10/9/12
Following the Song Line
Reading an essay by Oliver Sacks, "Altered States". In the opening paragraph he states:"To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape...we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need....to get beyond ourselves...in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings."
Here is the place of poetry, dance and music: the arts. I am studying how to be intoxicated with each moment, how to listen beyond the ordinary realms, how to follow the song line of a story beyond colonized mind constructs that demand we act within rules and laws that ensure our enslavement (see fundamentalist sects of Christianity, or a consumer culture run by multinationals for example) to fear.
In this study I realize that I do not know much at all. I do recognize love, the immense power of connection and compassion. It becomes most obvious in the natural world, at sunrise and sunset. It is then I see the connection between ancestors who love us, who we are now, and the children and grandchildren who follow.
As I get beyond myself I realize that I am closer. All roads leads to and from the heart.
Yesterday when I peered down at my heart to ask a question, it looked up at me with an immense shine. My loose footing steadied.
We will make it.
We will all make it.
9/21/12
Recent Radio Interview On First Person Radio
RECENT Radio Interview
On First Person Radio
with Laura Waterman Wittstock
Hear Interview:
Joy’s Interview is at 7:40 in the recording.
http://migizi.org/media/FPR_2012-09-12.mp3
Joy’s Interview is at 7:40 in the recording.
http://migizi.org/media/FPR_2012-09-12.mp3
More Information: http://tinyurl.com/6tna7hm
Joy at National Book Festival in DC
Reading and Book Signing
Saturday, September 22
At the DC National Mall
10:55-11:40 am Joy Harjo/Book signing at noon.
More Information: http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/author/joy_harjo
9/11/12
Joy Harjo RADIO Interview September 12
First Person Radio
Wed. September 12, 2012
KFAI 9 - 10 am Central Time
Local Stations: 90.3 Minneapolis & 106.7 St. Paul
Listen on kfai.org/firstpersonradio
or MIGIZI at http://tinyurl.com/6tna7hm
9/5/12
September 8th Joy Harjo Performance
September 8th
Joy Harjo Performance
and she will MC the Indian Summer Music Festival
7 pm
Indian Summer Music Festival, Milwaukee Lakefront
Henry Maier Festival Park, 200 North Harbor Drive, Milwaukee, WI
September 6th Poetry and Music Performance w/ Larry Mitchell
September 6th
Poetry and Music Performance w/ Larry Mitchell followed by book signing
Returning The Gift Writers and Storytellers Conference 2012
7 pm
Weasler Auditorium at Marquette University
1506 W. Wisconsin Avenue
Milwaukee, WI
9/3/12
My last Muscogee Nations News Column: July 2012
Itʻs summer and Indian stories are in the making everywhere.
The days are long and languid and the nights are warm and full of singing, full
of story potential. Everybody’s singing stomp dance, powwow, church, and
humming popular songs with ear buds in their ears. And it’s not just two-legged
humans but all the other humans: birds, frogs, insects and too many mosquitoes.
One of these days Iʻd like to start collecting some of those
contemporary “old” Indian stories. Many of them have their beginnings in the
summer, but are usually told on long winter nights. One category of these stories
that youʻll never find in the publishing world is painting stories. Like many
of you, (some of you behaved, like my sister Margaret) I lived through those
wild Indian parties and 49ʻs as a high school student at the Institute of
American Indian Arts and a student at the University of New Mexico. I see them
now as part of a test, a kind of coming of age. Some of us made it through,
barely, some of our friends…didnʻt…and others are still stuck there trying to
catch the thrill of the first high. Some good stories came out of the journey
because we needed them to make it.
Laughter is the grease that slides us through difficulty, even tragedy.
Painting was a tradition at those parties. The first person
to pass out was the canvas. We young women would dig through our purses and backpacks
and pull out fingernail polish, tape, glue, cotton balls and any other items
that might be decorative. (I hear superglue later made an appearance.) Oh, and
scissors if the painting posse was being especially devious. And then the
victim was…decorated on the face, arms, and sometimes…other…places. Imagine
waking up and looking in the mirror. One of the best painting stories was told
to me by an Umatilla man who has many, many contemporary “old” stories. He told
of waking up to the sun on his face, naked on a roof without a ladder, his body
painted…everywhere.
And then thereʻs the classic kind, like the story my cousin
George Coser, Jr. told us the other day as we drove downtown Tulsa on the way
to the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. “There used to be a church over there. They
used to serve food for the homeless,” he said as he pointed to a parking lot.
Then he told of a friend of his driving over to pick him and a buddy up to take
them out to lunch. They were excited and as they headed to Tulsa imagining all
their favorite eating places there. His friend pulled up to the church and next
thing he knew they were standing in line for their free lunch! Now thatʻs a
real Indian story!
Then there are the other kinds of stories that feed the soul
of our tribal culture in a different way. Those are the stories we heard at the
Thlopthloccco Tribal Town meeting out near Okemah, attended by ceremonial
grounds and other cultural leaders a few weeks ago. These were the deep
philosophical stories of the roots of meaning for our people, with the
overhanging question of how are we going to continue as a Mvskoke people, when
many of the children do not know their clans or arenʻt brought into the
function of the clans? There is
never one answer but many answers, many stories. Another important story we
heard was by the Mvskoke Food Sovereignty Initiative, about the restoration of
and reculturing of plants that have traveled with us and nurtured us through
our human stories.
Mvto, mvto to all the culture bearers, those who choose to remember
in a time of forgetting. Mvto to the spirits of all the stories that carry us
to laughter, to deeper understanding of our predicament, our place here on this
Earth.
This Song is a Pathway
There is a small bird that is not flashy and loud
like the blue jay who lives here. Blue jay likes everyone to know he’s here and
is especially good looking. That little bird is not the color of passion, and is
not known to carry good luck to humans like the redbird. Nor does it blush with
orange on its chest which marks it as a keeper of knowledge of the history of a
place like the robin whose family has lived her for generations. You would miss
this small bird if you scanned the horizon. It is small and brown. Yet, it has
a tone so pure your heart opens so it can know the movement of love that is
within the architecture of all life. That tone is a doorway. I need that bird’s
song this morning. I use it as my path to enter this new day. When I step out
into this song I trust my heart. I can hear it singing
7/9/12
CRAZY BRAVE is officially born!
Today, Talk of the Nation on NPR at 2PM CDT, and tomorrow GOODREADS live conversation at 3PM PDT. Please join in. Tomorrow night The Central Public Library with Keren Taylor moderating. Then, to Seattle, KPFA event in Oakland, Bookworks in Albuquerque. The tour resumes a week later with the Collected Works in Santa Fe, Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, Tattered Cover in Denver, the Boulder Bookstore in Boulder, then ends on the 27th at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage, Alaska!! See you Soon.
7/8/12
CRAZY BRAVE
There's a post that comes up when you Google CRAZY BRAVE that is title an "Excerpt from Crazy Brave."
For the record, it isn't an excerpt.
It's one of the over a hundred pages I deleted from the manuscript.
And I've rewritten the vignette that now appears as an "excerpt".
Tonight--on a new song from an older poem....
and need to finish packing, and get ready to be on Talk of the Nation tomorrow
with CRAZY BRAVE.
For the record, it isn't an excerpt.
It's one of the over a hundred pages I deleted from the manuscript.
And I've rewritten the vignette that now appears as an "excerpt".
Tonight--on a new song from an older poem....
and need to finish packing, and get ready to be on Talk of the Nation tomorrow
with CRAZY BRAVE.
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