Morning Prayer

It's 6:44 AM and I can hear rain falling gently outside my window. A little hint of sunlight plays in my curtains. Sleep was hard to fall into. I close my eyes again and promise I will get up in fifteen minutes.

6:45 is marked by a knock at the door that jolts me out of sleep. Was it next door? I don't hear anything more. Fine, I'll get up.

I crawl out of bed and dress. Outside my door is a quite hall full of closed doors. Down the stairs, the hall below is identical excepting one detail. A set of double doors at the West end of the hall is my destination this morning. Someone is waiting for me.

"They shall be filled"
The words meet me in a blue glow as I open the door, so close, I could touch them in a few steps. The Beatitudes are lit by the sun from the other side of the glass. No dazzle of sunlight this morning; only a faint, even light from the cloudy sky. Each pane is simple; words and small images on blues and greens. Each guilds me in a reflection. Blessed are those who morn, they shall be comforted." An anchor. Comfort in stability. Christ shall be my anchor, wherever the sea tosses me.

I walk to the railing of the balcony and look down at the pews on the ground floor. They are empty and serene. Everything is quiet in the morning. I am kneeling close to the words "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst" in the quietest room or the quietest building on campus in the morning stillness. Even the little red light by the tabernacle is still.

All night, as I slept, He waited here for me to discover His little house. He is the only person I know in this place. But I cannot feel lonely with Him here, so close. I remember hearing a Poor Claire sister tell of her first night in the convent. She was giddy with excitement. "Jesus lives in my house. He is just down stairs and I am sleeping a few rooms away."

Americans

Sometimes you hear a song that you used to listen to as a child and you understand the words for the first time. Sometimes you realize that you understood the song even though some of the words were just sylables. How does that happen?
I listened to Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories of frontier life when I was very small.I can't have been much older than four. Being the second child, I always identified with Laura. I was nothing like her. But we were the right age to be friends in the first book and no matter how far apart we grew after that, I always thought of her as a friend. Images stick in my head from each book. The first one that comes to mind is Laura and Mary playing catch with a pig's bladder. After that there are too many to mention.
I listened to mom read them aloud to Maleny and David recently. I hadn't realized, those books made a much bigger impression on me than merely giving me a picture of life in another time. The famous American spirit - responsible, industrious, careing towards neighbors and, above all, fiercly independant - resonates from those books so strongly, even a young child like me could learn to love those elusive qualities. They don't make Americans like that much anymore. My early understanding of those virtues has its roots in her stories. The roots have certainly grown, but I could still trace their development back to the source.
I listened to the stories and remembered them like the words to a song, and I understood them for the first time, even though their lessons have been with me all along.

"As For Me and My House..."

If, by some hellish chance, someone proved that all religions are "equally true," I would still be Catholic. God wrote His law on my heart and Catholicism is the only religion that teaches all the laws written there.

Ah, the joys of summer.

Got up this morning at 7:20. It was really nice to get up in the morning, rather than the early afternoon. I like being a morning person, but I need some motivation. I also like being a night owl and don't need much motivation for that at all. Being up with several hours of morning ahead of me was glorious... until about 11:00 AM when I got really sleepy and went back to bed.

Elbereth Star Kindler.

Lately I've fallen in love with Tolkien again. This irresistible world he created in my head begs to be translated into the outside world. As with all things that go on in my head, most of the essentials are lost in translation. Actually, the only thing that doesn't get hopelessly garbled are the stories; they tend to turn out better on paper than in my head. Maybe this is why I'm think I'm an English major and not an art or music major.

In any case, here is Varda, Tolkien's lady Elbereth Starkindler.
This is my fifth attempt at translating this image that Tolkien put into my head onto paper. Twice I have finished this image and been rather disappointed. The only good thing about the first one was the hands. I worked really hard on just the sketch of the hands. The only good thing about the second attempt was that it was slightly better than the first one. It's nice to see that I've made some progress. I figured out that I wanted to use black paper on the the third attempt. I started to wear a hole through the crumby construction paper with my eraser, so I didn't finish it. I might have to give the fourth version another shot at some point. It's much bigger and I have some ideas of how I want to fix it. I was playing with some materials that I don't know anything about.
She's still not quite right (even ignoring the minor proportional problems and other little things). Her face is not really how it looks in my head, but I was glad it looked like a human face and not a monkey like some of the others did. I'll get there. I've learned a lot drawing this image over and over. I feel like I have a much firmer grasp on the shape of a face, since I've had to draw it with the light coming the wrong way. The black paper is really maddening and fun.
So, the hard part is sticking with it till it's done. There are eleven more Valar and dozens of other Tolkien images that want out of my head, not to mention faces from my own stories.

Mud Babies

To top of my piano is once again covered in ceramics. This batch looks a little smaller, as far as the number of pieces. But all the pieces are far bigger than the ones I made last summer. I made lots of shot glasses last summer. This isn't actually all of them. One or two have already been given as gifts. There are still a few in my locker at school and I think there are a few more still cooling in another kiln. Once again, I feel like I've just started to figure out what I want to do with clay. I've started to actually do things on purpose with the potter's wheel. That's a mile stone. The small brown bottle in the back was a triumph because I actually drew the shape and then tried to make it. It took me two attempts, but I managed it.

I figured out the secret forbidden glaze combination to get those flashes of red and blue. It's two very runny glazes poured on top of each other. My teacher hates it when people figure it out because it runs right off the pots and onto the kiln shelves and generally makes a mess. Thus, I put it on the inside of a bowl. I So Clever.





This is the other thing I did on purpose. Well, sort of... I wanted to figure out how to make a chip dish with a built in place for chip dip. I made a plate with a Really thick bottom, then I pushed the floor down into a lump in the middle and pulled it up into a little bowl. It's not really big enough, but I felt very clever indeed for managing it. It cracked in the bisque kiln. I think something about pushing the floor down weakened it.

So, next time I get to play with mud, I'll do some more hand building and sculptural pieces. I love the wheel and functional pottery, but I feel like I only have half of the picture this way. I started several sculpture projects, but I didn't finish any of them. The wheel is just so much faster. I hate deadlines. Maybe, when I'm on semesters instead of quarters, I will have time to think things through instead of improvising so much. All the options are a bit overwhelming. There are about a million things your can do with wet clay, just forming methods and shapes you can make. Then there are thousands of decoration, altering, joining and further forming you can do when the clay is "leather hard." Then there is the "bone dry" stage where you can do a whole other set of decoration methods. This starts to sound like an annoying math problem. 1000000 X 1000 X 24... and we haven't even gotten to the glazing part yet. Do you want to dip, spray, pour or paint the glaze on? What color? What texture? How thick? Do you want to use stains? And then there are all these variables in the firing itself. Wood fire? Gas? Raku? And if your pot is on the edge, near the fire, that blue glaze might turn pale yellow, never mind that it looks red when you put it on...
I think I'm getting to a point where I can do some things with the first stage pretty well. I'm also pretty good with the bone dry part. There are only a few options at that point. The rest is all a game of chance. I've just decided to accept whatever I get and try to be appreciative. There are one or two pieces that I can reasonably expect other people to like. The rest is only beautiful to me. So the "pretty" ones get given away to my adoring fans. Anyone want one?

Writeing lab reflections

It's so nice to see people's faces again.

People have always interested me but I kind of like to have them at an arms length; being an introvert in hiding and all. Here in the tutoring lab, I very rarely meet people who I should like to meet outside of the writing lab. I usually like to get them done and out very quickly. But sometimes I think I really like people.

A student came in near the beginning of my shift today and presented me with her paper, covered in English teacher hieroglyphics. She needed a little help decoding, but mostly just a sounding board, like so many student who come to me. She was about my age. She said she had studied overseas but I was not sure if that meant she was an ESL student, or if she had just traveled. She did not write or speak like an ESL student. She may have been an ethnic minority, or she may have just had a tan. Her hair was very carefully tousled and jelled; longer and messier down the middle. She had a lip piecing and wore black, edgy clothes. She could have been an art student except she didn't seem to be trying to get attention quite as much as my art classmates do. There was something a little more thoughtful and confident about her appearance and demeanor. It is terrible to be a confident person in a vulnerable position. Like many students, she was a little unsure if she really wanted me to to tutor her. There is a faint hope that I will taker her paper and let her escape. I finally got her to sit down (next to me rather than across the table, which is pretty extraordinary) by pulling out the chair and verbally asking her to take a seat. So much for first impressions.

Her assignment was to describe a place with a function. She chose her kitchen and explained, very humorously, why it failed miserably to live up to being the heart and center of her home. It was not brilliantly written, but I could sense thought and even enjoyment behind the writing. We moved very quickly through it, working out her teacher's comments and discussing concepts and writing strategies. She seemed very intelligent and genuinely interested in making the paper her own, rather than just getting me to feed her sentences. She didn't want me to "fix" it for her and that was refreshing. I really enjoyed reading and discussion her paper, despite it's just-out-of-high-school feel. I gathered that writing sort of intimidated her. I also sensed that she could really enjoy writing with practice and confidence. Her teacher kept writing "show us" on her very detailed descriptive paragraphs. This happens a lot with English teachers. They always want more detail just as we think we have described everything. What they really want is a different kind of detail, but of course they don't say that. He was wanted her to be more specific about what why it was dangerous to open her cupboard. She left her readers' imaginations with many wide open spaces in which to play. She observed that her imagination goes wild and needs no further guidance. I told her that she ought to lead a little further us into her mind so we don't get lost. "I don't really like letting people into my mind," she said with a small smile. Neither do I. She said she felt much better about the paper when we were done.

I don't really know what it was about this girl that made her worthy of a blog post. I liked her a lot. Both of us were uneasy, in a way, because we didn't know each other. I had the advantage, since she came to me for help, and I've had a lot of practice talking to strangers in this job. But there was something friendly about it too. She is one of those people that I'm sure I could be friends with, even if we have nothing in common beyond a small, hazardous kitchen. Funny how that happens.