passing back through in november

okay, i went back to school (twice, maybe three times) and i missed you! and i remembered what i forgot, forgot what i remembered, and came back to visit.
i wanted to tell you about how i spit recently, in a rehearsal room;
i wanted to tell you about the deep feelings of failure i wrestle with;
and about how i went into the woods and then came out to think about the woods.
there's so much i want to tell you!
i took a class last year on art as political change, like this: http://artaspoliticalchange.blogspot.ca/
i have seen a thousand thousand things since i have seen your faces
i have gotten lost a hundred times.
maybe getting lost is my artistic practice.
maybe i'm not lost at all.

i wanted to tell you about how my mom is getting older, and my grandmother has dementia,
and i made a solo performance piece about how i asked my grandmother about slavery in our family history because i am trying to think and fight my way through whiteness and my own personal history, how whiteness happened to us and to whom i owe reparations yet somehow also acknowledging an inherent worth...anyway, i made a piece about it.
i wanted to tell you that i am living in toronto! in a second-floor apartment that isn't a commune, but it's nice, and it's above a vacuum cleaner store.

i wanted to tell you about my dreams and how i'm scared of getting older and i'm a kid forever and i have like these waves of nostalgia and i also try to thank my way to falling in love with the world just about every day, or every week
i'm taking a break from falling in love with a person; i have fallen so hard so many times and for now i am flying solo and it is strange and different;
i'm reading papers on queer ecology and books with titles like "why we dance" (ha) and "research theatre: the ecocide casebook." i'm studying performance ethnography--like how to know people by making performance with/about them. i'm reminded heuristically of my obsession with communalism and my love for making things with friends.
i notice being older! like, seeing people in their early 20's and i'm not there!
that is another post.
i made a zine about being 28; but i think i lost it. now i'm 29!

things i still love: cooking, love, patches, edges, exploring, laughing, sitting on the kitchen floor
things i'm trying out: graduate school, institutional affiliation, living closer to my parents, menu plans, making soup stock and freezing it, having a smart phone, not going to therapy, being 'single', cycling back to posting on this blog.

midnight mooning, here's the list

1. woah, it's going to be okay!
2. "you should know that even though all things are liberated and not tied to anything, they abie in their own phenomenal expression." (Dōgen--this is actually very comforting to me)
and
3. "as for cities--they are (to those who can see) old tree trunks, riverbed gravels, oil seeps, landslide scrapes, blowdowns and burns, the leavings after floods, coal colonies, paper-wasp nests, beehives, rotting logs, watercourses, rock-cleavage lines, ledge trata layers, guano heaps, feeding fenzies, courting and strutting bowers, lookout rocks, ad ground-squirrel apartments. and for a few people they are also palaces." (gary snyder in the practice of the wild which i am reading and really enjoying right now)
4. idleness and mystery and stillness and the full moon and curiosity are so important. i am stepping off my ambiguity pedestal and toward desire and fire and water and the steam and smoke where they meet and walking mountains and being on the internet at midnight seeing my memories and loves and desires reflected back in a thousand tabs--oh silly but sometimes true-feeling this tool of the modern world, of our increasingly visible subconsciousnesses--i believe in german transqueer radical radio and rilke and bread and work and magic and new tattoos across knowing flesh and pain and slowness and quickness.
5. things have been rough lately and often hard. in a knowingly privileged and marginally unstable kind of way.
6. of place: wood floors. the altar moved to the next room over. it is night and the neighbors are doing some kind of loud popping project in the garage and talking about race on their porch. the walls are red and i ate a tiny plum that dropped from the tree in our front yard. there is an herb spiral and kale plants and lots of tomato blossoms. the cherries are dropping in neighboring blocks and yarrow in flower. raspberries are out, gold and red! and salmonberries! and strawberries too! and oregon grapes not too far (not that those are nearly as tasty but still). it has been sunny off and on, rainy occasionally, gray here and there often, warm but never quite hot per se, the doors are open here in the day and closed at night--it is chilly but i will sleep outside tonight.
7. STRANGERCAT i will write a poem about you soon.

shrewd

how much

do you take your own advice?

and speaking of looping around,

"In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hronir and are, though awkward in form, somewhat longer.

"Until recently, the Hronir were the accidental products of distraction and forgetfulness. It seems unbelievable that their methodical production dates back scarcely a hundred years, but this is what the Eleventh Volume tells us. The first efforts were unsuccessful. However, the modus operandi merits description.

"The director of one of the state prisons told his inmates that there were certain tombs in an ancient river bed and promised freedom to whoever might make an important discovery. During the months preceding the excavation the inmates were shown photographs of what they were to find. This first effort proved that expectation and anxiety can be inhibitory; a week's work with pick and shovel did not mange to unearth anything in the way of a hron except a rusty wheel of a period posterior to the experiment.

"But this was kept in secret and the process was repeated later in four schools. In three of them failure was almost complete; in a fourth (whose director died accidentally during the first excavations) the students unearthed - or produced - a gold mask, an archaic sword, two or three clay urns and the moldy and mutilated torso of a king whose chest bore an inscription which it has not yet been possible to decipher.

"Thus was discovered the unreliability of witnesses who knew of the experimental nature of the search...Mass investigations produce contradictory objects; now individual and almost improvised jobs are preferred. The methodical fabrication of hronir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future.

"Curiously, the hronir of second and third degree - the hronir derived from another hron, those derived from the hron of a hron - exaggerate the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hron of the twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality. Stranger and more pure than any hron is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope. The great golden mask I have mentioned is an illustrious example."

- from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges