Today at 12 noon my identity will once again shift as I enter the ranks of the unemployed. I have been looking forward to this moment with both great excitement and fear for as long as I have been in Boston. One can only hope that better things are in store for the short and long-term future.

Many years ago, an immigrant from Ireland of my parents' generation said to me while talking about why people leave their homelands,

"One cannot live on beauty alone."

At the time, I had just finished my graduate program and was working about 3 different jobs in Chicago, none of which provided health insurance. Simultaneously my immune system was crashing and I was very very sick. Downtrodden worker bee that I was, I accepted that statement without any argument and thought, gee, maybe you better settle down and accept a full-time job in every sense of "acceptance". It is the practical thing to do. Beauty? Beauty doesn't pay the medical bills or rent.

Recently, I mentioned this statement to my partner and asked rather plaintively, what do you think, can one live on beauty alone? Kort's response, what are you talking about? Of course you can! Coming from him, I was filled with a great confidence about the future. There are compromises and sacrifices made with every decision, but as Gen-X'ers, and as products of a Naropan education, our decisions are based on something outside of our parents' and our predecessors' value systems. In the end what is there really, what reason to live, but Beauty, and Love, and the Path.

I have been reflective recently of the cursed blessings I have been the recipient of over the years. More than one semi angry/confused person in various break-up contexts has said, "I hope you find what you're looking for," or "I hope you find what brings you happiness," as if it didn't or wouldn't exist out there, as if I am blinded in some utopian and delusional search. Life, in all of its painfulness and its joys is an exploration, the end point ultimately just a guide post. As a Libran and a wood rabbit, I would certainly feel more confident if I had a clearer glimpse of the adventures ahead, and yet this is the moment to leap, to simply receive what is given.

I leave you with this poem by Michael Ondaatje from his poetry collection, Handwriting (Vintage 1998):

Last Ink

In certain countries aromas pierce the heart and one dies
half waking in the night as an owl and a murderer's cart go by

the way someone in your life will talk out love and grief
then leave your company laughing.

In certain languages the calligraphy celebrates
where you met the plum blossom and moon by chance

-the dusk light, the cloud pattern,
recorded always in your heart

and the rest of the world- chaos,
circling your winter boat.

Night of the Plum and Moon.

Years later you shared it
on a scroll or nudged
the ink onto stone
to hold the vista of a life.

A condensary of time in the mountains
-your rain-swollen gate, a summer
scarce with human meeting.
Just bells from another village.

The memory of a woman walking down stairs.

*

Life on an ancient leaf
or a crowded 5th-century seal

this mirror-world of art
-lying on it as if a bed.

When you first saw her,
the night of moon and plum,
you could speak of this to no one.
You cut your desire
against a river stone.
You caught yourself
in a cicada-wing rubbing,
lightly inked.
The indelible darker self.

A seal, the Masters said,
must contain bowing and leaping,
"and that which hides in waters."

Yellow, drunk with ink,
the scroll unrolls to the west
a river journey, each story
an owl in the dark, its child-howl

unreachable now
-that father and daughter,
that lover walking naked down blue stairs
each step jarring the humming from her mouth.

I want to die on your chest but not yet,
she wrote, sometime in the 13th century
of our love

before the yellow age of paper

before her story became a song,
lost in imprecise reproductions

until caught in jade,

whose spectrum could hold the black greens
the chalk-blue of her eyes in daylight.

*

Out altering love, our moonless faith.

Last ink in pen.

My body on this hard bed.

The moment in the heart
where I roam restless, searching

for the thin border of the fence
to break through or leap.

Leaping and bowing.