i lied and at least there were baby bees

k is bleeding now. now she is bleeding. it is bright red blood. it sucks. no cramping, but bleeding.

I am so fucking over all of this I can barely handle it.

What really sucks is today after work I had one of the most amazing experiences of my whole life, and k was there and she video taped it all and then we came home and had friends and neighbors on the porch and then k went to the bathroom and blood--bright red blood was all over the mini pad and a clot hung heavy on the top of the toilet water.

and i got mad and kind of turned my back.

and i am still mad.

but today, today after work we--that is my friends t and l plus me--we collected the most beautiful and enormous wild bee hive from an outbuilding one half block away from my house. It was such good work.



K taped us in action (hopefully, video cuts will one day be up on this blog).

The three of us worked so efficiently and well together. T cut the comb with wire from the eaves of the house one luscious piece at a time. L and I carried it to a tarp and cut the excess off into empty frames and then made sure the comb was held in place with rubber bands. The forefront of the wild hive was empty comb. The center of the hive was brood with edges of honey. Unfortunately we had to slice through larvae in order to cut the comb to frame size; it was a creamy white, pollen infested massacre.

But, but. oh my god, but...
We saw baby bees being born.

It was really the most amazing thing I've ever witnessed. The sweet wiggling heads of these finely formed insects busted with precision and grace out of their individual hexagonal larvae comb right before our eyes.

I witnessed three new lives surface from the mysterious depths of one of the most fascinating substances on earth--bee comb.

Their small bodies were pale yellow. Their legs were weak and clumsy--like new born goats trying to find footing.

We placed brood comb into the frames and then brushed hundreds of bees off of piece after piece of the large, undulating comb into the hive we were creating for them in place of their wild hive. There are more pictures to come, but later.

Did you know that a wild hive looks a bit like human female genita.lia?



It is lush and sensual and so full of life.



After the whole collection process, we came home and some of us drank beer and pizza was eaten. Then we went back to the hive spot and saw that the ladies were festering over the place where their other home had been so (without our strange, white, alienesque bee suits) t held a bucket up and scooped the remainder and I pulled the top off the super and he dumped them in and I closed the lid. We did this twice. We think the queen is in the new hive.

There are so many bees and the colony is so strong that even if we crushed her or she did not make it in, they would feed and build another...

At least there are bees being born amidst the bloody mess of stuff that keeps coming out of kk into our toilet.
at least.

dirty hands in 2010

every day slips by a little faster. the sun falling and then rising and the moon cracking white lines over blue black sky so many nights. then all darkness--sometimes. pink lines bend through the eastern horizon in mornings when the sun peeks out to reach us.

and by noon the ball of fire beams sends volts of light beyond measure into the trees and soil and over the tails of animals.

and we just keep going around and around on this ball of life and decay.

last year at this time i was sick with a life inside of me. this year at this time i look back on that time and think it was only a minute ago or it was so long ago or did that really happen at all?

it is like a vivid blur. too real to be hazy for always; too surreal to be entirely clear.

my body for 10 weeks was held captive by a brief curious sort of experience. many cells congregated in my womb and grew all liquidy and blood-filled and then the growing stopped and the cells busted through that supple place between my legs. i was flabbergasted throughout the life growing, then dying, then birthing the death, then bleeding a lot to eradicate the fleshy parts that had built up in my womb, and then this grieving surrounded by a cloud of panic and depression and questions.

and through all of it what i have learned is that the calling i have felt since i was fifteen needs to be gradually more realized in my life. while i do farm on my little urban plot, one day i want nothing more than to grow vegetables, nuts, fruits, animals, and bees and to do it well and do it surrounded by good community--good created family--good friends.

2009 started off with a miscarriage. it was a swooping bang of a wake up call; a kind of startling alarm orchestra blazing like a string section on speed. it told me that my body is very female. it is also very fertile and very connected to the rhythms of the moon and tides; the pulses of the seasons. I knew this already, but it raised it to a new level of realness in my heart. it made me ready to return to the soil and the roots and rhizomes that weave through her darkness. it made me more aware of the cycle of life and the deepness of decay and death connected to that life.

