Category: Excerpts

• Excerpts

  I have been thinking a lot about flowers lately. How they bloom; their delicacy and resilience.

  I intended to have a green garden — wide leaves and lush foliage, but I couldn’t help gravitating to these flowering types. In my balcony now sits three pots (I couldn’t bear to kill too many at once). Fuschia bougainvillea, hisbiscus that turned from a burnt orange to scarlet in my care, and jasmine. Their petals litter my floor.

  Why are flowers fragrant to us? And to insects and birds? What about the compounds are attractive? Is it by happenstance that we, too, enjoy their scent, or are we unwitting pollinators drawn to the same olfactory allure?

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  I have, also, been thinking endlessly about a book I’ve reviewed some time ago: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.

  Particularly, its conception of freedom.

  “Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed.”

  We grew up in the golden age of Hollywood, fed on stories of the Great American Freedom. The freedom of speech, the freedom to own arms. But what is freedom, if you can say anything you want without recourse, but can be spoken of and spoken to in any way others may wish? What is freedom, if it is a weapon that makes going to school unsafe, it it takes away life – the very means of our freedom?

  “To be responsible [for] one another is our freedom.”

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  I continue to mourn the end of the internet. I remember the days when every friend had a blog, whether they enjoyed writing or not. They wrote for no monetary returns, no concept of ‘followers’. They wrote to the void, to an invisible audience, and found pleasure in the act itself.

  What happened to thinking, what happened to our digital third space? These are things I grieve for daily.

  I extend this grief to the end of critical thinking, the value that is ascribed to critical thinking. Forget about critical, simply thinking. I was told it’s no longer needed to survive. But I don’t wish to merely survive, as an amoeba would. I want to be human.

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  Things I will write about soon! because I hold on to this space as an extension of me:

  – My wedding(s)

  – Dreams of an eaten world

  – Some excellent books reads

  – Some excellent movies watched

  September 16, 2025

  book review, capitalism, musings, reading, reflections, society, ursula k le guin

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• pins

  I have lived this life before. This sharp, insisting consciousness.

  A cascade of coincidences now a matrix of poetry and pain, pining and power.

  Two pins fall in an expanding universe, too loud to bear.

  What is so special about stardust, anyway? Every organic being risen from it, crumbles to it.

  April 7, 2022

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• A kind of certainty

  Perhaps to be secure in love is to allow in yourself the petulance of a child; the confidence to declare, than request, affection. Always “I know you will love me”, never “Do you” or “Will you?”

  Perhaps it is to have a child’s guileless cruelty. The way they close a palm over the powdery wings of a butterfly. To hurt not to harm, but to understand their ability to do so.

  Perhaps it is to have a child’s notion of ‘forever’. Not years bore in tedium, chained to bills; unforgiven words. But a captured moment of joy in silo, a perpetually shaken snowglobe.

  Perhaps it is just that. A return to form. A certainty distilled from untainted trust.

  April 6, 2022

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