Artist History
Receive e-mail alerts from the Cassandra Tribe Fan Club - powered by Botablog
‘Angel’ and ‘the greedy heart’: new poetry from Cassandra Tribe
CastleDeepBooks and loveandwords.com announces the dual release of Cassandra Tribe’s collection as cd, softcover and ebook with audio.
CastleDeepBooks and loveandwords.com announces the dual release of Cassandra Tribe’s collection as cd, softcover and ebook with audio.
109 pages
ISBN 978-0-615-25620-7
Library of Congress PCN 2008909591
ISBN 978-0-615-25620-7
Library of Congress PCN 2008909591
“Raise your head
and look forward, Angel,
let the ash
fall from your eyes.
Stand in balance
with not a word said,
and let the constellation
of your life rise . . .”
- Angel, C. Tribe
The Perfect Duet
What you don’t expect when you meet Cassandra Tribe is the sense of humor that bubbles beneath the surface. The same poet who has moved her audiences to tears with “Leela Raquel” and made hearts ache with “the dreams of bees”, the same hand that wrote the frightening social commentary “Monster” - is fun to be around. You would expect someone capable of describing forgiveness as a monster sitting on a throne made of “children bound together” to be a bit more dark. Instead, you find a woman who not only is self possessed and has an immediate sense of humor, but who radiates a kind of joy and interest in life that is nothing less than infectious. People stare at her and you get the sense that they’d like to sit down and join the conversation.
“I wanted to do a live album.” Tribe says over coffee, “I had just come off helping host an open mic and had begun to do more and more internet radio and I wanted to take my writing somewhere different. What needed to be said needed a different voice and it turned out to be my own.”
Recorded in a church in outside Magdalena, New Mexico, “Angel” has only five tracks, but these five come together to form almost 40 minutes of material.
“You don’t show up on someone’s stage and do a 14 minute piece unless they are expecting it. The cd let me take some of my newer pieces and give the words the time that they needed.”
The result is a cd of poetry that grabs your attention with her performance and moves you, sometimes beyond your comfort zone, with the power of her writing. She has drawn comparisons to Edgar Allen Poe and Anne Sexton and her stage presence brings to mind a young David Bowie. There is something about her that commands attention. All Tribe has to do is walk to the mic and the sense of expectation that takes over the audience is palpable. I saw her perform “the dreams of bees” in a bar and by the end, every pool stick was down, beers were forgotten and every person in that building hung on her voice. I turned to the man beside me and asked him what he thought and he said, “I don’t even like poetry, I wouldn’t have even come out tonight if I had known this was going on but it’s like there is a reason I am here tonight and I am hearing this.”
“The book was a fluke, “ she says, “ when I was sending the cd out for opinions I kept hearing from people that they wanted to see the text. So I thought I would put a small booklet in with the cd but “Monster” alone would have filled the case. One thing led to another and suddenly, one of the people I had asked to preview the cd, who was a publisher, said it has to have a book. And there it is. It was a nightmare pulling off the book in the same time frame as the cd, these things usually take months. We created the imprint CastleDeepBooks to marry the two projects and distribute them together.”
The book, “The Greedy Heart”. contains all the pieces on the cd and twelve others, including the acerbic title piece. Yet it is her version of Ovid’s morality tale, Baucis and Philemon, that takes center stage. Perhaps one of the best contemporary versions ever written, Tribe doesn’t bother retelling the tale (except in an author’s note) she plunges into the very last moment of their lives and reveals the inner secrets of their hearts. In her hands it becomes possible to have the kind of love that creates a story that will be told until the end of time. The ability she gives her audience to hold her words and listen to them is an experience that begins to allow the layers of her meaning to come to the fore.
“What is important, “ she says rising from the small table, “is that you keep trying to find out who you are and how to live. All of that is changing and evolving with every moment. Its much easier to demand the past or hope for the future, the challenge is to become willing to be present.”
Cassandra Tribe has managed to create the perfect duet with the simultaneous release of her third cd, “Angel” and the book, “The Greedy Heart”. Both are distributed in digital and hard copy on indieryhthm.com and on her website, loveandwords.com. Starting in December of ’08, Tribe launches on what she describes as a “long, slow tour” beginning in Chicago and ending in Montreal appearing in a series of invitation only venues that have been sold out since August. She has intermittent radio appearances planned throughout the year. and plans on “popping in” on open mics in areas she is performing. You can try to keep up with her through her popular and award winning blog, love and words.
(A. Baumgarden, New World Review, Volume 12, Issue 3, October 200
"What's your Tribe? The one who speaks the words of longing you didn't even know existed inside you, or the one that scares the pants off you with the mirror that she holds up to reveal your dark potential? Just perfect..."(James Duckworth)
Put your hand out, let Cassandra Tribe walk you though this journey. She will be your reflection on this trip to reality. “Angel,” Tribe’s new collection of poetry explores the human condition, from the painful ebb and flow of love to the uncertainty of living in a world where “Our poets are silent/Our singers drunk.”
Tribe, lends her audience a didactic and Humanistic view of the world, whether it is through her poetry, essays or her daily blog. One stand-out poem by Tribe, the epic-length “Monster,” urges readers to face the harsh reality that comes with being irresponsible in life—the false gods and monsters created by blind acceptance.
Vagner Revol, Poet Tree Magazine)
Her reading of Monster is bone chilling…not until near the end, when she begins to reveal glimpses of the humanity that lives within the monster does the piece change from a horrific cant worthy of Poe, to an epic tale of infinite loss and caution…brilliant.
(Jackson Willet, DarkCorners)
The dreams of bees, there is power there, this will get lots of play.
(Most Vocal Poets Society, Canada)
Cassandra Tribe Blog
Cassandra Tribe is on MySpace.com
| POSTED BY: radioindy | POSTED ON: 15 Jul 2009 04:04 AM | ||
|
MySpace page sample / purchase some great new music!
myspaceMusic.com is a registered trademark of MySpace - All rights reserved |
|||
Cassandra Tribe Press Release on Digg.com!
| POSTED BY: radioindy | POSTED ON: 15 Jul 2009 04:03 AM | ||
|
RadioIndy created a CD Announcement Press Release for Cassandra Tribe As part of our ongoing promotion with RadioIndy, we have published a press release of our truncated CD review.
FANS: Increase the popularity of this DIGG press release by visiting our homepage at www.radioindy.com and looking for the "Press Release" section in the lower right. Here, you can find and "DIGG" this press release for Cassandra Tribe
The more DIGGS, the more exposure! DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc. |
|||
Cassandra Tribe on Amazon!
| POSTED BY: radioindy | POSTED ON: 15 Jul 2009 04:02 AM | ||
|
FANS - Please checkout Cassandra Tribe page and sample / purchase some great new music! amazon.com is a registered trademark of amazon - All rights reserved |
|||
"Angel by Cassandra Tribe (Spoken Word Artist from Chicago, Illinois(IL))
| POSTED BY: momof5pacs | POSTED ON: 08 Feb 2009 08:02 PM | ||
|
 RadioIndy is pleased to present Cassandra Tribe with a GrIndie Award for the CD "Angel"
"Angel" by Cassandra Tribe is a deep and intellectual spoken word EP that is filled with precise imagery and a tone that is tense and revealing. It is not just Cassandra’s words that create the journey; it is her delivery, pacing, and tranquil voice that really rounds out the concept. She plays on silence in a way that keeps you longing for the next line and hanging on every word. This is Cassandra's third CD and the concept of this album is a stripped down work of art. You hear nothing but her voice on this one, a bold statement considering music and effects were a big part of her previous releases. There is a build as the journey unfolds when the album opens with the whispery "The Dark Flower of Hope (Part 1)," a reflection of wasted life. "Monster" deals with more irresponsibility, this time in the area of false gods. "The Dreams of Bees" brings forth tremendous power and intensity as Cassandra brings forth the most vivid of frustrations. If you enjoy rich, well performed poetry, you will enjoy “Angel.” -William |
|||
unfortunately
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 09 Dec 2008 02:59 AM | ||
|
Because of issues with the speed of this site I will no longer be mirroring the blog here.
If you would like to keep up with it, please join me at the love and words blog |
|||
jealous dogs
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 08 Dec 2008 06:23 PM | ||
|
it would appear that one of the rudimentary stages of the evolution of consciousness is to be able to notice when life is not fair and pitch a subsequent fit. God, sometimes the strange juxtapositions of things in my life even stops me - maybe it is a mix of the length of my days and the amount of space I travel through. I went from a day spent ticktalking about the whole control/prepared/bridesmaid thing then landed in a cafe where as I wrote the last post a woman was trying to convert a Nigerian man and when they left, an orthodox jew came in with his mother (which is something you rarely see in this area) and wound up talking computers with the haitian woman and her caucasian partner next to him. Then home to dinner and the news that yes Virginia, dogs are capable of jealousy according to a new study. Put two dogs together and ask them to perform the same act (give you the paw) but then only give the one dog a treat when he does it, the other dog will stop performing and essentially go into a snit. Which is how I actually started the day - talking about the vocabulary of dogs. I think it is around 400 words. Up till now, we had only noticed (or bothered to look) for this kind of behavior in primates. I remember the shock when Koko's kitten, All Ball, was killed and Koko signed 'sad'. Which makes you begin to wonder why we always assume that everything around us that we are not capable of speaking with is incapable of thinking? find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing - eat not the heart  what is that little flower? |
|||
save me
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 08 Dec 2008 03:38 PM | ||
|
one of the hardest things to overcome is the expectation that there is something or someone outside of yourself that will "save you". Just come sweeping in and go "oh no, how did you wind up here? Let me change that." It is a powerful experience, particularly in faith when you finally transcend the role of the child and become the partner of the God you worship (or choose not to worship, I have talked with Atheists who surprised me in describing the same experience of the "dark night of the soul" when you begin to wake to the fact that what you believe in does not negate the impact of your life, but rather is impacted by it). It is an experience that is hard to describe (although I am working on it) and I keep returning to the Pauline parable of the Bridesmaids, five foolish and five wise all of which succumb to a dreamlike sleep before awaking suddenly from time lost to find themselves having to begin again according to the ability they gave themselves by being prepared. There are similar teaching stories in all religions. And all our cultures have myths of the hero who is bewitched into sleep only to awake to begin exactly where they left off with what they had sense to bring in anticipation of rising to the effort. Outside of the dangerous ground of any type of religious discussion, these can be used as familiar and understood examples of the wakening to faith in yourself. The dark night of the soul is a passage we all enter in regards to our sense of our life and our ability to have faith in ourselves. The absolute faith that is the first step to being able to love someone else. But it is not an easy journey to give up your faith in a thousand things outside of yourself as being what will "save you", "change you", "free you". Yet, more and more these days as I zoom around my 350 mile a day commute I over hear so many conversations in which people are asking not what will save them, but what they can do to save themselves. I have traveled alot. I have eavesdropped even more. And this is the first time I have heard such similar conversations, as if something that has been floating in the air has settled and sunk into our tea. What do you think would happen to this culture if the majority of us lost our belief that something we bought would change our life? Make us younger, richer, smarter.....what would happen if we realized that we were the only ones that could do all of those things? find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing - eat not the heart what is that little flower? |
|||
ahhh...how do you
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 08 Dec 2008 08:25 AM | ||
|
reconcile the contradiction, find the acceptance and still not lock yourself into black and white thinking? I accepted that I may lose my job to caprice, however I could accept it because for the past seven months I have been preparing my entire life for a complete switch to a different level of income inorder to devote 6-12 months to some projects...so, a little less in the luxury zone and a lot more forward movement within my purpose and passion - if I lose my job it comes a few months too early. However, if I keep my job I can continue to segue into my plans without extremes of discomfort and possibly expand what I am planning to do, so what am I to do? Look at what the situation is and take control. My panic sister panics because nobody pays on time. So rather than wait, I stepped out of my boundaries at work and pursued the payment for the job I am on and it will be arriving...conveniently...when I step on a plane thursday. Now, come what may...all situations are provided for and I am much more at ease. I have done all that I can do to assure I keep my position, however I am also ready to step into a new situation that I have planned for. Either way, I feel less at the mercy of someone else's whim. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing - eat not the heart what is that little flower? |
|||
Michelle Obama vs. the Panic Sisters
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 08 Dec 2008 02:52 AM | ||
|
I face the very real prospect of losing my job this week for no other reason than the capriciousness of the panic sisters. I know this, and I know that I have had to make a choice between canceling out of appearances in Chicago and staying (and not working those days anyway, most likely) or going knowing that my very own set of panic sisters have forgotten that I scheduled this trip over two months ago and will latch onto it as a sign of my “unwillingness to do what needs to be done in the situation.” The point that most of the situation, where our company is concerned, was created by them will not be an issue. The point that I probably will not be working those two days anyway, will not be an issue. And it has been an underlying struggle all weekend, as I have done my things, to come to terms with my choice. I cannot stop my life in service of someone else’s panic and fear even though the very real possibility of it making my life much more difficult (temporarily) exists. It means I must fully accept the possibility of creating duress in my life now, in service of the future. I could cancel and stay, but what I would lose would be far more than a salary. It has taken phenomenal effort to put together the Madness of Desire and the whole Medusa’s Child thing is like a dream come true, it is an opportunity to take the next step. And then I read a blip from the Washington Post on the BBC and suddenly the whole choice got a hell of a lot easier to make. The Obamas, in particular – Michelle have announced that they plan to open up the white house to artists, writers, poets and musicians. They recognize the opportunity we have to rebuild not just the structure but also the culture of this country. And I think of Lady Bird Johnson and the good she did for the arts community. And as bad as things may get, I also know that they will get better. I just have to remember that the Panic Sisters do not just surround me, but they live inside me too and it is easy to succumb to picturing tomorrow, as all the future will be. It is easy to stop because many around me already have…they judge their life by what they have lost and will gauge their recovery by how long it takes them to gain back what they had before rather than continue to build towards something new. The Arts have been missing from this country for a long time. There are thriving pockets of artistic endeavor and innovation but we have become the land of sequels, of presidents and vice-presidents taking to the stage alongside musicians who have devoted their lives to their craft and talent and having their performance critique seriously. Most of our celebrity “artists” are artists of image not substance, letting the consumer dictate the performance and reluctant to let go of a successful formula for sales and continue growing. I think that is why in today’s music scene there is always the one shot wonder. I admire Adele for saying that while she was grateful for the Grammy nomination, she wished it had been for her third or fourth album instead of her debut. The Obamas recognize that the Arts are powerful sources of energy and motivation for the country as a whole and I see in their brief comments, a plan to begin to make artists a part of actively building, not rebuilding a culture that cannot only withstand the times ahead – but comes out in a different, not the same one we started from. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing - eat not the heart what is that little flower? |
|||
how disco saved my life
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 07 Dec 2008 07:46 PM | ||
|
Months ago, when I was getting no sleep and driving madly from one job in Colorado then down to southern points of New Mexico, back up north again and on and on and sleeping in tents, visiting my home one day a week and trying not to lose my mind - I finally figured out how to turn on the satellite radio in the company truck. Actually, it was the day I had to swap trucks with the owner and he had his cd changer hidden somewhere in the body and I couldn't figure out anything but how to turn on the satellite.<br><br>First I went (of course) to the 80's station, and that lasted about as long as shoulder pads and I started roaming around until I found the dance music stations. That fast beat, that driving music kept me awake mile after mile.<br><br>And then...I started listening to the lyrics...at first I was alternately amused and appalled (although I admit to a fondness to the "you and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals/so let's do it like they do it on the discovery channel" song) and then, I am not sure what happened, perhaps it was a change in DJ or the time and show I was listening to, or maybe I was so tired I forgot to be dismissive and I really started to listen to the lyrics.<br><br>Some of these songs, most of them, are singing about living the kind of life I keep talking about here. Oh there are the absolutely "unhealthy" songs, but for the most part, the lyrics are about the integrity of life, of wanting not needing, of loving and being. I swear to god I am starting to think that whoever writes these things must be as much a Fromm fanatic as me. <br><br>And listening to them started letting me see that the way I think of life, the way I am learning how to live it maybe, is not so out there after all - somehow (and you can really spot the difference when they play dance music from different eras side by side) somehow, the people who are "coming up" on this music have a desire to live and be in life in a way that I haven't found in most other genre lyrics before.<br><br>What is even more fascinating too me is ever since XM and Sirius got together, that type of music has been shunted off for the more sexual, violent or numbing kind. Although they recently yanked a show from the morning and brought back something alittle bit more similiar to what I had been listening to for months. Which tells me the demographics are younger persons, probably in their late twenties or early thirties who are going to work as it is the commute time.<br><br>Funny what you can learn when you start to pay attention...<br><br><br><br><br><br><br> <div style="text-align: center;"><hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"><div style="text-align: center;">find out more about Cassandra Tribe<br><a href="http://loveandwords.com/june08/calendar.html">performance schedule</a> - <a href="http://www.indierhythm.com/search.php?crit=cassandra+tribe&by=artist&x=14&y=12">audio recordings</a> - <a href="http://thegreedyheart.com">books</a> - <a href="http://loveandwords.com/june08/en_video.html">videos</a> - <a href="http://loveandwords.com/june08/en_writing.html"> writing</a> - <a href="http://eatnottheheart.com"> eat not the heart</a><br><img style="width: 50px; height: 50px;" src="http://cassandratribe.bravehost.com/myPictures/logocolornotext.jpg"><br></div><br><a href="http://loveandwords.com/june08/littleflower.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">what is that little flower?</span></a><br><hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"></div><br> |
|||
little cans of tuna
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 07 Dec 2008 08:52 AM | ||
|
I have been shamelessly indulging in bribery as a desperate means of getting the mad kitten to leave me alone while I worked on the computer. I have little cans of half eaten tuna scattered around as she would start them and then decide it was much more fun to bother me. Happy as a clam though, purring away and just getting into everything. It takes a herculean effort to pursue your passion. I think the whole Joseph Campbell thing got people confused a bit about how it all goes. Follow your bliss and happiness ensues but...and this is where what he was teaching got a little...erased...it is a lifetime effort. To commit day after day to the effort which is not rewarded takes a kind of fortitude and courage that you have to develop. I have known brilliant artists who have given up because they didn't get the kind of recognition they wanted, when they wanted it. Well, then again - in that lies its own explanation - passion is not something you can give up on because like Love, the idea of living without it is unbearable. The act of living in your passion becomes the sole purpose of your life. Not fame, not money, not anything. Slowly you begin to make the kind of choices that move all of your life into step with what your passion requires to keep growing. Ahhhhh...there is a though, one of the signs of passion is change. To live in passion means you must always be in a state of growing, evolving, becoming. Ok...now I need to go clean the house.... find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
oy
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 07 Dec 2008 05:28 AM | ||
|
it has taken hours but the first in a series of free articles drawn from "Eat not the Heart" is available here. The Mandala Key exercise it mentions is also available through a link on that page. I have been alternately steeped in the world of Maya Deren and computer code, it is an odd combination. I think I need my tea, and now that the first article is starting its journey out into the world at last I am going to clean my house, move into my new RV and go have a ball in Chicago. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
so I went to the casino
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 05 Dec 2008 12:25 PM | ||
|
I took twenty dollars and twenty minutes and I went to the casino and I won. Then I took myself out for lunch. I think, a large part of all this comes from the way things have gotten flipflopped. People think that the lifestyle will give them the life. So they accessorize with houses and jobs, trophy partners and children (and by trophy partners I mean either the beautiful and desired or the kind that optimizes the kind soulmate) and then are left floundering when this does not solve the emptiness within themselves. They have all the right words and can say them at the right time, the right concepts...but no idea how to use them. The opposite of this does the same thing. There has been such a kick about "simplfying" and downsizing that a lot of people who were not finding a sense of fulfilment and lasting happiness in life went the opposite way. Damning the things as the problem. But no-thing is not going to give it to you either. And believe, maintaining a "simple" lifestyle can be just as demanding on your time as a house with a half acre lawn. So they look...they look for a way in which to bring a kind of excitement and stimulation into their lives that mimics true passion. Like a boy in a car with a gun that makes him feel like he is in control because so much of his life is out of control. Or the woman obsessed with the colour of the president bringing about the end of the world because it is her only outlet for the fact that her husband has descended beyond being a functional drunk. That way you don't have to give up the life you have acquired (because that would entail admitting you made a mistake). You don't have to go through the pain (and it is painful) of examing yourself to discover who you have become and how to change that. You just seek to accessorize what you have with something that simulates passion. Only...passion comes with knowledge and choice and a deep level of focus on each other because you are irreplacable. It is not just something you do on tuesday. It is something that makes the thought of any other life unbearable and it only grows stronger and deeper with the passage of time. I think that is one of the ways in which you can guage if you are in a passionate relationship that is based in strong love. Did the excitement wear off? Is an evening out at the movies only as good as the movie is now? In passion, in love you are reborn together each day because you are alive to each other and not just something that is there. And that comes from each of you being alive to your selves first. You welcome the presence of each other because it is a part of your understanding of life. You don't play Mars and Venus because the core difference is only that you are two separate people. Two people, who by choice and knowledge - not despair - have become inseparable. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
hard enough
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 05 Dec 2008 07:35 AM | ||
|
it is hard enough to learn what love is, and then learn how to live by love when you are alone. It gets harder when you begin to love someone because there is so much to untangle that is within and between the two of you that the thought of promising monogamy without a strong base of love and experience seems so unrealistic. It why I say that monogamy is not given, but grown. For love to support and withstand the immediacy of desire, the ups and downs of emotional connections - it has to be well known. It is not enough to be able to promise commitment and monogamy out of a sense of righteousness and virtue. That does not tend to make a "garden for love" in which it can grow and thrive. Righteousness tends to lead to a kind of stagnation. And I have yet to meet anyone in a truly polyamorous relationship. I have met many who are essentially "dating with a lot of sex" and some for whom it is polyamory for one and the concept of the others involved being involved with others is disallowed. But love, learning to love. Learning to stand in it, is hard - especially when there is little in today's culture and society that supports it. We think constant communication and the sharing is a deep bond, that sex is love and that emotional connections must lead to sex. All so convoluted. All so complicated. Do you know what I realized this morning? If you have been reading for a while you know about the wild year I have had with stalkers, every single one of them was in a committed monogamous relationship. Strange. I don't think I have recovered from last night. I think I am riding tides of fear and anger that some one, for their entertainment, pointed a gun at me. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
okay
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 05 Dec 2008 05:26 AM | ||
|
I think I am over my little revolutionary rant from this morning...at least for the moment. It is just hard to keep my cool when I am confronted with all that. If nothing else, it is just plain insulting and disrespectful to hear someone speaking like that. It makes me furious, as if anyone in their right mind would choose to live on welfare or unemployment, as if it is some kind of vacation...whoops...I'm starting again. I am trying to exercise restraint and discipline. I need to keep my focus on what needs to be done and see my job as a key tool in getting it done. 'nuff said. It's just...I had a great conversation at dinner last night about "people", in general the kinds of mad behavior that goes on if you are dating these days that is taken as normal. And I have been trying to figure out, for myself, why I keep attracting to myself people who are already in supposedly committed relationships. They live together. Sometimes they even have children and somehow, I become like this...I don't know...its strange. If you are so unfulfilled in your relationship, don't cheat and put your supposed partners emotional security at risk , f---ing stand up for yourself and leave. Show some respect for your "partner". Go start dating again and try to find someone who is a better match. It's taken me a while to get to the point to realize that it is equally disrespectful of me to participate in all this. I hit that earlier this year and really grasped the damage done to my self esteem and every one else's involved when you undermine someone else's relationship and/or try to live and love in secret. That was a painful realization, but I am glad I had it. I am not proud of my almost behavior but am glad I am self aware enough to have made the connections before things went too far. People do meet, who are in other relationships, and discover that the potential for love between them is very strong...but there is no further step until both are free. Emotional affairs are just as devastating as physical ones if not more so. More so, I think. I think, what changed for me is a) I finally and fully grasped the empathy of "what if it were me?" and secondly, I realized that kind of relationship, when you are the third and secret - is not real. Nothing about it is real. Like one of you commented about people who jump from self help trend to self help trend, this kind of behavior is a kind of laziness in discovering what it is to love someone, and I am not talking just about being in a relationship but in making the effort to discover each other before you even form a relationship. And in the realm of fantasy, someone I knew briefly where our involvement almost became such until I "woke up", was appalled and ended it before anything happened (we are talking a few weeks) just sent me an email that they have a magazine interested in the article that they have written about it. Which I was fine with until I read further and they are presenting the article as being about internet dating. Which is just amazing, it wasn't internet dating - it was internet cheating. I wonder if that magazine is aware that is what the situation really was. I doubt it, and here they are about to present someone as an "expert" on relationships who cannot even respect their own. But isn't that how it always is? I am almost tempted to go read the article because if they managed to transform what almost transpired between us into "dating", I wonder what else about what really passed between us they have "transformed" into something else? find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
breakfast with the panic sisters
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 05 Dec 2008 02:36 AM | ||
|
I have tried to avoid it all week. Ever since they chose to enlighten us that we are in a recession (although why it took the media so long to figure that out is both beyond me and perfectly understood) I have tried to avoid having to go to the office but yesterday (before poetry, coffee and guns) I had to go. And the panic sisters were out in force. Only this time…the world was not ending, the question was “why don’t we go collect unemployment and welfare like everybody else?” Then that downhill experience turned to how much money they had one at the casinos. $28k in a month. So I asked how much money they spent to win and the answer was 5-600 dollars. Then I asked, “How much time did you spend there to win?” And the answer was hours. And the answer was delivered with high irritation, wouldn’t I spend any amount of time in a casino if it meant 28, 000 dollars? And I said no, because in that time I could be working towards something that would become worth far more than that. Don’t get me wrong. The money is tempting. Here, in the land of chance, casinos abound. And I have been tempted (and did once) to go and try my luck. But in the end, I spent four hours, lost 100 dollars I did not have to throw away and missed my life. I have a better chance of earning 28,000 dollars through sitting and working on my things that will bring me to different places then parking on a stool for hours and hoping a random machine rewards me. Because they forgot were the 5000 dollars they blew the month before with no gain. And over the course of a year, I think they have barely broken even. But they have lost those hours. I buy powerball. A dollar a week, I get it when I get one of my bunnies, that is the extent of my chance and time I am willing to devote to it. In the end, with these panic sisters, it comes down to the fact that Obama is black, although that would be the last thing that they admit – but the admission comes in warning their children that if they hear over the intercom at school that he has been killed they are to go hide in the bathrooms and stand on the toilets so no one can see their feet because they will be shooting white people in the street. They miss the fact that Obama is more white than me in a lot of aspects. If something happens to him, they should not fear the black community, they should fear all of us who have made them their money and are being punished in return. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
let's talk about happiness, shall we?
