You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Lucky’ tag.
For the next three weeks, instead of teaching Joyce’s Dubliners in Rosa’s Lit class, I’m going to teach Hopkins, Yeats, and Heaney. This is a blessed change, and there is much rejoicing. Having never read Dubliners, I’m unqualified to say anything on the subject except “Dubliners” and “Joyce,” but I am mostly qualified to say that these three poets, spanning Victorian and Modern poetry, taking traditional forms & a brilliant creativity and coaxing strange and beautiful new life from them, setting real toads in imaginary gardens, have expanded the consciousness of (if we’re honest) the world.
It’s sobering, being the one to introduce my budding artist/poet little sister to poems like “The Windhover,” “The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo,” “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” “The Second Coming,” and “Punishment.” These are poems the world needs, and I get to be part of this.
I even get to define words like alliteration and onomatopoeia, and teach her the vocabulary for describing poetic forms. I know I sound like a lunatic, but she has a vividly creative consciousness that will touch her community and the world someday. And today, I sat in the window of Starbucks with her and handed her her graded short story, lectured on Hopkins and the Oxford Movement, made her write down the definition of assonance.
There are so many things to be immensely grateful for, cables of power pulsing underground and showing up in showers of sparks at the first shove of the shovel into the soil.
People are multitude in their variety. There is the meeting of three earnest people at the table over there, long black leather coat and houndstooth scarf, the tight gray jeans and infinitely chic sweep of hair over the forehead, big brash Guess snakeskin bag, red converse sneakers. They are leaning on the table or leaning back in their chairs, alternately, talking about what awesome things they’re going to do once they get back to the City, maybe. This is the kind of slick scruffiness you don’t often see in our town. And there goes the guy who ducks his head and smiles, wearing the awful old running shoes and the tweed blazer with elbow patches. I’ve come here to Coffee & Chocolate from the library and the post office. I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov and thinking about how easy it is to love humanity, and how hard it is to love a person. Because I’m loving all these strange and beautiful people, and worried about going to work tonight.
Knoxville now has a street paper, and I bought a copy. I want this to be a success. Everybody should buy The Amplifier.
As I’m filling out my application to UTK I’m realizing that I have lame-sounding jobs. In reality, they are so far from lame. I’m a caretaker, which means I have a friend that I spend 17 hours a week with, who loves me and makes me laugh, whose life is cracking but whose spirit is almost unnervingly whole. I get to do that. I clean houses, which means I have a friend that I see once a week and help with things she can’t do, on account of her health. She tells me about how she hates being dependent and how she loved learning to cook during her years in New Orleans, and we put our heads together about so many things. On paper, on a paper being sent to UT in a priority mail flat-rate envelope, that looks stupid. Oh well. There’s not much I can do about that. Best I can do is remember real values, which is the perennial struggle of the human being in general. Especially the follower of Christ, right? This morning I was crabbed into a corner of my teal armchair and realized that the God of the universe is larger and kinder than I understood. Leaves opened and my life is changed again. Thank God.
Another thing I wanted to hear myself say was that it’s odd how working (again) toward a concrete thing (such as graduate school) makes me feel different. Like I have opened a window and here’s an eddy of fresh air. There are other concrete things I’m working toward, of course, like a wedding and a trip to Europe in the summer of 2012, like publication of my writings, like a new car, like a series of quilts, but none of the above have deadlines. That I can see, anyway. But here’s a deadline, and if I miss it, nobody’s going to feel bad and extend it for me. Something is so enlivening about it.
When Marshall and I met K. Woodhull to talk about potential pre-marital counseling a couple weeks ago, we ended up talking a lot about how Marshall and I both need (need) to have a purpose or goal, something in the future to work toward. Or we both get so effing depressed. I think one of the biggest things in our life is going to be finding and pursuing those goals, and knowing that is empowering. Working toward grad school, even if it’s a bad idea, even if it’s impossible, is empowering. I’m searching out my own heart, here. Being taught. Thank God.
And these are the rings and fingers of herself and her Matt. I love them both. Mozzletauf!!! Our parents are throwing them a party in a few weeks, and I hope all of you reading this will consider yourselves invited, if you live in the area, and love Erin and Matt. Well, I’m sure Mom would have me say that you should r.s.v.p. But I’m so proud, and happy, and had to say it out loud. We love you, Erin and Matt…
‘”We don’t have centuries of educated, autonomous female role models to imitate (there were no women quite like us until very recently), so nobody has given us a map. So let’s just anticipate that we (all of us) will disappoint ourselves somehow in the decade to come. Go ahead and let it happen. Let somebody else be a better mother than you for one afternoon. Let somebody else go to art school. Let somebody else have a happy marriage, while you foolishly pick the wrong guy. (Hell, I’ve done it; it’s survivable.) While you’re at it, take the wrong job. Move to the wrong city.
‘”This is what we all must learn to do, for this is how maps get charted – by taking wrong turns that lead to surprising passageways that open into spectacularly unexpected new worlds. Fall flat on your face if you must, but please, for the sake of us all, do not stop. Map your own life.”‘
“—This was on the blog of a friend of an acquaintance. Somebody I do not know, but whose writing I like. The quote, though, is something she read in a magazine. Sometimes I waste time reading blogs, but oh MAN do I read some good, helpful, life-saving, encouraging stuff sometimes. [...]
“Anyway, this is so much in the same spirit and vein of separate conversations I´ve been having with all of you that I thought I´d share it–something I think we all need, in this difficult time of life, hard days, long nights, and for ever. I love it! Make mistakes! Fall down! Do something stupid and regrettable! Make the blind choice! But KEEP MOVING…don´t stay still. Don´t become paralyzed by cowardice and fear, afraid of being judged, afraid of failure, afraid of being yourself and letting others know you, afraid of becoming attached and letting others attach themselves to you. Don´t let timidity and insecurities and doubt corrode your soul and keep you living smallishly.
“All of you, every single one of you, is fabulous and a sparkling gem and wicked smart and beautiful and powerful. All of us are admired, respected, and deeply loved. Also sometimes profoundly lonely. I think there´s a fear at the realization of our strength and potential…of wasting it, letting others down, maybe overcome by all the possibilities and directions, or the confession of desiring to seek greatness in small, invisible, private ways that the world doesn´t readily appreciate/ understand.
“…do what you want to do, and do what you are. Express (on paper, via teaching, in love, in excellence, with things you grow and make) the cries and delights of your soul…and you will be doing good work, and this will be a good thing for the world.”
This in an email from a dear friend … it was so great I had to share.
from clusterflock
Today I met my mom at Pete’s for two eggs, bacon & coffee and conversation. Every time I do this I end up talking with her for at least three hours, or sometimes three and a half (like this morning), and doing things like walking around downtown and ending up at a table in Market Square, talking for a hundred hours. I wish I was making money so I could take her somewhere awesome for breakfast, or dinner, and do it more often. This mom that I have is really great, and is still a spring chicken. She is amazing, and I am lucky to know her.
Then I came back home and drove to paint at one of Jordan’s houses and cut in the bathroom, reaching into the narrowest gaps and acutest angles, breathing too (many?) fumes and making dust tracks all over the newly refinished floors, gorgeous dark wood. I listened to Sullivan Street on repeat and am still listening to it, now as I’m down from the shower and up from my teal armchair where I’ve been writing a small letter to someone. I was listening to it the other day, too, in my car, and Luke came up and said something about it being enough to make you melancholy for the whole day. I’m not melancholy, though. The rhythm is driving me forward and I’m thinking about joy, how it can be like a boat coming into harbor.
My hair is getting long … I noticed it for the first time in the shower, because it was falling down all wet over my shoulder and I don’t really wear it down very often. My hair getting long is in the same category as the clouds today as I saw them through the upper-story windows at the duplex — they were blurry at the edges and lying in long swathes, blues and purples. I wanted to take a picture and be like the person who runs the LitttleBeats blog … and realized that it’s unusual that I can see that kind of beauty. This kind of beauty doesn’t break mirrors or really get photographed all that often, but it’s my favorite kind, and it makes me feel better about not being classically beautiful, because I can be like this: noon clouds or sunrises or the light coming in low over fields.
I have to say here something about how Crystal and Britta prayed for me last night, and I guess that would be: they did. I want this all my life long, to pray and be prayed for. We went up to their apartment above Pasta Trio in the Old City and looked out over the city, watched them make pasta, talked about ulcers and debt and church, and then interceded. This is powerful living, and I want it.
Now it’s evening … I can’t make more biscotti because I don’t have eggs, and I can’t have any milk because I don’t have any. And there’s no way I can have anything else, because everything else is rice and Ramen noodles and cans of black beans, and who wants THAT. Lucky I’m not hungry … lucky I got a letter on my car windshield today … lucky I’m awake and saying yes … lucky I’m taken care of by God and am learning the sound of His voice.
