And The Meadow is just so cool and Keisha is just too cool and then suddenly you are what they were and nobody can tell you you aren't.
My self exists in the lulls between living. I do not think of self when I am suspended at the top of a ferris wheel, intoxicated by the whizzing lights. I do not think of myself in the seconds before an orgasm. I am too busy living. In those moments, the passion that could have been the impetus for a million selves is wasted instead on cherishing the fleeting moment. Hence, the self emerges for me in the crux between happy times, when there is absolutely nothing.
*
i am. The slick mirror in which you see yourself, distant at first, merely a shape that attracts you through its empathy. You move, slickly, through space, catching peripherally a movement akin to your slick own. You move closer, tentatively, motivated by this childlike curiosity, this unadorned narcissism that modestly draws you in, draining color from wind weary trees into rich earth. i am.
i remember with a reverent fondness the way my mother’s hands held her voluminous skirts. Fat skirts with shirred edges that flaunted even the tiniest movement of her ample waist. Her hands, hardened with scars from being too brazen in her caring, tending fires glowing red-hot against wine-risked sky, graceful and elegant as they slowly wrote my name so my fingers might one day emulate: i am. Her hands, tacky and amber aloe scented, imploring their balm to soothe the poisonous prickles of days spent among wood nymphs. Her hands, which held my own protectively, covering their smallness in the bosom of her palm, sinew on bone, explaining through their love- i am.
Closer than close now, you see the marks of time scythed into your face. Laugh lines from jokes long forgotten, as if to say: i once was happy. You question it now, the happiness of those times, smoothed and sanded into matter-of-fact numbness.
(Would anyone believe that you once danced among the trees, naked as piano night, that you sat, with sunsoaked hands, peeling mangos with the natives, all darker chocolate than you, a sepia holograph in bright orange tank top, expertly devouring their flesh with skills you would one day translate into bodily need, your pink tongue flicking past stringy flesh, drinking in eel slickness?)
Closer still, now too close for comfort, you see small pores, each containing embarrassed rainbows, densely thicketed eyelashes shielding your mirror eyes from the mirror that is i am.
i remember auntie Barbara would sing calypso songs she had written in her tinny, am radio falsetto. She was my mother’s best friend when they were younger, while the Last Dance was still a hot place to go, dressed in shirred skirts pulled up by gentle hands. Before time etched distance into their faces, making them two, older now, pock-marked with memories of lives they once lived when they were too wise to care, too foolish to care, all at once.
Now, closest, what you see you can no longer identify as self. Pores and follicles, planes shaded by what once were features, closest now, you see that you do not know this thing before you. Closest now, you can distance yourself, clinically establishing NOT SELF in between this and you. Bored by the monotony of your own eyes, the unending monochrome of skin, marked only by time and matter-of-fact numbness. You see something peripherally, a movement that catches your eye. It moves when you do, draws you in, pulling you to it with colorful spring promise. If only there were more than these silent movies to listen to.
Regretful of time lost, you slickly move away from the self-not self, toward the peripheral mystery awaiting you in your mother’s hands, enclosed in hands that sift out the past into an eternal, magical now.
Regretfully, reverently, magically, foolishly, peripherally, slickly, curiously, numbly: i am.
*
Ignorance is lack of knowledge of the ways of the self, and this ignorance can be dissipated only by one’s constant awareness of the movements and responses of the self in all its relationships.
What we must realize is that we are not only conditioned by environment, but that we are the environment- we are not something apart from it. Our thoughts and responses are conditioned by values which society, of which we are a part, has imposed on us.
We never see that we are the total environment because there are several entities in us, all revolving around the “me,” the self. The self is made up of these entities, which are merely desires in various forms. From this conglomeration of desires arises the central figure, the thinker, the will of the “me” and the “mine”; and a division is thus established between the self and the not-self, between the “me” and the environment of our society. This separation is the beginning of conflict, inward and outward.
–J. Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life (56-7)
*
Somewhere some children are playing hopscotch. And somewhere else a girl is pretending not to listen to a boy because she very much does not want to hear that her name has been forgotten.
And a fish sizzles in somebody's pan. Somewhere.
And breakfast will be grits and sausage; and a guava will fall from the tree while we eat; and the rental keys will always be on the bar; and cola champagne will always be drunk before pineapple; and pineapple will always be drunk before grape; and grape will always be drunk before coke; and coke will be used for mixed drinks anyway; and I will always stick to car seats and put my bare feet on the dash.
Except for when it's cool and dark and we can't see the ditch in the middle of the driveway. The car will be filled with my mother's perfume and my lips will be very red. Then we shall sit like ladies in the a/c because the wind would muss our hair. I will no longer smell of salt water, the scent of barbequed chicken grease isn't on my freshly painted nails and my freckles are back in the bedroom with grandma, lost in a powder puff.
We drive to the place where men make me beautiful. Where sixteen is never said and drinks come for free with conversation. Hot sweaty men dance nasty, not feeling the music with their souls, but groping for love in the rhythm. They measure love in the squeaks of bedsprings. But I know this so I am safe like how you don't step on cracks once you realize the pain it can cause.
*
Each man’s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that- one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birth- the slime and eggshells of his primeval past-… to the end of his days... Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of us- experiments of the depths- strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each is able to interpret himself alone.
– Herman Hesse, Demian (4)
*
You don’t understand. I am boiling. I am passionate to understand this problem. It is burning me up, because that is my whole life and you are playing with it. I am lonely, desperate, and I see how destructive it is, and I want to resolve it. And yet I have to live with you, live in this world that is ambitious, greedy, violent. What am I to do? I will show you. But showing is not the same thing as you doing it. I’ll show you.
-J. Krishnamurti, On Right Livelihood (96)
*
Everybody is prettier in the spring. And you can make your lips feel so sticky and dry like you've kissed a boy so much that you have to kiss him again just for lip survival. And the boy is cute and sweet and you are cute and sweet as you leave the drugstore with a sleeve full of contraband lipstick and go to meet Anne at the Cuban restaurant where nobody speaks English and that's okay and the plantains are sweet and the rice and beans are good and the courtyard steps afterward are warm.
Everybody wears Wayfarers and Doc Martins. Everybody has a crush on everybody. And in the afternoon you can go play softball with girls from the South Bronx, and Puerto Rico before that, and then you can see how very cute your cute and sweet boy is.
The seed you planted in winter has indeed become a pretty flower of a boy. He is the subject spoken of over many a pint of coffee heath-bar crunch, and many many crates of strawberries. You don't even wish you were a prep school girl anymore. You remember unfortunate floral jumpers and really bad hair, but you are pretty now, as you were even then, and your hair is long and your legs are long and you are cute and sweet just like you are supposed to be.
And The Meadow is just so cool and Keisha is just too cool and then suddenly you are what they were and nobody can tell you you aren't.
*
We have come to a marvelous point... Just listen to this. Don’t say, ‘I must live this way.’ It’s like smelling a flower; just smell it, you can’t do anything about it, you can’t create a flower, you can only destroy it. Therefore just smell it, look at it, the beauty, the petals, the delicacy, the extraordinary quality of gentleness; you know what a flower is. In the same way just look at this, listen to this. Relationship out of loneliness leads to conflict, misery, divorce, fights, wrangles, sexual insufficiency. Out of loneliness all the misery comes in relationship. You understand? I don’t want your response that you love me also. I don’t care. Like the flower, it is there for you to look at it, to smell, see the beauty of it. It doesn’t say, ‘Love me.’ It is there. Therefore it is related to everything. You understand? Oh, for god’s sake get this. And in the great depth and beauty of sufficiency- in which there is no loneliness, no ambition- there is really love and love has relationship with nature. If you want it, there it is; if you don’t want it, it doesn’t matter. That’s the beauty of it.
–J. Krishnamurti, On Right Livelihood, (101)
*
Sometimes everything inside of you sighs. Gently, like a whisper. Sometimes something makes you feel complete. And you don't need laughter or holding
hands to make you feel delicious. You have all that you need, sometimes, somewhere inside of you.
It's in your own reflection as you clean the windows, languid springtime sun flitting filtered through. The image becomes clearer as you scratch the surface. The world and, superimposed over it, the faintest you. Sometimes, in the distilled light, if you look close enough and your skin has chocolates and reds in it, you can see little rainbows in the pores of your cheek, hiding delicately under eaves of eyelashes. And even though those rainbows can be explained away by sciency photons and light refraction, it doesn't make you any less special.
It's in the way you feel as you walk in the sun. Not sweltering summer sun that makes you sweat and feel sexy, for those walks- on the beach or, if you're lucky, on the hot city pavement- are meant for the eyes of others, all the men who have nothing to do and no choice but to adore you. In those moments you are directing your own pornography, softly hiding it in the loping of your hips and the subtle swish of your thighs. "Girls! Girls! Girls!" you say in the shimmy of your ass.
