What is Enough To Prove I am Ready for Love?

I feel intensely connected to the lyrics of this song.Music as always yields me a solace and simultaneous outlet like nothing else.


Ready for Love

I am ready for love

Why are you hiding from me?

Id quickly give my freedom

To be held in your captivity.

I am ready for love.

All of the joy and the pain

And all the time that it takes

Just to stay in your good grace

Lately I been thinking maybe you’re not ready for me.

Maybe you think that I need to learn maturity.

They say watch what you ask for

Cuz you might receive.

But if you ask me tomorrow,

Ill say the same thing:

I am ready for love.

Would you please lend me your ear?

I promise I wont complain.

I just need you to acknowledge I am here.

If you give me half a chance

Ill prove this to you.

I will be patient, kind, and true

To a man who loves music

A man who loves art

Respects the spirit world

And thinks with his heart.

I am ready for love.

If you’ll take me in your hands,

I will learn what you teach.

And do the best that I can.

I am ready for love.

Here with an offering of

My voice, my eyes, this song, my mind

Tell me what is enough

To prove I am ready for love?

Ramble Series: Flashback Friday (written sometime in September 2012)

...I just left a meeting at the Mckeldin library with Tim, one of the librarians for English literature and such. He took me along a virtual tour of research ports and databases and I confessed to him that I felt like a preschooler sitting in high school math; all this bibliographic work feels tedious and a little overwhelming. I tell him, I'd much rather read and write. But, I'm excited for the prospect of growing and I realize that my resistance to this new avenue is only a natural bucking at the impetus of growth and progression. Without a little struggle, there is neither growth nor progression. Still, I don't do it with an ear-to-ear smile.

Outside, it's raining and the tips of my boots still hold soggy socked feet. In an hour or so, I will be meeting with Dr. Ray, the graduate advisor. This meeting has no formal insinuations, but I'm taking the advice we received at orientation and making myself known.

The free coffee in my system was the perfect compliment to this rainy Thursday and I'm beginning to realize that I made the right choice. Often, I spend too much time doubting my decisions rather than relishing them. Like my dad says, it's your life, baby girl; only you know what you want, so do it.

I find myself unaccustomed to this new schedule. The mornings are the most confusing. Do I wake up with an alarm as the nine-to-fivers do? Or do I wake up to a soundless room, no alarm to pull me from my dreams? Do I work at home or head to campus? Shall I become nocturnal, burning midnight oils and closing my eyes during the sunshine of the day? Yeah, I already know...first-world problems. In the backdrop of my over-analysis are the thoughts of my students at Dwight Englewood. I think of them every day. I think of their boundless energy, their morning commutes, their heads bobbing in the lunch line, their school supplies in abundance.  And I think of my old classroom and its new teacher's decorations. All of this makes me smile. This first year has given me new liberties, of this I'm well aware. My teaching career presented visible limitations to intellectual and creative thought in many ways; although, not entirely.  Conversely, my studies here at Maryland have pulled away all reigns. Essentially, people now want to know what I deem important and wait to hear my contributions. This is a challenge for me to step into confidence. As Cheryl used to say, "Abbey, girl your biggest weakness is that you don't believe in yourself. You have to have confidence." In a sluggish attempt to take her advice, I'll declare that I do have confidence.

......

On the small table before me sits Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark and Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader. I've read the Morrison text, but almost three years ago now, so it's a bit fuzzy. For class, Martha has asked us to think about marginalized viewpoints and their significance as well as consider an article she assigned on literary history. The article, by Robert Hans Jauss, challenges Marxist and Formalist literary theory, suggesting through an outlining of seven theses that it is the reader's dialogic relationship with a text that harnesses an inherent understanding of the way we read and theorize. It is the reader's relationship to genre, to personal literary history, and to social postures, that determine a "horizon of expectation," ultimately establishing new ways to approach literary theory and historicism.  I tend to agree. His ideas converge quite well with the concepts Morrison lays out. Both argue for the centralization of readership in literary theory. For Morrison, she specifically calls into attention the white literary imagination and its inherent dependence on the black presence in America, which she terms American Africanism. It is impossible, she contends, to critically approach American literature without the acknowledgement of this black presence and to do so, would deny an implicit veracity...

I am rereading both works to get a tighter grip on the arguments. It is time for lunch says my stomach and so it is time to eat my granola bar.

I think that is enough rambling for now.

Golden Oldie

Rita Dove: Golden Oldie

I made it home early, only to get 
stalled in the driveway-swaying 
at the wheel like a blind pianist caught in a tune 
meant for more than two hands playing. 
The words were easy, crooned 
by a young girl dying to feel alive, to discover 
a pain majestic enough 
to live by. I turned the air conditioning off, 
leaned back to float on a film of sweat, 
and listened to her sentiment: 
Baby, where did our love go? - a lament
I greedily took in 
without a clue who my lover
might be, or where to start looking.

Epiphanies for a Dream

...Cecila often dreamed of what it might be like to fly away, to taste the clouds. At night, she wet the pillow with the fantasies of young pioneers, drifting, gliding on familiar foreign surfaces.  Her mother, a woman who had long since put her dreams into storage bins, believed her daughter’s dreams to be a folly. At night, she would peek past her daughter's room only to shake her head in dismay, though jealous with admonition: “We’ll never fly,” her mother would whisper to herself then retire to her bedroom, carefully laying down her tired body beside her old-married, holding her breath with her mouth agape as not to wake him... 

Ramble Series: School Daze

Captain’s Log September 6, 2012:

One of the best pieces of advice that I have ever gotten was from Oprah: “When somebody shows you who they are, believe them”. It’s advice I’ve taken a while to plant firmly into application. But as is most of the advice I’ve received in my life, it’s sound.

Today was the first day of school. I felt nervous and anxious like I always do. I take this as a good sign. My professor tells us to call her Martha or Martha Nell, just nothing succeeding Ms. or Mrs. “Call me Mr. Smith,” she says and I laugh, “just not Ms. or Mrs.” She’s adamant.

Our discussion circulates the class syllabus, tangential anecdotes, and inquiry around what it means to read a text, with a sprinkle of politics, naturally. Bubbling energy in the air, she tells us many things. She tells us: her Rutgers background, countless hours beneath library lights at Amherst, and plugging into email back in nineteen ninety four; oh and of course her first writing gig with Trojan. Yes, she says, the condoms. She’s well rehearsed but still funny. I like her honesty. Martha is obsessed with Emily Dickinson. This confuses me. And still, I get it. I look at her obsession like my own obsession with the lives of Black women writers, particularly Toni Morrison. I love her character, her demeanor, her voice...I am just in love with the bitch.

Then, Martha tells us a secret. She says it doesn’t really matter what you study. She says,  “make sure,” her finger dangling toward us weakly as she peers over glasses barely gripping the edge of her nose.“That you study, what you love.  You must have a passion for the thing,” she leans back in her chair.

“Because then, those long hours, those tortuous nights aren’t so tortuous. Oh, but they’re tortuous alright,” she laughs to herself tightening her grip on her spectacles.

My stomach is warm with satisfaction.  Yay! I like my teacher. Now, I know how those scared ass sixth graders felt when they realized I was the coolest teacher they’d ever effin met.

They’re about ten of us and we scatter the gamut when it comes to assortment. There’s Steve, the retired psychiatrist well into his sixties looking into ways literature intersects the lives of the ill as therapy, a high school teacher sick of teaching students how to research and ready to explore on her own, a poet, a cancer survivor who nods in agreement with Steve’s area of interest, a teacher of business writing who hates literature but figures she’d dabble in it for once, a pre-k teacher, a recent college graduate, a second year PhD with an obsession for Moby Dick, another teacher sick of education classes, a quiet one I can’t really remember, and then me.

We sit in a mutilated semicircle, our choice of seat suggesting we don't want to be too close to each other...urinal rule.  I sit quietly engaged and observant. Butterflies of anticipation flutter in my stomach and efforts to silence them manifest as random scribbles of Martha's anecdotal lecture in my tiny red notebook.

This semester, we are asked to conduct a research project, to become an expert on a particular work. Our semester project is to choose any text and research it under the pretenses of our class focus and guiding questions. Throughout the course, she asks us to consider,  “What is it like to read this? What does it mean to read professionally?” and “Where is the text?”

 I've chosen Gwendolyn Brooks's A Street in Bronzeville because I love Chicago circa 1940s and 50s, I love the black migration, and I love Brooks for her perspective on both. Taking Martha's advice to let our passions lead us, I feel this is a good choice.

Ramble Series: Insane in the Brain

8/17/2012

Today's message:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting the same result

    Albert Einstein

My workouts have become inherently woven into my daily undertakings. I don't feel satisfied unless I've broken a sweat, or done something for the good of my body. When I'm not working out, I find myself thinking of other ways to clear my mind, establishing routines that lend themselves to both personal pleasure and some level of productivity (the type a in me trying to break loose again).

And as I spend time leaning into these routines, allowing them to give me solace and a degree of resolve, I think of this einstein quote. Inevitably, habits become hardened, inflexible and unwilling to offer renewed outcomes. My online yoga instructor (don't be fooled, the extent of my yoga is watching her while I touch my toes, I'm writing this entry from my yoga position btw) points out the importance of reflecting on the habits we've chosen to wiggle into. Whether we are running to get that six pack or waiting patiently for someone to love us back, there comes a point when we must evaluate our methods. When do our routines veer off the course of patience and travel into the world of insanity? Exactly when do we change the methods we've established? Have most of us touched the skirts of insanity at some point? According to Einstein, I certainly have. . .