n-judah love song

-happier today-

via mrpenguino.tumblr.com

dia de los muertos | via a fave vox-er

Will my sugar skull be enough to make you want to return
   just for this one night
Will the sound of laughter and clinking glasses
   be enough to draw you out from where you are
What if the laughter is tinny and hollow
   because the celebration is too soon
   or too far after the fact

Will my romanticized remembrance of you

  make it all real

Will my altar make up for the days or years
   during which I never called
   never sent a letter to ask how you are
Will it matter to you that I spent more time constructing a memory
   than an actual relationship
Or, are you willing for the sake of a good party and old times
   to pretend with me
   that I was attentive in life
   and that I deserve this visit

via electricfirefly.vox.com

what I know for sure

a poem by a teacher of mine, Bob Hicok.

What I Know For Sure

Some people, told of witness trees,
pause in chopping a carrot or loosening a lug nut and ask, 
witness to what? So while salad 
is made, or getting from A to B 
is repaired, these people 
listen to the story 
of the Burnside Bridge sycamore, 
alive at Antietam, bloodiest day 
of the war, or the Appomattox Court House 
honey locust, just coming to leaf 
as Lee surrendered, and say, at the end, 
Cool. Then the chopping 
continues with its two sounds, 
the slight snap to the separation 
of carrot from carrot, the harder crack 
of knife against cutting board, 
or the sigh, also slight, of a lug nut 
as it's tightened against a wheel. In time, 
these people put their hands 
under water and say, not so much to you 
but to the window in front of the sink, 
Think of all the things 
trees have seen. Then it's time 
for dinner, or to leave, and a month passes, 
or a year, before two fawns 
cross in front of the car, or the man 
you've just given a dollar to 
lifts his shirt to the start 
of the 23rd psalm tattooed 
to his chest, "The Lord is my shepherd, 
I shall not want," when some people 
say, I feel like one of those trees, 
you know? And you do know. 
You make a good salad, change 
a wicked tire, you're one of those people, 
watching, listening, a witness 
to whatever this is, 
for as long as it is 
amazing, isn't it, that I could call you 
right now and say, They still 
can't talk to dolphins 
but are closer, as I still 
can't say everything I want to 
but am closer, for trying, to God, 
if you must, to spirit, if you will, 
to what's never easy for people 
like us: life, breath, the sheer volume 
of wonder.

parallel worlds | happy days are here again

Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.

via happydays.blogs.nytimes.com

Thanks to Lane for the link. The NYT's "Happy Days" blog is one of my favorites, often because they're not all schmaltzy-go-lucky-happy, but insightful about how differently people perceive the world at large.

guerrila goodness

a slice of lovely borrowed from kindnessgirl.

more of Patience's amazing Guerilla Goodness project at her site kindnessgirl.com

existence

I woke up this morning for the first time in those eight years since and was surprised to feel something different than I expected. It's as though I worked through my final stages of grief, that it's okay to remember.

It was many of these September days before I stopped being haunted by the abject fear I felt in 2001 huddling with the remote in my tiny studio apartment in DC. Wandering down 18th Street in a daze, passing through black Hummers, Army Hummers, even Red Cross Hummers, thinking I still had to work that night. Facing the fact that I was finally a grown-up, because there was no one to come over and pet my hair, to tell me it'd all be all right.

When a plane flies too low, I still train my eyes on it until it's out of sight.

Instead, it's a bit more of the arc of grief that Anil describes so well in his series of posts. Now the sadness knows a home, that the missing are never coming back, that the world is indeed changed, and that it's not okay, but it turns out okay.

Maybe it's because I've lost and found so much in the year since. I've wandered into deeper waters than I knew existed. Just like I did on that day.

via www.flickr.com

EXISTENCE- Thich Nhat Hanh

It is night.
Rain pelts the roof.
The soul awakens
to a flooded Earth--
a sea of storm
roaring,
then passing.

In that short moment,
shifting lines and shapes,
fleeting,
barely seen.

Before the passing moment tilts
and falls to melancholy,
laughter sounds
in quiet raindrops.

[This poem was written in Saigon in 1965. It was raining hard. There was so much death and killing, so much destruction. And yet in one moment, I could hear the laughter in a raindrop.] 

(I post this poem every year, just about. I sent it to most everyone I knew on September 12, 2001.)

okay vs. fantastic

thinking on the touchstones from some years ago, and how they can apply today/tomorrow:

I’m in a hole...

It is the great, not-so-great unknown I must cross to get from “okay” to “fantastic.” Okay was okay, too—really it was. I’ve had a good life. But life can be fantastic, and I don’t mean from a swimmin’-pools, movie-stars perspective. I mean the full living of your actual life: being there, doing that thing you do 100%, whether or not it earns you a thin dime. Fulfilling your purpose. You can do a lot of it from the land of okay, but eventually, you gotta go. And that is a scary gulf.

So if you cross…when you cross…stay aware. Reach out for a Halls or a hand or a good, sturdy, safety match, as appropriate. Know it won’t be the miasma forever. Know that even if you can’t see them, there are millions of people crossing their own impassible swamps.

Know that it’s okay to cling to the shore for awhile, but also know that once you strike out, there’s no going back.

You’ll be okay. You’ll be more than okay. You’ll be different.

You’ll be fantastic.

via www.communicatrix.com

This is a post I linked to long ago on Vox when I first tried to quit a lot of things that I didn't need.  It's good to read again.

being lazy | doing too much

"There's a Buddhist teaching," one of our friends on the mailing list writes, "that the impulse to stay busy can be a particularly insidious form of laziness. As Sogyal Rinpoche put it:

There are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practised in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy."

from www.caterina.net

can you critique the memoir and not the human

While watching Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk on nurturing creativity, I'm interested to see how her followup memoir to the phenomenally successful Eat, Pray, Love goes over with her fans and with reviewers. It often seems to me that people reading her work start to criticize her choices, rather than her writing, which seems to me a bit unfair. On the other hand, maybe I'm not the best judge: I still thought A Million Little Pieces was a great read, even when James Frey was outed for lying to Oprah.

Either way, whether you like her work or not, the TED talk is a good one for anyone who's struggling with the creative process.

belize it

And....returning from 10 days away, in a country that reminded me of a rasta-flavored Carolina shore, or a reggae version of New Orleans. I also highly recommend (for those of us who are all-too-connected) taking a trip wherein which nothing is plugged-in: a phone, the internet, or anything higher-tech than a good book and a cold beer. 

How have you been?