projects & discoveries

A friend asked me recently, "What are you into right now?" And my honest answer was, "Projects."

It might sound kind of silly, but my hope is that by re-learning how to dream little-- and some of these projects are really little-- I'm finding my way to dreaming bigger.

Here's what I think: Dreaming about our lives and what we can accomplish in them is a gift. It is our own form of creation. It shows that we have the imagination to travel beyond our circumstances into something not yet concrete, the confidence to actually believe our idea can be achieved, and the courage to begin pursuing it-- even though the path is rarely well-marked.

There's usually an element of fear in committing to, and following, an idea or a hope: As all these little projects keep reminding me, every dream requires a bit of daring. I keep finding my thoughts following the same well-worn path:

I don't know how to start.
Or keep going.
There are no instructions.
I don't know how everything will turn out.
I can't see the finished product up front.
How will I know if it was worth all my time, effort, and worry?
What if it ends up being a waste?
What if I can't do it?

Most starting points seem overwhelmingly insufficient when contrasted against the final vision in our minds. But really...you can't be too afraid to lay one brick because it's not yet a house. You don't have to accomplish everything at once, or even know how everything's going to happen. You just have to be willing to take a series of calculated and not-so-calculated risks, the first of which is the first step. Just start. Then try something else. Loving the process-- beginning, continuing, exploring, resolving, persisting-- allows you to discover your own competence and imagination, to discover things you didn't know you held within yourself. So much of dreaming is about just deciding that whatever you end up with, taking that risk and that journey was worth it.

So...onward, to more projects.

thoughts and questions: thomas merton

"I cannot make good choices unless I develop a mature and prudent conscience that gives me an accurate account of my motives, my intentions, and my moral acts.  The word to be stressed here is mature.  An infant, not having a conscience, is guided in its "decisions" by the attitude of somebody else.  The immature conscience is one that bases its judgments partly, or even entirely, on the way other people seem to be disposed toward its decisions.  The good is what is admired or accepted by the people it lives with.  The evil is what irritates or upsets them.  Even when the immature conscience is not entirely dominated by people outside itself, it nevertheless acts only as a representative of some other conscience.  

The immature conscience is not its own master.  It is merely the delegate of the conscience of another person, or of a group, or of a party, or of a social class, or of a nation, or of a race.  Therefore, it does not make real moral decisions of its own, it simply parrots the decisions of others.  It does not make judgments of its own, it merely 'conforms' to the party line.  It does not really have motives or intentions of its own.  Or if it does, it wrecks them by twisting and rationalizing them to fit the intentions of another.  That is not moral freedom.  It makes true love impossible.  For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another.  If my heart does not belong to me, how can I give it to another?"

triple scoop of salmonella, please

I pretty much bake to eat the dough. The cookies are a welcome by-product.

So once I had an image in my mind while daydreaming one day about what kind of cookies (read: dough) to make when I got home (how to choose?!), I had to make it a reality. Not just because a triple scoop of cookie dough on a cone would be cute and semi-innovative (and, okay, semi-gag-inducing), but because who wouldn't want to smoosh together all their favorite kinds of dough in a delectable little sampler?

Behold: the cookie dough cone ((c) to me as of now).

(This one features, from the bottom up, a tuile cookie cone, chocolate-toffee cookie dough, peanut butter-oatmeal-chocolate chip dough, and cakey chocolate-chip cookie dough.)

Now taking orders.

winter bed

I ran with leaves down the sidewalk

as the sky turned from burnt grey

toward a melancholy marigold.

The tulips had been waiting inside since September;

"double early," they're called,

but I've been running late.

The soil needed turning.

The shovel scraped and then sank,

revealing glistening crystals of frost

in what would become 

my tulips' bed.

In the wind, the bulbs' papery skin

flaked off like an onion,

and my fingers froze

in waxy gloves of soil.

I knelt, 

nestled those ivory bulbs

into their dark winter beds

and crumbled more cold earth

over their heads.

When they rise in the spring,

will they remember the early evening

when the wind and the leaves

sang them to sleep?

reverse resolutions

1. Gain more weight.
2. Watch more TV.

These are seriously resolutions I've heard people making this year! I love how counterintuitive they are.  They've been a good reminder to me not to take myself so seriously. What's the harm in making a goal to loosen up a bit? (Or in just having a laugh at ourselves?) So, my question is...
If you were to flip this New Year's tradition on its head, what would your reverse resolution be?

Here are some ideas:
- Spend more time on Facebook
- Work out less
- Neglect a few more basic housekeeping duties
- Put off taking the GRE a few more years
- Eat more carbs
- Be a little less punctual
- Take fewer photos
- Lose touch with old friends
- Play it safer

Have fun! (Seriously.)

and the hippo was allergic to magic

Just brushing up on my French and admiring this little girl's imagination!

"A story by Capucine, starring baby monkeys lost in frightening trees, a witch, crocodiles, a tiger, a "popotamus" and a lion, and even a "tremendously very bad mammoth". There are also magic powers and an orange ring, but sometimes, 'something goes amiss'."



Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

slumdog millionaire

This is my longest post to date, and it includes spoilers and some alliteration. If you decide to read the whole thing, thanks and please do let me know what you think.  (And whoever finds the alliteration first wins some home-baked cookies.)

--

This movie has made me ask a lot of questions, and I've only written about two of them so far (and incompletely, at that).  One question that lingered in my mind at the end of the movie was about the main character, Jamal:

How did he preserve his innocence?

What is innocence? Is it being unacquainted with evil? Or unpersuaded by it?
Is it still believing in the good despite being surrounded with bad?

Here's some of what I saw in the movie:

Jamal wouldn’t let himself be wronged by people who sought to wrong him, or by those who carelessly tread on him. He knew what he deserved, and he didn’t let anyone tell him otherwise.  

But he didn’t seek more than he deserved, either.* He didn’t care whether he won the money or not. He didn’t protect it fiercely, or fear losing it, as though it were already his; he also didn’t give it power over him by getting frustrated or angry with himself when he didn’t know the answers. His sudden arrest didn't sway him to lose, nor did his sudden fame sway him to win.  And he didn’t seek revenge on those who tried to hurt him, wrong him or lead him astray: he simply refused to submit to them. Neither tricks, taunts, nor threats caused him to question his own worth or intelligence.

He understood the way the world worked, but he didn’t work that way.
He was not innocent, but he was blameless.  

(* I'm thinking about what I saw of his adult life in the movie...I think as a child, he did let satisfying his need turn to greed a few times.  Although I have a lot of questions about the line there, too.)

In the shadow of my first question is this thought.

I wonder what I would have done.  

Would I have offered to be wounded instead of my brother? How far out the train would I have leaned to save my friend?  Would I have said I cheated?  Would I have cheated?

Which brings me to why I love movies like this one. Movies that place us in those situations over and over again stretch us, make us use muscles that we haven’t ever had to use before, even if only empathetically. It seems silly, but it reminds me of nights when I’ve gone to see a ballet and, walking out of the theater, I feel awakened both deeper inside and further out into my limbs than when I walked in. Why? Because with each movement of the dancer, there’s been a yearning inside of me to move like that.  And behind that, a question: You were made just like me. Can you move like this? Why don’t you?

Can I live like that? Why don’t I?