Journaling

   
























An era has ended as I now say goodbye to my old leather journal and welcome in a new time of my life, hopefully a little wiser, a little brighter. I was sent this new journal, one that I now call my youthful travels. Fitting, I think. This first entry is about the welcoming of spring in New York. 

March 20, 2012

When I think of New York, I think of my future. Phoenix renders me in riddled dreams of the past, mine and those forlorn ages cradled in green.  Thursday morning, the darkness pulled back until eyes wept in a golden glaze. The clouds frothed back and forth, rolling waves of a calm sea. The storm of a heavy night of restless talks and thoughts of the heavy autumn rush, a falling kind seemed to heave its final cry.  And all that was left was the morning dream, waves like blankets.  They seemed so close you wished you could roll the thick, double paned windows down and let your fingers swim in the clouds. Do what you knew as a kid.  I turned to my side as we descended into a communal fog of neither the heavy or light kind. It was just there. The pink and yellow, deep blue of an earlier time rose so high, it stayed behind, it said goodbye. I was approached by a baby’s eyes—welcomed into this new city that would be my home for a week.  Its mother whispered, “Good Morning.” I smiled at him, he laughed.  His eyes widened in excitement, raw and young and free.  I couldn’t help but laugh too because this was a new era.  I was away from something so heavy: the past.  But I was in flight, I was a bird like I always imagined young and in bed drifting away to bedtime stories.  The airplane was like a boat descending the sea, nothing was as serious as it seemed.  These past six days have blurred my vision of self, or it has awakened a new sense that has always been there, that I have never seen.  When I landed, I grabbed a ticket and trusted the yellow taxicab that seemed to be waiting to take me into New York City.  I pretended to know where I was or where I was going.  The traffic was the only thing keeping me from something bigger than myself. I spotted my best friend, Jackie, in her purple NYU sweatshirt. I didn’t even realize the 10 dollar tip I handed to the driver.  He didn’t say much.  After Jackie and I grabbed breakfast at this cute french bakery and restaurant, Le Pain, we joined the routine of the subway: the music, the people rushing and stopping, the incessant swiping of metrocards, the wind of those fast, frenzied underground trains. 

Our first stop was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  The waterfront, broken windows and graffiti art with cats and teenage hearts. We sat on the ground of this thrift shop, Junk, and held pictures that was once the property of lost families and dearest dears.  I wondered if they were missed.  We sat on the ground and held them up until the sun shone through.  That evening, we ventured to the markets of Chelsea, explored galleries, and drank don’t-mind-if-I-do glasses of wine. The crepes back in Greenwich were lovely. In the early hours of the morning, we walked through Washington Square Park, cast by the hazy shadow of the massive white arch.  Frozen and cold, we made it to St. Marks where I held my 99 cent pizza for warmth.  I felt more than what was, and even now my memory begins to fade.

Running on what seemed like no more than two hours of sleep, we awoke to a rainy mist and the brooklyn seashore.  I joined Jackie and her wonderfully artistic friends she made through photography. I couldn’t stop smiling at their eclectic blend of personalities that seemed to mix so well, and the way their views of the world painted itself beautifully through pictures (inspiring, might I add).  We were the only ones on a shore ridden with broken glass and bottles—a mosaic array that reminded me of stepping stones we used to make in Garden class in elementary school.  The shattered treasures became the sand itself, the bottles that washed among the current like an ancient celtic folklore clanged together with the tune of chimes dancing in the wind, not cradled by the lull of a waters edge.  It was so beautiful and untouched even though they say it was once a landfill, forgotten and left in decaying grace. I collected glass bottles, green, brown, clear for my future and past. A sacrificed present to the gods. I wondered who held these once, what apothecary named these Bella Donna.  My feet soon dragged on this cold, English coast.  We pandered through golden fields and found our way back to the bus stop, our noses and lips bruised blue by the cold, until we gathered for final warmth in Snice coffee shop with tea, bagels and cookies. 

St. Patrick’s Day filtered the city in green people. The bar hoppers started early with their green shirts and green, sparkly hats--an obvious patronage to the Irish spirit.  However, Jackie and her friend Jessie and I met some lovely old ladies, dressed in style at the famous "off broadway". We perused the shelves of a book store, novels and the likes painting the walls to the ceiling. We stopped for lunch at Cafe Lalo, a two-hour affair that was enjoyed over coffee and talks that perused the very living.  Central park bloomed cherry blossom and white daisy trees, the Guggenheim museum a marvel of art and photographs of Francesca Woodman that seemed so sad because maybe her life’s end was so sad. I lost myself in translation that night. Starting off the night in one of Jackie’s good friend, Maddie’s dorm room, I met some lovely, sweet and unique people. Swayed by influences that seemed to bubble in happy fever, I held a cigarette to my lips and knew that this is what my five-year-old self was thinking of: cool and burning like the embers lit.  We were fumbling over our high, unfiltered laughs.  Coughing the smoke away, sitting on St. Mark’s stoops with our 99 cent slice.  I didn’t want to leave these people. I wanted to collect every moment and sense. 

