Christa Bell

Saturday, April 29, 2006

poem

she is convinced that love is a crusade
the sacred war that never ends
her hair is the flag
her heart, a horse
she rides
drooping
and fat
the armor didn't fit
she stuffs a soldiers rations down her throat
to pad her skin
the darts fly
and then the spears
the bullets pierce
her heart keeps riding
this is holy
what warriors live for
the chance to die in battle
the blood of the enemy clinging to bits of scalp
scrunched inside the dark
of heroic fists
crisping to ash
atop funereal pyres

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

stream...

have picked up julia cameron's 'the artist's way' again and turned straight to week 5: recovering a sense of possibility, which is perfect for where i am today, for the first time really feeling the low after being high and on the road for three and a half months. my low looks and feels a bit whiney, like, i'll never be like...or have ...or go...or do....

the exercises at the end of the chapter are killer. they are an exploration and expansion of my relationship to the "source" i.e. god-energy that makes everything happen...some examples:

start an image file: if i had either faith or money i would try...list five desires. for the next week, be alert for images of these desires. when you spot them, clip them, buy them, photograph them, draw them, collect them somehow. with these images, begin a file of dreams that speak to you. add to it continually...

and

if i were twenty and had money...list five adventures. again, add images of these to your visual image file.

and

ten ways i am mean to myself are...just as making the postitive explicit helps allow it into our lives, making the negative explicit helps us to exorcise it.

and

honestly, my favorite creative block is...tv, over-reading, friends, work, rescuing others, overexercise. you name it. whether you can draw or not, please cartoon yourself indulging in it.

and

my payoff for staying blocked is...

and

the person i blame for being blocked it....

and

list ten things you love and would love to do but are not allowed to do. your list might look like this:
1. get regular weekly massages
2. travel to india
3. scuba dive
4. move to a bigger place

etc.

then the wish list: speed write 10 wishes....

am procrastinating doing the exercises right now, cuz i like being depressed and whiney sometimes...more later...cbell

Friday, April 14, 2006

the truth about meditation

so...ten days/ten nights at twelve hours of meditation/day equals the complete script to my one woman show: Coochie Magic: a SpokenWord Musical Comedy.

this was the first time i broke the rules. i've done s.n. goenka's vipassana retreat 8 times over the last six years and this was the FIRST TIME I BROKE THE RULES! up at 4am and meditating until 9pm, but this time, during the breaks, i WROTE MY ASS OFF!! I wrote my first full length show and composed five songs in less than 10 days (because i really was trying not to write!) anis mojani started the whole writing thing by TEXT MESSAGING ME TWO DAYS INTO THE RETREAT AFTER I CLEARLY TOLD HIM THAT I WOULD BE AT A 10 DAY SILENT RETREAT WHERE I WASN'T ALLOWED TO WRITE!!! i have a friend who told me just before i went in that i needed a 12 step program for text messaging. he calls me "two thumbs and a blackberry", because of the long ass letters i text him every week. matter of fact, i curated the entire common ground benefit by text message right before i went on retreat. the beautiful thing about texting is that it's more immediate than email and less committed than a conversation...which suits my intimacy issues just fine...i can talk to you without really, well, talking to you.

back to my sript though... the shyt is hilarious. for the last six years i've been working on a project called "56: memoire of a black girls sexual coming of age" and i tell you, it's the never ending story. and the thing is, i've been so attached to telling the story as a book. but one of my master teachers has been telling me for years that when you attach yourself to an idea of how something is, you cancel out a whole range of possiblilities for what it could be. so, at the retreat, i just let go of my memoir being a book and it came to me that since i'd been excerpting pieces from it as spoken word anyways, why not just transform it into a theatre piece?? brilliant-eh?

anyways...am excited to see where it goes. will be testing it out this summer at workshops and open mics around nYc. i've never done standup before so i'ma take some of the monologues to standup clubs too...we'll see how it goes...more later...cbell

Monday, April 10, 2006

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart

this is my friend michael cirelli's favorite poem, and now i understand why i love him...



The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart
By Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not laguage but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.