BOTANICA
11.14.20
Joshua Tree – Yucca brevifolia
“One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. “You’d be destroying what makes it special,” she said. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.”
J.W – The Glass Castle
They pick-pocket each other’s knowing looks with full intention of returning what is shared.
In this place, brevity becomes.
That side-eye glance that tracks back heritage from Umbilical Chord to the Pleiades.
You? You fly-on-the-wall in desert bedrock. Watch the spaces between familial lines and kneaded out avoidance.
Take that in. Take it all in. By either social fopaux or dumb luck you slipped in the cracks of some cellophane looking glass. Maybe that’s all there is here.
The way they set the dinner table with meals for one and yet, share a bite. All characters are present; The Hiker Trash, The Empath, The Dim Genius, The Mad Hater; all stitched together with paternity glue. All threaded to bits by wanting to do just a little better, feel a little more, avoid a little less pain.
“I wanted to let the world know that no one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.”
J.W – The Glass Castle
You? You sit, you listen, you gather your thanks for all the hugs and kisses, all the kind words, and the unkind ones too. All the years of molding your own version of “a little better.” That’s the spoon you were fed with. These lessons you swallow are mirror to the ones they’ve learned. There’s no telling if our legs would have carried us were we wearing each other’s shoes.
Sometimes it’s just better to face the boulder barefoot.
What would they think of me anyway… “I make my bed every day.” I tell them.
I have a bed. I omit.
These characters would frown at the likes of us. Us who packed these bags by need, rather than choice. Us who’s bedrock was be bed before it was therapy, us who made routine from making carrying home on your shoulders, making the whiskey warm the body, feeling too comfortable in discomfort.
“I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.”
J.W The Glass Castle
MIRROR
11.12.20
MILLER: Evolution is impartial. It doesn’t care what adaptation you employ, be it song or slime, speed or stillness that helps you endure. As for the hydra, the best guess scientists have these days as to how it cheats death, as Rob Steele explains, isn’t just its crazy stem cell production but its highly unusual ability to let go.
IThe Reluctant Immortalist – Invisibilia
STEELE: Whereas we aren’t so good at getting rid of cells. You know, our brain cells are pretty much with us for life, so if we get a brain tumor, we can’t get lucky and have it sort of ooze out our ear and disappear. It’s there, and eventually, the brain’s going to have to deal with the consequences.
MILLER: So maybe Daniel, for all his professed disinterest in the hydra’s immortality, is the one who had known, who had been practicing its secret all along. Time and time again, when I would ask him about hard memories – exes or break-ups or deaths – he would say…
“I don’t remember the details.”
I assumed that he was dodging. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe, like the hydra, he, too, is constantly shedding the things that could hurt him in the name of staying youthful and free from pain.
He is 61 years old, and I cannot keep up with him on the mountain.
So, what does that mean for you, little fox?
You put down names and faces back to the dirt they came from. Pluck them from your memory with all its nutrient dense emotion and history so they may grow deep outside your body , and grow they will.
You who prides themselves on effort and ease, push and pull, catch and release. What are you holding on to?
Ideas formed in years of momentum, childish thought patterns that bear no children. Compromise was never an option for someone determined to live radically.
How do you compromise that?
JAGUAR
11.11.20
continuously surprised
small sweetnesses, smelling of warm skin and morning
they wrap its skin around mine, sunshine kissing the body in crisp, like the sleep in our eyes
it’s the little things;
a lion disguised as lamb, not for its benefit — he doesn’t need to bear teeth for me to
show my nape
coffee cups and combinations of chocolate and berry
I say “read me one more paragraph”
but what i mean is, “thank you, I know you’re tired.”
because does it really count to show gratitude
when i receive these kindnesses with open palms
it’s easier to let go that way
i think you know
my fear of holding surrenders slowly
you can tell by the way bodies melt
hand looking for another to hold
how for just a moment, there is only you, me, and whatever
third half awake half asleep dimention
we’re nearing equinox
fall is just for these types of things
no one knows if winter will be animus or anima this year
DATURA
11.10.20
You’re Bilingual.
Because you understand the expansiveness of exquisite variation.
The difference between “There’s a fox at your door.” and “There’s a fox at your door.”
Love happens in so many spaces. You, like myself, occupy the spaces between time, feeling, and the undefined. We remain enthralled by the festival of living, and we occupy each and every space handed to us without reservation. We’ve conjured diligent designs sketched over a lifetime wanting, but knowing they may never live in skin. Wrapped and coiled in colors of cinnabar, lemon, incarnated in scales of dragons, the bark and spined books, shields welded by generations cast aside in the ink stained afterlife of what trees once were. We know this language like the back of our hands, the same that slaps expectation each time we try — and fail– to integrate it in our relationships. Some acts of violence are necessary before another synapse can fire within these labyrinthine brains.
You detect differing accents and letters without need for pursuit, even when you repeatedly discover perfect similitude you know the off white color of the page is, yes off-white but in the failing light appearing almost colored or the memory of a color, somehow red or violet, or close to that, or not at all. We know the weight and implication behind every experience. The same awareness that only comes to most in obvious extremes. Explain this to a friend, and they’ll laugh and tilt their head. Explain the freedom of running in the daylight, and compare it to the fear of running at night, and curious placation becomes understanding empathy.
The cipher clues of this subtle lifestyle are hidden among shared pages, plant tastings, old poetry, new poetry, and music. The type of depth that can turn Sunday into the personification of empathy without endorsement for the rest of the week. That is movement, even in stasis, even when the world looks upon us and sees no shift, we still dance with our idioms, play hide and seek with our art, let creativity be the flow of mischief, of catch and release, of explaining the unexplained. Failure to do this causes…. Monotony. Stagnation. Simplification and Tedium. A whole lot of rot suddenly packed up my nose with the stench of routine.
Quick note here: If this type of whimsy is hard for you to stomach; if you’ve never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that you’ve got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of unrealistic expectations for life you have, because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.
Yes, this is a high standard, taller than most my demands — so hear me out here:
While it’s true the simple intake of life as it comes provides satisfaction for the average person; I exists in different lives simultaneously and thanks to years of living with myself, I’ve come to understand this more and more as a gift rather than the pathology most simple-folk indite. Private nomenclature develops in tight, set-upon circles, right? So, is it too far-fetched for individuals to develop their own? I sure have. And that has value, to hell if I’ll settle for ignoring what’s written between the lines, it’s those spaces (and what we do with them) that fuel so much of the energy behind my love. Hell, who I am. What kind connection sustains itself on half-knowing?
So yes, you’re bilingual, trilingual, multilingua;, you’ll teach me new ways of speaking without talking. I’ll share my books, my herbs, these ramblings of mine. You’ll learn of past MUSES, MIRRORs, and SNAK.S.SKIN, we’ll play tag with the day’s song. You’ll show me yours, I’ll show you mine. We’ll meet in the place no one else goes.
BOOT.S.TRAPS
11.10.20
operate with love,
sure.
but exercise discernment
be limitless in your love, but know your boundaries
bits and pieces of your heart
collecting dust on someone else’s shelf
take back what’s not wanted, nurse it back to health, and give it away again.
PANDORA
11.9.20
Trying to find a box or wrapping paper big enough for my soul’s play time. It’s impatient and childish like that. Growing too quickly for its old clothes, curious, and restless. It lets everything hold it, but unsatisfied, it wants nothing to keep it.
I keep fancies like tissue paper for the dampest of moments, pour myself into pulls and yearnings. You can’t ignore that. The pulls, or me.
I come a pundit of instinct, turning more hearts than heads. Try telling Kismet she’s in the wrong room and you’ll be damned to ever find the matching sock again. There’s no denying my presence.
I’m everywhere and always, coming from somewhere, never dropping the anchor. Clip the chains and tie them to a transient place. Drawn by a dream or running from a nightmare, holding down the moment’s wrists but ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically — any way you want to look at it– Keeping a bag packed. Just in case.
It’s that itch. The;
getting what you want, then wanting to want again.
JAGUAR
11.8.20
This week, I’ve had more practice thanking my skeleton.
It lets my fingertips feel for the collective pulse, yours, hers, my own.
It holds my eyes in their socket (did you know even scarecrows were skinned back in the middle ages?) keeping them open to sniff out the next heartbeat.
So no, I’m not seeing red.
I will however, hold your flag at half mast — rejoicing (or mourning?) the sweetness with a little more salt.
Some would argue there’s flavor in that.
Others claim corrupted purity.
GARFIELD
11.5.20
I’m not sure what foundation you built that requires disrespect to hold its own. You’re carving arrows with your eyes, and throwing knives with your words. Do you realize how small you’ve become? I see cower in your posture, a snarl hiding shaking hands what don’t you want me to see right now?
I feel these words are revenge for a past I was never part off. Hate for hate.
But this? This borders on ingratitude. Hate for love.
I hope you find what healing looks like for you.
For me, it means removing my friendship as the welcome mat you wipe your day on.
BOOT(S)TRAPS
11.4.20
My eyes have become a ping pong ball between Blue and Red lines.
You’re going to be scared anyway. Might as well have something to show for it. This body of mine may very well become a graveyard of all the lives I’ve lived, so I make it a point to rise every morning without body bags under my eyes.
Let them see the world new, get lost on the same street over, and over, and over, this neighborhood is so beautiful, have you seen?
May I forever wonder if I’m worm, or bird, or both, maybe neither this morning. Maybe I’m weasel, otter, fox, horse, frog, dragonfly, and yeah, some days may I be dragon, or leopard, or beast.
There’s only so many time you can write out fear and anxiety before you take a lesson from your thighs. How they hold eachother like unashamed lovers in a world where everyone is so scared to touch the most human.
I want to be like that. Always touching the parts of myself that keep me in my body. Forgetting what they feel like, and discovering them again. Loving until I don’t, grieving until I can’t, and doing it all over again.
HISTORY
11.3.20
Madre, calmete.
You carry tomorrow’s load with today’s strength. Trying so hard to merge two days into one. And who am I kidding, we all are. That’s why we’re here, right? Drinking whiskey so we can inch tomorrow a little closer from its timeline. It’s silly, the whimsy of todays whiskey doesn’t quench the thirst of the morning, the same way this anxiety doesn’t empty tomorrow of it’s sorrow.
It empties today of it’s strength.
So we hold each other here. In the goodness of what we know won’t change. Friendships, love affairs, the music that makes us dance even if time has put it on some time-out-shelf.
The way mothers just know how stories will play out for their daughters. It must be frustrating not being able to predict what our country will do to our family.