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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