....

Man, am I ever tired. It's 11:30 and I'm seriously praying that I will be able to sleep. Soon I will take a bath and then we will see. I was looking at some of the the Internet sites today that I've heard like Indiepublic and Deviantart. It seems like one could just spend so much time on the Internet, couldn't one? But I'm feeling negative again. Sometimes it seems like I spend so much energy trying to grab at the world and the world just doesn't grab back. I don't know. Maybe I'm still disappointed that my story The Ring didn't get published in Glimmer Train. It got such good feedback and I really thought it would fit nicely there. I know rejection is the name of the game but I'm just tired in more ways then one. My husband's brother has an acquaintance painter friend (he is also a painter)who has been painting for 15 plus years and had his one and only show a couple of years back. His stuff is really amazing- there's this one where people are diving into a swimming pool that has such detail; the grass growing between the cracks in the sidewalk, the side of a girl's face; and so much feeling. His painting are filled with understated loneliness. And yet here he is, this amazing painter in his early 40s who has only had one show where he sold nothing. He is also a bit of a bitter hermit, holed away in his one room coal oven apartment in Prenzlauerberg. But he plugs away- keeps on painting though he barely makes enough to live, keep on painting though he has nothing to retire on, no house on Mallorca with the other German retirees for him. He has no choice. I have no choice. But I'm tired of not being noticed. So much of my life has been lived internally, like on this blog, as though I were born a half a mile below the ground and all of my life has been spent clawing inch by inch towards the surface. For the first time maybe I now feel like I am above ground but now I want to fly, to soar. I want someone to notice. It's funny. I have Virgo rising which is how I need to go through life: the cautious observer. But on the 12th house cusp I have the sign of Leo and if there is one thing Leo wants it is to be noticed. To be adored to be celebrated. The sign on the cusp of the 12th is your hidden motivation however, sometimes hidden even from yourself. My brother-in-law, who is also an astrologer, explained it as thus: Your ascendant is a dinner party you are throwing; who you invite, what you cook, where you are having it. But the sign on the 12th house cusp is the reason WHY you are throwing the party. If you have the same sign on the 12th as on the 1st then your motivations will match your actions: You are throwing the party because you like your friends and you would like to see them. But if the sign is different, your motivations won't necessarily match the outside, upfront action, i.e. throwing the party. You say you are throwing a party and making veal parmesean and inviting all of your best friends, but really it is an excuse to bring together Ron and Lisa, Ron recently divorced, Lisa attractive but terminally single. I live my life on the outside as a Virgo: stringing words upon one another into sentences, making lines of tiny stitches with a needle, scattering my thoughts and ideas and images in various places on the Internet. But I do it because I want to be noticed. Maybe even celebrated. This reminds me of a poem I wrote a while back when I was having my poetry renaissance for some reason. Here it is

Just as a stone drawn from a well
sparkles deep red with silver lines
that same stone will dull to brown and gray
once the water dries.

But haven't I already heard this story?

If my life were recorded in a leather bound book
by a scribe he would write: Here is where
she starts to live above the ground.

But sometimes I long for the richness
of my hibernation as does a seed before it roots.
How it's white heart beats beneath the husk
before it decides to shoot through earth.

Are each of us bound to stretch towards the light
bending our heads like sunflowers across the plains?
The scribe writes my answer to be yes.

But always my soul will sometimes cower in the darkness
dissolving into a wordless jungle soup meant to soothe
the throats of those who seek to shout across oceans.

Listen. Can you hear their voices
tangle in a wind heavy with salted air?

Nothing will ever mask their mournfulness.


Actually, that's not the one I was thinking of, but it also fight (they are all archived on MySpace)

Here is the other one:

To live the internal life is to hold one star you keep in a box at the back of your closet. Nobody knows its white brilliance or how it dances around when you let it out in your room at night. It is to dwell so deep you have forgotten your fire is not like the sun.

To live the internal life is to chop wood in the forest but not make a sound, your footprints as small as a swallow's. It is to know, by heart, all the lines on your hands in their jungle richness but with them, you sometimes touch none.

And the painter who paints the beautiful paintings alone in his one bedroom apartment in Prenlauerberg, his hands black with coal dust, will he die a sad man, regretting what he had done? Is a life with toil but no achievement, no notice, is it in the end worth it? Do I toil hard enough or do I get too distracted, my life scattering in so many directions like a jar of marbles dropped in slow motion? These are my questions. I want to leave here with an image.


This is me, by the ocean that I love....