The Crane Wife: A Review

Patrick Ness’ novel The Crane Wife leveled me completely. I practiced putting it down sometimes, that I wouldn’t get to the end too quickly. It reads like a fairy tale, features the kind of symbolism and irony I wished for in tenth grade English class. Maybe I just thought I understood it more than I understood The Scarlet Letter because I’m older now. Maybe it resonated me to near collapse every chapter or so because I’ve been in love, and this story is that story.

Close enough, anyway, that I was consoled by the humanity of Ness’ characters. The Crane Wife opens as George, the American London print shop owner, hears an odd sound in the middle of the night, and discovers a giant white bird with a giant arrow piercing its wing in his back yard. The next day, as he fiddles with a new art form, an enigmatic woman named Kumiko walks into his print shop and alters the course of George’s life with a little, innocent question and a lethal dose of calm. What follows is a middle-aged American-in-London’s path to freedom, and forgiveness. Which are, perhaps, as we find out later in the book, the same thing.

It is also a story of George’s daughter, Amanda, who despises everyone but her son and, rarely, her father. Through a surprisingly normal series of events—trouble getting along with co-workers, being left out of the loop about dad’s new girlfriend, sleeping regretfully with her ex-husband—Amanda begins to feel like she never has before. Tears, just below the surface. Unexpected blurting of intimate thoughts. Pushing others’ hot, hot buttons very, very hard.

George and the mysterious Kumiko collaborate on tile art that devastates everyone who sees it. Art people begin to offer ridiculous sums for the tiles, composed of feathers and cuttings from used books. As the worlds of George and his daughter Amanda start to overlap to no small degree, the reader may find himself in the back yard of his own logic.

Patrick Ness writes art and poetics into a self-aware, humorously critical narrative that is both seamless and timeless. With a small, dynamic cast, Ness shamelessly explores the confuzzled feelings that spark and sometimes erupt between two people regardless of who they think they are, or who they are to others.

I highly recommend The Crane Wife first to anyone who thinks they know what love is. More, to those who have been cast from it.

Turning-Point

by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell

>>>

The road from intensity to greatness
passes through sacrifice.
—Kassner

For a long time he attained it in looking.
Stars would fall to their knees
beneath his compelling vision.
Or as he looked on, kneeling,
his urgency’s fragrance
tired out a god until
it smiled at him in its sleep.

Towers he would gaze at so
that they were terrified:
building them up again, suddenly, in an instant!
But how often the landscape,
overburdened by day,
came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.

Animals trusted him, stepped
into his open look, grazing,
and the imprisoned lions
stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom;
birds, as it felt them, flew headlong
through it; and flowers, as enormous
as they are to children, gazed back
into it, on and on.

And the rumor that there was someone
who knew how to look,
stirred those less
visible creatures:
stirred the women.

Looking how long?
For how long now, deeply deprived,
beseeching in the depths of his glance?

When he, whose vocation was Waiting, sat far from home—
the hotel’s distracted unnoticing bedroom
moody around him, and in the avoided mirror
once more the room, and later
from the tormenting bed
once more:
then in the air the voices
discussed, beyond comprehension,
his heart, which could still be felt;
debated what through the painfully buried body
could somehow be felt—his heart;
debated and passed their judgment:
that it did not have love.

(And denied him further communions.)

For there is a boundary to looking.
And the world that is looked at so deeply
wants to flourish in love.

Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.
Learn, inner man, to look at your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand
natures, the merely attained but
not yet beloved form.

stages of shock. danger.

I have done everything possible since arriving to Kathmandu to avoid writing. I have done everything possible to avoid writing. It hurts to travel. Hurts to feel new and ignorant. Like a familiar brick lodged in the throat. We’re friends.

Friends. Let’s not start with friends. Let’s start with projectors instead – kind of like those in cinemas, but with facebook profiles and fingers. I’m being watched. We’re being watched, and projected upon by those dozens of loved ones who came to the wedding and may have thought, this is the kind of love that I want.

No, no, it’s likely not. Unless you’re comfortable in interrogation rooms nightly. Confessionals by day. We do our best to find cabins nestled amongst the great mountains, so neither of us has to feel like too much when we ask the other for what we need or want. Music and lights distract the ears from our voices, which in good time we’ve learned to love. Full-length mirrors hang loose behind the doors, so we can detect our flaws to vanquish them, and inspect smiles for sincerity.

We do not rest well, except after fishing. But then there’s so much to complicate that I do not sleep for long. Morningly she’s up before me, often to take care of me in some way I don’t know.

I don’t know how to say ‘we’ except in attempt to connect.

Oh my god I’m tired of writing about myself.

Nepal. The tire man in Podunk Oregon asked me where it was. Dig a hole to China, and look toward Antarctica. I don’t know anything. Forgot to print the tickets that morning. The unkind passport control woman in Vancouver did not like us, or herself. Bulletproof vest, empty corridor.

We crash-landed into Shangri-la. The walls were lime green and pink, watercolor paintings of Everest, Annapurna, porters and prayer flags, tilted. Since two days after landing, I’ve wanted to go home. My minority status determines the form most relationships with locals take. To hell with the begging. With the anger at my refusal to hand over a few rupees which will not serve well.

I’ve gotten too used to getting what I want.

I know that readers depend on detail. Try this: A couple of years ago I told a girl in Alaska an analogy about a river. How the headwaters, rapids, and deltas were that river simultaneously. Which basically disproves linear time. That if she stepped into the water, came out, and went in again, it would not be the same river. Kind of like life. Keep your memories, I said, but the water flowing when they formed is long since the sea.

She called that ‘deep,’ which said she didn’t get it.

Today, I read ‘Siddhartha’ for the first time, and found that he, Siddhartha, at least according to Hesse, had a similar revelation.

It’s easy to know these things; all you have to do is sit by a river and listen. Application is a different story.

The book distracted enveloped me on the bus from Nagarkot that I forgot my fire staves tucked in the overhead bin. Hours later, in a taxi in a different city, remembrance came with tears. They were gone, and with them, sanity.

I don’t remember the last time Heather and I were happy and thriving for more than a few consecutive days. Since wedding, we’ve embarked on four distinct chapters of honeymoon, a couple of days sweet.

“This doesn’t feel like a honeymoon,” she said. “This feels like…traveling.”

We’re buddies right now. I’m ignoring the world, wishing for a simpler trip, where visas weren’t a hassle, and what the fuck is my problem, my grandmother died yesterday. Or today. The time difference isn’t all that keeps my family apart. I’ve joined that unfortunate club of travelers who were accidentally international in times of family tragedy. This is not something I’m happy about, and it felt inevitable.

Heather called the hotel in Nagarkot, talked to Newa. He biked down to the bus, and found the staves. Sent them down the mountain to Kathmandu, straight to the hotel.

There’s reason to hope.

eight days, and counting.

In eight days I’m to marry the only woman I’ve met who is not only willing to tolerate my shit post-poetic charm, but professes to love me regardless.

She’s the kind of storyteller who speaks joy and inclusivity to the point where you might think, if what she says is not true, it should be. She’s human, and knows it. I hold that secret too, and tell myself in the mirror. Learning to be more so daily. We’re earning PhDs in Each Other, and some of the vocabulary words run off to be alone in the midst of planning a wedding. Later, to pout or cry in front of old friends.

Today was the first time in the two years since we met that I questioned whether, at the end of the day, I would still want to be her lover.

Engagement is not proving to be easy. I heard somewhere that we’re supposed to be at our most happy now, and I’ve experienced but bookmarks of bliss since we returned from fishing in Alaska this past summer. Then, the lesson was that our opinions of a ‘fantastic season’ differed.

I’m picking up words of a new language hourly – those of Love, of course, and it is everything it’s made out to be: mysterious, even when you know each other’s bodies like the route to the restroom in the dark; deep in the way that sub-sea level trenches cannot be trawled. They’re old explanations, yes, but once again, I’m in the Rite of Passage of Discovering Truth in Cliché, and writing, for me, has never been easy in these moments. I despise appearing within throwing distance of the normal way of doing things, and speak absolute truth less often than I’d like to think. Choosing the words of others to describe my emotional vortex does not work for me.

Ed Gish, the 85-year-old reason Heather and I chose life together in the same hemisphere, recently re-entered our space. He’s the officiant of our ceremony. Speaks Human, Potential, Spirit and Hollywood in the same paragraph. He’s the man I manifested from wanting to attract into my life a great storyteller from whom to learn. His greatest lesson for me? Be with the story; stand upon that makeshift stage, and tell it the thousandth time like it happened yesterday.

When counting to a number like a thousand, I’ve learned that each number likes to be remembered. Sometimes made up nicely, even tailored. The fine lines I color outside with my speech are the blurry limits of truth, which changes form as I learn more from the experience. What was truth for me in the month I spent walking through Scotland is different from what I’ve learned from the trip since. Now I’ve seen the world from the meanwhile perspectives, and can speak for all of them. I will tell the story our conversations needs most. We all know that this can border on what we do while sleeping.

I’m not sure of the money I’ve spent on this nearly-marital education. Today at the JazzKat Café I daydreamed, and pictured myself sometime in the future telling a woman the story that I was once almost married, once almost strong enough to face my true reflection, once almost loving enough to give everything for this thing I’ve wanted for decades, for which I’ve traveled thousands of miles – and over again, just to see – and kissed dozens of lips with hope and often envy. When I came back from the dream, I tried to remember how old I felt – was it close to now? Will I, in a weak moment, fall into the role of Wandering Traveler, who runs for the sake of running, because he was Once Almost, and needs to find himself again?

I’ve learned this before – I’m right here. A passport stamp will not change this. New photo albums and facebook friends, plane tickets and full moleskine notebooks do not carry me away from the life I’ve created. If there’s anything I can teach, it is this.

My heart knows small things. Like that when a man like Ben Kaplan-Singer calls me to express that in lieu of his presence at my wedding, he offers lifelong friendship and accountability, my only option is to accept. He is one of those men whom, if I could have one person witness the ceremony of my life, I would choose without hesitation. My posture improves on the phone with him.

To my proximity to influential and desirable men I have succeeded in a short time looking. I am honored by that the above paragraph could apply to any of two handfuls of men whom I consider brothers, fathers, and revered elders. In another life, some even lovers.

This morning, Heather discovered my secret that ‘Home’ is an idea that changes within me all the time. In consideration of her biological processes that are now thinking that she has found a mate with whom to nest and procreate, I understand it may have been a difficult notion. And, the idea impacts the world to which I wish to contribute; for example, one of clarity.

One year, five months and eleven days ago, in my flyest outfit and charm, I walked out of my hostel in San José, Costa Rica, hyper-aware that my last night of seven months in Central America was nigh. At a Mexican restaurant where she made forty cents a day, I met a nica named Dayra, and waited outside until she finished her shift. In the moments before she got into the taxi (for which I paid), I wondered if I’d ever hated myself more, or if my actions would convince Heather to do the same.

In eight days I’m to marry the woman for whom, since returning the the States, I’ve learned to manage and focus my energy, even when we don’t seem to know how to communicate desire.

Readiness is not the question; I am more prepared than ever, more inside the knowledge that this will be exactly what we create, and nothing more or less. To this extent our sway has no boundary.

Eight days until we begin again. My confidence in our strength grows, even on days that seem more like apocalypse. I wonder, how common is this?

mission statement.

During yoga this morning, between warrior pose and a bout of dizziness (probably should have eaten breakfast), it occurred to me to write a feminist mission statement. Why, I do not know. Thoughts are just thoughts – especially during yoga, when the monkey mind will do anything to avoid the next stretch – but thoughts are also things: tangible, and subject to change.

I remembered that Heather, weeks ago, asked me to encourage her to exercise so that she might be more fit for the wedding. It is a request I have entirely failed to to respect. Why? I’m a sort of hermit, but somehow I got this body of a warrior, and it demands to be worked. I am at times defiant, but not lazy. Her request reached further into my heart than indolence. It spoke to an expectation and pressure that she should be other than what she was.

