an invitation for tea (a singular ceremony)

My mentor muse in Seattle mailed me a box, full of breaths. Full of meditative motivations.

This box sits on top of my record player/tape player/cd player/radio. This box watches me watch a television program or movie. This box watches as I read a sliced open section of the NY Times. This box watches me kiss my mate. This box watches as I cry without tears, wondering where I am going and why I feel as though my wheels have been removed.

My mentor muse in Seattle writes to me about Murata Jukō and the ritual of serving, drinking, and sharing tea.

I place loose tea leaves in  french press, and drown with hot water. I watch the swirl of coconut green tea branches lift up and then swirl like leaves in a storm. Then, I wait until its color grows rusty.

My friend who I used to share a home with gave me a fancy tea cup with saucer for my birthday. It reminds me of something too dainty and delicate for my rough, scarred skin. For almost a month, it sat unused on a shelf. I greeted this cup and saucer everyday, wanting to be the kind of person that could drink out of such a refined object.

I place fingers around porcelain. I am just far too big and clumsy to clutch the handle. After tea is poured in, I bring cup to my mouth and gulp (because once again, I am just not the kind of person to sip or move with a slow ease). After gulp came swallow.

What I want is for this tea to purify me. (Are there enough tea leaves in the world to do such a thing?)

What I want is for this tea to remind me of the necessity of waiting. Being slow. Taking the time to acknowledge all of the flavors slapped against my tongue: nutty. tart. coconut. slight hint of coffee from all the days before this moment.

I want to meditate. I want to leave all the ghosts that scream me awake, to vacate my soul for the day. Or the afternoon. Or how about until I finish this swallow? I want to empty my pockets of things which ring and vibrate. I want to walk into rooms where other people’s pockets are empty too.

Next time, I will invite another to gulp tea with me. Or sip, if they are the kind of person who does such a thing. Because the point of all this is to remember how to remain. Or if not remember, learn how to.

How to sip sometimes. To taste. To be alive. In silence. With all the flavors of a moment sitting like a meditative monk on your tongue.

love in a disemboweled cigarette

Hair in its infinite stages of death can be far more beautiful than any orchid or moonlight or kiss.

This is what I was thinking when I watched the German with long, blond dreadlocks, parading death down his back like frozen stalks of sun, speak to me about getting lost.

We were in the front room of Bob’s Youth hostel located on a street in Amsterdam I still have difficulty pronouncing. I had been staring at him for what felt like hours, burning my hazel into his whole milk skin. I finally got up and sat across from him, asking if he’d write a poem with me.

“Yeah,” he said, “but I don’t really know how.”

“I don’t really either,” I said. “But if you can rummage inside your gut for the words which feel most potent, I think,” I paused, “I think you may find something there.”

So I gave him my tiny red notebook given to me by a lover who I had just started learning how to kiss, given to me to fill up during this two-week trip away from New York.

This was supposed to be an adventure on how to move toward who I was or who I wanted to be. My relationship with a different woman had ended just a few months earlier, one which I thought was the one I might marry, even though I did not believe in such a word.

It was a mourning trip.

I watched as the German, fingers sprinkled with fine commas of bleached hair, pressed his handwriting into the pages.

His dead knots became whispers soaring past his shoulders, for as he wrote, they shook. I wondered how many secrets were hiding in the decease of his hair.

“One must get lost,” he spoke. “Where are you from?” he asked me, handing back my pen and closing the book.

“Brooklyn. Quite a faraway land from here,” I said.

“Leave your maps behind, Brooklyn,” he said to me.

“No need,” I said. “I never carry them around. I get lost even when I do not intend to. But I like your reminder.”

He smiled. He had a tiny chip in his front tooth like the curve of a hammock. I wanted to lay in his mouth and nap beside his ridges.

He told me traveling is about connecting to the land, not the pages that speak about it.

“You’re beautiful,” I spat out. His eyes walked over the length and width of my face. I could feel his lashes even though we were an arm’s distance away from each other.

“Yes,” he said. As though I had asked a question. Or maybe he was answering something that he had heard much earlier. Either way, I enjoyed the oddity of his syllable.

“I’m trying to lose myself here. Bring another version back to New York,” I told him.

“Smoke enough hash and that will happen without trying too hard,” he smiled.

“I am trying to let go of a love. One so big, my heart still has stretchmarks.”

