Joy Harjo's Web Log

c Joy Harjo June 08


c Joy Harjo June 08

We can learn what's impending in the emotional tone by watching clouds. These I found when returning from New York City last week.

Honor everyone who crosses your path. Everyone includes time as a person or persons. It includes sky, earth, air, water and other elemental beings. It includes your body. Think kindly; think light. Even each email, text, each word is a transmission. Each transaction brings either light or confusion. Paying attention is honoring. I will never forget the roly-poly bug making his way across the bathroom of my hotel room in Kolkata. It was only when I went into my light body, in which we were equal, that I saw the light around him, and the light trail his path made across the bathroom floor.

Photo c Lurline McGregor

We Perform "This is My Heart" In Honor of the Bengali Poets and Poetry (after being blown away by everyone else's poetry)
Saturday June 14, 2008

Windy, even cool. Redbird singing. We go on. We all go on, even Redbird whose nest in the mango tree was pushed down by a cat or mynah bird. I found one of the naked babies on the ground. Took care of it until the Wild Bird Rescue people here picked him up. He was so new, but as he warmed up in a nest of a washcloth on a heating pad he made the same moves as a human newborn, the same shudders, the same needs. He's doing well in a nest with another found redbird his same age in the home of a caretaker. Redbird sings this morning, Keeps moving somehow, someway.

Yesterday before going I had a premonition about the outrigger canoe race site at Kailua Beach. I'd heard on the weather report there might be rain. I didn't get a clear image of rain. Turned out to be wind, and out on the short sandy bluff which marked the disappearing beach we were pelted with sand and blown relentlessly. And the wind didn't stop or let up, not for the five hours we were there. The ocean was a raceway for the wind. This made quite a run downwind, and a slurp of rolling, blowing ocean upwind. Many of the younger, inexperienced crews huli-ed, that is, flipped. Still, there's nothing like the blue of the Pacific waters and at Kailua the color is a perfect turquoise. I raced in a mixed crew. And in the push of a race you come to know yourself quite well. I became muscle, lungs, ocean, muscle, lungs, canoe and wind. We came in a close third, a few seconds behind one and two. I loved it. Tonight I head back out to train around five, after working on my memoir, saxophone and singing, and the stack of ongoing business, house, family...

Still, I can't let go the knowing of a dream that is still clinging to me: how the source of creativity is the Source of Creativity, and moves like the Pacific. How do I stay in this knowing through the mundane? It's the same.

Emerson said:

"Always do what you are afraid to do."

Even on Sunday in Honolulu in early June.

More later.

c Joy Harjo 2008

(Not literally the last, "my" last full moon in Albuquerque for awhile!)