458: “There Will Be A Name” (Marcelo Hernandez Castillo)

                “Because the bird flew before / there was a word / for flight / years from now / there will be a name / for what you and I are doing.”
                -Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, from “Cenzóntle,” Queer Poets of Color

                The birds have been singing in my neighborhood, and I love it. And I know, yes, that’s the kind of thing that people say is cliché—the birds are singing—but it’s delightful to let myself be delighted with all these things that are sometimes called clichés.
                Marcelo Hernandez Castillo helps me here. I love how Castillo (and poetry, and love, and Castillo’s loving poetry) plays back and forth with the meaning of things, and for me, the rhythm of that play washes me at least two different ways. There is the idea I read: how there was flight before the word “flight,” how what we do will become a linguistic possibility because we’ve done it. What you and I are doing becomes a word, a thing we can say. We name we’ve taken up to live with.
                And another way. I can say “the birds are singing,” that old cliché, but the cliché isn’t the specific birds who are right now outside my window. The birds who might be the same ones who sang to my friend and I yesterday evening, as we lay in the grass outside. Those good neighbors. Or maybe they’re new birds, new neighbors. And though I say “the grass outside” don’t think it was only grass, or don’t think grass is simple (a mistake I sometimes make), because as we lay there we noticed so many different leaves, so many different shades of green, so many growing joys in what I could simply call a “field.” There is so much more abundance, so much more life, than my simple namings. And while there will be a name for what we do, another side of that same thought, for me, is that the name for what we do will be part of our doing—maybe a celebration of it, or a reminder, or an invitation—without being all of our doing. Without being the birds or the songs that they’re singing. Which is lovely, isn’t it?

by Azlan

457: “A Lot of Trust” (Joy Harjo)

                “Sometimes when you go into a creative project there’s a lot of trust.”
                -Joy Harjo, in conversation with Jenny Davis at a CultureTalk on April 23, 2024 

                One of my favorite memories from my teenage years is walking through the forests of Oregon at night. We walked through tall trees. The boughs drinking starlight and moonlight. Filling the forest with a perfect darkness and playing tricks with our eyes. The brown needles carpeting the edge of our thoughts, and our little group following a dirt trail by the feeling of our barefoot feet. I did this once a year for seven years or so. Sometimes we lost the trail, and I would crawl on my hands and knees, feeling for smooth dust and the path that led through creaking tree trunks to a creek and then a river where the sky washed down and the water told long stories. I think, for me, that walking where I couldn’t see was a way of practicing—celebrating—growing into—resting into—trust.
                Creative projects are a wonderful place to grow that way. Lately I’ve been working on a novella I started in 2018. I started it as another kind of walking into what I couldn’t see, another kind of feeling for paths that lead toward river stories. In 2018 the project started as a kind of delighted what’s here?, a curiosity that was strong enough (easily!) to wrap roots around the rocks of worry and uncertainty and keep growing. Can I follow this? Find my way to listening a little more? Returning to the project, now, the can I often feels more frightening. I did an MFA. More of my professional life, more of my career, is tied to this idea of being a writer. That means the feeling of losing a path, of fumbling around for smooth dust in the prickly pine needles, is even scarier. “Can I follow this, learn from this?” can become a threat instead of an invitation. Joy Harjo reminds me that this project (like my love for Harjo and Davis’ poetry, their teachings) started with a lot of trust. And with a practice of trust that is a delight, and that gains even more delight through its strong roots, through the long slow growing and creaking of its tree trunk.

by Azlan

456: “Missing Out On The Chance To Be Frivolous” (Jack Halberstam)

                “Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant.” -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

                In the last years, I’ve done a number of community facilitation projects, and one of the questions funders often ask is how many people is this reaching. And it’s a good question. It’s important. But in systems where I’m taught to want more and more views, more and more likes, more and more influence, I also find myself thinking about the chance to make something with and for these fifty people here. Sometimes making something for “a wider audience” is missing the chance to make and live and share and let go of something with a little group, here.
                So to put it one way, Halberstam has me thinking about all the “goals” or “characteristics” I pursue because I learned somewhere that I’m supposed to—and about all the sillinesses or particularities or otherwises I could be pursuing. Or not pursuing. Lounging into. Growing. No longer resisting. To put it another way, I try to be responsible, but I also like the irresponsibilities of a bouncy ball parading down the stairs. I’ve been carrying a bouncy ball everywhere for a while now. My niece and I decided it was our friend, though in all my seriousness, I’ve forgotten what name we gave it. Am I so sure I want to miss out on being silly?

by Azlan

455: “Sometimes You Just Miss” (Ross Gay & Jericho Brown)

                “One day last July, feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something delightful. I remember laughing to myself for how obvious it was. I could call it something like The Book of Delights.” -Ross Gay, in the preface for The Book of Delights

                “Sometimes you just miss.” -Jericho Brown, in a talk at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, November 13th, 2021

                I meant to write my uproar post this morning, and ended up writing a piece of my PhD dissertation and then lying on the couch instead. By which I mean, would you like to try a practice with me?
                One of the lovely things about a practice (Uproar posts once a week, for instance, or a year of daily essays about something delightful) is that they don’t go how I intended them. Jericho Brown is responding to an audience question, maybe “How do you feel when you’re working on a poem and it just doesn’t work” or something like that. He laughed and asked if the audience member ever played basketball. “Sometimes you just miss.” 
                Ross Gay makes it clear in The Book of Delights that the daily essay thing stopped being “daily” pretty quickly. He missed a day. Then another. My own practices are like that: lots of missing the basket, lots of missing a day or three. And the practice makes it clear that this missing isn’t the horror that all these work-habits tips would have me believe. Missing is lovely. It’s another hour in bed. It’s pages of my PhD dissertation that, no, I’m not going to share here, but I might share sometime, and there they are tumbling. Five years ago when I started riding a kick scooter for my commute, I didn’t think about the days I’d be soaked in downpours, the days the wheels would jitter across icy, the snowy days I would carry the scooter instead of the other way around. All those were missing. And finding. And part of it in a way that grew delight. 
                So I’m not inviting you to try out the practice of writing a short daily essay (unless you want to). I’m not even inviting myself to try that, if “inviting” is somehow code for “setting a goal” which starts feeling like “setting in stone.” I’m saying: what’s a practice you’re growing into, a practice different from what you once thought it might be? How do you walk that practice? What do you find, what do you miss, and where (beyond the finding and the missing) do you end up, soaked through with rain or laughing about basketball?

by Azlan

454: “Listen To Your Body” (Charlesia McKinney)

                “Learn to really listen to your body.” -Charlesia McKinney, “Demystifying the Dissertation: A Critical Conversation with Graduate Students and Advisors,” April 3rd 2024

                I’m traveling now, away from home, but a few nights ago I was lying in bed next to my partner, a cool wind rustling in from the window, our skin warm, a neighbor laughing as they walked outside. And I felt this abiding peace, this lovely overflowing past any question of “enough.”
                In the last months I’ve also felt more unsettled in my career than I have in years. There’re lots of reasons for that—economy stuff, job market stuff, health stuff—but beyond those reasons, I’m thinking about one of the funny ways I’ve been coping. Or pretending to cope. I’ve been watching these really dumb reality competition shows. Running towards elaborate, obvious stories that pretend that meritocracy works in the US, that work hard and control everything and you’ll get ahead is advice that makes sense instead of an attempt to hide (or justify, or protect) prejudiced systems designed to create imbalance. To exploit workers. To concentrate power toward a few. I think those stories are part of a worldview that likes separating the world into winners and losers, and likes explaining why the winners “deserve it.” I think those stories are interwoven with racism, sexism, settler colonialism, ableism, empire. I believe that, and there I am, watching Survivor. Feeling the parts of me that have still internalized that competition is, in the end, the real description of what “we” are, and that competition is also the way out of whatever hurts I don’t want to feel. What a funny thing to believe. But myths are strong like that.
                Lying in bed next to my partner, I felt how I seek shows like Survivor because I learned somewhere that there will never be enough, so you’re supposed to take more. But I don’t think that’s true. When I feel deeply, that’s not what I feel.. And I had a wonderful moment of feeling how I could choose to turn, not toward my worries of doing enough so I can win, but toward the cool air and our skin’s warmth. To our words and our pauses, drifting between us like leaves on a lazy breeze. I could really listen to my body, to our bodies together. And our bodies were saying how wonderful and washed together a moment is.

