My Short Story

The following is a short story I wrote for school entitled "The Shadow of Silence." It isn't very good and its 8 pages long because it had to be, but I thought I'd share it just in case somebody out there is really bored or something!

Wherever I look, Toronto always provides me with more than enough gray to satisfy even the largest of appetites for that dull colour. It is everywhere. It towers above me, smiling down from shining sky scraping walls. I walk on gray cement, securing its permanence with the hammering of my feet. It does not help that even the sky has been gray lately. It has rained a lot, but the city refuses to be washed Back home, the rains make the trees shine a bright, clean, green, but here it just seems to heighten my awareness of the litter on these dirty streets.

It doesn’t help that winter is coming. The wet leaves scattered throughout the streets are now more brown than red. I remember how the snow was streaked through with gray grit last winter when I came up to visit the campus. It wasn’t nearly as bright as it is back at home. I didn’t notice it at the time, for my eyes were fixed on freedom. It is only looking back that I can see the reality in my first memories of this place.

I see the clearest when my eyes are closed. It is in the moments before sleep, or during daylight’s longer blinks, that I see the farm house. It is then that the faces start floating by inside my mind. Those visions force me to wrench open my eyes and see the gray land that I have chosen as mine. I have to silently chant the truth of my freedom. I have to work so hard to remember that this land is my paradise.

 It really doesn’t feel like paradise to me, and I miss home no matter how much I try not to. However, the home I miss is the loud and happy one of my childhood. Growing up, there was always an abundance of people in the farmhouse. I never really knew who was just visiting for the day and who was going to be staying with us till they got “back on their feet.” These visitors filled the farmhouse with loud and joyful music or conversation, but it isn’t like that anymore.

Silence invaded the farmhouse with the death of my mom. I cannot figure out where everyone went or why, they just stopped coming around. Maybe father’s silent grief made them nervous, or perhaps they just didn’t want to stop by uninvited. My mom was the one who welcomed the lost into our loud, chaotic and happy family. Father has always just sat there, in that dark green easy chair of his, watching life happen around him.

 It never bothered me before mom died. When I was growing up, father’s silent lap was a safe place from which to watch the fireworks of my mom’s life, but when my mom died his silence became a disease. I could feel it affecting me. That is when I knew I needed to get out of there. I was only in grade eleven at the time, but I started to plan my escape.

 I had been planning to go to the University of Western Ontario because it is the closest university to the farmhouse. When mom died, I knew that was no longer an option, for the short drive to London was no match for the plague of silence. I had to go farther away and I needed a city even bigger than London. I needed a place so full of people and noise that a silent disease could not survive there.

I decided to go to a university in Toronto, believing that this disease of silence would lose its power in the country’s largest city.  Oh how wrong I was. . There is a lot of noise here, but it is the noise of machines: the rumble of subways and the honking of cars. The only noise from the other humans is the sound of their footsteps on the cement or the swish of shopping bags against their legs.

 There are people everywhere here, but nobody looks at one another. People rush from work or school and home again without ever once saying hello. I never imaged that I could feel lonely in a place so full of human life. I thought I would be safe here, but the silence has followed me even to this noisy city. It is changing me, and now, when I walk down the street, I look at my feet.

One day I was wandering the lonely streets outside of campus, and went into a coffee shop to warm up. I felt awkward at first because I was by myself, but then I noticed that I was not the only one who had come in alone. We were like a collection of islands all floating in an ocean too vast to cross.

Some people were reading papers, typing on computers, or talking on their phones. One guy sat off in a corner just staring out the window. I sat across the room from him and watched his face thinking about how he had a story that I would never know. They all did.

I felt suddenly claustrophobic. I was trapped in that ocean of silence. I needed to get out of there, but I hadn’t finished my tea, so I went to the bathroom just for somewhere to go. I sat down on the cover of a toilet seat, closed the stall door and rested my head on the wall.  I paid attention to my breathing, thinking about an uncle of mine who strongly believes in the power of meditation.  I wondered if I could find a way out of the ocean in the patterns of my breath.

I sat up straighter, staring at the door in front of me. My eyes locked on a spot where someone had scratched into the metal the words “What are you waiting for?” “What am I waiting for?” I asked myself out loud without meaning to. Something about those words struck my heart and stayed in my mind. I came alive to the moment. I stood up and walked right out of that silent coffee shop.

 I stood on the corner with the cars rushing loudly past watching the crowds of people who were trying to keep the silence alive. I smiled at a man who was standing at a stoplight wearing a stern gray suit and holding a big black briefcase. “Good afternoon!” I said, “How are you?” He looked slightly startled and stared silently at my face in that second before the light turned green and his feet started moving him away from me. I heard him muttering “good, good, you?” but he was already half way across the street. I turned away, and walked home with a slight bounce in my step.

