talking.

I haven't written in months. If I am being really honest, I haven't written comfortably in over a year. I am finding a new voice, one grounded in a much more Northern clime, with far less red rock, and many more people. It has thrown me off kilter. But this last Sunday I spoke in church, and there is nothing like a church talk to set me straight. I am continually amazed at the power and clarity that can be bestowed through the Spirit. I began 4 talks, wrote for a bit, but never felt I was headed in the right direction. Something was missing: a scripture, a connection, the right words. As most of my real writing does, it evolves, builds,  transcends any notion or idea I had for its final form, even as I was reading it aloud. This is no exception. I wrote four talks, but ended up combining them altogether somehow into what I will paste below. My topic was a phrase from the Good Samaritan, "And who is my brother?" I know more than ever how important one soul is. I hope I can always personify that.

Note: I am aware my citations are not perfect. Don't judge.

"I want to begin my talk today with a simple scripture from 1 John 4:8 “ He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is love.” Today I have been asked to speak on the phrase from the parable of the Good Samaritan “And who is my neighbor?” But I feel that to truly understand what that question is asking we need to define a few things. Let’s begin with the equation just expressed by John: “God is love.” The word “is” is a statement of reality, to be, to exist. When used in mathematics it means “to have a specified significance” or “to equal.” Therefore, God = love. Over thousands of years the definition of love has taken on many connotations, but at its root it is an attachment, a chosen connection, an expression of a relationship between two or more things. Like the equation “God is Love” in its simplest form, love denotes the truest type of bond or connection to be had, a relationship with God.

We know how to love because of the pattern set in place by God. John explains this in verses 10-11: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us… Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” So God created the pattern for us to follow. He loved us, so we should love others in the same way. In fact, God went a HUGE step further and commanded that we follow it. In Matthew 22: 37-40, Christ sums up these commandments as follows, “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” Did you catch that last phrase, “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” In scriptural language this reads as saying… EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON THIS! Everything, as in “this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man,” kind of everything.

So what does this series of definitions have to do with my topic? Well, we were just told it has everything to do with it. As Dr. Marleen Williams stated, “All of God’s laws are ultimately laws of love. Every commandment is given out of love for you and concern for your happiness. Every commandment ultimately tests your ability to love Him and your fellowman.” If all the Gospel laws and the prophets hang on our ability to love God and our neighbor, then we had better learn about these relationships.

Let’s go back to the phrase I was given to study: “And who is my neighbor?” The word neighbor is an Old English/Saxon word “neahgebur” or “neah/nigh” meaning near + “gebur” (sounds like how my voice sounds) meaning dwelling. So a neighbor is a “near dweller” or someone who dwells near. Let me read from the parable of the Good Samaritan and you’ll see how this is all related: Luke, chapter 10 vs 25-29.

25: And Behold a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, What shall I do to inherit eternal life?

26: He said unto him: What is written in the law? How readest thou?

27: And he answering said: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself.

28: And he said unto him: thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

29: But he, willing to justify himself (or show he had reason for asking) said unto Jesus, and who is my neighbor?

As I have read through these passages I keep coming back to that final question. The emphasis of each individual word in the sentence shows the meaning and power these words have in relation to each other. And it is this idea of relationships (if you haven’t noticed already) that I want to focus on today.  

Returning to the parable of the Good Samaritan, it seems to me, that the lawyer who contended with Jesus sought to logically answer the question: “WHO is my neighbor?”  So with the prior definition of neighbor, the lawyer wanted to know the limit of his obligation for neighborliness. He wanted to know which of the people he associated with or “dwelled near” were considered his neighbors so that he could follow the law (as he stated previously) and then obtain eternal life. He wanted an equation, this + this + this = my neighbors.

But Christ made it clear from his parable that those people the lawyer normally associated with were not the only people who were his neighbors, nor did they (the priest and the Levite) necessarily treat those who dwelled near them as they would a close associate. Christ showed that Samaritans were his neighbors too, even if over time Jewish culture developed a hatred for the Samaritans because they had apostatized from the Israelite religion. Christ’s vision and understanding of “neighbor” extended further than the lawyer expected.

            Christ was leading him, and us to ask the question this way: “Who IS my neighbor?” We have already talked about the definition of the word “is.” It is a statement of reality. To understand who our neighbor truly is, we have to understand another relationship, the being we first dwelled near. God said “I will give unto you a pattern in all things, that ye may not be deceived.” He set in place our first relationship, that of a parent. As the bible dictionary states, “Mankind has a special relationship to [God] that differentiates man from all other created things: man is literally God’s offspring, made in his image, whereas all other things are but the work of his hands.” God, therefore, is our Father, and our doctrine and the scriptures testify repeatedly of this relationship.

It would have been easy to start my talk by just saying, God is our Father, our neighbors are God’s children, so we should love them as we love God. That really would be have been much easier. But, again, what I want to make clear are the relationships we are placed in. If you think about it, existence = relationships, to just be alive is to be in relationship with countless things. The instinctive act of breathing is a complicated and interconnected process of relationships involving our heart, veins, blood cells, lungs trachea, bronchi, bronchioles, and clusters of alveoli and more… not to mention the vertebrae, ribcage, back muscles, etc.. that keep our body erect and space inside for our lungs to expand. Or how about if we were to walk around outside right now… all of our senses would report the information or energy, colors, smells, etc, we are in relationship to. But as God said, all these things we see are “but the work of his hands.” Our neighbors, however, are our literal brothers and sisters all linked together in a vast series of interconnected, intergenerational, physical, spiritual, and emotional relationships. Our connections, obligations, and influences on each other are far greater than we often choose to realize.

It is through these relationships, with God and our neighbors, that we find meaning, that we literally learn language, understand that this person is a boy, and this person is a girl. Through these relationships we learn about power, and pain, endurance, joy, and love. This is what makes the Gospel truly amazing. It is our and its interconnectedness.

It is clear that the lawyer in the parable didn’t understand the breadth and depth of our relationship to others. Nor did the characters, the “certain priest” who saw the wounded man, but walked on the other side, or the Levite, who “looked on him” but continued on his way. They did what so many of us do with those we meet, we look, sometimes get really close- enough to see the wounds, and mistakenly think there is nothing we can do, or someone else will help them.

By the end of the parable Christ is asking the lawyer and us to adopt his view of the people that surrounded us and show mercy and compassion toward them. What better person to share a view of our fellow beings with than Christ, who more than being our Elder brother, chose to be our Savior and Redeemer, to create a relationship that would literally save us …from our sins, our heartache, those stupid things we did in jr. high, high school, or even yesterday, and the pain caused by being in relationships with others who do not see us and love us as Christ and God do.

The parable of the Good Samaritan, and particularly the phrase, “And Who is my neighbor?” is asking us to acknowledge the eternal connections, relationships, and desires we have when and if we choose to see and love others. The Samaritan may have not understood Jewish doctrine, or LDS doctrine, or even Christian beliefs, but his behavior toward the wounded man, left half dead, on the side of the road, was motivated by his innate humanness, by the light of Christ which connects us, and the love of God the Father, and our Redeemer. We as members of the church have the added companionship/relationship of the Holy Ghost, the literal Spirit of God. John confirms this relationship again in CH 4: 16- “And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.”

We, too, have been, and can continue to be motivated, like the Samaritan to have compassion on our brothers and sisters, some who may be wounded, even left half dead after life experience. We can extend our vision of our “neighbors” beyond our roommates/families, or the people across the hall, but to love and seek to understand those “in [the] sphere in which God has placed [us]” who we may not know, understand, agree with, or even acknowledge. When we choose this type of action we are being like God and like Christ, we are choosing to love as they do, the first step to becoming like them. As John states in a Ch 3: 2 “Beloved, now we are the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” It is my prayer that we will not pass by our brothers and sisters in need. That we can take every opportunity, though service, home and visiting teaching, game nights, softball, FHE, and by listening to the Spirit which dwelleth in us, to act upon our compassion for others and continually build upon our knowledge of the Gospel and its teaching of love. As John stated “God is love” and this eternal equation helps us to see the relationships and connections we have with God and our neighbor, for as Christ has told us, “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have ^adone it unto one of the ^bleast of these my ^cbrethren, ye have done it unto me.”"

