Words that Should Exist: Part 1

A new favourite hobby of mine is trying to capture succinctly in words common concepts and experiences of humans. I'm partially inspired by untranslatable words from other languages, which I'm compiling to highlight the transient nature of language but the solidity of human experience. So this will be a multi-part post as I compile experiences and/or the words to describe those experiences. Please do respond with suggestions.

• beach fever - the feeling of being hot and cold at the same time that happens at the beach 
• (need word) - the instant feeling of refreshment from walking barefoot on grass 
• (need word) - the positive feeling of excitement you get when you miss someone 

Poets' Corner

Today I took a field trip to Westminster Abbey and we toured the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. There were poppies everywhere, gold gilt out the ying-yang, and sweet, old marshalls in robes. It was darling and traditional and just a little bit chilly, the way it always is in a stone building.

But tucked away in the northern corner is Poets' Corner, where there are the tombs and memorials to many amazing English writers from Geoffrey Chaucer to Ted Hughes and many in between. I had a moment there, reading the memorial names of many beloved writers all together in one hallowed space. Most of the students only knew a few names... they didn't even see the Bronte's, the didn't know Tennyson or Keats or Chaucer, and it made me so unbearably sad.

I love teaching English to my kids... but it's almost like teaching them about these amazing people... the stories, the history, the culture, the politics, the biography... and I felt very sad that they didn't know these quirky and solemn and sarcastic individuals as I'd come to know them from a lifetime of reading.

I also felt really sad walking into Poets' Corner. I've been writing since I was about 10 years old and I've yet to really refine my craft or focus my energy or contribute to this body of work that I've been in love with my entire life. Will I be the teacher who couldn't do it... I can't write, so I'll teach? I can't read, so I'll teach? I love teaching and I know there is a certain art to it, but I love the art of reading and writing as well and there just seems to be so much I don't get to teach the younguns I'm charged with. There's so much they won't get to learn about literature, reading, writing... so many worlds they'll miss out on, characters they won't meet, battles they won't experience... not merely because I'm not taking them there, but because so few read outside of class.

::sigh:: 

So I gave up coffee for what?: Post Lent Reflections

Web woven by Spider on Caffeine

So it's been nearly a week since Easter, and I may have consumed 2-5 coffees/caffeinated drinks each day since Easter Sunday.

I thought about maybe cutting down or trying to make my fast semi-permanent, but road trips make that difficult.

Tea and coffee is cheap and often free at hostels, and it goes down smooth, does the trick, especially when it's cold and damp, like in Scotland.

Glen Coe, The Highlands, Scotland, UK 

So other than the knowledge that I can indeed fast from caffeine, what did I gain? What did Easter hold for me?

Easter held some amazing music. While Christmas Carols tend to be the most loved songs, I just revel in the beautiful, rejuvenating music of Easter. The lyrics and melodies just feed me, and I've been singing harmonies arranged by Huw White all week. The harmonies to Tim Hughes "Sing Alleluia" stuck with me wandering the fields of Scotland. The lyrics of "In Christ Alone" followed me through the glens and lochs and bens...

Easter is a reminder that all is not what it seems... a reminder of the promise that all will be made new. In a world where things that came out last week are considered old, it's really easy to miss the heavenly perspective on earthly time. It's easy to be shallow and feel old cause I'm not 22 anymore, or feel frumpy because my clothes aren't brand new, or something like that. It's easy to look at my modest teaching career and feel unimportant, or to look at the accomplishments of those around me and feel empty...

But things aren't always what they seem. As I've said before, there are invisible things... spiritual things happening all the time. Spiritual beings making choices, taking action. There are spiritual acts, movements, motions in us and all around us, and we wittingly or no, take part in these actions. So does Jesus.

Jesus saw faith in followers the world rejected. Jesus' spirit couldn't be held by death in the tomb. He saw men and women and girls alive where we saw death. He saw health where others saw illness, disease and deformation.

Even in my humble teaching post, I pray and Jesus tells me not to leave... that I can't know what He's doing because I'm there... maybe I'll never know.

Even in this silly blog with my silly words. Words I get scared to write because someone may someday throw them back in my face. Words I want to edit because someone might read them. Words which aren't judged by the numbers of followers I have or blog views I get (tho those stats are interesting,...)... No, I need to write because when I  pray, God says to write... to write humbly and honestly and without apology. So I try... cause who knows where they will go or what invisible things they will inspire?

I'm reading The Secret Garden again... and Mary keeps wandering around trying to figure out if her garden is dead. But she tends it for a few weeks before she finally gets Ben Weatherstaff and Dickon to tell her it's alive. Weeks. I would like to think that if I came to a dead garden I would be so faithful, but after a few hours of pulling weeds, I'd probably give it up for dead and come back in a month to see if it worked, but no. Mary comes back everyday. She explores and finds out every detail and every nook.

She doesn't know the invisible things are there, and they are changing her... but her reward is great.

I hope that I can develop the faithfulness of Contrary Mary in The Secret Garden... that my work, however humble, would change me, so that when spring does come, there are beautiful flowers in my garden (wow that sounds SO cheesy, but I'm leaving it here). Not like treasure in heaven or anything, but the reward for her toil, the garden, was the reward for Mary... She didn't get huge houses or money or fame or anything out of her toil (not yet anyway),... she got the gorgeous flowers to enjoy.

I'm trying to give it up, but there's a part of me that wants to be right all the time, and I'm slowly learning that a lot of the time, there aren't completely right or wrong answers, but perspectives and emotions and ideas and invisible things that happen because of words and ideas and thoughts and how we think them and when and where get thrown out into the universe causing their own version of chaos.

