calling on my orisha, my baba yaga, my hatikva

I found this incantation/prayer to Yemaya, goddess of the sea, who last year was identified for me as my orixa. The sea has always been the most powerful, soothing, and grounding force for me. It's energy peaks my own and when I am in it I am a mermaid.:

Yemaya. Mother, goddess of the Sea,
Be in this place, come forth unto me,
Lady of the oceans, the lakes, and the rivers,
Beautiful Queen, ebb and flow bringer,
Heal my mind, my body
my soul.
For with your sweet love, I become whole.
Ashe, Great Mother
---------------------------------------------

Even seeing that blue depth from my window is soothing and perfect. I have missed you so, sweet ocean power. The sea, seeing and not seeing it, feeling its energy near me. The sea, the sea, the sea.

I give thanks. I don blue today and in my heart, the blue of endless possibility, and believe that the world will open its depths to me if I just give it a little patience, a little care. I believe that there is poetry out there, and it awaits me. Poetry on the doorstep of my heart. Poetry that will tear us clean and new. Words that strip the pain and bring the light, I believe in hearts that heal each other and hands that warm each other and minds that help each other. I believe that some day we will be without a catch, ready for a better day. I believe that in this path we wretch, there is a better hand to play.

it all comes down to escapism

I realized that today...I didn't want my hot little date to be over because a date, and another person, particularly one that has nothing to do with my academic/professional world of warfare, can be such an amazing escape. Another world that has nothing to do with this one. This one which is overwhelming (mentally fulfilling yes,) but draining, and Protestant Ethic crazy...except alas ironically the man himself is a monk of sorts too and ran off to pay his ever-churning dues to the Faustian machine.

Another world I say:

Vacation = another world, but this concept has been sitting officiously in my thoughts ever since Liah Greenfeld's amazing Modernity seminar years ago...one of the students did her paper on the modern concept of vacation, the bourgeois routinization of reality avoidance.... You change location and activities for a specified period of time, so this is the most obvious as escape yes? You vacate your yearly routine, and this is the acceptable way to "stop the clock" and open the wallet or whatever. Time and space are altered, the wristwatch removed, the tummy filled, the skin tanned, the brain emptied like some kind of overfull receptacle of shit. Clean your hard drives ladies and gentlemen.

My point? You probably guessed it, everything except the dreaded (whatever your most constant existence happens to be,) is escape. Everything. This blog, almost everything about the oh-so-efficient but reality-consuming internet, movies, novels, coffee time, tea time, lunch time, booze time, drug-of-choice time, conversation of almost any kind unrelated to "it"...it just depends on how badly you wish to escape from "it" and how much of "it" you do every day. In the neuron-killing dead end jobs of my past, I remember bathroom breaks being escape too. I remember going to the bathroom and hearing my boyfriend's mocking voice in my head "at least they pay us to take a shit, hahaha." - and this was the sad solace of office work for me. The smugness of being paid to take a shit. Any wonder I'm in a monastic, bombastic, soultastic, starvation-causing, existential crisis-inducing, nerve-wracking, brain blowing, PhD program now?

Now too, with the overwhelm that comes with this year, everything that isn't my work is escape...people and places and movies that conjure other worlds all provide pleasures guilty and wonderful. At least the work is delicious if totally terrifying because as you can see I'm a rambler. My ideas coagulate and clot. I have to make sense of them and stick them into academicese. Easier to just be a poet? Probably. Not that poetry is easy, not the kind that gets chopped up on market blocks to fit parameters of editors who are looking for the latest fetishistically styled lines. Little meat parcels, little sushi lines that used to make sense as perfectly good verbalized soul

food.

power trips and paninis

Hello Paris. You are a sparkling majestic damsel of a city that always lives in my heart and charms me into sighing at your never-waning,

at your never waning.

You are perfect and blue and dark dark like night when

your brasseries beam and your falafel joints wink

turkish, eurasian, african, subsumed under versace

and versailles.

Paris.

You pull me into your rich arms and taunt me,

a reckless lover, never another

as full of luxurious svelte

melt me, dear city of de-lights

open up your beggar's palms and cathedral calls

take me under the bridge,

curve me up the thighs of your boats,

swallow me into your jazzy caverns

and crevices creeping with people

little ants in the fantasy maze.

I crawl to you and propose

have me.