Anyone who reads this blog will know why I like this poem, one of Culleny’s
dailies.
Cat Dance Music
Jim Culleny
Dance!
Delphiniums winddance
with phlox in Pat’s garden.
They sway in quiet concord,
rooted in motion.
Dancing’s a vital sign of endless youth;
even my grandmothers danced.
One danced to accordianed polkas,
corseted cantileverd bosom bouncing.
The other jigged across her chicken yard
with handfuls of eggs –having just left her hens
without yield– acting goofy for a camera.
I once danced with abandon
to big-holed 45s
spun by a DJ named Jocko
who sent four-part doowop through my radio:
the Prisonaires, the Cadillacs, the Moonglows…
When was the last time I danced with abandon?
How did I do that beautiful thing?
It’s best to dance with others, real gurus say.
It’s lonely dancing with a mirror,
leading and following in one motion,
thinking breaking it would be bad luck.
Our cats dance to deep cat vibrations always,
alert as…… cats to music far beyond our ears:
cat dance music.
Zorba knew. Have you seen
Quinn, the Greek, dance?
Felt life spring in rhythms?
Watched it prance on toes to a bouzouki
even in the embrace of despair?
Never. Never forget how to dance.
All innocents dance.
Only the troubled are still.

Most hummingbird feeders are made so that the little bird drinks while still airborne, wings continuing to beat away at an average of 30 beats per second. That’s how they’re used to hovering next to a flower and drinking its nectar.
This year I bought a hummingbird feeder that has little stands below each fake flower on which the bird can alight. And so I was able to sit a couple of feet away from the feeder and take some photos through the screen and the window.

It’s not often one has a chance to see a hummingbird when it’s not humming. Today one of our usual humming visitors sat quietly at the feeder for more than ten minutes while I watched it drink, look around, drink, pee, poop, look around, drink…. Over and over.
We have three or four different hummingbirds that stop by, including a ruby-throated. We can tell them apart by their sizes and markings.
Whenever it was really hot outside, we noticed that, while they would stop to take a drink, they would barely take a sip and then fly away. Over the last couple of days the weather has been considerably cooler, and they keep coming back to drink throughout the day. It finally occurred to us that, because the feeder is on the sunny side of the house, the liquid must frequently get really hot during the summer. Obviously, they like their meals on the cool side.
Whenever I see one perched on our feeder, I think about how much I would love to hold one in my hand, make it a pet. But that’s not the nature of the feisty little hummer. They’ve gotta keep moving.
Except when they take a rest at my feeder and let me watch them be birds rather than just those loudly buzzing large-insect-looking-things that are gone before you can focus on them.

That’s where we took my mom on Sunday: to the “black dirt” region outside of Goshen, New York for a Summer Fest at the Polish Legion of American Veterans’ picnic area. It was a 35 mile drive over back and bumpy roads, and (we now know) too long and jarring for her to sit comfortably. She fell asleep each way, and I tried to prop her up with pillows so that she wouldn’t fall over.
Packing her up to take her on even that short a trip was like packing up to take a child: snacks, water, an extra pair of underpants, a jacket, hat, pillows, blanket….
Add to that, of course, her wheelchair and her cane.
There was a polka band playing all afternoon, so after she ate some pierogi that I bought at the stand operated by Hudson Valley Polonaise Society, she and I got up to polka. We managed to do two dances (with a long break between), and my brother took a video clip to help her remember the event afterwards.
Here’s a still photo of us, baby-stepping along as everyone else hopped energetically around the dance floor. (I clipped the image from the video, so it’s kind of blurry).