The next day in class I paid much closer attention to my professor’s words then I normally did. I watched as the hands of eager students went up all around the room. There were a lot of students who were eager to share their thoughts. It hadn’t occurred to me that there were people who were not stifled by the silence. I had thought it was an unstoppable epidemic.

I listened as students began to argue with one another, sharing contrasting ideas until their disagreements sharpened their thoughts and created a new idea that they could both agree on.  This new idea was a combination of both of their original arguments, and it represented the communion of their minds.

 As I was watching, a short and bubbly girl, who was sitting near the front of the room, put her hand up in order to add to the discussion. The professor nodded at her and as she began to speak. I listened to her words with a new sense of focus. They were profound and flowery and she made observations I had never thought of. I was blown away.

The tall and handsome guy beside her was nodding slowly as she spoke, but when she finished his hand went up and the teacher called his name. His eyes focused on her face as he slowly formed his argument. His thoughts completely contrasted hers, but his argument was politely formed. He made his case in a slow and direct way. He spoke without her sense of the poetic, but he made just as much sense as she had.

 Somehow he had found a loophole in her argument that I had not seen, although it seemed so obvious once he had said it. I was sad for the girl with the smiling eyes that shone like my mom’s.  I would have been humiliated to have my comments criticized like that, even though he did it kindly. Her smile never faded, and the light in her eyes continued to dance as she cheerfully admitted defeat.

The professor spoke again, and I suddenly remembered that we were in class. She summarized their argument, rephrasing the comments of both the girl and the boy and asked if anyone else had any final thoughts. I listened carefully and silently rephrased all that had been said in a way that made sense to me. I fumbled with their thoughts carefully tracing them in my mind, begging them to make the same amount of sense as they had when my classmates were wowing me with their speeches.

As I sat their thinking, I realized that the girl’s ideas made more sense than the boy’s. When he was speaking the loophole he had mentioned seemed to be so damaging to the girl’s argument, but the whole thing was brought to sudden clarity in my mind and I realized that the girl had been right all along. The loophole the boy had brought up was in fact not a loophole at all.

I was shocked to see my hand slowly rising into the air. I wondered dully if I should just put it down again before the professor noticed that I had raised it, but she called my name and I knew it was too late. “Leslie?” She said, and I realized I had never before heard my name on her lips. I was shocked to hear my voice responding to hers. I was shocked to find that it wasn’t that hard to speak my thoughts out loud. I was nervous at first, but I felt more confident as my argument took its shape.

I was pleased to discover that my ideas still made sense when I spoke them out loud, and I was excited by this fight against the silence that had choked me for so long. The greatest shock was their faces. The girl shot the boy a look of victory and he smiled at me in what seemed to be amazement. The teacher noted that time was up and she thanked me for my comment saying she thought it wrapped the debate up quite nicely and then she bid us all a goodbye.

I was shocked to see the boy and the girl kiss on their way out the door. The girl smiled at the boy declaring that she had beaten him that time as she slipped her hand into his. He smiled at her before looking over his shoulder at me. “Yeah,” he admitted, “but you had help,” and she also looked back at me. They were by the door so I would have to pass them on my way out.

 I smiled nervously at them as I passed. “Thanks!” The girl said, smiling at me cheerfully. “Yeah, that was a really neat observation you made,” the boy said “I never thought of that, but I have a question for you!” “Oh no,” the girl said laughing and shaking her head “Germaine can never forget it if he loses a debate. He isn’t going to sleep for days trying to find a loophole in your argument. Hey, do you have class now?” she asked “We were just going to meet a few friends for a cup of coffee, you should come and Germaine can ask all of his silly questions!” I had nothing else to do, but I shifted my feet nervously. “Yeah you should come.” said Germaine “You could meet his sister Emily” the girl grinned “She loves anyone who can hold their own with Germaine.” “Ok” I said, shrugging a little. I’ll come for a bit.”

 “My name is Zoe by the way, yours is Leslie right?” “Yeah,” I said thinking that it made sense that her name meant life. She reminded me of my mom the way her eyes lit up when she listened and the way her hands danced when she talked. I found it was easier than I thought it would be to talk to them.

We went back to that same coffee shop where I had seen the graffiti in the bathroom. It was warmer than I had remembered it being in there, and there seemed to be more people who had come in groups. I noticed a lot of laughter and discussion. There were other people who spoke with dancing hands and shining eyes, just like Zoe.

