Call it Afternoon Light Through Branches. See if it answers.

I can tell it's almost Christmas cause I'm sitting in a spacious bodega stuffing mediocre Chinese food down my throat cause I forgot to eat, and the only other person sitting here is a thoughtful homeless man scribbling tiny indecipherable notes on the stacks of newspaper surrounding him. Considering the insane amount of notes I take, already stuffed into coat pockets and overflowing from under the couch in my room, I recognize that homeless man staring contemplatively out the window as a spectre of my potential future. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

I had a Floridian slip and bought a bunch of tiny oranges, desperate for some sunshine downloaded directly into my being. Then I realized they were frozen and tasted weird. It's winter in New York City, what was I thinking?

I decided to give these tiny weird oranges to my future self, sitting in the window oblivious to my attention.

Turns out he wasn't interested. I'm proud of my future self for knowing that we are both better than those sad, out of season oranges. Relieved that he wasn't so desperate that he felt like he had no choice but to accept my offering. Amused at how gracefully he turned me down.

Maybe I had to turn him into a metaphor to receive what he had to offer me: Hope. Faith. The kind of humor that arises out of the bittersweetness of life, as tart and real as lemons grown in the Florida heat.

Hearing the Cello

Last night I had a dream I only remember small pieces of. There were grounded stingrays being whipped around by the wind and there wasn't much water for me to submerge them into. According to TheCuriousDreamer.com a stingray represents Fluidity of movement, agility, and the ability to lay low and camouflage oneself (especially emotionally). As I run into rough edges at work, I wonder about how I may be finding myself in situations where there isn't enough water for me to express my fluid potential, I don't even know what kind of environment might make such a choice possible.

we all move and make choices in response to the stimulus of our environments.

Something I have considered one of my greatest strengths is my capacity to orient so deeply around the people who can teach me the most in any situation, that I can anticipate their needs or next moves almost before it escapes their lips. I pay such fierce attention to preferences and body patterns that I can find a rhythm and fast forward my learning, but I have also continued throughout my life to run into a deep confusion of relationships from people I have needed, even momentarily.

I find myself staring that question in the face again, but I can't keep claiming innocence.

It strikes me now that I have very much embraced the role of the needle, or the hands guiding the warp and weft of the projects I have worked on at a massive scale. It is necessarily a tapestry of all of our efforts to manifest it, and the flavor and style of my impact has been relegated to sculpting the experience from above, the only evidence of my work lives in the physical expressions of the crews I run. The shape and structure of the tapestry, of all of the hands who did the manifesting remain, and I am a ghost, too busy piercing the space with other people's threads to have woven in my own. Performing the part of the invisible plane, the axis. Guiding everything through its intimate relationship to myself. I have spent years writing about feeling like a ghost, not tied to history, about seeking proof of my existence through other people's responses to me, and I see that same pattern in the tapestry of the piece I just finished constructing.

My mother and I were one symbiotic organism when I was a child. I was logic and follow through, she was desire and destination maker. Our roles were reversed, I learned there was no truth to hierarchy, no rules actually existed. I have always been the needle. The Compass. Guiding hands. A container, rather than something contained.

But I am starting to suspect that not having a clear through line, a thread of my own selfness is also a choice I am making - to be the teller of the story rather than the character inside of it. To be infinitely responsive/acquiescent to others around me, so I can wear the right mask at the right moments. Shaping the world so I can control how I am shaped by it. My desire to feel myself through contact with others is kind of like a weird nervous tic, betraying something I feel helpless to control, a way of getting close to the feeling of being inside of my own story, so I can feel its heat from a safe distance.

As profound a skill as my awareness often is, I think it is time to consider how those habits might be manifesting a particular kind of reality that automatically keeps other possibilities languishing in the shadows.

"the problem with war is the victor. he has proven that war and violence do pay. Who will then teach him a lesson? And how?"