day 1

“In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here.” -Thoreau

This is a blog about moving to another country for a bit. It is a travel narrative, but it is also the story of deciding to change my life. Obviously, that decision is the first change. Here goes the rest— riding the back of adventure, purpose, pursuit, desire, fortitude, and good will.

What I’m done with= no, I can’t, I didn’t, I won’t.

I think everyone is their best when they are themselves, their deliberate, authentic selves, so this blog is also a place for recording what it is like when you choose to open to all possibilities.

Day 1- Don’t think about being scared. Tell myself I am not scared because telling myself that re-conceptualizes the idea of fear. I am excited. I am saying Yes.

You need another person only to live a certain kind of life. I was remiss for so many years, maybe every year up until the last one, maybe until 6 months ago, when I realized I don’t need another person to live happily, just to live that one kind of life that I wanted for myself, but required another person. Like I was trying to squeeze all my hopes into one hope that didn’t fit with the person I forced it onto. A partner and babies and all that is a life a want, but it is not the only life. Tell myself: it is not one story, but a stand in the braid of many stories.

My friend said to me on the day I announced my divorce, “Sophie, you can wake up into the life you want, one that is fully your own.”

Day 2 – From my friend Erika’s Instagram post, which was balm to my moody day:

“This leaf jumped out at me today. Not literally. But sort of. I was in a cranky as shit, push the world away, close my heart kinda mood and, well, there it was. And of course, it fits perfectly with the message in today’s cards: Keep giving what you’ve got to give. Give out only what you want to receive.”

I was feeling small, stuck in my own self and thoughts and heart, worrying that what I have to give isn’t enough. It wasn’t until I pulled Erika’s post up a second time later that day, to regain some inspiration, that I realized her impact on me, that what she is putting out there helps me, what I’m putting out there will help you (I hope). It doesn’t take the perfect word, just the expression of one’s authentic self.

The words themselves in this blog post are perfect, as it happens to be, but that she said them reminds me that we can, and do, all help each other.

I really bristled, a few months ago, at the Op-Ed in the New York Times titled, Unless You’re Oprah, ‘Be Yourself” is Terrible Advice.’  I disagree with the ideas behind this article because “being yourself” isn’t the same as being your authentic self, which is a self acting as a function of the larger world’s wisdom, but instead is some weird, ego-driven false self.

Anyway, if you’re afraid to put it out there, your story never gets the chance to help someone else. If you never share it (from a place of kindness, generosity, and love), you’ll never know how it could help someone else. Lydia Yuknavitch, author of the incredible memoir, “The Chronology of Water,” said in a recent interview in Lenny Letter “I believe in art the way other people believe in God.” I read that as: art gives people faith. 

Day 3 – At the funeral, my sister Emily said, “When you’re in the ground, the earth is digesting you.”  Seeing the roots growing around my grandfather’s casket, snuggled next to his second wife, the loved one we were burying, nestled between her and his first wife, was actually comforting.

My grandfather died a year ago. Yesterday I went to his second wife’s funeral, then my brother, sister, and I drove to the beach where I swam in the ocean with 15 of my family members. I think we all wanted to celebrate life; celebrating life is a common grief ritual in Judaism.

The salty water was good. I could taste it even through my eyes. My parents called the beach we were at Connie Island, it was so filled with people and noise, but when I looked down the shore toward the afternoon sun, I noticed all the kids running back and forth from the water’s edge and their castles and sandy buckets, running between the rushing and receding foamy water. Skinny little twig legs and arms, sopping ponytails, the ruffled waist of a one-piece bathing suit, the diaper bulging beneath.

I rode the ferris wheel with my little 3-year-old cousin on one side of me and my 6-year-old cousin on the other. We put our hands in the air and the top and yelled as we flew back down toward the ground. The 3-year-old told me she liked the view from the tippy top. She squealed and pointed out the ocean to me. She said, “I like when the ferris wheel goes fast and my hair flies up.”

Then, my brother, sister, mom, dad, and I took a photo booth picture. Back to the original 5, the nuclear family, us 3 child adults and 2 parents. What are we?

I dreamed last night that a girl, maybe me, was loved by someone but couldn’t get to him, couldn’t leave the building she was captive because a looming, angry and unpredictable man-monster wouldn’t let her. This monster attacked anyone who looked his direction, and though not very big, he was stronger than any other man. So she hid and no one could save her, but no one could see her either, not her best friends, not even her dog. She became a tiny person, like a lilliput, hiding in tall grasses and swimming from one place to another unseen underwater. People tried shooting the monster with guns, but they were potato guns and the monster raged through the streets undeterred. The President was called. Then, the girl, with the hope that he could be stopped, but no idea of how to subdue him beyond the failed efforts everyone had already tried, came out of hiding. It was a terrifying dream. The man was not a man but the dark part of everything unknown. The girl was me.

And then this, the exact email I needed to get right now from a friend and brilliant writer who just read my essay in progress “Wife to Myself.” He told me he loves it, he said, “Your brain is amazing.” My weird brain. My heart is renewed

And, the tarot card reading Erika gave me! 

(photo curtesy of House of Intuition)

Day 4 – I want to take actionable steps, but I also want to trust. I have to remind myself that these both are and are not mutually exclusive. I have to trust, that means trusting that the how will come to me or I will come to it and when it does I have to act on it. But the other and bigger part of trust is to give up the idea that I can know or control how it will come to me. When I am actively envisioning my desires, I try to exclude the how and just put the vision out there. When I am pursuing any one actionable task, I forgive myself of the idea that I have to do it perfectly in order for my dreams/desires/hopes to manifest. Trust that the big vast blank unknown I see with my closed eyes and meditate it not empty, but filled with possibility. The same as when I close my eyes to meditate and my vision is filled with mysterious light.

I met with a colleague of the university I teach at, Ariane, who moved to Berlin 14 months ago. She gave me tips about preparing for my trip and what to expect when I get there. For example, most Berliners speak English, but it is polite to ask in German first if they do. She had insights about acquiring a visa, should I decide to stay longer, and she referred me to a friend, a fellow writer, who is looking to sublet his apartment in East Berlin’s hip neighborhood, Neukolln, for a couple months.

Something I said to Ariane yesterday morning surprised me, that I want to leap before I look. I want to go in to it blind, but not ignorant. She said, that’s an important distinction.

During my tarot card reading, Erika pulled both the Fool card (adventure/journey) and the Emperor card (rigidness). I told her about my struggle to think differently, that for so long I had tried to squeeze a life’s worth of different possibility into one thread, as if a whole braid of lives would fit in a single strand. Frank was the strand, but my love was too big. I saw only one path, my conceptual framework rigidly defined by a single vision of happiness: love, marriage, baby, but it didn’t fit in the receptacle I chose to hold it. That was my past, rigidity and by-the-bookness. The present is the fool (forgive the immediate association). Erika said this card is about the adventure I’m about to begin, have already begun when I decided to open myself up to the eternal now. These cards validated my decision to trust in the universe’s greater vision of my life. What I can dream up or desire pales in comparison for all that can’t even be conceived of. All the more confirmation to trust: being where I want to be is the boon to being present.

I looked up the Fool card on the House of Intuition’s website and I was surprised, but gladdened again to see its full meaning. From their website, “the Fool represents beginnings, innocence and novelty. The story of the Tarot is often referred to as “the Journey of the Fool,” because it depicts the evolution of the spiritual seeker from ignorant fool to enlightened master. But don’t be fooled: in many ways, the entire secret of the Tarot is summed up in this single card.”

Day 5 – Even my hair is getting curlier. I just got out of the shower; curliest day yet, which I attribute to my new general breaking the rules attitude.

I had coffee with my friend Karina today. She gave me a present she purchased from a flea market this morning: a Berlin scarf.

This is the first time I’ve seen Karina since she got back from visiting our friend Clare in Berlin who moved to there with her husband and has been living and making art there for 2 years. Karina said she told Clare that I was different than how I was a couple years ago. Clare is a special person. She had a psychic vision about my future that she intimated to me, coincidentally, the morning I decided my marriage was over. It was a big vision and her words gave me fortitude and courage I needed at the time.

After coffee with Karina, I considered how I’d changed myself from an unhappy person into a happy one. Since my divorce, I worried that I’d gone back to exactly who I was before I got married. Re-initiating a life of grasping, suffering, and irreverent faithlessness. But then I got so tired of that. I got tired of responding to the question posed to me at parties, “What have you been up to lately” with the same tired answer, “teaching and working on my book.” I felt stuck and like my life was not one I created. But it was, of course, everything in my life is the result of a decision I made or position I put myself in, minus the normal ups and downs, brightness and dimming of events outside our control.

Karina said I used to be so anxious. I remember myself chain-smoking, drinking like a fish, and frantic to get into a relationship.

I’ve always had so much energy and desire, but I didn’t have confidence or a direction of where to put it. I wrote an epic poem titled Barf, Sexually, which employs the refrain, “what do you do with your love?”

I mean, where does one put her devotion?

Also, where do you put it? I’d like to know—feel free to leave comments 😉

I started thinking about the practical application of my transition into a more mindful, purpose-filled person, the things I actively did to change my outlook.

Namely I started meditating and practicing yoga. That lead to more and more spiritual work, to learning how to be still with myself even through the fear, which I saw underlie my every thought and action. Meditating and practicing yoga brought me from worrying and over-thinking to trusting and staying present, how that makes me feel like the world is full of possibilities, how I am not locked in one small self and one small story, but as Whitman wrote in the poem Song of Myself, “I contain multitudes.”

Early into my daily meditation practice, maybe three months, I had a voice come through to me, it was my own voice and it answered my question, what do you do with your love? It said, “It’s easy: you love.” That was it. “Sophie, you love.” Don’t worry about the how.

Don’t worry about funneling that love into a particular receptacle that is probably too small because anything you can imagine is too small. It is small because it is limited to what you know, while the open contains the truths you do know and the ones you could never have imagined. The unfathomable is the source of hope.

How did this all happen? Certainly not just from getting divorced. But that was the catalyst. When that life-path failed, I swept it out of the way and made room for the unknown. I trudged through the hard work of letting go of some dreams I’d been holding on to since I was a kid.

I did this by believing what was always meant for me, as a living thing worthy as any other living thing is of being what it is, and NOT by thinking that I could trick the universe into giving me what I want.

I gave up control. I gave in to the idea that trying to control my life and happiness completely, excluded all the other possibilities of what a happy life meant. When a friend said to me, “you don’t have to be married to Frank, you can find someone who you really love — I finally understood. My ex-husband is good man, but we were not for each other and that is ok, too.

Letting go of the idea of the life I thought I’d have with him was impossibly hard… for about 3 days. Then my sister told me to make it my choice instead of a thing being done to me. Her advice resonated. My sorrow went from hopeless suffering to a new opportunity. There was no more having to beat a dead horse. It was a relief.

What hurt though, what terrified me, must have been as clear as day because in the first 24 hours of deciding to separate, while I sat on my parents sofa and wept, my dad said to me, “You’ll have children, sweetheart, don’t worry.” Not, “It will be all okay, this is for the best, you’ll find love again,” but the thing I was most afraid of that I wore like a neon orange jumpsuit, “What if I never have a family?”

I would not have a child with my ex. What this looked like, at 34 years old, was “What if there’s not enough time to meet my soulmate, fall in love, and have children all before my healthy childbearing years are up?” The feeling of urgency and desperation that line of reasoning evoked was overwhelming to the point that it choked me, so I embraced the choking fear, and like Chinese finger torture toy you win at the arcade, I figured out that when I just gave in, it released its grip.

Fine, I said, the worst case scenario is just as likely to happen as the best, so there is no reason to worry. What’s worrying going to create except desperation, which we all know a bad look. If anything might influence my future, it is openness; it is rejecting all shoulds, rejecting the idea that there is one way to be happy.

My aunt asked me, about a year after the separation, what I would do about trying to have children. Would I freeze my eggs? Would I look for a sperm donor and do it myself?

I’m not ruling these out, but right now the answer is no.

When I hear about companies paying for women to do this, it feels like the women are being forced out of the present moment and locked into a particular future (also it is fucked up because the other implicit argument in that is that women are not valuable workers unless they push back motherhood). I think I would rather experience not being able to have children than to marry myself to a static, frozen (forgive the pun) future.

This relates to the question I asked myself about how I went from unhappy to happy. Really, all I did was change myself from being pessimistic to optimistic. In Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit, she discusses how people see suffering differently. At the heart suffering is often a feeling of hopelessness, which depends on whether you see suffering as something permanent or something you can change. “Permanent and pervasive explanations for adversity turn minor complications into major catastrophes. They make it seem logical to give up. If, on the other hand, you’re an optimist…these explanations are temporary and specific; their fixability motivates you to start clearing them way as problems.”

One line really got to me, “Optimists are more satisfied with their marriages.” Since my divorce, I thought the main problem was differing views of marriage my ex and I held. I see marriage as infallible, that is, yes, you’ll have problems (maybe lots of them), but that is to be expected and you work on them until they’re fixed. My ex-husband’s view was, life is too short to be miserable. If problems don’t get fixed, you cut your losses and move on. Both are fair arguments, but they are diametrically opposed. We used to quarrel about this all the time. I’d say, “how can you believe our marriage will improve if you don’t really believe problems can be fixed?

I reasoned that my view of marriage was traditional, while he had a modern one—which is true—but it also speaks to our different approaches to suffering. I had a boyfriend say to me once that I’d stay in a bad relationship no matter what, that I didn’t think highly enough of myself to get out of it. That is only a little true. The other part is that I have, at least with love, an attitude toward optimism. I can see how this has both served me and not harmed me at times.

When the plan fell apart and I got divorced, I decided to change some of the perceived areas of lack to perceived abundance, and that engendered more optimism.

I started reminding myself of what I am grateful for starting with the basics, “the sound of my cat’s purring, my soft bed, my sister and brother, my parents, coffee, air-conditioning, etc.” 

A new friend recently said to me, as my cat sat beside him purring, “I like the sound they [cats] make.” These little things are everywhere and would compose an entire life if you let them.

Here is another practice of redefining the idea of scarcity or lacking, I listen to Nina Simone’s “Aint Got No, I got Life” over and over. I’ve been doing this for a few months. The song is part of my morning jams that get me stoked on the day.

She says, “Aint got no water, aint got no love”

Aint got no love is the refrain because it is the seemingly the most cruel lacking, “why am i alive any way,” she asks. Then the tune changes:

“I got my arms, I got my hands
I got my fingers, got my legs
I got my feet, I got my toes
I got my liver, got my blood
Got life, I got my life”

Also, I’d argue, she has love too because she has the love that she gives out and away!

(Image courtesy of https://recoverynet.ca/2013/09/17/i-contain-multitudes-walt-whitman)

Day 6 – Lovely synchronicity, I opened my email this morning, read a message that linked to an interview that kinda bored me. So I googled the writer being interviewed, Jenny Zhang, and opened a link to one of her essays. The opening line is, “I have lived my whole life swearing there’s no truth more complete than Walt Whitman’s parenthetical line in the poem “Song of Myself”: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

I’ll read the rest of her essay tomorrow. This perfect lining up of signs is where I’ll stay today.

(The brilliant artist Sean Higgins graciously allowed me to use this image, Intervention, 2008) for my book cover. It is beautiful and I have loved it since the day I met it.)

Day 7 – It feels so good to do something I was afraid of, moving through it to the other side. I think of the idea that there is no trying, just doing or not doing.

Where does procrastination or inaction come from? Maybe it comes from thinking you can’t or you’ll be judged or feel embarrassed or look stupid while going for it. Maybe you think you weren’t meant for big things or that you’re on some level unlovable or that you’re unworthy of anything more than unhappiness.

I had to meditate on fact that worthiness is not a mutable condition, but a natural expression that comes from and belongs to the timeless wisdom of the universe. What the hell does that mean? It means, my weird and fallible self is the same as a tree. You would never look at a flower and say, that flower is doing a shitty job of being a flower. You would never think that a tree has too many pine needles.

The first poem in my book, Elemental Perceptions: A Panorama, I think, was an effort to tell myself (and my readers) this. Here’s the poem:

This is How a Prism Works

The light enters the glass, bending and refracting it, breaking it up into its constituent colors. The tower separates the color from the light. She said, believe me that you’re a beautiful human being. Think of your insides like a grand spectrum, a forgivable animal, teasing and mortal. The big mirror splintered, then came the din, bearing the cosmos and urging you. You are a body, but try watching your mind think, listen to the maundering; it traces the pacific coast. You can mesmerize all that daunting blue. And when the light breaks, try to appreciate the view.

What else am I saying here besides you are a “forgivable animal”? I’m saying, observe your mind work, watch it think, without (for a moment) doing the thinking itself. I often wonder what the hell spiritual teachers mean when they say, “lead with your heart,” but I think it means let go of trying to control everything and let your controlling mind go. Give the figuring out a break.

One of my favorite reminders from Wayne Dyer: “Stop trying to control and let your life unfold.”

