its very unlike me to keep all of myself in one place
so
i am moving -
let me know if you'd like to know where i'll be : )

look homeward, friend

a reminder to myself, to you as well

   

When you are already here

you appear to be only

a name that tells of you

whether you are present or not

and for now it seems as though

you are still summer

still the high familiar

endless summer

yet with a glint

of bronze in the chill mornings

and the late yellow petals

of the mullein fluttering

on the stalks that lean

over their broken

shadows across the cracked ground

but they all know

that you have come

the seed heads of the sage

the whispering birds

with nowhere to hide you

to keep you for later

you

who fly with them

you who are neither

before nor after

you who arrive

with blue plums

that have fallen through the night

perfect in the dew

(to the light of September: WS Mervin)

all things hold

: )

to the tune of lilies

if you search "indescribable" on google images, you'd find an abundance of galaxies.

: )

-
and to say that you are funny would be saying like the night sky is black, cause the night sky is filled with stars and comets and planets that no one has seen yet. and i want to look at you, lying down on my front lawn - i’ll try to take you all in at once but you just go on and on and on

(paul baribeau)

despite the damage

after a long good talk with two precious humans over lunch who are known to me by the noblest, yet most underrated name (people ask parents, how many children do you have? and that is a conversation starter. the young ones are mostly, the first on their mind. people do not ask children about their parents.) we found a cafe to sit down for a bit. small exchanges about emails and homework but mostly we sat in silence, and he read his magazine (dad is picking up old hobbies again!) while i did math. a lot was conveyed : )

in between every chapter i allow myself to read poetry, articles, two pages of a book. 

last night's dream was a myriad of places - that i want to surround myself in. a friend sitting cross-legged on the floor of a bookstore with the sun shining over his face and arms, peals of laughter effused from mum, bunsen burners, dancing in the unlikeliest places, mistakes, victories, and my dreamscape was on a whirl, changing and changing and changing until i woke up. when i did it was like a gentle rupture, and i only recalled all these places in the shower. i guess homes of habit just stick in your head (it is not true that one only dreams in bed.) i like how some songs are full of old sentiments. maybe, feelings can be kept. yep.

when we look back

I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world

would be the space my brother's body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man

but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,

rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.

This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This -- holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I'd say, What?

And he'd say, This, sort of looking around.

the gate, marie howe

intuition inn

if something is poetry in itself, does putting words to it make it - found?

here's another paradox:
you can carry words everywhere with you - and it carries you everywhere with it

dreams of orchards -

- the generosity of rain

listening to a downpour. study music!! : ) good feelings.

today was a day of being economical about language and eating, math, laughing, conversation, toast bread, econs, more math, thinking, watching children and the sun grow sleepy, good time spent with special people in clean, well lighted places : ) there are wonderful people around me and i hold them close

"i'm so tired but i'm not done with work"
"aiyo jaz just go and sleep. if you don't sleep right, your dendritic spine will start to die and you lose memory. serious"

--
"... being continuously aware that the bounds of personality are not reproducible by a sharp black line, but that each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things" - reminds me of a conversation i had with mr yong and michelle a few days ago about voices and meaning (non-meaning doesn't mean the lack of it, but rather when it is not effectively conveyed - rational inversion) reminds me that all creation is esoteric in a dimension of perspectives.

trying my best - beginning to settle, things are in comfortable shades of warm amber and calm maroon

trains traversing

who knows if the moon’s
a baloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky—filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their baloon,
why then
we’d go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody’s ever visited,where

always
            it’s
                   Spring)and everyone’s
in love and flowers pick themselves

( ee cummings )

timshel

these days are passing like a boat on water.

if we think it is enough, oftentimes it isn't- we all have a little more to learn.

as i am reminded of my insufficiency, i am humbled by grace

---

“okay i’m going to walk into my house, and i’m going to leave you with this question. can you guess the question?”

“(laughs.) of course i can.”

we are the ocean

have spent the past few weeks or so, immersed

during our late night conversation we took turns to talk about what we are thankful for, a consistent sort of closure for everyday - in recounting my thanksgiving i realise that these different art forms are not lonely at all, and unknowingly i receive so much more than i can ever give.

last night a friend read aloud a growing repertoire of six word stories.
tonight i am collecting memories written in five bullet points. (they are all special and brilliant.)
tomorrow i will give five friends typewritten, homemade things : ) and then after school, continue working on another work-in-progress with 20 wonderful humans, discovering new vocabularies through our bodies.

never want to tire of the things i love : ) we are all His art

maybe there are places in the people we love that we can never reach

and for that, you are Monet painting light

even the sun knows your name

at the end of the day, i am just thankful that i will always have a hiding place. that however i manoeuvre this constant that is change, and though my insecurities and fears may put up a fight-- here is a refuge to run to. here is a grace that is sufficient - however we change, You stay the same

till then. till the end of this race.

You are with me as I work; savouring my concentration,

enjoying my fascination, keeping me through all the scurry.

