An Analogy

Fragile,
but I put on the facade of independence, strength, and all the layers of an I'm-my-own-person armor. I need that protection, because if I were to be truly exposed, I would be nothing but a game of Jenga, allowing people to pull out parts of me and manipulating them.
I would be comprised of small blocks of wood, no bigger than a finger.
One by one, they would lie flat on the table. And they'd start to stack by threes, until eventually, they're all used up. That's when the game will begin. A finger would find a loose piece, and pull it out.
I would become an unstable, disarray of random sticks; holes everywhere. I know that one little nudge or shake is all that it would take.

I sway from side to side, not knowing the danger. At the same time, I come to that full acceptance of exposing myself. I choose to. I realize, it is not the people around me that pulls out those pieces.

They have always been missing.

And I come to that place of recognition, and find that God is slowly filling in those holes of instability. He's carefully sliding those missing pieces back in, and making sure they never come out.
He starts at the foundation.
It is for His glory.

"But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me." -2 Corinthians 12:9

Another Reaction

of a poem called "Susie Asado" by Gertrude Stein

Like the fragmented, disrupted pieces of unrelated images and things, ideas that are on the brink of forming, random random objects and images of them, this poem was a self-constructing mosaic that was forming. I read it at first, and immediately disliked it, but after reading it again I was able to look at it for what it is and appreciate it for being so puzzling. I like to think that my thoughts are relevant, and one will link to another coherently like a chain that builds itself into a band. But, that's usually not the case. It's often spontaneous and uncalled for, so relative to what I may have seen or heard or felt or smelled. Sometimes your on something, like coffee, and sometimes insignificant objects like pots and nails and trays have some sort of value at the given point in time. But it doesn't have to make sense, just because I said so. I can take these broken parts of glass from bottles and bowls, plates and cups and create a picture, to create something someone can recognize or will never make out. In the end, what matters is that I've created.

Wait a while.
But that doesn't mean
Don't do anything
at all.

Impressions

The Snowman

By Wallace Stevens

There’s a silence and solitude of winter that captivates me with a lonely stillness. To appreciate the “frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow”, and the “junipers shagged with ice”, as described in the poem, “one must have a mind of winter”. There’s this deep resonating quietness that this poem brings to the reader, and almost a sense of emptiness that one finds in beholding something that combines aesthetics and destruction with a slow pace. It is opposed by the actual characterization of winter, that it does not creep up on us but rather it hits us with a blast of sharp winds, and frozen particles of water usually exploding down on us. Then suddenly, we realize that the leaves on the trees have evaporated and all the green in the grass have been sucked out; in one moment of realization. To have regard and to behold the beauty of the aftermath in detail, there’s a need to being “cold a long time”, like Stevens states; cold a long time because then one becomes a part of the surrounding, and then one finds themselves actually listening in the snow. Listening, and waiting until you see that first snowflake falling, dancing on the skirts of the wind, and as small as it is you notice it because it sparkles loudly. And you keep watching it until it’s so close that you can see its unique pattern, and for a split second you realize you’ll never see one exactly like that one, then it sits on your nose and it melts like ice in flames, and crawls down onto your lips. It’s followed by millions more, and these snowflakes collectively take their time arriving. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, just time. And you notice the shimmering cotton blanketing the once green and warm place, and the trees now bearing fluffy white coolers on their arms, while holding icicles at their fingertips. Everything is united and blank at the same time, yet nothing disappears. Every little branch becomes more magnified and the ground is puffed up, and you take it all in one by one. You “behold nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”.

"The Man on the Dump" by Wallace Stevens

With all the imagery, the music of the words and the contrasting elements of the poem, it was a piece that was hard to digest. My reflex was to grasp the underlying, overarching idea or theme that Stevens might have been talking about. My initial impression was that it was a piece that was really unplanned and jumbled together. After reading it the fifth time, I entertained the idea that maybe that was the point. Though I’ve never actually seen a dump myself, I usually picture them as large landscapes with piles of random crap that may have been someone’s treasure at one point, or a necessity, souvenirs, old food and wrappers, rodents; alive and dead, everything under the sun that is subject to time and decay. Like the piles of old and used and rotting things, I thought of how the mind is so intricately layered with mounds of decomposing ideas, emotions, motives, reflection, inhibitions, that somehow disintegrate into some sort of truth- Like how my impressions and reactions became words on this paper.