This doesn’t mean you should stop working or doing or reaching for your goals. You should put everything you have into them. But that means being present and putting everything you have in the moment into those actions and that energy.

I haven’t talked much about what happened when I started listening and paying attention to life, but doing so turned out to be the catalyst for my decision to move  abroad. When I stopped trying to control everything, I was overwhelmed with a flood of signs. Actually, a biblical-size deluge.

Here’s one example. I live next-door to a residential care facility. They have a new patient who moved in maybe 6 months ago. She is the bane of my existence. And I feel bad about it.She screams, with the pitch and urgency of someone being murdered, with a rancor so shrill and unbearable that I often want to murder her myself. She is severely disabled, so I feel like an asshole and remind myself to be compassionate. She’s most often heard screaming, “Get outta here” for hours on end. It sometimes starts at 5am, right when I happen to be meditating. It’s always the same. I hear her, I get frustrated and angry, then I tell myself that I’m jerk and that this is my daily lesson in patience.

When the idea that I wanted to move popped in my head, I was kind of frozen for two days, unable to decide if I was going to take this urge seriously. I spent many morning meditations trying to open myself up to the wisdom of the universe and shoot for a little distance from my thinking mind. I was trying to lead with my heart. Then, the lady next door starts screaming. It hits me what she is actually saying, she’s saying “get out of here” and suddenly I feel like she’s talking to me. I start smiling wildly because it’s like a riddle I just figured out. I need to get out of here! I need to move to Germany!

I want to leave you with an excellent quote from Kafka. It might seem contradictory because the first line is “You do not have to leave this room,” but the essence is that the world will offer itself to you if you are still enough to watch and listen to it.

“You do not have to leave the room. Remain standing at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait. Be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”  -Franz Kafka

(“hope is a thing with feathers” courtesy of Rick&Brenda Beerhorst)

Day 8 – I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about hope. In a book I’m reading called, Grit, author Angela Duckworth follows up her discussion of optimism with a discussion of hope. She says there is a science behind hope. “This growth mindset, the belief that people are designed for change and growth, is what disposes people to be resilient when things don’t go well.”

So much of what happens to us is because of what we believe can happen. Hope.

When I think of hope, I see the word YES in my mind’s eye. The first title I had for this blog was actually: 30 Days to Saying Yes. For me, hope has been fueled by a million minute decisions to say yes instead of no. I see YES as being open to the idea that there is a solution to a problem or another approach to a shitty feeling. It’s hard, but like I said, every single time I catch myself thinking pessimistically, I try to remind myself that I can decide how to approach what I’m experiencing.

Duckworth reports that optimists “are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. Where they diverge is in their explanations: optimists habitually search for temporary and specific causes to their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.”

Why would you be hopeful when your problem looks like a room with no door? What if you start by deciding that the room could or could not have a door?

Yesterday, my friend told me about her bummer tarot card reading. She explained how she pulled two so-so cards and then a disappointing third. It was the Two of Swords, which looks like a giant X. She said, it has different meanings, but she reads it as a big ole NO. The question she brought to the cards was about love and if it’s something she’ll encounter on her trip to Scotland at the end of the month. The big X took the wind right out of that sail. 

It reminded me of all of the times I’d gone out to a bar or party, hoping to meet someone. As soon as I’d show up and quickly scoped the scene, my heart would drop and I’d regret bothering to put on eyeliner and unwalkable shoes.

Or, how another friend recently put it so aptly, “Just once I’d like to meet my future wife on a cross-country flight.”

About the X card, I said to my friend, “Maybe this is the universe’s way of taking your expectations out of your trip. Then, you can go into it totally open.” 

She said, “I’m open to the card being true, but I’m also open to it being not true.”

Later, I sat down to listen to a podcast by one of my favorite spiritual thinker/enlightened individual/practitioner of mindfulness, Tara Brach. Because I’ve struck a synchronicity jackpot lately, the most recent episode was on the subject of, you guessed it, hope! It’s titled, “How hope can heal and free us.” 

Seriously, I believe it can.

Brach talks about different types of hope. For example, the ego’s hope, what she calls the shadow side of hope, is when we grasp at things and set our hopes onto one specific outcomes, how this “robs us of the current moment.”

The moment is expansive with possibilities, but it is easy to attach to one that thing we really want and think there is only one path to achieving it. She says, real hope, the kind that expands us, means being ok with it not happening (whatever it might be).

Since normal life is composed of valleys and peaks, or as my sister says, “good shit usually follows bad shit,” and the reverse, hope has to transcend the day to day.

I see this as being about the moment, but not attaching too much the particulars: a romantic fling you didn’t see coming, a trip abroad a few weeks away, a party with so many people you think you might fall in love a hundred times, OR a party where you meet no one and wish you hadn’t put on long-wear lipstick, or a job you didn’t get that you really wanted, or drawing a big X from the cards when you wanted the tarot version of a green light.

Day 9 – This morning my dog woke me to walk him while it was still dark and I was groggy, wanting to stay in bed longer. 

He pulled me down the sidewalk. I was still rubbing my eyes,  when I saw a woman approaching. I managed a sleepy smile to which she responded with a robust “Good morning!” and a giant, loving grin. That was nice, I thought.

As I kept walking, the next person I encountered said the same thing, not with quite the vigor of the first, but very friendly. As it kept happening, I looked down at my little dog to see if there was something cuter about him today than other days, something to elicit such open friendliness from each passing stranger on a Tuesday morning. Cute little dogs tend to soften people, naturally, but this was something more. By the time I got home, I was brimming with joy and shinning my own a huge grin for anyone I walked by.

Truly, your mornings shapes the rest of the day. Your outlook begins when you wake up. A popular mindfulness practice used for achieving greater happiness, presence, reducing stress, increasing productivity, manifesting, creativity, etc. is to start your day, before you get out of bed even, by expressing gratitude for what you have.

I don’t remember if I actively did this or not, but generally when I get up, I greet my pets in the morning. I’m filled with the joy of their presence, which easily feels like a new gift each day, I tell them good morning, I love you, I’m so glad to see you!

As I said, nothing was different about my dog today. Nothing is different about today, today. Except, today I sold my engagement ring. It was not easy to do. I briefly considered it before, when my ex-husband got a new girlfriend, and the ring seemed to mock me, but I didn’t follow through. And the ring was SO pretty. The prettiest thing I’ve ever been given. I sensed that somewhere inside of me I actually believed it was the only one that I’d ever receive. 

But fuuuuck that. I loved it and I let that shit go.

Not until I was driving home from Beverly Hills, re-listening to Tara’s aforementioned Hope podcast, did I remember the deluge of friendly faces this morning. I realized that kind, loving start to my day had fortified me. When I walked into that high-rise to have my ring evaluated and resold, I felt supported. Then, as I sat there in the office admiring its sparkle and feeling wistful, I suddenly got very tired of looking at the sad, beautiful thing that no longer served its purpose, its promise for a future that didn’t work out, and I was ready to be done with it.

It’s not sad, just a story already told.

The consigners swept it away and into their ownership; all I felt was total liberation.

I texted my best friend about what I’d done and how it would help fund my adventures abroad. She said, “you go girl.” I will!

Here’s the note-to-self doodle I made to remind me about this particular bit of symbolism, so I can include it in the essay I’m working on.

And one of the foxy gemologist.

These past few days I’ve been feeling really open, like too open almost, everything is rushing in. I can barely keep up. Like my entire periphery has decided to join the foreground.

It reminds me of when you stay up all night to the morning with your lover or remaining party stragglers and you’re exhausted, but revved. Then you have to go out and order a huge stack of pancakes to bring you back down to earth.

One more night.

(Eternal inspiration, Joan Didion. Image courtesy of Joan Didion Kickstarter Biopic)

Day 11 – I paced my apartment this morning, overwhelmed, frantic. Had I not spent all day yesterday thinking about hope? This morning, I woke up, and one little sign banished it. Not even a sign, an absence of one. I attempted to get back into that place of openness. I reminded myself of a song lyric I heard that two days ago, “Everything will be alright if you just let go,” how I had repeated that line over and over to myself through a panic attack, until my heartbeat returned to normal and the lyric was integrated into my being.

But as I  paced between my office to the kitchen this morning, searching for the inspiration or impetus to write, I noticed the blue spine of a book on my shelf. Knowing, if I should do anything at all, it is to follow signs, I came back and looked at what it is, Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I told myself I would read any essay I happened to flip open to. I landed on the essay titled, On Self-Respect.

Didion talks about what I’ve been thinking of as dynamic/ generative hope, but what she calls “self-respect:”

“Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things that one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.”

Maybe this is the combination of grit and hope.

