Beyond Appearances

The appetite for reading or listening or learning—seeking out meanings—is an attempt to get beyond superficial, beyond appearances, to realize what is significant. The senses are fallible, and of course our minds are fallible, and I don’t have the belief in my ability or anyone’s ability to get very far beyond appearances, but again, I have the appetite for it . . . Like, I don’t think we ever find out what things are really like, but trying to get nearer is a hunger.

William Stafford, The Art of Poetry No. 67

Counterpoint

I'm not going to tell you how to live your life but gosh at least try reading a little poetry. Tom Hennen is a poet that I've only just started reading. The last verse of this one is so so good:
 

What the Plants Say
By Tom Hennen

Tree, give up your secret. How can you be so satisfied? Why
don’t you need to change location, look for a better job, find
prettier scenery, or even want to get away from people?

Grass, you don’t care where you turn up. You appear running
wild in the oat field, out of a crack in a city street. You are
the first word in the vocabulary of the earth. How is it that you
are able to grow so near the lake without falling in? How can
you be so alert for the early frost, bend in the slightest breeze,
and yet be so hard to break that you are still there, quiet, green,
among the ruins of others?

Weed, it is you with your bad reputation that I love the most.
Teach me not to care what anyone has to say about me. Help me
to be in the world for no purpose at all except for the joy of
sunlight and rain. Keep me close to the edge where every wild
thing begins.
 

Possibilities Infinite

Have I written about this before?

About five years ago, my sister and I were eating ice cream in the shade of the high rises in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. Across the patio, there was another ‘western’ woman drinking coffee alone. She looked like she was in her late 40’s and wore a worn-in, leather moto jacket. She was paging through a travel guide. I don’t know anything else about her but five years later she is persistently on my mind.

The paths I can take at this stage in my life are infinite. I could get married. I could have kids. I could keep my job forever. I could be single forever. I could quit my job and find a similar one. I could quit my job and become a freelancer. I could go back to school. I could buy a house. I could self destruct. I could move to Denver. I could move to Hawaii. I could move to San Fransisco. I could move to Scotland.

And I would be ok with any outcome … but at least every now and then I want to resemble that woman in Roppongi. Maybe happy, maybe intelligent, maybe engaging, and maybe often finds herself in foreign places drinking a late morning coffee and figuring out where next to wander.

May.

“She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.”
Zelda Fitzgerald

Love and Loneliness

I've suspected loneliness is the "human condition" since I was a teenager. To me, it's not a sad or scary thought - it's just a thing that we have as part of our humanness. It might actually be liberating to remind ourselves that feeling lonely is natural and normal. You can't patch that feeling up with a partner or a family or a dream job or social life. You can, at best, only distract yourself from it for a while.

This video by Hannah Jacobs does a great job addressing aloneness ... though I don't agree that being in love is an illusion. You can be lonely and in love at the same time and the one feeling is just as real as the other.

Because we humans are just skin and bones and brains full of contradictions.