together, alone.

Saturday, July 11, 2009 4:31:53 AM

today will be the last day of my binge.

i can feel it. i’ve been dragging through my life this week, someone else’s life, all scheduled and strained and small. looking through people, over shoulders as they speak, holding my own tonsils still which swell and threaten some sudden surge of weeping. i watch my own thoughts, projected like a movie playing over every cell of me, and reluctantly practice not naming; just existing here.

but today i have raced through my senses, my history, on this bike. today i crawled inside of myself and lifted out of the fog, pushed my face into the air and made wind.
it is good to breathe a little.

it’s surprising how desensitized people are to distance. how practiced we are at condoning aloofness, witnessing each other move through the world without feeling, sharing, connecting. i realize that i am also guilty of this, of course, and think of my own integrity.
it is time for me to be more real. the friend i have always wanted.


i think of this as i tear through the evening on two wheels, a route i’ve never taken. cherry creek bike path all the way to the health center; i am mapping my way to work. the sun drips thickly, mocking time, and there are shadowy creeks and fractured stones and a thousand plodding bends littering my path. the air is wet and warm, the mutual breath of so many wandering animals, and wandering suburbanites, and very small wandering bugs. i want to take a picture each time i blink, and lay every image across the floor for strangers to see.
everything is beautiful.
i want to see the world.

but i suppose it isn’t possible, or even desirable, to witness beauty all the time. beauty that causes weakness and staggering. submersion in emotion, or disassociation in spirit, or creative exhilaration, constantly. i suppose it is important to come down once in a while in order to relate to the real world.
but there are lots of real worlds. because there are lots of different lenses. and a life that looks irresponsible/boring/chaotic to one, may seem liberating/tranquil/eccentric to another, with a million versions in between.

nevertheless,
i wonder if i prefer the idea of life, but not the reality. i have thought on this for a long time.
because i love both. but one is less threatening somehow, uncomplicated by the raw experience of work or pain.

i think i realized last night on my ride that since my world is turning, or rather, i am turning my world, i am not certain which reality i want to buy into. which ideas are mine. which behaviors i will exhibit out of fear, or love. what the difference really looks like anyway. then again, sometimes i believe that i’m not changing what i believe at all, but am instead becoming more open to contradictions and the experience of not deciding.
because i do know what i believe in. i just don’t always know what to do with it.




.

when the night lulls.

Sunday, June 21, 2009 4:52:09 PM




i heard

that vulnerability is like raw tissue being exposed to the wind. the air both poisons and heals, like the growth of a scab, or the burning of wood into ash for the soil, or a vaccine coursing through the blood. faintly toxic. finally healing.

i want to live in this way, something risky. not the rush of candy or sunlight, but enduring and restorative. i want to face myself head on, knowing i can see in, feeling this is a gamble, and going for it. i want to be good in a way that is nourishing and lasts. i want to understand when the night lulls poetry and memories and secrets.




.

delicate and brave.

Saturday, May 23, 2009 3:17:24 PM

there are three pink peonies that an old woman plucked from her garden and plopped in a champagne vase on my desk. pink isn’t really my color, but it’s the right one for petals like these, papery thin and dense and waving in the breeze off the open door. one of them was a tiny cabbage head yesterday, all clenched into a leafy ball and hiding. this morning when i arrived it was open like a velvet yawn, lush and light and gaping. just like that.

i am wondering how this happens, how things just bloom overnight, in an hour, in a moment. how at first there is a tightening, a twisted knot, a bud. and then there is the startling relief of growth and movement, and the air smells like sugar.

.

commitments.

Monday, August 31, 2009 7:08:51 PM



march was not a good month for me, to put it lightly.

i had returned abruptly from an overambitious trip to mexico which ultimately defied my expectations, to discover winter still gripping each end of each day, idle and blurred and halfhearted. having no place in particular to go or be, i spent three weeks bouncing between hotels and hostels and the cold nostalgia of michigan, fragments of other people's homes. a relationship in which i had invested all of my energy and will and life was wretchedly dissolving, and i had no one and nothing to turn to in my despair, to my fault. i gave up on household chores, hating my temporary dwelling. smoked a lot of pot, needing sleep. wept on my bike and in lines and any time i found myself alone. at last, with the encouragement of my mother who had received a frightening email confessing my poetic wondering for suicide, i eventually made an effort for my own renewal and scheduled appointments with five therapists in one week.

i liked each one, and considered their questions and suggestions with important scrutiny. one of them wanted to know everything about my mother. another asked about my father. someone else spoke most of the time, spouting advice and explanations and eastern proverbs. i wasn't fond of him.
and after declaring all of my sorrow and suffering and woe, shifting in my chair and rolling my kleenex into a thousand shards of lint, one of the therapists asked pointedly: "so what are you committed to?"

i chose her.

and you have asked me. what are your commitments? and again, i paused, combing my complete past for answers. how can i not know? the question is about my love, my ideals, my life of course. what do i want on this journey? what will i ground myself in, and return to when i am lost or stuck or withdrawn? what do i want my partner to hold me accountable to? how shall i expect to grow?


