Special Post #2

Text: Mary Oliver’s Six Recognitions of the Lord: Stanza 5

“Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with

the fragrance of the fields and the

freshness of the oceans which you have

made, and help me to hear and to hold

in all-dearness those exacting and wonderful

words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying:

Follow me.”

I speak to the Lord as if He were next to me sometimes and sometimes think it might feel weird at first; I know that He is there right next to me. He is not distant as some believe; He sees my every move and He knows my every thought. He sent His Holy Spirit to me when He left this earth and promises to come back and get me. I can’t wait for that day, it’s going to be so sweet when my Savior comes back to get me, what a wonderful thought. But until that day the Holy Spirit is here to comfort me and part of Mary Oliver’s text is a prayer to our comforter and our Lord. God fills us up in many different ways but through the expression of Him through creation Mary Oliver captures a glimpse of what that filling up of our soul looks like and feels like.

“Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with the fragrance of the fields and the freshness of the oceans which you have made...”

Oliver speaks about God and the relationship with Him so eloquently and paints a picture of us being filled up with His presence through the sightings of His creation. Look at the fields how they grow in glory of God providing water and nutrition for them to grow; they are worshiping His name as they grow. Look at the ocean as the waves move in praise to Him and how the ocean obeys Him when He speaks. Through these examples we see how creation praises God’s name, He is their creator and they all give Him glory because He is worthy of it all. In this section of the poem the author is asking the Lord to fill her up in more ways than one. She wants to “Hear and to hold in all dearness” the words of the Lord speaking to hear which I can identify so much with.

“…wonderful words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying: Follow me.”

Jesus calls us to follow Him many times in the bible (especially in the books of the gospel where he talks about picking up our crosses and following Him) and through this He will fill us up like Oliver talks about in her poem.

When you first read this text you get the meaning of it and you can identify with it in a genuine way but then you go back and read it again and it means so much more. Oliver is asking the Holy Spirit to fill her up and she wants to follow God like He asks us too. When you read it again you can begin to envision the fields as they sway in the wind and you smell that wonderful fragrance of the Lord as He places His hand on the crop to make it grow. You read the line about the freshness of the oceans and you can see the oceans through your eyes and feel the waves bringing peace to your soul as you sit and watch them wash up on the shore. And then Oliver asks the Lord to help her hear and hold the words of Christ close because she doesn’t want to forget them. It is so easy for us to forget but she doesn’t want to ever forget the sweet words of our Lord which beckon us to follow Him. Once you read over this a couple times you see how she wants to keep that open connection between her and God and never lose it.

This text to me really reminds me of my relationship with God. Lately God has been redefining our relationship and making me fall madly and deeply in love with Him once again because sometimes I can get away from my first love, which is Him. God truly does capture my gaze when I realize how amazing He is and how much He loves me. Oliver’s whole poem ‘Six Recognitions of the Lord’ really spoke to me because it’s the words that I often try to find to describe the relationship between the Lord and I but sometimes I just can’t put it into words. The stanza that I chose really stuck out to me because it’s almost like a prayer that I always ask God for myself. I always am asking God to pour out His spirit on my life and over fill my cup so that I am totally content with Him and what He has for me. I want to have eyes that are always focused on Him above me and I want to be involved with Him every moment that I live. 2 Peter 1: 3-4 talks about God providing everything that I need forever and I love the fact that when I trust in Him and rely in Him for everything I know that He will never fail me.

Mary Oliver’s words spoke loudly to me and the more that I read them the louder they became. Even her other poems that we read in class spoke to me as well. The way she paints pictures with words is like nothing I’ve ever read. Her poems compliment the Bible so well when you think about it. She is speaking of what the scriptures are speaking of but they are in her own words. Actually in the beginning she confesses that she has a lot of fancy words but she doesn’t want those, she wants just her words to God and no fluff to go with them. I by no means am a poet but this is what I want when I speak to my savior. I want my words to be genuine as this poem sounds and I want God to hear nothing but my words, just my own words that are not fancy words but what I truly feel in my heart towards Him.

Pass

I am using my second pass for this post.

The Boys Next Door

Mr. Klemper: No, no I'm sorry. I. . . lost control. Jesus, Barry, I didn't mean to . . . Im sorry, I . . .
Barry: (Whimpering.) No, Dad. Please Dad. Don't hit me. . . Please. . .
Mr. Klepmer: (Paralyzed.) It was. . . It was an accident, Barry. I didn't mean to. I just. . . you know. . . lost control. I'm sorry. Jesus. . .

This scene wrecked my world as I read it. I am a psychology major so reading this play I see the dysfunction in each of the boy's lives and I see their psychological problems and how it affects their world. I have interacted with parents that had children with disabilities like this and they are exhausted a lot of the times because of how much work it really is to care for a child that has disabilities like these boys have. There are many statistics that talk about how parents get frustrated, not with their children, but more so the situation of having a child with a mental handicap. There are support groups that have been started to help parents get through these times when they feel helpless to their children and like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. I can only imagine how a parent feels when they discover that their baby is going to be mentally handicap and what it's going to take to raise that child. There have been many situations, basically all of them, where the parents fear what will happen with their child after they, themselves, pass. Who will take care of them? Will they adjust to me being gone? Will they even understand it?! It's scary being a parent of a child like this.

