Nostalgia: Laughing Spells

I remember sitting in the corner and laughing uncontrollably and feeling all the better for it.

It was bubble tea night. 9:30 pm had come and gone and the line was out the door of the dining hall, which had the strangely appealing aura of a nineteen sixties summer camp dwelling. After sitting in front of a computer screen for the undertaking of far too many essays that I both loved and hated to write, I’d gone to see the end of semester dance concert. Afterwards, word got around that bubble tea would be served in the dining hall that night, and so I, like just about everyone else on campus, departed my dorm room to join some friends for the almost-end-of-the-school-year festivity.

I was later told that I was staggering in an intoxicated fashion down the hill towards the dining hall. In all earnestness, I’ve never touched drugs or alcohol, though I’ve heard on more than one occasion that I’ve acted, or rather, existed, as though under the influence the majority of my days. ("People don't realize that's it's possible to be so happy when sober," I've been told.) But I can swear that I only stumbled as I did out of awe over the stars. In the midst of the Berkshires with few buildings to cloud the sky and an open field that was given the name Siberia, one of my fondest memories of my college is and always will be the impeccable view of the night sky. Something in the stars taught me how to live a more erratically balanced life. I am forever grateful to them (the stars) for that.

I remember hearing my name called out by my friend further forward in the line, but it must not have quite registered as I resolved to stay absorbed in my own world in the tail of the line. Once inside, I found them at a corner table and alternated between listening to the conversation and laughing to myself. This was only one of my many inexplicable and mystifying spells of knowing bemusement (Note to readers: I am aware that I write in contradictions. Sometimes they seem more honest to me than any other sort of phrasing).

Since leaving college I’ve had these moments of delirious euphoria on a few occasions, and they are always when I feel the most like myself. I wonder what caused them to start and why I believe that they are so strongly at the heart of my essence. Perhaps it is their fading that worries me the most. In the meantime, I wait with bated breath for the onset of another moment of clarity through the medium of laughter. After all, laughter is the best medicine.

Musing On Bliss

Seen on the desk at a local bookstore

Flowers on my street

How can bliss be defined?

For me, it is one foot on the other with sandals beneath, or looking out my window to see a single light on in the apartment across the way (someone else is still awake and thinking too). It is waking up to a day of freedom and adventure, and it is that day’s end, one that’s been long and brought happiness. It is laughing without bounds, to myself or to someone else. It is any kind of love that isn’t turned on its side. It is smiling to a stranger and them smiling back. It is happy surprises: fluffy dogs in shops, street side proclamations of wisdom, unexpected flowers and other notations of beauty, and the fond memories one carries everywhere. It is contented sleepiness put to rest and the hope for another full and bright day to come. It is feeling that things are forgivable.

And finally, bliss, I believe, is being able to walk in the world and see something, anything, worth loving.

Share beauty with everyone

Words of wisdom

Came across this masterpiece on the sidewalk outside my apartment building

Writing: The Great Love and Lie

Image from http://dianaludwig.com/illus/wnwg9.html

Few things in this world frighten me so immensely as the reality of how it is all too easy to lie to ourselves, and to believe our lies so adamantly. Even when it comes to our greatest desires for our lives, we often fail to recognize the truth, even when it is one of the most important recognitions we could possibly make.

These days, I wake up each morning with a new lie weighing heavily on my mind. They’re uncovered in my dreams, in sleeplessness, in tears, in sighs of relief, and in the renewed promise of the early morning hours.

One of the biggest lies I have told myself is that I can be a truly fulfilled and happy person without writing as the central focus of my life. But as tears streamed down my face first in bed and then in such mundane places as the aisles of the grocery store, the palpability of my great lie became evident. Writing was always, has always been, a part of my very being. It compels me to live a more honest and meaningful existence. It makes sense when nothing else does. It is my great solace, and my great ardor.

But you can only kid yourself about such things as this for so long before you remember what is true. It isn’t anyone who’s heart rate speeds up after reading a good sentence, or who wakes each day to look at the Ernest Hemingway quote pasted up on the wall:

Image from http://www.qualitylogoproducts.com/blog/hemingway-quotes-inspire-blogging-writing/

This is, and I believe always will be, true for me. I will never be anything quite as much as I am a writer. And so long as a life of artificial and half-hearted pursuits is not the sort which I long to live, I have found that I must learn to do those things that call out to me (and still whisper to me when I've strayed). Indeed, my only option, it seems, is to hold desperately onto those enduring passions that are so sweetly rare, because when we are lucky enough to find something that means the world to us, that is an occasion that perhaps most begs us to quit our lies and surrender to self-confessed truths.

It is infrequently that I feel I am in such a position to offer advice. However, let this post convey one thing to all readers: If there is something that you love like nothing else in the world, something that keeps you up at night, something that seems like the most genuine pursuit you could possibly undertake, then you must go after it if you can. Not all are so lucky to have the opportunity to pursue the things they love, but if you are, do so humbly and graciously, and always feel a resounding love for that truth you tell to yourself and to the world.

