NOVEL IDEA

It had started earlier before the end had happened. Remembering the right time wasn’t as important as when the words first came clear. Just as sunlight was meant to be remembered so it could complete its purpose, so too was the night’s dark work to be sought and made purposeful.

In order to complete the sound, we were made to form lines and rows, then pushed into memorizing, what later would prove to be a waste of our time. I concluded this by seeing through the dark of daylight.

I saw the lines we were taught and the silence asked of us and the non-communication expected from us during the same hours as later business became. It was not a surprise that happened, but a confirmation.

It was easy to see why business was as cliquish as the hounded wives relating to their captivity.

Birds I thought. Even though they rarely saw themselves eating seed, I saw what they bought, how they prepared it and who they let bless their work. Like sexual nuns waiting for the father to pass his approval, his judgement of the good graces. Then eat.

There is no real reason to get upset with this composition. Life works this way. It is concerning only in that it continues to present a problem.

¾ 2 ¾

Bird nest soup. Unusual and filling in an empty sort of way. Like the crème filling of a bad eclair. When you open up a can of worms expect the best.

There was never a time when the breeze didn’t raise the head up to see what blew in.

When you’re taught to be creative, when you’re taught to love reading, then there is no excuse to be abandoned to a world that loves neither, or barely loves it, keeps a hand full of people around to keep the stores running.

And then you find yourself not minding the difference and go on with what you’re about. Remembering to include the latest thought that brings the true color of yourself into your own field of vision.

Before you can begin to understand you’ll have to know that I can see in the dark like an owl, some kind of infrared signal I pick up and that’s okay at night, but in the daylight it can get you in trouble. I’ve learned not to speak so much of what I see and that makes things better for me.

The noise I hear is really more music, because the animal sounds appeal to my senses more than the sounds the business world makes every day, trying to drown out the sun, trying to forget the real world.

By the time most light switches have been turned on in most buildings, I’ve been up watching the sun unwrap the day, removing the black back like a blanket that we all sleep under.

Each leaf tipped in light. That’s how it starts, then the smell of coffee as if from a fine café. A latte. But before, I’ve seen Paris and London from here. That’s a visual acuity of several thousand miles, but it can’t be helped, it’s just the way things are. I’ve accepted these peculiarities as part and parcel of who I am and what I’m about. What I haven’t accepted are the daily things taken from each of us, so that the world can go on functioning, basically unchanged, from the time of the overthrow.

¾ 3 ¾

By the time you read this it will have been 20,000 years since you could sit down to a really good meal. There are exceptions of course, but those that you find are directly linked back to the time of island cooking. Before the hoards arrived. They arrived and arrived and arrived. And took over and stayed. These are the businessmen of today. Watch them descend upon a café, eat and run like locust on a good field.

The artists know of whom I refer. They’ve met their inability to process beauty and feeling. The artist’s have for eons felt the sting on the one hand and the hoarding of their work on the other by these business-types. But we, I include myself among them, we are able to pursue our life and create from what we feel.

And a good meal is something you can sink your teeth into.

In the old days you could take time to eat, because it was a celebration of your day. It was made special with flowers, bowls of water, candles and oil lamps. And you saw the faces around the table, they were as much the food as the food.

Like a good painting or mural, there were the parts, and you saw these, but you were always aware of the entire event. A meal was a pathway taking you to the field where the wheat was grown, or the tree from which the plums were picked. The red in the strawberries reminded you of sunrises and who was with you. There was none of this separated—out—ness.

Taste was felt as deeply as laughter and stories were told. There were conversations in those days. In those days people talked the way they thought. Now that only happens when they write, or paint, or dance. The rest is guarded, as it should be in this time of the businessmen.

But then I’m about to show you how in a very beautiful way their world is coming to a close.

¾ 4 ¾

Look at most people’s eyes, how they avert to the ground trying not to see, trying to hide from seeing the ones passing them in the street, in cars, in line at the bank, in the grocery stores. Those eyes were designed to see every

thing and respond easily. But it’s not safe anymore. This is the look you get now days, this non-looking look. And each time it’ s a signal of unsafety and curling up. It is the look of the armadillo, the stance of the porcupine in its stand-offish way.

These are the same people who never close their eyes to listen to a violin play. It’s too dangerous to do so. Their hand always ready to fend off an offensive glance.

Watch them eat a meal out. Heads down as in a trough with quick side glances to be sure no one will grab their meal time away from them. Those few minutes to be by themselves. The goal to remain separate.

They turn this against the artists, take the cloth of it and drape it over them like a shroud. Separate them like the yoke of an egg and scramble them apart.

