How it Happens...

I reach page 50 today on the new novel. I feel more and more certain of the way these stories will piece themselves together, the way they are inherently intertwined and, perhaps most importantly, that they already exist. Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet that "the future enters into us, in order to transform itself, long before it happens." In some ways I think he encapsulates the seed truth of my novel, and in another sense, I think that he speaks precisely of the process of writing it, how it is coming to be.

It is admittedly a bit esoteric, this little quote, and yet its essence, depending on the light in which I view it, seems utterly lucid. Violet's future entered into her in September of 1952, the day she received the telegram from the U.S. Army declaring her husband Missing In Action, in order to transform itself, long before it became her reality. Her future included those of her sons and of Jesse, her granddaughter, and within it was contained the whole of their combined and individual stories.

These stories enter me daily, it seems, almost as if while I sleep, dreamlessly, to be transformed and then manifest on the page as, upon waking, I write them down....it seems to occur by some magic of transcription, rather than by any ingenuity on my part. My job, it appears to me, is just to be open, receptive to the channel that runs through me, not only because I have 'agreed' to tell these stories but because in many ways, they are my own.

Who knew I would write novels, intimidated as I have always been by a work of such magnitude? And yet here is another story, another pattern of inextricably linked stories, as it were, that I have agreed to tell and which, because of my willingness, yields itself to me, to my telling of it. It is a relationship of mutual trust, and I grow to know and love these characters. I wake eager to meet them again in that linguistic space we inhabit together. It is a gift. It is a surprise, even to me. Especially to me.

Still Fixated on Radiohead's "Lotus Flower"...

Clap twice, shake your head, take your hair into your hands and pull. Pull up and away from your "fast ballooning head." Know that nothing is as it seems. And what is seems, after all? "Mother, I know not seems!" says the devoted boy, the ghost's story leering into his tilted consciousness.

Lotus flower sprouts up, opens itself: wide yawn of the hopelessly beautiful and infinitely complex. How one life is absorbed into another, moments ticking away the only measure of the space between birth and death. Abandon poetry for the real, for the grounded and mundane. Sip it like a martini, dry and acrid but full of promise.

We lift our hopes on air, giant, colorful parachute desire: cat and mouse, though not a game. Not the rush of childish whimsy but the ballooning evidence of dreams deferred and wishes turned to ashes, ashes we all fall down.

Bloom

I keep quiet. I speak again. There is a fine balance, it seems, between gratitude and complacency and thus between ingratitude and ambition. How to love what is, appreciate deeply all that is right in one's world, all that is a reflection of one's love, of one's perfect intent, and still believe in the power to create something more? More satisfying, more rewarding, more remunerative. Every life carries with it its own disappointments, its own grievances and sufferings, both great and small. Is it so fantastic to hope for these to fall away in lieu of the blooming dreams of my waking sleep?

Thank you, Universe, for my beautiful boys, thank you for their health and their vivacity and their ardor. Thank you for my husband, talented and genuine, kind-hearted and steadfast in his love. Thank you, Universe, for friends and family who gather 'round and hold space for our health and healing, our love and our light, and for the integration of it all, so that we might manifest what is already alive in our hearts.

I will keep doing what I do: loving up my boys, cherishing my husband, teaching with passion, writing with purpose, breathing fresh air and moving my body...and I will also create what is new. What is real. What is rewarding and makes me whole. These ways of being are not exclusive. Desire does not negate contentment. Vision does not subvert the visible.

What I am will grow and spill and bloom into the world, but it will always, always contain this present perfection. Om. In gratitude.

In Response to "Lotus Flower" by Radiohead

I.
It is about our own absurdity, our inadequacy at times to embody the vastness of our own humanity. How every beautiful thing is there, present, in the stillness of our being, and yet we move spasmodically around it, apoplectic in our need, in our strangeness. How we know the beauty we could manifest, crave it deeply, and are aware all the time of the distances we impose between ourselves and its realization. Oh--we are so hungry, we are so strange, even to ourselves. Especially to ourselves. We weep in frustration, tear at our hair and turn away. Send a cold stare in the place of our brokenness, nurse our brittle hearts in private.

II.
It is about how we bind ourselves and find we cannot live within such confines. How we spasm and knock ourselves against such walls only to erect them again in our consciousness. In our sleep. In our waking dreams we turn and jut and scramble and tip, only to find ourselves again in darkness. In light. Are the external variables so important really? Do they define anything beyond the stage upon which we are set to enact all the scenes between birth and death? To live it all before the fall of the curtain, heavy and musty with time. Oh, if I could only relieve your sadness. I'd kiss each eyelid, long and slow. Rock you to sleep like an infant in my birdlike arms.

III.
He jigs, he ambles, he props himself on air and moves spasmodically against the thing that pushes in on him from all sides. Threatens to crush him. He closes his eyes in the ecstasy, the torment, the sweetness of singing it away from the body, but it comes again with a force. It yanks him away from his solace, away from the quiet of his own jagged breath. He feels hunted, but he does not pity himself. Instead he is interested in his demise. In his absurd helplessness. In the irony of knowing oneself as a lotus blossom and being incapable of blooming into its beauty. Complexity is a given, but that beauty, that delicate wholeness. It eludes him again. Darkness pierces him: man on a stick. Not moon but man. Not stillness but apoplexy. Not here but there. Always far away and as if struggling against the weight of the entire ocean.

Melancholy

It is different from despair. Unlike in despair, there is still some music in melancholy. A low, sonorous song that has in it, ever, the awareness of the light, however distant. Despair knows no light. Despair leans into the hereafter as if into a headwind. In despair one's eyes are closed to beauty, to love, to peace, because of a disbelief that canvasses all awareness and thus inspires a general turning away.

Melancholy, on the other hand, leaves the eyes at half mast, the heart soft and tenable. It moves like a slow-trolling boat, gentle, gentle, and speaks nothing at all, though all manner of darkness accost it, because when the expectation for sadness is met with sadness, what is there to do but wonder at the likeness and carry on as before?

Brother

How can we sift through the garbage that clogs our experience, in particular our relationship to one another? History is what it is. It can no more be changed than the future can be predicted. It informs our present, whether we like it or not. Maybe it is not even possible to "let it go," as we are urged to do. Maybe all we can do is absorb it, allow the ache, allow the residual hurt to pervade us, until the fire of its collision is ignited and we burn. Burn away layer after layer until what remains is all there is or ever was: sisterhood, brotherhood. How regardless of childish inconsistencies I have loved you since before you were born, and how I will go on loving you into the next lifetime and thereafter. That is all. That is all.

The Delicacy of Kurt Cobain

Kurt Cobain. Study in American pop culture. Study in the abuses of celebrity. Study in despair. In the ways we look away. How we consume for our own pleasure. Lay the body of the icon out like a smorgasbord, partake of it greedily. How his music lulled us in our misery, fed our sophomoric angst, placated the cowardly rebel that slept in our hearts, and pleased us. Pleased us so with its melancholic brooding. Its angry, raucous ranting.

Did we not know that such beauty must arise from a life? Did we not know that such language and sound is not born of itself but is birthed in the bloody, fleshy extrication from a human body, a human sensibility, and is a blueprint for his genetic composition, for the story that sings his soul in this living?

