Who's in love with you now?

I swear to God, I am. 

I love Los Angeles for a million reasons, but the fact that the LA hip hop scene is finally jumping off again is not a small part of my satisfaction with this city as of late.  There's some great music coming out of the mainstream, commercial hip hop world right now, too (especially on the production end of things.) Still, it is really nice to hear that the level of sophistication and creativity coming out of the bedrooms of 19 year olds in this city is on par with the platinum club bangers.  These guys are killing it daily.   The new west, listen up...

Mr. Glover is ambidextrous...

 and Tyler speaks english, but...

Overdoz is too grown for that...

when love falls apart more than 2 people suffer

There is a black hole inside of you

where a soul would be.

Loss is your wife. Death is your only child.

The black vows you will never break.

They drag you around like a coffin full of dead moments. 

Now there is a hole inside of you.

And inside of me there is a soul, made of the ethers of a million spirits across time.

to remember better, to part with less pain

*******

dropped

and falling

from such 

heights

for so 

long

that

maybe

I will have

enough time

to learn 

flying

*******

why is the word yes so brief?

It should be

the longest, 

the hardest, 

so that you could not decide in an instant to say it, 

so that upon reflection you could stop

in the middle of saying it. 

*******

Let us touch each other

while we still have hands, 

palms, forearms, elbows...

Let us love each other for misery, 

let us torture each other, 

mangle, maim, 

to remember better,

to part with less pain. 

*******

Enough painkilling, heal.

Enough cajoling, command, 

even if your fiery joys 

mean endless inequality

and melt our vessels

that are dispensable.

Enough rehashing, create.

Enough lying to the sick:

they will not get well.

*******

On my back, alone, 

I feel your seed dying in me, 

feel its fear, feel its wish to live on...

I wonder if I can carry 

so many deaths inside me, as I nurture

my own?

*******

The wholy feminine poetry of Vera Pavlova.   Her words are the words of Kali, of Quan Yin, of our universal mother Mary.  Here is an interview of Vera by her gorgeous daughter, the psychologist Lisa Pavlova:

A happy or an unhappy love?

If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.

Responsibility. Response Ability.  Is there a difference between being responsible and being response able?

In order to be responsible for one’s affairs or behaviors, inner or outer, one must have a response. The response is a result of being response able.  What we choose to do as a result of our responses is an ethical matter.  The ethical quality of the response is consciousness.  Are you behaving ethically when you take responsibility for your response?

We are not designed to have total control of our emotions.  Fight or flight.  The collective, the creator, the chemical have the ultimate reign over our emotional experience.  So, although becoming consciously responsible is a developmental process, it is not as much a matter of getting better at it as it is a matter of growing into it- becoming comfortable in our lack of control over our own fundamental experiences.   That is written in stone.  The meaning we choose to make of our responsivity is our conscious, responsible choice. Maintaining mindfulness even as the tsunami, the earthquake, the fire and the flood innundate us, inside and out, is the practice.  Responsibility is the outcome.