ladyparts

Portland

I have spent the last ten days thick with love and admiration. What more could I ask for then to be curled up in Deveraux Glen with eight to ten people all of whom I am separately and uniquely madly in love with? Our tiny sweaty bodies congratulating each other over and over. My Beyonce! On this, the day of my cañada.

I have gorged myself with wild blackberries and I am ready to tell you…well actually I do not think I could ever explain all that has happened: I am engaged. My tiny love and I sat under the magic maple lace in the Japanese Gardens and held out our hopes like wanting birds. We were welcomed home to the sound of Mariah Carey’s “All I want for Christmas is you” and a banner that had “support your troops” inscribed inside the tiny cursive “l” of congratulations. We folded and stuffed Little Wings albums (I love rhythmic folding), a few of us made over five life changing personal pizzas, slept on blow-up mattresses, formed a team named “The Merkins” for trivia night, and read the Hard Rain screen play aloud with feeling. I walked the streets forever with my dear love, drinking coffee and sipping soups.

How did this happen?

Yesterday we hiked through the Arboretum in Washington Park with the intention of reaching forest park. We never got there, but the moist trees and ferns of this first destination were no less pleasurable. The walk ended with a couple sitting on a blanket. The man with his shirt open, leaning back onto his lover, who was swallowing a mouthful of wine. It was something off of a romance novel. Wet with sweat, we headed back to the Max stop, approximately 644 feet underground. I wish I could smell the cold earth forever.

Later that night we headed out for a show and as we walked up the hill I jumped into the air. At this exact moment a large bird took off out of the marsh below. It was massive and graceful.

We’re flying home.
We are in the air.

Laundromats and Ginger Beer

It was last summer and I was reading Still Life with Woodpecker, going for long solitary walks in the moonlight, and staying with my parents. I felt like I was encased in come kind of membrane that muffled sound and magnified senses.

I was on a walk with my parents, my younger sister, and my little brother. At the edge of a yard stood a cage. In the cage was a hawk.

dear hawk
d e
a
r haw k

I approached the hawk, as I did on my frequent walks alone, and sent my soul into the hawk’s magnificently black and shiny eyes. I said something aloud about how the hawk was wise and mysterious and my sister dismissed my comment and said that it didn’t matter because the eagle had no soul. “It is just an animal.”

And here I am again, trying to send my soul to the internet. To the infinity it represents. The collaboration. And I feel confused and moved by interjections. We know not what we do. We leave behind our folded, sweaty socks. So it goes.

Theater is catharsis, right? If life can be considered a performance, it could be said that the purpose of watching/reading/listening to each other is catharsis. If. We want to change ourselves; all we know is our self. We are the architecture of our reality, the context and building block. And we need each other; we need to relate to something to perform new acts or work out our structure.

But, when we observe, as in the case of theater or performance, are we relating to it? If so what is the nature of this relationship? What role does the metaphor play? Or is it something entirely different.

At first I did not think I had an opinion of the subject, that I could form an image of relational observation. I think I can now, I do it every day.

And that’s just it. The image/my memory/my experience/architecture/self is a place where two unrelated and seemingly paradoxical things become undenialbly true to me.

My head is swimming right now; I can’t get out of the water.
It is very beautiful here.

The space between those colliding materials, right now, is following recipes. Or stretching. Both of which will suffice as a way to give my self time to decipher what I am learning from all of this (you).

We are not strangers
and
I would be your moon