inspired by The Mayfly Project
'07
Seeds
living with decisions
watching Light dissolve
Big Rock Candy Summer
Drawing Chalk Doors
a fly on Wagon's Wheel carried forward to the
beginning
I shall sincerely miss ending my dates with /07.
It is a good number, but I guess the price of having variety and change to appreciate is not having everything at once.
Here's to '08.
Also a good number.
Just,
different.
Here's to the end of a year of beginning,
Here's to a future of growth.
Social trends at this time of the year remind me of something that I thought of .. a little over a year ago (oh my, so near it seems, yet so much in between): Resolved.
It has not led to my own demise, but since reaching a state above amorphous jelly, my focus has been more to find and climb small gradients of staying alive than on chosing my preferred, drawn-out death (a hyperbole, - physically, I'm fine).
Far from noble declarations,
my image lately has been one
in which I eat truth off the ground like a stingray.
It tastes like rubble, but it is real.
I am gathering myself to try again.
Announcing:
The first annual Olivian Paragraph Month which begins today, Dec 27, 2007 and ends on Jan 27, 2008 (the day before school starts).
From the creator:
What is Olivian Paragraph Month?
It's my response to NANO. Maybe it's helpful to write 50,000 words for some people, but I think getting in the habit of writing smaller, tighter, more concise writing and editing it well is what really improves readability of writing. So, within a month, the same time it takes for some people to write a very bad novel, you are challenged to write one good, solid story of a paragraph or more.
....and begin!
-Cool Hand Luke
They always look bigger and steeper from far away.
It's not so bad once you're there, right?
It's good, even.
And, I'm going home.
(appended, 12.21.07)
And, on my way home, ~17 hours and a free 2-way ticket later,
I declare the terminal in LAX which contains gate 69B to be cursed, for it has caused me more than 24 hours of accumulated delay on 2 occasions. Curséd also: United and Continental (but we already knew that).
This is maybe my 4th batch of tie-dye, but second round of pictures.
The tie-dye itself was done sometime in September, but I'm only getting the pictures up now.
Sometimes,
I think about how there is so much future out there
and so much change and so much uncertainty
...and it gets despairingly frighteningly unknown
but I guess I should try to remember that when I was 5, there was even more of it, about which I knew even less,
and I wasn't afraid then...
it was exciting.
It's been a long time from 5 'til now, filled with many different, interesting, transient things. I just have more of it to look forward to.
"Let's wipe away all of our expectations and wander around like children."
-郝鹿路
(my paraphrase...I shall have to check for the actual quote)
Finals Week.
I nearly lived in the library. 
I took a mandatory break from book-staring-at to find some external, dynamic stimulation in the library lobby. After 10 minutes or so, I was walking back to my desk when one of my very tall friends from a nearby desk passed me going the opposite direction, grinning down at me from under his awning of dark hair. I slowed and stopped near him to imply "..What..?"
He hardly needed an invitation:
"Somebody just walked past swinging a dead duck!"
"What? a... duck?"
"A dead duck! Swinging it, like this!"
"What? ...in the library?"
"This duck falls off of the library... I didn't see it, but the people in the desk next to me saw it fall off the library past the window! And then this guy walks up and picks it up and walks off with it!"
"What? just now!"
He nods vigorously as we both enter the library lobby (I had joined his original trajectory). I'm still mentally reeling with collecting the images in some coherent conceptual basket when immediately before me at the circ desk, I see:
"Holy Cow! Is that the dead duck? How did it die? (Can I see it?)"
"Sure. My friend shot it."
My mind flashes back to someone requesting slingshots for shooting ducks off of the Steele's during freshman year. Someone is shooting ducks off the library?
"He SHOT it? With a gun?"
"Yeah, it's duck season. He just got back from Sauvie Island"
Oh. This is starting to make sense...
"How did it fall off the library?"
