Thresholds

Clean, 1.1.07

New Year's day. Blue sky morning, it seems like any other cold January day really if you look outside the window. Its threshold into another calendar year is invisible. It is most real inside our minds. I was browsing through cirkusprinsesse's blog and saw her recap of 2006 and it made me start thinking about similar things. It was a mixed bag of surprises, fleeting moments of joy, dark abysses of despair along with an ever present sense of humor that twists itself into many different shapes in order to accommodate laughter into each and every situation so that I could go to pieces but not fall completely apart.

So what happened:

- I found myself alive and still living
- I reconnected with some family and severed connections with others that are family
- I learned that contentment and sadness aren't mutually exclusive and can exist in the same time and space together
- I reconnected with some long lost friends who are dear to my heart and found purpose in the friendships
- I accepted that I am in fact an artist to the very core of my being and to be otherwise is to destroy my integrity
- I learned that I can be extremely self destructive in order to preserve my integrity and that it can be preserved in healthier ways
- I realized that I am here mostly for others and not always myself
- I realized that some of the people I cherish the most are the farthest away from me geographically
- I realized that human connections are impervious to the vagaries of time and space
- I learned you can be very close with someone and learn to love them even when they are thousands of miles away and you may have never or ever meet them in person
- I learned that sometimes people you barely know can give you more comfort than your own flesh and blood. It is bittersweet
- I rediscovered that I can indeed paint though I am not sure where some of the ability comes from
- I discovered that some things I want to convey have to be done with words, images and silence in mixed combinations
- I found that I can live with very little
- I am finally officially divorced after five years of legal limbo
- I am a proud new uncle (again) to a beautiful little niece named Kim-Anh (she is in Paris, can't wait to meet her)
- One of my poems got published
- I found that in the blackest of depression one can find beauty and perhaps that itself is reason enough to persevere and continue
- I learned a lot about the inner turmoils of depression from a dead poet (Sylvia Plath) and found that she helps me cope from another place
- I accepted and learned to be more comfortable accusations of treason in order to be faithful to myself
- I embraced the idea that the only certainty in life is that uncertainty exists so I try to live with that in each and every moment of consciousness

I am sure this list could go on forever but I think this is the gist...

Happy Birthday Papa

Happy Birthday Papa

New Year's day is 13 hours away.
I think of all those who have birthdays on that day
though you neither saw 1967 nor the age of 21.

I wondered often what the sky was like on the day;
on the evening you complained of the headache.
I imagine an indigo tinted grey sky ceiling
covering the streets littered with ochre leaves.

New Year's day is 12 hours and 45 minutes away.
I think of the January 1st that you missed;
I always imagined that it snowed on that cold day.

Three continents and 40 years later close to New Year's day,
my mind and memory still goes back to the once gone date
and the shape of my heart still carries the form
of a flame that must have been the furnace of your soul.

– Son Dao
(December 31, 2006)

My father would have turned 60 on January 1st 2007

Crossings

For Zsuzsanna

Crossings

He stares at the reflection in the still water
and understands why the trapped fox chewed off its paw.
The sun lies low in the western sky bathed in vermillion.

She sits alone in a crowded café like a pillar of salt
and understands why the caged bird plucks its feathers bare.
The background music plays out the soundtrack of her life.

Vast geography and time between faces that have never met
sometimes cross hues and vibrate identical frequencies,
connected by either an old sage's strings and red silk ribbons;
or the light, wave and particles of a quantum universe.

(December 31, 2006)