smoke signals and celebrations

To the sun that woke me this morning with a prayer for grace and patience, I waved a finger in the sky that said- "not today." I'm holding my hand upward as a sign to take a break. I need a moment of silence.

Would the air be so kind as to check for my pulse tonight in my breathing, unconscious sleeping? I sometimes breathe smoke as a signal of fire deep inside, a reminder that there is life in the depths of a forest of trees. See the individuals within a collectivity of shelter giving limbs, those spun through the intentions of spiders and blooming through the broad-back shades of fallen leaves. Send a search party, or learn to read pauses, spaces in between puffs of grey. The blue respite turned dark with the moon, eclipsed by postponed dreams of another.

When is it noon? When does the sky belly house the light of a smile given freely, like the honey bees' overflowing cup of sweet buzzing? Hear the exhale murmur of sparked kindling, popping my ear drums so that my listening speaks volumes around full glasses of everything life-giving.

I've been drawn to energy of similar styles, flying together to the tops of burnt houses, the remnants of charred skeletons that create vantage points of time's progression, visible from feathered bodies, light as the ashes that float like carbonized buoys on air seas, oceans above me. I can drown lakes with the weight of my tears. I did it last night as I heard your words snap my old wooden limb structure. Tree houses are falling from their nails into my stomach.

I didn't mean for this to be a story of decay. The stripping of flesh away from principles of love leaves one feeling naked, brittle, and exposed to the crisp air. But the wind that picks up fans the coals of another year gone by in yellow flashes of smiles stolen by rebellious cells. Bodies attacking themselves like thieves taken away from their own carriages, wheeled into memories to stay before they fade.

I'm learning to let go of material connection. The wish is but a fantasy. I cherish the understanding that comes from simply knowing that you, and others who are siblings to your glow, inhabit the world around me like stars, or pinpricks on the water's skin, a spot reflected on an ocean's tipping wave salutation--hello, good bye.

I recognize your momentary exchange--in light comes, transient like the very breath I exhale into dark grey. At the moment of conception we can celebrate together in the way that we do in midnight reunions. Friendships actualized through subconscious recognition. I see your face transpire in my veins.

-11/12/09

Fly me a River in Harrisburg

I walked above the water on a bridge from a downtown to nowhere else. I didn't even make it to the end. My toes almost fell into the slotted square holes-holding tight to the support beams as they danced under the weight of strange travellers' steps.

Or was that the bridge struggling under my feet? Writhing away from the bolts and poles that kept it above the water. Though tied from end to end the center wanted to give in, to bend, to bow, to bathe in the river below.

Or perhaps the undulations were just the movements of the bridge's breathing. After all, it was a live bridge. In the setting sun of an autumn dusk the life lines of bridge weavers became visible. Nearly translucent, but strong as steel, the spiders made that bridge. I could see the beams, wires turned into support structures after thousands of miles of spinning silk dreams into a hard reality.

The currents below my feet and the rhythms of the bridge coinciding with my steps, surrounded by the continued webs of still-alive and pale, yellow sunlight, offered a space to feel like I was flying--traveling to no end, but journeying the sky.

a year is such a long time, a day is such a gift

It's been almost a year since I wished that I had said something to your face. I don't know what I would have said, perhaps rather I wanted to see into your eyes and hold your hand. The silence has been strange, but it has strengthened my understanding. I didn't say then what could have filled in for the years since that one time when you "baby sat" me. I was too young to stay in a house all alone, but I remember thinking you were pretty cool when you would drop me off at school.

I've grown up so much over the years, and now I can only imagine what it would've been like if we could have been friends. I missed my chance to say something meaningful to you last December. I knew you weren't feeling well, but you left the party too soon, even to tell me yourself that you liked my hair. I heard it from someone else, and I hope they told you along the way that over these past ten months I, too, wanted to reconnect with you.

Since middle school I have learned a lot about life, and with that, I thought I might know a little something about death. But I didn't want to tell you anything about that--I wanted to listen, to get to know you. Our short texts filled in those spaces enough for you to remind me to enjoy every day. I sent emails to you, and sometimes you wouldn't respond--this time I don't know if you even got the one asking you to keep the secret that I am coming home in a few weeks and that I wanted to see you. I signed with, "talk to you soon!" I wanted a day for us to finally talk face to face.

