this is a paean for ordinary moments of light

The loneliest time of my life was when I was studying abroad in Florence, Italy. I had gone abroad with the vague and romantic notions one has about living in a foreign country where anonymity is supposed to be met with serendipity. Feeling unsettled is as physical as it is metaphysical. It is much easier, of course, to believe that our discontent is caused by tangible problems we can solve—and so every next horizon you move towards is Arcadia until you get there. Every city in your future is one terrace higher until you realize you’re climbing the mount of purgatory. The abstraction of the people you’ll meet and the places you’ll be—the self-satisfying and perhaps desperate idealization of a better future—is dangerous. The ideal that is never realized, that is always out of reach, is a betrayal to self, a recurring, insoluble disappointment.

I lived in a dark, windowless room that had only a sliver of a pathway to move through. In the morning I smothered myself with a pillow to block out the fighting screams of Paola and Leo, which was frightening at first, but for the sake of self-preservation, I came to believe that’s what Italians did—express themselves with passion that could be mistaken for fury. Even as my Italian neared fluency, I existed as a stranger in their house. The Cappios would come home from work—Leo was a train conductor, Paola a kindergarten teacher—turn on the TV, and sit at the dining table for hours, with frozen pizza, canned tuna, hot dogs with mayonnaise, and cellophane-wrapped cornetti, among other drab and depressing fare.

I remember this time distinctly as a counterpoint—a time I never want to return to. My melancholy existence clarified the forms of nourishment my soul requires, as well as the things that were merely false idols—wayward romantic notions of fulfillment. As the latter category grew, so my notions of the ‘the good life’ dissolved. Growing up requires this dissolution. Maturity, it seems, is letting go your false ideals of what constitutes goodness, joy, and meaning; sometimes letting go is not enough; sometimes these ideals are erased by their impossibility; absence and negative space are epiphanies of their own. Living abroad, in the land of Italian men and good food (not in my household) and the most incredible art and olive oil, gave me little joy in the absence of community. Majestic churches and azure waters, smoked mozzarella and supple leather, were little consolation for an empty spiritual life. I was looking for all the wrong things.

I write about this time in my life to help myself understand why I am so in love with my community now. The contrast of darker times brings my current friendships and rhythms into relief. All of this is sentimental, I cannot help it. Sometimes sentimentality is a byproduct of gratitude, the overwhelm of abundance, a gift of grace, not of my own doing. I have little to boast about, for I know how fleeting and how fragile relationships can be. One day a solid communion—only joy and purity and the feeling of eternity—and the next, all gone, people leaving, people changing.

But if I were to tell you how joy has punctuated my life, I would tell you (head buried in the most saccharine nostalgia) of the fires that burned in the wake of communion with the people I love. There is nothing subtle, nuanced, or complex about any of this. These fires have blazed, not in embers but in the wild; not sparks over kindling but in revelatory floods. I cannot temper the simple and child-like joy of sitting around a table with people I love, celebrating our lives together, filling our bodies and our souls; indefensible against our excessive appetites and our over-sized hearts. I have put off writing about what gives me so much life and vigor for fear that I would trivialize joy; that this love letter I daily compose in my head would be so achingly cloying that you would think I have no grief in my life, no capacity for deep sorrows, no recognition of brokenness. My own soaring joy scares me even as it spills over. I swallow it back down lest my joy is robbed from me. See, I can only talk around it; I admit, I am swimming in sentimentality.

On Tuesday evening, there were peaches, honeycomb, truffled cheese, bread, homemade plum and peach jam; sweet harissa carrots on a bed of basil, mushroom risotto dotted with peas, golden cauliflower steaks lined up on a tray, piles of red and green vegetables shimmering in a wooden nest. The west-facing sun beamed its harsh light through the windows, casting our bodies and faces into chiaroscuro. We sat down to eat, knowing that in the hours to come, we would not be searching for anything beyond what we had here; that our desires were not stretched beyond this table, but that we had found meaning in existing together, caring for one another, knowing each other, being in the folds of each other’s lives. I should not speak for everyone, but the feelings that moved me that night were so large that they felt communal, and were so large because they seemed to be experienced by everyone, collectively.