Immaculate conception of human grief evidenced in the rollicking grunge rock we exalted and devoured at once. But what of the father? Man-boy who graced us with such exultant offspring of sound. What of the boy who weeps in this photograph dated September 22, 1990? Alone and anguished and invisible to the clamoring crowd just preparing for the feast.

Some animals eat their young. It is an anomaly--an act at once instinctive and contrary to nature. When will we learn to love the mother, the father, the artist in his creation? To see the longing and the despair as evidenced in his art and know it as sacred, as the holy progeny of his most profound murmurings.When will we know that we should sweep him up in our love, and not treat him like a vending machine that dispenses indiscriminately the sweets that will placate our own desperate desire?

West Coast Heart

With my ever west-facing orientation, it is hard to convince myself that this wind-peaked water is not the sea, the tree-covered land mass beyond it not an island, as the sun sets behind it all.

The way I am wired, suns set over water, into it, as it were, and slumber there until they make their ways beneath the earth to the other side of the world. They heft themselves into the sky again from behind the land, which is sometimes flat and sometimes mountainous, but always, always sprawling eastward.

The sun here is as light but does not warm in the same way it does in, say, California or Hawaii...and yet there is some promise in the warmth it does give. I have not left you for good, it sighs, lighting a blazing pathway across this water which flows, if I look closely, from one side to another, and not in heaving waves that spill themselves on the shore. Forward and back. Forward and back in the rocking motion of the sea.

No, the Hudson is a long pathway from one place to another; it is nestled in the trough of its riverbed and lays itself out across the variegated landscape. Islands have emerged directly from the ocean floor and exists in the water's salty embrace. Certainly I could drive over to Hilo, the east side of the Big Island, and see the sun rise over water. This is not the difference.

It is the difference of the sunset, I decide. It is the difference of where the sun sleeps. Good night, sun, I whisper to the train window that separates me from the cool evening air, and it is in this way each night I relinquish the Hawaiian sunset that has become a part of my consciousness and which I know I will always carry in my West Coast heart.

Of Poets...

I arrive 25 minutes early for the first "Discussion on Contemporary Poetry." I see myself in this place and do not feel foreign. It is one of the many halls at New York University, this one in the School of Law, but at the moment it is filled with poets, and while such a gathering inevitably reveals the pretentiousness of our kind, it also reveals our love. Of beauty, of language, of meaning. We experience the world differently, I think, not only from those who do not identify themselves with this art, but also from each other.

A lineup of 14 Chancellors of the Academy last night, all reading from their recent work, spoke to this directly. Of their readings, three, for me, were deeply felt. Three more deeply appreciated, and at least two barely enjoyed. That is as received through my sensibility. The filter of my poetic ear, such as it is. I reflect for some time that this range exists for them, as well, toward their myriad colleagues, but always in common, always this: a profound reverence for the bard in each of them. For the poet's heart in every one, for the yearning and inevitability of their language, for the shared ecstasy of a satisfying turn of phrase. A human cry perfectly rendered. A love song that drapes the body like a shroud.

Across the board, the vanity of such types was highlighted--how we assume that people want to read our deepest, most hidden selves. See us close up and beneath an unforgiving light. And yet, how endearing to be so willing to be naked before our readers, cold and chicken-skinned, skinny and alone. How intrepid, how admirable.

The topic of the discussion is "Risk in Poems," and Komunyakaa talks from his wing-backed chair about the first risk being to call oneself a poet, and Marilyn Hacker takes it back even further, placing the "first" risk in the act of "taking up the pen." But it is Komunyakaa's point that echoes the sensation I had earlier in the day when I was standing in a group of 10 or 12, awaiting our Walking Tour of the West Village where the formidable enchantment of the artist's life and the city itself had sent many a poet (by way of the White Horse Tavern and other such haunts) to their deaths at St. Vincent's Hospital, now closed and haunted itself by more than a handful of American lyricists.

When our 'guide' asked us how many of us were poets ourselves, I was surprised to see how many hands caught half way up, hovered feebly at ear level and either came back down or rose from there like sidling flags, limping into the air. The risk was great, and it occurred to me that by shooting my hand toward the sky (after the requisite pause midway) I was opening myself up to questions to which I might have to respond, "Yes, well, I don't actually have a full-length collection of poems that is published, but I...have a chapbook that was published....yes, well it was seven years ago and....I do have a couple dozen individual poems published in literary journals here and abroad, but I...well, my manuscript is complete, I don't know why I haven't sent it out, I--" Ugh.

I threw my hand up anyway. What the hell, I thought. I am a poet. For all that it entails. A poet indeed. It's the way I love, the way I speak and write and read the world. It's what I am in all of the egocentricity and yes, ingratiating self-exposure that the moniker denotes. I am a poet, and the written word was my first love. I admit it.

And after all, as we began to move en masse down Hudson Street, an ungainly mix of writer types (you know, berets, reading glasses, writing pads and pencils in hand), I was safe in my claim; no one even asked.

Liberated

I don't write those wildly ornate tangles of words any more. Perhaps it is because my life is no longer wildly tangled, my desire no longer breathing me like an animal, my doubt no longer wrapping its tentacles around my throat. I find myself embracing simplicity. Generating words that mean what they mean, in shadow or in light, having finally slipped out from under the requirement of subterfuge. It is a blessing, it is a relief. A liberation of the highest order. Mahalo. Mahalo. Om.

Publishing Blues

Sitting in the hall of the XXXX Creative Writing Center in New York City, I feel simultaneously at ease, as if surrounded, finally, by likeminded people, kindred spirits even, and like I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. I exult in language that has presented itself to another poet, here read aloud under soft track lighting, illuminating a personal map of the world so unique, so precise, as to render it beautiful regardless of what populates its topography.

I despair a little, too, if I'm not careful, when I compare their words to my own for, depending on the writer, mine might seem to me at any given moment too ornate or too spare, too obfuscating or too naked. But no, I know better than to do this for very long, because in my poet's heart, perhaps uncharacteristically optimistic, I do believe there is infinite capacity for originality in this life. That though there be "nothing new under the sun," there are eternally emerging new ways to describe what is old, what has been felt or even said before. This gathering has taught me, too, how against the fashionable grain this naive view really is.

I believe poems are like human faces, genetically limitless in their possibilities over the generations, and though one might find one face staring out from the borders of a photograph like an ancient windowpane, startlingly familiar, there is always the variation of color, shape, expression, that distinguishes it from the known. The extant and already recorded.

No, what makes me despair are the bad poems, and I consider myself a generous judge, an astute reader but compassionate and trusting nonetheless. Still, there is crap that gets read at a thing like this (is it laziness, after all, that drives a poet to publish work that feels unfinished?), and it is this content which crawls up under my fingernails and bores into my flesh like parasitic doubt, makes me swim in the arbitrariness of it all. What indeed swung this poet into favor and kept her there for so long that she cannot fall out?

The reading is punctuated, after all, with bright moments that make me sigh, that drive me back into my primal sense of love and beauty, and for these I can appreciate the whole of the delivery, but the backdrop, grim and banal at times, is what makes me wonder if I could ever count in this world where all I have are my verses, tenderly crafted, kissed onto the page over two decades, and not a single "relationship" that could place me squarely in the game, nor knowledge or hope of moving strategically within it. 

Angel

She wears serenity on her brow, soft canvas of un-fear. She gazes skyward, shoulders gentling in their sockets, proverbial wings lifting from their blades. There is a wide open channel between herself and God, and she knows that she alone crafts the objects and experiences that will populate that distance.

Warm hues of lavender, sage and pale blue pulse around the egg-like space that she occupies. She emerges from one nourishing space into another that has yet to take shape as hospitable or hostile. She is not agitated or fearful, because she knows the place takes its form from her mind, from her own intention.

"The universe agrees to every thought you have," she heard someone say, so she thinks up a perfection, a peacefulness that will receive her with grace.

For the Butterfly Girl

The last time I saw you alive you were taking a right turn onto Mamalahoa Highway in a dark, lifted truck. You looked too little behind that steering wheel. Too slight. A wine-colored streak of blush punctuated your cheek. Your eyes were smudged with darkness carried over from your time in the City of Angels.

You were so beautiful then, in your seeking, treading lightly on that diaphanous membrane you knew might give way at any moment, send you sprawling out into the ether, untethered and falling, falling into the nowhere that threatened you every living moment.

I wonder again and again whether when I read your post you were already gone. But you had made that plaintive cry so many times, and the wolf was always in the wings, waiting, waiting. Finally, when all was said and done, you gave yourself to him and I, among all the other fools, had long since turned away from the shadow he cast by your light.

The surprise of your departure was exceeded only by our sorrow at the thought--of you alone in the universe of the living, sending a quiet message into space, your shadowy face accompanying it like a phantom messenger from the edge. A photo-shopped whisper from the lost planet of your sadness, where you had roamed for too long and to which you never intended to return.

Angel Card: Transformation

I pull the word "Transformation." Again. For two years, this word keeps entering my life. Can one be transforming for years on end? When it first started appearing, I got excited, anticipating a dramatic, even a sudden, shift in my life. I suppose moving from California to Hawaii and then on to Vermont qualifies. I suppose writing, editing and finally publishing the story that has been blooming in my heart for five years qualifies. So what other transformation promises to take place? In what metamorphosis am I still engaged?

What I find is that life is a series of transformations, some of them more intense than others, all of them in service to the evolution of the soul. We are all constantly becoming. I could perceive this as frustrating--doesn't an individual constantly oriented toward achieving, doing, growing, yearn to at some point say, "I have achieved, I have done, I have grown?" Not according to certain philosophers who would argue that our very constitution contradicts itself in our inherent desire to achieve but not ever to 'have achieved.' They suggest that the moment that one has achieved a goal, s/he begins seeking to articulate and subsequently manifest the next, because the condition of actually having reached a goal is not indeed what we crave. It is the striving itself that we long for and which fulfills us, but we are beguiled by the goal into thinking that it is its consummation (and not the effort to consummate it) that makes us happy. I believe it was Dostoevsky who called this human tendency a "joke."

But I consider that perhaps our constitution is not so contrary to our reality. Perhaps our achievements are only perceived as 'ends,' but in reality they are simply transitions, and when seen in this way, the disappointment that inevitably accompanies the anti-climax of achievement can be eradicated. If I view life as a series of transformations, I can understand myself as occupying exactly the right place on a continuum at any given moment. Never falling short, never failing, indeed never succeeding either, but instead rolling with the tide of experience, expanding and contracting, splitting and dividing like a great cell contained in my proverbial skin, the diaphanous membrane between my soul and its eternity. Perfect in my learning. Perfect in my blooming. Ever embodying a great transformation that has every moment the potential for perfection. I am engaged in transformation now. And now. And now. Here. And here. And here. Oh. And Om.

Twiddle

Sunlight. Bubbles. The movement of light through feathers and shells strung in an arch over the improvised stage. A Vermont band sends their music across the valley that opens before us on the hill...vast expanse of green punctuated by Queen Anne's Lace, Bull Thistle, Black-eyed Susan.

We wear wildflowers in our hair, too, and we move our bodies in this way that means summer, ease, the free and open exchange of what lifts on air, from each of us, because it is less dense than our physical forms. Because it is the same as what rises from the head of every other person present. Because it is made up of our love: the buoyant atoms of an etheric and gently lilting embrace.

The History We Carry in our Bodies

I.

What always strikes me is how our shared history, though it spans back eons before our own births, is carried in its entirety in our cells. The grief and suffering of our ancestors moves in our marrow. It compromises our bones. At the 52-years delayed funeral of my grandfather, whom I never knew and whose remains slept in the fuselage of an F-86 Sabre Jet for half a century, buried beneath generations of dirt and debris and finally, a Chinese man's new garage, I wept.

I cried for what it meant to my grandmother to finally lay to rest the love of her life, to finally know without any doubt that he would not be coming back to her. I cried for what these remains, hidden from us for so many years, meant to my dad. How the whole of the ordeal could be distilled, for him, in a single sentence: "I grew up without a father." That is all. That is all.

"If you've never touched your dad, you know?" he said to me, almost asking my forgiveness for sending his hand out across the heap of human debris laid out before us in the Army identification laboratory; it was what remained of a man I never knew and who last touched his son before his infant memory could hold onto such momentous things. And yet the un-memory seemed in essence to be part of our shared consciousness, just as it was a part of our shared history, and together, we wept under the fluorescent lights of that laboratory, a line of military officials watching us from behind plate glass.

II.

How we carry our history in us, at the cellular level. Oh. We are so hurt in so many ways. We inherit a litany of suffering and without an effort to the contrary, it becomes the score for our lives. What must it take to break such cycles? Of intolerance, of injustice, of violence and war?

We must muster more than idealism if we are to escape it. More than awareness and education. It must be at the heart of our consciousness, and our every action must be in defiance of what has come before us. We must refuse to act from a place of fear and judgment of the other. But where can the seed take root? In the heart of the one who judges? Can s/he be asked to have such courage? The courage to assume that this undefined "other" has an intention, however deeply buried or obscured, to unite rather than to divide, to heal rather than to destroy?

Conversely, how can that seed be cultivated in the one who has been judged? Can we ask him to open himself again to such abuse, in the vulnerability of this new found and untried trust? It is so difficult to know, as real as our intention might be. We want to be good. It is in us to love, but how, given the precedents, can we lay ourselves bare to what in all honesty could precipitate our own ruin?

"One Floor Up More Highly"

"Rather than choosing between painting being a window and painting being flat, I view everything as a window: you're a window, the window is a window, the car is a window. For me, everything is an illusionistic surface, and painting is a mode of thought--a way to link these illusionistic elements together."--Katharina Grosse on her current exhibition entitled "One Floor Up More Highly" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, Massachusetts.

I already ascribe to the idea that everything is a mirror--you're a mirror, a mirror is a mirror, a car is a mirror. Ha. Every single thing, every "illusionistic surface" is in essence a mirror that reflects us back to ourselves. What we love, we love because it shows us what we love about ourselves. What we despise, we do so because it reflects back to us those traits we'd rather deny.

If I consider that a window can also be a mirror, then what Grosse suggests is that beyond the reflection we see there exists another, if not multiple, dimension(s), which if the surface is viewed from a particular angle or with enough concentrated effort, might be perceived.

What, then, does lie behind the glass? Behind the canvas, the concrete, the steel constructions that populate our cityscape? What does it take to perceive it? And if it can be perceived, can it not also be entered, explored, occupied? Here is Katharina Grosse's representation of what's there, dormant, until we perceive it. Are these not the vestments of those who have ventured thus far?

A window is a window, you are you, a car is a car. Or perhaps, for a moment, in the shadow of an enormous iceberg rising out of rainbow-colored earth beneath halogen lights, some number of individuals traversed the glass, doffed their worldly garments, their weight, their very memory of gravity which had kept them rooted to the real.

Once naked, they lifted off, one by one, the insubstantial quality of their physical bodies finally confirmed, their spirits soaring on light-filtered air, unrestrained and liberated unnaturally--but oh, so beautifully--from the fear of death, which is the only limitation that counts for anything in this world. I reject that fear, though it be based on what is indeed the only certainty we have in this life.

With one leg out the window, I look back over the landscape of the real. What I have lived these many years. What I know. Perhaps there is yet a choice to be made which has nothing to do with paintings or windows...and everything to do with life.

The Promise of Stillness

As yet, the grass is unaware  of the shift in season and indeed today it could easily still be summer. The leaves that punctuate the lawn speak of autumnal blazes, but the grass, barely cool yet, is still green beneath my feet. The sun in my hair is hot to the touch. I send my own roots deep into this soil, engage a promise that gurgles in my deep belly. It is a promise to my sons, my loves, to stay put. To find the beauty in stillness. To embrace the winter's cold.

I anticipate the snow and shiver slightly, an imaginary chill drifting across the tops of my shoulders even as they glow with September's last light. It is how we grow, how we change, what we give to the babies we bear. Oh. I am so deeply in love with them, and their little voices jingle in the air around my ears like country wind chimes: their gratitude, their faith in me, their utter love, all hung at odd angles but perfectly balanced and gently singing.

Thank you, sweet boys, for making me want to be the best thing I can become. For choosing me to be your mother--what luck! For your soft kisses before bed each night. For your hands in mine every morning. For the abundance you have brought to my life. For the weight of what we are--together. Namaste, my sweet bunnies. Namaste.

Meditation for Pierce

Your face is radiant, and your attention is directed entirely to your mother as I look on. I can see that you want to communicate with her through me, so I pay close attention. You show me a sequence of scenes that culminate in you, much taller than your mother, now white-headed and small with age: you are a man and you enclose her with your embrace, assure her with your wholeness.

For now you sit across from her, all nine years of you, cross-legged on the lawn, and the remnants of what has ailed you these past years is drawn like bits of magnetic sand to a cord of light. It follows the line of your spine and plunges down into the earth. The opaque little bits slide down the cord, bright with its light: divine healing. They are released deep into the soil and your mommy, she laughs because she is watering the ground and watching as daffodils emerge and bloom, absurdly time lapsed, right before your eyes.

These flowers are the tender fruits of your suffering, your fear, all of it suffused with purpose: your own divine intent. Together you laugh and the golden umbilicus that unites you, ties you gently to one another, is visible between you, spanning the space between you there on the grass. Daffodils pop to life all around you. Sunlight plays on your skin with the promise of days so light, so insubstantial, you will feel intoxicated by them, infused with their beauty and their freedom from fear.

Pierce, you are a special boy, and you have not struggled for nothing. Your mommy is awake. Awake and aware, and ever moving, sliding, morphing to keep you in her love's embrace, even as you grown, even as your heart remembers the joys of life on this earth.

I will tell her that you are staying. Fear not, sweet one. I will tell her you will stay, so that she can rest in the palm of your heart. In the moonstone lilt of your perfect love. In the assurance of a lifetime of your kisses. Namaste, love. Blessings.

Skinny Post 2: Om Mani Padme Hum

Om mani padme hum. The Tibetan blessing that has resounded in the cavern of my skull these many years. The recognition of all that is divine in this Universe, the connective fluid of a million suffering souls who still find cause to rejoice. "We would give anything for what we have," says the poet. Oh, teach me to see what I have, live it without trepidation...to be the thing that I am in the place I happen to inhabit. To know perfection when I see it, and to love it with abandon. Om.

Skinny Post: "Write it till it's gone"

"Write it till it's gone," she said, and I nearly wept at the simplicity of it, its resounding truth, the way it saved me from my own terrible censure. I have since been freed from that tangled topic, extricated myself from its sticky web, but others take its place, and I know them as ones that must be written by me and which will not be denied.

This urgency of our stories, it breathes us, occupies our linguistic landscape, regardless of what we try to place in the foreground. Perhaps all we can really do is acquiesce. Let them take their places and animate our words with their light...until they finish and pass quietly into the eternity of stories that stretches out behind us, gently reminding us of where we've been.

Love Song

Your face is the landscape that promises abundance, nourishment. Stone and moss, wind and sea, we--Oh. Even in your presence I long for more of you, feel jealous of the moments in which I cannot be conscious of your beauty. I wrap myself around you in my mind's eye, an amorous snake sliding her affection by degrees down your body. I nest in your heart where it glows our secret promise: forever. In this lifetime and the next.

Love is a wildness, it is a pause and an acceleration that surprises me even as I try to direct it. We have grown this thing--hydrangea heart, lilikoi love, delphinium dialogue of our affection. We grew children together--they become our enchantment, the exterior expression of our harmony, our philodendron faith.

I climb the rock face of your offering to me, know that I rise beyond all knowing. It is you, it is me, we are. This.

Anthem

Today I visit a yoga center in Western Mass, but I think I would enjoy it more if I did not just listen to a man reporting from volatile Mogadishu where people are flocking by the tens of thousands, because starvation is a more powerful dictator even than the instinct to avoid danger.

A Land Rover, he tells us, is parked outside the gathering of hungry Somalis, an automatic gun mounted to its back door. A small boy of 13 waits inside it, dutifully standing guard over the mothers whose breasts have dried up and who hold their babies out to volunteers who explain that the peanut-based formula they offer may still not be enough to save them, that the water/foodless week it took these mothers to walk from their abandoned and famished villages may have taken an irrevocable toll on their children.

Here, I watch one after another yogi walking erect, his/her yoga mat shouldered or encased in hand-embroidered fabric, float across the grounds of the multi-acre property that houses the center. Their faces are blissful, imbued with the glow of fresh meditations, and indeed they have come here as an act of awareness, an expression of their desire to be mindful, open, generous...to themselves and to others. I say that they "float" because some trick of the eye, some combination of their relaxed demeanor and the synchronous movement of greenery as backdrop to such serenity, causes them to appear as if they are gliding, rather than walking.

It is not that I think they don't deserve to glide, or to spend three, four, five days listening to their breath, choosing wholesome, organic foods from beneath a glass visor, nourishing their bodies and minds with measured movement. Nor is it that I think they should be aware of the Somali refugees who are this morning trying to survive the most hostile of conditions under a reign of terror that is nearly as relentless as their thirst. For all I know, they are aware of these things, offering silent prayers on their behalf.

What stays me is the contrast between that terrifying African world and our own (how can I not group myself with these yogis? Did I not just spend an entire day listening to live music under a perfect sky and a bubble machine in Southern Vermont?). I rather slink into the building, which is at the moment bustling with arriving guests and their luggage (it is Friday, after all). I visit the shop briefly--long enough to see that it is filled with pleasing trinkets, beautiful objects (none of them required for life) and long enough to find that the shop manager whom I have come to meet, has left for the day. Oh, I say to the colorful garments that line the walls, to the gemstones that sparkle in their dishes.

