2.11.09 Lvov Trip

Driven to desolate ends of the earth, where I run away with pieces of garbage flying out of my hair and little devils whispering incessantly into my ears until I step on needles and dirt and can't stand the sight, sound, the smell of it anymore.
Lifted up and up and up into beautiful worlds that don't exist like ones on the ground, they move upward without caring about forward, but move forward anyway, colored and graceful and fairy-tale magic.
It's a spiral, the core is wonder, made of faith and majesty and spirit and paint and fiercely beating hearts. Outside, the world around interferes for better or for worse.
With more and more excitement, comes more and more fear. The feelings grow and become more dangerous. Poems sing out loud for hearts, blood and broken bottles and flowers and candles in wind and crashing waves at night.

If the ocean had an equivalent, it would be this looking out onto the sunrise over the picaresque Hansel and Gretel wasteland, sunbeams passing through steam. It would be the violent crashing against cliffs of feeling, and their smooth abating into that world of aftermath and its eerie calm, where something inside you wakes up, sees in a way it never saw before. And suddenly everything around you looks different. Is different. Will always be different. It would be what wonders lie buried under high tide, the treasures in pieces of each other we all found when the moon peeled it back. I have learned something about all of you, and learning many things from all of you. Beautiful depths just barely set foot in, I know. There is something we all keep from one another at the same time as there is something we all offer. It came at many moments on this trip in the form of graceful, portent silence. A few specific moments: The first, on the train tracks in the middle of the night when we all sat struck, spellbound in the stillness of the blue and orange night of that other world, all trying, almost in pain to capture that moment with whatever tools we could use best, writings, photographs, sketches – all of us in perfect, harmonious, uninterrupted constitution. The second, in our Hungarian host's apartment, digesting a large dosage of the absurdity of life that this trip had offered us up so far, at the same time remaining in a state of constant wonder at everything around us, this dark and majestic city, this wise, unassuming post-modern novel hero―our current host―and his charming apartment (not lost on any one of us that this was holy ground), our new selves, our new perceptions of our world and of each other. Again we sat still and silent, writing, creating, drawing, smoking, thinking. We had sought the ingredients for a sensation, and it was made. We had sought relief from our established patterns, the one great established pattern that solidifies our existence and separates us from one another. And it was found. We sought connection and freedom from self-possession, we sought to lose ourselves in a realm of some great permanence. And we did.