Thursday, January 19, 2012

Chasing April

I was on my knees painting an unintentionally morbid looking picture today and "Ever Since" by The Head and The Heart popped up on Pandora. I had nearly forgotten how instantly I would die of overwhelming happiness if someone wrote that about me. Unless he was, you know, bald.
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I wrote a song today about coming to terms with the inevitable possibility that upon uprooting your life and moving out of state, the lives of the people you left behind may still function, even progress swiftly, without you, believe it or not. But alas! You can never really lose the ones you love. Because the reason they existed in your life in the first place, was for the love. The love that they brought to your life and allowed you to actualize within yourself. Remember your best times with people. "We only have what we remember." -Listener.

Monday, January 16, 2012

The Road to Willegillespie and Beyond.

You, you only, exist.
We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.

To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival!


Rainer Maria Rilke

I read this poem today in my collection of Rilke poetry, and I'm unsure if it's a picture of God or nature, or one within the other, maybe just "the way". The way all things have precisely one way of fitting together perfectly, looking so different from each angle at which they are seen. I'm seeing for perhaps the very first time that the garland is indeed hanging in chance.

I met an aspiring ultra-marathoner, a vitamin sales woman/closet super environmentalist, and a quintessential starving artist today. These people shared nearly no physical attributes, they didn't say the same things to me, they weren't headed for similar homes at the day's end or similar places to live or die or anything in between after today. But I was told by the human meteor who shook the foundation of my Earth, if only briefly, that the world around you, or your perception of it at least, is just a reflection of yourself. And I may have shattered my own skepticism of that today.



"You will love again the stranger who was your self."
Walcott

hang up
^photo by superpipo2010

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Like kings.

I am currently laying in my bed, on my back, with my computer resting gingerly atop my giant food baby. A couple friends of mine came over a couple hours ago so we could make a quick trip to trader joes, followed by a little commute home to make sweet potato soup and consume copious amounts of goat milk brie and apples and dried mangoes and whatever the heck that delicious Indian yogurt sauce was that Morgen wished she could go at with a spoon. Well, she was the only one who announced it vocally. Then we couldn't help but indulge in dark chocolate and a magnificently impromptu jam session. And this.

http://youmakemetouchyourhandsforstupidreasons.ytmnd.com/

This just gives me butterflies of excitement for the next time a boyfriend and I experience some catastrophic mushroom cloud of relationship trouble so I can lower my voice and recite this to him in person to a tee, all the way through.

I digress. One thing that's really rested heavily on my mind lately is the giant gaping metaphorical chasm that stands between my body's age, and my interests. Given the option to stay in and read or talk to someone over dinner about string theory or comparative religion or how little sense the physical world makes, I will snatch it like a hungry hungry hippo snatches those little white plastic spheres. Anybody who knows me, knows that I couldn't party my heart out if my life depended on it, and to be quite honest I kind of dig being an 80 year old woman in a 19 year old body. It's not some sort of faith-laced strictness or moral rigidity that steers me from it, partying is just like.... Strawberry ice cream. Lots of people love it, but I dont ever crave it,and will usually pass it up for something I like better.
I'm so lame I know.
Every time I'm at a rager all I want to do is go night running by myself then climb a mountain then impression sketch the pants off of the sunrise. Figurative pants.

Growing up seems to bring out the recluse in me. No, I think it just further removes me from mob mentality, and makes the depth and honesty of one on one relationships much more valuable to me. No, I'm not growing up.

http://m.youtube.com/index?desktop_uri=%2F&gl=US#/watch?v=2Z0ysQk1kaY

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Just call me Alexander Supertramp

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Today I am doing the anticipatory happy dance. I got a job interview, and I may very soon be hocking expensive retail in the form of denim, sparkly scarves, and all things "privileged white girl". Looks like I may very well be within days of finally slaying the job-hunt dragon after all!
I went on a walk with a young, homeless by choice man named Aaron in Ashland a few months back. He showed me which plants make your stomach feel better, which ones make your teeth stronger and whiter than any fluoride toothpaste would, which yellow weed tastes strikingly like broccoli, and he told me he'd someday prove to people that he didn't need any money to live. Let alone to be happy.
I suppose this was already in the back of my mind somewhere, (but that's how everything is. We've got everything we need and life is a quest to make it relevant) he's right. With money, comes stuff you have to pay for. Not only fiscally, but also emotionally and mentally and spiritually. You've been taxed.
I really hate that my greatest recognizable fear these days is that I will run out of money. I'm scared of giving up. Throwing in the towel and going home after almost six months will look very much like failure on the surface if it happens. But I'm convinced it won't. I got this. This, and a future as environmental progress pioneer, then a vagrant painter/ musician, then somebody who learned something from it all. And maybe somewhere along the way, I can be somebody who's got too much love for the beauty in a changing landscape that there's no room for tangible things.

I will give the world a little more air to breathe, a little more green to look at, then I'm going all Chris McCandless on this shit and living out of a backpack. Just call me Alexander Supertramp. Except he died in a bus in Alaska, which doesn't make me super jazzed to think about. I'm going to live on an orchard overlooking the Ireland coastline instead I think.



Also, go to the library. Libraries are pure good.
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Officially a blogger newby before the world ends! Woo!

I plan to send my first ever blog post flying off my fingertips in record time this evening, because this evening is in fact morning, and I know I must be tired because I just became so enamoured with the word "snooze" that I said it out loud to myself like four times. Snooze snooze snooze. Snooze. I digress. I made the decision to start up a bloggity blog about an hour ago, because Hector in his search for happiness ( good book given to me as a birthday present from a fantastic friend ) indirectly told me to. To share a bit of my life with everyone at least.

I've lived in Eugene, Oregon for about a week, where the people are ducks and the ducks...are too. I get so lost on my bike every day that I'm just waiting to see the big green "Welcome to Washington!" sign at any given moment. The first things I learned upon moving here were - 1) it is never too dark, too cold, or too unlikely that you'll find your way back. Trader Joe's chocolate is worth the bike ride. 2) do not apply for a job at the running store if the manager is a burly, muscular witch of a spandex-obsessed woman. 3) Be free.

My one of my three roommates told me the last one, and I figure she's got life as sorted as anybody I've yet encountered.

I'm going to hop viciously (there's a unique verb/adverb combo!) back on the yob hunt tomorrow and kick the crap out of a library visit. I'm taking a very intense approach to life tomorrow it seems. But anyways that means its time for sleeps.


Be freeeee!
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