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2006-05-01 - 5:17 p.m. A dear friend recently put some interesting questions to me, and as I am ALWAYS one to procrastinate my papers and delve into things I find more interesting... I've decided to make the answers into a mopheaded entry. Here goes. Q: I know you want to be a counselor, but is poetry your passion? Is music? Fire-spinning?
I love the human interaction of counseling; I love the thrill, the challenge, of helping someone else to grow, but of also growing myself alongside the work, of continually having to stretch myself in order to be worthy of doing this work. I adore poetry. I've talked about my challenges with it in other entries, but I really relish the ways in which I can convey, through carefully-crafted words, my deepest feelings to other people. To invite others into my reality for a moment and let us both examine something together. Slowly and delicately turning the images round and round in our heads and hearts until they resonate. (Do we see a common thread? I hope so.) I love music for much the same reasons, but I also love the structure and form of music. I love the way it reads like math but makes me emote like an attentive and abusive lover. I love the way music stirs me, and the way that I can in turn share that with others. And I love allowing myself to be a beginner every time I pick up a new song, whatever the instrument, and try to piece it together in a way that is uniquely mine. Fire-spinning is just sex, pure and simple. Fire-spinning is so ridiculously sexy that it makes my head want to explode. There is very little I find more beautiful than fire (decay, graffiti, destruction, birth, rebirth, sprouts, seedlings, babies...) and to be able to harnass that destructive force and tame it somehow and then twirl it around my body... And I suck at it, which is the funny part, because it's STILL so beautiful. Another instance of Humble Monkey Brain. Always learning new tricks. And the performative aspect is amazing. And watching people with whom I'm in love spinning fire is wonderful. There are so many others. Knitting -- another creative act, make it yourself, DIY, it's just so fucking feminine and so fucking punk, and my grandma taught me and I miss her. Dancing -- expressive, sensual, fun. Yoga -- serene, challenging, meditative, sweaty, falling in love with my big toe every time I'm in a forward bend. Sex -- mmmmm. Good overly-intellectual conversations among friends. Sushi (among friends). Cooking for people I care about. Cooking for me. Sharing food, time, space, energy, with friends and family. So yes, poetry is one of my passions. Q: Do you often wonder what you will do with your life? Having published some of your work already, do you feel that you make contributions to the world through your writing? Is contributing to the world important to you? What I will do, future tense? No, I wonder what I am doing. Constant present tense, and I'm quite certain of where I am. I am trying to leave the future up to the present and give it some time to develop before I attack it with MUSTs and SHOULDs. And I think, whatever the hell I'm doing with my life, I'm doing an okay job; there are people who love me and a dog who worships me and supposedly I'm smart and my work attests to that, although you would often not know it if you just examined my study habits. I feel that I make contributions to certain people's lives through my writing. My FGB in particular is probably my biggest fan. I'm wanting to put together some chapbooks to sell at the Anarchist Book Store in San Francisco, and if I could get back ahead of my homework and just steal a weekend to myself, that project would be well underway. Once it's ready, I'll be feeling like I've done more. Literary journals have such limited circulation, and I want my words out to the masses. That has always been a dream of mine, and I'm getting tired of waiting for other people to help me manifest those dreams. So. Fucking. Punk. Contributing to the world is deadly important to me. And while I think that just in breathing and existing we each contribute energetically to the planet (whether in an additive or a subtractive fashion...), I feel that there is more work for me to do. That was a really big reason for me to start volunteering at the Crisis Line last year -- I felt like I was being greedy by going to school, sucking up all this knowledge but imparting very little back to the community. Babbling in paper after paper about injustice but doing little to rectify it. So hopefully, a low-cost yoga studio with free childcare is in my future achievements, among others. You know, maybe save a few coupleships, turn a few hearts, open a few minds... whatever. I'll be as close to SuperGrrrl as I can while still being true to me.
It's... essential. Even when I'm not doing it, it's essential. I don't know that I can pinpoint its exact purpose -- I think it helps me contain, understand, make sense of, and share... but lots of my poetry has these little subtextual emotional currents, too, so in that sense it's a bit of a visceral expression as well... I don't know. I think it's just the way that I know how to make sense of and interact with the world. I love language. I read way too much as a child, and it shows. This is the best way I know to BE in the world, and BEing without words (which I attempt every once in a while) is valuable and beautiful and very, very alien to me. Which is, I think, part of my love of yoga -- because so few things get me OUT of my head and OUT of language, but utthita hasta paragustasana does. Sincerely, --mopheaded is on a deadline and pretending it's flexible
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