Change your environment to get things, uh, moving??

http://www.fastcompany.com/3014676/how-to-design-a-more-serendipitous-creative-life

Number 2, no pun intended, has been a consistent thought I've had here in Portland, as I frequent tea shops and in turn must frequent the restroom.  Many establishments will share a building in which the single stalled bathrooms are placed in the center of the structure and customers unite in the hallway to wait, an interesting place to strike up a conversation before slipping into privacy.  You never know what can happen while in line for the loo.  Serendipitous, creative endeavors could emerge?!  Ah, damn, this post has turned to shit.

Poetry post turns herb garden.

One bike adventure to The Rebuilding Center on Mississippi, one cutting of plexiglass, one afternoon of nail foraging(have you ever looked down to see how many screws are just lying around?), one evening carrying two, two-by-fours from Steve and Larry's house(two men I randomly asked for wood seven blocks from home, yes Steve and Larry, yes, I said wood), one bloody thumb, gorilla glue, building blocks, one tired arm o sawing, many un straight lines, one hot mess, one loss of vision and by vision I mean simplicity, and one week later I finished and aborted a poetry box all at once.

 

 I can build pretty much anything at this point...

  My visions were lofty, execution: poor.

  

 

Table saw and half a brain more next go round.

 

 But.. it evolved into this... poems, not to be contained, but plucked up with the pineapple sage or a sprig of mint or some free lemon thyme. I suppose the block I started with held a good idea all along.  And while I thought I might become Barb the Builder, I will not be assembling the next ark anytime soon... But I might like another go at it... Plumbean Book Exchange?!
>

Contornionist

"Those poor bonsai just want to grow," a coworker's grandmother said.  Just think of their limbs all twisted and contorted, manipulated and made to fit into one small pot, continually shaped to stunt growth.  Although, Japanese culture says "a tree left growing in it's natural state is a crude thing".

bonsai-
contorted roots,
your branches sag.

bonsai-
clipped wings,
twisted trunk.

bonsai-
thirsty
for the clouds.

Only one thing left...

This is the oddest place to spend a summer. First off, because, yes, Portland is odd, but mostly because there is no real semblance of summer, of consistent sun, of shorts and short sleeves, of people bustling about in a patterned fashion. Just a random assortment of heated days in this rain stricken city, residents peeking their heads out for a cup of coffee or slowly making their wet commutes to work. Meanwhile, what can you do while waiting for the annual 6 weeks of "solid sunshine" that supposedly ensues after July 4th, clad with movies in the park, BBQs, horseshoe pits, hammocks and PBR or mason jars full of sun tea... yes, indeed, masturbate.

Seeds

 

My sister in law eats sunflower seeds to feel like she's back home. She talks to her parents in a foreign tongue, in high pitched tones and her voice chirps most nights via Skype, while I'm trying to sleep before opening shifts at a coffee shop I work these days. I feel my blood boiling when I can't comprehend why she has a particular place for everything, why I don't seem to clean a dish quite well enough, why my brother ever wanted to get married in the first place, why the word grateful doesn't always reverberate in my mind. I watch them come home from their weekend errands to Ikea or Whole Foods or an Asian market and I watch the filling of their house with a delivery from Amazon daily, a new TV, curtain rods, a rice cooker, a sweater for their cat.  And I watch her cook, what seems to be the same three ingredients every night: meat, something green, and gallons of oil and I watch my brother do the pile of dishes afterward, and her scuttle around in her inside shoes as I stare at my bare feet, too stubborn to respect her tradition of covering them and I don't understand what I feel is pulling at my own heels, telling me to let my toes roam free. I simply step back outside to settle somewhere else for the evening. And I think about this making of a home and how I've watched it before and it's not about the TV or the start of a garden growing out back or the food in the fridge or the meal itself but what's created by simply doing these things.  The TV will break, the garden will freeze, and the meal will be gone, the dishes done. Upon returning and watching her crack those shells I feel something, stopped in my tracks as I remove my shoes at the door, and ask, "Do you feel like you're in China today?" and she nods. I ask if she'd like to try a blood orange I picked up at the corner fruit stand and she does and I watch her peel it quickly.  I don't know what it means to feel closer. Perhaps this is it, the closest I can come for now, seeing her with her cats and that orange and a pile of seed shells by her side, home settling somewhere in her belly.

Homage to the unknown??

I found myself walking through a cemetery this evening, faintly reminiscent of a time my Dad and I visited one some summer night when I was 12. I don't recall why we were there, perhaps to pay homage to someone or just to roam.  I do remember the eerie comfort of being in a place that recognized and somehow magnified that death was real or so it seemed as I stared at plot after plot.  I thought about death then as this realm that floated around us, almost tangible, like a constant tango.  I recall standing over my parent's bed staring them awake many nights as a child hoping they could assuage my angst about that moment when life ceases. They could not.  So, many nights I'd let it linger in the air after vivid dreams of a burning earth or dark alleyways in which Death itself or some "thing" seemed to accompany me. These days are no different.  I still dream of death and it still lingers in my waking life.  But it seems to hit harder when I'm going slow, in the polarity, in the juxtapositions. The tiger lily resting on an old wooden fence, the pruned up cheek of my elderly neighbor pressed against her 2 year old grandson's, the ripples from Geese skidding atop the Willamette, the first sight of the Pacific after many months away, the liftoff of a 747,  a smile from a homeless man who doesn't ask for a thing.  I see death in a stack of books yet to be read, I see it in light.  I see it in the planning of a camping trip to the coast.  I see death in all the things I won't be able to do.  I see it in the excitement of possibilities,  in all the places I will never visit and all the places I already have, in the two places I cannot be at once.  I see it in the sunset a friend sends me.  I see it in all the people I could love, if I'd let myself, and all the people I have.  I see it in the humor of the world. I see it when I send snail mail. I see it swaying in an empty hammock.  I see it in my chai tea steeping in a Christmas mug at a café on SE 23rd.  I see it sometimes in a single word. I see it in a good one liner. Simply, it hits me when I'm exited about life.  And maybe this is when death isn't so eerie, it just is, coming closer and closer.  I wanted to snap a photo of the sun falling on the headstone reading the last name "Failing" but couldn't muster up sharing the irony via snapshots. So I walked on, past Florence, Wade, English, Deardorrf, Harlow and many others, some with flags in recognition of the holiday, one I've never found myself celebrating, either with fancy Americanized weekend trips or acknowledging anyone who served, sadly, but true.  Instead I wandered the headstones imagining friend's parents  and my own relatives who have passed, what they were like, what kind of jokes they would tell, whether they put cream or sugar in their coffee, if they drank coffee at all, if they had healthy sex lives, if they worried about money or the state of the world or what the reason for living was all about, what my great grandfather's quirks were, if he made similar silly faces, if we would have been close or even liked each other's company. I didn't kneel down and speak out loud above decaying bones or ashes, I didn't know anyone in that cemetery on Holgate.  I only knew that the sun was going down slowly behind gathering clouds and there was a crow near an old oak, picking at haphazardly tossed leftovers and an abandoned house next door, an orange and green coffee mug resting on stacked furniture, a hole in the window screen, and an Oregonian mailbox in tact, waiting, for the news.

.......

jetsam-
an apple core
thrown overboard.
I miss you,
since you've gone.


lagan-
a starfish
blown ashore,
tethered to
the Milky Way.


flotsam-
debris-filled wake
of wanderlust.
Where do we go
when we die?

...

even the rain
has its secrets,
puddles collect in the sidewalk cracks,
droplets cling to the windowpanes,
azures bloom out back




seeking clarity
the Buddha wraps his worry
in the noose's neck

Writing Haiku

Flowers on the side table,
rosewater tea,
an empty vase.

The tongue of a fly
on the surface of the sea-
kismet.

yellow petal
on a black bike lock-
bumblebee.

Lily whispers blooming ah hah

By the waterfront
a man searches for a vein,
the geese leave ripples across the Willamette.

Japanese maples
bloom all over the city
I unfurl inside.

The shadow still
inside a composition book-
a light nap.

The snail slinks along

The rain falls heavier

On his house.

                    This isn't a revelation.

