5th September, 2018 Wednesday harposword.com
Tea is black with local honey and goat milk. A friend has Nubian goats, as I said, and her seven year old daughter milks them.
Day is very still and my space bar is acting a little strange. I have hit it several times and still it does a little stick. Seems a bit better now.
Dream last night…well, seems it’s Halloween. I’m in a hall with many friends. But its not me like me, its a dream younger me who finds I’m in a state of pregnancy. There is a band and lots of harvest stuff. Corn stalks, pumpkins, masks, and such. Kids and costumes, cider, apples, all that autumn bounty. And then the baby wants to come. Women the dream me knows gather round and shoo away the men and kids. I’m in a tented space and squirm through waves of clutching womb and then they tell me oh that’s done. But the babe is still inside. Oh yes, they tell me, this was just the first part, second’s gonna come. Go find your husband. So I leave the tented space and wander off among this crowd dream me knows but I do not and the husband I am looking for is not my own but dream husband. I do not know if babe is girl or boy. It hits me that girl I want, oh yes, but not a boy. Please no no no not a BOY!!! I thought this odd. I really hate the thought of boy.
So when I started writing two weeks ago, I sat on a kitchen stool, laptop on a counter. As it is the morning time when I write, the pack has had to adjust to morning nap strewn around the living room. Not in bed all heaped and nestled all around me. I used to, before I starting hitting all these keys, get up with all the pack and put them out to pee while I made tea and we would all hike up the stairs to roost in bed for tea and snuggle nap. But since typing has captured me this time of day, they’ve missed their nap time in the roost.
So this am, I put them out and made my tea and emptied dishwasher and cleaned the glass. And thought can I type on the sofa?
So they can all cuddle while I tap.
Well, its not as easy as I thought.
You see they want to be on top of me. And Lady Deerhound Bitch is dragon lurking on two thirds of this large couch so Zoi and me and duckles are squished into a corner. My lap is Zoi’s, not that metal thing, so she thinks. And duckle bodies cannot squeeze any more into that tiny space off to my left tween thigh and arm. Oh, first cup’s done, laptop screen has Zoi nose smear, duckles squirm to find the spot and, holy shit, I’ve had enough. I eject my pj’d mass from underneath and use the second cuppa as excuse to leave the furry pile.
They all follow me.
Second cup is goated, honeyed and one big arm chair gives me boundaries I need to tap. Zoi tried to puzzle where she could fit, oh yes, she did, but in the end the now emptied couch has gripped her off to nap. Duckles nest to my left and Lady Deerhound Bitch has found the other arm chair kingdom to her liking…for the moment.
I am listening to Gilles Apap, the violinist who I first found playing in a little schoolhouse on my youngest daughter’s small school campus in CA. I had been told to pick her up up there so in I drive and on the air are notes of some Mozart I have heard before but cannot name and as I walk the walk to house the notes shift seamlessly to one of my all time favorite Irish fiddle airs. I walk in the door of this wooden hall with 50 kids in folding chairs and a figure with a violin, jeaned, sneakered, hooded sweat shirt with a scruffy beard walks among them calling down the fucking angels with his bow…I am stunned…who the fuck is this guy?
I grew up outside of NYC and went to culture frequently. As a child I had no reason to know that how I learned what art should be came from the finest in the world.
But as I walked away from all that web around the NYC, I could not reconcile so much of what I saw in art around in other places with what my art had been seeded by.
But this strange moment, warm winter day in country town Ca, grabbed those roots by my throat and screamed, “Remember what you know!!!”
Look up Gilles if you want. He is a force I will not try to translate here. Buy an album and if you can, go see him live. He plays with all the finest in their lofty halls and then with buddy bluegrass bands in little places anywhere. He loves to play just for the sake of it.
Yes, his music is his art, not just a vomit of the scripts that are the scores of all the Gods of what is titled “Classical”. Art is sourced from soul, for sure. No matter what form it is, if soul is in some art, it always stirs.
It was his Soul called me that late afternoon as I was thinking I’m just Mom. Mine was buried at the time. Kids and life and “doing” for all those reasons that make sense. I cannot craft music in that way but I do have my soul’s voice inside me and I knew it then.
The tears I wept while being swirled round with sound so richly surged from something more, were tears of feeling my own Soul being stirred. His was Siren’s Song for me. Calling me to find my own. The Siren Song always calls for others to find Soul.
Why do any of us sing that Siren thing? To wake that part of all of us that feels the same. Its connection, that strange thing. Its the instinct to be reached. That we are not alone in all we are.
No, it was not love for Gilles that stirred in me. It was the mirror of what is me. So often when we think we love, we see in other what is us. They sing it out the way we want in a way we know we must. Its a call to own ourselves and all we got. It takes a while to wake up.
Well, I think I am done for now. Dogs are hungry and Harpo’s mad. Oh and Duckle left a kitchen puddle just for me.
Day will be warm and may be the last until the spring. The world is turning.
ta.
Tea With Me 