10 of 10

I have two tool boxes.
One I use to fix airplanes
And the other?
I fill with colors and all of the tools
I need to explain how I see the world.
I keep painter’s tape in both.
Not that I have ever tried to tape an airplane together
Or even that I use it so often in art.
Rather, it is a reminder that these two worlds
Are not so far apart. 

Artists need tools and precision.
They work in this same world after all,
With its limits, tangibility, and laws.
Mechanics need imagination and creativity and longing too.
Who else made the impossibility of flight possible?
It was not for a love of law,
Though maybe for love.

Or maybe just to tell gravity
That it was not the only authority we may appeal to,
That the ground does not own us,
And that we will decide how far is far enough.
So I keep painter’s tape
To remind me to always question
If the limits that are set
Are the limits that have to be.

Do they serve a purpose?
Can I color outside of those lines?

Painter’s tape is such a brilliant blue
That I cannot look at it
Without wondering if I too may try
To sail straight through the sky into the sun
In a last glance with only smoke
And wax tears to show behind me.
Perhaps not,
But only if I find my bearings.
Fly over the prison wall,
But stop at the sun.


My two worlds are held together by this blue
This brilliant, unmistakable blue.
And each gives the other context,
A strong foundation to build on
And a little something to look forward too,
If only in my mind's eye.

9 of 10

I learned how to build home on the topography of my father’s emotions between wandering the woods and chocolate chip cookie making. He was a man still working through the rubble of his own upbringing and so he brought me up in the crowded space between his own tears. I learned to read him the way sailor’s read the stars, the clouds, and the sea. I learned to sail him like he was the only ocean I could ever love. I tried to learn the words that could bring us both home.

He taught me everything I know about emotions and feeling. “Don’t bottle them up and stuff them in.” he’d say, “They’ll always find you because they are not the sort of things that fade unless you face them.” So while he told me not to keep them in, I resolved to be better than that. I chose, instead, to keep them always out.

It took years for me to figure out  that short cuts are just longer ways to the same place for those who want to put off confrontation until it hits you from behind, knocks the wind out of you, and demands your silent attention. It may be the shortest distance between two places; but there are no places or paths for lessons like love, forgiveness, and getting over yourself. Those are long roads you have to walk yourself. Do not skip a step or you may miss it altogether.

It took me even longer to realize that sometimes the act of sorrow is all you have to give. There are no wrong ways to feel, just wrong ways to cope with the feeling. Still I forget and so I say again, there are no wrong ways to feel.

I have now been brought up as far as anyone else can bring me. I do not always feel the things I know. And I do not always understand the things I feel. And yet, the longer I spend trying to feel truth and questioning the why’s and the how’s of feeling, the more I stand by that statement. There are no wrong ways to feel... but my emotions are often malnourished, ignorant, and a little disconnected.

The struggle is to bring all of me into agreement. The struggle is to learn my own coastlines, correct my compass, and learn to sail a new sea. The struggle is to connect and educate all of my emotions in the hope that the daughter I do not yet know if I will have will never have to try so hard to ride my waves, weather my storms, and bring me home.

8 of 10 "Rooms"

The kitchen and the bathroom are my two favorite rooms. 

If I could only have a house of two rooms, 

those would be them. 

The kitchen for loving. 

And the shower for forgiving. 

The kitchen to remember, 

the bathroom to forget. 

Bedrooms are dangerous if you leave your dreaming 

always and only for night. 

They just might swallow your ambition.

Hallways are passages just long enough to get lost in. 

Stairs are easy enough 

to push or be pushed down 

in the rush for fulfillment, success, 

and getting what’s yours to be had. 

But kitchens, 

they are for giving, for sharing. 

And the shower is that requisite don’t-forget-to-breathe 

and permission to be. 

Kitchens are for the mess of life 

with all of the wonder which that should bring. 

Showers are for getting clean, 

for letting go, and for moving on; 

because, when you are done, all you have left is you.

So take a bottle of soap.

Cry as mush as you like while you scrub.

No one else will be bothering you for awhile.

It is the bathroom after all.

Send all of the bad days down the drain

into that mysterious plumbing.

Living rooms are deceitful.

They would have you think that life

is only what you have when you are not working.

But living does not happen only in those particular four walls,

I would hope.

Dining rooms are liars as well.

They make you think family

is who sits around your table

and hospitality is what happens

at a quarter to 7:00.

Keep the sharp things in your kitchen,

knives, scissors, cheese graters and other divisive objects

which require discretion.

And keep the soft things always nearby:

towels, tissues, and a clean set of clothes.

If I could have a house of only two rooms,

these would be them.

A kitchen for loving,

a bathroom for forgiving.

Not just for loving and forgiving others,

but also to forgive and love yourself.

7 of 10

I am trying to find my voice.
Have you seen it?
Can you tell me if I am doing this right?
Are these the words I am supposed to use
And the motions I am supposed to wear?

Maybe, I am going about this wrong.

Could it be that there is more to take off,

Armor to shed and anxiety to let go of,

And less to put on,

Bind up and show off?

6 of 10

Stereotypes
have always made me uncomfortable
like a diagnosis I never asked for
because I did not find myself
ill or impaired.

