We have a pretty easy time of with puberty compared to many of the puberty rites that go along some of the initiations I've been reading about. I don't think many of us have had to go through traumatic circumcisions, or be dropped out in the middle of the ocean to swim to shore at the first sign of menstrual cycles, or had our breasts ironed, or gauged our lips for beauty (ouch), or forced to burn our hands by handling a burning ball of cotton and then wear a mat covered with biting and stinging ants.

I don't think Western girls can say that learning to use an eyelash curler for the first time is anywhere near that painful. Sure, junior high is not usually full of fond memories, and some things can be emotionally distressing, but is any of that nearly as bad as all of the above?

I think this initiation assignment is wonderful in two ways - it gives us the opportunity to learn about different cultures from all the corners of the world, and it (at least, it does for me) gives pause for us to realize how fortunate we are that only dealt with acne and braces, and not scarification and poison. We are incredibly lucky.

The last time I was moved to silence was almost two years ago.

I stood on a beach.

It was my first time abroad, and it was during the Fall Break tour of my four month stay in the Eternal City. I don't think I will ever lose the wonder for the world that this first trip gave to me.

We left for tour at the end of October, about a week away from my 20th birthday. It was to be a two week long visit to France, most specifically the northern half, and most specifically in my World-War-II-obsessed mind, a trip through Normandy.

We had a wonderful tour guide, a man named Stuart Robertson, who does more private tours, and someone who also has so many stories that he's received first hand from survivors and soldiers of the war alike that every place we went was shadowed and colored by real people from the past. I hate thinking of it as a "tour" because that word conjures all of the masses of crowds with their whisper sets following the one person holding a flag at the front. Stuart was a storyteller - and we were simply his listeners.

Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Pointe du Hoc (which is arguably one of the most beautiful places I have ever been), Utah Beach - each place we walked and stood upon in the sunny that morning was amazing.

But it was Omaha that struck me.

Once a tourist resort, the expanse is now empty. We stepped off the road and onto the thick sand. Stuart only spoke for a few moments and then fell silent, gesturing that we should go wherever we needed.

It's what you would call the perfect beach - golden sands, spread out to meet the blue sea that foams at its edges. A perfect sky, a slight breeze. But it was so eerily empty, so completely silent. No gulls cried. There was no one there but us, and a single little boy with a net, catching things in the shallows. I left the group and I walked to the edge of the sea, and when the toes of my boots touched the surf, I turned around.

The bluffs didn't seem that far away - I felt that I could cover the expanse at a run in less than a minute, 30 seconds even. But they couldn't that day. And some didn't even make it past where I stood. I stood and looked as the waves lapped at my boots, and couldn't find the words to fill the emotions that ran through me. I watched the little boy with his net, the picture of innocence standing testament to what happened there.

So much death, in such a quiet, beautiful place. I'll never forget it.

It's funny to use the word "ritual" and "religion" in the same sentence, but that's probably because I never thought of it that way before - even if it's true. I went through a baptism too - I was a baby for mine though, and I was baptized at the same time as my cousin Daniel, who I'm very close to. I may not remember anything from the ceremony, but the picture that was taken after is one that's always stuck in my mind. It's of me and Daniel - him, sitting on my mother's lap absolutely wailing, and me sitting on his mother's lap, looking at him quizzically. It makes me grin just thinking about it.

As for my own rituals? Leaving my house to walk to school every day at exactly 7:40 am, always buying a large container of ZOI vanilla Greek yogurt once a week, and talking to my man on the phone every night for a bit. Going to class every day would be a ritual too I suppose. Whenever we go on a road trip, we unfailingly buy a Snapple and a strawberry ice cream bar at the first rest stop.

My makeup varies, but I almost always use eyeliner, if any at all. I wear my hair up on the days I don't wash it, and down on the days I do. I go to the gym at 2 pm Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and at 9 am Tuesday and Wednesday - always starting with the elliptical when I get there.

I always listen to "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros when I drive into Dillon.

Humans - what oddly habitual creatures we are.

I'm not sure how I feel about that...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHEOF_rcND8
(link to the song :) )

Flowers in her hair

I have a dear friend who's spending the year studying abroad in Austria right now (though I think at the moment she's in Greece - and will soon be headed to Rome. I told her she has to go see Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne.":) ) and today I received a letter and a postcard from her, and a little wooden bookmark from Prague.

The bookmark is gorgeous - it's in one of my favorite styles: Art Nouveau.

This picture to the left is one she sent me over a year ago - and still one of my favorites. The style adapted from older forms of art; new takes influenced by the rococo and Grecian, Gothic and Roman, to name a few. Whenever I had seen these pictures and paintings before I'd been in class, I always thought they were so Grecian.

I love the subject matter that many of the artists used - mermaids and nymphs, all the beautiful women with flowers in their hair that could be dryads or nymphs. The woman on my bookmark is set against a beautiful palette of oranges and yellows, standing delicately like the beautiful marble statues I saw in Rome. All of the women in these pictures could be Callisto, Daphne, Europa...any of the famed ladies of many myths.

