Happy St. Patrick's Day!
This is the story of St. Patrick:
http://www.theresurgence.com/Vintage_Saints_St_Patrick
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The Colors of Faith (part 3)
Wednesday 8:35 a.m.
Wednesday 8:35 a.m.
Lowell sleeps through his alarm and finds himself going straight to school. All the while he prays that she will be there after school.
"What is going on today, Lowell? You're acting weird." A fellow cross country team member says to him at lunch.
"I guess you could say it's a girl, Jim," Lowell replies with a small smile.
"A girl? Here at school?"
"No, I met her yesterday afternoon..." his voice trails off and he stares at nothing.
"Must be some girl," Jimmy says with a shake of his head. "At least tell me what she's like."
"She's...hard to explain."
"Try. Blonde or brunette?"
"Blonde." Lowell tosses his lunch sack into the garbage can. "She's different, Jim, really different."
Jimmy gives him a confused and disgusted sort of look.
"I do not understand...."
"It's like this: if she lived in our world she would love animals and dot her "I"s with hearts," Lowell responds. Then adds quietly: "But she's not from our world."
to be continued...
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The Colors of Faith (continued)
"Hello...?" The girl asks hesitantly. Lowell looks around, and then looks back at the girl.
"Hi. I was just running and..." the boys voice drifts off as he sees her foggy eyes and realizes that she cannot see. Her eyes rest in his direction nonetheless.
"Were you following the fence?" She asks.
"Yeah, I guess so. I just wanted to go a little farther today.
"Why is that?" She wraps her arms around herself as a brisk wind floats past. He hesitates, but then steps closer.
"Small town life can be-er-constricting at times. I come out here to breathe."
"That's nice," she says. Lowell looks back through the curtain of trees and she asks him what his name is.
"Lowell. Yours?"
"I don't know." Lowell smiles, then chuckles so she'll know he found her "joke" amusing.
"No, really, I don't know my name yet." He examines her face, trying to understand someone so different.
"Really?"
"Really. Can I ask you a question, Lowell?"
"Shoot." Her brow furrows.
"Where did you come from? Just now I mean. What's over there?" She gestures to her right, over his shoulder. He looks at what she cannot see: the pine trees and their green needles, the brown needles that carpet the rustic floor. He thinks for a moment:
She can't see any of this. She can't see this fence, this wire barrier separating us, maybe even our worlds from one another. She can't see me.
"I came from over there, you are right. But I don't want to talk about that, okay? I want to talk about me; I want to talk about you. I want to know why you aren't afraid of me, why you don't wonder what I look like." She turns her face to the side and silvery-blonde strands of hair conceal the side of her pale face from him. She remains in this position for a moment before brushing her hair away and staring at him, again, in her own sightless way.
"I want to know about you; I want to know about me. The thing is, I want to know where I came from and I just thought that knowing where you came from would maybe help me discover where I came from." She pauses, then adds: "And I do wonder what you look like." They stand in silence. Then she reaches out her hands. "Show me." He steps up to the fence, grabs her hands and then places them on either side of his face. Her nose wrinkles.
"Why is it damp and slick?" She asks.
"I have been running. It's sweat," Lowell answers. Her lips tighten into a half smile. She feels the rest of his face gently.
"Is this your ear?"
"Yeah."
"And your hair?"
"Yep."
"What does it look like? Is it like mine?" She asks.
"Well it is considerably shorter and darker," he responds.
"Darker?" It takes him a moment to realize she needs an explanation.
"You know those moments you sometimes come across while walking outside? A sudden warmth on your skin?" She nods. "Your hair is like those moments; mine is like all the rest."
Lowell and the girl talk. They talk about life and his home and about songs and about beauty. At one point Lowell stops talking and starts thinking.
"I'm afraid," he admits.
"Why are you afraid? she asks. They sit back to back on opposite sides of the fence.
"Because I fear that you aren't real, that I'm making you up. What if I come back tomorrow and it turns out you are totally a figment of my imagination and I'm really a messed up guy with hallucinations." She doesn't respond. "You are the only person I have ever loved, the only person who has ever loved me. I never want to go back to the time before I had someone who cared. Before there was you."
She turns to face him and says:
"There's no way to prove my existence to you. I just know that I am not from your mind. I know that I exist outside of you. I do not know why or how, I just know that I do. So we will both have to have faith. There are a lot of people who love you, Lowell. They just haven't found you yet."
to be continued...
Lydia
"Hello...?" The girl asks hesitantly. Lowell looks around, and then looks back at the girl.
"Hi. I was just running and..." the boys voice drifts off as he sees her foggy eyes and realizes that she cannot see. Her eyes rest in his direction nonetheless.
"Were you following the fence?" She asks.
