"You do not support the root; the root supports you." (Barbara Kingsolver)

What is being grounded ?

First, I think toughness. A certain grit and grunt. Pull on your bootstraps and stand.
I was a pretty sensitive kid. Blown every which way. I'd endorse anything the least bit inspirational.

Once we had a preacher that would fall down on his knees. Sometimes cry. Sometimes make jokes. Kinda like T.V. People clapped at the end.

Our bulletins had note taking spaces where a few key sentences from the sermon were printed out with blanks for some of the words - you got to fill them in with the right words as the sermon went along. It was an intoxicating combination for a young, impressionable, idealistic, things are only black and white perfectionist list-maker (Going to church meant I could make sense of things with a fill in the blanks notecard?! yes, please). The only thing better would be if they also gave me a highlighter and an agenda book.

And so at eleven years old I began my crusade: bent on saving my siblings, my dad, my mom, and also the world.

It was a messy, ugly time for my family. I needed to believe in clean lines. But that meant I couldn't embrace the messiness of what it means to be a human. Couldn't accept it, couldn't love it; could only be scared of it because it didn't fit into the shape I had cut out for it (I studied my fill in the blank notecards).

Wasn't grounded in the reality of people and their tangled spectrums.
I had planted my feet in holy water and the cold made my toenail beds turn pink then purple then gray and the colors slid across my whole foot and chunked it into cement - too still and cold and hard to be alive and luckily I still remembered what it was like to be warm and pulsing. Luckily still wanted to be warm and pulsing. I stuck a tentative foot out and dried off and sat on the bank for a while with Huck just thinking.

"It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

'All right, then, I'll GO to hell' -- and tore it up." (Mark Twain)


Later,
-new people and place and I figured out that I stepped in that cold water because I mixed up Heaven and Hell - and maybe lots of people do,
new people and place and I figured out some people's holy water can be warm



I think being grounded is laughing at the mushrooms in your yard when you see them in the morning with perfect little chunks bitten out of them by the deer and then sometimes the whole top is bitten off and all that's left is a dorky white chomped on stem that's sticking bravely straight up in the air with little bits of mushroom around the base that probably fell out of the deer's mouth

"When St. Francis looked deeply at an almond tree in winter and asked it to speak to him about God, the tree was instantly covered with blossoms." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

wanna be so grounded that the toes I planted can taste the soil - creek water, mama's smile, blue eyes of sisters and brothers, Dad looks just like Robin Williams in Hook, children lock eyes with each other, easy smiles, and now a new place where I feel spindly woody roots growing like gnarled flowers on the side of a mountain - Boone      >>> these are the things I hope to keep my feet in, the things I hope to   come   from   when   I   be

be be be
              be  ing       very very very very very close to that edge - that edge that's defining - the only one

"this life cannot be lived apart from what it must forgive" (R Creeley)  richness in knowing you are of what is, and you are conscious of that and you're the

"universe's way of looking at itself"(Alan Watts)

being grounded --->   to be in the know that,   for our split second of here , when we can make the soil warm,                            the lightest of scrimmy veils is the difference between being alive and not being alive. Having time to spend and not having time to spend.

Awake Awake Awake (William Blake)

practicing gratitude - Day 2

Today I'm grateful for . . .

having a sister to fight with
watching my little brother fall in love
having a soft bed to lay down in, even if I think my Dad's cat might have peed somewhere nearby
drawing a line for myself and sticking to it, even if it means other people are disappointed



having places that are very hard to leave



                                                  you're         very dear Dear

practicing gratitude - DAY 1

I'm grateful for the way I could talk to my family on the phone today. Mel put it on speaker phone and it was her, my brother, and my mom in the car on the way home from visiting Grandma. We talked about Doug coming to visit and the silly nicknames that they had come up with for him.

My mom has this weird thing about making up nicknames for any of her children's significant others.
I get sincerely impressed with her creativity. The nicknames are most likely to be a hodgepodge of something or someone from her favorite soap opera, Days of Our Lives, combined with a physical trait of the boyfriend/girlfriend. Like it has become a veritable talent for her. She gets these really intense eyes  - squinty and teal and far away - when she's coming up with something because she's thinking so hard. She's a lot of fun.

I'm grateful for somebody telling me to lean in harder because there's no protecting yourself from the terrible feelings that happen when you lose someone, really lose someone (I think that feeling might be the most real feeling cuz it's the most "there's a bottom line" feeling) - soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into soften lean into

coax a toe in and keep saying it

what the roots of the word "courage" actually mean: share your whole story with your whole self

"dress rehearsing tragedy doesn't protect you" - Brene Brown

Complicated relationships I used to think felt like a lack of wholeness. But that's not it. A lack of perfection yeah. But nobody wants perfection. Show me a perfectionist and I'll show you loneliness.

