A work In progress: Shades of you.

*update February 14th 2009.

I am trying to work out the details of a song that I have been writing. it's not my first song, but it is the first that I have been moved to include words. Curse the boy and the love he inspires. [haha ;)]

I figured I'd put it up here as I work on it, let you all see how it's going, then publish the finished set when it's done.

An interesting note: In the Art therapy group I participated in this past semester the leading therapist suggested at the end of one of the group sessions "perhaps your relationship will truly begin when you finish that song." This was after I had expressed some fears of commitment, this song that I am working on and the root fear that I am not finishing it this song about my significant other because I fear I will come to a day or place where I do not love him anymore. (another note: the previous entry to this one was inspire by work that I was doing in that group therapy). This is not to say that I am defining the creation of this song upon that statement, rather, now that I have had a chance to openly explore past pain I would like to more openly explore how I experience love. This is what I am doing here, exploring, and hopefully knitting hearts.

It's not all grammatically correct, the words in ( ) are optional or considerations for the final work, and the // separate different lines or ideas written on different days. They are really not in any chronological order. Something in the middle I wrote today as I was recording all the other little tidbits, pausing transcription for demand of the flow for creation, then continued the process of recording and analysis. It really is like putting together pieces of a mystery, or scene that is come upon, or film that is started half way through the narrative. Thoughts all put together and looked at to be organized in a communicative way. I want you to be able to feel all the little pieces that are abstractly multidimensional inside of my experience. Also to have a record of those feelings for myself to return to if that day ever comes that I feel them no longer.

(this set of words and music has been taking many many months - I'm eager to see it complete and meet it in it's fullness, which will really only be full to me because of the process of creation).


Shades of You

I'm Flying/Feeling weightless when I'm with you
//
this verse will never be complete because I'll always have a need to tell you just how fantastic you are
//
one thing I know for sure is that my love for you is deeper than any stone
and higher than any moon or star,
purer than any diamond
and stretches farther than the reaching folds as the (uni)'verse are.
//
one thing I know for sure is that
my love for you is deeper than any stone
and wider than any expanse of the (uni)verse(heavens?)
//
our fate lies beyond this fallen state
always to continue on this earth and in the heavens we'll stay
together.
//
I want to smell the air those walls & to know
the wall of joy
through experiencing the world next to
the eyes that help my own to see

Let's take the living room outside
lounge on the sofa's in the sunshine
And act like we would in our private walls
without a care to who's looking at all.
//
I make a ridiculous Joke
and you follow with one just as ridiculous
//
silliness
//
you make my face hurt (from smiling of course!)
//
I choose love because Love is a choice
i will not give my fear a chance to offer it's voice
for it will surely deteriorate what beauty we share
yield heart to opportunity growth
//
live reacquainted with love
lived reacted
lived reactional
lived ready
lived reaffirmed
//
right moves with you
//
i'm glad i'm not totally comfortable with you, or ungrateful
it just ensures/warrants
that each moment will bring something new to love.
avoiding hedonic adaptation point of view
//
I'm not as psychic as some believe
I'm often left wondering what it is you think of (us)
so i watch instead for the inclination of your head
the gleam in your golden iris
your gentle hand always leading
even when we don't dance
//
my lips peak and curl
this happiness feels more mischievous
cause it feels like our own silly secret
as we anxiously try to remain oh so serious
//
you dance for passion & I dance because i'm passionate about you.
change often keeps us on our toes.
//
I choose love because love is a choice
it isn't some short lived feeling
//
The first time i saw you was on a thursday,
the sun was bright, the air was warm
our feet tread the sidewalk in one another's direction,
smiled as we passed each other
each on our way to our own/different place(s)
I had no idea what that look would turn into.

The next sunday you saved me,
pointed me in the right direction
(it was then you caught my attention)
and I wondered who is this man
who would care so much
for my(a stranger's) wandering feet that he would take a moment, (stop me in my tracks),
and set me on a path that I did not expect.

Look now what our silliness has gotten us into.
//
I'll continue to be silly if you agree to be ridiculous
//
silly, ridiculous
hilarious fit we're in
//
I'll be silly if you be ridiculous
and we'll laugh into the sunset
till the stroke of twelve.
//
I'm afraid to lose myself like I lost myself last time.
I was lost even to myself
//
the landscape of a room changes
so greatly with the addition of people
when you enter the energy becomes
bright & colourful, busy & directed
in so many individual ways
//
in you I have found happiness so excessive/expansive/ & exquisite.
//
i consult with others on how I can
stretch out my patience in attempt to
possibly come to understand
the mystery that is you.
OR
i consult with others on how I can
stretch out my patience in attempt to
possibly come to understand and see
the shades of you.
//
Dancing with Tod really is an experience, he is a fantastic partner, his signals are clear, he is patient and sincere, and when I ask for clarification he is willing to stop to show me.
//
sway, blink, in the shadow of memory

expectation clouds the surface of the message
analysis pierces the tension
waving its reaching
coming up with little more than what is now obvious.

