Fractures

a breath of wind

2005-07-25T11:59:35Z

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.

rambling in my free time

2005-06-08T03:19:04Z

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?

waitresshood and windsong

2005-05-25T03:39:26Z

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.

what to do...

2005-05-23T16:02:12Z

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?

faery children

2005-05-03T15:04:52Z

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.

!

2005-04-28T02:10:30Z

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.

rethinking some things

2005-04-27T07:01:21Z

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.

growing webs

2005-04-26T03:33:37Z

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.

reflection on human nature on an sunny afternoon

2005-04-20T23:46:29Z

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.

middle aged lechers

2005-04-14T01:48:04Z

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?

secrets to beatitude

2005-02-24T01:57:32Z

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.

on finding my tribe

2005-02-13T18:37:54Z

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?

it all aches so good

2005-02-13T06:26:08Z

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.

a year later, but..

2005-01-22T09:56:37Z

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.

cake and other good things

2005-01-11T19:00:35Z

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?

question

2005-01-05T20:18:56Z

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?

adrift

2004-11-23T19:33:04Z

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?

job prospect

2004-11-22T08:28:35Z

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.

back again

2004-11-18T19:31:16Z

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.

return

2004-08-11T17:53:11Z

Note: until now, my journal has been maintained, edited, and posted by my friend Trish, who offered to do this for me while I was busy in India. As I am home now, all future entries will be self-posted and unedited. I thank Trish profusely for her favor, as I would not have kept a livejournal while I was in India otherwise. All of you who followed my adventure and kept me sane by your comments and reminders that I was not in fact wholly alone in the world, as it sometimes seemed, thank you.

Well, guys, I made it. The last few weeks of the trip I became suddenly intensely inspired about all the exciting projects I was going to begin when I got home. I made lists and lists of ideas. I daydreamed of having my own bedroom, my own clothes, my own kitchen table. I imagined how great it was going to be to have a stable existance again for a while, friends nearby, a space to spread out my work. All I wanted, I said, was a dinky job in my old town and to have a whole lot of fun. India was many things, hard and good, but not neccessarily fun.

So I came home. The most fabulous thing about America is that almost everyone you meet in America speaks English. This is still somewhat of a novelty to me. What endless possibility, I can start up a conversation with every person I meet. Everyone seems interesting, everyone seems nice. I am in love with roadside diners and rednecks in pickup trucks at gas stations.

I am living in a tent in my old area in New York, my said reason for being here now is to find an apartment and possibly a job. But I am doing this halfheartedly. Something about the air and the sunshine of familiar summertime on the East Coast whispers of road trips and festivals and concerts and all-night bonfire dances. I am less and less inclined toward the ideal of the stable apartment, normal job idea. This is compounded by the fact that my best friend has just left the area semi-permanently for Morocco, my other best friend has surprised me my informing me the day after I returned to the States that he has been living with a new girlfriend for the past five months and has made no effort to stay in contact with me, and another friend is moving to California in a few months. A vision suddenly looms before me, it's dead-winter January, I'm working too many hours at a restaurant so I can afford my expensive apartment, all my friends are estranged or gone, and all my momentary inspiration has withered. Fun?

With this phantom in mind, I've been posting apartment wanted fliers around the area. Then Jess suggests Burning Man. A recurrent subject these days. Do I want to go? Instantaneously all my timeline plotting of apartment finding and ordinary job seeking blows effortlessly out the window into the warm summer sunshine air. Hell yeah I'll go.

What am I doing these days, where am I headed, what is it exactly that I want? Don't know, really. I knew better before I came home. Excited to be seeing old friends again, excited by such limitless possibility.

Three nights ago I went to a contact improv dance jam in the woods of western Massachusetts. This is a form of dance that involves a lot of lifting and twirling partners into the air in elaborate gravity-defying stunts and you end up spending a lot of time upside down. When you're done, the earth under your feet wobbles and you're not absolutely sure when you walk that the ground is going to be there for you when you make your next step. This is exactly what it is like to be alive right now. A little high, a little drunk, a lot of uncertainty.

