This election was a morally destructive wrestling that has dominated my thoughts for the past few months, and the after effects will continue to do so. I know the moral-guilt and repercussions of trying to decipher the lesser of two evils will haunt me for a long time. I'm physically sick of feeling jumpy and defensive by people's interrogations with a fear of their assumptions of me and my intelligence if I "reveal" who I voted for (which was a complete right to privacy before social media), which is the sad reality of this election and much of today's technological "spreading of awareness." It is tearing apart families, friendships, and ultimately, our nation. But the fact is,
we're all in this sticky situation together.
I love those who voted for Hillary, I love those who voted for Trump, I love those who voted for a 3rd party candidate and I love those who didn't vote at all. I quite seriously considered all four options. With this said, I realized that regardless of who I voted for, if I hate Hillary and her supporters, I'm propelling myself into the same snakiness and dishonesty that I think she is. I realized that if I hate Trump and his supporters, I'm letting the same discrimination and dirtiness that sickens me, win. Liking someone is a feeling, but choosing to love is a choice, and that choice can be made synonymously while continuing to fight for what you believe.
By no means am I the poster-child of how to be, my ideas are still, and will forever be, under construction, and I could be wrong about all of this. But what I have realized is that it's silly to make assumptions about a person until stepping into their shoes, the problem (and beauty) being that each of our feet is incredibly unique. It is impossible to perfectly fit into someone else's shoes as we, whether we like it or not, are effected by our economic background, childhood, ethnicity, education, financial stability, religious belief, physical location, biological make-up, gender, sexual orientation, environment... the list is astronomical. Endorse someone else's shoes, dislike someone else's shoes, but the fact is that they are all shoes with a purpose to be worn by feet; the common thread of humanity living and walking on the same ground. We will need to make a strong, proactive effort to offer arch support to each other to be able to stand in the times to come. But I'm thankful that our ideas are not uniform, because my world is continuously being shaken, which spearheads my growth and discovery when I choose to listen to what different shoes have to say.
Media is biased. Articles are biased. Many statistics are biased. This post is biased. I'm biased. Every single person has some kind of bias engrained into them, and I think it's important to critically, yet kindly judge those biases in order to learn from them. But I think the real issue at hand is how we choose to deal with our biases, accepting the fact that we are biased and the intention behind how and why we communicate our ideas. And when we can listen to and understand each other's biases, that's a beautiful thing, a uniting factor between souls, and there's a strength in that unity with a growth and wisdom of agreeing to disagree after truly listening to each other.
Politics and standing firm in what you believe and understanding why you believe it is wildly, radically important. But in addition:
My Dear Wormwood,
Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration, and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. Ensure the patient continues to believe that the problem is "out there" in the "broken system" rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself.
Keep up the good work,
Uncle Screwtape.
"Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis ~ 1942
The United States of America need some damn listening skills, damn good intention and divine intervention alongside individual, driven love and development.
That's my personal prayer and plan of action from here.
Being a parcel of humanity amidst nearly 3,000 flags is a sobering thing. Even without knowing the meaning behind them, when the only sounds are your own breath and the flags' flapping, something is stirred in you that makes you stop and realize that you are very small.
"Hello." I turned over my shoulder, a bit miffed that someone would interrupt my sobering experience. He was a man with vivid dark hair and complex eyes that had seen a lot of life.
"Hi." I responded in the friendliest tone I could assemble while trying to retain some of the somberness of the moment.
"What do these flags mean?" I started to answer, and paused. I looked at him standing in front of me naively anticipating my response, and I knew that the moment I told him the flags' meaning his experience would change. I held power over this situation, and that was a strange feeling.
"Each flag stands for a life lost at 9/11." I waited for his reaction. He looked down, expressionless.
"Oh...wow." The silence was filled with the sound of the flags. "I buried my brother that day." My senses froze as all else fell away. "I was lowering him into the ground when those towers fell."
It felt like my throat had been stung by a million bees.
I evoked a very unauthentic sounding "I'm so sorry" as I knew nothing I could say would alleviate or be able to relate to what he had been through. Another few moments passed with the fluttering flags. "Would you like a popsicle?" I asked. He nodded. I ran down the hill to grab one of the melty pineapple popsicles in my car from my market trip. When I returned, we ate our popsicles in the 105 degree sun and talked about life and how pineapple was both of our favorite flavor. His name is Raymond, and I remember that because after a few times of trying to remember it he reintroduced himself as, "Everybody loves...?"
Raymond will never know the impact he had on me.
After that day, my thinking expanded to realize the flags' deeper meaning. Those flags are an absolutely beautiful thing that Pepperdine does to honor the lives lost in 9/11, and by no means am I undermining it. But Raymond made me realize that there were many other tragedies that day. There was probably a mother holding her still-born, a widowing drunk driving collusion, a heart attack leaving grandchildren with mere memories of their grandpa, and Raymond's brother was lowered into the earth. We are desensitized to the fact that every siren could be someone else's life-altering event.
The Matthew 10:11 verse of "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? But not one of them will fall to the ground outside of your Father's care" took a new meaning to me as well. It made me truly realize that life matters.
Gun violence has taken over 3,000 in Chicago just in 2015, so far there has been a 78% increase of police officers shot and killed this year, 194 African Americans have been shot by police just this year, 6,000 killed in interracial violence in 2015, 2,150 Americans die each day from cardiovascular disease (that's one every 40
seconds), 589,430 people died of cancer in 2015, and at least 212 homeless people died just last year. These few stats are barely scratching the surface of deaths in America, and they're not even mentioning the tragedies in other countries. Forgive me if these statistics are off, but even just one unjust or premature death is one too many for me.
Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, Gay Rights, Women's Rights... There are so many movements vouching for their place in humanity, and rightfully so. Humanity is twisted, and I don't think I'll ever be able to wrap my mind around the discrimination that some have suffered. But the interwoven thing I've noticed throughout them all is that they allude to individual lives. When you look up lives in the dictionary, it just redirects you to the root word: life. Although life may be seen as an individual right (my life), grammatically, the word is the same when the adjective is plural (our life), and I don't think grammar has made an accident.
Souls are individual, and I believe all souls are just tapping into the shared existence of life, like many people drinking from the same river. Violence is high, health problems rampant and there are countless claims to the answer: Republican, Democrat, politics, religion, medicine. I don't know the answer, and as all these "answers" are formed in a minuscule, limited, decaying human perspective, I don't think I'll ever know the answer. But I know what is important. Souls are important. Life is important. And according to God (the all-knowing, life-breathing entity that is so much bigger than us), even the life of a sparrow worth less than a penny matters.
I don't know the right political action to take. I don't know if there is one answer. Maybe there is. But I know what I need to do: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another (Romans 12:13-16, but you should go read the whole thing, really)." I need to mourn with the souls mourning. However different they or their situation is from mine, whether I can relate to their pain or not, whatever depth or size of their suffering, my heart will break with theirs. I will mourn with our Nation, I will mourn with 9/11, I will mourn with those different than me, and I will mourn with Raymond on a grassy hill while we eat pineapple popsicles in the silence of the flags.
My name is Ashley Ekstrum, and I am a concerned student. Let me tell you why:
I am an avid attender at Surf Chapel. I have been for two years now. And I can tell you that (although surf chapel can stand alone as one of the best convos in Pepperdine's convocation history), the smell of hot coffee at 7am on the beach makes the world of difference. I will list the reasons to continue providing hot beverages for the weary students of this mid week congregation:
1. Hot beverages make money. Providing free coffee inspires students to get up early on their day off, which makes them more productive, thus raising their grades, thus giving Pepperdine a better overall grade average, which makes it a more revered and competitive college. This will encourage more students to apply to and attend Pepperdine, thus the university will grow, which will provide the university with a higher income.
2. Hot beverages are good for the environment. When free hot beverages are provided at Surf Chapel, students are encouraged to come to the beach to get free coffee, thus they see how beautiful the ocean is. When they see how beautiful the ocean is, they are inspired to protect it. When enough students are inspired to protect it, you are raising a generation that will reverse global warming and bring back more natural resources.
3. Hot beverages save lives. When students ingest hot coffee so early in the morning it reminds them that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. When students eat breakfast, it physiologically provides their body with the energy it needs to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Without maintaining a healthy lifestyle, people die.
I will now list the reasons to stop providing hot beverages for Surf Chapel:
As you can see, there are none.
The only argument I have heard to discontinue providing hot beverages to encourage students to wake up early on a day they do not have class in order to learn about God and pursue fellowship in a small group environment is that the weather is getting "warmer." May I remind you that Surf Chapel is at 7am. On a typical, warm Malibu day between 75 and 85 degrees, the low is approximately 55 to 65 degrees, and the temperature low of the day has consistently proven to be in the morning.
I do hope you can find it in your heart to provide Pepperdine a higher income, protect the environment, and save lives.
I don't usually start these bloggings with an outline, but today I am.
Gary
Church
Eminem
And that, my friends, is the most organization you'll ever see from me.
Quick backstory: my roomie and I went snowboarding this weekend.
Gary. So I guess you need to get gas before the 200-mile-ish stretch of nothing when driving to Mammoth. Or, if you find yourself in a situation like ours, you stop at the one Shell between civilizations and you use Dave's Mini Mart's restroom to brush your teeth and take out your contacts, as one had previously fallen out of your eye which then forced you to make your roommate control the steering wheel highway fiasco while you stabbed it back in. You'll probably make a joke about how the flickering neon sign looks like Dave's Mini Mar as the "t" is burnt out. And as you walk inside you will see Gary. He will be staring out the window as if he could see the world turning or the blackness breathe. He will have a bone-shivering horror music soundtrack playing and the store will be littered with clocks and mechanical middle fingers and tourist mugs. He will try to make a joke when you are walking to the restroom, one that is just as not funny as it is inaudible, and he will laugh morosely to himself as if to save his efforts. He will look down at his hands and metaphorically, but much too realistically, taste the familiarity of understanding that he is misunderstood.
Because that's what happened to us.
Angeli and I were in the bathroom. I was mid-tangle brush in the hair battle when we heard a knock on the bathroom door. We looked at each other. I opened it quizzically to find Gary standing there. He reminded me of Spongebob's Gary the snail... sized with a considerable round body, a sphere-like head sitting atop it, and a shaggy, rusty-colored bowl cut to (quite literally) top it off. I actually don't really know how he reminded me of a snail besides the name resemblance.
"How are you doing?" he asked... creepily, sheepishly, lonely.
"We're good. Thanks for... asking," I replied.
"Oh." His small, button-like eyes turned towards the floor again, "okay." I could imagine the mental attack in his head, beating him down, those little insecurities punching in his brain tissue with the self depreciation that I know all too well. We stood there, my hand on the bathroom door, his mass standing like a frozen tree.
"What is your name?" I asked. If he was previously frozen, spring happened... a magical spring like the one in Narnia when Aslan roars and breaks the boundaries of the white witch. I don't know if I've ever seen anyone's face light up and literally produce illumination, but his was close.
"Gary" he replied. His words were not words to me. I think his words were what life-hope would sound like if life-hope was a sound. He stood there, basking in the idea that someone actually cared about what his name might be, and then shook himself to come back to earth and the logic that goes with that.
"What's...what's your names?" His tongue pushed out the words like they were too big for his mouth.
"I'm Ashley." I stretched out my hand and he shook it, and for a second, there was a shared sense of community between human souls. There was a lightness in that strange little mini mart starting from the bathroom border that spread to the corners. I closed the door with a smile a wave and a "bye" and he left us to finish our nightly routines. I left him a "Happy Thanksgiving" note on the chalkboard in the women's restroom, but realized that he will probably never see it... because it is in the women's restroom.
Church and Eminem combined because I can't even stick to my own outline and my thoughts bleed all over each other. Angeli and I camped at Mammoth. We slept in the car the second night after realizing that no amount of layers could victoriously battle 19 degrees. Angeli and I always seem to have a theme song. It is unintentional. It has no reason, and definitely no rhyme. It chooses us.
Day 1
There is a Light that Never Goes Out - The Smiths
Day 2
Water Fountain - tUnE-yArDs
One of my favorite feelings in the world is waking up in my tent or the back of my car. And that second day I got to wake up in the back of my car in the bare-bone basin of the mountains. They surrounded us like they were the edge of the soup bowl and we were the soup. I love how gold glints off window dew and how ice forms on the inside of the car when you've been breathing all night in it. It melts, and the drops sprint down with their gravity incentive to pool in that little rubber lining around the window for such times as these. And then I got the stunning feeling that I was overwhelmingly small. That there is space and a globe and countries and that I'm a part of it. Later that day I watched the snow gusts snake their way along side of me while I snowboarded. When I paint, I see the artwork forming, but when I snowboard or wake up to the sun I feel as if I'm actually an active part of it. I feel as if I am a part of creation screaming the name of its Creator, and I feel close. Close to the intentional beauty meant for the world. Close to purity. Close to the God that orchestrates it together.
This picture represents a large sacrifice of body warmth.
Fast forward through two less-than-half-priced Mammoth dream days to the drive home. To the dark and those random neon lights as you pass through those random towns in that random cold desert. Through those five hours I discovered rather randomly that Angeli has a sweet-tooth for rap. Dare I say "old school" rap. A fresh Spotify playlist and a few hours later we came to Eminem. She showed me his song Headlights and told me how it was his response to his song Cleaning Out My Closet in his earlier years. Both are about his mom, and Headlights is his apology.
A pre-cursor disclaimer: I believe church can be an absolutely beautiful thing in the way that it was intended. Encouragement. People meeting together with the same fire in their heart. That concept is a beautiful result in anything really. Two mathematicians create brilliant formulas. Just thinking about two chefs in the same room makes my mouth water. And there's something so beautiful about people getting together who understand what having a relationship with God is like.
I believe that God is omnipresent. But I feel that there is a beauty lost when people stagnate "worship songs" into circles like those round-about driving things. I see so many more of God's qualities in Eminem's song Headlights than I do in the production of many church services and modern "worship." There is so much more authenticity, repentance, and beauty in this song than in any wooden pew. I believe that the heart behind the words, including the explicit ones, overflows just as much, if not more beauty than a perfect harmony or fancy chord progression. This... the cussing, the thoughts, the repentance, the search for new life is the deepest part of who he is, and I believe that is a beautiful thing to the heart of God. Jesus walked a life worth following, and by stumbling, sometimes backtracking, often wandering from but returning to those footsteps I've found a depth provided by a God who simply wants our authenticity. And the closer I get to Him... there's a continual clean slate, growing depth, and thirst for more like I've never known before.
(I especially like 2:25 and on)
Aaaand some more pictures. Adventure on and live deeply my friends.
Today I woke up at five and, in my (literal) blind delirium, I decided to go to the beach. I grabbed my six foot egg-fishy, a red flannel, and some of the incense I got on Amazon. But I forgot pants, which made it mildly inconvenient to write this in a public coffee shop. You really realize your priorities at 5 am. I also realized that there are different shades of black in the morning. The small-room-stubbed-toe black and the early morning sleeping pavement black. There's the eye pupil black and the copy-cat pupil camera lens black. It's strange to think we're looking at black through black. Whether you take that at a deep metaphorical level or the shallow physicality it was intended in, it's an interesting concept to think about.
The scent I grabbed was called Sunrise. Figures.