hesitation is prominent
though willingness is strong
I've thrown away most of the icons
and sold the cheap gold & stone.

recent attempts have been fruitful
though anxiety still persists
opportunity to face it
is avoided at best.

this residual dust I see
is fallout from your Manhattan project
all matter gathered lightly fluttering together
mostly settled as snow on the ground.

the beauty that ensues
eerily suggests a connection
imperceptible by the ignorant eye
to hate sorrow bickering & flippant expectation

that does not override the good memories that were
which is why the bad ones burn
As you found I was not a plug & play bride
with you I could have never been satisfied

denied myself for a feeling
clouded the perception of misrepresentation
fronted by a charming smile
cleverly hidden is the carious core

fool me once shame on you,
fool me twice shame on me,
fool me thrice that shall not be.

I decided that in summer of 2006
since your hauntings have ceased to exist
yet you have spread your disease
situationally fixating it in my ability to. . . (commit)

which you do not deserve credit to claim
that is my own experience and gut reaction
falling out from our Manhattan
I'll find a way to rebuild in my own way,

no matter how long it takes.

Any living thing trapped within a prison that endures its torture will instinctively attempt to escape.

- Matthew Good.

It still confounds me how in even in a family, people who have lived with me for nearly 26 years, still don't fully understand how to appropriately approach topics of sensitivity.

I just had an experience with my mother that triggered my own mental state that i cannot really explain. I have sympathized with situations that others have defined, such as the flight or flight response, or what John Gottman calls "emotional flooding", in order to understand what I experience frequently through every day of my life. It isn't quite anxiety, it is more full of inadequacy and shame, and when I recognize that a situation is moving my mental state into that space I do one of two things, leave or try to push through the situation. I have learned to be much better at pushing through situations that become triggers, and avoiding the inevitable mental shutdown that occurs once I become too flooded. I can't really predict when it's going to happen, but I can say that it happens more often in certain situations than others, such as learning situations where I m the student, situations of stress (not always conflict though that is included), and in situations or relationships where I feel emotionally/mentally/physically unsafe as an individual.

My relationship with my mother is one of those relationships that I do not feel emotionally safe. I hope that this doesn't come off as a harp of depreciation for her, because that is not my intent. She has raised me in a good home, with minimal physical discipline, and has always been concerned for my betterment, and taught me to be a good upstanding compassionate member of society. I am merely trying to describe what I experience. This blog is one of my outlets that I utilize to manage what it is I feel and experience. Anyways, I often feel judged by her. She has a fairly judgemental personality, as well as she's very sensitive, inflexible to surprises, and when someone is telling a story she tends to top it off with a statement of her own personal experience. She often will allow others their opinions but ultimately feels that she is right and offers that air of correctness whilst allowing others their view, as though one is entitled to what they think, but ultimately that's not truly good enough. Also, she rarely believes that her actions are wrong. She will often complain about most everything, expressing whatever experience as not fitting into her ideal expectation. She also likes to discuss what she feels about a family member with other members of the family, attempting to rally together and in a "team effort" influence that one family member to what she feels/views about them. Also if you ever offend her (even if you don't intend to) she will hand whatever event/favour that you asked of her in the near future over your head. "So this is how you treat someone you'd like to do ____ for you???" She also blankets her assumptions to be true in other aspects of life, freely offering up her criticisms, such as "if you communicate this way then you'll never be able to function in whatever future marriage you have." Now that I have insufficiently painter her personality let's move on to the story. (there really are lots of good things she does, but there are also lots of disabling things she does too.)

For example, we were discussing how her weekend went, which was a normal conversation. She had gone on a "Yoga retreat". Eventually the conversation moved on to a family friend whose teenage son is in a treatment centre for troubled youth. I add my comments that heroine has become a more common high school drug, it isn't just for the addict bums strung out downtown. She then says that it must have been the influence of bad friends, because isn't that how it is in most of these situations? (one of those blanketing comments)

I knew that she was directing her question to my own past experience of raving. Just because I went raving doesn't mean I did drugs, nor does it mean that my friends pressured me into doing drugs, nor does it mean i ought be judged for the choice to be there. Choices that an individual makes incorporate thousands of different combined reasons.

