The birds come to our bird house every day. Specks of seeds bounce against the window and sound like thick hornets crashing into glass. If I could be an animal, I'd be a finch. My mother brings the hot pita bread she has heated over the flame and places it over a paper towel. We dip the pieces into Lebanese yogurt and smile as we eat, watching the birds come and go, some fighting to make room on the bird house.
I tell her how it never gets old to watch them eat, always so frantic, looking up, down, through the window. She smiles silently and then looks down with a bigger smile, dipping her bread.
"What?"
"Oh, nothing," she says. "It's just sometimes I think that my dad sends these birds to check up on me.....and make sure everything is okay. I like to think that he comes in this form to see me."
.
.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
The Garden
She was quiet and thoughtful. She took out a shovel and uprooted each heavy plant while pushing the shovel down with her flip flops. The sandals bent and dented into the shape of her sole and I told her to wear safer shoes. She was silent and shook her head with a smile.
After scooping and pulling and sometimes being hindered by rocks underground, she managed to uproot the heavy plant. I saw hundreds of roots being revealed in a dirty white and they tore and stretched like an old ship tilting and breaking, sinking slowly and heavily in the water. There are roots to everything even when things become bland and desensitizing, a habit we ritually do. There are roots in me.
She tells me she wants to plant the small bulb I manage to pluck out so that she'll remember me. And I just imagine being dead by next spring, blooming as a reminder to my family.
The bulbs look like onions. Once you slice and kill the fruit, you can throw its remains back into the soil and it'll resurrect. Keep the spark alive. Pass the baton. We are living because of what is now dead.
My body weakens when I encounter cigarettes. When I recover and smell the cigarette smoke of others, my body will know to defend itself; it is now stronger. And when I let someone hurt me, I begin to learn that I deserve better. I am now stronger. My body learns its lesson and so do I.
But life is not metaphor. We will not resurrect. We will merely be compost, a fertilizer. "Hey, it's your turn now," we'll say to the unborn. And we'll pass the baton to them.
After scooping and pulling and sometimes being hindered by rocks underground, she managed to uproot the heavy plant. I saw hundreds of roots being revealed in a dirty white and they tore and stretched like an old ship tilting and breaking, sinking slowly and heavily in the water. There are roots to everything even when things become bland and desensitizing, a habit we ritually do. There are roots in me.
She tells me she wants to plant the small bulb I manage to pluck out so that she'll remember me. And I just imagine being dead by next spring, blooming as a reminder to my family.
The bulbs look like onions. Once you slice and kill the fruit, you can throw its remains back into the soil and it'll resurrect. Keep the spark alive. Pass the baton. We are living because of what is now dead.
My body weakens when I encounter cigarettes. When I recover and smell the cigarette smoke of others, my body will know to defend itself; it is now stronger. And when I let someone hurt me, I begin to learn that I deserve better. I am now stronger. My body learns its lesson and so do I.
But life is not metaphor. We will not resurrect. We will merely be compost, a fertilizer. "Hey, it's your turn now," we'll say to the unborn. And we'll pass the baton to them.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
It's raining
As I watch the different colors of the sky each day and how the water can be still, but in different ways, I feel God.
It rains in different places, and it rains in my backyard as my grandmother calls from the city and witnesses a dry and cloudy day. But there will be a time for sun and a time for her to hear the rain. God will give without grudge and reveal himself in a parting of a veil, in a bird outside your window, in the rumble of city buses on a fragile concrete ground. And though the good ones don't call out, Jesus, or Babi, he is there. He has always been there.
We will resurrect; I feel it. Like flowers we are, like the raging yet still waters we are, like the flickering leaves that bloom and fall we are. And as I stare into the earth, I see God, so happy, and so lovely, smiling widely like my dad with his eyes squinted shut and teeth glowing in the sun.
It rains in different places, and it rains in my backyard as my grandmother calls from the city and witnesses a dry and cloudy day. But there will be a time for sun and a time for her to hear the rain. God will give without grudge and reveal himself in a parting of a veil, in a bird outside your window, in the rumble of city buses on a fragile concrete ground. And though the good ones don't call out, Jesus, or Babi, he is there. He has always been there.
We will resurrect; I feel it. Like flowers we are, like the raging yet still waters we are, like the flickering leaves that bloom and fall we are. And as I stare into the earth, I see God, so happy, and so lovely, smiling widely like my dad with his eyes squinted shut and teeth glowing in the sun.
Waltz to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
We are all insane, and the only thing keeping us sane is our insanity.
Brother, if I feel these pangs of life so rootedly, so do you. If my mind swerves into madness, so does yours.
It amazes me that out of the same person, the same body, the same mind, I have become different persons. Just like spinning a round fish bowl and witnessing the stability of the water and plants- not moving, though the world, the walls, the glass is spinning. And when the earth spins on axis, when the rock at the park (and the seagull on that rock) remain stagnant when the sun rises, the water trickles and the clouds pull like threads of yarn and the leaves flicker. The world remains the same like stone, noticable like a mother, but changing like the whirlpool in her womb.
Out of my heart comes out an aching rod of panic. And out that same heart, that same planet, that same earth, comes drenching happiness. It stretches like these legs and arms, one half sustained to the gravel, the other suspended in the sky. The muscles stretch like rubber, first a tight ball of dough and then a thinly twirled flat bread, yanked and stretched all over.
