INSPIRED to FOCUS, SO TO SPEAK

Ever felt your insides shake with knowing there's an incredible storm coming? You have to be ready. Calm before the storm. You watch its terrifying beauty approaching. Your shaking, but with such a clear sight-so alive- your heart doesn't know what to do with it. Your listening, tracking the storm with braced legs and sweaty palms. As the sounds reach to slowly engulf your ears, the ...

My brother wrote to me a couple of weeks ago. I love my brother. He noticed my love for the pen and book when I was a kid and opened the literary world to me. He gave me Dostoevsky when I was a freshman. His letters to me from Paris were like vessels to a world I never thought could be that close to me. As cool, collected and focused as he was, I don't think he really could believe it at the time either. We wrote to each other. A secret celebration that meant there was hope in taking flight, that we could spread our wings and see the world. Since he told me to open this page again...here I am, now in my Paris. I still can't believe it either. Two and half years of New York worn on my skin and heart like a scar with a good story and a favorite pair of boots.

New York. Twinkling and bustling in my soles, the swarming echoes of a sleepless city launches each step I take. Last two years, I've laid some track down on this town's pavement. Lucky enough to have built my own trains to my destinations. My work spreading and unfolding like a subway map (and just as confusing). A choose your own adventure novel, the second I step out on Fort Washington everyday. Today in my subway meditation of the day I thought of home. How my creative force survived in Fort Worth. From birth to wings. What I did, what I learned, when I was the happiest, when my heart worked on my craft, my art to my heart's content with people that left their mark on me.

I am still that lucky and bless my stars, but in my Fort Worth Town, it was all about the art in a special way. Maybe time in my mind turns my twenties into sparklers, bright and electric. The fire moving me then was opportunity, a blank page of creating independent art. Us taking a single blank page and transforming all we had in our hands into something new among a family where we recognized each other's Worth and bowed to each other to help keep the good fire going because that was how things survived.

Broadway glares in your face. High rise apartments point their prissy noses in the air, so you do too and an $800 coat would look stunning on you. You imagine. When you are holding on by the skin of your teeth, you imagine...because you have to (if you your going to make it anywhere). Retirement and health insurance are just a fairytale and the hustle feels epic like a George Lucas early phenomenon-legendary. Each merciless battle a nod down in history books. Because in New York, you pay with blood to win. I think I just now got to know my opponent. Me.

My creative feels like a monster sometimes. Overwhelms with visions like howls, premonitions like choking smoke signals and as ravenous as a desperate, dirty wolf and I am holding on to the reins as tightly as I can. Doors keep opening and my arms are beginning to cramp from all the juggling last seven years. But with strong arms, maybe I can hold it all. I have to. This choose your own adventure tale is unraveling it's traps and futures and the hero ain't sure what road to take.

Your listening, tracking the storm with braced legs and sweaty palms. As the sounds reach to engulf your ears...

to my brother. In blood and ink-

your sister.

thanks tammy gomez for reminding me back in 2007, ken shimamoto for showing the way when I saw your face in the book you reminded me, thank you crystal casey for doing your thing.