I’ve had a lot of pyjama days in the last few weeks, but it’s another thing entirely when you commit to an underpants day. Something special happens when you decide to spend a whole day in your knickers. First off, you’ve pretty much committed to not leaving the house. Now pyjamas, you can wear those practically anywhere – anyone I’ve driven to the airport before 10am knows this. But when you’re in your unmentionables Continue reading
While I was having that meltdown sitting in a park freaking out because I’d lost the capacity to think, feeling like I was losing everything that mattered to me, I dug out Selections from Leaves of Grass – a collection of Walt Witman’s poetry I’d just picked up in my adventure downtown. I needed something to focus on, to pull myself out of my panic. Even if I couldn’t think, I could flip through and let the words wash over me. Poetry’s meant for that anyway, something to feel, not to try to understand.
My eyes fell to this stanza from I Sing the Body Electric
I have preciev’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing, flesh is enough.
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly
round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as a sea.
In that moment, I was reminded of what I still had, and that yes, it was enough.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted (or even wrote) a poem, so I’m stealing Walt’s words, to start a sohbet. To hear your poetic responses to being surrounded by the beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing… (God, I Iove that line!)
I broke my brain a few weeks ago, a remarkably frightening experience. Now, I’ve had cognitive burnout before, it’s pulled me out of school on many occasions: an inability to study or take the ideas in my head and find words for them. This was nothing like that. My brain suddenly seemed incapable of any kind of complex processing Continue reading
Two very cool and very geeky things have happened to me this week. One: a very benevolent soul has traded me an old acer laptop (this thing is vintage baby! – the wireless network card is externtal!) just choc-ful of open source software. I’m composing this piece on it right now, on OpenOffice of course! As an amusing aside, my laptop is resting on a copy of the Tao Te Chi and an old Make magazine from this summer – that pretty much sums up my brain and my life, eh?
The other humbling and utterly mind blowing encounter was also open source related. A bunch of protospacers got together for a hackathon to write a bunch of code and get the new website up and running (I think I slept through that…). The cool thing is, later somebody got me set up so I could log in and add some content. Well, I logged in and discovered …. Continue reading
I was chatting with a fella the other night, asking him about how he met his girlfriend (I’m always fascinated by the myriad of ways people come together and fall in love) and he followed up by asking me:
What about you, you’re unpartnered right now?
Unpartnered… I’d never heard the term before and found it odd. My state of being as a state of not-being something else. Continue reading
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