Flying for the First Time

Flying for the First Time
Elenowen

Can't put out the fire with my bare hands,
not even I need to understand how
I'm getting there.

Said a prayer with broken wings,
hoping to move toward greater things now
and face the fear.

I'm drifting
closer toward the skyline,
looking down on my life,
trying to get just one thing right.
The second I stop second-guessing,
let go like a confession,
seeing what I was born to find.
Flying for the first time.

I was the kind who played it safe,
wouldn't take a risk or leap of faith,
not before the leap.

Fear has a way of playing games,
go a little, go your separate ways,
but as for me:

I'm drifting
closer toward the skyline,
looking down on my life,
trying to get just one thing right.
The second I stop second-guessing,
let go like a confession,
seeing what I was born to find.
Flying for the first time

Ran through the open flame,
barely escaped,
now I'll never be the same.

I'm drifting
closer toward the skyline,
looking down on my life,
trying to get just one thing right.
The second I stop second-guessing,
let go like a confession,
seeing what I was born
I'm drifting
closer toward the skyline,
looking down on my life,
trying to get just one thing right.
The second I stop second-guessing,
let go like a confession,
seeing what I was born to find.
Flying for the first time
Flying for the first time.

I put out the fire with my bare hands.


I mentioned yesterday that I spent my whole day listening to the new Elenowen EP on repeat. I am seriously obsessed. I knew I needed to post a song on here, but couldn't decide which one to pick. Seriously. The album is that good. But since I'm rather obsessed with these airplane window pictures (watch for another one tomorrow) lately, I felt like the first track, Flying for the First Time, was a good choice. Plus starting at the beginning seems like a logical choice. I mean, if I am probably going to end up posting all of them, I might as well work my way through in order so I can keep track, no?

Heat, Illness, and Art Galleries

I am in the midst of a quick jaunt to Mississauga and Toronto. The temperature has been ungodly (really, it has been hotter than Hades) and I have managed to come down with a dreadful cold which is sapping my energy, but it has been a good trip nonetheless. And tomorrow I get to go to the AGO, which can only mean good things.


P.S. I've been Instagramming bits of my trip. You can follow me @breanna_girl, or, if you don't have Instagram, check out my photos here.

Home?

You know that point in your life when you realize the house you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of a sudden, even though you have someplace where you put your shit, that idea of home is gone...You'll see one day when you move out. It just sort of happens one day and it's gone. You feel like you can never get it back. It's like you feel homesick for a place that doesn't even exist. Maybe it's like this right of passage, you know? You won't ever have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself. You know, for your kids, for the family you start. It's like a cycle or something. I don't know, but I miss the idea of it, you know? (Garden State)

Home is a concept that has been on my mind a lot lately. When you're in your 20s, home is a puzzling concept. It's particularly bad if you move into dorms, I think. Your parents' house kind of stops feeling like home. Oh, you still call it home. And in some ways, I guess it always will be home, but now there's this other place, this place that you live eight months of the year, that feels more like home. At least, it does if you're like me and you're lucky enough to live with people who you genuinely feel at home with. And then summer comes and you move back "home." But you can't help but feel like you are moving away from home at the same time. It's confusing. You wind up with two separate worlds, a foot in each one. It only gets worse when you graduate. You've spent four years in this limbo, but you've also been carefully constructing a home for yourself. I know I did. And it had more to do with the people than the place, but I think that spaces hold significance, so the place probably had a role to play as well. The people are the really important part though. I just went to a wedding of some dear friends this weekend and sitting at a table amongst people I had spent years in school with, living with some of them, I felt profoundly at home. So, now that I'm moving across the country, and we are all scattering like shards from a dropped glass, where is home? What is home? I've loved this quote from Garden State for a long time because it just seems to capture this homeless kind of feeling so well.

