"women are like teabags. we don't know our own strength until we're in hot water."
~eleanor roosevelt


it was a scalding day.

equinox.

watching it melt away.

It's impossible to take note of your mind all of the time. You would tie yourself up in knots and run off the road. Instead of going to an extreme, begin by concentrating on one particular emotion in yourself. Choose the emotion that bothers you the most, or the one that is most prominent in you.... For many people, anger is a good starting point because it is easily noticed and dissolves faster than most other emotions. Once you begin to watch your anger, you will make an interesting discovery. You will find that as soon as you know you are angry, your anger will melt away by itself. It is very important that you watch without likes or dislikes. The more you are able to look at your own anger without making judgments, without being critical, the more easily the anger will dissipate.

Thynn Thynn, Living Meditation, Living Insight

first day of spring

today i broke up with eyelashes.

i used language he and i share so he would know what i was saying.

i told him that "with a heavy heavy heavy heavy heart i release you."

i feel terrible.

Double life

I drive to work in the sunrise. At 7:30am, Jiovanna tells me, "Ms. Gernes, I'm going to grow up like that" as she snaps her fingers and shakes her five pigtails. Roderick has his first temper tantrum at 7:45. Arlisha writes in her journal about "friends haveing hot love with ea chotherse." I give a "not okay in school, not okay till you're older" talk to a 6-year-old. I teach until I'm hoarse and clenched, listen to Kerrianna finally sound out "Hop on Pop" for the first time, convince Demetric that he really should go home instead of living at school and playing Legos all night, drive home.

In Cleveland after work, John goes to Wal-Mart, picks up the last two remaining cartons of tofu. The Wal-Mart associate standing next to him says, "Shoo, you mean you really eat that stuff??" He can hear the double question mark. "It's actually really good." "Man, you crazy." He goes to the self-check to avoid further condemnation.

I come home and do yoga, read prose that flows like a meditation, pick six-petaled flowers while walking on the banks of a creek, eat that tofu with a venegance.


***
To begin writing from our pain eventually engenders compassion for our small and groping lives. Out of this broken state there comes a tenderness for the cement below our feet, the dried grass cracking in a terrible wind. We can touch the things around us we once thought ugly and see their special detail, the peeling paint and gray of shadows as they are -- simply what they are: not bad, just part of the life around us-- and love this life because it is ours and in the moment there is nothing better.

~Natalie Goldberg, "Writing Down the Bones"

write.

inspire me.

i need it.

xoxo.

domingo.

it's one of those slow sundays where you wander from one task to the next with your head in a perfectly contained cloud. i'm on the couch with a candle lit, watching artsy movies that are making me sad, but it's quite wonderful. i made a very large hot chocolate and painted my toenails pink.

"in my heart, you'll stay."
- somersault, decoder ring

more magic

I knew that the play would be about language — that if it was to exist at all it would need to exist in its subtext, in the collision between different kinds of language, the tension between what is said and not said. The speaker would be someone who uses language not to communicate but to distance, to obscure what she thinks from even herself.
~Joan Didion, NYT March 4, 2007