in spite of all the dreaming

Anaphora

Each day with so much ceremony
begins, with birds, with bells,
with whistles from a factory;
such white-gold skies our eyes
first open on, such brilliant walls
that for a moment we wonder
"Where is the music coming from, the energy?
The day was meant for what ineffable creature
we must have missed?" Oh promptly he
appears and takes his earthly nature
instantly, instantly falls
victim of long intrigue,
assuming memory and mortal
mortal fatigue.

More slowly falling into sight
and showering into stippled faces,
darkening, condensing all his light;
in spite of all the dreaming
squandered upon him with that look,
suffers our uses and abuses,
sinks through the drift of bodies,
sinks through the drift of vlasses
to evening to the beggar in the park
who, weary, without lamp or book
prepares stupendous studies:
the fiery event
of every day in endless
endless assent.

Elizabeth Bishop

because i could not find sleep

because i could not find sleep
after talking to you, a glancing of
words that might be thought conversation

i rose to make tea eggs
in the silence
of the southern night

and it made me think of a hike we took
that summer day, the time we walked up
that mountain ridge,

warmed by the sun

my skin remembers how its surface
was cooled when we descended into
the path along the creek,

breathing in
the changed smell of the air
as we passed among redwoods that thrived

in that most unlikely place
we entered a valley of coolness
surrounded by golden,

baked hills strewn with oaks

we could not have known
then as we know now
that we had found

the nature of our path but as yet unaware

(2003)

strange nights

last night's dream was so strange.

it started in a room or place where i was manipulating a machine that looked like a asymmetrical monitor that had a lever on the right side. it looked like the style of design from the 50's and 60's, kind of retro.

i was looking at the screen as if i was driving some kind of vehicle remotely. then the dream changed and i was in the actual vehicle as if transported. i follow through this maze of corridors and tunnels and navigated through streets. one street name was larch. i don't remember the other streets now.

i woke up and went back the same dream a number of times. i was in a studio or apartment staying four young women. i didn't recognize any of them but it was odd because they were all asian. the apartment was elegant but did have any walls between personal areas. the separate rooms for individual closets and bathrooms. i had the sense we were all getting dressed and going out for the night. it seemed like it was supposed to be los angeles except it was too pretty. there was gorgeous architecture and there was too much neon and clean. perhaps tokyo? we were going out for sushi and the food was exquisite. tasty and beautiful.

because one of the women could not flag a cab, we had to take the same kind of tube but there were not cars. we just flew down the tubes at breakneck speed. i didn't know the way so i had to keep up with the women. i remember on the way back from the restaurant i took a different route slightly cause one of the women said it was other way and it was because we didn't have to navigate down a deep narrow chute.

i woke slightly and went back into the dream and returned to the apartment but once inside it had changed into a house on a river. there were some friends and family there. the house layout sort of reminded a house i lived in when i was 8-10 years old. i was in a back bedroom and there was a stray cat that came in the house. no pets are allowed so i chased the cat. when i picked it up it was an animate thing but made of burlap and as i gripped it little black things the size of watermelon seeds started to leak out everywhere over the carpet. i was in a panic because i put the cat out and it got back in again.

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)

It's the season of bowing our heads in the wind

The Atheist Christmas Carol

It's the season of grace coming out of the void
Where a man is saved by a voice in the distance
It's the season of possible miracle cures
Where hope is currency and death is not the last unknown
Where time begins to fade
And age is welcome home

It's the season of eyes meeting over the noise
And holding fast with sharp realization
It's the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention
You are safe here you know now

Don't forget
Don't forget I love
I love
I love you

It's the season of scars and of wounds in the heart
Of feeling the full weight of our burdens
It's the season of bowing our heads in the wind
And knowing we are not alone in fear
Not alone in the dark

– Vienna Teng

Christmas Day

Christmas day comes to me dressed in grey clouds and the scent of Oolong tea. Hardly a white Christmas but it is a peaceful one. I have the split urge to stay in all day dressed in pajamas and do nothing or to go out later to see friends. It has been so long since I've been in desired company and in laughter on Christmas that I feel like a bear who doesn't want to come out of hibernation...

Silly SantaSon

I rose with the sun this morning. Something was calling I think though I'm sure it was not a Christmas
ghost. They don't bother with me for the most part. I am either too silly or cynical about this particular holiday. I find it distasteful that western culture has embraced something solemn and turned it into a global economic venture. It is not Christmas spirit, it is shopping spirit. I'm sure many people think of this but most may not say it. Oh well...

In any case, at least for a short moment I decided to be at least goofy and humorous about it all. At least for the sake of the children who still believe in St Nicholas.

Merry Christmas blogland!

Winter Solstice

The shortest day of the year and the longest night of the year. It is my favorite day.

This morning greeted me with rain clouds and heaven's tears. The angels must be crying for those who are lonely and aren't loved. The cold and damp of grieving hearts seep through the air through the glass of my windows and into my muscle and bones like sharp shards of heaven cast from above. Faith is something one believes in without proof. Being human is the conditioning of familiarity to all things even if they make one suffer. Do I want to be a person of faith or a human being? This is the question.

This season of holidays and such seem redolent of bringing these types of thoughts out of me. Each year the period between Thanksgiving through Christmas seems to me more of a journey of walking barefeet on fallen cactus or beds of hell's coals. Some say that happiness is a choice, I did choose to be happy today. However, often I find that being happy and being sad are not mutually exclusive. It doesn't sound nice but in my experience it is the truth as I have experienced it.

So I am left to try to find the beauty in the sadness, all things that are beautiful are not pretty. This is today's measure of surity...

Those who (have) transformed

It's grandpa's beanie. I put it on this morning because it was cold. And then I thought of him...

Years ago when I was about 14 years old, I was preparing to take a trip with my uncle and cousins to the Grand Canyon. He told me it would be a wonderful trip and that I should write down my memories, my experiences. He gave me a note book. I had never kept a journal before. I took the book but really didn't put much down in it. I didn't know how to translate my experiences and thoughts into language that another could read and understand.

At the end of the trip there were some notes in there, dates, places and most likely some doodles. I always doodled then as I do to this day. I didn't realize until much later that in each of my doodles were encapsulated the experience I was living through in that moment. I can look at a doodle or sketch and recall entire volumes of what was going on in that moment, people, faces, images, words, pages of books, conversations, feelings, etc. Some people use mnemonic devices, I used drawings; my own language of hieroglyphs.

Some time after that trip, I started to try and keep a journal. It was strange and difficult at first – this thing with language. Being a perfectionist, it was hard at first to write down the perfect thought because I viewed the journal as something special, almost sacred so each sentence had to be perfect, as if what if someone read it one day? I got over that eventually.

26 years later, I still keep journals and try to record things. Well not so much things or events, there are better ways of recording those. I try to record the events and emotions that go on inside my mind, my heart. The funny moments, the happy moments, the anger, frustration, disappointment and so often, the heartbreaks.

This journey, process, commitment has led me to places in the world and in the cities of my interior that I could not have imagined. Uncertainty has been the only constant, I have learned that surprise is independent of good or evil, happiness or sadness. Uncertainty has become my friend because no matter how sure something is, our surity in the very thing we have faith in that it won't change is very likely to be the thing that unravels us like a hemp cord overburdened in an artic storm.

Every moment in my life I am reminded of these simple lessons.

It is heartening, poignant, sweet and sometimes bitter that the gentle words of an old man who has now left this physical world still vibrates in me like the hum of my arteries pumping blood through my tissues. I am reminded that life is not made up of grandeur but of meekness and little details that often reside in corners out of our line of sight or in partial shadow. I am reminded that this universe we live in is made up of astronomically tiny pieces of sometimes matter that change in the very event of us trying to observe them.

