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the unnatural light in the city, at every hour of day17 May 2004 - 01:38 22 April 04 until today: San Diego, CA. Calexico. Colorado River. Yuma, AZ. Dateland. Tucson. Las Cruces, NM. El Paso, TX. San Antonio. Houston. Beaumont, LA. Lafayette. The Bayou. Morgan City. Mississippi River. New Orleans. Biloxi, MS. Mobile, AL. Pensacola, FL. Panama City. Tampa. St Petersburg. Gainesville. Jacksonville. Savannah, GA. Myrtle Beach, NC. Wilmington. Richmond, VA. Potomac River. Upper Marlboro, MD. Washington, DC. Baltimore, MD. Philadelphia, PA. Schwenksville. New York, New York: Manhattan. Brooklyn. I left Portland in November reading *The Art Lover* by Carol Maso, in which the heroine moves to New York City to take care of her father's estate. When you look backwards in time, the clues are obvious. This trip has been one of circles closing. We may move to Brooklyn. Exponentially increasing strangeness. I have spent the last five years trying to understand how anyone could possibly grow up somewhere like Portland, or San Diego...it is something too strange and wonderful to me. Especially California -- places you grow up hearing about, imagining, materializing right in front of you. And then I brought the West Coast east. Becky and Kale and I wandering around my home town, the cemetery where I used to watch the sunset. I asked Kale if he could imagine growing up here. I asked him if it still felt as if the world began here to him... A few days later, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, he said he'd dreamed of being here before. Places he grew up hearing about, imagining, (places i always took for granted) were materializing in front of us. "I always knew somewhere there were people like this...see that man, see his face...people like that..." * Dear friends, family members, skyscrapers, the loved ones who surround me daily, the words on this page -- all of these things enter me or flow through me as if I were merely a vessel right now. I hold them, but they don't change me. I am holding but not holding on. I would be content to lose a battle with silence, but at the same time, I want all that is dear to me to know its dearness. The unnatural light in the city, at every hour of day. Sunsets with too many colors. Smog in the afternoon. Red skies instead of blue at night. Yet the landscrape is more comforting -- the planes and straight lines. Clearly a landscape we created, clearly a landscape in the mind. This is where I feel life is most conceptual. Nature is where I feel life is most spiritual. But of course, what is really "not natural"? -- [words in a letter to a lovely friend of mine] |