I’ve come to realize that I cling to pain and yearning because they give me inspiration. They may not be the sole source, but certainly a great deal. I always listen to Leonard Cohen and Elliot Smith during such moods, as they have the ability to intensify and deepen the sadness.

I can tell it’s something of a destructive habit. It’s almost like I subconsciously choose to dwell on things that have been resolved for the sake of something to write about.

It makes me think of the last lines from King Missile’s song Ed:

“Yes, this is the answer. This is the ending. I shall keep on running, because a body in motion tends to stay emotional, and it’s better to feel. Pain is better than emptiness, emptiness is better than nothing, and nothing is better than this.”

Is this how I feel alive, a way of bringing significance to my life? Or is this the way I truly feel, and I’m simply a slow healer, and too much of a thinker?

Or perhaps the better question is this: does happiness inspire me just as much?

I want the view. The city lights beneath me, blinking in red and white, to remind me that life still goes on even as we’re unconscious of it.

I want to be in the café with Darren, talking about that which only we could understand about each other.

I want to be looking out the open window of my uncle’s apartment in Hong Kong, to hear the people talking, even through the night. I want to smell the age of the wood, the sterility of the concrete.

I want the strings to be playing just for me. To guide me, through layers of resolution after resolution.

I want to stay on the beachfront. To feel the cool, moist wind blowing through open curtains and doors, completely trusting of the world. To feel the darkness and quiet swallowing me whole.

I want to be rolled up in my sheets with her, pressed together on the couch, naked as we came, as the morning light begins to glow through the blinds.

I want to be downtown in the warmth of summer, with the energy of those around me as if the night would never end.

I want the rituals accorded to those who love and are loved in return.

I want to walk out of the theatre into the deafening night air, my mind racing and humbled from the performance.

I want to ride with John. To speak without thinking. To feel without caring. To confide without worrying.

I want this feeling to last forever.

Sometimes, I feel like I’ve been waiting to capture moments like this my whole life.

I’ve been blessed with friends who paint, sculpt, carve, design, sing, and compose, and I’ve been fortunate enough to find a printer and framer who are artists themselves in what they do. Even though they have different mediums and ways of expressing themselves, they’re all driven by a sense of passion. Some can explain where it comes from, some can’t, but you can tell it’s rooted deep within their beings.

Passionate people have always attracted me. When you talk to them, you become filled with ebullient energy. You feed off each other, like a dialogue of ideas and inspiration.

It’s warming. It’s moving.

Together, you become something that’s greater than you are by yourself.

In any case, I’ve been working on my projects, though mostly trying to finish the ones I’ve started. Sometimes it seems like there’s no end. Aside from an awesome Friday night (and an hour after dinner on Saturday night trying to digest a big meal), I’ve been working non-stop this weekend.

At the very least, the days have brought much rain, and even more inspiration. I miss the snow, but the rain satisfies for now. I’m not even sure if I like how early the sun sets at this time of year. Both day and night affect the mind in different ways, bringing out (or masking) different parts of you that you forgot were there. Each has its own importance.

At one point, I realized that life is a series of Jens, from winter to winter.

There’s been much music too, so much that I’m thinking about starting up a podcast again. But it’s another project, another idea I have yet to do.

I could have written so much more about each one of these topics, but I tried to keep digression to a minimum. They’d end up being full-blown entries of their own, and I’d never finish writing anything. For these entries, the ones that ramble about no subject in particular, I always look for lyrics, or titles, or snippets from other people’s entries that sort of explain the mood I’m in. Yep.

I’ve been feeling disconnected, somewhat forgetting my Taoist teachings. This is probably a good thing, as I tend to be focused on the thought and theories too often, and not enough on the application.

There’s a fine line between resignation and acceptance. But sometimes I feel like I’ve fallen face-first to one side.

To be honest, I’ve been writing this entry for over a week now, but my thoughts and ideas keep branching out. Every time I sit down at the computer, I delete something that’s lost relevance, and add something more. Like this.

Sometimes, as I’m falling asleep, I think of her.

