Life

... is blindingly glorious

Spring is here, and once again the world is still spinning, and all right.

I remember two springs ago, noticing that after seeing the world light up again, I felt at peace to let it go on without me, seeing that it was growing and greening again - the life was not forgotten in the cold earth. I keep trying to push the rest of the world on with the warmth of my breath, and let it leave me behind to fade gray and smile to watch it go.

I feel that for a long time, it has been hard for me to tell the difference between living and dying - between breathing, growing, exploring, creating some chaos,... and trying to put things in order so I can die responsibly.

My grandmother is showing me living and dying.
My brother and I are trying to show her how well the world is turning - its ok to go.
My brother's slideshow reminds me of life as well.
The pictures are not well-composed, the subjects are often unprepared for the photos, and many are blurry.
But, the life in them! I remember it! A lesson, for me.



Spring is here

I think it's about time I came back to life.

Living is chaotic :)
I will have time for cooling later

belief makes things true

(thanks to Gavin DeGraw for the song title)

I think, that necessarily, people are not to be trusted;
they are to be believed in.

Fractured (I glimpsed a reflection in the gathered shards)

and I realized that it was me
I was broken
I was shattered
I was scattered long ago

and the visions I see in shards around me is not a lost God, but my soul (it is both)
I am not the only searcher, wading through the mirrors casting slanted golden light. I am not the only traveler, the only gatherer, stooping for pieces smaller than myself - we all of us are pieces

I am also a sharp-edged splinter, cast down with my brothers, my sisters, and in the confusion, I have thought they were someone else. I am a piece in the puzzle collecting.

The God I saw dispersed in shining lights,
As he was dispersed,
so the self I am familiar with appeared
and wondered

I call to the stars and they call back because we spoke with the same voice. They hear their answer in my echo.

In this moment, it is I who knows this.
But, soon it will pass and reflect from a different piece of fractured glass.

a crack around cracks around cracks
and so the light gets in
and we are dazzled

Pitzeem and the Mare

I brought a copy of "The Night Abraham Called to the Stars" by Robert Bly with me.
The other night, realizing I was parched for poetry, I turned to it and asked for water. I'd glanced across this poem before, but now have eyes to see:

Pitzeem and the Mare

Let's tell the other story about Pitzeem and his horse.
When the One He Loved moved to the mountains,
He bought a mare and a saddle and started out.

He rode all day with fire coming out of his ears,
And all night. When the reins fell, the mare knew it right
Away. She turned and headed straight for the barn.

No one had told Pitzeem, but his horse had left
a new foal back in the stable. She thought of nothing
All day but his sweet face with its long nose.

Pitzeem! Pitzeem! How much time you've lost!
He put the mountain between the mare's ears again.
He slapped his own face; he was a good lover.

And every night he fell asleep once more. Friends,
Our desire to reach our true wife is great,
But the mare's love for her child is also great. Please

Understand this. The journey was a three-day trip,
But it took Pitzeem thirty years. You and I have been
Riding for years, but we're still only a day from home.


( and another poem, just the last 2 stanzas:)

The Country Roads

...
In my early poems I praised so many lost things.
The way the crickets' cries in October carried
Them into the night sky felt right to me.

Every way of knowing is blessed by bootleggers.
Because the government does not allow delight
To be sold, you have to find it on the country roads.

平江路上找到我心 Peace River Road

Sometimes,
I arrive at moments like node in which I feel that I am in just the right place for the life that I am in at just the right time. They are brief, but deeply reassuring.





As I strolled Peace River Road that night, I felt like a variety of obstacles were shifting and passing around me in such a way that for a few sweet moments, they were all absent at once, giving me a rare straight shot of perception and appreciation. Like all the clouds parting to expose a mountaintop for a few brief seconds, like realizing Mt. Hood through the trees, like flying on my bike around the curve just as the sun emerged on fresh rain and set the world a-dazzle, a clear sweet breath of something like freedom.















It wasn't hard to feel that I was not just at 平江路, but that it was I who lay comfortably beside the river, the bridges my arms stretched out across the water.

A single star peeked out at me from the beloved sky behind ancient rooftops



平江路 was just perfect. I almost felt that, when I'd been trying to get to China for so long, I had actually been trying to come to just this place at just this time. I thank the hand of God.



And I feel grateful to everyone who helped and encouraged me to get here. My Grandmas, Aunt Karen, parents, friends, colleagues, advisers, and also the support of my boyfriend. All the life that brought me here.





And that's how the changes go, isn't it?
They just go, sometimes, like tectonic plates. *Shoop* different.

Spring

The days lengthen and the air warms
I feel my life rise up out of the waking earth

I remember writing on this very blog how my life was going to be awesome, because I was going to be so aware and try so hard. I've been feeling lately that I've just been doing a lot of doing. I need to find the hole in the cracks to fall through and be somewhere real and valuable. But, that description is misleading because I still think that where I am now is a good place for me to be at this point in my life. So, maybe I'm just being dissatisfied or thinking too much about what I don't have. However, I sometimes reflect on the things that keep me busy vs. the things that feel like being where the life is.

