I gotta talk to you for a minute about Andrea Gibson. I’ve got talk about her, because I don’t know if I have ever, ever been so moved by the work of a single individual.

Andrea Gibson is a master of spoken word, an award winning slam poet.

“Gibson is also among the nation’s most admired and emulated poets. Her verse is at once personal and political, concrete and abstract, feminist and universal, filled with incinerating verbs and metaphor and delivered with gut-punching urgency. You can hear the ache in her soul every time she utters God’s name, and even her inhales sound desperate. It’s not uncommon for audiences to gasp at some of her turns of phrase or rise to their feet when she finishes a poem.” MATT PEIKEN

She is a woman of uncommon passion, her performances lit by an internal fire that powers her through her poems with the force of a freight train, slicing through lines with the sharpness and precision of sword. She spits her words out like bullets – hitting me right in the gut, and in the next second changes course and breaths out her message with a gentle caress that makes her words drift to my ears like leaves falling softly to the ground. Every word carefully chosen, unflinchingly delivered, cutting through bullshit and convention with the energy of someone determined to create change but also with the tenderness of someone whose heart is so big she has to hurt more than most of us. She performs with ferocity and with compassion and with so much feeling that I am left raw and exposed by the power of her honesty.

I want you to watch these videos. I want you to close your eyes and absorb her words, her passion, her activism, her fire. I want you to feel her work with every fiber of your being. I want your toes to tingle and your heart to pound and for you to feel changed by what you hear. I don’t know exactly why I’m telling you this, why I think you need instructions or set expectations. I can’t quite imagine that you could listen to these words and not do all these things. I don’t know that it is possible to be fully present and aware and NOT be wholly moved by the spirit and soul of what this woman creates in the performance of her art.

Blue Blanket
I am moved by every single piece I have heard her read, but this one – this one more than any other – brings me to my knees. It slams into me and makes my breath feel tight in my lungs and my heart thud in my chest. If you have ever been violated, if you have ever sat and held a woman who has been violated while she cried or sat in horrified numbness, then you will feel this poem with every last cell in your body and the final line will remain a part of you long after you have finished listening.

I do.
Love poem and political statement all at once, this is just one the millions of reasons why it matters that love just be love, without restrictions, or inequality or limits on who and how and why.

“i never needed more
than the stars on your grin to lead me home
for fifty years you were my favorite poem
and i’d read you every night
knowing i might never understand every word
but that was okay cause the lines of you
were the closest thing to holy i’d ever heard
you’d say this kind of love has to be a verb”

Dive
Life dosesn’t rhyme. Paradox, irony, mirrored reflections - it’s all the beautiful grey between stark black and white, it’s the ambiguous spaces between absolutes where the brilliance of life resides.

“”it’s your worst sin saving your fucking life
it’s the devil’s knife carving holes into you soul
so angels will have a place to make their way inside
life doesn’t rhyme
still life is poetry — not math
all the world’s a stage
but the stage is a meditation mat
you tilt your head back
you breathe
when your heart is broken you plant seeds in the cracks
and you pray for rain
and you teach your sons and daughters
there are sharks in the water
but the only way to survive
is to breathe deep
and dive”

Say Yes
The world needs us right now more than it ever has before…this poem is hope - empowering, uplifting hope. This poem is the life I want to live.

For Eli
This is how I feel about war – not just the one we’re in now – but every last one of them.

““one third of the homeless men in this country are veterans
and we have the nerve to Support Our Troops
with pretty yellow ribbons
while giving nothing but dirty looks to their outstretched hands
tell me what land of the free
sets free its eighteen-year-old kids into greedy war zones
hones them like missiles
then returns their bones in the middle of the night
so no one can see”

I just stumbled on a treasure trove of peace, grace and inspiration. This blog, Evenstar Art, is a magical, comforting, soul-filling space…

It Is Enough

“Today, it is enough. It is enough to know the sun awoke. It is enough to know my waning cats stayed one more day. It is enough to know I am loved.

There is no wanting. There is no yearning. Passion settles. Peace floats. My walk is grounded, steady. I am loved. And it is enough.”

Right now, in this very moment, I am soaring high on possibility and potential. After months of transition and uncertainty, equilibrium is finding me again. It’s not over yet, changes and endings and beginnings are still rolling through. But I’m not resisting, not putting up walls, not trying to control. Right now it just feels good to drive down the street with the window down, music blasting, a smile on my face and peace in my heart.

No, nothing is perfect. My life is still more upside down than right side up, and there is a long road ahead – but I am full of hope, full of optimism, full of faith that it will all be as it should be.

Yes, it is enough. It is more than enough.

Came across this video today on yet another wonderful blog - Diamonds In The Sky With Lucy.

I’d like to think I’d be one of the people who would have gone up to this guy without hesitation or reservation and given and received a hug. But would I? Would I have gone with my gut, or would I have been so tied up in social convention and our ‘don’t touch’ society that I would have passed him by with a snicker and a look of amused condescension on my face. And if I had done that – what would I have lost?

Nothing perhaps, after all it would have just been a random moment, quite likely quickly forgotten as I got swept up in the all-consuming mundanities of daily life. But I would have lost something, something small but profound. I would have lost the infinitely precious opportunity for real connection with another human being.

The seclusion and separateness with which we live our lives creates a seemingly insurmountable division between us. And if this distance often seems too wide to cross with people we love, it seems near impossible with the countless people who pass in and out of our lives on a daily basis.