Okay, Sean, you don’t have to be so vigilant with your ideals – this is her wedding, she wants to look her best; so do most women for their big day. Some turn to yoga, some the gym. Others zigzag to an infantile and pretend anorexia which may or may not lead to other, and much bigger, problems.

Let’s step back for a moment from that story.

Once, in a grocery store, I watched a woman stare at tabloid magazines while unloading her cart. I saw her eyes scan the curveless bodies of bikini-clad celebrities whose thighs do not touch, and could hear from the back of the checkout line her breath fall from the crest she’d ascended that day when her son read aloud, without assistance, his first complete sentence.

Oh, my culture, let me count the self esteems you have destroyed; the minds, bodies and spirits of women you have driven to silicone prisons and disease. You stand outside the restroom demanding that they puke the food you sold them, and apply a good foundation before they walk outside.

You teach that I would not want them otherwise, that I would not be attracted by their light, even if it didn’t apply to their weight. That unless they met your ideal for beauty, they couldn’t possibly embody my utpoia for a lover, or my child’s mother.

In sooth, you’ve aimed for us both. I have not escaped your grasp, and will not apologize for broken fingers. The thing is, you’ve harmed the women whom I love. My request is that you acknowledge this. I’m capable of letting go, and forgiveness.

I hear silence from your invisible fist, so I’ll keep talking. Since childhood, my intention is respect. Not as a formality. Respect to me is that if I see the good in you, I’ll speak to it, in case you haven’t got a mirror handy. Sometimes I rely on the completed karma. My vision is better some days than others – when it’s not so good, I listen to what you say and ask you questions. I want you to understand your own potential. I may not know what it is, nor be the best partner for its cultivation, though often I’ve risked the interview process anyway, reckless and regardless, open to the possibility..  My heart as a result employs a plural state of peace.

I want you to know, my profligate culture, that I will take any risk to advance self-love and -acceptance. Even marriage to a divine creature who inspires me. Love is the least I can defy you.

The Story Portal

In the middle of the night, somewhere between the Gypsy Queen art car and the Fire Convergence Gathering, Heather told me about Andrew’s return home to Vashon Island.

I knew about the DUI in Alaska, how someone in the boatyard had called the Dillingham police because someone was doing donuts around container vans and fishing boats. The place was dangerous enough, but add a drunk Viking in a Nissan truck to the mix, and someone might get hurt. Battle axe, or something.

He got the ticket after I left town. Fishing finished early, and after three months on the sea, I wanted only to go home. When I said goodbye to him, I told him not to drive. We’d been drinking all morning and afternoon. He had showed me the copy of Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the original lithographs, foreboding images that reeked of the kind of seasickness that leads to insanity. It was beautiful. He intended to give it to his daughters when he got home to his yurt on Vashon.

Over bottles and bottles of wine, he made sure that I knew of my accomplishment. “You’ll never be fast enough for Robert,” he said. “That’s the point.”

Deckhanding a highliner tests the soul. Andrew did it for seven years – longer than anyone should. This year was my second, and I was thinking of retiring.

Andrew and I have things in common. An insatiable desire for risk and adventure; a somewhat unhealthy habit of pushing everything over the line; receipt of irritating amounts of attention for superficial traits; a deep and subtle preference to die young and glorified. We’re rock stars in our own ways. I don’t know if we share sordid histories with self-hatred, but I have a feeling that at times he’s had trouble looking in the mirror too.

So when Heather said that the DUI was nothing, that if he lost his entire crew share to paying it off it wouldn’t matter, I asked what else was up. I’d been angry about his getting caught. Andrew, I wanted to tell him, I told you not to drive.

“He got home to find out that his brother had killed himself,” Heather said. She said she wasn’t sure if it was the right time to tell me, what with Lucy there, and the chaos of blinking lights and fire, furry bicycles swerving this way and that, dissonant music thumping from a thousand origins surrounding.

I remember looking at her for a while, trying to comprehend what she said. I remember the searing orgasmic feeling run through my body as I stood there dumbfounded in my lights and gypsy garb. I envisioned a rainbow dagger slide into my belly button, and probing for my spine. A badly healed wound growled from between my heart’s dislocated ribs.

Nietzsche said “there is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.” In specific ways, the body remembers. We hold stress in our shoulders, anxiety in necks, heartbreak where it belongs. The distant memory of losing a brother to suicide bum-rushed me from every muscle and molecule in my body, where I’d stored it more than a decade before. It was the kind of pain that inspires art, and war. For years it had been my compass. It was the reason I started playing guitar, left Alaska at 16, went to audio engineering school. Years later, it was the reason I did not do the same myself. I remembered thinking that my death would have seemed unoriginal. And I wouldn’t have that.

“I’m so sorry, Sean,” said Heather. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, it’s perfect. Thank you. Can we go to the Story Portal?”

===

I spun the giant wheel. At each interval a prompt threatened to reveal something intimate about the spinner: High School Was…; Epic Fail; Gross!; What I Love Most About Myself, etc. I waited patiently for the wheel to stop. It didn’t matter which prompt I was given, I thought, standing there on stage. I would tell the story that I came to tell.

The steampunk clockwork on the wall behind me ticked away with anticipation. I had no nervousness; only anger and fear and sadness and doubt.  My prompt: “This One Time At The Burn…” I started immediately, “my fiancée told me that a brother of mine lost his to suicide. Now we have one more thing in common.”

I told the small audience about fishing in Alaska, about Andrew’s sky blue eyes and long blond locks, his ability to put away a case of beer in an afternoon, and how much I loved him. I monologued an obituary of winter 2001, and tried to describe how pain was so moist back then that picking at the scab didn’t seem to harm anything tangible. At 15, I didn’t yet understand how scars changed in shape and texture over time, how they shrunk or expanded depending on how one tends to them. I knew the importance of story, though, and how we all have a handful, and tell them over and over again in different words and context, hoping to heal and, secretly, to learn from them. For years I made a point of collecting stories so that this wasn’t the only one I had to tell. (And here I am, telling it, for the second time in a week).

With suicide it’s easy to search out blame. Reasons are simple explanations to people who have never experienced the biological battle of wanting to die. Reason changes nothing – it is neither a character, plot, nor action. Nothing that I had projected into the past had helped me feel better about losing my best friend, and I remember thinking, even as a rookie human, it doesn’t matter why – it just matters what I take from it, how I learn from it.

I remember my stage time being relatively emotionless. Not apathetic, but I was able to hold myself together to complete the story. I replaced in the mic, sat down on the pew in the back, and cried. The next two stories, a slow reentering into my body, were about a near death experience atop a mountain, and a man’s failure to keep his premature son alive. I was comforted by that mine was not the only death-ridden story on the playa, by that I was amongst kin and similar outcasts from the default world. I had found those who understood, and gave me space to be with myself.

After an hour of tears, I looked up and said aloud, without thinking, that I need to go to Vashon. I remembered wanting people around me who understood. So here we are, in a post-playa daze, putting away Burning Man stuff and preparing for a trip to the Island, and a facilitator from the Story Portal found me here. To my delight and honor. Her passion my outlet and opportunity to contribute to the world.

thank you.

six degrees of separation, post-collision.

While my co-worker Robbi spun tops in the toy store, I waited in the red brick park across the street and watched homeless kids try to kickflip off a two-stair. I rehearsed ways to tell my boss that I was done with the job after two weeks. Canvassing was not my thing. I had enough trouble accepting money after working for it, let alone trying to instill a warm fuzzy feeling in people on the street for contributing to an environmental cause I knew was funded mostly by oil companies. I didn’t believe in it, and only Jehovah Witnesses would listen to my rap and think that I was fo’ shizzle.

“I think need to focus my energy elsewhere,” I said to myself, in my most professional tone.

“Like where?” Robbi asked, sitting on the old brick memorial.

