Driving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

By: Adrienne Rich

The Africa they never show you

The real Africa is the one they never show you. The real Africa is hidden beneath veneer of poverty and hunger and death; a cancerous mass on the face of the earth that the rest of the world term homogenous ‘Africa’. The real Africa is submerged underneath corruption and greed, underneath tyranny and an ostentatious elite, underneath the faces of the people they cannot feed. The real Africa is buried beneath shanty towns rife with dirt and disease, where children are brought up too quickly to survive. The real Africa is under a noman’s desert, bare and dry, unable to sustain green and healthy life. No, that’s not the real Africa. The Africa I know, the Africa that is reflected in the warm sunshine that you can feel burning inside of you. The Africa that shines from warm, spontaneous smile. The Africa that is at the heart of sky-high mountains and tropical jungle, of golden sand dunes nd lush green grassland. The Africa that is at the heart of different people, different languages, differnt cultures, different identities who all call this land their home. The land where moyo muti unomera pauno; where roots take hold and don’t let go, solid as the baobab tree that has always been and will always be there, standing steady and solid against the menaces of time. My Africa is where my heart resides even when I am long gone and far away, where my mind drifts to across the distance of a never-ending ocean. The real Africa can be smelt the minute you step off a plane onto African soil and feel the air calling you, beckoning you home. The real Africa is the chaos and the calm that exist side by side as honking cars zoom past on streets that run parallel to cows grazing peacefully in a field. This is the real Africa, the one they never show.


-Unknown

kids

IF

BY RUDYARD KIPLING

If you can keep your head when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, 
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

A new year, a new intention

2011 came and went. Just as it was meant to. I looked back today at where my 2011 began. I breathe and it feels like I have lived a few lives since then, I breathe and it feels like yesterday. Not a single month without travel. Each lunch and brunch and sleep over documented. It looked like this:

Missouri Arkansas Louisiana Texas New Mexico Arizona California Washington Oklahoma Missouri New York Connecticut Rhode Island Massachusetts Missouri Tanzania Michigan Illinois Missouri New York Massachusetts Rhode Island Missouri Illinois Missouri Oregon Missouri Utah Missouri New York Massachusetts Washington DC Missouri Texas.

It’s almost exhausting, but it was a kick ass year. January 1^st 2011, Recently back from Tanzania, I drank in the New Year with family. The ones who I honor the most. The days came, and the year brought many things. Marriage, death, birth, engagement, dismayed, betrayal, hope, honor, discouragement, perseverance, perspective, denial, truth, pain, joy, contentment, turmoil, triumph. I reflect on the small moments and the grand gestures but most of all, among these, the stillness and the words that formed the shifting that occurred. The shift within me that no one else sees. The shift in intention and mentality and approach to humanity, and to love. It’s beginning. I fuck it up all the time, like today. But I notice now. And I am shifting my intent and my focus and how I show up for the world, and how I show up for me. I hope one day this will transform me, that one day I will really embody love in a new way, that loves well. I may be old and gray before its recognizable, but it will be my life’s journey. I will love with purpose and trust and connection and support and boldness and freedom and joy.  It's 2012 and I endeavor to be someone new this year, someone new for me and someone new for you. Here’s to loving, to failing, and to loving again.

"Change comes from millions of tiny acts that seem insignificant." - Howard Zinn

If we truly knew that, believed that, then we wouldn’t hesitate to take those acts.  

water

Happiness comes more from loving than being loved; and often when our affection seems wounded it is only our vanity bleeding. To love, and to be hurt often, and to love again - this is the brave and happy life.
- J. E. Buckrose

Wake up. Day calls you
to your life: your duty.

And to live, nothing more.
Root it out of the glum
night and the darkness
that covered your body
for which light waited
on tiptoe in the dawn.

Stand up, affirm the straight
simple will to be
a pure slender virgin.
Test your bodys metal.
cold, heat? Your blood
will tell against the snow,
or behind the window.

The colour
in your cheeks will tell.
And look at people. Rest
doing no more than adding
your perfection to another day.

Your task 
is to carry your life high, 
and play with it, hurl it 
like a voice to the clouds 
so it may retrieve the light 
already gone from us. 

That is your fate: to live
Do nothing.
Your work is you, nothing more.

- Pedro Salinas

For now.

I am within myself. Full of me.  Embodying who I am. I am in my mind, in my heart, in my body, in my step, in my vision, in my voice. I perceive me as me, as I am, not as I am perceived. I am the me I create, the creation I am.