I would march home from school to my mother's incessant questioning:
What did you learn today? What did they teach you?
This was a Kennedy Household -- dinner is not served until a lesson is shared.
And no amount of hunger, or exhaustion, or boredom could absolve me of this duty to think.
There is no such thing as entertainment, she would tell me.
There is just this bow, this arrow, this eye of this fish.
She's quoting an old tale from Hindu scriptures --
Drona asks Arjuna what he sees when he shoots,
and he says: the eye of the fish.
Where are we? The eye of the fish.
What is the date? The eye of the fish.
Focus, a better safe haven than gold.
Education, a better investment than real estate.
It is this question I ask myself every time I set out to write.
What did I learn today?
What did they teach me as I coaxed this chaos into the life I desire?
Two years ago to the day I was in an emergency room with a needle in my arm,
and today I'm blowing kisses at the sky in a foreign country.
From this I learned that if I'm worth anything later, I'm worth something now.
And so a poem was born.
Yesterday, I saw Las Meninas in real life,
and it was almost as good as the grainy projection I had seen in my AP European History class.
I breathlessly explained what this Velasquez meant,
and it was almost as perfect as the way it was once explained to me.
From this I learned that life can come from me as much as it can come at me.
And that what we give is not always what returns, but it is always what we are.
And so it was written.
Seeing beautiful things requires practice, I'm learning.
We must develop the inertia to let it compel us into motion,
and the discipline to stay that way once it does.
It is here that I appreciate my mother best--
she understood this, that life is an active thing,
that you can fuck around and find out only once armed with a sharp pen, thin skin, and open mind.
And so too, I hope, will her daughter.
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