Get up.

We went to creep around the Geffen before the lights were on. So good, so hood.

It just seems like he has a crew.

Trains.

rainbow warrior

the best hour of any day.

!!

BB! Getting a girl's name up never goes out of style.

yeah, that.

symbolic.

To be human is to be blessed with forget.

yeah you know me.

do the damn thing.

♥♥♥ ahhhh-ndre...

the devil inside

"Regardless of the outcome, you feel so much better about yourself when you do what you think is the right thing. That alone is worth the risk." 

- Bruno Bettelheim

As I was falling asleep I awoke with a violent start, feeling like someone had drop kicked me from the unconscious to the conscious realm. I carried with me an image of a young female prostitute sitting on an old, ratty brown couch.  As I watched from somewhere in the ethers, she crouched away from the fist beating she was receiving from a handsome, professional looking man who stood behind her.  He beat her on her shoulders, back and head. She was beautiful and indifferent, even as she was beaten. She was imbued with a real natural beauty of the most enviable type that she was obviously fighting against.

Some dreams just resonate.  They come from the most unacknowledged areas of existence. They open the door to those hazy, buried bits of experience that didn't suit us and ended up packed away where we forgot we'd had them. And here, right here, was a room, door flung open, waiting to be cleaned, emptied and sorted out!  I'd been searching for this place for months.   I excitedly noted that I should write this down to consider it further in the morning. That thought was interrupted. The interrupter was loud, persuasive, genderless: "it's not important to remember that".

Who was telling me not to remember?  Who thinks they know what's important and what's not? Will there ever come a time when the unconscious is not provocative?
I went back to sleep. I did not write it down.

The hours passed uneventfully. Thirty minutes before my alarm was to go off, I awoke again. I had been dreaming the same dream again.  I had been dreaming the same dream again. Repetition increases importance and draws the attention.

The girl was slightly different, as was the scenery and the appearance of the man, but the theme was still the same: a beautiful, desperate girl being subdued with force by a strong man, shamelessly acceptable even as he acted so vile.  The woman was curling into herself, not fighting back.  She had no fear, no pain.  Without a sense of self-worth, it's not so shocking to be treated as if you are worthless.

And now, the ground is filling with a rumble. The change is reaching the shoreline. Can you feel it coming your direction?  It is palpable if we let it work its way into us.  Love is our right.  No fear.

Forgiving All My Enemies

Chris Brown doesn't want to be a minute man.  And he's sick of everybody bringing up that sh*t from the past. His latest album F.A.M.E. was released last month with the singles Yeah x3 and Look at me now dropping a little bit beforehand.  The album sounds good with a decent dose of RnB music history, rappers behind it and some undeniable club bangers.

Being that Chris Brown is best known by most Angelenos (Americans?) for beating his girlfriend pretty badly on at least one occasion, you'd think most intelligent people might choose not to support Mr. Brown by becoming fans of his music.   He admitted guilt and was charged with 2 felonies for assault and making criminal threats following the beating. And a couple years later almost 500,000 people bought F.A.M.E within the first month after it's release.

Should we be concerned that so many of us are willing to forget about sustaining a moral compass because the media tells us a product is desirable?  Or is the real issue that the American public is so over saturated with media of both the corporate and independent variety that Chris Brown's situation has become forgettable in the first place?  Perhaps, we all want things like this to be forgettable so that we can feel safe that our own reprehensible mistakes can be wiped from our own personal histories.  Possibly the old 'moral compass' is irrelevant 235 years after capitalism became our religion.

Whatever the cause may be, we let Mr. Brown tell us to take a chance with him, girls, because you know that he won't do you no harm. Even though we have seen the harm he has done to other women with our own eyes.  And we are all one.  And some things do not change.  This is a lesson often learned the hard way.  Is forgiveness always a good thing?  Are there people and things that are just plain unforgiveable?  Is it important to learn to forgive the unforgivable?

Luckily, most of us still have a bit of control left about what we publicize and what we don't.  Maybe Mr. Brown has been a victim, too.  The collective has a gang mentality and the damage that can be done by bullying/gangbanging is sometimes really difficult to repair.  Because so many of us want to hear his music (all girlbashing and distasteful referencing of girlbashing in his lyrics aside) Chris Brown does not have any control over what aspects of his life are presented to the public.   He is forced to dance for us like a puppet and we feed him Benjamins in return.   Look at him now.

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. 

The Rose Captain

This part's for my love of old
How the rose in your heart you hold
Still all the water in your wells won't make it grow
Oh, the call of the nightingale
How I love beneath the ghostly sails
We move like gypsies 'neath the mist and beneath the gloom

This part's for my love of new
How the bulbs in my heart are true
They send the shoots through my fingers into your bones
Oh, the call of the collared dove
How I long to be your one true love
We'll move like gypsies 'neath the stars and beneath the moon

Oh, how the river flows under the ice and snow
The keeper of the flame
The rose captain knows our names
His perfumed breath we breath
For you my dear, my love will never leave

As above, so below

The vernal equinox is here!  This is one of 2 times in the year when the amount of light and the amount of darkness are nearest to equal across all parts of the world.  The sun, rising toward the pinnacle of light that is the summer solstice, appears in the sky halfway between its highest and lowest path on the vernal equinox.  This is a sacred and rare balance that occurs for only 2 out of 365 days every year. Because it is march in the north, lightness of being is on the rise while the shadow gets shorter and more condensed in response to the height of the sun. This is the day/night in which the sun begins his highest ascent to melt off the masks we wear and warm our authentic desires.

The equinox is about balance between bodies in relationship to each other.  This balance can be between our own physical and energetic bodies, the celestial bodies or the actual bodies of lovers, family and friends.  For those of us who have invited new bodies close to us within the last six months, now is an excellent time to harness the energy balance of the universe and align ourselves with not only our true centers, but with the true centers of others around us for the first time.   This is a time of accelerated creation potential for the qualities we want in relationships within and around us. Now is the time to sow the metaphorical seeds that we wish to nurture and warm with the natural cycles of the sun.  Dysfunction has the potential to realign with function to create a new, healthier balance.  All we have to do is surrender our awareness to any lack of balance that exists inside and around us.  Consider what hardships the darkness of winter carried into consciousness and imagine them realigning with the sun, the earth and the moon, with your heart, mind and soul.  Like darkness and light, surrender and raw, impulsive action are balanced today and will carry us into alignment if we desire.  The doors are open for 24 hours, if you want to- walk through. What we plant and cultivate now will pay off with a high yield when the time comes to gather our harvest in 6 months, at the autumnal equinox.  

As above, so below. 

at your heels

I'm in the belly of the canyon.
I can't come up with any reason.
Why a ghost is following me.
Why a ghost is following me.

I've got some feed for the longing.
I've got the pill for the bad dreams.
The apparition dancing with me, stepping down all over my feet.

There is no key to my gate, but you can still come around.
Lean your ladder against my window and I'll come down.
I'll come down.
x
x
x
x
x
x
You can still come around