Hi Everyone,
“Once upon a time, there was a Wrghting Wrghle at Whithworth. Sarah was going to go. She was very exyed.” Thus begins one of the many stories I wrote in my second grade journal, which my parents recently unearthed. As you may be able to decipher, I have always been excited by writing. Spelling, however, is not my forte. (“But at least you knew Welsh at a very early age,” my brother said in response to my attempt at phonetic spelling.) My parents were rather puzzled at this apparent gap in my otherwise unwavering academic passion. I remember them sitting me down and telling me I really needed to work on my spelling. They toyed with the idea of setting up a reward system for improved orthographic ability and I regret to this day that I didn’t capitalize on it. But they and my teachers were patient and realized that if I just kept writing, the spelling would come. They continued to foster this interest even while I was busy penning words and phrases so obviously misspelled that they would later become part of my family’s personal argot. Rather than errpting into anger or saying they were nerves about my ability to ever write proper English, they encouraged me to work on my wrghting by journaling, making stories, and even by going to rallies at Whitworth.
The movie Doubt (Thank heavens they didn’t put me in charge of spelling that!) starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep, deals brilliantly with the way doubt can be either a vehicle for discovering the truth or a sledgehammer to the truth you’ve already had. The climax of the movie comes when Meryl Streep’s character, who until that point has been adamantly suspicious of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s moral integrity, confides to her fellow sister, “I HAVE DOUBT!” In my opinion, the seriousness of the film breaks down for a moment here due to the suddenness and intensity of this revelation.
The other day, my brother and I were talking about times in our lives when we’ve been scared. My most terrifying time came after my family and I went on Semester at Sea when I was 16, when what I’d seen and learned caused me to question for the first time the religion that I’d grown up with and which structured my life. Am I Christian simply because my parents are? I wondered. Are all religions simply the opiate of the masses, as Marx said? Does Christianity deal effectively with the question of suffering? Is it even possible to know ultimate truth? This was a definite “I HAVE DOUBT!” period in my life, and I’ll be eternally grateful to the people who listened patiently to me as I processed and fretted, and I’m not even an award winning actress!
Eventually, after running my mind around in circles, it began to dawn on me that I could never argue my way back to being a Christian and that in fact, this was the whole point of faith. Since then, I have learned to see faith as an activity rather than a possession you could lose or regain. A few weeks ago, I finished President Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father. Before he became a Christian, churchgoing friends of his would ask him about his beliefs. “I would shrug and play the question off,” he says, “unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance.” I love this. It acknowledges that there are times when faith has very little to do with heartfelt belief and is more about just making it through the day. It acknowledges that there are times when believing in something bigger and better than us seems to be pure idiocy.
For several years after Semester at Sea, my faith felt featherlight. I would hear a comment or learn a fact in a class that would plunge me into a nauseating spasm of doubt. This faith which I’d fought so hard to win back seemed as fickle as a windsock, inflating only when the wind was strong enough.
After some time, though, things got better. The doubts remained, to be sure, but the anxious spiritual paralysis faded away. I learned to live with doubt. Last week, I wrote the following response to the Obama quote in my journal: So often, my senses seem to be telling me that they are all there is. But I keep going, despite what my belief-o-meter is telling me on a given day. I guess that’s partly because I know by now that I’ll “come around,” that give me a few days or even hours, and I could be singing a different tune. But I think it’s also partly because by now, I tend to see those periods or moments of doubt as essential to my faith. They’re the other side of the coin, the yang, the versa, the exhale. If I don’t have voices, including my own, that are expressing doubt at least semi-regularly, my faith becomes a monologue rather than a conversation.
I now see myself as a pendulum oscillating between doubt and belief and faith is the arc that this movement creates. I think faith is as hard as spelling. I’ll never be able to spell “privilege” on the first try, and I’ll never be able to prove definitively that God exists. But there is a strength that comes from endurance and in the end, knowing the Word is more important than spelling it.
Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Ideally Speaking
Hello Everyone,
I’m beginning to realize how important doing laundry is to me. I’ve already written two other letters about it, and am about to start a third. But laundry is something that is by its very nature cyclical, so I don’t feel too bad about bringing it up time after time. As I mentioned in an earlier letter, when I was in France, I hung my laundry on a line to dry. This habit continued in South Africa, where even in winter, it is common to rely on good old fashioned sunshine and a nice breeze. When we got back to Spokane and started to hack away at the mountains of dirty laundry we had accumulated, it was mid-July. I was convinced that it would not only be more energy efficient to use a clothes line, it would also be quicker, since the semi-arid conditions of Spokane summers make this time of year ideal for drying clothes outside. There was one problem: we don’t have a clothes line.
Not to worry, I declared! I’m a resourceful person! So I went to our garage to see what I could use instead. I found what I deemed a worthy substitute: weed wacker cord. It was strong, we had a ton of it, and best of all, it was a lovely blue color! My brother, who by this point had taken an interest in my project, helped me tie a length of wire to a fence post. “So,” I said, “know any good knots?” We momentarily regretted that he’d never been a boy scout, where an older boy, perhaps as part of his Eagle Scout project, would perhaps have passed on some of his knotty wisdom (careful how you say that!) in a series of seminars or something. But we forged ahead and managed to tie the cord all the same. We then stretched it tight and tied the other end to a hook attached to the bottom of our deck. It was perfect! The day was roasty and the line was taught. My freshly cleaned clothes would be stretched out and dry in minutes, I was sure. Think how much energy we’d be saving by not using the drier. Maybe, I thought, with a sudden gasp of environmental evangelism, the neighbors will see our stewardship example and follow suit!
I got my basket of clothes and proudly put the first item on the line. It sagged significantly. I put the second item on and the line bent lower still. After a few more, my T-shirts were touching the ground. This was not ideal.
The obvious solution was to go out and buy some actual laundry line and start again. But, for whatever reason, Matthew and I continue to use this system to dry our laundry. We started propping up the loaded line with plastic lawn furniture. When the chairs got knocked over in the breeze, we used duct tape to secure them to the line. We’ve probably dried over ten loads of laundry this way, and despite the rather pathetic display in the back yard, it works!
The back yard is the arena for another operation I’ve been performing regularly. I have a backlog of dirt samples from France and South Africa that I didn’t have time to filter while I was away, so I’ve been doing that under our deck. We have a table, where I can put my growing collection of mud-filled yogurt containers. There is a spigot nearby and I can dump the refuse mud directly into the flowerbed. The only issue is that my dad and brother have been stripping the deck so they can repaint it. This means that chunks of paint have been floating down into the mud, which defeats the purpose of filtering it in the first place. So, remembering I am resourceful, I looked around until I found an old plastic table cloth which I now use to cover the mud. To ensure that it won’t blow away, I pin it down to the table with a bucket, one of my snowboots, and one of my mom’s gardening clogs.
Though this seems to do the trick, I must confess that there have been several moments when I have thought to myself, “When I get a studio of my own, I won’t have to deal with these kind of inconveniences!”
But then I check myself: I paint with mud precisely because it isn’t ideal! I paint with mud because most people don’t have access to refined Winsor and Newton pigments. I paint with mud because even though I filter it, there are irregularities that make it an unpredictable and exciting medium. I paint with mud because it is inefficient, forcing me to put in hours of work before I even begin to think about an image.
I recently read a summary of the Bible which concluded by saying, “Ideally speaking, if we all lived in this kind of altruistic concern and engagement, human history would culminate in an epiphany of God in man. Mankind would visibly be ‘Christ.’” Thomas Merton, the author, put his entire summary, which was about a page long, in all caps, to separate it from the rest of the text. I read the conclusion and snort-laughed to myself. No kidding it’s “ideally speaking”! It’s hard enough for one life to be saturated with altruism, let alone all of human history. We have a very hard time seeing Christ in anyone, never mind all of humankind. However, as he said, Merton wasn’t describing what is, but what should be. Ideals are essential. They encourage us and make us aim high. They give us something to hope in and to wait for.
