Dangerous Prayers

by Sara Regina Ryan

Deliver us, O God, O Truth, O Love, from quiet prayer
from polite and politically correct language,
from appropriate gesture and form
and whatever else we think we must put forth to invoke or praise You.
Let us instead pray dangerously—wantonly, lustily, passionately.
Let us demand with every ounce of our strength,
let us storm the gates of heaven, let us shake ourselves
and our plaster saints from the sleep of years.
Let us pray dangerously.
Let us throw ourselves from the top of the tower,
let us risk a descent to the darkest regions of the abyss,
let us put our head into the lion's mouth
and direct our feet to the entrance of the dragon's cave.
Let us pray dangerously.
Let us not hold back a little portion,
dealing out our lives—our precious minutes and our
energies—like some efficient accountant.
Let us rather pray dangerously—unsafe, profligate, wasteful!
Let us ask for nothing less than that the Infinite ravage us.
Let us ask for nothing less than annihilation in the
Fires of Love.
Let us not pray in holy half-measures nor walk
the middle path for too long, but pray madly, foolishly.
Let us be too ecstatic,
let us be too overwhelmed with sorrow and remorse,
let us be undone and dismembered...and gladly.
Left to our devices, ah what structures of deceit we have created;
what battlements erected, what labyrinths woven,
what traps set for ourselves, and then
fallen into. Enough.
Let us pray dangerously—hot prayer, wet prayer, fierce prayer,
fiery prayer, improper prayer,
exuberant prayer, drunken and completely unrealistic prayer.
Let us say Yes, again and again and again.
And Yes some more.
Let us pray dangerously, the most dangerous prayer is
always yes.

i am running into a new year

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

poem by lucille clifton
tulips by june k.

I miss Katchoo and Francine.

www.strangersinparadise.com

About Last Night...

I had a seriously, serious hissy fit. I lost my cool and that ain't cool.

I feel much better now. So much better in fact that I could pee my pants. Why? Because I do not owe taxes. That's happened before and it's worse than awful having worked my butt off just to pay more taxes. Did you know that when you cannot pay owed taxes that you can pay in installments at 28% interest? Yeah.

Money is tight, but it's not extinct and it's not everything. I have a roof over my head, clean running water, clothes on my back, friends and family to love and who love me right back... I have my health. I have a great job. Heck, if food is that scarce I can plant a vegetable patch in the front yard and teach myself the craft of canning.

I will not live in fear. I choose to connect with my fellow countrymen and people of the world through love, or something, anything but fear. We each have our challenges and opportunities.

The possibilities are absolutely endless. No more fear.







http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N9m_F8ryfc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBlwU0MlUSk

KMFDM and Mother F**king Taxes

There is something seriously fucked up about working this hard only to lose $500 bucks in my '08 tax return. Lost it to what? Social Services? The Arts? Public Health Care and Education programs? HA! Losing $500 bucks that meant the difference between food in the cupboard and bus fare to work, clothes on my back or paying my rent on time in April. Having been relieved of one of my part time jobs in November I've been trying to find the good in all this. It's a good thing that I no longer work 65 hours a week, right? For one it made me feel dead inside, without creative or spiritual energy; for two it made me feel like I am nothing but an endless debt that never gets paid down; for three it leaves nothing at the end of the day for gardening, drawing, fucking, loving, walking, playing, breathing, napping, cooking, joyfulness or beauty...

On September 11, 2001 among the many conflicting and horrifying things I felt was one tiny-enormous feeling: a connection to my countrymen that I had never, ever experienced before. For the first time in my short life I knew that coast to coast the nation held it's breath, shed it's tears, voiced it's rage as one. Though our disagreements would follow I had glimpsed something amazing... to perceive this whole U.S.A. as connected, to sense for the first time a national identity.

As I sat at my dining room table this afternoon filing my taxes I had this experience again. Across the country people are feeling the same horrible, gut rotting thing: What now? I know many people are not making ends meet, are making cuts in already strained budgets, telling themselves to take a deep breath and keep focused on the moment; trying to tell themselves that it will pass before they lose the house, before the next round of layoffs... What the fuck is this? Is this who we are?

I know I'm not the only one who can't see beyond the next paycheck.

I scrimp and try to wear my shoes and clothes until they have holes in them. I skip buying groceries because the $25 will get me to work for the next week. Seriously? $25 for groceries?

I know that this rant means nothing and even contributes to the cacophony of fear, but filing my taxes makes me feel trapped! I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here, working in a capitalist society with a president who may have said what he meant or maybe not! Sure, I could give up my internet and save $90 a month but it's the one thing I splurge on. That and $6 a week at the little Cuban place across the street from my apartment: coffee and blueberry pancakes can maintain anyone's sanity.

I made 5 grand more than I did last year but my return will be a whole $18. Yee ha, maybe I can go get that IRA started at last.

Fuck this passive-let's-be-calm-and-take-a-deep-breath-and-live-in-the-moment-bullshit! I'm having a beer and blasting KMFDM and MIA, praying to God I don't completely lose my fucking mind tonight trying to hold on to what little I "have."

Lovely doesn't begin to describe this...

www.pbs.org

French 19th Century Blue Opaline Snake Paperweight, Appraised on Antiques Roadshow July 2003

Oh, Sweet Frabjousness!

It's been an awesome day: I slept in! which is no easy feat for me as I've been working at what my friend Beth refers to as "sparrow fart" - an hour so early you can hear a sparrow fart! - for the last ten years. I thought sleeping in was a thing of the past... It was a quarter to ten when I rolled my ass out of bed for breakfast at Victor's Cafe with friends Ruby and Miya where we proceeded to feast on a mango pancake and sub cuban toast;) Then on to some random snow sculptures in the uptown neighborhood behind Lund's that Al and I found totally by accident last night on our way home from said Lund's.

Onward to the Open Book Center where we happened upon artists hanging the new show for RosaLux gallery - sweet pen and ink by a guy who's name escapes me at the moment; pencil on paper by the other guy who's name I never got. I must go back and see it all put together! Then right next door to Big Brain Comics (yes, I am a GEEK!) where I found the best illustration magazine called Hi-Fructose and the latest installment of Terry Moore's Echo.

Once home I sat down to my computer and realized with frabjous joy that my blog has a follower! OMG, yo! So I started surfing... found some very cool sites... hifructose, phantasmaphile, amysteinphoto.blogspot, drawn.ca, thomglick.blogspot.

Now I'm eating chips and drinking a beer saying to myself that it's quite alright and not so bad to live happily and well.


*photo by Miya Rostein

Tori Amos No More

The astounding photo I had posted here of Tori Amos was apparently pilfered from the wrong site and today, just now in fact, they snatched it back. C'est la. If you saw it, it was good; maybe you can sense how good by reading the comments posted here:))

Gertrude Kasebier

by Ellen Bass

The water over slick plates, river water
dark, thick, warm
as water is at night.

She pushes back her skirt, her sleeves
rolled above the elbow, dips her hands into the water,
soft, heavy, flooding the plates.

They told her photography is not creative.
She believed them
until now, these nights

her fingertips grooved like the sand of river beds,
the willow and black alder rustling, the owl's hoo hoo
resonating, she can feel its tremor in the water.
Wet. The wet scent of river mud, river grass.

Water is the color of night, liquid
black without reflection. River stones, the soft turf
of river bank, her own arms and hands
are vague in the shallow star light.

All night she crouches,
her knees imprinted with wet folds of her skirts,
her hands certain, familiar to water, fish.

All night the images emerge
in imperceptible degrees, as she dips and rinses,
dips and rinses, the rush of river
obscuring that faint hum of planets

until the lightening of
mass into form, shadow,
shades of gray, pale
tinge of color, dawn.
She gathers up her plates.

Walking back to the house she shivers,
thinks about breakfast, ham, buttered toast
in a pewter rack, the next night.

I care for you, I care for our world. If I stop caring about one it would be only a matter of time before I stop loving the other...

*Title excerpt by Pat Parker

I Honor the Twin Stars of My Day: Baking & Cooking

I had a moment the other day when I realized that I've been working as a baker for 14 years. I had no idea that my first job at the Hometown Bakery with Dan and Mary Lang in Morris, Minnesota would lead to such a wonderful career. As a visual artist I don't think it's much of a stretch for me to love the beautiful, process oriented world of pastry... at long last these two worlds have collided in a photograph of my own hands at work.

The world in which I could make a portrait of myself as a baker - in the way I love to make portraits, in the moment - does not exist. I am so often on the other side of the camera or lost in thought as I roll dough or I'm covered in a goo that has no business near a camera that I never truly imagined the power of seeing myself, my hands, at work in a photo like this. I like it.

*photo by Katy Gerdes

I Feel SO Much Better!!

*I found this image on Grace's Wild Pomegranate.