Warmth

I agree with my sister, this dress makes me happy.  It’s not only springtime wonderful, but seeing her site reminds me again that I want to be more of a crafter.  Coming across her current contest coincides with listening to a podcast about crafts from To The Best of Our Knowledge.  It made sense to hear that crafting can actually help depression.  I was always sort of flippant about my crocheted afghan and the summer I spent working on it, but I guess I was tuning into something that was actually helping.

In the spirit of all this, I brought out the scarf I began last year while keeping my housemate company in the kitchen last night.  I got a few rows done, but it still needs work.  I’m having trouble justifying working on it while I still don’t have a job I’m happy in though.  Something is always in the way.  And then there are books to read and poems to work on and fellowships to apply for….

So I admire crafters. And one day, I will join your ranks.  Until then, visit my sister’s blog for her amazing projects, and stay tuned for the eventual-scarf.

Shouting off a cliff

I don’t have any pictures (yet) but Carrie Purcell and I read at Pilot Books on Friday night.  Despite the rain, Carrie brought many friends and I brought family and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves.  We went out to Vermillion afterwards, and it might be my new favorite place on Capitol Hill.  With a gallery in the front it has the feel of a speakeasy, the bar tucked into the dark brick beyond white walls.  There’s a jukebox and plenty of mac and cheese, tables to move around and music that doesn’t smother conversation.

In lui of photos of the evening, here’s some new art (thanks to my new scanner!) I’m not sure that it’s finished yet, but I wanted to post something.

Also, keep an eye on elimae, new work of mine will be appearing in November.

Time for Pumpkins

The colder weather and the on-again, off-again rain mean that it’s time to start baking again.  I’ve been a bit distracted lately, but with some extra pumpkin puree in the fridge and this awesome recipe, curtsy of my sister, I had at it in the kitchen this afternoon.  Instead of circles I made owls, and I just stuck with the ginger frosting.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had scones.  Muffins and toast seem to be more my speed these days, and I’m less about sweet things.  The icing is sweet, but the scones themselves aren’t.  Sort of a nice combination, if I do say so.

In addition to baking, I’m really digging into my books about Tyndall and Sir Oliver Lodge.  I’m continually amazed by the communities that used to exist, both in the artistic and scientific communities.  The minds meeting for drinks at ale houses or teas in each other’s living rooms seems fictitious.  I am left wondering if those same meetings are happening today, and which names people, a hundred years from now, will look back on and be amazed by.  I don’t know that communities function in the same way now.  People are more spread out, communication is through email and phone calls and there isn’t quite the elaborate record that exists from the turn of the 20th century.  But I don’t think that we’re without communities and meetings of minds.  I feel like I’m part of something larger than myself these days, and thank you to everyone in Seattle who has taken me in.  It’s a year now. Glorious.

So Who Wants Me?

I’m tired of feeling just to the left of where I want to be in Seattle.  I love the city, but it hasn’t exactly loved me back in the proper ways.  Last night the rain fell and fell.  It’s raining again.  Although I had intended on going to a job fair today, as I was pulling on tights and finding a shirt to match my skirt, I realized how little I wanted to network and push resumes into hands that belong to Target, Macy’s, Home Depot….

Yes, I need a better job.  But moving into another duldrum position isn’t what I need to do.  So I sat down and started working on fellowship applications.  Yes, I got a bit distracted with yummy food recipes.  But I have most of one application finished, and then I switched gears towards volunteering.

Every time I go into the Seattle Art Museum, I think I should be here. I shouldn’t be working near planes, I should be here instead.  I know that they aren’t hiring, but I have time, so what’s stopping me from volunteering?  The answer is- nothing.

So S.A.M, 826, Hugo House… I’ve submitted applications to volunteer at all of them, and if I’m getting in a bit over my head, well, frankly I’ve been spinning my wheels for too long.  It’s time to pack my schedule again.  Readings, volunteering, jobs, writing- I work best when I’m working. So who wants me? I’m coming at you, ready to be put to task.

At Night

Autumn is a time of happening.  The weather is starting to hunker into rain, with intermittent beautiful days.  Turns out, going up the Space Needle is a lot more fun than I’d thought.  Clear evening, a new friend, and the city spread like so many treasures.  I’m learning to piece this place together, and each person I’ve met has helped in their own way.  I have found new music, I have seen new places, I have danced and been silly and been serious.  Thank you.

I’m returning to science, and I discovered today that Sir Oliver Lodge knew John Tyndall.  Lodge considered Tyndall “one of my heroes” and in the biography Sir Oliver Lodge (W P Jolly) the meeting is described as “the inspiration which changed his life.”  I bounded down to the kitchen to share this find with my house mate and received a bit of a blank stare, but I’m still a bit giddy with the knowledge of it.  These men knew each other, and the world seems at once larger and more vast and yet smaller and intricately connected.

As the weather chills there are readings again, and book clubs, movies to watch and food to cook.  We have beer brewing in our dining room, I have books on scientists piling beside my bed, and the sunsets are enough to break your heart.

