Free Art Series:

The idea: create an art series to be left in public places for the first person who wants it to take it home. A collaboration with the fabulous Tim Legros.

Two drops were made today. The first, Free Art Series: Occupy. Really, I think this one speaks for itself.

The location: Harvard Yard.

The second, Free Art Series: Ocean. Because I find nothing more moving than the biological and spiritual connection to it.

The location: The Boat House at the intersection of JFK and Memorial.

Be well. And if the mood so strikes you, go find some free art.

There have been…

There have been times when I have been lucky enough to capture things I find beautiful in the world. Sometimes I do this with words, sometimes I do it by digital means, and sometimes I do it by film. Though feisty and a fickle mistress, the images I’ve taken with my Holga are now, and have always been, some of my favorite of these moments.

 

 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 
:end

And then, here (again).

Someone has recently decided that it’s possible people might want to know a bit about who I am and what I’ve done. He has the potential to be right, so this blog has gotten a bit of an overhaul. I’m not entirely sure this means I will start to use it more often, as I’ve always intended to do, but I have recently come to a new city and started what is, in many ways, a new life, so this is a possibility.

It’s been almost exactly two years since I started this blog, and over a year since I’ve updated it. But the world is changing. Life is changing. And perhaps this could be changing, too.

I hope that you’re all well, whoever you are.

Moving On

The gatekeeper’s concrete stare stops you in your tracks, his offering tray extended in his stony paw-hands. It’s difficult to determine what you need to give him to move forward, so you offer everything. You give all of yourself as sacrifice, hoping that he will cleanse you and let you move into the next chapter of your life. Satisfied, he lets you pass, but pricks a small black dot into the skin under your right wrist; a certain reminder of where you have been, a reminder for you to not forget.

Stuck. Sometimes, you end up stuck. Sometimes, these moments carved in stone hold you in your tracks. You look at your wrist, your eyes mesmerized by the small, significant spot, and your feet will not move, will not life, will not step forward. Full of melancholy, sometimes the path seems so difficult to navigate, sometimes the past so difficult to escape, to admit the genuine ending of particular situations, the genuine disappearance of particular people or relationships.

But the world, really, is full of magic. Not in the card trick disappearing act sense, but in the everyday. Surrounded by beauty, sometimes all it takes is a moment. In that moment you wake up, and look around, and step forward. In that moment, everything changes.

The ocean holds the most of it, of the magic. The ocean doesn’t signify home. It is home. The waves swallowing the shore, the way the salt makes your skin feel sticky when you’ve left it behind. Next to the ocean, in the ocean, your pulse slows and your brain quiets and you are completely and utterly at peace.

With each beginning must come an ending. Marked by something either beautiful or terrible or so mundane you don’t even notice, every situation changes us. Every sunset marks the end of who we are, and every sunrise marks the beginning of the existence of someone new.

I think, maybe, I’m starting to grow up. I can see it in my face. I don’t feel like I look like as young as I used to. It’s not a bad thing. Perhaps the physical transition marks a mental transition, too. Maybe the ocean has baptized me clean. Maybe I’m finally moving through the gate and letting the past pass. Either way, I know that, deep in the pit of my stomach, in my gut—that most honest emotional place—I’m happy. Even on bad days, in my gut, I know that it’s there.

Oh, and friends:

on grieving

Sometimes the missing sneaks up like it’s a physical entity, jumping from behind a tree when walking down an overgrown path late at night; you don’t know it’s there until it has hit you, and once it has hit you it’s too late to escape it.

They say that grief is a process. The word process implies motion, implies growth, implies a beginning and an ending. I’m not really sure that’s correct. Rather, it feels stagnant, like a pool of puddled rain water that hasn’t had the chance to either evaporate or absorb into the ground. It’s hot out, hot and humid, and the water in the puddle just warms until it almost slimes, a thin film that lines your foot if you accidentally step in it. It’s like living in that stubborn puddle that refuses to dissipate.

I guess that on some levels some would probably say it means I haven’t gotten over my father’s death. This is probably true. But is that something you really ever get over? My guess is no, that it’s something people say in order to try and help others as they work through their grief. But what choice do they have, really? Those on the outside don’t understand, though they try, and they don’t know what to say so we all fall to cliché at some point or another. There’s no fault in that, really.

I do find fault, though, in the fact that we don’t talk about him. We never did, and by now it’s been so long that we don’t know how (and by we I mean my family). It’s been so long that I don’t know how, even when I’d really like to. There is the battle with memory, forgetting and remembering and potentially reconstructing. There is learning to deal with those moments when they sneak up on you. There is learning how to interact with others when you’d rather recoil but know that’s the wrong course of action; there is learning how to interact with yourself. So much learning and adjusting and forgetting and then learning again.

This is a process of which I grow weary.

Well then.

Well, then. I’ve most certainly been quite neglectful here, and obviously didn’t continue with my intended path of, y’know, posting regularly. So…I’m considering this a fresh start. I graduate in 11 days and then my time will be considerably more free, minus the time spent job searching in a lousy market and working on some writing.

New life goal: By May 2011, I would like to have completed a book of essays. I think it’s doable. Maybe, also, I’d like to have some sort of an idea what I’d like to do with my life. Honestly, the book seems like a more likely goal.

I’ve been contemplating starting the 365 project, but my camera is kindof lousy and I wonder if I would have the motivation to continue the project. And if I didn’t have the motivation, I wonder if I would be too hard on myself for not continuing. Tough to say. I’ll probably think about it for the next week and then move forward one way or another.

Book recommendation: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine. Perhaps I’ll get into why at a future date.

For now, hopefully this marks the start of my (potentially triumphant) return to blog-land.

: on being told I’m beta

Someone close to me recently told me that I have a beta personality. When I went to find the exact definition of a beta personality, I realized he wasn’t quite right. What he really meant was that I am easily pushed around, easily walked all over. What he really meant was that I avoid situations rather than stand my ground; that those with large egos or aggressive personalities can affect me significantly more than they ought to be able to.

I hate to admit it, but he’s right.

A lot of people in my life would call bullshit on that statement, would say that I am opinionated and loud and not afraid to stand up for what I believe in. They’re right, too, but they’re right in different ways. If I perceive some sort of social injustice in the world, I speak up. I speak my mind, and I speak loudly. I was raised by hippies and am a protest kid at heart, so it comes naturally. If I see a friend being wronged, or sometimes even a stranger being wronged, I feel the need to do whatever I can to better the situation. Socially opinionated, yes. Defensive of my loved ones, yes. But somehow that same dominance does not cross over into personal situations. Instead, I recoil. I avoid. I hide.

There are few places in my life that I’ve noticed this more than I’ve noticed it in academia and the poetry world. Both of these are such political arenas that they’re often difficult to navigate. The small pieces I have seen are filled with ego and social hierarchies which I refuse to be a part of. (Is it really too much to ask for work to be judged by its own merits rather than by the name attached to it? Is it really so difficult to be respectful of one another, to avoid the social cliques that happen among high schoolers who so desperately want to fit in somewhere, anywhere at all?) Along with this refusal, though, comes the role of outcast. I’m going on my second year of filling the role, though it’s worse than it was the first year and affects me about equally.

I was told that if I faced these situations head-on I would find myself in them less often; that if I would stop letting people push me around they’d stop doing it. The thing is, though, that even the quiet ones have their breaking points, and once we reach them we start to fight back. It just so happens that things, sadly, usually have to get ugly to get to that point. And sometimes, they do. But even then, mostly, all of it seems to matter so little that I question the point of fighting back, the point of being a part of a toxic system that feeds off of itself and those who choose to be a part of it. Life, after all, is all about choices and priorities, right? It is what we make of it. What are yours?

: thankful

As tomorrow looms, I’m reminded of what we’re all reminded of this time of year; what we have to be thankful for. Even in the darkest of times small beacons of hope flicker like the flames in old lighthouses, before they started being run by electricity.

 

• My family. Although they may be far away (those with the most continual unfluence in my life all situated on the East coast), I realize that I’m lucky for the people who choose to unconditionally love me. And yes, sometimes it really is a choice.

“Happy Thanksgiving — Ben is asking after you — when is Bree coming to Boston?  Is Bree coming for X-Mas???”

• The locations that have shaped me. Visiting Spain. Living in Thailand. Moving from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts to Idaho. Feeling the difference between the East and the (Mid-ish)West. [geographical and self exploration.]

  

  

  

• The people who have shaped me, and there have been so many. Some have been permanent placeholders in my life; others have come and gone in months or even weeks. Some I made mistakes with; some correct decisions. Some I miss, and will probably always miss, and others barely cross my mind. Just the same, they’ve all become a part of me in some way or another.

  
  
  
  
  

• The written word. Of course, always. Sometimes people ask me to try and explain why I write and I never really can. I think that unless you’ve felt that pull toward something, that existence in your gut that drives you, it’s impossible to explain. But when it’s there, when you’ve discovered it, you can’t escape it, and you wouldn’t want to.
• The ocean, always, for my inexplicable connection to it. It’s another connection that I never expect to rid myself of.

  

: beginning

Beginnings are interesting things; looming on the horizon as unknown beings. We could encounter some of them. We could encounter none of them. We could encounter one of them that could negate the possibility of all others. At the end of the day, though, everything is about building, about connection, about scaffolding.

 

The Poem that Can’t Be Written
by Lawrence Raab

is different from the poem
that is not written, or the many

that are never finished—those boats
lost in the fog, adrift

 

in the windless latitudes,
the charts useless, the water gone.

 

In the poem that cannot
be written there is no danger,

 

no ponderous cargo of meaning,
no meaning at all. And this

 

is its splendor, this is how
it becomes an emblem,

 

not of failure or loss,
but of the impossible.

 

So the wind rises. The tattered sails
billow, and the air grows sweeter.

 

A green island appears.
Everyone is saved.

 

companionship/love/everything