Time

That empty space where all the clutter that weighs heavily on the mind can relax into itself, grow into a richness instead of molder in anxiety's quick burning kiln.

Ignoring the clutter of the house, the nearly empty fridge, my inability to speak French fluently, my phone's apparent dematerialization and the pestering knowledge that there is something that needs to be done (or a bunch of somethings that I can only recall through a desire to do them) I decided that today needed to be a day of space. That profound luxury was not wasted on me today, I assure you and though I maybe should feel guilty for ignoring everything other than the feel of paint, the poetry of a good story and ivory keys, I feel no such thing.

My days of late have been somehow full. Full in a very abundant sense, full of walking through brick building studded streets, of conversations, of marveling at the intricacies of computers (why are they so ridiculously complicated?) and other random things that whisk the hours away in a mysterious fashion. However, in this abundance, I am so thankful for days that are mostly silent, that are spent marveling over home based activities that lend me time to process all the opulence of being.

On being thankful

Why yes, it is thanksgiving and since I am currently away from America I feel a bit more entitled to be cliche in the tradition of giving thanks. It is a good practice.

I am thankful for people. Being away from family and friends only accentuates the knowledge of just how awesome these people are and how ridiculously blessed I am to have them. With the distance in mind I also want to publicly say how thankful I am for skype. Such a wonderful invention. Of course, I also am growing quite fond of people here as well.

Amid the day to day hassle of living I often forget how blessed I am. This is silly and rather cruel to all the people who grace my life and to the beauty that surrounds me. It is good to be reminded to simply look up from my own cyclic thinking and hazy rituals of the everyday to the surprising sight of gratitude.

And I am thankful even though I do not always remember that I am.

construction zone?

Of late, trudging through day to day activities, with French language piling up near my brain, though not yet truly there, with people's long opinions staining my roughly hewn building of thoughts and with plans never fully executed, I've been realizing that life will never be settled. I will always be able to find some way to move, hopefully in growth, often merely in movement. I must constantly shift in some way (along with most human beings). It seems sometimes as though walls are constantly crumbling around me and I pray that something is being built in all this destruction, and though I believe that something is being established (if only the knowledge of my complete dependence on grace), it is not always evident.

I often wonder as I search through the rubble of my collapsed concepts, always finding shards of other's conclusions, mismatched and generously strewn about the area, what to believe in all this chaos.

Currently:

Silence hangs, tips scales,

shifts the thin grace elaborately threaded

through pin eyed triumphs.

And we are caught:

empty of words,

stripped to the bare mind's pulsing,

with thoughts wrapped around our tongues,

sentences stuck to our teeth,

and remain with echoes only

of past revelations and present perplexity.

An Appeal

"...

Tell me, as you would in the middle of the night
When we face only night, the ticking of a watch,
the whistle of an express train, tell me
Whether you really think that this world
Is your home? That your internal planet
That revolves, red-hot, propelled by the current
Of your warm blood, is really in harmony
With what surrounds you? Probably you know very well
The bitter protest, every day, every hour,
The scream that wells up, stifled by a smile,
The feeling of a prisoner who touches a wall
And knows that beyond it valleys spread,
Oaks stand in summer splendor, a jay flies
And a kingfisher changes a river to a marvel.

..."

-Czeslaw Milosz

Standing outside the other night with a light misty rain burning tiny ice holes through my coat I waited for a bus that I had assumed (wrongly) was supposed to come 20 minutes earlier. During this half frozen posture of anticipation I realized that being far from home (far enough that a phone call home would cost a small fortune) and taking public transport is making me learn what it means to wait quietly.

I watched as bus after bus stopped, blazing numbers with unfamiliar destinations and spilling people from their well lit interiors into the dank darkness to clutter on the sidewalk's edge then disband and drift apart to their various separate destinations. Airplanes rushed overhead, their bottoms looking like large bug's bellies to my anxious eyes. Not yet being used to taking the bus, my eyes would only briefly land on the Brussel's airport sign, the twitching lamp or the sheltered bus stop benches across the street (I got no such luxury where I stood) but remained glued to the empty street, searching for a brightly lit, appropriately numbered bus to approach.