It is a reminder of the idea that we work hard, believe in ourselves as natural functions of the universe, let go of reputation, and trust that we will blossom into not what we can imagine for ourselves, but into the possibilities we cannot fathom.

This trust is, as Didion puts it:

“To have the sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”

So much of what defines us comes from doing what is hard. These challenges also are what leads to happiness. We are not trapped with in the whims of the day to day traumas, or what I talk about in one of my essays , “The Way Back to My Body,” when you feel cut off from life, “when you are alone in yourself, as if there is no universe to feel apart of, only stuck in a body abused by chaos or rapture.” We can transcend them.

In Grit, Duckworth talks about how feelings of hopelessness are tied to a perceived lack of control over your life. While you can’t control all circumstances, you can control your reaction to them and you can control what you choose to hold on to versus what you choose to let go of. Listening to yourself, trusting that wisdom, means when to say yes and when to say no.

It is easy to stress and fret and hard to let go. But you can practice at it and improve, then you see how much easier releasing hang-ups and worries is.

 One of my favorite practices, which I learned from Manifest Your Destiny by Wayne Dyer goes, “With every breath you take, feel yourself taking in unconditional love. With every exhalation, expel thoughts of fear.” Centering yourself and detaching from attempts to control is liberating.

Balance means accepting the good with the bad and taking it all in stride and without paralyzing fear. It is here now, it will also pass.

(photo of the August full moon courtesy of Henrik Hylland Uhlving)

Day 12 – It is no accident I had these insecurities during the full moon. Sorry, not sorry, for being witchy and new age and out there.

I googled the full moon and learned this:

“In fact during full moon, everything will be magnified, good and bad. Therefore full moon can be both viewed as a time of crisis as well as a time of opportunity. It depends on our overall state and activity during the full moon day to cultivate its positive or negative effects.” (A Time of Opportunity, pranaworld.net)

Here’s an example. I felt like crying. It was interrupting my attempt to meditate. I thought, should I call my mom and cry on the phone and complain and wallow? That would feel good. And there is a time and place for catharsis, certainly, but then I thought, then I’ll be immersed in that feeling and I don’t actually want to be. I want to acknowledge it and then find a way out from the inside of it.

Hoping for what you want and getting it are like the planets lining up. It happens only for one brief second before what you wanted and what really is, slip past each other. The act also reminds me of a kiss. It cannot last forever and the next moment will be entirely its own unpredictable thing.

From space.com’s 2 minute video about August’s full moon, I learned, “There is only one infinitely short instant when the moon is truly full.”

How rare and perfect and delightful.

Day 13 – Something I heard on a episode of Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast “Magic Lessons” caused me to examine the impetus of my desire to move.

In the episode, “Turn the brutal into the beautiful” Gilbert has a conversation with photographer Brandon Stanton (creator of the gorgeous and brilliant Humans of New York project. He explains the idea of courage, how courage is not something that happens by waiting around for it, but that you get it by doing what you are afraid of doing while you’re afraid of it. The latter is the important part, I think.

He goes on to say that “time is the most important commodity we have.” It made me of consider all the time I’ve spent trying to hold onto something I don’t really want. Stanton shares the story of how he went from a bonds trader to an artist. He’d always considered himself a creative person, then this prestigious job trading bonds fell into his lap. He told himself that he’d make his money, then carve out a space to make art. Two years later he lost the bonds trading job and realized he had spent 2 years of his life putting all his brain power into how to hold on to this job that wasn’t even what he wanted to be doing in the first place.

His solution was to make just enough money so that he could be in control of his time (or most of his time at least).

* * *

A few people have asked me why Berlin. I don’t speak German and it’s kind of a lousy time of year to go weather-wise, especially since I was dreaming of European swimming holes and crystalline waters lapping pebbled beaches. I dreamed it all through the smoky, firestorm this summer in LA has been.

Also, I did I mention that I’ve never been to Berlin? Nowhere in Germany, actually. 

I found myself saying, “I can stay in Berlin or I’ll travel around. I’m open. Italy this summer sounds nice. But, I could just as easily go Budapest.” 

The day I decided to move came after the most bizarre 36 hours, which began when I spent an impetuous and impassioned night with my new foreign lover who was returning to his homeland in less than a week. After a dreamy, soft morning with him in my white blanketed bed, drinking coffee from white coffee mugs, I got a call from my mom saying that an elder family member was put in hospice care and I needed to come immediately.

My brother and sister left work mid-day and together we drove to Newport Beach to see her. When we left the hospital, we breathed the air of the living and were grateful, so we went to the beach. We swam past the waves and I submerged my body and head in ocean, opening my eyes underwater, and floating onto my back so my toes pointed skyward. I felt part of the sea and everything else.

That evening, I got drunk accidentally at a Mexican food restaurant with my family, then fell sleep in the backseat of my sister’s car for a surreal drive back to LA with my brother at the wheel guiding us home. I woke up the next morning and thought, shit, I have to check email and see if I got that Dr. Phil job. That’s right, The Dr. Phil, but don’t get it excited, it was only a copy writing job for the website.

As I opened my computer, I got a sinking feeling that I didn’t want the job, actually. I told myself that if I got it, I’d take it because I want to be open to all possibilites and I need $$$. This would mean, however, that I’d keep living the same life I lived now, but 8 hours of my day would belong to the Dr. Phil.

I also told myself that if I didn’t get the job, I was moving to Berlin. No doubt about it. If I got scared or it felt difficult, I would power through. This was my promise.

I didn’t get the job. My ego felt a little pang of hurt, but it was followed by immense relief. And, of course it was a sign.

Like selling my ring. Doing something scary, but meaningful and deliberate, is LIBERATING. Deciding to leave my home has galvanized every part of my life.

Stanton prefaces his idea of courage begetting courage with the notion that becoming adept and accomplished at something happens the exact same way.

Practice and diligence is echoed all throughout the book Grit, too. Stanton’s advice really nails the point though: You become an expert by doing the thing, not by waiting for knowledge to impart itself on you.

I guess this is all to say that I see courage and expertise as inherently linked, both needed for taking that leap!

(Leonard Cohen does a headstand on the side of the road while waiting for the broken-down tour bus (1974). Photo by Emily Bindiger)

Day 14 – In yoga today, the teacher said something that caused me to pause, “When you practice yoga it is for an audience of one. No one but you is watching to see if you push yourself or if you give yourself a break to rest. You decide what your body needs and give yourself that.”

I realized that in yoga, I often take the more challenging variation of a pose, even when I know I probably can’t do it. I also rest when I need to. Until she said this, however, I never actually noticed that I do this, probably, because I consider myself a vehemently non-competitive person. Nor am I an athlete. So opposed to sports participation and being forced into competition with my peers, that even in elementary I protested. If the volleyball or softball made it to me way out in left field, I’d raise my arm without even a feigned attempt at catching it or caring.

This was not considerate to my teammates, however.

Whatever it was about sports teams that caused me to reject them, probably my lack of confidence in my athletic ability paired with the fear of being hit with a ball, despite the fact boys constantly yelled out to me, “the balls not gonna bite you,” I understood that I liked doing physical things that I had total control over.

So, I practiced ballet. Sometimes, even today, when I have anxiety and want to still my mind or I can’t fall asleep at night, I envision myself doing barre exercises. I can them in my bones. They’re rigid movements and the routine brought be great pleasure.

In both ballet and yoga, the control I speak of, is more the idea of mastery. My body actually responds very quickly to these practices. I can see my muscles grow defined after just a few days. Pushing myself gives me a very visual reward that can’t get lost in my thoughts.

I couldn’t do a headstand yesterday, but today I can. I couldn’t do the splits yesterday, but today I can.

Because I’m not competitive with others, I’ve mistakenly thought that I’m not driven in all areas of my life. The teacher’s comment reminded me that I am dedicated, motivated, and self-confident.

I love strenuous movement that I can practice alone. Like writing. Like travel. It’s all kinda the same thing.

(from a broadside I made in 2010 at Mills College)

Day 15 – In the early stages of an essay, I wrote the line, “I need the space to think differently.” Though it went through many drafts and revisions, that sentence stuck. The word “space” here works in two ways: 1) as in enough room, and (2) as in place, a new purposeful location.

The essay was titled, “Missing Person” or, sometimes, “I Go Missing.”

It was not about leaving, actually. Regrettably, it was not about making the decision to create a space or place where I could think differently, but about many failed attempts to do so, without really knowing what I was trying to do. I see, in retrospect, it was about wanting to change and move forward, but not knowing how or who I wanted to be.

Now, I understand that, if you try to leave without grounding yourself first, your spirit escapes and you go missing from yourself like smoke from the tip of a cigarette.

