sidewalk cracks and in betweens / life in a web

whew how the spirits of places guide our ups downs inspirations despair! been back 2 weeks in portland, bopping around writing hammering gardening dancing petting cats drawing pictures making epic dinners telling stories giving gifts.

hey you, wearing your nihilist craziness anxious ambiguity like a crown of clover buds and yampah roots, let's walk together behind the goats and watch their buttholes open and close like portals to another world where pooping is easy for everyone and we can digest much more of this world without being poisoned!

here's a question: what do we do with the products of industrial civilization and the industrial food system?
here's a question: how do you call yourself back home?
here's another one: when was the last time you did something unpleasant or hard for someone you love?
and: what plants do you use eat interact with daily?
and: how are you feeling this shift into august in your body, rhythm, state of mind?

hum, these days for me have been some HARDCORE HANGING OUT
which is also sometimes organizing & planning for the life and world i want to live in
i want for future children to live in
that i was called into being to help make
family-making without gettin wholesome
keeping my goodness and magic woven with nastiness and perversity
dancing out rhythms of place and being and priorities
drawing out maps of desire and walks

pshaw let me suck on your liver
taste the bloody dandelion root
drink milk-blood smoothies like i don't believe in the circuitry of disgust
raw testicles like the most special and most easy to put in your mouth
activate your third eye
touch your bones to help you remember their knowing
"your body evokes my body" we danced this
we danced slapped poked spun pushed edged this into being

what comes easily is not always because it existed before
but flows into existence because everything was ripe for its birth
already known and remembered even as as the most new just-imagined

ROOTS. BONES. MOVEMENTS. REWILDING. IMAGINATION. THE aRT wORLD. DROP OUT. AT HOME. ALIGNMENT. TENDRILS. LEARNING. BREAK. BUILD. WALK. SING.

an outline for stories i'd like to tell:
i. walking delicately in a web of beloveds / polyglamory and lessons on boundaries.
ii. moving from homelessness to homefulness.
iii. after death.
iv. nihilism and goat herding.
v. lessons from the hoop / dancing between the wild and the city.
vi. faeries and witches.
to be continued.

leaving soon to be moving again, back to the woods to the olympic peninsula to wandering to revisiting. lovin y'all like summer.

on being obliged to watch

on tuesday, whitey the sheep was slaughtered*. i felt obliged to be present for a lot of reasons, none of them peer pressure--i wanted to bear witness, to experience the impact of a life passing to take responsibility for the role of death in producing a meat- and animal-driven lifestyle, to face my complicitness, to see which parts or which people seemed cruel, if any...i don't think anyone is particularly cruel, and it's not easy for anyone. walt says that if it were easy, one shouldn't be doing it--there's a risk of detachment, of becoming too capable of killing something without thinking about it too much. i took the opposite route, holding on tight to the memory of whitey eating as she bled to death from her neck, slowly crumpling onto the ground but never in pain, never bleating--in short, remembering life as the cost through the process of removing the hide, fat, organs, cutting up the meat into chunks the next day.

in some ways, the experience of watching whitey die and the next day eating a bite of her was a beautiful closed-loop system...her body going to nourish windward, the people and earth and animals, and the impact of the flock on the land is being balanced so that they can survive the winter and to make space for new lambs to be born. i'm coming to feel and recognize my place in these cycles and circles of things--domesticator and cultivator but also spreader-of-seeds, feeder-of-bunnies, enricher-of-earth, consumer-of-predators-and-prey. the truth is that i, and most people i think, don't have nearly enough information to figure out how to choose a diet or way of living that impacts the earth as little (or as positively) as possible...monocrop agriculture and the cultivation of annual grains has fucked a lot of shit up too. and although humans have fucked up a lot more than our due on this planet, it also doesn't seem quite right to put us on the top of it all, the Ruiners and the FuckUppers...the earth has evolved along with us, animals evolved to live in synchrony with humans, cars replaced natural predators in controlling the deer population...how do we begin to take responsibility for all this?

something is always dying for us to eat,
and i think that is one reason i felt obliged to watch.
watching whitey get hoisted up, dying quietly--it didn't make me want to eat meat, really,
and when i ate a little it tasted...okay, i guess.

all my little molecules and cells, nourished on this and that, more and more from this land, from the garden and the goat milk and the soft white wheat, and eventually i will be eaten by a tree hungry for bones and calcium or some grasses or maybe some critter. who knows. but that it as it should be, i think, in this cycle of nutrients and lifegiving and lifetaking. life and death and birth go together, cycling and cycling and keeping each other in check--what separates us is not our faces or our speaking abilities or our ability to build televisions, i think, but our sense that we have a choice about how we want to compete or cooperate, take responsibility or destroy, take lives gracefully in order to live or destroy life in order to dominate. we don't know how, or we have forgotten why, to keep ourselves in check. how to recognize that the resources for us to live and bear children are no longer available...because they're not, we're past topsoil and living on fossil fuels, eating and drinking this painfully extracted blood of the earth.

and what to do with all this knowledge,
all this information that we were never told,
i was never taught,
some of me craves cities and traveling, people people people,
easy small relationships, opening myself daily,
i am not ready to settle and dwell. not here, anyway.
but it lets me see the possibility of how it might be done,
how we might live responsibly with the land and its critters--plants and animals and bacteria and us.
nothing is easy. but we have so many choices.

*the words chosen carefully to describe death are prolific...culling, harvesting, giving death to, slaughtering, butchering, doing...rarely killing.

lovin my blood

i want to shout it from the rooftops! today, as expected, i started bleeding (in prep for the new moon tomorrow...it's already been a cycle of the moon since rosh hashanah on 3rd beach in lapush with stam bex and elz), a few days after having used fertility awareness method (FAM) as birth control. i wasn't unprotected, i was protected by my own knowledge of my own body! fuck yeah!

also, if anyone wants a kombucha mother-- we have some pretty little babies ready to leave.

also, happy birthday to justin, our little boogerbutt:

new song

oh shit! i just did something i've been meaning to do for months:
Hungryforblood.mp3
hopefully you can download the above mp3 of my new song, called "hungry for blood". let me know if it doesn't work.
love,
radiodjleli