Adventure Parts 2-6

What more could I add?  New friends.  A club with lighting like stars exploding all over my skin, dancing through supernovas.  Being sorely tempted by the ice cage, which required donning Russian hats, fur coats and drinking vodka.  Riding trains, always my favorite thing to do, and running through a train station, weaving around posts and between people to get on the subway just before the doors close, Felicia in high heels, everyone out of breath, hearts racing.  

Late night snacks and feeling like a complete teenager, extending, unculrling conversation in the smoky pale dawn, being too excited and full of party to sleep, keeping each other awake and cuddling, pretending to yell at the guy with the lawn mower, 'people are trying to sleep'.  Breakfast at 4pm (and I'm the only one who eats breakfast food, coke and cigarettes are not for me). 

Frivolous underwear shopping which turned into trying on dresses, which turned into buying the dress I wasn't looking for but should have been.  The deal-clincher was getting locked out of my changing room stall and being able to wriggle under the door in said dress.  

An adventure in making dinner, or was it lunch? And of course pie.  Apple pie.  And being too tired and leaving dishes in the sink (what a luxury!).  And speaking of luxury, a hot tub in a place where the houses have columns and big porches.  Very impressive lighting fixtures.  

Bacon.  

A smallish road trip with a new-to-me musical playing on the tape deck, and my bare feet out the window.  It could be better, it could be raining, and just as we were about to reach our destination, the weather obliged.

A very merry undeathday to you (part 1)

This weekend I went into the city and celebrated Felicia still not being dead, and Elias too come to think of it. I knew it was going to a fabulous weekend when I saw the giant cube. Sitting and waiting for the evening to begin, I came to the realization that my way of participating in New York city is to blow bubbles (but I don't need to put out a hat for collecting change). Some guys across the street were playing really terrible jazz music, and the traffic was going by, while people waited to meet up with friends. My supply of personalized bubbles from Jeni's wedding came in handy, and I gave them out to people who were really excited about it. But what was amazing was the way that the wind blew the bubbles everywhere, out into the street, swirling around the statue, up into the sky. For some reason, skyscrapers make so much sense if there are bubbles floating up up up beside them. If I just blow bubbles in my own backyard, it makes only a few people happy, but in a city, the effects of living your life in a joyful way spread so much further. It made me rethink living in a hobbit house in the woods, because cities are where people connect.
And if you ever want someone to find you, leave them a trail of bubbles (but you have to keep blowing them faster than they pop).
This was such a real feeling of summer, and the East Village, and anticipation.

Come, listen to a story...

I've been thinking about fairytales, because of this guy. I've been thinking about being the wide-eyed child, the tumbling fool who wears his heart on his sleeve and carries his sentimentality as proudly as his old violin. The story is his, a pure expression of his adventurous spirit and good humor.

I was thinking about being the enchantress, the crone sometimes, sometimes the woman in the red dress, every ripple of movement around her soaked in mystery and seduction. She sees potential, and sets it on fire, drives the hesitant into becoming a hero, sets the challenges and makes the requirements, and with relish she plays the villain. My tale belongs to her, my stage manager, who gets things moving backstage, turns on the lights and whispers all the well-memorized cues to herself. She is in love with only the story, the characters as they will come to be.

I've been dwelling on being the reader, whose secret sorrow is the wonderful book she holds in her hands, the barrier between the worlds. She feels the bookcover in her hand, not heavy but significant, she counts the pages between her and the moment when they run dry, her currency the tears shed over beautiful things all too brief. It is for her, this story, and she can love it more deeply than anyone else could guess. She knows that the price of reading is to arrive at the endpages and be cut off from countless worlds as she shuts the cover, as she must. And still she must read, risk that loss, seek out her own suffering in exchange for the golden ball, a pair of shoes, the talking fish and a night at the ball. These things are tiny rivulets that run down into deeper, wilder undercurrents of myth. In the mutable void of story, she is cradled, she is home, for a while. Come deeper into the forest, child. Come, listen to a story...

