Along with formerly believing in the necessity of suffering on the path to actualizing one's dream, I also resolutely accepted the crippling existential loneliness that is emptiness. Today, I experienced an inversion of that emptiness, which looked like the overbrimming fullness of the heart broken open by love. Now, it seems to me that emptiness seems to come from attachment and grasping to the fullness, as it slips out of the fingertips. There is nothing to do but let go - love will renew itself endlessly in all of its shapelessness, and there is nothing to mourn but rather the celebration of a deep gratitude.

Laugh more, cry less.

'Cos I've read your horoscope
and now I've given up all hope.

I reread Antoine St. Exupery's Le Petit Prince this weekend, after somebody else told me that a colleague had identified his totem animal as the fox. Foxes are usually associated with cunning, tricksterism and slyness. I'm getting to know this person, so I felt an initial sense of alarm... thinking in particular of Japanese fox spirits. But when I came home on Saturday, I pulled the childhood tale off of my shelves and remembered that there is much to love in the fox - much to be learned in the development of new friendships and connections and the taming of the heart.

Alec Finlay is composing a Dictionary of Imagined Flowers, that include such delicate beauties as "fox petals" and "codswallop." Contact him if you have contributions.

John has been experimenting at his site with a project called "1,000 views of a girl singing." I've been keeping an eye on developments, but I admit that it wasn't until I heard this NPR piece on the game of telephone as carried out by indie musicians, that the concept of improvisation and adaptation completely crystallized for me.

I've been reading Clarissa Pinkola Estes "Woman who Run with Wolves" for the last two weeks and am about 2/3 of the way through. Last night, I happened upon a passage about the tradition of descansos. When I drive along the road and see white crosses planted at the roadside - that is a descanso - a resting place, the site of where someone's life force came to an early termination. As a metaphor, the descanso also reminds me of a number of anti-war demonstrations that I've seen at UW and on the lawn at Greenlake - fake tombstones planted into the grass symbolizing the soldiers who've died in Iraq along the names of the known dead Iraqis. Markers.

Estes has a great therapeutic/creative exercise in her book which involves the mapping out of a timeline of all the places from infancy to the present in which a woman has experienced moments of spiritual death - all the places that ask for healing and light, love and forgiveness. I very rarely follow thru on these sorts of exercises, but it was one that compelled me and so I mapped out my own timeline and was surprised by the themes/types of woundings and the number of them. Events that I had forgotten. It was revealing too to chart the recent events in the last year as moments of death. Estes talks about shame and secrets and how we move beyond these kinds of wounds. These are the events that I am glad to have moved beyond that are no longer secrets that I hold inside:

getting eyeglasses (age 8)
having my eyeglasses shattered by Jimmy Holmes' bullet (age 10)
getting sent to the principal's office for staging a revolt (age 12)
dropping acid (age 14)
cutting (age 14-16)
lying to my parents about boys (age 16-17)
getting busted for drugs by my parents (age 17)
first car accident (age 17)
getting assaulted on the street at BU (age 19)
taking mushrooms (age 19)
getting rejected by Keith W b/c I wasn't Xian and/or white (age 19)
having a long-term relationship w/ a bi-polar, drug-dealing street kid (age 20-21)
getting locked out of my apartment by my roommate at BU (age 21)
getting kicked out of my apartment at Naropa by my roommate (age 21)
every guy I fooled around with at Naropa (age 21)
having a tumor (age 22)
dating a married man (age 22)
getting molested by my chiropractor (age 23)
hooking up with a bad writing mentor based on race (age 23)
my job at the Poetry Center of Chicago (age 22-23)
my job at Columbia College (age 23)
my job at the Dallas Museum of Arts (age 24-25)
the break-up of my parents (age 30-32)
breaking with my yoga teachers (age 31)
the UW anthropology program (age 31-32)
leaving a toxic friendship with a girlfriend in my program (age 32)
breaking with a former mentor (age 32)

This is only a small section of the timeline - still so many things to transform.