When we gather like this, we forget the abstract desires that grow out of what we think we don’t have, and we meet as we are. Time stops. Candles are lit and blown out; fires glow and then pass into darkness. The peril of joy is its transience, but that is not a good reason for not cherishing it, for remembering it.

In my sleep I am humming paeans to sanctify these ordinary moments of light. Winged joy surprised by its own flight, barreling through inevitable darkness.

Thank you God for this family of mine.

this is my daily toast

I have two homes in San Francisco, one in which I sleep and maintain a monastic silence; the other, which I go to, to escape the noise in my head that results from too much silence.

Luckily for me, the latter is one right, one left, and one more right turn away, a two-minute walk, or a 30 second scamper. I arrive often with a sigh. Or an exclamation, which is sometimes the same thing.

Crystal is usually behind the white kitchen counter, which is always remarkably pristine when she is behind it. Its ultra-clean blankness is particularly notable in contrast to mine, which is currently littered with: three books, not neatly stacked; one magazine, flipped open to the middle of an article; two cookbooks; my electricity bill; a tea cup stuffed with a bunch of cilantro, half of it snipped off—I'm keeping it hydrated; and a plate with crusty peanut butter remains. Tidiness is not a factor of self-sufficiency, but messiness can certainly reflect a lack thereof.

Today she is in the kitchen with a three-page letter in hand, a notebook with a bumper sticker that says “NO RAMEN NO LIFE,” and an open Mason jar filled halfway with an amber-colored liquid. When Jacob walks in later, he refers to it as a “healing potion” and asks if I need any, to which my heart says yes and my mouth says no.

“Jacob was feeling a little under the weather today,” Crystal says. 

The “healing potion” is a mint tea tonic laced with peach-chili jam, which was made in this very kitchen yesterday, after twelve hours of chopping, stewing, and sugaring many pounds of peaches. They are sipping this tea tonic slowly, prolonging its life with more hot water.

Jacob is scanning papers, an adequately monotonous task for this grey day, and I am staring out the window, my legs pulled up into my chest, while balancing precariously on a wooden stool.

“Jacob, you are a consolation to me,” I tell him.

“A constellation?” he says.

“A consolation, which is something that makes you feel better when you’re feeling bad,” I explain.

“I thought a consolation prize is what the loser gets,” he says.

“So that they feel better,” I say.

“I like constellation better,” he says.

“Ok, then you’re my constellation,” I concede.

Jacob and Crystal, in this house, on this day, are the perfect confluence of people in a place at a time. I feel small today, trivial, and they let me talk, and they ask questions, and they are witty, funny, and nourishing. They make no caustic remarks.

Later Crystal and I walk to Local Mission Market to buy some bread for the jam. We are both condiment people. While Crystal is deciding between the boules and baguettes, I stand silently in front of the bowl of olive bread samples, eating one doughy cube at a time.

“Bread makes everything better,” I tell Crystal. “I feel better when I’m eating bread.”

Back at the house, Crystal slices the bread and lubricates it with a stick of butter. She looks like she’s giving the bread a belly rub, which is how Crystal interacts with food—elegantly, easily, gently. I like watching Crystal move around the kitchen—always deliberately, never haphazardly—a true meditator. Sometimes she whistles and softly sings—always in a barely audible, quivering tone—while washing the dishes, or wiping down the counters, and I listen intently. Her demeanor is delicate, her mien beautiful. She is one of the most thoughtful people I know. I watch Crystal pour boiling water on a fork to clean it, and then she begins reorganizing her jars, as she often does, checking on the ingredients of each jar as if they were plants to be tended to, which makes sense, because she is a gardener.

