BLUSH

I am in the middle of heaps of transition: planning and packing and laundering and good willing and Craigslisting.

In the clearance section of a Target aisle, I discovered that my nostrils have become desperately attached to the scent of patchouli; so I’ve decided to trust my olfactory nerves, and scored a $6 bottle of the patchouli diffusing oil from Pier 1 Imports. I also scored this sweet driftwood turtle whose back has become Agatha the Airplant’s new home:

The photo is more fun for me to look at than the object, itself; and I figured out why: because pictures really do last longer. However many more months or years Agatha and the driftwood may last in my possession, the original arrangement contained in this photo has already changed.

I find myself these days wafting through some odd mix of nostalgia and vorfreude and just blissfully, anonymously being alive …

I’ve started another Tumblr, so there’s that … mainly to serve as a dumping ground and pin board for all this splashing and foaming inspiration that takes me over in tidal waves lately.

I had lunch with my Sensei the other day at one of our favorite locations – Cancun in Downtown Berkeley. A piece of our conversation centered around the notion of the present moment … I was saying that for all of my urges to disengage from social media, there is a sense in which doing so prevents me from living fully in the moment or the zeitgeist of the time and place and history that I occupy. All at once, me not acknowledging or participating in social media with the rest of culture, friends, and families lops me off a bit from the experience of living in the stretch of land named California in the country we still call America in the year 2017.

On the other hand, our obsession with capturing each moment as we live through it – greeting nostalgia with cameras in our hands – only emphasizes what has always been true: