Thanks!

Ok, not to overdose on this "spirituality" theme I seem to have stumbled on, but there's a poem in a book I am reading and it completely speaks to what I've been thinking about recently. There's something so perversely beautiful about Bangladesh, which this poem reminds me of. Our street is lined with green trees dotted with pink, yellow, and red flowers, but below them on the road there are dumpsters that overflow with smelly trash, and brown dirt everywhere, and moldy white washed walls. I can't help but love it all, and find it all beautiful... somehow. And I find myself giving thanks for it, despite how crazy and perhaps even wrong that might seem. Maybe "thanks" isn't in order, but somehow I always seem to find myself saying it.

So I don't usually have much patience for poems, but I just can't help but love this one:



Listen
with the night fallingwe are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridge to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the back of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks that use us we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

                                                 --W. S. Merwin

Sugar-free Spirituality?

If you’re not Muslim, being in Bangladesh during Ramadan, or Ramazan, can feel like an exercise in guilt. No eating in the street, and even in the restaurants or cafes that remain open, you can expect to feel a little bit scrutinized. For a hypoglycemic like me, the unacceptability of eating or drinking in public means a certain level of lightheadedness and dizziness is often around the corner. I tend to rush home desperately to have my lunch, wondering in amazement how people last another five long hours until Iftar, the breaking of the fast.

Ramazan has had other impacts on me besides just wreaking havoc on my blood sugar. It’s gotten me to think a lot about the things we do out of belief, and the ways in which the physical realities of food and our bodies play a role in our spiritual life. Because I find the typical Muslim fast – no food and water during daylight, followed by a large, heavy meal after nightfall – to be highly unhealthy, I decided to engage in my own fast of sorts: a fast from refined sugar, which tends to make me crash about half an hour after eating, and generally just feel like crap.

I will admit that this “fast” was not undertaken with religious purposes. However, as the days rack up, I’m realizing that in my own way, this is something of a spiritual undertaking to me. Because really, what could be more spiritual than honoring and caring for what God gave me? The more I think about it, putting sugary shit into my body feels like a sin. Same goes for hydrogenated oils, fried gunk, and other things that were never meant to enter a human digestive system.

I also believe that I’m experiencing spiritual rewards by abstaining from refined sugar. At the beginning of this fast, I experienced huge cravings, but I refused to cave. And now that they’ve subsided a bit, I feel the clarity of mind that I never know when I’m experiencing sugar cravings. But mostly, I feel glad to know that I’m extending the life that I was blessed and lucky enough to have.

What's This?

I've decided to write a blog. I don't know how often I'll post, and I don't know how interesting the posts will be. But it's something I've wanted to do for a while now, so let me take a few paragraphs and do my best to explain why...

Ask me to shake your hand those days, and I might have hesitated a split second or two. It’s not that I’m a germ-a-phobe. Quite the opposite, actually, as my sister would tell you – I’m one of those drink-the-milk-straight-from-the-carton types. It’s actually that those days, toward the end of last semester, my hands were so chapped that I would have been hesitant to offer them up to you for judgment. I know after our palms had barely met that I would remain, ingrained forevermore in your mind, as “the girl with the really dry hands.”

Call me paranoid, but that is not an exaggeration. My hands were beyond papery. It actually almost reached the point of sandpaper; they looked like they’d lived sixty years longer than the rest of me. In order to attempt to salvage the last remnants of youth, I tried slathering my hopelessly chapped hands with some sort of banana hand cream I found in the medicine cabinet. It didn’t seem to work very well, but maybe my hands were just vastly beyond hope.

Throwing pots sure can take a toll on your hands, I learned. I learned a couple other things as well last semester in The Potter’s Wheel. How to make a teapot from a hunk of earth, being another one. I think, however, that what I gained last semester amounts to a bit more than some severely chapped hands and a shelf of doubtfully constructed ceramics.

In the studio, the hours pass effortlessly. An hour spent stuffed into a seat in Sci 101 may pass at snail’s pace, but in the ceramics studio, I glance up after hours and realize it’s already time to clean up and head to lunch. My thinking seems to slow down in the studio, which is maybe why time seems to pass so slowly. One thought, instead of leapfrogging into another tangential thought, hangs in my mind; it dawdles, sips a cup of tea, lingers for a while. Perhaps that’s why time moves so seamlessly in the studio -- instead of my usual hyper-speed leapfrogging from topic to topic to yet another topic, I watch the thoughts drift in and out of my mind.

I really enjoyed thinking in this way. Instead of feeling like I was desperately clinging to the caboose of my train-of-thought, I felt like I was detached from my thoughts rather than part of them, and I could stroll around, examine, assess, critique and criticize them. It was eye-opening. Instead of being a slave to my thoughts, whims, and ideas, I felt outside of them and thus able to properly assess them.

Another thing I love about ceramics is that it is so often a physical release. I spent my time in the studio scraping clay out of a big plastic-lined trashcan with my fingertips, wedging balls of it on the canvas-covered tables, smacking it into balls, slamming it onto the wheel, whacking it into the wheel’s center. No wonder my shoulders would ache after a long day in the studio, and nerves in my back would pinch against each other in painful reminder of the morning’s work.

For such a violent sport, though, you make such delicate things. That's another thing I love about pottery: you need a combination of harshness and gentleness. You need to be able to throw your whole body’s weight against that clay, but you also need to know when to lay off the pressure. You need to know force and delicacy; it’s all about the balance. And there’s something so perfect that happens when you throw a perfectly centered pot. When it’s centered in just the right way, you feel the clay move up with your hands almost effortlessly. Perfection... the universe is in order. You’ve achieved domination over this hunk of clay, you’ve gotten it to do exactly what you wanted it to do. It’s an incredibly satisfying feeling. That process of taking a mass of senseless stuff and shaping it into something beautiful and meaningful - not through brute force, but by controlled effort - is also to me what writing is about. I love doing this with pottery, and I love doing it with writing.

With this blog, I'd like to take some of my thoughts and slow them down to a ceramics class pace: allow them to wiggle and settle, and give my thoughts the time of day necessary to making any cogent conclusions about the world. I'd also like to practice some of the violent delicacy needed to making any good piece of art: I'd like to mash some ideas up, slam them around, shove at them from all directions, and then whittle at them gently until only the sleekest, smoothest ones remain. I'd like to separate my thoughts from myself in the same way that I was able to in the studio. So I'd like to make this blog an attempt at a moreartistic and contemplative way of thinking, and I'd also like to make it an attempt at working something beautiful out of the everyday.

So here's to clay-coated fingers, as I knead away at this big lump of clay!