2016

Monday morning
I swing my leg over the bicycle. It is morning and the adderall is starting to kick in. I watch as a drone takes over my body. A moment ago my body did not want to bike, did not want to get out of bed, did not want to do anything. I can almost hear my neurons buzzing. Before I know it i am hiking up the pace, standing up and pushing on the pedals, my body now a smooth component of the mechanical frame beneath me. I do not know who gives life to the other. Everything is dimly nice. Life is yellower. I am aware of all the work I have to do, but without emotional valence.

Monday, 11pm
I breathe deeply as the poison starts to leave my body, my hands erupting in hives as my system finally starts to push the toxins out. Inconvenient emotions seep in

Tuesday I dream of
The faces of the people I met who loved me without question, who saw me and for whatever reason decided to pour love like liquid gold straight into my gaping chest, my open mouth, asking for nothing in return

I want to see and give all the flowers, to people I know and even more to people I don’t know.

I want to breathe with the quiet power of nature and the mountains,

Feel the earth’s emotions even if they knock me to the ground

Tell Tim that if the night sky is a black sheet and the stars are holes showing just a tiny bit of what lies behind then your body is just one of those holes and your consciousness is equivalent to what lies behind the sheet, the giant shining white light

Only a tiny bit of who you really are can shine through your body in this life because you are everything and everyone; you are the giant web of consciousness that connects all living things.

How do you convey this to someone who has difficulty feeling it?

Sunday morning
What did I do in between the cars of the R train at 4 am?

Monday
You feel the deep pain of a might- have- been in your chest and you
Wonder
Why
It hurts
So
Much

A piece of advice: Don’t let your skin get too hungry otherwise, you’ll probably end up eating yourself.

Sometimes I still think about her and I feel like I’m gonna die, but it’s getting better and I know it’s getting better when I look up at the beautiful PNW sky and it’s like purple candy, sliding down my throat.

Tuesday
I ate too much chocolate and wound up sick and in the rain

Wednesday
You know, it is probably for the best. Why would you want to keep a big bird in a small cage? And who would be selfish enough not to water a plant when you have the water, and the plant needs to grow? In light of all this, I have been going around watering things, paying forward what so many people have given me.

 

How we Blend Into each other (careful who you share yourself with)

This gallery contains 4 photos.

Never make a home in a place

I started this image last May when I had to move out of my apartment, but finished it yesterday. As someone who has struggled with soul loss, the concept of building a home inside myself is important. Tad Williams puts it very well:

“Never make a home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it – memory. Friends you can trust. Love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey.”

Holes (or lack thereof)

Not talking to you I

finally feel at home in

my body

listening to bluegrass, the blueridge mountains i finally feel at home, in my dreams

holding the child who was my first

true love

 

holes

In my stomach that took my soul away for

Years,

Finally gone as I sit here typing frantically

To bridge space and time

to attempt to hold onto the feeling I have of

Home

Here

in this vast network of young people

attempting to find divinity in each other

We have forgotten the meaning of true relationships, of letting yourself

Love someone deeply

And without fear

 

I want to find

Divinity

in the curve

Of a horse’s back

a Mountaintop

pen on paper

Wisps of golden baby hair

The warm

sweet

scent

of Breast milk

dripping

Out of a sore nipple

 

My church is

Wind rushing past my ears over the roar

of a four wheeler engine,

Salty ocean water stinging my eyes

Bread and butter at every meal

“Hoppilei!”

screamed out over the Austrian alps, a warm

Sheep’s tongue licking salt out of my hands.

To me these things are the absence of holes; they fill

A soul

They protect

Against tears in your stomach

Lungs

And heart

 

I liked

when you said

extreme loneliness allows a person to listen to the trees.

I have been to the place where

You are so lonely the voices of nature fill you up

There, I have done my penance

Here

I am whole once again

I have gone to the far corners of the earth

Crying

And searching for my soul

I have shown it how much I love it and now

I deserve it back,

Finally

Filling the holes

In my skin

The fever

In the months after it happened

A fever would come

Rising from the trails you left on my skin

On a bus, hearing the words you spoke

“I think, in fact, that you’re incredibly beautiful.”

 

Later, I hated myself for caring

stains of the patriarchy still

on my body

And in my brain

 

I felt

A rush of heat

pressure behind my eyes

and then

Pain.

pure and simple,

sharp and hard,

like cutting glass

your hands

Now gripping my body uncomfortably

your eyes daggers

your hair poisonous snakes.

 

To my best friend:

I let

the devil

fuck me

The ache of a friendship lost heavy

in my chest for months

 

Nightmares where I saw your face

Moved in, moved out

In my dreams,

Chronologically rearranging events that had already passed

Wisps of the dog’s presence warm in our home

 

“Talk is cheap” by chet faker

I break out in a cold sweat,

On the subway

Closing my eyes while nausea passes

 

Finally, the worst of the storm was over

As my mother

once told me

The opposite of love is not hate

It is indifference

 

Her

After the spring her memory was stronger than ever

her smell

her hair on my pillow. the spattering

of freckles that gently decorated

her entire body

her kale- and- carrot stir fry,

the way the light in her

eyes could go

from easy to furious

in a moment

without warning.

 

The underhanded insults

The missing camera and bike

The constant self- lauding monologue

“I am god,” one of her poems proclaimed

 

her mouth, always wanting

her deep tenor voice full

to the brim, rich

unearthly beautiful, telling all

the pain inside her

Deep and gaping

raw and red

How to turn away from that voice?

 

The redwood forest spoke to her.

Her mother’s love

Was seared into the fiber of her being

It carried her through

Each coming day

 

I thought

Loving her enough could erase years

Of being without; give her what

her childhood lacked

She thought

She could play me like a violin.

 

I looked for simple answers

Where they would never exist

Sometimes

we must walk away

from something unfinished

without hope of reconciliation

Unsteady: reconstructing the life and work of Leila Ann Soltau

Repressing this post, about my late sister, by Stuart Bryant

Memory, as they say, is a funny thing. The last time I saw Leila, I cannot remember in any detail what we talked about, or what we watched on television after she returned, exhausted, from the chem…

Source: Unsteady: reconstructing the life and work of Leila Ann Soltau

Blue and Other Colors

I sat in a dark alleyway and noticed that
Songs sound slower in New York than they do elsewhere
I do not mind the cores of pears.
Everyone, no matter who you are, needs a fix.

There are some things I love about being here. Hot water, showers.
Everything is open for 24 hours.
Cables at sundown,
Hiding a tiny ghost in my closet while we talk late at night

Things I hate: bikers who don’t see red lights
How everyone is so close to each other, but inaccessible at the same time because if you live in new york, you have to be busy.
Sitting across from business men on the subway who
stare at me like I have red eyes and fifty teeth
The fact that “protect your heart” is tagged all over these city’s streets. For once, I don’t want to protect my heart.
I want it to speak.
It is the morning and your freckles are erased by the blue light settling on your face from the window. You take a deep breath and turn over, your back to me now. I look up at the dripping leaves. What brought me here?

While you sleep I think about the fragility of relationships, the fragility of life. I think about how much I took for granted two years ago, and now I know what it means to be truly alone. “Someday you will miss today,” an internet meme instructs me. “Thanks,” I tell it in my head, then click “unfollow.”

My grandmother’s life oddly parallels mine. Right now, her legs are so swollen that fungus grows on them. I imagine the insides of them like mitochondria – a wiggly inner layer to hold all those pockets of thick, sticky fluid. I sit with her and absorb the absurdities that emerge from her bruised brain,. She looks and me and smiles. “Where did you come from, you little booger?” We both laugh hysterically. I am thanking myself for coming back, that I caught her before it was too late.

I sometimes close my eyes and see a plane window over a landscape. The landscape itself isn’t specific, but the emotion, the mindset, is. Psychological isolation is preferable to the complications that come from being known. On this airplane I am by myself and going somewhere, for a reason that I convinced myself was valid at the time..

Fast forward and we are at the beach. Lucy and my sisters are there. I am letting myself burn for the hundredth time even though I know I am going to be sick later. There is a tiny part of me that likes doing these sorts of self- destructive things. Do I really need to live to be 100?

I am back in your room and try to rest again. In a dark headspace something appears that is colorful. The accompanying sound is the vibration of a bumble bee, the energy between us a rainbow oil film on a dirty puddle.

Through this, something is healing, but I am not yet sure what.

Sembran

I really love this song

song:

lyrics: (read the text on the right!) http://genius.com/Bibio-lovers-carvings-lyrics

The musical aspect of the song makes me think of spring and new beginnings, but the lyrics make me a little sad. When I think of a relationship ending I think about how everything is ephemeral. It is useless to hang on. The point is to look for greater meaning in things – patterns, feeling gratitude for a compilation of experiences. Sometimes I think about the fundamental unity of matter; the “inherent oneness” of everything; the idea that everything comes full circle so nothing is ever “really deleted,” just changed. Sometimes this is comforting and sometimes it isn’t. It still doesn’t erase the passage of time. But I guess that’s also the good thing about life – you know what you’re doing is important because you had to choose it over something else.

Can anyone relate?

All this aside I love listening to the second half of the song while walking somewhere, not thinking about what any of it means