"Many of us hate limitations. We rail against them and push into them, HARD. And sometimes to great effect...."

Video portrait of the blogger finally starting to hit a skill that took 2.5+ years of off-and-on work....both soft work and "smashing into the rocks" work.

 "There is a skill you will never do. It may require more strength than you will build, more flexibility than your body can manage, a specific kind of coordination, timing, or momentum that is outside of what you'll develop. We like to think of ourselves as limitless. But this is a mistake. We will always be able to continue to grow, but we grow like oaks, up and out and down and sideways, in accordance with our environment, our genetics, and our experience with previous growth. We don't grow infinitely in all directions at once.

"Many of us hate limitations. We rail against them and push into them, HARD. And sometimes to great effect.

"And sometimes, we put so much of our energy into railing against a limitation, pursuing a skill or a trick or a goal -- that we fail to grow into the soft places where we can have more success.

"I'll be the last to tell you to take the path of least resistance. But I'll be the first to tell you that what sets you apart as a performer, and as a human, is the beautiful variety of what comes naturally to you. Lean into what works, what feels good, what you do that no one else does. Strive for excellence AND don't smash yourself against the rocks of a skill that isn't coming.

"It's a hard balance to strike, it's even hard to explain. But if you needed permission to work on something different, or to soften your intensity where it's only frustrating you, or to spend time playing with that sill arm movement you like to do. This is it!"

- Janelle Peters / @cirque_psych 

I keep returning to these thoughts. I'm not a performer, just someone who likes to move and, both separately and relatedly, keeps needing to learn not to rail against limitations.

I hadn't experienced that in such a physical way until I started recreational circus. Aerials are physically strenuous enough that I found I could quickly ruin my whole evening if I didn't know when to quit trying, when to leave a skill alone that just wasn't happening for me. I'd get more and more tired and more and more frustrated (which is hardly a combination that leads to breakthroughs, huh)...

Anyway, I was grateful for this perspective and copied these words down into my aerials notebook. Circus specifics aside, maybe they'll resonate with you too.

On letters and becoming a writer

"The mindset of the writer I can trace back to the mindset of wanting to control the narrative of my life, which never otherwise felt like something I could control. The fears I had, the things I wanted but couldn't get, I discovered and expressed through writing letters to pen pals. In those days you bought a teen magazine, and it had a list of addresses for young people living all around the world. At one point there were whole magazines devoted to pen pal addresses....There was no security about it - you just wrote to them, and they wrote back. It was like discovering something impossibly brilliant and wonderful, something delightful that was available at no cost - always available. I still have at least one pen pal from those days of my preteen years that I am in touch with.

"But what fascinated me was that...your role was to explain your world to the person you were sending the letter to at a time when they did not have access to other parts of the world. There was no internet. I was living in Jamaica. If something happened for news to go around the world, it would have to be monumental; it wouldn't be about everyday life. If you went to an encyclopedia, it would be twenty years out of date. So, in a sense, I became not just an authority on my life, but an authority on the culture of the country in which I lived - its landscape, climate, day-to-day rhythms, and even its language. If I had a pen pal, they'd be the authority on their space. We'd be the conduit for knowing our worlds. I got a thrill both from receiving those letters and for the thought that what I was saying was being consumed and was shaping their understanding of the world I knew intimately.

"...What I was doing was telling my life from my perspective, my point of view, which, as it happened, was my point of power. I was acutely aware that if something happened to me, if I got beat up in a fight, that my telling could be my revenge, that I could control that narrative. Even if the fact was that I lost that fight, in the retelling of it and the choice of what I could tell, I was very aware of constructing and controlling the narrative, and that I was, whether through the use of humor or exclusion or of irony, the hero in the telling. You can imagine that, if you're doing this regularly, to multiple people, that as incidents happen to you, you're thinking, "I can't wait to write about this." And the difference between a letter and a journal is that there is an audience, and someone is going to write back and say, 'I didn't understand this,' or, 'This made me laugh,' and I think that's the moment when the sensation of writing and the command, the control, the shaping, the texturing of writing began appealing to me, and drew me in.

