peace
Peace is perhaps one of the most fashionable words seen in our world. It is stamped on gold and silver in bracelets and rings, it is stamped on tee shirts, on posters held in rallies for social justice. To be for peace is in fashion, and yet so often the world seems anxious, stressed, unsure, frighted, fearful and there are more words however I believe I have made my point. As I was sitting in mass this evening, the priest in refering to the gospel spoke of how fear and faith are incongrous with one another. Growing up my mum often would tell us that fear is not of God. And this is true, however it is a constant struggle for me not to give in to fear. I struggle with anxiety disorder and obessive compulsive disorder and sometimes the fear seems more familiar and reassuring than choosing to not be afraid. At this point I am rambling but this past week God has given me a sense of peace, a peace that I know can only come from Him. Because he is the Prince of Peace, and he is the balm of Gilead. To quote one of my favorite hymms, “Peace is flowing like a river, flowing through you and me.”
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My ringtone for the summer has been Lady Gaga’s ”Summerboy” for obvious reasons that I do not wish to disclose, it may involve a person of the male species. I have been laptopless for the past two months since I disabled mine the week before finals, let us just say that binder clips and lcd screens are dangerous when forced into a close embrace with the other. Lesson learned.
So what have you been up to this summer? I am at a loss for this is the first summer I am not living at home in my native Virginia, and oh I miss the city. D.C. you know I love you though I am having a summer affair with W. La! I suppose I should write some reflections on the summer, however I feel I am behind the curves when it come to life lessons, particularly in the ways of that ever popular four letter word that begins with an L. So I am in summer school and I wish we had textbooks because ma cheries, it is rocket science and it is not black and white, but many shades of gray.
Apart from working as a conference staff at the University I have been nannying my professor’s daughters, which has been entertaining and heartwarming. I miss the city because there is a distance from the world within this university, where I see the Iranian uproar on the television screen, and I hear the threats of North Korea through lipsticked mouths. This is our world we are NOT the future, we ARE the present. This is OUR world. As we can see the lazy summer will not last forever and we have to work to keep times peace. It is a time to educate ourselves and take responsibility.
I have to run. I shall try to post soon. Have a beautiful summer!
barbaraanne
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Frank
I love Amy Winehouse’s music, I own both of her albums Frank and Back to Black, though I fear that unless she begins to take care of herself, they may be the last albums she records. I find myself writing easy to her sultry edgy sound as if she turns the keystrokes into silver liquid spilling over the page. I am working on italian homework, currently writing about The Decadent period and Guido Gozzano…which while I love poetry italian poetry gives me a headache at times due to my painful translation skills. The window of our seventh story room is open and it is inky black outside. I love that my huge window looks onto the glass ceiling of the management building, it is my little new york in west la. There are times I wish I lived in the city…where I could wander downstairs at 3:05 and get a cup of coffee and watch the lights that come out at night. But it is quiet tonight and Amy’s voice is all that keeps me company.
My sister gave me Back to Black as a present for my 19th birthday and this album Frank, reveals a different side of the singer. The music and tone is souful and seems to be influenced my the blues and jazz mediums more than the R&B sound. I am leaving for New Orleans on Saturday for Spring Break and I am excited it will be fun to visit the city again, I haven’t been back since August…and I too will see a different side of the city than I did in the late summer. However are not true relationships multi dimensional?
Well I finished my homework and i rather in shock that it is almost 4 am, my biological clock is off…but I shall sign off for now and I hope to update more regularly.
barbaraanne
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Just Dance
Just Dance it’ll be ok…lady gaga croons these words straight into my soul. Sometimes I like to think of my relationship with God like a dance…sometimes we waltz, and sometimes we tango or cha-cha, it all depends on the day or the hour sometimes even the moment. When I sit in front of the tabernacle and there is silence around me and my God, I think of us slow dancing aroud an empty floor to the whispers of angelic wings…and in the Alleluia at mass on Sunday I think of a lively jive. but regardless of how we are dancing he holds me in his arms and sometimes that is all I really need. The conversations are not complex, and there are times when I wish he would tell me specific answers to some of my questions but most of the time it is me rambling and him responding “I know” or “I understand” or most irritatingly of all “You can do it, just keep trying.” Sometimes I feel like I am five and I am begging my Daddy to take the training wheels off of my bike, and he keeps saying “just a little longer” and “someday” and “right now you still need them.” Ironically I shall admit that God is probably right I still need training wheels, I still need the dance lessons.
The root of the frustration is paitence. And accepting that I will never know what tomarrow will bring, as often as I talk about how things must be done in God’s timing, I wish his timing would hurry up. But for now I shall take the words of Lady Gaga and just dance because everything will be ok.
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I am a hippie for God
It’s 2 am and I am in the middle of reading for Milton, however more pressing things are on my mind. Lately my friends have been talking about the specific goal God has for us in mind, a task that he created each of us uniquely so that we could execute it according to his plan. I find it humorous that as much as I love language, language in and of itself can easily become a barrier because there is a bias both on the speaker and reciever. However as one of my dear friends pointed out, in that ambiguity God can work. Again I see more humor. I love poetry and literature and I love my faith, and somehow every paper when I am stuck or miserably failing the word count I begin to talk about my Catholic faith. I begin to talk about love. Love. Since Valentine’s Day is tommarrow love is the air so to say. But love is so much more than candy hearts and red roses. Love is the greatest comandment God gave us. Love him and love our neighbor as ourself. Again in Corinthians Paul tells us if we do not have love, then everything we strive for is meaningless, our words, our actions, without love we are missing the point.
One of my friends in the past called me a hippie in reference to my desire to love people as Christ calls me to love them. And I retorted that hippies did not wear stilettos and therefore I am not a hippie. But more and more I find my self drawn towards being a hippie, because ultimately all we are called to do in this life is fueled by our love for our God and his people. And I say it proudly I am a hippie for God. All I want you to know it that you must love one another, and in loving you will find a beautiful freedom, and I hope you expierience great happiness. It will not be romantic but the joy is indescribable.
barbaraanne
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Humility is Truth
Humility is Truth. This is something that one of my friends spoke that he told me his father often tells us, and tonight I was at a prayer meeting at st. tomas at purdue and another one of my friends referenced this same saying. I believe Saint Teresa of Avila said it first. Humility is Truth. The act of killing a child before it is born in intrinsically evil. The Church does not say that the person is evil, for a sin can only be comitted in the heart, and many women in my expierience do not wish evil but are terrified, stunned, and feel as if there is no hope. These women who have abortions are not villians nor monsters, but individuals who we, as a society need to embrace, because they are hurting. And we are cause for thier hurt if we as men and women remain silent and proud. Humility is Truth. And Christ says the truth will set you free.
I found this poem on a blog I regularly visit and I decided to post it. As a woman, catholic, and poet I found it to be powerful. I hope this brings awareness and healing. My prayers go out to all women, children, and families affected by the lie that killing the unborn child doesn’t hurt. It does.
What I Never Told You About the Abortion
That it hurt, despite the anesthetic,
which they administered with a long needle, shot straight into the womb.
That they hit the vagus nerve the first time and I fell down when I tried to stand.
That after the second shot my legs snapped shut–
instinctively as any wild mother protecting chick, kit, cub.
That I held the hand of a young Hispanic nurse and wept
when she said, “You know, hon, you don’t have to do this.”
That I believed I did, though I nearly got up and left.
That the doctor was crude, saying (when he saw me conscious),
“It’s always the ones who want to be awake who should be put out.”
That dilation and curettage is exactly what it sounds like:
opening, scraping, digging out a scrap of tissue that clings.
That mothers both create and take life. That I crossed a picket line
to get into the clinic. That I wanted to come back another day
but knew if I left then I wouldn’t return. That my mind was not,
as I let you believe made up that night at Planned Parenthood,
the positive lab slip shining in my hand like a ticket to heaven.
That this was where the deep root of sadness began to take hold.
That I stood in our bedroom a few days before the “procedure,”
my blouse open and bra undone, looking at my breasts, marveling
at the way they swelled, even at eight weeks, like fruit I’d never seen,
remembering the rise and fall of my mother’s body as she nursed my sister.
That I felt inhabited then. Incarnate, the cells of my skin glowing,
bright and scared. That I wished we were married, though it seemed uncool.
That I wished you’d said “A baby? Let’s do it!”
instead of “It’s your body. You decide.”
That it was all surgical and neat, not even
any blood afterward on the Kotex that made me feel fourteen.
That I dreamed of it for weeks. That we married years later, that dream
torn between us. That I had wanted to feel the hard bowl of my belly.
That I believed it was practical–you in grad school,
no health insurance, me the one with a job.
That the table I lay on was cold. That there was a poster
of a kitten dangling from a tree limb, with the words “Hang in there, baby”
on the ceiling above me. That I turned names
over and over in my head like bright stones:
Caitlin, Phoebe, Rebecca, Siobhan.
That the nurse wept with me, like some twentieth-century
Southern Californian fate, midwife to death
in her uniform printed with flowers.
That she wrapped my hands in her navy blue sweater.
That I described the thumb-size embryo inside me in all the obvious ways –
shrimp, peanut, little bud-wanting-to-open.
But not baby, never baby.
That I saved the paperwork as proof I’d been admitted
to the college of mothers. That I told you a good story,
letting you believe I believed I might not be able to write with a child,
that this was the beginning of the end of us.
That though we are kind now, and always cordial when we meet,
a decade after our divorce, it is the one thing I cannot forgive you.
That it has taken me twenty years to find words for this story.
That no matter how many thats I write, there are not–will never be–enough.
-Alison Townsend
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It has been a long hiatus since I have written and life has been ridiculously busy and I felt an apathy towards writing in the previous months, but today I tap out words forming sentences once again on my laptop…partly because I am discouraged, I feel to unitelligent to be in my classes this semesters. In Italian I literally do not understand what is being said, haha and in my Milton class, well lets say I have looked so any words such as eschew and contradistinction that I feel as if even my home or shall I say la mamma lingua is foreign to me.
