Having watched Finding Nemo with Amelia the weekend before last, I am grateful to Dory, the fish, for helping me push past one of the strangest feelings I have had in a long time.
I can only describe this feeling as projected post-traumatic stress syndrome. On Saturday, I watched Amelia fall from the top of the stairs to our garage backwards head first and for a very short period of time, I felt that I had lost the entire universe, replaced by this split-second void that felt as if it would never ever go away not ever, until I saw her body move, heard her cry, watched tears stream down her face, and felt her warm body moving freely, safely in my arms.
I don't remember how I got to the bottom of the steps - my first memory is that I wasn't getting oxygen to my brain and I had to sit down. As the day progressed, I felt myself unable to stop holding my daughter, of wanting to hear her breathe, feel her little hands and feet, touch her soft curls. Physically my own body felt as if it had been in an accident. My whole body ached in a strange way.
Yesterday, the day after, was a celebration of life, sunshine, Amelia. And then today, it is as if I cannot concentrate. Padhraic has left for Canada and Amelia is in daycare. My brain has been fuzzy the entire day, and all the things that motivate me in life, my work, my writing, my running, even food which never ceases to be a passion, seem to feel far away, fuzzy.
I know when I pick up Amelia in less than an hour, my world will return to normal, but I want to recognize this moment, somehow capture the essence of what it is and feel it in all that it represents. I went out for a run, forced myself to do something, and I passed this nice couple walking down the street. The woman was wearing a baseball cap with a shamrock on it and she said - just keep going. And I remembered Dory, and her words, just keep swimming.
My heart goes out truly to people in this world who have experienced real and tangible loss, of which I only experienced a split second of and it has turned my body, brain, and essence of self into mush in the first opportunity I have had alone to process it.
Hugs to you all and sharing the only wisdom that seems to make sense of what I am feeling, and that coming from a blue fish who has the privilege of short-term memory loss.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Learning to be emotionally strong when pushing oneself
Today marks the end of a major deadline in work (a two-year release cycle). This deadline is quite different to others I have experienced in the past. It is the first time I have pushed towards a major release while being a mom. With my husband travelling three out of the last four weeks, I had to juggle being a single-parent while working long, intense hours.
Something happened on the way towards the deadline, something that I have often hoped for, but never quite was able to achieve. I stayed calm, I stayed focus, and I stayed positive, even with lots of variables pushing me in lots of directions.
Other times in my life, I would have experienced a sense of frustration towards the end, participating in the politics that other tired people are engaging in, or else arguing with my husband over trivial things that just don't matter in the bigger scheme of life. This time I felt it very important to stay positive, to be emotionally strong for my daughter. I did not want my work to negatively affect her life.
I felt this tremendous desire to prove to myself that I could be good at my job, successfully participate in an intense delivery period, and still sit down and play house, serving many, many stuffed animals cups of tea. What I discovered during this release is that it takes a lot less energy to stay positive and you get this tremendous boost of mental and physical strength, making it possible to do so much more than you would normally be capable of, simply because you are emotionally stable to the core.
I have pushed myself so many times before, physically, mentally, but I can honestly say this is the first time that I asked myself to stay emotionally sound, to be spiritually present while I was asking my mind and body to do way more than is natural in a 24-hour time period.
It is by far the biggest achievement for me in this release. I don't feel as if I need to rebuild my life - I never stopped living.
Thanks, Suzana, for helping me to realize the value of being present, here and now.
Something happened on the way towards the deadline, something that I have often hoped for, but never quite was able to achieve. I stayed calm, I stayed focus, and I stayed positive, even with lots of variables pushing me in lots of directions.
Other times in my life, I would have experienced a sense of frustration towards the end, participating in the politics that other tired people are engaging in, or else arguing with my husband over trivial things that just don't matter in the bigger scheme of life. This time I felt it very important to stay positive, to be emotionally strong for my daughter. I did not want my work to negatively affect her life.
I felt this tremendous desire to prove to myself that I could be good at my job, successfully participate in an intense delivery period, and still sit down and play house, serving many, many stuffed animals cups of tea. What I discovered during this release is that it takes a lot less energy to stay positive and you get this tremendous boost of mental and physical strength, making it possible to do so much more than you would normally be capable of, simply because you are emotionally stable to the core.
I have pushed myself so many times before, physically, mentally, but I can honestly say this is the first time that I asked myself to stay emotionally sound, to be spiritually present while I was asking my mind and body to do way more than is natural in a 24-hour time period.