In high school I was in a program where I had a buddy that I hung out with and just invested time into to brighten their world a little. The little boy I got paired up with was named Jarrett and he had just turned eight years old. He had cerebral palsy and was in a wheel chair. His eyes could not fully read a page because one eye would read half the book and the other would wonder the rest of the book. He was at about a second or third grade level where he was actually supposed to be in fourth grade. He didn't talk that well but at the same time he had a vibrant personality. His mother told me that even despite his physical handicaps and his mental handicaps he was sharp in other areas. If she took him shopping and she read her list to him in the beginning, he would remember everything that she needed. At the end she would make sure they got everything and if they forgot anything Jarrett knew exactly what they forgot. But at the same time as I listened to her tell me the story of how they got to this place, my heart ached for her because they had been through so much. She had to give him all his baths and feed him all his meals. And you could hear the fear for the future underneath it all. This must have been how Barry's dad felt. He feared the future and possibly he felt as though he had failed his son. This may have been where his anger was coming from and he was just placing it in the wrong place. Its heart wrenching to hear stories like this but it is the reality of having a mentally handicap person in your family. They teach you a lot about life but there are so many other worries as well...

Polk Art Museum

I went to the Polk Museum of Art for this assignment, and I stayed there for at least 40 minutes. I actually stayed there longer and if I had had time I would have liked to stay even longer than I did. I had forgotten how much I actually do love museums and going and getting lost in the midst of the history, art, or whatever it is. I live about an hour away from Washington D.C. where there are museums that you could visit for a month and still feel like you missed something so I’ve acquired a liking for museums. Though I didn’t realize how valuable going to a museum and partaking in all of it actually is. As I was walking around the museum I just kept thinking to myself, here I am in the midst of all this history and art that I didn’t even really know existed right around the corner from my school. It’s culture that we can be exposed to but yet we don’t take the chance to look it up or take the time to go visit it and get lost in all of it for an afternoon. I love looking at art and having it provoke emotion in me as I look at it and dissect what it is and what it represents. This happened to me many times today and I was filled with many different emotions. I was happy looking at some pictures, sad looking at others, and wondrous looking at others. There was one from the student gallery that stuck out to me and it was the I will make you hurt piece of art by Maranda Roudabush. She had taken a face of metal and sown a piece of the face back to the rest of the face with metal wiring, it had nails in it, and just looked mangled. As I looked at it closer there was writing on half of the face talking about feeling the pain of their flesh tearing apart and it was just heart wrenching to read. I wondered about the artist that did this and if she ever really felt this pain and if she did I wanted to sit and listen to her story. I want to understand her pain and from looking at her art work that’s what it did a little for me. This is what I love about going to art museums, you almost step into the artists world by standing in silence and figuring out their art work. My favorite though, had to be the hall upstairs of the “A camera’s – eye view: Our Material World: A Global Family Portrait.” This hall put things into perspective more than I’ve ever had them put into perspective for me. It told stories of families around the world and their living conditions, their family interactions, their hopes for the future, and what they valued most. I’ve never had so much culture contained in one small space like that and it evoked so much emotion in me. It evoked motion to be both thankful for what I have; and emotion to move and do something. Give away what I have and bless others by meeting their needs… so much emotion in just one small hall way, so much as to change a life almost.

They look into my eyes an

d yet I can say nothing bac

k to them..

I have no words to offer…

I wish I could give them ha

lf of what I have but I know

that’s not all that they nee

d, they need more than what

I can give them. Maybe I co

uld give to someone who is

over there helping them al

ready? But who is over there

?

Maybe I am to go,

Maybe I’m the one to help,

Maybe I’m the change that

has to evoke it in others.

But where do I start??

By just looking at the

pictures I see what they

need, but I won’t ev

er fully know what th

ey need unless I meet

them face to face. Hear

their voices speak the

reality of their world.

Their life is so differ

ent from mine but

as I see them I fee

l like I can hear the

ir cries through the

pictures.. if only I c

ould move out of

this state of shock to

help where I could,

maybe then this hall

wouldn’t be so shock

ing…

Reading for Transformation

Reading has been sort of a struggle for me in all my years of schooling. I used to say that I would only read a book if it was really interesting because I thought that if it held my interest then it was worth my time. Since then I’ve been going through high school and college where reading is mandatory, if you don’t read then you miss out on the knowledge that you are accountable for learning. I’ve had to teach myself to read with enthusiasm and to read with the intentions of finding a purpose for reading the text. What can I get out of this text that I can apply to my life and use in some other ways than just the reason that I am reading it in this moment? Every time I read a different text I ask myself this question and focus on what I’m trying to get out of the text. This is what the article was talking about also. McAloon talked about using the technique of lectio divina like we were taught in class to exam different text that he read; even the text that he didn’t really get anything out of. There was an author that he really didn’t have much likeness for but through this process of reading and meditating on the words of the author he came to respect the author’s words and even referenced them in his essay that we read tonight.

In the essay McAloon quoted Schneiders saying, “a literary work clears a space, creates a world, into which the reader is invited.” I agree so much with this statement and I love how it puts everything into perspective with how literary work impacts the world. It does create a world in which the reader is invited in, no matter what the genre is or anything. Little kids books invite them in to discover and stretch their imagination. History books take us back in time. Every book has its invite into another creative world and it’s what brought books to life for me. The more inviting books were and the more open I was to the books themselves, the more I began to read. It’s been a lot of growing into reading more and more but I love reading now and wish I had more time to read actually!

