trying to recapture something

I think I'm starting to get better. I feel a little more normal. I wish I could itch the inside of my throat. Unfortunately I have a huge gag reflex.

I painted a little sparrow today. She hit the front window yesterday... I spent two hours at least. It's an amazing feeling to challenge yourself. Keeping this watercolor sketch book is working myself in a way I never have. It's really gratifying. It kind of amazes me to look back on my past and see how afraid I was of color, so afraid I wouldn't touch it. I'm not afraid anymore, but I guess in part because I have tools and training now I didn't have then.

I had a dream about Ambika last night, I just remembered it. But just vaguely. She was resting on a chair in this vast building full of open rooms and corridors and I was standing over her talking to some other people. They were saying it was okay, that she was safe, she could wander everywhere in the building because the space belonged to her- but I was still afraid. My Ambika dreams are my gauge for how safe I feel with the most vulnerable parts of myself, the childlike parts. I'm hoping one day I have a dream where she can go anywhere and I'm not afraid. This is an improvement, but not all the way there...

Sigh, my original plan for christmas was to paint for people, watercolor from life... But christmas is a few days away and that never happened. I spent more money than I should have, but I feel okay about it...

I can't lie on my stomach and type, doesn't quite work, damn.

I'll try... I read a speech Bill Waterson gave to a graduating class today. It had a powerful effect on me. I wish I could memorize it and carry his words with me always, a reminder of what's important and to be me at all times. Something about it that would have shocked me in the past was a frankness about life, life after college, that made it rich and sad and real. Satisfying, his words were full, wonderful. It's good to be out of step with the world, very good. Some times I need a reminder because I so easily let the pace, perceptions, beliefs, and prejudices of the world legitimize or discredit my own choices and life. I forget so often and get caught up. Grrr at myself. Is that everything? Have I plumbed my expressable feelings? Something about it was so powerful for me, even just little things in it, like painting michelangelo's god and adam from the sistine chapel on his dorm ceiling, reminiscing on how he put more effort into that than any of his school work because it came from him, "I must obey the inexcruitable exhortations of my soul". That isn't right but I don't think I could easily look up the strip it came from. I was also really impacted by when he talked about being challenged to keep his strip fresh and learning by entering the mind of a six-year old boy everyday.

I was a little girl when Bill Waterson was writing and drawing Calvin and Hobbes. I loved the strip, for very different reasons from why I love and respect it now, as an adult. I didn't realize how much of the comic I didn't understand, I didn't care that it was full of words and concepts I couldn't comprehend, I didn't recognize the philosophic inquiries or the sadness that often permeated the lives of the characters and daily plots. I was a little kid who thought the comic was attractive and fun. Integrity is a powerful and rare thing. That was something else that he brought out in his speech. The recognition that if he commercialized Calvin and Hobbes that he would lose them, lose their identity and voice.

I'm going to bed.

Hear me

I have some quandaries on my mind. The big one is how valuable is an individual soul? (How many sins can be forgiven in the hope of transformation?...) Thoughts are always more erudite when they are new, I didn't have a chance to blog it when first reflecting... I guess I'm coming at it from two perspectives, reincarnation and salvation. Can a Hitler be saved, forgiven? or reincarnated even... Is that soul valuable enough to risk continued suffering inflicted on countless people in order to keep it? If not where is the boundary? Then there is the other side, the desire of those who suffered for justice. For their suffering to be paid for in a sense, atoned, satisfied. If a tyrant is forgiven are his victims betrayed? I guess I'm wondering about it because I've started thinking about this strange balance achieved in life through both evil and good and how they do seem to be connected, almost necessary to each other. I can't fully understand why or how, but I want to try.

So it's the holidays and every where we go we hear christmas music, both secular and religious. The lyrics of one song were expostulating their disbelief at the suffering inflicted on Jesus and it struck me that the attitude from the christian perspective is often how unbelievable and awful it was for man to torture and kill the son of god, but it seems just as maddening that we do it to anyone. I pictured the song being reconstructed to include expressions of disbelief as a list of innocent peoples names and the crimes against them were recited. I think part of the significance of what Jesus did is that he went through what we go through, the commiseration. I think it's a part of us trying to be in god's camp. Trying too hard? We watch the movies, relive the story all in part to manipulate ourselves to feel really bad. I'm tired of trying, I want to be real. I want what I feel to be real and to express it. Not to try to feel what I think I'm supposed to.

I'm sitting in my cherry spot, the magic zone where I get perfect pirated internet reception almost all the time with little to no interruption. It is a bit awkward, it works best beside me and not on my laptop.

