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 |  A journal of impressions, memories and thoughts. |
| This journal’s goal is not to chronicle the vagaries of daily life, but to record those moments when the greater passions of existence touch the mundane moments of life. As a child, I was inspired by the Romantic poets. I read their journals, and I found in them not mere records of activities but instead deeper musings on existence and on the world around us. |
| Life is made up of stories. Human beings love them, we live them, we listen to them, we believe in them. In our desperate life-long journey to understand and organize the chaos of this world in which we live and move and have our being, stories are the most natural, the most easy way to codify the path of our journey and to see it as part of the greater pattern of existence. Stories touch our hearts; they draw us out of our own world into the milieu of existence; they stay with us when clinical facts and statistics have all been lost. For me, stories are the greatest form of expression. They change as we grow, but they never leave us. We hear them in our cradles, comforting us, amusing us, easing us into this difficult thing we call life, making promises of what may be in our futures. We hear them on our deathbeds, the warmth of memories brought back into ephemeral reality though the power of story, the promise of hope beyond the dark veil of death, the stories of what was, is, and may yet be that eases us out of the story of life and into an epilogue. Stories happen, whether we want them to or not, events spinning through a thousand thousand thoughts, dreams, and footsteps each moment. Yet taking the truth of event and spinning it into the wonder of story, as instinctive as it may be, is not always easy. The miracle of creating story is frequently as fascinating as the story itself, a story within a story – the kind of thing that good old Billy Shakespeare loved. The canvas of emotion and experience is already stretched taut before us, but it takes the hand of a true artist to delicately trace the lines and fill them with the colors of drama that pull us out of our own story and allow us to experience something beyond our ken and invest in the tale of another, real or fictional. That wonder of story is why I have hurried home each night this week and turned on the television. My cable box is typically called upon for an average of ten or twenty hours in a year. I usually prefer film; DVD is the gift of God in my world. However, once every two years, I find myself glued to the television every night. I am well aware that I am in the minority; the Olympics are no longer a major event. The grandiose white hat against black hat drama of the US vs USSR ended with the crumbling of the iron curtain, and most people would prefer reality television like American Idol to reality television like the Olympics. Yet, even armed with that knowledge, I cannot pull myself away. The tapestry of story is just too rich, and the medium to grand. And, of course, the presentation is everything. Unlike the typical football or baseball game, I do not see the Olympics as being simply about sporting competition. They are about achievement, about faith, and about one shining moment in a life that can never be repeated or redeemed. In a few seconds, we catch a glimpse, in word and deed, of struggle, of pain, and of victory. With a few deft brush strokes, a story begins, and we, as viewers, bring its finer details of emotion and empathy from our own plotlines. Set against the driving complications of escalating competition, the beauty of athleticism plays out, yet it is the insights into the lives behind the beauty that makes the entire event so addictive to me. Far from the soggy melodrama of my workplace, where the primary tale of the day may well be who insulted whom during class or whose boyfriend has been caught sleeping with his new drinking partner, the Olympics offer the promise of something greater, something cleaner, something more. They are neither contrived to create story nor are the individuals participating in them merely engaging in less than scrupulous activities in order to attract the attention of a camera. The stories that play out on the screen, woven into a gestamkunstwerk of picture, sound, and story through the magic of television editing, are tiny miracles, bits of wonder which give hope, which inspire, which draw us out of our own story for a moment and whisper what stories our lives might be able to tell, if only. And I sit on my couch, indulging in the wonder of story, believing, in the glow of the screen, that effort and courage do inspire, do change the course of the story, the course of life, the course of the world. |