My desire to always be grounded to place and to establish deep roots seems to have multiplied tenfold since the miscarriage. Now, the question is where should these roots be put down. for so long i thought it would be here in ypsi. but now i keep questioning where we should be and k does too. we want to grow things together and growing on an urban lot in a city where people all too readily toss bloody bandages and burger k.ing cups and fry containers and homemade crack pipes and used condoms on the ground is a bit tougher than leasing or buying land somewhere more open and not as touched by the grimy, ill-intentioned/ignorant hands of humans.

cities need green spaces too and we have been doing it well here. chickens, bees, vegetables, trees, bicycling groups, friends--we've been growing it--many questions. few answers. we will see what 2010 brings.

i know i want my hands in the soil more hours of the day than not.

i know i want dirty hands in 2010.

lethargy amidst the crap--and how i cannot get the keeper up inside me

Right around now I would have been 8 months pregnant. When I think about it, I freak out a little bit. Mostly, the idea of me being pregnant or visibly pregnant--all plump with a busting bigger than a bowling ball protrusion extending from my abdomen--makes me cringe and cry.

Actually, i have not mustered up any tears for that which is not: not being pregnant;not having kids; not really wanting kids anymore, but I have thought a lot about it all lately.

I've thought about where we've been--me and my k and where we are going. I've thought about how maybe the miscarriage was really my fortune. Because this morning I was trying to use the keeper (I'm really striving to transition to no waste during my period; k's been using her cup for years, but when I've tried before well) and I kept fiddling around down in the wetness and coming up empty handed with blood all on my fingers and in my nails. I squeezed the damn thing and pushed, but I am tight. My hole is all bound up with muscle and years of being a mostly non-entrance top.

And I thought to myself, as I pushed and shoved and couldn't get it in, how in the hell would an infant human ever come out of this hole? How would I have been able to give birth when I cannot even get a silicone, smooshy, bendable, small cup up inside me?

And then I started thinking about how it would have been 8 months and then I got not sad but lethargic about it all.

Now as k's grandma s is fading from this earth minute by minute and I think about family and growing old and reproduction and hetero-normative bullshit and us(me and my k and our love and tenacity in the face of adversity after adversity), I really feel kind of numb. Like how can I think about this all anymore. How can I make decisions or even desire anything much more than what is just now here before me.

Without sounding all Buddhist, cause I am so far from being a Buddhist, I can only take the minutes as they unfold before me right now. Not that life will always be like this, sometimes anticipation is my greatest friend, and dreaming is my lifeblood, but lately just being able to make it through the day and take whatever news about all of the shit with work, or the march toward death unfolding before us, or the family conflict that comes with that march, or the conversation about children and the future, or the fact that I am taking a drug that makes me shit my brains out on a mostly daily basis,or the fact that k's dad wants some ill-equipped people to care for her other grandmother (the one not quite dying at least not yet, but almost died last year). I'm trying with all of my might to steady myself for the three months I have have off from work (this starts after 5:00 on Friday) and just let the shit roll and me slide side car through it all--with a grin on my face when capable of it.

I AM THUNDER. I AM SIRENS.

If only I could bellow like the thunder roaring and the the sirens shrieking outside my old cat scratched screens.

If only I could shout to the heavens and ask them for relief from the dark cloud hanging on the rusty hinges of my heart.

If only...

So, really things have not been all that bad. Zoloft has given me a lift and I have become chatty cathy queen. Oh, yes, dear readers, I have been popping a pharmaceutical. I take it daily and I think it makes my tits hurt and it makes me pee a lot and I was hazy for the first three weeks and I wanted to scream that I had caved to what I had called the lies of western medicine.