by Azlan

453: All Ghosts, All Together (Caitlin Doughty)

                Usually when I write I’m scared. Scared of getting enough done, scared of how long it’ll take, scared I’m not good enough or funny enough or fast enough. It’s like that game where kids carry an egg on a spoon and try to walk faster faster but my egg is already smashed. Smeared on my spoon. Clear and yellow pulp crunchy with eggshells. And any moment someone will notice I’ve always already failed.
                I wish when I wrote I was talking to you. I wish we were together at the lake with the first hints of the storm ruffling the surface, and maybe we’ll go in soon, before the rain really hits, but for now you say I keep thinking about the horror of having a body and I say I think about broken bones, the way they twist, the way all bones are broken bones that haven’t broken yet and you say I read this essay from a mortician who’d held a skull that day, a complete skull, cooked clean by the cremation chamber, and she was looking at the skull, holding this which used to hold a person, though now it was covered in ash and scorch marks and she was thinking about how sometime every part of her will be something that somebody else holds, and she’ll come apart, and she realized it’s important to sit sometimes with the fact that none of us are the center of the story, or at least not the center of the story for very long, and while we might be stardust, the iron in us literally made in the furnace of stars, we are also borrowed stardust, we are iron that was earth or roots, that was something else, and will be something else and I say wasn’t that Caitlin Doughty and you say yeah, I think it’s in Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and then you pause and you say the rain’s really starting to come down. And for a little while we’re sitting there, you, me, and Caitlin Doughty, all ghosts, all together, this together we’ve made as the surface ripples a reflection of the clouds and the trees.

by Azlan

452: “Find My Way Back” (Mylo Choy)

                “I slowly found a way to be in the water without drowning — a place in the middle. Even though I couldn’t always stay there, now I knew how to find my way back.” -Mylo Choy, Middle Distance, page 99-100

                There’s this phrase in the USA’s imagination of therapy: “I’m working through some stuff.” Working through. To the other side, I guess. In my own therapy (which was wonderful!), I definitely started wanting to work through and come out to somewhere past my hurts and confusions. And I don’t think it works that way. Choy and I like imaging our deep emotional worlds as water, as ocean. Reading Choy, for me, this kind of healing feels less like a going through and more like a habit of sometimes going into the water. Swimming out, or swept out unexpectedly. Learning that, as this is a place we can go to, this is also a place from which we can learn ways back to the sand when we’re ready to lie on the beach and rest.
                There are so many examples I could take up, but writing is a close one. I’m writing now. And all day, in the back of my head, I’ve been unsure how I would write this post. For a little while before I started I was looking to find a calm place, where the post was all laid out in front of me. Without any emotional waves. And I like feeling calm (it’s lovely), but writing this does have emotional waves. That’s why I want to write it. Sitting down to write about this isn’t a matter of finding some mythic place where there isn’t the water that washes me, carries me, or sometimes feels like it might drown me. It’s about finding ways to be in the water without drowning. To swim down. To feel the current. To know there are ways back—back to the beach, and back to the waves, as I need them. Fear and hopelessness (Mylo Choy reminds me) aren’t pitiless seas where no one could possibly breathe. They’re currents and creatures in the oceans where we swim

by Azlan

451: “As Long As It Helps Us Hope” (Weiwei & Stamboulis)

                “I think that it doesn’t matter whether poetry is good or bad… / …as long as it helps us hope.”
                -Ai Weiwei and Elettra Stamboulis, Zodiac, p. 154

