finding it really hard to write here anymore.

bursting to express something but it all feels wrong. here's too public. journal's too private.


one thing I can think to share is this: a couple weeks ago while lying on my bed i looked up to see my peace flags in the corner of my room, and i misread one:

"we can be
the wish
we change to see."

after rolling my eyes at my brain for being such a spazz, i decided i actually like the flip. it doesn't really alter the sentiment of the actual quote... perhaps refreshes it.

be the wish
be the wish

(what's the wish?)

"a blizzard of cherry blossoms" he said.
she and i sat on the floor pulling the yellow
from the green
and outside grey cloud trees rained
white pink spring
and
it smelled like a memory.


------------------------------------------------------
new train of thought
------------------------------------------------------


so, don't take this the wrong way, but i've been thinking a lot about marriage.
look,
i'm in love
with Wendell Berry
and the man has a lot to say about marriage (and everything). so i've been thinking about it (everything, that is). and anyway, there are about 500 quotes/poems/essays of his that i want to post/write about.
some other time, i suppose.
in the meantime, here's a poem of his i found just tonight that feels really present:


“Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here." 

that I broke something crystal
under the bed.
I imagined a castle
shattered by my own hasty hand.
I was afraid to look and
I didn't tell anyone.

Even though they scared me
I crawled down the ladder stairs
by myself.

I tried to get into the dark room
of iguanas and stars
where the boys watched a dragon movie,
but they didn't want someone in there
who cried over crystal
and worried that the reptile's cage
was too small.

We were in town for a wedding
and I don't remember
hearing
"in sickness and in health."
I guess the grown-ups didn't either.

We shatter things that are precious
and lock our little sisters
outside;
trap life in cages,
and hide beauty under beds
where it won't get broken.

But it does anyway.

I remember the day. 

love each other better.

"Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection."

Wendell Berry

"Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.
 
I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion."
Thich Nhat Hanh

Who cannot be bought;
Whose word is their bond;
Who put character above wealth;
Who possess opinion and a will;
Who are larger than their vocations;
Who do not hesitate to take chances;
Who will not lose their individuality in a crowd;
Who will be as honest in small things as in great things;
Who will make no compromise with wrong;
Whose ambitions are not confined to their own selfish desires;
Who will not say that they do it “because everybody else does it”
Who are true to their friends through good report and evil report, in adversity as well as prosperity;
Who do not believe that shrewdness, cunning, and hardheadedness are the best qualities for winning success;
Who are not ashamed or afraid to stand for the truth when it is unpopular;
Who can say “no” with emphasis, although all the rest of the world says “yes”
~~~Ted W. Engstrom ~~~~

For National Poetry Writing Month, I have written a poem each day for the past 10 days (except I missed Saturday... though, to be fair, I had written a couple extras in the days before). 20 more days to go. But it's so surprisingly what I look forward to every day that I may continue the ritual indefinitely.
I typed em up, but I wimped out on posting them yet. Maybe one tomorrow.

A woman on FaceTribe posted two amazing stories:

One:

"Today at the laundromat, the man was standing in an odd way, hunched yet looking ready to pounce. I asked if he was using the wheeled laundry basket near him. He mumbled something incoherent and made an odd gesture. I'm accustomed to people around here purposefully being vague as a power trip, that way any action you take they can act 'diss-ed' by and put you down for it. I didn't want to play that game today, so I said, "I'm sorry, I couldn't understand your response, was that a yes or a no?" More incoherency and a stronger, indecipherable gesture. With a thank you, I took the cart.

Over the next hour I watched him, always odd, strange eyed, not responding or interacting 'normally.' He wandered, fiddled with odd things, kept his back to the wall, kept glancing to the door. He never spoke to anyone, and generally kept his eyes averted from anyone else's. He began to look like a little boy who was trying to act cool but who was actually really scared.

As I was folding the last of my sheets a woman came in, gave this man a smile, a gentle touch on his shoulder and a kiss. His whole demeanor softened, his eyes bathed in her face. He smiled. Her hands started moving. Slow, cautious sign language. He responded slow, measured, as though just learning.

As I was walking out, the staff woman, who had seen me watching them together, told me "He came back from Iraq two years ago deaf, and was so angry he refused to learn sign language. He made it his New Years resolution this year to learn. He said he's doing it because he loves his wife so much."

It is so easy for me to judge, to assume, to become fearful. Yet, I never know a stranger's story. Never.

May I ever grow in my compassion. Ever grow. ah ho."

Two:

"Easter morning:
The sound was unmistakable - adult bird stuck in the rain gutter down spout, about mid second story. I investigated and said "There's nothing I can do. I don't have an extension ladder, the screws are rusted stuck and the pipe is anchored into the building mortar." Two hours later the pipe was cut, the mortar chiseled out, eight feet of jammed debris removed and an adult black bird came flying out to gracefully land on the wires across the street. I learned the bird had been in there for many days. There was fresh greenery among the stuck debris, she was nest building when she fell in. Later on a very skinny black bird landed on the tree near me and tweeted and chirped as I gardened.

At first I was hopeless saying there was nothing I could do. But I found I could do a lot. I could open the tomb. Happy Easter!"

 

i am so covered in darkness, but there is so much light.

hah, a year ago yesterday I wrote "i honestly don't think i will finish this quarter" which is exactly how i felt yesterday. i guess got through it before, so i can do it again.
it'd be great if i could enjoy it.

though I've never quite felt how i feel right now...
and words that i could say here wouldn't start to express it.

I was going to post a quote I really like about how creating a "balance between exuberance and humility" is one of the keys to happiness. I can never remember the quote exactly, nor can I ever remember who said/wrote it. When I went to look for it tonight, the first thing that came up on Google sounded really familiar, and I thought I had found the quote. Turns out, what I had found was something I myself had written... something that I didn't even know was online. Kinda cool. (As goes the interwebs, this discovery led me from one thing to another until I was thoroughly distracted.)

After further exploration when I got back on track, I discovered the quote (really, it was more of an entire lecture...) was made by Vladi Chalupka, a University of Washington professor who's class I sat in with Matt when I visited him during our Freshmen year of college. Except, I hadn't heard the quote then. I heard it when Vladi spoke at Science Camp in West Virginia two summers ago. He's also apparently given the lecture at Evergreen too. (linkslinkslinks)

On a side note, Peter Mulvey has a song about drinking outside a bar, looking at the stars, and talking about the universe with Vladi, the astrophysicist from UW.
Now I miss camp (not terribly though, and I am still glad about my decision to not go this summer), and feel calmer... peaceful-er (ha) in general.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

i donno

Its sick when people can't recognize themselves in the mirror.
Today the mirror is a movie. But it's not just a movie...
When is a story ever really just a story? We must be just too used to believing that they are.

I guess I thought I could handle watching something so incredibly disturbing and dark in a roomful of other people. I guess I thought other people cared about the same things I do.

But no. They don't. They didn't get it. They didn't even fucking get it. And they don't fucking care.

How someone could leave the theatre saying "there should have been more blood...I loved it but it wasn't bloody enough" after the story they just witnessed, is absolutely beyond me. It took everything I had not to lose it at those people in the hall on the way out. "Don't you see that what you are saying epitomizes everything the movie was criticizing?" If I could have said it so clearly at that point, I would have, but I was shaking and would have just started ranting and cussing and crying and being hysterical, so I kept it in. I kinda regret it though...

I mean, fuck.. they might as well have been sitting at the "Capital" watching the actual "hunger games" and saying "yea, it's entertaining, but I want to see more blood." Isn't that the whole point of the story? That we are so goddamned desensitized to violence and people's suffering that we turn it into a game?

Or a movie... not as a story we should draw insight and thought from (of course not), but as a fucking form of entertainment where we can mock ourselves mocking ourselves about being inhumane, disgusting, oblivious, and monstrous, and then turn around and be inhumane, disgusting, oblivious, and monstrous about it; treat it as just something we can enjoy and then even laugh about and say "there should have been more blood" even though we just watched 24 kids completely slaughter each other... FUCK THAT

Real or not, if you can leave after that smiling or complaining about the entertainment factor, you clearly missed the whole fucking point.

The story got its inspiration from somewhere... lets look around...
hmmm
It couldn't possibly be our culture and our wars and our video game violence, and our complete lack of regard for the well-being of the people who suffer in order for us to have it all, and our inability to any longer feel the full weight of violence and death. IT COULDN'T POSSIBLY BE THAT. or our collective unconsciousness that allows the paradox to continue (even in direct response to it being mirrored at us or shoved through our eyes and ears for 2 and half hours).

I mean, we aren't analyzing Shakespeare here people. Its pretty goddamned straightforward.
It's a good story, and yes, its entertaining... because its an fascinating portrayal of...reality. It hits the nail on the head. We're all just too fucking numb to realize it.

Mom said it best: "its hard to feel much of anything after watching that."
but it did hurt me and it fueled my anger, because as far as I'm concerned, it is real. We are already there. We are already being taken from our homes to kill other people, and we are called to appreciate this as our only way to maintain freedom. We are already being suppressed through fear-tactics and police violence and lies on the screens. We are already separated into districts: "third world" "first world," "homeless" "in poverty" "middle class" "rich/1%." We are already being exploited and exploiting other for resources in order to continue the possibility of lavish lifestyles. We already mock and get pleasure from other people's real-life hardships on reality television. We already.... on and on and on.


meh, maybe I'm getting too worked up about it. maybe I'm expecting too much of people. i feel better having gotten it out there though...

"i feel walled-in. i pretend to know why, but i dont respond. i try. i am working inside to change myself, to feel more free. it must just been a state of thought... a state of mind. (i wish i could write what we talked about without feeling like an idiot. its so damn difficult for me to fee confident in saying what i have to say. i feel like everything i know is so rudimentary. and like its all something someone told me, and i dont know what to believe anymore.

im exhausted of being the person ive been being. i want to feel curious, energetic, alive, bold, joyful, fearless, daring, happy, interested, caring, loving, and on and on. i want to feel free. but i am terrified of freedom. i am scared of certainty and i am scared of uncertainty. i am terrified to explore new ways of being, but can't continue on like this. my thought process is that it might be better not to go to camp so i can dedicate energy to this self-discovery that desperately needs to happen. then i think "oh, maybe going to camp will remind me of things i'd forgotton about myself." maybe. maybe. but maybe i am just hiding in what is "safer" and "known." although i know there are parts of it that i genuinely dont want to go without, and there are people there i want to spend time with, and things there i want to do. but also parts that feel like a waste and parts that feel selfish, and parts that feel dreadful.

i want to feel strong but i dont.
i am terrified of changing. there are so many ways to be, and im afraid to choose. im afraid of not being able to go back. im afraid of not making the right choice. im afraid of regret. im afraid of the truth. im afraid of myself. im afraid of everyone else.
im afraid of time...not having enough. of having enough and wasting it. im afraid of what ie already lost. not just time but truth, reality, visions, values, pieces of myself. im afraid to lose more. to give more. i am afraid of my power... how much i have and the fact that i will never be able to give it all.
im afraid that i will never be able to do enough.
im afraid that i will get comfortable. im afraid of discomfort. im afraid of pain. im afraid of being numb to other people's pain. im afraid i'll forget or be forgotten. im afraid i'll never be loved the way i love or the way i want to be loved. im afraid of meaninglessness. im afraid of placing meaning on something that only i care about.

im afraid of the dark. of zombies. of corruption, anger, sadness, pain, loss, solitude, groups, being wrong, being right, interactions, comparisons, criticism, betrayal, change, stagnation, death, love.
i wonder if i will survive.
but of course i will....
what of all of this could end me before my time (unless i let it)?
but if i am so strong, as to be able to face these things then i will surely have to face them all, an that is daunting.
knowing this though, how do i let go of the uncertainty of everything? how do i enjoy while waiting to be sprung upon by my fears? (the same way i fall asleep each night, gladly, even facing the eminence of my frequent nightmares... thy are all adventures anyway and they are at the least good stories). i will practice now. i will embrace this ending and embrace the blank pages ahead, which will fill with questions, ideas, answers, and probably more lists of fears."

that i can grow wings if i want to fly.

"To me it is clear that the way of life encouraged and imposed on people by the dominant institutions of our society (eg public schooling, media and advertising, the extractive capitalist economy) is in many vitally important ways contrary to our natures and our abilities to mature. We are conditioned to develop into parts of the technocratic machine that is the dominant, globalizing capitalist society, a society that professes to stand above nature, to have transcended nature and its messiness and beastliness. But to me this sense of dichotomous superiority is simply hubris, alienation, and unexamined pain. This is not to say that humanity is not a distinct form of life in nature, or that it doesn’t have some unique set of qualities, but that these very qualities can only find genuine expression if they are voiced form the ancestral home, the ground, the context of nature. To me, being whole must mean being an integral part of creation itself, that which has sprung from source: the earth, and further back, the unimaginable mystery of the cosmic womb of the universe. It is all continuous; there is no dichotomous break between the human and all else, except that which we perceive." -Cam

I finished my climbing project!
I smashed the tip! I got the ear! I climbed the V5! and it was awesome!

and on Tuesday, I gave a good presentation in Spanish, which was also a huge accomplishment for me.

and yesterday I danced harder than I ever have in my life, probably.

was full! (im hyper and sleep-deprived and have recently made a commitment to myself to stop taking myself so seriously--ya know, sometimes--and to be more of the goofball i am. so this could be interesante. let the ridiculosity begin! )

yesterday:
blah morning (except the sunny-crispness of the day)

i feel like i live in too many different realities...

I'm tired and scared.