Martyr!

     Planes are the best place to finish a book. You are above the human world, engine noises buzzing and humming, and best of all- everyone is leaving you alone. Only here can you absorb and envelope into the loving embrace of a sentence perfected, for it seems, only your eyes to hungrily consume. I finished Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! while in the sky this afternoon. So many, many tears hit my shoulders and danced sensually down my cheeks. After reading the Clarice Lispector quote on the final page, I closed the book and gave the cover a huge, wet kiss. Lipstick and all. 

    What can I ever give back to literature? What can I dawn onto the altar of word? The feeling this book has left me with is one of grace. It was dowsed in suffering, enlightened by acceptance, sick like war. There was bewilderment everywhere. Justice sang through the text. It was rotten with moments of deceit yet true like love. Martyr! was transparent, historic, and its ending tossed me into a pond of God-like clarity. Thank you and thank you. My love for writing, my impulse to extract my vast feelings from what I experience and sculpt them into a vessel through which I may be understood is-in a word- holy. 

 Saturday, Traveling to LA

    A bearded man poorly plays old Americana music while I listen to meditation music in my earphones to subtly drown the sound out. I am reading Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! 

One of the characters speaks of her novelist friend's response to a question she asks her. It strikes me like an alligator's jaw locking onto its dinner. She is asked if she methodically plans out her books step by step or if she writes as she goes, without a roadmap. The novelist's response being,

    "Behind me is silence and ahead of me is silence."

 

Monday, Traveling home

    I finished Martyr! on my return flight. It was as if all the angels in heaven intervened and granted me the uncommon luxury of two empty seats beside me. I let out every sob necessary with each remaining page I turned. Too many whimpers of resonance to count. In her own words, the character Orkideh says, 

    "I was not often 'a person to whom things happened'. And when I was, I had the sanctuary of imagination of art."  

Mediums

    August used to be a sore thumb on the list of months for me. That was long ago. Certainly, before I moved to the Pacific Northwest and began to indulge in the end of summer delights. The rivers fill with glacier water, and I nap under a baseball cap. My fingers, stained with dark red fruit juice. My dear friend came to visit me. They call this place 'another home'. This time of year, the golden spiders weave intricate webs and worlds. I like to imagine that I am walking around in a reality they spun. Stars in my eyes. Dizzy and drunk on the seasons. 

    My friend brought along their new partner and what a treasure it was to see them happy in love again. Love can wake even the most dormant joys up from sleep. I watched him take pictures of Hope throughout the handful of days we spent together. Laying on my brutish, neon green lounge chair, hair black as death, Hope sprawled out into a look of deep rest. Carlos took the picture. A muse, whether they know it or not. Some things are obvious to me. 

    We drove to Astoria for the day and stopped to take many polaroids. The pirate town was evocative. Of what? I can't put my finger on it yet. On the long drive back into the city, Hope rolled their window down and posed into the highway wind for Carlos' camera. A clean shot slides out of the mouth and so develops a black and white image of Hope, wind-blown and dreamy in their new deep aqua beret. Freshly twenty-four years old. Immortal feeling. 

    Since their visit, I have found myself drawn to pick up my film camera and capture the in-between moments more often. When creativity strikes me and I find myself inspired, my hands find a pen and paper and conjure up words before I've even begun to process what possessed me in the first place. Writing is such an automatic response for me. So much so that I found my inclination towards taking pictures to be, at first, atypical. A month or so later and I've filled nearly two rolls of film, of course, with Hope and Carlos in my heart's process. 

    Just yesterday, during a trip to LA, I shot some pictures of my friend Bee. She has always had a heavenly look to her. Almost as if she was not born of this Earth. Or if she were, she was the very first woman. We found this incredible tree in the middle of a nondescript park in the city. Scouting the perfect spot, we were awe-stricken by the most amazing tree. I can't quite translate what was so captivating about it. It wasn't necessarily its leaves or shape. Nor its branches or placement, but rather its energetic radiance. Just like Bee. I knew I wanted to take some photos of her there immediately. 

    My favorite thing to take photos of is a moment of transition. The moment just before someone says something wonderful and a room full of people laugh. Just before genius manifests. My friend Beaux, reaching over the bench to grab their drink. Jake in the kitchen chopping garlic before it sizzles in the pan. Someone on the street right before they get on the bus. I've never been fond of posing, of anything too manufactured or far from nature. 

Show it to me like it really is or I'll close my eyes. 

    I am so desperately infatuated with the human ability to capture meaning. To hold it in my palms, despite their trembling at the sacred glory of it. What would anything be without us being able to have it flow through us and give it to art? What a blessing to give ourselves to art in the ways that we do. I don't make too many promises but what I feel I can promise myself and all of you now is that while I'm breathing, I willingly grant myself the birthright of being open to the mediums through which I can animate God's gentleness. Pinky swear. 