“Mama Crystal,” Jacob and I joke. Mama Crystal, who takes care of us, who prepares two plates of toast strips, two corresponding bowls of jewel-toned jam. We eat.

  

this is a dog morning

My first hike up Bernal Heights, back in 2012.

This morning, there is a thumbprint of the moon in the sky, a trace of what was last night. The rest of the sky is one smooth swatch of mellow blue, slick and wrinkle-less. We are at the top of Bernal Heights. The paved road we walked wraps around the hill like a coil, and we’re getting a 360-degree view as we climb up.

Along the way, we encounter more dogs than people. One man has two large Irish wolfhounds, shaggy salt-and-pepper grey creatures, a few shades darker than the man’s silvery gray mane. He’s wearing their un-tethered leashes around his neck, and he walks behind them, as they zig-zag between one side of the trail and the other, sniffing the dry grass and whatever else interests them along the way. We stop and comment on these pony-sized dogs.

“They’re so big!” we say.

“That one used to be my little girl,” he says, pointing to the larger one of the two. She has hair as thick as a bath mat. “Now this one is my little girl. She’s seven months old,” he says, pointing to the smaller one, who is not much smaller, but has hair that is thinner, not fully grown in.

The wolfhounds are his dog-children, and he talks about them with pride.

“We have a Shih-Tsu at home too,” he says, “but he can’t keep up on these outdoor walks.”

“Do you have a backyard?” I ask.

I imagine the dogs are like large pieces of moving furniture in tiny San Francisco apartments, expensive occupants of space but worth the price for their effect on the apartment: a cozy and domestic enhancement.

“No,” he says. “They’re fine inside. They like to sleep all day.”

“Have a good morning,” we say, moving towards the next pack of dogs. There are many along the way.

I don’t love dogs, but I understand why people do: for their quiet companionship, for their unconditional love, for their cuteness. They also provide a happy reason to get out into the world, to walk your neighborhood, to strike up a conversation.

A friend of mine runs after dogs she sees on the street, chasing after little moments of acceptable and always (mostly) requited connections with strangers.

Another friend does the same but with babies. This chase is the same: for dependable joy, both aesthetic and emotional; for a little breath of life, not fraught with social mores or anxieties.

“Babies are your social network,” I tell my baby-loving friend.

“I never realized that, but you’re right,” she says, as she moves towards another stroller. “I love the ones with curly hair.”

this is the ship that sails

Crystal is sitting on the floor cross-legged, plucking filmy green cilantro leaves from their skinny stems. She's wearing a yellow apron, which is abnormally bright and frilly, considering her (and my) typical funerary garb, so we've been told. There's a beer can by her legs, and Carlos stands behind her, over the sink, washing the dishes. All morning he has been starting fires (literally), shepherding the kitchen herds, handling the meat, which are large and unwieldy slabs of flesh, a slippery sheet of stomach, red and yellow spiced chicken parts, offal-stuffed stomach lining. There is a lot to do. 

Jonathan is thinly slicing radishes, while Crystal makes kale salad in the sink because we don't have a bowl big enough. We make do with what we have--people power, mainly; the implements are not important. Carlos is stacking leeks and onions between pork slabs and tying it up in a burlap sack, an old coffee bean bag that I haphazardly sliced with a scissor blade. The pork has been seared and cooked again in its own coffee-filtered drippings. Now it is packaged like a meat present, and set atop a grill to steam through.

We've been shucking corn, and now it's painted with a cotija cheese-lime marinade, sitting on a rack that we pulled out of the oven, because we have so much food and nowhere to put it, nowhere to mix it and marinade it and salt it. Initially we didn't even have any salt, but we ran next door to Ben's house, and he gave us some, which was crucial. We always find a way to make it work.

