New Year 05: Resolution?

New Year: Resolution?

What does it mean to be guided by sign and song? 2004 is a loose end longing for closure. I am a journeyman searching for someplace I can call home. I am living in DC but it isn’t yet home. Oakland wasn’t either. Oakland was a blanket safekeeping fears I could avoid and with people who would protect me with their pens and manifestos. I had to leave that warrior tribe to expose myself more fully to my weaknesses. This year I resigned from a job I loved that grew to weigh on my heart with the burden of compromise. I wanted more for myself and the students I taught than to guise greatness. I risked certain comforts in doing so and was more afraid about it than I let on. I grieved over this family of 14 and 15 year olds that I’d lost for much of last year. There was something genuine in their expression of unconditional loving that I trusted—above blood and romantic attachments. I suppose they didn’t have to love me at all: just do homework and follow the rules. But in some small way they encouraged me to teach beyond those parameters. Education would be about growing from all the lessons our world provides. I was so often vulnerable enough to admit that I didn’t know something that they admired the process of truth-seeking. It wasn’t so much about finding truth—but the process of wanting it—the sensibility for knowing like when you know your mother’s love or that your heart isn’t where it should be. I am so thankful for their lessons.

I did feel abandoned for a bit. I traveled to NYC twice to sing out the pain, but only left with a longing for dirty pavement, the edge that comes with 24 hour bodegas or house music havens hypnotizing my feet till sunrise. March 2004 through August was this purgatory limbo where I felt very uneasy with my position in life. For all of my noted accomplishments and loved ones, I did not feel love. This time I’ve owned that it’s my shit. I am deserving; but there’s a bitterness about times past when I’ve most longed for it—unrequited or failing to fall for me in the ways I’ve fallen so furiously into it. Through this I’ve learned that even grown folk need new starts.

So I met this chocolate boy in NYC who made me believe that there was love for me somewhere beyond Oakland. And I realize now that it was not at all about him—seductive as his softness was to me. It was about growing uncomfortable with the particular comforts of my past life. I’m not suicidal anymore. I have a great handle on my health and HIV. I plan to live to get a ripe old age—even as I feel that the earth is sick of us here. I know that I’m among those people who will provide roadmaps to our heaven.

In 2005 I’ll be shedding a consciousness of poverty or “just getting by”. It’s my calling to have abundantly because I have the good heart to share generously in ways that can improve the quality of life for so many beyond me. I’m gonna be more happy in 2005 and more resolved about shit. My music deserves to be heard and will. My writing will find needed investments to flourish; and I’ll take myself more seriously as an artist. I will claim that I am, first and foremost, an artist who has gifts to offer in other areas, but who wants, more than anything, to scribble and sing and dance in ways that solicit the sounds and stories of others. I’m a gatekeeper.

I am no longer afraid of being alone. Tonight I am here writing in the house of a friend I love beyond the ways friends are told they can love. There are many men in my life who I love deeply—and womyn too. I honestly don’t know that I want to restrict this loving to whatever artificial, contrived boundaries we create when we “do” relationships. I have and will always love with passion and intensity; and I do hope to someday find (or be found by) a complement. But I do know my residue. And it’s some shit that demands, not therapeutic talk-through, but more time. Time to wake alone from time to time feeling that I am waking with the most amazing, loving, sexy black man there is.

This year I’ll creep out of fringe shadows of celebrated critical review and do a few things to popularize my presence. I’ll remain humble and consult my mother about love and business matters. I love her more than my sporadic contact would indicate.

Nothing is promised, not a next page, nor the pen with which to stain it with ramblings. My soul is continuous though; and so it has returned to accomplish more than I’m currently aware of. It’s a large task and I’m being prepared for the magnitude of it with each challenge or obstacle. Happiness in 2005 will be butter pecan banana cravings in soft pajamas: action flicks with brothas I love and who love me. It will be oatmeal in the morning while I rush to get to work on time, so that I won’t have to work on the same way this time next year. It’ll be sharing the stage with one or a few icons who respect my contributions to the world we are resuscitating.

I have a lot of healing to do, a book to write, more than a few people to forgive, many songs to write, a home to create for myself, teaching to do, and great sex to have in more abundance. I must remember that I am never alone. There’s a raw passionate, turbo energy that says LIVE, LIVE, SCREAM, DANCE, SHOUT, be more fully aware of the ways that you touch the world and are touched in return. This is a very happy time—even as my introspection and stirring in sleep sometimes seems to indicate otherwise. The ball dropped just blocks from here 30 minutes ago. I’m gonna go party and start practicing being happy and smiling more. It’s bound to manifest my most profound hopes and dreams.

Tim’m T. West
01.01.05
12:30 a.m.