The Pursuit

After traveling to several countries and having the honor to live in New Zealand for a year, I feel that I have been presented a gift; a relic along the seashore. This gift is the gift of perspective. To see and experience how other cultures live, how they live along side each other as citizens, humans, neighbors. My Americanized version of life has been taken a part and then reassembled with new eyes because of these different perspectives. 

You do realize there is an entire world out there right? Besides the one where you, reader, now comfortably sit in your easy chair with a pantry stocked full of food. The more you experience more of life, the world and other cultures - the more you realize you know nothing at all. The more you realize there's more to life than a comfortable house, job, chair etc. Life wasn't meant to be comfortable. 

However, being an American entails some sense of responsibility; to your country, to yourself as an individual, and to other Americans. Whether you know it or not, compared to many parts of the world, you are privileged to be an American. In the Declaration of Independence, there is a phrase that strikes me; "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

As an American, as a human being, you have the right to pursue Happiness. 

Pursue. Do you know what that word means? It means to follow, to strive, to gain, to chase, seek to attain or accomplish. But, many Americans chase or pursue that happiness in areas that always fail. Money, sex, power, success (by American standards), clothes, drugs, body image.... 

Let me tell you, I have looked into the eyes of beggars in Italy, poverty-stricken children in Mexico, the simplistic lives of school children in Thailand, laid back New Zealanders with small lives and little drive in life - and I have seen happiness. 

Some of the happiest people I have met do not have much. 

I met a Canadian in Thailand. He was on the back of an Elephant and so was I, and my family and I talked to him as the magnificent beast slowly walked around the most beautiful garden I had ever seen. He quit his comfortable job and was traveling the world.

I met a middle-aged woman who was kicked out of her home in her early teens, just because her parents didn't like her. She had the reading level of a first grader, couldn't drive, never had a career - but she worked with so much zeal, had an extremely compassionate heart and read the Bible every morning; slowly, articulately, word by word. Her face perpetually glowed with joy. 

I met a three-year-old girl on a busy Minneapolis street. With dirt smeared on her face and a messy hairdo she seemed like any other toddler; but her and her family were homeless. She lived and slept in a stroller in her little pink T-shirt. But when my sister and I brought her food in a couple of grocery bags, she ran to us screaming, laughing and smiling - overflowing with happiness and joy. 

I also met a CEO who gave up his dreams to become an artist and focused on business and marketing instead. He lived in an office, interacted little with his employees, and scolded his interns twice for not having the overhead light on over our desks. He had it all, in the worldly sense.

Our pursuit of happiness should never be to get to the highest level of success or to obtain materialistic things. In the end, those things matter little. Find what makes you happy, not content or comfortable, but rather fulfilled and joyful - and do it. Live always in the pursuit of something greater than yourself. 

Shoe Boxes

               

 There is a song by my favorite singer and songwriter, Jack Johnson, with a line that describes the nostalgia of physically kept memories perfectly: “Our dreams… are made out of real things, like a shoe box of memories with sepia-toned lovin’.” Shoe boxes are made for more than a pair of brand new shoes.

Inspiration can come in many forms. For me, my inspiration to write seems to come from memories – whether they happened yesterday or ten years ago, or they are physical things like shoelaces, ticket stubs, and picture frames, or whether they live as a moment frozen in time within my mind.  I love to collect things. Things like a green pen, a broken piece of guitar, or an eraser with little notes written in pen all over the surface would mean nothing to the average person; but to me, they are pieces, fragments of memories long gone.

I have at least five different shoe boxes, each with their own purpose. One contains letters, pictures, and scraps from my year in New Zealand. One contains memories from grade school all the way up until high school. Another contains a few dried roses, letters, cards, and more, collected over a period of two and a half years with my boyfriend. A bigger shoe box contains most of my snow globes I have carefully collected over a span of ten years. And my fifth one is a miscellaneous collection from places, events, pictures from various people, scraps of paper with written notes; an arbitrary assortment of things.

I’d like to believe I inherited my habit of collecting and saving little things from both my mother and my grandmother. In this way, it has become somewhat of a tradition that keeps on spreading from generation to generation. When I think of tradition, Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof comes to my mind. Swaying his hips as his tassels swish at his sides, his arms raised up at his sides snapping to the beat, "Traditionnn! Tradition!" In many cases, tradition was and is like a fiddler on the roof in my life as well. It follows me wherever I go, its song reminds me of who I am, and even though there are days I want to bang on my roof and tell him to be quiet and go away, it is still there - through silence, through sad songs and songs of celebration.