But after losing the pregnancy--oh yes I was fucking pregnant which sometimes sounds so weird as it rolls off my tongue or saunters over the soft gray matter of my thoughts--all the chemistry in my brain went back to the high-anxiety state of precoming out of the closet. All late winter and spring I had panic attacks and sleeplessness and even night sweats.

Finally, more than six weeks ago, my therapist was like, "you need something to break the chemical cycle that you cannot control." And so I started the drug. Well, I got the script and then it took me two weeks to start it but I did it. And now I am kind of "normal" again. Kind of.

But work is slowly giving me the kind of anxiety that feels like 3000 bricks piled high on my chest, and I just want to say-SHUT UP WORK. I AM THUNDER. I AM SIRENS. I AM SCREAMING AT ALL THE BULLSHIT.

I love my work--the actual work--the working with people in prison and their loved ones and trying with all of our might, together, to make us all look at crime and suffering and victimization and mental illness and hurt differently. And exposing through the direct stories and testimonies of the people living behind the caged walls what prison really is like--guess what folks it hurts people and communities more than any of us will ever realize.

But, without going into too much detail--my organization is having financial trouble right now and I am tired, tired, tired of the fall out of years of dysfunction--the dysfunction before the financial dysfunction that is exacerbated by the financial woes--cascading mountains of ash all around me.

So, lovely, nearly mid June Michigan thunderstorm, I am bellowing with your voice; I am calling out to the winds to bring more rain to cover the ash of the dysfunction and the wounds within our own hearts and histories.

Stopping the melodramatic writing: I really am just screaming and hollering like crazy, loud in my head and waiting with more and more anticipation for my sabbatical which will arrive soon and very soon (more on all that later).

3000 miles

On Friday, April 24 (which also happened to be my 33rd birthday), I hit 3,000 miles on my bicycle--the good old Portland. I was particularly happy cause it happened in the a park I love beside the River I love. I rode 3,000 in less than 11 months--it is a nice number--3,000.

Since February 7, I have rode 632 miles--this is mostly commuting mileage! So, I really have gotten my physical stride back since all that was once alive in me died and came spilling out between my legs. However, to be honest, I have not gotten my emotional stride back and that leaves my body feeling fatigued and worried and all out of whack.

So, if I am a bit missing in action from this blog, it is because I am a bit missing in action from my own life. I keep on keeping on, but things are muddled and foggy and heavy right now.

Back to the 3,000--a lovely number; the number I hit on my birthday! hooray.

waiting on spring...

I cannot even begin to express my recent tendency to cry.
Tears well up on the rims of my eyeballs without warning, without explanation, without an apparent reason. Except, I know there is a reason. Bigger than me and vast like the sky above my favorite lakes--a reason.

Yesterday, in the shower at the gym, I had a wee anxiety attack. My breathing became shallow and the coldness that dashes dark and bright across my belly, when confronted with thoughts of loss of control and mortality, coated my skin even though my body was hot through and through from time in the steam room. I counted to myself 1,2,3,4,5, breath, 6,7,8,9,10, breath, etc. And breathed deeply and caught air and was thankful for my lungs and my ability to still breath. I think the anxiety attack was prompted by the fact that I started a rather light period yesterday, and the sight of blood in my underwear brought I kind of terror into my space.

I've been trying hard to process all of what has happened to me and k in the last many months and still i have no solid answers. I am learning that answers are not necessarily what I need; what I do need is spring and the thawed soil beneath my hands and the sun on my back and face and the warmer rains that make green things grow.

I am also learning that while miscarriage is not very well formally documented/written about, what is out there is out there for heterosexual women. Damn, there is almost nil on the queer experience of miscarriage. I guess we, who have been through it, are creating it informally through the blog world. And it is not to say that I cannot relate to some of what is out there in terms of straight folks' experiences, but the things that are coming up for me are markedly different from what I have read. However, I have had beautiful conversations and connections with straight friends who have been through the painful process of miscarriage, so I am very lucky to be supported in real time.

