Musings of Mine

I need to get the hell out of Santa Barbara

2012-02-06T01:53:00.000-08:00

This night will stay
Clothed in your miasma

I'll go down deep
In dim red lights,
Finger the edges
Of a ticking time-bomb,
And carry my lust
In fistfuls of air.

What would I know
Of love? Of loss?

I only wanted your orange in azure,
Above a swelling tide.
The sand instead waits
Yearning, dry.

An honest disaster,
I'll collect my frayed edges,
As water, spilled.
I'll apologize, disappear.

--Alicia (2012)

What makes a life?

2012-01-14T14:05:00.000-08:00

This stunning poem, about the mystery of life and spontaneous generation, was written by the Irish poet Sinead Morrissey when she was pregnant with her first child. We were lucky enough to hear a private poetry reading by her in Belfast on England Semester last year, and I was struck by her humility and genuine sense of wonder. How can I possibly write anything worth reading when I've just re-visited one of the most awe-inspiring pieces of literature that I know of? Instead, I chose to copy the poem out of my copy of her book. Enjoy.

Matter

from Through the Square Window by Sinead Morrissey

Aristotle observed and recorded it all-

that out of rainwater, the marrow

of the human spine, foam from the sea,

or the putrefying carcasses of bulls and horses

spring living beings: frogs, serpents, anchovies,

bees and scarabs, locusts, weevils, maggots.

St Augustine agreed: what matter that the smallest

(and most meddlesome) of God’s creatures

find no mention in the chronicle of the Ark?

So long as alluvial mud remained, or rotted

wood, of rinsed white bones of crocodiles

after the wash abated and the salvaged couple

and their braying entourage were pitched

on top of Ararat, wasps and gnats and fleas

would manifest once more in clouds and colonies

without a union of the sexes (like Mary)

and the earth would effortlessly teem.

Recipes for rats and ‘small white puppies

a child might play with’ followed

during the Middle Ages, which typically included

hay, excrement, dirty shirts, wool

simmered for an hour then hung to dry

in an outhouse or chicken coop

(the air of such places being itself

so mutable and laden with infusoria,

it acts as a bridge to live). Golems

moulded from clay still needed a spell

to keep them animated, as though by

growing bigger and more complicated,

the offspring of the elements

were in danger of winding down,

yet Paracelsus, arch-advocate of decay,

saw no reason not to apply

the laws of spontaneous generation

to ourselves: let the semen of a man

putrefy itself for forty days in a sealed

cucurbite, it shall begin, at last, to live.

Fed on an arcanum of human blood

and kept in darkness, his fleet homunculus

had all the features of a human child.

Leeuwenhoek bore this experiment in mind

when, decades later, using his own microscope,

he scrutinized his sperm, magnified

as much as three hundred times and fashioned

like a bell, with the wrought perfection

of a tiny man curled inside each globule.

Ovists may have envisaged instead

a sacred cabinet of children, encased

inside each egg, opening in time

both backwards and forwards

to the breaking of Eve and the End

of the World, the likelihood remained:

whether one believed in this, or the evidence

of a light-blanched workshop and a knack

for polished glass, or whether one went back

to what the Greeks expressed

as the facts of reproduction,

a woman’s quest for contraception,

stacked against the odds of dogged visitors

finding lodging in the womb

at any beckoning, was hopeless.

No wonder Soranus suggested water from blacksmiths’.

No wonder olive oil, the pulp of a pomegranate,

honey, pine resin, mercury, beeswax,

pennyroyal, tobacco juice, arrowroot, tansy

were burnt, brewed, inhaled, ingested,

inserted into the cervix, or buried in fields left fallow

if the coppery stain of menstruation

persisted into the seventh day.

No wonder witches consulted the sky.

And though I know, thanks in part to Pasteur–

to his gauze impediments and penchant

for boiling–how your came to enter,

how you came to roll and hiccup and kick

against the windowless dark, feet to my heart

and skull to the pelvic cradle, I still think

of our lovemaking as a kind of door

to wherever you were, waiting in matter,

spooled into a form I have not yet been shown

by the umprompted action of nature,

by something corrupting in an earthenware pot

in Corinth, say, or Kingstown.

Stay the wind on a river eight weeks after equinox–

witness blue-green mayflies lift off

like a shaken blanket; add algae

and alchemical stones to the lake floor

in the strengthening teeth of winter, what swans.

--
Happy Saturday. :]

Independence

2011-12-25T23:22:00.000-08:00

Tonight my Dad told me that he's proud of me.

He has told me that he's proud of me before, but this time it meant something more to me. I have a degree, a stable job with health benefits and I'm self-sufficient. It's liberating to know that I can do it. And it's nice that my parents recognize that, and that they embrace the person I'm becoming. I have a lot to be grateful for.

Merry Christmas.

I can't be the only one who feels this way.

2011-12-20T21:40:00.000-08:00

[I want to sing like this poem. Listen to this as you read it.]

Barcarole

If only you would touch my heart,
if only you would put your mouth on my heart,
your delicate mouth, your teeth,
if you would put your tongue like a red arrow
there where my dusty heart beats,
if you would blow on my heart, near the sea, weeping,
it would sound with a dark noise, with the sound
of sleepy train wheels,
like wavering waters,
like a leafy autumn,
like blood,
with a noise of moist flames burning the sky,
sounding like dreams or branches or rains,
or foghorns in a dreary port,
if you would blow on my heart, near the sea,
like a white ghost,
at the edge of the foam,
in the midst of the wind,
like an unchained ghost, at the edge of the sea, weeping.

Like an extended absence, like a sudden bell,
the sea spreads the sound of the heart,
raining, at nightfall, on a lonely coast:
night doubtless falls,
and its mournful shipwrecked-banner blue
peoples itself with planets of hoarse silver.

And the heart sounds like a sour snail,
call, oh sea, oh lament, oh melted fright
scattered in misfortunes and rickety waves:
from resonance the sea reveals
its recumbent shadows, its green poppies.

If you suddenly existed, on a gloomy coast,
surrounded by the dead day,
facing a new night,
filled with waves,
and if you blew on my heart cold with fear,
if you blew on the lonely blood of my heart,
if you blew on its flaming dove movement,
its black bloody syllables would sound,
its incessant red waters would swell,
and it would sound, sound of shadows,
sound like death,
it would call like a tube filled with wind or weeping,
or a bottle squirting fright in spurts.

So it is, and the lightning would cover your tresses
and the rain would enter through your open eyes
to prepare the weeping that you silently enclose,
and the black wings of the sea would wheel around
you, with great claws, and croakings, and flights.

Do you want to be the solitary ghost that near the sea
plays upon its sad and sterile instrument?
If only you would call,
its prolonged sound, its malevolent whistle,
its arrangement of wounded waves,
someone would perhaps come,
someone would come,
from the peaks of the islands, from the red depths of the sea,
someone would come, someone would come.

Somebody would come; play furiously,
let it sound like the siren of a broken boat,
like a lament,
like a whinny in the midst of the foam and the blood,
like a ferocious water gnashing and echoing.

In the sea season
it snail of shadow circles like a shout,
the sea birds belittle it and fly away,
its roll call of sounds, its mournful crosspieces,
rise on the shore of the solitary sea.

--Pablo Neruda (translated by Donald D. Walsh)

Frustration is...

2011-12-10T17:33:00.000-08:00

...sitting at a table next to three Freshman girls from Westmont at Coffee Bean in Montecito while they study for their Christian Doctrine final.

All three of them have new Macbook Pros, covered in Toms, I <3 Oregon, and LOVE WINS stickers. They come complete with Nalgene bottles and nose piercings. They're talking enthusiastically about Christian Louboutin shoes until one of them finally interrupts:

"Ohmygosh, you guys. This final is gonna be SO hard. I don't know how she, like, expects us to know all of this. ...Okay, what is a primary source again?"

I am completely shocked and horrified that I could have possibly been a part of this. Ever.

Then I think back to a recent conversation that I had with a close friend of mine about embracing every part of one's self, past and present. [Read his beautifully articulated blog post on the subject.]

And I realize that I will never be free until I can love even the parts of myself of which I am most ashamed. I will never know peace until I can sit next to these girls and embrace them, along with all of the pain, confusion, and frustration at a flawed institution that they represent. I must reconcile the person I once was with my current self. Only then will I be able to move forward in confidence to the next chapter of my life.

A waltz:

2011-12-04T22:55:00.000-08:00

Good morning, lovely.
I see you're assumed a new
Hostility,

Clenched
Your fists against the bent world
And thrust yourself
From the depths of dark,
Bearing florescent beams
And bleached white,

All the more prolific.

Your silence speaks volumes.
I find myself leaning
On styrofoam waves.
The wires all crossed,
Scapegoats named,
And we remain

Estranged.

Your smile
Flattened
To a tense line.

Straight edge.
Straight mind.
I wind.

--Alicia (2011)

Tense, past

2011-12-03T02:05:00.000-08:00

You taper the edges
Of your honest words
As I
Stare at the blank wall behind.

But there was something
In the syntax there:
"I was. I thought."