I met a wild woman today. She is in her 70s and volunteers at the Cancer Society Thrift Shop where I like to shop. A man came in to drop off some paperwork and asked her how her car has been running. She said the only place she drives it to is "church and the liquor store." She's owned it for 14 years and it only has 50,000 miles on it. The juxtaposition of church and liquor store, an interesting one. She rang me up with a Wednesday senior discount and a wink and was sweet as pie.

wadded wet underpants
abandoned at shoreline,
white wifebeater submerged

beneath water, beer cans
bobbing slowly to surface
summer in Seattle,

families overtake
Greenlake - no one practices
tai chi on the beach

My highschool classmate and spelling bee nemesis Aquafortis, writer of YA fiction, is in town with her husband for a wedding. Met up with Sarah in Capitol Hill for sushi at Aoki and gabbed about academic politics, the oppression of grad school, and the merits of Japanese wasabi vs. the horseradish version of what we have stateside. The weather in Seattle has been unbelievably amazing. I want to live outdoors all summer long. It was great to see my friend, grown up and married, happy and at ease with the world and with a wonderful life partner. Sarah was two years younger than the rest of my highschool class, which made her about 15 when she graduated and went off to Berkeley. I had a hard time striking out on my own at 17 - it takes a very long time to figure out who you are - a lifetime - and to find someone to walk that path with you. It's crystal clear when people belong together.

The new issue of Damn the Caesars arrived in my mailbox today.

The issue features work by Lisa Samuels • Alan Gilbert • Meg Foulkes • Stacy Szymaszek • Matvei Yankelevich • Hoa Nguyen • Simon Pettet • Aaron Lowinger • mIEKAL aND • Linda Russo • Tom Leonard • Peter Makin • C.J. Martin • Hugo Garcia Manríquez • Billy Mills • Richard Kostelanetz • Harry Gilonis • Erica Van Horn • Gerry Loose • Shin Yu Pai & Andrew Schelling • Catherine Walsh

NY Reading Report

I had a good time at the Think Coffee reading - I'd heard conflicting reports about the venue - the size of Tom's kitchen, attached to a bookstore... turns out it is a wonderful, spacious venue with stage area and sound hookups and no bookstore, but a small bookcase of books for browsing. Booklyn bought free wine for everyone in the audience and the majority of the crowd were Pen & Cup Series regulars - there must have been 40-50 people in the crowd, with the number of people that we didn't know, far exceeding the people that we did know. My buddy Larry from art school was in town installing a show in Chinatown and came with his friend Brian Doyle. Afterwards, we caught up briefly at Dojo and then I headed to the Noho Star.


Tom Gilroy reading from Haiku Not Bombs. Tom is the director and writer of Spring Forward and works on a political commentary show called Shoot the Messenger.


Jim McKay reading. Jim made the movie Everyday People. It is a must see.


Patrick So, man of medicine. Patrick brought the largest crowd with him - his mates from his tennis league.

In the end, the event far exceeded my expectations of it. And the trip to NY in general was like a mini-dose of being on retreat at MacD - in that, NY is a different world. I saw about half of my creative community - people who live very alternative lives and make a different set of choices than my friends in Texas or Seattle. The possibilities exist in NY to work part-time in the creative fields and to block out the extra days for studio work. I need to never forget the commitment that I've made to being an artist first.

