the fact that she could go to work in a T-shirt and shorts, she answered, along with the privilege of participating in other people’s dreams, and most of all the thrill she got, the feeling of wondrous correctness, when a handful of words she had been organizing and reorganizing suddenly fastened themselves together, forming a chain that seemed to tug at the page from some distant, less provisional place, as if through an accidental pattern of sounds, rhythms, and insinuations she had linked herself to the beginning of the world, a time when words were inseparable from what they named and you could not mention a thing without establishing it in front of your eyes. it was the same feeling, she was convinced, that painters experienced through color, dancers through movement, photographers through light. the same feeling that mathematicians experienced through equations and actors experienced through emotion.

-the illumination, by kevin brockmeier

"It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” 

-chuck palahniuk

What it's like for a deaf person to hear music for the first time: article here.

Chapman writes, "I did the only sensible thing and went on a binge of music." From that binge, he composed his top-five list:

1. Mozart's Lacrimsoa... I know it's a depressing song but to me it represents the first time I could appreciate and experience music.
2. The soundtrack to Eleven Eleven... I can see how this comes off as narcissistic, it being my own film and all but it's such a personal work that when I listened to it for the first time I broke down. I felt like I was truly seeing the film for the first time ever. I'm grateful that Cazz was able to capture the tone perfectly. We discussed the film and specific scenes with essay-sized reasoning/deliberations on what should be conveyed. The critical response to the film surprised me and I still didn't quite get it until seeing the visual images coupled with the soundtrack.
3. Sigur Ros's Staralfur... The first song I had to listen to again, over and over.
4. IL Postino-Luis Bacalov
5. Minnesota's A Bad Place

"Silence is still my favorite sound," he writes.

"Everyone knows you're going to live
so you might as well start trying."

- Regina Spektor, Firewood

something struck me in conversation the other day.

we are all waiting for miracles. we are all waiting to be saved in our own ways. we are all waiting for love to appear. we are all waiting for our dreams to come true.

what if we've been waiting all this time for something that looks a certain way to us, but when it appears, it will be almost unrecognizable with a hint of mischief dancing across its eyes? what if it just looks different from what we have imagined-- what if our miracles have arrived, but we are too preoccupied with our assumptions to notice?

this morning was cold after the rain that rode in through the night. last night we stayed past midnight outside, drinking the air as it grew colder on our lips. the fog sat heavily on its haunches, watching the green mountains soak deeper colors into its bones. i feel autumn coming, and it fills me with hope that  this year's winter will bring a different kind of warmth, unlike previous years before it.

an old friend called me last night.

and another old friend fell in love.

--



By the Same Author
James Longenbach (2012)

Today, no matter if it rains,
It's time to follow the path into the forest.


The same people will be walking the same dogs,
Or if not the same dogs, dogs that behave in similar fashions,
Some barking, some standing aloof.
The owners carry plastic bags.


But this is the forest, they complain, we must do as we like.
We must let the dogs run free,
We must follow their example,
The way we did when we were young.


Back then we slept, watched TV—
We were the dogs.
By the time the screen door slammed, we were gone.


Nobody really talks like that in the forest.
They're proud of their dogs,
Proud especially of the ones who never bark.
They're upset about the Norway maple, it's everywhere,
Crowding out the hickories and oaks.


Did you know it takes a million seeds to make one tree?
Your chances of surviving in the forest,
Of replicating yourself, are slim.


Today, the smaller dogs are wearing raincoats,
The bigger ones are stiffing it out.
They're tense, preoccupied,
Running in circles,
Getting tangled in the leash—


It's hard remaining human in the forest.
To move the limbs of the body,
To speak intelligible words,
These things promise change.

I cannot be known
Better than you know me

Your eyes in which we sleep
We together
Have made for my man's gleam
A better fate than for the common nights

Your eyes in which I travel
Have given to signs along the roads
A meaning alien to the earth

In your eyes who reveal to us
Our endless solitude

Are no longer what they thought themselves to be

You cannot be known
Better than I know you.