Secret as a pebble on my tongue - steadily holding me in Your gaze

---

dear God,

there was a glow in the world today. today was a rather lonely day for me, but thank You for reminding me at so many instances today that my loneliness is never the romanticised one of humans, it is solitude that i enjoy with You. the light that You so openhandedly poured into this fragile and undeserving earth today opened a whole other realm. i will perennially be in awe.

You are beautiful.

in less than twenty words

you think you wrote a poem, when actually all the people in your life have written it for you.

saving samson

the morning sun
holding us up
-
clouds spilling out of our hands into the horizon too gentle to forget
-
dancing : has been truly liberating. could you feel us last saturday night because i could, really keenly. one thing i am really blessed with is guidance (because i can never do anything on my own really) other than spending lots of time with the batch as of late i've had really good conversations with the seniors and my current exco members : ) the more i dance the more i see the value of dance. also farewell was executed pretty well i must say! we had small mishaps but i think everything was fit for a home, and that night i learned that there are some walls i have built around my heart and self-consciousness that i have to deconstruct, and that it is perfectly okay to be vulnerable.

during church yesterday, a thought: that God's humble words sound so much like poetry- especially when they are spirit-led. next to me jp was writing furiously on paper and when i leaned over to take a peek he was writing a letter to God. "hey: what's up bro? i think i am really learning surrender to You."

and the day before - at 10.30pm while my hair was all wet and i was arranging my papers into thin little stacks for a file a friend arrived at my door with a movie, styrofoam cups and chocolate milk. watching Little Miss Sunshine with a treasured person while listening to the rain fall lightly outside was warm, incredibly warm :')

had a long talk with s this morning over eggs, grocery shopping, a haircut and a bus ride, and we talked about the changes that happen to people, the changes in what they do or think or feel, but mostly these changes are not in their control, or our control - these changes are unconscious? how do we truly label ourselves as someone who does this, or is this, when we know we can change any moment... it amazes me how time and circumstance can open up a body by the ribs and what comes spilling out is more than words, it is a soul, and sometimes i look at our bodies and our hands and the spaces between us and everything is just architecture, our bodies are a physical repository and that's all - and recently i realised even if we are of the same language it is so inadequate and it just functions and categorises identities - of course tonight what only shied into the light was a page of a great story. the rest for other days of discovery.

another long talk with someone who makes me feel very safe, with someone who i would not be able to do without in jc. it is good to express these sentiments of thankfulness - so -

today i am thankful that i have friends to keep me in check. i say this very often but we are all normal and we all have problems and i cannot emphasise this enough

david foster wallace said something in his speech about liberal arts, that we tend to see things from where we are because everything to us is so immediate as of our standpoint, we rely on things in our own head. isn't it a waste sometimes that we glaze over people sometimes that we don't realise the blaze in side of them, that it is so bright but we are just... standing at a selfish angle.

looking at the gulf between our trajectories and it is not too out of reach after all

dance

I am inspired / I am excited :') 

all that's safe

(7:20pm - it is dark outside)

Karen Thompson Walker says, that fears and stories have the same architecture - in our fears, the characters are us, they have plots, the beginning, middle and end. and just like all great stories, our fears also have a suspense - an attention on a question that is immensely important in life as in literature - what happens next?

around me there are people with hearts the size of houses (really big houses). came home to three consecutive phone calls, from three people who mean the world to me, the first on shortcomings, the second on spilling and the third on space - so many questions in my head and so many things not answered, we are all just a tangled web but this mess is a sincere chaos. is it still chaos if you manage to pick out three things (people) and hang on to them? in studying history and speaking to people i realise that all the lines that exist intersect.

these days are teaching me courage.

even kafka burned his books

am sometimes inundated by what needs to be done, but gosh i love being an arts student

switched on my computer to (1) print SEA homework (2) look up things for PW, and ended up scouring the internet for the past hour or so, poring over articles and journals and blogs and the news, ended up watching two tedtalks -

to me there is a difference between reading for school and reading for myself, and lately i have not been doing the latter very often, today L and i ended up carrying our books to chill and i managed to read, rather peacefully, for half an hour : ) i realised that reading keeps me very very sane - i was wide awake the rest of the day during lessons - and it feels so much better to really sit up straight in class to absorb and learn - there is always so much to learn

yeah. while reading i came across this which kind of spoke to me : )
 "And this is what writing is about for me—the way I can read a short piece and feel transformed within the small amount of time it takes to get from start to finish. There are deliberately cerebral pieces of writing that I think are fantastic and beautiful in their own right—but for me, in the end, I need literature to make me feel things. And not just a little bit. I want writing to be the most intense form of feeling that I can find. As if we’re putting words together in order to deeply alter or enhance or trigger our feelings – in order to feel more alive. This is part of why I write a story, why I put words together: because they are, in the end, a tremendous—possibly unrivaled—delivery mechanism for intense feeling. The kind of feeling that Kafka traffics in I find especially appealing because of its contradictions and conflicts, and because of the mixture of fear and beauty, the seemingly incompatible sensations are suspended and held aloft and presented to us." the atlantic

(lately i have been feeling a lot of things, but looking at people around me, and the imperfections we are stuck with, i think to be able to feel everything so keenly and vividly is one of the biggest blessings of being human)