Stereotypes have always made me itchy
--and there is a stereotype for that--
written like a prescription from a shady doctor
with a wink and a smirk.
It's meant as a kindness,
a sort of 'get out of jail free' card
to hand to whomever may try to expect something
which my stereot-um-pardon, condition may not permit.

But all I hear is limitation spoken forcefully,
but not unquestionably
like the voice of the Wizard of Oz
after the curtain has been pulled back,
"This is who you shall be and no one else!"

Oh really?

5 of 10 *Note: I did not know who this metaphor was for or where it would be used, until today.

The bottles clatter outside in the trash can.
I know you are home and what you are doing
Before I ever see your face.
I feel the plates of our world buckle and bend.
I hear the rumbling of tectonics,
The shifting of the way things are.
When you finally stumble in, fall up the stairs,
Everything I already know is confirmed.

And I smile like nothing is different
Because, in a way, nothing really is.
You must feel like a Greek god
When you move the Richter scale.
At least, that is what I figure.
I know, much more than you realize,
How hard a man has to fight for control
And what it feels like to have the world against you.

But that will never make you right.
You are sorry every single time
And that helps.
That helps until the next.
There always is a next time.
More bottles. More words. More shame.
Yet, it only takes one good night's sleep
In the arms of forgiveness to forget.

I should probably thank you though;
But I think that you would assume
That I was making fun of you.
I mean it though.
Your earthquakes have taught me
So many things like what disaster really is,
How to pray, where exactly I stand,
And the deceitfulness of ideas like security.

It has taken years of growing up,
But I have finally learned
How to be more than a survivor.
That, also, is something I am thankful for.
Getting by was never enough for living.
However, I am not fool enough to thank you.
You, sir, cannot take all the credit.
May I remind you, that things do not have to be this way?

Things do not have to be the way they are.
God forgive me, then remind me,
If I ever, ever let go of that.
And the way they are is wrong.
This constant shifting but never changing
Will not be forever.
You may be the Greek god of plate-tectonics
But no one worships the pantheon anymore.

4 of 10 [a little late in coming]

5:00am
My alarm awakes before me
--as is its habit.
It has no tact
Just that constant war cry,
Like an ambulance or squad car
All lit up with lungs yelling for a race
Or chase.

But the blankets...
They wrap around my limbs
Like stolen goods;
And sleep comes like a thief.
I am just a bystander
yet the alarm holds me
Always in the searchlight.

Hands in the air!
Reaching for the sky
--and my towel.
Apparently, I have aided and abetted
A criminal.
That...and I assaulted an officer of the law
As I hit snooze and, eventually,
OFF.

Now I am to be escorted
Downtown.
I stumble down the stairs as though drunk.
Breath tested for alcohol.
None found.
(But I should brush my teeth anyway.)
That will wait. No time.

I am hurried into a small room
With a bright light
And a loud fan
And told to strip.
A splash of warm water in my face
And a set of clean clothes later...

And I am a responsible citizen again:
Ready to contribute to society.

3 of 10

Tell me the secrets
That led to your falling.
Whisper the words
That first captured your heart .

Did they make you feel weightless?
Important?
Or Free?

Oh, Love, please tell me
What spell was spoken,
Which promise pronounced,
That ever could have made you leave?

Words are deceivers
--No, worse!
Words are mercenaries.

Love, have you not seen,
Words march for truth and guile alike
Without one helpful glance
To give you a clue?

Tell me the secrets.
Whisper the words.
Speak them aloud.

Hold them firmly besides truth.
See if they shrink and fold
Or grow bolder.
See if the fall was worth it.

2 of 10 (yet unedited. forgive the haste.)

I have always loved the stars.
When I was not yet 3 times
around our star, the sun,
my parents packed up the car
and the kid.
We drove from south to north,
sleeping under the stars in sleeping bags,
tarps and, occasionally, the Honda.
And I, not yet 3,
could not imagine a more beautiful ceiling
or a more comfortable bedroom.
I was already in love,
already lovesick,
already hopelessly in over my head.
I have never really recovered from that.
Perhaps, I gave too much too fast
to my first love.
Years bring growth and tears
or else growth brings tears and years.
I have never really figured it out.
I still love roads, and traveling,
And always the stars.
Some years since,
many more travels around our star,
I have lost much love,
Loved and lost,
and found yet more love.
But I have never lost the stars.

1 of 10

If I had a super power,
I think it would be something obscure
Like metaphor.

That is how I conquer my days anyway
--if you can call it conquering.

The secret is to never
EVER
look life in the eyes
but never look away.

Always call it by name
as if you know it
and all of its tricks.

I have made up so many names
for the faces life has made at me
but they keep working.

Names,
they soften the edges.

Metaphors,
they sound like names.

The tricks I play
as I spin the only language I know
are the only defense I have,
the only barrier between me and powerlessness.

Brain: In Pictures. [Translation Accompanied]

I have exploded.

This morning, this afternoon, my brain has finally erupted, unclenched, and given me hell.

I, I am trying to pack. 

I am more than a little excited to go home for a spell, even if it will be a cold one.

But my brain, my poor brain. It wants to leave nothing unfinished. I had to give the old man a face lift...

He's not done yet . I need to teach him to smile with old man mischief.
Oh, and eyelashes would be a kindness.