This place isn't just this:

The best brunch spot on a Sunday, where to get your downward dog on and become utterly enlightened, the myriad of coffeehouses to lose yourself in, how organically "unique" the next recipe can be or how much money one can throw at a person's sign on Burnside in hopes of bridging the gap between poverty and perseverance of the 9 to 5. That hostile sentence stops me in my tracks. My destination is some place on Hawthorne I frequent for tea because I too am a consumer. I do not throw pennies but smiles in the direction of strangers in hopes someone might hear me thinking "I understand", to feel as though we have shared the same definition of connection, full of remorse at my fortune, at my own dealt hand, my own dominoed decisions. In the same breathe I don't carry the burden of 10,000 things or the world on my shoulders. I'm one being. I desire to snap photos of these moments that feel substantially bleak and real at once, to tell myself this is why I'm living, of the man on his bike with bungee cords around his house, or the young girl nodding off in weekly group, the sun slanting in a little too sharply, the murmurings of an elderly woman in an alleyway, the buildings lined with flowering vines, but theres no way to capture that, so I slip inside a coffeeshop to consume, plan, contradict, scheme for happiness, ask for more hot water.

Portland, while you are the City of Roses and rain and eclectic upbringings, and flourishing creativity, you are also this, caught not in still frame but hindsight:

Sharing dark chocolate outside of New Seasons with Elsa who says she's 20 and looking for a place to stay, and you share simply because it's your favorite and it might be hers too but maybe she doesn't know it and her sign and eyes and bruised face says she's homeless but maybe she's not really and you don't ask her life story, just where she's from, a question that leaves you yourself unsettled, and you're both sitting there cross-legged on the pavement watching the people come and go with their grocery bags full of food and hopping on their bikes with their babies and big grins, and the wind stands still somehow, and she says "Portland", and it all becomes too much to be uncomfortable and not know what to say, like you're somehow better than someone who threw money into her jar and so you leave and feel sickened and saddened all over again and get on the 14 back home.

The woman who says she just got her teeth fixed and she's sending her picture to a friend because it's been over 20 years since she's had teeth and she's telling you because she's nervous and spilling her life story and that she'll try to wait to get home to cry, and you simply say "do it when you gotta do it" and she tells you that's the nicest thing and you wonder and know the answer at once at how many people are holding that hurt in.

A homeless man

The sea

Inside his eyes.

To take a picture would be too consumeresque.

Even writing these words feels too cheaply easy.

Somebody said recently, "Don't forget to hug yo mama once in a while".

http://www.npr.org/2013/05/11/182898557/mini-memoirs-6-word-stories-to-honor-mom

I stumbled upon this article the other day and wondered what I too might say.

I tried to come up with six words, something catchy, humorous, a gut-wrenchingly memorable moment that forever changed who I am in relation to you or vice versa or both. "You're  my Mom, I love you". No, too cliche. "Short, photographer, goofy, serious, helpful." Too vague and void of meaning. So here I sit..... blank space.... NOT because those moments don't exist, but because they constantly are, WE are ever changing and because those moments exist as the mundane, not the grandiose. Six words wouldn't be enough, and still too many. I love who you are in any form standing next to me. Raw, exposed, vulnerable, be that always. Perhaps, those are my six words: 

Raw: I ate sushi with you at the age of 15 for the first time, slurped down sea urchin, and while I can't recall the taste, you instilled fresh perspective, the California coastline, how to paddle a kayak across a landscape, renewal.
Exposed: there's this photo of you when you were in your early teens, posing with a tether ball, twiggy arms, pigtails, sinewy legs, innocent grin. I wonder what it would be to know you then, in the sepia tones of your youth.
Vulnerable: what I think it might mean to become a parent, an open vessel for the skinned knees, the tears and trials, the laughter, the stillness when they've flown the coop, the calamity when they come crashing back in, speaking in tongues, to fill up and either sink or learn to interpret the feeling of floating. 
Be: cause breathing is enough, and maybe it's what you drummed on your belly right before birth began, and you're still tapping into the California wind sent my way, playing patty cake with my hands on the other side, "just be, just be".
That: do you feel what words cannot name? 
Always: loving you. 

Happy Mama Day 
Love, your Boobutt

Belmont District

I walk. It's sunny and 65 out. I walk SE Belmont after a run up 60th. I walk to Laurelhurst Park via 37th, it's 10:30ish a.m. and I tell myself I'll lay in the grass staring up at the sky until my legs get itchy but they never do so I eventually get up and sit on a bench and listen to a man playing the violin across the pond and I can't get it out of my head that all things Italian seem to be sprouting up and I'm wondering if it's some kind of sign and then remind myself that everything I see somehow becomes a jigsawed sign I weave together piecemeal and so I continue staring at the pond and it starts to sprinkle and then stops and the sun stops shying away and stays out for a while, for the rest of the day and I go back down 37th and stop in at Sound Grounds and order honey tea and smile at the girl behind the counter who is not smiling back and I smile again at her tenacity and individual conviction to not smile still when I stop back by some five hours later for more hot water and so I add more honey to my cup and wander down Belmont somemore to 20th, to Yamhill, to Colonel Summers Park, past a community garden, past a dilapitated Buddhist Temple, past three men cleaning up their mother's burnt down trailer, past balconied apartments, past the interwined layers of modern architecture merged with houses from the 1800's and the Japanese Maples and past Anansi Beat, an african drum store that I will stop into an hour later, where the first question will be, "what is your name?" and I will sit down with the owner and talk for two hours as I watch him tighten the ropes on a Djembe and skin the hair from the top of the drum, and see random youtube clips streaming from the computer in the background and realize the culmination of then and now and yesterday and tomorrow, like a messy braid we secure at the end, and I'll listen about Ghana and then I'll decide to walk the long way back to my brother's house, because returning there isn't quite like returning home and I walk up and through Mount Tabor where I'll want to capture the 360 degree view of layered mountains and downtown and Mt Hood out there tiptoing in the clouds but my phone will have died a few hours before and I'll know it's because you can't possibly take a picture like an x-ray and capture what sinks into your bones and so I cried instead and smiled and walked the descent of a dirt trail down to 67thish and asked a stranger for a pen and sat on the sidewalk as I transcribed some version of my inner layers out onto the canvas of my arms, wrapping the words around my thumb, and up next to the shoulder of a tattoed female on my forearm and I got up and knew I wasn't smiling because I had somehow learned to praise every physicality of myself, every bone or scratch or freckle or scar or stretch of skin, or every undulated emotion pouring forth or accepted every time I didn't stop myself when I spoke or everytime I did and regretted it and I walked on down 67th to Powell and to sort of steal from Emerson as good art is mostly stolen smartly, my emotions centipeding along the sidewalk, my sympathies somewhere else or everywhere at once, I smiled at the unfurling and hurling of myself at myself and it is hard hitting and I keep walking down 67th and it's somewhere around 5 p.m. and I'm falling in love all over the city.

A week in pictures.

With a little hiccup in my journey this week, a detour of sorts, I have found myself exploring Portland for a bit, job hunting and selling my car, learning the ins and outs of Portland via bike, bus and foot, seeing the city from a new perspective. I have been writing things down in piecemeal, haphazardly, so here are some photos from the last week, some of which speak for themselves, reminding me of friends and the interesting things I am finding along the way. Keep Portland weird.

A picture for Preston... a little Cowboy counterpart I drove past before getting into Portland.

Mt. Tabor sunrise.

Sunset walks.

Portland's recycling extravaganza.

Tea at Pieper Cafe on Foster. 80's music always playing.

Trust the process.

Sunset on my drive from Logan to Portland.

Siblings.

A book I first came across at a b&b in Mt. Shasta when I was ten or so, came across it at Powell's.

Food Pods.

Vietnamese bakery. Banh mi.

Bike Portland.

Powell's on Hawthorne.

Thai food cart.

Toto in downtown.

Sunset on a walk by my brother's place.

Tom Yum Soup.

Cozy cafe on Division and 60th: mason jar water cups, mismatched furniture, Thursday night readings, darling gals slinging coffee.

Coffee at Powell's downtown, which takes up two blocks of Burnside... books, books, books.

Food pods all over Portland.

Cathedral Bridge.

Eva's cookin'... traditional Chinese food.

Cheese and crack! A little alley stand tucked along shops on Hawthorne.

"A self-observation-operation".

How can we know what freedom feels like unless we've been unshackled from our own devices?

Brother and Eva at the Cathedral Bridge along the Colombia River.

Lebanese food! Yum!

Stimulation Ova-Ova-ovaload.

