Written in the Style of Kerouac. Forgive Me, Jack.

And in the dark Living Room one lamp is on as I sit on the old couch we found watching the light from the small, single bulb lap at the corners of the room and feeling all that space that rolls immeasurably up and into the mind, all those memories building, but in the future I know it will still be the same mind this mind of mine, though our atoms are always shifting, and don’t you know that for a moment you will be made from the same molecules as Shakespeare? the bulb burns out and leaves a softer, humming darkness than what was just before and I am filled with a brown-black that reminds me of the country, of the creases in your eyes, the smell of leather and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen except that maybe time may hurt to everyone, and I think of being born, the most important beginning that I cannot remember, I think of being born.

Welcome Back Front Door Mat

hey yall

Are you still there? Do you remember me? And, how do you do this again? It is my first blog post in oh-so-long. I am afraid I have lost all my readers. I am afraid of this because everything I know about blogging I learned from links in Margaret Atwood's twitter, and she says you should always blog consistently. Readers need consistency. Blogs are habits. Put your habits into a blog. It's a symbiotic relationship, you know? So in light of this, I'm going to open this window again into my life; currently.

I am thirsty. I am in my living room, with good people. I have been with good people all day. I would like to think I am prone to believing that most people are good. But we are all cynics, aren't we? Today Tyler, Ruth, Hailey, James, Tate and I went apple picking at the Jones Creek Farm. I had never been apple picking before, but now I have a box full of them on my kitchen table. I will make sauce. Apple sauce. I would like to make cider as well, but you need a cider press for that. My neighbors have a press, when I lived in Oregon we would help Nancy and Steve, in the fall, press apples into juice. I remember Nancy telling me to throw in all the apples -- even the ones with bugs. Protein, she said. The eternal joke of protein.

Tyler and Ruth are playing scrabble. I was playing with them earlier, but I was the only one keeping score. I gave up because I realized that their only motivation involved how many "pretty" words they could create. I was done once the word tada entered the board. I was done once I realized they weren't playing for points, they were comparing which words would make the best cross streets to live on. I live on Sunlit and Heron. Tada and Saint. What ever guys. I'm motivated by competition.

We do have a great living room, however. We have a great porch as well. If you are ever in the area, Emerson street, please come by. It is full of people, good wood and light.
I am happy, can you tell?
Testify.

I am going to post this without rereading it:

Today was cool and grey. The wind must have blown our hot august days right up and over the cascades. Will they come back for one last visit? No one knows now, not even the weather man.

Yesterday I was laying on my floor with my good friend computer ( no, we're not seeing each other,) and I happened to looked out the window. Along the driveway that leads to my house are maple trees. The farthest one away, I could just make out, had the tint of yellow on the tips of its leaves. Like your best guy friend from 7th grade, the one with the bleach-frosted tips. (cough cough @tyler mccabe,) It was weird to have to accept in that moment that autumn is coming for us. I don't know about you, but I just got my first real sunburn last Saturday.
I guess to see the onslaught of fall means I have to admit the secession of summer. And this summer has been one that I have waited a long time for. I mean, we all grow up dreaming of far away places. It is built into the childhood liturgy, thanks to more than just Disney and Dreamworks. But these last few months I actually got to go far, far away. I saw things that were made of magic, both the fairy-godmother kind and the dark black kind.

But now I have returned. And then it's back to Seattle. I am ready.

Welcome Back to Summer

Run;
Steady movement of hips to thighs to heels to toe.
I will miss the steady rhythm of hamstrings when I'm old.

My friend gave up his smoking during spring in preparation for summer running. Wise man. I too enjoy my breath this evening. The air is heady with august, my body works to filter through the woodsmoke, timothy hay, queen anne's lace, and blackberries turning dark in the road-side ditch. A combine rumbles to life and a bi-plane hangs low over head. What a strange Eden this is; where everything is always green yet I walk through most of it only ever touching a carpet of black tar. I have to remind myself to leave the road. Little girls grow up laughing and the only convenience store on the corner sells gasoline and porn magazines. 

I would like to say I am not an emotional person. Not because I want it to be that way, just that I expect it is true. But this doesn't keep me from being anxious, reminiscent, sentimental. Would it be strange to say that I am led to my emotions fastest through every sense that is not the sense of sight? The nose knows memories and loss. The ears are capable of great desire. But I am afraid of these eyes that are cold and calculating, taught with great care to rationally account for everything being taken in. 


I am still running and there is a man on the side of the road. I can feel him looking at me and I keep running still, because one thing you learn in Europe and South Africa is to not make eye-contact with a single man. In the end I look at him anyways, because I cannot truly forget my small-town-girl sensibilities. He is telling me something. I take out my headphones and listen harder. "Walk over here," 
"What?" I say - 
"Just walk here, please." I run a little faster because I think he is asking me to come over by him, where he is standing just off the road in the timothy hay. But then from the underside of the hay explodes a pit bull. Barking and growling, it charges me and I freeze. It snaps at my left leg and I back up, so it begins to circle me and bite at the air. My heart races and finally the owner coaxes the animal back to the side of the road. "I was asking you to walk slowly," The owner explains, like it is my fault, "She is just a year old and will attack any bikers and runners." Well good to know, and isn't this road public? Yet I walk away slowly and only pick up my original pace when I can't see him or the animal anymore. 


When I saw the pit-bull rushing me, I was afraid. I saw it's glinting eyes and open teeth and felt fear. I laugh a little now because I realize that my eyes are not incapable of emotion, like I first believed. 