People are arriving. It's sunny in Oakland, with a bay breeze that we'll never escape, even on the hottest day. The meat is shuttled back and forth between the grill and a barren wooden table, where the food is laid out, unmediated by bowls and plates, just piled directly onto the table, arranged like a garden of earthly delights. Here is green foliage with shredded carrots and jicama and caramelized onions like a blooming bush, here are sliced radishes and cilantro and garnishes for your meat, a pot of beans cooked with pork neck, and spanish rice, simmered like risotto in red spices. Carlos is chopping the meat, and the knife thwacks the table rhythmically, like a metronome. Now everyone lines up, and Carlos is serving people their food, from table to plate, person to person.

It's JD's birthday, and we are all sitting around a long table, eating in the sun. I don't know how they do it--these people, my friends, I am so in awe of my friends, and I've never witnessed such community as this, who serve each other food and drink and music so gracefully, who fill each other's stomachs and carry each other with such love, dedication, humor. 

In the early morning, in a warehouse by 47th Avenue in Oakland, we are working with our hands, making food, but it is not a labor, it is camaraderie, the purest that I know. In the afternoon we are so full, and we are aching, sun-tired. We laugh as JD, who is tied up in a sweatshirt, attacks a football-shaped Raider pinata like a madman, and then we scramble to pick up horrible chicken-flavored lollipops that probably cost $1 at the Mexican grocery store.

this is a casual vacancy

FEBRUARY 2014

table of contents

I. VACANCY

II.  VISITING

III. VICTUALS

IV. VISUAL

V. VIVANT

VI. VIVRE

VII. VIEW

---

I. VACANCY

February was a month of vacancies. Leaving old places behind. Emptying a place of its contents and transporting those things to someone else's vacancy. Inhabiting a vacancy. Dissolving the vacancy. 

 "it was a sentence from a previous existence."

night shadows

strange, ordinary

At the moment I am empty of words, an emptiness which feels like a sleepy leg, needly and numbed. Perhaps I am doing the living which will distill the words I need later. The living is the vacation. The writing is the work. 

II. VISITING

Now I'm living around the corner from my friend Risa's letterpress studio, which she shares with another letterpress printer named James. The studio is in the Heath Ceramics building, in an old laundromat. A storefront, gallery, studio, gathering space.
The Aesthetic Union + Papa Llama. 555 Alabama Street. 

III. VICTUALS

Always.

roasted vegetable lunch, old mixtapes

soup, confessions

bread, butter

sushi, stories

shea, reveille

IV. VISUAL

taxonomies, textures, patterns from this book.

inspiration for living. 

V. VIVANT

rooftops

bookshelves

"Everything that I dreamed of is gone. [...] The places I've loved no longer exist. [...] You have to understand: I didn't visit places; I lived places. It makes all the difference in the world."

-Jack Gilbert

(the greatest vivant of them all)

VI. VIVRE

Remember the ordinary. Meditate on sentience. 

"a sense of the possibilities"

"Carol is around still, but less reliably. For almost a year, I would wake up from another later afternoon mini-nap in the same living-room chair, and in the instants before clarity, would sense her sitting in her own chair, just opposite. Not a ghost but a presence, alive as before, and in the same instant gone again. This happened often, and I almost came to count on it, knowing that it wouldn't last. Then it stopped."
-Roger Angell, "This Old Man"

(if you need a good cry...)

VII. VIEW

Driving alone at night, the world's pitch, black velvet

stapled occasionally by red tail lights

on the opposite highway but otherwise mild

panic when the eyes habitual check

produces nothing at all in the rearview mirror

[...]

Trying not to let imagination win over reality

Hurtling through the night

passions so spent become facts one observes

Not tempered, just momentarily out of the view

by the body that perceives them

Turning that into my prayer to be deprived

-"The Whole World is Gone" by Jennifer Grotz

"Language is dying, the novel is dying, poetry is a corpse colder than the Ice Man; they've all been dying for thousands of year, yet people still write, people still read, and everyone knows that nothing is really real until it is written. Until it is written! Even those who cannot read know that."

-Thomas Lux

"For writers have only one duty, as I see it, the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world. [...] once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogmas, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, [...] once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognize and do not believe in -- what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception..."

-Zadie Smith, "Fail Better"

mission sightglass / banana espresso chocolate chip bread / wildsam field guides 

this is a reflection/refraction

table of contents

I. GENESIS

II. GATHERINGS

III. GRANOLA

IV. GLOW

V. GERMS

VI. GROW

VII. GALLIMAUFRY, ETC.

VIII. GREEN

---

I. GENESIS

A February Saturday: I had woken up flustered at how late it was (10 am), ate leftover Chinese takeout while standing in front of the fridge, and ran down to the coffee shop for a cappuccino to calm myself down, to chat with Rita and Emma and Dena and Hector about the flowers on the counter and my distress and the grey skies. In the early afternoon, Crystal and I headed out of the city, to another city, floating from one train to another, perfectly content in the in-betweens, in the waiting. We were reading the same book. Bearing the first rainfall of the season. We bought pastries from a Korean bakery and got lost on the Berkeley campus. With enough time and distance, college life seemed charming again. When we arrived at the Berkeley Art Museum, we were triumphant, and the receptionist told us, "You guys look so happy to be here!" We were.

THE POSSIBLE correspondence.

Anzfer Farm constructions.

Domestic Integrities 

Natalie So, rug deputy: 

"Domestic Integrities rug deputies (Caroline Walters, Francesca Ferreira-Caruana, Valentina Castro, Rumi Koshino, Natalie Palms, and Natalie So) specially trained in the crochet technique will periodically be working on expanding the rug with locally donated clothes and textiles. They will also train museum visitors who want to help work on the rug." 

"I knew that if I didn't create a structure for seeing people in a stimulating, meaningful way, I might lose touch completely."

-Fritz Haeg, on living and making art in L.A.

II. GATHERINGS

Someone recently asked me, "What motivates you and what doesn't?" I replied, "I am motivated by the common good, by people I love and my accountability to them, by art and self-expression, by self-discovery and growth, by what's right and honorable and true. I am not motivated by jealousy, ambition, or money."

These days, the energy I give to the people and places and occupations of my life is in proportion to my priorities, which should be obvious, or revealing, or convicting. For me, this is relieving. I have been spending my time gathering around the table with the ones I love, mostly in, once in awhile out. One night, we ate in the backseat of a car on the way to the movie theatre. Most of the time, the food seems secondary, a transient delight that moves through the mouth into the stomach, but a blessing nonetheless, a reason we lean on to gather, a means to an extraordinary communion. Here's to the company I've been keeping, to the ones I love. 

A little New York fire escape moment at Kirsten's charming studio in Nob Hill. Eggs, berries, chocolate chip banana bread. I could stay here forever.

Beating the brunch line by taking advantage of weekday breakfast, at Plow. Korin and I plan to eat our way through all the breakfast nooks in the city. No waiting for brunch, ever.

Dave Lomas' book came out and we celebrated at a quirky Victorian house in the Lower Haight.

Chinese New Year was properly celebrated with takeout from Mission Chinese and Big Lantern, by candle light, in an empty apartment.

Chess mates. 

"Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up."
-Patti Smith, Just Kids

III. GRANOLA

I have had a long history with granola. From the days of eating a big bowl of it with Puffins, banana, and almond milk when I came home from school to summers at home testing recipe after recipe, granola has become an easy comfort. Making it is a familiar rhythm, in which I can build any permutation using a basic methodology. My affinity for granola also comes from its many possibilities: the classic and novel flavor profiles, the infinite ingredient combinations, the variety of never-agreed-upon recipes. 

This Oakland house--and my two very good friends in it--were in dire need of some granola.

And so it was made: oats, black sesame seeds, pecans, pepitas, maple syrup, extra fruity olive oil, extra salt, and brown sugar. We were going to add in dried cherries too but they looked like little turds and ruined the aesthetics of the granola. No can do.

