my day with sunrise, sweating it out with udon, a walk in pacific heights lusting after house furnishings i never knew i needed, green smoothies, and a visit to four barrels.

my night with avedon and penn. hot tea. blankets. sweatshirt. 

taking a moment in the middle of the day to read. and then, chasing sunsets in Manhattan.

bennington, vt

hobbled outside today for about 2 minutes. 

i've been wearing the same shirt for a couple of days now. 

i haven't looked in the mirror for a while now, so i haven't really tended to my face, or hair, or anything for that matter. 

which means that i didn't realize until today that the bruise on my chin has now shaped itself into somewhat of a smiley face

which, as anyone knows,

is always a good sign. 

***

also- today, in my inbox, haiku from Borges:

Haiku

1

Algo me han dicho

la tarde y la montaña.

Ya lo he perdido.

2

La vasta noche

no es ahora otra cosa

que una fragancia.

3

¿Es o no es

el sueño que olvidé

antes del alba?

4

Callan las cuerdas.

La música sabía

lo que yo siento.

5

Hoy no me alegran

los almendros del huerto.

Son tu recuerdo.

6

Oscuramente

libros, láminas, llaves

siguen mi suerte.

7

Desde aquel día

no he movido las piezas

en el tablero.

8

En el desierto

acontece la aurora.

Alguien lo sabe.

9

La ociosa espada

sueña con sus batallas.

Otro es mi sueño.

10

El hombre ha muerto.

La barba no lo sabe.

Crecen las uñas.

11

Ésta es la mano

que alguna vez tocaba

tu cabellera.

12

Bajo el alero

el espejo no copia

más que la luna.

13

Bajo la luna

la sombra que se alarga

es una sola.

14

¿Es un imperio

esa luz que se apaga

o una luciérnaga?

17

La vieja mano

sigue trazando versos

para el olvido

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

posted at flickr/rosekuo

self,
in a bathroom in a house that's not mine, in a mirror that was not whole, with a camera that stopped working afterwards.
houston, tx.
.

i have not worked at taking a self portrait in the past four years.

since then, I've ignited, fought, and settled revolutions within my heart- won or lost I can't tell, but perhaps that was never the purpose.

-

i am reading a book about change. and the most ground-shaking point in the book is that many things can effect change, but the factor that creates permanent change is belief. Higher powers and a transformation of habit can help us change, but it is the capacity to BELIEVE that things will get better that makes ALL the difference.

Todd Heatherton said, "Change occurs among other people. It seems real when we can see it in other people's eyes."

i have friends and family who surround me, sentinels in the darkness of the past two years. They have guided me through the storms, and they have been my most powerful weapons in these revolutions of heart.

On "Reclaiming Travel"

My friend Tu posted about a New York Times blog article about travel, and I thought it was such a fantastic, relevant read.

In the past five years, the amount of time I have spent in transit has been, in short, astounding. Even to myself. Not in a way that demands recognition or bragging, but in a way that serves up the questions of "why?" and "how?"

Often I receive curious inquiries about how I travel so often. and my reasons for it. While in many ways it is inexplicable, I can answer that I am a student of this life and this world. Far too often, people assume that travelers are looking to "hit the landmarks" and "check off the bucket list." While I spend a relatively inordinate amount of time traveling, I tend to spend more time in one city or country rather than hurry around trying to "squeeze" as many places in as possible.

Travel, for me, is not just about seeing the sights. I believe that the discovery of ourselves as humans lies in understanding others. I believe that the realm in which possibility is created is only created once we experience what is outside ourselves.

While there are pros and cons to what we identify as "tourism," my focus in travel is about something different. It is about hearing and marveling at different languages, at the way others walk, at other people's choices in leisure, at landscape, at how clouds look when going westward, at how the sunrise looks when going eastward, at the utensils people use to eat, at the vast vocabulary for "snow," at idioms, at proverbs,  at the way salt tastes in different seas, at the way the water changes color when the waves break across different horizons, at the usage of different terms of endearment, at the way people regard each other physically, at the forms of public transportation, at the way people sit to dine. Photography, for me, is not just about snapshots- it's a study of the way others' eyes move, it's a wandering of how sunlight moves across land, it's a capture of emotion in an ordinary moment, it's a peek at the way others seek and execute towards their dreams.

This life- this is not just a search for myself, but a search for myself in relation to other people and in the presence of other cultures. Aloneness while traveling is not always loneliness, but a contemplation on what it means to be human, what it means to be inherently vulnerable, yet inherently capable of reaching any combination of possibilities.

It is my hope that whether I am traveling or staying in one place, I will never stop searching.

(photographs below from one of my recent trips to the big apple, and one from galveston)

-----------------------------

The New York times article is below. I have highlighted a few items that I found particularly meaningful in italics.


Reclaiming Travel
By ILAN STAVANS and JOSHUA ELLISON

July 7, 2012, 3:00 PM
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/reclaiming-travel/

What compels us to leave home, to travel to other places? The great travel writer Bruce Chatwin described nomadism as an “inveterate impulse,” deeply rooted in our species. The relentless movement of the modern world bears this out: our relative prosperity has not turned us into a sedentary species. The World Tourism Organization, an agency of the United Nations, reported nearly a billion tourist arrivals in 2011. Some 200 million people are now living outside their country of birth.

Our once-epic journeys have been downsized to cruise ships and guided tours.
This type of massive movement — the rearrangement, temporary or permanent, of multitudes — is as fundamental to modern life as the Internet, global trade or any other sociopolitical developments. Certainly, many of our most intractable collective challenges as a society are directly linked to our mobility: urbanization, environmental depletion, scarcity and, of course, immigration. An immigrant is a traveler without a return ticket.

In the Bible, the human journey begins with an expulsion. God’s chosen people are also those condemned to wander. Not only wander, but wonder: Why are we in exile? Where is home? Can this rupture ever be repaired? “Gilgamesh,” the Icelandic sagas and “The Odyssey” are all about the itinerant life. Yet these characters don’t see travel as we moderns do. They embark on journeys of mythic significance — the literature of travel in the premodern era did not recognize travel for leisure or self-improvement. Today, our approach to travel is defined not by archetypal imagery but, rather, according to our own mostly prosaic trips. Literature, to be sure, still produces grand quests; likewise, there are still many people whose journeys are precarious and momentous on an epic scale.

For the most fortunate among us, our travels are now routine, devoted mainly to entertainment and personal enrichment. We have turned travel into something ordinary, deprived it of allegorical grandeur. We have made it a business: the business of being on the move. Whatever impels us to travel, it is no longer the oracle, the pilgrimage or the gods. It is the compulsion to be elsewhere, anywhere but here.

St. Augustine believed that “because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him.” We often think of restlessness as a malady. Thus, we urgently need to reclaim the etymology of restlessness — “stirring constantly, desirous of action” — to signal our curiosity toward what isn’t us, to explore outside the confines of our own environment. Getting lost isn’t a curse. Not knowing where we are, what to eat, how to speak the language can certainly make us anxious and uneasy. But anxiety is part of any person’s quest to find the parameters of life’s possibilities.



The act of traveling is an impossibly broad category: it can encompass both the death march and the cruise ship. Travel has no inherent moral character, no necessary outcome. It can be precious or worthless, productive or destructive. It can be ennobling or self-satisfied. The returns can be only as good as what we offer of ourselves in the process. So what distinguishes meaningful, fruitful travel from mere tourism? What turns travel into a quest rather than self-serving escapism?


George Steiner wrote that “human beings need to learn to be each other’s guests on this small planet.” We usually focus on the ethical imperative of hospitality, on the obligation to be a generous host. When we travel, though, we are asking for hospitality. There’s great vulnerability in this. It also requires considerable strength. To be a good guest — like being a good host — one needs to be secure in one’s own premises: where you stand, who you are. This means we tend to romanticize travel as a lonely pursuit. In fact, a much deeper virtue arises from the demands it makes on us as social beings.

Travel is a search for meaning, not only in our own lives, but also in the lives of others. The humility required for genuine travel is exactly what is missing from its opposite extreme, tourism.

Modern tourism does not promise transformation but rather the possibility of leaving home and coming back without any significant change or challenge. Tourists may enjoy the visit only because it is short. The memory of it, the retelling, will always be better. Whereas travel is about the unexpected, about giving oneself over to disorientation, tourism is safe, controlled and predetermined. We take a vacation, not so much to discover a new landscape, but to find respite from our current one, an antidote to routine.


There are still traces of the pilgrimage, even in tourism, though they have become warped and solipsistic. Holy seekers go looking for oracles, tombs, sites of revelation. Tourists like to visit ruins, empty churches, battlefields, memorials. Tourist kitsch depends on a sterilized version of history and a smug assurance that all of our stories of the past are ultimately redemptive — even if it is only the tourists’ false witness that redeems them. There’s no seeking required, and no real challenge, because the emotional voyage is preprogrammed. The world has become a frighteningly small place.

The planet’s size hasn’t changed, of course, but our outsize egos have shrunk it dramatically. We might feel we know our own neighborhood, our own city, our own country, yet we still know so little about other individuals, what distinguishes them from us, how they make their habitat into home.

This lack of awareness is even more pronounced when it comes to different cultures. The media bombards us with images from far-away places, making distant people seem less foreign, more relatable to us, less threatening. It’s a mirage, obviously. The kind of travel to which we aspire should tolerate uncertainty and discomfort. It isn’t about pain or excessive strain — travel doesn’t need to be an extreme sport — but we need to permit ourselves to be clumsy, inexpert and even a bit lonely. We might never understand travel as our ancestors did: our world is too open, relativistic, secular, demystified. But we will need to reclaim some notion of the heroic: a quest for communion and, ultimately, self-knowledge.


Our wandering is meant to lead back toward ourselves. This is the paradox: we set out on adventures to gain deeper access to ourselves; we travel to transcend our own limitations. Travel should be an art through which our restlessness finds expression. We must bring back the idea of travel as a search.

--
Ilan Stavans is a professor of literature at Amherst College. Joshua Ellison is the editor of the literary journal Habitus.

the end of march left me like a blazing wildfire. i feel stripped like the bare trees in the aftermath, really, breathless, anew.


“That which we manifest is before us.”


notes:
- korean restaurant on the third floor. it is raining outside. your umbrella is mint green, mine is pink (i stole it from my roommate just in case). sweet-sounding korean from you, a silent nod and smile from me. chicken kar-jeabe for the both of us. with handmade long noodle & dough flakes. chicken, potato, onion, green onion. our lives pouring out of our mouths, our eyes unblinkingly wide at the similarities of what we are saying.
- how there is no chronology in my writing. how i write out of order, but somehow it is absolutely in order
- moving every year
- ebay
- shedding things while growing possibility
- photography photography photography
- music making my heartbeat a warzone. not sure what weapons were involved (but surely the pitcher of sangria helped).
- an email i read on the way home. my heart pounds, i can't believe that you know exactly what i needed to hear at 12:41AM.
- sunset across the train tracks
- pretend-ballet at night, looking a fool and skipping across the carpet with audacity
- noting how the guy's photography was not at all like the Decisive Moment as described by Henri Cartier-Bresson
- oh, cindy sherman!