That's How We Roll

Feeling my feet leave the mat, I know I’m going down.  It’s part relief, to be on the ground where I feel more comfortable, part disappointment because my partner has succeeded where I have not.  But I don’t have time to think about that, because I’m already scrambling, searching to improve my position, with my heart pounding in my ears and sweat pouring in my eyes.  I move, but he counters fluidly, and I find myself moving without thought, listening to the conversation our bodies are having, but not stopping to think about what they are saying.  He overreaches, looking for an armbar, and I take my moment to explode, reversing our positions, and coming out on top.  I can’t rest or hesitate, because hesitating means being submitted.  Controlling my breathing, I stay tight to his body, feeling perfectly at ease.  For the first time as an adult, I don’t  feel slow, or awkward.  I feel like I’ve come home.

A few days ago, when I mentioned needing to get back into the rhythm of writing in this blog again, a friend asked me, quite earnestly, why I never write about martial arts, our gym, or training jiu jitsu.   It’s not like I haven’t thought about it, as goodness knows bjj has become the place where my brain drifts when it’s not otherwise occupied.  “I don’t feel qualified to talk about jiu jitsu,” I replied.  “I’m just a white belt, not an authority on the art.”  My friend surprised me by nodding, and then saying, “but you’re an authority on your own experience with it, and with what’s like to be a woman your age who trains.”

We were sitting on the mat, talking while we cooled down a bit, catching our breath before starting another match.  Open mat is different from class.  No less serious, but paced differently, allowing for time to talk, to drill, to try out techniques and make mistakes.  I look out across the sweat wet mats, seeing pairs of bodies locked together in silent combat, some weird primordial movement that looks part death roll, part alien foreplay, watching them roll.   My friends, my training partners, who trust me with their bodies, so that I might learn an art I’d never even heard of until after my 40^th birthday.

I stepped into Urban Jungle Self Defense a little over two years ago, a 40 year old woman with no athleticism, no background in any type of martial arts, and more than a little out of shape, wanting to try out Kardio Kickboxing classes, in hopes of losing some weight and finding some self-confidence.  Walking onto the mat that first time was one of the scariest things I had ever done.  So many people, all more fit than I was, and they all seemed to know what they were doing.  I flailed around with arms and legs for an hour, occasionally lying on the mat panting and fleetingly hoping to die.  But I left feeling…exhilarated?  Sore?  Absolutely.  Accomplished, for some odd reason.  And I went back two days later, though the instructor seemed surprised that I had returned.  And that I kept returning, more determined to make it all the way through a class, to move more gracefully, to prove something to myself that I couldn’t even define.  Spring turned to summer, and I sweated my way through the heat and felt myself grow stronger than I had been a long, long time.  It was waiting for Friday evening Thai pads class to begin when I first saw people rolling.  I had a moment of confusion, thinking one of the men had just attacked his own son, as they rolled across the mats, each battling to be on top, legs wrapping, arms twisting, muscles straining.  “What are they doing?” I asked.  The man’s wife replied, “jiu jitsu,” with a sigh.  I was both intrigued and appalled by what I was seeing, like some kind of wrestling gone mad.  I’d never heard of this art before, although I knew that Urban Jungle taught other classes.  I simply had not been curious about what any of them were, or, perhaps, thought they were for those far more fit and, well, younger.

Watching from a distance, I started to appreciate the way the men moved, the thought and strategy behind the movement.  I thought to myself, “maybe, someday, I’ll try that out.” I didn’t believe it, though, thinking I was too uncoordinated, too old, too out of shape to move my body through rolls and too heavy to climb on anyone without hurting them.

Six months after joining Urban Jungle, I signed up for a women’s self defense course, and talked my best friend into attending with me.  She doesn’t like physical contact with strangers, hates sweat, and considers a walk around the block physical exertion – I told her as little as possible about the class ahead of time.  She wasn’t thrilled that the class involved people sitting on her, grabbing her arms, trying to pick her up, and choking her – to say the least.  I, however, was entranced.  “This is part of jiu jitsu?”  I asked the instructor.  He explained to me that jiu jitsu was a sport, but also how it was an art of self-defense.  Somehow, I got the courage to ask if I could try a class.

That next Thursday, I put on my ill fitting, borrowed gi and climbed the stairs to the room I associated with Kardio class.  Instead of chatting women relaxing before a workout, there were a dozen men stretching, rolling, and talking.  I sat down in a corner and tried really hard to be invisible until class started.  One of the  men I knew from Kardio classes said hello, smiled, made me feel less like I needed to run away.  Warm ups started, and I was instantly lost and regretting my decision.  The men traveled as one unit, from one end of the long room to the other – bear walks, crab crawls, cartwheels, and things I didn’t even recognize.  I couldn’t do any of it.  One of the instructors took me aside and tried to teach me how to forward roll, a skill I had mastered when I was five, but could no longer perform.  By the time warm-ups ended, I was drenched in sweat, frustrated and really, really hated my oversized gi.  Class, however, returned us to the self-defense moves I had liked so much, and my confidence was bolstered by recognizing some of the instructions and being able to perform some of the basic movements.  A nice young man in a brown belt promised, “you can throw me as many times as you like.”  I took him up on it and left feeling impossibly happy, considering every part of my body hurt.

I went back the next week, and the week after that.  Everything hurt, some nights so much I couldn’t sleep, because I was using muscles I hadn’t previously known existed.  I still couldn’t do many of the movements, but every week it got a little bit easier.  I started to roll, having no idea what I was doing, and I learned how to tap out.  To tap out is to acknowledge your partner as a winner, to submit, but also to acknowledge you have something to learn.  I tapped often, sometimes mere seconds into a bout of rolling, often in frustration or even in anger.  Early on, my emotions beat me as often as my partner.  I’d get overeager in gaining a position and find myself on my back, or make a mistake because I was tired and frustrated, only to find myself being choked.  Within five minutes of rolling, I would be out of breath, having pressed as hard as I could, using strength rather than skill, and losing to someone who was calm and patient.  Often, as much as I loved what I was learning, I wanted to quit.

Urban Jungle truly began to feel like a second family.  More experienced students took the time, gave of themselves, to let me practice, to teach me, piece by piece, what I needed to survive and to advance.  Some days I feel as though I am learning and growing, and other days I wonder if I know anything at all.  Frustration is a part of the process, as is patience.  It’s not something to be learned in a week, or a year, or maybe even a lifetime. 

Over time, I’ve grown more comfortable, gained a little skill, but really just enough to see how far I still have to go.  Jiu jitsu has become a part of my life every day, whether I roll or not.  I find myself thinking about it, wake up dreaming about rolling – and sometimes choking my pillow.  My family and friends roll their eyes sometimes, because I probably talk about it a little too much.  I get out of bed every morning feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck.  A big, freakin’ truck going way over the speed limit.  Slowly, it’s changed who I am; I no longer overreact to small things.  I have more patience for a long process.  Being a person who has learned most things in life fairly quickly, it’s been a big deal to accept such a long learning curve, to settle in for a lifetime of learning and growing, knowing there really is no end goal to reach – just milestones along the way.  And the only ones that really count are the ones that answer the question, “am I better today than I was yesterday?  Last week?  Last year?”  Hopefully, the answer is yes.

 

I don’t hold top position very long.  My friend has years of experience on me, and he gives me chances to grow, and learn, but he’s not going to just let me win.  As my knee skims over his ribs to mount, I find myself being unbalanced and turned, landing back on the bottom, this time under tighter side control.  My arms scramble to find a safe position, my knee rising automatically to hold off his own mounting.  I fight down a fleeting moment of panic as his wet rash guard gets stuck to my face, making breathing impossible, before I turn my head and get a quick gasp of the humid air. I’m waiting for him to move, to hopefully make just a tiny mistake, but he’s quick and sure as he secures my arm and steps over my head.  With nowhere to go, I tap, noting to myself just how he made me give up that arm.  I won’t make that mistake again.  But, for that moment, I just stand back up, and start circling, looking for a chance to take us both to the mat, hoping I’ll be the one getting the take down this time.

Inspire Me

Last night I attended a literary reading, and I fell in love with words all over again.  Oh, it's an affair that finds me more often than not, sneaking up on me through a stark line in a movie, a clever phrase on the radio, brilliant wisdom passed on by a friend, lines scribbled on an envelope, in a play or in the middle of a novel, and turning my head again.  Sometimes, I forget. I get caught up in so many other things in my life, I forget to pay attention to the words that connect me to the rest of the world, tether me to humanity, remind me of what I am.  Words are what both knock me down, and, at the same time, lift me up.

In this case, it was poetry that had me captivated.  Sitting in my seat, under an open summer sky, soaking up the starlight and night breezes, those words wrapped around me.  Some of them caressed me, wrapped me gently in their embrace, while others slapped me sharply across the face.  Poetry is  a challenge - to capture emotions, a story, a fleeting vision, with just a few well chosen phrases.  It's an art all its own.  I've written my own poetry all of my life, using it less to convey what I see and feel to others than to reveal it to myself.  Others keep diaries, I write poems.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I never said I write good poetry.  I simply said, I write.  Sometimes, I don't know what the words are going to tell me, until they are on the paper.  But after last night, I find myself re-inspired, to write more, to polish my words and guide them as much as they often guide me.  And so, in keeping with that idea, below are some of my own words from the last decade or so.  Enjoy the snapshots of where I was, in those moments.  The words remain, though I have already changed.

Power Trip

I am afraid
of you
of power
of myself.

I am afraid to crawl, to laugh, to cry
and more afraid to fall.

I am afraid
of pain
of feeling
of living.

I am calm on the outside, shaking within;
I am ready to quit, unsure where to begin.

I am afraid
of dreams
of fantasy
of reality.

I am afraid
but not enough to

stop.

2005

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Math Reasoning

Cover me in one million kisses
Dance with me one thousand times
Sing to me one hundred love songs
Say to me once that I've been on your mind.

Bring to me your own special smiles
In number, greater than stars in the sky
Play for me eighth notes of moonlight
Celestial tunes to which we can fly.

Name for me one million reasons
That we belong to each other infinity squared
Share with me one thousand stores of love
Legends with which, our lives can compare.

One hundred nights to share together
One hundred and a thousand more again
Look in my eyes, until time no more passes
One billion cycles without beginning or end.

2008
------------------------------------------------------------------------

tired eyes
looking out on a jaded world
a world of deceit, regret, pain
a world of longing, drowning, sorrow, rain

angry eyes
seeing people for who they really are
people who lie, who rape, who maim
people who bruise, who ignore, who blame

grieving eyes
looking back on a bland life
a life of fear, defeat, numbness
a life of giving up, lying down, dumbness

blue eyes
looking into the mirror
looking into a futureless past
looking into an endless future

dead eyes
not seeing at all

2011

--------------------------------------------

he seduces me with words

and I forget my own name

he undresses me with wit and ideas

lays me bare until I find my own truths

he plays me with games

and I almost never know the rules

he draws me in with poetry and lyrics

then steals my thoughts and my voice

but he doesn’t really know himself

because, if he did, if he understood

half so well as he understands words

he wouldn’t like the story very much.

2014

------------------------------------------------------

with fiery touch,

engulf me

burn my skin with wanting,

the ember of your gaze.

surround me with the heat

of your touch

until I melt and am no longer

me and you are no longer you,

but we are one gasping, beating mass.

steal my breath and sear my lungs

and promise to breathe for me

illuminate me for one brief, brilliant, painful moment

worth every second of the brutal, searing pain,

for the fire is the most beautiful when it is

most greedily consuming, stealing, becoming,

and I want to burn

2015

 

 

Looking for Molly Ringwald

It’s the 30^th anniversary of The Breakfast Club this year.  30 years.  Wow.  I wasn’t old enough to see it in theatres the first time around, but definitely remember seeing the previews for it and would have liked to have been allowed to see it on the big screen at the time.  It wasn’t until a few  years later, sitting in a friend’s basement, that I finally watched the movie on a fresh VHS tape.  I was completely enchanted with the characters in this movie, how real they were, the fact that there weren’t any real fairy tale endings for them.  They presented problems that my friends faced, that I faced.  They were really just all of us.  Not that I was exactly like Molly Ringwald, or Ally Sheedy or Anthony Michael Hall.  There was a little bit of each of them in all of us.  And we saw a little of ourselves in each of their quirks.

By the time I finally did see The Breakfast Club, what many consider one of the defining films of that decade, I was already well familiar with the other teen movies of the time.  John Hughes just seemed to get us and he was making movies with characters that were incredibly real, incredibly connected to our experiences, to things that we cared about.

Now, I was slightly enchanted with Pretty In Pink at that age, though I find myself more annoyed than anything these days.  I was always more of a Some Kind of Wonderful girl.  I think part of it might be that I identified with Watts more than I did with Andi.  I wasn’t a complete tomboy, but certainly more like that than the ultra girly, always in angst, Andi.  But Molly Ringwald herself was something to behold in her heyday.  She was the girl that some part of us always wanted to be.  Something about her spunky red hair and forever underdog status resonated with me, and with most of the girls I knew growing up.  It’s no coincidence that she and Anthony Michael Hall played parts in so many of those movies.  They were the EVERYbody actor.  We recognized them.  And, as adolescents, that’s a big part of what we’re all looking for – confirmation that we’re not freaks.  That everyone else is just as screwed up and there’s hope for us after all.

Who am I?  It’s the question we all start asking from the moment we are first capable of abstract thought.  First, we identify as one gender or another, then as a member of a specific family, maybe a member of a church or community.  But then we start to label ourselves, or others label us.  Maybe we’re the funny one.  Or the smart  one.  The best athlete.  Or the worst.  Maybe we’re the kid who’s picked last on every team, or the kid who’s never picked at all.  And we start to wonder if the labels are fitted to us or if they define and mold us from the beginning.  There’s no such thing as any perfect label – we’re all more than what the world sees of us in quick snapshots.  This is what Andrew, Johnny, Claire, Brian and Allison discovered in a Saturday detention.  They had to smoke a little pot first, but they had a real and honest discussion.  It’s almost unheard of for a group of high school kids to really sit and have that kind of open dialogue in a group.  How frightening.  How freeing.

Where someone fits in, or if they don’t, was a recurring theme in this genre of movies, as much as how the opinions of your social strata could keep true love at bay.  John Hughs in particular was genius at highlighting this.  While he did not direct Some Kind of Wonderful, he did write the script.  Like Pretty in Pink before it, it features a main character from the quintessential wrong side of the tracks, a quirky best friend, and an unattainable dream – in this case, the boy, Keith, gets a date with his dream girl.  His best friend, the tomboy, Watts, surpresses her own affection for Keith to help him set up the perfect date.  But social restrictions get in the way and Keith finds himself wondering which girl is really his dream girl.  All of that sound kinda familiar?  It’s pretty much Andi and Blayne and Duckie all over again, but I think I prefer Keith’s story.  Maybe because I always secretly rooted for Duckie to get the girl.  Maybe because Eric Stoltz gives such a stellar performance in this one, not to mention that he was pretty cute back in the day.

Lea Thompson, Marty McFly’s girl, plays Amanda Jones – popular girl, who realizes she is trapped by her own popularity.  She agrees to the date with Keith to feed her own agenda, but learns something about herself along the way.  It’s another of Hughes’ themes – how popularity is its own kind of trap.  How those caught in its grasp are unable to make their own decisions or make friends outside their own group – how they feel stuck.  Claire and Andrew in Breakfast Club,  Blayne in Pretty in Pink, and Amanda in this flick all hint at how hard their lives are, living under a social microscope.  And we all know how cruel kids can be.  These movies don’t attempt to hide that.  They tell us high school, and growing up in general, is a hard, suck ass, place to be.  Those on the outside of the popular crowd long to have a taste of that world, to date the golden children, to try on their lives.  And, yet, they learn that these other glittering lives are just as imperfect as their own.  Life is messy – fitting in isn’t easy, and it isn’t everything, seems to be the message John Hughes and his peers were throwing out there for us.  He presents this, but never presumes to offer a solution.  It’s part of the charm of these movies – they’re a mirror of our insecurities not a recipe for fixing our lives.  In real life, the guy never turns to his best friend and realizes he’s secretly been in love with her all along.  Real life Duckies get their hearts broken again and again.  Good guys sometimes get kicked in the face.

I was neither an Andi nor an Amanda, and certainly never a Claire.  I wasn’t the outcast or loser, but nor was I the golden girl.  Neither prom queen nor basket case.  A friend once told me I am a lot of Anthony Michael Hall, a little bit of Ally Sheedy, and a tiny bit of Judd Nelson.  It’s the duality of the human condition – we present to the world as one dimensional, because people see us the way they choose to see us.  But we’re so much more than that, each of us not one thing or another.