More.

um... it's been almost 4 months. I should probably write something more than two sentences. Yeah, I should.

guilty pleasure # 43

On a snowy night like tonight where I nearly slammed my car into a BMW and an Miada parked along my brother's street I would like to share one of my guilty pleasures. No, this is not singing every word of Mariah Carey's "Always Be My Baby," the entire Backstreet Boys Millennium album, or even having "Say Yes to the Dress" tvo'd each week so I can check out the amazing and ridiculous things people decide to wear. My snowday guilty pleasure is that i LOVE kicking off the buildup from around my tires. You know, the stuff like this:

I mean look at it... it is a driving hazard. How do you expect to turn your wheels with solid chunks of ice wedged around your tires? So not only does kicking this muck save lives, but when you get out of your car and find that your entire wheel well is filled with ice and slush and that dirt they lay down for traction, it sure feels good to watch as the powerful whack from your boot dislodges a nearly impossible amount of the stuff. I mean really... how does it all fit up there. Sometimes it takes several swift kicks to really get the crud out of there. And then in the morning when it's time to go to work you get the added gift of being able to drive over the pile of buildup on the ground. Squash it flat like a pancake. 

Would you be surprised if I told you I love puddles as well? 

Probably not.

a holiday...

Maybe it is the bipolar weather of midwinter or maybe it is the way these grey days make me think of Jane Eyre wandering along the moors, but right now I wish I was in England. It has been on my mind for months. It started with my ritual viewing of "The Holiday" at Christmastime.  I know that there will not be a devilishly handsome (and rather pissed) Jude Law lookalike there to play tour guide to the charms of English village life and I know at this moment the weather is no better, probably worse than it is here. But I want it all the same. 

I want to walk these streets:

Rummage through history:

Walk amongst the heather:

Find new favorites with people like this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

Try new foods like haggis and blood pudding... maybe.

I'd even take getting thrown in the stocks again:

And drink the "awfully curative" waters at Bath:

If it meant I could see places like this:

And this: 

And this:

So friends, let's go. Let's fly to the place where people actually speak with the accents we copy daily. Who needs savings when we have all of these beautiful places to see. 

light, light, light.

I am a compulsive photographer. Many of you have experienced the endless click, click, click of my camera, sometimes one shot every second, framing, zooming in, laying open the panorama of some canyon or family party. For a long time I never understood or even thought about why I felt the need to take SO many pictures of the same things, why my summers were endlessly cataloged, and why I have thousands of pictures of sunsets and clouds, sun on red rock faces, and cloudscapes in the Salt Lake Valley. One reason is as artist and filmmaker Aaron Rose puts it, “In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.” 

I love what light can do. It changes the most banal subject (i.e. curtains) into something beautiful. It creates emotion and connection and surprise. 

Today I am sharing a few of my favorite "light" photographs. And these pictures are favorites for all of the reasons I love things, color and contrast, shape, composition, and emotion. Enjoy!

___________________________________________________________

Curtains: a study

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Southern Utah / Northern AZ

Cape Royal

LeFevere Viewpoint looking West.

Arizona Blue Sky

Sunset

Lees Ferry

Navajo Bridge

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Northern Utah

Sardine Canyon Fall

Deseret Ranch

Outside Logan

A butt load and other things.

So it looks like I may be a once a month writer. It also looks like I am beginning a habit of starting my blog posts with the word "so." SO… in honor of that word. I have dedicated this post to the accumulation of words I have looked up on my phone or those that have stood out to me in some way this past week.  

WARNING! There are etymological definitions in this post. Don't be skittish. Etymology is your friend.

