Year: 2016

December 16th – My third night back in the States found me at a holiday party for Imprint Projects at my sister’s place. It was a very LA occasion what with the quesadilla lady, piñata, and tub full of La Croix, but the best part was being with my sibs (and the piñata).

Earlier in the day, Sarah picked me up from Union Station and we had lunch in Little Tokyo. Theo is getting big, looking so much like both his parents.

The air here is soft, sweet-smelling. I forgot what that was like. There are leaves on the trees and flowers still in bloom.

People at the party asked me what I’m doing in Berlin. I still don’t have a great elevator answer except that I came for the adventure, stayed for the lifestyle. And, that you only get one shot to be here now, for the long now, that is.

I’m grateful to travel back and forth between these worlds, that I get to be in love with two totally different cities, and in many ways live two distinct, but not dissimilar lives. Instead of one eclipsing the other, it feels like I’ve grown a second self or a branch reaching toward the light in a wild, new direction.

I’ll be in the States for 3 weeks, going between LA, Newport, and a brief NorCal stint. Friends and lovers, I want to see you! All of you.

December 10th – Things are coming together! I moved into my new apartment with Jasmine, a painter from New York who came to Berlin at the start of the summer. She visited for 2 weeks, went home, packed her clothes, sold her furniture and moved here permanently. Meeting her through our mutual friend Lizzy has been such a boon. Jasmine has excellent style and the best sense of humor. She believes in the magic of coconut oil and the joys of blathering about our days over a glass of wine in the evening. It’s a perfect fit.

(my bedroom, a portrait of minimalism)

(move-in day, construction zone kitchen)

Before moving in, I felt a little odd about having a roommate, but looking around at our giant apartment, with its high, moulded ceilings, two bathrooms, and sweet location in Neukolln (right upstairs from my friend Ariane), I couldn’t feel luckier. We’re looking forward to furnishing the place so we can host dinner parties, brunches — really any kind of food with friends situations that exist.

In other news, it is winter in Berlin. The daylight has been reduced to what feels like a few hours each day and all the trees look like twigs for kindling. The brightest sky is still a variation of gray, but there is a kind of quiet, hunkering down it provides. I hear that the light returns, in shades, starting in January. Jasmine says if she didn’t know what summer was like here, the phenomenon of practically existing only outdoors, by the canal, by a lake, on the streets in those long, warm days, she wouldn’t survive the winter. I’m looking forward to that, reminding myself that adventure contains not just chaos, but onerous bouts of waiting, and then refusing the idea of waiting, as if there were something better, as if difference suggests a hierarchy.

The layers of clothing, the quick descent down the basement stairs of winter, the folding up of nature, turning into itself for a long meditation, bones cold as I hurry down the street burying my nose in my scarf — I wouldn’t have known any of it without being here.

Oh, and I went to a Christmas market last weekend!

Finally, my neighborhood contains cafes like this, so really, you never have to feel the cold.

Days 90-106

For a couple of weeks, my mom and sister visited me in Europe and my heart was alight. Except, of course, there was the election and waking up on November 9th to the results.

The idea of going back to the States for love of my country, for the truths we hold (ostensibly) to be self-evident, and for the need to participate in protest and civil disobedience, has not left me. My family and I commemorated the day by visiting Dachau, where I cried with the kind of plunging, heaving breaths only that kind particular grief can evoke. I took pictures of the photographs in the museum at Dachau. From my heart, I sent that sorrow to the hearts of my countrymen, thinking, this is what it looks like. Don’t forget, this is what can happen.

When we’ve decided that you are you, that I am me, and that we’re not the same, we’ve become the monstrous version of ourselves, unrecognizable to the part of our true selves that could have chosen to see this world and its inhabitants otherwise.

Years ago, Frank and I visited Bosnia. Sarajevo is a city that still shows the damage from the genocide that happened there. I wrote a poem called, “What if God was One of Us,” in which I discuss a point Joseph Campbell makes in Masks of God. He notes that many Native American cultures see godliness in everything, in the trees and animals.

From my poem:

He would argue, it’s not what if god was one of us, but what if god was all of us. Forgetting this is what lets us go to war, Campbell says. It’s only possible to kill an “it.” I forget that I am also you.

Is othering a survival skill? …

All over the Balkans I saw the remains of othering. It litters the towns and cities with such visions: walls lying in heaps of bricks among the weeds and wild that years of weather have brought up in a home, so many homes without roofs, the broken red skeletons of walls shivering, exposed to the cold, to the sun, showing themselves like ghosts. I could see some of the contents inside a bedroom, the dresser pushed against a wall still papered pink. The two other walls blown away. Its vision gave itself to me. The breast of the house was blown open to expose its heart.