He smiled.

“There is not enough smoke to inhale, which will get rid of that,” he said. “But how about this. Actually…” he paused. I watched him remove the tiny, hand-rolled cigarette between his fat, slightly blush lips. With the tip of two fingers pressed together, he put out the fire on the end. Then, I watched him peel it open, drip the nicotine out and hand me this frail rolling paper, half wet from the spit of his mouth.

“I can see from the rest of your notebook….pardon my snoop,” he interrupted himself, “…that your handwriting is bitty. Write what you want from love on this.”

I held this disemboweled cigarette in the palm of my hand. As though it were a tiny space alien, which had fallen from the sky from a spaceship that our eyes couldn’t quite fathom. With the fingers from my other hand, I poked at it.

“It may not even be words,” he said. “The love you lust may be symbols.”

I thought about every word I ever learned. The ones I kept and the ones I could never quite remember. I wasn’t thinking about limbs; instead, my brain began to conjure up images of smells. Music of taste.

I dropped the cigarette from my palm and grabbed my pen.

The German smiled and I could feel him get up, though never let my eyes wander away from the paper.

I began to finally get lost.

notes from a writing residency

written specifically for great weather for MEDIA

 

When I first landed in Grand Island, Nebraska (population 50,000), the first thing I said out loud was:

dear nebraska, I want my chest to be flat like you.

(all photos taken by Raluca Albu)

 

My roommate and I (Selina Josephs, the magnificent collage artist/painter) was traveling with me. We both got accepted to the writing/artist residency called Art Farm and were venturing to the town of Marquette (population 228) to spend two weeks savoring the flatlands and creating like mad.

Ed Dadey, the owner of Art Farm, picked us up at the tiniest of airports where only one conveyor belt rotated luggage. There were no skyscrapers here. All the clouds roamed without interrogation of bolts and metal. The sky was like an open stadium.

After a trip to purchase groceries, we made our way to this curious land in the middle of nowhere, where the grass stretched tall like preening models. Ed dropped us off by the house we’d be living in called Victoria.

Victoria house

Three stories tall, many walls unfinished. It was vast and haunted and magical and overwhelming. Throughout my days there, I got accustomed to the sound of mice traveling above me. These rodents were bold; chasing each other around the house; sipping water out of available mugs. There were also the raccoons. A family lived in the house. In the house. We could hear the babies chatter and the mother, we called Ricki, left each night at dusk and came back at dawn. I saw her once, as I rocked back in forth in a beautiful rocking chair in Selina’s art studio, while I typed away words gathering momentum on my computer. I heard the scratching of nails against wood, looked up and saw Ricki: climbing up the wall, slinking into a hole in the ceiling.

Add to the mix of wildlife: chiggers (mites which burrow beneath your skin, lay eggs, and create a monstrous display of itchiness), ticks (resilient– even landing on a citronella candle meant to ward them away), flies, flies, flies, ants, mosquitoes…….

Monday through Thursday for three hours, we worked on the farm. Tasks included gardening, moving furniture, digging holes, planting trees, and my personal favorite: carpentry. I picked wood, measured it, cut it down using a beloved and sexy band saw, sanded it down, then hammered into place.

photos by Raluca Albu

Then, the day was ours. Each artist worked in their studio; I alternated writing at the desk in my bedroom overlooking the farm, writing in the library or at a cafe called Espressions & More in Aurora (population 4,000). At the cafe, I drank delicious coffee, ate homemade sandwiches and met several locals. Here is where I found much inspiration for what I was working on. I wanted to infuse this Nebraska in my work. Hear stories of the humans who lived here.

During my time at Art Farm, I wrote over 15,000 words, ten poems and several letters mailed away. I skinny dipped in a beautiful lake beneath (what felt like) a million stars and called out my spirit animal (elephant) at a bonfire where the planet Venus glowed above us.

I (semi) conquered my fear of heights as I climbed a ladder that went to nowhere (an art installation by a previous resident), played my ukelele on a rooftop and swung from a very high swing shaped like a unicorn, hung in a floating barn.

Here in Nebraska, I found bits of my wild. A wild that had been stifled and punished and hidden for many years. A wild that always got me in trouble. A wild that put me in rehab at nineteen. A wild that knocked me out of relationships. A wild that bullied me back into drugs many many times.

