it is the 3rd of july, and I am on my back porch.
ahead of me, memories flicker of crackling fireworks, parades, barbecues, and joy over our collective freedom. these are ghosts I no longer believe in. these days, I barely have the energy to believe in tomorrow. it is the 3rd of july and I am on my back porch and everything else in the world that is not the 3rd of july that is not my back porch that is not my own dazed and delinquent mind does not exist.
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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 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 While my father built a mansion on the mountain, I was chasing my Teresa round the trees. “Can’t catch me!” she shouted, her pink tongue poking out and her skirts hitched to her knees. “Can too!” I replied brilliantly, and leapt over a fallen lodgepole to snag the back of her dress just before she made it across the creek. A rattle of cart wheels along the dirt road announced the approach of my father, sitting perched between a mule and a sweet-smelling mountain of timber, bound upward toward the mountain. With the gold he found at the claim, my father had become the richest man in the valley, even including Teresa’s father, who was the town doctor, and her uncle, who was the mayor. Not that that meant much, back then, just that he got a shiny badge and his first pint free at the Jaw. From atop his lodgepole cart, my father gave a slight smile and touched his cap toward Teresa, his kind blue eyes crinkled. “My father says your father is a lucky bastard.” Teresa informed me, matter-of-factly. “He is!” I responded with pride. “He’s the luckiest bastard this side of the Mississippi.”
And that bastard built a beautiful house. The crisp summer sunlight streamed through the massive windows, toasting the living room rug to cozy perfection, making it the perfect place to sprawl out my long teenage legs and read a book. I loved the rough-hewn walls, the massive cast-iron stove, the wrap-around porch, the trellis sprouted icicles in the winter and clematis in the summer. When Father added a horse to our crew, I was pleased, but Teresa was overjoyed, and begged to christen it Chestnut. Mother worried when Father insisted on installing an indoor water closet, expenses be damned, but I understood. Father was the luckiest bastard this side of the Mississippi, and I hated trekking to the outhouse in the depths of winter to use the necessary. Chestnut and I galloped down the mountain to find Teresa and carry her back to see the miraculous invention, and her goofy grin of amazement lingered in my mind for the next week at least. Eventually, some years later, I was pulling the chain in the water closet when I heard raised voices. Mother and Father were arguing. As I peeked my head around the corner of the landing and into the living room, I saw Mother shouting something about how the nice man from the bank had stopped her in town to ask her sheepishly about the debt, and Father gesticulated around at the grandfather clock, the lace-curtained window, the sputtering oil lamps, and asked who exactly it was that made this luxury possible. I ducked back into my room, eyes stinging, and thought that Teresa would know what to do. The next day, I went to visit her in the little apartment above the doctor’s office. She listened with a furrowed brow and a solemn expression as I explained what I had heard, and once I had finished, she nodded decisively. “Your father may be the luckiest bastard this side of the Mississippi,” she said, “but he’s rash. Your mother is right; he has made decisions that no prudent person ever could. But you, you’re a prudent person.” Her soft brown eyes met mine, with gentle insistence. Some months later, we were bent over an accounting-sheet. Even from what we could decipher of my father’s illegible script, we could tell that we were far, far in debt to Mr. Tabor. My Teresa dragged a rag across my brow. She said, “The weather’s never fair. But you’re stronger and smarter and more resilient than a thundercloud. The wind can only blow your hair.” And I believed her well enough, or didn’t care, as I leaned in to kiss her. Within a year, we were married, and within a year and a half, between Teresa and I, we had pulled my father out of the red. More than that, we had built the biggest mining operation in the state. One night, we had been invited by the governor to La Traviata at the Tabor Opera House. My Teresa was incandescent in a shimmering red dress and ermine stole, her tan and windblown and precious face radiant with scarlet lipstick and darkened eyelashes. I was following her with my eyes as she made her way through the room, asking politicians about their children and sympathizing with waiters about the pompousness of the newly rich, when a clerk tapped me on the shoulder with a telegram. After scanning it, I rushed to touch Teresa’ satin arm and handed her the yellow paper. We rushed across the marble floor sparking with chandelier light and out the ornamental