My Hands

My hand gravitates towards yours

As though you were a furnace

On the coldest day of the year

I keep my hands to myself

My body remembers you

Every cell wants to joyfully leap outside of me

My olfactory senses indulge in a familiarity

Rarely ever felt to me

I keep my body to myself

I am an energetic ball of restraint

For fear of rushing in full force

And never bouncing back

And I am terrified

I keep my energy to myself

  

A natural inclination to lay my head on your chest

Fall into an embrace like a child to a mother’s breast

Like your strong arms can hold me

I keep my head to myself

My stomach has collected more butterflies today

Than it has all year

And I like the way you look at me

I keep my heart to myself

I am laughing it off when you discuss other women

And everything in your life that doesn't include me

Using all of my will just to brush it off casually

When really I just want you to

Remember all those little things

That make up me

Like the fact that I’ll never really give up coffee

But I’ll keep trying

And my brow’s arch so slightly when I’m focusing

How I always say obscenities in Spanish

But only when I’m angry

I always laugh at my own jokes

When no one else thinks it’s funny

The way my tongue presses against my front teeth

When I’m smiling

And all I really want to do

Is lie down here with you

With my fingers caressing your face

But I keep my hands to myself

Love is...

Love is…

     Happiness for you at meeting your new girlfriend

Love is…

     Finding the letter you wrote me and knowing that at least once in my life someone truly saw me

Love is…

     Knowing we walked heaven and hell together

Love is…

     Anger dissipating into nothingness

Love is…

     Respecting what we lived through together

Love is…

     Accepting that you were right some of the time

Love is…

     Gratitude for all that you taught me

Love is…

     Knowing that timing is everything 

Love is…

     Respecting that time, respecting that place

Love is…

     Letting it all go

Love is…

     Forgiving you for everything

Love is…

     Forgiving myself

Or, for those of us who may be a bit more cynical:

Freedom Prayer

Feel the itch to

Shed some old skin

Live in the transformation

Let the Serpent back in

Watch as it coils around you

Until you can’t breathe

Your bones begin to crack

While your gender, age, height, race…

Those defining characteristics

Begin to deconstruct as your body condenses

Wrapped in the coils tight

The Serpent then begs the question

Of your identity

Before swallowing you whole

You’d be surprised just how seductive

That kiss of death could be

It strikes at you quickly

Without warning

Leaving you forever changed

The old you was far too safe

Too boring

Death comes in to set you free

Pray.

I am not my body

I am not my past

I am not my religion

I am not my sex

I am not my eyes

I am not my university

I am not my career

I am not my family
I am not even my poetry

If you could only remember

Death sits behind your left shoulder

What’s worth fighting for?

What’s left to cling to?

Comes a time

That you just can’t carry it around anymore

I pray to the Crows

Scavengers of the sky

I offer my body

If only to free my soul

Open my pumping heart

Satisfy their thirst

I am but my Father’s daughter

Came into this world with no possessions

This is all I have to offer

Tired of clinging to a false sense of autonomy

Freedom is the unhinged and unsecured

A floating leaf; subject to God’s will

The Wind’s doing

I’d lay naked before Her

This is how I pray

Lay bare enticing the Serpents, Crows

And Wind to come to me

I smoke the tobacco for all my relations

The animals too

Om

Aho

Hallelujah

And if I could strip down

Be delivered an empty vessel

For Spirit to live through

I would

Surrender completely

And watch how the Serpent saves you

A transmutation of DNA

An evolution of grandiose proportions

Don’t let the fear of death hold you back

For self preservation means nothing

Compared to this final sacrifice

I will never be anything more;

Anything less;

Than this.

"Death and Romance: Riddles of our Lifetime..."

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.  We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult in a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

Rainer Maria Rilke

To love is good, too: love being difficult.  For one human being to lover another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.  For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.  With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward beating heart, they must learn to love.  But learning time is always a long, secluding time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far into life, is solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake.  It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.  Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them.  Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that which for human lives as yet scarcely suffice.

Whoever looks seriously at it finds that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any explanation, any solution, any hint of way yet been discerned; and for these two problems that we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, it will not be possible to discover any general rule resting in agreement.  But in the same measure in which we begin as individuals to put life to the test, we shall, being individuals, meet these great things at closer range.

The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them.  But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence – then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet

Beauty Marks

She’s wearing that little black dress

You said she looked so beautiful in

Though she never believed you then

She examines her body in the mirror

Bruises all over her arms; a scraped knee

She’s a mangled tigress

In a sea of picture perfect kittens

Wearing fancy party dresses

Their little bodies in tact

She doesn’t wear shoes

She can’t run in at any given moment

She examines oceans of flawlessness

Only to stare at the scar beneath her chin

The motorcycle burn on her shin

She’s earned every single stripe

She consoles herself; licking wounds

‘cause domestication’s for the tame

She always colors outside the frame

She’s learned to scan every room

For any movement resembling her own

Still she’s only met a couple with that wilderness

A few with a will too strong to harness

Like her, they’re hard to hold onto

Disappearing when the night wind blows

Endangered species learn to be unreliable

A heavy adaptation to ensure their survival

So she stalks her loneliness

Balks at the emptiness

Learns to sit still in the darkness

She seeks a hunter

Someone of her kind

Not to tame her

Not to maim her

Not to capture or contain

But maybe to see the beauty

Outside the frame

For now in her little black dress

Waiting for the night’s wind to move her

Finally believing she too, is beautiful

Through the scars and the marks

Each indicating from where she came from

And how far she’s come

After all,

Her hunter will know her

By her stripes

Poetry to read to your lovers

You can thank me later. ;)