And I had to go through my class notes and keep what I liked...

oh, composites class

Then I had to take pictures of the remaining art that I have been ignoring...

edge of the world

and projects that have [temporarily] failed:

And food art...can't leave that out.

So there you go. Eventually, I plan to assemble poetry and stories which have hitherto been under wraps and stuffed into whatever void is willing to hold them and hide them from my restless mind. As it is, I am due to be on a train in 3 hours and have a bit of progress to make between now and then.

Transitions. Life. Moving. Change.

I think I will leave those words on the virtual page for at least a day. Treat them as if they have ink that needs to soak in and dry on the page. There's been so much of all of that happening all around. It is a whole season in and of itself.

I want to write a poem with a central metaphor of plate-tectonics, another about painter's tape making my worlds make sense, one about my alarm sounding like a siren (which is actually just about done), one about limitations, and a few other's about nothing in particular. It is quite possible that a few of these may bleed over into each other. For that, I am excited. Until then: letting the words above dry. And yet, by the time you, invisible reader, find them... these words may be well past dry and much more towards stale.

This is what I am listening to today between one responsibility and another. It's all very interesting and only vaguely pertains to my ever continuing pursuit of trying to figure out what it means to be wholly human and live the life that a healthy functioning human being should. She has a tattoo which I have thought about getting ...or something similar to it; go figure. I like her talk though, especially the last few minutes.

Meanwhile, I have been hiding in coffee shops trying to study enough, leaving my computer at home. It is not my norm. I like to work from home when I am stressed. I like to come home to that safe place, shut out the world, and dig in my heels until I can push past and through whatever challenge is looming. Lately, however, my focus has waned. I am not trustworthy. I cannot stay home because I will cook, clean, talk to people, make art and all manner of other good rebellions will find me. Even now, as I type when I should be reviewing, I realize I am quite possibly misusing my time. My normal default of bookstores will not do either. I am sure I will be found in the arms of a book which has not the slightest thing to do with mechanics or airplanes.

And so the coffee shops find me awkwardly trying to recall what it is to order drinks that are always only three sizes but which are never called the same name. (I don't know if it's a tall, just give me 16 oz. of something hot...please.) Then there's the awkward turn around as I fumble to find a seat that is culturally acceptable (Portland is a city of misanthropic, space conscious people attempting to look intellectual... at a distance). I am incredibly out of practice.

I found myself, on one occasion, in a coffee shop that I had only been in one other time and that time belonging to a different life. It was sometime in my first few weeks of moving to Portland, to college, to this new life that I have made and grown so used to. I was sobbing. My RA was asking me about myself, trying to get to know me and finding herself ...in over her head. Even then, I could discern that she was in no way prepared for my tears or for the wounds which I then carried with me everywhere.

It was strange, is strange, to me to stumble upon such an isolated memory and to know that who I was then... is gone. And yet, I am still her. If anything, I am more her than I was then. I am who I was then only yet becoming. In the months and years that have filled the space (only 2 years...and yet a whole 2 years!), very little of my externals have changed. I am doing what I said I would be doing. The things that made me ache, bleed, and ... sob are still very much a part of my life, without much change in shape. When I am honest, they can still bring tears; but they are not the same tears I poured out in that coffee shop. I do not know if I am capable of explaining the difference.

Most simply, I am not who I was. I am more myself and less my weakness. Perhaps it is in the gradual separation of pain and identity. It is easy to take a wound and make it your name because it is all that you can see and feel. It is much more difficult to hold pain in an open hand...to let it hurt and make you cry until it heals and dissipates. The latter takes a good deal more practice, band aids, and time.

creativity lapse and misanthropy.

Today, I've fallen between the cracks.
Today, I don't exist.
Today, I...


All I want is to believe that. I want to pack a bag of things I need to do and head to a book store, any book store with seating actually. But I doubt I would get anything done. So many unread voices sit on the shelves and I want to open each one and sit awhile. Mostly, I feel empty and want to fill myself up with the thoughts and ideas and longings of people I will never meet. I want to wade through their minds and keep what treasures I may find until I have enough materials to build.

Mostly, I do not want to do my homework or chores or, well, life as usual. I want to crawl between those cracks until time and deadlines and responsibility are words without meaning, dictators without power.

I promised myself that I would do some kind of art today, but I do not think I am able. The weight of work undone is yet too heavy, too distracting, too much. Even writing, I seem to write the same thing I have written before. Well, here it is, for better or worse:

-
Approach her gently.
Don’t make too many plans.
Don’t rely on your words for persuasion.
Make it a series of lovely actions.
Lovely to her, at least.
If you need help knowing,
If you cannot quite see
What her mind’s eye
And, indeed, her heart
Would call lovely...
Just ask.
That would be a lovely place to start.

I do not have to grow up
And I know it.
But I cannot keep the world young.

That, I realize, is what I really want.
It is a tragic case of miscommunication
Between cause and effect.

Digging in my heels will only make me
Terribly alone
--and covered in dirt.

Life is not ever one single thing,
That's just how our memory records it,
Editted and glamorized.

Instead, it is the quiet pounding
Of a thousand hearts
Headed hopefully home.

And every one of those hearts
Spins ever onward
At full tilt with our globe

As we race ever and always
Around the only star
That gets to rule and reign time itself.

We can stop all of the clocks
And break all of the alarms
But the world will never stay young.

Brilliant Archimedes wrote,
"Give me a place to stand,
And I will move the Earth."

But that is not the problem, is it?
Try to hold this Earth
Stationary.

Try to keep her still.
Yes, unwind all of the watches
And let us together lose track of time.

But neither you nor I can stop it.
And we will never be free
So long as we spin.

So shake the Earth from orbit,
If you can find a place
To stand so far away from home.

Or better yet,
Let us sail
Straight into the sun.

Let us make it explode
With all of the star light and wonder
Held in our own aging eyes.

There, in the dark of newly emptied space,
We will finally be free of time and change;
But we will also be left with no where to go.

uneditted: for the love of trees.

I do not know why photography is so difficult for me these days; but it does not flow naturally. It is a struggle to continue to see and to make what I see visible to those who look at the it from the other side of my camera. It was not always this hard; and I have a litany of half reasons trying to justify it. But at the end of the day, all I have to offer is that my mind's eye is blind being so full of ideas for the other things I want to do. 

Two separate window projects.

A sketch for a friend.

Experiments in painting or pastel-ing stars.

A whole world that I am trying to get out of my head and onto paper.

And this faint desire to pull several of these ideas together for a kid's book which I am having a hard time believing that I can do...not that that is relevant. (I am getting better at just doing something because I want to and not because I think I can. Sometimes belief arrives a bit late.)

As I write this, I have received another text from a friend in California who has a project for me.

And photography keeps sitting in the corner, looking abandoned. Over and again, I keep getting asked to do photography, but I do not know if I am artistically capable. It is not the direction my mind's eye is turned. The mind's eye is a really fickle thing. At least, this is true for me. It follows passion quite closely.

And so, if one wants me to do a certain project for them, to make this or that, one has to make me fall in love with the ideas supporting it and leading it. It is interesting to me how much love has to do with which projects get done. It is an appropriate metaphor in so many ways. If I do not get to work when I first fall in love with something, it can be difficult to remember what it was I first loved. I need to feed the infatuation until it can become a love that has the weight of time and testing attached to it.

I do not know what this means for me and photography. Perhaps we are taking a break. Perhaps, I just need to make the time to fall in love again.

control and oblivion

As of November 1st, I started keeping a journal of pain. I do not know what else to call it. The journal is not for emotional pain or psychological pain. Just physical pain (unless I have reason to believe that they are tied together). It has started to worry me how many of my hours and even days I give away to pain but I hardly keep track.

I am so busy running to the next day hoping to feel ok then, to feel like a functioning individual, to feel human and then trying my hardest to dwell there for as long as possible and forget the grinding of gears, the shorting of circuitry, and the complaining of parts desperately in need of maintenance that I do not know how to give...that I am quite certain that I am missing something.

This is my attempt to take a step back. To live less in survival. To stop swinging from 'things will never get better' to 'I hope this never leaves'. Because things will get better and then the better will leave and life will keep on living.

I need to be careful, though, not to fixate on my pain as I write it down. I need to not make any goals as I study myself. Because I cannot tap into another source of stress. This is more about honesty and remembering things which I have hitherto tried my best to forget because I do not want to have the answers available for myself much less for the people around me. I do not want to feel broken and I do not want anyone else to know that I am. But I do. And I am sure that they do.

And I guess in some way this is my attempt at reclaiming my life. Maybe a journal is progress... and maybe it is just there to make me feel like things are moving forwardly... like I am allowed to move forward... like I am not choosing blindness as I move on. I cannot be bound much longer to the constant stopping and starting of life; and I cannot keep making my life about how well my body is cooperating with my intentions. At some point, I have to stop caring about all of that and get to living.

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." ~Oscar Wilde

So I will let the paper do the caring, let my ink pay attention; but as for my life... it will not be found mapped out on paper and it will not be confined to the days when I feel like it. I have already allowed too much of pain to dictate who I will be on a given day. It is so easy to do.

My pain journal, in a way, is a confession and hopefully my repentance. If I am honest enough about the pain, if I let it in, if I stop ignoring it... I think it will not fight so hard to be heard. In a way, by giving it a voice, I hope to free up more life for actually living. And that really is all I can ask for at the end of the day: I want to be allowed to live. Everything else after that is peripheral. Descriptors and clauses. Commentary and opinion.

under siege

Do you ever have thoughts attack you, waylay you, nearly asphyxiate you with their constant proximity and weight? James 2. That's the one that finds me.


When I travel downtown.


Or to the grocery store.


On the way to school.


In city parks.


If I happen to catch a glimpse of the news.


When I see old photos, tell certain stories, or hold memories above the chasm of forgetfulness.


Words I innocently memorized in middle school to appease a teacher who never could have imagined how I would be tormented for what is turning into the rest of my life come back in torrents to flood a mind that is struggling to be made up.


What good is faith that has no deeds?
And again: If you say "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?


How is one supposed to function with words with weight like that pounding, throbbing... burning inside?


It does not matter how I choose to cope with whatever rhythm that pounding creates because the bottom line remains: I am not doing enough. My well-intended words exit my mouth only for those same phrases that always find me to take up residency in the space left over. What good is it...when you do nothing? 


It does not matter that I do not know what to do because those are hollow excuses and I have been burning with the weight of this challenge long enough now. Long enough to feel the urgency and long enough to be friends with despair as she echoes you aren't big enough and there is no way for you to be big enough.


I feel with sudden but thorough certainty the edges of the rabbit hole I stand above. There is a whole world down there; and, if I let myself fall, I may never come back. I will never be who I am right now and my eyes will never be able to see the world the way they do right now. And it is not a fear of being too small and too weak to handle the change (I am both of those for sure), but the knowledge that the way is shut once I enter. 


Did Alice ever really leave Wonderland entirely behind? Or did she take it with her everyday just behind her eyes like a filter or perhaps a buffer that used to exist between her and the world until everything changed?


It is knowing that I have absolutely no control who this will make me if I keep following my white rabbit. But the change is sure to be real, permanent, and terrifying. Oh yes, and I think good. But it is not the only rabbit hole I could choose to fall down. How do I know *THIS* is the one I want? Do I even get that choice? If I don't like it, can I choose another? All of that to say: how much do I give myself to homeless ministry? 


I already know the answers to all of those questions. Respectively: because it's bigger than me. Yes, but no: I already chose a long time ago. Yes and no again: it wont leave me the same even if I leave it. As much as I am allowed for as long as the season stays.


Somehow, these do not bring the comfort that we always expect of answers we do not yet have.

in an effort to distract myself, i bring you: the past.

She stands there like sad poetry gracing pastel pages,
ill-fitted but never wrong.

If you look at her side-ways,
her smile could be a frown.

Doorway open.
Sun streaking perfect, amber light.
Imperfect flies buzz at screened-in windows
as if to make you aware,
there are still worlds out there;
and they know nothing of her sad laughing eyes
and her big, sarcastic lips.

She is less sure than you
that there are differences
between your world and hers.

Some would say
to let the poetry be.
What is ethereal cannot
be understood.

Some would say.

Some always
always
have to say

something.

But as the sun wraps layers of warmth
around your shoulders,
as that perfect amber light
contrasts those imperfect flies,
as you contemplate the poetic differences
of tragedies and comedies
etched across skin,
there is prose that beckons understanding.

There is poetry in human living.

She has it all in her own subtle way.
Those who would say to let her be
have never met her, right?

When you begin to hope to understand,
her world comes crashing in.
Violent, living poetry
without a shade of gray,
her polarized planet stopped spinning
a long time ago.

She stands there
and when you are done reading her,
you smile.

There is poetry in human living.
And it is best when you understand
but understand without division.

There is nothing beautiful about
dismembered worlds yanked from orbit,
dissected lives taken out of context.

And those who always have to say
are only half right.
They read only their own poetry.

 08.03.09 3:24pm

One of my favorite places to just be at: Avalanche Gorge.

knots tied in between anger, boredom, and anxiety

Task (1): Meet the world each day somewhere between whatever terms it gives me and whatever terms I give it.

Task (2): Remain stress free.

Task (3): Try not to laugh/cry/scream at the combination of 1 and 2.

I have been mulling over how much of stress is a choice and how much of it just is. --As immovable, unalterable fact. It would seem that my body, and human bodies in general, were not made for stressing. They were not made for worry. They were not made for life to be so... hard. We are such fragile creatures for all of our bluffing and hoping and straining.

But how much of life being hard comes from our making it harder than it has to be?

I had a history teacher once who said that the purpose of history was to remind us that just because this is the way things are, does not mean that this is the way things should be or always have been. And ever since those words left his lips, they have followed me. He continued to explain that we need history to tell us that sometimes we need to fight and sometimes fighting is ugly. More than that, sometimes the way things are is, quite simply, wrong; and when it is wrong, we are not powerless. We are not restrained to a passive watching of the world, our world.

Those words have made me bold on more than one account in the years since. Lately, however, I have been really good at refusing to apply this idea. I am not so much the humanist that I can believe that a man's or woman's destiny is in their own hands entirely; but I do believe that the many of us spend too much time reacting to a life that appears to just happen. We are not as powerless as we often feel. We can take responsibility for more than we realize.

Those are dangerous beliefs. They are heavy and ready to add their own layer of chaos to the pile of things worth stressing about. And up until now, I have "turned a blind eye". Yet, I feel it is time to apply the process to the process itself... if that makes sense.

Because apparently, handling stress well is not merely refusing to let things bother you by forcing them into unsee-ably dark corners of yourself. And it is more than cheap denial or delayed reactions. It is not storing it for later to be dealt with when no one else is around. Apparently. Which sucks because...well, I am so good at those. Or I was.

Until my body rebelled. Treason. I had done the hard work of persuasion. Mutiny from the inside.

Now, it turns out, I am not meant to house and store things for later and 'not now'. I am learning to be more intentional about letting things go. Which is strange, because I swear that that is exactly the opposite of taking responsibility and meeting life on its terms and not just being a victim of passive reaction. Yet, it takes so much more effort to say (in a way that my body actually believes), "This is not worth the pain I will feel if I hold onto this one second more."

