some things i love about the city

1) you can lay down on a parkbench or a slab of rock on a beautiful day without EVERYONE assuming your a vagrant or homeless and calling the police
2) You don't have to drive 5 miles to get an iced coffee
3) People come in colors other than "white"
4) You can walk places or ride your bike instead of being ridiculously dependent on a car

Things I don't prefer about the city:

1) Going for a 15 min. Doctor's appointment at 1pm and not getting seen until 2:30pm. The betch even took her lunch break while I was waiting AND i was paying for parking. I LOVE MANAGED CARE! There's not a VISA/MC logo on the receptionist's window for nuthin!
2) People who create their own walkways and then get pissed at you when you almost accidentally run them over
3) Traffic, traffic and more traffic and people who can't drive, namely that 21 year old in Daddy's Escalade. Ya, you know who you are!
4) I'm not sure why inflation has doubled in the past 5 years, but no where, not even in the city, should a mediterrian roll-up from Au Bon Pain cost 8 fucking dollars.

That's all from my concrete slab today.

No where i. ...a type-o.but i'll leave it. it sounds cool


Currently listening:
Let It Die
By Leslie Feist
Release date: 15 July, 2004

Studying Stones

i am out here studying stones
trying to learn to be less alive
using all of my will
to keep very still
still even on the inside
i've cut all of the pertinent wires
so my eyes can't make that connection
i am holding my breath
i am feigning my death
when i'm looking in your direction

'course numb is an old hat
old as my oldest memories
see that one's my mother
and that one's my father
and that one in the hat, that's me
it's a skill i'd hoped to abandon
when i got out on the open road
but any more pent up emotion
and i think i'm gonna explode

there's never been an endeavor so strange
as trying to slow the blood in my veins
to keep my face blank
as a stone that just sank
until not a ripple remains
i am high above the tree line
sitting cross legged on the ground
when all of the forbidden fruit has fallen and rotted
that's when i'm gonna come down

'course numb is an old hat
old as my oldest memories
see that one's my mother
and that one's my father
and that one in the hat, that's me
it's a skill i'd hoped to abandon
when i got out on the open road
but any more pent up emotion
and i think i'm gonna explode

The Truth Shall Set you Free...

Current mood: aggravated

and then it will make everyone dislike you.

that is all, really.

I enjoyed this..maybe you will too..and if you don't, that's cool too

A Message From Caroline Myss

Greetings,

This past March Salon has had so many responses that we have decided to share it with the entire Myss.com Newsletter. Enjoy……!

Now that ENTERING THE CASTLE is out, I am on a book tour, which includes a fairly constant schedule of interviews. I thought I would share with you the most frequently asked questions about ENTERING THE CASTLE and "The Divine Miss T," as one of my dearest friends now refers to Teresa of Avila.

How did you discover Teresa of Avila, the extraordinary 16th-century Spanish mystic and saint who inspired your new book?

I knew about the life and work of Teresa of Avila as the result of my studies in mysticism in college, actually beginning in high school. I did not study her work as a high school student, of course, but all of us were certainly introduced to her as a great saint. But that was as far as it went until a few years ago. I have an educational institute called CMED (Caroline Myss Education) through which I teach two extensive programs that are divided into three seminars per year. During the second seminar of the course that was originally listed as INTUITION AND MYSTICISM, I had intended to teach a full day on the Christian mystics and a full day on the mystics from the Eastern and other traditions. I intended to begin with St. John of the Cross and his classic work, The Dark Night of the Soul, but on my way to teach I had grabbed, by accident, St. Teresa's great spiritual work, The Interior Castle. I thought, "It doesn't matter, I'll start with her." As I introduced St. Teresa, the individual, to the audience, I felt myself surrounded in silence. I couldn't hear my audience. It was as if I had entered a soundproof room. And then I heard the words, "Follow me, daughter." I knew instantly that St. Teresa was speaking to me. That was the beginning of our work together. We had an extremely subtle relationship, one that demanded prayer, silence, and isolation. Our communication was extremely subtle and very soft and rare, but like the most refined perfume, a small drop was sufficient to direct the outline, structure, and content of each chapter. Into my expanding relationship with Teresa I then wove my research about the spiritual struggles of the contemporary world, and the result is ENTERING THE CASTLE.

Why are this medieval nun's life and thoughts and practices relevant to our lives and spiritual practice today?

What makes great spiritual teachers great? Why does their work remain relevant for centuries? The reason is that they transcend the boundaries and limits of their own traditions and reach the level of cosmic truth – truth that applies to the eternal human experience. That is the nature of St. Teresa's work. For example, she addresses the human struggle with power, the need for recognition, the delicate struggle with the control one's family has over an individual and the need that individual has to break free in order to discover her or himself. I don't know any other spiritual teacher who even articulates that need, and yet I have met hundreds of people who struggle with the crisis of feeling divided between their desire to explore their interior life and still remain a primary nurturing figure in the family. Exploring your interior life, by the way, does not in any way mean that you have the desire to leave or abandon your family. Yet, that is so often the fear on both sides of the deeper spiritual experience: that an individual cannot have a rich interior life and a rich exterior life. This is simply not true. The ideal is to blend the two. By dividing the two, keeping your soul separated from your physical life, you create the endless suffering that comes from always searching for where you belong in this world.

In ENTERING THE CASTLE, you use the same symbolic image of the castle, which St. Teresa used, to represent the soul. How can St. Teresa's image of a medieval castle with many mansions be effective today?

The Castle was St. Teresa's metaphor for the soul. She was from the Spanish town of Avila, which is a castle town. It is still a castle town, surrounded by medieval walls in the design of a castle. The image of a castle is positively seductive to our imagination. It works and that's all that counts. The idea of crossing a drawbridge and closing that drawbridge to your outside world and finally being in an interior place where no one can find you is very effective. The Castle represents your inner soul, your deeper soul, the part of you that requires prayer, reflection, and the pursuit of self-knowledge to access. It's divinely seductive inner work.

You suggest that people are craving a breakthrough – a means to connect to a grounded, contemporary theology that they can practice every day. What are the means that we should use to do this?

Prayer, a devotion to contemplation and personal reflection, and an application of your interior life to the whole of your exterior life. That is, the Western person is fond of the God-in-their-mind, a rational concept of God that is accessible through books and seminars and discussion and perhaps group worship, such as church, synagogue, or mosque. But the type of breakthrough that I am referring to is a mystical breakthrough; that is, to move past a mental and behavioral relationship to God and into an experiential relationship with the Divine. That actually defines the mystic and the nature of a mystical experience – to experience the power and authority of the divine with complete abandon as opposed to defining the nature of God through intellectual definition.

What does it mean to be a "mystic without a monastery?"

Mystics are people who are called to experience life at the visionary level, to experience the power of God as opposed to thinking about it, or keeping it at arm's length because they fear it. Traditionally, mystics were found in monasteries or ashrams or, in earlier centuries, living as recluses in the forests or desert, like the Indian sadhus or the Desert Fathers. Like all ways of being, those mystics served the world effectively at that time. But times change and demand that all models and forms of human expression change their garb. There was a time when all Western women were more repressed and had to "wait to be asked to dance," so to speak, but that model is no longer effective. And there was a time when all men accepted war as a necessary evil, but now they see that they can resist and oppose it openly. Times change and ways of being in the world change to accommodate our changing times and the shifting patterns of chaos, both outside and inside of ourselves.

We are living at a time of great transformation. The spiritual awakening that began in the 1960s needs to mature to its next level, which is a deepening into devotion to a mystical practice while remaining an effective force in the world. And by that I mean remaining in your skin, in your role as who you are. Mystics knew how to channel grace through prayer and they knew the power of that. They knew how to receive guidance through reflection and contemplation; they knew how to share the gift of illumination with each other. These are great gifts of life and profound grace that we are capable of providing for each other and the world. This is what it means to be a mystic without a monastery. You make a commitment to your own interior illumination and through that discover the "sacred" part of your "contract" and the true meaning of your highest potential.

If we are craving spiritual experiences and encounters with God, why is it that we have such deep fears about the Divine and the ways that encountering God and our own Soul will change our life?

