ordinary extraordinary

Here’s a thought:

In the Ubahn between Görlitzer Bahnhof and Schlesiches Tor, I sat reading the first sentences of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and was completely blown away by the transition between looking down at the page, at her exquisite sentences gleaming, twining there like strands of liquid emerald running pages long, and then looking up from the page to the bored eye-contact-averted faces.

The coach was one of those old-fashioned Ubahns—the yellow ones with brown interior and windows with rounded rather than sharp edges—and the light was warm but grubby.

I read one sentence. Wings of angels flighting me to lofts of heaven and I lifted my head. All those grubby faces. I lowered my head—her voice, her characters in complex worlds on edge with emotion, as though each moment the world might explode and everyone die or live forever—and then looked back up: dull, somewhere coffee breath, everyone on their morning commute to paperclips. Paperclips and staplers and printers and hole-punchers.

That evening, walking back home, a breeze ran up behind me, and from behind blew a circle of leaves around my ankles and then twirled them in cross breezes, tying a bow of leaves and wind around me. An autumn package. I walked bound up in this way for a block, and the coal-darkened buildings slid past, an unobtrusive wallpaper for the featured exhibit. I thought to myself:

Who needs lightning bolts and trumpets
when you have a field of dry grasses backlit by the late day sun?

How do these things coexist? How is it possible to be struck by lightning in the ordinary places? Or that the ordinary places can without warning strike you, and themselves become lightning?

“How,” I wanted to ask a lady passing me, “do you cope with it?”

“How,” I wanted to stop a man who looked wise, “do you keep it from destroying you?”

“How,” I wanted to scream and then crumple in a pile and faint and then die in my faint, “does it not make anyone scream and crumpling faint and die?”

That’s what’s on my mind.

And now I think I understand a little bit of those mystics, who always talked about the ecstasy of death.

I don’t want to die, but who can live with so much extraordinary inside the ordinary?

p.s. this is not a suicide note

barely there

The last eight weeks have been a non-stop early-morning roller-coaster of teaching English to unruly German and Spanish teenagers. I am tired. I am out of touch with everyone who I sincerely care about in my life.

One more week of teaching, and my previous life of unemployment will start again. A blessing and a curse. I won’t be straining my introverted energies in front of a bunch of kids who would rather be out in the sun (understandably) than learning about the first and second conditional. But on the other hand, I won’t be making a living.

Always, this struggle to survive, pervading our ability to actually “live”. What does it mean to live well?

watching whales watching us

Whale by Ivan Chernayeff

Yesterday evening and this morning I read this wonderful article in the NY Times magazine, “Watching Whales Watching Us“, about the return of almost-extinct gray whales to lagoons of Baja. They are called “Friendlies” by the locals and the biologists who study them, because they appear to be trying to gently communicate with the same humans who less than 100 years ago almost harpooned their species into nonexistance.

Why are they coming back to talk with us so kindly? the question asks. Could it be a form of forgiveness?

That scientists would consider asking such a question was powerful to me. One scientist in the article speaks of  “cognitive revolution” recently occuring in scientific fields that allows scientists to speak of topics like forgiveness, awareness, compassion—value traits—and to tell stories.

This reminded me of another article I recently read called “When Poets Were Scientists and Nature Their Mysterious Muse“, (which is actually a review of the new book “The Age of Wonder” by Richard Holmes). The book looks at the early scientists, who measured and explored with wonder and awe, who “charted the skies as if making musical notations.”

Such explorations were always tied to the idea of the mysterious, to the unknowable, and to the excitement to honor it and make sense of it, but with the understanding that there are things that are not knowable, that are above our understanding, and that come from someplace with as much deep spiritual meaning as physical.

