Egret Eyes
March 3rd, 2013

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My mind is full of egret eyes.
Swiveling movement like the weight
At the end of a fishing line,
Pulling the hook serrated and sharp
Into the darkest parts of the sea
That only fish with grey translucent eyes
Can see with something more than sight
That illuminates the darkest parts of this world.

I feel disturbed like the jellied eye
Of a fish left too long in the sun;
Poked by innocent hands seeking fun.
My mind is pierced by shrieks of delight
As children run away, cringing in fright;
A game played by children in a twilight too dark
To be anything else but night.

Plucked from the sea by the dagger
Of a spear fishing egret
Perched atop a craggy rock out at sea,
The open mouthed, lipless screams
Of a fish out of water takes on new meaning.

My mind is full of egret eyes.
Preying with the majestic form of a killer,
Guised in beauty and lithe gossamer gowns
Of a white so pure it can only be called snowy.
But the bones buried beneath the snow
Remain unseen, hidden by layer and layer of white
So pure it can almost conceal the death in your eye
That pivots like a ballerina’s pirouette.

The bird opens wide its wings.
Wings of feathery white willing a skyward escape
Like a shot in the dark and a bullet left in a tree trunk
Because the wood won’t feel the burn, Right?
Just as a wriggling earthworm doesn’t feel the pierce
Of a hook dissecting its body into perfect segments
Like it was meant to be split by the greedy hands of men.
Did the fish see the pain as the worm was plunged
Into the depths of an element it didn’t understand?

These murky waters mean nothing to the eyes of a predator
As the egret dips its streamlined head into the water
Pulling forth its sacrifice of sea life.
The egret pushes itself from the rock in the middle of the sea
To return to its native country of sky clad creatures.
Bringing with it an unwilling victim of circumstance
Caught in the clutches of death, even the victim had to smile;
It was on this day, a fish learned to fly.

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Ravenous Reading (A Tear for Poetry)
February 26th, 2013

I always cry when I read poetry.
Oh, you must read very sad poems then.
No, I just forget to blink or maybe I am afraid-
In case a word slips away like a ship into the sunset
That can never be returned if lost at sea,
Or a love note burned so that it will never be seen.

You see poetry is elusive,
And we must keep a wary eye upon it at all times.
This watchful gaze cannot be pried from the page-
Just incase a word tries to escape,
Like a fox willing to bite off its foot for freedom
You see, I am diligent in my reading, like a hunter in wait.

My eyes water as they scan each new line,
Consuming each string of words
Like a wolf with a hunger that doesn’t die
Maw agape and body ready to be filled;
You see I have a mind that hungers
Like a wolf’s stomach that howls for more.

So those tears are not courted from sadness,
But ravenous hunger that twists my smile
Into a lip licking sneer of a grin
As the words on the page
Fill the spaces behind my retinas,
Like bones stuck in barred teeth.

Later they will come forth like a parade
Of parables to march before my mind;
This funeral procession of devoured words
Streams down my eyes like cold winter rain
After my eyes and mind have been full to the brim
And can hold them inside any more.

These tears roll down my cheeks like inevitably overflowing
Rain gutters, filled with words to heavy to remain confined
By the constrains of the brain I tried to devise;
So they drip from my eyes to the page again
These black inky puddles, the mistaken inkblots
Of a clumsy uncultured hand holding a calligraphy pen.

Taking from the stains of liquid reinvention,
This taint becomes the blood from which we begin again.
Dip the pen and scratch the etchings of new lines,
Stringing words along only to be re-devoured
By the next pair of ravenous eyes
Only to be written again by craving hands.

You see my eyes are burning again,
Starving for the page, striving for the game
The rumble of empty minds has shaken the foundation of me
These tears are not for the poetry, but the loss
Of who I used to be
Before the words on the page became all I could see.

Now the tears have blurred my vision,
And the poetry has become blindness to me
Now all the words escape and the cascade of poetry
From me has stained the page making an illegible craze;
My attempt at diligence has lost me the essence
Of the words I clung so desperately to.