these days are different now, i think. i'm trying to be a better person because i do not feel i have acted like one in much that i have done. i have quit jobs, deserting children and dear colleagues without delay. stolen people's wives, abandon all my family and friends. i have considered karma, the cosmic nature of the condition of my life, and thought on this (which was sent to me):

"The first Saturn Return is famous because it represents the first test of character and the structures a person has built their lives upon. According to traditions, should these structures be unsound or that a person is living out of touch with his or her true values, the Saturn Return will be a time of upheaval and limitations as Saturn forces him or her to jettison old concepts and worn out patterns of living. It is not uncommon for relationships and jobs to end during this time of life restructuring and reevaluation."

yes, a test of character and foundational values. a time of upheaval and strife. but i wasn't raised religiously; i have nothing prescribed to invest in. i haven't practiced specifics, defended my choices with essential convictions.

but, of course i have. it isn't so complicated, is it? we all act out of our own assumptions and beliefs whether we have named them or not. and we know when we have been true to ourselves and when we haven't, if we have any grasp of intuition.

what does my intuition want for me?

i once wrote a paper for school in which we were asked to define our "mantras" as teachers; what would we describe to our students mattered most? how would we rationalize our most vital learning? the professor explained how interesting the diversity of teacher mantras had been in each of his classes. some students have teachers who insist that organization and accuracy matters most; others defend curiosity and inquiry. some believed most in expeditionary and experiential learning, and others strive for the illusive mark of "rigor" and "excellence".

in believing that a true education is self-actualizing and contemplative, my mantra became "engage, reflect, transform". and although it was only a first effort and will likely develop alongside me, it was an eager attempt to merge school learning with life learning, my ultimate goal. authenticity. intentionality. truth.

i guess my point is that we are all on a trajectory of growth, and this is what i think it may look like. engagement with experience, reflection on it's meaning, transformation as a result. i want to welcome and witness my own growth. i want to be willing to evolve. to me, that is the most important thing: a willingness to respond to our own learning. to grow. to become more patient, more compassionate, more understanding, more thoughtful, more open, more reflective, more alive, more loving. more at peace. more connected. more human.
not perfect.
no, not perfect.
not even better, in the way that whoever we are in this moment is some failing of our selves, some fraction of what we could hope for, no. not in the way that we are less than what we should expect, inviting shame or diminishment. but only in the manner of acknowledging that we are becoming more whole.

but there is no absolute destination. i don't really believe in enlightenment.

there is something about love in all of this; the path is not a calculated process of self-improvement, but must fundamentally require the ability to love.

yes, love. what is love?
you have asked me, another question like a face at the window.

what do we do when we love ourselves, and each other?






.

luminary

Tuesday, October 2, 2007 8:33:41PM


mom,

i am crying from your email. i read it out loud like a eulogy, because it is deserving of an audience who listens fiercely for the revival of wayward souls. i want to frame it in a watermark over a landscape, and tell my daughters that their grandma was a writer who wondered about everything. they will understand that you are strong and important, and they will try to live up to your name.

it shocks me to learn that we shared space yesterday in a calm and puzzling disquiet. i think that must mean something important that is just out of our reach.

i almost headed that email, "you will not understand any of this, and that will hurt me deeply". but i knew better.


tell me more about the autumn.

in the center of our house

Sunday, April 27, 2008 11:03:45PM



in the center of our house

and all that we have made here:

this furniture, these curtains, the perfect rugs we have fastened to the floor. brave paint in every room, exalted patchwork. perilous computer wires slinking like ivy. dreadfully confused thermostat. trenches in the tender yellow floor (we will grate it to the soil). a two ton tv like a legendary gargoyle (it will never be moved). peeking white chips in the walls we have blundered. captive rugged yard, a battlefield for sparse crabgrass and sand. the light through seeping curtains against everything.

against everything.

(we were writing poetry.)


in the center of our house

i am cradling the birth of this life, our labor, i am cradling the beginning. and i am turning it in my hands and i am harvesting time.


i love you and i have always loved you. and this is a sure thing and a gamble.

i don’t know anything about what will come of this juncture, our apogee, but we have made something important of our past. we have created and we have struggled, marking our lifetimes with the unimagined experience of each other, a principal narrative, a renaissance. we can never neglect this.


in the center of our house

i am on my knees inside of one solitary instant, a summary of my life. these walls contain the pulsing grain of space that we have crafted out of hope.
we have been so fortunate and we are so fragile.




.

getting back.

(change.)

my process.

Monday, March 30, 2009 7:16:10 PM


my process.

i am listening to this american life on my new ipod shuffle. it is green, like a six-spotted tiger beetle in july. i love six-spotted tiger beetles. i remember them from my seventh grade insect project. we had to collect something like 25 different bugs, and research all kinds of information about them like what they ate and where they lived and other names they were known by. but in order to identify and receive credit for them, they had to be suffocated to death in jars of cotton balls saturated with rubbing alcohol, and pinned to trays of styrofoam above perfect rectangular labels:

Scientific Name: Cicindela Sexguttata
Common Name: Six-Spotted Tiger Beetle
Species: North American Beetle
Family: Carabidae

my best friend maggie was an artist who wore pink bell-bottom jeans, and refused to kill anything for any reason. she was allowed to take photos instead if she had her parents sign a permission slip to opt out of the slaughter. i admired her, but i loved this project, and the leaf project after that. and the vegetable project after that. and the quail project after that, which i somehow did not manage to place for at the science fair, even though my investigation was wildly unique. but maggie’s defense of all creatures did make me look at living things differently. i didn’t used to feel that a bug’s life was worth protecting, or that a leaf should not be plucked from its tree, or that a quail and all of its friends and family may not enjoy being the subjects of clumsy and meddlesome adolescent schemes. (the blue ribbon went to the girl who dyed an embryo green.) but after witnessing young maggie’s conviction to something so noble, i suddenly felt some gratitude for the things that i worked with in science class, and i was able to notice suffering in a new way, undisclosed by the clues of a wincing face or voice.

i found maggie on facebook last week. she is thin and blonde and conventionally beautiful. her picture defied my memory of her, alternative and windswept and small.

looking back, i wish someone would have told me you could make a living doing this, learning about bugs. i never took anything in school seriously because i didn’t know that one day i would need to decide what i loved enough to make a life out of. i guess teachers tell kids that all the time, “you’re gonna need to know this!” but it just isn’t real. school is school and life is life and there isn’t really any planning ahead.

my brilliant plan.

that is the name of the this american life program i am listening to. “ideas that arrive in a flash of inspiration, and then what happens next,” ira says.
i like that so much.
and i like stories.

i’m going to write something called “we don’t take the bus”.
because i witnessed such interesting interactions today from 12:01 to 12:56, and 1:32 to 2:38PM. the 16L runs all the way down colfax, and you must know where i’m going with this. i viewed a documentary produced by a fellow denverite in 2004 about colfax avenue. this road has great history and personality and symbolism, of course. i watched myself react to the people who ride the 16L. odors of rum and morning breath and sweaty, sagging fabric. small sense of privacy and space and social boundaries. i watched myself when the bus driver stopped to lift an extremely large woman in a wheel chair slowly into the aisle, give directions repeatedly to a young man in search of the nearest shelter, explain the return route to the restless woman who declared continuously to “blame it on the alcohol”. ‘i’m going to be late,’ i kept thinking, and then, ‘no. have some compassion’.

no, have some compassion. have some compassion.

i felt this way in mexico a lot, noticing my impatience, redirecting my judgment. it was so good for me, but eventually too exhausting. i needed some kind of relief in between where i could remember who i was, what i liked, how i did things. it is important, i think. or is it? does complete compassion mean full and total acceptance of all ways of doing things? are concepts like “safe” or “healthy” just as subjective as “right” or “good”?
the people on the bus would have a lot to say about this.

i like riding the bus. environments of clear segregation really interest me. churches and gay bars and neighborhood schools. and i like places where integration is available, but resisted. airports and long lines and college campuses. (and neighborhood schools.) they are like truth tellers, because they make you feel something about yourself. they present some comparison or variance, and make you think about where you fit in. and what makes you uncomfortable. and why.

we don’t ride the bus.


well.

my mouth is sticky and my cafe au lait is cold. i am sitting at daz bog across the room from a man wearing a long, red-and-black-striped felt top hat. he is sporting very black sunglasses and a sharp, sleeping face.
the woman he is talking to is always here. must be 85. slumps in her mobility scooter facing the window, talking about her cats and her girlfriend, whom i have never seen.
the girl next to me is responsible for the security of my power cord, but she keeps bumping it out of the socket with the inside of her knee.
and the gentleman next to her just asked our row if the word laptop is one word or two.

i could go on.


you know, there never was a people watching project at school. if there was, i might have known what i loved enough to make a life out of. instead, there are only glimpses, and a million possibilities. i could coordinate educational programming at an art center, or teach 14-18 year olds with mental and emotional disabilities how to read, or run after school programming for a girl’s inc. female empowerment course.

but maybe i’ll just start collecting bugs again.

and this time i’ll take pictures.


.

home, again.

what does home mean to you?


your food is scattered throughout the city, west and north and central, a crumb trail dotting your kitchens in a frame on a map. now another, then another, until you have bridged all the corners of your life here, until you can reason every turn, until you discover your own unfolding.

no matter where you are, you will live here. in these homes.


there were warm cookies on your vintage golden counter top. they were thin and tawny and puddled at the edges, as cookies without packages are. flawlessly misshapen and fragile and faintly grainy from too much sugar. lifted from fraying recipe books that love crisco and gluten and lots of eggs and butter in heavy sticks. cumbrous electric mixers. red ruffled aprons. aspiring middleclass cupboards. (they were white; she painted them white.)

and everything just built up around that view without asking, and the mountains are hidden behind hills of treetops and lampposts, and the new roads invite such swift and cursory travels along that fence.

is it tragic?
is it romantic?

yes, we are (home)made from and (home)grown by and (home)bound to our homes. and entrapped and displaced and divided, it’s true. they remember how we lived, to uphold us, to spite us. they call to us from new rooms and carpet and trees that appear inside someone else’s memory, and old floors and walls and windows that never budged.

of course, we are like them.

parking