Got Multnomah County library card, found humor in the man allowing me one if I didn't mind signing my life away, learning the Trimet, getting lost on bike on the backstreets behind Hawthorne, nausea, ass wet without fenders, (who doesn't have fenders in Portland?, this girl), learning Portland's recycling system, composting, sleeping 9 hours straight to wake exhausted, drinking more water, herbal tea, Eva's humor, the thought of a spider going for a stroll,(why wouldn't spiders go for walks as well?), blindsided humility. Eclectic coffee shop on SE Division. Rain or Shine.

Stimulation Overload

Powell books on Hawthorne, a drive through Old Town, on up to northwest heights, Forest Park, moss covered trees, or as Eva calls it, "green body hair", on around skyline peering in at million dollar homes tucked into the side of the mountain, Mt. Hood at eye level, Carts on Foster, food pods, freedom, Cathedral park on the Colombia river, finding "the beach" among the industrialization and beer cans waiting to be plucked up for recycling, the affirmation of cliche that Portland is, not knowing if I just saw the same girl twice, looking slightly similar to that very cliche, Men at Work playing again in the Oriental market, Lebanese dinner, Cheese and Crack, crack box, art, half a heart in Utah, caffeine crashing, learning to love me.

Portlandia

11 hours, 715 miles, 3 tanks of gas, 90 something dollars, 80 on the 84, watching the sunset with Buddha on the dashboard as Bob FM plays Pat Benetar and Men at Work and Huey Lewis and the News, a PBR sighting on Montello Ave, and two states later I find myself in Portland, Oregon, where the streets are appropriately far from "neat", and just how everyone likes it. Most of the drive yesterday was spent thinking how all things are inevitably connected. I pondered where I am now in relation to the people in my life, how I would not have been in Utah had so many other events not occurred. I would not have arrived in Portland today, most likely putting it off another couple weeks, had I not gone out into the white nothingness of Benson Marina with Preston back in Utah, and saw a bird thriving, flying, having survived winter, and then moments later witnessed the contrast of black feathers and blood on snow from another who was not so fortunate. Why I decided that day to leave sooner I'm not quite certain other than it was just time, but I found myself waking at 7 this morning for a sunrise run, weaving through the quirky neighborhoods of SE Portland and meandering Mt. Tabor Park with my brother to see an exquisite view of Mt. Hood, eating Banh Mi for lunch from a place off Foster and 54th, and riding my bike down to Fred Meyer's to buy razors, because as I still won't be wearing a bra, I do choose to keep grooming... Pictures to come when I get a better hang of this blogging shtuff, or ever just get organized.

"My house is me and I am it."

My favorite book growing up was a little gem called The Big Orange Splot. Mr. Plumbean lives on a "neat street", where all the houses are the same, until one day a mysterious bird drops a can of orange paint, A BIG ORANGE SPLOT, on his house. From that moment on Plumbean is inspired to defy conventional thought, embracing and welcoming this opportunity for change and the discovery to be, well, just himself. He paints his house every color you can imagine, sets up a hammock in his front lawn and adopts an alligator. His neighbors soon find themselves exploring and implementing their own expressions of who they are. It's a children's book, but as often as they are, it is about so much more: individuality, creativity, acceptance, exploration, sharing, listening, enjoying. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cPfjzYJcok

"I have nothing to sell, I have a lot to share."

3 weeks. Or tomorrow. Or a week. Or right now. Three hours. Or 45 minutes. I can leave at a moment's notice. Just as my car can move in one direction, I can always navigate it back to the places I have been. I can come and go as I please, and though things might be different when I do, that freedom is enough to feel good about change and motion. So, on the note of change and motion and returning to places both mentally, physically, viscerally, I'm composing an on-going list of the things in my past I have appreciation for:
Growing up with a best friend, Blaire who allowed me to learn how goodit is to share in the face of change, who when I see now after a month or a year or two I am just as connected as ever with her. Worry goes out the window in her presence.
Two parents with all their faults and folly and glory and love and acceptance and humaneness who to this day want me to be utterly happy and healthy and thriving and alive.

“You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.”

"Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.”