Somewhat relieved, I slink back through the lobby and out to my car. It is a relief to drive away, though I have drawn no conclusions, learned nothing specific from this contrast....only collected a fluid sort of uneasiness that pools in my belly. I don't know, is the thing...how we live with ourselves. How we live with our selves.

Chance, it seems, has been kind to me...in the big details--where I was born, to whom, under what government.  So then, how does one find a middle ground between purposed ignorance (in this I know that I am quite skilled, especially practiced during the period when my boys were babies and I could only see to love them, nourish them--what a luxury) and the impulse to abandon one's real or ordinary life for the super-heroism of "making a difference"?

It annoys me that I have no answer to this question and that writing this down has not yielded one--and then I forgive myself again for being so imperfect. We are broken in so many ways, but it is our intention that redeems us. I will find my way, the way for my little family...to live and to grow, and yes, to make a contribution somehow. I will live with my self, because "what can I be but this thing that remains, what can I be but this?"

I will glide when I can and receive with gratitude the many blessings that are rained down on me from an abundant sky. My guilt will not serve anyone. But I will not turn away from those headlines, and I will not ignore what I hear on the radio. My awareness will be my first act of generosity, and my second will be in teaching my own children about the world, about suffering, and about how we might, in our small way, help. I will relinquish my desire to find or create an answer and instead live. Live well and live mindfully. I will offer my words to the world...to those who might seek refuge in them. I will forgive myself for having a few things that serve no purpose but to please my aesthetic sensibility, but I will not hoard them. Perhaps this is the best I can do.

No. This is the best I can do: in this life that I am living, here, now, I will know suffering when I see it, and I swear, I will not turn away.

This Week's Featured Reader Response by new mama Ali Stewart-Ito of Honolulu, Hawaii

Thank you, Ali Stewart-Ito, for this review of Inertia the novel...

"Inertia takes the reader beyond the physical realm into a world where truth is found in the intangible. Cope Tait creates characters that manage to be quirky and fresh but also relatable and familiar. Time, a concept that we try so hard to define, reclaims its ethereal nature as we are allowed to momentarily embody the world of each character."

And congratulations on the birth of your new baby girl! <3 <3

Announcing the release of the Ebook version of Inertia the novel!

Yay! At long last the electronic version of Inertia is available on Amazon! With just a couple of clicks you can be reading in less than 2 minutes!!

Click here to buy Inertia for Kindle now!!

Bonus material in the electronic version: Book Club Discussion Questions!

This Week's Featured Reader Response by Teri Chong of Waimea, Hawaii

Thank you, Teri, for this gorgeous piece of writing in response to Inertia the novel. In gratitude...

"A must read that will attract, strengthen, and sustain your spirit in more ways than one. I continue to be amazed how our lives today are simply blueprints made eons ago that we live out, moment by moment. There are no coincidences, just purposeful, and some extremely profound, experiences that we must journey through. When we reach the critical point and feel this incredible certainty that we've been there, we've done that, we can then begin our very own journey of believing, living, loving, and healing. All is purposeful for our individual self, our individual growth, our individual journey of being who we are in mind, body, and most importantly, spirit. Thank you, Kim, for this beautiful work. It has touched me in so many ways, on so many planes, and has given me yet another opportunity to remind myself of who I really am. Sending you Peace, Love, & Light, always." --Teri Chong

This Week's Featured Reader Response from Tara Hitzig of Los Angeles

Thank you, Tara, for this inspiring response to Inertia the novel:

"Fear is like the darkness in the middle of the forest, blinding to the eyes. Your book has helped to open my eyes and what it spoke to me is this: 



I am so much happier to have loved, to have tried, to have witnessed, to have continued to "be and do" and to have experienced loss than to never have had those experiences in the first place. I believe that every experience I have had has given me reason to be here, to live each moment and to love with abandon. To love madly, blindly, insanely. I believe that there are those people who come in to your life, give you something, and then leave. Some stay with you for all your time, some stay only for a short time, but they all offer you something. And it is our duty, our work, to find out what they gave and to piece it together to reveal the beauty of this life. 



Yes, angels have come in to my life, are currently in my life, and have guided me and helped me to this place I am now. Without them, I don't think I would have truly made it through and still seen the beauty and for that, I am blessed they have come at all. 



Thank you for your words. Thank you for putting them down and allowing others to share in them. Thank you for being in my life and offering your self to all those fortunate to read this inspiring novel."  --Tara Hitzig, Los Angeles

Oh to Om.

I turn a corner. I accept payment for energy work ( a first). I wait. I breathe. I live. I watch Inertia's sales rise, continue to receive feedback from readers--always the same: read it in one sitting, couldn't put it down, the characters lived with me for days after I finished reading. I think about the ways its story heals. Open myself to its miracle, because indeed my own heart, my own family, have been healed through its birth. Its arrival. Its steadfast message. 

Oh. It was always a syllable of exasperation, of longing or despair. Now it is clipped at the end and round like its letters: Oh! Now it is an expression of delight. My surprise in seeing that life is good. Abundant. Real. Yes, all of it real in a way that I never knew. "Mother I never knew,/ every time I see the ocean,/ every time--" (Basho). All of it grounded and whole and laden with life's many truths--not insubstantial, as I had thought, but corporeal, it seems. Here and here. In this stone. In this leaf. In the light reflecting off the water as it moves... It only appears to be elusive; a little contemplation, a little observation, reveals that the source is constant and continuous. Though we in our fixed position on the earth may turn away from it for half of our living hours, that light doesn't abandon us but rather whispers its steadfastness by lighting the moon as we sleep to dream.

Oh. It is the shape of the sun, the moon, the planet we inhabit, and it begins the sacred syllable that closes my wonder now with the sound of pleasure: mmmmmm. Om. It is the sound of this, and every other, completion. It is a promise and a consummation at once. It is the syllable of our wholeness. It sets the vibration of our love. Ever.

The Clarity of 40

I sit and consider the stillness: gentle Vermont breeze, blue sky dripping onto green limbs that reach heavenward. Wasn't it only moments ago they held their leaves like tight little fists in the air, hoping for enough sun to nourish them? Scattered white puffs of cloud lazily change shape across their azul backdrop. Sound of a distant lawn mower, chatter of children hatching a plan to cool off at the snow-making pond or Pikes Falls. Dog comes back from somewhere, soaking wet and panting, a dogsmile lifting her black lips on either side of her lolling tongue. Wildflowers like jewels adorn the hillside between lawn and woods: Bull Thistles, Ox-eye Daisies, Bishop's Weed and Queen Anne's Lace populate the grasses and whisper summer's promises.

This kind of quiet, this kind of clarity, where every color is distinct, nothing bleeding into anything else but presenting itself in its wholeness, its real-ness...it's quite unexpected, really. And while things have been set in motion, while my love swells on language offered to the masses of people who would read, would dare to comprehend their own hearts, I rest here in the Green Mountains. I breathe. I make pancakes for my boys and their friends. I fill a kiddie pool on the back lawn.  Read a book written by a kindred spirit. Mmmmm. Yes and please. Oh.

Life was always this beautiful, I think, and this new decade I'm entering, it shows me that beauty unblinkingly. Despair edges our experience ever...always it is creeping along the periphery of what is light, what is perfectly bright, but it is perhaps the contrast that brings into focus what there is to be grateful for. Fear is useless, I have learned. Instead: a mindful acknowledgment that it is there--despair like a garment so easily adorned--and a deep appreciation that in this moment--today--now--it does not drape over our bodies. Does not cover our heads. Mahalo. Mahalo. Mahalo nui loa, I say to the sun, blazing above the arch of our mountain and illuminating the dew before lifting it from its sleep. There are no words, I think. But no. There are many.