I thought the wild inside me was bad, so I ignored it. Stopped going to parties, talking to strangers, trusting people. But in Nebraska, I was reminded that there is a good wild too. One which reminds me other ways I can celebrate my body, even my nude, in ways that won’t make me feel tarnished and scraped. A wild that reminds me the impact of words and creativity. A wild that encourages real friendships, allowing me to fall in love everyday with the humans around me. A wild that validated my existence.

I’m writing a novel. For years, I would not say this “n” word, for fear of what that meant. I’ve been writing this novel for over eight years. By the end of this summer, I will be done with my first draft.

On my final night at Art Farm, we opened up our studios and went on a creative crawl……viewing everyone’s art, hearing the words of the writers. It was incredible. I presented some of the words I had written during my two weeks, while Laura from Aurora (an enthusiastic local and wonderful human) played guitar.

presenting my work, with accompaniment by Laura from Aurora

I cried while viewing the art of my favorite oil painter called Lindsay. She captured many of the spaces on Art Farm, infusing each painting with the energy one can not see in each room, but it is certainly felt. During my time at Art Farm, Lindsay was the one who kept reminding me the importance of being present. So much of my wild came out because of her.

brilliant oil painter and human, Lindsay Peyton

Art Farm residency woke up so much of me, that I am still trying to articulate. Being back in Brooklyn has been an adjustment. The sky is zipped up in ways I never really noticed before Nebraska land. People move a lot faster here and when they ask you how you’re doing, they do not wait for the answer. I’ve been writing less, but trying not to be too hard on myself. I learned that I may not be that hippie I thought I was, but I am a hybrid of farm skin/city scum/open-road eyes. I’m still not quite sure where I belong or even how to be. But this residency taught me about resilience, facing my fears and the magnitude of trust. What a beautiful, powerful realization.

 

Lindsay, me, Z, and Selina (photo by the wonderful fiction writer and Brooklyn resident, Raluca Albu)

 

 

 

Read more Aimee in meant to wake up feeling 

 

day 9: elixir.

“What we need, is a break out. Out of our lives, out of Seattle, out of the dumb script of girl.”  –Lidia Yuknavitch

I search for the gentleman inside me. Swallow elixirs in order to make sense of the smoke and rough. I obsess over the wing span of my spine. How many words can I bench press. What can I digest in order to turn my body into a billboard reflecting what I really feel.

I visit an alchemist in the west village named Saje. This elixir mixer gesticulates me to sit down as he peruses narrow shelves with a collection of bottles, all varying in sizes.

Achillea millefolium, the alchemist speaks. Scent of chrysanthemum. It will carry away your wounds.

I grab this blue bottle with scratches like scars along the side from the alchemist. Inhale some of the liquid and drip it onto my weary tongue.

It will swallow your pain. A tonic for the blood you weep over, he spoke.

At home, I drink enough tea to float me away. When I walk, I can hear the tea leaves slosh around like an ocean of impatient waves.

My bladder empties and fills and empties and I take more drops of elixir in order to fill in the lines of my soul.

Previously in the west village, the alchemist had said to me, Take this ocimum tenuiflorum. Its holy will remove your fever. The heat of your questions scalding the remains of your day. And I am throwing in urtica dioica to treat the hemorrhage of your worry. Be mindful of servings. You can overflow your heal.

There are some parts of bodies that have no answer. In the most intimate parts of the day or night, I close my eyes and pretend away some of my bones. I wonder how my skin will fall. I cut out words from newspapers and magazines stuffed into my mailbox. I throw these letters in with the hot water and tea leaves. I drink sounds. I swallow fragments. All these pre-recorded meanings become something else. I give birth to something else. And this cannot fit into any box because these words are just beginning.

All of this is part of something similar to healing. Closer to meaning. Touching the tip of what all this means to be alive and searching because all these scripts are subject to a rewrite.

how to invoke religion while holding hands and sharing the heat of approaching summertime.

“I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars…I learned God’s true language is only silence and breath.”  –Kazim Ali (Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities)

Last summer, I found religion in the journal of a poet who described his hunger and silence while fasting for ramadan. I walked around taking slow, deliberate bites of whatever was around me. Napped on napping trees. Kissed beneath enough moon shadows to call myself a believer of things. Tried a new cuisine called sloped Brooklyn. Became a smoker briefly because I liked the way my breath would tangle with the invisibleness of air. Had a short love-affair with mayflies. Played ukelele on as many benches as my skin could find.