Currently I am also in the middle of an epic essay by Wendell Berry (of course!) called “Poetry and Place” (in his book Standing by Words). With the thoughtful analysis of several classical poems (particularly Milton’s Paradise Lost), Berry argues that the study of science in particular and the world in general has evolved from one with a respect toward the mysterious origins of all things to an understanding that we can, with enough prodding and measuring, figure everything out. This latter, current philosophy breaks down a classical hierarchy of being in which man is not the highest and last stop on that ladder (but is rather lower than something which man cannot understand or be) and rather supercedes it with a hierarchy of the world in which everything is subject to man’s endeavors. That is to say, respect for the unknowable and the higher-than-us is gone.

And this allows for unthinkable destruction, according to Mr. Berry.

Milton and others were driven by curiousity to ask questions and to explore the world, but they did so in a frame of reference which understood that we are one link in a chain of being that is inextricably connected and interdependent, and that we are furthermore not on the top of that chain. Respectful humility can go a long way in curbing arrogant misuse and exploitation of other species and the earth’s resources.

And so I am relieved to see that there are people studying the world today who are looking at the mystery of other species; who are looking at the gray whales with the understanding that they have been developing consciousness, compassion, communication and complex societal structures for hundreds of thousands of years before humans. This is not something to be taken lightly. This inspires respect and humility.

I hope that this “cognitive revolution,”—perhaps one in which those things that are not cognitively understandable are given due value—is really occuring and will continue to evolve. And I hope that more poets will become scientists and more scientists poets.

We need more beauty and mystery.

question

Standing on my elbow
With my finger in my ear,
Biting on a dandelion,
And humming kind of queer
While I watched a yellow caterpillar
Creeping up my wrist,
I leaned on a tree
And I said to me,
“Why am I doing this?”

from Standing by Shel Silverstein

♥

I read that poem to some friends last weekend, and as I read it I thought about how often I have that same feeling and ask myself that same question as the narrator of the poem: “why am I doing this?”

And not just about moving to another country, which often seems crazy, but also when I was in Seattle. It seems to me that ever since 1998, life has been strange. 1998 was when I moved away from home and became an adult.

There are so many unpredictable events in life, so many things we can’t control or expect or prepare for that seem to make everything look crooked or confusing.

But I wonder too if there aren’t many things that we get ourselves into simply because we don’t take time to think or to pause for reflection before we act. My experience with cell phones and online networking sites is an example: now that I’m immediately reachable, whether I’m sending an email to someone (people can now see if I’m online and send me instant messages) or because I have a handy cell phone that I carry around with me, my life has become a bustle of spontaneous conversations and meet-ups.

my beard grows to my toes (by Shel Silverstein)

I won’t call these necessarily “good” or “bad”, but I do think that they’ve made me less dependable and more chaotic overall (I can’t speak for others). Less dependable because now I often wait until the last minute to do something rather than preparing or arriving somewhere early (since it’s possible to communicate so quickly). And more chaotic because this last-minuteness means that I end up rushing here and there, and fitting into my schedule activities and conversations that I hadn’t originally planned on, often times taking away time for silence, reflection or important day-to-day practicalities.

That’s why I like this poem by Shel Silverstein. He paints an absurd picture of someone who finally pauses to reflect on why he is doing something that makes life difficult and might not have any real value.

You wouldn’t believe (or maybe you would?) how many of my friends and family talk about feeling pressured by their jobs, by their studies, by the social eagerness not to be left out of the loop so that they spend much more time than is physically or mentally healthy for a living creature to spend on working, reading, studying, writing, researching, socializing.

Of course we have to assume that everyone has different limits and boundaries to what constitutes “healthy”. My concern is that many work/school/social environments, at least in Germany and in the U.S., don’t seem to allow for the definition of “healthy” that I give for myself, which is a definition that I think might be considered “old-fashioned” in that it allows regular spaces for silence, solitude, sleeping eight hours a night, spending time with children & families, cooking, cleaning your own house, watering plants/gardening, exercising, taking regular breaks during the working day to clear the mind, eating together with others…

I am concerned because it feels like this is a way of life that is not only becoming extinct, but is becoming forbidden and unacceptable. In its place is a culture of ultra-competition and unsustainable work, and burnout. It also doesn’t seem to me to be making people any deeper.

Perhaps we should all lean on a tree for a five-minute pause today, look up at the leaves, and ask ourselves:

Why are we doing this?

creative aspect, special circumstances

the written word

This month I am reading about linguistics, to remind myself about the foundational legos of human communication. One book is by (of course) Wendell Berry, called “Standing by Words,” in which Berry argues that the degeneration in the clarity and meaning of words is symptomatic of the disconnection of individuals from their communities and the place where they are at. It’s very earthy, very thought-provoking, like chewing through a clod of dirt, feeling the sandiness in your teeth, not always easy to palate but clean and solid.

Another read is my intro to linguistics book (An Introduction to Language), whose authors must have had a lot of fun. Though I think Berry might criticize the mamby-pambiness of their seeming position that everyone’s language is just as good and complex as the next guy (they say: “No language or variety of a language is superior to any other in a linguistic sense. Every grammar is equally complex and logical and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought”), I enjoy their open view of the complexity of dialects, the philosophy of what is language exactly, and their dry comments on misuse and misunderstanding.

For example: “When we speak, we usually wish to convey some message. (Although it seems that some of us occasionally like to talk just to hear our own voices.)”

Or

“If sentences are muddled, it is not because of the language but because of the speakers.”

or

(when talking about the difference between human vs. animal forms of communication) “There is not an infinite set of fiddler crab sentences.”

bee dance

They also site an example of a researcher who “forced a bee to walk to the food source” to see how walking instead of flying would influence the bee’s communication to the hive of the distance to the food source. The result was that the bee communicated a much longer distance than it was in actuality. “The bee had no way of communicating the special circumstances in the message” since bees are apparently only able to communicate about distance, and not about other things, like being forced to walk by some sadistic linguistic researcher.

First of all, I want to go on record as being against the forcible walking of bees or of any insect not inclined to walk long distances. And I can’t really imagine how they forced the bee not to fly, unless they tore off its wings? But what really struck me was this conclusion:

“The bee had no way of communicating the special circumstances in the message.”

Noam Chomsky—linguistic hero— calls the uniquely human way of being able to form an infinite variety of creative sentences from our finite sets of vocabulary “creative aspect.” This is something that many linguists believe differentiates us from the animals.

And supposedly, it is also what enables us to talk about ourselves talking, or think about ourselves thinking. “Judy believes what Jon told her about you saying that you think she stinks.” That kind of thing. Or maybe like an extension of Descarte: “I [talk about] think[ing], therefore I am [human].”

What I wonder is how much does our ability to talk about what we’re thinking and experiencing help us actually to “communicate the special circumstances” in which we find ourselves, plunged down suddenly into this heap of life and perhaps without previous intention?

And do we even know those circumstances? I just wonder whether, on some über-meta level, we are the little bee, wiggling his rear to his colleagues, or spinning in a half-sickle pattern describing our feelings and philosophies without knowing that actual distances of our reality.

enlightenment

I appreciate the ability to communicate, even more so now that it isn’t always possible for me in Germany to adequately make clear my own special circumstances, needs and desires. I am grateful that I don’t make noises based only on response and stimuli, territory or food, mating calls and impending threats (I said “only”; sometimes we are just beastly and there’s nothing to help it).

And I am proposing no new theory here, rather a question of perspective, which might not have to do specifically with language as much as it does with consciousness and the level at which we are enough awake to talk about being awake and whether there is something even awaker than this uniquely human awakeness about which we have no conscious vocabulary to creatively communicate the unique circumstances?

Know what I mean?

taking time (or using it well like momo)

Momo and the turtle

In the children’s book “Momo” by Michael Ende, (same author of “The Neverending Story“), which I am reading in German at the moment, the young girl Momo follows a turtle to a street called “Nowhere Lane” with glass houses and seashell streets. It is a place outside of conventional time.

