I moved.

I moved! 


Find me here.   

This is love!

 

live in us

 

THAT LIVES IN US
- Rumi

If you put your hands on this oar with me,
they will never harm another, and they will come to find
they hold everything you want.

If you put your hands on this oar with me, they would no longer
lift anything to your
mouth that might wound your precious land-
that sacred earth that is
your body.

If you put your soul against this oar with me,
the power that made the universe will enter your sinew
from a source not outside your limbs, but from a holy realm
that lives in us.

Exuberant is existence, time a husk.
When the moment cracks open, ecstasy leaps out and devours space;
love goes mad with the blessings, like my words give.

Why lay yourself on the torturer’s rack of the past and future?
The mind that tries to shape tomorrow beyond its capacities
will find no rest.

Be kind to yourself, dear- to our innocent follies.
Forget any sounds or touch you knew that did not help you dance.
You will come to see that all evolves us.

If you put your heart against the earth with me, in serving
every creature, our Beloved will enter you from our sacred realm
and we will be, we will be
so happy..

[photo taken by me in Siem Reap, Cambodia]

missing.

I spend so much of my life missing - someone, some place, some time, some idyllic impossible because I try so hard to see the best in people, gather the best in life, and remember the most wonderful moments.

Sometimes I feel like I miss what hasn't even happened yet, ah! it's just this constant longing for something more. If I get this inkling that something's working out and could be better I can't wait. Seeing the best in people->seeing potential->pushing for that future possibility instead of living with faith for just today.

This is one of my favorite quotes. I keep it pinned in front of my desk written on some pretty Florentine stationery from Claire:

"Now we should live when the pulse of life is strong. Life is a tenuous thing...fragile, fleeting. Don't wait for tomorrow. Be here now! Be here now! Be here now!"

 

this was a be here now moment. even if it was there. in frankfurt.

Surprise summer hail storm

 

 

 

 

Brussels, Belgium

 

 

 

 

resilient hope

emotions:
hate. hate. hate. hate. hate.

I guess this is normal- leaving to study abroad in less than a week but i feel so separated from all my friends who've been back at school w/out me for two weeks. Suddenly this whole "extra time off" thing isn't so glorious. So it's natural to feel a bit left out, even if I'm the one doing the leaving.

Ah! True of life. Just talked to my ex, who isn't coping with coming back home and being "just friends" so well. That's exactly it! Revealing any depth of self or personality is...vulnerable. Vulnerability f*ing hurts, because it doesn't last. Leaving is a necessary part of life, strength is just learning to open up to people even when you know it will hurt to leave. [but is leaving really all that necessary? resisting leaving is a pretty dominant theme of my life]

So I'm striving to develop resilient hope, a hope in that true vulnerable humanity in all of us that consists of accumulated human experience and culminates in the moment--each waking moment one is aware of life and chooses to see what they want in their world. I'll choose hope in being real, fully present, and committed to seeing the best [or the potential] in the world and the people I encounter.

If every experience in my life thus far portrays me as a nomad, this is woven into my personality. I crave the ideal and the new, I choose a life of travel and exploration of people--getting to know them, what drives them, what forms their paradigm. I'll admit, I'm terrible at maintaining friendships, but I at least hope to be a positive encounter to everyone I've known and loved.

This is a bit cheesy, even a bit contrived, but it gives me purpose and focus, that's enough for now.

focus!

I've visited this blog every now and again, posting about whatever happens to be on my mind, but in the true spirit of 2010 and ridiculous resolutions, here are some topics I'm passionate about, read about fairly often, and ought to post about soon:

Writing - especially poetry and lyrics
God's plans and purposes on earth
Backpacking Europe
Russian language and culture
Design
Architecture
Healthy eating and living
Indie-folk music
String instruments

melt.

Jenny Lewis is so subtle but cuts deep into the root of things and illuminates little places I like to hide away in. For this, I love her raspy sweet voice. Her songs with Rilo Kiley are catchy and amazing (ahem Silver Lining), but solo work suits her fully exposed brutally crisp style so well. love it!

Jenny Lewis
Melt Your Heart

Nothing is ever as good as it was
And what's good for your soul will be bad on your nerves
If you reverse it

It's bound to melt your heart
One way or another
It's bound to melt your heart
For good for bad
It's like a valentine from your mother
It's bound to melt your heart

And we've lost the people we could've loved in you
What you know you have or what you think you want
It's never perfect

It's bound to melt your heart
One way or another
It's bound to melt your heart
For good for bad
It's like a valentine from your mother
It's bound to melt your heart

Are we killing time?
Are we killing each other?

