Alicia and I were talking about goals. We're in her workspace/shop, the manifestation of her dreams made into reality. Sitting around this big table. Shooting the shit. Cutting out shapes of fabric to make into aprons. I'm drawing. 
Cigarettes After Sex posted this soundless grey-toned video of a rain splattered window overlooking a few boats set in boundless agitated waters. Soundless, boundless. "This is what I want my next romantic relationship to feel like," I wrote in the comments. And it is through this curse of vague desire do I hover through an aimless life. Saudade. A vague and constant nostalgia for something that may not have been. For something vague and shadowy in the future. For the nameless and indistiguished present. 
Do I understand the mysterious tension of manifestation? Wish for something, and if the goal is fully formed in one's head it will appear. Be specific? Right? 
There's this line on my hand, the Heart Line. it runs between two fingers. Pisces in Venus. Vague and mysterious, romanctic goals uncertain. 
Mood. Home alone. Harsh Northern windows open to a fierce grey light. Curtains drawn. Been speaking terrible things about my dead father. I just decided to go for it. I want to move past it. I want to revel in the last moments we had together and let them define our relationship more. Forget about the hard times. There were better times. Woke up this morning with the most terrible uterine cramps. Dying. Cold sweats, couldn't move, threw up, laying in bed thinking of my dying father who never saw actually dead. Last moments between morphine and discomfort, forming commands to bring him water and ice. Curled into myself with this rolling pain I connect to him, suffering through colitis in the last four years. I took it personally, the way we were cut out because we could do nothing to help. In my own sharp new transient pain I bury myself. I want my mom. I just want her around. To do nothing rly. Do her own thing. 
In my trivially small example of pain I focused my humilty and connected to the bigger picture. 
Goal-setting. I can't do it. I can't even write an essay that has a singular focus. 

"I will create this space to be a place in which a change of consciousness will ensue. But in the meantime, I think I’m gonna wine out and nap." -Rubina Martini
​
There's this thing that happens. I almost want to blame the moon. When you build a momemtum that all of a sudden flops, or slows, or stalls. You are working towards a goal, checking off checks on the checklist, gathering all the necessary things, breaking ground, making prototypes, getting other people involved, excited, invested. There's groundword laid, and the inpiration is there until suddenly, it just stops. And you stop. And you need to do something else, and whatever you were working towards remains fixed, and then becomes stagant, and then you eventually put the tools away and put the supplies away and rest...
There's this picture of Ruby I'm thinking of. She's sitting on the couch with a glass of wine in her hand staring off into nothingness. In her own head. She bought a house in the last year. Moved in with her boyfriend, now husband. Started home school programming and an artist residency. Gathered things: a loom. Got herself hitched. Now she's resting, and I wonder, what will happen to all the projects set down for the moment? 
"This last week I've hit some new levels of exhaustion/breakdowns. I will create this space to be a place in which a change of consciousness will ensue. But in the meantime, I think I’m gonna wine out and nap."
But what does it mean when you set the work down for a minute? Or for an undetermined amount of time? 
Melanie has left a basket of tools in the living for several months. She's been finishing the windows and only has one left, the one in my room next to my bed. She has two bags of tin cans to turn into something for her room, and the old wallpaper in her room is being etched away to replace with fresh paint. But they sit. For months, a work in progress. And what happens when the work is stalled and never starts again? Where do unfinished projects go to die? 
My unfinished work are these puppets. The due date is April 26th. Have the puppets finished and photographed and turned into a book for them and for all kids with witchy aunties who want to add spiritual spice to their grandparent's Bible influence. Everything sits out, waiting, trying to look fresh and exciting. I want to do landscaping. I want to sew pockets and draw pictures and put together zines right now. I want to do tea readings.  

There's an unacknowledged Christmas tree onstage and a spider  spinning a web on the microphone. "Can I ask about the Christmas tree?" I ask later at the march booth. "Sure."
"What's with the Christmas tree?"
"I wanted something onstage, because there's really not a lot going on. I asked them to round up a couple old Christmas trees and they came through."
It made me think of that scene in Scott Carrier's, "Chasing After Antelope," where Scott Carrier is interviewing schizophrenics for a mental health survey. He's interviewing a woman in a house that feels normal except for a slice pizza that is upside down not the carpet.
"I can't stop looking at the slice of pizza on the carpet. I keep looking at it because it's the only clue that the woman is sick."
The Christmas tree feels like the pizza, an indication that, while everything is tame and expected, and Elverum is singing almost verbatim the songs we've heard on A Crow Looked At Me and the NPR First Listen streaming Now Only, there's a thread of undoing in all of this.
This isn't a normal show, even though it's scripted and abundantly rehearsed. The off-scripted moments feel loaded. The Christmas tree feels like a safe-haven for the eyes. To avoid sharing too strongly the feeling of loss.
I thought of the looks of the people in the hospice house, bravely looking at my father's yellowing eyes, bravely looking into our eyes which were wide and confused. They've been trained for this, so there's some comfort in that, but I know they have to go through genuine expressions of remorse in front of us.
Of course pancreatic cancer is the only link between Geneviève and my father. Today I was reminded of the times he wanted his father to die. The time he left him alone to choke in the bathroom at the Italian restaurant. The time my grandfather was white as a ghost because he had mixed pills with alcohol and how my father drove us away. A calcified murderous anger.
And I've never had a love the way is being sung about onstage. People are here with their person. White Belt Eagle Scout sends an homage to her person in the audience. People use this concert as sweet place to lean heads on shoulders and whisper little things like, "I would die if you died." I can't help but feel they should all be ashamed in some way, because I am alone and Phil's wife is dead and there's a dead Christmas tree onstage and a spider weaving a web and all of them are islands among themselves. Untouchable by the heaviness of this moments unraveling.
Next to me there's a boy mansplaining to a woman she has every right to consume media which supports her paradigm of the world. She wishes she had come alone. In no way does this person enhance her experience. And in this way I know too, there is no one is the world who could sit next to me and offer me any more brevity or depth.
Then I think of Ferranté. What was the pizza on the carpet for him? Such a madman. Somewhere along the Atlantic shore torturing another poor woman. It was stuffing coming undone from the seats in his car. Torn away by Ghost the German shepherd. He would leave her in there all day.
​Ferranté would have had something to say. He lost his wife by cheating though, not cancer. 
Later, in the lobby, I buy both records on vinyl. I've been listening to the albums on Spotify or NPR and wanted to throw money at the house that is being built in Anacortes or somewhere North of here. I want to throw money at the openness and the explaining of a real death. 

"In the National Galley in Oslo / There's a painting called Soria Moria / A kid looks across a deep canyon of fog at a lit up inhuman castle / or something / I have not stopped looking across the water from the few difficult spots where you can see / That the distance from this haunted house where I live to Soria  Moria is a real traversible space / I'm an arrow now / Mid-air"  P. Elverum

I don't cry as much as my face gets wets in grief. It's a secret comfort that I know no one reads my blog. There's a lost journal in the world where I confess I hate everyone. Someone is reading it now, a stranger that perfectly understands. 

My last journal entry was a dream I had with my Dad while he was still alive. This morning I dreamed of being in a tall building on the Westside of Portland overlooking the East of Portland, overlooking the river and the greyness of the world passed that point. Someone had shot a missile and a great black cloud went up, billowing, the way the wrecking yard fire had billowed. The dark smoke hit the window of the building and we knew we were safe for now. News footage showed the soundwave of the explosion knocking a surfer off their surfboard. Maybe they were dead. 
My Dad was there though, and we hugged, and I said, "I guess this is where we are hanging out now," and he didn't say anything and in my waking state I still feel stupid and out-of-touch with reality. I feel stupid for saying something like that to him. I used to rememeber this deep well inside myself which felt things very strongly. I hated it because sometimes I couldn't get out, and I didn't know how to ask or what to ask, for help. 
This dark unrelateable lonely place where things are real.

I'm not visiting my father yet. I'm not talking to him or asking him to connect and I feel bad for this. I'm trying to understand this freedom of being alone in the world without unsolicited guidance. He wasn't always a dad but I've always been a daughter. Now, transforming into something else, unrecognizable to anyone. 

I keep listening to Mount Eerie's, <A Crow Looked At Me,> over and over again. My mom and I drank wine out of coffee cups one night at the Hospice house where Dad lay dying in the other room and I played it over and over again. I now have regrets from that time, things that I could have done. One was putting coconut oil in his mouth so he didn't feel so thirsty when he came into consciousness. Open-mouth junkie naps, they put him on so many drugs to ease the pain. Unable to close his mouth in the sleep. I felt the entire time that I could reverse it from happening if I let go of my anger, but I couldn't, so I didn't, and I let him die. 

