"Shake off your shoes
Leave yesterday behind you
Shake off your shoes
But forget not where you've been."

Take Up Your Spade
Sara Watkins

I have made and left a lot of homes recently. Every time I prop myself up in a new place, I can feel an old one fade in my memory, to come back in flashes, like a song I used to know. But a new year is starting, and we are pressing onward. To more homes, more places, more people, more life.

Miroirs III. Une Barque sur L'Ocean 

 Ravel 

Performed by André Laplante

If I have learned anything at all from being transplanted from my home, the people I love, and the society I am familiar with for almost 5 months, it has been this:

Push outside of yourself. Real life is born on the edges of ourselves, and if we can die to our small desires, to shame, to the voices that say, “you are not good enough” or, “who do you think you are?”; if we can breathe in, if we can let those things fall to the ground around our feet, and if we can push hard out into the world around us, there will be something there.

There will be adventure, there will be connection, there will be time, there will be space.

There will even be people like you that are willing to talk.

The world is big, it is uncomfortable, it is grossly unfamiliar. But if you can push through that outer edge, crack through the shell that separates you from that which is not you, and push back, there will be life.

"What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."


from O Me! O Life!

by Walt Whitman


Listen here.

Goodness, it's been a long time!
I'm in Malaysia for the time being and this poem feels a little like the sticky, green, sweet, salty, smelly, and thickness of this country. It's more of a feeling or a sensation than a description, but that's what I like about it. South East Asia is a new sensation that is becoming more quickly recognizable when I see it, smell it, taste it.

"When the elephant’s-ear in the park
Shrivelled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp-light fell
On shining pillows,
Of sea-shades and sky-shades
Like umbrellas in Java."

Tea
Wallace Stevens

"Even in times of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people."

Garrison Keillor

Sit. Look. Listen.

I have been reading letters and it's a funny sensation to read about your life from a different place in it.

I hope your New Year has been full and light. Here's to living well, to being fine and genuine, to living in hope. Welcome 2012.