I am worried about the violence we need to commit against each other because of the violence committed against us. Once or never or always committed. Especially when there is no distinction between what is held inside my skin and what is held beyond it. I am also violence.

If “every water is the same water coming round, the same blood, the great circulation,” then every violence is the same violence coming round. Violence cannot be of different colors and versions and assignments, with different fates, cannot be different like the faces of the people who inhabit it. It is singular, with a singular purpose, to propagate and procreate. Like a burning hole that grows.

This is what I’ve been thinking about, haven’t stopped thinking about. Still, life rushes forward. So this becomes the question: What to do? More on that, another time…

After Berlin, we rented a car and drove to Prague. It is a dark and picturesque city. Perfect for lovers. It was a happy surprise to find it less touristy in the winter then when I’d seen it last so many summers ago. On the way, we stopped in Dresden.

(Emily in Dresden)

(Prague)

From Prague, we drove to this beautiful old town in southern Czech Republic called Cesky Kromlav. Our hotel was on the Vltava River beside a 13th century castle.

From there we drove to Munich where we drank giant beers and hung out with some LA friends who happened to be playing a show there.

(Emily, Kevin, and Cyrus)

(Mama, beautiful sis and I at the Hofbauhaus)

Our travels ended in Amsterdam, which is pretty close to being a perfect city.

I flew back to Berlin and moved into my friend Alexander’s place to stay for a little while until my apartment is ready at the end of the month. He lives in Prenzlauer Berg, a part of the city I’d not yet explored. The next day I had a birthday. Turning 36 in Berlin was magical. Alex had a brunch that morning where I made some new friends (including two very cute babies).

(pre-brunch)

(post-brunch chill)

(My kind host Alex and his friend, Lisa)

I rounded off the celebration that night with my friend and soon-to-be-roommate, Jasmine, at a gay bar in Neukolln called Roses. It was all sparkles and ’80s Madonna (plus a blonde photo-bomber).

Hooray for being alive.

Days 80-89

I went to one the many galleries on Potsdamer Strasse with Clare and Mirta last weekend to experience this instillation. It’s hard to understand the scale from the photos, but it was a huge room filled with sort of catacombs of red rope, sinewy and spiderweb-like at the same time. If felt like being an idea itself or a memory in a maundering brain. A sense of the expansive and befuddling qualities of potentiality.

The red ropes were harnessed from below to these black, skeletal boats, giving the illusion of a fog of spirit escaping, rising, or like the boat resting on the “upside down” (if you’ve seen Stranger Things, you know what I mean), so the rising spirit is maybe actually sinking, diluting itself into the greater body of red webbing.

There was something terrible about it, though it was beautiful. Parts of the webbing were thick, ornate with enmeshed-ness, while the caverns they created rose high up to the ceiling.

It took me 4 or 5 weeks to not feel completely disoriented in Berlin, to not feel like a fucking nerd, or obvious foreigner, to not feel as though I don’t belong. Finding a winter coat had a lot to do with wanting to leave my apartment more, too. Expanding my social circle and finding an apartment with my new friend Jasmine makes me feel more connected to this place. The apartment is being renovated, but we move in on Dec. 1st. A lovely, empty apartment with high ceilings and lots of light. An entire apartment to furnish. Daunting and exciting. Something like a relief in walking away from LA.

I see expectations dissolving, reassembling themselves, dissolving again as the moments and days act like rain plashing down and folding into a pool.

Another new friend mentioned how it’s too easy to get lost in the boredom of routine. He said this as we walked along the canal. These friends of friends are becoming my friends too and I feel less lonely.

This week all the leaves on the trees that line the streets turned yellow and covered the sidewalks. I took this picture on the way to my friend Emily’s baby shower, where all the women in attendance were smart and interesting.

Then, the other night, I sat in a nearly empty bar reading a book. My brain was swimmy from writing all day and I had gone on a walk to clear it, when I stumbled on a warm, cozy looking spot to stop in. I had been reading for several minutes, looked up and out the window where my stare locked with a man passing on the street, a man I know, but have not seen in a while. We held each other’s gaze for a few seconds, he without stopping, me without moving. Then the moment passed.

On sex and sultry moods, within 3 seconds of Angel Olsen’s show in Berlin last night, my friend squeezed my hand and said, “this is so romantic.” I was unprepared for it. Having not listened much to the new record, which is surprising rockin’ and sometimes electronic, in performance the sound was voluptuous. When she sang some lyrics, “I aint giving up tonight,” you agreed.

The air strobed, my beer was cold and bitter. The songs wended through my various selves like a demand or desire exaggerated, up close, the thing pulling back, the thing that makes a moaning.

In one of the most staggering songs, “Sister,” she says, “I want to live life, I want to die right,” which is juxtaposed with the jarring sentiment, “All my life I thought I’d change.” Consequence and the desire it was born of.

When I got home, I listened to the record in bed. I fell asleep and dreamed of eating a feast and also of being in love. For the past week, all of my dreams have followed this format. Different feasts, different men. I wake up satisfied. It wears off, of course.

I think challenges attract me now, though they rarely did before. I’ve noticed this with my body, in yoga, for example, I push myself past what I think I can do, then feel strong and capable when I’ve done it. Maybe this is why I’m allured by the difficulty of learning German, of going through the bureaucratic bullshit of trying to stay here, of finding an apartment so I can leave it in the spring and summer months to return to Italy, to Greece and Croatia, to see Scandinavia.

But I can’t deny this either: I want to be chased through a field with the summer light working through me.  

The baseline kills me (wait for it.)

Days 67-70

New cities are sexy. Sex appeal hinges on difficulty, on thwarting, on moving closer and falling back and moving closer. On being brave and free, ferried between the idea and being it.

Clara wrote me a note talking about how we put ourselves in places where we can’t go back. She said, “I love that art can only really be made in the space created by the absence of something profound.”

That something— the continents, a cosmic shelter, keys echoing through keyholes, hearts attending hearts, the hand that unhooks you?

I like Berlin fine, though it reminds me of San Francisco. Maybe I even like how I hate it. That old San Francisco and that me no longer exist, but for in ghosts and other dreams.

It is hard to live in a foreign country. It’s gray as fuck and cold and they don’t sell coats that fit me. But it’s cozy inside. The contrast of going from outside in is like a dozen homecomings a day, like slinking into a bath, like you’ve escaped something rough and met something better in the same breath.

It’s hard here. I want to stay.

Clara and I talked about the presence that exists in the empty. I said, “That potential, as you describe it, of pushing yourself or training, is a different sort of place to put your hopes, maybe one without expectations, the open space for potential to unfold.”

Living alone in a foreign country is hard, but making things here is easier. Writing is easier. Not a still moon sinking into midnight, but something swelled and awake, flushed with a language unpegged, relieved. It fetches me and for no reason I follow.

Day 63-66

Last night I dreamed that while swimming in a river, we saw a snake begin to wrap itself around a little skunk, who was too scared to move. So we rescued the skunk and took her home with us, only to find that the snake had followed. We couldn’t lose him. He was unwavering in his dedication to be close to the skunk and we realized he was actually in love with her. They got married. The skunk’s name was Prudence.

True story. Well, true dream story. Fucking Prudence. Look up the definition.

I woke up this morning laughing. I keep smiling when I think about it.

Days 50-62  – Last night at dinner, a new friend invited me to temple today, because today is Yom Kippur. Those Days of Awe, the past 10 days from Rosh Hashanah to today, really flew by. I know I started out by considering who I may have hurt in the past year, who’s forgiveness I should ask for, but I think I actually abhor the idea of doing so to save my soul, that is, to convince God to inscribe me in the Book of Life. Today we’re supposed to hope that all of our repenting has sealed a good fate for us, that God’s verdict will ascribe happiness and health in the coming year.

I’d prefer to believe that I have no fate, or rather, that fate is inherently dynamic.

And isn’t it? Doesn’t fate come from faith, in believing you’re inherently worthy, in coming to that certainty  from the daily practice of forgiving those you feel you’ve wronged and or have wronged you? Isn’t empathy and unconditional love born of that constant practice of humility, which engenders compassion and immerses us in the now?

Before I go to bed at night I tell the universe that I am grateful, I tell the universe how much love I have for it and every being within it. The practice has the effect of diminishing the distance between what I perceive as outside of myself and what is inside. It is both a relief and an embrace. It hurts and it forgives, as all beautiful things do.

In LA, the practice of mindfulness was nearly at the center of my life. It’s a lot easier when you speak the same language and share the same customs as everyone around you. Since I’ve been in Berlin, there are myriad centers and it feels as if they’re dots on a map in constant motion. What is close becomes far. Life grows in every direction, which it always does, of course, but this is most apparent when our internal compass is thrown off. I mean this literally. In new locations we can’t place ourselves amid unfamiliar surroundings. It takes a while to find orientation (especially if you can’t read maps or understand directions no matter how clear they are).

The argument for uncertainty is a solid one, I think, the idea of becoming lost in a place and/or losing oneself despite the place is why people travel the world or adventure inward on a monastic path. I came for both, forgetting that it’s also not easy. Conversely, I don’t think it’s hard if I let myself be lost without guilt or desperate fumbling for pieces of familiarity. That too is part of the now. The struggle, the not letting myself give in, seems to be the shitty part. The lostness is neither good nor bad, it just is.