When you're kissing someone who's too much like you
It's like kissing on the mirror
When you're sleeping with someone who doesn't get you
You're going to hate yourself in the morning

It's bound to melt your heart
One way or another
It's bound to melt your heart
For good for bad
It's like a valentine from your mother
It's bound to melt your heart

birds.

http://solitaryspade.deviantart.com/art/Love-Birds-72174056



Birds.
Persistent incessant obnoxious
Chirping!
Keeps me awake.
A mating ritual at two in the morning?
Sure.
"If you young things must,
So shall we. outside your window."
A reminder of love.
Silly ignorant lovebirds.
Sure love works without logic and reality
What's 2,000 miles to a lovebird?
Chirp away.
What does tomorrow hold for you?
Family and flight.
Ah! Me too.
Flight from family.
We really aren't all that different.

Ladeda.

I'm so antsy for change!
Always!
I can't even keep my bedroom furniture in the same place for over a month, it drives me nuts.
I'm totally out of re-arranging ideas, and spending every spare moment I should be studying planning projects for summer.
AHhhhh. no school. less stress....a job?
psh. it'll be full in no time.
So back to filling every last scrap of a notecard I can scrounge up around my apartment
(at least it's clean! i clean when i'm stressed....weird, i know).
And attempting to make sense of a Philosophy-course-on-crack.
Maybe Radiohead will enlighten me.
And then I can pray off the garbage I just let into my head. *cough* Hobbes. *cough* Freud.
That's all!

the island.

My mind. An island.
unapproachable.
unexplainable.
uncivilized.
It changes with the seasons,
and changes with the moons;
the tide rushes in
invigorates the shore with salty force
carrying foreign scents & foreign desire
but what's to grasp it? sand?
new deposits lie lonely upon the shore.
I want none of your nonsense.

Go along, temporal vessel, pass by.
Let your eyes reach the shores,
Let your imagination glimmer with hopes
of treasure left by another lost soul
entertain those musings, sure,
no soul left their memory here.
the vacancy within, filled by unrecognizable joy
is too dark for you to recognize.

the mind is the greatest vessel of escape from self.

hope

hope kills.
hope reunites that spark of resilient beauty in life
breathes invigoration across my heart's fading embers
once content to glow softly
hope stirs up
what little life my spent spirit has left
consumes all I have left to give,
leaving me with a faint glimmer
receding into ash.

Memory

This is a place I've known all too well.

THE PHILOSOPHER

And what are you that, wanting you,
I should be kept awake
As many nights as there are days
With weeping for your sake?

And what are you that, missing you,
As many days as crawl
I should be listening to the wind
And looking at the wall?

I know a man that's a braver man
And twenty men as kind,
And what are you, that you should be
The one man in my mind?

Yet women's ways are witless ways,
As any sage will tell, --
And what am I, that I should love
So wisely and so well?

ESVM

Hunger

My Heart, Being Hungry
-Edna St. Vincent Millay

My heart, being hungry, feeds on food
The fat of heart despise.
Beauty where beauty never stood,
And sweet where no sweet lies
I gather to my querulous need,
Having a growing heart to feed.

It may be, when my heart is dull,
Having attained its girth,
I shall not find so beautiful
The meager shapes of earth,
Nor linger in the rain to mark
The smell of tansy through the dark.

A Weekend Well Spent

I won't be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious,
and you hide them from me. p.164

I believed in a return to Nature once.
But how can we return to Nature when we have never been with her?
To-day, I believe that we must discover Nature.
After many conquests we shall attain simplicity.
It is our heritage. p. 121

She had worked like a great artist; for a time--indeed, for years--she had been meaningless, but at the end there was presented to the girl the complete picture of a cheerless, loveless world in which the young rush to destruction until they learn better--a shamefaced world of precautions and barriers which may avert evil, but which do not seem to bring good, if we may judge from those who have used them most." p.77

She was no dazzling executante; her runs were not at all like strings of pearls, and she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation. Nor was she the passionate young lady, who performs so tragically on a summer's evening with the window open. Passion was there, but it could not be easily labelled; it slipped between love and hatred and jealousy, and all the furniture of the pictorial style. And she was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory. Victory of what and over what--that is more than the words of daily life can tell us. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are writen tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph.



--E. M. Forster, A Room With A View