Arthisa

1. make sure you are awake – try reading a street sign or counting the number of letters in your name. 2. stand under the open sky – don't look up yet, you need to be watching your step. find a good spot to stop. 3. close your eyes and wait for the night to fall. if it helps, put on a blindfold. 4. use this time to think up a few prayers. 5. picture them in your mind: the incense sticks, the lit candles. 6. tilt your head up – if rain or snow, stick our your tongue just a second to taste it. 7. breathe in, breathe out, open your eyes.

a temple is a good place to reflect on your past lives: on grace and gratitude, grudges and grief, on coincidence and fate, 命和运, on good and evil, black and white, right and wrong. we didn't start this war, but look around, who did? has anyone not lived with its injustice?what grief, what pain, what justice or revenge, how bitter it howls, corrupts and corrodes – in this world, everyone is born innocent, but eventually someone will stab out first.

at last the world at rest is soft, is interior, is earth & souls, is the essence of itself.

something I've had to learn over and over again, it's not that easy to shift paradigms, to reason without axioms that have always seemed evident and from which were developed an elaborate model of rules and theorems that you've always followed, assumptions such as: two parallel li(n/v)es will always be exactly the same distance from each other                                    or two li(n/v)es perpendicular to a third will never intersect

pirate (wor)ships,                       rough (e)states, paper (e)clips(e),                        closed g(r)ates

sometimes I close my eyes, as if darkness could defend me against the world sometimes I simply walk away

you went ahead first onto a stage already set, alone, unprotected. we couldn't be with you, we were caught still in the folds of our bodies, having tried to leave them behind on high shelves and failed. the past you found was written out in the language of someone else's victories, a language learnt in repeated muteness, in a thousand breathing paper ghosts. dust covers everything we can't touch. what's left is our bodies folding into half-remembered shapes, throwing shadows on the wall. the crane, the bowl, the brush and its steady hand. books burn, only dust remain. a cemetery full of ashes with no names to give shape to our grief. w

i. the day you started counting down I still don't see how we could have known how our first meeting would fit into the untold narrative of your metamorphosis; but yes, in retrospect, I should have paid more attention during those 25 minutes in the audition room– I should have known it would be some kind of beginning. ii. the day your faith was shaken it's as if you always knew that it would come to this: we are climbing different mountains, and even though I swore I wouldn't leave you alone, we both know there's nothing scarier than the slow winding river of resentment. so we negotiate (e)motions over the creaking metal of border-p

you browse museums and bookshops, looking for that little spark of curiosity and desire. you fill your life with books, books that become piles, piles that become libraries, libraries that become cathedrals, cathedrals, which echo with a fearful emptiness.

well, if you're going to be bamboozled into this, remember that any place could be Zion, that your body could be Zion; pretend that you don't want two completely different things, make it sacred by drinking wine from the chalice, by drinking whiskey from silver cups, dip your fingers into the exoskeleton of this memory, like skimming a love letter to an old flame; be the kind of person who could tell her that faith is 90% made-up, and have it be the nicest thing someone ever said to her.