"Oh, well, he brought it back to give it to me on the 2nd floor, and I dropped it out my window..."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"I must cook it and eat it. I can't wait for finals to be over so I can eat this duck."
"...can I take a picture?"
"Sure."
A funny bit of trivia is that there was a guy who graduated last year that used to have loud arguments with the library circ(ulation) desk while tours were going through regarding demands for an explanation of why he couldn't take his duck into the library (he had a convincing-looking fake decoy-type duck). I told this story to the boy with the dead duck, and interestingly enough, I randomly met the boy-who-used-to-argue-about-his-fake-duck downtown and told him the story of how someone actually had an equally un-alive duck in the library.
When I went back into the bowels of the library, the talk of that row of desks was about how a dead duck had fallen off the roof and some guy had just walked up and carried it off, swinging it.
The part that's still a mystery to me is... how he managed to just drop it out of a 2nd story window...
In a High School Lit class, we read a lot of poetry and stories, including The Worn Path by Eudora Welty (for some reason, even with all of the stories we read, the phrase 'The Worn Path by Eudora Welty'' comes to mind far easier than the others).
(SPOILER ALERT! in this paragraph)
In the story as I remember it, an older negro woman named Phoenix Jackson (authors and the names they choose...) travels a difficult path through many obstacles to get to the pharmacy to buy some medication for her ailing grandson. In class, our teacher raised an ambiguity that none of us had considered: considering the type of medication and the duration of its purchase, our teacher severely suspected that the grandson had not survived his illness. Why then, did Phoenix continue to return to the pharmacy? We were a bit incredulous at the idea - if her grandson had in fact already succumbed to his illness, why would she go out of her way? ..spend her money? ..to buy an unnecessary drug? And why did they keep selling it to her?
Our teacher led us to consider her travel of the worn path as a ritual of her devotion to her grandson, and then phrased the question along the lines of - why would she continue traveling the difficult and unnecessary path when the object of her love and devotion was gone? It didn't make any sense.
We were high school students then, and silly with adolescence and inexperience. The story was kind of weird anyway.
Our teacher clarified,
Why would someone continue with such a method of demonstrating love?
we blinked at him.
Why do we partake in the ritualistic consumption of blood and flesh?
- a morbid non-sequiter for an instant,
but in a small, largely Catholic town, even the atheists know when you're talking about communion.
I don't remember how he said it, but I remember him bringing his hands and the theatrical twist of face near each other as he dramatically paced the room, every bit a professor in a high school box.
The room was silenced in the realization that the question we'd thought was nonsensical is actually applicable. The room was quiet as the thoughts drained from that concrete image to other areas of our brains.
I'm not sure that we'd answered the question, but he'd made his point.
Last week or so, my grandma, aunt, and mom sent me a fat envelope of good-ol' midwestern homemade chocolate-and-cereal-y bars with a Hello message and a newspaper clipping. The bars are cut into little squares. I shared some with my friends, because that is what one does with good things. But, I've kept the others to myself. I eat them now and then, but not when I'm hungry, because they are not just food, and not too quickly because I must ration their sustenance until I leave. They are medicine against the food of the dead. They were sent to me from far away - made in the same country I was - they are evidence of the promise that I have a home waiting to welcome me back, and that soon, I will be there myself.
In my psychological narrative,
6's are ends
7's, beginnings
8's are a ripening
This is the last month of a year of beginning.
A seed doesn't grow unless it falls and is buried, I suppose. In some metaphors, anyway.
(posted 12 18 2007)
In which I turn around to find an unexpected slip of paper on my clipboard. I turn it over to find a most welcome note:
I'm writing again
I use a pen because it lasts longer than pencil.
The only problem is that sometimes ink glides so clean and easily. I like the scratch of a pencil - the graphite grinding over subtle contours of the page - It's a friction I can feel that reminds me: I'm getting somewhere.
Even if I can't keep up,
friction means I am again moving.*
Hang in there
Thankyou, Mr. Olson.