In thinking about spring and my need for her to come to me quickly, I ordered a great amount and variety of herbs last week. I went for both trays of plugs and seeds and then some rarer, ready to plant in the ground plants.

I really want to grow a lot of chamomile and coriander this year. I use them both frequently and chamomile essential oil is really pricey. While a may not brew it into essential oil quite yet, I will make infusions of it and the stuff is great for joints (I swear by it).

Anyhow thinking about growing things is what gets me through the days--well that and riding my bike and holding my kk.

My kk, she is so kind to me and so silly and so beautiful. She makes me laugh even when I do not want to laugh. She compels me, in loving kindness, to do things when I would rather stay home and do nothing. For instance, on saturday she prodded me gently to got sit at a bar and drink a beer with her. The beer tasted good, but her company was better and I made a time-line of the miscarriage on a napkin and we talked about life and love and then she prodded me gently to go to a party that I did not want to go to, but I went and I got to sit in front of a warm fire in a Laze-E-boy and talk and it was nice.

I am blessed beyond reason to have her as my love.

updates-emotions, bicycles, and baby-dreams

it has been a hard few weeks.
my emotions have bounced around from feeling pretty normal--content--and laughing a lot to feeling weepy and out of control.

I went back to work last week and it went okay. I made it through, but my heart is not totally present in the field of caring about others, right now, cause I am still focusing on me.

And I think that is totally fine.

I mean really I feel like a wet towel that has been rung out and then hung out on the porch to dry and then drenched again with a cold down pour of winter rain then rung out again and hung out again and on and on.

But through all of this, k and I have been supported by such loving and supportive friends. Good people who have held us by being in their presences, by showering us with kind words, with dinner, with company, with laughter, with camaraderie.

It is so good to be loved so well.

I'm back on my bicycle. I rode on Saturday with kk and hit 2,400 miles on my 9 month old Trek Portland. My plans for more mileage by the bicycle's first birthday were interrupted by the whole pregnancy and then the lack there of. So, now I am hoping to get back up to good mileage by commuting as many days of the week as I can. My dream is to hit 4,000 miles by the end of May--my baby bike's first birthday. It is really a long shot, but...

On Sunday, i fixed up my Redline 925. I put on new brake pads and fixed the rear tire and took her on a sweet little ride around town.

Yesterday and today, I rode my Portland to and from work and my crotch is tender. I had not been on my bike since December 8 which is a really long time for me. I Forgot what a hard, slender seat can do to those tender, fleshy parts. But, all in all, it feels so good; it feels good to have these controllable parts of my life back.

I started looking for therapists this week, too. And my initial visits have been exhausting. I have been revisiting the traumatic parts of the last few months and that causes a lot of residue to surface.

Last night I dreamed that kk gave birth to a baby and we were putting the baby up for adoption. This brother and sister were adopting the kid, but I was arguing about how we had tried for so long to get pregnant we couldn't give the baby away. And then I won the argument and we took back the baby and we were both breastfeeding her.

That is only the second pregnancy/baby dream I have ever had in my whole life. I had one dream when I first found out I was pregnant and once again it involved me breast feeding the infant.

I'm not sure what the dream last night means, but I think it has something to do with letting go.

Tomorrow is our 9 year anniversary. So long we have had this love; we have been through been through thick messes and clear loveliness. tomorrow I'll write an ode to my kk here on this good old blog.

working on carving me back into me

As of today, I’ll be missing period number three. I would have been three months pregnant this week--1/3 done with it all. Damn.

I’ve been super fragile. I’m not used to being delicate and breakable. I am used to strength and tenacity in all things. This, of course, does not mean I am insensitive; I tend to be ultras-sensitive, but I usually pull myself up after I crash out. I usually make it on through the fear and sweaty palms and feelings of terror or sadness that might well up in my chest. I realize it is okay to be fragile. It is okay to need help and call on friends and family for care whether it be the need of comfort, food, or mindless chatter to keep me from my own worst thoughts.

