Home for Memorial Day

I'm home in Leslie, MI until this evening.


View Larger Map

It's such a comforting, sincere emotion to feel that I am really home.

I am discovering all the books and CD's that I have let slip from my mind while in Lansing.  How could Nick Drake's Pink Moon not be on my iPod?  Blasphemy.  Especially when the title track devastated me before my first driver's education lesson, the song pushing me forward to some adult ritual I hardly wanted to initiate.  Such a reaction fits well in my general tendency to abhor growing up, growing older, growing gray.

I have been feeling, in general, both very happy and very nervous about going to Brazil.  Health and safety precautions freak me out more than console me.

Humid air in Leslie is somehow more comfortable than humid air anywhere else in the world.

I find solace in a couple books on the I Ching I bought years ago.  I used to see them as mere instruments for fortune-telling, and not reliable ones at that.  After so many years away from these books, I now see them as very inconspicuous yet deep wells of a philosophy that, after so many quiet years on a forgotten bookshelf, has only grown more ripe and respectable.

I wish I could spend a lot more time here.  Every time I come back to Leslie, it's always in passing.  A night, a long day, an afternoon, then I'm back in what feels like my replacement home, an imitation of a true attachment to pieces of furniture, to painted walls or to sunlight falling on a staircase.

Here's to growing up:

A Poem from High School

As I was looking through some old books and papers at home, I found this sometimes awkward, sometimes interesting poem (a bit like anyone's teenage years):


I loved before the mountains loved.
My heart was pierced by Indian's arrows
Scores before your grace shot down from the sky.
Darkness lives wherefrom I have come;
Into darkness will I soon return.

What light, this life, and all its worth!
What beauty in the leaving and in death.
What whispers between all things living;
What cascading fountains of regret.

I do not know if I will make it
Past this day or through the night.
The sun in the trees,
hiding thick in the trees,
peeking out of the trees,
Fools my twisted heart,
and my bark brittles and breaks.

And for those who knew me in those distant halls of past lives,
Might you harbor love that, ago, didn't seem?
Send it to heaven in freedom and light,
Throw your hands to a purple light in the sky.

As if by twisting hurricanes,
As if by grinning reapers standing still in Kansas twilight,
As if by lonesome herders peering out across their land,
I turn my self-torn body around, and slowly make for home.

We were the land's before the land knew we were living,
And our monuments to no one created our gods,
In a moment they were flung from a shrug of god's shoulders,
and they danced on their light down to earth.

What more today can be done?
How can I save this all?
Is it worthless, to try, to care, or,
to give all that I'll soon have lost?

By looking up and making sure that witches don't appear,
You'll be all right, and your dogs are fine in their kennel on the moon.
But if you see a broom flash above your head, and you don't have a house to run to,
Run right up to me, and you're now company, and you will save my life,
And we'll both be all right, and we'll shoot off for the sun in a day's time.
And we'll pass through the universe in an hour.  To home.

Brazil Is Enormous

From Thomas Skidmore's Brazil: Five Centuries of Change.

Je m'y habitue

I am learning to write.  Learning to write in this blog.  Learning to write in this blog so that I will be able to relate my experience in Salvador, Brazil, with passages that shake and samba like the gently swaying hips of the Brazilian nation.  Learning to write in order to learn who this Joseph is.

Feeling much better after a week of adjusting to one of the three vaccinations I received last Tuesday.  I finally felt well enough to walk to Biggby this morning, despite all the trudging through invisible swamps of stagnant heat on the sidewalk.  After walking around in eighty degree heat for five minutes, I realized that I could never be a lava monster, even if I wanted to, or even if I had to in some strange reality show involving mythical fire creatures.

Yet, when I got my drink and took the first sip, all I could taste was sugar.  I realized that my Biggby tolerance had reverted to null after a sole week of caffeine abstinence.  The culprit looks unassuming enough:

Yet, behind that frosted smirk lies a pound of sugar at least.  Enough sugar to kill some form of cute animal in its infant state, let's just say a baby squirrel.  TRUTH.

I have been volunteering at the MSU Museum's Department of Historical Collections for about a week now.  And sure, the handling of artifacts from MSU's long storied heritage is fascinating, but this video captures, in zero words, the true joy of my volunteering experience thus far:  riding in the bed of a truck.



Ummmmmm... Yeah, I'm done with this post now.

Open Books and Impatience

Japanese oral exam went very well today.  Maybe it was the quadruple-shot latte.  Maybe it was my studying.  Maybe I can not worry so much about grades.

I will wake up late tomorrow, on purpose!

I rest while stressed.

Studying, Studying, Studying

I love the way the air smells right now, perfumed with the coming summer.  A heaviness, not overwhelming, yet laden with memories of lazy summers spent sipping glasses of water as I sat on couches and dreamed of the future, of when I would be in college and know exactly who I am.

I hope to write more in this blog, and I hope that it eventually feels natural, that I can at least know who I am during the moments when I write here, that I will at least feel rooted while sending off stray thoughts to a server in a distant state as I sit in Lansing and think about all my 14-year old dreams that are still being dreamt.  If I only could have learned sooner that the majority of teenage aspirations are only ever diverted, never given straightaway. 

I will blink my eyes, and I will be another year older.  Two blinks, another 10 years.  Three blinks, asleep in an overstuffed armchair in, probably, without fail, unfortunately, some well-shaded suburban American town...

My summer reading list is in front of me at my desk as I study:

"Un jour, j'étais âgée déjà, dans le hall d'un lieu public, un homme est venu vers moi".  Exquisite.

Japanese oral exam tomorrow.  I made flashcards with grammar points.  Tomorrow, armed with the biggest coffee I can legally buy, I will talk to myself in Japanese all morning, in probably a public place, and pray that the patterns I'm repeating begin to sound like that true chord ringing deep in my chest, the one that rings loudest when I'm sitting in Lansing  at 10:30 at night and inhaling slowly, savoring slowly each note of wet earth and humid air, feeling undeniably home.