We want to sit across from each other and say honestly, yeah me too - and then smile, making our face skin swim with wrinkles and sagging -       maybe why we're here?  to be with each other

ser - to be - I am - here - to be - here- I am -     in now with you   >>>   woah

grateful for language - grateful for knowing that language doesn't cut it -

slow it down Angie come back to bed rest your arms and /rest/ /your/ legs/ (Lumineers)

My           thoughts           have been        Slinkies

 lately.

Like the way when you hook a slinky in a circle and then pull on it and the energy makes the coils just keep going around and around and it's stuck in a loop that you don't realize is a loop because you can't see the whole slinky and today you're only as big as       a        dust     that's sitting on one of the metal coils and all you can see both ways are spirals and spirals of silver that look so complicated and hard until something happens in your life that makes your eyes ten times bigger (for just a moment and then SNAP back but there's a different taste in your mouth this time) and all of a sudden you can see the whole damn slinky and the little electric energies/edges of individual thoughts that are sparking around and around and around and used to blind you but are actually just winks and you didn't realize how sick you felt until you got off the ride.

"Of what use is genius . . . if the web is too finely woven, too irritable by pleasure and pain, so that life stagnates from too much reception, without due outlet?"

"Do not craze yourself with thinking, but go about your business anywhere. Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. It's chief good is for well-mixed people who can enjoy what they find without question." (Emerson, Experience)

somesomesomesomesomesome       body      convinces you, whether you realize it or not, to just stop. Just stop digging and sit in the dark for a while. And then you're actually able to see that you're in a hole. And it's still dark and you know you'll probably be here for a while but you might as well start to make friends with yourself and your loneliness and ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I like to think critically. Have been encouraged to think critically. Have accomplished things by thinking critically. I had a professor who liked to talk about the life of the mind. About dedicating yourself to academic exploration. Which certainly has its fruits.  But excess makes you stick your head in the sand. And when your eyes have adjusted to the darkness and you see the dirt in front of you, you think I've got to keep digging deeper, that's how I'll get out of this. Think think think think think. And then you start wondering about the meaning of life. And then you start realizing that everything is subjective perspective. It's all persesubjunctivity. Which isn't a word. Which means it's not real. Except there are no real words. Just assumption tied to sound. SIGNIFICANCE. Say it out loud and feel the way the word begins by first hissing through your lips and then moving straight to the back of your throat with the hard G. Bite your lip for the F. It pops out of your teeth with the I. Hiss back to the front for the last syllable. That's all. What's real? Cue existential crisis. Unravel. Dig deeper dig darker.

Thank god Colleen laughed at me and invited me to swing dance. She's got a great smile and knows how to laugh at things. she promises that later we can have some tea and belt out Adele on my dinky keyboard (only known cure for angst) and be really indulgent because when we sing Adele we get to own relationship suffering that's not even ours ( track: Someone like you ) for a good hour and then leave it and go to sleep next to the mountains

Another day another dizzy and

                               



                                           Just                                                        stop





My bones finally had room to speak. Hungry and I fed them.
                                                                                           with putting my gut into things
                                                                                            with being bad at dancing
                                                                                           with less reflections      (mirrors and more)
                                                                                            with a plane ticket





~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Still not oriented. But it feels like up. Like lighter-ness     still muggy muddle but it's different than when digging straight downandonly (different taste in the mouth this time) still not oriented. Not going to be oriented this       t      i m     e            a     r o u n d  .

But moving    (!)

Tuesday, July 22 2014

Dusk. A little humidity but it keeps me warm. The ducks are eyeing me, inching closer, thinking I have food for them. When I don't throw anything they full out waddle towards me. Impatient and shaking their big hips. Sassy mommas.

Mist still hanging around in the pockets of these hills - stubborn eraser marks against a clear deepening blue.

Feathers and reflections of light poles like snakes in the water.

Monday, July 21 2014

It's been one of those three day stretches of grey and rain in Boone. I welcomed it. My sleeping schedule has been pretty erratic, and I'm likely to be taking a nap at any point in the day. Fading in and out of consciousness while rain comes and goes - thrush against pavement - fine and delicate. It makes the sound of wind in overripe dogwood trees.
                 Then spatterings. Sleep. Car wheels make tiny wakes in the road and I wake up.

all this rain makes me depressed is the topic of a lot of small talk. It used to be a bad habit of mine to use that template ( all this _____ makes me ______) as a reason to be less whole than was real.

Growing up - growing out - growing into -    shed         reworking our gumbee selves and trying to climb out of ovens that we stayed too long in and now we're hard and we have to twist and painfully crack our crusts so we can remember how to let things pass through us again

The hardest time of growing up (thus far) was when Melanie was 17, Savannah was 15, me 13, and Calvin 11. Three teenage girls, each with hormones that, when interacting, disrupted the earth's magnetic field. At one point, when we were all PMSing at the same time, my mom got so frustrated with our high pitched bickering that she tied all of our long ponytails together.

