Political Interruption

The personal is political, I said to myself, when I thought about those girls who say they don't care much about politics at all.  I thought about how these sorts so often spend so many hours a day plucking their eyebrows and applying makeup just so, shaving off all the body hair just to don the inevitable short black dress and heels for parties, all in order to keep their seemingly politically minded men distracted away from the actually intelligent women present in the room who do not buy into that oppressive style and beauty products scheme at all but who do engage these men in lively and fascinating political discussion.  I want to know how these females could possibly fail to see how they are participating in their very own oppression, but what I thought was even odder was how such well informed and brilliant men could actually be attached to these sorts of rather surface women.

I have often noticed that when I have been engaged in a political discussion with one of these bright men that his girl might often interrupt us by making her presence seem much more important than the  conversation  that we were already engaged in.  She might act like a silly little child intent on monopolizing his attention at all times, by grabbing his arm or rolling her eyes or whispering in his ear or staring intently at him with major cleavage showing.  She might even act impatient or bored or even demand that he leave right that very moment, as there was something much more important that she wants him to attend to.  Just about anything is more important to her than the political discussion at hand, but nothing more than her man's immediate attention.  Why does she do these things?  Simplest answer is she feels threatened in an area where her sexual attractiveness means very little to what is actually going on at hand, a vibrant and enthralling conversation between two like minds obviously unlike her own.

Sometimes the man gives in to her shenanigans to keep the peace and begs off from the discussion so he can still have sex with her when they go home.  Other times he may become visibly irritated by her insistence upon acquiring his immediate attention and still yet at other times he may simply ignore her manipulation and continue talking because by now he knows exactly what she's doing.  She is curtailing his intellectual freedom, something he has become less and less willing to part with simply to ease her insecurities and keep her around to sleep with and show off to other men.  Politics are very personal when these sorts of things are happening.

As a thinking woman I do not enjoy contending with the inanities of insecure women who are ready to hijack or attack my political discussions, because their activities are based on manipulation and suppression of my intellectual freedom as a woman, as well as of their men's.  My own politics are based on mutual respect and love and freedom from all oppression, because I know that love and freedom cannot survive manipulation or suppression. The personal is political no matter what you're doing because it's the policy your body sets into motion in any human interaction.

No Last Drop

I want to know more
About you. Will you take
My hand and walk
With me beside
The stream where we
Can listen to the silence
In the song of water
From the greenest
Wellspring underground?
I know you feel me,
My love, and how there
Is no real end foreseen
Within the rhythm of
Our breathing hearts,
Our lungs, our veins,
Not in this wild rain
That always fills
This well we drink
Our songs from.
Tell me how you found
This thin place, and why
You leave here so often
When you really want
To stay and keep your
Peace, your truest
Dream, your home, your
Sloping hills and embracing
Mountains. It is here
I feel you, your love and
Even from this distance
I want to kiss each
And every single letter
Of your Gaelic name
Over and over and
Over again. There is
No last drop upon
My lips, my love, this
Well is forever being
Fed by silence
Of the hidden song within
The spring we cannot see,
Deep down, underground.

For Dolours

How can I weep for someone I never had the chance to meet and know?  And yet that is what I've done all the day and into the night and early morning now, for you have gone.  You, beautiful and brave woman of our Ireland who fought so hard for us, now are flying with our unforgotten fallen, cut down by life's hard pain and sorrow, into the other realm of memory and legend.

You never bowed down to false men but stood against them with all your might all these long years.  It took its toll on you, the forcefeeding, the weight of truthtelling, all the losses, the marginalization.  You were no auxiliary to anyone.  You were a full veteran of war and no one's mule or mere accomplice.  You stood so strong for so very long, never wavering in your complete devotion to our Ireland.  It had to hurt so much, what you knew inside your heart about your traitors, the ultimate betrayal of denial.  How dare they hide behind their lies and disrespect you and all of us who stood beside you?  How dare they dishonor our land with their falsity and verbal treason?  You stood up to them and we listened.  

I wept all day because I know the pain of not being believed, of being marginalized, betrayed and blackened by those I once believed in.  I know the pain of losing hope and feeling it alone in my room at night--how so few really understand or even want to know the nature of those feelings.  It almost killed me, Dolours, that pain.  And now I fear it's what took you, too, the exhaustion of living with your own private suffering.  It is just too much to ask of anyone to bear such things.  People who haven't been there simply cannot understand.