It's strangely wonderful to be forced to stand and wait sometimes, to be made to take in a single area with a patience not often present except in situations of need.

Jane Kenyon

I feel as though everyone should have some Jane Kenyon in their lives.

"Happiness" has always been one of my favorites and currently, among the chilling air and all the newness in my life growing ever so slightly more familiar, with the smell of good coffee and sunlight seeping through the window I am feeling quite content and even (dare I say it?) happy. I am often wary of this feeling for it always ebbs and flows in a crazy unreliable fashion, however I'm beginning to realize (as long as you never go too deep into the depths of despair) that this makes the moments of sheer happiness all the better (or at least I feel that way as I revel in this time of happiness.)

The other quote is from "Dutch Interiors." I just love it. That's all.

Happiness

There's just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned, that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone. No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair. It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker, and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots in the night. It even comes to the boulder in the perpetual shade of pine barrens, to rain falling on the open sea, to the wineglass, weary of holding wine. "Now tell me that the Holy Ghost does not reside in the play of light on cutlery!"

Indulgence

I have been attempting to process, but also to stay sane, to step away from all the newness that has been filling my brain and to allow myself to retreat and simply soak in loved things. I want to let myself indulge in the simple pleasures that are familiar, such as books, ink and blank paper, the calming beauty of Over the Rhine's music and conversations with family and to give myself some grace as I adjust and take in hundreds of things; ivy covered walls, languages, street's bends and names, and, of course, so many people.

I am currently in the midst of things that are, quite literally, foreign , and in the strangeness and newness of routines, faces and places I want to be able to remain, for lack of a more specific word, aware and lucid.

Sleep still alludes me at times. I still feel the fear of darkness and must peer under beds and in closets before turning off the light to ensure myself that there are no monsters lurking in the hidden corners of a room.

I always assumed as a young kid that when I got older I would cease to be afraid of things, that some switch would flip in my mind and I would no longer find "adult things" menacing and large. I find that this is not really the case. One gets used to things that would at first be frightening, gets used to them because they are expected or required, but no switch is flipped, only a gradual progression towards familiarity. Beginnings are still scary.

Lorraine Christie

For some reason I just really like these paintings...

And more at:

http://www.gallery1401.com/lorrainechristie/

http://www.lorrainechristie.com/home.html

A Fire-Truck

Right down the shocked street with a siren-blast

That sends all else skittering to the curb,

Redness, brass, ladders and hats hurl past,

Blurring to sheer verb,

Shift at the corner into uproarious gear

And make it around the turn in a squall of traction,

The headlong bell maintaining sure and clear,

Thought is degraded action!

Beautiful, heavy, unweary, loud, obvious thing!

I stand here purged of nuance, my mind a blank.

All I was brooding upon has taken wing,

And I have you to thank.

As you howl beyond hearing I carry you into my mind,

Ladders and brass and all, there to admire

Your phoenix-red simplicity, enshrined

In that not extinguished fire.

-Richard Wilbur

Friday, August 20

One More Day

Comprehension of good and evil is given in the running of the blood.

In child's nestling close to its mother, she is security and warmth,

In night fears when we are small, in dread of the beast's fangs and in

the terror of dark rooms,

In youthful infatuations where childhood delight finds completion.

And should we discredit the idea for its modest origins?

Or should we say plainly that good is on the side of the living

And evil on the side of a doom that lurks to devour us?

Yes, good is an ally of being and the mirror of evil is nothing,

Good is brightness, evil darkness, good high, evil low,

According to the nature of our bodies, of our language.

The same can be said of beauty. It should not exist.

There is not only no reason for it, but an argument against.

Yet, undoubtedly it is, and is different from ugliness.

The voices of birds outside the window when they greet the morning

And iridescent stripes of light blazing on the floor,

Or the horizon with a wavy line where the peach-colored sky and the

dark-blue mountains meet.

Or the architecture of a tree, the slimness of a column crowned with

green.

All that, hasn't it been invoked for centuries

As a mystery which, in one instant, will be suddenly revealed?

And the old artist thinks that all his life he has only trained his hand.

One more day and he will enter the core as one enters a flower.

And though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.

Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of

being,

It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence

And no one would know it, if they did not know that is was ugly.

And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil

Only beauty will call to them and save them

So that they still know how to say: this is true and that is false.

- Czeslaw Milosz

This poem rather encapsulates a lot of things that have been on my mind or in the back of my mind recently and for years. Despite the fact that I love knowledge, science and intellect I feel as though this poem expresses some of the mystery of life we can not help but agree with, that doesn't oppose intellect, but seems something not entirely different, but still somewhat different. And yet this poem seems rather simple and obvious in many ways. I keep wondering what is it about epic good vs. evil stories that so enthrall my senses and wonder and there remains both a keenly felt answer and a mystery to this question that this poem draws me back to. I keep attempting to write further why when opening Milosz today and finding this that I had to share it and I keep erasing my attempts at continued explanation, so all I'll say is I love it.

More Clouds

Unbending he swept aside the many crinkled shards that curled around the corners of his ears while the sunlight straightened and stretched its flagrant pins upon heads bowed and restlessly repeating echoes of events long dead. Seconds shredded into a million silver silent slits among the corners of the street’s dead ends and bricks of buildings. Flower bursts of light collapsing into a thousands questions beat upon his side cocked head and straight into his ear drum’s center. And yet the minutes blurred, the answers faded before clearing into cognition. He paused and pondered if it was the hope of answers holding him or if in a pure moment of clarity he would dissipate leaving only a faint exclamation mark where his bent body once stood.

There is this certain moth that keeps fluttering up against my computer screen as if looking for entrance into the brightly lit (though 2 dimensional) land of its technology. I too, these days, have felt that keen pull to push myself up against blank beautiful things in a kind of knowingly ineffectual attempt to bury myself inside these pieces of sparse illumination.

Clouds

Indiana - 1:42pm

The Malady of the Quotidian:

Change.

"But time will not relent."

Clouds

In the chaos and confusion of moving and the strange emotional upheaval that tags along in that process, I have wanted to find some kind of stability and continuation. I look ahead to uncertainty only and change in every direction. And so, to fill this gaping void, I decided to look to the skies and start taking pictures of clouds by the recommendation of Abigail Pettit. This is by no means a new idea, nor would I want it to be. People have been taking pictures, painting and have been fascinated with these puffy floating objects for, well, a long long time. It is this long tradition of cloud obsession that draws me to this picture taking task. I have been secretly in love with cloud pictures (and who isn't in love with clouds?) ever since being introduced to Alfred Stieglitz many years ago and his Equivalent series (for an example of said series see above picture.) This is not surprising given that Stieglitz was a contemporary of Kandinsky (a favorite of mine) and this series is generally regarded as being infused with Kandinsky's ideas, particularly "the belief that colors, shapes, and lines reflect the inner, often emotive 'vibrations of the soul.'" (phillipscollection.org) Kandinsky is great, no?

That, coupled with the fact that I was moving away (have now moved away) from the mountains and towards the plains where the sky grows and curves, leaving lots of space for cloud viewing, I prepared myself to experience the variation and yet continuance and stability of clouds.

And so, the day before leaving Chattanooga I took some pictures of the clouds there.

The day I pulled into Indiana, all my earthly possessions crammed into Hovhaness (my car) and my sister's car I looked up to discover the sky looking like this:

And, no, that is not a cloud there, that is a moon. Not a single, solitary cloud adorned the sky that day and despite the fact that I knew there are days where clouds are beyond visibility, I find the irony far too funny to keep to myself. I wonder what God is trying to tell me in these blank skies. There are a few clouds today (slightly sad and lonely looking), but for several days after moving back and through a trip up to Michigan, clouds stayed pretty much absent from the large sky mocking my desire for any kind of stability.

I still plan on taking pictures of clouds, if of course, they ever decide to grace the sky with their presence.

Summer weather has come quite suddenly and unexpectedly (I am never quite prepared for the change of seasons) with all its claustrophobic stickiness. Sometimes I feel like I'm swimming in heated honey and being smothered by a very large pillow all at the same time. My black air-conditionless car and defunct power windows add significantly to my appreciation of the elements.

I wish I could express my growing dismay at the speed of this past year without merely continually stating that it has flown by (looking back at least.) Repeatedly marveling like the cliche broken record at its senseless speed. I am in awe of the way time passes.

The Plunderers Mission Statement

We scour the hard worn floors of our thoughts searching

For a scrap, a coherent piece, of sheer luminosity.

What we find instead are pieces of lint and bugs scuttling past,

Shuffling into tiny dark crevices then blinking out,

Mothballs and cobwebs collect innocently within,

And a hint (a delusional whiff?) of lavender and oil.

So, in summers we, donning scuba gear and rubber gloves,

Will collect fading sheets of paper from old vacant houses,

Our feet carefully pushing aside rusty nails, broken glass,

And moldy bits of apples, chips and un-drunk whiskey.

We will search for hours to find some indicative item,

An old love letter, perhaps, or a page of dated newspaper.

After, we will pull our findings around us,

Pick through crumpled words with unknown meanings

And pin sentences from other's lives onto our doors.

Finding this repetitious lack in ourselves, we will

Painstakingly plunder stranger's souls.

Distractions

We play at the edge of disaster,

holding hop scotch chalk and pebbles lightly in hand.

We stare up and the clouds dusty

with unused lightning and waiting water,

but then forget for hours at a time

our looming tragedy, sticky and dense.

Instead we mock and mimic,

laughing with credulous mirth in skips and stumbles,

engrossed in scratchy lines

and the exact precision of throwing rocks.

Sometimes...

At times I can make myself believe that I am waiting

instead of merely dreaming into the ebony emptiness.

I hold my breath, fingers entwined, circulation spent

And stare at the page, the door, the blaring screen.

We humans are in such a muck. There is too much to know and far too little time to care for every detail pertaining to continuing existence, let alone for ever political theory or philosophy of living. We are constantly harassed by leases and mail, insurance, loans, yards, friends, jobs and money, not to mention hygiene, dirty dishes and toothbrushes.

It is a grand notion to think that we might be able to rely on others for some things, let them sort through political candidates, the complexity of taxes or even the foods we should be eating for our health. Yet, through bitter experience we must either become consigned and lazy or cynical and frantic, or some strange mingling.

Unfortunately, for me, I can think of very few, if any, real suggestions for this state of being other than to merely stagger on, thinking though what I can and plunging gruelingly through the rest, but what kind of advice is that really?

J.R. in church today spoke of contentedness, looking always upwards, our malcontent only remedied through the cross, also, I assume, through the realization of our own limitations, humanity and incessant falleness and fallibility.

Thinking through this I become mystified as I so often do when trying to figure out how to balance grace and peace with duty. How can we possibly know peace as we unflinchingly gape towards our own weakness, and yet this seems to be the deliberate dance that God demands. We can not do it, but we must try and pray that God will take pity on our feeble efforts, thankfully, I realize, he already has.

Sometimes this seems reasonable, to know we must do, yet to know it is done. It seems reasonable on lazy Sundays staring blankly at the sun blanched sky, when we are briefly allowed to forget that we live among other humans that cross our paths for longer than a greeting wave, that our lives are governed by rules we are not even always aware exist, or that when we strive at something it can all be turned around to become a scoffed at nothingness. However, on such remembrances I am jolted. It seems all that we can do is to shrug, tense and muddle onwards, yet it appears as though we must placidly, happily, contentedly fight and remain ever aware that the fight has been won (and such remembrances are a feat among themselves.)

God grant us grace in this utter chaos.

