Re-entering my life

Was I ever a silly girl with my head full only of laughter and serious boys who visited my attention with their stern adolescent dumbness?

Trying to remember: It would have been before I decide to choose between various styles and ideologies, and well before I chose to stop choosing. You see, if I am now the finely honed product of all those years of choosing, what was I before this, before choice? Can I even remember how old I was before I cease to be tabula rasa? Maybe not precisely, but there had to have been a time before the choice, the choice to speak in a certain tone, to mix a kind of polite forthrightness with a certain reticence.

It would have been sometime in early adolescence. Something, some event I may not even remember at first, would have launched me into the orbit of choice that led me to be the person I am now. Perhaps I was greatly impressed by something I saw or someone I knew, something I felt?

Did I remember when I begin to define myself?

What is you, is me

With Ashaqirin, where we did everything with gusto.

Sort of rocking my world

We all have layers of tenderness, dreams waiting to be born, and we all have courage waiting inside the pockets of our brokenness. When we acknowledge and embrace all of these vulnerabilities, we pave the way for an expansion of spirit, for an opportunity of growth, for rebirth, for really seeing ourselves. And most importantly, for creating the experiences we most need.

Which is where I'm at these days: unearthing extreme tenderness, birthing new parts of myself, digging deeper than ever before for the bravery that lives inside. I sense that these new vulnerabilities, however scary and intense, are expanding my capacity to love in ways that leave me stunned. I'm deeply aware of this and sometimes I'm not even sure what to do with myself or how to contain the widened spaces of my growing heart.

More than anything else, I'm surprised how this experience is unrelenting in all things: physically, soul work, heart exploding, tears, pure happiness, terror/fear. I can barely wrap my brain around all the parts and pockets and intricacies. It feels deeply, deeply layered and so much bigger than me or him or even true. There is a spiritual component that is blowing me away.

It's hard to explain but it's good. I feel supported and affirmed inside this spiritual piece.

The story begins in the middle

When I get home from a big trip, I like to let things sit for a while. I like to let things float around in my head while I settle back into the business of everyday. I put the images away and let the proverbial dust settle. I am slow to process, so slow. But I think this is because when I'm traveling, I am all the way in it. Up to my elbows, up to my eyeballs, up to my everything in whatever is happening around me. And I love while I'm in it but one day mushrooms into the next and I am too close to what's happening. I can't see it, not really. It's only when I pull back that the whole thing finally comes roaring into focus.

I kept thinking about this one

Found a little photobooth frame at the 39th street and had to dig through hundreds of old snapshots to find her but she was worth it. Stories after stories after stories. So many stories. Ther are lost people who need to be seen.

This is what I think:

She was an extraordinary speller and favored the scent of wild violets and coffee.

She kept her valuables in a red shoebox beneath the bathroom sink, just behind a stack of mismatched towels.

She had a goldfish named ching ching whom she confided in regularly. Though only after she was sure everyone had already gone to bed.

That's what I think. But that could change at any moment. Because that's what it is with found photographs. Their details are spectacularly mercurial and their stories are as wide open as the sky.

So much more inside

People, I have been struck down like a dog in the night. I am burried in blankets and begging for mercy. I want my mother. And a magic pill to make it all go away.

The landscape of comfort

I told a friend recently that I find myself without comfort right now (referring to life comforts of the kind that we crave after a long day, a comfy bed, a hot bath, a sense of organization). But afterwards I realized that this is not true. The comforts are smaller for the time being, but have just as much impact (if not more), and they are all around me if I choose to see them.

Fabulous silence found only underwater

Water brings so much peace. Float in it, face up to a turquoise sky and you feel calm, weightless, effortlessly suspended. Nothing like it in all of the world. Water is our world. And so I was floating and was thinking about all of this, the magic of water, the colours, the feeling, the taste, the sounds. Crazy how something that brings so much delight, so much joy also has the ability to inflict so much pain, so much destruction. The dark side of water takes on unfathomable force and relentless wrath. Sort of feels like a betrayal you have no choice but to forgive.

Currently

things are crazy. When this happens, I sort of shut down. This is unfortunate. Because I think I'd feel a little better if I could write my way through the craziness.

Better than everything in the sky

I love

1. how my room smells of strawberries and champagne

2. the salvatore brothers (especially DAMON!!!)