Maybe I should read some sad poetry,
Have a good cry,
And cleanse the old from my body,
Not fear the final loss of words,
As the funeral procession proceeds without me
Maybe when I am left behind, I can finally begin.

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Pinecone Pieces
February 24th, 2013

Picking apart the pieces of a pinecone
Digging with fingertips sore from the pain
From the sharp edges of a hardened core
The consistent pulling apart to pry open
The heavy wooden doors of the heart
Individually plucking the pieces like the strings of a harp
Angels screaming when the pluck turns to a pull
Like a sharp withdrawal of breath
That doesn’t belong in your lungs
This poison of decay
Not the decay of fall
Like the slowly drifting leaves that cascade
From heights unattainable by man
That can only be felt by the swift sigh of the wind
Between your grasping fingertips
Like the grasping fingers of your love
That slips away because you weren’t strong enough
To hold on to them as they begged with teary eyes
Looking up at you from the great descent
And you let them go, knowing you couldn’t bear the weight
Of both of you and the love that was creating a canopy
Over your heads and compressing your hearts
And lungs until even the soft scent of fall could not revive you
On this cold winter day
As the last of the fall leaves are being swept away down the stream
Where you once cast little paper boats
Wondering as you held hands where they would land
Hoping for fantasy but knowing even as your fingers unwove
That they would end caught in the dam of nature
Of things never quite meant to be
But it wasn’t enough to make you say no
Even as you plucked the ribs of a pinecone
Asking whether she loved you or not
Like petals of a daisy that have atrophied and petrified
Just as the bitterness of the question has cemented in your heart
Like a cancer hardening you from the inside out
Until you are as purely petrified
As the dissected limbs of lumber left for dead
Each band stands out, creating a carousel of time
But the Braille of years gone by has become illegible
Leaving you to remember the lost sound of symphonies
Music notes echoing into starless nights
Caught in cashmere skies cascading with rain
Where only the earthy smell of Petrichor remains
And the scattered scales of the barren pinecone
Left in the fall foliage like spent shells of artillery
Even these bullets cannot stop the pain in you
As you abandon the stripped pinecone
And begin to pull apart the sharp edges of yourself
To find the hardened core within
Hollow it out until it is empty
And start over again

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Israel: Mountains and Mysticism
February 21st, 2013

In the early morning aftermath of our New Year’s Eve Party, everyone slowly emerged, none too happily at that. All of us with little sleep and bleary eyes. It was a hard time to be waking up at 6:30am when you didn’t go to bed until around 2am that morning. Regardless, we struggled out of bed and greeted the first day of the New Year with half-tempered smiles and curious minds for the day ahead.

We took the bus through Tiberias and wove our way up a mountain called Mt. Arbel.

The view from the top of this mountain was magnfiicent, though a little hazy, but still many things could be seen. The Sea of Galilee far below, our hotel in the distance, tiny towns speckling the hills, and lots of greenery. The wind blasting at our backs led us down to the way we would be following that would eventually take us to the ruins of an old fortress built into the mountainside.The descent was much more difficult than I had imagined and it felt like we were going down forever. We had to scramble down rocky cliff faces and at all times could see the countryside around us backed by the Sea of Galilee.

Eventually we made it though and came to a leveling out in our descent down Mt. Arbel where the cliffs now towered over us. Looking up at the cliffs you could see the ruins of what once had been windows, rooms, and a fortress in days long gone by.

Then we climbed up uneven stone stairs to enter into the old fortress that was crumbling but still grand. After going into the cliff dwellings, we descended the rest of the mountain. We all walked down the mountain in great contemplation, deciding not to talk with anyone, we all descended in utter silence except for the loud noise from the town below and the sound of the wind rushing past the mountainside. We went down the entire mountain until we reach the cities that just about an hour or so before hand had seemed tiny and extremely distant. It seemed remarkably to have come that far, to look back up at the whole mountain knowing I had been at the top of it. It felt like so much had been accomplished; and it was only 10am.

Next on our trip was the legendary cit of Tzfat, home to Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah. We wove through the streets of this old city, only stopping briefly before an old British Embassy building hat was riddled with bullet holes. It was in moments like this that Israel really did seem like an entirely different world. A world where it was casual to sit in the shade of a war torn building as if it was a wide shaded oak that we took a brief rest under in the bright afternoon.

Everywhere there are little moments where a single thing, a teapot, a doorway, or a bullet torn building that made this experience feel so surreal.

Tzfat is a city of alley ways, closed doors, and art. All fo the small corridors that people bustle down are lined with tables of jewelry, art, and all kinds of artisan creations. Every other doorway houses a gallery of beautiful art that often harkens back to Jewish mysticism.

After a long day of exploring the city streets of Tzfat, jumping between art galleries and trying out unique foods, we wandered through the market areas that tingled with the ideas of Jewish mysticism. After exploring a bit we found our way to the top of the mountain Tzfat is built upon. We stood in a park that held the ruins of an old citadel, long left to waste away under the pressure of time. It was here we learned about a Jewish idea, Tikkun Olam- repairing the world. Tikkun Olam is the idea that we all have a responsibility to try and fix the world we live in to make it a better place; whether that means doing community service, teaching, or any other form of helping the world, we have a responsibility  We came to this place to take part in our responsibility in trying to restore this old citadel by trying to re-establish this place as a park for the people of Tzfat.

As the sun set over Tzfat we all got together and learned a couple of songs on the mandolin and learned what it felt like to belong in a Jewish community. It really was an amazing moment; bathed in shades of pink and yellow, we all felt like a family.

It was a long day, started early, hiked, worked, explored, but it was a truly a great day.

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Israel: A New Place, A New Year
January 24th, 2013

On the eve of a new year, I began my newest adventure in the land of Israel. Sleepless night turned into tired morning as the sun wiggled its way under my door. Being jet lagged is never fun, but when you open your door and feel the Israeli sun on your face for the first time, many things are forgotten. I opened the door to a clear crisp sun on a slightly hazy day that seemed to have been sung in by birdsong.

Breakfast was in the same room where we had eaten dinner the night before and the contrast was shocking. The things that we had heard were outside those windows, but couldn’t see for ourselves was now splayed before us in all its splendor. Palm trees and eucalyptus trees swayed in the wind outside of our window, framing the Sea of Galilee and the umbrella spotted beach where the waves crashed down in a slow rhythmic fashion. Hills surrounded us with cities terracing the mountainsides.

The hotel was just the beginning though, it would be our home for the next couple of days, but during the day we would adventure outward and explore Northern Israel. So we hopped on our bus to begin our first day in Israel.

Through the tinted glass of the windows inside the bus I got my first views of the Israeli countryside. In the north, rolling hills and mountains frame the land with their snow-capped tips, which looking down on rows of agricultural countryside in the valleys below. After a ride through the farmlands we arrived at the base of a huge mountain which is now a nature reserve but many, many years ago this was the biblical city of Tel Dan. At Tel Dan, there is a river, the main spring, that comes from the mountain that rushes along tree framed pathways.

It was a beautiful time to be at Tel Dan, fall was still in the air even though winter had made itself a guest here for some time, and the leaves were still yellow. We walked along the paths of Tel Dan that ranged from walkways littered with fall leaves, to pathways made up of individual rocks between which spring water ran, snaking its way between the cracks.

Along the pathways we found beautiful leaves, some in the shape of hearts and others that were large and fan like that came from fig trees all around us.

 

Finally at the end of the beautiful walk through the wilderness we came to the ruins of Tel Dan. Not much left besides the old crumbling foundations of this biblical city that thousands of years ago was a thriving center of religious activity; second only to Jerusalem in its time.

 

We took our very first group photo of all of us together at the foot of the Main Spring. It was a truly beautiful place and the yellow accent of fall leaves made it a magical first stop in Israel.

Afterwards we drove deeper into the Golan Heights of Israel where we took an off-road jeep ride through the old occupied land that was and still is a place of tension.

Our jeep driver was a really nice guy with an odd sense of humour who really seemed to enjoy entertaining American kids with off colored jokes and sarcastic quips.

We traversed the eucalyptus spotted hillsides along muddy gutted back roads in an open aired jeep where there was no separation between us and the Israeli countryside.

