the problem with wanting to write about one's life but having a bad memory is that you know you have a lot of stories to write but you can't remember what they are.

“Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people. This is true in political situations. The quality and depth of the politics evolving from a group depends in large part on their understanding of honor. Much of what is narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a longing for certainty even at the cost of honesty, for an analysis which, once given, need not be re-examined…It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.” 
― Adrienne Rich

“Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.”
― Adrienne Rich

(for those who know of my past trouble with sleep)

“power comes from the same place as our wounds”

—	Adrienne Rich 1978, pp. 3

I previously posted an excerpt from this interview, here. He died a few days ago. 

Interview with Jack Gilbert

INTERVIEWER

Do you think it’s important for American writers to live abroad?

GILBERT

At least at some point—so you have something to compare to what you think is normal, and you encounter things you aren’t used to. One of the great dangers is familiarity.

INTERVIEWER

How did your foreign settings—those places—figure into your poems?

GILBERT

It’s more how those places resonate in me. Rather than writing a poem about those places, they create something I write about.


(...)

INTERVIEWER

Is that why your style is unadorned and not ornamental?

GILBERT

Oh, I like ornament at the right time, but I don’t want a poem to be made out of decoration. If you like that kind of poetry, more power to you, but it doesn’t interest me. When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart—in all its forms—is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren’t any good at being alive.

(...)

NTERVIEWER

It sounds like even in your San Francisco days you sustained a rather remote life away from others. Is solitude important for you?

GILBERT

I don’t know how to answer that because I’ve always lived a life with a lot of quiet in it—either alone or with someone I’m in love with.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that being reclusive has preserved your career?

GILBERT

Certainly to the point that it gave me some control over my vanity and helped me keep a grip on what really matters.

INTERVIEWER

You expose a lot of yourself in your poetry. Are your poems taken directly from your life?

GILBERT

Yes, why would I invent them?

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever feel uncomfortable about naming the women you’ve been with in your poems?

GILBERT

No, I’m so proud—even the ones that didn’t work out, like Gianna.

INTERVIEWER

What was your life with Michiko like?

GILBERT

Pure. It was all the same piece of cloth—always gentle, always devilish. Always loving.

(...)

INTERVIEWER

When you write, do you read your poems out loud?

GILBERT

Sometimes. If my instincts register that something is wrong with the rhythm then I work on it, but it’s almost always unconscious.
The hard part for me is to find the poem—a poem that matters. To find what the poem knows that’s special. I may think of writing about the same thing that everyone does, but I really like to write a poem that hasn’t been written. And I don’t mean its shape. I want to experience or discover ways of feeling that are fresh. I love it when I have perceived something fresh about being human and being happy.
Ezra Pound said “make it new.” The great tragedy of that saying is he left out the essential word. It should be make it importantly new. So much of the time people are just aiming for novelty, surprise. I like to think that I’ve understood, that I’ve learned about something that matters—what the world should be, what life should be.

(...)

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel you have any flaw as a writer?

GILBERT

I can’t spell. I’m hopeless.

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.  I want to know what you ache for, And if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.  I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, For your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.  I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, If you have been opened by life’s betrayals or Have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own; If you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you To the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, Be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you’re telling me is true.  I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself, If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

I want to know if you can see beauty Even when it is not pretty every day, And if you can source your life from God’s presence.I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, And still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have, I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, Weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you are, how you came here, I want to know if you will stand in the center of the Fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.  I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away,I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, And if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

- Oriah Mountain Dreamer, Canadian Storyteller

this is a little overdue but, i must say, when this year started, i was losing faith that each year was going to be better than the last. i have serious thanks that i give in my mind to all the serious things, and:

i'm thankful for the time i toppled over in yoga class because it means that i'm not complacent in my practice.  i'm thankful for best friends who endure my complaints about cold showers while traipsing across Costa Rica sans navigation system or map. i'm thankful for the dancing, for the sore feet and joints for that means we gorged on delicious tandas while we could. i'm thankful for the sweat that i also so abhor, which means i'm working hard and healthy. i'm thankful for guys who re-rack their weights in the weight room so that i can bench the measly bar. i'm thankful for the ocean in its various forms, both too treacherous to surf and too beautiful to breach. i'm thankful for getting muddy at dog parks. i'm thankful for losing weight, because it's the only good side effect of sadness. i'm thankful for gaining weight, because it means i am happy and have more than enough to eat. i'm thankful for football season, because it means i have a good excuse to eat jalapeno chips and nachos.i'm thankful for butter biscuits from Specs, and also Crown from Specs. i'm thankful for hip hop music and line dances, i'm thankful for the electric slide and the wobble. i'm thankful for soy substitutes. i'm thankful for the ability to pursue my dreams. i'm thankful for the existential crises because it means that i've reached a point where many of my goals have been reached and i simply need to reach further. i'm thankful for the long nights that give way to growing up and learning more. i'm thankful for having the luxury of doing nothing and anything. i'm thankful for my Christmas gift last year, a Kindle, because even though i thought i'd never succumb to e-Readers, the Kindle has single-handedly helped me find my way back to reading. i'm thankful for reconnection. i'm thankful for having things i feel passionate about. i'm thankful for being able to finally eat meals on my own, and having enjoyed it so much that i even look for reasons and times to eat alone. i'm thankful for dark knights. i'm thankful for being able to fall asleep. i'm thankful for the nightmares that make waking up to real life seem like a fairy tale.

Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think
Frank O’Hara

I think of you
and the continents brilliant and arid
and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air
as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning
and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York

see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you
                  standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree
and in Toledo the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver
                  like glasses like and old ladies hair
it’s well known that God and I don’t get along together
it’s just a view of the brass works for me, I don’t care about the Moors
seen through you the great works of death, you are greater

you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone together.

Adrienne Rich, from an interview with Bill Moyers:



MOYERS: Then you go on to say, "I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language/guessing at some words while others keep you reading. .." Something like this happens to me when I read a poem: One minute I'm puzzling over some word or image, but the next line carries me forward beyond my misunderstanding into another realm of discovery.
RICH : Yes, and I had in mind an even more literal case as well--someone reading a poem in American English the way I would read a poem in Spanish or French or some other language that I know slightly, or used to know better, but of which I have forgotten a lot of the vocabulary, guessing at some words, yet struggling, and carried on by something in that poem. But what is that? And why do I want to know what it is? I want to know because whatever it is in my poem that keeps you reading is some kind of bond or filament between us, something that I've been able to put there that speaks even to this other person, whose language this is not.

MOYERS : How important is your audience when you are actually writing the poem? Do you picture the audience?
RICH : I write for whoever might read. I recently saw a very interesting distinction made by the African Canadian writer Marlene Nourbese Philip. She speaks of the difference between community, audience, and market. I believe that I write for a community. Obviously, I write for a community of other poets, people whom I know, people with whom I have already connected in some way, but I also write for whoever will constitute a new and expanded community audience.


MOYERS: So you did have the audience in mind, even though you couldn't picture the particular reader or listener?
RICH : I made up some readers and listeners, but I also remembered and recognized actual people, as a fiction writer might, in that section and throughout the poem. The poem is full of voices: they're not all my voice, they're not all women's voices, some of them are men's voices, but, yes, I certainly had an audience in mind. The distinction between community, audience, and market is a really important distinction for an artist of any kind. There is a community of those whose work and whose lives you respect and love and cherish, a community that gives you the strength to create, to push boundaries, to take risks, a community that perhaps challenges you to do all that.
There is an audience of those unknown to you but whom your words are going to reach. You can't know them in advance, but you can hope for them, desire them. Market, on the other hand, is all about packaging and buying and selling, and the corresponding group would be the consumer. I don't want my poetry to be consumed in that sense. I do want it to be used.

it seemed normal, even likely at the time. this hope.

(petals falling though it wasn't windy,
sunny though it wasn't warm,
pollen though i couldn't smell it,
sky though we couldn't reach it,
light though it wasn't blinding,
tree though it was more flower,
powerlines though barely showing,

spring, though this hope was not really of any season)

new york city

(original post on flickr)

i could have written this from my history. my history could have written this.

Kept Burning and Distant by Linda Gregg

You return when you feel like it,
like rain.  And like rain you are tender,
with the rain’s inept tenderness.
A passion so general I could be anywhere.
You carry me out into the wet air.
You lay me down on the leaves
and the strong thing is not the sex
but waking up alone under the trees after.

“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Albert Camus wrote that the only serious question is whether to kill yourself or not.
Tom Robbins wrote that the only serious question is whether time has a beginning and an end.
Camus clearly got up on the wrong side of the bed, and Robbins must have forgotten to set the alarm.
There is only one serious question. And that is:
Who knows how to make love stay?
Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself.
Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and the end of time.
Answer me that and I will reveal to you the purpose of the moon.

-Tom Robbins, from Still Life With Woodpecker


(Thank you, Eddie)

Looking for meaning in or cause of my plateau:

In geology and earth science, a plateau ( /pləˈtoʊ/ or /ˈplætoʊ/; plural plateaus or rarely plateaux), also called a high plain or tableland, is an area of highland, usually consisting of relatively flat terrain.

Plateaus can be formed by a number of processes, including upwelling of volcanic magma, extrusion of lava, and erosion by water and glaciers. Magma rises from the mantle causing the ground to swell upward, in this way large, flat areas of rock are uplifted. Plateaus can also be built up by lava spreading outward from cracks and weak areas in the crust. Plateaus can also be formed by the erosional processes of glaciers on mountain ranges, leaving them sitting between the mountain ranges. Water can also erode mountains and other landforms down into plateaus.

In my experience, the people who become writers are the ones who keep writing through the yards of silence and the years of discouragement… Allow yourself to be uncertain, but don’t let your uncertainty turn to despair. It can be wonderful to write when you’re sad and full of the dark bouquet of doubt, but misery leads itself to silence and one must get out of bed every morning and prepare for the great celebration of one’s own imagination, even if it doesn't happen that day.

- Dean Young

In case you didn't know, you can read Jack Gilbert for free.

Jack Gilbert:

My heart was shaped by stories, by pictures, by songs. I believe we are made by art, art that matters. Not what’s ingenious, clever, or hard to do. Not a mystery puzzle. I think if a poem doesn’t put pressure on me, I don’t feel uncomfortable in the sense of feeling more than I can feel, understanding more than I can understand, loving more than I am able to be in love. It enables me to do those things. If you try to copy an image and everything goes right, you may feel like more of a person afterwards. But I think that work of art is probably a failure. It’s nice to put a novel on paper, a painting over the couch. But I don’t want it unless it’s significant, unless it has something to do with me. If it’s just clever or entertaining or surprising, it’s a waste of time for me. I enjoy it. I do it. I read the novel, you know, the simple story line behind a mystery of who killed the cat. That’s entertaining, but that’s not what I think poetry is about. I think it’s something about putting pressure on me. If it doesn’t put pressure on the reader, what’s it for.

After all this time, my body finally fell victim to its travels. I lost track of time lying in bed trying to feel better.


“Music Is in the Piano Only When It Is Played”

We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves

as it passes through. We are not the wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of
insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

- Jack Gilbert, Rest In Peace. 

I feel like my existential crises lead to one of two things:
1) Unmotivated paralysis
2) Frenzied, passionate hunt for purpose

Sometimes a mix of the two (which seems impossible and ends up in a lot of confusion).

I read about Richard Kozi Hernandez and I am galvanized by his responses and his approach to mobile photography. (Also, by the quotes paired with his photos).


"I would describe my process for making street images as purposefully aimless. My photographs are a simple by-product of my normal life.  I don’t go out of my way to make images. Unless I spot a man in a fedora, then I’ll go out of my way. Don’t ask me why I love to take pictures of hats, I’m working that out with my therapist at the moment. [Insert chuckle here.]

My images are artifacts of my daily life. For me the hunt is always on. Picking my daughter up from school, a trip to the market or on my way to a meeting, it’s open season.

I’m a very reactionary image-maker. When my head and heart scream shoot, I shoot. Photography, for me, is about honoring the impulse to make an image, no matter what.

The “no matter what” wasn’t always an easy thing to act upon. Years ago, my head and heart would scream shoot, but another voice in me would yell back: “The light is bad. The composition isn’t perfect. The subject is too far away. What a silly picture, why would you make a photo of that?” It’s taken years, but I’ve honed my skill to shoot on impulse. This means having a camera in hand and ready at all times. For me, there is no better tool than my mobile phone.

Shoot. YES. YES. YES. Shoot. Shoot. YES."


Here are the quotes from the captions under the fantastic photographs:


"Our bodies are our gardens. Our wills are our gardeners." -- William Shakespeare

"Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface." -- Hugo von Hofmannsthal

"Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change -- this is the rhythm of living. Out of our over-confidence, fear; out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope. And out of hope, progress." -- Bruce Barton

"I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expectations hinder my path." -- Dalai Lama

"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive." -- Joseph Campbell

"To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful." -- Agnes De Mille

"We can't plan life. All we can do is be available for it." -- Lauryn Hill

"Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people." -- Albert Einstein

"How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard." -- Carol Sobieski and Thomas Meehan, "Annie" writers

"It was a woman who drove me to drink. Come to think of it, I never did hang around to thank her for that. 'Hey lady! Do I look all blurry to you? 'Cause you look blurry to me!' " -- Dean Martin

"I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, love, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstasy." -- Anais Nin

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined." -- Henry David Thoreau

"It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll." -- Donald Miller

"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense." -- Gertrude Stein

"Never too old, never too bad, never too late, never too sick to start from scratch once again." -- Bikram Choudhury

"...Self-doubt. I despise it. I hold it in contempt, along with the hell-spawned ooze-pit of Resistance from which it crawled. I will NEVER back off. I will NEVER give the work anything less than 100%. If I go down in flames, so be it. I'll be back." -- Steven Pressfield

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." -- Steve Jobs

"A man's errors are his portals of discovery." -- James Joyce

"Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves." -- Buddha

“Harmony makes small things grow, lack of it makes great things decay.”–Sallust

“Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.”–Danny Kaye

“Constant repetition carries conviction.”–Robert Collier

“The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today I sat down at my desk with a cup of hot green tea and read this excerpt from Ana Forrest's "Fierce Medicine".

"Size has nothing to do with standing up to someone. I began to grow my power."

"I’d believed that in order to do what I was afraid of, I had to get rid of the fear first, but that turned out to be only an idea, not the truth. You have to do something two hundred times before the fear will disperse. Are you still afraid of something? Just do it again. Do it again. Do it again."

I have practiced Forrest Yoga sporadically throughout my yoga explorations. My favorite yoga classes have been the ones in which instructors lead me to new territories of not only body, but of mind and life. Contrary to what it may seem (since I always seem eager to rearrange my schedule so that I can attend yoga classes), yoga has always been torturous for me. I am still terrified and nervous whenever I step into the yoga studio. I still feel like I might pass out every time I'm twisted into an asana with some creative name. It feels miraculous when I finally reach savasana, an ironed-out, satisfied heap on the ground. I don't think it's cliche to say that every single class is a facing of my fears. I have written briefly about my running journey, and though I've run half marathons, I still feel like I must prepare myself like a warrior whenever I stand at mile 0, even if it is only to conquer a 2 mile jog.

I am also reading Cheryl Strayed's "Wild", and I do believe that the physical journey combines so closely and intensely with the spiritual. I think about how impossible it seems that my past is littered with journeys up mountains and across glaciers and tiger leaping gorges. I think about how I arrived here, and how the days are steps up to a destination, and that there will be days where I feel like I can't take another.fucking.step, but when we arrive in a clearing at sunset, when we break bread with strangers or old friends, when we stop and make camp at points throughout the hike, isn't this what they meant when they emphasized the journey? We all seem to arrive at existential crises, but I remind myself that this path is our purpose.

Whenever I see him, Loren says, "do you know (insert poet's name)?" 

I always tuck the names of the poets into my pocket and research later.

Today it was Linda Gregg. 

From "The Art of Finding"

I believe that poetry at its best is found rather than written. Traditionally, and for many people even today, poems have been admired chiefly for their craftsmanship and musicality, the handsomeness of language and the abundance of similes, along with the patterning and rhymes. I respect and enjoy all that, but I would not have worked so hard and so long at my poetry if it were primarily the production of well-made objects, just as I would not have sacrificed so much for love if love were mostly about pleasure. What matters to me even more than the shapeliness and the dance of language is what the poem discovers deeper down than gracefulness and pleasures in figures of speech. I respond most to what is found out about the heart and spirit, what we can hear through the language. Best of all, of course, is when the language and other means of poetry combine with the meaning to make us experience what we understand. We are most likely to find this union by starting with the insides of the poem rather than with its surface, with the content rather than with the packaging. Too often in workshops and classrooms there is a concentration on the poem's garments instead of its life's blood.

Notes:

Love is not an agreement, nor a contract. It has no timelines.
Perhaps we can try to force terms upon a relationship- but love will not be forced.
It is as stubborn as the stubbornness you throw at it, and as yielding as what you give it.

“Traveler, there is no path.  The path is made by walking it.”  - Antonio Machado

of what is the body made? it’s made of emptiness and rhythm. at the ultimate heart of the world, there is no solidity. once again, there is only the dance.
george leonard

“A couple of times in your life, it happens like that. You meet a stranger, and all you know is that you need to know everything about them.”
- Lisa Kleypas