The Colors Abound

Well, I'm here, back in the 'big city' and all of that. It's nice, too, being in Austin with friends that were fast becoming mere images from old films than actual flesh beings from my year living in Texas. "This is where I live," I whisper to myself, "this is my home now."

After being welcomed at the airport by H, J, Z and N I felt like nothing could touch this chapter in my life. That's what it feels like, too, a new phase. Sure, some of the same characters reappear in my life (some have been imprinted in my own flesh for decades) but there is still that smell of spring, that smell of wandering blossoms and wild lavender in the air that makes me think something's up. What will it be? I don't know, and oh! how I rejoice in the unknowing!

I had a very anchoring conversation, while on my summer hiatus, at a lovely coffee shop, sitting outdoors sipping an iced coffee with my spiritual equivalent of the Dalai Lama. She can be tough, downright brutal, really, but it is her ferocity for truth that reminds me that it isn't just that I seek answers with her, but that I seek them in myself. I think I can say, unabashedly, that this is one of my greatest qualities. Even when I smother truth with pillows filled with naivety, I still keep it alive, even if it's barely breathing beneath my weight. This can also be an obnoxious quality to have, one that is unrelenting and forces you to see far uglier things than you wish. But, in the end, I do believe it is truth that will set you free (and so I use cliches when they are epically appropriate).

When I think of truth I like to picture a photograph in black and white. It looks lovely enough, demure and classy, but if you look closer you see there is one part of it that shines with color. There is that one bright hue that lashes out, drawing you into it, and you know that is where the beauty is, in the realness of what you are. It is a blue door in a dull landscape, telling you that this is where the juicy opening of your life stems.

I am hoping that this next year will be lined in truth. Like the inside of a plant cell, I will guard my walls with impenetrable honesty about who I am and what I want. I will not let people make me less than that. I will teach as best I can, while quietly unraveling all the ways I can improve (while hopefully gently avoiding any emotional masochism). That I can love with everything inside of me, knowing I will get hurt badly, scraped across highways of human relationships, because that is the absolute only way to find the sum of what I am capable of.

Austin can be a very tricky place to find truth. At times it feels as though you are plucking petals from a flower, asking truth if it loves you or loves you not. Everywhere you look there are those that are lying about who they are and what they want. Their clothes alone remind you how desperately people hope you can not see through them. Perhaps a vest, from 1976, can make them look unique and worthy of film class, or that a tattoo weaving up an ivory back can be a shield against people claiming you're uninteresting. But we know better. And I can feel that flurry of city bringing me in already; the drinking, the partying, the men........It is a very vibrant call and I will remind myself what the truth is inside of me, for that is the gravest stance of all, not knowing one's self well enough to have conviction. If you can not fight for yourself, how can you expect victory?

I will read my own words, in months to come, (or this very same afternoon) so that I can at least try and make them true. For, as I write, I know that it is I that am most worried about being those dishonest things than anyone else.

So here's to a fresh start. A big white glob of paint stuck on my life, reminding me I must actively search for the colors that make my heart delight.

Never Let It Go

There is a movie I watched recently, starring Kiera Knightley and the lovely Carey Mulligan. Both of these actresses have a propensity for being in period flicks that leave me feeling distant from modernity and yearning for simpler times. This movie was different, though, being more sci-fi than romantical. The plot is that cloning is an acceptable action, and that with cloning life expectancies have jumped to 120 and there are no longer people suffering from disease. This sounds lovely, in theory, but as always there is something tilted when science becomes too strong. In the sad case of the three main characters, they grew up as clones, born and breed to be the harvesting vestiges for other 'real' humans. Something Heather kept saying, throughout the movie, stuck with me. The three characters grow up together in a boarding school, not knowing they are clones until later. They are still taught schoolwork, but they know nothing of any other world existing outside the brick and ivy walls of their isolation.

Heather kept saying, "But why don't they fight for more?"

Before I even took a breath, my reaction was, "Because they know nothing else."

Why didn't they fight the people that put them on a cold, silver table and took their organs out one by one? Why didn't they build a boat and try to cross over to America, even if they died somewhere over the Atlantic? And why, dear God why, did they for a moment think that they were inferior to their originals?

But I didn't think those things; not at first. I saw the movie as a classic example of not yearning for the ocean when you have never seen any body of water larger than a pond. How can you want that vastness? How can you dream in neon when everything around you is an abused hue? The truth is, I don't know. I come from a time and place where dreaming is so prevalent that often reality is disappointing. Where, seeing the Eiffel Tower is more like the mind confirming the glossy pictures in the magazine than accepting the building as something profound. That is why I loved the movie. That is why I can't stop thinking about it. I want to know why those three didn't fight, why they didn't try to run away or selfishly take their own lives to at least be in control of their bodies. But the things they did find, the things that could not be halted or harnessed, were love and disappointment of things that could never be.

While walking through the redwoods on a recent trip to the California coast, I thought about this movie a lot. Sure, the scenery is beautiful, as England always is, and the acting is raw and worthy of award, but there was more to it. In fact, all I could think about, looking out at the great rippled trunks of red trees before me, was how amazingly steadfast the human spirit is. That there are those out there that sacrifice everything for love, for family, for pride. That in Yemen, child marriages are quietly acceptable, even when they result in death for a twelve-year-old girl from internal bleeding. That there could be women whose husbands are twenty years older than them, and they must live their lives within their beautiful internal palace of spirit with all the doors and windows locked around them. But they do it. They watch their fathers give them to violent old men and they stop crying, eventually, at that betrayal.

It makes one wonder if the human spirit is made to want certain things, programmed to crave freedom, to cherish family, and to spill into other humans with affection and love. Do these things come in each of us, like a complex micro-chip? Or, do we merely seek what is within reach, what our environment has exposed us to? I don't know. All I know is that in Thailand, they wanted white skin so bad they bleached their arms, legs and faces just to look a certain way. I also know that I will never want to stop learning about people, geography and the environment. That, though I have never been a mother, I want to one day hold my child in my arms and know that love of a mother and her darling baby. Could the movies and media have implanted all these desires in me? Perhaps.....but I think there is something more, something so deep within my spirit that no matter how much the outside world hammered upon my skull I would still want the things I do. Even if I had been born in 1476, I would have yearned for the Pacific Ocean, and I would want a room of my own for my writing (as blasphemous as that would have been). So what comes first, the desire or the delusion?

It seems that the overwhelming spirit of humans demands that they can never let their truest desires go. They can never let it go, and I'm afraid nor can I, which is why, just like the characters in the movie, I will always be lost in the magnificence of love and the darkness of wanting things I can't express and know should not have been born in me.