I am considering playing a part, playing every part, but only if I let myself forget that I am the author. And that is the best game of all.

some snippets for you

Dear Moon,

Sometimes we get too caught up in daylight and activity and forget.  We are so tired from the work and toil of the day that we roll into bed and ignore the dark, ignore the magic and mystery of your hours.  You are beautiful, Moon, and wise.  We feel embraced.

I have to go through the doors that are open, and follow divine timing.  I have to live what I've been reading about.  Reading the book and using it are two different things.  How do I know if I've read enough, or should I just let go and live, step away from chronicles?  I'm not ready to emanate, I'm afraid to purely be.  

There is that shining eternal, a glimpse of soul in the forest, a raw, pure, remembered sentiment common among groves and glades, one of deep truth.   Fearful and lovely, lonely.

There are powers shifting, things blossoming, and I can only half remember, I have to walk the line blindfolded, stern judgment (my own?) behind me.  I shall sow the seeds with truth and carry my burden to its finish.  

I had forgotten the feel of sweat, the smells of work and the dirt, and the sunshine on me hot.  A closeness with the wet and the green, a talking to the particular patch of land as I work.  No, not talking.  Listening.  That is what I had forgotten.  

Listening.

There are some things to be said for solitude.  

I do not know the word for shovel in French.  Nor the word for hoe.

Theme Song... gotta get me one of those

So I've been thinking about what my theme song could be. Polls are now open. Choices are:
When Did You Fall- Chris Rice
Accidentally In Love- Counting Crows
Paralyzer- Finger Eleven
Viva la Vida- Coldplay
On the Wing- Owl City
Hey There Delilah- Plain White T's
When I Was a Boy- Dar Williams

Wet Pavement

Small world, where it rains at night, and things smell of lake and pine and the underside of damp leaves in the dark, secret earth. Driving through cloud-herds, swishing in the fresh, looming blue. Wet secrets whisper from the dripping leaves, the eaves and marges of the forest brooding at the wayside, making way for my wake. Awake still, with reflections past the wipers, the pavement glistening a lake of ice and vertigo, and I slide along it, loosened from perception and glowing lines. I could live in this dark mirrored world where the signs shine out and cars cast glimmering trails, and the noises are those of a mermaid's dim cousin sighing gently in her sleep. For the hushed space of a rainstorm, I dream.

Even affirmations can be frustrating

My paradigms are not shifting. It is as if someone else is confirming a paradigm that I didn't know how to express. But I was aware of it, without words, and because I couldn't name it it was full of hoarse sorrow. As I am reading the Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram, I am feeling grief for the loss of a larger sense of connection to the community of life. I can feel the nerve endings that were severed when I or my predecessors were cut off from the nonhuman world. My ancestors robbed me of my heritage, this valuable sense, with a vicious and painful separation that is today manifesting everywhere as pollution, degradation, physiological disease and psychological disorder.

I'm beginning even to question keeping houseplants, as it separates a single organism from coexistence and interaction with all others (gee, kind of like us! I don't need ants or bird, wait, do I?). It is cruel to put a fish in a bowl, not because it hurts him, but because it denies and cuts him off from all elements and forms of knowledge, experience of life and life forms, and with this codependence removed, his life is now meaningless, without context, and he is gasping just as surely as if he was taken from the water.

No wonder I am ill. Not like in Madagascar, violently, but this is more a malaise, my head blocked up with a sinus migrain of the spirit. I lost 11 pounds due to dysentery, but I gained 15 back due to anxiety at being again rootless from the material world upon my return to my own culture. Even when I was there, I could feel the way missionaries and colonizers and aid workers had wrenched from the land some meaning, forcibly, with language and science as primary weapons.

I am frustrated by the huge barriers to sensitivity and sensation that exist in our civilized, high-tech culture. And also that people who are in need of life-saving solutions embrace these imperialist, colonialist and violent technologies which will unwittingly sever their ties to any life-source, imprisoning them in the tomb of the individual existence.
I want something so badly, but I can't articulate it.

Keep your eyes on the hat with the feather

I am trying on selves, the image I have is of the costume box adventure, parading in front of the mirror in as many different guises as I can conceive of. What am I practicing for?

a sample of my knitting

One of my qualifications should the zombie apocalypse come: I can knit and sew. Also one of my qualifications for marriage, but hope chests are a bit outdated, and no one really gives a damn anymore about needlepoint (which is good because I've been getting rusty). This took several hours. It's lamb's wool and I am making it into a pouch, note loose ends, it's not finished. It will have tassels.
The design I came up with for a gift! It's sort of every spirally thing I've ever thought about. Also the triskelion, which might be a Celtic symbol? There should be more elaborate interpretations in the future, this first spiral leads to smaller spirals on the edges, and they all circle back around. If we are thinking about symbolically portraying the cosmic dance, for me it would be something like this. There's a lot of focused energy and intensity, but also a bubbling sense of humor and intelligence, of consciously playing the Game.
Textiles do something to my brain. Something good. I have yet to find a metaphor for ecology that I can become so immersed in as the task of knitting. This is the way I see problems. I have a hole, or a dropped stitch, and first I sit very still and figure out what happened, a matter of temporospatial observation, what is the pattern, and how did it change, and take it back to the root cause of the problem, giving it enough slack so that I don't undo it further. Each stitch on its own is very loose, but put them all together and you have something flexible and whole. Miss one stitch, all the others start to fall apart around it. From a tangle of yarn I can create (or help coax into existence) something that will hold together. Turning holes into wholes. That is why I'm optimistic about the environment. I have patience to sit undoing a knot for hours after most people would give up and cut it apart.

Rest

"I haven't slept in ages" said the giant
as he lay down in the valley
a mountain for his pillow
and pulled the treeline snug around his chin.

the draught of knowledge

The bells of the chapel tolled, but he had lost track of how many chimes, so he was still floating out of time, the blue evening light filtered through the library's elaborate window panes and the dusty, weathered stacks. He was stuck inside the sphere of lamplight, surrounded by the piles of books he's made the walls of his academic universe, pillars of text stretching back to the bones of the world. He spent hours hunched inside that yellow sphere with the dust motes and the rustle of paper, his pencil filling in the spaces between the books with his own thoughts. He could have used a laptop, but it seemed more real to him to go at it with his shirt sleeves rolled back, with the real live books sighing away in front of him. He wanted direct contact, his bare skin soaking in the words of ages.
There were people, he knew (though the concept was hazy and half-formed), people outside who did it all seemingly without effort. It just came to them on the morning air, and they breezed it all onto the page, floating not wading through coursework and term papers. He didn't know how you got to that level, surely not by hard work because what those people did was at another plane, more a direct and somewhat mystical channeling of knowledge. He despaired of ever achieving the same facility, feeling himself weighed down by the rigidity of his own habits.
What he didn't know, and what was evident to most professors was that he wanted it badly, there was a fire in him and he would search for books and drink in lectures to feed it. Here was one who needed knowledge, and so the breathing pedagogic fossils knew that he would always find it and they were not concerned. It would never occur to them to tell him this, but they remembered well their own journeys, hunched with their noses touching the pages to better direct the torrent of knowledge. They knew that you either wrote all the time because you had to and the words coming out were as natural byproducts of your existence as shit or carbon dioxide, or you were kidding yourself. The ones who made it--who had to make it--were the ones who immersed themselves gasping in the vortex, becoming percolators and wells and taps for what they could barely sense, the raw river of consciousness tugging somewhere at their souls.
Looking up now from his private fold of the universe, he stared blankly, trying to see beyond the bubble of his thoughts like a goldfish through the watery glass. He wondered about the world outside, but didn't know how to go there, or if they had water.
The library settled on its foundations and he settled too, back into the depths of his research, and the pages rose up to welcome him back.

