journal

I finished a journal today. It doesn't matter how long I have had a particular journal; it always feels like I am saying goodbye to an old friend.

I wasn't expecting it to end - I thought I had a few more pages. It was a little too sudden for me today.

It's rather full of angst and confusion; but it was with me through some difficult times. I feel very grateful momentarily.

Pictures

I bought a new computer recently and it comes with fancy photography software. I am jealous of the pictures I see on there. The smiling people with the beautiful lighting. Mine never turn out so well. Eyes half closed, faces only partly in the picture: things like this occur frequently in my pictures. 

I suppose that I could practice more with my camera, read a few photo-taking tips online. I do not like always pulling out my camera. I am also suspicious of how a picture seems to verify facts. "I have the picture that I was at Mount Rushmore, therefore I was."  Some moments can't be captured, they can only be experienced. 

I'm also pretty lazy at uploading them to my computer, let alone sites like Facebook or Picasa. 

But if you are interested, Most of my uploaded pictures are stored at Picasa. 

Re-enchanting the world.

While I do not consider myself to be a literary critic or snob or anything of the sort, I must admit that I rarely find a book that truly delights me. I read a lot of books that I find "interesting" or "thought-provoking" but little that stirs something inside of me. However, today I did finish one that quite delighted me.

I took a class my senior year at Wheaton called Modern Mythology with Alan Jacobs. We read The Lord of the Rings and The Princess and Curdie and a crazy book by Charles Williams called All Hallow's Eve. One book we didn't read, but which was recommended to us, was Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Dr. Jacobs said that this book was a cross between Jane Austen and Harry Potter. I'm not a Harry Potter fan (and I found that if most of your HP knowledge comes from Wikipedia, don't mention this to a room full of people discussing the end of the seventh book.) but I do enjoy Jane Austen to a high degree. I probably would have forgotten about the book had I not found a used copy for $1. Hence I bought it and brought it along with me to Mexico.

I can't remember when I started reading the book - probably in November, but I finished it this morning. The paperback is a 1006 pages of closely set type and several pages have digressive footnotes that can take up half the room on the page. The story, which wasn't at all dull to begin with, began to pick up steam halfway through as numerous different story threads started to weave together. I thought it was quite addictive and read the last 500 pages or so just this week. At the end I wished it continued, to keep me in the world.

The basic plot is of two English magicians, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. The story begins in the early part of the 19th century and covers a time of about 10 years. It interweaves true British history with an additional, magical past. An extremely powerful English Magician, known mainly as the Raven King, ruled a kingdom in Northern England for 300 years but in the past half millennium English magic had slowly fallen asleep. Norrell and Strange wish to wake it up.

Clarke creates a host of characters, Englishmen, Fairies, day-to-day and enchanted, and the story darts back and forth among them. Plotting her novel in the midst of one winter after another (skipping summers) gives the magic a cold feeling, and the tone is quite matter-of-fact, tongue-in-cheek at some points. this, I think, succeeds in keeping the novel from being a little over the top.

One of the things that fantasy novels do for us is re-enchant the world. When I was a young girl I played Fairies with my sister every season - like the Fantasia fairies that brown the leaves and skate frost upon pond. We had a huge, tree-covered yard and when I went to college I realize how enchanting my childhood had been. Overgrown woods full of unexplored haunts and mystical vistas. Scope for the imagination and room to believe that the world is more than scientifically-explainable processes. I think many of us lose this as we grow, but fantasy brings it back. It reminds us that the world is a big, beautiful, hard place and returns a sense of wonder to us.

Jonathan Strange has brought a sense of that wonder back - visions of stones speaking to water and trees greeting a returning king. A world in which much is possible and mundane things may in fact have an incredibly important significance.

Actually, I missed some stuff because it seemed so mundane at the time. However, because the book was so large I had trouble going back and finding it so that I could read it again. I do not know if the book will end up being a long-time favorite, but, whether it was the story or the world or the ideas that drew me, I can truly say that I have not enjoyed a book like this in quite a long time.

an exercise in humility

I am currently applying for graduate programs in sociology. Actually, I'm about finished, with only two due dates ahead of me and my active roles all completed. I am applying to nine Ph.D. sociology programs and have already received notice that I have been accepted into one program (as I haven't heard from any others, that makes it 1 for 1, I guess).

When I came down here to Mexico it was for several reasons, but one was that I wanted to practice trusting God, if that makes sense. I wanted to leave my comfortable and under-control life and let God lead me with cultural struggles, raising money, unsureness about the future. Looking back on my journal through the past year I can see that I have grown in how I trust God, but I still don't trust him completely, as these applications have shown. I was a little bundle of intrusive worries - worries that would subside as I focused on my work or my friends, but which surfaced with pinches of awareness in how I still had to finish this and send that off and oh no! I don't think I changed that information before I attached it to the email!

Currently, as I have finished my part, these worries surface when the online status updater lacks my GRE scores or my transcript. What in tarnation? That should have been there since October. I have to stop and tell God again that I want him to be in control. I place this application in his hands. There's not much I can do, but I want to practice trusting.

I also have to practice humility. I didn't start off needing to, as I didn't have much confidence in being accepted (I thought I had weak research experience.) There was a huge difference once I heard from the first school, though. It began with a grateful acknowledgement that now I have an open door to receive a Ph.D. But before long I was thinking "ah, this personal statement is fine. It's already gotten me into grad school," and expecting to hear positively from all of my other schools as well. Is there such a thing as gluttony of schools? I can only attend one at a time, but I want to be accepted into all of them.

Oddly, I think often of the people with whom I attended high school, thinking how I will increase in their estimation. People for whose opinion I have cared little, but over whom I still desire superiority. Odd the workings of our human nature, hm?

Isaiah 26: 12 - Lord you establish peace for us. All that we have accomplished, you have done for us.




I shall also have to be careful in my social life, for, as Jane Austen says "A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can." (Northanger Abbey)

Found

I watched the movie August Rush with my friends Elizabeth and Juan the other day. It's a recent movie about a young musical prodigy who is eleven years old and has never met his parents. People tell him that he'll never find them, but he keeps believing, because he hears something that tells him they're still alive.

The movie has some wonderful music in it and some deep themes that resonated quite clearly within me. For all it's faults, I thought it was a worthwhile movie.

August's parents meet only once and don't see each other for eleven years, but during that time they are depicted as not being completely whole - they are missing something and know that they are really missing the other person. Though I think the movie would say it was because they are true soulmates, I think it speaks to the union that happens when we make love, a connection that cannot really be broken.

Another part that touched me was when the title character was asked what he wanted to be more than anything else in the world. He replied, 'Found.' More than anything, he wanted to be with his parents. The music that he heard reminded him that he didn't belong in the orphanage. It called him to a greater purpose. The Spanish title of the film is ¨Escucha tu destino¨ Or ¨Hear your Destiny¨. I thought it was an appropriate title.

For its faults, I don't think that the director really knew who was the main character. There is the love story between the parents, but aspects of their characters could have gone much deeper. And August, though the Title character, seemed distant and unknowable for the most part. And yet I think he is the person we should most emulate: being still to listen for the music all around us, waiting, and hoping, and looking to be Found.

update on blogging

I don't know if anyone is still reading this blog, considering that I haven't written in it since the middle of June and I have instead been writing at my Mexico blog.

I keep thinking about this blog, though, and about the nature of blog communication, and the pictures in my head when I think about my two blogs.

I like this blog, quite a bit. It has been my first one, and it's kind of special. I have really enjoyed thinking about how to tell my stories in a coherent and entertaining or thought-provoking way. I have also enjoyed the correspondence back and forth with people who comment (usually my friends or family but once someone I had never met).

This brings me to my second thought, the nature of this type of communication. Many of my friends who are in different parts of the world (as I am) use blogs as places to update their friends and families about their journeys. But instead of sending the update directly to their email (or, are we in the dark ages, their actual mail box) they post it in a impersonal, public space. It now is the responsibility of the friend or family member to check the blog. There are a couple of advantages - the writer can update however frequently he or she chooses, and if someone doesn't want to hear how things are going, they just don't go to the url. Or, if someone else, who didn't originally hear about the blog, finds the link on facebook (*ahem) or some other place, they can jump right in, reading all the way to the beginning if they so choose.

Finally, despite the fact that this is an incredibly public space, it's also hidden. I didn't tell many people about this particular blog, and unless someone finds a link through a search or browsing blogs, only my specific friends know about it. Conversely, my other blog, is much more publicized. I really have no clue how many people read it, but the address is on about 750 bookmarks (along with my face) that I sent out into the world and it goes on a lot of my update emails (I do sometimes send those out as well). This blog was named "The resting rock" and when I think of it, I see a rock or a cave behind a waterfall - the kind that is occasionally splashed on but in general is calm, a place to sit, semi-protected from everything else around it. My Mexico blog, on the other hand, is sun-bleached, and dusty. There's a lot of action and it's visible to a lot of people.

On driving to Fargo, June 12

I drove down to Fargo with my dad tonight. Tomorrow morning I fly out, heading to Fresnillo, Mexico.

After stopping for beef in Grand Forks (Texas Roadhouse), the drive to Fargo was really peaceful. South, the light pink and pastel orange sunlight reflecting off of the rainclouds had an ambient look to it: soft, like the subtle changes of the aurora Borealis. North Dakota mountains hung in the distance. (of course, these are not real mountains; merely the illusion of such caused by bilious cumulonimbus clouds on the horizon.)

Later, the setting sun crusted the western clouds with gold. Dad and I talked about television reception and drove into the rain. Tomorrow he will return, and I shall fly through clouds. See you on the other side.