From 29 November 2001

My life is a continual out-of-body experience. Except, when I realize that this is my body and there's no two ways around it.

Yesterday, washing my hands in the lovely Solagem bathroom, I looked into the mirror and saw a face I recognized. The stringy goatee and moustache beginning to hide in my general unshavenness. My sunken eyes' quiet pleading, receding hair's cruel taunting, and broad strokes of cheek that look meaty, but harmless. Why are my glasses always crooked?

I saw this face, a face I see every day, each trip to the bathroom, but this time I recognized the child I'd been. This is the face, altered, but not effaced, that watched me grow up. It is my interface to the world, other's first impression. And I wondered where I'd gone wrong, what mistakes I'd made. I want to be happy. I yearn for it, (don't we all), but I make no headway. These are the eyes that surveyed a skinny 6 year old body, poolside, one hot Utah summer day, wondering what my limbs would look like longer, when I had grown. Wondered what wonderful things I'd be doing. I looked forward to it. Oddly, a gut was not in that vision, nor unhappiness, nor any plan of action, just the whisper of hope that things would be okay.

This morning on the bus I read this poem by Robinson Jeffers:

Carmel Point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of surburban houses-
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads-
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.-As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

It resonated with me, but I know we don't have time. Over twenty years ago I dreamed of my future. Last night I listened to Owen cry until 2.00am. Owen is just beginning. And I am continuing. Sometimes it is difficult to understand where I am, how I got here. Sometimes I wonder why I can't stand against the tide of me, and push myself in a direction I want to go. But it is an illusion. I don't know where to go. I am at sea without maps or compass. The stars are unfamiliar, sometimes clouded, sometimes burning like fierce candles, often shifting their positions in the sky. How am I to proceed? It is not a bad place, but I didn't do anything to get here.

This morning, after reading the poem, three girls sat next to me. They were fifteen or sixteen years old, gregarious and conspicuously loud. A lady at the tail end of middle age looked at them intently. Especially the loudest, sitting next to me. They were planning what lukio (High School) they wanted to go to next year, and were reading the requirements for various specialty schools. I watched them. I watched the woman watching them. Occasionally she would turn her eyes to me and I thought I understood her eyes to say, "I was once like them." Young, vigorous, and confident the world was made just for them. I thought, "These three on the verge of womanhood". But then I stepped back. What are "hoods" and categories? My "manhood" is predictated by one thing: a penis. The most flamboyant flamer is as much a man as me. Categories, pigeonholes, all the stereotypes and cliches we create are only good as general statements. Once the individual enters, all bets are off.

But the most tired cliche is cliche by touching what is true.

I once believed the world existed for me. I know better now. But I don't exist for the world, either. Like the categories that cannot define us, but to which we belong, so we are to the world. We are bound by what is, but Jeffers is right by saying:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

Whatever I do, I can do. I am in the world, moved where it pushes me, but the world is also in me. Anything is possible.