this is what you shall do

Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem
And have the richest fluency,
Not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes, 
And in every motion and joint of your body.

-walt whitman

when it's getting crowded.

I felt all week as though I were going to scream. I felt as though there were too many pieces of a burgeoning, changing life for me to hold, too many faces, too many versions of the same, care-worn smile to be spread across too much space.

When I was a kid, and my dad and I would drive from Dodge City, Kansas to the tiny town of Randall where my grandma lived, we would drive through a place called Cawker City. And as the highway pulled through town, in a park under a shaky old picnic awning stood the creme de la creme of nothing-nowhere-sights-untold midwestern tourist traps.

This ramshackle leaning roof on stilts housed the World's Biggest Ball of Twine.

I would love to be joking. Even more would I like to be joking about how much I loved that hunchbacked fantasy. It represented one town's need to be more than just a potty break, just north of quiet, flat Highway 36. But I did, and in their endless quest to stay the biggest, they added to the ball, and added to the ball. And eyes squinting against the glare of my memory, my distorted self history bore witness to that ball of twine as something that did not fit, that could no longer live under that tiny roof that would soon have to sit atop the head of that squatted twine ball.  And this week, I was that poor faltering building, with too damn much inside.

and then I went in search of pictures. To drive my point home.
I did my research. and this is what found.


Either time had changed the housing in my eyes, or the citizens of Cawker City had expanded to make room for the sheer mass of their fantasy. They saw that in order to keep their piece of singularity in the world, they must make way for it's bigger burden. Make a home for the weight that must be carried in the name of claim. A safe place in which to house the small voice that let them scream above the rest, for just a moment.

So they expanded.

And celebrated it.

They put the wonder of their farmland world in great works of art. And made their town a shrine.


And so it is that, once again, my metaphor must change me.

I must expand myself, and keep wrapping myself in the trappings of a developing heart. Stringing myself up. And when I am made full to bursting, 

I must make way.

And celebrate. :)

this is why.

it's amazing, the magnitude of words.of the hope implicit in community.

I was going to catch up on reading. And then I realized that I hadn't read Meg's newest blog. I read this blog every day, because something about it touches me. Even if there is nothing new to read, I read something old.

For the last week or so, I've been in a funk. The kind bluesy restlessness that verges on being Truman Capote's "mean reds."  In the space where you know you should be getting out of bed, and aren't sure you can. I should recognize this space by now. It is the narrow slit of life in which you stop at the door to your class and think, I'm already a few minutes late, and who cares if I miss it; the fissure in your days where it takes an gale-force will to walk through the already-open door.

I enumerated all that was wrong with me, and burned forty of my very own witches on the hunt for some hands in which to put this crisis. But I was reminded today, that this funk is deja vu.

And then this morning, I read the latest entry at "The Wild and Wily Ways of  Brunette Bombshell".  I read her unhappiness. And I cried. (in the student union).  Because this is my fifth year in the fight for myself. Because I have been trying to contain this. Because I spent an entire summer in a dark basement, because I spent my 19th birthday alone with a chocolate souffle I baked myself. Because I am lonely. (because, just the other day, i too needed to remind myself, in a list, just to breathe) Because i tried too hard to push it down, to pack too much into the overspilling bin. only to have it utterly refuse to be made small. This week of wetted wings is the product of my soul's unrest in this place. It's periodic rebellion to such fallacy against my true nature.

And this is why. This is what it is all for. We write so that, from Texas, from New York from Provo, she can crucify my pretensions. So that I can hand out copies of "Everything is Illuminated" like a missionary, as a fantastical bible of my humanity, so that I, and not the receiver, might be baptized int he mutual recognition of ourselves in the tiny black glyphs on each page. Because I need e.e. cummings to tell me that I must breakfast always on light and silence, and in this way still, the vortex behind my eyes, for just a moment at a time.

Because these words are the mirror into which we can look to examine and see what we could not merely feel the presence of.

