Anna's CD mix

songs by Tori Amos:

In the Springtime of His VooDoo
Blues Skies (Radio Edit) -- BT featuring
Famous Blue Raincoat (Live) (this is, of course, a cover of the, well, famous song by Leonard Cohen)
Glory of the 80s
Big Wheel
Give
Welcome to England
Snow Angel

songs by Eddie Vedder

Into the Wild soundtrack
Longing to Belong

yes, I still make CD mixes. And I prefer my discman to an iPod. I'm serious.

I'm Still Here, Part 2

As my new poem says, I'm still here. This post's first paragraph foreshadowed that I would freak out and close the blog for awhile. I need to be clear about to whom I send a direct link to this blog. There's nothing blatantly offensive on it, at least I don't think so, but I can see how certain others might. So it'll be the internet's best kept secret. :)

Not only have a started smoking again, I've been chain smoking. Hopefully it's just holiday stress. (Yeah, right.)

The days have been cold and gray and woven through with bare black tree branches. That's my attempt at being a poet for the day.

I'm Still Here

the darkness is everything we want but shouldn't
have, or shouldn't do
magical darkness
shape-shifts trees and bushes in the bluish-silver moonlight,
it's like you're on drugs
but you're not

darkness is my voice of silence
I have spent the past several years silencing myself
for no good reason
other than the fact that I live in a glass house
check that:
a glass coffin
because this isn't living
I'm not really sure what's holding me back
I'm not really sure if when I look back on times I didn't feel held back, I was too wild
too weird
alienating others

being a woman can hold you back, if you let it
we say things are better now, we say we live in a "post-feminist" era...
but I'm still afraid to ride the train at night for fear I'll get raped
and then get blamed for it because I was riding the train late at night
I'm still afraid I'll alienate people every time I open my mouth

there are more insidious things

like people asking my husband and I when we're going to have a baby and then become hostile when we say we don't want children

I'm sure that someone, somewhere, once told me it’s all in my head, that if I just take it like a man and pick myself up by my boot straps I won’t feel held back
that I’m so lazy I can’t even admit I’m lazy and that I'm holding myself back because I’m lazy and chicken-shit

even though I don't remember who said it, they're in my head, their faces running like masks of wet gray sand, telling me my feelings aren’t real

but they are
and I know I'm not lazy

I know because

I fight
I fight every day
and I'm still here
most of the fight, these days,
is still being here
and I am

I just sent everyone on my email list a Happy New Year email right after I decided to post a link to this blog in my email signature, so now of course I'm worried something in here might offend someone. But I think I can honestly say I've worked very hard to not post anything here that would hurt a reasonable person's feelings, so that's all I can really say.

I totally bonded with my mom through retail therapy today. We went to Carsons and I don't have any fancy clothes... whenever I go to buy something pretty I always buy something hippie-ish... so I bought two off-white blouses... one for Christmas, one for New Year's. The thing is, what with them being clearance items and my mom and I being armed with coupons, these blouses that at first had been priced at about $60 apiece ended up setting me back about $21 together.

Well, anyway, here's the pic I sent in the email... it's the season's first snowfall as seen through my window.

This is the picture I really wanted to use

but I didn't want the email to be religious, because my friends are all over the place when it comes to that kind of thing (which I think is really cool!)

So, now I will leave you with the dark, weird artsy pictures from the creche shoot. Enjoy!

Night in Door County

THIS IS IN MOONLIGHT [I wrote this really big over a whole page of my diary on a magical night, outside, with only moonlight to see by]


Moonlight so silvery bright and unmarred by city lights you could see by it
Stars bright of course too
I really got why people would worship the cycles of the moon and have reverence for darkness, because while the sun shines everything is brightly illuminated but at night the moon is the one brightest thing, and its light is silvery and casts everything in a mystical and half-real glow, so barely there that nature seems to shape-shift




MY ENGAGEMENT RING AS THE CYCLES OF THE MOON

Diamonds flanking sapphire = waxing or waning moon
Sapphire is full moon (as in “once in a blue moon”) dark moon [“everybody knows you can conjure anything by the dark of the moon” –Tori Amos] ocean “my heart is black as the blackest ocean” –Tori [it’s a very dark sapphire, which I love]




SAPPHIRE = SKY

--link between cycles of moon and tides of ocean [and a woman’s menstrual cycle]


darkness and light are of the same creature, like an eye that burns light blue and then dark [that’s what my sapphire does], like a sea black at night but radiant with the blue sky’s reflection in the day

[writing on bracelet mom bought me, The Serenity Prayer]:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and Wisdom to know the difference.”

Lighting a Candle

Who are you?
(the light, the light, the light)

in church:
"Who are you?"

"I am not the Christ.
I am Mary, luminous and weightless."

"Who are you, what do you have to say for yourself?"

"I am the voice crying out in the dark desert.
Reaching out, I saw a light
piercing through me, lifting me up in and through its folds
until I could hardly stand it
and that's how I knew it to be God
by this overpowering light I saw the spiral of life
and then, somehow, I knew myself
to be a creature of this light

"I am the Mother of all
Maybe who I am is in the scriptures

"Who am I?
Once I thought I was merely God's handmaid
He hid my relentless power within the folds of my heart
to be illuminated by the relentless light that is my own soul
that is everyone's soul

"I am my heart
I am my heart

the light, the light, the light"

Village