door, into the rain that rushed in rivulets down the road. When we got back to the mansion, my father was drenched in sweat, his slim and frail body arched toward the ceiling. My mother, dampened cloth in hand, turned to me with tired eyes. Teresa walked over and kneeled down next to her, taking the cloth gently from her hand. She felt my father’s pulse, opened his eyes with her fingers and peered into them, and held the back of her roughened but lovely hand against his forehead. The doctor’s daughter turned her sweet face to me and shook her head. We read the writing on the wall and braced each other for the fall. As my father lay dying, he could only talk about the mountain mansion. How he had planned it brick by brick--the river stone fireplace, windows opening into the endless blue, the sun-drenched den, how he had saved every penny for it, built for himself a home and a life that Eastern society could never even conceive of. He expressed, most urgently, his wish that it wouldn’t die with him. There’s only one way off a mountain after all. While my father built a mansion on the mountain, it was me and my Teresa against the world, as it had always been and always would be. After we buried the luckiest bastard this side of the Mississippi, my mother moved into town so that she could have the garden full of lupines that she always longed for, join a ladies’ knitting circle, and meet Teresa’s mother for tea once a week at the Dusty Rose. Meanwhile, at the mansion on the mountain, me and my Teresa took all the river had to give, catching rainbow trout and washing our clothes and soaking in its bubbling hot spring, Teresa giggling madly as she sprayed me with sulphur-scented foam. We broke the pinewood bed that my father built with those lodgepoles in the back of his cart and built a crib with them instead. And eventually, when the ski resorts began tracing tractor lines along the fabric of the forest, we left the mountain mansion nothing to forgive. - K My father built a mansion on a mountain.
My father - Scabby-kneed and dusty from the hot streets of bombay - Rooted himself, firmly, In this dark and moist soil. Like aspens, our breed grew - They broke a bed and bought a crib - My sister and I were raised children of ice and snowmelt. How many ways are there off a mountain? Zigzagging around trees and through sagebrush, I chased young loves (And hid from them, too) - a woodnymph - Camouflaged in the forest. How many ways are there off a mountain? scholars differ. to some - (the strong and reckless types), only one - bruises and scraped knees, broken bones and punctured lungs, (I know two men who can attest to this method). but I believe in more — i’ve fallen, leapt, bounded, hurdled, off my mountain. landslides tumble, and of course, birds fly. We ache, restless, to find the world Beyond these dusty blue peaks. women, they run. careening downhill, skirts billowing, trails of hair and perfume snagging on pine trees. babies strapped to backs, arms full of fruit and nuts, taking shelter from storms and men. how many ways off a mountain? there’s ropes and rocks, wine and whiskey, Fear, faith, and family. Grown now, I’ve returned to these dusty old hills. My father’s mansion creaks and groans - Aches under the weight of Photo albums, half-finished diaries, And camping gear older than most of us. We took all the river had to give -- Life, laughter, hours by the fire, Roasting toes and marshmallows and listening to legends of the mountain folk. We’ll leave this mountain mansion Nothing to forget. The stories held here - Love letters from forest boys, Polaroids of campfire and rain-soaked tents, Instruments, heavy with the weight of folk songs and Imperfect chords - Warp and bend the creaky pine foundation of this old home. There are many ways down a mountain - Some right, proven, safe and consistent. Some, accidental, leave us stranded, confused, In a stand of lodgepoles and aspens Unfamiliar and frightening. My father climbed a mountain - Poorly, repeatedly, slowly carving his bootsoles Into the dusty trail of the old peak’s scarred face. Lost, he stumbled, took root where he could, And built a home from the pine and juniper, Fed by the glacial river. There are many ways off a mountain. But, returning to these trails of youth, Drinking what this river has to give, Trading chandelier light for starlight and silence - I trace ancient trails yet again. There’s only one way off a mountain, after all - The savvy, seasoned hiker knows, To increase chances of survival and sanity, And protect oneself from the harsh winds of change - The best way off a mountain Is likely the same way you came up. I explored all creative, deep, extraneous pathways of myself, and found within me a will, intrepid, to destroy everything I have been told, about myself and the ways in which this churning, grinding world works. I delve, impatient and ignorant, into the depths of my body, my mind, and the things which pull me from dewy reminiscences of self and into the gruesome monuments of importance.
