1 song a week challenge for 2014

Dear whomever is kindly reading this post,
   It is my 30th year on Planet Earth, I've been writing songs since a tender young age, and only minimally sharing these creations. That's changing this year... it feels like a mountain I must climb... Since 2012, I've written somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 songs (162 are recorded on my phone - the rest are scribbled on dare I say napkins... and the imaginary inked paper of my computer screen...as well as on pamphlets, magazines, the empty space on the top of newspapers and whatever else happened to be available as the flash of word and sound came through)... I've shared a handful of these creations with a handful of friends, I'm ready now to share what has been born inside of me...Tune in to hear the song of the week, a birthing celebration every week!

Vulnerability is lauded as a superhuman skill.

Vulnerability is lauded as a superhuman skill, a skill which each and everyone of us can potentially grow and harvest within ourselves. Why is it important in a semi-permiable membrane (our bodies) to be semipermiable, to actually be able to put ourselves in another's proverbial and actual shoes?

I believe the fate of our species depends on this ability, the concept makes itself known in many spiritual traditions from the Buddhists - Metta - meaning loving kindness, to the biblical charge... love thy neighbor as thyself. It is not hard to understand why once the shoes your wearing are someone else's.

A story, to illustrate my point from a personal perspective. I was in the airport in Austin, going to fetch my luggage in a steep crowd mountain of people flocking for their possessions, I grabbed a bag that was not mine, it was it's doppellgangers, a women in tall high heels and a tight miniskirt, with the eyes of an enraged creature, snatched the bag out of my hands and scolded me in a verbose tone. For a moment my heart broke for her, for how much wrath was being projected at a "stranger" for an innocent mistake. I allowed myself to be in her huffing, puffing, I'm going to blow your f***ing house down shoes. Then I came back into the lining of my own skin, feeling the rush of blood in the veins, and the hot blush of fresh tears, that filled the creek of my face during this flash flood. I once again chose, to not be in the victim, victimizer, savior trinity, rather to immerse myself in the intelligence of kind acceptance in the face of meanness. This is a skillset, that my life circumstances have had me cultivate time and again.

Physiologically, I have a strong body odor, when I am nervous, excited, elated, cramped, wearing too many layers, or a number of other reasons ... some which I can measurably point to, others which baffle me considerably. It often gets me in trouble in civilization, in the world of perfume and chemically altered smells, my fragrant ardor has gotten me kicked out of classrooms with the advice to shave my armpits, as well as thrown off a Southwest flight, my family of origin often finds it offensive... and yet
I love that my body reeks of a medley of organic spices whether I shower or not.
As a result of this condition, I have given myself permission to embrace my wilds and not take out the tree line to have a more socially coveted view.

A conversation on the bus

"How old are you?" The short haired curious eyed person whose voice sounded like the bassy chords of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, deep gutural sweetness pouring through and through.
 The little girl, pig tailed with deep flush of tanned skin, a hot pink hearing aid tucked close to her ear like a seashell picked up at the beach, that decided to stay on and bring the blasting woosh of the world closer to the perception of this tender soul. She stood on her tiny sneakered tip-toes- waxing and waning as the curled spume of the ocean waves. An old jew in prayer, a rainstick shaking by a gentle inner pull.
"Sit your butt down, now!"said the littles ones mother, a gruff woman, wearing a loping hoodie that slid down her curvy body as snow melt does down the mountainside on a sunny day. She was pierced and tattoed  by the intimate choices of her life and encircled by prayer beads. She handled the little one roughly, when the little one moved, spoke or did anything other than sit still and silent.
"Eternity, how old are you?" The person, with the coffee ground Cohen voice crooned.

 I heard the off kilter sound that arises from an old soul in a little body, not in protest or spite, to their unruly and uncooth caretakers... rather in a still peace-able, holy known to themselves way.

" I am as old as age, as time, as light, lightening and thunder, as love itself, I am eternal."

World Song

It was a time when stories moved as whales in the silken folds of the ocean.
It was a time when no one was counting or keeping track of time, in that kind of time... there was a song that the waters of life sang, a drinking song, a floating song, a bubbling song... a wordless melody.
Every stone on the pebbly road had a song, every blade of grass, every falling leaf, each creature had a song, each mood and season had a song. This is nothing new you know, it is this way the world over.
     The music of creation rang out in the ears of all who could truly hear. What did they hear?
     They heard a change in the beat and tempo of the world song that was occurring subtly at first and all at once it began to shift into another song, a song that did not sound like music. The sound was that of a disconsolate infant, a loud shrill murmur began to overtake the world song.
    So it was that the skilled listeners were called together to hear the song and invite the music in once again. The listeners gathered in small groups which split off into pairs. The pairs would converse, discuss and argue about the world song. They would collaborate and co-create new riffs to build a clearer song. Each layer of that song was heard and in the hearing the song began to change once again, into a melody that could be at any moment a laugh, a weeping baby, a tree limb falling, a bird diving into water, the rain landing and merging with the ocean, a litter of kittens being born, the kinds of songs may be short lived, the song itself is eternal.

Life is evidence of ....

Long ears and smiling eyes
A mechanical hand
Fealty for life
How can he dance with causeless joy
cradling life
A precious chore
in the sun and the rain shadow
of a well inhabited day
Heartstrings unstung
by humid weather
lets off kilter music arise
the tone of an out of tune piano
and a player sheer delight
at new compositions
of music
that bare fruit
from a tree composed
solely of light

Around a table
a clamor of glasses
 and a cheerful banter
leads to
silences gracious
heart
where stillness
stands
for a moment
until the ocean of conversation
laps again on the tables shore
The long eared, smiling eyed
mechanically handed body of light
winks with a knowing certainty
that life is the evidence of
a great mystery.

A thank you letter to my friends.

In these precious moments of reflection, our laser beam of love is focusing, gearing up to share and receive the sacred offerings tupon and within  the alter of our hearts, about what we are grateful for in this life, in time, in this moment.

We are a symphony, a musically enchanted mystery … we are a  beautiful version of many human instruments coming together to play reveries on life.. a tangible knowing is present, we synchronize and we harmonize... and our hearts have the capacity to make music that causes the stars to weep with ecstatic delight and the angels to dance riveted and nimble, and small growing things everywhere take in a little more light. 

          It's astonishing that we are time and again rediscovering just as the physicist's, rediscovered the mystical understanding of entrainment in wide eyed wonder, when an array of vibrations gather all vibrations raise to the highest... who in essence is setting the precedent for whats possible?

        Knowing deep from within that we are all catalyst for these monumental and incremental potentialities of grace blossoming from the firmament of our souls, so to are we capable of filling this circle with the footprints of gratitude, affirming the beauty of the lives we live...

Thank you, so deeply for your eternal wisdoms, for your clear and full expression of heart-ache and healing, of wholeness and the great mysteries of feeling. Each one of your shares this day will call out a knowing, a remembering of a knowing so pure and undiluted by time, story, or mask. We are the great awakeners, walking gently and in full connection. Weall are teaching the kinds of lessons that make life and death, blush... with each of your ways of dedicating your life to that elevated and yet wholly grounded and inner-sourced self-responsibility. You are each in your own unique ways reweaving the web, dancing alongside Indra and her sacred net, pulsing with an aliveness and a vibrance that signals out to all the ones who long to aid us in our evolution and expressions of love, they are hearing us as we are speaking them from the sacred openings of our mouths. Thank you, for the treasure of our connections, may each one of you realize in your whole being how many lives you are altering, just being in your shimmering presence. I love you all so much it springs up in tears and great expanses of every feeling state imaginable. We've just begun and yet it feels as though we have warmed these stones our whole lives.

Moon pads and dog feathers.

Once upon a slippery snake called time, a bump in the road of history changed directions, All the stories, that Lulu carried cross-pollinated and a whole new world of possibilities went from a seed to a flower and fruited… Here’s the fruit of the matter, are you ready?

Lulu, a nickname derived from the loving heart of a dear and wily childhood friend, stuck as a tack and became forever glued, when the sound of the name replaced the sound of name written on a yellow and green fingerpainted birth certificate.

Lulu started making her own moon pads for her monthly flow, the first time the red visitor made itself known. Lulu’s mom Rachel, bought her fabrics and set her up at the sewing machine. First Lulu practiced drawing spirals and then made a small pillow, sewing it on three sides and then stuffing it with recycled tags from all of her pants and tee-shirts, never really liking how they rested against her skin anyway, this seemed like a good use for a nuisance. Janie, a blue haired and sandy eyed girl Lulu met in Art appreciation class had spoken at length of the beauty of the moon time. For Lulu, who had only heard it called her period, it was a welcome alien awareness to know that women throughout time had actually celebrated the time of the month when blood flowed like water out of the body. (c)