Darkness, Questions, Poverty, and Spiritual Hope

Reading this essay was thought provoking for me. We are told in church a lot to keep our attitudes positive and to look up scripture that helps us remember God’s promises. In our walk with Christ though, we all know that there will be hard times. I think that there are many churches that are teaching the prosperity message weekly to get people to come to the church. They don’t talk about how as Christians we will be tested and ridiculed just as Jesus was. Sometimes its harder to be a Christian in the world we live in. I think I had myself fooled at the beginning of it all because I thought that everything was going to be flowers and daisy’s but darkness is something real in our lives. It is something we don’t like to always acknowledge but it’s a real part of life we must tend to.

Speaking on death in the family, my aunt was talking to me about that this week. She was born before the other children in my dad’s family but her mom put her up for adoption and she didn’t find our family till about three years ago. She was down visiting and I took her out for coffee and she began to discuss my grandmother and told me I needed to tell her some stories because unfortunately my grandmother died before my aunt got to meet her. So I began to remember the times with my grandmother that I could remember and began to tell her what my grandmother was like. But amongst all the light that my grandmother brought to my life, her death brought a lot of darkness to my world. She died when I was in seventh grade and I will never forget that day because I felt as though my world had come crashing down because she was such a big part of my world. This was a moment that I truly felt darkness in my world and I began to search for God to help me understand. I can really relate to what the essay is talking about because through this despair in my life, I began to find hope that I would see her in heaven one day.

Our lives will forever be without darkness at some point. We all will have times when darkness is a part of our lives but we all know the spiritual hope that God provides in times of need. I learn from every experience that I have with darkness, to abide more in Him so that when these times do come I can find that hope quicker each time.

"I went to Lake Bonny Park for this assignment, and I stayed there for at least 40 minutes."

Sitting at the park and just being still was refreshing for me today. I try to make it a point to go places like that and just sit in silence as often as I can because our lives can really get so busy so to go and sit and just be still is crucial I feel like. From our to do lists, to activities we are involved in, to just hanging out with friends; life gets busy so taking time to just stop and smell the roses is important. When we actually sit and stay still for longer than just five minutes we begin to realize there is this whole other world that exists and functions as we go on about our busy schedules day to day. There is the other side of God's creation that is functioning along side of us to keep this world spinning round and round and God didn't just put it there for us to live amongst. Creation is God's expression of Himself and its there for us to stop and enjoy and delight in just as He does. At home I can always tell when spring is here because I will begin to wake up and hear the birds outside of my window chirping as I wake up. It's like God's alarm clock for me and it sounds so sweet; nothing can replace that sound. And in the fall time (I know this doesn't happen as much in FL) the leafs begin to change colors and fall to the ground to make a scenery that looks as if God has taken a paint brush and painted the leafs to allow us to delight in all the brilliant colors alongside the road. I just can't express how much joy it brings me to see all of this around me, but yet so often I get so caught up in the business of life to really sit and enjoy the creation around us singing praise to our God.

As I lay in the grass and listened to the wind blowing and making the leafs of the trees speak all I could think was how amazing it was to hear this. We build our cities and communities up so much that we often forget what it sounds like for a tree to worship God as the wind blows through it's leafs. When is the last time we really sat and listened to nature praise God?? We need to make it a routine to do this because it's soothing to our soul when we join with creation and sing praise to Him; and it’s amazing what He has really blessed us with.

I feel the wind soft on my face as I

Walk the path man has made.

The trees to my right look like God

Planted them, but the trees across the street

Look like man planted them..

As I sit down, I realize little purple

Flowers amongst little yellow flowers.

They are so small yet when taken into account

They add color to the world.

Then a brown and orange butterfly comes along the

Colorful flowers and reminds me of God's doing in all of this,

Because after all He is the great creator of all that

I see before me.

The birds talking speak to each other

The leafs speaking through the winds passing through them

The sky a color blue that illuminates the

Message that in this moment

God is delighted that I see creation the way He sees it.

I imagine God laying next to me as I lay there on that small hill of grass.

Its like He's pointing out how much creation has grown since

He first made that place.

It's such a sweet moment that God and I have, one that I would not

Trade for the world.

His creation sings out His praise every day,

And every day I am blessed to encounter it.

Six Recognitions of the Lord

When I first started reading the poems written by Mary Oliver I was so overwhelmed with emotion as I read the eloquent words that she poured out from her heart. She is very talented in what words she puts together when she writes. Its like her vision becomes words and she has no problem describing God creativity that it almost makes me jealous that I can't find words like her. But I enjoy the fact that I get to read the words that she describes God's creation with.

In her poem of Six Recognitions of the Lord she is describing her view of the world and God's creation and it's so nicely written. In the beginning she opens with the fact that she has the ability to use fancy words but she doesn't want to, she just wants to speak to God through her words from her heart.

Section 5 was my favorite because they are words that ring true in my heart. It says:

"Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with

the fragrance of the fields and the

freshness of the oceans which you have

made, and help me to hear and to hold

in all dearness those exacting and wonderful

words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying:

Follow me."

Its talking about the creation of the Earth around us reminding us of God's words that we should hold dear to our hearts. And how we want creation (or the Holy Spirit) to remind us of those words which are simply to follow God. These are words that I would use to describe the sunset that I so often see and the stars in the dark night that light up my heart. My Lord has put them there to testify to His greatness and to remind me to follow Him. It's such a sweet thing to be reminded and such a sweet way of reminding us. God is the one that tells the sun when to rise, and He tells the moon where to hide as the sun comes up. He has placed every star in the exact position that it sits in the midnight sky and he ordains all the scenery that we see. He blesses us so much through all of this and I can’t thank Him enough for every time I see all of His creations in different lights.

State of the Planet

Reading this poem really put things into perspective for me as I read it.

"It must be a gift of evolution that humans

Can't sustain wonder. We'd never have gotten up

From our knees if we could. But soon enough

We'd have fashioned sexy little earrings from the feathers,

Highlighted our cheekbones by rubbings from the rock,

And made a spear from the sinewy wood of the tree."

This part of the poem was the part that stuck out the most for me. As I read it I thought about all the things we use from nature that we really could do without. How much of nature do we take for granted when we could just use more natural ways of doing things; such as the earrings and the makeup that we women use? I wouldn't classify myself as a person that is supper animal activist and all but at the same time I think we need to be careful how we treat our natural habitats because this is what God has given us to live amongst. If we keep going around and abusing the Earth that He gave us then what is going to be left over? Nothing but the remainder of what we have trashed. Just as we are to take care of our temples that are on loan from God, we are to take care of the Earth that He has given us to live on also. This means treating His creation with the utmost respect that it deserves and to make sure we take care of the Earth we live in. It’s an interesting thought when you think about the global warming that people talk about and how some think we are slowly killing our world and how some don't even believe in it. I can't say I'm totally sold on the topic but I do feel like we could treat the world God has given us to live in a little better than we do treat it. Even all this 'Go Green' campaigning that they are doing, I think that is making our world a better place and a more healthy Earth for us to live in.

Short story/Characterization

The last post that I created was so different for me to do. I struggled to start the short story and I actually wrote the first paragraph or so on one day but then came back to it another day and finished the rest of the story. It was interesting because in the chapter that we read that talked about characterization it posed the thought of who really writes the story? Does the author dictate what the character does or does the character tell the author what they do? As I began writing the story for the last post I found myself letting the character tell me what was going on, which to me was weird. I really had it in my mind that as the author of the story we dictate everything but it was different writing the story from the characters point of view and interpreting the story through their eyes.

I really enjoyed writing the short story because it's not something that I do on a regular basis. I usually don't write short stories at all because I think I'm just a mediocre writer so I don't send a lot of time on writing. But writing this story was fun for me and I liked being creative like I was. I think my story even came out better than I intended it to be. Like I've said before, when we are growing up we don't think that much about how deep the characters make the story or how much they impact the story. And not so much just the characters in general but more so the different characters and what type of characters they are; whether that be flat, round, dynamic or such. It really puts even more depth to the story for the characters to be unique in their characteristics and adds color to the story. I think a lot of us really only read stories that have color to them and that is (the majority of the time) the main way authors try to write. And often it's the stories that we read and buy so it's beneifical that we learn to write like this in school.

Special Post #1

She walked in thinking to herself, ‘what am I doing here? There’s no reason for me to be here..’ but there was a reason for her to be there, whether she knew the reason herself or didn’t. It seemed like everyone else knew why she was there but they wouldn’t tell her or even give her a hint of why she was there. The room was draped in what seemed to be thoughts of the future but she couldn’t tell why there was so much emphasis on the future. She was a young lady that had her entire life ahead of her but wanted to just simply live in the moment. She didn’t like thinking about the future in fear of missing the joy in a present moment. She wanted nothing to do with retirement plans but rather was a more free spirit kind of person and just went where ever the wind blew her.

The people all around her seemed to be planning out the future without any hesitation. They were planning out next year internships, next seasons sporting events, even next week’s Friday night outing. All she wanted to think about was who she was hanging out with for the night. She wanted to be care free in the moment, but according to the others around her she must choose now what she would do with her time.

She grew up believing that the world was at her fingertips if only she would reach out and touch the unimaginable than it would all come true. Her Daddy had told her to reach for the stars and never look back on this place she had once called home. Her ‘home’ had many dark places that she didn’t want to remember. From all this darkness her Daddy pushed her towards the light which was anywhere but where she had grown up. He wanted her to grow up and be something, be more than he was or her mother was, he wanted the world for her and could only push her to be what she wanted to be. He had pushed her to be in this place where she was now. A place where people wore finely pressed suits, or at least they looked like suits. A place where they spoke at a higher intelligence level and if you weren’t on their level than you needed to go elsewhere because you weren’t going to make it in their group. She wanted to just go home. She didn’t care how dark her home was, it was her home and the only place she had ever known. But she also trusted her Daddy, and if he was pushing her to get her out of that place and onto a new life than she was going to trust him and follow where he pushed her to go.

As she sat down she looked for someone to sit next to her but then realized that the speaker had begun. Even the speaker was neatly pressed like he stepped out of a magazine they had just air brushed. She tried to ignore that and listen to what the speaker had to say, except for the people in front of her were only consumed with their personal conversation so that’s all she could hear at the moment. She decided to stand up in the back of the room, partly so she could hear and partly because the man at the podium had a voice like Charley Brown’s teacher and she had been traveling all night long so it was all she could do to stay awake.

She wondered when she could get out and meet people around the area because in this room there was only enough room to move when people stopped their judgmental stares and their deceitful lips from moving. Finally the speaker paused and what she thought would be her escape was actually her open door to the new world her Daddy had been pushing her towards. A lady by the name of Ms. Philange asked her to step outside, to which the girl responded timidly because she felt like she had done something wrong. Ms. Philange, only an inch taller than herself with dark circles under her eyes like she had been up since the 1800s, began to tell her she had seen her walk in and wanted to introduce herself. This woman was strange to the girl but she decided to go with it and give the lady a chance. As she spoke to the girl, all she could think about was the time that her kindergarten teacher brought in a guest speaker to talk about some fundraiser and it seemed as though she only acknowledged her out of the entire classroom. The girl got the feeling that she was no longer proceeding to her open door, rather she felt she was receding, and wished she really had been, back to the seat where the girls in front of her couldn’t stop spilling their guts about which cute guy they would talk to first.

