school project

https://www.playposit.com/delivery/285786/590469/

quick reflection. 8.9.2016

it’s ten to eight in the evening and the lights are all the right colors. the sky purple gray in variation, street lights and windows orange and green, the tower banded in a steady red, with flashers at the top and lower down.

i have come and gone from the city of tel aviv (whereas the campus, where i live, is just north of the city) and in doing so:

chatted in Hebrew with my bus seat-mate. we got off at the same stop. she called me “mituka” (sweetie) and held my hand for a moment before we parted on the street

chatted in Hebrew & English with a crafter at the street market. she complemented my glasses. i told her how much that meant to me, since they are new and i wasn’t 100% sure of them. her eyes grew wide. i said it was a big deal and i gave her five and she, too, held my hand for a moment

stopped and admired really amazing, amazing crafts from vendors (some of whom i recognized from visits in previous years…) and started calculating how much it would cost to buy all of the things i fell in love with and thought about coming back and just doing it – buying all of my favorite things. the chamsa, and the pomegranate, and the man with a bird in his head, and the wallet made of my grandfather’s favorite coffee packet, and a glass pendant from the japanese woman who married an israeli, and some glass mezuzot for the people i love. all of it. a market truly full of wonder and love.

bought loose zatar from the vendor who let me taste before i chose. bought halva from the vendor who let me taste before i chose, too. heard the fruit vendor yelling that the tourist should stop taking pictures of his fruit.

took pictures of graffiti. great, great graffiti. and thought about the street art and the wall scribble that abounds in tel aviv. like the street is a coloring book. and thought about street art and hip hop, and english and language, and research topics and things…

took the bus

ate falafel, but definitely not the best falafel… i think the best falafel shop was displaced by a new building and now i have to best-falafel-find all over again

used punctuation and failed to use punctuation

got a headache from riding the bus backwards after eating falafel on the street, during which time, i am fairly certain, falafel fell down my shirt and into bra… or maybe just out the bottom of my shirt, because there is no falafel on me anymore

and had an interview that didn’t feel like an interview and now have to decide if i can swing starting my “stage”… that’s practicum… coincidentally with my first semester. it’s a really great placement opportunity. i will learn a lot… and maybe be overwhelmed… but be traveling into and out of the city center twice a week, compulsory…

and wrote an email

and did ok in class

and bought a box of tea

and looked around, and saw what i recognized, and thought of what i did before, and thought of what i was doing right then, and

now, here i am. and this brief reflection must close. 2.5 hours to read a chapter of a book and take some notes starts:

 

now.

now.

now.

now.

now.

 

back then, right now

first day of classes. ma tesol/ulpan. tel aviv university. holy. shit.

a recent and fairly consistent thought: what the f— am i doing here?

yes. really! c’mon, guys. the slides are in the projector. let’s click back a few. awesome friends, excellent apartment, money to spare on ice cream and beer, beautiful views…

ok. forwards now. but just a few clicks of the knob: tamar contemplates two big life goals. loving family companionship partnership, breaking through by breaking down into the ground, digging deep, getting really vulnerable, learning to tell the truest truth and listen when it’s spoken. uhm. and learning deep into the curiosity of years’ old curiosity – language, talking, verbs, dictionaries, accents, questions, speaking, conversing, communicating, exchanging, tongue to roof of mouth: currency of telling, telling. (this is all code for learning to teach and teaching to learn language!)

and now to right here. tamar on a bed with mis-fitting sheets, five floors up, facing the mediterranean…! (well, facing the wall at the moment, but the window faces that sea, even at night with the shade down…) here i am: digging, telling, asking, breaking down to build to build to build, and: please god, let me build up.

finding my way between past and present: get to it. get to what i am capable of back then, right now. right now i can look at the steps i am taking up the street between what? and huh? and find myself saying yes. and sure. not yes! and sure! just yes. yes. and sure. definitely. sure.

back then, right now, i find a way to buy groceries, school supplies, find a way to do homework because learning this stuff is either impossible or possible. the greatest predictor of school success is optimism. (did i read that or hear that today? honestly, i think that might be from facebook. maybe a prince ea video.)

anyway, i didn’t imagine it, but i am imagining it now: optimism in my nescafe, optimism in the flowers blooming from tree limbs that reach over painted gates to greet the sidewalk, optimism that reviews and reads aloud, optimism that places sharp pencils into pencil case, optimism that puts lines of poetry on the fridge door and looks at the few book spines of pleasure reading on the shelf and looks forward to deepening the indigenous groove of learning that is dug deep in the soft circuitry of the brain, the heart, the brain, the being…

being here. back then. right now. right now. right now.

soon

school will start and i will sweat and fall through a hundred holes.
i will fall through a hundred holes –
with pens gripped, notebook pages crinkled, and naps desired
i will roll into new cities… not just one city; not just one city inhabited by half a million people, but half a million cities encountered one by one by one.

school will start soon.

school will start soon and i will be among you, falling through holes – but i don’t mind. i just wanna hear, i just wanna feel everything.

i just wanna feel whatever it feels like and tell it like it is and fall through any hole without needing to come to rest in any dark pit, just slip through the falling, just be in the being, being true, being true, being true.

i missed you and i made a mess, but school will start soon and i will sweat and fall through a hundred holes. and i can’t keep your ear close. so i will learn to whisper in every direction; i will learn to whisper in the only direction – the infinite direction – and you are one of us, and what needs to hear will hear, and what needs to look ahead will find a gentle way to look ahead, and what needs to fall through holes will fall, will fall, will amazingly, miraculously fall.

when you return

when you return to a place you have been before, a place you have lived before, and the paths and the lamposts and the sand are the same (the latter perhaps a bit shifted, but palpably the same under and into sandal), it takes time – not for you, i think, but for your brain, for your brain!, to come around to the present moment. because you are seeing a carbon copy of a reality, a transparency, really. this place, any place, is just that: a transparency – just one layer of structural components which is bound and loosed from innumerable layers of people and intention and feeling and experience and heart and stars and smoke and sensation and drink and kiss and tears and cats and goddamn, godblessed living. right. so, here we are then. glance up at the path again and again. and each time, it makes a little more sense that it is empty, quiet, missing south african accent, young american machismo, russian curses, someone’s dog loose and running, a way home.

 

the ghost came to visit the first night. we looked into each other’s vibrating selves, each other’s lights, each other’s as-though-eyes, but it was dark. it woke me, clanging the door. i wanted to ask, “is someone there?” but didn’t want to wake my sleeping roommate. this wasn’t the first time. we separate ourselves from ourselves so that we can see what we look like from over there while our mind is still getting to us in whatever Now is. got your watch on?

 

and this tree is longer in the curving branch. and these benches were not here before. and the sunset and i exchange a whole new set of words. and slowly, slowly, i arrive. i check the time. i check the time. i arrive wherever I am; I arrive to Now again and again. and the path is not empty of who once stood, smoking and laughing there, but present with its quiet and its cool dark this evening. and neither are lost. both are here; me, too.

america: get the arrow out of the heart. it’s killing you.

america: get the arrow out of the heart. it’s killing you.

PROLOGUE NO. 2 i posted the following to my facebook page shortly ago in response to this article about the shooting of Charles Kinsey (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry…). as i wrote it, i wrote out of my gut. i wrote out of emotion and out of a senses of clarity that i had theretofore not been experiencing as i have considered the current state of fuckedness which is taking place in american politics and american public opinion. between bigotry and blatant divisiveness, the manner of current public discourse frightens me most in that it is taking place shamelessly, and with such inconsistent reproach or repudiation from major media sources, from so-called “leaders”, and from some whose social media content manages to make it through my news feed. (in fact, these are examples of those who are fanning the flames.)

i took down the post that follows because i was afraid. i was afraid of hard-lining myself and being misread. i was afraid of my sentiments losing their legitimacy because of their gritty presentation. i was afraid of my own anger – how quickly the act of expression becomes a source of real exposure and vulnerability.

the initial post received a few responses. but when i took it down, i got two more. they wanted to see the post. they said the post was important. they encouraged me. and with that encouragement from two people whom i really, really respect, i have decided to repost. this decision comes out of a sense of personal responsibility to allow my anger and my fear to have a voice. the country of my birth is rapt in something very wrong. and we cannot afford to mistake it. we cannot and we must not. if you have been holding back, i encourage you to give your feelings voice. we do not have to be perfect in our expression, but we should strive to be authentic. thank you to the ones who encourage authenticity. you are many and you make being so much safer. we all deserve that… to be safe. some of us struggle to feel safe internally, some of us struggle for it in society, some of us experience this struggle in both ways.

what follows is the post as i initially shared it, with several minor edits.

