living is more than breathing

Vivir va más allá de solo respirar. / Living is not only a matter of breathing, my friend.  

- Jeihhco, rapper for peace; Medellin, Colombia

five degrees

if you're five degrees off, you miss the mark.

if we're both five degrees off, we are landforms away from each other.
grand canyons. rift valleys. sahara deserts. atlantic oceans.

I'll try to better find my mark / and match it with yours.

tiny ponies

we made a tree opera in berkeley.

we painted dinosaurs in the backyard of fairlandia,
which we pasted all over cambridge.

we ran, jumped and skipped and played. and laughed.
and saw the streets of san francisco.

we drove through the length of the northern california coast between san fran and mendocino.

 we saw the man who sat who sold smoked salmon from a lazy boy nested in a trailer.
he had white powder in his life for his entire life until 40.
sugar. then coke.
then free from powder.

 we were nearly sprayed with the ashes of a grieving family on the san francisco coast.
they scattered the ashes of a loved one and we moved our eyes away in respect.

and here we are. and here you aren't.

you are absolutely tremendous, ms elsa kim. I will never forget that.

(my dear friend elsa kim, who died when her car collided with a tree. august 2013.)

what we put in

7. 
HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.

The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. ...We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour....

- Milton Glaser on Ten Things I Have Learned

The full list is here: http://revisionarts.com/2011/11/ten-things-i-have-learned-milton-glaser-part-of-aiga-talk-in-london/ 

delusions

that my hands can't reach inside your brain and stop the voices.
the irrationality.
the pain.
fear and suffering.

and the delusions.
/ delightful as they may be /

kills me.

Solidarity

Since the protests in Gezi Park began, every evening at 9:00pm the people of Istanbul show their solidarity by clinking their glasses with silverware wherever they are.

Here's a timeline of recent events in Istanbul. 

did they sing?

Or did they sing–
the humans and the monkeys and the wolves
rising their voices up
all together,
conjuring light from
the blacked out, inexhaustible moon.

Yes. We like to think that
some of them
must
have sung.

- from Caroline Harvey of Boston

breadth as an indicator of strength

I can point to all the obvious demarcations. 

I took your short words
the lack of question marks
as a lack of curiosity.

I mistook breadth for strength. 
is breadth an indicator of strength? 



when a thing breaks,
the interior becomes clear.

what I missed when it was solid,
is now apparent.




there is hint
the soft spots were there
always.




my enchantment,
fooled me.
my investment,
blurred the dents.

On Organization

“Technology should do the hard work, so people can get on with the things that make them happiest in life,” he said at Google I/O. “People are starving in the world, not because we don’t have enough food, but because we’re not organized. And computers are part of that. … Farming is great if that’s what you want to do, but not if that’s what you have to do.”

He says he’s uninterested in the stories about Google versus other companies (of course, everyone’s thinking Apple). Instead, he’s focused on building “things that don’t exist.” To him, the “important things aren’t zero-sum.” An example of one of these big visions is giving people’s commuting time back through self-driving cars.

- Larry Page, Google CEO

when it breaks.

I can point to all the obvious demarcations. 

I took your short words
and the lack of question marks
as a lack of curiosity

does breadth indicate strength? 
strength may not grow from breadth.

though.

I'm not sure my pointing would have realized anything different.
I think we would still be in the same spot. in the same roles. in the same patterns.
as it was, what I couldn't point to.
that I felt lonely sometimes right next to you.
that I felt I needed strong words to convey my meaning.
that our habits didn't seem to align.

I wanted you to support me and my ambitions
as I had tried to do for you.

the point in which you said not again to another full-fledged partnership.
the moment when I realized you knew nothing about my day-to-day life as I felt I knew about yours.

and then I heard you.
I had mistaken breadth for strength.
this exchange we have now, not perfect, stronger than before.

- - -

and when something breaks, its interior shows itself clearly. what was missed when it seemed to be solid is now apparent. perhaps its dents have always been there but hidden by its enchanting gleam.

I don't mean to break you.
I didn't know you thought we had something that could be broken.