But it doesn’t hold water. We’ve been where they’re going and they still are acting as though they’re the tour guides and want to charge admission. No one’s buying it anymore, so much so, that attendance is down and play is up.

The business-types think they know it all, even made up schools in the first place and printed their own certificates, handed them out like better-than-them badges. The slick attaché or portfolio has replaced the nerd’s satchel and pocket protector but its them just the same.

The CEO’s are the superintendents and principals, the board of directors are the teachers and the remaining employees are the students. There are the hall monitors passing out passes to allow travel up and down floors watching when to gleefully hand out demerits.

Attendance is kept track of, to see how well you were trained in school.

Business is just a carry over from school, and unpaid apprenticeship was your schooling, schooling is big business. Your taxes at work, like road building and bridge repair.

¾ 5 ¾

Beyond this easy recognition lies the truth. Novel in its idea and taller than the reach of most, it is approached through the motionary momentum of freedom. Here grammatical exactitude is seen as the foster child of real thought, a distant relative to spacial awareness and transcendent meaning. Tone is heard through the cattle gate of life and the branding doesn’t matter one jot. Rather, intent is felt for its harmony within freedom.

Corralled is not the thought as it moves through the streets and pathways to completion. Whether sipping tea at 4, or speaking to birds as the sun rises, or giving a speech at dinner. The intent moves with the feeling, and registers with that which is beyond limit. Freedom has no limit and the contractors on this thought are the ones evading its message.

Here today I can take you to a seaside resort and tell you what the catch of the day is, or let you feel the breeze from a passing leaf in the woods. Where we go comes from spacial referencing that is beyond editoring intent.

I can smell the smoke as the campfire springs to life and feel the soft flannel shirt on my back as you sit across from me in your chair or on your sofa or in your bed. I can smell your hair and the shampoo you used and feel that final squeekiness as you ran your fingers through it making sure all the soap was out.

Here. Where words belong to themselves and move according to the willingness, shaped out of spacial harmony, resonate will, a flowing and remarkable gift, is the well. Well founded in unlimitedness, built from the foundation of admitted hopefulness, of dreams coming true, faced through a world betting on a dream’s defeat.

¾ 6 ¾

I can certainly tell you how one brings hope to a situation filled with limit. Turn on this light. Just over your left shoulder, behind you next to the cabinets filled with food. It’s that easy. Following words that speak to you, taking you toward the center and its sound, that uses neither capital Or Lower CASE, but instead leads with discovery in the spirit it was written in.

Poetry is one place where

form is recognized as changing, given

space, it places itself into

shaped combinations

so that the thread being

woven will recognize the reader

as a valid purpose and worth

its time. the gift being the poem

not the reader. the gift

having already been given to the

holder of the pen. the sharing

to be recognized in the space opened.

¾ 7 ¾

Opened is the way through the silence. There with buttered toast and hot coffee, the day forwarding itself in grays and blues, and deciding yet what it should be.

The trees are lined up like pencils in sporadic rows, types mixed; hardwood, soft wood, No. 1, No. 2 pencils, their leaves just now unfurling like paper. Bits of green dotting the sheet of sky, writing out the day. The point not yet sharpened, instead the charcoal graphite lead is pulled and pushed across the page and magic happens. Look at this texture how it fills in the blanks.

There are broken limbs and snapped off tongues as the courage to speak is plowed and furrowed into shape.

Deep is the rooted space, but deeper still is the ability to say.

Uprooting is now what’s going on. The weeds have tried long enough to choke out the flowers. You always give a flower a hand, its just some-thing intrinsically right to do.

¾ 8 ¾

Gardening isn’t right here. This place being too full of clay to get it. English cream tea doesn’t go either, even scones with whipped cream and jam won’t bring them in.

Dreams are dashed easily from 1-6th grade if not done at home. By middle grade, you remember middle grade, there are few shooting ducks left and if any sneak through, well that’s what high school is for.

Weeding out has been done for years, more with people than gardens.

¾ 9 ¾

Within the next two minutes the door will open and in walking will be a person I’ll introduce you to. By the time you’ve met her I’ll have gone to the kitchen, turned on the overhead, turned the gas on under the tea kettle, gotten out several tea cups and non-matching saucers, opened the tea tin and served up a platter of cookies and cakes.

And now that you’ve met I hope you’re enjoying a hot cup of tea, or coffee if its your preference, and your favorite treats. Think of the tea kettle, its bright chrome and roly-poly shape, its curving handle and accents of red, and the light from the above head bulb on the stove hood, shining, creating double suns.

Think of how you met her. In that space, between the kitchen and the cup of tea you have, she appeared. In the doorway, at first, standing there watching you read. Her eyes seeing you for real, as she will hope you are able to do.