I lie to people all the time.  When someone asks "Why did you leave Hawaii for Logan?", my automatic response, a blatant lie really, is "It was expensive, I wanted to finish school."  While, yes,  I did want to finish school the truth is I very well could have at the University of Manoa; I could have claimed residency the month we left.  But in reality it wasn't that expensive for me, Mike was paying rent and I was working full-time, paying whatever miniscule bills I had to pay-phone, credit card, utilities, food, not even gas because I owned only a bike while there.  I really had it quite easy, I wasn't struggling to stay afloat.  We went out to eat, we drove to the North Shore on days off and went out for lunch at Big City Diner or drinks in town(Honolulu) at a little place called Coconut Willy's that has since gone out of business.  The truth is, perhaps, I was just unhappy, with myself, my job, a relationship that has since become an occasional swap of texts, a friendship I know still exists amidst the distance and across landscapes, but one that almost feels the same even when we slept in the same bed, and there is no longing for that, no longing for the person I was then.  Sure, I was tan, fifteen pounds lighter, living in the middle of the Pacific, but there was something I hadn't yet grasped, some concept of acceptance or contentedness or gratitude or maybe there wasn't something I had yet let go of, like the desire for more or change, and maybe I still haven't. I tell people this, without thought, because it seems easier, it seems like the kind of response or reason any sane person would leave something so seemingly "good", so aparently "put together", but sometimes we leave the facade of perfection to others simply for the sake of what feels right inside.

"'Is this normal?' 'For here it is.' I cannot imagine a better question, or a better answer, to explain why I am here. To explain why any of us travel. To explain our hopes as well as our desperation." -Gravity-

What is this all for?  This is the ongoing question.  Preston and I pondered this last night over a beer at the Hive and I believe the only conclusion we came to (well, I’ll speak for myself) is that we will never know what the hell this is all for.  Why do we wake in the morning, why  does it matter if we choose pancakes over omelets or to sit in a coffee shop all day or go to work for 8 hours, or does it even matter at all?  So, what keeps us going?  Is it the prospect of an enjoyable conversation with a close friend later that day? Is it the sunrise we might witness upon waking?  Is it the giggle of a little girl playing in the snow?  Is it the light that makes patterns on the down comforter midmorning, the taste of dark chocolate or beer, the feel of sand and seafoam, or good sex? Is it possibility itself that propels us forward?  Is it mystery?  Is it the unknown?  Is it just to feel ourselves smile? How minute do we feel when we look up and around?  How amazing is that thought in itself?  What if we just did what made us happy, right now, without a reason?  What if we could just relinquish our obsession with the word, why?  What if we learned to live comfortably in the undefinable?  And in the course of twenty-four hours, there are also the moments of undefinable desperation... like the moments you watch a friend of a friend crying in front of you over her son who is killing himself, been slowing severing his ties with life for the past seven years of addiction, and you hug her, not knowing what to say, not knowing anything else about her, and knowing there really is nothing to be said and she quietly fills the silence with "He's going to die.  He doesn't want to live," and she has stopped crying and you feel the pulsing in her body even after you've let go, and you feel the acceptance in her words but mostly the resistance and the reluctance and the desperation and the false sense of security in the smile she tries to wear.  And then she tells you she sits in her closet in the evenings to purge tears after finding him hudled in the snow close to hypothermia around the holidays, not knowing how to help even herself, or her husband who can only handle ten minutes of conversation about him at a time and you can feel mostly all that you can't feel or know and never will, and you step back and look at her and think how can we not ask why in these moments?  How do we attempt to explain what that is all for?

"Here, looking up at a mountain I've never seen before this morning, my sense of where I am holds nothing more than rock, than water, than birds and trees and bush. Here, apart from the insistence of others, I am able to catch a breath of the Other. There is no past in this place today, and no future. Just a tremendous present-filling eternity. It's enough to fill the soul." Gravity:The Allure of Distance

I like getting burrs in my hair.  I like digging the blades of my snowshoes in powder, then sliding down a hill on my ass.  I like watching a Schnauzer snowbunny in front of me, and Jeremy plowing his way through the trees, swinging from branch to branch to keep from tumbling down the side of a hill.  I like stopping to look down at the houses off Sumac, to feel taller than I did just a moment ago.  I like going uphill, knowing there will be a descent.  I like not thinking about tomorrow.