You can thank the Catholic Church, and many Protestant denominations as well, for the groundwork on that one, because they have done such an effective job of separating the authority of heaven and earth, body and soul, church and state. As a result, many of us still have a child's polarized view of God that goes something like this: "If I am good, I will be protected by God and that's all I really want. I want my things to be safe. I want a good job. I want my family safe. I want my health, and I want access to a few miracles in an emergency. In exchange, I will, on occasion, go to public worship and behave myself as best I can (within reason, of course)." At some primal level, most people are afraid – indeed, terrified –that getting close to God will result in the loss of their money and earthly goods, and will end up causing them untold physical suffering, not to mention celibacy. That's the role model from centuries of saints and monastics who did live lives of poverty and celibacy and physical suffering. But as I point out in my book, years ago sophisticated medicine, hospitals, and emergency rooms did not exist. During medieval times and before, everyone suffered from disease, not just those devoted to God. But those in the monasteries chose to respond to their illnesses as spiritual devotions and thus the association was born that God makes people suffer who enter into a deeper spiritual path. But for all our medical advances, people still suffer with illness and disease. Disease and suffering are a part of life, as the Buddha pointed out long ago. One need not be on a spiritual path to know what it is to experience depression, the loss of a partner, betrayal, or a devastating loss of one's finances. Look at the Enron crisis. You think all those people who were betrayed by that company suffered that experience because God wanted it to happen? That's ridiculous. Actually, that's just life.

How do we avoid being spiritually isolated after experiencing an encounter with the Divine?

Isolation is as highly misunderstood as are the consequences of a mystical experience. Mystical isolation does not result in an individual feeling that she is lost in a sea of confusion, or left to encounter life within the experiences of her own soul for the remainder of her days on earth. That is the outsider looking in through a terrified imagination. A mystical experience is a profound awakening to a cosmic truth in which that truth goes from being a mental idea to an animated force within your soul. Such an experience does not isolate you. It empowers you. A person can talk about healing in theory, for example, and he or she can even believe that people can be healed. And then there is the mystical experience of healing grace, in which you feel that grace running through your veins. In that moment, you understand how it is that people are healed. That doesn't isolate you. It empowers you and fills you with a depth of compassion that you did not know you were capable of feeling for another person. It requires a maturing prayer life to cope with the growing requests for help that come to you after that. Prayer is your support mechanism—and not petitionary prayer, but mystical prayer. I teach that in my workshops.

Why is this "spiritual life crisis" unique to this era of human evolution?

Many times during human history people could have said that they were living at a time of unparalleled change and it would have been true—for example, during the Great Plague or the beginning of the Nazi era. But the ingredients that make up our complex personal and social lives today present unrivaled challenges, and so, it's fair to say that we are in the midst of a Mystical Renaissance. Three factors come to mind. First, time has become the servant to timelessness; that is, we have entered the era of timelessness. We are now linked to the internet, to systems of communication that are essentially instantaneous – timeless. And people are addicted to this timeless medium. Timelessness is a characteristic of their interior self. Secondly, the speed of change has increased as has the breath and width of it, so to speak. All change is now universal. A change in Iraq affects the whole earth, as does a change in California or Washington or North Korea. Instantly the entire world is affected. All news on the Internet affects the whole. We have never been instantaneously affected by the whole of the world before. And third, we have evolved into the body/mind/spirit template, although most people only pull out that template at the doctor's office and remain unaware the rest of the time that they are, indeed, a walking-talking-functioning, multi-dimensional creature of consciousness. Yet, you are exactly that, a multi-sensory human being, who is now fully connected to a global system of information and energetic data, and who, for the most part, lives unaware of the impact all of that information has on you. Amid all of this energetic chaos, the practices so necessary for inner balance are completely missing—practices such as reflection and contemplation. Instead, we are offered therapy and tranquilizers in their place. Reflection is the practice of taking time to reflect on the information that has come into your body and mind that day and how it has merged with your conscience and your soul. How are you being affected by the new thoughts that have come to you that day? And how are your choices affecting you and the people around you? Are you able to live with your choices? Do they have integrity? Are they honorable? Did you take the time to pray before you made your significant decisions? And if you say that you didn't have time to pray before significant decisions, what does that tell you about your inner life and how you maintain your spiritual devotion and your priorities with God? It says that you don't take your interior life seriously at all. God, for you, is a crisis operation, a superstitious force to turn to when things are confusing. God is a panic button and nothing more.

What is the most effective way to meet your soul?

