Category Archives: Quotes

Into the Wilderness

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This month, I’ve been taking over the Sycamore House blog. This is one of my posts.

“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition.”

–       unknown

Comfort, until about two months ago, was the dry Colorado air. Comfort was knowing that the mountains are to the west. Comfort was school, papers, and my college campus.

The wilderness, in contrast, is strange and unfamiliar. I’ve found myself using my GPS more times than I’d like to admit and missing people even more than I thought I would.

When I think of a wilderness, I think first of an overgrown jungle and then the desert with nothing except for sand and possibly cacti. Quite the opposite images, right? Or not… A wilderness, really, is simply a place where your compass doesn’t always point north or rather, not the north you expected. It’s a place where there aren’t road signs detailing where and how you should go.

Harrisburg is a wilderness at times. It certainly felt so during my first week or two. But I’ve driven to work on auto pilot a few times already. I know where to get groceries and, more importantly, I know where the bookstores are and where the Chipotle is. I have not completely navigated through all that I’m doing at work, but I am slowly getting trained on using active listening and helping with the helpline and creating a volunteer recruitment plan.

My wilderness is becoming tamer. I do know where physical north is now (and I can use the river as a reference!) and I am working on clarifying my spiritual north. Will my wilderness ever become completely tame? I don’t know. After all, life is a wilderness of sorts and it changes constantly. But this year has already proved that I am not traveling alone. I have: Myself, my housemates, the wonderful people of St Stephen’s Cathedral, my family, and my friends back home.

Check out https://sycamorehousehbg.wordpress.com/to read about the program. I have one more entry to go for October and then my amazing housemates will be taking a turn.

Currently Reading

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This year so far has been a time for service and reflection, but I have also been reading. I was lucky enough to have landed in the bedroom that has bookshelves. The shelves hold a random assortment of Messiah College yearbooks, Encyclopedias, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and (most wonderfully in my estimation) a 1901 Collector’s Edition of all of Shakespeare’s plays. The book that I’m reviewing today did not come from these books or the scant number of books I brought, but from a local bookstore, Midtown Scholar.

I had gone there to write. And write I did. But while I was writing (and peering at all the characters in the store), one particular book kept staring me down. The title, What the Night Tells the Day, distracted me so much that I had to get it. I wanted to know what indeed the night tells the day. And how does it tell it? Does it whisper? Does it scream?

The cover describes it as a novel, but the introduction says that it is a memoir. An endorsement on the back calls it an autobiography (which makes me inwardly cringe). Whether you call it by the outdated term “autobiography” or more truthful “memoir,” it is clear it is not a novel.

It is the story of the author, Hector Bianciotti, his childhood in Argentina and his migration to France. He relates his Italian immigrant parent’s difficulty of fitting into Argentina society, his strained relationship with his father, and his time in a monastery, all the while discovering his sexuality and his love for literature.

All memoirs are human, but I find that this one was especially human because it reveals both the good and the slightly disturbing qualities of the author. It also relays memories like we remember them: in short little bits when we are young and then clearer, more tangible moments when we are older. Since our childhood memories tend not to line up in linear order, the beginning of the memoir is a little tangled. And as Bianciotti himself says “Like some children, certain memories like to gather together their most insignificant toys.”

Like all memoirs (and most novels), What the Night Tells the Day does not really end. It has an ending, most certainly, but authors cannot write their own deaths. It does somewhat answer some of my previous questions about the book, but the answers are open for interpretation. But it tells Bianciotti’s version of the truth and that is the most memorable and the most important.

 

 

Shut Up and Dance

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During my first dinner at my new house, one of my housemates asked as an impromptu icebreaker, “What song would you say was your summer anthem?” I thought a moment and said, “Shut Up and Dance” (by Walk the Moon). Now looking back at my first week, I’ve decided that the popular song has also been this week’s anthem (only in part because it’s been sung acapella or played a couple times in the past few days).

It has become a ritual of sorts for me to turn up the volume as high as possible and dance to the best of my abilities when this song comes on my car radio. Whether I’m alone or not (my boyfriend has been subjected to this ritual twice). I mumble sing along to the verses, but I can quite confidently deliver the chorus:

“Oh don’t you dare look back
Just keep your eyes on me
I said you’re holding back
She said shut up and dance with me
This woman is my destiny
She said oh oh oh
Shut up and dance with me”

This week has been tiring. I’ve met and bonded with six new brilliant housemates and our director, been warmly welcomed by members of the community, gone boating, cleaned onions on a farm, and taken walking tours of a new city with a different culture than my own. While I have been exhausted and busy, I have welcomed every opportunity instead of closing down or refusing. Because this year will challenge me and offer me experiences that I wouldn’t have had otherwise, experiences that will change me for good. And I think I should let myself be changed.
This year is like the woman in this song. It says to me, “quiet your anxieties”. It says, “just dive in.” It says, “you may not know what’s coming, but you can do it.” It says, “shut up and dance.”

 

Recently Read

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A few weeks ago,  I was lent a book that I perhaps wouldn’t have picked up at the bookstore because it isn’t fiction. However, I found that Richard Hooper’s Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, & Lao Tzu: The Parallel Sayings is quite enjoyable and enlightening.

Like many books, it opens with a praise/review section. Often, these praises are generic (the worst is “the next Lord of the Rings, when the book is nothing like the trilogy) and seems like the reviewer did not bother to read the book). Not so with these praises, which are genuine and true compliments. One such review says that it is “bound to nourish those who are soul-weary of combativeness in the name of religion.”

I am one who is weary of religious disputes and those hiding behind religion while attacking each other and found that the book replenished me and continues to do so every time I look through it. You see, Hooper does not focus on how each leader and how each religion/philosophy differs from each other, but how they are similar, reminding me that there can be unity among so much discord.

Hopper begins with explaining the history of each figure, the Buddha and Jesus in particular. Although I have a Christian upbringing and I have a decent knowledge of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), I learned quite a lot about both. The introduction was affirming to me as it put in words what I have been feeling for a long time: that Christianity has become a religion about Jesus and his teachings instead of being of Jesus and his teachings.

After the introduction, the book is broken into chapters on topics such as the self, wisdom and knowledge, love and compassion, and death and immortality. Hooper discusses each topic briefly before leaving the reader with quotations from the 4 philosophers that are remarkably similar. For instance, in the section about compassion, a quote from Jesus says “Blessed are the merciful, for theywill achieve mercy” and one from Lao Tzu says, “Compassion and mercy bring victory. Heaven belongs to the merciful.”

Hooper’s words may be challenging to some beliefs and reaffirming to others, but we need to challenge our beliefs in order to find out what they are and who we truly are.

 

Graduation

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“The world is waiting for us to graduate from ourselves.”- Shannon L. Adler

Four years ago, I was impatiently waiting for my day to graduate from high school. Despite my best efforts, I had succumbed to what is affectionately termed as “senioritis” and I was just ready to get done with the polo shirts, the lockers, a block schedule, and a early commute every morning. Yes, I would miss my friends and I would miss the unique atmosphere of an all girls school, but I was ready.

In a little more than a couple weeks, I will be graduating again. But this time, the word “graduation” means something different. It means leaving the security blanket of school and hopefully making something of myself. It means seizing a wonderful opportunity to serve people for a year in another state (more on that closer to time). And more tangibly, it means getting done with all these papers and projects that have been chasing me up and down an invisible roller coaster for the past month.

Like Ms. Adler says, I will be graduating from myself. In a way. My true and complete graduation from myself will take place (hopefully) far in the future, but that is not the graduation that I speak of.

I will graduate from being a student (after about 18 years), concerned mostly with completing homework and receiving helpful judgments called grades.

I will graduate into a life of giving my thoughts and my aid to others.

I will graduate into a world that I know will have puddles, but also rainbows.

I (hope) to (someday) graduate into becoming a wife and a mother.

And most importantly, I will graduate into a Sarah who will remember to love and listen and change.

Coursing through my veins

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“Then I reflected that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.” – Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

 

First, let me apologize for the lack of posts recently. This semester has been especially difficult.

This semester, I signed up for a yoga class with the university. Unlike my other classes, it does not have weekly assignments or stress associated with it. Instead, it works as a destresser.

I took a yoga class for an elective in high school and even then I was somewhat wary of taking it. I was well aware that it could help take some weight off shoulders at the end of each week, but I was also extremely aware of its increasingly popular status in society. I was afraid that my class would be full of people who were taking it simply because it is fashionable in some way, but maybe because it is offered at the university and not at a studio, it does not seem to be.

My instructor especially emphasizes the breath. He says that each movement should by synchronized our inhales and exhales, something that I haven’t perfected quite yet. Quite often, I am too intent on not falling out of poses or doing them correctly to focus on my breathing. Every once in a while, he asks if any of us have stopped breathing during the current pose, a sign that we might be pushing our bodies past our limit. My honest answer, which I don’t say out loud, is that I hadn’t noticed.

