tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31778113261946706972024-03-05T07:27:36.418-05:00The International Woman of MysteryLadahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.comBlogger48125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-33463137623095607152015-04-02T21:02:00.000-04:002015-04-02T21:10:57.016-04:00We Shall Not Cease from ExplorationThis is one of those years of tiny, big moments. It's the year where two years of labour and questioning evolved at last into one moment of standing on stage and receiving my Master's degree. All I heard in that moment was the fierce beating of my heart, pounding ecstatically against my ribs: I've no idea what was actually said. (Though that might be also the result of two years of school-related sleep deprivation...)<br />
<br />
This is a year that will quietly watch me slip into the next age marker and I find myself reflecting often on who I am now and how I want to grow myself for the next five years. I look at pictures of a five year old me, an eleven year old me, and I wonder who that I was then is still now, and what of who I am now would I have wanted to be at that age if I could only have known to want it. Which makes me wonder how I will look back on this age, and on this age I am slipping into.<br />
<br />
Today is the anniversary of when my family left my first home, my beautiful island in the Caribbean, so I am extra pensive and lost to nostalgia, to thinking about home and place and belonging.<br />
<br />
When I ride in the cabs and talk with drivers who are from Ethiopia, Uganda, and elsewhere, they reminisce to me of home, spell out for me the language of land written on their hearts, and I see the place stamped on their being. Then I ask how long they have been in the States now, and each time--each and every time!--it is longer than I have lived here in this country. And they have been gone from their homes that long (longer yet if they were refugees at some point), and yet it is to them still the compass which guides them through their life.<br />
<br />
I think, if they can have their homeland still affect them so, is it so strange that my own heart is often still awash in longing for the otherness I know? For my other worlds? Even though in every place I go, that longing persists because I have lived and loved in too many?<br />
<br />
What is the limit of the human heart?<br />
<br />
I have become very adept at making home wherever I am, at building place and setting down roots whilst still carrying with me the places and people I love, while still holding onto the many different and opposing things that have made me the strange person who I am--and I am enormously proud of this accomplishment. I think, in a life full of fracture, finding a way to some sort of wholeness is a pretty satisfying thing to accomplish, and probably explains why I have cared so much more in my life about who I am as a person than what I am doing or going to do. Being a person is a lot of hard work, and I cherish my beingness.<br />
<br />
But what now? And how now?<br />
<br />
Maybe that will be the next five years of learning for me.<br />
<br />
I returned not half a month ago yet from a trip to Iceland. What a beautiful country. I don't even have the vocabulary yet to adequately talk about it, though I have begun to read Icelandic literature in hopes of discovering and growing that ability.<br />
<br />
Going there, I hoped most to be able to step outside myself a little, to step into a place I do not know at all, have never been. To bathe in the strange newness of it all and so, being outside of my world, gain rest and better my vision. I wanted to celebrate what I have achieved (the degree) and reward myself. Wanted to dance with the Northern Lights and experience their magic for the first time, to ride on the back of the wind. I wanted so badly to find something that looks like the edge of the world and stand trembling on the brink of it full of wonder at life and the stark beauty of it all, raging and silent in a single breath, luminescent as the glaciers and black as the sand, rock, and night encompassing it all.<br />
<br />
And the thing that I love most about experiences like that; it isn't the going there and then , eventually, turning back and returning to the place you were before. It's that you don't return to the place you were before.<br />
<br />
I will always, forever, be homesick for something. My heart beats the song of saudade; an eternal song of melancholic loss for the other.<br />
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But that doesn't mean that I do not nor cannot love the new, the next, or the present. And I do, enormously and passionately.<br />
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But when you go enter a neverland or stand at the edge of any world, there is always a door. Though I did turn and drive back the way I had come, though the next day I got on a plane and flew back to my present home which I adore, that next portal has been crossed and I passed into a new place, a new world to explore which will become a part of the fabric of my being. I didn't even fully realise it then, but now, when I find myself reading new books since my return, writing new things and thinking in language I have not before, I know.<br />
<br />
Know that for the first time, I have come to love and appreciate change as much as I have always hated and feared it. Many of us carry wounds and split hearts and live in between worlds with that continual ache for the otherness of home, but as T.S. Elliot said, "the end of all our explorations will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." Which in the end, means that the place and we ourselves are as new; reborn and more full.<br />
<br />
Isn't the evolution of our being a wondrous thing?<br />
<br />
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<br />Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-81893439751227461832014-09-19T17:48:00.000-04:002015-01-30T22:00:40.780-05:00In search of AlchemyIt's been a year now since I decided to leave my hard earned home of five years and go out into the wide world once more. <br />
<br />
Once more with nothing. With no furniture, not even a bed. With my books packed up and left behind, boxes of colour and memory dusting in a barn. My piano gone, pictures locked up, papers destroyed. <br />
<br />
I left with no job and limited savings to make my way alone in a place I had never lived. To move back into a city from deep rolling hills, back into all the languages of the world and the engine of city traffic from the kayikiki call of fox outside my window and coyote and bear in the woods. To make friends in a city of strangers after leaving those who would come by with homemade butternut soup and thermometers when I was sick or hunt christmastrees with me, swim in lakes and pools, and explore the surroundings of a whole wide state. <br />
<br />
It was just this idea of where I wanted to be next, who I wanted to enable myself to become (again?) and what I wanted to surround myself with. An image of the lifestyle I wanted to experience next and opportunities to find. <br />
<br />
How has it nearly been a year since I was packing all my things away to set out across the country? <br />
And what has been done or found or left in that year?<br />
<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> "To live without roads seemed one way</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> not to get lost. To make maps</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">of stone and grass, to rub stars together,</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">find a spark." </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">~<i>from "Spark," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye</i></span></div>
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<br />
I have travelled through and explored<br />
<em>New York, New Hampshire, Massachusets, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina</em><br />
as well as <br />
<em>New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, </em>and <em>Guatemala</em><br />
<em></em><br />
I have depleted my yatch savings fund to nearly the last dollar, but starting saving over again. <br />
<br />
I slept on a floor and then an airmattress for three months. <br />
<br />
I worked as a canvasser on the street, a cashier and hospitality hostess in a pizza place, and am in my second position doing development and marketing work in an awesome arts organization now.<br />
<br />
I completed two residencies, two terms of grad school, a critical thesis, and am preparing to graduate with my first Masters degree. (There is always room for another MA...) <br />
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I've missed my friends, people who have poured into my life over the five years who feel like family, who may themselves have moved, too, but many of whom still keep in touch, find ways to say hello and an "I'm thinking of you" and some of whom have even managed to visit. <br />
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I've made new friends and reconnected with friends from my past--discovering one college friend and I can see each other's bedroom windows from our rooms here in all the expanse and building jungle of this city. <br />
<br />
There have been organizations to discover, to join and participate in. Women's groups, political groups, arts groups, writing groups, UN groups, groups from my life's many homelands, embassies, music, bellydancing, martial arts, concerts, all my favourite food groups, rake-leaves-at-the-monuments--so many different experiences to explore and wonder at. So many fascinating new people with complex backgrounds and stories far crazier than my own. Giving strangers in the metro or at a restaurant my name, my number, my smile. <br />
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I've made it to a movie theater five times.<em> (LOTR the Hobbit II, Frozen, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Maleficent, and How to Train Your Dragon 2, again--if you were wondering...)</em><br />
<em></em><br />
I sold my car. <br />
<br />
My belongings are still in storage and I miss my books and my piano every single day. <br />
<br />
I've acquired more books and learned how to use a library at last (though I still don't like them much!)<br />
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I've seen 2 ballets, 3 operas, 3 theater productions, 1 dance show, 1 musical, 1 concert (and I think more that I cannot recall offhand). <br />
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I have visited and been visited by my siblings more this year than perhaps the last two years combined. <br />
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I've run away to a nearby beach twice, and made it back to NY briefly twice, too. <br />
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It's been a scary year. A year of wondering, <em>Am I going to make it? Can this work out?</em> A year of signing onto leases before having employment, believing that the job was around the corner. Believing what I was earnestly looking for would come. <br />
<br />
On the hard days, I would draw up this wonderful quote in my head from Theodore Roosevelt:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><em>It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.</em></span></div>
<br />
It has been a year of letting go of everything and finding a path through the sky. <br />
<br />
And, in fact, doing not zero, not one, but TWO high ropes courses, despite vertigo and hating feeling out of control. And losing a friend to an accident, who two years earlier helped me first conquer those things, climb a 70something ft tree and jump off a 50 something ft pole.<br />
<br />
This year has felt a lot like skydiving did last summer. At the beginning being excited, then going through the paperwork that lists in horrid detail every possible way you might die or worse, injure yourself and recieve nothing but a miserable life without any assistance. And then you see the little backpack that is supposed to let you soar and you think, no way. That will never work. <br />
<br />
Yet still you get into a rinky-dink plane and you climb up two miles into the sky and you open that door and jump anyways and somewhere in that crazy freefall you discover what it is to fly, and you land on your feet ready to go up again, to fly some more, to see the world in a whole new way outside of itself and so far beyond your tiny little being. <br />
<br />
It's one of the most beautiful things imaginable. <br />
And it is my life. <br />
And I am deeply grateful. Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-30268984823040287582014-05-07T22:07:00.000-04:002014-05-07T22:49:34.263-04:00Thoughts from the Washington Mall, Post Migraine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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More than half a year ago now, I came first to this new city. My seventh capital of the world to live or study in, I think? It is strange to me, that a year ago I came with my brother on a trip, thinking perhaps he would find work here after graduation. It never occurred to me that I would come, instead. Now I walk past every day where I celebrated my birthday last year in novelty. </div>
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How is it that a person can love so much in this world, carry so much heart for so many very different places and people? </div>
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I am so exquisitely happy in this place. Hearing every day languages of home. Walking beneath buildings of familial architecture, stepping once more into the paths of people whom as global expatriates you know your whole life. The fashion, the art, the galas. </div>
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But I find my heart equally close to breaking as to bursting, from sorrow as from happiness. Only the sorrow is so much more difficult to share or even visualize. It is sometimes hard to embrace the wonder of my life right now when worlds I know feel like they are on the brink of chaos. Or have already fallen into it, fighting and despair and confusion. When I am reminded of how fragile life is, when countries can implode overnight. When places which (or who, because to me they feel like people, like family) have bled into my being are bleeding again and I am far away but the blood calls. Countries to my south, countries to my east, all north to my heart. </div>
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And then you add the single stories. The rape of every person woman man child, rape of country. The kinds of rape and violation that make you sick in public on the floor and it is nothing, your waste is nothing, to what you responded to, what is happening. Even stories outside of my countries, stories like the kidnapping of hundreds of girls, enslaved as wives (is that at best or at worst?) and taken away from education that they risked everything for. I just risk debt for my education. </div>
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I went and toured an opera studio workshop here in DC, and one room was full of clothes, racks of shirts and dresses and pants hung and freshly laundered. Shelves of shoes, boxes of props. Clean and waiting full of promise to be stepped into and I stepped instead back into my mind, my memories; to walking through Birkenau and Auschwitz with the rooms of piles of shoes piles of hair and glasses and suitcases labeled with names of the dead. Of the people I met who survived, who walked like ghosts the streets of the cities I grew up on and stopped me to tell their story, this old story over and again. I stepped instead of into opera, the schoolhouse in the countryside of Rwanda, where I studied, where I witnessed room after room of white limed shattered limb fractured bone bodies. I think there were some 17 rooms I counted but I tried not to remember that too specifically. And then a big room there, with clotheslines every which way, draping ornamentally, awfully, bloodied torn bulleted clothes of women men and children. But I kept on touring an opera studio, which was wonderful and amazing in itself! and reveling in the fine arts instead. Instead of what? </div>
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I think of these worlds I love. I think of how fragile ideas are and how hard we have to fight for them and sometimes against them, of how much is often sacrificed and how only sometimes we come out whole. </div>
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I work hard in myself for these worlds I love, to let them stay together, to find a history that works for them all even when the cultures clash, even when the different histories I have imbibed and come to embody over the years are so different as to make this almost impossible. But I like to hope that if somehow one person can come to hold the world, maybe one day the world will also be able to hold itself. Maybe more of us will come to reshape our world and fit the pieces so beloved to someone, together. </div>
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Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-26673724478183882362014-03-30T16:22:00.002-04:002014-03-30T16:27:34.593-04:00The End of our ExploringIt is a rainy day here in the city, and I am curled up over a steaming cup of coffee at the Ethiopian cafe with a fellow writer friend. It's our writing day, only every time I bend my thoughts into story, what comes back to me are images of my life right now.<br />
<br />
Steam has gathered on the windows, so condensed it runs down drops inside the pane of glass like rain and the strong smell of beans crushed and rushing into waiting mugs fills the air. I love this place. I love being here in this city where everything is always happening and changing and full of possibility.<br />
<br />
Yesterday bore witness to the arrival of a real bed for me. We laughed in my flat, called it a rite of passage that I graduated from an air mattress to the real deal--something that all my flatmates have gone through, and with this same mattress now passed on to me. It was a day of rearranging my room to make space for this new thing, and a day of realising; I have been in this place for four months now. I have left my last home six months ago. Six months. That is a half year! How has that time passed without my count? How does it seem both so little and so long?<br />
<br />
I have been in my new job four weeks now, and still love it. I love that I work in the centre of the arts in a role which encompasses everything from theatre to opera to orchestra to ballet and on to touch every outer reach of this wonderful galaxy. Love that every week I meet new people and can begin a new friendship to enrich my world, to hopefully enrich other worlds. Love commuting to work and standing in this throng of people and voices and colours. Sound and motion. Love going for a walk in the city somewhere new every time, something yet unseen to find.<br />
<br />
Today I made my first craigslist purchase: a chair for my desk. When I leave this coffeeshop it will be to go home to my room where I have a real bed now, to sit down at my desk that I pulled out of storage, to use this new chair to pour into words this story that will be written that will come out that breaks my heart and I have no idea the ending to, the middle of, the path.<br />
<br />
I am reviewing my life in my head these days. Thinking of the many lives I have lived and how separate from one another they have so many of them seemed. I love how connected this life makes me feel to the rest of myself. Not as whole as living in London made me, but close. And beautiful. It is so much in the little things. New friends. A bed. A chair. Steaming coffee in the rain that tastes the flavours of another home. The three languages I heard in passing on the street one of which I share, one I recognise, and one as yet unknown.<br />
<br />
Last summer I started thinking about moving on, but could not imagine that life. Seven months ago I decided to leave and launch out into this new somewhere. Six months ago I began, not having a clue what lay ahead.<br />
<br />
I remember five years ago now, I wanted so very desperately to have a place in this world. To have my own place, my slot marked out for me and the path clearly stretched out before me. In many ways I think we are wired to want that, to look for our little slice of life and fit it, to be restless until it, to fear being without it. It is safety and comfort and clarity. Security and definition. I as a writer love definition, oftentimes too much. As a young adult with a unstable, roving childhood, I wanted that place of my own, or at least to know how to claim it, how anyone can ever claim something. Have ownership or be owned, perhaps. I wrote a lot at the time about how you find your path, about what that should look like, and I finally decided that perhaps the straight lined path is just an illusion. We are living in a world with a curved horizon, a lie of a line. Even the straightest path circles around the world and if we expect it to be even we are in for a rude interruption or two. So I slowly changed my thinking. I decided that maybe the curving route that can go anywhere, that can wrap itself around the world over and again and come from so many different places beginning again everywhere and coming always from somewhere else and going still elsewhere may be the most beloved best adventure infinitely satisfying experience possible.<br />
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Now I think that if I could see down a straight line to the end of my life I would be bored or crazed to an early death.<br />
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I love this adventure of discovery, the not knowing, the thrill of beginning ever again. Love how many chances we have to be new and renew. To begin and begin again. Greater and greater.<br />
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<br />
<div style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0); text-align: left;">“We shall not cease from exploration</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="text-align: left;">And the end of all our exploring</span></span></div>
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</span><span style="text-align: left;"></span></span>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="text-align: left;">Will be to arrive where we started</span></span></div>
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</span><span style="text-align: left;"></span></span>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="text-align: left;">And know the place for the first time.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="text-align: left;">― T.S. Eliot, <i>Four Quartets</i></span></span></div>
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I have no idea what these next six months will hold. I couldn't possibly have imagined the adventures of the past six and I am so glad, because everything has been harder and more beautiful than I could possibly have. This is a beautiful thing.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-78534793714612907262014-03-21T00:26:00.000-04:002014-03-21T00:29:05.338-04:00Risking LifeToday is one of those days that begs talking about.<br />
<br />
I had no desire to wake up this morning and I forgot to brush my hair, put on earrings, and grab breakfast before heading out the door for work. Then the metro was backed up for reasons unknown. I waited three trains before finally making it through the door onto one of them. I stepped hard on one poor man's (very nice!) shoe by accident, trying to avoid falling over because there was no where to hold onto and the train driver was crazier than Cruella in 101 Dalmatians. The road right next to my office got shut down because of a suspicious package scare at one of the embassies there and we all got some amber alert on our phones.<br />
<br />
But it was the first day of Spring, and it didn't snow here. Both sun and blue skies popped out to visit. I successfully finished setting up my banking and I bumped into some friends when I went out to grab some lunch.<br />
<br />
After work tonight, I went to a play at the Kennedy Center with one of my housemates. We saw <a href="http://tinyurl.com/nzfcarj" target="_blank">A Midsummer Night's Dream</a> together. My last experience with that play was actually as an actor in i<span style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">t--one of the most fun roles I've ever played, actually--</span>and the lead make-up design/conceptual artist. I think we did a pretty spectacular job with it, too--from set design to choreography to costuming and make-up to actual presentation of lines and character development (etc etc). But this, tonight, it was spectacular. It was breathtaking. I sat there riveted and got a headache and spotty vision at more than one point only to realise it was because I was actually holding my breath for the splendidness of it.<br />
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If you've ever seen <a href="http://garrick.official-theatre.co.uk/london/mysteries-yiimimangaliso" target="_blank">The Mysteries</a> (and you should--and which I would almost die to see performed live!!!), there were a lot of element similarities to me between the two. This production of Midsummer was done including puppets. Not muppets (which are, admittedly, awesome), but real incredibly put together wood carved puppets. Sometimes tiny, sometimes larger than life. And sometimes a basket with three people holding different objects next to in order to animate. But it DID animate. It came to life so amazingly.<br />
<br />
And then after a performance that really couldn't possibly have gotten any better, an actor went and proposed to his girlfriend after the long standing ovation!! (and she said yes)<br />
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What what what!?<br />
<br />
We took a taxi home tonight. The driver was Ethiopian, and he and I chatted all about Ethiopian food, and how a woman has to know how to cut a chicken just right, and life. Last time I was in a taxi with an Ethiopian man was on my way to the final interview for my now job. That driver told me he knew I would get the job if I wanted it, and I did want it, and I did get it.<br />
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Now here I am a month later going home. Home after a long day at work. A day of working at a place I am just so incredibly delighted to be a part of and bewildered just how exactly it came about. A day of movement and drama and art, of cross realities and playfulness. I got to ride home driving down the Mall looking at the monuments and then passing the Capital building, the senate buildings. Home to a street that I know and love to curl up on my bed.<br />
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I saw a card today that read something to the effect of, "life without risk is not an adventure." I think all of life is filled with risks whether we acknowledge them or not, whether we take extra ones or not, and it can always be seen as an adventure if you figure out a new perspective. But the fact is, I am just so very glad that I took the risk of moving to this city and searching for a job and settling into yet another world. Because it is a beautiful world, and the rest of my world is bigger for it, and even on days of complete ordinariness or terribly rough starts or interminable saudade, I feel like I have the whole of the universe dancing stars inside of me.<br />
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<br />Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-84320008455747562782014-02-13T00:38:00.001-05:002014-02-13T00:38:31.948-05:00Lost in Language<br />
There are times when life appears to mimic literature and as you move through your own passages now stumbling, now wandering, now dancing: motifs and themes begin to appear in the scenes. It makes me think of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book whose ideas and thoughts I adore and run through in my mind over and again. Who is to say whether it is our noticing and noticing again of random events which give them their significance, or whether we notice the event of them because of their significance? Which comes first and in the end does it matter? (I think that yes, it does matter, because there is a certain amount of power involved and one way gives us more power, the other less. But that is all beyond the point of thought I am following tonight.)<br />
<br />
For the last many days, I have been thinking of language. What am I saying? For the last many years, the last decades of a life that only does have a few decades, I have been thinking of language. And now my critical thesis revolves around language and my dreams focus on language and my insecurities stem from language.<br />
<br />
I am working on the idea of code switching in language right now, a study which seems terribly overlooked and I am bound to generate far too many pages in my thesis if I do not cut myself off or learn to control my insatiable desire for more, for satisfaction, in this topic. It is a black whole of wondrous exploration at the moment.<br />
<br />
The more I explore this idea and try to get inside the concept, the more I find myself surrounded by it every day and moment by moment. Being in this capital city certainly aides that, as I am regularly plunged into other languages on the metro, the streets, and in restaurants. (it is glorious!)<br />
<br />
