Joshie # 3

So many times that night we caught each others eyes

you were radiating, that warm social energy you have when you are tipsy and comfortable and chatty and free.

so much happened around us that night. I was stuck in such turmoil and you knew it, you saw it, you felt it.
But i would find myself with your eyes on mine. And we would just look and i cant help but smile for what you evoke in me. For how we look, how we search, how we give to each other with those eyes. 

Yours are so full.

I remember grabbing your head in my hands and pulling your face to mine. I think I just laughed. you give me such joy. Everything we create in friendship is joyful for me. 

We sat on the couch,

i hardly noticed that everyone had left
your face was turned away
I put my hand to your chin and turned it towards me
i wanted your eyes
i wanted your lips

I think you thought it was about something else, someone else
something else external to that moment
it wasn't.
it never is with you.
You create something for me, a space, a feeling, and nothing else is important.
in those moments it is only about you.

Everyone left and we just lay together. Looking. I would touch your face. It is amazing to me that we feel so comfortable just looking. For so long. That you are so generous with your eyes.

We spoke a little. In whispers to each other. But we don't really need words. 

You asked me what i wanted. I sighed with such heaviness. 

You said i was so complicated. 

I am Joshie, but I so wish I could give you simple and beautiful things.

On Coffee, Bread and Patience

Patience has never been easy for me. I am too headstrong and short tempered. Fevered, giddy and impulsive. But patience has its place, especially in a creative heart. So I like to seek it. Force it upon myself. Hand myself moments, whole and golden to pause and gather and assess and breathe and observe with patience. Not in a vertiginous frenzy.

I can have moments, isolated and discrete but still whole, where I am creating. I am achieving. I am pursuing life. Maybe it is not furiously. Maybe I am not spilling coffee on my dress, maybe I am not eating breakfast in the car as I rush from one adventure to the next. I am still pursuing life. But in the spaces, the silences. There is just as much to be found. There is a natural rhythm to be found.

This morning I went to a cafe and had a coffee while I read some creative essays.

I stir my coffee before I drink it. I learnt that from Gen. So that the consistency is a little more uniform. Not half froth – half actual coffee. The spoon clinks in syncopation against the glass. I pull it out slowly and while I wait for it to be cool enough to suck, I watch to see if the residual coffee will drip. I tilt it on some elegant trajectory and hold it at an angle so the coffee gathers on the end of the spoon and forms a little drop. My heart beat quickens in trepidation, will it, wont it, my eyes are fixed on this spoon and my surroundings are fuzzy. One drop, two drops, and I catch the third in my mouth and lick up the sides of the spoon. Warm metal, sticky amber coffee.

It is mornings like this that remind me of how sacred and gilded each moment is. How much there is to be found in them, how rich a resource, how worthy of attention. I like that sometimes I feel a torrent of moments and it evokes creativity in me, and sometimes i just feel one, with intensity and attention to detail, and it evokes a different kind of creativity.

Like baking bread. I crave days that I have time of a morning to bake bread. It represents to me the idea of slow and comfortable creation. The absence of pressure and expectation and this great sense of haste and hurry. Because creating should be free. You cannot force it, you can encourage it and create a space where it is fertile and rampant, but it has it’s own rhythm. A tricky thing to balance sometimes, so I bake bread, and bread represents my balance. I drink black coffee, I listen to blues music and I stick my hands in a bowl of dough. it is so good to make something with your hands. to spend time engaging in something purely physical (well, dexterous) for the sole sake of creating. it is the most glorious suspended moment of time. with dough warm and wholesome in your palms. it is so good to have hands covered in butter and sticky dough. to form something with your fingers. to feel the yeast alive and growing and elastic. feel it bouncing beneath the heel of my hand. its very sensual. bread. creating. kneading. needing.

and then i just sit and wait while it rises. maybe there is a time for everything and i can just learn to be patient.

I used to add cold water to my black coffees, to my herbal teas and even to my teas with milk. Such haste, such hurry. Such impulsive imminent desires for things. Now, most of the time, I like waiting for my coffees and teas to cool, for that perfect drinking temperature.