Milarepa Cave

2004-07-14T12:58:50Z

27 June 2004. After breakfast this morning, I tied a liter of water around my waist with some wire, and set off to find a rumored cave, Milarepa Cave, somewhere up in the mountains on the other side of the river. I went alone, and had only a decrepit sign and some very vague directions to guide me. It was a very steep ascent, but eventually I found the way.

I rounded a turn and saw above me, distantly, numerous stretches of prayer-flags, ever so long, strung from atop a cliff to a much lover ridge, and beneath these strands of flags appeared a tiny village, perhaps five huts, and many peple going about their day. I asked the way to Milarepa cave, and one man pointed me farther up the field, to where more flags flew, high up on a cliffside. So I trudged on in the hallucinogenic sun. I am at about 4800 meters, an altitude at which many people start to have trouble, and though I felt fine, I found I was breathing very heavily with every step. I stop a moment to drink some water, and gaze up at another assortment of flags upon a high jutting rock on the extremely steep hillside. From this precipice, I notice something sparkling shooting out into the wind, falling in clouds like butterflies or bubbles or fairy dust. They rose and fell in the gusts of air, and spread all around, glittering in the sun. What were they? They came in spurts, and I could just barely discern that in each spurt they sparkled with a different color. Naturally, I had to climb up (and up, and up) to investigate. But first let me illustrate that moment, that vision I had, more clearly than I have done:

I have just climbed probably close to 1000 meters and feel pleasantly lightheaded from the exertion and the thin air. I am sitting on a rock in a field full of low-lying scrub bushes, wildflowers, and small cairns. At my back there is a modest ridge, and before me a very steep ridge. Along both ridges are strung hundreds of many-colored flags, flying in the strong wind. Below me is the tiny village I just walked through, whose monastery I peeked into and heard people chanting and smelled a sweet incense. Rising majestically not all that far from my seat, to my left, is a giant snow mountain, garbed in cloud, set against the blue, blue sky. Down the valley to my right an entire range of white-topped mountins rises as far as I can see. It is neither warm nor cool. It is so ecstatically bright it hurts to open my eyes wide. I am higher than I've ever been before. I look up on the ridge before me and out among the flickering prayer flags falls swarms of glitter, dancing in the wind. I think it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

So I climb up snstable rock slides to the place wher I saw the sparkle coming from and find two monks busy stringing up yet more prayer-flags. One of them picks up a small square of colored paper from the ground; it is printed with a buddha and some Tibetan script, and looks just like a miniature prayer flag. They are scattered all around. This is what I saw from below. Though only paper, in the sun they reflected like holograms. The monk had been throwing prayers into the wind. If prayers were visible, I thought, they would indeed look just like that.

Still seeking the elusive Milarepa cave, I half-walk, half-crawl along the steep ridge to the next cluster of flags, where the monk said the cave was to be found. I do not find the cave. What I do find, however, is a tiny, tiny stone hut--but hut is too large and pretentious a word for it--set in against the rock of the ridge. It is perhaps five feet by four feet, and about three feet tall. It is rimmed around by a tiny fence. It has a little cylindrical metal chimney out of the roof, and the door-opening is shielded by a rusted sheet of metal. I am enthralled. I peek inside, relieved to find it unoccupied. Inside it is very dark, and all I can see is three pictures of the buddha on one wall, and an asssortment of unidentifiable stuff in a bundle on the floor. Afraid its inhabitant might come back and find me snooping, I do not go inside. A real mystic cave-dwelling! I am truly struck. I spend a little more time climbing around the rocks, pulling myself around with handholds on clumps of grass, looking for the cave, but soon, hungry and feeling my quest has reached a satisfactory peak, I return to the village below.

There I am very surprised to find a foreign man, a Frenchman by birth, eating rice and talking to some monks in English. I am invited to have something to eat, so I plunk down across the low table from the Frenchman and begin to eat my rice. Again the setting must be described: From my new perspective, sitting directly beneath the multi-colored flags I mentioned before, the very long ones that stretch clear across the narrow valley over the village, the flags appear like rainbows, ten or twelve rainbows, curved by the wind, against the blue blue sky, juxtaposed against the distant mountain range. It is magical, just barely real. The cries of crows die in the wind.

