2.sep.08

This just seems like such a pleasing metaphor to me right now. It is positive, even though all information in the image itself seems to warrant fear, or at least anxiety. Why do I keep finding black widow egg sacs? It seems safer to put them in a jar than let them hatch in my garden. Yet so many people's reactions are near hysterics when they see it. Maybe that's what draws me to the image - the contradiction between the anxiety others feel and beauty I see in it. Bottled fears, bottled potential. Controlled poison. It tells me things I already know about myself, and inspires who I want to be.

 

22.jan.08

Ray -

There are things I know and there are things I don't know. Bear with me, I'm still trying to round out my edges; and still there are times I'm trying to be patient enough to wait until you catch up. Let's just love each other regardless.

- Tasha

- Hand-written note on the front page of "The Missing Piece Meets the Big O" by Shel Silverstein

 

25.nov.07

Today I went to church.

I haven't said those words in many years. I've been in a church, in the building, for weddings, for example. But to go to church, for the event... no.

I can say it today though.

I don't remember whether I took the feeling for granted as a child, or in childhood there were more of these spaces in life, but to occupy a space in which your reason for standing there is to be good to one another was, I discovered, a lost concept.

There are so many reasons to get annoyed with people around you, people you know or don't know, people in your proximity... maybe they're driving too slow, or writing out the check at the last minute, or saying rude things in a loud voice.

But here was a space where, at last, you have no excuse to succumb to the annoyances. You are in a small church of liberal, like-minded people; if you can't take everything in stride here, where else is there better to do so?

The minister asked how many people found the church during a time of turmoil or change in their lives. I felt like my visit had a giant spotlight placed overhead at that comment. I had to remind myself that, if anyone else in the room knew, they would not hold it against me.

It felt so unlike Mass to be listening, to shout out the hymn you want to sing, to want to take notes, to be thinking rather than repeating motions and words. It wasn't Mass at all. The ritual will always be a familiar comfort, but here was a sense of dialogue.

The last song was called "Make It a Dance": take the bad with the good. I repeat that sentiment to myself on most days, and have unfortunately built up habits that often tarnish the impact. But this song was well-written, and a good refresher of a message. The line that carried me through the day:

If there's nothing wrong, then nothing's right.

Maybe I'm not doing so bad.

 

1.oct.07

GRACE TO BE SAID AT THE SUPERMARKET

That God of ours, the Great Geomerer,
Does something for us here, where He hath put
(if you want to put it that way) things in shape,
Compressing the little lambs in orderly cubes,
Making the roast a decent cylinder,
Fairing the tin ellipsoid of a ham,
Getting the luncheon meat anonymous
In squares and oblongs with the edges bevelled
Or rounded (streamlined, maybe, for greater speed).

Praise Him, He hath conferred aesthetic distance
Upon our appetites, and on the bloody
Mess of our birthright, our unseemly need,
Imposed significant form. Through Him the brutes
Enter the pure Euclidean kingdom of number,
Free of their bulging and blood-swollen lives
They come to us holy, in cellophane
Transparencies, in the mystical body,
That we may look unflinchingly on death
As the greatest good, like a philosopher should.

-Howard Nemerov

 

21.jun.07

Perhaps there are things that have been unsaid.

I recall seeing fireflies in Ohio at the age of 21, discovering what the children around me knew their whole lives, and the feeling of warmth and calm that ensued.

I recall October 15, 1994, the first cool day of the season to grace Orlando, my long hair, a day truly in the moment, on the precipice of responsibility and "the future".

I recall seeing a professor from my undergrad studies in the same show as me, in Watkinsville in 2002, and the sudden simultaneous pride and fear that the lines are now truly imaginary.

I recall a perfect meal in an apartment in Brooklyn at 26, a long dinner table, music in a small room, a perfect amount of vodka, and the suspicion of possibly being content in that nook forever.

I recall raised drinks in the air of a restaurant in south Georgia in the fall of 2005, sunburned faces, a day in which years of potential was finally realized.

I recall standing in a field in the north of Ghana at 23, staring into the sunset, touching the dirt at my feet wth my hands, and realizing, "I could do this."

