In that Leonard Cohen film I posted last time, LC talks of being interested in going through his days in a state of grace. And if he is not in a state of grace, he goes back to bed. That he says this in response to a question from a ...
"Breathe," someone said to me yesterday.
Good idea. #survivaltactic. How is it I had forgotten about breathing? Taking in oxygen. Even when I have worked fourteen straight days and am doing little beyond working very hard, eating and sleeping. Or especially then.
I can still breathe in and out. I can still ...
A quote from Jan Frazier, "When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening" --What do I want for myself? I want to learn how to pare from my consciousness all that is not gratitude. I want to cease praying for anything I do not already have, but pray ...
Somehow, I would pour the colors of this room where I sit, of the birds that sing outside my window, of the knockout pink roses which have begun to multiply in bloom, into this liquid page where I write. This page which goes to you, which beams all I would ...
I could listen to this forever. "Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from. Everybody's worrying where they're going to go when the whole thing's done. No one knows for certain, so if it's all the same to me, I think I'll just let the mystery be."
Take Polaroids of your tv screen while Lucas dances, black eyes, black hair, black turtleneck, lanky Lucas, while he dances, no tripod, no vertical hold, no pause, just you leaning sweet into Lucas. Make 1,000 copies on photo glossy, staple gun each glossy to a telephone pole every mile from ...
Do you ever feel as though your life is being narrated? Or as though you may want to turn to Dustin Hoffman for metaphysical advice? Then this little gem of a movie is one of your new best friends. The luminous beings that appear in this movie are: Will Farrell, ...
It is early, early in the morning. It doesn't feel like it's late at night. I woke at 2 a.m. and I love that sometimes. The stillness. The poetry of middle of the night thoughts. Would I love it as much if every night some wakefulness awakened me, and my ...
To me, the true test of an excellent grocery store is this: if you walked in smiling (and I hope you were), were you smiling when you came out? If you’re all frustrated when you come out then conjure up a lovely grocery store to go to.
It will very likely ...
My darling son Kenny was in town this weekend and we went to the James River, by way of what's known in these parts as Texas Beach. You depart ordinary reality slowly, via a path from a park near Maymont which seems initially rather, well, ordinary. This is, ...
Tap here to begin writing, someone whispered, and she realized it had already begun. It had started somewhere after her telephone call with a friend from her early life, from when she was some inconsequential, flimsy thing unrecognizable to her now and it had fluttered, birdlike, when she began her ...
Just pose the question to yourself, whether or not there's an impending weather event. What happens? Have you got excellent flashlights, fondue pots, Viewmaster sets and drawers full of good candles? Gallons of clean water, Sterno, batteries? It’s a comforting thing to have provisions. But still more comforting to know ...
"Dance is a very powerful drug, Mr. Keane. If embraced judiciously, it can exorcise demons, access deep seated emotions and color your life in joyous shades of brilliant magenta that you never knew existed. But, one must shoulder its challenges with intrepid countenance if one is ever to reap its ...
There is something about a road trip, with its vast changing panoramas of field, sky, city, flowers, truck wheels, with its swooping birds and deep possibilities, that lets me hold life a little looser, more delicately, giving it room to breathe.
Here is a video of Kenny Crowley, beauty-walker, singer-songwriter, son of mine, singing his anthem to the Grand Canyon and to all of earth. Last summer he retrofitted his pickup truck so it would be a camper/home on wheels and did a big loop during July and August. He left ...
Some friends of mine started a writing group around the beginning of the last decade, and this is how I first met them. I am so deeply grateful that I did, as they are the loveliest people and writers: Leah, and Nathan, and Melanie. And RaasaLeela, who was in ...
Oh my goodness I am so in love with the lady in the truckstop where I just went in for ice and beef jerky. She has purple eyeshadow and pink lipstick and dark moviestar hair, staring off into the desert when I opened the glass door.
This is going in the ...
