the morning after

it all tumbles down in my memory
i replayed every moment five thousand times and i can't find any solace in any of it, alas. people tell me well meant things. give it time, get over it. you are not over it. let it go. and in the early morning when she is still sleeping and nobody called i sit with my friend the guitar and just try to convert some of it at last, but alas, to no avail, all it does is opening the shutters to the well of tears and sorrow.
after lecturing me about the insignificance of heart related problems compared to the 'real' problems of life and 'making it' he was facing now he admitted everything. about this girl i had been jealous about. how my intuition had been right about that. it doesn't change a thing that the way i reacted was utterly and completely destructive to our love but it does make me cringe and cry quietly, hidden, forbidden, when i think about it. i was done wrong man. i was done wrong. my poor heart. it opened so wide. it trusted so much. and it wasn't met. aw, how much that hurts. and of course, it hurts to think that had i been more mature everything would have been different. but instead i tried to manage by communicating to him, thinking he would actually go and make a difference for me. because he loved me. now he is so completely gone, it is sad, to see all these walls. it hurts, yeah. it does. i know i am not the first one and i won't be the last. but that too, doesn't help now. and he was right. yes, i always find a way to cope with anything. yes, my life could be technically worse than his but i always make it good somehow. but no, that's not an invitation to trample over my heart. and no, matters of the heart are not insignificant. when you die, you will see.
the morning after is bittersweet and hard. there is no attempt of communication on his part, this girl is in love with me he says and now they decided to make it this 'thing'. oh okay. oh, ohwell. tears swell. what the fuck. how could you throw it all away. when it meant everything to me. when i gave everything. how could you take so much and come back for the rest and how could you possibly disappoint me so terribly much..how could you be the guy you had been warning me about. and i trusted you to care...aw. it will pass.

things that hurt

i don't mind hurt
i don't mind pain
they say you can't choose pain
but suffering is your choice
i have suffered
i have not
i have chosen not to
sometimes pain backstabs me out of the blue
but that's okay

things that hurt
is when they are taken out of context
when the depth goes lost in shallow actions
when someone destroys unwillingly or willingly
the essence of what mattered
to me

but i am still waiting somehow
somewhere
just don't think about it
let it rest
let it go
build a fence
build a wall
don't speak
at all

sinking

wind so soft and refreshing, summer summer time in southern California.
Eukalyptus guarding my ride, tac tac tac says the longboard.
People so pretty, passing by.
And then I dive and sink and sink and sink and sink.
Some music is playing.

it might have been a cigarette wish or maybe just intuition but I kept walking down seventh street under these huge beautiful eukalyptus trees inhaling the night.
at the bakery three older men hung out on the chairs that stand around there, it was midnight almost and they invited me to stay with them.
i don't know why these things always happen to me but I think it might have to do with the fact that I do sit down when someone invites me and not miss the chance to go by unhonored.
I have to tell you this story cut and dry, because it is impossible for me right now to convey the magic of it. I'll just give you the skeleton and you fill it with life, if you like. The oldest of them was a singer, had sung with Frank Sinatra, amongst others, and serenaded me and another girl that came by walking her dog and his friends with the most amazing songs you can imagine. And in the most professional performing manner. They invited me to play as well and I shared three songs with them, Bob Dylan, L. Cohen and there is just something about a receptive audience that makes me sound so much better... It was a genuinely refreshing encounter with a lot of laughter and joy. At midnight. On dead Montana Avenue.

hard to fly on sometimes

2006 and you slam on the break at my favorite red light Hollywood and Gower maybe or later, after you made me coucou with your love next to a red chevvy.
he, you say slowly, i can't believe it. you say, i can't believe it but my favorite song of all times is written about you, so you say and push rewind with your sweet sweet magic fingers, go back to that one song and here it goes as you slowly look back at me through time and space, through dream and drown:

Well shes walking through the clouds
With a circus mind thats running round
Butterflies and zebras
And moonbeams and fairy tales
Thats all she ever thinks about
Riding with the wind.

When Im sad, she comes to me
With a thousand smiles, she gives to me free
Its alright she says its alright
Take anything you want from me, anything
Anything.

Fly on little wing,
Yeah yeah, yeah, little wing


It's just weird, if you know me, how fitting it indeed was it's just, sometimes, it's hard to fly on, sometimes, it is hard not to take the alright back and make it alwrong. sometimes i am just not on.

eero johannes and my soft summer night

It is Eero Johannes from Helsinki, Finland, playing. And the night is so soft, the streets so wide and you eukalyptus and palmtrees, you're just so familiar to my heart now. I remember when I first arrived here it was all weird and freaky to me. Like being in a picture book, I felt no relations whatsoever. Now I am on a flight through the soft ocean breeze, gliding so fast and I don't know if these tears are from the wind cutting my eyes into million pieces or is it that I leave.
Listening to Bob Dylan and the Visions of Johanna and my friend calling from New Orleans just propels me into this weird space. My dad's distant voice calling, a year or so ago, listen, listen, daughter, be aware, if you stay there long enough you will become American and you won't be able to come back.
I feel how it is tugging and tearing on me now, exactly this, the heart exploding into this great vast space, filled with so much more to long for.
Then I call my sweet love, far away, gypsy gypsy gone gone, letting him know about my feelings now, isn't it weird I say, isn't it strange, how I was so homesick and now I barely can go.
All these circus people I just met, rekindling my passions, all these dancers and people I can play with finally, like children in the meadows of life. Clown noses, laughter, dance, skinny dipping, singing, embracing. The high life.
But I am flying, high and low, in waves, and I know I can't stop now.
Berlin, Berlin, hello....

concha buika

It was 6 AM and I was racing through a fresh LA morning, the streets had just been cleaned and the city still somewhat sleeping. Concha Buika sang 'mi Nina Lola' on my discman and the clear, different morning light wasn't warming yet. It cast a weird light on this city that I have learned to love. It put an impossible night into another perspective.
Only now I can start opening up about this. Slowly digest what really happened. Scratch the paint away a little bit. Tell it as it is. How I sat at the Santa Monica and Highland bus station that had seen so much of my time and you saying good bye, my love, here in LA, at 4:30 AM, sobbing against the wall, with just me, my bike and my guitar. The transvestites walking by, raising their plucked eyebrows, one of them even turning to ask me if I was okay.
My heart was breaking in the wee morning hours of my first day of TA-ing at the massage school. It was breaking into thousand pieces. 'The timeless explosion of fantasy's dreams' as my love had quoted Bob Dylan already so long ago. Summer 2006 and I still didn't believe it.
So now it had come to a different end, I had made it possible by not taking action myself and Concha Buika sang my agony as if it was her own.
I felt so sorry. So fucking fucking sorry man. I felt like I was breaking and I felt that this was a very forceful liberation. I felt so free as I hadn't felt in a long time. I felt free to go wherever I would want to go with a broken heart and shattered dreams like that.
It's not like I don't like my dreams and my joy and my life in this new constellation. But in that morning, I was sitting on the dirty street where they sell speed and I was breaking.