I don't love traveling anymore - the flight from West to East Coast seems interminable. I used to travel looking for the place where I thought could be home someday - these are the places I end up returning to over and over again: Santa Fe, Chicago, and now Seattle. Most places I live in twice - the need to reframe a place long after I've fled it in lieu of processing a feeling. I don't have a lot of attachments or fond memories of New York, though some of my favorite people now live there, as well as people I dread running into. I don't like to put myself in situations anymore where there is dread. I have memories of the breakdown of several relationships in New York. I never even lived in New York, but this is perhaps what I have come to associate New York with.

things to do in NYC

- lunch with Ferenc on Wednesday
- lunch with David on Thursday
- Turner show at the Metropolitan
- coffee with Stephen
- preview of Larry's opening at White on White at gallery Number Thirty-Five

Wednesday in the Big City

Haiku Not Bombs Book Release Party

Featuring:
Shin Yu Pai
Tom Gilroy
Jim McKay
Patrick So
Rick Roth

July 9, 2008, 8 pm
Think Coffee, 248 mercer street, New York, NY

The authors of Haiku Not Bombs celebrate the release of Booklyn's newest title with a reading by several contributors.

Sponsored by The Pen and Cup Reading Series

The book I am reading on the five wisdom energies (buddha families), suggests going to shops, festivals or bookstores, when needing a dose of abundance/ratna energy. I take comfort in places like grocery stores and book shops and being around strange people though I usually have no interest in talking to strangers ... K works on Saturdays, so I went to Third Place Books in Ravenna, down the street from our house. It's nice to not be stuck indoors writing lengthy term papers or reading desperately to stay caught up with coursework. I suppose my outing was a somewhat leisurely activity, but it's unclear to me whether on an energetic level, I was working on masking or enhancing my dis-ease...

I sorted through the remainders table and found Kev Young's Jelly Roll deeply discounted, along with a gorgeous visual-text collab/artist's edition by Ben Marcus and painter Matthew Ritchie produced by Artspace. Went over to the vis art section and discovered two full price editions of the Post Secret project - Post Secret is a moving project that was started by a guy named Frank who is not an artist but who had a terrific idea. He recalled being a kid and sending himself a postcard from camp to his home address. When he returned home, he received this dispatch from himself written at a different point of time and found the event cathartic. So Frank made up about 3,000 blank, pre-addressed postcards and gave them to strangers and friends who were charged with writing their secrets and decorating these dispatches. The digital version is here. I sat and read through the first catalog for about an hour, reading through secrets of loss, shame, insecurity, fear, and love, and unrequited love. I was most deeply moved by a note that was sent to the project organizer from a woman who had made 6 postcards with the intention of sending them to Frank. She had written down secrets she had never shared with her boyfriend. Instead of sending them, she left them on the pillow next to her boyfried, while he slept, and went to work. Her boyfriend showed up at work later that morning and asked her to marry him.

It made me think about the secrets I keep and the secrets that others carry. I come from a family of people where it is impossible to get a straight answer from anyone about anything. Though lately, that situation seems to have settled down a bit.

Ultimately, I left the bookstore a little bit overwhelmed, left all of the books on the reading table and bought some strawberries and two ripe mangoes at the mini farmer's market stand. I ate a leftover turkey burger from dinner last night and took a load of clothes over to the Cancer Society Thrift Shop and bought a brand spanking new Banana Republic shirt, a black cardigan, and a Clarissa Pinkola Estes book for $20. Then stopped at the grocery shop and bought some coconut milk to make curry and some sour cream to add into the chipotle mayonaisse that I made last night to go with the burgers - the mayo was way too spicy. K pointed out that when you leave out or decrease one ingredient, you gotta cut the other ingredients. This would not have occurred to me, but then you are reading the ramblings of someone who once put a container of yogurt in the freezer thinking that it would become frozen yogurt through some imaginative event. I also believe that with a little will power, you can bend spoons with your mind.

Sometimes I feel mildly guilty about my low-grade need for retail therapy - true, it is on the secondhand scale and never beyond my means, but there is an emptiness to fill. I have been reading about padma. It is my dominant neurotic energy that would like to become wisdom and here is what it says:

At its best padma energy opens to the immediacy and preciousness of each moment. Padma people want to have strong contact with what is attractive and feel it fully. They delight in intimate connections. They want to become one with the world...they are able to dissolve the boundary between themselves and others. They are full of life. Padma is the energy of falling in love, with all its bittersweet qualities. Padma love is perpetual unrequited, because a padma can never fully possess the object of desire. Embracing the pain and pleasure of love has a heart-piercing quality; padma feels it can never be quite whole. The Japanese call this "aware" - a sweetness tinged with sorrow. The symbol for this is a half circle.

