stake your claim

I met a woman yesterday who told me, with pride, that she finally convinced her husband to "convert" to Buddhism. Not only that, but he is looking forward to seeing his first Buddha shrine during their visit to Thailand. P.S. I should visit her blog.

If only belief were as easy as that - like washing dishes and talking about the weather. If only a shrine were erected, in any country, to any prophet, that people could actually go to and see.

Niche got it wrong. God isn't dead, religion is.

Amok.

delicate and luminous as the egg moon

My face is changing. I've got crows-feet around my eyes from smiling too damn much and creases in my forehead from frowning too damn much.

If you were to read these lines, like a palm reader, they would reveal a great trapeze artist. I perform emotional acrobatics. Flips, somersaults, etc. - usually without a net (when we're together). When you're with me we move so fast I can no longer tell who's catching and who's being caught. Probably me.

keeping account we
note each cent given to love-
always wanting more.

leaving day

Valentine's Day, for me, is not about heart-shaped candy and kisses, but bravery, pain, loss and personal transcendence. It marks the eight-year anniversary of my leaving home.

Eight years ago tomorrow my mother walked into an empty bedroom expecting to find me there. It took her a while to understand what she saw. I hadn't left a note. I had even "patched things up" before I left. I didn't want them to think I ran away from an argument. I had stood on the line separating our crumbled driveway and the black-top of Sherrell Drive before, and decided then. A person who runs away is weak. Leaving requires courage.

You take everything from your parents. You even take the absence of giving. You absorb everything into your child-heart. Mine had grown too full. It wasn't a crime of passion. There was nothing to be gotten back, no revenge, no point to be taken or made. It was sacrificial. People judge you for the sacrifices you make in the name of life. But to argue responsibility for others over responsibility for ones self is to deny every instinct and every decision a person makes in life - none of which are wholly selfless. I turned eighteen. I packed, and I left them. I was still in high school.

Erin and another blues bar

We both needed cures last night. Me for restlessness and unspeakable sadness. Erin for alcohol-induced ranting and Coke spillage.

Nowhere is the right place to vent your blues. No venue is blues-accommodating. Bars and coffee houses are practiced at alienating you when you need them most. They don't want your sadness, it spoils the atmosphere. Bars and coffee houses are for romanticists and sexy hipsters; realists aren't allowed. The light they bring is too harsh for those places, even with their dimmed lighting and mood music.

This, at least, seemed to be the case last night. So we went where it made the most sense - Northside Tavern (aka "The Blues Bar"). Except they weren't playing our blues, they were playing middle-class white boy wanna be Elvis Costello blues. It wasn't even danceable. And then there were the alpha male pool hall preppy show-offs we had to contend with, who lurked around our pool table as though they were interested in our game. (I kicked Erin's ass BTW)...(fuck you, I'm not a show-off).

I chain-smoked last night and don't even feel it this morning. Normally I'd sound like Betty Davis.

Oh, and Erin, thanks for leaving your half-eaten piece of cheesecake in my car.

willing

I got my Indian drone box yesterday. It imitates the sound of a Tanpura (an instrument like a sitar). I played my cello with it and it felt oh, so good. Harmonizing is therapeutic, especially when there's no attachment to melody or performance. One note, played with complete concentration and submission can be the most beautiful, expressive thing. When it's your heart spilling out and you know it and choose to let it go anyway. You will it to go.

And you're not embarrassed this time.

mad death

I can't stop dying. I can't wait to stop dying. Maybe healing. Re-creating. Dis-covery. If I were alive I could make some happiness for myself.

He worries there might be someone else because something changed with me, suddenly but not at all sudden. Something broke that was always. There isn't anyone else but it might be easier for him to accept if there were. People understand the language of better and want. They follow their eyes.

love
bitter as iron
we eat as though it were
sweet and easy

Dear John:

At first you pack in secret –
Quietly stowing away your happiness,
Then your grief.

Turning to your belongings,
You look at them in a different light;
What goes and what stays,

What's essential and what you would leave
If it were burning. It's me that's burning.
You can guess the rest.

Majda's house

Every time I leave your house it's the same. The same fog, the same wet grass, the same darkness. Every time I try to make a three point turn and almost hit your mailbox. Every time I feel the loneliness. It sets in before I make it past your hedge (monkey grass that gives me goose-bumps when it brushes against my legs in the summer).

Atlanta was a series of headless buildings tonight. Low clouds. You would have liked that. You're all destruction and slow unraveling. I'm veils and burning fields. You make me certain of my absolute sanity. We scare men at Kinkos into giving us discounts. We stink of smoke and coffee.

Your mother campaigns for me to gain weight and does so successfully. Homemade bread and cheese and salmon - sometimes a piece of cake or a hunk of smoked beef. Some soup or other Bosnian delight whose name I can neither pronounce nor find a word for in English. When I ask your mom to make it I say it's that noodle-wrap-cheesy-meat-thing.

You like fragments too.
not to be broken.
We don't pretend

I hope all those fancy schools in New York reject you. I've told you this. I imagine us in Chicago, nursing each other through graduate school. I want to think about that. I don't want to think about the fires we've set to our lives. Maybe it was smoke that masked Atlanta, disguised as clouds. Like I'm disguised as a wife.

clementines before bed

I'm wearing blue slippers with stars and moons on them. They were given to me in December of 2001 at a company Christmas party. I took off my heels and put them on. I got chided by my boss for doing so - but only because we were at the Ritz.

My fingers smell of clementines because I've just eaten about five of them. There's something about peeling fruit. Oranges, tangerines, pomegranites, grapefruit even. Everything is veiled. Everything breaths, everything shits, and everything has a membrane of some sort.

Burst your bubble.

We often say we're doing something to "get close", but we're usually just talking about physical proximity. Matt wants to "get close" me. I want to "get close" to ____. But I just ate a clementine. What the hell are we talking about?

greed

Your heart said "more"
but you thought it was
your stomach and so ate

(and ate and ate until
nothing remained,
not even the plate).

Remembering How to Sing After a Long Winter

There are new blossoms on the trees.
I step outside, emerging from a chill
that had settled in my body, in my lungs.
Ahead of me is grocery shopping,
coffee, sitting on a bench people-watching.
Behind me: a season of mourning.
Its slow dissipation an ambulence
whose warning screams have faded back
into the humming of life.

The gas furnace in our living room
shut off. Cooling rods creaked,
arthritic in their metal joints.

Every moment I suffer the same fate
the heat of my life created thus
by the science of equal forces.

An organ weighed in exact proportions
of expansion and contraction. My heart
labors, without solution, the same arithmetic.

Response to Erin N.

You bring up a few really good points here:

Compulsion isn't the same as dicipline.

This is something to really think about. Especially when it comes to habits. If you are doing something compulsively, even if it's a "good" thing, it has limited benefit for you because you are or have become at some point, a slave to it. It ceases to be a choice you made in other words. No real discipline. This happened with me and meditation. Once it became habitual it began to lose it's real meaning and purpose for me. I fight with this all the time. It's still healthy for me. It still works for me, but I have to constantly remind myself why I started doing it in the first place.

Chaos and impulsivity are not the same thing as sponteneity.

I used to really want to be spontaneous. People who were spontaneous seemed so keyed in to the moment. Whereas I was always stuck in my head, thinking about the past or the future. What I came to realize is that people who are truly spontaneous (not just carefree and impulsive) were people who had knowledge. They knew what needed to be done at that particular moment. They knew what the moment demanded and were able to respond. On the outside it looks erratic almost. Random. A person following their whim. But I don't think this is the case. It's not a matter of doing whatever comes to mind rather, doing what is right that particular moment and situation in time. The only problem is, how do you know what's right and appropriate moment to moment? And how do I come to know?

I refuse to start the change process where I am.

I NEED TO HAVE this evening. I NEED to sit in my chair and relax, feeling like my house in order.

It's funny how in some ways we know completely what needs to be done. We know what is wrong with us. We know. Get a person drunk enough and they'll confess. I've seen this. We know our weaknesses to some extent, yet we're so ineffective when it comes to self-medicating. Why does it seem impossible for us to create change in ourselves?

Of course I have answers to all these questions :) and a poem:

Deep down
we all know
what is there
and what is not.

It wouldn't be so obvious
on the outside
if we weren't always trying to cover it up
make it what it's not

Fingers self-consciously
tugging down the hem of a skirt
move to absolve the legs
of their imperfections.

So I caught myself looking at myself contempt-fully in the mirror today. Something has deteriorated. I don't know if it happened slow, over time. Pressure cooked without my noticing. Or if it happened all at once. A crack in the bowl. A fissure. Tectonic plates shifting. Whatever. Now that I've seen it I don't think it'll be too hard to fix. If fixing is the right word. You live in your own skin long enough you (hopefully) begin to gain some small understanding of what needs to happen for you to be healthy again when something slips off balance.

I'm going to develop a schedule - and try to stick to it. Law and order. Law and order.

I'm going to again point out to myself what I like in people. What makes them worthwhile - and therefore myself worthwhile. I've noticed that whenever I lose a little faith in others, I tend to lose faith in myself. I guess it's just another thing. We're constantly looking for answers. What's so troubling about people who do "bad" things is not always what they've done, but what that says about us. I notice it in myself constantly - the looking for answers, for identity in others. I'm not always interested in others - just what they have to say about me. What I can learn about me from them. About humanity. Even their most personal stories. They're talking about me too. All stories are mine.

I have so much to learn. I am incalculably ignorant. But at least I have somewhere to go from here.

you're trying too hard - surrender.

I saw a man today who had ears like dried apricots.

I saw a man today bent over a pair of men's patent leather shoes, buffing away furiously.

I saw a man today crossing the road who looked nervously at my car as I inched it up to the crosswalk line.

I said "hello" to Deb who works the burrito line at my favorite bistro. She has a teenage daughter and a grandson. She's got the kind of sense of humor you mistake for rudeness at first. She said I looked tired. I am tired. I had the pleasure of "putting up" Kt and Seth last night. I made deviled eggs, some anti-pasta, fettuccine alfredo, and cookies. I do actually enjoy cooking. I don't know when I began to believe that I didn't.

It was good to see Kt. She made a scrapbook for me I feel the need to show off as soon as possible. I also enjoyed having Seth around. He and Matt get along really well. Matt entertained him while Kt and I went for a walk. Later we went dancing at the Star Bar where we both got really sweaty.

I'm not the most trusting person. I wouldn't say I'm un-trusting necessarily, but I try to keep my eyes open. There's usually not much I need to trust people with so it hasn't been an issue. Lately I've been conflicted. I want to disclose, but every time I open my mouth I feel I'm just providing another person with ammo. Most of the time I feel healthy (not a feeling but what the hell) about disclosure. But right now it feels more like exposure. Sometimes I take people's good will for granted. I assume people have basic good will towards each other and that they operate on somewhat standard moral practices - like openness and honesty. This isn't the case all the time. It's left me feeling I need to be more careful. More sensitive to how I'm being perceived, despite my actual intentions, motivations, feelings etc. Despite how I actually AM essentially.

On one hand, it doesn't matter at all what people think of you. There's a disconnect between people's thoughts and reality - so what does it matter? Thoughts can't hurt me. On the other hand, you can be whatever you want, have all the good qualities in the world, but that doesn't guarantee success typically unless someone else recognizes those in you. Like the whole grad school thing for instance. Or leadership. It's not enough to be right. Just like how good research alone doesn't facilitate change in the world. Being right or "good" isn't enough, you have to be convincing as well.

Yosemite Valley

Wedding was yesterday. Will write more when I get back. It was the best wedding I've ever been to - and it was mine. Couldn't ask for anything better. Will share my pics when they come in. Yosemite is a place for dreaming. Will try to visit the Giant Sequoias before dusk.