Lately though strength is not my forte. The other night I cried and screamed so hard I think I scared the hell out of kk. My hip had gone all painfully whack. It hurt so bad and I thought, “what if I lose my ability to walk? What if my body is failing me? What if…this and that and this other terrible thing, etc?”

This is not what it means to be vulnerable; this is however what it means to be ground up and spat out. And then it demonstrates the reaching to put myself back together with the greasy ligaments and bony fragments of my former self. And gristly, ground round is hard to repair—it is hard to carve back out the image of the me I have been accustomed to and familiar with.

And this re-negotiating me, isn’t even all about the miscarriage…It is about where my mind and heart are after such a strange experience. Realistically, kk was supposed to be the carrier of our kid. Realistically, I am quite a boy at heart. Realistically, I do not prefer periods and bleeding and some of the other femaley things about me. Realistically, I love my own version of me as a woman. I like bending gender. I never thought I would explore my version of me as a queer woman through the lens of my own pregnancy. And then I was in the middle of raging hormones and the possibility of a child coming into our lives and the shock and physical and mental befuddlement of it all. Of course, now this experience is one of the tools I’m using to carve through the ground round mound of malleable material that I am right now.

Furthermore, I think we come into realizations of who we are in the world through every experience and that versions of womanhood and manhood and queerhood are constructed on multiple levels. I do not need to be pregnant and give birth and/or be a parent to come into a full version of who I am as a queer woman. I fear that often people who choose not to have children are left in an isolated place among the breeders and their offspring. I think it is critical that we understand that we are all in our own time and in our daily deeds and experiences constructing who we are and that our versions of ourselves do not need certain events, biological or other, to make us complete.

Eating gas station trail mix and swallowing my own tears to wash down the salty dryness.

Last night I went to bed with tears falling down my face and this morning I woke up with tears falling down my face. When I try to tap the underlying feeling behind the tears, I cannot quite find it. And I know I do not have to find it, but still I want to make them stop. Or at least subside here and there so I do not feel like my heart has been painted gray and is floundering for footing that never seems to come.

This has all been harder than I though it might be. Being physically diminished and emotionally wounded is like being trapped in some kind of cavern. I can feel the rocks wet and hard and thick around me, but there is no light. I think bats are overhead and pools of water below me, and maybe I want to be swiped by the bats and fall back into the water and sink for a while and then come back up and see some kind of glow over the cave that is holding me captive and have the jagged edges become defined with reason and guidance for what is next.

I keep wondering if I need to make sense out of any of this or come to any kind of conclusive state of mind. For now, I am trying to just be in this unusual, unfamiliar state of mind and heart. I am trying to be okay with being depressed and full of anxiety and grief.

I keep contemplating how there are two wombs involved here. I mean how lucky am I that the first time some sliders of life were sent up my vagina they clicked with my egg and I found myself pregnant? But, please remember that we have been trying with kk for almost two years. And we have been let down over and over and over again. And for just once we had a respite from the negative test.

Oh, and then shock hung over my chest like a murky ocean wave. And I felt sick and hijacked for weeks. And then I started to feel better and then what had been living inside of me was dead. And then its deadness came dropping out of me and sent my hormones raging yet again to a place where I have no control. Or as I have been discovering I’ve been in a place where I let my fear have all the control. And, every time I go pee there is still the reminder of the life that was once in me on the surface of the plush pads that I have been wearing for nearly two weeks.

And while I still am asking the question if sense does need to be made…I have to think that maybe this hard road does have some meaning—meaning with conclusions attached. Like maybe we are not meant to be parents. Maybe we are meant to love one another fiercely and love our community with pure attentiveness and work for justice with all of our might, time, and energy. And maybe I am not really cut out to carry a child in my womb—maybe my strengths rest in other arenas of creating life and giving back to this larger than me life force.