The one pose during which I am very cognizant of my breath is shavasana, or “corpse pose.” Physically, it is the easiest pose as it consists of laying on your spine with your arms nestled against your sides and your eyes closed. Some people find it the most difficult as thoughts have a tendency to take over. Ideally, in this pose, one should become grounded in their body, in their breath, in their existence and nothing else.

At the end of my first yoga class, we lay like this for a few minutes and I was very aware of my blood. I felt it pulsing in my arm and I spent the time idly imagining it running its course through my body, an image, which I realize now, is perhaps slightly disturbing. But at that time, I was amazed at my heart’s ability to send the substance throughout my body and at it changing and changelessness. That is, cells die and are reborn, but are swept along in the same current of life. At that point, my blood, my body was different than it was a moment, a day, a year before that. But it was the same.

In this present moment, I am drinking blueberry green tea, sitting on my bed, listening to the Pentatonix radio on Pandora, and typing this. I am not aware of my veins right now, but I am aware of the slight cramp in my fingers and the feeling of the keys on my fingers, which are pressing the keys out of memory. I know that when I move onto other things later today, this moment may or may not matter. Because I will be in a different present. I will have different, but the same blood in my veins.

 

Humanity

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I’m sorry I have been absent from this blog for a while. Life got hectic.

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” -Mahatma Gandhi

Last Friday when I heard about the Paris attacks and the day afterwards when I read some of the negative reactions, I had a hard time believing in humanity and my heavenly father. It seemed like there wasn’t much proof of his existence. But two things happened that made me realize that our creator is there after all.

The first happened on Sunday when my car broke down at an intersection of a busy street. This event was nerve racking and did not help my present insecurity. However, my faith in the human race and God as well returned when a couple with two kids towed my little car to safety at a gas station before AAA came. One of the kids, a tween girl, showered me with compliments such as “I like your wallet” and “I like your shoes.” Usually I do not like compliments, but she cheered me up excessively.

Humanity seems quite ugly sometimes. And often social media and news stations emphasize that. But it is important to remember that humans can be beautiful to. The family that helped me in that stressful situation was beautiful as well as my friend who drove to the gas station to rescue me and the various people who drove me to and from work this week. And just like not all humans are bad, not all Muslims, Christians, or anyone religious are bad.

I said that two things happened. The second thing appeared in something that I wrote in my journal last month when I felt like I was drowning in stress.

wordlist

Darkness

no one like you

healer

with

There is no one like you in the darkness. I, a river, try to flow for you, but I stumble over broken rocks. With you, I am stronger. With you, my healer, I am reminded that rocks cause a waterfall glorious in beauty.

wordlist

strength

ache

silver

falling

brand new

see

unmovable

The unmovable silver ache falls like a leaf burdened with what it’s seen. It lies limply on the ground, but it finds, somehow, the strength – and the faith – to look at the brand new mountains.

 

Everything is a Choice

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In the Broadway version of The Lion King, Simba sings of the “Endless Night” that he is experiencing when he feels abandoned by his father:

“Where has the starlight gone?

Dark is the day

How can I find my way home?

Home is an empty dream

Lost to the night

Father, I feel so alone.”

But something amazing happens. The chorus starts singing,”I know that the night must end. And that the sun will rise.” And Simba eventually joins in. His story, his battle is really just beginning, but he’s already starting to realize that he has a choice. He can either believe that the night, his exile, is never ending… or he can put his faith in the ever consistent sunrise.

Everything is a choice.

Whether or not we get out of bed in the morning is a choice. Eating breakfast is a choice. Driving safely is a choice. We always choose what we do, even if we do not realize it. Even if they are automatic.

I read a short, not quite credible clickbait article from “Health of Women” that made me upset this morning titled “Robin Williams did not die from suicide, wake up people.” A couple of my Facebook friends had shared it. I clicked on it because I was expecting some crazy idea about some conspiracy (it was on Facebook, after all). As it turns out, the author did have a crazy idea. And it was this: Robin Williams died from depression and not from suicide. He also wrote that suicide is not a choice.

Becoming depressed may not be a choice, but staying depressed is. One can cheer themselves up (it can seem impossible, I admit) or choose the night, to stay burden down by the oppressive blackness. If one can choose to not feel depressed, shouldn’t one be able to choose life?

Suicide, by definition, is voluntary. It is deliberately, intentionally killing oneself. It usually means that one has a plan thought out beforehand. It is not inevitable.

I agree wholeheartedly that mood disorders, all mental illnesses, and suicide have collected stigma that should be dissolved. This will only happen when those afflicted with these kind of darknesses are truly heard. Not understood. I don’t think it’s possible for mental illness to be completely understood by everyone. They just need to be heard and acknowledged.

That acknowledgement is a choice.

Going to class is a choice.

Eating beef ramen over chicken is a choice.

Going to work on time (or even working in the first place) is a choice.

Reading this is a choice.

And above all, life is a choice. The biggest, the hardest, and the most important one of all.

 

 

This Little Light of Mine…

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“A single tiny light creates a space where darkness cannot exist. The light vanquishes the darkness. Try as it might, the darkness cannot conquer the light.” – Donald L. Hicks

I do not think I am alone in my awe of what light can do to darkness. This awe has been prevalent since the beginning of humans’ time on earth and I suspect that it will be around long after I’m gone. Our relationship with light, however, has changed since the early humans’ discovery of fire. We, especially in first world countries like the U.S.,  do not always quite get the true relationship of dark and light. We have so much light at night, we can’t always see the stars. Many astrologists have to resort to retreating to the mountains or to secluded places away from civilization where their only adversary is the weather.

Perhaps because of the constant presence of light pollution, I am extra aware of the power that a single candle can bestow onto a room and how a flashlight can transform a forested campsite. A candle won’t light up everything in the room entirely, but it does illuminate the things that do matter: family, friends, a book, a game introduced by a child’s mother to decrease fear… When camping, I have seen the beam of a flashlight transform pine trees into monsters with many wild hands, but I have also seen it shine on rocks I might have stumbled on, the path to my destination (usually the bathroom), and the welcoming sight of our family tent.

Our relationship with darkness and light is not always literal. Darkness can be a fitting, albeit simple, metaphor for depression, natural disasters, tragedies like the Oregon school shooting, or just personal struggles. Similarly, light is whatever expels that darkness.

Some of my lights are:

My family. They glow with love for me, each other, and for others around them.

My friends. They’re like glow-in-the-dark-stars, except they don’t fade after a certain time.

Those are the easy ones. The ones on the top of my head.

I also find my lights in:

Good literature, especially the ones that make me tingle inside.

Bananagrams.

Relaying my dreams to my roommate.

Spending time with my beau, even if it’s for a few minutes.

Laughing at myself.

Serving other people, especially if they have stories to tell.

Having enough food.

Being other people’s lights

 

I often worry that I’m not doing anything that will make my life memorable. But I guess if I’m at least one person’s light during my lifetime, that will suffice.

 

Currently Reading

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One of the books that I am reading for an American Lit class is White Noise by Don Delillo. Set in the 1980s, the novel explores the life of Jack, a professor who invented the field of “Hitler Studies” at his college, and his nontraditional family around the event of a chemical explosion.

Before we read it, my professor told us that it is okay for us to find some of the events and dialogue funny. And some parts of it is funny. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny, but they deserve a couple chuckles.

For instance, this scene with two of Jack’s daughters:

In bed two nights later  I heard voices, put on my robe and went down the hall to see what was going on. Denise stood outside the bathroom door.

“Steffie’s taking one of her baths.”

“It’s late,” I said.

“She’s just sitting in all that dirty water.”

“It’s my dirt,” Steffie said from the other side of the door.

“It’s still dirt.”

“Well it’s my dirt and I don’t care.”

“Dirt is dirt.”

“Not when it’s mine.”

This scene is mostly funny because it is relatable. You can easily see siblings having a similar conversation.

The novel is very aptly named. Throughout the novel, Jack mentions bits and pieces of noise from the television, which no one really seems to pay attention too. Events, such as the smoke alarm going off and people going missing, are talked about but stay part of the background.The conversations are often like the one on either side of the bathroom door. Background conversations, ones that don’t really matter. One could argue that all the conversations (at least the ones I’ve seen so far) classify as such. I personally think that Jack’s family is all part of the white noise and that he and his thoughts on death are all that he really pays attention to.

One view of white noise, background noise, the noise that we don’t quite pay attention to, is that it is different for everyone. Some people have to have music or the TV on all the time and some people actually listen, so they can’t have it on while they work on their business. Another view is that everything, even your thoughts, are white noise.

If the second is true, if everything and everyone is white noise, then do we matter?

I’m hoping that the second half of the book will give me a semblance of an answer.