I taught my first yoga class tonight.

It’s about an inch shy of the wettest June on record here, cosmic wah wah.

My class was on the throat, exercises for strengthening and clearing. About the time Elmer was heading outa town, something knocked my car sideways and even Ears, who was sitting right next to the subsequent dents, didn’t see a thing. The witch says I was Godsmacked, which was exactly my interpretation even before she said it. In short, been 'choked up'.

I can offer a modified exercise, based on the ancient wisdom of women who pound on their chests and keen when they’ve lost something: Sit on the floor, put your hands behind you, let your head fall, lean back (45 degree angle) and make a moaning sound that vibrates the throat - give it at least 5 minutes. Look at the wall behind you or close your eyes and roll em back into your head. Think of (for example): What you tell yourself about how you’re a fuck up and you’ll never do this or accomplish that or get free of whatever; stuff you say in your head to someone who is dead that reverberates back in a boomerang of wah; stuff someone said to you to hurt you that you can’t forget; a picture of a face you can’t let go – any image that you’d rather avoid but sometimes can't; anything and everything that gives you nagging grief; what you would try to say with your last breath. I’d say, “I’m sorry, so so sorry.”

Maybe I was hung for a crime that I deeply regretted in my last life and “I’m sorry” was the last thing I couldn’t say – it feels that way, like I’ve had “I’m sorry” stuck in my throat since my first wail. It’s not a lie, I am really sorry.

So lean back and push your throat up to the sky: I am bad, I remember, I will miss you, I see your face, I am sorry . hMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm it loose, (wah it out).

Cuz the thing is, people are counting on us all.

So ya can’t go around being a choking hazard.

----

hi rec acoustic covers:

kt tunstall - I want u back (MJ again)
Laura Tsaggaris: Can’t Let Go

To see a ring in your dream, symbolizes emotional wholeness, continuity and commitments. To dream that you lose a ring or someone has stolen your ring, represents insecurity. A ring is the idea of a commitment, whether romantic or non-romantic.

we were hunting for it, him trailing me but only because I'm smaller and quicker not because he didn't want to be there (I think), and we were looking for it in crowded places overgrown like pawn shops full of flotsam, a thick ring (wedding band?), a tube/circle that I could fit my finger into with cut outs and made of bone, ivory maybe, and I kept putting the ones we'd find into my hand, testing them with the skin of my palm but they'd be wrong bc they were too cold as if mixed with metal, and bone is cool-warm not cold and there had to be carved holes, and I felt purposeful and was beathing evenly, trying to stay calm and focused [note the feeling, the witch teaches me, because it is the feeling that makes the symbols readable], so that we'd find it eventually but not get hectic about it meantime - I was with Mark (I'm pretty sure, but he was always behind me - a man, bearded and bigger and stronger and slower [than me] and familiar), so when I woke up I wondered if it were a memory or . . . then I read this (randomly, under "science", my fave Sunday morning category) in the news, and that's what we were looking for, just like that only shorter and thicker enough so that my finger would block the holes along it but fit into either end

dream symbol, bone: Support of self. Personal integrity. Strength of character (as in being a "solid person"). See also the particular area of the body

To notice your palm in your dream, suggests that you hold all the knowledge you need in you own hands. You need to reach and utilize your full potential. It also symbolizes openness and if you have a generous nature

. . . the flute is the human heart, and a heart which is made hollow will become a flute for the God of love to play upon. When the heart is not empty, in other words, when there is not scope in the heart, there is no place for love. Rumi, the great poet of Persia, explains this idea more clearly. He says the pains and sorrows the soul experiences through life, are like holes made in a reed flute, and it is by making these holes that a player makes the flute out of a reed. This means that the heart of man is first a reed, and the sufferings and pains it goes through make it a flute, which can then be used by God as the instrument for the music that He constantly wishes to produce. But as every reed is not a flute, so every heart is not His instrument. As the reed can be made into a flute, so the human heart can be turned into an instrument, and can be offered to the God of love. It is the human heart which becomes the harp of the angels; it is the human heart which is known as the lute of Orpheus. It was on the model of the heart of man that the first instrument of music was made, and no earthly instrument can produce that music which the heart produces, raising the mortal soul to immortality

Shivaree: Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough (MJ cover [with flute])

went to a thing last night, some presentation by peace gurus - I dunno, so I go to a thing or not go to a thing, waiting for the end of the world or not. so I go to this thing, they hand me a stick, and I just stand there a second trying to think of a good word but all I can think of is ________ so I say "quiet", dead quiet

Sara Watkins: Lord, Won’t You Help Me

[couldn't have written it better myself]

"Galaxy of the Lost (Lightspeed Champion cover)," Florence and the Machine

Mike and Ruthy: Hang Me

In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish,

Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, (of that

indescribable look,) . . .

Long have they pass'd, faces and trenches and fields,

Where through the carnage I moved with a callous

composure, or away from the fallen,

Onward I sped at the time - but now of their forms at night,

I dream, I dream, I dream.

--Walt Whitman, "Old War Dreams"

Girlyman: All Through the Night (Cyndi Lauper)

soltice storm 6-20-09

Glen Tomasetti: Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier

The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we could even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. . . . but souls never really touch their object. - Emerson

eels - climbing to the moon

I wash your ankles

with my tears. Unhem

my sweep of hair

and burnish the arch of your foot.

Still your voice cracks above me.

I cut off my hair and toss it across your pillow.

A dark towel

like the one after sex.

I'm walking out,

my face a dustpan,

my body stiff as a new broom.

It is the old way that girls

get even with their fathers --

by wrecking their bodies on other men.

--Louise Erdrich, "Mary Magdalene"

Kristen Vigard: Man from Mars (joni mitchell)

bye Elmer

I hope his woman was waiting w/ budweiser on other side. (wah)



mazzy star - into dust

"I grieve that grief can teach me nothing." - Emerson

talked to K - Geod, I'm chokin round the pain and it's not even mine. who would you trust to give a shit if something was really bad (like if one of your folks were dying in intolerable pain)? heaven help you if you don't even know = the wretched lesson of today

for virgo: When I was 19 years old, a so-called psychic predicted I would die when I was 24. As much as I scoffed at his careless quackery, his words subliminally worried me for years. On the day I turned 25 I celebrated extra hard. Partly because of that experience, I've always tried to be impeccably conscientious about how I conduct myself as a fortune-teller. I've vowed never to manipulate you with melodramatic prophecies that could distort your free will. So it's with a cautious sense of responsibility that I offer the following augury: The weeks ahead could be one of the most illuminating and successful times of the last five years. [sounds frankly ominous]

"The Book Of Love (Magnetic Fields cover)," Catherine A.D., seems like a good vigil song for Elmer, my friends' father, who is reported as both panicking and funny in the face of death

denison witmer - these days

To see a swimming pool full of water in your dream is lucky, symbolizing that you will find much happiness and pleasure in friendship and love. An empty pool means trouble in love and friendship, or that you are not feeling enough affection in your life. A swimming pool is about your spiritual side. These dreams normally focus on specific spiritual abilities which are indicated by other symbols in the dream. (a man finding and fixing and filling it, the kids swimming in it, I was underwater watching [holding my breath])

bonus - hip- honey please

counting crows - start again

Human Highway: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

solomon burke - none of us are free