I recall walking through O'Hare in 2003, a ticket in my hand, the music in my headphones slowing the crowds to a crawl as the television screens repeatedly crooned to me: Sydney B2.

I recall at 19 walking up to the Pacific Ocean, after four straight nights of sleeping upright in a bus seat, with nothing but a backpack to claim me.

I recall so many small moments of beauty in so many nameless days.

Perhaps there are things that have been unsaid.

 

22.may.07

"Now we are no longer primitive. Now the whole world seems not holy... We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism... It is difficult to undo our own damage and recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave. It is hard to desecrate a grove and change your mind. We doused the burning bush and cannot rekindle it. We are lighting matches in vain under every green tree... What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello?"

-Annie Dillard, from "Teaching a Stone to Talk"

 

2.may.07

In Cuba, less than 1% of homes have internet access. It is a threat.

This is an anonymous Cuban blogger whose first entry I read paralleled some thoughts I have been batting around lately about the concept of truth, and how relative it is.

Behind our economic systems, language barriers, geography, we're all the same people.

http://isla12pm.blogspot.com/

 

25.apr.07

Circa 1986.

Please, Campbell's, don't sue me.

What a find. Thanks, mom. And such a comfort to hear a good friend say, "Bridget! You've always been who you are!"

 

19.apr.07

I don't know what it says
about my society
when I fear
violent backlash
from strangers
for simply stating:
"I pity the gunman
as much as the victims."

I sometimes wonder if Jesus' actions would be too shocking for contemporary times.

 

15.apr.07

Tan tontos miedos.

 

25.feb.07

Collaboration with Emy Mixon... if she ever finds out.

 

10.feb.07

I found this photo many months ago on the BBC. The article was about how Pakistan had just trained its first group of female fighter pilots in its military. It makes me think of the small victories so many people are reaching in every day, even though this is no small one for Pakistani women. She looks pretty tough. I admire her. I think of how many times I have made that face, and how I don't feel I should make it anymore. Or rather, that I should earn it - I know I don't have what she has behind her eyes. Maybe not yet.

 

07.jan.07

Churches, bars, graffitti, and other sundries.
I learned that Jairus is a biblical name. Budweiser is Budvar. And rockabilly exists in Budapest?

 

01.jan.07

Happy New Year from Budapest.

Fog and rain and cold. Lots of mayonnaise. Good coffee. Americans as usual. Cheap beer.

I am torn between making art and seeing the city. Every time I do one, I feel guilty about not doing the other. So far I'm painting tiny silver birds over and over. Don't know what it is going to become, but it is soothing to do.

Tomorrow I will give my presentation, and go to a church that contains its patron saint's right hand. Awesome.

 

11.dec.06

A few years ago, I wrote about nearly throwing away the most important photograph of my life. This is it.

When I was 16, I found this photo in my English textbook. At the end of the year, I cut it out of the book - a significant act of vandalism for my quiet self.

It struck me with a power that has only grown over the years. At the time, something unnamed resonated in me when I saw it. Now, I could write volumes about it.

I've put this photograph on the walls of every dormitory, apartment, and house I have lived in. I have traveled with it.

I remember that it came from a story in the textbook surrounding Jews and World War II. It was made by N.R. Farbman, who I only later found minimal information on as a short-lived photographer for Life Magazine. What caught my attention was the byline in the text - Refugees photographed by N.R. Farbman.

I remember even at the time it having an impact on me that these were refugees. They were young. They were well-dressed. And they were smiling. They had heavy bags slung on their backs, and looked like this was their last glance back before they marched off. And I thought they were marching off to adventure - look at the glow in her eyes! Yet - hearing refugee, and knowing every dismal circumstance that must have surrounded this young couple in light of history, how could they possibly have this attitude? How could they have fooled me into thinking that everything was okay, even exhilarating?

This photograph has served as a reminder, a warning, an inspiration, a motivation for many many years now. I come back to it over and over. I have shown it on the first day in every Photo I class I have taught. This is ironic, because the message of the photo has always been get out there and see the world NOW, which has always been the circumstance pitted against my love of Art and teaching. Look at the striking large circle of her watch. Time is ticking. You need to get out there. Carry that large burden on your back with grace. Keep that charged look in your eyes, which betrays your spirit. No matter the circumstance, take every journey with this spirit of adventure. And let this attitude filter down into your everyday life.

It has been a lot to live up to. I am still trying. I will continue to try.

I want to look back on this photograph many decades from now to see a self-portrait.

 

25.nov.06
In PInellas County, Florida, where I partly grew up, there is a walking trail that extends some 30 miles around the county. In the late nineties, someone had a heart attack on a section of the trail near my parents' house, and the paramedics had a difficult time reaching this person because the foliage was so dense. After the incident, the county decided to cut back the trees in this area of the trail as a result of the incident. When they did so, what was revealed was a path of bricks once known as County Road 37. This road extended from Dunedin to the fishing village of Ozona in the late 1800s.

In a portion of America that emphasizes what is new, what is so clean that it is sterile, I walked this historical path that runs alongside cyclists and rollerblading women pushing big-wheel strollers. Tree stumps litter this ghosted "trailside oasis". The bricks break free of the paled cement that tried to erase it. How does one lose a road? I had a student who marveled over how forty paintings could go missing in an article she read about a UK museum, and I understood the inner workings (or confusion, rather) of cataloguing, of management mishap, and even corruption to comprehend this loss. I suppose someone else out there understands the simple explanation of a missing road. It's not something that happens overnight, I think, although that would have to be true of today, as the pace is too frantic to watch a major connector slowly die.. No records? No personal accounts? Why wasn't anyone looking for it? It's one of the few highlights of sincerity in this part of the state.

 

23.nov.06
Exploration of Two Emotions

I recognize the need and action in myself, the necessity to have a role in everything that goes on around me. I never thought of it as a power trip, though it may appear outwardly so, it may also appear as criticism though I never inwardly thought I was being critical before. I was participating. Even now as I observe it I don't think it stems from insecurity, still. But I still can't put a finger on what the motivation is. In this environment, it becomes a lashing at how I incorrectly used the ice machine. I look back to all the times I thought I was sharing with someone the best way to accomplish something. Was I making them feel this scrutinzed and wrong? Where is the line between help and incapacitation?

I feel the collective warmth of my friends, and know that I have something special. And yet, I recognize that while this remains, I lack a steady sense of what one might take for granted as a necessary component of this, something I once had: companionship. I know I have it from time to time with various people when most necessary, and for this I am thankful. But I am thinking of the companionship where two people weave their lives together like pieces of fabric. Every event is nearly not complete until it becomes known to the other - on the level of impassioned letters poured furiously onto notebook paper for validation. It is done without fear of expectations, labeling, responsibility, or the future. It is done without fear at all, done because it simply feels natural, and there is no second-guessing intentions. It is not engagement, marriage, or children. It is simply the family that only twosomeness can provide, a self-assured weave into your arms. This I miss.

 

22.nov.06
I have seen this bumpersticker before - Join the Military, Travel to Exotic Places, Meet Interesting People - Kill Them - but today I saw it on a car whose windows and bumper were filled with other stickers praising the US Marines. You see, I always thought that was a bumpersticker which criticized the military. But in this case, I think the young man was displaying it in a proud manner. I was fascinated. I sincerely wanted to ask him, but he was a full car-length ahead of me, and we never stopped together again. People are so angry here, angry and don't even know it, they think the emotion is called something else, if they even detect it at all. They all compete to fly past me into the intersection as the light turns green, with no particular reward in mind. In the middle of these large roads, various scraps of metal and glass are piled high into the centers, out of the paths of the steady streams of cars, the residue of accidents that never gets touched, either out of ability or choice.

 

20.nov.06
"The men like to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I am one of the best painters."
-Georgia O'Keeffe

 

10.mar.06
I never knew I believed in god until you told me that you didn't

 

22.feb.06
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us."
-Nelson Mandela

 

28.jan.06
Twenty years ago today, I stood in uniform jumper and kneesocks, face pressed to the classroom window, staring into the sky, and watched the Challenger break into two plumes of smoke. I knew it wasn't supposed to look like that. We all murmured the questions of seven year-old minds, sat down, and waited for the announcement over the school intercom.

The space shuttles of my youth are gone. Columbia never made it home in 2003. Families stood near the runway awaiting a massive machine and nothing ever came. Staring, wondering how something so enormous could yield nothing, could be reduced to dust, with parents, spouses, children inside. I fell to my knees when I read the headline. I did not cry for Challenger, but watched solemnly as the video looped over and over for hours on the television, burning into my memory. Over twenty years, my awareness of the suffering of strangers developed, as did a connection to losses of humankind as a whole. The tears of maturity are composed of a different salt than those of childhood.

Mine may be few and far between, but they are potent; they are sea salt.

I cry for that which I am embarassed to have believed in so deeply, that which sounded good in poetry, but put into practice got me silence and sensitivity. I am sorry for my absurdity.

I cry for the medicines I now know control me. I am patience in a bottle.

I cry for the portion of myself lost to the floodwaters, which no one, however close to me from here on out, will ever know. Smothered under toxic mud, washed out to the Mississippi, a loss as startling as a city being crossed off a map.

I cry for both the familiarity and loss I feel when I chop vegetables, when I make dough.

For my voice, so flawed.

 

17.jan.06
"Self preservation is a full-time occupation."
-Ani DiFranco

Smell, amongst the five senses, is the strongest generator of memory. My earliest smell-memory is clove. It takes me back to a time before speech. It makes me want to cry. Cry for what, I don't know... maybe a yearning for simplicity. It brings me to an event, one that I thought was a dream, but maybe it really did happen.

 

12.jan.06
"If dreams were thunder and lightning was desire
This old house would have burned down a long time ago."
-John Prine

Is there something to be said for youth manifesting in choices, for maturity manifesting in decisiveness?

 

10.jan.06
And i knew it fourteen years ago:

"Threads worms on a string
Keeps spiders in her pocket
Collects fly wings in a jar
Scrubs horseflies and pinches them in a line..."
-Sugarcubes

 

31.dec.05
Dare to be more than your gender.

 

25.dec.05
My patriotism is rooted in geography.

"O beautiful for spacious skies
For amber waves of grain
For purple mountains majesties
Across the fruited plain..."

I found lesser known verses. Namely:

"O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!"

The feet of those seeking their own path carved out those that became my interstates. I defend interstates, as a I spend hours pouring over them in maps. As a friend once pointed out, the deer paths became hunting trails which became trade routes which became paved roads. Yesterday's worn dirt became today's arteries of the country. Americans are blessed with the distance and financial ability to experience speed in a vehicle, an experience few other countries receive so casually.

"America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness
And every gain divine!"

My perception of party lines blurs when I realize a conservative and I can both see comfort in these words, and be thinking of two different concepts. Our gold needs redefinition. Divinity needs renaming, reassignment to resurrect its place in society.

A lost painting of mine, seven years old, brought me here. From sea to sea to sea.

 

25.dec.05
A whole year has passed. I didn't leave the country.

I divide time into months and years, into segments which are man-made, and maybe this is the wrong way to go about it all. All wrong, all wrong. My lists and obsessing over striking through the text. My journey toward an absolute which leaves me unable to side with anything at all. Even truths aside, my fumbled dances with sincerity. All wrong, all wrong. Is this the time in life when we reevaluate our whole operating system? Bite our tongues for twenty some-odd years of false wisdom, for arrogance we didn't even know we were functioning upon, and start anew? Or do we swallow it up for fear of looking wrong, squeeze shut the eyes, plug the ears, and march defiantly to the tune of our own comfort? Maybe that's the biggest problem of all. As soon as we discovered that others would believe our flawed summaries of life and how to live it, we comfortably settled into them, rather than adamantly continued to seek sincerity.

I lost South America to half a breath of hesitancy. Is any cause ever so worthy to jump upon it without resort to logic? Or is it an entrapment of personality, of habit that keeps all causes out of reach?

 

05.dec.04
"I wish I had more to tell of my grandmothers. It is terrible how much has been forgotten, which is why, I suppose, remembering seems a holy thing."
-The Red Tent, Anita Diamant

And here I am again.