Two days ago,
Our paths merged on the library stairway
tentative eye contact, then the common greeting
How're you doing?
(pause)
better
...yeah, that's how I feel, too
good. It's about time...
yeah, before was worse
I know... I felt like that for a while
It really sucked when it was worse!
But now is hopeful
yeah!
(pause for relieved and mutual-understanding laughter)
...wow, I'm really glad.. this has been -
- .. the best conversation I've had all day.
(grin)
bye
bye!
And we went again our separate ways through separate doors.
"Approach the brink serenely and accept the risk of melting into nothingness."
A butchered translation, no doubt, of the words of one of the greatest masters of any language the world has seen, but I still like it. I've many times in my life only been able to feel great and positive changes after doing the person-to-puddle trick. We're always held down by habits and modes that we didn't even intend to develop crowding out new and better manifestations of ourselves.
- E.B.M
the moon in her tent of pastel rainbow -
the rippled quilted clouds of her cloak drape over this globe of earth-
through the ripples in the cotton, I look up, agape at shining dots -
diamonds in the vast expanse of clear sea above her
I noticed that the gray day produced not a darkening, but a clarity,
the wash on which the watercolors perform.
A river of malleable west wind stirred the flocks of solid yellow tree wings and pressed them amid the black and white tree branches. Beyond, sliding atop the west-bound sheet of the gray sky water, the black, white, and yellow colors did not blend, but encircled and caressed one another.
my ears caught a whiff of descending violins 
today is better.
Quoted on PostSecret
The children the world almost breaks
become the adults who save it.
-attributed to Frank
As I walked to the library in the warm bubble of my coat,
between the cold foggy lamplight, there were no sharp corners, no chameleons, no fish. Sharp corners are hazardous and fish an intermediate. If you can make chameleons sprout by will, you're dreaming.
I hoped for a bounding white stag, which leads to reality, to at least blink across the corner of my vision.
I saw none of these, and I haven't replaced the chalk in my pocket.
Earlier,
We exchanged the common greetings, a hazardous task for us both.
"I'm getting stronger," I say, surprised at the manner of optimism in my own voice.
Do you know, I've died once already? Now, it can only make me stronger.
She hears it too.
"What?"
"It can't kill me, I'm getting stronger"
After so long, the disease is only in my lungs, which guard my heart. Daily, I cough it out, but still my heart is safe, unless it's also in my head, which renders judgment suspect.
"Oh,"
She pulls me in with her arms around my shoulders.
"I'm getting stronger," I protest ineffectively, without a change in voice.
"I know," she said,
not unlike a mother rocking a child waking from a bad dream.
"I know."
(posted 12.28.07)
Leaf Bids Farewell
How brave they are to dance the dance so gracefully
(Posted 12 18 2007)
(What does it say for my school when all day I was amused that people were wearing costumes, but only understood that it was Halloween when I saw my math professors dressed semi-formally?)
Yesterday,
despite checking my email periodically,
I never received this.
Subject: Hey!
There you are! I've been looking for you for so long. I'm sorry none
of my other emails got through. Turns out I was spelling your name
without the last e. I didn't remember how it should be spelled.
That's funny cuz usually ppul don't know how it's pronounced, eh?
Anyway, I'm sorry I didn't say goodbye before I left. I'm currently
in Cork, India. It's been snowing a lot, but the bikes are still good
and the kittens haven't gotten rusty. I wish I could show you this
peach I've been sculpting.
The potatoes are all sprouting and they can't see very well yet.
There are no sad robots here. We are all nicely oiled humming
machines. I have not broken any teeth and most of the time we drink
red tea with lunch.
I do not miss our old home. I've just arrived but I feel like I'm
constantly arriving. It's not so bad you know, to forget. I
remembered you. I thought maybe you'd want to come. Oh, do tell me
how things are going there! I did not leave anything behind. I
didn't have anything to leave. It would be nice to see people again
though.
