Nobody tells the birds

... about international boundaries.

Tonight I will be on a flight headed south to Costa Rica to try to meet up with the little gray birds I became acquainted with last summer. Like them, I will travel at night. Unlike them, I need a passport.

Sometimes stories are destroyed

Cement on my street explodes.

I've seen it buckle and crack, and fill with dust and shells.

Trees don't grow, bushes get tired.

Concrete is white and silence strikes like the hard light in the mid-day sun.

A silent dream is a place without a center, where history and stories fall as thousands or millions of corpses.

Memories are scared away.

But a million buildings stand, tall or squat, white-washed with windows covered in tinfoil and metal doors. Maps and plans come wrapped in foreign fatigues and foreign faces.

Our building was captured in silence. It is parchment, vague, distant. It is wrinkled like my grandmother. 

She said if you make a habit of smiling or laughing or if you let go of your words and sounds in any old direction, pieces of you can get lost and you'll never find them again when it's time to go home.

And all those pieces will fly off into the air like the birds, and they'll lose eachother. Like letters of the alpahabet, they don't have any meaning when they are alone. They aren't a word or a sentence or a story or a memory. 

My thoughts and feelings fly off alive and warm and get lost. Further from home than ever before, flying until their hearts beat out. 

A person can lose a home.

Thousands and millions of people can lose their homes.

Their stories and memories can fly away and become thousands and millions of pieces of lost words and lost sounds. When I'm old enough, I'll go back and pick up all the pieces and put them back together again. Letter by letter, word by word, brick by brick, the stories and sound birds will come home.

Science says everything is somewhere in a law called The Conservation of Mass. It says that it's not possible for anything in the universe to just go away. The somethings might turn into something else, they might be crushed or smashed, blown-up or destroyed, but the pieces and parts are all there. 

Is it possible, then, to put anything back together again?

Can you put back together concrete buildings with metal doors, cracked cement streets lined with trees and tired bushes, pianos, rugs, chocolate, laughter? 

Is it possible to put back together words once lost as fly-away letters, melodies once lost as fly-away  songs?

Words can hurt. They are solid. They can come screaming, obscene, laughing in the middle of the night and shout at you to leave your home. I wish someone would pray for sounds and memories and lost stories-they are trapped in hell.

Silence is not without sound.

When separated,

both are an exiled, 

meaningless noise without a center,

without a pattern,

without identity or family or story or memory,

without history,

without a home.  

Hello 2013

Well hello there, 

2013! Do ya have any crickets? From, 

this guy. 

Happy Path-Marker

"My eyes are in my feet..." -Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (1977)

My dad walked the same path every night of my childhood. In all seasons. He dressed for winter snow storms, for sleet and rain. On clear nights of summer or spring and in the winds of autumn, he would go out into the night for a two-mile walk through the protected wetlands.  My parents moved to Minnetonka in the early 1980's, after the city acknowledged the importance of preserving the wetlands. 

Roughly 20,000 years ago, the area I grew up in was at the edge of a glacial lake. As the glaciar melted, piles of dirt and blocks of ice were deposited and left depressions in the landscape. The shallow depressions my father walked through, and I later on, followed cattails and rushes. I got to know my dad by joining him on his walks at night. I also got to know my self, and the topography of my inner and outer worlds. 

In "The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot", Robert Macfarlane said, quite simply, "Path's connect. This is their first duty and chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension, they relate people."  

The topography of the self is shaped by landscape and the paths we walk early on. I navigated wetlands-shallow depressions, seeps and swales and rushes and cattails, oaks, maples, and elms, and of course, mosquitos. Close to water and submerged- storing, recharging, housing. 

Minne-tonka, my home town, meant water-big to the Dakotah Sioux. To settlers in the mid 19th century it meant a township, it meant farming and a sawmill and furniture shop. Since WWI and to my family, it has meant suburbs where people can live and go to work and raise their kids.  

We internalize the features of our individual path-filled landscapes. They shape the form and function of our everyday hopes and longings. Projected into us early on are landscapes, and we create maps to navigate inward and outward terrains. 

We speak of places in terms of what we make of them-it seems more difficult to say what a place makes of us. 

In our culture, the holidays, the winter solstice, and the new year act as way markings, or path-markers, just as a cairn, milestone, mile-marker, boulders in a river, or blazes on trees mark paths. 

My dad followed the path in the wetlands every night as a meandering river with a singular necessity-to keep in motion.

The marker leading into 2013 draws my eye. 

