Thank You

"Eyes of Love," Paris storefront, June 2013

For my writing students.

 “Writing is constantly letting letters arrange into different combinations and meanings.”

-       a student from this last seven-week session

Thank you

for showing up

for speaking out

for putting up with struggle

for laughing when you can

for giving critic space before giving it the boot

for your sincere joy and curiosity

for witnessing words and their energy

for being game to go as far as you can at any given time

for your commitment to the unknown.

Sometimes total strangers trump intimacy in terms of safety and secrecy.

Sometimes metaphor carries deep feeling miles further than it can by itself.

Sometimes when breath hits the bottom of lungs, of diaphragm, something cracks and opens knowing that is otherwise unspoken

there in those spaces we pull out

the shovels

the maps

the compasses

and we curiosity our way through our minds’ landscapes

our hearts’ fire escapes

our instincts’ innate flow

our potential fates’ uneven knowing

Sometimes in the middle of the most ordinary-seeming statements, something clicks into place that’s been edging in that direction, letter by letter, syllable by syllable, for decades.

It’s in those moments

and the gaps in-between

that we practice

this writing.

Sacred and mundane

deep and cheap

real and fantastical

understood and undermined

woven and separate.

Chez moi, ou non pas? (My home, or not?)

"Please don't park here - car exit" Paris, 2012

I remember when I was eleven or so, I went on a trip with my brothers to Ohio, for a family friend's wedding. Staying in her apartment, one of a large building that encircled an active courtyard, I recorded the sounds that were so unusual - normal to someone but not to me - and enjoyed listening to them again and again. I wasn't bothered by being "kept awake" - I was curious about this place where even the pace of speech differed.

I could hear people's conversations, something I didn't often overhear in my quiet, "a suburb not attached to a larger city" town of upbringing. I heard basketball and sirens, yelling and people running around. It was what made me most aware I was elsewhere.

So, when I woke from a nap this afternoon in the lovely, light and open fifth story bedroom of my host's place in Paris, I had a similar curiosity. For a moment, I thought I was at home:
I heard skateboards outside, cars shuffling around one another, a cat on my left, cuddled up close.
It could have been home: comfortable, clean, cozy.
Only, it's not.