I am rarely impressed by store-bought granola, but ate this breakfast granola bowl (with Damn Fine Granola, Straus Creamery yogurt, persimmons, and pears) recently at Craftsman and Wolves and loved it. Inspiration for the next batch of granola. Pistachios, cornflakes, cocoa nibs, cinnamon, curry powder, coconut, vanilla bean, and honey. Yes please.

"I can't say much more, except that it all happened in silence and peaceful simplicity, and something that felt like the bliss of a certainty and a life lived in accordance with that certainty. I must remember this, I thought, as we fly back to America. Pray God I remember this." -Mary Oliver, "Varanasi"

IV. GLOW

After a long day at work, I have very little energy to exert, or to entertain, or to make small talk. I want to be at home. On my couch. Or at my dining table. Or at Josh and Carlos' house in Oakland, which I've made a second home. These people are my people--the best people. They are creating a handcrafted space that will be both living quarters as well as a wood shop for our community. I have been fortunate enough to see this place get moved into and furnished from the very beginning, and it's inspiring to see how much love and labor they have put into this place--both in concept and in practice.

Every meal here, thus far, has been a christening. And we followed suit with a first fire and a late-night dinner of roasted cabbage, sweet potatoes, onions, and chorizo, first wrapped in hobo packets and thrown into the fire, then laid atop the logs for a perfect, smoky char--my favorite flavor..

 

"The quietest way to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west chasing after it but to head east into the darkness until you finally reach the sunrise."

-Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality

V. GERMS 

On Wednesday, January 22, after a morning of rabble-rousing photo shoots at work, I felt faint and took an early train home. As a precaution, I carried toilet paper in my purse. A heavy dose of Nyquil induced 18 hours of intermittent sleep. On Thursday, January 23, I did not speak to anyone. I am generally pleased with the strength of my immune system, but like a spoiled child thrown into pauperdom, I was shocked by how difficult it was to bear a mild affliction--of body, mind, and spirit. The forced rest did me good though--that was when I began writing about the desert. 

Sick person's view.

Every place a home.

Well-prepared.

"An attachment, certainly, though I was never sure it was love. But what did it mean to be in love? Maybe all the things people said about falling in love, about the initial torrent of joy, were a lie. And then there was the matter of how my days and weeks and months had become so unexceptional, they were nearly indistinguishable from one another--marked only by my job at a second-rate law firm and the occasional date and watching the weather shift through my apartment windows." 

-Laura Van Den Berg, The Isle of Youth

VI. GROW

February flowers:

On 18th Street.

At Dean & Shelbey's wedding.

At my parents' house.

From McCall's Book of Handicrafts, which I checked out from the library. You can make flower-head vases like these.

"The most beautiful still lifes are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets. The lemon has been half-peeled, the wine tasted, the bread broken ... These objects are in use, in dialogue, a part of, implicated. They refuse perfection, or rather, they assert that this is perfection, this state of being consumed, used up, enjoyed, existing in time."

-Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

VII. GALLIMAUFRY, ETC.

Gallimaufry, from the French word galimafree, which was a kind of sauce or stew, meaning:
A hodgepodge; jumble; confused medley.

Fantastic 14. 

Typical & accurate.

Heath tiles.

Typical & accurate.

Linea almond milk cappuccino & this book. Only the best.

VIII. GREEN

Sir Prize Avocados, Cara Cara Oranges, Josey Baker toast with cream cheese. Crystal Jones. JD Stark. I live a pretty good life here.

This is the first sandwich I have bought in two years. 

Fractal planet.

"I know I must be dying (Death draw nears)I know I must be dying, for I crave

Life--life, strong life, and think not of the grave,

And turf-bound silence, in the frosty year."

-Edith Thomas, "Winter Sleep"

"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortes. Yet I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in the folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo."-Patti Smith, Just Kids

February: jarring movements. big pivots. getting deeper. moving forward. 

lorde / jacob montague / spirits of the red city / arthur russell / dirty three