In the course of the conversation I mentioned that I had grown up on a farm house. I told them that I missed the fields, the forests, and especially the lake. “But we are right by a lake!” Zoe exclaimed “Yeah I know,” I shrugged, “but it’s not the same with all these buildings around it,” I said. “Oh you have to come to our special place.” She leaned across the table when she said this and her voice was heavy with enthusiasm. “We found this amazing spot on the beach. Leslie, you would love it. It is really isolated and totally overgrown with nature. It is so relaxing. We go there a lot for picnics. In fact we were going to go this weekend if the weather’s nice! You should come.” All of their friends agreed and, without really thinking about it, I promised to meet them that Saturday.

I waited for them at a street car stop like we’d planned. Germaine’s sister had come again, as well as the two boys I had met at the coffee shop a few days before and also a girl I had never seen before. They introduced me to this girl and then the street car came and we all got on.

I had no idea where we were going so I just followed them as we hopped from one type of transit to another and walked down streets I didn’t recognize. We ended up on at the shore of Lake Ontario, but it wasn’t a spot that the city would advertise. It was all grown over with wild grasses and the sand between those was sprinkled with pebbles.

 It reminded me of the quieter parts of Lake Eerie that lie away from the bustling beach towns. The farmhouse is only a short bike ride from a place like that, so there was a part of me that felt like it was coming home.

We stretched out on blankets and huddled in our coats. It was cold and windy but the sun had come out for once, and we built a fire. We didn’t really know the rules for fire there, but it warmed our bones so we didn’t care. We ate then, and drank tea out of a communal thermos. Everyone had brought something for the picnic.

 Once their bellies were full and warm, the hinges of their mouths hung a little looser. I just sat and listened as they danced in and out of those big topics of conversation like God, pain, death, war, hope, and epistemology. There was no anger and no one seemed too sure. This wasn’t a cut throat debate. It seemed to me like they were pondering their questions the way I was savoring the tea. They weren’t in any rush to understand the universe. In fact, they seemed to enjoy their confusion because it meant that there was something bigger than just them in this life. Imagine if we could understand everything. How small and boring would the world have to be to be understood?

I nibbled on a sandwich while I listened to them talk. It was a pleasant sound. It reminded me of the way the farmhouse had sounded when I was a little kid. I started to think about my father’s silence. I had been thinking about not going home for Christmas, but in that moment I knew I would go back often to visit. I figured I shouldn’t leave my sister and brother alone with his silence, but also that it might not be a disease. My father’s face sat clear inside my mind and I knew that his silence was just another part of this world that something inside of me felt love for even though it made the thinking part of me a little nervous.

Identity Crisis

BACK STORY:

The first ten years of my life were hard in the normal ways, yet still lovely beyond all imagination because no matter how much I got bullied by the silly neighbourhood children I felt secure in my identity which was based in my family, our faith, our church, and our friends.

By the time I was 14 we had left church and moved. I had lost touch with my childhood friends. My doubt was growing larger.

When I started public school (before grade nine I had been homeschooled) I failed at making friends. I wasn't the prettiest, the most popular, or the most athletic. I wasn't even the most artistic and though I did eventually find a role in the drama crew I was never truly sure if I belonged.

Half way through school my father died and it felt like my family was crumbling.

That was the last straw.

I was not secure in my family, my friends, or my faith.

The only thing I had left was school.

In university I have learned that getting a 90 average in highschool is not a big deal, but my school was mostly populated by druggies and teen moms so I ended up with the best grade of my entire graduating class.

I didn't get these grades because I was smart but because I had no life so I did nothing but school.

I told myself that I was a hardworker.

It was the only thing I really liked about myself and I clung to it. This was my identity.

I also used to love school. Yeah, it has always been stressful, but it was interesting and I was good at it.

I took a year off after highschool and I felt like I had lost everything.

I didn't know what the point of life was without school to focus on.

I realised that I loved learning and I loved the subject of literature, so I went back to the arms of academia.

EVERYTHING IS CHANGING:
At first I struggeled a little with university but still I always enjoyed it. It was stressful, but more so because I was dealing with it on top of other things then just because it was stressful.

I didn't get the most amazing marks, but I did alright and still kept fairly on top of things.

As time has gone on I have got worse at organizing my time and coming up with things to say and my grades have started slipping.

I am no longer anything above slightly mediocre.

I get 70s and I finish things on the same day they are due.

Meanwhile: My faith in Jesus is growing stronger and it is becoming the most important part of my life. My relationship with Him has become a determining factor of everything I do. My life has become all about loving Him, growing in my understanding of Him, and reacting to that understanding by loving others. My time is spent at church, small group, volunteering, or hanging out with friends who need me and who I love. All of these things are taking the place of school as the most important thing in my life and it scares me because the only way I usued to be able to keep from hating myself was by saying "Hey, I work hard at school, I'm not a bad person." I can't do that anymore. I don't work hard. I'm becoming a slacker because school isn't fun for me any more because it doesn't seem to matter and I can't relate it to any other part of my life.

I really and truly have to love myself only because Jesus loves me and is changing me because that is all I have anymore and that is all I am, but it is scary because I know who I was much more than I know who I am.

ARagTagHooligan

"There is nothing I hold on to"

Today I was listening to a worship song that contains the line "there's nothing I hold on to." It caused me to stop and think for a minute. I have always been troubled by the concept of giving everything over to Jesus because I have felt like I can't do that.

 So often in my life, I have found that the things that I know will hurt myself and my friends in the long run (sins if you will) just seem so good in the moment that I don't know how to turn away, and when I fail to turn away I feel nothing but shame. Over and over I find myself thinking, "well, I've messed up again, whats the point of continuing on? I'm just a failure."

I struggle to say "Lord, I'm not going to hold on to my mistakes and let them get in the way of recieving Your love for me. I admit them to You, I surrender to You, and, enabled by Your Spirit, I will turn away from them, for now I want Your will to be done in my life."

Oh I say it, and I try to walk in it, but it's hard you know? I stumble so much, I think we all do, its just another part of this being human thing that makes it necessary to fight agains the evil inside of us all. (A fight that I believe I can only win when I am on His side.)

I have been encouraged by how God forgives me every time, and is working in my heart to enable me to be more like the one I was made to be.

His love inspires me to let go of my sin, instead of holding on to it as an excuse for why I must be the exception to His grace.

However, it is more than just sin that I have been holding onto.

In the circles that I travel in, a lot of my friends are really bothered by the lies of the so called "prosperity gospel" which teaches that, because God loves us, faith in Him means forever happiness and even physical health and wealth.

Clearly this is not true. Every single day I see Christians struggling with everybody else under the weight of illness, death, conflict, and poverty.

I don't have to hold onto my griefs. They can be dehabilitating, for my griefs are great, but oh my God is greater.

However, I am learning that this doesn't necessarily mean that everything is going to be the kind of ok that I innitially want it to be.

My faith teaches me that all these crappy things are just a reality of the messed up world that we are living in.

However, as a Christian, I truly believe that it gets better. For me, heaven is not just a happy bow to tie up the confusion of death, for I believe it is real.

I believe it is a place free of these sorrows, and that it is way more amazing than I can imagine. 

It is partly this hope that allows me to let go of my griefs.

I want to confess a secret: I love this earth.

Sometimes I worry that I love it a little too much more than I should as a Christian.

Yeah, it is broken. Even my non Christian actavist friends can see that this place is twisted. I've talked about it before: racism, ageism, sexism, poverty, war, classism, and hatred. Sometimes my heart wants to break because there are people all over this earth who are starving and depressed.

And yet, I can see beauty, within all of this sadness there are hugs and there is laughter and babies and birds and sunrises and something inside of me leaps with joy...

But heaven is better?

I don't pretend to know what it will be like, but I think it will be better because all the bad stuff will be over.

I'll be honest with you, inspite of the heartache I sometimes want to cling to to art, to literature, to music, and to nature, because I see beauty in them, and I want to cling to my family and friends because I love them, but...

"There is nothing I hold on to."

I could be wrong, but I think this is about finding my joy, peace, and contenment in God instead of in my own awesomeness or good surroundings.

Holding on to nothing but Jesus seems to mean letting go of my mistakes and grief and exchanging it for forgiveness, hope, and love.

However, it also seems to mean saying that all the good things on the earth are gifts from God that I don't deserve, and that He can take away.

This bothered me.

I mean if I see them as gifts I can still be thankful for them and enjoy them, but it means I need to abstain from holding on to these things as though they are my reason for living.

Ever since my father died, I have lived in fear of my mother's death.

What would I do? She is my advisor, my understanding listening ear, my friend, and my mother. I love her, and sometimes I feel like I need her to survive.

As I grapple with what it means to "give it all to You God," I realize that if my mother died I would be ok, because God is all I need. This doesn't mean that I don't enjoy the gifts He gives, but I am not dependant on them.

This has always been such a hard concept for me.

Maybe it shows a immaturity in my concept of love. I seem to still be loving with the mind of a child who recieves the milk she feels she needs from the mother she is dependant on and responds with the thankfulness of love.

I am still thankful for my mum, but I am not dependant on anyone but God.

Yeah, God uses people to take care of other people, but I think it is fluid and flexible and in the end I need the Gardener not the fruit trees.

This concept has always bothered me. I need the things I  love I scream, but I'm learning the beauty in being dependent only on God, it is freeing really. This world is messed up, so the idea of finding peace withing that mess instead of waiting for it to be over to find joy is a truly exiting one for me. You could take everything away from me. You could kill my family, and my friends, you could steal the money that buys my food, education, clothing, and rent, and still I would be ok.