You can write in Chinese here, but no one remembers how to speak it.
A couple of the old men say they remember and they have meetings twice
a month. Nobody would mind. Beneath the grass, I think the ground
is made of sponges.
I do hope you can visit. You should make sure first that you don't
leave anything behind. And the old men would probably like to see
your Chinese book (Josh told me you're taking Chinese now). I miss
you and I hope I can still make you laugh. There are many things I
think you'd enjoy. Why don't you write more often? I would like to
read some of your stories.
Please meet me above Eliot circle at 9:10pm Thursday morning. Just
get on board the train. 98 Zephyr makes the trip a couple of times
every month. I'll be in the 48th passenger car, so don't train hop,
come find me! I'll probably bring my friend the Yeti. You should
bring your guitar. We'll it need to sing Wagon Wheel.
We're going home.
I don't know who will sign it. Maybe I'll just know. Maybe the poets
can tell me. Maybe it's whomever I was in the tavern with when this
drunkenness began.
I say to you today dear friends, that in spite of my general inability to recall them,
that last night, I had a dream.
I had a dream,
that I returned to my homeland in Wisconsin to find the land covered in snow and the roads partially plowed.
I had a dream,
in which my family had, in my absence, acquired a system of transportation to suit the snowy weather. Ordinary bicycling was out of season.
Brothers and sisters,
I had a dream last night,
that the sensible alternative transportation was to adjust your bicycle by hitching a team of adorable sled kittens to the front fork. They were cuddly and soft. They work just like sled dogs, but they are much smaller.
It did not occur to me
until I had been awake for at least several minutes and was brushing my teeth in the bathroom, that a team of sled-kitties hitched to a bicycle is not a normal mode of transportation.
"He who forsakes what is there
for what there ought to be
pursues his own ruin."
(paraphrased by impression as best as I remember)
EDIT:
in which I am corrected:
"The way men live is so far removed from the way men ought to live
that he who forsakes what is for what ought to be pursues his ruin."
Actually a quote from Machiavelli. I think it's interesting because
it's blunt, but you can take it a couple ways. I'd like to think that
even if he's right, there are times when it's worth your ruin.
-ST
The restaurant is on the corner of a block with space to eat outside at small round tables.
Indoors, it's like being inside of a very nice gift box or a giant petit-four. The place would be a great still-shot backdrop for a lighthearted cartoon.
The color of choice seems to be the spectrum of beige, from cream to chocolate with a hint of pink. Wide robin's-egg-blue stripes appear on the parts of the walls that don't have windows or circle mirrors, and the cabinets are what I'll call green tea with milk or cream olive forest green. The chairs are autumn-windfall-apple red.
Flowers, still-life russet-goldenrod fireworks lean silently against
each table's vase.
Quiet jazz (catch the trumpet?) from the radio matches the floor: vanilla cream and medium-brown outline paintings of kitchen utensils, each labeled with smooth curly-edge brushmanship.
A friend and I eat outside,
After much deliberation and indecision (so many good ideas), she orders the Tex Mex Breakfast, and I the Cornmeal Pancakes with Apple Compote and Caramel. They're so good that during the course of our meal, we switch plates twice.
Hers is some magical synthesis of beans/rice/salsa with a fried egg on top and ample guacamole served in a ceramic medium-dark blue bowl with a handle that makes it look as if it might have been raised with the saucepans.
I've never had cornmeal in pancakes before and I don't expect wheat to come anywhere near it anytime soon. Two slabs of pancake, served slightly off-center on a smooth white ceramic plate, were topped with an inviting pile of apple compote laced about with caramel. I think perhaps the best justice I can do to this pancake is again to list the ingredients:
*cornmeal pancakes
(Not grainy at all, but soft and very willing to separate when prompted by a fork)
*apple compote
little chips of apple in a little hill with cinnamon
*caramel
drizzled in an artistic entropic fashion.
Not too sweet to cover the cornmeal, not too much to make anything soggy, just enough to know that its there and mixing with the apple.
I know.. the flowers in these pictures are differently colored than I described... but that's because they use fresh flowers!
i used to worry
that an idea could die out with a people
but there are so many of us
and though we often pretend to be unique and individual,
our thoughts are nothing special - as long as there are people, an idea will find someone to host it. Especially today, none of my thoughts are original. If all of the humans who think the same ideas as I were to perish in an Instant, the ideas would independently come to others, though perhaps they would use different words.
Today,
instead of feeling like a fountain or a spring which channels and gives shape to my meanings,
the ink from my pen draws little cages on my paper.
I peer down at ideas
bound to twisted black lines
-the page becomes a prison-
and wonder what I've done
As quoted in Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler:
"Writing is that means by which the world values the Way, but writing is no more than words and words, too, have value. Meaning is what gives value to words, but meaning is dependent on something. What meaning depends on cannot be expressed in language, yet the world transmits writing because it values language. Although the world values writing, I for my part, do not think it worthy of being valued, because what is valued is not what is really valuable."
and
"A fish-trap is for catching fish; once you've caught the fish, you can forget the trap. A rabbit-snare is for catching rabbits; once you've caught the rabbit, you can forget about the snare. Words are for catching ideas: once you've caught the idea, you can forget about the words. Where can I find a person who knows how to forget about words so that I can have a few words with him?"
me dijé,
انا pienso que aiza comprender mas idiomas para poder 听懂 他们 que las 說.
Pero a veces,
pienso que 我 想 是 un 人 differente.
Un otro lengua, otro 名字,
別 我.
Aiza 有 palabras de cada ala, con cada pluma, para volar ... nicht 知道.
没有 zhao3ta4che1 escaparé mit 漢字
Ich yao4 schreibe así
nadie me encontrará sin buscando.
Two things discovered to me today, of which I am excited:
ASHOKA: Innovators for the Public
&
www.changemakers.net
The howareyou?goodyourself?fine exchange has often bothered me.
We'd already exchanged formalities, but as he left, he half-turned back to say "Are you well?" his voice lifted at the end in statement of a question.
Several words caught at my throat.
He'd asked the right question.
"With my soul" I replied.
At last, it is the right answer.
We must "resist the tetmptation to suppose that some miraculous and costly action can be the solution to all our problems."
-Somebody Else, (quoted by Eric Schlosser)
Also,
The original Reaxorz license expire(d/s) at midnight (depending on which midnight it is...)
and apparently to mark the ocassion...
A transmission:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-10-03-terror-exercise_N.htm
A terrorism drill is happening soon on the Steel Bridge. State
distraktion and annoyanke forces should be deployed to the scene.
Rekkomend:
1) Go to rektor and get decontamination suits, the tyvek ones, lots of them
2) get other good things and report to the bomb site to either klean up
or act as pieses of radioaktive kontamination whi4 kannot be removed.
3)enjoy yourselves
-melor
"I am frustrated," Sima Qian once said, "that my heart has that which it has not completely expressed."
"As a man who had suffered much, and who believed that all distinguished literature is born in suffering, the Han historian not only assembled and attempted to make sense from the abundant texts of the past, but also poured out sentiments from a heart shaped by a curious and traumatic series of personal events."
(Stephen Durrant, 1995)
Prelude
She had enthusiasm strung as though each passing moment were a landing felted hammer prompting it to sing, shining through her eyes in such a way that sometimes made me feel that I could see pieces of myself in her reflection.
I'd see her now and then, she was
that familiar tune that reenters your ears on occasion, unbidden, always welcome.
One day, I was playing, shaping sounds and volumes from the discrete set of keys before me. Finishing, I was surprised to hear, Oh, don't stop! Keep playing! The voice came from under the piano. I thought I'd heard a noise before, as though someone sliding under, but I didn't think they'd stay this long.
She peeked out and up at me like a baby bird.
Ah. I was glad that she was the one who'd been listening from below - I know that that's the best seat in the house: Under the piano.
That was last year. Today,
she showed me this poem:
First Movement
Under The Piano
by Ken Weisner
for Kit
There is nothing better than listening
to Debussy's Claire du Lune,
under your piano.
Students who are leaving you
go under their last day
and listen to you
play for them.
It's how you say goodbye.
The piano sits in the corner
of the small carpeted front room,
a Baldwin baby-grand
next to my Grandmother's 100-year-old
German side-table with lions' paws.
You have them dive right back there
into the dark corner
right beneath the bass strings. In a way,
a piano is a horrifying thing;
this black angel's coffin
could come thumping down
and kill someone.
You and a student rode it out there
during the big quake;
a bookshelf full of music
smashed the bench,
stopping inches from the keys.
When I arrived home yesterday,
you were playing Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G Minor.
I don't know why--I didn't even break stride--
just went right under
to close my eyes awhile
after a long day.
It's cozy, actually,
relaxing and warm
even for those who normally don't prefer the floor.
Oh, I love this part... a dramatic downward run:
descending diminished seventh chords in octaves
proclaim a minor key, some triumph in exile
turned sumptuous, modulating back now upward in thirds....
And though I am not your student
and you are not saying goodbye,
how good it is that you are playing now
for me! sprawled on the old carpet
appreciating every heady consonance
but also every jangly overtone
and percussive distortion,
the hilarious volume and vivid harmonics;
no, not even a kiss can do this.
And as in love,
even the mistakes are glorious,
blunt thunder.
And then when you go a long time without missing a note,
how marvelous--what a miracle--
transported by virtuosity
into the composer's heart, or is it your heart?
or is it my own?
Oh, terrible exile;
oh wonderful life!
And such a private place, sacred: the piano
filling the sky.
So what happens? The wonder
mixes with the love, music, and privacy
to form
shameless ecstasy,
a fortune so difficult to find these days
in nature, church, politics,
or even the theater.
It may not be God, but I feel loved
and you feel loved.
All the better because neither
the machine nor the interpreter
is perfect,
but the resulting chaos might be
the best thing in life.
And having married the piano player
so many stormy years ago,
now, without sentimentality but in
the presence of
Rachmaninoff--
so much meaning--
and hearing the wonderful sense
in the sound, mouth set in its slight smirk,
as usual slightly disappointed at the world...
I for once do the logical thing:
nothing--just lie there
and weep through the whole recap and coda,
silently, shamelessly, for the ecstasy of it.
Second Movement
Vivaldi's Sposa son disprezzata
by Ken Weisner
"il mio sposo, il mio amor,
la mia speranza."
In this song about a faithful wife
betrayed (che feci mai, what did I do),
I was astonished at how
the spare single verse and brief refrain
made one particular word
take flight within its vowel: sper-ahhhh-nza.
It flew!
In a six minute song, on the warm
current of grief, the soprano
soared again and again
a full thirty seconds
just on the updraft
of that one vowel,
as if the meaning of the song weren't grief at all,
but rather the possibility of
hope,
as if singing
were making, naming
her grief.
She was too good for him.
How freely and completely
she flew! Over and over,
veiled, yet soaring,
for as long as her breath would hold.
Third Movement
In Memorium
by Tracy Mehoke
There’s a boy at the piano
The piano that I love to coax a voice from
The piano that turns deft fingers
and minute internal tensions
into song
He’s playing the piano
And the air is thick with music
Not smoke
Music
In the SU
Everyone else hears it, too
The air is thick with our thoughts,
reading about images
and Lucretius
and swirling atoms and void
I’m not sure how acclimatized they are
to breathing atmospheric music
But I feel the music in my lungs
as if
my hands are the ones at the piano
and my arms are shaping it into
just the right size
to breathe out on the keys.
