Eulogy for a Language - Epilogue: Faithful Companions (or Sky 外有 Sky)

The special thing about planets aligning 


is they don't stay that way for long.

The night I gave up my placelessness, was also the night that the sky started falling.

You'd told me a secret;
said you were wearing my shirt
turns out it was a little too tight.
I had no idea.

The stars turn to water on my face under a gray evening sky
There are many ways that stars can go down
Stubbornly, we love the darkness they leave; the star we can't see.
As if we had authority to house-arrest a memory.

It's good
that tonight there are clouds, or perhaps I'd stubbornly love the empty dark behind them.

You thanked me for walking you home.

I wasn't expecting your hand on my back, as though gently sending me off
I wish I'd taken your hand while departing; a picture of faithful companions to stars.

Even if stars could stay put, the sky is still constantly changing.
I walked home alone to my own kingdom through fields in muddy shoes 
amid cold, falling stars coming down in tiny multitudes.

The frozen earth is gently cradled in white blankets.

Lost in the silent din of a widening gyre outside,
I think of my shirt tight around you,
holding you together where I failed.

I tell myself that even when it falls,

behind the sky,
there is still more sky.

identity

Sometimes you're Theseus

Sometimes, his ship.

Sometimes you're Magellan,

and sometimes, the Victoria.

Learning to walk

In the beginning
The land fell away on both sides

I walked a tightrope
I watched a horizon

This is the only way not to fall:
to put each step exactly where it goes and nowhere else.

The waves rose up. The air stormed.
Still,
only one put to place each foot.

The stars did not waver
Then, all was calm around me
The storm was yet outside
just distracting: a horizontal pillar of cloud and of fire
I walked through the Eye
until placing one foot in front of the next was second nature.

Then the rope became an open field
After all, with practice, what's the difference when regardless of terrain, you have only two feet and one path?

Speed skaters know the only place for each narrow blade is beneath the center of gravity.
We balance on an intersection with reality.
This walking is a meditation.
It no longer matters whether I follow the thread or it follows me.
From outside, it looks precarious.

I remember a chess player stating that he thinks only one move ahead - the best move.
The field may be wide.
The path is narrow.
And in each moment, only one step.
I find this comforting.
Even liberating.

Eulogy for a Language - Part I: Genesis - There was Evening and there was Morning

A language and its culture grow together.

(Part I) Genesis



Ours

was a language of lips and of legs, smooth

punctuated by bedsheets

bellybuttons pressed tightly under night

skin seeking fusion

telling songs of how long we'd waited,

what we'd wanted,

hadn't spoken

for so long

Answering silently NOW

to foreign questions like, "why oh why didnt we ..."

We were suddenly fluent

in the present tense

sheltered alone together

under our own covers

exploring the grammar of looks and of touches

in a common native tongue

Acoustics of hollow arrows

What if Cupid shot you with a hollow arrow
and you broke it off,

would the part of the tube
still set deep within you

resonate with the sound of a voice?

It's like even after I
pulled the fletching from my side
some of the hollow shaft remains
a tunnel straight to my heart

and that's how his words bypass my ears.


And,
what if Cupid aimed
not for the heart,
but the mind?

Confessing Regrets

I've done many things wrong in my life,
things I sometimes wish that I could change,
but few things that I regret.



Each to different people,
different times,
different places:

(1)

Your voice and your eyes asked if I'd stay for another drink and more conversation, but I felt compelled to keep a promise to myself to start the next morning early. I thought I did the right thing, so why did I feel only regret?

You accepted my decision,
but I never have.

In my thoughts, I go back and say, Yes, of course
of course.

(2)

On early morning of the first and last night that we kissed, we were both standing there, but I'd already moved on into the next day.
I should have kissed you back.

(3)

You held me in your arms in our pile of nightfall covers,
and I heard your voice, saying with a touch of wonder,
"What did I do to deserve this?"

You weren't asking me.

Fool that I am,
prodded by memories of times I should have spoken up,
I tried to answer.

I wish I'd let the silence hold us.

Ninh Binh weather report: days so dark it's like the world didn't want to wake up

For the last two days,
the Earth has seemed unwilling
to open its eyes.

Thank you

Giving me a better chance to dwell in an empty cave within fog
and notice what patterns arise from the mist

The trivial perception:
mapping me to myself.

(I've found you in the past.
Our lives will be a hide and seek.

Please, remember the many tiny lights, and gratitude for what reflects them)

A memory of unseen gritty streets

Now how did he put it...

It may have been a gritty Shanghai night,
unrinsed rain coating the city streets.
I think he was asking, why choose? Why couldn't you love everyone?

The one you love to talk with for hours
The one you are sleeping with
The one you wish you could wake up beside

I may have tilted my head under the streetlights.
We'd been talking for hours, walking along our own maps.
I balanced empty beer cans like offerings on windowsills, utility boxes, dented cars.

I loved him with my very veins,
crisscrossing like streets
under hidden stars.

Wanted: Found Travel Collage

I watch
I learn
I travel
I wander through landscapes of unperceived chaos,
mapping the metaphors,
patching together the photos like on the Truman Show,
looking up at the sky like it was a throneroom; as if the stars were your mirror.

Sharing my collage, asking everyone I see,
"Have you seen me?" I'm lost.

I'm looking for a girl
who is making a collage.

She left, you see, because she knows that we can only percieve
what we already understand.

She's looking for me
Trying to understand everything
so that she'll be able to see.

And, I miss her.

The Quest (or, how to find yourself a muse)

(discovered in the notebook, probably written on the train between Hue and Ninh Binh, probably around Dec 11, 2017)
(I don't remember writing this; it must have been part of the dream, and near the Source)

... It is interesting to see what hallucinations rise up out of emptiness.

I think these are potentium dreams. When we want to disconnect into nothingness, yes, it is to touch that primal energetic chaos of creation. But it's not all chaos; perhaps just undifferentiated signal.

You have to wade into it.
That's The Quest.

You have to wade into the nothing.
The nothing that is the seed of everything.
And, you have to become nothing enough
for the chaos to accept you as one of its own,
for you to accept the nothing as yourself
and see, at that point, that it's not really nothing...

It's an energetic nothing
A bundle of everything
humming, softly dormant
without a shape

That's where you come in.

Your curse
is that, being something, you cannot fully return to nothingness,
you can only befriend it.

But relax and let your chest be hollow.
As the energetic nothing accepts your body, it tunes its hum to fit.

It listens to you,
listening to it.

Quiet down.
Learn to listen to the energetic hum
of shapeless everything.

Noise is not chaos, but signals out of place,
ungroomed, uncivilized,
running rogue.

Let your chest be empty
and observe the nothings that make you hum.

They will not come at once.
They are timid and quiet. Wait for them like rabbits.

They will not come in an orderly way. Some will not stay.
Do not try to catch the first you see.
Tempting as it may be,
you'll scare it and the others.

Let your hollow chest become a stage.

Watch their dreams rise and fall, and ask yourself:
What shape must my heart be
such that these nothings
choose to visit? Which persist?

Your empty body is a flute
a singing bowl
a taught, but silent string.

Provide the tension.
Pay attention

to hear which nothings sing.


[...]


These visions are not meant to be futures; only possibilities.
They allow me to consider potential realities without commitment.

I try to listen to all the harmonies that make up my own voice.

The Quest is to retrieve something from the primal chaos: a signal
You are the vessel.

Quiet yourself to receive the signal. Listen carefully to its guidance.
When the hum of every/nothing has chosen a song in you,
Arise and depart. Return to the village with your gift:
a song in the shape of your heart.

An adopted energetic something
filling your empty chest.

This is not all predestined. The songs fit between your ribs like hermit crabs in shells.

It takes another level of patience, but if you can change the shape of your heart,
then different songs will choose to stay.

You can sample different signals. Give them time to rise and fall.
When they grow strong enough, you'll begin to see yourself expressing them.

Retain the quarantine
Allow them to grow stronger.
Practice singing them back to yourself before leaving the cave,
this energetic,
silent chaos.

Nothing is not empty
Nothing is future everything.

It is your sanctuary.
Let your body be a temple
Let your mind be a priest
Let your heart be a choir,
an organ

Breathe

Become a conductor
of the songs that choose you.

Breathe

Become a vessel
that harbors the music.

Listen
to what they tell you
Watch
the dance of potentials
Carve
your body
like a violin maker
and listen to the nothings that hum within your frame.

This is your Quest

To learn to sing your songs
First to hear them,
then to sing them to yourself,
then with others.

Observe
what gets your attention
what gives you energy
and what you begin to naturally produce.

Too much
static and we begin to see shapes
silence and we begin to hear voices
nothing and we begin to manifest patterns

Chaos is a fertile nothing
given a seed,
it cannot but drink the energy that matches it.

The Quest
is none other than man's effot
to unearth a sliver of valuable
signal from a sea of noise.


Some people mistake Potentium Dreams for instructions. They may be instructional, but they are not instructions. They merely reveal your wishes.

Watch their dance and learn from them. Do not obey them. They are not your gods any more than the trees and weather are.

But, ask yourself
why you allowed them to appear, and what their signal means to you, these mirages.

Wait for the consistent hum.
Its patience outlives the others.
This will be your heartbeat. Observe yourself with curiosity.

[...]

An energetic nothing makes it easier to hear
the rhythms I would like to have
and to practice.

descending a mountain of snakes

I dreamed them, one early morning
My body lying beside you in bed
My dream-mind still with you, picking its way along a mountain slope
And then there were the snakes

Looking down at my feet,
they seemed to leak from and over the rocks like a spring
already flooding over my ankles, swimming over each other towards the way I'd already come.
My heart fluttered panic, then still.

They seemed not to notice;
fixed unblinking eyes on their own horizon.
They hadn't come for me.

I could choose to fear them, and in doing so, cause commotion.
I focused on my own horizon; let them keep theirs.

A fate that has not come for you has no fangs.
My mind focused on their faces. Snakes of all different colors and sizes.
Smooth like grass and rough like flowing boulders.

My dream-fears, seeking confirmation of danger, identified one in particular
an adder or rattle-shape, cheeks fat with poison
yellow slit eyes staring straight ahead; not at me.
I was but a boulder in his landscape.

I breathed a sigh of relief atop my own mental tightrope.
One misstep could prompt a thousand poisoned teeth.
But, only if I drew attention with fear.
I breathed in and out in this valley. The sun was out.

These fates were not mine unless I chose to demand their attention.
I breathe out again, grateful for tightrope practice
and content to keep the egos of my fears invisible.

Grateful that I can look to my own horizon and let my fears choose theirs.
Grateful for being exactly where and when I am:
Descending a mountain, with snakes not meant for me.

One by one,
I respectfully lifted my feet,
and hopped down the rocks to join you.

This world is a glove

In the space between, it's easier to see an all.
That tree, that cat, those people.
Perhaps only as different from each other
as the pinky on my right hand
from my left thumb
from my ear.

What, in this world, is reincarnation?
What sense does it make to think of switching places,
When you lose the illusion of discretely separate lives?

The surface of this world is like a glove,
that life wears when it goes out.
What sense does it make to think of switching fingers?

keep waking

He told me of his dreams
Of how they're nightmares.
Of how he doesn't want to sleep.

I do not want to sleep,
Because I fear that I'll have dreams,
From which I do not want to wake.

What shall I do, but return to cultivating the space
between stimulus and response
in which a pilgrim soul may wander?

清明节

你知道吗？
我的外婆最喜欢的颜色青色。
她说过 是因为活的，生长的，青色
In which I am grateful for homemade qingtuan and tiny lights.

The time between

Somewhen in my imagined past

There is a girl still waiting
by the driveway
for her dad
to take her in his pickup truck to the dump, to the store, to the local racing club
knowing they'll to talk about science, about college, about people, about the future
real things, she knew.
She didn't know how she knew, but she knew, and she would save the memories for discussions.

neither the girl nor her father could know that for the next decade, he would leave each month without knowing how to say goodbye. And, she would get used to saying goodbye without knowing that he'd left.

She would spend the next few decades finding men who couldn't recognize her; who had a certain brand of humor and critical nature, and learning, painfully, by trial and error, to stop waiting and leave them instead.

"Just how lonely ARE you?" asked the Voice
The Heart stayed silent, knowing that the Voice speaks from the overflow


It is no wonder
that while Odysseus stole the stage at the time,
the character from the Odyssey I will always remember is the unnamed hound who,
on recognizing the disguised Master he lost when a puppy
wagged his heavy tail in joy, and finally died.


Filling the time between
there is a loneliness
The mission is to drain it until the empty space is just that and nothing more

no more salt,
no more water
just the space and time

The space between

Last year, the image was water
the kind that runs down a mountain, searching for a stream
the kind that reacts in perfect measure, no more, no less, to a dropped and sinking stone.
the kind that calmly accepts an obstacle and, in embracing it, flows unimpeded
the kind that is not ice

The image was water
and we made it down the mountain to a lake.

This year, I wondered whether there would be a new image
And there is.

It is the non-image. The emptiness, the void, the gap, the non-often-recognized-yet-structured space between.

In keeping with that theme, we ask ourselves what is not.

When I encounter a given situation with a given person
- what is not happening?
- who is not speaking?
- which voices am I not hearing?
- who is the other person not?
and at last,
- who am I not?

What at first seems inefficient becomes quickly clarifying.
In describing what is not the stone,
I finally see (and absorb) only the stone that falls
and nothing else

3/14/16

The pi day of the century, I spent it well

Would Einstein like Asahi?
We should have poured one out for him.

Crisscrossing streets through Shanghai,
An exercise in linguistic chemistry:
Adventures in Potentium,
An unexpected gedanken experiment
in the emergent alchemic triad

A steam-punk vat laden with purple possibility
a silver paint of reflective perception
the lightless black of non-negotiable that-which-simply-is
And the pack of Diogenic monks that herd these dreams into glowing vats or painted maps
in an allegorical territory following the physics of presocratic philosophy

all while warding off the maw that goes on consuming and is never consumed

There's a story
trying to tell itself
as we fumble for the images
And yet,
we find them.
Finding them, we test them and they hold.

The streetlamp flickered and went out. I witnessed receipt of the message before he left.

Have you ever realized that you're on the other side? An antipode of the very world that you once (and still do) walked?

"You can do it," I thought toward the darkened light, on behalf of a previous world.

The streetlamp hummed back to orange, then yellow-white before he returned.

I want to hear this story.