Ms. Philange continued on about some blabber blabber about the facilities, to which the girl responded, “I’m sorry, am I supposed to be taking notes?” Ms. Philange gave the girl a look like she needed to learn some manners but the girl was being serious. Why was this lady talking to her like she was in first grade? She had been minding her own business and not bothering anyone. In actuality the girls in front of her should have been being talked to because they were the ones that really needed to be talked to. Just then another girl came up and screamed “Anna!!!” The girl just looked at her and decided to go along with it as she screamed back, “Jessica!! How great it is to see you??” She didn’t know the girl a day in her life but for some reason there was a sense of understanding her pain as she stood there and listened to Ms. Philange go on and on. The other girl began to tell Ms. Philange that she was so glad that she had found her friend she had been looking for all day and that she would take her from here and give her a proper tour of the facilities. Ms. Philange just stared aimlessly as the girls trotted off into the new world that the girls’ father had so badly longed for her to be a part of. This was finally the start that the girl had been searching for and she couldn’t wait to call her father and tell him every detail of the day, especially about the new world she had now discovered through his persistence of a better life for her.

Character

While reading this chapter, all that I could think of was back in elementary school and going into middle school how we learn about all these terms talked about in the chapter. We learn about the protagonist, antagonist, and hero and on and on and on. We learn the plot and the climax and all that as well which all is put together as a story. We are drilled to learn about it all so we can read better and understand the text better. By understanding these terms we can identify what is what and who plays what role. But the chapter expounds more on character than what we are taught in middle school. We are taught that there are different kinds of characters and they all add differently to the text which makes the story interesting. You love some characters because of the way they are presented and you hate some of them because of the way they are presented. But do we ever stop to think (like the author of chapter 2 talks about) does the character make the story or does the story make the character?? This thought was rather interesting to me because I guess I never stopped to think about it. I started to think about all the books and stories I have read and keep thinking, which one would this story apply to? Did the character make the story or did the story make the character? I would almost say it depends on the author and how they write the story. Nicholas Sparks writes books, in my opinion, where the characters make the story. But in Sonny's Blues, the author writes it as the story makes the characters; you don't realize who the characters really are until the author presents them through the story. So in my opinion it really does depend on the author and how they write the story. And sometimes it even depends on how we read a story I think. If we have knowledge on the story than we might already know a little about the characters and then in this case the characters make the story. For example trilogies or books that continue into other books would fall into this category. Interesting thoughts when thinking about literature and reading about the stories/characters we are interacting with.

Sonny's Blues

This story that we read was something that I was not expecting. It started out with a man narrating about his day of reading in the news paper that his brother had been taken to jail for drugs. This is certainly not something that a person wants to read at any point of their life, especially being an older brother. And to top that, one of his brother's friends came by to make sure he had heard the news. The narrator is someone that I commend for taking responsibility for not only his life and his family but also before his mother died he promised her to take care of his brother Sonny, so to see this in the papers that his brother has taken this road of falling to drugs is somewhat a failure on his part in his mind almost. So the story then goes through the path of Sonny getting back in touch with his brother after many years and reconnecting with him and telling him about his life.

While reading this story I didn't realize things until a certain point in the reading. The author almost keeps some things under wraps until certain points in the reading. I didn’t 't realize the boys were blood brothers till a few pages into the readings, or that they were African American until a few pages in. Then the author unfolds the brother's relationship as the text keeps going on which is how I love reading text. I like the way the author starts in the middle of the narrators' day and slowly unfolds the details of the story. This keeps you wondering what this happened for or why they said that. What memory does that go back to, or why are they acting like that? This kind of reading keeps me enticed and wanting to read on until I get the full story, I love it!

The Imaginary Invalid

When I attended this play I was really excited to see a live play because it's been a while since I've been to a play. My church puts on productions for Christmas and ester which is the last play that I've really seen. I think it brings something to the storyline to see it live acted out and experience the actors in the living flesh. I was pleasantly surprised at what the cast brought to the story and quite grateful that I got the chance to go. As I sat and watched the play I was even more surprised to learn how much talent we had here among us at Southeastern. The cast did a wonderful job by bringing the play to life and really telling a story not only with their words and expressions but by their body language and facial expressions.

I went to the play not knowing anything about the story line at all and the only thing I really had to go off of was the quote on the front of the program. It read, "It is for my sake that I give her this doctor, and a good daughter ought to be delighted to marry for the sake of her father's health..." From that I made the assumption that the story would be about a daughter not wanting to marry a specific man but her family forcing her too which is along the lines of what happened. The father, Argan, was ill (which even that was questionable seeing as how his actual doctor at the time was a little on the mad/evil scientist side of the spectrum) and he got an offer from a man to marry his daughter off to a future doctor; which in his mind was a wonderful plan to ensure his treatments in life. But his daughter was in love with another boy she had met named Cleante. The daughter, Angelique, wanted nothing to do with this other boy because she was in love with Cleante who was a music person whom she had met and fallen for. The story goes on trying to get the father to understand that since he truly does love his daughter he should let her marry whom she loves rather than marry to suffice his needs in life.

