Candle lit within and without. Keeping my focus on the novella. Publishing it at the site next week for real. In the meantime, wondering if I should walk with the rising sun or write all morning. Loving the mess 'cause the robin is here to tell me how. yours in life and song. X=h/m. howling to you from the holy road, L

So excited by writing this novella and by the prospect of The Howloween Ball...no time to journal as now time is needing tis story to be my focus over the next two weeks. i love being here now. i'd rather be here now. thank you for being alive. thank yoou for making me alive. if you can, please come to the ball, download the book, sing the sparty song, and celebrate with us. there really is a time to cry and the time is now and then we will have won. -howling to you from the holy road, Lizzie X=h/m (more at howloweenball.com)

* * * *
All characters in this story are fictional. Although they may be inspired, at times, by my travels along the holy road, they are, in fact, imagined, seeded and grown in the fields of my mind .

To my loving friends at The Agency who have given me the courage to finally tell this story.

The Wonderful Adventures... by Lizzie West
This is the story of ten little children who knew everything and nothing at the very same time. I’ll begin with Eva and the forgotten Church.

BOOK ONE: The Wonderful adventures of Eva and The Forgotten Church

“After all the tea and cakes and ices, shall I have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? For though I have wept and fasted and wept and prayed and though I have seen my head brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet and here is no great matter, for I have seen the eternal footman carry my coat and snicker and in short, I was afraid.” - T.S. Eliot

CHAPTER ONE: The Letters Behind The Mantle (or “Just in case something happens...”)

October 10, 2069
It’s now 5.23 a.m. and I’m in the October garden on St. Joseph Street, with my lantern lit, the fire warm and the outdoor chimney smoking. I am ninety six years old, just five years older then Heidi Lewis was the year that we, The Hucksters, bought her home and turned it into The Holy Road House. The red breasted robin is still picking seeds from the ground nearby and the ghosts are still singing our songs. I’ve been trying to tell this story for a long long time....

too much to tell. writing the novella keeps me away from this blog. but i promise to at least get a few lines up each week. me and figaro are sitting on the porch at st.joseph street. it's chilly out here. october's coming! we are a little tired 'cause we wrote most the night to finish the first chapter. building this co-op with these wonderful columbia citizens is the most fun i've had, maybe ever. knowing that ourstory is possible to create and history is possible to leave behind...of course we must always study it, understand it, recognize it, not repeat it, but let's not create it anymore either...okay? congratulations to gregg's sister who had her baby and to mike hagan had his baby. tony mixed the new howloween ball single "sparty", it'll be up next week. laura and sparty are growing wings and manifesting constantly...what else? for now, just howling to you all,Lizzie X=h/m

baba and i at the table paula and ken lent to the holy road house. both typing on our lap tops to meet deadlines. the moving truck full of gifts arrived yesterday. the baby grand is up in the music room and the red breasted robyn came to give promise of mama with me in eternal time. love is the best teacher, sometimes the hardest too. hoowling to you, X=h/m, LIzzie

nice to talk last night. out in the garden at the holy road house.it's all new. can't say it's not scary. it is. but i'm not growing to get distracted by the destination. I am going to stay with the journey. be clear about the intention and grow it to fruition. A fruition that will feed my soul by practicing the art of creating reality on a whole new level. I'm going all the way Home this time. Creating a collective reality through the BALL. howloweenball.com
They found a fire place for the garden, .35 cents says god is, without a doubt, winking, laughing and howling for the holy road. Howlelujah...
howling to you from the holy road, Lizzie X=h/m