The Cave is a long tunnel under a roof of stars

Lyrics

It's empty in the valley of your heart
The sun, it rises slowly as you walk
Away from all the fears
And all the faults you've left behind

The harvest left no food for you to eat
You cannibal, you meat-eater, you see
But I have seen the same
I know the shame in your defeat

But I will hold on hope
And I won't let you choke
On the noose around your neck

And I'll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I'll know my name as it's called again

'Cause I have other things to fill my time
You take what is yours and I'll take mine
Now let me at the truth
Which will refresh my broken mind

So tie me to a post and block my ears
I can see widows and orphans through my tears
I know my call despite my faults
And despite my growing fears

But I will hold on hope
And I won't let you choke
On the noose around your neck

And I'll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I'll know my name as it's called again

So come out of your cave walking on your hands
And see the world hanging upside down
You can understand dependence
When you know the maker's hand

So make your siren's call
And sing all you want
I will not hear what you have to say

'Cause I need freedom now
And I need to know how
To live my life as it's meant to be

And I will hold on hope
And I won't let you choke
On the noose around your neck

And I'll find strength in pain
And I will change my ways
I'll know my name as it's called again

From alabaster, through a tunnel of silent lightning colors. Walking a Tightrope of Serenity. Accompanied by a jellyfish. It is stunningly beautiful.

All heavy laden acquainted with sorrow
May Christ in our marrow, carry us home
From alabaster come blessings of laughter
A fragrance of passion and joy from the truth

Grant the unbroken tears ever flowing
From hearts of contrition only for You
May sin never hold true that love never broke through
For God's mercy holds us and we are His own

This road that we travel, may it be the straight and narrow
God give us peace and grace from You, all the day
Shelter with fire, our voices we raise still higher
God give us peace and grace from You, all the day through

Serendipitous Wine

All day I think it, and last/night I say it.

I love you.

I loveyou
i love you

At times, I believe that all of creation is the attempt to both say and hear these words; is wrapped around the channel that sends and delivers these words; is a facet of this singularity.
I feel grateful and honored and humbled to be spoken through.

More importantly,
I know that you heard it.

The cosmos breathes
banners fly and flutes
hum with their hollow hearts
----

In which direction, I wanted to know, do I shout my gratitude to the universe?
Tell yourself, he said with a smile.
But later, (since the sky is a mirror) we both yelled gleefully towards the stars
in thanks for serendipitous wine.

Another kind of magic

(first draft lost)

It's another kind of magic to gimpse when something already is and has been.

Perhaps
even more amazing than discovering that someone understands what you are trying to say
Is discovering that not only do they already know,
they've already told you.

I love the way gifts can be wrapped in time.
I love the way that time delivers gifts.

I am indebted to writers
for preserving an experience for others who recognize it to point at and agree
yes; with all my past and present, yes.

Anna and Berlin only had one night

He was right to remind us both that you cannot prolong such gifts.  You cannot preserve them.

But, you can bring something back.

I am building a memory palace.

The bus home in Portland and everything as it should be

That 1/2 hour on Pingjiang Lu as the city kindly met with me

The block in old town painted gleaming white with gratitude, gratitude, gratitude for a gift I didn't know I needed.

The brilliant embroidered 'mandala' (I abuse the term) I planted (and by 'planted', I mean 'chose to notice') flowering on the intersection where I saw the separate woven threads emerge from their knit pattern and combine.

I endeavor to be a sculpter of time

and of meaning

I do deeply appreciate whoever is writing my book

Bedtime story of the universe

Have you ever fallen in love with a star
and then realized that it's actually a constellation?

letter in notebook before bothering to finally look up character book reference

I wish

there was a kind of heaven
where someone would tell you an account of the work you've done in your life

so that you could see who you have been in mine.

If, on your deathbed,
you have a little time left after your life flashes before your eyes,
please ask someone to let you see my 2015
and you within it.


And how, no matter what happened next
I remembered and used the memories for the rest of my life.

Ask someone to show you the blazing floral embroidered mandala?

on Yongjia and Taiyuan Lu.

It's selfish I suppose
to see so much of the world in terms of myself
but by the law of mirrors, perhaps it must be so.

I enjoy the celebration
of finding so much recognizable self
in you.

Comforting;
the world, a bit less strange
when there's more of you in it.

The SuperHuman Achievement

(proceeding from Frankl's description of the human achievement as taking on a role of creator and artist of meaning itself)

(and, meaning "Super" not as in being better, but as being greater, more inclusive, transcending individual identity)

And further:

"Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.  No one can become fully aware of the essence of another human being unless he loves him.  by his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features of the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.  Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities.

By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true..."  

-Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning


When I was young, I asked God to see others the way He did, and through his love. This description sounds to me like an elegant and ultimate combination of the "God is Love" foundation of John wedded to the Paulo Coelho's description of love as enabling and transformative in "The Alchemist" - In a world where the only constant is change, and where love is what believes in and encourages that growth, then that is a thing, a characteristic, a vision worth aspiring to, leaning on like a cane, cultivating, embracing, and becoming.

Moonshadow

'Did it take long to find me?' I asked the faithful light.
'Did it take long to find me?  And, are you gonna stay tonight?'

Thank you.
And, to the other little lights as well.


Is this part of what he (and Campbell) had mentioned?  That we are creating our own mythology?
Either way, I'll choose to appreciate the times when, after sending my request into the earth, the universe meets me in a way that I can recognize.

Today, my favorite lyrics are from "Moonshadow" by Cat Stevens.  It just occurred to me today that maybe 老子 would have also been amused.

Water. Meaning.

Flaming swords and rivers are no threat to one another

if meaning is of any importance,

and yes - yes it is. 

In some ways, it is the only thing of importance.

Although (and perhaps because) it is easily blown away without a trace.

The most important thing we can synthesize from the blocks we hack out of our minecraft-like world .. is meaning.

What art can one learn to craft from a river (or rivers) if one learns to treat time as a medium?

The game between the game

Following a prompt from a friend on a better way to practice this:

I am playing a new game of seeing the negative space.
Seeing the thing as outlined by the not-thing.
Noticing the distances that make things what they are by the nature of the separation.
Seeing the thing as being the outline of the not-thing.
When I write, outlining the not-thing with the thing.
Acknowledging the decisions not made, the roads not traveled, the silence between by which sounds are defined.

The quiet into which what I don't plan can grow.

The world feels much more comfortably full,
when I acknowledge even the stories that don't speak.

The Human Achievement

I'm listening to Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning on Audible.
It's the background and description of his school of thought in psychiatry called "logotherapy".

I like the way he describes the "human achievement" as that which a person may produce from a given "predicament".

Turning predicament into a human achievement is the manner in which all people are necessarily artists.  Like any art, it can be practiced, stylized, and honed into a truly respectable craft.

In everything, the uniquely human potential is to paint that layer of perception, interpretation, and chosen response upon the canvas of situation with which we are presented.

It is the art of acknowledging and working with what we cannot change to produce, create, or accept what we can.  We may or may not consider it to be successful, but it is this layer of perception and response that would not arise in any other way, and thus, in its uniqueness, is a human achievement.

I am reminded of the quote at the beginning of Steinbeck's Cannery Row.
And Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

continue (meaning of life resolved, next question please)

Walking the evening streets of Shanghai,

Harbin beers in hand,

(considering the All as an informational map in 1s and 0s
the "things" that we know as selected groupings of those,
and a human drive to uncover meaning like an algorithm tasked with revealing its own code)

is as good a place as any

to be reminded that one's "purpose" in life is to be,

to be uniquely,

and so being,

continue.



Thank you.

Fits and Stops and starts

Looking back at my own posts, not finding what I wanted.
Surprised at what I did find

including silence.