I've had a cold for many days now, many days more than I can stand. The symptoms are often thoroughly miserable. Night is generally the worst part of the cold, the time when I'm supposed to be resting and recuperating. No, instead I'm waking up frequently to blow my nose or because I have a relentless sinus headache that is aggravated by everything (including lying down. Most nights the thought running through my head is a big fat FUCK) Every time I'm sick it's the same thing, don't sleep well or long. Oh, the other thing that is killing me is at night the air I breath through my nostrils becomes cold and biting against my throat and it stings and dries me out. The surface of my nostrils is red, dry and soar from blowing it (despite having the best tissues in the world- Puffs with lotion. Pure bliss.) One thing I think is a kick about being sick is the inevitable voice change, entering a deeper range that carries all this weight and power behind it! Sarah, god of thunder! Hear me!

I can't wait to be well. :(

I also can't wait for christmas to be over, just the day, not the season. The rush and madness that go with it- that part needs to be over. This turns out to be how I feel about all significant holidays now. I just wanted Thanksgiving to be over so I wouldn't feel over burdened and anxious anymore.

I bought a wacom intuos2 graphic tablet for myself (my christmas present to me) off ebay. Of all the big purchases I've made lately I actually fully owned that one. The whole process, hoowuh. That feels great! I decided I would use the money I get at christmas to offset the cost, and I decided to make the winning bid on it 2 minutes before it closed. I was plagued by massive doubt and guilt over both the computer and photoshop. Which, incidentally, I both love deeply. My life is fuller because of their presence. Those, my ipod, a couple very special pieces of costume jewelry, my 35mm manual Nikon camera, my electric miter saw, my pocket sized watercolor set and sketchbooks, and my cats all make my life fuller and put a special warm feeling in my center.

That's it, those are all my feelings for now.

plus one more, I have such a hankering to play super nintendo in the winter, that and knit.

A Consuming Sadness

Oh heavy sadness, that hangs over my heart, like a fog clinging to the deep pine hills. A coat of cold covering my being.

How do you evoke color and 'the feel of things' with words? It is a search for me, an internal search. Conducted mostly intuitively. I want to write my feelings the way an artist paints theirs. I don't like literal, it's one sided, misses the soul. The soul hides in metaphor, illustration, it brings you somewhere the way a path does. The path doesn't spell out what it's doing. Even now my words frustrate me because they sound kind of woo hoo, pseudo, lacking sincerity. I don't know, I don't know. It's my song...

I've been experiencing a new sadness. It's not a despairing sadness. There is this constant sense behind it that I feel okay, even happy. But it is still so powerful at times. I think maybe that is what life is. Deeply, even comsumingly, sad- but beautiful and okay. I can easily identify why life is sad. I think most people can. It's harder to capture why it's okay. I know it has something to do with what I keep seeing again and again. True joy, true beauty, good people, and moments that contain something... But it makes me wonder about god and what god feels and sees? Does god experience deep sadness? A continuosly broken heart? Not broken because of lost love, but to see the suffering of so many living beings, so many small and precious things... ( I want god to be like me.)

A long time ago I wanted to create a blog just for poetry. I think now that my readership is down so much, I kind of feel a freedom to be, well, unusual. That won't be what this becomes, ultimately. Just at times. Or in little places.

I had a dream about betrayal. But not in any obvious sense. It was about my cousin. Her family was staying with us and she was very sick. With something like a flu or stomach virus. What I see when I think of the dream is this view into the bathroom, in the darkness, of her sleeping on the tiolet because she was throwing up bile so frequently she couldn't leave. All I felt in the dream was a fear for myself. All I can think of now is that little girl confined to the bathroom, sleeping on a toilet... That was how I was for so long, afraid of getting sick. Unable to feel anything for those who were suffering, just looking out for me. What I hate is a large remnant of that fear is still there. It isn't what it was. But I have some pretty negative feelings towards myself because of it. I worry about myself. Will I be able to become a better person? Will I let my weaknesses and my fears always rule me?

The more I learn about Muslim faith and beliefs it reminds me of old testament Israel. Bloody, wrathful, unbending. How can so many people want to live like that? It's incredibly unstable, there is absolutely no security. It seems to bring with it everywhere destruction, poverty, and extreme suffering. I know I mostly speak of the fringe, which seems to grow, like a poisonous bacteria. I see the same mind in all fringes. In the christian church... A poison, a deep insatiable hate, a flame that never dies, but consumes everything in its radious. People almost foaming at the mouth with hate. Where does it come from? Why do people become so infected? Maybe that is what the zombie architype represents? The true living dead, who posses the power to turn others into what they are...