Mixed Moss

So I’ve just finished reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. And, despite the (unpromising) first three hundred (!) pages, I ended by really liking it a lot. Why? Because of how it shows the physical world hanging like a curtain in front of the spiritual or “magical” world, and versa vice. Because of how it shows the language in nature– in rocks and trees and skies and water– and how man spends so much of his life ignoring it.

There’s something in it that appeals. And it’s not just the idea of magic. I know I’ve said this before, but I believe that the reason stories like JS&MN, with their emphasis on the connection between humans and nature, appeal to many of us so much is that they vaguely resemble what the natural order of things was meant to be, and what things once looked like.

Well, there’s this longing inside of me. (No, that’s not new by any stretch, but me writing about it is at least a little bit new. Fresher at any rate than the man-and-nature-are-one-and-all-things-are-connected spiel. My fascination with connectedness is well documented on this Vox.) It’s taken on new urgency now, though; an urgency that I haven’t felt since college choked it down deep inside. An urgency I haven’t felt since high school, when I just felt that the ordinary world around me was the most boring thing I’d ever come across and that I didn’t belong in it and never would. I’m beginning to feel that way again.

Well, maybe to say that the urgency wasn’t there in college isn’t entirely accurate. It was there, as in me trying to escape things; but I just wanted to work in the inner city or become a missionary. I had forgotten. I had forgotten that there is beauty elsewhere than just in our ability to heal and love. The dreamer had forgotten to sleep.

Lately, the dreamer has returned to me. The visionary, who sees things where nobody else sees them. The listener, who hears things where no one else hears them.

So here’s to falling back asleep.

Dream on…

At 5:30pm this evening I got a call from my mother to tell me that the girl in this article is a childhood friend of mine. She is the sweetest little girl you’ll ever meet. And I wish I could hunt this guy down and cut his penis off. But all I can do is stand dazed and witness these scenes of violence and pain as they whirl past, drag past, stagger past, dance past in a haunting waltz. Because this is life, and everyday I see Christ crucified in the eyes of those around me.

Please join me in praying for my friend, her family, her boyfriend, and everyone touched by this wretched and despicable occurrence. And pray for life in this crazy, messed up, sin-filled world. May we all one day learn to live well. May we somehow learn to heal, and to survive, and to make things well.
Witness
by Sarah McLachlan

Make me a witness
Take me out
Out of darkness
Out of doubt
I won’t weigh you down
With good intention
Won’t make fire out of clay
Or other inventions

Will we burn in heaven
Like we do down here
Will the change come
While we’re waiting

Everyone is waiting

And when we’re done
Soul searching
As we carried the weight
And died for the cause
Is misery
Made beautiful
Right before our eyes
Will mercy be revealed
Or blind us where we stand

Will we burn in heaven
Like we do down here
Will the change come
While we’re waiting
Everyone is waiting

There isn’t much that’s cozier than sitting cuddled in a quilt at your computer and voxing with a warm and purring cat asleep on your feet and a cup of hot chocolate at your elbow.

I have often heard that our lives are like gardens. I know who my magician is.

“The grounds of the Shadow House did not perhaps deserve the name, ‘gardens’. No one had tended them for a hundred years. But nor were they a wood. Or a wilderness. There is no word in the English language for a magician’s garden two hundred years after the magician is dead. It was richer and more disordered than any garden [you have] ever seen before.”
-Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell 

I have a friend named Jane who is starting a school in Uganda. I have been helping her by planning fundraisers for the organization she has started, i.HUG.

Recently she went to Kampala for a few weeks to try and find a building to rent to hold the school in for the first year or so (because we haven’t raised enough money to buy or build our own yet). While she was there she did lots of art projects with the kids. One thing they drew pictures of was “Things that make me happy.” Many of them said that it made them happy to play, and almost all of them drew pictures of children jumping rope. I commented on this to Jane as we were sorting through their artwork, looking for pictures we could use for the front of some greeting cards we are going to print and sell. I said that they must really like jumping rope. Jane said no, she had never seen them skipping rope, that she didn’t think they had any skipping ropes (Jane is British, and so she says skipping in conjunction with rope instead of jumping). They must have seen pictures of it somewhere, or seen the children in more wealthy areas of town whose parents can afford to send them to school doing it. It’s surprising how often this sort of thing happens. In children’s art, life is not as it is, but is represented in icons. They see white children in Western media– picture books and comics and cartoons– so when they draw themselves they leave the faces white, even though that is not what they see in real life, because the media they have seen subconsiously informs their concept of what the media they create should look like.

