musing

Oh my goodness. These are both excellent. I like the second better... but I am incredibly biased due to my love of heights. 

A most excellent quotation:
"Improvisation is empowering because it welcomes the unknown. And since what's impossible is always unknown, it allows me to believe I can cheat the impossible.” (Philippe Petit)

Also: "The opposite of poverty is not wealth. … In too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.” (Bryan Stevenson)


I know it's a lot to take the time to watch. Trust me, though, they are good thoughts. All very different, but all very much good thoughts.

These days,
well,
these days are numbered.
It has taken awhile
to trust that they truly are in order
and it has taken even longer
for the numbers to get small enough
to mean something.
But these days...
are numbered
which is to say,
passing,
leaving,
draining,
fading.
But when they are gone,
I will still be here.

A bit overdue:

Montana and I are complicated lovers. 
We should probably move on. 
But I cannot. 
There is something about waking up in the embrace of mountains...
of hearing nothing but the very distant car 
interrupting the slow inhale of hills 
and the long exhale of sky. 
It takes my breath away 
but gives me its own breath. 
And so I breathe easy 
as I take in winding dirt roads. 
I breathe easy 
as on cold mornings 
when you can see your breath leave in puffs 
like lost clouds trying to find their way home. 
I breathe easy 
and I know this will always be, 
in some ineffable way, 
home.

Seeing.

I have begun taking walks as prescribed by my mother. I forget why. There was some very important health reason. Muscles? Maybe... Stress relief? Sure... Better sleep? Could have been... Less headaches? Sounds right... Anyway, yesterday being the exception, I have been walking about 20-70 minutes everyday. I feel like I am seeing the world for the first time some days. I used to look at the details of other people's worlds and lives. I am only now reclaiming that. Here's my album.
I realized that I stopped taking photos in the city because I don't like being watched while I work and here someone is always watching; and because everyone is a photographer here, I felt like I had to know what I was doing. I needed to choreograph my seeing; but that's not how seeing works best. You should see the objects and people on their terms, put them in their best light and angle, and forget about how you look in this process.
And so I walked and kept on walking. I saw and I kept on seeing. I saw so much that I forgot I could be seen.

And then I saw things that I could not photograph. I saw where wealthy neighborhoods fell away into *other* neighborhoods as if a line had been drawn. Feeling seems a lot like seeing when you begin to see abstract concepts. You close your eyes and the feeling is still there with senses that have not yet been named, telling you about the worlds out there.

It's taken nearly 3 years or 8. Depending on how you count it. But I have successfully changed my identity, I think. I say "I think" because of my own insecurity. (Because I'm afraid it wont stick). But I call it a success because I have seen the way people have changed the way they see me. And the way people I know see airplanes. I love it. I get photos, cards, texts...and so on. Because people I love see an airplane and think "Elaine!". Yes. Success. It's not all of who I am and it is not all of who I want to be. But I am days away from finishing my mechanic's program and only just realizing I am in a new chapter of life and one which I have fought so very hard to get to. I am battle weary, but I guess I should be. It's nearly the end.

Overflowing.

I promise...
to do more seeing
and less talking.

There are too many words here.
Too many so as to take the place of Oxygen.
So let us look
because our eyes are not yet full.

Home, revisited.

From a letter I received upon returning to Portland,

"Is home just an idea? Is it just a feeling? Is it an actual thing that can be tangibly felt? Or is it tangible at all? I once thought that I was satisfied just believing that home would only come when heaven did but that's not satisfying at all. Another time I convinced myself that home is where there are friends and food. But that leaves the impression that home can never be stable."

 They were perfect words to go to sleep to because they gave names and faces to many of my emotions having just left one home to return to another.

In reading Radical Hospitality, I am beginning to wonder if home is not much more easily defined as space. Space to breathe and be. Specifically addressed in the book are the areas of people, of ourselves, even of God that remain mysteries. Homan writes,

"There is a gentle hospitality with the self that most of us fail to practice. You know that moment you look in the mirror and see a stranger staring out those eyes? We don't accept the stranger within. We dread the regions of ourselves we don't understand. By learning to value the otherliness of the actual stranger, we honor the mystery within us, too. ...Not only is there a stranger in your skin, there are several in your home too. The essence of hospitality is receiving the stranger while letting them remain a stranger."

He continues on talking about the importance of making room for who people actually are instead of who we want them to be, elaborating on God in the stranger and our inability to ever understand God... how He is always a bit of a stranger. Already, however, I have copied enough words to keep me occupied the rest of my life. I could spend the rest of my life just trying to "receive the stranger while letting them remain a stranger"; and I am sure that it will take months if not years of trying before I begin getting it right often enough to see any progress in myself. While this is profoundly overwhelming, I digress in my pursuit of words to address home.

I do not think home in the truest sense is possible without great endeavors toward hospitality. Home is that space where you can be greeted for the similarities you have and the sense you do make, but your mysteries and tangles are welcome to come inside and rest too. A space where it is safe to grow because no one and nothing are trying to force it.

I will not fully understand myself at the end of my life and life is so much easier to handle if I am not expected to. If I am free to take in hand one mystery at a time and let them rest in a safe place, I may yet learn and grow. I can hardly do that if I must hide the irrational and non sequitur from view, much less the bent and broken.