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Monday, July 25th, 2005
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7:37 am - a breath of wind
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After an incredible weekend, constant stimuli and new people, three days/nights of dance, a couple of prolonged altered states, getting paid, going out for dinner, kissing W___, losing contact of the floor on Friday, losing my contact lens on the floor on Saturday, wandering around Penn Station half blind at five in the morning twirling a scarlet feather sighing deeply wondering at the exquisite world-- the post-trip brain-exhaustion, sense of wholeness and appreciation of and resignation to life, having met many people and talked and eavesdropped and thought a whole lot about a lot of things, I returned to Hudson, worked a shift at the diner, and, hoping to catch up with J, decided to go out to Tivoli to talk, only to discover after setting off that she’d invited Mr. K along too, begrudgingly picked him up, and drank two drinks at the bar with them.
Had a conversation with Jbird yesterday, about possibly becoming housemates come September, and I said, well, I can’t do that b/c I have to get through another semester of school first, wait for my lease to expire, say goodbye to this area I love, make well with my friends/roommate, prepare (as I always do so fastidiously) to leave and to know what I’m getting into and what I’m looking for from it, yes, yes, so Dec. is better. I got a flyer in the mail today from the community college inviting me into their Honors program, which means little but reminds me of the other side. M&D of course exhume the benefits of school. Mom called this morning around 11 before I’d gone to sleep yet from being up all night, to check in to see how I my weekend went, and I announced that I had officially been paid 50 American dollars for dancing at the String Cheese Incident show on Thursday, the first money I’ve ever earned doing something I like. Apparently inspired by this information, within 12 hours she had emailed me a sample resume for me as if I was trying to sell myself as a professional dancer/artist, she said, in honor of my “professional” status. Painfully I read the thing, and promptly resolved not to tell my mother about anything really important to me ever again as long as it remains untried and vulnerable, lest she leap upon it and tear it to pieces with her suffocating love. Politely emailed her that her help, while I understand the impulse, is not welcome, not now, at all. Thanks but no thanks.
I am thinking about J, who got drunk at the bar with Mr. K, and when he passed out in the back seat of my car and couldn’t join us on the dock by the river where we sat afterwards for a while looking at the black glimmering water and talking, told me in passing that she’d made out with T, again, on Thursday, probably while I was asleep on a costume crate in the performer tent in the center of the festival in Prospect park. Which I anticipated, but hoped would not happen. I know that what goes on between them has nothing to do with me, but that only makes it hurt more. And so the knife turns again, but having spent a significant portion of the last 2 days in a heightened state, I observe the feeling, notice it, and feel a certain remove from J throughout the evening. Ever since she insisted Mr. K come out with us despite my making clear that the whole reason I wanted to go out in the first place was to conference with her, specifically, not to hang out with friends and drink. But bowing to the sense that whatever must be will be, I agree to bring Mr. K along, and it was fine after all.
I’m scared to move, I said, speaking of moving to Brooklyn, I’m afraid I’m too easily influenced, too uncertain of myself, jumping at a hope that is merely a beautiful picture spun of a silver tongue. How can I change my mind so rapidly? A month ago I was going to school for 4 years to become a biologist. Three weeks ago I was going to school to study art design and ecstatic dance. Two weeks ago I was going to one more semester of school before moving to Brooklyn in January, and now, suddenly, I’m thinking maybe I’ll forgo the whole waiting period and go as soon as I can and not go to school next semester at all. Because, after all, why wait? This is the time to be down there if I want to be there when it takes off, if it takes off. Burning Man is in a month and after that the relationships will have either dispersed or solidified, and some people will filter off and new connections will be made and there’s going to be a big catapulting change for freek factory, and if it’s true what rumors say that we’re about on the verge of getting some real funding, that we could go to Vegas in October and across north Africa by next summer, then hell yeah I want to be there!
And talking to Mikio is so encouraging, who says solidly that what you dream of IS! possible and has the cred and years to back it up, and says follow your bliss. Next to my computer a post-it note says: DO what you want to do!-- and it is clear of course that what I want to do is move to Brooklyn, now. I question my motives, my resolve, because I’ve lived a different lifestyle and by a different set of rules so far in life. The lines were drawn neatly, and I accepted them though I hated them, because no one said what you dream of IS! possible before so I would believe it, except perhaps Trish, who, like Mikio, I put in the category of Really Great People I Love who are significantly older than me. Friends, yes, but teachers too. I’ve lacked role models who are successfully leading lives I admire, people able to see me, young, impressionable, but tough, fierce me, wholly and lovingly and respectfully as a person in the process of becoming.
But this move is nothing less than a change of all the rules, a change in lifestyle, and a change in the way that I understand and relate to the very energy of being. I want to move so I can be more involved in dancing with Freek Factory, yes, but inherent in that statement is an acknowledgment that for me to become a better dancer, and more than that, to become the person I’d like to be, I have to attune myself to that life-energy, or in academic terms, to develop my kinetic sense, I have to learn to manipulate it, move with it and transform it, and at the risk of sounding melodramatic, that is not much different from learning to make magic. It requires a commitment to my body and my health that I’ve found difficult here, because so many of people I know here smoke and drink and remain unmotivated, while I’m the only one who regularly exercises or dreams extravagantly: (too much? They patronizingly accuse me of a lack of experience or of having illusions of grandeur. I protest, no it is NOT that, there are many ways to see it, the world is infinitely malleable, and yours is only one way, but that attitude rubs off, you know, after a while, and the dream-sheen dulls and you see yourself in all your starkness: waitress. small town. barely any schooling. Or whatever the stark, impartial view may be. But it does not have to be that way. That is not the way I choose to see it. So there. And I dumped T, despite the fact that sure we never were together to begin with, and that was the breath of wind that started this boulder rolling.) That is another thing, if I move I will immediately be surrounded by new people who specifically are not saying that dreams are illusions, they are people who use dreams as I do, as guides and tools, people working actively in their areas of interest, people trying to become, people trying to change, do things, make things, learn. Not a defeated one among them. Indeed, why should I stick around struggling just to breathe when the question should not be is breathing possible, but how deep and full and vitalizing is each breath? The move is a bigger deal than it may seem, and I don’t want to be foolish, jumping blindly into an unknown sea. Will the sea be any more known by January? Should I go through another semester of school after all for insurance’ sake? Oh, how dearly do I hate insurance.