My eyes are where I feel my fear. 


I am also laughing because the pit-bull scene has kind of sprung me from my earlier dreamy trance and I feel that my thought pattern was possibly a little too melodramatic. 


But I cannot shake the idea of a connection between my sight and my fears. In that connection I make a little hole and climb back through my memories to South Africa. It is no longer summer but winter and my eyes are overwhelmed with the work of rationally accounting for shack after shack crowded for miles along the busy highway. Too much Too much I think and I feel fear. Then I am walking at night in Cape Town and a black man approaches. I feel fear and then I am overwhelmed as he passes me, I am overwhelmed by shame and confusion and the unreliability of these things that we call eyes, yeux, ojos, so that we may better understand the reality of the world. 

Walking in Cape Millay, Part One

okay.

For those reading, the distance between me and my home has been extended greatly for the next several months. A sea-distance away from three sisters kingdom.

I am falling in love with South Africa.
Cape Millay is a community on the west side of Capetown. It is tucked away past the Museum Mile, past the wild nights of Long Street, and past Queen Victoria's Botanical Gardens. A few sky scrapers rise from the pavement, but do not dwarf Table Mountain which holds court over the city. The mountain does seem to watch over everything - people refer to Capetown as the Mother City because from a distance the rocky skyline adopts the figure of a reclining woman, cradling the city. It is comforting. What a figure to take shape over a place that has also doubled as the boiling pot for a violent clash of politics, history, and humanity.
Cape Millay is about a ten minute walk from The Backpack - the hostel where I am staying. Row after row of two story cement houses nestle against cobble stone streets that push up against the side of the mountain. (Aproximately the mother's neck.) Each house is painted a bright pastel color that compliments the whole neighborhood ascetic. When I say pastel, do not imagine kitchsy easter-egg adds from Fred Meyer. Instead, these colors adopt a stoic dignity when carefully painted throughout the neighborhood. You can feel the care and time put in to each house. They have stood here for ages, but the pain is as fresh as yesterday. Pinkgreenturquoisepinktanyellowgreen. "This wouldn't work if one house was by itself," Tyler says next to me. "But together, this creates something beautiful." He is right, and we walk further in - entranced by the colors, the linen strung between windows to dry, the dog sleeping in the shady doorway. In the distance the call to prayer is heard from the top of a mint-green mosque.

By the Way, I'm In South Africa.

It is raining. Thick and heavy drops fall as if previously held in some giant's hands. Maybe Gods. We; 16 students, two adults, and a seven year old, run up the stone stairs of the Cape Town art museum. We've escaped the torrential downpour for now.




"Ja, there can be four seasons in one day in South Africa," We are warned by a tour guide.



June means winter for the residents of Capetown, but that doesn't keep the parks from being full of bright, juicy flowers and big game ducks with bright yellow eyes. The interior of the art museum echos the colors of the park outside, except for one exhibit. This section of the museum is dedicated to the black and white photography of Ranjith Kelly, an 85 year old artist from Durban.



In the last 85 years, Kelly has held a lens to the extreme climates of social, political, and economic change in South Africa. One picture in particular caught my attention. It depicted a man and woman, emerging from a public building. You can easily tell they are a couple - frozen in their walk; they lean towards each other. The man is Colored, the woman is White. The implications of this relationship are spelled out in the caption underneath; A couple exiting jailhouse after breaking Immorality Act: 1960.



Immorality act. When I was young, I was taught that being immoral meant stealing, or maybe hiding my little sister's barbies under her bed. As far as I could tell, these two individuals had commited neither attrocities. Wikipedia had the definition: "The Immorality Act (1950–1985) was one of the first apartheid laws in South Africa. It attempted to forbid all sexual relations between whites and non-whites."



In the museum, I sit down on the bench accross from the photograph. "What is morality?' I wonder. The word itself is an abstraction. Purity. an abstraction. There seems to be a strong link drawn between these two words in apartheid days. To be moral is to be pure, and vica versa. Intrinsicly woven together, these terms slip into the political rhetoric of world leaders seeking justify their ethnic cleansing or segregation policies.



Well, what are the consequences when these abstractions are projected onto people? The "Pure" are celebrated and justified. The "Impure" are de-humanized and repressed.



There is an obvious problem with this catagorizing. Human beings can never be fully contained by legislation. It's like trying to hold the whole ocean in your fist; eventually the moon calls it home. The tide ebbs out and over the crevaces, spilling out below. The whole process is impossible and unretainable.



But through the lens of powerful Purity, this is "defilement." Mixing seen as evil. New creations seen as evil. Reconcilliation seen as evil. These absolutists, these purticans, they are blind to the true implications of Imago Dei; In the image of God, Man was created.



Man; a word that isn't an abstraction. The word man is earth, love, hate, and as coloured as the flowers growing in the gardens of Capetown. What a blending of life! Thus South Africa is seeking to reconcile this human combination. However, they are not revenging the violence put upon the coloureds or the blacks through war or more violence. They are not creating a new enemy abroad. The opposite of an evil king is not a different king. It is an entirely different governance altogether; maybe one we have never heard of.



Maybe soon so much of the ocean will leak out of that blind fist. And when nothing is left for it to hold on to, what will happen? Outside of the fist lovers are reunited, families restored under one roof; A father kneels in the dust and holds his daugther again.

A Coffee Heart, and the Plentitude of God

 Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

                               Pied Beauty

    Glory be to God for dappled things—
        For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
    Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
        Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

    All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
        Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
            With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
    He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change: 

                                                Práise hím.