Little Miss Obvious

Feel so much better after a night with more than four hours' sleep!

(no subject)

Still at peace. Even scheduling doesn't stress me out.

Tues: unknown morning/afternoon (biking, Bob, mom? Drew?), Juggler evening
Wed: Tillie am, Eva afternoon, buy drum?, karaoke pm
Thurs: Lizzy am, afternoon unknown (Sobey? Petter? Bike to Stanley Park?), evening unknown (Drew? Mom?)
Fri: unknown, maybe organix with Cat?
Sat: morning unknown (breakfast with CrazyChris?), afternoon Kynnin and Mouse's wedding party, evening Sin City
Sunday: morning unknown, maybe homeward bound evening

Love, Joy, and Proper Behaviour: A Meditation

If life were a poem, it would be a circle. If people were a cradle, the world would be no different- when we're talking about social networks we refer to the hammock that supports us, each knot and strand shaped to a different part. It keeps us from lying in the dirt (though what sort of a metaphor is that, you ask, coming from someone so in love with dirt?) What we put into us effects us, it becomes us. Food, speech, emotion, we suck it up and, just like eating a clove of garlic, breathe it out again on our skin. It's hard sometimes to make choices about what comes out, but it becomes easier when we monitor what goes in. This sounds so analytical that it's crazy, because the feelings come up out of you and you just *do* in accordance with them and it works-- better than forcing yourself into too many things you don't like, because then things you don't like have stuck to you. Only, you must try a lot of things with an open heart, to know what you like.

I'm trying to put joy into words but I don't know that it comes clear across to you. Of course, there's very little common frame of reference societally for this feeling, for ringing like a bell with each event and person and feeling. We're great with shared anger and pain, not too bad with desire and the glut that is its fulfillment.

When there's no time to be fully aware of doing a thing while doing it, the unique and lovely character of each thing becomes dulled. There's no fullness to action, no ful-fill-ment. If I remain in Vancouver for the rest of the summer, this is what I've learned from Kelowna. If I live in Kelowna for the rest of the summer, or for my life, this is what I've learned from the last month and a half.

From the last ten years, my years of relationships, I've learned that people are what they are. To distort them by percieving them through more of your own preconceptions and fears and desires is a disservice to them and to yourself. To them, because then you leave them alone and speak to the shadow around them. There's no connection. To you, because then life becomes solitary confinement in a box of funhouse mirrors. If you are so busy attending to the way smeone's actions interact with your expectations, you have no time or attention for their actions themselves-- and a person's actions are a person, really. And a person is a wonderful complex thing that is so often a joy to behold.

This year, the most beautiful thing I've ever seen is people I love smiling. A real smile is like a flame, like sunshine in a dark place, like rain in the desert. These are not idle metaphors, because I've experienced both these things, and they are the same. They don't touch me as humanly as happiness in the face of a loved one, though. I may say this because I have known the land more frequently than I've known people, just lately, and we really do see things better when we have a little space. We may feel them better when they're closer, though? Sometimes at night I remember smiles, networks of lines crinkling big at the corner of the mouth or little around the eyes, and I am soothed.

My next lessons will be lessons of respect. For myself, for others, when there's a tie involved (and there always seems to be, somehow), respect involves behaving in an appropriate way to honour that tie. I will learn about the appropriate. It needs only a little quiet space in my head to come out, and time to come out, and a life to come out in. I will be those things, time and space and life.

Good morning.

Transmission

A friend of mine, greensinger, wrote a post that spoke to me this morning, and sort of inspired me to write. He is, incidentally, completing an epic bike journey from New York shortly. He said, and I quote:

My love, you are a river fed by many streams
I bless all who have shaped you,
The lovers whose delights still dance patterns on your back,
Those who carved your channels deeper, broader, wider,
Whitewater and backwater lovers,
Swamp lovers, sun-warmed estuary lovers,
Lovers with surface tension,
Lovers like boulders,
Like ice forming and breaking,
Lovers that fill and spill with the tides.
I bless those who have taught you and those who have pleased you and
those who have hurt you.
All those who have made you who you are.
--Starhawk, from The Fifth Sacred Thing


I know you may never feel this way; there are things here that are new to me, too. I want you to know, though, to not feel awkward or sick when you think of all the hands and lips that have touched me, bodies whose heat still make every particle in me vibrate a little faster, ones whose thoughts shape mine. I hope you can understand that trying to let go of judgement is not a lack of discernment, but an acknowledgement of my limited understanding, and a forgiveness--I don't want the burden of clenched resentment--just as I forgive those who came the deepest into me and left only after planting barbed and thorny seeds. And I want to appreciate the people who have shaped you, given you keen wit and clever hands, eyes that speak of modesty and passion in the same breath, who have taught you unabashed joy (or simply shamelessness); the linguists, psychologists, yogis and holy seekers and storytellers, ones who have made it possible for our two languages to communicate; every cock and tongue and hand that taught you to love sex; lovers refined and untamed, chaste or debauched, Dionysian and Apollonian, the timely and the unseasonable--all who have made possible a recipe so delicious out of discarded produce such as we.

Thanks, Greensinger. :)

Old Poems Unearthed

Tonight I'm wandering through other people's words trying to pin down something so elusive that I'm not sure I can feel it, beyond knowing that it's there and keeping me restless about midnight. I don't know. This is the pattern, I suppose, of love in my life. It takes awhile to wear in a groove, and until it does the whole thing skips and jitters.

Love? God only knows. Words are words. I only live the thing itself.

My head is muddy now because I am so tired. I haven't been sleeping well. This is the pattern... groove... skips... jitters, etc.

Did you know I'm in love with Vancouver? In love with the ocean, with downtown, with the wet air and the huge green growth and the shapes of the buildings in a skyline and the way people walk down the street? This land is generous land, and gives so much.

I open when touched. It's like sunlight on a flower, or warm water in a vase for buds.

I'm too tired to write, really, so maybe someone else has come up with something serene and beautiful, about complexity and simplicity, old and new, uncovering and nostalgia. desire and fulfillment. It's all the tension of matched pairs, after all, that keeps things going. Let's look through and see:

( Read more... )

This one needs to be out from behind the cut, though.

To Drink
I want to gather your darkness
in my hands, to cup it like water
and drink.
I want this in the same way
as I want to touch your cheek –
it is the same –
the way a moth will come
to the bedroom window in late September,
beating and beating its wings against the cold glass,
the way a horse will lower
his long head to water, and drink,
and pause to lift his head and look,
and drink again,
taking everything in with the water,
everything.
Jane Hirshfield

That's it, I think. I've been having experiences with darkness lately; not mine, but others'. It's an integral part of people, but not something I've given much notice or attention or tolerance or love to. You know, we always try to make it go away in people we love, but if it IS them, then what? Where is the close examination, the gradual comprehension of overlapping shadings, the wonder at complexity, the joy in difference?