She’s lying on my stomach again, listening to my heart beat, hands tucked neatly under my body. Or she’s spooning me, her arm resting on the crook of my waist, with a finger drawing distracting circular lines on my chest.

Sometimes we’re in the tall grass, surrounded by colours of life with the warmth of the sun above us. A regression to a time when all I had to think about was the colour of popsicle I would have when I got home from camp. How unfair that our innocence is taken from us when we need it most.

And I lie there in bed, waiting for sleep to take me as the images lead me on.

My body telling me to let go, my mind struggling to keep her next to me a moment longer.

I tell her she’s beautiful. Over and over again. As often as I can.

But she shakes her head, and says I only think so because I love her.

It’s true. But would I love her any less if she didn’t have those soft, innocent eyes? If she didn’t wear her hair up, or down, or curly, or straight, or different every time I saw her? If her body didn’t curve so distractingly when she lets herself fall into me?

It makes me wonder if anyone sees the same thing that I do.

To me, her beauty is obvious, not subtle in any way.

So I tell her, over and over again.

Sometimes I think she’ll start to believe me if I say it enough.

Our bodies burn like flames in an oven, so we kick off the covers. I slip my arm around her waist and press her body close to mine. She holds my hand to her chest, fingers wrapped around fingers, legs wrapped around legs.

The morning light comes in blue and soft and subtle through the window, and the stars begin to fade.

I want to hold her like this under a tree in the summer and pass the time in her company, alive to every moment we’re together. I want to hold her like this when the cars and streets are buried under snow outside, so we may truly know what it is to be warm and comfortable. I want to run my finger along the softness of her face, so I may learn every landmark and feature, and never forget. I want to read to her my favourite books on lazy Sunday afternoons, so I can take her to where they’ve taken me. I want to feel her breath against my skin, the breath that gives her life, and me joy. I want to wake up to find she’s not away in another bed, but next to me, lost in slumber, for there can be no other such simple happiness.

This is where I’m perfectly content, lost in a moment when time has stopped and nothing else matters.

But I know it won’t last forever. She’ll soon be gone. I won’t be the one to do these things with her, the one to love her the way she was meant to be loved, the one to love her as deeply as she deserves. There’s no use in thinking about it now.

The one who inspires me to create wonderful things, to make beauty as I see it in her, so that others may share in this feeling. If I had a million words to describe her grace, it still wouldn’t be enough.

I could be sad, but I’d rather be happy instead.

So as the sun begins to rise, I indulge myself a little longer, and hold her closer before drifting off to sleep.

The woman I’ve been looking for my entire life.

Her name was Christine. She was thin lipped. Frail limbed. Not the least bit camera shy, as she pulled her shirt up to expose a breast, like she had fallen on the grass this way and the folds in her clothes rearranged themselves on her body.

Here she is on a horse in the night. Here she is, grim-faced, cradling her son. There was a scar on her neck from a suicide attempt years earlier, and through a series of photographs, you could see the scar heal.

For seven years she was married, before she successfully jumped to her death from the 9th floor of an apartment in East Berlin.

This is someone who understood his art, his morbidity, his need to capture her suicide in a frame, then publish the image of her body on the pavement, looking down from the 9th floor, along with insouciant pictures of a teacup, a playground, a tank, three plants.

And as soon as I had found her, she’s gone.

Should I be happy that she existed? Should I be sad that she’s gone? Should I be punished for comparing the women I’ve had to her?

Is this painful, or beautiful, or both?

Angel I can see myself in your eyes
Angel won’t you feel for me from your heart
Do return my heart to me
No don’t insist I’m already hurt

— Blonde Redhead, Elephant Woman

Yep. It’s over. Although she still doesn’t know.

Maybe it was just a phase. Maybe I’ve accepted the fact that she’s taken. Maybe we’re too similar. Maybe I’ve realized it would never work. Maybe I just love her less, the more I know her.

Or maybe it was just a phase. One of the many things cured by time.

It makes me wonder if I cling to such feelings simply because I love being in love, unrequited or otherwise. It’s like when you’re in a purely physical relationship with someone, and you start getting feelings for them. You wonder if you’re really in love with the person, or in love with the idea that you have someone with whom to go to bed, someone to kiss and kiss you back. It’s a blurry line, something you don’t figure out until you remove yourself from the situation.

Not that it matters. I’m over her.

And I’ve lost my inspiration.

This is one of the strangest times of my life. I remember feeling something similar to this over four years ago, but I haven’t had it since.

I’m fighting my old self again. Fighting against these feelings and past habits.

I wish I could define and explain it. Vincent Gallo has a song he titled “Glad To Be Unhappy”, filled his distinctly minimalistic piano and acoustic guitar sounds, so sparse you don’t know where the downbeat falls. But there are no lyrics, and I think I’m starting to understand why.

Everything is so simple when you’re set in your heart. But when you’re filled with such paradoxical, contradictory feelings, nothing makes any sense. The world is turned upside down.

I think a part of me wants to think about it. I want to keep this feeling, where every song sounds as good as the first time you heard it, and the leaden sky is urging you forward with every step you take. To be so inspired.

And while part of me knows that to fight against ones inner nature is foolish², another part of me knows how destructive it can be.

1. The original title of that post was actually just a 5×5 pixel square, meant to confuse the reader into not knowing what to think. Trolley tried to correct me once and told me the title was broken, and I had to let him know it was done on purpose. With my new headline images plugin, the graphic title doesn’t quite work so I had to change it. [↑]
2. To add another level to this, I’m fighting against fighting myself [↑]

How simple a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple heart.

—Zorba the Greek

I feel like writing.

Saturdays are usually reserved for relaxation, but I mixed it with a few errands throughout the day. Bought extra auburn foliage for one of my pots, and a funnel to get fresh-ground pepper into my new pepper shaker. Picked up my weekly groceries. Sat down at the pizza parlor to start Beautiful Losers while my Hawaiian was being baked.

I watched Zorba The Greek tonight, about the adventures of an aimless Englishman who goes to Crete, and the lessons he learns from a man he meets named Zorba.

Though generally jovial and lighthearted, it was heavy and heavy at times. There’s a scene where a beautiful widow (the love interest of the movie) is ritualistically stoned and killed out of jealousy by the men of the village, simply because she wouldn’t let any of them have her. The direction is a little inconsistent, but Anthony Quinn’s portrayal of the Grecian spirit keeps the movie in tact. Many believe the movie to be an analysis of Apollonian vs Dionysian thought, but I saw it as a nod to Taoism as well.

Zorba’s a Taoist, whether he knows it or not. He shuns intellectual thought and analysis, and loves life with bubbling spontaneity. In the end, the Englishman learns from Zorba, not about life, but how to live it.

And it inspired me. Not just the dialogue or the playfulness, but the locations too. It made me want to travel, to see new places, to meet more people, and explore other cultures.

One day. For now, I’ll enjoy the comfort of my house.

So here I am, staying up late with my back next to the open window, eating butter pecan tarts, drinking Dragon Well tea, and writing as much as I can.

I think I’ll go practice the form now.

Tomorrow, I have nothing to do but live.

If I were in your shoes and got hit with an happy-sounding phrase like INSPIRATION IS EVERYWHERE, I’d mentally spring into one of three mindsets: 1. Skepticism 2. “Amen, Brother!” or 3. Apathy. I’d also make a few assumptions: that the intention behind such a proclamation was to be inspirational in itself. Furthermore, the meta-assumption is that we’re all looking for it, or need it real bad.

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Bronwen is my original muse. We happened to meet shortly after I got my SLR camera, and ever since, she’s my primary model when doing photographic tests and experiments.

These were taken over the course of about a year. From before we started dating to passed the break-up.

Every angle captures a different side of someone.

Looking back on these reminds me of how much I miss it when she had red hair, which she dyed for me (but didn’t like to admit it). Too bad I can’t convince her now to do it again.

It’s getting easier to write again. Ideas are coming a little more fluidly, and aren’t quite as straining to develop anymore. Perhaps there’s been an excess of inspiration in the last while, from the music that keeps me moving, to the people I interact with, to the temperature of the season, to the words in the books that I’ve been reading with relish.

I can never seem to get it all down.