PROLOGUE [NO. 1] reader beware. tamar is about to cut-loose. not appropriate for all audiences. PS. i post this now knowing i’m tripping wires. i have been holding back for weeks because the news and politics and the rnc are just bludgeoning my brain and i haven’t been able to find a path through it. but i’m posting this because it came out of me fluidly. there is no question about my feelings. i may be taken to task on my perspective, but i think it has at least a seed of legitimacy. with love to you who give me space to find a way through, or at least to try. t.

holy wtf. wtf. wtf. wtf. wtf. wtf. wtf. wtf. SHIT MUST STOP. it must stop. this election is not fucking helping and it SHOULD BE FUCKING HELPING. i am so disappointed in my (would be & current) public officials. you are fucking shit up. stop it, damnit. stop it. make it the fuck better. we the people have a voice and rights and shit, yes. and it is on us to say what we want. but you fuckers have the power, let’s be honest. USE. IT. make this shit stop. be better. help us be better. change the emotional response to perceived threat in this country. fuck racism and every other whatever. i’m sorry. it’s not that it’s not real or not in need of address. (it is both!) it’s not that it isn’t present in this situation, even. (what the fuck else is going on here except for some wildly fucked up assumptions?!) but it is a FUCKING RED HERRING to the issue of VIOLENCE itself. focus on racism and ask people to change their deepest, potentially unconscious feelings about shit when your purpose is way more fucking immediate: TO STOP FUCKING VIOLENCE. look. we need to address EMOTIONS in this country. we need to address how people deal with ADVERSITY in this county, with PERCEIVED THREAT in this country. with ANGER. with BLIND ANGER based on WRONG thoughts based on HATE. but all of these still point to changing how people think about their EMOTIONS & THEIR ACTIONS. help people BEHAVE differently. these are the SAME issues as those we saw but failed, in my opinion, to FACE when we started seeing serious violence in schools. columbine WAS and IS about the same issue as this news story and so many others I have been reading & seeing & crying over. we need to make emotional literacy, self-care, and taking good action for conflict resolution (in public and internal domains) CORE VALUES. enough. enough…. fucking. enough.

to charles kinsey: my god, i’m so sorry man. i am so, so sorry. i just can’t believe it. i cannot believe this. and i am so, so sorry.

to america: get the arrow out of the heart. it’s killing you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parab…

a bazaar of crossing paths

from john f. kennedy airport, queens, ny
layed-over; en route

not a traveller. not proudly self-sufficient, blood swirling with adrenaline and pride and appraisal as in my early long-distance travels. just holding a sort of stillness, mid-way through a lay-over — not a traveller, but a person at mid-day, spending an afternoon in an airport full of blue carpet waiting spaces filled with connected segments of blue pleather chairs.

the tarmac resembles a taxi yard to me – men and women and children entering the vessels, their things clutched, just to be taken away from home or toward. but, no. it’s better than that. because (chris walters:) home is not singular. and that is why i am not a traveller today. today i am a human woman, american woman, i am this woman who observes — and the stream of people i see moving down the corridor are alive beyond the boundaries of their origins, their languages, their complexions, their views. these are all in tow – but they are beyond them in a central space where we have the real potential to exceed ourselves, our first places, our first beliefs, our first understandings – because we are stepping out; we are stepped out. we are stepped out from a place where the view is small into a space where it is larger, into a bazaar of crossing paths.

there is a woman, not two seats away, tears in her eyes, looking for a tissue in her things, finding one, daubing her nose and her eyes. i can feel the warm lump of her tears in my own throat. a man who works here reclines in a seat around the corner, jacket and shoes off. i can feel his shoulders in my body, leaning back for a while, breathing out, loosening.

