Other People’s Thoughts: Hope Beyond the Blue

Posted in Other People's Thoughts on 02/21/2012 05:25 am by admin

Sometimes the only way to return is to go

Where the winds will take you,

To let go of all you cannot hold onto

For the hope beyond the blue

- Josh Garrels in “Beyond the Blue” from Love & War & The Sea In Between

My personality and work style tends toward the type that likes to get things done. Identify the problem, figure out the solution, make a list of steps, put my head down and work until the job is finished.

Some things in life don’t resolve themselves in such a methodical way. Some problems can’t be solved by coming to a pragmatic conclusion and putting in the man hours to work it all out. Looking back over the years of my life as an adult, much of my greatest growth as a follower of Jesus has come when I’m in those types of situations, when I have to let go of my control of a situation, let go of my expectations for how things should play out. Even if what I’m expecting or envisioning or praying for doesn’t seem overly selfish, even if it seems like it would be a good thing and could bring a measure of glory to God, ultimately I just don’t know everything in this life — and my deepest joy comes in the moments when I can glimpse beyond the Right Now into that place “where the winds will take you” when I’m completely surrendered to God.

Check out Josh Garrels’s music on his website. You can get a free download of his latest album — powerful, meaningful lyrics.

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On Zumba and Life

Posted in Everything else on 02/16/2012 05:54 am by admin

I am hopelessly uncoordinated. In the past I’ve been accused of exaggerating for effect (and what writer doesn’t at times?), but I am not making it up when I say that I cannot move my arms and legs at the same time. One or the other, take your pick, but both together just isn’t going to happen. This is part of the reason why it was such a big deal for me to discover running as a sport — at long last, something athletic that I could do easily, mostly because running requires me to do very little with my arms, besides wave at my neighbors or click “next” on my iPod.

I am so uncoordinated that I never could learn how to swim. When I was a kid, I learned to tread water, but beyond that, I quit trying. Several years ago a friend challenged me to attempt learning again. She started by giving me a foam kick-board to practice moving my legs. No problem — I could kick my way back and forth across the pool all day long. Then she showed me how to move my arms and coordinate my breathing with the stroke. I suddenly lost all ability to kick. It really is too much to ask for me to have my arms, legs, head, and lungs all doing something different at the same time. I flopped around for a while longer that day, called it quits, and decided I’m more of a lounging-in-the-hot-tub person than a swimming laps person.

Last fall when a friend asked me to join a Zumba class with her for a few weeks, I quickly said yes (loud music and Latin dancing, what’s not to get excited about?) before I realized that this class would require me to move both my arms and my legs. And my hips. In front of other people.

First class, I was on the back row. I get really swept away when there’s loud music and when there’s a crowd, and this classroom was crowded — so I danced my little heart out and had a blast. Second class and third class, I made sure to arrive in the room early enough to get a spot in the middle row so that I could see the instructor better. For the fourth class, attendance was down, and there was a spot wide open on the first row. “You’re all going to need extra energy tonight, to make up for the ones who are missing,” the instructor yelled over the warm-up music. The class was definitely missing its usual vibe, and we were dragging our feet to get started.

I moved up to the spot on the front row. Now, I don’t know about other classes, but at this Zumba class the people on the front row know what they’re doing. They’ve been in the class the longest. They’ve memorized the routines. They have rhythm. They are not like me.

But on that night, our teacher was asking for energy. It’s more or less what she’s asked for in every class — “even if you can’t get all the steps, just keep moving to the beat and have a good time.” I decided that it didn’t matter that my steps aren’t perfect, that my arms tend to flail instead of looking smooth, that my hips just don’t move the same way the teacher’s do. I would get out there and flail my arms and shake my hips and keep doing the steps with enough energy to warrant a place on the front row. I samba-ed like we were at Carnival and mambo-ed like I grew up in Havana.

I was much sorer the day after class than I had been after the previous lessons. Soreness is an indication of how hard you’ve worked. In Zumba and in life, I want to be the kind of person who helps give the group energy by putting my heart into every step, not just mumbling and stumbling through the movements, but dancing all out even when I know I’m not going to be perfect.

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God in the Garden: God is in Control

Posted in Everything else on 02/09/2012 04:52 am by admin

(This essay is the latest in the series on the Quinault Community Garden — previous essays include God is Good, God is Faithful, and God Works in His Time.)

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Genesis 50:20

With snow and ice covering the ground, it’s hard to imagine that anything can be happening in the garden plot behind the building at 5400 W. Canal Drive. The soil is frozen, not even visible, much less able to produce a green sprout from a seed. Winter time seems useless where gardens are concerned.

Many of us begin a Bible reading plan at the first of the year, in the starkest point of winter, and the stories of so many people from those early books in the Old Testament remind us of the long, cold, dark periods of life where the days and years seem to pass without any evidence of God’s life-giving work. Abraham, Moses, Joseph and others experienced years — decades — where they waited for God to keep His promises. They waited. And waited. And waited. Don’t you know Joseph more than once must have looked around his Egyptian dungeon and wondered if he would ever experience life and joy and the sunshine again? Surely at least once he wondered how things could have ended up this way and whether God really knew what He was doing after all.

The end of Joseph’s story tells the conclusions he drew from the evidence around him when all was said and done: God was in control all along and He was working out a plan to bring life to many people. God never stopped being in control, never stopped working in His creation, even in the deepest winter of Joseph’s life.

Even now in our garden, God is in control and He is at work. The ground rests and waits and produces no growth for the time being, but it is for a purpose. The compost pile appears to be a mess of limbs and leaves and coffee grounds and eggshells, but eventually it will become good black dirt, ready to give nutrients to the seeds we plant. God is in control of this whole process, and He will bring about life through this cold waiting season.

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Jacksboro, TX

Posted in Travel, West Texas Interlude on 02/07/2012 05:17 am by admin

On these past two research trips to Texas for West Texas Interlude, my grandparents and I have driven into town from their place two or three times a week. “Town” can mean a couple of different places, but the town I’ve come to enjoy the most is Jacksboro, about 25 miles from their house. The county seat of Jack County, it’s the town where my grandfather came to high school from his childhood home in nearby Joplin and my grandmother came from her home in Wizard Wells. In the first year after Conoco sent my grandfather back from West Texas to work out of Fort Worth, the family lived at Wizard Wells, and my dad went to seventh grade in town at Jacksboro — “the year John F. Kennedy was killed,” my grandmother remembers. 1963.

When I was 8 or 9 years old, I remember piling into my grandmother’s car with my cousins and sister to go to Fort Richardson State Park at Jacksboro. Almost as vivid is my memory of a hamburger eaten on a picnic table at a roadside burger joint on the way home from that trip. Burgers are better when eaten outdoors, juice dripping from the fresh tomato, accompanied by a milkshake.

I found out in November that my memory is of Herd’s Hamburgers, a Jacksboro fixture since 1916. The picnic tables are still there in the parking lot, and you have two choices for indoor seating: old Coke crates or old wooden school desks. My grandparents and I ordered burgers and ate them in the parking lot while they reminisced about the price of meals when they were younger — my grandmother says that in high school they would often go to Herd’s for lunch because you could get a burger, Coke, and candy bar for 25 cents, compared to 35 cents for a meal in the school cafeteria. Part of what makes the burgers taste so flavorful today is that they are still using the same griddle from when they opened 96 years ago. That is one well-seasoned griddle.

I’ve had several opportunities to go by the Rexall Pharmacy at City Drug to pick up prescriptions with my grandparents in recent weeks — I really like this photo because I managed to get both the drug store sign and the reflection of old buildings on the city square.

Last week was the first time I had a chance to sit at the counter with the old soda fountain — my mom and I stopped by for a malt when we drove into town to pick up some stuff at the hardware store.

My grandfather told me later in the afternoon, “If we got a malt when we went to town, we thought we were in high cotton.” I can just picture him there as a little kid, putting down 10 cents on the counter for a malt in a thin glass with a tall spoon. That mental picture is why I prefer heading to Jacksboro to pick up groceries or prescriptions, rather than into the bigger towns with WalMart and Starbucks.

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January Research Trip

Posted in West Texas Interlude on 01/31/2012 06:50 pm by admin

I’ve just about caught up with sorting through photos and notes on scraps of paper and in my little spiral at this point on my second research trip for my work-in-progress, the nonfiction book West Texas Interlude. I spent most of last week at my grandparents’ place in Boonsville, before my aunt and I headed out on a two day trip to West Texas.

As happened on my first research trip in November 2011, many of my best recordings and notes were made while driving to doctor appointments for my grandfather or hovering behind my grandmother while she stirred something on the stove. I’ve done quite a bit of driving in the counties near where they live, as well as riding around on the Polaris Ranger or walking on their place. I haven’t seen as many deer as I did last fall, but a few are still hanging around. One morning I saw the largest jackrabbit I’ve ever seen, bouncing out of the brush near where I’d pulled over my truck on the gravel road. My grandmother and I spotted the red-tailed hawk that we’d seen a couple of times in November, and I couldn’t begin to count the cardinals that have flitted back and forth in front of me on the road or in the front yard, their vibrant feathers brightening up the dull browns of a January landscape in Texas.

Over the weekend, my aunt and I found ourselves in Stamford, Aspermont, Snyder, and Sweetwater. We were on a quest to find rent houses, an apartment, a motel, a couple of churches, an elementary school, and a roadside park where my grandfather played baseball on the Conoco team in 1950. We took photos all along the way, less for me to post online, more to show my grandparents (who would have come along for the ride if they could).

My favorite house that we found was this one in Aspermont (pop. 1021). A couple of ladies we talked to at the Pony Espresso cafe near the square in Aspermont surmised that this is the one where my grandparents rented an upstairs apartment as their first home after their wedding in 1950. Wouldn’t it make a perfect haunted house in a movie?

I love the dormers and the quirky diamond-shaped windows.

Alas, my grandmother took one look at the photos and announced that this was not the house where they lived. Our new friends at the Pony Espresso knew of no other house in town that was large enough to be divided into apartments that fit the bill, so we’re left to assume the house is gone.

Back to organizing photos and transcribing interviews…

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Other People’s Thoughts: The Choice of Simplicity

Posted in Other People's Thoughts on 01/24/2012 06:23 pm by admin

“Simplifying your life is meant to make things better, not worse. It’s about choices — about saying no to the things in your life that aren’t the best so that you are free and available to say yes to those things you truly want.” — Tsh Oxenreider

Last week I read the Kindle version of a book by Tsh Oxenreider called Organized Simplicity: The Clutter-Free Approach to Intentional Living. It was the #1 free book for Kindle for several days, and I recommend it, though now it is back to full-price in the Amazon store. If you have 8 bucks to spend on a book, this one is worthwhile.

My quote for Other People’s Thoughts today comes from one of the early chapters in the book, where the author is explaining the philosophy of simple living, before diving into some practicalities in later chapters. I’ve written blog posts in the past about my own desire to live simply (see Couchless or Help and Helplessness) — and Organized Simplicity is one of those books that in reading it I found myself saying, “I wish I could say I’d written this book.”

When Oxenreider says that simplifying your life is about choices, I couldn’t agree more. There are a lot of things I’ve said no to in the past few years so that I’m able to say yes to others. No to cable TV (not a huge loss, except that Baylor is now doing well in both football and basketball) so that I can say yes to more time for writing and more money for travel. No to new clothes every season so that I can say yes to buying a tent or new running shoes. The peace and freedom that comes from living without debt, without excessive stuff, without numerous bills is more than worth what I’m “giving up” in order to get it. It’s a choice, not a loss.

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Dumplings for Chinese New Year

Posted in Everything else on 01/19/2012 04:58 am by admin

Chinese New Year is January 23 this year, and since I’ll be in Texas doing research at that time, I decided to celebrate a little early with my friends here in Washington. We’re entering into the Year of the Dragon, the year I was born in, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make a ton of food and a pot of eight treasures tea and enjoy the evening with my friends. The celebration was a bit inauthenthic in that we didn’t set off a barrage of firecrackers outside the neighbors’ doors, but hey, we’re within city limits in the U.S., what do you expect?

When I made nacatamales with my friends for Christmas Eve a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d been wanting to teach them how to make dumplings. You can buy them frozen at Costco or wherever, and they’re really pretty good — but I still have a mental block that assures me anything I buy in a bag from the freezer section can’t be as good as what I make from scratch. It just can’t be. Yes, it’s time consuming and labor intensive to put together 120 dumplings for a dinner party, but what’s a little time spent in the afternoon compared to the yumminess of homemade dumplings?

Here we are, filling the wrappers. You can buy packages of the wrappers at the grocery store, usually in the section where you’ll find tofu. If I were a good little Chinese grandma (which I’m not, on several counts), I would roll out my own wrappers from flour and water. But that would be just silly.

We made dumplings with two different fillings: pork and cabbage in one, beef and carrot in the other. The filling also has all sorts of other wonderful ingredients, like garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and scallions. A small spoonful of filling is lovingly nestled in the center of each wrapper, before the edges are sealed and the tiny pocket of deliciousness is tucked in its spot in the row to await the pot, where it will fulfill its dumpling destiny.

Some of the dumplings went into a large soup pot. Once the water comes to a boil, you put several dumplings in, bring the water back to a boil, and then cool the water off again by adding a cup of cold water. You bring the water to a boil again, add more cold water, boil, add cold water, and by the third time the water comes back to a boil, they should be done. Adding cold water keeps the outside of the dumpling from cooking faster than the inside, which would result in a tough wrapper.

We also did a few dumplings in true potsticker style by pan frying them. It’s a less healthy cooking method, for sure, but who doesn’t enjoy a little oil now and then?

Thank you, Jane and Andy, for letting me take over your kitchen to make dumplings! (Jane and Andy aren’t in this photo, but this is their table and place settings with our dumpling feast.)

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What’s Stopping You?

Posted in Everything else on 01/16/2012 05:32 am by admin

Lately I’ve been on a quest to overcome my dread of the cold. When I spent the summer in Alaska in 2010, I wrote about resigning myself to the fact that I’m a wimp in the cold. I’m not ashamed: I get cold easily and have to bundle up a bit more than the average person in Washington.

But I’m not going to let the cold stop me. (I will, however, let snowy and icy roads stop me.) I cannot let the four or five months of temperatures consistently below or around 40 degrees keep me from leaving my house everyday. As a full-time writer who works out of a home office, I start to go a bit crazy when I can’t get out for breaks to exercise or talk to people, to see something besides the four walls of my apartment. In Texas you can hunker down and not leave the house during the coldest days of the year — because they last for about four days. In Washington, though, I’ve come to terms with the realities of wearing wool underwear and socks, boots with fuzzy lining, scarves, and hats every day until Easter. I invested in cold weather running tights, so freezing temps don’t keep me from putting in a few miles a week. Long wool tights, socks that come up to my knees, and warm boots allow me to wear dresses and skirts year-round, something I never imagined possible. That one little consolation is helping me endure this winter — I love skirts and got used to wearing them year-round with flip-flops in tropical Yunnan, and I feel distinctly unfeminine if I have to wear jeans for months on end. I’m making the best of it and improvising with cold gear so that I can keep dressing and looking like a girl.

I’m trying not to let circumstances stop me in other areas, as well. At this point in life I don’t have the home furnishings or space necessary to have big groups of people over for dinner or to hang out. Having an open house is important to me, and I want my home to be a place where I can entertain, serve meals, show hospitality to people who might need a place to stay. Right now, I only have enough space around the table for six, and two of those people will need to sit on a patio chair or bar stool. Depending on what we’re eating, I don’t have enough place settings to serve those six. But I’m making do. I’ve determined not to be embarrassed about the little I have and to invite friends over now — not wait until I have a larger kitchen and table and plenty of bowls and plates for a big dinner party. I’m not going to let my limitations stop me. If I don’t invite folks over for dinner now, what makes me think I won’t find another excuse to prevent it in two years?

Writing is another example. It’s easy to wake up each morning and look at all the things I need to get done for my bill-paying freelance jobs, or the chores to be done around the house, and think to myself, “I wish I could be completely care-free and have all the time in the world to write each day.” But that kind of care-free scenario is the stuff of dreams. I can arrange my life so that I have as much writing time as possible, but ultimately I have to just sit down and do the writing, stop looking at all the obstacles, get down to business. I can’t let any number of hesitations or fears or distractions keep me from doing the tasks that will lead to my end goal: completed essays and stories and books.

And now I ask, what about you? What are some areas where you catch yourself saying, “One day when the stars are perfectly aligned, I would love to start doing this or that.” Could you take a small step toward preparing for those possibilities, not letting the present circumstances stop you from enjoying today what you desire for the future?

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Reflecting on a Year of Poetry

Posted in Books on 01/10/2012 05:56 am by admin

I haven’t mentioned it on the blog since, oh, let’s see, it looks like it was last June, but 2011 was the year I started trying to read a poem a day. To recap, I’ve always been a bit intimidated by poetry and haven’t made the time to read much in the past, but when I do read poetry, my mind and thoughts slow down to a pace that is much healthier for my heart and soul. So, I wanted to take time each day for a year to read a poem, preferably out loud.

You might have guessed from the fact that I didn’t mention it again in the second half of the year, but I didn’t exactly read 365 poems in 2011. I did read a couple hundred more than I read in 2010 or any preceding year, though. I started the year off right with Wendell Berry and A Timbered Choir, then read a couple of not-so-memorable books by people whose names I won’t mention (because they’re not memorable), then got bogged down in Emily Dickinson in the summer. Her poems aren’t boggy, but the large “collected poems” volume of hers is quite boggy if you don’t take a break from it. Somewhere around July I found myself reading a poem every other day, then every couple of days. Soon after that, I was reading only poems I came across in literary journals or posted as poem-of-the-day by a few people I follow on Twitter or Facebook.

Honestly, I’m ok with that. Mostly because in 2010 I would skip over a poem in a magazine or newsfeed. Now, I stop and read them. It’s not the same (i.e. not as good, as beneficial, as dedicated) as reading through an entire set of poems by one person, but it has helped expose me to a great many more poets than I’ve ever read before, including some writers who are my contemporaries.

On January 1st of this year, I found myself sitting under a group of trees on the banks of the Columbia, looking back on a few of my favorite poems from last year, trying to take Wendell Berry’s advice about how to read his poetry. My desire to keep reading poems on a regular basis is renewed. As I read back over some of my posts on poetry from last year, I was reminded of my quest to read more poets who aren’t white and from the eastern part of the U.S. My friend Erin left a comment suggesting Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali poet from the previous century. I remember at the time she left the comment, the library here in the Tri-Cities didn’t have anything by him, and I never got around to finding his work anywhere else. This year, however, the library has a brand new copy of an anthology of his — which makes me wonder if he’s suddenly under demand by others in the Tri-Cities or if the librarians can see a list of search terms and ordered this book after I looked for it. Helpful, but sort of creepy (although, who am I to complain, with my fascination for looking at search terms?).

To sum up, if my goal had been to check a poem a day off a list in my 2011 calendar, I failed. But since I wanted to develop a greater appreciation for poetry, one that I hope lasts a lifetime, I’m calling the year a success.

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South or Southwest?

Posted in Everything else on 01/06/2012 05:17 am by admin

Is Texas part of the South, or the Southwest, or its own culture?

This is not a border area militia Rick Perry secessionist question. That kind of talk irritates me to no end, almost as much as hearing jokes about Waco and the Branch Davidian compound when I tell people I went to Baylor (sic ‘em Bears and RG3).

I started thinking about this question again over the holidays, as I made black eyed peas for dinner in keeping with the southern tradition. FYI, all-knowing online sources state that black eyed peas and greens on New Year’s Day are a token for prosperity in the year to come, although I’m pretty sure when I was little and asked my mom why we eat them, the answer was “because we do.”

Black eyed peas on New Year’s is a decidedly southern tradition, not solely a Texas one. But I find that since moving to Washington, I don’t often claim to be from the “South.” I make a clear distinction that I’m from Texas and that it’s different from other southern states. I say this not out of Texas pride — I never say things like “everything’s bigger and better in Texas,” I don’t call it God’s Country, and you will never hear me say “hook ‘em Horns.” I am proud of Texas, but I also like a lot of other places I’ve been.

I think I’m making a cultural distinction here. In a lot of ways, Texas isn’t like the rest of the South (the Deep South, which I guess is really more accurately the Southeast). I grew up eating way more tamales and sopaipillas than someone from Georgia or Alabama. And yes, my family actually has a ranch, and my dad, uncle, and grandfather are honest-to-goodness cowboys, though some say that’s a stereotype of Texas. Stereotypes have to come from somewhere, right?

I started making the distinction in my mind that Texas belongs more to the Southwest than the South a few years ago when I was hiking in Tiger Leaping Gorge in northern Yunnan, China, of all places. At a guesthouse in the gorge I met and hung out with a couple from Arizona, and the guy said to me, “You’re from Texas? Then we’re cousins from the Southwest.” (He also later told me he loved me, right in front of his girlfriend, because I was traveling with only a small backpack while she had a large suitcase — but that’s another story, let me get back on track, we’ll talk later about guys who’ve declared their love for me while dating someone else.) That casual comment about the Southwest really caused me to think (you have a lot of time to do that while hiking through a gorge and riding long haul buses across Yunnan), and since that time, I have associated myself as a Texan more with the Southwest than with the South. Maybe that explains part of my reasoning behind wanting to write West Texas Interlude — a desire to head to the desert and deepen my connection with the Southwest.

Yet, there are still some things about Texas that are more southern than not. Like black eyed peas on New Year’s. And Bible Belt culture. And the word y’all. I can’t say that sweet tea is one of those things, though, because you’re just as likely as not to find unsweetened tea in the pitcher in my family’s fridge.

Opinions?

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