At this point in the conversation I recognized it as a place where the conversation is on the way to breakdown, and my own emotional flooding where that fight or flight response kicks in and my mind loses what sense it contains so I chose to leave the conversation, because I did not want to go into that with her. I said I don't want to talk about this individual anymore (though I knew her comment was directed at me). I was being honest and left. Well she got offended (cause I was in the wrong for leaving) and as she walks past my open bedroom door and says "you don't have to be snarky." She also loves to leave little bombs like that to shame whomever she's talking to for whatever they did she didn't appreciate. I expressed to her, when she passed in return, that it isn't my intention to offend her, that is her choice to feel that way. Open opportunity for going from bad to worse. Somehow she always manipulates my intention into something it isn't. She then points out her intention for the pointed cornering question by saying "don't pretend like I don't know about how you were involved with something that began with an R and ended with an E and is four letters, and how my car mysteriously disappeared at night." She's also really good at hanging onto past offences. That was over 8 YEARS ago that I was going to raves, yet she still categorizes me into the moderately delinquent slot she's got me in. She's never going to understand why i chose what I did, because she can't separate herself from the judgement long enough to consider the whole truth of the situation, thus I will never discus it with her. I set it akin to how soldiers will not talk about their war experiences with their family. Somethings are better left alone. John Gottman says that it's ok to have problems, an not solve them. That just means another arrangement needs working out to accommodate for the problem, like building a little boundary around it that both can appropriately handle the issue without solving it.

She accuses me of not even being conscious of when I am being "snarky", to which I reply that is because it isn't my intention, and i tried to make a repair attempt by making a joke out of it, putting my index fingers next to my head like little devil horns that are loaded cannons stating "I'm going to unconsciously sabotage my mother (pow, pow, pow)" making little exploding noises and moving my metaphorical cannon horns like they're firing. She didn't appreciate that very much, and says "see you're being snarky right now". She has a broad definition of what it means to be snarky, basically I understand it to be when she gets offended.

She says all of this to me like it's news that I stonewall people. I know I do, and if i recognize it to be a safe situation I am better able to work through those feelings of mental shut down and manage the inevitable breakdown myself. If it is necessary to tell people I am communicating with that this is something that I do, then i do so, in hopes that they will react to me so as not to further elevate the situation when that begins to happen, and work at bringing the stress level back to a place of safety. If it not safe that is when i either run away and hide to work through calming myself down, or i fight and try to ride it out without panicking.

I have had one panic attack that i can recall, it was in the Salt Lake airport. I was in the security clearance section, sitting, waiting to board my plane. Several planes had just landed at and around the gate at which I was waiting, so suddenly the area was packed with individuals trying to make their connections or to pick up their luggage. I started to feel very rushed, and terrified because there were so many people rushing around me, and my chest began to feel like it was being tightened. I had not where i could go, i was at the end of the gateways, with hundreds of people rushing in different directions, I felt trapped. All i could do was put my head down, plug in my iPod, crank the volume, try to make the world quieter, and breathe.

You're thinking, cranking the volume makes the world quieter? and I resoundingly say, Yes it most certainly does. So often the world gets so noisy. I hear everything, all at once, and it takes a great deal of ignoring to desensitize myself to all that is going on around me. Though there are times when I can get hyper focused in on things, like when i am working on art pieces I am creating.

They say ADD is a dysfunction of focus. Those people who say that do not have ADD. It is not a dysfunction of focus, my experience has been that I can focus on things just as long as the setting is right. My setting is not the same as your setting. You may like to have an open door to hear the bustle of the office outside, or you my talk to a co-worker working beside you as you get tasks done. For me if the stimulus isn't aiding what I am doing, it is detracting from it. That stimulus could be anything. I may like to listen to the bustle outside the office, and be able to work great.

I find that when the rushing and multiple loud activities are occurring simultaneously within close proximity to me that's when i lose ability to think. I hear it all going on, the boss giving instructions, the phone ringing, the clock ticking, the staff member coming to check their schedule, the radio playing, the casual conversation across the room, the customer coming in to fill in details of an order and the sound of their pen on the paper as they leave them, the receptionist typing on her keyboard, her chair wheels as they slide across the carpet, the money counter in the back room. In addition to hearing it all my mind then creates visual images to match the sounds it is receiving. Can you understand how this can be confusing for a person who is linear in their thinking? My mind is not a linear tool, it understands everything in vision and multiple dimensions. I can spout off details of a setting, or aspects of a page i read, including the layout, or possibilities of how a person acts and why they act that way, but ask me to memorize and work through a formula, and it doesn't work so well.

I just do what I can do to accommodate what i can accommodate about myself, but i don't try to "fix" myself, because someone concludes that because i act or think this way I am broken, whilst offering a label to write off who I am.

Too many people search for labels to things they don't understand.

I am moved,

The clouds have been heavy and wet for several days, soaking us groundlings. Some of us revel it, while some of us curse it, but the heavy clouds stay all the same. Yet, the clouds don't all rain the same. Yesterday it rained so hard rivers were created in any gully that existed, gathering into small trepidatious lakes. The drops would careen the surface heeling the tension in such a way that air would be trapped for just a moment under the tight molecules stretched across the displaced gas until the bubble blossomed into coruscating petals of water. Even within the same storm the clouds evolve through measures of downpour and blusters of existence.

An Odd Mood (The Wall)

I have felt and odd mood lately
one that separates the communication of your senses of each other
compartmentalizes each into their own unrelated box

My headspace is going numb,
& wrapping it around the ordinary is a
challenge

I analyze this state
in & through the spam of the day
sometimes forgetting it in the business
& fully realizing it
when someone is speaking to me for too long.
(longer than a few phrases)

I think I need to get out of this town
run away to the city
alone.

I want to touch those walls I've
Learned of
dreamt of
& felt in sleeping sense
I want to smell the air around those walls
& to
know the wall of
joy
experiencing
the world next to a pair of eyes that open
my own

The Wall(s) (in no specific order)
The louvre,
Paris (specifically Van Gough & the Nike of Somathrace)
Scotland
Meet Matthew good (done june 30th 2007)
The Bauhaus (my art therapy studio)
Japan - war sites
Germany - war sites
Australia
India
Niagra Falls
Brazil
A healthful body
A companion who is willing to be with me, not follow or force me.

what i said about myself, on my flickr.

Artist, Behavioural scientist.

Those 2 elements are my passions which keep me going on a day to day basis. The big picture is in the process of being made, and it would be a pity to leave it unfinished.

I am going to get my masters degree in Art therapy, at some big school out east. My top choice is Concordia University in Montreal Quebec Canada.
When i finish school I want to open an art therapy studio. Make it a centre for positive learning, not just a place were weird people with problems go to line my pockets with money.

I care about people and I care about what they think, because what they think is what they create.

I feel that art can positively influence for positive change.

As for what is life right now,
I go to school believing I am going to do something with my life and save a world. I get involved in campus stuff to feel involved, keep busy and productive. As a side note I try to do what I can to make a difference in other people's lives. Talk with them, do things for them, just be there. I haven't always done that, and I'm trying to get better at it. It's not really a conscious effort to receive some reward, it's just what I want to do.

Other than that I appreciate all things beautiful that are well thought out. That is not to say that perfection is demanded. Beauty is found in the scars and imperfections.

I also appreciate the adage: It's easy to make something complicated. To make something simple and effective is difficult, but far greater.

mechanics of a gun

just thinking about that as a metaphor, for a kick start reaction instead of an intention for harm...

Pushing buttons he’s not going to like.

It is possible, yet far more complicated than being alone, to be with someone and to feel entirely afraid of being anything but alone.

This being with someone pushes boundaries, fears of being together, fears of opening up and having it all fall apart again, fears of knowing how and when to express or reciprocate. Fears of the anxiety that creeps up and stops you like a crushing rock set gently upon your chest. It creeps in and settles in your mind, taking the will power of a deep thick carefully engineered concrete wall to fend it off, hold the sanity in, and to walk across the violent chopping glassy surface.

Loving is the easy part. Saying it is the hard part. So I try to show him. I kiss him, I snuggle with him. I hold him loosely so as to avoid too fast an attachment that is already developing. I am picking up new social hobbies so I can be a deeper part of his world. I fear him becoming a deeper part of my world. My logic is that maybe if I can find out who he is and feel comfortable there, he can find out who I am and feel a similar way. Then, somehow, we will be able to survive the flood waters when they come.

I have plans. I have plans to be, to go, to do, to become, for I have been promised these will be because of who I am. I have made plans that have been set in place prior to him even entering my world, those plans now having been modified and yet still modifiable, to become something different. I see the important thing here being flexibility. To incorporate new concepts and ideas within the process of carrying out plans. Bending and not breaking, seeing and not running, loving and staying.

You thought it’d be possible to remake something out of a rock? I already tried, and to sore disappointment it is valued far less coming from the hands of the owner than the originating hands of a salesman. I tried to save you from pain and anguish that you experienced anyways, resulting from a rescinding action opposed to returning an owned item. Taking an owned item back to the salesman who doesn’t hold a simple return or exchange policy is rigidly and psychologically flooding, like a dam holding back too much emotional water, running off to surrounding plains, effecting every detail of the landscape, pushing away life, flattening strong historic trees, thinning out fertile soil, burying entity beneath a flooding tumult of restless death. The rock sits in a box, underneath the tumult, underneath the restlessness, underneath the entity which bore it. But even the rock is not alone; it sits with another precious metal beneath it, procured by a similar method the first was obtained. They sit together, closed away and protected by a box, buried.

I made a suckers choice.