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 04 Dec 2008 09:23 AM | ||
|
The majority of our social welfare and culture is based upon the premise that with the assured provision of base needs (food, comfort, shelter, safety) we are then enabled to become the kind of persons who rise into a consciousness capable of choice, love, faith, compassion, empathy and esteem (the components of lasting happiness). Culturally we have evolved this equation so that money becomes the source for everything. Money providing the base needs that we need for achieve love and esteem becoming shortened to the equations of “money=happiness” and “money=love”. However, no matter whether money is tied to the root or result the fundamental structure of our perception of how we gain happiness is deeply flawed. In the assumption that we need food, comfort, shelter and safety before we can become “conscious beings” we create a perception of persons without these things as - inhuman. They do not count. The poor, those without are subtly perceived as being less capable of contributions to humanity, of living a full and valued life then someone who has the minimum of base needs met. Because, after all, how could they think of anything else but their hunger? We begin as conscious beings. We begin with the rudimentary abilities to make choices, to love, to have faith, to have compassion, empathy and esteem. It is this inherent ability that we are born with that can enable us to rise above poverty and provide our basic needs. It is what enables us to survive things that otherwise be physically, psychologically and emotionally un-survivable. If you look to the documentation of concentration camp survivors many came through the experience possessed of a deep and abiding capacity for happiness even though they more then were denied base needs because they had to rely upon their conscious abilities. Victor Frankl points out the difference between the survival rate of those who had or found faith and esteem during the imprisonment versus those who could not get past the hunger and the denial of base needs. And he is points out that this faith (not necessarily. in god or religion) coupled with love, the love for another caused survivors to transcend the very physical death they slowly progressed towards. I forget her name, but there is a French woman who transformed the hospice movement in the 80s and 90s and she documents well how people with no comfort, provided with respect and esteem for their persons often achieved a sense of happiness and contentment that did not know when healthy. Having basic needs met does make things easier in some aspects, but it is not required. Happiness, like love, is a simple term applied to a very broad web of abilities and emotions, but its core requirement is not comfort, safety or having basic physical needs met – it is the unwavering faith of the individual in their worth and the worth of what they love. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
wild ideas
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 04 Dec 2008 08:10 AM | ||
|
I gave "Filemon" to the guys at work on DVD and the one guy's five year old son said "She needs to get a new camera the movie is all dirty and scratched up." But then the wives said, "So when is she going to put the three of you in a video?" and its like my heart stop beating. First of all I have been working on something kind of about them. Second of all, to even have it casually bandied about to film at Zia. To film Zia. I mean...they don't allow that. They are one of the few pueblos that so carefully control the information about them that there is almost none available. Their response was "oh great, you're going to want me to run around in a loincloth." No, no...I have other wild ideas growing. My feet are cold. But again, there is no snow. It just keeps passing us by and on the in between my blue bunny hunny took me into the store room and showed me the boxes of blue bunny they have ordered for me. She was proud that she had figured out how long I would be in the area working and ordered enough for a bunny a day, monday through friday. I could have kissed her. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
the waiting game
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 04 Dec 2008 02:36 AM | ||
|
We wait. We wait for things to change. We wait for answers to questions. We wait to find out if we have gotten jobs or into schools or if something we truly want is available….we wait. We wait to be old enough to be independent. We wait to be rested enough to feel youth again. We wait for love to open her eyes, we wait for chance to find us. We wait. And it is in what we do while we wait that makes us who we become. Do we wait in a kind of paralysis? Not moving, not doing, not breathing? Do we plunge into distraction in order that we may not feel the wait? Do we wait and while waiting, use the silence and calmness to prepare? I have got to try and knock myself back on some sort of regular schedule, inadvertently I have fallen back on a very natural one to me which is to wake up at 1am and go to sleep at 7. Good for me, but kind of limits how I interact with the rest of the world. But a part of it is a kind of avoidance too, my house is a disaster. The move is paused between both RVs and everything is a mess – but I had to “give up” trying to do a little bit each day because this week all my daylight hours are needed for other things and that four hour commute just wipes away a lot. But this weekend, I have nothing else planned but moving forward with it. Hand in hand with my shiny new toilet. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
loving zero
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 03 Dec 2008 05:04 PM | ||
|
Aristotle warned that there were two laws that society must not forget or they would bring about the demise of civilization: the law of contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. In these laws is the rule that one thing, cannot be another and cannot be not itself. If we forget that what a thing is, is what it is – we begin to create contradiction that cannot exist. And if we forget all this, we can begin to believe that the contradiction that cannot exist is real. Like trying to believe you own a home that you make payments on. You cannot own something that you are still paying for. One of these things is not real. You cannot profess undying love and then love another. One of these things is not real. You cannot be pro-life because all life is sacred and support war in which no life is sacred. One of these things is not real. But you can be pro-choice and support or not support war because you have established a system of judgment of the value of life. You can love someone and love another in different ways without choosing and without judging one as the chosen because you are not making a choice. You still…cannot own a home you make payments on…. But you can carry the extent of your beliefs in what is not real to the point that you begin to create things to support it. Like all the new studies that money contributes greatly to happiness. If the “money” and what it represents is based in something that does not exist, then what type of happiness are you securing except one that does not exist and is based in fantasy. Fantasy, which for most people these days, has become god, lover and home. Fantasy that requires a constant external validation of its existence. But I do believe we may be nearing the end of our ability to reconcile the contradictions we have created in this society and the times are getting ready to change dramatically. To a demand for the real. A house that is yours. A love that is chosen. A life that is valued. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
the panic sisters sing
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 03 Dec 2008 10:05 AM | ||
|
the headlines are "the recession is official" and the dow plunges and the panic sisters huddle together and begin to sing how terrible it all is, how horrible, how a great depression is upon us. And we talked about it at worked and laughed over the reactions people have to all this because it reveals where they live in life, in America. Because if you are the type of person who cannot own a home, probably doesn't have healthcare or good healthcare and the concept of having had enough "spare money" to be in the stock market (gaining fantasy money) is a pipe dream - then you have noticed we have been in an ever increasing recession for the past two and a half years. One of the panic sisters points out that the "man in the field" had the best four years of work under this administration and doesn't understand what is going to happen. Maybe not, but the man in the field has known that for each of those years he has worked more and been able to buy less. Food prices have skyrocketed, everything inflated to the point that unless you were of a certain income and class - you could not participate in that "healthy economy". The "gas crunch" wasn't when we hit almost 4 or 5 dollars a gallon, it was three years ago when it began to go past $1.80 and peoples wages did not increase. But of course, there is no disaster or recession unless the prices have climbed high enough that the upper and upper middle classes feel it. Then of course, the world must panic and "do something about it." So we laugh, because in the past four years or so, we have learned how to live without and now we watch people whom this hardly ever touches - learn what it feels like when all that you do is not enough and there seems to be no where to go but down. And what we are certain of, across aboard, the "little people in the field" who don't understand the intricacies of economy is that in the plans to fix things - our lives will get better first. Kind of a poetic justice in that, no? find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
my toilet
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 03 Dec 2008 05:07 AM | ||
|
is wandering around the country it would appear. When last seen, it was in Kentucky. I am becoming more and more disenchanted with the USPS. But at least, I can follow it as it travels - I only wish it could take pictures and post them. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
the lizard wore a ring
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 03 Dec 2008 01:11 AM | ||
|
I am up god awful early because I fell asleep right when I got home and stayed asleep. Dreaming again. I got up and looked up the meanings, having to sift through different sites - aware now that some of my dream imagery (especially that of animals which I rarely dream of) falls into the Native American interpretation. I dreamed of a ring being returned to me. Only when I opened the box, it was not the ring I had given but a larger one made of pure gold with a delicate braided pattern. And the lizard, a gecko moved in with me and we were boon companions. In the native definitions, the gecko symbolizes the "dreamer" and is a sign that this dream is important and reveals a lot about where you're coming from, where you're going, and how best to get there. It is a sign of the importance of a dream and it is important to look at what else is there to discover the clues. The lizard came at the end. The ring, the delicate braided ring represents a circle of completion and understanding that was returned to me. And in the dream, I gave a plain gold band to someone and they returned the larger gold braided version. And the other elements of the dream, when I back up and look at them and take them as having meaning and not just throw away images of the dream, when I look at them and ask "how do these make the circle complete?" I begin to understand something that I have struggled with. It does not make it any better, but I understand. Then I wake and wind up in an email discussion about Ramen noodles. I just learned a "jail trick" of eating them dry and straight out of the package with the seasoning sprinkled on. It is kind of like "chex mix" and in a pinch, good. What educated me about that "trick" was learning that the reason this is done in jail is one person makes the bowl of snacks for the weekend poker game. It shifted my perception abit. Mind you, this is jail and not prison but this small element of trying to bring or make social comfort in very uncomfortable places was like a window opening. Oh, it is early. My dream stays with me. It was a continuation of the one I had earlier and now I am thinking back and rethinking how I took that dream. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
and then I fell in the hole
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 02 Dec 2008 01:06 PM | ||
|
I love my blog. It is notebook, journal, cloud, life preserver, generator and it all talks back. but after the last round, I bounced out of the truck to catch the guys up on what the talk was and fell in the hole. Now I want my blue bunny. And I had to interject myself into a conversation at work where one was talking about their upcoming fire dance and the other started describing their fire/arrow swallowing ritual and as it got more detailed I had to say "do not go home and try that." Different pueblos, different rituals. Last year (remember?) one of them didn't follow the ritual and went and saw his girlfriend during the fast and then punctured his lung with an arrow and then the whole damn pueblo had to sit around and get lectured by the state about how they shouldn't be doing those types of things anymore. and what do they propose they do instead? find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
like a moth to the flame
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 02 Dec 2008 09:41 AM | ||
|
The left side of our brain controls our sense of order and logic. We make judgments from there and use reason. Our right side, the side without time, is where our emotions live. And endless and immediate reaction to the things around us as they are connected to the past and projections of the future as if all those things were happening at once. We react with the right side of our brain, instantaneously, instinctively. If we live by reason alone, we fail to make the kind of connections that lead to compassion, empathy and love. The left brain thinks in linear and module fashion. If we live by the right brain alone, we are in a constant state of reaction based upon our emotional interpretations, which may not be justified by the reality. We become incapable of sustained effort, of commitment. The right side of the brain thinks in images, it “sees” in patterns and can make connective leaps between seemingly unrelated items. If we bring both sides together, we are given the ability to make judgments that are based in the reality of a situation and informed by our experience and compassion. When we make judgments we are capable of making choices and then acting on the choice without harm to others or ourselves. It is hard to do this because our society and culture is aimed at left sided logic and we dismiss the right side. Or, counter culturally, we vaunt the right and dismiss the left. Each side lays its claim to our soul through its perception of time. The left side values only the ability to keep a schedule, the right – doesn’t recognize time restraints as valid because it does not understand their value. Brought together, the whole mind realizes that time is one of the single most important elements of our lives. We have only a finite amount of it and how we value our time reveals whether or not we value our life or the lives of others. We trend toward an ideal that time off from work should be unstructured and filled with either distractions or a sense of achieved “nothingness” and that….that is one of the most nihilistic views ever. It is poison to life because it clearly sends the message that the individual is not of value, is only to be passed until such point as you can go “do” for someone else again. In the comment, they said, “ Unless you're the Prime Minister or something and your days are jam-packed from 8 am to 8 pm, there's no need for such rigid structuring of one's day the way I see it. I can always stay 20 minutes longer at the end of the day.” Well, you are the Prime Minister…of your own country, which is more important than any other country, and you can be a productive and effective member of no union of countries unless you govern yourself as if you are important. Stay 20 minutes longer at the end of the day? Then you lose 20 minutes from your home life – what a cavalier attitude towards life – as if nothing matters and you can “catch up “ with everything. But comes a time when you can no longer catch up, when the what is left undone creates so much to do that your time to pursue your life and love is overwhelmed and made second. and then it doesn’t exist at all. Every waking moment is important. Every waking moment should be full of an excitement and energy because it is your life and you know that when you get done with whatever you are doing, you know where you are going next and you crave it, and you plunge into it with your full attention. This is your life. Of which you only get one. With a fairly decently planned beginning and an absolute certain but unpredictable end. Why would you wait to live it? Why would you live as if you had time to waste? find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
the profundity of dreams
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 02 Dec 2008 02:11 AM | ||
|
I still have that dream from yesterday burned into my head. Images that keep playing over and over and the sound of that voice, that voice asking that question and the answer that followed filled me with sadness. And I feel as if both the question and answer have a deeply personal meaning for me, which is why I am not writing what it is. I am holding it. Protecting it until I know what to do with it. Dreams have two purposes. One is to integrate our daily experiences into our history (which we can do to an extent on the fly but sometimes we need the full-imagined language of the right brain to draw the connections, see the patterns and gain from our experiences. Sometimes, what we dream comes from “somewhere else”. This is what Jung called the collective unconscious, a repository of experience from our history as a spIt is how we can know things without ever having learned them. It is where our sense of déjà vu comes from. It can be what gives us the feeling of having “known” someone before. And this type of dream is a communication to the dreamer. It is an integration of their being and conscious into what are common experiences. It is how someone in Texas can have the same dream imagery as someone in Bangkok and it means the same thing. I always hear “oh, I don’t dream.” but that is not true. You just do not remember your dreams. Dreams are the province of the right brain, which sees in images and is distinctly lacking in any sense of time. Dreaming is an emotional language and the more you begin to stretch yourself into your emotions, the more you will remember your dreams. And the video – a lot of my imagery in videos and drawings comes from my dreams, but that is not what I was about to write. One of the comments on the new pictures I put up on myspace asked what the place is. It is in the Cibola National Forest, at the base of the Sandias, not even a mile outside of Albuquerque. One of the many horseback riders who came over to see what I was doing (and rode through the film, it was a long day and took a long time to edit the framing so you wouldn’t see them milling around) stopped and said, “Since you are filming here you should know what this place is.” It was the original national forest office, built sometime early in the 1800s and the large space I run through up to the steps, is where people would come and park their horse and buggies before going hiking in the mountains. She said there are pictures of that. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
encumbered dreams
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 01 Dec 2008 04:00 PM | ||
|
I fell asleep and had one of those dreams in which you realize that something is definitely being communicated from your subconscious and a few other things to you. I wish I could write it done scene by scene but the one thing I am deeply aware of is it ended in an area I have never dreamed of before. God...I have all the images tumbling through my head and I know that within them lies yet another key to something that has been sitting around in the back of my mind. The dreamworld is so strange in what it reveals to us and settles for us. I have not nearly gotten done what I had wanted to on the RV, my mid day nap just absolutely interrupted everything but I woke up with this strange urgency. What is even odder is when I first got home I fell asleep and was literally yanked awake by someone talking to me. There was no one in the room and I knew who was speaking yet...so strange. You expect these things in th dark of night, not the middle of the day. I am addled. I am not sure if the goal is to wake up fully or fall back and let the inner workings of my mind do their thing. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
loving in darkness
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 01 Dec 2008 11:44 AM | ||
|
years ago, the consideration - the question was, whether or not to get involved with someone who had children...now, I am off the age where it may not only be a question of children, but of the care of parents or other important people in our lives that may have become ill or just need help in their age. Comes a point, when you realize that Love sits between you in a room and is holding out its hand, only to take it - you have to be willing to let go of some things that may not suit the reality of the house of love you are trying to create. We want, we desire to have someone all to ourselves and yet the reality is that we never do. Not even if we are on a deserted island, the other has their self, their history and dreams that come before us. They have always come before us because they have existed long before either knew of each other's existence. And in that lies the loneliness that can come as a surprise to each partner in a deep relationship. For the loneliness is the knowledge that no matter how well loved, no matter how much shared - there is never a point when the other "becomes you" and knows you completely. It is an impossibility because we change constantly. When we can give up the unrealistic expectation for someone to be our "all" or to "know us completely" we elevate ourselves out of a limited form of love for them that is based in their ability to "get" us and begin to see the totality of their life. And love them, and love what is in their hours. Sometimes, what exists in someones hours is a kind of darkness of love, the care of the sick, the care of the elderly, the presence of family that may not be of the best kind and you learn through loving the ability of the person to care for others, that you not only love them more, but you begin to love the ones being cared for and not see them as a burden. When you cease to see them as a burden, then the energy and care that your lover gives to them - ceases to be a burden on you, or a burden of guilt on them for the time it may take away from "your life together" - for again, they return home and see their act of love reflected in the love you have for them because of their actions. Ok...back to the royal blue walls, and I am adding a "sun yellow" trim. I very well may have to where sunglasses when I am at home. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
loving you
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 01 Dec 2008 09:53 AM | ||
|
loving you has made me an enemy of the state. And so opens "requiem for a god" and I just so excited to be almost plunged head first back into it, I found someone to bounce it off as I write. Having writing partners is something not to underestimated, just having someone to write with, never mind the critique aspect, is such a boon. I am off work early. Thus begins the winter. And I have stopped at Loews and purchased way too many things and am off to work on my new kaleidoscope home. What is it that makes romance powerful and gives it the kind of energy in which you never lose the excitement and passion? It is when you are loved for your actions and see your life reflected in the love of another person. You begin to want to do more, to bring them more, to celebrate with them all that is life. And they welcome the celebration. And you fulfill those roles for each other. Where each of you is bonded together out of the celebration of each other's life and the ability to celebrate with each other. Celebration will even get you through dark times because you never cease looking forward to the other. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
just because you put wheels on my grandmother
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 01 Dec 2008 02:10 AM | ||
|
does not make her a bus..."<br/><br/>there are reasons why I love the act of discovering people on myspace. Sometimes the things (like that quote) they write on their profile pages just change my day. And I am glad that I have made it a habit since day one to go and read the pages of anyone who is "a friend" whether I want to add them or they want to add me. I am also finally getting to the point where I can zoom around and start reading people's blogs. I think people are a lot more interesting then they give themselves credit for. I have a few "vanity" friendships (you know, the musicians that are more a way of saying "this is what I like" then having any dialogue with them), but for the most part I have communicated with everyone on my friend list and it has been an expanding experience.<br/><br/>'cept for those work at home things....<br/><br/>and I am up early trying to get ready for the work-a-day. I am just split and scattered. Well, that is what it feels like but I know it isn't really so. I was supposed to switch RVs this weekend but the US postal service lost my toilet so now I am inbetween, everything is a mess, I am still moving ahead but god, tripping over everything is a pain. I bought bronze and goldenrod and royal blue satin for the walls of the new one. The floor is a sea green faux marble and the ceilings a bordello red. In the end, I will have to get rid of nothing in order to fit my life in there and yet I will still have more room then before. Isn't that odd? But the spacial layout is so different, no more alley - an actual room.<br/><br/>And at some point I would like a house, only what I am doing with my life at the moment makes that a little impractical.<br/><br/>And on and on and on...I have the move to complete and two more things I am wrapped up in and then life is relatively back to normal...another week and a half and I am caught up. The typewriter will return and I can get back to new things. Is that how you would say it? Get back to new things.<br/><br/>696 more months to go.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/> <div style="text-align: center;"><hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"/><div style="text-align: center;">find out more about Cassandra Tribe<br/><a href="http://loveandwords.com/june08/calendar.html">performance schedule</a> - <a href="http://www.indierhythm.com/search.php?crit=cassandra+tribe&by=artist&x=14&y=12">audio recordings</a> - <a href="http://thegreedyheart.com">books</a> - <a href="http://loveandwords.com/june08/en_video.html">videos</a> - <a href="http://loveandwords.com/june08/en_writing.html">writing</a><br/><img style="width: 50px; height: 50px;" src="http://cassandratribe.bravehost.com/myPictures/logocolornotext.jpg"/><br/></div> <br/><a href="http://loveandwords.com/june08/littleflower.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">what is that little flower?</span></a><br/><hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"/></div> <br/> |
|||
medusa's child
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 30 Nov 2008 06:32 PM | ||
|
I have gotten enough questions today in email and comments to decide to do a post about this. I think a lot stems from me adding the signature to the bottom of my posts which links back to my performance schedule. I was originally putting together a small tour called "The Madness of Desire" (based on a piece of the same name), while doing that I got connected with a gallery and they had the idea of forming a catalogue of writers, artists and performers and then submitting this to various art collectors and allowing them to commission work from us to be performed. Thus was born the cabaret/salon of Medusa's Child. It is a series of five shows in Chicago, Louisville, NYC, Boston and Montreal (although we are discussing adding Miami as well). Each city has one or more collector that "bought" one of our performances. They suggested a theme that was in keeping with 'the Madness of Desire' and each of the performers involved have come up with 5 different pieces that are to be performed once and once only in the private venue of the collector for the audience of their choosing. Because of the nature of the performances, dates are not being released until just a few weeks before each show. For most of them, I am staying in the area a few other days and either booking into open venues, dropping by open mics and generally doing things that I normally can't do because I am not there. I am in the Chicago/Louisville area in December. NYC in January (and Arizona but that is unrelated) then Bosten and Montreal in Feb/March. What I like about 'Medusa's Child' is it has let me write some things that I think I would have delayed pursuing because of time. I am performing 'Monster' by request in each venue along with the commissioned work which is nice because it is such a long piece and not well suited for the unsuspecting. So there....that is the scoop... find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
little disease (final edit, a re-post for 2 people)
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 30 Nov 2008 01:57 PM | ||
|
(I am reposting this piece given the nature of the discussion in my blog and for two very specific people in my life...one just returned and one I am slowly coming to know) little disease Oh little disease, would you take from me, all that life has come to mean? If you were to look at me, if I were to place myself before your eyes without costume or masque - you could trace the history of my life by the path it has left on my body. Here is the scar from the time I fell down and discovered just how yellow I could become. A smooth healed place glows white on my wrist where my first love grew tired of my inattentive fits and used her teeth to voice her dissatisfaction. There are marks on my feet from a race run long in shoes just out of the box. A thin scar there...no here, from the shattering glass of a bomb thrown to scare. And my arms bear the various and sundry, marks and wounds, from a work too hard for most - but it cleanses me. What you cannot see, are the injuries within, and the little disease that lives inside me. My little friend, who most likely, will be my last company and end. It strikes me as funny. that I wear my past on my body yet the future is something you cannot see. Only I know it is already written deep within me. In my cells sleeping so sound, tossing fitfully when the nightmares come around. My whole life now, my whole life - which till now was so absent minded as not to feel the pain as I picked up my scars along the way, my whole life, is devoted to paying such close attention to my little friend's whims, that sometimes it seems, as if my little disease, is quite a bit larger than me. Sometimes. But I am learning that although my past may be tattooed and carved into me, it is nothing more nor less, than an interesting but harmless memory. And my future, so clearly written down, isn't even close to being here. In between. In between... there are years. I know, and take comfort in, the knowledge that unlike my youth and the years I passed it in, I do not go into the future alone. My little disease, my little friend, will be the type of companion who will always remind me to look closer and pay attention. Don't miss a thing. For unlike before, I am so very aware of my end and wish to live the years leading to it rather than read how they have been, from the pages of my skin. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
another lifetime
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 30 Nov 2008 08:46 AM | ||
|
so... on Sunday, March 28 2066 I am supposed to be dead. That, according to deathclock (dot) com. I ran it a few times and the dates slide around a bit but stay rooted within a 5 year timeframe, oddly enough, I will live longer if I do not give up smoking. Then again, my BMI and outlook are both good. Why on earth would I look such a thing up? Because statistically, barring accident or incurable disease, I have about 58 years to live. Another lifetime. I have already lived 40. In my 40 years I spent 16 of them being too young to do much of anything, 15 of them a mess as I tried to undo a lot of damage in my life (from others and from myself perpetuating what they began), 7 years fighting with myself as I tried to discover who I am, and only about 2 years actually beginning to step into my life and moving forward. I would like a slightly different pattern in the coming years. I am in the infancy of myself right now. We make a mistake when we adopt the outlook of "live each day as if it was your last" because we fail to include in that outlook what it takes to build towards a life. Not all things can come simply or with speed. We have to live towards life, knowing that there is a chance that today could be our last but acknowledging that the chances of that are kind of slim. And while we celebrate our beginnings, I think it would do wonders to celebrate our approaching end as well. To mark our accomplishments as we move forward. To know, that within the next 58 years there is a life I want to achieve and to be able to celebrate each passing milestone towards that life, I think, will do me better than to celebrate the passing from life, the distance from a beginning. What would happen to you, if you went and plugged in your information and got a date you could expect your life to be done by and looked at it every morning? How would that change how you live your life? I think it would serve to give you a little "ooomph" in the area of making decisions that bring you closer to living within your purpose and passion. I think it might make one pay attention to the people we love a great deal more. I think....it might just serve to bring back a sense of excitement to living, rather then waiting for life to occur. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing what is that little flower? |
|||
like a fish in the sea
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 30 Nov 2008 05:10 AM | ||
|
I remember when I was younger being asked what I wanted - did I want to be a "big fish in a little pond" or would I rather be a "little fish in a sea." I much prefer the sea. One of the things I have discovered is that if you truly have faith in what you do, if you truly love it - that nothing will stand in your way of doing it. What happens is that we create all these obstacles that rationalize our not doing something. Not enough money, not enough time, I want this, I want that...all that is a justification to not do something. And if you are, on faith and love, trying to do - its funny how one of the first things you have to get done is rid yourself of the ability of others who are not actually interested in doing anything but wasting your time and stopping you because they resent your energy and effort. One of the most insidious justifications is "its too much"...as if we have the time and life in which to wait for broad clear moments in which to contemplate things. Life requires the willingness to make mistakes. Big mistakes. Messy mistakes. To take chance that keep you up late at night and give you nasty habits where all you want to do is chew on things because you just don't know if everything is going to work out - but you do it anyway, because you believe. You can only fail if the only way you determine your success is from things outside of yourself. There....that is my morning rant. and how I responded to that email. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing |
|||
help me help you
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 30 Nov 2008 04:17 AM | ||
|
I went to bed at 6:30 last night. Why? Because I was avoiding an email I had just received that I needed...I needed to sleep on. Its a strange thing the way my life is evolving, the internet is such a huge part of it. I have always lived a life in which the people I have considered my friends have been scattered (as I have) all over the world but it wasn't until this past year that I really began "using" the internet in a way that it has become an integral part of my life - socially, artisically, business. It is where I get my news, it is how I continue my education, it is how I talk to people I would otherwise never meet or lose touch with. You could say "just make a phone call" but sheer number of timezones makes it impossible. Better to write and slide it under their door for when they have time and space to reply. But...last night I was heavy into avoidance and went to bed early. My close friends all share in common one trait, they actively "do". They do music, magazines, writing, performing, thinking, teaching, building but they do something. And when they get blocked or frustrated they actively seek resolution. They seek to find ways in which to bring their dreams to life. We are a group of busy people. But one of them asked me to consider last night, "doing for someone else" who is not inclined to do for themselves. As a means of getting them started. To take my "production talent" and put it in service of those who do not wish to produce themselves but to have someone else assume that responsibility. Oh....wait....I think in that last sentence I found my answer. I am more than willing to work alongside someone, to contribute my efforts to assist their own, but to "do it for them"? Why? It is not as if they are not capable of doing it themselves? The nature of support is not to assume the responsibility of living someone's elses life for them in hopes that while you are carrying them, they will eventually put down their feet and start walking on their own. I see that all the time in some people's relationships, how they put forth all the effort in hopes that their poor partner will be inspired and begin to rise to the occasion. Some people choose not to rise. They choose not to do. They sit and complain and want someone to deliver an answer on a silver platter that only requires a minimal amount of effort on their part to bring change. Its like...being well informed about issues. You can debate them with anyone, see the answers but in the end - you are wasting your time unless it is coupled with actual effort. Talking does nothing, teaching does everything, doing provides change. So no...I think I am going to write back and say that I am not inclined to offer my "production talents" to people who are unwilling to expend the effort to produce themselves. If they arrive with a raw video and need assistance with the producing, yes - of course, I can contribute my efforts. But my life and what I chose to do, gets the fullness of my energy first, from there and only from a full commitment to my life can I then offer assistance to someone who is already making the effort to stand. find out more about Cassandra Tribe performance schedule - audio recordings - books - videos - writing |
|||
hey there, cutie
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 29 Nov 2008 12:17 PM | ||
|
soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo if you know me...actually, if you don't know me at all and you have only seen a few pictures of me then it is fairly safe to make certain assumptions about me and my lifestyle. I am not the kind of woman who gets whistled at, neither to I give it a second thought about going somewhere alone or late at night. I get called 'sir' quite often. People move out of my way. So I forget. I forget what life is like for women who do not look or present like me. Until I slap a wig on my head and some makeup on my face to make a video and start to receive the kind of emails and blog comments that frequently begin with "hey there, cutie." What is most interesting to me is that, where as I most often get emails and comments about content and thought - I have a sharp rise in ones that could not care less what I am saying but are writing to play on the "perceived woman's needs". For sanctuary, commitment and desire. and it glaringly points out to me how our culture dismisses a woman as a human being and still sees her as an object to be taken less than seriously. In the conversations surrounding the elections I have noticed an unexpected aura of relief that "thank god it was a black man and not a woman who got in." I forget....because I pass so frequently as a man, because I work in a male dominated industry and lead, because my entire life experience revolves through doors that are typically associated with males that my experience is so very different from women who are more culturally feminine then me. and now I am reminded.... |
|||
Nuevo Video: Filemón de Cassandra Tribe (spanish w/english subtitles)
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 28 Nov 2008 01:32 PM | ||
|
|
|||
ouch
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 28 Nov 2008 11:25 AM | ||
|
Last night I was so happy and amazed that I got the video done that I was not prepared for the sheer headache of subtitling the little sucker. But now that is done as well, I do think it may be a cold day in hell before I sub "the rest of the world" (or at least till I have a solid block of time). But I am happy with it. I should have it up within the next few hours (I just have to launch myself out the door for coffee and free wifi). And it is a step, another step in understanding video and poetry. Another step in learning how to "paint" with these two mediums. In learning yet another thing....I am plotting and planning for the day after christmas to get both a real camera and finalcut pro. I am still using my little "hangs on the wall at walmart" cameras and $1.99 software and now I feel like I could take a professional set up and really fly.... now it is a race to get to the cafe, pick up my pumpkin pie, get the video up and go eat. |
|||
I dream in a city
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 28 Nov 2008 04:58 AM | ||
|
I think I have mentioned before that I don't (or very rarely) dream of people I know or places I have been. I dream of another country, so often and vividly I have even been able to sit down and map the cities and roads. It's quite large. And it grows, not so much in the discovery of new places but it grow like towns grow to cities in our waking life. Things change. Places evolve but never out of the realm of some kind of logic. And there is one city, that I have dreamed of infrequently during the years, but find myself in quite a bit of late. It is vast and tumbled like an Escher drawing, all yellows and golden hues, the ceilings of the palaces stretch so high you cannot see their end, the windows are sixty feet tall. And in one section of the palace, there is nothing but this immense library. Reading room are attached and they are ornate but much cosier nests and that is where I have been of late. Reading books with pages four feet by two. It is odd. But alright. In response to a comment I got, yes - I do believe that we choose to either pursue our lives or just maintain them. When we maintain our lives we become stagnated. But in this day and age, "maintenance" is overwhelming. It is a difficult thing to break free and find the energy and will and discipline to not give up on your life but to keep living and growing. But, it is a choice made either through action or passivity. People who are passively involved with their life seek passion and excitement in things outside of themselves - affairs, addictions, obsessions, the pursuit of things which - in the end - create nothing in their life but the continued sameness (for example, an airplane pilot who is passionate about flying but in the end the act of flying day in and day out remains the same, brings nothing but a kind of busyness you get very good at - it comes from the difference between choosing to live a life you can be good at and choosing to live a life that you are passionate about). Passive people are marked by "hope" in which the hope is based on something outside of themselves "allowing" things to happen. People who are actively involved in their life find passion and excitement within themselves and their exterior lives are marked by creation - new ideas, further goals and faith. Faith being the sure knowledge that you will bring about all you hope for, that those around you will bring about all they hope for, that together you can bring about your common goals. It takes faith to have love because it requires an absolute belief in your own ability to love and the other person's ability. It takes faith to achieve because it requires an absolute confidence in your potential and ability. It takes faith to live because it requires an absolute understanding that within the here and now, this is your one and only life. |
|||
oh my, I'm done
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 27 Nov 2008 05:55 PM | ||
|
I was expecting a far more tortuous route to the deadline for "Filemon", but it is done. I will have it up tomorrow. Also, I will be on the speakeasy cafe's one year anniversary show reading "Baucis and Philemon" complete. In english. With the little story. The video is for Philemon only and it is in spanish (albeit with english subtitles). Now what am I going to do for the rest of the evening? |
|||
brings up
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 27 Nov 2008 04:51 PM | ||
|
some questions, no?
