The Lone Star State

(This is a bit late: I apologize)

I’ve survived a week in Texas, and truth be told it hasn’t been that hard. I’m settling into the heat and daily giving thanks for air conditioning and welcoming the rain with a knowing smile because it somehow brings comfort. I still don’t entirely know why I am here, but I do feel taken care of.

Next week, Than begins his graduate program, and the school I work at begins classes. I’m anxious to get a sense of this place and its people: cultures and customs. I think I understand why “middle-America” sometimes seems so insular. I don’t think Texas technically qualifies as middle-America, but in my mind I equate the two. Anyway, there is something about being landlocked in the middle of dessert and miles of fields that just makes you forget about the rest of the world. All you really need to know is where the nearest store, gas station, and church are. I’ve met so many people whose radius of knowledge by choice or circumstance is 100 miles. It’s a bit endearing (although this is still probably part of my own cultural bias) – generations growing up together, side by side. Parents, grandparents, children, with intimate knowledge of one another. Families spread out and planted like treees, connected to the very land itself. Richness of life found through one another. It’s also been a bit shocking to hear many people express, “I don’t like traveling."

I knew when I moved here and still know that this is not me, but for this season – it is me. This is my home now. And this isn’t entirely foreign to me. Though I’ve come to embrace urban “cultured” life, my roots are somewhere in the great plains of Manitoba, in the mixed tongue of low German. My roots are found somewhere in the corn fields and cattle farms and homesteads that have not remained untouched by the modern forces of change. We all scattered as seed; the land sold off and stolen piece by piece.

I trace my line through my mother. As I have grown older, it becomes clearer why. The stories we embrace and tell about ourselves. I grew up in Germany. My mother is Canadian, but not just Canadian: Mennonite. My family emigrated from Holland to Prussia to Russia to Canada. I completely ignore the generations on my father’s side who I have never met or known, who grew up on American soil. As far as I know, my father’s line begins with his mother in the great northwestern state of Oregon, and I’m from the Northwest: somewhere that is far removed from the center of our country, the last territory discovered, on the edge of an ocean which connects us with continents thousands of miles away.

But at the moment, it all seems irrelevant. Now, I’m from Texas.

The Elders

Hope for the world.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/EXERES/59C0C017-4A63-4F97-9D91-D1A336A2B83A.htm

divisadero

Michael Ondaatje has a new novel out, which I discovered by chance through Wikipedia yesterday at work. It must have been orchestrated by the stars because this novel is really brand new (as in The Stranger reviewed it this week). My heart is pounding, and this morning I am craving and savoring the possibility of buying this book and losing myself in it. It's lust in the truest sense: is that wrong? Possibly.

July

I feel restless – alert when I need to be tired and tired when I need to be alert. I am ready to go to bed at 7:30 only to feel wide awake at 10. I wake up at 5:30 clear-headed and by 7:00 AM I’m stumbling through the day. I can hardly drink coffee.

I spent the last two weekends at home and just felt weary but also pleasantly surprised by an ache in my side. Gazing at the great arched backs of gentle warrior mountains, I no longer felt tied to the sweet air and the blistering sun. I felt ready to leave and finally to say: this is not my home and this is not my family. This is something else, once removed.

My family is growing from my limbs, from the soft tissue of my side, from somewhere deep in my heart – I think. Love, now, is thicker than skin. Even if we decided we didn’t want it, it would still choose us. Love is like breath. It slides between our angry gazes and our sharp words and keeps us close.

I like you close. Sometimes you are the only person in the world that I can tolerate. The only person who keeps me sane or keeps me calm. And sometimes you are the one I cannot tolerate, the one who makes me crazy, makes me angry. But that’s ok. I still want you near

christian sex cult

As a former member of the Christian Sex Cult, I highly recommend reading and reflecting on this article: http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=226.

Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen seems like a good soundtrack for today. It is rainy and sad in Seattle, and yet, I'm murmuring still...

If it be your will
if there is a choice
let the rivers fill
let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell,
if it be your will
to make us well.

In times like these, all we can do is ask for mercy to draw us close and bind us tight so that we can stand - somehow - in these rags of light.



I recommend Leonard Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat and, of course, If It Be Your Will - haunting, beautiful, rich.