REDEFINED

Full sensory experience.

Quiet moments, sitting alone on my porch in the middle of a city, facing a peaceful park space with trees in full spring greenness. Birds chirping. The smell of new living punctuated by car emissions. Alone with my thoughts, regardless of a million distractions.

Happiness and contentedness mingling with sadness and the potential of failure. Realization of all that I can, all that I will, and all that can not and will not.

Stay. Go.

I wonder, I wander. 

RUN AND BE MERRY: a brief meditation

The past few months have been a trying time. I entered unemployment with no warning and little confidence. It's been a long and tough winter, especially since I was ready to quit that job anyways.

Still, it took me 3 months to gather up the pieces and get my confidence back. The last month has been amazing. Becoming completely in-step with who you are is so important. Why fake an interview when you can be completely yourself and at ease? I'm tired of trying to hide my past or parts of me to conform to whatever job I am applying for. This idea of doing whatever it takes to join the ranks is gone for me. I am a different person, a bit quirky, unique, but I am interesting, fluent with people of all types, and I truly care. Confidence isn't some kind of concrete thing that requires wearing a suit or acting a certain way, it's knowing yourself in and out, and deciding to be that person that you are. It's being present and not allowing the past to bog you down.

I interviewed for my dream job a month into unemployment and completely botched it, almost every aspect of it. I felt phony too, to the point where I downplayed all of my skills, experience, online presence, and personality. Now, it's different.

I ran in Rock Creek Park today, nothing but shoes and a pair of shorts, blazing up trails and down the sides of hills. I came to a bridge overlooking the rushing water with giant boulders strewn about. Seventy degrees, perfectly blue skies, sun on my skin. I meditated for a while. Ephemeral thoughts trickled in and out of my skull as the water cascaded and pooled.

I'm uncertain of the future. But I am happy. And I've been happy. I know what I want, and I am leading myself there, slowly, and surely.

A long road         seems to be related to pensive passes of the pen
fear
fear
fear
hate

wind to bleach bone

snow packed into floating cloud

glimpse half illuminated moon

-your light poured over a dark rock-

creation of my mind

haunt me still

defied

"let me tell you boy"
did you ever really have an idea?
my mind harbors rampaging children
in multitudes
kicking and screaming
running to their rooms
packing their things
and leaving into the night.
run away together
horde of the defiant and lost.

flight for these

this rote

routine

repetition

in my dreams at night where they have no place 

in my eyes in closing where they have no home

the escape must be complete if the invasion has been made

pass the ice

we're riding down this hill it stretches all the way to the city

the wind in our ears, nose and mouth

your skin peels away you are left as you were born

a natural face is revealed

you are beautiful

let's ride into the night these flashing neon lights

my rims as they spin and your pupils as they echo the truth

in our hearts

there is nothing planned

no fear 

nothing uneasy

our childlike existence dwarfed by the exhilaration of living

this night is ours

excited dance of molecules through irritated energy
every time, drag you down beaten thoroughly
fucked every which way, somewhere a child simply held a clover
a treasure plucked from the earth no concept of it as ordinary

REPOST from Chrissy Stockton

The Pros and Cons of GChat II

written by Chrissy Stockton, of the lovely philolzophers...originally seen here

We are having a conversation on gChat about our future. When we finally give up searching for Mr. and Mrs. Right, we say, we will meet together on the coast and build a house. “It has to have a record player,” you say. I tell you about chopping wood, how it is cathartic and makes you feel like you have earned your keep as a human being. We’ll have a wood burning stove, you say. There will be a part of our porch with no roof, so we can lay there and watch all the stars we missed by spending all our youth in cities. Mornings, we’ll drink coffee and read. We will bind our own anthologies of things we like: poems, old letters and stories about things we have done.

There are things that are understood in this conversation that would be hard to address directly so we talk as if we are making a Plan B. What I am trying not to say is that when you talk I feel uneasy. It took me a long time to talk myself down into reality where I understand that men are not sensitive creatures who want to talk about The Meaning of Life endlessly. I’m going to ignore the evidence to the contrary lest I actually have to stop dating indefinitely until I can find one of these elusive hybrids.

In this world there is room for two people who notice everything and grieve over the mortality of insects. There is room for more, but they’re rare enough to not be found by chance. Maybe it’s just myopia. Maybe we aren’t deeper than anyone else, maybe they’ve just learned to let go of the weight we are carrying around. Isn’t a simpler explanation more likely to be correct? But I feel like Atlas sometimes because I’m trying to hold my world up by myself and expose just the parts that I think people want to deal with and can relate to.

I don’t want you to feel lonely. It’s in my favorite Mary Oliver poem when she talks about having to carry this kind of weight. You don’t have to, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

It’s embarrassing to be human sometimes and be at the mercy of embodied cravings and emotions that can go wherever.

The pros and cons of gChat is talking to someone that doesn’t make me feel like an alien about it. What our generation lacks in attention span it makes up for in disbarring physical proximity as the determining factor in who you get to have conversations with.

girls that say "ohh he was cute"
after you walk by

__________________

boys that say "i like your shirt"
earnestly

"i love you"
"what?"
"is this on sale?"
-------------------------


"oh gluten free, me too!" she said.
"oh, uh, ya, i'm not really, but uh ya it's good..." he said, as the blood rushed harder and faster into his cheeks.
the silence that ensued seemed to last more than mere moments, as it always does in these interactions. every word and movement takes on a weight 100 times more powerful than normal, especially when reflected upon later.

an awkward shuffle, a dance for two.
"uhhh sooooooooooooo 10:30 at mark's kitchen you should come, bye"