october 20 1998

a lighter spirit is flying over me now-alignment of the planets changed or i changed them. about face! says what's in front of me. coffee stirs the real me. intense mood swings towards the positives are what i need now. neutralizing music to guide me into the day, and e-conversations with the kindred ones.

i'll eat the pastry i am served. my natural mould was being forfeited; essentially, the best part of who i am is that flip floppy element and nothing rigid. of course the lighter side of the day has lightened up. with just a tiny tad of effort, i cross the boundary of feardom, let down my prickly skin, and somehow my armspan broadens. i won't say they are mine again, because that may be what took them away from me in the first place. but cautiously i'll tread away from the big rudders. let's let this boat steer itself, as they all will. my own direction, although dependant on this ship for fuel, is not related to the area under the curve.

 
but    i  t ' s      a  l  l     r  e  l  a  t  e  d

---

"we ran into her just by chance
i saw it in a single glance
my oldest friend, your new romance
must i remember?
you couldn't run she couldn't hide
she turned her eyes you turned aside
you didn't want to hurt my pride
but you knew that
love is a rush a wild wind
the scent of a summer rose
a whistle blowing on a distant track:
and when it goes, it goes"
-Maya Angelou, Roberta Flack, Barry Miles 1988

---

can i convey pure canadianism here? is it possible to package a certain authentic modality of thought? how much of it can be dissected, painted, and applauded? well we never can know, but i must revel in the concept of forces greater than my own choices making me who i at least, try to be.

if poots turns the narrow pole counter-clockwise, only small treads of light enter the room. there goes another walking day, taken from me not by the streams of water falling from the sky but from a natural desire to follow the rhythym of what goes. roberta 'celebrates her love' in the next room, the second dose of bancha warms itself and there's a general darkness slowing down the whole waking process.

who am i to stop it. not i.

but does it contribute, or counteract? how is one to know. does the natural feeling necessarily lead to what is right, what is better. perhaps in the right context. then you must change the entire folds of your life. yes, we know that to be true, but are we weak searching for lifetimes of strength to arrive at once, or strong, allowing ounces of weakness to trip us as we go.
 
 
 

october 13 1998 - tuesday

singing songs of wishfull thinking between bouts of lip-chewing, the effects of the bancha are beginning to wear thin. it may not stand up to a good canadian winter, i'm afraid. and will i, what project awaits me that will become real by merely dreaming of it? certainly many already have. spousal rrsps and dreaming of spouses, several years too late. what an odd space, the land of dreams. tempting with old emotions transformed into their current perspective; yet the viewfinder shows us old faces, now with grey hair. curly-queue smiles and miles of jealously, hollywood could not fare better.

it is proportional to what you give out. don't try so hard. smiling, embrace what is offered, it is all around you. do not let fractions of what you would like to call evil distract, block the channels. let your shoulders down. deep breaths. today is mine, today is mine.

yesterday i decided that my parents were definately more enlightened, by design.
faith, for one, helps a great deal. but there was composure then; what was considered 'proper'. less struggling for answers, fewer questions, more of what was certain. trees grew tall, and small children wore patent leather shoes. white ones on sunday, in the summertime. sometimes the buckle came undone, and you would sit perched on a ledge, while your mother fastened it again. your tiny foot, the size of what fit in her strong hands.

all of that and what has passed is still real. these memories, my comfort, live on inside of me. awash with unchartered perspective, they are holy, in their own right i suspect. and perhaps sacred by design as well, just like our parents.

---

"The recent analysis of the parish registers of Port Royal
show that Acadians respected the religious customs of the time
and that they lived within the rigid framework of their farming
activities. Marriages never took place during Lent or Advent -the
holiest periods in the Christian calendar. Most couples married
between late October and February, in other during the cold months
outside spring planting time and the harvest season. The first child
was usually born nine months or more after the wedding. Various records
also indicate that between 1671 and 1730 the average household in
Port Royal had about seven children. Generally, women married at a
younger age (between 15 and 21) and had more children than their
contemporaries in France."
-Sally Ross, Alphonse Deveau, 'The Acadians of Nova Scotia' 1992 p.31

---

---

"To undertake this venture of becoming aware of ourselves,"
and to discover the sources of inner strength and security
which are the rewards of such a venture, let us start at the
beginning by asking, What is this person, this sense of selfhood we seek?
-Rollo.May "Man's search for himself" 1953, p.83

---

not much time for banter today but this flicker of cheeriness makes me stay.
back into stranger mode; i like it. thank-you td, again, your words are not
in small part related to these inner smiles. my explanations are short-handed
now, my own embarrassment piled higher than i could see over, and now slowly
with time the pile will erode; and i am nor sitting atop nor aside the pile,
i AM the pile, and this causes pain. but if anyone can really read these words,
the answers are actually found here, in concise form.

there is such inherent beauty in these words;
a neglected magic which calls to me.
again, and again, i must reference them.
 