I can wait for things to fully form themselves in their own time. There are things I have control over and i celebrate my urgent desires for them. But there are things that gloriously, I have no control over. I can wait for those to form around me, to be ready to give themselves to me. I can work around the rhythm of other things. I can wait.

open

I want to leave my doors unlocked
and my windows wide open
a vessel
for both sun and storm

summer had burned long and hard
the fields had turned to dust
it had been so long
since i had even touched someone
i waited oh i waited long
my body could not last
i felt a storm come rising up inside

save me from what i want
save me from what i want

-jen cloher

a collection of special things #3

black cats with bald bandy legs giving me furry kisses

playing banjo til my fingers callous

feverishly writing lists of secret fears on napkins in the beer garden with sophie

seeing the stars burn waywardly through the gumtrees at waverock

spending a whole day in constant communication with gen, and feeling like she is back here again.

walking through the farmers markets, arms bundled with bread

Dylan's mannerisms, gesticulations, expressions, presence.

red wine outside in the cool evening

dreams about a tall willowy woman as the air changes shape around her

spring # 5

spring is for lazy ambivalence
spring is for heart aches about the future
for fear and for excitement in equal parts
spring is for specific lists of vague delights desires and dreams

spring #4

for green gumboots and stripy grey socks
for white sun hats
for walking down william street
cheeks rosy and underarms sticky with warmth

for familiar men with spectacles and long ginger beards
for peculiar friends
for ambivalent conversations about Steven King over a coffee machine

for Cat's flushed face, not meeting my eyes
for the 'accidentally-going-the-same-way-when-we-kiss-goodbye' dance

spring #3

Spring is for warm days with cool winds
for singing while hanging washing on the line
colourful pegs, crumpled whites that will never be white again,
and it drying quickly, crisp and stiff

sunrise

a smattering of pink
a sensual pink. soft and chalky
a hazy diaphanous smudge across the sky line

uncertainty

Sophie and I had a great conversation about freedom and fate, and whether they are mutually exclusive concepts. It was challenging and inspiring and exciting.The kind of excitement that only learning with and through other people can give me. We picked through eachother's thoughts and offered alternative thoughts and drew on the thoughts of important and smart people.

Sophie had such clear and thrilling ideas about fate. I just had to read it over and over again. they were sublime, i wanted to gild them to my windows.

it got me thinking about something else though. I have been thinking about this a lot.... How I feel about uncertainty.

A few years ago I was so certain about this. About how I felt about freedom. There was no room for doubt. doubt was weakness.
But now i am just in the process of asking questions. It frightens me to be asking questions. I long for certainty that i lost. But I am sure I'll find my way back to certainty, but i’ll have a much stronger foundation for those questions.

I envy past Fiona and her unexamined certainty. There were, still are, so many things that i believed were implacable. This is what i feel, this is who i am. There is no scope for error. For mistake or uncertainty.

There were these things that i believed were so foundational to me. Never being less than free. Never doing something that i doesn't fill me with joy. Never having sex with someone i am not completely physically enthralled by. Never doing something without understanding what my motivation was, or without being comfortable with that motivation. I thought it was conceptually impossible. Physically, fundamentally impossible. My body would not engage. My heart would not negotiate. My soul would resist.

I am in this place now where... i need to know its ok to be asking questions about what i thought was non negotiable. I need to know that its ok to have feet of clay sometimes. (here’s a random bit of poetry I always remember - from the bible, of all places - ‘This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.’) I need to know that there is strength in identifying weakness. That i don’t have to be stoic and strong 100 % of the time. That there are parts of me that are uncertain and uncovered and thats ok because life is about learning. That doesn’t frighten me anymore, that thrills me.

There is a penumbra around these things. Around certainty of values. There is scope for mistake. There is always scope for learning. Its ok that i am not fully formed (got that one from clare bowditch) Its ok that I am relative (sophie got that one from Anais Nin)

Or maybe it is about identifying what you want to be a foundational concept. And then you work hard to make it that way. Is a belief less valuable because it was cultivated over time and determination rather than something that has always been there? Now that i think about it, i think there is much more value in identifying what i want to grow in me and growing it myself. Maybe it all comes back to that idea of accidents vs autonomy. There is value in choice and hard work.