Seeing these movies as an adult, some things have changed and others have not.  Molly Ringwald is still the every girl, and the conflicts her characters face still ring true.  Just because we’re adults and we’ve learned how to deal with our emotions doesn’t mean we stop having them.  Allison Reynolds might believe that “When you grow up, your heart dies,” but it’s not true.  We bury these discovered truths and half truths, but we don’t ever forget them.   The things that make the emotions so true, so raw, so real is the newness of them when we are teenagers.  Everything is fresh, and everything is important.

Forever, Molly, Anthony, Emilio, Judd and Ally will be captured and represent a generation.  The movies of that genre, for the most part, stand the test of time.  Get past the terrible clothing and the cheesy jokes.  Look to the heart of who they were showing us.  Look back at your own adolescence.   I bet you find plenty in common with the brain, the jock, the criminal, the basket case and the beauty queen.

A Separation from the Stars

I have long been fascinated with looking to the night sky, finding it both overwhelming and reassuring, at the same time. I am still struck by something I read in A Stone for a Pillow, which is a biblical reflection by Madeleine L'Engle: the word disaster breaks down to mean "a separation from the stars." L'Engle goes on to reflect that it is when we are separated from the natural world, when we delve too exclusively into our humanity that we become the least human. When we are literally separated from the stars, through physical limitations such as city lights or through isolation, or ignorance, a part of us dies. We need the connection to the night sky, to the earth beneath our feet, the wind on our faces, and the stone beneath our neck for a pillow, as Jacob is said to have used in the fields.

Madeleine L'Engle was one of my favorite authors as a child, and my love affair with her writing continued into adulthood. She was the first person who awoke my interest in science, on both the large and small scale. The first person to introduce me to the idea of space, mitochondria, to fascinate me with both the macro and microcosms. And she was the first person to make me seriously think about faith, what I believe, if I think there is a divine order to the universe. She made me feel like it was OK to question those things, and to not have an answer. And she made it OK for science and faith to coexist. Because she was open about having those some questions and occasional doubts. My own religious beliefs aside, for I am still on the fence about many things, I find reassurance in knowing there is something of order and design to all life. I can find the patterns and they repeat, showing me that things are purposeful and work for a reason. L'Engle wove together science, art, poetry and personal introspection. She made me think, as all great artists do.

Being outside at night has long been of comfort to me. When we fear the darkness, we fear not the dark itself, but what sits just outside our circle of light. But when we embrace the night, and look to the stars, there is a feeling of connection. I feel both important and insignificant in the universal design and flow. After an evening run, resting in a swing on the local playground, head tipped back, watching the stars flow back and forth as my body sways, I feel connected. L'Engle awoke a need for understanding in me as a child, and I've fed that need over the last few decades.

Science, be it biology, physics, astronomy, or geology, has long been studied, and the importance never underrated.  But science, outside of school, has remained a mystery through much of the last century.  Now, however, there is a surge of need to understand.  Through online blogging, and posting of photos on Instagram, a need to know has been awoken in many who would, in the past, never have thought to question.  Science has become accessible to the common man.  There’s a new ilk of scientists, rock stars of astronomy, of chemistry and medicine.  Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Bye, Richard Dawkins.  Through books, blogs, tweets, Instagram, podcasting, and television, they have brought science into everyone’s lives.  We live in what is, no doubt, a very exciting time.  I was born after man had been to the moon, but before the Challenger disaster of 1986.  I was a child when space travel was exciting, but accessible.  Yet, I knew very little about the travel itself, the process, or what was beyond our atmosphere.  What I did know, I learned in school.  The launches were televised, but the physics and mechanics were glossed over.  I suppose it wasn’t something the media felt was important for the general population to know. 

 

Now, my daily e-mail, Facebook wall, Twitter feed, news logs are filled with articles on space, astrophysics, genetic research, climate theory, and much more.  In short, we are accepting the science into our lives as something we have a right to know.