WHY

What makes a good student?

I have often heard:

Questions!

    If God is like the teachers that I have had, would they not tire of my complete dedication to not only constantly asking questions but my iron-fisted repetition of the same ones over and over again? Lucky for me, I'm mostly certain God is not like my former teachers at all being that God is the first and last teacher. Talk about knowing. God knew so much they just started creating everything. What to do with all this knowledge? Make something beautiful! Make something disastrous. Make humans and then make them debate over who deserves to eat, be happy, have healthcare, or breathe. It's all happening in God's mouth while they balance on a unicycle, floating through Jupiter and I'm stressed about work?? I'm doing my little breathing exercises every time I open my phone to some form of atrocity or another and looking up into the great big sky like, 

    "What's your deal today, God?"

    That's my most recent question. Why? It's simple and yet we have been asking it since we found ourselves to be muttering anything at all. It is the most human question I can source in my skull. Above all else, beneath all the rubble of debate, theory, and confusion, we chant 'WHYYYY' instead of 'ohmmm'. 

I get a body

I borrow it for a time

Running sweating dancing 

Even floating 

Mine

 

This is Not My Car

    In the vibrant yellow of a butterfly's wing, there is summer. I am young. I am hungry. Each day feels necessary. Alex G's new album comes out later this month. Caterpillars are nesting in my heart, clearly whispering notions of a nearing personal transformation. Already, I have found that I wasted this early summer season feeling stuck in an energy of confusion pertaining to my future. Being this age feels like a never-ending leap backwards and forwards between knowing how young I am and yet knowing that there is a multitude of time left. The very real need to set up the rest of my life exists here and now. I wish an elder would just laugh at me and how clearly my age I am acting. They seem to know this phase well. 

    I was worried that I was leaning into an energy of inaction. That I was pushing away what the world had drawn up as vital movement towards my future. I stopped yesterday and asked myself: What would I want my life to look like if it were completely up to me? If I could choose it all? I figured that I would be a writer and a Spanish teacher. One that frequents bathhouses and is well-versed in yoga. I would have more energy and patience for the world. I dreamt of having enough money not only to travel to distant places but to become intimate with these locations. To take a piece of each of them with me everywhere I find myself next. It would be my hope that if I were lucky enough to end up with the dharma that is a wealth like this, that I would be able to easily give it away, knowing money is energy and sitting on massive amounts of it while others go without could hardly stir good fortune going forward. 

    This woman I would become would leak blue hues of salt water, straight from source, into everything. I would listen more than I talk. In my belief that words are spells, I would stand tall. Spinning magic threads of honey as a philosophy. When I entertain this future reality and all it would encompass, I sense that these desires do not stem from me being unsatisfied in my corner of the world but rather are a natural urge to deepen my encounters with God in a new way as I enhance my awareness. Learning by doing. I fail at nothing in this place. I learn everything. It has come to my attention lately that I become increasingly more anxious the longer I go without having a teacher. 

    Always have I identified as a student. My spongy mind loves new information, theories, science, wisdom. It desires newness and seeing over the valley of what I've learned to find a vast forest of all I am ignorant to. My hair stands on end with a new book in my hands. This summer I did not enroll myself in any courses due to lack of resources to continue my education. Truthfully, I am no stranger to this non-linear world of on and off schooling. But my sadness grows in a very real way when I do not have an elder or teacher to look to. Thankfully, the anxiety around not being in school right now has dropped significantly. 

    This is no small step I am choosing for myself, after all. The fork in the road is big and domineering. No matter the intimidation, I return to my heart and remind myself that choices are privileges and I am not without luck or protection. The other night I was laying on my yoga mat thinking about all the roads that I can take to "have a career" and buy into some American dream to play out. Like a semi-truck made of flowers I was softly hit with the real inclination that I very well know why I can't seem to choose a distinct path at this time. All I want to do is study God. Not in an organized, theological classroom environment but in the only place I really like to learn: my big fat heart! Duh!

    If I had the choice, I would make every day on Earth my opportunity to learn about it. About the creator. How had I not seen this as a genuine path for myself? It's complicated. Learning about God through birthing goodness into every action I do and person I meet doesn't always translate onto a resume or into a rigid workplace. I don't know that that's going to award me with a great job. Girl has to eat. My appetite craves only God's words from God's mouth. There may not be a structured road to take in this moment. I am resting in the knowing that this isn't my car and I'm not really on this highway. God does not roll dice. Why should I?