Sepia monsoon ferns. Some day, I'd like to wallpaper a room in this.



Saturday afternoon, I walked to one of my favorite local spots: Fairy Glen. Ferns and these peacock orchids carpet the ground there this time of year. No better way to find serenity...



Saturday was also Independence Day here and it's quite the event. Everyone wears formal national dress, so it's colorful. Unfortunately, my camera les fogged up in the monsoon mist and I got zero pictues of the people. Right at the end of lunch, as everyone was leaving, I caught sight of this ambitious monkey trying to sneak across the top of the tent and snatch some food.

In preparation to begin examining the Renaissance, I've been teaching my European History class about the way people in medieval Europe viewed the world and their place in it. Today we discussed a medieval person's sense of identity. If you asked a medieval man, "Who are you?" What would he say?

Communal identity meant more than individual identity to someone living half a millenium ago. The man would have no last name and would explain his identity almost entirely in terms of his relationships--his family, his lord, his church. Even more importantly, his membership in groups would define him. Banishment served as one of the most powerful medieval punishments.

To explain the contrast to our identities, I found myself talking about facebook. We develop individual profiles, defining our independence by listing books and movies and music. We choose profile pictures that represent our selves the way we'd like to be perceived, or to defiantly state that we don't care how others perceive us. We selectively reveal and conceal. The privilege of privacy allows us to create a virtual self that may bear little resemblance to the selves that walk and talk through real space.

And yet, and yet...even as I illustrated the hyper-individualism cyberspace allows, even encourages, bizarre facebook groups popped into my head....are you a member of the I-turn-my-pillow-over-to-feel-the-cool-side group? Or what about the fans-of-lego-stop-action-spinal-tap-videos group? Then, of course, there's the endless tally of facebook friends to monitor. Maybe we aren't so different, after all. We still define ourselves by the groups we join and the groups that exclude us. But we have a mind-numbing degree of choice about how to mold our relationships to others. A medieval man was born into his relationships, for the most part.

I can't decide which I'd prefer: The security of knowing where I belong and feeling little privacy or the freedom of choosing where I belong and feeling little intimacy. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), we have no choice about when and where our lives begin.

So, I have a new monthly project: "Short Stories and Supper," I call it. Life here at Woodstock gets more than a little insular. I get tired of recycling the same five topics of conversation, all of which have something to do with school.

Enter The Project....

We all read the same short story and then get together to discuss it over dinner. Brilliant, isn't it? No one has time for a book club, but everyone can squeeze in a short story.

We met for the first time tonight. Embarrassingly, I've been here a year and this was also the first time I've had some of these guests in my house. I haven't entertained much, and I realise that I've missed it. I love serving good food and trying to make people feel like they're being "treated." I love bringing people together who normally might not talk to each other and I love hearing what they have to say.

I sent out the story on Friday; a short, short story by Kurt Vonnegut: "Harrison Bergeron." It's Brave-New-World-ish, about a dystopic society in which everyone with any gift must wear a handicap to be equal to the rest of the population. It's brash, unsubtle, and as some pointed out, "child-like." But that's deceptive. I have never been able to forget it in the way I forget so much of what I read. The climax comes when a man calling himself The Emperor charges on to a television set, and grabs a ballerina. They throw off their handicaps and dance, floating up to the ceiling on "love and pure will." Right before they're both shot by the wicked Handicapper General.

We had some interesting discussion, but I felt nervous (mostly, I think, because I have no sense of the group yet, and what people were feeling/thinking/expecting, and because two English teachers came). What I was not able to articulate clearly in the group was how--from the first time I read the story--Vonnegut provoked this visceral yet profound response in me. It's why I can't forget his story, or maybe it's his parable. I want to keep the ballerinas and Mozarts. I want to read writers who take me to a different world or help me see my own. I want life not to be fair.

Writing Guidelines for the Inspirationally Impaired:

A mechanical pencil squeaks its way across a line in lukewarm lead. Give me a freshly sharpened pencil any day. Intoxicate my brain with the smell of graphite and wood shavings and I will think great thoughts. Or my thoughts, at least, will seem greater because they appear in bold, dark strokes. If I must write in pen, then the ink of inspiration can only be blue-black. And the paper must not blind me with white. Filling college-ruled legal pads of recycled paper with loopy 'g's and dramatically crossed 't's makes me sigh in satisfaction.

I don't know how many times I have set down a three-quarter-filled journal to begin a new one, only because the new one was prettier. I love new beginnings, before the pages grow messy and cluttered.

For every class I teach, I begin with crisp sheets of handwritten lecture notes in the form taught to me by Miss Carolyn Hames, my empowered kiwi Chemistry teacher of the silk sarees and stilettos. She dictated color-coded notes in class. I feel secure when I teach from a page of beautifully organized blue-black notes with the headings in dark green ink. As the course gets repeated, though, I begin to scribble extra notes in the margins. Blue-black pens are not always handy, so I resort to red color pencils and black pens and, heaven forbid, even pink pens when that's all I can find. During class, I find myself continually distracted and disturbed by my circles and arrows delineating extra enlightenments I've received since I first planned the lesson. Every year, I say that I will take the time to sort and redo my notes, but that never actually happens. I never have time to clear out all the extra garbage and clarify the thread of the lesson.

New school years mean new beginnings--lots of them. With a fresh journal and a new set of teaching notes come new students and new friends. Like the Doon Valley sparkling after rain, with every line highlighted against the sky, I sigh with satisfaction at the clarity and the potential. Nothing is messy or hazy. Yet. Soon, both students and friends will begin writing in my soul and I will write in theirs. Some will be faint mechanical markings, while others inspire me instantly with bold, singular statements. Come October, relationships will grow messy. I know this. I will clench my inward fist towards an abrasive colleague. I will offend a student whose heart I did not consider when I spoke. I will forget something important and wound others with my carelessness. And it will seem like there is no time to stop and sort it all out. As with my teaching, I will prefer to simply keep moving and ignore the mess.

Ah, but what if this year, this beginning, could be different? What if I armed myself to write carefully on the lives around me? What if I managed to love my neighbour as myself? What if I pledged to work at untangling the mess and to seek clarity? We love to start over, with journals, with work, with homes, with relationships, but what if we chose to write till the book was full and see what pattern emerged? This requires a patience I'm not sure I possess; a steadfastness, too.

John Donne speaks of this in his Meditation XVII: "...all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another."

THe translation he speaks of here is death, the final end. We often encounter the idea of chapters of our lives being written, but we rarely hit upon the idea that we each are chapters of some larger book God is writing. We are all connected to each other in some bigger, deeper story. When I see the people around me as part of myself, as part of a grand pattern we're being made into together, then I am compelled both to know them and to make myself known to them. Even more, I want to see how God is working in them, how he is writing our "scattered leaves" together.

Looking for the bigger story inspires me.