There's a stretch of sidewalk that passes by the Korean Supreme Court on the way to my school that I walk every day (M-F). It's lined with evergreens, and more importantly the detritus of their shed needles, worn away, eroded from the towering pines, creating a carpet of brown needles elevated above the sidewalk by a rising wall with a barricade of sorts, undoubtedly designed to keep the debris from the busy pedestrian and adjacent street traffic. On days when the rain is held at bay, and the wind coming down the gentle grade is not too severe, I can catch the scent of dying decaying needles and every time I recollect an era of childhood that I've forever associated with that wonderful aroma.
It's odd that dying evergreens remind me of the beach, but when I was young we used to visit a family cottage at Wasaga Beach on Georgian Bay. The path we walked to get to the water was a mix of sand and evergreen needles, being lined with pines, and always held that distinctive smell that I've cherished ever since. I have a scar on my knee from kneeling on glass at that beach, and so when I walk this busy Seoul sidewalk to work, and chance to smell the beach, I think of kneeling on a shard of glass too. Still the pain is gone, and only the memory of warmth, sun and sand remains in the recollection.
I've been thinking a lot about other memories. Some less pleasant, most... all, and because of that fact, I'm wondering why I can't duplicate that same experience with the evergreens and the beach to the other blessings I've enjoyed in life, abundant as they are. It struck me that most of my most vivid memories include some manner of trauma. Even the beach with the physical scar has that association, but the scar has lost its significance, and only the joy remains. I wonder if I can, in time, expect the same of the other scars, visible, or not so much, to simply point the way to the joys that led to their making, and forget the pain that still seems, at times, more potent than the pleasures.
Ideally, I'd like to have the pleasures to cherish without the suffering... but the propensity of traumatic recollection makes that seem less likely, unless of course I can find a means of obtaining traumatic joy, getting absolutely wrecked by happiness, and make the two the same. I don't want to sound masochistic. I'm not. I think most times that I have that in my realm of experience already, it will just take a little more time to see it because I keep picking at the wound. If I could leave the things alone, let them heal, I'd see that I've been more traumatized by the joys than these insignificant bumps and bruises profess.
Ultimately, I'm not driven by a desire for instances of momentary happiness, however repeatable or frequent they could be, but a deeper sense of peace, fulfilled purpose, and joy. The differences may be semantic, but I'm not going to get into meanings and definitions now, just know that I differentiate between the transience of a moment and the knowledge of enduring eternal elements.
That's all for now... time for class.
- Foster
Sunday 31 May 2009
Wednesday 27 May 2009
Fruits of Labo(u)r: Musings and Writings from Lessons on Metaphor
Since these stem from the previous post I figured I'd put them here before transcribing them to my writing blog... after cleaning them up a bit. Enjoy!
Lesson 1:
The sparkling flower in the vast garden grows
In the darkest soil, shining bright,
Longing for a corner to share the light
With other plants planted in circling rows.
It feels too far from the nurturing stream,
The milky way that flows forth with life,
Where so many grow free of the strife
One suffers in the solitude of a dream.
The sparkling flower just longs to be picked
To grant a fellow dreamer's wish,
Perhaps an aphid in a distant place
Corralled with too many teeming mixed
Could be tricked into trading places with
The furthest glimmer it can see in this space.
Lesson 2:
This is an odd bird. She cannot fly. Instead of wings she has eight legs and hangs in stasis from invisible threads she has woven together to build her nest. Her silken home holds friend, foe and food, all together, and often the same. This bird's simple song is translated from silence to sing a Bard's verse;
"What's in a name?"
Lesson 1:
The sparkling flower in the vast garden grows
In the darkest soil, shining bright,
Longing for a corner to share the light
With other plants planted in circling rows.
It feels too far from the nurturing stream,
The milky way that flows forth with life,
Where so many grow free of the strife
One suffers in the solitude of a dream.
The sparkling flower just longs to be picked
To grant a fellow dreamer's wish,
Perhaps an aphid in a distant place
Corralled with too many teeming mixed
Could be tricked into trading places with
The furthest glimmer it can see in this space.
Lesson 2:
This is an odd bird. She cannot fly. Instead of wings she has eight legs and hangs in stasis from invisible threads she has woven together to build her nest. Her silken home holds friend, foe and food, all together, and often the same. This bird's simple song is translated from silence to sing a Bard's verse;
"What's in a name?"
Monday 25 May 2009
Nuclear Tests, Swine Flu, Immunity, and Teaching Metaphor to Children
I just heard that North Korea has been performing underground nuclear tests and that most of the world is not all that happy about it. Perhaps I should watch the news more, but I doubt it. Anyways, Obama's miffed, South Korea's a little perturbed, and I'm sure other countries care to some degree, they're just not mentioned on the MSN homepage hotmail sends me to when I logout.