1) Waffle: 

Some of you may believe I have recently become obsessed with this word. It is not true. I do like waffles and we had some pretty incredible one’s at our New Year’s party, but the search for this definition came while eating waffles at Aspen Grove with Gretchen and Katie. I am instead, obsessed with etymology, or word origins. And apart from functioning as a clock and obviously, a phone, my cell phone’s most important job after those tasks is to act as an all-knowing advisor. “I'll look it up,” at least for me, seems to be the new “can you hear me now?” of the smartphone generation. Perhaps after “is there an app for that?” and “Do you have Angry Birds?”

Etymology: 

waffle (n.): 

1744, from Du. wafel "waffle," from M.Du. or M.L.G. wafel; cognate with O.H.G. waba "honeycomb" (Ger. Wabe) and related to O.H.G. weban, O.E. wefan "to weave" (see weave). Sense of "honeycomb" is preserved in some combinations referring to a weave of cloth. Waffle iron is from 1794.

(This of course makes perfect sense in reference to the traditional honeycombed appearance of modern waffle makers…)

waffle (v.): 

1690s, "to yelp, bark," frequentative of waff "to yelp" (1610); possibly of imitative origin. Figurative sense of "talk foolishly" (1701) led to that of "vacillate, equivocate" (1803), originally a Scottish and northern English usage. Related: Waffled; waffling.

I couldn’t leave out this definition of the word however…Who knew that all those waffling politicians could be linked back to yelping and barking… This, OF COURSE, made me think of one of my favorite childhood Christmas Specials. "Here we come a waffling." Enjoy.

2) Witance: 

This was the word I was asked to type into Gretchen’s blog to verify I was a human being and not a virus leaving her a message about our next Daycare Theater movie selection. This is not a “real” word in the English language. In fact, if you Google this word all that comes up are garbled words used as code or VERY poorly translated sentences:

“Tha the handsgh the souhat files of the Qi rArts oliva, the clawy reinforcdes, I hea you not lhas a relaxcited witance of wid vividly at

”firhe Ying Keraid the l moved witance, liketoday's reloped him.gray. 

But this should/could be a word because of the combination of its individual parts.

Wit:

1. The natural ability to perceive and understand; intelligence.

2. The ability to perceive and express in an ingeniously humorous manner the relationship between seemingly incongruous or disparate things.

wit (n.): 

"mental capacity," O.E. wit, more commonly gewit, from P.Gmc. *witjan (cf. O.S. wit, O.N. vit, Dan. vid, Swed. vett, O.Fris. wit, O.H.G. wizzi "knowledge, understanding, intelligence, mind," Ger. Witz "wit, witticism, joke," Goth. unwiti "ignorance"), from PIE *woid-/*weid-/*wid- "to see," metaphorically "to know" (see vision). Related to O.E. witan "to know" (source of wit (v.)). Meaning "ability to make clever remarks in an amusing way" is first recorded 1540s; that of "person of wit or learning" is from late 15c. For nuances of usage, see humor.

-ance: 

1. indicating an action, state or condition, or quality

 -ance:

suffix attached to verbs to form abstract nouns of process or fact (convergence from converge), or of state or quality (absence from absent); ultimately from L. -antia and -entia, which depended on the vowel in the stem word. As Old French evolved from Latin, these were leveled to -ance, but later French borrowings from Latin (some of them subsequently passed to English) used the appropriate Latin form of the ending, as did words borrowed by English directly from Latin (diligence, absence). English thus inherited a confused mass of words from French and further confused it since c.1500 by restoring -ence selectively in some forms of these words to conform with Latin. Thus dependant, but independence, etc.

Wit + ance 

So, as English “inherited a confused mass of words” it didn’t seem to add wit + ance together. The combination is plausible, but awkward. 

“Her genuine witance made her very likable” doesn’t pack the same punch as just saying the girl is “witty". The girl with “witance” might require white gloves and a role in a BBC drama.