The posts, huddled in time around gaping empty spaces
craters. Trying to grow again before the next carves out its due.

Posts drafted in my head that I don't see - flags of thought I wish I'd thrown in time.
I see comments I wish I'd known about, responded to
Perhaps from others trying to walk across this same slippery stream
the stepping stones are many, but the water deep.
The breaths come few and far between.

Though I hope that others understand,
I know that really, I address myself in saying:

Please forgive the silence
it's not that I've been drowning
but all the work at breathing
makes it awful hard to speak.

At least,
I know the taste of air
I know when I'm awake
The struggle is for the next breath of consciousness
every time I slip and plunge
as I make my way across this river dream

I am ashamed at the ways I betray my own progress
but the way ahead is still forward
My previous steps, though unsteady, inconsistent, drive me from the past to start again
and on I go

Home Burial

I'm sad that I'll never be able to talk with my grandfather about "Home Burial" by Robert Frost.   But, maybe I'll be able to find something in his research or class notes about it some day.

I recently learned that my grandmother says that my grandfather says that this poem said it all.

He taught it to his students.

I'd read it once before, and I didn't get it.

I just read it again,

and I get it (or, at least much much more of it)

But, too late.

role reversal?

Seems that it is possible to change places without changing roles

إن شاء الله

the splash of liquid diamonds in the night sky

the commas, pause for breath, 'midst poetry

fresh dewdrops awakening, perched atop the grass

light rain of tears rebounding up unheard from dust and puddles

the scratch of drumming surfaces that beat a rhythm

flightpath of birds on their way to the throne room

hoofprints of Pitzeem's mare

the dirt in the field flying out behind Badger's hind claws

the wink of gleaming stardust settling behind rocky peaks in a yellowing dawn

The Globe Theater was ringed by lamps with reflective shades that cast the light upon the stage.

Do you see good things in the world?  Since everything is a mirror, the goodness you see around you is a reflection of yourself.  The light also comes from you, and is projected outward onto stage by the reflective panels behind you. Find your inner lightbulb, and twist the panels it to aim the light back onto yourself until you also feel the warmth.

crawling out of bed

It occurs to me in words that one of the most important abilities of a victim is first, to know when one is being victimized and when one isn't; and second, to know the source of the threat.

 If one is being victimized without knowing, this descends into an awful twilight swamp of partial humanity. If one is not being victimized, but feels otherwise, this brings that nightmare into waking life.

If one can identify the source of the threat, then one knows whether or not the swamp comes from oneself. Try to find that door and shut it. Anticipated, unverified threats from others have no place in one's internal world.

 Since the reality is that all humans should be able to expect to be treated with dignity and respect, to live knowing otherwise is a kind of nightmare. Even if conscious, it is a world that isn't real.
 This ... Dream.

morning sun rises

people are actually pretty cool

most of them are really interesting,
and are actually not trying to impose on me, get something from me, or judge/criticize/shame me.

I feel like I just woke up from an unsettling nightmare
It's morning and the sun is shining

The people outside are familiar in a normal way.

I shall practice again expecting commonly expectable things
when did I start dreaming?
 

I would like to remember this feeling of waking up twice.

And, not to return to that dream.

Longing and Patience and a dialogue in definitions

Longing:

The centrifugal rise of your heart in your chest every time you come around to check for no new news.

The upreached compass arm
not willing to release
the fix'd foot

'round which it paces

Patience:

The even space between my breaths
that is the same as every other space

Longing:

The heart of the Earth for the Sun

Patience:

The constant speed with which it pursues - rotating so that each face in turn may have a glimpse

The tide awaits the moon.

Longing:

The ocean swell which keeps its face upturned

Following even onto land
until the strength

(though not the will)

is broken by the rocks

Patience?

The Sun sees his reflection in the Moon

which the Moon shares with Earth in his apparent absence

The same day as lights the other side of Earth
is painted gently on our own night sky

The buildings are not interested - their light clamors too loud

But mountains, trees, and old stones still await the news

and someday the buildings will die down.

كلام معك ~ انا بحب مصر

Sometimes I'm not sure if it's you
or if it's the dry sun I feel the heat of through your words.  The dust, the carts,
donkeys on strong, tiny ankles
the hot dust quenched by thick and cool and maybe sour orange mango juice -

the bakeries with their tiny breads - ~ the yellow cardstock rectangle from Ramses Station, the heavy, knotted rope slamming courtyard playground floor,
the light gleaming off of Leonardo's guitar

the cool dark of that tomb among the pyramids, the giant blocks, the men with camels and cameras,

the sunset on the Nile and football...

I wonder if it's you, or this flap of silver-white and teal

wings of the bird of time that I want so much to glimpse again
and to tell me
flitting above desert streams
that it's ok

to forget

Though I know

We all must lift each other up by sharing what we know

At any rate,
if you do come,
I'll find mint for tea

and ask you how many spoonfulls of sugar?  two? or three?

freewriting -

Is writing time always going to be

10 - 11 - 12 - too late?

Will it always wait for that
liminal state
between day and
delayed desire for morning?

dawn
the farthest from my eyes
my tired mind and I
gaze into darkened pooling of the
night gathering
therin we glimpse reflection
of the day
and paint with ink.

painted in ink -
an ink that comes from between the stars

and
above the lands where day is clearest

spreads the whole sun across the sky

The lunar glow is not from one radiant source

It reminds us to share
there is no glare in her light

We breathe with borrowed breath
our hands
on loan from ashes

Eyes gently receiving the light that
from one source
funds us only after first touching others

The moon reminds us of this by her example

/remember you are not the true source/

And her beauty is not diminished
And in the gathered-cloak night sky
I see the kaleidoscopic gleam
still painted with the broad-brush silver river of their time snaked 'cross the sky
of a billion distant

ancient days

soon to be eclipsed by our own

When Helios closes the door of day behind him

He opens the Sky to the hall of his brothers'

The moon
unblinded by her own
reflects it all
a luminescent cool silk sheet

upon the face of Earth

The End of the Beginning

I think it's time to embrace the fact that I will never really be ok.

There was a time - a short period of time - in which I felt I had my life together.
I'd made a place for everything, and everything in it's place.

And then,
it was all unexpectedly scrambled. 
Like I was thrown to the ground had my brain scattered across the floor like a raw egg or ground beef.

I've been trying for more than 8 years to get it back together.  That's almost a decade.  Almost a decade of trying and failing to put the pieces back together enough to feel like 'myself'.

Those eight years each passed with a quiet unfulfilled hope that maybe sometime soon - with enough discipline, enough thinking, enough trying, enough rest, enough effort -  I could figure out how to get it all together again.  Certainly there are many other ways I've made improvements, many other accomplishments, many other things lost and regained… but it's been 8 years of feeling like I should come with a disclaimer "I am not at my best." "I've been better, I promise."  But, I've never been able to prove the latter by replicating it. Not sustainably.

Even when I look back on the time when had it all together, I didn't /really/ have it all together, but I didn't feel like I needed that disclaimer.

I feel like something came unraveled and I'm endlessly trying to 'ravel' it again… it's like I've never really been able to find the end.  Maybe I should take a hint from the fact that there's no English word 'raveling' for something that has 'un'raveled. 

Anyway,
I think it's time I embrace the fact that I will never really be ok.
Turn that disclaimer into a product description. 
If I've been trying for 8 years without figuring out how to feel like the 'myself' I thought I once did, then I'm probably not going to make it.
Not ok. not together. scattered. is the new self.