<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7749932.stm">new in theaters</a> |
|||
home
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 27 Nov 2008 02:49 PM | ||
|
it didn't just rain, it thundered and poured and I was in the new "box" and thank god, it leaked like a sieve. When I bought the last RV I knew nothing about nothing and it wasn't until I was 1000 of miles down the road in the middle of the night in pitch blackness that I hit my first rain. The first thing that happened was the windshield wipers flew off and I had to pull over, that's when I noticed that the entire back of the RV looked like it had a waterfall flowing down. Hence the fact that I own oilskin jackets and leather hats, you never know what kind of weather you will be forced out into. And I am home today, no dinner - my thanksgiving is tomorrow (which I think is one of the brightest ideas I have ever heard of, it gives you a day between work and holiday to realign yourself). And I can't help but notice all the people around me for whom there is no dinner today, or tomorrow. And I am not talking about the homeless. I am talking about those with no family, no home other than what they can find within themselves if they are fortunate enough to have been able to do that. But mostly...they are forgotten...you can feel the discomfort as you look at them and they look away. As if not having a place to go to, to be welcomed in is some secret form of shame. When I lived in Providence my favourite thing to do on thanksgiving was to walk the Blackstone Boulevard path, I never heard as many different languages as I did on that day, all these people from other countries for whom the day held no special meaning would come and walk. It was always these old couples, walking arm in arm, leaning against each other and talking in words I could not understand - but I could listen to the song. The wind blows here. The rain falls and then moves on... my clarity of the morning is sinking into sentences...how people chose to distract themselves from lives that are inadequate by finding new ways to make themselves feel excited about something that is always not a part of how they live - and they never look at the choices they have made, they only look for something new when the excitement proves to temporary and leaves them in the stagnation of their days. |
|||
it happened again
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 27 Nov 2008 08:29 AM | ||
|
I was at the gym, in the shower and clarity decided to join me. I didn't mind, I was already having a conversation with the woman in the shower next door so it wasn't like I was completely wrapped up in a need for naked privacy. and I feel better, I have been a bit off all week, half of mind wrapped up in thinking about some things that I am not quite ready to talk about because I have been trying to disentangle the words. Now I have them in clear, straight sentences. Its funny how life goes, sometimes you feel like you are struggling with something and you just don't know what it is, but you can see it effecting everything about you. Then in a moment, all is revealed, and a burden is lifted. I know I have talked quite a bit about the move I have been on to reconcile the contradictions in my life, but the other thing that has begun to happen as a spontaneous after effect, is that I have also begun to be relieved of the "burden of living" and am beginning to live as if I actually am the driving force in my own life. I feel better with each day. I feel....I look forward to everything, even the nasty bits because none of it is happening to me, it is happening because of me. I don't know if that makes sense, but it is a shift in perception. And that shift is beginning to open up doors inside if myself that while they open to rooms that are full of stale air and piles of dust and garbage, only have to be cleaned out and kept open to become bright, welcoming spaces. |
|||
with both ears
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 27 Nov 2008 03:29 AM | ||
|
I have to admit to the one thing that will always bring me back to Walmart and that is their selection of "smart pet" toys. Last night, in a fit of desperation to try and keep the mad kitten from stomping all over the new video - I ran out to see if they had anything new. The last smart toy I bought...the cat didn't come near me for four days, she slept on top of it and was obsessed. This time I found the "Rocker Roller" (which is about as big as my RV when assembled) but it is this rocking sisal scratching thing with a side bar with a bar and a bell and a hanging toy (like a crib with a mobile, I know, I don't look to closely at this right now). And...I have not seen the cat since last night. I hear mad rocking and jingling behind me and then she goes and passes out in one of her tubes and I can get some things done. It takes both ears to listen. Sometimes, I imagine that instead of having two ears that are the same, we have two seperate ears that just happen to look a great deal a like. With one ear we listen to what is new, and with the other ear, we are listening to what we know. Too often, I find (and I catch myself doing sometimes and bring myself back) that we only listen with the one ear, the "new ear" so we may hear details, we may be able to accurately respond to the question "What did I just say?" by parroting the details back but unless you are listening with your other ear as well - you miss what the conversation means. With the ear that listens to what you know, you are not so much listening to what you know about yourself, but what you know of the other person. It is what allows you to become involved in the conversation, to generate a connection. It also prevents you from endlessly relating conversations to yourself only because you begin to relate them first to the other person (which makes sense, since they are speaking). It makes the other person more interesting, it makes you more involved and interesting and it prevents you from falling back on judgments made without all the information. Funny I should be thinking about this on this type of holiday. |
|||
the activity of love
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 26 Nov 2008 03:40 PM | ||
|
(from Erich Fromm's, The Art of Loving) ...Love is an activity; If I love, I am in a state of active concern with the loved person, but not only with him or her. For I shall become incapable of relating myself actively to the loved person if I become lazy, if I am not in a state of constant awareness, alertness, activity. Sleep is the only proper situation for activity, the state of awakeness is one in which laziness should have no place. The paradoxical situation with a vast number of people today is that they are half asleep when awake, or half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep. To be fully awake is the condition of not being bored, or being boring - indeed, not to be bored or boring is on of the main conditions for loving. To be active in thought, with one's eyes and ears, throughout the day, to avoid inner laziness, be it in the form of being receptive, hoarding, or plain wasting one's time, is an indispensable condition for the practice of the art of loving. It is an illusion to believe that one can seperate life in such a way that one is productive in the sphere of love and unproductive in all other spheres. Productiveness does not permit such a division of labor. The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either... |
|||
independence
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 26 Nov 2008 10:16 AM | ||
|
sometimes...the identities we choose for ourselves predispose us to a certain kind of "judgment" without our even being aware of it...I have talked a bit over the past year about my shifting understanding of my own identity. If I were to distance myself and look at it all in cold pieces, all these elements of my identity have not change but there has been a tremendous shift in which ones I consider to be my primary identities and which come second or third. most of all, the totality of my person comes before any individual piece because I think I have finally realized that there are no individual pieces and the more I kept trying to pull them out and separate them, the more contradiction and discord I was causing in my life. Do you know how I know that it is the holiday season? Not by the sales or signs or early mangers and lights...its the large flashing signs on the highway that warn "DWI Super Blitz: Cops are everywhere." At work we talked about Thanksgiving. On the radio they were taking calls on whether or not it was politically correct to celebrate the holiday. They talked about the two elementary schools we have here, one on each side of the street and it is a tradition that one school dresses as indians and the other as pilgrims. Mind, my crew is all Native. They don't celebrate our "thanksgiving" but have an equivalent celebration because what is being celebrated is hospitality. Not conquest. Not new countries. Not families. It is the act of offering to a stranger who is in want without thought to what you will gain from them, and it is the act of sharing what you have in your life - not what you create for a day to give an impression of. |
|||
waking with delusions
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 26 Nov 2008 02:13 AM | ||
|
I woke up virtually singing, my headache of the past four days...gone, and I also woke up under the deep delusion that I speak Spanish. I don't. Not well. Actually I speak like a hamster and know enough to make myself understood at work but between learning a little cuban spanish, a little mexican spanish and then substituting some german and french for words I do not know or, if all else fails, just saying the english with an accent....I get by. But I spent four hours last night editing the video, listening to myself speak almost flawlessly and forgetting that if I hadn't written the damn thing I would have absolutely no idea what I was saying. But it is such a beautiful sound, it fits the "mood" of the piece so well. And the mood of the day is just wild with hope. Just wild. Oddly enough, I have received three gifts this week. Well, one and then one will come today and one will come within the next few days. And these gifts are completely unexpected and are just making my mood soar. One of them was a sheet of writing and two of them are books. One of the books I can only have for four days - I have four days to read 800 pages and still get all my things done. In my life, the only gift I have ever truly wanted was books. Just books, nothing else. And to suddenly be receiving books for no good reason just...makes me feel like I am doing right in life. Its like pencils. Books and pencils can reduce me to the sheer joy of a four year old. go figure. |
|||
at one point
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 25 Nov 2008 07:28 PM | ||
|
I think I said what a strange day this has been...I was able to chalk most of it up to a severe sinus headache from a coming storm, but the rest of it...its like there are strange things circling in the air. and I had the rare chance to talk to someone (in person) who had just read the book and really, I think that was one of the best conversations we have ever had. I liked (not only that she liked the book and was sharing it with other people) but I liked that it formed some connection between us, that she could say that "every time she opened it she found something new, a new meaning than what she had read before." And that makes me feel good. almost as good as seeing everyone begin to talk to each other in the blog, you have no idea...no idea how after a two hour drive with a headache and irritability to stop at a gas station and log on and see someone's opinion, someone's thoughts posted just refuels me. So different...I swear there is a part of me that would be more than happy to just sit all day and cross post the comments. I bought a 4 x 8 piece of plywood today. That is about four steps heel to toe, turn and then take 8 steps heel to toe. From this I will construct a kitchen, a closet and an office for "the box". It is starting to come together and everything is getting tucked into its small spot. It is beginning to make me ache to travel though, it has been almost 3 years since I have taken a month or two to travel and see and hear and listen. I think I am coming up on the time to do that again. |
|||
the politics of self-hatred
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 25 Nov 2008 08:15 AM | ||
|
what a strange day....it has the cast of serious snow to it. I got an email...from one of you all, and...it is not the first of its type that I have received (I answered it and forewarned them I was going to use it as a jumping off point) in which the story, not a question really, but just the story told to me was of a life hemmed in by outside influences that the person was letting dictate the quality and choices in their life. But the thing about claiming membership to a group, any group is that the basis of all membership is that there is someone who is considered "not a member". And then that statement is followed by the most destructive word in the english language "because". That word is how we rationalize anything, for better or for worse. And when we begin to rationalize why we are members of something and someone else is not that can be very, very dangerous territory. And not so much in the opening it leaves for racism, classism and every other -ism you can think of - but think of the damage that can be done if the membership you claim is to a "support" group. I am all for support groups, I think they help enormously to recover or overcome very many issues and help to find give you the strength to keep going as you make a new way of living a habit....but....if your membership in the group is based upon you having an issue, and non-members are viewed as (not not having the issue) but people without the benefit of the enlightment of the group (of which having an issue is a requirement) at what point do you ever heal? Can you heal if part of your identity is rooted in having the problem? Part of growing, in any aspect - growing up, healing, recovery is taking the next step towards fulfilling your potential and part of what comes with that is we leave the groups we were members of and join another. Eventually...hopefully...we become the type of person who can stand alone and needs no group for identity but is capable of relating and forming relationships with other individuals based upon commonalities not common identities. But groups, to survive, need to constantly present the message that you would not survive without the group. That you are less then and incapable without them. That you can do nothing but fail. They breed a kind of self-hatred in the interest of surviving. It is a contradiction, that something so good could also hold such a bitter side but...as in all things...to each its season and if you try to cling to something beyond its usefulness it will become a burden. |
|||
spell check
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 25 Nov 2008 02:17 AM | ||
|
I should really use spell check when I blog, then again...what difference would it make? My keyboard is full of sand and what isn't crunching when I type has been subjected to gummy cat paws. I also found out yesterday that those little things you plug into a cigarette lighter so you can run your lap do explode (yes they do!) and was shocked and appalled at the cost of getting another one with a surge protector in it. Then again, I came home to find my rebate check from the state which was mysteriously the same cost as the new inverter. It's an odd thing to back up and look at your life and ask the question, "What do I do now that I would be happy doing 24 hours a day, seven days a week?" Things shift and change at work. We moved from emptiness into a discussion of Paul (not the beatles, the saint) and the one man's discovery that Paul made the Christian church and everything that he knew of as "Christianity" did not come from Christ but from Paul's interpretation. When I was in Divinity School, one of the requirements was that you chose to learn Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic so you could go back and read the oldest writings possible and read them as the words were defined then - not the ever changing interpretations we put on them. It was a revelation (pardon the pun) to read what was written and what it meant versus the piles of "translation" and subsequent documents of faith. We talked about the history of women in Christianity, how before Paul they were leaders, and after - they quickly descended into imperfect chattel. He just kept looking at me going "everything they taught me was made up, wasn't it" and I had no answer but "yes". We're talking about the law of contradiction and excluded middle and he comes over and we swap a few sentences then he goes back over to the hole he is working in and just stews for a bit. He is in a quandary because he is supposed to be both Roman Catholic and a Medicine Man, he is going through what has historically been known as "the dark night of the soul." As one who has traveled through that very dark passage I know all I can do is offer him answers that in the end mean nothing because they are my answers, not his. There are universal laws and truths, but our answers are written in our language - not anyone else's. |
|||
annie lenox performing last night
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 24 Nov 2008 03:06 PM | ||
|
|
|||
my long luxurious hair
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 24 Nov 2008 08:24 AM | ||
|
I let the guys at work see some of the stills from the new video and they didn't even recognize me in my "brunette sensuous" wig and makeup. I am tempted to post a few but I will wait. I hope to have the video up by late thursday or friday. I think it weirded them out. They are used to me, have even seen me at public functions in a suit but me in with long hair and makeup was just...a shock to the system. It is just going to be one of those goofy days. "The Conversation" has started up again. We have all been doing our homework and somehow, the one who lingered on the threshold, that we thought had missed the open door, has stepped through. It is like he has found something inside himself that gives him a new weight. Today the topic is Aristole's axiom "emptiness is impossible" |
|||
time
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 24 Nov 2008 02:14 AM | ||
|
right as I went to sleep last night I thought of a way to do the english alongside the spanish of Philemon, which is much more happy making then thinking of making two different videos. Modern time is often viewed as a straight line that starts at point A and ends at point B. At any given point on the line, you are in the present, the past is behind you and the future lies ahead. In circular time, again - at any given moment, where you started and where you are going are different and inaccessible to where you are and at some point, the future ends where you began and the cycle starts all over. Like the old story called the "seven arrows" and the warrior is given the charge of traveling the world gathering the seven arrows from various people and animals that will give him understanding and the last one, is in the hands of the teacher who sent him on his journey and the teacher is standing in the exact spot in which the warrior asked the question. In the spiral of time, at any given moment, where you are is also where you began and where you are going, there really is no beginning and there really is no end as even the shortest of spirals, if you keep turning them, wraps about itself and appears to continue both rising into the air and drilling towards the ground. I am liking the spiral more and more because it explains more things, how the past can repeat and yet be so different and be the thing that infuses the future. How coincidence can happen that is really connected to other things. How in an instant you can be confronted with something that reminds you of what has been and also provides the key for the future. But like I said, in spinning, depending on the direction of the turn, the spiral goes up, or the spiral goes down. monday, tuesday, wedensday and then four days off. Four whole days. I am endlessly amused by all the speculation in America about who will be announced as Treasurer when Europe and the rest of the world have known who for about a week now. Thank god for the BBC. I would not know what went on in my own country if I relied on our media solely. |
|||
speak for me slowly (rough edit)
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 23 Nov 2008 06:18 PM | ||
|
(this is the one I spoke of a few weeks ago, about someone I know who is Zia) speak for me slowly |
|||
by what is done and undone
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 23 Nov 2008 04:59 PM | ||
|
it is hard...especially around a "family" holiday to be thrown against people who mean well (maybe) but haven't really done you the service of paying attention to anything in your life. Harder still should the two of you have been faced with similar situations and one, has chosen to go forward and the other has chosen to repeat the behavior of before. Then you are left with conversations that have a kind of edge to it as the refusal to hear that there are different choices is valid. The need for validation by both of you having done the same thing is overwhelming. Selective deafness sets in and I have noticed, that I seem to be having the same conversation over and over - as if there is hope that if the questions are asked enough times, the answers will change. When I came to New Mexico, no matter the reasons I had on the surface, my underlying drive was that something about all the things that were coming together to bring me here was so very important to my life. I did not know whether this was going to be a good thing, or a bad thing. I just knew that if I did not take that chance, that step - I was missing a door that I was not sure was ever going to open up again. And it has been hard. And yes, my being here has turned into one of the most important times of my life so far. But I have noticed, in the past few months, that everything has spiraled around to overlap itself and I am in the exact same position I was exactly seven years ago. Down to buying an RV in late November. And the very same things are repeating themselves - only...I have paid attention and I have learned. And I am making different choices. I have looked up, not just behind me and not just at my feet. It is such an intensely weird feeling. As if all these things that brought me here are getting ready to spit me back out into the world and I leave so much stronger then I was before. I leave again, to do all those things I thought I was going to do seven years ago, but my fear was too great and I kept walking up and down the same small part of the spiral. The video looks good. I have a full time job ergo, I am only doing the spanish version. I shot the english but that can come later. It is....a lot of work. |
|||
re-verse
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 23 Nov 2008 09:40 AM | ||
|
today at 3pm EST come listen to re-verse where classic poetry is read by today's voices. Come listen. I'll be reading "The River Merchant's Wife: A letter" written in 762 by Li Po |
|||
the changing effect of things
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 23 Nov 2008 07:44 AM | ||
|
I was thinking about when I brought a poem to the open mic and announced I would read it, but not say who wrote it and at the end, everyone got three guesses. Lord Byron, Carly Simon and a whole lot of guesses but nobody got that it was Dolly Parton who had written what I read. The context in which we place things, the different emphasis that we choose, what we leave out on occasion can change the meaning of the whole. I stopped by my old gas station (the one where I used to go for breakfast and conversation on the weekends) and we all sat around viewing the rushes from yesterday. They have read "Baucis and Philemon" and were shocked that in the way I had begun to film it, Philemon has transformed herself from an ancient tale into a very modern story of the end of a relationship. I still struggle with whether or not I will do an english version. I start to rationalize it by saying "well, I do 'Leela Raquel' for them." We shall see... |
|||
how we start
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 23 Nov 2008 03:15 AM | ||
|
I keep trying to figure out where I start. Not in any grand philosophical sense, but in a very real down to earth sense. I think I have finally figured out that my week ends on Friday and starts on Saturday because usually, so much has happened that when I get to that point where I know I have two days...what I planned to do on them the last week just doesn't fit the bill anymore. So again, I shift and change. The only constancy in life is change. Within ourselves there is a core that defines us - what type of person we are and that is consistent although it evolves (up or down the scale depending on your choices), that is the part that allows us to have faith. If we can have faith in the type of person that we are, then we can begin to have faith in how we will act and behave. If we can have faith in ourselves, then and only then can we have faith in others. Too often we get together with someone because they express a faith in us that we do not feel. Little wonder then that such relationships are so challenging and often do not work. You have to be able to make your own choices based in a faith that you sustain before you can even attempt to have faith in someone else, because conversely sometimes we will substitute faith in someone else for our own - making of ourselves second class citizens and in Love, we do not need "fans", we need the presence of someone who is capable of taking care of their own life. |
|||
I turned around
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 22 Nov 2008 06:06 PM | ||
|
and the hours just flew, I have been deep into things for two hours and have an unbelievable amount of windows open on my laptop. No wonder my battery literally exploded this week (it popped its case). Now it is home and finally, back to the video - a little edit, a little rehearse... You have no idea how much I really enjoy making these videos. I kept trying to get to one this summer but it never worked out. But now I am rolling and thinking about the next - however, and this is a huge however, I am really, preferring how Philemon sounds in spanish and am teetering on the edge of giving the english version short shrift or the plain old heave ho. We shall see. Hopefully my neighbors are too hungover to do a repeat of last night. |
|||
moments
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 22 Nov 2008 04:05 PM | ||
|
I spent all afternoon working in the new RV, building and finishing, trying to move it all along before the snow hits. And it hit me, in a single moment, how my life has come full circle - only I am so much different then I was before and I wonder where I will go from here... more and more I think that time is a spiral and not a line that goes from beginning to end, we go along curves and pass over where we have been before and if we chose to look up, we can see the future...and if you don't choose to look up, there is no telling if we will lose our way and wind up going back down the same path, or going further. |
|||
random horses
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 22 Nov 2008 01:46 PM | ||
|
I had a problem with random horses today. I was out shooting part of "philemon" and first I got a $75 dollar ticket for not having seen the itty bitty box behind a bush that wanted $3 for me to enter the national forest. Then I was filming away and had the camera set up and was doing my thing and heard this sound and this horse and rider came galloping over the rise and onto the scene. So we hung out and talked. Then two more came by. Mind you, I have been looking at this place and trying to figure out what to shoot there for four months and never...ever...never ran into anyone else there. At least I wasn't in full "brunette sensuous" wig regalia complete with fake nails. I filmed the horse. He was eating. It doesn't have anything to do with anything so I won't use it. and to answer someone's question, no I don't post or cross post all comments...I mean, I do have a life and a full time job...but it is getting easier to do and of course, emails are always welcome. Someone commented (and I did cross post it) about the whole marriage rights thing (sort of, kind of mentioned in passing) and I have been thinking about that all day - that whole issue boils down to individual - human rights. The fact that the business contract of marriage became a religious matter and then bopped its hybrid **** back into politics is a whole other story. But for now, suffice it to say - marriage does beget monogamy and monogamy does not imply marriage. Ok...I have three hours of daylight left and have to jam on the car. |
|||
silly me, the question is monogamy
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 22 Nov 2008 03:57 AM | ||
|