This Week's Featured Reader Response by MY MOM & DAD!

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for your Amazon Review of Inertia...it means everything to me!

Kim Cope Tait's Inertia is a beautiful, descriptive tale that gives us a stirring glimpse into the rational fear of losing someone we love and the sanguine hope that it can be meaningfully explained. The book pierces the heart with an emotionally charged journey on the rollercoaster cycle of grief. The story is told with awe inspiring prose that evokes both tears and joy. We simply love this book!  --Dan & Gail Cope

Couple of pros, yeah? : D Thanks, guys!! xo

The Wanderlust Festival is right around the corner...please join us at Sugar and Spice Wine Bar & Coffee Lounge

This Week's Featured Reader Response by Tyne Pike-Sprenger

Thank you, Tyne, for this beautiful response to Inertia...

"Inertia is a novel that touches an innate human desire to comprehend the elusive nature of life. For anyone that has ever risked fully giving themselves to someone, has experienced love or its unfathomable loss, Inertia pulls at fear and despair, offering in its place the hope of finding something tangible we can forever hold onto. Long after you finish the final page, the emotions and experiences linger as you contemplate the world that exists through the vivid imagery of Kim Cope Tait's writing. Once in awhile, Tait suggests, we are blessed by some remarkable soul whose life will drastically impact our own. Every once in awhile we are also lucky to fall into a story, like Inertia, that will forever change our understanding of this divine existence."  --Tyne Pike-Sprenger

Tree Dreams

Atoms stack themselves, one upon the other, in the shape of my intention until the thing is made real. Real and palpable before me: heavy branches, thick with meaning, dripping with whispering green. I touch them with my hands, marvel at my own creation, the pulsing light of divine collusion passing from the rough bark to my fingertips, my palms flattened against it.

Why is it so hard to sit with our creation? Study its striations, its nuances of color and texture? Why do we deny its perfection before we even explore it? It is because, I think, what we articulate in our minds rarely resembles the outward manifestation in the ways we expect it to. I dream a tree and then turn away from the willow that grows overnight in my yard. Never mind the miracle of its engenderment--I dreamt a pine!

No. I will love this willow up, read its message like braille, intuiting its likeness to the seeds I held for so long in my heart, until my knowing encompasses its perfection, until it teaches me all I wanted to learn from it, even before it broke the warm earth that enclosed its slumber.

Featured Reader Response: "Poetic Medicine" by Kerry Balaam

Thank you to Kerry Balaam of Waimea for this week's Featured Reader Response. The story of her relationship to Inertia is like a poem itself. I love it and am deeply honored by her words. In gratitude...

"When I first read Inertia, I was in flight, literally, on an airplane above the ocean. The day before, I had attended the funeral of a young man I loved, so I was grappling with fresh devastation as I traveled. Both my origin and destination were places my high school friend called home before he passed away suddenly in an accident at age 26. Deepening the melancholy of my pilgrimage was another pain, the acute awareness that I had lived, in the very same two locations, with another young man, my college sweetheart, until only a few years ago, when he was killed as a passenger in a car accident at age 25.


"There in the sky, in transit between places where I'd repeatedly loved and lost so much, between two spots on the planet so full of memories and so marred by premature death, I looked down on the Pacific, clutching Kim Cope Tait's pages to my chest as I leaned to peer out of the tiny oval portal over the expansive blue. This body of water plays a key role in Inertia, uniting California, Hawaii, and New Zealand, the novel's solid-ground settings. Illustrated aptly by Noe Erger's cover art--a rushing swirl threatening to barrel the viewer--waves form a fluid motif throughout Inertia's story and the power of ocean depths serves as a fitting metaphor for an unstoppable, all-engulfing 'momentum toward fate.' Inertia's narrators are, perhaps necessarily then, surfers.

"They are also writers. And their story is about shared, "real" experiences of unbelievable, heart-shattering coincidences, with "super real" meaning beyond the scope of individual lifetimes. Inertia is a lesson in relinquishing isolated, and often possessively held, grief, in awe of truths greater than ourselves and our grasp. It is also a memorial to the departures of spirits by whom we've been so blessed, by whose loss we are so broken, and ultimately, by whose enduring light we open so fully to the living we've yet to do.

"As I read Inertia, I soon began to feel that I was hovering, not only above the sea, but above the storm of my "personal spiral," above my hurting. The great poet Hafiz expresses his desire to turn himself into a 'Forest / Herb,' and begs his reader 'Apply me to your / Wounds.' For me, Cope Tait's poetic telling of Inertia's story functioned in exactly this way, as a divine healing salve for my most tender and internal injuries. Intervals of 'crazy urgency' arising 'in my ribcage' as I identified with Jake, gave way to a quieter, more deeply held and ancient knowing, a profound sense of peace. Just as my airplane's wheels reached down to meet the runway, I'd gained 'traction.' Inertia had provided not only medicine for my heartache, but also momentum to my soul's journey. Moving forward, I'm agreeing again: 'What can I be but this thing that remains?'"

The Dealio.

Horoscope

Lunar eclipse in Gemini on Tuesday and a New Moon in my House of Self-Undoing on Wednesday. Do I really need a house of self-undoing? Why do I even have that? Time, my horoscope says, to identify what beliefs--fears and blockages--are keeping me from my destiny. I contemplate this for a while, feel the whisper of unease as it slinks up my back and curls itself around my ears. Could there be beliefs I hold, of which I am not even cognizant, that stunt my forward motion? That close me off from the abundance and bounty the Universe has for me? I've heard of this. I've even seen it. Probably done it. But then I recognize the habit of self-doubt--familiar indeed. And then I reject it. No.

First of all, there is nothing that is wholly true for me and every single other person born under the zodiac sign of Cancer. Not one thing. I am every moment fulfilling my destiny, moving with force into my future which is happening, as Stoppard's Guildenstern says, now...and now...and now. It is a destiny divinely sketched and loosely governed by what my transcendent self desires to learn in this lifetime.

Out in the ether, I looked at what I could do/be/have in this lifetime. Yes and please, I sighed, and with my hands I built the rough shape of a meaningful existence. Agreed to navigate it as best I could. Nodded to kindred spirits who also agreed--to what we would live, how we would grow, what we would teach each other. All of it loosely contained by my need to evolve as a spirit, I put it together. And yes, my destiny unfolds every second.

I still my bird-like heart and live my knowing. I sing the prayer of my perfect intent and make an origami lotus from this page of words. Words that attempt to define my wildness, to circumscribe my heroic pathways, to delineate the ethereal. No, I say aloud again, because I reject such confinement, such limitation--is it not language like this that plants the seeds of such fear? Don't its authors, with their suggestion, begin the process of germinating those beliefs and thereby grow them where there might have been others, and only to validate themselves. Not prophesy but engenderment, one must finally concede.

Though it would be a comfort, perhaps, if a stranger could tell us how best to approach a particular day or week, and in a weekly mass email at that, ulimtately one's greatest comfort must be drawn from the fact that one is the author of her own destiny, and just by showing up, she begins to manifest it.

This Week's Featured Reader Response by Betsy Boland

I have so enjoyed and appreciated reading the responses that readers have had to Inertia, many of which have been posted on Inertia's Amazon web page. I decided I'd like to give them a little more exposure (and happily Inertia, too) by posting one each week here on my blog. This week's review comes from Betsy Boland in Waimea, Hawaii. Thank you so much for your beautiful words!
  
     "'Calling all angels/Calling all angels/ Walk me through this one/Don't leave me alone'... In their hopeful chorus, Jane Siberry and K.D. Lang solicit solace for humanity during life's most uncertain moments. To such a heartfelt, human plea, Kim Cope Tait's Inertia invokes a deeply sacred, propitious reply. Tait's divinely woven, resonant tale, is a wise, eloquent, healing response, delivered on the wings of her angelic but very earthy characters, to every reader who ever dared shout out to the heavens for company in the wake of loss.
     "There is great art to the manner in which Tait intently elicits the power of youthful passion and friendship while gently prying the band-aid from the wounds of mature grief in order to spread a spiritual balm capable of freeing hearts and souls. She writes in beautiful, vivid, nuanced prose, guiding us through an entrancing, ethereal weave of beginning and end, where we become instantly and steadfastly connected to Inertia's select cast of characters - seemingly molded from our own flesh, in the silhouette of our own spirit - and are enticed into their compelling story.
     "Tait's young school mates walk firmly in this world, and anchor us in the rich, weighty experience of being in a body and in each other's lives, with such utter love and intensity. In contrast, her grown up soul mates hover more tentatively in the world, and echo our inherent hesitation; we're so often not really sure how this life goes.
     "Seekers and skeptics alike will find themselves stealing a glance at everyone they encounter, or perhaps peeking within their own implausible souls, in the hope of recognizing someone akin to the unforgettable, down to Earth angels in Kim Cope Tait's Inertia. In the end, it is our own silent asking and quiet knowing in which Inertia beckons us to truly believe, in order to be fully present in our lives and to understand our blessings from those passed. Inertia will appeal to all six of your senses, linger in your life, and keep you searching eagerly on the bookshelves for more from Kim Cope Tait."

May 10, 2011

My darling boy...you are 10 today. How can that be?

Only yesterday you were pushing and stretching against my taut belly, insisting on an early arrival. Only last night you were cutting your first teeth, taking your first tumbles, growing your first curls, smiling that beautiful smile I know so well, all glossy with baby drool and accompanied by your baby squeals. Only this morning you were swimming in the sea of your Hawaiian home, trotting barefoot across the lawn of your Waimea pre-school, holding my hand for ring-around-the-rosie...again. Only this afternoon you were winning your first skateboard competition, idolizing Mrs. Seliskar in your 2nd grade class, painting award-winning tropical fish with bubbles for farts that no one would notice.

And now, this evening, look at you. So big. So wonderful. I blink and try to refocus--who is this tall boy with curls that graze his shoulder blades? Who is this kind-hearted, quick-witted, generous and compassionate boy? Oh, it is my bunny. My baby boy. My love, I'm so proud of you. I love you so much. Happy 10th birthday, sweet one.

Ever, Mommy

Believe.

I settle in to the Green Mountains. They receive me with water, in all its forms, and with leaves budding all around--promise of spring. If I am to understand this transition from one season to the next as symbolic of my own reluctant transformation, then there is hope yet of the full bloom for which I have prepared myself.

Leaf buds hold tight to branches still brittle from winter's long cold, but they begin, slowly, hesitantly, to unfurl. Tulips and daffodils shyly appear in clusters along the edge of a lawn or near a doorway, and though the temperature is chilly, the sun graces them at intervals, spills its light over them with its usual ardor.

Birds flit around the periphery of my awareness and  catch the attention of dogs that stretch, awaken, and begin to shed their winter weight and coats. The promise is there. Evidence of this change is everywhere. Believe in it, I whisper, and I am speaking to the air. To the sky. To my own trembling heart. 

Atom Tuning

I let it breathe. I breathe. I feel its tentacles extend beyond my reach, beyond my vision. It is good. Perfect, in fact. More than, and ever transcending, what I am as its author. It is a moment of stillness. I am as in a dinghy, far out at sea, in a pocket of quiet. Of calm. The sunlight envelopes me, enlivens my aquamarine milieu. Yes and please, I murmur, for it is here. Here. In gratitude the sacred syllable rises from deep in my belly, finds its perfect pitch along my throat and spills into the air around my head: Om. Its vibration tunes the atoms that surround me, until the wooden boat, the salty air, the sea beneath me...even my own flesh and bone...become it. I am absorbed into the collective. I am gone. Infinite and pure. Radiant and divine. Present and adorned with light. Namaste.

Read Inertia's Prologue & First Chapter in a single doc...

If you'd like to read the prologue & first chapter of Inertia in a single document online, visit my growing website (thank you, GW!):

http://kimcopetait.com/

Enjoy!

Hawaii Public Radio Interview

Had a great radio interview with Chris Vandercook that aired this week on HPR Tuesday 4/19...click on the link below to listen now! The discussion of Inertia the novel begins at 17:22...

http://hawaiiconversation.org/?p=235

Thank you, Chris, for asking such fabulous questions!

AMAZON RELEASE!!

Big day for Inertia...making its entry onto the scene in a BIG way! http://tinyurl.com/452wpxe

Order today and share with all your friends. In gratitude...

In it for real...

Last night was magical. Inertia moved through the audience like wind, like breath, like love. Thank you to everyone who attended the reading and book signing at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT. I am so honored to have had so many people there to share in the birth of this book into the world. Great questions, great energy, great company! Mahalo nui!

     Signing my first books! Yay!

                                             At the mic...

                                         ...with Debbi Wraga to whom I am eternally grateful. For her love of Inertia, for her incredible design work, for her advocacy, for  her generosity. Love. Ever.
                

Last minute reflections...

The morning of the launch. Inertia enters the world today. It feels surreal. Super-real. Yes. Perfectly timed and perfectly intentioned. My dad is here from California. The event is tonight. The first of many. I lay out the clothes for my little guys to wear. I listen to the wind in trees. I message back and forth with friends who cannot attend but whose love is all around me. Such gratitude is inexpressible. But then, it has already been expressed....and bound and adorned with Noe's artwork. Oh. So beautiful the tapestry we slowly learn to see: ourselves as interwoven with every other brightly colored thread. Namaste. Hope to see you tonight! xo

Bloom

The sun warms my body and sends the snow into the earth. Its heat has a moving shadow that undulates in the square of light on my office floor. My own shadow there is ageless, featureless, but not without the crisp form I recognize as my own.

I move in silence these days, in quiet anticipation of what will come from this seed. Oh. It grows me. Promises that it will bloom the way my heart believes it will. I have always only been its steward. Like a child, it is mine while it is mine, for a time. For a time.

I nurture it, love it up, present it to the world. There is beauty here. Also perfect intent--it is this last that will grow in the hearts of uncountable others. Unfathomable love. Undeniable healing. Whisper of the divine as I conceived it. And what we love: a good story with characters to believe in. In gratitude. In gratitude.

T-minus eleven days and counting...