Not "happy" exactly, but at peace.

This life is a storm, wouldn't you love to have confidence that soon it will be over and in the mean time know that you are loved and forgiven?

I still find it a struggle to say "there is nothing I hold on to" and to let go of my sin, my grief, and the things I love, and for my peace to be rooted in the love and forgiveness of my Father in heaven and the hope of future glory.

"I lean not on my own understanding, my life is in the hands of The Maker of Heaven"

(All lyrics are from the song "Nothing I Hold On To by United Pursuit)

ARagTagHooligan

Frustrations with Academia

This year I have really been wondering what I'm doing here at school. I have been daydreaming way more than usual about dropping out of school. I want to move to where work is, and spend the rest of my life working a minimum wage job in the public service sector. This would allow me to be kind to people who might be having bad days. I would spend my time off volunteering to help the poor and being an ear for anyone who might need to be listened to.

I just want to escape the empty universe of academia.

I do not want to give up my analytical mind and my search for understanding (as long as I continue to attempt to ballance this with an appreciation of the things that don't make sense...see previous blog post).

However, I feel like people at my school are not sitting around trying to figure out the universe, or even trying to appreciate the beauty of its complexity.

I need to go back to the begginning in order to explain my lack of satisfaction with my current situation.

I think I have mentioned this before, but I took a year off in between high school and University.

I have also mentioned that my dad died the summer I was in between grades ten and eleven.

I think I took that year off after highschool because I felt like being preocupied with school kept me from dealing with my emotions as well as my intelectual and spiritual confusions.

I wanted to just work for a year so my spare time could be used to figure things out.

I tried crazy hard to find a job, but it didn't work.

I was getting depressed because I felt like a useless waste of space, and by October I was feeling pretty hopeless and wondering what I should do and where I should go.

I read a novel that I can't even remember the plot of any more. I don't want to give its name as I haven't read it in three years and, for all I know, current me would think it is horrible. However, past me thought it was fabulous. I was so moved by that novel that I decided to go to university.

I did not come here to get a degree that would lead me to my dream job. (Although after I decided what I wanted to study and where I realised that such an education would enable me to do something which, at that time, I decided was pretty much my dream job. .)

I did not come here because my teachers told me to (although they did think it was my destiny),

Or because society obligated me to do so (being rebellious, this was one of my main reasons for wanting to stay far away from university).

I came for the experience.

I wanted to talk to people about books.

I came to learn. I didn't really think about what the professors would be saying to me, I just assumed it would help me understand literature better. I assumed it would be enlightening and helpful.

I did not get what I wanted.

Myself and my peers have been taught a language, and we have been taught what kind of observations professors look for from their students.

Most of the things I really want to say would be considered surface value and unintelligent.

I want to say, this book was beautiful, it taught me so much about the problems with how people work. It taught me about myself because I could see myself in the vilains.

They don't want me to say this. They want me to point out the metaphors, make comparisons between texts, and point out the affects of how the text works.

I hate all this stuff. Metaphors anger me.

Anallagies and similies are really awesome because they are straightforward and intended. Similies can help people understand one thing by openly comparing it to something that people already know more about.

Metaphors don't say that they are comparing two things, and they don't say why they are comparing two things, they just do it. It's confusing and pointless, and whats more, half of the time I wonder if we are making it up. Is the owl really symbolic for the soul of her dead mother or do we just presume this because we want things to make sense, we want the dead to be able to send back a sign, and we want there to be a reason for the owl to be there. Doesn't all of this just go back to the arrogance of us human beings who are constantly trying to make sense of things? I like to take things I read at face value. In my mind a poem about a tree is a poem about a tree and that is enough.

I guess that's kind of funny seeings as I'm always trying to understand my world. Why don't I try to understand books? I do try to understand what books show me about the world, but this is considered to be unacademic. In academic circles books should not be read as something containing a moral. That's how I read books. That's how I've always read books.

I was homeschooled until the end of grade eight, and, throughout that time, my mother started every day by reading a story. More than the math, spelling, grammar, science, history, art, and French that we would study later on in the day, it is those stories that have stuck with me.

From those stories I learned more about history than I ever did in any textbook.

From those stories I developed the life skill of empathy.

From those stories I learned about far away things, places, politics, traditions, cultures, or religions.

From those stories I learned about what it means to be human. It is those stories that taught me how evil we all are, but that(with Jesus, who usually wasn't explicitly mentioned in the stories) there is a possibility for redemption.

I learned about what we have done to eachother.

I learned what it is like to experience true hardship.

I learned about what needs to be done in life to make this place better.

