waking

Yesterday I woke from a dream in which I wrote and publicly declared my vows. Today I awoke from a dream of betrayal, gripped with fear and with the ache of a broken heart. I admit I'm rather curious about tomorrow.

love and fear

The other night I was listening to a song and misheard the lyrics, but in doing so, struck upon a line I may have to use in a poem.

More importantly, it got me thinking about this thing called love. It seems that many people don't have the slightest idea of what love is... clarity on this issue seems about as rare as a truly blue colored flower. And, to be sure, I don't pretend I have it all figured out. My life is a testament to the fact of my trying and failing and sometimes succeeding, and, while I do tend to learn from my mistakes and am willing to assimilate new information, I certainly don't have any answers.

What I've observed, however, is compulsive pairing. It seems the phenomenon is two-fold. To begin with, it seems that many people are absolutely terrified of being alone. So much so that they hardly seem to know what to do with themselves if they do not have a partner. It's how they identify themselves. It's what they do with their time. It's where all their interests seem to lie...

Related to this, is what also appears to be a deep and abiding fear of desire. I think this bears further explanation. Most people have likes and dislikes and are pretty comfortable saying, hey, I really like this thing, but often it seems to exist on a very surface level. When one digs deeper into one's desires, sometimes what one turns up is not always what one expects or wants to talk about in polite company. Acknowledging one's deepest desires takes courage and strength, especially if one hopes to not pervert and distort one's desires. True honesty is difficult, even if you are only dealing with the self.

Bodily desires open up a whole bunch of anxieties. Lots of shoulds and shouldn'ts and shame and, of course, lots of fear. What I have observed seems to indicate that the response for many to this kind of fear is this compulsive coupling, which then gets slapped with the label "love" and everybody just sort of accepts it. But (and here's the line I aim to use in a poem) love is more than just a fear of desire.

If one cannot accept and integrate the various aspects of the self, including those desires, if one cannot reach past fear, work through it, and be at peace with the experience, I'm not sure one can find love either. To love one's self is challenging. It requires work and sacrifice. It requires removing the veneers and the blind spots we put in place to comfort us from the truth of ourselves, which is often more unruly than we'd like to admit. It requires that one develops, as Gurdjieff put it, a controlling "I" so that there is, in the self, some consistency, some measure of reliability. One has to have a self in order to share it with another.

And what is love, truly, if not union, communion, partnership among equals? What gift can one give one's lover more fine and true than the gift of one's highest and greatest self, a surrender of that self, a flame ignited within that is so fierce and pure that the beloved cannot help but ignite his own fire within to offer up? When two are not completing the other, but whole in and of themselves and coming together to burn even more brightly together, is that not love? Is that not beyond fear? It most certainly is not compulsive.

This is the love I aim to cultivate in myself. This is the love I aim to share. This is the work I am undertaking and I can't imagine settling for anything less.

how little I know

An excerpt from How Little I Know by R. Buckminster Fuller

It is understood
That if you know that I know
How to say it "correctly"
The exact meaning of which
I have not yet learned)
Then I am entitled to say it
All incorrectly
Which once in a rare while
Will make you laugh.
And I love you so much
Whenever you laugh.
But I haven't learned yet
What love may be
But I love to love
And love being loved
And that is a whole lot
Of unlearnedness.

I haven't learned yet
What laughter is
But a mother told me
How surprised was she
When an undergraduate first
Belly laughed in her
Alma mater
Dormitory.

Encontre un hombre exquisito

El dulce sabor de una mujer exquisita

Una mujer exquisita no es aquella que más hombres tiene a sus pies,
sino aquella que tiene uno solo que la hace realmente feliz.

Una mujer hermosa no es la más joven, ni la más flaca, ni la que
tiene el cutis más terso o el cabello más llamativo, es aquella
que con tan solo una sonrisa y un buen consejo puede alegrarte la vida.


Una mujer valiosa no es aquella que tiene más títulos, ni más
cargos académicos es aquella que sacrifica su sueño por hacer felices a los demás.

Una mujer exquisita no es la más ardiente, sino la que vibra al
hacer al amor solamente con el hombre que ama.

Una mujer interesante no es aquella que se siente halagada por ser
admirada por su belleza y elegancia, es aquella mujer firme de carácter
que puede decir NO.

