Alive

A year ago today I posted this for Poetry Friday, talking about how grateful I was to be alive.

Poetry Friday: A Quiet Life

In times of crisis, I appreciate the ordinary. So now, when my life isn't particularly in crisis, I am trying to appreciate the ordinary, too, instead of waiting until it is gone. This week as I read about the earthquake in New Zealand and hurt for those people, as I understood exactly what they were going through, I thought of how grateful I am for a quiet life. Baron Wormser's take on that concept is to focus on a properly boiled egg. (I posted this poem once before, in June 2008.)

For the people of Christchurch, I wish a properly boiled egg, and other features of ordinary life, soon.


A Quiet Life

by Baron Wormser

What a person desires in life
is a properly boiled egg.
This isn't as easy as it seems.
There must be gas and a stove,
the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,
banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.
There must be a pot, the product of mines
and furnaces and factories,
of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,
of women in kerchiefs and men with
sweat-soaked hair.
Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies
and God knows what causes it to happen.
There seems always too much or too little
of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping
stations, towers, tanks.
And salt-a miracle of the first order,
the ace in any argument for God.
Only God could have imagined from
nothingness the pang of salt.
Political peace too. It should be quiet
when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and
take it out on you, no dictators
posing as tribunes.
It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear
the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type
of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.
Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain
that came from nowhere.

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is here, at Read Write Believe.

A Year Ago Today

I wrote this post a year ago today, about aftershocks. I'm reading about the ones they are experiencing in New Zealand. The most recent aftershock I know about here in Haiti was January 31st, 2011. The metaphorical ones continue.

Reading Update

Books #7 and #8 of this year were Confusion and Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard. These are the third and fourth books of the Cazalet Chronicle, an enormously entertaining and engrossing series about the Cazalet family in the years before, during, and immediately after the second World War. Howard's great strength is her characters, whom the reader comes to know. I also enjoyed her attention to the details of the historical period.

Book #9 was a YA title, Sarah Dessen's Someone Like You. Dessen's books are very popular among my middle school girls. Her characters are believable and motivated by the things that really do motivate teenagers. This book deals with friendship, the appeal of "bad boys," and teen pregnancy. I found myself groaning at the birth scene - it just screamed "teen movie." However, I cheered for Halley's growing awareness that "someone like her" is worth much more than she thought.

This post is linked to today's Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: Rain

I didn't post a poem last week, but I'm back today with a poem about rain. It's been raining every night here in Haiti - way too early for the rainy season. Everyone keeps saying, "Wow, isn't it good that it didn't rain like this last year?" There are still many people living in tents and in less than adequate shelter, but nothing like the millions who were sleeping outdoors last February. In French they use the expression à la belle étoile - under the beautiful stars - to talk about sleeping outside. Sounds lovely, doesn't it? The reality is somewhat different. Here's what I posted on February 11th, 2010, the first time it rained after the earthquake.

Today's rain poem has the perfect attitude towards the rain.



Before the Rain

by Lianne Spidel


Minutes before the rain begins
I always waken, listening
to the world hold its breath,
as if a phone had rung once in a far
room or a door had creaked
in the darkness.

Perhaps the genes of some forebear
startle in me, some tribal warrior
keeping watch on a crag beside a loch,
miserable in the cold...

Here's the rest of it.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Hello, Ordinary

A year ago today I wrote this post, called "Ordinary." I was longing for ordinary, for my daily life as I had known it before the earthquake. I missed my husband and my students, my home and my routines.

Today is a blessedly ordinary day. I ate breakfast at home with my family (we are out of propane, so I didn't get a cup of tea), came to work where I taught and graded and interacted with students and generally did my job, ate beans and rice sitting at a picnic table in our snack shop area. How beautiful all of that is!

Was your day ordinary today? Did you appreciate what a blessing ordinary really is?

Valentine's Day in Middle School

I have to admit, this is a day that I am often quite glad to see the end of. The massive amounts of sugar, the rose deliveries during class, the teddy bears which say "I love you": none of these things are conducive to great academic progress. Today as I was teaching eighth grade, there were serenades going on right outside my window during high school lunch. Eighth grade is a little more trying on this day than seventh, anyway; my observation is that for the seventh graders the holiday is still mostly about candy, whereas for the eighth graders, hormones have become a part of the festivities.