My mom has saved cards from my five year old birthday, newspaper clippings from my fourth grade science fair, my sister’s cast from when she broke her ankle at one year old, even snippets of hair from her children’s first haircuts. My grandma Bonny, my mom’s mom, went so far as to reuse plastic Ziploc baggies, and she saved toys, blankets, and bonnets from her children’s childhood. 

My grandma clung to traditions. Big or small, she loved them. Things like making popcorn balls every autumn, watching Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman with Fresca and popcorn, wearing your best lipstick no matter how the day goes, and making oyster stew every Christmas are now woven with nostalgia into my life. Even during stretches of months where the patchwork quilt of my life was fraying at the seams, those threads of memories and tradition held the separate patches together. My grandma rubbed off on me in that way. If she were still alive, I could picture us watching re-runs of Touched by an Angel eating popcorn and sliced green apples, crying with a box of tissues in front of each of us.

I suppose I have a sixth shoe box, a metaphorical one where those memories that can’t be held or touched in the physical sense are packed carefully away. They are evoked by a song, a smell, a comment from a friend, and soon I am unpacking that shoe box once more to play over the memories in my head like a slow moving feature film.

Shoe boxes are indeed made for more than a brand new pair of shoes. They hold things, they cherish things, and they somehow keep memories alive despite the mismatched conglomeration of things strewn together in one, tiny, cardboard box. To the beholder, they are not just boxes of stuff or junk but rather, boxes full of people dear to them. And those things, those bits and pieces of memories are really just bits and pieces of dreams and people. 

Down the Rabbit Hole

“So she sat on with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality.” 

― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass 




A professor once told me about a student he had in class only a few years ago. The student suddenly looked up over the top of his laptop and said, "You know? I believe our culture and generation today has lost their ability to wonder." And I believe that to be true. 

I have a bit of a confession to make: I am borderline obsessed with Alice in Wonderland. I bought an antique Alice in Wonderland book for $20 at an antique store and I am in love with everything about it. If you take the protective sleeve off, the cover is this rich green with beautifully etched designs on the front and the spine of the hardcover. The pages smell like a spice cupboard mixed with wood chips, and are filled with beautiful original illustrations. 

I bought the complete collection of Lewis Carroll at Barnes & Noble for only $7 and it sits on my nightstand next to my Alice in Wonderland mug. The old paperback book I have of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass has pages falling out and the cover ripping off. 

But what I love most about Alice and her absurd adventures is her ability to wonder, imagine, and to be curious. 

I feel so lost in a world where people go through their day and life without stopping to look, or ask, or wonder in awe about something. With all this amazing, profound technology surrounding us we use it and never stop to think - how did this happen? How did we get to a place where we can talk to our phones and this thing called Siri talks back to us!?

We are becoming like the man in the story and short film, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. It takes place during the Civil War and he is about to be hanged. It isn't until he stands at the edge of the bridge about to have his life ended, that he suddenly notices the little things. The beautiful day, the sun rising, the birds chirping, the leaves, the sand, the way the water moved in the river below, the way the trees danced in the breeze. It isn't until something threatening happens to us, or something is about to be taken away from us, when we stand in wonder at the beauty around us. 

Alice began her big adventure by following something completely out of the ordinary: A talking white rabbit wearing a waist coat and a pocket watch. What would have happened if Alice saw that and thought to herself, "Hm, that's strange!" but then went on with her studies and didn't follow her sense of curiosity. Or what would have happened if Alice was too busy texting and and scrolling through her Facebook news feed to even notice this marvelous, extraordinary sight? She would have never gone to Wonderland, there never would have been this big adventure, and the rest of the book would have been about her boring book with no pictures and her mute cat Dinah. 


Take my nieces, or kids in general. They ask questions. Lots of them. You answer one question and you think, "Great, that's done with!" but no, they have to ask, "But, why?" One time my niece asked after driving by a cemetery what all those stones were out there. "They're graves, it's where people's bodies get buried after they die," her mother said.

"But why do we bury people after they die?"

"Well, we've been doing that for a very long time and we need to get rid of the body after they die somehow."

"But... why?"

And the conversation went on like this for quite sometime. I'm not sure if it got anywhere, but she asks some very great questions. Kids also are not afraid to dream and imagine great, big, absurd, silly things. My niece believes that when she gets to heaven her skin will be indigo, because that's her favorite color. Who knows, maybe she's right. She also thinks the other side of the lake is a whole other country with people who dress differently and speak a different language than us.

We have lost our ability to wonder. We have become desensitized and numbed to every day miracles happening all around us.