So I was thinking about how J had made out with T again, after they both knew how much it had hurt me the last time, and I was feeling the knife turning. “That’s just exceptionally disrespectful,” I said, and left it at that. J has been miserable for a week or so now, miserable herself and miserable to be with, injecting dire self-sacrificing statements in between her every other phrase. No need for me cut deeper. And I know what goes on with them does not have anything to do with me, so it is not my place to interject. But it feels really shitty and she knew it made me feel shitty and that didn’t stop her from doing it and so that pissed me off, rightfully or not, I felt betrayed. Then I had to drive poor drunk Mr. K, still passed out in the back seat of my car, back to his parents’ house, practically lift him from his seat, and watch drunk J lead wobbly Mr. K to the front door. He’d spilled his beer all over the floor of my new car.
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| Tuesday, June 7th, 2005
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11:15 pm - rambling in my free time
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Sun was hot and bright, spent four hours sitting on the easy chair at the Indian restaurant waiting in vain for customers but with beatific calm because I knew I would not have to ever do it again. Somehow the day passed, I went for a run, discovered the large cemetery that’s only a five minute walk from my house, made an incredibly extravagant salad for dinner, thought about what it is I want to do after all. Considered fact that Bard may be financially out of my reach until I’m 24. Wondered whether I want to stay in this area that I have grown to know and love. Sat around in my bedroom listening to music appreciating the comfort of relaxing in a space I have made my own. Thought about Tom in California and Ben in Fez and Natasha in Marseille and Amelie in Barcelona. Without Tom, life seems surprisingly simple. I feel independent and ambitious, if lacking in drama. I stay here because I like my apartment, I like knowing everyone and being known, I like the land, I like Jess P., I like my job, and I have made some connections in New Paltz, the City, and at Bard, and I like the idea of having enough time to pursue latent interests without having to devote all time and energy to adjusting to a new place, life, rhythm, job, and assortment of people. This is more than many people have, what I have here...why would I leave? I would leave because the opportunity for learning or adventure elsewhere was stronger than here, I would leave if I was offered an incredible job or internship that sent shivers up my spine, I would leave if people I loved needed me elsewhere. But should I look for these things: adventure, distant schools, a wild job, a mad love? Or should I continue on here and get my degree sooner or later and keep on dancing and moulding and waiting tables and writing letters to distant friends? Do I crave the tremendous? How shall I create magnificence here? I am still impatient aren’t I? I thought I learned that making a beautiful life wherever you are is the most important thing, but I am still swayed by stories of people who deliberately left the traditional channels and made an entirely different path for themselves, and did it with pizazz and intelligence. I was supposed to have been humbled, but I still want to be fabulous, dammit. It would help if I knew what I wanted. The lesson was, friends and family are most important. The world is alive with God and the thing I want to do is notice and worship and eventually convey this. How shall I navigate life so that this is foremost?
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| Tuesday, May 24th, 2005
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11:34 pm - waitresshood and windsong
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There was an article in the NY Times today about how there is a great increase in college dropouts now in their mid-twenties facing the same challenges that J and I and most of our friends face: we’re from working and middle class families who’ve dreamed big for their children and yet can’t necessarily put them through school. We’re faced with an expectation for some kind of greatness, that to aspire to mere waitresshood would squander our talents and intelligence, so we can’t be satisfied to “merely” grow up, raise a family, and grow old, that is not enough, yet we aren’t given the economic means to philander away at school without having to work too to pay for rent and food. We are told we can do anything, so we muse and agonize over this immense privilege, yet it still seems a quaint and preposterous idea that actually IN FACT we could someday find ourselves doing something other than blue-collar work for a living. The women I know are waitresses or childcare workers, the men I know are construction workers or computer desk slaves. Only recently have I met anyone successfully doing anything else, and they are exalted in the minds of everyone else as deities, almost. Oh, and as a sidenote, my brother’s going to BROWN with his 4.0 and 1600. J tells me that in a recent survey a significant number of female college dropouts drop out in conjunction with their first major love affair. This is true, of course, and discouraging. I did too, though I didn’t think of it in that way at the time. Trish tells me to pursue people who love what they're doing in my proposed area of study (currently, natural science), to follow them around and soak up some of their vibrance and see if it resonates with mine, which is a great idea, but takes some initiative and creativity, which I have now that it is summer, but summer feels so short, so limited, I feel pressure to squeeze as much as possible into this brief time that I don’t have to be in school, because god knows I won’t be able to do any of it once classes begin again in September. I hate this. In my one day off this week I wake at noon because it is raining and my bed is overly comfortable and just barely have time to clean my room and do my laundry and piece together the songbook that Stan tore to pieces two years ago and almost set on fire before it becomes too late to go for my daily run and I have to go grocery shopping and then people start arriving for the evening dinner social and so I sigh and sit on my porch railing smoking a cigarette knowing I shouldn’t and watching the rain splatter out from under the wheels of the passing cars marveling at how I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. When will I take the reins and go? And when I do, where will it be? If I could be really good at just one thing, then I could just do that thing and eventually make it. But because so many things interest and pull me, I feel always torn, and always strained one or another way, and wonder if I really have the oomph I need to really do school. I got a 4.0 this semester while working 30 hours a week, maintaining an apartment and a fledgling social life, and forging a relationship with an entirely new social network of people in a production collective in New York City: not an insignificant feat. However, I now feel an ever-stronger pull to create, and to have time for the creations to incubate, and to have time to pursue the things that fascinate me. But I also know that if I am not in school, unless I am doing something really blatantly significant, I will feel aimless and the days will slide too easily by. And it’s really easy to be so dreamy in the springtime; come January I will waste away if I have no structure from which to swing. This is also what tormented me the year I spent at college; the siren songs of places yet to see and people yet to meet and things I could be doing were too sumptuous, and I succumbed. Then instead of following the windsongs, I spent three years as a housewife in a town within walking distance of the college, because I was In Love. Argh! And now I say I wish I had a lover who would meet me, but why should I want that now? Would that not only bring ruin? I am not a cynic, and I am still willing to put myself out there into the storm to see what happens, but I AM suspicious of this desire, and wary of my weakness.
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| Monday, May 23rd, 2005
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12:04 pm - what to do...
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I fear that reality pales in comparison to the vision. I don’t really know what I want to study in school. Biology, blah. Dance, Spanish, French, clay sculpture, literature, history, philosophy, and Sanskrit all sound better to me than science. Yet stronger in me than anything, even art, even intellect, is the love of nature and adventure. And the path to that as a job is....biology. Anyone have any other ideas?
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| Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005
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11:06 am - faery children
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Yesternight at the Beltane festival I danced the spring in as Persephone around the bonfire, but during the day I unpacked my tool kit full of latex paints and brushes and sparklies and glitter and spread out a blanket on the grass and painted kid's faces all afternoon. And I realized afterward that it was the first time I remember really interacting with children, ever. Face-painting is so intimate, sitting cross legged on the blanket, I had to touch them, look into their eyes, talk to them, I've never been so close to small children before. And they struck me. So innocent. Such soft skin, such open eyes, so willing to talk about what they really think about everything. Each one so different, some sitting solemn and completely still, some jerking this way and that looking in all directions, some very forthright and talkative, some very very shy. But they all loved having their faces painted, and they all thought I was just amazing, with my red-streaked hair and sparkly costume. I have never really liked kids much, I've always seen them as kind of alien and even a little intimidating, always I just didn't know what to say to them. But yesterday I painted twenty kids' faces, and finally got it, what was so holy and wonderful about kids. The little four year old boy, round cheeked and completely still, who looked wide-eyed and silent the whole time I painted him, and I turned him into a little faery creature, and he walked away across the field of sun-- oh I understood then, I didn't understand it before. Could we all have once started like that? Such a sun-child, such a child of God? I felt a twinge, I fell in love, a cry stuck in my throat. Dangerous. I became aware that I had grown up.
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| Wednesday, April 27th, 2005
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10:05 pm - !
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Sefirah (pl. sefirot) is a channel of Divine energy or life-force. This most fundamental concept of Kabbalah is that in the process of creation an intermediate stage was emanated from God's infinite light to create what we experience as finite reality. These channels are called the Ten Sefirot, Ten Divine Emanations, Ten Divine Radiances, Ten Divine Eluminices, or Ten Divine Powers which are the basic terms and concepts of the inner wisdom of the Torah which is called Kabbalah.
It is via the sefirot that God interacts with creation.
Sefirot are composed of "lights" and "vessels." The light of any sefirah is the Divine flow within it; the vessel is the identity that flow takes in order to relate to or create some aspect of the world in a specific way. Inasmuch as a reality is created by means of the sefirot, they constitute the conceptual paradigm for understanding all reality.
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3:01 am - rethinking some things
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Went to Mikio and Serpentessa’s house for meeting on Mercuralia, listened and paid attention to the way an event like this one is planned and organized, though I contributed little. Watched Serpentessa’s python undulate around her body absentmindedly, thought about a lot of stuff on my hour drive home, which I will relate at some point when I am not utterly exhausted. It is related to being utterly exhausted, stretched too far, having spring fever, being unenthusiastic about school, falling in love with this idea, being highly impressionable and knowing it, knowing that I can do just about anything that comes my way and strikes my fancy, and that science was the only idea I could think of then but now maybe I can think of some more ideas, and how hmm if the world is really as malleable as I say it is, then why don’t I start really taking myself seriously about doing what I want to do, really. Or am I really just being swept up and foolishly falling in love and abandoning a chance once again to “succeed”? I just couldn’t keep that out of quotes. Will I eternally run toward the ephemeral, the dancing and the lights? Or have I been running toward the same thing this whole time, and only now am beginning to find the path to fruition? And is this my true path? It feels like it. The way opportunity is flinging itself wide challenging me right now, the way that meetings with key people are stirring within me twinges of recognition. Understand? I want to make room in my life for creativity to germinate, for stillness to rest, time for thought and books and people. Ironic, that because I’m in school I have almost no time for thought or books or people. At the same time, I’m not going to do anything rash or unthought out, and I am wary of doing so. If I am going to make dancing central, and I would like to, if I can, then it will require a much greater investment of time and especially energy, it will be a lifestyle change, and it requires a sharpening of both my physical and spiritual selves, which takes focus, time, and dreamtime, none of which I have to spare right now. I also don’t want to become shiftless and undirected without a structure in the time between. School has been helping me structure time efficiently and appreciate what moments I can catch here and there. I want to be able to do that out of context too. I am aware that the entire reason I decided to become a scientist was because I was hiking up and down the Himalayas in a semi ecstatic state thinking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life and I started by thinking about what I like to do, and I thought, well, I like to be outside, and I like to notice things, and I like to think about them and write about them and I’d maybe like to make some kind of difference in the world through my intellect about the things I care about, and who do I most admire and what are they doing? And I thought, well, I guess I’ll be a scientist, I can be outside, constantly be learning new things, making an impact on the world, getting respect for my profession, and using my gifts and abilities as well as they were intended. I wanted to be an explorer. It never occurred to me that I could make a living as an artist. It just never crossed my mind. I thought it was something I could pursue as a hobby at best, of course not an actual life path. As J pointed out tonight, this attitude might be acquired by being a waitress. I want respect still, and I am driven, among other things, by the desire to be something more accomplished than a waitress. No one told me I could really be an artist. Yet now, for the first time, I am meeting people who have made their art central to their lives and are in one way or another actually making ends meet that way. This is more than an inspiration; it is a revelation. Older people in my life have often stressed the importance of education, of a good career, and warned that I could not stay young and supple forever, and only so much dillydallying could be excused before it really started to take a toll on one’s long term future. These words haunt me. Other older people I respect have said, quoting Joseph Campbell (who just happens to be the founder of the Center for Symbolic Studies, where our Mercuralia event will take place), to “follow my bliss” and the infinitely malleable universe will take heed. Is this the motto for the most exclusive, self-involved, privileged decadent class? Is it okay to believe it anyway, knowing this? It feels like I’m following my bliss, and it feels like the universe is responding with unprecedented enthusiasm, so much that I feel like I have to run to catch up. And it’s just like falling in love, (damn spring!)
I was talking to my friend JW about how all this is happening and how it’s embarrassing, sort of, that I feel such a strong connection with these people one might be tempted to call hippies. And he said, “But they’re not hippies. They’re ecstatics, like yourself.” I liked that. That really is the right word for us.
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| Monday, April 25th, 2005
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11:29 pm - growing webs
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There are growing (rapidly, tantalizingly) two separate social groups around me. One is these people from the city and from the frolic, who are interested in me, it seems, and who have cast me as Persephone and call me Sefirah and think I’m amazing, and the feeling’s heartily mutual. It feels so right, I lack a better phrase, it feels so familiar, like I’m sliding effortlessly into a space allotted to me long ago, it is exciting and bewildering the ease that everything is happening, and the speed of the connections, and the almost spooky correspondence. They have made me Persephone, after all, after having met me but twice, and I know this is just a small thing, hardly something to bubble over, but wow I feel recognized for the first time, I feel opportunity practically rolling out a red carpet for me to follow, and I am doing exactly what I want for the first time in my life and working with people who are creating art and events I recognize and love viscerally. And I’m a little timid, hoping oh hoping that I will live up to all this fanfare and synchronicity and hope. It is a performance after all. It never occurred to me that I would be a performer, and that I would love it more than anything in the world. And with no background, no history, nothing but the strength of my bare feet on the earth and the depth of my capacity to feel and my ability to make it all come out and be seen. I suppose I am an artist after all. And I feel the need, now, to live as one, paying attention and sensing the flex and pulse of the tendons of energy, and catching them and translating them, cultivating awareness, being really wide awake and thinking hard about everything. This is the beginning of becoming a dancer, to remember who you are, to envelop the whole wide world around and become aware of every nuance, twinge, and feel. In the translation of this you become a sorceress, a witch in the surest sense, a bender of worlds and a channel of the divine. The way is just beginning to rustle, I see a movement in the leaves, there! the way is pointing, there you go, god be with you, you must pray!
The other growing group is the local one, there is a definite embryo of a new dynamic social network here, as people cross-pollinate and make acquaintance and make love and exchange new phone numbers, and the possibility of a fledgling community right here in our towns from the odd and disparate corners that previously were only vaguely aware of each other is becoming stronger almost daily. Plans for cave-parties and fortuitous meetings with strangers abound, there is talk of fires and mountains, there are sudden bouts of ecstatic wiggling and glee. Spring is here, and it is absolutely my favorite time of the year.
Just a note-- when I emerge from the center stone as Persephone, I will be bearing---yes-----pomegranates. POMEGRANATES!
I resign to my no-longer-can-deny-it-anymore fate. Damn hippies.
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| Wednesday, April 20th, 2005
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7:47 pm - reflection on human nature on an sunny afternoon
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Watching young girls do cartwheels in the yard across the street. I envision a time and place where there is no traffic and the only sounds are the birds and the wind, where land is not owned by anyone. It is not right that a person must travel forty miles just to build a bonfire. Fire and windsong are rights of all humans, and speed is the enemy of human goodness. To sit still for just half an hour, to let the wind rush through your hair, to listen to the reeds brush together, to the birds, to see the play of light on water, to watch the sun track across the sky and study the ripples of the pond: these are things that mummer of truth. What you start to see, then, is that this is a myriad playground for the senses, this whole world an endless interlacing net of undiscovered tracks and at any one moment you, human self, can be anywhere, you remain always one dynamic point, perceiving, questioning, generating meaning. We are meaning-makers, we cannot help ourselves. Our constructs of meaning and god are unique things we give to the great play. I think of our colors, the colors we make that could never be found in nature: the florescents, the unfaltering uniformity of green, pink, red, blue, gold. Our fascination with things that shine and all things optically pleasing. We would eat light if we could. Our fire is like our color, we make it everywhere we live. Humans are light-creatures, a view of the planet at night shows through light exactly which parts are inhabited. And music is our greatest gift to creation. It may be the only thing uniquely ours that is wholly good. It alone may justify our existence, despite all the suffering we inflict and endure. I marvel at our speed. How rarely we rest for merely to watch and breathe and think. A canada goose and I studied each other for a long time this afternoon, one or the other of us turning our head there and back, while turtles dipped in and out of the pond weeds, the wind blew warmly, and the traffic rumbled past. What I’d forgotten is that we endure a lifestyle for which we are entirely unsuited. We need stillness, we need silence, we need to be able to trust the ones close to us, we need communities that know and love us, we need fresh young green things, we need open spaces and wild spaces and places to wander. We need a chance to worship what we know is holy. We need songs to sing to the dusk because the sound of our voice will fill a pinpoint of existence with longing.
It is interesting what we do with our excess time as a species. We expand and explore and invent and improve and complexify. Or perhaps that is not innately human, but rather just the spirit of our time. Why did other cultures remain unchanged technologically for so many, many years? The evolution of our species is fascinating. When all of our needs are taken care of, when we want for nothing and are left to do anything we want with infinite resources, invariably we opt for spectacle. This is why I so appreciate the spectacular: the carnivals, circuses, freak shows, light shows, fire rituals, magic tricks, psychedelic visions, befeathered masks, costumes, all manifestations of art, storytales, goblins, parties, illusions, acrobats, mirrors, and the like: these are the things that are uniquely human, these are the things that we most love and fear. They have intrinsic value. I like to think of us as magic-makers, blinded by our own inventions and commerce and speed, wired with an urge to create or destroy meaning, inherently alone and desirous of love, and deprived of all these things, magic, meaning, love, because we have stopped listening to the wild things and the sound of the wind and where we might have built fires we have built parking lots and where there could be open land for all there are Forbidden signs and loud machinery.
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| Wednesday, April 13th, 2005
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9:49 pm - middle aged lechers
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If something happens twice is it a pattern? I seem to be ideal bait for rich forty- or fifty- something entreprenur divorcees with leftward leanings from the City, and I find it rather disgusting. These men who are just SO eager to talk to me, to establish that we have oh so MUCH in common, that shake my hand so tightly, that humbly and with the greatest diplomacy ask to take the seat next to mine, who talk of their prolific life history, dropping all the important details as if I wouldn’t notice, waxing nostalgic about success, philosophizing about life, and so sincerely pressing for my details, pretending they’re merely interested in a friendly cup of coffee, carefully pretending they’re soaking up some local upstate flavor, they who are driven to eternal self-enrichment. Do I remind you of your daughter? Do I make you think of your wife before she bore your children, became lumpy, and began to nag and bore you? What do you think I will do for you? You self-absorbed men, so privileged and so wrong, you who have always had everything you want, what do you do now that you are alone and the world’s caught up to you and your money’s all made and the grave is mocking you on the pale horizon?
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| Wednesday, February 23rd, 2005
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8:52 pm - secrets to beatitude
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I’ve aligned my energy in a way that works for once, and instead of having too much erratic energy with no direction or place to go, I have found a focus, many focuses, and in doing so have discovered what the secret is for me, to ultimate chillness. These are the keys to my beatitude: get enough sleep, exercise every day, stay busy, and be involved in things that you enjoy. Keep doors open. Habitually talk to new people. Be persistent. Take notice. Remember that reality is infinitely malleable. Lose concern of self. Activity is essential. DOing things, learning, exploring, making myself a little uncomfortable, tests and goals and dreams of every degree.
I have achieved an amazing functionality, I am completely capable of everything. Problems slip off my back like water off the wings of a raven. Is this sustainable? I’ve only felt this healthy and good a few other times that I can remember. They were when I was bicycling across the plains and when I was hiking up the Himalayas. Work, sleep, exercise, and the feeling that you are progressing toward things that excite and matter to you. That’s it.
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| Sunday, February 13th, 2005
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1:39 pm - on finding my tribe
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So, about discovering your generation, recognizing trends, and realizing ever more that you are completely a product of your time and your influences. I am talking about a small subgroup of my age group, a very specific underground movement that does not necessarily mirror the whole, but nevertheless there are a lot of us, and somehow, each of us individually harbored the same latent fantasies and collected the same art and music and secretly our minds traveled the same pathways, becoming interested in very similar things. And when I go to events like the one last night, and to Burning Man, and places akin to it, I have an overwhelming sense of recognition, that all of this is familiar, and that this is just what I would have done if I had unlimited resources connections and imagination. This is IT. It is superficial at first; I notice the infatuation with fire and bedazzlement and drama and costume. The love of deep, deep music and outrageous dance, of nakedness, the exotic, the erotic, drugs, big bad drums and circus theatrics. Then I dig a little deeper and realize all these people have been cultivating a private interests in religion and neo-tribalism, and want to learn about the edible and medicinal plants of the world. We were the bare foot wonders and tree climbers of a decade ago. We were all the kids secretly sewing up spectacular make-believe costumes in our bedrooms, reading Hindu devotional poetry and Starhawk, making faces at ourselves in our mirrors, climbing mountains and thinking about communes and god, drawn to the spectacular, the unconditional, the Most Beautiful. Sometimes it is eerily specific. The boy whose house I allowed myself to be taken to after the party to get a few hours of sleep had the same painted picture of the Indian woman with a cow that I cut out from some place god knows where ten years ago and pasted into my journal. His house is filled with miniature Alex Grey prints. There is something in the air and I didn’t know it before but I am a part of this thing, whatever it is, I was from the beginning, I couldn’t escape it if I wanted to. It is simultaneously very humbling to finally realize that there are a whole lot of people in their twenties right now who are right there with me, but it’s also just great to realize I’ve found the people with whom I belong, like it or not. And I do like it; I’m embarrassed I love it so much. I’m embarrassed b/c it identifies me as a member of this very specific caste, but I cannot deny it, I grew up with the same circumstances and influences and reacted to them in the same way. So be it.