I got home and visited my BF's blog - her planned reunion with her husband went awry and so the two will go a month without seeing one another, as he trains in Oklahoma. She is alone in a new city that is more hostile, than welcoming and feeling acutely the color of her skin.

Since I started this post, it started raining.

K gets home in an hour and we are going to see an art film in the U District on the Three Gorges dam project. All of the films we have been to see in the last few months have been his picks - everything from Ironman and Kung-Fu Panda to The Hulk. I am certain that K's idea of fun is not going to a foreign film with subtitles that will inevitably bring on nostalgia and weeping on my part, but catharsis feels overdue.

I am going to New York on Tuesday for the Haiku Not Bombs book release party on Wednesday. I really need to cheer up.

Outdated - Polaroid art show
Now seeking original Polaroid film images for upcoming gallery show in Chicago. Polaroid Corporation has announced that it is discontinuing production of all instant films. To celebrate the wonder of Polaroid film and bid it farewell, we are asking for submissions for a Polaroid-only show set to take place on August 15th in Chicago, Illinois.Deadline for submissions is July 25th. The goal is to have a show full of a wide variety of images showing the versatility of this disappearing medium. Therefore the theme is open. Help us show the wide range of subjects captured on Polaroid brand instant film. For more information and submission guidelines, please visit: http://www.polaroidshow.com

Deadline: July 28, 2008

The American version of Adbusters.

ASPECT SEEKS MEDIA ART SUBMISSIONS FOR VOLUME 13: PUBLIC
ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art, a biannual dvd publication, is currently seeking time-based documentation of artwork in common space for Volume 13: Public. Expanding the notion of public art, this issue will focus on artists' interventions within civic space, ephemeral or monumental.

The staff of ASPECT is asking curators, art critics, and members of the contemporary art community to help assemble and comment on works for the next issue by submitting a work of art on which they wish to provide audio commentary. Due to the format of the publication, the criteria for selection will include both the qualifications of the commentator and the quality of the work submitted. Audio recordings of the commentary will be assembled after the submissions have been selected.

Deadline: August 25, 2008

For more information see FAQ:
http://www.aspectmag.com/contact/faq.cfm

I'm writing a new poem to go with a show at the 516 Art Gallery in Albuquerque in September that accompanies the work of Jeff Gibson. This is his mixed media piece "Mr. half-breed."



monsieur métis

crosshatched currency
& the civilizing project
of the new nationalism

bundled baby sling
papoose, the bony offspring
sprung from Hellenic crown,

in a myth of immaculate invention
congested varicose departures
from the norm, divorcing

two feet tapered to
opposing directions
the waddler toddling

into the front line to march
w/ one hoof before
the other


And here's info about the show:

Cautionary Tales • A Visual Dystopia
September 6–October 18, 2008

In an epoch in which our global community seems to be rapidly disintegrating politically, economically and most alarmingly, environmentally, this exhibit will present work by artists whose images reflect a world going/gone awry. This is a place where much is not well through misuse/abuse of the environment, where because of the failure of society as a whole to properly take care of itself and the world it exists in, we may actually be near the end of the world as we have always known it. These artists have a common theme of alarm and dismay, while at the same time finding haunting beauty and powerful personal expression in their words of caution to us all. Featured artists include Roger Ballen, Jeff Gibson, Robert Hirsch, Rhiannon Mercer, Lori Nix, David Ondrik, Robert Sullkin, Emily Trovillion, Laurie Tumer, Erika Wanenmacher, William Wilson and Cathy Wysocki. Curated by Holly Roberts.