"my useless, uncalloused hands"

title from Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters.

The tension between intellectualizing and acting pervades my skin (until I'm crawling) every time I vere to some dyadic end. Wholeness in living requires some balancing act that is inevitably ungraceful. Maybe liminality (between work and thought) is like vulnerability in relationship; uncomfortable, but necessary and enriching (when you don't fight it).

I've had a perpetual layer of dirt under my fingernails since Saturday.
And I haven't been writing.
I swear, my body's been going through detox.

Tired of its "useless uncalloused hands."

Tired, too, of being by itself.

(The rabbithole is bright and magnetic, but best shared--lest you find yourself lost, and in danger of losing head).

Anyways, I'm off to ride my bicycle.
And Thursday, I'm going back to Good Earth Farm.
Farm-magic reminds me how simultaneously small and big I am,
and when I ride my bicycle, it always feels like I'm flying.
I like that.

Always,

L

weeds//sidewalk-cracks by Leslie Albanese is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

insides

("Shadow Dance" by Martin Lewis).

("Mother and Child" by Gustav Klimt).

For every route, could haves/should haves/might haves in infinity.

It's a dangerous game: the either/or, the re-writing of choices.

There so many pulls inside me.

So many entryways, leading to new entryways.

30-loves list. (for Dale). (and also for myself).

1. Love of family.
2. Love of friendship, that becomes a kind-of family.
3. Love of the way we can be many different things to each other.
4. Love of farm stillness.
5. And farm movement.
6. And love of knowing that I might plant the garlic, but I do not make the garlic grow.
7. Love of service.
8. Love of the humility that allows oneself to be served by another.
   
9. Love of the capacity for reinventions.
   
10. Love of second chances, with things right in front of you.
11. Love of saying sorry.
    
12. Love of music, and the way it shares things between people (the way it shares things between the multiple people in one person).
    
13. Love of moments when I recognize I'm human.
14. Love of my cat Comet.
15. And my old cat Chewy (rest in peace).
16. Love of the people who have passed--physically, or emotionally--from my life, for they are and always will be a present part of who I am.
17. That is, Love of the way Love lingers, even when bodies and hearts do not.
    
18. Love of functioning in a Communion of Saints.
    
19. And of the Joy and value in little pleasures and safeties.
20. Love of my body (on a good day).
21. And my spirit (on a good day).
    
22. Love in strength and flexibility (but not malleability).
23. Love of the way I am big and small in a world that is big and small.
24. Love of warm things.
25. Love of the intimacy allowing one to speak a coded language, that only one more understands.
26. Love of spending a lifetime, almost knowing one another.
    
27. And the way that people return to each other after miscommunications to try to communicate again; their persistence shows a caring language cannot capture.
    
28. Love of deep peace.
29. Love of not taking oneself too seriously.
    
30. Serious Love.

"There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, a eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest."
-Anais Nin.

(Wholly honest; I am terrified).

Just one near-perfect thing.

"If I could do just one near-perfect thing, I'd be happy.

They'd write it on my grave, or when they scattered my ashes.

On second thoughts-- I'd rather hang around and

be there with my best friend if she wants me"

-Belle and Sebastian, from IF SHE WANTS ME

..

Dissonance: n. A tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements.

Meta- Meta- Meta --- dancing.

Have you ever been simultaneously a character in your own dream, and a third-person, omni-present dreamer? Not a dream where the dreamer is a character, but a dream where the dreamer is distinct from the dream and you are the dreamer but also in the dream. I have them often, and oftentimes they carry over when I wake up-- so I am experiencing and watching myself experience at the same time. Self critiquing while being. Fully engaged in my actions, and their results, but also fully distinct from them.

This is dissonance; sometimes land // sometimes ocean. This is the artist's tension. The observing hand. This is the lodging between ethereal and corporal: suspension somewhere--ambivalent-- in-between. --

Like mid-winter springtime.

Like on-the-brink again.

....

I'm gonna go buy some yogurt. (That's exactly my point).

Hunger is as corporal, but also as real as it comes. And thinking, no matter how precious

doesn't taste like Plain Greek Yogurt with Strawberries.

flashes of melancholy (and the Middle Ages).

John Keats wanted his grave to read: here lies one whose name was writ in water.

[They didn't honor it].

Learned the etymology of melancholy the other day. Turns, out--

In the Middle Ages, bodies were thought to be made of humors, right? Well, when certain humors were in abundance--or sparse--one was said to have relational illness.
Melancholy was one of those humors.
Melancholia was the humoral illness.

One with 'excess' melancholy was clinically deemed: high-strung, but remarkably creative; simultaneously insane and genius.

It's a love/hate relationship--The Poet's and Melancholy's--like something un-catchable that catches you. What is prescriptive mental normalcy, anyways? Is intellectual genius inevitably so isolating that one who has it cannot help but feel crazy? disconnected? I think that is sad. I'm no intellectual genius (and I vow to not be as broody as John Keats), but sometimes I feel crazy, too. Yeah, sometimes I feel crazy, too.

When I was a super-little tyke (like, too young to remember--so super-little), the Dr. gave me some 'test,' and told my mother I had an acute form of Attention Defecate Disorder. He tried to put me on Ritalin, and maybe that's good and well for some people, but personally, I think it was kind of fucked up that he suggested it. Luckily for me, my mom thought so too, wrote the thing off as "one man's opinion" and kept me undrugged-- never even mentioning the incident to me until about a year ago. And maybe I'll go through life losing things more often than most people, and maybe my mind'll be full of flashes, and my stories will go through all these anecdotal turns before they make their points, but what's wrong with that? I'm Joyful and my relationships run deep, and I do well professionally/academically/ etc. etc. Why fix what's not broken in the head?

I, for one, am glad Keats was Melancholy. (And for the record; he was too)

flashes of melancholy (and the Middle Ages) by Leslie Albanese is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Inspired by Dr. Brandy Fraley--lecture on John Keats and his Circle.

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(click to enlarge photos)

"One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap is the most difficult to make--to part with one's faith, one's love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion."
-- Anais Nin