Splendid + Love

I am a minister of love. Did ya know that?
Yeah. I can officiate weddings. It's cool.

My pals Ty + Lauren got hitched at Jeni's in the Short North yesterday.
It was a sweet lil ceremony with words of love + serendipity +fate+ the beatles...

I was honored to usher new bonds of love into the wild wide world.  xo


last photo via Jenis xo

How to seduce your partner

I have sexy thoughts of my husband today. 
I had a dream about him last night that I can't shake. 
It was a strange dream but all day long I am plotting his seduction.

I am married to the sexiest man. I really shouldn't advertise it because you will want to steal him but there is no lack of steamy in my house.  I have thousands of hot memories on loop in my mind.
I am a DJ of love and lust and luck. It's gorgeous being in his arms. It's safe and it's like a goddamn poem.

But I have to go back and sample and mix and loop these memories too.
I have to catch myself from going too far into the seedy side of life.
I have to pull myself out of the murk of motherhood and work.
I have to tell my husband that I want him more.
I have to open my soft mouth and tell him all of the things he wants to hear.
because no one can read my mind
I need to bite my bottom lip more.  I need to be alive right now.
We must not stop working on this thing called love.
Lust powers the whole shebang and we have to feed the fire.
We have to burn like tigers.

I always want him. I do. I could be like Yoko Ono and John Lennon and just stay in bed all day with Joe. Yet, lately I just deflate over the course of the day into a person who wants to sleep.
Damn you work. Damn you hard hot days of people and pressures.
I just want to sleep.
Alone in the only room of my own that I have.
Sinking into the ether of peace.
The only place where no one needs me or expects things of me.
It sounds terrible and crazy but sleep is my lover lately.
Sleep is my sexy lover and I need to break it off.

I can't stop thinking of his wicked grin.
The corner of his mouth that I want to crawl inside of and settle.
His hands come to me and I am instantly transformed into the woman that I want to be.
It's like when he touches me- Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" bursts from my skin
and fills the room and it is light and wet and shining.
It is.

What do you love about the one you love?
How do you sleep less and live more?
What are your best seduction tips? 
{Mine are saying yes to science fiction/expensive beer/back rubs/food that cooks all day/boobs}

Ain't love grand?


source

teacher gifts

These are what we are giving to the kiddo's teachers this year...

I love these rings and I love the thought of them resting on the hands of people who have opened up the world to my children. I love the thought of the rings even being inside of old jewelry boxes someday. Relics of a teacher's history.

*the beginning*

My pal Jora tweeted something the other night that I just loved.

She said:
Best way to re-fall in love with one's husband? Listen to music from *the beginning*

Um. Yeah. I have been listening to music all day that makes me think of Joe. He has a great eclectic collection of tunes and I love all of the music he has introduced me to over the years. I like British punk now.  He tolerates the Indigo Girls.  We both sing Dylan so loud that our neighbors laugh.
I love this man.

and she is starting a revolution/i love her

chookooloonks

I am really good at it.

Ok. Well sometimes I fall flat.
Sometimes I just want it to work out so badly in the meadows of my mind.

But I got it really right once.
In the way back machine of my career outside of the internets I had these two employees that loved each other. I could see it. I knew that had desire potential. I knew they had fire if I could just spark it. I am good at this. I throw sparks.
So I smashed them together in tiny cafe chairs outside of our old city apartment balcony a decade ago. I made them Chicken Korma while wearing red lipstick and a tight black dress and pushed so much wine down them that they had to spend the night with us. We pointed towards my old daybed in the office and Joe and I fell into our bed with giggles and slurry love songs.

Yesterday I got this in the mail:

And it has made me float ever since.
Because love is so fricking real.
It's what we eat.
It's our water.

It's our best thing we got people.

even after all the things we said

This makes me happy sad. {or sappy if you will}

I was like an ass kicking homeschooler yesterday.

So we studied Greek Gods yesterday.
Like all day.
I am amazed at how much I learned or relearned.
I love myth and I am so happy to share it with the boys.
The silver age got me- to be a child for 100 years? oooo.
And the tale of Demeter.
And all about Eros.
And the Gorgons.
The tale of Achilles.
And all of it.
It's just so cool we get to blow our kid's minds with new information.
Blaise wants to see a hell hound and Finnian has worn a toga for 24 hours.

That's learning.

Tear it Down

We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.”

-Jack Gilbert, “Tear it Down“

poem

I would love to curl up with you on the right side of the bed that lives in Taliesin West over there in Arizona.

In early December I was sitting in a coffee shop in my childhood friend's little Chelsea neighborhood with Neil and we were amping ourselves up to be epic soon, we were telling each other all the right things. Things like how I need to focus more on the essayist that lives inside of me and how Neil needs to get off twitter and finish his damn screenplay.

I told him how my novel sucked but then I would look out the dirty window and tell him it may be pretty good but it will never get edited. He told me about his screenplay while sipping tea and I could kinda see it in my head. And this is a good thing. He was a bit manic and I was a bit gloomy.  We were wishy washy in our writer spine ways.
I think all the talking just talked us back into a circle.
We turned around and had ended the conversation just where it began.
Change. We need it. Writing. We crave it.
We are just unsure.
We are just angst ridden writers.
We are different.
Like you.
We are different.
We are so the fucking same as everyone else.

It sucks to be a writer. If I were a singer and good at it I could just sing out loud to people in the market or on the street. They would tell me I was good and I would walk away with a smile and a secret little pop to my step. A swagger. A bounce. I could know that I was good at singing. I feel beat down sometimes because if I were a singer I could make you hear me. I feel like I am talking to myself on here but I know it is good practice for me. It matters. It is time frozen. It is a memory.

I just want long hair and a small house with endless wooden floors and all of the people that I love inside of it dancing -but there would also be a small room for me where I would write poetry all day.

I would have a bed like Frank Lloyd Wright.
There was a divider in it. If Frankie was sleeping on the right he could be disturbed. It meant he was only resting or daydreaming or being lazy. You could come to him with art and dreams and wishes and problems. But if he were on the left side of the bed you could never touch him.  You could never bother him. He was sleeping. He was in his small allotment of true sleep. Genius sleep. The darkest place you can climb down into and nestle. The place where we are only ever alone.
I would have a bed like that.

I tried to tell someone today how I feel crazy a lot of the time. She just told me not to worry about it. That I was a little crazy but how the crazy ones are the best. Like the sweetest oranges and the slowest kisses.  I remembered this post I wrote about a year back and suddenly I felt fine. On 1/11/11 I felt fine. I shake my tiny fist at you 2011. I lift my shirt up at you and flash you. I laugh with my mouth so wide open that you can see my white childhood cavities. I make you want to be with me 2011.

I did drive across the United States one time. It was a very long drive.

I was with Julian Simpson from England and my friend Bryan. We had just been released from our shackles of Presbyterian church camp counselor servitude. It was August and someone that I loved had just died and it seemed like the thing to do. We drove from Chapin, South Carolina to Los Angeles and back home to Cowtown, Ohio. I was just thinking about how I hate to drive nowadays. How I am prone to panic and angst on long journeys in my adulthood. I am not sure when the little screw fell out and took me to a yucky place with driving, but it happened.
Back then I would roll down the windows and my long hair would slap my eyes and I would love it. I drove across Texas all night with Madonna and fast through the Nevada desert with Metallica where the sky hung low and purple. All around me were scenes from movies that had not yet been made and songs unsung. I think looking back- that trip was meant to be escapist for me in theory, but all the way as the tires spun round and round, I thought of how sad I was to go back home to a place that now was missing someone I truly took for granted.

