Thoughts on unfeeling

My Grandad passed away yesterday. I had only seen him a few times in my life, and really didn't know him very well, so I'm not entirely surprised that I don't feel a whole lot of emotion about his death. I'm sad for his wife, and for my dad and aunt, and I suppose I am sad in my own way about it. But I don't feel a lot of the loss that they're feeling.

So it did surprise me when I got in bed last night and couldn't sleep because of what I was feeling. I feel bad for not feeling that loss. I feel guilty for not making more of an effort. I feel bad that I forgot to call him over the weekend. I feel glad that I did have a chance to talk with him a week ago. I feel sorry for his wife, who has cancer and has to start chemotherapy alone now. I feel concerned for his eternal soul. I feel glad that he was comfortable in his last days.

I feel a bit...anxious? Alone? Unsure? Something I can't quite figure out.

And I don't know where all these feelings leave me. I don't want this to have zero effect on my life, but it feels strange to have to construct some sort of "moral" or meaning or outcome. I guess I'll just have to see how the pieces fall.

Corvallis Obituary

Winston-Salem obituary

Cracked Pot

Tonight was my first yoga class! It's Vinyasa yoga, which means it's fairly aerobic (about an hour and a half of constant movement). At one point, our instructor said, "You've made it through the difficult part!" and that's when I knew I could do this...even though I am clearly not as limber or in shape as I have been in the past. The BEST part, though, was the very end. As we cooled down, we went into a pose called Shava-asana, which literally means "corpse pose". Essentially, you just lie on your mat with your feet apart and your arms comfortably away from your body. You just lie there with your eyes closed...like you're a corpse. Our instructor turned off the lights, and after we were comfortable, she began reading us this story:

A water bearer had two large pots, each hung on the ends of a pole, which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the cracked pot arrived only half full.

For a full two years this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one and a half pots full of water to his house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect for which it was made. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do.

After 2 yrs of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it spoke to the water bearer one day by the stream." I am ashamed of myself, and I want to apologize to you. I have been able to deliver only half my load because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your house. Because of my flaws, you have to do all of this work, and you don't get full value from your efforts, " the pot said. The bearer said to the pot, "Did you notice that there were flowers only on your side of the path, but not on the other pot's side? That's because I have always known about your flaw, and I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back, you've watered them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate the table. Without you being just the way you are, there would not be this beauty to grace the house!"

At the end of the story, I thought "Thank you, Jesus, for loving a cracked little pot like me."

Making connections

As I was getting ready for bed tonight, I was thinking again about the CS Lewis quote I posted earlier. That's when it occurred to me that the idea Lewis talked about is similar to something we talked about at Dox this week. Unfortunately, my podcast from last week won't load, so I'll have to paraphrase.

The concept discussed went something like this:

Before the world was created, the Trinity lived in perfect union and love. Jesus poured all of Himself out into God and the Spirit. All of Him. He served them both and loved them until He had nothing left. Here's where it gets good: God and the Spirit were also pouring all of Themselves into Him. Two of Them. Into one. By giving all of Himself, Jesus made room for twice as much inside Himself. He doubled his capacity. And He was then able to give that doubled amount away again.

So how does this relate to Lewis' quote about putting first things first? By putting God first, by giving all my love and my trust to Him, He is able to give back to me (at least) twice as much as I had before. Loving God gives me an even greater capacity to love Him...and others. When I truly love God, I will have even more to give to those around me. Maybe this seems like an obvious connection. Obvious or not, it's a connection I'm very interested in thinking more about.

I absolutely love when the things that I'm reading and hearing and talking to people about take on a common theme.

Dear Clive...

Thank you for writing the quote below. Pretty much everything you wrote was great, but this quote is such a good reminder to me right now. So thanks!

Admiringly,
Avery

PS: When you died, was there really a bus waiting to take you to Heaven? I sure hope so.



"When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. In so far as I learn to love my earthly dearest at the expense of God and instead of God, I shall be moving towards the state in which I shall not love my earthly dearest at all. When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased." - C.S. Lewis

The verdict is in...

I finished "Wuthering Heights" this afternoon, and...I liked it!

I am absolutely positive that I just didn't have the capacity to understand what I was reading when I read it in high school, and I mean that both experientially and maturity-wise. I've had much more practice reading works from a similar time period since then, which made it much easier for me to actually read the book, and I've also just matured as a reader.

Beyond basic comprehension of the words and story, though, I'm still not sure if I "get" it. Heathcliff is determined to ruin the lives of everyone he feels wronged by, and is nearly successful, save for the fact that Hareton and Cathy fall in love in the end. But why? He seems to forget any kindness he was ever shown through his pursuits. He seems so...inhuman (as he's often accused of being throughout the story). Maybe that's the point, though: what would it look like for a person to have no compassion on anyone, to not display the characteristics we deem "human"? Heathcliff is definitely the picture of one seeking revenge for what he views are unforgivable wrongs.

Something I do love about this story is the pathetic fallacy (flexing my English Major muscle there ;) ). Pathetic fallacy is the technique of reflecting the mood of the story through the weather and surroundings of the characters, and it's one of my favorites. Nothing sets the mood like a dark and stormy night, and those are just the kinds of nights that often proceed or determine the events in "Wuthering Heights". The word "wuthering" comes from a colloquial term for decaying, and decay/ruin is a definite theme in the story. Also, the fact that both houses in the story are essentially isolated from the rest of the world out on the English moors really emphasises the isolation and hopelessness that many of the characters feel.

Alright...this is really starting to feel like an essay! Suffice it to say that because I literally just finished this book two hours ago, I've still got some processing to do. Maybe there will be a "Wuthering Heights" review part deux in the future.

The end is the beginning is the end...

I watched the movie "Synecdoche, NY" recently, and besides being a total mind trip, there was a line in it that really stood out to me: the end is built into the beginning.

I believe that. I believe that everything ends, as Death Cab's latest single so gracefully tells me. I was born, and the act of being born inherently presupposes the act of dying at some future date. Sometimes death itself is what ends something. Not all things are ended during the course of someone's life, but death unequivocally signals the end of a thousand beginnings.

I also believe that the reverse is true: beginnings come from endings. And what makes this side of the coin so amazing is that the beginning often times includes struggle. Being born is difficult, but it takes a baby from being, in its basest definition, a parasite, to an autonomous being. When we hurt, when we don't understand, when we are confused...these are uncomfortable, challenging times of struggle. And they make us who we are.

If we choose to just "get through" the hard times, we really cheat ourselves out of learning what they have to teach us. At the end of my life, I hope to look back and say I lived every moment of it. I want to look back and see very few moments that I simply endured because they were uncomfortable. I want to say that I took every lesson presented to me and at least learned something - something about myself, something about God, something about others. And those lessons very often come during the times when we would rather hurt and feel pitied and overcome. Those feelings are valid, and should be acknowledged, but they should not consume us. Life never stops, despite our feelings that the world is over, that it has ended. Our previous world has perhaps ended, but our present world, our new world, is just being born. By learning to embrace that moment of change for what it is, it will be much easier to maintain joy - a sense of peace and contentment that goes beyond the immediate circumstances of life.

In the last month or so, this message of joy that surpasses circumstance has really been hammered into me from all angles. I may never fully understand it, but I will continue to try. I will embrace the endings that are beginnings.

I'm a Student Again! (sort of)

It's official: I have signed up for two classes this Fall! One is a writing class, called What's the Story? Here's a description:

"For both new and seasoned writers. Emmy-award winning TV writer, novelist and teacher, Linda Elin Hamner will help bring clarity to your efforts in creating and developing a compelling fiction piece or screenplay. Examine story sources, target audiences, story arc, theme, characters and more. Join in the creative process with Linda, who is currently at work on her second novel."

Basically, it will be a good review for me. I fully expect to learn new things, but I'm mostly hoping the class will help me shake off some of the rust my writing has accumulated, and give me some new motivation/inspiration with my writing.

The other class is a yoga class that meets twice a week. I've done dance and pilates, but never yoga, so I'm excited!

Now all I have to do is pay...boo!

What's the Point of Reading?

Today at the library, I picked up a copy of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights". I read this book in high school. I use the term "read" loosely because I probably didn't really put a lot of effort into it at the time. The fact is, I hated it. A lot of that feeling probably came from the fact that I didn't understand it at the time, but maybe I just didn't like it.

Since high school, I've often wondered about "Wuthering Heights". It's a classic, right? But why? I can't think of a single person I know who likes it (maybe some do, I'm just not aware of it). But the fact remains that it's required reading for a lot of students, and it holds a firm place in literature. All of this leads me to the question: what is the point of reading?

If the point of reading is to always love what I'm reading, I'm not going to grow much as a person. Yes, there are a lot of books out there written purely for entertainment, and that's fine. Sometimes it's nice to just get lost in a story and not have to do a lot of thinking. But I think that's what defines literature: it makes you think. It doesn't let you be passive. The reader has to question things, and this may lead a person to dislike the answers they come up with, which in turn may lead them to thinking they dislike the book. Granted, there are some books that people just don't like for no other reason than they just don't, and that's fine. I know for myself there are several books I have read and disliked the outcome, but they still made me analyze my own thinking. That makes them worth the read.

Which is what brings me back to "Wuthering Heights". I don't think I was mature enough to understand the point of reading when I originally read this book. So I'll try it again. If I finish it and still don't like it this time around, at least I'll have a more concrete understanding of why that is. And hopefully I'll have done some good thinking along the way.

That Rilke Was Good

More quotes from Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" that really stuck out to me:

"But please ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps, somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad."

"How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."

"So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you?"

"And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one for your best workers - perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life."