Avenir

"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

-- Lewis Carrol

But keep on believing those far after the breakfasting hour ends.

And...

Fast only to break it.

//...//

Just collecting jewels over here

Readying for another leap

And if the cliff turns out to be a valley wall

I'll take solace that the window or door

Which deceived me in the first place

Still counts as an awakening.

For it is the spirit I'm after

More so than the sedentary.

So possibility dons

with its necklace.

//...//

Of the metaphysical chain

connecting tangible or semi-tangible

events

sentiments

wonderments

engagements

distilled into one jewel,

the moment your path crosses with some others

like you've been on a crash course

or just blithely fell together

upon life's whim.

//...//

All being collected

what will eventually be strung together

or is being strung together

along the way.

.. ///..

Tie the kite strings round your fingers.

This is October, After Twelve Steps

Legs feel like walking sticks with those exposed, knobby joints. Nights fall swiftly without much warning. Lists grow longer and more obtuse as I grow languid in the listing process of writing one line down, then another, and another... Nine is the morning's desired hour to stir me from darkened, cavernous dreams. I read somewhere that people don't look forward to dreaming anymore. Dreaming is all I look forward to. Well, not really. There are others, too.

Like.

Letter writing.

I was struck last night as I lay in bed, gazing absentmindedly across the open room which lies past the foot of my bed {a queendom, kingdom without a king, as I also recently read}, my eyes lighted upon the letter, folded into three rectangular portions, two kinds of stationary, one plastered atop the other, pale pink under the other's eggy watercolor. Pen just dry, papers yet to be stuffed into envelope, address yet to be scrawled, I realized I had forgotten these words had not reached the eyes meant to read them. I sat there, doggedly, assuming she who would had already... read and received. Ha! So much for unconscious conditioning at the gaping, grasping, invisible tendrils of technology. And the finite action of handwriting, delivering a psychological push to those words, stronger yet less definite than the mail carrier's easy abandonment when releasing said letter from the grasp of red-cold fingertips in a few fine October days.

Like.

Filling Burners.

Stirring the contents of multiple frying pans and brews, letting one sizzle and another simmer, going for a walk and coming home to the smell of each single endeavor, noticing their points of intersection, letting the steam cloud together... In short, many new ideas on the horizon, soon to be making the shift to physical form.

Like.

Peering into Corners and Retrieving

ways to fill the front of an envelope, so that the letters fall across the page in a sweeping fashion, like ribbons fall accidentally out of the hair or slip noiselessly off the waist, settling in greeting on the ground used by the lively and the adventurous for day-long endeavors unhurried by the grinning approach of night.

neither snow... via oh joy.

thoughts from footsteps retraced

Choose.

Find something to live for.

Abandon yourself to it.

I hope a part of that something, is yourself.

Learn how to abandon. Learn how to live with abandon. Learn the boundaries of abandon. Test your own boundaries of abandon.

Walk. Run. Cycle. Do this until you reach a spot you once occupied on a geographical map. Then take out the psychological one. Remember. Feel it, the space, the moods. See it, from the height you were then, from the curtain of thoughts through which you peered at that point in time. Get closer. Look inside through the windows that haven't been replaced. Note the paint, always the same color.

Recognize the similarities and examine the differences. There are so many kinds of trees, houses, books, humans, animals... Yet we are all doing the same thing, by different methods. We are being. We are being for others. We are being for what we are, for the Self.

Don't try too hard. Have nothing to do with the overwrought. Yet there is no room for complacency, either. Integrate yourself into the space around you. The place you occupy is the one deserving of your attention. Look ahead, but hold the moment's hand.

_____.

Naomi knows how to live with abandon. Precise abandon. Her art--books, watercolors, installations--is an ongoing shrine to the larger aspect, contained and extracted from her mind and body.

____.

I want to ask this question to everyone:

What do you do when you need to look up? That is, what is your go-to, sure fire, way to combat the despondency and doldrums?

morning. 13.

