Divorce the Dividing Wall

We met Auntie Jude in Canberra, Australia. She is an Aboriginal woman who is fighting for the rights of other Aborigines in the areas of national land, law, and representation. 
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We listened as she told her story through very tired eyes. It was difficult to watch, but so important to hear. 
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A few quotes from what she shared with us:
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“We’ve had 6 generations of genocide.”
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“Our place (Australia) was a perfect place, a beautiful place – a haven.”
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“I don’t want to get sucked into the system.”
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“This is democracy, I suppose. I’m living it – breathing it.”
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“All governments, per se, are just businesses …. Where does the humanity come into it?”
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“Closed doors where the inside dies more …”
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“Divorce the dividing wall.” 

Barnaby Joyce and Bundy on Tap

This post is looooong overdue. These are images from Canberra - our very first group trip with the Australia Studies Centre back in March. I shall make a list of all the important things seen and learned in the capital city of Oz! 
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> The name "Canberra" either means "Meeting Place" ..... or "The Valley Between a Woman's Breasts." There is no way to be sure. I wouldn't worry about it. 
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> The most important thing at the National Portrait Gallery, I gathered, were not the paintings of diplomats or the depictions of Australia's past royalty ... Nope. Two words to make your heart stop: Heath Ledger. I walked by his photograph several times, and there were always at least 10 girls just sort of gazing at the grandeur of his presence. Glued to his demised magnificence. 
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> Senator Barnaby Joyce (Best. Name. Ever.) is excellent at character assessment. He called his opponent, who was playing a game on his iPhone in the middle of their debate, a "Garden Gnome," among other things. 
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> We routinely fit all 28 of us into normal-sized elevators. There was much love. There was also just enough oxygen. 
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> We were told to NOT roll down the grassy green hill that Parliament House is built into, please. No matter how perfect it would be. It is built that way so that people can politely stand on the hill, and be symbols of how the government is never above the people is represents. 
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> Bundanoon, an Aussie city devoid of bottled water, brought to light the possible conspiracy of "Evian," the first company to present the idea of having people pay money for something that is free: Water. "Evian" = "Naive" spelled backwards? Hmmmmmmm-furrowed-brow-of-suspicion.
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> Also, the word "Bundanoon" now officially means "To not drink bottled water" in Flemish. This is key. 
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> Not enough time spent at the Art Gallery of Australia! For those of you who join me in knowing some things about artsy-fartsy stuff, there were pieces by Moholy Nagy, Toulouse Lautrec, Josef Albers, Pollack, de Kooning, and some Rothko, among others. (Some gorgeous Picasso line drawings, too!) 
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> We visited the War Memorial, which is said to rival London's War Memorial. Also, our trip took us to the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (a bit more about that in my next post). 
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To see more pictures of our group, and our time in Canberra, click here. Or visit alessandra-elizabeth.posterous.com.


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Click here to view more pictures.

Gyros and Yoga

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This morning I went to a yoga class with my housemate.  

My favorite part was probably when a neighborhood children’s parade, complete with a drum corps and twirling and Scooby Doo and girls in tutus, stationed itself outside the building just as the instructor talked about getting rid of distractions.

I have been trying to say “yes” more often – to things that are new, and that I haven’t tried before.

Like shrimp.

Like going to a 6am water aerobics class. Like eating lettuce in a gyro. Like wearing a strapless dress.

I have learned all kinds of exciting things over the past few weeks. I’ve learned that, unfourtunately, I am not allergic to shrimp (it has been my silent supplication for years to fall deathly ill from trying it so that I have a legit excuse for turning it down in the future). I’ve learned that grand battements are more satisfying when done in the water surrounded by 70-year-olds. I’ve learned that things are made with the flavors they contain for a reason, and should be eaten as a whole (a gyro with just meat on pita bread is more of just …. a ….. “not-gyro.”) Strapless dresses are only as terrifying as what you’re trying to prove by wearing one. A “Plank” in Yoga is the same as a “Plank” in Jazz … but neither is an excuse for Planking on a moving car or a train or a boat so that your friends in Sydney will think you’re cool.