3. leaving paper snowflakes in unlikely places (we left a whole box at a hotel room cause it has by far, the nicest people amongst all the hotels we've been to)

4. making paper hats to bring home to the one who irritates me most

5. cherry-dipped ice cream cone

6. the feeling of holding one of my beloved friend's newborn baby girl in my arms (a child we are sure to spoil mercilessly for decades to come)

7. laying in a foreign country, dreaming of strawberry fields, drive-in movies and the ocean

8. slicing up watermelon

9. contemplating colour for nails (when I don't have to paint red for work, that is)

10. having my hair blown willy nilly whilst riding

11. now more than then

The year I put together a wall of sunshine

What a big year, maybe the biggest ever. I experienced what felt like a hundred firsts. If there was a year to celebrate unpredictability, this would be it. I'm telling you, this year was a force to be reckoned with. So as I say goodbye to 2009, I say goodbye, too, to the number that has served me well since 2002. As of 2010, I will no longer be a 9117.

2010, be spectacular.

My a little biggish boy

Danish and Olivia, magical monday. Just the three of us.

Flow

Life is full right now, really really full. Maybe possibly more than I can handle but I have willed myself to flow. And the words, they have taken up residence someplace else. Am currently without words and hoping they return soon.

If you say that it can't, then talk to the hand

There's a pink balloon in my room and it will not die. Not that I want it to die, but it's been two weeks and shouldn't it be dead by now? Really, it should be somewhere near the floor looking sorry. Instead, it continues to hover shyly over my side of the bed and let me tell you, it's as pink and buoyant as ever. I've taken to calling her pinkie and I'm rooting for her to make it. I really am.

Cuckoo bird

She's bald now. And I am completely and absolutely not surprise at all.

Please

come closer
because my heart doesn't touch yours anymore

Cleaning out the closet

When at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter - they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you for so long.

Lone eagle

I’m lost and looking for the sky, for moving parts and a place that doesn’t rust. For wheels that burn and a world that turns. For a road that phantom cars still drive down while lovers long lost feel wind that’s blown too long in silver hair. You are the only map I know.

Bop Bop Baby

The idiot

Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

Pollen and salt

And somewhere on coastlines unknown to me,
you paint your dreams, with reds and blues and greens
You're painting daffodils growing by the sea,
without me.

And you know for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be.

And that you will never again quite be the same person you were.

18 things before 19

1. Roller skate backwards

2. Take Yaya on a photowalk

3. Fill a book with collages

4. Bake a pie from scratch

5. Celebrate with Ifa

6. Teach Danish the rerun

7. Finish the unfinished

8. Wander aimlessly

9. Fill a jar with magical thinking

10. Drink to "die without regrets" with Brandon

11. Cultivate a collection of found paper

12. Learn to embroider (Nana, perhaps LILY could teach HAHA)

13. Beat my sister at Hearts

14. Get away for the weekend

15. Make key tag jewelry with Sarah

16. Ride my bike along the "eastbank esplanade"

17. Learn how to cook ayam cili padi

18. STOP BROODING

The secret

When you were sleeping on my bed,
I put my ear to your ear and listened
to the echo of your dreams

That is the ocean I want to dive in,
merge with the bright fish,
plankton and pirate ships

I feel like walking up to people on the street that kind of look like you
and ask them the questions I would want to ask you

Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke
rising from a chimney?
Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing?

I don’t wish I was in your arms,
I just wish I was peddling a bicycle
toward your arms

Varisparvi

Bitter aftertaste of misplaced hope

There was, in that small space, the extreme austerity of an almost empty mind colliding with something sweetly frantic and wrong between the many breaths, and an indifference to what would happen when the breathing was quiet again.

You weren't supposed to be there.

The mouse and the model are laughing at us

Olivia, you got me crazy, cause you're so crazy beautiful

The alarming discovery that you were never God

You wasted the very ripest years of your life on a fool, a man who don't pay even the debt he owes to his country, much less to you. He goes on living as if he's done nothing wrong.

Wolfboy

It's like water

but sweeter

Like drug

only much stronger

Like obsession

to the point of destruction

It's like so impossible

almost suicidal

It's like I love you so much

yet you broke my heart

Earth

That dot. It's here. It's home. It's us.

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

New Moon

Before you, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars - points of light and reason . . . And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything.

A world making its passage

Sometimes when you're sitting and looking out the window, you realize that you don't know how things have gotten to that point. It's that strange time in life where everything is changing in front of your eyes. People who were once important become increasingly distant, and you crave the normalcy that you once knew. It's scary to look back at your life and how it was your life. I took for granted everything that I had, thinking that things would always be that way.

Something once coveted as my 'whole world' is morphing into another casuality of 'growing up'. I've almost gotten to the point where I'd rather be alone. Trying to cling to something that's drifting away becomes increasingly tiring and never ceases to stop the distance from growing. Well I guess I'm just finally accepting that in a few years I will be working and living someplace else, and my friends will possibly be scattered across the country. But, I'll always have room in my heart for the people that once filled it completely.

Seeing how much they've changed; how much you've changed, and how some things will never change. It's almost like meeting a new person, only to find that you have a beautiful web of history behind you.