I know I was thinking of you at the moment when you passed away. I took a day trip, gathered some friends, said, "Yeah, I have papers to write, but I'm living my life today!" and I went to Harrisburg to smile and laugh while watching ellis sing. You previously had her quote under the picture of your own smiling face: "What if loving what you have is everything?" But then I noticed just two days ago, when I wrote to let you know that I was coming home, that you had changed that quote to say: "Sometimes we don't know exactly why things happen, or don't happen...just embrace the unexpected details and be thankful for the amazing things we do have...while we have them."

Did you already know?

On this day when I intentionally set out to enjoy the fact that I am alive, I thought of you and carried your spirit along with me. My smiles with ellis's songs turned into tears when she sang about words that you would have said: "Don't let a day go by without a love in your life....I am one spoke in a wheel, one leaf in the tree. I will fall when my time comes, and the snow will cover me." Minutes after the music was over I checked my phone and learned that I had missed my chance to say goodbye. We were months, years too late; this day came weeks too soon. I cried tears into the Susquehanna River--it carried them to some other place.

In the silence over the year, the missed moments to fully communicate, you've been a true friend. I hope you knew all of the things that I never got to say. You have taught me about life, even through your death: May we always approach both with such beauty and grace.

You have been a wonderful gift, Hannah, and you will truly be missed.

Hannah: July 6, 1981-November 8, 2009.

free write in a falling night

This is going to be another free-write--the truth of my gut feelings can come out freely. I beg for them to reveal themselves and exit my body so that I can clear my head, feel my lungs, taste my breath like wildflowers in the gutter, sleeping in the sidewalks and walking on my bed. These are the hours of conversations on phones, computer screens, living rooms, car seats purged onto pages.

Sometimes all we want is for an ear to hear our silence, for our gaze to speak operas that cry tears at subtle pauses, for our encores to be brought on by an applause of every moon, every morning, every dawn of a new noon.

Sometimes old trees are our best audiences.

Sometimes I wish I could stop thinking strong and start breathing love. Sometimes I wish I wasn't moving already, that I still had yet to begin, that the rest had not already been done; that the lessons were yet to come, that for now I could remain young, that my reflection would not present me with wrinkles of wisdom on my brain; that my heart would still be two-dimensional, paper-thin construction, paper mache, gentle, soft, light and trusting that the wind would carry it away; that my heart would not be afraid that without a solid stronghold it would be blown asunder, crumbled, folded, or framed as an invitation for someone else to be a valentine on any given day.

Sometimes strongholds come in the shape of push pins, staples, wooden stakes, or moving boxes, king sized beds, clothes worn second-hand. Sometimes strongholds can also be friends. Sometimes they are nothing but dreams and illusions.

I wish that the tissue of my young paper heart would not dissolve so easily in tear-water, cried at operas of the drama that seems to fall with the leaves, perennial as the seasons. The colors of autumn were at their height before I could write them tonight. I fear that when I return to read them their passion, their fire, will have already been lost in transcription.

I wish that I, too, could naively ask for another to 'be mine.' Won't you be mine, to have and to hold, to cherish and love until death do we die? What would a vow mean if it was recognized that words are most powerful only in the instant when they are first stated? Is that why we write things down, to have them to hold, to cherish and preserve, so that we don't touch the fear of it dying? Our love. Our life. Our selves. Our truth.

This is my night. This is the noontide spectacle of dark light that struggles to recognize the strength it takes to reconcile the temporality of changes, the flux that life makes as the Earth continues to move, as the leaves fade into the dirt, below my aching feet that sometimes beg to be carried.

Sometimes I feel too old.

Sometimes I wonder what it takes to be fearless falling.
From limbs full of faith. From heaven stripped of grace. From love lost in speech.

Is this what it is to let go--passionately?

--10/30/09

my life as a foodie

Finally, with my eyes turned in to see the lines that lay tracks like veins in my body, and my tongue stretched out to taste the sound of releasing, I hear recipes for what it means to be me come out in my speech, through my habituated movements. This is one step in a process of healing.

I remember through meals and tears the moments when everything broke and exploded over how we would ingest our wounds, hand over hand, saying thanks but asking for more grace to carry us to the next room without leaving welts on each others' skin, though we etched marks in our hearts. Keeping score like tally marks on a wall that count the times that we cried over lost appetites, ate in silence over the loudest judgments, the darkest pain of families torn apart and trying to eat it away. But those meals blur the boundaries between us, and those memories are internalized, metabolized, they become us.

If we are what we eat, I wish that those meals would be nourishing, that the tallies would turn sideways and move from prison walls to door frames and serve as markers to show us how we are growing.

There are some memories that I have of us crying around dinner because we were laughing, and when we didn't use a table but ate on the floor to make a picnic in the loft to mimic the pizza in a park that had been shared a decade before. I remember dancing on linoleum tiles in my grandma's kitchen making whatever we could from scratch. Like magic, she would make food out of air and I learned then the power of manifesting what you want to create so that it can be given away. At times I wish I could a bake a cake, if only to let you know that I thought of you today and decided that you deserved a cake in your name, with lots of candles on it to wish upon.

And without me knowing why I'm compelled to put aside some white rice and savor it with just a little bit of soy sauce, or to stuff chips in my sandwich bite by bite, or individually slice a nectarine off the pit, with a towel in my lap, that's the dessert I might still pick, or why I like my tea black, or too much pepper on my hashbrowns, or sometimes why I put thyme on my eggs when I don't even feel like thyme...without knowing why I have these cravings...

I think it is because my family becomes me as I eat. This is my body that has been raised and fed on experiences of love, pain, laughter. My tastes have been cultivated through Sunday dinners and aversions have been sculpted from culture-clashes on my plate. But as I've eaten, I've grown, and I only hope to continue bringing in more, to become more, so that I can cook up and give more.

Let's eat!--bon apetit!

-8/13/09

at the height of conception

I have to write when I'm on planes to figure out where I've been and where I'm going. Stuck mid-air in transition wondering who I can be way up here. I'll be landing shortly and have to pretend like I know what it means to have both feet on the ground, to have come down from singing with my whole body in the clouds.

I can see how even my handwriting is changing. It's creating spaces and holes to insert breaths and fingertips to feel what pulsates beneath my words. Perhaps they're minute slits that break dimensions for us to dive in to and seep out through. Or even invitations to reconsider the truths that my body already knows, my hand reveals, that my lips couldn't shape but my heart could hear if only I would trust more in my writing.

I'm writing to make sense of my fears.

I'm writing to connect the drops of my tears into letters from birds on high who sang so softly within the sighs through the night that the dreamers forgot they were even there. I've got symbols around me on t-shirts-they're crossed with screen-printed whales-and dots on my eyes from painting them clear blue and wide like the crispness of your chords drawn tight from your chest last night. It's a story of tempo and rhythm, written on these pale sheets, of inflection and connection between lines and scars on the bodies of silent trees. Like them we grow-even deeper into evil, ever higher into peace; even wiser than recollection, and ever brighter with each cycle of moons and breaths and spirals.

Let us learn to write (to speak).

-5/3/09

just like breathing. easy.

It's surprising that I haven't been able to write for seven days now after spending a week's worth of nights listening to your voice and the sounds of my blood rushing past my heart and into my unclenched fists. After seeing how much it means to let go and trust freely, to share the deepest fears and feelings, to be secure with a stranger who's never felt more familiar, I want to give you my breath.

I want you to feel with each exhale the way you are. so beautiful. I want you to catch with each gasp an image of divine light that painfully emanates from one hundred sets of your eyes. I want you to absorb the inspiration that comes with your vision, the vibration that comes at your touch.

With each inhale I wish for you to accept a second body, a second home. To become a wholeness, growing day by day to be able to give in the vein you imagined years ago. I wish for you, with each breath in, to be more present with the love at this moment than you've ever been, to see how incredibly you manifest miracles, you become art, you create magic.

You are that source.

I believe. in breath. you are.

............exhale...............

-4/12/09