I recognized Kyle again, the same way I recognized him at Burning Man and forgot. He’s part of it, sir Kyle of the four times to India and Sanskrit and electronic drug-music making. I watched those DJs up there pulsing behind their boards, looking just like Kyle. Oh, I thought, I see. Of course I would have met him in India, or someone like him, but I met him because by making him from my home town the universe made its point unmistakably clear. This is your life, this is your predictable life, right down to the details, this is the zeitgeist for people of your age and social standing, this is it, how could you have not known it before? You are a tuft of fuzz upon the toe of the monstrous universe, you are just exactly where you were always meant to be, we knew it all before you even opened your eyes, so now what are you going to do, recognizing yourself finally? Hmmm?
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1:23 am - it all aches so good
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Went to the big bass-throbbing party in a warehouse in Brooklyn and it was just exactly, exactly right. Outrageous costumes, out of this world dancing, all night long, all night until after sunrise, body painted demon-girls dancing their souls on fire, a lounge pit of pillows and diaphanous fabric and gigantic red orb lights with Indian flute and tabla. Upstairs the floor shook, the people lost control, and after dancing myself to utter exhaustion, to the point where my muscles just wouldn’t do it for me anymore, I reached it--that moment where you leave your pounding, jiggling, madly gyrating sweat-soaked body behind and break through--there I was and there I wasn’t, moving like I haven’t moved in years. And I kept it up until dawn, tireless with alien energy, bare feet flying, costume in shreds, vibrating with the sound.
There are several things this showed me. It was as revelatory as any dream. One is that I can do just about anything. I left in an altered state, aching in a way that only hinted at how my body will feel tomorrow, and feeling lean and taught and svelte like a stretched rubber band. This was new. I felt physically like a completely different person. My perspective changed--I did not feel like I did before, I felt like a newer, better, more fabulous version of me, and this even momentary shift was incredibly pivotal. I saw a whole landscape of possibilities stretching before me that had never been available before. There are certain truths that each of us maintains as self-evident, and sometimes they are inspiring and sometimes they are inhibitive, and maybe we don’t even recognize them until they change, but when they change the whole world changes, REALLY. Our minds are maniacal organizers, putting everything in boxes whenever possible, uncomfortable with outliers, and inevitably we construct our reality through the minute fractal-organization that our minds make of a lifetime’s collective experiences... but it is a construction, and that means it is finite and by definition limited. We need our boxed reality, it keeps us sane, but when in a fit the box breaks and in floods the glare of all we were not seeing, what a gift, what a moment for prayer, for sacrifice. So what I mean to say is that today was that moment, and that’s what I saw, and things won’t be the same anymore.
The other thoughts that last night fanned are part of a longer, more interesting train, and have to do with being of a certain generation, but more of that later, my little brain is turning rapidly into a puddle.
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| Saturday, January 22nd, 2005
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4:51 am - a year later, but..
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I definitively ended the old phase when I left Tivoli just over a year ago. It was as swift and as absolute and as authentic an initiation as I had hoped. What I lack is a context to return to, people to guide me in my duties and choices, a community. Initiation enables you to proceed into adulthood, but all adulthood is marked by in our society is the ability to self-support yourself monetarily, and more importantly, to surround yourself with useful consumer items in an attractive living area. The ability to host a guest, the ability to find a paintbrush or a spare stepladder when you need one without having to go out and buy one, this must mean you’ve grown up. I own a coffee grinder and a double boiler and a humidifier and a carpet and a Christmas tree stand. These are all useful things. They each fulfill specific functions when I need them to. But every time I buy something like this, I feel heavy, like I have added one more weight to the shackles round my ankles. These things are necessary for my current lifestyle, but my lifestyle is not necessary nor do I feel any particular attachment to it, other than that it IS nice to have a room of my own full of all my own stuff and a house that fills with light all day long and at night fills with pleasant kitchen aromas. But what else could I do right now? It is sub zero here upstate. I am starting to have fantasies of men on motorcycles again, coming in black to whisk me away. They are not so much escapist, though, as candy fantasy for an idle mind.
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| Tuesday, January 11th, 2005
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1:54 pm - cake and other good things
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So, I was reading the NY Times at the coffeeshop when an middle aged man with an eastern European accent approaches me with a piece of chocolate cake. “I could not get you a tea or coffee,” he says, eying my cup, “so here is some cake.” He is barely coherant, obviously self-conscious. I am so surprised I ask, “..But why?” before fumblingly thanking him. He managed to convey that he was from Ukraine and, “I miss my daughter, my wife. So. Eat cake.” and he kissed my hand before disappearing out the door too fast for me to fully grasp what was happening and more appropriately express my gratitude. Then I am the only person in the coffeeshop, holding a slice of cake, astonished. Life. Maybe, I think, maybe I should pay more attention. All it takes is a little initiative, a small effort to put yourself out there in the world, and things will happen. I have begun to take walks in the morning. I have started to make lists. It’s funny how well the world responds. Suddenly almost-strangers strike up conversations with me. I spent an hour yesterday talking to a man my father’s age at that same coffeeshop who knew me as a waitress at the diner he sometimes frequents. It’s funny how you can so easily forget there’s a world outside yourself. It’s funny how the world loves you when you finally start to notice it. The garbagemen wave and toot their horn at you. The crazy Italian who cuts your hair tells you his life story. For the first time you notice the barber shop with the tube of revolving red and blue stripes outside, even though you’ve been past that corner a hundred times before. Inside there is an old man who is giving another old man a haircut. They both look at you look at them. You smile at them, so they smile at you. You have an impromptu conversation with a 50 year old artist entrepreneur over coffee as the sun slides across the sky. An eastern European buys you cake.
One of my plants is sprouting a flower for the first time in more than a year. My plants have had it rough, traveling from NY to PA back to NY through the cold and the heat. And this little one has decided it is finally time to have a flower. At the risk of sounding silly, this is definitely a good sign.
Perhaps walking makes you more human. Nobody walks anywhere. They drive. Sometimes you see questionable characters walking down the side of the road, but how often a young woman alone? Is this why so many things happen when you travel, because when you travel there is little else to do but walk, and when you walk you notice things and so the world notices you? Is it really that easy?
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| Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
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3:15 pm - question
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It is a hard choice, between sticking by the promises you made to yourself and your world, or revising and changing as your reality changes. This is perhaps the hardest choice of all. How do people dare get married? Is it worth being miserable just because you made a commitment? Is your word to yourself more important than change? A person has to adapt to new circumstance, but a person also has to be reliable. How to balance these two? I have had my whole worldview shaken more than once, and I do not know if I can really trust myself anymore. Do you think adulthood is marked my a certain dis-ease, an uncertainty and displacement of self that was never there before? Twice I was wrong. Once I failed even though I did my best. The great force fate was stronger than me, and I learned I am capable being beaten. And once I believed in a love for a person in the same way I love those few things I thought were indisputable, beyond the reaches of change. But that changed, and that love vanished. So how can I be sure of anything? And India above all else humbled me. I feel like for four years I've been pummeled repeatedly until the last shred of arrogance fled. Perhaps this was what I needed. But it has left me with a deep sense of uncertainty. I believe in making commitments, I believe that it brings depth and meaning to life, and I wholeheartedly believe in following through with them, or else they are so much empty air. But what do you do when things occur that were outside your realm of imagining? Do you make space for that and alter your commitment, honoring it but moving on with the wave of change? Or do you stick to it for the sake of personal integrity?
current music: Jethro Tull
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| Tuesday, November 23rd, 2004
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2:18 pm - adrift
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I want connection and depth but find emptiness and mirrors. I think I maybe lost all sense of identity permanently in India. I don’t feel smart; I find my thoughts trite and my writing shallow and facile. I feel very little anymore. A sense of wonder that is most important has been lost. Last night, half-asleep, I was seeing India again, seeing it in shining detail and living memory. Almost dreaming, the scenes I remembered glimmered with magical intensity, as if they could not possibly have ever been real. It is hard to believe I am the girl who remembers these scenes. She is not who I was before, nor is she who I am now. I feel humbled and uncertain and scared and alone and very small. It’s as if my point of reference, which is supposed to be at my center, has been moved to an ambiguous place just outside myself, and I am no longer the perceiver, the dynamic agent. I dissociate; I perceive the world independently and it seems to just so happen that I am also in this picture, alive and apparently capable of interacting with it, but wholly unimportant in it. Jess says she feels like she’s living in a diorama. As if we’re inside someone else’s little cardboard story. A few days ago while driving it suddenly seemed strange that every day of our lives we wake the same person, that we carry the same memories our whole life long, no matter what changes. Strange to still be here, to still be alive, to be called by the same name and have the same history. We are confined within our own skin. Just about anything seems possible but every possible thing seems roughly equivalent. Motivation is hard. Finding meaning is hard, or maybe it’s just that I haven’t gone outside to pray. What matters? Is this Tom’s attitude rubbing off on me, or is it the inevitable place one gets to when one lives long enough in the Hudson Valley, or is it just the winter coming on, or am I still in the trough of India’s wake?
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| Monday, November 22nd, 2004
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3:26 am - job prospect
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Last night Jess and I made fifty dollars apiece on a typically slow Saturday night. This naturally led to a discussion of other ways a competent uneducated girl could make some money. Hours later we found ourselves with Peter in a strip club in Albany, doing research. I have flirted with the idea before, since I saw my first strip show in Montreal with Stan two years ago and loved it. It was one of those things I thought about playfully but never seriously considered, like hangliding, something that greatly appealed to me but seemed too far from my sphere of possibility to actually try. Last night I watched with a critical eye: could I do this? Yes, I could do it. I wanted to do it. Why? After all, as the girl I talked to in the dressing room put it, it’s just another job. It is also an extremely potent display and manipulation of power. It lays bare (ahem) the dynamic of power between men and women and gives the woman the upper hand. Yes, some would say we are objectified, we are degraded to the least of ourselves as women: a body. We are using our bodies for money because we have no analogous outlet through which to earn money with our minds. We are taken advantage of and we take advantage. But all of this assumes that the body is low, the body is dirty, it is not as worthy as the mind. I realize that this belief is the spirit of our time, and that some people will judge me no matter how my philosophy sounds. Do I mind? We are of course taking advantage of the fact we are woman and hold great sway over men. There is no equivalent source of income for a man. However, power dynamics between men and women are not going to suddenly change, and as a reasonably attractive young twentysomething with a flair for drama and skill with dance and love of being in the spotlight with ample experience relating to men both sexually and superficially, I could certainly do the job well and probably enjoy it. And if I can make ridiculous amounts of money while I’m at it, all the better. I would derive an immensely sweet irony if I was a waitress at the Red Hook Diner by day and an exotic dancer by night. I do not think I could take much anything too seriously, and certainly not term papers, which I will be writing next semester, do or die. Because, like most strippers, I will be putting myself through school, and my great hope is that I will be cured of my narrow-sighted perfectionism and hence finally be able to write. The future looms large. I keep wondering if becoming a stripper will be the end of the road or a brow-raising item on my bio thirty years from now. One is led to believe that once you walk some roads, a whole retinue of options automatically closes to you. But conversely we pepper our identity as Americans with stories of great transformations and how a lot of hard work and determination can raise the low from their stations. This is a myth; maybe it is true.