A few weeks ago now, I went out wandering and by a series of spontaneous decisions, ended up at a sushi happy hour. No sooner did I sit than I noted that the gentlemen at the table next to me were speaking English. A moment later, I thought, no, they are speaking Spanish, that's funny. Then it was English again. I couldn't figure out which language they were actually speaking (was it English or Spanish, and why was I having this difficulty deciphering which--it must be Spanish if I am thinking about it in English concernedly?) until finally they started switching back and forth between them--one in English the other in Spanish and then one in Spanish-English, the other in English-Spanish. We ended up talking after I could no longer not-listen and not-lean in towards them and it was delightful to discover not only fellow South Americans (I claiming that part of my identity) and make new friends, but to be part of what is this idea of code-switching, of moving across the borders of language and culture for various purposes. I had just been thinking about it and then there it was next to me and happening inside of me.<br />
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Tonight, getting on the metro for a rather long commute home, I stepped onto a nearly empty train car. I walked up the whole length of it to sit towards the front, where three people in three separate rows where talking across the space--about nothing less than language. About switching between languages and "wearing" accents and putting on culture. Did they know these are the ideas I dream about now at night and in my waking moments? So I listened, and when I started laughing with them, I was officially part of the group. I even moved up a row to sit directly with them. Now we were four strangers (as they were all, in fact, strangers) sitting together and talking language, connected by our Caribbean heritage and our chameleon abilities (or lack there-of). We went our separate ways one by one, saying good night, high-fiving, waving, all smiles. It was fascinating and wonderful and so beautiful it almost hurt me.<br />
<br />
I realise I'm not really telling you anything here about code switching. Feel free to research it a little and let me know what you find. I don't think you will find much--I haven't yet (aside from 200+ pages culled out of linguistic, literary, and psychology journals that lightly touch the topic). But I am writing my thesis on it so you can know that you will likely be hearing much much more about it.<br />
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Really, I just wanted to say tonight how exquisitely wonderful it was to get on a nearly empty traincar and find myself in the midst of a circle of friends I do not and will not ever know the names of. To step into a basement Japanese restaurant at the edge of Chinatown for sushi happy hour and find friends who know the cities I have walked in and who coax back into my consciousness a language I have only turned over and held in my subconscious for years and years.<br />
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These beautiful strangers and these waking dreams and falling back into language are all the reasons I wanted to come back to city, to international life, to this world where by accident I can walk into all the places I know of as home and speak friend.<br />
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Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-77255516116849438902014-01-01T22:36:00.001-05:002014-01-01T22:38:14.958-05:00A Challenge of Imagination <br />
As a temporarily unemployed professional, I have done a lot of thinking about this process of searching for work in which I find myself these days. People ask questions like, "how are you doing," or "what sort of work are you looking for," or make comments like, "man, it must be rough to not have a job," or "boy, I sure wish I didn't have to be working, too."<br />
<br />
I find that being between work does indeed leave a lot to be desired--security and stability, in sum, not to mention the fact that I happen to love working and really miss it. There are times when the narrow reality of my situation presses in on me and I feel my stress rising; blood in my ears and bile in my mouth. Times when I toss and turn instead of sleep, or when my eyes fly open from a deep sleep back to this waking, unsettling insecurity. Many of those who know me probably also know that for all my adventuring, I do actually like structure in my life and I love to work. This is not an easy experience for me.<br />
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What I have come to find when I am not holding onto narrow reality or demanding impossible answers to temporally irrelevant questions, however, is that this place of searching for work is a beautiful place to be. There is always something wondrous in being lost and much of the wonder of that comes in what you find along the wandering way.<br />
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I think and talk all the time about translating culture across boundaries, about shape and place and space and being. But how often do I think or take the time to consider the possibility of translating the [non-cultural shape of] myself? Now, every day when I look at job descriptions, I think, Can I do this? Do I want to do this? What skills and experiences would I bring into this? Who are they looking for?<br />
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I left the realm of "jobs which I obviously and easily can do" behind weeks ago now, and spend time looking at jobs that I would have said were out of my circle of possibility. I think that is wonderful. Searching for work is teaching me to see myself anew every day, and not only to see myself, but to imagine and to re-imagine myself over and again.<br />
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It is like acting in a way, looking at a role and saying, do I have something within me that I can call upon and respond to the call of this character to me? Can I embody this being and be it so well that the crowds roar, that my heart soars, that the integrity of the character is satisfied?<br />
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But the fact is, it is not actually acting at all: it is a translating of myself: not an act, but a new form of being. Sure, there is this "one me" with the list of things I have done. But we are not defined--should not be defined-- by what we have or have not done. That is what traps people and creates the silent despair so many people suffer through in their daily lives. That is a form of death, I think.<br />
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It is our being which matters, and our being is expansive and ever expanding (I think when our being ceases to expand we are like the dead). Our whole, elastic being contains so much more than simply what has been done, what we have accomplished. We are not wearied check lists buried under dusty stacks on a desk.<br />
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One of my favourite historical figures (alas that now I no longer have the possibility of dining with him!) is Vaclav Havel. He wrote, in addition to many other world changing things, this incredible speech about the power of the powerless. The fact is, we all have power; we all participate in the shaping of reality. We can pull out from the realm of imagination and enact; we can expand our being and do differently--challenge ourselves and step outside of what we think is possible to discover the boundlessness of possibility and the feebleness of reality.<br />
<br />
It is incredibly uncomfortable to push the edges of reality. I think of my childhood, trying to step into a mirror all the time to find the other world and the frustrations when it would not yield to me. Frustration, disappointment, the risk of feeling one's trappedness or smallness after all. But fear is the worst possible jailor, and I refuse to put myself in shackles. If there will be shackles in my future, they will not be because I held out my wrists meekly or shackled myself fearfully. Fear is what keeps us powerless. Fear is what keeps us going in a dead end job because we are too afraid to re-imagine ourselves in a new life, in a new world. Fear is what confines us to one possible reality. Fear is what never lands on the moon.<br />
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Imagination is not child's play in the grown up world, but maybe if we exercised it more, or if we played harder and dared longer, we could grow into it again. I do think for many people, there comes a time when we have left the imagining and re-imagining of ourselves and possibilities so long in the past that we no longer know how to do it. Perhaps we no longer know how to see ourselves at all or are afraid of what we will see when we do simply look in that mirror. Not even that should stop us, though; search out your muscle memory, try and try again.<br />
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I know that right now, far beyond the discomfort and the instability, I just love this idea that I could be and try so many different things. I am discovering jobs, lifestyles, endless universes I did not even know existed! And when I look at myself in light of those possibilities, I see there on the other side of the mirror myself, smiling back.<br />
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Exploring. Becoming anew. It is spectacularly freeing and empowering. Expanding the universe of self.<br />
<br />
Right now we are reading in my workshop here at residency this book called 19 Translations of Wang-Wei. It is based on this one, 4000 something year old ancient Chinese poem that has been translated and retranslated throughout history. Every version of it still is itself, but new and delightful and rediscovered. I want to be that poem. I want to be fully myself, with so many facets that I sparkle like the most gorgeous diamond in the world. That some intrinsic intricate part of me resonates wherever I go and echoes still in my absence, touching and changing and challenging the world. And I cannot wait to find this next translation of myself to fully step into and develop.<br />
<br />
I think everyone should join me in taking on and enjoying at least one of these actions this year<br />
<br />
identify your fears and embrace at least one of them<br />
take a long look at yourself--all of you, the whole entire beautiful wondrous and terrifying essence of your being--and then re-imagine yourself in some way<br />
<br />
I'd add at the end of both of those, "be different," or "be re-imagined," but the fact is, I think if any of us try any of these things, that will be the result no matter how small or large that difference seems at first. We are not dead; we are gloriously alive. And since we are alive--living matter, breathing being--we can shape and reshape and expand ourselves to encompass possibilities we can (or cannot yet!) only dream about right now.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-47485799699231017102013-12-26T13:42:00.000-05:002014-09-19T17:48:13.194-04:00Rubbing Stars"To live without roads seemed one way<br />
<div>
not to get lost. To make maps</div>
<div>
of stone and grass, to rub stars together,</div>
<div>
find a spark." </div>
<div>
~<i>from "Spark," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye</i></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
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Sometimes it is in the wandering that we find ourselves in the most perfect of places. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Just now, I am curled up on a couch in the lounge of a college in Vermont, happily tuning in and out of conversations around me; tuning in to hear discussions of publishing, of writing styles, point of view and audience. Tuning out to reflect on the day, on the last few days, on the end of last year. Last year when I came to this place of wonderfulness at the very end and after too long in transit. Tuning out to think of the next few days and the future smiling at me. </div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">To settle back into a small city, even if just for this period of 12 days, is beautiful. Walking everywhere--20 minutes down a slushy slide of a road to the downtown, dumptrucks loaded with snow driving past, clearing the way. On either side of the main streets quaint shops, local and proudly green or organic or handmade all. Espressos in honey-wooden rooms, crepe cafes and mad tacos and the most alice-in-wonderland sort of thrift stores. A sweater I have hunted for 8 years! Late night viewings of Les Miserables with my roommate at the old cinema by the capitol building and a taxi ride back through the night. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">Engaging in lectures on all sorts of wonderful subjects; of craft and of creation, of theories and possibilities and fascinations of all kinds. Readings that make you hold your breath, unable to breathe for the beauty of the words, of the particular arrangement of those precisely chosen words one after another in art and in meaning (and are those the same, afterall?). Losing yourself in workshops; reading and thinking and sharing--this wonderful back and forth--dialogue to take a work from what it is to even better; to impossibly better. Beautiful.</span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">I love the new faces, the new stories, the new friendships being made. The fact that this place is obviously a community that exists across space and regardless of this particular place; the understanding so crystalline that when we leave this particular here we will still be together talking and sharing and exchanging. Pushing and encouraging each other and continuing these dialogues. Continuing this lovely engagement. To not only go out with a group of friends, of fellow students, but with professors you cannot wait to work with; have so much to glean from. </span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); -webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.292969);">I love that in all my wandering without roads, I am found here, in this perfect place. Ready to wander some more, ready to make maps of stone and grass and to find a spark--to <i>make </i>a spark. To write. </span></div>
Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-58581528575246955212013-12-19T14:10:00.002-05:002013-12-26T13:53:10.584-05:00Bellydancing and Translation LessonsWhen I first packed up my beautiful apartment of the last five years--five years!!--I knew I had chosen to enter a season of suffering in some form. I remembered from growing up and studying across four fascinating continents that every change of place and abrupt altering of routine means not only exquisite adventures, but also ache and longing. It is the great dichotomy of my life; this love and hate of movement.<br />
