Tag: love

536: What “I’m Asking” (Tochi Onyebuchi)

“Hell yeah, I’m lost. More lost than I’ve ever been in my damn life.”
“I don’t have the answer you’re looking for.”
“Answer? I don’t even know what question I’m asking anymore.”
“But you’re still asking it. That is the important part. That is always the most important part.”
                -Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season, p. 178

                I just got back from a walk with my mom. Well, my mom’s some thousands of miles away, actually, so what I had with me as today’s 68 degrees dropped toward tonight’s 36 was my jacket and my phone and her voice, walking along with me. And the blowing leaves. And the shadows of someone else at the park, also talking to someone on their phone. And the trees, the clear skies, the moon. The traffic sounds. The silences in between.
                I’ve lived far away from my family since I was seventeen. For whatever reason, this year’s been especially hard. There are probably several good reasons for that, but instead of trying to lay them out, I’m thinking about the leaves that swirled by with our voices on the evening wind, and the little chill in my fingers, almost pleasant, that’s drifting away now that I’m warming up inside. I think years ago I started wondering what happens if I turn less toward answers. (I know I miss you). I think, these days, I’m also letting go of questions. (What can we say to connect?). Or some of them, at least. There are still the questions that we can’t put into words, and whatever is between and through the questions. The rustling leaves. The wind. Someone else on the phone, talking to their loved one. The branches drawing pictures in the sky. The traffic sounds. The silences in between.

by Azlan

534: “Much Together” (D’Arcy McNickle)

                “Even then, it seemed, they said but little to each other, yet nothing went unsaid that needed saying.
                In those days they were much together.”
                -D’Arcy McNickle The Surrounded

                My sibling’s visiting for a week. In the kitchen just now, actually, baking bread. Ten minutes ago we were lounging on the couch together. Earlier today we were walking beneath sycamores. (I love sycamores: the patterned bark, the broad leaves, the nobby branches like fairytale walking sticks or heretale hands waving hello). I think I feel a pressure, when I get to see a loved one again after a long time apart, to try and say everything. To talk it all out: the catching up, the reorienting, the worrying, hoping, planning, sharing. And I really do like talking. I am, I think most of my loved ones would agree, a talker. But I’ve also been sitting—or walking—with the limitations of all that saying. The saying (for me) can be a way of trying to undo the distance we also live in, our lives growing in different places. It works in some ways, and in some ways it doesn’t. More than words, what I want is our connections. And when we also live far apart, when we are together, I want that time together. Here is still a distance, not undone but not all-doing. And here’s our closeness. And here are these walks beneath the sycamores, shared steps, shared stillnesses. We are much together.

by Azlan

528: Reading to “Stay In The World” (Bec McBride)

                “If I don’t read, I get distracted from what’s important to me […] reading helps me stay in the world.” -Bec McBride, in conversation with me today

                At 11:30 this morning the world felt wonderful: Bec and I had been in the park for an hour, sitting in dappled light, catching up about our families and friends, our hurts and how we’re healing, our delights at recent cooler nights. At 5:30 today I was in a real low: a new big chunk of work had landed on my desk, crunching the work already there as it made space for itself. I didn’t know how I would handle everything. And there was something else. My mind clutched, hard knuckled. My beloved Maria José helped me pause for a moment. Helped me remember to step outside. She went with me. Crickets hopped through the grass, and we breathed.
                Lately I’ve been thinking about reading and writing as kinds of worlding. Of making world: of making our world look and feel certain ways. Every day there are so many forces pushing me to world the way they say. Today some commercials, celebrating how world is a chance to buy happiness or bask in “deserved” comfort. My hustle culture to-do list, insisting world is where nothing will ever be enough. News stories about political madmen insisting world is a war that always needs more killing. Posts from activists proposing that right now world is resisting the systems set up to consume us, while building solidarity among all those who resist toward justice. In last week’s post I read Joy Harjo: “Rain opens us, like flowers.” This evening Maria José and I stood outside. I tried to read the trees. They breathe what I exhale. I exhale what they breathe. World as a breath we share.
                For me, reading is one way to slowly, deeply, and sometimes in a momentous whoosh put meaning together. I like reading sounds and silences, movements and words. And learning from Bec, I think I read to find ways back toward the world I choose to keep help making.

by Azlan

527: “Rain opens us” (Joy Harjo)

“Rain opens us, like flowers, or earth that has been thirsty for more than a season.
We stop all of our talking, quit thinking, or blowing sax to drink the mystery.
We listen to the breathing beneath our breathing.
This is how the rain became rain, how we became human.”
                -Joy Harjo, from “It’s Raining in Honolulu,” which I first saw quoted in Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

                My friends, I was writing a different Uproar post—perhaps for next week–when the wind shifted in the window and then it was raining. Clouds’ fingers dancing on the deck. Then I was outside, too, surprised and opened by how thick the water fell. Then I was crouching beneath a little tree in my backyard, making sure the rain barrel was closed, water stitching down around us, earth into sky, now into before into after. Life into life.
                Rain opens us, like flowers.
                There’s been a drought here. The plants lying down, one kind after another, beneath the dry heat. Until I see wilted ground cover like ragged carpet over hard dirt. Now I’m back inside, skin still slicked, long enough to write down that I think the plant stems will lift back up with this. Like I feel myself lifting.
                We listen to the breathing beneath our breathing.
                Long enough, and no longer. And back outside to feel the water soaking down, lavish, luscious, alive.
                This is how the rain became rain, how we became human.

by Azlan

523: “Comes Back” (Hap Palmer)

                “Sitting in a high chair, big chair, my chair, sittin’ in a high chair, bang my spoon!
                -Hap Palmer, “Sittin’ in a High Chair”

                “She always comes back, she never would forget me…”
                -Hap Palmer, “My Mommy Comes Back”

                This week I’ve been showing my beloved Maria José some of the places where I grew up. 
                The path outside my dad’s house, grassy now and scattered with dry pine needles, but deep with snow midwinter when I’m 9, stepping outside to help him shovel. 
                The pier at the lake where we jumped in, the cool dark breaking open to hold us.
                The beach where, at 16, I built a warm, dry little driftwood house with my best friend.
                The pool where my mom held me in the water, and later I learned to swim, somewhere back before my memory of years and ages.
                The hills where I watched tadpoles and frogs, always unsure how one becomes the other, already waist deep in the wonder of mud and algae. 
                Tonight, inside after these places, we listened to songs I remember from before I remember. I’m struck by how lush and joyous such childhood tastes of the world could be. Worlds so full of flavor. I sit with how scary, how sad, these tastes could be. I was a kid sometimes so lost. And grounding. A little more than a year after our wedding, it’s a delight to be sharing these children we were, these delights and uncertainties we’re rooted in, these places we grow.

by Azlan

522: “A Reply” (Moses Ose Utomi)

                “He never noticed that he didn’t get a reply.”
                -Moses Ose Utomi, The Truth of the Aleke, p. 37

                Have you ever talked with someone who doesn’t seem to notice your reply? Who nods, maybe, or doesn’t, and then goes straight back to what they want to say? Have you ever felt a whisper and wondered if you’re doing something like that—if you’re saying without noticing what else is said? I have. Both ways.
                Utomi’s line comes in a moment when his main character, Osi, has written and sent an important letter. And then has gotten caught up in all the other busy, important things he has to do, so he doesn’t notice that the person he wrote to never writes back. I read this and had to sit for a while. Quiet. Whirling. It shakes my ideas of writing and reading. Because the hope is that we’re communicating, yes? That we’re saying and hearing? But how much of my typing away at my keyboard is making space for what I can notice from you (and you, and you)? And how much is leading me back to my own tck tck tcking?
                I mistrust writing. Love it, too, and mistrust it. And I want in it a kind of listening. Which means I love listening practices more than I love writing practices. Which means I’m off, because last night I flew across the country to visit family, and now I want what I hear (my partner and my mom chatting near me) so much more than anything I might say.

by Azlan

519: “You Don’t Know” (Jack Halberstam)

                “You don’t know what your child will be like when they grow up. Just as you don’t know what profession they will have, you probably shouldn’t know what form their social intimacies will take. Maybe they’ll have many friends and date many people. Maybe they’ll be single their whole life. Maybe they’ll join a commune. But the idea that we already know in advance exactly how their life will play out after the age of 23 tames the wild potential of human existence and human complexity.” -Jack Halberstam, in this wonderful interview

                Sometimes—often—I’m sad that so many of my loved ones are in so many different places. Doing so many different things. But today I was outside, seeing all these plants I don’t know growing together and it’s beautiful. With so much up in the air and unknown, I’m trying to listen to Halberstam. To swerve to a kind of open unknowing, a kind of context, in which unpredictability can blossom into wondrous gardens of possibility. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying it’s lovely.
                In the interview Halberstam thinks about “the terms under which unpredictability can thrive.” This isn’t about an individual epiphany. This is looking for social forms that celebrate and support the unpredictable, that make space for different ways that someone might walk. I think about what those forms might be. I think about food systems. Housing systems. Healthcare systems. Education systems. Resistance networks. Mutual aid networks. I think about all the systems that insist they do know what life will look like in fifty years, and how they’re wrong again and again and again. Obviously. Hilariously. Crushingly. With so much up in the air and unknown, I want to feel the wild as beautiful and bursting with life. As it is.

by Azlan

509: “Become Slow” (Thích Nhất Hạnh)

