One remains

With one week of class remaining at Wellesley, I have begun to notice the details of the woodwork and appreciate the way the light falls. The general noise of the everyday is significantly less stress-inducing. This end is not only the end of the year, it's the end of my undergraduate career. My ID will not allow me back into the buildings. I will become guest or trespasser in the classrooms and dorms and dining halls. The prospective students (prospies) arrive on campus every day of April and May with the energy, curiosity, and hope that comes with the transition to college from home and high school. I witness them as a drag myself to class and on some days I just grumble. But with one week of class remaining, I look back nostalgically to when I was beginning at Wellesley. And then I look around and realize that things are only better now than they were when I first started. I live in a better dorm, I have stronger friendships, I have learned more than I ever had hoped, and I have a acquired a multitude of stories.

Just minutes ago, a giant group of female Japanese students filled into and filled the Great Hall, where I am working. They were being led by a soft-spoken white man with white hair that stops just above his shoulders and a beret.

The students had out their cameras and were pointing and talking and laughing and taking pictures of each other.

Although he gently waved everyone out of the Great Hall and on to their next destination, one girl remained. She had her camera out and was taking a few final pictures.

The man was in front of her, waiting patiently, as she continued to point her camera at the architecture that surrounded him.

He turned to face her and I thought to wave her onward, but instead, with his fingers he formed a peace sign.

She snapped that one final picture, and away they went.

Fullness of Nothing

"Let's consider Emptiness in general for a moment. What is it about a Taoist landscape painting that seems so refreshing to so many different kinds of people? The Emptiness, the space that's not filled in. What is it about fresh snow, clean air, pure water? Or good music? As Claude Debussy expressed it, "Music is the space between the notes." ....Like silence after noise, or cool, clear water on a hot, stuffy day, Emptiness cleans out the messy mind and charges up the batteries of spiritual energy. Many people are afraid of Emptiness, however, because it reminds them of Loneliness. Everything has to be filled in, it seems--appointment books, hillsides, vacant lots--but when all the spaces are filled, the Loneliness really begins. Then the Groups are joined, the Classes are signed up for, the Gift-to-Yourself items are bought. When the Loneliness starts creeping in the door, the Television Set is turned on to make it go away. But it doesn't go away. So some of us do instead, and after discarding the emptiness of the Big Congested Mess, we discover the fullness of Nothing."

Excerpt from Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff.

What is a picture worth?

Please pardon the mess, brain under construction.  

Through keystrokes fueled by music, I am able to play with (but certainly not polish) ideas introduced to me in the college classroom. Here are my most recent ramblings:

“What is this life?” I find myself asking the Universe ten times a day. Is it a series of experiences? A good story?

The problem is that we haven’t figured out to translate emotions into words. When I want to express how I feel I want to put it into words so that I can share. I want to package my feelings into a code that others can understand. This code we often refer to as “language.” But, as we discussed in the course I’m taking in my school’s Religion Department this semester, maybe just by turning feelings and experiences into words we are taking away something vital.

In the same course, we talked about a hierarchy of communication/expression/experience where prose is the lowest form and either song or silence is the highest form. Which one is truly the highest depends on your religious tradition or spiritual orientation, but either way, song and silence are placed at the top.  

Where does the image fit in? The authors we read for the course believe that the things that are outside the body are not considered as holy as those that are inside. Is an image outside or inside? The moment it involves a technology, the camera for example, I suppose it could be considered outer. But some people, like me, have such deep connections with images, with photography, with moving film, with paint, that they get (what I understand to be) the same importance from those means of art as they do the art of words and the art of music. However, I might imagine that the photograph would be considered by some scholars of religion to be the lowest, lower than prose because it is a product. It is tangible and it is not spoken. Though, it is felt. It is interpreted within but produced outside of the body. That being said, a picture is supposedly worth a thousand words. How are we to make sense of that?