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It has been two months now since my arrival in this city--it is in fact my seventh capital city in which I have resided in some measure of permanence rather than transience. I love it and frequently wonder why and how I lived so long in a rural area before coming back to a place that plays like music through my being, though I know the answers well and do not regret the choice.<br />
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In addition to glorious happiness, however, has been the pain. Firstly, people--people whom I grew to know and love over the years and expect to see every day, many times a day, on weekends. Fixtures in my life whom I must now live without their promise of regularity. People whom I miss dearly, who are now added to the Hall of Wonderful People I Have Known Around The World.<br />
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Past people comes everything else. The learning how to live and be and move in a new place. Building your reputation anew. Learning the culture and choosing what to embody and what to find a way around. Deciphering the webs; transportation networks, organization networks, friend networks, job networks. Where the best coffee is and how a dishwasher works. How you cannot get a post office box without a signed lease or car/home insurance or car/home ownership papers. How to calculate risk. How to write cover letters and obtain interviews and listen and talk. How to introduce yourself--here that experience is so different than the introduction of myself I have shaped the last five years. Here I am learning myself anew and determining what facets of myself to show and what to tuck away.<br />
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When I first came here, and found no one to smile back at me, no one I knew to feed me a hug or wish me good day; when I had no job to learn and no work to pour myself into, I found myself fading in shadow. I jokingly say to friends I am like a dementor (Harry Potter reference, if you don't know), feeding off the souls of others. (Don't worry, it's not quite like that...) In order to hold onto myself, I decided I needed to find a way to connect. For the record, connecting in a city is significantly easier than connecting in a rural area. All I had to do was chose what to connect with and decide it was monetarily an affordable investment. I chose: bellydancing.<br />
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Now bellydancing immediately afforded me a number of things: my first friends, my first group (think of this as a circle of people to come home to in a way), positive endorphins from the exercise, a reason to get out, discipline, and something wondrously fun and new. It was a perfect choice. The learning of bellydancing has also paralleled my own experiences moving here.<br />
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You start out simply, moving your body in ways that make you laugh, moving your body in ways that are so basic you think, that's it? really? But then as you continue learning, you discover some of the moves require you to forget muscle memory; that the particular muscle you are trying to use for a move is the wrong one; you need to forget it, and you need to learn to move all over again through a different muscle. The differentiation is fine, but significant. You also begin to discover muscles you never knew existed. I had no idea about some of the ones the teachers tell me to use. "You need to use this muscle, here," they say, pointing to a place on their belly that moves. I look at myself and try to move that area. Nothing. "Um, I don't think I have muscle there," I say, sheepishly, trying again. "Oh no, you do! You just aren't used to moving it!" And we all laugh. Now my body aches in places I never felt anything before, and the tiniest success I have in making a twitch thrills me. As we have progressed through the class, we have begun layering. Instead of working on just one move at a time, we combine two, or three. It's like on piano, the first time you play with both hands, and then the first time you play two different, complimentary notes on those two hands.<br />
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And it is exactly like starting out in a new place. You are back in many ways to the basics, to one step at a time and it feels so elementary it makes you angry at times. Things you should be able to do, or to handle, that you just cannot. How some things you did before still need doing, but with a tweak. You have to forget the old way and teach yourself the new. I feel as though after two months here, I am finally starting to find some of these new muscles, to reteach some of the old muscles, and to tap into muscles I used to use back in the day, when once before I lived in cities and capitals around the world, though never as an adult and professional.<br />
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So many new things.<br />
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Which brings me to translation. This is certainly something that I know a great deal of. How many languages have come through my ears? How many cultures and idioms? I remember in college days, I was still troubled by this idea that I had to be all of one thing and that meant none of another. For those like myself, global citizens and nomads, to deny one of our cultures in order to be fully the other is sto destroy or anihlate part of ourselves. A sort of ethnocide of self. But we just need to learn how to translate ourselves from one culture into another. We will pick up things, as actors keep a piece of every part they play, and we take all of these things and translate them throught the cultures in which we live and move. It is beautiful. It is a work of art. And like a baby growing up, it is the most natural thing in the world.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-80785108278429541022013-12-09T22:47:00.000-05:002013-12-26T13:17:34.378-05:00Just a Day's ReflectionOne of the things I have long loved about city living is the anonymity, and more particularly; finding within the anonymity your common humanity with the strangers around you. In my current employment, I get to interrupt the lives of people rushing past me, seeming to see only the next thing on their list, the lineup of their day, a driving goal they must reach in time. I interrupt them and speak for those who cannot, working for the chance to be heard and to connect them with someone completely outside of their world. Interrupting other people's lives is fascinating; watching the effect of these encounters on my life is no less so.<br />
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Today I met a man from the Czech Republic. It was so much fun to get to speak with him in a mixture of Czech, Slovak, and English. Earlier in the morning I met a man and stumbled through a brief conversation with him in Spanish. It was like dragging words out of a dream for me, so long since I have used that mind and tongue. I love that I can find here people in whom I can find an echo of life I know, but whose personal experiences in life are so incredibly different than my own.<br />
<br />
I spoke with one gentleman today, a friendly and brief exchange that made me smile--only to have him come back an hour or two later and blame me for losing him a contract. He spoke hatefully, commenting derogatorily on my appearance, tearing apart our conversation from earlier and it was shocking to see the transformation. I lost him nothing, in all honesty. I was a scapegoat to his bad morning and nothing else, but watching him rage there at me, at my coworkers, at the man whose conversation with me he interrupted--it was sad. It was as though he was dismantling his humanity and baring beast teeth and no one was impressed. "He is a sick, sick man," someone commented to me, shaking his head and then apologizing to me for what the man had said. "Don't you listen to that man. And you're beautiful, don't even think about what he said."<br />
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I hope I will never see that man again. I struggled with anxiety the rest of the day, wondering if others I meet would be like him, wondering if the whole world is like him, wondering what hope we have for ourselves when in reaction to our own disappointments we go out and deliberately crush and attempt to humiliate those surrounding us, people who are our neighbors for a second and our fellow humans for our lifetime. I wonder what it was he was hoping for and why his disappointment so devastated him; is his mind already sick, or did he have so much hinging on this one possibility that the disappointment of loss maddened him and lost him to himself?<br />
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The rest of my day was filled with fascinating encounters; a man who was homeless and on the streets at fifteen and sixteen who is now passionate about helping homeless children. My Slavic smile of the day. People who love to travel as much as I do, who love people and hold hope for humanity. Riding home at the end of the day, I saw a woman wearing a Santa Claus hat with "Bah Humbug" on it (like one I own but alas, is in storage this year). She sat down behind me on the metro and I turned and asked her about her hat--resulting in our chatting the rest of the ride to my stop. We just talked about Christmas, about giving gifts to our friends, about our families and life. It was beautiful.<br />
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Here in this city, there is so much opportunity to do things and so many people who like me, come from all over the world. I am reminded often of my days studying in London, when I first felt as if I could be in one place and experience all of my homes again. I love it. Walking home tonight, I stopped first at the grocery store and then wandered back laden down with oranges and wine and firewood and I was just overwhelmed with how completely happy I am to be here, in this city, in this place and time despite all the difficulties, despite the upheaval of perpetual transition, despite the continual unknown. I think how many things I am going to have learnt at the end of this, and I find myself slowly adapting to the continual feeling of being off kilter and unsettled. Though I have only been in this apartment now for a week and my room is a disaster zone, I can call it home and feel at home.<br />
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I am so excited for the perpetual possibility here for involvement and the motion picture of humanity playing around me every day and bumping into me. These make it possible to dream, and wondrous<br />
to exist as a being. So here's to humanity, and to possibility to renew and transform ourselves and the world around us even one small moment at a time.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-86355283873024911252013-10-29T15:50:00.002-04:002013-12-26T13:28:56.342-05:00Moving Pictures: A Motion StudyI am sitting today outside a Starbucks, ostensibly to take time out from writing job applications to write stories, to create outside of my life through the experiences in my life. That is something I deeply love about this idea of writing fiction; that it gives me the opportunity to be greater than the simple sum of my parts by leaping into the vast sea of humanity and the human experience: a dissolution of self into so much more.<br />
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But right now, everything in my immediate life is so intense and vivid that it overwhelms, that I jump off the diving board into the recesses of my mind only to be brought back up again by another wave of my reality, another pressing thing I need to do or consider.<br />
<br />
Moving, I think, to a new location takes hardly anything at all. You simply go from point A to point B. To make a successful transition, however, that takes so much more. There are things to do:<br />
--Get a new address<br />
--Update your address with every subscription, card, service, membership organization, and friend. (That, by the by, takes not one, but more like four hours, and may need repeating should the post office reassign your box)<br />
--Find new hangouts where you can be refreshed<br />
--Create a new health routine to suit your new situation and schedule<br />
--Build a new social network<br />
--Find out how to integrate your past social network into your new situation and schedule. Because while you can cut off your friends and end relationships when you move from A to B, why would you? Friendships are those things which ought to be able to not only rise above circumstances, but circumference differences and changes and geography. They may need reimaging and reimagining, but they are such a beautiful and wonderful and vital part of our lives. I would not be quite myself, <i>this </i>self, without the friends who have poured their lives into me through the years.<br />
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There are things required:<br />
--courage to explore and find these new things<br />
--boldness to accept an image of yourself that you may not feel confident in, but wish to move forward through: the sort of idea where you step into a pair of shoes which are too big for you and find that they give you the space to grow into them and expand your being<br />
--energy to try and try again, or to step a little further, or to again wake into a day that is full of the unfamiliar, that brims over with strangeness; that has little or no comfort zone for you to curl up in and hide away within<br />
--forgiveness of your mortality, of the humanity of yourself. Of the fact that you love having your life filled with people that you love, people you have gotten to know through the years starting with a smile at a stranger or a hello, and then built into the regular features of your life and now have to live without that regularity. Now have to start with ten million new smiles and hellos to a small ratio of returns<br />
--joy that you get to have this. That you get to wonder and wander and try and try again. That you get to meet SO MANY NEW PEOPLE every day and you never know who might become wrapped into the future of your life, what might come next, what to expect at all<br />
--a vision that helps you see how the many pieces of your life are not, or need not be, fragments. How they may all be so different and even clashing but still have worked to make you yourself--and in that way of being your self, you make all of them one and whole and not broken fragments at all. And this vision helps you with grief, because you know that what was still is, and what will be already is beautiful for that, too.<br />
