Yak Back

I have been living in Europe for the last few years, and upon return, I’ve noticed a few things of irkish nature, things that seem more resolutely “American” than ever.  I’ve become aware of these things through interactions, but also in the re-emergence of old habits and patterns that run rather deep within myself (although I’m having a hard time convincing myself that being caught red-handed (by myself) halfway through shoveling a jar of crunchy peanut butter into my face is society’s fault). 

First—my propensity towards consumption has been disconcerting.  Not just food, but technology as well.  Hashtags ‘n shit.  Specifically, the quality of my consumption—namely how I consume.  What’s the point of checking my email 5-10 times a day if I’m not going to sit down and really answer them?  What about eating food while standing up, which contradicts my scoffing at drive-thru goers?  Being constantly available to texts and emails has led to an anxious ambient tension; an unconscious concern for missing out; a frenetic radar for stimulation, constantly scanning all horizons.  

I wouldn’t consider myself unhurried or calm by most measures (aforementioned peanut butter binge—case in point), but I’ve noticed that this hunger for consumption has altered the way that we—yes, I will risk generalization here—interact significantly.  What struck me most immediately upon return was Conversation, and namely the lack thereof.

Growing up in America, I guess I’ve been hardwired to shoot breeze, to la-tee-da it with one and all, to keep up with the Joneses (and Clintons, and Bushes—wait, did big money just get into small talk?!?! Sorry, had to…).  To Talk Small.  

Small Talk is Uncle Sam’s bread and butter.  It’s what we’re known for—gregarious openness, saying “how are you” and not meaning a lick of it.  For the collective effervescence of getting along, that lighthearted demeanor that most foreigners construe as superficiality; or, as some might have it, “friendliness.”

[Digression: I can’t help but think of that scene in The Italian Job—which I watched countless times as a teenager, for reasons still unbeknownst to me (let’s just say it’s hard to forgive yourself for at some point or other truly believing that Mark Wahlberg was cool)—where Donald Sutherland asks Charlize Theron how she’s doing, and she responds with, well, what else—“fine.”  

“You know what “fine” stands for?” he counters.  “Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.”  

Shitty movie, but a good point.  End, Digression.]

Friendliness is the great American social virtue.  But in being tainted by our penchant for consumption, social exchanges have felt wildly A.D.D. and random to me—simply anything but a pause, god forbid silence.  Since I’ve been back (I was living mostly in Germany), conversation has felt, at times, like escapism.

I never knew the quality of speaking slowly until I could speak German at a proficient level.  Somewhere amidst my progression towards fluency, desperately grasping for words in order to translate the images in my head became a steadied and measured feeling of pace, of allowing for space between words, and larger silences between sentences—space for thoughts to begin materializing into language.  Intention became more than a buzzword.  And in learning another language, I’ve intuitively begun recalibrating my relationship to my mother tongue.  I like when conversations stay on topic, and can test myself to see if there’s something hiding in me that I didn’t realize I thought.  More than anything, I relish when people take a moment to consider what they’re to say next; it reminds me of what makes music interesting—the tension of the space between the notes.  

Venting and Pontificating aside (oh…wait, there’s more of that…), Small Talk stunt doubles as context and the ultimate human lubricant (yes, that is the only word I can use there)—humor.  The exchange of X’s and O’s.  Valuable grease, really—good stuff.   Not just for networking/connecting, but especially when leveraged as fertile ground for Big Talk.  And in the grander scheme of things, Small Talk is beautiful in that it might be our most accomplished democratic tendency—breeze can be shot between most anyone.  

If anything, this is a declaration of a desired way of being; a reminder, and an affirmation: if this is the type of conversation I’m seeking for, pointing my finger at gross American culture isn’t going to help me get it.  

Guess I’m going to have to take this spoon out of my mouth first.

I Thought to be Slow

Capped like an electric wheelchair

whining to consume more parquet tiles

racing down the hallway

I'm counting until the moon--

there are no more numbers now

just a brow scrunched like vacuum sealed packaging.

Mr. Penny used to ride his bicycle

while we were shooting hoops,

baggy shorts, the newest shoes,

six out of ten from the free throw line.

Forgive me, Lord of my Childhood,

for peeing at the roots of the tree that

hoisted us away from Mom's

calls for supper.

Forgive me—

Down in my meadow, knee-deep in the

weeds of this mind.

Why and I Watching MarieTV?

Because my brother does!  So... basically, he's the uncool one, but I'm going to cherrypick all the creativity cred and chuck a duce before anyone realizes what actually happened...



CLIFF(bar) NOTES (paraphrasing):

"I'm not interested in conquering fear.  Fear protects us.  But fear doesn't know the difference between a genuinely dangerous situation and a creative endeavor because creativity is such a new part of our brains."

Talk to your fear--"So, thanks for coming along, I know how vitally important you are to my safety, but we don't need you on this one."

Originality vs. Authenticity --"It may have been done before, but it has not been done by YOU.  There are no new stories to tell.  They've all been told before.  We're just borrowing from each other.  But the humanity in an authentic piece of creation is what moves our hearts."

"Helping people is a side effect of creativity, and ALL HELP IS A SIDE EFFECT OF LOVE.  Love where you are, what you're doing, and you'll start radiating, and making everyone better around you.  That's the best thing that you can do for your community."

"Don't murder your creativity by insisting that it will pay the bills.  We're all adults here.  Let's be honest that if you try really hard at something, it doesn't mean that you're going to get everything that you've been dreaming about."

"Perfectionism is a serial killer.  True perfectionist don't even start."

"Done is better than good.  what will make you finish things is not discipline, but self-forgiveness."

"When did inspiration promise you anything other than dancing with it for a while?  There's no better thing to do in life than to say yes to that invitation."

"Your project is not a human baby.  If anything, you're your own project's baby.  That's why you have to let your creativity out, because it has you as a project, it's building you, it's creating you."


Or... you could just watch it yourself.  Please do.

Home

Lips:

Cedar woods that my breath

Ebbs though.

Flow:

Light into the corners of your eyes

Where I see for the first time the colors of the land

We grew up in.

Did you know:

Light has a consciousness of its own?

Me:

Down on my fields.

Love:

Light, as ever,

Conscious of its own.

And no Dream but This---

You are standing on a bridge,
watching yourself go by.

Notes from a Summer, V

I guess this is growing up—the feathers that found themselves in my fingers while weeding, the way the sky triumphantly marched cloud after cloud across the sky but only rained once. Watching my hands hoe the greenhouse dirt as if they themselves were the challenge of staying present; they hardly have to do with it. The days are starting to blend together like watercolors… ah, to know the feeling of a cloud that wants to spread its roots.

Notes from a Summer, IV

I know how midday’s heat

Gnashes its teeth

And how watching the sun burn out

Next to the wildflowers is a religious

Experience if you allow yourself the

Ideleness to watch your own flame

Still and hush beneath the sweat

Dark blanket of your own night:

Solitude.

Notes from a Summer, III

Wind from the west, wind

From the east,

Birds drawing faint

Lines across my vision—

They’re still singing so I guess

It won’t rain too long.

I’ve been trying to lay these

Thoughts down, hold

Their heads and set them

Gently in the dirt,

Let the streaking rain

Pierce through them and shoot

Into the earth like roots.

Being good is hard.

It constantly requires the more

Difficult of two choices

To be made. 

I could keep trying to plant 

These thoughts, or

Take off my clothes and run

Wild in the rain. Slowly,

The clouds are wisked apart--

Swept east, 
Swept west. 

Notes from a Summer, pt. II

A flurry of edges, of outcasts,

Those things seemingly beyond principle—

A rusted tractor gathering color,

The soggy noodles and plain sauce served

Luke-warm to cold on Friday (and “thank you

For cooking, Hauke”), small children

Calling their parents by their first name.