No, the walks that are for you are the ones in the spring, where you embody all that is feminine. You make the wind gasp. You bend the trees, beautifully. And when you sit, all the leaves want to cast their patterns on your face. Sometimes, if you sit on the grass or in a snazzy outdoor café, you can eat and drink your fill, making poetry with the movement of your spoon. When you finish, you are satiated, the floral print of your dress tightening just slightly at your waist. You do not cover it with your white cloth napkin. You are not ashamed because you are too pretty to be ashamed. You simply sit a bit straighter and stroke the fabric with a clandestine hand. You are as beautiful as a little Buddha; you are an icon cast in the most wildly unrealistic chocolates and reds. And sometimes you are completely at peace.
These times are not few and far between if you take the time to know yourself and know that you are the most perfect imperfection there is. But if you are ignorant, you will not have these precious moments. You will pass each day in cowardice, waiting for happiness to approach you. You will be a scarecrow (instead of being beautiful and lucky), hung in a wheat field in the middle of nowhere, watching the world unfold around you like unstarched sheets. And you will stay there, hanged and crucified, ignorant and full of nothing important, scaring things away for the rest of your life.
You mustn't miss the springtime sweetie, nor let it miss you. You are much too delicious for that.
*
…because I can’t hold my breath anymore, in life, in love. Breath, the life force that makes my chest rise and fall, that keeps me in this life, in this body, at this moment in time. How does my heart do it? Those faint thumps on my chest, softer than an unborn baby’s kick, are all that separates this life from death. My breath, soft and generous, fuels that heart, that heat, keeps this body alive. Out of appreciation for my heart and breath, I won’t settle for anything in this life. Not a man, not a lifestyle, not a job. I’m just going to get everything I ever dreamed of. Because my heart, my breath, they deserve it, acknowledgement that these moments, pregnant with choices, only exist because of them, and, sooner or later, they will have to rest.
Look where God, in the guise of infinite choices made one by one, moment by moment, has placed us. We know that we are poised on the brink of a momentous possibility, but that is no better than this very moment. I can’t judge the moments, can’t look to the past or the future, because all of my moments are strikingly similar to my heart, my breath, sometimes rapid and shallow, sometimes slow and deep.
I can’t judge myself because my heart and breath continue, conditionally yet unconditionally. They love me.
*
Ah this life, crazy bundle of atoms and molecules and fresh mouths and cycles, it spits tiger tears at molecules and atomic tears. Atoms of a sunset, atoms of a second kiss (less nervous, more certain, possibly still curling and yellowing the edges), the atoms of a sigh, you, a sweating truck, a purple sweater, puppy saliva, me the atoms of understanding.
I am-
An uncontrollable jazz solo, French horns, horned kisses, horny horny me. Tequila doesn’t help my case, though it does extinguish some atoms in the most desirable way.
i am: infused with the strangest sense of peace.
Love is not complicated. Fear complicates. I can choose simplicity.
*
How can anticipation taste so ripe, so mid-summer strawberries? How can a moment evoke a universe? How can the now be so full of tomorrow that both pervade the senses, a soft first caress after orgasm? What to do with this part of you that loves so ardently, almost desperately, over and over, spilling love like red wine on the linen tablecloth?
Still, peace prevails. You are not blown this way and that. You are balanced, poised on a blissful in-between that creates your triumvirate with here and there…
What now? Fun at the party, blessings where there once was nothing. Life, as delicate as it can be sometimes, as precariously teetering as it can seem sometimes, as sallow and blanched as it can leave you, can also creep like familiar fingertips up your back, foretelling the fuller presence of hands cupping your breasts, of swollen lips lost in your exquisite elixir. You, a flower chosen almost randomly to stand alone, in an antique vase reminiscent of a champagne flute, cast against the backdrop of a day full of song, muted now.
*
When you look at a flower without the word, without the image, and with a mind that is completely attentive, then what is the relationship between you and the flower? Have you ever done it? Have you ever looked at a flower without saying ‘That is a rose’? Have you ever looked at a flower completely, with total attention in which there is no word, no symbol, no naming of the flower and, therefore, complete attention? Until you do that, you have no relationship with the flower. To have any relationship with another or with the rock or with the leaf, one has to watch and to observe with complete attention. Then your relationship to that which you see is entirely different. Then there is no observer at all. There is only that. If you so observe, then there is no opinion, no judgment. It is what is. Have you understood? Will you do it? Look at a flower that way. Do it, sir, don’t talk about it, but do it.
J. Krishnamurti, On Right Livelihood, (83)
*
