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I've spent the majority of my day putting in a raised-bed garden in our cooperative like run apartment. Today I just put in the herbs: garlic chives, fennel, sweet majoram, sweet basil, rosemary, and dill. Am at the very end of The Ominvore's Deliemma and feel strongly about trying to eat even more local than I already am. The book is astonishingly brilliant- a look at natural history through the lens of food, including, the evolutinary, existential, and economical theories that drive such a thesis. It is good to get confirmation that it is more important to eat local than to eat organic--particularly "industry organic."
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I was sick as a dog while at the immigration conference in Vegas--barely spoke a word to anyone, except to re-fill my hot water for tea. Afterwards, I realized it was quite profound, to be that silent for that long in one of the loudest, raunchiest cities I've ever wandered. I felt like Curly Sue in my hotel room at the Palazzo.
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Am feeling a bit anti-industry after this trip and reading and gardening. It is not in my blood to push for numbers or money. The older I get the slower I go and I am loving it. I am grateful for dinners with friends and family where we sit and talk the night away. Truly connect. Wild connect. The romance in conversation.
happy belated Chastity!
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I revised my sequence/series piece, "Naturalization" and am thinking that I'll include it in almost all of my MFA writing samples this fall. My best friend, and writing comrade, gave some excellent suggestions about how to distinguish the characters, which now are indeterminite pronouns. And also how each section weaves with the larger engine of the piece but still has its own trajectory and how to think of the order of the sections with this in mind.
working on four new pieces-that are swilling in me simultaneously:
1)"FOIA" (Freedom of Information Act) w/ a quote: "I don't know someone's insides." Am thinking of doing this as a fragments poem. Had an interesting conversation at work about Islam and domestic violence and being a Westerner..may surface in this piece, will see where it goes as I draft.
2)"Hound Me" (result of processing the loss of eye contact with a dog/intution/death-backwards birth
3)"Atomic Potter" (twirling beauties/moonwalking time)
4) "Virgins" (south dakota cowboy)
So, am just collecting bits here and there to shape these in the next couple of weeks which might be difficult as Chas and I leave for NYC next weekend. As a side note she booked a gig at Banjo's Jim's on the 4th! Am looking forward to traveling with a lover to a new place.
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Am feeling blissed out right now. Am just about to bike to a club to go dancing for pride weekend and have had a relatively slow day reflecting and will be trippin next week. I had been stressin about finding time to write and started reading Women Who Run With the Wolves, particularly the section on "Nourishing the Creative Life":
"It is up to her to inform them that when she has "that look" in her eyes, it does not mean she is a vacant lot waiting to be filled. It means she is balancing a big cardhouse of ideas on a single fingertip, and she is carefully connecting all the cards using tiny crystalline bones and a little spit, and if she can just get it all to the table without it falling down or flying apart, she can bring an image from the unseen world into being. To speak to her in that moment is to creat a Harpy wind that blows the entire structure to tatters. To speak to her in that moment is to break her heart."
--and other bits that talk about over-responsibility (i.e. cleaning the entire house before sitting down to do whatever it is that you love to do/whatever burns inside you to get out)
--how to be insistent on my own tempo and to venture by myself, keeping the wild psyche intact and not lose it to domesticity, over-anaylzing, or work
--how to be in my body with certainty and how stories are medicine
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Also just rediscovered this favorite line in Fanny Howe's collection On the Ground.
from "Kneeling Bus"
"How disassemble
the hypocritical
crippling factor in every body?"
I saw her read this poem at the Loft Literary center a year or so ago and almost sunk into the floor when she got to this line.
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watched: The Reader and Revolutionary Road and thinking: the heightened level of communication and honesty that is needed in a relationship in order to make sure each partner is going towards their own individualism while growing as a couple towards new journeys--and how hopefully, mystery underlies even our most certain decisions, whether they be yes or no
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listening to: DeYarmond Edison "Silent Signs"
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putting on: dancing shoes
