The Perks of Being a Wifeflower

Okay, that was a really dumb title.
Sorry.

But here's the thing: every time I leave the bathroom light on long enough for Jacob to see it before I can scurry and try to turn it off, I owe him a substantive blog post. He says when he reads my writing, he loves me more. Right now I owe him seven blog posts.

And so, here is the first of many entries wherein I will actually write about the thoughts and problems and mental struggles that betoken my every day living. The following is the transcript of a talk I gave in my ward (that's Mormon for when a lay member presents a sermon to their congregation) a couple weeks ago.

The problem now is that if I start writing about things that I really really care about, then I'll be vulnerable to people who are smarter and meaner than me . But oh well. It's time, you know?

I've included a couple pictures from our stay in Florence, because it is the most inspirational place I've ever been.

Come From Where it May

Sacrament Meeting Talk 6/23/13

Jacob reading at the Accademia

               I have always been a bit of a bookworm. Long before I could read I would insist that “I turn!” the pages when my parents read me stories, and I remember distinctly volunteering my four year old self to “read” picture books to my friends. (I’d beextremely interested now to hear the captions I came up with for the pictures then)
 So, over the years many works of literature have become so precious to me, as to be something like scripture. From many wonderful books have I read, re-read, re-read, filled the margins with scribbled notes, cross-referenced, and memorized quotes to adopt as personal mantras. In works of every genre I’ve learned much of what I know about sin, repentance, redemption, salvation, charity, and the greatest extremes of evil and of human and divine kindness.

As I grew older I discovered the other arts; visual, performing, vocal, instrumental. There was a whole beautiful world of Godly language to hear and to learn to speak! Every day of my arts-filled childhood contained many sermons. So for me, the divide between what was scripture, what officially belonged to the True and Living Gospel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and what was merely inspirational never seemed incredibly material.

When I became a teenager, though, that time when you start to realize that you pretty much know everything, before you go to college and discover that you don’t know anything- -I started to notice that in many of my meetings, lessons, and activities, Gospel truths were usually expressed in very specific language, namely King James English. Very few of the Hymns in the hymn book were actually sung and my favorite authors and poets were usually only quoted in General Conference. As a young girl I began my personal journey, the one we are all continually on because we’re alive, to gain a testimony of what living the restored gospel meant for me and in what languages I accessed its truths.

Now, when we speak of “The Restored Gospel”—of what that phrase really means, it’s difficult to pinpoint what is gospel and what is merely good.

As Joseph Fielding Smith said,“… There is a great fund of knowledge in the possession of men,” ,“that will not save them in the kingdom of God. What they have got to learn are the fundamental things of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” [1]

Many of us audibly breathe a sigh of relief here. Phew, good. “I only need to learn the fundamentals, because the rest is extraneous. I want to be saved in the Kingdom of God“. Reassuring, right? All those novels I consumed as a child were childish things that it’s now time to put away.

I’ve met many people over the years who take this kind of council to fuel their pronouncement that “the only books I read are the scriptures,” or “I only listen to the MoTab and EFY CDS”.

And yet, we embrace as an article of our faith (the thirteenth one to be exact) “ If there is anything ^hvirtuous, ⁱlovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things”.

SEEK is an extremely active verb. It connotes much more than merely absorbing gospel truths through osmosis as we sit in church. In fact, the act of seeking is often very uncomfortable. If something is right in front of you, you can’t seek for it. You can look for it maybe. But seeking implies that it may be far away, or out of reach, soul-stretching or mind-blowing. After you find what you’re seeking, you’ll be different. And that’s uncomfortable. Seeking is a process, a journey, never immediately ended.  Maybe you’re not even sure what it is you’re seeking for, and that requires faith.

So in saying that we seek after anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy are we saying that, as Latter-day Saints, we commit to actively living an uncomfortable life of scraping, stretching, seeking and making ourselves vulnerable and uncomfortable? Yeah, I think so.

Our prophets seers and revelators of the restored gospel take this idea even further:

Brigham Young said, It is our duty and calling, as ministers of the same salvation and Gospel, to gather every item of truth and reject every error. Whether a truth be found with…the Universalists, or the Church of Rome, or the Methodists, the Church of England, the Presbyterians, the Baptists, the Quakers, the Shakers, or any other of the various and numerous different sects and parties, all of whom have more or less truth, it is the business of the Elders of this Church…[and I would add members of this church] to gather up all the truths in the world pertaining to life and salvation, to the Gospel we preach, … to the sciences, and to philosophy, wherever it may be found in every nation, kindred, tongue, and people and bring it to Zion.[2]

A highlight of my life at Badia Fiorentina

Joseph Smith said: “One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from where it may.”[3]

And the Lord says, in Doctrine and Covenants 88:118, “Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom.”