finding the balance and learning to keep heart over mind, that is the way to eat the fruit. to eat it to its core. If we had finished it to the core, we wouldn't be in this tangle. Just one bite meant a confusing evolution toward learning to just sit and finish the apple on the river bank, saying Thank you! my god that feels good.
But life is demanding. it calls for our time and attention at every detailed pass. there is always something to justify working in the name of your mind and leaving the heart behind. but making a commitment to electing a different dictator, a different source of power....that's what the equation is about. what amazes me is how i can carry around songs, ideas and books of reasearch in my bag of living and then wake up in the morning of my re-birth again and again, knowing i didn't practice the X=H/M method as i had hoped i would. that M somehow negotiated its way into the drivers seat again and took me down a road that H would never of allowed. damn it. I got taken for a ride again, a ride through a world that ticks desperately toward human time.
life is messy and that's the moral of the story. learning to love the mess is how H stays strong, stays the dominant factor in an equation for living that satisfies my eternal being. when M tries to organize the beautiful chaos and compartamentalize my fear of losing control, that's when I can't hear H telling me what to do anymore.
let me promise once again that i'll honor H first. to simplify it, it's like this...next time my mind says...we have to do this, go here, be afraid, wear this...my Heart will firmly but gently remind the Tool (the mind being a miraculous tool, which is productive when it knows its place and dangerous when it tries to command the road) that it is a Tool and nothing more, not the Hand of god (as Whitman says, "the elderhand of my own.") In short, i won't accept my writing time stolen from my Heart schedule, the Now Manager. Indeed, if the mind wants to do something, fine, but it will have to apply for approval from H. "This I replied: no one, if he could help it, would tolerate the presence of untruth in the most vital part of his nature concerning the most vital matters. There is nothing he would fear so much as to harbour falshood in the the soul." - The Republic Of Plato
Heading for the prarie on tuesday is a promise to H. - Howling to you from the holy road, Lizzie X=h/m

E-MAIL LETTER SENT TO NYC FAM:
This September 11th at 7:30, we'll be together with you at The Cutting Room in NYC. http://www.lizziewestlife.com/cutting.jpg

We'll gently remind ourselves who we are and what it means to be human on earth today, in the early Fall of 2006. We'll remember what happened, sing the sorrow from our bones. We'll create our reality in the midst of a seemingly unchanged world, knowing all the while, that though we may seem the same, every one of us is completely changed in the very core of our being. Though our waking may be slow and distracted, it is a waking nonetheless. Something HAS begun and it is good. My home town was born and raised under the towering stages of hustle and bustle, a shocking destruction stunned my soul and set me free. I believe, I believe, I believe. The morning after September 11th, 2001, I sat down to to let music do its work on me. As I recorded "A Time To Cry", by myself in the garden, the song kneaded my pain into healing. We'll sing that song on Monday night, along with 19 Miles To Baghdad, Prayer, Portrait Of An Artist As A Young Woman, Waiting For A Sign and Look What They Done To MY World, MA...If you have any other song requests, please let me know before Sept 7th. I'll do my best to fit it in. The morning after this coming Sept 11th, myself and our family at Holy Road Tours will leave again for the Prairie. We won't be back with you until December. Here's a live download of "Waiting For A Sign",

Please join us on Sept 11th, 2006, to listen, to sing, to be kneaded, to reach for light and to send us off with love... as we head to our Midwestern October Artist In Residency. If you don't create your reality, your reality will create you. It's easy to read about our travels on the holy road, http://travelingtheholyroad.blogspot.com/

Here's a photo of us with our long time friend and newly added band member,
Gregg Osofsky (you'll meet him at the show) taken the other day at WKZE the Inspiring local independent radio station of our "Pine Plain's Artist in Residency Home"

Howling to you from the holy road always, Lizzie West X=h/m

Coming 'round the bend of time, seven days left here in pine plains before we celebrate the residency with our closing show at the stissing house. we've been living in the old farm house next to hammertown barn. joan and gregg adopted us. wkze produced the ads. the stissing house made sure to be a perfect space to honor 21 years of independent business, hammertown happiness i call it. the farming workshop was real. it fed me from within. i was especially interested in listening to kaya talk about killing her livestock by herself. i always wanted to know that i could do that and listening to her reminded me of that. i ate a local steak the other night. it was red and good. it fed me from without. i haven't eaten meat in a long while. the new song is whole and belongs to columbia, our commuting route 70 and this small east coast town. i've been remembering my hunger for the plains lately. laura's been really keeping the ship sailing lately, with logistics of the move and the shows and so much that is worldly and necessary to reach you. tony's been making sure the web site is always new. gregg has been such a friend, an good loving host. we're planning to kidnap him and show him our love, missouri. i have a feeling he'll fly there and show me how. meanwhile, i reach for light in this moment, at the mountain cow cafe in pine plains new york. i'm wearing the yellow rag dress that baba's mama made me. it's almost time to retire the summer dress for the colder fabrics of fall. my black pants have been useful lately since my jeans ripped down the leg beyond repair. funny when i think that i bought these pants i'm wearing now so that i would look good for a record label meeting. that was back in the day when i was still trying to please the machine makers. HALLELUJAH, i lost my job. i've changed so much, i think i would be entirely unrecognizable to the vampires now. fam jim perry from new hampshire died suddenly this month. so strange to think of time's vulnerability to eternity. he was just here! we were just talking about how we'd sing the sun in to being and now he's completely gone to my world. i love it. it keeps me on my toes. i know he went where the buffalos will always roam and if i stay steady, preparing for my return, this spiraling journey through the now, maybe the Source will take me HOME too. I'll greet mama and all my goodness when i arrive. missing her is harsh lately as i close in on her birthday and spreading her ashes back to earth. "why should i see god better than this day? i see something of god each hour of the twenty four, and each moment then, in the faces of men and women, and in my own face in the glass; i find letters from god dropped in the street, and every one is signed by god's name. And i leave them where they are, for i know that others will punctually come forever and ever."-Whitman. i plan to prepare my soul daily and rise according to the rights of passage, there where i enter the trail to the planetary divide. i'll do it from the stage and sea, you and me, sept 1st in boston, sept 3rd in pine plains, sept 11th in new york city. come be with me and i promise to be true. howling to you from the holy road, X=h/m Lizzie

another week now. we've got just a while left here in this pine plains residency. mama's doing her thing, moving all things into constant bieng. i've been inside my notes on research with colored pens and glue. renewed vows for the new years declerations of celebration and discipline. plan to start now. abbey's gregg's golden retriever. she's sleeping on the floor by the early fall fire. gregg's sitting with music a while. baba's reading lust for life in the room next door, the dharma's beside him, breathing heavy and restful, like a dharma does, i love this living. the howl-o-weeen ball found its home today. Laura's been driving around the country side in Faith (the spitfire convertable) passing out fliers and hanging up posters around the hudson valley. come october 28th, we'll all dress up like pilgrims kidnapped by indians and like it. i'll go meet the boys in bed now, read my copy of the john irving paperback. gregg's coming with us to boston, he'll sit in and we'll all start the new book of today. tomorrow's the first real holy road tours workshop, "living local in america". i'm so looking forward to the learning. howling to you from the holy road, L X=h/m

the holy howl. five days without word. that's the howling taking all my body, mind and soul. closing on 214 tomorrow. that's the biggest news since birth, in ways. i'll return with the wind when the sun's gone down. too much growing growing on to tell stories now. only in retrosepect will it make sense, but i'll say this....the fast brought me Home. i am whole again. i remembered what it means to pray and that i need to be taught too. "after all the tea and cakes and ices, shall i have the strength to bring the moment to its crisis, for though i have wept and fasted and wept and prayed and though i have seen my head brought in upon a platter, i am no prophet and here is no great matter. for i have seen the eternal footman carry my coat and snicker and in short, i was afraid."(T.S. Elliot) - Howling to you from the holy road, X=h/m, Lizzie

Waking up felt impossible this morning. My body had sunk into the bed and the night had attatched itself to me. After the fruit juice Tony brought me in bed, I started to come to. Then the excavating began. All day was an inch toward memory, toward the new life. I went through waves of clinging and release. I swam and loosened the pain between my shoulder blades, stretching slowly. I think that's where my wings are growing in, where the pain is. I sat with the sun from its first sign of setting until the new night star had appeared. I wrote and remembered how to pray again. How to be in total surrender and say help and I do not know.... Breath in, thank you....breath out, for give me. Howling to you from the holy road, X=h/m, L