I hope for a happy, healthy new year. I believe that all beings are worthy of this. I forgive myself for times I forget.

Days 46-49 – Oh! It’s raining. And the sounds, not just of the rain hitting the rooftops, but of the ground absorbing and digesting it, becoming soft. It sounds like the soil is breathing. Insects hum and hiss. The sky is light gray, both impenetrable and deep, like some mood or atmosphere ushered in from a location beyond today.

I am happy, cozy in my studio grading papers and commenting on poems. I can hear the church bells. The sounds of my neighbors preparing lunch. I just want to be here and I am here.

Last night I went to a little wine store with a bar and a few tables for eating dinner. I sat on old leather love-seat beside a new friend, sipping wine, talking about the ways words are made differently than art, a more tenuous translation from emotion to expression. He said, I’ve never wanted to miss my flight before and we laughed about that. Candles and rows of bottles filled the bar. A waiter leaning over us to take down a bottle for someone.

Today is the first of October.

I got the idea to read a novel that takes place in Berlin while I’m here, so I downloaded The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood.

I get lost in being here, that is, I get caught up in the city so that I become a part of it and forget where I am, that I’m away from home. Maybe I could be anywhere and feel that I’m alive. That sense of presence, for any reason, is a gift.

Day 45 – I took a train to the suburb of Potsdam yesterday. I went to a giant park, Sanssouci Park, that’s filled with palaces. I struggled trying to capture the immensity of them with iphone camera until I met someone also traveling alone, also not humiliating himself with a selfie stick, so we paired up for the day.

It’s impossible to relate the scale of these structures, including the natural ones, like the sweeping fields that reminded me a lot of Yosemite. And gardens with statues that remind me of giant chess pieces.

If you are down with OPP, other people’s palaces, here’s some pictures for you.

There’s too much catching up that I owe you, so I’ve made a brief, 10-day retrospective:

Days 33-43 – A couple of days before I left for my trip, my dad said something that I thought was strange. He said, “When you get there, I think you’ll be disappointed.” I wondered how I could be let down by a place that I’d never been to? But that’s the very reason why I might be; it was all expectations grounded in no reality.

It’s been 10 days since I first landed in Berlin and from the instant I walked out of the airport, I’ve had the sense that I love it here. Not only that, before I came even, I already didn’t want to leave. When my ex-husband, who also spent 3 months in Berlin before we met, asked what I liked most about it, I said, “I like walking along the canal,” which is the only tangible thing I could think of. Of course, I like the food and culture and people, that everyone rides a bike, that you can drink a beer as you sit by the river, and, in fact this is what you see many young people doing, gathered in the afternoons or evenings here in Berlin. I like the cafes that line the canal. I like the seriousness of german culture. I like that art is everywhere. I like walking and taking the bahn. I like the orange shingled rooftops and the view of them from my 4th floor apartment. I like the tall ceilings and old hardware in apartments and that the apartments are built around courtyards. I like that it feels like autumn and the old European city architecture. 

I like everything about it here.

Last night Clare and I went to the James Turrell light instillation in an old (circa 1924) cemetery chapel. The LED lights hidden within the structures of the windows and walls, the alter, and apses follow the movement of natural light outside as the sunsets. It both mimics and enhances the natural light. This time of day has always been a profoundly violent one for me because of the shifting light, it disturbs me and makes me sad. So you can understand that this experience was overwhelming, the mood magnified, both awesome and inescapable.

Afterward, Clare and I went to dinner where we met with her friend Emily, a writer and magazine editor living in Berlin. After telling me that she did her MFA at University of Arizona, I realized that she knows my ex-husband. She remembered him posting excited comments to Facebook when we got married. “And now, I’m meeting you,” she said. The coincidence blew Clare’s mind. It was already wild enough that Clare and I would be sitting across from each other at a restaurant table in a city and country so far from the one where we’d known each other before. I knew Clare before LA, though. In San Francisco, her boyfriend was best friends with my old boyfriend. We once we on a camping trip together.

When people say the world is small, you can’t imagine how small it is until experiences like these where you feel like eventually, you might end up meeting everyone on the planet someday.

In many ways, I can’t tell if it is what I expected it to be or not.

Walking home from a bar last night, I could hear my boots clicking along the sidewalk and it reminded me of living in San Francisco, my boots clicking down those streets you walk or bike or take the bus down, but never drive. It felt safe, though it was dark and late, because lots of people were out. I always felt safe in San Francisco too, because of this.

I feel very free here. I don’t know if this is particular to Berlin, maybe I’d feel this way in any European city, but it feels just right. Going back to LA seems unimaginable and I’d like to figure out a way not to.

But I also have to admit that there was a let down. Before I left, I met someone who lived not in Germany, but a country close by and I thought we would meet up when I got here. I’d missed his presence since he left LA. We’d only spent a little over a week together there, but I had, of course, created an expectation. I was open to whatever happened once we met up, but the openness was still contingent on meeting up. When I got here and learned that it was not meant to be, my expectations didn’t know where to settle themselves. Somehow the failure of this idea compounded the loneliness I suddenly felt of not knowing anyone here aside from Clare, her husband, and my friend Ariane.

I wondered then if this was the disappointment my dad was talking about. Could be. But, though this man, in his small way, inspired the open spirit it took to get me to move here, I see he was a bridge to this adventure and does not need to belong to it in any other way.

In the last few days, I’ve met so many people. I have dates not just with Germans, but people from other countries also doing stints in Berlin for whatever reason. It is the international richness, too, that I love about Berlin. America is wide and big, but it is just one country. With all its diversity, it is homogeneous, in that, our cultures are bonded in more ways than they’re not.

A few nights after arriving, I had drinks with Ariane and her french neighbor. The intertwining and exchangeability, interchangeability of languages deepened what was communicated, I think, because grappling with languages fuels the need to understand and be understood. It was beautiful.

I don’t feel too lonely anymore. I don’t get lost as much. Public transit is easy. I wake up in the morning and ask myself what I want to do, who I want to be. I can be anyone. I get to be the parts of myself I was afraid of, or didn’t understand, before I made myself do a frightening thing and then discovered how sweet it is.

From the Turrell installation.

Day 33 – My sister put me in touch with one of her co-workers who’s husband just opened an art gallery here. I went to the opening last night and it was awesome, also great to be around lots of people speaking english and to make new friends!

The artist is Chris Johanson. I remember seeing his art instillation at Adobe Books in San Francisco, years ago. He rearranged all of the books in the entire store by color. I feel like he kinda started the trend of people doing this on their bookshelves at home. It looked incredible, but made it impossible to find the book you wanted.

Last night’s show is called Imperfect Reality with Figures and Challenging Abstraction. I felt like the title really spoke to me. Since I came here, I’ve been navigating the gap between what I thought it would be like and what it’s like. More on that later.

(images courtesy of arrestedmotion.com)

The prevalence of the color blue reminded me of something else from my writings before I decided to go to abroad.

The word “leaving” is a locution woven into my thoughts without harness of place or purpose, but I conjured pictures I’ve seen of Germans gathered around lakes and swimming. From my own travels I recalled sunbathers and picnickers lakeside in Zurich, and in the warm Parisian evenings, people carrying a blanket and bottle of wine down to  sit by the Seine. Once my husband and I clinked wine glasses and ate cherries on the river that goes through Lubjiana amid Astro-Hungarian architecture and walkways bustling with college students and young families.

I’m feeling down. I even texted my Frank, hoping he would offer to bring our dog over to cheer me up. 

He texted back, “Wow. You must be bad off. Most people would jus say, “I’m feel blue.”

Me: “What did I say?”

Frank: “Blue feeling.”

I am blue feeling. I want to be completely and constitutionally blue. Like how the Chinese ascribe red for vitality and life. Blue, cobalt or clear or powdery, or fatty, swaying itself  against a rocky Slovenian shore or dalmatian island, lapping the 2 concrete steps into the sea. You hold the rail along the first few steps then dive in both feet at once because there’s no other way.

(image courtesy danacohen)

Day 32 – On my second day in Berlin, I moved into my apartment in Neukolln. It is an airy studio furnished with a bed, large desk, not just one but 2 rocking chairs, some other seating options, and a small rug that I meditate on. It is perfect! I’m on the 4th floor and my window opens up to the courtyard.

Before I knew where I would go to, or even if I would really leave LA, I did some writing about it. I had been feeling stifled and stymied, but was kind of paralyzed, afraid to take the leap. Instead I waded a bit in the waters of possibility. Then the signs started streaming in. Here’s an excerpt from those writings:

I woke up to an email this morning from Budapest. It was from a writer I’d met once. When I saw pictures of him standing on a balcony from his new Hungarian location, I pictured it furnished sparsely, with a bed of clean starched sheets and a writing desk near a window looking out onto the night sounds of a city thousands of years old.

I wrote him an email asking if he was doing a writing residency or if work brought him there. And now he writing me back, telling me how he did it.

For two weeks solid I’ve been feeding myself fantasies of European living. Watching House Hunters International obsessively, picturing myself in their shoes, wondering how desire translates itself into doing the thing you want. Rather, when one decides a want is a need.

Do I look more like a Berliner yet?