After my climb-in-the-passenger's-door-due-to-my-bad-park-job shuffle, Bethel popped in my head. It more like burst to the seams of my skull because the name's been a bubble in my head for a while. It took the needle of 5 am for it to burst and make me actually look them up. My fingers stumbled on It is Well (Live). I'm really glad they did ---->
Fast forward to 6 am at Zuma watching the 20 billion people fight each other for the ankle biters and me burning incense like I was better than the quarter of their ability that I actually am. Whenever I burn incense it makes me think of the frankincense the wise men brought to Jesus or the burnt offerings in the Old Testament. Sometimes I wonder if that's what it was like to be God... He smelled the offerings and got that dull buzzing in the back of his head because the smell was so encompassing. I have no idea, but all I know is that moment was like a symbol of taking a moment (moment-ception?) to simply take time to sit in silence with God and give Him the first fruits of everything I find pleasurable... the best smells, the best part of the morning, the best place to possibly watch the sunrise... and I was so fully completely perfectly content. It reminded me of the gratification I get when I please someone I love... except that God IS the definition of love, and He gives us the opportunity to fully please Him when we will never be able to fully please people.
So have a happy, fulfilled morning. Please the One you Love today.
Today is earth day. It's my favorite holiday... that I forget about until about 4 pm the day of. Thank God for facebook. I almost forgot my second-cousin-triple-removed's birthday too.
I find myself focusing on the "the things unseen" in a lot of my theocratic, pensive quiet time, especially when I want to be "spiritual." I believe in them with all my heart. Like love and a relationship with God. They're so potent in life, and I don't know what life would be like without them. That's such an arbitrary statement. Like the ones you hear in Sunday school stories while you're coloring Joseph's coat with broken crayons that have weird names like piggy bank pink.
"Color inside the lines. It's a coat of many separate colors." You stop and look at your scribbled coloring-book cartoon adolescent. He looks back with bubble eyes and an overly friendly grin. The oh-so-helpful lady who helped your artistic juices flow now interrupts your pondering.
"Let's clean up! Time for our Noah and the goldfish snacks!" You can hear the zingy squeak of Larry the Cucumber wafering in from the other room... My question is where in the Bible does it ever say that Joseph's coat was composed of separated colors?
But when I stop to think about it, I really don't know what life would be like without the things we can't see.
But... the earth. I think it's one of the few "beyond-our-understanding" things we can touch. We can see its mind-entrancing complexity on top of a mountain when the pines and boulders and ribbon rivers are laid out like a tea party. We can see it under a microscope in the life of a drop of water, which we drink every day without thinking. We see a myriad of colors and slithering shadows scratch themselves across drawstring curtains and we can touch the sun dancing on our skin when the wind coughs through an elderly oak's leaves. But it is all so much bigger than us... In every concept available. Yet I feel like we only have the perspective of a ladybug in a cardboard box (I used to collect those, poor things) in comparison to what God has planned for us.
Nature is tangible. Ask any tree house enthusiast. I can assure you that they won't be sleeping in a non-tangible tree. But it is so much more than tangible. There's a secret tree house in my neighborhood that we call Wonderland. Why? Because when you lay down and see the egg-shell sky held back by branches with little ants and birds breathing their little lives into the same air as you it's not just a tree house. It's an all-encompassing, jaw-dropping awe.
So, Happy Jaw-Dropping, Stupifying, Cali-fragil-is-tic Earth Day. May you hug many trees.
I'm coming home soon. I feel like my heart is being strained through a cheese cloth... with no emotions. My heart is just my heart. The cheese, cheese. The cloth, well, it's a cheese cloth... a cloth with a bit of specification... but you get the point. There's so many feelings that they all mutilate each other like rabid rats. At the Casa there's a plastic toy gun that's been on the couch for about a week. I know because I sit on it just about every stupid day. I was (emphatically) informed by Jacob, my 20-year-old colleague, that it was the "red power ranger's gun... Jason's gun." And yes, I googled that to refresh my memory.
Anyways, I can't seem to focus on the big picture. I haven't blogged for a while because everything that rolls off my tongue (or more literally, my fingers) is word salad. That's actually a term I learned about in Psychology. Word salad. I can just imagine a bunch of men in lab coats discussing it at an over sized, rectangular very official table. Probably with rat cages blurred in the background.
"Yes, yes, we need a term for this." A mouse squeaks in the distance.
"Wordanoia?" a man suggests. His lab coat is one button off and his goggles are steaming up a bit.
"No... no..." the instigator replies. "That's been used for the Wordophomous solomonus." Seemingly defeated, he puts his head in his hands. "They're too similar."
"Spitography!" exclaims another across the table raising a finger. The instigator sighs in unison with another mouse squeak and just shakes his head, still in his hands. Suddenly the doors swing open and a boy enters. He's carrying a brown paper bag with little oil spots seeping through.
"Dad, you forgot your sala..." The men sit up a little straighter and independently look off in the distance with glazed eyes. The rats stop running on their wheels. The boy freezes. Light suddenly streams down onto the boy's hand holding the bag. A rat falls over dead. The men then whisper in unison as if the lightest sound would break the magic,
"Salad..."
I also learned about schizophrenia. My teacher showed us a clip of a schizophrenic man. The things he said were so disjointedly brilliant. They made such illogical sense to me that I started to frantically write down everything he said, starting with the "picture [on the wall] that had a headache." Afterwards I looked up expectantly to discuss what he said when I remembered we were analyzing the subject, not the subject matter.
That made me sad. Trained by society, I feel that we focus on analyzing the subject rather than listening to what it is saying. I guess that's what I'm unconsciously not doing. I'm not saying this to say I'm better than society, but rather, why I don't feel like I'm a part of it. I think I'm not feeling because I'm listening to what South America is saying rather than trying to analyze it. Of course I realize that everyone processes and deals with things in different ways. Mine isn't necessarily better or worse than someone else's... it's just different. I could go into one of my infamous rants about my love hate relationship with the cracks on the sidewalks, but I think you've heard that enough.
I hear South America saying many of the same things the United States would say. That I need to shower in the mornings. That the dust here is also made from skin cells and that gravity still keeps our feet planted in the same way. Don't get me wrong... there are definitely differences. Major differences. But that toy gun will probably still be on the couch when I leave, and life will go on, and that's okay. And somehow that's both a comforting and rip-my-body-to-shreds-ing concept that isn't soaking in. I don't know if it ever will because my head can only soak things in at one place at a time, which never really gives me the full perspective because I can only physically be at one place at a time.
"It's God, not me." I've been thinking about that concept a lot lately, and how much I've used it. I never want to use it again. It assumes that I was something in the first place. Why don't I just say "It's God?" Because I have to be in the equation somewhere. "Here God, I'll let You have the first respective subject in this non-grammatically-correct-sentence because I have reached complete humility." I want to replace that with what John the Baptist said, "He must increase, but I must decrease." Now there's some good grammar. It's a continuous action of decreasing. That's addressing the constant struggle for humility rather than saying I am humble. That's the authenticity I want.
I was going to talk about my English class and how we "analyze" things. The trick to the class is to use "teacher pleasers" such as idealized and passionate and suffering and despair. Bonus points for personification and reminiscence or if you can think of anything longer than 5 syllables. You could pretty much say the same thing about everything to deepen the class discussion.
"Oh yes, I believe the author used personification to idealize the situation of suffering he was in when he was reminiscing in his passion." Maybe switch it up to add a new perspective. But make sure to furrow your brow a bit to make it authentic.
"The author used personification when describing his suffering to idealize the passion because his reality was clouded by despair."
They like it when you use nouns as verbs with quick little suffixes, such as clouded. You could do that with just about anything. Shower-ed. Pillow-ed. Meth-ed... (Maybe not everything). How out-of-the-box and descriptive of me. But as I was writing this I realized it's all I do on this blog anyway. How sneakily hypocritical of me. I surprise myself at my abilities sometimes. Jesus really does deserve to be "increased" and I really do deserve to be "decreased."
