Changes

Last week was an interesting week, introspectively. I feel like it's the start of something great, like a change is on the horizon, but I don't know exactly how the change is likely to manifest, so I've been thinking of a few common changes that I know take place so as to prepare myself for whichever precedent I'm liable to follow.

The Pupa in the Chrysalis: Metamorphosis is not a bad thing, but the process is often slow, delicate, and leaves one vulnerable to attack. The pupa is the interim stage between the caterpillar and the butterfly, when the insect prepares a haven, designed for the twofold purpose of protection from enemies, and privacy for the transformation it is to undergo. Sometimes I feel like the self-imposed isolation I endure is my chrysalis, my cocoon, from which I will soon emerge, transformed.

The Diamond in the Rough: A much slower process, but a much richer exchange wherein, through immeasurable time, coal is compressed, condensed, crushed, with the weight of the world bearing down on it for the wait of the world, into a gem prized for the [supposed] rarity, clarity, and color of the process caused by immense geothermal forces where the greater the pressure borne, the purer the result birthed when unearthed, cut, polished, and set. It could be that I am only beginning to bear a particular burden and that the end ahead is something unforeseen but all the more beautiful for being so.

Changes of State (of Matter): Like ice, water, and steam, all matter has three hypothetical states in which they can exist (or so my limited understanding grasps the concept, though I'm sure there must be exceptions I'm too ignorant to cite, but my last science class was in my early years at Mayfield... so). These changes can happen relatively quickly, and with equal frequency, given the right catalyst for the change to occur, usually heat, or the reduction thereof. I'm not sure if the end result would be a harder or softer me, more or less pliable, I could find arguments for both, and a desire for either, but I'm equally unsure how much the coming metamorphosis has to do with my present, my past, my desires or my needs and least of all what say I'll have in the end manifestation.

There are myriad other illustrations I could use from the changing of the seasons to simply changing one's mind, but I've been waxing wordy lately and your patience is a virtue I don't want to consume too much of here and now. Whatever happens I think the important distinction is to make sure that it is understood that change is a good thing, almost always, but certainly that which I'm anticipating in the days (weeks, months, years) ahead.

- Foster

Don't be alarmed...

I awoke Saturday at about 10 am. I enjoy that I needn't set an alarm on Saturdays, but I try to remain within certain scheduling boundaries so as not to throw myself out of whack and have to make gross adjustments for the work week. I'm up for roughly ten minutes before the air raid sirens sound.

For any who may not know, I'm living in Seoul South Korea for the year, and while I don't pay much attention to the news, there are those around me who keep me dutifully informed to the extent I'm willing to pay attention regarding the goings on in the world, and more specifically, the growing uncertainty of North Korea's "posturing" antics... or so I've understood them to be, so when air raid sirens sound for the first time in six months, given the recent news, it gives one pause. I paused and waited, mildly curious what it would be like to hear a bomb drop, see an explosion outside of my window, or whether or not I'd feel anything during the imminent ordeal.

Questions arose: Do I remember my EMT training? Could I help if I lived? How many could I shelter in this meager abode if the need arose? What's the fallout radius of a nuclear weapon? Can I enlist in the US military from here? WWJD? Am I okay with God?

I found my peace pretty quickly. And with no whistling sounds from overhead, no growing panic in the street, no mushroom cloud on the horizon, the day soon settled into a regular Saturday with eggs for breakfast, a failed attempt to connect with Dad on Skype, a trip to the gym, a Starbucks coffee, and the added bonus of a small get together with some friends from work to look forward to in the evening.

So y'all know, there's evidently little to worry about. I try to live relatively worry-free anyway and find I'm pretty successful, I think largely in part for my willful ignorance of the so-called news. I like good news, which colloquially means either no news, or gospel, so I try to filter information appropriately, but I have it on good authority that there will be days' notice of imminent danger and I have a good US intelligence contact who (without breaking protocols) has reassured us that measures can be taken if necessary to get out of Dodge (Chrysler/Buick/GMC is another story, so I hear).

Anyway, Saturday night culminated in a great dinner, and the uncommon luxury of a game of Life. That's right: Milton Bradley's own!

The game started pretty quickly for me. I raced through college, got a job as a lawyer (as my mother always thought I should) making 90K, picked up my wife, had a kid (a little girl), bought a house, picked up a few raises, met a few risks, and was doing pretty well to the chagrin of my opponents. I quickly became a target, fending off lawsuits (despite my warnings), before succumbing to a few, but still doing my best to uphold certain standards when all of a sudden I spun the spinner, and lost my now 130K career, to become an athlete (I presume a golfer) quickly followed by a financial tailspin of fraternal twins, shared expenses, college funds, tuition costs, refurnishing bills and before I knew it, I was at the end of the game with the losing number: a measly million and change. The winner was the tortoise, as I predicted from the onset when she was miles behind the rest of the board, struggling along, stuck with the ones and twos through college, still single well past others' first and second children, and still I reiterated the fable, and indeed the tortoise beat not only the hare, but all others in the race with a whopping 4.5 mil.

I did some reflecting today on how apt the game of Life can be to our lives if we think about it... rather, if we don't. If we get caught up in the race and struggle to acquire wealth thinking that we'll somehow win if we have the most at the end of the game instead of taking all the experiences we have, the good and bad, and looking at them with the perspective that there is so much more of value than wealth. I really started to think that the "life" I lost with would be a great life, with kids and grandkids and relationships and stories to tell and trials and tribulations and victories and failures on a sliding scale from massive to miniscule, and it served to reinforce a lot of issues and ideas I've been working through over the last few years concerning what this game is all about, and what it means to win. Perhaps I should write ol' Milt, just to say thanks...

I have one last duty today, thanks to a fellow Blogger who "tagged" me (Ronnie at "http://www.ronniekerrigan.com/"), and now's as good a time as any to fulfill the imposition placed in doing so:

Eight things I've always wanted to do (or keep doing):

i. Love someone to the best of my ability for as long as I'm granted the privilege.
ii. Live well.
iii. Write a book, a screenplay, and a song, and see all of them through to their respective points of completion/production, being involved creatively, along the way as much as possible.
iv. Travel.
v. Learn a martial art.
vi. Do a one-armed pull up.
vii. Skydive.
viii. Believe.

Eight Favorite Foods (this is a bad list for me... I'm not sure if I have the liberty to change these parameters, but if not):

i. Communion.
ii. A hearty, healthy, delicious meal with friends and/or family.
iii. A paltry, healthy, delicious meal with friends and/or family.
iv: A healthy meal with friends and/or family.
v: Sustenance with frinds and/or family.
vi. A healthy delicious meal.
vii. A healthy meal.
viii. Sustenance.

Eight Things (I use the term "things" loosely... I'm trying to get over the love of most things) I Love:

i. The idea of Love in the Bible.
ii. Various expressions (ambiguity intended).
iii. Creative use of (the English) language.
iv. Truth in fiction/storytelling.
v. Stories.
vi. Relationships.
vii. Nature (after too much time spent in Urban Centers).
viii. Urban Centers (after too much time spent in nature).

If you've followed this post thus far I applaud you. I'm supposed to tag others, but I won't. I'll just look for others' willful expressions, thoughts, feelings, confessions and such and hope to continue learning a thing or two along the way. If you decide to post something along these lines, let me know. I'll read it.

Cheers.

Traumatic Happiness?

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

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?"

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

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

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