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Sunday, October 18th, 2009
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12:12 am - my 28th birthday is today: yearly self-portraits
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| Monday, September 28th, 2009
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3:00 am - nativity
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a new autumn birthed by the new moon, bathed by the thunderstorms of a final dying heat. the maternal season arrives with a low, bloody ache of the womb, the red field, the dan tien, radiant with fire and seat of meditative action. we receive the equinox as chronometry and eternal return. the intact expanse of ecstatic time, unmeasured and continuous, unobscured by "before" and "after." the swallowed time of illness, the eclipsed hours of pain, the lost hours of fever and convulsion. the exacting time of domestic cruelty, circumscribed by vigilance, captivity, survival. witness and intention are born equally of contemplation and avowal, equal mercies of solitude and companionship, equal jewels of compassion.
the bravery of openness. i have averted my eyes from poets and priests; i have feared prayer. we ascribed this, in eras of myth, to the monster-gods and ghastly deities, through whom unmanifest divine impulse becomes both creation and destruction. to open wide the heart is to welcome a joyful ruin, rupturing the self with dual consciousness of smallness and infinity -- the cup is perpetually overrun, defined at once by the limitations of form and the limitlessness of water. we bear the pain of so narrow a cast and the pain of engulfing generosity, understood only by the constraints of the vessel in which it cannot be contained. these are the annihilations and the courages of love: the drowning cup, the raindrop consumed by a selfsame ocean, the mirror ablaze with reflected sunlight such that it is itself the sun.
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empty of self and filled with love. when we say, "the nights are lengthening," we mean, "we too will embrace all." there is no way to speak of formlessness, only nights with the endless depth of the sea. what we thought was loss was simply union. thus we are carried; thus we are held.
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| Sunday, July 12th, 2009
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2:30 pm - sunrise ruby, pearl moon
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the weight of night gathers deep and still as water, and like water, nourishes the ripening season. by these simplicities are we sustained. the slow cycles of heat, the flourishing green, the merged generations of tree, fruit, and seed. orchard birds sing in darkness well before dawn; gratitude inspires the gift, antecedent rather than result. the wholeness of love dissolves individuation, giving and receiving, self and other: "there is nothing left of me. i'm like a ruby held up to the sunrise. is it still a stone, or a world made of redness? it has no resistance to sunlight."
we turn like sunned leaves toward the abundance of midsummer, gradual and generous. weeks move quietly, as in sleep. grace arrives in measure equal to the need.
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what are wisdom, love, and compassion without a welcoming of sorrow? we must embrace the range and entirety of life, with reverence for the precious temporary. how blessed am i to live a story of the fullest depth and breadth of human experience, including suffering, including sadness. the lover desires all aspects of the beloved, cataloguing odd habits as treasures of intimacy, kissing scars. partnered thus with existence, devotedly gathering the diverse minutiae of passion, we unclothe mere temporality and reveal, in a gesture of ardent love, the nakedness of Joy.
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the waning moon at midnight, a transitory vessel for perpetual light.
we are as luminous, as fleeting.
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| Friday, March 6th, 2009
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1:11 am - lent
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unrelenting illness as an exercise in selflessness, a practice in love. the constancy of service; the small temporality of both body and ego. we enact joyful rituals of self-ministry, with infinite gestures of frailty, infinite gestures of healing. the blue flowers of bruises fade under poultices back to pallor. the angry, ruptured slits of wounds close quietly into scars. thus we discover the illusion of the separate self: the strange exogenous vein, with a red and astonishing intensity. (the intravenous infusion line flooded accidentally with a backflow of one's own blood becomes at once plastic and organic, alien yet connected intimately, literally with the heart.)
blood, the physiologic metal: sharp, conductive, crimson-oxidized, how it both pierces and yields. the salt of sweat and tears. these somatic elements, mined from within the earth. the harbors of the body at eaux mortes.
the sway of planets manifests in ever-rising, ever-falling tides, both visceral and hydrospheric. the dialogues of immersion, lustration. weight returns to limbs as the bath drains, this maiden of infirmity held once so wholly and affectionately by water, the caressing, the only lover. (atomism as proof of union; the analytic graces; the perpetual and manifold discovery of the vanishing thinness of barriers.) water touches us with our own hands. we look into our own eyes in the face of another. these are the ways of love: recognition, opening, assent.
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a flowing back and returning to origin. the final storm of winter has blown in from the ocean; snowmelt swells the rivers traveling to sea. the storm consumes all in white and wind, and we, too, are eclipsed, made plain.
the moon is not visible on nights of heavy snow, nights on the wintry cusp of spring, nights of veiled streetlamps and the answering silence of frost.
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| Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
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1:21 am - leaf bodhisattvas
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the evanescent snow of november, quiet as an afternoon shifting imperceptibly toward dusk. a veil of vanishing snowfall and shadow now hides, now reveals the half-clothed, intimate trees, scattered still with the colors of sunset, of waning, the forest a woman made more beautiful through modesty. how demure is late autumn. how ardently, with what passionate and rich-hued splendor, does the landscape hasten toward barrenness. both fervor and calm are contained within this vibrant simplicity, this reduction -- a plainness that is the unfettered exuberance of Joy, silent and profound. the november stillness of root and sap; the illusion of dormancy.
we follow the season in its litany of losses. it is a meditation on grace and absence: the hush of night and monasteries, the welcoming gesture of open hands and empty vessels, the undressing of a lover, the austerity of cold. a self-renewing bliss fills the unfilled spaces. endeavor without expectation. intention without attachment.
shortening days bring diminution in all things. the singular and fervent focus of Love seeks to reunite all with itself, to abandon the falseness of images, to unbecome. in these ways do forms reveal Formlessness: they are the light, the heat, the ash, and the smoke that exist through and evince the flame. amidst the autumn ashes, the brilliance of trees turned bare and soot-grey, we go searching for fire.
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| Saturday, October 18th, 2008
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2:11 pm - my 27th birthday is today: annual self-portraits
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| Saturday, June 14th, 2008
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5:39 am - five thirty-nine, ante meridiem
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the fluttering of birds at daybreak, sun carried on a flurry of wings, perched on the balcony railing, on the balcony chairs; a pale and lambent light, a warbling song. cardinals, finches, and doves stir but do not unsettle the stillness of early morning, early summer. in these hours, the incipient heat is all gentleness, all soft and humid warmth: motionless, suspended, and without wind. morning pools in the broadness of june leaves, in the vegetable-blossoms, in the bushes and green suburban ornament where the birds sing and are silent.
fever and insomnia ask that i observe closely the sunrise. how tender are the requests of illness, how small. how little mastery i have other than to say joyfully, yes. each morning is intimate in this way, whispered, with the bareness of alabaster. each morning is borne weightlessly on the wings of birds. it is as if the same single day repeats, the same narrow rituals of the body, that i may learn to live each moment out of love, to perfect and sanctify by repetition the limited and mundane. i have devoted years at once deliberate and brief to this study, regarded the recurrent and advancing arc of the sun, a chronology so fluid that whole seasons seem to pass within the whitening of a single dawn.
the subdued tenor of days is a poor timekeeper. the procession of weeks is marked instead by a french calendar that lists the feastdays of catholic saints. each day is a celebration. in some months, we will celebrate saints fiacre and aristide; perhaps, also, we will lose our home. i will keep the feast of saint amandine as a three-year wife, the double solemnity of vow and veneration, but perhaps thenceforth alone. (the comforts of menology, that holy ordering of days. the edifying subservience of temporal to transcendent.) may all experience be used toward betterment. may we ever manifest equal readiness for acquiescence and action, in both guided by wisdom, in both uplifted by joy. let us honor the dawn and the lives of saints. let us see in imperfection, in difficulty, only frailty and a longing for the perfect divine.
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the migration of a volant sun, reappearing at the horizon on wings of cloud. our constant and dynamic paths. in witnessing, there is no boundary between observer and observed. let me witness the daybreak and learn thus the love that marries the sun to the world.
current music: arvo part, summa for string orchestra
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| Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
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4:00 am - total lunar eclipse
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february snow, delicate as lace and as finely wrought, ornaments the dusk. those plain, blue hours of repose, of consolation. the silver-blue of snowfall. the sapphire-black of silhouetted trees. the moon rises and is eclipsed, darkened to umber by umbral shadow. these miracles reaffirm that the world is but a place of passage. love overflows into late february snow, into the hidden and revealed moon. by this evanescence is the everlasting made known.
(the final, fleeting weeks of winter; the promissory season. the landscape of rising sap and snow is made holy only by reverence. through the eyes of reverence alone do we behold the miracles that were always present.)
the prayer of saint francis de sales: yes, my god, and always yes. the consuming, narrow devotion of gratitude, of receiving. how this singularity of focus becomes a radiant and expansive joy. the moonlit snow carries within itself water and tides, global winds, the alignment of planets. i will become simple as the moonlit snow.
yes, and always yes. i pray by opening and by assent; may every thought, word, and action be begotten thus of love. how blessed is this hidden life, alone and in communion. the intimacy and ardor of contemplation, as of lover and beloved. this fullness of heart. contentment comes when the suffering that steals, that takes away, asks us to surrender freely the attachments that remain; we reduce until there is only Essence, only joy.
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she asked saint pio of pietrelcina, "when did you first consecrate your life to god?"
he answered, "always, daughter, always."
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| Sunday, November 25th, 2007
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11:59 pm - istud quod facio, non facio nisi ut inveniam te
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i have been visited by doves, enticed by augury. in thin november mornings, the mourning doves. which deity incarnates thus? by what name shall i address you? i know only the legend of pairs of crows, messengers of mahakala, who roost in rooftops far from mine. the exaltations of god and the envoys of god.
a palette of exuberance before the pale, restrained winter. the limbs and leaves of trees are shaken by wind; they billow and bend, are broken and made bare. the trunk does not move. surely in this is a sign for a reflective people.
the priest anoints the forehead with consecrated oil, saying, "through this holy anointing, may the lord, in his love and mercy, aid you with the grace of the holy spirit." he then anoints the hands, saying, "may the lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up." a grace that is outside us and yet our own. that sudden alignment, that immediacy.
'the old pond --
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.'
how, in this way, we are impelled beyond the world of senses through the world of senses. we are anointed with prayer-oil and the sound of water. grace is received with open hands -- to those whose hands are closed, or clutching, we offer poetry and ritual as a vessel. the empty hands and the empty vessel likewise are filled.
the understanding of god as a reduction. the experience of god is the nothingness that separates us from god. the bare, ideographic arms of trees. november takes off her clothes.
as the ancients, i am taking the auspices, observing the flight patterns of a single grey dove. i give thanks to the god of compassion and the envoys of the god of compassion; i give thanks to the forms of compassion that reveal Formlessness. we sing the canticles of late autumn, music at once praise and benediction: prayer bells, chants, hymns, and the coo of the mourning dove.
current music: birchpaper
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| Thursday, October 18th, 2007
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12:02 am - my 26th birthday is today: annual self-portraits
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| Sunday, September 2nd, 2007
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1:11 am - hospital parables
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how calm i have grown in the tranquility and reduction of illness. i am one of those blessed deepest by loss. when the clamor of the city is stilled, when the ticking of clocks and the low electric hum of a household are silenced, when a hush falls upon the constant, varied music of birds and insects, when we neither speak nor are spoken to, we hear, finally, the soft miracle of breath and pulse. the distracting cacophony of the everyday is muted by this loss; let us rejoice in the reprieve even if it is not of our choosing. we are the guests of this silence. let not our lamentations rise above the whisper of the heart. because i am ill, i am quieted, serene, my existence narrowed until it begins and ends in the word "love."
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the lessons of dependence. it is difficult to sit, walk, cook, clean, carry. i am made helpless; i am given the blessings and agencies of the helpless. i wish for someone to bathe me, and in this moment my illusions of separateness disappear. suddenly there is only the wholeness and vividness of my trusting, the utterness of my connection, the consuming tenderness of compassion. all sorrow looks the same. all those who have borne grief live in me, and i in them. from the same roots do we reach ever upward.
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detachment is not merely the absence of suffering, but also the purest devotion to joy. the seedling grows toward the sun, drawn to the warmth by its nature, born of fruit and holding within itself the fruited fullness of life. there is no other purpose but this, to reach for the heavens. the graceful green unfurling of stem and leaf, the microcosmic aqueducts of sap and water, the alchemy of photosynthesis, the incipient buds and exuberant flowers: all are not gained for their own sake, but are rather the unwitting manifestations of a singular striving toward sky. it is thus that the joyful receive and create the pleasures of their lives, without attachment, without myopic toil. in this way, too, do the joyful receive difficulties as the advocates of growth, which obscure all light but the sun. facing only sunward, we suffer not from shadow. we must hope less for a change of inevitable circumstance than for a change of self. each vein a tragedy in the delicately patterned, pale underside of a sunned leaf; each leaf a triumph.
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i know now that even our breathing is a prayer. it is in this way that we chant the names of god.
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| Sunday, July 15th, 2007
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12:58 am - no god but god
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the elements of midsummer: languid heat, a calm moon, the violent workings of the five visible planets. rainfall born of both mist and cataclysm that flows always toward reunion with the sea.
the course of grave illness is deliberate and exact. how minutely contained becomes a woman, how circumscribed. how solaced by monastic piety, begotten of seclusion and the expiation of failing health. the ascetic restraint of movement consecrates every gesture; the difficulty of speech hallows every word. to be, at times, only and entirely a vessel of breath becomes a meditation on the act of breathing. everything returns gradually to its simplest form.
i am ill. my husband and i have separated. the measure of virtue is known only during trial. a blessing be upon him; peace be with him.
the desire to pray is itself a prayer. i will learn to exist wholly within the space of a breath; that infinite smallness, that infinite fullness. i will learn to love through the point of release.
in this way, i will live still with joy, with gratitude.
all is grace.
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| Friday, June 1st, 2007
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11:54 pm - to love without attachment
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an evening thunderstorm with its torrents and brevity. she calls her lover to the window. she remembers suddenly, then, the beautiful illusion of his body, in which she rejoices. the passing illusion of rain. the purpose of my love is to devour me, she says.
she delights in their frailties and singularities, the idiosyncratic proofs of their transience. the noticing of unintentional gestures, she thinks, is the greatest blessing of intimacy. how, when she talks, her hands become small and cupped, as if offering seeds to tiny birds. how his eyes are boyish even while his brow is furrowed. how, after love, she turns on her side to face him, beads of sweat tracing the heavy undersides of her breasts. how he holds the glass of water to her lips, and she drinks. the erotics of offer and consent.
we can no longer name what binds us. the decay of memory makes partnership at once stiflingly familiar and shockingly alien. our knowledge becomes vague and ritual, the way great joys and great sorrows require memorial and public ceremony. in some moments, we love each other only viscerally, without reason. how great joys and great sorrows share the same intolerable breathlessness and must fade; how they are, in the end, indistinguishable.
the story of love must be written on the body, to avoid the terror of forgetting. lovers like the myth-writers of the ancients, as desperate and driven by passion. the vulnerable imprint of a fingernail. the lazy bitemark of satiety, of exhaustion. symbolic signposts of a dissolved boundary.
the thunderstorm neither tempers nor releases the interminable low heat of dusk. we expose, consume each other. the small hot tip of her tongue tracing the corner of his eye where tears collect. his thumb pressing the fullness of her lips, her lips with the softness of fruit, ripened like fruit with latent sun, and, like fruit, delicately opened. she removes her wedding ring and bites it between her teeth. the sharp, electric taste of metal, the sting of its flavor. desire blooms in her body.
he holds the glass of water to her lips, and she drinks. the vessel shatters.
outside, the twilight thunder.
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current music: pandit pran nath
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| Saturday, April 21st, 2007
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3:40 am - on international marriages
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he will return, for a time, to his home, and i will remain in mine. i imagine all the heralds of his homecoming, how even the architecture will announce his arrival. with what gratitude he will meet the impractically high ceilings; the baroque balconies; the weight of windowsills, scattered with greenery; the windows themselves ineffably tall. the astonished, unblinking eyes of streetlights, diligently sleepless. the streets that he will walk alone. how he will receive, alone, with gratitude, all the charms of his ancient, familiar cities. and perhaps gratitude, yes, for the tender exile of separation.
i will wait, uncharmed, ungrateful, in my indifferent city, a home born of happenstance and utterly nominal. already i begin the practices of absence, the faraway lover's meditation on the universal ordinary. (do the birds sing thus for you at dawn? indeed, they must, they must.)
the mornings are heavy, pale, and cool. lost seabirds cry out for the sea; their whiteness fades into white fog, made luminescent by the weak early sun. such stillness exists only in these hours. how the seabirds float, seemingly without motion, on extended wings.
these are the preparations for a journey. we judge distances with increasing accuracy. he remarks on the beauty of other women. acquaintances warn of the dangers of the young wife left alone. (to live the life of separation is to live the life of loss. but loss, too, is the life of union. we are reduced to nothing but the breath and heartbeat of the other. a magnificent, terrifying pulse.)
these are the preparations for a journey. i will lay my head on his chest and hear the cadence of his blood, allowing my own heart to take up that rhythm. a gesture of fearlessness, of devotion. in this way, i will say, "return. i am holding you within me." i will say, "we must live in each other, and be home."
current music: marta sebestyen. szerelem, szerelem.
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| Sunday, March 4th, 2007
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10:37 pm - trois couleurs: march
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a tepid in-between season, swollen with snowmelt, made pale by sunlight and paler still by dusk. in a world of one color, gray trees stretch tediously toward gray sky.
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an eclipse colors the moon scarlet. she unclothes and lies down before sleeping. she is pale as march. her arms form a curved posture of surrender. her hands rest on her stomach as it, with her breath, rises and falls. she encircles thus the full moon, red with foreboding. an apparition both universal and intimate, dually manifest. a specter bringing fear to the ancients. how the moon has belonged always to women. how it bleeds.
