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  • Newly Cursed 🙂

    Well, Kent and Dayna were so kind as to give me a ride to the airport this morning (Dayna was driving—thanks Dayna!) in spite of threatening weather. Kent (half-)joked that I was cursed, because every time he gives me a ride to the airport, I-15 ends up turning into a soupy, snowy quagmire. In fact, last year the weather was so bad that he missed a final exam. Getting to the airport is often a challenge for me—and, by implication, for my friends as well.

    However, we have a friend, Kristel, who is seemingly cursed to have flights canceled, delayed, and otherwise disrupted with ridiculously high frequency. “At least I’m not cursed like Kristel,” I said. It was true. Was true.

    Well, I’m now officially double-cursed, because today my flight to Washington was Canceled with a capital ‘C’, leaving me to languish in Utah. Languish languish languish! (Not that that’s that bad, especially having received some offers from locals to let me share the fun times at their homes.)

    I’m going to try to catch a bus home at 6am. Hopefully we don’t hit any terrible weather. The weather looks like it will be worse on Wednesday than on Tuesday, and I really hope this is true because I’ll be foregoing what sounds like a really fun skiing trip with a bunch of my friends in order to capitalize on the supposedly-better weather.

    By the way, it seemed like a strange coincidence that Britten and Sandra were booked for the same flight as me, in spite of their living in California now and having no apparent connections in eastern Washington. It was great find them waiting in just the spot I was about to sit down at at gate B13. The only thing more gratifying than having friends with you at the airport is having friends with you at the airport when you discover you’re suddenly stranded in Salt Lake and wanting a friendly face (or two) around to make the debacle more enjoyable 🙂

    Anyway, I guess I’ll go get 3.5 hours of sleep, then probably wake up Kent so he can drive me to the bus station. Worst case scenario now (aside from an accident, I guess—knock on wood, and all that) is getting stranded in Baker City or some other forgotten backwater. (Apologies to any Baker City residents reading this! Just joking around… mostly :-] ) Yup. I don’t want that to happen! Hopefully I’ll do some writing, read Heart of Darkness, maybe sleep. Here goes nothing.

  • Haunted Harry

    Great stories have a way of making me reflect on my life, remember how it has been and think about how it is and hopefully will be. I’m here on the couch supposed to be working on my project, but instead I’m listening to my friends watch Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but the story brings me close to tears. Why?

    I guess I relate to Harry. Of course, that’s the point, right? But when he suffers through terrible things, I’m reminded of the ones I’ve experienced. I’ve never seen a friend murdered in a graveyard, but from time to time my heart, my spirit, have been murdered within me. I’ve seen people do terrible things, even do terrible things to me, and I’ve watched people suffer for years without reprieve, only to escape in the end through violent death. At some point, the combined trauma breaks you, tears your soul in pieces. You’re haunted by the knowledge that such terrible things happen, not just in the abstract sense in which wars and famines occur in distant times and places, but in a sense so real and immediate and personal that it overwhelms you. Sometimes, when you look at yourself in the mirror, you can see it in your eyes—you can see the darkness, the memories pushing themselves painfully to the surface like a festering sore on your skin—and you know that you’re different, and that something fundamental went wrong somewhere along the way to deprive you of the peace that everyone else seems to enjoy and that seems your natural right, but that ever escapes you.

    I’m sure Harry would see that on occasion in his own eyes. And yet, he, and I, and everyone taken so cruelly from safety to dwell in the path of fear, go forward. And in the real world, life doesn’t stop for your wounds to heal, and no Dumbledore ex machina comes to save the day, to tell you how wonderful you are and explain why everything had to happen the way it did. Nobody sits you down and asks you how you feel about it all, asks you whether your heart is dying inside of you and what it’s like to hurt so much you can hardly bear it. You just stumble onward, alive but paralyzed, and your heart turns off to protect you from the future terrors of misty graveyards looming so surely on life’s horizon. But, if that stilled heart never starts to beat again, and you can’t love or feel or live your life, then Voldemort wins. Don’t let the Dark Lord win.

    There must be a way, somehow, to come back to life, to awake from the protective slumber into which your heart and mind have placed you. When will the world seem safe enough for the real self to emerge and stay in control, never to retreat again into the recesses of the soul? I think that, for me, the day is coming. Actually, in many ways, it’s already here. The potential for healing is as great as the potential for hurt, and someday—maybe today—it just might be healing’s turn. But that, as they say, is another story altogether.

  • Change

    Change. Things are changing. Some of these are unhappy changes, and in many ways the world seems to be falling apart. The whole mood is that we have been much more than we ever will be again.

    The incoming president promises change as well. The change of progress to counteract the change of decay. We expect that he and his administration will change things as diverse as health care and the conduct of war. We expect more people than in two generations to receive employment from government work programs. Many things will change.

    But if this is all that happens—acknowledgment and then reluctant acceptance that the world and its things have changed around us—then nothing, really, has changed at all. If we remain the same, then all of the chaos and churn swirling around us will be repeated over and over in an unending cycle. Working to change our world is necessary but not sufficient; if we want that change to last, then we must change as well.

    In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius opines that those who rely on the caprice of Fortune have no peace. It is only those who allow themselves to learn from Philosophy, or wisdom, who can ride out the storms of life with tranquility. As great and powerful as we think we are as civilizations and nations and individuals, we would be unforgivably arrogant to believe we can really control the world around us. The screams of traders as they watch fortunes in paper vanish in seconds; the troubled faces of presidents, bankers, and bureaucrats using policies to glue pieces of sky back in place before they fall; the dark humor of new graduates facing a hostile job market: are these people really in control? No. Not of things. They—we—influence our environment, but ultimately it is what’s going on inside of our hearts and minds and souls that is ours to order and direct. We should all ponder this as we fall Icarus-like from the heights of our conceit. And, once we land, let us remember it before we try to build any more towers to heaven.

    So let the markets fall and the sky with it. And amidst the collapse, may the illusion of control crumble and give way to humility. Let us not love our own prosperity, but instead love our neighbor. And perhaps amidst all of this unwelcome change, as familiar things disappear and old ways are lost, we will find something we’ve long since ceased to know: ourselves.