Father Death (reprise)

I have posted this before, but I felt  it was worth reposting with all that is going on in the world. The point isn't to appoint someone as the scapegoat for all the evil taking place in the world, but rather to ask how our culture got to a place where it could be so ill that it could manifest itself in such madness and then deem the fruits of that madness king? No one in our culture is free from this sickness, there are just those of us who can see it, and those of us who can't.

Remember, they can only kill each of us once.

And one more because we need to again speak with the twists and turns of metaphor if we ever hope to survive all of this. Speak out of the side of your mouth, so those who are watching you can't quite catch your meaning.

It is getting late...

In the Western world of 2017, dying of heartbreak seems to have gone completely out of fashion. As something of an idealist, I am willing to let heartbreak lead me to that final and deepest of thresholds. I am heartbroken and feel prepared to look at those things which I feel I can hardly stand to turn my gaze toward. The grief of loss sits heavy upon my shoulders tonight, like some sort of sick specter. The world is and has been mad, and I don't want to talk about it with rational language because it doesn't make sense for me in that way. I want to go into that mythic and poetic place beyond rationality. I want to talk about how my loneliness is a cracked sliver of moonlight. I want to talk about the way that environmental collapse sinks my heart to the deepest depths of some midnight dark sea. I want to talk about the sickness that lives in all of us in the Western world and the black snake seething through the land.

Reading List 2016

For the last few years, I have been trying to keep a reading list. Sometimes things slip through the cracks, but for the most part I keep a pretty good record. There hasn't been much done in the way of reading this last year,  but I still kept my list. It's hard to find the time to do much reading while attending college (lots of reading for school!), working two jobs, and dealing with rough emotional terrain. I love reading and sometimes forget how much it does for me. My goal for this year (not a resolution!) is to spend more of my free time reading and less distracting myself on the computer. So without further ado, here is my underwhelming reading list 2016:

Flight Behavior by Barba Kingsolver
The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson
Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder
In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell
Scrapper by Matt Bell
Pax by Sara Pennypacker
Tinker by Paul Harding
Sing Down the Moon by Scott O'Dell
Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
Wild Form and Savage Grammar: Poetry, Ecology, Asia by Andrew Schelling
The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams
Get Into Trouble by Kelly Link
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood
Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch
Mr. Gwyn by Alessandro Baricco
Dora by Lidia Yuknavitch
Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach