coco says

                                                                                                              (that's not funny.)

how you do one thing is how you do all things

a wise woman who is also sometimes a wise-cracking lady said to me once, "how you do one thing is how you do all things." her words floated into my awareness again recently, as i watched the preparations of what would later become a fire for a council ceremony held at the ojai foundation. 

the sun was high over the kiva, with temperatures nosing 100 degrees all day. i sat against the earthen walls in a slim slice of shade, seeking relief from the heat. council is a practice in listening, and listening actively is exhausting.

this fire was prepared in the tradition of 'the beauty way': creating beauty by being lovingly present and leaving things better than how you found them; it's a bit like tikkun olam but with more feathers and less guilt.

organic mafia

Laminated sign for the Organic Mafia at a Whole Foods in Sacramento, CA.

Dear Thousand Oaks Whole Foods,

Twice now, I have asked if a $30 wheel of Mt Tam could be cut down to size, and twice, I have been told by your cheese counter clerks that the “organic integrity of the cheese would be compromised” if the wheel was cut. The last guy who told me this was actually wearing a beret; nice touch.

Perhaps your cheese department has confused the concepts of Organic and Kosher? The ingredients of the cheese are organic. Cutting the wheel of cheese does not compromise the integrity of the organic ingredients in any way. If you were to cut the cheese (sorry) and rub it all over your body, it would still be, more or less, organic.

springy-time poetics

after all danger of frost is past:
thinking of a fragile child
by christopher l. king

if we depend on summer flowers
to feed us and sustain us
we will always have to weep
to see the petals fall.
because we need the leaves.
the fruit,
the heavy wood;
we need all seasons, after all.

and so we plant our seedlings
    in the dark
in warmth, within the walls
while sober frost surrounds the house,
while hungry winds still whisper
and the soil is hard.

coco says

and jah bless the bike retrievah

gold for lady pele

when i was 5, my father gave me a gold charm, a small circle with my initials in the center. since i was only 5, the charm was put away for safe keeping.

after my father passed away a few years ago, i finally put the adored charm on a chain. i wear it, and i think that my father is with me, conducted in gold. but now i am starting to fret over the gold charm. i wonder, when i put the necklace on in the morning- will i lose my dad's charm today? will it fall off my neck in the grocery store? or the garden? will it be many hours later, after it has been lost in some mysterious location, that i reach up to touch my neck and discover the charm is gone?

i worry that i will lose the necklace, and what worries me most is i will not know where i lost it. i will wonder for the rest of my life, where did it go? did someone find it? is my father's charm lost from me forever? 

i brought the necklace with me to hawaii last summer, and considered losing it on purpose. this charm is one of my most precious things. if i give my father's charm to pele, it will not be lost. it will no longer be in my possession, certainly-- but i will always know where it is at, and this brings me great peace. 

los maestros locos

I am an art teacher, and I will never arm myself with a gun to teach. I will arm myself with paintbrushes and chalk and paper and even xacto knives, but never a gun. 

Reader, teachers are crazy. We spend the better part of our day with your children. Not just your kid, Spandex-Mafia-Mom, but your neighbors’ kids too. And your cleaning lady’s kids-- all the little childrens. Start with the assumption that teachers are amazing people with a gift for sharing information, they are magicians of classroom management, they are the sowers of internal motivation, and the coordinators of organic teachable moments-- but they are a little crazy. Even teachers will tell you this.

And as we’ve seen, crazy people should not have access to guns.

have a rapey earth day.

the environment is in trouble because people have taken what they wanted from gaia, with no regard to or for gaia, and this energetic vibrates as rape. to have power over someone or something else, to take something that does not belong to you because you like it, because you want to have it, be it tree, water, diamonds, people, or artwork-- the energetic is the same.  it is poo (power over others) and it is rapey. even a record company forcing a woman to sing a song she dislikes with another artist is rapey.

when you take something that does not belong to you because you like it, you are reinforcing the rape energetic, not the love energetic.  and this holds true even if you are stealing something for what you consider to be a larger good, like funding your art collective* with water bottles or "writing" a book about universal spiritualism.

when you steal art “for a good cause” to promote your own ego agenda at the expense of the artist and/or the non-profit organization the image was made for, you are being rapey.

our world, our mother gaia, has been victimized by this mentality and energetic. devastating deforestation, plastic islands floating around in the pacific, dirty air, dirty water, dirty soil, chemical laden food. you don't need to be a rapist to be rapey.

*how you gonna make a call for artists by using an image from an artist you have never called? 

sister salmon medicine message

Savita Praveen Halappanavar

she died in a catholic country. *

*hopefully, she is not reincarnated in a catholic country.