Season: Winter

It's wintertime, and I'm closing shop. Shedding the leaves of spring, summer, and fall; embracing the stillness of a snow-cloaked winter night.

Meanwhile, I'll be rebuilding on a new interface, and when things are ready, I'll link to it. Until then, an interim of quietude.

Words to Live By

Philosophies on living, sources varied:

"You need to want to be a butterfly more than you want to be a caterpillar." 

"The truth is always the right decision."

"A little bit at a time, then it hurts less--like a bandaid."   

"It's our secrets that keep us dysfunctional."

"To be an amazing person, you just have to do little things that no one else does."

 "MYF: Move your feet, make your fate." 

(Speaking of Merida from Pixar's Brave) "Her hair's all over the place, and it's beautiful, and sometimes when I don't brush my hair, I pretend I'm her."  

"Au-naturale is always good. It's the best way to approach the Lord." 

We Choose What We Know

One of the greatest things about knowing decisively what you believe is the sense of empowerment that comes from that surety. Not very many things are certain in this world, and we're all journeying. We shape-shift along the way. But choosing to believe in something that perpetuates safety, power, and light--that is freedom.

Kids These Days

If I never have a child who shares my name, these, the children who share my heart, are mine. They are mine because I see them. I see their faces, their eyes, their souls. I see who they are when they hide behind bad-boy exteriors, tough-girl grins, brave faces, silliness, or silence. Some keep silent, afraid to let their mixed-up insides spill to the outside. Some play it cool so you’ll think they’re something they’re not, because they too are afraid.  When they don’t believe they can be good again, I do, because I see what even they have forgotten about themselves.

They are six or eight or ten years younger than me. They are my students, but they are my children too. These are the children who face hell every day, the ones no one remembers except to criticize and condemn them with phrases like “kids these days.” These kids hear it so often and spoken with so much disgust that soon they believe it too. But I don’t. I look into their eyes and see who they are, and more, who they can be.

At nine years old, he alone took care of his dying mother. His older brother, who had already married and moved away, never came back to help. After his adoption, he saw things about his homeland on the news, images of frightening destruction, and no one would or maybe no one could tell him why. He came here, as scared and alone as any boy. For a long time, he never smiled, he never asked questions. He didn’t know how to trust anymore. Slowly, slowly, as he learned about electrons jumping back and forth and laughed at my silly pictures of cells and trucks and dogs, he began to trust. Slowly, he started to learn that he didn’t have to fight alone. He started to smile back, and after a while, he started to smile first. Then his mom, who didn’t understand his fears, took him away again, and he had to start all over learning to trust.

One day she told me her story. “I was born addicted to heroin,” she said. “I have my birth mother to thank for that. And I grew up and there was a chemical imbalance in my brain and I got depressed and seven months ago I found my way to heroin and got addicted again. I was born a stillborn, but then my heart started beating at exactly 6:06. I used to think it was some big mistake. That I was never supposed to live and by some awful mistake my heart started working and my lungs too. But then, my therapist and other people more optimistic than me said I was never supposed to die and that’s why I lived.”

We read “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg and she told me the story of that city was her story too. “To me, this city is not only my home, but the place where I faced my worst nightmares and found that I was able to get through the night.” I told her to write. Don’t put me between your heart and the page. Just write, I told her. She wrote. She said, “If this world were faultless and absolutely perfect, no person would experience courage, strength, and success.” She smiled when she wrote that, for once feeling a little pride in herself. I smiled at her too, hoping she would remember this feeling, my heart pleading for her take this pride and bring it on her road to triumph.

The voices of my children drift down from my ears and into my heart. I hear them. I hear them crying out, afraid to be alone. “Can I have a pocket you?” she said. “Then whenever I am lost, I can pull you out and set you on the table and l can say ‘Amanda, help!’” Their voices sound familiar, ring of my own voice and the moments I find myself helpless, crying out for somebody bigger, stronger, wiser to take my hand too. Then I remember their words, their courage. I tighten my bootstraps and walk on.

