For the record,
I have been deciding not to write in this blog for my own good. When I can write clearly and honestly again, I will do so.
I decided this when, about 8 months ago, I wrote a letter home to my mom, and realized that it was the first time in too long that I actually felt as though I were preparing a message for someone other than myself.
Back in the early days,
sometime before 5th grade,
when the chickens still lived in the shack by the burning barrels,
I'd gone to collect eggs. And, while I was gathering the last few out of the straw in the opposite corner, the one with the lean neck - the one I'd dubbed 'Black Beauty' overturned the basket I'd left carefully at the top of the few cement stairs at the entrance. She'd leaped up to perch on the handle and in a few wingbeats, toppled the basket and eggs out onto the cold stairs -- I saw it begin, but couldn't stop it in time. The eggs cracked and spilled. Only the few in my hand were saved. The chickens rushed to eat the others. I felt terrible.
Not only would I return to the house with a paltry few eggs, but the others were wasted and it was my fault. Normally, we collected eggs in rust-dented Maxwell coffee cans which 1) the chickens rarely took interest in and 2) are more stable and solidly cylindrical. But this day, I'd been showing off to myself. I'd passed up the cans for a basket - the woven kind with a shallow basin and handle arched over top. I'd been feeling fancy, quaintly colloquial, and was playing my imaginarily scripted role of deftly-intentioned child egg collector and with a properly aesthetic basket.
It was the basket handle which attracted the chicken, the shallow basin which rolled and tipped, and my selfish game and subsequent carelessness which broke the eggs. I was afraid of what Mom would say to how I'd failed.
Trembling slightly, I walked back to the porch to turn myself in in early twilight. My mother was already standing there. I climbed each stair. Beginning to cry, I told how I'd lost the eggs.
The voice that came in reply lifted my head in surprise. She seemed unconcerned with the eggs lost and quietly stated that it wasn't my fault that the chicken had tipped the basket over. I don't remember the words, but I remember her even voice and comforting presence through sob-strained and blurred hearing. I hadn't expected that. I'm not sure if she was even looking at me when she said it. In my memory, her height and stature exceed my range of vision and she seems to speak mostly to the hill in the north, fading as the twilight moved in on the tails of sunset to borrow the hill, fields and forests, saving them for later.
She suggested we go for a walk then, she and I. We walked toward the cooling sunset and she told me about her dreams for the forest and trails around the house, how she wanted to plan places to sit and take in the view. We talked about which overlooks could be best taken advantage of, and I described to her the ones I liked. In her gift of descriptions, she let me come in close to things close to her. Perhaps, I only remember walking because of how she described her visions for the land and trees - in my memory I am transported in the same gray evening air from the porch to the site on the hill where she wants to put a bench.
This is one of the closest memories of I have to my mother. Now, it seems well worth the eggs, and that whole thing is so insignificant except in what it led to.
(From the Introduction to Steinbeck's Cannery Row)
How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for the break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the best way to write this book - to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.
I think it's safe to tell you that the light is back in my eyes and the smile is back on my face.
I don't know what's going to happen next,
but it'll be good.
Thank you for your hope and your note all this time.
I'm taking this moment to remind myself
that with the future and the whole unknown thing and all...
a major perk is that it is prime space for making adventures and for trying things that are different than the part of the future that's already happened (it used to be the future).
There's so much of it to fill with new and different things. Or old and deeper things. This is very exciting.
Sometimes I forget.
Reading through an old journal today,
I discovered this message to myself.
**
I already know what's important. We all do.
Our lives depend on remembering.
**
I think I hope it's true.
And I hope that I can act on it.
Passing through LA on my way to Cairo, I met this guy on his way to Lima. We were both heading to our Global Urban Trek cities. We might never pass the same way again, but at least there are the internets. He's done a much more efficient job of directing his energy on the behalf of people in need than I have, and his blog Notes from the Overground has a lot of his interesting thoughts as he actually tries to practice his beliefs. He recently made this post of things that members of the general public can do to contribute. I like it, so I'm posting it here too.
Thanks.
Today I shared 2 mangoes with a housemate.
After unsuccessfully cutting most of the the fruit away, I tried the soft yellow around the seed with my teeth.
And I found myself again in Cairo. I felt it before I recognized it. I felt it before my mind filled in the nighttime, people, traffic, and dust.
There are not juice stands here, on every other corner, the way they are in Cairo. The sense Mango filling my mouth and the memories that filled my brain took me back to buying glasses of fresh mango juice from the juice stands - a tall glass filled with liquid fruit - we competed with each other to find the best and cheapest stands.
I maintain that Tiff and I won.
I don't remember the exact price, but I remember it was less than anything else we knew of, and the juice was first rate - eating mangoes that you didn't even have to chew. The place is in Arbaa-Wa-Noos - I think it's in the Northeast. Hop in a mini bus that goes to Seleb! Seleb! Seleb! and get off when you see the sign for the textile factory: 'ال سلاب,' if I remember right. There was construction here, a few years ago, so it probably looks different now. But find the school - ask someone to take you to Central, school for displaced Sudanese. Stop at the school and play jumprope with the kids and drink tea with the teachers. Ask them if they ever got the pictures we took with them. Ask them whose gone back to Sudan and if there are new teachers. Ask them if Bafi is still there, or if he and his family have made it out. Then keep going down the direction you were headed in. I think you'll come to a fork in the path between sand and abandoned buildings. They're not abandoned - most buildings are not falling apart but rather are unfinished, so as to avoid the tax that applies to completed buildings. Take the right fork. In that direction, I think, and not too much farther, is the best mango juice stand I know of.
It's past Gheda's house and near the restaurant where we took her out to dinner. Gheda, who spoke a little more of our language than we knew of hers, who was engaged to be married, who invited us into her home, and whose friendship with us consisted mostly of smiles, nods, and laughter to replace the words, but none of it ingenuine.
I am going against Pascal's musings.
I am trying to be everything
Is this why I unravel?
Is anything correlated?
I think I cast the thread of these stories in the partial hope that someone will recognize the spool that spins them or the fabric they might be trying to weave.
I hardly dare ask for causes,
but is anything correlated?
At one time, I'd asked for a sign
to help me identify a person
A friend asked me once, what I would do if I got it.
'I think I'd cry'
A year later, my ideas of fate and signs had changed, but I knew when I found its equivalent, and
I was right.
I cry at things I don't understand
and things that are true
and I'd just found something all of good, longed-for, unexpected, and real.
However, the near future contained sudden modifications to the situation I thought I'd found, and the side-effects from it which I'd accepted on temporary conditions swelled like ice until entire paths turned to rubble. The maw between what could and what was yawned until one gray morning I woke for the last time for the next year beneath my bed, unusually confused by my surroundings and feeling like a seasick sailor. My first task was to understand that I'd never before understood what being homesick really felt like.
For a year, I lived with experiences and colors at once too subdued and too brilliant to be continuously real. I looked out windows as if they were closed eyelids. When I awoke suddenly this January, my memory of the time preceding seemed to fade more quickly. My inclination is to explain this in terms of a lived dream, but this is probably not useful as I'll only confuse myself with attempted justifications for uncorrelations resulting from a poor organizing metaphor. It is poetic though.
The hope I'd let dissolve revived in the real world, and I searched for a phrase to describe how I felt. I wanted to say it felt surreal or felt like I was dreaming except that those sentiments are both cliché and false. If anything, I felt like I'd finally woken up.
But further complications continuously submerge me into an underwater realm of subconscious. At times I find myself free of this fishbowl, but eventually my sense of the vitality of reality fades. I don't know if I'm exaggerating or getting complacent.
I sometimes find a distinction between waking and sleeping useful because knowing that the reality I exist in will not stay helps me get through dreams. I had a sign above my pillow saying 'Reality' with an arrow pointing towards the rest of my room. But,
I probably do not help my situation by dividing time between dreaming and awake. It might all be one tangled string of possible correlations and attempted explanations.
.
I heard that there was a study done on rats in which the rats received random shocks regardless of what levers they pressed or what actions they did or didn't perform. I heard the rats ceased to function.
The ability to function is an extremely important one to me. Perhaps this is why I feel like I have so much trouble with it. Perhaps I want the wrong kinds of explanations - the kinds that use words and begin with 'because'.
I think I will never get out of the fishbowl by specifically trying.
(further thoughts might unroll, I feel them curled like ferns around these images)
Sometimes I write to help my present or future self
sometimes I write in the hope that others might benefit
sometimes I write because I hope that a curious psychiatrist will someday find my written ramblings and piece myself together from a more objective vantage point.
The more I understand though,
the more I realize that I must be that psychiatrist.
I am here,
still -
I lack the words to say in what manner -
There are either too many or too few.
What I need, I think,
are some good stories.