The third day of the fast. My whole body feels lifted. The hunger is gone. I don't feel the need to eat. The juices are so full of life. When I drink them they go straight to my heart, my blood, my brain, my memory, and I feel all emotions being transformed. It seems like faith in a glass. My fear cells are diluted and then flower into grace. Tony looks lifted, Laura and Gregg too. I practice the chanting, "god is breathing in me, i am breathing in god," and I question the time to bring me closer. It is now. i just want to be closer to The Great Author, let it be known that I am a humble and ready collaborator, on my knees I pray to thee...The Moon is so huge tonight, bigger than I've ever seen it. White as white can be. We're at The Hammertown House waiting for Gregg to finish showering. We're gonna take a night walk through the corn fields and howl our intentions. I'm in the holy old jeans and my I Pledge Allegiance To Myself sweatshirt, sitting next to the buffalo in bed. He's typing. I'm typing. The wireless connection is everywhere here. We're both reaching for light. Figaro's being his dharma self on the end of the bed and in a few moments from now it will be now again. I'll sit up and say, "ready baba?" Fig's ears will stand up all pointy and curious, his eyes will look at me with hope and devout love. Somewhere in his dharma Self he knows I'd never do a night walk without him, but still, he has to ask....Howling to you from the holy road, Lizzie X=h/m.

Started the fast yesterday. Juice and nothing but juice for seven days and seven nights. Greg, our host and long time friend of mine, says I should write about it, he says that we should all write about it. So, Tony started his story..."dear mom" he writes... god, how I'd love to write this story as a letter to my mama but she's gone now and so she wouldn't be able to leave comments like Tony's mom does...The moon's almost full tonight and music is a consistant part of the sunsets here. I want to lose my addictions to coffee and food and all things that keep me from surrender. I want to be more myself than I've ever been. Creating my reality in the fascinating moon, sinking orange into everything and focusing. Wanting to see the puzzle for what it is...But there's no guidance save the face my heart wears, the one I have to search for like a fumbling kid. I'm hungry without hunger and satisfied without food. The long lawn into the Cattail field and the Sunflower field tell me that this is a whole 'nother lifetime again, a new chapter in a book i'm writing, reading and a walking in, all at once, just right now. I have won when I remember that, that I can't win the Great wrestling match with god. I surrender at the mercy of goodness and magic everywhere. god is everywhere, go there."we must eat first of all, to believe in what makes us eat, that something makes us eat, to believe that whatever haunts us in the mysterious depths of ourselves need not haunt us as a soley digestive concern. what I mean is, if it is important for us to eat, it's even more important for us not to waste in the sole concern for eating." -Artaud / howling to you from the holy road, X=h/m....Lizzie

We've been doing the holy road scramble. Keeping H over M and all together happy. the wind shift took us to a blessed 60 acres of Roundfarm, old friends and new fam everywhere... thank you mama. the show in NYC last Wed was one of my favorites.... I'll send out some live downloads to fam who've signed up for those kinds of things. I'll say more here when i can but right now i'm catching my breath from that dance i did, the holy road scramble and the Force that caught us, helped us land on our feet again, for yet another chance at this graceful walk Home. last night we ate a great meal 'round a long table of strangers who quickly became fam, enjoyed the heat and sweat with a group of beautiful young farmers, since it meant we were alive after...earlier that evening we had come six inches from losing our lives in a car wreck...on our way to watching the collective play soccer and sing songs on the sidelines, . THANK YOU MAMA -howling to you from the holy road X=h/m, L

It turned out that traffic hit and the human hours tied me up into the what will be, ripping me out of the now and keeping me from seeing tony's show. i was so mad that my head turned and split in two. i lost the ground i'd found, ended up wishing i'd left two hours early, which is always the holy road rule of travel...when something important lies ahead....
that was my birthday day, being Born again, back into the now....which is Not fun but still a gift. the weekend was spent celebrating the new life, with constant thanks for baba, the dharma, the manifestor, the long coutry road, the books, the sleeping, the waking, the howling, the big open lake, the breathing, the reaching for light and the Now Clock that ticks in my time. tomorrow's show will tell the whole story. the little boxes exposed, my fight for the right to be in the now, our journey back to new york, our road heading to new hampshire and the healings to come...from the holy road with love and howling - L, X=h/m

Today is my birthday, Every day is my birthday on the holy road and every minute my funeral and all things are always in the process of being born and dying. Something special happened though, 33 years ago (in human calculation) when my body entered this earth by way of The Great Mother Canal. At New York Hospital, on July 21st, 1973, I arrived. They used to say I was born singing/born laughing but it's not true....I was born quiet and silently screaming for my return to the eternal cradle. Memory believes before knowing remembers. My skin was yellow and they lost both our heartbeats....My mother clung to me, all sweaty and strong, once it was clear that we had both survived and we would travel this lifetime together, helping each other find the Way Home. I'll write more later...howling to you, X=h/m. Lizzie

