This phrase replays in my mind. After raging through a decade of what felt like the continuous unraveling of the world in any semblance of a harmonious state, I come to realize again and again, as those before me have, the necessary anchor of truth.
Truth as embodiment, truth as expression, truth as light
This summer is already one I know I will be referencing again and again in the future, as a period of the past which changed me and thus, refined me.
Sometimes I’m lost as to what the past thirty months have amounted to. But in other ways, I’d say it’s a return. It’s a return back to the space of carving myself a place that is mine for me. Out of survival, out of necessity, probably both..knowing my realities could change in the place I made which was mine..without limits and with only the truths I know. Keeping it, tending to it with and through change and just trying to be, to live as true as possible.
I know I’ll know more once time does what it does. So far:
Is there a numerologist in the house
They laid new road on 126th last night. I was up for the entire thing. I could hear it happening, smell it, and occasionally I would look out the window and watch the crane and people working. I can’t help but draw some analogous meaning out of it..that maybe I too am supposed to be making new roads.
I recently went through an experience where I said to a friend: “Why does it feel like all the lessons in my life are trial by fire?” It didn’t help that it was an exceptionally hot summer and I had spent hours in the previous days marching about the city to stomp my way through processing this specific experience. Then, it occurred to me while listening to a song I had not heard in a while – I asked for much and what ensued was refinement and purification by fire, a clearing to make way for what is to come, for what I have been calling in.
1- Rashid Johnson exhibition at Guggenheim; 2- 126 Red; 3- California limes; 4- Reminders LA is dreamy; 5- Rainbow water in Cass cup; 6- Easter origami; 7- My mom!!!; 8- Cheer; 9- Cornbread
Everything matters yet nothing does yet nothing does not matter because everything matters. It seems to go around and around like that the more time passes it feels. As it does I find I know less and less into possibly knowing nothing at all. And yet, the exception is that the very little I do know I keep coming to know as more and more true.
Everything is connected. The lessons we need exist in nature, exist infinitely in multiples everywhere and evidently. What’s being noticed lately? What’s being missed? What’s changing and what’s being done? The planting of a tree beside a river extends its roots by the stream. It is not afraid of heat and it does not worry in periods of drought because it knows the source from which its leaves remain green and branches produce fruit until completion.
Lee Chang Dong wrote of his experience with another writer’s proposition that to write after or amidst tragedy is barbaric. “And yet, I still had to write. What role can a line of writing play in changing reality? Even as I asked myself such questions, I had to write my stories as a way to avoid escaping reality.”
Sometimes a call requires a response. Other times, it requires trust and perpetual motion despite not knowing what exactly the response entails.
Sometimes life events, or the delayed conscious acknowledgement of and subsequent process of coming to terms with life’s events, throw you into silence. It zips you up and shuts you in, a prison of oneself now made where you are both the prisoner and prison keeper. It silences even the ones who were sent here as breath..to speak, to tell the truth. What happens when one who is breath feels a not sudden, but more insidious sewing up of all that gives life to breath in words, speech, text? It whacks violently inside until space is generated in stillness. And within that stillness, the inevitable transformation of silence into language and action.*
*Audre Lorde’s ‘The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action‘
I’ve tried another way, various ways and went about miserably everywhere except to live, let alone feel alive, feel present.
To be alive is to tell the truth, to be truth, to embody truth. To live is to tell the truth. And to the best effort I can give, I intend to tell the truth. 진심 truth
Truth in love, truth with wisdom..exactly as it was anointed to me.