How do I get what I want?
I’ve lived in Portland for 3 months now. Every time I ride my bike over the Hawthorne bridge, I look out over the river, and the freeways, and the skyscrapers, and the city lights, and I find it unbelievable that this is the place where I live. Nonetheless, even as I cross the bridge, I am following routines I’ve already established for myself here; the bike rides to the library, the internet sessions at the coffeeshop, the grocery store shopping. It feels settling to have routines, and yet…. Where’s the thrill? The promise of possibility is still elusive, and fades ever wider to the outskirts as I establish more and more daily certainties. I still want those things I don’t have. And I still don’t have them. What qualities do I need to embody in order to draw those invisible possibilities towards me? What actions do I need to take in order to construct my unknown life around me? It’s not so much more that I want. Just to be artistically successful, and to find those wide open arms. The steam on the windows. The protection and vulnerability of another person. That person is out there, roaming the undiscovered alleys of my landscape. And it is my job to find the tools to get there at the right time. And if I can’t find the tools, I’m going to have to forge them myself. Now all I have to do is figure out how to make something solid using burning hot, liquid steel.
November 9th, 2005 at 11:40 pm
you’re killing me…
November 10th, 2005 at 11:31 am
I love how you describe the processes of developing your bike routes and having things fill in to familiarity. I love to always walk around aware of to what extent my maps of everything fill up from the unknown to the known. Those bike routes, they can get so comfortable, to the point to where your body just knows every peddle motion and lean of gravity, there can be so much finesse, technique-to-burn, and freedom to thrive from the grid of familiarity-and-mastery of the known. Play, slack, fun, ability.
And the unkown feels so open, so beautiful, so true, so good and important. So essential. According to some, it is the only true living.
I love the feeling of things-in-space more than anything else in the world. Mutual interdependence. The things that come to fill the space would be nothing without the space that impregnates them.
Feeling and enjoying as the glass fills with water. The complete electrical circuit.