Drop down, crossleggedly arranged on the floor. The blue of the oriental rug a sea of flowers and vines supporting my mass like a web or a net or a song. On this morning I keep breathing in the wind of an overcast day and wondering about covering my feet in soil from the flowerbed or by the cornstalks so I can grow taller and see above it all.

Let me elaborate.

Above the cloudy din of mechanically moving limbs and wheels and cogs and minds, above the expected, the understood and the explored.

So they say, she won't have grown among those explorers and adventurers, but she will have wished to -- and so her consciousness of a lack, of a space to fill, gives her a boost and perhaps will help her personally realize her positionary, reactionary dreams of a heaving alleluia outlined in that blue found in light and in deep breaths and slow afternoons and elegance.

___.

Up, down, to the side. Seamless lines of polished wood. Strong, not yet weathered, or perhaps just beautified for the weekend. Sparkling waters deeper blue than skies. Victorian lives perched on windblown cliffs and main street store-fronted by idea translated to form. And that ivy remembered from the co-op as if from a dream. With each bend opening to a valley half moon of grassy farmland, red barn and sheep or cow or horse.

Breath continually caught between memories slipped and held fast. A lot of fog, a bit of rain then not as now. Silly projections of my own life and blurred vision of my golden hair and tanned complexion in the side view mirror. Turn to the green forest to combat those watery blues. Rise up, they encircle the depths, lead the way and protect from land but never from skies. No, never from skies which might turn blue to grey and soon, fast and expectedly yet unstoppably, to black.

Can it be things passed me by then as if I were a child? Everything was circular with an origin of fear and love -- a circumference of protective cloud barrier and starry interior liable to evaporate upon departure. Once that barrier is broken the wailing outlives the song, but eventually, if you think strongly enough and in the right vein, the song comes back, this time for permanence, as in "I-won't-let-go-of -your -hand" line of thought. It might even become something of legend. Treat it well, then, and with the light heart of comic verse and a capella.

change your escape

"I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change."-- Jim Rohn

Change can be thought of as escape, yet why do we feel the need to escape in the first place? What are we really escaping from if only a self-imposed and believed perception of things? Although reality can't be denied and escaped from by evasive dreaming--confronting a problem and living in the moment demands such clarity of perception, if such a thing exists--any present state is still a living state (unless besought by a fatal and debilitating illness of a certain kind) and thus escaping becomes something layered upon living. To escape from a current state of being, semi-permanent and sometimes referred to as real life, is to escape from a chosen situation which is not obligatory. Where an escape is needed, is happiness present?

On the other hand, when change is needed, perhaps it would be easier to execute if thought of as escape. I believe we have at hand many different coping mechanisms, including the ability to romanticise and alter perception and create spin in any given state or situation. We all live in our own sort of dreamworld, we all perceive the same "realities," assuming they are real and have a static form outside our perception, differently. And thank goodness. Sophie wrote a bit about perception and writers recently in a biting response to part of New York life. Writer or not, we all do the same thing. And so what if instead of looking upon change as a terrifying leap or an event sure to result in deterioration of the self, it was thought of as another great adventure, an escape if you will. What then?

And with that I'm off to Crescent Lake.

gelato.

This is about pine nuts and whole milk and honey. It is about machinery and method. It is taste and consistency and scent and temperature all tied up with bonds too small for the eye to see but strong enough for the body to feel.

This is also about something just as visceral but more ethereal. The bringing back and the leaning forward, coinciding in some odd modernistic dance of the girl who travels far away, lovingly returns home and finds herself propelled and pulled and projected into some other realm where her emptiness might be satiated. She would even settle for another drop in the cavern that has occupied the place just above her stomach and below her chest since she can remember feeling anything; since she could imagine alternate worlds, so far removed from her own yet coinciding with what she knew, what she knows, what she wants to know.

