My job is to live in the liminal spaces.
My job is to recognize the unique core of every person I meet.
My job is to merge life and death until they are indistinguishable.
My job is to lie down in city graveyards.
My job is to stare at the trees dancing in the late August wind.
My job is to close my eyes and recognize the infinite grasping and gulping for air.
My job is to watch the blades of grass caress the cut stone of the graves, to absorb the desperation and intention with which humans desire permanence.
My job is to find people who will build me up and create a clear space for work and play.
My job is to stay clear on what my job is.
My job is to find ways to do my job.
My job is to remain open to new channels.
My job is to break myself open, again and again, trusting that I will always be whole, even as I fall apart.
My job is to expect nothing and everything all at once, forever.
My job is to be human and allow others to witness me being human.
My job is to create spaces for people to feel safe being human in concert with one another.
My job is to ask questions.
My job is to be part of nature.
My job is to gently unfold the blocks inside of me, inquiring into what might lie behind, underneath, and between them.
My job is to look at my hands in wonder.
My job is to use my hands to create music, writing, dance, thus communicating in the most direct way I know how.
My job is to feel the earth holding me.
My job is to discern discomfort from endangerment.
My job is to cherish the creative connections, friendships, and relationships I have been gifted with.
My job is to lead with honesty and compassion.
My job is to remain present with the stuff that feels ambiguous, confusing, murky, muddy, in between, and fuzzy.
My job is to translate the immediacy of life and death into art.
My job is to hold hope.
My job is to feel the seasons change.
My job is to let go of “shoulds” and find what feels good.
My job is to decorate Easter Eggs with tiny broken treasures I’ve slowly and intentionally collected over the years.
My job is to listen to the small voices, and report back.
My job is to commune with souls while “performing” (sharing, broadcasting, communicating) music and spoken word on stages, in living rooms, and in headphones.
My job is to turn towards the truth of being alive in the chaos.
My job is knowing myself well enough to know when something in my life is dying.
My job is to hold hands.
My job is to dance, sweaty and joyful, among people I love.
My job is to recognize the the sadness and hurt in others, and to hold space for it without becoming it myself.
My job is to lean into sensation if it’s pleasurable, and say no to sensation if it’s unwanted.
My job is to surrender to the mystery.
My job is to shout my humanness from the tallest hill where somebody and nobody can hear me.
My job is to follow the softness.
My job is to pull up my socks and keep going.
Tag: Vision
sure of the tide
These waters
Pull at me
Lap at my hips
I learned to swim
In the roughest weather
So here
I am
Breathing in
Sure of myself
Sure of the tide
That always takes me
To you
Security is Surrender
It is astounding to me how much I have grasped at security. I have believed that in order to secure my future, I need to live small and tidy in the present. I have nursed anxieties about “not having enough” and “not being enough” and “not doing enough.” Grasping at security offers the illusion of control. If I can just make everything good enough, if I can settle into something, then I have control over my life, my existence, the lives of my beloveds. But this isn’t true, is it? Why is it that I insist on keeping up this ridiculous charade of control?
We do not know if we will be alive tomorrow. We do not know if we will be alive one minute from now. We do not know if our friends and family will be here, either.
What is “security,” then, really? What does security look like amidst all of these truths?
Perhaps, faced with this question, we are drawn to admit that we know nothing. That we control nothing. That, in fact, security does not exist.
Or, perhaps, we are drawn to redefine security.
Security is possessing the ability to access your core self, maintaining a direct line to your life force.
Security is staying curious, and receptive towards, perspectives on the world that differ from your own.
Security is allowing your desire to shine out of your body, to play, to explore, to keep you safe.
Perhaps, faced with these truths, we are led to a different conclusion entirely: security is surrender. How might we live our lives, love our people, do our work, if we truly believe that to be secure is to be like water, not hard stone? Even hard stone gives way eventually to the current.
all this will be ruins
All this will be ruins someday. The earth re-membering herself, re-calling her own Name. All this will be ruins someday. The bright red METRO MATTRESS DISCOUNT SLEEP SUPERSTORE sign will crack and sink into the soft forgiveness of the mud. Every Grande styrofoam cup will slowly settle beneath the dirt, snap into pieces, become one with bulging roots and galaxies of mycelium. There will be no plastic left, only vivid tangles of roots. Swelling. Sighing. It will all be ruins.
All this will be ruins someday. Every desperate, pavement-sodden parking lot will cry out in relief as burbling streams find their way through the concrete, saplings shove themselves up between tiny crevices, and grass sprouts up, along the perimeter, now in the middle, now in every possible direction. It will all be ruins.