Blond, brown, and strawberry-blond curls wrapped and knotted.  We couldn't believe she actually did it, so we just stood still for a minute with our backs to each other, a thick mass of hair in the middle. My mom couldn't believe that she just did what she had always jokingly threatened. She covered her mouth with a hand to hide her smile.

Then our anger caught up with us again and we reached our hands back and yanked at each other. We were rotating in a tight circle, our heads jerking and bucking. But it worked. By the time we had figured out how to get our long, curly hair untangled, we were all friends again and laughing.

Poor, poor, poor, poor, poor Calvin.

Although, he is so far beyond his years in understanding girls. Your welcome, brother. And yes, I too am glad that the hellish fever dream of puberty is over.

Friday, July 11 2014

At work yesterday I was digitizing some old cassette tapes as part of the "Cratis Williams" collection. The warm, cantankerous, wavering voice of an old Appalachian woman sung out a Scotch irish ballad into a hand held recorder made in the seventies.  I imagined the hands that held the recorder to have swollen knuckles and splotchy red pink tan skin. The foamy headphones warmed my ears and I folded my legs under my long skirt. It's a great job, being a research assistant in Special Collections. The Cratis Williams collection has been an interesting one to curate. Williams used to be the dean of the graduate school here at App, and most of the collection are recordings of his own lectures or talks he gave on radio shows. His voice is really kind and rumply and he travels the country to talk about how special Appalachia is. I like it because after a few hours of listening to the Appalachian accent, my bias and instinctual reaction (one of dislike and inferiority, and I'm ashamed to admit it) goes away and you start hearing the poetry and rhythm and style of these people who drop the hard g's that I grew up with.

But the latest cassettes have been recordings of mountain folk singing their old old ballads. These Appalachian ballads are sung by old people living in hollows and valleys who I am certain have warm, crinkly kind eyes and richly lined faces and smile lines. But the ballads themselves remind me a lot of Grimm's fairy tales. Meant to teach something moral in a horrifying way. But the latest one was about a man who stuck pins and needles into babies and then drowned them in bath tubs. Not clear what was being taught there.

About seven minutes into the tape,  the scream of a little girl cut through the recording. I jumped in my chair, my cross-legged knees banging into the desk.The old woman stopped singing.

"Whachu cryn fer?"

Mumbled, muffled noise. I didn't hear the little girl speak.

More shuffling and the screaming stopped. The old woman began her ballad where she left off. A minute later, the little girl started screaming again. There weren't any giggles. A loud old man voice started shouting. Twenty five minutes of the woman's creepy ballad sung against a backdrop of a child's screams and an old man's shouts.

It was a really eerie thing. I still feel a bit unsettled about it. Listening to that recording reminds me of the weird, contradictory energy of the Appalachians.

The way a fierce, tight brutality runs in these people. It's un-rippable and it's coiling through stone and it's about making a home in an inhospitable place. The same way the relentless whip of the winter wind here scrapes and smacks everything into hard, bent shapes            - -

         - -   these people have roots.

And then there's a summer night like tonight. Walking down King Street. That mountain. The way the light hits the green is incredible and soft. Old people in lawn chairs at the Jones House. Most of them don't have an expression on their face but they clap loudly and holler when the song ends. Their jaws hang open slightly cuz they don't care to stop what their bodies want to do anymore. The air tastes like laurel. Sweet, pressing harmonies that strain, rising for fifteen seconds and then finally finally rubbing up against each other. They make you smile and cock your head and then nod and you say, "damn" in a fragile way. 

The band on the corner of Anna Banana's.
We drop our packs because they're doing a folksy version of "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and somebody has bongos and the weirdness has a great beat. We almost start swing dancing but then the song ends. We thumbs up them and keep walking. Cut through hilly alleyways. A guy on a motorcycle almost runs us over. Speeds up when he sees us. Rudest guy in Boone. But we pushed to opposite sides of the street and laughed and for the next fifteen minutes you lamented that you didn't pull out your camera quicker. Would've made for a great picture. Hell, with this light everything would be a great picture.

We make it to the old venue across from char. Live big band and everything. Swing dance is one of the best things that's ever happened to me. To keep up, there's no room for self consciousness or thoughts. Body wisdom talks to your body wisdom and you kick your heels up and the smoothness is like the rush when you drop real quick on a roller coaster except more fun. It's a boh oh oh oh own thing.

Shuffle and stomp and toss your hair over a shoulder. Ponies. Eventually our hands get so sweaty that we lose our grip but it's okay we'll both just keep spinning and reaching out for each other.

Saxophones and trumpets and a classy lady voice cooes into the mic.

We dance and laugh when we try to make it sexy, try to match that sax that gets in through your toenails and works its way up up up.

Coffee ice cream and lots of water to wash down a really dizzy and stylish night.

Things hold on so tight here that sometimes you forget that a moment and a moment and a moment just happened until you don't.