I Fall In Love All The Time

Source unknown (possibly background fairy)

With music, with books, with making, with people, places, things. Lately, I'm in a fiery clinch  (yet again) with poetry. The death of Adrienne Rich accelerated this current conflagration. And from her work I turned again to Stanley Kunitz, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, William Stafford (oh my beloved friend).

Here is a poem that plays over and over in my mind. Via 3Quarksdaily:

Grammar

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap

by Tony Hoagland
from Donkey Gospel, 1998
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minn.

Lest you think I am flighty or fickle with all this constant falling (I can assure you my loves endure), I offer this as explanation - I listen to wise people and I try and try and try:

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Saint Patrick's Day

Happy Saint Patrick's Day - one of my Poppa's favorite holidays. I am a proud descendent of John Kelly. I take my name from his. It means warrior. My beautiful mother, his fine daughter, sent me greetings and she closed with: "May the most you wish for be the least you get; may the best times you ever had be the worst you will ever see." And love, always love.

Noirin Ni Riain



And from Sinead

I'm A Slut!

For A Lost Friend Who Grieves

Especially Wild Geese and Peonies. For Reg.

The Things You Do Endear You to Me

Oh you know I will.



I love you Valentine.

Daddy's Got a Gun

I left the comment below on Mrs. G's blog, but I wanted to put it here to remember. It fits in with a certain theme I'm vibing on. The comment was left in response to Mrs. G's request for thoughts on this video (which she said was sweeping the web and I had not yet seen-6 million viewers?):



So, Dad is quite angry. And he has a gun. And obviously, he is a parenting teenager newb. As the daughter of an angry man, I can tell you that public rants and humiliation do not forge strong parent/child bonds, healthy relationships,compliance with daddy's wishes, or respect.

We are seeing one angry dad's response to his child's teenage angst. Teenagers do that. They diss their parents. They feel "put out" by the demands their parents make. The are embarrassed and even disdainful of their parents. They can frequently be over-the-top asshats, cruel, thoughtless, and pissy mean.

This is normal human development. Normal = Not a shooting offense. Fear has no place in parent/child relationships. It is destructive to that which is most essential-trust. And, if handled correctly, (I liked to use long words about individuation and developing synaptic connections i.e. "your brain don't work so hot right now because you have a lot of synaptic connections to forge.") teenage asshatment can be talking points that enhance a teenager's sense of self and self-worth, which helps them develop connection and empathy, which makes aging parental ass-wiping highly probable (one among many of the highly desirable traits we hope to see in our offspring).

I don't advocate being a doormat for a kid, but I do believe we must show our children respect before we can demand it from them. Like all tough skills, becoming a tolerable human is a learned behavior. Takes trial and error and a very committed team routing for you to actually master the complex feat of growing up.

I have 2 beautiful adult children who at times did equally stupid, insensitive things (just as I, too, did when young-probably still do as we save all our best bullshit for those we love and trust. Sorry Mama.). I believe that they have learned how to be remarkable adult people through loving, honest, SAFE, (no cigarettes, anger, guns -heaven help us!) and respectful interactions with adults they could count on to establish boundaries and listen as often as they talked to teenagers.

I feel bad for this family. Where do you go to talk things out when the level of aggression is raised to such heights? And how can a cornered kid make a graceful retreat or attempt rapprochement when they are not shown how to handle disappointing behaviors which, let's face it parents, our kids receive from us as well.

So, that was my comment on the video. It makes me sad to think 6 million people think this is ok parenting. I call shenanigans. This dude is an amateur who could benefit from some education. I can only hope he was arrested for deploying hollow-point bullets in a residential neighborhood and that his arrest taught his daughter a little bit about how not to handle her disappointment and anger.

I Am An Emotional Creature

Lately I've been feeling cranky. Any time I open my mouth someone is there to tell me I am angry. Every alert woman will have this experience almost daily. It's nothing new. Most of the time I just ignore it, sometimes don't even notice it. The offense I am committing is commonly called having an opinion while wearing a vagina. Hearing about how this makes me an angry woman, a wrathful goddess, bitchy, or the perennial "over-reactive" is so fucking boring.

I have opinions. I am an emotional creature. You could be so lucky. You could. And then, if you were, you would stop policing my words. You would hesitate before clamping your hand over my mouth and whispering "shhh!" in fear of the boogeyman who is around every corner just waiting to hurt a girl. You might, like me, occasionally call that boogeyman out. Yell " Bring it!" at him or point out to passers by that he is standing right there and they are walking too close and should tell him to go shower some of the stank off if he really wants to use stealth to scare.

I am not interested in compliance. I believe it is how we got into this mess. I am tired of being told how I feel or that the radical fact that I feel and then express my feelings is a problem.

My life, like everyone's life, will be brief. Too quick a trip to tiptoe around all this bullshit. So, I wear hip waders and get on with it. To those who would prefer I demur I say "Fuck you" and "You should try it sometime." I know that you are afraid that once you open your mouth all that will come out is a scream, but trust me, there is so much more you have to say.




"I am an emotional creature. It's how the earth got made. I love love love being a girl." Thank you Eve Ensler.