I don’t want to seduce you
I want to love you
I want to fill you with me
As though you were the pages of my journal
I want to draw my poetry
All over your skin
I want to spend my nights
Breathing you in
I want to fall asleep
In the crevice between
Where heart and clavicle meet
I want to sing you all day long
Feel your skin touching mine
From dusk until dawn
I want to kiss you until
We are 4 sore lips
Hearts pounding; minds asking
“is there anything
better
than
this?”
I want to love you so completely
That every other woman you meet on the street
Could never hold a light to me
Sweep you into a whirlwind romance
I will be the gentlest tornado you’ve ever seen
Lifting you 40 feet off the ground
While you look me in the eye
Never noticing your distance from the earth
Our dance a weightless one
I will love ALL of you
Graze my lips over your scars
Know the darkness in your heart
I promise I’m strong enough
To keep you safe and sound
On the earth or 80 feet above the ground
I do not fear space or time
So long as you know
That you’re mine
When the fiercest winds blow
I’ll let you look up my skirt
I will make your heart flutter
Pure joyfulness at each batting of the butterfly’s wings
I want to explore you
My never-ending labyrinth
I’d stop and smell the flowers
I wouldn’t jump at shadows
Because no, I don’t want to seduce you
I want to love you
God please give me the wisdom
To know the difference

The Fast: Day 27; Here it comes: a better version of me

“So why are you doing this?”

I hear this question constantly.  I have so many answers I struggle with what to say first.  My usual quip that I’m sure people are tiring of is because I want to be like Jesus (Jesus fasted 40 days; Jen fasts 40 days), but jokes aside, Jesus has nothing to do with it.

I guess to explain fully I’ll have to go back to California in early April.  There, I experienced an “aha” moment.  I was travelling solo for a few days in Los Angeles and then later met up with my extended family and finally my parents.  I hadn’t seen my aunts in a year and a half and you couldn’t mask their reaction to me when they saw me. 

I didn’t feel well.  I was coming out of somewhat of a depression that I didn’t even know I was in from the year before.  No one said coming of age was going to be easy and I experienced some challenges that year.  My body reflected all of this.  How had it been in one year’s time I managed to gain a whopping 40 pounds?

As soon as I got back to Chicago, I started watching what I ate more closely and exercising regularly and by July I was down 20 pounds.  It was subtle and not dramatic but I felt better.  

Then in August, my coworker popped into my office to ask if I had heard of the Master Cleanse before because she was on her seventh day.  I couldn’t believe it – I had not even noticed (and we have a tiny office).  I had just watched this documentary about juice fasting and considered it a sign that it was time to get back into it.

So why fast?  Most people who know me (and those of you who have followed this blog religiously) know that I’m a very adventurous young woman; from backpacking solo adventures to living with wolves.  The same thing that draws me to do these things is what draws me to unconventional paths to self discovery.

I absolutely loathe stagnation.  I need to constantly challenge myself and put myself in uncomfortable situations to learn and grow.  I’d say abstaining from food and alcohol for a 20-something social butterfly is pretty damn uncomfortable (thank God men are not on that list).

Yes, it’s hard.  Someone told me once that there’s no point in doing anything unless it’s hard because it’s the challenge that forces you to grow and furthermore no one ever achieved anything without sacrifice.

Mountains in Oaxaca, Mexico.  I miss you.

I mentioned in an earlier blog that I couldn’t escape to the mountains of Mexico and meditate in a cave for three days so instead I’m fasting.  In the past 27 days the things I’ve learned from doing this are astounding.  I feel like a different person and I still have 13 magical more days to go.  I can say that sometimes I wake up (super energized and happy of course) and think that 40 days is too little – that I should go longer because I feel so good.  Maybe I will.

You’ll have to wait for the next blogs to learn about those discoveries and changes, but I can tell you that the Jen that was 27 days ago is no longer.  In the words of Fiona Apple: “Here comes a better version of me.”

xoxoxo

Why won't this last forever, I hope this lasts forever...

It’s a shame that my ex-lovers have ruined so many great songs for me…this being one of them.

These are the poems that come when you fall in love with the wrong people..

The Nihilist Thief

You drew a quick sketch of me on the train
I had a dream about
that waiter from the restaurant
downtown where we ditched the bill
he was holding me as I waywardly
turned myself in
all I had was water...
I never mentioned you.

The police were drawing a quick sketch of me
and you were laughing
and tapping on the one-way window
I glared into the mirrors

I know now
you're not good for me
your moods dictate wind
I am the current
I used to go sailing alone
and watch the sky for the colors
but I now know how the sky changes
and no longer do I wish to see it
Fear is my companion

So I lay quiet these days
afraid of storms
but more afraid of those perfect days
with the warming sunrises
and the sunset's beauty
that marks the sky
with colors that seem
newly invented every time
it reminds me of the way
you used to hold me
and tell me everything would be fine
that was a lie

It reminds me
of running around the city
walking endlessly
with no money
and that drive along the lake
when you used Nietzsche
to tell me
that there's no where else you'd rather be

it reminds me of that
pale blue of your eyes
that converts to a deeper blue
when you pleadingly apologize
I can't say no
to my spoiled child
I am a discipline less mother
feeding your baby bottles
and you are beautiful
wiping my kisses off your cheek.

falling in love with the universe...

Just in case you forget how infinitesimal and tiny you really are.  We are but a grains of sand in this universe.

Need to go somewhere again to remind myself...

It's not futile - sand forms sandstone and survive rivers and time and sit for thousands of years preserving fossils.  Looking for infinite ways to fall in love with the universe today...might be in music or in smiles or in an out of place flower.

The Grand Canyon, 2009.