So here we are, with not only council but a duty and calling to SEEK for truth, well, basically everywhere. Something of a daunting task.

So how do we possibly sift through all the good and bad teachings of the world in books and religions and find the valuable ones that have a rightful and useful place in our understanding of the restored gospel? How do we determine which ones are the best books and which are merely a waste of our time—or worse, detrimental to our spiritual education? How do we avoid the pitfalls of embracing unrighteous philosophies of men mingled with scripture?

As Elder B.H. Roberts of the Seventy famously said, “While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is established for the instruction of men; and it is one of God’s instrumentalities for making known the truth yet he is not limited to that institution for such purposes, neither in time nor place. God raises up wise men and prophets here and there among all the children of men, of their own tongue and nationality, speaking to them through means that they can comprehend. … All the great teachers are servants of God; among all nations and in all ages”

All the great teachers are servants of God? How do we distinguish between the good, the great, and the bad? With this kind of council, how do we possibly prioritize our spiritual education??

The answer lies in the topic of this sacrament meeting, which is beautiful in its simplicity: PROPHETS TEACH US TO LIVE THE RESTORED GOSPEL.

Prophets teach us. With so many beautiful, useful truths in religions of the world that we have a duty to seek after and embrace, the Restored Gospel is singular in the fact that we have living, breathing, teaching prophets. Indeed, our Gospel is true and living, meaning it is changing and growing, just like a living human being—like we are. We believe in continuing revelation that is given us through prophets and through the Holy Ghost directly from our Father to us. That’s pretty cool.

I keep on my computer, so it’s always within view, a sticky note that serves as a gentle caution in my insatiable drive to seek after knowledge and beauty. It’s Second Timothy 3:7: Ever learning, never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

As we follow our duty to seek and learn and embrace and discover, we always come back to the beautiful, grounding fundamentals of the gospel, as President Smith reminded us. In making our central study that we base everything else around the words of prophets, both ancient and modern, we will be able to recognize the other truths we are seeking for when we come across them. We’ll recognize godly language elsewhere because we’ll know it so well from the scriptures, from prophets, and from speaking to God ourselves through prayer.

Elder Bruce R. McConkie (1915–85) put it well when speaking to members and nonmembers alike during an area conference in Tahiti: “Keep all the truth and all the good that you have. Do not abandon any sound or proper principle. Do not forsake any standard of the past which is good, righteous, and true. Every truth found in every church in all the world we believe. But we also say this to all men—Come and take the added light and truth that God has restored in our day. The more truth we have, the greater is our joy here and now; the more truth we receive, the greater is our reward in eternity.” ^[4]

I have a personal testimony of the limitless beauties and truths that exist for us to discover in churches, mosques, synagogues, ashrams, libraries, concert halls, museums, movie theaters, and in all the limitless languages of divinity in the world around us. I know that we’ll have a more complete appreciation of the restored gospel if we better come to know and understand all of God’s children and recognize the light of Christ that pervades and infuses all of His creation.

I love this Gospel with my whole soul and I come to love it more the more I study, seek, and embrace truth, “come from where it may.”

---

[1] Bruce R. McConkie, comp., Doctrines of Salvation (Bookcraft, 1954), 1:291.

[2] Journal of Discourses 7:283

[3] Sermon of Joseph Smith, 9 July 1843 (Sunday Morning), in Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., The Words of Joseph Smith: The Contemporary Accounts of the Nauvoo Discourses of the Prophet Joseph (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1980), p. 229

[4]  Bruce R. McConkie, comp., Doctrines of Salvation (Bookcraft, 1954), 1:291.

Writing a play is hard, apparently.

Trust me, I checked.

To make my Modern Musicals 315 class count as a graduate level 515 class, I told Dr. Nelson that I would write a musical.

I'm not sure exactly why I thought that was an appropriate thing to say. I must have still been jet lagged.

"write a musical"!?!?!?