As I was looking through an online album, I came across this one:

They are everywhere, these characters. They are timeless.

Have a Yippee Ki Yay Valentines Day!

For all the haters out there, I loved Valentine's Day even before I ever had my first boyfriend. People call it stupid, but what's so stupid about having one day set aside every year to show the people you love how much you care about them? I think that's wonderful.

My man came down to spend the evening with me; we went to dinner, and watched the premiere of the new Die Hard (yes - it was funny to watch all of the couples going to the new Nicholas Sparks movie, "Safe Haven" across the hall from the movie we were going to. Nothing says "I love you!" more than Bruce Willis smashing things... ).

Before we left, we exchanged gifts, and in a jest as to the fact I keep joking with him to buy me a ring, he bought me wine entitled "The Diamond." Which got me wondering...why is it we associate diamonds with weddings and love and engagement rings and all of that stuff? There has to be a mythology attached to that somewhere.

I found a few interesting sites about diamonds, one of which I'll post below, but the two things that stood out to me were these: In Greek mythology, diamonds were thought to be the tears of the gods. And in Roman mythology, they were thought to be the splinters of stars (isn't that beautiful??) that Cupid used to tip his love arrows.

How funny to find that out on a day where little baby cupids are hovering from strings in the windows of shops and making inappropriate jokes on some cards everywhere you look. Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if in any of the sections with Cupid diamond-tipped arrows are mentioned in Ovid. Hmmmmm. I'm going to have to go look.

Hope everyone had a love-filled Valentine's Day, complete with explosions, good company, fun, and many John McClain one-liners. ♥

http://www.abazias.com/diamondblog/diamond-education/appreciating-the-symbolism-of-the-diamond

Dish soap. That would be where this entry stems from. My roommate brought us  home a new bottle of dish soap, which we both cheered at - I'll never take having a dishwasher for granted again - and as I came to the sink later, and noticed the name of the brand: Ajax.

If anyone's seen Troy, you'll know the image of the burly man my mind went straight to - tall, strong, falls to Hector ( in the movie). I watched him before I read about him in Ovid, but there he was, his name never to die, emblazoned on a container of yellow dish soap. There's something about men always wanting their names to last through the ages in that movie, these grand gestures that will make them known to the world long after they are gone. My mind moved to Odysseus in that film as well (one of Sean Bean's only movie roles where he doesn't die) - a character who I despise...but who's wife I'm fond of.

And as I'm standing at the counter, I remember the phrase, "Penelope did this too." There was a poem, way back somewhere between grades three and six that I remembered very clearly being one of my favorites. I hadn't read it in ages, couldn't remember the title. But I found it.

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope...
Penelope, who really cried.

 

- Edna St. Vincent Millay An Ancient Gesture

 

 All these mythic clues are jogging my memory the way music does. It's wonderful. 

"Penelope, who really cried."

♪ i threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell ♪

So Rachel and I made hot chocolate this evening and bundled up to go out and look at the stars. We drove up to Pete's Hill, had a bit of an adventure trying to find the trail and the bench, and then sat, sipping cocoa in the cool air, looking up at the sky above us, and talking about all things "philosophical."

Rachel and I went to high school together, so we've known each other for almost eight years now. There was a moment after our senior year of high school, early that summer, that a similar night like this passed. We were out at her place having a bonfire, an assortment of different friends laughing and being loud and throwing unused furniture into the fire (don't ask), and she, myself, and my cousin Daniel, wandered away from all the noise out into one of the empty fields near her house, one that my uncle works. It was chilly, but not cold, and we all sat down in the middle of the field, avoiding the parts of mud and the pokey grass - we turned our faces to the sky.

Our friend Kevin once said, "I swear, the sky really is bigger here. Everyone else says differently, but it really is." Our Montana sky is enormous; a wide expansive opening of everything that I really do swear is larger here. We sat that night and stared at it, and the stars were brilliant, covering the entire night sky like a thick blanket. We talked about who must have seen these generations before, who must have written the stories of where the constellations come from. It was beautiful, and it was quiet.

Thinking about it now, stars bookmark so many places in my memory. Laying out in the middle of a quiet highway, the dotted yellow line beneath me. A night in Coeur d'Alene that changed my life. A moment in the Pyrenees, surrounded by the same prayer being voiced in so many different tongues. They're always watching, always witnessing.

They're always telling us stories.

The Origin of Originality

Tom said something in class on Monday about how humanity as a species is boring - that we lack the creativity to come up with anything new, that "boring" is a learned trait (correct me if I'm wrong Tom).

That nothing you come up with is original - somebody else has already thought it, written it, spoke it, acted it. For the life of me, I can't remember where I heard this, but I remember talking with someone one day about a phobia they had discussed in one of their writing classes. I can't seem to find the name for this phobia - and I've been looking for a while - but I remember that it was applied to writers. The fear of nothing they write ever being original. Which, in a sense, isn't that sort of true? The ideas we have for stories, papers, movies, etc, all of these...weren't they influenced to some extent by all of the things that we see and read and hear and take in everyday? (I would go in to a rant about how some forms of plagiarism in my opinion aren't plagiarism in my opinion, but I'll refrain.)