I learned about the importance of expression and telling your own story.

I still love literature. I think of it as entertainment, and beauty, but mostly I think about it as a powerful tool for teaching, understanding(exploration), and also something that can be a catalyst for change.

My professors don't seem to be interested in all of this.

They don't seem to want us to think of the characters as being real.

They don't seem to want us to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.

They don't seem to want us to relate to the characters, and

They don't seem to want us to focus on what we can learn from these characters.

Well what is the point?

By the end of four years I will know how to speak a meaningless academic language.
That is so encouraging, not.
I suppose I will also know how to clearly argue a point, I will have (hopefully) a better understanding of grammar and spelling, and I will have a degree that might help me find a job.
This is what I'm paying so much for? Is this enough?

The questions I have been asking myself lately are:

Why am I here?

Am I supposed to be here?

Should I stay, or leave?

If I left, where would I go?

I have always prayed generally that God would have His way in my life, although it is only lately that I have taken to praying about specific descisions.

However, I still believe that he directed my paths to this city.

All of the things that led to me chosing university, and this university in particular, are so random that (being an arrogant human who thinks I can understand everything if I try) I just can't help but think that it was planned and I was supposed to come here.

I also think this because of all of the summer opportunities I have had which helped me grow so much and would not have been available to me if I had not met the people that I met here.

Most importantly, I do not regret my descision to come here because of how much I (think I)have grown spiritually and I guess just as a person in general since I have come here.

However, I am plagued by the question of what to do next. Do I finish my B.A. and if I do then do I go on to my M.A. or do I need to abandon academics. If I do abandon them, what do I do instead.

I realise this has just been a whole lot of personal ramblings about my life (which I guess all my posts are).

I'm sorry if this bothers you.

I do this because I value honesty.

I enjoy knowing what other people are going through because I can relate to and learn from their experiences.

I feel like it is presumptuous of me to say I hope you can relate to or learn from my experiences, mistakes, thoughts, understandings, and confusions, but deep down that is what I hope, and that is why I am so redonculously honest all the time.

ARagTagHooligan

When Things Don't Make Sense

Growing up, I was completely obsessed with things making sense.
My dad used to get mad at me a lot because every time he asked me to do something I would ask him why.

A lot of people used to think that I was a rebellious youth, and I guess I was rebellious, but I didn't want to be, I WANTED to obey authority and make them happy, but I didn't know how to do that when they didn't make sense.

My mumma has always understood me better than anyone else in the world. Whenever she asked me to do anything, she would tell me why and that made obedience so much easier for me to do.

I've always been a question asker. When I graduated highschool one of my friends took a fith year and I remember him telling me that school was a lot quieter without me there asking a million questions.

Throughout my life, I have met a lot of people who find my questions to be frustrating. It is rare for me to feel like someone is actually LISTENING to my questions. Usually, I feel like people are just waiting for me to shut up so they can tell me that I am wrong and they are right, without ever actually explaining why.

The thing that few people seem to be able to understand is that I actually don't LIKE arguing with people. I WANT to agree, I just can't unless it makes sense.

In the past few years I have met more people who are willing to actually listen to my questions and use them to sharpen their answers into something that I can understand.

I have really appreciated this.

However, I am also starting to realise tha I am never going to understand everything, and it is the journey of constantly discovering new answers, and even new questions, which helps make life so exciting.

This is an embarassing story: for one reason or another I took a year off between highschool and university, this gave me a lot of time to think, so when I got to university I thought I was pretty secure in what I thought about things, but I was scared to talk to other people about these things. One day I finally had a really intense convorsation with a guy in one of my classes. Afterwards, I just had to sit and think for a bit. That convorsation raised so many questions when I had thought I had it all figured out. I remember calling my mom completely excited to tell her that there was still so much I didn't know.

My mum couldn't help but laugh: she is 32 years older than me and still has questions.

The point is, for me, having something to ponder makes life exciting.

I am also beginning to appreciate the beauty and importance of things that can't be understood.

I remember last Christmas me and my cousin were standing in our uncle's kitchen discussing Christianity. (Cause that's what I do at family reunions, hahaha, my family is special, many of us are very intelectual and enjoy discussions, it is fun.) I mentioned something about my frustration with things about God that don't make sense and he said that he wouldn't want to worship a God that made sense because then that God would be smaller than us. How can something smaller than my brain create the whole world? It's a pretty simple concept but I had never considered it before.

A slightly more disconcerting reason to just let things not make sense came to me from one of my professors today. She commented that perhaps our modern day need to analyze everthing is actually a form of arrogance. We must think we are pretty smart and important if we think we can figure out what everything means.