"And if I were to be honest, and here I am being very honest, that impulse has not changed - it has merely grown. What I mean to say is that the closest thing that I can think of to a prototype for my fascination with being a writer was in my experience as a writer of letters to pen pals in my teen years. Any genuine study of writers of the past, and especially of the 19th and 20th century, will make this point clear. Most writers practiced their craft in letters. At the very least, their first experience of 'publication' would have been in letters. It is a shaping thing."

- Kwame Dawes
in interview in Rattle #65

As someone who also spent some of my formative years writing to friends I'd never met, I loved his explanation of what that process can bring, and it resonated profoundly.

"Such a boom of organized hostility to life"

"As a young girl at boarding school, I cartooned...to possess the unattainable....Today I realize I've got quite the opposite impulse, trying to nail down the normalized malaise that defines the downtown world. My once bohemian city is now pumped so full of tech cash that everyone walks around terrified: of failure, of not enough or the wrong kind of success, of being beat to market by someone with the same absurd idea. I've never witnessed such a boom of organized hostility to life. It's as though the whole city is standing on a shrinking ledge while pretending it's at the best party ever thrown. The twisted creatures flowing out of my finger onto the tablet screen are like the neck-treading demons lurking inside every comely young entrepreneur carting endless confidence and optimist to the streets. Out, out, all of you, into the cold light of day. Let us examine and document the true shape of you."

Jen Burke Anderson
Womankind #21

It has been so bizarre to see how my hometown of San Francisco has transformed in the past ten years. I felt grateful when I read these words from another longer-term resident of SF, for what they capture that I haven't been able to put into words myself.

And the only pain

Here the soft hills touch the ocean
like one eternity touching another
and the cows grazing on them
ignore us, like angels.
Even the scent of ripe melon in the cellar
is a prophecy of peace.

The darkness doesn't war against the light,
it carries us forward
to another light, and the only pain
is the pain of not staying.

– Yehuda Amichai
from "North of San Francisco"

On the process of exercising our own voices

"...[T]he same thing happened to me that has happened to many other women who've set out initially to recover lost and silenced feminine voices. Too constrained or timid or plain bewildered to speak for ourselves, unready, perhaps, to open certain doors in our own consciousness, we take the part of another...and break her silence. It might be our mother or grandmother, a woman of our own ethnic background or religious tradition, or one who has undergone a significant experience that we have, too, like illness, divorce, conversion, or exile. We choose our alter egos carefully and practice ventriloquism under the guise of scholarship or journalism, and eventually, often before we realize what's happening, we've begun to exercise our own voices."

– Carol Lee Flinders
At the Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst

This rings true for me. For you?

I thought first of Faith's recent post on sexual harassment and fear, because she expresses anger on behalf of her younger sister in it — though I don't want to impose Carol Lee Flinders' analysis on her.

The incident that comes to mind from my own life: the sadness and anger I felt when I overheard my younger cousins assessing their bodies with the most ancient-sounding of sighs. Before I could recognize my own eating disorder as outrageous and grievous, before I could want health and peace for myself, I had to want it for them. And so I spoke about them, and a year later was ready to repeat my sentiments on my own behalf as well.

It is beautiful and right to become angry for others and advocate for them. And it is most beautiful and most right when it reminds us to expect and demand no less for ourselves — because it is consistent, because justice belongs to everyone, because we deserve no less than anyone else does. No less.

From "A Long Conversation"

All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you’re
only
as we were     trying
          to keep an eye
         on the weapons on the street
     and under the street

Just here, our friend L.: bony, nerve-driven, closeted, working as a nurse when he can’t get teaching jobs. Jew from a dynasty of converts, philosopher trained as an engineer, he can’t fit in where his brilliant and privileged childhood pointed him. He too is losing patience: What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc . . . & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends?

You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about “certainty,” “probability,” perception, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people’s lives. And thinking about these things is NOT THRILLING, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s MOST important.

His high-pitched voice with its darker, hoarse undertone.

At least he didn’t walk out, he stayed, long fingers drumming.

– Adrienne Rich
in Midnight Salvage

You / I

"do you remember the way the girls
would call out 'love you!'
conveniently leaving out the 'I'
as if they didn’t want to commit
to their own declarations."

– David Berman (via)

My thoughts as I read this:

1. I do that.

2. It does feel more comfortable and less meaningful.

3. Resolved: no longer. Subject pronouns or bust. Let words have weight; I love you.

And where there is rain

This is what I love about his poems, that they are like photographs. Or small in-between moments from a beautiful movie. An aching clarity.


