His Name Was Peter Sacks

akimbo (uh-KIM-bo) adjective

With hands on hips and elbows turned outwards.

I've tried to write a decent blog entry for the last couple of mornings and nothing's surfaced. My quick, furious jaunt to Tucson proved both ridiculously exhaustive and wonderfully reaffirming, yet, somehow, I am starved for how to put together a set of interesting sentences. So here's an unrelated thought.

A very kind coworker gave me a pocket version of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg as a gift. In the foreword, Goldberg quotes a passage from Jack Kerouac that, in a roundabout way, reminded me of a South African poet I met in college. His name escapes me (as names often do), but the experience of listening to his thoughts and hearing his voice enliven his poems will remain etched in my memory forever. "Patience is passion," he said, nonchalantly in response to a particular poem. "The words stem from the same etymological root."

Patience is passion. I used to say that all the time. It used to ease my more depressed moments, used to make sense out of loneliness, out of pining. Almost like a little prayer--was there ever a god of Patience?--to help balance dreams with reality. And now, from this palm-sized book about applying Zen meditation to writing, a fountain of old practices emerge.

I used to write every day. To journal. Read. Every day. Bike to class, to work. Shoot baskets at a nearby park. Drink on desert porches and draw self-sketched portraits. Sit alone in bars. Midnight breakfast burritos. Sunsets atop parking garages. Tack book or magazine-cut collages to my bedroom walls. Smoke joints, laugh, and drive home. I used to have a car. I used to underline only in pencil. I used to like two cigarettes each night of drinking.

I used to write every day.