But it helps to recognize that sometimes, “good enough” is precisely that. We don’t live in the ideal; we live in the dirt. And as long as we manage to clean our clothes every so often, who cares how exactly we dry them?
Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse
I’m beginning to realize how important doing laundry is to me. I’ve already written two other letters about it, and am about to start a third. But laundry is something that is by its very nature cyclical, so I don’t feel too bad about bringing it up time after time. As I mentioned in an earlier letter, when I was in France, I hung my laundry on a line to dry. This habit continued in South Africa, where even in winter, it is common to rely on good old fashioned sunshine and a nice breeze. When we got back to Spokane and started to hack away at the mountains of dirty laundry we had accumulated, it was mid-July. I was convinced that it would not only be more energy efficient to use a clothes line, it would also be quicker, since the semi-arid conditions of Spokane summers make this time of year ideal for drying clothes outside. There was one problem: we don’t have a clothes line.
Not to worry, I declared! I’m a resourceful person! So I went to our garage to see what I could use instead. I found what I deemed a worthy substitute: weed wacker cord. It was strong, we had a ton of it, and best of all, it was a lovely blue color! My brother, who by this point had taken an interest in my project, helped me tie a length of wire to a fence post. “So,” I said, “know any good knots?” We momentarily regretted that he’d never been a boy scout, where an older boy, perhaps as part of his Eagle Scout project, would perhaps have passed on some of his knotty wisdom (careful how you say that!) in a series of seminars or something. But we forged ahead and managed to tie the cord all the same. We then stretched it tight and tied the other end to a hook attached to the bottom of our deck. It was perfect! The day was roasty and the line was taught. My freshly cleaned clothes would be stretched out and dry in minutes, I was sure. Think how much energy we’d be saving by not using the drier. Maybe, I thought, with a sudden gasp of environmental evangelism, the neighbors will see our stewardship example and follow suit!
I got my basket of clothes and proudly put the first item on the line. It sagged significantly. I put the second item on and the line bent lower still. After a few more, my T-shirts were touching the ground. This was not ideal.
The obvious solution was to go out and buy some actual laundry line and start again. But, for whatever reason, Matthew and I continue to use this system to dry our laundry. We started propping up the loaded line with plastic lawn furniture. When the chairs got knocked over in the breeze, we used duct tape to secure them to the line. We’ve probably dried over ten loads of laundry this way, and despite the rather pathetic display in the back yard, it works!
The back yard is the arena for another operation I’ve been performing regularly. I have a backlog of dirt samples from France and South Africa that I didn’t have time to filter while I was away, so I’ve been doing that under our deck. We have a table, where I can put my growing collection of mud-filled yogurt containers. There is a spigot nearby and I can dump the refuse mud directly into the flowerbed. The only issue is that my dad and brother have been stripping the deck so they can repaint it. This means that chunks of paint have been floating down into the mud, which defeats the purpose of filtering it in the first place. So, remembering I am resourceful, I looked around until I found an old plastic table cloth which I now use to cover the mud. To ensure that it won’t blow away, I pin it down to the table with a bucket, one of my snowboots, and one of my mom’s gardening clogs.
Though this seems to do the trick, I must confess that there have been several moments when I have thought to myself, “When I get a studio of my own, I won’t have to deal with these kind of inconveniences!”
But then I check myself: I paint with mud precisely because it isn’t ideal! I paint with mud because most people don’t have access to refined Winsor and Newton pigments. I paint with mud because even though I filter it, there are irregularities that make it an unpredictable and exciting medium. I paint with mud because it is inefficient, forcing me to put in hours of work before I even begin to think about an image.
I recently read a summary of the Bible which concluded by saying, “Ideally speaking, if we all lived in this kind of altruistic concern and engagement, human history would culminate in an epiphany of God in man. Mankind would visibly be ‘Christ.’” Thomas Merton, the author, put his entire summary, which was about a page long, in all caps, to separate it from the rest of the text. I read the conclusion and snort-laughed to myself. No kidding it’s “ideally speaking”! It’s hard enough for one life to be saturated with altruism, let alone all of human history. We have a very hard time seeing Christ in anyone, never mind all of humankind. However, as he said, Merton wasn’t describing what is, but what should be. Ideals are essential. They encourage us and make us aim high. They give us something to hope in and to wait for.
