"in dreams emotions are overwhelming."

Alright, so my mind is still abuzz.

This morning, while unpacking a box, I found a mixed tape, made for me for my thirteenth birthday by my friend and her uber-cool 15-year-old sister. I put it in my car's tape deck while I was driving to work, and the weirdest feeling overtook me. I had a flash of what it felt like to be me then, and all the things that filled my life then. It felt so...intense. Like I was absolutely head-over-heels in love with life. I know, of course, that those unspeakable highs were mixed with some very low lows, but still, I miss that intensity. I've become so even-keel. What happened? Should it have happened? Does it happen to everyone?

Maybe we all get to the point where we decide that the proper things to worry about are paying bills and tuition and getting to work on time and getting laundry done before we run out of underwear, and we stop putting so much metaphysical importance on whether our parents understand us or whether our friends are really our friends or what our identities should be and whether other people are getting the message of what our identities are. I used to spend so much time trying to figure myself out and what I wanted to do with my life. And I still think about these things, but not in the same way. I spend so much time thinking about practicalities, and it takes so much energy. On a typical evening, if there's enough in the fridge to make some kind of dinner and I haven't run out of shampoo, I figure life is going pretty well. I still think about what I want for my future, but at the same time I have to think about whether it will pay the bills and the student loans. I've met so very many people lately who work for money doing really what are pretty boring careers, who have settled in to some kind of contentment with having disposable income and a decent-looking social life. And it's so very easy to have "friends" who are really just acquaintances, to keep up the polite chatter without having a real conversation, to work without feeling passionate about it, to date without falling in love. To get by.

Part of me wonders if I could really return to my quasi-mystical adolescent way of thinking about life. Would I want to deal with such turbulence and uncertainty, and the risk of pain, when you believe something is important and you want it so much, and if it doesn't work out you are crushed and must ask the hard question of why and never be satisfied by the answer. But then, if it does... To believe something is big, big enough to change your life. To attach importance to seemingly small things, for no other reason than they ARE important, to you, and no other explanation is needed. To drink in an experience without rationalizing about it at all, to love what you love and hate what you hate, and KNOW what you love or hate. Now, I mostly just accept what is and deal with it in whatever way seems reasonable. And there are a lot of situations where that is wise. But still, I wonder if there is room somewhere for the vaulted emotions that I've folded up and tucked away, that maybe I can bring them back out and get to know them again. They were so vivid, even in remembering.

don't go.

My life has been so tame lately. What happened? Probably just the thing that I felt in the breeze last night, and the thing that is filling the girl I nanny and all of her friends with a sudden case of ennui. Summer is ending. Summer is winding down.
And summer always brings a little extra wildness and restlessness out in me.
So what will happen now? Will I become domesticated in the way I do every fall, and start wearing skirts with tall boots, and make tea three times a day, and generally start acting like an English professor? I always associate fall with school, but this is the first time that I won't have any school to go to. So, maybe things will be different. But I've spent a whole summer reading Eastern philosophy in the shade of trees, and how do you follow that?
Fall is when I always become very busy with Important Things, and this one will probably be no different. Even if I don't have classes, I still have moving and job-hunting and otherwise re-adjusting to do. But the thing is, I always become so absorbed in all these things for about three weeks, convinced of their vitalness, and then one weekend morning I'll wake up and think, "Why is my life so boring? What, exactly, did I do this week, other than write lists in my planner?" It's routine that gets me, every time. Routine is universally boring.
Sweet summer, don't leave me. You have been so wonderfully unpredictable. Please at least leave a little of your free spirit behind.

preaching to the choir?

“On the one hand, the development of environmental problems…is accelerating exponentially. On the other hand, the development of public environmental concern, and of private and governmental countermeasures, is also accelerating exponentially. Which horse will win the race? Many readers of this book are young enough, and will live long enough, to see the outcome.”
-Jared Diamond, Collapse

These words chilled me to the bone when I read them. And I ask myself the question I have asked so many times: What kind of world am I inheriting? I do not feel that I am watching a horse race, passively, but rather running a footrace, and I feel myself facing a very real risk of failure. I feel we are all facing it, even if we prefer not to think about it.
The question of sustainability on a human level has been on my mind a long time. Can we provide real human needs, including the need for satisfying work, in a way that uses only Earth’s annual interest, and not her long-stored capital? In a way that doesn’t destroy Earth’s very ability to produce what sustains human life?
The time is upon us to dismantle the Tower and get back to the Garden. With the same energy and focus with which we tried to build to the heavens and make a name for ourselves, we need now to cultivate the earth and protect it. I can foresee the end of the modern First World, centered so much of the availability of fossil fuels and mineral deposits, production and consumption at ever-increasing rates. I know it cannot last, though I don’t know exactly when its end will come. But the earth cannot support this kind of life, though the earth has supported Life for millions of years. And if we want the earth to be a place where humans can continue to live, we must first and foremost not destroy all the conditions that made human life possible in the first place – such as stable climate and complex ecosystems, particularly forests.
What I have come to believe is that we cannot destroy the forest for the sake of the field (or for the sake of the mine, oil derrick, or factory, for that matter), but we may destroy it anyway, without even realizing what we are doing. The foundation of human survival rests on whether we can feed ourselves, and thus on agriculture, and our ability to practice agriculture depends on the health of the broader ecosystem. We must develop agricultural practices that sustain the life of that system. We must tread lightly on these fragile soils.

blink

Look at it, straight on,
and remind yourself it will not last
Through gradual change or sudden end,
it will not be what it is now.
So do not be afraid to see what is,
for soon it will not be there to be seen.
And do not fear what you cannot avoid
do not resist what you cannot hold off
Hush, be still.
God moves.

insomnia

It's almost 2 in the morning, and I can't sleep. So instead I'm sitting on my balcony, listening to the rain.
But then, I haven't slept, really, all week. There are things I'm holding in, for lack of a better idea of what to do with them. There is nothing to do with them. They just are.
Oh, attachment. I'd thought I'd conquered you.

soliloquy

It's seven o'clock in the morning, and there's a beautiful woman asleep in my bed, and every man in the world should be jealous of me. But I can't sleep. The morning has come, and I am wide awake.
I step outside in my pajamas, with a handkerchief holding back my wild hair, and head for the blackberry bushes. The morning air is clear and fresh. For a moment, I'm not in Seattle. I'm on every camping trip I've ever been on. I'm in every book I read in my childhood. I am everywhere.

There's a scene in the book "Walk Two Moons" where the daughter and mother are out picking berries, and the little girl is frustrated to see so many out of her reach. The mother tells her that the berries at bird-height are for birds, the berries at bunny-height are for bunnies, and the ones at people-height are for people. But it's so hard to see the black jewels you've waited for all summer long, lingering just beyond the reach of your hand. The first summer of my grandparents marriage, my grandmother picked blackberries off of the gigantic bush growing in the pasture, the same one that grew there throughout my childhood. She had the brilliant idea of using a ladder to reach the higher berries. Hearing this, my grandfather said simply, "If you fall in, I'm not crawling in after you." The ladder stayed in the shed.

Blackberries were what I waited for through every hot and dusty summer in Idaho. They came at the end of August, and stayed only a week or two. But it was glorious. My mother and sister and I would go out in the morning, armed with long sleeves and plastic ice-cream buckets, and pick them until the sun grew too hot and my sister and I felt full and slow from eating so many. The cows would always mill around us, hoping to discover an unattended bucket. Cows love blackberries, and they love it even more if you do the picking for them.

The picking is hard this year, and the berries are late. Two summers ago, they seemed to be everywhere, from mid-July through the rest of the summer. They fell into my hand, along with several new friends, in the midst of a summer that was much lonelier than I had expected. We ate blackberry cobbler on a small boat in Lake Union and watched the light fade over the city and the water. Some things can only fall into your hand, and you can only look and wait until they do. And try your best to savor them before they are gone Some seasons are so very short - you blink and they are gone.

Sometimes I worry about letting the sweeter things slip past me and being too oblivious or busy to notice. Or too afraid of thorns. Or too lazy and comfortable (probably reading a book) to go out into the hot sun. Truth be told, berry brambles have stuck and scratched me many times. I've walked through that pasture many times, bucket in hand, to be greeted by berries still red and sour. But my childhood self was never dissuaded. I knew when a thing was worth waiting for, watching for, braving a few cuts and a little blood for. Books will wait. Cuts will heal. But when the berries shrivel and fall, only autumn lies in front of you.

Without beginning, middle, or end, of infinite power,
Of infinite arms, whose eyes are the moon and sun,
I see Thee, whose face is a flaming fire,
Burning this whole universe with Thy radiance.

Therefore, bowing and prostrating my body,
I beg grace of Thee, the Lord to be revered;
As a father to his son, as a friend to his friend,
As a love to his beloved, be pleased to show mercy, O God!

-Bhagavad-gita

the sound of one hand clapping

In the movie, a boy fell in love with a girl, and kissed her beneath a lamppost, beside a river. It was a great kiss.

I find myself feeling restless, at the time when the light is just beginning to dim. I head outside, my laptop in my bag, and walk. I follow my feet. I walk past an SUV, sitting in a driveway, with a black man in his thirties in the driver’s seat. He calls after me just as I pass, asks me how to get to the “highway” and I give him directions to I-5, thinking in the back of my mind that anyone who’s gotten off the freeway that dominates Seattle shouldn’t have too much trouble finding it again. The rest of the conversation goes something like this:

Man, can I just say that you are gorgeous?
Um, thanks.
You lived in Seattle very long?
Yeah, I went to school at SPU.
(some comments about Queen Anne vs. Bellevue)
Man, you really are gorgeous. Do you model?
No.
Well, you should try it. I mean, seeing you in the light of that street lamp, your skin and everything, man, you are gorgeous.
Okay, well, I think I’ll keep walking. Nice to meet you.

I walk on, the light fading out, the shadows creeping in. I walk past dark houses, through silent blocks. At a corner a jogger meets me and I literally jump. My feet take me to Kerry Park and I sit down, with the space needle looming in front of me, dominating the city, and all the lights blending together as if there is just one, rather large, rather postmodern building making up all of downtown. I sit in the midst of Asian tourists and third dates, looking at the few stars not obliterated by light-pollution, wishing it were quiet, realizing that tonight it won’t be. Wishing there were something beautiful to watch, but here there are no young French Jews falling in love. Here is just the noisy city, on just another summer evening.
I think of the time I sat on the edge of a lake in the middle of the night, with only a trace of light from the moon filtering through the clouds, and didn’t see, yet saw, a silent bird wing past me. The spirit hovering above the waters.
But such things won’t happen here. This night hasn’t given me what I want, whatever that is. I feel everything is a cheap imitation of what should be, what might be. I sit awhile longer, listening, but hear only my echoing desire to be somewhere else. I follow my tired feet home, to my bed, and sleep without dreaming.

Poems from July

In my more truthful moments, I have to admit
I am savoring this summer as a chance to do nothing.
I am holding myself at a bare simmer
letting my flavors blend
the one absolute I gained in college was a belief in living slowly
Besides,
Here everything is glowing with summer's kiss
and that is not to be missed.
I find myself often in a contemplative mood
Seeking spaces beneath trees, airy solitude
I find myself staring at everything
as if my eyes are just starting to focus
I find myself enamored of the present
and pondering the past
I keep telling the future,
"We'll do lunch next week..."
Right now I am all booked up with the now
She is so beautiful and I am in love with her
I can't tear myself away from her for another blind date
that is likely to be a disappointment.



The man one bench over
with shimmering white hair
one arm gracefully resting on the back of the bench
one leg crossed over the other
looks like Elie Wiesel
looks like everything good about New York
contained in a body
and sitting next to me here
making my city poised and refined
by the simple fact
of his presence



the absurdity of trees.
no. absurd
is the wrong word
tenacity?
virility?
it is only that
trees exist
and have, and will
trees are the thing we want God to be.



blue gleaming gold
against smooth-polished orange
the last of the sunlight
blowing on our skin and through our hair
the click and clack of stones
beneath our sandaled feet
and our fervor,
quasi-delirious
picking up stones and hurling them
across and against the insistent waves
I pick up a lenth of driftwood
I trace in the sand
a flower, a face,
thinking of the monks who do the same
and then watch it being washed away by the tide
the intransitory. life.
the day that ends
but begins.



well.
the summer has ceased to be summer,
suddenly.
with the insistent rain
comes a chilled and clammy reminder
that this summer will end
and what then?

the future looms,
it looms
dark and cloudy and huge
all that makes up my life now will end
and what then?

I have unclasped the last
pretty bauble from my collection
the last sweet kiss of desire
I stand alone
and disoriented.

I stand.
very still.

The Big Bang and all the little ones

“As the world’s resources of non-renewable fuels – coal, oil, and gas – are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature, which must inevitably lead to violence between men.”
- E.F. Schumacher
-
Nothing makes sense. And everything does. This morning I watched a documentary called “Why We Fight.” I think why we fight is the exact reason the government is often willing to tell us – “to protect the American way of life.” The life I live. The life I can’t see a way out of.
In a nutshell, our way of living is dependent, totally, on the availability of oil. The global economy would not exist without it. And in order to keep it running smoothly, oil must be coming in regularly, at stable prices. This is a game with very high stakes, and especially for the U.S. as the world’s biggest consumer of oil. We are fighting over oil because we want things to stay the way they are. We are used to it.

I feel stuck. I feel like everything I try to do amounts to spooning water out of the ocean. I try to walk. I shop at farmer’s markets. I keep giving things to Valu-Village, trying to re-define for myself how many possessions I actually need to cart around this earth. I dabble in the art of making things, baking bread, braiding friendship bracelets. And yet. This morning I put bread in an electric toaster from out of a plastic bag. Bread made in a factory and trucked to the store that I drove to in order to buy it. I made tea in the microwave. I watched a DVD, sitting on plush carpet, surrounded by latex-painted walls. I took a shower with water heated by electricity. I squirted things made from various chemicals out of various plastic bottles and put them on my skin. I dressed in factory-made clothing. A T-shirt from Mexico. A jacket from Sri Lanka. Everything I buy, no matter how local, was driven some distance in some kind of oil-using vehicle. This is life, and most of the time we don’t even think about it. I don’t often remember that nothing was like this even two hundred years ago. Two hundred years. And for hundreds of thousands of years, homo sapiens have been living without oil and industrialization. For thousands of years, civilizations have developed and disappeared without it. And so I think that the “American way of life” has nothing at all to do with what it really means to be human, to be the size of a human, so much bigger than microbes and atoms, so much smaller than stars and galaxies and even trees, so much cleverer than other animals, so much more confused. Shouldn’t being human come before being American? Shouldn’t we be more concerned with finding our place in this very old place called earth than our place in this very new, humanly-created global economy? The tower of babel has been built, and we all rent rooms in it. Have we forgotten the basic truths, that everything built falls down, everything that begins will end, everything born will die. The nature of reality is change. We try so hard to keep things as they are, try to forbid all changes except those we have decided are “good” – by which we mean, those that are in line with what we desire, what we have learned to desire. But the universe is not at our beck and call. The tides come in, the seasons change, rain falls, lightning strikes. Stars nova. Comets fly. Gravity pulls. Space and time and matter do what they do, without us. We are small. We are not in control. Have we forgotten?

Confessions.

- It's 3 o'clock in the afternoon and I am drinking Guinness.

- I know I can write. Maybe. But other than this blog, I don't know what to write.

- Most of the time, I feel useless to society. I feel most helpful to my friends. You could say my friends are my reason for existing.

- I justify my existence by how intelligent I am. As to why that would justify my existence, I don't really know. But it makes me feel better.

- I have an avoidance of talking to my family because most of the time I don't know what to say. I feel we are so very, very different and they wouldn't understand me. Maybe I am wrong, but so far I haven't taken the pains to find out.

-I believe in Ultimate Reality, something bigger than the human drama and encompassing all of it, but at this point I feel too...limited to understand it. I don't feel confident enough to say there is a Personal God who Loves us. I don't know what's behind Good and Evil. I don't know what happens after Death. My optimistic side wants to think it will all just work out in the end. I've come to appreciate how very little control I have over the vast reality I am a part of. My realist side says that what will happen will happen and there's no point in living in fear of the unknown. But in the quiet of night, I fear it anyway.

- More and more, I want to collect every scrap of soul I can find in the murky waters of my mind and throw it down here. Because there's a space between me and whoever reads this, and I need that space. It makes it feel...safer. And at the same time, I need to bare all. Well, not ALL all. Sometimes I need to speak the truth without ever knowing the response. And sometimes, getting a response makes my heart leap--"Someone hears! I am not alone! I am real!"

-As far as material life goes, I've got it good and I know I've got it good and sometimes I feel guilty and sometimes I don't want to give any of it up. Except for the shit I didn't want anyway and can cart off to Valu-Village without missing it at all.

- I am a leaver.

- I fear for the earth, and I feel helpless. And I still drive a car. Because it's convenient. And because I can.

- I am saddened and outraged by the ghetto, but at the same time relieved to have no contact with it.

- Most of the time I don't read other people's blogs.

- I really hope someone reads this.

-...but I keep stalling on hitting the "publish post" button.

A pause after the fact.

Sometimes I get in a mood to keep going, even if I'm headed in the completely wrong direction.
Case in point:
My roommate Sarah was getting a haircut, and wanted me to pick her up. She told me the name of the salon multiple times, but I of course promptly forgot it. She gave me the address and a few directions over the phone and I wrote them down. She needed to be picked up at 5:30.
It's 4:30 and I'm in Fremont with nothing much to do, so I set off. At some point, I realize something is maybe wrong. I've followed my chicken-scratch directions and gone north to 65th, but the address is 23-something. I've gone north to go south? I keep going. The street changes names. I cross a bridge. I keep going. It's after 5. My thought at this point is to find a computer with internet access and find better directions. I can see the street I want to be in now, but I can't get in the right lane. The lane I'm in will lead me onto I-5, at 5:15. I stall with my turn blinker on, hoping for a really nice person to let me over, but no such luck. Instead, I have a pickup behind me, honking. So I get onto I-5, and the entire time the only thing running through my brain is "F--, F---, F---!" I'm a little less than calm at this point. I'm tired and it's too hot and I'm hungry and I would rather be anywhere on the interstate. So I take the first exit possible, which lands me in downtown. Maybe I could have planned this out better... I keep trying to get over a lane, so I can make any kind of turn, so I can stop heading in the completely wrong direction. Finally, I end up on 1st avenue and drive all the way through Belltown and onto Elliot Ave. I pull into my own driveway. It's 5:37. I send a text message to Sarah: "Um, you need to take the bus."
My fatherly neighbor, Daniel, a carpenter who likes to hang out shirtless and usually chats with me when I get home, sees the look on my face and asks what's wrong. "Well, I was supposed to pick someone up at a place I didn't know with an address that didn't exist, and the short version is I didn't pick her up and I feel bad." At this point I'm starting to cry just a little, mostly out of pent-up frustration, and I turn towards my door.

I open it to the loud voices and laughter of two Hollywood boys. (I'm not kidding, they're really from Hollywood). They're friends of my roommate's boyfriend, and I knew they were coming tonight, but I just can't deal with them now. I walk straight past the kitchen door without looking at anyone and head for my bedroom, shutting the door behind me. Through it, I hear Cynthia's voice: "Um, that was my roommate."

I flop down on my mattress and put my pillow over my face, trying to focus on my breathing. I lie still for a while. Then I take out a map and trace out with a black pen the route I had taken. I had gone, in a nutshell, through Fremont, up to Greenlake, over almost to Ravenna, down through the University District, across downtown to the water front, and back up to Queen Anne. Basically, I went in an extremely large circle. I take out my newly-found copy of the Baghavad Gita and read for a while.

Cynthia knocks on my door and comes in with a gleam in her eye. She pounces on top of me and nuzzles my neck (not actually an unusual occurrence in our house), and I start laughing. I follow her into the kitchen, to be greeted by two very tan, very rock-hard, very racuous boys. They each give me a bear hug, and I can't say I mind. They're twins trying out the acting thing, and I sip red wine while they start telling us stories about working in LA, which for them means mostly serving at catering events (shirtless), dancing in music videos, and being the occasional gay escort. I'm tempted to ask if they get $50 for the powder room, but I don't. But allusions to Breakfast at Tiffany's don't seem that far off the mark. They both remind of Holly Golightly--innocent, maybe a little naive, even for all the things they've already seen and done. Making a living off their social skills and using their acting skills mostly at parties, where they are "so happy!" to see people they don't actually like. Their life sounds lonely. You can't help but feel a little twinge, a temptation to want to play Paul Varjak and try to rescue them. They don't seem to belong in Hollywood, even though they do. They seem less-than-passionate about acting, unsure of their own abilities, unsure maybe of the road they have chosen. But still they go on.

I want to say to them "Take it from me, sometimes it's best to pull over." Maybe the road seems smooth and straight, maybe you just want to see where it goes, but maybe it would be better to pull the cab over and stand still, even in the rain, and think. Because maybe the place you're going, even if you got there, would be nowhere. Maybe it's time to turn around.
These things are so hard to know. All I do know is, it's hard to move and think at the same time.

Vignettes

I was on the bus with two friends early on a Sunday afternoon. Sitting across from me was a boy (I say boy, he was probably 27) with a tie-dyed maroon t-shirt and unkempt curly hair threatening to spontaneously dread. He was so engrossed in his book that I could watch him without him knowing it. He was reading Anthem by Ayn Rand, which surprised me. It didn't seem to fit. But it's funny how Ayn Rand, whose heroes and heroines are all thin and angular and glamourous by virtue of their superiority and single-minded drive, is read mostly by my transient, cynical, earth-wandering generation.
The bus stopped to let people off, and then a man hopped onto the first step, not to ride the bus, but to ask the driver a question. Then another person came, with another question. Then another. And, finally, one more. I turned to look at my friends with an ironic smile, but met his eyes instead. Just for a second, but a longish one. His smirk mirrored mine, and I knew we were thinking the same thing.

I was walking through a pristine shopping center, four stories tall and full of the same stores that are in every mall, the kind of place that turns my stomach a little and makes me miss trees really really badly, when I saw a penguin statue made of metal objects. Made of...trash. Only now it wasn't. I kept circling around it, trying to identify all these old bits of old things. A hubcap. An ice-cream scoop. A piece of refrigerator door. It was beautiful, and it made me feel a little more hopeful about human civilization. Someone had seen possibility in all these discarded human objects, a chance to create using old material. But really, what thing isn't created out of old material?

Way back in the midst of my naive youth, I worked at a restaurant inside a hotel. I was the room-service girl, and it was one those days where I seemed to be running around like crazy while everyone working in the restaurant-proper had nothing to do. A tray of leftover desserts was brought down from a catering event, and all of us lingered in the kitchen, eyeing which one we wanted. Then I had to rush off to answer the room service line. Many orders, many trays, many elevator trips, no dinner break and several hours later, I wandered back into the kitchen to see the counter empty and the tray gone. Sigh. Mel, a cook from Mexico who spoke fairly decent English and liked to call me "princess", comes into the kitchen and sees me. He lifts the silver cover off a plate to reveal the exact fruit tart I had been drooling over. "I save this. For you," he says in his soft and gravelly accent, with his big brown eyes smiling at me. And suddenly the word "gift" was completely re-defined.

wealth

I was lying on the grass, eyes closed, with the sounds swirling around me. The clear glass of children's voices. The relaxed assuredness of fathers' voices. Birds. A toy xylophone. Around me were the tents and games and people. Directly in front of me was the Eastern-European man selling everything you could possibly need to pull a prank on someone. He was wearing a paisley shirt and he looked so...satisfied, with his tent and the children all pawing through bins and his wife in an umbrella hat demonstrating the marionettes and his teenage son counting change.

There's something about Magnolia.

The next day I ended up in Magnolia again, and, wonder of wonders, there was a parade. And not a typical Seattle, exhibitionist, naked cyclist parade. One for children, with middle-aged men dressed as pirates and older men dressed as clowns. There are few things I love more than home-made costumes and face-paint on wrinkled skin. Oh, the things we will do for kids. The things kids will give us an excuse to do.

There's something about the smile on the face of an adult who has just created a smile on the face of a child.

Oh, the things that are not measured by the GNP.