Joni Mitchell Morning

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.