reading.

it's winter break, meaning i have way too much free time on my hands.

going out of my mind.

resolved to branch out and start reading for fun again.

starting with German lit.

i'm really falling in love with Rainer Maria Rilke, and i thought i'd share some of my favorite bits:

Entering

Whoever you may be: step into the evening.
Step out of the room where everything is known.
Whoever you are,
your house is the last before the far-off.
With your eyes, which are almost too tired
to free themselves from the familiar,
you slowly take one black tree and set it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made a world.
It is big
and like a word, still ripening in silence.
And though your mind would fabricate its meaning,
your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.


Lifting My Eyes

Lifting my eyes from the book, from the
tightly sequenced lines
to the full and perfect night:
Oh how like the stars my buried feelings
break free,
as if a bouquet of wildflowers
had come untied:

The upswing of the light ones, the bowing sway of the heavy ones
and the delicate ones' timid curve.
Everywhere joy in relation and nowhere
grasping;
world in abundance and earth enough.

it looks as though that time-honored tradition of accidentally and melodramatically reading books that go along with whatever post-adolescent/adolescent experiences i'm going through.

all i want to do is set out and write well.

too see and create.

give back.

set out, run away.

be me.

the only thing that's stopping me, i know, is myself.

i need to finally grow up and prepare myself for doing the things that make me happy.

i don't ask for much.

i wake up first.

i'm standing under the running shower head, soaking in the night before.

the door creaks open and you quietly close it again.

gently pull the curtain back and stand behind me.

you put your arms around my waist and press yourself into my back.

kiss my neck.

and we just stand there for a little while.

the night hasn't ended yet.

i turn to face you, kiss you.

i touch your face and your body.

"I'm blind without my glasses," i say, "I can't see you, but you feel beautiful."

i become a little embarrassed by this confession, but you put your hands behind my head, stroke my hair with your long fingers, and pull me into another kiss.

not too long.

just right.

and we stand there, holding each other.

fessing up.

i don't want to become my mother, a fearsome, broken vessel with only the shards of regret held together by anger and resentment to build her frame.

she wanted to be an artist.

to run away and become the person she always wanted to be.

but she was denied these things.

for so long, her entire being was crafted for her, forged in tradition by her parents' hands.

she went on to finally - so she thought - find escape.

but the world she came to was just as cruel and withholding as the one she left.

she had to trade her passion in for pragmatism.

raise her girls to succeed in the lives she knew and feared they would grow to hate as much as she did hers.

pass on the legacies of duty and practicality.

train them to be as realistic and prepared as she was forced to become.

but she failed.

underneath all those talks of what was right and real and attainable were whispers of an unforgotten, unforgettably passionate and angry past.

we heard the whispers.

soaked them up like sponges, more than we could ever do with the shrill call of reality.

we became passionate, too.

angry with the system that broke our mother and took her in.

i want to be an artist.

i want to say the things my mother never got to paint.

i want to prove to her and to all the nay sayers that the most real and most practical thing we can do is to have passion and to act on it.

to be the selves we were always meant to be.

to outweigh the anger with happiness and love and sincerity.

to stop breaking ourselves and to create and commit to the selves that hide, secretly, underneath all of the fear and doubt.

i don't want to be my mother as she is.

i want to be me and provide some ounce of comfort to the woman with night terrors.

i want to turn her nightmares into dreams and dreams into reality.

i want to give that secret self of hers a sense of solace.

and a voice.

going back.

the older i get, the more people i meet, the more i find out how much i've been missing out on.

i find myself reading and rereading old childhood gems that went ignored in my mother's effort to fashion 3 grown-up women out of her own regrets: a method that inadvertently let me forget to grow.

so now when i read Rowling or Silverstein or Juster, i'm learning more - or about the same - from them as i have from my fledgling adulthood or the presumptuously Big World i was once convinced had all the answers to all the questions i could ever have.

but the truth is, i'm coming to find that i haven't been asking the right questions or the most honest ones.

or any, even.

for so long my truest voice has gone unheared and unused, drowned out by that wful din of other voices - borrowed voices - that for too long spoke for me.

so now i'm constructing my own Neverland: walls built high to keep it untainted and unchecked and my own.

to guard the foundations of unconditional love and generosity and curiosity and hope and courage and the unyielding promise for change and growth that can come by taking the time to enjoy the simple pleasures of quiet nights or flapping sails or leaves that brown in fall.

all these things get lost in translation, between the jump from brief childhood innocence to supposed budding and predtermined adulthood.

all too often i see that missing glint in the eyes of passersby, jaded friends and family who, having long since passed that age of wonder, have lost that purity and strength of heart that got them here in the first place.

i wouldn't say that i'm a bad person, or an idealistic one, and i'd like to think that i'm kind and gentle, but i would also add that i'm unwise and unlearned, and the more i see those faded or absent sparks, the more i want to find out where they went.

have i lost m ine?

can you lose something you're not sure you ever had?

i'm on a quest now for my own Rhyme and Reason, to discover my own glint and help return those missing to the eyes of their desperate and rightful owners.

the fact of the matter is, though, i'm not a child.

a full recovery of what's been missing is now intermingled with the grown-up experiences - few as they are - that i've been able to collect.

so now, interspersed with mentions of spellbooks and giving trees and trusty watchdogs are cigarettes, red cups, and faulty relationships.

the point here - the upside to all of this - is that i'm learning on my own.

i'm growing.

changing.

finding and using my own voice to say things like, "No," or, "I'll give it a try."

in attempting to fashion my own person - my own beginnings, because this really is my beginning - with the pages of presumably childish fare, and the erratic events and experiences that are forging my adulthood, i am building something new, fine, and, to an extent, pure.

i'm creating me.

it gets better.

i wrote this as something of a treatment/narration for a short video idea that was inspired by Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project.

it's set to Broken Social Scene's "Pitter Patter Goes My Heart" and is intended to play over a montage of various animated sequences as well as snippets of live-action shots.

Pitter patter goes my heart when I get too close now.

Closer than I've ever been.

Because this distance between me and her, you and me, is the smallest I've ever let it be.

It's been broken before.

Once, twice.

Probably more than I even know.

It was born broken, I supposed, because it loved the wrong things, the wrong people, too much.

So it couldn't love me.

But there was never really hate in it, as much as I used to think.

Just too much bad love that no one - not even me - could understand.

It was full of longing.

Longing to belong to someone else or to beat for the right kind of person.

To sustain the kind of love other people thought was right.

Told me was right.

I didn't want this heart to be my own.

I was ugly and weak, and my heart strained under the weight of two bodies: one that was mine and one that was for others.

And it was dying, because the things that could make it happy and full and whole were denied.

And I had to save myself somehow.

Close that gap between you and me, it and others.

To get rid of the strain and let it beat.

I told someone.

And she loved me in that way that sisters do, and every time she said, "There's nothing wrong with you," my heart became fuller and more open and strong.

There was nothing wrong with me.

I wasn't broken, it wasn't broken, and there was nothing wrong with me.

There is nothing wrong with you.

Because you are beautiful because you are you, and there is nothing more beautiful than that love you have to give and that wholeness and strength you have in your heart that's waiting to break through.

And the people it touches - friends, family, lovers - will love it, too, and there'll be so many people sharing that love with the world and with you.

It gets better because you are stronger.

Because you know better than to let the people who're determined to discourage you to hurt you, because you know to hold out for the ones who surprise and love you.

Because you have faith in yourself and you have faith in others and you know that without either of those things you'd be lost and incomplete.

Because love is love and love is right, no matter where it goes and who it's for, and you deserve all of its beauty.

You are beautiful.

The world is beautiful.

It gets better.