Also, sometimes you have to kill your boyfriend’s cows. Also, sometimes he will make Mickey-Mouse-shaped pancakes so that you will like breakfast more.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that “yes” is a fun word to say. Sometimes. Most times. If you’re using your noggin’ in saying it. Say “yes” to doing hugs, not drugs. That kind of thing.

Worth a thousand

Yes. I have failed the blog world. It is a fact of life. Like Lysol. 
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SO ..... I will now finally bombard you with the barrage of photos and experiences that have fallen into my scattered life since the last time I posted something. I hope that they might somehow bless you, even if just a fraction as much as how they have blessed me. 
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I will mostly post pictures, since they often speak louder than words. I keep trying to put this past semester into words for those who have asked questions about it - but there are just too many ---- and when I try --- I end up just saying "great" or "awesome" or something equally un-descriptive and lame. 

A mighty graveyard

We have all these ideas, these possibilities for accomplishment and venturing thoughts of dynamic deeds,  that get drawn out of us like ship captains who never come home. It’s as though, for every one action we take, a thousand more potential actions drown, sinking to the depths along with their homeward-bound ships; ideas that often cry out from the sea-floor in ghostly recall, but that will never come to be.

I find myself plagued with ideas. Wonderful ideas – big ones, small ones – that could make of me the most interesting and useful human specimen if I were to follow them all (or the most laughed at, but we will ignore that possibility). I could be noteworthy for my accomplishments in newspaper-clipping collages, my skills of button organization, my strides in language and literature and the making of lasagna. I could be the first to break new ground in operatic singing, and then go on to conquer the realms of bringing belly dance into the forefront of the church. I could write poems of liberation and print them on napkins, then drop the napkins from hot air balloons into the cages of imprisoned zoo animals. I could knit kites, kill roaches, and have better reflexes than a cat’s ninth life. For each one idea I pursue (often to its failing demise), infinite more are lost; however silly, or successful, they might turn out to be.

So many ideas lost. It makes me think of armies strewn about shores; dead to their lives, but deader-still to their possibilities.

We recently spoke in one of our classes about the battle of Gallipoli in WWI, fought in Europe between Australian and Turkish troops. Some of you may not realize that Australia, at the time of WWI, was only just over 100 years old, compared to America’s 500-year-plus history. The first British ships landed in Australia in 1788, compared to America’s wonderful, “In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and the accomplishment found in the signing of the United States’ Declaration of Independence in 1776.

It was said of the Battle of Gallipoli, a battle in which Australia failed miserably, that “A young nation could not afford to lose such men.” This brought out the reality that, in all the lives lost, there were thousands of potential doctors, engineers, agriculturalists, mayors, fathers and brothers and scientists and artists …. Thousands of men who would have been forces of national forward-propulsion for the young country of Australia, and for the lives of those left behind. Thousands of men with ideas, and thoughts, and potential actions that could have changed the history of a place. In response to a European request for more Australian troops to be sent to fight in the war, Billy Hughes, the Aussie Prime Minister at the time, declined, saying, “I speak for 60,000 Australian dead.”

It is a mighty graveyard, the resting place of ideas. 

The image above is from the War Memorial in Canberra. I will write more about the memorial later, but this is a portion of a boat retrieved from the site of the Battle of Gallipoli, riddled with bullet holes. It is eerie to think of what was hit by those bullets after they pierced straight through the shell. 

Garage-sale luggage

This week I had to write a blog post for my Australian Culture class, to be posted on the ASC blog. I chose to do it on the notion of "home." I figured I might as well post it here, too: 
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 It is often our intent to provide ourselves with definable peace through objective comfort. We think we know what home is, and that we know what home is made of. We think we know how to feel, and how to act, and how to rest in the place we feel we know the best. This is why we often do things like hide behind coffee, eat at McDonald’s, and carry our own pillows with us on airplanes when travelling; trying to relocate the familiar into the unfamiliar.

I speak two languages, but can effectively communicate in neither. Growing up in Brazil, I celebrated American holidays, like Thanksgiving, with things like failed jell-o molds in 100 –degree weather and Christmas with the illusion of Santa coming down a chimney in a city that hasn’t the need for fireplaces. My dad was born in Hawaii before it was a state. My mom is Latvian. I have stuff stored in a cockroach-laden attic in Rio, a church basement in Illinois, garage-sale luggage in Nebraska, a Rubbermaid tub in Washington, and a spare room in South Carolina.

May I venture that, in fact, we do not truly know what home is until we are away from what we once thought home was?

It used to make my blood boil whenever our friends in America would refer to our furloughs in the States as being “Home Assignments.” Who were they to tell my sisters and I where our home was? Who had given them the prerogative to assume America was our home? What did they know of home, beyond their concrete establishment of space and possession? These are, of course, rash reactions from a child’s mind, but I often find myself coming back to the stubborn thoughts. We love to say that “Home is where the heart is,” but how does one come to find where their heart is unless they’ve had it taken out of them? If our heart has always been in the same place, and has been held on to with an iron grip of blind dependency, we live in delusional comfort because we think we have a notion of how dear those things closest to us are.

We don’t. We can’t. We cannot know how dear they are until they are taken away, or moved, or changed.

Oswald Chambers once said, “What is it that blinds me in the ‘my day’? Have I a strange god – not a disgusting monster, but a disposition that rules me? More than once God has brought me face to face with the strange god and I thought I should have to yield, but I did not do it. I got through the crisis by the skin of my teeth and I find myself in the possession of the strange god still; I am blind to the things which belong to my peace.”

We desperately hold on to our notions of comfort. Our ideals for calm. Some of my times feeling most “at home” were when I was furthest from family, furthest from my birthplace … furthest from anything “comfortable.” --- But closest to God, and closest to who I am. An evening spent out in crisp mountain air, escaping from being found in the same place as a roommate who was hiding from the police. The feeling of driving into an awakening sun that makes all things new as you leave behind the foul motel you took harbour in. Sitting down to collect your thoughts when you realize how close you came to losing something, or someone. These things are home. Peace presented by the very presence of God.

Being in Australia, I have come to find that each person in our group, myself included, has arrived with a “disposition that rules me,” as Chambers stated. These dispositions are not disgusting monsters. They are not even necessarily bad. But they rule over us. And now we are brought face to face with these dispositions and given a chance to yield them for the purpose of seeing things clearer than we ever have before. God is presenting an opportunity to experience “home” as we never have felt it before through the offering of peace in a way we’ve never seen it before. We get to have our notions of comfort completely redefined, and our ideals for calm controlled by Him, instead of by the environment we’ve been raised in.

I am sitting in a bed at the house of people I met for the first time only four weeks ago, with trust that they will not poison the meals I am fed or stab me in the night. God has amazing ways of constantly redefining what we see as home. I am living in this peace presented by God’s presence--- and, for me --- He alone is home.

Finish Never

I have recently been missing a lot of things that will probably never come back to me. Missing sights and smells and sounds that fade insistently as new ones cloud my mind. Beautiful clouds; but clouds nonetheless. Attempting to describe a welcoming loaf of banana bread made fresh from the excess bunches in the backyard becomes more difficult when you’ve been eating cafeteria food for three years. Recalling how a passion fruit vine smells when the indigo flowers are just about to give way to their new sleepy fruit is a challenge when genetically engineered apples and oranges are the only fruits you see on a regular basis. I was recently overcome by a desire to lay flat as a skipping stone on a tile floor in the heat of a summer afternoon; to be immune to the world in sweet stillness while thinking of nothing at all.

I guess it all breaks my heart just a little. Which sounds cheesy. But I enjoy cheese, as do church mice.

The church is an interesting phenomenon. I am becoming a firm believer in Christians, on a regular basis, experiencing how Christians of other denominations worship, though also maintaining community within their own congregation. As I visit more churches, though, it truly allows me to step back and notice the binding agents in the family of Christ. In going to a Uniting Church here in Sydney, I have been transported back to my days in Yellowstone as the people pray prayers of Confession, or stand for a Call to Worship; acts of faith from people serving a God Who is far greater than even our words, but Who is alive and present in our words. Last night I went to Hillsong Church. You may have heard of it. : ) In being in the middle of hands raised high as they go, and lights scattering color across faces concentrated on adoration, I was transported back to a similar church visited on the East Coast of the U.S., where I stood beside my dad as I saw him raise his hands for the first time in a service, unguarded, since the last time we were in Rio together; a church where the technical perfection of a service is just as much praise to our God as humble half-tuned pianos and fading microphones might be. Uninhibited worship. Worship standing in the presence of a Saviour who swallows our stupidity and allows us to just …. Be.  