A properly cultivated human, I think, has amazing perceptive and interactive powers within his or her environment. Human capacities for improvisation and re-evaluation while working towards goals are extremely valuable traits, and to suppress or detract from them seems vitally hazardous.
We are capable of programming robots to follow models and make approximations.
I must not expect this of myself.
I often set models for myself to follow. Recently, I am trying to stop this. I am trying not to let established structures influence the way I move. I am trying to live kinetically - in the motion itself.
(This seems to result in writing less)
He told me that Lloyd J. Reynolds used to write it in huge sweeping motions on the chalkboard at the start of every class:
S.erene
O.pen
A.wareness
My brother's post reminded me...
I forgot a second anniversary: Tres De Mayo.
This post comes 10 days and some odd hours late. I completely forgot about it this year.
My, the things we can forget...
I can feel the time running like liquid through my fingers. Like a river, it keeps the same shape, but always moving.
A few days back I read myself the stories I read my archive from last April. I was impressed by the efforts of my then-self to record and collect the pieces of the world I thought I saw shattering around me for my future self, or for anyone who'd come wondering where I'd been. When the world shatters, the light catches the edges.
Perhaps things are more beautiful when one is aware of expending life. Or perhaps an awareness of dying makes one try more vitally at living, and this trying is more keenly observant.
Perhaps in a pit, one tries harder to see, and is more grateful to find, the stars.
People told me then that the images were beautiful. I could see then where they might be coming from. Reading back now, I see it more. But I remember writing them. I see the titles paired with each post and read from their doublespeak the messages I left for myself. It reads now almost as two separate narrations.
My impression of it now is like the dancing lights that come with a blow to the head. Reeling at the time, now I hardly remember. But, the lights were beautiful. I described the lights.
I am glad to have moved on (I cannot adequately describe the difference between these last two aprils). I recall thinking to myself a few weeks ago, walking under the cushion-like light surrounding Elliot circle at night, that I felt sane, and it felt nice.
But I haven't felt the knife-edge of the world in the balls of my feet as sharply or as frequently. Perhaps I am no longer trying so well or intently to lean out beyond the present. Through the kaleidoscope of images, there runs a thread of trying, which I find myself admiring now, though at the time I remember feeling only that I was unable to tighten my fists enough around the thread, feeling it run through my raw hands.
I still have too many pieces.
I need to let these concepts roll back into a ball. I want to be able to feel and understand without feeling like having to consciously enumerate the components of an experience. Some dissections are not useful or meaningful.
Earlier this month, I re-visited a river briefly. Over a year since I'd been there.
My brother sent me a hope. We lend hopes to each other, trading them back when they are needed elsewhere.
I hope that you can live like a river and continue to flow while coming to a swirling equilibrium with your contents and incoming silt deposits and runoff, sorting and smoothing them into soft pebbles and sandy shores.
****
My favorite time of day lately has been near-sunset. My favorite season is fall. I'm becoming more convinced these things are more beautiful, the colors richer, because inevitable change makes them seem dearer.
When I was young, my father gave me wine to taste and I was overwhelmed by the odor filling my mouth. I did not understand how he could enjoy the taste. He said in his father-to-child voice that he can appreciate wine probably be cause he's killed off enough tastebuds.
Whenever my Chinese professor tells a story, the moral is usually about the best uses of youthfulness: "Play Hard while you can!" (despite the fact that playing hard probably contributes to its vanishing.
Recently,
I began to wonder - though I we may mourn the loss of youthfulness and of tastebuds and many other things that, like candles, expend themselves by their intended use, what are the things that one can only really appreciate, having first lost something else? Shall these also be celebrated? Or prevented?
the bird of time has but a little way
to flutter,
and the bird is on the wing
It is not enough to have an experience.
You must interact with it, to whatever extent you can.
so much of everything,
it seems,
is based on the quality of the dialogue through the seambetween the world of one's perceptions and the world they come from
a process working out an equilibrium of perceptions
since our world must live within the larger one until our presence is removed
(Imagine this written in the italic hand of Lloyd J. Reynolds. Maybe I can get a picture sometime.)
The Perennial Pedagogy
1. Get the idea. (Formative image.)
2. Concentrate.
3. Get the feel.
4. Practice, practice, practice.
5. Take it easy. (Easy does it.)
6. Get the swing of it.
7. Be in good form.
8. Get lost in the work.
9. Let IT do it.
10. Work for the work's sake.
11. Don't sell out.
12. Do it the right way.
13. Keep to your calling.
14. Teach. (Share your skill.)