three notes on the internal landscape this morning…

1. soon i will be surrounded by another language, surrounded, in a way, in that way, by what i am not, what i cannot decipher, what i cannot interject, what i have not yet acquired the ability to exchange.
2. i attended a women’s retreat this weekend and this is what i learned: every next thing is part of the sacred journey. every next thing can be approached as ritual. there is no part of the day in which i need be separated from the potential to be present and to grow. all of this is an opportunity to be with intention. still, or active. silent, or speaking. fresh from the washing, or sticky in the armpits.
3. walking into the security check while looking over my shoulder to see my mother on the other side of the stanchion tape, i swung my guitar case into a stanchion, affecting a rather loud clang. i turned around smiling – silly, clumsy, noisy moment made out of eyes-on-my-mother-while-still-stepping-out!-stepping-out!. when  i got my head around to forward, every TSA officer was alert as a woodland animal sensing danger, all eyes fast upon me. i addressed each set of eyes with my own, smiling, smiling. see? i am safe. i am safe. the one who took my passport said lovingly, “of course i get all the trouble makers…” and i knew with a suddenness that the quiet fear in my out-into-the-world-gut, the quiet fear thickened by sorrow from news and again more news, was a potential these folk rose and attended to each morning… and yet: HERE THEY WERE. here they were, keeping the world open to us. open and open and open and open to us.

may we keep entering the open, keep stepping out, keep entering the bazaar of crossing paths where we can see each other’s eyes and lives and bodies just a little — but if we really let ourselves look and see, then just enough. enough for now. enough for continuing, again, more bravely still tomorrow.

[post script: arrived safe on the ground at destination. more! to! come!…]

moving out

1. live five years in a tilting house. impact? low. marbles? easily found at the southern-most edge of any room.
2. having collected your marbles, advance toward any and all signs of better well-being. spend more time out of the tilting house. let more people into your tilting house. say yes when friends extend invitations. take long and intentional walks. see a life coach. when the life coach tells you you should see a therapist, ask someone you trust for a name and call him. climb the stairs to his office. you will come to love these stairs. sit on one side of the couch for a couple of months. then move to the other side. you are ready. your perspective is shifting. you must shift, too.
3. go away. go away, go away, go away, go away, go away. feel it move in you like a switch being pulled on a track. this is not because you do not love your friends, do not love your tilting house, do not love your soft gray couch, do not love your neighborhood, do not love your view of the river, do not love your green metal bridge. this is not because you do not love your supermarket, coffee shop, pizza parlor. this is not because you do not know your way around backroads and front roads. this is not because you do not still have many conversations you can imagine having, wish to have. this is not because you have already done everything there is to do in this town, at this desk, among these folk. this is because of something else. it is because of something else you know to be true but are still learning to trust. and, in learning to trust that you can go away, you learn to trust how fully you must be exactly where you are. the heart is tenderized, not cauterized, and this, this, this, this, this is how you will continue to grow.
4. be in your country. be in it for a whole month after you have packed the last of your things into the stick shift car that will surpass 150k on your way out of town. be in it. be in it on june 29, 2016, when news of terror attacks in turkey will repeat on every npr station you catch from 22963 to 14830 on your way back for a visit. be in it to hear and to cry; to feel the clarity in your sorrow as the skin of humanity pulls away from the muscle. grieve for the killers and grieve for the killed. grieve for the man who threw his body on the bomber. this story contains what we are made for, what we are made of, what we are tragically capable of being so bereft from that we can plan and execute its destruction.
5. be in your country july 4, 2016. lie back on a sloping dike beside someone who wants to hold you as fireworks fly and umbrella the full scope of your periphery. be there while it is beautiful and be there while you cannot shake the sense of profanity entangled in our simulating bombs for our own pleasure. be there while it is beautiful and profane and beautiful and profane. be there when the urgent desire arises to start the hundreds gathered to watch singing  – singing something patriotic – so that you can all say something beautiful together. your anthem never seemed so appropriate as now, now that you have seen “bombs bursting in air”.  but, when the show is over, everyone rises, some leaving their empties, and immediately begins walking towards home. you think you mustn’t be the only one tonight who heard the bombs in our “bombs,” who saw the rockets in our “rockets”.
6. be in your country when philander castile and alton sterling lose their lives in the same week. the media will show you the country responding, social media will show your friends responding. you’ll look around yourself. you’ll ask questions. you’ll think you begin to understand. you’ll realize things are missing from what you realize. you’ll want to be more perfect in your understanding. at first you’ll try to realize answers; then you’ll try to realize questions. you’ll hope you can realize how to ask them. you want to be brave enough to say what you don’t know and to speak what you hope and to keep after the will to see the systemic truth while seeing each man and woman in the eyes.
7. and get ready. get ready to leave to go, to go, to go, to be going, to be going, to go. get ready to read and read and read and have more to read; to be behind on your postcards and your electronic correspondences. get ready to run out of fresh sheets, fresh towels, and fresh sox. get ready to find the grocery store, laundromat, bus stop, train station. get ready to make every purchase into a math problem, converting currency to currency. get ready to figure out how to be with new people and away from old people and with yourself, with yourself, with yourself. and dance. and cry. and get better.
8. with love, in particular, to aaron e.l.r.b., katie v., paisley w., josh a., rodi r., maria k., connie s.b., laura c., bryce b., daniel h., terry o., michael c., beth b., edward d., sue m., hannah l., cathy a.t., jill k., matthew w., kaye n. …. our conversations changed my year. your support changed my life. and thanks to others i cannot name to whom i am bonded though distance serves us. and to the boys at vitrix and all my other corning steadies: much love. keep your eyes on everything beautiful and keep growing. see you soon.
9. more to come. t.s.s.