These short stories are continually luminous to me, and when I read them -- or when I breathed them in and out later, after they'd become a part of me -- I was so pleased to be in a world where they had appeared. They warm up the place considerably.
The ...
I love moving my car to a new spot every two hours. Because it means a small adventure, regularly scheduled. What will it be? Today it is a trip to the yoga studio to check it out and pick up a schedule, a little pink card I can hold in ...
In the dream last night, the tri-level where I once lived was collapsing, much like -- you know -- the memories give way in the film "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." At the ceiling on the ground level, you could see the floor above beginning to disintegrate, and ...
I am at Silver Diner for the first time, having a delightful Saturday morning. I've helped my Dad shovel two truckloads of mulch and, after my Belgian waffles, Amish eggs and nitrate-free bacon, I am going over to lounge around with my beautiful sister and talk of anything/everything.
A lovely young ...
Here is a post from a few days ago I thought I had published... "Heading toward Sedona now. Just saw an elk jerky roadside stand. The sign said "really good." I believe them...."
You will note the radio silence since just before entering Sedona. Meet me there, all my beloveds reading ...
You know that, don't you, Scott Hastings?
Maybe the Ballroom Dancing Federation doesn't have any new moves.
And you're bored with the old ones. Aren't you, Scott?
Wouldn't you rather dance your own dance now? Wherever your feet want to go?
I've started to notice that there is something about being grateful that seems to change my way of being in the world. And it seems to me to be another aspect of this notion of having a choice.
I can find something or someone to be grateful for. Even if it's ...
You may not seem to be doing anything much in the way of production, like clocking work hours or acquiring goods, or writing Pulitzer Prize winning books. Imagine, though, that there are qualities in you that are very tree-like. You stand with roots deep in the ground, soaking up water, ...
I see I have some catching up to do. I'm only halfway through Caitlin Moran's "How to Be a Woman," which is HILarious and brilliant, and LITERALLY made me want to stand up on the chair at Elwood Thompson's one fine morning and shout out "I AM A FEMINIST!" just ...
Here are some things that might be fun. Or might not. You decide.
Research memory. Or Joseph Campbell. Or the workings of the brain. Or the Shakers, or Diane Arbus, or Walker Evans.
Wallpaper the bathroom with Bazooka bubblegum comics.
Plan a weird ass party.
Make yourself some paper mache birds and let them ...
Laundromats are portals, too. You know what I mean. You walk in, the color is different. The people have appeared there for each other, converged on the place to do ordinary things with great beauty, like drink coffee softly from a heavy mug or lift the lid to the Speed ...
Sunset Boulevard to the water, then up the coast to Santa Barbara as the sun moves spectacularly from our sight.
Image by Corie Crowley, Coriedoesmyhair.com.
I love when I wake up in the morning with finger waves in my hair, as though I've been to a night salon, where my straight hair has been pampered and has run wild into curls.
I love when my Titanic of a story has hit its iceburg. And it has. ...
In the writing group last night, we wrote.
I kept turning on the porch light, walking out to meet the things that would be written, but I just saw them glimmering off in the backstreets, holding still when I paused to listen. They are on their way to dance parties, to ...
This was a very different sunrise over corn. First it started flashing me its color behind the St. Louis arch.
Then over the Missouri River and into Illinois where the colors of the sun spreading across the enormous sky and the fields and the road were all I wanted in the ...
Send love into your body -- your heart, your cheekbones, your belly. Know that you are love in human form.
Beam out love to everyone you have ever met. This kind of love you will beam needs nothing back; it needs nothing more than to make its way from your heart ...
I wash my glass in Palmolive dish soap in the kitchen at work and it very sweetly catapults me back 28 years to where my babies are babies and I am washing dishes very sweetly in the kitchen in upstate New York. Any moment one of them might come around ...
Sometimes I want to give you everything. Yes, you, reading this now. I sit in the morning darkened by the rain, listening to the tea pot work up to a whistle, making precise Morse code clicks on my iPad keyboard as I type this. I have just read this morning's ...