--Alicia (2011)

An entropic state of affairs

2011-11-29T22:48:00.000-08:00

I feel like lately, I'm just waiting for anything and everything to unravel. It seems inevitable.

Life is very long.

And yet in the midst of a difficult week, I experienced a small moment of relent, almost like grace. The chamber group that I sing with had a dress rehearsal for our Christmas concert at the Mission tonight. I found comfort in adobe walls and the resonance of other voices. I felt completely mortal and completely vulnerable. And for a moment I didn't feel so alone.

Tea Fire Anniversary

2011-11-13T22:38:00.001-08:00

Three years ago today...

...was the beginning of the breakdown.

There are some nights when I can't sleep until I write out a "to-do" list.

2011-11-12T01:24:00.000-08:00

Is that weird?

These days, I feel less like a singer and more like a poet.

2011-11-08T23:35:00.001-08:00

Gathering Sea Glass

When I was seven and spent afternoons
At the Olson's house,
I always admired the giant vase
That sat on their living room table,
Filled with tiny spindled seashells.

I marveled at the thousands
Of pearl and bronze fronds,
Each of them wrapped
As miniscule and stretched chambered nautili,
Which seemed to infinitely spin.

It must have taken a lifetime
To collect so many.

One day, I finally asked
Where they all came from.

They're my mom's.
She found them on the beach herself
When she was twenty-four,
Before she met my dad.

I found it hard to imagine her
Pacing the shore,
Sagacious in her search
For each delicate spiral,

Her patience, holding them up for inspection,
Tossing the chipped ones aside
In a time before children,
Covenantal vows, companionship.

I found it hard to imagine her alone.

Now, at two years and twenty, I understand.
I pace daily,
Sand-powdered shores,
Gathering sea glass
For my own solitary collection.

I note their arrayed hues,
Their crystal, azure, bronze, and jade.
I hold them up to the light
And look through them.
I toss the imperfect ones aside.

I store the pieces in a large jar,
Their shattered green and white mosaic
Seems almost like me:
Many fragments of something
Not yet complete.

Something indefinite,
And all the more beautiful for it.

--Alicia (2011)

Hope

2011-11-06T16:50:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to believe that literature is the only hope we have for truly understanding each other.

And this kind of hope is something worth chasing after.

Where the hell did October go?

2011-10-23T22:49:00.001-07:00

That's all.

"No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good." -Plato

2011-10-18T22:31:00.001-07:00

Sit with it for a while.

First day at the Symphony tomorrow!

2011-10-02T20:21:00.001-07:00

I feel very lucky these days. Everything seems to be changing for the better.

You are so young; you stand before beginnings.

2011-09-24T17:56:00.000-07:00

"You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. Perhaps you are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it, and do not hate anything. [. . .] Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters."

--Letters To A Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke)

...Best advice I've heard in a long time...

2011-09-11T21:51:00.000-07:00

We are unutterably alone, essentially,
especially in the things most intimate
and most important to us.

--Rainer Maria Rilke [Letters To A Young Poet]

Great book, by the way...

Probably more than you wanted to know.

2011-09-04T16:38:00.000-07:00

I've felt inexplicably crappy all day. I think it's because I feel trapped...

in my job,

in certain life situations,

in existence.

Perhaps it has something to do with the woman I met the other day. I was singing in the new practice rooms at Westmont (because I might as well take advantage of the nice rooms that we didn't have while I was there) and this random lady knocked on my door. She asked me if I'd be interested in singing a few pieces at a music service at her church, which was cool. But then when I mentioned that I had double majored in English and Music, her response was "that sounds like a degree in unemployment to me." Yeah thanks, lady. I have a job, even if I hate it.

Why do people think it's ok to say things like that? It happens much too often.

Anyway, the thought of going to church today seemed daunting. I've had enough emotional exhaustion as of late. I took a walk on the beach instead, but that didn't really help. So I went to a coffee shop and read some poetry:

The Clock Fallen Into The Sea

There is so much dark light in space
and so many dimensions suddenly yellow
because the wind does not fall
and the leaves do not breathe.

It is a Sunday day arrested in the sea,
a day like a submerged ship,
a drop of time assaulted by scales
that are fiercely dressed in transparent dampness.

There are months seriously accumulated in a vestment
that we wish to smell weeping with closed eyes,
and there are years in a single blind sign of water
deposited and green,
there is the age that neither fingers nor light captured,
much more praiseworthy than a broken fan,
much more silent than a disinterred foot,
there is the nuptial age of the days dissolved
in a sad tomb traversed by fish.

The petals of time fall immensely
like vague umbrellas looking like sky,
growing around, it is scarcely
a bell never seen,
a flooded rose, a jellyfish, a long
shattered throbbing:
but it's not that, it's something that scarcely touches and spends,
a confused trace without sound or birds,
a dissipation of perfumes and races.

The clock that in the field stretched out upon the moss
and struck a hip with its electric form
runs rickety and wounded beneath the fearful water
that ripples palpitating with central currents.

--Pablo Neruda (translated by Donald S. Walsh)

Painfully beautiful and pertinent. But it only made me more depressed.

I went home and talked to my dad for a while. He's the greatest. Then I listened to this song. That helped a little.

Things always get better, somehow.

God, could this be any more beautiful?

2011-08-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

Always before your voice my soul
half-beautiful and wholly droll
is as some smooth and awkward foal,
whereof young moons begin
the newness of his skin,

so of my stupid sincere youth
the exquisite failure uncouth
discovers a trembling and smooth
Unstrength, against the strong
silences of your song;

or as a single lamb whose sheen
of full unsheared fleece is mean
beside its lovelier friends, between
your thoughts more white than wool
My thought is sorrowful:

but my heart smote in trembling thirds
of anguish quivers to your words,
As to a flight of thirty birds
shakes with a thickening fright
the sudden fooled light.

it is the autumn of a year:
When through the thin air stooped with dear,
across the harvest whitely peer
empty of surprise
death's fautless eyes

(whose hand my folded soul shall know
while on faint hills do frailly go
The peaceful terrors of the snow,
and before your dead face
which sleeps, a dream shall pass)

and these my days their sounds and flowers
Fall in a pride of petaled hours,
like flowers at the feet of mowers
whose bodies strong with love
through meadows hugely move.

yet what am i that such and such
mysteries very simply touch
me, whose heart-wholeness overmuch
Expects of your hair pale,
a terror musical?

while in an eatrhless hour my fond
soul seriously yearns beyond
this fern of sunset frond on frond
opening in a rare
Slowness of gloried air...

The flute of morning stilled in noon-
noon the implacable bassoon-
now Twilight seeks the thrill of moon,
washed with a wild and thin
despair of violin

--e.e. cummings (Tulips and Chimneys, Songs, III)

I'm frustrated with language.

2011-08-23T22:52:00.000-07:00

That's all that I have to say.

Freedom

2011-08-20T22:23:00.000-07:00

I'm alone.

But I'm not lonely.
I'm not desperate.
I don't need another person to make me whole.
And I don't need your approval.
I'm done punishing myself.

I'm going to pursue my dreams now.

.

2011-08-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

True that.

Nobody ever tells you how hard this time of life is going to be.

It's my sister's birthday and I miss her!

2011-08-08T22:09:00.001-07:00

The Art of the Song Recital

2011-08-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

The Art of the Song Recital

It's dying, you say.
Endangered as a rare bird,
Her song, a velvet ribbon
Wound, weeping to its end.

I sit and listen, silent.
Who I am. Who am I?

In truth, you can't handle me,
Delicate, strange.

I am dusk
Mixed with morning air
And ash, rising
From rooftops in rain.

My star risen half way
And dropped this far.
I free-fall in crimson,
Burn out white.

I am buried deep.

Lost music, I drift at ocean floor,
Songstress, streaming red melody
Into rippled chambers
Of undulating light.

Speak to me softly,
Whisper as rain in a wood.
Touch me as snow
Blankets its pearlescent new
Over dull ground.

Tell no one.
I will listen only,
Sing nothing.

--Alicia (2011)

Ohkay.

2011-08-06T17:59:00.000-07:00

I'm going to marry this guy.

HAPPY...New Month?

2011-08-01T16:07:00.000-07:00

I'm celebrating the beginning of August like the beginning of a new year.

I want more free space in my mind. I want everything to be different.

Now if people would just stop getting married, I'd be fine.

I could laundry list the reasons why I'm never good enough these days. Or I could write a poem.

2011-07-26T20:46:00.000-07:00

Dahlias always sounded exotic
But magnolias were strong.

Sweet morning flower unfurled
Its shapely white to kiss sky's blue.

Crisp, the contrast, singing bright,
Unapologetic at the sun.

Here I am, estranged dreamer
Woken to find

Each bleeding day is no blossomed tree,
That my monochrome is not poetry. And now

How the sky changes from orange to crimson,
Gray, the haze over this dimming

Blue, soon to black. Sun sinks low
Like honey sap.

I feel far away.

--Alicia (2011)

You have no idea.

