I don't think I can underestimate the effect of Sex and the City on the BF. The fact that Carrie Bradshaw is a writer on the series... I think there is something key here about her profession - teaching other's to tell their own stories.

Yoga - I have practiced Anusara, Ana Forest, Iyengar, Hatha, Bikram, and Ashtanga. I finally have a sense of what these different schools focus on and what works and doesn't for me. It's taken me a long time to really develop a personal practice, but now it's become a part of the routine, much like writing. The heart was missing from Iyengar for me - both the heart and spirit. Bikram is a good workout, but it also leaves something to be desired. Can anyone explain to be the difference between Ashtanga in the Pathabi Jois tradition vs. the Patanjali lineage?

I transcribed a great oral history over the break of an interview with Al Young, a Chinese-American world championship race car driver. He donated his race car, the Challenger, to MOHAI and was interviewed about this object and his experiences in the sport of race car driving. Al talked about having an undiagnosed learning disability and doing poorly in junior high and high school (after being identified as a gifted learner in elementary school). He talks about his ADHD and how he had to learn to read while walking and moving to be able to focus. Yet this disability came into play in helping him in race car driving. When the lights would flash for the race to start, you have a thousandth of a second to leave the starting position, and for him, it would all play out in slow motion. His oral history talks about women in the sport, not just bathing suit models, but female race car drivers who beat men, and how they had a distinct psychological advantage over the men - because it's not a sport about "strength." Cars interest me about as much as sports, but this was a wonderful oral history of one of Asian America's little known heroes.

Reading Working the Woods,Working the Sea from Empty Bowl. Poems from treeplanters, loggers, and salmon fisherman, a literature of the "back-to-the-land" movement. One of the writers in the book tells of his days planting trees in word patterns to write out radical and poetic messages. It reminded me of David Antin's cloud poems, but ever more radical and activist. A sort of performance poetry meets land art meets environmental activism.

Mike O'Connor's The Basin is the best book I've read all year.

Tomorrow is 2009. Cripes!

Classes for the winter:
- Collections Management with lab at the Wing Luke Asian Museum.
- Thesis credits for continued work on the chop suey project.
- Educational Leadership

Here's to setting an intent: I want to be in Taos in Summer 2010 at the Wurlitzer.

It is hard to find a healer. The person I wanted to refer to my friend in Leonardtown, MD, has uprooted to Rochester, NY. The person I wanted to refer to my friend in Austin, relocated to Dallas, buying the practice of the woman who wanted Kort to take over her business. She left Dallas to find a cure for her aging boyfriend's macular degeneration and imminent blindness. Sharon absorbed the business of a Japanese acupuncturist who left Dallas to go to medical school in Mexico, to only drop out and later return to Texas. My acupuncturist left to pan for gold in Durango after considering a romantic stint on a cruise ship fighting Somali pirates. My current healer is MIA - he wasn't really taking new patients, and is in the process of closing a yoga studio. This all teaches me something - it's not right to keep moving Kort and I around - as I have been given the lead in the last year or two. Kort needs to be rooted in a place to build healing relationships with his clients - to lose your healer is a painful experience, at best, a difficult transition. I think I've lived it too many times this year to feel like we can keep doing it.

Thanks to David Horton for publishing an excerpt of Adamantine in Work 12 which is now available as a PDF file here. I've got tons of contributor's copies - if you want a hard copy, give me a shout.

New Year's Resolutions

I re-set my goals every year. This upcoming year, the list seems lengthy...

- drink more water
- eat less processed sugar and wheat
- read more (poetry)
- be able to lift my body weight/improve my chaturanga
- take up/practice a musical instrument (piano, guitar, vox)
- keep the plants healthy
- achieve unassisted headstand w/out wall
- learn to cook 5-10 new recipes/standards
- be more involved with sangha
- revisit Port Townsend
- stay open-hearted
- publish Adamantine
- funding from Artist Trust
- love well
- visit parents more
- finish school
- continue with oral history work
- make more fotos
- take another retreat
- develop my prose
- reconsider my relationship to social networking and the internet
- go off the grid more often
- explore new collaborations w/ old friends
- revisit Colorado

A very good poetry sale at SPD.

Spent my last morning in Port Townsend before K drove in to pick me up before the big blizzard dumps snow on the peninsula. It is another world from Seattle, indeed.

