Inhaling


It's coming from some untouched place. This rare, lost, but waiting to be found-place. It is tiny and passes when you blink. Just in that moment before you take a breath to say, "hello" -- it is there, living inbetween the inhale. And my mind wants to badly to catch it. But, like a hummingbird's wings, my sight can't find its stillness and my hands can't catch it in mid-flutter without killing it.

So, I'm stuck within this delicate balance of it all. Watching time reveal what it does to us all. Watching it unfold its everyday birth and decay. I'm only trying to find this delicate, quantum space in-between it all. This sweep maple smell that finds me, coming from a hundred-year-old-tree, reminding me of my own mortality.

And, the clock keeps ticking. Time --- demanding that the battery life in my watch keep up with it. It is snuggled within perpetual motion and I am but a spirit bound by the gravity within my flesh.

I find solace in knowing I breathe.
I look forward to the moments between all of my inhales --- this space where I stop time and can witness the unfolding of its consequences.
Action. Reaction.

I am alive.

I DIDN’T KNOW I WAS PRETTY


And then I turned into a girl. Always steel. Always silver. Always gray. Cold. Sharp. Exterior.

But someone lit a small pink petal with a tiny flame. And that pink turned fire red and consumed the monotone. Then the sepia came.


I worry too much about everyone around me. I think about her and how misery has covered her like bear fur in a false winter. I think about how sex has smothered him like slick oil, making him slip on his own desires. And about her rigidity, like a lightening bolt, has struck her straight into a perpetual pose and the inevitable gout found her. And their denial; how it covers them with ash – taking away the myriad hues of truth.

And myself and how I manipulate the edge of pavement and dirt. How I avoid the cuts at my feet.

“Come back to the center” some collective cries. But I stay dumb with lush, on purpose, watching the realness of it all swirm around me, like a peripheral parade chanting aside me and I am but a spectator to it.

Sometimes I like to get lost. And I know when I’ve put away my compass. And I use him. I use his warm body to find me – make me feel human. I use him, his cascading hair, deep breathing, whispering voice and sweat. And I lie a little bit to myself. Closing my eyes I let myself dip, for a sliver of time, into the possibility of him letting go. Imagining us by the tickling sound of skinny water pushing forward in a shallow creek over small pebbles, tiny rock. I imagine us in silence and only looking at each other underneath a swallowing, overcast sky – waiting for the rain.
And it is the rawest kind of beauty.

So, I imagine these things while he’s over me and his mouth suckles me. then I realize he could be anybody and it would be okay. He is a shadow come to life. Flesh appearing on his dark bones. Warm liquid swimming inside of him. And suddenly he is human before me. eyes sparkle in the indigo light and I see the river in them. And this empty cavern inside of my chest is suddenly filled with the sharp UV rays of the day’s sun. it finds me cuddled in the corner, still young and naïve and waiting to be found by love. I am like an abandoned child with torn, dirty clothes. Fresh faced. Dirty faced. Scared. Not-trusting. White-pink, small paths of tears already created underneath my eyes, the way that small water carves its path into ancient earth. I am curled up and remembering when I was a fetus – longing to be closed eyed and fed by my mother.

And so I pretend that he is the sun – that which has brought a song into my silence. And the melodies are like magic carpets and I ride the treble out high, dropping with the bass underneath the clouds. I am a girl laughing in the air carried and loved by the syncopated dips of notes and sounds. My melodic parent keeping me safe in the womb of sound.

And I just want to be loved. Embraced. Filled with lucidity while limber. It’s okay to be limber and just let gravity let me rest.

Then, in the midst of all this noise the silence found me. In the midst of all this colorless space, I have been discovered by the rainbow – and sepia has turned into contrasted brightness. Every color is bold. Every color takes on its purpose.
And there is harmony while holding my breath.

I didn’t know I was pretty until I turned into a woman. Always linen. Always ivory. Always immaculate. Hot. Blunt. Interior.


I didn’t know I was pretty until I realized ---- it never mattered.
And I have ended where I began.