| Outside the windows, the light had faded until the sky is barely divided from the land, a whisper of blue so deep that it fades into black, its edges blurring into the darkness. The windows are open, last resort against the broken fan for the air conditioner that burned out over the weekend here in our offices, and through them the sounds of the highway and the students leaving for the night filter vaguely in. And, for the first time today, I breathe deeply of the night-scented air and lean back in my chair under the harsh glare of fluorescents. Only one student remains, clicking away on one of the keyboards across the room, and I relax into the gentle rhythms of the music whispering out of the speakers beside my monitor. Today was no different than a thousand other Mondays; the pressures of people and of promises crowding against me. I do not thrive; I cope. And yet, today, even here in the middle of the clamor of distraction and mundane reality, magic found me in the most unexpected of moments. Generally speaking, I hate email forwards. They are the equivalent of annoying insects on a warm summer night. I love email as much as I love a nighttime walk, but I just can’t take the annoying irritants that seem to come with it. Several people have landed firmly on my junk email filter, and more than a few others have gotten replies headlined by the link to a snopes.com article telling them in no uncertain terms that their forward had the validity of the Weekly World News story about the batboy being found for the fifty-first time. So when one of the college counselors sent me an email forward with a video attached, I was less than thrilled. My co-worker, however, urged me to open it; it was “interesting.” Dutifully, I double clicked. I found myself leaning forward, elbows resting on the desk, transported, for a beautiful moment away from the mundane, and into the world of wonder. The film was a miniature gestamkunstwerk, performance art that moved me beyond my expectations, and certainly beyond the rational. It was the simplest thing; a woman drawing with her fingers in piles of sand over a lighted surface. The tools were crude to say the least: sand, a backlight, and ten fingers. But magic does not rely upon complexities, it relies upon the storehouse of wonder we lock away at puberty and upon our capacity to be touched by the beautiful and remarkable. I watched as the artist’s fingers traced patterns into the sand, molding it, to the accompaniment of music, into a series of changing patterns, images of beauty that resonated with me, reaching through the endless demands of work and into somewhere more beautiful, more comforting, and more rewarding. It was just a spark, just something that someone else might have found amusing or ‘neat,’ but for me, it was pure magic. Magic got me through to watch the sky fade into the Florida night, magic reminded me that it is not the complexity of the tools life offers us, but the beauty we create with them. And, as the night settles in, turning the view outside our windows into an impenetrable darkness that simply reflects the room back to me, I turn back to the video clip, again caught up in the miracle that the flick of a finger, the turn of a wrist, can make such beauty, such possibility, and speak so clearly to me of what might be possible, if only I dare to try… (the clip was from a website called sandfantasy) |
| For me, there isn’t much question as far as being an introvert. Fascinated by the quirky, amorphous phenomenon we call “personality,” I’ve taken four or five iterations of the MBTI along with a rather broad range of online personality batteries of more questionable accuracy. On those versions of the MBTI which provide percentile ranks for the individual dynamics measured by the test, I come out somewhere between 70 and 90 percent introverted – a reasonably high result. Of course, I know what that means. I get my energy from being alone. Being in large groups tires me quickly. I prefer to work alone instead of in a group. Believe me, I’ve read the diagnostic. But in the real world, I don’t think about that sort of thing much. I work in a public service job where I am constantly helping students with academic, and sometimes personal, problems. I an the supervisor of my area, and I have four employees whom I must nurture, direct, and watch over. About 50 hours of my week is spent either in my supervisory capacity or actively instructing students in the classroom. When I come home, I am incredibly grateful to see my husband. His emotional support is what holds me together, providing me with the reassurance and approval so vital to keeping me sane and able to keep going through 10 to 13 hour days. But I don’t have time to be alone; it’s not a realistic option in my schedule. So when it does happen, in those rare moments I find myself without human beings in a 200 foot radius, it surprises me. And more than that, it reminds me. Twice this week, I have been home alone. It was not a condition I necessarily sought out; as I said, I value each moment that I get to be at home with my family. Yet, when the realization arrived, the knowledge that I was truly alone, I remembered that “I” at the opening of my MBTI results. There is such peace in alone time. Not lonely times – I know those well too, and most often they strike hardest in places filled with human contact – but in solitude. There are no words for what true solitude means to me as an introvert. I am a people pleaser in my job, in my personal space, in every aspect of my life. With few exceptions, I instinctively define who I am by how well I serve those around me. Even when no one asks or implies, I feel compelled to do, constantly measuring the results on others. I am not comfortable being waited upon, served, or taken care of. I feel obscurely guilty, even when someone does the service willingly. That solitude is a gift for me, for in those moments of silence, I am more free than at any other time in reality. No one will disapprove of anything that I do, nor will they see my mistakes, or judge my level of responsibility. I am able to do what I want without considering its benefit or detriment to others. I can stop moving, stop worrying, and relax. Naturally, it is not a condition to be indulged to excess. Solitude is a treasure, and must be cherished as such. Its excess leads to self destruction, as does its absence. But for me, those moments are ones to be remembered, to be savored, and to be recalled in later moments. |
| They have returned. Every year they come, flooding in from parts unknown, passing through on their way to other places. I knew they had arrived when I got up this morning, stumbling bleary eyed out to the kitchen to start the coffee pot, and I heard them. The sound filtered through the windows and the cracks, the cacophony of the voices of nature: the robins had come. The little corner of Florida that I call home has, as of yet, evaded the hustle and bustle of the tourist trade and the majority of the wealthy residents of northern states moving away to warmer climes. We’re still a pseudo-country town only moderately plagued with the disease of suburbia, still enjoying the luxury of the small pleasures in life like squirrels, raccoons, foxes, and a plethora of mockingbirds. But we don’t have many robins, at least not like we did back in Pennsylvania…usually. It seems, however, that our little country town is a robin rest area directly on the migration route, and, twice a year, the robins come en masse. This morning they blanketed my back yard, a moving carpet of avian life, pecking at the dull blades of grass and unearthing juicy tidbits hiding under the leaves and detritus from the sudden brown and burgundy onslaught. Above the sea of movement, the squirrels dashed back and forth across the power lines, seemingly unsure of what to make of the invasion of their territory, their harsh barks lost in the waves of twitters, chirps, and birdsong filling the air. When I went home at lunchtime, the robins were still there, dissolving into invisibility as I swung open the car door and headed toward the house, but leaving their opinion and legacy all over my roof and rear window in my absence. As I drove back to work, however, they were all around me, wheeling in the skies above me, their black silhouettes sharp against the flushed twilight sky. I almost wrecked twice on the drive, my eyes continually drawn away from the road by the chaotic dance of life above me. The robins were everywhere, springing from the barren tree branches in the hundreds, their wings beating the clear air, whirling in beautiful disorder, filling the air with life. I regretted I could not have simply stopped and watched them. They appealed to me in the way that all miraculous organic nature does. Like the brilliant flashing life of a fish tank, like the pulsing fireflies in the velvet blackness of a summer night, the robins represented the throb of life, the ineffable miracle of nature, forever ordered, forever beyond the comprehension of our straight-lined, geometric world. That beautiful orderly chaos calls to me; it draws out some primal instinct, some memory of what should be beyond the straight, white plastered walls and the hum of the air conditioners. And yet the people around me drove without an upward glance, never seeing the ballet above them, not caring about the pulse of nature, thrumming around their fragile iron shells. By the time I got to work, they were gone, left behind in the woods and the yards closer to my home. I came back here, to the grey cubicle of my office world, and I watched the light slowly fade outside the windows of my office, gradually giving way to the inky blackness of the overcast Florida winter night. I’ll go home tonight, and wipe the robin’s legacy from my car’s roof and rear window like a good suburbanite. But, secretly, in the wild part of my soul, I will hope that when I stumble out of bed tomorrow, the birdsong will be back, seeping in through the straight lines of my walls and bathing me in the balm of nature’s mystery. |