A Simple Thing

Life has been giving me a headache lately. I have way too many things on my plate. My brain is constantly spinning in these tiny obsessive circles. Whenever I am doing anything I am also thinking about (and sometimes attempting to actually do) at least three other things. It's like having a wild animal trapped in my head. He's trapped in there and getting panicky because he can't find a way out. So he just keeps throwing things around, knocking stuff over, making me panicky right along with him. I am feeling un-grounded. I am cursing the law that seems to exist right along with gravity that everything must happen at once. Things can never come at a sane, slow pace. Instead they pile up on top of each other like a bad crash on the highway. And I'm pinned in the middle of all of them.

So, as my life begins to get out of control it was nice to come home on Monday to two new perfumes. Something so simple, but it was like taking a deep breath of air. I can't use alcohol-based fragrances because they give me major headaches, but I found MCMC Fragrances and fell in love with their organic oil-based roll-on perfumes. They are exquisite. The one on the right in this picture, Maine, is my go-to perfume. It's salty and subtly grassy. It smells like sea and dried beach scrub. It makes me think of being in a seaside cabin. I adore it. I just got Hunter and Kept, but I'm already madly in love with them. Hunter is woodsy and outdoorsy. It's masculine (a quality that all of my perfumes must have) and, as the website describes it, is "best if worn with a flannel shirt" - and I seriously love flannel shirts. Kept is a little bit girlier than the other two since it's red rose based. But this is balanced out beautifully by black tea, leather, clove and amber and it ends up being this really rock and roll, tough but sweet girl kind of fragrance. Perfume is a small thing, but it is beautiful. I like looking at it, I like smelling it, I like how it makes me feel special and beautiful when I wear it. I'm big on surrounding myself with beauty and in the midst of my swirling vortex of craziness, I was glad to find something beautiful to hold onto.

Rain that never leaves your bones

Into Arrival
Anne Michaels

It will be in a station
with a glass roof
grimy with the soot 
of every train and
they will embrace for every mile
of arrival. They will not
let go, not all the long way,
his arm in the curve
of her longing. Walking in a city
neither knows too well,
watching women with satchels
give coins to a priest for the war veterans;
finding the keyhole view of the church
from an old wall across the city, the dome
filling the keyhole precisely,
like an eye. In the home
of winter, under an earth
of blankets, he warms her skin
as she climbs in from the air.

There is a way our bodies
are not our own, and when he finds her
there is room at last
for everyone they love,
the place he finds,
she finds, each word of skin
a decision.

There is earth
that never leaves your hands,
rain that never leaves
your bones. Words so old they are broken
from us, because they can only be 
broken. They will not
let go. Because some love
is broken from love,
like stones
from stone,
rain from rain,
like the sea
from the sea.


This poem is exceptionally beautiful. The sweetest love. The deepest connection to each other, to history, to our own personal worlds. I'm basking in this piece. Luxuriating.

Also, the kind of greeting described in the first stanza is something I hope to experience one day. Whether in a train station or airport, I've always wanted that. "They will embrace for every mile." Lovely.

There's a certain Slant of light

There's a certain Slant of light
Emily Dickinson

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons -
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes -

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us -
We can find no scar,
But internal difference -
Where the Meanings, are -

None may teach it - Any -
'Tis the Seal Despair -
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air -

When it comes, the Landscape listens -
Shadows - hold their breath -
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death -


So, despite the fact that it is "officially" spring, Edmonton has been rather wintery the past couple of days. Looking out the window this afternoon, I was reminded of this poem, so I thought I would share it with you.

The Dream I Didn't Know I Had

Have you ever opened your mouth and had a dream you didn't even know existed escape before you recognized it? I have. Just over a week ago I was having a conversation with some of my fellow English majors and said something off-hand in the middle of a conversation. Just one of those rapid-fire conversational moments. It has been haunting me ever since. Not haunting me like a regret. It's not that crazed bashing itself into the walls of my brain kind of haunting. It's more like this thought has just found a comfortable spot and is sitting there, waiting for me to visit it, to converse with it, to fall in love with it. And I have been doing just that. Slowly. Just briefly stopping by to say hello, ask it how it's doing. I am cautious when it comes to these things. Plus this little guy caught me off-guard. He just snuck right into the middle of a conversation, so I wasn't quite sure how seriously to take him. Today I had a really good conversation with Bean about it though, and somewhere in the course of this caution fell asleep and I fell in love. I'm still hesitant to talk about it with very many people. It's something that may never happen. It's something that, even if it does happen, will not be for years and years. My trepidation also comes from doubt though. Doubt that I would ever be able to accomplish this. Doubt that others would be on board for it. It's still new, still delicate. I don't yet have the strength of conviction. It's coming though. I can feel it. So I am going to keep visiting this dream. He may have been a bit unexpected, but now that he's here I hope he doesn't leave.

