On Inauguration Day, 2017
I was invited to an open mic night in the home of a friend of a friend I've made here in Prague. For the last few months, I've been feeling a drive toward storytelling. I miss it. Standup was a thought, but then, a few days ago, I found myself re-reading old notebook entries.
On the day after the election, I started a new notebook. A cute little thing with a print of blood orange Penang shophouses, filled with blank pages. I have maybe 7 or 8 left. The book is filled with moments, thoughts, references to things I've seen, read, or heard (some is quoted, but for the purposes of elegance and timing, not attributed) - people I've met. It's about me, home, America, and what the last few months have been. Reading these sketches, I felt them knit together and I knew a kind of prose poem was the right thing for the occasion and the emotion.
Reading it to a room of welcoming strangers was exactly what I could have hoped for, and now it belongs here. The title is long, but fitting - it is the script I've come to use when introducing myself to the people I meet along the way.
......
I'm from the US. New York originally - but I grew up mostly in Utah. In the West. In the mountains. But, I've been living abroad for a few years - and now I'm doing a work/travel program where I live in a different city every month for a year.
No more fear, I have my voice and my open hands,
and the world - a spin around the sun in the form of a gift.
Glimpses of old men holding psalters in stoneways and stained glass windows,
Teenaged girls waxing rhapsodical in cockney accents about Jesus and
their rights to their own bodies.
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightening and her name:
Mother of Exiles/ stands hand in hand
with an angry glittering goddess keeping watch over fields.
Wings thrown back, hands forward - pushing, grasping, a motion at once pressing and receiving.
Her eyes wild - challenging, channeling.
"Intimacies that keep people apart are also what bring them back together,"
I think to myself as I carry stalks of brussels sprouts like bouquets through the old town square.
They linger at the kitchen counter, flirting with 17 year old waiters, and trying bites of everything.
"These days, all important things have decided to become invisible.
Love is invisible, war is also invisible."
But there are lessons on ways to be. Four things says Abukar:
"Open, Honest, Fair, and Smart."
And Mario reminds you that your fate may be to one day kill the wild boar of destiny.
The ocean will sing to you, your heart will come close to exploding from happiness
- or was it the 8 espresso shots you drank by mistake?
Because Heaven is also a place we can measure;
Botticelli, and the man in Pizza Napoli who asked me to dance told me so.
These are the things to ponder when you're sitting is the special section made for
gazing at The David's ass.
In the course of two weeks you will find yourself in so many piles of stones -
some filled with love or loss or moss.
A love brimming with potential, a life lived in the only moment we were each other's.
There's a knot in your throat as you watch the girl in purple dance and
you somehow manage to build a poem without screaming and rendering your garments
on the day Trump becomes the President of the United States of America.
And there is so little to do but watch a legacy thwarted from the faraway nearby.
You stumble so often, it is as if the air is a second home, welcoming you the right of return.
The grey days are bright; even the sharp brisk winds nurture in them a kind of kindness.
Every new city brings a new kind of door to struggle with before there's a familiarity of how
to open them.
And from two Dutch ancients and a Jewish mystic you excavate the Truth that will carry you
forward -
"I have chosen the melancholy that hopes, strives, and searches, over the melancholy that
despairs in sorrow and paralysis,"
For
"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."
And although it terrifies me more than anything - here I am on the staircase, moving
up, or down, or both.