I was Made of Nows

We Make the Path by Walking by Paul Gaffney

I Was My Own Route (Yo misma fui mi ruta)

by Julia de Burgos (1914-1953)

I wanted to be like men wanted me to be:
an attempt at life;
a game of hide and seek with my being.
But I was made of nows,
and my feet level on the promissory earth
would not accept walking backwards
and went forward, forward,
mocking the ashes to reach the kiss
of new paths.

At each advancing step on my route forward
my back was ripped by the desperate flapping wings
of the old guard.

But the branch was unpinned forever,
and at each new whiplash my look
separated more and more and more from the distant
familiar horizons;
and my face took the expansion that came from within,
the defined expression that hinted at a feeling
of intimate liberation;
a feeling that surged
from the balance between my life
and the truth of the kiss of the new paths.

Already my course now set in the present,
I felt myself a blossom of all the soils of the earth,
of the soils without history,
of the soils without a future,
of the soil always soil without edges
of all the men and all the epochs.

And I was all in me as was life in me...

I wanted to be like men wanted me to be:
an attempt at life;
a game of hide and seek with my being.
But I was made of nows;
when the heralds announced meat the regal parade of the old guard,
the desire to follow men warped in me,
and the homage was left waiting for me.

Only One View

Biblios by Guy Laramée

"Because of your unique history, you have evolved a series of stories that you repeatedly return to throughout your life. These stories determine how you see yourself and how you interpret what is happening to you. You may well be overidentified with your stories and not see that they represent only one view of your circumstances. Your stories can limit what you believe to be your choices and define what happens to you in your day. They may not have even come from you but may have been suggested by someone else. You may not even recognize them as stories; to you they may seem like worries or just the way you are."

~ Phillip Moffit, from "The Fallacy of Story-Making," Emotional Chaos to Clarity, Chapter 7

Finding an Identity is Easy

"Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful, and decide what you want and need and must do. It's a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that's the deal: you have to live; you can't live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It's the easy way out."

~ Zadie Smith, from On Beauty

There is Always a Gust of Wind Somewhere

Pass On, Poem by Michael Lee from Runner Runner on Vimeo.

Pass On
by Michael Lee

When searching for the lost remember 8 things.

1. 
We are vessels. 
We are rooms.
We are so much less important than the things inside of us.
We are circuit boards
swallowing the electricity of life upon birth.
It wheels through us creating every moment,
the pulse of a story, the soft hums of labor and love.
In our last moment it will come rushing 
from our chests and be given back to the wind.
When we die. We go everywhere.

2. 
Newton said energy is neither created nor destroyed.
In the halls of my middle school I can still hear 
my friend Stephen singing his favorite song. 
In the gymnasium I can still hear 
the way he dribbled that basketball like it was a mallet 
and the earth was a xylophone.
With an ear to the Atlantic I can hear
the Titanic's band playing her to sleep,
Music. Wind. Music. Wind.
If you listen to the wind and don't hear a thousand years of music, you're not listening hard enough.

3. 
The day my grandfather passed away there was the strongest wind, 
I could feel his gentle hands blowing away from me. 
I knew then they were off to find someone 
who needed them more than I did.
On average 1.8 people on earth die every second.
There is always a gust of wind somewhere.

4. 
The day Stephen was murdered
everything that made us love him rushed from his knife wounds
as though his chest were an auditorium
his life an audience leaving single file.
Every ounce of him has been 
wrapping around this world in a windstorm
I have been looking for him for 9 years.

5.
Our bodies are nothing more than hosts to a collection of brilliant things.
When someone dies I do not weep over polaroids or belongings,
I begin to look for the lightning that has left them,
I feel out the strongest breeze and take off running.

6.
After 9 years I found Stephen.
I passed a basketball court in Boston
the point guard dribbled like he had a stadium roaring in his palms
Wilt Chamberlain pumping in his feet,
his hands flashing like x-rays,
a cross-over, a wrap-around
rewinding, turn-tables cracking open,
camera-men turn flash bulbs to fireworks.
Seven games and he never missed a shot,
his hands were luminous.
Pulsing. Pulsing.
I asked him how long he'd been playing,
he said nine 9 years

7. 
The theory of six degrees of separation 

was never meant to show how many people we can find,
it was a set of directions for how to find the people we have lost.

I found your voice Stephen,
found it in a young boy in Michigan who was always singing,
his lungs flapping like sails
I found your smile in Australia, 
a young girls teeth shining like the opera house in your neck,
I saw your one true love come to life on the asphalt of Boston.

8. 
We are not created or destroyed,
we are constantly transferred, shifted and renewed.
Everything we are is given to us.
Death does not come when a body is too exhausted to live
Death comes, because the brilliance inside us can only be contained for so long.
We do not die. We pass on, pass on the lightning burning through our throats.
when you leave me I will not cry for you
I will run into the strongest wind I can find
and welcome you home.

---

See also: "Michael Lee's 'Pass On' and Why Spoken-Word Continues to Matter"by Guante

What Openness Looks Like

David Richo, from an interview by Susan Johnston, The Urban Muse, April 2011:

The most exciting part of finding out who we are is discovering our own uniqueness, who we are outside the box, beyond the categories in a Psychology 101 textbook. In our inimitable singularity, there is an infinite range of possibility that cannot be tied to any one description of what it means to be human or healthy.

Just as our fingerprints are one-of-a-kind, so is our identity. Each of us is a once-only articulation of what humans can be. We are rare, unmatched, mysterious. This is why the quality of openness is so crucial to our self-discovery. We cannot know ourselves by who we think we are, who others take us to be, or what our driver’s license may say. We are fields of potential, some now actualized, most not yet. Poetry goes to that quarter of what humanness is about. It is what openness looks like on a page."

---

See also: Richo, D. (2009). Being true to life: Poetic paths to personal growth. Boston: Shambhala.