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Wandering last week around Portsmouth (Pronounced "port's-muth"), Maine, I found my eye captured by this beautiful combination of colours; a yellow on a blue. It was just simply these beautiful berries of yellow and orange against the backdrop of the stony blue sea and I was swept away with the thought--my room at home (now gone), where i painted blue sea and stony sky and curtained rising yellow light from my childhood. That room is not lost for being gone; those colours are something I carry with me, carry everywhere. The splashes of what and who we love, of the tiny things which shape us echo about us, everywhere and always. Even when we are quite alone or cut off and apart from the particularity of what shaped us, their resonance remains, sounding like a song through our lives, note after note of meaning winding together and creating this most beautiful harmonic and perfectly unique piece which we play out.<br />
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I am reminded here in DC of how I first fell in love with London: it was the first place I had been to, since discovering that life can shatter us or give us the experience of fragmenting, where I felt whole and complete. Where I could walk around the city and hear languages in all my tongues . Where I did not need to choose between what part of my life was real and what might not be or had no space to be. Here in DC, I again hear so many languages, the ones I know. German, clearly from Vienna, speaking, and I remember riding around on the u-bahn going to and from school. The laughter and the homework and and the beautiful long trips. I bought these recycled beer earrings off a Kenyan man in the market Sunday afternoon. With him I got to connect and talk about Kenya, about the places one should see there and what did I see while there? And I thought, how funny it is that when I first travelled to Kenya, I never imagined that this "insane adventure" would echo so far into my future as to be part of my most solid reality.<br />
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Vertigo affects some people; I for one am deeply affected by it. I look over a cliff's edge and I experience motion. I struggle going down AND up escalators because the tedious motion of the steps and I think I might faint or collapse from it. This is not an issue of height, but of a particular manner of experiencing motion. Wibbly wobbly bridges. Rope ladders. Ice skates and skis. What I struggle with in moving is perhaps another form of vertigo; of everything being thrown into some strange suspension and this sensation of instability. But I adore the expanding of my universe, and the way that out of place and the definitions we lock onto in our lives, reality becomes reborn and we, with it.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-1471313090023078722013-10-11T16:56:00.001-04:002013-12-26T13:30:11.621-05:00Not All Who Wander Are Lost<br />
It's funny how life happens sometimes. One month ago, I never imagined that today I would be sitting by piles of red rocks staring out across the Atlantic Ocean from a portico on Prince Edward Island--and I have a pretty wild imagination! Yet here I sit, watching the clouds gather grey overhead and the ocean resting so very still. Across the way, the black of trees on an outcropping of land silhouettes itself against blue rolling hills further aback and the blue light falling from the sky beyond and above.<br />
For three years, I have fruitlessly lain plans with friends for roadtrips or plane-trips to this island, and each year they have fallen through; even this very summer! And now without a plan at all, with only a breath and a whim and a great big woosh, here I am.<br />
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It fascinates me to think what has been lost and what not? I no longer have a job; but I am still a professional. I no longer have an income, but I'm still existing and doing and eating and going. I no longer have my beautiful, perfect, and first apartment ever; but I have lots of couches and spare rooms and homes opened up to me for a return, for a visit, for a trip home. I am still a student and I am definitely an artist. I'm still a traveler, even if I have to let go of studying in Puerto Rico this winter because I cannot reconcile yet in my mind how do I pay for that when I have no idea of how my living will look? And I am doing and being what I do and know best right now: living a nomad's life and running to the sea. Crying and laughing with friends. Watching, writing, thinking.<br />
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I love that I have come to an island to think when I come firstly from an island. I love that the rocks and the dirt (or is it sand?) hidden here is red-toned, like earth I remember from childhood. I love that I have friends across the world and am never quite gone from home despite being where I have never stepped before.<br />
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Though not new to me, it is still odd to think that I will not be "going back" after this adventure. That I will instead be going on to something newer yet, more unknown and that the picture ahead is not littered with the faces and smiles of people I have come to expect to see every day, whom I already miss, dearly. That the picture ahead has very little at all that I can expect to know.<br />
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What I do know, though, is that I can read signs. I can get to Prince Edward Island by myself. I have navigated countries not my own, spoken languages I do not know the names of, and have yet to not enjoy an adventure I meet with. I know that I love challenges and that I crave a rawness in life and well, I've certainly got that ahead of me! These are exciting and wonderful times, however strange and hard and tiring they may also feel. This is how I love to live; walking on an unmapped path surrounded by wonder and heading into a great and beautiful mystery I will get to explore and learn.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-36894837725795116712013-05-24T17:47:00.002-04:002013-12-26T13:51:36.263-05:00Mid-trip Happy QuipI don't know how, but somehow in the absolute madness of the last few months I forgot just how much I love to travel. Not that I thought I didn't love it, but I forgot how ridiculously and completely happy I am when in motion, when lounging in an airport, when sitting in a place I have never sat before and perhaps will never again.<br />
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Right now I'm working at a coffee shop in downtown Portland, OR, and my sheets of paper and files litter the table while I stare out at a red brick building, a tree, and weather that changes rainy to sunshine to rain, etc, about every few minutes.<br />
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For the three nights of being in town, I rented a sailboat. My very own, whole, just for me sailboat. And it is wonderful. Last time I came out this way my friend Chloe and I roadtripped up to Friday Harbor from Portland and back again in the span of 24 hours. Now she is adventuring with me on my sailboat. It is glorious. Though I am tired and jetlagged and worn out from so much busyness and behind on my writing for school I am so happy I cannot stop smiling. My mouth hurts from defying gravity and poking up at the corners.<br />
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And then at this coffee shop, there is a piano. So I played piano for a while. Minutes. Not quite an hour. I'm not sure how long. But it was wonderful--such a deeply rich-toned piano that sounded like it would be friends with the boat if they could meet.<br />
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There is no doubt in my mind that one day I will have my own crossbreed of a sailboat/yacht and that there will be a piano in the cabin. And I will sit for hours on the deck and eat chocolate and cheese and listen to the wind and watch the expressions of the water change, and I will fall asleep to the lapping lullaby of the water again.<br />
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Tomorrow I head off to Seattle and then next week I head "home" again to London. I will be a jet-lagged wreck of a very happy person!<br />
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I love the random meetings with people you don't know at all. Love the walking past a boutique and finding the most perfect dress that fits just right. Love the sitting down to poetry and philosophy and the deep questions about life and the connections that make life so electric and eclectic. Love the live piano music in the airport and the man who tips you at the coffee shop to show how much he appreciates you sharing your music. I love that I'm sitting here on the other side of a continent doing work with a friend I haven't seen in two years as if we come here every day. Like I live here. Because I do, in a way. I live everywhere. I live most when everywhere. When in between and out of place. My place is the dandelion in the crack in the sidewalk. The boat frequenting new harbors. The plane stopping in around the globe. The girl on the bus or running along the river or riding out into the sea. Where every surrounding has a friend that I know, that I'm about to know, and that I love knowing. That I love, simply.<br />
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Right now I am so exquisitely happy. And this is how it ought to be.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-4707107339493858642013-04-28T10:44:00.003-04:002013-12-26T13:32:51.030-05:00Spring!The sun finally begins to warm up the world in this cold northern area, and I don't remember the last time I was this glad of that. It has been a long winter, and as much as I can still enjoy the snow, and prefer the shades of brown and grey to all these shades of green, I have missed the warmth rather desperately this year. Missed being outside all hours of the day and night reading or writing or just sitting and thinking. It's a bit too cold to do that all in the wintertime.<br />
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Picnicing outside this morning with my breakfast, I keep remembering the beautiful days growing up in the Caribbean. How my older sister and I would climb up into the boughs of our flamboyant tree, and curl up in the branches there to read all afternoon. Later on, we put wooden planks between the branches so we could stretch out. And still later on, we made a fortress on the roof of our already 2 story play house and would lie there between the earth and the sky and look out over the sea which lapped at our backyard; would look out across the bay to the town and to the hills and watch the dolphins go by and the pelicans and seaguls fish. I would give almost anything to go back to that space in time even for just an hour or two.<br />
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I remember how my grandfather, visiting from the States, would stare out at the sea all the time and tell us it was a million dollar view, or tell us we didn't know what we had. I think we just didn't know that the rest of the world didn't have it, too.<br />
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We spent all the time we could out-of-doors, in our "secret gardens"--little nooks and crannies of the yard where no one else went and later, no one else was allowed to go. She, my older sister, actually grew things in her garden. Beautiful flowers, lots of periwinkles, and a cantaloupe plant to list a few. My garden was of rocks. I displayed the gorgeous rocks I would find around the island on the lids of buckets tucked in between every branch that could possibly bear the weight. And one wall of my garden was lilies, and the door to it was a pale pink bouganvillea tree that bent just right so I could sit in it like a reclining chair.<br />
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Besides our gardens, we had a special area of very loose dirt in which we liked to play--out in the back yard up agaisnt the cliff edge that dropped down into the sea. We played hours in the red swirling dirt, moving our toy cars and trucks (the miniature ones) around and imagining cities and towns that now I think must have rather resembled the dwellings of Tatooine.<br />
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I am so happy right now to be able to sit outside again and read and write and eat and play in the dirt--though now I too play with plants instead of with cars and trucks. Even if these birds still sound so different to my ears and I miss the callings of the parakeets and the cheeps of the chibi-chibis and barika-hels, and even though I live now beside a creek and near a river instead of by the sea. Outside is just a glorious place to be.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-53263536308346756422013-03-10T22:48:00.000-04:002013-12-26T13:34:02.413-05:00What's A Little Uproar, Anyway? A week ago was the first day in about a month and a half where I woke up and actually felt good. I was beginning to think I'd never recognise that feeling again if it ever tried to show up, but I did, and I welcomed it back wholeheartedly.<br />
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This week has been full of much much work (that still didn't all get done!) as well as some happy fun. I don't have much to say on the matter, because right now I need to either be sleeping or working on story revisions... but I just have to tell you this one little anecdote.<br />
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Saturday afternoon my dear friend Cherith and I met up for a few hours visit. We used to have a girls time once a week at least back when we lived about 3.5 minutes apart. Now, though, the 1 hour drive dividing us makes that a little harder to swing. So it had been a while. Too long. And we decided to fix it with a late lunching at Applebees.<br />
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Well, with apologies to the vegetarians and vegans among my friends, I wanted meat. Badly. Like a starving carniverous dinosaur, in fact. Enough that every cow I passed on the drive there (and believe me, there were a LOT of cows!) looked like big juicy flank steaks just waiting for me to go bite into them. So when the waiter came around to collect my order (I just had to take enough time to see what kind of seasoning and sides I cared about, if i cared about them at all), I ordered a steak. Nice yummy 7 oz steak (just enough to leave you wanting more...)<br />
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And how would you like that served?<br />
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What? I questioned back. The din in the room was a little loud.<br />
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How would you like that served?<br />
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For some reason I thought at first he was meaning what did I want it brought out on, or maybe how it should be cut. So i stared rather dumbly at him, I'm afraid.<br />