There is a bit of mystery that shrouds everything we touch, mystery in socks and waffle house signs. There are many reasons to feel this; the awareness that so much of our ordinary day is surrounded in other's random decisions, the thought that we ourselves could merely be the product of a right thought at a right time. It is either the mystery of randomness or a deeper mystery, the mystery of providence. Either way we are befuddled in ideas too big for our bodies, encircled by paradoxes and illogical conclusions that are the most logical conclusion we can make, tainted by the supernatural in every seemingly slight event and entity.

Honestly

I have no strength for anger.

I sit placidly idling time

curious for the way people stand,

tense, feet set wide, arms barring

chests that swell in defiance.

Sneaking around the stalwart figures

I glance rigid backs, curved necks

arching up, bulging calves and bony elbows,

but then a certain weakness underlies

the left shoulder, a snag here,

a bit crooked and bending down.

Smoothing my rumpled pride I lean

against the palm of my hand,

blood rushing into my thumb's knuckle

and trace the downward dash with my eyes

and (sadly) smile.

confusion

"It is thus writ in heaven that any critic who has not given up will remain to some degree confused." -Wayne C. Booth

This pretty much sums up my thoughts, not just on criticism, but on life in general. There are so many avenues we could explore, but can only haltingly explain, especially when we try to take into account the full entirety of what we know or could know (not even to mention what we can't know.) If our words and thoughts do not become muddled it so often seems that it is because we have oversimplified and abandoned many legitimate ways of looking at something.

Of course I do feel a deep kinship with France (a novelist) as Booth explains Paul West to view him (though I have read nothing of either France or West.) France is explained as a man who has "nothing coherent to say," or someone who tries "to reconcile high intellectual ambitions with an impossibly cluttered mind." So it is possible that my mind is more cluttered than most. I can be a pack rat. Though, to be fair to myself, probably most of us can feel this way, at least occasionally. There is so many thoughts to sort through of so many people on so many issues that even people with well organized minds will have to check all kinds of drawers and folders to collect the necessary knowledge.

Layers of color hold me,

the lustrous combinations,

flecks of light violet and yellow

or dark white and teal blotches,

shadows stretching lanky grey people

upon the speckled asphalt.

Birthday ramblings

There is a nostalgia for something we have never known

in the way the world warms slowly.

In the brightly lit luminance of spring,

we imagine sea side shacks

where we lived in our imagined past,

plaster peeling off its deranged interiors,

our feet buried and scratched in sand.

Maybe it is longing pushing at our delirious emotions?

A childhood reality restored, a place we can appreciate

the simple aesthetics of being,

where a years passing is a glorious event,

where longing is littered with chocolate and festivities

and simple skylines absorb our astonished eyes for hours.

Whatever it is,

That epic pull bringing speckled imprints

on my calloused hands - is welcome,

the long shadows tilting towards me,

the small green sprouts reaching above the frosted dirt

for a taste of momentary air.

I am so tired of dignity. Why do we so desperately scramble for this tediously convoluted idea of molding ourselves to other's expectations, even people we care nothing for? Not that dignity is all bad, or bad at all, only it can become such a subjective arbiter of well being that is also so very universally held. Maybe dignity is the wrong word even, but I am going to stick with that word and choose to believe that it can be understood for the concept I have in my head.

I say this probably because I feel rather nostalgic for childhood. It was much easier to become excited about events and things, unfettered as children are by the "uncoolness" factor of such excitement. I miss climbing the dirt mounds of our developing, but not yet developed, neighborhood, unconcerned with my undignified dusty dirt stains. I used to revel in wearing certain things, shockingly bummish as many of those things were, comfortable in my hand-me-down stretch pants and baggy t-shirts. Now I wear muted colors, not exactly fashionable still, but not unfashionable anyways. I succumb to expectations on a regular basis where just a few years (or so) ago I would not even realize the expectations. I miss the ignorance of childhood in many ways and the freedom that that ignorance held. Or if nothing else, I miss the kinds of expectations of childhood, expectations to play and to be rather undignified.

Life

Life irrepressible gathers to meet us

Arms spread, weeping words,

And we sit, weary eyed and disconcerted,

Staring stupidly at the strange vision.

