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[somstory]

[somstory]

September, already. All thoughts of dying disappear and I wake up to try again. After I split the year in half in July I lost myself to the fever dream of starting over---You told me to wait, be patient. When the heat wave rolls away, we can do whatever you want. But you walk and talk like an old man reminiscing! I said. I feel like I am dying!

It was our first summer in America. We listened to This Land is Your Land over and over. Ate only half of every ice cream we were given. Drank the other.

When we felt the first few notes of autumn touch our skins and the children conquer the green again, my head suddenly cleared with the intention of living.

There is a stanza missing in the song, and I want to know why.

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[somstory]

Mahmoud Darwish, Life To The Last Drop

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Unknown, Nature Documentary on American west,  1970s

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Kay Ryan, Winter Fear. December 1999 

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Henri Biva (1848 - 1928) 

Villeneuve-l'Étang embrumé

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R.D. Laing, 1970

One is inside

then outside what one has been inside

One feels empty

Because there is nothing inside oneself

One tries to get inside oneself

that inside of the outside

that one was once inside

once one tries to get oneself inside what

one is outside:

to eat and to be eaten

to have the outside inside and to be

inside the outside

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The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

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Medicine Cabinet

10x16”

Oil on Paper

Wylee Risso

Seattle, Washington

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Traditional Country Style, 1991

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From the Bare Handed Series by Holly Lynton

These images are from my most recent series, “Bare Handed.” To create these images, I sought out individuals who make themselves vulnerable in the face of nature and attempted to capture the meditative, transformative state they achieved while working with a potentially dangerous animal or in an uncomfortable environment.

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A promise as easy as a feather--- When I was yours, when I was a bird.

Now what do I do with all these limbs? Knobby, angled things.

A head full of hair---and nothing else!

And who are you now? You who were the envy of my envy

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Dusk at Ulster Heights Wetlands by Gerald Berliner

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Anti-Intellectual

A day as old as millennia. We awoke to the sound of the alarm, shuffled out of bed, and dusted off the sleep from our faces. The day announced itself through the window, the autumn light made crisp by the chill air.

The kitchen was quickly busy with just two bodies, unpacking, chopping, peeling, washing. The eggs were cracked against wood, swirled into the bowl with a pinch of salt and pepper. Husband complaining about rising costs. Wife scolding husband for eating too many sweet breads. All the devices faithfully at work — the kettle boiling, the toaster heating, the pan sizzling with a modicum of butter.

This is the life I want to live, I thought, and I felt the weight of my poor liberal education weigh me down, though my feet were quick to move in the small, tight space. It was over for me, I was sure. I could only enjoy in glimpses the beautiful, lively mornings of my ancestors, a fair price to pay for being equally blind to their pain. As I poured the maple onto the figs, berries, and seeds, I was sure I wanted this. The simplicity. The movement and light.

There was something I was missing. Even the anti-intellectuality discussed by the scholars in the books I read surely did not campaign for complete degeneration and discharge. The anti-intellectualism they spoke of had to be a detour for a higher, more sophisticated path of living. Surely, they were not supporters of emptying the bucket completely? Surely, there was to be a substitute.

But I had forgotten all the important bits. There was something they were meaning to say between relinquishing the rational grasp on life and appreciating it in full wake of flesh and blood. Something about saving the soul, perhaps, but I had taken them all too literally. My mind was slipping before they made it intellectually becoming to do so. It was with a dumb stubbornness I wished to run after my breakfast. I wanted to hit the pavement with the flat of my foot, to slap the city in the face — pat, pat, pat, pat, hah! — make dents where I was alive.