have shamansuit, will travel

Did you really just ask me this, anon? Do you understand the task you are setting me out to complete….Trying to explain my URL is a little like pulling a miracle out of a snails asshole….I’m pretty sure they don’t even have assholes…but I still need the miracle…Basically you’re expecting me to remember that split second after I decided to create a new tumblr & before I decided on the name. Impossible. Nearly.

I hesitated a little to include the word new there…but I pretty much love you guys sooooo….yeah, I had an old tumblr, which was tocarryawalkingstick & was solely for writing & I had like a whopping thirty followers & only a select couple of them were kind enough to follow me here…right, well, trespass at your own risk…

Anyway, I dunno, anon, that seems like a particularly difficult location in time to jump too…even The Doctor isn’t that good at traveling to specific times & places. Seeing as I’ve had some practice playing The Doctor though, & as I’m feeling particularly clever, I’m going to try….Of course I am, I wouldn’t be answering this if I wasn’t going to try in something like a long winded fashion. That’s your warning though…this probably wont be short.

At this precise moment my thoughts keep jumping to Thoreau’s Walden & Whitman’s Song of Myself, both of which I used to keep at my bedside before my bedside became a tower of books to be read, & both of which my brain keeps telling me have something to do with my picking process…

While I’m waiting to find them in my library of a bedroom…enjoy this picture of my nightside table…I like to pretend it’s actually a nightside table…like yanked from Simon Green’s Nightside series & that’s how it holds more than twice its weight in books… anyway…my tower:

It’s probably not actually from the Nightside, but we’re going to pretend. Anyway, I found my copy of Whitman’s Song of Myself & I’m going to give you a quote & then unearth my copy of Walden & find you a quote there too:

“Dazzling and tremendous how quick a sunrise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me.

We also ascend dazzling and tremendous as the sun,
We found our own my soul in the calm and cool of the daybreak.” 

 & now one from Walden:

“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

Now understand I’ve spent my entire life in love with the moon. I have worshiped & still worship her in verse, in more words than I could dare count, in stray thoughts, in prayers for better nights to come. I have spent my life praying for night, praying for darkness & stars & cold sky. This is not to say that I am sick of it, this is not say that I will not continue to admire & adore the silk-lovely ivory of our midnight disc, but I have spent too much of my life ignoring the sun.

Around the time I created my new tumblr, I was changing. I was eating healthier, I was being healthier, & while my body was getting stronger, I found myself seeking more and more sunlight. Found myself wanting more days than I did nights. Something in my head shifted, something in my thinking kind of snapped & I realized I wasn’t in love with the moon anymore. At that same time I was rereading these books. Walden first & then….well Starvingforthesun didn’t come until after Whitman, so maybe I owe a little more to him…anyway…

The focal point in Thoreau’s quote is “There is more day to dawn,” this was the key for the ending of Walden, it leaves things opens, sets a torch for his readers to pick up, & it’s the part of that passage I most relate to. There is hope in the sun, there is consistency you don’t find with the moon. Putting Whitman on top of that, reading them back to back, it started working around in my head this idea that there are more days to come. I was in a dark place, & then I wasn’t the more I thought about how many chances you have to find that cool and calm daybreak wherein the starheart of the soul is lodged.

This is jumpy, anon, I’m sorry. Time travel does awful things to a boy reborn. Consider this; I once said, on the bank of a dark river years ago, watching the moon struggle in the current, that every poet should have at least one love affair with a celestial body. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. Maybe my fickle poet heart was done with the moon & was moving on & it’s as simple as that….Maybe I never needed to go quoting dead writers to you, dead visionaries who have turned to dust, untouched by moon or sun…But anon, I’m starving for sunlight because every day is another chance, every day is another opportunity for anything. I need that hope to hold back the darkness.

Dawn is a clean slate. Daylight a fresh start & that means new light. I want the sunrise to almost kill me, I want every day to start with a new challenge & I want to be the kind of person that rises with the sun to meet it. I didn’t want to be the moon’s lover anymore, I was sick of slipping out while everyone is sleeping, slinking back when everyone came beautifully awake. It is a difficult thing existing in shadows & expecting to maintain substance.

Obviously I’m not perfect. It doesn’t always work out. Every day is different. Sometimes I slink back to night, more often than I’d like to even, but that’s why I’m starving for the sun; I don’t always let a sunrise strike me & those are the days I’m most hungry for it. I don’t always settle myself with a cool and calm daybreak. Sometimes I’m left pulling pieces of light together when the sun is at its zenith, when it is molten & unruly, & I don’t always succeed.

So I guess starvingforthesun is all that; it’s me having faith, where the sun is a hope to hold onto. It’s that light to look to when you know everything behind you is varying shades of dark and grey.

As always with these…maybe that was something like an answer…

-N 

The may implies doubt. If you had had a sex dream about me you would remember it.

…

In all seriousness though, take two bottles of wine, read Garden of Eden by Hemingway, & then, when you are too tired to keep your eyes open, put in the movie you watch when you just want to look at attractive men in skin-tight suits, dashing long coats, or next to nothing, and call me in the morning.

My dream self has been known to wander. He will almost always shy away in face of a more attractive man though.

If he happens to make it back, don’t let his silver tongue fool you. Don’t let his fingers or his mouth or him anywhere near you. He is poison, trying to steal you word by word, and there can be no happiness where he is concerned.

I will try to reign him in, but I suggest you try to forget all about it. Poets, especially dream poets, are nothing but sweet and fluff; they will never be able to nourish you.

N