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| Maybe
I can split my life 50/50. I so strongly want to travel dirty; to
thrive on the graces of others, have every moment/action unplanned,
never know when to expect the oppourtunity for good hygeine. Granted I
have only had a one week experience with this, but I found it to be the
most lively seven days of my entire existance.
The other fifty, of course, being the
great pleasure I take in curling my hair, applying eyeliner, and
composing outfits, frequenting good restuarants, and various other
pleasures. How can one so fervantly enjoy such polars?
Off The Map
has resonated deeply with me, whether it reflects my own experiences,
puts sentences and cohesion to thoughts and ideals floating around
messily in my head, or simply evokes wanderlust and dreaming.
Supposing you regretably never get around to reading on your own, let me highlight my favorite quotes. And I have a lot of favorites. If you are terribly lazy/busy, you should at least read the boldened parts.
"His eyes held forty years of all
those beginings, once upon a times which had never quite reached the
stores of happily ever after." 39
"...talking about all the stories that sit untold in the hearts of older people.
We're all fed such false messages about success in life, made to
believe it is a point of arrival. So most of us spend our while lives
waiting to arrive. We expect that once we get there, the lond story of
the life we just lived will be infused with meaning. But while were waiting our voices dry up. They forget how to ask, they forget how to listen, they forget how to tell." 40
"I could feel for a moment what it would be life to live outside the fear of that ultimate loneliness, to
be certain that you would partake of life the whole way through in the
company of your most beloved friends. It felt amazing."41
"I was a student of life's poetry, deep in the throes of epiphany." 45
"They ahdn't been pretensious
about peeling back the surface of the city and I'd skirted enough
scenes to know that realness was a rare gift. I liked them a whole
lot; I
liked the way that they seemed to see past my bad spanish and overly
dilated pupils straight to my curious dreaming heart. I liked the way
they took my not having the answers as me wanting to lean, not me being
stupid." 57
"It was a leftover reaction from
a genteel custom where people said one thing and meant another, and
made offers they expected you to refuse. But this wasn't genteel
America. This was Spain, and I hadn't come all this way to politely
close the door someone was offering to open for me." 58
"Without the thick cloak of words to hide behing that a native language easily provides, a sharp
honesty is necessary, and equally so a faith that others are
communicating exactly what they mean. It's too complicated to weave
mazes of shy requests or equate thanks with guilt. So this time I just
said thank you from the bottom of my heart
and didn't question that, for whatever reason, Judit could see enough
goodness shining through our dirty faces to trust us with her keys." 58
"Everywhere
the message seemed to be one of fear: guard what's yours, and keep it
under lock and key. I didn't weant to guard what was mine. I wanted
to throw open my doors and give it it's wings. I wanted to let it out
and share it with the wold. It had been locked up for too long, and Barcelona was the place I'd chosen to learn how to be my own boltcutters.
Maybe it was a choice too arbitrary, maybe it was too much like an
arranged marriage, but I wasn't giving up yet. Not when I'd just been
handed keys and a map." 59
"They were engaged in struggle for a big revolution but they were also living it right there in their own small kitchen." 59
"All of the flatmates were politcally active,
busy everyday with meetings and jobs, parties and events that had them
out late at night and up early in the morning. Constant laughter flowed
through the bustling kitchen. It was the heart of their collective
household. Meals taken easily together, food cooked communally and
paid for with an untracked honor system. The systems of organization
all seemed organic and natural; there were no exacting accounts kept,
no chore charts, just an expectation that everone would do their part,
and everyone did."60
"In
the mornings the women walked around half-naked until they took their
showers... Most of it was unselfconscious habit. They hung and folded
laundry, washed dishes, made crepes and coffee, all
with bare and imperfectly gorgeous bodies. Lived-in bodies, bodies
claimed like favorite forts, bodies forgiven and broken-in and used
like a well-loved pair of shoes. Their bodies lived in nonchalant
pleasure, outside the jurisdiction of magazine pages..." 60
"Our entire lives have been squatted by systems we don't believe in,
and our very souls have been occupied by indoctrinations which destroy
our ability to love and create, and which take away our freedom from
the inside out. It's time to squat back, we had agreed again and
again, time to stake claim to the bones of human history and sew upon
them a new flesh." 61
"But how did I want my world to look? I was tired of defining it by
negatives: I don't want this, nah, not that for me... we had traveled
and entire circle of squats and named more of what we wanted to avoid
that what we wanted to create. If we were going to define by negatives
why were we bothering with alternative communities anyway." 61
"What I wanted was to try to get
inside life, not stand in doorways, watching and judging from the
peripheries, until one day I woke up old and realized that for all my
stories, I didn't care that much about telling them. That meant I better choose the right doorway and go inside." 62
"We
are learning to say yes to everything in our lives, to say it with our
whole bodies, the contagious way of singing it out from our guts with
our heads thrown back, swinging our hips up to the sky: yes! Yes! YES!