I said to Jess: everything worthwhile takes effort. Nothing important comes easy. I am finally realizing this. That something desirable is hard is a measure of its potential for change.
So I decided I’m not going to look for another job. For several reasons, the best being that I love having five days off every week. The diner will be rebuilt by the end of January at the latest, and I know I have at least one shift a week there designated for me when that time comes, and probably more considering that everything will be in flux and starting anew and people will maybe have found other jobs or have gone back to school or had another baby or whatnot and I know I can subsist for a couple of months on my meager two days at the other restaurant and then I’ll be going back to school and I don’t want to have to go through the hassle of having to be trained and initiated at another place only to have to quit two months later. And it will give me a chance to read a few of the books I want to read and to survey all of Albany’s strip club offerings and prepare myself for the great return to academia and prepare my body for g-strings and six-inch plastic platform heels and will enable me to spend a whole week with my family over Christmas. I hereby wholeheartedly join the ranks of the marginally employed.
There is still something very important I’m not explaining that is the backdrop to everything I think and do. It is an elusive and essential thing I’m learning, and I have not been able yet to articulate it accurately. It has a lot to do with humility.
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| Thursday, November 18th, 2004
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2:15 pm - back again
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Now that I have a computer and an internet connection in my very own bedroom, and no lack of free time due to the fact that my place of employment caught fire and burned to the ground three days ago, I can now have an active livejournal again, and this time without power cuts every half hour. I am thoroughly enjoying this not having to go to work phenomenon. I realize in retrospect how incredibly disfunctional I was for working seven days a week waking up at 5 and 6 in the morning and surviving on a chronic four hours of sleep every night endlessly. The world seems softer, kinder. The suffocation lifts, suddenly I notice the sky for the first time in months. With the advent of my computer my journal has transcended the confines of paper, probably permanently. I'm back.
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| Thursday, November 11th, 2004
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2:37 pm - school and other goals
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This was written a week ago, before the diner burned down:
My goal for the near future is to lead a functional, balanced life. That is, to change the way I’ve lived ever since I can remember. To be able to work and go to school and eat well and run every day and get enough sleep and not smoke and maybe have some time to read and write and make art and see friends, sustainably, not merely for a month or two only to have it all fall apart again under too much pressure. To make the most of my time, to not procrastinate, to not be afraid anymore. I am afraid that it is not possible, that I am too unbalanced and inherantly disfunctional a person to be able to do it. There is nothing in my personal history to indicate that I will be able to do it, I can only hope that this is a way in which people can change. Work and I clearly have had a troubled relationship, and generally, the more work I do, the unhappier I am. This is what I most fear about going back to school: not so much my ability to do it and do it well, of which I think I am capable, but whether I am able to do it without going crazy and becoming self-destructive and bitterly miserable. I am also afraid b/c going to school itself, regardless of the time it takes and life situation I now have to fit it into, will take great effort on my part, for learning is real work, and I don’t know if I am up to the task. There is nothing about school that I feel confident about anymore, and even if I had no other obligations but school, I don’t know anymore if I am good enough to be able to learn. Perhaps my mind is dulled irretrievably. I began reading the book by Wade Davis again today, the one I’ve had on my bookshelf for five years and have never read all the way through. He’s my hero. I began today by asking myself, what is it exactly that I want to learn? What is it that I want to specialize in? What is it that I really feel passionate about anymore? And how can I build a life around that? And is going to college really the best way to do it? I just read about this guy who, 20 years ago, when he was 30 years old, after being a shepherd in the mountains of Switzerland and growing his own food and sewing his own clothes and making cheese which he sold in the market in town, and pursuing independently his hobbies of art and spelunking, decided to go to Malaysia for a caving expedition and afterward lived among the nomadic tribespeople in the rainforest there for the next 6 years and when the logging companies began to destroy the forests there, he tried to blockade the bulldozers from coming in along with many hundred native people. I choked. I felt immediate connection with this man. I know my type; anyone who is described in the same sentence as an artist AND an avid cave-explorer is one of my kind. Perhaps there are many of us but most of us are too dysfunctional to ever manifest our visions. And that is my fear. I asked Tom did he think that by fearing something, we draw it closer to ourselves? He said no but did not explain.
This is something quoted by Wade Davis in his book that the Swiss shepherd-turned Malaysian nomad said in a speech: “We have lost the ability to live in the moment. Yet eternity happens in the moment. It is so simple. Fate- you open the gates and it comes to meet you. I was drawn to the Penan for the simple reason that I feel well in nature. It is nothing romantic. When you live in the jungle you realize that daily life doesn’t permit romanticism. One walks, the legs hurt, and the leeches and the rain, and then you see something beautiful- that is your wage. Then you remember that we are all of one heart.”
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