All this will be ruins someday. Ruin, from the Latin word “ruere,” meaning “to fall violently,” turning into an Old English word meaning “act of giving way” and the Italian word “rovina,” meaning “to knock down, tear out, or dig up.” Ruins. What a relief to release the burden of progress and productivity. It will all be ruins.
All this will be ruins someday. A re-in-statement of the natural order of things. A letting-go of the chokehold we have on the world, this dangerous and exhausting myth of control. A digging up of all that we have imposed on Her. All this will be ruins someday.
May that day come sooner, rather than later.
i am not special
i am not special
i race to nowhere
i am not special
i hang sunset flowers to dry
in the west-facing window
i am not special
i eat discount applesauce from the plastic bottle
i am not special
i am always looking for reasons to want
On Cafe Daydreams
Character sketches at a cafe in Garmisch, Germany
thin waitress wearing light gold glasses and white shirt, very focused and quiet, not interacting with her coworkers much, except with thin-lipped eye crinkles to show appreciation and respect
woman pushing a stroller wearing jeans and a silvery, mirror-like raincoat that falls down to her knees, covering her arms and shoulders, reflecting the light in rainbow pools
dark blue t-shirt on a tan, blond man with a chiseled face and deep-set eyes
blond woman with light blue jeans, dark sandals, and embroidered pants with a rip in the knee
two women with short hair, severe faces, and biking outfits
heavy lash makeup barista with dark red hair tied up in a high ponytail with a thin silver scrunchy, wearing a dark outfit with white stripes down her pant leg and thick white sneakers
woman on her phone wearing a raspberry-colored wide, long dress and a creamy muslin hijab, thick and sturdy covering her head
wide, built woman wearing jeans and a beige t-shirt with gold dots on the front, holds herself as royalty or great beauty
On Prayer
Forgive me
I have forgotten
myself
again
Believe me
if I could do better
I
would
Please, I just want
to feel like
myself
again
On Clutter
Last Tuesday, I put the endless stacks of sheets into the closet. Finally. I’m resisting editing that sentence, even though I know it’s a bad beginning. It’s really a bad sentence in general. But I’m resisting. I want to try writing this piece all at once, badly, just to get something out.
In November I did my one-blog-post-a-day challenge, and it was so fucking hard but it was so fruitful! By the end of the month, there were thirty pieces, all about different things, all written at varying levels of honesty. Almost all of them had something good hidden in them, a little gem, that I will use later. So that challenge was a success. But the problem with challenges is that when they’re over, you can let yourself off the hook. You can say “alright cool beans. I’m tired now. I’m gonna watch Netflix at night instead of forcing myself to pump out yet another blog post. Yay! Celebration! Sigh of relief!” And then you can lie to yourself and say “I’ll write one blog post a week, instead of once a day…but after I take a little break.”
So five months later, here I am! Back at it. Not doing a daily challenge this time, just writing regularly and putting stuff out there.
Just for the record – and fyi, “the record” is pretty much just my overactive need for approval and recognition, things that I mostly need from myself, that I almost never give myself, yay for therapy – I have been writing almost daily in my journal. The first evidence of journaling I have is from 2001 (I was six). My family went to visit my 20-something aunt in California. I remember feeling a strong urge to write in this sparkly purple journal she gifted me. It was so beautiful, so empty. It was waiting. At least I felt like it was. I wrote about seeing the elephant seals sunning themselves on the rocks by the ocean, my handwriting was big and loopy, and I felt this weird satisfaction from being able to write something down in a little book all my own. I liked that nobody but me would ever see it, so I could write whatever I wanted.
I wrote a year later in that journal that I thought my best friend’s father, Les, was “brainwashing my dad.” I think I had never seen my dad agree with anyone before, and the fact that he was nodding along to what Les was saying was shocking to me. I was genuinely angry and afraid for my dad, and I wrote about those feelings in my journal. A “boiling hot feeling” spread through my body. I thought my dad would lose himself completely if he acknowledged any more of Les’ opinions. It wasn’t that Les’ opinions were scary or wrong. It was that I was terrified seeing my dad accept anyone else’s perspective as valid. It wasn’t normal.
To be fair, I had also just watched the Scooby Doo live action movie where most of the characters get possessed and lose control of their bodies, so the fear of being brainwashed was pretty present in my mind.
Then there was my fourth grade teacher. Mr. Baker saw the writer in me immediately, and made it his mission to nurture that identity. He was a writer, and actually encouraged all of his fourth grade students to keep their own journals, and read pieces to the class. Pretty much all I remember of fourth grade was writing writing writing. Every single day, my best friend Sophia and I would be the last to leave the classroom. We were either the most disorganized, or the least concerned about getting out, or the most chatty, or a combination of all three, and Mr. Baker would ALWAYS send us off with a hearty “don’t forget to write!” Every singled afternoon. It stuck. I’ve kept a consistent journal since fourth grade, without fail. So. Much. Material. So. Many. Ridiculous. Stories. So. Much. Processing. I fucking love it.
And since this was originally supposed to be about clutter, I’ll just quickly describe the clutter around me in my office. I did finally put the linens away in my closet. About 8 months ago, I took them out of the closet to organize them into piles – this piles is the towels, this pile is the winter sheets, this pile is the summer sheets, etc. Very exciting. The problem was, once I organized them, I didn’t have shelves to put them on. There are not shelves in the closet, because my partner and I just haven’t had time yet to build them. So I just put the individual piles on this big white IKEA chair that we got from my parents, and left it at that. It was easy to find each thing, at least, but it was terrible because my office was basically one big linen closet all winter.
Last week I decided enough was enough. I was putting the linens back in the closet, organized, shelves or no shelves.
There’s still clutter, though. In the right corner I have all of our house documents, including our deed and other important things, in a folder waiting to be filed, along with piles of music books, a broom for cleaning the upstairs bathroom, CDs that Chris and I have no intention of listening to, paintbrushes, paints, empty photo albums, empty binders, empty journals, and a collection of old calendars from my middle school years.
In the left corner of my office sits a desk that I found on the side of the road in Vermont and toted back to Rochester. Chris and I painted it this awesome eggplant color, and now it’s covered with art magazines that are “weighing down” a collage I made a couple years ago that got a bit curled from our move. There’s also a huge prickly pear cactus that we repotted recently, thinking it would do it some good to have space, only to find that repotting it was a huge mistake. So now it’s in rehab on the purple desk. Then there’s my little blue paper organizer that holds folders of receipts and checks. It’s kind of teetering on a pile of art magazines, just barely staying up. Then there’s piles of envelopes and stamps, also perched on top of the art magazines, that I use to send poetry to my patrons. Then there’s a pile of paper of various thicknesses and colors that I use for art and poetry. And to top it all off, I have a pile of piano teaching materials sitting on top of the art paper pile.
It’s all very overwhelming once I start writing it down. But the thing is, I’m doing the best I can. I actually keep our house pretty well organized. I actually look around me with a fond amusement. I think it’s delightful how messy and in-use my office is. Eventually I’ll create zones and more shelves and blah blah blah. But for now, this is what it is. This is where I’m at. And that’s okay.
The most important shelf in my office is my journal shelf. I have all of my journals, from 2001 to the present, lined up on that shelf. My history, my healing, my process, my trauma, my experiences, my family, my friends, my pain and joys, my core and my wanderings, everything is in those journals. Most of them look different. Most of them I received as gifts. All of them I love and cherish.
On Secrets
I want to give you the full picture I promised.
You have to understand that the full picture isn’t pretty, and does not seem conducive with making money, or receiving more support from the general public. But, I think it’s important to tell the truth somewhere. And since I can’t tell it on social media (I lose followers, shed likes, and lose engagement if my posts are not sunny and hopeful and perfect), I will share it with you here.
Let me back up and set the scene. I’m lying on an ugly couch in my beautiful home, cozy in a big, hooded sweatshirt from the University of Rochester, with a hot water bottle and my cat curled up at my feet. I am safe. I am panicking. There are too many people I have not called back, too many emails I have ignored and let slip into the dank muck of internet memory, too many songs I have not yet recorded, and too many opportunities I have been unable to pay attention to. I am panicking because I am not enough. Or rather, I believe I am not enough.
Two competing ideals vie for attention in my mind:
- The artistic freedom I possess in my life makes the “suffering” worthwhile.
- I am supposed to be living the dream.
Here it is in a nutshell: my innate musical talent is a gift, and thus I am encouraged to work hard to share it with other people. I practice piano and voice, create arrangements in rehearsals with my band, promote my shows online, haul my keyboard and gear to small bars, give all of my raw energy and passion to performing with my band, collect a couple hundred bucks at the end of the night, distribute the money between band members, and finally drive home, depleted, to start over the next day. I also record my songs, collaborate with audio engineers, book future shows, and maintain a Patreon community.
This is fine. It works for someone who has more tolerance than me and who gets energy from being out. I am very sensitive to noise, though, as well as socializing and being out late at night. Being out depletes my energy.
Then there’s the “making a living” part, which tends to be important for staying alive. I spend 20-30 hours a week making my music career work, not including the hours I spend teaching. Due to my sensitive nervous system, I can play about 3 live shows a month, and leave with $50-$100 bucks in my pocket. I make about $160 a month from my patrons on Patreon. With this income, at the current New York minimum wage of $13.20 per hour, I get paid for only 8 hours of work each week.
Eight. Out of thirty. At minimum wage.
So. It’s becoming clear to me that I’m doing community service when I’m working on my music. Okay. That’s fine. Community service is wonderful. The question is, is it strengthening me or slowly killing me? Is it my fault? The eternal question for everything challenging in our lives.
I don’t have an answer, and don’t think the answer is truly important, but I can at least start to think it through.
Mostly, I just want to be alone and quiet. That desire makes me feel unloveable and broken, and it also makes me feel like a failure of a musician. What musician wants to be alone and quiet most of the time? Living the life of a musician, I am almost never alone, and quiet is not the goal, to say the least. I am rehearsing with my band, or creating relationships online with my fans, or performing for a crowd at a bar who is half listening, half talking, and half numbing the stress of daily life.
These necessary, day-to-day tasks push me far past my limit. I’m so far past my limit that I can’t bring myself to call the people I love back, respond to supportive messages from friends, clean my office properly, or consider new opportunities. I’m at a standstill, trapped in the commitments I’ve already made, but unable to function properly. This is all obvious to me. I can write it out and nod my head and go “yes, I am burnt out.” But it also seems absolutely ludicrous. It’s ridiculous to me that I have such a low tolerance for stimulation, for other people’s experiences, for being out in the world. It seems impossible. I must be capable of more. I just have to bully myself into being capable of more. At least that’s what I tell myself.
We always have to answer to someone, right? I answer to my audience. And until recently, I loved doing it. I reveled in their joy, their excitement. I absorbed their energy and called it mine. But now, when I go onstage, I notice a huge disconnect between how I’m feeling on the inside and how I present to my audience on the outside. I can never go onstage and use my audience for comfort. I can’t go on and say “today has been really fucking difficult and I need some love.” They use me for comfort, not the other way around; that’s how the agreement works. The person onstage provides a respite for the people offstage. I am vulnerable, soft, exhausted in front of my audience. I try to be myself. I try to be open. I hold so much space for them. I bleed myself dry in front of a crowd of people for a couple of hours. The problem is, I cannot hold the same space for myself. At least not at the dizzying rate it would take to counteract the depletion of resources caused by performing. If I can’t love myself, or give myself the space I need to thrive, then the rest means absolutely nothing.
My life force, or energy, or whatever you want to call it, is at an all-time low, and still I push myself to play one more show, to make one more Instagram post, to keep expanding my business. That’s where I’m at, in this precious moment on my ugly couch. That’s the truth. Is this what I’m working for?
I thought I was doing all of this to build a sustainable music career. Simple. If I could gain enough financial and physical support from my fans, then I could relax a little bit and my days would be like a well-oiled machine, rather than the scrabbling rat parade they are now. I work super hard in the present so that I can relax a bit in the future. Tour the world, play big stages, make steady money, hire a team of people to book my shows, run my social media accounts, and market my music. Focus only on the music, not on all the stuff surrounding it.
But.
It turns out I want to be cozy at home with my cats instead of touring the world with my band. So why am I really doing all of this?
Because I am terrified of failing. I’m terrified of not being enough. I’m terrified of letting go.
I have so many questions. As usual.
Why do I try to expand when I can’t yet handle the work I’m currently doing? Why am I trying to build this ‘strong foundation’ when I don’t want, or don’t think I can handle, the life of a touring musician? Is not wanting the same thing as not being able to? Is there a way to do this without martyring myself? Is there a way to do ANYTHING without martyring myself? My therapist tells me there is. She says I need to stop doing third grade work when I’m still in second grade (a clever reference to me skipping second grade as a kid) so that I can succeed instead of drown.
It’s true that I am drowning. In my own ambition. I am trapped in my own skewed sense of self and responsibility.
I’m not supposed to be telling anybody this. I’m supposed to keep up a rehearsed front, in which I am always excited and grateful to be doing what I’m doing, in which I’m always proud of my work, where I consistently advocate for myself with a smile on my face and a spring in my step. I’m exhausted from all the springing and the stepping. I don’t want to advocate for myself anymore. I don’t have the capacity to do it. I just don’t.
I’m actually sick right now, came down with a bad cold. I’ve been sick for days, but I refused to let myself rest until today. I had too many things to do, too many tasks to complete, too many people to answer to.
Why?
Because I can’t fail. But I can’t keep going like this, either.
On Beauty and Strangeness
Beauty and Strangeness
drop to the sand
come, get the ropes
(who are, after all, not mild
but militant)
I don’t think I am old yet,
half asleep,
not
all at once
but steadily
I know I have already lived
Words found in Mary Oliver’s book of essays Upstream and rearranged to my heart’s content. I found the words, but was careful not to copy any phrases or pairs of words. Each word is its own island set in the fabric of this poem.
Siena Rose 