My feet eyes are watching.

Drop the finger, pick up a mirror

Here is a story. 

Twenty-eight children sit in a classroom. They have hung up their coats in their individually decorated cubby holes lining the wall, beneath their artwork and drawings. They each pick up the Science book from the back shelf, take their seats and wait for the lesson. The teacher begins. They talk of stars and the solar system. The teacher talks about the Universe. They are twenty-eight small people listening and reading aloud and making spit balls, and picking their noses. And then, time stops, and the twenty-nine people in the room freeze at the sound of a loud noise.

You know, like a bang, or crash, or maybe a boom. A sound wave at first, but once it reaches the ears, a process in the mind rushes to make sense of it. And before the mind can make sense the room is changed, the world and universe and stars and planets all flip, and something unnamed is gone, but somethings are at once left behind.

And the people left behind are caught in the lessons of society's how's, and yet are oblivious to the why.

What of the students who now go home and ask their parents the why. And of the parents who can't talk to their children whom have been taken as pieces from the now to the who knows when. And what of the people trying to make sense of the why.

What of the tragedies that go unnoticed and under the radar, unlearned.

A mortician publicly discussed the importance of talking to children about violence and death. When they ask the why, do we tell them we know why?

We could say, our culture has violence and that violence has meaning. But beyond that, we can not say.

We can look into the barrel of a gun as if into a mirror. Yes.

Or, we can feel powerless-up against a force of nature.

We could say it is out there and there are bad people, and it's scary and uncertain, and one day somebody could happen to pass through your life, and they could take it.

We are those children. Caught in the how, and oblivious to the why, we are torn between bitterness and hope.

And we look to the ones we fear most, as if they are the why. We look to the other, the stranger, and they are the why.

We need the why. The why is the space where our bullet-holed hearts and minds mingle to tell us the meaning for our pain.

According to Webster Online,
Massacre is:
 1. a) the indiscriminate, merciless killing of a number of human beings
     b) large-scale slaughter of animals
and
2) Informal an overwhelming defeat, as in sports

Multiple messages occupying the same space. And in that space a construction, a meaning about right and wrong, black and white, good and evil, and where we all reside is formed.

What happens when multiple meanings crash into each other? Is it like a boom, a crack, a fizzle, a snap? Can we hear it?

Is a massacre of others a crime against the self? Does this construction lead to an irresolvable world?

Mark Twain said,

“By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.”

In jest.

I sift through the recesses of my heart for a reminder of beauty where no beauty seems possible, for a reminder of kinship when isolation feels inevitable. I ache for the reminder that lonely does not mean we have to pretend to be someone we are not, and that my actions towards those around me are the most significant force constructing the world I live in.

Researchers in primate behavior study aggression in chimps. They try to make sense of inter-group violence. Jane Goodall spoke in an interview with Bill Moyers about how she reconciles a world which equally contains cruelty and violence communally with solidarity, and ultimately, love. She said, “ I reach the conclusion that I do believe we have brought aggressive tendencies with us through our long evolutionary path. I mean, you can't look around the world and not realize that we can be, and often are, extremely brutal and aggressive. And equally, we have inherited tendencies of love, compassion, and altruism, because they are there in our closest ancestors. So, we've brought those with us. It's like each of us has this dark side and a more noble side. And I guess it's up to each one of us to push one down and develop the other.”

These are the conflicts of multiple forces which rage within us. Within us and against us. Against us and within us.

Perhaps the need to answer the why is to escape. To escape the scariest story of them all. Not the story of crimes of others, but of the brutal massacre of the self.

All our secrets are the same.

How to become, seemingly invisible

Octopuses imitate color even though they are colorblind.

They distinguish between objects which are black and white from objects which are different shades of grey.

Distinguishing between different polarizations of light allows them to sense the slightest contrasts between different colors, so they can adjust the texture and color of their skin until they exactly match the shade they seek to blend in with, and become, seemingly,

invisible.

Experimental Flips

wanting to stick
to the moment right before
wanting it to begin
---------------------------

full-fledged crows
circle jack in the box
to shout at cars
---------------------------

midnight rat
chewing her toe callus-is there
really a point in life?
---------------------------

alternately off
then on-lipstick
for a contrast
---------------------------

smell of victory
is napalm-he said while
remembering burning flesh
---------------------------

the loud crow woke me
from my walking dream
of walking away from myself
----------------------------

An important man can
skip stones over words-as he
jumps from boat to boat