12:58 am

What happens when you no longer identify with your identity?
Who do you become when you are no longer inspired to be the person you were? When the things that gave you so much joy don’t, or even worse, when they feel like obligations. You are who you are. I am who I am. I am what I do, where I go and how I treat people.
I want to be how I treat myself.
I am afraid I am not who I am- who people see me as. What do you do when your defining character no longer defines you? What do you do?

I hide. I write. I crawl into a quiet, private place under a rock in a cave and focus on very little. Sometimes I focus on work. Sometimes I anesthetize. But I don’t leap.

And I pretend.

I pretend to be over it.
I pretend to be strong.
I pretend to be worldly and independent.
Capable.
I pretend to be her… me…
But I am strong, …
Worldly
Independent
Capable.
I pretend to be more so.
How do I become something else? Someone else?

“No one will judge you.” And she was right, except for one. Me. I will judge me. I identify with my identity so much that it defines me, even now though I don’t recognize it, like I am wearing someone else’s clothes, like I am reading a book about somebody else. I want it to be mine. I want it to be me, like it once was, but it no longer fits and I don’t recognize the words.
And I don’t know what else to do, to be.

And in this moment I am afraid… afraid that what will define me, what will become my new identity my new definition is the walls I have built, I am building, the walls of the cave in which I am hiding. I am the rigid, exterior. I am becoming something else while waiting to mourn the loss of my identity. But she is not me and she is not who I want to become.
“No one will judge you” but me.

3.6.10

If you can't write the truth don't write at all.
metaphors are hiding.
silence is hiding too, but at least it is real.

the Idiot-wise

I am retarded in the strictest sense of the word.
Is it possible to be so impeded, so slowed that I could be actually devolving…

I feel that I am getting younger as time goes on. But the reality is that I think I prematurely matured and this resulting equalizing it causing my regression.
While I have recently realized that I am not the same age as my students, I spent the last 5 or 6 years feeling that I was very much in the midst of puberty, not feeling much more than 15; awkward and giggly, shy and at the same time feeling very much like an adult, but still with that sneaking feeling that I might not be.

It was a new sensation; I don’t remember having that feeling in high school. I was certainly a hormonal and social mess, but this was different, like I was finally old enough to be 15 (of course I was a decade older than that). While my students have stayed roughly the same age, I surprisingly, somehow have not… and I wonder how much I have matured in the past years. Is it possible that I am not (or is maturation, like the most potent of realizations, that true maturity is its own antonym)? Now that is sophomoric, the wise idiot… or is it more “moronsophoic”… the Idiot-wise?

Regardless of how I can bend words or ideas, I still feel lost in myself, my perception and how I am viewed. I wonder if somewhere in that mess of perceptions and misconceptions, I am hidden.

Realizing that whether intended or not, feeling asi or not, I am in fact an adult, 15 twice, (quite possibly, against my will). Sadly, now that I am ready to face all the teenage challenges that I was too scared or too wise and mature to fall, I fear that it is no longer appropriate. And the things that I should be doing at this stage of my life, I have no idea how to begin. I feel more like a weasely, awkward teenager than the independent woman others see. And in fact, my students are too sophisticated for their own good too. So maybe we start old, and growing up means realizing how to be the children we escaped from with all our maturity.

So I embrace my adolescence.
Better late than never. Cierto?

“If you liked it you should have put a ring on it”

Jealousy is a sharp knife

When she moves down the street, with her little sway and waddle there creates a commotion; the desired effect. Every wisp of hair, every adornment and effort made to create this ripple, while looking like no effort was taken at all. The park locals hush to a whisper; the boys look away from whomever else it is they are each nuzzling to keep an eye on her as she passes. The taxis make extra effort to make sure she isn’t in need of a lift. Every effort is made.

The exterior is worshiped, adorned and bedazzled. The exterior is praised. She does her work, and it does its work. Drawing attention as she walks, seemingly in complete oblivion. Just a girl, no effort what so ever. Just a woman on her way. Because it is all part of the dance, and when this part yields the next part the music stops and a new dance begins. The effort is made, but now with a different purpose. The effort is also now to protect what she now claims, her prize, won on the battlefields of beauty and charm. She protects her future, her security and her claim. She, like a lioness, protects with ferocity even if it is the subtle, and seemingly effortless kind. She will protect her den and her stake on this man with the same cunning that she employed to win him: dazzling beauty, effort disguised as nature and manipulation (with or without the negative connotations and overtones).

It is both a threat and a compliment for what she defends so ruthlessly; it is for her station and for her respect. It is with this devotion, demonstrated as viciousness, that she honors her man, shows him that he is valued, and that she will bare her teeth and claws to maintain her right to claim him.

And the dance goes on.

Some of this is cultural, and other women no longer stalk their prey in such manners, nor do they defend so fiercely. It is a delicate line to walk when do you hunt, when do you become the prey; when do you dig in and fight for what is yours and when you let this one go, catch and release?

Have women really changed that much? Has nature evolved at all or just been retarded by social trappings, things with fancy names like propriety, liberation, independence, education, property, civilization and formalities? How does a man know she cares unless she bares her teeth, defend what you love and fight to the death? How do women hang on to what they want while seeming so aloof? Is there a way to walk through the park and be seen for who you are, beyond your sway and waddle? Who are you beyond your sway and waddle?

The man is the hunter, or is so often said, but what if it isn’t that way? Not the way we have always thought, the way we have always said.

How come in nearly every species but our own, the males are the more decorative, the more bedazzled and with the most plumage? Is the plumage what makes the hunter? How else are women supposed to navigate this dance? Teeth and feathers, dancing, swaying with claws out.

So she moves through the park, head up, tail out, feathers glistening in the light and swaying in the wind, ready to be the hunter or the hunted, while looking like no effort was taken at all.

Full. still. hungry

Full and hungry

Resting and tired.
Content but melancholy

Bored and excited.
Hungry and full.

Lonely while occupied (surrounded) and engaged.

Hot and cold.
Wanting yesterday and tomorrow, but not today. Not now.
Half full -half empty? No overfull, bone dry and barren.
Gushing, bubbling and silent and cold. Withdrawn and warm.
Jubilant and sullen. Private and open.
Compassionate and unforgiving.
Patient, with so many things patient, but not the one that matters.
And still… Hungry and full.

a love affair with the rain.

The rain can’t deter me. The pit in my stomach neither. The glory of the familiar and the mundane is raining down on me, literally trickling, spitting, pattering and in the hot breeze battering me with reminders. Momentary awakenings and the physical properties of sunshine.

Tired. Still. Hungry, not really. Ready and not ready. Hiding and basking. Is it possible to have too many contradictions? Is it possible to ruin a computer in the rain.
Is it possible to fall in love with yourself? Or break-up for that matter?
Kiss me rain. Kiss me tender and caress my hair, my arms and ankles. My cheek.
The sun threatens to break through those clouds and break up this wonderful love affair of the afternoon. Your unrelenting passion of this afternoon torrent is now gone. More timid and gentle you fall as if for the first time, unaware of the power, force and romance you hold within each droplet of your being. You dance with the wind, but I feel as if you fall only upon my skin. Is it possible to love a force of nature?
And when the torrential afternoon passion is gone and the land is quiet and water seeps into the soil, once the birds have ruffled their feathers and the bamboo no longer drips, where will you be? Who will stay with me? You will go back to where you came from, no idea when you will return. Back to the river, back to the lake, back to the sky. Who am I to ask you to stay? What can I give you in return?
So I sit on the balcony railing and let you kiss me good-bye; the wind already pulling at my hair tearing you away. And when the sun breaks through the clouds and others sigh in relief, you are gone. And all I am left with is… a love affair with the rain.

Life as a Rocket Ship

Why anyone would want to and why nobody has is well beyond me.
Quick, now. Think of the thing you want most in the world. Ok now, DON’T concentrate on it. In fact now try not to think of it. I bet you can’t. Ha! Exactly. That is what I thought. Me either.

So how do I do it? They say that you can’t get what you want when you focus on it, and you can’t often get what you want if you don’t know what it is, and then others say that once you get what you want you may discover that you don’t want it after all… Sadly, at one time or another all those anonymous pseudo- sages have been correct. At least as far as my life is concerned.

So maybe it is not in my cards to have some of the most basic things in life; was I destined (or have I manifested a reality) to live alone. In my experience it seems so remote, so distant, impossible and unlikely. The few sparks that have lit up my life were short-lived, twinkling lights and seem more like glimmers from stars long dead than realities. And in fact that is what they are. The light that I see is just what is left. As it has traveled so far through time that the light is all that is left. But unlike the stars in the sky, there are only a spare few. Leaving the rest of the night sky dark, blank and dark. Far more comets than stars and certainly no planets. Ok, well one planet… the gravitational pull of that one still lingers and often operates more like a black hole sucking everything into its vacuous darkness.

I once said I wanted to be … I don’t want to be the sun in someone else's sky. Nor do I want to be a moon simply reflecting back on another, trapped in a monotonous orbital path forever circling. I want my light to shine and to be shone upon; I want my orbital path to be intertwined, but not dictated by another's.

As far back as 2006, when I first wrote about this concept I have felt drawn to this image of the “mutual orbit… the Binary star.”

“I want to find my celestial body a new relation. A mutual orbit. And form an ellipse. … I am concerned now both with metaphysics and my own ability to love and to be loved, to release and let the powers of nature work. I want to be a binary star, want to have and orbit around my companion star.
Interminable.
A sun burns brightly and shines on all it sees. It provides light, warmth and life. It is essential. A moon, as far as we know, is dark and lifeless. As far as a comparison, this is entirely unfair, because this is not in fact true about any man. …The moon provides no light. It only reflects the glory of the sun. The moon is miraculous… but I want a binary star.” The Orbit, Sierra Melcher. 8.27.06

And as I look around in the world on every continent across cultural and age boundaries, across religious and linguistic groups, people have managed to find their own celestial relationship… whether it be sun and moon, stars in the sky, comets passing or bodies united through space and time; they have each managed to find their orbit.

Yet, I remain without such consistency. I have been living my life more like a rocket ship darting to and from distant and remote regions of the universe seeing all the wonders of the world, bearing witness to the glories of God and space as they exist in people and nature. And I have docked several times to gather supplies, so to speak, but never have I rested long enough to develop a gravitational pull of any kind. And there has, up to this point, been no space in my ship for others. Will I be a rocket man, or is there a more intimate, less glorious path I can travel.
Will the allure of the distant reaches of the world lose their appeal, will the basic forces of nature ever catch up with me, or will I make them chase me into old age when the decisions I never made will be made for me?
Is it possible to be two people? Is it possible to live life to the fullest without giving up on something?