I'm reading "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn", just started it on Thursday and I'm half way through. It's so good to read like that again, just hours of being with a book, traveling back to New York in the early 1900s.
We had a weekend of rest, the Buffalo, myself....the Dharma Dog and Spartacus joined for air conditioning couch rest too. Didn't turn the news on, not once, knowing that it would scare us if we did, feeling like the start of World War III.... Instead, we slept, played guitars and howled in the afternoon, walked through the crowded soho weekend streets in the humidity, heading to dinner with Kermit and Azi at 14th street. No time for podcasting or the work of the holy road now, not until August 1st, when we're back from break and in the flow again.
"Have you heard it is good to gain the day, I also say it is good to fall. Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won." -WW...We're carving a path for ourselves now, we who don't want to worship money god anymore, clearing the brush of consumption and ownership obsession, finding a passageway Home. "Summer in the city can cause that rip to tear." Tony went back to a week of teaching for NDI until Friday. Laura and I are here on Prince street, planting holy trees that will bare such colorful caring fruit in the Fall. Howling to you from the holy road, Lizzie X=h/m

Watching the news is always a paralysis. the wars breaking out all over the world, fundamentalism of every kind, religious and corporate. i want to crawl into the consumer sleep and be safe there like everyone else, inside the drama box, the tv. the only thing that draws me out is steady breathing, knowing tony's coming for the weekend...we'll talk and read and rest here, in love and leaves of grass, "it is not chaos or death, it is form and union and plan, it is eternal life, it is happiness." I miss the city in the middle but know the now. -howling to you from the holy road, Lizzie X=h/m

It's evening now and I find the storming new york almost lovable again, almost peaceful and almost sincere. sitting under the cafe canopy on prince street, writing about the midwestern tumbleweed. the lovers from denmark say i still hold the city in my heart, they can tell, they say, by the way i direct them to the williamsburg galleries and the central park boat yard and the natural history museum. howling to you, L ... X=h.m

The city is packed with people moving in and out of train cars. hot, busy, overwhelming, lots of homeless people
carrying bags of cans or doing nothing but be hungry. cellphones everywhere, inescapable sounds of ring tones and honking. i don't know how folks find serenity in the constant suck of this city. it's beyond gravity, what pulls people to volunteer for the drain every day. it's social distortion indeed , i grew up in this and have spent my life trying to leave. i've seen both the coasts and i know they harbor the disease worse than anyone. fear and money worship are the natural causes from which we die every day. places where people are caught with their heads in the tiger's mouth, time is the tiger and they're addicted to their own hanging skin. the thrill is enough to make them trade their whole life for that feeling but not me, no way. i'm planning my escape route from the egg roll and next time i come back, i'll call the seaguls from the east river to host a breakfast of thieves. with one breath after breakfast, i'll invite you to join me in travel through the tunnel we carved for the evolution. howling to you from the holy road, Lizzie X=h/m "every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you."

The first night back in New York is always the hardest. I hear my mother's voice, not as an eternal cradle song but as a memory with actual tone and emotion. I see her playing Chopin on the grand piano or calling me to the living room to sit and as she would say... "tell me everything, everything!" If only I could, I would...oh how I'd ramble on...all about Columbia, The House on St.Joseph Street, all the angels flying in and out of my court, about the beautiful buffalo and the rising, and laura's being deeper than all the oceans deep, the saturday hospital healing from Paula and Ken, some of the infinite family found... but I can't tell her, not in words anyway. it makes me feel better when the buffalo says, "she already knows everything, she's 'conducting the orchestra, lizzie', (quoting "louise"). The Dharma sees me on my knees. he barks the same wisdom that the buffalo shares. I'm sure they're right... but I miss her bountiful hug, her excited eyes opening wide with my stories, her feeding crackers to fig while we walk and talk, her physical being was such a wonder. Since I can't sit beside her, I've decided, this morning, to come and sit beside you. Is it alright if I tell you everything....the holy road is neither good or bad but always winding, I'm heading Home, chanting this with every step.... If you don't create your reality, your reality will create you...Howling to you from the holy road, your friend in life and song, Lizzie ( X=h/m)
www.http//lizziewestlife.com