It can be hard, sometimes, to remember who you are. What makes you happy, what you love, who loves you, what you’re supposed to do. Giving works. Giving to others helps you let yourself back in. Maybe because in recognizing that others are forgivable animals, recognizing how much you love them, you can love it about yourself too.

In that vein, I like to re-read these opening verses in A Song for Occupations, from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

Come closer to me,
Push close my lovers and take the best I possess,
Yield closer and closer and give me the best you possess.

(the one and only time I beat Frank at chess, which happened to be in Croatia)

Day 16 – I heard an author talking about how all we have is the present moment because seeking more than that, seeking some kind of certainty, well, certainty doesn’t exist.

A friend asked if I was meeting up with anyone in Berlin. While I have a friend or two, I mostly know no one. It scared me for a second, to realize this, until I remembered that that is exactly why I’m going there. Nothing like making new friends!

I remember once, on a rainy night in Dubrovnik, Frank and I made our way to a local bar filled with young Croatians. Frank liked to play chess, so we brought our portable chessboard with us everywhere. In the bar, people crowded around looking at the board, then telling Frank or I what move to make next. I was no real match for Frank, a man who spends much of his free time playing chess online with masters, so after he beat me, a local challenged him to the next game. His English was surprising good.

The young people there speak it, unlike many middle aged Croatian folks we met who speak some German, French or Italian, but little English.

What sticks out to me was how nice it was to speak English and to share the customs of booze and bar activities. To converse freely, with someone other than Frank, since he had been the only person I spent time with during our travels who shared the same language, was an unexpected delight.

We had a raucous drunken night, stumbling home later by way of a flooded upward stairway along a narrow Dubrovnik alley that had become a small river. It was one of the best nights. To be folded into a tiny corner of a culture so different from ours, but at the same time, no different at all because we are all people and happy there together.

(image courtesy of artboullion.com)

Day 17 – I was reading about mindfulness from Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project, this morning. In this book she posits the question, “What do I want from life , anyway?”

In the aforementioned chapter, Rubin talks about finding the idea of meditating unbearable, but still wanting to cultivate “conscious, non-judgmental awareness.” As I read this, I looked down at my cat who was curled in my lap, looking up at me.

Oh yeah, I thought, this is exactly where I want to be right now, so I should take full advantage of being here. This moment is perfect.

During my morning creativity rituals, which entails reading something that inspires me, I tend to get filled with ideas. My mind files these ideas into different essay threads or ways to integrate new, beneficial practices into my life. It gets me excited and my intellectual juices flowing. As Rubin reminds us throughout her project, curiosity invigorates.

I looked down at my cat and thought, in a couple weeks I’ll be in Germany and I won’t get to do this. One day, she’ll won’t be in my life at all. But, more importantly and much more positively (and gratefully), she is here now and I am very happy about that. I told her so.

I turned a few pages in the book and read the line, “Instead of walking though life on auto-pilot, I wanted to question the assumptions I made without noticing.”

I’ve been thinking the key to saying YES is to reject the impulse to hold beliefs based on principle. To open yourself up, you have to move from the assumption of NO to YES.

Yoko Ono’s famous Yes! art instillation came to mind —more so, John Lennon’s reaction to it. I’d heard him talk about it once, the now infamous Ono exhibit where the two met, and how things could have gone very differently between them.

I googled it. In an interview Lennon describes the exhibit, how you had to climb a ladder, then hold a magnifying class up to the ceiling to read what was printed there. Here he is talking about it:

“You’re on this ladder — you feel like a fool, you could fall any minute — and you look through it and it just says ‘YES’ …Well, all the so-called avant-garde art at the time, and everything that was supposedly interesting, was all negative; this smash-the-piano-with-a-hammer, break-the-sculpture, boring, negative crap. It was all anti-, anti-, anti-. Anti-art, anti-establishment. And just that ‘YES’ made me stay in a gallery full of apples and nails, instead of just walking out saying, ‘I’m not gonna buy any of this crap.’” (http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/john-lennon30.htm)

If it had said, “NO,” I imagine he would have walked out the door and never looked back. But it didn’t say no, and he didn’t leave, and we all know how the rest of the story goes.

Day 18 – I started thinking seriously about how happiness could be cultivated. I’d picked up the book, The Happiness Project, at the airport several months ago and started reading it, but then stopped. It was very good and practical, but, something about it overwhelmed me. After I read Grit, I realized what it was. For so long, I didn’t know what I really wanted out of life and from myself. That had to be the first question I asked myself.

Actually, the reason I read Grit, the desire that allowed the recommendation from a friend to manifest in my life, happened a month earlier at a dinner with my friend Ashley.

She’d come out of a divorce and had to ask herself what she wanted. She’d been unhappy without knowing it for years. To fix that feeling she clung to the thing she knew and got married ,even though she and her partner had never cared before about getting married before. Well, it all fell apart, of course, and she started doing some self work. She said she’d always known what she wanted but thought it was weird. “I want to live with my dog in my own house and have an amazing career.” After her divorce, she found the job she wanted, moved into her own house, funded by the money she was making with her new career, and now lives there with her dog, loving her life. 

What do I want, I had asked myself after our dinner date? I meditated on this question extensively. I want to write. I don’t want to write copy for products or work in marketing, but I want instead to tell my own stories.

I’ve been doing that, so why isn’t it moving me forward?

I think there were many reasons, but namely, I didn’t have faith in even making that the primary goal. I had to say it aloud and believe in it myself. Then, I had to do it.

The next question was, why aren’t I writing more? This answer was easy. I work from home (teaching online) and write from home too. Though I have an active social life, I see friends constantly, I go to coffeeshops to work, I go to yoga classes, I get out, etc., I still spend the majority of my life in my house, the house I moved into with my then finance and the expectation of a very different life.

If the stories I’m telling were going to serve anyone other than myself, they had to come to a place of having moved forward, of having learned something true and useful. You don’t tell a story that has no point. You tell a story when you’ve figured out the meaning or lesson from your experience and you think it would serve someone else to hear. It is not that my stories were sad or lacked epiphany or insight, but that they were born, literally, in a place seeded in the past.

How far could I get with this tether to my old life? That made it very easy to snap the ties I felt to the comforts of my house, my life, my stable predictable day-to-day.

After it occurred to me that I am doing what I want to (writing) and I know what my passion is, the next goal is to do it better. And, do it bigger.

What I found interesting about Grit is that one of the precepts it promotes is one found in all spiritual guidance for living with purpose and mindfulness. It mandates that one engage in work they not only enjoy, but that serves others. My stories could not fully help someone else until they were fully helping me, and vice versa. We (me and the writing) both had to grow and expand and open to every possibility.

What does this look like? Full trust in my ability to write a good story.

And I do, time and time again. It amazes me with each instance that this happens, but it does happen, with hours of work (and sometimes years of working on just one essay.) Something clicks and the story transcends itself and what I thought it could be. I jokingly say, “it was written by divine inspiration.” But it’s not a joke. I work and work and work, but then something else comes through, I tap into it and it comes through me. That is the part that is beyond my ego and makes my representation of life useful to someone else. So I trust myself to put in the labor and the universe to support me.

What else does it look like? Getting out of my comfort zone. Moving to a country where I don’t speak the language or that I’ve ever even visited. Jar my senses. This is the cure to fear. When you are afraid to do something, it shakes you wide awake and afterward, you’re a million times be content and confident from having done it.

My dad has said, “get up and make your life happen”

My mom says, “go out and make your life shine”

Both begin with the impulse toward movement. When I heard these words of advice, though, I got caught up in the how. How the hell do I make my life shine? I work and try, but nothing is happening. What do I do? I sit still and listen.

This is my one life little life. I say, fuck it to fear. Where are the crystals I energized at the sound bath last night?

Does this make me sound crazy and new age? Yes, but saying fuck it to embarrassment too, is another tenet to being open. As long as what I’m putting out there, what I’m sharing with the world, comes from a place of loving kindness and my authentic desire to do good, and with integrity, I give zero shits about looking silly. 

Only if it is a hurtful, negative thought do I think twice about putting it out there.

Tis is the life I’ve chosen to live, so I can live it better, do it so it suits me. I am naturally curious. I want to be startled every day. I can stand at the precipice or I can just jump.

My dad also once shared with me the piece of career advice his own father gave him. Just pick something and stick with it. While the choice of what you pick shouldn’t be totally arbitrary, as Duckworth says in Grit, it should be something you like and have a natural interest in, the sticking with it is key.