So the other day we were at a school supply store ordering paper and pencils and things for the school, and what did I see on the shelf? Jump ropes– the same kind that we used at recess when I was in grade school. So I bought four of them (they had four different lengths, three for one child but of different heights, and the longest one for three people to use). Jane will take them with her when she goes back. I think that may be the best, most productive, most eternal thing I did all month: buying jump ropes for poor kids in Uganda. I love to think of their happy little faces and how nice and strong and healthy they’ll get playing with their jump ropes.

And now, a tribute to Meg Cabot, one of my favorite take-on-a-cross-Atlantic-flight novelists.  This is from the afterword to her detective novel / chick-lit book, Size 12 Is Not Fat.

“Recently, when I told a friend the title of my new book, she asked, ‘But if size 12 isn’t fat, what is?’

Obviously, this person has never worn a size 12. Or a 14. Or a 16, like I have. She is clearly not s omeone accustomed to trying on a large, only to find that she cannot pull it on past her knees, and that an extra large won’t go past her hips.

Yeah. Been there, done that.

But she did bring up an important issue: What is fat, exactly?

We all know about the numbers…our body mass index, height-weight ratio, waistline measurement.

And we also know plenty of perfectly healthy people who defy the numbers…people who, according to their numbers, should be walking time bombs, but whose blood pressure and cholesterol levels are normal, and who are no closer to dropping dead from being overweight than Kate Moss.

We know, further, that “fat” wasn’t always a faux pas. In past centuries, extra padding was a sign not only of good health, but of prosperity, as well.

So I have a better question for my friend: Who cares?

I mean, if you, like the heroine of Size 12 Is Not Fat, eat as healthfully as can be expected in a world filled with DoveBars and barbecue Lays potato chips, and get your daily recommended dose of exercise, and yet can’t squeeze into a pair of vanitiy-sized 8s from the Gap…what does it matter?

It doesn’t. So long as you’ve got attitude.”

 

Let’s all get a little attitude, girls. 

-Mel 

Have you ever tasted chocolate that is 70% cacao? I have. It is amazing. Not just because I really like chocolate– although I do. But because it is such an indescibable mix of opposites. It is what people call “bittersweet.” Not “Sweet and sour;” that can be achieved by anyone with the proper flavors of alcohol. Amaretto sour, whiskey sour– anything with sweet and sour mix, really. You can even get sweet and sour sauce at a chinese restaurant. The opposit of sweet is not sour– it’s bitter. And the only thing I’ve ever had that is both bitter and sweet is extremely dark chocolate– that is, it has a very strong percen tage of cacao.

Lately my life has been like that. Intensely bitter. Intensely sweet. So strong that it makes me drunk, just on life. Being unemployed is like that for me. I worry a lot and feel very hurt and a bit bitter; but it forces me out of the normal routine, the chatter that fills my ears and mind and time and will not let me think or feel or get in touch with the life inherent all around me on this planet. Sometimes I can’t even get out of bed; other times I go for long walks early, early in the morning when it is cold and dark and the grass is crispy and the only people awake are commuters who haven’t gotten into the city yet or people getting off the night shift. I take walks in the afternoon too, and my favorites are when it is raining a little bit and all the colors appear more intense, more saturated, and there are delicate white lichens and green moss on the trees, and the green spikes of ivy climbing the dark grey tree trunks is so beautiful that it makes me want to be green and grey too.

Sometimes all of this is so big and beautiful that I just stand and breathe it in and revel in it. But other times it makes me feel lonely. Because I know that out there in the trees there are faeries and nymphs and dryads and that I can never meet them because they are apart from me. There’s something about nature that draws mankind, but we cannot communicate with it and be a part of it. Maybe that is because we were meant to understand and rule and love it, but the first man and woman shut themselves out and lost the key at the Fall. Lewis wrote that maybe someday, when the earth will be healed and all things will be reunited and restored, perhaps then humans will be truly at one with nature in the way God always meant us to be.

In the meantime, we are separated not only from nature, but from each other and from God. And because of this separation we are forever trying to connect and to understand and to be understood. I think most people in the world go through life feeling like nobody truly understands them. Perhaps this is most noticeable during adolescence, but I don’ thtink the phenomenon ever goes away; it’s just that people lower their standards; they still have a deep-seated desire to be understood, to have somebody see them for who they really are and to love and appreciate them, and it motivates them more than they know. But adults have put that desire away in a little box in their heart and shut it up and tried to forget about it. Over the years and through the generations we have become very good at forgetting. People throw themselves into work. People as a species are remarkably hard-working.

People who are not very good at forgetting about it may become depressed, or become alcoholics or abuse other substances, or (still worse!) write poetry lol. Or they might become very focused on having sex with people so that they can feel intimate physically and get a rush and just ignore that other need, which is physical but is also emotional and mental and spiritual. (Freud was actually quite close to the problem, in fact; but he assumed that it stopped at sex and didn’t realise that the problem went deeper and sex was just a smoke screen for a lack of intimacy and being understood; no wonder all those women were willing to talk to him for hours! They just wanted somebody to listen. Freud himself, I think, used all of this to distract him from his own problems too.)

So when I have a job and lots of distractions I can ignore all of this for the most part, this need that is caused by being apart and disconnected from mankind and God and the world around me. But when I have nothing to do but be alone with my thoughts and drink coffee I come very close to this loneliness, this state of being apart. And I can see that everyone is just like me in that sense. Everyone walking down the street, or riding on the city bus, or walking through the grocery store. And I start to make little attempts to reach out, to connect. I talk long walks to connect with nature. I read books to connect with what other people are thinking. I ask a friend to coffee but become too frightened of getting hurt to tell them anything real. I help with fundraisers for children in other parts of the world so that I feel a little bit more connected to mankind. I write letters to God, or draw pictures for him, and go to church and sometimes to mass.

But it doesn’t work. None of it works. Because although I see the great big wonderful beautiful picture that is Life and I love it and I feel very grateful for it, and that sweetness fills me, I always come back to the bitter fact that I am shut out and cannot fully enter in. And neither can anybody else. It is not even a matter of the universe consciously shunning me; it is worse than that. They do not even notice me. It is not for us to attend the ball, but the Great Ones do not mind if we look on from a distance, if we peep through the windows or watch from our hiding spots behing the trees.

And so life is very bittersweet. Sometimes it is so bitter I do not want to even get out of bed and am not sure I want life to go on, and sometimes it is so sweet that it takes my breath away. But always they are two sides of the same coin. And I shut my eyes, and flip the coin, and then open one eye just a crack to squint at the coin and see which side has landed up this time.

Am I crazy?

It strikes me that I come across as very chicken in this post. Maybe I am. I wish that I could view life as a big adventure and love every moment of it, but that also with Peter Pan I could say, “To die would be an awfully big adventure!”  Perhaps the secret to life is that you must love life so much that you would die to live it. Perhaps that is what will ultimately set us free from fear.

My sister and I have been on line doing a bit of Christmas shopping…but we seem to have gotten a bit sidetracked…here’s the result!

Who knew? Lol. No, actually, I can see this. My attitude is less than stellar at times and I seem to try all the wrong ways before I try the right ones. Sadly, it won’t make any sense to most of you unless you’ve read the books and/or seen the old BBC version of the films…I hope that the current group gets to make all of them straight through, because the BBC stopped after #4, the Silver Chair (the book which introduces this character).

Go on, click on the banner and the link will take you to the quiz. Tell me who you are!

This is a fabulous spot by Dove as part of their Real Beauty/Dove Self Esteem Fund campaign. (I don’t know if they are doing this out of legitimate concern for the girls and women of the worldor if they’ve simply stumbled to the fact that it sells their products; but I for one applaud them.) It shows the transformation of a model from when she walks in the door of the studio to when her picture appears on a billboard– time-lapsed down to about sixty seconds.

Check it out: Dove “Evolution” commercial

Kudos to Steve, whose blog I ganked this from.