Dearest mentor~
Apologies for not getting back to you sooner---I just returned from a trip to Toledo, OH to see a few doctors. It turns out my migraines (the ones I have written about in the clockbook) are comorbid and at the very least exacerbated by several underlying conditions including dysautonomia secondary to Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome type 3 involving a mutation in the gene for connective tissue, essentially causing my entire vascular system to be slightly too stretchy and not constrict properly when standing up or digesting food. So blood does not get back up to my heart and brain as it should. Anyways, this complicated medical picture has been prominent, although only recently understood, for nearly 6 years, half of which I've been out of school for. It's placed me in an entirely new landscape, and challenged me to grow fiercely in other, non-standard-for-these-years, ways. In winter of 2009, during an intense period of chronic daily migraine, I began to write a letter to you. It just happened; in a way the letter was written to no one, but then...it was still a communication. I knew deep down, after I had written it, that this letter was from a Lost Boy, the androgynous child that lives somewhere in me, that's lost, but not in the way that things are lost by and in grown-ups. So it was from a Lost Boy, to the marvelous creative writing mentor I had when I was nine, the Horse of a Different Color who gave me Orion's Belt when I began to consciously face death and try to understand it for the first time. Suddenly, slowly, there was this steady, gradual string of writings that emerged over the next year and a half. I still don't know what connects them all, but there was this process of finding each one in another, in the rest. Sometimes I feel that they are the only validations of something, of me, of my interactions on Earth from that period, which in so many ways was so surreal and so real and so both that it feels hard to remember. But then I only need to listen to the crackle of dreams like coals in the engines of my daily life, to the pulse of this small and steady Redwood of integrated and (on the whole) spiritual growings, to the Lost Boy within. Or I could just look up at Orion's Belt, a constellation that is on hand here in the winter as the nights start before dinner time. These pieces of me, which came together in the form of the clockbook, have been so important to me, but more even as symbols of inner-cultivation, of home-ness in alone-ness, of being with various living processes (and dying ones, and cyclic ones) in the truest sense, than as the writings they are.
I think that whether or not as a result of those early, coinciding events at Centauri of processing death, loss and living and freeing myself open to draw upon any and every experience lived or living to write, the both such things (which turned out to be more like practices than things that could be contained in single events) have been such parallel processes that it is impossible for them to be un-entangled and even more impossible for me to stay away from while living deeply. That is why I needed to write, and why it became a letter to you---I think that for a long time, I was in kind of a 'dark night of the soul,' a winter in which each migraine killed me off, while each migraine woke me up. Sent me into dreams, vivid, lucid even. I had experiences where a migraine killed me, and then there was no separation between the migraine, the room, and me, and I could feel all of it, each part, without holding my breath, without suffering or separation. And when I felt better and emerged from my home into the wintery, streetlamp-lit streets, I would see continents of stars instead of blankets of snow. One morning, when the house was already empty, I walked into my parents' bedroom just as the sun was rising, and stopped flat. There was this glister of starlight coruscating from a diamond stuck to the window pane--it was indeed starlight, because the sun had just peeped through the jungle of obstructions between me and the sky and walked right through the frost above the sill, straight into my retinas. It got into me, something so strange and ephemeral, so I was strange and ephemeral; my pulse quickened, tears arrived, and I started to swallow back laughing, upward-beating gasps. Because the cosmos had just proposed to me, just offered this already melting diamond through which the sun's light moved, proposed and offered this moment, and now I was engaged with the cosmos! And this was my spiritual engagement with everything, with the processes and the strange loops and the dichotomies, half and whole truths, both/and. It was my choice to live the whole thing, good and bad and both and others, and give all of it, each kind of experience, my love.
The Lost Boy started out as a friend of mine who killed himself when we were sixteen. I was in a computer class at school in Japan when I found out, and five days into my exchange experience. The last time I had talked with him was just a couple days before I left the country; we parted on a staircase (he going down, me going on), on a hanging sentence, on a possibility. A tentative plan to meet up the next day (this part was spoken) that, tentatively, wasn't going to work for either of us (this part was heard only in our hesitations). We had French class together, and I first met him while reading The Little Prince, a book I've treasured since childhood. When he killed himself, he became lost to me. It was like he dove into that depthless canyon of death and created such a displacement of emptiness that when it all splashed out, we were no longer coexisting in the same dimension. He was downright unreachable, but closer than ever possible, since now the only him I had was in me, at a cross-section where the dimensions fold through each other. But the displacement caused floods, typhoons, dark nights of questions, and the suicide murdered all possible external answers. And so began the assemblage of some sort of spirituality for me, the building of a home for questions, for being with questions like pain and permanence and paradox and death and transience and odd things, broken things, breaking things, lost things, loved things, ugly, hard-to-look-at things, breathtaking things, life things. All of the foundations of this home were laid deep within myself, but I built it in the sky, because it is sometimes helpful, I think, to go outwards with deep inner-workings. The sky seemed perfect for a lost girl that was going to change grounds, fly off to a different world soon enough. I think it was a very beautiful beginning, because it was so full of growing pains, labor pains, frost-covered window panes, and it took place far, far away from answers (of which I could get none of any kind, for weeks), convention (which I could not find in my surroundings even when I wanted it, because I was like a baby in this new culture, and hardly able to speak), and escape (the impossibility of which snapped me like a glow stick, snapped me on, so that for seven weeks I lived with double the intention, energy, ferocity).
We were still kids when my friend killed himself, and we were lost. He didn't grow up, just like Peter Pan, and me neither--the parts of me that died went to my Lost Boy, whom, over time (as my migraines got worse), I realized was not really this friend (although they are found in each other, I think), but my other half. My childhood, which is certainly not lost the way it can be in grown-ups, only lost like a Yesterday on a Today at that age before you learned to know what days are Todays. He is like the one foot I have in any world (Any Where), while I am the other foot I have in this world (where the ground is hard and grounding is harder). The Lost Boy is a theme in the clockbook because when I started to die of migraines, I slowed down almost to a stop in my growth away from childhood; in fact, I started to find my childhood all around me. The migraines (like black cars) drove me further and further away from timelines (among other things) and I found myself and all of my lost worlds in a lost home (the one I began to build in the sky from the ground in Japan) much bigger than the Little Prince's planet (perhaps even incorporating it), out on the line of Orion's Belt, a place that you showed me when I was nine years old. A place that is far away from answers, convention and escape, but one that also takes answers, convention, and escape in as questions.
As this book emerged, each piece came up from within me like a birth, without choice or distance, and composed of my own body and my own interactions with the things I'm interbeing (with). It is a process that I think belongs to everyone, if only each will find her own form of it and then bring her consciousness to it. You facilitated my enduring engagement with and in this artistic and meaningful birth and rebirth through writing, with the 'first (or free) thought' exercises that you gave us bright-eyed, pointy-toothed, scribbling beginners under the Poet Tree. There is a kind of zen in that stream-of-thought practice, of getting to the middle ground, simultaneously listening and expressing, 'in the zone,' and living it. So---as the book emerged, I began to look forward to sending it off to you. It was always the goal to share it with you, to wait patiently for each piece to come until I knew it was complete and then to bind it as my grandfather bound books half a century ago, and finally to travel to Milwaukee, travel through chrome forests with leaves made of blank CDs, past distending double helices and beds of needles to acquire the clock-piece to epoxy-glue it to the cover and hand it over to the universe to deliver. The book is a tremendous journey (tremendous relative to me, anyways; I think I am still quite small), but it's choppy and like a conglomerate. I don't know what its place is, I'm not sure what to do---it's such an odd shape in my external landscape. I feel like while it's immensely important to me (not so much the book or the writing, but rather the worlds of growth I find in it), it doesn't really have a place anywhere here on Earth, just a space reserved for it with the lost things at Any Where. I think this is sometimes the struggle and suffering that artists face, as it can feel like a kind of stillbirth.
Anyways, I thank you with all my heart for receiving my book. You can, by the way, find all the pieces (and a little bit more) online at a blog that I update only sporadically: http://intertrinsics.blogspot.com/ I eagerly welcome any feedback you have, as a writer, editor or publisher (you are both of the latter two, right?), in fact I think I'd be honored, but I don't want to distract you from your own current adventures.
A flower of peace and appreciation for you, and for the teacher within~
Sola Vie
[From late 2010]