A LETTER TO THE ONE I LIKE AND COULD LOVE IF HE LET ME AND WHOM I KNOW WOULD LOVE ME IF HE COULD ONLY OPEN UP.

August 20, 2006
C. Pacheco

Brave and Stupid


There’s this love thing again. How could a civilization be so predictable and complicated at the same time?
How could this cliché of the subject of love become commonplace in a society that has risen, pushed through oppressive forces of our earth’s gravitational pull and despite all odds – still land on the moon?
How could the ethereal nature of love be so filled with blinding complexity and binding ropes?

This isn’t like me. My time is usually spent thinking about the sky and looking at the trillions of tiny dots that make up our multi-dimensional real-life moving painting. I think about them and the quantum leaps that happen all around us everyday. I wonder about DNA, perpetual motion, and the science of emotion, spirit and reincarnation. I dig inside of the mud, get dirty and want to discover the bottomless pit.

But love.
I am clueless and without words or language.

The wanting of love and not knowing how to ask for it leaves me the most fearful. It makes me more scared than traveling alone in a wet, thundering mountain in a country below the equator, surrounded by strangers in a lost place.
It is my heart that is bigger than this world. It expounds beyond the literal universe and reaches toward a horizon, poised to land in the incinerating center of the sun.

It is brave and stupid. But isn’t the difference just a transparent, fragile, fine line?

And so I’m here in this place- staring at the dots, creating a play list of music for you as you are probably daydreaming about your happiness, your sadness, what it is that you may want, don’t want, don’t want to admit you want --- amongst your confusion, your breakfast, your laugh, the lowering of your head -------- your sighs.
I can’t help that your exhaled breath finds me like smoke signals.
Wondering about these little pieces, I have a deep desire to touch you and remind you that you are not alone.
Then, I feel crazy --- as if I fell through a wormhole in outer space and the universe of my heart is leading me further away from civilization. There, I become like an animal – reactionary and losing all my reason.



And I don’t care.
Perhaps I have already found this pit – this 8th wonder of the world; deep, dark, mysterious, primordial and unexplainable.

Between all of my deep ponderings and curiosity about our existence, at the end of it all, I want to slow dance with you.
I want to think of nothing. Maybe that is the greatest give that love can bring to me, can bring to you…

Silence.


Inspired by E.

A LETTER TO THE ONE I DON’T WANT TO ADMIT I WANT TO LOVE AND WANT HIM TO WANT TO LOVE ME BACK



Promise of Spring
By C. Pacheco


WORDS TO CLEAR MY THROAT:

What if I told you that every time I’m near you I feel like I never learned a thing? You make me want to pull my heart out of my chest again and lay it down for your to explore. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt my center rise and my core as bright blue as the hottest flame in a dark room.


THE POINT:

I want to hold you with my eyes closed, touch your beautiful hair, smell your golden skin and bring you into me – over and over again.
I want to exhaust myself at the end of everyday for over-loving you.
I’m sure that it would be reciprocated. I have a place for every part of you. Your sweat dripping into my small valleys – there’s a dry part of me matching every damp part of you. You arrived like a thunderstorm, uninvited and surprisingly. So, rain hard on me. Demand your thunder to shake my earth – your lightening to strike me more than once. This humid, sticky essence of your entrance brought green to my grey.

I can’t explain all of those silly little reasons that I feel this way. I’m just drawn to you like dew to a thorn. And even if it means yet another pain of heartbreak, I want to lay with you and feel what it could be, in my mind for this moment – if only for this moment.

Please be him.
Rub your body around me as we dance to deep, slow rhythms and make me want it.

You can make me wet with longing. Kiss me where I’m raw, sore, tired – where tears swell and my body tickles. Give me your mouth and sip on my sweet, hot tea for a while.
I want to show you my words, my most open – my most honest – and I want for you to play with them between your rough fingers. Swirl the o’s in your index, tickle the x’s, dot my I’s, squeeze my e’s and push down on my g’s with your green thumb. Grip my sentences and hold them up against your warmth. Then give them back reinvented, like new full-bloomed dewy roses from your garden.

In the deep purple and blue hours of the night I want to awake with my body lying over you - lethargic and trusting. Let me sleep cradled in your thighs and dream of all that you could be.
I will dance for you – undulate my body, like you are the dry shore and I am the full moon’s tide.
I want to rub you, feel you rise - pumped full with blooming gardens of life and a promise of spring.


Your lips are ripe and high above the sea – ready for me to dive deep into yet another abyss - this deep blue bottomless wetland where I never catch my breath.
Come close to me, up against me. Feel my damp chest slipping against yours – I am squirming and not wanting to give in. Make me see in your eyes that I am but a young girl again, remembering my innocence.

Though all of this is like over-saturated sweet syrup poured in lumps into milk, just bare with me today as I finally am waking from my winter’s slumber. I am grateful for the possibility of you and it makes me rise in the morning and look toward the sun.

Shine over me. Bring me your heat.
Make my flower bloom in your orange, hot and humid dawn.

A letter to the one I don’t want to admit I still love

Perpetual winter


I want to hate you.
Don’t we all feel that way about some people?

I don’t even really want to want to hate you.
Where are you anyway?

You damn fool. You still feel me when you sleep against her. Her hair, her smell, her skin, her breathing. Isn’t she lovely? Really.

In your dreams I know you see the “ifs”. And no matter how collected you are and perfect you are and clean you are – no matter how composed and intensely focused you are, those messy memories of us cloud you.

It’s all about the, what if’s, isn’t it?

But who in the hell cares anyway?
This mini obsession I have with the wonderings about you add up like small dollars and tiny cents. It was expensive to have experienced you at all, on any level, in my life.
I have been paying on the interest and feel like I’ve just begun bargaining with the principal. And I still have a long way to go.

When can I finally upgrade from you? When can I at least trade in this broken heart for a newer one? Perhaps one with a different vibe, smile, texture and color. At least it would be a variety on this pain. A buffet of gut wrenching is better than the same ol’ everyday, predictable and petty disappointments. It would at least give me the thrill of the un-expected. You remember how I enjoyed playing with fire, don’t you? I like skating the unstable edges of piercing cliffs and cutting earth. There’s just something so divine about the hurting that reminds me of my closeness to apathy. It’s just a quick, steep and fast death fall ahead.
So, at least pain that I don’t expect - keeps me on my toes and reminds me that I’m living.
If I only could say that I’ve been hurt by another this way. I want to say that I have – but no. I tried to. At times I may have stared deeply into myself in a mirror until this person in the reflection became a blurred, melted fleshly version of me. She became part of the glass and evaporated away. I was searching for a kernel of something that would convince me, sincerely that I have bled for another him.
But, no.
Instead, all they’ve ever been were just other let-downs. Like flies and honking horns in the distance never letting me sleep. But never like yours.
I wonder if the veil over my soul has thickened like the dry callous on the balls of my feet, and have become themselves like those dark, old timeless rocks existing in a vast, isolating land – never uncovered.
Damn how I long for that sweet pain of slipping and slicing myself open. That deep, violet haze of pain that rises like smoke in a room on fire.
But for that I’m guessing I would have to open up this cave, again. And at least for now, it seems that snow is still falling on those steep and sharp edged cliffs. Sleet is still slick up against the pavement and the bitter cold is breaking the bark of an old oak outside my sunken lair. I will hibernate until the first trickle of melted ice, like a bug, sneaks its way underneath me and into my hiding.

This winter has been a blizzard and even the sun holds out his hands, bloody & filled with sharp ice. Stabbing, cutting, hard frozen water.

This is how I loved you. This is how you loved me back. Such sweet slicing pain that created a dichotomy inside me – splitting me in two - like ice cracking rocks in a perpetual winter.
You see I want for you to come back and hurt me again. Summon out the purple from my beige. Conjure up my red from my still white. Bring out the black from my clear and lucid pastel.
Come and bring this pain, sharp and cradled in your hands, and make me hate you again.
So that for one brief moment I can remember how it feels to want to love someone else, anyone else, but you.





For G.

