Reflection is as familiar as breathing when your in an season that’s “ending”.
…transition
…change
…shufflings
Where have you been?
Where are you going?
What are the contours that have molded you and led you here?
Like water molding the hardest stone,
you have been shaped by those movements
…altered by their constancy.
Sputtering around this city as I do,
my mind has returned to those days when I was little and used to say to myself with that child-like cocky assurance
I want to live in Vancouver at some point – I think I’d love it.
- as if all I had to do was speak it and it would happen.
And as I see these city-scapes, water views, mountains, horizons, people, coffee shops, neighbourhoods, streets and corners of this city
I am entirely shocked.
I stand dazed and stuttering because
…well
here I am.
I have had the privilege of living here; in a place I’ve always wanted to spend time in.
I’ve been able to study at a school I’ve wanted to attend since 2002.
What do you do when you realize your walking in the places you’ve always wanted to walk?
When your living the dream (so to speak)
So dazed and stuttering these past 4 months I’ve walked around in awe – like this place has materialized out of thin air.
I am so very grateful to be here, to have been here.
I hold my dreams with a degree of reverence now,
as if any one of those innocently spoken cocky sentences I utter like
“I want to drink tea in every nation on the globe”
or
“I want to live in ________ (fill in the blank)”
or
“I want to translate the bible for random dialects in far off corners” AND
“own my own tea house” AND
“own some land with a cottage and some goats”
just might materialize in front of me.
just might become touchable and liveable
just might take shape and have life and colour.
I don’t verbalize my dreams as frequently as I did when I was little – because more than once now in this small little life of mine I have experienced them taking shape before me, I have found myself in the midst of the very things I’ve always dreamed of doing.
Something both terribly exciting and awfully terrifying.
And so this stunned and sputtering little raeh feels a little shell-shocked – again
and is attempting to learn the balance between dreaming big and child-like – with joy and excitement at all the possibilities of a good, caring and joyful God – and recognizing the boundaries of this world I live in. I am beginning to realize again the courage it takes to joyfully embrace this gift of life and run forward like a carefree child who trusts in the one who says He’s watching out for her.
I am in awe of the creativity of God to move around those things we think are obstacles and His capacity to do the new, the vibrant, and the good in the midst of them.
This lack of posting is driving me nuts.
Completely nutter.
I have ideas in a zillion directions and none of them have substance.
There are photos to post,
poems to write,
stories to elaborate,
theology to muse over,
life to update,
and media to quip over…
I have about 8 posts half written just sitting there.
I come back to them, scrap some, edit others, restructure and reorder.
But none of them are ready to post.
I am satisfied with none of them,
none of their efforts.
Of course yes – I have an unbearable slant towards perfectionism,
and so blogs never “cut it”.
But these are exceptionally lacking.
In other news…I am on my third way through Hunger Games.
it remains incapable of being read slowly.
The movie comes out on Friday and I am having trouble reigning in my excitment.
They have been teasing us fans with small scenes being released.
Have you seen Donald Sutherland as President Snow?
I mean – freakin’ pitch perfect.
And all the still photos from scenes not in the official trailers,
And if you have read all the books *sqeeee*
the things that are coming…
so.
excited.
…hurry up and get here Friday.
As it has been obvious – I’ve not blogged much lately.
Truth be had I’ve not written much of anything lately.
This is never really a good thing in my life.
I will always have a soft spot for writing.
It was one of the first ways I began to explore the depths.
I am finished.
I have completed my Masters Degree.
I still cannot believe it.
All my excuses for not blogging are now gone.
It used to be because all my “writing” energy went to assignments,
…all my energy in general went to school.
Extra time was spent in the fetal position trying to recover.
It’s a tough slog this full time studies thing.
But now I’m finished.
The degree is over.
The tornado has passed and I’m left standing at the edge of the winds.
Slightly unsure of what to do next.
Breathe?
Move?
Blink?
I am still in recovery mode,
I have been shocked how much this journey has tuckered me out,
….completely tuckered out.
And yet,
there are musings of all shapes and sizes that have been tugging at my soul
there are many levels of life to process, past present and future.
there are shades of reflections I need to pay attention to.
Of course this kind of reflection and processing is something that is going to be happening in waves throughout the rest of my life – and I’m grateful for that – grateful for those layers of reflection that come again and again.
Ive been given a challenge to start writing again.
I will attempt to step up to that challenge.
So there may be more blogs in the near future.
Just a heads up…
Since high school I always wanted to live in Vancouver.
It was a city I had a hunch about, a place I thought would fit well with all the varied things I love.
