you capture – doorways

Thai people believe that the spirit of the house resides in the threshold. Why the threshold of all places, I’m not sure. However, there may be another way to read this. Perhaps our spirit resides in the threshold of our metaphorical home. In the temple that is our body, in the safe haven that is our soul.

The question is: is the doorway open or closed? Open to possibility, or closed for control?

Open for opportunity?

Or closed for comfort?

Does your spirit sit on the threshold? Tell me, how does your doorway stand?

you capture – lights

I had originally planned this post for last week’s You Capture, but then my internet decided a 2-day hiatus was necessary, so that was fun. But turns out what I had planned for “outside” also works for “lights” and potentially even “holiday magic”. I know the point of You Capture is to get you out every week. But in case you were afraid I haven’t been busy taking enough photos…please see the rest of my blog.

“Holiday magic” is a little bit of a stretch though because, while Thailand has been in the throes of their own holiday season, it’s not really Christmas here. Occasionally you’ll see a pink aluminum Christmas tree or a sign that says “Happy C’mas!”, but the Thais have pretty much moved on to the next course: New Years. Although, for them, the Thai New Year is in April. Also, this year is not going to be 2011 for them. It will be 2554. Because they’re on a totally different calendar. (Or we’re hailing from the future. One of the two.) Their calendar begins, not with the birth of Christ, but with the achievement of nirvana/death of Buddha, which occurred approximately 543 years before the son of Mary arrived. Nevertheless, Thais are not the type to pooh-pooh any reason to have a good time, so they celebrate the Gregorian New Year too.

So we scouted out some holiday activities, and found pretty lights.

Ok, well first we found Totoro. If you don’t know Totoro, you need to beef up on your anime.

Then we found lights. That spell “nap” for some reason. Hey, I guess we all need a good one from time to time.

And because everybody needs a Che Guevara monkey…

As for us, we’ll celebrate a little Christmas together. We don’t have a tree, but we do have a string of lights strung up above our fireplace (that conveniently has an electrical cord running through it, ‘cuz that’s a good idea…).

And we’ll open our gifts up on Christmas Eve, Norwegian/German style. We’re multicultural that way. It’ll be cozy. I’m hoping to talk my mom into skyping us Christmas Eve California time and just setting up the laptop in the living room so we can watch everyone else open up their gifts.

Happy Holidays!

P.S. If you requested postcard love, I think they should be arriving soon. Or four months from now. You never know with international mail.

Food, etc.

This post is long overdue. My family has been begging me for pictures of food from Thailand since the day I touched foot to land here. I’ve been accruing some photos, but shamefully, not nearly enough. I blame the poor lighting in most eateries (hello? street food) which leads to unappetizing photos. It would be an injustice to the food.

Some of my favorite street food I don’t even have photos of, like khao mun gai, which involves chicken on top of rice that has been cooked in chicken broth and served with a chili sauce, or kai pa loh, which involves a hock of pork leg simmered for days in a cinnamon-star anise-rich broth and hard boiled eggs. And tub tim grob! Oh, be still my heart. My favorite dessert! I won’t explain what it’s made of because you’ll just raise your eyebrows and go “Eh?” But I will say it involves a delicate strawberry-vanilla like flavor, with a bit of crispy goodness soaked on ice and coconut milk.

Here’s what I do have photos of though:

By the way, Thailand does indeed have excellent coffee. Our fears were much assuaged. Also: European desserts here are amazing.

Pure blended fruit juices. This one is orange and passion fruit.

Because remember these guys?

Lest you think passion fruit is the only interesting fruit around here, let me introduce you to jackfruit.

These guys are filled with little sweet yellow segments that are a bit crunchy/chewy and oh-so-yummy. But please do not confuse this spiny fruit with durian, which looks very similar, but with larger spikes. Durian smells to high heaven of the lovely perfume Eau du Diaper and tastes much like it smells. I think so anyway. A lot of people love it. But due to its intense perfume, in many cities in Asia, it is banned on subways and buses and recommended that you not enter public transportation at least 20 minutes after consumption. You think I’m kidding.

Much better for the palate, however, is mangosteen, sweet, delicate and delicious. Plus it’s pretty.

And did I mention there’s good coffee?

Because yes, oh yes, there is.

Also consumed, but not pictured above: pad phuk boong (fried morning glory – I eat this almost every day), tom kah (coconut soup), larb moo Issan (a northern Thai meat salad), deep fried fish topped with lemongrass salad, deep fried fish topped with five sauces, moo ping (grilled pork on skewers), yum talay (seafood salad), roasted duck in salads and curries, pomelo, dragon fruit, guava, and rotee (an Indian style crepe served with sweetened condensed milk).

And oatmeal. I found Quaker Oats at the grocery store and eat that with soymilk and a banana every morning because I’ve been a little stopped up since I got here. Better than the alternative I must say, which is what usually hits foreigners upon introduction to the Thai diet. (TMI?)

But on that note, you might have noticed some of the above dishes appear on the spicy side? I can confirm that they are indeed at least as spicy as they look. And what goes in must come out (FIRE IN THE HOLE!!). And a blog about life in Thailand would not be complete without…

A Word on Toilets

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Being a Woman in Thailand

* BIG HUGE CAVEAT * I’ve been here just a few days shy of a month, so these are first impressions and observations only.

One thing that must first be made clear is that Thailand is not a country built upon values of equality. There are very clear rules guiding behavior according to social status, and while not quite as rigid as the Indian caste system, hierarchy here is accepted and indispensible.

Men and women are not equals, but guidelines dictating their roles and spheres of influence are not straightforward either. For example, women are not allowed to touch monks. If a woman wants to hand something to a monk, it must be done indirectly, either through a man, or by placing the item on a special cloth for that purpose. Women may own property, but after they are married, any future property must be in their husbands’ name. However, in many marriages, the woman is the one to control the finances.

{Also, let’s not even get into gender equality at work. We’ll just say that when I looked at the faculty of the political science department at one of the universities the male-to-female ratio was not exactly 1:1. Or even 5:1. Perhaps not a representative sample of office politics, I will admit.}

Surprisingly, the tension between women who work outside the home and those who are housewives seems similar to that in the U.S. Women are often expected to help bring money home, and people may look a little surprised if you say you don’t work. However, many women are homemakers, especially after having children if they can afford to do so.

And then there’s the cattiness and the judging, of women and by women. One of the bigger issues I’ve bumped up against is dress. Thai people are considered to be very fastidious. They are clean and they care about their appearances to the nth degree. But to my eye, at least, their sense of fashion seems to be stuck in the 80s castaway section of Ross or Mervyns. I really don’t mean to be derogatory here, but the best visual I can come up with is that it is clothing we might associate with recent immigrants in the U.S. Bright colors, stripes, polka dots, ensembles that may or may not match and tops that often are just a tad too big for the person in question. I’m not even convinced many women here even wear makeup most days of the year. In America, I wear a more bohemian, artist style – something along the lines of what you might see in Anthropologie or Urban Outfitters. Not full on catalogue, but we’ll say “inspired by.” Here, many of my shirts are considered too low cut because they dip below the tops of my armpits, and the long draping lines appear slovenly.

You’ll definitely see girls in teeny, tiny short cutoffs and shirts that say ferocious and pornographic things, but these are not respectable ladies and the social price for wearing such things can be severe. Some of the hipster fashion is showing up here too, but it appears that the general line on fashion in Thailand, especially outside of Bangkok is “be fashionable, but not too fashionable”, which is ironic considering how interested Thai people are in fashion and being cool.

So for me, finding clothes that I can feel comfortable in but that still are appropriate for the various social and business occasions I find myself in is quite a challenge. As much as we’ve had a simply awe-filled time here, this seemingly innocuous problem contributes to – and maybe even in representative of – some of the many moments in which I feel completely overwhelmed. Moments where I sense I’ve given offense, but everyone is too polite to explain how or why. It’s simply up to me to intuit what went wrong.

There are times that, as a woman and a foreigner here, I feel that I am without power, without voice. There are moments in which I feel like I have to fight for myself against everyone else, and these are moments in which I feel very alone.

Celebrating the King

And no, I don’t mean Elvis.

This past weekend, three of my cousins drove up from Bangkok to visit us. Thais love any holiday to bai tieo (which kind of means: to go around having fun), and a three-day weekend to celebrate the King’s birthday is just such an occasion.

Now, in the U.S., for a three-day weekend, my friends and I would be expected to take off right after work (if you couldn’t sneak off work early) and maximize the three days. We’d jam pack it full of things to do and see, barely taking a break, and then return home at the last possible minute. Because we’re a maximizing culture. Even if we spend the weekend relaxing, we would maximize every minute of relaxation.

The Lonely Planet warns that Thai holidays are a little bit different: to expect more time spent eating than visiting the intended destination, making lots of pit stops along the way, picking up friends and running unrelated errands. “But the waiting and detours are part of the excursion and go unnoticed by chatting friends.”

Even having read this, I still found myself surprised at how the weekend turned out. Instead of coming up Friday night, they left Bangkok at noon on Saturday. Driving from Bangkok to Chiang Mai takes about 8 hours: roughly like driving from LA to San Francisco. So they arrived on our doorstep around 8 p.m. We went to dinner, had a lovely long, chat-filled dinner…then instead of going out to bars or the night markets, we all went to bed.

Sunday was the King’s birthday and Thais do love their King. The plan was to go to the foothills of one of our nearby mountains, Doi Suthep, to a small shrine dedicated to an old monk who helped build the city. We would go there to pray and give offerings. Then by noon on Sunday (rather than hanging around until Monday) they wanted to head back to Bangkok.

We awoke around 7 a.m. and had breakfast together, then we took them to see our new house, which still didn’t have much in the way of dishes and other household items. Toby and I were planning to wrangle a taxi to help carry our goods. But since we wanted to head up to Doi Suthep and I knew they needed to leave by noon, I expected that they would want to get on the road quickly. But they looked at our home and remarked on its beauty and how they plan to visit much more, now that they know we don’t live in a shack…and then they got worried. “Don’t you need stuff for the house?” We explained we would get it ourselves, that they didn’t need to worry. Then began the slow, inexorable brow-beating by kindness until we capitulated and we all went shopping at the Thai equivalent of a Wal-mart and Home Depot. Two hours later, we hit the road straight from the stores to get up to the mountain.

Traffic was thick for the holiday, so it took some time to get there. I think we were there for about 20 minutes – at most – before everyone declared they were hungry. Done praying, we went back down the mountain and spent the next hour or so eating lunch. Then picked up more snacks, just in time for them to drop us off, wave good-bye and commence the drive back down to Bangkok.

I would have felt so guilty wasting their time shopping for our stuff instead of exploring Chiang Mai, except that they seemed thoroughly at ease with spending their time that way. Supplied with good food and fun half-English, half-Thai conversation, they seemed quite satisfied with their trip. So instead, I just felt supremely grateful that moving in was made far easier by loving cousins.

Toby and I spent the rest of the day maximizing the holiday. We put away everything and settled into our home, like two little spring birds making a nest. When evening came, we trundled back into town and wandered around the Sunday market, watching all the festivities for the King’s birthday.

They shot off fireworks, straight above our heads, scattering bats with every boom.

Save for Burning Man, this is the closest I’ve been to fireworks since the U.S. tends to frown upon explosions occurring directly above head. (Sometimes, we remark on how surprisingly similar some things are between Thailand and Burning Man.) I was traumatized at first because I saw the bats scatter and then little greyish-brown things flopping down to earth. I thought the fireworks had hit and killed the bats! But upon closer inspection, we saw the things falling from the sky were not bats, but shells from the fireworks. Whew!

