heaven right here

When I went home to visit family this holiday, my grandparents had a wonderful surprise. My grandmother, in her 88th year and feeling more tired and weak each day, had written a lively rouser of a protest song! As a Christmas present to her, my grandfather invited folk singer Larry Long to their house to put the words to music. I am thrilled and proud to say, the result was fantastic.

Here are the original lyrics (the recorded version will be included on Larry Long's forthcoming album - we'll see whether he uses the version with my grandma singing back-up):

I talked to God the other day,
And one thing God made clear
"You say you love heaven
And you want to go to heaven.
Why don't you have yourself
A heaven down here?"

"But I wanna get to heaven,
Wanna sit on a cloud,
Wanna dance and sing and laugh out loud."
"Don't be silly," the Good Lord said,
"Heaven's here and now, not when you're dead.

"Heaven's no more exploitation,
Freedom from all domination.
Heaven's the beauty of the earth,
Perfect joy in each new birth.

"So do away with corporate greed,
Give clothes and shelter to those in need.
Stop the war, feed the poor,
And we'll have a little heaven right here."
(audience: "Right here, right now!")
Yes, we'll all have heaven down here.

holiday cheer

I secretly would love to get on a soap box every once in a while, but my lowly place as a customer service representative doesn't really allow me to do this in any of my daily interactions. But, if I could, here is what I would say:

1. As privileged folks living on this planet, I would like to see the people around me show a bit more love. When you live a life as comfortable as ours, you are blessed with the ability to open your heart to other human beings and give - anything, time, money, a smile. Please consider passing one of these along.

2. Life is not a fight - for many of us, at least. I know, living in a big city where there are long lines and traffic and lots of demand for a limited supply of things, it is easy to forget that we are all just trying to survive. Don't fight it, go with it - accept the stress, rise above it, move on. Think about and celebrate what you do have - health, life, something to eat, internet access...

3. Most importantly, people, there is a war going on. Please, please, do not forget this. There is pain and conflict and suffering, and people in the thickest throes of it are finding ways to be joyful this holiday season. Let's take a step back and consider our problems in this light.

These days are blessed and short. Let's fill them with joy, not stress. Ok?

goosebumps

I think sometimes our skin likes to remind us that we are alive, and that our souls are physically linked to our bodies. Goosebumps are one of those reactions you can't control, they just happen - when you are so moved, that you can literally feel an emotion physically. It's wonderful.

(It is a fluffy-snowy day and I'm sitting in the window feeling corny. Forgive me.)

why do we do what we do?

Here is a quote from the vision statement of a friend's ideal theater company. They stole the words right out of my head, those kids!

"We live in a world that is increasingly globalised, yet increasingly divided. In times such as these, it is more important than ever to seek to illuminate and understand what makes us human, and the ties that bind across cultures, language, and experience."

haiku

Here is a haiku I wrote on the train this morning, remembering a moment of Paraguayan irony:

no water today
the holding tank has a leak
we'll drink Coke instead

This is inspiring me, now, to write a whole essay. Poetry is insanely dense.

how to be...

Here, folks, is some inspiration passed along to me by my new roommate. I haven't read the whole article, but I think it's good advice.

muse

When the Muse comes She doesn't tell you to write;
She says get up for a minute, I've something to show you, stand here.
- M. Goldman

these are the days of miracle and wonder

Lately, I have felt an overwhelming sense of amazement at several little things. Every day there is something that impresses me, however small. I have been reading Annie Dillard and she has a way of appreciating the tiniest, beautiful things and I think it has been rubbing off on me. This is a gift, I want to be sure to remember these moments.

The other day, I watched a boy who was about 6 or 7 years old, lean into the office to check the time on our clock. I realized that it is quite incredible that such a young person can look at the cryptic clock and know how to interpret the placement of those rotating hands. There are so many people in this world to whom a clock would hold no meaning. Many humans sharing the globe with us live in societies where ticking time holds little relevance; others may be our own neighbors, children and adults who simply do not know how to read. The confluence of this child's awareness of time, ability to read and understand numbers conceptually, and his interpretation of our western device which measures seconds and minutes and hours - if one is thinking about it in a certain mindset, this really is a miracle.

hm...

So NYT is all about Bahia these days. This is weird... Weird, I suppose, because I was just there and I know how I felt about it, and they make it sound all tourist-hot-spot, and I'm just "eh".

pt

I think public transportation may be just what is keeping people sane in this crazy city... although some days the delays and crowded aisles can be enough to drive one insane. My point is that when you're actually on the bus - you've waited and waited, it finally arrives and you board, you're in transit - it can be quite a soothing place (as long as you're not in too much of a hurry).

That moment, when you let go and allow the driver to make all the decisions, you are still moving toward your destination but you have relinquished control - that is precious time for me. Sitting in my seat, I have a little window on the world from a moving glass box. I can observe the passing buildings, I can observe my life as it moves along around me, time passes and I am completely removed from it.

I have experienced some wonderfully emotional moments on trains, buses, airplanes. I can see things with unparalleled clarity, and I have found I can feel things more - when I'm not weighted down by schedules and responsibilities, but I am still in the world. I hope others around me are in as deep a place as I am on the train. It takes those moments, when we can go to that place, then come back and deal with each other with perspective.

the classics

There are moments when you're singing an old song that everyone knows and hundreds of bands have covered, when you understand suddenly just precisely why the song meant so much to so many people and it is like you can feel the breath of a thousand people inside you and their voices power yours and you're all singing together. Those are wonderful moments.

the letter

I am currently working on a story called "The Letter" and the topic has brought up so many thoughts about letters - real letters, like on paper - that I have written over the last several years. Some funny, others poignant.

One that sticks out in my mind at the moment was a letter I wrote to myself (along with 25 of my classmates in one of my classes freshman year of high school). Our teacher assigned us the task of writing to our selves "four years from now" and she kept her promise to mail those letters the week of our graduation in 2000. I remember being unimpressed at what I had written, and I think I may have tossed the letter in the recycling after a quick skim, a semi-indifferent eyebrow-raise, and/or a forced chuckle.

The thing is, now I am wishing I had kept doing that - writing letters to my future self. I could totally use a refresher right now on what I was thinking during so many of those college and after-college moments when I made dramatic life-altering decisions on a whim. A friend told me she believes she did much more personal growing in her twenties than she ever did during high-school and early college years, and that makes so much sense. If I could have written a letter to myself on the day I graduated from college, now that would be one I'd want to read and re-read.

the social scientist

As a social science major in college, my research projects were structured as studies of societal phenomena. I would read books and articles and analyze lots of numbers with the ultimate goal of discovering why each particular phenomenon existed... or at least coming up with one possible reason that the event may have taken place under certain conditions and given all sorts of assumptions.

It was cool stuff. I particularly enjoyed researching the relationships between the U.S. and Latin American countries - disparities of wealth, legal and illegal trade, and the cultural factors (like a history of colonization) that kept the enduring power structures in place. Those were the things I was interested in at the time, having had the privilege of participating in a summer volunteer program in Costa Rica and a semester abroad in Mexico. I saw myself living a very different life in these new places, and I wanted to understand and expose the things I had seen.

I realized recently that I still do this, but I now call it something else. I now call it art. Observing the lives of others, analyzing my own life, and telling stories that I believe to be somewhat universal, with the hope that perhaps there will be one reader who'll see their own personal history a bit more clearly - this is the goal I have for my "art".

The artists I most appreciate are those who have captured a very universal feeling in a way that helps me understand myself, and embrace my humanity. Here's a great quote that I have been mulling over in my head since I read it on a poster in Batesville, Arkansas about a month ago:

"I write because I believe poetry has the power to change our emotional lives."
- Andrea Hollander Budy

switch-back

I have been working on a different blog lately, but the time has come to move back.

The Not-For-Profit Human

Something about working at the music school - a non-profit org with a mission and vision that I strongly support - has gotten me thinking about my lifelong goals in a new light.

Before, at the corporate job, I had some personal short-term goals: learn how large businesses operate, learn the theory behind financial modeling, develop basic management skills, etc. But when I thought about my role in the company in the broadest sense, I realized that their understanding of my contributions was far simpler than mine: train her to make money for the executives. Without realizing it, my dedication of time and energy went more toward furthering the lifelong goals of a few people I had never met, than it did toward developing and meeting my own goals.

And so it is we call it "working for the man." Yes, Erica, we've all been there.

Right, I just realized that it is easy to lose sight of your personal goals when someone else pays you to help them achieve their's. And when their only goal is to make money (or not lose money, whatever the case may be) the whole thing just gets ugly. But that's all I'll say about that.

What got my brain turning today was the idea of "misson and vision" - something non-profit organizations are always discussing and re-defining and having big meetings about - and how cool that is. What is even cooler is thinking about these concepts on a personal level.

What would your personal "mission statement" be if you had to write it down? What would your long-term "vision" be for your life? If you were a not-for-profit organization, what would you be called?

This might be fun... post a comment if you come up with some answers.

Influences

I just finished reading My Name is Red, a fascinating novel by Orhan Pamuk, which has set off several internal debates on the creative process, artistic influences, and how these concepts manifest themselves in the present day.

The primary characters in the story were Fifteenth Century painters who worked for the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, a particularly avid supporter of book arts. In the painters’ Istanbul workshop, the masters placed extreme importance on creating exact replicas of ancient illustrations – of scenes from the Koran, or poems by ancient writers. Any evidence of a painter’s attempts to cultivate a personal style was disdained.

Essentially, the creative process in the Ottoman workshop involved exhaustive replication of the ancient masters’ paintings, with the ultimate intent of being able to re-create these illustrations without even looking at the page or the subject.

I have been thinking to myself, since reading the book, how much things have changed – whereas the Ottoman Empire rejected the concept of “style”, our contemporary culture wholly embraces the stylized and new. So much so, in fact, that if the work of an artist too closely resembles that of others who came before, the artist risks accusations of unoriginality. These days, one’s style is one’s art.

That said there is something that remains the same in the creative process of old and that of today. While perusing band websites recently, I noticed a theme that has cropped up in the media surrounding nearly all art forms: creative people consider it acceptable to list their “influences”. It is as though the artist is saying, “you need to know where I came from in order to completely understand how I cultivated my personal style.”

The key difference between ancient and modern art, then, is the emphasis on style combined with an ever-more individualized canon. In this sense, the new creative process is a testament to our globalized, contemporary culture: take the various creative elements you have been exposed to, find the most meaningful parts and work on replicating them, then once you’ve honed your artistic skills, add some personal elements and you’ve created something that is uniquely your own.

I think my favorite example of this right now is turn-tabling. I was listening to the Girl Talk album last week and was amazed at how unique each song is, while the content itself is nothing you haven’t heard before. They don’t even need to cite their “influences” because you can hear every one on the track!

Sites to See

I suppose I have been busy. Here are some inspiring websites for fun and creative motivation:

http://www.rogerbonairagard.com/
http://www.etsy.com/
http://www.thehousetheatre.com/

I love these people! Hope you do too :)