give me rainstorms turned hailstorm,
surging white rivers, and dewy cold mornings. give me the hot dogs, crisp, on my father’s grill, dirty bare feet on asphalt, a buggy forest, beckoning to be explored and interrogated, waiting to vanish me within pine needles and willow. give me late nights in randy’s treehouse getting stoned and drunk off saccharine, apple-flavored liqueur. nights, dark blue and endless, carrying one another through the blacked shadows of the woods. parties by the bonfire, waking up at dawn in the cold of my car, drinking coffee as the sleepy town rises. give me colorado in june, in all of her blueness, richness, the jagged line of mountains slicing through the clearest, deepest sky. the rivers at my feet churning with spring snowmelt, the days endless, and never long enough. up here in high country, folks come for the winter and stay for the summer. give me autumn in new york, summer in sydney, but i’ll be dammed if you take from me my colorado in june. -P
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I miss the first winter in new york.
In union square, with snowdrops on my eyelashes, Bundled and soaked with strangers I would call friends. We drank mulled wine, Broke oven-warmed bread, clustered around market stalls. Our livelihood was dependent on closeness - How much we trusted ourselves to lean into one another. I was not alone much that winter - Though I had few friends, I was surrounded, always, By bodies eager and loving, hopeful to be held. I am hopeful to be held. Now, it is hot, and I am far from Greenwich Village. I could go months without knocking shoulders with another human. But I don’t want to. I want to puff my warm and bothered breath into a crowded subway car. I want to lean close to you, Catch the whiff of your exhale and the steam of your coffee, Over a rumbling subway grate. Perhaps it isn’t touch I am longing for -- Rather, breath, hot and intimate, The only gasp of warmth a cold new york winter could afford me. Breathe deep, my love, and think of me as you sip the air. In the cool mist of summer mountain mornings, I grasp, longing, at the memory of the puff of your lungs. My enchantment with smoke, likely, resides in my enchantment with breath. I want to see the vapor your lungs leave As you breathe within this world. I want to soak it in, inhale; know you from the air you churn, In, and out. I am cold, from the inside out. I miss the mist, the closeness, Your mouth next to mine In the snow In Union Square Park. -P Teacher seeks pupil . . . must have an earnest desire to save the world.
This is the opening line of Ishmael, a book about a telepathic gorilla who teaches an inquisitive student about the workings and churnings of this creaky old world. Ishmael was assigned to me by Mr. Wischmeyer, or, as we affectionately came to call him, Wischmael. Wischmael was my teacher for our Environmental Systems and Society course junior year of high school. ESS was a required course for all IB students -- we were a nerdy, indoors lot, focused on more serious academic endeavors such as Cold War history and calculus. Nevertheless, we gathered, obliged and intrigued, to be taught the ways in which our ecosystem matters, and why we matter to it. Wischmael is an entomologist, so the classroom had hundreds of tiny inhabitants, pinned in shadowboxes, scuttling and burrowing in egg cartons, and spread, wings open, across wood panels. My best friend and I, curious, would often stick around after class and talk to our teacher about bugs. He would show us his roach collections, and we would ask him questions about bugs, plants, and all things that grow and wander on this planet. He taught us about dwarf mistletoe, a parasitic plant that haunts the overstory of lodgepoles, clustering like a stringy red bird's nest against the clear emptiness of a Colorado blue sky. My journey of environmentalism has been a long, winding, trail, and I have had many wise, insightful, encouraging teachers who have nudged me along the path. In Thailand, a backpacking instructor taught me the foundations of yoga, sheltered in a thatch-roofed hut, preaching gentle wisdom with his legs twisted in a full padmasana lotus pose. Instructing me to deepen my breath, pay attention, and ask questions, he pondered aloud about the slow trek of a line of ants across his mat. In North India, I met an Oregonian outdoorist who had recently hiked the PCT, and sitting in a tangly green garden in the foothills of the Himalayas, we talked about what there is to be taken from rural, intentional, consumptively-minimal living as we prepared to head back stateside. I've been incredibly lucky to have enthusiastic, engaged professors who have assigned me some of my favorite books, the books that have nudged my mind to where it is today. But Wischmael was probably the first. He sent us out to the swath of National Forest land behind our high school, with the instruction to count all of the lodgepole pines in a 100 foot square that he'd marked off. We rambled through the sloping hillside, crunching rusty pine cones, shooting the shit and making offhanded remarks about all the neat, squirmy, overflowing life that we were uncovering. We would stand in a circle, notebook pages flapping in the brisk wind, all of us a little too hot or too cold, uncomfortable in this strange and foreign environment. And he would teach us. I've been looking to teachers a lot these days. I've been growing my yoga practice, and guru Adriene talks me slowly through finding what feels good, moving in a way that matters, and paying attention to the space I take up and the way I use it. When college went online earlier this spring, my Australian and Kiwi professors transformed from lively lecturers at the front of the room to small squares, preaching from a screen in front of me. My favorite authors broadcast their thoughts and musings on podcasts, and, as I move through my day and the spaces that are mine, I listen to them. The other day, Kaeli and I were on a hike and paused to bring our noses inches away from the mountain moss and fungi that crawled across the faces of boulders. "What was that one joke of Mr. Wischmeyer's?" she asked me, "something about algae and moss taking a lichen to one another?" I chuckled - it had been a good joke. And helpful, too, if you want to remember that lichen is the symbiotic relationship between algae and fungi. I couldn't remember, though, and neither could she. "would it be weird to ask our old high school ESS teacher about a joke about lichen?" We considered, and concluded that it might be, but we'll think about it. Along the hike, several other ESS-related questions bounced between us. Are the insects getting bigger because of climate change? The bees, wasps, and hornets in my little locality are absolutely gigantic these days, and some of the mosquitos I've had to whack off my sunburnt wrist are absolutely gargantuan. By the time we'd summited, descended, and were sitting outside the local candy shop, having a beer and listening to a grumbly old folk singer cover Led Zeppelin, we agreed. We needed to message Wischmael and get some answers. So I did. And here's the joke. “Alex algae and Francine fungus took a lichen to each other... but now their relationship is on the rocks” Fucking incredible, right? Absolutely worth it. So, the moral of the story, is that you shouldn't be afraid to ask questions and look for teachers, even if you haven't spoken to them in years. Wischmael said that if I ever have any other ecology-related questions, he's there to answer them, and I probably will. I have a lot of questions, generally. We are learning right now. And we are teaching each other. So, I encourage you, dear one, to think about who has taught you, what you learned from them, and what you might have forgotten. I know I am. And If there's something you want to teach me, or think we could learn from each other here, let me know. I am an eager student, sitting in padmasana pose, cross-legged in front of my computer. Ask me questions, and if I don't know the answer, let's look for it together. This is an open call. Pupil seeks teacher. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. -P I spent today walking
up a mountain. stretching, balancing, taking up a priya-shaped space in the woods, between the hills - a breathing part of a very big, churning, creaking world. it is my job to stay balanced - move forward - think and reflect on the paths i’m following (and the new paths I am helping to carve). i’ve been thinking about trails, learning about the ways we in which we follow each other, over generations, heaving changes, the rockies nudge and guide us to familiar paths, the footsteps of others carving a line before us - a guide to the way ahead. we are blazing new trails right now - retraining our minds to walk in different ways, following different leaders, and wondering what other stories carved in our earth, our own history, can we choose to follow and learn from? there is a mountain I grew up under. it’s tattooed on my back, and, throughout childhood, it presided over my community reigning blue and white, supreme, silent and ever-present in the periphery. i’ve always joked that you can identify mountain folk because we brand ourselves with the hills that have raised us. the tenmile range, arcing and tracing along a colorado blue sky, finds its same outline on the calves, feet, backs, and arms of devoted coloradans. we carve them into our skin, and carve ourselves into theirs, shaping and interacting with each other in thin, ragged lines. so anyway, peak one. the beast, the looming giant, is split into three smaller hills. the first, mount royal, is short but spicy, a meandering trail of scree and breaks of aspen stands. (lovely, isn’t it, that the collective noun for a group of trees is a “stand”?) victoria, the middle child, summits right around treeline, and winds through the reaching, parallel lines of lodgepoles And gnarled, twisted trunks. It was Victoria we made a bid for today, Walking out of our house and finding our way up a mountain. We were stopped by a wall of snow, Nearly impenetrable, Utterly unanticipated, The mountain laughing at our Futile and imperfect plans. Because that’s how it goes, isn’t it? Man makes plans, and god laughs. (I don’t like any of the nouns in that sentiment, But the sentiment itself is very comforting). Man makes plans, and the mountain laughs. We make plans, set off with full packs and hearts, A summit, distant, in sight. But there are things we cannot control -- Roadblocks in our trail, diverting us to more useful, If unanticipated, Trails. -P In praise of Karma Chameleon, by Culture Club.
There are songs that we hate before we love. Blame what you will - poor introduction, a drunken memory, or the bitter taste of teenage bias - our allegiance to tune and lyric runs deep, and we rage violently against those melodies that draw us to old, worn down trails of bitterness and distaste. It can be very easy to hate Karma Chameleon. It’s exhaustively perky, features a fair amount of zydeco-style bop, and is deeply repetitive. But it’s one of those songs, that, begrudgingly, I find will always put me in a better mood after spending three minutes with it, on a journey with a loving lizard. Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go. Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dream, red gold and green. Maybe it’s the uniqueness of this current moment - my red, gold, and green (but mostly orange) lizard is very come and go, hot and cold. Idiotic yet wise, somehow Stevie feels morally superior to me just in that she isn’t burdened with knowing about morals or karma. She is good, and I want to learn goodness from her. My sister, too, wanes hot and cold. As we navigate how much of ourselves we share with each other, and how our need for human connection must be satisfied solely within one another’s person-ness, she is chameleon-like, a color-changing, moody lizard, and we work to understand one another’s minds and coexist in harmony. Every day is like survival, you’re my lover, not my rival. These days are strange. We rage, incessantly, against the establishment, one another, and the scientific truths of our grinding, churning planet. Every day, we awake in the same place, and set to the same old, exhaustive task of surviving in a world whose cogs are churning too fast for our hungry, weary minds. You’re my lover, not my rival, and I love you. I love you angrily, and I wane hot and cold, red gold and green, changing under heat and stress and doing my best to live while also doing my best to help you live. Karma chameleon, you come and go, you come and go. My sister has allotted me 1 Karma Chameleon per day - a time when I queue it in our continuous spotify queue, and it transforms into a 3 minute dance-session -- unashamed, wild flailing of limbs and belting of choruses - a moment to come and go with whatever pulls us. Whenever the first chords of the song stream through our little green speaker, she begrudgingly groans, and I, too, wonder if I am being exhaustive in my love of this tune. Then, it picks up. Slowly, then all at once (the way you fall in love and the way you fall asleep), Karma Chameleon pulls you from your chair and into a new way of being. Your job is to come and go, to change colors, to make loving yourself a challenge, a pursuit of changing hues and effervescent oranges. Stevie is a Karma Chameleon. So am I, and so are you. Loving you would be easy, if your colors were like my dreams -- red gold and green. Red, gold, and green. -P |
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October 2020
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