Have you ever wondered, I mean truly wondered about why we get hiccups? Or why we have to close our eyes when we sneeze? Or how the birds just know when to come back or go away during the change of seasons and where to go? Or why we started in the first place to color our cheese orange, because it sure as heck isn't naturally that way!

I believe we need to step out of our go-go-go reality for a little bit each day, and step into Wonderland. Because if we lose our ability to wonder... that will truly be a terrifying and awful reality.

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

(From an old journal entry I wrote last summer. Written at sunset by the end of my dock.)

The late August sunset stretches her long arms out onto the water, into the sky, across my face. Her warmth is weakening, becoming less strong than it was in the July heat. There is a crispness in the air - almost bitter - that wasn't there before. A season will soon end... a new one shall soon begin. 

Life has a way of sneaking up on you doesn't it? We groan and complain for a new season, but  suddenly it is here without even realizing it. And in another fleeting moment - it vanishes once again. My mother always tells me, "Don't wish for tomorrow, for tomorrow never comes." 

How many tomorrows are we going to ask for? Long for? Wish for? We look too much to the future to what could be and not what is. Our lives are but fleeting moments. Like the dew in  the morning, like the smoke of a blown out candle. 

And now, the August sun has gone to bed, tucked tightly in its sheets of clouds. The sly west wind whispers in my ear and dances in my hair, "Come play!" the wind beckons, "come play before my bitter brother, the North wind comes out to spite you." I turn my face toward its direction and smile, "Tomorrow, wind, tomorrow I will play," and her reply was but a faint whisper. 

I wish I had the courage to live today not tomorrow. There is a person deep within my soul that longs to come out and live her dreams. Travel the world. Meet interesting people with stories to tell and write about. But.... 

But, graduation, financial worries, and marriage is looming in the near future. Money is needed if one wants to travel the world. Commitment and unselfishness and sharing dreams comes with marriage. And my writing? It is sitting passively in the pages of a journal, unknown and untouched by the world. 

Dusk is upon me and goosebumps are creeping onto the surface of my skin. As I stare out into the calm water of this lake and the darkening sky, a realization has made its way into my mind: My life has become nothing but a string of tomorrows. 

Tomorrow I will write a novel. Tomorrow I will pursue my dreams. Tomorrow I will travel to here and there. Tomorrow. 

But tomorrow never comes. Today is the time; the time to do what I need and want to do. Today is the day.  

Third Time's a Charm

Here I sit, nearly 11 at night and I have rummaged through every last memory box, picture album, and old forgotten journals. I am nostalgic in the worst way. I look back on many things in my past and think to myself, "How wonderful things were back then." Especially now, a senior in college about to graduate in May with no job lined up and no clue what to do with my future, parts of my past seem pretty great right about now. 

Third time's a charm for me. I began a blog on Wordpress a couple of years ago. I had to do it for a class, but I kept up with it and people loved it. About three months ago I was going through this phase where I thought about absolutely nothing other than my future career. It consumed me. So I deleted everything off that blog and began a new blog on Social Media, thinking only of my future employers of course. 

It bombed. Actually, it would have been quite good. I got 100 views in the first day I started it. But I became stressed - about my future, my job, my life, and more. So much so that as a 21-year-old I got shingles (which the doctor said was related to stress), I had four canker sores in my mouth at one time, had the worst stress-related acne breakout I ever had, and even lost a few pounds - all within a matter of a couple months. So needless to say, I didn't have the energy or time to put into that second blog as I had hoped. 

Now, I have finally come to the reasons why I truly want to blog, and the reasons why the other two bombed. 

1. I wrote for other people - not myself. Yes, sometimes I wrote stuff I liked, but I had to do it, writing felt like a chore sometimes rather than something I have always been in love with. 

2. I told my followers when I would publish a new post. You read any good blogger and most of the time they'll tell you to have a certain day or days to post a new blog. But again, I felt guilty for missing my own deadline I created for myself that I just eventually gave up. So now, instead of writing when I have to, I'm going to write when I want to. 

3. I had a strict subject to follow. Again, most blogs obviously have a theme or specific topic of choice which they follow - which is great! But I felt restricted by those subjects sometimes and my creativity bubble would burst. Now, not only will I write when I want but also what I want. 


So there you have it. A little taste of this blog. I love to write about everyday ordinary things that become extraordinary in my life. I will write about heartache, or laughter, or pens, or shoelaces, or summer, or the way the waves sound as they lap against the shore. I will about whatever comes into my heart. Enjoy