Day 31 – My first day in Berlin and I’m mesmerized by Clare and Jakob’s apartment, which has been transformed into some kind of beautiful sculpture garden filled with Clare’s 3D collages and floating flower-topias.

I couldn’t be luckier to have such a soft landing in a foreign country. It’s been almost 2 years since I last saw her. When she and Jakob moved here, I dreamed of coming to visit. After my divorce, I thought maybe I’ll move here. I longed to rewrite my life with type of deliberateness that comes from choosing and making what you want to create. We may feel like we’re spit out from a void must live out our lives where we land, but there is also always the potential for something else.

Clare’s art opening is October 8th and is titled, Intimate Immensity. The structures she’s created reminds me of something I mentioned before, the practice of holding a magnifying glass up to the myriad of the minute that compose our landscape and seeing the immensity there.

If you’re in Berlin in early October, come by the opening and say hello!

Day 30 –  Dear Readers, forgive my delay. I wrote Day 30 from the airplane and it has taken me a couple of days to settle in here in Berlin. I’ve not been here long, but does that refuse me the right to say I love it here? Because, I do!

I flew from LA to Iceland for a quick layover, then boarded the plane for Berlin. Here is my diary entry:

Day 30 – From the airplane window, I see what is outside at these heights, the big open, split in two at the horizon. The bottom half, an almost perfectly unbroken cloud bank that looks more like a frozen ocean, rippled with the textures snow drifts impart. The top half is an expanse of blue, punctuated by a big round moon. It looked like the size, and color of a new silver dollar, pasted within the frame of this little rectangular window with soft corners. The middle space is hazy orange and pink…

A few minutes later, the pink stretched, pink is leaking from the center. I sit back in my seat with a miniature bottle of white wine I’ve just cracked open and remembered something, but it isn’t a memory from something I’ve seen or done before, but the kind of nostalgia you feel when you’re waiting for it to happen. Every possibility seems as available and familiar as the smell of orange blossoms on hot summer nights in the place I grew up. Something old and new is about to happen. It is right there and it feels like it always has been, like falling in love with a stranger. So you go diving into yourself, probably to the same place where dreams exist, I picture it like a photo I’ve saw of a geothermal bath in Iceland surrounded by snow, steaming from its own warmth. It is called Blue Lagoon and I think that beyond thoughts place I’m talking about should have the same name.

Now, everything outside is purple bleeding into pink, into red, into orange and so on through the rainbow. And as the color that served as night takes over, I feel safe in the airplane going by myself to a country I’ve never seen. Maybe it feels like when I went off to camp, or college, or when I came home from San Francisco, that first year, for the holidays. I will never understand why new experiences feel like old ones and old ones feel new, like falling in love, or, like folding into the bed your mother or sister has made up for you, like when a cat jumps in with you, curling itself into your bent shape, purring, as if to sleep without the warmth of another living thing would cause you to freeze to death during the night.

I am looking forward to the cold. I’m looking forward to seeking out warmth instead of the heat that’s blanked LA. In LA it was starting to feel like there was nothing we could do that would let us throw the blanket off.

So now it is dark out. The plane feels like a submarine swimming through the bluest dark parts of the ocean and the moon is a porch light.

Day 29 – Moving Day! The subletter moves in this afternoon. My cat’s getting relocated to my folk’s house where she and I will hang until I fly out in a few days.

Last night I dreamed that my lover invited me to a party, but when I showed up everyone at the party belonged to some old, elite club that spanned generations and shunned anyone new, especially brunettes. Everything I said was wrong. I used the wrong utensils and drank too much wine so that it turned my mouth purple. Instead of defending me, my lover turned against me, he said he never really knew me, but now that he did, I should leave.

Walking home, in the dream, feeling dejected and lost, a limousine pulled over. The driver told me to get in. Steve Martin was sitting inside and said he was taking me as his date to the old elites’ dinner, which he happened to be on his way to, where he planned to deliver a big f*ck you speech to the old guard. Together we’d usher in a new era of humor, spontaneity, free thinking, and democracy.

Of course this dream was about worrying I’ll feel out place. Of course, “brunette” means Jew. Of course, this dream was about Germany.

Last night, before I went to bed and dreamed the dream, my sister and I sat at Edendale’s crowded back patio, sipping cocktails. I said, “imagine everyone here speaking German.”

I’d experienced vertigo at a restaurant earlier. It was a cozy, softly lit little space; the last place one would expect to feel suddenly like they were side-swiped by a truck. My sister had gone to the bathroom and came back to find me sitting stiff in my chair, clutching the edges of seat so I didn’t go tumbling onto the ground. I’ve never had vertigo before. I didn’t know it feels like your brain is doing somersaults in your skull.

