what do i come here to write?
about the legions i have read today?

There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophies.
My brain and my heart are my temples; my philosophy is kindness.
- The Dalai Lama

Almost every morning since last week, my mom has sent me text messages about mindfulness and living in the moment, and practicing Buddhist beliefs.

There have been many stirrings in my mind about happiness and how much it can rely on internal conditions (yet how many of us let it be destructed by external conditions), and relying on self for fulfillment. Reading the Dalai Lama's teachings helps me to see the possibilities. It excites me to taste freedom in my mouth. With freedom comes fear, but I work on realizing that uncertainty can be positive.

“Deep down, I don’t believe it takes any special talent for a person to lift himself off the ground and hover in the air. We all have it in us—every man, woman, and child—and with enough hard work and concentration, every human being is capable of…the feat….You must learn to stop being yourself. That’s where it begins, and everything else follows from that. You must let yourself evaporate. Let your muscles go limp, breathe until you feel your soul pouring out of you, and then shut your eyes. That’s how it’s done. The emptiness inside your body grows lighter than the air around you. Little by little, you begin to weigh less than nothing. You shut your eyes; you spread your arms; you let yourself evaporate. And then, little by little, you lift yourself off the ground.
Like so.”
― Paul Auster, Mr. Vertigo


“But that was the beauty of this particular game. The moment you lost, you won.”
― Paul Auster, Timbuktu

it's just far too easy to go backwards
to read what she used to write,
to see what we used to think was art,
to listen to the songs that moved us to tears.

and what of the present?

“ There was a time
only certainty gave me
any joy. Imagine—
certainty, a dead thing. "

Louise Glück

Love and hate are emotions that easily ignore the boundaries between people; madness too knows no boundaries.—Juliet Mitchell.

How is it I remember everything
That never happened and almost nothing that did?
- Donald Revell

remember when we were at a coffeehouse, and it was the first time we had ever met, and you wanted to prove that you could dance salsa so you played Shakira on your phone (after I told you that you can't dance salsa to Shakira) and we danced in the middle of everyone drinking their saturday night coffee?

remember when we were at a wedding, and you stood up among all the bored married couples waiting for cake and danced with me at the table?

remember when we were walking outside Dave and Buster, and there was salsa music playing, and we danced on the concrete while passersby gave us funny looks?

i stayed in bed this morning
i walked out to the balcony briefly
there is sunlight but it's a little chilly, so i stayed in.
made some tea, the mango green kind that you and i discovered together at the grocery store.
sunday mornings should be spent this way.

holy shit i found this tonight


deeper
December 25, 2008 – 10:49 am
"
what’s so frustrating is that not everyone shares the thirst to really understand the moments, and speak about them, and communicate about them. we all live on this one physical planet, but there are all of these wavelengths, all of these dimensions, all of these planes. and we’re all hovering around each other, making contact where it hurts, joined at the hip, grinding at the hips, smoothing over skin, and still we’re in different places. “long distance” isn’t just geographical.

and i’m going through the different phases of realizing why i was with you.
before, i thought you had tricked me. it was all a lie, the words, the letters, the conversations, your eyes. everything. i thought that you words flowed nonsense from the pages, and i was sucked into a love that never actually existed except in writing.

but now i realize, you spoiled me. everything might have been true, the way you felt, the way you spoke, the way you wove everything into stories and explanations and imagery while waxing poetic. but what i held onto desperately was the fact that you had a voice that could respond to mine. that when i said “i feel guarded around you,” you would know exactly what i meant. that you used those same three languages (only two of them spoken) to the fullest extent, and you carried me along with them.

and now i know why i despaired at your absence. i may not ever find you again.

I had a good day and then another
I was married to mountains on all sides of me
- Donald Revell

I have begun to learn in sleep that sleep
Plummets from the skies
- Donald Revell

Is it just pain that keeps us separate,
that forms the frontier of our loneliness
and without it we would all jumble together
into one bright color?
- Stephen Dobyns

Language purports to fill a need. But what if, as the eye can see, there is no need? Why represent what is surely present? Too, our language is the material of our thoughts. But what if the lavish providence of reality requires no repair, no thought? We must somehow learn to be careless. Though we cannot be unlanguaged we may, perhaps, sometimes by poetry, be unburdened of cares our words presume. Here's a passage from Book III of William Carlos Williams's Paterson.

Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.

The poetry of attention thrives on carelessness, even as it outspeeds our cares. Greenness is a current even that must keep current (courant, running) to survive. And so, it seems, to abolish doubt we must study velocities. It's easy, just as Goethe implies. The eye, after all, is well acquainted with the speed of light.

- donald revell

"[T]here were obstacles. You have to go against or through them, or climb over them..." - from Pina

I wish I could have written down the entire movie

Notes on the weekend:

- M&A so happy, the crocuses blooming, our walk to Hawthorne, the camellia blooming, happy smiles and talking about the choreography in Pina. The wind.
- R is just like me, sharing stories about our love life and understanding the behaviors stemming from our culture
- Resistance, in dance and in life
- How it felt to "come home" and be in front of the heat lamp and read
- Meeting B and talking about life for a brief time
- Japanese tea cake
- The rain.

Last night, I awoke awash in something that may not have been your true feelings. I felt at sea, mareada.

I had fallen asleep reading sentences I no longer remember. Your hands I do remember. I remember not knowing what time it was. I remember afterwards I strained to look at the glowing hands of your watch to make sure it was not yet morning. This was the first time in many months. I remember the other time, when we were in Freeport, and I could hear the faint crashing of the sea. I remember the last time, when I felt the faint crashing of you through my bedroom door.

I fell asleep and there were dreams. Colorful ones, of dance parties and people other than you. Some were just acquaintances, some were strangers. But none were you. I think this is a commentary on something, but I don't yet know what.

This morning, what was real? You, or the dream, or neither?

"What I came to understand is that change is not a choice. It happens, and you are different."
- Traci

I can't decide.

This morning:
"más vale lo malo conocido que lo bueno por conocer"

The possibility of time vacated, rather than the burden.

This morning I awoke after three hours of sleep, an hour and a half before my alarm went off. I didn't think about oceans, but I did think about cobwebs.

What do we call that feeling as we convince our minds to overcome the body's fear of the obvious delusion of jumping off a cliff into blue water below? It is the moment after fear, before elation.

--

Sometimes the Unsaid is more important than what was said.

"Do you want strawberries?"

project that seems (not insensitive, not sensistive, not groundbreaking) but not sure what word to call it

treat each other as if the other has cancer. or has only one day to live. or is an alien who will leave the world in 3 days. or as a stranger you'll only see for an hour.

go.

I'm sitting in my car in a parking spot that is particularly bathed with sunlight. On NPR, a particularly interesting and relevant piece about making decisions and choices to be or not be in a relationship.

"Sometimes you don't know where you need to be. And sometimes the best thing you can do is to hold your breath, take a guess, and jump."

"Sometimes, the world in which you've experienced the most conflict also happens to be the world you're the most drawn to."
- Addie's flickr

i didn't plan for this dream, i just dreamt it.

if we could harness this power instead of fight it

I say we were

never silent. We read each other’s lips and said
one word four times. And laughed four times

in loving repetition. We read each other’s lips to uncover
the poverty of laughter.

-ilya kaminsky


If you will it, it is no dream.
—Theodore Herzl