Thursday, November 22, 2018
Friday, October 19, 2018
The Giving Tree
In Vancouver, we stopped to look around near a one thousand year old tree in Stanley Park. Visitors could walk beneath the hollowed area at the base of the historic tree. I watched in horror as a grown man, with a woman and child in tow, took out a knife and began to carve into the underbelly of the tree. I said nothing.
A few weeks later, my silence haunts me. When I was young, I had no problem calling out adults decades older for acting unfairly or inappropriately. I can think of a handful of occasions without effort. Why is it that I find myself so timid, now that they're my peers?
Rather than confront the man, I walked away so I wouldn't have to witness the abuse.
Complicit.
Was I afraid of how he would react? Maybe. But I think maybe the root of my inaction is more despair than fear. So I somehow prevent the man from desecrating the tree... There are a hundred ancient trees lining this road that his blade could find as easily. Somewhere along the way I guess I started believing that people can't be changed. That putting out fires exhausts the water-thrower and doesn't save the forest.
So maybe my saying something or simply asking him what he was doing might have planted a seed of thought or understanding in him that would eventually lend itself to seeing the world differently.
So what.
By 2050 the global climate will inevitably have increased by a degree despite our half-ass efforts.
Why should I write a poem if I am going to die?
And yet, tonight on my walk,
I carried some weight
of silent complicity.
A few weeks later, my silence haunts me. When I was young, I had no problem calling out adults decades older for acting unfairly or inappropriately. I can think of a handful of occasions without effort. Why is it that I find myself so timid, now that they're my peers?
Rather than confront the man, I walked away so I wouldn't have to witness the abuse.
Complicit.
Was I afraid of how he would react? Maybe. But I think maybe the root of my inaction is more despair than fear. So I somehow prevent the man from desecrating the tree... There are a hundred ancient trees lining this road that his blade could find as easily. Somewhere along the way I guess I started believing that people can't be changed. That putting out fires exhausts the water-thrower and doesn't save the forest.
So maybe my saying something or simply asking him what he was doing might have planted a seed of thought or understanding in him that would eventually lend itself to seeing the world differently.
So what.
By 2050 the global climate will inevitably have increased by a degree despite our half-ass efforts.
Why should I write a poem if I am going to die?
And yet, tonight on my walk,
I carried some weight
of silent complicity.
Sunday, May 27, 2018
Lessons I'm Still Unlearning
In my first years of college I was home for winter break, looking through a box of high school letters and photos. I was newly Christian at the time, and looked at my "old life" with curious speculation. I don't remember what prompted the advice, but my mom suggested I just get rid the pictures of my on-again-off-again high school boyfriend and I. What was the point of keeping them around, anyway? Besides, what if someday they brought pain or discomfort to my future husband? Easier to just throw them out.
I woke up the other night suddenly with the memory of a small lock diary in my mind. The diary that contained the narrative of some of my first experiences with men. Thoughts and feelings and lists. Aches and resolve. Glimpses into my forming heart. Now just nebulous mysteries, really; it did not survive the cut. Those sixteen-seventeen year old words were thrown out, along with piles of pictures, in a sanctimonious act of victory over a shameful pass. A washing away. A making clean.
What a perfect symbolic scene that was. My mom, teaching me to sacrifice myself to protect the potential fears and insecurities of a yet unknown future man in my life. Trading my own history and memories for the comfort of the other. Stand by your man to the erasure of your own identity. I was learning.
I woke up the other night suddenly with the memory of a small lock diary in my mind. The diary that contained the narrative of some of my first experiences with men. Thoughts and feelings and lists. Aches and resolve. Glimpses into my forming heart. Now just nebulous mysteries, really; it did not survive the cut. Those sixteen-seventeen year old words were thrown out, along with piles of pictures, in a sanctimonious act of victory over a shameful pass. A washing away. A making clean.
What a perfect symbolic scene that was. My mom, teaching me to sacrifice myself to protect the potential fears and insecurities of a yet unknown future man in my life. Trading my own history and memories for the comfort of the other. Stand by your man to the erasure of your own identity. I was learning.
Sunday, March 18, 2018
21 Days
The truly terrible cacophony of smells and noises.
You try finishing your dinner with someone across the curtain shitting the bed.
Someone in the hallway on the phone, crying. "There's nothing else they can do for her."
That was the third floor.
On the seventh floor, a man with green socks gets to walk laps around the hall all day. There's the obese man. The young man. Nurse Joan with a beard and venom toward Hillary Clinton. Chatty nurses. The nurses who zone out to your TV for awhile without really saying a word. Packs of visitors who travel in a cloud of stale cigarette smells. An endless ricochet of beeping IVs. The neighbor needs help going to the bathroom for the fifteenth time since I've been there. Wants to tell the nurse a joke.
There's a look of desperation on everyone's faces, and not just here. On the highways too. No one's seen the sun in months. Not really. It's just a hurried shuffle from vent to vent under layers and layers. It takes a toll. It hasn't even been a terrible winter but there is an urgent lean toward Spring.
I feel like this is doing something to me.
I'm here and there's nothing I can do except be here now. Minutes and hours indistinguishable. Surprised to see it's still daylight out of the windows by the elevator. There nothing more to do except be here and that is enough for now. But there's the very real knowing that I can't stay. I cannot. A matter of self preservation. 96 Westbound takes me to 19 or 23 again and the highway is an endless tongue lapping up depression, bare tree limbs on both sides of the sky, reaching and never filling the space. In gatherings around town all I see is a sea of camouflage and disease and addiction. A town full of trauma. Pale like there's no telling what's spirit and what's flesh. Haunted, not holy. I have no idea how I escaped all of this.
Seeing dad withered away to skin and bones is a confusing overlay of life leaps. Like seeing him truly for the first time and like seeing him for the last time at the same time. They're the kinds of visions you push all the way to the bottom. The kind you stand on with all your weight so it cannot possibly surface. The kind that has you crying driving up the parking ramp. A3Fish. A2Apple. 21 Days without a full night of sleep. Without a shower. Without any real idea of when.
What are we? There is so much going on inside.
You try finishing your dinner with someone across the curtain shitting the bed.
Someone in the hallway on the phone, crying. "There's nothing else they can do for her."
That was the third floor.
On the seventh floor, a man with green socks gets to walk laps around the hall all day. There's the obese man. The young man. Nurse Joan with a beard and venom toward Hillary Clinton. Chatty nurses. The nurses who zone out to your TV for awhile without really saying a word. Packs of visitors who travel in a cloud of stale cigarette smells. An endless ricochet of beeping IVs. The neighbor needs help going to the bathroom for the fifteenth time since I've been there. Wants to tell the nurse a joke.
There's a look of desperation on everyone's faces, and not just here. On the highways too. No one's seen the sun in months. Not really. It's just a hurried shuffle from vent to vent under layers and layers. It takes a toll. It hasn't even been a terrible winter but there is an urgent lean toward Spring.
I feel like this is doing something to me.
I'm here and there's nothing I can do except be here now. Minutes and hours indistinguishable. Surprised to see it's still daylight out of the windows by the elevator. There nothing more to do except be here and that is enough for now. But there's the very real knowing that I can't stay. I cannot. A matter of self preservation. 96 Westbound takes me to 19 or 23 again and the highway is an endless tongue lapping up depression, bare tree limbs on both sides of the sky, reaching and never filling the space. In gatherings around town all I see is a sea of camouflage and disease and addiction. A town full of trauma. Pale like there's no telling what's spirit and what's flesh. Haunted, not holy. I have no idea how I escaped all of this.
Seeing dad withered away to skin and bones is a confusing overlay of life leaps. Like seeing him truly for the first time and like seeing him for the last time at the same time. They're the kinds of visions you push all the way to the bottom. The kind you stand on with all your weight so it cannot possibly surface. The kind that has you crying driving up the parking ramp. A3Fish. A2Apple. 21 Days without a full night of sleep. Without a shower. Without any real idea of when.
What are we? There is so much going on inside.
Sunday, February 25, 2018
ash wednesday
There is a magic to it all. Some unnamed connection between the details of every day and one. Some pull toward a city or repulsion from. Energy and exhaustion. And yes, even love.
But let's not shout about knowing.
Let's not lean in to italicize the greatness of our truth.
Let's not give it names or dogmas or presume to know the facts of an abstract.
Let's not.
Why would we?
"Even with all we understand about the world, there are still things that cannot be explained by science."
Why presume humans are capable of understanding everything about everything? Isn't that the height of hubris? We humans, self-crowned animals that, evolutionary speaking, are barely a blip on the radar. Like America in regards to history. Barely an etch on the timeline but certain it must be the pinnacle. Vanity cloaked in virtue. I will not.
Some people are not so much the marrying type. They just know, privately or together, until they don't or until forever.
The identity of an artist got all muddled in talk about instruments and motives and just knowing. Trying to measure different states of matter on a solid scale. The words words words kept on and kept clashing. And all along we mean the same thing. What matters most, motive or material?
Depends on where you live.
On the way home I watch 42 grams (42 grams being the supposed weight of two souls yaddyaddy). Husband and wife team who give up everything to pursue their dream and achieve wild success in the Michelin world of art. What emotion! Passion! Purpose and meaning!
A closing black screen noted their divorce less than two years later.
When asked recently to name a current obsession, I came up blank. Truly blank.
You know, I quite prefer it.
Friday, January 5, 2018
feverish
Five hours into her hospital stay, she begins to run a fever. Ice packs come out. Two more bags drip fluid.
It's funny how much effort goes into avoiding the fragility of it all. They talk about starting her on antibiotics. "That doesn't sound good," she says softly, but goes no further.
Funny how often we live with that terror in the room. When is a sign a sign? What is normal about any feeling at all? The unthinkable stretch between 0 and 10. When the baby is born, at last, isn't that only the beginning?
It's funny how much effort goes into avoiding the fragility of it all. They talk about starting her on antibiotics. "That doesn't sound good," she says softly, but goes no further.
Funny how often we live with that terror in the room. When is a sign a sign? What is normal about any feeling at all? The unthinkable stretch between 0 and 10. When the baby is born, at last, isn't that only the beginning?
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