She’s a painter and you like that, because I can tell by the way you hold your cup that it is so. She also writes and that appeals to you, I see that by the way you’re holding this book, not like a weight but more like a dessert.

If you notice her talking, you will see how words form their way along her neck, just as you will notice the strength of her words.

Books are magic. Words are magic. One word and you can turn the corner of an entire world. Painting is like that.

We’re in the studio now. Light is from inside because it is night. It may be day where you’re reading this, but here in this studio it is night. There are canvases stacked all around the walls, all facing outward to be seen. Tables and easels with works in progress on them. This is her world and you feel at home here with your cup of tea in hand walking among her visions. I am writing this, but it is she who has made you feel welcome.

You don’t have to be here if you don’t want to be. You don’t have to ask her anything. But since you’re here it would be a shame not to befriend her. Look, she’s showing you her latest vision, one that will help you most to feel your day. The yellow background runs through you like butter or the sun melted on toast, warm and sweet. The black trees arch you into that sky, letting you know the power of protection for your new ideas.

Seeing the yellow reminds you of your best friend and how she left one morning her old life and came back decided and into a new direction. You feeling this and loving your life and how writing makes you feel, how your soft couch and warm slippers nurture you and your cat purring in your ear.

All this from just the yellow and black. You dream of being able to write and make a living and envision a world that wants to feel more of what you feel. There are her paintings too. And her writing, and her visiting you today.

¾ 10 ¾

I keep seeing you in an apartment with lots of ferns and a cat. Throw rugs on the floors. A kitchen with big black and white tiles. A wonderful round edged stove and a refrigerator that isn’t mammoth.

I see that she has visited you here in your own space. And that you like photography framed and up on your walls. That your bathroom has aqua in it to resemble water and the sea. Your towels have seashell designs and starfish on them. She has used your soap, I can tell by the paint across the top of the Ivory.

Flowers. Fresh cut flowers are a sign that the two of you have things in common. It doesn’t matter that you live with someone else or not, or whether you’re married or not, or gay or not. The point is that you’re looking and you are seeing. That you take time to see the sky and its color today. That you feed the cat and take time to smell the flavor you picked out. These matters are important in the life of anyone who loves an atmosphere that contributes to the well-being of the liver.

This person I’ve introduced you to is a goddess. She uses magic from the mystical perspective because it suits her best and sits easily with people she comes in touch with.

Notice the refrigerator and how well it speaks of you. If you’ve judged food in the past, you’re no longer judging it now. This is good, it makes way for the goddess to step into your day, because she won’t be around if you’re busy judging yourself through food or clothes or décor. She does notice what you love. Like your fuzzy slippers tucked under the edge of your bed that you’ve had since who knows when, or your favorite tee shirt whose cotton has been washed so many times that it feels like a second skin.

What’s noticeable, especially is your determination to make it.

¾ 11 ¾

And the fact that you have journals, collect them even, and have written in some of them, are writing presently, is something worth commenting on. There are not that many people who love to write, to watch the tip of the pen move across paper leaving a trail of feelings and observations to be seen outside the body. These words special, and different from spoken words. These words you live in like garments and pull out when you need to wear something that’s just right, fits the moment just so. Yet they’re tailor-made on the spot. That’s the magic, the cloth of them coming from some mystical space where value is greater than money.

Spiral journals that fold back easily and lay perfectly flat, and small ones that fit nicely in your book bag. Shelves lined with books and journals are a marvelous sight as they stand and lean against one another.

Each morning these spiraled books confirm your feelings living their lives through you, tasting your breakfast, loving lunch, savoring dinner and the candlelight with its fluttering light across your walls, the books dancing in them like a veil lifted.

¾ 12 ¾

By some remote chance your window is open for fresh air and you smell the coffee I’m brewing, it comes wafting in like the twilight shimmering and makes you want a cup. You rub the palm of your hand against the fabric of the couch. Company’s coming. By the time your own coffee is ready the doorbell rings and your dearest friend is standing there smiling, asking if she can read you her next poem. Magic happens this way. It is simple and wished for. She has a toothbrush in her hand and when you notice she laughs and asks if the two of you can have a sleepover. Of course you say because this means you can share the breakfast rolls in the morning and open that new bottle of white zinfandel tonight.

¾ 13 ¾

What has all this to do with the demise of the businessmen, the business-types that is? Nothing and everything. Every day and every night that atmosphere and friendship is increased and valued over getting ahead, another get ahead at all costs is laid to rest. And they need it. They’re exhausted and don’t know it.

