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.