slashed my self open, and I have been angry enough to do this in the past couple of days, barely holding the anger in--why--because I judge even my own anger. I don't want to make a mess or disappoint anyone. I see myself as absolutely pathetic. As a person undeserving of love who has failed whatever my mission on earth was. I can't even just enjoy the simple pleasures that come with every day. I am a complete fraud, walking around making small talk to forget how lonely I am and saying yes to things I dont' want to do and don't believe in. I don't care about anything.

The wave didn't come yesterday. Or did it? Has it been coming for months now as I slowly let go of all doubts and fears, so slowly I don't know they're being swept away? It would be easier if they were washed away by something as obvious as a tsunami. To die is easier than to live in some ways. Does anyone else feel these things? Are you being swept away and are you struggling against the current that wants to erase you becuase you are the only thing you have to hold onto when you go to sleep at night?

How To Commit To Life

2005-05-13T21:53:00.000-04:00

How To Commit To Life

You head toward the mud. It’s a habit.
You’re not a great blue-heron, you just
like the way it feels between your toes
and the challenge of staying upright.
The mud is full of dead things,
most of them unrecognizable.
Under the bridge, no one can see you.
For once, the water doesn’t reflect anything.
You’re safe. You push your thoughts away
before shame sends you running back to the
yellow house looking for some errand that has to
get done right away or the world will fall apart, right?
You pray for instinct to lay its hands upon you.
Your hands reach down and pluck three bits of broken
china from the mosaic of oyster and clam shells
decorating the mudflats.
The air is thick as water, if you didn’t know better
you’d think you had gills and could flash by this scene
like the schools of minnows who flee under this
bridge when the sun is bright in summer.
The blue willow painted on the surface makes you weep.
Champ plunges a clam rake off the dock to your right.
No distractions, you say to yourself.
You close your mind to the gentle humor in his face.
You don’t let yourself think of how you love to watch the seals
get knocked off the rocks by the waves.
On the left, two great black-backed gulls squabble over
a flounder, plucked live out of the shallow water.
They tear its guts out as it flaps on the flat
with their livid yellow beaks.
You’ve been careful to hide what you’re feeling
as you went about your daily business, maybe
with a little less purpose than everyone else,
but with enough verve that no one suspects you
when you hoist yourself up on to the bridge and
look down at the current, your eyes seeking
the center of a whirlpool for a clear sign.
You don’t see the surface, only what’s beneath.
All of you calls to the rocks, to the ripples,
to the currents crashing at the tip of the island,
to every wave that has broken on every beach.
You raise your face.
The wind from the north blows through you.
A dissonant chord rings.
You move closer to the edge as it dissolves,
clashing against the solid walls of guts and liver and kidneys.
But then they break down--your organs--and your
rebellious cells pull you back from the edge with a will
you hadn’t known they had. You have.
Silence arcs toward you in the form of a gull as sure of its way
as a boomerang that flies out into space and turns back without resisting.
The gull returns to the flounder, still flopping on the mudflat.
It won’t be long now.
How will you ever be able to say what made you
step off the bridge and walk back to the yellow house on the hill,
past the rock painted with the American flag,
where for the first time, the word freedom isn’t ironic?
All you can say is the mallard with the emerald green head
swam side by side with his drab mate.
All you can say is my heart is not these three bits
of broken china plucked from the mud by instinct.