Oh and the beautiful countryside we were driving through was also an old land mine area. We were let out of the jeep once and they told us not to venture far for fear of land mines. It was quite an interesting experience being in what some might consider an active war zone.

If being near where old land mines were once was a startling experience, then I was not prepared for our next stop, Mt. Bental. Mt. Bental is a huge mountain, once a volcano, that has an amazing view from high above the world. Standing atop it we could see Damascus, Syria, and Lebanon. As the sign below indicates, from here, on a clear day almost anything can be seen.

The view of the countryside below is Syria. While standing atop Mt. Bental we could hear loud bangs in the distance. We quickly learned that not far away we were hearing the sound of bombs going off in Syria because of their current civil war. It was shocking to be that close to a very active war zone, to hear the ear drum rattling sound of a bombs impact. It makes me shudder, wondering what happened when we heard those sounds from so far away. What about the people who were not as lucky as us to be far away? The people who live there, the people who die there? But here we were sitting atop a mountain, listening to what could very well have been the last sound that some person ever heard in their lives.

In the biting wind we stood at the top of Mt. Bental listening to the sounds of war ring out, it was something you don’t forget.

After Mt. Bental we returned to our hotel at the shores of the Sea of Galilee for an early preparation for the New Years Eve Party. We were all exhausted, I was getting sick, but we all went out for a talk by the shore. A great blue heron stood on a pole of the pier and the sun was setting in shades of soft pinks and purples as we listened to the gently lapping waves of the Sea of Galilee.

It was an extremely peaceful moment of reflection, waiting for the new year to roll in on our heels. The history of this place is unbelievable, astounding, and awe-inspiring. The shore was littered with tiny shells and glinted like secret treasures as I sifted this foreign sand through my fingers. This was my new years, spent in a land utterly foreign to me, yet vaguely felt like home. I never imagined I would be spending my last days of 2012 in Israel, let alone the first week of 2013 there. It was a strange bridging of the gap that was utterly unexpected yet invigorating. This new place, opened new horizons, and I welcomed the new year with open arms with no idea of what lies before me.

 

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Israel: The Beginning of a Journey
January 13th, 2013

Whenever I return home from a trip there is always a barrage of questions awaiting me from everyone I know. I love to return to family and friends that are inquisitive and curious about my experiences, but I always feel a sense of disappointment in my ability to answer their questions. How can I put into words so quickly the things that I saw? How can I explain the ways in which I have been changed by the things that I saw? How can I convey the beauty and complexity that fills the world that we live in and how grateful I am for even a short glimpse into these complexities? This is what I am faced with upon my return from any trip, but I feel these things especially now after my return from Israel.

I was extremely blessed to be given the opportunity to go to Israel for almost completely free with a group of my peers from University of California Berkeley through Hillel and Taglit Birthright. I got to fly out of New York to Israel and tour around the country for ten days with about 50 of my peers including eight Israeli soldiers who joined us halfway through our incredible journey.

So, now I am faced with the problem that I always dread upon my return home, telling my story of what happened during those ten amazing days. It is difficult expressing all that happened on my trip because it was truly incredible in so many ways. I made so many friends and saw such amazing things that I do not think any words that I use can do justice to everything I experienced. But I will do my best, I will do all that the limit of words can do for me.

To begin? Let’s start where I did with an alarm going off at 3:30 am of the day my journey began. The day was long with travel, 3:3o wake up, flight left at 7:30am, 6 hour flight to JFK, 8 hour lay over, and then finally a 12 hour flight that landed us in Ben Gurion Airport, Israel. From there a two hour bus ride to the hotel/kibbutz that would be our home for the first leg of the journey.