Andrew Lloyd Webber writes musicals (and purchases all of my favorite paintings so I can't see them, I've recently learned). I... I wake up late and and whine to Jacob and pop my zits and eat too many digestives and get love handles and get hangry and fall asleep all over the place. I am lamentably ordinary and am sick of all my clothes and rarely shave my legs and procrastinate everything and don't know how to manage money. I am one big human flaw. I don't write musicals.
But, for what it's worth, I'm trying.

In other news on the theater front, we're having a marvelous time. Jacob has seen more musicals since we've been here than in his entire 32 years combined (I think he saw...two before this. The two he came to see me in).

So, here's the run down on just a sampling of the plays I've seen in Jolly Old London:

There's nothing like seeing the Phantom of the Opera to make you want to lose weight and take voice lessons.

(No pictures, whoops)

There's nothing like seeing Carmen to make you glad you're not a terrible hussy with a death wish.

 It was Jacob's first Opera, and he hated it (we're working on this). But sitting in the Royal Albert Hall alone is a sublime experience (Side note: the Royal Albert Hall is just a quick skip through Kensington Gardens from our flat. !?!?).

This place is BIG.

There's nothing like seeing The Lion King to make you feel not only inflexible, but entirely incapable physically.

 

There's nothing like seeing Wicked to assure you that something, at least, is better in America.

Though Americans, perhaps, go a little insane waiting at the stage door in the freezing rain to meet West End stars .

There's nothing like seeing War Horse to bring back all of your girlhood equine obsessions (including, but not limited to: horseback riding lessons, a Breyer Horse collection, notebooks filled with Learn to Draw Horses attempts, multiple homemade stop animation videos starring Playmobil horses, etc.) and make you practice, incessantly, moving and sounding like a horse. 

Sue me.

And there's absolutely nothing like seeing Les Miserables  to convince you that you should NEVER attempt to write a musical.

 (I joined in their crusade...)

But guess what?

I'm still going to do it. And as terrifying as it is, I actually really like doing it. Every time I run breathlessly to my computer because some dialogue magically worked itself out in my mind or a character's back story writes itself because the character knows more about their life than I do... wow. Those moments are delicious. And a little addicting. And even though I'm beyond self-conscious to let anyone read my soul-baring, nonsensical crap script, I am more fulfilled by actually finally attempting to do this than by most other things.

So I let Jacob read some scenes. I work at the piano where I know everyone can hear, but I just do it anyway. I'm trying to write music. I'm trying to write stories. And even if they turn out as bad as I fear they will and they never speak to a single soul... at least I did what I've always felt, at my deepest depths, that I was meant to do. 

Love, drafts, and more drafts,

Banana

I don't want to write papers anymore.

I just want to get married.

Poor banana

Today I went on a great run and got an amazing facial and made lunch for my darling girlfriends and went to the temple (and it was nice and very holy) and performed in a beautiful play. Then I came home and cried my false eyelashes right off. Literally...they slipped off my lids and down my lashes due to my powerful, seemingly bionic, glue-eating tears.

Why, you ask? Is your uterus bleeding? Are you a victim of a sublime, destructive unrequited love? Are you just bored and tired and inferior and lonely?

yes yes yes.
 But I'm also a beneficiary of a very nice life.
So why is it such a poor, sad, desperate little banana?

HMMM?

The thought occurred to me while I was dish washing today, this very nice little day, that I need to start writing.
I need to start writing.
I NEED TO START WRITING.

What should the poor banana start writing about? She's awfully tired of her weepy little self. 

back.

I'm getting feisty in my old age.

 I am very quickly irked, it seems, by everything. Racism, sexism, general rudeness, road rage, people who scam elderly people, genocide, my own intellectual limitations, everything... zero tolerance. And it gets to the point where it makes it very hard to be happy about anything because pretending to be Little Susie Sunshine when everyone else seems to be hurting feels insensitive and fake. I vowed to never use my acting skills to be someone I'm not. There are just so many things to care  about everywhere. So many injustices.

Sooo...what right have I to go on a lovely little bike ride in the sun and read some poems and just feel all lovely and tickled and ignore all the disgusting pride and arrogance and cruelty out there????

Well. It also seems like a disservice on my part to be Little Susie Raincloud all the time, you know? I'm not contributing anything by just caring and getting pissed and being rude to everyone because I think they are just preserving their comfort by ignoring important human rights violations. Oh dear. Listen to me! 

I decommissioned this blog for a while because I was disgusted with myself. I do NOT want to be another post-pictures-of-myself-every-day-so-I-maintain-a-carefully-constructed-illusion-of-what-my-life-is-like-and-everyone-can-envy-me-and-validate-me-with-their-comments-and-giveaway-entries blogger. And since I began to sort of lean that way I pulled the plug. Straight up.

BUT. Here's the point of all this ranting. No matter how much I care, I can't solve the world's problems. No sirree. And by  acting all put-out all the time about things that really are awful, I'll just become a negative person and you just can't keep friends that way, not even the ones that really love you.

What to do then? Well, I've decided to keep caring. Stay human. But a big part of being human, I've decided, is also loving despite things. Not just loving the underdog, but loving everyone. Loving women who PREFER to be controlled and don't want to think about the alternative. Loving grandparents who were raised in the 30's and 40's and really didn't have much of a chance to not be racist. Just loving.
Because, as I discovered, being intolerant of intolerant people is still intolerance. And probably worse since I consider myself so "enlightened." Being narrow-minded about narrow-mindedness is the ultimate hypocrisy, I think. I am going to change.

I am going to keep blogging because words and pictures and pretty things are my life force, and that's okay. If I can make the world a teensy bit prettier by dwelling on the beautiful things I discover, there's no shame in that, is there? Sharing is caring. Or so my childhood taught me.

So. The point is... I'm back. Come back with me?

banana

Why I'll never be a successful blogger

• I don't have a cute indie husband or any cute indie babies.
• I can never blog about my outfits. Never. Not that I don't consult, respect, and even envy my sisters of the blogosphere who make good money doing this every day. But I really would feel ridiculous. I already am pretty ridiculous, so I don't want to make it worse.
• My cupcakes are nothing special.
• I don't know anything about Lady Gaga and I'm still trying to figure out who Justin Bieber is.
• My paint creations look like this:

 

• I'm a nerd without a niche.
• My life lost all meaning after Harry Potter.

But I will keep calm and carry on in this vain crusade on a volunteer basis because I'm addicted to writing and I like posting pictures of myself .

Just kidding.

um.

I want to write a book.

...Any ideas?

Ode à France {dernier projet}.

Here lies my last project for my French photography class. Enjoy (and, as always, comment if you please)!

Buildings. Space. Land.

Tension.

Rootedness and up-rootedness.

"I don't regret the numerous pictures of Brigitte Bardot, but I'd rather have a good photograph of my father."

Identity. 

Did all this conjure up a portrait of twentieth century french photographer Raymond Depardon? Well that's alright. To me, he's something of a hodge-podge of ideologies and sentimentality, all summed up by his grand commission from the state of France to capture, well, France.

Depardon scoured the country seeking for areas of "tension"; he photographed objects, particularly buildings, that cohabitated in  space and told (people-lessly) the story and history of a people that is inseparable from that people's fierce attachment to the land. 

So for my final photographic reflection on Paris and my little "Ode to Depardon," I thought I ought to pay hommage to some of the tensions, or apparent incongruencies, that give France and French culture their identities to me.

Take, for instance, the fact that one of the reasons Paris is Paris is because everyone wants to be there, so they bring their country along with them.

And snuggle the converging architectural style right in, nice and cozy.

 

Or take the tension between the universal, unrestrained joy of early childhood, and the necessity of growing into the determinedly indifferent french girls young french girls must inevitably become.

 

And then there are other, deeper stirrings. Culture and counter-culture.France's proud past of the classical Academy and the reality of post-revolution iconoclasm.

All brought together in the ever-present cultural melting pot of the Metro.

 

Depardon used "tension" to represent images that were "so French." 

Perhaps he wouldn't even have taken the following picture or seen anything culturally significant in its subject matter, but to a foreign eye the charm of an elderly jogger literally stopping to hop the fence and smell the roses is endless. And so very French.

 

It's probably inevitable that my Ode to French Identity is thus fueled and restricted by own identity. That is, because these things are "so French" to me, it probably just shows how not French I am.

But this tension creates a startingly new identity of its own. Before I came to France (as silly as it sounds), I never really thought of myself as "American". I defined myself by my gender, my hobbies, my interests, my religion. I was a Mormon, a theater nerd, a francophile. In the very American tradition, I prided myself in my freedom to be an individual and defined myself accordingly.

But how else can you explain the strange pang of comfort and irony in turning the corner to witness a sight so "very french," but also with a name so very American that it makes me smile? I feel like we know each other. I get it. 

Bearing in mind it's named after a state (and region) I've never even been to, and if I sat down at one of the smokey tables to order, I would undoubtedly make many cultural and linguistic fumbles before finally sinking back in an uneasy sigh of relief and starting to think of home.

Bathing in the Multitude

“The street leads the flaneur into a vanished age... In the asphalt over which he passes, his footsteps awaken an astonishing echo.The gaslight, that streams down onto the pavements, throws an ambiguously suggestive
light onto this false bottom…A rapture comes over him who spends a long time marching aimlessly through the streets. With every step, the walking urge grows more powerful;  ever quicker come the seductions of shops, of bistros, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next street corner, a distant mass of foliage, a street name…”

Okay.

Maybe I wanted Baudelaire to write my post on the art of flanerie for me. I can't pontificate about the beautiful art of wandering with that kind of poetry ("his footsteps awaken an astonishing echo"!? puh-lease), and though I've been successfully getting lost my whole life, I don't know if I've ever done it on purpose.

Plus, I think I started out the wrong anyway. A flaneur sets out to "walk his turtle" and "bathe in the multitude" with no other goal in mind but to let the endless charms of Paris enthrall and astound him.

And I set out to get lost, yes, but also hopefully to wander straight into the most amazing pâtisserie and to be enthralled by the poetic jubilance of my very first macaron.

That was naughty.

But it was the beginning of a truly enriching flâneuse experience.

You see, I'm experiencing Paris in stages. On the very top level there's the sheer tourist awe of delicious treats and beautiful (thin. I'll never understand) people and iconic history and glamour and excitement of a place and culture I've romanticized my whole life.

I had literally been waiting for that macaron my whole life.

But once I started wandering (aimlessly, thoughtlessly), I finally stopped filtering out everything that didn't fit with my carefully crafted image of me in Paris (this image really is quite lovely, though, if you'd like to know. It mainly involves reading, writing poems, and being worshipped by beautiful, articulate men).

But I'm learning (slowly, like my baby french) as I walk slowly, and peeling back layers, like the torn posters in the metro.

There's so much more depth to this city and this experience. And when I let myself look at it-- really look, bathe, wander-- and let the beauty wash over me right along with the filth, I feel like I'm doing something truly significant, somehow.

But as to what that is, exactly, you'll have to ask Baudelaire.

On James Baldwin and how he gets it (and me).

I wrote my first short story this week.

JINKIES!

 Was it good, you ask? No. Not really.

And of course that's okay.

So it's not a very big deal, really. I wrote most of it the night before/ morning it was due.

Just like I do everything, you know?

 So why does it matter so much to me? And why do I do that anyway (write everything the morning of)?

I'll tell you why. 

And James Baldwin will tell you why.

It's because I'm scared scared scared SCARED SCARED.

And this is why:

Of all the things I want and hope and yearn to be (which is a considerable list of things, you have perhaps noticed), a writer, in its most hazy and glamorous depiction, is perhaps what I want most.

 So write, you might say.

Write every day! Write everything. Write poems. Write dumb things. Write brilliant things. Write about people you don't know and people you wish you knew and yourself and weak people and brave people. And I DO. Kind of.

Actually I write all the time.

But I'm so afraid of writing something good (or trying to) because that's what I want more than anything, and if I fail... well then, I fail everything.

So purposefully procrastinated mediocrity is safe. Huh? I've been planning that story for WEEKS.

But I wouldn't let myself write it. SCARED SCARED SCARED. Waiting waiting waiting.

As the brilliant James says,

"I thus gave the world and altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write.

One writes out of one thing only-- one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give".

Ode to margin writers (and, of course, to Billy)

I love reading. I am a shameless book worm and I perfectly embodied the wikipedia definition of gawky nerd until I grew into my nobs a little. then again, I still do a little.
Well, I have a habit of reading with a pen in hand (and usually also a pencil behind the ear, perhaps an additional pen to sit on, given up for long lost).
I am a margin writer!! And proud of it.

this little smidge of beauty by my rhetorical lover, Billy Collins, honors me in this sense.
The last line is also the namesake of this little bloggie poo.
Thought I'd share.

Thanks, Bill. You're a real pal. You're a babe.

[thanks for the photo]

Marginalia - Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."