I had no idea, and changed the subject immediately. Neither of us wanted to go back to work, so we danced around topics to kill time. An actress, Robbi related her canvassing job to the thrill of the stage. When a whole audience rejects you, she told me, that hurts. When someone keeps walking on the street and doesn’t want to listen to my rap, whatever. Other people have money too.

Acting has always scared me. In classes, I learned techniques for stepping into character, how to make the script a three-dimensional, living breathing being, and how to represent something much larger than myself. A sort of sacrifice, where just before stepping from behind the curtain, I placed my ego on a chopping block, and walked out without it, giving the axe-wielding, masked executioner my blessing with pat on the back and a sparklewink.

Um, no. I retain full rights and responsibility for the death of my ego, thank you.

At one point, Robbi said something of Runa. Runa was a girl who lived as hard as she could in every direction, the conductor of her own great drama, and a great friend. You should meet her, Sean, you’d think she’s great.

I’d heard of someone named Runa once before. She was an idea, an internet friend you’ll never meet. I’d talked to her on the phone a few times. Seen her naked. An ex-girlfriend of mine, of my first real/crazy/awesome/scary long term relationship, was e-married to a Runa. They talked all the time. Sent each other thinspiration photos. Enabled each other to starve, or binge, or cut. My ex, then 17 or so, cried for days when Runa ended up in the hospital.  All, years ago.

Robbi – suddenly, innocently, unknowingly – started describing my memories back to me. Late-teen dramas of eating disorders, addiction, and suicidal tendencies. My eyes welled up with tears. I took my fedora off, ran my fingers through my hair, and pieced my history together. Runa was from the Netherlands, but lived in Portland. My ex always wanted to visit her, but never did. Not when we were together, anyway.

Robbi tripped out on our degrees of separation with big smiles and laughter. Had my memories been less malevolent, I might have matched her excitement. Ever a sucker for nostalgic moments, I indulged myself in my past, and told her some of what I remembered – not knowing if I should have felt jealousy or amusement that my girlfriend was e-married to someone whom she had never met, not knowing how to hold space for a woman who’d starved and beaten her survival instinct to a pulp every meal since childhood, thinking that if I just stayed there and kept loving, that everything would be okay.

Yes, and if Okay isn’t good enough?

As of the day I quit, Robbi and Runa, best friends, hadn’t talked for five months. That night, Runa replied to a text containing my name. Fascinating.

happy new everything

The bathroom door slammed hard. I didn’t mean to do it. It was just loud. I walked to the mirror. I saw the toilet, the bathtub, the lovely tile floor in perfect incandescent lighting, all in watery ripples. It took a moment to realize that I was there. That I was happy. I smiled at the me in the mirror, and thought of the dance floor at the Portland Art Museum. The stilt-walkers playing trumpets. The feather headdresses and sequin trench coats. Rubber bodies bending backwards in a break dance to the March Fourth Marching band. I remembered the line at the door of the secret library, where they brought you in, sat you in a chair, and played beautiful music and lights next to your face, Clockwork Orange-style. Until you got the way they wanted you.

I saw a man dancing in the bathroom through the glass. He looked happy. Maybe brainwashed. Then he walked out of the bathroom and back into his bliss.

onward and upward, always.

On the Gratitude Trip to California (a fantastic journey south for Thanksgiving), I danced my legs from under me, had nightly epiphanies on the state of my world (some contradictory to others), said more “until next times” than I care to count, and finished a novel. In some ways it was the end of an era – my first year in festival culture and introduction to soul family and tribe (whom I’ve been subconsciously looking for all my life), but I prefer to think of it as a crux: the universe presented me with all I’ve ever wanted, and stood back to see how I would handle it.

A few days ago, I watched my good friend and dance partner Sacha – standing thumbward on the side of the road in rural California bound for the Himalaya in four days – shrink in the rear view mirror. In the eight months before, I played my part in the evolution of a counterculture that operates on the sole principle of people Being at their best. And I know these goodbyes are just beginnings. A seasoned gypsy asked me at Burning Man how long I’d been on the road. I told him. “Oh, you’re just getting started. I see it in your eyes.”

It’s my time to step up, to redefine myself as a man.