I worry i have tainted this idea of freedom for me. That the very fact that i doubt its implacability means that it is not a part of me. But there is value in me choosing freedom. And actively seeking it for myself.

when i did something that i did not understand why i was doing it, which is a big deal for me... it frightened me. Because i thought it was a fundamental value. Unshakable. Inherent. But now i think... its ok that i have learnt that through trial and mistake and questions and decisions. Its ok that i will spend time deliberately entrenching this as a chosen value in me. It has more strength for it.

So i don’t really envy past Fiona so much. Because she didnt ask questions. because she was afraid of learning. And I think asking questions is brave. I think examining life is brave. Was it Socrates that said an unexamined life is not worth living? A very strong thing to say. Im not sure how i feel about it for anyone else, but for me it rings true.

So this is the context that I am thinking about fate and freedom in. The context of... asking questions about things i once accepted was certain and being ok about that.

And also... finding a balance. I find myself charging ahead with such certainty about what i think, and then life stops me and challenges me and i have to re assess. I have to consider alternatives and soften my iron clad views. I have to balance the elements.

Like, for example - I am learning to be ok with the fact that i cant be for myself every thing that i need, that i might need something outside of myself. I need to balance, i need to soften.

Certainty in freedom.....For as long as i can remember I have felt these words to be so true. That i am free. That I was never less than free. So when people challenged that, when i let people challenge that and in turn challenged it myself, it is super frightening. But I am balancing. I am asking questions and considering and exploring the penumbra bravely and when I do come to a conclusion it will be stitched under my skin with all of these background colours and textures. 

I am dusting off my feet of clay and continuing to march along.

and celebrating wondering. 

Alpheius and Arethusa

Three times I saw you
woman of the land
three times you entered me
the capricious sea
three times our bodies were one

From the moment that I felt you
nymph, naked and wild
when i felt your toes
in my muddy banks
I understood
one day again I would surround you

The first time
You bathed in me
Your body
soft, brown and reptilian
lithe and limber
slender and svelte

You bathed in me,
in my erratic body
my tumult surrounds you
my rising tides push up against you

For glorious moments
so consumed we were
not even air could invade
your spaces that i filled
most private, most intimate
i breathed you in
and you drank from me

Together we rose
wilder and wilder

But you rose from me
you shook your hair
and walked away
for you dwell on the land
and I am the sea
But, my love, I am drawn to thee

Your footprints remained marked in my soil
and I remained a vestige dripping from your skin

The second time I felt you, my love
You ran by me
throbbing with life
your sisters shrieking
giddy from the hot sun
you splashed, you played
and i swelled around you
simmering with your freedom

Ripples resounding
your love will drown me
Implacable was my desire once more.

So here i wait, cavernous and capricious
For you roam the land
wayward and wayfaring
and i am that which mires you
that to which you will return

You have feet to walk the hard, red earth
and I am the swelling, surging sea
but I am bound to your body
and implacably I will pursue thee

The third time I met you, 

I was rushing through Ortygia
fanciful and free
raging and ravenous
and there you were
by the hand of Artemis
no longer mortal
a giggling, babbling stream

I watch for you
i search the seas, the brooks, the springs
i listen for your laughter like bells
I feel for your skin, now soft flowing water
your wayward feet now thunderous torrents

There is a current that runs through me
a deep and entrenched destination
without deviation,
without hesitation
without alteration

I am bound to your body
as you, rivulet,
are now bound to the sea
i am bound to thee
until we merge
boundlessly

I surge through Syracuse
a thrum of determination
I find you there waiting
a thrum of anticipation
we mingle our waters
a thrum of satiation

I press against your banks
your columns of soil
of mossy dank pillars
here i dwell in your warm cavernous body
I shape myself around your creases
I flow through you, i surround you, i swallow you whole

Finally, my love, we are emerged.