Those cracks are probably not going to go away anytime soon.  I might as well start setting my personal dinner table for myself and for each of them as well.


And, we'll try to say goodbye to the self I've been trying and failing to be.  If she becomes me in the future, it won't be by my intention.

In the morning, I'll wake up as me.  Same as every other day.  But this time, I'll embrace the fact that I am who I am now, cracks and all.
And, that I don't have it together.


(Besides ~
I suspect if there is any way through this hall of broken mirrors to another side,
it might start with embracing the image I have to work with right now.  But, I'm not going to think about that - that thought would just get in the way.)

(and by the way,… don't worry. I am ok.  I am physically, mentally, and psychologically well-off and stable.  Compared to most of the world, I am relatively excellent. But, that doesn't stop me from wanting to be ideally me...)

The art of losing

isn't hard to master

summer evening in May

according to the lunar calendar,

summer arrived in May

good thing

it's just in time 

for sitting on the balcony

with a calico kitten and a quiet guitar

curtains of laundry that dried earlier in the white sun

all resting together in the soft dark

parted by the hush of cars across the bridge below

beaded by the music drifting from a nestled iPad

in the orange-lamp-lit shaded dark

warm summer evening

国际劳动节

And on this May Day, one more international worker was liberated :)

镜子 - Chinese: mirror

People ask me why I'm interested in China and Chinese.  They've been asking me for 5 years.

I tell people that I seek contrasts, conflicts, contradictions, because where these things are, there is much to learn from.  I also think to myself that there is something about China that I feel I relate to - something that I see myself in - but of course that doesn't make much sense.  It makes more sense today, though.

I was reading this article ( http://www.theworldofchinese.com/magazine/articles/how-to-like-cheese-as-a-chinese-person/ ) about things that I have never experienced, but still desperately wanted to understand, as if this article about the 80's generation in China could tell me, as a 80后, about myself.

Do you remember that everything is a mirror?  I think that, as narcissistic as it sounds, one of the more compelling actions is to look oneself in the face - in the eyes.  I think that's why I'm interested in Chinese.

To seek myself in China is to explore the nature of this mirror.
And, I suppose,
to discover the nature of the mirror is to see myself. 

There are many many mirrors - China and Chinese just seems to be the one that's most fascinating to me right now.

For 5 years, that didn't make sense in words.  It still doesn't quite, but it's much closer.

Upon learning about the title of "The Thorn Birds" from the last sentence of Wikipedia, I thought...

I am on my 3rd life

one by one those gone before have found their thorns,

I am reborn

from their tragic ashes.

They sang themselves to death.

Who's next?

robin's shadow

we met in April,
flowered in June,
I loved him like a robin loves the northern spring
and winter came

we fell with the temperature
froze with snow
We were the swallow and the Happy Prince
the nightingale I was, oak I remain

I think the sun is like a flower that blooms for just one hour

May the glow of those days light the rest of my life forever

God is a basket weaver

When I ask about which strand is the right one, she smiles and shakes
her head, and slowly weaves it into the basket that I didn't know how
to see.

She reminds me that it's not so simple, or so singular -- the way we
all are carried.

Valley spectator, Spectre speaking

Regina Spektor is speaking to me tonight

On the Radio
The Call
Fidelity

I couldn't remember these songs properly when I clicked on them. It's
like somewhere, along the line, I told someone to ring me when it was
time because I knew I wouldn't be able to keep track myself. The
memory stored itself away until the day of its reminding.

I'm having my heart broken in beautiful and alive ways - breaking like
an egg. An old shell is slowly cracking so that what was safely
stored there in the first place can emerge and run and fly again.

Someone somewhere is singing my songs back to me again.


I know why we go through valleys:
In valleys, it is easiest to hear the echoes.
I know why we ascend mountains:
To call down into the valleys - the message has been carried and
loyally delivered
from mountaintop to mountaintop
we bring good news and guide ourselves through the valleys: the lands
where we to hear the messages we were meant to receive.


Now I know, ... why I take music like my lungs take air...
I keep my memory in music, the way fish navigate by smell.
No wonder
I feel lost without it, and at home immersed in it.
No wonder
In darkness, I am inclined to silence, as though trying to allow
myself to be slippery and forget my way through lto escape the claws.
And No wonder
in tight situations, lacking traction,
I cling to songs like a tow rope.
Though my hands may run red and ragged, and the rope slips, still I can follow.
Though it may be dark,
I can hear the signs echo from the valley walls, enough to remind me
of the steps
They pull me strongly to the land they came from, the land they're
tied to in which my memory dwells, and won't abandon me to whatever
world would claim me elsewhere.

The music crawls like rope down cavern walls, waiting to remind me.
.

Eternity is the Cure for Passion

This song just reappeared itself within my head. I think the title is
"Sunny Days" by Jars of Clay:

"If you're waiting on love,
it's a promise I'll keep:
If you don't mind believing that it changes everything
then time will never matter."

I'm glad someone somewhere is singing my songs back to me when I need them

Mending Wall - Robert Frost

http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

I love the dragon that sleeps in the earth

I love the dragon that sleeps in the earth.

The smoke from his nostrils catches the glow of his breath.

The glow from his belly alights on the smoke of his nostrils
which drifts on his steady breathing
casting the dancing shadows that are the world we see.

I love this dragon
my eyes catch his embers as the glow shifts,
winking through the curtains of smoke
twinkling like stars

Even my body is a plume
Drifting like a banner in his breath

Language

We learn by imitation
we synthesize
we innovate
we produce

But, even our productions are affected by what we express,
intentionally or otherwise.

What we express is shaped by the way we anticipate it to be
interpreted by ourselves and others.

In a Dune-like manner,
We all of us are interacting through a medium - language, culture,
communication - by which we channel selected combinations of those we
have observed; we manifest chosen proportions of everyone and
everything that has come before us for the sake of significance and
meaning that can again return to the world from which it came to be
seen, interpreted, and perhaps even understood.

I learned words from my parents, and every interaction with every
person since has flavored their meaning and adjusted the colors by
which I choose to speak. It was the same for my parents, and for
theirs, and for those before theirs…

The voices of the multitude who came before us speak through our
mouths, with our voices. What is "my" voice, but a precise
combination of the voices of those multitudes?

My voice continues through those with whom I've interacted, and theirs
through mine. This is how we participate in the linguistic and
cultural memory. This is how we think, collectively. Our mixing
voices long outlive our tiny breaths.

The Growing Season

Even in the furrows of difficulty, does nature sow the seeds of resolution

The plow that breaks the earth and seeds for new growth seeds come
hand in hand. One hand drives the plow, the other sows the seeds.
Rending and resolution meet in the furrow.

First, one prevails, then the other. But, both were there from the beginning.

stories as meaning and memory

Stories are how we organize and make meaning of information.
Therefore, the best mnemonic is a good story.

Two images of God

God is the _whole_ journey
(and by this, I mean all possible paths)


God is a writer
he has to let his script
go out and be interpreted by others
here is hell

To Light, as seen through the bushel

(In the way that a leaf or a twig carves a path through the stream)
I am a sculpter (and a sculpture)
of time.

I am a time sculpter
a reorganizer
a gatherer

I am the shepherd's apprentice
of fireflies
and the little light they carry

I love the dragon that sleeps in the earth

The sun scattered across the water
The breath that spreads a smile from its first to final
The voice that echoes in the stars
The wind that makes a lifeless banner dance
The reflection in the mirror of the sky

I used to love the edges
since they gave the light a stage to dance

But, I am learning to love the light.

