foods, wines.

new house

soft focus

To have steady focus on any one thing, it seems necessary to have the outer picture, the over-structure, the surrounding atmosphere be calm. It seems necessary to have a steady, if static hum around the edges of what I am looking at. In the city we are inundated with so much noise-- so much stimulation, so much sensory overload. I am not advocating a change from this. I am however, with some space and distance from it today, recognizing the fact that I am in motion, that I am changing, and adding to a body of knowledge that is vast. I am allowing myself to be satisfied right now. I am letting myself sink a little more into the sensation of Now, of the present moment. This allows a two-fold effect: access to a realm of listening and accepting, and also the rising up of the many facets that comprise myself-- the many strands and threads of thought that combine to actualize in this moment.

I feel driven, and precise, and ambitious, but I must acknowledge the areas of my life that need this attention. To fill in the cracks and crevices that are blank, to repack soil into the areas where it has crumbled away may take something more akin to compassion than brute force. I may want certain things NOW, or the outside shape of them, but the way towards them is within. I may feel the need to be razor sharp and laden with successive victories, but to truly absorb anything new I need to soften a little. I can set goals that will propel me, I can incorporate chains and ropes of accumulated blood-consciousness, but I have to let these things congeal naturally. I can face everything, but need to inhabit the space around me powerfully, and with intention, with drive and hooked eyes, but also with softness, and laughter.

So, acceding to a sedimentary life, agreeing to a quietness sometimes, feeling grateful, feeling warm, being soft. What a serious and fearful gift it is to have family, to feel family bloodties, to feel the pull and response of friends, to be active, to be acted on, to be loved.

new place.

The Song Taught to Joseph

by Ray A. Young Bear

I was born unto this snowy-red earth
with the aura and name of the Black Lynx.
When we simply think of each other,
night begins. My twin the Heron
is on a perpetual flight northward,
familiarizing himself with the landscape
of Afterlife, but he never gets there...
because the Missouri River descends
from the Northern Plains
into the Morning Star.

One certain thing though,
he sings the song of the fish
below him in the mirror
of Milky Way.

In this confrontation,
the gills of the predator
overtake me in daylight near home;
in this confrontation,
he hinders my progress with a cloud of mud he stirs.
Crying, I ask that I not feel each painful part
he takes, at least not until I can grasp
in the darkness the entrance
of home.

solastalgia

"“There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease,’ ” Albrecht told me as we sat in his car on a cliff above the Newcastle shore, overlooking the Pacific. In the distance, just before the earth curved out of sight, 40 coal tankers were lined up single file. “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.” Australian aborigines, Navajos and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land. What Albrecht realized during his trip to the Upper Valley was that this “place pathology,” as one philosopher has called it, wasn’t limited to natives. Albrecht’s petitioners were anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed — just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them." ("Is There an Ecological Unconscious?" NYT, By DANIEL B. SMITH, Published: January 27, 2010)

an american childhood

So, description is revelation, days turn over each other in regular succession, cities of my past reveal themselves to me in lit squares today; (upside down and large scrimshaw-style, like a pinhole camera image splayed on opposite wall).

Full-up with emotion, wound, I sit on this middle point, this precipice, this hinge. Breathing quietly and blinking, I try and remind myself that each day is happening, regardless of me, of my noticing.

I downloaded Annie Dillard's audio version of 'An American Childhood' this morning, and was (again) shocked at our parallel experience of the world, only to be described as topographical. If all other things faded, which city would I see in this over-view, topsail, ambulatory way? If I choose to commit, to focus, what sort of dwelling will I build? I know that I need a house, (again, scaffold), lattice-matrix, a concretized form.

I know instinctively what Dillard describes as the 'building blocks of language': stones, cells, atoms, words. To be a writer, you must love words. It is AT ONCE as simple and difficult as this.