She is nine, beloved, as open-faced as the sky and as self-contained. I have watched her grow. As recently as three or four years ago, she had a young child's perfectly shallow receptiveness; she fitted into the world of time, it fitted into her, as thoughtlessly as sky fits its edges, or a river its banks. But as she has grown, her smile has widened with a touch of fear and her glance has taken on depth. Now she is aware of some of the losses you incur by being here--the extortionary rent you have to pay as long as you stay.
Aces and Eights
8.29.2009
I who have died am alive again today
well here I am. moved into a new comfortable cozy apartment. wonderful friends and happy reunions.
something feels funny though. something heavy. the night before I left we talked of brokenness, uncertainty, sickness. a friend of mine is praying each day for her husband's life to be spared overseas.
and summer is over. with it goes that strange season of nothingness, of blankness, of emptiness. I lost myself this summer; I became somehow less.
but now to be in this place surrounded by people who know me at my best and fullest. to realize how many steps backward I have taken these past few months. to see again, and bitterly, and more acutely than ever before, how living at home reinforces my insecurities and renders me functionally incompetent.
[note to self: never live at home for more than two weeks straight ever again.]
it's nice being here, of course. the freedom is priceless. here I can be a person, find myself again. but here I no longer have the safety of indifference. here I feel, here people treat me with respect. here I will be found out.
sanctification, it seems, is a continual crumbling into bits. always I am breaking, healed only to fall apart again.
[so I turn to annie dillard yet again:
"Holiness is a force, and like the others can be resisted. It was given, but I didn't want to see it, God or no God. It was as if God had said, 'I am here, but not as you have known me. This is the look of silence, and of loneliness unendurable; it too has always been mine, and now will be yours.'"]
something feels funny though. something heavy. the night before I left we talked of brokenness, uncertainty, sickness. a friend of mine is praying each day for her husband's life to be spared overseas.
and summer is over. with it goes that strange season of nothingness, of blankness, of emptiness. I lost myself this summer; I became somehow less.
but now to be in this place surrounded by people who know me at my best and fullest. to realize how many steps backward I have taken these past few months. to see again, and bitterly, and more acutely than ever before, how living at home reinforces my insecurities and renders me functionally incompetent.
[note to self: never live at home for more than two weeks straight ever again.]
it's nice being here, of course. the freedom is priceless. here I can be a person, find myself again. but here I no longer have the safety of indifference. here I feel, here people treat me with respect. here I will be found out.
sanctification, it seems, is a continual crumbling into bits. always I am breaking, healed only to fall apart again.
[so I turn to annie dillard yet again:
"Holiness is a force, and like the others can be resisted. It was given, but I didn't want to see it, God or no God. It was as if God had said, 'I am here, but not as you have known me. This is the look of silence, and of loneliness unendurable; it too has always been mine, and now will be yours.'"]
8.15.2009
life is good in santa barbara
I found the piece that was missing. in Santa Barbara, of course.
now I am home but just waiting to get back. I am whole and brimming when there.
my santa barbara friends teach me about living, growth, possibility. we adventure, we explore, we walk. we don't sleep much--there is too much life to live.
lights in a garden, classical guitar, black tea, fire pits, peach hookah, a corner loveseat.
heavy rolling clouds of fog, streetlamps.
freedom. yogurtland at 11 at night. hours spent in antique shops. a penis traced in the dirt and ash on my windshield? somehow it all feels like I am finally living, like I have finally stepped into the world I've been watching turn on its axis.
the ocean is there. still and ever-moving. always the same, always changing. so easy to lose the baggage, to drop all that weighs down. it is enough to surrender, to let the beauty surround, to realize yes I too belong in this picture, I am beautiful too.
one day I will have a little house and decorate it all in blue and white with birds and vases and candles. maybe I'll start collecting now.
I am humbled in this city
There seems to be an endless sea of people like us
Wakeful dreamers, I pass them on the sunlit streets
In our rooms filled with laughter
We make hope from every small disaster
Everybody says "you can't, you can't, you can't, don't try."
Still everybody says that if they had the chance they'd fly like we do.
weepies, a painting by chagall
now I am home but just waiting to get back. I am whole and brimming when there.
my santa barbara friends teach me about living, growth, possibility. we adventure, we explore, we walk. we don't sleep much--there is too much life to live.
lights in a garden, classical guitar, black tea, fire pits, peach hookah, a corner loveseat.
heavy rolling clouds of fog, streetlamps.
freedom. yogurtland at 11 at night. hours spent in antique shops. a penis traced in the dirt and ash on my windshield? somehow it all feels like I am finally living, like I have finally stepped into the world I've been watching turn on its axis.
the ocean is there. still and ever-moving. always the same, always changing. so easy to lose the baggage, to drop all that weighs down. it is enough to surrender, to let the beauty surround, to realize yes I too belong in this picture, I am beautiful too.
one day I will have a little house and decorate it all in blue and white with birds and vases and candles. maybe I'll start collecting now.
I am humbled in this city
There seems to be an endless sea of people like us
Wakeful dreamers, I pass them on the sunlit streets
In our rooms filled with laughter
We make hope from every small disaster
Everybody says "you can't, you can't, you can't, don't try."
Still everybody says that if they had the chance they'd fly like we do.
weepies, a painting by chagall
8.07.2009
Summer, a sketch.
Somedays I wake up, look in the mirror, and don't recognize myself. Everything is the same: I can trace the contours of my face, nose, mouth, I see how comfortably my hair falls across my face and eyes, I even see how my body fits just right in the little familiar bathroom space. But something unnamable, something just underneath the surface is different.
That strange unsettling feeling defines my entire summer. Everything is normal on the surface, but there is something deeper that is not right, something that remains just beyond the reach of consciousness. This summer, like every summer, like every time I spend any extended period of time at home, I lose touch. I live in indifferent routine, moving from day to day, task to task mindlessly, accomplishing nothing.
I've written little all summer, and I think the reason is because writing requires long looking, attention to detail, stillness, thought, analysis, patience, work. Almost daily, I realize I am slipping, somehow losing parts of myself that I have worked so hard for years to maintain. When I was younger, there was something inside me that compelled me to make music, to write, to stargaze, to seek solitude and silence, to create--no matter what the circumstances. But I've realized this summer that the need to create is gone.
In a way, it's been freeing. I've been thinking about Hedda Gabler's obsession with Ejlert's "beautiful death," and I wonder if I have had an obsession with living a beautiful life, with creating beautiful things because somehow that beauty will transfer back to me. I am learning to let things be, to let myself be: a process approaching but never reaching product, in continual refinement, change, and growth.
At the same time, however, I feel blank, lost, somehow less than who I know myself to be. Spending more than a few minutes at the piano every few hours gets more difficult with each passing day. The moments when I lose myself in a book and find myself more invested in the lives of fictional characters than I am in my own life are few and far between.
My life is a constant state of transition, it seems. A continual give and take, a neverending loss of one thing and gain of another. But I think I'm okay with that--I've been reading Annie Dillard lately:
At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, an single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence.
We were put on earth to recognize God's work before we carry out His will, to receive before we give, to experience before we create, to see before we share, to be before we become. It is enough to be here, to rejoice in what is known and the mystery of what is not yet known, to see the beauty that dwells in all.
That strange unsettling feeling defines my entire summer. Everything is normal on the surface, but there is something deeper that is not right, something that remains just beyond the reach of consciousness. This summer, like every summer, like every time I spend any extended period of time at home, I lose touch. I live in indifferent routine, moving from day to day, task to task mindlessly, accomplishing nothing.
I've written little all summer, and I think the reason is because writing requires long looking, attention to detail, stillness, thought, analysis, patience, work. Almost daily, I realize I am slipping, somehow losing parts of myself that I have worked so hard for years to maintain. When I was younger, there was something inside me that compelled me to make music, to write, to stargaze, to seek solitude and silence, to create--no matter what the circumstances. But I've realized this summer that the need to create is gone.
In a way, it's been freeing. I've been thinking about Hedda Gabler's obsession with Ejlert's "beautiful death," and I wonder if I have had an obsession with living a beautiful life, with creating beautiful things because somehow that beauty will transfer back to me. I am learning to let things be, to let myself be: a process approaching but never reaching product, in continual refinement, change, and growth.
At the same time, however, I feel blank, lost, somehow less than who I know myself to be. Spending more than a few minutes at the piano every few hours gets more difficult with each passing day. The moments when I lose myself in a book and find myself more invested in the lives of fictional characters than I am in my own life are few and far between.
My life is a constant state of transition, it seems. A continual give and take, a neverending loss of one thing and gain of another. But I think I'm okay with that--I've been reading Annie Dillard lately:
At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, an single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence.
We were put on earth to recognize God's work before we carry out His will, to receive before we give, to experience before we create, to see before we share, to be before we become. It is enough to be here, to rejoice in what is known and the mystery of what is not yet known, to see the beauty that dwells in all.
8.04.2009
too long.
I haven't written in ages.
something about me feels lost.
oh well.
this entire month I'll be home in gilroy [the middle of nowhere] with nothing to do. my older sister already left for college, my younger sister is leaving this weekend...and I won't be leaving til the last week of august. hopefully I'll write.
anyways:
new favorite pandora station: she & him.
currently reading: angela's ashes, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
and I'm a little in love with jim halpert.
something about me feels lost.
oh well.
this entire month I'll be home in gilroy [the middle of nowhere] with nothing to do. my older sister already left for college, my younger sister is leaving this weekend...and I won't be leaving til the last week of august. hopefully I'll write.
anyways:
new favorite pandora station: she & him.
currently reading: angela's ashes, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.
and I'm a little in love with jim halpert.
5.19.2009
mayterm, growing up, going home.
book after book. I'm sifting through, trying to read word by word. so much, too much to process so quickly.
I want to stop, let the words and meanings seep deep into my soul and mind and heart, change me. but there isn't time.
the words, the pile of books relentless.
but I love this experience, love the progress I have made, love how much I have learned in just one short week.
for the first time in my life I know prolonged stillness, quiet, independence. I'm living in a little house with two girls, one works from 8-5 each day and the other is just as busy with class and homework as I am. so the house is mostly empty most days.
now this is no small change for me: I come from a loud in-your-face chinese homeschooled family with five siblings and always relatives or friends at my house which make dorm life seem quiet and calm. strangely enough, the shift to living in a neat quiet house with eight hours of sleep every night came smoothly, completely naturally, as though this is the life that I was meant to have all along. except the learning how to cook for just one person thing.
in high school I craved time alone, an empty house. I would snatch at times when I could sit alone, listening to silence. I remember those rare once-every-two-or-three-month occurrences, after putting the children to bed, turning all the lights off in the house moving blindly from room to room like a ghost or sitting in the center of my house, resting, not anticipating anything, not waiting, not thinking, just sitting, eyes closed, body still, heart rate slow, resting.
sometimes with a bowl of ice cream and mango cubes.
and here I can read a string of books in a week's time, here there are no interruptions to cook dinner for ten people, or pick up someone from dance class and drop off someone else at boy scouts and buy a chinese newspaper for my grandpa.
but of course I know all this is short-lived. four weeks from now I'll be back home with my entire family and both sets of grandparents and an uncle and aunt from the east coast and going half-deaf with all five languages spoken in my house, and chinese tv shows, and stir-frying, and kristina's hannah montana, and maddie's...everything, and maria's need to control the craziness, and the boys running around and screaming and laughing, and my mother trying to pay attention to everything and talking to everyone at once, and my father trying to make peace, and my going-deaf-and-senile grandparents repeating everything twenty times and loudly and all at once.
so every moment I am learning to value for what it is now, hoping to bring that all-pervading peace I know so well here back home with me.
don't get me wrong. I love home. I love my family. I love the craziness, although in small doses. and in a strange way I long to be back now because nothing will be the same from here on out. maria's going to med school, maddie's going to boston, and the children are growing up. gabe couldn't speak in sentences when I first came to college and now he's reading and writing. kristina looks more like maddie each time I go home, and mikey is getting wiser, concerned about how much of a temptation candy is for him.
sometimes I want my brothers to never grow up, to keep picking me flowers and drawing me pictures, and climbing onto my lap and asking me to tell them stories about dragons and adventures and aliens, and to always be entranced by the squirrel in the front yard, and to always find something to laugh about, but in other ways I'm so glad they're growing up and changing. because, strange as it seems for me to be saying this, I have been growing up and changing and becoming more deeply myself or at least accepting more of myself and it's not half bad.
...but oops I should have reading all this time.
I want to stop, let the words and meanings seep deep into my soul and mind and heart, change me. but there isn't time.
the words, the pile of books relentless.
but I love this experience, love the progress I have made, love how much I have learned in just one short week.
for the first time in my life I know prolonged stillness, quiet, independence. I'm living in a little house with two girls, one works from 8-5 each day and the other is just as busy with class and homework as I am. so the house is mostly empty most days.
now this is no small change for me: I come from a loud in-your-face chinese homeschooled family with five siblings and always relatives or friends at my house which make dorm life seem quiet and calm. strangely enough, the shift to living in a neat quiet house with eight hours of sleep every night came smoothly, completely naturally, as though this is the life that I was meant to have all along. except the learning how to cook for just one person thing.
in high school I craved time alone, an empty house. I would snatch at times when I could sit alone, listening to silence. I remember those rare once-every-two-or-three-month occurrences, after putting the children to bed, turning all the lights off in the house moving blindly from room to room like a ghost or sitting in the center of my house, resting, not anticipating anything, not waiting, not thinking, just sitting, eyes closed, body still, heart rate slow, resting.
sometimes with a bowl of ice cream and mango cubes.
and here I can read a string of books in a week's time, here there are no interruptions to cook dinner for ten people, or pick up someone from dance class and drop off someone else at boy scouts and buy a chinese newspaper for my grandpa.
but of course I know all this is short-lived. four weeks from now I'll be back home with my entire family and both sets of grandparents and an uncle and aunt from the east coast and going half-deaf with all five languages spoken in my house, and chinese tv shows, and stir-frying, and kristina's hannah montana, and maddie's...everything, and maria's need to control the craziness, and the boys running around and screaming and laughing, and my mother trying to pay attention to everything and talking to everyone at once, and my father trying to make peace, and my going-deaf-and-senile grandparents repeating everything twenty times and loudly and all at once.
so every moment I am learning to value for what it is now, hoping to bring that all-pervading peace I know so well here back home with me.
don't get me wrong. I love home. I love my family. I love the craziness, although in small doses. and in a strange way I long to be back now because nothing will be the same from here on out. maria's going to med school, maddie's going to boston, and the children are growing up. gabe couldn't speak in sentences when I first came to college and now he's reading and writing. kristina looks more like maddie each time I go home, and mikey is getting wiser, concerned about how much of a temptation candy is for him.
sometimes I want my brothers to never grow up, to keep picking me flowers and drawing me pictures, and climbing onto my lap and asking me to tell them stories about dragons and adventures and aliens, and to always be entranced by the squirrel in the front yard, and to always find something to laugh about, but in other ways I'm so glad they're growing up and changing. because, strange as it seems for me to be saying this, I have been growing up and changing and becoming more deeply myself or at least accepting more of myself and it's not half bad.
...but oops I should have reading all this time.
12.17.2008
we have become beautiful without even knowing it.
Where do I begin? I am a hundred times over filled with happiness. Returning to familiarity is like slipping on an old favorite sweater; reassuring, it stirs my heart to sing.
It’s the collection of all the little things that make the difference: sunshine, blue skies, the sparkling of sunlight on the ocean, the pure Santa Barbara light, and, most of all, old friends who have changed and recognize that I have changed too but still love me the same. I have a suspicion that it is not so much that we have changed but have grown more deeply into ourselves.
I do miss England. I do miss the frost on the windows, tea and scones, the deep glowing green of the trees, the gray that hangs over everything, the thick, heavy, almost yellow-tinged light in London. But England is far away now, a whole week in the past; England to me is dream-like. It’s as time though time had stopped for three and a half months and I had a long elaborate vision, hardly real.
Coming back makes me realize how far I have come and how much I have learned. In many ways, I feel no different now than I did before I left, just a little wiser from mistakes I have made, a little more knowledgeable of who I am, how I work, what I desire in life. I have seen how people can hurt each other, I have seen how people can love each other, can forgive each other, can move on, even when healing seems counterintuitive.
With only twenty-eight people living together for three and a half months, all things were magnified: drama, sorrow, joy, laughter. There were few places to go alone and there was little privacy [even the walls were thin, almost non-existent], and so we became a little family who wept together, laughed together, argued with each other, wrestled with each other, processed through our pasts and presents and futures together, danced and sang together, played together.
There was one night at the end of the semester when we all put on our best selves, and all things were made beautiful. In the darkened gymnasium we talked individually with each person on the trip, naming the good in each person, apologizing for mistakes and hurting each other, and showering each other with only truths. Actively searching for the good in people automatically revealed the beauty in these people that was often hidden because we were too lazy and selfish to look for it. There were tears shed, there was uncontrollable laughter, there were memories recalled, and I came out not only knowing myself more truthfully but seeing others in a more truthful, and therefore more beautiful, light.
After that night, I can look into these people’s eyes and say with all honesty, ‘Namaste—I see the divine in you. You are beautiful, you are God’s creation, and He has so much more in store for you. Do not cheapen yourself, do not settle for less, because you deserve more—you are God’s child, you are His beloved.”
Of course, not all things were made perfect that night. Deep-seated hurt takes time to heal and conversations are only stepping stones. But I am determined not to lose what I learned there even though the truths seem less relevant now. I find myself gripping on to these truths because I know they were true of myself then and are not entirely dependent on place and time, and so should be and must be true of myself still.
And now, today, in Santa Barbara, my circle of twenty-eight people has expanded exponentially. But still, my task is the same: to look deeply for the good, for the divine in each person without reservation, to name the beauty that is in the people around me.
And it is good to be back. It is good to see how much people have grown while I have been gone, a growth I may not have recognized if I had spent every day with these people. How wonderful, how beautiful—God is here, God is present, God is working. I am in love with life.
It’s the collection of all the little things that make the difference: sunshine, blue skies, the sparkling of sunlight on the ocean, the pure Santa Barbara light, and, most of all, old friends who have changed and recognize that I have changed too but still love me the same. I have a suspicion that it is not so much that we have changed but have grown more deeply into ourselves.
I do miss England. I do miss the frost on the windows, tea and scones, the deep glowing green of the trees, the gray that hangs over everything, the thick, heavy, almost yellow-tinged light in London. But England is far away now, a whole week in the past; England to me is dream-like. It’s as time though time had stopped for three and a half months and I had a long elaborate vision, hardly real.
Coming back makes me realize how far I have come and how much I have learned. In many ways, I feel no different now than I did before I left, just a little wiser from mistakes I have made, a little more knowledgeable of who I am, how I work, what I desire in life. I have seen how people can hurt each other, I have seen how people can love each other, can forgive each other, can move on, even when healing seems counterintuitive.
With only twenty-eight people living together for three and a half months, all things were magnified: drama, sorrow, joy, laughter. There were few places to go alone and there was little privacy [even the walls were thin, almost non-existent], and so we became a little family who wept together, laughed together, argued with each other, wrestled with each other, processed through our pasts and presents and futures together, danced and sang together, played together.
There was one night at the end of the semester when we all put on our best selves, and all things were made beautiful. In the darkened gymnasium we talked individually with each person on the trip, naming the good in each person, apologizing for mistakes and hurting each other, and showering each other with only truths. Actively searching for the good in people automatically revealed the beauty in these people that was often hidden because we were too lazy and selfish to look for it. There were tears shed, there was uncontrollable laughter, there were memories recalled, and I came out not only knowing myself more truthfully but seeing others in a more truthful, and therefore more beautiful, light.
After that night, I can look into these people’s eyes and say with all honesty, ‘Namaste—I see the divine in you. You are beautiful, you are God’s creation, and He has so much more in store for you. Do not cheapen yourself, do not settle for less, because you deserve more—you are God’s child, you are His beloved.”
Of course, not all things were made perfect that night. Deep-seated hurt takes time to heal and conversations are only stepping stones. But I am determined not to lose what I learned there even though the truths seem less relevant now. I find myself gripping on to these truths because I know they were true of myself then and are not entirely dependent on place and time, and so should be and must be true of myself still.
And now, today, in Santa Barbara, my circle of twenty-eight people has expanded exponentially. But still, my task is the same: to look deeply for the good, for the divine in each person without reservation, to name the beauty that is in the people around me.
And it is good to be back. It is good to see how much people have grown while I have been gone, a growth I may not have recognized if I had spent every day with these people. How wonderful, how beautiful—God is here, God is present, God is working. I am in love with life.
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