This morning, I settled into my meditation as usual, focused on envisioning what feels good and right. I never hear any voices from god while meditating, and I try my best to quiet my own thoughts, but an a few occasions a song streams through the silence.

The first time it happened, it was the line from a Yo La Tengo song, which was a surprise since I haven’t listened to them in like 10 years. In my quieted mind, the voice broke through and said, “you can have it all.” Awesome, I thought. A few nights later I went out to dinner with a friend that I hadn’t seen in since graduating college. In talking about her new life (she’d made some big changes recently) she said, “you don’t realize it, but you can have it all. I tell all the women I work with because it still blows my mind, but you really can.”

A few days after that I was working in a cafe and another song from the same Yo La Tengo album came on, so I googled it because I couldn’t remember the album’s title. It’s called, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. Man, I thought. Nothing’s a waste, everything’s a sign. The opposite, inside-out side of nothing is everything; you can have it all.

Getting back to this morning, I told myself I’d hold off on analyzing my dream until I was done meditating. I had just woken up, was still stuck in the emotions of it, struggling to extradite myself from the reality of that world and settle into this one. I sat down, found my position, breathed a few times in and out to begin my meditation practice, and then the song, The Place Where You Belong rang through the empty quiet.

Behind my closed eyes I had been picturing where I was going. It was more than Berlin. The place where you belong.

My friends’ band, Lemonade, covers the original Shai jam, and I like their version more. In fact, I fucking love it.

Day 28 – The mind gets cluttered. That’s what it does. For me, this shows up most frequently fas indecisiveness. I may have mentioned before that I have a note to myself on my desk that says, “practice small acts of decisiveness.” It really helps. I also tell myself, “leap before you look” and “first thought, best thought.”

It all means the same thing, go from your gut. Not that the head is wrong, but it gets in the way.

Allen Ginsberg developed “first thought, best thought” as a way of embracing writing with immediacy, bravery, spontaneity, and presence. Kerouac said that writing this way reveals “the actual workings of the mind during the writing itself; you confess your thoughts about events in your own unchangeable way.”

To untangle and prioritize my thoughts, which were causing undue urgency, also known as crippling anxiety, I wrote down in one sentence what I needed to get done today. I put aside writing and teaching, because that could do those in the evening, and focused on my trip. What is the main goal I need to complete? Here’s what I wrote: To be completely prepared for my trip to Berlin.

Then I wrote one action I could physically do to get me closer to achieving it. I started to write down, practice german. I mean, it makes sense, but can I get on a plane without practicing german. Yes. What could I not get on a plane without having done. Having packed! That’s what I wrote and that is what I got done today.

 How simple and yet, what I needed to do didn’t come to me until I pushed the competing and confusing “I shoulds” out of my head.

I sometimes find it hard to get what people mean when they say “just let it go.” They’ll direct this advice toward anything from an addiction to obsessive worrying to irrational fears. But how do you let go of thinking? Or, how do you let go of paralyzing procrastination caused by overthinking, that is, how do you let go of not doing something.

This exercise of writing down my goal and one thing I could physically do to reach it helped me, because when I swept the “shoulds” aside, it let the next actionable step stand out like neon.

There is thinking and then there is looking at your thoughts.

About letting go, I don’t think it every means doing nothing. It should not suggest one stops moving. More like, leap before you look. But it also, it also doesn’t have to mean move yourself to another country. Tara Brach says in one of her talks about letting go that it isn’t good or bad, it just is.

Instead of should, it is a type of letting be.

Day 27 –  I stood some books up straight to make room for another one on the shelf and discovered an old travel journal tucked behind the row. I store my journals out of sight because I don’t want anyone to read them, including me. The writing is terrible, and worse, so painfully self-conscious, that it generally takes a decade before even I can look at it again. I remember burning a journal once, or many pages from it, that I kept when I was a teen because the thoughts noted in it repulsed me so much. Now I’m a writer and spend 70% of my day reading my own thoughts.

The travel journal I found today is 11 years old. I kept it when my best friend, Molly, and I traveled around Europe together. There are some gem lines. Here’s one regarding a guy I met at a hostel, a Jewish-Canadian wearing Teva Sandals who serenaded us with Ben Harper and Hayden songs, so, obviously you can guess what came next, “I brought him back to my room. With Molly passed out in the bed next to mine a few feet away, the risk was clear, but not compelling, so we exchanged fervid kisses without discretion, and our clothes were quickly discarded.”

We exchanged promises with “drunk and sleepy hearts. We were strangers and that was the best part.”

I don’t think the rhyme was intentional. Also, what I was reading at the time that made me want to write like that?