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How do you want it prepared? He asked, patiently changing the word for me.<br />
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Well, I don't know about you meat lovers, but I like my steak so raw that it's practically like the cows I passed on the way here, still moving around on the plate. The more red, the happier I am. It is perhaps a more Gollum-esque turn of mine.<br />
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But I was really having a bad day for languages. I mean, all this writing and delving into your worlds and stuff, it's all tapping into these langages that I've never let mix in my head. They're flapping around there like a bunch of liberated girls from the 20's now, shaking it up and giving me mental wiplash.<br />
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So I said to the waiter, I'd like it rawer.<br />
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Can you say that out loud, please? Just take a second. Do you hear what it sounds like? A roar. A nice catty little claws out badly sexy RRRAaaawrrrr!<br />
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The poor waiter just stared at me. So I tried again.<br />
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Raawwweeerrr!<br />
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Rare? Cherith (I think) ventured to verify.<br />
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Yes. Rare. More rare is better. More raw is better. Rare-er. Raw-er. RED.<br />
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So yeah. Saturday is the day I Raaawr'd at a waiter. hahaha!<br />
It's nice to be out and about again!Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-44498898670548590382013-02-17T23:40:00.000-05:002013-12-26T13:35:54.553-05:00Adventures of a Recuperating Winter-bug WomanFar too many days have passed since I last stepped into this space, and I'm sorry for my absence!<br />
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These past few weeks I was first terribly busy for a few days, and then horribly and utterly miserably sick for a solid two weeks. I'm practically all better now, just more tired than usual. So, apologies--but know I'd much rather have been on here than be stuck sick in bed!</div>
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Being sick was a good reminder that my feisty independent self still can appreciate the care of friends, and I was touched by friends who came to watch movies with me so I wasn't alone the whole time (or skyped me so I could have a "change of scene" and actually croak to someone), or to bring me soup, a thermometer, medicines, juices, things I could actually eat now and then, and take me to the doctor. It also reminded me how much I hate not having words, because I was so sick I couldn't even think straight or get a string of words to work together. That was even worse than not having people around, I think--not being able to use words. </div>
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I remember so many different times in my life when I've not had words, too; when it has been not sickness, but language that has kept me from being able to speak, to say, to express. Sometimes it's just complete muteness. You have no words yet in that language, you cannot speak if you wanted to, your body does not know how to shape itself around that sound--it can barely recognise it as sound at all! And other times, it has felt like choking--when I've had the words in my head, when my tongue feels them in my mouth, but the edge of them gets caught at the back of my throat and garble comes out instead, choking noises none of us can comprehend. But when you cannot even <i>think </i>words, not in any language, not even with the mind in your fingertips? I am so thankful for the ability of my mind. </div>
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This last month, when I wasn't sick, and I wasn't going home early because of still being absurdly tired from having been sick, I was probably busy enough to make up for the sick time.<br />
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A group of seven members of a county leadership program (myself included) organized and hosted a silent auction, dinner, and mock trial to benefit the county youth court program. That was a really neat moment (a moment that topped like a cherry hours and hours of preparation and planning!). We had an overwhelming amount of items that we auctioned off throughout the day of the event, and then over 80 people who attended our dinner--raising about $3000. I go back and forth with this amount--is it a lot, or not that much, as a number by itself? But when I think of the significance of that number, when I think of the difference it will make to this program (ensuring the continuation another year of an amazing program of restorative justice for young people needing a second chance), then I think, wow, that really is an incredible success, and I am honoured to have been able to be a part of making that difference.<br />
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Our leadership class actually just came to completion this week: we had our graduation celebration Friday night, and the 14 of us got our certificates of completion for the program as well as a beautiful plaque to display and certificates of merit from our local state senator and of congressional recognition from our local congressman. I like baubles like that, I admit it. It's one of those "oooh, that's really neat" kind of things. But I want it to be more than just neat, and more than just a bauble or accolade to dangle like an earring or other accessory. I'm excited to be a graduate of this program now, and to go out and continue to see for the rest of forever all the ways I'm going to intentionally and unintentionally let this program affect my life. I love already being so much more connected to the greater community that I live in, and I'm so excited to go do something purposeful with that connection.<br />
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And finally (though not all-inclusively)...<br />
Late yesterday afternoon, after hours of trying to write in the afternoon, I enjoyed taking a break to go "teach a cooking class." I'm not sure how much teaching really happened, but I did succeed in leading a group of about 15 college students to prepare a very yummy dinner of one of my favourite foods from the Caribbean--pastechis. These are delectable half-circles of fried dough containing some wonderful filling. Last night we made some with cheese and then some with a spicy beef. We topped that off with a very USA chocolate chip pie. It was fun. Fun to share this taste of home, fun to hop around a huge kitchen, and mostly just fun watching all of them chop, roll, saute, fry, mix, knead and interact with each other. I did go straight home and sleep after that, though! (energy is just not up to par yet...)<br />
But then today, I went skiing again! Because yes, I really did love that first go. So I picked up a friend and off we went--her first time since a nasty accident 4 years ago that had her in a cast for about 5 months, and my second time ever. She took to the slopes like a fish to water, and I, well... I had a few intimate bonding experiences with the ground this time around. BUT, I had a wonderful time, and I made it up a whole new and super high ski lift (a feat because of my fear of heights) and down a big new swooshing slope--the hardest of the beginner levels. I'll definitely have a lot more rounds on the beginning slopes before I even consider going on the other ones, but it was nice to walk away with that accomplishment. And now, I am considerably exhausted and ready to sleep, dream, and anticipate all the wonderful things waiting in this new week. </div>
Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-47800605950736990962013-01-27T23:08:00.003-05:002013-12-26T13:37:29.556-05:00Ski Lifts, Bucket Lists and LifeWhen I was a little girl, I remember climbing up the gate at our house to sit on the stone column next to it and wait. Wait for my sister to leave for and then come back from school. Wait for the car to take me to school later on. Wait for my dad to come home from work. There was so much eagerness in that waiting--the excitement of something coming.<br />
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Yesterday I climbed the pile of snow plowed up by my house. The last few years I confess I tunneled into these piles with pots and pans and so of course, I had to make sure no other person tunneled in yet this year. But no such thing, so up I climbed. It was like my own personal little mountain in my front yard, a wonderful hawk-eyed view of the streets, the passersby. Not so high as my magic carpet, but wonderful in the way of the tree fort, the hide-out. </div>
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And again, I waited. Waited for some friends to come through so we could caravaan off to the ski slopes together. Tennis I wanted to play since I was a very little child. Skiing, though, I've wanted to try since I first left the Caribbean and got over the shock of the cold and winters. And though I spent so much time around skiiers, I was never granted that opportunity. These past few years, I've thought about it, watched it come around nearly in my reach, and then either slip away again or else I myself have chosen to grab some other opportunity. </div>
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But yesterday--yesterday was my day for skiing at long last. Yesterday, in this marvelously surprising unforseen way, I got to go skiing and it was just so delightful. Learning this foreign feeling, this way of thinking with the muscles of my body, of hearing them in my head and focusing on their directions. The conquering the never-ending fear of heights to move up the mountain, shaking in the seat as I try not to look down, as I remember all the other things I have conquered in my life and how this is the least of them all. To glide down this slope of pure white, so intent on harmony and balance and the beauty of your surroundings and having only a sensory awareness of others on the slope passing nearby at varying speeds. The hilltops across the valley smiling back at me and the cold kissing my nose. It was wonderful. </div>
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And it is the waiting for wonderful things like that, the eager climbing up a snow plow pile and watching for adventure, for opportunity, for <i>pure beauty-</i>-I want to do that with this whole year, with the rest of my life which sometimes feels like too many lifetimes to me. I want to climb to this hill of new persepective, of bubbling childish excitement, stamp a spot and plant my feet solidly and wait, eagerly; expectantly. Wait and reach out and embrace all the wonderful new experiences that lie around, hidden from my sight til just that perfect moment. </div>
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Today I ran away from home a while to start reading the next book on my school-list. Sometimes you just need to work from a clean slate, a new environment where everything isn't chatting away at you familiarly and intrusively all at once. I ran away to a coffeeshop where lots of strangers pass through; strangers whose lives seem oddly comforting and vaguely interesting, and it is not intrusive to tune in to their chatter. </div>
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One huddle of women around the firepit near me, wealth sparkling off their particular clothes, their large rings and fancy materials and all; they were talking about their vacations, where they wanted to go next, when they were done this skiing holiday of theirs. Belize, the Caribbean, somewhere really exotic. </div>
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From there, their conversation turned to bucket lists, to checking things off (one apparently is getting quite near to finishing her original list). And it got me thinking about my own list of things I want to do. Not much, really. I don't often sit around and think up adventures, or set life-goals or throw stones at the future in hopes that when I arrive there, I'll find the stone and recognise the significance of that place. But I do have a few things on my list, casual little ideas like flying a plane, walking across a country, seeing the northern lights, looking at the moon from antarctica. Higher education and telling stories that have little truths in them, stories that can resonante with something in all of us who claim common humanity. </div>
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I know I don't value my life enough. I spend copious amounts of time imagining for myself beautiful deaths, epic ways to leave this life behind because I get weary of waiting for the unexpected, or weary of letting ago of another piece of life that I loved dearly. Dearly. And because there is some part of me that finds an aspect of death alluring--Peter Pan saying "to die will be an awfully great adventure," perhaps. But I am grateful for the luxury of dreaming, grateful for the wealth of opportunities that I can choose to take hold of now and, hopefully, over the course of my lifetime. I'm glad that my life is one that can afford even the idea of a bucket list, of langously floating through life coming up with new adventures to turn my rotor towards. I'm delighted that I got to ski yesterday, and that I might go again sometime. I'm eager, in spite of the worse parts of myself, for the adventures of the lifetimes I have yet to live before me. And I am grateful for my life and its many measures of wholeness. </div>
Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-11670778298278787012013-01-20T13:03:00.002-05:002013-12-26T13:39:11.036-05:00The Intent to be Lost"So many things seemed filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster"<br />
~Excerpt from the poem "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop<br />
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I was thinking a bit this morning about lostness. This week has been such a one for me, wandering circles in my mind, going nowhere, breaking down. Wondering why so many things get lost. Wishing I didn't always feel so lost, myself.<br />