2011-07-24T17:35:00.000-07:00

The guy that bagged my groceries at Vons today told me that I looked tired. He seemed genuinely concerned, but that's possibly one of the worst things you can say to someone.

Thanks for noticing, anyway.

Sometimes I surprise myself.

2011-07-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

Today I was thinking about auditions and planning repertoire. I realized that I'm only good at singing songs about unrequited love. Figures.

While driving home (during my hour and 10 minute long commute, thanks to an accident on the 101), I had a lot of time to think about things. I was slightly comforted by this poem:

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."

--Mary Oliver

Memorizing poems is a good thing. :]

Lately

2011-07-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

I feel like the world's punching bag.

And no matter how many times I try to tell myself that I'm strong, I'm really not.

Direction: found.

2011-07-09T15:58:00.000-07:00

I'm going to get my voice back in shape. I'm going to pass my piano proficiency test. I'm going to audition of the SB Opera Chorus. I'm going to audition of a spot in a private vocal ensemble. I'm going to apply for a job at the Symphony. And I'm going to do the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in the fall.

I'm done messing around.

...

2011-07-08T21:14:00.001-07:00

I need something to change. Soon.

Santa Barbara, here I come.

2011-07-05T13:22:00.001-07:00

There's nothing like a long drive to clear your mind. And a change of scenery to make you appreciate what you have.

Also...another poem:

Last Wednesday

I almost believed in God
The way the sun bloomed
Over the sea's cerulean.

Waves white-capped,
A thousand miles beyond my visage,
Pure.

Amazing Grace echoed in my ears
And my eyes
Lit with the sun.

How sweet the sound.

T'was grace that taught my heart to fear
And grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear

The hour I almost believed.

--Alicia (2011)

I could love you as dry roots love rain.

2011-07-03T13:08:00.000-07:00

Let your heart look
On white sea spray
And be lonely.

Love is a fool star.

--Sandburg

..

Missy Higgins knows what's up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WzwcveXULQ

..

My parents are secretly hpstr.

2011-07-03T00:05:00.000-07:00

So the upside of all of my computer drama as of late:

While I was backing up my iphoto library, I found this old picture of my parents.

Lace

2011-06-28T23:19:00.000-07:00

Lace, black on white,
My delicate opaque
Made of a million woven
Facets and wiles.

Today you unravel me.

Soon you'll find
The measures of my
Vast patience
Are not boundless.

Palms outstretched, I hang on thin.

--Alicia (2011)

Something like optimism

2011-06-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

..

Poppies in October

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly-

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers!

--Sylvia Plath

..

I love this poem.

On aging

2011-06-18T18:56:00.000-07:00

I think about aging and death a lot these days. I blame graduation, and my job.

The majority of the patients we see at the ophthalmologist's office are around 70 years old. Dr. Wu. performs cataract surgery and treats patients with glaucoma, detached retinas, macular degeneration and other age-related eye issues. Patients range from overly cheerfull, to senile, to horribly bitter, to defeated, to completely unable to function anymore.

I feel like the things I've seen have aged me 10 years in just 1 1/2 month. The other day a patient missed her appointment, and I called her at the end of the day to reschedule. Her daughter answered the phone and told me that her mother had died 3 days ago. I felt AWFUL.

I know some people get desensitized to this kind of thing, but I don't think I will. And even though being numb would make things a lot easier, I don't really want to lose my sensitivity, or my humanity.

Still, I'm watching the way time passes more closely these days. I'm aware of how I'm aging, how my parents are getting older, and how all things come to an end. I think about death a lot, and I don't know how to handle it.

I guess seeing how different people deal with the aging process offers me insight into the way I want to handle the passage of time and life. Everyone has a choice. I just hope I'm strong enough to see the good in things and to appreciate the life I have.

Perspective. More than I wanted, really.

.

2011-06-14T22:44:00.000-07:00

May becomes a memory as mist
Diffuses in afternoon sun,

As smoke
Rises in light rain.

Who knows how or where
It's gone.

--Alicia (2011)

I catch myself counting losses these days. I'm not sure how to do life right now: what's supposed to happen next, where I should go, who I should be.

I am never enough.

2011-05-23T22:52:00.001-07:00

I'm so tired. That's all.

Crossword

2011-05-19T20:36:00.000-07:00

That night I was alone

And so were you.

We started a crossword puzzle,

Close against the cold in a little room.

We abandoned it, frustrated

At its enigmatic clues.

We moved on to other riddles:

My doubt. Your delusions.

You walked me home

In the frigid wind,

Hugged me goodbye.

We left it unfinished,

Never found

Four across,

Twenty-seven down.

--Alicia (2011)

Giving up the dream

2011-05-16T21:34:00.000-07:00

Today was my first official day at my new job. I'm working as a receptionist at an Opthamologist's office.

My job is fine. My coworkers are great and time goes by fast. I like dealing with little details and organizing things. It's oddly therapeutic. I appreciate feeling like I'm helping people, and it's nice to actually do something practical for a change. I've made the choice to be positive and to enjoy the work as much as I can.

Still, I can't escape this fear that I'm giving up the dream.

"So, are you going to do anything with singing?"

I hate that question. Why does everyone ask it? If I'm thinking practically, there's no way that anything will be made of a professional singing career on my part. So why do I feel like I have so much to prove? Why do I feel the weight of a lifetime of expectations?

If one could self-destruct of sentimentality, I would now. I can't stop thinking about all of the things that have been a part of my life in the past; the things that probably won't live on. I'm afraid of slipping into monotony. I'm afraid of being wasted talent.

I have to remind myself that this is only temporary; that this is my time to re-prioritize and to figure out what exactly I want - who I want to be.

This is really not the time to get all sentimental and write a blog.

2011-05-14T01:28:00.001-07:00

I don't have time for this. I have packing to do! Tomorrow I move away from home indefinitely. Wait. What?

I keep catching myself alluding to "when I go back to school." Wups. That's over. I have to start referring to everything in the past tense now: "When I went to Westmont, I ___." "When I was in College Choir, we ___." "When I was an English major, I ___." Eeeh.

If I'm going to be honest, aside from the switch in tenses; from the way I talk about my life and my experiences, I don't feel all that different. It's all very surreal. Did four years just go by? Am I a different person? Did I just grow up? What the hell just happened?

These days I feel even more attached to family and friends in San Diego, and more connected to Westmont than I ever have. I'm grateful for the formative experiences and the beautiful people. I'm so lucky, and I can't get over it.

So even though I have no idea what comes next or what I want my life to look like, I'm going to focus on everything that I love about my life right now. And that is enough.

And of course, nobody ever said it better than Eliot:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

"And would it have been worth it after all..."

2011-05-02T21:58:00.000-07:00

[At least I'll always have my sister when I'm lonely.]

And yet again...

2011-04-29T16:50:00.000-07:00

"When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don't make any fuss." -Banksy

Sentimental individual that I am, I have developed a series of personal traditions over the course of my 22 years, one of which is my practice of writing letters to myself. In high school I wrote one each year, then opened them around graduation. I did the same thing in college and just recently opened them. It's fascinating, seeing how I've grown over the past four years into the person that I am now.

I'm surprised at how much (and why) I've changed. Personal struggles that once seemed insurmountable - my insecurity, shyness, and fear of offending people - are not issues that I deal with on a large scale anymore. Interestingly though, in each of these things I've had to be taken to my breaking point (by a number of circumstances) in order to get any better. Reading my letters, I was struck by how grateful I am for the bad experiences that have shaped me into a more self-assured, open person. I am able to get outside of my own head and concentrate on what's going on with other people now.

On the other side of things, new issues have come up that I never imagined myself dealing with. I take comfort though, in the fact that change is always possible. For this reason, I'm grateful for the changes that graduation will bring and I look forward to the time that lies ahead. Though it is terrifying, I am choosing to appreciate the uncertainty.

Annnd what would this post be without a poem? . . .

May Grad, 2011

Tomorrow's alarm will need to be shrill

To wake me to this sunny diaspora,

Ready, willing.

Annie Dillard's The Maytrees

Sits unread on my desk, in the exact place

I left it after you handed it

Two months ago, saying "Take this, eat."

Your words, the wisdom,

A life full of wonderings.

When Spring ends and we move out,

I'll have to give it back.

--Alicia (2011)

Dies Irae

2011-04-18T16:01:00.000-07:00

Dies Irae echoes in my headphones,

Drowning out the sound

Of your philosophical discourse

Three tables down.

You argue determinism

To a wry-smiled friend

And I have chill-bumps

On a hot summer day,

I close my eyes and sway

To the slow drone

Of dies irae, dies illa,

Solvet saeclum in favilla . . .

Chant sequence, ancient as

These unanswered questions.

Salva, salva, salva me.

--Alicia (2011)

This is particularly relevant today.

2011-04-07T15:18:00.000-07:00

You keep us waiting.
You, the God of all time,
Want us to wait for the right time in which to discover
Who we are, where we must go,
Who will be with us, and what we must do.
So, thank you…for the waiting time.

You keep us looking.
You, the God of all space,
Want us to look in the right and wrong places for signs of hope,
For people who are hopeless,
For visions of a better world that will appear among the disappointments of the world we know.
So, thank you…for the looking time.

You keep us loving.
You, the God whose name is love,
Want us to be like you –
To love the loveless and the unlovely and the unlovable;
To love without jealousy or design or threat,
And most difficult of all, to love ourselves.
So, thank you…for the loving time.

And in all this you keep us,
Through hard questions with no easy answers;
Through failing where we hoped to succeed and making an impact when we felt useless;
Through the patience and the dreams and the love of others;
And through Jesus Christ and his Spirit, you keep us.

--Prayer of the Iona Community in Scotland

This is how I feel right now.

2011-04-02T13:03:00.000-07:00

Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa

"Listen. Outside this frame I can see light,

heavy as pardon, reliable as granite.

Help me. Help me drag it into the picture."

--Jeanne Murray Walker, "After Terrorism"

Vocalise

2011-03-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

Rachmaninoff could not know

The weight of what he'd done

When he wove

C sharp minor, dissonant.

Three chords repeated soft,

Before a vast

Chromatic descent.

Cluster chords assail as dark.

He bloomed a voice above it.

Oh, how a melody without words

Can speak.

Oh, how this ache grows as a vine,

Twisted tendril of sound

Out of my mouth.

Out from seat of stomach,

Chest heavy, and heart lead,

Through throat wrought and jaw dropped.

Head resting back, I am lost

In the ecstatic ache.

All things sad and lovely,

All unknown, leave my body on air

Until I am hollow again:

An absence I often have not found.

Catharsis is a million filaments of sound.

It's over,

As quickly as it began.

--Alicia (2011)

This...made me have an hour long laughing fit yesterday.

2011-03-23T11:40:00.000-07:00

This is my sister on Christmas day a few years ago. It's actually really sad...she got bit by this crazy dog at a friend's house. But this photo...HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!!!

One of the weirdest Postsecrets I've seen...

2011-03-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

"Whenever I finish a good book, I eat the last page."

Huh.

Today I feel at peace:

2011-03-16T14:11:00.000-07:00

At peace with myself.

At peace with the direction my life is going (or really, my lack of direction at this point).

At peace with spiritual uncertainty and lack of answers.

There is space to breathe in this undefined state. It's ok. I'm ok. This is going to be ok.

It's good to be alive. It's good to experience the things that come with being human. It's good to pursue truth and to find freedom from doubt in small, unassuming places.

Absence

2011-03-10T15:50:00.000-08:00

We coast through hills, rolling green

and blanketed in gossamer web

of liquid sunlight's diamond drips.

They glimmer on grass and windows.

The day sings while my heart

keeps its silence. The sky sits,

changing easel of orange

and gold on blue.

Traces of pink tufts

and a single bird

slice the horizon:

dark outlines over

illumined backdrop,

changing infinite.

To my right, the sun pants low,

recedes to day's end

as earth rotates away.

The car turns left with the road.

I am turned, am carried

off into dusk's gray.

One glance back

at the dying sun.

Unblinking, I soak in last light.

When I face forward, it's gone.

We drive east into night.

Still, I keep with me dark

spots in my eyes

from staring too long at the light.

When I blink,

they spark red and white.

My eyes open,

they blot spots out of view.

I carry the sun with me

as patches of dark in my eyes.

--Alicia (2011)

Lately...

2011-03-01T16:09:00.000-08:00

All I want to do is read in coffee shops.

So many books, so little time.

I think that means I'm ready to graduate.

Good thing.

[In other news: I'm learning to find peace in the midst of uncertainty, in many aspects.]

Purple

2011-02-24T23:14:00.000-08:00

Purple-stained fingernails

Set off peaches and cream complexion.

I wait for you, buoyant,

Pace the room, placing each

Teacup, pen, and barrette

In perfect disarray:

An illusion of apathy,

Carefully controlled.

My green eyes lined black,

Changed to match your dark,

And this is all but natural.

I pace and pretend that I

Don’t need your touch,

The pinks and blush;

That you don’t make me weak,

Don’t toss me between black and pink:

Between I miss you. You can’t have me.

I want you. I don’t.

Someday I’ll try to forget

How you never came.

--Alicia (2011)

Today I'm missing England.

2011-02-16T21:33:00.000-08:00

I was at Coffee Bean earlier, listening to a playlist of music Emerson gave me on England Semester. It brought me back to those moments during coach rides, riding along green countryside, living completely inside my head and alone with my thoughts. I miss those times the most.

It's weird to miss being alone when my primary feeling this semester has been loneliness.

The most difficult part of coming back to Westmont has been feeling unknown and out of the loop. It's hard to be vulnerable and initiate things with people when you know that they have moved on and have filled your absence with other things and other people. I have never felt so anxious at the prospect of spending time alone.

It also rained this morning, and it made me miss the virulent, unpredictable weather - the sudden downpours that catch you completely off guard. Ironically, when I was in England I missed the sun.

These days it seems like I'm in a perpetual state of nostalgia. No matter where I am or who I'm with, I always miss something or someone.

It's tiresome.

Also, I tweaked this poem a little. Here's the end product:

Stasis

What happens to a caterpillar

Cocooned in November,

To spend weeks locked in

Chrysaline capsule of stasis,

The lonely transformation,

As beauty stole inward and frost

Killed the green world around,

To emerge new and find

Only quiet chill of December,

The world he changed beautiful for

Too changed while he was gone,

To die too soon for spring.

--Alicia (2011)

Also, also...I found a short list of things I learned on England Semester. It's quite entertaining. :]

I learned:

How to pay using eight different types of coins (1 penny, 2 pence, 5 pence, 10 pence, 20 pence, 50 pence, 1 pound, 2 pounds).

That I am worth more than I've been giving myself credit for. I don't have to try so hard, and I don't have to settle.

That my voice doesn't define me. But singing is an important part of my life, and I do miss it when it's not there.

That olives are my "drunk food."

To ALWAYS carry and umbrella. And a camera.

To appreciate everything and everyone around me.

[Many more things were learned.]

I feel strange.

2011-01-20T22:56:00.000-08:00

It's not that I'm unhappy here. I just feel out of place somehow - ill at ease. I feel very far from the person I was and the things I wanted/valued when I was last at Westmont. And it's odd knowing that I'm adjusting back to life here only to leave soon.

I feel an overwhelming sense of the ephemeral nature of things. None of us have much time - here, or anywhere.

In the words of Eilean Ni Chuilleanain:

Seamus Murphy, Died October 2nd 1975

Walking in the graveyard, a maze

Of angels and families

The path coils like a shaving of wood

We stop to read the names.

In time they all come around

Again, the spearbearer, the spongebearer

Ladder and pillar

Scooped from shallow beds.

Carrying black clothes

Whiskey and ham for the wake

The city revolves

White peaks of churches clockwise lifting and falling.

The hill below the barracks

The sprouting sandstone walls go past

And as always you are facing the past

Finding below the old clockface

The long rambles of the spider

In the narrow bed of a saint

The names inscribed travelling

Into a winter of stone.

Poems like this make me wonder what the point of all my effort is.

Be still and wait without hope.

2010-12-28T00:10:00.000-08:00

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth."

--T.S. Eliot (The Four Quartets)

I. LOVE. THIS. POET.

For the past few months, doubt has overwhelmed my perspective. I can't pinpoint a specific incident or issue. It's all interrelated and complicated, but in short, I have been living without hope.

After a long period of silence about the issues I'm dealing with (I'm choosing to be vague here), I reached a point where my need for answers began to outweigh my fear of being honest. I have finally been able to talk things through with several good friends; some who are dealing with the same things, and some who aren't. These conversations have been healing, life-giving, and honest. I'm grateful for them.

I started re-reading Ecclesiastes after friend reminded me that it was once my favorite book. This time around, I'm realizing how much uncertainty Solomon expresses in his writing. My current reading of it is likely being influenced by my state of mind. Still, the supposed wisest man seems unsure of the possibility of a resurrection, the difference between animals and humans, the existence of a soul, God's degree of involvement with the world, and the purpose of man's existence. Interestingly, uncertainty on such issues is not popularly expressed or acknowledged in the church. If I've learned one thing over my past few months abroad though, it is that silence surrounding these issues solves nothing. Openness about my doubt has given me a new kind of freedom from it.

In my doubt, I have also gained a new understanding of what faith is. Faith is not independent of doubt. In fact, you cannot have faith without doubt. Believing is a process. And "certainty" is often a crutch. Faith is not as safe as we would like to think it is.

"And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices."

--T.S. Eliot

The Mind-Body Problem...

2010-10-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

...completely freaks me out.

I'm in need of some clarity on the whole dualism vs. materialism deal. I'm not sure that's even possible though, for anyone.

Hmm...

Unsexed [Why is it that whenever I have a ton of stuff to do, I suddenly have a poem to write?]

2010-10-08T04:46:00.000-07:00

Unsexed

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe topful.

--Macbeth (I.v.40-42)

I read once that cloistered nuns,

When caught in the torrents of desire,

Would grind up the buds of roses

And drink their pulp, in order

To abate lustful cravings.