Three reasons to go back to a monastery

The umbrella in the night
looming dark beyond the flashlight's beam
hides a lotus.

A small orange and white cat
is Lucky
to call this place home.

Bluish white puddles in the dawn
and the ceramic basin of sky
brims over.

Always a first

Tonight I was not as moved by something as I was when first I experienced it. I feel old.

"Always a great one for the tea parties..."

---The Secret of Roan Inish.

BTW, I did NOT paint Tree full of Sky (below). I wish I had, but the talented artist is Clive Barker (see post below).

What can you do with a drunken sailor?

That was the first thing that came into my head, be prepared for STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS! More like a trickle. If there was anything to be said, I would have said it. No actually, I would have hemmed and hawed (what a great expression that is) and then I would have said 'um' a few more times, and then thought about what I was going to say some more, and then tried to phrase it, with the end result that you ran out of patience and finished my sentence for me! I stand in the way of good conversation. I also try to stay on the phone as long as possible, there is something so beautiful in the awkward way people try not to seem like they are hanging up on me, because I'm sure not hanging up! People are awkward and beautiful. Have you ever noticed that? Watch someone eating a sandwich. Watch someone eating anything, really. They are very self-conscious, and disgusting, sort of, you can hear chewing noises and see down their throat. A great thing to do is to try and make eye contact with someone while they are eating, and see their gaze slide away, embarrassed and full of enjoyment. I love how we think that we are so fragile that we can be shattered with a glance! Walking along down the street, carefully avoiding each other, eyes on our shoes, nervously we put our hands in our pockets, we take them out again, we ruffle our hair. Being a human is probably the best game I can think of, because we forget we are playing and we start taking ourselves seriously! Could that be the theme of this blog so far? Hmmm....
I've been in a good mood lately because of the rain. About twice every day for the past month it has been raining in Poughkeepsie, and there is something about the sky just before, just after, or during a thunderstorm, it makes me very happy to be alive, and to be wearing a yellow raincoat, and to be wet/notwet inside/outside, any combination of the above, possibly with a mug of tea and a movie, or barefoot in wet grass. Also, puddles! The smells are better, the sunsets are definitely better, and it's soothing to listen to when I fall asleep. All of which leads me to the conclusion that I should move somewhere like Wales. Oh, Wales... of course I would live in a cottage, and it would downpour regularly and then one day a young, freshfaced Welsh shepherd would knock on my door, carrying a lost lamb and wearing a wool sweater (because damp wool has such a Nice smell), and I'd invite him in for tea (hem hem).
The answer to the drunken sailor question is you press-gang him, of course, but it's suggestive isn't it? In my childhood I was exposed to an unusual quantity of Irish drinking songs. I've no regrets, I won't be the sucker who has to buy the whole pub a round because she kept clapping when the chorus was over. But my true weakness is for folk ballads. Songs that wear their hearts on their sleeves, and are damn proud of it too. Unabashed sentimentality, that's for me, with a bit of antiwar propaganda here and there.
I suddenly had a paranoid moment of realizing how impersonal the internet is, and how little control I have over machines. Why am I trusting the computer? It could kill me with its little finger. If it had a little finger. (WHY is THAT an expression? English, I tell you, it's pretty weird, yeah, hehe.) But the worst is bathrooms that are fully automated. If machines suddenly developed consciousness, a sadistic sense of humor, and a grudge against humans, bathrooms in which the toilet flush, the running water, soap and dryers are all electrical would be an absolute nightmare. Be afraid! Be very afraid!
...And that's my story.
And then we went and had pasta.

Drunk and giddy we converse

drunk with ourselves and giddy with each other
whirl in dance into the infinite
playing the best and only game
the only game
flinging ladders across the void suspended
in midair waiting
to be met halfway
the next step, step again
climb until you run out of rungs and
take the next step in perfect trust
a thrust into the mist, the gist
I understand!
I understand!
spirit-jumping into the world
or out of it. out of time
eternal in between
with no way to fall
word-woven nets unneeded
unheeded in the silent knowing
to keep talking when you feel complete
when there can be no more pretense
and still you allow yourself to pretend
that the golden settling whole
is not gathering around you
but it's getting harder to breathe joy instead of air
the longer you try not to notice
the longer it stays, the only unicorn in the room
the elusive flocking to your beauty
in this moment
filling the world to the brim
the holy grail
the space in the center of two overlapping circles
and a heartbeat.
How can you be afraid? How can you not
be? afraid for the dissolution of affinity
the hesitation, a waver in-
complete trust
afraid to scare it away
the only measure how far from the center
your fear takes you
the conversation in-dwelling
dancing with you as you
pretend that you are not the mystery
that shines in all your faces.

Family Fun

The longest game of cards. Ever.

"We are ganging up on you in a game based entirely on chance."

"It's all good until somebody gets hurt. Then it's hilarious."

Ahhhhh!

So much to write, so little time! It is paramount that I get some semblance of sleep, yet how can I do that when everything is changing all the time, and I'm so excited about it? This is the imagined danger, that I will burn so hot I crisp and fall away into ash. It is not real. I have felt this way sitting perfectly serenely on a park bench, watching a thunderstorm be born. I have sat and wondered if I should move, if it matters whether I get soaked. I have decided it does not matter, and sat there for a while, and then decided it doesn't matter but I like to be dry, and to dash breathlessly in out of the rain, and so I did, laughing. I am taking the party with me, and you are invited. I can see the vortex rippling where I go, ere I go. I am starting to run, starting to dance, and the universe is rushing to meet me. The possibilities are limitless. There. I think I can go to bed, if that's true. It means tomorrow will be amazing.

where am I going

There are people stalking me in my dreams, or maybe just one person, one feeling. The dream is a dark one, and the being sees me from its shadows, and I know it's there, though I can't change my route to walk away. Where are you going. It's not a question. I see the dog sleeping on the sidewalk and don't want to wake it, as I grab my things and tiptoe to the gate, but it is the shade in the house that is awake and malicious and speaks with all the irony of God asking Cain Where is your brother? But this is vicious, dark humor, at my expense...

Beware of: Shadowy figure with a bullwhip and a ferret, responsible for two deaths. I found both the bodies, and realized I had passed by the murderer earlier that day/dream...

Another dream involves a woman with an umbrella, she is short, face obscured, and she does not try to chase me, because she has a sleek gray ocelot that is tracking me down. I want to pet the ocelot even though it is going to bite me and I should be running away. I come around a corner and the woman traps me with her umbrella. I am powerless. I throw up my arms...

some thoughts, perhaps: Even if I do not consciously acknowledge it, perhaps I am telling myself to embrace pain and darkness and things that can hurt me. I am stalking myself, knowing I cannot get away, and my intent is murderous self-love. Maybe I'm the one playing the oldest game.

The Book

The Book: on the taboo against knowing who you are, or The Book: that is changing my life a little right now. I don't usually like books about philosophy, because how can you express something so close to your center self? But in between the words there is something falling, and when he forgets to be a philosopher it approaches poetry. Alan Watts doesn't actually say the important things, but he also doesn't try to. He indicates.
I welcome any comments or thoughts on the passages I found most interesting.
quotes!:
"Is it conceivable, then, that I am basically an eternal existence momentarily and perhaps needlessly terrified by one half of itself because it has identified all of itself with the other half?"

"... as my sensation of "I-ness," of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the "central" Self-the IT- appears as the self/other situation in its myriads of pulsating forms-- always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst of many. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born."

"In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant."

"... [those] who honestly believe themselves to be lonely, individual spirits in a desperate and agonizing struggle for life. For all such there must be deep and unpatronizing compassion, even a special kind of reverence and respect, because after all, in them the Self is playing its most far-out and daring game--the game of having lost Itself completely and of being in danger of some total and irremediable disaster."

