All of my letters are unfinished
So when they say the writing's on the wall
No secret of mine can be read
My hopes mostly left un-wished
In this ragtag collection I scrawl
on the inside of seashells I thread
into strings of un-pearls,
these dreams float
not on currents but inside my head.

Making my way through a book of poetry and a bowl of palatable oatmeal, and it keeps occurring to me, one flash of insight hard on the heels of the previous one, that I am quick to read the book of someone else's existence. Quick to witness someone else's dash into the unknown with a torch. I courageously brave only the night, my reading lamp my only torch, illuminating no other path but the one laid out for a strong female lead.
I remember a man, once an uncle, who built his career on making structures outlive their inhabitants, preserved past the content of living memory. So keen in detecting structural flaws, he left his own house til too late, the moldings crumbling til my aunt brought the roof down around his ears. He made life safe for ages of long-dead residents, and she outgrew his living for someone else.
Fortune cookie says: Stay, and be unremarkable, leave and break hearts.

the Meaning of FLOW

Forgive my soapbox speech, my pulpit pounding. I've a lot to say.
Flowtoys hosted a recent video challenge to members of the spinning arts community to describe the meaning of 'flow.' Flow describes a state when the basic skills of a craft have been mastered and can be applied with some fluency to express the artist's whim. After a run, spinners might say "Nice flow" and mean nothing more than the smooth linkage of basic concepts to form words, sentences, paragraphs in a language that laps the air with tongues of flame. A superficial connection, but a necessary precursor to the real deal. For fire spinners and performers, the term flow can also be used to reference a state of synchronistic performance, when rote drills and muscle memory meet inspiration. In the state where the well-honed artist wields himself as the tool, the lag time between thought and deed disappears, and the resulting cosmic dance within a human vessel leaves sizzling trails burned into the back wall of the audiences' skulls. This may happen never, once in a lifetime, or, for some people, every other week; but if you ask even years later they will recall the sensation of everything clicking into place and streaming through them as if from somewhere else, from divine inspiration, one could argue. Elizabeth Gilbert describes the relationship of the psychologically healthy artist with a creative muse in similar terms in her TED talk. And in general, artists have taken this experience of creative flow and run with it, pushing all the limits of human expression past known horizons.

I privately approach fire twirling not so differently from the religious ceremonies of Sufi mysticism, especially those of the people colloquially referred to as the whirling dervishes. The Sufi mystic poet Rumi began the practice of turning in circles to attempt to reach a state of divine ecstasy. To be more precise, Rumi turned in circles to attempt to return to a state of divine ecstasy, to echo his previous, direct experience of a very intense, transpersonal and ecstatic nature that occurred in the presence of Shams of Tabriz, whom he referred to as Friend in many of his poems. Sometimes you can believe that the Friend is God, and sometimes the Friend seems to be Rumi himself, perfectly mirrored in the eyes of another, but the underlying friendship, loyalty, and love within the poetry are almost tangible. For Rumi, being with that man, talking with him, was like looking into the heart of a fire. Really magnetic, and with no chance to turn away. This experience was so important that Rumi ceased teaching his followers, and only conversed with Shams. His students, angered and jealous, had Shams murdered. And in Rumi's ensuing grief, he began to walk in circles around the pole in his garden, speaking free form poetry for dictation. He began turning and turning and turning to try to recapture the original state of that experience, and he left blazing poetry to trail behind him, about love and infinity and experiencing windows into the divine. Not so different from the aim of the fire spinner: turning on an axis can become a prayer. In motion, there is stillness, a stilling of the will, and in that silent space there is room for conversation with something greater. And that conversation might be about the human condition, what it's like to be a human, to rise to meet challenges, to feel, to suffer, to be inspired, to triumph.

Poi spinning (to me) describes the same experience, it's an inward journey of reflection when you work things out and put ideas into practice, but the art is also about how you bring your revelations to the world, and how you express the fruits of your inner journey. It's one thing to experience the meaning of life, it's another to convey that experience to another so that it lives inside them too, making them want to leap to join the dance.

"Those cursed/blessed with a Psychedelic view of the world have some condition or have some extraordinary experience in their history that changed their basic perceptions of the world. Which is why a lot of them gravitate towards the arts, it's the only way they can express the ineffable," said Christopher Knowles, posting on The Secret Sun blogspot early this month. To paraphrase, experiences may be classified as psychedelic, as opposed to rational or scientific, moments when the mind acknowledges the incomplete and faulty nature of the sensory input upon which 'reality' is based.

It is my privately held theory that object manipulators (like artists and magicians of every stripe (and I do love stripes)) are prone to 'extraordinary experiences' of what the human body and mind are capable of . Those who strive to reach beyond the everyday become artists to express the unquantifiable living wonder they find there, and like Prometheus, they emerge from the mountain of the gods bearing fire to spread among humankind. The success of this quest depends on the ability to enter into mystery, to swim in waters where others might drown, and equally important, to return intact and to form a bridge between the transcendent and the ordinary, to chart those waters for a daring few, further explorers. It may be an act of grief at separation, a longing to return to transcendent bliss, as in the case of Rumi, but it is vitally important for the world, for the advancement of human potential, that these highly gifted beings return to a reality that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, and bring back a little of that warmth and illumination with them. They make the world habitable for everyone who seeks out the extraordinary.

frozen tracks

Write what you know, people say, as if they know what they mean. I'm waiting, nothing under my bathrobe, I'm waiting to write, barefoot in the chill of a winter morning, until I know something worth writing. I clip my toenails as I wait, in the pale diffuse light reflected in snow from an overcast sky, blankets of white covering the world. Instead of trudging the well-tracked margins, I'm waiting for some urgent mission to send me plowing my own track across the pages, ledger lines drawn out for me like corn-stubble marching through a snowy field. I'm waiting to be hit with sudden inspiration, before I take my morning shower. Waiting for the call of life to grip me as a hand grips a pen, waiting for life to make me its instrument. Indifference or merely indecision will dissipate, going the way of the cloud cover as a beam of sun, a clarion call, comes to galvanize me into aciton. I'll sit, then, alert, bare feet barely feeling the chill, and I'll swim through the meltwater from the thaw that was my fear bound in blocks of ice, shocked by the cold and by the pouring torrent of life rushing all at once to fill and flood the unused corners that lately were settling fields for my imagination. I'm waiting to write until I am struck forcefully on the temples by something worth writing. With all the expectancy and hush of winter, I am waiting to live until I find a reason worth stepping oug my front door, so I can knowingly take that risk and go about the dangerous business of living with the eagerness of a beloved. I'm waiting, sweating under my bathrobe, with ice cold, purpling feet and stubbly unshaven legs, my blood racing with sweet expectation that can only be the ice block's lusty dream of running fast across a plain, in love with the flowering of spring.

It's been becoming more and more obvious to me that writing, and especially writing science fiction and fantasy, is the best way to open young minds to new ideas, the meaning of life, and to convey the importance of protecting the planet we live on and creating a livable future for all. Speculative fiction, as it's called in the 'biz, gives all people but especially young people, a chance to imagine 'what if' and to explore beyond the boundaries of the known. It is through such exploration that we dream and invent and make something more inspiring of ourselves, and escape beyond the confines of current expression and conventions to realize our own potential. I was thinking about this when I found the following letter, drafted circa 2006. A bit childish, simple, but my sentiments have not changed and neither has the overwhelming message that fiction is what feeds my passion. I have a habit of writing to authors as I finish a book, my mind afire. Maybe only the last sentence is worthwhile, but for context, here is the letter I wrote:

To: Diana Wynne Jones, on the subject of The Merlin Conspiracy, a thoroughly excellent book.
This was fabulous. I must say the cover art had me quite skeptical at first. But I opened the book and immediately was plunged into an intricately, vividly entertaining story, that was both amusing and profound. With each page, a new layer was added, the whole piece weaving itself together into a delicate, delicious and exotic tapestry, like the people in the canyon world.
I enjoyed most of all Nick, Romanov, and Maxwell Hyde, the latter two for having real power and enticing complexity, and the former for not having either quality. Nick seemed so genuinely a teenage kid, with absolutely no clue what was going on, but who wanted to do something important. To have a grand adventure sprung upon such a character rings true for me. I feel sometimes that school, homework and worrying about college and test scores are just fillers, things to take up time until one day I'll just take a step sideways and find myself plunging into my real life, which will of course be full of adventure and excitement. There's got to be more to life than existing and consuming, even soaking in knowledge has begun to seem pointless and anticlimactic.
I enjoyed the very British flavor of your story. British lore can't help but have something of chivalry and King Arthur, of Stonehenge. There is a connectedness with the land, history, something archaic, something greater, that you just don't get in America. Your whole country is steeped in history and myth and magic; everyone just breathes it in I think, and the resulting works are refreshing to those surrounded by raw commercialism daily.
Thank you. I'm sure you get fanmail, but I wonder how much genuine appreciation and admiration actually gets through to fantastic authors. Definitely not enough. Thank you for a moment, a point in time, one page, when the world was still, and time held its breath, and the universe fit inside a book, and a book was a wealth of universes.