We found some street food. I had pad see ew (a fried noodle dish). Toby even got sushi! I was rather skeptical of raw fish sold on the street, but he said it tasted good and he didn’t get sick. Thus it appeared to meet my two criteria for judging food here: 1) it tastes good, and 2) it doesn’t make you sick. Then we both enjoyed a fresh squeezed orange and passion fruit juice ($1 each). Total for both our meals: $5.

Mostly we wonder why we didn’t move here sooner.

house hunting & night shopping

Today marked the first of our foray into house hunting in Thailand. We saw two places, one of which was awesome, and the other…well, let’s just say it deserved its low price. The lady driving us around to see the places was very nice and helpful, but oh Lord, are we lucky to still be alive. She was bespectacled like an Asian Professor Trelawny and drove like I imagine Trelawny would too. On the highway, she came to a full stop (with no cars in front) to pause and read a sign. Otherwise, her default position was between two lanes, like she was aiming to keep the lane line along the middle of the car, even if it put us within an inch of the ferociously honking car beside us. It was all I could do to keep a polite face.

Aside from the near death experience, today has been a lot of fun, spent exploring our soon-to-be new home town. There are so many markets full of all kinds of wonderful things to buy: beautiful crafts and household goods, yummy street food, fun trinkets…

…

and then there’s this:

Have you heard of this? The fish are there to clean your feet! They nibble off the dead skin cells. Or something like that. No I didn’t try it. I think I’ll stick to traditional pedicures, thankyouverymuch.

One thing I love about Thailand are all the lights at night. The cities are perpetually twinkling with lanterns and Christmas string lights. I read that Bangkok is one of the largest cities with the least light pollution because Thais prefer these little happy lights to loud, blaring ones. I’m okay with that. I can’t wait to have a home to string some of these up in the garden!

butterflies in my tummy

I am thrumming down along the meridian lines. In acupuncture, the meridian lines are the pathways in the body along which vital energy is said to flow. I am the meridian line. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

Today we celebrated an early Thanksgiving-backslash-Bon-Voyage party. I started prepping food on Friday and finished promptly in time for guests’ arrival Sunday at 2 p.m. Then after the party, I promptly crashed. I meant to take photos, but I was so busy cooking, eating, and spending time with loved ones, that all I have to show for it are a few crappy shots of the last of the pear crisps I made for dessert.

The party was festive and fun. Everybody ate and drank and had a good time.

So why is it that now, at 12:33 a.m., I sit here alone, Indian style, with tears rolling down my face and plopping in my lap, wetting my ankles?

It is because, today, I saw my family laugh and smile and hug. And I saw that though they had smiles on their faces there was sadness behind their eyes.

Today is the first day that leaving here becomes really really hard. In one week, my life is about to become very, very different. Up until now, I’ve just been anxious for this time to arrive, busy trying to cut through all the things we have to get done before we leave. About halfway through last week, I started to get really excited. Like jumping up-and-down excited.

Now I’m just about every emotion in the book. Nervous that things won’t go right. Excited for the change. Afraid of the things that might really not go right. Incredibly sad to leave family and to see their sadness (and worry) as we go. Ready for the new chapter, for space, for freedom. Exhilarated to take the plunge. Vertigo at the fall.

Toby and I, our tempers are short now. Not because we are angry, but rather because there’s no where for all this crazy feeling to go. In some form of wordless understanding, we give each other space to process. Then, in private spaces and stolen moments, we cling to each other tight. It’s a dance, where somehow we know the steps with each other, even though neither of us knows what the hell we’re doing.

We’ve been reading a couple of books about Thai culture and it is a strange sensation for me to read about things like how Thai people express love with a sniff, taking a whiff of a loved one’s cheek or neck. Or how snacking is an essential part of Thai life, the peccadillos of Thai high society, and how Buddhism radiates out through all elements of Thai life. When I read these things, it is like a remembering. I’ve never expressly been told any of this, nor do I recall specifically noticing or observing these elements of Thai culture. But having it pointed out to me is like culling out a long-lost memory. Like tapping into the collective unconscious. In that sense, I wonder just how farang (foreign) I will really be, if I understand before being taught. If, to me, these things are already ingrained and intuitive. The Thai call it faa suung paen din tam. “Sky high, Land low” – an order of social nature so self-evident that only a farang could question it.