I am part of an undivided world – one that will flourish from my – and your – contributions. We have a choice. I’ve been playing one side of it for twenty-six years, and become well-versed in the ordinary, in self-deprecation, in fear of my potential. It was all words. Declaration after declaration pronounced in luscious, poetic, passionate language – all meant to pretty up the stories I was raised on.

I’ve fallen in love so many times I’ve forgotten what all with. No one ever told me there was more than one love (there’s a lot no one told me). I was well-practiced in the physical form, but didn’t know what to do with it in my heart. I’ve caused confusion and suffering in myself and others. I’m not sure that I’ve broken the habit.

In return, I have received only forgiveness and love, even gratitude. Such kindness does not bode well for a heart that once wished to remain foreverfractured. That’s not what I want anymore. I’m tired of resisting change, and am only weaker for it.

So -in light of the winter solstice, the end of the world, the Mayan Calendar, 2012, and my first quarter century or so, this is my promise to myself: I’m taking Running Away off the table. I will no longer use fear to option out of life, love, or happiness. I will communicate with clarity, compassion, and truth. I will pursue what I love, and my highest potential, whether it be traveling, writing, climbing, music, dance, or things I haven’t yet discovered. I accept peace into my mind. If I falter in these, I will be gentle with myself and others.

This is not a new year’s resolution; this is a portal – one that allows abundance and grace augmented by unfiltered, unabashed creativity and lagniappe. I am lifting the asphalt of my path and straightening it to my will. If it is to the peril of others, my deepest apologies and love be with them. They have done their part in getting me here, a place of constant growth and learning. There’s nowhere I’d rather be within myself.

Thank you.

*bow*

like shoehorns for fingertips.

The blank screen scares me. I hope that I can show up for it, bearing gifts of truth and beauty.

Let’s get the big stuff out of the way:
This has been the most intense, wildest summer of my life. I have arrived to the world, finally, as the person I’ve always wanted to be – incomplete, questioning, rarely certain of myself, always in movement, and hyper-aware of the potential dripping out of my ears. I’ve said before that I’ve been in a rapid state of evolution – when that struck me, it seemed egotistical, arrogant, superior. More often than those things, it is uncomfortable and alienating. Where first came the choice to let go of nouns (people, places, concepts, attachments, associations, former truths, etc.) that do not serve me, now I arrive daily at decisions that, were I to want a ‘normal’, easy life, I would never want to make.

I chose this style of life, and feared that I would be found to be a fraud. I feel now that this life has chosen me, and I have the choice to be at my best, and be open to as many opportunities for growth as I can be. Anything less would do a disservice to everyone in my life. I have disserviced them enough.

An old adage about the Burn goes: everything that happens at Burning Man is exactly what is supposed to. Every step, every piece of art, every swallow, every dance. They Are, and they lead to the next step. I learned there what buttons I could push to provoke certain reactions from those I love. Opportunities appeared like shoehorns for fingertips – they facilitated the pushing of edges and concentrated the execution because they know there’s just so much more to learn.

This is what happens when you speak your deepest truth in its rawest form.

This is what happens when you take responsibility for consciously lying to get what you wanted.

This is what happens when you hold nothing back from your eye gazing.

This is what happens when you embark on a journey with an unmarked map.

This is what happens when your love is as boundless as mine.

It was practice for life, in the safest conditions of culture possible. On a blank canvas of desert where 50,000 people are not simply attendees or civilians, but participants and contributors, we paint life to its extremes, welcome it, and let it go – sometimes, all at once. The pretty lights and millions of hours of music, love, pain, and death are palpable still, in the regions of my heart that wish to be integrated out here, in the default world. I am no evangelist – I am a translator of senses, and I only hope to deliver these ideas to you gracefully.

The hardest thing about Burning Man is not the 70 mph wind that kick up white-out dust storms, it is not the loneliness felt by those who journey there solo, or the bad acid trips experienced in the periphery – it is taking those observations, struggles, and understandings, and applying them to Life Out Here, and knowing that we are welcome home in our hearts always, because that’s where the burn happens, sparking and arcing and flowing like magma.