this 1’s for the boys
This is the perfect time to write.
I just finished work, my wife is resting in the other room, and there are some real nice clouds out.
I’m going to brew the last of the carrot tea.
I really loved that Subaru.
I had become ungovernable.
Still,
My mind continues to rattle empty, save the ever-growing siren song of Peloton ownership.
It’ll be great, it says.
Man’s societal ills will vanish, it says.
it’s nice though,
Sat here—sleep-addled and faintly-conscious: aglow in the light cast from the spoils reaped, in conquest of an edifice of my own manufacture:
softly careening in a lavender harbor
.
It’s been a month today, since returning home from this trip to Los Angeles by way of Joshua Tree.
It’s been about 3 weeks since I initially started to write this.
And yet,
The desire to, remains.
Maybe it just takes a slice of banana bread.
I guess it’s a micocosm, really—
This website, these images, this effort-collage
It feels less and less possible at times.
All in service of some idle memorialization.
Some grand gesture at the whole of it.
Whatever it may be
In many ways I look back at this period as a cutting implement.
A knife tearing through the curtains I have hung in this house—the curtains that gird what remains of my self-imposed liminality.
A blade tightly-sheathed.
It serves in shadows as a propulsion; in light, as a ferry toll.
12am, in the Mojave desert,
The clouds imparted to the land succor, and our traveling party waded in its proximal balm.
As gathered the tempest, so too the ache for relent. At the same time, a revealing of the hilt: now-decorated by time and certainty.
So I took to it.
Stood on a deck, beneath a palm tree, watching the chaff float off in the water trails, jarred by the act.
It felt uncertain, and I don’t think its full weight was outwardly manifest.
I still remember how corporeal it felt, the animation of it all.
As from me fell the envelopment—this curtain… so upon me fell a robe of petrichor.
In it, I bathed.
and then we continued west
jonathan and Marc were not impressed.
Well,
It’s November now and the oven is open.
Literally, as I’ve just made toast and the lingering heat warms the kitchen tile.
I’ve come back to this every so often since starting— trying to relieve this series of images and prompts to move on to the next.
I keep trying to wrap my being around this undulating concept of incorporation, the final rite of passage. The final change.
The occasion deserves it, but I don’t know if I can reach it.
Things have changed.
But you know?
In fact, they did very soon after returning to Phoenix.
I guess it’s why it feels so imporant to make something of this moment, to properly document it.
This, was a special place.
*this was the view from the house we stayed in, in los feliz.
There is something to be acknowledged within these few days on holiday.
A time in which I learned to give yield to animus, to contort ever earthward—to be freed of concern over separation, over liminality, and over incorporation—learning to gesture more broadly: to be self-concerned in the manner of the redwoods.
To palm the earth from time to time,
To come to know of its content,
and to act therefrom
It’s December 27th.
It’s been just over 5 months since I first took to this.
The carrot tea is long gone.
and it’s true:
…though i’m still learning how,
the endeavor feels sacred.
It feels monumental and infinitesimal:
it feels like so many years spent withholding, now being suffused with in-gathering, and selecting, with making a whole.
…the endeavor feels sacred.
2024 belongs to Hillhurst.
boschian death-world
Hi Aziz
I still look at this period as an implemet,
—though less for shearing,
more now, for attenuation.
I maintain this way:
prostrated low, to greet the latencies bound in the soil, enjoying the din of imperceptibility:
the daily calamities, the ant shout—
to resist the horizonal gaze.
a period of concentration of space that I now hold for myself to learn sit, to gather momentum.
It’s January, and I’ll be leaving for Missouri soon.
Maybe there didn’t have to be some holiday to have to serve as propellant to some higher stratum.
and maybe there is no grand conclusion:
no need for some final assessment, some governed clarity.
Maybe that’s the point.
Maybe I simply found an instance to yield,
to allow for the full expanse, the full cave-in—the diaphragmatic release.
Maybe there is no passage,
Maybe there simply is,
and there always has been.
and in so doing—
in hearing the wind’s tousle and the Brittlebush’s recoil.
In being enrobed in petrichor, and night’s blanket,
in seeking harmony with earthen hymn—
I learn to be low,
I learn to be near.
it is enough.