I would like to do profane things to my neighbor. Bad enough that I fell asleep after work and screwed up my whole evening and was awake at 10. But then he came over at 10:30 to pound on the door and ask me if I wanted a shish-ka-bob. His music was going, my RV was rocking to the bass and I finally gave up any hope of recording and passed out. Only to wake up periodically and still here the pounding music. I am tempted to just go "unplug" his house. Living in RVs gives you all sorts of strange things to do. But, he and his GF have never lived in one before, have no idea about this communities culture etc. and we are all suffering his learning process. So grumpy and disorganized, I went online to poke around and see if I could lift myself into thoughts other then torturing him. And found a bulletin on myspace that simply asked "Monogamy - collected opinions?" and I found my cup of tea... Monogamy is not given but grown. It rises from the depth and richness of a relationship in which each person, through developing a strength with the other through emotional and sexual intimacy, views them with such value and respect that they become almost irreplacable. Bonds such as these do not come quickly or easily, but develop over time - through shared vulnerability, joy and grief and the willingness to show up emotionally. There is an expectation these days that "intimacy" (the combined type) establishes itself within that very first moment that you feel close or understood by another. It takes a lot more to gain intimacy with someone and only after that can you begin growing a lasting intimate love that is held by monogamy. Sex does not grant you intimacy, neither does a moment of emotional bonding. Intimacy is like Love, in which it is one word we use to try and hold all these different pieces. And while no one person can be everything for someone, only one person can be the place in which we know we can bring all of ourselves (but don't have to), that is the beginning of making a "home" with someone. And when you begin to do that, not only do you begin to respect and value this person in an "irreplaceable" way but you begin to see that some things, like sex, do create the kind of bond that is not only deeply personal - but has the double edge sword of both healing/bonding and hurting/distancing. Intimacy, a huge component of it, is based in the safety that we find in the arms of another. When we choose to limit that safety for another then we lessen the intimacy. Yet, conversely (and this is why relationships are so hard) you cannot create intimacy through establishing a kind of safety that in the end is trusted by neither because it has no basis in reality. There is a level of intimacy that opens when you know that both of you have chosen each other above all else because of your knowledge of each other - not because of your fear of losing them or desire to create that deep bond "as quick as you can". And...and...I truly believe that there is not one "sexual group" left that can claim the stigma of not having "role models" or a "culture" that supports growing lasting relationships. None of us do anymore - not **** or straight or bi or whatever. The expectation is on the "thrill of love" and not the reality which is infinitely more passionate yet does involve the passage of time needed to create history and understanding. And not just of the other, but in most cases, we enter relationships without really understanding ourselves and part of growing a relationship is the very first confrontation with the efforts of growing yourself - and most people balk and say "the bloom is off the rose" and start looking for that first thrill again. I am not even going to launch into my rant about "making babies" to strengthen relationships except to say that children are not glue. There...I feel fully awake and not a drop of coffee yet and look at that - he finally turned his f---ing music off. |
|||
the body reveals
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 21 Nov 2008 08:41 PM | ||
|
I am gearing up to shoot the video for "Philemon" and one of the things that I do as part of the process is, in character, I take a bunch of test photos to decide on lighting, angle etc. Most people do not realize how asymmetrical they are until you start looking at your face from right and left angles. Waaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy back when, I had a college professor that was teaching us about the right side of the brain and the difference in its functions from the left. She illustrated the differences by bringing in a camera and having us stand in front of it, facing forward, close our eyes and then when she said "open", you opened your eyes and she took a picture of your face. Then she went back to her darkroom and developed the pictures, first normally, then she flipped the negative and did it again. Then she cut your face down the middle and put the two "lefts" together and "two rights". It is easier, these days to do it in the computer. Take a shoot of yourself face on (do the close and open eyes things because it relaxes your face), then take one image that is normal, flip the other one, cut and paste to make two new faces. The one image is an illustration of what you would look like if you were all left brain, all the time. And the other is the face of your right brain. At the time, my hair was slightly longer on top and I had kind of a part in it. The left brain portrait wound up with two parts, one of the left and one on the right and it looked like I had this doric column on top of my head, my face was narrow and all hard lines and angles. The right brain portrait, I looked like I was mad and had just run into a wall, my face was so broad and just crazed, everything - lips, nose, eyes was strikingly pronounced. Its a really fascinating thing. In the videos, I have learned based on this, depending on the voice - which side of my face you will see. Mostly I shoot the right, but for Philemon (which has two characters) one will be shot from the right and the other from the left. |
|||
back to panic
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 21 Nov 2008 09:40 AM | ||
|
a certain somebody who might be nicknamed HP is back at it again, only this time at least someone else is nipping it in the bud and going to be banishing him to a far dark corner for most of December. In talking about it we all decided that the problem with panic (particulry if you are in a leadership role) is that it makes you seem incapable of doing your job. That it kills morale and spreads more panic is sort of a side note. People lose respect for you and begin to think you are incompetent. I have had days when (by accident) I have set an entire building on fire (huge flames, shooting up off the foundations) while there just happened to be the once a month town, state and owners meeting on site and I have learned that I do not run screaming "fire!"...I nonchalantly walk into the meeting and begin to calmly gather all the fire extinguishers and say we need to log and submit the charge records and boy don't I wish I could do it inside since it is nastily hot (or cold, season depending) outside. If you have ever been in a group that is just waiting...waiting for either someone to take charge and tell them how to move forward or someone in charge to panic and say "all is lost" you know the kind of palpable energy that comes off people. fortunately for every HP, there are conveniently placed small coops to go stuff them in. |
|||
loss
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 21 Nov 2008 12:15 AM | ||
|
the temptation always, when someone comes to you in pain or hurt from their loss - whether it be the death of a loved one or the demise of a relationship, is to make them feel better. To let anything fall out of your mouth (and usually a lot of it) in hopes that there will be one thing that will provide a magic key and give back to the other person their happiness and hope. I have rarely found anything that works. There are all these cliches about "time heals" and "it gets better" and while that may be true saying things like that only shuts people down in a way from talking about their grief and pain. Part of the healing, part of the getting better is getting it outside of yourself like a nightmare that once you say it aloud when you are awake, doesn't go away, but doesn't become all consuming either. We all die. That is a fact and it amuses me when I encounter people who refuse to even give that a moment's thought because "it's too depressing" or they want to "focus on life." But what better way to start focusing on life then in a true acceptance that we have only a limited time and that amount of time is something that no one can predict. Feel the truth of that statement and suddenly, life becomes something you are very interested in. You become a bit more focused. Loss is...overwhelming. Your entire universe becomes unbalanced and you reel from your safe nest and totter along the narrow branch with all of us gathered below, holding our breath because ever since you built that nest - you ceased to fly and use your wings and now that you may need them - no one knows if they still work. But they do. They always do. They say one of the "exercises" to do to maintain a healthy and passionate relationship is to always allow yourself moments to visit the potential end, whether that be the loss of your partner through death or the demise of the relationship. Keeping in touch with the possibilities reminds us to not only cherish what we have, but tempers our anger and inclination to just react. It makes us more willing to seek solutions where otherwise we might be willing to throw something away and in the end, the study proved that people who actively imagined the possible end of their current relationship were not only happier in that relationship but should it actually end, they recovered quicker. Nothing is written in stone. And while you can have faith in anything you want, the only faith you need is in the fact that life goes on. |
|||
the general was altered
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 20 Nov 2008 03:51 PM | ||
|
I just paid $1.90 for gas. and came home to find out that Gen. Dunwoody's photo was altered by the DOD. The AP has pulled it. Everyone is concerned that first there was a house, and then there was a flag. I am wondering what happened to the small bags under her eyes. The polish model refuses to comment on the investigative article that wonders why she doesn't have a belly button. Her agent will only say, "She is not an alien." and they airbrush a bb into her photos. Madonna and Guy Ritchie are finalizing their divorce (now everyone repeat after me "who cares?" and Nancy Pelosi told the Car Industry to "show us a plan, then we will show you the money", and her Republican counterpart came out and directly said "the auto maker's need to get their act together." oh yes... and it is international Philosophy day. |
|||
loving the robot
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 20 Nov 2008 12:56 PM | ||
|
I have talked enough about my job and even posted pictures on occasion that I think that most of you have a fairly good idea of where I spend my day. But I have never mentioned the robot. It creeps me out. It about...four and a half feet tall and almost six feet long and about three feet wide and split in the middle so it can turn and twist as it moves around. Its actually a remote controlled compactor and it has these two drums for wheels that flatten the earth. I cannot stand working near it. It puts my teeth on edge. And I wound up working next to it and then talking to one of the guys who recently lost a good friend. I think, from talking to him, it was the first "major" death in his life and as we talked, his face did that odd twitching thing. How is it we come to appreciate our own loss? Is it from the words of comfort it gives us to say to another? |
|||
living in boxes
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 20 Nov 2008 09:18 AM | ||
|
when I was younger I refused to rent anything less than a 3 bedroom apartment for myself because I needed the "space". Literally, I never had furniture, just a desk and a bed and a table (clothing was conveniently kept on the floor) - but I needed the space in a way that I didn't really begin to understand until much later. I needed the space around me, not to fill with beautiful things that I cherished, or to allow for me to seat groups of friends for vibrant nights - I needed to know that the space around me was empty - no one was in it and no one was going to come in. What I was doing I think, was trying to rebuild my interior life, my interior sense of safety through cushioning it with a vast exterior boundary. And slowly, that boundary began to need less and less room as the one inside me became more defined till now, the thought of cramming myself in a shoebox doesn't bother me a whit. I would like someday to have a bit more "accomadating" surroundings, but for now - it lets me do what I need to do. When I was younger, the need for space dictated where I lived, how I lived etc and so forth. Every so often I sit and actually draw a map of the things I have placed around me and try to figure out which things are external replacements for something I need to build and/or heal internally. my god, have you ever had these "PB4Me" peanut butter lunch cup things? they are the best...just enough, we're all slowly preparing for the colder weather and switching a really high protein diet, I think the crew bought a 5 pound bag of nuts and seeds they keep on the back of my tail gate like it was some kind of strange blue birdfeeder, but it keeps you going. |
|||
On the Radio - today at 7pm EST
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 20 Nov 2008 02:56 AM | ||
|
November 20, 2008 7pm EST <a href="http://blogtalkradio.com/speakeasycafe">speakeasycafe</a> reading "Angel" from 'angel' and 'the greedy heart' (I know..if you have been following this page, I keep changing my mind but I swear this is it.) |
|||
oh my god
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 20 Nov 2008 02:34 AM | ||
|
Ok...I just did my first round of "making like a bee" and it took me an hour. But I already see ways I can sort of "do a little bit of this" and "do a little bit of that" and make it a bit more manageable. For now though, I am going to limit the effort to myspace, curve ning, cultvault ning, blogger and the home blog. I think it will automatically feed to facebook and two of the others. But...even so...it was so cool for me to start to see everyone together, its like we all stepped into the same room. Which is kind of freaky... Yesterday I was emailing someone and I started to sound like I was some lost cause from the 1800s saying things like "I love the internet radio open mics because it just blows my mind to hear someone from another part of the country reading their poetry..." but it does. Even with the internet, our worlds are not nearly as global as we would like to think. Mostly, we go on line and recreate the boundaries of the one we have in real life (only slightly bigger). I like that even though some of the sites that have my blog are very narrowly defined social groups - now we're creating a new kind of group that is defined differently (and yet you don't have to leave the comfort of the one you are in). Gardens...all this garden metaphor in my life. I still have to talk more about the whole "home" thing. That was wall to wall garden metaphor. Then again, if I am going to have one in my life, I so much prefer the effect having a metaphor that is about a living and growing thing that you have to take care of then its opposite. Building a frame of reference for your life and how you understand the world is just that, an act of building. You don't have to finish what you started if mid way through you see that you could change the design to make it better. Just change the design and keep on going. I keep running into these people this week who seem so trapped by their frame of reference. What we beleive (should) evolve as we go if only to deepen our understanding of it. oy...how much coffee can I have? |
|||
the little flower
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 19 Nov 2008 04:43 PM | ||
|
I am not quite sure how I am going to do this but here is my idea... I have been writing this blog for over a year now. At first I didn't post any of the comments and people sent me emails or comments that I responded to either personally or in the blog (which I still do). Then I started fooling around with opening up the blog to comments to some degree of success. This blog is mirrored on 12 sites, 7 of them social sites. 35,000 people a month read it. The more the comments come in, the more a dialogue is beginning to develop that goes beyond me and I keep bouncing between the sites and responding and catching myself thinking something like..."god, steamboat jim would just eat up this comment." But he'll never see it unless I write it into a blog and that kind of changes everything. Unless...unless (and here is my "as if I don't have enough to do" idea...unless I start treating my blog like a series of small flowers and I am the bee and "cross pollinate" them with the comments, it wouldn't matter how you had found me, or what site you were on - you would get to dialogue with people you most likely would never cross paths with who are interested in the same thing... I am going to try it out and see how it goes, if it is even feasible for me to do timewise...keep watching for the comments and you'll know when I have started... |
|||
it only takes me
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 19 Nov 2008 01:10 PM | ||
|
so long of suffering to start to put two and two together - take off the long underwear, have some water and suddenly the world looks like a brighter place. It is amazing to me how sometimes we completely overlook the simplest thing that could be done to start "unwinding" ourselves. Last night I flew through all the things I had to do just so I had the clear time and space to do nothing but sit and write a letter to someone important. Not type a long email. But get out the pen and the paper and write words and sentences that I had chosen, rather than just my typical flow. I read this quote at the bottom of someone's email (cannot remember the name of the person who said it or who had it - it was one of those newsletter type things) but it was something like " Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention. life can be art even a kind of work like the kind you go to everyday and do more or less the same thing I am calm. I am off to search out a bunny. |
|||
stop and go
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 19 Nov 2008 09:49 AM | ||
|
I love New Mexico. I love how a little bit of wind can just wipe out all your internet connections and towns can't understand why an entire job sit is freaking out because they want us to turn the gas on in the pipelines beneath the site. Where they are still excavating and occasional detonating. Why on earth would we be fighting them so badly on this? I got up at midnight and have been a little off and a little spot on all morning. I feel abit like I am in a cloud but everytime I try to get myself back on track, there is some surprise distraction (usually in the form of a little man with a very large napolean complex). Let me go see if I can change my attitude. |
|||
the shower of epiphany
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 19 Nov 2008 03:18 AM | ||
|
I seem to have these epiphanies in the shower at the gym, maybe its the hot water I don't have to pay for. But it occurred to me how for the past two weeks or so at work, we have all had this sensation of standing within opportunity. The thoughts flying, throwing around all these possibilities - the sheer excitement of coming to work to get back to talking about what was going on. And one of the things, I realized in the shower, that made all this so exciting and intense, was the rare occurrence of being in a group of people in which everyone was experiencing the same thing. Not the same exact thing, but that opening or opportunity. And now...everything is calmer. Each of us took what was our opportunity - except one man, who questioned so much and wanted answers, sure answers before he made the leap that he is still wandering around trying to start the discussion again but each of us has taken a step in our own direction and we are no longer "back there." Strange to see, how although we all faced the same questions and emotions and excitement, how the opportunity and change manifests in each of our lives is very, very different. And the man "back there" wants us to stop and stay awhile between the doors and he doesn't quite see that the doors through which we have gone have closed behind us. Harry the truck driver (who is also a rising stock investor, he has done exceedingly well these past four months) says quite bluntly, "Most people are lazy, they don't want to hear that they have to do the work and invest the time and it is constant. They want you to give them an answer that sounds good, doesn't take too much time for them to memorize and then leave you to do the work. That way, if it fails, they have someone to blame. Part of trying things is they fail. Sometimes in a big way, but you have to accept that is a part of it." Harry told me some things about the stock market I didn't know and then said, "None of this is a secret, the NYSE publishes this list every year and it tels you which stocks will lose 23%." Good for me to know, should I ever have money I can accept losing. But now, as the phone line is down on my debit card and I am scraping together dimes for a cup of coffee - for now, I think I will just listen and learn. |
|||
pro-ana, pro-mia
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 18 Nov 2008 06:16 PM | ||
|
I read the BBC news. One of the stories they covered this week was the rise of respectability on social sites of various pro-anorexia (pro-ana) and pro-bulimia (pro-mia) groups. Places where people go to find "helpful" tips on what to do when the hunger kicks in. So I went to myspace and I looked. Most of the sites you need to have a password to access the galleries, but just paging through the "friends" was enough for me. I could easily rant and rage at these people who cannot see what they are doing to themselves. As they said in the article, of all the psychiatric disorders these are the deadliest. But...part of the disorder is the inability to perceive your body realistically. Most of the disorder is about trying to have something in your life that makes you feel like you are in control and matter. That you have an effect, that you exist. Self-esteem is not even present enough to be considered low and the alternate reality created is astounding. I have known two people, one with each disorder - one who was not aware of her disorder (anorexia) and she died within the year, but not before essentially losing her mind. And the other who was painfully aware of her disorder (bul-rexia, a combo) and struggled to find some way to heal (and has since done so and gone on to do amazing things). To rant and rage at these people, to try and som how "shock them" into seeing the permanent and deadly damage they are doing to their bodies - doesn't do a thing. The disorder is a symptom of a much larger malaise. I think most of us can touch compassion for those with ED because we have all experienced moments when our perception of ourselves in a mirror has not matched the reality we know. We look and see fat and old and tired and weak and it comes from our ability (inability) to handle our lives. When we are emotionally hurt, if we are not attuned enough to be aware of it - it shows itself in any way it can and sometimes, the easiest, is the way the eye looks at itself. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6935768.stm this is the link if you are interested in reading more, they actually have a few articles on it. |
|||
I saw it
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 18 Nov 2008 03:16 PM | ||
|
I managed to unbend myself and get in the truck and as I was driving down the narrow and twisting mountain pass, I saw it. There in the distance and coming closer, this red thing - totally distracting me from the beautiful scenery around me. I thought, "no, it can't be...such things don't exist anymore." But they do... I have seen it... the new Oscar Mayer Weiner Mobile.... it just drove all thoughts of blue bunnies from my head, the thing is absolutely freaky looking, they've got the weiner molded onto this sexy yellow sports car and done away with the bun. I mean...it was...a sexy weiner....god that sounds perverse... such a strange end to the day, in the middle of everything I was back to those questions about "What is a home?" that a friend challenged me with and we were swapping emails back, it took me a week to write my answer because I had to really get past the things I have filled my head and heart with as far as being told what it should be and discovered what it is for me. Home is inside of you. You cannot have any other or one with someone else until you have found the one within. Its foundations are faith, unquestionable faith in yourself, your ability to do and your ability to love. I'll write more about that later...now, I am off to perform surgery on the bug pack in the car and then hit the gym. |
|||
the crab
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 18 Nov 2008 09:10 AM | ||
|
not what you think...if we thought last week was tedious, this week we are doing something that (hang on, you can do this in your house to see what my day is like)...stand up, bend over at the waist, now pretend you are tying a bow on the floor about a foot in front of you, now do this while walking, now do this for three hours at a time without standing straight or falling over. entertaining, no? unfortunately we are not close enough to be running our mouths so periodically we come up with different patterns in which to move. The best so far has been the "crab", where we walk sideways by alternately crossing one leg behind the other (while still bent over and tying) for six feet, then step forward and crab six feet in the opposite direction. It is amazing the things you will com up with to keep the day moving forward. |
|||
ok...it's out of my system
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 18 Nov 2008 02:02 AM | ||
|
not really but...I am just amazed that the cd and the book are doing so well. Reviews are one thing (and some of them have some very interesting interpretations) but I think in the back of my mind I thought "it's poetry, who buys poetry?" And the cd, that really shocks me, I know some people have been upset that I did it "nekkid", but you know...the point was to do what suited the writing. I am beginning to really work on wedding the voices and music with the video because it suits, but I am also bringing a lot of focus on to just the words. Speaking of which...it took an hour to slow down the spanish and insert enough silence so I could hear the lines...I am either going to wind up sounding like a hamster or a 70 year old woman but, as a performer, it is opening up a whole new vista of how to say words...I thought I would just get a recording of it being spoken and then memorize the words and do it the same way as english but spanish phrasing is different. I am having to learn to keep my intention with the delivery but do it ...differently. Which is good, I need that, if you have ever read poetry before you know how after a certain point, a certain comfort level, you develop such a "voice" that everything is in danger of sounding the same and the words get lost in the delivery. Shake the tree every so often and fruit that ripened closer to the sun falls free. Now I just have to figure out the intricacies of makeup for the video, which, if you have seen any of the pictures or videos of me is not exactly a daily practiced art in my life. |
|||
absolute crowing
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 18 Nov 2008 01:42 AM | ||
|
RadioIndy Reviews: "Angel" by Cassandra Tribe is a deep and intellectual spoken word EP that is filled with precise imagery and a tone that is tense and revealing. It is not just Cassandra’s words that create the journey; it is her delivery, pacing, and tranquil voice that really rounds out the concept. She plays on silence in a way that keeps you longing for the next line and hanging on every word. This is Cassandra's third CD and the concept of this album is a stripped down work of art. You hear nothing but her voice on this one, a bold statement considering music and effects were a big part of her previous releases. There is a build as the journey unfolds when the album opens with the whispery "The Dark Flower of Hope (Part 1)," a reflection of wasted life. "Monster" deals with more irresponsibility, this time in the area of false gods. "The Dreams of Bees" brings forth tremendous power and intensity as Cassandra brings forth the most vivid of frustrations. If you enjoy rich, well performed poetry, you will enjoy “Angel.” |
|||
duct tape on the crockpot
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 17 Nov 2008 04:29 PM | ||
|
I solved the problem of the Mad Kitten wanting to play in the crockpot (resulting in a crunchy, dried out dinner). I am...sooooooooooooooooo distracted.........my stomach is doing these absolute....not flips....but its like it has drawn itself up in a little ball and gone "shush", don't breathe, don't move, don't disturb the moment. I have been investigating something on line that has to do with something I would really like to have happen in my personal life at some point and my god, its possible. Like....attainable....and I am just soooooooooooo distracted. I need to like....slap myself in the face and get on with these things I have all around me right now. That sweet little old lady spoke spanish like she was driving in the Indy 500 of poetry. I am going to have to slow it all down. Ok....I think I am going to go stand in the corner and I don't know....fan myself. |
|||
"Angel" Reviewed by RadioIndy.com!
| POSTED BY: EricLawrence | POSTED ON: 17 Nov 2008 01:15 PM | ||
 "Angel" by Cassandra Tribe is a deep and intellectual spoken word EP that is filled with precise imagery and a tone that is tense and revealing. It is not just Cassandra’s words that create the journey; it is her delivery, pacing, and tranquil voice that really rounds out the concept. She plays on silence in a way that keeps you longing for the next line and hanging on every word. This is Cassandra's third CD and the concept of this album is a stripped down work of art. You hear nothing but her voice on this one, a bold statement considering music and effects were a big part of her previous releases. There is a build as the journey unfolds when the album opens with the whispery "The Dark Flower of Hope (Part 1)," a reflection of wasted life. "Monster" deals with more irresponsibility, this time in the area of false gods. "The Dreams of Bees" brings forth tremendous power and intensity as Cassandra brings forth the most vivid of frustrations. If you enjoy rich, well performed poetry, you will enjoy “Angel.” -William and the RadioIndy.com Reviewer Team Check out Cassandra Tribe 's music on RadioIndy.com with link to purchase and links to popular sites |
|||
shall I rave
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 17 Nov 2008 01:13 PM | ||
|
about incompetence? Shall I rant about the amount of time people will devote to trying to find someone or something to blame rather then spend five minutes coming up with a solution? Shall I? Shall I? No...I shall drive fast with loud music and stop only briefly to snare a blue bunny from its cool hutch and rip its head off with my teeth and then scream because the cold is just too much and then go on... I have a little old lady I am meeting today who is going to teach me how to read some of my poems in spanish...I am so excited... |
|||
code name: H. P.
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 17 Nov 2008 09:09 AM | ||
|
we're calling this guy "HP" and he has no idea that it stands for "Henny Penny" because all he has been doing is running around saying the sky is falling and there hasn't been one ounce of substance in any of his claims. But of course, when HP comes a cryin', everyone has to stop and investigate and find out his information came from a small dark and very personal place. the fact that he is in a "leadership" position just makes it all the more...embarassing...then he gets upset because he feels no one takes him seriously. professional doomsayers artists of negativity what else can we call this particular kind of person... at work we have HP and then two that always seem to feed each others paranoia that we call "the panic sisters" I want my ice cream. |
|||
the end of narcissim
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 17 Nov 2008 02:54 AM | ||
|
Ahhhhhh....you know, I was feeling all warm and fuzzy and then I got up and discovered that finally and at last, I ran out of propane (which I have been trying to do) but that meant that I have no coffee this morning as I did not bring in my back up stove. Which does provide me with the excuse of being able to hang out at my new preferred Circle K and chat with the overnight crew. But still, cold tea versus hot coffee....ehhhhhh.... and I was feeling all warm and fuzzy about my little epiphany last week about the other layer of forgiveness and then right before I went to sleep I was doing some reading and read an absolute description of what I had felt. I, had chalked it up to some kind of astounding new level of compassion that I had achieved and instead discovered that what had happened is I had finally broken the last vestiges of my narcissism and was finally capable of seeing the world as it exists and not only in relation to my self. I have finally understood emotionally and mentally and become capable of thinking and acting on the difference between "I" and "thou" that they talk about being the first step in consciousness of a child. Which did not make me feel warm and fuzzy. One likes to perceive oneself as all grown up and perfect now doesn't one? But then I kept reading and discovered that it is not something most people achieve at all. (which made me feel special and warm and fuzzy again, now isn't that how it always works?) because it requires effort and introspection and...and...an understanding and acceptance of your mortality. The end of narcissism lies in the acceptance that you end and someone else goes on. That reality as you experience it is entirely subjective and that there is a broader reality that is objective. Then you begin to see other people as what they really are, unique entities with their own subjective realities, and then you can begin to see them (and your self) as part of a third reality that is objective, that exists without emotional interpretation because it existed before you and will continue to exist after. While I am moved by all this, I think a part of me preferred the highly narcissitsic view that I had achieved uber-compassion and now was free to spread it around the world... |
|||
youth
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 16 Nov 2008 06:16 PM | ||
|
one of the places I go (ostensibly for dessert and tea but really for the wifi), has this strange shifting crowd. When I came in earlier, the air literally snapped with energy. Each table was full of students studying and cramming for test. Some of the piles of books were bigger than the tables. Then slowly, a shift, the students begin to drift off and the 30-50 year old crowd comes in. It is interesting to watch them self-segregate into age communities. And just like high school, whites in one section, hispanics in another and one or two token asians or blacks sit on the edges. Phenomenal. I have even noticed, over the course of the past few weeks, how the Native Americans only sit in one section. Day to day, different people, same section. I need to read more about this. It is one thing when it is in a high school and it is a reoccuring social situation, but here in this kind of cafe where there is also a lot of traffic off the highway, why? And who starts claiming a section, and how does one know - if there is no one else like you in the place, where your section is? But it is like a magnetic attraction.... |
|||
On the Radio - today at 7pm EST
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 16 Nov 2008 03:27 PM | ||
|
November 16, 2008 7pm EST Arts Inside Radio reading "the dark flower of hope" from the book, the greedy heart. |
|||
form follows
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 16 Nov 2008 12:36 PM | ||
|
I managed to get all this foam sealant on my good boots yesterday (good, as opposed to the workboots I should have been wearing when I do such things...its a recurring problem in my life) and its like the parking lot is glued to the soles. No traction, just this odd heavy feeling accompanied by this slick ice skating experience because the bottoms of the boots are covered in little pebbles. I keep returning to the new piece I am working on "Speak for me Slowly" and circling it, letting it build. Ever since "Monster" I have discovered the joys of theme. I keep looking at the new one and asking myself - what am I talking about? What am I trying to say? And then it comes and it is like translating another language. I'll have this very dry understanding of what I am talking about and then I sit back and let that understanding be translated into verbal imagery. I used to think only write from these fits and starts of inspiration, which I think will always be a necessity in life because sometimes the words just flow - but I have just learned the ability to go back and and really find the words that show the meaning. More and more writing is beginning to remind me of painting. |
|||
corsets
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 16 Nov 2008 05:27 AM | ||
|
a beautiful body, a beautiful face, a latex corset and and other assets do not an arousing picture make. There is so much more to sexuality than just slapping on the gear we have been told makes us sexually attractive - whether that means corsets or bras or gstrings or makeup. The item does not make one attractive, it is how the item showcases how you feel about yourself. Last night was phenomenal. The BN troupe was exceedingly accomplished and the Ellen Degeneres (impersonator) co-host was just perfect. But it was funny to watch which performers absolutely captivated the audience and which were the ones where people got distracted. It came down to what was projected on stage and what was successful was when the persona, the act, the props and the movement came from a performer who obviously understood the totality of their projection and were well studied in their craft. The few who relied on just the props and costumes to deliver an effect - well, came off as rather full of themselves. It did not distract from the fact that their "act" was poorly developed. I remember briefly entertaining an involvement with a woman that died a quick death when I got "the checklist". The "checklist" covered a variety of clothing styles, hairstyles, makeup etc. that I was to select as what would be most arousing to me. Now...we all tend to have types...some fantasy some echoed in reality. And it is true that no matter how much "what is inside counts" our attractions are limited to certain looks...the attraction is based in the coupling (pardon the pun) of our type with what is inside the other person. You cannot just acquire the "type" and bless the involvement. Changing yourself to that degree to try and please another person just never works. It is one thing, as an involvement progresses, to learn what your partner responds to that you have chosen and then enhance that. That keeps sexual attraction alive. But it is another to let another person choose what you become, then you are not there at all. You might as well be a blow up doll or a fantasy on a screen. |
|||
love your gloves
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 15 Nov 2008 06:15 PM | ||
|
ooohhhh...too much, I am ready for the evening
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTLQCH1ff2I |
|||
I always wondered
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 15 Nov 2008 05:28 PM | ||
|
what or how philosophy could have an impact on the immediate, modern life. I caught myself laughing over the answer to that question as I stood in the Kinko's photocopying a test copy of my book, "Eat not the Heart". I minored in philosophy during my bachelors and then went on to have it thread its way through my life forever and a day, but it always seemed so remote - so esoteric. Big long books, most of them out of print, long words that half the time - if you are honest - you can't remember the meaning of them anyway because you don't use them. I have always known that having a philosophy of life was important in finding meaning and purpose and being able to survive - but there again, philosophy is like the fire axe you keep behind glass in case of emergency. But now I know....it will probably take me a few months to finish all the revisions and test out certain things so I will just leave the form a mystery till I put out the book. Now...dinner and then burlesque. I started insulating the new RV. I spent a solid hour but was successful in hacking through the damn hood bolt of the car and tomorrow I connect all the bits and fire it up. The people in the RV park are circling my new home warily. As one friend put in an email after I sent her pictures of it "oh....my....gawd...." |
|||
I found my balance
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 15 Nov 2008 12:21 PM | ||
|
I found my balance at the bottom of the cardboard box that has been sitting on the floor of my kitchen "catching" every thing I did not want to put away. Literally - I found "balance", it had gotten knocked off the range hood where I have all my other little word magnets and as I move through the week I keep finding small words like "famished", "magical" and "exuberant" in odd places. I finally cleaned out the box and "balance" was at the bottom. I have not missed the coincidental significance of that. |
|||
simple
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 15 Nov 2008 08:51 AM | ||
|
I am tempted to repost a bulletin that someone sent around on myspace that was just beautiful in its simplicity. Actually, I am going to ...hang on... 1. I've come to reali​ze that my boobs​.​.​. are not something i spend much time thinking about. 2. I've come to reali​ze that my job.​.​. ​is an asset in the world today 3. I've come to reali​ze that when I'm drivi​ng.​.​. ​i sing like no one is watching 4. I've come to reali​ze that I need.​.​.​. ​only the simplest things 5. I've come to reali​ze that my heart​.​.​. ​always gets back up again (& always will...) 6. I've come to reali​ze that I hate it when.​.​. people can't see how dishonest they are with themselves. 7. I've come to reali​ze that when I'm drunk​.​.​. ​i babble & giggle. a lot. 8. I've come to reali​ze that money​.​.​. ​isn't all there is. 9. I've come to reali​ze that certa​in peopl​e.​.​. ​live in fear but call it "love. " 10. I've come to reali​ze that I'll never​ be.​.​. ​perfect & that is beautiful. 11. I've come to reali​ze drugs​ are.​. ​pointless. 12. I've come to reali​ze that my best frien​ds.​.​.​. ​are some of the most amazing people i've ever known. 13. I've come to reali​ze that my cell phone​.​.​. ​needs to be turned off every once and a while 14. I've come to reali​ze when i woke up this morni​ng.​.​. ​that pausing for a few moments before i got up was worth it. 15. I've come to reali​ze that last night​ befor​e i went to sleep​.​.​. ​i was content. 16. I've come to reali​ze that right​ now I am think​ing about​.​.​. ​what i need to accomplish today. 17. I've come to reali​ze that when I get on Myspa​ce.​.​. ​i can take things too personally. 18. I've come to reali​ze that yeste​rday.​.​. ​was what is was & will never be again. 19. I've come to reali​ze that today​.​. ​is full of potential. 20. I've come to reali​ze that tomor​row.​.​. ​remains to be seen. 21. I've come to reali​ze that tonig​ht.​.​. ​is for me to decide. 22. I've come to reali​ze that I reall​y want to.​.​.​. ​find peace within myself...the rest will come... 23. I've come to reali​ze that the perso​n who is most likel​y to repos​t this.​.​.​. ​is someone who will have read my answers. 24. I've come to reali​ze that I love.​.​. ​without regard. 25. I've come to reali​ze that this weeke​nd.​.​. ​will unfold as it will. 26. I've reali​zed the best music​ to liste​n to when i am upset​.​.​. ​reaches inside of me and turns it all around. 27. I've come to reali​ze that some of my frien​ds.​.​. ​are irreplaceable. 28. I've come to reali​ze that this year.​.​.​. ​has passed so quickly... |
|||
late night hours
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 15 Nov 2008 01:06 AM | ||
|
I passed out at 6. I stand on the fact that I got a million things done despite feeling vaguely sick and claimed the down time so the flu doesn't come back. Of course...now here I am at 2 in the morning, bright eyed and bushy tailed wanting to do things that require sunlight. Such as...start working on the new RV that I managed to pick up last night. I am so happy, it is bigger than I remembered it and I have already stopped and gotten the insulation and boards to begin framing the interior. Years and years ago I lived on a 21 foot sailboat. It was a Ranger solo sailor and I lived off the florida keys. I loved it, except every other day when I would come home and for various odd reasons the boat had sunk (not really every other day, only about once a month). But I learned so much about small spaces then. Before I passed out I sat and sketched the basic plan for the interior. The bed becomes the desk is the storage is the closet is the just about everything and then I move out from there, including incorporating a kind of "habit trail" for the Mad Kitten that comes complete with a balcony to the outdoors. Slowly...surely, I have lived in this RV long enough to know what drives me batty and the first things I am going to do is insulate and seal all the gaps. No more drafts. Plus, I have learned how to completely soundproof without using ten inches of insulation. I am so excited. I have just been jumping around so much these past few months and not been able to take my "home" with me because of driving issues that it is a relief to know that shortly, no matter where work sends me, I will just "hook up" my life and be there. This 4 hour commute a day is just killing me. OK...if I am up I need to do some things, that will be the surest way for me to find the need to go back to bed again. |
|||
for people to have hope
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 14 Nov 2008 01:11 PM | ||
|
I was eavesdropping on a conversation and was struck by the comment that "Obama needs to give people enough hope to get them through fixing themselves." True...no matter what you believe, for most of us, the fixing falls on us alone. There are no bailouts. No special contracts. But then again, isn't that true about everything? No matter what you believe, in the end, the responsibility for fixing our selves lies with us. My mood has gotten slightly better. I got off work absurdly early and have just flooded myself with errands....ok...now I just overheard the other part of the conversation about how a woman can not be president because all of our problems are in the Middle East and women are not respected there. Excuse me, a statement of that kind only reveals the absolute ignorance of the speaker about how many women presidents, prime ministers and secretaries of state that are in office today and successfully dealing with the Middle East. Alright...you know, burlesque and now I have done enough errands to just stay at home and just repair my psyche all weekend. |
|||
you ever have one of those
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 14 Nov 2008 10:22 AM | ||
|
things that you just can't shake out of your mind...replaying all the things you'd like to be saying but you're better than that, aren't you? God....I am just gnawing at something and trying to do my best to let it go because in the end it doesn't matter and in the end, I have already made my plans anyway and it doesn't effect me. But sheer stupidity that results in people getting offended is always hard to take. At least I have managed to connect with the fact that I am offended. But...I am trying to keep the big picture in mind. But it is not easy...much more comfortable to stew.... |
|||
sneezing while drinking coffee
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 14 Nov 2008 02:45 AM | ||
|
I came home and went directly to bed last night. I just have that fuzzy off feeling like the flu is coming back so it is time to just gently pass out as the body directs. On the way home from dinner last night I passed my very first, on November 13th no less, full scale white light christmas tree and manger deal outside a shopping plaza. Christmas, we've only just begun to creep close enough to thanksgiving to even realize its on the calendar. And all around me the financial crisis is beginning to hit, layoffs in one company, "belt-tightening" in another. I talked to someone who is of the "world war III" camp and they blamed the financial crisis squarely on the "little man". "If they hadn't borrowed money to buy things they couldn't afford we wouldn't be in this mess so of course we have to bail out the poor, maligned big businesses." While there is a lot of valid truth in the fact that it was sheer stupidity and financial irresponsibility to a) borrow to buy things that your lifestyle cannot afford and b) borrow to buy things that you can't afford and are not worth the price attached to them (ie cethe housing market) - it is downright bald headed irresponisble and dumb behavior on the part of business to have been so intent on selling "non-existent" products to people who cannot afford them with money the business loans them from funds they had to borrow themselves. Its like a game "if you believe what I believe then we can keep passing this cookie back and forth and everything will be fine as long as no one tries to eat it." Because then you discover, instead of sugar, flour and milk - the cookie was made with water and sand. What gets me, as things enter this stage and people are "belt-tightening" and feeling the frightening effects of a recession, is the attitude, the thinking that is going on that we have to just get through this and then things will be fixed and we will go on. Any time you hear "belt-tightening" what it means is the way we tried to do things didn't work. So, why would you want to try and fix something that is broken instead of learn to do something new. Free market capitalism is not the cause of this problem. The cause of this problem is the failure of the the people who participate in the free-market to insure their products are worthwhile things and the failure of the consumer to regard a product as a choice to be decided on whether that product be a house, a loan, health insurance, food or a car. Just because it is there and someone gives us a coupon for it doesn't mean it is a good thing or that we are saving money. Coupons, to me, are generally a sign that there is something about the product, something about the pricing of the product that is not justified by the products actual worth. |
|||
fish and chips
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 13 Nov 2008 03:55 PM | ||
|
I have run and run all day fueled by my excitement and I turned around and was ready to pass out and there on the menu was "fish and chips"...it has made me so happy... This morning was awkward, I had to get right up in the face of one of my crew and tell him that "if he was late again and he was the cause of two other men being late to work (he drives the carpool car and has been oversleeping etc.), you - and only you - will be fired." Then I docked him an hours pay which included his lateness and the lateness of the other two. It's hard because he is young and every so often, almost on schedule, every three months I have to stick my boot up his derriere and he straightens out and flies. He is an amazing worker. Just has that little brain fart thing going on. And I am really becoming highly intolerant of people fooling around, wasting time and all that preventing other people from getting done what they are trying to do. I think because I have so much on my plate now it makes me very sensitive to it. I have to get everything done so when I go home at night and change out of my work clothes, I can sit and write with no thought as to things that were not done. I don't want to fool around in the grocery store, I don't want to drag things out at work, or participate in a conversation about "how awful it all is" when there is nothing that person is going to do but **** to anyone who can listen (and usually people trapped there - cashiers, etc.) Jesus...I sat next to this guy in a cafe...me on my laptop and he on his. And then he had this chuckle thing going on and he leaned over and said "I just can't stand poor people, can you?" He was so sweetly amused by this fellow that wanted to buy his Blackberry but had to save up the money out of each paycheque and he emailed him every day asking "is it still available." You know...there are sometimes persuasive arguments for staying at home. |
|||
Burlesque Noir
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 13 Nov 2008 09:19 AM | ||
|
I'm going, are you?
|
|||
Dita Von Teese
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 13 Nov 2008 02:49 AM | ||
|
I have this ever growing excitement because for the first time in over 5 years I am going out to a Burlesque show this Saturday. I am so glad that it has begun to ascend again as an artform. I love what it does for women. I love the satire, the humour, the celebration of the body and then the stinging commentary delivered. Plus, they have silk aerialists opening for them. I will see if I can pry the invitation out of myspace and repost it. I am going, anyone near Albuquerque should go to. Its so funny how having something like that to look forward to just elevates my whole week. I mean...I even forced myself to sit down and catch up on all my receipts and bills (since August, I am so ashamed) last night and I flew through it because I was remembering the last show I saw...it was either in Boston or Miami - all dark, low ceiling clubs look the same after a certain point. And the thing I look forward to equally as much is I took the initiative and grabbed everyone I could find that I know and am trying to corral them into going. Share the experience. Share what makes you excited and people wind up getting to know you just a little better. Its kind of like this sentence I have been hearing since August, the one where everyone is shocked that I have a sense of humour and don't spend my waking hours in dark, brooding contemplation - the reaction when I mention Burlesque has been "You??? You like Burlesque????" Oh honey, it is the theater of the mind. |
|||
a return to forgiveness
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 12 Nov 2008 06:33 PM | ||
|
I have talked about forgiveness. I have written a flippin' "epic" poem about it. I have read on it, contemplated it and even experienced it (from both the giving of and receiving)... and still, forgiveness appears again in these past few days in a way I had never even imagined possible. so I sit and explore the feelings that have come up. There are things you forgive, there are things that cannot (and should not) ever be forgiven. There is a broad tendency in our culture to encourage speedy forgiveness without much thought about the consequences to our morality and personal responsibility. Forgiveness is encouraged and expected....lauded. But...I just discovered there is a layer to forgiveness that is kind of...it shifts your whole center. I have someone in my life that will never be forgiven, there will be no reconciliation with them because of the absolute evil that they perpetrated in my life. That decision was the result of years of introspection, therapy and much learning about human nature and I had come to a kind of place with it. And then...somehow, in the past few days, I have been thinking of them (for a lot of reasons) and for the first time I was able to separate me, and what happened with me from my understanding of this person. Its like...for the first time I was able to see the totality of their life that would make their actions possible, allow them to even consider such choices. And within that context, I found a type of forgiveness that does not forgive them for their actions, but forgives them because I understand their experiences, I feel compassion for them...I think that is it. I never...ever...thought I would ever even think of the word "compassion" as a description for my emotional experiences with this person. Its weird...feels weird...yet right. And my anger towards them has lessened. My hate and rage at their actions is staying right where it should, as it should - but my anger at their very existence...has lessened. |
|||
the thing about things
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 12 Nov 2008 01:01 PM | ||
|
I've gotten a lot of emails about my move into the itsy, bitsy RV. One of the things I have to say is that I am not doing it because I am so wonderfully unattached to material things. I am not. I am absolutely hedonistic in the things I am choosing to retain and they mean a lot to me. However, as much as the luxury of things has had its place in my life, and will continue to - I do not let "things" keep me from going and doing things that take my life into the next step. That is what alot of my downsizing is about. Things are things. I donate them to goodwill and they will become other people's important things for how ever long they need them. Life is life. And no thing should prevent you from going and doing whatever it takes to realize your full potential. |
|||
strange to think
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 12 Nov 2008 09:46 AM | ||
|
I am on one mountain, staring over and only slightly up at another that has a peak covered with snow. Sometimes, being from the East Coast originally, it just amazes me the sheer amount of distance you can look across here. I look out and towards the snow peaks and then realize, that's where I was only a month ago and most likely, I was there looking over here. I neither remembered to turn down the heat last night nor did I recall my promise not to sleep in the cab over bed again as it gathers all the heat of the RV. I woke up disoriented and dehydrated and it is sort of like moving in a cloud today while propped up by bottles of water. |
|||
and when things happen
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 12 Nov 2008 03:13 AM | ||
|
busy...busy...busy...and profoundly organized am I. Scheduled right down to the last minute each day, but things happen and suddenly - my plans seem so...naive in regards to recognizing what it means to stay in the conversation. My dinner turned into an almost three hour bouncing conversation, only the imminent threat of us both passing out on the table at the Flying Star brought it to a close. And you know? For "messing up" my plans, I am right where I should be and I feel as if what I learned, the new questions I have to ask that are all a result of that dinner - have expanded my horizons. The ability to recognize the value in your relationships is beyond importance. The ability to learn how to manage between what is planned and what happens is a skill that is beyond compare and slowly I am learning it. And it brings to my life this intense drive and purpose. The intense drive and purpose to adopt "kenneling" for the damn Mad Kitten. I didn't realize how much of her behavior was repressed because of the other cats in the house, but now that they are gone I think I would happily kill her or sell her on the street corner. She just "discovered" the crock pot and the noise it makes if you flip the lid off. I have a feeling my dinner will be on the floor by the time I get home. Not to mention she has managed to completely entwine herself in all of my cell phone charger cords. I think I have to go to work and get some peace. |
|||
downtime
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 11 Nov 2008 04:10 PM | ||
|
It is so nice to be sitting in a restaurant and getting ready to have dinner with someone. I just looked at the time (I have been sitting here getting things madly done on the wifi) and realized the time and am beginning to shut things off and suddenly I am hungry. Its odd, the juxtaposition of things in my life. On one hand I am buried in dirt on a construction site, doing things I must be insane to do and on the other, I transition into this other life where no one around me has the same kind of daily life I have and its like a strange meeting of cultures. That seems to be a theme these days. It was odd that, in looking at book manufacturers, one of them said "oh, let me send you some free samples" and the book they sent me was the Native American Quarterly. I gave it to one of my crew today and when we started talking about it, it became quickly apparent that they had no clue (especially the young) that there were native writers and teachers in the world. They frame of reference they have for what they can do is limited. So I took a list of things they are interested in and am going to try and find different books and things for them. Which I am sure, is going to be its own kind of education for me. |
|||
alien children
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 11 Nov 2008 12:44 PM | ||
|
One of the guys was telling me he bought his 9 year old son an xbox this summer and they played nonstop and then a few days before school started he saw his son in his room carefully packing up everything. He asked him what he was doing and the kid said "School starts monday, so I am putting the game away." And his dad was like, "Wait I'm still playing it." And the kid said "No, if I come home from school and play then all the things I've learned will go away." And all year he only takes out the xbox when there is a school vacation. The guy I work with is baffled, wondering where this kid came from. |
|||
in the middle
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 11 Nov 2008 09:07 AM | ||
|
of the day (which for me comes godawful in the morning), you just get this sensation that “god, I’d like to be doing other things”. But what would we be doing if we did not have our “adult daycares” to go to? I wonder how many people could actually live and enjoy life if they did not have this preset and socially demanded structured time? I wonder how many people really enjoy their vacations…I wonder what enjoyment is. Now there is a question. What is enjoyment? is it distraction from your life? total immersion in it? Oh god…you have to understand I have 800 feet of space in which I have to tie in place two little bars every six inches and I am seriously starting to wonder what enjoyment is… That which makes you happy. Well then, smarty, what the heck is happiness? Someone at the philosophy group I used to go to said that happiness is the ability to make and the knowledge of choices. But I think, even if our choices are very limited, or strictly defined by others we are capable of happiness because it lies in the ability to act and our self worth and self esteem. |
|||
for other people
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 11 Nov 2008 02:40 AM | ||
|
Strange, I realized last night, as I was working on a new piece that while I often write because of other people (and because of myself), I rarely write for other people. I wrote “Leela Raquel” in that odd space of because/for. It was for one of the guys at work. Now I am working on “speak for me slowly” and again it is for one of the guys at work. I immediately ran into this block about whether or not, I - white woman supreme, could write something based on a very native American experience, but then I had to back up and look at what I was writing about and realized the details are native, but the content is something everybody experiences. Something everybody experiences. Strange to think that we are all these amazingly unique people with completely separate experiences and personalities, perceptions and desires and yet – there is an element to our lives that is based in a common…I do not know what to call it. Carl Jung wrote of it towards the end of his life when he began to examine more closely the ideas of the “collective unconscious”, our physic inheritance as one writer put it and then went on to eloquently describe it as “our reservoir of experiences as a species.” A knowledge we are born with. I think there might also be something called the “collective experience”, things, emotions that as a species we experience. Perhaps that is what makes empathy such a powerful thing. |
|||
the anti-passion
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 10 Nov 2008 05:46 PM | ||
|
We always think of passionate involvements as being so life-giving and good but there is a kind of passion, an almost anti-passion and that comes from a persons intense focus on limiting life. You know what I am talking about, just take a look at the extremes of the reactions to Obama’s election. The anit-passionists will not rest until they have helped to bring about a kind of limit to life that reconfirms there opinion of “what is going to happen”. These are truly the proponents of anti-life movements. Rather than accept what has happened and seek to join the effort to change and heal this country, they are dedicated to not assisting, not giving, not helping all in the name of being proven right. And what happens is they bring a kind of poison to the table. A kind of poison that many do not recognize at first and digest before they realize the harm it represents. These people are like the kid that shows up with the ball in the playground and wants to have a game, and when everyone votes for a game he doesn’t want to play, he gets upset and takes his ball home so that no one – not even himself plays. That is about control. The search for control of other people is just about the most anti-life, anti-passion and anti-love action you can initiate. It is the beginning of evil. |
|||
and daisies on my hands
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 10 Nov 2008 12:30 PM | ||
|
I finally got one of the guys back...when they came in I stopped them and told them they had five minutes and five minutes only to make fun of my gloves, the only ones I could find were "ladies" work gloves, leather with daisies embroidered on the back of the hands. They were all good about it except one, and I waited and then he left himself open with a real doofus statement and I needled him do bad he finally stood up and shouted "Help! I'm being taunted by a white woman!" Our job can be alternately challenging, stimulating, dangerous, exciting or so unbelievably boring it is unreal. But...we can find ways to make this day fly by...despite the fact that even on the radar it shows that all around us are storms and there is one hole in the system and it is sitting right over the jobsite. But...I like it so much better then when I get stuck with a crew that uses an all day boring event as an excuse to **** and complain about everything. Sh*t, in two weeks we have covered Aristotle, Plato, Fromm, Frankl, Rand , the law of attraction, the secret, powerball and the slot machine...work, this job, this boring repetitive job that we are all driving four hours round trip to get to and get out and work in wind and freezing temperatures, has become something we look forward to and it is like a challenge each day to take it to the next step. One of the guys said his paintings of crown dancers is on line...I will try and find it and post a link later. |
|||
the passionate life
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 10 Nov 2008 09:05 AM | ||
|
“a living fluidity” is how I ended the last post, and that is the basis and criteria for the passionate life. You cannot live a passionate life in which you are the sole author of the passion. Passion is exchanged, it is combined to become even greater. One’s passion for another is like a tributary, completely separate until it flows together with another and creates a raging river – whereas drought may dry up the small tributary, it rarely dries the river. God, it is cold and nasty, just a little bit more nastiness and I can call it a day and drive back to Albuquerque and hack off that damn latch bolt. I have tried and tried to keep the original but now I see, time for a replacement. I like this crew I have, they do their homework. This morning they came in and stood around the truck, not so much interested in the snow or the work but wanting to have a discussion about things that had occurred to them over the weekend. The main question was…if man created money and created value to go with it, then what is the real value of life if what we think tells us the value of success is something we made up? Where is it? |
|||
being lost
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 10 Nov 2008 02:44 AM | ||
|
Monday finds most of us re-entering the work-a-day, and isn’t it sad how most times it feels like you leave at home, not just your loved ones who may still be sleeping, but yourself? I am fortunate because for a very long time I have been passionately involved with my career, but things have changed, I have grown in a different direction that has moved my career from my passion to just a means of making money, and not a very nice one at that. I find it hard to be passionate about money. About things. I find the only “things” I get passionate about are the ones that actually house my efforts. Like the damn car (currently with its hood latch stuck and about to be hacksawed off), what makes me passionate about the car is not what it is, but the effort I am putting into it, the ability to take what I know and use it and to learn new things. And my passion for this thing will last long enough to enjoy it for a bit and then it will become…a car. Passion is tied to living things or things that you bring to life through the engagement of all your senses and efforts. Passion in regards to people, comes with the kind of connection in which effort, meaning and value flow back and forth. It is easy to be temporarily passionate about a thing that does not respond, or a person that does not respond – but to find passion that is met, that is where passionate love begins to grow. The kind that, yes, goes through its ups and downs, its highs and lows, but that always regenerates itself because the connection is based on a living fluidity. |
|||
you know
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 09 Nov 2008 07:56 PM | ||
|
I am just not sure how I feel about so obviously having a bed time. I mean, when life is going smoothly, I sail right up to a certain time and it is like "I'm done". Then again, I have to remember that I get up at 2 or 3 am...so I guess that makes the 9 o'clock bed time acceptable. But I have just flown through this day and gotten so much done. So smoothly, even the truck is clean. I had this idea that when the other two cats (long story if you don't know it but in the end, I asked for it, it was my own doing no matter how I try to spread the blame around) were finally gone that my mad kitten would be bereft and that is so not the case. We have played fetch more today then we have played in six months. I forgot what a happy making experience it is to feel her standing up and patting my leg with her paw and I look down and she has the toy-of-the-hour in her mouth and we play fetch. She has gotten exceedingly good at it. I was feeling bad last week as I watched her trying to throw the toys herself and then chase it. She kept giving up after a few minutes. My dog, back when he was alive, never quite mastered fetch. He was five years old before he got the concept of going after the ball. Mostly he would sit within arms reach and I would gently toss him the ball and then take it out of his mouth while he growled. It took him four years to learn how to catch the ball. Oh god...I am tired. |
|||
conflict
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 09 Nov 2008 05:06 PM | ||
|
talking about stress, talking about communion and intimacy, talking about...conflict. So many people seem so in love with their conflict, and if it gets resolved - let's go make another. Because conflict, in anything - job, relationships, politics plays on our extreme emotional responses and makes us feel alive and connected. And in love - after conflict comes the reconciliation where our feelings of love and pleasure and connection are amplified in contrast to the strain of conflict. But it gets so that people don't recognize or validate the emotions that aren't extreme. The reality of Love, the everyday... |
|||
On the Radio - today at 5pm EST
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 09 Nov 2008 09:01 AM | ||
|
November 9, 2008 5pm EST WorldWide Open Reading - the poetry super highway reading "the greedy heart" |
|||
going back in time
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 09 Nov 2008 06:17 AM | ||
|
I am planning on reading "the greedy heart" today on the Poetry Super Highway and between that and the emails from yesterday I thought I would just...go back in time a bit and talk about...things... Isn't that specific? The language of longing can be so very vague. We talk about "feeling a connection", "wanting intimacy" but it reminds me of a conversation I had with a young girl who wanted to be a Roman Catholic. Her mother (a unitarian) was appalled and wanted me to "talk to her". So we talked and I could understand the reasons why this 12 year old was drawn to the stability of the ritual (considering the instability of her life) but as we got down to the details...she had all the vocabulary and none of the understanding. She very much wanted to be involved with a faith that worshiped Jesus Christ. We talked about that...at one point I asked her if she knew anything about him and she said, "Yes, he was a great prophet." We went on from there and then she said something, I forget what it was, but a light went off in my head and I said, "Wait a second, what does being a great prophet mean?" without missing a beat she replied "It's someone who makes a lot of money." We use words, and we know they have powerful meaning and represents things that we know would be so wonderful to have in our lives and yet often - our understanding of the words is at the very least, limited, and often quite different from that of the person we are talking too. I almost think, in the beginnings of a potential relationship, it would be better if we communicated to each other in signs and symbols because visual meaning is far more universal then verbal. And it is what can make a "new relationship" so difficult to see clearly for what it is. We get caught up in the emotions and the physical desire, we want to spend all of our time with that person when it would serve the relationship better if we were a bit more selective with our time and could let our experience of the person sink into our histories and definitions. Back up, slow down, feel...not the feeling of the moment...but let the actual signs and symbols of a person speak to your own. Then we can begin to understand our reaction to someone, we can see more clearly where we have placed somthing on them that doesn't belong to them - we begin to become open to learning what their definitions are because we are not saturated in our own, demanding everything be understood immediately through our own words. Life...is actually, very long. Yet we act like we have deadlines. Yes, we die. Yes, we grow older. Yes, opportunities can come and go but look at what has been going on - in our drive to have, we have only wasted time on things we should have known better about. |
|||
sex and change and ice cream
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 08 Nov 2008 07:34 PM | ||
|
God.. I have gotten a lot done today. And to answer a few things...sexual intimacy does not mean you have communication and vulnerability and all the rest that goes with that - you can have it without it - but sexual union combined with a strong intimate relationship gives to everything a deeper and stronger communication or really...communion. and change...the hardest thing about Change is that eventually you get faced with this: you change, you ask people to respect the change, in essence - to respect your integrity. Now either they do or they don’t. It’s not an immediate thing because as you actually go through and make the change real in your life, everyone has to adjust to it. Either they do or they don’t. Eventually, you begin to recognize who isn’t and you have to decide what to do with that relationship. That gets complicated because what you do with that relationship means you have to understand what its importance is in your life and what role you have allowed it to play (which may be very, very different from the importance it actually has). I wish I hadn't been so damn good today and had bought the blue bunny. I carry this mental map in my head of all the gas stations that carry it and have it in stock...but no...I was on one of my "I need to make it more of a treat kicks"...which I regret right now...ah well... |
|||
but what about jealousy, possessivenss and feeling unsure?