But then again, I guess there's always life to be near and in. Need to tap into that every day. (I've been considering whether up and doing Teach For China would be a welcome and growthful change in my life, or whether it is really more of the same (in the way I'm approaching it).

In the meantime, this is somewhat encouraging, and reminds me of other ways I used to write on here ...

2.20.2012

"Jesus > Religion" Spoken Word

found on An Aspiring Yogi in the West, thanks again my one-sided friend.

Imogen Heap, Filmed in Hangzhou

noticed on An Aspiring Yogi in the West's blog. A blog I have a one-sided friendship with.

counting blessings

my gosh, it has been so long since I've written, that I accidentally read a bit.

It is inspiring, to some extent, to think of all the things that I have now, and all the ways that I have come, however normal or expected they may be,

because there was a time when I did not have even them.

I had forgotten what I'd come through.

merge the looking-glass

I was hovering above the surface of the water, on a ferry between China and Japan, contemplating the nature of my fear.

There was a time when I felt established in my concept of the world and of God, even if other aspects of my life were trying.
My concept of God was not unlike as a parent, encouraging me to grow and become spiritually mature and responsible, to stand on my own and no longer need parenting.
This concept began to erode and eventually decentralize, showering every aspect of the universe in a dazzling brilliance, as if to illustrate the riddle: Godisnowhere.
I described it to a friend once as though a long-time pen pal had written one final letter saying that I would no longer be receiving letters from them this way, and that they were not who I thought they were. I didn't know where to look after that.

This corresponded with series of other life-events that wrought general shattering of plane of my life. When I stand on one shard, I feel I have access to the life and memories connected to that shard, but not to memories or self from the other. It feels like it began the morning I was pushed through the ice into cold water and awoke, submerged in my lower bunk, disoriented, homesick for the first time in my life, and trapped, unable to go home. My room was an echo-chamber into which rocks were daily thrown. I first swam, then crawled out and learned to walk again over a period of years. I told myself that I could stay with things because if it ever became /that bad/, I was young. I could restart my life, and still live a relatively long time. In some ways I hadn't considered though, I had already started over, and shouldn't be too hard on myself for only being 5 years old. In the times I could not walk, I learned by being suspended from the mirror of the sky.

I still sensed within me an understanding and desire to know God's will and do it, and a trust that it would be the best way to live, but also a fear that God would call on me to give too much. But, in my difficult times, had not there been provision? Had it really been too much? ...it still feels difficult to volunteer for, although volunteering still seems like the correct choice. I feel conflicted, and I sometimes fear the voice in the sky, though I know that my pain is not from God, and instead, there was provision.

I am reminded the example of a child staying with a kind aunt while his mother is in the hospital giving birth to a baby brother. The aunt is kind, but the child cannot help but link her to the absence of his mother and may resent it.

I was hovering above the surface of the water, on a ferry between China and Japan, contemplating the nature of my fear.

I perceived myself two selves - one contained within me, and the other without. One, the concave reflection beneath the mirror of the sky, and the other spread broad and convex. One side of me, internal. The other side, more external. I perceived that my interior me feared the other, which also feared. A fear of harming, a fear of pain; a fear of abandonment, a fear of insufficiency, and both reflections retreating sadly from one another.

I perceived that these two aspects of me were interchangeable. And both feared. They might as well be one another. I perceived that they did not desire to fear, and that they should be friends. And they were. Reunited, I felt capable and confident in myself and in approaching others.

They were comfortable with one another for several days, until there was a test. I did not succeed, and instead caved and emptied myself like a ship trying to stay afloat, and failed to hold my sense of person, sense of limits of responsibility, and regard my sense of appeasement. I emerged from the scenario, but not with anything of value. I failed to keep from abandoning myself, and I do not know how to ask the reflections to trust again, especially when I am not capable of assuring their safety. They desire to trust me to manage, but I give them no evidence.

Trust-building exercise: Impossible Questions

I was recently reading the following from an old article on Joel on Software about interviewing software engineers, when I came to his typical interviewing process:


Introduction
Question about recent project candidate worked on
Impossible Question
C Function
Are you satisfied?
Design Question
The Challenge
Do you have any questions?


I noted the 'Impossible Question' nested there in the middle and immediately thought that perhaps he was giving an example of a bad interviewing process. But no, it was his own method (...at the time. He now has an updated post on interviewing: GuerrillaInterviewing3)

Here is his description of the way he (at that time) approached the 'Impossible Question':


*****
OK, the third thing on that list is the impossible question. This is fun. The idea is to ask a question that they have no possible way of answering, just to see how they handle it. "How many optometrists are there in Seattle?" "How many tons does the Washington Monument weigh?" "How many gas stations are in Los Angeles?" "How many piano tuners are there in New York?"

Smart candidates will realize that you are not quizzing them on their knowledge, and they will enthusiastically leap into trying to figure out some back-of-the-envelope answer.
*****


I stopped after reading this to analyze the mingling feelings of dread, numbness, and envy that I was feeling, surprised since this was an informative article by a knowledgeable person. Why should I be anything other than interested and happy to learn from it?

I realized that I felt a bit put-off by the section: "Smart candidates will realize that you are not quizzing them on their knowledge, and they will enthusiastically leap..."

I feel that I am a smart person, but would not have responded to the Impossible Question that way at all. I think that perhaps a better adjective than 'Smart' would be 'Confident', 'Experienced-with-interviews', or even better:'Trusting' ... because my first emotional response upon imagining being asked the examples of 'Impossible Questions' was not a leap into an enthusiastic challenge (that contained too much variability to have any hope of being accurate in), but to think to myself, You don't really want to hire me, do you?

It occurred to me that my past ... 5? 8? Years of significant human interaction since leaving home has carried strong elements of feeling that if I am not careful, people will set me up, take advantage of my goodwill or whatever else they want from me for their own sake, and discard me for not fulfilling impossible (usually unspoken) demands if they have the chance. At least being asked an 'Impossible Question' gives me a chance to realize what game is being played and exit by accepting the better situation of being discarded sooner than later. If I really want something out of a situation, and can play the game long enough, then it can work. If there's not something I want so much, then Ok, we both know what's going on. I'll be going now.

It occurs to me that in good situations, this sets me up to feel always on edge, always needing to cross my t's and dot my i's and use exactly correct punctuation. It has kept the monsters from leaping out of the shadows and devouring me so far, so I keep doing it. Even when it doesn't work, I keep doing it because it seems like the best way to keep the monsters down. Every now and then, I don't see everything through to the last iota, partly because I may want to assert the ability to assess that it's not always worth it, and perhaps also to give someone a chance to discard me for not being perfect, although, in a situation where I don't have to feel like I should have been expected to be perfect.

This kind of response may be preventing me from reaching for speculative challenges. How many piano tuners are there in Seattle? I think it would be completely absurd to try to actually estimate that with any kind of confidence. However, thinking about it might be interesting in that the attempt to come up with the most reasonably possible estimate might produce some interesting thoughts or connections as side-effects. It can be fun to wonder about something together as long as no one is tricked into thinking they are actually right.

It was good of this article to show me this conflict in ways that I am vs. ways that I can be, and would like to be. I've been needing things like this.

perfect

Somewhere around June 2010, I remember that for a moment, I felt perfect.

Sesame Street

I haven't been paying attention to sesame street in a long time, but I think these more recent clips are great. (videos on Youku, one of the Chinese Youtube sites)

This one is unexpectedly hilarious: G club

And this one is just a good reminder:Will.i.ams Song, 'What I am'

New blogging space

Please check out my new Travel Blog for actual updates.

I have been on the fence about whether or not to continue this blog. Mostly, I think this blog represents a quiet, dark, cool space in my mind that hasn't been visited or dwelt in for a long time. I am not sure if I want it there or not. When I'm feeling friendly, I accept it as part of me. When I am feeling stuck, I want to push it into the past and move forward. But, for now anyway, I am avoiding embarking upon such an internal cultural revolution. I tend to return to the desire of embracing history, even if it's just the desire.

Flowers

"One of the things you have to do with a flower," he said, "is let it grow, it's own way. You have to give the flower what it needs to grow.

patience

When I was younger, each day was its own eternity, and I wondered at adults' comments that months could seem to fly by.

When I was younger, I was amazed by my parents' relative lack of enthusiasm over holidays. They explained to me that although I had only seen a few holidays, holidays happened every year. After many years, you get used to them. I did not comprehend this.

Almost two decades later, I feel weeks flicker past. Holidays come and go like a wheel.

I think that if a person were to live infinitely, seeing all things, whole eons would pass in the blink of an eye and the heaves and surges of the world would become a steady ebb and flow.

I consider that God is infinite patience

Things

In school, one of the things that used to keep me awake was the wondering over how much of me was myself, and how much of me was made of parts that I incorporated from other people. I wondered whether there was a particular thing that I could point to that was myself, since I felt that there should be. If not, then who/what was I?

Now, I feel the situation has almost reversed. It feels almost easier to consider myself as an aggregate, refracted expression of experiences and preferences.

It seems natural that any one Thing is itself an organized, interdependent collection of other things.

Collective perspective

I am a dendrite in the mind of humankind

Whirlwind

"You are such a fascinating whirlwind" he said,
"People are brought together... and improved because of you"

he continued searching behind his mind for words and found them

"You don't seem to have an ego. You try to help everybody regardless of where we are in our incompleteness"