I remember with my back against the sticky seat of the Toyota Corolla cultivating the uncanny mind sweeping thoughts that now take up most of my days- thoughts that it has to be easier for other people to get through this life. That not everyone can think this much and at this intensity all the time. That I was cursed with the internal equivalent of a mosh pit. That I just wanted to stop feeling so much. That the sun was somehow brighter on my face than anyone else in the car and if I opened up my mouth and told you the startling esoteric whispers that hid sneaky in my throat- you would laugh at me because that's what people do around me. They laugh. I think I learned in a startling catechism with myself that summer that I was indeed an artist -and not crazy. Well not crazy enough to do much anything about it.

I heard Metallica today and it did indeed jack my head up for thirty seconds or so as the day spread out before me and the kids were like beyond the fourth wall and I was back there and looking at the me that lives now. I waved at me and she waved back and it was like there was a little peace. And later in my minivan rolling down the main drag of my town I sunk low into my captain's chair and rolled the window down and shook my bob. I shook my hair and told the boys a little story about America.

Let's go get the shit kicked out of us by love

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around.”


for you Karey xo

{Holiday Gift Guide Day FIVE}

 

Do you know Mama K? Follow the stars for a great gift for kiddos*************************

CBUS is full of talented people

Speaking of handmade...
How gorgeous are the clothes of LottieDa (and the stylings and photos from Lauryn Byrdy)
I am locally blessed.

Scout is ONE month old today... (like woah)

I get jealous of other boobies

Breastfeeding is hard. (for me)
Even with my lactation lady and my fairy breastmother.
And now I probably fed my baby beetles the news said yesterday as he is supplemented with some formula when I can't pump like a rock star.
And let me tell you- I am not a rock star with the pump.
I like being good at things.
I get jealous of other boobies.
It's annoying really.

Sunday

Scout met his 90 year old great granny today.

She is slowly making her comeback to pie baker extraordinaire
with her new pacemaker and physical therapy.



Who knows where she will end up living- nursing home/apartment/with my parents...
We are just thankful after all she's been through that she is still here.

Kidd Sharp

I have been up since early morning cleaning and sorting.
I am sticking the two boys together to share a room to make a nursery for the new baby.
It's so funny how the last two times I had a theme and mad ideas and everything just so.
This time round we will be lucky to have the poor babe a stocked and minimal room.
I have to-date bought only 1 thing!
(pack of newborn pacifiers)
seriously

It's coming fast (about two weeks) and I am in full on insanity.
Do they call this nesting?
I have cleaned and purged so much that I have a giant pile of donations that nearly take over the play room today. This is a good thing.

We don't have a name yet- just lots of ideas that we throw at each other in the evening.
Finn and Blaise are convinced that we will name him Kidd Sharp because they like it.
We don't know much.

We just know that it has finally come to the place of complete love and anticipation that creeps up daily and tightens our throats.
It's almost time for our hearts to push out and expand again-
to pump and shudder with wild love...


image via fffound

What runs through my mind at night- moments before I fall asleep

My other granny- the minister's wife is struggling with a heart that wants to push from her chest. She has a ticker that tocks and knocks and causes her pain. She is weak now and it makes me sad. She is a painter and keeps telling my mother to ask me what I would like her to paint for me. I resist for this whole past year or so. I don't want the last of anything. It sounds so final. What would you have someone paint for you if it would be the last thing they may ever paint for you?

She's sensitive. She may even have it.
The ability to find the information hidden from most of us- from the senses.
Extrasensory perception.
Whatever.
She woke up one time in the night and said a plane crash was happening and it was.
Her son was in a plane crash.
She also woke up and circled a date on the calendar.
Her father died on that day.

I want her to paint my future.
In colors bright and vivid.
I can hang it up on the wall and never be afraid to look at it.
Or share it.
When the light hits yr lens you will see peace
and all throughout your body a feeling will wash right over you.

It will feel like the way it feels when someone rubs your head

and you know that through their fingers pulse love.

piper of love

My awesome friend Piper is having a hard time lately and a bunch of her sweet friends all over the web decided to make her a wee video to cheer her up. I just love the way the blogosphere really takes heart and supports. Love it. (thanks to Rachel, @sthrnfairytale for this video)

That we must go write it down.

I posted over here today.
It felt good.
xo


photo via robot-heart.tumblr.com