And now, I sit, with my hand on my heart, full of love for Bob Dylan, that wondrous, mighty seer who has decided the time has come for the story of the Titanic TO BE SUNG. Christomighty, and amen, brother. You are, for sure, the fiddler I want fiddling whilst ...
I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful ...
Your true home is where you live in your heart. The place where you are connected to love and the way it moves through the world, permeating everything, beaming out from toll booth ladies, impatient clerks, flat tires, cows mooing, people who interrupt you, redwood trees, sun setting on the ...
I have things to tell you, you know. It won't take long. Or it may take a hundred years. And I will be listening, because you have things to say, too. We have stories to put together like bubbles, bumping lazily into each other, fusing, popping, suddenly boundaryless, suddenly all ...
Imagine that everywhere you go, there are angels in plain sight. Your waiter, for example.
Here is what happened to me one day several years back when I sat in one of my favorite coffee shops, writing, brainstorming, considering what my next move in life would be. I looked up from ...
When someone speaks to you, let everything slow down, and listen very closely. This is how you will get a glimpse of someone's true spirit, and maybe share a little of yours with them. You can practice this at first with people you already really like, and then as you ...
For many years, whenever I've sat down and asked myself something along the lines of: "What does your divine right life look like?", something in me would flash back a vision of gorgeous walls of jars. Jars filled with beautiful food and lots and lots of dried herbs. Lovely colors. ...
More loveliness from Making it Lovely. This is a conceptual art piece by Tyree Callahan. So dreamy.
Image compilation by Making It Lovely. Art and Image by Tyree Callahan.
The land flattens out, stretches further. Yarrow grows at the roadside. Treeless, here where you'd have to go so deep for water. Scattered cattle ranches, the continental divide. Ethereal, butter-colored place.
They just seem to match out here, something glimmering back the color of everything as it drives through, just a little more saturated, just a little more certain of its light.
Oh, my darlings, it has been most of the winter since I’ve written here. Kenny called me on his way to Lake Tahoe with Dana last night to ask me about some of the herbs I had given him at Thanksgiving that we’d grown and dried from the garden. He had blended them all together and made what he calls Momma Love Tea and wanted to recall some of what went in there. And in so doing he called me back to this place where I love so much, this place where my heart lives.
So this morning I woke, and got out all the jars of herbs that have been patiently waiting for me, and started blending an enormous batch of Richmondy Momma Love Tea. And the beauty that was everywhere! The colors, my hands communing with the herbs, filling my heart with light.
Kenny said he has been brewing the tea in the french press, and he is able to extract several pots full from each brew. As I think (and hope) that said french press must be the one I left there when I headed back east, I am going to go hunt down another french press today and get brewing.
And listen to this. Dana has brewed up some kombucha and mixed it with some Momma Love Tea and added oranges to it, and Kenny said it is seriously the most amazing concoction ever. So, perhaps time to start another kombucha mother and get back to that, too.
Here is what goes in Momma Love Tea:
Marigolds
Echinacea flower
Echinacea leaf
Burdock root
Lemongrass
Knockout dried pink roses
Yarrow leaves
Yarrow blossom
Dried lemon rinds
Chrysanthemums
Spearmint
Tiny bit of rosemary
Lemon balm
Xoxoxo
Lisa
P.S. I also made a batch of a cleansing and strengthening tea using some things from the garden and some dried herbs I got from Elwood Thompson’s, which is a healthy grocery store here. The herbs from the store, lovely as they are, do not have nearly as much chi as they have probably been sitting around a while. I will have to get seeds to grow this stuff my own self. (we are just now beginning to plan the garden, OMG.). Here is what’s in it:
Red clover
Skullcap
Raspberry leaf
Dandelion root
Mugwort
Slippery elm root
Then I added some dried pink knockout roses and some echinacea leaf and root, some St. John’s Wort, some mint, some dried burdock root and some dried pink rosehips. We will see.