Flubber Trouble

Sometimes I let things percolate too much. It always starts out slowly, with just the drip, drip, drip of an idea. Except then the idea gathers and grows and changes shape. I put words to it, and it changes again. Quite suddenly, or so it seems, the tiny drips coagulate and turn into a little Flubber of an idea. A mischief-making, life-of-its-own Flubber of an idea.

Dreams Count

Dreams count for quite a lot, although keeping faith in my dreams isn't always easy. Still, as Mark Mathabane said to his grade-school headmaster, "I will go somewhere, sir. I just have a feeling I will. I don't know why I have that feeling. Maybe I'm just dreaming. But I've had so many dreams come true in my life, that I now look toward dreams for the meaning of my life."

So before I sign off for the next two months to live another piece of my dream, here's theme song I've adopted as I've made choices between the familiar same and the crazy dream:

**close your eyes when listening. the song is better than the video.

And when the theme song wasn't enough, this TED talk helped me too:

So here it goes--the China-mohawk dream. And if my dreams can come true, so can yours.

Valentines with Style

This is niche humor, but oh so great.

And here's something a little more mainstream, for good measure:

Identity Crisis

My roommate is taking a multicultural psychology course in her graduate program, and she told me the section in her textbook on dealing with Asian Americans reminded her a lot of dealing with me. I hope "dealing" was in the non-pejorative sense. If so, I'm highly amused.

I swiped her textbook tonight to find out what she meant. There was a part about selective directness, something about allowing for pauses in conversation, and a bit about the client's need to establish trust and context before easing into difficult (especially emotional) topics. I might concede those points. Maybe that means I'm more ready for my China trip than I thought.

Sometimes I really hate dance.

I mean, sometimes my inner Amazon warrior (cough, feminist) rebels at the choreography. Some of it just seems so...ugh. Demeaning, objectifying, sexist.

Over the holidays, I saw the performance of a couple called "The Duo Amaury" who were somewhere between ballet dancers and acrobats. The first number they danced put him in a position of significant power and made her into his puppet. My inner Amazon started threatening. The next number was better, and the next one after that was better still. The choreography told a powerful story from song to song. I loved it. In the beginning, he sought her out, and she followed, an unwilling marionette. As they danced together, they grew in harmony, and united, they took flight.

Sometimes and really hate dance, and then, sometimes I love it.

The most beautiful film I think I've seen to date

It's a triple story, influenced by both Buddhism and Mayan lore--three parallel versions of the same very human experience. 

One--the lived-in narrative. 

Two--the fictional retelling of one.

Three--the metaphysical redrawing of one and two. 

It's the story of losing of a loved one, losing of oneself, and learning what matters most. It's also the story of a quest. It tells of the sometimes prerequisite descent into hellish darkness before ascent to glory becomes possible and how the way to glory (or "the road to awe") requires that we learn to let go of our own way and accept a higher road. We must sometimes relinquish the things we cling to, things that we imagine hold life-giving properties, in order to accept the ultimate source of life and glory. In the end, the things that matter to us most will all be ours; we will have changed to make room for them. Although our own hand-sketched blue print may be altered or discarded along the way, and sometimes several times along the way, it is this release that yields an internal change of state and finally allows us to accommodate an even better state--"awe." 

Economics Class is Still Fun

On Google Translate:

"And with Google Translate, it's amazing what you can get off government websites. Google Translate does an 85 percent good job. The other 15 percent it's fun to guess on your own."

On Occupy Wall Street: 

"They hold up Occupy Wall Street as the liberal alternative to the Tea Party, but the thing is the Tea Party at least had a charter they coalesced around. Occupy Wall Street doesn't even have a charter."

(Student: well, actually they have a charter now…no government debt, forgive all student debts, trillion dollar increase in this and that, free secondary education for everybody...and somehow no debt?)

"They've made progress. I didn't know they'd coalesced around something. (pause.) If you want to coalesce around fairyland, I guess that's fine."

On Medicare and the debt crisis: 

"Lots of fun stuff to talk about today. The subject is 'what destroyed the United States of America.' "

Students: (laughter, already?, it's finished?)