I think grandpa too has transformed into those little Quantum packets and he is out there in the universe exploring the stars. No doubt he is mapping everything, but that is another story...

Bodies of water and strange faces

Last night I had another dream with a large body of water, I think it was a sea or ocean. I know it ran North-South and the water was to the West. Don't ask, I just know. I am always oriented in my dreams. I always know which ways the cardinal directions are. Maybe I was a navigator in a past life and I did something horrid and was cursed to keep certain aspects of that life: constant wandering and never being able to be lost into something I love. Anyway, the place was coastal. There was a very large, modern house in the dream. I was staying there but it was not my home. Again, I was a chaperone or escort or bodyguard or some sort. Me, a mercenary; funny as hell. But this time it was a little different, I was in charge of two young women in this dream. They were sisters and one of them, the older one was some kind of performer. We kept going back and forth to a huge old theatre of some kind. It was beautiful. I didn't understand why their parents were not around as they were not adults yet. At the end of the dream, we were preparing for a long journey to somewhere. I didn't know where, that was the end of the dream.

In writing this entry, it struck me that what if I was not a hired hand and this was in the future and the girls were my children? Yikes! I have had many prescient dreams before but at the time I didn't know it. They sometimes come true in days, weeks or in most cases, years after the dreams. Hmm, something to ponder...

Slipping through water

Had a dream last night that I was somewhere with mom and Khoi near a large body of water. I was canoeing. I remember my thighs being sore from kneeling. I talked to mom, didn't talk to Khoi.

Later in another dream, the body of water was larger. I was in a house on an island in a sound or something like that. Bernie and some others were there, he got his hands on a canoe that didn't seem all that worthy but he wanted to go out. I looked at the water and the sky and saw that there was a lot of wind and cautioned him against it but he went anyway.

You can throw someone a flotation ring but you can't make them hang on to it.

Condensation on glass

When I opened the blinds this morning, there was condensation on the glass. It is the first time of the season. It is a little strange how I've paid attention to the first's of the season this autumn. Not that I'm ever inattentive or ignorant of little things but it feels that I'm paying a different kind of eye to them now. Something inside has changed in the last months, even in the last days, I have perhaps crossed some kind of threshold. Perhaps life is coming back to me or I have wandered back into its domain.

I had dreams of doing something that required the taking of blood from patients in a hospital or clinic. That in itself is not odd though what was odd was that I was queasy about it. I am in real life never queasy about blood nor needles. The entire
dream had a feeling of discomfort. Odd really.

But the best thing that happened last night was right before I went to sleep I got a message from me dear friend Hilary that I had lost contact with for a long time. I was too tired to reply in full but sent a message to say hi and say I would write more today. I had the biggest smile on my face in a long time falling asleep...

In a raging river

I come into Friday morning with Oolong tea and the scent of Meyer lemons. It is not such a bad start. Outside it is grey with hints of cyan, the blue sky trying in earnest to break through but in honesty I don't mind a bit of gloom.

The last dream I recall clearly was endowed with water, no surprise. But there was a lot of water, a deluge. I was at some sort of research facility. It looked like an old NASA lab. Everything was old, nine inch monitors, old analog phones, men in white short sleeve button shirts and thick black framed plastic glasses. I was there to find a message, do a pick up. I am not sure if I found the message or not. It turned out the entire facility sat on pilings in the middle of a huge river like the Mekong or the Amazon. And for whatever reason, it was cresting and tearing everything apart. Tsunami? Perhaps. The building we were in was coming lose from its pilings and we were trying to evacuate. Debris, huge debris were flowing upriver, the current reversed violently. Trees, man made detritus flowed and tumbled all around us. I don't know if we made it out...

Certainty and Uncertainty

Wednesday has passed like a cloud moving over cold water.

Time spent sometimes feels like it is not spent well in the moment until one has had a moment to ponder what was just experienced. Then, then everything seems to have a purpose whereas hours or minutes before seemed pointless. Is all understanding only in hindsight?

I like to think not but certainty is a strange companion. She is steadfast only in her uncertainty. She always keeps one on their toes. Perhaps this is why she is so enchanting, we like to think that we like knowns but deep within the universe of our hearts we harbor an affection for what we aren't sure of, what we don't know.

It is like the temptation of opening Pandora's box.

Why do I personify certainty as a woman? Perhaps it is a woman that I think of as certainty/uncertainty...

Rainy Tuesday Morning

Sleep did not last as long as I would liked last night but I don't feel too fatigued. I woke up in the middle of the night to the "tid, tip, tup" of rain drops on the roof. The rain has been steady since sometimes after midnight. I tend to sleep better with the rain but last night wasn't so. Nevertheless I did go into REM sleep. The dream I recall was odd. Well, all my dreams are odd.

I was on some sort of school campus with a number of people with 4x4 vehicles. It was some sort of camp out. We were to spend the night spread out across the grounds of this place. There was a grass quad, tables, benches and chairs. I remember staking out a spot for my tent after a conversation with some people. I put a green folding plastic and metal chair to hold my spot. I then left to go back to my old apartment. I rang the bell. A young woman came to the door. I apologized that I had not come back to fetch all my things and asked if it was okay that I did it now? She let me in and we walked upstairs into the flat. It was much as I left it. As I entered the living room, my old cat Stoopid who I thought was lost came up to me. His fur was beautiful, soft and blue grey as I remembered him. He snuggled up to me affectionately. The young woman said he'd been waiting for me. I picked him up, held him close and smelled him. He was the same as I had remembered. That was the end of the dream.

Alas, when I woke Stoopid was still lost to me. I am sure he has either died or living happily with newly adopted parents. I had left him with a cousin during a period when I was moving around a lot. My cousin went to Burning Man and left the care of his animals to a friend. The witless friend accidentally let the cat out onto the street and he was never seen again. I was very angry and sad. Stoopid had been through so much with me over the years and to lose him like that... I never wanted to know who my cousin's friend was because I would have hurt him. And ever since, I've had a hatred towards Burning Man.

The presence of those you love through loss is something you never shake...

Rainy Monday

Monday's morning came softly like random half droplets of moisture shed by heaven. The light filtered by grey clouds remained soft and encouraged me to stay in bed longer than I might have. I was coming out of a series of dreams.

Again there were people I didn't recognize, I'm sure I would meet one day. It always happens like that. The recall of the dreams were not particularly clear this morning. The only one that is clear in my memory is that of me being in a desert town and riding a Harley Davidson motorcycle. That was a laugh! But it was like the Harleys of today, it was futuristic and more advanced. The bike was not painted at all. The entire finish was bare metal or polished metal. It was surprisingly light looking for a Harley. The people traveling with me were in cars or SUV's. I was the only one with two wheels. I remember a red lighted intersection where the signals were hung from cables across the intersection, like in the desert in Southern California. That is all I remember...

Mint

There is chalky dust on the windowsill;
traces of glory of a story that has ended.
Though it leaves its pigment behind, faded.
What was once emerald is now faded mint,
the hue reminds my eyes of faded photos
like the ones sitting in the shoe box in the closet.
I keep those hidden away, in the dark;
I say it is to keep them from dust, from light
to prevent the fading of memories; visions,
but it is really to protect myself from nostalgia.
To protect myself from living ghosts now gone
like a pagan's exorcism of the fire that lives within.

(December 2006)

She Brought Me

I sat at my desk, dippling paper with a pigment laden brush
wondering what this new day might bring,
having crossed a threshold in my mind and heart
then I heard shuffling of gentle footsteps behind me,
a familiar swooshing and tap, tap-tap; I turned,
it was grandma standing there, all dressed and ready.
She brought me bread and pepper roasted chicken for brunch,
said she'd be back in the afternoon to fetch me for our outing;
later we strolled in a place that brought back memories
like the plenitude of petals and vibrancy of Spring colors.

(October 2006)