BE MORE
Are you the love letter unwritten?
The song left abandoned in the neck of the guitar?
Are you the moments that pass between strangers
as neither says “hello”?
(Source: dallasclayton)
When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences - their insignificant, everyday experiences - so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others - and how many there are! - are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much.
You see that circular dome on the outermost left? I always get this feeling I want to stand in there like a Byzantine princess, even if it has no relevancy to the architecture whatsoever.
Swallowed dreams
February 5, 2011
The other day See Ann asked me what my dream job would be and I said something along the lines of working in a community cafe with poetry and music and art. Then I thought: how fucking cliched. As much as I’m in love with the idea of it, and know of its beauty and healing powers. Living the past year in a (near) vacuum seems to have suck the appetite of charging for my ideals. Ten months ago I would never have said anything like that. But lately I feel terribly selfish, in loving the people that surround me, let alone those beyond my bubble. Nowadays all I want to do is work in some coffeehouse, speak to strangers and dissect what they order - if they’re safe like a BLT, or healthy like a banana milkshake.
Sometimes I think of C/redo C/afe, where I used to spend my lunchtimes meeting strange men and women. In a basement somewhere off the richest street in town, you exchange awkward, halting words across the communal table with a whole bunch of vagabonds: Me + You + Everybody Else. We are all travelling through this fleeting thing called life, anyway. For the most part, maintaining eye contact was the hardest bit. Then there was Lju/ca, who had Russian blood and bounced with positive energy. Her easy warmth made me feel like I belonged, when it was really her home and not yet mine. She wrote down my email and came in a week later and told us she tried to jump off the bridge.
I remember being determined never to become a social worker. I met a social worker by the name of Bec in my first year of uni and I still have her number. She made an incredible impression on me. They all do. (Okay, I lie). Yet I didn’t want the relationship of a professional, helping out a client. I still don’t, and it scares me that this next two years I will be learning to do just that. Why Can’t You Be My Friend I Can Help You Like That? But I soon realised that even in intentional community, you are never truly as equals, even if you yearn that to be the ideal. We cannot fix people overnight, in a year, or even four years. Gin once told us the story of a girl they took in and loved for 12 years before her life resembled anything near whole. It saddens me that the miracle stories are mostly the exception.
These days I go by how it is most easiest to live (even if not by choice). I think I would have had to fight for myself to go live in intentional community somewhere. Only those that can afford to live the bourgeois dream choose the bohemian way. I hate to think I have idealised that life, all this while. And then there’s timing. Perhaps I’m simply not ready to commit, even if I can’t imagine a life more giving and fulfilling. But it’s okay for now, even if I haven’t simplified my life to two bags and a pair of shoes. It’s always the hardest to live with people you most take for granted, even if they are the only people I would have period cramps for.
I thought of the similarities of complaints - always selfishness, always blindness - and the old psychological truth that what we complain of in others, others will complain of in us.
This is intensely feminine, but it’s so fierce!
(via highheelshighstandards)
(via nopantsinthesepockets)
Moving, divorce, death, financial turmoil. Those are the top stressors in a life. And this is what you get every freaking year in the Army.
(Source: New York Magazine)
Stella
cos it makes/made me wonder
what happened to u
if im allowed to say stuff like that..
I switch to my Gmail tab and I see her online on Gchat, with her status set to red on Busy, and a message saying “maybe I wont lose my faith in America after all”. I ask her why… and after a not very fruitful chat, she gives me the above.
She speaks such wistful words sometimes, and I like how she is so upfront with her feelings, how she does not bottle it up but instead bursts with a frightful load of emotion that even I cannot take it when I shrink into my lackadaisical self. I love that she can tell me how she feels and I want to tousle with her about it, because I have never known anyone as real as her, and who fights for her people like she does. When I left for America and I couldn’t look her in the eye as she whispered a farewell song to me, I knew then that here was someone who loved me deeply even after I’ve been awfully cold and say dismissive things thinking it will simply bounce off the thick skin that she has the strangest ability to wear. I am forever in love with my friends, but it is her that evokes most admiration from me, in how she can avoid social niceties but be such an incredible Friend who can give so much even when you don’t respond in the same terms.
It occurred to me last week when she turned twenty-five, that I have spent most of the past year without her. The Year Without Stella. Which is funny because I’d always held her at arms length and fought for my right to not tell my deepest darkest thoughts, yet when she is gone (and not vice versa) - I inadvertently think, gosh, I need this person in my life. And not in a I Cannot Live Without You sort of sense, but a I’m Actually Really Glad You’re Here way, because, hey - I miss you.