Written on Thursday, July 27, 2006 (on the plane over to Tejas)

OZ


The other day while feeling bad, I bought myself a beautiful pair of deep-red, patent leather, closed toe, classic high heeled shoes.
I’ve always wanted a good pair of red shoes.
And last night I found myself packing them up alongside some old, tattered, dirty flip flops. They are meant to be broken in someplace else.

Here in Austin, it is hot, humid and wide-spread – just like I remember Texas.

You see, that’s the thing about Texas. It sticks to you, like the humidity. And already, in some ways, it seems like San Francisco was a fairy-land, foggy dream. Did all that ever really happen? Did I really live in such an amazing world-famous city, on my own, in a cool neighborhood, dance naked for some funny money, do media work, go to the Hopi reservation and Alaska, meet Maya Angelou, get my heart swollen and broken, hang on for dear life in the Muni, run down the stairs to jump on the BART, participate in some of the largest protests, smoke the best herb and meet the strangest, coolest, funkiest people? As a matter of fact, it can be said that I indeed met the tin man with no heart, the lion with no courage, the scarecrow with no brain while skipping around in the emerald city.

And the result of that messy mosaic is formidable. My wisdom is heavier, like a water-balloon. My conscience looks bright like white linen shining through sun. My heart is large and filled with the deep blue liquid of humility. And, my spirit. She is light and boundless – forever rising above me, watching the landscape and guiding me where to go next.

But there is something I must say to you all, my fellow travelers down this yellow brick road: In my deepest core I am certain some day, some how, I will click those shiny red heels of mine and return to Oz – taking the emerald city within me.

But, for now I’ve got to admit ------- there’s no place like home.


A big embrace to my California peeps. You are with me for life.
And to SF --- I've never felt a warmer embrace from any other cold place.

Thank you.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

-- Robert Frost

Monet. His art is a metaphor for my journey. I spent the day staring at his collection at the museum and I was profoundly moved. I never thought I liked him. That is not until I witnessed him for myself.

Things aren’t always what they seem. And my life in it’s collective this far, is like an impressionist painting. Up close the wonderful inaccuracies, imperfections and subtle ways of movement are what is dictating my compass.
The way that Monet creates swirls and crashes them into one another is the way my daily hours interact with one another – creating a temperamental and unpredicatable path. Rich and honest – no pretentiousness. It is in the brushstroke that the real story lies. The truth is in the rising, textured inches of sloshed paint and texture.

What are we looking for when we stare into them? Some portal that may open up into a world of catharsis? Some universal understanding of a momentary clarity? And, does that door open in the light parted behind the morning buildings or the orange at dusk's horizon? Perhaps it is in the unbenounced darkness of his grounds or deep blue waters. Maybe it's all relative.

My eyes strain over the grain of spectrums reflected back at me. The small slivers of violets juxtaposed with pinks. From afar the breeze is tickling the grassy knolls and the flurries of snow are still swirling up and around a dense winter. It is painting made that of molecules breathing life into me today.

I want Monet to paint me purple with a violet haze. Deep blue around my atmosphere and orange at my core. A photograph would capture me still in a moment, but his language would translate my essence – deep, wounded but hopeful. I am bursting like a ripe fruit from the inside out oozing a dark sweetness and damp with new birth. I have always been but today most keenly reminded that I am a walking piece of dotted color pulled out from his gardens and co-existing with the collective – participating in his macro feast for the eyes. I am spilling over the lines and onto other accidental pages where an entire other world exists. I blend suddenly with her white and his red. And the messiness of it all is warm and right. I am boundless in a world of boundaries and I have become a foaming tide.

I am a whisper. I am effervescent and transparent – no longer afraid of the vulnerability that renders. I rejoice in my newfound fragility. I am holding my breath within a ceramic cup - delicate and beautiful; next to a blue flame I go unfethered.

I bask in the coolness of pale yellow and warm my fingertips at the sharp edges of deep orange.
I am an organism floating on those lili-pads staring at my tiny reflection in a never-ending pond - floating beside peaceful droplets of dew - followed by my black, smudged shadow.

Thank you Monet for your light and honest renditions of our world around and within us.