We arrived, after over 24 hours of traveling, at the shores of the Sea of Galilee at our hotel, Nof Ginosar. It was strange because I had been in darkness, without sunlight, for over a day and arriving at our hotel we were told of the surroundings. Told of hills that shone with the glittering lights of homes scattered along hillsides in nearby Tiberias. Told of the softly lapping waves on the shores just outside from the great Sea of Galilee. Told of many things, but we arrived in darkness. There was nothing to see, we could only faintly hear in the distance the rustle of palm trees and ever so slightly the sound of waves. But we were greeted by darkness and the glow of our hotel’s lights. We were rushed into dinner and saw our hotel for the first time. I was very pleasantly surprised by our hotel, I had had very low expectations for our accommodations because we were receiving them for free, but it was extremely pleasant. We all stumbled in, not really knowing one another, tired, exhausted from travel, and just a little disheveled from our long day, and were greeted by a huge buffet of Israeli food. Everything was so bright, colorful salads, curries, and lots and lots of bread. Famished and tired we ate and began to familiarize ourselves with this new place and one another.

We all headed to our shared rooms in the dark dragging our luggage behind us, ready for sleep. Ready to greet the new day tomorrow. Our very first day in Israel.

 

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Finding Fantasy in Reality
December 26th, 2012

Some where in the back of my mind I have always known I lived in an exceptional place, it just wasn’t often that I cared to appreciate it. I used to make up stories about adventures in far away lands and imagine myself in a thousand places, anywhere but home. The exciting and the extraordinary was always beyond that next mountain or underneath the crashing waves of the sea, but never did I look at the mountains or the ocean right in front of me.

This is not to say that I didn’t love growing up in Santa Cruz, because I did and still do, it just simply means I never saw the fantastical qualities that I dreamed of in the place where I lived my everyday life. I never realized the fairy circles in the redwoods, or the glint of the sun on the sea, the way the wind swept across grassy hillside like a fingers running through feather soft hair. The world I felt I had to create when I was younger, was the world I was already residing in, I just didn’t know it yet.

Maybe it was when I left for college, or maybe it has been a building wave that has been gathering for some time within me, all I know now is the overwhelming appreciation and awe I have for my home in Santa Cruz.

There is so much I love about Santa Cruz; I realize that I do not have to escape this place to find adventure or fantastical things, I just need to step out of my front door. That is why for Christmas we stuck around town and for our Christmas Day we went hiking along the Davenport Bluffs and then took in the stormy skies from the Santa Cruz Wharf. It is nice to take a vacation in your own town, to make the everyday new again in the most exciting of ways.

Look upon your world with new eyes and see what there is to find. You may just be surprised to behold the imaginary world you spent your whole life searching for.

 

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The Spirit of Christmas and Santa Claus Strawberries
December 25th, 2012

My family spent a lot of time this holiday season thinking about memories of holidays past. What made things memorable, what things did we hold on to so many years later, was it happiness? Was it disappointment? And if so, why? I have been thinking a lot about this lately and one thing my mother said to me that she remembered from Christmas in her childhood very fondly was when she made things for her entire family. How the act of sitting down and applying oneself entirely to doing something that you just want to do because it would make your family happy. I think that is a good reason to look back on Christmas or whatever holiday is being celebrated during this cold winter season where family keeps us warm and happy; to celebrate not because we feel obligated and tied to disappointment or the gratification of materialistic desires, but the  celebration of loving for the sake of loving. Because they are family, because they are not perfect, and because they are our blood, our flesh, and from them we find meaning.

I realized I do not often give without reason and I really would like to change that about myself. I thought it would be fun to start small, kind of like my mother did in her memory of her early Christmas, by making something for my family to enjoy. What better way to make something they would enjoy than by starting where everyone ends on Christmas? With desserts. I found a nifty little picture on the internet of a little strawberry Santa and decided that would be a great little present to make for Christmas Eve dinner. The website, Operation Santa Claus, had a bunch of fun little Christmasy things to do, but I decided on these cute little bite sized desserts to share with my family.

I took these Santa strawberries to be easier than they actually were at first sight and my adventure in making these began as most attempts to re-create something found on the internet do, with failure. I tried to use just whipped cream as the filling for the strawberries and very quickly realized the error of my ways as they began to deflate, melt, and deform into little haphazard Santas, slightly off kilter and very unappetizing to behold.

The ones on the left side of the photograph are the initial attempts and the right are the later more successful attempts. I realized that the filling had to be sturdier so we made a cheesecake like filling made simply from cream cheese, powder sugar, and a dash of half and half to thin the mixture enough to be piped. Now, with the successful mixture (in a plastic bag used for piping) the strawberries were cut and filled and dressed to look like Santa Claus. The final touch being the sprinkles for little eyes on the cute little bite sized desserts.

