A Love Letter to Austin

From a city-avoidant, sub-rural-urbanite

My black, opaque tights slap and lick and settle on my skin as they set the stage for a cold and cozy winter. Lo-fi music plays in the dim coffee shop where I’ve plopped my soul this morning. The corners of my lips tug at a gentle joy. I settle my back against a wooden bench, safely tucked against the wall, with an idyllic view of the place as it fills with the slow trickle of an earnest Friday daybreak.

Brisk air seeps into the dusty corners of my creatively stagnant and overly-occupied mind, breathing life into spaces I haven’t known how to clean or how, with, to be.

A warm cappuccino caresses my fingerless-gloved palm as a gentle breast might, found under my fingertips on an extra lucky morning.
Although this curve is ceramic, it still feels extra lucky.

Outside, the leftovers of last night’s rain echo the image of newly constructed buildings as they stack themselves into the sky and back again, diving into the city-streets of Austin.

I got to see Vulture Feather last night. Assuming the name correlates with the spiritual use of such an item to remove evil influences from people and objects, the moniker nails the musical group’s transcendent aural offerings.

I didn’t know about them until yesterday morning, but wow, am I glad I do now. They're a “post/pre/future punk band from the mountains of California & New Mexico…These songs are amorphous vessels encapsulating the dream-like, liminal fields that all of us as beings are passing through from one moment to the next. The spaces in between the events that seem to be arising incessantly from the powerful projector that is our mind. Beyond the reaches of time, neither remaining nor departing.”

Mmm. Such delicious grooves to slide movement into.

I wish for mornings of movement, prayer, and quiet.
I wish for more commitment to myself.
I pray for my internal fire to expand and fill me with passion and faith, drive and a taste
of everything about my art that I miss.
I miss the city, it would seem.
How funny… how much I’ve done to escape concrete jungles, and yet how inspired I feel when I let one in.

What truth have you been resisting in the name of logic?

A hui ho,

Julia