I don't want to worry about how I stack up against other people, but what I can offer them and how I can love them better. Somehow, not drinking coffee has helped me learn this about myself... but how, I don't know... it's just one of those invisible things that got thrown out into the universe in my crazed caffeine craving fits, I suppose. 

Words to Live By...

This is a HORRID pic of Kant...  

The moral philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote some pretty cool stuff I debated in my moral philosophy class a few years ago... though we couldn't rest with surety on everything he said, I did come away with a pretty good idea of his categorical imperative... 

A categorical imperative is basically a mantra which you should live by morally IF and ONLY IF it could be followed in EVERY circumstance. 

Philosophers LOVE to think about every possible circumstance, and they like breaking the rules of physics to do so... 

On a slight tangent, my favorite question, which hasn't been answered, was posed by both Mel Gibson, and  my philosophy of religion teacher... Why is BLOOD the vehicle by which God forgives sins? He could have chosen ANYTHING, and He chose BlOOD... 

Anyway, I am a word collector in many ways... whether it's old words that should come back into play, or what I consider words to live by, whether or not they may classify as a categorical imperative, here are some people and sayings that get me going in a good way. 

Much nicer... he has kind eyes... or he's checking you out ;)

• "I am most myself when I am loving others." - Pastor Greg Hill 
• "The universe is so vast and so ageless that the life of one man can only be justified by the measure of his sacrifice." 
• "Your spiritual life is never just for you...but for the healing of the nations...that we might be part of God's world." - Archie Coates (Pastor at HTB)
• "The opposite of love isn't hatred, it's the using of another as a means to an end." --Christopher West 
• "It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." - Leo Tolstoy
• "Step back and decide how important your opinions are verses the people you claim to love." ~ Bill Johnson
• "Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value." ~ Arthur Miller
• ‘You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the amount that it is attacked.’--Gustave Flaubert
• "Christians need to have soft hearts and hard feet" ~ Jackie Pullinger
• "Safety isn't found in the absence of danger, but in the presence of God" - Simon Guillebaud
• "The language of Friendship is not words but meanings. It is an intelligence above language." - Henry David Thoreau
• "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T.S. Elliot
• "Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
• "Anything less than this complete trust...would not be love, anything less than pure trust would be a kind of careful negotiation. A careful negotiation isn't love. A person must be willing to be dashed on the rocks or made the fool in exchange for a relationship in order for pure love to take place." Donald Miller "Searching for God Knows What" 
• "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." ~ from "Ulysses," A.L. Tennyson 
• "What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?" ~ George Eliot
• The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. He has accepted God's estimate of his own life: In himself, nothing; In God, everything. He knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has stopped caring.-- A.W. Tozer
• "Courage does not always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day that simply says 'I will try again tomorrow.'" ~ Pope Benedict XVI
• "It is not our abilities that show who we truly are. It is our choices." - Albus Dumbledore
• "Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”-- Anais Nin
• "If you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe ... that all art is morally trivial and that all education is morally irrelevant." ~ Irving Kristol
• "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

These amazing words, full of courage, stamina, grace and truth... these words were set into contexts which I've forgotten. And context, I think adds power and meaning to these words, not the other way around. The Jackie Pullinger quote, for example, comes from over 40 years of missionary work in Hong Kong's tough heroine/prostitution rings... talk about hard feet living there! Somehow working in East London doesn't seem so bad. 

I've been in a season of reading lately. My life seems to come in seasons... never finding the balance, something always takes the majority of my attention, whether it's writing, reading, dancing, working, meeting with friends, praying, etc... right now it's reading. (soon I'll be editing, I promise). There are so many books that I want to read, books I want to re-read, books I think I should have read when I was a child... lifetimes of books! Sometimes it's maddeningly depressing, other times, I stare at the wonder of my goodreads to-read list, or my amazon wishlist, and just think it's a miracle that so many awesome sounding books have been published. 

It gives me hope and utter despair. 

Sorry for the tangent... 

But getting back to context, these words, from other worlds and societies and contexts... they speak to my context... they meet me here and breathe life into me here. 

And I think to myself, I hope anything that I write or say does the same to others... 

Hope. Despair. Caught in an unbearable tension... So I hope they do you some good. 

Writing Communities: Everyone is out to destroy or steal my ideas

So... while I've never been on DeviantART... I'm a budding writer and I know I'm in desperate need of a community to read/edit/support me as I write. It takes a  village to publish a novel... maybe...

The thing is I am SOO suspicious of everyone... successful and not. They will steal my ideas (as if my ideas were intriguing and rare in the first place). They will mock me behind my back. They will rip my novel to pieces and then steal it in the manner of deception used in Bridesmaids.

I know that supportive and creative writing communities exist, but I think instead of trying to find one that suits me, I'm trying to build my own by finding friends who write and swap and critique and encourage.

While I tried to engage a bit with the nanowrimo forums... even they seemed terrifying to me. While I don't think I'm a terrible writer, I'm not actually sure how good/not good I am. I know grammar, I'm not sure about aesthetic. I know what I like, I know lit crit., but approaching things from a writerly perspective is something I'm not as experienced with (odd for someone who writes on a near daily basis).

Writing is new territory for me. I've been writing stories and poems since I was a little girl, but I've kept them mostly to myself. I don't know how good I am, so my hubris level is very low. I take it for what it is, and don't expose it to the world for ridicule. But the time is coming when I would like to put it out there, and I just can't seem to find the community I'm looking for where it seems friendly but not forced, business-like and helpful, and understanding.

Everything out there seems like a competition... sigh...

Advice? I'll take anything I can get my hands and eyes on ...