I want to learn to sing a chorus of Yesses that follow the Nos: yes to
building our own choices, our own visions and dreams and ideas, even
though they may fail. Yes to our loves and our strange salvaged
lives. Instead of saying "No that isn't enough". I want to say "Yes
we can make it more". 65
"We can't give up the view from here now can we?"
"It met me like an old lover, salty and familiar, the surprising remembrance of weightlessness." 66
"We took the wine down to the
sand, sat supping and toasting, then lay there handing wishes on
shooting stars and plotting a message for the bottle." 67
"Fuck it, let's get some coffee and wait for evening." 69
"It was a daydream. Somehow I
had stolen through the gates of time while the guards slept; I had
outsmarted banks and logic and all the pessimistic realists in the
world and swum like a mermaid to the edges of my own daydream." 73
"We don't want to be the boring girls that the boys in adventure
stories get crushes on. We wanted to have our own adventure stories." 76
"You can learn so much just from
walking alongside the highway. It's the dust under our collective bed,
the underside of society's couch cushions. It's the fray at the edges
of our order and whether we like it or not, it tells our secrets." 85
"If you can see the garden I could become, I will be yours." 71
"We
are playing house here, but more than that we are playing home. We
have transformed space and lived in it. We would do this anywhere.
Anywhere we go we will clean a little or a lot, make some food and make
some magic, learn about love and revolution from whatever surrounds
us. Anywhere we go, we will make gardens with whatever seeds are
available to us." 71
"Why is it we were moved to make
these places for some idea of God, but we don't make them for each
other? And what would it be like if we did?" 101
"But then again, everything I've seen has shown me that the only way to escape those twin gods (moneyandpower) is by
working for and with each other. This off-balance society is centered
on climbing, reaching over and past one another, wherher we're reaching
toward a god of religion or of money is irrelevant. It's always just
beyond us, just at the top. But what we build for each other starts at
the bottom, in the village, in the details of our own imperfect bodies
and uncertain lives. All the houses and doors and hearts opened for us
as we travel... every opening has felt like a step away from
moneyandpower, a step into the something that we build for each other.
Even when they seemed flawed and faltering, these are living relics,
the details that prove you can make a way to live wholly,
even without the balance of moneyandpower on your side. Throw in with
us, they say, see what we can make together? You don't even have to
climb your way to the top, you're already there." 101
"Like every other time I moved
away, I was careful not to leave behind anything I'd need in the
future, just in case. I could build a home from outer motion and inner
fire." 106
"No matter how I come back, full
of hope or desperate to be filled, someone I loved was waiting there,
holding a space for me." 106
"My street-rat life is a choice for me. I may re-enter that less deviant world any time I want. I
can use my priveledge to buy back respect from the same people who
right now lock me out of it. All the keys to those doors are for
sale. So why am I living in self-imposed exile? Because you get what
you pay for. Pay a lot and you get an expensive life. Take what's
free, and you get freedom.
On most people's terms this trip wouldn't be possible. No, we didn't
have money for the youth hostels, but who would've told us to keep
dancing if we didn't go to Verottu Krottu? And if we'd taken the bus we
would have missed Pontourson. No cemetary picnics to be found in the
formula for success. No cheap bread and stolen chocolate on the menu. But off the map and beyond the borders of fear, there are other formulas. Abandoned houses - permission = free shelter and adventure.
Rain + covered doorways = gratitude. Soon it's obvious that what you
thought was flat actually has an underside, an edge, a core.