I tried to put myself in her shoes and just really thought about how appalled I would be if my father tried to marry me off to a man just to ensure his health in the future. That is a horrible base for arranged marriage and is not fair to anyone in that situation. But in the end her father realizes how much he loves her and then they "trick" him into becoming his own doctor and life is all at peace and the two get married.

The play was very enjoyable in my opinion. I loved the casting of the play and the talent that shined out of it. The set was amazing how they used a doll house type setting where the house literally opened up when the scene was taking place within the house. The one thing that I thought was cute but really didn't understand was the extra dancers in the play. They were cute and the definitely added to the play but I didn't understand what they were representative of? They were an interesting addition to the play but I didn't really understand their role in all of it...

Pass

I'm choosing to use my first pass for this post.

Have a great day :)

Blogging

The instructions for the blog are very specific yet give a lot of room for expanding and creativity in our blogs. The instructions are instructing us to get into the books that we read and get deep with the reading so that as we write our blogs we show an understanding for the text. Through blogging we are showing how in-depth we got with the text or how serious we took the reading. Just like how on Friday we were reading the blogs from other people, you can tell whether a person actually read the text and then just wrote the blog but then you can actually tell the people that took the text and read the words and interacted with it and wrote out of their heart how the text impacted them. Every time we interact with text in class is a new way that we can get perspective on the text and interact with it. The activities that we do in this class are very different and out of the box ways to interact with the text which makes you understand things in a different light with different senses even. We are applying what we are learning through how we are learning to relate to the text and then living it out with every text that we read as time goes on.

Blogging extends the reading process by us reading the text and then lingering more in the thought of what we read because now we are relaying the information on our blogs and "speaking' in a sense, about what we read. It's like the morning that we went to the cafeteria for breakfast and we discussed a book that changed our lives and what it meant to us. This is a new way to interact with the text because we are telling people about the text and how it impacted our thinking and way of life sometimes. When we blog it's like telling others about the text that we just read and what we thought about it and how it changed the way we thought about something or the way we view the text that we were reading. This blogging project for me has been a new way to discuss the literature that we have been reading. I don't sit around and talk about the literature that I read very often, it's more like in passing I talk to people and tell them to read something that I've read before. Literary discussion is definitely something new for me so this blogging has really helped me to process the readings that we do and then either summarizes what I got out of it or just to figure out what I did get out of it and relay that to other people through this blog. I like the idea of blogging my interaction with the text because then as I type the words I can realize "O wow that's what I thought I read but actually it affected me in this way." Blogging has opened my eyes up a little more to the actual importance of literature and what a big role it really does play in our society. Before movies, before technology, before all that, literature has been something that has been with us for multiple years and it's something that many people have taken in but it's something that in our society we take for granite now-a-days and we must stop. We must stop our busy schedules and sit and read some of the great literature to let it wreck our lives and change our outlook on life.

"I went to the Lakeview, Roselawn and Tiger Flowers cemetery complex for this fieldtrip, and I stayed there for at least 40 minutes."

This trip for me was amazing. It really puts life into perspective when we think about how we simply burry our dead and we "lay them to rest" and then in a few weeks we go on about our buisness. We think about them here and there, but then our time comes and we get "laid to rest" and it is just a continuous process. Why do we hold onto our dead? Why do we create a memorial stone in their honor? Are our memories of them not enough? Do we just forget them after a period of time and so we have a stone put in the ground and grave yards to hold them so that we don't forget about them? I love going to a burrial site and seeing what a legacy people have on their tomb stones. It's sad but refreshing to see that there were people before us and that life isn't just about the here and now. There were millions of people that lived before us and we so often get wrapped up in our own little word and forget that there were many significant people that lived full lives before us. It's such a peaceful place to be yet we make it out to be such a wierd place to go and visit. Maybe if we paid a little more respect for our dead and realized that it's not just about the piece of stone in the ground that honors them but rather the memories that make their legacy so strong then we can truely begin to appreciate those before us.

"When Lylacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

As I laid there and read this poem out loud to my roommate I couldn't help but think about how the author was writing this poem and how eloquent it was that he could write about a subject so dreary in such depth. Walt Whitman's words are so unique to today's culture and I even said it out loud that these words seem so outdated but this is the way people communicated back in those days. When I read the poem at first it was hard in the beginning to realize it was about a funeral but then as I got into the poem more and more I realized that's what Whitman was talking about. His words are so well put together and I enjoyed reading them but at times they were hard to understand. He paints a picture in our minds of people mourning by the train station and just the many faces of sadness and it really puts into perspective how this one funeral of one man affected an entire nation.

In the activity that we wrote down our favorite parts and our difficult parts it really helped me to understand something’s. I wrote down as my favorite part:

O western orb sailing the heaven,

Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk'd,

As I walk'd in silence the transparent shadowy night,

As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,

As you droop'd from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other starts all look'd on)

I read this and just imagined the galaxy talking to him about the death that he was encountering which when we think about it is kind of what happens when death occurs in our lives. We feel like the world should stop in remembrance of the deceased person but it doesn't and these words jus show how in our own world time does stop when someone dies. Even if the death is someone that is not that close to you (in this case the president) death still makes time stand still if even for a little.. everything just pauses in remembrance of that person...

Painting my interpretations

In class on Wednesday we had the opportunity to respond to the text in the way of art. When professor Corrigan said that we would be painting I thought to myself, I am going to suck at this because I just can't paint. Even that morning, as I was walk to class with my suitemate, I was telling her I should just not go to class because I can't paint anyways so what's the point of going to try. She responded that that was a poor excuse to not go to class. Painting in response to literature doesn't have to be perfect. We have to realize that when we respond to something, it is through our own interpretation of whatever it is that we are responding to.

