notes:

- sitting in a ramen restaurant, with a traveler guitar, with headphones plugged into it, hearing all that beauty in just one badly-played out-of-practice chord
- train windows
- windows

i have several countries inside of me, they are all aching, they are all having earthquakes, they are all ready

“And one by one the nights between our separated cities are joined to the night that unites us.”

― Pablo Neruda

“We’ve been filled with great treasure for one purpose: to be spilled. ”
― Yoko Ono

A text message from a friend asked, "What is your beautiful thought for today?"

I say to myself (exclaim, really!), my god, I can see the entire sky from where I sit at this moment. I can see the city divided into green, into houses, into the skyscrapers at the very edge. I can see boats on the horizon. I can swallow the clouds and still have light remaining to reach your night.

Yes to spectacle.

Yes to virtuosity.

Yes to transformations and magic and make-believe.

Yes to the heroic.

Yes to the anti-heroic.

Yes to involvement of performer or spectator.

Yes to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.

Yes to eccentricity.

Yes to moving or being moved.

(parts from jillian pena portfolio)

perhaps the thing about life is that we are all searching for permanence in places that it doesn't exist, and simultaneously a transience that is impossible to maintain

Fascinating.

why bilinguals are smarter

The key difference between bilinguals and monolinguals may be more basic: a heightened ability to monitor the environment. “Bilinguals have to switch languages quite often — you may talk to your father in one language and to your mother in another language,” says Albert Costa, a researcher at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Spain. “It requires keeping track of changes around you in the same way that we monitor our surroundings when driving.” In a study comparing German-Italian bilinguals with Italian monolinguals on monitoring tasks, Mr. Costa and his colleagues found that the bilingual subjects not only performed better, but they also did so with less activity in parts of the brain involved in monitoring, indicating that they were more efficient at it.

“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
― Khaled Hosseini

“Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”
― Edwidge Danticat

I risk my life to write this. I risk my life to write about you. I risk my life to love you. i've risked my life to dance.

How to wake up:
1. confess your hidden faults
2. approach what you find repulsive
3. help those you don't want to help
4. anything you are attached to, give that
5. go to the places that scare you

-Pha Dampa Sangye to Machig Labdron

Mariner's Song

If you've seen one wave, you've seen them all.
Why don't they come in different colors
Making a rainbow waterfall
In reds and purples, mauves and yellows
Instead of this green after green sea swell?

What do they do all night at the bottom
But churn their green grains; mud and shells
As furniture, or a fish as totem,
Wasting that darkness as the sea wills,
Instead of a rainbow, waterfalls?

We cried for color as the boat went over;
The day was blue; the sea was green.
I said, "Love should come out of cover,
Instead of repeating the face, the scene," ---
As wave after greenest wave went over.

- Howard Moss

the chronology of it is no longer something i study.
the geography no longer something i memorize

it's different, this commitment
quieter, perhaps.
or louder, in some ways.

“Don't use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
― Jack Kerouac

there is something about dawn as it soaks into the room,
like hope humming in the stillness, or tangible in the quiet
this replaces the thing i felt about the mornings, the feeling of survival

"Doesn’t pattern require – to be seen / as pattern – not just repetition but, as well, eventually, / the interruption of it?" (phillips)

i can taste it in my mouth while swimming in the halogen lights,
i spread it over my skin while showering under white lights,
i fasten it to my hair before i run faster than my heartbeat underneath the orange light of streetlamps i'll never pass under again

"I don't know. We never arrived," I said.
"But I felt happy."

- a quote with many meanings to me- taken out of context from a book you wouldn't expect

Speak to me, aching heart: what
Ridiculous errand are you inventing for yourself

- louise gluck

17.
The self ended and the world began.
They were of equal size,
commensurate,
one mirrored the other.


18.
The riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind.

The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.

― Louise Glück

i've probably posted this at least once before already.


Carl Phillips quotes from Howard Moss’s poem, “Rules of Sleep”:

"…intimacy is only another form of separation."

Interview with Carl Phillips ("a way of happening")

LH: We are not suddenly beyond beauty—not even beauty in the same things that were beautiful four thousand years ago—are we?

CP: No, we are not beyond beauty, whether it is the beauty of centuries ago, or of the present moment. I’m not even sure what it would mean, to be beyond beauty—to have outgrown it? To be somehow too wise for it? The world may be fragmented—actually, it always has been, nothing new about that—but who said there wasn’t beauty in the shards? I was out working in the garden yesterday, when the cathedral bells started ringing—it seemed to me a beautiful moment. That doesn’t change the fact of suffering in the world, it coexists with that fact. I think people worry that a concern with beauty is a form of being blind to the realities of life, modern or otherwise. But beauty is one of those realities of life.