It is by far the biggest achievement for me in this release. I don't feel as if I need to rebuild my life - I never stopped living.
Thanks, Suzana, for helping me to realize the value of being present, here and now.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Unifying themes in the novel
I mentioned awhile back that I am working on a novel. I haven't said a lot about this novel, but interestingly enough, it is the one thing I haven't totally dropped the ball on during major deadlines in work.
I have reached a point in the writing process where I have 35 scenes lined up, some real characters, and some real themes developing. I know the next step is to work on the narrative, bringing the scenes, characters, and themes together in a plot. But I was struggling a little bit on the overall message, something at the tip of my tongue, but not quite out yet... until today.
Let me start by talking about three themes that I have been pursuing.
The first theme has been there since the beginning. I call it the tie-theme. There are three primary types of personalities that I am interested in pursuing: the person who wears the tie they are meant to wear, the person who wears the cool tie without even trying (the one you want to emulate), and the person who wears the wrong tie (let's say the awkward, eclectic type). Right now I have three characters, each one aligning with one of these personalities, but how that plays out internally and externally is somewhat 'grey'.
The 'grey' theme is based on the notion that we all have moments when we realize the world isn't black and white (I have been exploring this theme in the blog). We have to find a way to accept this. And if we are truly be happy, we have to find a way to embrace this. This is playing out through one of the main characters whom I have based on my perceptions of my young daugher's personality, and how she will begin to grow up in this world. As a young child, she and her mom have a moment at the end of each day (which I am planning on doing with my daugher) where we talk about five good things that happened and five not so good things that happened in the day. There is a point in the narrative (which may be very close to the start of the novel) where this young girl starts to genuinely struggle with the process of dividing the good and the bad. Things just don't seem to fall into these categories any more. And she feels a crumbling, a genuine struggle.
The third theme, the hardest of all, is the one that I knew I had to get right in order to be able to bring to the novel a message, an idea, something that I intrinsically feel to be true, and that I want to bring to my daughter's life as she gets older. I have known for awhile now, that I wanted to push against Virginia Woolf and her intense desire to seek the internal in her narrative, to move away from the external as the reflection of self, and see self as something far deeper than the surroundings. Virginia was, of course, pushing against writers like Henry James, who used surroundings to capture the internal essence of their characters.
You must know that I feel a serious connection to Woolf, one that is developing so much more as I transform into a writer of fiction. (For those of you wondering, I did get the Woolf tattoo which I will share with you in a separate account.) And I have been trying to come to terms with why I want to push against this writer that I feel such admiration for. But every part of me knows that it isn't liberating to be stuck in a room of one's own, alone with our thoughts for hours on end. It isn't empowering to be stuck in one's head, and particuarly dangerous to remove one's thoughts from the intensity of environment.
Perhaps it has come to me today, this beautiful thing, precisely because I have spent the last few weeks with my head deep in concentration, in a study in the back of my house, away from life, working intensely toward deadlines in work. And today, on this most glorious California spring day, I said feck this - I am going running, I am going to feel the sun, I am going to be outside of my head, I am going to experience the senses of the world around me.... Shebang!
The main character in her struggle to make sense out of the grey has these moments of being stuck in her head, and no matter how hard she tries to make life explainable in the binary sense, the more she is unable to do so. The more she tries to curb her senses, to try and think her way, to reason her way around the external spaces, the more she will be removed from self.
There will be moments when she is able to experience the world, when her memory and her ability to reason with herself will seem to make sense, literally, her physical and her mental will start to feel a sense of harmony with each other. And I can see something similar playing out for all three characters (just in a different way based on their personalities).
This is where it gets very technical. I wrote a paper awhile back on memory and the connection with fiction - the same part of the brain that is responsible for writing fiction is aligned with that part of the brain that is responsible for memory. The neurological memory theory is that the more senses one can attach to a memory, the more likely that memory is to be true... I will very much use this as my push against Virginia.
That in becoming self, this young woman will have this moment when she is feeling so much around her, when all her senses are heightened, and she realizes why she was able to make those lists as a child, and why she cannot seem to do it now - that as a child, what her senses perceived were absolutely aligned with the way she analyzed the world. But as she got older, there seemed to grow this disconnect, that sometimes she could feel good sensually about something, but not so good mentally. And yet, in this awesome moment of sensory perception of self (we have all had these amazing moments in our lives), she once again reconciles that which is inside with that which is out.
I am ready to name this character. She is Gracie.
