Trees Or Car Ride: Upstate New York

Dark bark ink shaking hands thoughts into thick cobwebs speeding by in the cold, in the car, from the window---the forest in naked layers, bared and hiding both. Everything runs together at this speed, angled rain and rugged roots. But clean golden field red house chimney, brief silence, in the swirl of sticks and rivers.

"But you see, life is not like that at all; life is not permanent. Like the leaves that fall from a tree, all things are impermanent, nothing endures; there is always change and death. Have you ever noticed a tree standing naked against the sky, how beautiful it is? All its branches are outlined, and in its nakedness there is a poem, there is a song. Every leaf is gone and it is waiting for the spring. When the spring comes it again fills the tree with the music of many leaves, which in due season fall and are blown away; and that is the way of life."

Think On These Things, p. 140, Krishnamurti

Why?

The cash total on the register this evening:
$1108.94.

11/08. 9/4.

Why?
Why did I look at the total today, for the first time ever, of all days to look, of all numbers to find, and those few pennies that did it...

I'll never understand. These patterns, coincidences, appear and vanish like quick dark laughter, and there I am, reminded all over again, startled, and lonely.

Jewels

I want you in old jewels. Your fingers, your neck, the hollow of your collarbones, the bumps of your wrists, the soft useless flesh of your ear lobes.

Take what's been patient in the earth, in the sea, unthinking heat compressing nothing into kaleidoscopes, fragments of light fanning in the dirt like snowflakes, fanning buds like arteries, nutrient-rich chunks, rubies, pearls, diamonds, liquid streams silver, gold.

And the hours of too-human work, the tools and eyes and minutes, straining tight, all heat and carve, heat and carve, etch and set. Father to son, fathers to sons, lockets and rings, bracelets, crowns. Quiet pieces, worlds alone, living through dents and dead owners, thieves and gutters. Living through dust.

But your skin, creased with lines and pores, is mortal-soft. Fleck it in heavy gems, before it's gone. Weight of jewels, crowns for every part, nothing too heavy for you, nothing to overwhelm those eyes dug from somewhere I still wonder on long dark nights.

Knowing

Train

Hmm.

even abstract sunsets

make me think of

you

you said it was a picture like a painting

and i thought of your hands eyes full of paint

Fly

I don't know why we stay here winters, why we stay, when winter whips in, brute and reasonless. Sudden winds strip the trees, dry the leaves to shards, bits of metal, scraping the train tracks in the night cold.

What makes the birds go, to fly away when the bitter edges in, when the days get dimmer, when the night grows deeper, quieter.

Silent Snow, Secret Snow

By Conrad Aiken.  It starts like this:

Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened just when it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor perhaps could it even have occurred to him to ask.  The thing was above all a secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part of its deliciousness.  It was like a peculiarly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser-pocket---a rare stamp, an old coin, a few tiny gold links found trodden out of shape on the path in the park, a pebble of carnelian, a sea shell distinguishable from all others by an unusual spot or stripe---and, as if it were anyone of these, he carried around with him everywhere a warm and persistent and increasingly beautiful sense of possession.  Nor was it only a sense of possession---it was also a sense of protection.  It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion.

I read this story for the first time today, just after I woke up, in that easy Sunday way.  I hadn't known that it existed.  But the title, Silent Snow, Secret Snow, intrigued me, and it was one of the shorter ones in the little paperback I was leafing through, 50 Great American Short Stories.

It's one of those short stories that are like potent poems, tight and simple, with one idea, one beautiful thought, like the gilded trinket that you keep in your pocket.  The bit of intricate that comforts you.  

The story was like that today. A reminder that someone else's pretty little thought could feel like warmth.  The words were clear and clean, in bright fall-morning light, on a day where I had nowhere to be.  

And if I never string words together again, I can collect the trinkets that I find along the way.   It will be okay, if every so often, I press my fingertips to the details, scraps crafted by people who thought they might have figured out beauty for a moment.

Happy Birthday

11.08.

I saw this as an expiration date a few weeks ago. I think I will always see this expiration date, I don't think it will go away, even if I try very hard.

You told me you run away from Happy Birthdays, from fuss and gifts, but I think you were lying to me. I hope that you were lying to me, that you're getting cake, and things wrapped up, pretty and neat. I hope there is something that surprises you.

I hope that you are smiling without thinking.

That there isn't that moment when you're suddenly sad, that birthday-sad moment, when you're too-conscious of the day, of how nice it should be, and suddenly you realize time, that one more Christmas has passed by, one more 4th of July, one more slow turn into autumn.

I hope you don't think about any of that. Only that you feel, that your birth means something to somebody, that they treasure the minute, the hour, that you first gasped air, and they want you there, they want you to stay here with them.

I hope that's how you feel today.

Ocean

I went to the salt, for the first time in years, to try and baptise myself. I wanted it underneath my eyelids, on every inch of my skin, I wanted the salt like some vinegar-pure cure, that could help, when I was too-much-indoors, too much the robot, pressing buttons, nodding, repeating.

I wanted the silence, the immense sound of the crash, the churning of the water, like a heartbeat for some being too big for me to picture.

I went to the salt, for just a day, but it might take months, and I don't know when I'll have the courage to leave.

Fragment

I left irises by the iron gate---
open petals like vocal chords
tender peeled-back blue
flesh woven
tendon buds
purple bundled clots
rusting on the grass
by the iron gate.

Looking for a mantra

What am I looking for?

Too many things.

I want to be the farmer, the lover, the writer, the laborer, the wanderer.

I once read about how being overwhelmed with possibility is just a way to avoid actual action. If you attempt nothing, the possibilities are endless, limitless. By never making a choice, you never fail at any of the things that you imagine you could do. The groundless dream is always intact. Then again, you fail by default, never having achieved.

M.-L. Von Franz calls it an identification with the puer aeternus image in his The Problem of the Puer Aeternus:

"...there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about. If this attitude is prolonged, it means a constant inner refusal to commit oneself to the moment. With this there is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a saviour complex, or a Messiah complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to save the world; the last word in philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will be found. This can go so far as to be a typical pathological megalomania, or there may be minor traces of it in the idea that one's time 'has not yet come.' The one thing dreaded throughout by such a type of man is to be bound to anything whatever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the one human being that one is." (Ego and Archetype, by Edward F. Edinger, page 14)

This puer aeternus idea is the idea that "to be something in reality," a person "must give up everything in potentia." By choosing something to dedicate yourself to, some trait to fully cultivate, you are giving up all those endless possibilities, all those untainted fancies. But never committing also means that you are someone who "never brings any reality to birth."

This is a such human quality, a weird combination of fear of failure and delusions of grandeur. I see it in myself, as I'm sure many others do. But it is deeply frustrating, and it makes me wish for that one simple thing, for painstaking hours of labor to lead to a single accomplishment. That one piece of fruit or that one carved fragment would feel more pure and whole than years and years of dreams and ideals, no matter how pretty.

Does it matter what that one simple thing is? Is it more important to just choose it, and cultivate, and live in patience and silence and hard work? Or should we wait for the right moment, the right cause, the right fit? Maybe there is no way to know the right fit, just the pressure of our own push, the contented weariness of actual work.