New Blog
I am working on a new blog to incorporate my photo work more smoothly.
Let me know there what you think. Thanks!
tuesday
some recent musings have included the specific feeling of recalling one’s own solitude, realizing the trust around it in the space guarded, recognized, seen by the protector of one’s love. the joy of given up entirely and growing through life. one is whole, and against a large sky, as one translator said with rilke.
that is being oneself, that is letting go of what isn’t and noticing, feeling, seeing what is. which is nothing special; it just is.
i have also been thinking about intervention in the built environment, intervening in community and intervening in space as two parts of the same dime, interacting with life through the planes that intrigue and allume the mind. (well, mine.)
flowers, sheets, wind, light. these are the typical decorations of house doors and front porchs, street-sat, stationary houses with curtains, windows, hung-over eaves, and sad shingles hung down the roof. sunlight can beat on the tiles of the roof and eat the moss, letting it grow and thrive off portland’s winter sunshine and wet moss, edible plants in the sky’s moisture, eating the roof speck by speck, attaching to an oldness that eats the heart, that opens love and heats the coolness of your old, old basement breath, the houses that eat your love, the love that eats your breath,
every day, i jump in the river,
and the water is cold and tangerine cold and icy cold and star cold. Xing xing!
The river goes one way, and one way only. You know whether you’re in it. It’s pretty much up, or down. Sometimes, you look around, and you wonder, “am I in this river? Am I in the river? What river am I in? And where is this one going?”
The only answer: jump in.
Jump in to the river, and swim downstream.
Swim ’till your heart is out, swim ’till your lung fills up
with sweat, swim ’till you’re
out of your mind,
out of your sea,
out of the peach,
out of the sunlit
catastrophes to which you’ve accustomed
your autumn blossom,
your trickle-tree,
your sunshine basin,
your abnormal catastrophe,
and remember the
river,
yo. Remeber the river.
It leads up your stage left,
down your stage right,
through the center doors,
out.
Sight never saw a more glissening catastrophe,
a more partial umgang an’ e’er ‘e saw.
Up trickle, yo.
Down bubble.
Fast-acting,
ready. Pass. Go.
$20
a friend told me that sincerity, when she thought of it, brought to mind her withdrawal of $20 from the bank. current events allusions aside. very matter of fact, but $20 is $20, and it’s pretty much all that drives the transaction. there were some other, more personal accounts of sincerity that didn’t get shared, and probably not without reason.
i’ve heard it called by lots of names. sincerity. taking oneself seriously. being there completely. being oneself, living oneself.
in any case, it’s a full presentation of who one is. or, if not a full presentation of who one is, it’s a full presentation, a full commitment, of at least a part of who someone is.
thankfully for that last qualification, given what most of us bring to the atm’s table.
in any case. sincerity when i think of it gets at having no space between oneself and the thing at hand. the conversation, the person, the project. the life. the object or subject. sincerity is this sense is closeness, is being right flush up against one’s interlocutor. and being completely what one is sharing, expressing. it is full expression.
taking oneself seriously? that is being sincere to oneself. i’m not sure how much sincerity makes sense as the directed action we usually make it out to be, but, if it is, then i think taking oneself seriously gets at being sincere with oneself.
again, less, or no, space between oneself and one’s interlocutor, and also being one and the same as what one is trying to express, where what one is trying to express is a way of relating to oneself.
it means a lot for staying up late eating donuts and watching the carpet grow red. and playing stupid games with your blog readers. at the moment, if somebody asked me, i would put sincerity (and, perhaps, taking oneself seriously) as a part of living fully. sincerely living. has some ring of earnestness, too, which may have more to do with effort, and with its limitations.