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On my second breakfast of today, circling cereal absently in my bowl, I came into focus on the spoon I was using. I love this spoon. It's not gold or silver, and it isn't fancy at all, but... My older sister and I, sometime in our early childhood, were flying with our parents to the States for a visit. They had those handy take-out bags on the plane; most people called them barf bags, but we could see their true purpose. So we took our take-out bags, filled them with cookies (the flight attendants loved us, so we got lots of extra goodies from them), and then went up and down the aisle collecting cast-off treasures from other travellers. I'm not sure just when exactly our parents, seated somewhere else on the plane, discovered our entrepreneurial designs, but we did have to retire back to our seat eventually. Yet even so, when we got off the plane and offered up our treasures to our parents, they were surprised.<br />
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In addition to cookies, apples, sugar packets, towelettes, pretzels and some salt & pepper packets, we had taken several sets of silverware. Yes, real honest to goodness (not silver) silverware. They used to use those on planes, before it was just first class, before it was unsafe to have it at all. And it didn't occur to us that you were supposed to leave the silverware on the plane! So, we had this fine mini-collection of both of our sets of silverware--knives, forks, and spoons. Monogrammed with the airline's name, no less.<br />
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All these many years later, I wonder what drawers in what countries those forks and knives and spoons came to rest in, so far away from their airline home, so settled onto the earth instead of flying over it endlessly. And in fact, that airline shut down years ago. But somehow, I still have that one solitary spoon and it makes me smile every time I see it. Smile and remember two brown skinned blond haired girls going up and down the airplane aisle with barf bags. Smile and remember being told to NEVER take silverware off a plane again (though I'm pretty sure our parents probably muffled their laughter at our shocking actions). Smile and think how funny it is that such a small thing can still echo into today.<br />
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I think about that in terms of lostness. The fact is, I know that as bewildering and exhausting as the experience of lostness is, and even how frightening and overwhelming as it sometimes grows, I would rather live my whole life lost than ever walk on a road.<br />
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My youngest sister and I have a plan lying between us; our golden egg which we look forward to hatching. When she has a breath and I can get 3 months off in a row, we are going to walk from the bottom of England to the top of Scotland, and then ferry our way across the islands at the top to the highest one, to Unst. I dream of that place I have never seen. I dream of us wandering through all that land, wet and smelly and angry and perfectly wonderously content. They say that there are 3 ways you can do that trip--walk along the roads, travel from camp-site to camp-site, or wander by the stars through fields, hobbiting your way across the world. Can you guess which way we'll go?<br />
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I think of all the things I've lost through the years, the toys and the dolls, the pens and the keys and the books--so many books. The ID cards and tickets. The friends and the homes. Colours. Villages and cities and smells. Countries I love. Languages I now can only cry in.<br />
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But I think the fact is, we carry the truth of all these things with us still. I think someday, even if I am denied my freedom, denied my belongings, denied my dignity; I think even if I am cut off from my memories completely through cruelty or the naturally unnatural brokenness of the body, I think I will still be myself. And myself holds all these things, holds the image the imprint the timeless impact of all these things, of all the things which ever touch or shape us. So how can they ever be lost to us? And how can we ever truly be lost? Why should we ever despair in our feelings of lostness?<br />
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Maybe the experience of lostness is just tasting the wonderous expanse of the world that exists outside of time, and being perfectly overwhelmed. <i>Perfectly.</i>Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-60642100463160400382013-01-13T23:51:00.003-05:002013-12-26T13:40:28.321-05:00Happy Sleepy Warm and Fuzzy Thoughts from a GRAD STUDENT!I think January caught the flu; we've had about 24 hours now of enjoying the heat of its fever. After the bone-chilling weather of Vermont which had been years since I had to experience, the exceptional warmth of these days in NY came even more shockingly. Sleeveless dresses? Picnics in the warm sun? flip-flops to cross the grass while piles of melting snow tug at the corner of my eye? So bizarre. But not at all unwelcome! <br />
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These days of being back home, of adjusting to "real-life" once more; these mornings of waking up with the refrain <i>I'm a student again</i>! singing in my head so happily (far too cheerfully for so early in the morning!!) and of loving it, loving every minute of it. Tracking my first few books (yes, paper books still--I have yet to submit to the nook or the firepad) as they make their journey through the states (I think, it would have been so fun if the pony-express-boys could have had little gps devices attached to them so the girls in their dresses tucked away at home could at least follow the adventures of their little missiles...). Sitting in front of the computer screen and teaching myself it's ok, it's alright--release the Krakken; let your imagination come forth and swallow you whole. </div>
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Writing. Just the pure joy and the crystalline despair of writing. Of investing in myself in this one thing which I love most and above all else. So wonderful! </div>
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It's terribly invigorating. Though I have so much less time, I've already done more cleaning and more cooking and more baking and more walking and more scheduled eating than I usually do in at least a month's time. (Well, excepting the walking. I haven't walked <i>that</i> much yet, not a month's worth!) But really. It's like being alive again. </div>
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Watch me take that back next week, when I get swallowed up in the craziness of starting up a semester again and decide instead of being alive, it's drowning instead... </div>
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Today I made the experiment of cooking Ethiopian food. I had some ingredients for it hiding in cupboard around my home, I think they must have been whispering to me. And of course, experience says that when you are about to embark on the tied-for-2nd busiest month of the year, you should always have meals available for a quick grab, so that you don't subsist on 2 shots of espresso a day, office chocolates, granola bars, and shrimp and spinach. Not that those are bad things. But they don't promise the best nutritional balance or the carousel of flavour which I prefer to indulge my taste buds in. So now i have a freezer full of daro-wat and kik alicha, as well as enough in my fridge for the next week of off and on meals, and some stock to make into a hearty potato stew (if I get around to picking up some vegetables in the market). </div>
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I also indulged my nostalgia and made poppy-seed bread which I haven't made in about a decade. It still tastes just as good! And fresh out of the oven poppy seed bread with a nice mug of fresh-brewed double-shot mocha is perfect for a Sunday morning. </div>
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It was all very good. </div>
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I think tonight I am just so happy it is hard to even think about sleeping, hard to imagine that I might close my eyes on this well of joy and wake up tomorrow still with this thrill, still with this exultation. But I suppose if I don't close them soon... I will be too tired and grumpy in the morning to even care about exultation! </div>
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And so, goodnight my readers. I hope you sleep well, or wake well, whichever timezone this finds you in. </div>
Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-53223092741544998812012-12-31T21:18:00.003-05:002013-12-26T13:44:06.805-05:00Thanks for No Apocalypse It only seems fitting to end the year with a note of some kind. I thought about saying goodnight to a tired year, but somehow I feel as though this year is wide awake and ready for a dance party with the new year. So why say goodnight to it? Why even really say goodbye? I want to say<br />
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2012, you have been a year of surprise. I knew how old I would turn this year if I didn't die beforehand, but I'm not sure I saw anything else coming along towards me.<br />
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I'm pretty sure 2011 was a tame travel year, but 2012--we saw the world together. Another continent, and the chance to go home again. Could I ask more? But there was. The West Coast again, and then the northeast coast with Maine. And then dropping down to Florida.<br />
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I went by last minute whim in the spring wondering what I was doing to a writing conference because I happened to do and enjoy an improv poetry reading night with a couple friends and a number of strangers in DC in summer 2011 and chanced on a lecture on essays and talked to one of the lecturers after and then on another whim in August applied to grad school. At the professor's school. Which is where I now sit writing this. Wow.<br />
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Somehow I happened into my first year in which not a single holiday was spent with my family, not a one. And yet I think this year has filled fuller with family and positive, bond strengthening family moments than any other in a long time past.<br />
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So many other things. Many of which are already chronicled here and will not be repeated in this post. But really, what an insane year. I don't know how 2012 <i>isn't </i>a tired year, after all it's done on my part alone. I mean, <i>I'm </i>tired just thinking about all this, and I cram a lot in, I think.<br />
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I have no idea what to expect of this next year. I know I should graduate from my county leadership program. I know I will be writing, a lot. A <i>lot.</i> I will be a full time professional and a full time student. Maybe I will learn to ski. I will watch my brother graduate and I will desperately miss the last couple years of having the very unexpected privilege of living nearby him and watching him grow up and become a bigger being and stealing a hug or a lunch with him. (or coffee and cookies)<br />
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I will also be loving the usage of student discounts again. I can't even say that enough.<br />
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But when I think about this year now closing, I have to say that really, I don't know what this next one will be. I hope it will be a little less sad, with a lot less loss (somehow!). But I also hope it will be also (still? anyways?) dynamic and surprising. Because 2012, it's been something else. Thanks for not going out in apocalypse.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-51283196086418326602012-11-30T14:45:00.001-05:002013-12-26T13:45:09.745-05:00Sun Coast Sun Kissed Some Kind of HappinessIt's Friday where I am, sitting at a high table in a cafe at an airport right now, in transit somewhere in the great wide small large world. I've spent this whole last week in transit, this whole last month, several months--year, really. What a year! But this is not a new years reflection.<br />
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This past week I have enjoyed the warm and sunny weather of Florida--a nice change from the snow I left behind, and no doubt a cruel change to the snow falling steadily and piling up on my car for my return home. A welcome nonetheless, though. </div>
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I love airports; I realise I have made this statement before, and it surely will not be the last time. But really I do just love them. And I love the people I got to see on this Florida trip; friends I unexpectedly found out were in the area, childhood friends who live here, school fellows through a soccer match, new acquaintances through business meetings, and completely delightful strangers. </div>
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I spent hours in a cute little car my favourite shade of bright blue driving around the state, over huge bridges with towers like the sails of a ship, across marshlands, past Disney, by grove after organge grove, around fields and fields of cows--more cows here than in NY!--where old large trees stretched out their limbs languidly in the heat and covered themsevlves in drapes of grey moss falling down to meet the drying grass. So many different sights of beautiful. And even when I found myself despising the endless stretches of flat I rolled into wavy planes and found small small hills to smile in again. </div>
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Sea sponge, fisherman's warves, eating Greek food. Blue water sparkling everywhere. </div>
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I didnt go to Disney when I was near, didn't go because I hadn't the time to spare. Because I can't imagine doing Disney on one's own--you need a group to laugh with for an experience like that. I didn't do Disney because they advertised "come enjoy the most spectacular experience in the world," and maybe I'm a snob or maybe I'm just incredibly ignorant, but I can't imagine that the most spectacular experiences in the world will be found in an amusment park or in simulated adventures. I like to think that my own completely ordinary day to day moment to moment experiences are spectacular, and that I have done and seen and touched and tasted and shared in some of the most wonderful and inimitable experienes in the world and they were part of real life, not a place of pretend that is outside of reality. (And don't get me wrong. I LOVE movies and films and Harry Potter world and I would love to go fly a broom and drink pumpkin juice and have a try at Hogwarts--in UK--and all of that. I just don't think that it should be chalked up as the single most spectacular and life changing dream come true kind of thing... Though maybe it is. I don't know.)</div>