It is letting go of my right to feel incensed, annoyed, piteous etc. But it is not denying myself emotions, because that also I feel in this seditious wreck. Instead, it is the highest honesty of feeling everything as it comes without letting it rule me. I have never been so aware of my own thoughts or how little true self-control I have. More often than not, it seems an impossible balance to strike; but I guess it is just a more mature version of choosing to feel. To feel without shutting down or being consumed by emotion. To feel emotions in wisdom, if that is possible (and I do not yet know if I believe it to be).

So here I am. Open window blowing peaceful wind across my typing fingers as I try to figure out why I hurt today. All I can figure is that I am pushing myself too hard this week and  my body is too tired to filter out the stressors. I was not always this fragile. But I did love my strength.




Also, art. I have very much enjoyed this photographer over the last few days.

It just feels like a day that I should spend writing.

And by that it is possible that I mean..."I have so many other things I have to do."

I am about to fall into the rabbit hole of structure and schedules again. Outwardly, I am sure the transition will go well. I am halfway to becoming a veteran. Inwardly... I am equally sure you will find me chafing against time-ropes and deadline-chains. The dreams will be nearly unmemorable, the art that I have scattered about my room will be scaled down from life-sized to take-what-you-can-into-class-without-making-your-prof-feel-too-unimportant sized, and I will be who I need to be and a little less of who I want to be. But it is not all so bad, especially after the transition phase.
It really is a good thing actually, when the rebellion and cynicism settles.

You see, my love of aviation has always been from a very artistic point of view. Stories. Adventure. Curiosity. Perhaps, even, love. Even my appreciation of most science comes through a very thick filter of the abstract and imagined...and now I need it to be detailed, linear, mechanical. At it's idealistic height, it really is 'all for a dream's sake.' But the more I do this, follow this rabbit hole, retrain my thinking, and try to live in a world that does not always understand me and which I am sure to misunderstand at least a few times...the more I find out what I am really capable of.

And by that I do not mean by skill... but by design. And not just me as an individual but as one example of human beings as a collective creation. I am going to need to remember this in the coming weeks as I attempt not to drown being immersed in world not yet wholly mine.

changes, requested and otherwise

For some things to make sense, you need a change of scenery. It's unavoidable at times. Your imagination is not always big enough to handle the static. Your muse is not always inspired enough with the same material. Your mind's eye is not always full enough. Often times, I am entirely unaware that change is exactly what I need to get unstuck. Fortunately, I am not the final authority or even the main person in charge of my affairs.

So I wound up in the desert.

I was born there, allegedly. Well, not in this particular desert... but pretty close actually. It is really a small matter of borders and names... how does the government decide where one national 'forest' or park ends for another to begin? Anyway... I was not raised in the desert. Though I love the hot weather and the colors and the sunrises/sunsets of the desert... I love water entirely too much. And mountains. And clouds. And trees. Tall trees. Even if they block some of the stars. But the desert has its beauty (like how far you can see and how amazing that rare storm is) and its things to teach.


It was there that my chalk pastels made sense. And faces made sense. I have not a clue why faces made more sense in the desert, but I know that the colors of pastel that I was working with suddenly just worked.



Color. Texture. Shape. Lines.

It is not that I have arrived. But it is the feeling that now I have somewhere to go. I could not see where I was headed for such a long time. And even though I have left the desert and have no intention of living there; I see beauty from a new perspective. And taking that home with me gives better light to all that I see where I am.

I know I hurt you every time I ask the impossible. I know that you would do it too. That is, if it weren’t... “the impossible.” But I cannot seem to tie back the words with knots or ropes or chains or weights heavy enough and strong enough to keep them from charging out and asking again.

It is hope.

It is foolishness.

It is blindness and I love it;

because seeing how far away you really are is not worth the weight that it brings. And so I love blindness. Because I can pretend that you are right here; and that when I ask you to come, you can.

It is selfishness too.

To hurt you so that I hurt less.
To shut my eyes and speak words that make you open yours that much wider.
To make you the one with the bad news and reality riding on your back for you to deliver...because I chose to forget. I am hoping for a day when we can both shirk responsibility and reality, cross the distance, and forget the gap was ever there. I keep hoping even though I know it to be the most selfish, foolish blindness.

But I love it.

Perhaps, forgive me, more than I love you.

Because, you see, I have to think that if I really loved you more than I loved the idea of you here, I would find a way to swallow those poison words instead of feeding them to you. But I do not. I am trying though, to learn.

And that has got to count for something, right? I mean, it is hard and unwieldy and I do not like it. I think that that is life though; and if the rumors are true, you and I, dear are alive and in this thing called life for awhile. If you could, be patient with me while I learn to love you more than my blindness.

leftovers

These are exactly as labeled: leftovers. thoughts. emotions. ideas. From the last month or more. Mostly mine, I think. Finally grown up and finished, I think. Ah, I lied. The first one ends too abruptly and I know it, but this is my temporary cop out. (and now it has been editted again...)



Here I am stuck again
With eyes so dry
They make the desert weep.

It is not that I do not want to release
And feel the salt water oceans pour down over me,
Just that I do not quite remember how to swim.

At first,
I was waiting
Until I felt safe enough.

But I forgot
who it is
who makes me safe.

And I forgot what a fickle thing
Security can be
to chase.

How do you end a drought
you requested, demanded, created?

How can salt water
possibly make an oasis
of any desert much less me?

Shall I grow
myself a salt garden
with glistening roses and petunias?

But how?
Especially when it feels like
everything that will be watered

must die again.
So I wait
to grow my sparkling garden.

And say always, "tomorrow".

-----------------------------------------------------

I have read about people who have woken up to confront change staring toe to toe with them without warning. And it really does happen like that sometimes. You go to sleep and a strange wind creeps in through all the cracks and takes away the familiar. The more often it happens, the more familiar the feeling is even in its unarguable foreignness. In a way, the more you know this wind, the more foreign you yourself have become.

So when the air greeted me with the first auntumn kiss I had been given in more than a few months, I knew there was more afoot and overhead than cool weather and geese flying south. Fall was coming, sure, or was already here. But it came with a mission: to sweep away the past and pack it away.

Summer was a memory. That season was over. It was being uprooted and thrown out; and not just summer weather, but the life we lived and the people we were then. Fall had crept in and wrapped its fingers, arms, and heart around my fingers, my arms, and my heart.

It is a good thing that change never asks permission. I never would have grown the way I have, to appreciate it and even to love it. As it is, Change just comes, shakes the world, and lies down for a bit--only to fade when the requisite newness and pedantic instability wear off. That is what I wait for, the new normal. Let North settle northerly and let gravity find the ground. Then we who are left can build.

done?

tell me of your coming and your going
tell me of your wishing and your passing
tell me of it all

sing me a song
or tell me a story

please, take my heart in hand
just fill my senses to overflowing
the way clearest dark takes up the stars

and moves aside
to let them puncture timid, trembling night.

yes, tell me
and when you finish,
fill the rest with ineffable silence.

Things That Rattle

For the week, I am staying at my aunt's house in Arizona. Yay, desert! And being spoiled. It's a huge house that really does feel familiar enough to be home. I spent many family reunions exploring it and so it is a good place for some mind/body reconnection and reordering.

So I am trying to figure out how to write again, how to pray again, how to read one book at a time, how to lay enough of life down to let my body unclench, and how to draw what my mind sees and feels. In short, exploring the limits of discipline and focus. That video keeps haunting me. I makes me think. About a lot of things. But it also brings me back again and again to this woman in a pink dress that I saw on 82nd the other night with the hot dogs and stories. I am 96% sure she was a prostituted woman. I wanted so badly to go and talk to her, but she was preoccupied and I was a coward.

It's not a direct leap in my thoughts, but it does not take much to make me think of her. I think I have a window I will paint her on amidst...something else. For that, I will have to learn how to paint people. And I need to buy pink paint as I do not currently have any. This could be awhile.

Not to mention, I am trying to learn how to paint deep dark storm clouds and red kites (though I don't have anymore red paint)... and yes. Good things.

Also, I want a tattoo. So I've been researching that. Something about stars and compasses. And it will say "love is enough." Oh yes, vacation. So many things that have been rattling in the back of my brain can finally be heard and attended too.

Oh, and one more thing: I'm going through some of my old high school photography (2006/2007) and I found a few favorites that I mind as well share.

What to do, what to do?

The world feels awfully big today. Body hurts. Soul hurts. Soul hurts for all the hurting souls. Big. Heavy. World.

I spent last night talking to (primarily) homeless people with a fantastic group that exchanges a hot dog for a story. Any story. Preferably, true, but they will listen regardless. It is amazing the secrets that people will tell. Many of them like to start at the beginning and tell us how they got to where they are. Now, the human condition is all I can see and hear and feel. Too many ladies walking the same streets over and over. Too many men medicating. Too many people without hope and direction and any idea that it doesn't have to be this way. So many lonely, lonely people.

As usual, there is no easy solution or cure for the human condition; and it is this weight that is going to spare my bit of virtual space from more philosophizing about home and context as I get ready to head to Montana for a spell.

and we come back to the human condition, since I cannot escape. I went to a small time poetry slam downtown a week or two ago. It was fascinating. I am convinced I will never find more exquisite people watching if I search over and through half the globe.

I swear, nobody feels comfortable until they are the most outrageous form of weird here. You would think that abnormal people would feel at home in such a crowd, but I think they felt like they've been displaced, one-upped, and turned out. It is not a gathering of idiosyncrasies but a parade that somehow became a pageant of sorts. Oh, Portland. Competitive over quirks. Brazen and bold but not yet confidant. Everybody has to keep moving before you see too much of them.

And the poetry. Oh yes. I was surprised to find two categories: sex and questions. Sex, sure. It's Portland. Questions. Really? But it is the questioning and the uncertainty and the doubts and the... lost feeling that everyone connects with, writes about, shares in. I guess. And words are apparently the answers. The very words that may or may not have any meaning to begin with are the tools that the slammers go about looking for answers.

And I get it. Of course the poets will go to their art, their trade, their comfort for the answers. But I don't get how time after time words themselves were said to be the answers. Go no further. Are words it? Is there a language so universal that it actually fills the holes that beg questions of honesty? Have I been making all of my life entirely too complicated? I need to search the words themselves for my answers. Truly, I am lost here.