The fog has arrived and it swims in my hair this late night in San Francisco. It is cool in the midst of warm air and lands on me like tiny beaded jewelry. I can see it rolling through the streets. It swishes, flops, spirals and disappears around corners and evaporates suddenly before me. It is female and temperamental in July and I am caught inbetween a moment linking all of my past and my invisible future.
I daydream out into the street - waiting for my ride. I stare through some dirty glass at the blinking lights and hear distant sounds of music and clinking glasses. I am in limbo. I am suspended inbetween gravity and space. I am inside silence herself. And just as I understand that I don't want for this moment to elude me - it does. It goes away and marries itself with other moments - linking time together.
And so I sigh, exit and jump into my ride.

Here I am. Sitting at 1am. I feel stll suspended and bundled up inside of a tight space. But for the moment, this tiny restricted space is saving me from myself and my tendancies. They to be like melted wax and want to become part of an endless ebb and flow with no destination and no beginning - just a primordial gooeyness that resents the rules of physics and form.

Which is how I've been living my life. And I pay for that.
I just want to be left alone. Can't I just be? Sometimes I do what I want. Most of the time I do what I have to. And I know that I'm not alone. Most of us live this way.

I used to tell people who were shy and afraid of public speaking to 'just imagine everyone watching you - naked.' Or, 'just imagine them all sitting on a toilet.' Isn't this where we overlap? If we were all naked - then vulnerability would lose its grip on us. And if most of us know that we are only doing what we 'have to', then why create such painstaking situations for ourselves?

At the risk of sounding a little 'After-School-Special', I almost feel the above question is rhetorical. Or maybe the little, innocent, naive, un-corrupted girl in me still holds an ember to her face. Look at me.
We don't live our lives through common sense.
We purposely take detours around it.

Being an adult sucks.
I'm just gonna watch the fog & play hop-scotch.
yay.

Today my good friend arrived from Austin. She is going to be here for 2 weeks. Her arriving is a most definite reminder that I am indeed leaving San Francisco and her presence is the symbol of a graceful overlap of my two lives: The SF life and Austin life. It is definitely a relief to have her here. She represents the safe and close familiar. It calms the vulnerability of a new beginning.

I had a restful day, though. I also purchased my ticket to go home --- a one way. July 27th I will be arriving in Austin. I don't mean to make such a huge deal about all the things I do in my life. I feel like most people don't walk around and behave and think like I do: as if they have a constant camera on them --- like they are always a star on some stage where the people of the world are always following them around. Yeah right! Like my life would be that interesting to them. It is so self-indulgent, I know. But, I don't mean to be that way. I just can't help but see the drama in every little and large event. I remember when I was 5 years old and it was the night before my first day at kindergarten, I was with my family at a park as the sun was setting. We had a bar-b-que and were cleaning up - getting ready to go home. I stood on top of a huge root that was protruding out the ground from an old, very large oak tree. And I'll never forget this. I remember staring at the setting sun, looked all around me at how it turned everything orange and gold, stared back into it, took a deep breath and thought, "Tomorrow. It all begins tomorrow."

Hence, 28 years later I find myself on the rooftop of my apartment building looking out at San Francisco and telling myself the same thing.
"Tomorrow. It all begins tomorrow." Even when I meet people I have to prepare my mind to consider their spirit and shadow. I feel all levels of them at once.

You see, I just don't live in a one-path kind of reality. I exist within the split fork in the road and I travel both at once. And I'm not crazy -- it just feels like I've always got 3-d glasses on.

And I can't help to see the action and reaction. I can't help but hear the point of sound and it's delay.
All this just to reiterate my tendency toward drama -- and I don't mean the ghetto kind. I mean the kind that appreciates the flower in it's slow bloom and the moon in its slow rising. Paying attention to subtlety and smiling at its humble ways.

Right now, I am paying attention to my toes at the end of this couch. And to the time as it tick-tocks closer to a moment that brings slow and subtle gravity to my eyes -----------

So, until tomorrow; which began yesterday.

I know - it's been too damn long since I've written. Not that I have an audience or anything. But, I am my own perpetual, internal, external and omnicient audience. And if someone else is out there - I am humbled that you have partaken in my ramblings on about the deeper things of life.
I am quite a clown, you know. I'm not all about the fall and winter, the blues and blacks, the ice and rain --- endings and sunsets.
I am about the orange in the day-glow, the red of the desert rain, the spring and summer, bright linen and the sun herself. I just find that when I dive deeper, like anything else that is the metaphor for surgery, I find tiny things in the dark that somewhere were perhaps, never meant to be found. And if you found them - the question is, then what??

I have always been a person who is all about the micro. My cynical nature is maybe the culprit behind it.
"Nah, you've gotta be lying to me," or "Aww, that's not all there is -- there's something lurking. There's always something lurking."

And my spirit, armed with a scalpel, has always searched beneath surfaces. I'm always curious about what things are made of.

My absence with bloggin is filled with both excuses and reasons. But, it is where they overlap that's interesting. Within that blend lies the minutia of life. The multi-dimensional messiness of the way things really are. Not resume perfect and finely starched. In my time away from this blog, I have lived a nano-second of a century - it seems. And so many important, life-changing decisions have been made.

It is now time for a new journey -- a journey that, like the outstretched Texas land, will never reach a horizon. I've decided to move to Austin and pursue my music, expression, the place I left behind, old friends, family, writing, quiet and healing. Most of all I am returning to my birthplace with an amazing and truly-earned sense of self. Wow am I grounded! And wow am I prepared - fearless - confident. Now, it's time to manifest these intangibles into some real world realities. Although i don't believe in the silliness of what our world deems to be "successful" and "the right thing to do", I do believe in self-actualization and the courage to put that into something that can bring some hope and smelling salt to a comatose society - as well as to our individual selves. Above all, let it be inspiring.

I will spend the next several weeks writing about my utter gratitude to San Francisco, my friends and experiences here. I will explore all of the micros related to that experience and once in a while will take you out on a hot-air balloon ride high above the Trans-America building, over Twin-Peaks, atop the cool foggy hills and towards Napa Valley.
I want to forever remember the sights from up here ----
But, I am ready - ready for the hot, territories of Texas; a mysterious place in which I didn't yet have the insight or maturity to explore. Those old grounds that stretch out to the edge of earth; forever teasing the eye to no end.

But before I arrive there I must say -
Thank you California. Thank you San Francisco --- for helping me gain the courage to go back home.

I am eternally thankful for your warm embrace in your endless cool autumn breeze ---------------

SONG: "Wunderkind" The Chronicles of Narnia SDTK - Alanis Morissette

Tonight, the city is really dark. Black with no trace of blue.

It's as if the lights turned up the contrast so that they can seem brighter.
The air is clean and clear and a collective anxiety has been squished, for now. Tonight, there's not just a lightness for the eyes, but a lightness for the chest. As if some dense mass was wrestled down by the hands of something mighty - held to the ground just above the cooling city pavement.

So, I sigh and bring some warm chai to my lips and wonder how long I have to breathe.

Today was good. I enjoyed the sun. Dressed for a job interview, I caught the #2, interviewed with a nutritionist for a part-time receptionist/assistant position. We loved each other instantly. She was filled with humor and candor and I found her to be refreshing. What a wonderful way to be a doctor.

"I have other interviews scheduled," she said. "But, I think I already like you."

I smiled and felt some relief. Relief that I was out in the sun and relieved to meet this woman whom, according to the piles of randomness on her desk and laid-back demeanor, I could tell was also a spacial being existing in a linear world.
I immediately felt at home.

"You're so accomplished", she said looking down at my resume. "Why do you want to do this?"

And then a perpetual moment began. You know, those moments when everything passes before you like a deck of cards. Because I knew the only reason I was there was because I've been searching for sanity. Some kind of routine in my routineless life. Something to get me out of bed. And I guess things like eating and paying rent are important, too.
But, accomplished? That word struck me because for so long, I've felt the opposite according to the world. And here was this "accomplished" woman extending a bravo to me.

"I'm transitioning and I'm an independent writer so I'm looking for something to supplement my income." That was the joker.
Nodding and understanding, she preceded on to the next point.

Afterward on my way home, I paid attention a little longer to people's faces on the bus. Where had they just come from? Where are they going? I tried not to stare and be rude. It's just that I feel like I'm seeing everything for the first time lately. Like I'm becoming privy to another dimension and all of my senses have been heightened.

And it's all utterly beautiful and utterly tragic at once. Like the current night cradling the lights, lately all of everything is showing me it's sharpest contrasts.

Slowly but surely, I'm learning not to get cut by them.

Tonight the city is really dark. Black with no trace of blue.
But the day --- ah the day. It was filled with rolling color falling all around and in and out of me ---
--- blending itself, and me, into this giant bliss of a breathing painting.

So, I think I'll undulate in this rainbow today. And I'll hope for more - for the perpetual tomorrow.



SONG: Brian Eno & Harold Budd, "Still Return" - Album: The Pearl

Today is hard.

I can't find a job and it's making me understand some things. I've hated this system for so long. It's broken and forever will be unable to sustain anyone who knows it.
I have purposely lived my life eccentrically -- creatively learning to earn a living.
I'm a writer.
I'm a musician.
I'm a strong communicator.
I'm a dancer.

I can look good on paper but even better in action. Yet, what I don't have is the ability nor the desire to put on the smile, nod my head, wear what they wear, say what they say -- nor do I have the desire to even try.
So, that leaves me here -- living in-between the cracks I've fallen through. Or, maybe I purposely dove into them trying to avoid becoming 'one of them'.
And it's lonely in this crevice. Once in a while someone else falls in - someone new. Then, I become a teacher. This is what becomes my job.

"How did you get here?" they ask. "Did you see that hole up ahead?"
I wonder about my answer. Because I didn't necessarily see the hole up ahead. But, subconsciously I may have wished for a detour - something - anything to take me away from this unnatural way of being.
"No", I say daydreaming into their eyes. "I slipped."

But, I've got to be honest. The truth is I've chosen to stay here. I hear the mainstream traffic above me pounding ahead. Like herds of animals, I can tell the time when they are rising to go west and when, at the end of the day, they herd together towards the setting sun.
Mumblings, lights, drips and odors sometimes make their way down here. And I love when the soft rain falls gracefully onto the pavement above me. It is slow to drip into this crack but when it does it brings glitter - making this old, deep dark earth sweat.

I swear at times I can sense someone spotting the hole but choosing to jump over it with their brand new heels, in the rain. But something in me can see their pause. Their eyebrows furrowing and eyes searching back within their sockets.
Instead, they move on with the traffic. Maybe they'll return someday with a flashlight.

"Do you know the way out?" asks the newly fallen.
We look at each other exchanging subliminal messages. Silence. No answer. Sighs.

Looking at them in the silence of the graceful rain, I quietly respond "It's just that today -- I don't know if I want to be found".

Today I am seeing my hands for the first time.

They are fine, aging, interesting, strong and vulnerable. I paid attention to their detail. The areas around my cuticles are chipped, split, pink and slightly opened. My thumbs are decorated with small pieces of dry skin.
I slather cream on them in hopes to moisturize away their deadness --- or maybe just hide it.

But, the fact remains --- I am biting them because of some invisible deadness in me. So, I search for something within that invisibility. I swim through the abstract nuance with hopes of finding something so utterly real that I will know it when I see it.

Here, I will share my innate human desire to find meaning to it all. Everything from finger-tips to the sea will be considered in this tiny, dusty space off the access road of this internet highway.

Maybe you feel this way -- it's just that there's got to be more - more than this silly system of bureaucracy that continues to haze all of us in this sorority/fraternity of a world. Jumping through hoops of fire loses it's fun after a while.

Today I'm seeing the sea for the first time.

It is ancient ... a collective consciousness that holds the secrets of our literal world. It is a grave and a source of life. Today, when looking out upon its perpetual rippling and tempered mood swings, I don't only see a place to bathe --- I see Mercy incarnate. For, if it wanted to, it would come up from its depths and devour us into its belly.

I hope you all will join me as I swirl upward - searching for what I feel is a better place waiting to be realized.

Always,
-WomanWhoSees