Mindful Living.

space is the symbol of liberty... if you don't have space around you, you can not move.

and therefore in order to be happy, you should allow yourself some space -

inside and outside.

the refreshing moon of the buddha is traveling in the sky of utmost emptiness...

practice bringing space into you and around you.

if you want your loved one to be happy, leave him some space,

inside and around him.

if you have too many concerns, too many worries -

how can you have space?

I am reading Thich Nhat Hanh's The Art of Mindful Living. This part about leaving the people you love space feels very true to me.

::::

What She Was Wearing

by Denver Butson

this is my suicide dress
she told him
I only wear it on days
when I’m afraid
I might kill myself
if I don’t wear it

you’ve been wearing it
every day since we met
he said

and these are my arson gloves
so you don’t set fire to something?

he asked

exactly

and this is my terrorism lipstick
my assault and battery eyeliner
my armed robbery boots

I’d like to undress you he said
but would that make me an accomplice?

and today she said I’m wearing
my infidelity underwear
so don’t get any ideas

and she put on her nervous breakdown hat
and walked out the door

hehe.

luck.

have a wonderful weekend, friends :)

::::: from an incredible, canadian (ahem) designer.

Bruce Mau Design Inc.
An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.


.... go to website for the rest!

::::

Christopher David Ryan.
i'm so in love with him.
i hope some day he reads this.
i'm so in love with you!

post valentine's poem.

san francisco.

True Love
by Barry Gifford.

Your sickness made me

a little sick, it’s

true—I still

feel it

Mayakovsky got down

on his knees

and declared

his love

to his last

mistress

a few hours after

he’d met her

Remember me

at the hotel

in Paris,

on my knees

in the lift?

We’re all the same

men of too much passion

and a little talent—

some a little more

than others

We fool ourselves

into thinking

we’re strong

then complain

the rest of our lives

crippled by

the consequences

returning from my hiatus!

i am applying to graduate school and unfortunately the application process has consumed 90% of my time (leaving a hefty 10% for sleep). starting today I am returning to daily posts!

i hope you all had wonderful, romantic valentine's days :)

never have I ever had a one night stand.

san francisco, alamo square park, the shoe garden.

Billy Collins, review of Donald Hall.

In a review of Hall's recent Selected Poems, Billy Collins wrote in the Washington Post:

Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines.

Safe Sex

::::: Donald Hall


If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;

if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other

as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,

no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated

apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge

1,000 journals project.

about: The 1000 Journals Project is an ongoing collaborative experiment attempting to follow 1000 journals throughout their travels. The goal is to provide a method for interaction and shared creativity among friends and strangers.

This weekend we saw the 1,000 journals exhibit at the museum of modern art in San Francisco... I was taken aback by people's creativity and depth. Page topics ranged from political statements to personal expressions to marked up term papers & shopping lists. If you are in the area it's definitely worth seeing.

www.1000journals.com

::::

this weekend I shirked responsibilities & traveled to San Francisco with my family, had a whirlwind & wonderful time...

... on this most monday feeling of mondays I am cheerful about:

sarah, a new bright spot
the color green
finding time to write this morning
curled up sampson warming my feet.

have a wonderful week!

::::

lots of work on my artwork this weekend.

hope it's a good one for you all :)

still thinking about canada.

ontario's corn fields and cows

from one of Lydia's comments,
Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke.

Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered.

But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy.

The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them.

But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.

the other half of summer - dorset, canada.

::::

AT THE RIVER
by Louise Gluck

One night that summer my mother decided it was time to tell me about
what she referred to as pleasure, though you could see she felt
some sort of unease about this ceremony, which she tried to cover up
by first taking my hand, as though somebody in the family had just died—
she went on holding my hand as she made her speech
which was more like a speech about mechanical engineering
than a conversation about pleasure. In her other hand
she had a book from which, apparently, she’d taken the main facts.
She did the same thing with the others, my two brothers and sister,
and the book was always the same book, dark blue,
though we each got our own copy.


There was a line drawing on the cover
showing a man and woman holding hands
but standing fairly far apart, like people on two sides of a dirt road.

Obviously, she and my father did not have a language for what they did
which, from what I could judge, wasn’t pleasure.
At the same time, whatever holds human beings together
could hardly resemble those cool black-and-white diagrams, which suggested,
among other things, that you could only achieve pleasure
with a person of the opposite sex,
so you didn’t get two sockets, say, and no plug.

School wasn’t in session.
I went back to my room and shut the door
and my mother went into the kitchen
where my father was pouring glasses of wine for himself and his invisible guest
who—surprise—doesn’t appear.

No, it’s just my father and his friend the Holy Ghost
partying the night away until the bottle runs out,
after which my father continues sitting at the table
with an open book in front of him.

Tactfully, so as not to embarrass the Spirit,
my father handled all the glasses,
first his own, then the other, back and forth like every other night.

By then, I was out of the house.
It was summer; my friends used to meet at the river.
The whole thing seemed a grave embarrassment
although the truth was that, except for the boys, maybe we didn’t understand
mechanics.

The boys had the key right in front of them, in their hands if they wanted,
and many of them said they’d already used it,
though once one boy said this, the others said it too,
and of course people had older brothers and sisters.

We sat at the edge of the river discussing parents in general
and sex in particular. And a lot of information got shared,
and of course the subject was unfailingly interesting.
I showed people my book, Ideal Marriage—we all had a good laugh over it.

One night a boy brought a bottle of wine and we passed it around for a while.

More and more that summer we understood
that something was going to happen to us
that would change us.
And the group, all of us who used to meet this way,
the group would shatter, like a shell that falls away
so the bird can emerge.
Only of course it would be two birds emerging, pairs of birds.

We sat in the reeds at the edge of the river
throwing small stones. When the stones hit,
you could see the stars multiply for a second, little explosions of light
flashing and going out. There was a boy I was beginning to like,
not to speak to but to watch.
I liked to sit behind him to study the back of his neck.

And after a while we’d all get up together and walk back through the dark
to the village. Above the field, the sky was clear,
stars everywhere, like in the river, though these were the real stars,
even the dead ones were real.

But the ones in the river—
they were like having some idea that explodes suddenly into a thousand ideas,
not real, maybe, but somehow more lifelike.

When I got home, my mother was asleep, my father was still at the table,
reading his book. And I said, Did your friend go away?
And he looked at me intently for a while,
then he said, Your mother and I used to drink a glass of wine together
after dinner.