Nothing is more satisfying than when pieces start fitting together. (This may not be true but it feels true in the moment!) That little rush of wonder and understanding.
On minimalism and a paradox of technology
Five years ago, I left America. Now I live far away from universities and libraries and mega bookstores, outside the cheap shipping zones of online behemoths, in a climate unfriendly to the longterm preservation of organic material, including paper goods. My house is modest, my storage space is minimal, and there’s an active volcano right next door. I have neither the wish nor the practical ability nor the extra coin to get or have or keep more stuff. I guess I’ve learned this lesson in my life, that books burn, and houses burn, and cities burn. The whole world is a burning thing.
To be alive is to travel and it’s best to travel light. So I use cloud storage, digital photos, ebooks, online libraries, which are all lighter and cheaper than books and notebooks and pencils and pens. And I was wondering, is this the best use of technology, I mean for human beings in general, to help us travel light? Always to be ready to leave. Or does technology only give the illusion of lightness, not the reality of it? It has its own kind of weight, if it postpones an inevitable question. If it is a habit-forming postponement of the most important questions. No matter how light, it will still be gone when the network burns.
Good advice for living near a volcano: cultivate clear sight and the readiness to leave. (What have you done lately to get ready?)
Is it foliage?
One really cool thing about an ashtanga vinyasa practice is that you can experience dynamic tipping points in your own body.
Sometimes I feel like I know how the earth’s climate feels, as it’s being changed, because of the changes I put my body through. But my changes are toward balance, and Earth’s changes are away from balance. I try to understand the karmic accounting of that, how it could possibly be allowed, how it makes sense. This has been a big part of my yoga practice the past five years. Persuading my body that it’s ok for it to get better, in the cosmic scheme of things, it’s ok to be healthy. I can be an expression of strength and joy in a disintegrating landscape. It’s allowed. It might even be my final orders, so to speak.
Started reading Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚, my new favorite poet of the extra-terrestrial.
Up early for sahur. Fasting is a trial and a demonstration, and if Muslims don’t write very much about it, that might be because it’s such a consuming practice. Focus is required to stay yourself and writing, which is an othering of the self, becomes impossible, irrelevant. I do not fast but I do wake up early to help, and to witness. And I do enjoy the morning.
My favorite time of day is the early hours, the stillness of the dark and the freshness of dawn light, the quiet that slowly awakens. This morning the sunrise brings with it a thunderstorm, pale light and rain coming at once, like a heavy sigh of release. Jeki huddles in my lap and glares at the inundated morning.
But the pale glow begins to turn golden. Soon sunbeams will pierce the grey clouds, and day will chase away the dawn, with its brightness and noise and heat. Birdsong will fade behind the growl of traffic, clarity will give way to obviousness, and inward potential will be burned off by the relentless activity of coming and going, until all words are spent and externality is complete.
Card of destiny.
Finished Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree 📚 According to my mom, this one “is not as delightful as the last one.” I agree. And there was some word usage that a better editor would have fixed. And it was low on surprises. But it was fine and I cried at the end, however I am also an easy crier.
A dream about a friend from Seattle. She came to visit with a group of people. She had a lot of tattoos. I wanted to copy the tattoo of Chinese characters on her thumb, but she showed me another tattoo she wanted me to copy. That tattoo was more violent than I expected and I didn’t want to say yes.
Masuk angin is a uniquely Indonesian thing that is hard to explain. Masuk angin literally translates as “wind goes in”, and it is a danger whenever the wind can go into you, like when you don’t wear longsleeves on a motorbike, or in the mountains, or if you are an under-dressed tourist in the street. Masuk angin makes you feel off, sometimes dizzy, sometimes indigestion (gas, bloating, burping), sometimes like a hangover with a headache, sometimes just a bad mood. Masuk angin is an acceptable excuse to escape any social or religious obligation. Every Indonesian understands what masuk angin is and respects the necessity of it.
I myself don’t entirely believe masuk angin is a real thing, however I understand what it means when E has it, and I have used it as an excuse for myself as well. I think of masuk angin more as a useful social convention than as a specific ailment, and in that sense I believe in it and also like it.
There are some interesting remedies for masuk angin, such as rubbing someone’s back with a vintage coin in a branching pattern until red marks form, supposedly releasing the angin/wind. At home we drink warm water to assuage it, or rub the back or other affected area with minyak kayu putih/cajeput oil.
Jepun bali flowers.
…hard to imagine the intensity of their cognitive dissonance, or to say what it’s done to your brother, the experience and trauma of fighting in Ukraine (being there involuntarily? being the aggressor? witnessing atrocities? participating in atrocities? fending for himself without adequate training or support? etc.?), and then almost dying. Hard to imagine somebody you love going through that. Forced to play somebody else’s war game.
It may just solidify your family’s support for Putin’s war. As you say, “he is the hero.” A high price to pay for loyalty to the boss…
It isn’t your fault. None of it is. You’re stuck in the terrible theater of a political regime that is choking its citizens, eliminating trust, breaking families and friendships with no mercy. You have made your own sacrifices, are showing your own strength, your own heroism. Even if your family can’t see or admit this, it’s true.
It is possible to love and support your family from afar at the same time as you oppose Putin’s war. Because your family is not your enemy and you are not theirs. The propaganda is designed to make it feel that way, but it isn’t true. Love is the most important thing, and solidarity between the better parts of ourselves, so that the better parts can survive. Love can find a way.
That’s easy for me to say, I’m not great at listening to that myself…
(From a message to a friend // edited.)
The opposite of bocor (leak) is actually mampet (clog). There’s a mampet in the drain line of our AC unit causing a drippy cascade of water and a large puddle under the bed. Like sleeping in a rainforest cafe. Time to call Blih’s AC guys, who are agents of the absurd, but what are you gonna do.
My interest in (devotion to? ministry of?) sleeping and napping is definitely an overarching theme of my blog. Also one of my more relatable enthusiasms. Maybe I should add a sleep category.
Shiny new toy.
Sing more.
Peaches and sea-green.
One of the few good memories I have of my father is how he would sing me songs at bedtime. Barbara Allen, Poncho and Lefty, Frog went a-courtin. Goodnight My Someone/Seventy-six Trombones from The Music Man snuck up on me the other day with a flood of feelings. Those were the times he let go, the demon inside let him go for a while, singing outloud. Vulnerable moments for him, moments of relief for me.
It’s hard to sit with good memories of someone you’ve let go from your life. (It seemed active but what I actually did was passive. I stopped reaching out, he stopped being there.) As a child it’s impossible to see how fragile your parents are, to understand their separate suffering. To pry open that understanding without their consent, like breaking open an oyster, which is an act of violence. To cleanse yourself of that violence as well as you can, which is never-ending work. To sustain hope that you might never cause somebody else the same pain or sadness. To hold the secret knowledge that you were born under a bad star.
Thinking about the vulnerability of writing, if there is vulnerability in it, what that is.
If you don’t take the nap, you might miss the dream being sent to you.
Odysseus is also an opportunistic napper??