I need a burst of enthusiasm to pump me up for this semesterm, and getting rid of the cold would help too. Only I could manage to get a concussion on my first weekend back at school. However I am excited to be back to the land of high speed internet which = watching The City, Whitney’s show on life working for DVF in NYC. Oh it makes me crave for the city and “bright lights, long nights.” That is all for now chicas…I hope your lives are humming blissfully and I shall hope to write much more this semester.
Nehemiah 8:10
“Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared, for this day is holy to Our LORD; and do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
Ciao!
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The poem is you
erasure poem from John Ashbury’s “Paradoxes and Oxymorons”
Concerned with language
You look out a window.
You have it,
But you don’t have
It.
You miss it.
It
Misses you.
You
Miss
Each other.
It wants to be
Yours.
A deeper thing- dreamed
In the division of grace,
Open-ended,
Lost in the steam and chatter
of typewriters, once more
you exsist only
to tease me
doing it,
on your level
you
have adopted a different attitude.
Set me softly down beside you.
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The last 18 days
Well there is not too much to say on one hand and, and way too much on the other. I am sitting on the caitlin’s floor watching the hills, with my modern poetry anthology and a carryout container of rice. I had the colonoscopy today, let’s just say it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, on the other hand not the biggest fan of drinking gross stuff for these medical tests.
The other week I went out to lunch with a friend of mine here at Purdue, who had suffered with narcolepsy, and he said that sometimes being sick forces you to live in the present, which is not always a bad thing. Do not get me wrong, he is a great friend, but at the moment I feel like being sick robs you of the present. I am frustrated, mostly at myself. I am angry at my body. It is not my fault I have these problems right now. I don’t what to do to fix them except keep trying medicines and now that the tests are finished for now I suppose it is this waiting to see what happens?
I feel like I have no control over what my body does these days, the random falling asleep in class, body twitching in my sleep in class, and it not just the humiliation, I am anxious because, well the work I am turning in isn’t my best, it what my drugged body puts out…which isn’t always intelligable.
I don’t want to go home, I want to finish out the semester, but hate not being excited about my classes, I dread getting out of bed. I am a victim to a terrorist, that lives within my body.
Normally I finish with this cute connection and make everyone feel peppy, but I don’t know what to say. I had high hopes for this semester, and well they deflated with the thought out clothing charts. There are days I fear my hobo look called “rolled out of bed in the sweatpants I slept in” has made frequent appearances.
I guess if nothing else I have learned that do not take for granted your health. Ironically I had a deadline today, I had to send in an article for Helen on Campus, and the title is “The Eight Things Women in thier 20’s Need to Know about thier Health”. I submitted it this morning before going into the hospital and I thought to myself, isn’t it funny that colonoscopies do not make the list? Not really I know.
The one positive thing about today is that when I was confessing to the nurse that I was afraid my bottom was kinda big and not very firm and very white, she laughed and told me it was the best ass she had seen in a long time because most people getting colonoscopies are over 60. Oh let me tell you how wonderful that was!
Second positive thing it there is a new continuation of The Hills!!!! It is Whitney’s story in NYC called The City!!!!!! Airs Dec. 29th!!!!!!!!
Ok this is sad but let me take pleasure in what little I can these days.
Ciao: barbaraanne
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I will be an artist
I am sitting at my desk, and I was just ready to type in the title as “I want to be an artist” but then I stopped myself. Because I don’t want to spend my life wanting to be people, I don’t want to run finger through my hair and stare at a kitchen counter when I am 40 and wonder how I ended up there. I don’t was to rediscover myself at 40 because I don’t want to lose myself. And ironically I already did, and it is now, yes the present moment in which I am going through the process of finding myself again.
So much of myself I buried deep beneath layers of what I thought I should be, and now I am reaching that mid-life crisis of sorts and I want to do what I want to do, and not let the fear of failing stop me. So I am going to buy paints this weekend, and i am going to buy a canvas and I am going to paint. And I am going to not feel guilty but recklessly squeeze the paint out onto my palette, well a piece of cardboard and I am going to take my brushes and dirty them in paint and plunge the color onto the whiteness. I am going to make swoops with my brush if I want to, I am not going to worry about perfection, I am going to take plenty of Xanax and I am going to listen to jazz and laugh, out loud and paint. I will be an artist, I will paint, I will love what I paint and hate what I paint but i won’t stop because I am scared I cannot control the outcome. Because you see that is what I have been doing my whole life, controlling the outcome, and I look around now and wonder how did I get here, to this person who is sick and so this weekend I am going to do something I really really want, even if I feel a little guilty like it is naughty or I should be doing homework. I am going to paint. I am going to be an artist and I am going to be happy and let my soul do whatever it pleases this weekend. And maybe I will take a picture when I am done so you can see it. And I am not making any promises. I refuse to plan a perfect representation of anything, because I am going to let my hand go free and see where it takes me.
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