sewn

so much of a doing is an undoing too
an untangling of knots
tracing back to sources that still tug at times
shout their weight
reaching back to let go
of old threads
that hold nothing together anymore
but hold on still

needle in hand and i've almost
stitched up all those old wounds
thread wound around my very own skin
somehow feels brand new

making something good

aftershock

Last night I dreamed I was in Elisnore with J and C when an earthquake happened.  It just kept going on and on.  Everyone started to panic and grab furniture.  C darted off around the corner, not realizing the severity.  We could see the ground start to twist and move away from him.  J ran after him and pushed him toward me at the last possible second and I sheltered him.   I just kept thinking, "I have to brace myself.  I am about to die."

I woke up from the anxiety, but I must have survived

Because when I went back to sleep, I was on a huge boat with all kinds of other people who had survived a recent earthquake or natural disaster.  No one was sure of what was going to happen now but everyone was frantic to prepare for potential aftershocks.  

I just kept trying to think of what I should do if the ship started sinking.  Should I climb outside?Would I be safer in the ocean adrift or should I stay inside and bury myself underneath something, hoping on some chance that the ceiling wouldn't crush me if it fell?  There seemed to be no sure sign of safety- everything a gamble and a chance.  Resigned to death but still hoping at life.  

ajar

In the last few weeks, a strange number of doors at my place have broken.  closet door, shower door, screen door, all off track or ajar with some new stubbornness to close.  It would take a special effort to set them all back- a deliberate act.  It's almost as if something shifted at the foundation.  For now, they remain ajar.

When you knocked, I answered without thinking.  Caught in some in-between state of dreaming and waking, I didn't have the wherewithal to ignore or hide or send you away.  I answered in my truest state.  Not my best, but my truest.  Disheveled and barely coherent, some delirious truth serum of fatigue and detachment.  I'm waking up now.  And here you are and here I am and I waking up now and I am still listening.

mirror

"In me she has drown a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish."

"Mirror" -Sylvia Plath

"I'm getting old," she says, touching her neck.  "Look at all these wrinkles."
A constant state of surprise
A strange reintroduction
A failure to recognize your self in your skin
How did things change when I feel quite the same?

I fear these pictures from my mom's wedding will take me a month to get through.  They're all there- ready- but I can't get past the smallest batch before the swelling of some horrible force of emotion stalls me.  Who IS that?  Who IS she?  Where AM I in that frame? How did I spend the whole weekend with them an not see them at all?  How is it that my face?

and to think these are the easy years- years that i will look back on in a few decades as vibrant with a lack of responsibility.  to think that the future scrapes toward a growing dependence- louder needs- more fragile mental landscapes- delicate conversations.

You can stop life from starting if you care enough to try, but there's no avoiding this sagging drag of time.
It makes me feel mad to live and mad to be and wild with urgency to experience everything and love intensely and

this pendulum
joy/despair
it swings and swings and swings

a case

1. I think the whole "live your passion" or "find a job that doesn't feel like work" vibe applies only to the hoping and wishing middle class. The upper class don't need to be reminded- it is their reality. To insist upon pursuit of passion to the disenfranchised seems cruel. How about pursuit of basic needs? Passion and dreaming are the curse and blessing of the middle dwellers. Those who aren't but might be.

2. food money sex popularity youth drinking aspecificperson spirituality music smoking fitness

at any given time, I think everyone it's in some manner controlled by some underlying fixation. listenand you'll hear it.

3. I think, out of nowhere, I caught a case of the blues. What to do.

glimpse

goddamn it,
to catch a glimpse is to crave the vision.

there are some leaps i could take,
i think.

a range of things

Something that used to make me happy but now (kinda) makes me sad:   teaching

Something that makes me sad:  Overweight middle aged people eating salad and raw vegetables for lunch every day.  What gives?  What is the point of anything?

Something that used to make me sad but now makes me happy:  When my new neighbor had two little kids with loud little feet and screams in tow, I was a little annoyed.  I mean, I did not move to a residential neighborhood to live next to kids, right?  Right.  But I've softened up.  Every few mornings I get to hear a little exchange between the little six or seven boy and his live-in grandma as he leaves for school.  "I love you, grandma!" "I love you to infinity!" she'll say.  "I'll love you to infinity PLUS ONE!"  he'll respond.  Or "I love you, grandma."  "I love you more!"  "I love you most!"  He always has the last word and it is always perfect.

Something that makes me happy:  ordering cat food from Amazon Prime.

belief systems

It occurred to me today that my doubt about the sustainability of long term romantic relationships feels a lot like when I first started seriously questioning and breaking away from my religious belief.  It had nothing to do with no longer wanting to believe.  It had nothing to do with rebellion.  It just no longer made sense.

I went through so much internal conflict in the beginning.  I begged for signs.  I tried to accept the lack of evidence.  I took the burden on myself, thinking that I just hadn't read enough or tried hard enough to make faith work.  But given that the questions I became brave enough to ask only lead to more unanswered questions, faith broke down entirely and rapidly when I refused to divorce it from my intellect.

I feel that way now on a lot of levels.  For most of my life, I have never questioned the plausibility of commitment or marriage as an end.  In many ways, I think I'm built for partnered life... for a shared life.  But the last year has moved me toward a general skepticism of the very nature of it.  If anything, a committed relationship makes sense to me as a sort of sober joining of small worlds for some pragmatic purpose- like taxes or living situations or companionship or the desire for kids.  In the same way, religion "makes sense" in providing a packaged world view and offering a sense of community and purpose.

But both of those "uses" for commitment break down so easily under the slightest scrutiny... or can be fulfilled in other ways less coated in confusion.

They're really both some weird fantastical risks we take in the name of some greater purpose or belonging.  But on the other sides of both are fallible, sometimes ridiculous realities that at the end of the day may be based entirely on myth.

I am no good at trusting blindly.  Not anymore.

I heard a snippet of a TED Talk by Christopher Ryan that questions the inherent flaws in societal expectations of monogamy.  The ideas just all swarm together to create some knot of conflict.  I suppose we're driven toward religion because of some buried fear of our own mortality and insignificance.  We're driven toward sex by the deeply rooted instinct to reproduce- stemming from the same encoded awareness of our own eventual end.  We're driven toward relationships for the same reason, I guess... to make sense of a purposeless world.  At first it feels like we're less alone in the confusion, and eventually it seems, our partners become the scapegoats for the confusion and feeling of isolation.  The drive and the desire seem so related to me- and the breakdown does too.

So does the loss.

If I had my way, long term committed relationships would make sense.  Trusting the integrity of another enough to share a life would not have to entail a divorce from reason.  But it seems as though we may not be wired toward the long haul.  Pragmatic partnership, maybe.  And that might not have to be entirely divorced from romance and love at times.  I can still sing Jesus songs at work and accept the weird nostalgic comfort I get from it- but I know now that the comfort comes from me, not from the outside.  I can still feel deeply connected to the world- full of compassion or the longing to serve- but that no longer comes from anything to do with a religious faith.  I guess I can still imagine a shared life that makes sense, it is just stripped bare of all of the things we are raised to believe are the bedrock of committed relationships.  And... I don't know.  I don't know what it would even take for that to seem like a better choice than the life I have on my own- just me trying to know me and love me and be a decent human being for the world.

If jesus christ wasn't able to convince me that he made sense for me, I certainly don't expect another human to.

Eventually a world without a god was a world that made sense to me too.  It doesn't feel like a loss, just a different sort of living.  And I think someday I can get there with these thoughts too.

Eventually.

correct me if i'm wrong

I'm starting to think that almost everyone in the world is kinda sleezy.

like a library book

so overdue
except minus the Dewey Decimal system-like order

1.  To a Senior who shared with me news about her acceptance into a NY Performing Arts school, "It will be overwhelming... because you'll feel special and not special at the same time.  And the reality is, both are true." #realtalk

2.  Said and heard while sitting around at coffeeshops over teh last few months:
"Let there be no record of our shame." -me "History is a trading of corruptions." -me "How many wars have the horses started?  None." -Neil #coffeehousephilosophers

3.  Too much work and no play makes Lindsey a financially stable(ish) adult.  #therearemoreimportantthings

4.  Last weekend I woke up in between unavoidable, restless naps with the distinct thought that someday, along with a birthday, I will have a death day.   Death hasn't been on my mind in any anxiety connected way since I dropped religion years ago.  I didn't necessarily feel panicked, just... somber.  Like Emily Webb all over again, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?  Every--- every minute?"  That reality.  The thought has stayed with me- both heavy and igniting. #realize

5.  I believe in kindness and recognizing the goodness in others. #onethingiknow

6.  The Theory of Everything - Boyhood - Whiplash  ... film matters to me.  I cried or freaked out in some zoned-in way during all of these.  I'm sure I would feel the same sense of immersion with the other Oscar nominees.    This year, I'm going to try to see all of the Oscar buzz movies when they play at the Art Theatre.  There is something sacred about telling stories through film.  Film matters to me.  It inspires and reminds and devastates.  #humanexperience

7.  Huge pendulum swings of feelings with photography.  Learning so much.  This art requires immersion and impatience and forgiveness.  Growing, still.  I'm realizing I enjoy fine-tuning single images in conceptual-type work more than cranking out huge batches of event work.  When my schedule frees up, I hope to move more in that direction experimentally.  #chaseit

like a prayer

oh god, take me back to indifference:
that sublime lack

futility

"you sell yourself short.  aim high.  go in firing," they said.  they said to go in tall with unvanquished confidence.  a few hours later I got the polite rejection message and thought about the futility of aiming at all when it is almost certainly always too high or low (and which is better really?).  why aim at all?  why hustle or pronounce or project or aspire?

shadowboxing a locked vault.  sweat and adrenaline into an unfeeling vortex.

it's just unfortunate timing, really.  the real sting is just in the red i recently penned when i drew up my cost of living.  prognosis- negative.  subsisting on deficit for an unforeseeable future.

(if i could go back, and had not been born in the midwest to a breed conditioned toward higher education, and had had a bit more prompting in the way of self-promotion and artistic edification, would i even have gone to college at all?)

in the morning, after a night of light dreams, the parking ticket stuffed under the wiper greeted me like a bully.  waiting and callous.  i mindlessly chose one spot instead of another (though i've lived there for over a year) and so the forces that be- like pheromones or gravity- demand recompense.

but i summoned my courage and found some silver in a penny found- in my leftover lunch from yesterday that hadn't been thrown out yet- in a kind word.

later, when i went to  prepare my camera to use at the school rally, i found a battery had exploded into a crusted mess into my external flash like cancer.  how long had it been inside there?  could i have stopped it or even known?  there is no stopping it now.  an hour later was like the day after a funeral, singing a six hundred dollar dirge to useless shell in my hand.

and it seems that these little threats lie everywhere.  there is no safety.

on the way home, i heard on the radio about the man recently released from years of interrogation and torture in some cold cell.  and i watched the obese woman crossing the road.  and saw that man in the wheelchair with the long ponytail and i thought of the futility of everything

and what very different shapes a bad day can take.

and the futility and the danger and relativity of it all means a handhold with despair.  right here and far away from my family and any real suffering and an old, sad ache.

hemingway

We only want facts here. We'll derive feeling from how they fit together, or from the gaps they leave between. Just tell me about your day, Hemingway. You're chasing a ghost with a drink in your hand. The stupor will excuse you from fidelity to the truth, but you'll still record it in minute detail. Tell me more about which way the cab was headed, or what it looked like out that train window. I'll know by the middle that you're prophet for some obsolete religion. The cathedral walls ring empty, but I recognize that pull toward prayer. Hold her up like a relic. Chant with the choir over cocktails. We're all just along for the ride.

I understand you like I understand the need to remember after the fact. The scramble to recall the morning commute that you ignored until you lost that job.  The pining for the everyday constants in middle of the relationship once your lover has moved on. How was it ever before? How was it ever at all?

words

I wish these words meant something a little different from what they do:

LEVITY:  I wish it just meant lightness, without the disrespect

VIGILANT:  I wish it just mean alert or aware, maybe even excited, without the threat of danger.