To be honest, it was killing me not to get up and really dance. I kept looking around to see if there might be any men there without partners who looked as though they wanted to dance as much as I did. No such luck. Five years ago, I would have even gone up to a guy who was with a partner and asked his partner if I could borrow him for one dance — explaining that I was from out of town and was dying to get at least one dance in before I left.
Obviously, I’ve lost many of my edges. No more guts. No more glory.
Mom barely remembers the experience. And she slept almost all day on Monday. I’m not sure it was worth the bother of the trip, except I did buy some tomatoes (the best I’ve had yet), a perfect watermelon, and, of course, onions at what was once the Onion Capital of the World.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily’s guest writer every Monday.
First there was Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat, right?
Well, no. Courageous as Rosa Parks’s act of civil disobedience was, and as important as it was to the Civil Rights Movement, it was not the first such act of its kind.
Last week, August 14, a woman named Irene Morgan Kirkaldy died at age 90 of Alzheimer’s. It’s not a name we’re familiar with, and that’s too bad. You see, back in 1944, at age 27, this woman got on a Greyhound bus headed from Gloucester, Virginia, to Baltimore, Maryland. Then she was arrested. Why? Because she, a black woman, refused to give up her seat to white passengers and subsequently resisted arrest. As she described her encounter with a sheriff, “I kicked him in a very bad place.” According to her daughter, Mrs. Kirkaldy later always told her children, “If you know you’re right, it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”
Further importance is added to her action by the subsequent legal outcome. She was convicted of violating Virginia’s segregation law, and eventually, her case went all the way to the Supreme Court. There it was successfully appealed by a future Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. The case paved the way for what was to come.
All this more than a decade before Rosa Parks’s landmark resistance in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
So how come we didn’t/don’t hear anything about Irene Morgan Kirkaldy? “She didn’t see herself as a hero,” her daughter says. So she likely never sought recognition. And back when she committed her act of civil disobedience, World War II was raging, nearing its end, yes, but still the overwhelmingly dominant activity of the time. There wasn’t much national interest in or attention to some “quarrel” about a bus seat.
But that unnoticed seed flowered fully eleven years later, and we might wonder if Rosa Parks knew of Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, if she drew inspiration from her predecessor, that little-known woman to whom we owe a great deal. (As a side note, Mrs. Kirkaldy earned a degree from St. John’s at age 68, and then a Master’s from Queens College at age 73.)
And it would be a greater honor to her if some 63 years later, we’d totally erased the notion that black or white had any relevance in our culture. “I have a dream my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character….” Thus Martin Luther King spoke to us 19 years after that brave woman’s defiance. And now, another 44 years after King’s words, we actually have being raised this astonishing question about a candidate for a presidential nomination: Is he black enough?
Maybe we need again to say, loud and clear, “ENOUGH!” And add…”PERIOD!”
If only to say the sacrifice of Irene Morgan Kirkaldy really meant something.

You need some healing hands, Sistah, big time. This is my visual virtual prayer for the Sessums, for whatever it’s worth.

Cybermagic and the beginning of shifting the universe for r@d@r and his family:

The conjuring goes on here on the mountain, with the digging of roots, the finding of wings, the weaving of shield, the sewing (yes, SEWING) of seeds, the winding of vines.
Intention and will. It all begins in chaos and it ends in connection and creativity.
More to come.

Chaos is the theme here. And magic.
I live in a state of chaos, a slave to my mother’s elusive mind. My own living space is a shambles of clothes and crafts, books and dishes and paper.
And so I’m fascinated to have been introduced to “chaos magic” or, as it is known, “Kaos Magick.” From a link that r@D@r sent me to, I found out

Results are what count. Try something. If it works, try it again to verify. Continue to practice the technique until you perfect it. If the technique doesn’t work for you, drop it and try something else. Explore – and don’t accept as truth anything you haven’t experimented with yourself; you are your own laboratory. “Everything else is mysticism,” according to Pete Carroll. Phil Hine is a little more elaborate: “Rather than trying to recover and maintain a tradition that links back to the past (and former glory), Chaos Magick is an approach that enables the individual to use anything that s/he thinks is suitable as a temporary belief or symbol system. What matters is the results you get, not the ‘authenticity’ of the system used.”

[snip]

Most chaotes recognise three basis models of magick: the spirit, energy and psychological models. Recently, a number of leading-edge chaotes have begun to integrate the magickal models of other eras into a new model: the Cybernetic model…

The whole article is fascinating to me because, until last night, I never heard of Kaos Magick, but apparently that is close to what I do — except I only subscribe to the bolded half of this assertion:

Since life is meaningless, be the artist of your own destiny. Create your own meaning, rather than be enslaved or conditioned by anyone else’s. If nothing is true, then everything is permitted.

