Heartbeats

I watched a movie once.

Amazing I know. Hard to believe but true.

It wasn't on any of the Academy's "To Watch" lists I'm sure but it wasn't horrible.

It was a bit of an estrogen filled story about mitigating bad luck and bad decisions by loving each other. There are many other stories along the same vein - and especially with southern accents and this one was no different.

Most of it was fairly forgettable but there is one dialogue that has stuck with me.

A side character of a single mother with a bunch of kids was desperately looking for a husband and one day found a guy. She thought he was the answer to prayer but it turns out it he was an abusive pedophile. Naturally the mother was beside herself with grief and regret and fear and without any answers. She comes out and sits on the front porch with the main character who is a single mother herself and had been dealt a very difficult deck and she asks

"what do I tell them when they ask why this happened to them?"

and the main character says

"you tell them that our lives can change with every breath we take.
We both know that.
And you tell them to let go of what's gone. 'Cause men like Roger Brisco never win. And tell them to hold on like hell to what they've got--
each other and a mother who would die for them...
and almost did.
You tell them we've all got meanness in us.
But we've got good in us too.
And the only thing worth livin' for is the good.
And that is why we've gotta make sure to pass it on."

I spent this weekend in Salt Lake with my two younger brothers and soon to be sister-in-law doing the last minute stuff for the wedding and doing my best to be a supportive sister. There is still a lot more to do and SO many more changes to come for me and my family. The more I inventory the schedule for the next 10 weeks or so its all I can do to not crawl up in a corner and sing primary songs to myself. And since we've officially adopted Murphy into the fold the more changes we get ready for the more changes we realize we need to make.

Jonathan is getting married

Nick is going on a mission

Chris is probably going to move back to Pasadena

I'm graduating from college

I'm applying to Grad school and desperately awaiting an answer

I might move back home to take care of my empty nested and still ill parents

I'm taking the GRE

I might be a college professor in 5 years (how freaking weird is that??!)

Good things are happening but they are also never going to be the same and I'm beginning to feel the loss.

Valuable experience and things are never easy. Being proven is not a day at the Pier.

But its always easier to talk about or watch a game than actually play one. I'm in the first quarter and feel pretty pooped.

Our lives can change with every breath we take - and that's a good thing.
It lets you love people better and your people love you more.

I guess I'm just doing my best to pass it on.

Familiar Stranger

I was a bit of an eccentric child.
It was like my heart was always 5 or 6 steps ahead of my head.
I don't think much has changed.

When I was about 8 my mom, as most dutiful cultured mothers did, recorded a movie off of TV. It was HBO's production of The Pirates of Penzance and when I watched it I was completely taken by it. I loved the music. I loved the costumes. I loved Rex Smith's boots and Linda Ronstadts' effortless running scales. I loved Kevin Klein's acrobatics and I loved the painfully obvious fake parrot. I watched it over and over and over again. Any minute of spare TV time had me lost in the poor wandering one's and catlike treads of it all. I was so diligent a fan that it pretty much drove the rest of my siblings insane. Especially when they just wanted to play Zelda. It got to the point that my brother stole the video tape away from me, and after a mad around the house screaming pursuit for my most prized possession, he opened up the flap and totally crumpled up a good portion of the tape. He didn't break it but there was always a delightful snow storm as Angela Lansbury sang about her wrinkles - and I was OK with that.

School and life encroached in on my available TV time so I gradually weaned myself off of it and when I got my first DVD player I was making a list of the movies I felt necessary for my personal library and Pirates of Penzance had a top 10 spot. I located one through the KCET store and stat down for a night of fun with the old friend of a movie that it was. It had been a good 10 years since I'd seen or heard a note of the production. Needless to say, I was very excited.

What followed was one of the most schizophrenic experiences of my life.

Every look and eyelash blink of blocking was totally familiar to me. It was written on my DNA. Every note of every song was a friend. I knew every aspect, dimension and angle of this production but it was a whole new movie. I was watching something I intimately knew, but for the first time. It was a completely different show but the same at the same time. I've never forgotten it.

Goonies was an even stranger experience - Chunk is Jewish! I never knew. It was like I met all of them after knowing them my whole life.

