Author: Azlan

554: “The Bees Belong” (Ross Gay)

                “The worker unfolded the sign that said the bees belong here as much as we do, orienting it so pedestrians could read it…”
                -Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, pg. 211

                From some perspectives the yard outside my front door looks a mess. Last year’s dead stems akimbo, matted brown leaves, a few crocuses pushing up. I’ve been walking by and saying hello.
                A few weeks ago a neighbor and I chatted about solitary bees. When I think about bees I usually think about hives, about honey, but as far as I understand (to that burst of brown leaves and back, maybe) most of the bees from where I live are solitary. As far as I understand (a little less far, this time) most of these solitary bees live in the ground, but some of them will snuggle up in dead stems or hollow wood. Snuggle in for winter. Until it’s warm enough to wake up. Which is one of the many reasons (my neighbor said) they’re never in too much of a hurry to tidy anything. No good to be asleep and have someone come and stack you and your bedding in the waste pile. And how sickening to be the one doing the stacking?
                I’d heard about nesting solitary bees before, but since I chatted with my neighbor, I’ve been saying hello. And listening. I haven’t seen any of them yet, so this evening when I walked by I said how are you doing. I said I’m sleepy, too. I said spring’s coming but it’s still going to freeze tonight. And they were quiet, if they’re here. I spoke softly so as not to disturb them, and then went in to make dinner and crawl inside my blankets.

by Azlan

553: Satisfied Hunger (Ava Nathaniel Winter)

                “more alive / for having satisfied a hunger.” -Ava Nathaniel Winter, Transgenesis, pg. 7

                I often think about hunger as a destructive thing, a selfish thing. I have been taught to think that way. And, I realize, to hunger that way. Hungry to consume, to take, to take away from another. Ava Nathaniel Winter reminds me: aren’t there other hungers?
                And there are. So many. I’m grateful for the reminder. For instance: today as I walked with my friend we were hungry for the conversation, for sharing it, for walking together. We were hungry for intricate patterns of hands and knees and hips and swinging arms and glances, and hungry too for the rain that scattered over us. Rain that might (I think now, reading Winter) be generous in its loving hunger for grass, for ground, for trees and creatures walking through its laughter. 
                For instance: my partner is traveling, and I am hungry for the quiet of sharing space, for the stretch in an early spring evening when the sun has gone down and the rain has picked up and we are sitting for a long time before we look over and see each other. Share that: that loving glance. I’m hungry for it, and more alive for having satisfied the hunger.
                For instance: I am so often hungry to hear my friends’ voices.
                For instance: my partner and I first read this poem out loud, together, lounged on the same floor where we often lay side by side listening to the rain. We were hungry for the poems we read: for Ava Nathaniel Winter’s words, Ai Qing’s images, Fatima Asghar’s rhythms, and so many more. Poetry for me is sometimes a hungry thing: words hungry for sound, sounds hungry for sharing. Blooming, weaving hungers, tasting growing hungers, growing like grass does, and more alive for its embraces and satisfactions. 

by Azlan

552: “Where They’re At” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)

                “Knowing who they’re with helps them know where they’re at and where they want to be.” -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, pg. 53

                In some ways it’s been a hard few months, and two weeks ago my partner commented: you’ve been going for walks with people less often. So I started reaching out. Inviting friends to the park. To the neighborhoods between our houses. Asking: when’s a good time?
                Earlier today I thought about those walks while walking back to my house from a chat with four other artists. We talked about our processes, what we were making. I got to see some of their pieces, including a sculpture like a three dimensional window peering into the sky, inviting me to lean forward, to breathe, to find that we’re breathing. Our conversation returned again and again to the compassion and joy of accountability. To the power of making as part of our relationships together, of how we’re responsible to each other, of what we share.
                Knowing who I’m with helps me know where we’re at and where we want to be. Art is one way to invite that knowing. These steps. And here I am, tired, getting ready for bed, alone at my kitchen table—and walking again beneath the sky that sculpture opened.

by Azlan

551: Spells, Counterspells, and Selves (Maiga Doocy)

                “It hurt because my counterspell couldn’t distinguish between what was the curse and what was you.”
                -Maiga Doocy, Sorcery and Small Magics, pg. 268

                I love when fantasy and science fiction stories end up reckoning with core cultural concepts. For example: what does consciousness mean? Or in this book, what are the boundaries—and the blurred connections—between who I “am” and how I am being pressed to behave, day after day?
                One of my mentors, Melissa Littlefield, used to study “lie detectors.” As far as I understand, one of her starting points was turning to consider the theory of the world that is a foundation for “lie detectors.” If you believe some technology can sense, in someone’s physiology, that they’re lying, then doesn’t that mean you also believe that a “lie” is something physiological, like a brainwave, or a certain kind of brain wave? Years ago, Melissa and her colleagues did a bunch of brain scan experiments that indicate something wrong with that underlying theory. What “lie detectors” look for (they argued) is actually some kind of stress response, which someone might experience while trying to get away with a lie, and also might experience while telling a truth they expect to be received poorly. There are lots of reasons to be stressed. Hearing Melissa talk through this, I found myself wondering, why was I so ready (at 15, at 20) to believe that lies were a physical category, something like light that the right kind of telescope could pick up? What kind of cultural stories and values made that belief so appealing?
                Now I sit holding Sorcery and Small Magics, wondering at the difference between me and what I’ve learned. Or maybe what I’ve been taught: what’s been impressed into me. If there were curses and countercurses, and a curse could push my thinking onto a certain path day after day, what would the distinction be between that path of thinking and “me”? Would a countercurse be able to distinguish it? Of course I don’t know, but the wondering makes me think, how can I be careful with what I’m learning, and reflective about what I’ve learned. And maybe also: how wondrous it is to be always becoming.

by Azlan

550: “this tree has been here” (Ada Limón)

“this tree has been here
all this time, and I didn’t notice.
I swear, I’ll try harder not to
miss as much: the tree, or how
your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets
coaxed all my colors back.”
-Ada Limón, from “The Tree of Fire,” Bright Dead Things pg. 15

                I had an argument once—call it a conversation, call it a tiff—with a friend who preferred botany to poetry, and wasn’t sure why I was reading another book. 
                “It helps me see the plants,” I said.
                “I can go outside and do that,” they said.
                “It helps me—well, appreciate them.”
                “I can go outside and do that if I want. I could go out and do that right now,” they said.
                And perhaps they could. We were sort-of roommates at the time. I went off to my room in a huff. They went off to theirs. I still think about it. I wonder what they were seeing when they went outside. We planted peas together later that year. I wonder what I meant by “see.” What Limón means by “miss.” I think—or maybe I feel: the maple that shook me today with its height and its lean and its balanced weight, that maple is so many things. A home, of course, to more creatures than I can count or name. A fountain of sap for syrup to my neighbor who taps it every year. A bare statue, this time of year, saying I sleep and also I’ll wake. An ocean of shade in humid summers when a dog and I both pause, mouths open, panting. I want to be present with more than my idea of things. A tree: it’s own wide, deep life, woven through with the breath of the windows and the growth of the bacteria along its roots. What else? What more? What colors, coaxed and alive in the interplay of bark and skin and swaying limbs?

by Azlan

549: “I Stretch My Systems” (Barbara Truelove)

                “I stretch into my systems, enjoying the frizz of electricity dancing across my nodes and the widening of my consciousness as more and more servers come online.”
                -Barbara Truelove, Of Monsters and Mainframes, p. 3

                Tonight was our little group’s second night of playing Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, and in addition to dinner, laughs, chats, a crackling fire, and the game, we shared books. Bella and Margie gave us a little stack, including Of Monsters and Mainframes which I started reading as soon as they left. We tried to give Bella and Margie Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned, which they already had, and Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, which they had, and ND Stevenson’s The Fire Never Goes Out—which, wonderfully, they’d never heard of. And it’s wonderful that they were already in love with Undrowned and Jonny Appleseed. That these two books, swirling up in my thoughts as I wondered what they might like, are things they do like. Are in fact already part of the swirling thoughts through which we meet and become friends. Are part of our shared living world.
                Of Monsters and Mainframes follows a synthetic consciousness tasked with flying a spaceship, but robots in science fiction are so often about what it feels like to be human. (Truelove opens her book, “Dedicated to all those running human.exe files. Don’t forget to take a break.”)I feel myself as part of another kind of network. So many of my ideas, my values, my patterns for being are reflections, echoes, responses, continuations, gifts from people around me. I love that. Love the widening of my consciousness as consciousnesses spin.

by Azlan

548: “Thinking and Seeing” (Nick Sousanis)

                “Perception is not dispensable. It’s not mere decoration or afterthought, but integral to thought, a fundamental partner in making meaning. In reuniting thinking and seeing, we expand our thinking and concept of what thinking is.” -Nick Sousanis, Unflattening, p. 81

                I’ve been making space to think by looking lately, and in looking, I’ve been finding paths of my thinking. Some thoughts in images:
                The overwhelm of this particular work week in the scatter of the kitchen table where I’m typing, the lunch bowl and rumpled napkin and loose handwritten pages and book stacks and dried mango and fingerless gloves. The overwhelm and the delight, too: these inspiring books, that sweet mango, those delicious noodles now a memory in the bowl.
                The power of warm soft touch: my partner beneath a blanket, stretched on the couch, typing her own overwhelm or inspiration. Seeing her steadies me, and when I snuggle in beside her I’ll make sure to tuck the blanket around our feet. It’s 9 degrees outside.
                Which reminds me: a squirrel’s tracks and mine and a bird’s in the bright snow. A neighbor’s red hands at the bus stop. Our shared smile-grimace-smile. The snowy road, worn to patches of cement, as we look back, waiting for the bus, trusting, trust and community infrastructure a pattern of bare trees with sleeping leaves inside and the road and the bus coming soon.
                I’ve been looking as a practice of thinking. Thinking along the paths and branches and tracks and patterns I see.

by Azlan

547: Stories Together (Acosta, Dragon, Harris & Veselak)

                “Sal sighed. Parish sighed. Amelie buzzed softly.” -Mercedes Acosta, Jay Dragon, Lillie J. Harris, and M. Veselak, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, p. 310

                Tonight I stepped out from the cozy room—that’s what we call it; it has a fireplace!—to chop some carrots and celery for snacks. By the time I got back, our friend Margie was drinking tea, and Bella had set on the table a bag of sour gummies. (I love sour gummies). They were talking with my partner Majo about holidays, family dynamics, relationships, cooking. We kept talking. Munched sour gummies. Carrots. Celery.
                “Sal sighed,” alone, isn’t much of a story. “Parish sighed” isn’t much of a story. But “Sal sighed. Parish sighed. Amelie buzzed softly”—that’s a story I might want to be part of. And luckily I could be, because Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast is a storytelling game, the kind where friends gather around and make up a story together. (The game has pieces and patterns to support that). Tonight the four of us played for the first time. I don’t have a new idea in this post—at least, I don’t think I do. Just the old idea, or that returning feeling, that writing is my favorite when there are many hands drawing out the words, and my least favorite when it’s isolated, locked in a word processor, individually controlled, alone. Typing this I’m looking down at lyrics Bella wrote on one page of our shared game. At Margie’s little doodle on another page, titled, “Bath salt.” At the colors Majo gave Amelie’s character portrait. And now I’ll stop writing and keep talking with Majo about the game and our days and what snacks to have before bed, because Sal sighed, Parish sighed, Amelie buzzed softly, and it’s in the mix I feel a story moving.

by Azlan

546: “Your Grandma Made That Quilt” (R. Kikuo Johnson)

                “Hold on, bud, your grandma made that quilt…” – R. Kikuo Johnson, No One Else, p. 96

                What work did I do today?
                Some emails, yes. There are always more of those. Some writing toward one research project, some reading toward another. A couple phone calls. More emails. Teaching a long seminar, and last preparations before it, and notes afterward on how I might lead it differently next time. Follow up emails from participants’ questions. And washing an apple, cutting it for my beloved on the cutting board they got me, arranging the slices in a wave around some peanut butter. A snack for partway through a busy afternoon.
                The systems around me keep insisting that work is what I do for payment. In the face of that noise, R. Kikuo Johnson’s No One Else paints with all the hidden, submerged work of families, communities, overlapping lives. At the heart of the book is all the years a woman spends caretaking her elderly father. After the first page, we never see that. Not directly. We feel it: a kind of haunting inside the pages, inside the house’s walls. We hear it mentioned once. We see so little of the grandmother’s and grandfather’s work in shaping the world their family lives in, so little of the kid’s work in trying to care for his mother as she cares for her father. It hurts, all this work that goes unread. And it lifts up lives like sap lifts the leaves of a tree the kid stares into, searching for his lost cat. 
                He finds the cat. It snuggles in his lap. No One Else turns me toward all the work that goes into an ongoing moment, and suggests that seeing might mean opening to what’s outside the frame.

by Azlan

545: “Any Other Day” (Yun Na-ra)

                “I can only do my best. I mean, it’s not like I’ll be more exceptional today compared to any other day.” -Yun Na-ra, aka Brewmaster Yun, Culinary Class Wars (Season 2, Episode 11, 57:07)

                Sometimes I tell myself that this needs to be the best thing I’ve ever written. This effort should be better, stronger, singular, more notable.A lot of my training, a lot of the systems in which I work and learn, ask me to think that way. And then there’s the delight of watching Yun Na-ra make delicious food and talk about her cooking. I don’t read Yun as being (only) self deprecating. She may have her doubts, but her dishes dance. By episode 11 we’ve seen that again and again. So has she. What I hear is something like this: instead of a story about gathering everything you have to do better than you’ve ever done, why not a story about daily practice, the attention and the tools and the community of it, and inside that practice another intent dance toward another meal to share. Delicious.

by Azlan