ariel, jacob and hollin, thank you for the memories you left, wow.

love, Miranda

borrowed wordforword from aariel's blog:

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want -- good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

hello, all!

so I'm back from Canada, in El Paso/Las Cruces with my parents, and new on the fall-horizon is an MFA in creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso. feeling very nostalgic for intellectual stimulation and community, so I can't wait to be with a group of writers. I'm slightly nervous to be jumping into this, my inner artist gets stagefright... but I want to give this a shot.

wow, I haven't posted in so, so long. I may be speaking to the air.

if anyone is in or around Chicago, I'm going to be visiting a friend there later in the summer, so let me know.

I miss everyone, terribly!

I highly recommend the book Truth and Beauty, especially if you're into writing. It's Anne Pratchett's memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, who wrote Autobiography of a Face. Lucy was herself a poet and Anne a novelist, and they were kind of eachother's muses while they were at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Lucy battled cancer as a kid and lost part of her jaw, which raised huge questions for her of identity and self-esteem, which are major themes in both books. In Truth and Beauty I fell in love with both of them (in addition to just identifying with the struggles of young writers).

And if anyone is interested in meditation, the book Turning the Mind Into an Ally  by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche was a staple for me while I was at Gampo Abbey. It's a clear, accessible and (most importantly) MOTIVATING book on the art of following the breath.

And my three favorite poets at the moment are Mark Smith-Soto, Erik Campbell and Alden Nowlan. Ed Lent too, but you'd have to know him to get access to his poetry.


All the best in love, luck, changing the world, making breakfast, sleeping well and engaging the paradoxical, all the time.
Miranda

ps. current project: making chess pieces out of cork.

Damien Rice has a new album! i had no idea until I checked out his website.

official announcement:

I want to be off of antidepressants.
I may enter a world as dark as Edgar Allan Poe's, but I want to be off.
I had a small epiphany a few minutes ago, sleepless in bed, that every decision related to taking medication or stopping medication, from the time I started, has been in service of making my life more manageable, saner, comfortable.
And all these decisions, no matter how well intentioned, have led to frustration, self-doubt and anguish these past few months.
Compromise, here, feels lame.
My neuro-receptors may be fried, I may not be able to stand the withdrawal, but I want to do it anyway, for everyone else who wants the same.

A man walked into the bookstore this morning, laid a small pile of bird-watching books on our desk. "Hi, I just want to give these to you. My wife died, and I don't want them." He smiled, too bright, with barely a pause walked back out the store, luminous. Kiera and I gawked at eachother, and in her defeated New Jersey accent said, "Oh my god."
"Oh my god," I repeated.
"Look, this one's from us," looking at the Birds of New Mexico book, its white price sticker frayed.
"But that's an older edition, the color is slightly off," Lukas remarked.
"I can't believe he's out here," Kiera said, "that he's not, like, in bed. How did he get out here?"
"I bet it's hell for him," I said. I examined the bird books trying to divine who they both were. It wasn't until I was driving home on my lunch break and a block from home a bird flew past, a kind I didn't know, yellow. (The Birds of New Mexico book divided the birds by color.) When finally I felt a kind of loss. Inside I heated up the tortilla soup my mom left me on the counter, and absence hit me in the stomach.
The bookstore is like that, someone will say something off the cuff that exposes their world for a moment. And I marvel at how close and how far the distance is between stranger and friend, clerk and customer.

I was in Barnes and Noble late one night, and found this book called PostSecret. I sat in a chair and paged through it reverently for half an hour. Some of the postcards had me near tears. I really, really, really recommend it to everyone. The original website is, I think, postsecret.com. Has anyone else seen this? What are your thoughts?

I look like the hunchback of notre dame. HIVES. it's sort of funny to see your face morph like that though. Ironic that I was dressed up as a gypsy fortuneteller [re Esmerelda] the night previous. I'm like the impermanence posterchild.

Hope everyone is well.

So taken with
The faultless face and radiance
Of an alluring moon,
My mind goes farther, farther
To reach remote regions of the sky.

- Saigyo (1118 – 1190)


from daily_zen.

From: An Interview With Ajahn Sumedho

Having been a monk for forty years, you now know a great deal about human nature. Looking back is there on particular thing that would be most surprising to that thirty-year-old who first put on robes?

- Yes. Not to believe anything your mind says. (Laughs.)

Say more about that.

- In other words, you are not what you think. This is the greatest discovery. At thirty, my thoughts were my reality. They were the way I created and judged myself. I was very hard on myself and in many ways quite cruel and judgmental. Now I know how to think without being a victim of my own thoughts.

( continued a bit... )

This is a really cool article from Tricycle magazine about Weezer front-man Rivers Cuomo, that sheds light on the relationship between his art and meditation/Buddhist practice.

http://www.tricycle.com/issues/editors_pick/3546-1.html

so being at home with your parents in a city with no one you know is a little maddening. I think it would actually be alot easier if I was living alone in an apartment in a city with no one I knew. so i'm still connected to larger social networks through my parents, but it feels pretty bottlenecked.

so the goals are to:
-gym every day
-meditate every day
-write every day
-and see how that goes, and then find time to paint.

I have no idea what i'm doing with myself. AHH.

The past two nights I've woken up covered in what look like mosquito bites. Does anyone know what these are? Fleas or bedbugs?

they're mosquito bite sized, I think. sort of big. does that make them bed bugs? are flea bites small?

a good quote:
Security is a kind of death. -Tennessee Williams
and insecurity is wise. but stressful, too. you have to face the night-terrors.

so many ghosts to reckon with. and odd to write in this journal, it feels like being on-stage somehow. that's probably why I haven't written much. actually, the internet is such a distraction I kind of wish I could resign from it. amazing thing to say when, as an 11 year old kid, it was my life. luckily, I'm now much more fascinated by anything not man-made.

here's my playlist of the hour.
1. Iron and Wine- Such Great Heights
2. Regina Spektor- Fidelity
3. Imogen Heap- Hide and Seek
4. Owen Pallett- The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead
5. Rilo Kiley- Portions for Foxes
6. The Killers- Mr. Brightside
7. Coldplay- Yellow
8. Rubyhorse- Fell On Bad Days
9. The Von Bondies- C'mon C'mon
10. Lauren Hoffman- Magic Stick

love to all.

Re: amicitia6's quotation thing. 5 quotes i think are awesome, selected from http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

If I had my life to live over... I'd dare to make more mistakes next time.
Nadine Stair

All of the significant battles are waged within the self.
Sheldon Kopp

The life of man is the true romance, which when it is valiantly conduced, will yield the imagination a higher joy than any fiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

A mother understands what a child does not say.
Jewish Proverb

THIS IS SO COOL.
MHC Alum Miles is on Queer Eye, episode 302, talking about what's like to be trans.

I quote (and it's a women's college, by the way):

EPISODE / 302: TRANS-FORM THIS TRANS-MAN

PROFILE:
NAME: Miles G.
STATUS: Married
CATEGORY: Newly Made Straight Guy
EVENT: Coming Out Party

Miles is a 24 year-old trans-gendered male who just moved from California to Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Born Amelia Goff, Miles didnt feel like he was a “woman” the way he was supposed to feel like a “woman.” She grew up in Vermont as part of an extended born again Christian family, and began her transformation when she came out to her family and friends as a lesbian at the age of 15. It wasnҒt until her sophomore year at Mount Holyoke College (an all girls school!) that she started calling herself Miles. Taking testosterone for the last two years, Miles is finally able to “pass” as a male due to the physical effects of the shots. His body has gone through many changes, and now that his second “puberty” is coming to an end, he is finally ready to embrace his new life in NYC as a man.

But he needs help! Not only does he need to learn the basic skills of being a “male,” but he also needs some serious lessons in style and panache! With careful guidance from the Fab Five, Miles will become the most stylish “trans-man” this city has ever seen! The Fab Five will help Miles host a gathering of family and friends to celebrate his coming of age as a man. Many of the guests have not seen Miles since he has been on the hormone therapy, and it is important for him to reintroduce himself to everyone as Miles and show off his new look for his new life in New York City. If done right, this party is an important step for everyone in his life, past and present, to accept him and come to terms with his choice to “perform” his gender as a man.

PROBLEM AREAS
...is a new man, literally
...needs to learn how to be a man
...Miles must know how to take care of his new body

thank you to all good dentists everywhere!!

Today:

I think this is great. (borrowed from daily_zen.)


In my pot nothing but the wind’s deep moan,
For company only a staff of wisteria vine;
Last night we chatted and laughed till all hours
The empty sky listened with a cold heart.

- Muso Soseki (1275–1351)