When Pluto was demoted from a planet several years back, so many people were up in arms.  What I had learned to call the ninth planet, was not a planet at all.  It made everything we had learned in school be questioned.  It rocked what little we knew about the solar system, made our own knowledge about how the universe is arranged and how it works, or doesn’t work, seem even smaller and less reliable.  Neil Degrasse Tyson, largely unheard of previously outside of the science community, became the most hated man in science.  Or at least by school children.    But he was classifying the  universe into like sets of celestial objects, and science is without empathy at times.  What this did, however, was make Tyson a household name.  I know that I started paying more attention to him after reading about Pluto being labeled as a “dwarf planet.”  I picked up Tyson’s book Death by Blackhole and fell in love with the night sky all over again.

What makes Tyson so undeniably well read and respected is that he’s not just another science geek with a telescope.  I mean, yes, he is that.  But he’s more.   I joke a lot that anyone who understands how great a mystery the universe is and seeks to understand it while dressing with such flair (just think of his awesome waistcoats), can dance like Michael Jackson and wrestled like a badass in college, well, he’s got my respect.  He’s got the respect of many people – he’s a cool guy, who likes science. A  rock god of astronomy who’s made it cool to want to study science.  We’ve come a long way, baby.  Tyson was encouraged in his early years by Carl Sagan and has said that Sagan didn’t just make him want to be a better scientist, but gave him a clue about the kind of person he wanted to be.   Someone who treated others with respect, spoke calmly and clearly about things that matter, someone who sought knowledge but also sought to enjoy life.

Tyson is not like Madeleine L’Engle, my earlier influence in looking to the stars.  She was unabashedly Episcopalian, solidly aligning her love of science and the natural world and her firm belief in a creator.  Tyson identifies himself as agnostic.  Not an atheist, because he “doesn’t care enough” to consider himself such.  He looks to the spirituality of science.  He does not discount scientists who firmly believe in a higher being – he says the high percentage of people who are well educated and still have strong faith tells him that he might be wrong, but he still holds fast to what he feels is the truth.  He does, however, speak with feeling about blind faith, because blind infers ignorant.  Ignorance is the enemy.

Tyson’s peer, Richard Dawkins, looks also to the universe, to the matters of the physical world, both seen and unseen.  Dawkins is an unashamed atheist, using science to debunk religion.  I read both authors, neither completely agreeing or disagreeing with most of their points.  They have their own views, and I have mine – confused though they often are.  L’Engle showed me there is a place for both.  I can look to the mathematical order of the world, see the patterns, and know there is some kind of design to the universe.  Some kind of force driving life.  I don’t pretend to understand it or label it.  But I know it is there, and I feel connected when I stand under the stars, and feel how alone and small I really am in the universe, and then feel the contrast that I do matter to so many other people on this planet.

Today I could open my Facebook feed, and read a dozen different articles just from this morning on the universe, the natural world, research into medicine and genetics, technology and engineering.  Website such as Star Talk and I Fucking Love Science collect articles and share them.  My favorite is IFLS’ weekly summary column that details the ten best scientific articles of the week.  This week in science, look what we have done…

We live in exciting times.  They’re not the first exciting times, though.  The philosophers of the natural world, the masters of the ancient world – they were the first to not only observe, but to share.  While Chinese naturalists, early Greek philosophers and the Vedic philosophy of India all predated them, it is the Classical Greek philosophers and those who followed shortly after who most easily come to mind.  Because they not only observed and theorized, but also wrote and shared with the masses.  While Socrates did not write many of his own observations, his student Aristotle recorded much of his teaching.  Aristotle himself was a student of the natural world, studying physics, biology, zoology, ethics, poetry and language.  While Plato was more of a narrative writer, Aristotle observed and wrote. He influenced the philosophy of many other cultures.  In his wake came others, such as Archimedes. Those who saw the order in the natural world, the greater adventure in the stars, and they shared with others.  Imagine what they could have done, if they’d had Twitter and Tumblr at their fingertips.  Alas, the smart phone was not yet at hand.

Today, scientists have the means to communicate with the larger population.  They are represented by those like Tyson, Nye, Hawking – household names, with big personalities and personal stories they are willing to share.  They’ve connected their humanity to the understanding of the universe and welcomed us into their world and their thoughts through social media.  Through them, we are experiencing a new age of enlightenment, if only in understanding how little we really know.  How much there still is to discover, on both the universal and the microscopic levels.