"You will have plenty to eat and be satisfied

And praise the name of the LORD your God,

Who has dealt wondrously with you;

Then My people will never be put to shame. "

This was the text that I was responding to and I honestly couldn't have told you what I was painting as I picked up that cheap brush and dunked it in the yellow paint on my desk. I took the first stroke and still felt like a little kindergartener just painting to paint. But as I trusted myself and made myself understand that whatever comes of this picture is what is meant to come out, it was then that I was aware that it didn't matter the end result, as long as I was expressing what I felt when I thought about the text. As I made more strokes and added more color I began to feel more confident and the end result that came out really made me feel good about myself. It was no longer about not being able to paint, but it was now about expressing myself through the painting and telling my group about how the text touched my heart. It was an expression of my heart at the time because it was about praising God for His goodness and provisions that He makes for His people and the color and loudness of my painting expressed that. It was a great way to stretch us as readers and really helped me become comfortable with expressing my feelings towards a text in different ways.

Joel

First off I want to express how thankful I am that God has blessed me, us, to be able to come to a school where reading and discussing scripture is a norm and getting deep into the text is something that happens in every classroom. This has never been a norm in my life because I've been going to public school my entire life. Prayer and scripture reading was something that never happened in the classroom, rather just in Sunday school and as the pastor read it in service during his sermons.

Reading Joel was a little different because you see a lot of down points in the text but then it also talks about the faithfulness of God and how He is going to provide for His people. Reading the text out loud in class on Monday was helpful to me because I feel like sometimes we just read the text in our devotions or just read it to ourselves and we don't get the full impact of everything the text is saying. When we read it out loud it gives power to the text and life to the text. As people read Joel out loud I began to pick up on some things that I hadn't when I read it just by myself. But now that I think of it, I even read some of the text out loud to my roommate when I was preparing for class this weekend. We want to share things that touch our hearts; and that's what I was doing as I read verses that I wanted to proclaim out loud because it was so impactful in my reading the literature. So reading the words out loud in class was almost like me reading them to the girls in my room as I read it the night before. It was a great activity and I’m glad we had a chance to experience the text like that.

Theme

Whether it’s a reoccurring theme in our daily lives, in a TV show we are watching, or in a book we are reading; we see theme's everywhere. When I read the chapter on theme and realized that even in a little story that we all know, such as little red writing hood, we can see so many themes that can come out of it. The first version was a generic, typical, and basically the story that we are used of hearing. Then there was the second version of the story where the ending was different (the girl shot the wolf) and the moral was a one liner and very blunt. These stories here show how themes of stories can really change the mood of the story and what the reader gets out of the story. When I read the second version of the story I about fell out of my seat at the ending that the author wrote because I couldn't believe that the author wrote that kind of an ending. This ending puts such a different theme on the story which is such a big part of reading a piece of literature. When reading Lewis' 'Grief Observed' you don't sit and smile as you read it, the theme presents a saddened feel and at moments you feel like crying. Theme is something we never get away from. We have good days, bad days, in between days, and all around days. Its such a big part of our lives and such a big part of literature so we really have to understand it when/as we read the literature we read. When we understand the theme we better understand what the author is trying to convey and what they are trying to have us understand through the theme. If a story has no theme, is it still a story? Are we interested in stories without themes?...

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much literature I actually read outside of class and it really has put a new perspective on things. I want to read more literature by authors that really have something to say like C.S. Lewis. I’ve only read one of his books and already I’m hooked and want to see what else he has written. I know that he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and I haven’t even seen those movies but I know they did very well in the box office and a lot of people that saw it told me the movies were really well done. I’ve talked before about how movies really don’t give justice to the authors words on the page and I think this is a motivating factor for me to read the books before I see the movie. Literature has not been a big part of my life except for the fictional stories when I was younger and then some Christian writings as I’ve gotten older but I just feel like I’ve missed out on some good literature. I thank God for the opportunity to be in school and read the literature I have. But reading the book by C.S. Lewis has challenged me to read more and more literature that is going to further my education and be beneficial to me being social when it comes to literature; such as when we went to breakfast and spoke in groups about literature that we had read and that had made an impact on our lives. I want to be able to do that more and I can now a little more because I’ve read one of Lewis’ books. But again I feel like I just need to grow more in reading more literature and to become cultured a little more in the literature realm.

Grief Observed

Reading this literature has really opened my eyes to what literature can bring to the table. Often we read books to let our imaginations soar and run wild as we imagine what it would be like to be a certain character in the book. But then there are certian pieces of literature where a person can identify realistically with the author and understands what they are going through. I loved this piece of literature by C.S. Lewis because it was so raw in material that it almost sounded like we were his friend listening to him tell us how he was handling this hardship in his life. The parts where he was outraged with God because he didn't understand why he woud put him through this or when he finally understood a little why he was being put through this. Lewis is real with his reader on how he is handling all this which is the whole point of the book.
One part that really stood out to me was when he was talking about the time that him and his wife had together and if it was enough time. He says that maybe it was the time that they finally got together and perhaps God said this is too perfect so he split them but then on the other hand maybe the time they had together was the amount that they were supposed to be together only (which of course with our God who is caring and loving, this explanation is more understandable). Lewis is going through every thought and sharing even his most raw thoughts despite what people may think which makes this writing so much more attractive because its thoughts that we can all identify with because most of us have lost a loved one at some point. I really did enjoy this text and would love to read more of Lewis's writings.