The gruesome monuments of importance. Wealth, influence, the fleeting and impossible notion of mattering - all of these things drive me from myself and into the arms of those who want to move my body, my mind, and my labor to the will of their own design. What is my body? A vessel, imperfect, with whom I rage and quarrel, stifle and shrink, to fit into ideas of whom and what I ought to be in this world. Who moves me, and with what intentions? I am growing weary of allotting parts of myself to others - I chain bits of me, ragged and bloody and raw, to the hearts and minds of those wrapped within their own self-dissections. It is selfish, I suppose, to expect to see oneself in the eyes of others. The eyes of others are too often preoccupied, warped, blended, and serve not the delusions of importance we seek within ourselves. What do we seek, when we seek to matter? I seek to dissolve into goodness - to have the good that I create to serve, even while I rot. The world burns around me, and I, biting at the bit to leave some imprint of myself, scramble to write it down, scream loudly into the night, and etch myself into the sandstone of this crumbling city. I want to be pressed within the stone and soil of this moment, buried between fossils and roots, to be discovered and remembered once I am gone. I don’t believe it does us any good to dream of posterity. For all I know, posterity doesn’t exist --- the world may end with us, in these rooms, grasping for one another on dusty keyboards and cracked touchscreens. And yet, I dream of our children still - those raised with echoed stories of this time - and the ways in which they will build upon our wreckage. These days, I feel like wreckage - a ship, draped in algae and broken, crashed upon a white and sandy shore. Parts of me, I am sure, are floating somewhere in the Pacific, off the coast of Australia, or else moored on the shores of southern India. I am a captain, set to chart an ocean I do not know, stranded, and broken, and somewhere far away from you. - P Like a lot of things, the West is recognizable only by contrast. Happiness without despair is unremarkable, comfort is nothing without the contrast of suffering, and intoxication only exists in relation to sobriety. Similarly, for me, I realized the singularity of the West only after I moved East. Like any kind of nostalgia, missing the West is an ache right under my sternum that never goes away—I have a couple of those aches there, vying for room.
One of my fondest memories is of a trip we took West, driving from Frisco to the Sequoias in California. We stopped along the way in Buena Vista, Mesa Verde, and a couple other spots before entering the ancient, giant forest. We drove through the wasteland of Utah, Arizona, and/or New Mexico (I don’t really remember now). I would sideways in my seat, the soles of my feet pressed against the window, looking at the rusty landscape zoom past, pretending I was on Mars. We stopped at Area 51, and were guided through a dingy museum that was air conditioned but somehow also sticky, and saw weird 70s molds of little grey aliens, displayed behind glass on rolling gurneys or in faded polaroids. Before that, we got caught in a snowstorm, huddling in our RV while the world took on that puffy-paint, fluffy marshmallow-like quality that accompanies a big dump. Anyway, I digress. I didn’t realize I loved the West until I moved East. Like any college kid, I was homesick, imagining the aspens turning golden without me and missing the first snow. But the West is more than that. I think it’s a sensibility, an understanding that your role in the universe is small compared to the grandeur that surrounds you. City people, East Coast people, never really get to see the stars, or know how a moose grazes (on its elbows like a big old doofus). Not to say there isn’t beauty there, but the West is something else. I used to walk along the streets of Hyde Park, stepping around sun-filled puddles, listening to John Denver and imagining the mountains in springtime. I used to, to the extent that I used to do anything in New York, lay in Central Park on my lunch break with my top few buttons unbuttoned and Fleetwood Mac in my ears and pretend I was basking on dusky red sandstone, and that it was aspen, not oak, leaves rustling in my ears. Now, though, I have all of that. I sit on my porch railing in the mornings and watch the mountain chickadees swoop and chuckle at each other, and smell the dew rising from the pines, and even though this is the most upside-down the world has ever felt, I’ve somehow also never felt more at peace. -K |
journal entriessome poems, some prose, some in-between Archives
October 2020
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