Always a Rose: 6

Not for the golden pears, rotten on the ground —
their sweetness their secret — not for the scent
of their dying did I go back to my father's house. Not for the grass
grown wild as his beard in his last few months,
nor for the hard, little apples that littered the yard,
and vines, rampant on the porch, tying the door shut,
did I stand there, late, rain arriving.
The rain came. And where there is rain,
there is time, and memory, and sometimes sweetness.
Where there is a son, there is a father.
And if there is love there is
no forgetting, but regret rending
two shaggy hearts.
I said good-bye to the forsythia, flowerless for years.
I turned from the hive-laden pine.
Then, I saw it — you, actually.
Past the choked rhododendrons,
behind the perishing gladiolas, there
in the far corner of the yard, you, my rose,
lovely for nothing, lonely for no one,
stunning the afternoon
with your single flower ablaze.
I left that place, I let the rain
meditate on the brilliance of one blossom
quivering in the beginning of downpour.

– Li-Young Lee
from  Rose

Our tentative and groping words

"Women have been driven mad, 'gaslighted,' for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each others' sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

"Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other...

"Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body.

"The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper.

...

"It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I want to tell you.

"It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

"The possibility of life between us."

– Adrienne Rich
"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying"

Anna Akhmatova ate the metaphorical tangerine

"'Who can refuse to live his own life?' Akhmatova once remarked in answer to some expression of sympathy. Her refusal not to live her life made of her one of those few people who have given dignity and meaning to our terrible century, and through whom and for whom it will be remembered.

...

Pushkin was the closest of the friends she did not meet even once in her life. He helped her to survive the 1920s and 30s, the first of Akhmatova's long periods of isolation and persecution. Dante, too, was close. And there were friends whom she could meet, including Mandelstam and Pasternak, whose unbreakable integrity supported her own. But no-one could have helped, through thirty years of persecution, war, and persecution, if she had not herself been one of the rare incorruptible spirits.

Her incorruptibility as a person is closely linked to her most fundamental characteristic as a poet: fidelity to things as they are, to 'the clear, familiar, material world'....In all her life's work, her fusion with ordinary unbetrayable existence is so complete that only the word 'modest' can express it truthfully. When she tells us (In 1940), 'But I warn you,/I am living for the last time', the words unconsciously define her greatness: her total allegiance to the life she was in...Her poetry seems...to be a transparent medium through which life streams."

– D.M. Thomas

Uncertainties

This reminds me of a Japanese poem I can't quite remember, which we read in elementary school with our poetry teacher. A woman missing her lover, a line about her own hair or the night. Two years ago in NaPoWriMo I wrote, "I am so happy today that I dialed your number certain you would answer." That same sense of contagion, that joy makes more joy more possible, and the same with sorrow, I suppose — there's something intuitive about it.

The moon

has been missing
for nearly a week; and
you haven't called.

There may be
no connection,
but darkness

is contagious
and blood brother
to silence.

– Linda Pastan
in Traveling Light

Second Movement, Scene 1 (the underworld)

           EURYDICE

There was a roar, and a coldness—
I think my husband was with me.
What was my husband's name?

   Eurydice turns to the Stones.

My husband's name? Do you know it?

   The Stones shrug their shoulders.

How strange. I don't remember.
It was horrible to see his face
when I died. His eyes were
two black birds
and they flew to me.
I said: no—stay where you are—
he needs you in order to see!
When I got through the cold
they made me swim in a river
and I forgot his name.
I forgot all the names.
I know his name starts with my mouth
shaped like a ball of twine—
Oar—oar.
I forget.
They took me to a tiny boat.
I only just fit inside.
I looked at the oars
and I wanted to cry.
I tried to cry but I just drooled a little.
I'll try now.

   She tries to cry but finds that she can't.

What happiness it would be to cry.

   She takes a breath.

I was not lonely
only alone with myself
begging myself not to leave my own body
but I was leaving.
Good-bye, head—I said—
it inclined itself a little, as though to nod to me
in a solemn kind of way.

   She turns to the Stones.

How do you say good-bye to yourself?

   They shake their heads.
   A train whistle.

– Sarah Ruhl
from her play Eurydice

Installations

My professor's definition of ritual: "a means of paying attention. physical acts that direct our attention to an idea, value, or concern. most need to be public to be meaningful."

