Location, Location, Location

Many thanks to all of you who have adventurously walked under the red awning and stepped across the threshold into The Safety Pin Cafe. In a few short weeks more than 1,000 visitors, and nearly 200 readers have sampled the medicine story of Pale the Border Witch. The cafe located in a town so familiar, yet without an address, might be found in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places? The story of wandering between what passes as reality in the everyday and what could be just as real in the borders has a gift for any of us who has been faceless, homeless, or otherwise without. Tucked in the folds of a cozy yet mythic story of 6,000 words layers of common magic has been planted in the community imagination. The wave that is Drewslist: what a place! Most of the visitors and readers discovered The Safety Pin Cafe because of the ongoing enticements I've posted on Drew Kampion's email list.

Many thanks also to Annie Horton Zeller and Gwen Samelson from WhidbeyAIR for creating the space to share The Safety Pin Cafe and the Hawaiian traditional practice Makua O'o. The air waves, and the comfortable recording studio of WhidbeyAIR in Coopeville is a perfect location for spreading a medicine story. Mahalo nui loa a pau. LISTEN to that program here.

Simple and sometimes silly, the journey between here and there can dwither (I made that up) a person who is set in the way things ought to be. Mythic arts editor, author and blogger Terri Windling has long been a source of courage and inspiration to me. On her blog Myth and Moor Windling wrote this about "Foolishness" 

"While our intellect chases its bright and lofty visions, our  most original, powerful ideas tend to rise from muddy, murky depths below: from the clouded waters of the subconscious; from the baffling landscape of nightmare and dream; from the odd obssessions, weird fixations, and uncanny flashes of intuition that rise up from those strange parts of ourselves that we know and approve of least; from those places most likely to make us feel ridiculous, and exposed. The muse, if we follow her far enough, and honestly enough, demands that we bare it all: our angel wings and our asses' ears. It doesn't matter if we're writing genre fiction and not memoir; it doesn't matter if we're painting fairy tales and not self-portraits. "All art is autobiographical," said Federico Fellini; "the pearl is the oyster's autobiography."

You gotta serve somebody!

"Although the skills aren't hard to learn, finding the happiness and finding the satisfaction and finding fulfillment in continuously serving somebody else something good to eat, is what makes a really good restaurant."

Mario Batali 

Earlier this week I had a chance to meet and get to know Annie Zeller Horton, Co-host of  WhidbeyAIR's all internet public radio's "Isle of Arts". Annie has been reading and tasting the samples from The Safety Pin Cafe via Drewslist. I got an e-mail from her a week ago,"You have me tantalized and made me eager to learn more about The Safety Pin Cafe," she wrote. The menu and the method for serving up the story, the characters and the setting for this imaginary place has been an adventure. I was thrilled to know someone I didn't know (yet) was tantalized. 

The entrance into ... the poetry of language ... the bones of The Safety Pin Cafe

" When your soul awakens, you begin to truly inherit your life. You leave the kingdom of fake surfaces, repetitive talk and weary roles and slip deeper into the true adventure of who you are and who you are called to become. The greatest friend of the soul is the unknown. Yet we are afraid of the unknown because it lies outside our vision and our control. We avoid it or quell it by filtering it through our protective barriers of domestication and control. The normal way never leads home." - John Donohue

For a month now, The Safety Pin Cafe has surfed the cyber waves, catching the reader's eye, perhaps, tantalized your imagination. It tickles me to know that the scents of The Safety Pin Cafe interest you, for I see that more than 100 readers have sampled the story that began in the winter. My ancestors were skilled and powerful water-folk, surfers and voyagers on the wa'a kaulua (canoe) the ride from here to there depended upon a willingness to adapt to the wave, to the water.

 If you have read the medicine story and came to the concluding chapter you might recognize the Granny Smith Apple ... the choice of apples for a pie served around a table upstairs, above the cozy cafe that serves no coffee, but offers instead steamed milk and cinnamon toast. The photos above were taken years ago (before the story of a border witch strung itself), yet it is that apple and that pan which will be the cover to the book. Left unattended the photos rested in the archives and now they have been uncovered ... they have a job to do, a joy to encourage, a story to enliven.

How patient am I to learn the skills of self-publication? Not always very patient, but I persist, teaching myself how to use new software I press on the brain cells and hope for bridges to make sense of LibreOffice Writer.  I thought the pages of the chapbook would be ready by now, 'aue ... alas, no, not yet. Still paddling! Writing this post is a break from that new territory which I wade through like eating a tasty bit of fish filled with bones. Ono (delicious) with some risks.