To reach the door of the house where her journey will eventually propel her to dangers and delights, she discovers that she can only move forward by walking backwards.

This has been my first half-year in Berlin. In almost every way, I have had to step backwards into something almost like childhood, to re-learn everything from measurements to bus schedules, the names of vegetables, how to say thank you and hello, what is involved in getting a job in a new country, how to be in a committed relationship, dialing area codes, and bicycle etiquette.

And for the first six months, it mostly felt like I was moving backwards. The metaphor that best suits the feeling is that of swimming–or struggling to swim–against a strong current of frothing waves. Sometimes it’s difficult just to keep your head above the water, to breathe. And then, it’s always difficult to move forward, instead of being swept along backwards.

Against the Flow by Karen Hammat

Backwards for me has included:

1. no job
2. no income
3. not being able to express myself or to be understood
4. not being able to understand others
5. no close community of friends and family nearby
6. unfamiliarity and lack of connection to my place (where I am living)
7. difficulties getting out into nature

But now I am very happy to report that though the tide may not have changed, my stride has become stronger against it. My German proficiency has improved enough that I am understood and can understand much around me. General banter.

I have interviewed for, and been offered some jobs instructing English at various schools–some of them dependent on which work visa I am able to get.

There are people here who I have met and spend some time with who bring me outside of myself. I now know how the transportation system of Berlin works, in general. I now know what the basic vegetables are called.

And I was able to feel so supported by the friends and family that we were able to visit in May on Baby Tour 2009. Being surrounded by familiar, wonderful, inspiring people who I love gave me so much strength and reminded me of who I am and where I come from.

This blog has been silent for awhile, since the last months were a slow moving backwards in order to move forwards. But the time spent struggling toward survival and happiness in Berlin has toned my emotional, linguistic, and mental muscles for a smoother ride in the future.

Now I am ready for the summer time.

afternoons

or The Glamorous Germanic Life of An American Girl In Berlin — Part II

syntax

My weekday afternoons in Berlin are generally divided into two parts. The first consists of gutting my brain’s previous syntactical superhighways and constructing new synapses suitable to German word order. The second consists of practicing “on the street” whether the synapses collapse or hold.

Last week I learned that the Germans have a verb that means “drinking alcohol in the morning.” Naturally.

After my half-day of German classes (only one month left, by the way, of six months), I emerge most likely dazed out onto the busy Hauptstrasse. Usually I march directly toward the S-bahn and ride for fourteen minutes back home, reading a book. My average rate so far is about 2 books per week on the sbahn. I feel self-conscious when I pull out an English book, but then I think, well hey at least I am proving to the underground subway world of Berlin that some Americans can read.

Sometimes I walk home, or if I’ve ridden my bicycle, as has been the case lately with the warmer and dryer weather, then I ride through the large Tiergarten (like Central Park in NY) and past the Brandenburg Gate, up behind the Reichstag and then over the Spree, through the Charite hospital and up Chausseestrasse. I always try to go a different route when I walk, and one week

magical garden gnome

I ended up lost in a maze of garden houses with little gnomes and flamingos, and I didn’t know how to get out until one little gnome saw my plight and sprung over his garden fence. “Lady,” he said, “you don’t belong here, and after dark the flamingos get nasty.” So he showed me out and gave me some fairy dust for good luck.

Another time I walked through a graveyard that had been separated by the Berlin Wall. Pieces of the wall are still there.

Sometimes I also stop in at the huge Dussman bookstore, which isn’t my favorite because it reminds me of Barnes & Noble (corporate chain) but is nonetheless important because it has an entire floor of English books. I don’t have money to buy any of them, so I tend to sit on the floor and read a chapter at a time. In this way, I have gotten through “No One Belongs Here More Than You” by Miranda July and some travel books.

In most cases, I usually go straight home after school, eat a piece of bread with butter and cheese and drink a green tea, do my homework, and then get on my laptop and start writing letters for jobs. How does one get a job in a city with no contacts? I still haven’t found the solution to that question. I am treading water in the unemployment pool.

Each day I spend a good three or four hours trying to find a job and applying, writing letters, emails, posting my resume, the whole shebang. I’d be lying to say that I’m not depressed at the lack of outcome. What am I doing wrong? (Besides living in a foreign city where I don’t speak the language and don’t know anyone?) The latest breakthrough is that now I can actually read the advertisements for jobs in German, though I am still far from being able to write a cover letter to apply for them…

Exercise = happiness hormones

Then if I have any energy I would normally try to get in some exercise. Lately my knee has been very bad, as has the weather. Bad knee + bad weather = little exercise. Yelp! And if exercise = happy hormones + relief of stress, then you can see my current dilemma. But the days are getting longer again, and then I am hoping to become a running maniac with a completely restored knee. I miss my soccer league.

Once a week I meet with a German teacher, who asked me if I wanted to trade a conversational hour with her regularly. So for two hours we sit and drink tea and half of it we speak in English and half of it we speak in German. This is a good resource for testing the weight of the previously built synapses. We meet in a cafe nearby called Eins and has a big #1 on the wall made out of fruit box labels.

Last week I got desperate and went into five cafes near Friedrichstrasse to ask for a job. Anyone ever read “Nickle and Dimed: On not getting by in America“? I felt the way the author did when she, a successful professional journalist, wasn’t even able to get simple waitressing jobs at the beginning. And I’m not a professional journalist, but I think I have some skills. But the employers were really skeptical. It was a lesson in humility. Any tips on how to carry a tray?

On the rare days when it’s been sunny (2 out of 180 so far), I have sat outside on a bench in the full sunlight and then sauntered around. Sunlight is too serious to be wasted here. It’s like the equivalent of water in “Dune.”

I also miss playing the piano.

Until I find employment or come into some money (which I only mention because I love the phrase “to come into some money”), my afternoons won’t be much more glamorous than this, which is still more glamorous than emptying portable toilets or mining.

One difference that I’ve really felt since being in Berlin is that I haven’t volunteered my time at all. I was always volunteering in Seattle, and I enjoyed that so much. Here, though, I have realized that it takes almost as much energy to find out how and where and as what to volunteer as it does to find a job. The language is the main barrier, but also that I don’t know what organizations are out there and therefore what I could do. However I believe that volunteering is a super way to meet people, feel useful and give to the community.

(Does anyone know the word for “volunteer” in German?) Also, go HERE if you want to volunteer in the states.

Stay tuned for a rendition of the glamorous and action filled evenings…

horse people help horse people

In times like these, what folks need is a heartening tale. I myself have been looking for creativity in odd places, when I find that I’m at the end of my rope and don’t know what else to do to find a job or to rally my spirits.

On BBC radio this week, I heard this story, as good a remedy as any, about Donna Byrne, a woman who just lost her job as a cowhand in Florida, then subsequently lost her house from lack of payments. So she saddled up her two horses, Jay and Tonto (Lone Ranger, anyone?) and took to the trail, riding to Texas and even to Montana if she has to in order to find work.

Why did that story strike such a chord in me, who has only very infrequently ridden horses on the prarie?

Is it because of Donna’s determination, willingness to rough-it in the wild, and the gritty, adventurous spirit of the American West that I have somehow inevitably come to love?

Is it because her simple act of setting out on her horses with everything she owns seems to contradict wonderfully our modern, fast, strangely-prioritized culture in a way that makes me nod and say, “you know, she’s got a point there”?

Is it because along her way, she has encountered strangers who help her and her horses, who show her that people don’t have to be isolated and alone, or to hoard what we’ve got for ourselves in tough times? That her trust in those along the road shows a beautiful, down to earth faith in community that sometimes seems extinct?