| We all chase butterflies at some point in our life. They attract us, their brilliantly colored wings flickering through the clear air in a dance of magnificent grace that we cannot exist. We follow them, leaning close with bated breath in hopes of somehow sharing in their magic. They have no place in human practicality; we need no pollinating nor are most of us particularly fond of the butterfly’s relations, the “bugs.” And yet we follow them, unable to resist the freedom and passing beauty that they represent to us. Butterflies are strange creatures with their gemstone hued wings, flashing unbelievable color as they pass. They evoke emotion, imagination, wonder, and yet if examined closely, butterflies are not attractive beyond their wings. Their thin bodies and bulging eyes place them in a bracket of creepy-crawlies not exalted by most humans. And yet our minds filter out the insectoid aspects of the little creatures, focusing instead on what they represent to us. We chase them because they are beautiful; they evoke the wonder of childhood, the memory of belief in Truth, Beauty, and all of the other simple wonders that, as adults, we fear to speak out loud. When I was a young woman, still unafraid to give voice to those mind-boggling intangibles that maturity teaches us to fear, I purchased a book on a vacation visit to Haaslam’s bookstore in St. Petersburg Florida. Honestly, I never finished reading the book; it is still resting on a bookshelf at home gathering dust. Its title, however, drew me: Creative Writing for People Who Can’t Not Write. That, I felt, was me. As a solitary child, I found my world, my home in books. I spent more time in literary worlds than in the real one, and my goal in life was to create worlds of my own. I couldn’t not write; I constantly had a notebook at my side. When grown-ups asked me my ambition, I proudly told them that I would be a writer when I grew up. When I suffered at the hands of my schoolmates, I wrote out my vengeance; I was a writer. When I chose the college I would attend, I chose it on the basis of its writing program. But I did not become a writer. Practicality and the iron fist of money and “reality” stepped in. Yet I cannot resist the allure of the written word. I know that words are, in reality, no more than cramped black lines on a pale page. They are nothing special, limited little creatures whose meaning has been carefully chronicled by the followers of Webster. And yet my mind filters out the cold denotative realities, focusing instead on the magic and wonder that words trigger in our minds. I trace their paths, laying them carefully one next to the other in hopes that they will reach beyond the written page into the realm of wonder and touch someone’s soul. I cannot help it; I chase the butterflies of the written word, never tiring of the beauty and wonder of their flashing beauty, the mystery and magic of their flight from the written page to the soul and spirit. I chase them because they are beautiful, because they speak to something primal within me, because I long to follow them to the place I am sure they will lead me – a place where dreams still can come true. |
| There is white in the beard of the spirit of Florida this morning. In the grander scheme of things, Florida is a young place, a place where the hand of civilization has not yet choked the spirit of the land. Many people do not like Florida, or simply choose to ignore or stifle its native flora and fauna; the nature of Florida is different, wilder, younger, less amenable to humanity than the older, gentler spirit of the north. But there is great beauty in that wild soul, if one has the patience to stop and to look. The cold rolled in last night, touching the Florida landscape with the unfamiliar finger of frost and ice. As the sun peered over the horizon, the first glow of light spreading pale fingers across the green and brown landscape of the Florida winter, a strange sight greeted those of us out of bed early enough to see it. The familiar brown stubs of grass, interspersed with the heartier green of “weeds” was cloaked in white. From the hoar-frosted edges of the palm fronds to the shimmering pale blanket spread across the lawns, winter had come. Along the roadsides, cars breathed plumes of white smoke into the pale air as their occupants shivered their way into the chilled boxes of steel and plastic. Drainage areas, turned to lakes as they clung to the memory of last week’s rains, were transformed into patchwork quilts of molten silver, their surfaces mottled with scraps of ice. Deeper ponds resisted the touch of the cold, breathing steam around the ice-coated stems of the water plants reaching upward through their surface to the pale sky. And here and there, as I whizzed by the pale fields, I could see circles of deep green, sheltered from the cold by the drooping branches of the live oaks, standing proud against the frost and the chill, waiting patiently for the promise of summer. Rolling into my parking space, I shivered my way across the grey pavement, squinting against the light of the sun making its way over the scrim of trees to the east of the college. And, in the pale morning silence, I could have sworn I heard the rolling laughter of Florida himself, brushing the ice from his beard and stretching chilled muscles as the day began and the white blanket of frost faded in the liquid fire of the southern sun’s touch. |