Yesterday, tribes of rain clouds

Parted and twisted slowly

Amongst themselves, incense

After the rain dance that

We didn’t perform.

Sometimes, a day will

Cock its head and look at you

Sideways. When this happens,

Gather your things, and

Go stand on the upper field,

Amongst the whipping heads of wild flowers.

See what doesn’t fly away.

Notes From a Summer, pt. I

These days,

I’ve been learning the shape of

My solitude, it’s bleached and simmering

Horizons, rutted back roads with a wheel

Stuck in the squelch that someone

Gave up on. These days, I’ve been

Tracing the lines of the face 

Of my silence 

With eyes closed, 

With the curiosity of

A first love, a child, an artist.

These days…

The waves I send crashing upon

Your shore don’t know if they’re supposed to

Slap you or lick you clean

Because these waves,

They are learning to disappear. 

Exercise

-       What was the highlight of your last year?

-       What’s something that you really like and appreciate about yourself, and what’s something that you’d like to work on or change?

-       What’s your first memory?

-       What’s a fear that you hold subconsciously, that might not be yours?

-       When do you feel most alive?

-       What’s something you really couldn’t live without (not people)?

-       Who’s someone that you admire and why?

-       What do you feel you have to offer other people and the world?

-       What do you look for in other people?

-       What’s the hardest question for you to answer?

-       What makes you really uncomfortable?

-       What color do you think best represents your personality and why?

-       If your mood were a texture, what would it be (right now)?

-       What’s the best Halloween costume you’ve ever had?

-       Describe yourself in five words. Okay, three.

-       What song best represents this current stage of your life?

-       If you could teach everyone one thing that you know or that can do well, what would it be?

-       If someone wrote a book about your life, what would it be called?

-       If you weren’t named what you are, what would you choose to be named?

-       Who is the best teacher you had?

-       What’s the most beautiful language in your opinion?

-       What traits do you think you got from your mother? Father?

-       Who is your best friend and why is your relationship so deep/special?

-       What’s something your parents told you that always stuck?

-       What one quality of yours would you like your children to possess?

-       What does “god” mean to you?

-       If you could combine any two fruits together, which would they be and what would you call the result?

-       When was the last time that you were really, really angry?

-       If you could be any gae again, what would it be and why?

Mark

"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." -- Twain

Pond Chatter

Pops on paint, I'm at words.  Here's what's we're happening...

***

birds rise from ash
trees
on the forehead of a man
drawn, cross-hatched
and held up and
weary of it.

spit and breathe on the life of this until
it washes and runs into the valleys of
hand, face, us.  what's welling there
is a window into the world of the
rising pink voices, quivering like the strings
that God plucked, as he sat, courting 
our Mother. 

Slouching Toward Bethlehem --- excerpts

Just got wind of some essay snippets from Joan Didion's masterful meditations on such things as self-respect and what it means to keep a notebook, and why it's vital, at least for a writer, to do so. 

As follows, self-respect:

"To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called ‘alienation from self.’ In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home."

----

On keeping a notebook:

"I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.

[…]

Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.

[…]

But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

[…]

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

[…]

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,

vacation with pay. Want more

of everything ready-made. Be afraid

to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.

Not even your future will be a mystery

any more. Your mind will be punched in a card

and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something

they will call you. When they want you

to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something

that won’t compute. Love the Lord.

Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace

the flag. Hope to live in that free

republic for which it stands.

Give your approval to all you cannot

understand. Praise ignorance, for what man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear

close, and hear the faint chattering

of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.

Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful

though you have considered all the facts.

So long as women do not go cheap

for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy

a woman satisfied to bear a child?

Will this disturb the sleep

of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.

Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head

in her lap. Swear allegiance

to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction. 

Practice resurrection.  -- Wendell Berry