Play · is powerful · writing is play · painting is play · making coffee for friends is play · reaching into your soul is play · play is serious and it is fun and silly and goofy and intelligent and it reminds you always of being free to do what you want to share the most at the time you want to share it. This drives the business-types nuts, and in a very easy way shows them reality.

Better than showing them reality is living your own and that happens right here. And you have to take it. No one will give it to you, no one will just say here – have this reality. Unless they’re your friends and understand the value and concept of taking time.

¾ 14 ¾

Café’s and bookstores are safe havens, even in the biggest of cities these places scale down to a space of nurturing. One of the few places outside the home that this can happen in.

Places set up for 2 or 3 people to talk and books and art and music are ideal. Make your home into that kind of space. Go to both. Frequent both. Feel the rain outside, the streets wet, smell the rain steaming off the pavement, watch the clouds go by. Talk to your best friend, look in their eyes as they sip their coffee, as they talk excitedly about their latest poem, as they fill you up with their dreams. And read to them of your dreams, watch them share with you the sound you heard that filled you earlier in the day, now spilling into their ears, entering into them as they entered you. And the latest book you bought or postcard with photo of the Eiffel Tower and city of lights spread before it.

Watch each other breathe in rhythm to the adventure happening there. And the sound of others moving about loving the same space as you. Listening to music, bringing books and writing pads, loading up on pens and sketching pencils. There is plenty going on and all of these people are trying to escape the rat race. Escape is the right word here. Because that is what you must do to break the bond between a 9-5 reality and your own. 9-5 is not it but everyone keeps saying it is because if it isn’t it, then what is?

I’ll tell you what is. 24 hours is and 48 is and 72 is. You can’t separate it out. This 7 day week is absurd and 30 day month is stupid and 365 day year is ridiculous. What is true is you are you and you are not 9-5. You are more, but to feel it you have to take time. It’s the gift, in the space we’re in.

So bookstores and cafés and studios are the places to be, and homes that take time to be in.

Many would disagree, many, many would disagree, but I‘m not talking about them, I’m talking about you and me. People who connect at a point in space where time expands and is taken for real.

Right now while I’m writing this, my wife and best friend are out on our deck planting flowers in huge primary colored plastic tubs, up to their elbows in dirt and mulch and flowers being silly as 10 year-olds playing dress-up, and my other best friend just returned from the grocery store with goodies for the week. We all live together because it makes sense. And it gives us more time. More time to do things that help each other out and more time to be together.

This weekend instead of getting together for a little bit, we’re already together so we get to get together for the whole time; having breakfast with each other and talking about the movie we saw together the night before, fixing lunch after yard-sailing, writing, painting and gardening all today because we are together.

The windows are open and fresh air is spilling in, flipping the prayer plant leaves back and forth, like a dervish it moves with the wind and the laughter of my wife and best friends.

There is no screen in this window so you’ll have to excuse the bug that just flew in, never mind, it just flew out again.

Because we are friends living together, we can afford a place that individually we wouldn’t be able to touch. And the fact that my wife and I are artists and writers full-time gives us all support. We supporting with the inner arrangement and atmosphere of the home and our best friends by supporting with the outer arrangement and atmosphere. Together we are a family and have been for more than 8 years. All of us for each other more of a family than our generic/genetic families could be.

We ask a lot of being a family, and together we get it. That’s the way it is for us, and the core of the core of what we want for each other is for each to be in their dream, whatever it is.

--15 --

Take tonight for instance, we're having a breakfast dinner of scrambled eggs and bits of ham and homemade biscuits, sliced tomatoes and hot coffee. And you with the white zinfindel and your friend over. It is a night of magic. Time being taken for the realness of life. And quilts, our quilts are being washed. Patch worked and old we bring them back to life, love them for what they are with their quilting un-stuffing in spots like the Velveteen Rabbit, loved and all the more real. But here we are friends, best friends, family really and doing laundry at night as we sit and talk in our tearoom, 3 of us talking, the 4th in the kitchen baking ameretto cheese cake for tomorrow. It is dark outside you can see the stars from our deck. We all go for a walk to breathe the night air and talk about the day. To look at the stars to wonder if that bigger yellow looking one might be a satellite and how an airplane can fly so high as to look like a star except for its movement. Us holding hands, my wife and I, and our two friends either in front of us or behind us depending on how things fell into place and them loving how much we love each other.

--16 --

The next morning, we have an idea for a painting that refers to these new quilts. Yard sailing quilts. Nine of them from one sale. Their color and shapes speaking the language of art and time taken. I see the painting as it is now, knowing by the time we do it it will have changed like breath or wind blowing the prayer plant leaves. And many things will be included in this painting; the garden with its new flowers bought yesterday to celebrate that we're still here, even with the threat over us of having to move from this rental space we've so lovingly made real, and the cheese cake will be there, so will seeing other writer friends yesterday, one at the café and one stopping by to borrow a keyboard to record sound with her stories on tape. This is how we paint. This is how we write. And one of us is fixing breakfast; eggs, polish sausage, toast and hot coffee. We'll come around the tea table after our meditation or yoga or showers or writing or reading or whatever it is we each are doing after waking. Where you might hope to get together for a special Sunday morning breakfast and talk about the week gone by or the week-end or the week coming up, we simply arrive at the morning breakfast table and our special day begins because we're going to spend it together.

--17--

There are ways to keep the world satisfied that you are where you belong. Firstly act as thought what you're doing is what you want to do, secondly act that way stronger than them wanting you to do something else, and thirdly treat the world as a person. Since there are so many of "them", condense, concentrate, consolidate it all into one person, and the things that you feel the world presses you about, makes you do, demands of you, ask yourself, if that were a person being this pushy, or that mean what would you do? If someone was extremely rude to you would you stay around them of find a more comfortable space? Find or create things that aren't rude or don't create a rudeness and you've succeeded. Living with friends succeeded for us because we always thought of it as fun, as taking a moment of fun and expanding it into an adventure. The adventure of grocery shopping together, the adventure of buying books together, of eating out together. It adds up to be very supportive because when you look around of someone they're there.

--18--

Wait. That blue is coming back, perhaps not as much because it's a bit overcast, but there's this blue along the mountain tops that shows up every evening and its got me looking for it. I could eat pastels its so delicious looking, it just drowns you in its blueness and carries you along that crest like a giant ocean wave. There is always something to be said about light. We've painted today and color is felt best that way, the pigment sliding across the canvas, watching the pattern develop into a shape and form. I love seeing the brush loaded with paint as it travels from the palette to canvas and to see the white background change to color. Seeing change happen is a joy and feeling it in your movement as you go from place to place within the painting is magic. A studio is so healthy a space to have, with its designated purpose and focused intent and its so easy to have. Ours have been in every room just about, the library, the living room, our bedroom, the tearoom, the garage, another bedroom. Each time, we moved things around, because we don't nail down our furniture and it's adventurous to change things for a couple of months at a time. Our friends love it, they'll come home from work and find what was in the library in the living room, what was in the living room in the tearoom, and what was in the tearoom in the library and it feels like a whole new house. And we love doing a painting and showing them as soon as they hit the door and the writing is fun to share in the evening with fresh hot coffee and cheesecake. It really works, Because we want it to. I always feel as though we're living a European life-style in the States, because we shop for each other and cook for each other, car pool together always, entertain each other with stories and feelings, always going out together to our favorite café and getting coffees and expressos and cappuccinos, and hot chocolates with each other and sharing bites of dessert, "Yeah, we'll take a slice of cheesecake and 4 forks please" and its okay because everybody knows us. Our art is hanging on the walls there and it feels like an extension of home. This is living with friends who are committed to seeing each other go for their dream and where each dreams comes together. It won't work for all people, only the ones that want it bad enough. There are always assholes that will tell you it won't work, but there are the same people who are sure you're going to take something from them and they're always that way. But I'm not talking to them, I'm talking to someone who lives their space, loves light and atmosphere, books, and writing, music and sound and is not afraid of taking time to create something for themselves beyond the everyday everyday.

--19--

Raining lightly with heavy wind and more flowers planted today, their blooms bobbing along nicely in the dark night air. The dirt matching the night sky, the flowers are stars that landed and seed themselves. People are so blasé, going to the corner supermart and picking up a handful of packets never noticing they have baby stars in their hands.

--20 --

Like gardening, writing takes place where the bed is richest and that takes time and atmosphere to complete. Pens and pencils are like good shovels and hoes digging and furrowing the land of words, turning up rich earth, the earthiness of your own imagination. That's why it fun to take time out to buy pens and pencils, paper and typewriter ribbons. The computer is okay but it's more related to thought than writing. And computers by their very nature are not cozy. Writing, the act of writing should bring in as many senses as possible, you should feel the room you're in and smell and taste the coffee hot and steamy and it just isn't that way with computers. With them if all is going well you're inside the screen. Shopping for your writing or your painting, anything that inspires your creative nature, is worth more to your inner life than can be spoken. Seeing a pen on a table next to a book or journal inspires the impulse to write. Photographs on a wall inspire the desire to take pictures, paintings on the walls makes you want to paint. Pottery on shelves or end tables and coffee tables gives its geeing to you, and if you're a person that truly loves these things, creates a mood of creativity that won't let you sit still. And that's the point with creativity, it creates time for itself to continue, if you'll let it. And it will become your life if you'll let it. It's the perfect reason to allow yourself to buy all the wonderful supplies that go with the territory. Seeing a person's studio, whether its 1,000 sq. ft. or the corner of their bedroom is a look and sharing of their soul. I love palettes with their build-up of paint and old brushes who's been through it with you and easels with their edges splattered with different colors. And canvases stacked around, leaning against one another and cups of coffee not mistaken for the brush can. Fresh cut flowers and sunlight coming in, or at night, the reflector lights brilliant as the sun shining on the surface of ideas. A space dedicated to the pursuit of vision and conclusion, as space where you hear music, see light and color, and move with both, so that what you feel comes to the surface, a present to yourself and a comment of reality.

