Rilke

“if there is no communion between other people and yourself, try to be near things, which will not desert you; the nights are still there, and the winds that go through the trees and over many lands; among things and with the animals everything is still full of happening, in which you may take a part.” 

- Rilke, Letters To a Young Poet 

When I did feel that any relation I had to other people was never the right one to allow into my darkest depths, I did immerse myself in these eternal things - things still so full of happening and life - and had indeed resigned myself to these being the singular complete refuge for my soul. I still intently share in them for myself. But my soul has a refuge now, in another human being. Something I've never accomplished with complete success like this before. Fantastical.

"Real" Job

A few months ago, one of the things I wanted more than anything else in the world, was to be relieved of this status that I had brought upon myself of unconventional, weird, something of a pariah because of the way that I carry myself, the decisions I have made, the fact I was willing to work a highly unconventional 'job' (teaching Philosophy to inmates) for no pay, and all but still living off my parents except for my two-to-three-times-a-week-shady job. I sat in a Starbucks downtown, still wearing the clothes I'd taught in at San Quentin the day before, I'd just spent the night at my dad's house - him ever graciously having invited me over after several most unpleasant  and painful days - and ridden the ferry back across the bay with him in the morning, and I sat, an impostor, feeling the deep emotional wound - repercussions of some of my unconventional decisions - in what appeared to be financial district attire, with my coffee and my laptop, but I was pretending, and I was wishing that I wasn't. I was wishing I was sitting there like that because I was getting ready to go to my 9-5, seeming to be but anything but.

Well now I have my normal person job, or I've worked the first day of it anyway. And I just pray that I don't forget my dreams of scholarship and creativity, that I don't lose that thing in me that has kept me strange all these years. I pray that I don't become one of the millions of people who go to their jobs day in and day out, and like everyone else, never really forgets the truth of their resigned existence, but just get better at lying.

Although, I must say, it IS a relief to come home and have NO work to stay up into the late hours doing. The grass will always be greener, no matter whether I'm poor, artistic, intellectual, in love, rich, somewhere in between them all.

What else to do right now except listen to Apolcalyptica and watch Revolutionary Road, wait for my love to come home.

Watching the Eucalyptus dancing.


I'm crying my eyes out.