                “Breathing in, I notice that my in-breath has become deep. 
                Breathing out, I notice that my out-breath has become slow. 
                Deep, slow. 
                Enjoy.”
                -Thích Nhất Hạnh, in this guided meditation

                A long time ago, in trying to help her two kids stay calm and engaged on long car rides, my mom brought along cassette tapes of guided meditations from Thích Nhất Hạnh. I don’t think I remember them. But I absolutely remember being told how much we objected to them. It’s part of our family lore: my mom puts in the tape, and then young voices from the backseat are shouting no, no, we don’t want this tape, turn it off.
                All that makes me smile. Perhaps because, one, as life goes along I connect more and more with my mom, trying to support her kids as they shout back nos (which she listened to, by the way—turning off the tape, though I think she tried again after a while). And two, because I recognize the love in it, the love that tries and struggles and offers and sometimes doesn’t go how you expected (and keeps trying). And three, because my partner and I just shared the Thích Nhất Hạnh guided meditation linked above. Listening to his voice—I was wrong, I do remember it, as we remember childhood before the actions and images of storied memory—I enjoy breathing. Enjoy it like leaves drinking in the sun. Enjoy it as lungs sipping at the sky.
                Breathing in, I notice that my in-breath has become deep. 
                Breathing out, I notice that my out-breath has become slow. 
                Deep, slow. 
                Enjoy.
                I love how some seeds take a long time to grow.

by Azlan

498: “Long-Distance Love” (Ishita Dharap)

                “The Long-Distance Love-Letters program has been rescheduled to take place on Sat, February 22, 2 pm, at Krannert Art Museum.” -Ishita Dharap, in an email sent out this afternoon

                I messaged my dear friend Ishita on December 2nd, inviting her to come over and enjoy dinner and a cozy fire. She was in India with her family, she said, and she sent a picture of a truly delicious dinner that I would’ve loved to share. I met her family once. We talked about joy and rest and becoming an interwoven family as leaves rustled overhead and the stars came out in a deepening sky.
                Ishita and I messaged each other again on January 3rd, looking for a moment to catch up, but we wouldn’t be back in the same town until January 12th. Then things were busy. Now it’s mid February. Whenever we catch up, my friend, it won’t be soon enough—and at the same time, all this—and her email today—has me thinking about how the joy and curiosity and support of our friendship isn’t something put off to that scheduled moment where we can see each other in the craziness of our current political moment. That joy and curiosity and support is already woven all through: long distance love, sweet and playful and sad as we say hello from close and far away.
        I haven’t been to Ishita’s Long Distance Love-Letters museum program. Not yet. But I’ve seen her write about it (in a book and a journal article), I’ve talked with her about it, and in imagining it I’ve felt it. Maybe that’s because I’m thousands of miles away from so many of the people I love. Maybe that’s because the stories I often hear told about “long distance” are about missing, about absence. Ishita’s work makes me think back through all the ways that missing and remembering are kinds of touching and playing and learning and being together. It helps me feel that so many of my beloved absences are presences, day after day, in so many ways.

by Azlan

480: Performing Card Tricks (Jean Hugard & Frederick Braué)

                “We cannot emphasize too strongly that knowing the secret of the trick is not the same as knowing how to perform that trick.” -Jean Hugard & Frederick Braué, The Royal Road to Card Magic

                It’s a long way, maybe, from this book on learning card magic to the workshop my partner and I joined last Sunday. And in another way they’re close. In their joyfulness. Their serious playfulness. Their habit of being lost (and found) in the movement itself, and not the knowledge of it.
                Last Sunday’s workshop built on body mapping. We lay on the floor and traced one another’s shapes onto two large pieces of paper. Then we drew around and with our shapes: our hands, our legs, the messy cloud of our hair. We started by tracing with black markers. As soon as I got up I reached for colors. Purples. Pinks. Golds. Next to me my partner started growing roots, up from beneath her feet and into her legs. Watching her roots became drawing my roots. Drawing our roots became twining these roots together, weaving them, our papers and our hands and our colors playing together. At the end of the workshop we were invited to share about what we’d drawn, and I realized I didn’t want to say anything. It’s not that I hadn’t liked the workshop: I’d love it. But I’d felt something and learned something in the drawing, the time together, the crawling on the floor to find my colors, and I didn’t (not then, at least; not yet) want to put any of it in words.
                I know the secret for a few card tricks. At one point I knew how to perform two—how to push a card through the table, maybe, which was always a delight to share on a bored afternoon when we’d forgotten why talking had once felt exciting. Beyond the tricks (or through them?) there’s this playful wonder. This magic. The what? The how? Too often, in thinking, I can mistake the secret of the trick for the practice of its performance, but it’s in the performance that I’m always falling in love.

by Azlan