I am everything my father hated

Welcome. Please come in and relax.

It was a disappointing sweat lodge; a white guy was running it. I could tell he didn't know what he was doing, I had been to some Sioux sweats. We had been instructed to bring a drum or a rattle, and I had my huge rattle made from the horn of a bull. The idiot across from me had brought a baby's rattle, but in his favor he had a gorgeous brunette with him and we were all naked. This was up at Gold Run, California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and it was starting to snow outside. As the lodge grew hot, spiders came in for the warmth. when they would crawl on me in the dark I would flick them over at the brunette to hear her go "ooh!" It was not my most spiritual sweat lodge.

"Wanting one good organic line, I wrote a thousand sonnets."

Sam Hammill

Juliana Coles

_____________________________________________

Look at my hands. I am everything my father hated, everything he feared. And look at my eyes. My father is behind my eyes, watching everything I love, knowing the whole while I never needed him, that I will never be what he wanted me to become. Truth is everything. This life belongs to me.

"The more we learn, the more we realize how much we still don’t know." 

Vanessa R. Sasson

I have never been a farmer, but farmland feels welcoming to me, a green field under a golden sun, or corn stalks under a full moon; these things are a blessing. Thirty-seven years I have lived in this valley. The seasons of the year, the seasons of the crops; these are the seasons of my life. And that, too, is a blessing.

Emil Kosa Jr

"How can you fix something bad by doing something else bad?"

Brad Warner

That I might peel away the layers of nonsense I have built around myself that hide who I am. That I might know myself before the time of knowing comes to an end, and that I might use that knowledge, such as it is, in a positive manner.

A poem by the late Jim Harrison:

BROOM

To remember you’re alive

visit the cemetery of your father

at noon after you’ve made love

and are still wrapped in a mammalian

odor that you are forced to cherish.

Under each stone is someone’s inevitable

surprise, the unexpected death

of their biology that struggled hard, as it must.

Now to home without looking back,

enough is enough.

En route buy the best wine

you can afford and a dozen stiff brooms.

Have a few swallows then throw the furniture

out the window and begin sweeping.

Sweep until the walls are

bare of paint and at your feet sweep

until the floor disappears. Finish the wine

in this field of air, return to the cemetery

in evening and wind through the stones

a slow dance of your name visible only to birds.

Jim Harrison, from SONGS OF UNREASON

I hope you found something to like. Anything that doesn’t have a name under it was written by me.
All Good Things

James Lee Jobe