Thoughts on home

2005-05-13T21:42:00.000-04:00

Is the earth my home? This is the question I have been asking myself over and over again for the past couple of months. It seems funny to ask, since I have been weeding for a living and the earth is right in my face. I inhale it. I dig my fingers into it everyday. My fingers are so dirty I can't scrub the dirt off. Sometimes the earth smells so good I think of course I belong here, and when I open my heart to the robins and gulls who chirp and swirl around me I know the earth is my home. It is only when I look up and reenter the world of people where things go awry. Maybe because it is people who I blame for making the earth into a place that I don't want to live. I know though, that I must let my mind soar like a hawk. That I have to see everything that is happening on earth now as part of a natural cycle of decay, as natural as the decay and death of my own body, or of a beetle I unearth with my spade. And I must fully accept that I was born at this time for a reason to witness and be a part of what is going to happen to the earth. I must accept reincarnation in my heart, not just as intellectual idea, and that above all, I must remember that I choose and create every experience that comes my way. I have been living with the psychic pressure of tsunami building in me ever since I read that one was predicted to hit the east coast on May 15. ACtually, I 've been living with this pressure my whole life. May 15th is in two days. Everything has fallen away. I have reached a point where I don't care what happens really. This isn't because of despair, but because I feel like I at least accomplished two things that I was sent here to do. Wrote and published Siren, awakening people who read it to the possibility of apocalypse, and finishing Bluebell: The Apocalypse Diary. No one's read it yet, but I am the living embodiment of its ideas. We are waves of sound and light. My wave touches all of you. Will it crash and break on the beach? Probably. But it will also sneak up on the shore like a lover's kiss as you sleep.

Thoughts on home

2005-05-13T10:50:00.000-04:00

The Worm Bin

2005-04-28T14:49:00.000-04:00

While flipping over rocks at Three Sisters today, I was delighted to come upon several red wrigglers! I had been searching through manure the past few months for the critters to no avail. Now that spring has sprung they are everywhere, wriggling through the wet soil up into the sun. Now I can start my worm bin. What is a worm bin, you may ask? I certainly had no idea before I went to EAT. The purpose of a worm bin is to create worm casings which you can use fertilizer, either putting them directly onto your plants or by brewing worm tea. They are easy to make. Just get a garbage can and poke some holes in it so the worms can breathe. Toss in some newspaper and some food scraps and some red wrigglers, and the worms will do their thing, digesting your food scraps into succulent casings. It sounds grosser than it is. The casings actually look and feel just like soil, not like the manure which they actually are. A worm bin is more practical than a compost pile if you live in a city. You can put it in your basement or under your kitchen sink. The worms should be red wrigglers, not the larger earth worms. Red wrigglers can be mail-ordered, purchased from a bait shop, or dug yourself--horse manure is a good place to look. To make worm tea take a handful of casings and add it to a five gallon bucket of water. AT EAT we dumped in two bottles of blackstrap molasses as well, since the sugar promotes bacterial growth. The tea should be aerated by stirring it for an hour or by hooking it up to a pump (like for an aquarium) if you don't want to do it yourself. Here on BI, a wormbin is economical as well, since we have to pay for our trash by weight at the dump. Plus you get to have pets!

Sadhana

2005-04-27T22:36:00.000-04:00

Sadhana is a Sanskrit work meaning spiritual practice. It is doing the same thing day after day until it becomes an unconscious habit, like tying your shoes, only sadhana relates to more intangible things like the emotions. My hope is that if I do my sadhana every day I will be able to deal with my emotions the same way that I tie my shoes.

Sadhana

A scent upon the surface.
A dew covered mountainside at dawn.

Insects pass their mantra on to the bush birds
twittering as the sun strikes the far side of the valley.

Callused fingertips. A shaky hand.
Not many years left of doing.

A stooped woman leans forward to pick tea leaves.
Heavy basket slung across her shoulders. Crooked hips.

Who do you belong to the same way
the leaves belong to the branches?

The air is so humid she pretends she is swimming.
Nobody ever taught her, but she knows how anyway.

The game is to forget what you’re doing her mother told her.
When she was a girl she used to believe clouds had faces.

Do the branches wonder if they belong to the roots?
She’s lived her whole life in this valley.

At the end of the day she sits on her porch drinking tea.
The insects take up the mantra as the moon peaks.

Her children have all moved to a far distant city.
If she could write, she’d tell them how the earth turns when
she stands in place.

Vultures draft on currents of air she can’t feel so close to the ground.
There’s a road leading out of the valley.

I still might take it, she thinks.
I still might learn to write.

One last sip.
What do the leaves at the bottom say?

Go to sleep, old woman.
There’s work to be done in the morning.