--21--

If only the world would let you be where you most want to be, because where you most want to be is where you need to be. I would love to live in a studio and it would have light, lots of light and windows and skylights and sofas and stuffed chairs and plenty of places for your coffee cup. Framed photographs on the walls. Soft thick throw rugs and you'd walk around in soft thick socks. The teapot would always be going and the sun beaming its way in saying, Yes, this is right. And the threat from the world to devalue, diminish, undercut, swipe at, and ignore your work would blow away. And people would come that wanted to see you, wanted your company, were so happy with you that you practically shook out of your skin with passion for living, and they did too. This is a dream dreamed to me, it is a mystery how it happens, just as it's a mystery how I got it. But I have it and I'm not to let it go, so I will continue dreaming it, until everything that is opposed to it vanishes. I see that. Things vanishing making way, making room for this new living to be. This old world is like the dry dead leaves from last year. They blow away or get raked away so that the tender shoots can breathe and have light. Those old leaves are being taken away and burned up. The garden is ready and the studio is coming. I've seen it.

--22--

There is a battle going on, but death is not used. Living is, and it has to be fought for, and it is won by your creativity. Your art. Find out what your art is. Painting. Writing. Cooking. Organizing. Sewing. Weaving. Putting together. Do your art. Your must win. You must want living. I see your home, how you love the things in it that make you feel the happiest. How can I see it? Because you're inside my book, it's why I'm talking to you. You let me in, into your day, into your night. There are lots of us who feel art is worth living for. But up to now its been too dangerous to talk this deeply about it. We must speak about it now, not politically, not on a stand or in front of audiences but to one another and then pass the feeling along. Think cozy. It's stronger that global. Speak in tones of inner resolution and power. Speak the power of home. The power of beauty, the power of creativity and life, the power of children. Power of color, power of light. The power of this sentence that I've seen written before I wrote it. You sitting on your sofa, legs tucked up under you like a deer, you sipping tea, our eyes seeing this dream together. I've written to where we are and the dry leaves are blowing away. Our studio calls us artists, its sofas give us places to write, places to hold on to one another, places to share the secret of creativity. We are at war to survive and we will win by not using their weapons. Our brush colors out a thousand of their attacks of attitude, our pens defeat a million of the businesses. They are the Nazis to our creativity. They do not want to see, they want to starve out the arts and artists, and feed on the remains, gobbling up the color for free. You are different. You see where things are now, where they stand, how slow they are. This is a life we're defending and we take offense at their belittling ways. Crank up the atmosphere, add color, the music that frees your soul, get out the journals with their curlicue spirals, open up the paints, prop the canvas on the easel or lay it flat on the table, get out the watercolor paper, open up the pastels, get your hands into the clay, fire up the kiln. These all are acts for yourself and frees you from their grip

--23 --

Ah. Today……a blue and green Spring day, a writing day, a strengthening day, a day of efficiency and defined movement. There are series of events in a day that support the motion you desire to happen. Look at the floor, how it shines with support and goes so well with your walls, how the two of them meet and touch at the edges of themselves, knowing someday you will notice how well they contain you as your nest. How firmly you see past the flaws and through the doors and windows into the day sky. How you see her free, her here at last, her words spoken past the flaws where sound knocks over resistance and she goes to the mother and the mother is the swan of us all. Algiz puts down its birdly foot and grabs the worm up in its beakly beak and tears apart what would have been, leaving the pathway clean for the home, the nest, the cozy space to have the little one back home, safe in her flight from fall. Spring is this new season and there are not enough words to explain how the magic happened. It just did. And now it's a whole new world we step into.