Y un hombre, un hombre exquisito es aquel que valora una mujer así…”

Gabriel García Márquez

you're lucky

I dreamed I met my rapist. We stood together in a dimly lit room. I took his face in my hand, squeezed his jaw, and said, "you're lucky."

"Why am I lucky?" he asked me.

"You're lucky I didn't kill you."

I woke up to a series of muscle spasms releasing tension in my pelvic floor.

strange zoo

It may have become apparent recently that I have been cataloging some of my dream imagery here. I've decided to just go with it. Welcome to the inside of my head.

Several nights ago I dreamed I was in an outdoor zoo, well, perhaps part zoo and part wildlife preserve. I was standing near a water feature and the nesting grounds of a strange hybrid bird: part bird of prey, part carrion eater. Imagine a crow with deep chocolate feathers flickering with variations of iridescent gold. Then imagine that bird with an additional crown of feathers that arches up, over the top of the head, and hangs long toward the back of the neck. These feathers are more spiny, with smallish feathery tufts at the end, so that it looks more like a sort of headdress, only it grows in this fashion. Actually, it seems like nature might have found a use for this type of bird by now, killing fresh when it's available, and dining on carrion when food sources are scarce. Resourceful.

I walked further through the water feature to a section with a glass wall, so that one could see both above and below the waterline. Here I encountered an octopus, but it was much more transparent and jellyfish-like than an ordinary octopus. Its long tentacles were clasped around a large stack of papers. Looking more closely it appeared that a teacher had dropped a stack of syllabi into or near the water and the octopus was cradling or devouring it intensely. Looking closer still, I observed another hybrid creature wrapped around the octopus's tentacles. This creature appeared to be part crab, part sea urchin. It was purplish red and bore rounded white protruding bumps, like spines that had been ground down. It's legs wrapped around two tentacles. From my vantage point the octopus almost appeared as some kind of sea maiden with a cockle shell or flower in her hair, though, presumably, this sea creature was gnawing at the octopus.

As I watched a large cat ventured into the scene: another hybrid creature, part leopard, part mountain lion. Its spots were faint and its teeth were large. It dipped its massive head into the water and came back up with the octopus, syllabi and all, in its great mouth. The cat stood there shaking the whole collection like a much smaller cat might do to a catnip pillow. At this point the scenery changes in the way scenery changes in dreams, with perfectly absurd logic that is perfectly acceptable and in the context of the dream. The out-of-doors seamlessly turns indoors and soon I am watching this scene unfold as though it's within a large enclosure and I am standing behind a pane of glass.

In the distance I see a rather large giraffe. I say rather large because, while giraffes are large to begin with, this particular giraffe was comparatively much larger. There was nothing at all delicate about its muscular neck. The giraffe approached and swooped its knobby head down, scooping the great cat up, octopus and all, and shaking it, too, back and forth. Two zookeepers appeared and shook their hands in distress, mouthing words to each other I couldn't entirely make out. There was evidently some concern about a hip injury in the large cat, but all I could think about was how much more awesome this entire scene would be if it were taking place on the back of an elephant. As no elephant seemed destined to appear, I stepped away from the glass and exited through the nearest door.

Outside again, I was approached by a young man.

"What's the word for... or what do you call it when there are two Christs?" he asked me.

"Deuce Ex Machina," I replied, but when he looked only confused, I said, "Ah... never mind" and continued to walk away.

more dreams

The other night I dreamed of a cat, not mine exactly, but a cat, or rather several cats, but one in particular that, when I reached for it, turned into a bird but with bat wings and then lifted out of my reach.

Last night I dreamed I was being strangled by a man I did not know, a man for whom this was not a temporary rush, but one who clearly intended to see me dead. In my effort to escape him, I climbed a deep shelf against the long wall of double paned windows in this large and rather sound-proof room. I kicked him and he bent my arm back, snapping my wrist. I screamed and screamed but hardly a sound came out, as though my sounds were being vacuumed right out.

A smaller set of windows near the ceiling appeared to have once had cranks that would open them, though the handles had been removed. I pinched the end with my good hand until it barely began to open. I screamed again, imploring the row of girls sitting on the other side of the glass to help me. They sat motionless, expressionless, flipping through magazines as though waiting in a doctor's office, twirling their hair and staring at (through?) the activity occurring behind the glass before them as though it were the climax of a television drama.