So thank you Meg, for holding up a reflection, like a beacon leading home, in which I could see my fault.

too much

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog followed a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I cried over it…I spent my life learning to feel less."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

my phone took that picture. all by itself. and now i check on it often as it sits in my bag. a fret for it as one would a tiny thing, (a sparrow, or a hope) slung across me in my bag, waiting to see beautiful things. its whole life is just to wait, to be the tool through which those i love who are not here tell me i am someone. 

and while it waits it steals tiny pieces of beauty

to pass along

pictures

messages

just to say "i miss you" 

it is so easy 

to forget for a moment

and feel that such a thing might come to life.

and so i catch myself peering at it

even when it has made no noise.

asking it questions it can't answer.

and sometimes it's just too much

 and i have to laugh at myself.

for being so moved,

by something which never wanted to be beautiful.
something that never wanted anything at all.
i laugh because i can't help but seek depth in the smallest puddles.

breakfast.

I'm taking a moment of silence, of gratitude, not at the beginning of my meal. This is no precursor. But I've stopped, with berry to lip, in confusion.

Sometimes beginnings happen without our ever having noticed. For all the pomp and stutter stepping that accompanies the fiercest beginnings, sometimes they just slide past us, like a fish underwater. Inches below or to the side. All we feel is a slight rush of water. But suddenly, everything is different.

We commence, and once it is done, we are astonished, frightened, diminished by the crime of life not having given us proper warning. Something momentous has happened, and we were not given the rites of deliberation and procrastination. For an instant, we are bewildered. Misplaced from our own ritual stuttering. And then, it dawns on us. The exuberant moment when we realize that far away light wasn't a tired fluttering of exhausted eyes in the dark, but a chink in the great edifice.

I did not even feel this change, until it was upon me. For a lifetime, I have done what I must. I have moved by necessity. Ended up in this house or that town because of a lack of preparation more than any real decision on my part. Because I could not begin, my life carried me, and I reacted. I have allowed myself to be a refugee.

But today, with my blueberries, my coffee, and my philosophy homework, I realized that I chose this.

This is the moment I have chosen for my breakfast  (for breaking so many fasts) and it is of my design. I have chosen these days of feasting on knowledge, on joy, on the pleasure of a room which is mine. I am the designator of this revelry. I do not feel cheated, but as though I've cheated the world. Like I've slipped a five hundred note from the bank in Monopoly.

Now, if only more beginnings would slip past me. (like the beginning of my Palooka Journal fiction submission).

p.s. sorry there are no pictures, I was very hungry...

base

I am strange. I am one of the most spontaneous, random people you will perhaps ever meet. The other day, I fell in a fountain.  But I am a creature of habit, of needing a lot of pomp and circumstance before beginnings. Of needing to feel some sort of ceremony. I love my tiny rituals. 

The way I eat bananas. Split into thirds from top to bottom. Three tender curving triangles. as delicately chewed as possible to preserve their perfect graininess.

I like to find favorite spots, favorite stores, favorite feelings. I revisit these with unwavering affection, they are my anchored bouy in the evermoving, ebbing, flowing, sea of myself.  They are bastions against panic.
j
My small superstitious tokens against the instability of never having permanent homes and entirely reliable families.


These tiny corners of fortitude are what allow me to be who I am. They are that which make moving whenever, wherever possible. They give me the assurity to jump in the fountain, feetfirst, and therefore fall on my butt, and soak myself entirely.

And when I am taking on a great thing (because returning to school with 19 credits is no small thing) I seek these bases for my context, so that I may safely venture out and play tag with my ambitions, and always have a place to sprint towards when breath is needed.

And so, this morning, I am here. Between the math and geosciences building. In the sun. Near coffee. Near people. In the midst of campus, so that my very presence here may act as a revolt against that which I fear.

"it's the middle of the night there chief, what are you doing--?"

"learning how to be a human, and part of a family"

"yeah, i think you speak for a lot of us there"

image courtesy of rottentomatoes.com

from the movie Martian Child