I relax into this knowing. It carries me like a wave, and my timing is such that rather than being pitched over the falls with its watery weight, I am sent skittering down its face in delight, my heart swelling with the new sensation I can only identify as fulfillment. Mother. Wife. Creator. Healer. Oh. What I have managed to create with my quiet intention, building, building--this wonderful thing from only grace. Who knew it could become a concrete thing? This life for my family, our Vermont home, the birthplace of Inertia and indeed all the words and works that will and must follow it. I find myself reeling but grounded, wheeling with the stars but 'no longer in orbit around the planet of self.' No need to tie 'fishing sinkers into my hair' or put 'stones in my pockets.' Only this: the perfection of gravity. I inhabit this body fully, embrace every aspect of being--in this life, in this love, in this exquisite place. In gratitude. Om.

Here's the Facebook Event Invitation...

Inertia Preview Release Reading/Book Signing Event

Inertia: Final Pre-Publication Installment!

Here is the last little bit of Chapter One... I can't believe it's already time to post this.  Ya' gotta' buy the book to read the rest! : ) Enjoy, and follow the link here to pre-order through Northshire Bookstore (yes, they ship internationally!). You can also pre-order from Amazon starting later this week. You may click the text below for easier viewing.  Happy reading!

Incongruity, Gratitude, and Prayers for Japan

I have meant to write, for days, about Japan.The incongruity of that disaster with what blooms here in Vermont as the glorious aftermath of ice storms: glistening ice-slicked branches that catch the light just so. Three Japanese people have fed themselves to the machine in order to lift countless others from its maw--does heroism emerge by degrees? Is one born with that seed in them? So that it is activated by need: today, I will give myself away. What prompts it? Is it urgency, or a slow-growing love of humanity that germinates into such an act? Incongruous, too, is the way my own life blossoms into snow and sunlight--a million glistening promises blanketed over still-warm earth, while an enormous wave of saltwater, an entire ocean of grief, lifts itself up and over entire cities, swallows them in its voracious hunger. Oh. I must go in gratitude, with a million prayers swelling in my quiet heart. Blessings to you, my Japanese brothers and sisters. May your bodies heal, your hearts expand with light, your land re-emerge renewed. Namaste.

Inertia Installment #10

Here is the second to last installment of Chapter One in Inertia the novel. Only one left, and then it'll be about two and a half weeks to go-time! In this tiny clip, Angela's narrative has nearly reached its end.

 Thank you to all of you who have been reading faithfully. I hope to see you on April 16th at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT! Tune in again next week for the final installment of Chapter One. Click on the text below, if you like, for easier viewing, and please hit "share" if you like what you read! Mahalo!

Inertia Installment #9!

Getting so close to the end of Chapter One...and to the reading/signing event at 7pm at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester on April 16th. Everyone is invited for this, and then afterward to Sugar & Spice in Stratton Village for the after party chez Smaranda! Enjoy. Click the text below for easier viewing...and please hit the "Share" button if you like what you're reading here!

Inertia Installment #8

I can't believe it's already time for the 8th installment of Inertia...and that the release is less than 6 weeks away! Here, Angela continues her narrative in Chapter One. Enjoy! (Click the text below for easier viewing).

Inertia Installment #7!

Aloha Reader Friends! Here is the 7th installment of Inertia the novel. As the release date draws near, we approach the end of Chapter 1.  In this passage, Angela continues her narrative. Enjoy, and please share it if you like what you read! (Click on the text below for easier viewing).

Some stray thoughts as Inertia comes to fruition...

I am wriggling my way in through the small opening of a balloon, only inside it is infinite. In the last few days I have become aware of the imminence of vast change but not yet witnessed its manifestation. I have made my way inside, the dust of my dreaming still coating my skin, and I can see everything now, though some of it is still animated by my imagination. I catch my breath again and fall into the lap of my own faith, so generous it has been in raveling out these many moons, these fragmentary hours. This kaleidoscopic beauty--It is mine, it is mine, I whisper to no one in particular and know, without speaking it, that it always was.

Inertia Installment #6: Angela

Aloha! Please enjoy this next little chunk of my novel Inertia.  Also, mark your calendars with the April 18th Internet release date....and for April 16th if you're in New England for the reading/signing at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, followed by the Inertia Launch Party hosted by Smaranda at Sugar & Spice in Stratton Village! Hope to see you all there!

Inertia Installment #5

Welcome to the 5th weekly installment of Inertia the novel. Angela continues her narration here (click on the text below for easier viewing, if you like). Remember to mark Inertia's Amazon release date on your calendar: April 18th, 2011. Enjoy, and see you next week!

Inertia Installment #4: Angela

Here is the 4th installment of Inertia the novel, promoting its release on April 18th, 2011. These are the next two paragraphs of Chapter 1, and Angela is speaking. Click the text below for easier viewing, if you like. Enjoy!

Inertia Installment #3! If you like it, please share it! (Click on the text below for easier viewing)

Inertia Installment #2

Here is the second weekly installment of Inertia the novel. You've met Jake. Introducing...Angela. (Click the image below for easier viewing)

Inertia Sneak Peek!

I will be publishing the prologue and first chapter in weekly installments now until the release date (April 18th, 2011), so stay tuned for more. Thanks to Debbi Wraga at The Shires Press, we get to use the actual text. Here is the first one; it's from the Prologue. Inertia has two narrators. Meet Jake. (Click on the text below for easier viewing).

Inertia promo...

“Only the good die young,” croons Billy Joel, and we all know exactly what he’s talking about. It is always those who are too light, too bright for this planet that seem to make their exits early. We concede that it could be in part because they are immortalized in the bloom of their youth, too soon to make the mistakes the rest of us make sooner or later and live to regret, but we wonder, somehow, if it isn’t something more than that.

What if…they are special? Spirits, angels even, who have agreed somewhere out in the ether, before they took bodies in this life, to come to earth for only short periods at a time, bless those they come in contact with intensely, and then leave again, lift off into the next cycle of life and love? And what if…you had the unlikely experience of knowing such a spirit twice in one lifetime? Once as their peer and once as their elder?

How we long for such a reprieve from the losses we experience, how we hope to be brushed, even for an instant, with the ethereal traces of the one who is gone from us. What if it happened for real, and you knew it?

Inertia the novel...

I receive the galley proof of Inertia. It is in fact a book. A novel that I am preparing to send into the world as on a little boat with candles and flower-petal-confetti. I send it out on the waters of its gentle birth. It carries with it my most perfect intention.

On the night it is in transit to me, the night of my waiting, I am visited by M in my dream. He is sunny and sandy and fully alive. He is grinning and nodding his awe and approval, a look I remember well from when I would introduce him to a new poem, a new concept, a new meditation. It was so vivid, and I remember appreciating the accuracy and likeness of this dream M with the real boy I knew and loved in my time at HPA.

It was a simple message, one of many--it said, wordlessly, Yes. And Oh. Mmm. M's smile said You are onto it, Kim. This thing came into being of its own accord. It has its own life now. He expressed universal gratitude for my willingness to sit for three months straight at a child desk with a cafe chair and the hope of a trade wind to kiss my forehead from the high window I faced all that time. He said Thank you for being so small so these ideas could pour themselves into your long shadow, let you collect them like seashells or Job's tears, as from a river, set them against sky like morning stars. 

I knew when I woke that I was moving with the universe, not against it. That there was something divine in the whole celestial arrangement of those shells, those gorgeous little tears. I saw them as my love, grown from the grains of my early distress into the gift which I now lift over my head and offer back to the sky, to every single soul who desires it. Indeed, to God.