Summer promises


Sun, hot days with very little on. Toes that enjoy the light and skin that breathes gently. Having lunch and dinners with my girls, talking about days gone by, hopes, dreams, how we've changed, pain and love. Smiling genuinely. Rest, peace and recuperation. Buckets of iced sugar cane and alongside seafood and spiced stingray, a wiff of a cigarette as we debrief the past semester. No more inadequate esoteric ideas and theories, but a life to hold and to live. Time to start speaking in tangible weighted words, instead of dead-end concepts spewed onto double-spaced papers and yellow walls. To find myself gravitating back into who I am, to be re-centered and to re-become, to create art and to constitute the person that I am. To find strength and peace, joy and forgiveness through new-born eyes which cast their cautious gaze onto the world.

Embrace me again, and help me find reasons to be beautiful. For I lost them here, somewhere along the way. And when refound, they will teach me again how to love truely, through everything. For there is no fear in perfect love, and perfect love is possible.

"You have love written all over you like silver on a Gypsy's palm"
~ Friend

I'm not sure if this is a culturally/historically insensitive remark, but it made me feel a little better about myself.

I love my girlies back home. :)

Do I simply attempt to justify, what I really ought to be conquering? Is my choice of a particular path less of a choice then I would like it to be? Which was is which?

水

I was 15 when I decided that my element was water. Of course, I was embarrassed to have such significant information bestowed upon me by Amy Tan. I am unfortunately so Anglo that the best of my cultural heritage is bestowed upon me by an Asian-American. But that is a gripe for another day.

Anyway. my element is water. I've known that full well. Sitting with Thi by the Tadlo falls in Laos - or rather, I was floating in the stream and he was pawing the shore like a finicky cat - I found a smug sense of belonging in the fluid flesh of the falls. And what was it that I said? That I, as liquid (and protean) in my footsteps as I am, am apt to take the path of least resistance. What else do we expect of water? "Ah! But it doing so, I carve canyons out of stone!" I defended myself against the apparent notion that I am, in my watery ways, intrinsically weak. In great weakness there is great strength, and in strength - weakness.

Then I discover that water is as violent as she is soft. Her rage in all its tsunamic blindness calls all others to beg pointlessly for mercy. And she takes, and crushes, and destroys everything beneath her indiscriminate thumb, leaving behind numb bodies and uncomprehending minds.

And this is where I am. Perhaps. Being driven unwittingly by my blind surges of intensity, I find myself rolling on forward, through time and tasks, spaces and people. I keep moving keep pushing keep racing ahead running on breath so hard it hurts to breathe.

The crest of my wave breaks and after the crash subsides, I lie still and silent. Stunned by my journey - too hard and fast. I realise that I have been blinded by my perceived importance of being, such that I ceased to find my harmonious part in anything else. My world was flooded by my immense wave of unbridled severity that I have destroyed most everything else.

有山有水 － Balance! Balance!
I ought to know. Or at least, ought to learn.
In my insistence in being who I am, please don't let me destroy everything that otherwise validates me.

So here, in my strongest of strengths, lies my most fragile weakness.
~ Thursday, July 19, 2007

Odd how old stories have the capacity to be retold into new truths, fresh like morning dew. I am a glass of split water. Or, at least, the bottle dropped somewhere, smashing into a million crystaline pieces. Nothing to weep over but impossible to recover. All I can do now, is to wait to be reconsituted. Thank God for cycles, and thank God water never breaks.

For the rest of this year, and my life, I will work on my art.