--24--

When you have a space that you can open, then share it, but only with one of commitment that runs deep and creatively passionate. This is the little bird come back to us. She loves our loving her, loves our expression, loves art and her own strength of creativity. She loves being who she is and is justly proud of her own self. This is not for the whole world, we thought at one time it would be. It is not. It is only for people who are strong enough to be who they want to be without explanation. Much of the world demands explanation because they have forgotten the cozy of who they are. That is why they become rough and coarse. And the world is rough and coarse to those who create without explanation. Take tonight for instance with a meal fixed for us and three other friends who can laugh at food and be completely silly then bring out the 3-D viewmasters and look like aliens sitting around laughing at tiny surreal pictures and pretending to be there. By the time one is fixed with a sense from childhood another lands in a Disney movie. This is real food and the stories make their way into print as the cozy night brings nurturing into focus. All relax into a rhythm that can't be explained to happen so easily, yet it does. And it reminds me to let go into the presence of completeness where enjoyed and happy are the passwords to the secret realness, like watching a friend twirl her hair while she snuggles into our sofa and reads a book. The night takes on a completion of it's own and another one surfaces as talk moves to having a breakfast dinner soon. These things happen that take you away from the exterior world of false value, these things happen that remind you to invite in those whose life is lived passionately and can attest to the realness of what you love.

--25--

Meanwhile the ago of time brought into the room plates full of books and we ate the words and drank the pictures in and filled ourselves to over-flowing and when we over-flew we saw above the house we were in and the clouds lit the night skye with color as in a special display. And we saw the moon to our left where flowers were lighted from above and the ground was watered for their growth and the growth happened before our eyes like magic and the night was magical because we wished it so. And she came home on one of the moon's light beams and we saw her there and we came home to greet her.

--26 --

The bones crunch down and the crack is heard like a beating outside the window. It is my tiger killing the marauders that always try to intrude on your day. I go outside and sweep up the dust that remains and get a clear vision by smelling the air. There is an all clear feeling and the light spilling from my window adds its color to the peace that now washes over my frame. I look across the way and see other lights spilling from other windows and brooms ready to dust off the last remaining stealers of dreams.

I see by the light and shadow movement, journals being opened, people sitting at typewriters and computer keyboards, clicking on desk lamps and bridge lamps next to stuffed chairs in order to clearly speak what they're feeling that's new, and needs room outside of them to grow. I see in this provided light the effects of commitment to the inner voice and those who resonate with its sound. It calls like a bird or a breeze, it calls like an ocean wave insistent in its nature to be heard and seen. Salt flavors your speech and flowers spray themselves among the rocks in the garden, playing tag with names on their markers. I see an ocean of writers and artists coming ashore, stepping off their boats like lost immigrants from a forgotten war. Refugees returning home, bedraggled and wide-eyed in wonder at what's been created while they were away. Your home, your apartment, your townhouse, your cottage, your bungalow, all of you who kept writing and drawing and painting and singing and dancing and sculpting, who kept your lights on in the dark days and late into the night, and the early early morning hours in these your places called home will remember how lonely it's been, will remember the difficulty, remember the guarded words in public and the safe places you could be, where the creative and new spoke its voice past the past and old, and into the new spaces opening because of the lighted windows of poets and writers, and painters and sculptors. I see the light coming from windows but I haven't yet seen everyone sweep away the dust at their door. Passion does that, and anger at what was and what was kept from flowing. I see the doors bursting open and flooding the world with color and new ideas. I see cafés and bookstores becoming the community of ideas and relief from political thought and religious dogma. They've had their time and only create strife and conflict. It's old and boring, the same old same old.

--27 --

Pouring tea or coffee into a favorite cup is an act of epiphanic (e.pif.anic) proportion. One moment nothing, the next viola. There you are, we are because we've come this far together. I'm just getting used to your rhythm. The time of day you read, you getting used to "This is your book talking to you", its what we're to do together. Do you remember your breakfast, or did you fly past it on the run? The kitchen this morning was bright and cool from the window over the sink being left open during the blackly black of night when the trees crawled through the opening and danced on the squeaky floorboards. The dog never barked or came down to pee at their feet, but I noticed fresh green spring leaves in the sink that they no doubt left when exiting out my window. I just rinsed them down the sink and into the disposal where all was disposed and the night left on little tree feet. You can never be bored with life if you can think this way. The imagination has tons of room and gave us everything, from Shakespeare to the Eiffel Tower poking lustily into the Parisian sky, to the Empire State Building and Sears Tower to London's Big Ben, all great monuments to phallic attempts at down sizing the feminine spirit. The business of business years and years and years ago used to be from home until they built toys so big that they wouldn't fit in the yard. Then they nailed a sign up on the side of their new club house (club referring back to cave man cartoonish thought) that said "NO GIRLS ALLOWED" and put home on the back burner. Well the pot boiled over and the kitchen smudged itself and now the window's thrown open. --28--

If you've noticed your kitchen window needs cleaning it's just the fog from a million fires blowing past.