We can’t connect with everyone, of course, but how many potentially magical connections – large and small – do we miss because we’re not open to noticing and receiving them? How often do we not notice, not reach out, not connect simply because we are too busy, too shy, too scared, too distracted to reach out and grab the opportunity?

How much more richness might we claim in this existence if, ever once in a while, we took a day and vowed to live it in awareness. If we decided to boldly claim each and every opportunity that came our way, no matter how seemingly bizarre or random or inconsequential. What sort of things might we learn? What sort of bliss might we encounter? What sort of growth might come our way?

Think about moments like this one from the same blog.

Or these two stories of connection from the ever wise Jen Lemen

Or this story from Krystyn Heide, who just yesterday found a negative rant left in a coffee shop and used it as inspiration to write and leave random love notes around the city for people to find.

What would you have done if you passed a long haired, bearded stranger in the mall holding a sign offering “FREE HUGS”? What would you have done with the stranger on the bus, or at the gas station or at Trader Joes? What would you have done with that noxious note in the coffee store?

Every second of our existence is created by and carries the potential of our choices. The choice to connect or disconnect. The choice to reach out or close off. The choice to notice and be aware, or the choice to shut down and look away. The choice to not only accept, but to seek out and create new opportunities for connection with the people surrounding us.

Lets just think for a moment about what could happen if we all took a day and made the choice to connect, to notice, to reach out…can you imagine the power in that?

So what do you say? I say lets do it.

I’ve been thinking about breath lately, about how my breath is truly the core of my existence. Not just on a physiological level, with oxygenation of blood cells and carbon dioxide exchange, but on a much more spiritual plane.

When you get right down to it, everything comes back to breath. In and out, in and out. To keep myself alive, I breathe. To focus my awareness, I breathe. To calm myself down when my stress goes through the roof, I breathe and breathe and breathe again. It does not get much more basic, or more profound than that.

I wrote a poem last week called ‘breath.life.hope’ that included the following stanzas

“And so I take a breath
and I breathe again
and again and again
filling my lungs and heart and soul
with hope
because my life depends on it

because the center
of life,
mine and yours,
is always breath”

And then yesterday, when visiting my eternal muse Jen Lemen, I came across this passage:
“…That no matter what’s happening there is still the magic of my own breath, rising and falling–this one moment where if I breathe into it, I can discover what’s really going down. And truth is always less horrific and more connected than I could have imagined.”

Last week I also got a very last minute opportunity to see an amazing concert. Ingrid Michaelson, Brandi Carlile, Indigo Girls and KT Tunstall. What a line-up of fabulous women. Ingrid was the opening act, and one of the first songs she sang was “Keep Breathing”

“But all that I know is I’m breathing.
All I can do is keep breathing.
All we can do is keep breathing now.”

I’m including a random youtube video, and trust me – it cannot even come close to the experience of hearing her sing this live (talk about tingles all the way to my toes). I was having a rough week, and I must have played this song on repeat about eight hundred bazillion times because it reminded me to do exactly what I needed to do, and nothing more.

Keep breathing.

And so I did, and I got through it. There are days when we have the ability to harness the power of the universe in our bodies and minds and hands. On those days we are made of energy and mental clarity and there is nothing we cannot accomplish. Then there are those days when our breath is all that we have, and indeed, all that we need.

On those days, we need to go back to that breath, and we need to flow with it as best as we possibly can. We need to forget about trying to do more, or be more. We need to relinquish our need to be better or stronger or faster or even saner and we just need to breathe.

When I am aware of my breath, as I am when I listen to this song, I realize that my breath is a channel. It is the conduit for energy, for strength, for serenity, for clarity, for acceptance. It is the center of my life, both given and received. I have a choice in every moment of how deep I want to breathe.

There is a quote I have shared here before, from one of my favorite poets. Mary Oliver’s words move me to the most exquisite and divine places, she is pure magic. This quote, for me a call to action and a reminder to live life fully, is Mary at her most simple and her most brilliant all at once.

“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” ~ Mary Oliver

It’s an easy choice to breathe deep, to find the stillness in the midst of chaos. To take the air, and the energy and the strength and the clarity and the acceptance all the way into the core of my being and to release all the rest back out to the universe. To take in what I need, and to let all that I do not need be carried away and absorbed into the spaces around me instead of letting it dwell inside me.

We are usually so unaware of our breath; it is unconscious, not something requiring attention. As much as the choice to breath deeply is an easy one to make, it is also so incredibly easy to forget to make it.

Breath awareness. It is central to the practice of meditation, but also, I believe, central to the act of living a graceful and mindful life. For me, this awareness of my breath is also an awareness of my life. It brings me back to my center, and allows me to become both weightless and grounded in the very same moment.

So do me a favour today, okay? Slow yourself down and sit in stillness for a few minutes. Play the song above, find one that speaks to you or just absorb the music of your life swirling around you. And then just breathe. Don’t worry about what thoughts come into your head, or if the kids are screaming in the background. Just breathe. Your breath is a gift to the universe. Think for a moment, about how much the world receives just because you make the choice to keep breathing. On your breath you will find gratitude, and peace, and deeper understanding of where you fit into this wild and crazy existence.

Just breathe. Keep breathing.

There’s not much more you need to do, really.

the story of stuff

Bella watched it with me, and it has brought on a ton of intelligent questions and provoked an important dialogue. Check it out.