Wildlife sightings: 7 deer, numerous crows, 1 pigeon, several seagulls, 1 starfish
Bug rescues: 2 ladybugs, 3 houseflies

I stayed in SUD cabin 261, great light, a cozy little cottage, much better heated than our house in Seattle.

I can see myself living in few places - a handful of places over the years have called to me - Port Townsend, is definitely one of them.

Reading at Northwinds got cancelled due to inclement weather. A good reason to go back.

Thanks to new friends Mike O'Connor and Ling-hui Liu for the good company during my short stay.

Adamantine is finished. I'm happy with it, and tremendously proud. The minute that all shifted, I relaxed into vacation mode. Scribbled notes for a few prose/family essays, but having finished what I set out to do, I felt at ease finally.

The next two quarters will go quickly and be pretty intense, to finish up in June at UW, in the nick of time.

Onwards!

passing

my friend mourns
each day since her babe
was born,

Liam’s first day
on earth, his sixth
month of life,

this much
self-reflection
I can’t fathom, when

I catch sight of
your wool-capped figure
descending the snow-

covered path winding
away from my rooms,
aware then that

there will be a day
when you no longer
climb the stone steps

back to this heart

manuscript complete
the working retreat becomes
overdue vacation

***

too much talk during
savasana when a body
scan would be enough

***

after first/last Nia
class, feeling all the wisdom
traditions diluted

What happens to snow when it falls in the ocean? Why doesn't it freeze?

I regret not bringing a hat and snow shoes to Port Townsend.

I found an ancient Hitachi black & white tv buried in the bedroom closet of my cabin. Trying to watch the season finale of Biggest Loser without any picture and just sound, is like eating cake made out of Nutrasweet or some god awful substitute. Just not the same.

The fireplace in the Ft Worden Commons is operated by gas - those logs in the fireplace are fake! Someone just flipped the switch.

I took a Nia class at Madrona. It wasn't for me.

rope trick

picture a line in the sand
then imagine that edge
as a hempen rope

move it near or apart
from you, or lift the border
& lay it down

around your double,
so that you merge to make
a new center

Well, Adamantine has been undergoing some Frankenstein/samurai surgery. It's now a very different animal, yet very much the same.

What I've been reading:

Sara Suleri's Meatless Days - linked essay collection, highly lyric, somewhat overwrought. Compelling family stories exploring love and loss, obscured by the intellectual quality of the prose.

CS Perez's Unincorporated Territory - magnificent

Bachelard's Poetics of Fire - the poetry of intimate spaces: houses, rooms, and corners

Mauss' The Gift - a study of gift exchange, Lewis Hyde's book by the same name is much more relevant to poetry and creativity, though this book traces a number of cultures that engage in gift exchange

Sontag's On Photography - essays on Diane Arbus, August Sander, and the authority of photography

Joseph Goldstein on Buddhism practice - more

Cherrie Moraga plays

Note from the department of programming

My best friend and I are planning a blog swap. I will not say when she will be guest blogging, as I don't know when. You may or may not notice.

new haiku

stranded w/out nail
clippers, I resort to using
the kitchen shears

new gelato flavor
at the corner market,
small town pleasures

why must frozen
yogurt in Seattle taste sour
as normal yogurt?

wanting to reach through
the phone & pull him close
here next to me

nearly invisible:
the carrot yellow lotion
splattered on mustard walls

emotional eating
not just for boredom but
writer’s block too

panning for gold
in Durango, he sets up
his first business

dissed by Santa on
the Polar Express, he gets
into the Xmas spirit

leafing thru lit journals
I want to find something to
respond to; keep reading

after so many
sleepless nights, I’ve slept in
almost every bed

Revision

blind spot

when I turn back to stare
at the man poised at the street

crossing, long after
the light has gone green

only then do I see
the round sticker affixed

to his chest

I am deaf and blind
in big white letters

paling in comparison to
his outfit: the oversized purple shirt

beneath the orange safety vest
in his right hand a retracted

walking stick; the way
he doesn’t move, lost

in thought, I think,
the way I lose

myself in daydreaming
dumbstruck, I am

without words when
I realize there is no other

way to communicate
but through touch &

I do not have permission

when I lay my hand
upon his arm; see him

give a start; cross
traffic, just as the red palm


begins to flash, I
place myself between

his body & the hostile line
of humming cars queuing;

when we reach the other side
he’s ready for me

to let go
this is the practice

to mirror thought
with action, what I wish

for every effort, each
poem, this intention

why I like Mike O’Connor

when I ask Mike if he can
give me a lift he answers
SURE! w/ an easy smile,

Let me find a ride first –
my car’s in the shop.

this is not my story

cereal boxes in the kitchen
cupboard nibbled through
the sudden appearance of

droppings, a mouse in
the house, her lover says
it has a very tiny heart,

you need only chase
it until it tires; he knows
the hearts of small creatures

you see, having chased down
a few chickens in his youth,
accustomed to how birds wear out

easily - the human heart is
a wholly different animal,
we must know when to give in

before the other gives up

altar

change comes
whether or not
I hold

true inside
how I see
sometimes

a room/poem/altar
things set in concrete
fixed as though nothing

can ever speak –
the iron-coiled figure
I join to my shrine

a keepsake that asked
for a just memorial,
to mirror his place

inside the stone of
my heart the stone
of my heart

requiescat

on campus, co-eds mark
remembrance by wearing
“Free Amanda” shirts,

localizing their support
for the classmate jailed
in Perugia, entangled in

the murder of her flatmate

***

in the center of Red Square
the flower vigils have stopped
no more bouquets mark the spot

where In Soo Chun doused
himself in gasoline &
set himself on fire

a memory like a burning body
can’t be put out with water
bottles/jackets/fire extinguishers

***

that last week in October,
long after they pronounce him
dead at Harborview,

I hunt for his name
the death of a 61-year-old
immigrant laborer

won’t make headline news
unnamed in the UW Daily,
I find his identity in The Stranger

learn he was assigned
to the Ethnic Studies building
to empty trash baskets

scrub toilets, mop floors
when no one is looking

I lie down to sleep

***

what part of him failed
out there, the young initiate
who believed what he was

seeing: the death ritual
unfolding before his eyes
contact made

a moment before
cauterized flesh covered
ninety percent of Chun’s body

the police made him
stop praying over the corpse
noted him on the record as

a “person of interest”

***

these messages that arrive
from the administration:
170 million dollar shortfall

& twenty percent cuts
school-wide, the campus
health clinic extends

its hours, not its outreach
to accommodate those that
are affected, what counsel

mandated to turn long-term
cases outside the community
meet new patient quotas

***

we save a few
we lose a few

we lose a few too many
we lose a few too many

we lose

on the dirt road leading out
of Tamarindo a roadside
gasolinero puts up a custom-
painted display: stylized

orange flames, a flexed
bicep – bilingual the seller
reasoned to command
a better title

Pura Vida

Pura vida is what
the shopkeeper’s wife says
when Tom makes an offer
on a different sign, folk art

to his eyes, the weather-
beaten board, faded, full
of typos, to the Ticans
just another gringo loco

doesn’t even check
first with her man knowing
argument will ensue; let some
other actor lay down

in this gender war, cultural
contretemps over what seemed
an easy enough barter: a new sign
to replace the old –

picture a fistful of flaming
wrenches scripted in both
ingles & Spanish

a perfectly good sign
gone missing, the patriarch’s
shock to find himself cuckolded
by his woman and this outsider

demands that justice be restored,
along with his property;
Tom wracks his loss
up to a few days of labor

at least he’s not wedded
to this grease monkey who now
owns not one, but two signs
and just one shop

semiotics

the wooden notice hanging
in my friend’s Brooklyn 3-story,
hand-painted in childish
block lettering states simply

SE REPARA LLANTAS

Centrum

Not just a multi-vitamin...Centrum is an artist residency program in Fort Worden, two miles from downtown Port Townsend. My renovated cabin is a close neighbor to Copper Canyon and the Madrona Mind-Body Institute. I have a view of the ocean and from my front room, I can see the waters moving. I've been reading, sleeping, and doing some writing, but there are some definite shifts happening in my creative voice. The spaciousness has allowed me to arrive at a point where I was finally able to process why I left anthropology for museum studies.

Port Townsend is a Victorian seaport town full of hippies, retirees, and interesting people with names like Tarani, Nala, Tinker and Sweethouse. If I thought the Gene Juarez Academy in Seattle attracted people with interesting names (they actually choose their own studio names - i.e. Astrid, Stella, Gwynneth) - Port Townsend attracts a whole different breed. The town has four excellent thrift/consignment shops and a food coop. Multiple yoga studios and CAM practitioners in abundance. Small town living, good for the country-hearted country mouse.

salivating at
ropes of seaweed
washed up on the waterfront

that angry fly just
gets angrier, can’t see how
the door just opened

after three years of
practice, I kick into head-
stand, my spine holding

first day of writing
retreat: burn sage, invoke muse
& walk the land

day two of writing
retreat: I sleep & read
& sleep some more

looking before
leaping is not quite the same
as just simply leaping

warming my cabin
metal heat coils rising like
Van Der Rohe’s corn cobs

like a game of
musical chairs, trying to find
the writing sweet spot

starting to consider
caffeine options after over-
sleeping three days straight

On December 18, Northwind Reading Series will feature Shin Yu Pai and Tim McNulty. The readings will start at 7 pm in the Northwind Arts Center, 2409 Jefferson Street, Port Townsend, WA.

Shin Yu Pai is the author of seven books of poetry, including Haiku Not Bombs (Booklyn Artists Alliance), Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks), Sightings: Selected Works [2000 - 2005] (1913 Press), and Equivalence (La Alameda). Her work is anthologized in America Zen: A Gathering of Poets and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry. She lives in Seattle and is currently involved in Centrum's Creative Residency Program.

Tim McNulty is a poet, essayist, and nature writer. He is the author of two collections of poetry, In Blue Mountain Dusk (Pleasure Boat Studio) and Pawtracks (Copper Canyon Press), and eight chapbooks, including Last Year's Poverty (Brooding Heron Press), Reflected Light (Tangram Press), Through High Still Air, A Season at Sourdough Mountain (Pleasure Boat Studio), and out this month from Port Townsend's Empty Bowl, Cloud Studies. Some Ducks, A Cycle of Poems for my Daughter, is due from Pleasure Boat Studio early next year.

His award-winning books on nature include: The Art of Nature, Washington's Wild Rivers, Olympic National Park: A Natural History, Washington's Mount Rainier National Park , Grand Teton: Where Lightning Walks, and Grand Canyon: Window on the River of Time. Tim has received the Washington Governor's Writers Award and the National Outdoor Book Award. He lives with his family in the foothills of Washington’s Olympic Mountains.

The readings are free and open to the public. Donations are gladly accepted to support Northwind, a nonprofit organization dedicated to connecting the arts to our community

I leave on Sunday for a 14-day retreat in Port Townsend at the Centrum Center in Fort Worden National Park. Reading at Northwind Arts on December 18 at 7 p.m. with Tim McNulty. I am a bit nervous about the accommodations - I don't know if I will have my own cottage/space, or if it will be one big central building housing multiple sleeping rooms for AIRs with a shared bath and kitchen. Ideally, I'd like my own space, like in P-town or MacDowell. Where my space is my space to fill with words, noise, mess, and whatever. But that's not always how it works out. But things worked out pretty well at Soul Mountain last year, when Chip Livingston was my downstairs neighbor and we shared a kitchen and bath. Either way, extreme privacy or semi-private could be just fine and I'll need to be flexible, but I will keep my fingers crossed that I can lounge around the building in my sleepwear if I choose to...

Last day of my internship at Densho today. I got to close out my quarter by interviewing the lovely and amazing Kay Aiko Abe. Here's a woman who's been feeding the homeless in Seattle for 17 years, completely unfunded by any charitable organizations. She uses her social security payments to buy food to help feed the homeless. She is in her 80s and has had an inspired life. Interned at Minidoka in her teens. When they got out of the camp, her family had nowhere to go and she felt a profound sense of homelessness. This early experience helps her to identify with Seattle's poorest populations. She left the Densho studio to go pick up chicken to cook for tonight's offering. Four nights a week, Monday through Thursday, she serves 200-300 people and has rotating teams of volunteers from area churches to help cook and serve. Kay's eye sparkle with light and compassion and absolutely lit up my spirit. Even in a recession, she said, they have enough food. They never run out of food. I don't share Kay's religious faith, but her stories renewed my faith in basic goodness and doing good.