Ashtree Honeybee

alone with a few books and a few cats. maybe i will paint my nails or let the breeze dance around me, just sit and do nothing. there’s a good show to watch and laundry to be done. i keep looking around for my dog, forgetting she’s gone. it’s so quiet without her. i am alone now with just a few books and a few cats and also some plants and a big cup of tea, more often coffee. i am melting into the heat and melting into my sheets. i am waking up older and wondering if wiser. alarm is set for four forty-five in the morning. i am waking up and carrying myself to someplace new. pardon the kicking and screaming. 

I dreamed about a strong crooked nose, pointing down toward the ground and covered in blonde bangs. It kept peeking through the hair but wouldn’t look me in the eye and I couldn’t figure out why. I tried to push the hair away and see through the septum into the soul but I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. There was no path or way to it. We stood at such a distance, only feet away.

there is too much being said
with children running down
a painted blue street-
it smells like rain, 
open sores,
humidity,

too full.
pouring out
quiet now. 

dopedungeon:

the further world
warps me, plays
me– i’m just a
thing to you, some
thing in the back
seat.

one for wasps
and stings, can
I negotiate
my way off the
floor?

there’s a stunning
wrinkle in your
skin, and I should
avert my iron
eyes from it.

What a fantastic day! I bought & planted seeds for my new plot at the Community Garden. I put them in a mini greenhouse and now I wait for seedlings! Very, very exciting. It will be so wonderful when I get these things in the ground:

• Broccoli
• Zucchini
• Cucumber
• Pole Bean
• Beet
• Red Onion
• Yellow Onion
• Sweet Peppers
• Serrano Peppers
• Buttercrunch
• Mesclun 
• Romaine
• Spinach
• Kale

In the morning I enjoyed good coffee and the crossword puzzle. In the afternoon I had lunch with my Dad & Sisters and went swimming in the pool. For thirty dollars at the swap meet I walked away with:

• Big floppy gardening hat
• Three flower pots
• Brown leather fanny pack
• Floor mats for my car
• Paul Simon’s Graceland 
• ELO’s Out of the Blue
• Green tank top

I also acquired weird tan lines on my shoulders & ate a bowl of vanilla ice cream with fresh blueberries. 

SUNDAY SUCCESS!

We waited for days, weeks, months even. Eyes glancing upward every morning upon waking, waiting and wondering, “Will it come out today?” Nothing but gray for so long it wore us down like the elbows on our sweaters’ sleeves. Now it’s the middle of July and Summer has hit so hard the past few days it’s felt like having the wind knocked out of you.

We are covered in bruises and full of sore muscles, lopsided sun tans mark our shoulders and legs. We climbed trees during the day until our legs gave out under us and there was nothing left to do but collapse in the grass and be covered in sun. We swam in a strange pool in the middle of the night and laid out to dry beneath a royal blue sky all lit up from the city lights. 

I have film to develop, three books to read, two gardens to tend to, a road trip planned and products & projects to make & create. Hallelujah, I’m saved.

It’s not a place you go 

It’s a place that comes to you

work

roof

hot

swim

breeze

skip

park

lay

grass

tree

climb

henna

hands

I am in my infancy with my understanding and love for Jazz. It’s exciting that way but it is scary as well. Yes, Jazz scares me.

Not in a frightening sort of way but in a this-music-has-power-to-change-my-soul sort of way. Listening to Jazz is like learning a foreign language. It is vast and confusing and your mind is so used to thinking one way, it is a stretch and a discipline to grasp new words, to roll your tongue in a new direction, to accentuate syllables your lips are not used to wrapping themselves around. It’s hard because you don’t understand the language as a whole, you don’t really know the meaning behind the rolled tongues or the umlauts, you can only grasp it in select words, not sentences, and certainly not in entire pages or stories.

I think a lot of people don’t like jazz or don’t listen to it simply because they have not ever taken the time to understand it. And it is something that takes time to understand. You have to commit yourself to the understanding, more-so, you have to OPEN yourself to the understanding. You have to expose yourself to all of it and you have to learn the language before it can make sense, before your ears will even receive it.

If jazz were a foreign language I think I just started formulating sentences. I can link sounds together in my mind and make sense out of songs that my brain didn’t even know how to process the first time I heard them. It’s exhilarating and something I’ve never experienced with any other genre of music. All I want to listen to is Jazz. Everything else sounds weak in comparison. Now that I am starting to speak the music, it is like a new revelation every time I put a record on. My soul reckons with the sound vibrations and I can understand what is being said.

The more clarity I get the more I want. Deeper sounds, spiritual songs, ancient chorus lines. I am hungry, hungry, hungry for more of this language. More of this knowledge. More of this thing that is far beyond what we call music. I want more JAZZ.

To start a project & finish it. To follow through & be consistent.

heyangella:

To spend more time looking people in the eye and exploring relationships I’m often afraid of. I’d like to let myself show softly. Like a glow.

To expand my sense of what it is to be alive in the world.

from your elders. Respect them and take time to listen to what they have to say. This morning over breakfast with my Dad I listened openly and intently to thoughts and advice he had on my emotional “swings” and where he thinks they stem from and how I can reach a place of more even temperateness in life. The things he spoke echoed so true in my heart, and wouldn’t they? He raised me and has seen my development from such a young age, it is no wonder he can speak such truth to me. I cried openly over my waffles and with a smile on my face, taking encouragement in his words; so much wisdom that man has. 

Now I just spent half an hour at the Pine Valley Java talking to a seventy year old man from Holland about his life as a piano tuner and how he fled the country and the FBI to come to California in 1968. I sat and listened while he told all these magical stories about Russian pianists and being sent to a German concentration camp at age sixteen and how he worked for two dollars a week in order to come here. He spoke with a thick accent and blinked at me with all his memories through even thicker glasses.

I had to interrupt him so I wouldn’t be late for work and before I left he insisted that my sister’s and I come over to his music house (his real house is in La Mesa) to hear him play the piano and hear more stories. I love it. I want as much exposure as I can get to other people and cultures and generations. More wisdom, more knowledge, please.