            

One Day

Late morning light

Morning: I woke just like any other day, to the sound of an alarm and that minute measure of dimmed light that falls through the torn curtain over my window. In paisley underwear, I adjusted to my surroundings and departed from the dreamland of the night. Remnants of sleep stayed in my eyes as reality commenced once again and the hours stretched out ahead of me. I felt better after a cup of tea.

Early afternoon: I walked the now-familiar path to the grocery market that is two subway stops and a walk away from my apartment. Rounding the corner to the last straight away, I smiled as I always do when I see the street’s people sitting on stoops, lazily conversing with one another or talking on the phone, or the elderly woman who leans over her windowsill, just watching as the younger generations pass by below. A mother grabbed the hand of her toddler child, and I passed my favorite car in Brooklyn, a worn blue Volkswagen van that’s always parked on the right side of the street. I picked up some groceries and then trailed back, seeing much of the same as I mimicked the walk there. A blonde haired boy walked ahead of me, and we rounded the corner in the unity of strangeness back onto the main street where all is less intimate and affable.

A familiar landmark of my Brooklyn life

Mid afternoon: The subway never ceases to make me smile. Families arrange themselves in the cluster of seats that are as close together as they can manage. Couples sleepily hold onto one another, and often fall asleep on the shoulder of their dearly beloved. A man sits alone in the back of the subway car, absorbing the daily news in its black and white print, sometimes good and sometimes that which warrants tears (and other times, both). Adolescent girls group together and alternate between complimenting one another, conversations that seem to take a turn for the somber, and the most commonplace yet happiest laughs on earth. I take all of this in, intoxicated by the all too rare displays of domesticity, intellectual pursuits, and the foreign familiarity of friendships. Sometimes I’m caught in the act of observing my fellow commuters and must make a choice to either avert my gaze towards the most recent advertisement or smile in the way that means our existence for the next few minutes is kindred. I will not question them as the world so often does. I will not wonder if this is an affectation or if their world has become more insincere than they care to admit. I will share in their madness and happiness, even if only until the car doors slide open and we walk out to the world again.

Where I go to go somewhere else

Evening: This is when the lies come. It’s so easy to feign contentment, until it’s not anymore. Sunset can be beautiful, but it is as though I learned in that literature class as well as from my own studies of the world; if there is beauty, there must be an opposite. And at some point we all meet it.

Sunset in Union Square

Night: My tendency towards bedtime comes and goes. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a particular fondness for it, but even I can admit that there is a certain peacefulness and tired relinquishment that cloaks someone in those few moments, however long or short, that pass between waking's malaise and slumber's restfulness. Maybe we will dream tonight and maybe not. Perhaps the strangest thing is that so often we don’t even wonder whether we’ll dream. That, I think, is the mechanistic side of living. There are good things about the night though. Spotting stars and the glow of the moon in its phase for the passing moment can capture a sort of strange hopefulness for the umpteenth time, as we become sanguine once again, echoing the light of those stars and moon above, wondering what tomorrow may bring.

An Introduction

I first read one of my favorite quotes in the front of Michael Lang’s memoir The Road To Woodstock:

 With blustering resonance, these words echoed in my mind long after the first reading, persuading me to do the things I hadn’t thought to do before, pushing me towards the edge of everything unknown, towards the edge of a found sweetness.

Leaving high school and my hometown of Peachtree City, Georgia at the age of sixteen and traveling to the Northeast for early college was among the first marks of my irreverence for those experiences had merely in the name of convention. It was also a tremendous leap, perhaps more unexpected by myself than anyone else. It was a departure from my chronic cautiousness, and it changed my life for the better more than anything else.

Two years and a degree later, I couldn’t convince myself to stay in college in pursuit of a “higher” degree. For all my vast love of learning and my college’s community, I wasn’t quite fulfilled by the idea of staying in school for another two years. Then the opportunity came to spend the summer in Brooklyn as an in-office extension of my magazine internship. My parents would say, “This is your semester away from school to get some real world experience before returning for your Bachelor’s.” And I would agree, until the point where I stopped agreeing and started to know, intuitively, that some other path was waiting for my trek.

Looking back I now recognize that the first path only saw me attempting to triumph through a footslog, trying to fit myself into the role of my magazine internship position. But then one evening when I left the office, I decided to stop forcing myself into a box that I wasn’t meant for… and I never went back.

All the while, I’d continued nurturing my natural passion for vegan food, scouting out new vegan restaurants and bakeries with great frequency,  observing their inner workings and atmosphere, and taking advantage of finally having a kitchen at my disposal. Then it occurred to me that I just might have a love for the culinary arts and for sharing food that promotes good health for the earth, people, and animals. So while I was lost in my internship, I started to become found in the kitchen and in a wonderful little café called Sun In Bloom, where I recently took a job.

So there I was and here I am now and where I will be I cannot know. The “so far” is all I have, all any of us have. The so far holds our memories and our past cares, our used-to-be’s and our maybe’s, our whispers and our screams, our walking and then running to the now. Every day adds new experiences to our “so far.”

This blog captures mine.

Newly graduated from Bard College at Simon's Rock, all smiles as I approached the next part of my life and what it would teach me.