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 08 Nov 2008 09:57 AM | ||
|
But what about jealousy, possessiveness and feeling unsure? See…now here is how it goes, I wake up to a question from one part of the world and post, go back to sleep and wake up again to the next part of the question - only this time provided by someone halfway across the world from the first person. Speaking different languages but wondering the same thing. That alone should be enough to make you think about the nature of our lives. What about jealously, possessiveness and feeling unsure? If you want to have something, the only opposite to having it is not having. Losing it. If all someone is to you, in essence, is a thing to be acquired you will fear your losing them. Everything becomes a threat, even the person themselves because they are capable of meeting other people. When our relationship to them is defined as “two of us separate and against the world” it becomes an enormous source of safety and comfort, not a sanctuary but a cave that we can go hide in. It is the antithesis of Love, because with Love, in intimate Love, one of the ways in which it resonates in your life is it increases your capacity to love the world. To extend outside of yourself, to express empathy, to participate – the two of you do not hide in a cave at the end of the day, but you walk together within the kind of sacred sanctuary you have made and nurture each other knowing that the stronger you have made each other, the more you have to give to others. Uncertainty is difficult. Everything associated with uncertainty is written in the language of the body and crosses a range of emotions that you may or may not immediately recognize. Uncertainty may mean that you are putting yourself in a position, an emotional position that is very disruptive to you because it is not feeding into a positive range of emotions, but to some very nasty fear and old messages that you have not fully confronted and moved beyond. Often we find that we are uncertain about “someone” when we have begun to grow past our old messages and yet, still are picking someone who fits them. The other side of Uncertainty is that the same feelings, the same letters containing the same words from the body could mean that we are confronting change that is very good for us, but change can make us very uncomfortable. It is difficult to leave our patterns because they are familiar and don’t make us feel slightly sick to our stomach when we think about them. The only thing I have noticed of late, in regards to Uncertainty in my life, is if it has to do with old messages it comes after I have been with a person – when I am alone. When it comes popping up while I am with them, tend to be because I am confronting a type of change. And….and…I really don’t believe that there is much uncertainty about people who represent a change for the worse. Come on, we know…it’s just whether or not we have developed the personal strength to risk rejecting someone before we get in to deep because even if we say “no”, it does open the door to them saying “no” back. Reciprocal rejection is as hard to take as plain old rejection. |
|||
friends and lovers
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 08 Nov 2008 03:11 AM | ||
|
I woke up to this email that asked what I thought about whether or not it was possible to have an intimate relationship without physical affection. Yes, that is what a friend is. There are two words that we have somehow lost the meaning of along the way - "intimacy" and "friend". Nowadays, 'intimacy' means sex and a 'friend' is any one who has swapped two text messages with you. Lovers become the people we have sex with and text on a regular basis and then we are shocked and disappointed when our committed relationships fall apart or in a few short months are revealed to be empty and deeply dis - satisfying. If I were to pick out the most common phrase I have heard about people's experience of their relationship it would be "I am lonely." And they are not talking about the kind of loneliness that comes from being in a deeply connected union - they literally feel like they are either the only ones there or that the other person perceives that they are the only one. Sexual intimacy aside (that is a part of a lover, they come to know and share with you the body - and note, in casual sex there is no knowing, so that does not count in the stack of points for the capacity to have sexual intimacy). Intimacy is about communication and familiarity, a sharing of thoughts and emotions. There is a reason why, for decades there has been a distinction between a friend and an "intimate friend", a friend may be someone you have communication and familiarity with but it is in a very limited capacity. There are areas you choose not to share. An Intimate friends is one with whom there is a mutual (and hey...oh...pay attention to that word) communication and familiarity that is little edited. Like in a Love Relationship, you and the friend have created a sacred space between the two of you. Lovers are intimate friends with sexual intimacy added and....and....the capacity to hold your fears, hopes and vulnerabilities in safety. You have the sacred space between you, but what makes it so different from just an intimate friend is an existence of a kind of wordless communication because they share a knowledge of the way you body speaks. Just because you are intimate with someone, friend of Lover, does not mean that they can be everything or receive everything from you. That is why, in Love, it is so important to maintain intimate friends because different people are capable of different understandings. When push comes to shove though, it will be the Lover, that not understanding a thing that is going on - will feel complete empathy with you because your union goes beyond detail that must be communicated through words. |
|||
Small
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 07 Nov 2008 05:30 PM | ||
|
If you have been reading for a while, you are aware I live in an RV. A small RV. A small, old RV I have funked up and traveled all over the country for a long time. If you have been reading for a while, you are aware that periodically I complain that even this small, old RV (120 sq ft living space) feels too big sometimes. Even when I had someone else staying with me. Even when I had the three cats (down to one, mine, thank god...) If you have been reading for a while, you know that this past summer, I spent about 8 weeks living in a 6 person tent on the side of the mountain and felt perfectly at home. So...... I bought another RV. This one is from the 60's and it has 49 sq ft of living space and I am so excited. I think I have lost my mind. There is absolutely nothing inside of it and I get to do it all myself. I expect to be fully moved in by the end of November and I will sell this one. Small....small...small...but it is all I need. It feels hugely spacious to me because the layout is more of a room then a couple of narrow hallways. One of the things I discovered in the tent was that the important things in my life fit in a box and throw down an oriental carpet and keep a china tea cup and life just sailed on. The guys at work think I am nuts. "That's a cell" (almost all of them have been in jail.) "Yeah but she gets to leave when she wants" and suddenly they were excited about the little room on two wheels I have found... |
|||
what is good
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 07 Nov 2008 12:56 PM | ||
|
is agreeable to the soul. Not necessarily pleasant, particularly not at first when you are learning something new – it may feel awkward and you long for the ease of what you have known. But you wouldn’t really be looking at trying new things if what you were doing was working, now would you? But…there is a feeling of rightness in the body when you begin to do something that is good for you. You have moments, when you are wholly concentrated on it where the sensation is one of being in “right place” or “right mind”. It sounds silly, but a type of small smile tends to appear and even though everything is exactly the same – it has all seems so much easier. I am trying out this new way of organizing my day and am just floored how all the overwhelming stuff has gone away, well its still there, its just not overwhelming anymore. But, it’s a learning process. |
|||
I am cold
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 07 Nov 2008 09:13 AM | ||
|
let me take that back, I am freezing and having a difficulty getting my fingers to move in the right way on the keyboard. It always seems so shocking when the winter begins to arrive, but at last it is sunny. At least we have all been wildly entertained by Berlusconi's remark about Obama "Young, handsome and tanned"...the truck driver almost fell out of the cab laughing when we told him about it. What is good to see is the return of a sense of humour and connection to the rest of the world onsite. Over the past year or so its almost been like there has been a narrowing of focus down to the immediate details of our lives and we forgot that the rest of the world exists and they are not the enemy. Now we are delving full force back into our discussion of the existence of God and Mysticism once again, we've progressed into examining the way our perception of God has changed - across religions - in the past centuries. The guys are looking up Aristotle and Plato and Socrates online and coming prepared to make the day fly. |
|||
Vanity (rough text)
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 07 Nov 2008 01:45 AM | ||
|
What is it |
|||
odd questions
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 06 Nov 2008 06:00 PM | ||
|
So I read on the speakeasycafe, which has got to be one of my favourite shows, something about the hosts, the poets that gather just...you could be dead tired and after a few minutes, just feel alive again. I read "now that I am undone" from the book and at the end, Nyla asked where it came from - what inspired it...I mentioned ill chosen attempts at relationships but the truth is...how can you answer where it came from when in that moment, when the idea to write came up - it was about relationships, about life, about all these things together and yet the words come out about two people and a bird's nest. Underneath the obvious, there is always so much more. Hidden currents all flowing in the same direction. The more I write, the older I get, the more I pay attention - the more I am beginning to see that all these currents come from the same source, split into individual rivers that think they are so important, only to flow together again and become something else without losing the memory of what they have been. |
|||
world war III
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 06 Nov 2008 04:45 PM | ||
|
I am just a hair distracted, I wound up getting pigeonholed by someone I have been avoiding since the election and sure enough...had to hear all about her African Documentation that Obama is Muslim, how World War III is going to start and if he gets assassinated she is immediately going to grab her kids because they are going to be killing white people in the street. Put that on top of the article that said there has been a mad rush on guns at all the local gun shops and I would just like to take a shower thankyou. Extremism on either end is never pretty. |
|||
I'd like to be
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 06 Nov 2008 09:11 AM | ||
|
Home right now. The basic kind with four walls and some heat. Yesterday was miserable here with wind and snow and then we would come down off the mountain and sunny and 50 degrees felt like heaven. I think winter is sneaking in. “Home”, passionate or not, includes other people. It is kind of a plural word. Yet, we seem to have an immense difficulty building the kinds of “home” that can house two passions – we either completely neuter the environment making it the one place where we cannot bring the totality of ourselves out of deference to getting along or being understood – or – one person’s life is literally adjudged to be more important than another. |
|||
the passionate home
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 06 Nov 2008 02:49 AM | ||
|
So hands down, the emails and comments all repeated the basically same phrase “when I discovered my passion that is when I found my home.” Passion is about the realization of your potentials. It is not obsession. It is a full force engagement of everything that you have within you in the service of a purpose. Whether that purpose be making a painting, writing a poem or loving a person – passion is what happens when we bring our all. The passionate person discovers quickly that no matter where they go, they are home, because they carry within them the awareness of themselves, their efforts and desires and they express it through their actions. Their life becomes about being present, being aware of all the things around them that contribute to their sense of experience. Home, is not a physical place. We may house it in buildings or tents, surround it with memories or hopes, but home is where we live . Where the experience of the totality of ourselves is expressed. That guy, whose name I still can’t remember, who wrote a book about the evolution of our homes and houses emphasizes that the purpose of our physical structures has gone from shelter of self, to place of business to showcase of status in list of priorities. I think that is why so many people have been drawn to “simplifying” because what we think of as “home”, the environment encased in four walls no longer really has a relevant social reference anymore and we try to strip it of what it has become and return meaning and importance to the concept. Oh god, I am starving. |
|||
I'll know I'm all grown up
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 05 Nov 2008 04:38 PM | ||
|
when I manage to get out of the showers in the gym and not put my clothes on backwards. I do not know what my malfunction is. Maybe its the exertion, maybe the hot water... I got a lot of email about the stress post. I know I have a few new mirror sites so I just want to say again that you are welcome to email me (info at loveandwords dot com) or post a comment. I rarely post the comments to the blog - that's a growing and changing thing...but any way...back to stress think of it this way...suppose every thursday you take yoga because you signed up for yoga's benefits knowing that towards the end of the week you are a stressed out mess and yoga helps. Its suppose to. But what begins to happen if thursday rolls around and you are not quite as stressed as you normally are? For maybe weeks in a row? You begin to not feel that exhilarating thankfulness for the yoga experience because your expectation of it is to relieve your stress. You might find (like a while ago when I was blogging about my thursday depression and the powerball, that you begin to subtly create stress before going to Yoga to get that sense of pleasure and relief. If you take Yoga simply to learn it. To improve yourself, the chances of you creating false circumstances to validate Yoga are slim (although there is that pink cloud phenom)...but at least that is not overwhelmingly detrimental. The expectations we have of something influence our experience of it. To validate our "worldview" it is not above our strange sleeping minds to create circumstances that reinforce our beliefs. |
|||
home
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 05 Nov 2008 12:26 PM | ||
|
and all of this, about stress, brings me in an odd way back to that series of questions posed by another friend. The ones about the concept of ‘home’. Odd how we have some very specific ideas of home (home is where the heart is, home is where you are safe, home is where you are nurtured, home is where you are accepted) but in my little fever dream of the past few days, as I have been asking people about this, everyone has an answer until I ask – “Well, how do you go about creating a home?” How do you go about creating a sanctuary and a garden? What does it look like to you? What does it feel like? And then…how do you imagine other people in your home. It almost seems like we think we find a person, make a relationship with them and then “home” is something we put on like a jacket large enough to fit two. But homes are more than just shelters, they are the embodiment of what is important in our lives. Homes, the concept of homes has transformed into a symbol of achievement and presentation. Our definition of our home relies heavily on our visualization of other people’s responses to our physical homes and this effects how we construct the homes inside of us and how strong they are in weathering any of life’s storms. The room in the house I am dancing around trying to get specific about what a home is to me and how we go about creating it, but I think it is important first – to build an image of the house complete and then figure out how to get there. Our home shelters the rooms inside of it and the rooms are the small homes that we build for love and hope and safety and history. OK…shoot…I have to get that phone call. |
|||
stress
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 05 Nov 2008 08:50 AM | ||
|
I keep returning in my head to that conversation last night about the things we tend to do that set up our reactions and failures, the thing about the stress balls. And I have to admit that I have indulged in setting aside time and developing activities not because they are relaxing and restorative to me, but because they relax me because I am stressed. Now mind you, these things are built into my weekly schedule and how do I know on Sunday that I will be stressed on Friday? Because I have come to expect it and built a life around being stressed rather than doing the more obvious thing which is to examine the nature of the stress and do something f---ing about it. So now my stress takes up twice as much time and time away from my relationships because not only am I stressed but them I am off de-stressing myself even before I have gotten stressed. It always makes me feel like I have had a bucket of water dumped on me when I have one of these “duh” moments. But of course, now I have to go and look at where my stress is specifically coming from and do something about it. I have been building a life around a reaction rather than trying to do what I can to change the situation. |
|||
learning new things
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 05 Nov 2008 02:41 AM | ||
|
now that we have managed to elect the "great hope of the nation" (and that is said with the utmost sincerity), what really remains to be seen is if we are going to back off from our efforts and rely on him and our elected officials to be the sole impetus for change or if we will allow our momentum to begin to make ourselves active in the change itself. It is easy, once our hope is in the basket we carry, to think that it is enough that we have it and not look to discover how it should be used. And the same is true in every aspect of our lives - gas prices are down, do our habits return to a "carefree state"; our choice is elected - do we know lose our political awareness and activity; even a loved one has finally heard our needs - do we cease trying to effectively communicate with them and rely again on their ability to mind read? There is effort in everything. And in the effort comes a cessation of stress and fear. When we participate in our own lives and the lives around us we cease to fear not doing, become less overwhelmed because everything returns to the realm of our possibilities. Perhaps the key to managing stress is not to learn to take vacations but to learn to do more, only more of what is needed to bring things to a fruitful conclusion. That kind of goes against a lot of current thought, but as someone pointed out to me the other night " if all you do is invest in ways to relieve your stress, you are only reinforcing the idea that you cannot handle things and increasing your reaction to stress." What about looking for ways to regain control of the situation rather than letting the situation control you? |
|||
everybody
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 04 Nov 2008 09:07 AM | ||
|
was too chicken to tell me who wrote "Vote McCain" in the dust on my truck while I was in a meeting, but I am glad to see that just about all the contractors are letting everyone off early to go vote or go babysit so that their wives and such can vote. There are only two dingbats on site who are walking around talking about how proud they are that they are not voting. And the wind picks up. And a storm hovers. And at the meeting we watched a video on all the archeological sites that we are trying to protect as we basically destroy everything in the basin. Funny to think that it is so important to protect someone's footprints but not the land they walked through. |
|||
Today I Wish
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 04 Nov 2008 03:37 AM | ||
|
I owned a TV, sort of...well, no not really. I can just check in on the internet - I think the mad stress that watching the polls would not help with anything. And on a side note, if you are in New Mexico and put in for an absentee ballot and did not get it, did not mail it or they did not receive it - go to the polls and they will give you a provisional ballot. And on another sad but true note - if you are Hispanic, look hispanic ( and reality check, yes that includes everyon from the pueblos because most whites can't tell the difference) or have an exotic name - you may be challenged direcetly at the polls. If you have been following the newshere then you know its been happening. Do not panic. Do not walk away. Even if you are challenged you can vote on a provisional ballot and let them sort it out later. The important thing to do is to vote. Get it in there. We are one of the five (I think it is five) swing states, New Mexico controls 5 electoral votes and yes, one little vote here can change where those votes go. Now enough about you, let's talk about me - I slept from 6pm yesterday till now and am late. I still feel awkwardly sick but maybe a little better. At least all that stuff I do keeps me from getting all clogged up. And I am behind in answering my emails and comments but will get to it just as soon as I can think clearly. Now go make the day about making sure you vote. |
|||
ugh
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 03 Nov 2008 05:22 PM | ||
|
I have been good...up to a point...but seem to have fully gotten that cold/flu...everything is slightly hazy...and my brain is definitely fuzzy... which kills me because in all my discussions this weekend I had a series of questions posed to me that I would really like to sit and sink my teeth into - what is a home? what makes a home? can you have more than one? what is the difference between a toxic and healthy home? I love my close friends...they irritate the f**k out of me with these questions they cook up and then send me off on... and before I pass out for the evening, the one thing that I do know about homes is that they are both sanctuary and garden. |
|||
which brings me back
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 03 Nov 2008 12:02 PM | ||
|
right square into the driving reason I started doing all this which is that poor woman I have left on the beach which is how "the city of love" begins. She has been out there for months now. And her dilemma is that having no real memory of who she is, but recognizing her name and what it means (which could be a key to reclaim everything) what is she going to do? Work to reclaim what she has been? Or learn from the memory in her body and build something new? The body remembers everything - whether it be through sight or sound, smell or the sensation of movement everything that we do or that is done for us is written there. This woman, who I had an ephiphany and identified as War (although she is not aware of it yet) remembers in the smell of the sea, the feel of the sun through the heat of the sand beneath her feet not actually things - but emotions, longing, desire, fear and small fragments of happiness. They say that we can never be what we were just a moment before and have yet to become what we will be in the next, we have only the present instance in which to base our ability to make decision. And that present is inclusive of our histories and defines our hopes - but our action, our decision can come from neither - if that makes sense, it has to come from our awareness of where we are in the present. Not who we have been. Not who we desire to be, but a body awareness of how the moment is inside of us. |
|||
transformation
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 03 Nov 2008 03:26 AM | ||
|
I woke up on the front porch of the flu - it has been drifting near for a week but I keep battering it back with a variety of homeopathic tricks and I am hoping (because I forgot yesterday to do them) that I have not dropped the ball. The part of change I have been missing, or talking in circles about while I struggled to understand it was fairly clearly stated in that article last night. That change involves transformation, a complete shift in your point of reference fo making sense of the world and that is not an easy or comfortable thing to do. In some aspects it can be, when you get to that point when you begin to truly let go of your old ideas about life, love and the world and begin to accept new ones - there is a sensation of a rush of fresh air into a stale room. But until you reach that point, it feels like a massive struggle and it is so tempting to just give it up and stay where you are while simultaneously hoping for something different while doing nothing to ensure it happens. But a part of transformation (like a large part of forgiveness) is allowing yourself to fully feel the extent of your emotions. You cannot forgive until you have experienced the depths of your rage and hate and anger because some of it is justified and some of it is healing. You cannot begin to transform until you have touched the despair that living as you are now causes. Once touched, it can become the fuel for surviving change. And once you begin to understand that within despair and change is the opportunity to make change, life seems so much easier and less overwhelming. It is when we forget that the first part of rising is to begin to change what we think that things begin to look endless. One of the exercises some one sent in (about the law of attraction) was a simple way of beginning to write down "evidence" of the change. The more evidence you can show yourself of change the more you begin to undo the old frame of reference and thought that tended to be a bit toxic. Toxic seems to be a recurring phrase, maybe its because I feel sicktired and my throat hurts. |
|||
future world
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 02 Nov 2008 07:27 PM | ||
|
a friend just sent me a link to an article called "Letting go of Bitterness and Hate" by Mary Baures, it is a long, stiff academic article (and the editing job by the journal sucks, repeated paragraphs and pages) but it is a continuation of a discussion I have been having off line about the nature of transformation...which is probably where my head is going to be for a bit. But I thought I would retype these bits for you: “A study was conducted to examine how some people are able to transform themselves in positive ways following extreme loss. The criterion of participation in the study was positive transformation following trauma. Transformation was defined as changes in priorities, values, and goals and different assumptions about the nature of the world and the self. Twenty subjects were chosen and most of them not only coped with the trauma but went on to do extraordinary things with their lives in spite of it it and sometimes because of it….Many have devoted their lives to increasing human rights and dignity of others…No attempt was made to find a representational sample of trauma survivors. People were chosen because they were outliers at the positive extreme of trauma recovery, who, in the words of Lillian Smith, taught “the terrors of their nature and their world to sing…” A major finding of the study was that all of the survivors, in contrast to repressing the trauma, transformed themselves around its horror. They reworked the symbols and images in the trauma by revisiting it when helping others and in creative projects. Many used creativity to create a new reality to convert pain and waste into truth and beauty, and to give the dead a posthumous life. They focused on hopeful visions of the future, not on what they could no longer do or have. They all found ways to let go of bitterness and hate and accepted the dark parts of life without being defeated by them. Direct contact with evil and suffering seemed to motivate them to creat a more humane future world…” |
|||
toxic
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 02 Nov 2008 02:03 PM | ||
|
one of the things I realized (while trying to refix the fixed hood that I broke) was that in the brief span of two and a half months I had become what is known as "toxically busy". When I made my list this morning all of it had to do with things that I had placed in priority over what is of the utmost importance to me. Granted, some of it was needed, I had to manage an awful lot in a short period of time but what I almost did was keep on managing my life rather than living it. Even when I began to have downtime it was like I no longer knew how to enjoy it and the activities I was choosing were merely ways to make the time pass as unnoticed as possible. And my relationships to the people around me took on this odd frenetic quality, as if I was looking at my watch and saying "ok, you have five minutes for us to have an emotional connection and then I have to go do something else." I stopped enjoying the company of others. and all I can think is thank god living like that is so....alien to me that I literally became uncomfortable in my skin and was able to back up and take a look at everything and begin to make different choices before what was needed in a moment became a way of life. Scary how fast that can happen. |
|||
Christine
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 02 Nov 2008 11:25 AM | ||
|
maybe not, but I definitely think my car is aiming to inspire me to write some kind of saga. First I broke my nose fixing the hood latch, today I almost shot one of the front shocks through my neighbors house (all those warnings are true...) but progress is being made. I am finding all these people in town who are like little ferrets when it comes to odd car parts and I show up with my cuts and bruises and some rusted thing in my hand and they cluck their tongues and say "I'll call you on tuesday." And they do and somehow they have found what will work. I don't know if I have mentioned this but my refrigerator is covered with green contact paper so I can write on it with a dry erase pen. This morning I wiped it clean and then forced myself to make a list of the four ways in which I stand in my own way and behave/think/believe in a self-defeating manner. Not a pleasant exercise but when I was done (and under each of them I made a list of all the things that the behavior has made me put off or avoid) I felt such relief. Some of them are big...but...to see them as a list. They looked much smaller then they have been inside me. And they look like things that won't last that much longer. I will leave the list there until I feel I have done what I have needed to do to move past this cycle. Okay....have fire extinguisher, emergency numbers programmed....I am off to work on the fuel pump... |
|||
if I were
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 02 Nov 2008 05:51 AM | ||
|
to start again, how would I choose to go forward? Step one, sit and make a list someplace where I can't avoid seeing it of all the things I recognize that I do to procrastinate/stand in my own way and don't do them. Make another list beside it that contains just a few things that I want to be doing. Make a third list of things I truly like to do and use them in as a shameless reward system. There are times I gt overwhelmingly productive and it is actually a very creative and stunning way of not doing something else. There has been a lot of discussion around me lately about things like "the secret" and the "law of attraction" and what isn't being discussed is once you master the art of positive thinking, you still have to pay attention to recognize opportunity and then reach out and participate in it, do the work. It brings me right back to how people pronounce themselves in love and in a committed relationship and then assume because it has been said that they no longer have to participate and be responsive in the relationship. As if, just the title alone is enough to make it happen. Oh coffee...much coffee....I am having a bit of a hard time transitioning from going 90 miles and hour to back to my regular life of only going 80. |
|||
the kindness of longing
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 01 Nov 2008 07:09 PM | ||
|