When in panic and when my eyes feel tense, unable to stare at people calmly, I go away to myself and take bits of my so-called insanity and talk to myself.
"Tell me what you are excited for in the near future, Steph?"
I then answer without thought, without shame or hesitation or embarrassment, speaking quietly like a vulnerable patient.
"I am excited to feel his warm muscular arm around mine as we walk through the door and to rest my head on the lump under his pillow."
Then I am happy and relieved for a bit, forgetting about my mind. Then, I am in control.
Sometimes I wish that someone can come from beneath the shadows and scream and scare me until I'm screaming, too, both of us screaming, one louder than the other. Then I'll put my hand to my heart, breathe heavily, and then, then we'll both laugh, barely able to speak, pointing a joking finger at our childlike fears.
Sometimes you need the Boogieman to reveal the mystery and pop up and say, "Alright! I really do exist!"
You shake and quiver coldly like a hungry dog, as if you are craving the shadowy monster. Once you see the face of your monster, of the thing in your mind that you call "thought," you will laugh and lay bare your chest and say, "Do your best destroy me" (as Ray Lamontagne sings). It is just a shade of gray, you'll say. A neuron, not even an atom to the eye. And all these years will flash and flicker like a shadow of a dancing tree on the hardwood floor, and you'll realize that the leaves weren't blowing fiercely in the wind and that the darkness of the shadow was a contorted mirror, and the lump beneath your bed was only a bundle of colorful laundry.
Paul told me to embrace everything that comes my way, even these panic attacks. As he was telling me this, I was shaking from fear at hearing the "p" in panic.
How? I thought, could I embrace something that feels so unhealthy and deeply horrific. Though it is a demon and a hard seed, a plant that keeps failing and tilting, it is something I am now trying to embrace and love.
An old lover sees a beauty and a strength in me that I cannot and have never seen. And though I cannot see it, I know it is there. That strength is a shadow, and (oddly) as I wrote "there," the sunlight cleanly flapped through the blinds and onto the word "there."
"Here Comes the Sun" sounded beautiful early today. It's alright. I never knew these words as I've known them today. I felt my bones recovering, and when I went to bed last night, my skull felt like glowing skin and my breathing and my muscles were moist and light.
Right now, I see my strength as a darkness: not sure if I am void of one or if it is shadowed like the monsters inside me.
Brother, if I feel these pangs of life so rootedly, so do you. If my mind swerves into madness, so does yours.
It amazes me that out of the same person, the same body, the same mind, I have become different persons. Just like spinning a round fish bowl and witnessing the stability of the water and plants- not moving, though the world, the walls, the glass is spinning. And when the earth spins on axis, when the rock at the park (and the seagull on that rock) remain stagnant when the sun rises, the water trickles and the clouds pull like threads of yarn and the leaves flicker. The world remains the same like stone, noticable like a mother, but changing like the whirlpool in her womb.
Out of my heart comes out an aching rod of panic. And out that same heart, that same planet, that same earth, comes drenching happiness. It stretches like these legs and arms, one half sustained to the gravel, the other suspended in the sky. The muscles stretch like rubber, first a tight ball of dough and then a thinly twirled flat bread, yanked and stretched all over.
When in panic and when my eyes feel tense, unable to stare at people calmly, I go away to myself and take bits of my so-called insanity and talk to myself.
"Tell me what you are excited for in the near future, Steph?"
I then answer without thought, without shame or hesitation or embarrassment, speaking quietly like a vulnerable patient.
"I am excited to feel his warm muscular arm around mine as we walk through the door and to rest my head on the lump under his pillow."
Then I am happy and relieved for a bit, forgetting about my mind. Then, I am in control.
Sometimes I wish that someone can come from beneath the shadows and scream and scare me until I'm screaming, too, both of us screaming, one louder than the other. Then I'll put my hand to my heart, breathe heavily, and then, then we'll both laugh, barely able to speak, pointing a joking finger at our childlike fears.
Sometimes you need the Boogieman to reveal the mystery and pop up and say, "Alright! I really do exist!"
You shake and quiver coldly like a hungry dog, as if you are craving the shadowy monster. Once you see the face of your monster, of the thing in your mind that you call "thought," you will laugh and lay bare your chest and say, "Do your best destroy me" (as Ray Lamontagne sings). It is just a shade of gray, you'll say. A neuron, not even an atom to the eye. And all these years will flash and flicker like a shadow of a dancing tree on the hardwood floor, and you'll realize that the leaves weren't blowing fiercely in the wind and that the darkness of the shadow was a contorted mirror, and the lump beneath your bed was only a bundle of colorful laundry.
Paul told me to embrace everything that comes my way, even these panic attacks. As he was telling me this, I was shaking from fear at hearing the "p" in panic.
How? I thought, could I embrace something that feels so unhealthy and deeply horrific. Though it is a demon and a hard seed, a plant that keeps failing and tilting, it is something I am now trying to embrace and love.
An old lover sees a beauty and a strength in me that I cannot and have never seen. And though I cannot see it, I know it is there. That strength is a shadow, and (oddly) as I wrote "there," the sunlight cleanly flapped through the blinds and onto the word "there."
"Here Comes the Sun" sounded beautiful early today. It's alright. I never knew these words as I've known them today. I felt my bones recovering, and when I went to bed last night, my skull felt like glowing skin and my breathing and my muscles were moist and light.
Right now, I see my strength as a darkness: not sure if I am void of one or if it is shadowed like the monsters inside me.
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