Walking by myself around west village, I noticed the movement of trees and flowers: nature in such a high rise city garden.  We look for what is more than ourselves, hoping to lose what has been garnered real and vaguely this. Words are lost when attempting to pinpoint each encumbrance.  If only I could envelop the words of all the great poets and novelists, but I find that I am only left with an empty sugar packet and a dehydrated cherry blossom.  My tea bag of apricot orange has floated, or descended to the warmth of a grounded city. 

“I am living,” I laughed uncontrollably under the sway of bubbly, happy fever drinks. 

 I am living. 

Raisin Oranges

My mother and her best friend sat at our kitchen table crying and smiling, watching us children jump and sink like titanic on that lone raft in the pool—we were the sailors, our dog the captain. it was summertime and the sun was hot and heavy, but freeing like the smell of citrus from the orange trees in the backyard. I stood on the cool kitchen tiles looking out, but not looking back. The table was bare with just their hands. My own felt like raisins, pruned from the indian waters, wrung out in nervous predicament. My mother played with my hair, and I told them about my break from this child’s play of the populars, and they laughed over a possible poplar tree, “populars or poplars?” I couldn’t understand how trees had anything to do with being popular. I can’t understand how I thought they had nothing to do with being loved. My pronunciation was no good; I was young and knew I wanted to be neither.

We aren't what we say we are

Blueberry Bliss, Ginger Vitality

A godess's homesickness for the romanticized

I couldn’t look up any longer; I couldn’t speak up any louder. I just lay on the ground and imagined myself in some distant landing. If I closed my eyes, could I make you and all of this disappear? My pulse sighed in rendered dreams of energy; there I was, my final release to therapeutic presence. Immersed, faded and invisible like one who’s already experienced and channeled. But I haven’t experienced, I have yet to channel. Yet I feel so old. I feel so withered and old. A raisin in the sun, a child looking up at Shel Silverstein’s pizza sun. But I remember being young where the sun engulfed everything you touched and felt and said and cried. I dreamt of nothing because I knew of nothing to dream. Time didn’t find me; it didn’t stalk me until I knew pain. I could cry and it would be the dark ages. I was so young and already eye level with the sun and moon—friends of transcendence in flight. The must of my grandmother’s brown and white lace curtains stuck to my skin and eyes, relics of a golden age where rock-and-roll and desert sun made waves in the sand, and oasis’s in velvet pools and string bean rope trees. Because there you were. There it was. Time meant nothing, it didn’t weigh this energy of now, brief and fleeting and, hold on, step back, cheap. Hang on, wait up. What’s wrong? I’m not now. These tears can’t be taken away. You can’t just keep on saying that someday, someday now I will find a way to forget those goddamn hearts and flowers. Because what if it will all only take this one day, these one tears to say that you aren’t alone in what you fear and what sears every nerve and childish cry. Why did I care so much about that key and the lock to the aged, rosewood Grandfather clock? I would follow the swing, and hope to grow as tall as the wall of vanillin books, ripened with age and travels and voices. Goddammit relinquish control—let me fall and hit hard. Let the sand wash me away so I can sail the seven moons. The sky tells us we can’t go back, but we can live between the two, night and day and eye level all the same. The yin and yang of a child’s heart, or maybe just homesickness for the romanticized.  I’ve realized that it wasn’t the specificity of time, but the release of time itself, the ignorance and innocence of a child in relation to an era. The road only went for some time until it was you and the wild—people were wild, not tamed and estranged. What a calamity to no longer feel the wind’s silky wrap, watch lips kiss smoke, feel the sparseness of change and a pay phone, the haunting of all those people before you reaching for the call of home, honey and wine to nameless, weathered voices.

Sweet child of mine, you feel that your hair has grown too fierce and coarse for the comfort of a mother’s hands, soothing the tangles and brushing away your gasping fears that seem to yank you to the floor in a broken water depth, a dragging jerk that pulls you fighting, a cold recluse with no breath. You can’t seem to escape the sea, lying broken in your mother’s hands. Sweet child, you’ve seemed to have forgotten those healing hands, touching your forehead in a pause of hope and light, honing those sun rays and the moon’s pale, seeping chill until breath returned, your chest fell heavy and still. You weren’t blue, you weren’t black, you were coral peach, the dip between the two. Sweet child, you were taken by the sky. You wish to feel the braid of a mother’s hands, the stories of nostalgia and its cratered heart; you wish to smile all the smiles you’ve heard and seen and felt. Lived all the moments, black and white, coral peach, cradled in the lights of stop and go; a mother’s hands balmy sweep and butterfly dance through turbulent and anxious tidal waves, until you are soothed, you are healed. 

Wild skies, freed hearts seek solace, “will you ever win?” Those words carpeted the Shirley curls of orange shag, the strung guitar that my mother once held in gypsy rhythm, individual and soul, and me, healing those strings in smiles I’ve heard and seen and felt. Nostalgia fluttered and like melding stars in poetry, glowed like the goddess itself. I was surrounded, a child dripping in nectar calling for the monarch butterflies until they amassed as fields of flowers in the sky—their arched wings each a broken piece of holy, stained glass drenched in golden light, each a broken, wild smile of heaven—the true cathedral in all its pure divinity. I looked up, I spoke, I was overcome.

Listen while reading: http://crystallizedhope.tumblr.com/post/16207156171/crystallineknowledge-her-breath-is-the-wind

Coffee Shop Text

I’m growing hard and cold in this tribal world. I don’t think you could say I am happy. With this constant chatter of unrest delving to rest inside my head; they are putting up camp, I can tell, they can say. There’s this perpetual expectance from society of what to be, how to say and why to live. I don’t know if I can ever grow to understand this type of living. I grip Excalibur inside the fist of my hand; it hangs loosely from a silver cord around my neck, claiming to have been pulled from the formidable rock where no one else stood to understand that it takes grace and patience, not sure strength. It’s as if I’m waiting to be saved, to be sure of protection from all of this pounding energy—consuming, eating away my vitality. Who’s ever really sure of their existence? I want to be told I am okay, I am going to make it through the day, that I am good enough. I want to be held and be seen as true. I’ve been thrown out, no packed bags but the clothes on my back. I have no home now, left to wander through tempos unheard of. It’s weird how people look at you, like they know where you stand. People have forgotten the language of telepathy, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t communicate, wordless. We aren’t ever really alone, because in some sense or another, people always know what you are feeling. They meet you--sad, betrayed, this deep seed of resentment and label you as unhappy, depressed. No one can explain how they know specifically, they just do. It’s too much for the comprehension of words. I don’t know how I feel about that. I could easily leave this barren place, with people who feed jealousy and fight for the funniest funny, an attack on the weakest link, but I wonder if it would change anything. Would the people really be different, would I make friends and feel content? Maybe green really is my color, and that is what I needed to realize. I guess I am just tired of feeling below the rest of society, when I think so much too. No one seems to understand my need to be at one of those colleges where thinking is revered, books a well sought-after perfume. I want to sit in those grand libraries; you know one of those brick, home-in-front-of-a-warm-crackling-fire ones? I want to live there. Create a home there. Drink my coffee, study and sleep there. Modern isn’t my thing. Ironic, when journalism is on its last limb, surviving by the newest new—the search for obliterating human communication. Give me a typewriter and that will do. Storytelling must never die. Faces must never fade.

I think confrontation is needed. To go out and be okay with falling down, once, twice or numerous times, you know. We must be open to meeting so many people, even if we don’t necessarily talk to them. To just interact with their energy is good enough. To sit in the open, alone, is the bravest of all. Because you are telling the world, I am okay by myself. I am okay meeting you. We may all be suffering, but I am still okay.  I love this feeling of essential rebellion.

A farewell to nobility in loneliness

The leaping woman arrives in an ambulance of starlight. Take heed young warrior, wanderlust vagabond—these stars burn for only so long; they can fall and die en masse of clouded fire, its grip reaching for a death experienced together, not alone like everyone else. Make a wish, or this search will be your downfall; see there, light-years scrape across battered and bruised skies encased in flaming trails of golden chariots. They didn't race ahead, star-bright, to fall in vain. Once, only once in a lifetime, myths braced for the constellation of gods splattered among the cosmos. Oh, see it pass you by now. Adrift a torrent of wind and sea and deserted dust storms, that leaping woman bathed in starlight felt as if she was rusting as burnt and red as iron. She was no "holy city," so she looked to the moon and waited for its milky cradle, a boat in a rather black, brash sea—a sailor’s friend in Poseidon’s tidal pull. Waves of stars took its shot, they rose up and hit like a tsunami's sucker punch until she clung to the orbit of impermanence. Her family always told her about the principles of practice, but what did they do other than call her a kind of lazy susan, waiting for the heavens to guide her home. So she leapt and she fell, and she snagged and cracked with each broken branch, until she lay still, very still, most like those monastic monks, waiting for the brush of enlightenment and the tongue of its tempters beneath a tree and its grassy roots. She was on the roof of the world, her name known only as Ngari, the remains of a celebrated and ruined kingdom, a place for the rather vast and few. Magical, divine—a final state of nirvana—a place to pilgrimage and find what all those stars lost, alone "to fly high and never fall." No need for another emergency call, this was her final search for home.