A journey made through poetry
A nightly diary [ongoing]
“She is not here to write history but to write her feelings. Do not kill poetry, too, in the name of the revolution.”
“Poetry forms the quality of light with which we examine our lives...
As we learn to bare the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the product of that scrutiny for power within our lives, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us. ”
‘It’s the loving I love’ — Forugh Farrokhzad [Sin]
“A bedouin was traveling through the desert, carrying a filled water skin and weeping bitterly. When another traveler asked him why he was crying, the man replied that his dog was suffering terribly from thirst. The traveler asked why he didn’t give his dog a drink from the water skin, and the Bedouin said, “I couldn’t do that. I might need this water for myself.”
EL BRUC, SPAIN — 06/28
Death and love.
I stood by the cemetery above the hill and thought of all the deaths I’ve passed through in loving. The real story matters little. How we spent our time, the hours we hated, the hours we loved, the truth, and what’s become of that truth with time. The days we wanted to run away, and the days when we couldn’t bear thought of leaving.
It’s in the end where our loving is made known to us, in departure where we witness the depth we’ve recklessly submitted to. The confession of what lay unspoken — that perhaps you loved far more than you knew, and feared far more than you were prepared to admit…
***
We walked back, the three of us, down the hill, talking about the end of our lives. Later, I thought about this: that what matters is not how much time we get here, but, how much time we have with the miracles that visit us while we’re here…the love that makes you believe you were birthed for this being, for this place, for this moment. The look that convinces you that you were delivered here for this eye because— look how it pulls from the shadows. Watch how the light falls softly on your sadness, how an ordinary moment becomes extraordinary ..
There was a Buddhist monk I worked with one summer who defined beauty as something you stopped for, that it was made beautiful because you paid attention to it. Undefined by your gaze, it’s neither beautiful nor ugly. But in your sudden pause, in the words you lose to a passing face, in the stunned silence that mutes the chaos, something was made beautiful because it was looked at, because from the faceless crowd your eyes rescued one, one that is yours, for today, for tomorrow, but not always. No.
I remember my father used to hate celebrating birthdays. He used to think of them as countdowns to the end. Religiously, he would say that your timer began from the first minute you entered the world. That means, each beginning is an initiation of an end, and that the end begins on the same day as the beginning. He used to compare life to a bus station — a place of transit, to be left the way you found it because, what was the point of changing something so ephemeral, so frustratingly temporary?
But what else are we to do with that in-between space? How else do we pass the time? In the time between a lover gone and a lover coming (Nizar Qabbani), between the beginning of love and its end? If we only poured ourself into what was permanent, all of us, every temporary, on-its-way-to-the-end body, would leave this world a hollow, dried, unworthy being. We’d un-board our bus with empty hands, enter our destination with the blur of a crowd pushing its weight through the rush hour, returning home with the wound of knowing it comes back as it left in the morning: having done nothing of significance. We return shapeless and barren. So focused were we on temporality and the end, we left the poems unwritten, the lover unloved, the art unbirthed, the music unsung, the journey unmade. And nothing in our life was beautiful because we stopped for nothing. The station stood undecorated, the chairs unpainted, the passengers unspoken to. Sure, they could say you passed, but none could tell me your name.
“I want nothing, nothing at all, except perhaps one thing. To be saved through love from it all. To find myself again, to recover the self I had lost. ”
“I love my nakedness, love the tremor of my naked body before the pool of ink. I believe it is only those words which strip us bare that resemble us.”
“Poets understand that there is nothing of value without death. Without death there are no lessons...the culture often encourages that we throw Skeleton Woman over the cliffs, for not only is she fearsome, it takes too long to learn her ways. A soul-less world encourages faster, quicker, thrashing about to find the one filament that seems to be the one that will burn forever and right now. However, the miracle we are seeking takes time: time to find it, time to bring it to life.”
EL BRUC, SPAIN — 06/29
It’s late, and it’s been a long day, but this is just to say — life is showing me how insanely beautiful it can be. Beautiful in its deep, slow, silent simplicity, and in all the ways it can be when I no longer run from the pain..
Today was a mirage of beauty: the tree dropping flowers over my head as I sat by a well beside a cat that has visited me in my deepest pain, warm Moroccan tea shared with a woman I was meant to meet, and who has changed me… a goodbye made under a slim moon above the garden, a slow departure spilling into a very slow and tender arrival.
So this is how life ends — and this is how it begins.
ECOMMOY, FRANCE — 07/05
The days pass and again I’m reminded of the tidal trail of beauty…how strong it can be, how soft and still too.
Tonight I am sitting by an emptied bed of water. There is no tide, nothing to hold my reflection, to ask how far I’ve come, and how much further I have to go. There is only the invisibility of not knowing — how tired I look, how much has been lost, what of me remains, and what has gone. Tonight there is the cold silence of a family that has never been family, of hearts as dry as the yellow grass that’s forgotten the feeling of rain, and that it had known it, once. Ahh, what do you do with the tragedy you come from? When you grew in spite of the pill inside the poisoned waters of your mother’s belly, when life didn’t wait for you to understand before it led you from door to door, when you knew a man who bought you candy once a week before you knew he was your father, and the girls that came for a visit became your sisters the second time you saw them.. what chance do you have? I tried to make a lover of invisibility and peace of smallness, but the woman in me wouldn’t let it happen. She screamed through every cafe, every dirty apron I tried to smuggle her power in. She cried through every empty body I tried to feed her with. She led revolutions out of every office, every false home, every free bed.
My eyes fall on this foreign land, and the others that led to this one, and again the same question spills into the air what am I doing here? But where else would I be? It’s a scary place — when you’ve found the answer to what you should be doing before you’ve figured out where. In every encounter, I search for pillows and yellow lamps in a voice that may lead me to what I’ve been painfully desiring. Every meeting is a possibility of a question answered. But face after face passes me, time passes, languages..land, but you’ve nothing to tell you if you are moving closer, or away, only that you are moving.. it matters, no? That if nothing else, I moved. I took that train, that flight. I searched. I did not collapse into I give up and I don’t know. I did not walk back to the poisoned nest and ask for the keys I returned. No. I’ve kept on, exhausted, inspired, dried, drunk on a possibility, I haven’t given up. And if it’s nothing but madness that sustains this long, long road, let it be madness. I have nothing else to drink from tonight.
What do I do with the woman in me who won’t allow me to surrender into the ordinary, who would rather I die then return to what took all of me to leave for good, but who won’t lead me to where I need to be for the necessary possibility to unfold?
“We keep telling ourselves to ourselves — telling ourselves to others — and sometimes one single detail rediscovered or removed is enough to change the balance of what we know.”
ECOMMOY, FRANCE — 07/06
Where have you come from?
Where will you go after this?
I stand between the borders of these two questions.. in the slim land between what I’ve left and what I’m searching for. It’s time to become, to un-board this train, and be done with these questions..
I’ve run away from be-coming, from what I believed it meant, and the loss I’ve witnessed in the others who have made that passage: the dimming light in the eye, the low calling of a search, gone — gone with it too is the memory of what had caused so much pain and with that goes the art of crying one’s way back to life, back to the belly, back to feeling. The need to live right replaces the desire to live. I’ve watched many girls walk too fast and too early into the dry body of a woman the world could stand, something it can hold in its eye without confusion. I watched it — the journeys of women much younger and much older, and I stood for years, one foot through the door, the other rooted in a childhood that never began, and which I wasn’t prepared to release unlived. Neither woman nor wildly young, I tore myself for years in this in-between space where I felt too late for both.
But no — tonight I take my first step. There is a woman waiting… she’s been waiting for a very long time. A woman who stood on the other side of those disgusted eyes that watched my body shape itself quick and early into what it was preparing to become. Except past the shaping, the be-coming never completed itself. Stuck with the body of a woman and still a girl, I stood shocked at the reaction of what my passage meant for the ones around me. They couldn’t bear it, and I couldn’t bear them not bearing me. And now, with the embarrassing voice of a flustered girl, a girl who is always always searching the eyes of the ones it meets for her image, I take this first, hesitant step towards a road I had set on years ago and never finished. Without permission, I go. With my own yes, I go. With no-one to teach me, to hold me through this long road, I go. With the contradiction of deep trust and dizzying uncertainty, I go..
“It was as if I had first need to destroy my identity in order that I might find it more clearly and thereafter cling to it more passionately. ”
“...enantiodromia, the psychic state in which all that was once held valuable is now not so valuable anymore..”
Tunisia - east coast; 2019
I believe the people who really change your life are the ones you meet in passing, for a few minutes. Disguised as minor characters and deceiving you with their brevity, they leave you with a voice and presence that echoes in your body for years, if we are lucky (or desperate) enough to have our eyes open when they pass us..
I once met a fisherman in Tunisia, for five minutes. He was retuning through the waveless sea in the morning. I began to take photos of him, and when he reached the shore, he approached me. Then, in his own, propheticly unintentional way, he proceeded to teach me one of the most important lessons in my life. Smiling, he flipped his hand-made basket to show me the small collection of tiny fish he had caught in the early morning, likely heading into the sea while the sky was still dark, departing slowly and unseen from a town deeply asleep.
This is what god gave me today.
It has taken me a very, very long time to accept the lesson he was trying to teach me, to understand the profound simplicity of this moment.
And this is why I hear now: be careful with how much you ask of the day. Learn to arrive at the end through a feeling — begin to understand, slowly, and with much time, how long to wait in the swaying boat, and, perhaps far more importantly, when to lift the net and steer home.
And more than that, much more than that: to smile at the little, and the lot. To move through life with the delicate movement of someone who knows how much to ask, how to receive, and how much to return…