Still, at the school, the nuclear tests haven't been raising as much concern as the swine flu epidemic. Evidently a few foreigners have brought a resurgence of the dreaded disease into the city not a few massive blocks from where I teach, and since foreigners do nothing but fornicate and languish in each others' sordid, endemic, parasitic hovels or the equally infested hangout hotbeds of diseases frequented in our spare time, we've become greater pariahs of late. So until further notice we're being subjected to daily temperature checks, have been issued filtered face masks, and it's been recommended to us that when we're not at school we confine ourselves to our apartments. The jokes on them though, I've pretty much been doing that anyway.
It not all bad, however; I've been working on a new story idea and this little hysteria has played directly into inspirational material for the plot. The working title is "Immunity". I'll let you ponder the rest for now. At least until I get a little further along and post it on my writing blog:
http://fosterink.blogspot.com/ (I'm trying to work more [shameless] plugs in.)
Stuff in the classroom seems to progressing relatively well; by that I mean I'm still working and haven't been fired yet. I've been teaching poetry to third graders for a few classes now... as though poetry isn't hard enough to get in one's native language. Still, I feel like I'm making headway. The word for the day was Metaphor. Since we've already covered imagery, simile, personification, alliteration and rhyme scheme, I figured it was time. One of their worksheets had a list of words that the two kids had to create metaphors for. The first was "star".
"So, I can write, 'sparkling flower'?"
I'd never heard of a sparkling flower so I thought about it for a second. It was a second that ignited a whole conceit! If a star is a sparkling flower, then space can be the garden in which it grows, the milky way the water nourishing it and the other plan(e)ts in the garden's midst. The possibilities were endless. I got excited and tried to share this with the blank faces looking back at me and finally decided that, yes, a sparkling flower would do fine. My writing on the matter is far from over.
From the mouth of babes...
- Foster
Still, at the school, the nuclear tests haven't been raising as much concern as the swine flu epidemic. Evidently a few foreigners have brought a resurgence of the dreaded disease into the city not a few massive blocks from where I teach, and since foreigners do nothing but fornicate and languish in each others' sordid, endemic, parasitic hovels or the equally infested hangout hotbeds of diseases frequented in our spare time, we've become greater pariahs of late. So until further notice we're being subjected to daily temperature checks, have been issued filtered face masks, and it's been recommended to us that when we're not at school we confine ourselves to our apartments. The jokes on them though, I've pretty much been doing that anyway.
It not all bad, however; I've been working on a new story idea and this little hysteria has played directly into inspirational material for the plot. The working title is "Immunity". I'll let you ponder the rest for now. At least until I get a little further along and post it on my writing blog:
http://fosterink.blogspot.com/ (I'm trying to work more [shameless] plugs in.)
Stuff in the classroom seems to progressing relatively well; by that I mean I'm still working and haven't been fired yet. I've been teaching poetry to third graders for a few classes now... as though poetry isn't hard enough to get in one's native language. Still, I feel like I'm making headway. The word for the day was Metaphor. Since we've already covered imagery, simile, personification, alliteration and rhyme scheme, I figured it was time. One of their worksheets had a list of words that the two kids had to create metaphors for. The first was "star".
"So, I can write, 'sparkling flower'?"
I'd never heard of a sparkling flower so I thought about it for a second. It was a second that ignited a whole conceit! If a star is a sparkling flower, then space can be the garden in which it grows, the milky way the water nourishing it and the other plan(e)ts in the garden's midst. The possibilities were endless. I got excited and tried to share this with the blank faces looking back at me and finally decided that, yes, a sparkling flower would do fine. My writing on the matter is far from over.
From the mouth of babes...
- Foster
Tuesday 19 May 2009
The Cube Game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cube_(game)
I must admit, I was a little prepared, not having participated in this exact game per se, but having participated in others like it, and did so with a decided agenda of creating an interesting picture, but which nonetheless led to an interesting introspective interpretation given the games parameters.
Here's the picture:
It's a desert. It's a dry, barren landscape, cracked from years without sufficient moisture, just the occasional deluge of the too-short rainy season, leaving naught but the hardest lives left to endure.
In the middle of this desert is a giant block of ice. It's shaped like a cube, but is melting in the midday sun. Leaning against the southern face of the directionally aligned cube of ice is a ladder, leading to its summit, a mere 12 feet (cubed).
There is a horse, a Palomino, drinking from the melting rivulets pouring down the eastern face.
When the storm comes, a savage sandstorm tearing in from the west, the horse is already mostly sheltered, only needing to take a few cautionary steps back, towards the north, for the cube of ice suffers the brunt of the stinging sands, marring its surface with pits and scars from the windblown erosion.
However, the storm must have blown in a seed from afar, for shortly thereafter, in the filthy hollowed pool formed by the wind and sun in the top of the cube, a seed sprouts a rose. The rose grows by sending it's roots down through the ice, causing great cracks and fissures throughout the matter that sustains it.
In the end the cube doesn't quite resemble the majesty and awe of a pure block of steaming ice in the middle of a desert as it did with the initial image; it is cracked, breaking, shrinking, and falling away, but the rose grows, and the horse drinks.
- Foster
I must admit, I was a little prepared, not having participated in this exact game per se, but having participated in others like it, and did so with a decided agenda of creating an interesting picture, but which nonetheless led to an interesting introspective interpretation given the games parameters.
Here's the picture:
It's a desert. It's a dry, barren landscape, cracked from years without sufficient moisture, just the occasional deluge of the too-short rainy season, leaving naught but the hardest lives left to endure.
In the middle of this desert is a giant block of ice. It's shaped like a cube, but is melting in the midday sun. Leaning against the southern face of the directionally aligned cube of ice is a ladder, leading to its summit, a mere 12 feet (cubed).
There is a horse, a Palomino, drinking from the melting rivulets pouring down the eastern face.
When the storm comes, a savage sandstorm tearing in from the west, the horse is already mostly sheltered, only needing to take a few cautionary steps back, towards the north, for the cube of ice suffers the brunt of the stinging sands, marring its surface with pits and scars from the windblown erosion.
However, the storm must have blown in a seed from afar, for shortly thereafter, in the filthy hollowed pool formed by the wind and sun in the top of the cube, a seed sprouts a rose. The rose grows by sending it's roots down through the ice, causing great cracks and fissures throughout the matter that sustains it.
In the end the cube doesn't quite resemble the majesty and awe of a pure block of steaming ice in the middle of a desert as it did with the initial image; it is cracked, breaking, shrinking, and falling away, but the rose grows, and the horse drinks.
- Foster
Saturday 9 May 2009
Virtual Memory Lane
In nursing my aching back, the result of some bad squats and stubborn practices I should have known better than to adhere to (work through it!), I took a rest day. It was Saturday, so no harm done, but over the past few hours, amidst some light cleaning, some movie watching, television catching up, and writing, I began, and continued, to look through old blogs, letters, emails, posts, writings and whatnot spanning a good ten years or more.
Many of you are remembered often regardless, but it's really amazing to go through moments in time, reading captured thoughts and conversations, contextualized and compartmentalized, that have been such an amusing, amazing, insightful, influential, or otherwise important part of my life past, present and future. Often it's specific advice or notice to a particular time, place or event, but as those are and/or were the events that have shaped who I am, they prove nonetheless as applicable today, even if only to serve the memory they help create. I have some of your engagement/wedding musings, your condolences, your frustrations (concerning me, concerning you, concerning others), your announcements, your encouragements, your correspondences, reactions, news, updates, and other forms of communique tucked away in emails, blog posts, cut-and-pasted tidbits, and of course, recorded in my own recollections, both fictitious and factual, in voices composed or comprised of amalgamations, combinations, permutations, or (un)reasonable facsimiles.
Some made me smile. Some made me think. I'm glad I have them all though, as I'm glad I have all y'all, especially as needed, when needed, and I hope at least at times you can say the same of me.
It's funny how there is little here for me to relate to my past, but I still find ways back. I'm undecided as to the merits or faults that lie in that journey, despite my frequent travels, and I'm sure that those of you who know me best could offer your insight on the subject, but that's another note. This one is a thank you note.
So thanks.
- Foster
Many of you are remembered often regardless, but it's really amazing to go through moments in time, reading captured thoughts and conversations, contextualized and compartmentalized, that have been such an amusing, amazing, insightful, influential, or otherwise important part of my life past, present and future. Often it's specific advice or notice to a particular time, place or event, but as those are and/or were the events that have shaped who I am, they prove nonetheless as applicable today, even if only to serve the memory they help create. I have some of your engagement/wedding musings, your condolences, your frustrations (concerning me, concerning you, concerning others), your announcements, your encouragements, your correspondences, reactions, news, updates, and other forms of communique tucked away in emails, blog posts, cut-and-pasted tidbits, and of course, recorded in my own recollections, both fictitious and factual, in voices composed or comprised of amalgamations, combinations, permutations, or (un)reasonable facsimiles.
Some made me smile. Some made me think. I'm glad I have them all though, as I'm glad I have all y'all, especially as needed, when needed, and I hope at least at times you can say the same of me.
It's funny how there is little here for me to relate to my past, but I still find ways back. I'm undecided as to the merits or faults that lie in that journey, despite my frequent travels, and I'm sure that those of you who know me best could offer your insight on the subject, but that's another note. This one is a thank you note.
So thanks.
- Foster
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