Well, I am still sitting here with the bag of trail mix next to me; the tears tucked up in my eye rims for now; the snow falling more; the day gray and cold; the cave still dark; the glow maybe waiting beneath it all.

um...

um, i spoke way too soon about thinking it was all almost over. yesterday what came out of me was like a horror show and the pain for a few hours was insane.

at 1:30 i started having pretty steady regular cramps. then i had a healing session/massage with a great therapist. i had cramps all through it but handle them okay. then k and i went and had sandwiches and ice cream. i ate it all through some rough cramping. when we got home. around 5:20 i stood up and a gush of blood dropped between my legs. i ran up to the bathroom and passed the first of about nine clots in total. they were large clots like lemons and long fingers. i documented many of them but won't gross you out.

All through the passage of the first six clots, i was in excrutiating pain. i thought my uterus my come sliding out into the toilet.

i called the midwife on call, cause i was bleeding a lot, she told me to get off the toilet because you cannot tell how much blood is really coming out and if i was filling more than a pad an hour i should go to the er. well i filled up a few pads pretty quickly, but they were the thin overnites, so who knows...

i also called my midwife friend and she told me to take the cohoshs (blue one half hour black the next half hour for four hours). i did so and the bleeding seemed to lessen. i let out some more liquid and clots around midnight and then hit the bed. through the nite i did not bleed very much.

and now i am here writing hoping the bleeding stays less throughout the day.
it is the 7 year anniversary of k's mama's passing so she is going to be with her dad and brother and my mama and dad are coming to hang out with me just in case i start to bleed too much.

i have to say all of the bleeding freaked the utter hell out of me. i got panicky and scared and thought i might die. keep in mind i have very light periods--light bleeding for two to three days tops. and passing semi-large pieces of tissue is weird.

here's to hoping it is almost really, really done.

fixing my gaze on other things

still bleeding. still having cramps here and there. wanting it to be over and done with. thursday night was the worst so far. I was up all night with pretty hard cramping. every hour i got up to piss and a quarter size clot would disembark from my vaginal canal into the not so sacred place of toilet water.

i'm trying to just go on with life, minus work. I skipped work last week. I hung out with k at her work on thursday anticipating hard pain. But the pain did not come until that night. I went for a walk yesterday with pookah, our sweet whippet. I walked through the pain of some pretty heavy cramping and felt better for it upon my return home.

my plan now is to train hard. after that which once lived within me is totally expelled from my womb, I plan to get back into the groove of cycling hard and fast and long. My new goal is to participate in the ODRAM (a ride across michigan in one day--150 miles) in september of 2009. last year 20-25 miles a day was normal for me. This year I want a 30-40 mile ride to be normal for me.

I also cannot wait for spring. I look forward to gardening like a mad woman. I might not be able to grow a human just yet, but I sure can grow living things that come out of the earth. I'm really going to focus on herbs this year. I want to quadruple my chamomile plants. I am hoping to get some bergamot growing throughout my yard. I want to up the ante with lavender and coriander (I've already used up all of my coriander from last harvest). and I also want to explore the possibilities for creating my own herbal essential oils...

i am focusing on things far away from the creation of children. i have to to keep my sanity. as i explained to the midwife on the phone after she confirmed the miscarriage was happening (which was first confirmed by the really calm and nice ultra sound tech), there have been two wombs involved in all of this trying and loss and it has been going on for almost two years and it is tiring and trying.

so on to other things that give me the deepest sense of being alive--physical activities out and about in the beautiful surroundings of this earth and growing things in the soil then harvesting them and taking the bounty into my being and providing sustenance for the bodies of the people I love.

at night the emptiness of what we have constructed as a desire for our lives--the desire for children + the absence of those children = the emptiness--does surface and haunt my heart, but I steady my gaze on other life-giving ideas and plans and then it doesn't hurt so bad.

Music for a miscarriage

Over the last few days, I really did not think that which had been living inside me was still alive. My body just knew it. Perhaps it was my mind preparing me for the finality of the ultrasound images, but whatever it was, a graceful intuition let me know that today there would be no heartbeat. And now I am swallowing this pill laced with loss a bit easier than I might have otherwise (at least for now).