| Twilight: magic hour. It is the intake of breath, the pause between where the world shifts from the brilliant colors of daytime into the dim shadows of night. It is the moment when it is most easy to believe in wonder, as the familiar shapes and colors of the daytime fade into the shadows becoming for a moment something new, not yet cloaked in the mystery of night, yet not quite the things we take for granted in the bright kiss of the sun. It is magic hour, a moment of cobalt and periwinkle, a place of purple and grey. |
| Wonder isn’t dead; it’s just eclipsed by Nintendo. Being a humanities teacher is a challenge, to say the least. Most days, I call my class cultural literacy, not humanities. I’ve had students tell me on exams that Archduke Ferdinand was Hitler’s Great Dane, mascot of the Nazi party, that the Medici family moved to China where they invented spaghetti sauce and became known as the Boyardii, and that Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling because he was afraid of heights. But of all the disturbing bits of ignorance I have encountered, one disturbs me more than all of the rest: people no longer understand wonder. The medieval period has always been one of my favorites to study. As attached as I am to the hot water heater, light bulb, and flush toilet, I find myself equally drawn to the sense of wonder inherent in an earlier age. There is, in my mind, a sense of right-ness to considering the more miraculous, simpler explanations for our world, for seeing in the events around us a will and a direct force that the modern focus on Sola Sciencia tends to debunk. Perhaps that makes me a barbarian, a fool, but it makes me a fool who is happy believing in the power of wonder, embracing the primal instincts that still draw crowds to the box office for horror and fantasy neatly wrapped within the twilit safety of the movie theater. Of course, I am no ignoramus; I believe the lessons science has taught us, and I am grateful for their knowledge. But accepting that the pile of numbers and scientific methodology offered up as rationalization is all the explanation there can be is the willingness to kill all of the hope and the Truth I carried with me from the purer halls of childhood. There is a call for me in the medieval belief that the sun rises because people beseech God to bring it up. Something in that mystical, perhaps childish, direct correlation between cause and effect satisfies my soul better than the maze of wires and plastic balls I recall as the solar system from my middle school days. My frustration is how to convey that wonder, how to teach my students to open the doors of their mind, closed and rusted behind superficiality, commercialism, and years of training that anything mysterious can be explained away by a laboratory. If, even for a moment, I can capture their imaginations, I may win the struggle and get them to wonder, even for a moment, whether the roses petals do shudder in anticipation or fear when they pass by. |
| I have neighbors. Yes, yes, everyone has neighbors in this suburban, claustrophobic world in which we live. But I have that kind of neighbors. The house next door isn’t a very large place, not much bigger than my own little 2 bedroom, yet there are always three or four cars out front in varying states of decay. In all honesty, I’m not too sure who exactly lives there or how many of them there are. The population seems to change on a regular basis. Their dogs regularly wander into my yard, and as much as it irritates me and my own pets, I remain grateful that it’s the dogs on my property and not the strange fellow with the yellow and black Mohawk. For the most part, they’re rather innocuous. They work strange hours, and the lights are rarely on when I glance over at night. Occasionally, however, they have parties of the sort that make quiet, early-to-bed old farts like me rather homicidal. For a while, they held raucous pool parties, but recently they’ve stopped treating the water, and the pool has come to resemble the Bog of Eternal Stench, so no one has been swimming in it. Instead, they’ve moved their events out onto the front lawn. For some strange reason it seems, the lawn is preferable to the interior of the house. Perhaps there is not enough space inside the house for the volume of guests, or perhaps the house is completely composed of bedrooms for the crew that inhabits it. Regardless, four or five times a year, a party occupies the front yard, right next to my bedroom, and I have the pleasure of listening to drunken banter that threatens to kill brain cells merely by its proximity and hearing dueling banjos, rendered authentically on a pair of banjos, at two thirty in the morning. They threw one of those lovely galas on New Year’s Eve. In all honesty, I could not begrudge them a celebration of the turning of the spring of time - at first. However, by around three thirty in the morning, I was more than a little tired of the slurred repetition of “Ha-pee New Year” and “Man, you are so friggin’ smashed.” I admit it, by that point, I begrudged them the celebration of the New Year. In fact, I recall asking the Lord why he had not included a remote control with a mute button for human beings in the original plan for creation. The next morning I crawled out of bed a few hours later than usual, still a bit bleary from my late bedtime and the repeated unorthodox wake up calls from behind the bedroom wall. Irritated, I stumbled over to the window facing the neighbors’ property and peered through the blinds at the fringe of scrubby trees overhanging the chain link fence and the line of beer-can filled trash cans huddled against the tan-painted concrete block. And then I noticed the bush between the trash cans and the fence. It was a scraggly shrub perhaps four and a half feet high, its thin branches clearly visible as they stretched up from the sandy Florida soil. A memorial to holidays long past, the bush had doubtless started as one of those catch-all gifts: the traditional poinsettia-in-a-pot that one is never quite sure what to do with. Obviously, my neighbors had done better than I – they had planted their poinsettia next to their back yard fence, and the hearty little plant had flourished. The poinsettia bush was certainly not lush. It fell far short of the rich plenty of verdure exhibited by the carefully cultivated poinsettias I had seen in Christmas displays in Orlando earlier in the month. Yet it survived and grew, tucked away between the garbage cans and the back yard. And more than that, atop the thin spindly branches, a rich green canopy of leaves spread out to the sun, crowned by a pair of brilliant red poinsettias. Even in the least likely place, unexpected beauty and grace in difficult soil. The plant, discarded in a far less than perfect situation, could not help but try; how could I do less? |
| The fog rolled in this morning, softening the harsh edges of the landscape, smudging outlines with damp fingers, and blessing the world with the aura of the sunrise broken into a thousand droplets of luminescence. Behind me, the bustle of morning traffic and the hum of the heat exchanger were no more than abstracts, sounds without the visibility to make them tangible. I climbed the stairs, the fog fading in the familiar embrace of concrete and steel. The heat exchanger for our building is still broken, so I shivered my way into my office and sat for a moment, staring at the familiar desktop of my computer and waiting for inspiration, motivation, or naptime, whichever arrived first. Outside the windows, the sun broke free of the horizon, rising over the dense blockade of live oaks and scrub brush to take its rightful place in the pale blue bowl of the winter sky. I wandered across the rug to the eastern-facing windows, hoping that the touch of the sun would clear the fog from my brain with some degree of the efficiency with which it was clearing it from the landscape outside the glass. Propping my shoulder against the wall, I squinted through the blinds. The tree outside the window long ago lost its leaves, shedding its greenery in its annual sacrifice to the touch of winter in hopes that spring would bring it even greater bounty, a reward for the long months of stark emptiness. The white branches have bobbed outside the glass for three months now, pale fingers against the green and brown of the landscape in the background. But on this morning, the tree was clothed again in a sparkle of light. The morning mist had touched the its branches, and at the tip of each was a single drop of moisture that caught the morning sun, glowing with light. The sun climbed with the explosive energy characteristic of its Floridian incarnation, and as it inched further above the tree line, the tree glowed stronger, capturing more and more of the light in the tiny gems of water that tipped its branches, turning them into diamonds. Even stripped of all the usual ornaments, even here, I had to remember to take the gifts of beauty given…and to glow. |
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