night sweat

shake off the night sweat. there are so many things i must do and so little time to do them. i feel overwhelmed to say the least. i'm such a little dreamer. i have a few days to try and find an apartment and to apply for jobs and instead i am here, in this little room, waxing poetically about love. i am truly hopeless. i remember this line from my freshmen year in college "shake off the night sweat". i imagined myself a tired race horse, overwhelmed and falling behind, sweating in the dark hours of night, trying the whole time to get ahead, trying to shake off the night sweat.

virginia and wristbands

it's difficult to say what has happened in the past two months, to convey the meaning behind the motions, but i'll put these memories before you, let you feel them, maneuver around their soft silky bones, grip their long and uneven edges, let the symbolism slip through your fingers like water. we are all blind once past the present and so let us fumble through the dark and uncertain corridors of memory.

observation:

people put on symbols to express concretely the intangibility of emotional connections.

explanation:

imagine your wrist, imagine every fine hair blooming from your pores, imagine the roughness of this landscape, observe every wrinkle and depression, listen to the echo of light as it penetrates your skin, listen to it bellow in the shadowy hallows where veins dive like dikes and tendons carve out valleys. imagine your wrist is bare, no jewelry, no restrictions, no watch and therefore you have no sense of time. imagine your life as timeless just for this moment. you enter with a wrist that is wholly yours, yours by birthright, a naked entirely known living piece, you uninterrupted. now imagine the world in its varied hues of emotion, imagine a beat, a pulse if you will, felt, rarely seen, but omnipresent circulating all around you. this is meaning, this is emotion, this is spirituality carried through tunnels of symbolism. feel your pulse. alive. feel another's pulse. alive. known but not seen.

we were strangers all wearing the same blue shirt all touting the same phrase, "conservation begins here". nothing else was known but a connection was made immediately through the visual recognition of identical objects. we became a crew suddenly, thrown together like atoms colliding. would this be disastrous? no one could say and either way, we could not stop the momentum, we had been spinning in one another's direction for centuries. in a small airport in virginia we finally met. in a small airport in virginia we unconsciously agreed to change one anothers' lives.

you can spend a lifetime with a person and they will still be strange to you. of course, you know better than most, the intricacies of their being, working your way from the outside to the center. you unravel their physical body, learn the texture of their lips, the angulation of their teeth, map the constellations of their moles and scars, learn the length and loss of their hair. you memorize the iridescence of the iris, the chameleon changes they undergo when in cahoots with the sea during a storm or the gentle, whimsical fall of the first snow or the amber light of a sunset sliding down the trunks of ancient oaks. those eyes are changing all the time and you catalogue these changes and you know just which shirt to pick out at the department store to compliment their eyes. but what do you really know? the slope of their back and the inward turn of their feet, a bum knee that makes them limp. you know the body, whether it tends to chill or overheat, to be sluggish or to run itself ragged. the body then begins to reveal the inner layers of the person. tough little nails that have been gnawed on all their life makes you think of their nervousness, tight muscles, aching bones, migraines all bare witness to the conspirators inside. but what do you really know? the further you get inside the harder it is to define what you know, like traveling to the center of the earth logical thought disintegrates and a glorious entropy of rationality takes over.

which brings me back to wrists and wristbands. in the past two months i have met fourteen very unique, very complex individuals. in the span of twenty days i forged strong bonds with these people and yet they are still very strange to me. i look for reminders of our relationship and find my wrist, once bare, wrapped in symbolism. what do i really know? i have willingly put something on, something that has changed my appearance in the most explicit sense as well as changed my thoughts and who i am. i have worked from the outside to the center, my body has changed, this is seen and known, my perceptions and thoughts, the amorphous parts of myself have also changed, this is not seen but known. my wrists are wrapped in warbling memories to tie down the tenuous ties to these two transient groups. i remember in june, pink flagging holding fast to my arm. we bound our wrists to bond with one another. in july a tie dye silly band, vibrant and verifying. how long can we hold onto a symbol? surely the symbolism outlasts the concrete entity that carries it. i imagine this band five years from now in a box with all my letters. i'll shake it out, it's tired wiggle bringing me peace.