Dad, how amazing is that?!
I have reached a point in the writing process where I have 35 scenes lined up, some real characters, and some real themes developing. I know the next step is to work on the narrative, bringing the scenes, characters, and themes together in a plot. But I was struggling a little bit on the overall message, something at the tip of my tongue, but not quite out yet... until today.
Let me start by talking about three themes that I have been pursuing.
The first theme has been there since the beginning. I call it the tie-theme. There are three primary types of personalities that I am interested in pursuing: the person who wears the tie they are meant to wear, the person who wears the cool tie without even trying (the one you want to emulate), and the person who wears the wrong tie (let's say the awkward, eclectic type). Right now I have three characters, each one aligning with one of these personalities, but how that plays out internally and externally is somewhat 'grey'.
The 'grey' theme is based on the notion that we all have moments when we realize the world isn't black and white (I have been exploring this theme in the blog). We have to find a way to accept this. And if we are truly be happy, we have to find a way to embrace this. This is playing out through one of the main characters whom I have based on my perceptions of my young daugher's personality, and how she will begin to grow up in this world. As a young child, she and her mom have a moment at the end of each day (which I am planning on doing with my daugher) where we talk about five good things that happened and five not so good things that happened in the day. There is a point in the narrative (which may be very close to the start of the novel) where this young girl starts to genuinely struggle with the process of dividing the good and the bad. Things just don't seem to fall into these categories any more. And she feels a crumbling, a genuine struggle.
The third theme, the hardest of all, is the one that I knew I had to get right in order to be able to bring to the novel a message, an idea, something that I intrinsically feel to be true, and that I want to bring to my daughter's life as she gets older. I have known for awhile now, that I wanted to push against Virginia Woolf and her intense desire to seek the internal in her narrative, to move away from the external as the reflection of self, and see self as something far deeper than the surroundings. Virginia was, of course, pushing against writers like Henry James, who used surroundings to capture the internal essence of their characters.
You must know that I feel a serious connection to Woolf, one that is developing so much more as I transform into a writer of fiction. (For those of you wondering, I did get the Woolf tattoo which I will share with you in a separate account.) And I have been trying to come to terms with why I want to push against this writer that I feel such admiration for. But every part of me knows that it isn't liberating to be stuck in a room of one's own, alone with our thoughts for hours on end. It isn't empowering to be stuck in one's head, and particuarly dangerous to remove one's thoughts from the intensity of environment.
Perhaps it has come to me today, this beautiful thing, precisely because I have spent the last few weeks with my head deep in concentration, in a study in the back of my house, away from life, working intensely toward deadlines in work. And today, on this most glorious California spring day, I said feck this - I am going running, I am going to feel the sun, I am going to be outside of my head, I am going to experience the senses of the world around me.... Shebang!
The main character in her struggle to make sense out of the grey has these moments of being stuck in her head, and no matter how hard she tries to make life explainable in the binary sense, the more she is unable to do so. The more she tries to curb her senses, to try and think her way, to reason her way around the external spaces, the more she will be removed from self.
There will be moments when she is able to experience the world, when her memory and her ability to reason with herself will seem to make sense, literally, her physical and her mental will start to feel a sense of harmony with each other. And I can see something similar playing out for all three characters (just in a different way based on their personalities).
This is where it gets very technical. I wrote a paper awhile back on memory and the connection with fiction - the same part of the brain that is responsible for writing fiction is aligned with that part of the brain that is responsible for memory. The neurological memory theory is that the more senses one can attach to a memory, the more likely that memory is to be true... I will very much use this as my push against Virginia.
That in becoming self, this young woman will have this moment when she is feeling so much around her, when all her senses are heightened, and she realizes why she was able to make those lists as a child, and why she cannot seem to do it now - that as a child, what her senses perceived were absolutely aligned with the way she analyzed the world. But as she got older, there seemed to grow this disconnect, that sometimes she could feel good sensually about something, but not so good mentally. And yet, in this awesome moment of sensory perception of self (we have all had these amazing moments in our lives), she once again reconciles that which is inside with that which is out.
I am ready to name this character. She is Gracie.
Dad, how amazing is that?!
Monday, March 14, 2011
On feminism (please don't let the title put you off)
I have thought about writing an entry on feminism for awhile now, and I had all these sophisticated ideas on how to cover the subject, but couldn't narrow down my focus, or get enough time to express simply some of the ideas spinning in my head. But today it is a subject I feel compelled to write about, even if I do not have the time or focus to do it justice.
Two friends close to my heart are experiencing fundamental moments in their lives: one is in full labor as I write, induced with a pitocin drip; the other had her bandages taken off after her double-mastectomy. A third friend sent a long email about her pregnancy, the nervousness coming into the last trimester, and the almost comical preparations that we go through leading up to the big moment. On top of this, I am in still deadlines, my husband is traveling, and I have been coming to terms with the fact that I can't seem to get my head stuck back into work tonight.
I just got off the phone with my husband. He said that he was going to clear his plate after presentations on Wednesday so that I could have some much needed time to do the work that I need to do. I did not ask for this - he offered it. And there is something essential in this moment. Many people would read this and think that of course he should give me time on Thursday and Friday to do what I need to do. And since he will have finished his major presentations, he should not feel pressure to do so.
But there is something subtle at play here. Sometimes I know that he feels life would be easier if one of us was less determined in our profession, and that one of us could happily take a step back if it was feasible in our lives financially. He grapples with the fact that I had to make sauce for Nicki and Morgan tonight, in the same breadth I was pushing on work deadlines, in the same breadth he is traveling and our daughter needs to come first before all the other bits and pieces. He sees the tired in me, the lack of ability to get out for runs, to do my own writing, the novel, this blog, and all those other things that are quintessential me.
Tonight though, he processed what it is for me to be the person that I am, the one who is good at her job, who is good at being a mom, who wants so much to be a devoted wife, who is a loving friend, but who is also a person in and around all these things that make up the daily schedule. He recognized the meaning of feminism in my life - the need to be driven in all aspects of self at all times, rather than zoning in on one particular aspect, and making it of singular importance in a specific moment in time.
Feminism has changed so much that I almost think we need a new word for it. It is about pursuing excellence in all aspects of self, be it the physical aspects of woman in child bearing, child rearing, in exercising and having a body that isn't totally frumpy (which mine seems to be these days), the emotional aspects of supporting the ones we love when they need us the most, the social aspects of engaging with the community through a blog, volunteering, the mental aspects of problem solving, and communicating it in the simplest, clearest, effective way possible, and most of all, the spiritual aspects of self - being able to take a deep breath and be present with ourselves and our own passions with our partners and our family - taking time not just to experience life, but to embrace it. I am exhausted typing this, just as many women are exhausted living this.
For me, feminism is like a finely cut diamond, all the edges coming together in as perfectly a symmetrical way as possible. So I googled 'adjectives to describe diamonds' hoping that a term would emerge that better describes feminism, and I found 'dispersion', defined as 'the degree to which white light is split into its spectral colors within the stone' (thank-you wikipedia). Perhaps modern day feminism is better phrased as 'dispersionism'.
Two friends close to my heart are experiencing fundamental moments in their lives: one is in full labor as I write, induced with a pitocin drip; the other had her bandages taken off after her double-mastectomy. A third friend sent a long email about her pregnancy, the nervousness coming into the last trimester, and the almost comical preparations that we go through leading up to the big moment. On top of this, I am in still deadlines, my husband is traveling, and I have been coming to terms with the fact that I can't seem to get my head stuck back into work tonight.
I just got off the phone with my husband. He said that he was going to clear his plate after presentations on Wednesday so that I could have some much needed time to do the work that I need to do. I did not ask for this - he offered it. And there is something essential in this moment. Many people would read this and think that of course he should give me time on Thursday and Friday to do what I need to do. And since he will have finished his major presentations, he should not feel pressure to do so.
But there is something subtle at play here. Sometimes I know that he feels life would be easier if one of us was less determined in our profession, and that one of us could happily take a step back if it was feasible in our lives financially. He grapples with the fact that I had to make sauce for Nicki and Morgan tonight, in the same breadth I was pushing on work deadlines, in the same breadth he is traveling and our daughter needs to come first before all the other bits and pieces. He sees the tired in me, the lack of ability to get out for runs, to do my own writing, the novel, this blog, and all those other things that are quintessential me.
Tonight though, he processed what it is for me to be the person that I am, the one who is good at her job, who is good at being a mom, who wants so much to be a devoted wife, who is a loving friend, but who is also a person in and around all these things that make up the daily schedule. He recognized the meaning of feminism in my life - the need to be driven in all aspects of self at all times, rather than zoning in on one particular aspect, and making it of singular importance in a specific moment in time.
Feminism has changed so much that I almost think we need a new word for it. It is about pursuing excellence in all aspects of self, be it the physical aspects of woman in child bearing, child rearing, in exercising and having a body that isn't totally frumpy (which mine seems to be these days), the emotional aspects of supporting the ones we love when they need us the most, the social aspects of engaging with the community through a blog, volunteering, the mental aspects of problem solving, and communicating it in the simplest, clearest, effective way possible, and most of all, the spiritual aspects of self - being able to take a deep breath and be present with ourselves and our own passions with our partners and our family - taking time not just to experience life, but to embrace it. I am exhausted typing this, just as many women are exhausted living this.
For me, feminism is like a finely cut diamond, all the edges coming together in as perfectly a symmetrical way as possible. So I googled 'adjectives to describe diamonds' hoping that a term would emerge that better describes feminism, and I found 'dispersion', defined as 'the degree to which white light is split into its spectral colors within the stone' (thank-you wikipedia). Perhaps modern day feminism is better phrased as 'dispersionism'.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Grace
I want to talk about the spectrum of people's ability to cope with problems, myself included. I am coming to terms with something very interesting about myself - that I am very good at complaining, moaning, mostly about the small things (I tend not to moan as much about the big stuff). I complain about the increased workload in release mode, I complain about politics, I complain about the lack of sleep in my life, about missed exercise, not being able to go skiing last Sunday.
I have had this motto in my life for a long time - that it is better to complain and get things done than to never complain and never get things done. And this motto has worked for me... until recently.
I have been spending time with a friend who's had a lot of big stuff on her plate all at once. I am not going to list all of these things. She jokes and says that if she wrote a book, it would never get published because people would not believe it is the truth - it would be far to out of touch with the realistic. I joke that I wish Oprah was still around, as we might be able to dedicate a whole show to her life.
With all that she is going through, the most important thing to her is to fix it, to find normalcy. She often talks about other people's lives, dreams about how things could be better, asks me about my own life. And in discussion about her own situation, there are jokes, moments of frustration, sheer exhaustion, but never that moany-groany-complaining sense of life isn't fair.
What I have noticed in all this is that I want to be around her, I am not dragged down by her suffering. And I have realized that I could learn from this, that I could tone down my own moaning. My life is seriously good. There are so many blessings around me, I can't even count them. And yes, I do get tired, but that doesn't mean that I need to moan about it. If I can find a way in myself to push through it, to embrace that full life that I have rather than seeing the tired as a burden, it will not only make me happier, but also all those around me.
I am never going to be as strong as my friend. My husband who rarely comments on people says that she is the strongest person he has ever met which says a lot more than me saying it. But I for sure feel that I can embrace the grace with which she lives her life.
I have had this motto in my life for a long time - that it is better to complain and get things done than to never complain and never get things done. And this motto has worked for me... until recently.
I have been spending time with a friend who's had a lot of big stuff on her plate all at once. I am not going to list all of these things. She jokes and says that if she wrote a book, it would never get published because people would not believe it is the truth - it would be far to out of touch with the realistic. I joke that I wish Oprah was still around, as we might be able to dedicate a whole show to her life.
With all that she is going through, the most important thing to her is to fix it, to find normalcy. She often talks about other people's lives, dreams about how things could be better, asks me about my own life. And in discussion about her own situation, there are jokes, moments of frustration, sheer exhaustion, but never that moany-groany-complaining sense of life isn't fair.
What I have noticed in all this is that I want to be around her, I am not dragged down by her suffering. And I have realized that I could learn from this, that I could tone down my own moaning. My life is seriously good. There are so many blessings around me, I can't even count them. And yes, I do get tired, but that doesn't mean that I need to moan about it. If I can find a way in myself to push through it, to embrace that full life that I have rather than seeing the tired as a burden, it will not only make me happier, but also all those around me.
I am never going to be as strong as my friend. My husband who rarely comments on people says that she is the strongest person he has ever met which says a lot more than me saying it. But I for sure feel that I can embrace the grace with which she lives her life.
Monday, February 14, 2011
On love
This is a very quick, but complex blog on love which came to me running in the rain at lunchtime today. It is Valentine's Day, so naturally my mind was thinking about love, and what exactly that means to me in my life.
And I thought about something very bizarre, but that seemed to make sense out of it all. I thought about the story in the bible about Jesus' 40 days and nights in the desert, on how the devil tempted him. I wondered if this is meant to be a metaphor for something quintessentially human about Jesus - what if in order to be able to feel true empathy, to be capable of real forgiveness, it is necessary to make bad choices, to face darker stuff in one's life?
This I believe is the essence of love - that in order to truly know and love ourselves, we need to make mistakes, to face difficult decisions, to wonder if we did the right thing, or even better, to know that we did not. And these very same principles are what define love between people, friends, marriages, etc. - that in order to truly love our partners, our friends, our children, we need to experience with them those vulnerable moments.
I've been working on the novel, steadily, and am coming to learn about and love a character whom I thought would be the most difficult for me to understand and/or feel towards, as I am not like her nor am I the opposite of her. The key to seeing her, to truly knowing her, has been watching her make mistakes, struggle, change, come to terms with those aspects of herself that are not perfect and are not part of her comfort zone.
At the same time, I have been reading Virginia Woolf's diaries, and I am feeling the sense of sadness coming over me - that she is so very hard on herself, so truly unforgiving, lacking all empathy towards her own self, her own work. I wish I could have met her, talked with her, made her see how very essential these aspects of self are part of the greatness that defines her work. I can't help but wonder if this inability to embrace those dark parts of herself is why she chose to end her life as she did.
And this is becoming an incredibly important part of my novel - this wrenching discovery of self that is followed by a level of comfort that one can never experience without falling apart.
And I thought about something very bizarre, but that seemed to make sense out of it all. I thought about the story in the bible about Jesus' 40 days and nights in the desert, on how the devil tempted him. I wondered if this is meant to be a metaphor for something quintessentially human about Jesus - what if in order to be able to feel true empathy, to be capable of real forgiveness, it is necessary to make bad choices, to face darker stuff in one's life?
This I believe is the essence of love - that in order to truly know and love ourselves, we need to make mistakes, to face difficult decisions, to wonder if we did the right thing, or even better, to know that we did not. And these very same principles are what define love between people, friends, marriages, etc. - that in order to truly love our partners, our friends, our children, we need to experience with them those vulnerable moments.
I've been working on the novel, steadily, and am coming to learn about and love a character whom I thought would be the most difficult for me to understand and/or feel towards, as I am not like her nor am I the opposite of her. The key to seeing her, to truly knowing her, has been watching her make mistakes, struggle, change, come to terms with those aspects of herself that are not perfect and are not part of her comfort zone.
At the same time, I have been reading Virginia Woolf's diaries, and I am feeling the sense of sadness coming over me - that she is so very hard on herself, so truly unforgiving, lacking all empathy towards her own self, her own work. I wish I could have met her, talked with her, made her see how very essential these aspects of self are part of the greatness that defines her work. I can't help but wonder if this inability to embrace those dark parts of herself is why she chose to end her life as she did.
And this is becoming an incredibly important part of my novel - this wrenching discovery of self that is followed by a level of comfort that one can never experience without falling apart.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
I want to write about Egypt
When I was 18, I went on my first adventure out of the US: an antiquity tour of Italy and Egypt, 5 days in both countries. It was a student tour, but run by a school that was not my own. I knew a couple of students on the trip, but they weren't close friends, so I felt mostly on my own, not isolated, but with a sense of freedom that one can only experience when free from the constructs of familiarity. We traveled both countries on guided tour buses. I don't remember the Italian tours - I spent most of my time trying to get away from the group.
In Egypt, we had the same tour guide, a young woman, highly educated, beautiful in that way I imagined myself becoming in life as I learned more about the world. My relationship with this woman started off like an admiring pupil asking her teacher questions that made her think I was smart, well-read. Very quickly that relationship changed into something much more elegant, simple, a sharing of cultures that shaped how I approach women of different cultures going forward.
One of our tours was of the Citadel of Cairo. I had carefully planned my outfit for the day, a simple dress with a long cotton skirt, wooden sandals, and a head scarf large enough to cover all of my hair. I felt a reverence, putting on the cover, taking off my shoes, and walking into the Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha. When we got inside, I became very aware of the fact that the only women around me were tourists - there were no local women who had come to pray. Perhaps I was naive, but I wanted to feel prayer in this moment, I wanted to experience what God felt like in such an ancient place.
After the tour, I took my usual seat next to the tour guide, and I was quiet, something that is unusual for me. The tour guide asked me what I was thinking, how come I wasn't talking a million miles a minute about the experience. And so I asked her if it bothered her that she was not welcome to worship in the main hall of this spiritual place. She laughed, full-heartedly, and her words still remain very clear to me nearly twenty years later. She asked me when I am in deep prayer, when I want to connect with God and feel that presence, am I able to do this surrounded by groups of men chanting, with my face to the floor? She said that for her, it seemed so much more natural, free, to experience God in a communal group of women, mothers, daughters, sisters, smiling, heads up, bodies swaying, a sense of warm and of kind.
She told me about her faith, what it meant to her, this belief in God, and how she had come to understand that power of women in community, that they were much freer to feel happiness in the face of God, rather than what the men were meant to experience - reverence. Typing this now, I can feel her faith and I can feel that presence of God that we shared - the same God I experienced, not watching a priest chanting up at the alter, but in celebrations with my family, with close friends, people with whom I could trust to be my most vulnerable self.
Later that same evening, the sun was setting over the city, pink hued, smells that can only be experienced first-hand, and I heard the evening prayer, walked out on the balcony, and realized how truly amazing it was to be in a country where people stopped to center themselves at key moments in the day. This was so very different from the Sunday Mass, something that had begun to feel empty of meaning, that sense of going through the steps, but not really understanding what those steps were meant to mean in the living out of one's life, in those moments of conflict, and grey. Strange, reverent in itself, this moment on the balcony was also the first time I heard the Nirvana song, Memoria - my roommate was playing for me in the background, and there was this simple merging of the two worlds, both sounds still resounding in my ears this many years later.
Fast forward many years, approaching a topic for my dissertation on post-colonial literature, and I knew I wanted to examine that sense of community that I had felt so many years ago. I wanted to understand what this meant in a world that seemed to be changing quickly. The first paragraph of my dissertation included an excerpt from Barack Obama's speech in Cairo. Although I knew it at the time, that this was rhetoric, it still felt so fundamentally different to the Western speeches on freedom and individuality that had preceded it for so many years under the Bush regime.
And I truly believed that there was a revolution stirring - that the young people in that audience felt something powerful, far more than the presence of a less ideological US president. There was a pride that day in the University of Cairo auditorium, a pride that was a merging of simple ideals, those of the family, the community, that had shaped each person's faith, and supported a people for thousands of years, and those of human freedoms, to be creative, innovative, honest, and capable of changing the world for the better through the power of each individual voice coming together.
Over two years later, watching the people gather in Tahrir Square, large groups of men chanting, families, children asleep on mother's shoulders, women in solidarity, tears sometimes streaming down the faces of men and women, and I feel I am truly watching history. This is not a revolution about taking down a dictator regime; this is not a 'facebook' revolution. This is very much about the meeting point between two very important beliefs that mean so much to all of us - that of the power of community, a sense of belonging, and that power of freedom to make change, to shape our own lives and the lives of our children. It is a cross-roads in the global world - a meeting of the best of Western and non-Western ideals.
I have felt an excitement the past couple of weeks, and a profound disappointment in the elders (Egyptian and US leaders) to be unable to see just how important this change is for the future of society. When I expressed some of my thoughts to my husband, he brushed it off - saying it was just another news reel, something to hype, people watching from the outside in, the media almost hoping for things to fall apart, and the rest of the world waiting for things to go back to the way they have always been.
So I decided to test the waters - I posted a comment in response to the New York Times' columnist, Nicholas Kristof's blog, http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/the-pharaoh-refuses-to-go/. The comment I posted:
"For Egyptians reading this,
There are many people like me who very much support you in your efforts to take back control of your own country, to have the power to define what it is you feel is best for your people, and to be a voice of positive change across the world."
From very early on in my posting, the comment topped the list of readers' recommendations. As I am writing this blog, it is still at the top of the list. What this tells me is that we are witnessing something very different than the typical news real. Unlike most scenarios in the non-Western world that make it into a prolonged news real - we are not secretly watching to see innocent people's lives ruined and destroyed by corruption. We are genuinely hoping that this community of people can succeed in their endeavors. We are watching with hope.
In Egypt, we had the same tour guide, a young woman, highly educated, beautiful in that way I imagined myself becoming in life as I learned more about the world. My relationship with this woman started off like an admiring pupil asking her teacher questions that made her think I was smart, well-read. Very quickly that relationship changed into something much more elegant, simple, a sharing of cultures that shaped how I approach women of different cultures going forward.
One of our tours was of the Citadel of Cairo. I had carefully planned my outfit for the day, a simple dress with a long cotton skirt, wooden sandals, and a head scarf large enough to cover all of my hair. I felt a reverence, putting on the cover, taking off my shoes, and walking into the Mosque of Muhammad Ali Pasha. When we got inside, I became very aware of the fact that the only women around me were tourists - there were no local women who had come to pray. Perhaps I was naive, but I wanted to feel prayer in this moment, I wanted to experience what God felt like in such an ancient place.
After the tour, I took my usual seat next to the tour guide, and I was quiet, something that is unusual for me. The tour guide asked me what I was thinking, how come I wasn't talking a million miles a minute about the experience. And so I asked her if it bothered her that she was not welcome to worship in the main hall of this spiritual place. She laughed, full-heartedly, and her words still remain very clear to me nearly twenty years later. She asked me when I am in deep prayer, when I want to connect with God and feel that presence, am I able to do this surrounded by groups of men chanting, with my face to the floor? She said that for her, it seemed so much more natural, free, to experience God in a communal group of women, mothers, daughters, sisters, smiling, heads up, bodies swaying, a sense of warm and of kind.
She told me about her faith, what it meant to her, this belief in God, and how she had come to understand that power of women in community, that they were much freer to feel happiness in the face of God, rather than what the men were meant to experience - reverence. Typing this now, I can feel her faith and I can feel that presence of God that we shared - the same God I experienced, not watching a priest chanting up at the alter, but in celebrations with my family, with close friends, people with whom I could trust to be my most vulnerable self.
Later that same evening, the sun was setting over the city, pink hued, smells that can only be experienced first-hand, and I heard the evening prayer, walked out on the balcony, and realized how truly amazing it was to be in a country where people stopped to center themselves at key moments in the day. This was so very different from the Sunday Mass, something that had begun to feel empty of meaning, that sense of going through the steps, but not really understanding what those steps were meant to mean in the living out of one's life, in those moments of conflict, and grey. Strange, reverent in itself, this moment on the balcony was also the first time I heard the Nirvana song, Memoria - my roommate was playing for me in the background, and there was this simple merging of the two worlds, both sounds still resounding in my ears this many years later.
Fast forward many years, approaching a topic for my dissertation on post-colonial literature, and I knew I wanted to examine that sense of community that I had felt so many years ago. I wanted to understand what this meant in a world that seemed to be changing quickly. The first paragraph of my dissertation included an excerpt from Barack Obama's speech in Cairo. Although I knew it at the time, that this was rhetoric, it still felt so fundamentally different to the Western speeches on freedom and individuality that had preceded it for so many years under the Bush regime.
And I truly believed that there was a revolution stirring - that the young people in that audience felt something powerful, far more than the presence of a less ideological US president. There was a pride that day in the University of Cairo auditorium, a pride that was a merging of simple ideals, those of the family, the community, that had shaped each person's faith, and supported a people for thousands of years, and those of human freedoms, to be creative, innovative, honest, and capable of changing the world for the better through the power of each individual voice coming together.
Over two years later, watching the people gather in Tahrir Square, large groups of men chanting, families, children asleep on mother's shoulders, women in solidarity, tears sometimes streaming down the faces of men and women, and I feel I am truly watching history. This is not a revolution about taking down a dictator regime; this is not a 'facebook' revolution. This is very much about the meeting point between two very important beliefs that mean so much to all of us - that of the power of community, a sense of belonging, and that power of freedom to make change, to shape our own lives and the lives of our children. It is a cross-roads in the global world - a meeting of the best of Western and non-Western ideals.
I have felt an excitement the past couple of weeks, and a profound disappointment in the elders (Egyptian and US leaders) to be unable to see just how important this change is for the future of society. When I expressed some of my thoughts to my husband, he brushed it off - saying it was just another news reel, something to hype, people watching from the outside in, the media almost hoping for things to fall apart, and the rest of the world waiting for things to go back to the way they have always been.
So I decided to test the waters - I posted a comment in response to the New York Times' columnist, Nicholas Kristof's blog, http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/the-pharaoh-refuses-to-go/. The comment I posted:
"For Egyptians reading this,
There are many people like me who very much support you in your efforts to take back control of your own country, to have the power to define what it is you feel is best for your people, and to be a voice of positive change across the world."
From very early on in my posting, the comment topped the list of readers' recommendations. As I am writing this blog, it is still at the top of the list. What this tells me is that we are witnessing something very different than the typical news real. Unlike most scenarios in the non-Western world that make it into a prolonged news real - we are not secretly watching to see innocent people's lives ruined and destroyed by corruption. We are genuinely hoping that this community of people can succeed in their endeavors. We are watching with hope.
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