"It is simultaneously the purest nonsense and the utmost artistry."

Three is a magic number

Or, to quote one of my favorite authors "Three is the number of those who do holy work." Which brings me to my three favorite authors: Clive Barker (quote and image), Neil Gaiman, and China Mieville. Concepts dreamed up by these men have changed my life and more importantly my dreams.

Clive Barker is a fantasy/horror/erotica writer, and also paints some of my favorite work (on the left is tree full of sky). The real reason he is on my list is because of Abarat. Barker took a break from his usual and started a series of intensely personal, vivid oil paintings, which grew into the hundreds, and then became a storyline, and then became a series of the most beautifully illustrated, weirdest, wildest fiction I've had the good fortune to come across, with here and there a glimmer of live, imaginative power, higher purpose and philosophical commentary that makes Disney squirm in their mainstream capitalist pants. And it's about to get even better. The next book is called Absolute Midnight. More information here: http://www.clivebarker.info/yaabaratunpub.html

Neil Gaiman should need no introduction. All of his fiction is enjoyable, and the past year I dove into Sandman, opening floodgates that I did not know existed. I'm still traveling headlong, through dreams, through darkness and all unspeakable, and I have no regrets (except that it's over, but it's never really).

China Mieville is the other side of the moon, an Author, someone to draw down the portals. His writing makes me want to drink coffee and cackle insanely, sit on a roof and burn deep into the night (not that i don't want to do any of these normally, well, everything but the coffee). London, or London as it could be, is alive and brooding, breathing, stinking, fucking, dreaming, behind everything he writes. The only author in a long while to send me searching through my thickest dictionary regularly. Even though there are no illustrations (I allow begrudgingly) there are thousands of composite images evolving organically from the smog and diction. Steampunk, socialism, magic and even stranger perversions of the natural world. Perdido Street Station or the short story the Tain are the best introductions to his work.

The inside of my head surprises me occasionally

In the dream I just had, a line of women were walking down the runway, and one woman gets to the front and she's doing a little hip wiggle, and then it turns into a belly dance, and she is making eye contact with the audience and she says "Did you see that? Look at these frills. Of course, if you buy the dress, he's going to want to see some moves." And then she goes over to someone, and her feet are about level with this audience member's face, and she's wearing these ugly transparent drawstring bags on her feet, and she tells the lady "Will you check out these shoes? They're so comfortable." And then someone comes to shoo her off, because she's holding up the line and she goes "Oh, yes, that's right" and holds up an index card, which she doesn't read from, and she says "And next... who had two sandwiches for lunch..." and then she walks off, and the next girl comes on, and she's enormous, and accompanying her is her even more enormous mother, and I sort of follow the first woman but I hear in the background the next girl telling the audience that her dress is made from whey, and then I realize how ridiculous this dream is and I fall on the ground laughing. I end the dream in hysterics, curled up in a ball behind the scenes of the runway.

What do you call Inuits who are really annoying?

Peskimos!

So why mangoes? you may well ask

There are two thoughts. Actually, three. Thought One is an idea I had while doodling in class, about a place I wanted to live in, where I could stand on my balcony and pick mangoes and eat them whole. I can eat at least four at a time. It is a dream of abundant, sensuous pleasure, of sunny, sweet fruit and the flowering of my creative life. Thought Two followed shortly after, and involved having so many mangoes that I am standing on my balcony and giving away a pile of them. As I release them one by one into the air, they turn into golden thought balloons that float and bob gently before you. This is a dream of wealth shared, spent lovingly on you. Taste the mango, enjoy the celebration, a windfall, feel good. Leave the seed somewhere else to grow, and pass on. We are the agents of seed dispersal. What good is changing the world if you don't enjoy it? And what is enjoyment if it doesn't change the world? Thought Three I will keep to myself, for now.