it has been a busy day but everything has gone well, thank you so much for all the emails and comments concerning the release - now I feel like the real work begins and in all these weeks of madness building up to today, life has been put on hold and I have come plunging back into a sea of longing for all the things I have held at bay in order to stay so single minded and focused. And now I am back, crawling through the house with its litter of mailing labels and empty shipping boxes. Digging out my small notes and things, looking at the silver wall I have that is blank, longing for it to be pinned with sheets of onion skin again that show me, more than anything, that I am paying attention to life. And I long...I long for things and people in my life that have been missing for years...does that make sense? In this space between the doors of what has been and what will be I am remembering all of the things that have brought me here, and I remember them with kindness. And it is with gratitude that humility that I recognize the kindness of longing, for it returns to me a portion of my life that perhaps has become buried under survival. Love and longing. Kindness and strentgh. Are these not the things that keep us all in balance? |
|||
Angel and the greedy heart
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 01 Nov 2008 04:20 AM | ||
 CastleDeepBooks and loveandwords.com announces the dual release of Cassandra Tribe’s collection as cd, softcover and ebook with audio.  109 pages ISBN 978-0-615-25620-7 Library of Congress PCN 2008909591 “Raise your head and look forward, Angel, let the ash fall from your eyes. Stand in balance with not a word said, and let the constellation of your life rise . . .” download preview softcover $6.95 cd/itunes ebook with audio $3.98   ebook $1.98 The Perfect Duet What you don’t expect when you meet Cassandra Tribe is the sense of humor that bubbles beneath the surface. The same poet who has moved her audiences to tears with “Leela Raquel” and made hearts ache with “the dreams of bees”, the same hand that wrote the frightening social commentary “Monster” - is fun to be around. You would expect someone capable of describing forgiveness as a monster sitting on a throne made of “children bound together” to be a bit more dark. Instead, you find a woman who not only is self possessed and has an immediate sense of humor, but who radiates a kind of joy and interest in life that is nothing less than infectious. People stare at her and you get the sense that they’d like to sit down and join the conversation. “I wanted to do a live album.” Tribe says over coffee, “I had just come off helping host an open mic and had begun to do more and more internet radio and I wanted to take my writing somewhere different. What needed to be said needed a different voice and it turned out to be my own.” Recorded in a church in outside Magdalena, New Mexico, “Angel” has only five tracks, but these five come together to form almost 40 minutes of material. “You don’t show up on someone’s stage and do a 14 minute piece unless they are expecting it. The cd let me take some of my newer pieces and give the words the time that they needed.” The result is a cd of poetry that grabs your attention with her performance and moves you, sometimes beyond your comfort zone, with the power of her writing. She has drawn comparisons to Edgar Allen Poe and Anne Sexton and her stage presence brings to mind a young David Bowie. There is something about her that commands attention. All Tribe has to do is walk to the mic and the sense of expectation that takes over the audience is palpable. I saw her perform “the dreams of bees” in a bar and by the end, every pool stick was down, beers were forgotten and every person in that building hung on her voice. I turned to the man beside me and asked him what he thought and he said, “I don’t even like poetry, I wouldn’t have even come out tonight if I had known this was going on but it’s like there is a reason I am here tonight and I am hearing this.” “The book was a fluke, “ she says, “ when I was sending the cd out for opinions I kept hearing from people that they wanted to see the text. So I thought I would put a small booklet in with the cd but “Monster” alone would have filled the case. One thing led to another and suddenly, one of the people I had asked to preview the cd, who was a publisher, said it has to have a book. And there it is. It was a nightmare pulling off the book in the same time frame as the cd, these things usually take months. We created the imprint CastleDeepBooks to marry the two projects and distribute them together.” The book, “The Greedy Heart”. contains all the pieces on the cd and twelve others, including the acerbic title piece. Yet it is her version of Ovid’s morality tale, Baucis and Philemon, that takes center stage. Perhaps one of the best contemporary versions ever written, Tribe doesn’t bother retelling the tale (except in an author’s note) she plunges into the very last moment of their lives and reveals the inner secrets of their hearts. In her hands it becomes possible to have the kind of love that creates a story that will be told until the end of time. The ability she gives her audience to hold her words and listen to them is an experience that begins to allow the layers of her meaning to come to the fore. “What is important, “ she says rising from the small table, “is that you keep trying to find out who you are and how to live. All of that is changing and evolving with every moment. Its much easier to demand the past or hope for the future, the challenge is to become willing to be present.” Cassandra Tribe has managed to create the perfect duet with the simultaneous release of her third cd, “Angel” and the book, “The Greedy Heart”. Both are distributed in digital and hard copy on indieryhthm.com and on her website, loveandwords.com. Starting in December of ’08, Tribe launches on what she describes as a “long, slow tour” beginning in Chicago and ending in Montreal appearing in a series of invitation only venues that have been sold out since August. She has intermittent radio appearances planned throughout the year. and plans on “popping in” on open mics in areas she is performing. You can try to keep up with her through her popular and award winning blog, love and words. (A. Baumgarden, New World Review, Volume 12, Issue 3, October 200  "What's your Tribe? The one who speaks the words of longing you didn't even know existed inside you, or the one that scares the pants off you with the mirror that she holds up to reveal your dark potential? Just perfect..." James Duckworth)Put your hand out, let Cassandra Tribe walk you though this journey. She will be your reflection on this trip to reality. “Angel,” Tribe’s new collection of poetry explores the human condition, from the painful ebb and flow of love to the uncertainty of living in a world where “Our poets are silent/Our singers drunk.” Tribe, lends her audience a didactic and Humanistic view of the world, whether it is through her poetry, essays or her daily blog. One stand-out poem by Tribe, the epic-length “Monster,” urges readers to face the harsh reality that comes with being irresponsible in life—the false gods and monsters created by blind acceptance. Vagner Revol, Poet Tree Magazine)Her reading of Monster is bone chilling…not until near the end, when she begins to reveal glimpses of the humanity that lives within the monster does the piece change from a horrific cant worthy of Poe, to an epic tale of infinite loss and caution…brilliant. (Jackson Willet, DarkCorners) The dreams of bees, there is power there, this will get lots of play. (Most Vocal Poets Society, Canada)  |
|||
are you ready?
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 31 Oct 2008 04:54 PM | ||
|
I am... |
|||
enough of that
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 31 Oct 2008 08:23 AM | ||
|
the day is...crawling, but so isn't everybody else. I got so wrapped up in what I was doing this morning I almost forgot to go to work, and thn I got here and the thing I forgot to do was get gas so who knows if I will even make it home. maybe it is because of halloween, maybe because of the day of the dead but everyone is just intensely discussing things about life, love, god, the world and reality. Its been this insistent theme on the job site...maybe it is the approach of winter. But what makes it stand out so much is that all of these discussions are lacking opinions. Not one person has jumped in with that attitude of "what I say is right" and I think that is why we have talked more and learned more about each other then we have in a year. Then there was that creepy moment when I decided to tell one of the Zia this dream I had and he finished it for me. He remembers what was in it from when he was a kind and is going to try and find someone old enough to remember the tale. It's gotta be halloween... |
|||
sex
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 31 Oct 2008 02:14 AM | ||
|
I can tell life is starting to get back to normal because I was cruising the romance ads on craigslist nationally last night - seeing what the trends were. Funny how it goes in waves. Sometimes there are these vibrant discussions about what it means to be "real" and relationships, sometimes it is like going to Disneyland when you read the descriptions of what people are looking for and last night, I noticed this small trend - mostly in the "casual encounters" section - of people posting trying to get a message through to someone they had met, wondering what had happened. Sex is important. Sex, I think, is more important to our relationships and emotional health then we would like to believe. Sex is how the body speaks without all the crap it has learned and yet with its entire tangled history. I think it is impossible to have sex without emotional involvement and if you are managing to do that, then you are shoring up and validating a kind of wall that in the end will prove intensely difficult to overcome when you are wanting to join the physical and emotional expression again. But we treat sex, we show sex as if it wasn't anything at all. Our music, movies, books etc. downplay the powerful role it plays in our lives. We make of it an "inconvenience" to be overcome, rather than a language to be learned and celebrated for its ability to draw us together. Yet sex is not love, and too often we mistake the sense of communion that is achieved in sex, that comes so easily with it, for the fullness and extent of Love. I have zero interest in going to work today. Thank god this has been an easy week because my mind is definately elsewhere. |
|||
like two plants
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 30 Oct 2008 02:32 PM | ||
|
let me pick it up from there... I am at the point in my life when I am so very aware of when I am not paying attention to someone, and worse, they can tell the difference as well. Oh I am engaged, even having a conversation, asking questions etc and so forth - but sometimes, I am so off somewhere else so focused on my own world that I am painfully aware that I am giving who is talking to me barely a quarter of my attention. And it embarrasses me and I find that I pull my self out of my world (also known as getting one's head out of their ****) and go and make that connection. because more and more I am coming to believe that life, and love, lies seeded in our ability to be fully present. To cease to say "this is mine and that is yours" but to become aware that everything is a part of everything else. There are the individual worlds through which we experience the world, but the more we begin to see that although our experiences may be contained in the body, what we experience knows no boundaries. There are no laws to it. There are no limits. There is no "body" in life, it is an immortal thing. and this is what gives Love such tremendous impact and power in our lives, because, more so then anything else, we leave our created expectations and unite with someone in a way that is not physically possible or explainable and become a part of the world that exists beyond our understanding or attempts to define it. Love is the key to immortal life. because in loving, it no longer matters that body slowly devolves and dies, because what makes the life in the body is reunited with what has been since the beginning of time, and will probably survive what ever understanding we could possibly have of the end. Relationships are not about "working together", they are about creating an expression of the universe. |
|||
deliberate
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 30 Oct 2008 08:27 AM | ||
|
I am having a hard time connecting to all the stress I am suppose to be feeling about certain things during the work today and I think it is driving some people up a wall. So I am trying to make a deliberate attempt to at least act like I care... Focus...connection...there are all these ways that we know how to do it and yet most of them have become this kind of rote - think of the couples counselors with their "now repeat back what she just said." just bcause I can train myself to remember your words doesn't mean I have connected and empathized with their meaning. On of the guys was describing how much better his marriage has gotten in the past few months and he kept saying "my wife pays attention to me now, she follows what is important to me rather than just say "oh well, that's your thing." Somehow I think a lot of us have lost the ability to pay attention to our loved ones. We can recite their schedule like it was ours, maybe we can tell you what things will stress them out or make them happy but there is a different kind of attention - where you notice the others presence and are conscious not only of what it brings to you, but how your choices and actions effect them. Its like being two plants in the same soil making air for the room that our waking lives are in. |
|||
and on and on
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 30 Oct 2008 02:18 AM | ||
|
I slept for like...ten hours last night and woke up feeling like I had been away on a very long and hectic trip but had suddenly arrived back home. There are all these current modes of thought and books out these days about the "power of positive thinking" in a way. There is "The Secret" and all the "laws of attraction" books and each of them addresses the very real idea that life is what we think. Because what we think is how we perceive reality and the possibilities available to us, it effects our emotional reactions and determines our abilities to form and implement change. While we are, no matter how you look at it, responsive emotional creatures. We have the ability to learn to change what we think and change our emotional reactions, change all that and life begins to change how it appears and interacts with us. What alot of the current books do not emphasize enough is that the process goes beyond just changing the phrase you are focused on in your mind. Changing how you think, what you think, what your historical emotional response to something is means you are changing the very core of your being and some assumptions you hold about the nature of life that may be so deeply embedded that you are not even aware that you have "adopted" them and have assumed that they are truth. It is not a quick process and is fraught with all the emotional challenge and trauma that comes when you begin to challenge deeply held beliefs that shape your reality. At work, we have been stuck in beautiful weather doing unbelievable repetitive things and we have been talking about how what we think and believe shapes what we see. Kind of like that article I posted here about the nature of our political beliefs revealing our psychology. What you think and believe not only effects how you see reality, but also what you "allow" life and reality to give to you. |
|||
which end
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 29 Oct 2008 04:27 PM | ||
|
is up? You know...I think I am seriously exhausted and half sick, but I need to hold out until Saturday am and then everything I need to do is done and all the deadlines are met. the thing about the book, which is kind of a surprise to me, is that it has gotten to everyone I wanted to get my copies to and something that I have been absolutely obsessive and uncompromising over is the one thing that they are shooting back that they love before they have even read the darn thing. And that is the size. You have no idea the hoops I had to jump through to get a "pocket size" book. for some reason...that, above all else that has been said about it in the pre-reviews has just made everything seem worth it. and I am circling going back to try and start playing in the words that have come up this week, there is a lot there, I feel like....a truck pulled up and dumped a ton of fresh sand in my playbox. The whole concept of belief and the power of thought, the power of intention is just...riveting right now and coming up in conversation after conversation - that, and the tangled discussion of what happens when what you believe in suddenly not only becomes real, but so much larger than what you imagined it to be. What do you do? Desperately try to box it up and back within the container of what you know and understand? Or do you let it change the very rules and definitions of your life and how you understand it... I have promised myself...one post and then bed. I have already packed my gym clothes for tomorrow. I plot and scheme about new videos, I have found the book I almost always carry to write down phrases that occur, and I did a **** poor job of trying to clean up a bit. But at least I tried. |
|||
this secret
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 29 Oct 2008 08:06 AM | ||
|
now there is a topic, what is the "secret", what is all this "laws of attraction" stuff and what are all these things that are floating around I swear I will get to it but shoot...I thought I had a little more time before the meeting started and everyone just roared up like it was the indy 500. I'll leave you though with an old indian saying, "if you believe in religion be careful you do not learn too much or look too deep or you will stop believing in anything at all." |
|||
just done
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 29 Oct 2008 02:32 AM | ||
|
I think I am starting to fight that cold/flu thing that is going around, either that or I am just plain exhausted. Or maybe its commuting 2 hours each way, or working all day, or having to meet all these deadlines, or living three lives at once - but I am tired. It seems like there is not enough coffee in the world today. But last night, I went out for coffee (which I need to switch what I am drinking because I don't drink that much coffee anymore and just go spastic, when I left I plowed into a few things and took out my taillight) and it was good to talk about other things. Like the fact that while the republicans are mudslinging at the democrats that they are secret socialists and would want to nationalize everything - they have marched in and nationalized the banks and insurance industry - but there is nothing...no acknowledgment in the media about all this. And my conversation in the middle of the day with that guy from work about the existence of God. It was so strange, not your usual talk about God/No God and organized religion versus everything but a profoundly deep and stilted conversation on the meaning of life and how our choices in how we perceive it and compartmentalize things effects our futures and possibilities. Which, as you know, is a big theme for me - our choices in memory and perception (and they are choices) versus what potentially is the reality of life. We also wandered into talking about "the Secret" and "the law of attraction" and a few other current and popular modes of thought. Its like, maybe because of the times and it being an election year, there are these surfacing questions floating around and it is interesting to watch the difference in some people's reactions. Some get almost angry and demand the status quo, and some, like that man - pause...and find a way slightly outside of their lives to begin to look at things just ...a...little...bit...more...carefully. Today will be good...my blue bunny honey scored 12 cones and is keeping them in the back for me. |
|||
one of those
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 28 Oct 2008 08:25 AM | ||
|
conversations.... I was working, we all were working and for no good reason, one of the men got up and walked over to me and asked "Do you think there is a God?" and it felt like the earth shifted and a door opened, so I put down my tools and we talked for 45 minutes. Oddly enough, both of us - in our separate worlds had been coming to grips with the same questions. I told him about the "requiem" I am working on and the problems I am having, he told me about the odd set of circumstances that have been following him since august. Since August, when my odd set started. We decided that it was comforting to know that these kinds of questions were occuring to other people too and that even though there is a lot of stuff going on that we really don't understand, we have decided to keep following our "odd coincidences" because something about what is going on in our parallel lives feels right. and no - I am not going to tell you what my answer was, it was a very involved conversation that did not really have yes or no answers. |
|||
one of those
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 28 Oct 2008 08:24 AM | ||
|
conversations.... I was working, we all were working and for no good reason, one of the men got up and walked over to me and asked "Do you think there is a God?" and it felt like the earth shifted and a door opened, so I put down my tools and we talked for 45 minutes. Oddly enough, both of us - in our separate worlds had been coming to grips with the same questions. I told him about the "requiem" I am working on and the problems I am having, he told me about the odd set of circumstances that have been following him since august. Since August, when my odd set started. We decided that it was comforting to know that these kinds of questions were occuring to other people too and that even though there is a lot of stuff going on that we really don't understand, we have decided to keep following our "odd coincidences" because something about what is going on in our parallel lives feels right. and no - I am not going to tell you what my answer was, it was a very involved conversation that did not really have yes or no answers. |
|||
jack jack race
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 28 Oct 2008 05:07 AM | ||
|
I woke up sooooooo late this morning and raced up to the job site so I would have enough time to try and take care of some things online. Strange that I am racing from one place to another to make time. One of the things that has been going on with me, the one I barely mentioned that I was trying to figure out how to talk about, let alone how to handle....was very similar to what happened to Jennifer Hudson's family, only with an even darker twist. It didn't happen to me, but to someone I work with and I have been involved with it just because I am their boss and friend and I have been around police work and investigations and grief and all those good things. And no matter what my life has been like, no matter what has been going on with me, I have had to become able to put it and everything I know aside because things like this - they are so hard to wrap your mind around. And on one hand, you want to let loose with all the grief and anger caused by the death of a child but then the details that come out, that accompany it - my god, it just stops you cold and you have no idea what it going on. And I am sorry for Miss Hudson. Sorry too that her life is so public, but maybe in a way, that will help in the end. The family here isn't famous. And when the immediacy of the tragedy is gone, nobody will see them on the street and already have an idea of what they have been through. They will just be treated as if there is nothing special to consider about them at all. But maybe in a good way, that will help in the end. |
|||
blue bunny breakdown
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 27 Oct 2008 04:54 PM | ||
|
I look forward to it all afternoon and when I arrived, the only bin in the blue bunny display that was empty was my cone that I am obsessed with and the woman behind the counter was just beside herself. We looked and looked and there were none to be found. Reluctantly, I got a Good Humor cone out of the display next to it and then launched into this (embarrassing in hindsight) poetic rant about the wonders of blue bunny and how I had found it three months ago and eaten all the bunnies in Magdelena and now, alas, it appears the bunnies in Los Alamos have disappeared. Then we spied the stock boxes under the cages in the ice chest and it took three of us twenty minutes to figure out the trick to unlocking the blue bunny display so we could move the bins and get to the storage area. Not a bunny cone in sight. And I drove off with my slightly melted Good Humor in my hand wondering if even I could find some kind of metaphor for life in all this. |
|||
a little bit of this
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 27 Oct 2008 12:34 PM | ||
|
a little bit of that...today I learned that I can so to go online and search for outstanding warrants, we have a job coming up that requires a background check and some of the guys were nervous because they didn't want to show up and be arrested so I googled a bit and started running their names then passed out little sticky notes with their warrants on it so they can go get it taken care of before the job starts. The odd skills I acquire. and it has been an easier day...more like real life then the hectic pace I have been keeping for months. Suddenly I find I can begin to think of the future again and not just be overwhelmed by the things that need to be done. And, I am becoming more intune with the present and not just viewing everything as a delay. I am ignoring the small fit I had this morning when I told someone the book was done and without missing a beat she immediately asked me when the other manuscript we had talked about would be ready. I mean...the ink isn't even dry on this one, I at least need a nap inbetween mad projects. Ah well...off to explore my new fetish of flash video. The possibilities I am discovering with it are just endless... |
|||
jennifer hudson
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 27 Oct 2008 08:20 AM | ||
|
Everyone knows what happened with Jennifer Hudson and her family. There are no words that can describe this, and I would venture that very few of us have comparable experiences. But we have (almost all of us) experienced sudden loss, within our own experience of these feelings we can begin to empathize with what she is going through. Maybe not understand it completely, but share the burden of the grief and all that comes with that. It does not matter so much if ones tragedy is bigger than another, or one makes the front page and one doesn't even merit a mention - these are not competitions or areas in which we can compare our lives. There is no point in saying - "that was horrible but look what happened to her, I shouldn't be so upset" because what happened to her, happened to her and what happened to you happened to you. If you begin to compare events as if one is "better" than the other you will shut down your emotional experience of your own life. Without experiencing the depths of your own emotions, you cannot truly empathize with another. Nobodies experiences are the same or equal. The key, is to learn to be able to recognize when you need to put your things down and make someone else's life the focus. Sometimes there are moments when we have to do that, and sometimes it is our turn to be focused on. I know she has a post in her myspace blog that is asking for people to help. I think it would be a good idea to go read it. |
|||
the roots and the stems
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 27 Oct 2008 02:34 AM | ||
|
compassion and passion, with strong feeling - we use the term compassionate frequently as a goal and also as a description for someone, to borrow Bill Clinton's words "feels your pain." Yet, I think the popular definition of compassion somehow has it limited to an intellectual understanding of someone's feelings. Compassion is the ability to feel what they feel as if it were your own immediate emotion. You have to give up your "self" in order to do that. In that moment, you exist only in your awareness of the contradiction that what you feel does not match your reality, but someone else's. In a way, it is a form of ultimate union. And it is why it is such a key element in Love. If your partner does not possess the ability to compassionately connect to you or vice versa, then it is a sign that the willingness to suspend the self in love and care for another is not there. More so, if they are incapable of compassion for others they are not directly involved with - how then, could they do it at home? And without the ability to express compassion, how could you expect them to love passionately? running late, a million things to do... |
|||
the return to now
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 26 Oct 2008 05:39 PM | ||
|
I was in the gym - my laundry never made it off my floor, sacrificed in the name of the great god "book release" (and thus will die another pair of "good" jeans to the work altar this week) - I was in the gym trying to get back in the swing of things and it was towards the end of the work out, my thoughts were on numbers and whitespace and the fact that I had forgotten to bring another sportsbra and was contemplating what this meant for the planned trip to buy catfood after when I looked out the window and beyond my reflection and saw one of the local homeless, slightly crazy guys walking across the parking lot. The wind had started to pick up and he was walking in this odd, hunched way, like whatever he was holding against his chest - protecting from the world - was life itself. It wasn't till he passed beneath the streetlamp that I could see a small kitten tucked in his arms and everything inside of me just broke, and I put down my weights and went into the locker room and cried. I cried for the man and kitten, who probably wouldn't make it through the night togther - kittens being hungry and curious and the man, who I know in passing - not being capable of the much in attention. And I cried for what I knew he was feeling right then, in that moment, because I had been there and no matter how "far" I get from that time in my life, it is always right behind me. Three times in my life I have been told that I was incapable of living. Once when I was younger and the powers that be decided that because of the horrors I had been through that my problems were untreatable and I should give up my attempts for an independent life and go on permanent disability and live in a half way house. That it was unreasonable to expect me to heal from my experiences. It took years of healing, including some difficult ones when I was homeless and so dysfunctional that the only reason I survived was my therapist, who was treating me for free, would bring me trashbags of food for me and the dog. And as I got better, I learned to eat in soup kitchens and finally to be able to take care of myself, But I remember what it was like, when there was nothing else in the world but that small heart pressed in your jacket... The second time was when I was injured in Korea and the Army told me I was 100% physically disabled, and it took physical therapy and then dealing with the PTSD from the situation that caused it to get myself to where I am, doing the type of absurdly physical in-your-face-my-body-is-better-than-yours kind of work that I do and it takes daily effort to maintain my physical balance. And my dog again, the only thing that every day looked at me as if I could do anything - and if on that day, I couldn't - that was fine by him too. The third time was the cancer, and the western medicine told me I had to give up all physical activity, stress, basically movement in order to survive. And I found someplace that was willing to try a different root. I came through that, and my dog, I think - finally knew I was okay and passed away. But when I looked out that window, at that man and that kitten, it all came back - that and the knowledge that who would have thought, way back then - that I would be where I am today? Down to being asked to lecture to Psych Students on what it means to be alive. I can tell I am almost at the end of my giant to-do list because I am once again beginning to respond and connect to the world around me. And for that, I am so grateful. Life...living....the capacity to heal and be whole, to feel Love and all the other emotions - these are things I had to earn because I did not start out with any idea of how to any of it. Explains my obsession with these things, no? |
|||
bouncing
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 26 Oct 2008 06:46 AM | ||
|
this is the hard part, I am so close to being done with the release that my mind is wandering to places it would rather be - passion, love, life...not figuring out how to destroy the english language by writing webpages according to key words. Oy vey...while I am so pleased that all of this has come together - I am so forward to being able to devote my time to writing and thinking, following all these small paths that open up. Actually, the image I have more in my head is those strange calendars from Christmas, the ones with all the little doors or windows you open, one a day, and there is something different behind them all. I am so uninterested in doing my laundry. But...to respond to a couple of comments...one of the problems we have (this is a grand 'we', a common cultural thing) is that within our intimate relationships we begin to sexualize everything and every contact. Every time you go out with a friend, it has a tendency to be seen as a threat. What this does is it destroys the inspiring part of your relationship because it moves you into the defensive. No one person can be everything, that is unfair to them to place that expectation on them. Yet, in looking for other small complimentary relationships, there does have to be something that denotes your 'one' as the 'one'. Scattered...just scattered...okay laundry and then off to kinko's. |