Also when I was a kid there was this hymn we used to sing a lot at church. More than we do now. It was always kind of funny to me because it had the same melody as the merry go round at the local McDonalds so it never felt right, but there was a line that caught my attention, even as a munchkin, and still resonates in me.

Yet oft times a secret something whispered, “You’re a stranger here”
And I felt that I had wandered from a more exalted sphere.

So all of this, coupled with the infinite wisdom of Sesame Street, has been a cornucopia of food for thought for me and left me wondering, honestly child-like wondering about things. Why is something familiar but totally new at the same time? I know that coming back to things with a new set of eyes and experiences and using the vellum of art to make my point is more than a little subjective, but I think there are deeper principles in play. Something much more significant than childhood movies seen with adult eyes.

I've noticed that there are times that something pushes me outside of my normal everyday-living-my-life-frequency and for a moment or two and I feel completely outside of myself. My family has an emotional sepia frame placed on them, some friends reveal themselves to be sheep skin laden opportunists, and nearly everything I turn my mind to seems familiar but disconnected from me. Even the sound of my voice has sometimes seemed foreign.

It doesn't happen often but it slightly haunts me until the next displacement.

I drive the relatively same route to work. I see every shop and person that regularly waits for the bus every day. Twice a day oft times, there and home, but do I know them? No - they're all familiar strangers.

Everything seems to be.
Conversations. The same words from different mouths
Movies. Same jokes in different frames
Meals.
Songs.
the face of my watch

Things usually click back quickly and the sepia lifts but I feel changed. I feel educated and usually kind of sad. But not the defeated kind, just the displaced kind.

In my frequency or out, the sine wave never stops. The music never goes away. And among the handful of things I've honestly learned it's that I've got to belong somewhere; even if it's among familiar strangers.

Marching Orders

It is a marvelous thing to be a woman.

I sometimes feel sorry for my noble male counter parts because they don't get to see the 5th dimension of things like women-folk get to.

I've been thinking a lot about what that means recently. And as I have I've gotten continuously more and more irked at the "fruits" of the Feminist Revolution. Here - a generation after the fireworks I see a lot of things that concern me.

It's a delicate insanity.

I see women who are marvelous and amazing and precious abandoning themselves and their gorgeous feminine natures and their rights as women to be mothers for what they've learned is being "a woman".

We dress like men, cut our hair like men, make our bodies hard and curveless like men, take on their manner of speech, embrace their (general) stoic dispositions, devalue relationships, elbow them out of their God-given drive and right to provide in the work place, all of these things are everywhere all with the intent to be a "better woman".

This is bad for MANY reasons.

Principally, it neuters our future generations of men. Women - Ladies... we need our men. And we need our men to be men. There are holes to dig and wars to fight and spiders to kill and we could do all of them if we needed to but our men were built to. That's what they do. That's how they feel important and useful. That's how they show us that they love us. How cruel is it to not let them? And frankly, I think it takes a stronger woman to let a man take care of those things than to just do it yourself. If we're doing all of the manly stuff we're upsetting the balance of things. Consequently men don't have much wiggle room and sadly there has been a trend of them becoming a lazy, high maintenance, ungentlemanly and flat out weak and cowardly bunch. It's sad, and I don't like to dwell on it because there are marvelous men out there too. I'm related to a number of them, but its a trend I can't ignore either.

And whats worse is that they are frustrated. They're being told to do one thing but then being criticized and when they do and criticized when they don't. Its a horrible cycle. If they get up and be men we consider them arrogant and if they don't then we consider them weak. Its a lose/lose and it breaks my heart to see. Men are programmed to make their women happy. Its their finest hour when we're speechless with gratitude. If we're constantly displeased no one is happy - ever. And you know the only way to fix it?

Letting women be Women. Then men can be Men.

After this weekend I feel the amazing task and blessing of being a woman. And not just being a woman but being a woman of God. Saturday was the General Relief Society meeting and I have not felt more filled and inspired by one in ages.

I love our leadership.

I love our calling as women.

And mostly I loved the fact that we have been righteous enough to get some marching orders. These meetings are usually really wonderful but I, sometimes, walk away feeling kind of patted on the head. They tell us that we're wonderful and that they love us and that we're doing a wonderful job and what we do doesn't go unnoticed and I bet a lot of us really need to hear that. If not they probably wouldn't have said it. But I sometimes feel like I failed a little too because I never felt very instructed, just praised. I don't know if its my manic tasky nature but it always felt like more of a spiritual bubble bath than a work out. And I expect a training session at General meetings - ya know?

But not this last time. Its probably just a case of me cleaning out the wax from my own ears but I really felt praised and inspired and instructed. Sister Beck and her councillors are so marvelous. I tear up just thinking about them and their tender, intensely feminine strength and their charge and belief in us to become not just members of The Church but Defenders of it. Schooled, learned, tried and passionate defenders of marriage and family and the home by means of being scholars of the doctrines of Jesus Christ and being unmoved in our testimonies. Not because we can do hospital bed corners in 10 seconds flat. Not because we're canning machines. Not because we've quilted enough blankets to build a bridge between Salt Lake and Nigeria. No - that is all secondary to our studied out personal findings of the scriptures and our relationship with the Lord. I love it.

And what more important things can we be called to take proverbial arms up for? What is it that we're programmed to do above all else? And to do it as Women of God and with His blessing and power. I can't say it enough -

Its a marvelous thing to be a woman.

And its a beautiful thing to be a Woman of God.

Complex Simplicity

So in my cluttered brain I usually have a few bebesque ideas that rattle around and that I mull over in quiet moments, or standing in line at Target, or whenever there isn't an immediate task at hand, and one of these that's been pinging around is that of perceptions.

Lemme a-splain a bit-o background:

Last week the amazing Liz Wolfe wrote a very thought provoking blog about "honor in the ordinary" and my immediate question was - What makes something ordinary? What parts does something have that makes it common? If it's common does that make it more or less real? And is it those parts that make things common or real what make up "reality"? Because your reality is honestly the lens through which you perceive the world. And then I started thinking that it isn't a particular quality that make things ordinary, or real, or part of a reality, its how you see them.

Like Monet - he was a painter in a time when it was no longer necessary to hone the artistic talent of capturing the details of things. The camera had already been invented, so the artistic unicorn was to go inside of the mind as opposed to outside of it. Monet painted the same thing over and over again not to capture the thing itself, but the light that bathed it. He didn't even bother to blend his paint on the canvas most of the time because he wanted the perceiver's eye to blend the colors and make up the picture. That's why every time you increase or decrease the distance between you and a Monet the picture changes. Its a different painting because the way the light hits your eye changes. No two people have ever seen the same Monet. Even when they've seen it at the same time and in the same light. Kinda the whole "can't step in the same river twice principle" except without the dancing raccoons and all that.

But seriously - How beautiful is that? How beautiful is it that we can construct our own worlds so powerfully and still have the mobility to go in and out of each other's worlds as well? We essentially live on 5 or 6 different levels all the time. What we think, what our family might think, what our society would think, what would another society think of our society's thinking. We even have precious insight into God's perceptions and what He thinks. Especially of us.

I think this is one of the things Neal A. Maxwell meant when he outlined his idea of "complex simplicity".

So besides the individual and collective individual's thought windows, what further perplexes/fascinates me is the layers things and people have when being perceived. Its almost as if they want and don't want to be seen at the same time. Like things that are similarly different or are differently similar.

Children all look and act the same to a casual and intolerant eye (small, loud, usually pretty grubby) but are all so beautifully and differently complicated on a second look that it takes a special kind of genius to mitigate more than one.

Books all have the relative same shape and format but all have very different silent messages.

Like - if every car (speaking in a strictly aesthetic sense) in the world had the exact same interior - would we care about what kind of car we drove? People would all see us in our different cars from the outside, but it would all be the same to us on the inside? Would we value what we have more or less? Would we value ourselves more or less?

I don't really know or have any answers that would be valid to anyone other than myself. But I do know that we all live with a complicated hunger to distinguish ourselves but also to belong somewhere. I know that a good portion of people in a crowed room feel alone and that we somehow understand that contained contradiction is an inevitable part of life. We just accept diet candy and fuel economy SUVs. That abusive parents do love their children in some fashion. That we have to fight to have peace. We understand that things can live on two fronts but not necessarily serve two masters. C.S. Lewis said that "Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time." and that might explain everything. So our own dual natures are the cause and cure....

I dont' know. I don't know if any of this makes sense at all. I suppose I'll have to let it rattle around for a little bit longer.