in the void

I'm glad this happened. First of all, there is a kick ass song by Eero Johannes and the touch of a friend through virtual reality and time. Secondly then there is a video posted by someone I know to impress this very friend. As he smokes his cuban cigar there is a voice commenting on how the days of the plight for the black man apparently are over and this voice cuts deep into my flesh and soul, it soothes me and abstracts and distracts and abducts me into other realities. Dreams emerge such as, what if I could have been sitting with them up there on the roof top with a barbecue thingie there and cuban cigars and jokes so tangible. Shallow and happy. Would it have made a difference???? And possible, at the least? That I would like to know....
What, if.
For example, what if I could have just fucking relaxed for a moment. I recall my sisters voice literally a year ago explaining me that he and I might need another break for me to learn how the fuck to relax. I am sorry for cussing so much. It's just, you have to understand, under the full moon light tonight next to the crushing waves on Dockweiler beach I envisioned him in my room and me in his arms and all that stuff, fine and dandy. I didn't expect any of this of course, not to find this music that puts everything so neatly into place, describing so appropriately how I feel. So broken up and so electric and so repetitious and so ... I don't know, flowing.
I haven't been able finding words lately and this just helped me to care less and just jump back on track. Let it go. Let these freaking words play themselves out without shame. Let them say the unsayable. The stuff that needs to be forgotten. The stuff that everyone of course keeps telling me not to think about.
Like, his voice. Commenting on a black man and transcending another life in another living room into the depths of a wishing well that has the full potential of drowning me one day.
It's like. You know, he fell for my depths and then he couldn't swim. So I drained myself so he wouldn't drown and now he is playing in the shallow waters of another sea. It hurts and I am still waiting for the salty rainy waters to wash my eyes, my soul and refill this vast empty void inside that used to be an ocean.
I want tempests and tides, pirates and islands and new shores inside.
I want his breath to be my winds and I want his hands to rekindle the flood.
How pathetic to press replay a hundred times to just hear his voice one more time. It's so much more convenient then replaying his voicemails for example. And also, Eero Johannes makes it seem all so much more acceptable. His music echoes in my vast void and allows my petty dreams to bounce happily like children in sand.
I want to make love to you again.

three weeks

Silver Lake and the sun is shining. Lush, lush, lush hills and vegetation. That's what this word is all about. It sounds just as it looks like. Lush are the people too and the music and all I want is to sing and jam and dance.
Three weeks.
Three weeks until I leave. Funny, how the awareness of death magnifies every experience. Dying from this place will be hard. But so it is. In three weeks I will stand at the ocean saying good bye to the sunset, crying, laughing, dancing.
I can't believe it.

full moon twice in taurus

it's hard to write these days. my mind is cluttered with leaving, breaking, finishing, pressing, tearing, caressing... you call in the mid day hours out of a misty moisty mind, fogged up and clouded. the message appreciated, the inappropriateness secretly savored. after all, there is a spot inside that felt abandoned and not worth the trouble after all. to hear you rants soothe that spot, make it cum in glory.
everything is getting almost too much, too many things that could and should be done and completed and just not enough time or effort to do so.
it's easy to retreat into willy wallowing moments of motion that deal with the heart, and heart only.
sometimes i stop and read past posts. full of colorful language and passion.
and then i feel like i just don't know what to say anymore.

paving

waking up was hard, the bed too soft, the warmth dragging me deeper and deeper back into the pillows. Mom cleaned the sink in the kitchen and my melancholy was bigger than my annoyance about that. i stared at the blue white striped Mexican rug on my wall and the painting I drew back in 2006 in Santa Barbara and the lamp that used to stand in the corner of our apartment behind the green soft chair. I stared at the 'The Times Are A Changing' Poster of Bob Dylan and I stared at the door. Trying to figure out what this feeling was. This feeling that started to grow in me when I saw you and that ebbed into the night, multiplying over night, nailing me into my bed in the morning.
it would be hard to describe. an indistinct feeling of sorrow, interwoven with obscure longings and indecipherable, irrational dreams. dreams of would be, of should be. not of could be. dreams, that include parallel realities and worlds, worlds, in which love is paving the way for everything else, making everything possible.

difference, different

does it make a difference how much she means to you? does it make a difference how much he means to me? well. in my case, no.
so i guess, i can't say anything else.
because we know. we know.
our bodies know. our souls know. our spirits know. we know.
that we belong together in a different way
somehow
someway
someday

agony

i can't shake this cosmic blues off, somehow, it holds me captive.
involuntarily i screen impossible images in my mind, the forbidden fruits. that it is true. that i can't grasp what it means, that it puts me into agony.
i writh and twist and try to escape the grip of brute reality. or is it just another illusion? what does this mean? can it set me free? will it continue bringing me down?

late late at night, almost early morning i crawled into her bed and suddenly felt like crying. why did i do this? why did i do anything? come on, now, Emeralda, admit it, admit that you are hurt. Yes, these pictures hurt. Yes, all this hurts. The demeanor, the attitude, the lies, the excuses, the talks, the walks.
So, it hurts. So, you are in agony. So, deal with it. admit it. let it wash through you. let yourself be angry. no, don't engage with the demons, just let it wash through you.

earlier, on the couch outside i observed the whirling stream of joy and exuberance as they all played and I, I just couldn't get all that into it. finally i asked nina to sit down with me and listen to what crazy images i had to fight with in my mind, wanted to ask her to talk it all away for me. she bent down and sat on my lap. leaning into me , still part almost of their dance. her eyes so black and glowing and sweet sweet lips her face like a fairytale. what is it she asked, what is it and i couldn't find any words anymore, just quickly vanishing regrets about how to be or not to be and in the sweetness of her presence i found more comfort than in any other thing i could have found in that night.

see, i reckon it must be all good. but that's beside the point now, is it!? that he is with that girl, what does it say? about me? what does he tell our friends? see, that's when it starts getting whacky. what does it say about all that he told me? about our love? does he lie to me yet again when he confesses his love to me and that he just plays? I mean, what the fuck. it's irresponsible in any case now is it?
awww. aw, aw, aw. i got the blues man, i got the blues.

oh brother where art thou

IMG_0543.JPG, originally uploaded by saralaimon.

What I think about it?
I don't know. Don't be defensive. Don't tell me, that I don't know what I am talking about just because I haven't gone there. I doubt you know profoundly more than I do.
I don't judge you, I got past that. I am not the one who runs around at a party telling people how much fun I have without drinking or getting high. I got high, I drank, and I feel like Joni Mitchell's "Blue" when she sings 'everybody is saying that hell's the hippest way to go, well I don't think so, but I'm gonna take a look around..."
It's just that... it's not mine. It really isn't.
What I think about it?
I think if we face it (and yes that does imply some slight unintended judgement just by having a different opinion which does include not only my life but life in general) it has to do with an inconvenient truth.
I hear so many explanations that sound somewhat defensive and also, almost like excuses, ranging from 'spiritual cleansing' to 'medicine' to 'i take it only in a ritualistic setting' to 'you have to break down those walls'.
Why, I love walls. I love climbing over walls and I love hiding behind walls, I love building walls, I love taking them apart. I do not like bombs.

I have the feeling that in the end of the day it has to do with following analogy:
Taking drugs is like pouring spirit into a vessel that is not big enough to contain all of it. It overspills. It feels abundant and good and all these things just bubble around you, give you an overdose of whatever matter that spirit contains, gives you extra power because it is so abundant.
But in the end of the day your vessel is NOT able to contain all that. And I feel that it erodes under the pressure over time. It wears out. It doesn't get what it needs to organically grow to contain more spiritmatter. Yes, in tribal ritualistic settings maybe that is different but you don't live in a god damn tribe, my friend. You didn't do the homework of a shaman who's life WORK is to deal with these things. You didn't live the life that is tied into that particular rite which uses that particular drug to help you. In fact, I think, this drug doesn't help you at all but it uses you. I mean, really, what do we know about these things? About eventualities of realities that do include spirit, demons, powers that be, consequences, truths?
I met all these healers and shamans from cultural healing traditions in Minneapolis at the Symposium of 'Ways of Knowing'.
The shopping mentality of the western people is just disgusting. IT doesn't go anywhere. People are not willing and too lazy to do their homework. They want the best of everything and leave. And usually they leave a trail of destruction, unintentional but yet very tangible. Like children with no elders.
The craze for eastern or generally indigenous ways of life is understandable considering the void and emptiness that the dead ended road of one sided intellectualism and materialism has brought us to. However, I feel strongly that the ruthless and uprooted fast food mentality which by no means is mean spirited but moreover, filled with great intentions, leads into yet another void.
In our cultural traditions are just as many ways of healing, knowing and life, that do open pathways to wholeness, to ecstasy, to elevation, esprit, spiritual growth.
The way we came opened up a new, very dangerous freedom, that we didn't have before in indigenous tribal settings. It does transcend in some ways the confinements of the very protective ways of life in a tribe and opens up a horrific abyss of possibilities that not many people can deal with, apparently. I understand the need for exploration, for anything that will take us over or under or away from there.
But I do also painfully see how great chances and opportunities are shunned away from.
To walk a spiritual path with the assets of a fully engaged left brain, marrying it with the right brain, exercising, taking it step by step, has enormous potential.
How do we learn? How do we find new ways? I do understand which role drugs can play within that scheme. I do also understand that I don't have to burn to know that fire is hot, I can touch it, I can watch it burn by itself.
I am searching myself. I'm just saying. Either way, if you have all these elaborate explanations already, you might as well have the balls to face other inconvenient thoughts every now and then. Maybe.
This, of course needs to be revisited. This was just a brainstorm.
This is for all the people I have lost in the battle. This is for all the tears I have shed. I cry not only for those who exploded and imploded during their search for something, I also cry for those who got stuck, in general, anywhere. In soberness, in conservatism, in liberalism, in any ism. I guess that in the end it's about the way we deal with things. I don't mind broken glass, there is always mosaics to be made. I guess I mind, most of all, getting stuck and the value of even that, I know, is beyond my comprehension.
It's just that, I still get overwhelmed and cry.

i honestly don't know why i still would say that. that i miss you so much. it's so messed up, maybe it's just the night that takes it toll on me. but the cross streets just were too familiar and if you just feel half as weird to see me as i felt about being on these bloody streets i completely understand that you would have an issue with that. i am at 'home' now, or whatever they call this place and some random shit is happening on the tv. james dean looks across the room from a poster pinned up at the wall and i remember random moments in the practice rooms, an orange skirt, passion, truth and a shut door. it's just passing, is it.

The Straw

Change is scary and uncomfortable. It is a bitch, because it comes unprepared, other change that I anticipated creeps up to me in the wee morning hours when the dawn riddles my existence. The eternal struggle to attain and maintain balance weighs so many of us down, luring us in all kinds of extremity just like it happened to pamino in the 'magical flute' by Mozart when he had to go through the fire and the ice to break through to his own truth, finally. Sittin' on the dock of the bay comes to me, bringing back memories of another lifetime, inciting dreams of what is yet to come.
Sharing the most intimate moments in this space has become hard, first I started molding and forging more, creating as I have with my art installations back in the day but then I made the mistake to let too many people know about this sacred place and the awareness of possibly judgemental eyes put yet another layer on this cage and I keep trying to break through. To who?
Funny, how in the hassle sometimes we forget to ask the right questions.
Change doesn't come slowly, it does, it does, but the actual straw that breaks the camel's back seems so evergreen. In the midst of the whole load still improbable. Unexpected. Outrageous and different.
Letting go of the old picture and putting the new one in is the most trivial of acts conceivable and yet, it pinpointed the change, it hurt and doubted, it wasn't the same.
But I have to go there, I have to go.

obscurity

IMG_0674.JPG, originally uploaded by saralaimon.

Three months after our long and painful departure had imploded in the worst possible of ways I finally started coming through a little more pronounced after all.
Well, it could have been worse, in the same time, don't you think, and I slowly let go of certain layers and bits, carefully, so as to not to destroy the precious fragility of our love. In the dawn of a new era in my life my tears kissed the earth like dewdrop in those morning hours, my smiles dried them like dancing sunrays and my songs blew them into thousand directions like the winds when they dance to feast.

In obscurity I was, trying to break through, I, with my smaragd eyes, flaming into the sea.

TRILOGY

_MG_8934.JPG, originally uploaded by saralaimon.

I found him under a eucalyptus tree, balancing on his little unicycle while playing with his bandmates in the glowing afternoon. My bare feet couldn't stand still, soon the dust road was twirled up by our dancing. The sweet sound of upright bass and violin pierced my heart, lifted me up, made me one again.
Later Oso and I discovered the obvious and went on a breath taking ride throughout the festivities, letting the flute, the guitar and the childish enthusiasm about unicycling in new circumstance play their magic out...

I can't find words really for what I experienced, maybe later, when it all settled down. Picking up my flute and the unicycle after such a long time was truly reconnecting me with something dormant inside of my soul...

...

_MG_8937.JPG, originally uploaded by saralaimon.

on a magical ride

_MG_8943.JPG, originally uploaded by saralaimon.