a final note: if you are one of the fourteen people who either wear a piece of pink flagging or a tie dye silly band, thank you for sharing your life with me, it has been an unforgettable experience.

one sixty-sixth of a second

i close myself off in an austere and sterile room so that i might tell you a story. i want nothing to distract from the image in my mind. i paint the picture here, for you, to explain this, all this, you and me and us. i am at the bottom of a waterfall. it is sixty-six feet; i measure the collapse of hydrogen and oxygen molecules with my shutter-speed eyes and in one sixty-sixth of a second the whole grand spectacle, the flying leap of life crashes with infinitesimal sound. i cannot move that fast, but i know that's how quick the current kicks and who am i to fight it? i trace it with my senses, soak in the text of the world. i am talking of course about a waterfall. i am at it's base, i am the deep pool, i am the swirling eddies of blue sky and my white foam are the aquatic clouds. i am a deep pool looking up and out from the bottom. i watch the stupendously swift spitting and spewing life-saturated force stampeding in perfect speed over an edge then falling off, gracefully, violently, passionately in sacred prisms of liquid light that can only be described as miraculous. continuous fall, forever. i watch the sky grow foul and grey. a large bird struggles against the wind putting up just enough resistance to remain still. leaves pour down from the sky like ash from burning buildings. i watch them pirouette with a carelessness and glee given to those who are departing in their proper time. in a sixty-sixth of a second i know a storm is coming. i let the movement of water drum in my body, the vibrations chilling my skin. the smell of change is so strong i can scarcely focus. i keep my eyes locked on the bird. he glides left and it begins to rain.

i get the notion that everything is a waterfall to some degree. all is given a moment of miraculous flight that is, at the same time, the descent as well as the re-collection of parts. from whole to part to whole. i think about people, naturally, and i think about you and me. are we waterfalls? are we falling water? little hydrogen's clinging to our oxygen, trying desperately to keep it together, moving fast, so fast, so very fast. and you are one sixty-sixth of a second and i am one sixty-sixth of a second and together we are one sixty-sixth of the same second, flowing continuously in and out of one another. i am a deep pool and i am a waterfall, you are a bird in a ominous sky. you veer right and i cry. how quickly everything changes, how very far the distance of one sixty-sixth of a second.

anthropologist in the field

Under the kitchen tarp, I live in a fragmented world. Most lines of thought are jumbled and snipped too soon like flowers stolen from bloom. But this is the life of teenage madness, a life in which I brace myself, wondering if my adult knees, beaten in with rationality and relativity, will be able to hold my weight. I am an anthropologist who has somehow managed to sneak inside. There is a red light around me and glossy pictographs of googly-eye inducing guy glam hanging from clothes pins. There’s a complex equation being figured and personalities being pieced together. Who are we? Only the pop magazines know. People with marshmallow peep voices mumble and suddenly there is a violently ecstatic outcry; there is a discrepancy in the calculation. Wake in another dawn and you are a new creature. This place is an etch-a-sketch, each day a tabla rasa, the lines shaky, barely permanent, fluttering inattentively like an acid tripped butterfly. “shorty got low, low, low” they chant. I’m in a primitive dance club, an open heart spasm consecrated by stobe-matic head lamps. Where am I? These are graffiti artists, Jackson Pollacks on this tabla rasa, manic smatterings of self proclamation. My mind is reeling and the ears shrug; what can they do? They’re only delivering the message.

All she can draw are flowers and pine trees and people. What more would you need to know? Flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. Flowers illuminate the pines and the pines draw down the spines of people—all needle-like and fine, all needle-like in a line. There are more words spoken to the points beyond flowers and pines and people and, in fact, it’s probably safe to say that most people think the entirety of existence is perhaps more complex than her drawing of flowers and pines and people. However, most people are wrong. The flowers portray beauty and desire, the exotic, the dreamy. The pine is the fuel, the means, the upstanding continuum, the ever-growing, mutable and yet romantically static concentric rings of the reverberating pulse of the world. Then there are people, agents of light and dark, unpredictable little swaths of fright that could uproot the oldest pine or pluck the most sacred flower.

So all she draws are flowers and pines and people. No more, no less. What’s the point of drawing anything else? The entire lovely mess is scrawled so perfectly on your Tupperware. I wonder if you know that? How else can we tell this story? The first drawings were found in a cave. The subject the same. Time barely moves when you take a moment and think about it.

Virginia Life

it's been a long time since this blog has seen any attention. and so i timidly approach it. so much has happened since i last wrote. i met many people and got to know at least seven folks. it's strange trying to figure out time. there never seems to be enough or perhaps there's way too much. lately, i feel as if there is a shortage of time. my first crew has come and gone and i look back and think, all we had was time. where did it go? it's not fair that time should move so fast as you grow older; you're not equipped to keep up.

my writing is wild, i feel it. i can barely get a grip on it. it wants to run, run, run, until it's burned itself up into ether. i cannot harness this language.

it will take some time to calm myself down into the bed of a story. after all it feels as if i've just woken up. and so, where should i take you? should i recount time? i spent a month camped out on a forest service road named Pocahontas. we named our place camp Taiwan on a night of bleary-eyed sleep deprivation. we felt we were in another place altogether, half-magical, half-far, far, far off. the beaten path was laid down into this place well before our arrival. we were second rate settlers, though i doubt that Pocahontas was the first. the road meanders for about 3 miles, gravel and dust that illuminates sun rays which are otherwise much too shy to reveal themselves. the heart of camp Taiwan was open and large as it needed to be to direct the coursing of a curiously crafted collective. we strung up a tarp in this center area and deemed it a kitchen. bulky Rubbermaid tubs stuffed with food and supplies squatted under the plastic shelter like big league catchers. the propane stove sat on the earth like a primitive robot and our cardboard boxes full of miscellaneous materials tried their best to look classy in the corner. my co-leader and i sat in the back of our shiny red Ford SUV rental and looked at the home we created. our little red wagon was hitched to a star and all we could do was hold our breath and hope we wouldn't fall out of the sky.

the kids arrived at the airport on time. we split the group such that i took the first 3 kids to arrive and we hung out in the college town of Blacksburg. my co-leader took the other 3 kids and met us later.

it had been a little while since high school and i wasn't sure what to say. i was sure lots had changed since my time amongst the upper echelon of teen years. the girl from France sat up front. i studied french in high school but i was in no way prepared to speak french. forget it. i turned on the radio. country music. forget it. the drive was a blur and i looped and loped and lost myself in these brand new creatures. they were silent, a moment. i felt myself sweating. perhaps i'm not fit to handle such fragile beings. we talked in the way that one does when moving your face around and making sounds is nothing more than an attempt to achieve comfort. i couldn't explain to you what was said. i don't think i made much sense of it. i might as well have been speaking french.

i got cold feet that night. i felt like throwing down my apron and kicking off my cute little house slippers and running full tilt for the hills. no way, no how, was i going to make it out of this alive. perhaps i dreamed right through my teenage years and now that i was faced with real, breathing adolescence, i had no bearings. i felt lost.

work. can be a saving grace. i awoke the next morning in my tent, somehow resisting the urge to take flight in the night. things look different in the morning light. the kids rubbed their eager but shy little eyes and looked at me, looked into me. the look of a teenager can be empowering. i felt in that morning, sitting around the big bag of granola, that they needed me and i knew full well that everything is a balance, a give and take, high tide, low tide, ebb and flow, wax and wane, and therefore just as they had made a plea to me, i was making one to them. we needed each other and furthermore we agreed that we wanted to need each other. in their silence i heard the truest words. this was going to be something special.

we hiked up the trail and i felt instantly better. i told them about rock work and trail design. this was familiar ground, this had the sturdy sound of the known, this was teaching. i saw, in part, why i had come all the way to Virginia. we were going to change each other's lives. it was a scary thought and i ruminated on it a while as we advanced further and further into the woods.