Paying My Dues to Possibility

Never in my life have I had so little prescience about what is next. “In Northern Virginia by default,” I’ve tried to relocate about three times since graduation in May 2008. I’ve considered transitioning fields: editing, technical writing. I’ve thought about teaching K-12. I called the State Department and found out I’m not qualified to be an Education Specialist—almost applied to USAID as an education junior officer. I paid off my car and my school loans because I wanted to be unfettered--free to abandon the U.S. for the world on a whim.

My Bulgarian friend almost convinced me to move to Vienna. Teaching in Europe sounded like a fabulous two year plan during which I planned to have a couple short-lived romances with extremely handsome and intellectual atheists. After putting a nest-egg aside, I would then pick a developing country to devote myself to, and maybe some orphans.

I waited until mid-October to purchase a ticket home for Christmas because I couldn’t decide if I should buy a one-way. The luxury of spending the winter holed up in my parents’ basement trying to get published was hard to pass up. A few weeks later I quit a teaching job I had accepted a week before—hadn’t even filled out the paperwork yet.

A week ago, I sent in my application to a Ph.D. program in Creative Writing at the University of Utah. In three weeks, I’ll send one into the University of Houston and the University of Ohio. In January, I’ll try to sell my book once more, and in February, I’m going to renounce social activities in order to write another one.

For the meantime, I’m going to have to make one thing definite—so I’m getting a haircut and blonde highlights. This is the short-term plan.

In sum I refer to the last two lines of “The Lion’s tooth (Dandelion)” a bad poem I wrote in my early, early twenties: and so I send my wishes feather-born / on the seedlings of my many lives.

An Abundant Life

Four years ago, I decided that I needed to have one, and only one New Year's Resolution (yes, I'm blowing past 2 holidays right now). So I decided, in classic D.C. style, that I would be unflappable. That year I got flapped so bad, I didn't know what hit me. Until two weeks ago, I was still feeling the repercussions of it.

In any case, the next year I was too flapped to come up with any New Year's Resolutions, but the following I decided I was barking up the wrong New Year's Resolution and needed to regroup. That year I went for "being good." I tried awful hard to be good that year (somewhat successfully) and had all sorts of challenges to that end but learned a lot in the exchange.

2009 was the year of "joy." I can honestly say that there were months and weeks during this year when I was full of effulgence just because I decided to be. Nothing particularly marvelous has happened this year, but nothing particularly rotten either. A lot of frustration not knowing where I'm going next, but a lot of gratitude for health and for the vivacity of spirit I feel when I am joyous.

We're coming on 2010, and I am declaring this now because I have a lot of preparing to do. This next year is going to be the year of the abundant life. A couple weeks ago, I finally kicked fear in the butt--he's been hounding me for years, and I'm ready to be full, full of all good things. I'm making a list of things that give me the feelings of light, peace, youth, and freedom, so I can come up with some ideas of how to fulfill them:

1. Experiencing inspiration, truth, and the Holy Spirit of God.

2. Loving people, both my friends and people who are different than me.

3. Being out in nature where the wild things are.

4. Using my muscles and moving my body.

5. Reading, writing, and talking about interesting ideas.

6. Being exposed to beautiful things.

7. Creating beautiful things.

8. Having international experiences or being with people from international countries.

An American Dream

I've been an ESL teacher for over ten years, so this is a phrase I hear often. My students have written essays and given presentations about what this ideal signifies. When they say, "American Dream," they say it meaningfully because many of them saved all they had and went through a long process of paper work to come to the United States. Others skipped the paperwork and hid in Mango trucks or cut through the brush at night over the border, risking their lives for the hope of a better one. Others crossed deserts in countries across the world as refugees from wars or corrupt governments.

When you are an ESL teacher, you believe in the American Dream because you see it every day in the lives of your students. Sometimes they would get frustrated with the time it took to socially and economically climb through learning English and improving their skills. "Be patient," I would tell them. "Don't compare yourself to others. It's not a race. There is no other way, but this way, and it is hard work." I told them this because I believed it; at least I did for them.

A few weeks ago, I realized that I needed to believe in the American Dream for me. A member of the middle class, I am an inheritor of this dream, but when I think of its personal application, I look back to my ancestors. I think of Alma Elizabeth who crossed the plains with her family from Sweden. I think of Guissepe Toronto and the flat he ran down the Missouri River. I think of my Grandpa Thomas, who grew up in a coal mining family and worked his way through his first degree doing swing and night shifts at the shipyard. He was bald and into his thirties before he had finished his last degree and began to obtain any sort of decent income for raising his two children.

I've inherited these acts of initiative and sacrifice but have somehow gotten it into my head (maybe from the "me" generation--it ruined us all) that for me it will be smoother than this uphill climb. Then is the danger of complacency, the danger of the middle class, that I will stop dreaming and be satisfied with the status quo.

I'm frustrated that I'm over thirty (thank goodness hair still intact) and not on salary--that I teach over 26 credits and spend all my time correcting and not writing; that right this minute I'm neglecting a pile of 50 essays and 500 journal entries along with a plethora of other ungraded assignments.

I'm frustrated that my glasses and my contacts are not up to prescription, that my filling fell out and I can't afford to go the dentist, and that I have to order all my medications from Canada. I'm frustrated that I take 6 different vitamins each day because I can't afford to lose time or money being sick.

I'm frustrated that nobody will take my pitches or publish my essays. I'm frustrated that no agent will take on my book. I'm even more frustrated that I don't have the time to dedicate to making this writing thing happen.

But there's this thing about American Dreams--they often involve pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, putting in long hours at the docks, and crossing deserts. That's why there's the dream part--you need hope to keep on going and to keep on believing although it's difficult. Because there is no other way.

But after it all, America is the land of opportunity. And I've decided lately that I mean to make it the land of mine.

Morpho Blue

In January, reveling in my pre-semester bliss, I went to an exhibition at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum with a fellow teacher featuring butterflies. We walked through a room controlled for heat and moisture with butterflies fluttering around our heads, watching our step to make sure we wouldn't crush one of the moths that enjoyed lounging around on the stone path below.

Always a bit of a priss at heart, I love things light and ethereal like butterfly wings and flower petals, so I was in ecstatics although I tried to reign in my 5 year old like joy. The bug that caught my fancy the most was the Morpho.

Morpho blue is not the result of pigmentation, but of scales shaped like crystal that refract light. Only the males are blue--a way to signal other males to stay out of their mating territory. The scales of Morpho butterflies have been studied to produce the iridescence used in anti-counterfeit technology for bills.

This Morpho blue is a similar color to another item from the natural world that has always fascinated me: lapis lazuli. A stone embedded for decoration in many items from Antiquity, lapis lazuli is mentioned many times in the epic of Gilgamesh. In the Renaissance it was ground to make an expensive blue paint used for the shawl of Mary. The wealth of a patron who commissioned an alter piece could be determined by the amount of blue paint used by the artist. At a market in Otovalo, Ecuador, I stumbled on a outlay of jewelry made of lapis lazuli and haggled for a low enough price that I could take some home with me.

Ultramarine, the color derived from lapis lazuli, went out of style due to its price and also because the color tended to dull when mixed with oil. Yves Klein, a twentieth century artist bordering on neo-dada and early modernism, discovered how to suspend ultramarine paint in synthetic resin, which preserved its brilliance. This color became known as "International Ives Klein Blue."

Yves Klein, when lying on the beach as a young man, divided the world between his two friends. Klein picked the sky. As a result of many years studying judo and Eastern philosophy, he tried to produce an aesthetic experience similar to nirvana: "With this famous symbolic gesture of signing the sky, Klein had foreseen, as in a reverie, the thrust of his art from that time onwards- a quest to reach the far side of the infinite." The "void" was Klein's representation of this pure idea or the separation from the material world of man. His exhibits consisted of empty galleries or galleries hung with identical paintings of "Yves Klein Blue."

While studying art in college, I wasn't always so sure that I bought into Yves Klein, but I sure bought into Yves Klein blue. This is why while entering a Marshall's last week, I caught my breath and made a straight line to the dressing room. Due to financial restrictions lately, I have made a personal commitment to separate myself from the material world of man, but I had to buy this dress. Morpho blue, Ultramarine, Yves Klein blue, whatever color this dress is (Lagoon it said on the tag), it represents a pure idea that looks smashing with my silver heels.

The dress was a little short, a little tight (made for a female without curves), and the top flapped open a little too much. I spent all yesterday altering this dress with a thread called "Monaco blue," but how could I not, with what such splendid company this hue keeps?

P.S. I don't quite understand yet how to insert pictures right, so they are in inverse order. The top is Yves Kline jumping into the "void." The next is a painting using Yves Kline Blue. The next are the Babylonian Gates to Ishtar, and the last is a Morpho butterfly.

The Holding Pattern

I had a dream once in fable form. It might have even been illustrated. The tortoise from the Tortoise and the hare, came upon a clam relaxing on the edge of the ocean.

"You're so lazy," the tortoise told the clam. "All you do is just sit there. You should get up and do something."

And the clam replied, in this particular fable the wise one, "Sometimes you have to wait for the ocean to pick you up and move you."

I just finished my first semester of professorhood. Every few days I get another email from one of the community colleges in California who aren't even interested in interviewing me. But I have this overall sense of well-being and nonchalance about the whole thing.

I feel like I've taken just about every positive action I can to move my life forward in a myriad of ways. I feel good about myself. Really good.

I've decided that living in Northern Virginia by default, ain't half bad, and until whatever is next decides to present itself on the horizon, I'm going to wait for the ocean to pick me up and move me. Meanwhile, I'm going to spend all summer enjoying the beach.

Soups

I had an amazing bit of luck yesterday and whipped up some yummy Easter soups. The chicken and wild rice was such a haphazard dance of "whoops," and "get in my belly," that I don't think it is replicable. I'll have to mess around with it a little more to get anything standardized.

The tomato, however, I think is reproducible in recipe format:

1 15 oz can tomato sauce
1 30 oz can crushed / diced tomatoes.
5 grams vegetable bouillon
3 medium carrots or 4 small ones
3/4 a regular sized yellow onion
1 pint half and half

Season to taste:
Basil (lots)
black pepper
garlic (2 large cloves)
red pepper (2 small, dried, medium-hot ground in pestle)

Chop and saute the carrots and onion in the bottom of a soup pan in olive oil. Add tomatoes. Simmer 15-20 minutes. Let cool a little and blend in blender (You'll need to add enough water to make it soupy). Add spices and half and half.

Easter in Wales

Last year I spent my Easter in Wales. A typically temperate time of the year in Europe, this spring was unusually cold. We got hailed on in Paris, and on Easter morning in Wales it snowed. My friend Abby and I were staying in Merthyr Tydfil, a village in "The Valleys," the old coal fields of South Wales. My great, great grandmother Margaret and Evan immigrated from this once booming iron and coal mining town to Scofield, Utah around the turn of the century. I was back to do research and visit the last deep coal mine in Wales: The Tower Colliery. It had been bought out by the men who mined it when Margaret Thatcher shut down all the mines in Britain--an amazing story retold to me over a ginger ale in a charming Welsh accent by one of the ring leaders, who was kind enough to meet me the Glancynon, the most popular pub in the little town of Hirwaun.

Most of my nights in Wales had been restless, full of dreams of driving. We had rented a car, and we'd gotten to the dealer in Cardiff only moments before they closed. The only car they had left was a brand new Mercedes Benz. A luxury vehicle, a little wider than the average European car, this was not the ideal for a first time driver on the left side of the road. Driving was especially difficult given the fact I am R/L challenged and took a while to remember which was the right side when I started driving at 16. Needless to say, Abby heard me curse for the first time, and in my dreams, I practiced driving for the next day. The "new right," the "new left," I would tell myself as I navigated through the maps of roads in my sleep.

What added to my restlessness is that I was sleeping in a child's bunk bed in a member of my church's home in the wrong side of town. They were out of town for the week and had offered their house since we were unable to find lodging in the few hotel options in Merthyr. It was "rough," but not too "rough," we were counseled. They might slash our tires, but they wouldn't steal our car. This wasn't much comfort parking a Mercedes Benz in area where there were very few vehicles and strange noises of bored teenagers throughout the night. If they slashed our tires, what then?

But, I awoke this Easter in Wales remarkably rested in a time that I had not been sleeping for months with a repeating thought. I still don't know what it portends, "When one door closes, another opens." In a time of my life when I've felt like I've had very little direction, in which I've almost picked up and moved twice, I'm still waiting for that door. But this thought came with a rush of elation and light, such that I believed all that I was worried about at that moment would be resolved. In this Easter morning in Wales with a light touch of snow over the thin, winding roads of Merthyr, I felt how much I loved life. I felt like I was passing through one of those "pillars of mortality," and that I had once again learned what it meant to be redeemed and resurrected from all the times I had died and was born again. I feel this again this year. I turned 31 yesterday, and it is a new year. I feel hopeful. Forgiven. Redeemed.