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But all that being said, I think I had a pretty fantastic experience even with some deeply frustrating moments strewn in. This morning before heading to the airport, I ran to the beach. (Shock, I know) And it was so beautiful to walk on the fragile broken rainbow of shells in the soft white powder sand along the gulf and look out and think how perfect. How perfect. And how happy I am to have seen the ocean this year from shore to shore to shore to shore to shore. So much. So happy.</div>
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Now comes it that November ends and tomorrow begins December, a month where seeing magic is so easy. A month where I'm going to be just as busy!! And I'm terribly excited to see how it goes. </div>
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Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-71043905147874168002012-11-19T19:35:00.002-05:002013-12-26T13:46:02.844-05:00In Abstract Sometimes as I sit at home, curled up on the floor toes tucked in and fingers curled around a warm mug, I catch myself wondering what in the world I'm doing. I'm the kind of person who lives a very very busy life--and not just busy, but deliberately full. That differentiation is crucial. Busy is mainly concerned with doing and quantity; full is rather more about being and quality.<br />
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This year has had an awful lot of busy, so that at times like this when I'm curled up at home, I wonder, what am I doing? What is my life about? Is it ok that I am taking a few moments of pure silence--not speaking to anyone for a few minutes or occasionally, whole days? How do I keep the balance for myself between just being "busy" and having a "full" life as I explore what life has just sitting around waiting for me to pick up and try out? I don't want to invalidate my existence.<br />
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I think that what I love most about my life is the people I get to meet going through it. People are also the hardest part for me because they are the most unpredictable. They come in, they go out. They live, they love, they leave. (And they will all leave, you know, even if it is just through death.) I love that my life is such that it allows for so very many people, and such different people at that.<br />
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And I think what I love even more about life is the beauty that can be found in it. The beauty of people, of their beings and how they choose to live their lives. Or the beauty of wonder. So much wonder! And the time to sit quietly like now and mull over the wonder of it all, this is good and still full. I think, I am so fortunate to be a witness to so much beauty, even the most painful piercing kinds of beauty that we find in the depths of life.<br />
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Just a thought.<br />
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<br />Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-29335053561116151422012-11-06T20:34:00.000-05:002013-12-26T13:47:05.158-05:00Experiencing the Governance of GovernmentIt is election night in These United States, and for the first time in my life, I am a part of this process. I have been old enough to be legally permitted to cast my ballot for some years now (no, I will not specify how many), but was not ready until today to do so. Not that I actually was ready to do so today, either. But I would never be more ready than today, and so it is done. I voted.<br />
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As someone who has grown up ever on the outside of government, though always fiercly affected by them, this is a momentous occasion. To me it is not simply the act of voting, which is, honestly, pretty exciting in its own right. It is in the choosing to claim a privilege offered to me in a country which happens to have also offered me citizenship. It is the accepting of that privilege, and the desire to do right by it.<br />
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I love that in this election, I can actually know some of those whom I had the choice of voting for, too. It is one thing to be able to claim, I greeted the Queen of the Netherlands at the airport once, or to say, I shook hands with the President of Slovakia (back when he was president). But to say, I have looked at what such and such person did, and dialogued about it in the community, and met that person different times and heard in person for myself what they have to say, how they feel and think on issues of importance and relevance to my local community, to my extended community, even to my international home community--that is something different. And then to voice my opinion; do I want them to continue their mission? To continue working in my service, in the service of the people and localities around me? Who do I choose to shape my world, and who do I set in place to do that shaping?<br />
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These are new experiences.<br />
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I like the idea that this does not have to be a choice of life or death. I like that I can vote in peace. I like not having to wonder if after tonight there will still be a government or the same country at all. I like that there are so many reasons I can determine who I wish to vote for--did they do that thing i wanted them to? do they believe in my preferred form of government? (which if i may say--it is interesting that perhaps it is not always best to choose your preferred form of government. not all government is good for all places. Hmmm. easy to say when you look somewhere else and think--they shouldn't do that kind of government there! but when you have to look at your own world and say they shouldn't do my kind of government here.... that's funny.)<br />
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I like that I am sitting outside a cafe right now, my booted feet propped up on a fire pit, gloved hands typing this and spiced hot chocolate next to me, and i can watch the results come in on my free wifi to this device i'm using. I like that it is peaceful and quiet on such a big night here.<br />
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I have no idea what to expect or even what really to want, because who can ever possibly predict what the passing of the moon and the sun will bring. But I am proud of myself tonight for finally taking part in government; for accepting a privilege and for taking ownership over something. And I will sleep well for that reason alone.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-83311116472682158652012-11-01T00:23:00.001-04:002013-12-26T13:48:25.610-05:00A Brief Grief Journal<br />
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October has been such an exquisitely difficult month. I have felt the pain of loss keenly, reaching me from many different areas of my life. It has taken great effort to put energy into anything other than simply sitting and allowing myself to feel my way through sadness and pain to the other side of grief. Certainly I am not there yet, but I know I'm closer and that is good enough for now.<br />
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In the midst of hurt, though, I find myself thinking how fortunate I am to have things in my life that can hurt me. To have people you love so much that the loss of them is unspeakable agony--the kind that cramps your whole body up, the kind that makes you bend down over and curl up fetally, the kind that just turns you into a leaky sieve so that you start crying even in a happy moment. Funny how closely tied pain and hurt are to happiness and joy.<br />
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I think that while allowing oneself to experience grief is both good and necessary, giving yourself up to drown in it is not good. Wallowing is easy. Stasis is easy. After all, as I mentioned earlier, so much energy is spent just experiencing so much feeling at all, how do you have energy to do anything else? To move forward? And if there is one thing that I would look back at my life and say, it is that you cannot expect anyone else to pick you up when you are down. You have to choose to get up. For me, that means doing things even when I don't feel like doing them--especially things that give energy.<br />
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I derive energy from creativity, so I have taken on the project (BIG project) of painting one of the rooms in my house. Colours, primer, moving pianos and stacks of books and clothes and pictures and stuff stuff stuff. Painting. Creating. Repetitive motion.<br />
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I do derive energy from people. So don't cancel your parties, don't isolate yourself from others even when you don't feel like seeing anyone. Keep living and being and watching those around you live and be and remember how beautiful it is to love people, to love at all. If you are lonely, invite someone else who is alone. If you are hungry, make something and share it with someone, even if you don't see them, even if you are simply sending it to them.<br />
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Take conscious note of all the things you find beautiful. I was in Buffalo visiting one of my dear friends. I didn't feel social--I just felt sad. But I let myself let go and move outside of the sadness and enjoy something happy (and tasty!! mmm, Thai food.) And then, I went with her to visit an Nepali family she has gotten to know. It was so incredibly perfect, sitting on a couch somewhere in Buffalo talking about loss and exile and experiencing someone else's pain that you understand and drinking chai and knowing that <i>life is beautiful </i>anyway.<br />
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I've eaten sushi, picked pumpkins, receivedhugs, scheduled out things to keep doing til i'm finally starting to think a bit more spontaneously again.<br />
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Nearly a week ago now, I went to a fundraiser up there. What fun! Going on stage at Shea's--one of the biggest stages in the whole of the States! And going backstage and in the stars' dressing rooms, and underneath the stage where the trap doors are. I still have yet to shake my desire to go straight back into serious theatre. It's come in handy, though, with lots of costume parties the rest of this week. Snow White and Marilyn Monroe!<br />
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During the big "Frankenstorm" that just came around, I had a sleepover and pumpkin-carving and movie-night with another friend. Storms are one experience I hate to have alone, and it was so much fun to have a sleepover in response to my facebook post "now accepting applications for storm-sleepover-buddies" (or something like that) and to revel in good company.<br />
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What I know is that I hope November is a better month. No new losses to stagger under. No horrid storms, no deaths nor dying. To come out of this sleepwalking and back into smiles and quick laughter that just bubbles out again. To not have to work so hard at living and remembering the beautiful. Please, November--be restorative.Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3177811326194670697.post-28030814460033856142012-10-22T21:27:00.001-04:002013-12-26T13:50:17.548-05:00Thoughts from a Sunday DriveYesterday afternoon, I drove back to NY from South Jersey--about a 6.5 hour drive, really. Beautiful drive. Music playing; my brother buried in his book and I in my thoughts. Sometimes it frightens me--for the last few months the hills of NY have risen up to welcome me back. They roll in waves of home at me and swallow me up. I'm still not fond of their particular shade of green (except when the shadows hit them just right and they turn a beautiful blue-green and purple instead), but on this drive even that did not matter. Those hills were lit up in tongues of flame: it was like driving through fire, all burning glory and golden auburn bronzed beauty.<br />
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I am proud that I can feel at home in this place now; proud of the hard work I put into making a strange and foreign land become a home and a haven. Proud that I made a place to come back to--that I find myself thinking in my head one day I will return to. Where the whales go to die.<br />
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But who knows--I could say that of many places already, so I suppose there are many other places I may yet come to say that of.<br />
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I think of the way I have home in the people I love, so that I can go to a strange place and find it feels like home to me. Over a year ago, I spent 6 days traversing the West Coast--California, Oregon, and Washington all. (Yes, it was a whirlwind!!) And I had hardly a single set plan going there except the times of my flights and the airports themselves. But it was fabulous. It was home every single breath because of the people, because of the wonder, because of the space to be whole self.<br />
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This month has been a month of grieving and of loss, and I know that the experience of both for myself will continue on for some time more. But still I love the choice to smile anyways. The choice to live largely, to be bigger than oneself and to exist outside of the limits of immediate feeling. Time travel is unfortunately not an option (to me, anyways...), but what we do with the time we have? How much we can fill it with. Minutes are confined, but moments--aren't those forever? They stretch on and on in their own expanse somehow.<br />
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Nearly a month ago (how has time gone by so?!), I traveled out to Indiana to visit some dear friends. And it was wonderful. I jumped the midnight train, arrived around 8:30 a.m., changed at their flat and then went and volunteer worked all day alongside my friend in a kindergarten classroom (where she works). Never done that before... Then I saw my first highschool football game. Which also happened to be a homecoming game and the homecoming court was crowned. Then that weekend I also saw my first band competition, which was really fun! And of course, hours walking and talking and full of tasty foods and drinks and new people and dear dear people I already know. I think I like to have at least one new experience every day, though I do prefer them more happy than grievous.<br />
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Live as big as you can just for the breath-taking beauty of life which is bigger than you, and then live a little bit bigger than that.<br />
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<br />Ladahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02433774655645838501noreply@blogger.com2