At one point I remark how “fucking romantic looking out train windows is.” Molly and I had a lot of quiet train rides. I remember trying to figure out what I should do with my life, what kind of person to be. I remember too, my mom telling me that she wondered the same thing riding across India and Turkey by train in the early 70s with my dad. In my travel journal I ask myself if I’ll become, a lawyer, a teacher or writer, or mother and wife. Reading it now, I feel like I’m answering myself.

We forget all the different people we’ve been. It’s too easy. This evening, for example, I’m a totally different person from who I was this morning.

At six o’clock this morning, while walking Fritz, I found 3 fake leaves in different locations on the ground. When I saw the first, I stopped and asked myself, “what was I thinking when I saw that fake leaf?” I remembered. It was a big, round happy thought-wish and it charged me to think this was a sign affirming it. I kept walking half a block and found another fake leaf, identical to the first.

It was too much! I avoided looking at the ground, walked another half block and let Fritz pull me across the street. As we crossed, not believing it happened twice, I looked at the place I saw the first leaf and made myself recall what I had been thinking. Then Fritz stopped to pee on a tangle of vines. I looked down and saw, in a pile of flowers and leaves, another fake leaf. I laughed out loud and kept laughing, now and again, until we finished our walk and headed home.

(my friend Erika’s picture of Scotland)

Day 26 – They guy subletting my place moves in 3 days from now. I leave in 7. I bought new luggage and it is orange and I love it. My office is filled with to-do lists. Sudden insights and story ideas are scribbled across manuscripts’ blank back pages. Every empty space has something that was floating around my head pegged down to it.

I take a lot of deep breaths. I rub Frankincense on the bottoms of my feet and tell myself that I am relaxed. Breathe in, “I am,” breathe out, “relaxed.”

I’ve been practicing German and have become very good at telling people what they are, should anyone in Germany forget. I’ll say, “You are a man. They are men. I am a woman.” I mean, “Er ist ein mann. Ist sind manner. Ich bin ein frau.” I’m adept at identifying both water and bread, too. Helpful if I find myself in prison.

Also this, l want to visit Scandinavia while I’m there. Denmark, Sweden and maybe Findland. In one day, I thought about Helsinki like 100 times, even though I’ve never before thought about Helsinki even once. Have you seen that show SLOW TV on Netflix yet? I watched one about the Northern Railway in Norway. I dream of riding it through a snowy winter landscape while drinking a hot Norwegian beverage, as tunes from the 1954 film White Christmas (specifically the train scene) and Bing Crosby’s sweet voice drift through my heart.

I learned that there are other things to eat in Berlin besides sausages. I don’t eat sausages, so this is great news. Nedelle wrote a piece for PETA about the veggie spots in Berlin. She says Berlin is a veggie foodie haven, actually.

My dog is moving to Athens, Georgia with my ex. Thinking about not seeing my dog, Fritz, again makes me feel like I can’t breathe. Luckily, it is really easy to fall in love with dogs, and cats too, and trees and rivers. Most all living things. Thank god for that.

I met my best-friend’s baby. I see how things can be difficult and wonderful at the same time.

Erika is in Scotland and posted the picture above from Glencoe Valley, Highlands. It makes me feel that sense of “fantastic” that Knausgard describes, which I wrote about yesterday. Like, feeling both hungry and full. The picture also relaxes me.

To Do, 9/7/16

I need to go to Whole Foods
I need to call Verizon about international data use
I need to edit my essay A Living Thing
I need to do laundry
I need to grade papers

I need to practice German. Das ist wasser. Ok. I am, too.

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
-Eden Phillpotts

Day 25 –  I remember from my 3-month-long trip to Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia a few years ago, that time slows down when you’re traveling.

An article on Lifehacker explains:

The reason is simple: the longer it takes for our brain to process information, the longer the period of time feels. So, when the brain isn’t doing a lot of processing, like, say, on your commute to work that never changes, the time it took to do so doesn’t feel that long. One study from the Journal of Consumer Psychology suggests that the more attention we pay to an event, the longer the interval of time feels. Another study from the Journal of the Association for Psychological Science had similar findings.

I’ve been thinking lately about events and encounters that slow down time. They feel like little bursts of life happening beyond our ability to understand them. My ex used to make fun of me when we’d go for our evening walk, because I’d wax on about the smell of jasmine or passion fruit or even the subtle shift at the start of a season’s change. But the more I breathed in, it expanded the breadth of the moment.

Practicing mindfulness, even the act of listening to your breath going in and out, is like holding a microscope up to the moment, so that everything that looked smooth is actually an intricate latticework, built not just of the thing itself, but of its history and every influence that makes it what it is now.

Like I said once in a poem, “Objects are solid and moving beneath.”