But that has been my life no matter where I stand. Neither of this world nor that, and of both simultaneously.

I am not static. I am not one place. I am the energy flowing between East and West. The energy within me is tumultuous at this moment, while my actions cause the energy around me to change. There is a shake-up in my family, by the act of me moving to Thailand. My family had a routine, a way of life, a way of thinking about life in Thailand and life in the U.S. I hope it does not sound too immodest for me to admit it, but me moving to Thailand challenges all that. A whole clan content to stay here now are shifting, thinking of time for and possibilities of going back. Uprooting me uproots them.

This is my bigger picture moment. This is the day I learn never to underestimate the power of one person to transform the fabric of an entire family. It’s probably a little bit crazy that I feel a little bit guilty and a little bit proud.

Monday we fly out. I can’t wait to show you all Thailand.

a bigger picture moment

This week I struggled to find the bigger picture moment. There was turmoil, and I tossed and turned, groping for what I was supposed to learn from it, but all I got was lost.

I have a colleague, whom I know others avoid talking to because, well…he’s extreme. Not just extreme, but also incendiary. He enjoys provocation. He’s self-aggrandizing and tries to use huge post-modernist words to sound smart, but usually ends up just obfuscating his leaps in logic. I know this about him, but I’ve always maintained a degree of tolerance, respect, even bemused affection for him, because, you know, at least he’s earnest. And usually I don’t take the bait when he’s being incendiary and provocative because I know it never ends well. He’s always too busy trying to prove he’s right to ever listen to what truth might lie on the other side, and he doesn’t care who he offends in the meantime.

But this time, when he said that America’s institution of marriage was a sham, I had to put a few words in. Except, it’s never just a few words and pretty soon we were into it. Only later, through the course of the argument it started to become clear that he didn’t think committing lifelong to someone was a sham, only having state involvement in it was. He doesn’t believe in signing a legal document about it and he rails against the state’s incentive structure privileging married couples over nonmarried couples. He wondered why the state should be involved at all.

I was willing to grant that he had a valid point in there, though I still argued there are important reasons to want state protection for marriages. (The argument really isn’t important here though and I’m not seeking validation for my side of it.) But his point did make me start looking into the history of marriage and how states ever got involved in the first place. And I thought, maybe this is my bigger picture moment. Engaging with him might make me learn something here. So I waded through material about patriarchy and the historical economic motivations for marriage and the split between church and state and Europe…and I waded…and then…I just. didn’t. care. I stopped.

And after that point, he lost what semblance of respect he had maintained in the conversation and just became flat out insulting, so I stopped responding. But it stuck with me. And I couldn’t figure out why it stuck with me. I didn’t care about proving myself right. I knew better than to be really hurt by his insults because that’s just how he is. I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to learn from this exchange. Tolerance is hard maybe? I just didn’t know.

But then I realized something. He’s just a kid. His arguments may be more eloquent and better considered than those who just say legal marriage is nothing more than the signing of a document. But he has never known what it is to totally subsume himself for something greater. (Or if he has, he must have gotten burned in the process, and that explains why he upholds individual freedom above any other possible value.) There is a profoundly important difference between making promises to your lover in private and getting up in front of everyone you know and love and declaring your commitment. There is a difference when you love someone so much, you’re willing to declare your commitment in a legally binding way. That process transforms you. And no amount of armchair theorizing can tell you how that process changes you until you experience it. A marriage is still prone to weaknesses and no legal stature can totally inoculate it from danger. But the ceremony and tradition links you to all those who have come before you.

And I found I just truly did not care that the state is involved, even if it means we’re pawns in some scheme larger than what we can see. So what if, historically, marriage supported patriarchy? My marriage does not. I don’t have to change the institution of marriage by opting out. I can change it by living it the way we want to, every single day. I’m reminded of a quote by Barbara Kingsolver (bear with me, it’s a little long):

“But his kind will always lose in the end. I know this, and now I know why. Whether it’s wife or nation they occupy, their mistake is the same: they stand still, and their stake moves underneath them….Even a language won’t stand still. A territory is only possessed for a moment in time. They stake everything on that moment, posing for photographs while planting the flag, casting themselves in bronze. Washington crossing the Delaware. The capture of Okinawa. They’re desperate to hang on.

But they can’t. Even before the flagpole begins to peel and splinter, the ground underneath arches and slides forward into its own new destiny. It may bear the marks of boots on its back, but those marks become the possessions of the land. What does Okinawa remember of its fall? Forbidden to make engines of war, Japan made automobiles instead, and won the world. It all moves on.”
– The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver, p. 384.

It all moves on. The state has been involved in marriage for centuries, but the institution of marriage has changed over that time without the state having much say about it. Whereas once marriage might have been a primarily financial consideration to ensure progeny, entered into by a man of at least 30 years of age and a woman under 18, now we marry for love, usually between equals. In the last century alone it has changed. Who knows what it will be a century from now? What matters is the will of the people in it. And we can theorize all we want about the social and political implications, but it all moves on, and people will make of it what they want from it. And that is our power.

I realized that, and I slept soundly. And into my dreams, I did not bring in this argument. I dreamt of different things and lovely things. And when I woke, I kissed my husband good morning.

Tell It To Me Tuesday – Free

Update: Originally posted on Tuesday, I’m linking this up to this week’s Bigger Picture Moment.

I want to give you some backstory to this post because it probably is more fun in context. Honestly the end point relating to “free” doesn’t really need a whole lot of backstory. I just like the backstory so I’m going to tell it to you anyway. But you might be thinking, “Crap I don’t have time to read a whole long @ss post.” So in case you just want to get to the point, I’ve separated this post into two parts: the backstory and the point. So you can read the prelude if you want to…or you can just get right to the point.

The Prelude: A Train to Munich, or How Jade Met German Alex

The twenty-fourth year of my life was probably one of the hardest ones. Huge emotional turmoil plus I had just started the first year of my grad program, which in and of itself was intense. Going into my twenty-fifth birthday I had an urgent desire to do something big for myself. So I booked a flight to Germany. I had never traveled by myself before, but I had a deep need to prove to myself that I was strong and independent enough to travel to a foreign country, and you know, not get into trouble of the very bad sort.

Right before I left, as a soon-to-be-second-year in the grad program, I was asked to mentor an incoming first year and just happened to be assigned to a German student named Alex. So I sent him an email introducing myself and saying if he had any questions about the program, feel free to ask, etc. Oh and by the way, I’ll be in Germany soon too! And after a flurry of emails, we agreed to meet in Munich and that I would stay with him for four days out of my 2-week trip.

It wasn’t until I was about to board the train to Munich that I started to panic. What the hell was I getting myself into, traveling to meet a man I had never before seen in my life, all by myself, and staying with him? He could be a murderer! Or a rapist! Or any number of skeezy-type things. I turned to my German step-mother-in-law (who wasn’t an in-law at the time at all, but that’s a whole other long story) in my panic and she said, “It’s okay. Let me talk to him.” I gave her his phone number and she called him and grilled him on where I was to stay and who we’d be with and after about a 20-minute interview in which he was interrogated by a complete stranger, she hung up and said, “Ya, he’s fine.”

So I got on the train, got to Munich, and found myself face-to-face with a tall German man with a gruff, scruffy face and a warm, wounded teddy-bear heart (grumpy softies are my favorite kind of person, really). He had gotten a female friend of his to open her place up to a complete stranger and he introduced me to other friends and they took me around the city and we had a fabulous grand old time. And I was really thankful I hadn’t freaked out so much that I had bailed and missed out on all these wonderful people.

Alex soon come to the States and even stayed with me a little while until he got an apartment. Then he met Manouchka (which I know probably sounds Russian or something, but she’s actually from the African nation of Gabon). And after a year together here, Alex and Manouchka left for Gabon and got married there, and have been living there and in Cape Town (South Africa) since (they were even there during the World Cup!). Living in Cape Town has not been so fun for them, since he is white and she is black. Their marriage was met with a great deal of hostility.

So we haven’t seen them in four years, but they are back in L.A. now, and last night we had a mini reunion, wherein we swapped stories…and here I come to my point.

The Point of the Post: Freedom from Tradition, and the Tradition of Freedom

Manouchka was telling us of the funeral of her uncle. Apparently, funerals in Gabonese tradition are quite drawn out, lengthy and heady affairs. It’s not just a service that lasts a few hours, followed by a meal, a few words, and then everyone goes their own way to tend to their grief privately. Funerals in Gabon last a solid week. When it became clear that her uncle, who by her account was not a good man (he was not a really bad man either, but not a good man), was going to pass away, the entire house was prepared. There was a room where his body lay in death, and then there was a room where all the women retreated in to cry (theirs is a matrilineal society). The women stayed there for days, crying and wailing together, trying to cry out everything they could. They emphasized their mourning so that his spirit would not linger. They wore traditional makeup and did not shower. When they emerged, they looked quite wild. They slept outside, anywhere they could find, even on the ground with the mosquitoes. Eventually his body was moved to the village where he was born, for they believe the body must return to its source. The women again retreated into the Crying Room, while Alex waited with the men outside. He did not know what the women were doing; he just sensed he could not follow where the women went. Drummers beat traditional music, and for days they could not really sleep because of the constant drumming and the discomfort of sleeping outside, so that soon they all began to feel as if they were in a trance. The women began to dance to the drum beat, and as they did, they shook their limbs and bodies, to encourage his spirit to go, to free himself from the world, and to not take anyone with him. The dancing and the crying went on through the night culminating just at the break of dawn on the last day. Dawn is believed to be the time when spirits move, and at dawn they shook the last remnants of his spirit free. And then it all stopped. The sun rose with the new day, and they were cleansed and free.

Manouchka said she felt that, in his death, he had more meaning than he had had in his life.

In western cultures we pride ourselves on our freedoms: our freedoms to choose our own paths and forge our own ways. But there is a price for our freedom. We lose the richness of deeply embedded traditions, where every action has a meaning and a symbolism. Many people feel it is only the couple who marry, instead of entire families and communities joining together (and are often quite glad for that for they are estranged from their families). And when we grieve, we grieve alone. And when we die, we die alone. This loss of meaning has an impact. I think that’s why we see so many stories like Eat, Pray, Love where people wander the world in search of meaning. The risk of having complete freedom of direction is that you can become lost along the way. I am not saying this freedom is a bad thing. I too am striving for it in many ways. But while there may be no scientific basis for the need to shake a spirit free, there is no denying the power of a community coming together. And there is no denying the power of such intense grief giving way to catharsis. After that week, there is no more sense of depression, there is no mourning. They are free.

This week’s challenge: Free
You can take that any way you like. Write up something, then just link it up in the comments below!

Next week’s challenge: Origins

P.S. I know not all my readers have blogs, and/or some topics you may not want to share what you’ve written. If you just leave me a comment saying you’ve participated or even just thought about what you would write, I’d be gratified to know!

Join in this week’s Bigger Picture Moment here.

Finding The Element

If you read nothing else in this life, read this book. I’ve been itching to write a review of it for two days now and haven’t because…because I don’t know why. Because I had a rule in my head that I had to finish it before urging you to read it, even though I knew I was going to recommend it after reading the first page.

I stumbled across his book after a friend posted a link to the author’s speech. You should watch it first. It will give you a really good idea what his book is about. Plus he’s a really entertaining speaker.

His book is called The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, and oh my is it ever true. He makes a lot of beautiful points about what it takes to find what he calls “the element”: that nexus between aptitude and passion, where what you’re good at meets what you love doing. Through countless examples of really successful people who found success through extraordinary means, Robinson shows how so many people go through life thinking they are not creative, or they’re not particularly good at anything, when nothing could be further from the truth. But true creativity, authenticity, and talent gets crushed by our educational system because it promotes one kind of success, one way of thinking, one route to fulfillment, and it’s becoming ever more standardized and forces children ever more towards conformity.

But when it comes to learning and growing and performing, there is not just one style. He says, “Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.” Never underestimate the importance of work that for you is play. We have such a social stigma, don’t we, against actually enjoying our work? People who love their jobs are said to be the lucky ones. Imagine what life would be like if we all allowed ourselves to pursue work that was our passion. Work we hate takes too much energy. It saps the life out of us. Work we love? It gives us energy. It gives us life. And yet, we put ourselves in “sensible jobs” to pay the bills, have stability, etc. because we’ve been told what we really love isn’t a viable option. But as Robinson says, “doing something ‘for your own good’ is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you really are.”

This isn’t just about personal fulfillment either. If people are pursuing their passions, they work to the fullest of their capacity. Therein lies the magic to maximizing human potential. We don’t just need this as individuals. We need this as a society to grow.

This message isn’t just for the young trying to find their way. It’s for anyone still looking. It’s for mothers with children for whom school doesn’t have a spark, or doesn’t tap into and allow enough space for learning in the area where the child’s heart is. It’s for people looking for a second or even third career. It encourages you to think about how it is you think and learn, in what ways you are intelligent and passionate. And it re-envisages the boundless ways you can use your particular strengths. Maybe you’re really good at memorizing baseball stats. Useless as that may seem to others, who knows…you could just be a really fantastic sports team manager. Maybe you love gardening…who knows, maybe there’s a life for you in landscape design. The point is, it is never too late to try to find it.

He makes a fabulous point about how the education system only prepares for the world as it is now and leaves us hopelessly unprepared for a changing and dynamic future. But the future is incredibly dynamic. Think how much change has occurred just over the past 2 decades. Can any of us say with any certainty what 2030 will look like?

I’m increasingly convinced too that the one career or one job for your entire working lifetime model of our parents’ generation is becoming obsolete. I think that for many industries and avenues for work, many of my generation will have multiple jobs and multiple careers over the span of their lifetime. Being able to adjust and roll with this requires a great deal of versatility and flexibility. It requires thinking about your skill set in broad, open-minded ways. For many of us, I think even the idea of working for large corporations is anathema to our deepest desires and happiness. Many will venture out on their own, as small business owners, freelancers, or otherwise self-made men and women. And for many of these paths, a college degree is not exactly what it takes to succeed.

Did I just really say that? *gasp* Yes I did. After teaching undergrads at the university level for the past 5 or so years, I’ve really begun to feel that pushing kids into college for that “all-mighty degree” is a mistake (perhaps one of even colossal proportions). We are told that you can’t get anywhere anymore without a college degree. Yet, once you get past the interview stage for most jobs…for how many of us has that degree actually mattered? It’s all about what you can do and what you have done. Meanwhile, kids plunk tens of thousands of dollars into a college education and at least 4 years (now going on 5 or more with budget cutbacks), and most students are just not plugged in. They’re not particularly interested in the subjects, certainly not as interested as they are in what grade they’ll get at the end and so they end up just floating through the whole experience. What an enormous waste of time and money for the students, and of expertise and know-how on the part of professors.

Of course I think education is important. But I don’t like this boilerplate model we’re adopting. I think many students would be far better served taking some time off after high school to work or travel to find out what it is that really motivates them. When they find their passion, then they should go to school for it. They’d get far more out of the experience. And it may be that a university is not the best place for them to learn. For a lot of careers, what employers are looking for is talent, not a GPA and magna cum laude. So it may be that looking into a trade school or a series of workshops and working internships is the way to go. Some guidance and feedback is always helpful. But sometimes people really do just learn best and discover their own unique contributions most efficiently simply by doing.

Anyway, take a look at the speech. If it speaks to you, I urge you to try the book.

Jade Keller

Tag Archives: culture