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Each of us has our own unique GPS system... Truth-telling is the most thorough navigation tool.

Friday, March 13, 2009

TUMBLING ONTO THE BLANK PAGE


Fifteen minutes... Can I pull one off in fifteen minutes? Can I let myself loose, flow through these wrists that rest on my overheated white iBox... supple wrists that remain ever ready, willing to transform me through words, and transport others through touch.

I want to let it rip tonight, to flow verbally about the last twenty-four hours, to record my excitement, the amazing high of hearing my voice in the tape recorder say at 3:30 AM, “I LOVE MY DIARY!” Started when I was twelve and a half, it became slightly embarrassing throughout the years. The blank books would first be filled, then gathered like hair into a braid.

I carried them with me. They were on the shelves at home when I went through high school. Then I took them up north during my four years at UC Berkeley. All of them flew with me to the east coast and even more came back to California with me, three years later. I remember storing them at a friend’s twice when I was pet/house-sitting in Snohomish Washington for five weeks and on Connective Avenue in Washington DC for three months. I wouldn’t leave them in storage.


I remember they were one of the things unpacked first whenever I moved into a new place. I moved often. Eight moves in the Metropolitan DC area alone. I think I once counted the different places I’ve lived and I’ve moved twenty-three times. Lots of packing boxes only to unpack them and then repack too soon. Fortunately, I’ve been home here for eight years.

It was kind of like a drug fix... this need I had to document what I was experiencing. Tallulah Bankhead once said, “Good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don’t have time.” In one of my diaries I glued in a snipped article. At the end of her life, Tallulah wandered up and down Broadway, wondering what life was all about.

It was important for me to figure out what life was all about. More than anything I wanted to know why I was here, much more than I wanted to figure out what I could get for being here. Even though I won an award for modeling in the 6th grade, I wasn’t into clothes. I never had a thing about being pretty, yet I look back at old pictures now and know Goddess gave me looks.

I learned early however that there would always be someone prettier, smarter, funnier, more popular, and wealthier than me... therefore the only part of the equation I could control was that I had to be specifically me. I had to know what the me part was, not the pretty, or smart, or funny, or popular, or rich parts were... it was what was underneath it all, that’s what I sought. In myself and in others. That was my focus all these years, when taking time to explore what I was experiencing in words, to figure out what I was feeling on the page. I sought to understand why I was hurting or enraged. By writing about it long enough a deeper explanation would come through, if I could get quiet enough to truly listen.

My writing did that for me all these years. I used to think it was a nasty habit, somewhat wasteful of time and energy. So many pages, so many shelves, leaden with words, frustrations and loaded revelries. The notes I took on a life I was sometimes too afraid to really live.

And yet... what I did do in all those moments I sat posed with fingers over keyboard or when gripping a pen, was to get present in the moment with where me was, what was covering her, challenging her, making her hide.

I can come present, quickly...

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