what we deserve.

"Here she comes, running, out of prison and off the pedestal; chains off, crown off, halo off, just a live woman."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

in reading this I both hear and remember a loved one.

"speech is holy; it was not intended to be set free only to be wasted. It is for hearing and remembering."

Ella Cara Delouria


 We only have one shot to be sincere here, y'all. Let's love when we love,  and say so.

the night will have no stars and you will be as far as you think you can ever get, but walk on because you can't go back now...

be what you want to be.

[today's study playlist]


Masterswarm- Andrew Bird

Honey and the Moon- Joesph Arthur

Michael Stipes- In the Sun (Joseph Arthur Cover)

Just in Case- Micachu

There are Birds- The Ruby Suns

Say Goodbye- Seepeoples

Leaves in the River- Seawolf

3 Legged Animals- Californe

Bathosphere- Smog

Can't go back- The Weepies

stopping you would stifle your enchanting ghost (leaked. awesome.)

"...and if it grieves you to stay here, just go...
ohhhhh for I have no spell on you, it's all a ghost."

Even if you're one of those "too cool" anti-hipsters (in itself a form of hipster, the anti.) or anti-everyonelikesthat kids-- take a listen. It's good, no matter your position on Sufjanism.


Sufjan Stevens- Enchanting Ghost

Things now. From a letter I wrote. Easier than writing a blog.

There is one fact I have found in my life to be very central to who I am and what I'm here for. Mountains. I was 16 years old before I saw a mountain, and when I did I felt like a resting metronome. Peaceful, done with a hard day's work. "Found it!" I spent hours taking pictures of graveyards on mountainsides (in North Carolina in the snow). I have never been good at the cold, and thus don't think I really appreciated how much I NEED mountains intermittently until I moved to Spain when I was 22.

Right now listening to a song I can't stop listening to for whatever reason- "Nerves of the Nightmind" by Fronteir Ruckus. It will surely go on my August mix.

Back to mountains. When I was 21 I packed a backpack and went out to explore the place where I spent my preteen years-- Ascot, England. From there I traveled all over Europe with a friend for the summer. I fall in love with languages and this particular summer I became twitterpated with Catalan. (I remain twitterpated, but nothing compares to the lust I feel about words, verbs, sounds when I first fall in love with a language and do not yet speak it).

Segway-- I have always been interested in world markets, capitalism and language. What languages become economically beneficial to speak? What other reasons to languages have for surviving. Catalan was an obvious choice for these reasons, that and it is the most beautiful language I have ever head. I speak Spanish...and hearing a romance language with so much of what I love of Spanish...sound so...French, and in love...floored me.

I came back to the United States from this trip in love with Catalan and determined to learn to speak it. That is a bit difficult in Gainesville, Florida. There was a course in Catalan I, so I enrolled..my love grew...and rather than join the Peace Corps or go straight to graduate school in Development Studies I packed up my things, sold most of it, and moved to Catalonia-- to a mountainous island called Mallorca.

It was there I learned the power that mountains have in my life, and the person I can be when I'm around them. There were nights I talked friends into putting me on the back of their motorbikes...with Chopin's nocturnes blaring in my headphones as performed live by Claudio Arrau...(he wrote some of those IN Mallorca)...I asked them to go as fast as they could, winding..through narrow mountain valleys, around corners, the moon shining brightly on the water.

I had only lived in Kansas, Chicago, and Florida. never around mountains, never around such natural beauty. It became my goal to find this beauty in my country when I moved back.

My research became focused on language activism during the Franco regime (it was illegal to speak Catalan, physical punishment, jail, etc, and yet...the language thrived) and gender. I critiqued existing literature for crediting public activists for the survival of Catalan when clearly only the rich (afford bail) and public figures (read: male at the time) could engage in that activity. To me what language theorists can garner from that epoch is how the everyday decisions of mothers, parents, workers to use and teach their progeny Catalan were deliberated. I can become intensely interested in anything I immerse myself in-- as everything to me is complex. Especially things that seem simple.

I lived there for two years, and found out my father had terminal cancer. My father and I were very, very close. He was given 6 a frightening prognosis and I returned to the United States immediately. I had earned (while there) a degree in language teaching, and gained teaching experience. I found a job as a teacher in Florida, and walked with him through that final stage of life...and as soon as he moved on applied to return to school to pursue my dream-- a PhD. Starting that with high hopes.

I currently have a crush on Quechua and Aymara. I have chosen to pursue words in the former, as Aymara is not spoken as much in the mountains (as is Quechua).  The Andes are the mountain chain I currently stalk, but I have plans to travel to just be, write, listen to music, hike in Tennessee if I can find someone else who is interested. I want to fall in love with my country the way I am in love with others.

One huge landmark for me in this quest was my first visit out west (right before I moved back to the US. Big Sur, California changed my life. Listening to the Beach Boys at the Henry Miller Library while reading Tropic of Cancer...waiting a Philip Glass show. Later to walk home along cliffs, waves crashing below..in the dark, huge moon. This is the closest thing I found to racing on motorbikes listening to Chopin in this country thus far. I seek to top it. constantly.

I have a video of some pictures from that summer.

I have so much to respond to in your letter, but need to go on a date with my corgi. sorry if this as not the best response, but you can trust it to be sincere!

oh- we listen to this american life on the hikes. it is great.

Good bye, why-poe-lark.

T Hatch says, 'round every corner
by: p:ano


'round every corner
I'm as good as my word so....
'round every corner
there's a good life and there's monsters
and they're all dancing together


they do the madison, they do the foxtrot, they do whatever.

Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke to Kappus Letter 7

Letter Seven


Rome
May 14, 1904

My dear Mr. Kappus,



Much time has passed since I received your last letter. Please don't hold that against me; first it was work, then a number of interruptions, and finally poor health that again and again kept me from answering, because I wanted my answer to come to you out of peaceful and happy days. Now I feel somewhat better again (the beginning of spring with its moody, bad-tempered transitions was hard to bear here too) and once again, dear Mr. Kappus, I can greet you and talk to you (which I do with real pleasure) about this and that in response to your letter, as well as I can.



You see: I have copied out your sonnet, * because I found that it is lovely and simple born in the shape that it moves in with such quiet decorum. It is the best poem of yours that you have let me read. And now I am giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much it is your own.



It was a pleasure for me to read this sonnet and your letter, often; I thank you for both.


We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.



It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is - ; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent - ?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.



But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. . . . : And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are live-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of very sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.



Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.



We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes that time has brought about there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.

And one more thing: Don't think that the great love which was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you know whether vast and generous wishes didn't ripen in you at that time, and purposes by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life. - All good wished to you, dear Mr. Kappus!



Yours,

Rainer Maria Rilke