They were cute, small, tasty, and a sweet way to end Christmas Eve. It was a good way to give back to my family in a very tiny way that built up our family instead of building materialistic gratification. I wonder if I will look back years from now and remember this fondly as my Christmas memory…

 

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Reading Places
December 21st, 2012

I spent a lot of time this semester sitting in a library, neck craned, eyes strained, and brain drained. Even though these places are beautiful in their own majestic academic ways, with towering columns that have held up the burdening weight of university, I can’t help but feel closed in by four walls. There is so much outside those tall grandiose windows that let light drift gently in to illuminate the library walls.

I always sit and watch as the library is lit by the dazzling color of sunset as I sat with my textbooks splayed out in front of me like the casualties of war, thinking of the beauty outside the rows and rows of books that lined the world around me. Yet, even as the colors began to fade to a darker shade and slip farther and farther away, I would remain. Instead of taking a breath and leaving behind my books for a moment, I would dive right back in, but my air never lasted sufficiently. It felt like drowning because it was. Diving back down without a replenishing breath of air is a scary thing, yet almost everyone in that library with me was doing it. Gasping like a fish out of water, watching with wide glassy eyes the cast off colors of a sunset sitting right out side, but like the shadows in Plato’s Cave, we tried to draw real light from only the shadows of reality.

I am tired of the shadows of reality, and I have been growing tired because I have drained these shadows dry and am ready, craving for more. So I have abandoned my beautiful little box for the outside world. I have been drinking in the color of every sunset, and finding every place that one can fit themselves only to sit down and read. The familiar is full of fascinating places to explore that function just as well as a library seat for a place to rest my book. Whether it means climbing rooftops or climbing mountains just for a nice place to cross my legs and lay open a book infront of me, I have been exploring in the name of reading. Even if but for a short while to crack open the spine of a book while over looking the Golden Gate Bridge, or just sitting underneath the shade of a great redwood, or sitting on a cliff above the tumultous sea, I am expanding. I am ready for new horizons, if you need me, I will be at the cusp of the ordinary, waiting.

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The Hat
November 29th, 2012

Windy, cloudy, stormy days always remind me of this poem. It is an older one but I thought I would repost it today just because I always think of this poem on a day like today.

The woman walks
Along in a crowded street
Surrounded by people
Yet so alone
A scarf like a noose
Wrapped around her frail neck
Hands shoved deep
Into her pockets
She only looks
At the ground
The rhythmic step of her feet
Her wide hat
Shields her from the world
She ignores them
Is afraid of them
She wraps herself tighter
In what is safe and comforting
And is content in isolation
So she walks along
In a crowd of people
Without faces
The wind picks up
For a moment it whispers
A soft secret in her ear
A riddle told to fast
As the wind
Carried her hat away
The woman let out
A short little gasp
As her barrier was removed
She reached forward
Fingertips grazing it
Just out of reach
As it bounces and rolls
Along the dirty street
She chases in vain
And no one will help
Finally out of breath
And out of heart
She gives up
Standing in the crowd
Puffs of winter breath
Clouding before her as she watches
Her hat dance away
Her hair billowing about her
Watching with sad longing eyes
She stands still among thousands
As she turns to leave
A tap on her shoulder
She turns in surprise
A man stands before her
Her hat in hand
Holding it out towards her
A smile but no words
She takes it and offers
A shy little smile in return
As she starts to pull it
Back into place
He reaches out to stop her
Why
He asks her
You have such a pretty face
He smiles and lets go
Giving an impartial shrug
You don’t need to hide
You are beautiful you know
He leaves her with
His few soft words
And a knowing smile
She stands there
Hat in hand
Filled with his offerings
Her eyes are wide
And her hands slightly quake
She lifts the hat
Looking at it now
And tosses it away
She watches it
Flit and dance in the sky
Gone forever
She smiles slightly
The stranger’s knowing smile
She doesn’t need it anymore

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