                Sometimes I sit and listen to the resonance between experiences. Between these three, for example: 1) When I taught high school poetry in the twenty-teens, one of my favorite practices to do with a class was “short order poetry. Each student asks another for a poem (“about the first day of school,” “about a cracked windshield”). Then in ten-ish minutes each writer makes a poem to give back to the asker. This practice positions poetry as community, a gift between friends. The time limit can also help me stop worrying about “how good” the poem is and focus on putting lines together. 2) Some years after those classes, a mentor and I started talking about a teaching moment when you let go of worrying “how good” your classes are, recognize students’ work and interest as so much larger than you, and focus on offering what you can and supporting your students’ work how they ask you to. After that moment, paradoxically, our classes felt “better”—but something else had shifted, too. 3) During the worst years of feeling farther and farther away from my writing, writing felt more and more like a place where I had to perform expertise and less and less like the reach toward community that made me want to write. In the middle of those years I started writing flash fiction. Tiny paragraph- or page-long stories that touched one moment of connection, movement, need, loss. Writing those came to feel—well, like walking down to the beach every day to splash my face with the water. Or like letting the ocean wash its face with me.The practice helped me start finding my way back toward what I love in writing.
                When I finished reading Zodiac, I sat for a while, listening to the resonance between Ai Weiwei’s thoughts and so many of my (shared) experiences and relationships. I think the sitting—the quiet—was a way to turn towards and understand how the question “how good is this?” gets planted almost everywhere around me. And recognizing that planting is also a chance to stop planting, to focus instead, perhaps, on the ground the question grows in. The ground of what we’re doing, together. Of how what we’re doing together weaves our lived experience. How that doing makes it easier (or harder) to hope actively, playfully, courageously, communally.

by Azlan

450: “A Place For You” (Jasmine Walls)

                “Or, if you want, there’s always a place for you here with me.”
                -Jasmine Walls, Brooms (p. 230)

                I’ve been thinking lately about how so many of the places where I’m at home and feel connected, feel able to help—so many of those places are actually people.
                I’ve moved a fair amount in the last fifteen years. Massachusetts to California to Andhra Pradesh to a different part of California to Oklahoma to Illinois. And while I’ve largely stayed here since 2019, I’ve also moved six times inside Illinois. That doesn’t count the trips to visit folks elsewhere. If I look at any place, if I look at how I was and who I was in a place, what I find is people. My friend Krishna in Andhra Pradesh, the two of us at a table supposedly playing chess but moving more thoughts and smiles than pieces. The rabbits who nested near my front door my first year in Oklahoma. My friend Fin in Illinois, the two of us lying beneath the trees and talking. And on and on: there are so many friends to remember, so many people making a place for me with them.
                When I started working on this post, I was focused on how people become the “where” of my life. But as I sit with this, revising it—that’s one of the wonders of revising: sitting with words like muddy waters, as the clay settles, as I see another shape in the slow current—I’m also thinking about how wheres grow the communities who become my life. Fin and I became connected while watching the trees together. More than anything else, the rabbits and I shared grass, its a green delight. Krishna and I became friends in the shade that dappled our table. So I’m focused less, now, on how one leads into the other, and more on how they blend together: how here and us can weave together so there’s always a place for me with you. For you with me.

by Azlan

449: “Nuance” (a color gradient puzzle)

“English acquired ‘nuance’ from French, with the meaning ‘a subtle distinction or variation,’”
-from the box for “nuance,” a color gradient puzzle produced by Robert Frederick Ltd

                I don’t usually pay so much attention to color. Sometimes I do: my orange jacket is next to the orange foam roller I use to help relax the muscles of my back, and as I sit here thinking, I’m enjoying the difference in their shade. The way they’re both shadowed by the room’s one light. The way those shadows paint the pale cushion my jacket’s sitting on. But I probably drop my jacket there a lot, and the roam roller’s usually beside that cushion. I’m looking at them now because I’m thinking about this puzzle. 
                A couple years ago my partner and I did the puzzle together. Starting with the edge, like we usually do, and then the corners. I think about that sometimes, because early on I wasn’t at all sure I could do this puzzle. There were no lines to follow. No horizons, no lakeshores. But then doing the puzzle together turned into a playful game of feeling with our eyes: there’s a lot of green here, but what feels really green? Or in all these purple pieces, what feels really purple? And surprisingly often, looking at all these pieces, I had a feeling to follow along to a piece that fit. I think I’m remembering that tonight because I want to spend more time being open to the orangyness of the orange, the shadow of the cushion: the wash of changing color, luxuriant as paint washed along my skin.

by Azlan