--29 --

Just when you're not sure, jump in. it is as likely the time as not. Hesitation is a great time to do things, especially in the middle of it. Should I have green tea or a good Assam? Yes, go for the Assam. Should I write or go for a walk. Yes, get out the pen. Should I have a night alone or call a friend. Yes, call. Right in the middle of the questions when you're at your peak of curiosity, decide, like a leaf decides to be dropped from the limb. Float free and glide into your feeling for it. This seems to be the way of the nature of things. And it's a good way to get rut free. The middle of things is a heavily ruled area. There you're not suppose to begin anything new yet, and you're not suppose to end anything until you've completed what you've started. This makes it a prime location for expansion. Start by putting on the tea or coffee. And perhaps a few cookies and a side order of milk. Here the defeat of the rules of the middle of things occurs. Not the middle of what you want, just the middle of what you don't want, which indicates where the rules are hooked in. Next look around you, at your desk with the favorite trinkets, toys, totems you keep around you for pleasure and breathe a breath of freedom. You've made it this far. Each day you become more of what you want to be. A writer who was a writer yesterday still has to become or be one today. An artist, the same thing. And when you awake you are in the middle of the mystery from the night, and like a leaf floating from your limb, there are no rules for this, what are you today, who are you today? You are in the middle of the mystery, its gift surrounds you. Have a sip of your tea, feel its warmth penetrate the skin on your hands, wrap and unwrap your fingers around the curve of your cup like a cat kneads the carpet with its paws feeling the ground outside. Look at the dark liquid and drink the night, feel it caress your insides like the mother of your dreams. Smell the leaf or roast and its history to you. Someone's effort, someone's day sharing your cup of liquid seeing you for the first time. hope you're dressed for all the strangers in your kitchen. The tomato pickers love your fuzzy robe, the bread bakers always talk about your slippers, saying you deserve a new pair soon. The peanut nut packers love the flavor of jellies you have on hand. And the Oyster Packers Local 107 are crazy about the fishermen knit sweater you wear on cold nights, crumbs of oyster crackers caught in its net weave.

--30 --

I smell bread as it fragrances its way into the library from the kitchen and I smell the Spring as it comes through the open screenless window. There the colors of outside mingle with the yeast smell rising up to yield its loafing in the kitchen. This while I listed to 12th Century vocal music, and I am in another world where these combined things take me. We are all artists here, those that want to be in the art of writing, baking, and cloth are all moving together and we stop and talk about it in the middle of it. It's not like watching a movie and then everyone gets up and leaves, even with that we all talk about it. It assimilates it more and moves what's happening to a deeper level of understanding. So with the needle pulling thread out, day is woven from the pieces we all bring to it, or have found, or make up. A new recipe, and new painting, a new design, a new written piece, a new concept, we add them all together because we're looking for and finding the expansion of the art of expression in all media.

--31--

Visiting. I visit myself every day starting with a friendly hello in the morning, a smile in the mirror while brushing my teeth, a bounce down the stairs on my way to breakfast, a look at all the art work on the walls along the way, a hello to the dogs, a plunking down into a chair at the breakfast table, which is also the lunch and dinner table kind of all rolled into one. The Day builds itself on these kinds of visits, takes me in hand and travels me through my day. We're all like this in a way, but with our own rhythm and individual timing that got synchronized somewhere along the way.

--32 --

A visit to a friend's new apartment is a great sharing and blessing in both directions. Seeing their windows open, breeze blowing in unhindered lets you feel their line of vision, lets you feel your own. Bright and open, wooden floors sounding out their tune, feet passing tapping, sliding toe and heel, heel and toe, the window sill inhabitants keeping time to the rhythm. Coffee pours through the periwinkle portal and into the cups, racing across the bottom and climbing the sides as it fills the interior space with night's awakening. Art leaning its lean against the walls, walls open and ready to receive new color as the foundation on which the canvases will hand. Home, a place of dreams fulfilled and expansion of ideas created to nurture sound into pleasure. A nest of sounds warmed by the bodies inhabiting the place. Sounds moving across the books, the bells, the keyboard, skittering around the cat like a black string toy to be played with. A visit is always a visitation, a celebration when deep rooted friends are involved. There you can sink deep into the fertile soil of the home and see or imagine the seeded ideas sprouting forth. There, in deep soil, you can reach your hands into the earth and part the soil into planting, you yourself become a flower reaching for light, magical an clear. Become a visit. Extend yourself into another cozy place. Feel the home and remember your own comfort you carry with you.

© 2003 Clarity