When things are new and fresh, they are like dew-but it applies to just before the sun or moon rises because as exciting and vibrant they are at first, they are just as disposable. Like the poem says, "between that disgust and this, between the things that are on the dump and those that will be, one feels the purifying change". The duality is dismissed to being one-sided, only life, only happiness and other related products. As it states: “one rejects the trash”. Apparently, that’s when the moon creeps up, because there’s a limit to valuing something, and then it must be disposed as soon as something better is in place. It’s the time of death, darkness, decay, but beholds a beauty in which we understand and observe the “elephant-colorings of tires”, and “everything is shed” as we see things the way they really are, ironically, with less light.

It all reminded me of when I was in elementary school, and I had gone to the grocery store for my mom. On the way there, I noticed myself treading over the filthy sidewalks flooded with sloshes of brown snow and wrappers of all sorts shoved in and between the crevices. I was old enough to feel disgusted. I remember the sky being a mysterious medium between gray and blue. Though it was bright enough to see what was in front of me, it was dark enough to see the moon. I had just enough money for what I needed, and a dime leftover. I walked out of the grocery store, and spotted an old man sitting on a large white pail. There were layers of soil smeared here and there on his skin and jacket, and the thread on the hem of his pants were branching out from all angles. And he held out his blackened hand, slowly, with a smile, to me. I hesitated for a second and almost passed him. But I pulled out the dime I had, and placed it there. He looked down at it and smiled again. After that I could only think about how that man must not have been a beggar after all.

Where did the time go? Another year has come and gone, and I'm amazed again at how utterly possible it is to still feel like a little kid at age 20 (going on 21). But I reexamine my ideals, principles, and goals and realize I'm actually moving. My legs are definitely moving, but I have no idea where I'm going. Maybe I like the drama of teetering between uncertainty and reality and dreams.

a thought

what if we weren't so inhibited by fears and anxieties of all sorts...ranging from rejection to appearing too much of something, or anything, putting yourself too much out there, being so vulnerable that you can hear a pin needle falling and hit the ground like a piano crashing, an anxiety that somehow wiggles into the crazy space inbetween your thoughts, worming through the silver lining or what's left of it and feeding on it until it's dried up, and you can't say what you really feel without the ringworm of the possibilities of what the person may think digests your intention before it's carried out...if we weren't, then we'd be truly, undoubtedly honest with ourselves and especially...especially with others, and god forbid we'd have geniune pure-as-refined-gold relationships that were so real that there would never be enough room for lukewarm emotions, actions, thoughts, and never enough time for seconding guessing every little minute detail that inevitably will shape and mold our discretion and the definition of what love looks like...and just...be.

i'll take a step back and wonder how i ended up in this tangled mess. i'll take a step back further and realize it spells out understanding. and then i look at you in the eye and we say at the same time: i do.

Question

Is it
Possible
To Love
Someone
For
Their
Heartache?

The Individual

All humans have a need for aesthetics--for depth & perception.

We have to meet it by some manifestation of our inner self being projected into the outward space, which we like to call our appearance of some sort--skill, potential, knowledge--trying to format a dimension to our thoughts, because it has a tendency to leap out in the tangible world of things.

It builds upon that need that must be fulfilled by some means.

However, the question "why" is fiercely loyal to who you are.

Mannequins in Munich?

Munich Mannequins by Sylvia Plath took me back a couple weeks ago when I was actually in Europe, visiting Germany, the Czech Republic, and Austria. Before my sister and I left for Germany, we were told by a reliable source that German people are known for their stoic nature, and serious disposition. If we were to be obnoxiously loud or too friendly, we would be labeled as rude or weird. Going there, being told that, we saw what we expected. Tourists were easy to spot amongst the natives who were a bit more composed, a bit more reserved. The differentiation may have just been established by preconceived notions, but I guess being set apart put me in the objective standpoint. I could gawk and awe at the new environment, culture, and people; on the outside looking in. It was in this manner that I read this poem.

The first time I read it, I thought it was about a relationship between a woman and a man. The woman, seemed to be describing how their relationship was like the winter, cold and voiceless and based on the ideal of perfection. Reading it a couple times over, I realized that this poem was about a relationship, but between a woman and herself. Her inner being seemed to be addressing her flesh; her appearance.

First she considers the label of perfection as a sterile state of being. Though the menstrual cycle comes every month, there is no purpose because it cannot bear children. Perhaps both literally and figuratively, the speaker talks about perfection as being personified as a woman who cannot produce children, and also telling her outward self that gaining or maintaining perfection would mean not bearing any as well.

Almost as if she is talking to a mirror, she says, “It means: no more idols but me, /Me and you” her inner self telling her reflection that she will not have any image or standard as an idol but herself, just as she is. Then, almost as if to justify the reasons for it, she describes the victims of perfection as mannequins, leaning in Munich in their short-lived loveliness. Between two lively cities, they lean in a morgue, a container for dead-bodies.

The whole poem I pictured all of the strong imagery described, and I could almost feel the cold wind from winter, the screaming silence, and the flat, crisp uniformity of these mannequins. I imagined a seemingly deserted town, with nothing but snow and a couple of footprints here and there as the only evidence of inhabitance. The only lights on are coming from a hotel where these mannequins are mingling, staring at each other as if staring into a mirror. The other, is coming from a small house, where two women are standing face to face, one is talking, the other is voiceless like the snow.

Purely Based on Nothing

Separate the writer from the speaker, and you simply get a perspective. Put it together and you get a personal experience. Often times, it’s hard to know when.
Is it really all that important to dissemble the person behind the words rather than grasp the meaning and concept of the words themselves?
I pose an indirect request, but a conflicted one.
I write to construct…to form a point of view, to describe something in a refreshing way, or to simply organize my thoughts. Either way, I want to be heard.
I cannot control the reaction, but I can force an opinion. The writer has the right to do that. However, most of the time it’s about my own thoughts; my own depictions. I struggle to portray things from an angle that is all-around objective, all by itself. But at the same time I cannot remove myself from my writing…the choice makes all the difference; the choice, as in the method and technique and the words that I select.
So I bury bits and pieces of myself within the selection of words, rather than the subject or the perspective I give. At least, it’s what I aim to do. Not to say though, that I don’t like to use what I’ve experienced as a motivation for what I express.
I’m a firm believer of a theory that I came to realize about myself. Everyone, and I say literally everyone’s first impression of me is always the same. Since it takes me a long, grueling time for me to open up (feeling totally myself around a person), taking a while to verbally express my thoughts, writing was an outlet. Now it’s become, dare I say it, a passion. It’s the first skill that I’ve come to terms with as something I want to progress, but not necessarily become the best at. My goal is to be able to express, appropriately, adequately, according to the object or subject of which I’m trying to describe, rather than competing. Subconsciously, maybe it has to do with a bit of insecurity? I know I cannot become the best. The best has already come and gone; everything has been done and said. More importantly though, there are opinions; a lot of them.
I want to steer away from overindulging myself in introspection…without God in the picture, it leads to absolutely nowhere. The gluttony in emotions is a direction towards self-destruction when there’s just one purpose in mind: to gratify it. So I try to keep Him at the root of what I say, though at times my efforts are in vain.
The thing with expressing feelings, is that it’s hard not to use statements or metaphors that has been overused. I cringe when I catch myself being cliché, so I strive to be different - so ironically what everyone wants, but in different manifestations. I want to pose a new expression, and that’s what I intend to do in every piece I write.
Ideally, I would want the reader to consider the words themselves, and possibly learn something about themselves. I say that, but I feel that my writing is so personal. Even when I attempt to discuss purely objective matters, I end up concluding that it still has revealed a lot about myself.
Even in what I aspired to do here, I produced something entirely different.

Art...

evokes an emotion, erupting from a vague realm; from an abyss, open for multiple interpretations, inviting us into the world of our inner being and how we place ourselves in its depiction of something, to extract a better understanding of identity and concepts... 

seems to be somewhat morbid, somewhat alienated, sometimes sadistic, at times depressing, but never boring as it beholds technique, time and meaning, always unique and intriguing because we learn about ourselves just by observing...

even at the risk of being pretentious...

We will never cease to redefine who we are in the world we live in.

We are forever indebted to each other's thoughts. 

Max Lucado & Sue Wood

This semester, I'm taking Journalism 200 where we've been writing a lot of stories & interviewing a lot of people. Today, I'm doing a story on the bell tower. It's that ancient-looking, pointy castle beside the union. It's also known as the Altgeld Tower.
I'm sitting here, in front of the entrance to the bell tower waiting for the very narrow and obscure entrance to open. The door is placed so furtively that you'd miss it even if you walked by it a thousand times. You won't find it unless you're looking for it, attentively.
Walking around in circles, I finally asked a teacher where the entrance was. He seemed rather annoyed, maybe because he's been asked that a lot. Finally finding it, I am staring at this little door. It's at a regular height, but half it's width. There's a sheet of paper that's pasted on the front, with a picture of the swirly end of a violin and a quote:

"There are things only you can do, and you are alive to do them. In the great orchestra we call Life, you have an instrument & a song, and you owe it to God to play them both sublimely." - Max Lucado

This quote is unarguably inspirational, yet seemingly antithetical to the Chimemaster: Sue Wood. She runs the bells, and is in charge of who gets to play at the bell tower. Being an elderly woman, she seems like just another senior citizen, but she embodies Lucado's quote. One would never expect such swiftness from someone so calm and old, but Sue Wood definitely lives by the statement. She plays & arranges the music, schedules the concerts gratis.
As her experienced hands glide over the levers that ring the bells, she does it with grace and skill. Having most of the songs memorized, Wood smiles as she pushes each note. She comes back to the tower everyday, and has been for the past 37 years without fail. Her motivation? Pure enjoyment.

just some thoughts

Sometimes, I wonder if a person can be essentially addicted to their insecurities, and all the promises that come with it. Maybe it carries a comfort for them, a regular familiarity, or some lazy backdrop. I can relate. Don't get it wrong, it's not a depressed state, neither an inferiority complex (for me at least). It's just...a state of being, come about through developmental experiences and some subtle behaviors manifested in a variety of situations. My quietly pronounced personality can be psycho-analyzed to a needle, pinpointing to where exactly my life went wrong or right, and how I've become molded into the person I am now. But, the reality is that we don't know anything else than what we are, and we adapt to it somehow. There's no sound proof that we can see and hear that says I'm who I am because of this and that. With anyone, there's obvious reason to why we do certain things, and some shared underlying motives that drive us to behave. However, a person can't look at another individual and say, "You are what you experience," without knowing them first.
Can we really attribute our identity to what we've lived, through our senses?
Well...I think there's a duality to everything. Like a double-sided tape, we gather two sides of evidence in our lives-something that maybe we won't be able to explain until we see God. I wish there was a simpler way to contain it, but the reality is that there is the spirit's nature as well as the sinful nature that tugs at our hearts. Both will always be there, and always pulling at the brain to make certain decisions. It's complex, but so...complete that it's possible to feel locked up and released at the same time.
We are body AND spirit, through the soul and the mind.

Random Rambling

In my philosophy class, we were discussing on David Hume. The focus of the book centers around the idea that there must be a designer, in observation of a design – in other words God created us and everything else. But as the book progresses, the question of whether the design – a.k.a the universe (in a sense) is good or bad, therefore questioning whether or not the designer is “bad” as well.
At first we addressed the characteristics of God; or at least what people conclude about how He is and how He should be. Everyone agreed that God cannot be fully comprehensible, and we can’t fully grasp the concept of Him – at least the “Christian” God. He is viewed, and thus should be perfect in every way.
The argument for most skeptics in my class was that as long as pain and suffering exists, then we have to consider the possibility that God by default is a “bad designer”—that He may not be perfect, or good at all. So the other argument was how about Satan and Hell? Someone said, “God may have not created evil itself, but he created the source of evil – the angel himself before he became Satan.” Reasonably, God should have known what would happen to Lucifer, because he’s supposed to be all-knowing. The “flaw” that most of my classmates find in God is the question “why”. Why does God allow evil? Why does He allow people who enjoy inflicting pain on others to exist? The response, as a lot of people would’ve probably guessed, was that we can’t have good without evil, or vice-versa because we wouldn’t have the contrast or the difference to define them. Reply to that is obvious too: well then why can’t God allow us to be in a perfect, happy state where we don’t need that comparison, if He is all powerful, to make us perfectly happy – perfectly good all the freaking time?
I surprised myself with my immediate reaction. It was totally unexpected and naïve of me to feel personally unjustified, and even angry in a way. But I really had to question if I was getting stirred up because it went against my own thoughts that I’ve been somewhat conditioned into thinking, or if I absolutely believed in it. I had to hear my classmates out, because that was the only way to know for sure.
I don’t consider myself to have strong faith – but I have a lot of ideas of what it is, and what Christian life is—not to say that they are more than assumptions and biased conclusions. In the midst of trying to reconstruct my thought process and even the way I approach the bible, I found myself asking the most fundamental question: is God real and do I believe in him?
I felt a strange sense of duty to address the arguments. Perhaps it was because of guilt for not speaking up or “defending” God in class, or a nagging conscience that requires me to justify what I’ve been trying to learn all my life was not a waste.
Regardless of what was said during class, I realized that it wasn’t that I couldn’t deny the absoluteness of God, but I refused to even consider it. How can God be God if he isn’t absolute in every way? I don’t have enough knowledge of the bible to say I guess, but in a weird way it almost makes things easier. The way I see it is that God IS perfect and absolute, but not to the way we understand. Like the argument given, we can’t comprehend God or why he allows certain things. I feel like it keeps going back to the question of God’s ultimate control versus human free will. Obviously, God could essentially make everything to be perfect without the need to define what it means to be good in contrast to what it means to be evil. He has the ability to do that, but he did not design us in that way, therefore the argument is that he is a “bad” designer. Well…what do we define as good and evil? God did allow certain things to occur that no one can explain or begin to explain. However, can we say that all pain and suffering is evil/bad? Evidently, this is not the case because people can potentially evolve in character/knowledge through pain and suffering. We can all agree that harm inflicted onto anyone is bad; but only if we fixate on the action itself. Something to illustrate it better I guess, is “love at first sight”. Some people experience this, and claim that they just know that he/she is the one, without rationale or reasonable evidence. They start to get to know each other, and get married. From an objective point of view, if I fixate only on the instances that they fight with each other, I will conclude that they don’t love each other, and their claims were a lie. But, if I see how they treat each other collectively on a day-to-day basis, I can see that they love each other despite the hard times. How does this relate to God? Well we can see the “bad” things that happen in the world, and ask how could a righteous diety allow it? But we don’t, and we can’t see the bigger picture. In cliché but nonetheless true terms, God has a bigger plan. I don’t know if it even negates the argument, but we can only see a miniscule portion; a quarrel in a marriage (figuratively speaking).
The older I get, and even in the short life I’ve lived so far, I’ve realized more and more how relative everything is. Our definition of truth is degrading as the generations progress, and post-modernism is becoming more a part of that definition. Everything is relative – and to me it’s as if saying “anything goes”. It should be liberating, right? To me, it’s more like justifying anything and everything. People will say, truth is anything that you perceive and understand with evidence to be factual. Well then, there is no definite universal “perspective” that we can judge and even decide who is a criminal or not for example. Who we are and who we choose to be doesn’t even matter; the line between good and evil becomes hazy. I don’t want to emphasize the matter of what good and evil is, because I don’t think that’s the point of God. I feel like He’s perfect in the sense that good and evil both exist; free will is created; humans have the ability, and more importantly the choice to get to know God. Ideally, Christians want to say that they believe in God because we’ve “fallen in love with Him” in a sense, but often times that’s not the case. I can say that through personal experience and constant struggle to believe that He’s already handed everything to me on a platter – giving me space and grace to love him.