(Laughter) "I don't know exactly what tense it's in."

On Halloween:

"We instituted what we called the daddy tax. It had multiple functions, but one of them was to teach the functions of government. If you get a service like being driven around the neighborhood, you have to pay for that. The tax came in a variety of forms; it was particularly high in chocolate." 

It's an umbrella day.

Oh, life. Some days just take it out of me. Knock me off my feet, scare me blind. Then friends caught me when I fell, steadied my umbrella-holding hand, and ameliorated the storm for me and for everyone I try to keep under my umbrella. Except I'm learning how very much that umbrella isn't mine at all, but God's. I am the steward. Under His eye I learn to turn the umbrella just so to hold out the worst of the storm. Deep inside, where my breath is rapid and my heart beats fast and the interior liquid motion is found, exists a well of gratitude, deep and still, for those surprisingly steady influencers who stand by to lift and watch and hold me and my umbrella.


Grateful, too, for the gentle voice of the Holy Ghost in reassuring me. Grateful for the healing and peace that is restored thereby. I remember something I read once, a lesson taught President Henry B. Eyring by his father, who was dying of cancer. Of his father, he wrote, 

One night when I was not with him and the pain seemed more than he could bear, he somehow got out of bed and on his knees beside it--I know not how. He pled with God to know why he was suffering so. And the next morning he said, with quiet firmness, "I know why now. God needs brave sons."

I know too, God needs brave sons and strong daughters and strong sons and brave daughters. He needs children who will hold out an umbrella and who will be willing to get caught in the storm by doing so. And if that's the errand He needs run, I'll run it. I'm just unspeakably relieved that I don't run it alone. 

Winnie-the-Pooh, that gentle bear

"Some people care too much. I think it's called love."

A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

http://timeitneedstime.blogspot.com/2011/10/mother-knows-best.html

If this doesn't get you in the mood for Conference...

October 2011 General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Holding on and letting go

Imagine.
Imagine a dream the size of the ocean--
Build it and breathe it and let it go.

And letting go, then dream again.
Dream a dream as high as a mountain--
Build it and breathe it and watch it go.

Then one time more,
Forge a dream as grand as the sky--
Build it and breathe it and never let it go.

Economics Class is Fun

“It’s funny how this major changes you. We make you socially inept. You’re much more likely to cause problems in future Relief Society or Elder's Quorum meetings. You’re much more likely to say something that will just bring everybody’s wrath down upon you.” Dr. Showalter

“I’m in the operating room, and a little disconcerting, cause they were just blaring country music…somehow that didn’t fit the picture I had in mind…” Dr. Showalter

"How do you say 'sun umbrella' in English?"

Today I saw something I never thought I'd see. I walked out of my afternoon class to see a woman carrying an umbrella to protect herself from the sun. This is a sight I've seen many times before, but usually in Taiwan or mainland China and always, always the woman is Asian. But this woman looked more Nordic than anything with her blonde hair and tall nose. I would have stopped to take a picture if I had thought I could get away with it, but even so, she had me smiling all the way home.

Once I was asked by a Taiwanese person what the English equivalent for "sun umbrella" is. I told the person that we don't have such a thing. Maybe I'd better go find that person and revise my statement.

Here?

Of all the things they planted here,
        the ones in this lone corner
                  seem most queer.
Stuff young and old
and black and white--
Both everything of day and night.

Of all the places far and near,
How did I end up here?

If

"If" by Rudyard Kipling. I like it. Some parts really felt fitting. Some parts at first read had me hinged on the cusp of acceptance and rejection. But I like it. 

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Funny Saying

The other day I tutored a student in intermediate algebra. This student has a tendency to panic when she sees too many letters and numbers in one place. I gave her a problem that required her to incorporate her recently acquired knowledge of imaginary numbers. When she reached that step, she froze.

"You can do it," I told her.
"Says the Easter bunny!" she exclaimed.

My other favorite saying of hers? Instead of saying "no way!" she says, "shut the front door!"