When I learn to love the blinding sun from which it comes,
I will know everything and nothing

I will know when we finally peek
around the corner
we will see not a man behind the curtain
but come face to face with ourselves.

I delay, because then there will be nothing left
… and everything

(We will dissolve like birds in the throne room)
Never a clearer mirror

Bly's Badger, Keats' Stars

With whose voice do I scream
as I root my feet in the earth and expand like a stalk
imploring for heaven?

The scream
takes all the effort of my life,
but will make no more sound
than the lifting of fingers from the keys before the final bow.

But, it is not a voice.
It is the hollow wind of the universe
breathing
in which I am a flapping banner

Oh, but to fashion my form like a whistle and
capture the glorious friction!

The expensive friction, the difficult friction,
the grit of one presence saying
I AM HERE
as it meets another
and moves across a surface

Oh, and I love friction,
the unnecessary heat returned to the system.

But oh, to feel!
It is to know that something at least is and was -
the blessing and the curse of substantial beings
to feel the rasp and feel the proof of friction.

And, with this friction,
this inefficient heat,
this proof of being and changing,
with this friction as my guide,
I craft a whistle
so that the hollow breath of the world
may catch the sails of my being and SING
before
this breath expires.


I breathe gratitude to those who came before, and left me their images
with which to think.

The Cup that Rumi longs for

This is the passion that drives the universe
- to have something to say -
and to strive your whole life
your whole being
generations
climates
solar systems

to say it

Because it never comes out quite right

But, if you could just send it out
And hear yourself echoed back from the sky,
your heart could die in peace

they seem like truths

All that you see and seem is a mirror, and you are the projector

People are good at saying what they WANT to be true

We are what is left when it comes time to solve for the final unknown
after all else is measured.

the tour

Many times,
I wanted to say:

"I'll be your tour guide.
I'll take you everywhere and show you everything,
but I won't say a word. See what you will."

My heart is begging that you'll choose to see and understand.

Do not look directly

Some things tarnish when exposed to air
and so I hide them here
wrapped in words

The ink takes the 1st
beating of reality
(those with eyes may see)

The words, the second
(those with ears to hear may hear)

What remains is for those with hearts to listen to the silence underneath

Longing (another definition)

The desperate pledge of palm on (sliding) glass

sometime in maybe Aprilish, I think

I am in China :)
Spring turning hot summer
downpouroutside
night, not asleep yet
I am in CHINA!

healing the world

I have a friend who is Jewish.
I asked him once about the laws he chooses to follow -

He said some of them, he really believes are the best way to live.
For some, it's hard to tell what benefit they may have. But, as tiny
humans, we don't know what is really going on in the world, and what
part obedience of the laws plays in the grand scheme.

There is a phrase for it - I forget the phrase - but the meaning is of
Healing the World.
The world is broken, but by the actions we choose and the laws we
follow, we are healing it without really knowing the exact ways that
this is done.

I'm not following Jewish laws.
But, I was thinking about this because today, I feel like I can look
back on what I feel is a small part of my role in healing the world.

even more fragmentary

the even more fragmentary nature of recent posts may be resolved once
I exist on internets that allow me to edit thoughts post-posting

edit to the previous

( I just realized I had written this in a notebook, but it somehow
didn't make it in with the previously-posted ideas)

I feel like I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
I also feel lost.
Maybe I am supposed to be lost for a while.

always seeing the stars

Sometimes, life seems like maybe one long dazzling punch in the face,
that you don't realize it until it's happened.

All Summer and the day after

"I think the sun is a flower, that blooms for just one hour."
- All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury

I think, that like many natural phenomena, human beings go through
periods of extension followed by the necessary contraction, followed
by the rebounding expansion, and so on.

It sometimes seems like every 10 or 12 months, I get a really good
month. That isn't a bad ratio.

I think I feel sometimes, that my time for expansion is beginning to
cool, and it is time to contract once again. I think I feel a little
disappointed, as though the opportunity to stretch and grow came, was
hobbled, and is now passing. There certainly were good parts, and I
have been accomplishing my missions, but it doesn't feel like the kind
of full stretch that it seems it could have. I will have to begin
gathering my energies for the next one. I look forward to a little
shade and quiet.

Smile for the camera

I have a lot to be happy about all the time.
I am living in a dream year.
But, when I look at pictures of myself here - even ones where I
thought I was happy and smiling, thought I was being pleasant, thought
I was looking exuberant - I think I actually look kind of depressed
and maybe a little desperate, as if I am afraid that looking into the
camera will open a channel to something I'm not ready to see or to
have seen.

The most disturbing part is thinking at the time that I was happy and
fine, when the evidence seems to point to more ... weary, and slipping
in my poorly calibrated attempts to keep up the act.

to Tumblr

For internet accessibility reasons, it might be a while until I can regularly get to this blog. So, if I have something to say, it might end up on Derivations on Tumblr instead. I'm just sticking the link here for now in case I need it later - if you try to follow it and can't, it's because I haven't actually used it yet. I also finally set up email posting, so maybe I won't even have to use it. Also, the 'old' Wordpress Tracy Update will also be continued on the Tracy Update tumblr, since I have discovered that tumblr is so much more convenient for me to use here...

Here we go again (deep breath)

gettin' up again~



got a call to answer

what solvent to create the solution?

"First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean."
-Matthew 23:26

These simple instructions have seemed so difficult to follow for so long - how do you clean the inside of a cup?

...Perhaps by drinking it?
Can't go under it, can't go over it ...

the breathing is worth the work

To my 5-years-ago-self:

Thank you for your work,
the first good lungfuls are already worth it.
I know you remember this song in your struggles - it is now one of emerging -
keep going - there is sight of land - and we can almost stand again...



I'm not sure if you can hear me or not,
but thank you.
The drowning has seemed awfully easy at times.
Thank you from the future. You did well. We're going to make it.
briney, tangled in seaweed, and all...
Don't let up...

Thought pocket

God is all of the journeys

There is a cradle that can be made in the distance between two peoples' eyes

the pain of parting is down payment for reunion

everyone is me, but with their own unique changes. I am you, with some important differences.

when trying to make decisions under emotional influence, remember that your brain is on drugs

everyone just wants to be respected, understood, and allowed to live

a torn seam in the fabric of my life has just smoothed over.
it's a little like being able to see the whole sky again - front and back.
and maybe the water will warm enough that my fractured iceberg will dissolve, and hey, it's all water anyway.

I got rhythm, I got music, I got my wide horizon
my world just recovered some of its fullness

regathering the horcruxes… I made too many .. In attempt to save it, I divided my heart and scattered the pieces into hiding. I face a cooling - now I've been remembering my hiding places - bring them back together, gather embers - it is not yet time to fade.


I think,
that as the life moves up through the trunk from the earth,
it can feel the other branches, the roads not taken,
as it stretches towards the particular leaf from which it will be exhaled back into the world.


When You Are Old by Wiliam Butler Yeats

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced among the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

(Happy Easter.)
One month since I made it to the river

dispersion

it seems,
that when a signifier is no longer present,
that which was signified disperses,
like dandelion seeds or fireflies or mist
and alights a little on everything else around

My grandma's favorite color is green

I come from a long line of strong women
My grandmother began college and moved to a farm to raise 6 children.
My mother and an aunt went to Veterinary School
I have been a math major, a nuclear reactor operator, and made it to China
Enterprise and entrepreneurship run in my family, and I expect similarly of myself

My grandma's favorite color is green - like growing things
I remember:
When I was young -
Saving her perfect strawberry jam by eating it so slowly that it began to mold,
Grasping the upper bar of my crib in protest of being made to retire there in the blue-gray twilight,
Being unable to escape either breadcrusts or unfinished milk
Her approval of my cursive handwriting, and eventually, of my gift-wrapping
The way she colored perfectly within the lines
The colored egg she brought me from a research trip to Ukraine
The greatness of her smile when I visited her in the hospital

When I was young,
I hid from the way she made me eat my breadcrusts, at an age when grandparents were judged by their willingness to provide icecream.
She was the strict one, the no-eating-cookie-dough, brush-your-hair-100-times-a-day, stand-up-straight-don't-slouch, eat-all-your-crusts, drink-all-your-milk, you-don't-know-what-you're-missing, one.

Raising 6 children herself, she had more than enough to spare on a family half that size. Old milk went back in the fridge to come out again when your tummy had made room for dessert. She made nearly every kind of potato at Thanksgiving and whipped out the smoothest mashed potatoes short of instant mix.

She always said she had a dull personality, so she had to wear bright colors, but if you've seen her, and seen the way her enjoyment of life and her pride in her family beams out of her smile, then you might also find her claim a little hard to believe :)

In my high school and college days, I enjoyed the friendship and conversation of a grandma that no longer had to be strict with me. She took interest in my pursuits and encouraged and supported me such that there are many things that I literally would not have been able to do without her. Solid as the stone from which her house is built, and just as midwestern, she raised a family able to go off into the world, and grandchildren who benefit from a firm family foundation.

She is a strong one.
She's lived a long, and sometimes difficult life
Her family is successful, and she enjoys bragging privileges.

I have forgotten how old she is, since every year she tells us that she is going on 27.
Soon, I will turn 26.

When her health came into question for the second time,
She chose probable death over extended medical treatment.

I can only hope that
I, too, will be this kind of strong.

I love you, grandma, from thousands of miles away.
Thank you for who you have been in my life.

relief... is not the right word

I am having a very hard time thinking of the right word to describe the feeling of being told that the letter that might be the last message you will ever be able to send to someone, has made it across the time and distance, and has been received and read.

it is grateful
it is grieving
it is almost debilitating
it is finished
a part of me can let out the breath it's been holding and rest in peace
and the rest of me celebrates mournfully

I told my brother the good news I'd heard - that his email had been received and read.
"That's good to hear," he said - his shoulders relaxed, bringing his forehead down to his hand as the first tears came, and mine followed.

Life

... is blindingly glorious

Spring is here, and once again the world is still spinning, and all right.

I remember two springs ago, noticing that after seeing the world light up again, I felt at peace to let it go on without me, seeing that it was growing and greening again - the life was not forgotten in the cold earth. I keep trying to push the rest of the world on with the warmth of my breath, and let it leave me behind to fade gray and smile to watch it go.

I feel that for a long time, it has been hard for me to tell the difference between living and dying - between breathing, growing, exploring, creating some chaos,... and trying to put things in order so I can die responsibly.

My grandmother is showing me living and dying.
My brother and I are trying to show her how well the world is turning - its ok to go.
My brother's slideshow reminds me of life as well.
The pictures are not well-composed, the subjects are often unprepared for the photos, and many are blurry.
But, the life in them! I remember it! A lesson, for me.



Spring is here

I think it's about time I came back to life.

Living is chaotic :)
I will have time for cooling later

belief makes things true

(thanks to Gavin DeGraw for the song title)

I think, that necessarily, people are not to be trusted;
they are to be believed in.

Fractured (I glimpsed a reflection in the gathered shards)

and I realized that it was me
I was broken
I was shattered
I was scattered long ago

and the visions I see in shards around me is not a lost God, but my soul (it is both)
I am not the only searcher, wading through the mirrors casting slanted golden light. I am not the only traveler, the only gatherer, stooping for pieces smaller than myself - we all of us are pieces

I am also a sharp-edged splinter, cast down with my brothers, my sisters, and in the confusion, I have thought they were someone else. I am a piece in the puzzle collecting.

The God I saw dispersed in shining lights,
As he was dispersed,
so the self I am familiar with appeared
and wondered

I call to the stars and they call back because we spoke with the same voice. They hear their answer in my echo.

In this moment, it is I who knows this.
But, soon it will pass and reflect from a different piece of fractured glass.

a crack around cracks around cracks
and so the light gets in
and we are dazzled

Pitzeem and the Mare

I brought a copy of "The Night Abraham Called to the Stars" by Robert Bly with me.
The other night, realizing I was parched for poetry, I turned to it and asked for water. I'd glanced across this poem before, but now have eyes to see:

Pitzeem and the Mare

Let's tell the other story about Pitzeem and his horse.
When the One He Loved moved to the mountains,
He bought a mare and a saddle and started out.

He rode all day with fire coming out of his ears,
And all night. When the reins fell, the mare knew it right
Away. She turned and headed straight for the barn.

No one had told Pitzeem, but his horse had left
a new foal back in the stable. She thought of nothing
All day but his sweet face with its long nose.

Pitzeem! Pitzeem! How much time you've lost!
He put the mountain between the mare's ears again.
He slapped his own face; he was a good lover.

And every night he fell asleep once more. Friends,
Our desire to reach our true wife is great,
But the mare's love for her child is also great. Please

Understand this. The journey was a three-day trip,
But it took Pitzeem thirty years. You and I have been
Riding for years, but we're still only a day from home.


( and another poem, just the last 2 stanzas:)

The Country Roads

...
In my early poems I praised so many lost things.
The way the crickets' cries in October carried
Them into the night sky felt right to me.

Every way of knowing is blessed by bootleggers.
Because the government does not allow delight
To be sold, you have to find it on the country roads.

平江路上找到我心 Peace River Road

Sometimes,
I arrive at moments like node in which I feel that I am in just the right place for the life that I am in at just the right time. They are brief, but deeply reassuring.





As I strolled Peace River Road that night, I felt like a variety of obstacles were shifting and passing around me in such a way that for a few sweet moments, they were all absent at once, giving me a rare straight shot of perception and appreciation. Like all the clouds parting to expose a mountaintop for a few brief seconds, like realizing Mt. Hood through the trees, like flying on my bike around the curve just as the sun emerged on fresh rain and set the world a-dazzle, a clear sweet breath of something like freedom.















It wasn't hard to feel that I was not just at 平江路, but that it was I who lay comfortably beside the river, the bridges my arms stretched out across the water.

A single star peeked out at me from the beloved sky behind ancient rooftops



平江路 was just perfect. I almost felt that, when I'd been trying to get to China for so long, I had actually been trying to come to just this place at just this time. I thank the hand of God.



And I feel grateful to everyone who helped and encouraged me to get here. My Grandmas, Aunt Karen, parents, friends, colleagues, advisers, and also the support of my boyfriend. All the life that brought me here.





And that's how the changes go, isn't it?
They just go, sometimes, like tectonic plates. *Shoop* different.

Spring

The days lengthen and the air warms
I feel my life rise up out of the waking earth

beautiful life

I remember writing on this very blog how my life was going to be awesome, because I was going to be so aware and try so hard. I've been feeling lately that I've just been doing a lot of doing. I need to find the hole in the cracks to fall through and be somewhere real and valuable. But, that description is misleading because I still think that where I am now is a good place for me to be at this point in my life. So, maybe I'm just being dissatisfied or thinking too much about what I don't have. However, I sometimes reflect on the things that keep me busy vs. the things that feel like being where the life is.