When I finally moved here I was so very happy to discover that my feelings were bang on.
I love this city.
I could see myself never moving – I would love to live here long term
Of course – all the great cities are the most expensive
(boo)
Now that school is quickly at its end I am faced with the “what next” decisions.
It’s a blend between what I need to do and what I want to do and trying to strike that balance.
It is strange thinking that I might have only a short amount of time left in this city,
that circumstances may take me elsewhere,
that I simply may not be able to afford to live here.
On the other hand circumstances may provide me with a longer stint here – the point is I don’t know.
And that’s ok.
I’m learning to let that be ok.
In the meantime – I will enjoy every minute I have in this city.
Many of you who stop here and actually know me you might know (or have guessed) that I like to read.
It doesn’t have to be a specific kind of read per se, just a good read. You would also know that I haven’t done any book reviews on this blog (I don’t think ever). There isn’t really a significant reason for this – it’s simply that I am a rather large believer in letting people experience the power of a story for themselves. Too much said – even in attempts to be objective and even handed – tends to taint a persons view and set them in a mood before they even begin.
I think good authors gather you up, welcome you in, and unfold their world before you.
With all that said,
I’m about to do a book review of sorts.
*gasp*
Coming home from this holiday season I had a 17hr Greyhound trip through the mountains
(read pain, discomfort, beautiful view, snow, ice, and random crazy people etc…)
So to pass the time – I read a few books.
Having devoured the Hunger Games Trilogy I was reunited with a genre that I forgot I liked (fiction aimed at a Jr High audience). From the moment I began hearing of this story however, it was almost always mentioned in tandem with another book – Graceling by Kristin Cashore.
After avoiding this book for ages – I finally bought a nice cheap Kindle copy and this was what I read while couped up on a Greyhound for so long. It’s a smallish book and an easy read (as it’s aimed at Jr high) so the first 6 hours of the trip were reading – the last bit was me realizing – annoyingly – that I couldn’t quit thinking about the book and was still worked up about it.
Hence the post.
I didn’t like it.
It is hard for me to say that so definitively – I almost always find parts I like, that work well, and so rarely feel so strongly.
I think the reason my feelings are so strong are because the author messed with such a foundational thing – the story. Cashore was doing great until about 3/4′s of the way through when suddenly I’m reading with furrowed brows, “huh?”‘s, and “whoa, what?”‘s – and having to re-read paragraphs because I am certain I must have glanced over a sentence that would liberate my confusion.
Lo and behold – no sentence missed – and suddenly we are at the end of the book and I’m reading only because I’m hoping the author will pull it together somehow, throw a paragraph in that will make the confusion make sense. Even the epilogue didn’t resolve – well anything.
And so the book ended,
and I sat frustrated,
wanting to find a pen and correct it, fill the gaps, re-write that whole last half of the story…
What got under my skin was that she didn’t stay true to her story – her world. When you are writing fantasy, fiction, or anything that is not based in what we all know and experience – you have to create the laws, the boundaries, the structures of that world. The world can be entirely foreign to anything readers know – and a good author – will be able to not only present the world before you, but draw you in and make you feel a part of it. They write in such a way as to make the unfamiliar familiar.
This is why I love fiction so much – because it is the familiar cloaked in the unfamiliar. Cashore lost me because she threw too sharp of a curve (more than once and way to close together) and it lost its grip, it had no traction in the world she had created. In a matter of paragraphs it felt like everything she had spent time building – slid and crashed into a pile.
And to make the crash all the more prominent – she didn’t adequately resolve the important areas that needed resolving. As a reader, I found myself longing for resolve, for something to make sense of how things could suddenly crash in such grand proportions. It wasn’t intended ill-resolve either, where you are meant to feel unsettled when the story finishes…
Instead – the books hangs like an unfinished sentence.
Like she was intending to make it at least 10 chapters longer and instead surprise – WHAM – you have 2.5 chapters to wrap it ALL up – and she fails. She fails at pulling it together and wrapping it up.
It’s too bad because the premise is great and I think has SO much potential if it were in the hands of a good authour; one who could take the time to really develop the rich bits, spend time with the characters properly, round them out and let them breathe. It is like she focused on all the wrong parts; developed insignificant areas that lead to nowhere and missed entirely the parts that deserved to be fleshed out.
Instead your left feeling like it was a great idea but far too rushed writing, someone trying to cash in on the success of Hunger Games while the theme is hot, and a book that feels un-edited, and written with barely any attention given to the parts that actually matter.
It’s too bad,
and so I will continue re-reading the Hunger Games Trilogy – again.
What have you been reading lately friends?