But it helps to recognize that sometimes, “good enough” is precisely that. We don’t live in the ideal; we live in the dirt. And as long as we manage to clean our clothes every so often, who cares how exactly we dry them?
Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Voice
Hello Everyone,
A few weeks ago, my family celebrated my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary partly by listening to a cassette recording of the speeches made at their reception. The best man spoke first, offering encouragement and congratulations. My uncle spoke next, seeing the occasion as a chance not only to offer wisdom and his best wishes, but also to share some of his favorite jokes regardless of whether he could think of an appropriate segue. Then it was time for the speech my brother and I had been waiting a lifetime to hear. Ever since I can remember, people have been telling me what a good speech my dad gave. “A classic,” they’d say. “I will remember it for the rest of my life.”
So we were ready to be amazed, and amazed we certainly were. A man with a rather high pitched and vaguely sibilant voice started talking and Matthew and I assumed he was introducing our father. It took us about a minute of context clues and assurance from our parents to realize that it was our father. It was a great speech, but though the content was quintessential Daddy with a sustained comic theme, a hilarious impression of the then president of South Africa, P.W. Botha, and a brilliantly placed pun to cap it all off, the voice was incongruous. He proceeded to speak this way for maybe ten minutes. His intonation and inflection were the same, but that voice! We thought maybe the tape had warped after three decades, but the other two speakers had sounded normal. There was only one explanation: his voice has changed significantly.
This incident threw into turmoil an analogy I adopted several years ago to help me understand the difference between artistic “style” and “voice.” I heard from an illustrator that one’s style is more superficial or at least more controllable than one’s voice. Just as you can change fashion styles by putting on a different set of clothes, you can change artistic styles by choosing to draw differently, for example by including significantly more or less detail, by using a very different medium, or by relying more or less on value or textures. I think that accents are the vocal equivalent of style. My brother can change between accents faster than an experienced shopaholic goes through outfits in the Nordstrom changing rooms on Black Friday. Even people who aren’t training to be actors sometimes find themselves involuntarily imitating those exotic foreigners who pronounce “been” as “bean,” and who say things like “I need to go to the loo.”
One’s voice, though, is much harder to change. We think that essentially once we’ve braved our way through the murky waters of puberty, our voices remain relatively constant. I had a childhood friend who was always trying to make her voice less nasal. And though her attempts provided me many a good laugh, she never succeeded in modifying her voice at all. And perhaps because of this apparent permanence, it seems that people sometimes listen more to our voices than to our accents or even to the words we say. Although my mom’s accent has softened a bit and mine has always been slightly more British-sounding than my peers’, we have distinctly different accents. And yet I can’t count the number of times I answer the phone by saying, “Hi, this is Sarah,” only to have the person on the other end respond by saying, “Hi Sue, this is so-and-so.” It gets confusing when they ask for me:
“Oh hi, Carrie. Actually, this is Sarah.”
“How are you doing? Are you having a good summer?”
“Yeah, it’s been good. You?”
“Very good, thank you. Well, could you tell Sarah that she needs to set up an appointment at the dentist?”
“Um . . . well, this IS Sarah.”
“She could come in any time next week.”
“Uh . . . actually, this is -- oh nevermind. Yeah, I’ll have her call you back.”
So it was all the more strange to me that it was my dad’s voice -- not just his accent -- that had changed so dramatically. The analogy the illustrator had given me was in danger of either exploding or expanding. If my physical voice doesn’t remain constant throughout life, does that meant that my artistic voice will also change? Of course, I want to grow and develop, but shouldn’t there be a definitive Mouse-ish-ness to all my work? I don’t know, and I don’t suppose it is terribly helpful or healthy to be constantly examining my work wondering, “Is this drawing the real me? . . . What about this one?” So many things are better understood in retrospect.