How I have missed being.

Because of many excursions and observations, the significance of the Eucharist has also grown in my life, based on simple experiences of it being practiced in different manners at different places. This last Sunday morning I went to a church that is very, very small and close-knit. Communion was one of the most beautiful things I have seen in a long time, and the sheer simplicity of it nearly made me cry. Because of the small amount of people, a few at a time came up and sat in the front pew. The pastor, along with two others, proceeded to hand each person an element, along with saying a few words to each. There was no hurry. There was no production or sense of accomplishment. Just … communion. The bread was a huge loaf with the toughest of exteriors and the softest of interiors, broken in half as the pastor initially read the NT passage on the Last Supper. As it was handed out to each person, the woman giving it tore thick, unrestricted segments from the soft inside; a very powerful visual for the Body broken and given.

This contrasts with a Catholic church attended several weeks back, where the Eucharist is obviously taken only by those who are members. Some friends of mine, in their experience at it, accidentally found themselves in the line to go up and take the elements, having not been aware of the restrictions. When arriving in the front of the line, and being recognized by the priest as not belonging, they were escorted back to their seats and asked to sit down.

There was certainly a level of magnificence, though, in observing characteristics of the belief in transubstantiation at that Catholic service. The priest solemnly consumed all that was left after the congregation had partaken, being diligent in leaving no trace. As the music drew to a close, he silently began  mixing pure water into the chalice and drinking the wash, then gathering crumbs from the plate and ingesting those, as well. Then, in a long-practiced manner of ceremony and service, wiped everything clean with a persistent white cloth.

Chambers once said, “Many of us are loyal to our notions of Jesus Christ, but how many of us are loyal to Him?”

Later he said, “Begin to know Him now, and finish never.” 

The earth in two

From Mumford & Sons’ I Gave You All

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Rip the earth in two with your mind

Seal the urge which ensues with brass wires

I close my eyes for a while

And force from the world a patient smile

And how can you say that your truth is better than ours?

Shoulder to shoulder now brother, we carry no arms

The blind man sleeps in the doorway, his home

If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy, I could have won

But I gave you all

I gave you all

I gave you all

Goodbye Seattle

Life is excruciatingly and beautifully not fair most of the time. The rest of the time, when it IS fair, it is generally being lived in apathy or complacency, and so shouldn’t be counted as living anyways.

Today I have to say goodbye to my best friend. It has been wonderful to spend most of my school break in Seattle. I’m very thankful that we are often given amazing opportunities, but when it comes right down to it, find them to be wrapped in the nice neat gift of that which we deem as pain. Yes, it sounds strange to describe a study abroad semester in this manner, but there it is.

My last few days in Seattle summed up in my favorite writing style, a list! :)

Wide noodles at Thai Tom’s and Salted Caramel from Molly Moon’s

Wishing for a tripod during a sunset at Gasworks

Eric understands what isn’t meant to be understood in The Big Bang Theory

The Gypsy Wagon is being lazy

Pumpkin will probably be dead soon : (

Being in a house with a vegetarian, a Methodist Pastor, and someone who is Lactose Intolerant AND allergic to Gluten is the most awesome thing ever (and will be greatly missed)

Shampoo weighs a lot

There is never traffic when you want there to be

How to run into a wall

Some images from around Ballard, in Seattle.

 

 

 

I am sixty-one

 Thought I'd share an excerpt from one of my favorite books ...

From Madeleine L'Engle's Walking on Water (page 74): 

"I need not belabour the point that to retain our childlike openness does not mean to be childish. Only the most mature of us are able to be childlike. And to be able to be childlike involves memory; we must never forget any part of ourselves. As of this writing I am sixty-one years old in chronology. But I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thrity-one, and forty-five, and .... and .... and ... 

If we lose any part of ourselves, we are thereby diminished. If I cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away ... For growing up never ends; we never get there."