Their penitence sheathed

In self-denying acts,

They found salvation in an Order;

In a balance, finely crafted

Of holy love--of chaste touch.

Crushing their lust to pulp,

They drank full the very pap

Of the un-budded passions

Which they denied themselves,

Clipped before blossom's flourish.

I can see them,

Their silver chalices

Of blush liquid

Tipped back on pale lips,

Drinking a world of sin away,

As Yam, god of the sea-

The world his goblet, tipped

Back on vast lips-

Drank the sea's roaring wake.

How did it taste?

Was their liquid lust sweet?

Did it burn as they swallowed,

Dross rising like froth

Away from their golden flesh,

Burned holy in denial's fire?

I, too, drink to holiness,

Have cloistered and denied,

Skimmed sin's dross, and strong-willed

The passion of my wiles. I try

To follow suit, seven self-flagellating nuns,

Painfully, as they rise above.

--Alicia (2010)

A few hours alone in Galway...becomes a poem.

2010-10-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

Galway, Ireland

On a promontory between two rivers

flowing out to sea, I walk alone.

One river thrashes virulent.

The other flows placid.

In their parallel journeys, one fights

as the other accedes to tide’s inevitable purge;

a resigned recognition

of the unjust workings of the world.

I am alone with the silence and the fog,

the flecks of rain on the grass at my feet,

and the overcast glow of the sky

as the sun’s faint orange ekes through white.

Pale light glosses the evening; a reminder

of another day, another era fading.

Smoke drifts from distant chimneys;

the heavy ash a smell, black as this land’s history.

It rises silent above the rooftops,

carrying secrets unuttered, toxic.

I pace to the sound of my own blood

pulsing behind my ears.

I accede to the rhythm of my heartbeat,

as the rivers accede to their end.

The smoke accedes to the sky,

as the people accede to their myth.

The land accedes to the waves,

as history crumbles in clods of broken past.

The sea is giant tear, rolling down the cheek

of a nation, stained with blood and ash.

--Alicia (2010)

The result of philosophical conversations in the drizzling rain at 1:00 AM. [Edited]

2010-09-22T18:25:00.000-07:00

[I just wrote this poem. I'm sure it needs a lot of editing. But I'm going to go ahead and share it before my better judgement prevents me from doing so.]

You are the devil at my left shoulder,

Leaned back against the bench

As you draw from your pipe,

Smoldering languid, casual.

Soft plumes

Of smoke drift up - sweet miasma

In night's black expanse.

Above us cloud tufts pass, changing

Over the constant moon - ever distorting,

Ever re-shaping its image as it looms, distant above.

And the moon is never the same

Or exactly explained

By what we can see of it,

In a single moment under starless expanse,

Suspended with the effervescent ping

Of invisible water flecks on skin.

Always there is a thin veil

Shrouding its full,

Luminescence.

You wax calmly about Kierkegaard,

Existential philosophy,

The downfall of Marxist theory;

About how you don't believe

In objective reality,

Or any collective human identity.

Beside you in the dark I hope

For some sign of your belief in my own

Fragile reality; want you to touch me warm,

Touch me soft under the smothering

Canvas of dark, amidst the faint hiss

Of smoke diffusing through light rain.

You depress me more than anyone

I have ever known. And still,

I see the luster of your lips in moonlight,

The firm angle of your jaw,

And wonder how it would feel

To brush lightly, lips over your brow,

Across the satin of your skin,

And blossom for you, the throbbing,

White-hot reality of my presence.

I shiver next to you in the dark.

I gaze up at the sky for a shard

Of escaping light,

As the fog obscures the moon.

--Alicia (2010)

Yes, I am blogging about Project Runway.

2010-08-06T23:55:00.001-07:00

A new season of Project Runway premiered two weeks ago. And this time, Tim Gunn has a clear favorite, who also happens to be my favorite (in my supremely limited knowledge of fashion - I really only watch this show for the antics). His name is Mondo Guerra. He's kind of eccentric, and more than a little shy. Mondo is cool. I don't think he knows how cool he is.

In last night's episode, they aired a clip of Mondo getting really emotional during one of his interviews, talking about how lonely he is. I've never seen Project Runway (or any reality show, for that matter) air such a genuine, heart-wrenching interview. It was actually kind of uncomfortable to watch.

Mondo said something along the lines of:

"I need a connection to be whole, and I haven't found that with anyone really. I am alone with my thoughts too much, and they just eat away at me. I am all alone, and I just want to be loved for who I am, but it's what I create that I need to be loved and appreciated. I am so creative with this gift and I am cursed with always having to create to get by and be noticed."

Sometimes our gifts can become curses. Sometimes they can define us in an upsetting way.

Mondo doesn't feel like he's connecting with any of the other designers. He doesn't feel like he's ever been loved for who he really is. Instead, it's always about what he can create. I feel for this guy. I have felt this way before about singing. I hope he's ok.

In other news, this week I had my last voice lesson for the next five months. I am SO excited for the break. I think it's going to be refreshing to concentrate on English.

And still . . .

2010-07-25T23:13:00.001-07:00

I have to acknowledge the fact that a lot of good has come out of my loneliness this summer. I've been forced to deal with things that I would have otherwise ignored. Even if it has been hard, I have learned not to look to external sources for validation or security.

My sister has the flu, so I've been hanging out with her today. A while ago, my dad gave her some Motrin for her headache. She didn't think it would help. But my dad just handed it to her and said "Take this. Trust."

Maybe this is all more simple than we realize. And maybe the whole battle is learning how to wait, and to trust that things will be ok.

These matters that with myself I too much discuss.

2010-07-24T02:10:00.001-07:00

If I'm going to be completely honest, this summer has been a long, quiet struggle with depression and insecurity. I don't like what being at home does to me. There's too much space to be lonely.

I don't belong here anymore. I feel unwanted - like my absence isn't even noticed. So I've just given up, because I'm not the kind of person who forces things. I know that I have friends who care about me. But it's difficult when they're not present, and when it's hard for me to talk about my problems without feeling completely egocentric, or guilty for not being more positive.

I've tried to be at peace with the situation at home this summer. But I can't escape the overwhelming feeling that I don't fit here anymore.

At this point, I'm waiting for it to end. I know that going to England won't solve these problems. But I need a change of scenery, and a meaningful conversation.

--
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

New Blog!

2010-07-22T12:48:00.001-07:00

I have a new blog for England Semester!

http://aarchambault.wordpress.com/

Don't worry...I'm still keeping this one. I'll continue writing in it after I'm back. But in the meantime, the new blog is a good way to share what I'm experiencing in the UK (because a lot of people don't know about this blog :).

Until next time, cheerio!

Of course not.

2010-07-16T01:17:00.000-07:00

Almanac

by Carl Sandburg

Scrutinize the Scorpion constellation

and see where a hook of stars

ends with a lonely star.

Go to the grey sea horizon

and ask for a message

and listen and wait.

See whether the conundrums

of a heavy land fog

either sing or talk.

Let only a small cry come

in behalf of a clean sunrise:

the sun performs so often.

Speak to the branches of spring

and the surprise of blossoms:

they too hope for a good year.

Search the first winter snowstorm

for a symphonic arrangement:

it is always there.

Take an alphabet of gold or mud and spell

as you wish any words: kiss me, kill me,

love, hate, ice, thought, victory.

Read the numbers on your wrist watch

and ask: is being born, being loved,

being dead, nothing but numbers?

[See title of post.]

Also, I wonder...

When did I stop thinking in paragraphs

and start thinking in poems?

Is this some weird form of ADD?

Noteworthy quote from my dad:

2010-07-05T23:38:00.000-07:00

"Love is patient, love is kind.

Love means slowly losing your mind."

haha

If you haven't met my dad, he's pretty much the best.

Update:

Another quote from my dad...

When asked about getting a facebook: "No, I wouldn't talk to anyone. I'm just your garden variety stalker."

When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don’t make any fuss.

2010-06-28T14:08:00.001-07:00

--Banksy

Life has been teaching me how to do this lately.

:] So true...

2010-06-24T00:05:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmLE2bliXCI

Walt Whitman knew what was up.

2010-06-17T23:42:00.000-07:00

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood, isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my Soul.

--Walt Whitman (1900)

Mozart

2010-06-01T23:28:00.000-07:00

It was only fitting that the child prodigy should die
before fruition,
before age stole his verve and dried his mind as a raisin
in desert sun,
before years carved bitter lines, like rivers
into porcelain skin,
before he gave the world all that he had, and was left
without a melody.

Instead he left at the height of an era, his eon,
a Requiem Unfinished;
unheard and unwasted on dying ears.

He surrendered to the earthen enemy, Time,
thirty-five years still young,
as a star crumples on itself, then expands.
It explodes in its cataclysmic
infancy and is lost, having left all of its light so hastily,
forcefully at once.

And then the dark.

--Alicia (2010)

Jealousy

2010-05-27T00:18:00.000-07:00

Her fingers danced across his shoulder,

traced a line up the back of his neck, and

brushed through locks of umber brown.

Wry lip corners curved upward, behind

the frame of her shining blonde's arc,

as his eyes fixed and smiled on hers.

My neck muscles tightened as I

let out a silent scream,

muffled by tongue and cheek.

--Alicia (2010)

Nocturne in D Flat Major

2010-05-08T23:39:00.000-07:00

I can’t stop listening

to  Chopin’s Nocturne in D flat major.

Quietly forceful, lyrical, sad,

it reminds me of you.

Staring at my computer screen

in an empty coffee shop at dusk,

I can’t force myself to write

my Music History paper.

There is nothing for me to say

about Mozart’s harmonic structure.

All I have is a list of things

unsaid on that last afternoon

as I stared into your ocean blue,

right across the table and close

enough to touch. But I

was terrified and could not make

the invisible wall between us

disappear. I could not tell you that

I want you more than a melody,

more than a breath; not for me, but for

your lovely soft blue, and for all

there is to know behind it.

The air hung, static,

screaming in my silence. I opened

my mouth to speak and felt

my lungs touch, deflated and dry.

I don’t think that you knew.

And now, as I gaze at the

vacant chair across from me,

its emptiness is smothering.

As Chopin’s melody rises,

pulsing strident to its climax,

I realize that this is the last crescendo

before its final cadence, and soon

I will sit aching in the silence.

And I am not ready

for it to end. 

--Alicia (2010)

Expectation is the root of all heartache.

2010-05-04T13:01:00.001-07:00

If there's anything I've learned this past year, it's that people will let you down. It's best not to have expectations, and to be pleasantly surprised when things go well.

That is all.

. . .

2010-04-20T19:02:00.000-07:00

I am not perfect. And that's ok.

I've been carrying around a lot of stubborn dandelions lately.

2010-03-19T22:33:00.000-07:00

Today was one of those days

when you have everything to do, and

more restlessness than motivation for doing.

So I walked down the street to an open field

and lay there in the baking sun,

letting rays of heat swell over my body,

thawing cold-clenched muscles to life.

For a moment, time melted in my placid mind.

When I got up to walk away,

I saw a dandelion in the grass

and bent down to pick it.

The bud was yellow and stiff, but I figured

a dandelion’s a dandelion.

I blew and wished on its fluffy seeds.

Only this was a stubborn dandelion. Its dry seeds,

seconds before, had looked helpless. But now

no matter how hard I tried, they wouldn’t budge.

I thought about forcing the seeds off with my fingers.

But what would it have accomplished?

I took the situation as a sign

that my wish was void.

Still, I couldn’t bear to let go

of my stubborn dandelion.

So I put it in my pocket

and walked away.

--Alicia (2010)

In the quiet dark of night, alone (Edited)

2010-03-09T00:14:00.000-08:00

In the quiet dark of night, alone

I sat and wondered at this life, which

frustrated the knowledge of wise men

and the irony of Fools;

us wise fools,

living in a strand of incoherent musing,

revolving hazy on this celestial sphere,

round thoughts, lives, and cosmological constructs:

primordial gasses mixed with an inexplicable Something,

which is explained: divine.

Divine and nothing,

out of nothing,

formless and void,

formed

in the depths of nothing,

in the shadow which crept along

the edge of a glistening web of star:

star dust and star ashes,

from dust to life,

we are.

We form out lives, logical and succinct,

squeeze the inexplicable world

into explanations of nothing,

as loss blunts the edges of our star-crossed passions.

We learn to love those humble melodies we trace

along the listless drone of the metronome, Time.

We do not waste life wanting things we cannot-

lusting things we should not-

And we do not concern ourselves with higher things.

For the Lord is our shepherd,

we shall not want.

And yet . . .

--Alicia (2009)

Why do you sing?

2010-02-28T23:39:00.001-08:00

Today I received possibly the best compliment about my singing that I've ever been given.

I sang my concerto piece (O Quante Volte) with Westmont's orchestra this weekend. After today's concert, an older man (of about 80 years) walked up to me and introduced himself. He told me that he has always loved classical music and enjoyed listening to orchestral music. But he's always hated opera, and whenever he would listen to classical radio stations and any opera would come on, he would turn the station. He told me that my singing changed his whole outlook on opera, and that I opened his eyes to the beauty in it.

I haven't been all that inspired about music lately. I struggle with the feeling that it was never my choice to pursue music - that it was just decided for me by everyone else that it was what I wanted to do with my life. I don't enjoy the vulnerability that comes with performing, and I've often felt like a slave to my talent (as melodramatic as that may sound). But I've gone along with it because part of me is afraid of being "wasted talent."

I participated in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions this past fall. It's a pretty intense vocal competition (one that I don't think I was ready for). After it was over, I had the opportunity to get feedback from the judges. One of them asked me a simple question:

"Why do you sing?"

I didn't have an answer for him. It was actually pretty embarrassing, how much this simple question made me doubt my motives. It made me wonder if I only sing because I'm good at it - and because it's what has always been expected of me.

After talking with that older man today though, I think I figured out what keeps me singing.

I remember when I was in middle school, I would sit on the floor in my room, listening to recordings of Kiri Te Kanawa, Maria Callas, Kathleen Battle, and all of these gorgeous sopranos, in awe of each unique voice. I would go from aria to aria for hours (as nerdy as that sounds), amazed at the things they could do. I've always loved listening to opera, and practicing what I could do with my own voice. I've struggled with performing, though. This is partly because acting is awkward for me, and partly because I spent a long time not liking the sound of my own voice. But now that I'm over being insecure and comparing my voice to this un-attainable ideal in my head, I realize that even though I don't always enjoy performing and being so vulnerable in front of people, I do it because I want people to feel what I feel when I listen to opera.

I know that opera can be brash and obnoxious - especially the nationalistic opera of Wagner and Strauss, which is what people usually imagine when they think of opera, crazy ladies with viking helmets and such. (Part of me is afraid of being associated with that.) But opera can also be completely divine, like the Bel Canto arias from 17th c. Italy. There can be such agility, subtlety and gorgeous expression in the human voice. I want to share the wonder that I feel, listening to the instrument which God creates uniquely in each person. Singing is a beautiful, more heightened form of expression amidst otherwise mundane, uninspired life. I want to share that with people.

And that is why I sing.

Salt and Pepper

2010-02-25T00:09:00.000-08:00

Measure the world up to size,

categorize and classify.

Sort and label:

salt from pepper,

sugar from salt.

All kept at a comfortable

distance - shelved

in their places and

labeled distinctly,

for free-functioning life.

I don’t fit into your salt and pepper paradigm.

Spilled my grainy substance through

table cracks and mixed,

irreparably,

foreign matter with mine.

I’m strange. All too strange for you.

--Alicia (2010)

Redone

2010-02-22T19:42:00.000-08:00

Life, lips linger still.

Softly in this whisper moment,

time can only fill.

Breath, catch from corners,

bent into ends,

untouched.

As swells rise,

within your chest,

love, laugh, life-filled

with plans, squeezed from

edges, thin.

Step backward.

Watch your plans

all spill.

Begin, begin, and again

begin. New

beginnings

in ends you'll begin.

As morning streams from east

light calm, peel back life's petals,

gently, fair. Bend plans to fit Other's

plans again.

Sing, sweet

flower petal joy. Lift me

up to yours.

--Alicia (2010)

Anxiety

2010-01-16T00:31:00.000-08:00

I posted a version of this poem earlier, but have since changed it. It’s about my struggle with anxiety, which developed out of my unvoiced doubts involving death-related philosophical issues (though I'm realizing that I'm anxiety-prone in general). This poem is my attempt at putting words to the experience. For a long time, the anxiety issue was too emotional for me to step outside of and write about coherently. I guess Wordsworth was right when he said that poetry is "emotion, recollected in tranquility." So, without further explanation:

Meditations on a Life

Between rest and rest,

I saw my life unfold,

poured over horizon's edge

in ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Flower unfurled, ephemeral bliss,

the corners of lighted and

lustrous sky to kiss,

only to wither and wane into abyss.

Whither? We do not know.

I watched a candle flicker and fade,

saw its flame rise and expand

into endless empyrean.

Vapor surrendered up to sky,

as a soul divides itself

in a sigh from the dust

which once bound it - gone,

to ever-praise or ever-slumber;

and I wondered

if my faith was merely

a poetic speculation,

contained within the

fallible fragments of my mind:

a dream, formed to

damper the crash

from the realization that

my life was a dimming ember;

a finite reality, fading softly.

Glancing into resplendent sky, have you seen

your plans sucked dry? Have you felt

your stomach drop through you, and

the space inside your chest constrict

until your lungs touched, and you sank into the place

between your unconfessed sins and undisclosed thoughts -

thick doubt pounding from stomach to hands to fingertips, numb;

ice-flooded veins, writhing in dread?

Life's loss rings deep, in the hollow of a lonely head.

--Alicia (2010)

2009-11-26T21:37:00.000-08:00

"The mind is its own place and in itself, can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."

-John Milton (Paradise Lost)

Acceptance!

2009-11-02T23:45:00.000-08:00

I got in to England semester! So if I decide to go (still not sure), I'll be traveling around the British Isles this time next year!

I really shouldn't be writing a blog right now.

2009-08-29T00:35:00.000-07:00

My cat can tell that I'm leaving. He's mad at me right now.

Leaving never gets easier, even though I thought it would with time. No matter how much I subconsciously try to distance myself from certain people and places, I always find myself attached.

Tonight was a good night. (Happy Birthday Mae Leah!) I got to share meaningful conversation with people I care about, and I feel like it provided closure for this otherwise strange summer.

Still, I really don't want to leave Emily, my family, or the friends I have here. I guess I should look on the bright side though...I'm lucky to have two places that I can call home. I can't say I know where I'll go from here, but I trust that wherever it is, it'll be amazing. God willing, I'll be back.

So, here's to another chapter.

I want this.

2009-08-21T02:22:00.001-07:00

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

--e.e. cummings

Interesting quote

2009-08-12T00:08:00.000-07:00

"Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist." -George Carlin

I somewhat agree with this.

Ok, that's all.

I'm going to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight! :D

Edit: here's Mike's response to this post.

How not to be a woman:

2009-08-05T10:30:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been thinking about femininity and what it means to be a woman.

20 is an awkward age. People start referring to you as a woman (provided that you are female, I guess). But for me at least, the title always sounds weird.

Part of the oddity in being called a woman is that I'm not exactly sure what it means to be a woman. I was thinking about this the other day. Then when I arrived at my voice lesson, my voice teacher and her accompanist were talking about a friend who majored in Women's Studies at UC Santa Cruz. My voice teacher, who is around 80 years old, thought the whole idea of Women's Studies was ridiculous. She said something like, "In my day nobody had to teach you how to be a woman. These things were common knowledge." (I thought this was a funny comment. :) Then her accompanist, who is rather conservative, chimed in, "No, Women's Studies is really the opposite. It's basically learning how not to be a woman."

Though I value Women's Studies and don't completely agree with her statement, it made me think. In a certain sense, she's right. Modern ideology teaches women "how not to be women," in that it questions the standardized schema for the female sex which society had originally constructed. (Yet in certain ways women are still objectified...) Don't get me wrong, I'm all for empowerment and equality. I think that it's healthy to question societal norms, because having to mold yourself to fit any kind of "role" can be crippling. But in the case of femininity, what is the cost of questioning the status quo? Does too much empowerment and not enough "femininity" cause marriages and relationships to fail (or never even begin in the first place)?

How can a woman be empowered and still be feminine?

I'm not the kind of person who cheapens myself, dumbs myself down, or pretends to operate on surface-level. But most guys are intimidated by intelligence and confidence, even if it's understated. And honestly, most choose to date girls who are simple and surfacey. Though I do recognize that not every guy is looking for the same thing in a relationship and that this is not always the case, it seems to be the trend. And as a female, it's almost like you're left with the choice of either being the smart girl who ends up lonely, or the surfacey girl who everyone loves. And if you're not satisfied with either choice, you find yourself trying to be everything: empowered yet passive, vocal yet submissive, equality-minded yet role-conscious, contemplative yet carefree. And in my case at least, you over-analyze your behavior so much that you end up silent most of the time. I don't want to pretend to be something I'm not, so I don't dumb myself down. But at the same time I don't want to steamroll over people. So a lot of the time, I say nothing. (This doesn't happen all the time. But it's gotten worse since I started going to Westmont.) Silence obviously isn't the answer though. In the overly-quoted, yet still insightful words of Marianne Williamson:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

This seems to be a more constructive mindset. And it's a welcome reminder. I'm personally sick of watering myself down, trying to play two parts, and worrying about how I come across to people. I think maybe the key in this whole gender issue is to not dwell on it so much. Because sometimes when you dwell on difference and prejudice, you end up highlighting the difference and alienating people from one another so that they learn to expect the prejudice.

Thoughts?

Thankfulness

2009-08-02T01:18:00.000-07:00

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

--e.e. cummings

Question?

2009-07-15T00:55:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about this lately, and I want to get different people's perspectives.

I read The Birth of Tragedy (by Nietzsche) for my Theory and Criticism in The Arts class last semester. It was about the role of Apollinian (logical) and Dionysian (emotional) tendencies in the formation of Attic Tragedy (art). It got me thinking about the relationship between logic and emotion. We had to write personal responses for our reading in this class. I've posted parts of my response to Nietzsche's essay below for some background:

"Nietzsche argues an interesting kind of dualism between Apollinian and Dionysian tendencies. First he establishes a dichotomy between the two, then he explains how each run parallel to the other as essential parts in the formation of Attic tragedy. He tells us that Apollo rules the world of dreams as the deity of light. Apollo grants clarity of sight with “measured restraint” of such illusions, providing a firm grasp of reality and “freedom from the wilder emotions.” When Nietzsche speaks of Apollo, he speaks of logic. On the other hand, he claims that the nature of the Dionysian emerges at the collapse of this grasp on logic and controlled restraint. It is the spirit of intoxication, the freedom that results from handing the spirit over to emotion. Nietzsche has set the forces of logic and emotion in opposition.

[...blah, blah, blah...]

"Nietzsche’s argument broke down when he started to commend the dual nature of Aeschylus’ Prometheus. He says that it is both Apollinian and Dionysian in nature because its central message states, “all that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both.” This statement wrongly alienates logic and emotion from one another. By suggesting this kind of duality between the forces of reason and feeling, Nietzsche sets the two in opposition. In this act of pitting the two principles against each other, he inevitably implies that one is better than the other. Equality is no longer possible, and Nietzsche's logic nullifies all that he has been arguing about the interplay of emotion and logic.

Nietzsche is right to say that the art of tragedy involves both emotion and logic. He fails to recognize, though, that emotion cannot be separated from logic, nor logic from emotion. They both exist together as cognitive processes in the mind of individuals. And so they coexist in the world, not as dueling, opposing forces, but as one wedded force."

I've gone back and forth on this issue since I wrote the above response. People always talk about logic and emotion like they're polar opposites. For example, certain personality tests will tell you that you're either ruled by logic or emotion...you're either a "thinker," or a "feeler." (Just a side note: this bothers me as someone who falls in between the two preferences.) But can't emotion influence a person's logic (and their logic, their emotions)? Isn't emotion a cognitive process, experienced in the same mind as logic?

So my question: do you think that logic and emotion are completely unrelated to each other ("mutually exclusive," to borrow a favorite phrase of Kelsey's :), or are they inseparable?

And now, completely unrelated:

With her pro photo skills, Mae Leah took some headshots for me to use for the Met Opera National Council Auditions this fall (a competition I'm entering to gain some audition experience). I don't have them all yet, but here are a couple. I'm not sure which one I want to use, and I don't have all of them yet, but I like them so far. I'm wondering which should I use out of these three:

Feedback, yes? Please and thank you.

Present. Future?

2009-06-19T00:14:00.000-07:00

So...

Things are starting to pick up this summer. =]

Emily's done with school, so I have her to hang out with now!

I'm officially going as a counselor with RBBC to Indian Hills. One week with elementary schoolers from my church and Anna. I'm looking forward to it. :]

I'm going to start teaching voice lessons (finally). So far I only have two students, but it's a start. And hopefully they'll tell other people. I'm kind of nervous to teach though, because you have to tailor everything to each individual voice. I think it'll be better once we start though.

Speaking of voice lessons, I've been going to coachings with my voice teacher in San Diego's voice coach, Jane Westbrook. She's 80 years old, can still sing (within reason...which is amazing at her age), and has worked with some highly esteemed people in her life. Her perspective has been extremely helpful already, and she doesn't mess around. She's been really hard on me, not just technically, but with my "lack of confidence and conviction."

It's weird, but for some reason voice teachers always tend to criticize my personality more than my voice. I'm always "too passive," "not connected to the song emotionally," "not enough of a diva," or whatever. The problem is, I don't want to be a "diva" (the word kind of makes me recoil). Sometimes I feel like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. I have a nice voice, and it's easy for me to work on technique and make it as pleasing as I can. But it's not in my nature to want to show it off. I don't like being the center of attention and I don't like being looked at. It's kind of ironic actually. I love singing, but I love it most when I'm alone and I don't have to worry about the pressure to please anyone else. Because too much of the time, pleasing other people is all that I care about. I know that I should be eager to share beauty and share inspiration as relief from the ordinary, but getting to that place is hard for me when I can't see past the possible judgement.

Maybe this is why leading worship has always been easier for me. I can let go and express emotion in worship because I'm directing the attention onto God, and not myself. It's not about me. I don't want it to be about me. But obviously the music industry is a self-focused one. And that's where my problem arises.

Another thing...I decided to switch voice teachers at Westmont. I felt like I was backsliding at school and constantly having to re-gain lost ground with my teacher at home. I started to dread my lessons...which my roommate definitely heard about. haha Becky, what would I do without you? So I told my voice teacher that I was going to switch earlier this week. She was NOT happy about it, and she made that clear. She also made clear on the phone every single issue she's had with me and my personality. That was great. I tried to handle the situation delicately and not offend anyone, but it just blew up in my face. I'm going to forget about it and move on. But still, if I have to keep dealing with this junk and these strong personalities, then I don't know if this career is right for me. I don't want to live in conflict. I've seen it harden people and frankly, I'm afraid of who I'd become under all of the pressure.