Where does "inspiration" come from? Outside sources. Everything influences everything we do, whether we notice it or not. It fits right into everything coming from myth. How many movies or books do we know that are influenced by some of Ovid's stories in Metamorphoses? Here's something my dad always seems to say: "Your own generation can't seem to write any good music so they just cover songs from ours" or something to that extent ;)

Sure there are a hundred versions of different fairy tales all over the world. They've been retold and refurnished and rewritten and spun on by different generations, and will continue to be. But they're all original - because none of them are told the same way twice. It's a bit like a game of Telephone. It evolves. Nobody tells it the same way.

Kind of like our repeated Creation Myth presentations.

Cool.

 

Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady

Creation Myth Themes

The parts of the myths that I heard most used were these:

1) Earth diver (wchi we discussed in class)
2) The use of clay or dirt to create either the world or humans.
3) Th cosmic egg.
4) "In the beginning there was nothing."
5) Body parts being using to create (Guam, Sedna, etc.)
6) The mother and father of the world being so close together that nothing can separate them (until their offspring do).
7) Sibling rivalry.
8) The Egyptian myth all on it's own.
9) And this one seems a little obscure, but the idea of the woman lying down to become either the water or create the land.

I thin one of the favorite myths I heard was actually the one from the Indians of British Columbia - the five beautiful women who each turn into an element of the world.

Gather Round the Fire...

My family and I camping the Boulder River (2012)

Here is my myth, as told by the website:
http://josmojo.wordpress.com/tag/iyadolas-babies/ :

" Nyame the sky God was sitting bored up in the sky. So he took a basket, a big round basket, filled it with leaves and plants and trees. He cut a curved hole in the sky so that he could push the basket out through it and he hung this basket from a cloud.

To see the basket better, he cut out a few jagged holes in the the sky. The curved hole was the moon and the jagged ones the stars.

He enjoyed watching the blades of grass dance in the breeze, the leaves change their colour and the creepers wind their way around other plants. But after a while this too was boring. So he took another basket and filled it with all kinds of wonderful creatures. Birds, animals, fish …..some soft and fluffy, others colorful, some huge, others minuscule, some fierce, others gentler.

He poured the contents of this basket out through the curved hole, into the first basket, The Earth. He loved to watch the animals frolic through the cutouts in the sky.

Inside Nyame there lived two little spirit creatures. They loved to creep up to the edge of Nyame’s mouth or nose and look out onto the earth along with him.

One day while they were all watching the animals on the earth, Nyame sneezed…..a humongous Sky God sneeze!

Out tumbled the spirit man and woman, out through Nyame’s nose, through the holes in the sky and down into the earth. Once they reached the earth they found it so different from the warmth and darkness of Nyame’s body. But soon they began to enjoy it. They loved walking on the soft grass and relaxing under the shade of a tree. They learnt to eat what they could find on the trees and bushes.

The spirit man began to make a few weapons and soon he was off hunting animals for their food, leaving behind the spirit lady in their cave home. The spirit lady was very lonely as the spirit man never ever took her hunting.

She got a brilliant idea and told the spirit man that they should make little clay creatures that looked exactly like them. They could bake them in a fire, blow on them and make them come to life. They would be able to move and talk just like the spirit man and lady. They could be our children, she said.

The spirit man liked the idea and began to build a fire while the spirit lady moulded the clay children.

As they put the first few clay dolls into the fire and sat back to wait and see how they would come out, they heard Nyame come thundering through the trees. The spirit man and lady quickly pulled out the clay children, wrapped them in leaves and hid them under the bushes.
Nyame had just dropped by to check what the spirit people thought of the wonderful earth he had created. Then he stomped out the way he came in.

The spirit man and woman quickly made some more clay children……but as they put them in the fire, Nyame was back and they had no time to even pull them out of the fire. ‘Why are you sitting by a fire?’ asked Nyame. They mumbled something about how they were feeling cold, but as the sun was shining bright, Nyame did’nt seem convinced. As soon as Nyame left they pulled them out and wrapped them in leaves.

Every time they put more clay children into the fire, Nyame would unexpectedly pop by to check on them on some silly pretext or the other. Finally, Nyame got hungry and went back up, to the sky.

The spirit man and woman unwrapped all the little clay children they had made. Such a variety of colours!! Some were in the fire for a very short time and so were very pale. Others had been there for too long and were dark, almost black. Then there were a whole range of different colours like yellow-brown, rosy pink, red-brown and plenty in between.

The spirit man and woman blew on these clay children and they all began to stretch out their legs and move….running around the earth. Now the spirit lady was no longer lonely when the spirit man went hunting, her children kept her occupied.The spirit lady would hug them all, loving each one equally.

The spirit lady is called Iyadola, which means ‘Earth Mother.’ "