back to california, where it's warm*

September 30, 2011 candacemorris 3 Comments

Headed back to my roots this weekend, thought you might enjoy a photo of my youth:


Oh, to go back to the days where I longed for hips. I think I wished too hard, because holy gudunk-y-dunk, I got em.

Moving On.

I have unofficially officially decided that listening to David Bowie is the only way to commute to work on Friday morning.  Especially if that particular Friday includes jet-setting to Los Angeles to stay with my sister (whose name I will bless until my dying day for introducing me to Bowie) for her birthday, kiss Clara's sweet cheeks (Teresa recently mentioned that they tasted like donuts!) and visit with my mom and other sister (also her birthday!) over a delicious luncheon.  It will be a whirlwind trip, but there's rumor of a Flamenco Dinner Theater.  (What does one wear to such a place?)



Think DB would mind if I borrowed his suit?

Make a memory, dolls.  Happy Weekend.




*Song title by Low

3 comments:

date night

September 26, 2011 candacemorris 5 Comments

photo


She keeps taking hits.
Her beauty fleets and shies.
Her jeans don't fit, her face scarred.
She weeps openly and freely, but they both know
[by jove, they have both learned
that as much as they both want to let him swoop in
and romance her back to a thin, young place]
That she must do the work.

She started with him in tandem, driving.
They progressed to one hand holding the seat, training wheels trepidatiously removed.
But still, he was there,
Ready in an instant to shatter the facade of her independence,
If she should need it.

She's now scared;
It's time to take a spin around the cul-de-sac
And she knows he'll let go.
And she knows that the faster and more steady she becomes,
the less she'll notice.

She is guilty of relying lazily on his perfect balance,
his stalwart legs.

Out of love and hate,
with tears washing her face
she man ups.
Does it solo.
Tries not to look back.
Tries like hell to make him proud.

One night, she tells him over a bottle of wine how she's loosing ground.
And needs him to put the safety back on.

He whispered in her ear as they fall asleep,
"How did I ever find you?"

And the words, like caresses and deep breaths,
Wash her cells, her sad blood, anew.
And even if she had to swallow the fierce pain of dependence,
decides that tonight, just one night
she can borrow his vision again.

She slumbers to visions of ribbons flying free on the handlebars and eyes closed in belief and bliss.

Without the good, good love from another human, we cannot love ourselves.
It's not your fault.



5 comments:

sunday

September 25, 2011 candacemorris 3 Comments















I've felt very quiet lately, which isn't terribly rare for my external expressions.
This time it is internal quiet.
A sobriety, a hibernation, a still.
Lock-jawed.

There is a creative shut-down.  Instead, I am taking in.
When I cannot write a words, I read.
When I cannot take a photo, I look.
When I cannot fashion an outfit, I naked.

Perhaps I am meant to be listening more,
Perhaps I am too isolated.  Blank.  Disconnected.

Sometimes speaking well, accurately, freely, casually
Is the hardest damn task I face in the day.
And the challenge of connecting with another human being is daunting enough to keep me in bed.

And then Sunday comes along, and I can sit on the laurels of my well-crafted love, finish a book, forgive myself for crippling introversion, and just feel good.

Oh Sunday, we'd never make it without you.


3 comments:

the one that got away

September 20, 2011 candacemorris 2 Comments

A Moveable Feast, 20 September 2011

I've been itching for pages and pages and hours and hours spent with those pages and pages. My love, my first love, it's been too long.

2 comments:

cute

September 16, 2011 candacemorris 7 Comments

photo
photo

I swore to myself I was done buying TOMS, but how could I resist?  I was wandering around in Whole Foods, spending more than anyone should for 6 items, minding my own green business when SLAP...these cuties demanded to be owned.  

But swearing off cute things is kinda like promising to stop posting pictures of your pet.

photo

When it's cute, it's just cute.

Happy Friday,

7 comments:

Goodnight, my love.

September 14, 2011 candacemorris 4 Comments














photo
Many good and beautiful things happened tonight, the least of which was a splurge on a 2007 Valpolicella and our delicate home holding us in her good graces.

Goodnight, my someone.  Goodnight, my love.

4 comments:

We Go On

September 13, 2011 candacemorris 13 Comments


It strikes me as weird and wonderful, this life.  Truly worth digging up and examining, worms and silt and the nasty bits stuck under fingernails.  In any one lifetime, a human can be innumerable amounts of people.  My elderly grandfather is a bachelor again, dating and learning to do dishes.  My sister is confounded by the completely different student and person she is in graduate school as compared to undergrad.  My marriage is not the same marriage it was 5 years ago.  My toddling niece will never know herself as she exists right now.

 We often wish to be someone else, and we are continually granted that wish.
Over and over.   

I am thankful today, deeply thankful for that which is in constant renewal and evolution.  For reinvention, for second chances, for the gluing together of broken overnights to fresh and perky new mornings.  For old thoughts growing into new thoughts.  For the old me, for the current me, for the future mes. For that amphibious DNA which can grow a new tail.