Come visit. I will show it all to you.

return to Love

The Seattle sun strikes hot today and it cannot feel like the first day of autumn.    My skin just beneath sweating, the water between myself and downtown a rocking body.  The boats cut slowly, minimal wakes.  I only smell dirt, warmed concrete, my own scent rising. I return to H.C. and love, because I have to return.

Z. is leaving again.  A month.  He was supposed to have months. Plural. And today, I was on a bus swaying with heat. Sweat and perfume and the hum of electric motors.  And my phone, buzzing.  I looked, debated for a moment.  Buses are loud, conversations bleed over into adjacent seats.  Hesitated.  Then answered, and felt the days rush into my body, colliding into each other.  A month.  After the disconnect, held my hand to my lips as if to stave off something.

And so I have to return to H.C., look into her pages to explain my own.  If I can understand her abstract Love then I can define my own.  I can explain why I must hold my hands to my lips for a body both (not lost) and (not mine).

I have known love, and I have been at the other side, looking towards the buildings blurred with the humidity of after-love.  H.C. writes about the destructive force of love, the destructivecreative force of it.  –Defeat me. Pillage me. If there is a house, a room, a safe in my city that I have not turned over to you, whose keys I haven’t provided, if you find one single door I might have forgotten inadvertently deep inside my soul, smash it open. The need to give and be given, to take and be taken.

Grey shades of it, the limits of what I am willing to give.  No. I am still too faint, too dim. I do not have enough strength yet to start dying again. Because that’s it, isn’t it?  Love a death, a destruction of boundaries—I give you my body for your body and I take your body for my body. But how can anyone survive this?  I can’t, not yet.

I say body, and I mean more.  I seem to return to certain words.  Body and edge, for example.  My iceberg words, I mean whole oceans and only say: body. I mean—pneumea. Lifebreath.  My edges.

I think I give easily, to a point.  Here here here.  It seems: entire.

But it isn’t.  I keep a seed, the turtle shell to stand on.  Because who can do it and return?

All this to circle back, and say: Z., even before leaving, please please return.  Not to me, as I lay no claim, but all the same.

(All italic text from Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea)

Where we are is a matter of record

I woke up after a night of much dancing and revelry thinking about the King cello.  I’d never heard of it before last night, but my friend C. is doing a lot of research into it.  The instrument has survived years of revolution, turmoil and mishandling to find its home in South Dakota.  It’s shipped to Italy every year to be played, and I’m sure that the current owners take out millions in insurance and keep careful track of its movements until it is safe in it’s home again.

When C. was telling me the story of the cello (which is much more interesting than I am making it, and I can’t wait to read the work she’s doing on it) it made me think of the Sarajevo Haggadah.  I’ve been listening to NPR on my bus commute, and To The Best of Our Knowledge had a segment on libraries.  They talked to Geraldine Brooks about her book The People of the Book, which traces the Sarajevo Haggadah.  This book lasted through the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust, the bombing of the Bosnian Library…. like the cello, it was passed hand to hand and has lasted.  I don’t know much about the bombing of Sarajevo, beyond what I remember hearing from the news when I was little.  I feel like I should have known about the library and the librarians that risked their lives for the books.  A human chain helped to save ten percent of the collection, and I found myself wondering what I would risk my life for.  For a book? I hope so.

Both of the Sarajevo Haggadah and the King cello, though we know where they are now, had years of simply vanishing.  No one knows where they were, how they got there, and they barely seem to know why they resurfaced.  This is where C. and Geraldine Brooks enter, creating a story for the blank space.

So of course, I’m feeling the need to return to ether.  I thought I’d taken the project as far as I could, but I keep finding spaces that are empty, but not.  The missing information that can be created, the emptiness filled with shimmering lumniferous words.

It feels nice to be back.

New Work

(Photograph by Alex Russell.  See more of his work here.)

Autumn Crocus

I don’t think these are really called crocuses, they look too large and the season is all wrong.  They remind me of the bright shock of spring though, and what a wonderful way of entering into fall.

There are so many things that make me happy these days.  Yummy meals cooked for friends, a wonderful find at the Goodwill, poetry readings and beginning to craft again and realizing that I have been writing, just not re-typing.  So I have work again, proper work, music to listen to, and a glowing cow. What’s not to love about Seattle right now? 

Family

Ballard Locks

Water a slip slickness behind glass–

salmon struggle against current.

The girl beside me presses her face

to the greenness, all nose smudge and forehead.

.

Thick bodies squirming with the effort

of returning home.  Outside the viewing room

.

the air is brine-scented, the sky optimistic blue.

I have not seen my mother in months

but I know above her the dusk is pulling across clouds–

the first stars emerging.  The nights are shorter here,

.

as if afterthoughts.

*

I am missing my family, and I don’t know when I’ll be back East to see them next.  I am finally placing my roots here, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten where I’ve come from.  I wish sometimes that I could populate my own village, with the people I love and care about.  The world is such a vast place.  Right now, I know people who have been asleep for hours, I know people who have a dark sky above them.  I’m not sure that I know anyone just beginning to wake, but it’s a matter of time.  How large, this earth.  How incredibly vast.