Follows The Sun

When one speaks of loneliness, what does one speak about?

Empty space.

When there is too much empty space around you, it can be bad.
Before you’re two months old, for instance
even having arms can be overwhelming, over stimulating.

Better to swaddle them close. Any space is too much space.

But what about those times when the space opens up
not around but within you?

Between your organs and your ribs.

Who knew your chest cavity could be
so cavernous?

A person can get lost in there.

When I am nervous about the intangible,
the spaces within me grow and grow
and I feel invisible fingers inside of me,
exploring my belly. Clutching my uterus.
Reaching up between my liver and my lungs.

Is this God?

I do not like it.

I think perhaps the whole long road to self-actualization
the one I am ostensibly travelling
(except that I wander off so frequently)
is nothing but a scheme
to keep some sort of control over

how much space I have
inside of me.

Did you know that today it is Sunny in Providence?
And it’s not even morning anymore.

It is Tuesday.
Since last Tuesday, and the Tuesday before that
I have been given a talking to
by the Universe
(My Pantheon).

I ought not forget that
I am seen
noticed
and loved.

It is Tuesday. It is sunny.
I am full of joy and grace.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Thank you.

Last year my great aunt died, and I wrote about it on Valentine’s Day.

I would like to be the sort of person who can ignore Valentine’s Day – just, not notice it, the way I basically don’t notice Groundhog Day. So far, I have not turned out to be that person.

This year I bought myself roses, to see how it would feel. It feels like I have 24 deep red roses looking incongruous on my blue-and-white tablecloth in my yellow kitchen.

I suspect it would feel different if somebody else bought ‘em, but that was not what this experiment was about. They’re nice, but expensive. I don’t think I’ll do it again soon.

I will spend today in solitude. I hope I’ll get a little work done.

Last year also somebody threw rhubarb at me on Valentine’s Day, in my acting class, and I did not get to give them a hug afterwards, but I would have.

I lived in a different house then. I spent a lot of time sitting right in front of the heater. I burned the backs of some of my sweaters. I don’t do that now.

I think what I would like very much is to be loved publicly. But I don’t know if it’s true because I don’t think I ever have been (except one time somebody threw a surprise party for me, and that felt like their love was powering this whole event that other people were involved in, and that felt really good). Mostly the people who love me tell me, somewhere unobtrusive like the sidewalk or in bed or in the kitchen, that they adore me.

That’s not about Valentine’s Day, particularly, though. Just a thought, which the Internet has brought to me this morning.

I think I would be flattered if somebody told me somewhere where everybody else could see it, too. Dear world, they would say: there is this girl and I think she’s just magnificent, I think she’s the bees knees, and I hope I keep thinking so for a long time, because it’s fun as fun can be.

I used to have partners who used to do that, but mostly they stopped by the time they were with me. It was luck of the draw, that way.

One week ago exactly somebody who loves me made me a sweet dinner, and I wore a nice dress for it, and we made a watering can out of a coffee tin and some copper tubing (which we have discovered leaks just a little). In one week exactly, I think I may surprise this same person.

But today is a day for being alone, and not ignoring Valentine’s Day, and not being mad at it even though it is probably more stress and bagage than it’s worth.

It’s just a little holiday. We don’t even take off work for it. If I am not mad at Groundhog Day, it’s not fair to be mad at Valentine’s Day.

Maybe just a little lonely, in an ok-sort of way. That is how I’ll be about Valentine’s Day, this year.

We think she’s a big deal here,
just because we can’t sleep some nights
walk out restless in her reflected lights
like she is calling to us
pulling our soft tissues towards her

But this is nothing
she’s being gentle
toying with us, really

There are planets where her sisters
sweep so ruthlessly across the gas-swirled sky
that liquid is helpless not to follow

Barrenness is an end
not a beginning

the oceans know who’s in charge.

He rarely looks at you when he speaks
and not at all when he listens

He moves like a cat but
looks like a crow
and his voice
is downright operatic

He is rude

He is frustrating, and not above cheap jokes
he takes pains to sweep in dramatically
he knows how to pick his moment

In this,
as in many things
he is nearly always correct

My kitchen gets a lot of sunshine. I have been growing my sample size of kitchens over the past month, and I am satisfied to say that my kitchen is the sunniest of the lot.

