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