Just the act of throwing yourself into something, of basing the majority of your decisions — those grand plans as well as the day-to-day to day tasks –around accomplishing that thing you believe in, is rewarding in itself. Laboring at something you truly dedicate your time and energy and heart to, generates its own kind of love.

Day 19 – I’d been thinking about moving for a some time. While hanging out one night with friends, two of which were visiting from another country, and in seeing how much fun the foreign friends were having here, I got serious about my adventure fantasizing.

Then, there was a message.

I noticed that a writer I’d met briefly was posting a lot of pictures of himself in Budapest, so I wrote him and asked if he was doing a residency there. This was his story.

He said that he didn’t like the company he was working for, and he didn’t like where they had him living, so he decided to quit that job. He bought a oneway ticket for Budapest, rented an apartment and was working on writing his second novel there until the spring when he would come back to the states and decide what to do with his life. Fuck, I thought, I love that story.

A few days later, I’d booked my flight, found an apartment in Berlin, had someone to sublet my apartment while I was away, and lined up the next few classes teaching online (to secure my funds). It was all so easy. The little ropes tying me to this life were so easy to snap, one by one, like in Gulliver’s Travels, as one friend put it.

(image courtesy of Relaxing Music)

Day 20 – The other day, my instructor opened our yoga class by talking about the idea of abhyasa. She described it as the daily, nitty-gritty work we put in to achieving our grander goals.

In my morning meditations I often focus on what I want to manifest in my life. The idea is that we create this image, send it out into the universe, then let go of it, understanding that it is in the hands of a greater wisdom. It requires the belief that it will be taken care of paired with the work of going about your daily business to get you there. It sounds contradictory at first, but the heart of it is total trust, both in yourself and in the higher , timeless wisdom.

Yoga Journal explains the idea of abhyasa and the idea of “Balancing Effort and Surrender“:

The word abhyasa is rooted in, as meaning “to sit.” But abhyasa isn’t your garden-variety sitting. Rather, abhyasa implies action without interruption—action that’s not easily distracted, discouraged, or bored. Abhyasa builds on itself, just as a ball rolling downhill picks up momentum; the more we practice, the more we want to practice, and the faster we reach our destination.

As also means “to be present.” This reminds us that for our practice to be effective, we must always be intensely present to what we’re doing. Eventually, such resolute, vigilant enterprise on the yoga mat becomes part and parcel of everything we do in daily life. (http://www.yogajournal.com/article/philosophy/balancing-effort-and-surrender/)

I’m so grateful to my instructor for sharing this idea with us!

(image courtesy of Collective Evolution)

Day 21 – And…I’m nervous. As my adventure date approaches, the glow is wearing off and reality is setting in. I have to remember that I want to get out of my comfort zone. I’m choosing that. Traveling alone, not speaking the language, not having many friends there, blah blah blah.

OK, this is my one little life. I wanna live.

Also, there was a new moon last night. Earlier in the week, I had decided I’d set some intentions for myself on this occasion, but instead I set reverse intentions. Sometimes we cling to old, familiar comforts when faced with the challenge to make a leap, then you realize that those old comforts no longer serve you.

Erika reminded me that we’re still in the energy of the new moon, so with my mistake-laden reverse intentions in mind, I’m going to make some new ones!

From the Collective Evolution website I learned that we also had a solar eclipse in Virgo last night. It explains:

This type of eclipse (annular) is commonly referred to as a ‘Ring of Fire’ because when it is in its totality, the Sun’s light forms the lit up edges, appearing as a ring…

Solar Eclipses are very potent New Moons that generally happen every 6 months. Astrologically this is recognized as a time of powerful changes and new beginnings in specific area(s) of our lives. These changes build up in the 6 weeks before and play out during the following 4-6 month period leading up to the next one. However, this upcoming month is when we will see most of the shifts taking place. 

We are encouraged to consider what Virgo-themed changes have been happening in our lives:

How can you make your life more efficient and productive and what is preventing that? What are your counterproductive patterns (and/or habits) and how can you rearrange your lifestyle in order to transcend them? What do you need to do to improve your health and overall well-being? Some people have been experiencing health complications, which is the body trying to get your attention to make positive changes. Pay attention to any signs like that. (http://www.collective-evolution.com/2016/08/31/ring-of-fire-solar-eclipse-in-virgo-this-is-whats-going-on/)

Day 22 – In one of the Magic Lesson’s podcasts, Elizabeth Gilbert has a conversation with a woman who wants to tell a story, through photos paired with text, about her brother. The woman has been taking photos of her brother for a while, documenting his struggle with PTSD and drug addiction. The bigger project of organizing the raw materials daunts her. She can’t get started.

There is a moment when Gilbert asks her why she started this project, how has it changed her life.

The woman takes a minute to compose herself and, in a deeper tone of equal amounts shame and relief, she says, “it helped me stop judging him.”

I had paused the podcast for a minute. The question prompted me to consider this about my own creative project, a collection of stories/personal essays. More than two years ago I started writing them, but over that time, they’ve changed. Their texture is different. Earlier ones don’t have the empathy and strength of voice more recent ones do.Of course, the more I write, the writing itself improves, but there is something else at work. Every new day informs the past. Until recently, I didn’t quite understand what they meant.

Their function has changed. I want to see something within my experience that will serve others, the way others do for me. When I decided to move, it was so clear that the stuckness my essays were effected by, my inability or the slow-going it took to get them up the hill to their peak, is because the were being written from a place in the past. Literally, I was writing them in the office that had been by husband’s. My story had come full circle, but not transcendent. In other words, in order for my stories to have that kind of movement, my own story needed to actually move.

In the interview Hemingway gave the Paris Review (Spring, 1958 issue),  I think he puts it best:

INTERVIEWER

Finally, a fundamental question: as a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?

HEMINGWAY

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Also, this, my essays did begin to be true until I stopped judging the events and the self (the various iterations of the selves I’ve been) that appeared in them. It cannot be “truer than anything true and alive” if you wish it dead, if you wish parts of yourself were not what they are.

 .

Day 23 – I’ve been waiting for months to hear back from a very excellent magazine about an essay I sent them. I had submitted once before, about a year and a half ago, and got a slip of paper in the mail 9 months later telling me thank you, but that they were going to pass.

This time, when the email popped up,  I held my breath. I’d submitted one of my favorite essays, the first one that finally clicked. I feel like a pretty accomplished poet, but the non-fiction thing is something I’ve had to teach myself how to do. And it’s taken a long time.

I’d struggled to write this particular essay for months, so long that I began to doubt whether it would ever be good. It went through 15 drafts. Then, the thing that I hope for, when all of the seemingly disparate elements come together informing the theme of the essay AND when the story itself finds its most clear, distinct shape, happens and I am the happiest woman alive. The funny thing is that I forget that I can get there. Something keeps me writing, though, and revising and brooding on why I’ve brought these ideas and people and events together in the first place. Every time I don’t think the essay will make it. But it always does, in the end.

Here’s the response I got from the magazine:

Dear Sophie,

Thanks for sending us “Wife to Myself.” We really liked this piece; I’m genuinely sorry to say that in the end we decided its not quite right [for us]…

We found the writing in your essay lovely – for example, when you talk about imagining the domestic dinner scenes behind softly lit windows: “I felt my own presence vulgar, dreaming myself into their windows, longing to be invited in.” And we were intrigued by the underlying themes of the essay: wanting your own family from a young age, the aversion to twilight, your transformation from a slovenly roommate to someone who pays attention to domestic matters.

But several readers read this, and we all felt that there was a missing piece here: we wanted to know more about the unravelling of your marriage…

The editor goes on to suggest that maybe I was reluctant to include such personal information. Her feedback is of immeasurable value to me. In fact, I didn’t even know this lapse in the story existed.  Now that I do, I can respond to it.

The editor’s personal response made me almost as happy as if the piece had been accepted. I know the essay is good and that the editor had enough faith in my writing to help me see what’s missing, heartens me.

In her closing comments, she said that they really liked my writing and hoped I would submit other essays. I am grateful for this reminder to go forward when it is hard, when I think an essay sucks and will never get better, and when I think it is good, but can improve it still.

Fail better; I suppose that’s the take-away!

Day 24 – The desire within beauty has always intrigued me. The heart of the idea, as I put it in an essay, that “to want is really to want more of something” is hard to pinpoint.

I’ve been slowing reading Karl Ove Knausgard’s My Struggle. Since I’m behind everyone else who have likely read up to the 6th book, I’m just now reckoning with his famous descriptions of minutiae. One such philosophical maundering struck me. He talks about the feeling he gets when looking at particular paintings. He says:

…the feelings the pictures evoked in me went against everything I had learned about what art was and what it was for…even though the pictures were supposed to be idylls, such as Claude’s archaic landscapes, I was always unsettled when I left them because what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire.