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there is no strength but for the test of strength. the heavens and the earth are both volatile. the white almost-buds of flowers appear already on the branches of fruit trees. white ice still lingers in hollows, depressions, and footpaths: a landscape in exaggerated relief. how deeply and with what hesitance do we feel this season of changes. the preparatory season. we awaken to the ever-earlier dawn, that timid and radiant hour. early march, early morning, and the white eastern sun.
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| Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007
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11:59 pm - on poor health, snowfall
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a thin snow fell without sound, silhouetted against the black shadows of trees in the fragile light of dusk. the landscape whitened, became more plain. the rising moon, too, was thin. in this way, we were lulled to sleep.
this stillness lives also within my body, this winter lassitude. illness makes me talk in terms of absences; i am whitening, becoming more plain. the reductions and asceticisms of january: the wedding bed becomes the fever bed. i am freed from attachment, becoming incorporeal. see, the snow covers a blade of grass. the snow covers a tree branch. with such gentleness, such ineffable serenity, they are taken away.
a thin snow fell in the twilight hush, with only the sussuration of a slow and shallow wind. we lengthened the pauses between our breathing. we live now in a place where nothing moves, where january gathers its silences, a place quickened only by the months-old memory of migratory birds. a thin moon rises in the whitening sky.
current music: ippolitov-ivanov, o gentle light of holy glory
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| Monday, November 13th, 2006
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11:14 pm - foliage
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i want to cover my skin with fallen leaves, their vibrancy and thinness, their bitter ink. i have never before been so heartbroken by the trees. how little i have noticed them, until at last i realize that i am not attentive enough for the brevity of their splendor nor intimate enough for the pale, leafless bodies they unclothe. let us, then, become acquainted. i am raw with pity, wind-bitten, tannin-stained. i will gather your tossed-off garments carefully, like a nextday lover, with that particular tactile joy.
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how touch is the closest knowledge. the desire of fingertips seeking pulse in all things. i am brushing past houseplants, lightly grazing leaves, tracing beads of water with my thumb. surely they, too, know that it is november. (something in them must know that they have been set apart.) surely they, too, know how strangely and beautifully they are preserved. the most odd and precious is the autumn house-blossom: this captive flower, this pedestalled curiosity. a white-lily queen of golden forests. your curve and softness so much like his lips.
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i am holding the stem of an oakleaf between my teeth, a wife made maidenly by the lack. my hands are empty as autumn. i am seduced by his body, graceful and plain as oak trees, and by november.
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| Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
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1:09 am - my 25th birthday is today: the annual self-portrait vanity
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| Tuesday, September 5th, 2006
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6:07 am - on building
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why have we abandoned the canon of consecrated architecture? the venerated "beautiful corners" of homes, altars lit with prayer lamps, curtains closed over the inviolable eyes of saints. each room a sanctuary. the balanced proportions of archways, the propitious height of doors. the auspicious and holy cardinal directions. (how else to orient our living?) the number of beams appropriate for a house; the number of beams appropriate for a temple. no more than two doors in a single line, to prevent the rushing in of spirits. the colors of the devout laity.
the structure of the everyday is no longer a supplication. we have forgotten the ceremonial reconstruction of the universe in intimate scale. i cannot understand why the length of my hand, now, measures nothing; such inexplicable apostasy.
i will eclipse, from wrist to fingertip, the space between your breastbone and heart.
this will be my home, of ideal architecture and perfectly circumscribed.
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| Friday, June 23rd, 2006
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2:43 pm - summer abroad
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two days after the solstice, i want to know which fruits are ripening. the sidewalks outside our home are scattered with inedible berries, their futile evolution from blossoms crushed underfoot. (an overabundance of green and fecundity.) the days are torrid and long, heavy, the air seductive with pollen and languor. the heat of another body intolerable, and yet -- back arched, exposed neck, bitten lip, lifted chin. evenings are cooler, more humid. the purple shadow of dusk. the purple stain of unsweet fruit. purple lovemarks, unhidden, on still-pale skin. we are deepening toward midsummer.
this season of intoxicants, thunderstorms, and vivid dreams. last night, the dream of a thousand incarnations of a woman in procession down a mountainside. the desire, upon waking, to close my thousand selves into one. the elegant restraint of a seed that carries in itself the knowledge of leaves and flowers and fruit but never opens. a seed that defies the summer. with the shape of a teardrop, of a kiss, smooth and dark, with the patina of age-worn wood. it is already open.
we will travel to countries whose summer i do not know, whose rain i have not tasted, whose fruit is ripened with a new heat. whose cities are, perhaps, as vibrant as our verdant trees. i will hold their language like a seed under my tongue. i will see their thousand shades of green.
current mood: borispol july 5th
current music: sheremetyevo august 10th
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