Interesting notion, this Kaos Magick. I don’t like putting labels on myself, so I’m not putting this one on either.
But it sure is “interesting.”

I’m feeling fired up, thanks to Ex-Liontamer, r@d@r
I don’t know who “r@d@r” really is. That is I don’t know his real-world name. But his blog has been on my radar since I started blogging, and he sometimes leaves comments here, the last one being on my previous post.
So, he’s got me fired up about creating something to urge the universe to give him and his family some well-deserved changes in fortune. And we’re both going to blog the process. He’s already begun.
(As a relevant aside, I heard Keith Olbermann today report on an Oxford professor’s assertion that planet earth and those of us on it could be a simulation that some greater intelligence is playing on his/her computer. A sort of truly complex version of “Sim City.” Heh. God as some ultimate computer geek; or else the ultimate alien invasion. The point of my aside being, if that’s the case, all the more possibility for the effectiveness of ritual, prayer, and ordinary magic.)
It also helped to fire up my spirit that a friend from Albany called this morning and invited me to join her and her aunt for lunch at the Culinary Institute of America (which, it turns out, is only about 15 miles from where I live). My brother agreed to take over my day shift, and off I went for a gourmet lunch that ended in some Tiramisu the way it should be made.
My taste buds are in ecstasy and my right brain is in overdrive. That pretty much makes a perfect day for me.
Stay tuned as r@d@r and I connect to instigate a shift in the universe.

There was a time, when time was mine, when I would gather sticks and feathers and beads and stones and whatever other relevant and symbolic objects I could find and do my own little bit of magic making. Over my years of blogging, I even have created and snail mailed some to other bloggers from Colorado to South Africa to Australia.
But, time and access being what it is, I am resorting to the virtual this time, as I send my good energies across the country to my son in Portland, Oregon, who is making every effort to land the job he wants.
Instead of poking around for substantial objects that I can wind and weave, I search around for images that have no substance except what I give to them with my hopes and wishes. And so this virtual talisman for success. To my son.

The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily’s guest writer every Monday.
Dear President Mr. Gee Dumbya Bush:
This is a letter to you but also many others may read it ‘cuz it’s an open letter. One of your aides can explain to you what that is. And I know you’re on vacation right now, but maybe one of your aides will read this to you anyway.
Well, President Mr. Etc., I am a lifelong citizen and fan of the United States of America, but lately it’s more like the Un-United States, and that troubles me. You said you’d be the uniter. But instead of a Union, we seem to be more like an onion — with layers being peeled away ’til all that’s left are you, your dog, and Laura (she’s your wife). And 2 people and a pooch are hardly enough to be a country as I think even you could see. (If not, one of your aides could explain it.)
The reason for our problems, in part, is that you’re, as you like to say, the 911 prez. To you, that refers to the terrorist attack on the U.S., but what it’s really more like is the other 911, the emergency number we need to call almost every day ‘cuz of the trouble we’re in since you got elected and somehow re-elected. (I won’t bring up the election cheating business right now.) Like the dumb war you started and can’t figure how to finish (and your aides are obviously no help there).
Then, too, there’s your trimming away at the Constitution (no, not the ship, ask your aides) and hiding behind your Executive Privilege (which someone told me you think is a car) or the line about Need to Know. That last I understand some ‘cuz where your presidency’s concerned, I have a similar need, too: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!
And you oughta stop trying to scare people with those “maybe” terrorist threats you announce so as to keep some kind of hold over folks (like all terrorists do) by yelling “BOO!” at them every once in awhile when you feel the heat creeping up the backside of your presidency. Try remembering this is the land of the FREE and the home of the BRAVE (which one of your aides etc). It’s only you and your VEEP who duck into hidey-holes when some kind of trouble threatens.
Anyway, that’s what I wanted to say.
Sincerely,
Myrln S. Orcerer
p.s. My daddy read this over and says it shouldn’t be “Dumbya” in the salutation ‘cuz that’s plain wrong. I told him if he thinks it’s not Dumbya, he hasn’t been paying attention the last couple of years! (If you don’t get it, one of your aides…oh you probably know the drill by now. If not, one of your…….)