Last night when sleep would not come, I started a soundtrack of music for a miscarriage in my head. Below are the songs that surfaced for this day with some lines I like and my little reflection next to them. Thank you all for your kind words and support throughout this crazy and befuddling time. Our hearts are achy and numb and jagged around the edges. If anyone wants me to burn the tunes listed below, just let me know and I will send them your way. You really have to hear them to get the full impact of the soundtrack!

Music for when a heart is little bit cracked

Red House Painters—Song for a Blue Guitar Some lines: “In the room all I feel is the cold that you left/ In the air all I see is your face full of blame/ What’s left to see?/ What’s there to see?” Reflection: Because Mark Kozelek’s voice is familiar and his words touching and the tone of his music reaches that sweet space in my soul.

Patty Griffin—When it don’t Come Easy Some lines: “But if you break down,
I'll drive out and find you/ If you forget my love, I'll try to remind you/
And stay by you when it don't come easy/ I don't know nothing except change will come/ Year after year what we do is undone/ Time keeps moving from a crawl to a run/ I wonder if we're gonna ever get home” Reflection: Patty Griffin's voice is like a healing balm. Her lyrics hit at the core of so much involved in the mundane and extraordinary of the human experience. This song reminds me of my mom—I know she would always come out and find me if I was lost or confused. Throughout the fragile time of my short-lived pregnancy, I was reminded of her tenacity for loving her children as I listened to this…

Mahalia Jackson, Take My Hand, Precious Lord Some lines:
Precious Lord, take my hand.
Lead me on, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, and worn.
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light.
Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home
Reflection: I simply love this song. I love Mahalia Jackson’s voice and the depth of her belief and the grace and guidance she calls for in these old words.

Bob Dylan—Let me Die in My Footsteps Some lines: “And some people thinking that the end is close by, instead of learning to live they are learning to die/ let me die in my footsteps before I go down under the ground.” This song makes me want to live and live well. In my depressive teenage years, I used to listen to this song over and over to help me make it through the days. I still need it.

Robert Johnson—Stones in my Passway Some lines: “I got stones in my passway/ and all my roads seem dark at night/ I got stones in my passway/ and all my roads seem dark at night/ I have pains in my heart/ they have taken my appetite/ I have a bird to whistle/ I have a bird to sing/ Have a bird to whistle/ and I have a bird to sing” Reflection: Cause the blues are good for me right now.

Dirty Three—The Restless Waves Instrumental. The music simply reflects the rises, dips, and plateaus of my emotions over the last many weeks.

Phil Ochs--When I'm Gone Some lines: "Won't see the golden of the sun when I'm gone/
And the evenings and the mornings will be one when I'm gone/
Can't be singing louder than the guns when I'm gone/
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here." Reflection: This is our song (kk and me). I first shared it with her when we were newly together, nine years ago, and it is our reminder to work for what is just and right while we are here, to love with a fierce persistence while we are alive, to take in the beauty and plainness of everyday while we still have breath in our lungs.

Chris Bathgate—A Problem in Dissonance Solved Some lines: “The kids they will come out the kids will come out they come, so I will withdraw now cause enough within this world is broke.” This song always makes me well up with emotion. It is melodic and melancholy and touches a nerve of truth somewhere in the cavity of my chest where my heart lives.

Townes Van Zandt—Snow Don’t Fall Some lines: “My love I need not see to know she casts her glance at me/ snow don’t fall on summer’s time/ wind don’t blow below the sea/ my love lies ‘neath frozen skies and waits in sweet repose for me” Reflection: This is my favorite Van Zandt tune and it makes me happy in Winter. It makes me think of hope and how I need it in my life.

Joy Division—Disorder Some Lines: “I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand/ Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man/ New sensations bear the innocence, leave them for another day/ I've got the spirit, lose the feeling, take the shock away.” One of my favorite Joy Division songs; it always makes me contemplative and excited at once. I feel on the edge of something bigger and better and scary when I listen to it.