Wrapping Up

What is sweet without the bitter? What is life without the urgency caused by death? What is love without yearning? Everything tinged with sadness, all sadness tinged with beauty, each beautiful thing beholds a mystery which fills the heart with wonder- a wonder which elevates the spirit, if only briefly, and not without lasting consequence. This Christmas, I give to show that I love, and I am going to midnight mass as an atheist. Driven by awareness of the brevity of life to seize the chance for kindness and love, for ritual and mystery. This Christmas, I spend time and money on a live Christmas tree that will soon whither and die, driven by nostalgia for Christmas trees past, by a childish reverence for this particular tradition, and by a desire to not let this year's Christmas season pass quietly and forgettably. This year, I embrace the experience of Christmas for all its worth, dead tree and all. Merry Christmas, y'all.

Table Set for Four

After work, I take a walk and gather garlic, persimmon, and a bouquet of pink roses and hydrangea from George Baker flowers. Once home, I boil beef chuck, rehydrate dried seaweed and cringe multiple times at the terrible smell of fish sauce as I spoon it into the brothy medley not once, nor twice, but FIVE times. I arrange the various items just so on my boring, white ikea table, a table set for four.

Yarn Store

I dallied in a yarnyard this afternoon, a resplendent world of different colored skeins. An otherworldly periwinkle blue sat on a shelf, so unassuming, waiting patiently to be transformed into a dreamlike stratosphere. Lush grassy greens and mustard yellows caught my eye; as well did a deep, rich red, and a black that was not quite black-- containing silver linings. In my mind, images were spun of strawberries and Central Park, of traipsing through a wonderland of autumn leaves until time and direction held no meaning. And chartreuse! such a delightfully ambiguous color...

Ballet. Beer. Beatles. The Bachelorette Life.

The Definition of Movement

Theorem 2.5.11: A movement is the integral of an infinitesimal series of poses.

Corollary: Between each pose, there must exist a critical factor called "flow".

Example: Pirouettes. Pique fouettes.

It is unrealistic and detrimental to practice to try to hit every single pose contained within a movement. The mind must focus on the most prominent, pivotal moments and visualize them as images to aim for. Flow must be created through proper timing, proper use of the parts of the body, etc. Flow must be used, not forced; under control, not out of control. 

*Source: The Calculus of Ballet, by Angelina Ballerina

Gravitational Grief

Grief is a force like gravity; it works over a field that is greater, much greater than the day to day, the hour by hour, or even the week to week. It extends its broad, heavy reach over a vast area of months, perhaps even years-- I cannot yet tell-- and weighs heavily on your subconscious, latent, until it manifests itself, for instance, in dreams, which more and more to me seem like a conduit to some realm beyond, whether this hidden realm lies in the self or in angels and ghosts. Because its reach covers such a vast area of time, its weight is only minimally felt from day to day. But over time-- weeks, months-- this weight accumulates with the self being none the wiser until one night, you find yourself facing an old brick wall in the middle of a walk home, weeping, unable to contain the grief that has mysteriously taken over your conscious, adult self and broken it down into notes of whimpering, sounds of the child that you thought you had outgrown many years ago. You could attribute it to extreme fatigue, hunger, physical exhaustion, daily stress, all leading to some random existential crisis, but the truth is that the grief exists inside of you independent of these negative physical conditions, and is carried around with you through all the day-to-day, week-to-week highs and lows, through all the ephemeral moments of laughter or of worldly troubles. The negative physical conditions only make it easier to break down the self, to tap into this latent abyss-like pool of sadness and release the element within, an element which hijacks the well-controlled, well-composed self of reason and maturity, and reduces it to a heaving soul, primal sounds escaping from a source beyond comprehension, as if the force of the element is too much to bear for one fragile human being and must be released to the night sky, dissipated among the stars, absorbed by the silence of space and whatever mysterious dark matter that exists there. Thus is the mammoth power of grief; it buries deeply inside the individual self, and extends across acres and acres of time.

Cleveland

Beauty is made visible by the presence of light. 

Light can be found in any corner of the world,

 no matter how seemingly desolate or dull.

29th Birthday

Dear Umma, I miss you. Thank you for giving me life.

Love,

Angie