Sunday, March 30, 2008

Blood Diamonds, redux

So, you think dying for mining coal is outrageous? Here's yet another reason not to buy gemstones:
75 Miners presumed dead in Tanzanian Gem Mine.

Seriously, people.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Come, labor on!

I went back to work today after a few really well-needed days off.... and it felt great. I really like my job, I like the folks I work with, much got done, and laughing happened. Amazing what a little holiday can do!

Tonight I found myself humming a tune: at first I didn't recognize it until I had hummed it through enough times to have a google-able phrase, and even then I googled "Come linger on." Which it is not, of course. It is "Come, labor on!"

"Come, labor on!
Who dares stand idle, on the harvest plain
While all around him waves the golden grain?
And to each servant does the Master say,
“Go work today.”

Come, labor on!
Claim the high calling angels cannot share—" etc.

Wow, guess that counts as a good day at work, huh?

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Flipper

Okay, so that was kind of conversation killer. Sorry! If you have ideas, you can always bring it up later, or, hey, maybe I will.

To make it up to you, here's a feel-good story about a dolphin who saved a couple of whales from beaching in New Zealand. He just came right up, and helped them find their way back out to sea! It made me shiver to read it. Very cool.

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Stranger in a Known Land, or Frontier Living

I've been thinking a lot lately about liminal space and construction of identity. Mine and LPs, mostly. It seems pretty complicated to me, and I'm not sure I've fully formed my ideas about it, but it's a theme I seem to cycle around to from time to time, so I figured I'd share the short version, and maybe cycle back here to expand next time I'm thinking about it.

Most of you know LP and I are an international, bilingual couple. That's one/ two? borders. We have each lived in each other's country of origin for significant periods of time. What we have noticed, and have confirmed as a pretty common experience with other bicultural folks, is that once you have truly crossed a border and lived in that other culture to the point of comfortably accepting many of the societal constructions of that place, you can't really ever completely come back home. That is, when you come back to the place you originally called home, it doesn't feel completely natural either. You have done irreparable 'damage' to your default world view. You can see why certain 'givens' in your culture seem silly/shocking/obscene to foreigners, because they now seem silly, etc. to you, too.

This can be a good thing, of course, but right now I am trying to get a feel for the size of the impact on a human psyche over a lifetime of not being able to go 'home'. Or maybe trying to figure out what two people can do in such a frontierland to create their own home(land?). But also, right now we are living in a few other significant liminal spaces as well, so it is perhaps more on my mind than usual. And I don't mean to say that it's horrible: it's just different, I think, from what I perceive most other peoples' experience to be.

So, if you feel like it, please tell me about your experience of being 'other' or of being caught between two worlds. Can people who share a similar experience meet up and be citizens of some combined no-man's land, even if their original border crossing happened on a different kind of threshold? What do you think? I have a practical/objective hunch that our situation is not as exceptional as I subjectively feel it to be, yet that assumption doesn't make it feel less real to me. Why should that be?

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Open Letter to the Sun

Dear Sun.
Please come back. I hear from my friends in other places that you are doing well. I miss you very much and hope you will visit me again sometime soon.
Very sincerely yours,
Ursa