spinach enchiladas.

taking note.

i don't know if this will make any sense. i'm in a hotel room in Waterloo. more travel. the last of the road trips. one more air trip (to D.C.). then december will end, and i intend to go home and stay home for a very long time. possibly forever. you may never see me leave my house again. ever. except to buy bananas. because i love bananas, and chris is not very good at picking out produce.

sidenote: my jeans are fitting more snuggly. this is concerning. end of sidenote.

today is World AIDS Day. prior to my current job, my only related experience with HIV/AIDS was to tell the students i worked with to use a frickin' condom, for God's sakes (but then i was really only thinking about how horrifying it would be if they brought children into their chaos. admittedly, i wasn't thinking about HIV. i wasn't even thinking about herpes. i just didn't want them procreating.). without detailing every nook and cranny, i have landed in this position within HIV Prevention through a strange and not-coincidental series of universe-nudges. at the risk of sounding like a total corndog, i was led here, and i wasn't exactly sure why. i'm still not exactly sure why (i still can't talk about s-e-x without blushing), but i always assume divine guidance happens because one has both something to offer and something to learn. when you feel the hand of God poking you in the ribcage, you should shut your big fat mouth and listen close.

and i have learned a lot in the past 1.25 years. HIV is so deeply embedded in context and complexity. so many large, dinosaur human systems at play, layered, and shifting (yet unmovable, oddly)-- so much overlap (spirit, economics, education, faith, culture, cognition…). roots incomprehensibly deep. HIV preventable, behaviorally based. but what's below that? and what's below that? and under that? and then still, go deeper. good god, the undercurrents of us… can't you feel them? how do we ever get to the root of why we do as we do?

i can't begin to articulate this…whatever... just yet (it's still forming. it's still a fetus of a notion assuming shape in my melon.), but i really feel like a large part of my cosmic purpose (maybe everyone's, because i don't think i'm unique) is connection. find and form. people, ideas, institutions, movements. there is no them, no there, no other. only us, here, this. nothing is separate. everything is related. everything. i cannot think of a single exception. and the fetus of a notion in my melon is whispering that there is a critical lesson in this connectivity-- an evolutionary, revolutionary lesson. to embrace it (universal connectivity) would be to permanently and profoundly change the way we "do business." we would be kinder, healthier, smarter, sexier, more efficient, awesomer, handsomer, and peacefuller.

foolish that i'm trying to write a paragraph about it. i don't even know what it is. but it makes me want to be very quiet. like if i could get quiet enough, i would understand connectivity as more than just a concept, and then i would live better. i do so want to understand. and i do so want us to be better.

sometimes things just feel too big for words. 

i'm babbling because i'm tired, and i am in a hotel room, and i feel full of ideas bigger than my available vocabulary. sometimes i feel so full of ideas that i worry i will never get them all out, and they will die with me and be lost to the cosmos. 

i am also full of spinach enchiladas. they were delicious. good job, Chapala. 

we may or may not be tulips.

I've been noticing the tulips along Locust. Red and yellow. Tall and short and full and skinny. Some are taller than the others, and I don't understand why. They are competing for light, and some are winning. All things uniform: soil, exposure to sun. protection from environmental toxins -- why are they not of equal height?

Originally, I thought this was an argument for genetics and predestination. All this stuff about free will made garbage by the unpredictable appearance of perennials. "Of course we are tulips," I told myself. We are of disproportionate bulbs packed in unequal soil -- tulips.

Because I think that. Not tulips, necessarily -- sometimes trees, birds, creeping charlie, and river weeds. I think we are nature--sprouting bits competing for light--and we flail when we forget what we are. (I don't ever want to believe I am better or more evolved than an oak tree.) In the moments I pass tulips on Locust, I think our success and failure must be predestined, and all plans are for naught. All that time I spent practicing the piano was silly. I was already as good as I would get.

Then, I notice that I am thinking, and I doubt that the tulips are. They aren't making choices about their health, aren't choosing to increase their intake of chlorophyll and deliberating over root calisthenics. They do as they do what they do. I don't.

And so I wonder why we've brains at all, as much as they muck up the joint -- needle with the natural, convince us we are separate, unique, the evolutionary supreme. I think my life purpose must be to quiet the brain, and just grow to the light.