As often happens, Valentine's Day coincides with Teacher Appreciation Week this year, so we started the morning with a Teacher Appreciation Breakfast that was fabulous. After school I went to a Valentine's party. And in between there were several surprises which ensured that I had a great day.

Anniversary

Yesterday it was thirteen months since the earthquake. I didn't write about it, on purpose. It was the first time since that day in January 2010 that the 12th came around without me obsessing about it for a few days before and thinking about it instantly the moment I woke up on the day itself. I thought about it early in the morning, but it wasn't my first thought. Is this progress?

Thirteen months. Everyone I talk to says both that it seems more recent than that, and that it seems a very long time ago. I can hardly imagine a time before the earthquake. What kind of a person was I back then? How did I see the world?

Every time we drive to church we pass many signs for a school called the Life Goes On Institute. I don't know how good the school is, but I know that its name speaks truth: Life Goes On. It doesn't stop just because everything falls apart. Life has gone on for the past thirteen months. We took a strange road today and my husband said he just wanted to try it; the last time he had been down that road it was impassable because it was full of rubble and tents. Now there was some rubble, but no tents; those people have moved on. Other places in the city are still crammed with tents. For those people, too, still living thirteen months later in a way that might be fun for a weekend but not at all for month after month, life goes on.

This time last year, Haiti was observing three days of prayer and fasting, replacing Carnival. This year, preparations are on track for Carnival. The theme this year is An'n Selebre Lavi: Let's Celebrate Life. (Carnival is much later this year than it was last, not until the beginning of March.) Let's Celebrate Life. I do, every day, because it does go on for us, though not for so many others.

Poetry Friday

It has been months and months -- I think more than a year -- since I missed a Poetry Friday, but somehow I'm just not feeling it today. Maybe I'll be able to get my poetic fervor back later in the day, but meanwhile, plenty of other people are posting. Here's the roundup.

Grumpy but Grateful

A year ago today, it was four weeks after the earthquake. I wrote this, reflecting on how I had changed. Of course, it was a little early to say that.

Today, I thought about those days a year ago, when I was so desperately missing my job and my students and my classroom. Today I yelled at my eighth graders (not just raising my voice to be heard above them, but yelling, which I do about once a semester and hate myself for immediately afterward). The other day I commented to my seventh graders that it seemed they were having a hard time listening, and one of them said, "We're behaving better than we usually do." Another one added, "Yeah, you're just in a bad mood."

I took a moment, while I was on lunch duty and policing the playground, to be thankful for meaningful work, for papers to grade, for reading and writing. (This time last year I could hardly read a book.) I also thanked God for my students, for who they are (noisy, maddening, lovable), and for who they are becoming. I wish I could say I won't ever yell at them again, or ever be in a bad mood again, but I know that's not realistic. The earthquake didn't turn me into a flawless teacher or a flawless human being. But I can promise that I will always be grateful; I will always remember, if not every moment, at least every day, to thank God for my life, for my work, and for the young people in my temporary care.

Life Goes On in Haiti

Every day when I ask my seventh graders for prayer requests in the morning, I hear, "The elections." These seem to be the most drawn-out elections in history. The first round took place in November. The second round is now officially to happen in March.

Emily Troutman wrote this very good article about the mood in Haiti right now. It begins:

"After exhaustive delays, Haiti's electoral council announced today that presidential candidates Mirlande Manigat and Michel Martelly will go forward into the next round. The candidate promoted by current President Rene Preval, Jude Celestin, was scrapped.

By now, though, many seem too tired, and too sad, to care."

If you're looking for political information, this blog is always great for that, as well as amazing photos.

I'm just going to work every day and trying to teach my middle schoolers some things about being literate citizens. I hope that makes a difference some day.

Poetry Friday: The Road Not Taken

What choices have "made all the difference?" Who knows? When I was choosing my path, "both that morning equally lay." I thought I might come back, but you never do.

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Thursday, and Five Kids in Middle School

So we have more problems in Haiti. Yawn. What else is new? This time it's the announcement of the official election results. (Yes. The election was in November.)

The announcement was supposed to be at 8 last night, but it didn't happen until nearly 8 this morning. And it's as expected: Martelly and Manigat will be in the runoff in March. The question is whether Celestin will accept this gracefully or whether he will get his supporters out on the street. N'ap we. We'll see.

Meanwhile I have three seventh graders here and there are two eighth graders. The math teacher took them all for first period and I'll get them all second period. Time to break out the games.

And yeah, I haven't written about Baby Doc being back in Haiti, or rumors that Aristide is coming back too. Sometimes I just don't know what to say. The sheer craziness is too much to believe. So let's just play Taboo and not think about it.

If you want some actual political information, this blog is always very informative.

Why it Matters

I have been having difficulty blogging lately because of internet problems at home, but I wanted to link to a post by Jess responding to a book I recommended, Francis Chan's Crazy Love.

Jess wrote (in this post) about Chan's quote of his wife's grandmother, who went to see a play and then said, "Oh honey, I really don't want to be here right now. I just don't know if this is where I want to be when Christ returns. I'd rather be helping someone or on my knees praying. I don't want him to return and find me sitting in a theater."

Does life have to be virtue OR art, Jess asks? Can't it be both?

On this subject I love Sara Groves' song "Why it Matters," in which she describes her view of art, which she considers "small ramparts for the soul."

Why it Matters
by Sara Groves

Sit with me and tell me once again
Of the story that's been told us
Of the power that will hold us
Of the beauty, of the beauty
Why it matters.

Speak to me until I understand
Why our thinking and creating
And our efforts at narrating
About the beauty, of the beauty
And why it matters

Like the statue in the park
Of this war-torn town
And its protest of the darkness
And the chaos all around
With its beauty, how it matters
How it matters

Show me the love that never fails
The compassion and attention
Midst confusion and dissension
Like small ramparts for the soul
How it matters

Like a single cup of water
How it matters


Why does reading matter? Why does art matter? Why do drama and painting and all those efforts of narrating the beauty of God's world matter? God put some of His own creativity in us. We don't create ex nihilo like He does, but some of us do our best to fight against the chaos around us by writing, or drawing, or making something. When we exercise the talents God gave us, we honor Him. We bring "compassion and attention" to His world. And the art we produce really can be "small ramparts for the soul." For our own souls and, sometimes, for the souls of those who read, or listen, or look.

Poetry Friday: Ode to the Lizard

I finished reading The Dreamer this week. It's a fictionalized biography of Pablo Neruda, and at the end there are some of Neruda's poems. I loved the book (here's my review) and I love this poem:



Ode to the Lizard
Pablo Neruda (translated by Margaret Peden)

On the sand
a
lizard
with a sandy tail.
Beneath
a leaf,
a leaflike
head.

From what planet,
from what
cold green ember
did you fall?
From the moon?
From frozen space?
Or from
the emerald
did your color
climb the vine?

On a rotting
tree trunk
you are
a living
shoot,
arrow
of its foliage.
On a stone
you are a stone
with two small, ancient
eyes -
eyes of the stone.
By the
water
you are
silent, slippery
slime.
To
a fly
you are the dart
of an annihilating dragon.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

The Dreamer

I got a package the week before last from a blog friend (that is, we know each other only through reading each other's blogs and have never met). She sent me a book! (People keep giving me books to read lately - I love that!) The book was The Dreamer, by Pam Muñoz Ryan.

The dreamer of the title is Neftalí Reyes, a shy, misunderstood little boy who loves to read, to collect words and objects, and to notice what is beautiful around him. When Reyes grew up he took the pen name Pablo Neruda. Peter Sís did the wonderful pictures.

Muñoz Ryan read about an incident from Neruda's childhood in which a pair of hands from an unseen child next door passed the poet a toy sheep through a hole in the wall. From there, she researched his life and used her imagination to produce this book. Neruda grew up with a demanding father who thought his son was feeble and absent-minded and refused to consider that writing might be a profession worth pursuing. (Neruda's brother, Rodolfo, was a gifted singer and was equally discouraged by their railroad-worker father.) The book describes several events; my favorite was the Cyrano-like story of Neruda writing love letters to the girl of his dreams on behalf of a bigger, stronger, but less literate boy at his school.

I love Neruda's poetry and didn't know anything about his life, so I enjoyed reading this. Neruda found the encouragement and help he needed in spite of discouragement from his father, and was able to grow into, according to an Author's Note, "probably the most widely read poet in the world."

This was book #6 of the year.

Reading Update

Book #2 of 2011 was Night Over Water, by Ken Follett. This was my first book by this author. It's the story of an assortment of travelers on the Pan American Clipper, a combination airplane and boat that really existed, and a transatlantic flight in 1939. I had never heard of these planes and there are a lot of interesting details in the story about what they were like.

Book #3 was The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway. Set in Sarajevo in the early 90s, this book tells the story of four characters who are trying to survive the war. The cellist of the title sets out to play Albinoni's Adagio after a mortar attack on his neighborhood. "He'll do this every day for twenty-two days, a day for each person killed. Or at least he'll try. He won't be sure he will survive. He won't be sure he has enough Adagios left." The other characters are a man who works in a bakery, a father who spends large amounts of his time making sure his household has enough water, and a sniper, Arrow. Here is Arrow before the war: "She felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. It overwhelmed her, made her pull the car to the side of the road. Afterward she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn't being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It's a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won't last forever." Arrow is assigned to protect the cellist as he plays his music. This was a horrifying book, describing as it does life in Sarajevo, where a sniper's bullet could hit you at any moment as you went about your business. However, it was also a beautiful one, showing how human beings can survive.

Book #4, Fire, by Kristin Cashore, was not really my kind of book, and yet I enjoyed it immensely. I don't read a lot of fantasy, and I found the plot had some big holes in it. But I loved the characters in this book. As in Graceling, to which this book is billed as a "companion," there is a lot of mind-reading, and Cashore does it expertly, with Fire, the main character, picking up feelings and impressions from people around her, even those who shield their minds, which in this world it is possible to learn to do. Fire is a "monster," meaning she has special abilities and irresistible beauty. The beauty is more of a liability than anything else, and Fire struggles to deal with the effect she has on others. The range of relationships Cashore describes is so much fun to read about, and there's romance, but not at all in a stereotypical way. The one concern I have about this book, as I did with the other one, is the attitude of the young women protagonists towards sexuality; both Katsa (in Graceling) and Fire are extremely resistant to marriage, though not to sex (which isn't described explicitly but is very obviously happening). This book is supposed to be for kids my students' age, but I'd give it to older teenagers. Cashore does such a beautiful job telling her story, and I'm not entirely sure why, but reading this book made me happy. (I'm expecting my literature degrees to be revoked immediately after that last sentence.)



Book #5 was Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way, by Shauna Niequist. Katie texted me Sunday night and said "I have a book for you!" She gave it to me in our staff meeting on Monday morning. She said she thought of me the whole time she was reading it. I'm not quite sure why she did (I'll ask her next time I see her), but she was right to think that I'd love this book. It reads like a blog between covers, and sure enough, the author blogs. (I added her to my Blog List yesterday.) Niequist tells, in short essays (posts, really), about a difficult time in her life, when she lost a job, had a baby, had a miscarriage, and lost friends who moved away. I enjoy her voice. Here's a sample, from her description of grace:

"If arithmetic is numbers, and if algebra is numbers and letters, then grace is numbers, letters, sounds, and tears, feelings, and dreams. Grace is smashing the calculator, and using all the broken buttons and pieces to make a mosaic.

Grace isn't about having a second chance; grace is having so many chances that you could use them through all eternity and never come up empty. It's when you finally realize that the other shoe isn't going to drop, ever. It's the moment you feel as precious and handmade as every star, when you feel, finally, at home for the very first time.

Grace is when you finally stop keeping score and when you realize that God never was, that his game is a different one entirely. Grace is when the silence is so complete that you can hear your own heartbeat, and right within your ribs, God's beating heart too."

This post is linked to today's Saturday Review of Books.

Poetry Friday: In the Elementary School Choir

I love Gregory Djanikian's poems, and have posted several before. (Here, here, and here.)

The poem I've chosen for today is about where home is, and about feeling at home in a place that isn't where your family originally came from. I know a lot about this subject from personal experience, having lived in several countries, and I have students who know all about it too. I love the way Djanikian describes himself in choir, singing the quintessentially American songs but conjuring up mental pictures for himself which are quite different from what the lyricists intended.

In the Elementary School Choir

by Gregory Djanikian

I had never seen a cornfield in my life,
I had never been to Oklahoma,
But I was singing as loud as anyone,
“Oh what a beautiful morning. . . . The corn
Is as high as an elephant’s eye,”
Though I knew something about elephants I thought,
Coming from the same continent as they did,
And they being more like camels than anything else.

And when we sang from Meet Me in St. Louis,
“Clang, clang, clang went the trolley,”
I remembered the ride from Ramleh Station
In the heart of Alexandria
All the way to Roushdy where my grandmother lived,
The autos on the roadway vying
With mule carts and bicycles,
The Mediterranean half a mile off on the left,
The air smelling sharply of diesel and salt.

Here's the rest of the poem.

And here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Links

Some good reading:

A friend sent me this blog post on the earthquake. It's a repost of what Tim Challies posted on January 14th, 2010, along with some updated thoughts on the anniversary.

"A year ago, two days after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, I took a stab at suggesting what the late Neil Postman, the author, media theorist and cultural critic, might have to say about it. I suggested that this earthquake was an example of the kind of news that surrounds us today—news that elicits emotion from us, but news we can really do nothing about. In the end, news like this is often barely distinguishable from entertainment to us."

He goes on to talk about what we can do about a disaster that we hear about on the news.

Here's Tara's beautiful post for BlogHer. An excerpt:

"The hours, days, and weeks that followed the earthquake felt entirely surreal to us. It reminded us of the movies where things that don't make any sense happen and where story lines don't always match up with reality. On one corner bodies, were being stacked by the dozens for mass removal, and on another people gathered to pray, sing, and thank God for sparing them even as multiple aftershocks shook the ground violently."

Dr. Jen has been doing "one year ago today" posts, based on her journals, photos, and memories of medical relief she did after the earthquake. (The link is to her whole blog, and I know I have already linked to individual posts, but Jen's calm, clear-eyed, compassionate descriptions are really something special.)

Normal

Life in Haiti is far from being back to normal. There are still tent cities everywhere you look, though there have been buyouts going on recently, where people are given a sum of cash to leave the tent city. There are still destroyed buildings, some of which look as though nothing at all has been done to them since January 12th.

And yet, there seems to be a new normal, the new normal everyone was talking to me about this time last year. They said that Haiti would find it, and that so would I.

Haiti's new normal isn't acceptable. People can't continue to live this way indefinitely, and yet that is exactly what I fear will happen.

But in my own life, I am definitely starting to see a new normal. I commented to a friend yesterday that I am getting annoyed with my students again, and that in a strange sort of way, this feels like progress. I'm getting back to normal.

Of course, getting back to normal is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because nobody can live forever on the kind of intensity that I've been experiencing to varying degrees since January 12th, 2010. The deep pain, grief, and loss were devastating, and the deep love, joy, and gratitude were wonderful, but at both extremes, the strong emotions were exhausting. A couple of times I used the image of a sunburn - that's how it felt, that extra sensitivity to everything because your skin is burned.

And, of course, it's a bad thing - this getting back to normal - because I don't ever want to forget completely the huge appreciation for everyone and everything that I have experienced since the earthquake, the intense awareness of pain and suffering around me, the deepened love for the people God has put in my life. I want my new normal to include the lessons that the earthquake taught me, that life can be gone in a second, that we should let others know what they mean to us every chance we get, that God is very near.

Ordinary. I longed for it last winter. I appreciate it still. But it has to be a new normal. I can't ever forget that the earth can move, that life is heart-breakingly precious, that people are there to be loved.