this is so exciting

^^ learning a new language

^^ still rough, but getting there :D

(the clicky sound in the background is my laptop, sorry)

snow and ice and fog, oh my!

the first snow

 the housemate ran a 10K today in the snow. "you are intense," i said, and then i sat and waited in the car with a DFW book. i did make her a sign, though. (i'm not totally useless).

now it's time to do some christmas decorations around the apartment. :)

you couldn't pay me to do it

at 5 pm on Friday I found myself calling the pastor of my church in Harrisonburg, volunteering myself to drive a stranded member of Early Church back home from DC.

in the rain.
in the dark.
late at night.

file this one under crazy, impulsive, irrational. 



"if you're sure, that would be a blessing to me, emily," he said, the static of a bad connection hissing in my ear.

i crouched in the hallway, scribbled a phone number down on a bit of graph paper. i'm crazy. "i'm sure."



i remember my dad telling me about working for habitat for humanity, one time; how he said "there are some things you couldn't pay me to do, but i'd do them for free."



what is it that takes hold of people and shakes them into this crazy, impulsive, irrational behavior?



...file this one under love.

why I write (an exercise in attention)

IV ii

in the middle of traffic at Church and Gerrard I notice someone, 

two women, for a moment unfamiliar, not crouched with me

in a hallway, for this moment unfamiliar, not cringing at the

grit of bombers, the whine of our breath in collapsing chests, in

the middle of traffic right there for a moment unfamiliar and

familiar, the light changing and as usual in the middle of almost

dying, yelling phone numbers and parting, feeling now, as the

light beckons, all the delicateness of pedestrians. I wish that I

was forgetful. All that day the streets felt painful and the

subways tender as eggshells.

-Dionne Brand

---

in the middle of traffic at Greentree and Old Georgetown I notice the 

two black women waiting for the crosswalk to start counting down,

20, 19, 18... I step confidently past them, I walk across the six lanes, 

the light is green; I have the right of way, the light is green and I step into 

traffic; I step out on to the dark macadam and the car turning right

honks, the driver leaning into the sound, and I keep walking. The solid thunk

of my books keeps thunking across the six lanes and the light is green.

I'm not who I was. I hold my head up. I stare into middle distance. My boots

thunk on the solid road.

all the delicateness of pedestrians. the last time a driver honked at me while

I had the right of way was while crossing a four-lane (five lane?) (six lane?)

road in Damascus. I do not wish that I was forgetful. 

And yet: all that day the streets felt painful and the subways tender as eggshells.

---

"And my personality is such that I'm more likely to just sit and try to figure it out. But I'm getting better at using M___ as a resource, I think."

He looks at me closely. Nods. "Constitutionally, I'm like that. Maybe it's a Mennonite thing. Take care of yourself, be self-sufficient. You know."

I can feel the corner of my mouth tipping up. Yes. I know.

"But you're still having fun," he asks, before sending me on my way to catch the bus. "You're still feeling like you're growing? Because that's high on my priority list."

I pace in the elevator, too alive to keep still.

---

I close Dionne's book, holding my place with my index finger, think of what else I've read on this bus route. Fahrenheit 451 is the first thing that comes to mind.

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. 

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

The man next to me gets off at Rolston Road. I think of Jacqueline Berger's poem The Failure of Language, think "there are no right words," ask myself "...or does it only deepen what we know of loss?" 

I get off the bus at my stop. Marywood Road. I start trudging up the hill. It is dark; I think of the little red cabin in Pennsylvania that my grandparents took us to when I was small. I think of the streetlights on South Fulton Street. I think of walking late at night on the roads west of EMU.

I think, as I walk, of Jacqueline Berger writing about her friend's kitchen; I don't have the whole poem memorized but I know the line about the glass, the etched walls, "and add it to a box marked Kitchen."

That line is the whole poem, I told Thia once. The weight of it, the amber against the glass, all of it wrapped in words (newspaper) and reduced to a brown, nondescript box... the poem was trying to rescue rescue her friend from her radiant perishing, was trying to see and love what was vanishing, and the language was important. The language was so important, was the thing that could keep a life from disappearing into a small brown box.

---

I estimate that since January 1 of this year, I have written very nearly 100,000 words. They have taken the form of academic essay, poetry, blogging, journal entries, and attempts at fiction.

Oh, and letters. Maybe - maybe add a few thousand more words to that tally.

---

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it'll make sense.

-Ray Bradbury

---

Last week I was looking through an old journal in search of something and stumbled across this instead: 

...and also him telling me that he had heard i can 'read a book and know it.' 

They make good companions, books do. They are worth carrying around in your head, worth the mental space.

---

It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

-Ray Bradbury

---

There are no right words, if by right we mean perfect. But there are good words, and words worth remembering. 

As I walked up the dark sidewalk to the door of my apartment, I had a line of a poem knocking around in my head - "I am not done with my changes." 

I couldn't remember where it was from, and so I looked it up. Oh, yes. the layers by Stanley Kunitz. how shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? 

yet I turn, I turn...

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go...

I think again of my conversation with K___. "You're happy?" he asked me. "You're growing?" 

I think of Lancaster, of Harrisonburg.

Some losses. Some gains. 

Maybe I am finally learning how to love the place I am in.

---

In this language I have sought, during those years and the years since then, to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself.

…A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are underway: they are making toward something.

Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps toward an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.

Such realities, I think, are at stake in a poem.

-Paul Celan

thanksgiving poems

thanks
     by w.s. merwin

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow for the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
looking up from tables we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is



from a window
     by christian wiman

Incurable and unbelieving
In any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree
Rise kaleidoscopically

As if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close

To the pane as I could get
To watch that fitful, fluent spirit

That seemed a single being undefined
Or countless beings of one mind

Haul its strange cohesion
Beyond the limits of my vision

Over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood
Exactly as it had and would

(But why should it seem fuller now?)
And though a man’s mind might endow

Even a tree with some excess
Of life to which a man seems witness,

That life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.

a sort of fall-cleaning

I spent an hour today organizing the bookmarks folder on my laptop. A smattering of what I re-discovered:

on fitzgerald
a beautiful blog
raymond carver
on missions
a feminist analysis of rand paul
exposing sexism
gluten-free chocolate cake
syrian civil war reaches maaloula
congress is actually getting dumber
why we should support basic science research
on arguing
the case against high school sports
kim jong-il's sushi chef
a nuanced view of GM food
on systemic evil
on mountain top removal
on racism
why I love wendell berry
DFW breaks my heart
I had this guy as a professor
NSA pickup lines
how to create a letter postage scale
llama font
how a sewing machine works
the frog that didn't quite make it into space


The Housemate & I were talking recently about missing our Friday Night Dinner conversations from the past two years. That dinner group lead to so many interesting thoughts and conversations. But I said something about how my internal life has still been feeling really interesting to me, recently...I think it is possible to cultivate interesting thoughts just by being curious in all kinds of things. Like, for instance, the above links.