The Second Stage

I haven't written in days, maybe a month. I haven't checked recently. All I know is that I do check, and I do ponder. Constantly refelecting on my mind the ever present "coming and goings in the mind." For what you may ask? Because of who I am.

Because of how I do life. Eat, drink, sup, breathe... I reflect.

My recent reflecting is on parenting. On the overwhelming desire I have to live for Cohen and the overwhelming desire I have to walk away from it all. From the messes, from the monotonous "doings," screamings, cryings... UGH UGH UGH For what? For a moment of inquisitive understanding? Peace of mind? No. To simply BE.

To BE is terrifying. It hurts, it reaches it's bloody arms down to the depths of my soul and SCREAMS "I've got you."

I want that. I want the pain that comes with discovering who I am as a parent. No matter if it looks like how I grew up or not. Who cares... right? Right? RIGHT?

Right.

Yes. Moments of intricate despair surrounded by immense amound of love. This parenting shit is a serious business. I have no idea what I'm doing. How I'm doing it... where I'm going with it.

I pray for some sort of grace I believe I have... some sort of enlightenment that is promised to me.

Yet there I sit, alone, on a lonely dusty road waiting for someone to sweep up behind my flowing dress to tell me this simple thing:

PEACE

Peace. Give me now. Give me everyday of every second of every moment.

I don't pray for an eye opening experience rather someone who meets me in the harsh winds and the unbearable heats of life.

Take me, break me.

I am yours.

Timeless

This poem needs to introduction. One of the greatest pieces (in my opinion) in all of American literature.

 

Howl

       I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,   

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,   

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,

who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blur floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years,

(ginsberg)

To the 10% of the World

I am an intuitive-feeler.


Which means most of the world was not made for someone like me. For someone who sees the abstract in every situation, who questions (everything), who finds meaning in authenticity, who ponders more than acts, who sits quietly at a party and would rather... watch.


Me?


Me.


I create. I write. I explore. I love, not understanding myself completely. I believe I will be on my death bed and say to someone:


Did I live authentically? 


My life is an endless stream of dot dot dots. 

Intuitive-Feeling students approach learning eager to explore ideas, generate new solutions to problems, and discuss moral dilemmas. Their interests are varied and unpredictable, but they prefer activities which allow them to use their imaginations and do things in unique ways. They are turned off by routine or rote assignments and prefer questions which are open ended, such as "What would happen if...?"

Intuitive Feelers are highly motivated by their own interests. Things of interest will be done inventively well. Things which they do not like may be done poorly or forgotten altogether. When engaged in a project which intrigues them, time is meaningless. Intuitive Feelers operate by an "internal clock" and, therefore, often feel constrained or frustrated by external rules or schedules.

Intuitive Feelers are independent and nonconformist. They do not fear being different and are usually aware of their own and others' impulses. They are open to the irrational and not confined by convention. They are sensitive to beauty and symmetry and will comment on the aesthetic characteristics of things.

Intuitive Feelers prefer not to follow step-by-step procedures but rather to move where their intuition takes them. They prefer to find their own solutions rather than being told what to do or how to do it. They are able to take intuitive leaps, and they trust their own insights. Intuitive Feelers often take circuitous routes to solving problems and may not be able to explain how they arrived at the answer.

Highly adaptable to new solutions, Intuitive Feelers are flexible in thought and action. They prefer dynamic environments with many resources and materials. Intuitive Feelers, more than any other type, are less likely to be disturbed by changes in routine. They are comfortable working with a minimum of directions. Their work is sometimes scattered and may look chaotic to thinking types. Intuitive-Feeling learners are often engaged in a number of activities at the same time and move from one to the other according to where their interests take them. Often, they start more proejcts than they can finish.

Meet me. There I am. All scattered among those words, fluid and often times confused. 

Meet the 10% of the world that does not meet the norm. That is often rejected by modern society. That questions and observes... you... the 90%. That yearns to be "normal" like you. That yearns to do "life" like you. That sees the 90% as a number to be desired... yet... our intuitiveness knows better. 


We are who we are.

But alas... we find ourselves in a predicament. Because... we know we will never be like you. And that's ok. It's ok to not be you. It's ok to desire alone time more than social time. It's ok to feel our perspectives out and live forever in the dot dot dot.

Growing up I was surrounding by the statement "Search... but then land."

Why?

Why land? When all I desire to do is search? To deny the very thing that defines me?

Nah.

You can take your declarative statement. I'm happy with my interrogative one.

Cheers 10%, drinking an Old Vine Zin for you tonight.

Creativity

I have this thing in me that screams for me to write. Some call it "experience" others call it "thoughts" but I call it "creativity." I heard creativity described once as an organism. That it thrives when fed and nourished yet sadly dies as one puts it in a corner and neglects it.

I deactivated my typepad account. I was pleased as the numbers were growing but the thought of turning my creativity into a "blog" in the grandest sense of the word, severely displeased me.

I am not a blogger, I am a creator. Life moves me but I believe it does not move everyone.

Why should you read what I write?

I'm not sure. You don't have to. The fact that you are reading my words on your computer screen oddly seems trite. But I appreciate it. Because expressing my creativity is my heart's desire. Don't we all desire for others to grasp our longings? Feel our passions deeply? Become so engrossed in someone's words that we forget where we are, who we are, where we came from?

I do.

I hope I am that for you.

I'm back at blogspot here to stay because whether or not you like what I am writing... thanks for reading. It is a gift to me.

Exciting

I'm super excited to announce that as of tomorrow, I will have a new blog site up and running! It will be updated with new bells and whistles! I have been asked numerously for e-mail subscriptions so that will be available also.

Hopefully by tomorrow evening all the kinks will be worked out!

Thanks for reading :)

Done

I’m done. Really done. That’s it. No more. Paper-turned-in. Books put away.

Done.

Silence.

It’s been exactly 3 days since I finished my last final. Wrote on the role of the female narrative in Wright’s Native Son. I did ok on it. Not my best paper. For being my last of over three hundred papers, it could have been better. I turned it in anyway.

I walked out of Columbine last Thursday morning to a crisp air that hit my face. I listened as the door slammed behind me.

I’m done.

I watched a group of laughing hipster girls walk into the building as I walked out. I walked past them swiftly as I eyed my car. I felt my feet dragging as I walked further and further away.

I’m done.

I smiled. I began to skip, just a little. Recognizing that there were others around, I casually sauntered. Crisp air felt like freedom. This moment felt overwhelming and underwhelming all at the same time. I wanted to scream, yell, laugh, throw my fists in the air and scream I DID IT at the top of my lungs.

Hundreds of thousands of students graduate every year. They order their cap and gowns. They order graduation announcements. They get their degrees in disciplines like “Communications” or “Business” as they simply go through the motions. One thing down, another few to go…

Not me. I fought for this degree. I clawed tooth and nail. I took every summer semester, every May semester and every fall and spring semester for this degree. I listened to Cohen tell me over and over that he missed me for this degree. I told Zac “not tonight” for this degree. I missed birthdays, anniversaries, get-togethers and laughter for this degree. I traded in my social life for this degree. I spent hours and hours at the library for this degree. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of papers for this degree.

My degree. Mine. I did it. I’m done.

I sat in my car and my eyes became weak with tears. I cried. Then I sobbed. Then I couldn’t even breathe. Picasso once said, “Action is the key to all success.”

I acted furiously.

Sophocles said, “Success is depended on effort.”

I gave all my effort.

Aching, bleeding and content heart, I sat sobbing in my car. My first year of college flashed before me when I was pregnant and barely passed any of my classes. I was birthing something new, something precious, something I could not understand.

I acted furiously.

Baby, marriage, hard marriage, hard financial times, hard parenting, hard life, hard… times.