Another thing that has made me reconsider my love for things that make sense is the poetry class I've been taking this semester at school. I didn't know we were only going to be studying poetry or I wouldn't have taken it. This might strike some people as strange seeing as I love to read and write poetry and my favourite word is "poetic." However, for me, the beauty of poetry is that I can't understand it with my brain. It makes me feel something deep in my heart that I don't know how to express in words and, when we try to box it into something we can understand in class, I always feel like the poets would probably just roll their eyes if they could hear us.

As much as I love wresling with things until they make sense, and as nervouse as I am about things that confuse me, I have to admit that there is something beautiful about those things that you just can't comprehend.

ARagTagHooligan

I Shall Hope

When I first came to Univeristy, I decided to take an introductory course in Canadian Studies. I have since chosen to minor in this subject. I am attracted to this educational department becuase it allows me to study a wide variety of different subjects (literature studies, environmental studies, gender studies, Indigenous studies, and history - just to name a few) while also learning about the country that I love so much. It just makes sense.

Right away my professors told me that Canadian Studies would bring up all the skelletons hiding in my country's closet and show us what a rotten place this is.

My professors delievered on this promise.

In fact, all of the courses I have taken seem dedicated to proving how much people suck, and not just Canadians, but all people.

I have learned more fully about racism, classism, sexism, poverty, wars, animal abuse, ageism, and the environmental crisis which we are currently experiencing.

People brought on all of this stuff.

People fight, people exclude, people hate, people steal, people kill, and people refuse to help one another.

My professors seem to agree with my Christian beliefs on at least one point: there is something wrong with us human beings.

I remember when I was in my first year of university there was a guy in fourth year in my introductory English Literature class.

This guy had failed this course in first year and so he was coming back to try again. He always seemed so bitter and jaded. I called him out on his cynicism one time and he said that he used to be idealistic in first year too, but that university makes you cynical and apathetic. He predicted that none of us would still be idealistic or optimistic come fourth year.

At first, this both worried and sadened me, but later it became a challange, and it was a challenge that I accepted.

I will not give into apathy or cynisism!

Last year, I took a course which was crosslisted between Environmental Studies, Canadian Studies, Geography, and Indigenous Studies. It was a very alternative education sort of course. I loved this aspect of it, but because this class was all about the environmental crisis it often made me feel depressed. Being the bluntly honest person I am, I brought up my emotions surrounding the subject of the course. We all decided that we could not give into depression, that would mean giving up and then nothing would get better.

A few weeks ago, I bumped into a Marxist on campus. I told him that I thought communism made a lot of sense on paper and had a lot of beautiful asperations, but that history has shown us that it won't work because of human selfishness, so I din't want to risk trying it again.

He told me that if I talked like that I would just become apathetic and not do anything to change the world. His idea seems to be that we have to keep trying to fight against our humanity.

I believe that too, but I don't think that I can do it on my own.

This is such a big part of why I am a Christian.

Sometimes, I get really caught up in the monotony of every day living. I get tired of the monotony of trying on all my own strength not to give into my less than loving impulses, to figure things out in my head, to learn about all these bad things in our society, and to find a solution to it all. Sometimes all of these tiring things preocupy me so much that I forget about the hope I have found in a God who loves me, forgives me, instructs me in the best way to live out this life, and enables me to do it.

Without this hope, all the things I'm learning about my world get me down and make me want to give up on trying to make it a better place or be a better person. When I focus on the hope I have it affects every part of my life.

You can think what you want about all this, all I'm saying is that, for me, I am nothing without my hopes in Jesus. I am an apathetic, depressed, joy-less, mess who barely wants to keep on living, but when I fix my eyes on the hope of Jesus I suddenly feel like I can wake up and get out of bed and love my neighbour, because I know I am loved.

It's true that, even though I know the God I trust in, I find it hard to get out of bed sometimes: I.E. when I forget about the beauty of Jesus and so it cannot inspire my life. I am human and sometimes I focus on the wrong things, but what I want to tell you is that I have found (and there is no lie here) that when I focus my mind on Jesus, I find hope to keep living.

ARagTagHooligan

On Family and Whether Love is Selfish.

Today I am nearing then end of a book I have been reading for class about a woman whose mother died because of cancer. The story is from the daughter's perspective, but it focuses on the mother's slow death and her family's struggle to accept this reality.

Whenever I read anything about death, I think about my father.

The two stories are nothing alike, my father died suddenly.

There is, however, one simularity: in both situations the family gathered.

When my dad died, my mom's large family gathered around us. At the time we still had my grandmother's farm. She had recently moved into a nursing home and we were still figuring out what to do with the farm. My uncle and aunt from a distant province (who later moved to our province permanately) just happened to be visiting when dad died. They were staying in the empty farmhouse. In the weeks after my Dad's death, we often gathered at the farmhouse to have campfires, eat food, and just be together.