This was before I’d read Charles Simic and James Tate and saw that you could quietly translate oceans into little drops of water and pour them patiently over the page, leaving hints of the colors of deep sea life when they dry.
But I would never have made it in the circus, where you must stand in the center ring and project the happy, glorious story of elephants who weren’t being tortured before coming out to perform for the wide-eyed. You must point out the wire walkers, the fire eaters, the lion tamers, and make it seem thrilling rather than suicidal or cruel. You must cart animals and people in crates and cages from place to place, and you must think, the show must go on. The mountaintops must be removed. The Roundup must be sprayed. The floods must be televised.
And in the town, after the circus leaves, the Little League games resume, and I stand in the spot where the cotton candy vendor was, I circle the field and stare up at the wooden scoreboard while runners run the baselines and parents yell, run!
Were there ever elephants here? They are the ones I would follow, speak to. I would touch their shoulders and I would say, tell me everything about you, just everything. And they would look at me, the way my dog did, completely wordless, and more filled with love and beauty than words could possibly hold.
And then, flash. I would take their picture with my brand new iPhone camera so I could show everyone about elephants.
There is something about the notion of being in a house (or two houses) with 20 -30 of my nearest and dearest family members that fills me with equal parts joy and dread. On the one hand, I love them and we share a blood line. On the other hand, it is not what I call a group of listeners. Is this how it is in families everywhere? Whoever brags the loudest wins?
Moreover, there is the food situation. I am so filled with horror at their naivete about food that I don’t even know what to say. I go into panic mode a little bit just trying to anticipate how I am going to eat food that won’t make me sick, and at the same time be sociable and honor these people. So I am driving to a farm to pick up the fresh turkeys with the idea that here is something I can actually eat and I just know that, in the end, some well-meaning soul is going to cover the leftovers with Saranwrap, unwittingly slathering dioxins all over it. Blerg. If I was enlightened, I would just blithely eat it anyway. Yes?
Still, I can see how this is a brilliant sort of exercise for an ego that’s on the run, maybe. I can see how the situation calls for a whole lot of being-ness. If I can just go into love and stay there through the week, I will be… in love. Madness can ensue and I will just smile.
It is early, early in the morning. It doesn’t feel like it’s late at night. I woke at 2 a.m. and I love that sometimes. The stillness. The poetry of middle of the night thoughts. Would I love it as much if every night some wakefulness awakened me, and my days took place in the dark? Would I love exhaustion? How many do I meet in the days that live their brightest at night, and what I am seeing is just a glimmer of them?
The more I read this Jan Frazier book the more I….the more I….the more I what? Maybe I am going to leave that sentence alone and get back to this thing of not knowing.
Meanwhile the coffee is ready. Beyond the heightened gurgling of the steam through coffee grinds, there are four beeps that pierce the morning, signaling its readiness. I fill my cup, smiling at the bike mug that Julie and Kristina got me to commemorate my inaugural long-ass bike ride. They presented it to me, ceremoniously, laughing kindly, hilariously, while I smile-glared at them in all my exhausted petulance. The bike on the mug is one of those impossible double-decker numbers that you would have to mount from a great height, like from a ladder or a second story window, and do not plan on your feet touching the ground because they won’t. God, it’s perfect.
Every single moment, it seems, I have the choice of feeling the deliciousness of light pouring through me, this something which is always there just at the back of my spine and I lean back into it a little bit and the world is transformed. And my dear little ego/whatever is always ready to start looking around, saying if THIS THING were just THAT WAY or [blah de blah blah blah], then: ta da! Happiness! Such is the terrible task of the ego, and, as in the urgent-toned world of the newscaster on the tellie, things always bear watching and the poor stuck creature can’t see out beyond that screen –that teletype with terse little stories of drama! intrigue! sorrow! loss! — to know the sun is coming up, going down, with great beauty, and there are just these deeply lovely series of moments strung together, there are these rivers to float down.
This — this life — is like the day I climbed the Tor in Glastonbury, which was a hill when I climbed it but is possibly now a mountain. The stuff of legends, yes? I got so scared of the height and the expanse and wanted to cling to the ground because there were certainly no railings and then I just expanded into everything I could see, into everything. And it was gorgeous, and perfectly fine, and perfectly Sound of Music. Just like crossing the Bay Bridge at night, the one I had seen crumble on the tv screen in the 80′s earthquake, and I was goddamned terrified, a total hazard to anyone unfortunate enough to be riding around me, and then, I was the bay, and the city by it, and, you know what I mean.
I knew a man once who, while I was hiding in the house trying to stay just above all of the shattering thoughts of all my stories, would go out and take Polaroids of the beauty moments and then bring them to me. He saw me through in ways I don’t know that anyone else could have, probably because he was a brilliant and kind of fucked up shaman type who excavated the poetry in me, the witness in me to beauty, and I am mostly so grateful for that. I still feel his laughter pouring out of me every now & then and it makes me a little happy we found each other and all. Other times, I think, what the hell are you still doing here, you fool?
Then I think maybe he is just another delicious story that keeps telling itself, over and over, the way a river does. And so is everybody. And so is this.
One of my friends said my website was like a Rauschenberg in electronic form with its collages in layers of color and words appearing or not appearing. Maybe she saw what this was before I did, as she was able to stand back a little. As it happens, I do tend to collage things and blend them with paint. And when some one or some moment does this well, I feel like flowers must feel — really warm and lovely and rooted.
This morning, as the sun pours through my window, and some birds cackle and I breathe from my belly, I can hear the thrum of everything on the planet expanding/contracting, waxing/waning, upping/downing, yin-ing, yang-ing. And then my little reptilian brain scurries, wanting to gain purchase of this thing: a place to stand steadily — a foothold — or complete dominion while we are at it. Which, of course, is needless. But cute, in its way. Like a salamander making its way across the rocks to bring a splash of blue to an already color-soaked moment. I will take it; and I will keep making words out of wordless things just to illustrate the edge of things, just to call back to you a little bit from where I live.
When science bears witness to love. When Russell Brand narrates our enlightenment. When meditating alone brings us closer to everyone. That’s what now is.
I am at Silver Diner for the first time, having a delightful Saturday morning. I’ve helped my Dad shovel two truckloads of mulch and, after my Belgian waffles, Amish eggs and nitrate-free bacon, I am going over to lounge around with my beautiful sister and talk of anything/everything.
A lovely young father walks by, carrying his two year old blonde son from the table. The boy is crying in a rather overwhelmed sort of way and the father very kindly says to him, “do you have a choice?” And the boy is immediately quiet. As though enlightened, in realizing he really does have a choice in the way he responds. As though honored. As though empowered.
“My goodness,” think I. “Isn’t that the truth he was saying?” Part of me wants to go back and re-mother my children in just this empowering way. Part of me just sits there at the table with my waffles, loving them right this very minute.
Beauty happens everywhere. And I feel so lucky when I notice it.
When someone speaks to you, let everything slow down, and listen very closely. This is how you will get a glimpse of someone’s true spirit, and maybe share a little of yours with them. You can practice this at first with people you already really like, and then as you get better you can even try this with people who initially seem very annoying. Let me know what you find out.
![Kenny in that Grand Canyon [video]](http://www.thebeautythatiseverywhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Kenny-grand-canyon-singing-150x150.jpg)
Oh, my darlings, it has been most of the winter since I’ve written here. Kenny called me on his way to Lake Tahoe with Dana last night to ask me about some of the herbs I had given him at Thanksgiving that we’d grown and dried from the garden. He had blended them all together and made what he calls Momma Love Tea and wanted to recall some of what went in there. And in so doing he called me back to this place where I love so much, this place where my heart lives.