Icy

I was sitting at my desk on Monday when I looked up and realized there was ice on the inside of my window. That my friends is how cold it is. This was a very depressing realization. Fortunately I have a space heater. Unfortunately, as soon as I step outside of the lovely little bubble of heat produced by said space heater I turn into a popsicle. Oh Winter. What a joyous season.

On the Inside Looking Out

I'm sure that everyone has heard the phrase "on the outside looking in". It conjours images of the Little Match Girl, or Sara from A Little Princess standing on the street watching the warm and happy lives of the Large family. Sometimes though, I think that the inverse of that phrase is just as true. Sometimes you can be on the inside looking out and wanting to be out just as much as the ones outside want to be in. The circumstances of life can become so controlling sometimes and one can end up feeling trapped. Windows can be awful because they allow one to see out of the cage they are in, but very rarely provide any real connection or possibility of escape. Sorry that this is coming across as emo, it's just something I've been thinking about lately, this feeling of being trapped. I'm not trying to be depressing and I'm actually in a pretty good place mentally right now. This is more of a philosophical pondering, the kind that I am prone to late at night when I've been in hermit mode for a while. I've definitely spent this summer so far feeling rather trapped by some circumstances in my life. I've been spending a good amount of time daydreaming about what I would be doing/what I will do once I'm not in this particular position any more. It's one of the reasons art has become so big a part of my life. For some reason if I am creating things then I feel less trapped, less stuck in the mire of circumstances, and more in control of what is happening. There is always a note of melancholy to daydreams when in this kind of position though. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the knowledge that I am not in a position to do the things I'm dreaming about right now and that always leaves the slightest hint of sadness and desperation on my dreams.

On to the photo. I took this one when my family visited Fortress Louisbourg in Nova Scotia a couple of years ago. It was grey and rainy and cold (as is fitting for Nova Scotia) and something about the way the misty light was coming in this window struck me. It's a photo that I come back to frequently. I feel like there are so many potential emotions locked up in this image and depending on what I'm dealing with I find it can either be hopeful and cheery or rather melancholy. Today it's feeling melancholy. I love it though.

Envisioning Portsmouth

I have been looking at this picture for days now, thinking that I should post it but never knowing what to write about in connection with it. I finally have it though. I am currently working my way through Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. If you know me well then you probably know that I have a love for Jane Austen, particularly Pride and Prejudice, which I have read so many times that my copy (which is only four years old) is beginning to fall apart. Over the past year or so, I've been working through the rest of her novels and dearly loving them. I am just over halfway through Mansfield Park and Fanny's brother William has just come to visit. William is a midshipman and has been at sea for seven years. His ship comes to port in Portsmouth, which is where he and Fanny are from (although Fanny hasn't been there since she was ten). Now, I've seen the BBC version of Mansfield Park already so I have very dfinite impressions of the settings and characters and how they appear. Whenever Portsmouth or any other harbour town is mentioned this picture is the sort of thing that comes to mind. Weathered wood, fog, grey skies, patches of bright paint. It's really rather lovely. This particular image comes from Fortress Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island and is precisely what I think Portsmouth would look like. Fill the streets with Victorian English sailors and voila, you have one of the locales in Mansfield Park. Since I love Cape Breton and actually have a fondness for foggy days (although it was mighty cold there) and also love color, this image has a particular attraction for me. There is something so perfect about the pop of the red shutters against the grey weathered wood in the misty air. Lovely.