Simultaneously wanting to leave and wanting to stay leaves only limbo to occupy. Bent back at an odd angle with a self-made and socially-perpetuated deadline to make oneself on the chest is the position that lasts too long and exhausts inspiration and beats freedom away with a howl, source unknown. There are day dreams and night dreams and wished-for scenarios yet no simple or obvious path for collecting experiences to create the concoction of last night’s reverie, yesterday’s fervor. Yet there is at any given time an arsenal made of spices, dairy and grain available to the patient, the creative or simply the willing. There is cooking. There is baking. There is ice cream making on a summer afternoon.

My suitcase is unruly. Unfailingly, each time I return from Europe it refuses to accommodate spatial needs. The hand woven, thick yarned, cream woolen sweater from San Gimignano? Rejected. The red wine from Verona? Drink it in Rome. The white leather vintage style Capri car shoes from Siena? Carry them on. My palate, however, is different. Instead of growing smaller by the excursion, it makes room for new tastes, new textures, new memories. Daily habits are flawlessly formed, recorded and deftly executed with a rigidity that only great self-control can sustain. Oh, there are many examples. But for now… gelato. Every night. Rotating gelaterias, varied combination of flavors, sometimes cone sometimes cup. But always, always, the pine nut.

I left Oregon despising peanut butter and I returned with a sudden craving for the nutty spread in a form sweeter and slightly modified. {I also left freshly graduated from college, and suddenly finished with technology, the speed and ease by which people can reach and be reached by a person, turning my nose up at those with iPhone or Blackberry in palm, and returned ravenous for the aforementioned device}. I wish to thank this gelato.

Solid, foundational and warm are perhaps unlikely adjectives used to describe gelato, yet pine nuts have a way of transforming something delightfully cold and refreshing into something akin to that sweater carefully smashed into the corner of my suitcase. Gelato seems to be among the favorite recommendations when it comes to what to eat in Italy and although virtually nothing edible can be recreated 3,000 miles away from the region in which it was first tasted and thus produced, there is always the wild possibility of creating something synonymous and dazzling, something of your region, translated.

It is sometimes enough for the moment to sit down with a dish of sweetness at once provoking a memory and casting a line to potential friends as yet unknown. When the physical can be a symbol of the intangible, when it can calm the highs and lows with a nod to the future and wink to the past and smile in the present.

Pine Nut Gelato
I combined a few different recipes and scoured cookbooks for the following method, roughly based upon this recipe from Epicurious.

Spread roughly 1 cup pine nuts on a baking sheet and toast for 5 minutes in a 400 degree oven.

While pine nuts toast, combine ½ cup honey and ¼ cup sugar in a food processor fitted with the blade attachment. Add the just-toasted nuts and process until a consistency of peanut butter is reached. Add 2 whole {fresh} eggs and process until combined.

Boil 2 ½ cups whole milk in a heavy saucepan over medium heat. With the food processor running, slowly pour the hot milk into the egg and nut mixture. The processor will be very full. Keep processing until the milk is incorporated into the nut mixture, about 20 seconds. The liquid should be smooth with a few small pieces of pine nut.

Pour the mixture back into the heavy saucepan and slowly reheat on low for about 10 minutes. Whisk constantly and do not boil. The mixture should thicken slightly. Pour the mixture into a large, clean bowl and cool slightly, about 15 minutes. Add ¼ teaspoon salt and ½ teaspoon vanilla extract, whisking until combined. {Alternatively, add 1 vanilla bean [optional] sliced lengthwise to the pan when bringing the milk to a boil. Before pouring milk into nut mixture, scrape seeds from vanilla bean into milk and discard bean. Omit vanilla extract}. Cover bowl and refrigerate until cold, about 3 hours.

Transfer mixture to ice cream maker and freeze after churning.

but a preview.

"This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.” 

- Colum McCann 

Because today is Bloomsday. 

And because of Saturday--Bloomsday minus two--the day upon which  I graduated from college. 

Also, because I haven't had the time to refine my thoughts from said day, to record with hoped for eloquence the ensuing experiences taking me all the way through a late and lively and lucid dinner. 

Because this, the story, is the mechanism by which people will see. 

Because this is what I hope for, to create such moving thought experiments shrouded in the well placed word. 

Let me steep. I want to steep.

After reading a certain article in Vanity Fair, one of my indispensable and surefire sites of inspiration and energy, I’ve a few thoughts. They flow from visions of my imminent college graduation and into another oft-imagined realm of life, the one where you throw all energy into personal endeavors of the sort that moves society: at large and in small underground movements, the ones where voices are repeated outside the boundaries of peer academia and ridiculed school papers. Yes, and on this cusp of shifting life pattern comes also the penetration of technology—a ripe theme in all my courses this final quarter. Technology that sterilizes and de-authenticates human grittiness and experience and ensuing inspiration.

“You didn’t just watch a double feature but steeped like a tea bag in the contemplative dungeon atmosphere,” writes James Wolcott about the physicality of cinema houses in 1970's New York.

I’m talking about the technology which takes the place and the “steeping” out of being in the world. Less cinema house and more dvd; less hole in the wall rental store and more netflix. This is as true for film as it is true for face-to-face sociality in general. For instead, people arein their extended lives--their computers, their internet personas, their narrow vision through which they hope to overcome isolation. The dialogue comes flowing from these virtual spaces only to connect in this non-place with other such hopeful beings. More on spaces soon.

In reading a small scrap about the New Yorker, I remembered a book I have gathering dust on the shelf at my childhood home {and always home} in Portland. It was given to me—along with two other books—upon my high school graduation. This is the sort of gift I laud, the sort of offering I hope to give throughout life—the gift of inspiration, what would take lifetimes to say and experience, verbally translated onto leafs of paper. The great woman who gave these to me has since passed, and now I wish more than ever to see and thank her, Carol Anne. She was my great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, and a vapid vixen—a one-time great beauty with red lips and slender, shapely legs. She was also an intellectual, outspoken and opinionated, yet graceful. She made up her mind and stuck to her guns. Admirable. We need more women as such.

The only book I have yet to read from her thoughtful offering is a history of the New Yorker, and so this is the first book I will begin upon exiting academia. The first book to begin the rest of my personally designed curriculum, now tailored and fashioned in the way I think all higher—and indeed, lower—education should be. Travel, questions, meditation, inspiration, pain, joy... life, in short, conscious and mindful, challenging and met by a good meal with wine and sometimes friends, sometimes family, sometimes solitude, at the end of the day.

And then to write. For whom? For those who believe in me, for Carol who encouraged me with fellow inspirators and intellectuals, for my mother, for my grandfather who was so proud of me for being no one more than I am, and who I miss so dearly, for my grandmother who has a way with words but will never remember now, for my distant father, for my two cousins so I might guide and inspire them, for my friends so I might fill and arouse in my role. For myself. For future lovers. For humans. Writing for the very sake of writing, because it heals and opens, souls and wounds. 

And just to be. 

not necessarily the light...

Feeling very calm today. I want to keep it for awhile, add up all the small things that moved me here, to rest if only for a moment. Perhaps it was this torte. Or this cake that indeed wins hearts and minds... and settled mine, and revealed a remembered sweet tooth. Perhaps it was an unexpected visit that took us to lunch here. And a mild, bright day where wandering produced contentment, simply. Or reconnecting with a friend and professor, who recently finished a book and never fails to bolster the present Self with her certainty in future possibility. 

Like

Life gets better, the older you get. It really does. 

All of this, perhaps, but not for sure and not necessary to reach such a state-of-mind. Only a shift in consciousness, only a widened vision, only some perspective. 

It has been days, now, since I was so moved as to fill this space with spirited effusions not satiated by telling those present around me. 

First two photos my own; third photo via here; fourth photo via here. 

a case for creating, regardless

"Scenario work shows that the future is usually a combination off all the stories you can construct to anticipate it." 

... Joel Garreau

Just a little something gleaned from studying on an otherwise dreary and bright Monday morning while trudging through ideas I wish I had more time and space to explore. 

Someday.

Soon.

Even though I should be doing so now.

Or maybe we are 

always

without realizing it.

Yes, I think so.

"One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon--instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside of our windows today."

... Dale Carnegie 

So

"Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings."

... Victor Hugo

reaction.

To Read:

finish, begin

finish, begin

to finish and to begin

But it doesn't always happen that way

Does it? 

In fact, it rarely does

if ever

at all

Though we may not know it

If ever

At all.

It wasn't so very late, that night at home. Somehow it always seems later when away from the life that fills in moments of silence found alone. Alone at home, even though another moved through unoccupied rooms. So I began to think about closing books. 

What if reading the book is like the process of birth--like being born--and closing the book like taking the first breaths of air? Those few seconds from the moment you eye and grasp the book with a view to open it to the moment you do--reading, eyeing, mouthing, whispering, speaking that first word--is like the act of consummation. Deciding whether to open the book at all, to consider it even, is like the dance of choosing a partner. And depending on pre-meditation, how long you've waited for this book, could even be naive falling in love. 

Huh, well. Nary a page of this sort read over the break. And now, once again but for the final time, come the textbooks. 

anthem.

And then I was thinking

It's not so much a running away from as a running toward, or perhaps just 

running. 

That was before stumbling across this song by the Kahn Brothers,

 by way of a certain gash of creativity and consciousness,

and also had nothing to do with the message in the video 

yet, like many a time, these guys ended up falling into running leap

and muddy brawl along with my thoughts. Or the other way around. 

what do you believe? it is our choice.

I Believe in Bedtime Stories

I Believe in placing a small piece of dark chocolate on the tongue just before falling asleep, if only to wake the next morning with it's ruddy, bitter taste still on the buds -- I know someone does this, I read about him once, I think he was an architect

I Believe in this boy and his poetics and his words 

I Believe in Play

I Believe in these people and this question

I Believe that I don't know 

But

Most of All

I Believe in Love. 

monday morning.

Lately I’m finding inspiration in the simple words of other human beings, unguarded, off guard and generally observational. But the words are revelatory of the writer’s depth of thought and consciousness and ability to see a moment for more than just the physical actions being played out before them, while the figures of study unaware of their identity as actor in the everyday scene. For this everyday scene is suddenly a rupture from the mundane routine. And all that it takes is an Other, an observer, to feel the rupture. It becomes something else; or at least the false bottom drops away like one’s heart upon the decent of a rollercoaster, the future opens up and this gaping past-of-choices propels it. Like an hourglass where the sand slides through the narrow passage for but an instant, where above and below open wide like arms readying for an embrace, the moment slows for a point, just long enough to glimpse and maybe even to feel, before things change and the sands slide on.

A long way to reach something I look forward to every Monday: The Metropolitan Diary in the New York Times. I can’t get last Monday’s mention of stifled poetic possibility out of my head. And today, a whole bouquet of scenes to bloom all the week’s rest.

On tuning out {"On the L.I.R.R."}

On saving the world  and On the sweetness of New York, when all would seem bitter  {The first and the final letters}

Have You Ever

Been inspired by a textbook?

Awoken Early One Dark Morning

To words flowing in seamless sentences through the mind,

Stream of between consciousness

Turned poetic gush when pencil

Is finally placed sleepily upon paper?

Dreamt of a shiny, lacquered Wooden Bench

Blinding in its bright design of peppercorn-sized colorful shapes in patterns 

like Polish Pottery

only more wildly colorful and supposedly from Egypt

but reminiscent of Russia?

How about this. 

Heard your name {in its nick form} drift from another room 

by adored friends, responded grudgingly from a desk

softly lit in mid-night shadow,

to their call:

Look at the snow.

Shrouding Seattle. 

This Morning's Night. 

a sense of place.

I only want to.

I see no problem with loosing 

oneself

often.

It builds humbleness 

and a stronger sense

of the power

of the personal narrative.

Freedom.

to meander down dusty roads

in thought and in body

turning eyes to the sun

and back to the dust.

to feel the beginnings of spring

forcing its wobbly, kinetic energy 

through layers of silent winter sun 

in spindly tendrils of molecules upon bare skinned faces. 

to let the place consume the Self

then realize it, murky thick air

through which the body moves

in the rush to orient the Self whilst separated into the Other. 

{first photo via ffound.

second and third photos via Joanna Goddard, by Linn Photography.} 

a letter.

Sophie--of this aforementioned collection of musings--recognized me on her blog. And so I have this to say:  

Your words made my heart leap to my throat. Such recognition is akin to being spied by another while looking through the keyhole oneself—thrilling, in a word. I can’t express the evocation of charm in my pleadingly optimistic being that our mutual understanding elicits.

In my final year at a small university in Seattle I am embedded in the heart of the city yet balancing on the precipice that separates comfortable academia from the thrill of boundless and unprotected Life. And in the middle of the extremely tactile and the extremely cognitive is this fissure we can fill any way we choose.

Andreas Huyssen wrote this:

“The past is not simply there in memory, but it must be articulated to become memory. The fissure that opens up between experiencing an event and remembering it in representation is unavoidable. Rather than remembering or ignoring it, this split should be understood as a powerful stimulant for cultural and artistic creativity.”

It is odd to be surrounded by friends who have those tactile goals, easily definable in society’s structure. Most of the time it’s grounding to be surrounded by people possessing such certainty of profession. But what about the kind of goal that doesn’t slide so easily into an already carved out cavern?

My ideal is to be in a collaborative and creative relationship with similarly oriented people, where we produce work that is at once meaningful to ourselves and the larger collective community. Thus, our personal fulfillment—this powerful force of life and love and questioning but foundational curiosity—can be transferred to a larger audience, to humanity, enriching other’s lives as well. Inspiration by ideal, by living a life of creative and dynamic exploration.

And so, this is why your press and your words buoy my own soul with renewed concentration... and hope of creative fulfillment.

Thanks! 

 

Love.

It has been a few Tuesdays now, that there ran, in the Science Times section of the NY Times, an article about love. More specifically, an article about avoiding love--at least that's what the writer suggested. 

What ensued in my mind were absurd and tragic comedies of a Sleeper-esque machine in which love {well, in the literal case of Sleeper, physical love} is relegated to the flip of a switch. Where cognitive significance has disappeared, been forgotten and if remembered, thought of as silly.

Why would you bother to go through all of that time and effort when you can neatly take care of a craving in less than 30 seconds, then peacefully return to "regular life?" Why would you want to experience all of that distracting emotion when you have a particularly demanding week at work? Or, to use the writer's example, if you are in the midst of a mid-life crisis and become attracted to someone other than your significant other, why not just medicate oneself against desire? Instead of recognizing the situation, identifying the underlying issues and attempting to reach a common ground of understanding, why not just take the quick and smooth route in the form of a pill or elixir to stifle any unwanted {or wanted} urge? 

Yes, perhaps it could stop someone from doing something they may later regret. But it could also stop them from recognizing and addressing any deeper problems. Oh, and then there is very minor obstruction, just that human propensity to fall into something all-consuming and earth-moving... right, love. 

Here is the article, Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss written by John Tierney. 

Photo by the always lovely Danske. 

constant, i hope

and inescapably inspiring

what ever the recipient

or whom ever

and only defined

by the lover. 

Photo from The Selby.