Once a year, on a day in May

Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy..

I can't lose track of the ways that I miss you.

Nonetheless, character

– the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.

Joan Didion

if WKW a stylist, quizas quizas quizas...

Du Juan, the modern day Maggie with longer legs.

by Vincent Peters, Numéro China September.

Found while packing

1991

my mommy looked like Yang lan when she was young

Shanghai (2x) in the springtime.

other diversions elsewhere

most acutely,
I am this.

I am missing her
over and
underneath, inside
and in-between
each then
every moment
in each and
every day

Senior, the film

That Go | Röyksopp 'Senior'

WAY neater than the Kanye video. Part two is here

Rilke: the limits of your longing

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear: 

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me. 

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me. 

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.

Did Rainer Maria Rilke actually believe in God?
I am drawn to this idea of Longing as a landscape God does not set foot in. He lets us travel to the borders of our own yearning; he will not go with us. God cannot possibly reciprocate the reaching and need of all the universe. If he did (need us), he'd just implode of longing for himself.

I'm excited for my first Zen workshop at the monastery!

Meditations on Over-Ingesting Info

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi says I am a guest house
so spacious, and inviting
Oh-so-much info,
come hear me roar:
YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH SHIT I CAN STORE!!!!!!!!!!

!!

I leave behind my bookshelf :(

taking the bare essentials:

From the bottom 

- Maira Kalman's drawings add life to mechanics 

- i am humbled by the creative privileges of existing in this century 

- My feisty 87-year old grandma LOVES this. And she says the day I fully understand de Beauvoir's writing is the day I will amount to substance in my personal and professional life. 

- Liz Gilbert is endearing

- I can't bear to part with old pages. Good for future giggles, I'm sure.

at summer's dusk

    

  

  

propinquity

is such a yummy word {definition via Wiki}

so is this:

& Chase

the course of
tongues run along
wood, whose fondness
kneels & forfeits quiet dissolve. To say
it's collusion; splinters against taste against
shape, that freeze or melt all mount
the same, small betrayals to

thin air

freeze to melt
popsicles
stained and plummet

on cue
on clean skirts &
then defy, lips that
enclose unwilling
gasps
&
tongues curl
to fabric
the stains &
let
gravity
dash on
to say,
it's you,
& inflect, you
Thin air,
you
ungrateful
frolicking thief.

*
i think it's a sad millisecond when the unsuspecting popsicle drops :(

Why

My parting line to the Prof was that I would always keep writing - a promise to self wrapped in serious gratitude. What patience, I thought, it takes to steer indulgent young minds to an explorer's courage. After two years of prodding and many meek stories, I found my boldness and grasped a handful of understanding. I wanted to leap towards my future words. For a moment at least, crafting vivid sentences didn't seem like half the labour I knew it to be ... (quite possibility) why I then said I'd found the meaning writing in fiction.

Two months later, I know I was wrong.
What's worse, I haven't been diligent and am still befuddled on how to write (well). This is an awful excuse because in this time, I have traveled across the globe, walked in an inviting yet unfamiliar country, met some severely intriguing people, swallowed The Question of What I Will Be In Life and found more rooms for my imagination ... even with this bounty of material, my writing fell flat.

I have written accounts of the moments, exchanges and landmarks that passed me by, as I paused and exclaimed 'Ah! this could make great fiction.' But to gather these snippets of eminence, to conceive a story that breathes with naked, pulsating truth - I have yet to learn how.

I hope this place will commence how.

Because I've promised there to be words that follow, to dear Poet Prof and the dozens of anonymous eyes across the computer screen, I shall not disappoint thee :)

What follows here will be fiction, fiction questioned, questions fictioned and (at last) many things written.