I was a teenager in the middle of my high school career.

Selfish and shocked, my family annoyed me.

See, they are Dutch and I don't want to perpetuate stereotypes, but it is common for the Dutch to live in their minds, they don't discuss feelings, they don't hug, and they don't cry in front of eachother.

This culture makes death difficult to deal with, because death is not a private business that can be dealt with on your own. The death of one person affects many.

I have the analytical brain of my mother's clan, but it is mixed with the expressive heart of my father's people.

When I am sad, I cry. When something is funny, I laugh. When I am angry, I yell. When I am Happy, I sing. When I am scared, I talk. And no matter what I feel, I express it loudly.

I feel deeply. Every small joy or fear is felt in an exagerated way inside of my heart. I then express those feelings. However, when something really big happens, like the death  of my father, I don't know how to feel about it, so I don't. I just think about it for a few months or years until I am familiar with it well enough to feel it.

When this first happened I was scared. I wasn't used to this emotional disconnect. I wanted more than anything to grieve wildly. My family seemed to want me to accept it and understand it: that death is natural and the living keep living without the dead, that death is ok because it isn't the end and that the living are ok because they aren't alone.

They didn't understand my need to feel and I didn't understand their quiet greif and quiet love.

I rejected their practical love because I thought that love needed to take the form of words and hugs.

It was only when I moved away from home that I realized how much they love me, in their own way, and I was able to give it back.

When I came to university I started to build a new family without even really thinking about it. I depended on other people and asked them for help because it was the only way I knew to survive.

People said I wasn't very independant but it didn't bother me much because I don't want to be independant. What I do want is to help others as much as they help me.

This sounds selfish, like I only want to help others so they can help me and we'll form a circle where everyone takes care of eachother instead of just taking care of others as well as taking care of my self.

It might be selfish, it might be wrong, but its the only way I know to live.

I think of my littlest cousin who was only a baby when my dad died.

The day we burried my dad I felt like I was adrift, I didn't know what to think or feel or do, I searched for somewhere to land my heart and mind, and my eyes landed on the safest person in the grave yard: my little baby cousin perched in his mother's arms. I walked over to him and goo goo talked to him all the while thinking of the Jack Johnson song that says "new life makes losing life easier to understand" and I felt comforted somehow in a way my brain couldn't grasp.

Then something happened.

This little baby reached his arms out to me and I picked him up.

A simple little moment, but his mother was excited! "That's only the second time he's ever done that, the first time was to me, just this morning when I went to get him out of bed."

He was a baby.

When he pooped or peed, he needed someone to clean it up. He needed to be fed, burped, rocked, and held. He was completely dependant in a selfish sort of way. When he reached out to me it was probably just because I was interesting or familar or safe seeming and in that moment he felt like a change of scenery from his mama's arms to mine. Selfish reasons really, but he gave me something, in all his selfish dependance, he made me feel loved, he made me feel better as I stood beside my father's grave.

Just a coincidance right? He was a baby, he couldn't have comforted me on purpose because he didn't understand! That may or may not be, we will never know, but even if you assume it is true: think about this - in a way, his reaching was his way of showing that he deemed me safe, and he deemed me safe because I was good to him, and he wanted to be with me because I was good to him. Maybe he even loved me - for selfish reasons, but that love wasn't really selfish, it was more like a way of saying thanks, and when he said thanks in his baby way I felt appreciated and loved and my love for him grew.

Now the baby is growing every day and getting closer to his sixth birthday.

He is getting better at showing his love for me.

He is five and thinks that girls (even his sisters, cousins, aunts, and maybe even his mother) are gross and its either his dutch blood or his toddler stubborness, but he doesn't give hugs.

However, whenever I visit he sits beside me and pokes me and tickles me and begs for piggy back rides.

I can see the love behind the funny games.

When I'm not around he asks about me, where is she and when is she coming back? and when I do come back he asks if I'm done school yet.

Even today he is reaching out because he likes being with me.

I understand this child language, I used to speak it too.

He's getting better at helping, as kids grow they can do more for the people who held up their heads when they were babies.

Today when I go grocery shopping with mother I insist on carrying the heavier bags "You carried me for 9 months and more" I say "Its my turn to do the carrying."

Is this selfishness? To love the ones who help me and to help them back, and to help others because I know what its like to need and recieve help and because I hope one day they will help me?

It might be, and there might be a greater love that has nothing to do with being loved in return. If there is I would like to experience it, from the giving end, but for now this is all I know and it makes me feel safe, all these families, biological or not, taking their place recieving and giving help and love and just doing life together.

ARagTagHooligan