All pressure comes from the saying "life is short". It is a deceptive phrase, a misleading American truth. Australia seemed long living it. Then in America, I blink twice and half that time spent abroad is over and there is little to show for it. But life is not short, it is long, and filled with the opportunity for many careers, many circles of friends, a multitude of realities, and more than an endless, droning stream of money-making and consumption.

What is two years? Taken out a pre-supposed context of what one should be doing with the latter half of their second decade, it hardly seems to be a phase of time that could wreck a life.

Is a career, however noble and fitting, a reason to distract one from interacting with the world?

 

(23.jan.04)
On the street in Melbourne I saw a woman with no teeth and huge spectacles singing for money. A man was playing the hammered dulcimer. The sun blinded me. I saw it through an elderly lady's puff of hair that glowed like a halo as she walked towards me. I think it is the eve of the Chinese New Year. I'm considering going to the Northern Territory. I complain of being travel weary and that's still the best plan I can come up with. Is there a train I can sit on for two and a half weeks? Watch the outback roll like a film on a loop?

Will travel and art wrestle out a kindly compromise with me? Or will they tug and toss me about like a child with divorced parents?

23.may.04
Australia was the place where I was always hungry. Grocery stores were a wonderland to wander through and fantasize about - food out of reach either because of budget, no room in the backpack, or that it needed refrigeration. At the vineyard in South Australia, a brief sedentary interlude, I watched in amazement as the Koreans and Japanese I lived with would cook for hours and hours after having worked the fields since 6am. I barely had the strength to make a grilled cheese sandwich at the end of the day. Their rice was so good as to be eaten plain. Later on the road were days spent battling melting ice in vain attempts to preserve cheese so that one may escape peanut butter for a spell. I wished for something hot. I dreamed of biscuits, one simple clump of bread unseemingly special, but unknown to Australians, Germans, English, Japanese, Irish, or anyone else I described it lovingly to. But my reality was the peanut butter I carried with me for two and a half months. It hitched on my back across the country, in the backpack that dug into my newly-discovered pelvic bones. My hips ached from the weight and my thighs cramped from too many bus rides through the night spent sleeping on my side, legs perpendicular to my torso. Like my journey back to Sydney at the end of it all. Somewhere in the night between Narrandera and Canberra I opened my eyes to the perfect view of the sky out the window in which the Southern Cross lay huge and low right across the horizon. I knew it would be the last time I would see it. I traded it for the Big Dipper, sprouting up into a cold winter sky out the window of a plane heading south from Chicago, as foreign as Greek, as foreign as the rest of America appeared, with its strange-looking money of one color and size.

America is the place where I am constantly eating. Not just heating up but cooking in a kitchen, making any meal I can think of, being in possession of a refrigerator full of food that will keep for weeks or even longer. I pay more for brown eggs here, as Americans aren't widely taught that they are naturally brown. Or that they don't need refrigeration. The rest of the world knows this. I always maintain a constant level of 'full' here: when the slightest hint of hunger surfaces, I vanquish it with any myriad of snacks at my disposal. Pants that fit loosely in Tasmanian mountain climbs now encase tightly the thighs that have made a rebound as a result of the luxury of the automobile. My first week back in the States I walked stretches of roads that Floridians only traverse by car. Pedestrian crosswalks are a parade of the poor and unfortunate, and the signals never change from 'don't walk'. In Sydney I traveled on foot many kilometers from Paddington to Newtown once because I just didn't feel like waiting for a bus, because I wanted to exist in the environment and not in the filmstrip out the window. But half a mile on foot through suburban America must indicate something has gone wrong, unless you have a dog or are wearing jogging shoes. Jogging was invented for all the food we didn't need to take in - the heated leftovers we threw half of away anyway, the excess of bleached rice, the chocolate chip cookies whose dough was pre-cut into perfect identical disks because having a tube of pre-made cookie dough wasn't convenient enough. I argued with my mom who threw the over-baked apple crisp down the garbage disposal. The issue isn't that you can get two more packages of it at Wal-Mart for less effort than having to tolerate too-crunchy streussel. The issue is that I've carried it all on my back. I know its weight and I know its worth.