Head bent listening to the chatter

of an accumulation of sounds:

the indecipherable murmur of a million voices,

the shuffle of two million feet,

clicks, slurs, falsetto laughs

blurring into a mechanical whole,

people pressing towards intricate images

sated by white wine and their own sophistical savvy.

Eyes drawn fervently round,

land locked in the sea of faces

you lapse into thought, unfettered by time

in the glorious anonymity of the crowd.

White washed walls linger in your brain

beige blemishes obscuring the calm clean,

and a hesitant memory; street corners

heavy with nostalgia, rain stained, quiet.

You are obese with longing,

gorged on the hallucination of contentment.

You walk past darkened alleys

swept into a persistent dream,

the bauble that is the white moon blurred

by the streaked film of clouds,

vacant hooked doorways looming,

the hint of unknowable secrets

collecting at your elbows,

and then a wine glass shatters

and you return to muted reality, disappointed.

Good ol' G.K.

Here is a fairly lengthy quote from The Everlasting Man from the chapter on man and mythologies that I must share.

"Now the first fact is that the most simple people have the most subtle ideas. Everybody ought to know that, for everybody has been a child. Ignorant as a child is, he knows more than he can say and feels not only atmospheres but fine shades. And in this matter there are several fine shades. Nobody understands it who has not had what can only be called the ache of the artist to find some sense and some story in the beautiful things he sees; his hunger for secrets and his anger at any tower or tree escaping with its tale untold. He feels that nothing is perfect unless it is personal. Without that the blind unconscious beauty of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue. One need only be a very minor poet to have wrestled with the tower or the tree until it spoke like a titan or a dryad . . . Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there; something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; the imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up."

I love you Chesterton.

Recognition

Footsteps formed holed gaps

in the soggy winter umbrage

as we haltingly walked.

Words were a mocking mimic

of the beautiful bedlam that surrounded us.

Our irresolute steps,

the glorious thrill of approaching spring

was upon my astonished eyes

making me almost forget

the asymmetrical act of human

emotions that twisted in the air

the unknowable determinate

of each ambiguous circumstance.

I remembered July

many years past

walking in the sunlight's baked grass

oblivious to the blister burns

being tattooed on my forehead

like an oil anointment.

I am always astounded when people ask what the point of art is. Astounded and understanding. I struggle daily with this question. Why art?

As someone who desires to live creatively, I wonder. Even though I hesitate to call myself an artist, that is what I want to be and I do think that desire is a large part of what makes us who we are. It is also what I spend most of my time doing. (I am using the terms artist and art loosely - music, writing, visual etc...) I wonder why this desire is embedded in me, drags me from one medium to another and sometimes makes me want to pull out my hair in frustration when I go through a patch of creative dryness. I do also think that my own fear of proclaiming myself an artist is this lack of understanding in what that might even mean and why that would even be important. My insecurities are palpable and yet I am passionate in defending the arts even when the activity is shrouded in mystery and reasons that seem far from concrete. I mean, doctors save lives, farmers grow food, merchants sell things, or save the world from chaos, accountants do things with math which is above reproach, scientists discover things and so on and so forth. All seem touchable, understandable. And in a sense this is all art of a kind. I certainly fear at times that artists are just the lazy bums of the world who want to sit around reiterating the beautiful things that other people are doing.

And yet.

All these things can be seen as meaningless as well. These are all survival, and I'm not knocking survival, but we all die sooner or later. Many of these things push past survival to the realm of living more abundantly. And there you find art.

Not that art is above and beyond anything else. But art helps us to live, just as doctors and farmers, lawyers and police officers do. Maybe the reason we are so quick to judge art is that many of these things also have beauty, have art. Science and farming, I know, are often used as inspirations for poems and pictures. But art helps us to step back from the day to day survival that we become so entranced with. More importantly art points us to the mysteries of existence, questions our securities.

When I start to doubt the legitimacy of art I also must remember that God created and I am certainly thankful that he did. (of course he also healed, provided food, judges, counts...)

Really, I just need to read Walking On Water again by Madeline L'Engle, or so many other books that have already explained much more eloquently than I just how needed, how useful art is.

I feel a little better now, though. A little more secure in what I feel drawn to do and be.

Epic

Maybe it is too much LOST, too many stories swirling through my head, currently the million squawking birds outside my door making it sound like Hichcock's "The Birds" isn't helping, but I want an adventure so ridiculously bad. I am aware that most people going through epic like events in real life do not necessarily feel thrilled with their lot. And I am aware that, most likely, I too would want normalcy to descend if I was swept away into an adventure, but that does not stop me from feeling horribly restless and discontented with my comfort no matter how hard I try to rationalize or guilt away this wanderlust.

I blame the winter on most days. I blame my own lack of initiative on other days. Maybe if I just moved about some more, but where? And to what purpose? I also blame my impatience. I am going to Belgium in about a half a year.

I feel as though I should not complain, should not express this desire. I can hear so many rebuttals in my brain, some legitimate, some merely condescending. However, I do not think that this desire is such a bad thing. Not really. Just bothersome and grating in its unfocused form.

Walking

Warmth is good.

I was actually capable of pulling my winter-worn self out of the door today for a walk. I should not be so horribly wimpy about the cold, howsomever I am. Today, though, was gloriously temperate.

It is good to walk, to move, to clear the flow of my mind that quickly stagnates when my body is too sedentary. I have done little of late that requires much movement. I sit and work on writing, on music, on support raising and read and watch Lost (which I have become far too addicted to of late) and forget that I have more than fingers and a brain, but a whole body.

I am looking forward to spring, more than I can even communicate. It is starting to feel like spring. I am even reminded that I have neighbors. People seem to have been carefully unbolting their doors, peering out from the chained crack and tasting the air. Then, one by one we are each cautiously ending our hibernation, or at least our quarantine, cautiously at first as if we are flexing our thawing muscles, but even in the course of a couple warmer days people start to become more reckless and kids are sent out to spin cartwheels on the lawn.

Yet it is only the end of January. We are getting there, but I realize the warmth is really only, at best, a short break from the cold and at worst a cruel joke. I've decided to accept it as a reprieve and merely linger as long as possible in the warming air.

Problems with Neon

Thoughts coil and weave around my backwards sight

as the muddled moon grows dim with freckled clouds

questioning the purpose of my intent gatherings

in the cratered crevices of its frowning face.

I rely too heavily on the balanced bones of my neck

to lift my thoughts from the static ruminations of grief,

those misplaced sorrows, those awkward fears,

to the way the night fades and chills to frosted morning muses,

Or to Pierre, the cat's, strange twitching pleasure in crunching

the flakes of dead dry leaves.

For life is unkind to hurried joy in flamboyant neon lights

and I must accept the pleasures of quiet routine glory.

Noted.

I'm awkward - and the word awkward is awkward to type - imagine that.

....

And sometimes a bit self-deprecating.

...

That is all.

There is a longing, tilting, sideways

glance that cannot be denied.

No words can suppress or expose.

It is an internal gut clenching nausea

for a cast of light caught perfectly put

to glint down on this mundane reality.

I find glimpses of beauty merely make it fester.

Bare beauty unattainable shattering

each hopeful preconception.

And I would like to pen this posture,

this grasping, awkward pose

each is forced to precariously balance,

this one leg gravity shaking stance.

But I cannot give credit to the odious

inelegance we each must endure.

Morning Rites

How I know I am awake.

1) Eyes must remain open for more than 5 minutes -

More than a trip to the bathroom.

2)Then the coffee grinder's harsh jolt

That crunching, gravely noise

And hot sauna steam.

I may then be able to muddle though the day -

tilting slowly - acting out motions long ago

tucked into my being.

I weave my hands around many things

in the drunken hours of morning

as if putting incantations on them

(the stove, the kitchen chairs, the fridge)

mumbling diligently to myself

to coax my mind from slumber,

to convince myself that this day

is worth being awake.