…The pictures made my insides tremble, but for what? The picture filled me with longing, but for what?

…But the moment I focused my gaze on the paining again all of my reasoning vanished in the surge of energy and beauty that arose in me. Yes, yes, yes, I heard. That’s where it is. That’s where I have to go. But what was it I had said yes to? Where was it I had to go?

Have you felt this too? The longing that is in something fantastic. I think this is the thing that also makes certain books impossible to put down, how we say that we’ve “devoured” it. It is something from the idyllic that is not fulfilled by its idyllic representation, but spurred by it.

I was driving up to Sacramento to meet my best friend’s baby when I heard a song lyric that seemed to respond to this question. From Bill Callahan’s song Winter Road, he says:

The blinding lights of the kingdom can make you weep

I have learned
When things are beautiful
To just keep on
Just keep on

Often, it is when things are dark and impossible we tell ourselves to just keep on. I meditated on the idea for a long time.

When things are beautiful, when the beauty is staggering, it can be paralyzing. The mind wants to understand what the body is experiencing. Reasoning gets in the way and we find ourselves further from it.

Do we want it? Do want to be it? Or, might it serve as is a reminder of what possibility means. Possibility is neither having nor becoming the thing we desire, but to hold the thing within us.

I’ve talked about my morning meditations before, those dedicated to manifesting. The point of these is to hold the idea of what I want as a vision, not one that I see coming true, but as one already part of my being.

“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.”

(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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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)

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Balboa Beach day after I arrived

Jan. 7th – I’ve never before lived in a city that snows. One of things I brought back from LA is my grandmother’s wool coat from the ’50s. She bought it when she moved to Detroit in her early 20s. It has a black, rabbit fur collar and feels like it weights about 30 pounds. They don’t make coats of that quality anymore. It’s in perfect condition. My mom held on to it all this time, probably thinking no one in our family would have use for it. When I tried it on for my 91-year-old grandmother, who had long forgotten about the coat, she said, “Well I’ll be darned. Does it smell like moth balls?” It does not.

I spent the 3 weeks between LA and Orange County with a quick trip down to San Diego. Somehow, I didn’t have time or the chance to see all the people I wanted to. And now I’m back in Berlin where I have like 5 friends, but it’s cozy and excellent weather for writing. Visiting home was grounding and invigorating alike. It rained off and on most of the trip, but when the sky cleared, the air was crystalline and everything sparked, washed of smog and city dust, it bounced with color. The sunshine was warm on my face, coming through the looping vines of the veranda, on those mornings when I sat on Emily’s back porch sipping my coffee, Clifford the cat beside me.

I stopped by my LA apartment to pick up a few books and things and realized that I miss nothing about it. What I miss are my dog and my cat, my friends and my yoga studio. But, driving around that first day back, I was overwhelmed by how beautiful it is in LA. By afternoon I was already tired of the same old neighborhood, the same old streets, the same views. They aren’t mine anymore. Newport Beach living, however, is easy to get used to (except for all the weird republicans and unfriendly wasps).

(We had fish tacos and beer then walked to the beach)

These exquisite cutie-pies

Here are a smattering of trip highlights

Miranda, Meadow and I dined at Taix. Our presence was graced by true LA royalty, Chong, of Cheech and Chong.

“Chrismaka”

Old Soul, Michael

James Meetze making dinner and the lovely La Jolla shoreline

I didn’t draw this, but I like it!

Jan. 11

I took this picture when my friend Debra and I went to Doug Aitken’s “Electric Earth” exhibit at MOCA when I was in LA. This piece, NOW, is made of wood, mirror, and glass. The description/explanation says, “…the term ‘now’ is slippery, unstable, and transient, as ‘now’ quickly becomes the immediate past. On one hand, by virtue of its mirror-clad surface, the viewer is fully integrated into and reflected in the sculpture’s present moment…On the other hand, linguistically NOW ensnares the viewer in an inexhaustibly repetitive, elusive tense.“

I’ve been thinking about this. Yes, time is experienced in contradictory ways. And it’s not just the “now” that’s slippery, but much of time can be broken down into now, never, and always, interchangeably. The more salient point I’m trying to make is, what is the purpose of now? I made a new year’s resolution to myself to do what is hard. I’ve noticed it usually manifests as making myself do something when I think of it, now, instead of putting it off. I also think about now in terms of forgiving myself, forgiveness generally and absolutely, and forgiveness as love and empathy across the world in the now.

A line from one of my favorite books, says “one is loved because one is loved.”*

Applying this to our existence and its relationship to time, it seems to touch on that idea of accepting who you are and where you are without qualifiers. Being you now is to be loved because you are loved.

It’s kind of like how the phrases, “don’t try” and “give it your all” seem conflicting, but aren’t. Time is slipping away or time is infinite. Both. What do you want to give and what do you want to get from the now, from this very moment? A sense of peace, perhaps?

I found the entire exhibit disturbing, which it’s intended to be, I guess. Images of LA traffic and apartment buildings, ubiquitous and disembodied. The film of feral animals in motel rooms made me SO sad. There’s a beaver in a bathtub (not what you’re thinking), rabbits on a bed, and a deer nosing through a refrigerator full of packaged drinks it can’t access because they’re sealed in plastic. That was the one that got me. How we’ve perverted and shut ourselves out of the natural world, and in these scenes, the natural world from itself.

But then Terry Riley played a couple of nights at the exhibit and my brother said it was beautiful. Electronic music fits the vibe, something from nature but slightly removed.

In Berlin news, it snowed a bunch today. I stood by the window watching it like a real Californian or a child. While rain is loud, snow is quiet. It makes me feel peaceful. Good things like coffee and blankets and hot showers are made even better.

Tomorrow I’m seeing Robert Wilson’s “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” performed by the Berlin Ensemble. Looking forward to it!

Good night. I love you.

From a few days ago

From today

We celebrated this lovely creature’s birthday last night.

And earlier that day, we marched at Brandenburg Gate.

This morning, looking at the New York Times pictures of the Women’s Marches across the globe made me choked-up by the goodness of human beings.

This is unity and love beyond what I’ve ever witnessed in my life. A reminder that people do care about each other and about our planet, that we are resilient; we resist.

Every member of my family marched yesterday in one city or another, LA, SF, OC, Oakland, Berlin!

I come from resistance and revolution stock. Both my parents were political activists. Below is a picture of my dad participating in a student protest at SF State when then military were on campus recruiting young men for Vietnam.

I saw this on Instagram from the March in LA. I love it.

And this, because I love it too.

I’ve discovered a Berlin treasure. It is also the best way to mitigate this gray-skied winter, which is great because it turns out I cannot stand winters in Berlin and will never again move to a foreign country when it’s on the cusp of plunging into one. This season has tried my spirit in unprecedented ways, but this post is about surviving. It is also about healing waters, frozen waters, and omens.

Berlin’s treasure is spa culture. I went Friday night with Clare and Mirta. They’d been before, but it was my first time at Vabali—a sprawling spa and sauna oasis in the style of “a small balinese village.” We stripped down and started with a swim in the indoor pool, followed by a eucalyptus infused Russian style steam room, then risked the cold outside to soak in a hot pool. Steam rising from bodies and the water and our breath made it feel cloaked in primordial magic. I ran tippy-toed through the freezing night back into the main hall in dipped into another sauna room. Stretching out in a sauna, submitting to the dry heat drives the cold from my bones like nothing else. We rested on heated waterbeds in a relaxation room perched on the second floor, overlooking the outdoor baths, old park, and tree-bones stark agains the black sky.

Also, everyone is naked, which is why I don’t have pictures. My initial thought of penises everywhere was unappetizing. Give me naked hippies by a river and I’m good, but I’m not experienced with crowding nude into various enclosed spaces. But upon arriving, the vibe was so relaxing and peaceful, I was fine.

People are beautiful, really, and mostly look the same naked, variations on a theme.

I came home feeling like a noodle (a happy one) and woke up the next morning still thinking about it.

This week, I’ll check out, on a friend’s recommendation, Liquidrom, which is also close to the coworking space I’ve been utilizing.

In other water related adventures—Last weekend Jasmine and I went to nearby Lake Schlachtensee. Clare says it’s a great swimming spot in the summer. This time of year it was frozen solid, but peopled none the less. Some ice-skated, numerous dogs scamped and slid playing fetch, couples pushed strollers and we even saw people jogging across it.