- Paul Eluard

I don't wanna to spend my whole life asking, "What if I had given everything?"
-Matt West, "The Motions"

sometimes when i hear the violin, i want to cry. not because the sound of the violin makes me sad, but because it makes me sad that i once knew how to play and no longer do. sometimes i want to cry because it's so fucking beautiful. sometimes i just think how lucky i am to have ever played it at all. sometimes i think how lucky i am to be able to hear it at all.

earlier this year, for a moment in time, everything stood still. and this man saved (changed) my life. he was more romantic than he'd admit, more intelligent than people give him credit for, and more tender than he'd like to seem.

we wrote letters back and forth for a little while, but it tapered off as we both became busier and more distant.  i still read this particular excerpt often:

"Your mom's lectures sound pretty extensive and hardcore. I think that's good though. She really cares and wants the best.

"I understand your issues with your father. My family actually has some tough communication issues, with my mom and dad. I'm trying hard with my mom though. Sitting on her couch as a write this.
I think my communication troubles stem from my relationship with my mom and dad actually. I'm trying to work on being a better communicator and being honest and open as well. It's really tough though and I feel like I'm always opening myself up for ppl to judge me. I don't deal so well with that. For men, communication is really tough. Men are taught to be doers and not really communicators. It's good that you are trying to keep strains in your relationship with your father from effecting your other relationships. That's not easy to do, but it's important. Everyone deserves a fair shot to be understood and loved without comparison to someone else. We are each our own individuals and though many types of people may share traits, comparison is really not fair.

"Also your statement about men letting you down and your father letting you down really stood out to me. I can really relate and understand where you are coming from. The sad truth is that men are going to let you down. They just are. It's a certainty. Your dad is going to let you down . . .  again. Unfortunately, I'm going to let you down. Your closest friends will let you down. The funny paradox is that the way humans are wired makes us desperate for relationship and so dependent on one another. But interestingly, other people can never fully be all that we may need them to be. Thus they are bound to disappoint us. It's a really hard reality to swallow and something that I understand on an intellectual level (and I'm sure you do too) but hard to realize emotionally. Humans are gloriously tragic beings. Our capabilities, passion and beauty are truly amazing. We are truly something to behold. But our brokenness and shortcomings are so immediately present. It's truly an amazing paradox. I write all that to say that you have to take the glory with the tragedy. Even when the tragic seems so overbearing, fight for perspective to see the good. If you think the fight is worth it. So take the glory with the tragedy with your dad, with men, with everyone. It doesn't mean that you have to lower your standards for support, just change your perspective so that you can really SEE everything. But then again, you and I both know that this is all very easy to preach and very hard to practice. But just make the decision for yourself to see if it's worth practicing.

"And that's all I have to say about that. . . Forrest Gump style."

- June 17th, which was 4 days before my birthday, which was 4 days before his flowers arrived at my front door. And my father's orchids appeared on my desk in my room. Because life is like a box of chocolates.

addie posted this.

There is another world, but it is inside this one.
- Paul Éluard

The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night is thinking. It's thinking of love. - Richard Siken

“I swallow your heart and it crawls right out of my mouth. You swallow my heart and flee, but I want it back now, baby. I want it back.”
— Richard Siken

"I love you but you have no idea what you are talking about." - Moonrise Kingdom, which, if you haven't seen yet, you should drop everything you're doing, play hooky, and go see it. Right now. 

Sometimes, the things that affect me the most are what seem to be the most ordinary of things. 

This Saturday, the sunlight and perfect weather. The city in which I was born and raised (and that which I will always call home) is almost always humid and hot.  It's flat, it's plain, but my god has it caused me to notice beauty and feel perfect weather when it happens!

A month ago, in San Francisco, when I stayed at my friend L's place. I had been there before, and so I went upstairs to his bathroom to get ready. He said, "wait, here are your house slippers. Now, you're a real guest in my home. Oh, and by the way, have you heard of Larry Levis? He will change your life, here, you should read this." And he handed me a blue hardcover book of poetry. 

The guy at the front desk, Scott, who remembered my name. He opened the door for me when my badge didn't work. At lunch he addressed me by name and I did the same, and he looked at my curiously and said, "you remembered my name." and I said, "yes, of course I remember your name. Remembering names is the secret to life." and he chuckled and said, "well, I think there is more to it than that." and I said, "yes, but remembering people's names is the beginning." And he laughed. 

When my friends know if I'm going to like that type of food or not.

When A asked, "you ate lunch alone?" and I said proudly, "why, of course. I eat lunch alone often, and I enjoy my time to myself."

My father, when he gave me orchids for my birthday. 

My mother, who took the orchid blooms that had already fallen and put them in tiny little homemade vases made from water bottle tops. So that they could bloom a little longer. 

“Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. / These, our bodies, possessed by light. / Tell me we'll never get used to it.”
― Richard Siken, Crush

woke up the morning and drove through the mountains to get to work, light everywhere, hovering masses of land around me, green, so green. i can't imagine living somewhere with mountains or water and feeling like they have become ordinary.

i'd rather photograph than be photographed

let me be challenged

There are things unbearable. And there are unbearable things worth bearing.

Today, during my lunch break, I got utterly lost among the mountains and hills of Pennsylvania. and I was really happy about it.

This is my 500th post in this blog. I have been blogging since 1999, when my friend Elissa and I started fooling around with the concept of journalling online. Coding our own simple, HTML-based journals hosted by Angelfire. Then we were hosted by a girl we had never met on Silverfire.net, which also still exists. Then we got ourselves into Livejournal (somehow mine still exists). I've blogged with friends at phuzzymath.net, and I've blogged on my own. I've blogged at tigerose.org, which I still own, but now redirects to rosekuo.org. I've written about food, humor, relationships, and professional life. There have been many attempts and iterations of blogs under many different aliases, and I have never been sure about how to express myself online. I change my mind all the time and sometimes my inconstancy is my constancy. I've tried collaborations and different mishmashes of photos and words and thoughts. I've tried to be perfect. I've purposely striven for imperfection. I've spelled things wrong and then corrected them later. I've spelled thing wrong on purpose. I've spelled things wrong and never bothered to correct them. I've edited and re-edited. I've kept the original. I've tried to use correct punctuation, and I've tried to use no punctuation at all. I've been inconsistent in my use of capitalization. I've changed my mind about who I share my online presence with. I've struggled with how to reconcile my personal writing and photography with my professional life. I've struggled with how to reconcile what I write online with what my significant others have wanted me to write. I use pronouns instead of names. I use initials instead of pronouns. I use names. I've gone through periods of writing nothing at all, for months and months. I've gone through phases of only writing down what others have said to me. I've gone through phases of only writing down what I've read.  I've identified myself as a person who writes, but not a writer. And vice versa.

The thing that matters most is that we haven't stopped trying to create. and I really think that's why I share. It's all a process, creation, creativity, art, writing, sharing. Perhaps it helps us become who will be, or perhaps it helps others realize who we are. In the end, I'm grateful for the opportunity to read others' writing and to share my own. My earliest dream, as told to my mother when I was old enough to scribble in plastic pink diaries, was to be an "arthur" (which was my incorrect pronunciation of author). Without this outlet (and the devoted friends who encouraged me to keep this outlet), I am sure, I would not have continued writing.

soft country music wafts toward me from the office next to me. it makes me want to two step across the carpeted cubicle floors. the soft hum of the oversized printers plays over the music, and i'm thinking about his eyes. his face is laughing all the time, but there is a seriousness that keeps watch above his smile.

"[Y]ou must allow your doubt to become your calling, you must permit it. I don’t suggest that you make it so, only that you let it be. Let your doubt be your calling. Then your doubt will be invisible."

Denis Johnson

(from Traci's blog)

[...] These   

poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant   

as elm leaves, which if they love love only   

the wide blue sky and the air and the idea

of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,   

and not a beginning. Love means love

of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.   

These poems, she said....

                                       You are, he said,

beautiful.

                That is not love, she said rightly.

  

- from Robert Bringhust's "These Poems, She Said"  

also from Traci

i grinned and responded, "my philosophy? do it now, do it now, do it now."

---

"to live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else at all."

emily dickinson

"Courage […] is knowing you are somehow separate from the things that happen to you. And so it doesn’t matter if you’re destroyed by a decision you make, you’re willing to accept the consequences. There’s something in you that’s deeper than whatever your fate turns to be." 

- Graham Harman

There is this episode of Big Bang Theory where Leonard and Penny trade lists of attributes of each other that could be improved. Leonard writes, "If you read more, we would have more to talk about."

my friend Elif's post today:


Today's thought of the day was very apt since I had mortality on my mind:

"Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you." -Annie Dillard, author (b. 1945)

Un día después de la tormenta, cuando menos piensas:  sale el sol  - Shakira

i took this stealthily when they weren't looking during my visit with j to the metropolitan museum of art in nyc.


"For the Blind series, Calle photographed people born without sight and asked them to describe "their image of beauty." Juxtaposing words and images, the artist compounded various modes of apprehension in order to point out their inevitable lack- the blind spot implicit in all representation. Cleverly undercutting objective notions of truth and beauty, she instead locates the meaning of art within the infinite, irreducible responses of the beholder."

if you stop before you begin, does it hurt less? or more?

let there be cake.

“Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.”
- Game of Thrones 

Well. If you ever wanted to learn more about fusion music (or blues) and dancing to it, here's an excellent post  to help define it all.

Because “Fusion dancing” can refer to both fusing different elements of specific dances and also to dancing based more on spontaneous creative movement, defining what “Fusion music” is can get tricky. In other words, music for fusion dancing can mean a cross-over song to some, but for others it also means music that is not necessarily related to traditional partner dancing. These categories are not mutually exclusive.
For this reason, our Fusion music should be looked at as a vessel capable of holding a lot of different dancing. The parameters of this vessel are same parameters we use for any dance. And, like any dance, it’s about optimizing a combination of tempo, pulse, accents between odd and even beats, melody and phrasing.
Between different musical styles we can find songs that have similar elements and complementing these elements will probably make for the most satisfying dance experience for the most number of people.

And it’s the thing my mind kept swirling back to over these five weeks since you wrote to me and said you didn’t know the definition of “love.” It is not so incomprehensible as you pretend, sweet pea. Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard. It can be light as the hug we give a friend or heavy as the sacrifices we make for our children. It can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and “loaded with promises and commitments” that we may or may not want or keep. The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of love.

...you aren’t afraid of love. You’re afraid of all the junk you’ve yoked to love. And you’ve convinced yourself that withholding one tiny word from the woman you think you love will shield you from that junk. But it won’t. We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, whether we say we love them or not. Our main obligation is to be forthright— to elucidate the nature of our affection when such elucidation would be meaningful or clarifying.

...you asked me when is the right time to tell your lover that you love her and the answer is when you think you love her. That’s also the right time to tell her what your love for her means to you. If you continue using avoidance as the main tactic in your romantic relationships with women, you’re going to stunt not only your happiness, but your life.

A proclamation of love is not inherently “loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.” The terms you agree to in any given relationship are connected to, but not defined by, whether you’ve said “I love you” or not. “I love you” can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful and I’m going to do everything in my power to be your partner for the rest of my life. It can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful but I’m in transition right now, so let’s go easy on the promises and take it as it comes. It can mean I think you’re groovy and beautiful but I’m not interested in a commitment with you, now or probably ever, no matter how groovy or beautiful you continue to be.

Do you realize that your refusal to utter the word “love” to your lover has created a force field all its own? Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel. 

So release yourself from that. Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word “love” to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will. We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime. 

--  Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (Strayed, Cheryl)

My eyes burn from sleepiness and jetlag. My clothes reek of dust and San Francisco wind. My ears ring from  thumping bass and crying guitars. My calves throb from walking 60 blocks round trip every day to Golden Gate Park. My voice cracks from singing along with the live artists and then promptly heading to the karaoke club to belt out bad pop songs until 2 in the morning.

It's a worthwhile venture, taking advantage of being young. 

Tu often points out in half awe, half I'm-so-glad-I'm-not-like-you: "You recover faster than anyone I know. You're like the energizer bunny, and I've never seen you slow down." I do believe in "do it now, do it now, do it now." I do believe in "if not now, then when?"

But what is youth without the ability to stand still as well? What is heartbeat if you haven't had that hesitant pause that creates butterflies?

Here is the rhythmic syncopation that creates hope. Here is my pause, my breath, my meditation. 

----

I can't wait. Here we go.

FRIDAY
Foo Fighters
Beck
Andrew Bird
Fitz and the Tantrums
Of Monsters and Men
The Walkmen
Antibalas

SATURDAY
Sigur Ros
Norah Jones
Passion Pit
Grandaddy
Big Boi
Explosions in the Sky
Portugal. The Man
Alabama Shakes
Tame Impala
Sean Hayes
Yellow Ostrich

SUNDAY
Stevie Wonder
Skirillex
Dispatch
Regina Spektor
Bloc Party
Santigold
Franz Ferdinand
Fun.
Amadou & Mariam
Trampled by Turtles
Bomba Estereo

so.
i'm sitting in the office.
the lights have turned off because i've stayed later than most.
and this song is on full volume in my ears.

Regina Spektor's song on her new album. The song is called "How."
Don't write it off as cliche until you have heard it. I suggest you drink in the song with dim lights with your eyes closed.


How can I forget your love
How can I never see you again?
There is a time and place
For one more sweet embrace
And there's a time ooh
Where it all ohh
Went wrong
I guess you know by now
That we will meet again somehow

How oh oh
Oh baby how
Can I begin again
How can I try to love someone knew
Someone who isn't you
How can our love be true
When I'm not ooh I'm not ooh over you
I guess you know by now
That we will meet again somehow

Time can come and take away the pain
But I just want my memories to remain
To hear your voice to see your face
There's not one moment I'd erase
You are a guest here now

So baby how can I forget your love
How can I never see you again
How can I never know
Why some stay otehrs go
When I don't ohhh I don't want you oooh to go
I guess I know by now that we will meet again somehow

Time can come and wash away the pain
But I just want my mind to stay the same
To hear your voice
To see your face
There's not one moment I'd erase
You are a guest here now

So baby how can I forget your love
How can I never see you again?

I posted this on Addie's wall.


Today I read this poem by Siken. Some excerpts:

He was pointing at the moon but I was looking at his hand.
He was dead anyway, a ghost. I'm surprised
I saw his hand at all. The moon, of course, is always
there—day moon, but it's still there; behind the clouds but
it's still there. I like seeing things: a hand, the moon, ice
in a highball glass. The moon? It's free, it doesn't
cost you anything so go ahead and look. Sustained attention
to anything—a focus, a scrutiny—always yields results.
I'd live on the moon probably except I think I'd miss
the moonlight, landscaping craters with clay roses in earthshine
...

Make yourself white.
Make yourself snow but the black bears trample
your landscape like little black dots that show up on x-rays.
It is not enough to be a landscape. One must also become
the path through the landscape,

...
Even my imagination sleeps
when I sleep and why not rest? Why crash the party
on the astral plane? You'll just be too tired to go
to the real party later. Have you ever eaten
Swedish meatballs at a dream party? They taste like
your blanket, because they are your blanket.
My imagination wants breakfast burritos. It refuses
to punch the clock until then.

..

Why is it we believe we only have one soul?
Because it's easier to set the table for one. And you can
sing your dinner tune to yourself while you eat over the sink.
...

How do I tell you how I got here without getting trapped
in the past? I suppose that's a bigger question than I expected.

...
And yet
should we really spend our velocities on backwards motion?
Yes. Any motion, every motion. It's spring, green, take off
your coat, pull down your cap, roll up your sleeves, we're
hunting, we're arrows, we're stag in a meadow, in a frenzy.

....

One wonders why a story like this exists. Who wrote it
and to what end? Sure, everyone wants the same things—
to belong, and to not be left behind—but still, does it help?
Perhaps. Once, in a fable: a man in a tree. Once,
in a fable: the trace of his thinking, the sound of his singing.
I like seeing things: a hand, the moon, ice in a highball glass.
The light of the mind illuminating the mind itself.
Put it in a tree. Hide it in plain sight and climb higher.
We are all of us secret agents, undercover in our overcoats,
the snow falling down.

things i remember:

- the way you looked a decade ago

- the first time your lips found mine, the way my heart sank and floated at the same time

- the color of your hands

- the sound you make when you laugh loudly

- the sound you make when you laugh quietly

I hope that’s the sound of a tide turning.

What exists? My heartbeat? The sound the air conditioner makes when it shuts off? The distant conversation I can hear through the thin walls? Your eyes, blinking back uncertainty? The emptiness of your arms? My protests, the way I believed that right was right and love was powerful? My own heart's conviction in the face of my body's resistance? My own mistakes like projections on the walls of my skin? What exists?

There have been nights when I've moved towards sadness, but (fortunately) I couldn't get past the fact that negative thinking has never helped me (despite what I read today about that subject). There have been nights when my face showed sadness, in tears or downward looking eyes.

But today. Today:


Gravity - Maura O'Connor

Today I am fragile
pale
twitching
insane and full of purpose.

I'm thinking of my lover:
my soft hips pressing his coarse belly,
my tongue on a salmon nipple,
his hand buried in my thick orange hair
the telephone ringing.

I'm thinking we tend our illnesses
as if they are our children:
fevered
screaming
demanding attention and twenty dollar bills,
hours we could have spent making love with the television on.

Faith is a series of calculations
made by an idiot savant.
I'm in love.
I'm alone
in this city of painted boxes
stacked like alphabet blocks
spelling nothing.

There are things I know:
trees don't sing
birds don't sprout leaves
roses bloom because that's what roses do,
whether we write poems for them
or not.

I concentrate on small things:
ivy threaded through chain link,
giveaway kittens huddled in a soggy cardboard box,
a fat man blowing a harmonica
through a beard of rusty wires
brown birds chattering furiously on power lines.

I try not to think about
lung cancer, AIDS,
the chemicals in the rain;
things I can't imagine any more than
a color I've never seen.

My heart is graffiti on the side of a subway train,
a shadow on the wall made by a child.
Nothing has been fair since my first skinned knee

I believe death
must be.

I cling to love as if it were an answer.
I go on buying eggs and bread,
boots and corsets,
knowing I'll burn out before the sun.

I'm thinking of
the days I tried to stay awake
while the billboards and TV ads
for condoms, microwave brownies, and dietetic jello
lulled me to sleep.

A brown-eyed girl once told me a secret
that should have blown this city
into a mass of unconnected atoms
Our sewage is piped to the sea.
Beggars in the street
are hated for having the nerve
to die in public.

Charity requires paperwork,
Relief requires medication

as if we were the afterthoughts of institutions
greater than our rage.

Gravity chains us to the asphalt with such grace
we think it is kind.

We all go on buying lottery tickets
Diet Coke and toothpaste
as if the sky over our heads
were the roof of a gilded cage.

We provide evidence that we were here:

initials cut into cracked vinyl bus seats,
into trees growing from squares
of concrete,
a name left on a stone, an office building,
a flower, a disease, a museum,
a child.
Tonight the stars glitter like rhinestones
on a black suede glove.

In the coffin my room has become,
I talk to God
about the infrequency of rain
about people who can't see the current gentleness
running under the pale crust of my skin.

I tell him under
the jackhammer crack, the diesel truck rumble,
even the clicking sound traffic lights make
switching from yellow to red,
there is a silence
swallowing
every song,
conversation,
every whisper made beside graves
or in the twisted white sheets of love.

I tell him I can't fill it
with dark wine, blue pills,
a pink candle lit at the altar
the lover
touching my hair.
God doesn't answer.
God doesn't know our names.

He's only the architect
designing the places we occupy
like high rise offices or ant hills

I know this
the way I know
sunrise and sunset
are caused by the endless turning
of the Earth.

but isn't it?
life is(n't) about losing(finding) oneself.


from Traci's blog:

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal ... 

but to lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - 

that calls for quite a different schooling.

- Lucy Harrison

The trips during which I stayed in New York City for longer periods of time created awareness for me. This time created a sense of self outside oneself, and a sense of chaos that was uncontrollable at times. The effort it took to try to control the chaos resulted in a realization that while control isn't always possible, it may not even be necessary. New York City taught me the art of being by myself, and helped me cultivate an exploration of possibility rather than limitation within vulnerability. It taught me the beauty of being uncertain, and, beyond that, the beauty of the willingness to be uncertain.

Walking down the empty city streets at night taught me fear and confidence at the same time. Dancing among the greatest dancers in the nation taught me humility.

I could write similar lessons about life from the perspective of so many places.

I think back to 8th grade, when my mother gave us permission to board our first flight. I think back to freshman year of college, when my mother gave me permission to go to another country with a boy she had never met. To sophomore year, when my mother waved goodbye to me as I left to live away across the Atlantic. To junior year, when my mother listened patiently as I cried over the phone from across the Pacific about cultural and language shock.

Perhaps my movement creates an illusion of instability, of flight, of volatility, of inconstancy. On the other hand, when we think of the word "home," we think of stillness, peace, contentment. Contrary to what it may seem, it is because of my movement that I feel more certain of my place in life than ever before. And to the thought about what it means to be home - often I consider that I will never take for granted how I have had the chance to make the world my home, and to give the world a home within me.