Or is it because I love the smell of saddles and alfalfa?

If you go to this site set up by people who heard about her story, you can even hear the song that was inspired by her, written by Johnny B and the Sunspots (to listen go to http://soundclick.com/share?songid=7386992). You can pay 0.99 cents for the song, which is donated to Donna.

riding west

mornings

or,

The Glamorous Germanic Life of An American Girl In Berlin — Part I

Some strange radio ad that sounds like a creepy nightmare. This is the first thing I hear in the morning, since 1) the normal clock alarm scares the crap out of me, 2) I changed the station from BBC because I got depressed hearing about plane crashes, financial crises, Obama, war, and pirates, and 3) somehow the German station the radio is set to always plays the exact same ad every morning at 7am. Go figure.

The snooze button is admittedly over-pummeled.

When I manage to roll out from under a family of stuffed animals (two tigers, two dogs, one frog), I have been trying to do twenty minutes of yoga and ten minutes of meditation.

Usually the meditation concentration on in and out breaths lapses quickly into the realization that either I forgot to do my homework and can’t recall the rule for separated and unseparated prefixes or that I am still unemployed and speaking like a child in a strange land at the age of 28. This usually means more rapid in-breaths. No master of zen am I.

But I like to think I am. So, zen-like, I eat, boot and mitten up, and run past the store where they sell kitschy statues of Buddha to catch my Sbahn that always either just arrives or just leaves as I enter the station. Some days are lucky.

I am usually reading some form of poetry on the metro. Today it was someone’s master thesis that I’m proofing, about the environmental and social effects of gold mining in western Ghana. (Then today I saw this incredible photo show about gold mining in the Congo on NY Times).

If I’m lucky, I get to my class in time to remove the scarf that is wrapped like a woolly bandage three times around my neck, my wool jacket, two mittens, and a hat before trying to answer questions about whether one goes to a store or at the dentist or is interested in something or appalled by one’s gross inability to speak clearly, all the while thinking of long walks along Lake Washington, or browsing through the rows and rows and levels and floors of wooden shelves at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, and conversations with friends and family at warm coffee houses or in their gardens for summer barbecues.

Memories are everywhere in between the lines, just like breaths.

slow food revolutions

As I sat in a chic office writing a small article about a heavy metal band performing next week in Shanghai, wondering what in the world am I doing in freezing cold Berlin writing about a band I’ve never heard of and whose music I would probably hate on the other side of the world, I had one of those experiences where you find yourself by losing yourself.

In other words, knowing what you are NOT can aid in knowing who you are.

So, at least I know now that I am NO LONGER working writing these articles for Shanghai, which means that —-> I AM unemployed (it was unpaid anyway).

I know that I DON’T speak German fluently, which means that —-> I AM a native English speaker who loves to be able to communicate.

I have NO CLUE what job to get or what to do at this present moment, which means that —-> I WANT to do something meaningful and active, and furthermore, that the possibilities are quite open (hurray!?).

In times like that, it’s not a bad idea to read about something uplifting, unconventional, a little bit risky, and completely down to earth which other innovative people are doing at this moment in time on our planet Earth.

slow food revolution

Thus I was happy to find this article in the New York Times today, about a group of young culinary artisans forming a slow food community in the heart of Brooklyn. “Slow growth, slow design, slow food. Slow, but without being flaky.” said the 29 year old chocolate maker, Michael Mast, whose website is mastbrotherschocolate.com.

One thing I’ve been asking myself is, “when does need take priority over values?” but I’m not sure if that is the right question. Does need ever trump values?

I mean to say, at what point should I find a job just because it provides income rather than because it is a meaningful vocation that justly and responsibly (for me and for the task at hand) applies my experience?

There is a lack of creativity in my mind at the moment for possibilities–I think they may have gotten sucked out and are floating around somewhere in Shanghai.

Brainstorming and rooted advice is welcome.