As if my wrists and fingertips
are pressed into the keys,
my palms conduct a symphony of levers
Before my eyes,
black and white
transforming into marble in my hands.
Breathing in, the music
is a radiantly churning cloud
Supporting on all sides.
From this height, I can see in
The last notes dissolve
The clouds drift away
and other conversations
become noticeable
as gradually
everyone remembers
their previous life
and wakes up from cloudy dreams.
The air thins
Now it’s just atoms and void
without the swirl
Now it smells
more like smoke
My head clears
And once again, I’m
within walls
with windows to see out
not a cloud, but a couch.
ba-da-
the door rests in its frame again
The piano is still,
a monument,
a nudging reminder
of something seen in dreams
Fin
One option down:
My Watson Application was not approved.
If I pause for a moment to consider the possible forks of my future,
it is not the prospects that lead me on into uncharted territory:
- moving to pursue a Masters Degree
- teaching English or studying in a foreign country
- choosing some possible destinations and living out of my bicycle
- traveling to research something and write about it
- inventing my own low-budget Watson Year
- (grad school is a 'no' at this time)
The goals I set up, the many things I want to do, the process of attaining them are all far easier to deal with mentally than the prospect of not having an immediate direction to work towards.
I think,
that when I cannot see a possible future,
I get very unsettled and partially paralyzed.
All of the above options, with the time and effort they would require, seem more mentally/psychologically possible to me than an option that my Dad brought to my attention a few days ago: a well-paying job near home. It would probably be a good job. It interests me.
But the prospect of living - not at home, but just several hours north is incredibly daunting at this moment because my mind cannot imagine either the time or space components of this future.
I am just interested in the idea that I feel more agreeable to traveling solo around the world than staying still in someplace that is near, but not quite, home.
Perhaps I have an odd case of motion sickness
in which I feel ill if made to hold still.
but I feel it.
Outside of the Red and Black Cafe
on its last open night at the 'old' location,
I find an old friend whom I've met but once before, at a cafe I've stopped at but once before (but this has been a day for serendipitously-timed encounters).
I told him about the many places I was trying to be at once.
He said to follow your heart
rather than an ever-changing wind
I said sometimes my heart was an ever changing wind.
Then realized, no
***
"Listen to your heart. It knows all things because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there.
Why should I listen to my heart?
Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet.
You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it's better to listen to what it has to say. That way, you'll never have to fear an unanticipated blow"
***
To others, I would be.
think I have a persistent, creeping fear that following my heart will take me far from here.
I have Tango class tonight.
And they were right:
for an instant, you know exactly where you are,
and it IS terrifying,
because all of everything is swirling except for you.
Because you know
Amid the rapid, constant change,
you know where you are.
***
I think I am beginning to understand this line from The Alchemist:
"Yes, that's what love is. It's what makes the game become the falcon, the falcon become man, and man, in his turn, the desert. It's what turns lead into gold, and makes the gold return to the earth.
It's not love to be static or to see from a distance,... Love is the force that transforms and improves the Soul of the World.
When we love, we always strive to become better than we are."
***
A Paradox:
I constantly leave an old self behind
I constantly am becoming myself
...to be the wind...
can I ever be content to stay still? I am always leaving, always arriving -
It's out there.
And there is so much of it.
There's so much future! What am I going to do with it all?
This prospect is nearly staggering.
And,
no matter how many times I hear it in every literature-related class I take, no amount of the explanation Repetition is used for emphasis is nearly strong enough as
using it once
in some desperate effort to carry a significance securely to the reader.
It took me a while to understand why they repeated whole lines, he said
you mean the verses where the next is a copy of the previous but with one thing changed?
no, the entire line repeated.
word for word?
yes,
it was for emphasis, he said
It was for emphasis he said.
Now I know,
I thought
Now I know why he didn't care to read my writing.
