Luban @perkwunos - Tumblr Blog

I am deeply moved and aided by Rilke's vision of God. But I am also dissatisfied. Something in me demands—how to put it?—a bit more blood. Something in me, beyond the craveless state Rilke defines above, craves the reality (the divinity) that remains messy, and overflows art and contemplation, and includes great suffering and jags of transformative joy, and is shared.

Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman, Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian

It’s a surprisingly cool night and I changed my bed sheets… this will be a good sleep

We’re getting to that point soon where the stone of July becomes the rock of August.

There’s only one real song in the entire world. Have you heard it?

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Attempting to uncover the basic intimacy of the naked world: crumpling a dried leaf in my hand and dropping it onto the grass.

Struggling with a headache and slight queasiness while nevertheless sitting outside in perfect weather and enjoying 80s pop music in short shorts. I’d like to inscribe some symbols on a clay jar. The sun is stretched like finely worked dough across the earth, baking at a slow and even pace. I feel like I’ve never been happier to be barefoot.

I might start going to a Quaker church. Is this a bad idea?

Made it back home from the beach trip. It was with my family including my three year old nephew so it wasn’t exactly a restful vacation. On the drive back I watched the haze of forest fire smoke merge into a storm cloud, driving through an icy summer rain as smog and moisture gathered in small valleys in the Pennsylvania woods. The end of this trip felt dominated by fumes, smokes, bubbles, foams. Every sound and texture could suddenly turn into a burst of air felt on my cheek in a moment and then it’s gone. Like Heraclitus said, if everything turned into smoke our noses would still distinguish them all. Returning back to my normal life, walking into my house and looking around, everything feels just a bit strange and unfamiliar, though running into my roommate I hadn’t seen in weeks (since he was also traveling) and chatting with him felt surprisingly grounding. Continuing on with whatever this life is: paddling a small kayak through calm waters.

Feels thematically fitting to have my beach vacation interrupted by wildfire smoke. Going out to the shore early in the morning to see a blood-red sun reflected in a smoke-white sea, haze in the distance. Feeling the texture of fish-scales and sand-covered feet; the taste of charcoal, stone grit, salt and mango, sunscreen, light roast coffee, lager, woodsmoke, and sweat on tie dye shirts. I bought a copy of Helen in Egypt by HD at a bookstore and walked around 19th century graves; the imagery that immediately came to mind consisted of scenes from the Merchant Ivory adaptation of The Europeans, thinking about what it means to be American. These types of mildly apocalyptic climate events make me feel both historical and cut away from prior history: are we living in a fashion entirely separate from how people experienced the world two centuries ago, before industrialization and mass culture? There are deep puddles across the Earth with closed eyelids. In the same way that every physical system has properties capable of being measured, of being put in one to one correspondence to numbers reflecting some structural isomorphisms, every image and texture of experience is waiting to be fit to symbols. We are constantly creating our next experience, dipping into some new wave of water: smoke hovering above calm waves, mirroring itself.

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I used to howl at the moon when it was full and I was young. In those days, driving down 202 or into the valley or past the Wawa, when I saw it emerge from between trees or billboards, I would tip my head back and wreck the car's hum and pulse with the long, hot funnel of my voice. I wasn't unmuzzling an animal self. The howling was an obligation, a task to check off until next month. I howled because I was afraid not to--if I missed a night, would I cower forever? Would I husk into a blow-away-able girl? I howled because it scared me, every time, the sound that surged from my chest, and if I could scare myself, then inside that moment, nothing else could. Outside the car, the rest of my life trembled.

Catherine Pierce, American Poetry Review Vol. 55, No. 4