Some voices do change over time, and so they should. They subconsciously react to new experiences and other people’s voices. Come to think of it, this sounds a lot like the job description of an artist. The past thirty years have been incredibly rich for my parents, and if the next thirty are similarly varied, who knows what my dad will sound like in 2040!
Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse
A few weeks ago, my family celebrated my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary partly by listening to a cassette recording of the speeches made at their reception. The best man spoke first, offering encouragement and congratulations. My uncle spoke next, seeing the occasion as a chance not only to offer wisdom and his best wishes, but also to share some of his favorite jokes regardless of whether he could think of an appropriate segue. Then it was time for the speech my brother and I had been waiting a lifetime to hear. Ever since I can remember, people have been telling me what a good speech my dad gave. “A classic,” they’d say. “I will remember it for the rest of my life.”
So we were ready to be amazed, and amazed we certainly were. A man with a rather high pitched and vaguely sibilant voice started talking and Matthew and I assumed he was introducing our father. It took us about a minute of context clues and assurance from our parents to realize that it was our father. It was a great speech, but though the content was quintessential Daddy with a sustained comic theme, a hilarious impression of the then president of South Africa, P.W. Botha, and a brilliantly placed pun to cap it all off, the voice was incongruous. He proceeded to speak this way for maybe ten minutes. His intonation and inflection were the same, but that voice! We thought maybe the tape had warped after three decades, but the other two speakers had sounded normal. There was only one explanation: his voice has changed significantly.
This incident threw into turmoil an analogy I adopted several years ago to help me understand the difference between artistic “style” and “voice.” I heard from an illustrator that one’s style is more superficial or at least more controllable than one’s voice. Just as you can change fashion styles by putting on a different set of clothes, you can change artistic styles by choosing to draw differently, for example by including significantly more or less detail, by using a very different medium, or by relying more or less on value or textures. I think that accents are the vocal equivalent of style. My brother can change between accents faster than an experienced shopaholic goes through outfits in the Nordstrom changing rooms on Black Friday. Even people who aren’t training to be actors sometimes find themselves involuntarily imitating those exotic foreigners who pronounce “been” as “bean,” and who say things like “I need to go to the loo.”
One’s voice, though, is much harder to change. We think that essentially once we’ve braved our way through the murky waters of puberty, our voices remain relatively constant. I had a childhood friend who was always trying to make her voice less nasal. And though her attempts provided me many a good laugh, she never succeeded in modifying her voice at all. And perhaps because of this apparent permanence, it seems that people sometimes listen more to our voices than to our accents or even to the words we say. Although my mom’s accent has softened a bit and mine has always been slightly more British-sounding than my peers’, we have distinctly different accents. And yet I can’t count the number of times I answer the phone by saying, “Hi, this is Sarah,” only to have the person on the other end respond by saying, “Hi Sue, this is so-and-so.” It gets confusing when they ask for me:
“Oh hi, Carrie. Actually, this is Sarah.”
“How are you doing? Are you having a good summer?”
“Yeah, it’s been good. You?”
“Very good, thank you. Well, could you tell Sarah that she needs to set up an appointment at the dentist?”
“Um . . . well, this IS Sarah.”
“She could come in any time next week.”
“Uh . . . actually, this is -- oh nevermind. Yeah, I’ll have her call you back.”
So it was all the more strange to me that it was my dad’s voice -- not just his accent -- that had changed so dramatically. The analogy the illustrator had given me was in danger of either exploding or expanding. If my physical voice doesn’t remain constant throughout life, does that meant that my artistic voice will also change? Of course, I want to grow and develop, but shouldn’t there be a definitive Mouse-ish-ness to all my work? I don’t know, and I don’t suppose it is terribly helpful or healthy to be constantly examining my work wondering, “Is this drawing the real me? . . . What about this one?” So many things are better understood in retrospect.
Some voices do change over time, and so they should. They subconsciously react to new experiences and other people’s voices. Come to think of it, this sounds a lot like the job description of an artist. The past thirty years have been incredibly rich for my parents, and if the next thirty are similarly varied, who knows what my dad will sound like in 2040!
Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse
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