Literary Discussion

The breakfast at the ristorante was an interesting way to get our brains stimulated and talking about literature. I personally have sat around talking about literature before but it was a subconscious thing that I was doing. I would just talk about a book that I had been recently reading or a book that I was currently reading and that would be the extent of my literary discussion. I haven't read a whole lot of literature but as I've grown up and realized that literature does really add so much to our world I'm trying to read more and more. As we were discussing literature on Monday at breakfast we talked about how much our society has gotten lazy with the literature we have. We have books and some people read them but the majority of the time the books are made into motion pictures and then that's when people realize that there is a book that the story came from. If we instead pushed people to read more, what would our world imagine and change into for our students and our minds? Our imagination has been given to us by God and its something that we could really benefit from but when the producer takes this in their hands and make it into what they interpret the book as it cuts off our ability to imagine with the text that the author has written. I know that there are many books that have been turned into motion pictures that I wish I had read the book first because I would love to see how my imagination develops the words off the pages. And then again I remember that we live in a fast pace society and to be able to calm our spirit and just sit and read is sometimes hard for us, well for me at least. I have a list of like five books that I would like to read but with all the business of life I feel like I never have time to just sit and read a good book unless I'm traveling or something. So reading maybe reading more literature should have been a new years resolution for me!

Happy Endings

When I first read this story I didn't know if I was supposed to go on and read option B and option C and all. All the beginning said was for a happy ending read option A so I did and things ended well. Life was lived blissfully and then the people died and that is the way life is for all of us. Some have more of a happy life then others but over all we all have a good life. But then I chose to read the rest of the options and realized that the author had thought of other endings to the story that actually played off of option A. But interestingly enough every option was just about the in between time of when the couple got together and when they died. So all she was adjusting was the in between of their lives together which was interesting to look at life in scenarios like that.
As I read each option they got a little more obscene with each one and I began to ask what her point was to writing such a story like this. But when I was done reading everything I realized that what she had written wasn't far from what our reality is that we live in today. Our society gasps when they first hear of stories like this but then people begin to think about the situation and say it's not that surprising that things turned out that way; which is very sad and says a lot about our society. People don't see commitment as something sacred in our world anymore which is a shame because so much turmoil comes from not viewing it as sacred. Each option shows what our society does as a result of not viewing commitment as something sacred. People begin to cheat on their partners and spouses and they begin to kill people and ruin marriages, infidelity comes into play and the whole situation is now in a sticky situation. This story showed all of this and really put things into perspective, but then again we have to remember just as the author said… in the end one line is always the same. They die. We all die at one point and it really is all about how we live the dash in between our date. Do we live in “happy ending” option A? Or do we try to live our own lives in one of the other options??

What We Talk about When We Talk about Love

Reading this story was very interesting to me. Its about four people just sitting around a table enjoying each others company; one couple has been in previous relationships and they have currently been married to each other for four years and the other couple has been married for a year and a half. Already by reading that information we see that the dynamics of the two couples relationships vary in how they interact with one another. One couple is still in the "honeymoon" stage of their marriage where everything is blissful and grand, while the other couple has seen the good and the bad, the pretty and the ugly.

The couples get on the topic of love which comes up a lot in conversation wherever a person is. They are more or less trying to define love, which truthfully is a task that is almost impossible to come up with that applies to the entire human population. As we see in the story, Terri got dragged down and basically beaten to "love," if you will.. This to me would not be the love that I would want to experience but she had a point. Being a psychology major myself, I understand that some people have mental problems where they can't express their emotion in a healthy way. Take for example Ed. I would guess that he was abused in some form as a child OR his mother was abused by his father. Somewhere in his lifetime he learned that beating the person you love is the way to express that you love them, which a healthy person would understand that this is not the way to show love. So to Ed, love is beating the person and expressing that to them. Terri even had a distorted view of love because she stuck by him in the worst of times and felt that even after everything was said and done he truly did love her, but in reality he was mentally disturbed in some ways and one might say that Ed was more infatuated with Terri then deeply in love with her.

Mel obviously disagreed with Terri in his definition of love. He refused to believe that what Ed had for Terri was love and if it was then he wanted nothing of it. This reaction from Mel is normal though because he was now Terri's man, he was the one taking care of her and protecting her so to hear that some other man beat her and dragged her around the house to show how much he "loved" her angered Mel. But also they were all drinking so Mel may have been able to understand things a little better if he wasn't drunk. But what Mel needs to understand is that Ed did love Terri, maybe not to the depths that Mel loved Terri, but Ed obviously had some issues that he had not dealt with so he couldn't love Terri to the full potential.

We see this a lot in our society with all the abuse cases that come into the social workers offices. Battered wives, abused children, neglected children; all resulting from people not knowing how to love someone and show their love in a healthy way. This all has the potential to lead to things such as dysfunctional relationships in the future, repeating of history where the child can't love in a healthy way when they grow up, and even children as a result of not feeling love in a healthy way can get involved in things that are not healthy. Things such as pre-marital sex, drugs, alcohol and more. Our society would gain a lot if they just stepped back and took a look at what love really is. I understand that the way love is portrayed and lived out is very different family to family but we need to have a healthy view of love all the way around. Love is not something that is always blissful, it takes time and work to love a person 24/7 but we need to learn how to love our friends and family in healthy ways. And honestly, the best way to learn this would be to look at the example Jesus was to us...