 

8.oct.03
so i'm running for this door so furiously. run run run for so long. so hard that i trip on my way out as the door shuts behind me. and i realize that it's my keys to the door that i tripped over. and i'm locked out now. i deserve a good smack. i hope at least it's nice weather outside.

timing
timing
timing
timing
timing
ha!

you can't tell me it's not all charted out.
it's too hilarious not to be.

i think you might be in love with life when you can manage to laugh at the universe's pranks. specifically those of which you are the victim. when, despite that, the events still make you warm and satisfied like a belly full of oatmeal. when you can see your life filling out chapters of a book and not take it personally. i hope i make a great book. with lots of dog-eared pages.

it only gets better.

----------

three people called me brave in the past two days. i found that funny too. or maybe i shouldn't laugh.

someone asked me why i would choose to put myself in a situation that made me uncomfortable or nervous. it never occurred to me that i shouldn't make myself do it. is it a luxury i can afford due to a charmed life? is it a nagging imp in the chest that will never rest being stationary? it's probably a little bit environment and a little innate both, like most everything.

so off
i
go...
promise to write
promise

 

10.aug.03
Yesterday I finally saw the Cedar Waxwing. In an aviary, not outdoors though, I still think that will be just as notable of an event. They were smaller than I imagined. But their behavior, I was pleased to see, so docile. In a display of birds of the northeast United States, they were the only ones I saw as a pair. They perched up high, not moving in the ten minutes I stood studying them, close to each other, quietly observing the other species fluttering around them. Softer than sleek. I beamed in pride reserved for family. The meeting affirmed my instant affinity towards them. And satisfied small droplets of romantisism within me that won't dry up. Birds in pairs. Lovebirds.

I keep waiting to panic but I don't. I wait to start hopelessly pining for Athens, for my life that I left, and upon realizing that it doesn't exist anymore, that a stranger lives in my house, that I am no longer a student as I have been for the past twenty years of my life, land in panic, but I don't. I miss Athens, but life temporarily in Ohio seems like life. And the temporary life again in Athens will hopefully seem like life, and Australia, and whatever comes after, will hopefully also just be life, and the panic won't come.

I'm considering taking a boat to Australia. Do albatross still exist?

 

18.jul.03

Australia has a pink robin! Could it really exist? It seems mythical.

 

15.jul.03
Today I nearly threw away the most meaningful photograph in my life. It would have been a careless mistake, I was throwing out heaps of papers. It fell out of the pile and I gasped. Then I cried for a minute out of shock at what I could have done. I cut the photo out of a textbook when I was 15 and have never seen it reproduced anywhere since. Its meaning is very important to what I am doing right now, and I am a laid-back enough person to now, after the jolt, laugh at how ironic it would have been that ten years later, I throw it out when I am finally attempting to accomplish doing what the photo has represented to me.

At the same time, as I was taking my stereo unit apart yesterday, I found a book propping up the back of the unit that, obviously, I have not seen in two years since I set the thing up. It really didn't seem like two years. It was a book of modern russian architecture, written in Russian, that I bought in Russia. My first thought was to put it in my pile of books to be saved, but I reconsidered: if I have lived without it for two years, do I really need to keep it?

The past few days I've been exploring more ideas of having possessions... as I clean out my house in which just I alone have lived, how much garbage have I generated. I don't think of myself as someone who has a ton of useless things, I know there are people out there who have a lot more than me. Yet the time and weight and effort is enormous. I feel an onus lifted (does everyone feel the problem with that? or do they just ignore the burden their possessions create?) but also I think about the relationship between memory and object. When I throw away that one token that reminds me of that one event, what happens to the memory? Is it homeless without physical form? Does it have less validity, do I need to reincarnate it into some other physical form? As an artist who makes collections of things, this experience of shedding belongings has been curious. Must get rid of so many things of youth... yet the collection of used teabags must stay.

"Let's go down to the East River
and throw something in
something we can't live without, and then
let's start again"
-Ani DiFranco

On Friday, a friend gave me a gift that reminded me of who I am. Thank you.

 

7.jul.03
I'm always amazed at how easy it is to forget seasons. Half of my life is spent in autumn and winter. But in the middle of July it is such a difficult thing to recall - the weightlessness, the energy in the air. The anticipation of autumn is not the same emotion as it is in spring. Autumn has always been so many beginnings and endings at the same time. It has always been a charge. How much of that fabulous cool atmosphere have I breathed over how many years and how can I still manage to forget it for half my life? It really is amazing how adaptable people are if they give themselves the opportunity. What if I had a year of summer? Would I even miss the cold? Would my body go on adapting, or would it feel a loss? I will find that out.

If there's one thing I have faith in, it's seasons. That everything will circle and return. However if one grows up on just one side of the globe, one attaches seasons to times of the year. December is equated with winter. As much as I'd like to go on believing that that is universal, for comfort and stability, it is not true. How much do I think of as 'human' experience, things I don't realize are just regional? Like thinking the ground is solid, and then in May, an earthquake. An earthquake in Georgia! What kind of omen is this? My entire house shakes from side to side, and faith in the one thing I have stood on my whole life is lost. All day long, I stare at everything outside and think of it shifting in space. But relative to nothing, what is space? After that experience, everything is relative. Anything is possible.

Third gift: another moth.

 

27.jun.03
Heat upon heat upon heat. Laying like dust all over everything. But dust would be more refreshing. Easier to breathe.

I don't go out without seeing people I know nowadays. Or people I am supposed to meet, it seems. Timing is heightened. Or at least my awareness of it. Every event fits into the web, as I always knew it did... I just see how clearer lately.

Another gift - simply left for me in the backseat of my car, unscathed: a beautiful brown and orange moth. Huge. Stopped me in my tracks. I think it might be a reminder to keep up with my new work, even though a million other things are occupying my time. These things happen in threes, you know. Whatever could be next!

 

23.jun.03
Two hours ago, was exhausted. Now, still sleepless.

"Put me in your calendar, give me a number
Magnify me, let me have one day of your week
Don't tie me to the time that I couldn't love you,
As time came like water and swallowed me whole
Time came like water and swallowed me whole"
-Bitch and Animal

I've stopped keeping track of how many weeks it's been since you left.

Momentum has been down a little lately. The days are filled with plenty of activity and plans and positive thought, but travel momentum is low. The urge to go. I'm not worried, it's just temporarily dormant. Meditating on the amount of possessions you have, calculating plans on how to rid yourself of them, lists of what stays, what goes, what sells, what is lent... it's consuming to a mind. But I think that is where most people get tripped up and don't recover. A decision made in a spell of emotion and clarity and beauty would like to be carried out on a whim, quickly while hot, running in bare feet... but in maturity, takes patience to enflesh. I'm going to stick to my story and see what plays out. Confidence in cycles. Faith in intuition.

"The goal, she said, is keep your head, and fit your life in the trunk of a yellow cab."
-Brenda Kahn

 

13.jun.03
Today I modeled for a drawing class for the first time. I enjoyed it. I had flashbacks to Russia. To the journal I kept there, my first journey abroad, over four years ago. I remembered what I wrote on the uncomfortable train, as everyone whined around me... the feeling of being pleased at sweating, at being cramped... the first time seeing that as experience rather than inconvenience.

May 3, 1999
...so after dinner we went to the train station and here I am. Everyone is a little whiny - too hot, too smelly, etc., but I think it is great. I want to stand out in the hall and watch everything outside but my feet really hurt after today. I can see a little bit out my window if I lay on my belly. I don't see how anyone can resist looking out the window. It's kinda killing me just being in the car writing this, not out in the hall. Everyone is trying to sleep but me.

I thought of it today as I ached from sitting in one position for twenty minutes. It doesn't seem like much to say it, but I shook and ached and burned over it. And that felt good, in a way I find hard to explain. I hope I can apply that experience to bigger life situations. It's what I'm counting on.

 

12.jun.03
Today I found a dead bird on the sidewalk. Strangely enough, I have seen other dead birds in the same six feet of sidewalk in the past, and always thought about taking them. But every time I go back, they are already gone. Today I decided not to let that opportunity slip by. I swiftly gathered him into a newspaper, and moved along, trying not to miss a beat. I found it curious how paranoid I was over my act, I guess it is a gruesome thing to most people: why would I want a dead bird. How do I explain that I considered it a gift that I have neglected a few times over, a gift that I had to accept now, that I had to incorporate its little body into a piece of artwork to honor it? People who understand why I would see it as such would understand without explanation, and those who don't understand, never would despite hours of persuasion on my behalf. You understand or you don't. The bird is a white-eyed vireo, yellow and gray and white, a species that I have never spied at my bird feeder, as a double-blessing. Do I photograph him? He will fade fast. Must decide soon. Thank the universe and think fast.

 

10.jun.03
Even after depriving myself of sleep, in hopes that I will go to bed at night and wake in early morning hours, I still lie awake in bed, exhausted, 1am, 2am. the moon isn't full. what is the noun form of 'nocturnal'? is it something that exists in some people's blood?

Whenever I think of desperation I think of heat. Days heavy and slow with thick air. Of cycles that repeat not out of choice or celebration, but from entrapment. Atmosphere so dense that it retards any energy that would propel me into planning for sweeter things. Today might be the first day of the season that I need to turn on my air conditioner, it's close to 90 in my house, but I am holding out. When summer comes, I always leave. I always have. Little slices of summer, broken up by work and travel, all cushioned between school and school. Sandwiched by security. I'll either win in unspeakably beautiful success, or fail in sweltering horror. I don't see a lot of room for middle ground right now.

 

5.jun.03
I live a perfect distance from the train tracks. Far enough to where it doesn't wake me in the night. Close enough so that when I lie in bed awaiting sleep, I hear it and comfort washes over me, that moment is perfect and beautiful and I don't need the past or future. The low hum of cars going over tracks, which is actually a metallic howl when close by, reminds me of being underwater in the ocean. Looking up through salt as a beast of a wave pounds over me with a muted thud. Hearing the whistle feels like a homecoming, and how ironic is that? A train passing through town after town in the night, through hollow and lonely areas, maybe with a vagrant or two on board (or is that too romantic of a notion for this day?). On a steady course through the night while all around is stationary asleep. This is the sound that centers me?

"And I've been making promises I know I'll never keep
One of these days I'm gonna leave you in your sleep
I'll have to go where the whistle blows, the whistle knows my name
Baby, I was born on a train"
-Magnetic Fields

 

1.jun.03
There is a time before every journey I take where I start to doubt. I get scared and start to think this is the last time I will leave comfort, why do I do this over and over - why can't I be content watching TV and getting a desk job and a husband, wouldn't that just make everything easier? Then I get out there and I remember why I do it. There are no more doubts when I get out there.

"So why did I sign on for this? Oh come on! You got to go. What else are you going to do, go home? This is where you see what you're made of."
-Henry Rollins

 

30.may.03
When I am in Australia, where will I think of as "home"? Athens? What makes home? Family? Florida? Florida is the least comforting place I can think of. Is home the last physical location in which I lived? Is it where I feel a sense of history? If everyone I knew left New Orleans would it still be home? Is this thought enough to keep me traveling?

 

28.may.03
My life is three garbage bags lighter.

 

27.may.03
Once I tried to count how many beds I had slept in in the past year. Beds from travels. Small rooms and hot rooms and rooms with no pictures on walls.

"Think of every town you've lived in
Every room you lay your head
And what is it that you remember?"
-Hem

The feeling of having everything I need in that room.

"And I do not want what I haven't got."
-Sinead O'Connor

 

26.may.03
"Why can't you write burning letters and let your nocturnal self smolder with desire for one who is not there? Why not let the days before you see her be excruciating and ferment in your mind so on the day you go to the airport to pick her up, you're nearly sick with anticipation? And then when that desire shows the first sign of contentment, throw it back in its cage and let it slowly build itself back into a state of starved fury. Then when you are together, it all matters. So that when you look into her eyes, you lose your balance, so that when she touches you, it feels like you have never been touched before. When she says your name, you think it was she who named you. When she has gone, you bury your face in the pillow to smell her hair and you lie awake at night remembering your face in her neck, her breathing and the amazing smell of her skin. Your eyes go wet because you want her so bad and miss her so much. Now that is worth the miles and the time."
-Henry Rollins