Planes

April in Los Angeles. The sun alights my twelfth house: the house of unconscious. My dreams are vivid. I talk in my sleep. In one, my college roommate appears in my kitchen. She is in pajamas and scolding me for feeding the birds.

I leave in anger, in pride, and meet my father who is waiting for me in an airfield. Planes land near us, one after another in perfect precision. I hold my breath as though some part of my subconscious controls this process, engineers perfect landings, in my sleep.

My Vedic astrologer: astral bodies die and are reborn. Every day, every moment, things are dying.

And being borned I think. Something needs to be reborn within me. Something needs to end the malaise. The exhaustion of believing that I am landing planes in my mind in my dreams. Letting go of the machinations of my own mind.

A poem my mother sent me on my birthday last year:

Living With Her


She opens her eyes
and I see.
She counts the birds and I hear
the names of the months and days.

A girl, one of her names
is Change. And my childhood
lasted all of an evening.
Called light, she breathes, my living share

of every moment emerging.
Called life, she is a pomegranate
pecked clean by birds to entirely

become a part of their flying.
Do you love me? she asks.

I love you,
she answers, and the world keeps beginning.



(Li-Young Lee, Behind My Eyes, poems)