The Rough-IST of paper ideas

Silence, it's all around us, but we fail to listen and fail to see the epiphany of everyday life. I want to think about this and form my paper around the Epiphanies of Everyday Life, the epiphany of silence and simplicity, solitude, spirituality, and soul. All these are significant parts of our lives that we talk over or push aside for more distracting distractions.

When people die or there has been a major catastrophe we take a moment of silence to remember those in need or those who have passed on to the world above the moon. These moments of remembrance and silence seem to fall into our class discussions of remembrance. And now our silence is trumped by the sounds of instant gratification. We as a society have silenced our silence with commodities, and the desire to purchase, consume, and collect material objects that "make us happy." Many times we forget to observe, removing ourselves from the world of chaos and noise. We need to remove ourselves to a world of silence and remembrance.

I am still figuring this out, but I think that meditation is a good place to start for me to dream up my papers meaning. What is the point of this paper?--to show myself that I too am caught up in a world of noise and the silence is almost deafening to listen to because it hasn't been heard in an obscene amount of years?--or is this paper going to connect my life of chaos to the life of divine being? I want to make sense, and I want to write something meaningful, but fear that if I try to hard I will fail. The desire to succeed is overwhelming and causing me to have anxiety of the author for sure, and to "just do it" seems like a daunting task, and that I might have stuck my foot in my mouth when I preached it in my blog.

In order to succeed and have the divine being appear to me I must sacrifice not just my life but my soul and my knowledge...but does that mean I must forget in order to remember? Or does it mean that I must sacrifice my fun in order to gain more knowledge about the divine?

I will figure this out, just as Arjuna has his moment of distraction, as well as Hamlet, Toad, Mole, and even Ratty. Our ability to distract ourselves from the task at had will be my biggest hurdle to get over.

~L.

The Bhahahahagavad-Gita

I completely agree with the self-help thought that Tai explained in his blog. It got to be a bit preachy and yeah it's about religious experiences and giving ourselves to a higher power thought lessons of everyday life. So as I read and I thought of my own life and all the "wrongs" that I've done and how I too am on the battle field trying to fight the ever pressing reality of the world. And so I read and I read and I read and finally two or so hours later I closed the book, and instead of feeling at peace and ready to fight on for my divine right to live I got pissed. And I don't mean just upset, I mean yelling and screaming at the top of my lungs at someone significant in my life who's name I will keep a secret. I lost control, I was no longer peaceful, I was no longer listening and devoting myself to the higher self, I was wrapped up in the smaller self, the ME. The clam soothing words of Krishna were like a faded song, a half forgotten memory, or a moment in time of past and future experiences that could not come together to make the present.

So why would I have this reaction? I have no idea. Perhaps Ronald and I are on the same page and instead of me having the realization during my reading, I had the realization after and instead of throwing my book I threw my words. And yet I see this book's cover and I am not angry, I am not afraid, I am not worried that I might have the same reaction if I open it up again. I think, hummm there are lessons to be learned, and thoughts to be thought. I need to open it up again and discover myself between the lines and in the essence of the book. Or maybe I actually need to not look for MYself and I simply need to let 'my' go and find just 'self' in the lines and in the ora surrounding these sacred words.

~L.

Dillard's Wack

Honestly Annie Dillard seems like a weirdo from this essay. Her detail was almost too much, and hard to believe seeing as how she wrote it years after the fact. And who the heck would scream and be terrified of an eclipse? I can remember back to elementary school when I got to see an eclipse, though it wasn't a full one but pretty darn close, it was so amazingly beautiful that even at such a young age I knew how special it was for me to be experiencing this phenomenon. My dad and I sat outside by our bird Fred's cage with our makeshift eclipse glasses, the world around us changed from a lush green to dark orange almost as if we were driving through a fire where the smoke covers the sun making everything hazy gray orange. Nothing to scream about, yes awesome, but terrifying not even close. Then again it might be because of my love and obsession of the sky and everything entrapped in the vast unknown such as: birds, stars, moons, planets and yes the most important of them all aliens. The eclipse that I was present for brought me closer to the extra-terrestrial lives that I know are out there. Haha ok enough of that.

Dillards piece was just a little to much nonsense. She seems to skip over the entertainment factor for me, and falls under a more negative tone. This essay seemed to be more about the fear of dying than anything else. Her obsession with dying took over and distracted me from the eclipse. When the story finally started to pick up was when she heard the college guy talking about how the ring that she was so afraid of looked like a "life-saver." How ironic that she thought it symbolized death, and yet this kid who saw the same eclipse had a completely different outlook and saw life in it! And not just life, but a life-Saver!

And though this essay is not just about the eclipse and seems to be more about the experience of remembrance, she--for my own taste--took it overboard. I enjoy memory and remembering experiences that were magical and made an impression on me, but there is a line, and she crossed it.

~L.

Tintern

How wonderful a morning we are having on this day the first of March, a new chapter in our lives, and a beautiful spring like day to start it off right! (how cheesy)

At first Tintern Abbey was nothing special to me, it did not make me cry, did not make me question life, did not provide any epiphanic moments to remember, it simply was an assignment. And yes, this poem in some ways is still just that, an assignment, but I did find one part that took hold of me, and made a connection. 

"For I have learned

To Look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue."

The lines above reminded me of summer on my grandpa's ranch and the sounds we would hear, and the sounds that we left behind in LA, and the joke my dad would always say, "Shhh! You hear that?" and we would all be really quiet, listening closely, and then he'd yell "IT'S NOTHING!" and everyone would jump and then not laugh at my dad's uninspiring Dad Joke.

But what we heard on the ranch might have sounded like nothing to the untrained ear, as in youth such as I was back in the day. But  now I am much more wise, and have somewhat of an understanding with the fact that nature does speak to us. In my Native American Studies classes, nature is a big theme, not the connection to nature, but instead the theme for nature lies more with the understanding of it's power and the natural rotation of life and life's necessities. The changing of seasons, the calm before the storm, life after a fire, harvesting times, and animal migrations all have the power to speak to us and show us how to utilize what we are given in nature. But at last we hear and are apart of the "sad music of humanity" singing along with our industrious and consumer ways, paying little attention to the natural changing of the seasons, and focusing more on the fashion lines for the in season, or the sport of the season. And perhaps in Bozeman it is not as prominent, this lose of nature, since we are a community of outside activity lovers, and look forward to every day we can spend in nature, but in places such as LA, or New York, or Las Vegas people are spending more time consuming than living. 

Wordsworth knew the importance in stepping outside of the everyday, and focusing on the now, the moment in which he sat on the River Wye, just above Tintern Abbey, and wrote of his experiences with the natural and man made world. He was writing a poem out of change and out of simplicity and chaos. Nature is the greatest creation of all, it creates and destroys, like Eliot suggests about the river in Dry Salvages, 

"...the brown god is almost forgotten

By the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable,

Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder

Of what men choose to forget."

We must never forget, how daunting of a task. 

~L.