Still, there's another factor in all of this. I remember one day in Christian Doctrine, Telford went off on a tangent and started to talk about why he ended up teaching theology. He said that one of his professors told him to think of the thing that he would never forgive himself for giving up, and then to think of the thing that scares him the most. Your answers are supposed to tell you what you should do in life. For him, those two things ended up being the same. My answers are the same too...both singing. That's why, despite it all, I'm majoring in Music (well, along with my English major). Maybe the most fulfilling things in life aren't supposed to come easy. Maybe that's the irony in it all.

This blog ended up much longer than anticipated. I don't expect people to read it all because it's just me processing my thoughts. (But I guess if you're reading this now, that woud mean you've already read it...unless you're me and you read things backwards.)

Eh, future...why I do I even worry about the future? I guess in the end it doesn't really matter. Still, it seems like it does in the moment.

Ah, insomnia...

2009-06-14T01:54:00.000-07:00

I'm having trouble falling asleep, as usual. Tonight I went to bed feeling anxious about a bunch of stuff, and I couldn't relax. Lately, I haven't had much of a desire to read the Bible. So I haven't been, aside from a few exceptions. (I desire the discipline to be consistent and the peace that comes with consistency. But sometimes I push myself so hard in other areas of my life that my relationship with God becomes an afterthought. I'm saying this because I don't want to give the false impression that I have this thing together...because I really don't.)

Anyway, tonight was one of those exceptions. Because I couldn't sleep I got up and read Psalm 39 (from the NRSV). It's a really perplexing Psalm, but in an odd way it spoke to me. The psalmist articulated almost exactly what I'm feeling right now, and it was a much needed dose of perspective (in a different sort of way).

So I thought I'd share it:

Psalm 39

To the leader: to Jeduthun. A Psalm of David.
¹I said, ‘I will guard my ways
   that I may not sin with my tongue;
I will keep a muzzle on my mouth
   as long as the wicked are in my presence.’
²I was silent and still;
   I held my peace to no avail;
my distress grew worse,
³   my heart became hot within me.
While I mused, the fire burned;
   then I spoke with my tongue:

⁴‘Lord, let me know my end,
   and what is the measure of my days;
   let me know how fleeting my life is.
⁵You have made my days a few handbreadths,
   and my lifetime is as nothing in your sight.
Surely everyone stands as a mere breath.
          Selah
⁶   Surely everyone goes about like a shadow.
Surely for nothing they are in turmoil;
   they heap up, and do not know who will gather.

⁷‘And now, O Lord, what do I wait for?
   My hope is in you.
⁸Deliver me from all my transgressions.
   Do not make me the scorn of the fool.
⁹I am silent; I do not open my mouth,
   for it is you who have done it.
¹⁰Remove your stroke from me;
   I am worn down by the blows of your hand.

¹¹‘You chastise mortals
   in punishment for sin,
consuming like a moth what is dear to them;
   surely everyone is a mere breath.
          Selah

¹²‘Hear my prayer, O Lord,
   and give ear to my cry;
   do not hold your peace at my tears.
For I am your passing guest,
   an alien, like all my forebears.
¹³Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again,
   before I depart and am no more.’

This is the way the year ends

2009-05-09T23:57:00.001-07:00

V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea 
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                                Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
and the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

For thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

--T.S. Eliot (from "The Hollow Men")

Paradigm shift...

2009-04-24T00:40:00.001-07:00

of the good sort. I feel new these days.

I realize that this is vague, and that I haven't written in a while.

I'll elaborate later?

Ok seriously...this needs to end.

2009-04-02T08:10:00.001-07:00

I have a new pet-peeve:

It's the Christianese phrase "love on." As in, "we're just gonna go love on them...etc." It's usually used when describing short term missions endeavors to people at church.

My problem with it: it sounds wrong, and its users sound slightly crazy when they say it. What even does it mean? What exactly does "loving on" someone involve? Did we ever define it?

I think it's just one of those phrases that everyone picks up because they hear other people saying it. And in that process, it's come to mean something different to each person. This bugs me. I know that all language is subjective, but Christians need to work at defining their words and think about how much jargon is helpful and how much is harmful.

I can't be the only one who's disturbed by "loving on." It's such a weird thing to say...

I feel like this requires an explanation

2009-03-20T23:56:00.001-07:00

But I'm not going to give one.

I can't handle this life:

Sunny and lovely,

Spent

Crouched within dark corners

Of nebulous thought.

All I am,

All I know,

Hinged on illusion -

The control

I feign to possess.

My mind inflicting war wounds

On my body

Ticking slowly,

Grave-ward bound.

All will go down with me

When I'm dead in the ground.

My courage sets

With the sun's receding light

And flickers

In my hollowing soul.

Only in emptiness

Will I ever be pure.

This life has dealt me

All but sorrow,

All but strife.

Instead, I've seen

Lazy summers and electric nights,

Perfumed air rising over an ashen sky,

Lush strokes of genius sunset,

Falling to rise in resplendent dawn,

Those gloried awakenings of light.

And still,

Still I drift

Among sorrowed planes of thought,

Revive my dead longings

And grieve happily,

Biting my lip to smile

At all of the suffering

I haven't been forced to bear.

Still I catch myself weeping

Behind closed doors,

Over the cards that could have been,

Should have been,

Would have been,

Yet, have not been

Dealt as mine.

For I have known

The terror that lurks inside man's mind.

For I have looked inside my heart

And seen that it was mine.

With rose blossoms in my hands,

I bequeath on the world

A sacrificial offering,

Deaf to suffering,

Their wilting beauty fading,

As dry thorns wrap

In crowning glory

Round an innocent's head -

Not mine.

Not of mine offering.

Not of mine innocence.

And that is why,

Throat clenched,

With salt-streaked eyes,

I turn away from gazes,

Fixed to heal

The pain I'll never admit

I bear.

I've lived a thousand lives,

Died a thousand sunsets in my mind,

My futility only

To realize.

And it's always been more beautiful in my mind.

--Alicia (2009)

Isn't it funny?

2009-02-24T21:41:00.001-08:00

Isn't it funny how life repeats itself?

I wrote this during my senior year of high school. It applies again...to a different situation, different people.

I've always loved your eyes most -

the way they catch the light

when you're glancing off at a distance,

at just the right angle.

For that fleeting moment

they appear transparent:

an undisturbed liquid crystal,

yet with a depth unsolved, enchanting.

I've spent so long wondering

at the mystery beneath them;

wondering whether you'll enlighten a stranger.

So long wondering...

perhaps too long.

Only recently have I discovered

the futility of my fixation.

Your eyes don't glimmer exclusively.

And it's funny...

All this time as I admired your eyes,

you were never looking at me at all.

Of such divine ebullience,

I was never the source

And she will explore those depths,

which I will never know.

--Alicia (2007)

Not for the weak at heart.

2009-02-16T01:43:00.000-08:00

I think I'm weak at heart.

I'm reading A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway for one of my classes. I really hate it. I can't handle gory war stories and all of the horrible bloody details. I've never been able to. I was the kid who felt sick to her stomach when she visited the San Luis Rey Mission in fourth grade. For everyone else, it was just another field trip. But walking through the old adobe buildings, I felt an oppressive hollowness about that place. And I couldn't handle it.

I'm bothered by things that don't bother other people. I thought I was getting over it, but it seems worse lately. I feel other people's emotions, and it gets to me. Sometimes I think that I can't handle life the way other people can. Then I wonder if everyone feels the same way at times.

This book is making me really depressed. It makes me sick, how horrible people can be...especially when it comes to war. Why do we have to take such a beautiful thing as life and destroy it?

I'll be relieved once I finish this book. I don't want to read about darkness. I can see enough of it in my bright and happy world as it is.

I am not a fan of Robert Frost.

2009-02-06T14:02:00.000-08:00

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there's some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

--Robert Frost

I'm not a fan of Robert Frost. I've always thought that his poetry was simple and a little boring. Maybe it's me, but I can't really derive any kind of profound deeper meaning from most of his writing...most of his writing.

But this poem's last stanza has been echoing in my head a lot lately. I have to admit, I like it. I can relate to it:

The woods are lovely and perplexing. I'd like to stop and contemplate them; figure it all out. But I've got miles to go and obligations to fulfill. There is simply no time: No time to contemplate. No time to sleep.

Man, I'm such a freaking English major...

Words, words, words.

2009-01-16T15:17:00.000-08:00

When I saw that The Great Gatsby was one of the books we were supposed to read in my Major American Writers class, I was annoyed. I read it in high school, didn't really like it, and dismissed it as "one of those high school books." But now I'm noticing how much depth I missed.

Here's the end of Chapter 6:

"He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...

...One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees- he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something- an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound, and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever."

This is brilliant.

In other news, I'm coming home this weekend.