What about nature? Nature is outside the body and the mind. Though, when I am in nature I feel like I Know. I use a capital “k” to signify the experience of something bigger than oneself. I feel as though in nature I am communicating with the earth, and therefore something much greater than me. Can we communicate emotions through nature? We can share feelings by taking a friend to an important spot, an important place, so that they can experience it and maybe find similar emotions. Is that a legitimate form of communication? Is that less valuable that simple silence?

I haven’t used my camera much recently, so I cannot even provide an image that I think rightly communicates my feelings. My most recent images are portraits of people or buildings, taken in a style that reveals fact without much feeling. The camera is calling and I must go (get it? …like John Muir said “the mountains are calling and I must go”). But it's 3:00AM and freezing outside. 

Perhaps the camera will call again tomorrow.  

[I hope to share more thoughts on these subjects in the future. For every word printed here, there are dozens more racing through my mind.] 

In summary

Here is another article about leadership, specifically women in the boardroom.

In reflecting on my semester, I think my biggest take-away is the importance of considering bias and recognizing that thoughts and theory are the products of their times and their creators, not inherent facts. It's important to think about where the dominant narratives come from and why they persist.

Reading period

It's reading period here at Wellesley. Reading period for me is just an extension of exam week. I have papers to write for three of my four classes. For the other class I have a cumulative exam. Since my final assignments are writing intensive I just use reading period as a time to work on the papers. If I were to leave them for exam week I wouldn't be able to complete them.

I dread finals and yet I find something appealing about them. Because I spend a lot of time procrastinating on the internet, I am suddenly immersed in the internet culture for which I am usually oblivious. I find, listen and love music I have never heard before. I view images and read articles that inspire (one of which I will talk about below). But best of all, I become introspective. I have numerous personal epiphanies and gain a much stronger sense of self. It would be great if those moments occurred during the day and not at 3:30 AM, but you cannot plan creativity.

My first find of finals period is this article about leadership. Leadership is, and has been for many years, of great interest to me. I like the ideas this article brings to the table: “If you’re going to engage people in change, there’s a whole language of narrative that goes with it,” said Ganz.

Searching for liquid modernity

I'm working on a project for a class that was originally going to be about the people on the outskirts of society. I was going to walk around the Boston Commons and through pictures I took of these people, I thought, I'd be inspired to explore Zygmunt Bauman's concept of liquid modernity. Liquid modernity is Bauman's way of describing the context we are living in now. Basically, without the solid social forms of the past, we have fewer frames of references and are left as individuals to our own devises. We all become more fluid in our lives without the constraints of the past. We have more choices and more possible paths than ever before. Interpret this as good, interpret this as bad... but I am not making a value-judgment at this point. I am just trying to observe the liquidity around me, specifically by looking at those who are not accepted into the mainstream, the flow of society.

It turns out that with winter approaching there are fewer persons from this population in public spaces outdoors. With very few images to look at, I have not quite felt the inspiration I expected. Today I'm revisiting the images of one performer taken for that project and posting them to try to get more inspired. I've added a picture from NYC because I think it contributes to the collection.

I think there is a lot to be explored in urban greenscapes like the Commons and Central Park. I find so much irony (not sure if that is the best word) in the images above. It's amazing how the awe of incredible structures of industry and of nature can coexist with the awe of poverty.

Never enough

I had to press pause and stop to contemplate when this TEDx talk introduced the idea that we live in a culture that tells us "there is never enough." Things are "never good enough, never safe enough, never certain enough, never perfect enough, never extraordinary enough." The presenter in this talk, Brene Brown, lingers on that last idea of the extraordinary. She says that you can't have the good emotions all of the time, you have to have the bad too. We are on a quest for extraordinary when the moments that in fact give us the most joy are ordinary moments. She says, "honor the ordinary."

There are many ways this "never enough" concept can be used. As consumers we feel as though we never have consumed enough. I have never thought about this in the context of emotions though.