|||
the problem with passion
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 26 Oct 2008 04:07 AM | ||
|
from the dictionary, the current definitions for "passion" 1often capitalized a: the sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death b: an oratorio based on a gospel narrative of the Passion2obsolete : suffering3: the state or capacity of being acted on by external agents or forces4 a (1): emotion <his ruling passion is greed> (2)plural : the emotions as distinguished from reason b: intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction c: an outbreak of anger5 a: ardent affection : love b: a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept c: sexual desire d: an object of desire or deep interest the problem is, passion is like love, kind of a catchall term we use to describe a very complex experience of emotions. It can exists based on something completely outside of your self, inside, or perhaps even divinely inspired. In this culture, we tend to have placed a limitation on the experience of passion - there is the sexual or a devotion to an activity that virtually renders someone asexual. We also have a tendency to reserve "passion" for a few types of people - artists, writers that kind of thing and leave everyone else incapable of experiencing it. Which is not true. I think that passion, like love is one of the higher forms of emotional experience because again, it involves a level of vulnerability and committment that is also found in the experience of Love. But when you live in a culture who's only deep understanding of love is based in sex or tragedy, it is hard to navigate the waters through which you must pass to encounter passion, and even more so passionate love. For passionate love is beyond the sexual - but becomes the divine and the drive. It goes back to th concept of the sacred space. Sacred spaces are not just meant to protect tragic things. They are also invitations to the sacred or divine to come and live between you. |
|||
the loss of passion
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 25 Oct 2008 02:59 PM | ||
|
can you lose something that you never had in the first place? I think, sometimes, we mistake the thrill of new attraction and infatuation with the power of passion - and when that newness wears off - we are left thinking that we have lost something that made the relationship whole. But passion is a difficult thing to lose, once it has been found. What makes it hard to find though, is that for passion to exist, both people must be at a stage of willingness to be vulnerable. They must be willing, in their relationship to each other, to give up their assumptions and rules because passion - for lack of a better analogy - is a thing of the gods and does not thrive under manmade needs for control. Passion brings out your innermost talents and capabilities. It is minimally about physical desire and has everything to do with a complete desire to live your life as if you were wide awake and capable of everything. It is not so much a focus on another person but an internal drive, a flowering that finds its passage through love for another. There are a million theories about how we "connect" and one of the explanations (from human design) is that we all come equipped with a series of "gates" and when we meet someone who has the complimentary gate, a path is formed and what was available, but had no place to go before can travel freely. Travel not only outside of ourselves, but we become open to what comes to us. Passion is rooted in this kind of connection. Not that someone else completes us, but in a way - that they possess something that teaches us a language we had been trying to speak but could not before. But what is strange, while this kind of "awakening" may most easily happen when you meet your compliment - it is not dependent on them to exist. Once awake, you are the sole driver of your passion. |
|||
on one hand
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 25 Oct 2008 04:33 AM | ||
|
Isn't it strange how on one hand we assume that a part of growing older is that we lose our "naive" hopes and dreams for the future and become more realistic. Then, once we hit our "realistic adulthood" we discover that perhaps these were the things we should have clung to because they are life itself. So many people who feel so lost, as if they have somehow lost themselves along the way and suddenly things and responsibilities have taken on a life of their own and everything becomes more important than the interior life. One of the things I have come to believe about Love is that a huge part of a relationship is the ability of your connection with that person to inspire you to commit to yourself and remember what it is that makes life a living thing for you. And I am not talking about the other person being "supportive" of you (which, I have got to look at that phrase, talk about vague and catch all) but that within your connection, your wordless connection, just the two of you in a room not even looking at each other, is a kind of energy that sustains your interior life. A Passion. A fever that comes and is not directed at the other, but is fed by their presence and love. Ok...more coffee and onto to even more things.... |
|||
why not? A little tease
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 24 Oct 2008 05:17 PM | |||
|
||||
flash
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 24 Oct 2008 04:51 PM | ||
|
I am having to learn flash in like, hours, so far so good except I hit a big glitch that my software (in fact, almost all of my music and art software) is from Germany and all the required coding is written for MS flash or whatever....so, I punted a version of the ad over to their web people and we'll see. However, flash does open up just a downright vista of possibilites with making videos. I have bounced between wanting to make one for "Hell", or "Angel" but now am drawn to "Baucis and Philemon" but was having an issue about how to do certain effects and flash would definately become this complete obsession to pull it all off. However, I am still crashing through this current project and am just swamped. Swamped and happy. Sometimes, when you are overwhelmed, it is for all the right reasons and you find yourself handling everything with this brilliant ease. But at least I think tomorrow I can begin to pull my head out of the computer and begin to get back to the task of living. |
|||
zone
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 24 Oct 2008 01:30 AM | ||
|
I am "in the zone"...unfortunately, my alarm clock thought that one of them was Eastern Time so I woke up late and I am just trying to have enough coffee to get in the truck and find the gas station. And my head is spinning, I have been through a cultural education in these past 24 hours and I am trying to let it all sift down and become part of my soil. Trying to figure out a way to talk about it without talking about someone else's business. Their business is theirs, but my reactions and what I learn can be discussed. But I feel, I feel like I have suddenly stepped into my own skin. This past month has just been a whirlwind and...how can I put it....yesterday I had to stop just responding to everything and become open to it all and when I did, I discovered that somewhere along the way - I have stepped fully through another door. I make no sense without caffeine. I am late. All the last bits and pieces of the release are falling into place and it is on its way. |
|||
when rain falls
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 23 Oct 2008 05:56 PM | ||
|
they say, when the rain falls on a funeral, it is a good thing. The one who has passed has gone immediately to where they should go. Their footprints have been washed from the earth and all who grieve for them are cleansed. It is when the rain does not fall that grief and ghosts are locked hand in hand until whatever needs to still to be done is done. I got a lot of the same kind of question that I received when I wrote on forgiveness, "Are there some things that you cannot heal from?" Tons, there are probably less that you can heal from. There are physical disabilities, emotional wounds, mental damages to name a few. But within these, healing takes on a new meaning - it is what I am talking about when you "heal into something new". Healing is about both expectation and hope. It is about bringing your experience into your understanding of life and reconciling it. It has been a long strange day. One where I started thinking I knew what to do and actually, I did. Somehow I had enough sense to keep my mouth shut and not interject my fabulous wisdom on healing and to listen instead to the other person and begin to discover what the experience was to them. I feel as if....I have been educated in an area of life that I am not just wholly ignorant, but a complete outsider. Yet, even in that, odd that this is the tack I have been on for a day or two - I return to it, not only saying "yes, heal into something new" but recognizing within myself how trying to share experience to ease pain may sometimes be the single creates disservice we can do to other people's need for us and our capacity to be there. Because in sharing, you are speaking, and if you haven't noticed - if you are speaking, it is next to impossible to listen. |
|||
when rain falls
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 23 Oct 2008 05:55 PM | ||
|
they say, when the rain falls on a funeral, it is a good thing. The one who has passed has gone immediately to where they should go. Their footprints have been washed from the earth and all who grieve for them are cleansed. It is when the rain does not fall that grief and ghosts are locked hand in hand until whatever needs to still to be done is done. I got a lot of the same kind of question that I received when I wrote on forgiveness, "Are there some things that you cannot heal from?" Tons, there are probably less that you can heal from. There are physical disabilities, emotional wounds, mental damages to name a few. But within these, healing takes on a new meaning - it is what I am talking about when you "heal into something new". Healing is about both expectation and hope. It is about bringing your experience into your understanding of life and reconciling it. It has been a long strange day. One where I started thinking I knew what to do and actually, I did. Somehow I had enough sense to keep my mouth shut and not interject my fabulous wisdom on healing and to listen instead to the other person and begin to discover what the experience was to them. I feel as if....I have been educated in an area of life that I am not just wholly ignorant, but a complete outsider. Yet, even in that, odd that this is the tack I have been on for a day or two - I return to it, not only saying "yes, heal into something new" but recognizing within myself how trying to share experience to ease pain may sometimes be the single creates disservice we can do to other people's need for us and our capacity to be there. Because in sharing, you are speaking, and if you haven't noticed - if you are speaking, it is next to impossible to listen. |
|||
I always like
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 23 Oct 2008 02:21 AM | ||
|
waking up and staring at pictures of myself. I fell asleep after dinner and did not wake up till 2am. At least today I am prepared and as the guys call them, I have my "granny panties" on and hopefully won't freeze today. But it is a race to try and finish the online ads, I have to have everything in by noon on Friday and suddenly have to fit in a trip to Colorado. Be it what it may. It is frustrating, this contradictory state of wanting to help someone and yet becoming resentful that "they are not doing what I say". It helps to remember that when we were in the same situation, we weren't exactly listening to the world's wisdom because although there are perhaps millions of people who have gone through exactly what we have been through - some with more on their plate then others at the time, the experience is completely different for everyone. There is no same experience because our experiences are filtered through our histories and that is what makes us unique. We may share a common event, but what it means to us, how it can effect us is unique to the individual. The core tenet of many self-help programs is that we are all the same and our experiences are the same. I can understand the neccessity of this message because in the beginning, in the mix, you have to get the person to see that "other people made it, so can you" but you also set the healing up for a kind of failure. Because after a certain point, you have to start to deal with what makes it unique in your experience and that is a hard and lonely thing. I keep returning to loneliness as an element in all this change, don't I? Loneliness is also one of the key ingredients of Love, believe it or not, not in that it drives us to seek companionship but that one of the experiences of love, of true intimacy, is a sense of profound lonliness because because it is very real that the two of you are separate and there is no complete union or sharing. But this lonliness is a part of life, and one of the gifts of love, is that it becomes easier to bear this completely personal experience. I am under the impression I drifted...ok, time to get this show on the road. |
|||
ride a painted pony
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 22 Oct 2008 03:51 PM | ||
|
it is safe to say that I am spastic, it was cold and windy for the first time today and it can have the effect of way too much caffeine. Now I am home, getting ready to launch into the evenings project - the release, for me, happens Friday at noon and then my part is over. Nothing appears for another week or so but at least I can get back to my life. Such as it is. But back to healing - I think one of the hardest things about it is the often well meant projections we put on another person's path. I mean, if something has worked for us, or if we found our way out of a similar situation then the temptation is to not only offer our wisdom, but to refuse to accept if it is not working for an other. We get impatient that they are not going "oh, your right, I'll start there" or worse, reject them if they reject what has helped us. There are instances when our efforts to help are not founded in "good faith", perhaps we don't want to have to deal with their issues and want them "fixed fast", and perhaps, our interest in someone else's health is not all it appears to be. We want their attention, we want to be recognized by them as someone special who cares in a way that only we can. Healing, from all views, is complex. Oh...it just hit me, I am starving. |
|||
hatred
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 22 Oct 2008 04:50 AM | ||
|
You know...ok...there has been some things going on in New Mexico that fortunately the media and population at large have dealt with fairly swiftly and effectively but they bear mentioning because in election time we have to be very careful about where we get our news from because some things are the product of hatred, pure and simple, and not fact. Several weeks ago we had the Chairman of the Stat Republican Committee (I think that was his role), a Hispanic, come out in an interview with the BBC at our state fair and say "No Hispanic would vote for an African American because Hispanics came here as conquerors and Blacks came here as slaves..." as well as a few other choice things and then refused to step down, even when asked by the Republican party (he finally did resign). Mind you, the facts are that an overwhelming majority of Hispanics 65 and older in NM support Obama and he has high numbers in other age ranges. Now, Otero County Republican Women Chair, Marcia Stirman, issued a letter to the letter to the editor in which she not only states that she "believes Muslims are our enemy" but goes on to call Obama a "Muslim Socialist". Facts are he is not and neither are Muslims enemies. All religions, including Christianity, bear the burden of being claimed as the excuse for terrorism. To quote Rabbi Joseph Black of the Congregation Albert in the Duke city "I am sickened...History has taught us the dangers if mindless hatred based on religious affiliation." You know and then everyone down plays that with a Republican leader in place now, the US has effectively nationalized the majority of our banking and financial industries. But it is this poison, this mindless hatred that destroys the integrity of the party they sprout from and just...we need to be a bit vigilant. Early voting is taking off, lines are in the two hour range but the South Valley and Downtown locations are still empty. Crowds are smaller around dinner. You can vote at any location, not just the one near you. You can still do an absentee ballot - just call 505-468-1291. The county clerk need the app by October 30th. If you put in for an absentee ballot and want to go vote eary at the poll instead, just tell them at the polls and they will cancel the application and you are set. Again, do not wear a t-shirt, pin, sticker or anything else depicting a candidate within 100 feet of the polls. Good god, not only can I not wait for all this to be over, but the dirt and spiders it is revealing in our dark corners need a lot of cleaning and light if we are actually going to start participating in the process of change. |
|||
healing
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 22 Oct 2008 02:00 AM | ||
|
there are some things we heal ourselves from in moments. The deep breath, the silent thought that everything is ok and we move on. There are other things that it takes time and effort to heal, and there are still more that require a lifetime. While it is a profoundly individual process, there are "hallmarks" to it that let you know when you have become stuck in it. Sometimes, being acknowledged as having been hurt can be very validating and it becomes tempting, as life ebbs and flows to always return to that point where you are given recognition for survival and the effort of healing takes a kind of back burner. One of the issues I have with American Psychiatric Medicine is that it is based in an "emergency response" base. People are diagnoses and medicated according to their original symptoms and then sustained to avoid the return of the original symptoms. In the 15 minutes a month that people are usually slotted in with someone to adjust their medications the focus is on the presence of original symptoms rather then dealing with the gradual unveiling of the problem. American Psych Meds has a habit of using medication designed for short term intervention as a long term treatment. But then again, that is our mode isn't it? We assign people labels based upon tragedy and ever more hold them there. Individually, we have adopted this trend and begin to assign to ourselves labels and identities based upon moments that interfere with our ability to make change and create healing into something new. That is the phrase I am looking for "healing into something new". We cannot heal into the old. And in anything psychiatric or medicinal, the old had some deep flaws anyway. And the new may come with its own set of problems but life is about evolving change. There is far too much emphasis on the magic pill - rather than learn a new way of living that increases our quality of life and health - we seek a regimen that need not interfere with how our lives have always been and hope that our pain will disappear. While there are conditions, physical and mental that do require medication, 85% of what is marketed today is to treat disorders that could be eradicated by a change in lifestyle. But we don't support people who try to change now do we? Not culturally...its like the election, I think half the peopl think whoever gets in will be able to magically change everything back to the way "it was" or make it "better" and we view it as the sole responsibility of the people in office to make it happen. The point is, it doesn't matter who is in office, granted they can make it easier or f**k things up a whole lot faster - but cultural change, societal change, personal change starts within each individual and their actions. Rant building....ok, I have got to go to work and have to tear myself away from all this. |
|||
pick and choose
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 21 Oct 2008 05:28 PM | ||
|
wow...there is so much in all the comments and emails concerning the whole victim/group thing. It is hard to pick and choose, but there is one phrase (and thank you S) that jumps out as the main thing people are saying and that is "a perpetual merry go round of taking without healing". What does it mean to heal? Does it come with an image and ideal? Do we approach like we approach having a good relationship (and f**k that all up) by creating some type of cookie cutter ideal that is not only unrealistic, but definately unhealthy. There are times when I think what people mean by "healing" is the inability to be hurt again and that is not how it works. Nor does the magic of healing give you the power to survive everything, handle everything become some kind of superman. Dang..ok, I am going to see if I can stay focused - this is a good topic for me. My whole life is about healing myself it seems...its why I write the way I do, think about the things I think about - because I am healing and I do not know if there will ever be a point where I stop. |
|||
cold hot
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 21 Oct 2008 08:15 AM | ||
|
I hate when I have brought the dud energy bar for lunch, I only buy a variety because I don't want to admit I would be perfectly happy eating the same thing day in and day out for weeks on end. My pseudo indian food MREs still rock though. Self Esteem and the ways we shore it up, build it and take it down is a very complex and subtle series of movements in our lives. I have been talking with some people who are trying to introduce a module of teaching to young students about "victimology" and the ways in which we may inadvertently grab onto something as a part of our identity and use it to define ourselves as victim, even when we are long past the actual victimization. It's a difficult thing to get someone to begin to recognize when what they have accepted as a support system, may at some point, become a source for a re-victimization. Unfortunately, one of the downfalls of "groups" is that being a member of the group becomes important and if your group is based in something being wrong with you, the concept of becoming well and identifying as recovered or functioning is frightening because it means you no longer belong. When our identities shift and grow, there is always an uncomfortable period in which we belong to nothing and are alone. But it lasts only so long... |
|||
instant
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 21 Oct 2008 02:07 AM | ||
|
it's like I woke up in a bubble today and everything that has been so pressing and important is somewhere off in the mountains picking daisies. It's not a happy, happy mood - but I just can't connect to any of my stress and that is a fine thing. What it feels like is that I have arrived at a moment "inbetween" and suddenly, before everything changes, there is this calmness. All the details around me are standing out. I don't feel lost or overwhelmed and yet I am completely lacking in any sense of urgency to connect with my todo list. Now that I have identified the feeling as not "god, I am coming down with the flu" I am gently trying to savor it. I think a lot of it has to do with the upcoming release. I am down to small details. Somehow I have manage to steer this project to a point where come November it is released to 5,365,000 places for the ad. I have no idea how I have done that. I have only the ebook to finalize and approve, some last minute approvals on the ad campaign and it is done. The business side of art is a strange thing. You have to learn it and you just pray to God that someone comes along eventually that can take responsibility for it. But it is a part of it all. If anything, it has been the best teacher for me as far as editing and attention to detail. It's made me a little less "willy nilly" and cavalier with how I treat my work. I didn't realize that a large part of my attitude toward it was really...self-defeating in a way. I love what I do, I make time for it, I am committed to it but inside - there was this small tape playing that said "you're not good enough." Who knew advertising would be a form of therapy, but it has been in a way, because it has forced me to come face to face with thoughts and habits I have had that have kept me in the same cycle and pattern and whether or not I even sell enough of the book and cd to cover the cost of making them - I have earned a new degree of confidence and self-respect that I didn't have before. Self esteem. Every choice we make is a reflection of our true self esteem. It's a matter of becoming able to pay attention to the choices enough to begin to see whether our actions are matching the image we think we have of ourselves. I am looking forward to a return to the quiet of writing though. This having to be on call all day long for three different timezones and making decisions is just a bit much. That and my small cat has just managed to produce what should be marketed as a weapon of mass destruction in the litterbox...that's disgusting. |
|||
transition
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 20 Oct 2008 03:29 PM | ||
|
today I said goodbye to my Zia crew and packed them off to a job that looks like it will keep them busy for a year or two. I am glad for them, but.... that is how it goes when transition occurs, in the past month, everything around me has been shifting and changing while I have been rooted in one spot working on the release. I should really be moving before the winter hits but I have so many things tied to this address (and the postal system here is like no other) - that I have to hold steady or I will upset the apple cart. And I have to do a little more, and work a little harder to make everything happen. But I am ....sad, alittle lost, because they have become my friends here. And now... ah well, to the gym, loud music, keep on going |
|||
Shelley Clooney
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 20 Oct 2008 04:37 AM | ||
|
Shelley Winters swam in a ship. Rosemary Clooney sang on a stage. I think I am losing my mind. I had this dream once and I was in this spaceship, circling earth, climbing up the balcony of this strange auditorium and I ran into someone I sort of knew and while I was talking to them, their skin unzipped and it was someone else I had known from way back then. Until that moment, I hadn't realized how much they were alike and the reason that I was so comfortable with this new person was that they reminded me so much of the old. Work now. |
|||
swimming underwater
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 20 Oct 2008 02:15 AM | ||
|
Maybe its because I have been listening to a lot of Rosemary Clooney lately, but do you remember that scene in the "Poseidan Adventure"? The one where she says "I'll swim, I used to be a champion in high school" and everyone (including you) is looking at her, at her size, at her everything and thinking "there is no way" and her pinstick husband points out that she is scared of going underwater - and she does it. And you cheer. That's alot of what it is like about getting placed in a position where you have to confront a fear that may have started off small, but was allowed (mostly though avoidance and careful feeding by you) to grow into an elephant. Your choice is to drown doing what you have always done, or take the chance - move through it all - but there is a real possibility you might drown that way - but at least it won't be because you are sitting, paralyzed and waiting for life to happen to you. I find that most fears have a root in other people. Maybe instilled by them, maybe in the moment when you first faced the option - there was a reluctance to actually go through it, a sense of unsurety and you look to those around you that are suppose to be your support system and you are looking for one of two things - some sweeping statement that you are a superhero and none of it matters to grand 'ol you; or yes, don't do it, how dare you even consider the possibility and you are simultaneously relieved of the burden of responsibility for trying something new, but also have a negative piece of your self-image reinforced. And as I have pointed out before, it takes six "good" instances to counteract a "bad" experience. You see how easy it is in our mind to build up a perception that all is not worth trying. I wonder if that is part of a left over animal survival that we would give so much more weight to a moment of bad then a moment of good. I do know that is why all of the religions and self-helps etc., work so hard on trying to get you to focus on the good. Oh god, it's late.... |
|||
as it should be
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 19 Oct 2008 05:06 PM | ||
|
in the grand tradition of all the work I have done, I have found the one mistake that got past me and made it into the first run....I have been sitting here for a week dealing with disaster after disaster and doing well but wondering, where is the one thing that is going to sneak on by? And I found it , and fixed it and am pulling another run and the world feels as it should. I use to panic and lose my mind when this happens, now I just view it as having christmas gifts for friends and family... But I am relaxed now, what is done is done, what is fixed is fixed and I am more involved with the thoughts going around in my head (still from my conversation from yesterday) about the violin being so soothing because it is the musical instrument closest in waveform to the human voice. Did I ever mention I used to play? But gave it up when I launched myself into the RV and switched to the guitar. Ok...off to the store. |
|||
turning 'round and 'round
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 19 Oct 2008 09:59 AM | ||
|
I am already into the "reward", three weeks of avoidance, fifteen minutes of getting it done and relief. Isn't it amazing how we do this to ourselves? Spend more time procrastinating and making distractions then taking the literal moments it would take to get something done. But I have learned, that when it comes to "issues" they do need room to breath and be heard. Just enough to see them and begin to learn the questions to ask about how to get past them - but not enough time to take a tent and make it a permanent home. There are some things that the understanding of the "how they came to be", that prolonged and deep psychoanalytical couch trip - isn't what is required. All you need is to find out how to get past it without passing out from holding your breath. |
|||
I choose
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 19 Oct 2008 02:26 AM | ||
|
Today...I choose to confront a fear of mine. The whole day is about it, and then I have six rewards planned for after. I find, sometimes, that is the only way to get myself to take the actual step. Now, I am not going to say what the fear is, but I have caught on to the fact that over the past two weeks it has steadily slipped from the top of my list, to the bottom. Always, I am finding or creating something that "has to be done" instead of this realitively simple task. All I have to do is print out something that is already written and mail it. Then I caught myself saying that "I needed time" to try and figure out why this is such an issue for me. And now I realize...anymore time, any more projects and I will have conveniently missed my deadline rendering it a non-issue. So...today is all about getting me to press the print button and address the envelope. I had this great talk yesterday with a woman who I have known of, but not known anything at all about for a while - and we wound up having lunch and conversation for almost four hours. It was good. But I think I have already identified the "theme of the week", starting early yesterday morning I have begun to be surrounded by conversations et. al. about how is it, that we turn around and discover we have lost ourselves along the way? And when we find this, can we get ourselves back - or is who we were - only a memory? I have areas of my life (that include my little spate of paralyzing fear today) in which this is the question at hand. I think I have done a pretty good job of staying the course as far as my passions, but there are some areas where I am so painfully aware of what used to be important to me and somehow, somehow I have let things slowly stack up in front of it and I am trying to take down the bricks without knocking over the whole damn wall and winding up causing harm rather then reuniting with a very important part of myself. Two night with eight hours sleep - what a luxury. |
|||
Welcome to Love and Words
| POSTED BY: ctribe | POSTED ON: 18 Oct 2008 04:39 PM | ||
|
Love and Words is the award winning blog from poet and philosopher, Cassandra Tribe. Join her as she writes about life, love and the search for purpose; talks about her upcoming work and posts about new releases.
Welcome to the Tribe. |
|||
Feeds