"Yeah, I guess so. I just wanted to go a little farther today.
"Why is that?" She wraps her arms around herself as a brisk wind floats past. He hesitates, but then steps closer.
"Small town life can be-er-constricting at times. I come out here to breathe."
"That's nice," she says. Lowell looks back through the curtain of trees and she asks him what his name is.
"Lowell. Yours?"
"I don't know." Lowell smiles, then chuckles so she'll know he found her "joke" amusing.
"No, really, I don't know my name yet." He examines her face, trying to understand someone so different.
"Really?"
"Really. Can I ask you a question, Lowell?"
"Shoot." Her brow furrows.
"Where did you come from? Just now I mean. What's over there?" She gestures to her right, over his shoulder. He looks at what she cannot see: the pine trees and their green needles, the brown needles that carpet the rustic floor. He thinks for a moment:
She can't see any of this. She can't see this fence, this wire barrier separating us, maybe even our worlds from one another. She can't see me.
"I came from over there, you are right. But I don't want to talk about that, okay? I want to talk about me; I want to talk about you. I want to know why you aren't afraid of me, why you don't wonder what I look like." She turns her face to the side and silvery-blonde strands of hair conceal the side of her pale face from him. She remains in this position for a moment before brushing her hair away and staring at him, again, in her own sightless way.
"I want to know about you; I want to know about me. The thing is, I want to know where I came from and I just thought that knowing where you came from would maybe help me discover where I came from." She pauses, then adds: "And I do wonder what you look like." They stand in silence. Then she reaches out her hands. "Show me." He steps up to the fence, grabs her hands and then places them on either side of his face. Her nose wrinkles.
"Why is it damp and slick?" She asks.
"I have been running. It's sweat," Lowell answers. Her lips tighten into a half smile. She feels the rest of his face gently.
"Is this your ear?"
"Yeah."
"And your hair?"
"Yep."
"What does it look like? Is it like mine?" She asks.
"Well it is considerably shorter and darker," he responds.
"Darker?" It takes him a moment to realize she needs an explanation.
"You know those moments you sometimes come across while walking outside? A sudden warmth on your skin?" She nods. "Your hair is like those moments; mine is like all the rest."
Lowell and the girl talk. They talk about life and his home and about songs and about beauty. At one point Lowell stops talking and starts thinking.
"I'm afraid," he admits.
"Why are you afraid? she asks. They sit back to back on opposite sides of the fence.
"Because I fear that you aren't real, that I'm making you up. What if I come back tomorrow and it turns out you are totally a figment of my imagination and I'm really a messed up guy with hallucinations." She doesn't respond. "You are the only person I have ever loved, the only person who has ever loved me. I never want to go back to the time before I had someone who cared. Before there was you."
She turns to face him and says:
"There's no way to prove my existence to you. I just know that I am not from your mind. I know that I exist outside of you. I do not know why or how, I just know that I do. So we will both have to have faith. There are a lot of people who love you, Lowell. They just haven't found you yet."
to be continued...
Lydia
Monday, March 15, 2010
The Colors of Faith
Tuesday 4:22 p.m.
I tie my shoes and go
I breathe in, I breathe out.
I feel my matted hair brush roughly against my forehead
I breathe in, I breathe out.
I stop thinking about what I'm doing and start wondering
I breathe in, I breathe out.
What am I doing here? Am I alone?
I breathe in, I breathe out.
This is the farthest I've ever gone. Have I gone too far?
I breathe in, I breathe out.
I slow and look around the serene wood
I breathe in, I breathe out.
And then I see her, but she does not see me
I breathe in, I breathe out.
to be continued....
Tuesday 4:22 p.m.
I tie my shoes and go
I breathe in, I breathe out.
I feel my matted hair brush roughly against my forehead
I breathe in, I breathe out.
I stop thinking about what I'm doing and start wondering
I breathe in, I breathe out.
What am I doing here? Am I alone?
I breathe in, I breathe out.
This is the farthest I've ever gone. Have I gone too far?
I breathe in, I breathe out.
I slow and look around the serene wood
I breathe in, I breathe out.
And then I see her, but she does not see me
I breathe in, I breathe out.
to be continued....
Sunday, March 14, 2010
"One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody." Mother Teresa
Are we such a self-aborbed people that we cannot even love someone, that we can't even care for someone? Just one person?! Imagine that for a moment.
Don't be so self-absorbed that you cannot see the hurt all around you. The pain in the world and the tears the flow freely all around us. This is a hurting world.
Be someone to somebody. Love someone. Give that person the love they so deeply desire. While no, it will not satisfy them like the incomprehendible love of the Father...they will see Him through your love and maybe will turn to Him. Give to that person selflessly. It is easy to say you can do this, but try it...you will realize it is hard. But it gets easier to love selflessly as time passes. Loving like this becomes part of you. This love pours out of you. It has a name. It originates from one source. It is Christ's love.