I did not take pictures of the kitchensI visited, so you must take this claim on faith. However:

Here is a picture of my parents in a cave made of Michigan woods.

Here is a picture of what it looks like when a whole lot of people release balloons a quarter of an hour before a new year begins in Harrisonburg, Virginia. * #

Here is a picture I took from inside a tree in Portola Redwoods, in California.

And here is a picture of a frog showing off its toes in the California Academy of Sciences.

While I was in California I ate avocados every day. They were very good in an omelette with gooey american cheese, and they made a lovely addition to a nice BLT, but they were best of all on a bagel sandwich with hummus, lettuce, tomato and sprouts. I knew they would be.

The first thing I did when I got back to my chilly non-California kitchen was turn on the heat and go back out to get groceries. I got veggie juice (became instantly obsessed with it on the flight from SF back to DTW), cheese and crackers (reminded by my mother that this is an easy snack for people who are often not quite hungry enough to bother with an actual meal), stuff to make soup and all the fixings for an SF-style veggie-bagel sandwich.

The second thing I did was get sick.

I got home on a Thursday and took Friday off. At some point in the weekend I managed to dazedly put together a filling and nutritive sausage-escarole-chickpea soup. I even managed to eat it. My avocados and tomatoes ripened and were ignored. I snuffled, read books, drank veggie juice, slept.

Finally, on Tuesday, my avocado-guilt overcame me. I gathered my ingredients in the sunny kitchen and attempted to put together an Avocado-Tomato-Lettuce-Sprouts-Hummus-Sesame-Bagel-Sandwich. The result was quite handsom, in its way:

And it looked nice with my customary toureen of coffe:

But I can tell the difference between a San Francisco avocado and a world-weary East Coast impersonator. Also, lovely as it looked, the started to crumble before I even took a bite. I wound up eating bagel-with-hummus-sprouts-and-lettuce and mopping up bits of avocado and tomato with my fingers.

I will keep trying. And in a year-ish, give or take, when I get back to California, the first thing I will do is go out and get a sandwich.

* It looks better in person.
# Apparently the balloons were biodegradable, in case you’re the sort of person who worries about that kind of thing, which I am.

She’s terrifying.

Not because of the way she makes
it perfectly clear
how she owns the world.

Not because of the marks she can leave,
little slices. Big slices.
red red red.
blue black yellow green.

Not because she’s like me not like me a little like me
and that can be confusing
in an admiring
not admiring
sort of way.

In fact, because of all of those things.

But mostly because of her teeth.

Her teeth are so small.

They are white and they are each
individual
little pieces of bone
little bone knives.

Most people, you look at their teeth,
and they’re like the palisades
or a fence
they’re all together in a line, teeth
not a collection of tooths.

It’s that individuation
and the smallness
somehow, that makes them so scary.

What a surprise –
those little edges.

The better to eat you with.

Some things on my mind right now:

• How until someone with federal power takes notice and says something, the Occupy Movement all over the country remains a local issue. Local in from coast to coast. Dealt with in all sorts of different ways. I wonder if it’s caused camaraderie in mayors the way it’s caused it in occupiers?
• How jaded my generation is, how excited and optimistic I am, and why I’m still mostly following the news instead of being part of it.
• How even people with the right sort of ideas can really miss the picture sometimes. Example: When I was working with kids in AmeriCorps, I was taught never to use rice or dried beans or other edible products as art supplies – it was too likely to be painful to a child without enough to eat at home. Now, I teach Sunday school for a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and they don’t bat an eye at using rice in art. Why not? None of their kids are going hungry. Woah, demographics.
• What makes me claim some neurotransmitters as my own, whereas others (the ones I ingest in birth control instance) I am uncomfortable with, and try to separate. How I will feel when I can’t point to an outside source of hormones to take the blame away from me when I react to situations in ways I wish I didn’t. What I’ll do if my insecurity and sadness are, in fact, based squarely in the same place that I base my sense of self.
• Gender, gender, gender. My gender, kids’ genders, gender choice and gender presentation and how to give options and support without pushing or weighing things in one way or another. Gender is complicated. Gender is great!
• How crazy it is to base relationships on appreciation of difference instead of (or, let’s be honest, in addition to) appreciation of sameness. Whether I’ll be able to love myself a little more easily if I can stop being afraid that the parts of me that aren’t like the things I admire in other people somehow make me bad.
• How much I love America. How proud I am to be American. How afraid I am of America, and how sick I am of the way Americans set up media to speak to ourselves. Today in doctors office I caught some morning news program. It was bad. Just, really bad.
• Gradschool. Getting a masters level degree. Not getting a PhD even though lots of my friends and one of my parents are getting or have one. Trying not to feel like getting an MSW instead makes me less smart, hard working, accomplished, worthwhile…
• Syntax. Sentence structures are fun!
• How hard it is to buy clothes that fit, and how I kind of wish they didn’t even PUT misleading information like “small” or “large” or “size 6″ or “size 10″ on things. Also, how very nice it is to be able to buy clothes, and to have clothes that fit.
• My hands hurt. I am brave. I am not anathema.
• How totally, unutterably lucky and blessed I am to have the life and the brain and the body and the skills I do, and to be loved by so many amazing people. How biodiversity is amazing. How closely connected wolves are to domestic dogs. How much I love moss. How beautiful the world is, fences and vines, leaves and the dark shadows they leave on the sidewalk, sunshine and clouds. That kind of stuff. You know.

They lifted their feet
and stepped softly into evening
the view was incredible.
They wore raincoats to keep off the clouds.

They climbed until distance made everything look
exactly half it’s regular size,
and thought about the half-size people
living in that half-size town.

Everything was pink around them,
and when it purpled and got dark
they zipped up their rain coats and stepped softly down,

out of the cold
into lamplight.

This is the story of how they up and ran away. At first they thought they were running away from their past, and then it occurred to them, somewhere in flight, that perhaps they were running away from the future, which seemed more complicated. So they hid behind a big, romping rosebush to get their thoughts together. “Where do you run when you’re running away from the future?” they asked each other. Paradoxically enough, the answer seemed to be “space.” So they build a rocket out of cardboard boxes and wooden pallets and some branches lent by the rosebush and duct tape, of course, and they picked up a sad-looking pigeon who they thought might need company, and they flew off into space, where it was very cold.

They parked on an asteroid, and sat and looked at the stars and all the other asteroids, and ate some sandwiches (of course they had sandwiches. Would you go to space without sandwiches?) and talked it out. And although they were assuredly afraid of societal stagnation, especially as illustrated by the unending political gridlock that had become the bane of the bipartisan system, and also afraid of the earth’s dwindling resources and humanity’s general inability to get its consumerist economic habits under any sort of control, they weren’t sure that building a rocket and going to space had solved that issue. Not for the earth, certainly, but they found that even sitting on an asteroid looking down at the deceptively pristine globe, they were still afraid, for the planet and the people on it. They still apparently cared. And so it seemed they must not have been running away from the future.

What, then, was the purpose of their flight? Had they been running to, rather than running from? They discussed it, but neither had had dreams of being an astronaut, so it didn’t seem like they had had space lurking in their minds at the outset. Having gotten away from so many things, and still feeling that their running away was not what you might call a success, they were forced to accept a somewhat unpalatable truth.

They must have been running away from each other.

Once they finally said it, they found it to be a relief.

So they climbed back into their rocket ship, and wandered a little until they found a nice-enough planet (rather, a large-ish asteroid) and she set him down and waved goodbye and continued wandering until she found a similarly sized asteroid – perhaps, a little smaller, but with a lovely billabong that suited her fancy, and landed the rocket ship there.

She found some seeds in the branches the rosebush had lent, and grew a rose garden in the abundant sunlight with billabong-water. He built cairns and towers out of rocks, and spent a lot of time looking at the stars, which he found very calming. They wrote each other letters, which the pigeon (who had perked up considerably) agreed to ferry back and forth for them, although it had to rest for quite a while, and be petted and made a bit of a fuss over after each trip.

They each found reading the other’s letters an unfettered joy. They composed them carefully, with thought and precision and love.

They loved each other, of course, after all. Just like they loved the earth.

All they needed was a little bit of distance.