I gave it all my effort.

It was so anticlimactic and climactic all at once. The dichotomy astounded me.

I did it for me. I did it because it meant something far more complex than a simple diploma. I did it for Cohen and the story I will tell him. I did it for my marriage. I did it to prove to myself that commitment is valuable. That time and effort birth something extravagant. To birth a moment like today when I can look at my friends and family and say yes, five years of non-stop schoolwork, yes, I can, yes I did.

A common Buddhist saying is that “If you are facing the right direction…just keep on walking.”

I walked, I ran, I sprinted, I cried, I screamed, I loathed, I lost, but yet.

I gave it all my effort.

My degree is not mine but Zacs, Cohens, my parents, my extended family and my friends. Without the grace and practical help from them… I would be nothing and have nothing.

I started my car. I drove away. My keys clanked back and forth on my legs as my eye darted toward the rearview mirror. What’s next? One long chapter closed, now what?

I acted furiously.

I gave it all my effort.

My heart is full. Sweet, sweet grace.

Passion

Reflection and Introspection.


They are siblings. Both coming from the matriarch of Melancholy. 


They are my siblings.


I was talking, dialoguing, discussing the character, persona, perspective that is me. I find myself fighting against the core of who I believe myself to be in order to be like... that. Like... them. Like... her. I see myself falling in love with an idea that is not me. A life that is not mine. 


We all do it.


There are seasons in my life where I do it a lot. Zac was commenting on my nature and my presence. How I see others and how they see me. Marriage is a mirror. You are forced to see things you have no desire to or maybe the thought of hearing them out loud is what intrinsically is damning. That to me is always damning. Just don't tell me, I don't want to see it.


There is a fine line between personality and potential growth. I can be seen as cold, disheartening and judgmental. All cousins of Melancholy. At times I can be seen as these things as they are apart of my family. I am Introspective and Reflective. It is my core. It is my place of rest and recovery. I find myself unable to relax in most situations as my mind is plagued with a million thoughts. I tell Zac often, I wish I could turn off my mind for one day.


Modernist writer Virgina Woolf felt the same. She states: "My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"


What's this passion for? Why do I grieve harder? Why do I see the details of a disaster so clearly in my mind? Why does grief plague me so deeply? What do I do with all of this knowledge and insight?


I rebuke my Melancholy matriarch most of the time. I do not embrace who she is in my life. I do not desire her around. People see me as cold, I have been told, people see me as unfriendly. Often times when we resist the ones who formed us, we are left feeling wanting. I desire to come to terms with who I am and who I have been called to be. 


Why then do I fight it? Why do I fight my Melancholy? What's this passion for?


The world does not encourage personalities like mine. It shuns it for not being: happy-enough, joyful-enough, sweet-enough, encouraging-enough...


Not enough.


Even worse, Melancholics are often shunned by people of faith. Jesus is your joy! Just be happy more! Life is the best thing ever! Stop being so pessimistic! Smile more! Be more! Extend yourself more!


Not enough.


How does Jesus work with someone like me? Someone who is prone toward depression and anxiety. Who is intutive enough to go home exhausted each day, desiring to carry the weight of the world. How does he fix someone who would rather be alone than be with others? Am I sick? Is something wrong with me?


What's this passion for?


For I know and I believe that: Jesus is humility. Jesus is hope. Jesus is grace. More than that though, Jesus sees me.


I am who I am. Period. I can not change the DNA that encompasses my body.


But I have hope and this is my hope:


I do not know the ins and outs of who I am but He does. I do not understand the vastness of my gifts and abilities but He does. 


My need to figure myself out is a longing to figure myself OUT of how I am feeling. Jesus was quiet. Jesus was introspective. Jesus understands my frustrations and desires to see life at times in a different light.


Clinging to him is my only option. He is my patriarch. He understands my matriarch-Melancholy. He designed the unconscious depths of who I am.


This passion is known by the one who formed me. He alone provides the answer.