Inspired by Paul Coelho
August 17th, 2008
I love traveling.
The fear of the unknown with the comfort of being alone. You have no one else but your self to depend on.
Some countries make me nervous. Today I’m at ease. The boat skims over the water, cutting through choppy ocean with like fresh cheese cake in covert late night indulgences. That’s how I know I’m meant to be here.
I use my book like a journal and even before I’m finished mix feelings arise. Do I want to say read me, know me, don’t forget me, I matter and sign it? Do I acknowledge that I am a small in the microcosm, not much different than the Russian behind me, the Korean beside me, the Japaneese im front me, and not sign it? Just…read me, let me get inside your skin. Are you looking out the window feeling lost or awe? Do you wonder about my thoughts like I do about yours?
I think about the man I gave the candle to hold and the one I dropped and burnt all existance of. Both the best lessons I,ve ever had. I regret not having the maturity to keep that great relationship just as much as loving someone more than my own skin. One taught me to keep on course and self reflect often while the other taught me mitigation of emotional investment. So, I look at this overcast sky ready to make it pour and wonder how well I can navigate a gray area. I let the tides rock me to sleep where ever that may be as the evening clouds over the Japaneese coast line smile at me. How odd that traveling makes me loose all the feelings of uncertainty, regret or fear. You are where you’re meant to be even if you don’t know where you’re going yet. I leave my email on my thoughts. Can’t wait to see the city lights.
__
The river’s response to the death of Narcissus’ “I weep for Narcissus, but I never notice he was beautiful. I weep because each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.” –P. Coelho
How do you sell philosophy?
August 9th, 2008
How do you sell a thought? “Actively, or sometimes inactively,” says the white Netherlands’s boy with dread locks in the New Delhi Airport. “See those in the orange pants over there? They just came to get high.” I wonder how much different their experience is compared to my student’s trying it for the first time, the executive who uses it like a martini, or the girl mixing embalming fluid with her weed to get a three day high? How is that seeing God?
How do you create a prism of mind filtering life into organized colors of intention and emotion? Repeat in extreme simplicity and allow for extreme complexity in individualized meaning. Repeat an om until the om can be heard no more. Hare Krishna! say the Lord’s name and be blessed with the mere sound. Commission a work of art and be save through your art if not with your money. Pray the rosary, chant and read for hours until the emotion is spit and burnt in a fire, to cleanse the soul. I wonder if anybody here repeats the om until they bleed from the pain of those fallen in a war that’s continued for seven plus years hoping it won’t spill into Pakistan. Or are they just feelings not polite to voice in our religion?
I’ve come to the conclusion that selling religion is like selling someone on marriage. Left to the complete truth, we’ll become depressed. Much like happiness and love, the longevity of a marriage depends on selective memories of everything that keeps us illusionary happy and trash the rest. We agree to disagree or believe if the story sounds right, anything and everything for hope.
How do you label colors in area that keeps you thinking long after its gone? You don’t, not everyone will agree. You infuse it like chai with strong contrasting tastes. This is India. India the caste, the white gold and diamonds on elaborate hands with intricate saris. The gangrened beggars that parade on the street in their profession of pity. The simplicity of the country side on camel and a farm. India the colorful, the brown and white marble that never keeps heat and the dirty street that mixes dung and piss with jasmines. India, a bed of religions and charlatans, how contrasting you are, how beautiful you are.
Sorry, back to every Monday posting!
August 5th, 2008
Still traveling but writing more. Stay tuned and my apologies for the time lapse.
add to del.icio.usSingle Monologue
August 3rd, 2008
I hate this falling in love business. It feels like a hell of a lot of generated energy for something that may or may not happen in some take your time distant future so you can get to know each other when you’ll never really know a person. You have to thread lightly so that you do or do not confuse depending on the variation of the chase and while truth can not be changed it can be omitted upon level of interest and time in the relationship… or friendship… or whatever it was you decide to call it. Squinting from reading all the in between lines and the caveats of the in between ‘tweens, if and only if statements to help you make sense, predict or reprogram an action, is painful to me. The excitement of a kiss is really a negotiating chip for a possibility that you may or may not get me depending if you do or do not like me today and/or tomorrow as long as the strong attraction Pluto and the waxing moon on a partial Asiatic eclipse stopping at China doesn’t interfere. I’m tired of wondering why the phone doesn’t ring.
My scalp is itching and before anything begins, I erase the number. I’m seriously tempted to go back into the serene silent tranquility of single world if it weren’t for the fact that in the end we all settle. I hold my tongue when I see the lugubrious pour of loyalty and affection to a career, hobby or pet, when one deficiency doesn’t and can not compensate for the other. I wonder if settling just isn’t another way of just getting tired of all the mundane complexities when it’s difficult to stay in love as the years go by. When we look into each other and step into the tender spots that trigger doubt: am I good enough, do I matter, is there love. And I breath. Alone…like we all do.
add to del.icio.us Happy Birthday! (to me!!)
July 9th, 2008
By the end of this year, my travels will be in good number:
Thailand - Bangkok, Koh Larn, Pattaya, Chiang Mai
India - Jaisalamer, Agra, New Delhi, Jaipur
Japan - Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Osaka, Hiroshima
Korea - all eastern region
My 1st grade class learned the Macarena and sung me happy birthday. All that’s left is a poem. Here is my version of Nikki Giovani’s “Ego Tripping.” Hey, Neruda and Nikki can do it, why can’t I?
Big Pimp’n…(there’s just no stopping me)
I sat back on the mountain peak of my 31st,
A child at heart, the party of 100+ attendees
trotted all over the world:
From Frankfurt to India, Cali to DC, Buenos Aires to Pohang,
I am strong.
I gave myself a Thailand Elephant on the hills of the Hmong,
A camel to explore the Jaisalamer desert fort,
An interview with a Geisha one early morning treat,
Walking along side paupers and royalty with a Seoulian jade attitude,
…my lovers laid down the Floridian keys by my feet.
I am bad.
Before that, for my 15th birthday,
My mother gave me the moon in a necklace of pearls
and my father gave me the earth in a string gold
My uncle laid at my feet volumes of poetry and words
and my ant a five layered cake decorated with flowers
worth my weight in sweet delights
My friends played Sonoran trumpets that woke the morning sun for me,
I am a queen.
When my heart was broken
I cried a river that swelled pages of my journal
like the Mekong in Monsoon tides,
lachrymal sentiment fecundating California fires
all was dark and ashy,
all was a cry in the dark of a blues melody,
where the river took me was far and high.
So now I look ahead,
The Pyramids of Chichinitzen to explore,
where the moon cradled sun and Aztecs discovered dentistry,
while locals frolic and watch from Playa del Carmen, I’ll be there.
In front of Asian councils hours of evaluations
to be the first Colombian to achieve…I’ll succeed.
Hopping from island to island of tropical beauty
in Malaysian volcanic treasures of serendipity,
I’ll find…because there’s just no stopping me.
Happy Birthday to me!!
—
“Serendipity…such an accident of sagacity..” –Horace Walpole
Rain on My Feet
July 2nd, 2008
Land has a way of stamping itself into memory,
working its way into psyche,
transforming itself into an emotion
manifesting as normal abnormalities in an organ,
sometimes an extra palpitation, a scar,
a drop of sweat that appears,
depending on time, place and mood.
Sometimes it’s my heart,
looking below at a blanket of sparkling lights
uneven terrain of my birth crib,
wooden houses testing faith
or mimicking the unequal societal balance,
that limits the middle class,
that’s Cali.
Sometimes it’s my skin,
stretching for countless flat miles
on hot, humid, melting asphalt road
that jumps free at night,
it doesn’t hold make up,
it doesn’t hold water on flooding roads
it just keeps the pot holes on the road
and the scratches of where I once been,
that’s Houston.
Sometimes it’s my eyes,
engrossed in detail and architecture
rebuilding images in detail
jumping from painting upon painting
upon rooms full of rows and columns
buttress that bend like majestic trees
inside churches that make me weep,
that’s Italy.
Sometimes it’s my vocal chords,
quiet when I eat, quiet when I watch
quiet in the evening sun setting on Hun roads
quiet inside temples of golden Buddha
loud when it sings to the elephants
and talks to the people
bargaining for gold that no one else notices
that’s Thailand.
Today it’s my feet,
the one that follows the sounds of the gushing stream
on uneven road in spring monsoons,
runs to the top of the temple
that blesses the rice fields below and roots beside
moves past the bonsai nursery,
sitting in the middle of a cricket symphony rice crop,
the clay tennis court beside cabbage fields and houses
and the elders that built it on the land they farm
keeping a quiet tradition and identity for the community,
running past the curtain of trees that limit the wind
to the garden of a thousand flowers where
a landfill use to be…
that‘s Korea.
I used to think that I should have asked for a different city,
Somewhere that pays more, closer to city, has more room,
I used to think that I was here to forget
and change all the regrets there were about me.
I use to think it was difficult to be quiet and alone.
Reality: Learning means you can’t forget,
on the border of the city and the country,
smiling at cloudy and moody mountain peaks,
on a border land that challenges space and time,
looking ahead, working inside with sounds and words
I’m exactly where I was meant to be.