meditation 060624

The overwhelming feeling of talking to somebody fiercely independent makes me feel there’s another world out there I’ve been missing. The independent world. The world of living by yourself, being ‘out there’, taking care of yourself, and being accountable for your actions. Let me regroup my thoughts.

I’m less than four years away from 30. I don’t feel old. I feel like a highschooler the way I still travel about backpacking here and there. So I feel like her. She is not able to articulate all her thoughts but she is thinking and it makes me think if when I was 18 I had the capacity to think the way she thinks now, even though her thoughts and utterances are not complete, that I might be able to make the right choices sooner. There is something about her, something of an immense energy that comes from being ‘out there’, an out-of-this-world kind of worldliness. “There’s a lot I want to do,” she says. “Of all those things, is there one thing that you feel a particular passion for?” I asked. She thinks about it. She looks up in the sky and around and the whole entire world is here for her as she stands between the end of highschool and the start of university about to devour every ounce of meaning in her surroundings. There is immense energy in that.

I look at myself and I say yes, I’m well on this path extracting meaning out of everything I see and hear. I try to say how I feel and I try to say how I feel and I try. Then I come home and write down how I try. Then I go out and try some more. And I learn about people and myself.

meditation 060623

Even the city can be quiet, this late at night, but that’s because I’m watching it all from above. The apartment across from me has the same regular windows still bright this time of night. Maybe they’re reading. Maybe they’re cooking a late meal. Maybe they just forgot to turn off the light. An ambulance driver plays with his siren.

i have not meditated in a long time

When the heart is quiet at night, it becomes easier to write, especially when the summer is cool and you are sitting before a big window on the nineteenth floor of a carpeted condo watching over cars with the faint red lights on their tails as they line up at a red light. Then red light turns green. Then you blur your vision and enter another world, a world that gives the feeling of being steamed without feeling hot. The feeling of being steamed comes from blurring one's vision while looking at the red traffic light, or is it the red lights on the tail of cars that are now moving? It can be neither, for the cars move and the traffic lights change. But no, it is when the cars move, when the red lights on their tails move with them, that at night, given the dark street and half of your own reflection hovering in midair, that you see these moving red lights expand and condense and expand and condense as the cars move up the slope and down the slope. Yes, when the heart is quiet, it becomes easier to write. But the head needs to be thinking and the words need to fill the gaps of the imagery you've created. Otherwise your words end up creating more gaps and it's like Sisyphus all over.

supper

Came home so thankful with plenty food on the table which includes rice noodles mixed with shreds of carrots and other vegetables in a plastic container. The noodles were so contained in the container that when I poured them out they were stuck together like a cube. I put them on a clean plate and with chopsticks I made the noodles look like noodles again and oh they looked so delicious on the plate. I didn’t put them in the microwave. I ate them as they were and they were yummy.

the teacher is always young

I’ve heard someone say that the teacher never grows up. The teacher never grows up. The kids come to class, they finish one year, and then they move on to the next year, to a different room with a different teacher in a different grade. They climb up the ladder. They grow. Whereas the teacher stays as he watches his students come into his class and then they finish and they move on. Kids come and go and that’s how they grow, but the teacher stays in the same spot. So that years later a student comes back to visit the teacher who is still in that same room teaching the same grade and then the student would realize how much he or she has grown. But the teacher stays the same. The teacher stays put. This is why the teacher is always young.

Today was our last class. I had them sit together in a circle because it was our last class. I handed out report cards and we had a mini party. And then they move on.

god bless germany

To sit here like this in my bedroom the heat rising and my not being calm enough to write something makes me want to go to bed. The CD player holds the record in place, but no sounds. I wonder if it will all work out. I must find a way to catch the Germany game tomorrow. I want to see Klinsmann and Oliver Kahn and the good guys win. Go Klinsmann!

the morning and the devil

O morning. They say today makes the number 666 so it's devil's day and they'll go watch this new movie about devil and feel all Satanic... Have they not better things to do? Why are we so interested in the apocalyptic? People love 'the dark side'. It gives them an edge? The dark side is really quite boring if you ask me. I've played that game. I've seen all the gimmicks. The dark side is no longer new or edgy anymore. In this day and age, new stuff is becoming boring. Unoriginal. And so we produce a generation of robots. 'How come my kid only got an 80 in English class... blah... blah..." Robots.

O morning. They say, there are many ways to be bad and only one way to be good. Kind of like how Tolstoy said how sad families are sad in many different ways but happy families are happy for one unifying reason. That one way of being happy; that one way of being good is far more interesting, far more worthy of exploring, to me, than the many ways of deterioration. And yet people think it's so cool to be exploring 'the dark side' for its variety and excitement. People are so repressed. What can I do about this? I don't want to be like walking on the high wire and be looking down on people. All I know is that the study of heaven is far more interesting than the study of hell. If only I can show them...

O morning. I don't want to be an angry poet. That cannot be healthy. I want to live long, after all. So many things I want to say, so many ideas, images, and I say to myself, Yes, they will all be represented in my fiction in some way or another, but really, can I live long enough to record everything? No! C'est ne pas possible!

O morning. Let my heart be light today. Let me not say let me. I shall be light to day. I will.