Perhaps, it is the feeling of not knowing that is terrifying. If you can describe it, then you have nothing to fear. If you can tack words to it, stuff it full... If you find the right words... If the words fit and fall and paint a picture bright enough... the terrifying unknown becomes familiar and is tamed. Then the feeling of falling finally goes away. Maybe. Ug. I wish. But it will take more than words to fill the heart of man, to make it knowable, and to give us hope.

Our emotions and our fear keep us honest enough to keep looking... but I do not like them today. I want to bind up the hurt and the hopelessness and carry it to the sun. Maybe that is a fire hot enough to consume them.

Trust is a pie
that you fill with the best of yourself
until it cannot hold anymore.

Then you bake it
so that all of the flavors
Bleed and blend;
And you have no hope of ever recovering
one single ingredient from another.

It is a pie

you leave in the window of summer,
filling your mind with either
Anxiety or excitement
because you know what is coming.

(And you do know exactly what is coming.)

It is hard to determine precisely
where the greatest point
of vulnerability lies.

From mixing bowl to oven,
from oven to open window,
or from window to knife blade.
A quality pie is never quite safe,
almost, and not really, but never truly or completely safe.

Sweet or savory.
Rich like the silt of the rivers
Or eggs whipped light
like clouds run away from home.
Trust is a pie

One made for you and I
to share with one condition.
We will never be quite truly, completely safe.

Coby? Koby? Colby? ...

Coby was still drunk when we met him. We may have woken him up as we stood by the car talking about lunch and passing off the responsibility to make decisions and plans. He had spent the night in a doorway not far from our church, passed out. He was strangely pleasant, though a bit bewildered by the fact that someone had stolen his shoes. I understood then that he had not been homeless in Portland for long.

We have so many homeless people and the competition between them only increases in the dry (drier) summers when the more transient population comes in and passes through. It is worse here than in a lot of cities I think. More than that, in the two years I have been here, the corners and bridges seem to be filling up steadily with an increasing population. Portland is simultaneously an easy city to be homeless in and a difficult one.

It is true more often than not what they teach you if you volunteer with homeless people for long, "everyone is from somewhere else." And everyone almost always is. It is part of the process. And so I have a habit of asking where they are from. He said Seattle. In fact, this was his first night in Portland. And someone stole his shoes. He said he had never walked outside without shoes before and that it hurt. (I didn't know what to do with that...but I hate wearing shoes. It is a luxury I have though to take my shoes off and know that they will still be in my closet when I decide I need them.) We found him some water in the church and asked around for some shoes. No luck. Nobody was even the right size.

Eventually we decided to drive Kolby to the Rescue Mission to look for shoes and to get him connected. Hopefully, to get him into a recovery program...but he would have to want it. And I am not sure he did. If my hasty judgments were correct, he was chronically homeless and chronically in and out of prison with a host of prison tattoos to show. I wonder how it all started. And I wonder if he even knows how it started. But that is not the point.

Colby wasn't shy or reserved like so many people tend to be. There was no way Betty would have ever gotten in my car, especially since there were so many of us when I met her. And it's not just her, there is a common thread of mistrust among people who are reduced to hourly survival. Admittedly, Koby was less than sober, but still. It surprised me.

So I wonder. I wonder why he let us take him anywhere. And I wonder if he really wanted help or if he just wanted us to feel good so he could go live his own form of life. I wonder if he was puzzled by us or if he had met us church people before and knew exactly what he had to do to make us feel like we may had made a difference so we could continue on to home and lunch and all of the constructs of a life that either he has no appreciation for or which had no appreciation for him at some pivotal point. School. Work. Bills. Family. Friends. Dinner. Get stuff. Get rid of stuff.

I cannot help but wonder if all of my intentions were misread for naivety, which would be true in part. (I have more curiosity and enthusiasm than I do experience.) Or if there was no reading into things at all and he just took things as they came. I want so badly to know, though, how it all looked through his blurry eyes.

what i see today

that haunting feeling

I have a confession. It is one of those confessions...you know, the kind you promise yourself for years will never come from your lips. Not while you are living. Not even after. Other people will make this confession. They don't know better, poor souls. But you, you see what is coming and dodge it lightning quick because you can change what is coming and you can choose to never ever need to say that.

Are you ready? Here it is:

I have become my parents. At a very young age at that. I am not married. I have no kids. I haven't even found a real job. But I see it. Creeping out through my expressions, mannerisms, and choices.

I laugh like my mom? I drive like my dad? I cook like they both taught me. I sweep like my stepmom? I do my dishes like my stepdad always insisted? And so many more things. I give advice and their words fall out. When did that happen? It is the phrases I choose and the things I care about. Today, this realization came upon me en force as I walked through the grocery store with my legs feeling wobbly because I had just gotten off my bike. Though I was wearing Teva sandals, I could close my eyes and imagine my dad's bike shoes clack clack clacking. (My own shoes made just a similar enough noise.) Just like they did every summer of my memory until this one. Just like they do this summer without me to hear. Some things never change.

None of these things are bad. It is just weird. It isn't like I set out to avoid picking up my parent's traits, just that I thought I was immune because they were all so different from each other. But no. There they are, staring at me in whatever metaphorical mirror I look. Today is the day that I have to admit, I am their daughter. So many of the things I made fun of them for fall from my limbs and emerge in my expressions. Oops?