Leaning Into The Afternoons

What inspires me today...
POETRY!
Right?

Neruda makes me miss the sea.

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.
There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.
I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.
You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.
-Pablo Neruda



A poem for Neruda:
She sent him a line from a poem
Obscure as any; could have been pulled from any world,
But he immediately recognized its fragile words
As he let them pour out of his mouth.
Her feet in your lap, a book gently opened over them
Spine to toes.
She had never heard of Neruda.
She said she couldn't understand
Hers were tangled amidst the floorboards
Tied around my waist.
Hushed tones and days ending too frequently,
Finally they couldn't end enough.
A letter from far away, now full in his hands,
One line of the sea.
-Katie

Misc.

What inspires me today...

leaving the city.

What form of speech would lend itself to describe the fact that the folder on my computer, neatly hidden within My Documents, titled “Misc,” holds all the writings I’ve chosen to preserve from the past two years? Mostly poems, some fragmented sentiments, a few letters, copy/pasted emails that are still too painful to read but I save so I don’t forget they’re there, and lyrics to songs I typed out while waiting delay after delay at SFO/SBA/LAX/PDX. Is this irony? Most would say no, I would agree. Poetic? Maybe. Cowardly? Probably. I'm making a conscious decision to move some of those out of that folder and onto the internet, where no one will read them, but I can still feel more adventurous.

Something about how I know every creak, every smell, every secret home has to offer leaves me wanting to reach out for more. A semester in San Francisco has come and gone, leaving me with an extra suitcase full of clothes I don't need, a few more/less friends to go back to at that hilly campus on the shore, and an assignment that Karen made us write in order to sum up our experiences:

Katie Leaves The City

Katie leaves the city; left with no more answers. In their place are two tasks I have in this life: to love my God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. I have learned to shun certainty, and yet with everything in me, I am certain of the cross, which looms so mightily in my mind. Never have I been so full of compromise and philanthropy, neither succeeding in making it recede. I cry sometimes thinking that I can never be good or terrible enough to dwarf its power. Here I have aged to 21. Next is 30. I never understood that stillness is not a waste of the days that I am not promised, because I have found Jesus wanting to share in my ordinary. I watched a tree all afternoon shed its leaves, one-by-one, each a sacrifice to the tugs of a crisp and well traveled exhale. They soon blanketed the ground, the trunk standing naked. The wind sharpened its teeth, and will hold the fragile frame through the winter, as the tree will wish to gather each precious and loosely tossed sacrifice, now scattered across the world, swimming in the seas.

In a moment I will be looking back at two years of distance, and this time will be a memory of a memory, and I will be different. But never far from my mind will be those crying themselves to sleep because the elite surrounding the cross refuse to let them close, yelling that their burden is too dark to pin upon the pine. I can never let go the string that holds me closely to the people who look me in the eye and refuse to hide me away in a box of ridged absolutes. I now know a God of paradox, who tears apart those boxes and gives me a book full of stories to show me that I am not alone, and that I can love better. I finally don’t know why so many are meant to suffer while others build mansions atop their molehills. Children are raped. Children die. People go to hell. There is no such thing as the fairness we were so certain of when sitting in those single desks in a neat little row; but I know God is good. I know that the tearing and retching of my soul is nothing compared to that of the one who created us so carefully and purposefully from the dirt. He watches as we shed our leaves, and as the winter chaps our skin and stings our eyes, He sews new ones to our frame when the spring returns.

We have never had a manual, we have had a Spirit and each other, so we better treat them both with love, and give all we have in sacrifice. This city has taught me that time is on the heels of my lazy, slow-released love, and that I truly want to love better.

Excerpted.

 What inspires me today...

Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)

"Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory, elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doily... None of it moved her. She addressed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don't love you. Poem too long: I don't love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don't love you. Physics, the idea of you, the laws of you: I don't love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in its thingness.

If we were to open a random page in her journal- which she must have kept and kept with her at all times, not fearing that it would be lost, or discovered and read, but that she would one day stumble upon that thing which was finally worth writing about and remembering, only to find that she had no place to write it- we would find some rendering of the following sentiment: I am not in love."

So she had to satisfy herself with the idea of love--loving the loving of things whose existence she didn't care at all about. Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for. It was not the world that was the great and saving lie, but her willingness to make it beautiful and fair, to live a once-removed life, in a world once-removed from the one in which everyone else seemed to exit."


But how could anyone remain unmoved by a doily?

Happy New Year, You're My Only Vice!

I supposed I ought to start a blog. This isn't entirely true, Lizzy supposed I ought to start a blog, mostly because it was 1 in the morning when we were talking on the phone, and I think she was sick of listening to my stories and rants.

Regardless, this is happening, so I will start off with the end of 2008, and the very beginnings of 2009.

Christmas time has ended, and new years has come and gone. This is marked by the only thing remaining of the winter angelic scene set up under a glass cake cover in our bathroom being a mysterious circle of white glitter. The holidays were truly great this year. Snowed in for the first week, I fully embraced this forced state of hermitdom with a pair of stretch pants and overgrown tee shirts. The snow cleared just enough for both of my sisters to make their flights in from their distant locations, so instead of being able to get some much needed reading and art done, I honed my Mario Cart skills (if you can call them that) with Erika on her Wii. I guess you can count a half hour making everyone we know as a Me character creatively stimulating.

New years eve was a grand olde time. Veronica and Isaac's house was filled with people and the music of a DJ who set up in the basement that quickly turned into and remained a dance floor for the whole night. I got to see the new year in with some of my oldest and newest friends, and that is the way to do it, in my opinion. And, as I have learned from The OC (which I also became hopelessly addicted to in the flurries of snowfall) how you spend new year is how you will spend the rest of the year.

Since then I've had to play catch up with friends, making up for the time lost to the weather. Sarah came back from her adventures in the East, baring gifts such as a shirt from the genocide museum, which has taken place of the 2003 basketball camp shirt I had donned the past two weeks, and a Kim Jong-il alarm clock that will make an appearance on my desk in a few short days.

I bought a skirt and some more saltwater sandals at the red white and blue thrift store yesterday, so I'm optimistic so far about 2009.
Here are my resolutions:
1. Journal more (preferably every day, but seeing as this is the first thing I've written in the new year that even resembles a journal, I'm setting realistic goals.)
2. Spend less money (also seeing as I bought a skirt and saltwater sandals yesterday, which are nice, but hardly necessities, we'll also see about this one.)
3. Actually apply for the things I need to.
4. Figure out all the secrets of Lost
5. Stop biting my nails (this doesn't mean permanently. But at least give the little ones a chance.)
6. Be more honest. (I don't know how I will gauge this one, but I guess that's why it's a good one. No scale can tell me I've gained more dishonesty!)

And those are my resolutions, they're a little cheaty, we'll see if I keep them. Oh yes, we will see.