This is my Painting

I am typically not a good artist at all. So I will say I was just a little worried about this assignment because I knew whatever I painted would not look like I want it too. For some reason I always have these great grand paintings or drawing or whatever in my head, and I go through what I feel will make it become reality on a page, but somewhere in translation things go severely wrong and my final work never looks like what I come up with in my mind. So I knew this would be the some reality for this project.

Once it came to the project though it was different for me because it was more than me just trying to be artistic, it was dealing with me and the text. How I was relating to what passage I was reading. Because of this process it wasn’t just trying to paint a master piece and make my painting the best. Now I would be lying if I said I didn’t want mine to still look good. But I didn’t care as much about what it looked like because I was looking into how it related to the text through my eyes, or my thoughts. I have never done that before. The… For the first time in a long time I was not disappointed in my finial work. I guess it could have been better but It was what I was encountering while I was meditating on the text. It was me. It was the text. I wasn’t trying to be anyone else I was just trying to understand and relate the text in a different way.

I enjoyed it so much I actually plan on doing another painting for one of my blogs because it truly does help you remember it better for one, but I just enjoy that a lot more than just sitting a mulling over a text trying to get as much as possible out of it. Painting give me something to do while my thought are running and thinking and trying to understand the text. It give my thought a vehicle other than using words.

Joel

   Joel was a passage that I had to read very slowly and often read many parts more than once. When it first starts off talking about the locusts and it doesn’t just mention locusts as a whole, there is the gnawing, swarming, creeping, and stripping locust. I never knew there could be so many different kinds. But I though, ok, is this really referring to actual locust or is it a metaphor to something else. Later on in the chapter is leads me to believe that it is actually locust that came and destroyed everything. So did God send them? Because of what? I feel that after reading this maybe there is some history to what was happening or what was going on before this that if I knew it, it would help me understand better this passage of Joel.

   Knowing the history or the background of a text that you are reading really help shape how well you understand what you are reading. I remember back when I read that poem out of the Literary Experience text and how confused I was at who the talk of a bonsi tree was really about the oppression of women. But I remember Professor Corrigan coming up and explain one line to me about “bound feet”. I had the picture of the tree so heavily on my mind that thinking of a tree having bound feet didn’t make any sense to me. But he said so matter-of-factly… Well in the Chinese culture they bound the feet of women so as to keep them from growing. I had learned that so long ago that when he said that it made sense! I feel the same goes for the Bible. There are things that I learned a long time ago but have kind of forgot them but knowledge of what the context is or what their culture was like changes so much of how I understand the Bible. I guess that is why it is important to learn history or read older books because they bring to life what is to follow them.

similes and metaphors...

One thing I love about our class is that we hardly ever just sit there and listen to a lecture. He always has us listening to something, reading something, and doing something hands on. I learn so much better that way, it just seems to open up different parts of my brain and allows things to sink in and stay in. where as listen to a lecture, the words seem to bounce off my brain, never sticking.

He did this hand on learning with the house of cards. In trying and trying to build a house of cards we all saw how hard it was and how much work and focus it took to just build two stories! I don’t know how many times my group tried and how many different ways we tried to just make a full second story, we never really succeeded. But I did succeed in something with the house of cards; I got such a better understanding of what C.S Lewis was referring to when he used that metaphor in his book.

We talked about similes and metaphors in class and I have also been talking about that in another class as referring to the Bible. So much of how Jesus taught was trying to get us to understand divine things through our everyday human activities. I would like to know how many times it is said in the divine subject x is like human understanding y. It is one way we can began to even touch the tip of understanding the divine nature. I think that we need to remind ourselves of this when we are trying to witness to people. So many times we through facts at them like, “your going to hell”, “repent of your sins”, “God is love” “The kingdom of Heaven is near” and so on. We need to go back and see how Jesus taught so often, through stories and parables, or in our words, similes and metaphors.

Luch Talk

I know this is a little late but I wanted to blog on our lunch talk we hade last week. I tend to learn more from conversation type learning as compared to lecture or reading type learning. So having lunch together and talking out the literature we brought was a great experience for me. I sat with Aubrey, Adam, Alicia, and Shantel and we had a good conversation. I will say I was a little worried that conversation would be dead and we would have to ask awkward questions and call on people to answer them. But our conversation actually flew by and went well. I brought a poem from our lit book that was very confusing to me and wanted to talk it out. Thankfully everyone else did not really get it either so I felt better about myself. It was not until professor Corrigan came by and explained it then I got it. Alicia brought some song lyrics that were really good. I think that is where I got one of the best thoughts in my head. Something about literature clicked. The lyrics of that song could apply to different people in different situation and that is what literature is supposed to do. I think I always look for a black and white explanation. I want to know exactly what something means. But one of the beauties of literature is that it is expandable and reaches people on different levels. That conversation can go back and forth and it does not ever really come to one specific conclusion. But rather multiple conclusions that people can see from different angles. Aubrey brought a book that she had been reading that had a very confusing statement about literature that we all seemed to circle around in our mind for a while not really coming to any conclusion, but once again, our good professor came and cleared things up for us. I believe I will ever understand literature like Paul Corrigan does but I do think through this table conversation I took a big step in understand literature and letting go of the desire to understand every text to complete fullness.

Cemetery

I went to the Lakeview, Roselawn and Tiger Flowers cemetery complex for this fieldtrip, and I stayed there for at least 40 minutes. This time made me think about all those people.. what were their lives like. Some of them loved so long ago in such a different time than me, I went with Seth, Sterling and Isaac and some of our conversation we had was about a African American couple that had lived through some major racial oppression. Seth also said that it made him wonder what people would think of him once he died. What a great question to ask yourself and even check yourself. Am I living a life that is meaningful enough? Will I have impacted lives in my lifetime enough to be remembered? Reading the text of Lewis in the Cemetery made the words that he wrote have much weight. It wasn't just reading about death and grief, it was being surrounded by it. I think people often stray from readings about death or going to cemeteries because it is not the enjoyable place to be or things to read. But I think it is good to remind ourselves of the weight of death to sharpen our compassion for those who have lost loved ones and also remind us of the good we have in our lives. Someone once said "how can we know what true happiness is unless we understand the opposite". I don't know if I agree completely with that but I do know that you are far more grateful for things when you think of others hardships or something of your own that you have been through.
The day we went was on the anniversary of 9-11 which gave the field trip even more meaning. To sit and think of all the people who had died and all those who this very day are morning the loss of their loved ones. It just makes you stop in your tracks. I thought of all the children who lost parents and made me give prayers of thanks for my parents still being present in my life. I was glad I could  go and reflect on this specific day to remember what had happened nine years ago that is still effecting the lives of so many today.

Chapter Three: Theme

   It was my freshman year here at Southeastern when I first realize my struggles with going deeper into a text and looking beyond what was just before me. I tend to be a very black and white person. I don’t want there to be any question of what is going on, it is either this or that, no grey area.
   What caused me to notice this inside me was an assignment in my English Comp 2 class. The teacher handed us a photo. The picture was outdoors with a large bridge suspended over a river, next to the river a few feet from the bottom of the bridge was a very run-down shack surrounded by junk. It looked like someone one had been collecting random things thrown on the street or washed up on the river bank and took it back to that shack. The teacher asked us to go and write a one page response about the picture. So I went back and in a few more words described the picture like I just did for you. I went into as much detail as possible, because I didn’t see how I could write one page on this one picture. Somehow I pulled it out. He then asked us to talk about what we wrote, people started talking about how they saw it as the two different levels of society and how the upper class goes rushing by like the cars on the bridge never even noticing the lower class, or one student talked about how they saw it as a gateway into heave and how there was so much hope. Each time someone would say their thoughts I would gaze at the picture in confusion and think, how on earth did they get all that from this picture? That class is where my realization came: I am a very black and white thinker.
   The very same concept happened when I was reading the Piercy poem A Work of Artifice. It talked about a bonsai tree and a gardener and the last bit kind of confused me. The sentence explaining the poem said, “We can all agree that Piercy’s poem is “about” the oppression of women.” We can? We can all agree on that? Because I didn’t get that one bit! The more I thought about it and talked it out with my roommate I began to see how maybe someone could take it that way. Unfortunately I have a long way to go in understanding “theme”.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Love

Love... I believe it is the most universal sought out expression. Just as it was said in class, love and death are the main tension, or the engine of literature. Most all movies we watch have some sort of love in them. Even the manly ones like Braveheart and Gladiator, both of these movies deal with men driven by love, or the death of the ones they love. “Love makes you do crazy things!” Ever herd that one? William Wallace goes about killing tons of soldiers in the revenge of love. He goes against his own conviction about wanting peace and become their leader into war for his love: craziness, all for love. Even now as I have my iPod on shuffle, it’s amazing how many songs come up that are about love. Some are about gaining love, others about loosing it. It’s everywhere! I believe it is this way because we are created in God image and he is the Father of love, we have a spiritual and physical drive towards love. I don't believe the hunger for love is ever truly satisfied until we are in heaven with our Lord. Until that day, we continue to seek out, search for, long for, desire, need, wish for... love. There was a line that stopped me in my reading of this story. When Mel, the one doing most of the talking, says that "it seems to me we're just beginners at love." I think that statement has so much truth in it. When does one fully accomplish love? You hear married couples say all the time that they are more in love then ever before. Do we grow more in love or do we grow more appreciative for what love is and how important it is in our life or how blessed we are to have it in our lives.