Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

-Mary Oliver

......................................


of course
loss is the great lesson.

But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,

when it's done right,
is a kind of holiness

-Mary Oliver


You just never know who/what is going to come through the front door of our flat. And by that I mean our dueños locos. Rifling through phone bills to see who called who on what day and for how long, Lo - como siempre - decided to make me laugh to the point of tears with her witty skype comments and thus receive menacing glares from Chinca, or whatever Mig calls her.

There will be no central theme to this. Just to say that MI VIDA is perhaps the most eclectic mix of nothing you would ever expect and all that sitcom writers are dying to think up. The frenchies never wake up before 2pm and love to ask where the hell I could have found that extraordinary head of lettuce and if I have heard that there is an ESPECTACULAR at the monjuic fountain. Holland gladly shows me the fruits of his shopping trip and crudely overcompensates for not wanting to seem gay, kind of a disappointment I have to admit. And Germany is just cute. Like the little sister I never had.

Today has been the most incredibly fulfilling unproductive day. Two hour naps are like cheesecake. I do not belong in Canada. This happiness is like a kind of holiness.

More to come on what Jesus is teaching me when I'm not drinking Rosa Parks.

I came here to study hard things .... and to temper my spirit on their edges. - Anne Dillard

Home. I used to write endlessly about home, thinking and dreaming about home, wanting more than anything to be home. And sometime between then and now, Carrer Bonaventura Pollés 11-13, Barcelona became home. Not a replacement, sino una adición.

Struggle, maybe more than anything else, consecrates a place. This flat is consecrated. This kitchen, this blue couch, this hallway, this bedroom - these places embody a year's worth of my struggles and the lessons I learned the hard way. Not to say that there hasn't been more than enough good times here - certainly there has. But struggle - to grapple with life and sometimes flounder about - is to be changed and pushed forward. It is not for nothing.

As said by Anne Dillard, "There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by." I can only hope for a life full of good days, but the struggles that I've had here in Barcelona - they hit me in the soul, and are what bring me closer to knowing what a good life could mean.

I realize, oh how ironically, that it will be hard to leave. Hard in that complicated and uncomfortable way. As elated as I'll be to touch down in my California, I anticipate - nervously - the ache that will be me missing Barcelona for all her details and all the secrets she knows about me.

I still can't understand how it is that one can feel so about two very different things. I want to be home so much some moments that it makes me dizzy because I forget to suck air into my lungs, and yet, when I wasn't paying attention somehow the walls came down and now my heart is dancing around this city with an abandon that is unimaginably fulfilling.

It's just that it took so much to get here. Can I really be leaving this all in a month or so? Oh shoot.

"Poetry should be a shock to the senses. It should also hurt." - Anne Sexton

An Afternoon In The Stacks
By: Mary Oliver

Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open
their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound,
words adjusting themselves to their meaning.
Long passages open at successive pages. An echo,
continuous from the title onward, hums
behind me. From in here, the world looms,
a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences
carved out when an author traveled and a reader
kept the way open. When this book ends
I will pull it inside-out like a sock
and throw it back in the library. But the rumor
of it will haunt all that follows in my life.
A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.

Somewhere I Have Never Travelled
By: EE Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands




In Memoriam Mae Noblitt
By: AR Ammons

This is just a place:
we go around, distanced,
yearly in a star's

atmosphere, turning
daily into and out of
direct light and

slanting through the
quadrant seasons: deep
space begins at our

heels, nearly rousing
us loose: we look up
or out so high, sight's

silk almost draws us away:
this is just a place:
currents worry themselves

coiled and free in airs
and oceans: water picks
up mineral shadow and

plasm into billions of
designs, frames: trees,
grains, bacteria: but

is love a reality we
made here ourselves--
and grief--did we design

that--or do these,
like currents, whine
in and out among us merely

as we arrive and go:
this is just a place:
the reality we agree with,

that agrees with us,
outbounding this, arrives
to touch, joining with

us from far away:
our home which defines
us is elsewhere but not

so far away we have
forgotten it:
this is just a place.





A Dream Of Trees
By: Mary Oliver

There is a thing in me that dreamed of trees,
A quiet house, some green and modest acres
A little way from every troubling town,
A little way from factories, schools, laments.
I would have time, I thought, and time to spare,
With only streams and birds for company.
To build out of my life a few wild stanzas.
And then it came to me, that so was death,
A little way away from everywhere.

There is a thing in me still dreams of trees,
But let it go. Homesick for moderation,
Half the world's artists shrink or fall away.
If any find solution, let him tell it.
Meanwhile I bend my heart toward lamentation
Where, as the times implore our true involvement,
The blades of every crisis point the way.

I would it were not so, but so it is.
Who ever made music of a mild day?



We Real Cool
By: Gwendolyn Brooks

THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.



AND OTHERS:
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
Adrienne Rich
Elizabeth Bishop
Walt Whitman