And what I find is that knowing more about the universe, understanding how a star is formed and what stage of life it might be in, and trying to fathom the incredible distances in space, well, none of that takes away the magic I feel standing under a sky full of stars.  The way I hold my breath watching a shooting star.  Or the way I imagine I will be overwhelmed someday when I finally do see the Northern Lights.  Understanding science doesn’t diminish the wonder – it increases it a thousand fold.  So, I thank these pioneers of scientific wonder – those who dared to bare themselves a bit to invite us into this world and open our eyes just a little bit wider.

For the Love of Words

 

Last night I was reading an article that was just a collection of some of the most enticing phrases found in classic literature.  A friend had posted it on social media and I clicked on it, half out of boredom, and found myself falling in love with some of those phrases all over again.  Whether it was lamenting a love lost, admiring the landscape, or pondering the human condition, these writers had managed to weave words into art.  It’s what all good writers do, what all good artists do – help others to see the world through their eyes.

 

                “She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.”  - Salinger,   A Girl I Knew

 

With one well-turned phrase, I am seeing the world through Salinger’s eyes.  I can picture the girl, and I want to know her.  Words are powerful things, people.  Knowing when to use them is an even deeper art.  There is a profound strength in using just the right words, just enough words, and letting silence speak in between.  I’m still grappling to find that strength, to restrain my words, to not over use them or abuse them.  I find myself loving the words themselves, collecting them and gathering them into neat phrases, to be savored and shared and blurted out, sometimes without thinking.  For I often expect others to share my enthusiasm for language.

“Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.” – Krauss The History of Love

And I feel that way about words, and stories, and conversations.  It’s how I connect myself to the world at large, to other people, to the universe I have yet to comprehend.  It’s always been that way for me, listening to conversations of others, even as a child.  Marveling at the sound of words, the way the sounds themselves could have edges, curves, undulations.  Some words are sharp and hard, regardless of meaning.  Some sound slinky and seductive and hypnotic.  Some words are fun to say.  Even as a child, I collected words, hoarded them until I could share them in a choice setting.

All good writers know this.  I am a writer, though not an author.  That would imply publication, while I merely write to amuse myself, to organize my thoughts, or to find the end of a story.  But the words, themselves, even as I type this, seem right on the page.  There is a satisfaction in spitting them out, seeing them in black and white.

English is messy.  It’s vague and imprecise, leaving room to argue or ignore.  Other languages are specific and leave no mystery.  In Russian, there is a single word that means to become so lost in reading a book that you lose track of all around you.  A single word, to express how I’ve spent a good bit of my life – seems like we should have a word for that state of being, in English.

”And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”  - Steinbeck,  East of Eden

 

Words are also my weapon of choice.  Like many of my friends, I hide behind sarcasm and double entendres.  I cuss like a sailor, taking great joy in the sound of those words being flung out into the air.  I can almost see them hanging there.  I remember the first time I dared to curse out loud.  My heart beat a little faster, as I looked around, making sure that no grown-up had heard.  How freeing to tell my friend to go to hell, how absolutely freeing.  The word has power because we bestow that power upon it.  And in my eleven year old mind, it felt like a pretty big word.  I found bigger ones over the years, and added dire wishes to accompany them, in the fashion of the Romans, hoping great tragedy would befall someone’s entrails.  That was fun, but then again, so was dropping the f-bomb.  My teenage years were a gluttony of cursing and swearing.  Once again, there is strength in knowing the power of a word and when to use it.  A well timed, well crafted insult, I find to be a thing of beauty.  Even when I’m on the receiving end of it.

One could argue that technology has whittled down our vocabulary.  One could even say that our society is devolving into users of text acronyms and murdered punctuation.  But there are still wonderful words being used.  New words creeping into our daily use, words that evoke images of a new millennium, while leaving room to embrace the words of the past.  There’s room for wifi and ottoman to exist in the same world.

Me, I’ll continue to collect words.  Picking them off the pages of books, from movies, and magazines and conversations overheard in hallways.   I’ll string together phrases, and use them to both amuse and to anger.  Words are my solace,  my weapons, my art and my passion.

“One must be careful of books, and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us.”  - Clare, The Infernal Devices