I will carry your memory in my heart forever, brave Oglach Dolours Price.  To me you are forever unbowed and unbroken, true soldier for our Ireland.  I stand and salute you, courageous woman.  You shall never be forgotten.  Our day will come.

Trust

This writing can be very unnerving at times.  It shows me things that I don't always want to see or even know about, about me and others and what things may mean or don't mean, about me or about them, and yet by this writing I am exposing my innermost self without even thinking.

I do not plan out what I am going to write nor do I have any idea what it's going to look like when I am done.  It is a sort of automatic writing, like W.B. Yeats wrote about, but with a bit of minor editing.  It rarely comes from my mind and mostly comes directly from my heart and my deepest feelings.  And this is why my writing can be both deeply satisfying as well as alarming.  Sometimes I am shocked at the very depth and breadth of my own feelings and yet they fly out of me no matter who is looking. They simply will not behave themselves and stay down.  I have been told that this is exactly what makes me a dangerous woman.  If so, then dangerous I am.

I don't censor myself and I suppose this is what causes fear in some. After all,  I believe in the possibility of things where many others see impossibility or extreme unlikelihood.  I venture forth into places that might be called risky or foolish or impractical mainly because it is in those areas that I find my nuggets of beauty and truth as well as the people I am supposed to know, no matter what is going on in our lives at the time.  It is always my heart leading me, and when it speaks to me I listen. All the outward trappings fall by the wayside and there my heart is naked and standing strong.  No shame.  The real me.  With no mask or costume I hold my heart in my hands so you can see your own.  

This heart of mine has a language all its own and so that's one of the reasons why I try to share it in my writing, instead of the language of my mind.  The language of my mind can be so fearful, critical, doubting and limiting that it can create an artificial distance between us and I never want that to happen.  This language of the heart is the holy ground where I extend my hands to you in love, in greeting, in soulful recognition.  Please don't be afraid.  We don't have to know where we are going. You have walked with me this far so let's keep walking.   We might find something.

Direct Line

I don't know if my writing ever means anything to you or not but to me, well, it's all I got right now to reach you and make connection.  When I am home I am totally alone and so I seek you in the darkness out there somewhere, the mystic dream across the ocean in another time zone.  I really want to meet you, even if it's only by the light of the screen I type on.

So maybe we can meet here in the silence behind the words, in this thin place where there is no real distance or psychic separation.  There is only us and the night sky moving into morning.

It is here I slowly close my eyes and see a stream of light right out my heart and into you.  Can you feel it now, this glowing beam between us, this warm transfusion?  This part is not a dream, this connection. It is as real as the moon and stars, the music of the spheres, the galaxies and constellations.  You are right here with me now, this is our thin place, the hidden link, the silence of the other world,  the direct line.  

Angel Rain to Wellspring

In my flat there is an opaque skylight in my kitchen that serves as a drum skin for the rain.  Many a night I sit in my living room without the lights on just listening.  There is this strange exchange between the rhythmic rain and the refrigerator hum, a tapping and a drone that regulates my breathing so my body begins relaxing and off goes my mind right into the beyond, the otherworld of tones.

Beethoven once said that "music is the mediator between the spiritual and sensual life" and I believe him.  There is an ear within the heart that hears the tones and a desire within the blood that wants to make love to them and birth their children, on the piano or guitar strings or even by a window in the ceiling that mingles with the heavens.  Melodies and poems and songs and symphonies are born this way and everyone in the universe listens because it is the breath of love we hear that breathes us into union with the beauty of these sounds.  

As I walked out my door today I stopped and stood stock still and listened.  The giant evergreens were bending altogether in the wind and chanting in their basso profundo vox, "the rain is coming soon, the tears of angels in the sky may freeze before they reach the ground."  I closed my eyes and let the coldness kiss my lips till roses bloomed full red upon my cheeks and I was taken by the blasting gale.  It filled my lungs and heart and soul until my own limbs were quivering with its song. I was more alive than I had ever been and knew this was a love I had never known and it was growing in the wind.

Later back inside I gave over to the dark again and the muted drone and drumming in my kitchen.  As I sat with my palms open in a little meditation I recalled this dream I had for many, many years but had long since given up on, of drifting off to sleep to chords of one guitar and one voice humming or softly singing to me in my room.  At once I knew I had to have that dream alive again and breathing right beside me if I were to rest, and there he was.  All I had to do was press a power source and I could hear him, his guitar and singing from his heart and soul, sometimes like the wind and sometimes like the rain but always like himself, the one I've never met before but know way down inside, a healing wellspring.  I fell asleep while listening and through listening was reborn.  

Further Ramblings in the Key of G minor

When I was still practicing and performing classical music on the flute I really cherished the minor keys the most for their dark and mysterious sonority and luster.  I could feel them in my brain and bones and all the way into the very core of my emotions in ways the major keys could never reach.  They felt like the blackened skies of Seattle rain and wind had mated with the fluid in my spine  and drew me down into the netherworld of tone.  Adagios.  Fugues.  Lamentations.  Largos.  In and way down, spiraling and stirring, down into the soul of the unseen.

I was on a path then that had no hope for realization.  Seventeen and with very little human support from any direction I left the rain behind for a false sun.  I thought I was heading for a freedom where I could be the musician I had always dreamed of being.  I thought my family would understand why I broke away from the violent alcoholic home and i thought that they would keep supporting my musical dreams but no, they stopped as soon as I was gone so I completely lost my whole identity, my natural musical direction.  I gave up practicing and playing my flute but as a result I began to learn how to really listen to other musicians.

For many years I thought this was a tragedy that I stopped playing, that I bought flutes and then sold them again whenever I needed the money to keep going.  I hated to let go of them but this was also a part of learning how to really listen.  I had no idea at the time that I was learning anything.  I thought I was losing something.

So I continually attended many kinds of musical performances, rock and roll bands, jazz bands, punk rock shows, avant garde chamber music, folk concerts, anything and everything, every musical genre known to humans.  These events became my food and blood and reason for being.  I no longer had to blow a flute in a symphony to receive the gift of musical sound.  I had become a vital part of any  music simply by listening, by feeling it fully and remembering.

Over all these years since I was seventeen I have still felt my innermost connection with the minor keys, the dark and eerie symphonies, the deep black southern blues, the keening.  I live to listen to them, in protest songs and ballads, love songs, the laments of broken men and women, the search for justice where there is none.  I am a minor key of G and I have learned how to stay alive by listening.

Green Light

As a young child while riding in my ma's car, I would point my finger at the red stop lights we approached and many times they would actually turn green.  This didn't occur every single time, of course, but I noticed that it most often did when I poured my direct energy and concentration into changing the red into the green.  I'm not really sure why I started doing this at about age nine but I now believe I was tapping into something hidden deep within myself that I didn't yet fully understand.

I was a very musical child and was constantly singing in the car, as well.  I was very nervous and high strung as my parents did a great deal of drinking and drunk driving.  This was always quite terrifying for me so singing calmed me down.  I would begin very softly and the more frightened I became the louder I would sing.  My parents thought it was just charming and enchanting but for me it became survival by distraction.  This worked for me until one day my father teased me about it in the car in front of some of his friends and attempted to cajole me into singing for them.  I was so very embarrassed by him pointing and smiling and laughing at me in front of those men that I deeply reddened in shame.  I was locked in the car with them and there was no escaping.  I grew very angry and refused to sing.  That was the last time anyone ever heard me sing alone, outside of chapel with the parish hymn singing. 

I did, however, continue to sing when I was alone.  It was so soothing to me and I could feel the music fill my heart with love and longing.  How I loved those feelings!  It was like I was born to feel them, to join myself to them so they would never end, like I was born from song itself and lived upon its wings of freedom.  Music and I were one and no amount of embarrassment or shame could ever  destroy our special song.  It was born into my blood, from the blood of Ireland.

My aunt and uncle had a grand piano in their great room and from the time i was two I would beg to

be lifted up to its bench so I could pick out tunes.  I was mesmerized by how my index finger could press upon a key and a lovely tone would sound, and then with more fingers more sounds.  I could sit at that bench for hours on end, experimenting, discovering the backbone of melody, rhythm, song.  I could not yet read the notes but I could find their sounds.  I was in sheer heaven.  I begged to get a piano for home but I never did get one, not even a toy piano, so I never did fully learn the proper way to play it with either hand or both of them.  I did learn, though, that one finger could create a tune.  I could still feel that vital connection between my heart, my finger and the tune, even though I had no words for it then.  It was only an intrinsic understanding that I could not explain to anyone then.

There was this power in my finger that felt like warmth, a soft lightning that flowed out the center of
my chest into my hand.  I could feel it pulsing and when I relaxed I could feel every single finger on
my hands filled with this silent love so that when my fingers touched the instruments they sang. They sang in their own voices even when I played them poorly, the viola, the French horn, the oboe, the
saxophone, the flute.  It was flute who fully came alive inside my hands, like a new baby was born and I breathed life into its lungs so it could breathe all on its own.  Something deep within me learned about my breath and how to send it out into another form.

This breath was like returning to another time, a timelessness, before I knew I was remembering that I was breathing, when I was sitting with my gran beside the shore of Lake Chelan and we were watching how the rays of sun were breaking through the clouds and evaporating rain.  I was only five then and those rays of light flew down into my little open heart and I just knew I loved them anwhere they came from for how they made me feel inside, they were a silent music all their own and so I breathed them in, all the way into my lungs and blood and hands.  I felt like I was glowing and knew
I was being gifted by them, these timeless golden light streams.

Now I sit in silence listening to the warm and point my finger at the light to turn the red into the green. I breathe in rhythm to the rays and I am flying on their wings of song into an ancient place in Ireland, the mountains of Cuchullaine.  There I send this song into the brooks and streams and trees and mists and rain to join it with another song that rises also in the wind, the blood, the heart, the green.

Last Ramblings of 2012

It's the thirty first of December and I just deleted all but one of my past blog posts.  I reread them before I deleted them, of course, and so I now fully realize exactly why I haven't written anything here since the end of July.  I had pigeonholed myself and didn't want to return to the scene of the crime.

It is all too easy for me to tell you all about myself when I am writing.  I will tell you things that I might never tell you in person.  That's what I love so much about writing and yet that's exactly what I detest about it at the same time.  Such writing can draw you in and repel you in only a few seconds and then I am left naked and trembling and wondering what the hell happened.  Am I responsible for all conclusions that may be drawn from my confessions?  What is my intention in revealing myself to you, the reader, who may know nothing at all about me until I so freely share my deepest and most hidden feelings?  I want to show you an alternative way of reading, of contemplation, of intrigue and fascination.  And even then,  all you will ever really know about me at those moments in my words are these little pieces of a speck in time that may never reveal themselves again...it is very tender business, this arrangement of the letters mixed with secrets and dreams.

I often write about my sexuality because it can be so confounding, misleading and seemingly limiting.  Writing is not about limitation and yet by July I began to feel limited by my own writing.  I had been writing about what it is like for some women to love other women and what it had meant to me when I had loved another woman.  No sooner had I done that did I also feel an alienation, that I was divorcing myself from another reality that is also a big part of me as a woman, that of my love for men.


I have only been fully in love several times in my life, twice with men I was married to and once with a woman who did not love me in return.  Most of my liaisons have been with men.  I have never been in a committed relationship with another woman though I have been attracted to some.  There have been many times in my life when I tried to define my sexuality and label myself as either heterosexual, bisexual or lesbian but I have come to resist this tendency of labeling because it pigeonholes me and can cause alienation, and not just in myself.  The labels of sexuality do not define my heart in any way, or my capacity for loving, because those rare times I fall in love it's with the heart and spirit and soul of a person, the person who embraces mine, my heart and spirit and soul, at the same time.  It can be in near vicinity or all the way across the world.  It is not limited by distance or earthly time zones.

I know this isn't comfortable for some, shedding the armor.  For me it's just part of my healing from abuse and violence.  I've had to learn how to walk around and be with people without the shield up all the time, so I can actually see that they all aren't out to hurt me.  As a result I have come to see how it's become all too easy in this world for some to dismiss people based only on their differences.  I seek to find the similarities in our hearts, in our souls and in our spirits so I resist the pigeonholing,
especially my own by my own hand.  Here's to freedom in 2013.

The Lowdown

I've never done this before, written a blog. The word 'blog' is not music for me but the idea of it may be... I've written all my life, first in diaries with a lock and key and later in those old spiral notebooks. Now it's iPad time and I'm a wee bit embarrassed, Luddite that I am...somehow all this just seems so strange, typing with my pointers only and not my whole hand...it is just not the same as typing on my old Remington, though I do believe this may end up a good thing and not loathsome ;) The lowdown is that things just gotta change sometime...