i’ve got the blues; now what?

got a new computer & a wifi connection, so i’m plugging back in to this blog. i started a draft the other day, and, coming back to review it this evening, bumped into a draft from nearly two years ago. so, to start the return, a little bit of the blues, circa 2014.

september 7, 2014

over the hudson from kingston, down a windy road through some woods, and spreading like a heart that breaks and heals, consoles and carrousels — there is omega institute, where i lived, worked, played & learned for a season in 2005. towards the end of the season, the institute hosted a program called “women and power”. one afternoon i was part of the audience, ladies crowding the venue, watching the speaker, listening.

i can’t tell you who was speaking, nor outline her talk in total. i can tell you this: she fell out with her lover. (who left whom when, i don’t know). things got broken. (who broke them, i don’t remember). she was confronted with a terrible mess… she cried. she screamed. and then: she cleaned it up.

the pain came. the mess came. and then came her hand, riding out of her own body, moving her wrist and elbow, her upper arm and shoulder. her hand moved with volition –  away from the stillness of the body that had stopped to regard the chaos, to the broom. and, what did the broom do? it was an intermediary, a translator between body and room, between heart and mess. broom lets body and building conspire, lets heart and mess convalesce…

people, i’ve got the blues; now what? it’s nine years since i heard that story. nine years since the summer i let a nose ring break my skin as true as first sex; nine years since i loaned out my car in exchange for an oil change; nine years since reiki attunement & graphology & evenings spent “dancing my bliss”; nine years since my art class spent a day making stick lean-tos, an evening making living tableaus with our bodies.

gentle now. the lineage from then to now is foreign languages and navigating streets. it is stretching the neck for a kiss and rivers full of meditations and pollutants. it is dancing and identity stretched. it is a sorrowful summer with a dark autumn quick on its heels.

[author’s addendum, july 13, 2016: following the apparently sorrowful summer of 2014 came the exuberant summer of 2015 when i rode my bicycle every day, unlidded beer on the front stoop in the evening, and spoke real and good conversations that moved me to move. then the leap-and-bound summer of 2016 during which the entire contents of my drawers, closets, and shelves were donated, gifted & packed and i cried and laughed and hunkered down like a mole for a while, waiting in a weird emotional underground invaded by the news and another kind of weird kind of blues.  more to come on that soon… & looking forward to seeing you then… t.]

possible outcomes

read to this awesome, melodramatic mood music: stay (rihanna ft. mikky ekko)

in my current thinking, the answer is that, perhaps, possible outcomes is defined by the closed set {1}. it’s not like me to employ mathematics in the figuring of things, but, there it is, for the moment, whereby {1} is more manageable than infinity, despite all the things that {1} implies – for example, that we must feel mess, must experience pain,… must even cause it – in others, yes, and also in ourselves.