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.