That the mirror you grew up with is as warped as the ones in the
funhouse, and there's no going back to them. There's either giving up,
or going on. One way cynicism, the other, dreams." 107
"...I snarl at the inequities, I
hiss at blatant stares and vow to quit dreaming. But I can't. Even
snarling, even hissing and cursing, I am reminded that there are angels
everywhere. Angels choosing to sow the stars back into the dust." 108
"It is the nectar of the angel world that feeds the travelers on the road of dreams. We sustain each other,
even when our equations very. We're all angels of the things that once
looked flat. We bring it's body to life. As it fleshes out, forms
ridges, tests edges, bares a hidden belly and a beating heart at its
core, the thing that once looked flat is recognized as the other world
we are creating. We
make it home for each other. We open it's doors and offer kindnesses
and we pass through those doors when we say yes. We make windows when
we tell stories." 109
"She looked like a raven who had
recently flown out of an enchanted attic library. I could almost see
bits of aged brown pages crumbling in her footsteps like confetti and
it seemed like she was stepping out from history and into the
afternoon." 111 (What a charming way to be described.)
"I've been
standing guard vigilantly on top of a fortress of possibility, trying
desperately to shoot arrows with dream messages attatched straight into
the hearts of everyone who crosses my path." 115
"'De ruin, de ruin.' Is this what is meant by kindness, welling up
effortlessly, thoughtlessly? 'It's nothing, it's nothing.' Maybe I
hadn't known kindness before." 118
"There were no mirrors in her house and no clocks; Isabelle moved through the house singing with a grace that made it plain she kept her own time, saw her reflection clearly enough in the hearts around her." 124
"I thought, this is where magic
is; in the lines of our laughter and our stories, where we make a haven
from what hurts us in the rest of the world, in the chance to turn our
fears and dissappointments into dreams where
we touch each other, where we leave room to be touched; to say here,
here are the wings of my heart, make a roof from it, make a shelter." 125
"I stepped accross a certain
boundary of fear when I said goodbye to my steady life, filled my
backpack and took off without a return ticket. To some people that was
no more than an easy, romantic gesture. But it wasn't noble heroics I was after, that wasn't the point.
I didn't decide to travel this way--with no map and no certainty and
very little money, relying on strangers as much as myself--because it
was bold or adventurous or even original. I just had to do it that way to get accross the real border, which is the one in my own head and heart." 130
"This
is life, it doesn't stop coming on full force. Don't let a little fear
get in the way of your dreams coming on that strong too." 134
"Yes, life means turning the questions on your own ideas, not just everyone else's; but it also means leaving room between the question marks to make answers with the people you love." 134
"You might need time to nurse the wounds of your dreams. This is not what you expected but anything you are ready to love is lovable, even if it's scarred or fucked-up or broken. These are still good and worhty dreams." 137
"When I find myself in this place
of incontrovertible aliveness, when the world is on fire and I am with
it--I think, I won't forget this, I won't be lost in the pettiness of
the day to day, my own turmoil, I won't succomb to sorrow or inertia or
fall prey to fear. None of it matters nearly as much as this joy, this knowing the beauty of each thing exactly as it is." 141
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I rode a motorcycle for the first time in my life today. Oh my. Must seek more thrills. I had an interview at the Alpine Schulers Books. I would adore a position with that company, in addition to SanChez. Pray for me if you will; I should hear back by Friday. | | |
| San Chez is the best company ever to work for. While the three weeks of my employment there have been a bit of a roller coaster (overwhelming amounts to learn, the occasional bouts of zero self-confidence, crying before/after but proudly not during shifts) God has been faithful to show that if I trust Him it will all work out. And I do not mean some passive, elusive trust. I mean "oh God please help me because I am utterly aware that I am nothing apart from you and regardless of all my own efforts, only your grace warrants success on any level. Help me, help me" and a lot of "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me". I have been learning/seeking the worlds of actual trust, prayer, wonder, and the foolishness of following Jesus. Let's converse. The Brothers album is quite genuinely amazing. | | |
| Meesh, Jenna and I are on an east coast sojourn and in need of places to stay. Have any friends in Philly (tonight), New York (tomorrow) or Boston (that next day) that could show us around town or house/feed us? We are reachable at 616.648.0379.
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| As an effort to free myself from the burden of posessions, I am selling all of my stuff. Books, clothing, furniture, jewelry, shoes. Basically every non-essential that I have accumulated over the years. I have a lot of fabulous things that you probably want!!! I am setting up shop in my yard today and Friday at 2487 Sherwood St, Byron Center, MI 49315. Call me if there is anything specific that you want. Everything unsold is being donated. 616.901.4561 | | |
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