Skillful Water Carrier

"I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other."

-Jane Eyre

"Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
— Anais Nin

“To my eyes, this system I was observing, this ‘trial’ thing itself, began to take on the appearance of some special, weird creature…like, say, an octopus. A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it’s heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean. I’m sitting there listening to these trials, and all I can see in my head is this creature. It takes on all kinds of different shapes – sometimes it’s ‘the nation’, and sometimes it’s ‘the law’, and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off it’s legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It’s too strong, and it lives far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where it’s heart is. What I felt then was deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn’t give a damn that I’m me or you’re you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers.”

Kelly Tsai, "One September" , reflections on the 10th anniversary of September 11.

Looking back on these last 10 years since September 11th is synonymous to looking back on these last 10 years of myself. A loss of innocence. A coming of age. Everything is not as you think that it is. It takes courage just to live. It takes a kind of insanity to have a singular focus to not believe in war and commit every single fiber within you to stopping it. It essentially takes you denying a kind of life to yourself.

Every day a bombing occurs. Nearly every day a child dies. In history, we will be remembered as a terrible empire, a hypocritical one, and I will be a part of it. A poet with a heart full of desire and a head full of shame. One who wanted the earthly delights of clothes and shoes and good food, while others died, yes, in my name, but also to satisfy a kind of thirst that has tried to destroy me also. But I survive and if I can make anything of this life, I will think of that man on that train one day in September, come down like an angel from a heaven that none of us may deserve, trying to quiet the fear in a young woman’s heart.