Tag: cohabitation

The Formation of Light

 

photo Anya Segalovich

When I think about you
I think about the formation of light
I think about how light is made.
I think about slipping between worlds
I think in terms of potentials.
When I think about you
I think about the absence of longing
I think about being poured into a cup the shape of your heart.
I think about over-late parties where night wakes to day again,
and a continuous unraveling of stories
having been wound in to a ball for
well, a long time.
I think about
the slow intensity of surprise
and standing or walking in space.
I think about time,
and how the light comes to us.

xoc

On Landscape and The River Is the Path

 

photo Luis chumbe

On Landscape

Texture and Heat. Having been there makes a difference (does it?). (It does).

What I say is: “My body misses Latin America.” What I mean is: After 3 days in Iquitos, my body has recycled most of its water. I am now a living exchange with the air breathed by the Amazon River via the trees. I am made up of madura tierra, dolphins swim my blood, my body re-orients itself as a boat—after all the river is the path. (Wow, that one took a long time. 10 years maybe.)

As I am re-inhabited by the river, my body re-orients itself as a boat. The river is the path. As many times as I need to hear it and lose it. I lose it again.

Presently my body feels hollow, greedily metabolizing rare sunlight, missing the rainbow-haze droplet filtered quality. The water is life component. The swimming in the water-air component. The each footfall is a blessing communicated to the earth and lifted back up and out through the trees to be reabsorbed component. The roundness of walking as blessing and being blessed by the moisture in the air component. The Softness—if earth can be silty, slip silky, this is the quality applied to air. A warm stone feeling, hand warmed clay as walking environs.

Yesterday someone asked: How could you not miss the forest (la selva)? I miss the forest like I miss my sister, like I miss a birthplace, like I miss knowing where I actually AM.

Well! That was true! And elicited some breaking up of the dam inside of myself. I place myself there inside of it and the river land calls me, immediately, you can come home, you can come home. Yesterday I thought about it as my “spiritual birthplace” and that is not really it. It is the place where I became (and become) re-oriented to myself and to the world. My first and dearest long-term, long-distance relationship—with a river, weaving herself underground. Yes, I’m getting it, I’m hearing it.

Do I have to say, so obviously, the paintings with the black backgrounds are true. They are dreams, map flashes of landscape, they are connections of the human turned back in to communion with/of the larger experience. In the realities of Westernization we have an idea that perhaps were are floating in a kind of void, why we are obsessed with a cold-metallic-alone version of space craft and exploration, instead of an organic, community version. In the forest, I met a tree who is a spaceship. The presence of this craft-self was so obvious that it reminded me to myself, and that is a feeling that no longing for it could match. Coming home. Coming home.

That I will not be returning to this beloved, to this mother, this sister, this homeplace this turn is suddenly present with me. The recognition shuts something down in me, in the relationship, in the dreaming. But perhaps something else is being born in me, some hybrid seed of self that is both river and boat.

And to think–I was trained to feel that weaving myself back in to the dream is lonely. But that’s not true. It is Full To Bursting with Life, Blessing, Purpose, Meaning, and Beauty. It is filled with Truth. It is filled with the Real World.

Blessings on Your Heads,
Ashe
Charlotte

Real Magic is in Relationship

I dream you
dream to the reaches
beyond my own ability to conceive—
what has been carried
was not carried by “us” only
but by things we didn’t know we once were
we still are
things that (we) will continue to be
long, long after we are gone…
maybe, just maybe, until we are here again…

what, in you, gives me the gift of sight
of breath catch in sudden altitude,
what, in me, allows you to star-skip
freely, with the whisperings in your ear and
galaxy seedings in your palm

what is it, in recognition, in relationship,
in allowing, that allows the fun-house
distortion of space-time,
inward, outward, inside-outward,
zoom lens like a merkaba ball,
like a slinky sent sideways down
a wormhole, like water become wave
like…something I cannot place because
it is not fathomable by myself *alone*

real magic
is in relationships
the trick is we have been deceived
to think we cannot see
that which is right in front of us—
it must have been veiled, concealed,
sewed up in a bag, hidden, buried
it is right here

it is right here for the taking,
right here for the making
spinning into now like lightning
strike
like sound that makes the Earth wave
boom
like molten core made island like
gas made environment— things that we in our minds
have made separate that laugh, laugh,
laugh at these imposed restrictions…
ah, but let it be
let it be. let “it” melt back into “be”
verb become noun, concept become wing,
bird become sky and toadstool become voice
ah, let it all be

the miracle is in the heartbeat, that we
can see it, hear it, feel it, touch it
in self, in other.
inward/outward, so far outward…

it reaches, us to us,
it is imprinted, unable to be removed
I see you
I hear you
I love you
Sonic
Boom

X.

listen to this poem read by the author

Real Magic is in Relationship

You Can Come Home and The Bear, The Wind, The Bear

“the World and the Bear” 2011, C.Savage

You Can Come Home
and
The Bear, The Wind, The Bear

1. You Can Come Home, The Wind

Is the feeling I am mistaking for love free fall?
And is there anything inherently incorrect with that?

There is talk of “groundedness”
and then, the visceral feeling,
of the sprinting spiral trajectory of our entire solar system. **
Of our star shooting through space, even as I sit and type.
**(the former-physicist me wishes for a moment for a memory)

The plane of Between in all stillness practices,
in this moment, is this the feel of subspace,
the place of acknowledgment,
the yogis flexing and bending as their bodies hurtle through an incomprehensible galaxy,
you can come home
you can come home
you can come home

Here.
A dance of matching speeds
human v human on horse
wood v wood-fired metal
glass v gourd
bear v car
nature v structure
speaking v understanding knowing
is it a set up?
is it a construct of the walled mind?**
**(bridge v river)

existence in a spacetime of
imminent collision…
inevitable…
there is no toward
or getting away from

and what is it really,
and what does it matter
and I’d rather leave the
strict suburbs of why
for the open plains of
star time
and
your mind
and weeping until we are done

the rigidity of opposing
v
the flexibility of intertwined roots
lifting the land
breathing the wind

stone, water, love
beyond what is time
beyond what is concept

the feeling of my body
the feeling of knowing
the feeling of wind
the feeling of the whole thing coming down**
**(the feeling of the potential of the whole thing coming down)

i’m all shook up

2. The Bear, The Wind, The Bear

What I know is there is nothing to argue about
A state of wonder is a state of wonder is a state of wonder is a state of wonder is a state of wonder

what is being in love
what is world worry
what does the Hubble space telescope show us
what is the movement of planets
I gotta stop I almost started to cry

why spend our time arguing about the existence of love?
altho it’s me who squirms away from philosophy.

3. The Bear, The Bear

In August I arrived from Peru with Amazon River water, full of pink dolphins, still on my skin
I drove to pick up a friend, hearing his voice after years and years
gravelly like my Russian brother, and the same opening statement
Sorry, sorrysorrysorrysorry, I’m sorry
I know

In the short timespan I drove to retrieve him:
a big, fat-flowing male bear galloped across the highway, I almost hit him,
on the way back, he was dead, huge still, on the side of the road.
We didn’t have time to stop for him. I felt awful. We were on a mission.
The Kontomble had sent a recipe with bear fur.
And we couldn’t stop.

On Tuesday, now three months later, after the weekend of shamanic wind and weeping through music, I was driving to drop my child off at school and saw another bear, dead on the side of the road.

At first I thought it was a dog, a German Shepherd, but it was a bear. I felt sick. I had just mentioned the bear the night before. Here was the bear. I took my child to school. I borrowed children’s scissors from his classroom, I remembered, in my rush of the morning and all the bags, leaving my bag with the knife at home.

I was distraught, I called my friend, I drove up and turned around at the next exit and came back, looking for the bear. I saw it, lying the the grass, and as I got closer began to cry for its smallness. I pulled over next to its body. My friend asked me to be careful, to be aware and present for other bears, if this one was so small, to make an offering. I hung up.

I went over to the bear, crying, truck sound roaring by, I stayed close to my car, I felt fear, I felt a large bubble of fear, pain, disaster. It felt warm, present, watery, a different quality of air. I looked over my shoulder, feeling another bear may come barreling down the hillside on the opposite side of the road. I saw the blood pattern on the road, of the bear coming across, being hit, and stumbling to the side, collapsing. The head wound, the killing blow, was resting on the ground, the young bear’s eye half open. She looked alive, still, resting a moment before death, her spirit still in the air around her.

I was so sad and afraid. I pulled tobacco from a cigarette and sage from the window, I did not have a lighter, I ground it between my hands and sang two songs I do not remember, tears falling into the grass. I was hot and afraid, feeling the bear. Was there another bear? I opened the plastic bag I had pulled from my car door and there were feathers in it. I looked around again and felt there was no physical danger. I knelt by the bear and snipped some of her fur into a towel. The warm bubble disappeared, my tears stopped, I was able to breathe normally again, I got into my car. The Bear.

More The Wind another time.

xoc

Iquitos, Freaking Center of the Universe, 2018 ed.

Iquitos, Freaking Center of the Universe, 2018 ed.
I.

+swimming in the energy of Belen

+pink dolphins like twisting flags, traveling

+tossing friends into the air

+dancing and throwing limbs to the edges

+deeply surprising lunches and motorides

+witnessing transformation, mastery, awareness

+making a magical, medicinal space

+being held by the Amazon, swimming in space

+being healed by the hands of my community, creating a space for safety and direct contact

+listening and being delivered treasure

+receiving indigenous wisdom via community and plant medicines

II. Thank yous

Thank you
for the gifts
the gift of murga
the gift of seeing and being seen, of being heard
the gift of meeting, encountering, moving together like a cloud of birds, vapor,
molecules in a container, together, and flowing out to join with what is, with other, with water

Thank you
for the gift of your eyes
the gift of your heart—wide
thank you, thank you for your pouring
of intention and commitment to task
thank you for your sensitivity, your sensibility, your gentleness
your creativity, your flexibility

Thank you for bringing your magical self,
your mystical, mythical self,
your self as you walk in this land and other lands.
Thank you for bringing your awareness,
your care,
the extension of yourself in this and other worlds—your love,
your body full of medicine

Thank you for your kisses,
your hugs, your squeezes
around the middle,
your loving gazes

good morning, good evening, good night,
blessings, blessings on your heart, your eyes, your life

Thank you for being light bearers
thank you for being
thank you for thinking of water, and
river, and
grass, and
eyes, and
plants, and
hands, and
carrying,
carrying the gifts in
your hands,
your eyes,
your heart.

Thank you for your blessings,
Thank you for the blessings that you are.
Thank you for being kindness
Thank you for bringing joy.

xoc

The Flowers Come Home

from February 18

Something I am discovering about medicine is that everything begins to tend toward it, like a magnet. Dreams, especially, poetry and art and heart and mind. Music, intention, environment. Flowers demand to come home in a bag, be planted, be cut and arranged, keep dream company on the bedside. There is no demand, there just is. The flowers come home.

Last night I was overtired after drinking a little and painting flowers from last weekend, and completing a notebook with a poem, and I began to have visual distortion in the edges of things, and because I noticed I didn’t jump too hard.

In bed I searched for an Albert Goldbarth poem I have been looking for and finally found it— To Be Read in 500 Years —and read it, and my heart was beating like a ball bouncing off a wall and started to double skip again, for the first time in a week. The poem is 4 pages long and in me behaves like sex, rolling up through my body, my chest and head filling with blood in calculated waves, creating a sense of wonder and confusion, which, as cheesy as that sounds, is true.

And so after the poetry I tried to sleep, and here is this owl, from behind my head, and I am already at the very edges of the physical world, and I allow the memory of the malevolent pushing force to surface and he/they/it begins to walk the room, and my heart is double beating and the owl is hoo hooooing in the small patch of woods and there are no flowers on the bookshelf to look over the dream—I left them on the table—and he/it begins to round the corner of the bed and I also don’t have any Frankincense and then I remember Thuy is on the floor at the foot of the bed and I call a stop. I breathe flowers into my body and reorder my heart. I know where order rests, and how to quickly calm a rise of adrenaline, in my own home.

I try to sleep. The owl is calling and calling and there is this other animal, this other owl, or dog, in call with it. I think it is a dog, and imagine shouting out the window at night, to ask some neighbor to put the dog in, or have it shut the fuck up. And then I start to think it is a fledgling owl, or some other injured party, who does not know how to properly call, and I think this other owl is being very patient with its call, responding to the exaggerated and obnoxious, incorrect one. Out of order.

I fall asleep eventually and the owls are still calling, and what happens is: they begin to build an icaro. I watch it being weaved. Circular, with patterns being called by the top to bottom, branching out to the edges. The two animals are calling the patterns next to each other, and I am starting to feel the feeling of being able to understand how the medicine is to be used, and the stitching is reaching the bottom and edges and

Thuy calls out, calmly, in an awake voice, not a night terror voice, “Mommy? Mommy?” and the dream begins to dissolve and he is cold, his blanket has shifted and I get up and lay it back over him, on his little pallet, and I say I Love You and Good Night and Stay Cozy Baby and I try to stay in the dream mind and lie down and imagine the edges of the weaving and where the magic and the medicine was starting to lead out into two sticks maybe and it didn’t come back. And by now the owl too had moved on or gone to bed and I let myself hold loosely to the image of the unfinished edge and fell back into dreaming but of something else.

xoc

Allegiance

Eastern Hellbender Cryptobranchus allegeniensis photo: Bronx Zoo

Listen to this writing on SoundCloud 

“To Whom and//or what do you give your allegiance?”
“How Does Such Allegiance impact your sense of self and thus your writing?”

Aham, my allegiance is to the trout, the stars, the folded cups of mountain laurel, pale pink centered.

“How is your writing a form of peyote?”
“How is your writing medicine to bring back to your community?”
“Take these 15 minutes of peyote time.”

Is my allegiance really to the shovel?
I bought such a beautiful one—German-made, expensive,
not from Home Depot.
I sparkled over its heaviness, its “heirloom” quality—
my five year old asked if it was his and I said “sometime.”
I hacked through 4—or, really 2 square feet of crabgrass and
cursed the roots, cried about deforestation of my place,
which isn’t really my place,
which doesn’t feel like my place,
without any living trees,
and hoped the cherry tomatoes would volunteer again,
and glared, sweaty, from my kitchen over a glass of cider.
This is work for machines.
And as I write this I think, “no.
I will take the shovel to the decorative parts of the land and
put in my peas and my radishes where the crabgrass
has not yet taken over.”
I will water the pear trees and make offerings to the
one great oak left—
I will tie it round with ribbons and flags
and people zooming by with confederate plates might wonder—
“what the fuck is that little girl doing, dressing up a tree?”
and will I have the bravery to make shrines?
Will I have the peace in my heart to walk with questions to the native peoples and request introductions to places.
I need an invitation, a calling card.

And the little, pointing, laughing, curious, drunken, activated little spirits say:
Stop with all that lamentation. You have had your introductions,
you have made the spaces and the fires in your heart and the
mountains see you, darling,
and the rivers love you,
dear one,
and the fishes and the dreams request your
full presence.
So turn your eyes TOWARD, instead of AWAY FROM.
Turn them into eggs, turn them into bellies, turn them into
honey and holes.
Listen with your spots, with your salamanders.
Speak with your stones and your hands and your bloody heart and your toothiness and your
radiant eyes. Speak little one, speak young one, speak.

Give your heart fully to the things you love
without fear that it will be removed from your body—
for it does not reside there anyway.
Remember the green, the smell, the water full of toes and
hellbenders.
I give my allegiance to the hellbenders and their
ugly, magnificent kin,
to their riffles and ruffles and
nose holes and hiding places,
I burn pyres for their deaths and for their lives.
I give my love and my honor and whatever I have—
my voice.

from a writing prompt at Asheville Wordfest: Geopoetics
session with Todd Levasseur: Writing Through Collapse

xoc

Asheville Wordfest

for breakfast

I weep for the magic of the world. And yet. And yet. Does it need my weeping?

Holding a small round of bread spread with white cheese and Imladris Farms raspberry jam and thinking of [slipping into] some far off homey fantasy perhaps populated by hobbits my still-physical body/eyes sense that the bread is steaming, though it is not hot in my hand and my dreaming-mind is providing the perception of molecular events…I hesitate to use the word “reality,” it has myriad personal connotations and while there are facts existing and we all share this world, etc, where our filters meet there is a glamour..[of…]

So my brain and mind are trying to make amends/make sense of this observed phenomenon and somewhere in there, in the next few [following] seconds I see the coffee cup, partly obscured and steaming in the background. And I am overcome by the desire to cry.

Though I do not believe I am a particularly special specimen, physically or chemically, my allowing of events to unfold in their own time gives me something I cannot find, could not find if I looked (and I am looking) [that i cannot find though i am looking] elsewhere. Somewhere other than my own mind. It’s not that it’s fascinating (here I am considering what my counselor has to say) but that time seems to slow down/alter in story. It is not My Own Story. It is a story of being in the world, and the curious moments that open up when the sensory input says something is happening [that is not happening] that is not corroborated by other senses. What then? That it is not “real”—well, in a sense, “who cares,” or “everyone already knows that.” But for a moment, I don’t know.

I am thinking of the parts of life the memory immediately erases, unable classify and place, and this small occurrence among them—a fucking piece of toast and some coffee steam—that would disappear before I leave the table, without this examination of the brief confusion I felt, between breaths. Most often they are in nature, colossal and unreal to the modern mind, unused to such patterns, unable to identify and store—a nearby breaching whale, huge beyond belief, a murmuration of birds (my, I really must have overdone it, or overnight without training become a mistress of object manipulation), the last moment of birth—my own body doing something beyond my imagining or processing though I have seen it on film and with [viewed happening in the body of] others. Those seconds disappear, replaced (if allowed) by wonder, by a sense of profound order of Earth.

And so here I am again, my hands covering my eyes and a lurch in my stomach. We need the magics imagined by women. We need the creation and the recovery. We need the rolling of the heavens, of the stars, of the…of the beauty swelling through. We need the memories, the singing, the trades. Do good deeds with your hands, I am tasked, I am asked, I am given. Do good deeds with your hands. My son sings seeds into punk music. Respect, love, honor, true love, true love woven into everything we do—the net must be created, or repaired, recreated for this era, the strands unravel, all hand-created objects must have care, must be made with care. Must be made with care.

Where is a place where we could go to figure this out, some fallow valley land, some mountain green nearby, some stream, some place, some heaven. Where could we sit on the ground and run in the sunshine and let our hair grow long and our minds grow wild. There were places like this and somehow the weavings were not enough—aha I am now thinking of old California and the idea of freedom The Idea of Freedom where there is already a system of unfreedom, of oppression, of struggle. I am thinking of the societies before ours, based in art, in making, in creation, in pulling the threads from the very atmosphere and I have seen it. I have seen the threads and sat in prayer and here I am with my eyes closed and my hands clasped and the streams and waves and waters of knowing and disbelief descending on me in ribbons of light. All parts of myself making amends, I stretch my arms and open my eyes and here this strange experience is happening to me in public, in an unassuming coffee shop, and I am thinking of my friend across town and perhaps she has been lost, separated from the web, and I don’t want to write about that.

Mine

I want to exchange words.

I want to absorb your vocabulary, I want your words in my mouth, I want to speak your language. I want to see recognition in your eyes. I want you to know, to understand, that it is you, a part of you, taken in, loved, and given back into the world (like breath, like breathing).

Communication, Relationships, Meaning—cornerstones of (my) life, beginnings of (a) path. They make my boat, and river, and body, and forest-mind or mind-as-forest. They make up my lake, my star, my mountain, anything I extend my hand toward or could even address as “mine.’”

“Mine” as not a possessiveness but an offering—fingers outstretched. “Mine” as “I am willing to believe you if you tell me you see me as myself.” “Mine” as “I can sink into this physical environment and know your eyes are everywhere, because I see them//because I see with them.” “Mine” as a feeling just had, fleeting, a feeling of between-two. A sensation of confirmation, ever-curious, never-guessing, something only briefly known, waiting to know again. “Mine” as “myself—in relation to—…”

The mountains claim me
“Mine.”
The sea claims me, the air claims me, the trees, the birds, the whales, the insects, the spiders claim me, wrap and prod me with their stick legs, their mossy fingers, wands,
the birches and the birch springs claim me,
the rushings and the whirrings and the whinings and the silences,
the soft paddings of feet and the intricate markings and the innate swivelings of ears
claim me
more than myself
“mine”
mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine mine.
Ours then.

Audio on soundcloud

 

Somatic response and questions re:Bjork on Bjork

Glass bridge to Hunter Museum, Chattanooga TN, Sept 2017

Last night I read an article on my phone—Bjork interviewing herself, and I felt a tingle in my ribcage and on the tops of my thighs. I felt this strongly at the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga.  A somatic response to arts, not just an idea.

And then I came up with some questions:

What if we were happier?

Would we make different things?

Would our minds fire differently?

Would our mind’s fire behave differently?

Would our mind’s eye cast a different light?

What would we cast?

What light would we sing?

How would the missions differ?

What. small. molecular. changes would be made? With our vision, with our voices?

Be not afraid, angels, to rearrange the pattern,

to create form where form must be seen,

and to dismantle, dissolve, and resurrect where it is also needed.

It is also needed.

What if we were happy?

(Audio recording )

https://soundcloud.com/user-832655160/response-questions-2017-10-13

xoc

Bjork article, W magazine

https://www.wmagazine.com/story/bjork-interviews-herself