"For they will know we are Christians by our love." Love that pours out of our being toward all of His creation...that is Christian love. It looks beyond color, deformity, mentality, and morals--everything the world's love is based on. The world's love is not free. In order to win the world's love you have to line up with what it says to be right and true. How terrible to live where you cannot be you. Where you cannot be who God set you apart to be.
Love the widowed, the orphaned, the unloveable--love them like your life depended on it.
Brianna
Are we such a self-aborbed people that we cannot even love someone, that we can't even care for someone? Just one person?! Imagine that for a moment.
Don't be so self-absorbed that you cannot see the hurt all around you. The pain in the world and the tears the flow freely all around us. This is a hurting world.
Be someone to somebody. Love someone. Give that person the love they so deeply desire. While no, it will not satisfy them like the incomprehendible love of the Father...they will see Him through your love and maybe will turn to Him. Give to that person selflessly. It is easy to say you can do this, but try it...you will realize it is hard. But it gets easier to love selflessly as time passes. Loving like this becomes part of you. This love pours out of you. It has a name. It originates from one source. It is Christ's love.
"For they will know we are Christians by our love." Love that pours out of our being toward all of His creation...that is Christian love. It looks beyond color, deformity, mentality, and morals--everything the world's love is based on. The world's love is not free. In order to win the world's love you have to line up with what it says to be right and true. How terrible to live where you cannot be you. Where you cannot be who God set you apart to be.
Love the widowed, the orphaned, the unloveable--love them like your life depended on it.
Brianna
Saturday, March 13, 2010
North of Beautiful is a work of art. There is no other way to describe this book. It is a painting. A tapestry. A collage.Headley did an amazing job using similes and metaphors to impart the ideas of her characters and what they were going through. Not to mention that her characters were slightly exaggerated and romantic in an unusually comforting way.
The main character is an artist and Headley reflects this amazingly well in this seventeen-year-old's story. Just as the girl makes collages of different pictures linked together in various ways, so Headley crafts a geniously coordinated sequence of events linked by the desires all the characters have to understand and relate to those around them. The variety of the author's characters are equivalent to an artist's use of exotic colours that are completely different yet fit together like pieces in a puzzle.
This novel is a delightful picture of regret, independence, the desire to belong, all kinds of love, and true beauty.
I highly recommend. As does Brianna.
Lydia
Monday, March 1, 2010
Kinds of knowledge.
Somebody smart may be the person who can tell you the root of a word mentioned, who can date the events leading up to the founding of the U.S. , who knows twenty digits of Pi, who can convert six centimeters to inches in a flash. Then again the smart one could be the one who sees more than just a painting, the one who knows what colours go best together, the one who loves to take advice, the one who comforts where comfort is due, and leaves when it is time.
As far as I can see and fathom there are three kinds of knowledge: brain knowledge, head knowledge, and heart knowledge. The kind most applauded being the brain knowledge. The kind most underestimated, the head knowledge, and the kind of knowledge most misunderstood being that of the heart. Surely there are terms for each of these knowledges that I have yet to hear but I won't allow that to hinder my thoughts...so I'll define them the way they appear to me.
Brain knowledge is book learning: is the ability to understand the discoveries unearthed by those that have come before. It is reading a book and having a clear idea of the definition of each and every word therein. It is knowing what makes an engineer an engineer. These smarts equal progress, they equal long hours of study. Those who posses them are often those who can overcome all the lions of theory, but are found lacking when it comes to actual living.
Head knowledge is quick-wit, it is the ability to acurately predict the repercussions of one's actions and react to them. It is knowing how variables effect a situation-a real life state of affairs, that is, not a mathematic algorithm. It is seeing beyond the facts and facing the truth. It is manipulation. This intelligence equals accepting your weaknesses, and is often possessed by those who fail tests yet excel at life.
Heart knowledge is something different. It is understanding the feelings of another. It is looking for someone to bare one's soul to. It is balancing on the edge of our world, it is pounding on the door of moral revolution. It is looking for something more, it is believing in the afterlife. This knowledge requires living like it's your last day, finding beauty in ashes. Those who possess heart knowledge never hesitate before taking a leap of faith or falling into the arms of the unknown.
These three knowledges have formed and sculpted our world into the bustling hubbub of diversity that it is. Which knowledge do you possess? Will uncovering your "knowledge" be the key to revealing the map of your life? No. No, because they seem always to be united to closely to be picked apart.
Albert Einstein is a good example for this matrimony of difference. He most definetely possessed knowledge of the brain. He's said to have been an independent man yet he married (always an action that is in some way influenced by the heart). Even Einstein, arguably the smartest man ever, wasn't one-hundred percent brain knowledge.
Call me crazy but I always thought that Ghengis Khan (Mongolian horde-boss) was smart for being receptive to the views and discoveries of those he conquered. Unlike the Caesars, he knew his people weren't all-knowing and could learn from those cultures around them, even from the individuals he decided needed to die. Khan's head knowledge revealed to him that even though he was the biggest and the strongest, he wasn't the smartest.
The perfect example of heart knowledge is the example left us by Christ. The only man who has given it all up in return for nothing. He saw through the eye of his heart into the heart of those who were hurting and knew exactly what needed to be done. This man also exhibited the other two knowledges, further proving my point.
Everyone is a mixture, a combination of the three knowledges though one may be more detectable in a person than the other two. I think that everyone has some say in which knowledge they belong to, but mostly people are born with their knowledges engrained into their being. This is no excuse to keep from exploring another side of life. Don't think that your "kind of knowledge" can ever prevent you from searching for the knowledge you have yet to perceive inside of yourself.
That's what I see. Whether I see it through the eye of my brain, my head, or my heart I cannot say. Maybe this knowledge of mine will morph and change, maybe it will stay the same until the day I die. Again, who is to say?
Lydia
Somebody smart may be the person who can tell you the root of a word mentioned, who can date the events leading up to the founding of the U.S. , who knows twenty digits of Pi, who can convert six centimeters to inches in a flash. Then again the smart one could be the one who sees more than just a painting, the one who knows what colours go best together, the one who loves to take advice, the one who comforts where comfort is due, and leaves when it is time.
As far as I can see and fathom there are three kinds of knowledge: brain knowledge, head knowledge, and heart knowledge. The kind most applauded being the brain knowledge. The kind most underestimated, the head knowledge, and the kind of knowledge most misunderstood being that of the heart. Surely there are terms for each of these knowledges that I have yet to hear but I won't allow that to hinder my thoughts...so I'll define them the way they appear to me.
Brain knowledge is book learning: is the ability to understand the discoveries unearthed by those that have come before. It is reading a book and having a clear idea of the definition of each and every word therein. It is knowing what makes an engineer an engineer. These smarts equal progress, they equal long hours of study. Those who posses them are often those who can overcome all the lions of theory, but are found lacking when it comes to actual living.
Head knowledge is quick-wit, it is the ability to acurately predict the repercussions of one's actions and react to them. It is knowing how variables effect a situation-a real life state of affairs, that is, not a mathematic algorithm. It is seeing beyond the facts and facing the truth. It is manipulation. This intelligence equals accepting your weaknesses, and is often possessed by those who fail tests yet excel at life.
Heart knowledge is something different. It is understanding the feelings of another. It is looking for someone to bare one's soul to. It is balancing on the edge of our world, it is pounding on the door of moral revolution. It is looking for something more, it is believing in the afterlife. This knowledge requires living like it's your last day, finding beauty in ashes. Those who possess heart knowledge never hesitate before taking a leap of faith or falling into the arms of the unknown.
These three knowledges have formed and sculpted our world into the bustling hubbub of diversity that it is. Which knowledge do you possess? Will uncovering your "knowledge" be the key to revealing the map of your life? No. No, because they seem always to be united to closely to be picked apart.
Albert Einstein is a good example for this matrimony of difference. He most definetely possessed knowledge of the brain. He's said to have been an independent man yet he married (always an action that is in some way influenced by the heart). Even Einstein, arguably the smartest man ever, wasn't one-hundred percent brain knowledge.
Call me crazy but I always thought that Ghengis Khan (Mongolian horde-boss) was smart for being receptive to the views and discoveries of those he conquered. Unlike the Caesars, he knew his people weren't all-knowing and could learn from those cultures around them, even from the individuals he decided needed to die. Khan's head knowledge revealed to him that even though he was the biggest and the strongest, he wasn't the smartest.
The perfect example of heart knowledge is the example left us by Christ. The only man who has given it all up in return for nothing. He saw through the eye of his heart into the heart of those who were hurting and knew exactly what needed to be done. This man also exhibited the other two knowledges, further proving my point.
Everyone is a mixture, a combination of the three knowledges though one may be more detectable in a person than the other two. I think that everyone has some say in which knowledge they belong to, but mostly people are born with their knowledges engrained into their being. This is no excuse to keep from exploring another side of life. Don't think that your "kind of knowledge" can ever prevent you from searching for the knowledge you have yet to perceive inside of yourself.
That's what I see. Whether I see it through the eye of my brain, my head, or my heart I cannot say. Maybe this knowledge of mine will morph and change, maybe it will stay the same until the day I die. Again, who is to say?
Lydia
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)