I wrote ENTERING THE CASTLE for precisely this reason, as a guide to meet your soul. The soul is a force that cannot be described; it must be experienced. Imagine that a newly married woman asked a mother, "But describe what childbirth is like and then tell me what it's like to love your children, because I have to know exactly what that's like before I have a child so I know for sure if I really want to have a child." Could a mother really find the right words? When I ask that question in a lecture, mothers laugh out loud because they know that unless a woman experiences being a mother, she can never know what it is like to love a child. She has to meet that child directly. The same is true for the soul. You have to enter your Castle, beginning with crossing your drawbridge and taking up the exploration of each of the seven mansions. The journey, I will admit, is not easy. In fact, it is extremely rigorous. Each mansion has many rooms, as I describe in my book. And that's where you begin.

How do Teresa of Avila's Seven Mansions of prayer relate to the human energy system and the seven chakras that you have described in ANATOMY OF THE SPIRIT?

The soul is build on a template of seven levels of power, and that is what St. Teresa's vision of the soul also embraced. Her division of the lower and upper mansions is similar to the seven chakras, in that the lower three mansions are the "worker-bee" mansions and the upper mansions are devoted to more mystical awakenings. Aside from that, there are no more direct comparisons.

As we enter our personal Castles, what will some of our most profound challenges be? And what will be some of our greatest rewards?

How typical to ask for the rewards before you even begin the journey. As for the challenges, the greatest challenge will be to defeat the power of your need to have God be a force of logic and reason in your life. The greatest challenge you will ever face is to confront your fear of being humiliated and come to understand the power of being humble, and to allow that power to lead you finally to surrender your life to God's direction for you. It's so ironic to me that most people assume that in surrendering to God, their lives will become miserable and not wonderful. That's just incredible. They have no idea that their lives will, in fact, become extraordinary. They cannot see that they have been living in a prison, held captive by a fear of being humiliated and the need for others' approval most of the days of their lives. The most profound challenge will be to get over the grip the earth has on you. In the language of the Buddha, free yourself from these endless illusions. St. Teresa calls them your reptiles. That freedom is your reward.

St. Teresa's instructions in the Seventh Mansion are to serve the divine through serving others. How can we use prayer and channeling grace to be of service in the world?

People have no idea how powerful prayer really is. After people have tried everything else in terms of medical interventions, for example, they often say, "Well, all we can do now is pray." If they really understood prayer, they would begin medical procedures with a prayer and then do whatever they can medically. St. Teresa wrote The Interior Castle as a guide of illumination to God through prayer, through learning how to rely on the ever-increasing depth of inner dialogue with your soul and God as the means to discover your profound capacity to become a channel for grace in this world. Grace comes in many forms: illuminated thought, a moment of authority, abundant compassion and courage, the capacity to heal and comfort another, visionary creativity. Grace has many, many forms and grace is meant to be shared, to be distributed to others constantly and under the radar, in silence, invisibly. That's the role of a mystic out of a monastery – to become a channel for grace in this world invisibly, to form circles of grace that gather for the sake of sharing their capacity to nurture each other in their spiritual lives, to share their gifts of illumination, to channel grace at a distance in order to heal others and this earth, and to bring forth new creative thought. This is a great calling and I know many, many people are emerging as mystics out of monasteries. Many are coming to study with me at CMED, because people need support as they venture into their souls/Castles. Even St. Teresa said that one should not go into the soul alone. You need soul companions. And the groups that bond as a result are profoundly bonded to each other because they come to know each other through prayer and a devotion to bring the best of themselves to each other and to the world. I feel very blessed to be doing this work and I am so grateful to all of these students, so very grateful. And most of all, I am grateful to St. Teresa.

The Addict and the Enabler

Highway Robbery

The highway that robbed you last night, robbed me too. Swallowed me whole and spit me out. Looked into my eyes and smiled a crooked, toothless grin. "I was raised on it," you say. "I was too, " I said. He took what he wanted and drove away, but this time I knew his name.