A little conversation with the Frenchman reveals that he intends to use that very isolated stone shack as a home and meditation retreat for the next five months. Of course I am intrigued, despite the fact that he describes himself as a "nomad" who was "in this life" born in France but left at 19 and has travelled all over the world ever since and met his "master" a little over a year ago, and it was this master who instructed him to come to Milarepa Cave and retreat there for five months. I believe the phrase "dharma bum" even escaped his lips, but I might have just imagined it. Neverthless, he is a person who is planning to sit in a cave in the Himalayas alone for five months to focus on his religious practice, and I am therefore greatly intrigued. So when he suggested we meet tonight for dinner, I agreed without hesitation. This will surely be interesting.

The theme of one living alone in a cave for revelatory and/or magical purposes is one that recurs in my life. I find it one of the most frighteningly seductive, and at the same time, strangely familiar, of my visions.

The man from the village refused to let me pay them for the meal I ate, and seemed almost to laugh when I asked. He told me if I wanted to give something, to put it in the donation box inside the monastery. Which I did.

On the way back, walking through a vast field of green and wildflowers, I gave a yell and twirled around 'til I was dizzy. It was a beautiful day.

Nepalese Wind

2004-07-14T12:57:36Z

[Editor's note: Jess has been in the mountains in Nepal, far from any cyberspace. She's sending exerpts from her paper journal now that she's back to what we foolishly call civilizaton.]

25 June 2004. I have entered wholly different country, high country that smells of cedar and pine. It is vaster, more barren, brighter. It is dry and rocky, and the roar of the river has become secondary to the wind. The defining characteristic of this land is the air and the wind; it speaks of empty spaces, and of very great distance. Devoid of humidity, it feels as clean and clear and articulate as the New Mexican desert. Everything appears as if in sharpest focus, gleaming almost, with being, with existance. The wind whips down the valley from the peaks, and is caught by the mile-high bare bowl of rock to the east, along the base of which I walked today. It is an awesome slab of rock with no name, shaped like an amphitheater for the gods, and nearly smoothe all the way from base to summit, curved concavely, a massive wall, the uppermost ridge of which is sometimes hidden by cloud. I have never known so beautiful a wind, such a lonely wind, and so inaccessably free. The wind is like a beautiful mournful woman who wanders the hills and will never love anyone and though many desire her, can never herself be loved. The sound of the wind is like the language of the stars; it is the song of empty places. I have been seduced by this wind, and by these mountains. I am at home in my solitude like never before. I feel like if I stayed here a little while the mystery would be revealed. Perhaps the atmosphere presses too hard upon us at low altitudes and keeps our minds in check. Perhaps it is interaction with other people which grounds us. I would start to fly if I stayed here long alone, an idea that both frightens and appeals to me. Interaction with other people is our structure as human beings, it keeps us sane and safe and muffles our ears and eyes to the other voices and other realities than our own accustomed one. It keeps us from learning too much.

daily life

2004-06-02T12:51:39Z

[Editor's note: When we left Jess, she was in Nepal, so the mountains she's talking about in the following paragraph refer to the Himalaya.]

A week of heaven wandering though the mountains in the rain, pulling off leeches from my toes, climbing up nearly vertical trails for eight hours at a time, pondering ancient snakey spooky trees dripping with moss materialize from out of the mist, jumping over icy mountain waterfalls, and arriving exhausted, filthy, and starving to teahouses, where I sipped tea, napped by the woodstove, watched the clouds and the rain from the window, and read a fantasy novel by candlelight.

A 30-hour journey from Pokhara to Delhi, in three parts: First, the bus ride to the India-Nepal border, swinging down out of the mountains on a one-lane road around hairpin turns with no shoulder, looking down the cliff into the valley below from the bus-window, where the skeletons of less fortunate buses lie upside-down, having flown off the road. Then, a spectacular ride from the boder atop the roof of another bus sharing space with the luggage, wind blowing my hair behind me, and all the land of India expanding before me. Finally, a sixteen hour train ride to Delhi in which I paid to have a waiting-list ticket, which meant that I got the great luxury of sleeping on the floor of the train, next to everyone's shoes and suitcases, my head propped up on my own lumpy handbag. When dawn came, the chai-sellers roused me, and I managed to ursurp someone's unused bunk for the remainder of the ride, attempting to sleep amid the screaming children and the heat, and the florescent light directly above my head. Blinking, rubbery-legged and sticky, I emerged on the platform of the Delhi railway station, and found a hotel room exactly three and a half feet by six feet square, made passable by the fact that it has a window. Life is great. There are dust storms in the evening because it is almost monsoon-time, and good food to be found.

I am appreciating everything uniquely Indian anew because I just realized I only have seven weeks left of it. Wow. My extremely cool aunt Liz is coming to Delhi tomorrow to adventure around with me for two weeks.

Pokhara, Nepal

2004-05-22T11:56:18Z

After subsisting on thali and fried bread for months, and withering under the opressive Varanasi sky, I discover Nepal, and I think I'm in heaven. If I had known that a mere two days away I would find such a land I would have left weeks ago. The Nepalis are NICE. They smile and laugh genuinely. The Nepalis are beautiful, especially the women. I think they are the most beautiful people on earth. The women are relaxed, and wear simple sarongs and sleeveless tops as often as saris. The distrustful stare I had almost gotten used in India in Nepal is a smile. The land is epic and so dramatic it takes my breath away. The town of Pokhara is like a valley oasis in the center of the mountains, and in addition to being right next to a gorgeous lake at the base of the hills, it has music shops and bookshops and trekking gear shops and hundreds of good restaurants (I had sushi--real sushi!--last night) and shops selling every kind of beautiful thing ever, and bars--actual bars--with live music and pool tables, and the weather is cool and wet and misty, and whenever you feel like it you can take a bus half an hour to the mountains and disappear for a month or two. And because it is not tourist season anymore everything is dirt cheap. I am suffering from the shock of first impressions, because I only just arrived, but I feel like I've found paradise.

I was stuck in the India-Nepal border town of Sunali for two days because a strike in Nepal caused all transportation to cease. There I met a cheerful Transylvanian(!) who will accompany me into the hills for a week of walking. The last night in Sunali, we were sitting on the roof of the hotel watching the flashing of lightning that was coming toward us from the north, as frequent as a strobe light but it filled the whole sky, when suddenly a violent gust of wind blew over us, knocking over our flask of rum and raising the dust from the fields and street in a great cloud, and then came the rain, pouring in almost horizontal sheets, with such force that it came through the doors and down the stairs and flooded all the floors of the hotel like it was a sinking ship. I yelled and flapped my arms: "Welcome to life!"

I can't wait to get into the mountains. Varanasi taught me one thing: I belong in the mountains.

lackluster afternoons

2004-05-10T22:17:58Z

I was run over by a wheelbarrow full of bricks today, which tore the skin off the tops of all my toes, but I do in fact still have all ten of them, so I guess I'm lucky. Then, after dyeing my hair, I discover that my hotel has no running water for some reason, so I go to the communal hand pump in the alley to wash out the dye, much to the amusement of many onlookers. Then, thinking to recover myself, I relax on my balcony with a mango, only to have my mango STOLEN from right beside me by a monkey. I yelled at it, but it just sat there, out of reach, holding my mango, gloating at me with its nasty beady little eyes.

I am in the process of learning a little bit of Hindi, more dutifully than for any other reason; I said I would learn Hindi here, so I am now obligated to myself to do it. Days have been lackluster, and the great flowering tree of revelation has begun to wither a bit and lose its fragrance. I know I need to head for the mountains. It is so hot I move only with great effort in the afternoon, mostly I just lie in bed and think about all the things I could be doing.