 
 

october 7- wednesday

winding down now, i take time. bouncy emotions are a possibility for all of us, i imagine some are more disturbed by it than others. and so what determines how truly madly deeply we understand any concept? my final conclusion is caring. he, him, over there, may truly and completely grasp my fluffiness, my stand on a tippy-toe spin around backwards and skate through the air notions...yet, he simply may not care.
and then who says we're allowed to change what people care about, who says. ultimately, we seem to remember the love story in the movie- perhaps indicating what most of us care about, but this, born out of true fondness for love, or merely inability to deal with suffering? there is certainly an inability to believe that something so unthinkable actually truly madly deeply happened.

*sigh*

the likeness of me turns my head to the right, living in this dichotomous society chooses right or left; it is not a large window, but comparing to past mEp-locations, it is a fair one, since those had no window on the right whatsoever. i'm not crazy about the coldness of the bicycles which frame the view, nor the boxes protruding with very odds and ends below it, but i am happy it is there. if i were a bird who had made my home in the ice-storm shorn tree top there, i would be making a spectacle of myself. i would move lower into the thickness of the thing. ... ... ... i'm going to be caring more, i think. i plan on smiling and feeling warmer, and anticipate some warmth returning to me. sharing, growing in circles, we all know these are things i must do; although at times it is only human of me to be taken away from these things. caused entirely by my very own mistakes, that is a learning process of the most difficult sort. and who ever heard of such grossly subtle lessons in full fledged adulthood who? not i said the blind man, not i.

*deep breath*

it's not even a wiping of the slate, no, the process is a natural one - as natural as living and dying. this uncontrolable aspect is what i lament most. and of course is what i am seeking to learn to live with the most. i actually doubt i can ever do it, but i think i care about it, so perhaps not such a lofty goal is that. as natural as writing it all down as if no one but the heavens could see. and so the dream becomes finding a way to share more goodness in a few with the ones who really need it. it's important to stay on track. without letting anything rub off on me, without being permanently blinded.

*more tea*

without harnessing their fears; their misgivings, and making them my own. and of course there is only one way to do this. now if i only knew what that was. 

if only more understood this, truly madly deeply.
 
 
 

october 6

coughing leaves me no peace for anything else.
perhaps i've been left behind as a result.
warmth, at long last. thinking thinking too much thinking.
this time for myself is lost on myself for i do not seem
to know what to do with it.

tuesday now and little still motivating me.
if i were bear, i would hibernate.
i am not bear, i must tell myself and yourself
that these moments will pass, creativity will come,
sharing will come.

would Leo have said 'when in misery, be miserable'?
somehow i doubt it.

is my new world void of touching, feeling.
this is my worst fear. i look around me and
see inward people, fearful people, programmed.
calculations, the mass of them. wandering
on the planet living to be calculated.
with less interaction, i feel the air short;
when will come that lucky shining moment of glory
when a perfect soul comes and touches my shoulder
and reminds me of who i am...

i miss my friends to the south;
i think of you every day,
you are still my rock.



 
 
 
 

chilly worlds wrap minds around frozen words
seeking nourishment of all kinds;
frogs in my throat
time pushes from behind;
the brainspace has not settled for a time.
 

yes, an eternal bout of pms. and a big pile of words,
some would say a mess mess mess. but just try to find them,
those words that bind, the words that unclench the fists
and put things in their order. no one would believe me if
i tried to tell them what causes stress for me, why bother.
they might simply move their life or get used to the stress
or take it out on someone else. me, i live with it. choices.
my choices; are difficult and are causing me stress. rooted
in other stresses in my life, which none of should have been
stressful in and of themselves and now i can barely focus.
forgetting nevermind envelopes, recipes, phone numbers, but
words too. concepts. theories, places, etc etc...
i am forgetting everything. but i want it all..

"and did i say i have the right to want it all
cause if it's true i want it all how could that do me any harm" -b.n.c.

and why write here, these are merely dump-words,
nothing new, nothing derived from any real creative
process. and yet that is all i want, the creative
process. am i really trying to find it, really?
or have i given up long ago with some of the choices
i made. yes unfortunately that is the real truth.
and now i must live with my choices.

i just need to know where things are.
just need to know what's done, where's that name of the book
i wrote down last week, what were all those things i wanted
to do when i had the time and now i have the time and don't
know what they are and why is it so cold in here
nothing anyone wants to hear.

"and the light shines in the darkness again
and the darkness did not understand"