Before we knew he had cancer he was sick with a digestive disorder and I would brew cups of tea for my altar, and make blessings, and put photos of him everywhere, and light candles, and ask those in the ether to bless him and make him well. Sometimes I would stop the spell midway out of anger that he wouldn't do the same for me. He would ask Jesus to make me normal, not to make me free. But I'm projecting. And I'm so angry.  

I'm reading through the text messages my father and I wrote to each other over the last year. Our strange back and forth of similar minded musings. In the last month of his life I dreamed he took us on a trip South.
"I just woke up from a dream you were driving all of us through the countryside. We were going to find a place to pick apples but I wanted to harvest California poppies. In the dream you told me you love those flowers." It became me that was harder to love in the end. It was me that wouldn't let the walls down. Too afraid the hurt that happened when I did. The patriarchy is not gentle. It's better to be prepared than to feel. Is this true? I want to bring down the patriarchy for softness to occur. But who have I become in this?
Knight of cups.
I keep asking myself, what does it mean to me that my father is dead, and I know I am asking the wrong question. 
What is the right question? What to ask God when the opening is cracked, letting my father into the ether. What question should I scream into the void? 
Where do you go when you die?
Smoke, all around. My mother hands me a vile of my father's ashes. Dust to dust. The monk crossing my forehead reminding me, "dust you will become." My father is in the smoke erupting from the chimney. The vapors that join the clouds. Why are you handing me this pile of matter? My father is the wind.
He is gone and I'm not sad and I don't know why. 
My walls haven't come down still. I am still afraid and I know this is the key to everything. I stopped drinking last week. It hasn't done much. I wonder if I can feel without alcohol.

Grandma practiced the faith of movement and transition. Guilham did the same. Bringing metro tickets from Tehran to Paris, Paris to Tehran. Grandma put pinecones on dining tables and kitchen counters. Peeter took stones from the island and sent them in a package to Prague. I placed one on the grave of a young man. 
Marina Abramovic spent time on a different island. One where there were many tourists. There were no shells on the beach because the tourists would take them. She went to the giftshop and bought shells. She scattered the shells in the sand for the tourist to find. Offering them a magic moment of discovery. 
Marina Abramovic delivered mail once. In England, I think. She would only deliver the nice parcels and leave out the bills. Ryan's grandmother had a similar practice. She would take the mail from neighbor's homes and bring them to her home. They thought about creating a service where she would take all the mail and offer them a summary of what was received. 
Some people mine mountains for precious metals to be taken to other places and shaped into different things. This is not part of our practice. Ours is a movement, not a stealing. 
You took a frog once, and put it in a shoebox with some leaves. You released it into the creek near your home. Away from its kind, would it survive?
The cats bring in a mouse alive in the middle-of-the-night. It climbs the sheer curtains and slacklines the string of bulbs on the ceiling. Captured in a pot it is taken down the street. 
Nature has its own way, its own alchemy of movement and transition. Of the bees (des abeilles), from wind. 
Did you ever wonder how things got to where they were? In childhood the way things are feels so taken for granted. The way things are is answered so simply as, it always was. In time we witness prolonged periods where creation and destruction occur making us admit, what is the source? Things once were and they were not always. There is a completion in someways, or an energy exchange. 
I asked Nick once if he believed in reincarnation. "In a way," he had responded, "for so much of us has been made up of other things, things that have been once alive and are alive again. And our shape, as it is now, may never be again, but pieces may take a new form."
Stardust, they always say. It's romantic. 
Do you remember when I stood under the sky and remembered myself? As a thing not a part of the heavens but a part of here? Made up piece by piece of soil and milk and honey and breath? Do you remember when I realized I was not to rise to meet the Hebrew God but fall and sink into Pagan Earth? The ecstasy of all things known to be. 
Ferranté once was a feather blowing over a mountain wishing to reduce it to a pebble. He wakes every morning, another breath in his broken lungs, knowing he will displace pieces of the earth that once came together harmoniously. He spoke to me last over the phone on the shores of the Atlantic overseen by the shadows of a women who he has broken. They spoke to me, to save me, and now they are gone. Perhaps to return to their bodies, but I worry they are lost. 
You let go more easily one time. The Snake year. You threw in all the photographs and mixed tapes. The things Grandma displaced and brought to you. It was heavy and you needed to be light. You let it go. It became smoke and you asked it to carry you somewhere else. And the wind picked you and you became lost. You learned a language no one else spoke and carried on the practice of movement and transition. Walking holes in shoes, leaving them on the train. Krònas in the collection plate at the Easter mass you attended in St. Céré. 

It's one of those ordinary mornings. Grant plays OPB in his room, I hear him shaving in the bathroom. Bill the cat is following him everywhere and jowling at him. I'm drinking coffee with cream that has slightly turned, making the flavor pleasantly sour and pronounced. The coffee mug is a soft jade green, or grey green. Almost milky in it's semi-transparence.
Nick and I would play this game walking around the neighborhoods, in the same season, almost a year ago. Every house we would identify the name of the paint color.
"Hushed mustard."
"Retreat evening blush."
"Stereotypical pink."
Playing this game with my coffee mug I assert, "bluey-sage," "opposite-of-crimson."
Maybe I should have my students do this.
Megan the tarot-reader.. why did she come up in my thoughts? Ah, VOICES.
We spoke about Milla Prince and her strong voice. I remember teaching over the summer and feeling my soft voice in my throat. Voice of authority. I remember Ted yelling at the students to listen to me and how weird that felt. To have a loud voice advocate for me because my voice wasn't strong enough? Why do people need to be yelled at to be heard?
Milla Prince didn't yell, but she had a captivating ability to hold her audience. Speaking from a reverberating place.
"Singing lessons," I had told myself. Years ago I took a single singing lesson from a man. We were going to work on trade. He needed illustration work for his band and offered singing lessons in exchange. Our first and only lesson was breath work. Blowing over paper, blowing out a candle. Projection of the breath and by extension, the voice. Authority. Amplification. A super-power. I remember hearing a radio show about a sociologist who wanted to test the"ten-thousand-hours-to-mastery" theory. Her goal was to create the "loud sound" she heard from professional singers. She worked with a voice coach who kept telling her, "you're so close, keep going." Eventually it came. It clicked. A "My Fair Lady" moment.
I think of all the work I do and how much of the teachers in my practice encourage continuous singing/conversation. In a radio segment I just heard African-American cook and culinary historian Michael Twitty says, "having conversation with the utensils that you use as if they're your friends, as if they're your allies in the act of making your food."
Speaking. Voices. Amplification of our intentions. Manifesting our will into the tactile realm.
Another thing Megan and I spoke about was accepting the role of the inconclusive.. allowing the process to be in itself, the piece of work. Letting the wheel of fate spin.
"Leaving My Father's House," a compilation of women's essays spoke in the introduction of feeling uncertain in it's final stages of publication. I want to quote her on this. I just requested the book at the library.
I feel a big part of person and my writing holds this quality. Uncertainty. Process-oriented. Thoughtful rather than conclusive. It's been a challenge accepting this in myself because there isn't a place for pondering in the world. Pondering happens inside. In the kitchen, in the cooking pot. Not on the table or on the serving plate.
It's awkward.
The voice. The words. The thoughts. The world is made from a linear method of completion. It's not for the soft. The coffee in my grass-cream colored cup is triumph. I did not use the word patrilineal correctly... I need to put socks on, it's cold in the house.

Are soft. Moving gently over the glossy surface of the cardboard. Someone is moving it. There has to be someone moving it. Lights off. We're quiet. Writing down the letters as they are spelled out for us. Who shall we marry. Where shall we live. What is your name. Are you a good spirit or a bad spirit. Melanie told me she was one of the ones who moved it. Max and I sat in silence under the glow of the Virgin Mary nightlight until she burned out. Say something.
The soft felt of the oracle was meant to limit the friction of the board. Something silent, like slippers on wooden floors. Something easy for the spirit to direct the hands. Maybe it was our heart-beat that inpsired the oracle's movement across the board. Silent little girls in the darkness. Who has a crush on me. Who is talking shit behind me back. The spirit knows. Moving in between realms. Between secrets. Hearing whispers. The weightless veil of smoke in our ears and mouths. Into our pasts and futures.
Me, I'm trying to be the oracle feet. Soft and weightless and light. Vulnerable to movement. Senstive to the minute shifts of the planets above. Below. Aware. Listening. Fluids attune to the moon. Gravity weighted to the roots. Ancestors inside me, flowing in puzzle pieces in the coils of DNA, materializing scraps if I can isolate them and ask them to speak, They are all there, inside of me, with voices, with curiousities and unfinished business and skills and crafts and projects that at one time faded from their hands and reclaimed by us, by me, by the living of us. The line. Lineage. A myriad of names. My kindred, my protector, guardian, muse, somehow a culmination of this. Melange.
Around me I eat the earth and breathe the air. I meditate on deepening this relationship as well as staying light.
I know it's made-up. It's my imagination. Someone is moving the oracle.