I am still pissed that nothing at all is permanent, bound by the paradox of fighting for grounding and centeredness in a blurry merry-go-round planet.  I have to force myself not only to sit still, but also to remain in motion.  I cannot let moss grow over my complacent soul, and yet I have to learn to be in the Now.  

I feel the passage of the seasons and it's all I can do to grab one little flower as I speed on down the road.


It's all,
We know,
That's left,
To hold.

We go on and on.



And that, my dears, is the reason I record.
The reason I notice.
The reason I take your picture and write you letters.
All we have are remnants of our various lives, tokens and knick-knacks and chipped tea cups to offer a glimpse into the person we used to be, from where and from whom we came.  That person is as dear to me as the woman typing right now.  I never want to lose her.


I am nothing but a grain of sand.
I am all of the universe's stars.
All housed in one cerebral cortex.

It's making me dizzy.


The final mystery is oneself.  When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself.  Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
--oscar wilde--


13 comments:

On the afterwards, the presence of fear, and the ugliness of birth

September 07, 2011 candacemorris 15 Comments

Apparently August has come and gone.  The traffic on the bridge can only be explained by the influx of students and parents back to the daily grind.  I've noticed myself looking back a lot these last few days, trying to assimlate new information, new faces, and new feelings into my daily doings.


I believe one of my greatest strengths is in analysis.  Also, as an introvert, my natural tendency is to look back and assess my and others' behaviors and words (read: obsess).  Both of these personality traits combined makes for an anxious aftermath to social events, and I often feel that I severely mirepresented myself, wish I would have not said ___, wish I would have done ___, etc...and suddently, that swift and severe axe of self-judgement comes swinging down upon my head.  Now, I'm bleeding and blind.  I wonder if other people do this?

It reminds me of a year or so ago after a particularly grueling ladies' night.  Lots of wine had us loosed-lipped and  unabashedly weepy.  I remember waking up the next morning not only nursing a nasty headache, but feeling particularly sheepish about my vulnerable behavior and spent a few hours replaying everything I said just in case I needed to apologize to someone.  I desperately wished to go back in time and regain the composure and control I then seemed so eager to rid myself of.  I comforted myself with the notion that the other girls were probably feeling the same way and wrote one of them a letter to that effect, encouraging her not to succumb to false insecurities, to not berate herself for something she may have said,  and to take all parts of the others into her being with willing acceptance, gracious forgiveness, and fierce loyalty.

In the end, there is nothing to do with my analysis of people other than to love them.  This includes myself.  I am human.  You are human.  We can be decidedly virtuous and altruistic. We can be atrociously maleficent and grotesque.  Even the most composed of people have hurt someone else with a flippant, impulsive comment.  Lord knows every single one of us has been hurt by the same.  We can spout off so much of our bull shit and soapbox about our arbitrary opinions that can crush others around us at worst, or (at best) keeps them from sharing their own opinions.  We do not listen well, we do not speak carefully.  We intimidate and dominate and in our eagerness to be known, bulldoze those in our company.

All of this to say that I feel this great need to analyze and obsess and ultimately forgive.  I also feel the need to assure myself of people's affections for me.  But in the end, my acceptance of Candace is what is really in decline.  I could easily demand assurances from others, but I know, oh dears, HOW I KNOW - this is my battle.   It is no one's job but my own to be confident and to trustingly accept people's words at face value without criticism or manipulative self-deprecation.


Speaking of insecurities, I have recently been stopped short by fear.  Many of you know I am working on a humble collection of poems for self-publishing.  I am in the editing stages, and I have to tell someone - the poems are total shit. They are simply not good enough to put out into the world; a world I love, a world of Plath and Rilke and Shakespeare and Donne.  I do not think the world needs another mediocre poet.  For the most part, I am a confident writer and care little about how my work is received (coming from someone who has received only positive feedback, so I realize I am lacking in the character formed by artistic rejection).  Now that I am really looking to put myself out there, fear is taking hold of my throat. I feel it very physcially.

One one hand, the fear makes me pissed and frustrated.  On the other, I see it as a necessary birth pang.  What mother wasn't afraid to give birth?  What artist wasn't terrified to put their canvas on display?  Fear is a right of passage, and I'm beginning to trust its presence and leave it alone.

"Oh hello Fear.  I forgot you were there.  You may go now."
(a small adaptation of Doc Holliday in Tombstone)

I am sick of the portayal of artists and designers and stylists online who chose to convey an overly-white, overly-simple, overly-amiable, overly-clear, and annoyingly overly-painless process to creating.  Even if it sometimes gets muddy for them, it seems they are unable to express the sheer disgusting ugliness that comes from birth.  Have you ever seen a woman deliver a baby?  It's completely violent and gross.  It's also the most naturally beautiful occurance.

What I am saying here is that creating is ugly. I am prepared to work hard on these poems and puke them up and be doubled over in labor pains and fight like holy hell to bring forth that which has been placed inside of me.  I am on the verge of something wanting out and it's gagging me and tearing me and I am not sure I will survive it.  

I hope you'll like the poems.  I hope you'll like me.
But more so, I hope against ALL HOPE that I like them, that I will like me.
And that the scars won't be too bad.

15 comments: