Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is a day to remember. This is a poem in memoriam by Czeslaw Milosz, born in 1911 in Lithuania and a survivor of WWII in Warsaw.

Album of Dreams

June 17
And that snow will remain forever,
unredeemed, not spoken of to anyone.
On it their track freezes at sunset
in an hour, in a year, in a district, in a country.

And that face will remain forever
beaten for ages by drops of rain.
One drop is running from eyelid to lip
on an empty square, in an unnamed city.

August 14
They ordered us to pack our things, as the house was to be burned.
There was time to write a letter, but that letter was with me.
We laid down our bundles and sat against the wall.
They looked when we placed a violin on the bundles.
My little sons did not cry. Gravity and curiosity.
One of the soldiers brought a can of gasoline. Others were tearing
down curtains.

November 23
A long train is standing in the station and the platform is empty.
Winter, night, the sky is flooded with red.
Only a woman's weeping is heard. She is pleading for something
from an officer in a stone coat.

Goodbye, Leah Davis!

Traveler, pay attention
to the hardships of the road,
to mysteries on the walls.

I know this at great cost,
that all life is not outward
nor all death within,
and that the age writes letters
with water and stone for no one,
so that no one knows,
so that no one understands anything.

-Pable Neruda

Recurring Dream

An aisle strewn with white flower petals, and a tall man in a black tuxedo waiting at the end - I'm the center of attention. And then he gives me the ring, but instead of putting it on my finger he places it in my hand and says, "You aren't who I thought you were. I'm sorry." Then I run, and wake up out of breath.

This dream seems to like my memory pool at night, why is it back?

Disillusion

Lewis has said that the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing is not an easy one to make. I think this appears in whatever undertaking we begin, from a little kid who is excited with the new found ability to read who then meets a textbook to a pair of enamored lovers entering the ups and downs of marriage.

Disillusion preys on the idyllic visions that play in our heads. By changing my major from piano performance to music therapy, I thought I would be cultivating a more meaningful way to change the world and minister to people in pain. Music therapy was a romanticized picture in my head of working with children in the hospital or connecting with adolescents. For Music Therapy Practicum I was not placed with kids, but in a nursing home. Walking into the facility on my first day I felt so uncomfortable – it didn’t smell very nice, loneliness seemed to be a blanket on every person’s lap, and the group of wheelchair-bound patients in the therapy room was unresponsive due to advanced Alzheimer’s. Only one lady in the group could actually talk, and she kept asking where her husband was and saying he was due for a visit anytime because she missed him. The therapist pulled me aside and said that her husband had died two years ago, but since her memory could only retain that fact for five minutes they refrained from telling her so that she wouldn’t have to re-live her grief on a daily basis. This first session did not match up at all to the ideal in my head, and I was so heavy with the loneliness and hopelessness in the eyes of the seniors living there that I began to cry when I got to my car. After thirty minutes in the car, I had almost decided that music therapy was definitely not for me - too uncomfortable, too hard, too emotionally draining. When I told this to my best friend, she didn't give me the affirmation and understanding that I expected. She said, "What if the right question is whether or not this is where your gifts meet the world's deep need? I don't think vocation's path is exactly strewn with daisies." Completely taken by surprise by this faithful question (everyone else probably would have simply agreed with me) I realized that my decision in the car was dependent on emotion and therefore lacking any desire to find God's intent when he made me.

Sometimes I wish that God would carry me to the goals that he sets before me. I hope that in the struggle with free will and disillusionment my decision will be strengthened with conviction.

Christmastime

The Nativity by C.S. Lewis

Among the oxen (like an ox I’m slow)
I see a glory in the stable grow
Which, with the ox’s dullness might at length
Give me an ox’s strength.

Among the asses (stubborn I as they)
I see my Saviour where I looked for hay;
So may my beastlike folly learn at least
The patience of a beast.

Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)
I watch the manger where my Lord is laid;
Oh that my baa-ing nature would win thence
Some wooly innocence!

Slow, stubborn, and the tendency to stray - so much of my personality is found in this circle of animals, but thankfully redemption of these traits is found within the manger that they are gathered around...

An experiment in limitations

Professor Marsh says that limitations inspire creativity. If there are no boundaries, then our Muse becomes overwhelmed by the possibilities. In the name of productive procrastination (what final projects?), this is a short story less than 100 words:

My eyes followed rows of heavy trees anchored in the steep hill below, then glanced at the stranger beside me. The cold wind teased his clothes: worn jeans, a frayed denim jacket, and fingerless gloves. Dangling below us, my new parabolic skis glistened condescendingly beside his ancient wooden ones.

“It’s good to be skiing again,” he remarked, flicking greasy hair over his shoulder.

“Again?” I casually inquired.

“Yeah, I was in prison for three years.”

“Oh…”

“Pushed a guy off a Ferris wheel.”

My arm curled tightly around the pole between us, and he laughed.

“Had you, didn’t I?”

Fragment

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

-Raymond Carver

Some people change your life just by their presence in it.