3) Butt load: 

My final selection came from a late night car conversation with Katie Jane. I know it’s not just me. I know you have also wondered where the phrase “butt load” came from. Here’s what I found.

1. A large amount, possibly a variant of boatload, or perhaps refering to a large container known as a butt.

“We spent all day Sunday and picked up a buttload of pecans.
”

            “For some reason there were a buttload of books with unicorns on the cover.” 

The Measurement: 

Butt - a measure of liquid capacity equal to 126 gallons or two hogs heads. An English butt is 2 hogshead of 54 imperial gallons each or ~129.7 US gallons (i.e., a UK butt is apparently slightly bigger than a US one).

But don’t confuse it with the Spanish butt. We wouldn’t want that.

A Spanish butt is based on a wine cask and is equivalent to 140 US gallons or ~116.6 UK gallons (i.e., a Spanish butt is bigger still)

1 butt equals:

•  2 hogsheads (this is probably the easiest to remember for social occasions) – OF COURSE!
•  476.961 liters
• 126 gallons
• 104.917 UK gallons
• 13.5347 bushels
•  0.131592 cords
• 11.6574 firkins (not to be confused with jerkin  
• 4032 gills
• 21504 ponys
• 4032 noggins
• 1008 pints
• 96768 teaspoons
• 12.0308 ephahs
• 1.58987x10^7 drops
• 10752 jiggers
• 16128 shots
• 629.504 wine bottles
•  630 fifths

So those of you who are not quite convinced of the benefits of having a smart phone or of looking up the definitions of words and phrases should stop waffling, add to your witance, and start looking up words. There are a butt load of them out there and you never know what you might find. 

A beginning.

So here’s the deal. I have been meaning to start a blog for a while now. In fact, this site has been organized like this since August. But now that the press of my master’s thesis has finally lifted and with it the feeling that writing = overwhelmed, incompetent, and a bit pukey, it is time to start writing again. I used to think a journal was enough. But I am a terrible journal writer. I usually write too soon after an experience and spew emotions and lame phrases that sound like they should be in a high school yearbook or I become melodramatic and once again misrepresent the truth. It seems my problem is audience. Of course I am going to think “he is SOOO awesome!” because the only person I have to account to is, well, me. But as a writing instructor I recognize that audience is everything. I am not trying to amuse myself in my journal, or share my favorite music, writings, truth, and snatches of Arizona sky. Nope. It’s just me and my little brain. But here, I can share. And I love sharing. Actually, I think that is why I am a teacher. Because sometimes things are too wonderful, clear, ridiculous, inspiring, and awkward not to share them and help others recognize them as well. In fact, that is what I see as beautiful, that process of connection between people and places, humor, knowledge, inspiration, and truth. And I am in search of all those things.

During parts of my life I have wandered from one place to the next, collecting these bits of beauty or as Everett Ruess, the man whom the title of my blog was originally written for, once penned, “I only live to see again. To mix and match my colors with the visioned splendors I’ve failed to catch.” That is what makes a vagabond so restless, or at least me and Everett. We are always on the move, in search of this beauty wherever we find ourselves. It crops up in the most interesting places, like this semester in the words of one of my 19 year old students who woke to his crying infant daughter and instead of just calming her and heading back to bed, he held her for an hour so he could “learn to understand her deep brown eyes.” That kind of beauty is everywhere, mixing, growing, morphing into the genius that created “Scrooge / Muppet's Christmas Carol,” digital SLR cameras, spam haikus, or homemade waffles.

You can call these moments gifts, or for some of you— coincidence. I call it being blessed with an extraordinary life. But beware, once you start looking for the beauty, recognize that it is, in fact, all around you, it becomes addictive, buries itself deep inside and you crave it more and more. But don’t fight it. Give in, like me and Everett, until “the wild silences have enfolded [you], unresisting.” You’ll thank me when you do.  Just make sure you share those flashes of inspiration when they come, or you’ll find that someone else has patented your “Baby Cage.” And no one wants that.

 Now here we are, at least for the moment.