I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. 

I write against power and for democracy. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams. I write in a solitude born out of community. I write to the questions that shatter my sleep. I write to the answers that keep me complacent. I write to remember. I write to forget. I write to the music that opens my heart. I write to quell the pain. I write to migrating birds with the hubris of language. I write as a form of translation. I write with the patience of melancholy in winter. 

I write because it allows me to confront that which I do not know. I write as an act of faith. I write as an act of slowness. I write to record what I love in the face of loss. I write because it makes me less fearful of death. I write as an exercise in pure joy. I write as one who walks on the surface of a frozen river beginning to melt. I write out of my anger and into my passion. I write from the stillness of night anticipating-always anticipating. I write to listen. 

I write out of silence. I write to soothe the voices shouting inside me, outside me, all around. I write because of the humor of our condition as humans. I write because I believe in words. I write because I do not believe in words. I write because it is a dance with paradox. I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in sand. I write because it belongs to the force of the moon: high tide, low tide. I write because it is the way I take long 6 Why I Write walks. I write as a bow to wilderness. 

I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness. I write because as a child I spoke a different language. I write with a knife carving each word through the generosity of trees. I write as ritual. I write because I am not employable. I write out of my inconsistencies. I write because then I do not have to speak. I write with the colors of memory. I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as a witness to what I imagine. I write by grace and grit. I write out of indigestion. I write when I am starving. I write when I am full. I write to the dead. I write out of the body. I write to put food on the table. I write on the other side of procrastination. I write for the children we never had. 

I write for the love of ideas. I write for the surprise of a sentence. I write with the belief of alchemists. I write knowing I will always fail. I write knowing words always fall short. I write knowing I can be killed by my own words, stabbed by syntax, crucified by both understanding and misunderstanding. I write out of ignorance. I write by accident. I write past the embarrassment of exposure. I keep writing and suddenly, I am overcome by the sheer indulgence, (the madness,) the meaninglessness, the ridiculousness of this list. 

I trust nothing especially myself and slide head first into the familiar abyss of doubt and humiliation and threaten to push the delete button on my way down, or madly erase each line, pick up the paper and rip it into shreds-and then I realize, it doesn't matter, words are always a gamble, words are splinters from cut glass. I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient. I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.


Jefferson State- Northern CA, Canyon Creek Trail; also leads to 3 waterfalls:

What I hope:

I hope to feel the dew collect along my collarbones and arms in the rice paddy fields of Bali as the sun reaches up, evoking the promise of today.

I hope to ride my bike through streets laden with the stories of thousands embedded within them.

I hope to marvel at the work of our Earth; lush greenery polluted with the fragrance of rain and soil, land and forests littered with flora and fauna—the ultimate permeable magic, the holy footprint of our Mother.

I hope to sit atop a mountain, or cliff, or a grassy peak and let the landscape consume me—the microcosm into the macrocosm—letting the wide, expansive, abysmal horizon devour me.  

I hope to smell roses—native roses lunging toward the sky, wild and unruly, adorning themselves with painful thorns and irrevocable beauty in one fell swoop; a metaphor for the unwavering woman.

I hope to be surrounded by lavender; hundreds of foliage so potent and persuasive, a paradise so holy all you can do is fall to your knees in a prayer of quiet resolution.

I hope to be enclosed in a small sphere of sound—a theatre housing reverberations and intricacy of echo and air and movement, taking our heads, unraveling them, and lifting them to the ceiling. I hope the hairs stand tall on the back of my neck.

I hope to always know my home, and that, to come home, is to be still wherever I am in any frame of time; the pause, the exhale, the stillness—that is my meditation. No need to try or attempt at the favorite identity of the ego; the doer, the excel-ler, the spiritual one.

 No need for false refuges any longer. 

 :



If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails 

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere. 
And if your spirit
carries within it 

the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging --- 

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted --- 

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly, 
every morning, 

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy, 
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray. -Mary Oliver 

To be moved by sound, by echo, is to ultimately be moved by grace. 


Our love is like the padlocks on the Pont des Arts, in Paris—
Thousands of locks, symbols of unbreakable love.
Isn’t that beautiful?
Apparently, though, all those locks are too heavy for the bridge.
Did you hear this?
I read it somewhere.
The locks are weighing the bridge down.
So you know what they’re going to do?
They’re taking them off with bolt cutters and throwing them out.
Isn’t that beautiful, too?
So now the people aren’t locked together anymore.
They’re free to maybe see other people.
I thought that was interesting.

Hilarious and tender poetry for Valentine's Day from the New Yorker

Art from the fiercely talented SAINTE MARIA
A "Ha" and An Exhale

light:


I pause at a stoplight, hands at the 10’ and 2’ and it hits. Not a moving vehicle housing an unaware driver (thankfully), but sadness.

The words of Miranda July repeat softly with the in-breath that follows; “All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”

It is the third year in a row with no “happy birthday”. Blood is thicker than water echoes at the forefront of my mind with a “ha” and an exhale. Whoever decided that that idiom was a true representation of an impenetrable familial bond had little idea of the contrary. Water can be pretty damn thick.

Five days before I turned twenty-four I received several spit-fire messages from my dad. Out of the blue, without a trigger-warning or causation. It had been months since we'd spoken (about eight or nine) and about two decades of nonexistent emotional relationship. The last year or so of events became the turning point in finally severing and (emotionally) removing any blood-binding relations we most certainly share. I think of the DNA splitting itself apart; I visualize animated slides of a molecule binding and separating, causing some sort of chaos in the reaction, yet the singular molecule survives on its’ own. I’m left with a brain in my skull and a heart beating in my chest that bears no resemblance to his.

 I demand respect.
You need medication so you can learn how to actually be around and get along with others.
You’re clueless to what real life is like.
Grow up and experience hard times. You don’t know what true suffering is. I need you to grow up and experience the real world, you pitiful little brat.

I imagine this is what many, many people do when they’re embarrassed, vulnerable, angry, and aggressive—they’re in pain. And what’s the easiest, easiest thing to do to alleviate that pain? Push and pull it into the false refuge that is displacement and pour it out onto others. I know this to be true because I've done it myself. Shamefully, sadly, but truthfully. But that scene of message after message, the maelstrom of emotion and words and adrenaline (all the while at a coffee shop trying to write and send out my writing) made me think on my past reactions in relation to his; the ticking bomb, the hidden land mine that is my father, and me, the solider in battle on the front-line knowing it can go one of two ways.

My reactions and displacements similar to my father's ceased at the exact season in my life when I began to love and accept my humanness, with all my flaws, and endure my proclivity of a harsh and judgmental mind. I learned to feel it all. I felt so much pain in so many of the meditations, mental and physical manifestations, that I thought I would not be able to continue. But I did. I did. My back would swell so much that lying is savasana sent radiating splints all over my body. 


Eula Biss writes, “Assigning a value to my own pain has never ceased to feel like a political act. I am a citizen of a country that ranks our comfort above any other concern. People suffer, I know, so that I may eat bananas in February. And then there is history . . . I struggle to consider my pain in proportion to the pain of a napalmed Vietnamese girl whose skin is slowly melting off as she walks naked in the sun. This exercise itself is painful.”

I think of the girl too scared and worn to get out of her bed—her eyes sunken, glazed over; her sight hazy and spotty as an off-shoot symptom; her clothing loose as she can’t manage to eat anything more than kefir yogurt or amber colored soup. Yet she wears makeup and fixes her hair and wears nice boots because “doing so will make you believe you are okay,” she is told. And it works in some regard, but never enough to lift the brick off her chest that dissipates every belief that she will somehow survive this feeling of despair.

In The Faerie Queene it is transcribed that despair is the worst sin man can commit as it denies the mercy of God. Despaire was the personification of man’s worst fate, a transgression of every guiding thought that led man and woman far from the light of the Lord and into the deepest caves of mulling darkness. Once Despaire got a hold of him, the mired mind of the Redcrosse Knight couldn’t bear to believe that he was somehow worthy of this life. He couldn't fathom that his humanness was sanctified by God’s love and that he was precious and of value. Despaire’s own convictions were suddenly meddled with Redcrosse’s own voice, thoughts, and beliefs. Their declarations and thoughts were one in the same: hopeless, hopelessness.

If dread and despair are not synonymous with pain and suffering than I’m not sure how else to view the body and mind in the realm of connectedness—because that is exactly what they are: one interwoven and cohesive entity, one holy and heavy bone-house. Like family, like the blood and water in our bodies. 

The pain of my father and his own demons, his own grim-reaping Despaire, is visible to me. The displacement, the reactions, the result of my own bodily reactions, the flooding of thoughts and threats in my mind. Pain. Past. Resurfacing, wading, sinking down again. Rating my pain against anyone else's is an injustice to humanity and to myself, as it lacks compassion and awareness to all living things who suffer in this realm. 

Losing the connectedness with my bloodline is an act of an exhale--taking it deeply within, pausing, holding it in, cherishing it for the nourishment, and finally, letting it go. For as long as I am alive the thickness of blood will move through me, the water, too. I need both to survive, but I don't need them in anyone else. I already have them here, at home, in me. 

little slipper of a moon:


My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream. -Dylan Thomas

My father is not a man of many words. And the words I do remember, the majority of them, were not kind or encouraging--they were/are often belittling, acrimonious, painful. I don't say this with anger, resentment, blame, or bitterness. I render it only as fact; a small (maybe quite large, in retrospect), but true outline in the story that is my life. 

I came across this letter/list that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote for his daughter, Scottie, when she was a young girl. I thought the sweetness and hopefulness of the list was endearing. I felt a pang of sadness for all the words my own father has neglected to say, leaving me devoid of any fatherly, parental advice in my life. I fill this empty bowl on my own again and again. It has been propitious beyond words in its own right. 

The list is as follows:



Things to worry about:

Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship

Things not to worry about: 

Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about: 

What am I really aiming at? 
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them? 
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it? 

With dearest love,

Daddy

 :



Very little grows on jagged rock.
Be ground. Be crumbled,
so wildflowers will come up
where you are.

You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different.
Surrender. | Rumi





 :

This piece was published here, at the ever-growing Soul Anatomy



No one tells you that your boobs will grow in at twenty-two. It's the best kept secret. No one tells you that at twenty-three, you will develop cystic acne that looks like it belongs to a very hormonal teenage boy. But, like all things, it will heal in time. No one tells you that at twenty you will develop an anxiety disorder. And panic attacks. No one will tell you how to treat them either, especially doctors. But guess what? You will learn on your own. You will recover and grow through the concrete boundaries like the smallest seed in the crack sprouting towards the sky. I promise you, you will.

 No one tells you that your parents will be the empty bowls that you will have to fill again and again*--especially your dad. But the bowls will be there and you will fill them with good intention, with acceptance and compassion, and in time, forgiveness. You will repeat this all of your life. No one tells you that it's okay to not fit in with the family you were born into. You are not broken or bad. You are sacred and a being deserving of love. No one tells you how to breathe--this seems silly, right? We were born knowing how, but somewhere along the road, we started breathing in a reverse cycle, causing more ill effects than imagined.No one tells you not to blame yourself--that what you feel, no matter what in the holy hell it is, is valid. And okay. And you must not blame yourself, or anyone else, for the same reason that it will eat at you. No one tells you to sit in silence. To let whatever arises be present. You will want to run and scream. You will cry and shake and ache in places you didn't know were capable of feeling pain. But stay. Please, stay. 

No one tells you that American (and all worldly) "success" is an illusive fallacy, a smoke-and-mirrors effect created by capitalism and oppression. No one tells you the true issues of our society and culture, the faces of oppression resulting in violence, cultural imperialism, and exploitation*. No one tells you that when people act out in anger and in selfishness and in violence, they are hurting. They are in so much pain themselves, they are blinded by tension and primal emotions with little logic, compassion, and empathy to rely on.  

 No one tells you that you are wonderful as you are. You will hear from others of your flaws, you will know your insecurities through the faces of other people--but I will tell you, you are loved as you are. Through this recognition and self-cultivating love you will give your own self the permission to change and grow and, ultimately, just be. But no one ever tells you this. 


*Cheryl Strayed
*Iris Young 


This unique hiking feeling <3:







This little affirmation of sorts was gracefully published here at Soul Anatomy. Thanks for reading (from all my heart).
trees
Image from Soul Anatomy

I believe in the long drawn out breath after a good cry. I believe in the ritual that is drinking coffee (decaf, cold brew, french press, drip--the style and flavor irrelevant). I believe in throwing out the scales and going by how you feel; if you like the way your clothes fit then that is simply enough. I believe in not leaving your apartment for an entire day because it's quite possibly as restorative as anything else could be, every now and then. I believe in the written word--penmanship. I believe in saving every letter someone has ever written me, a piece of them kept in a box. I believe in therapy, good therapy and with the right person (you will find him or her if that is what you desire). I believe that what you seek is seeking you. I believe in selling everything I own and taking two suitcases across the world. I believe I will do this in my lifetime. I believe in serving and how it throws you in the muck and makes you a strong, hard worker; one that could handle any other job because this is probably the hardest one you will ever have. I believe some secrets should be kept closer, while others need to be caught and released back into the abyss that is the universe (or, to said therapist). I believe in writing because it will always help me to understand what the verbal usage of words do not. I believe in reading a piece from the arsenal of my favorite writers at least once a day because it nourishes me as much as deep breathing. I believe in good men--men who are good at the core of their person; loving, kind, and invested. I believe in good women, and people in general, too. I believe in cheap sushi, despite possible illness. I believe in not eating mammals or their produce--even though I do occasionally engage in it myself more than I'd like to. I believe in the revisiting of the gnawing feelings that ask to be felt, seen, and heard, again, and again. I believe in forgiveness and compassion--the hand I press to my heart each day, my lips whispering, "It's okay. It's okay. It's okay."



mary robinson:


A compilation of the dark green sea grape leaves
The black soil that birthed our starfruit tree
The glistening tar that marred our cul-de-sac

 I see her with a mason jar
Collecting the rocks and leaves
Pieces of the planet and the universe
To be carried with her, always.

Looking up into a vast blue sky,
The universe is mirrored back to my child eyes
Mason jars housing tadpoles and fireflies
Containing life, glittering light

My mind in time became like an ocean’s trench
A dark, deep blue
Vast, endless.
Like the sky from my youth

Everything I knew, everything I questioned
Floated just beneath the surface
Or far too deep
A scary journey into the unknown

My sun-drenched childhood was transported north
Sailing into adulthood,
My ocean, my sky became cold and numb

Like the way my fingers felt in the winter
Beneath the snow or through the wind
From the hole in the pocket of my pea coat. 

My fingers would feel so cold
Like they could just fall off 
And I wouldn't feel a thing. 

I could just fall off now,
Off and away from the bloodline
Dropping the glass jar of my universe

I could fall away from the tree
Like the sea grape leaves
Fall from it entirely,
And I wouldn't feel a thing. 


Image. 

fairy tales by nature:



I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

-mary oliver
consider.



This small piece was published here, at Soul Anatomy, a site created by writer Brianna Wiest, who's work I've had such a joy to read for some time. 

Consider more sleep. Eight hours is okay. More is better, personally. Consider that people weave in and out of your life--it's part of growing up, in the least cliche way possible. Not fitting into the relationships with people you once were so comfortable in is integral to your own growth. Consider buying a pretty dress and wearing it the second the mail comes--then go on date with yourself. Get a glass of wine, a burger, and enjoy. Consider the fact that being single all through university is the best thing that could have happened to you. The best has yet to show up on your path, but remember, the path is the goal. Consider the path you've currently taken; the choices you've made that have led you here. Rejoice. For this is exactly where you need to be. Consider that perhaps backpacking alone is really the right move. It's you, babe. You are all you will ever need. Consider that your mother always tried her best. She did the most with what she could, with what she had, mentally, physically, emotionally, materially. Consider that life was hard, is hard, and everyone is walking around in a shell that houses scary, beautiful, haunting, and magnificent things that no one in that shell could ever run away from, despite adversity to it. So we all struggle and we all try our best. Especially mum. Consider the Lobster. Just kidding. But really--read more. Read the work of dead people and consider what it means to be human; what it means to have existed, to have felt the inner workings of one's own being so strongly, to have lived through the human condition. Consider delving into what the "human condition" even means. Consider eating bread for the sake of the warmth and softness on your tongue that is flour and yeast when beaten into submission; it then rises from its' own undoing. "Breaking bread" is sacred among almost all religions--find the beauty and the meaning among it. Consider that, yes, carbs and gluten and grain are in the making of the thing, but, for once, just once, let the senses be present. Consider what it means to be in the moment. What does that truly mean to you? Then breathe. Always breathe. 



A year of filtering out friends and family that do not serve me. 

A year of essays and late-night library work leading to graduation (with a 4.0); a year of therapy and meditation and Hatha yoga. 

A year of applying to a job overseas, of writing and reading and fulfilling myself with a kind of sustenance that is not found anywhere else. 

A year of ghosts showing themselves, coming up and reappearing; a year of being hurt, not by others, but by myself and my perceptions and expectations. Learning this has been key. 

A year of ironic humor--the universe is hilarious and, I have found, is never kidding. 

Twenty-three and twenty-fifteen were incredibly special. I came together, and then fall I apart. Over and over again. 


Can you call it
See it coming
Just enough to tell a story 'bout a
Portrait of a young girl waiting for the ending of an era
Can you call it
See it coming
Just enough to tell a story bout a