I like it. And rituals. I like the small ones. E.g. putting on makeup (best of all: stage makeup), even though I don't generally wear any. Or braiding hair, or mixing ingredients for a recipe, or the way I clean my room, or preparing a letter to mail. To paraphrase my friend, if I didn't know that smoking is terrible for you (and if I could afford it, and tolerate the smell...), I'd be a smoker just out of enjoyment of the ritual of it.

*

What I kept thinking when I sat on the dock in Wisconsin in the stillness, watching across the lake:

and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters

*

"You think you live for a long time, cats can live until they are twenty-five. My cat died when she was eighteen. I miss her. She was all black; name was Merlin."
– a stranger, inexplicably addressing me

*

A few things before I forget:

• I put up the wrong version of Sui's portrait in this post...fixed now.

• I added a shuffle button at the top of the sidebar a while ago, if you haven't seen it yet. I'm not really sure what the point is, but I like it.

• Heather too wrote some thoughts about happiness in response to my post (about happiness not being the point).

• Odessa and I had a cupcake afternoon documented with her new Lomo camera.
• And Olivia did a sketch off one of my photos from the lake.

"this is the birth/day of life and love and wings"

Spring is being born and everything is being born. This is how I am feeling lately, from the moment I wake with the sky blowing on my face through the open window—so exultant. I ate lunch in the full sunshine thinking this is the sun's birthday and so I must share this with you, a favorite since freshman year.

i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

- e.e. cummings

This is for my Australians and New Zealanders [astronomy lulz]

"Even those who could accept the sphericity of the Earth [in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages] often had problems with the existence of people at the antipodes. Frequently, those who grudgingly admitted this last possibility were inclined to add that such beings would not be descended from Adam, would be beyond redemption, and by walking with their heads below their feet would be incapable of rational thought."

- my cosmology textbook.

Guest Post: Cold

By my Chicago girl.

Step out and
lungs gasp but

throat closes tight at the no, no,

no! of the cold,

and for a moment I am breathless.

It slowly slides through all
my layers,
a solid sheet of pin-pricking––

You don't belong here, my
body moans,
and for a moment I understand
that despite my honey-dark hair,
my blue eyes, my fair skin meant to drink in
this thin northern sunlight,
far,
far,
far back,
my family lived in Africa.

And it's quite laughable,
really,
the endeavors of
down and
wool and
leather,


for all never quite make up
for my heritage.

"I am absence. The pursuit of heaven."

One day, I will be what I want to be.
One day, I will be a bird, and will snatch my being out of my nothingness.

The more my wings burn, the more I near the truth and arise from the ashes.
I am the dreamer's speech, having forsaken body and soul
to continue my first journey to what set me on fire and vanished:
The Meaning. I am absence. The pursuit of heaven.

One day, I will be what I want to be.
One day, I will be a poet. Water will depend on my vision.
My language will be a metaphor for metaphor.

- Mahmoud Darwish
from "Mural"

If the shoe fits, Che...

"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality...We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force."
- Che Guevara

"You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials 'for the sake of humanity' and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man."
- C.S. Lewis

In empty or ugly hours: G.K. Chesterton on minimalism and gratitude

"Robinson Crusoe...owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the bookcase, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island."

- G.K. Chesterton
in Orthodoxy

I was reading this in bed last night, and as I read this passage, I did just that—looked at my pillow and imagined how it would feel to have that pillow with me if I were stranded on a desert island. I could have hugged it—my soul positively swelled with love.

3am Christina

As promised. I love the mood of this: intimately reflective, yet detached. I can't decide if I should find what she describes unhappy or not.

In Progress

Ten years ago it seemed impossible
  That she should ever grow so calm as this,
  With self-remembrance in her warmest kiss
And dim dried eyes like an exhausted well.
Slow-speaking when she has some fact to tell,
  Silent with long-unbroken silences,
  Centred in self yet not unpleased to please,
Gravely monotonous like a passing bell.
Mindful of drudging daily common things,
  Patient at pastime, patient at her work,
Wearied perhaps but strenuous certainly.
Sometimes I fancy we may one day see
  Her head shoot forth seven stars from where they lurk
And her eyes lightnings and her shoulders wings.

- Christina Rossetti