But then again, I guess there's always life to be near and in. Need to tap into that every day. (I've been considering whether up and doing Teach For China would be a welcome and growthful change in my life, or whether it is really more of the same (in the way I'm approaching it).

In the meantime, this is somewhat encouraging, and reminds me of other ways I used to write on here ...

2.20.2012

"Jesus > Religion" Spoken Word

found on An Aspiring Yogi in the West, thanks again my one-sided friend.

Imogen Heap, Filmed in Hangzhou

noticed on An Aspiring Yogi in the West's blog. A blog I have a one-sided friendship with.

counting blessings

my gosh, it has been so long since I've written, that I accidentally read a bit.

It is inspiring, to some extent, to think of all the things that I have now, and all the ways that I have come, however normal or expected they may be,

because there was a time when I did not have even them.

I had forgotten what I'd come through.

merge the looking-glass

I was hovering above the surface of the water, on a ferry between China and Japan, contemplating the nature of my fear.

There was a time when I felt established in my concept of the world and of God, even if other aspects of my life were trying.
My concept of God was not unlike as a parent, encouraging me to grow and become spiritually mature and responsible, to stand on my own and no longer need parenting.
This concept began to erode and eventually decentralize, showering every aspect of the universe in a dazzling brilliance, as if to illustrate the riddle: Godisnowhere.
I described it to a friend once as though a long-time pen pal had written one final letter saying that I would no longer be receiving letters from them this way, and that they were not who I thought they were. I didn't know where to look after that.

This corresponded with series of other life-events that wrought general shattering of plane of my life. When I stand on one shard, I feel I have access to the life and memories connected to that shard, but not to memories or self from the other. It feels like it began the morning I was pushed through the ice into cold water and awoke, submerged in my lower bunk, disoriented, homesick for the first time in my life, and trapped, unable to go home. My room was an echo-chamber into which rocks were daily thrown. I first swam, then crawled out and learned to walk again over a period of years. I told myself that I could stay with things because if it ever became /that bad/, I was young. I could restart my life, and still live a relatively long time. In some ways I hadn't considered though, I had already started over, and shouldn't be too hard on myself for only being 5 years old. In the times I could not walk, I learned by being suspended from the mirror of the sky.

I still sensed within me an understanding and desire to know God's will and do it, and a trust that it would be the best way to live, but also a fear that God would call on me to give too much. But, in my difficult times, had not there been provision? Had it really been too much? ...it still feels difficult to volunteer for, although volunteering still seems like the correct choice. I feel conflicted, and I sometimes fear the voice in the sky, though I know that my pain is not from God, and instead, there was provision.

I am reminded the example of a child staying with a kind aunt while his mother is in the hospital giving birth to a baby brother. The aunt is kind, but the child cannot help but link her to the absence of his mother and may resent it.

I was hovering above the surface of the water, on a ferry between China and Japan, contemplating the nature of my fear.

I perceived myself two selves - one contained within me, and the other without. One, the concave reflection beneath the mirror of the sky, and the other spread broad and convex. One side of me, internal. The other side, more external. I perceived that my interior me feared the other, which also feared. A fear of harming, a fear of pain; a fear of abandonment, a fear of insufficiency, and both reflections retreating sadly from one another.

I perceived that these two aspects of me were interchangeable. And both feared. They might as well be one another. I perceived that they did not desire to fear, and that they should be friends. And they were. Reunited, I felt capable and confident in myself and in approaching others.

They were comfortable with one another for several days, until there was a test. I did not succeed, and instead caved and emptied myself like a ship trying to stay afloat, and failed to hold my sense of person, sense of limits of responsibility, and regard my sense of appeasement. I emerged from the scenario, but not with anything of value. I failed to keep from abandoning myself, and I do not know how to ask the reflections to trust again, especially when I am not capable of assuring their safety. They desire to trust me to manage, but I give them no evidence.

Trust-building exercise: Impossible Questions

I was recently reading the following from an old article on Joel on Software about interviewing software engineers, when I came to his typical interviewing process:


Introduction
Question about recent project candidate worked on
Impossible Question
C Function
Are you satisfied?
Design Question
The Challenge
Do you have any questions?


I noted the 'Impossible Question' nested there in the middle and immediately thought that perhaps he was giving an example of a bad interviewing process. But no, it was his own method (...at the time. He now has an updated post on interviewing: GuerrillaInterviewing3)

Here is his description of the way he (at that time) approached the 'Impossible Question':


*****
OK, the third thing on that list is the impossible question. This is fun. The idea is to ask a question that they have no possible way of answering, just to see how they handle it. "How many optometrists are there in Seattle?" "How many tons does the Washington Monument weigh?" "How many gas stations are in Los Angeles?" "How many piano tuners are there in New York?"

Smart candidates will realize that you are not quizzing them on their knowledge, and they will enthusiastically leap into trying to figure out some back-of-the-envelope answer.
*****


I stopped after reading this to analyze the mingling feelings of dread, numbness, and envy that I was feeling, surprised since this was an informative article by a knowledgeable person. Why should I be anything other than interested and happy to learn from it?

I realized that I felt a bit put-off by the section: "Smart candidates will realize that you are not quizzing them on their knowledge, and they will enthusiastically leap..."

I feel that I am a smart person, but would not have responded to the Impossible Question that way at all. I think that perhaps a better adjective than 'Smart' would be 'Confident', 'Experienced-with-interviews', or even better:'Trusting' ... because my first emotional response upon imagining being asked the examples of 'Impossible Questions' was not a leap into an enthusiastic challenge (that contained too much variability to have any hope of being accurate in), but to think to myself, You don't really want to hire me, do you?

It occurred to me that my past ... 5? 8? Years of significant human interaction since leaving home has carried strong elements of feeling that if I am not careful, people will set me up, take advantage of my goodwill or whatever else they want from me for their own sake, and discard me for not fulfilling impossible (usually unspoken) demands if they have the chance. At least being asked an 'Impossible Question' gives me a chance to realize what game is being played and exit by accepting the better situation of being discarded sooner than later. If I really want something out of a situation, and can play the game long enough, then it can work. If there's not something I want so much, then Ok, we both know what's going on. I'll be going now.

It occurs to me that in good situations, this sets me up to feel always on edge, always needing to cross my t's and dot my i's and use exactly correct punctuation. It has kept the monsters from leaping out of the shadows and devouring me so far, so I keep doing it. Even when it doesn't work, I keep doing it because it seems like the best way to keep the monsters down. Every now and then, I don't see everything through to the last iota, partly because I may want to assert the ability to assess that it's not always worth it, and perhaps also to give someone a chance to discard me for not being perfect, although, in a situation where I don't have to feel like I should have been expected to be perfect.

This kind of response may be preventing me from reaching for speculative challenges. How many piano tuners are there in Seattle? I think it would be completely absurd to try to actually estimate that with any kind of confidence. However, thinking about it might be interesting in that the attempt to come up with the most reasonably possible estimate might produce some interesting thoughts or connections as side-effects. It can be fun to wonder about something together as long as no one is tricked into thinking they are actually right.

It was good of this article to show me this conflict in ways that I am vs. ways that I can be, and would like to be. I've been needing things like this.