Weeks wait to be found before summer begins but check out this air! One can call themselves religious just by breathing. Just by emptying the winter from lungs and exhaling bouts of lonely or shiver or hungry. Hours can easily climb mountaintops. Clouds wait to be deciphered into a language of picture maps.

This time is different. You may use the same words for things but meanings no longer need to be still and unwavering. You can memorize a prayer like love and it can be new each time. How amazing! How wonderful to climb hands into another’s and trace the elongation of breath traveling without passport to another country just by feeling your way. 

Bodies are like religious institutions. Stained glass. Memorials. Psalms and palms. Sermons threading together the meanings of things.

We fast (figuratively and metaphorically) to remember why we hunger so much. We gain weight when we allow our bodies permission to hold on to what finally nourishes us.

finding what you forgot you were looking for.

Yesterday, I crashed into a photograph…down on eastern parkway…it was just me and a woman in white.We enter and exit moments, some of which belong to us and some of which belong to others.

On a Tuesday, I biked my way into a snapshot of a woman wearing the garb of approaching wedding. Her hands were hidden by a bouquet of flowers and I never got to see her face, just that body clothed by fabric that looked like January sky. I wanted to ask her so many questions, but instead I spoke them out loud into the wind:

What are you hoping for?

How necessary are rings? Do they come with a guarantee?

On a different day, I speak about love with another poet. He asks me: So, what’s going on? Are you in love?

I smile because this gives me time to approach such a question. I tell him: I’ve had some immense loves in my life and if it never happens again, I think I’ll be ok. And then I add: It’s too fucking scary to get into again.

Bike rides tend to lead me toward discovery of self and place.  So do these conversations with poets and musicians.

Where are we going and how are we getting there.

I haven’t owned a car in over three years, so I’ve been getting places through the transportation of my body. It can roll and honk and brake and signal. None of my parts are borrowed, but they don’t all exactly belong to me. I’ve torn off my rear-view mirrors; no need to see what is behind me anymore. I study the cracked windshield of my soul and allow it to veer me forward.

I almost got married once, though I doubt I would have worn white. I’ve been in love 4 and a half times. There may be more ahead of me, but for now, I am working on the one who keeps trying to get away: me.

 

 

 

unfurnished dust traveling through tumbleweed

“How you love another person might be a reflection of your relationship to God or the world itself, not to the other person, not to any other person, mother, father, sister, brother. Untrusting? Suspicious? Jealous? Indifferent? Abject? These feelings may be an indication of your larger existential position, hardly personal. And the heart is an organ of the soul, in such a case, not the reverse.”   –Fanny Howe
Reference this as a pilgrimage. Gather up leather knapsack but if such a contraption does not exist, prepare the turquoise one given to you by the one who exhales bits of sea glass. Fill it with spiritual remorse, muted sounds of love-making, womb of peace-offerings, reflection of space. Walk to nearest planet where library of crumbled books beg you to put them back together with spit and ink. If such a location does not exist, walk to nearest bodega and purchase a lemon, plastic bottle of honey, and tweezers to pick out the particles of sad hunting through your organs. How do you walk. With hands playing hide-n-go seek in pockets or do they sway like winter’s wind at your side. Do you hop or hunch. What leads you to look up. Write a haiku about the last time you loved:

similar to traf-

fic light, when one is color-

blind and cannot see

 

All these noises are a reminder of the first one. The first time. Or the third time. And all these feelings were gathered on that walk that lasted two or three decades and in your pockets, you picked up moss, mosquito bites, grey, techniques on how to kiss, several steno pads, half of a butterfly, two addictions, an allergy, almost-death, almost-marriage, exhaust fumes, a newspaper dated tomorrow, an over-priced cellular phone plan, champagne mangoes, a dog, a scar, paper, another scar, someone to eat dinner with, a ring which has since rusted, salt.

Before you got here, you were over there. And over there was (maybe) when you were at your happiest or hungriest. Where you need to be is where you are going. So go there.

tell me again how to breathe.

“Love was a country we couldn’t defend.”  (G.A.I.)
All of this is just to say: pause. 

In this room called east, your oxygen will be guided from your nose. When ready, let it out through mouth. Stop. Remember the city behind your ribs. Breathe from there as well.

Channel the comma. There is balance as it tips its weight upwards. There is curvature; you can even address it as top-heavy. Give yourself room to interrupt the spaces that haunt you.

In this room called Brooklyn, you may run into panic. Channel the bicycle spokes that secretly live beneath your skin. Roll away. Climb mountains even when the land you walk over is flat. Pick flowers even in the Winter and instead of photographing, hand this stem of green and face of yellow to the first human you see. Breathe in the breaths they offer to you like invisible bouquets of carbon dioxide.

Now, this may not be as easy, but. Remain in this room called love. It is hardest to get out of and often includes a cover charge too intense to dig out of wallet. But you do. Because it is so deeply aromatic. Inhale that sandalwood. And ylang ylang. Press your tired, nervous thighs against this other. Stretch out numerics and reveal one thing that makes you bleed, one thing that guts the salt out of you and choose an adventure with this one, barefoot.

It is impossible to run very far when the calluses on your feet slow you down. So, slow down.

In this room called lonely, exist long enough to take a ticket. Rip it. Scoop up its entrails and throw away. Choose to be in love this time than surrounding its periphery.

But before all that or while, keep breathing. Walk in and out and in these rooms and inhale and exit and exhale. And remain. (You often forget that part.)

gathering of rainbows

Follow the green bus. It has been gutted and gathers all those on the way toward (their version of) enlightenment.

What are you in search of?

Several years ago, I hunched back from weight of extensive backpack full of words and clothes over border into Amsterdam. Met poets and Germans and a beautiful psychology student and a doctor and a lesbian who told me she wanted to write like a writer. I fell in love with the foreign side of the moon. I was searching for closure from love in order to make room for more.

On an evening where everything has been watered from a full day of rain, I gaze into the eyes of a Poet who has just come back from several journeys. He tells me of his desire for lust in all forms and I mention to him my recent wanderings within various humans.

I want to gather myself into rainbows and find a hippie to love, I said. I want to burrow into the soil and smell the layers of earth that rarely get noticed. I want to be kissed by a human that understands all my silences……..

Recently, I re-opened several scars and tripped over some love and lust; there has been blood and guts that decorated many Brooklyn sidewalks. I have poem’d and performed on stages, unwrapping these layers of wounds in order to make sense of it all.

Now. I am thinking about a Canadian waterfall. I am contemplating a meditation of disemboweled behaviors and thoughts. I am considering a train ride to a French-speaking province. Or I just may root right here.

What are you in search of?

all of this will soon be past.

“If this life isn’t enough/ then an afterlife won’t be enough”      -fanny howe

Dear Kazim,

There are presents to be received when remaining in the present.

You wrote, “The body is like a day: it begins with the darkness of evening, ends with the ebbing of light.

I say to you: Within this wander, I recognize who remains. That in this present, my past exists like swollen gifts. Some I sense the need not to open. Some I must not only open but rummage and fondle. Kazim, I am tangled. The knots wrestle themselves into my hair and my loins and even in my words. I like your sense of beginning in the dark in order to travel toward light.

There are these humans hovering around me: a music MAker, a soul sister, a brother, several lovers, the satellite that exchanges shapes each night, a Rebel, a father, a gender warrior. Each one tells me in their language how to remain. How to remain.

Kazim, you remind me: “If the plot of my life is writing then I have nothing but time.”

What is this rush to unpack my boxes. Perhaps I need to wander in order to remember what it feels like to be still. The writing exists in me; this earth has many desks and “rooms” that permit and encourage our creativity.

A traveling human tells me that all we really need as writers is time. Space is everywhere.

Several months ago, I met a woman who wore earth on her skin. One day, we sat beside each other in a room full of others and we painted. We were each given blank circles and asked to fill them in with our souls. With our souls, Kazim. Can you imagine this task? So, I painted a tree with branches of words and she combined colors into a womb and sperm and there was dark and light and I could smell her tears even before I noticed them bungee-jumping from her eyes. In this human, I saw hope that even in such sadness, there is desperation to live. To remain. Before I said goodbye to her, I gave her a tulip, which someone else had given me. This flower is like you, I said. Alive. Watered. From the earth. And breathing. And giving. And giving. And giving.