It snowed really hard here last Monday, unannounced. I got on the subway to meet a friend for dinner in Mitte when it started to sprinkle. When I got off on the other side, snowflakes the size of quarters tumbled out of the sky down. It lasted hours, burying the city in a foot of soft snow. I couldn’t get over the size of the snowflakes and stood there being very LA, snapping pictures in the frigid night of what looked to me like cotton ball shavings.

On a final note, I had trouble concentrating this weekend. When there’s no sunlight to guide me through the day, to help me see my location in time, I feel scattered and low-energy.

I get stuck in the details. For example, I wouldn’t walk out the door until I’d found the hair clip I wanted to use. The longer I looked for it, the more absurd the situation become and the more annoyed I was with the hair-clip and myself. It was so inconsequential. Months ago, a friend pointed out how much time I spent debating small decisions. That’s when I gave it up. First thought best thought. Yet here I was.

I found it after a few more minutes, clipped the thing in my hair, then walked to the door and put my shoes on. As I stood up, I hit my head so fucking hard on an electrical box that tears started gushing out while I held my head, swearing weakly.

Have you ever cried from hurting yourself as an adult? It’s pretty rare. You feel like a kid, but also like a human in undeniable, guileless pain. There’s comfort in the fact that it’s physical, not existential.

I checked in the bathroom mirror to see if it was bleeding, then stumbled into the living room, still crying, and sat down on the sofa. Why did this happen (besides the ill-placement of the electrical box)?  What is this sign or omen asking me to pay attention to? Is it reminding me to slow down? To speed up? To relax? To focus more?

I don’t know, but after I had cried really hard for two minutes I felt like I was being breathed by the universe, like something that seemed bottomless had been purged, and I felt better about EVERYTHING, including the lump of wet clay gray sky.

February 14th – Happy Valentine’s Day (if you celebrate)! It’s still unclear to me if Germans do and to what degree. We’ll file that under German dating customs I haven’t figured out. More on that soon!

On love: I’ve been thinking a lot the last week or so about the love we didn’t know existed until we knew it, that is, until we found it. Maybe it is a specific person who ignites a exact want that was always there, our heart unawares. People bring this type of love up often when talking about having a child. But it exists as much in romance, too, I think.

While reading this morning one of Keats’ letters to his beloved Fanny, he expresses this idea:

You have ravish’d me away by a Power I cannot resist: and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even since I have seen you I have endeavoured often “to reason against the reasons of my Love.” I can do that no more – the pain would be too great – My Love is selfish – I cannot breathe without you.

Yours for ever
John Keats

Cannot breathe without you vibe
Photo courtesy of my girl, Nedelle @advicefromparadise

I was also reading the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (for which there is a U-bahn stop named after) and came on the idea there too in his poems The Phoenix and Leaning Against the Mast. They appear below (Translated by Vernon Watkins) from an August, 1949 issue of Poetry magazine.

I could write and research and think only about love for the rest of my life. That is what I’m doing much of the time in my essay collection. Love — romantic, familiar, universal. I adore you and this world and this life!

I leave you with the sexiest song ever. Play it on repeat as you undress someone you love tonight.

It’s been a minute! Since we last talked, I got my German visa (an artist visa), good for 2 years! And I started taking German lessons. The teacher doesn’t speak English, which is typical in a German class, that is, to only speak in the language you’re learning. However, she also doesn’t really know English, and is limited in her ability to explain things, often reverting to French. Between a Swedish guy and an American who’s been in Berlin for 2 years, the important stuff ends up roughly translated to the rest of us, but not without profound confusion.

I think I’m the oldest of the 8 students and least naturally adept at absorbing languages. Or maybe it’s just been awhile since I was on the student side of a lectern. It’s a frustrating blast though. I love walking home afterward, reading the building signs, sounding out words. I was complimented on my pronunciation and told it holds a lot of potential.

The teacher said we should practice everyday, then one morning we’ll wake up and it will all be there.

That is perfect advice, I realized, for enduring any transformation. You practice, you try, you mess up, you do it again. It’s always a little painful. Or unbearably painful. Then one day it’s not. Then you’re on the other side in the new morning and on to the next transformation.

Alles gut.

In domestic news: Jasmine and I went to Bauhaus yesterday, which sounds cool, but Bauhaus is the German Home Depot, so it was just orange and overwhelming and we walked away wondering if we bought the right grit sizes of sandpaper. We also bought black paint for a long awaited home improvement project. We’re going to black out one of the of bedrooms and turn it into a low key, techno sex club to earn some extra cash, or “dosh” as they call it here. No lines. Totally discrete.

Just kidding. We’re painting a table.

I’ve heard birds singing in the morning. I opened the window to hear them better and smell the morning air, then I noticed all the little buds on the branches. Spring is coming. Nature is waking up.

I held my friend’s baby yesterday. The sun came through their window and shined on my hair and he tried to grab the sun and laughed and laughed.

May 17th

It’s 75 degrees out. People are eating iced-cream, some dude is kayaking on the canal, I’m wearing sandals AND drinking an iced beverage. I feel like the sun is melting the stress away. Hooray for the sun.

I didn’t mind the time we lay sprawled on the canal’s grassy banks kissing and shielding each other from the sun, which on that day was—like the iteration of each slice from the panorama of happiness—so strong.

We are going to be free soon

No, I would not have minded if it lasted a little longer.

Then the aching, gray ended. What would have been spring decided to double-down, so that we jumped from winter to summer overnight. Now I sniff the air and the roses blooming like floral carpets hung over fences. I put my face in the sunlight and the sun holds it there as if it has hands.

The fantasy I had when I first dreamed up this German adventure was brought to fruition yesterday, because yesterday we went to the lake.

I emerged from a couple of low weeks (landlord selling the apartment, a romance coming to an end) the way I did from that cold lake water, revitalized, clean, and happy.

Cosmic threads, sweetheart

My very dear, old friend Evan passed through Berlin this past weekend. He’s on tour with the best, possibly only, all male choir dedicated to singing strictly Leonard Cohen songs, The Conspiracy of Beards. When I first met Evan over a decade ago, he was a member of the band, though he is more of their roadie now. He had once stood among the fedoras and suits singing lyrics like, You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me.

Evan and I are all grown up now and both better versions of our earlier selves, comfortable and crinkled around the eyes selves we could never have imagined. Nor could we have known how much all of this, and our lasting friendship, would both satisfy and excite us.

During the San Francisco years, we used to search out all all natural, idyllic, swimmable locations. It was called River Club, a nature-loving tribe composed of Evan, April, and I. I’m glad to see its comeback, albeit, this river was a lake. The lake smelled so cold and sweet and mossy. There were a million German lake-goes and so many blonde water babies.

All I thought all day long was, “it is so good to be alive.”

Tomorrow morning I’m flying to Switzerland to meet-up with my good friend from LA, Erika, in Lucerne. Summer is here; adventures abound…

In a conversation with Clare last night, she told me about a time in her life when she couldn’t walk past a body of water without wading into it. I know this feeling, the pull water has as an embodiment of vitality, a beacon of life, but also as the dark, still thing possessing secrets in its depths we long to know. We need water, are made of water, but how often when we’ve swam out past the waves and find ourselves bobbing and paddling through the sea does the urge to swim back to shore suddenly strike us?

There is something about water that speaks to a primordial desire. It is the desire to join something you cannot become no matter how wholly you immerse yourself in it.

How many times have I gathered friends together and drove to Nevada City to baptize myself in the crystalline waters of the Yuba River? When I see pictures of it, it makes me thirsty. I want to be naked in the sun on a boulder along the river’s shore.

My trip to Switzerland last week was as much a pilgrimage to dip my toes to the rivers and lakes as it could be for this time of the year when the waters are still as cold as the snow they came from. Every body of water I met, I stopped and slipped my sandals off.

Like Lorca said, “On the waters I have dreamed.”

I once left Los Angeles’ dry chaparrals and cracked creek beds to escape to blue capes, wade shin-deep in ice rivers, and bob in the black lagoon of the Sea of Crete under the moon light, while my family finished their glasses of rocky in the hotel on the hill. It looked not so unlike California on that hill, replace the chaparral for olive trees, coyote scat for goat droppings in the caves, and crickets for cicadas.

I was always going. I was always coming back.

Planning a trip now for Bavaria and Austria. Then, Berlin to see my beloveds. Paris and Provence with my mother and sister.

There is always water. Always a marble fountain, or park, hilltops, caves, ruins, ancient dwellings, or cathedrals.

I am always dreaming. Mountain sheep, thistle and wildflower, dust, lavender, roots, rocks, mist, mirror surfaced lakes, cobble stones, stone homes, pottery, perfume, royalty, revolution, thirsty rivers, canals the color of car coolant, carts and villages, clearings and castles.