He was sitting in the lounge of the empire hotel
He was drinking for diversion
He was thinking for himself
A little money riding on the maple leafs
Along comes a lady in lacy sleeves
She says...
Let me sit down
You know, drinkin alones a shame
Its a shame, its a crying shame
Look at those jokers
Glued to that damn hockey game
Hey honey-youve got lots of cash
Bring us round a bottle
And well have some laughs
Gins what Im drinking
I was raised on robbery

Im a pretty good cook
Im sitting on my groceries
Come up to my kitchen
Ill show you my best recipe
I try and I try but I cant save a cent
Im up after midnight, cooking
Trying to make my rent
Im rough but Im pleasin
I was raised on robbery

We had a little money once
They were pushing through a four lane highway
Government gave us three thousand dollars
You should have seen it fly away
First he bought a 57 biscayne
He put it in the ditch
He drunk up all the rest
That son of a bitch
His bloods bad whiskey
I was raised on robbery

You know you aint bad looking
I like the way you hold your drinks
Come home with me honey
I aint asking for no full length mink
Hey, where you going...
Dont go yet...
Your glass aint empty and we just met
Youre mean when your loaded-
I was raised on robbery

-JM

The highway howls Tonight

The highway howls tonight.
the hum of combustion makes its way out of a stranger's engine..
into the air, up onto the darkened hill..through the window
of my cardboard cutout life. stilllife. still - LIFE. complete.

the fridge is an arm's length from the bathroom door.
my 3 cent shoes make me want to tapdance
alone in my room and pretend it's Black Tuesday and no one's caught on yet, not even me.
and i'm dancing for rations down at the bowery. crash! collapse! panic!
i'm still here. i'm still here.

dancing too much to notice i am alone. the room cleared after i knocked over the apple cart. i didn't tell them it was an accident this time. that would have been a lie.

all that's left now is nothing and everything.
for anyone who knows, knows what they need is already there
and is all they could ever want..yet, there's more to come.

and maybe dorothy goes back to oz once she's realized oz or kansas matters not. maybe she's in new jersey and toto has "bad legs."

it's in the heart. it's in the the fucking heart, she says. and in my 3 cent ruby-red shoes and the dandelion i picked for you today.
and the hug you gave me yesterday.

Then there was a tornado or an earthquake, a blizzard or a sand storm. I'm not quite sure anymore. The background of the shadowbox keeps changing.

So you asked me what death was.
i didn't know what to say at the time.
because death must come before birth.
and birthing is painful

but dying slowly, frame by frame.
is worse. much worse.

and i've seen this movie so many times that i'd like to smash the projector until it's contents ricochet off the theater walls right before it's murmurs the last whir.

but it's not 1929. and now the world is going digital. And Bleecker Street is lined with condos.

No more desperation. Ongoing resolutions and long, slow mortgages--day by day...30 years come and gone. Death.

So you think they're done with you too. America is done with all of us. So what? She'll find herself again. She never had me and I never had her.

All I remember is that it's 5-7-7.

And last night I was reborn. Again. Every breath. Reborn.

And somehow, I am not America. And you are not America. So turn off the fucking TV.

And when they call you Americana, say "No soy Americana." "No soy hija de mi padre". Nawa. Bonjour. Hola. Marhaba. Ci yi Bak. Shalom. Namaskaar.

I am not my father's daughter.

I am a map of the world, drawing myself as I go. My father's trapped, bouncing off the rafters-ears burning with the Rapture, in the river, underneath my couch, in my rearview mirror. Trying to teach me to remember how it feels to be desperate and alone, dirty, detested and Complete.

America is MY daughter. Remember, I gave birth to her last night. She is in my head and in my dreams. Troubled and turmoiled, tattered and teased, beautiful and battered. She remembered my face and I hers. We both got pulled out with forceps and left on the side of the road in a trash bag, next to an empty McDonald's cup.

I held her face in my hands, rubbing one finger over the scar tissue.

Tattered and triumphant, villified, spit on, betrayed and neglected. She stops telling me about the bruises. I've seen them all. Photographed, archived and stored for her daughters' daughters.

She starts to tell me a new story.

Then all of a sudden....

crash.collapse.panic.

breathe.

i'm still there. she's still here. we find a tiny pinhole under the debris. my finger breaks through the plastic cacoon.

breathe.

Again.

Brent Shapiro: Ecstasy Poisoning

http://www.brentshapiro.org/about_brentshapiro.php

Good Lord, I love this woman.

Tori Amos visited PS22 in New York City this past week to listen to the school's children's choir sing one of her songs.
She was so overcome with emotion that she started to cry!
Click here to check it out.