Monday's Metaphor

The Flower Fields
Carlsbad, California (April 2011)

Sometimes, you may find yourself out of sync with your surroundings.  Might not be a bad thing. 

Lonely Crowd

I was sorting through some old files and stumbled on a poem I wrote when I was about 16.  Don't you love the dot matrix printout (with my hard copy edits to the original after printing)?  It's not a particularly good poem, of course, but wow does it resurrect what I often felt in those days, growing up in a very Catholic school as an "other."  I was the captain of the track team, and we started each and every track meet with a group chant of The Lord's Prayer given in a tight circle in the middle of the track.  I pretended to know the words.  This poem attempted to capture the long-ago feeling of isolation and loneliness that came with being "different," and the irony of creating that separation through a prayer intended to unite.

Those days are long past, but I still find myself preparing a face to meet the faces I meet.  Don't we all?

Let's Have a Party

The teachers stretched and formed the children into lines on a crisp October morning at Windsor Elementary.  It was 1978, and it was my sixth birthday.  The lines would not hold, forms morphing like cloud shapes in the sky.  Assembly day, and we could hardly contain our excitement.  It actually doesn't take much to enliven a group of elementary school-age children, as you may know.  Our honored assembly speaker was a cookbook author, and none of us knew how to cook.  But we didn't care.  The assembly was a break in the routine, and that was enough.  What's more, there would be a lottery, and one lucky child (among hundreds) would actually win a signed copy of the speaker's cookbook, "Let's Have a Party"!  

The mass of children that would not stay lined floated  towards the multi-purpose room like a storm cloud.  For some reason that is entirely inexplicable to me now, I was praying.  I was praying with all the fervent faith of a first grader that I would be the lucky child to win the lottery.  It WAS my birthday after all, I bargained.  I do not remember all I promised in return for God's grace on this particular request, but I'm sure I probably promised to be a better girl.  Nor do I recall why in the world I cared to have the cookbook.  At the age of six, I certainly wasn't planning many parties, let alone themed dinner party menus like those contained in the book (including the intriguing "For Lovers Only," "Ladies Lit Luncheon," and "Morning Reveille," among others).

But as you may be guessing, my prayer was answered, and my name was drawn.  I won the cookbook.  God existed.  And I've never forgotten it.  In all seriousness, the question is why?  Why are some prayers answered and others (so much more important than cookbooks) not?  Maybe you've wondered that yourself.

I recently had lunch with a dear friend, and we found ourselves on the topic of why oh why do such horrible things happen to good people?  Senseless, inexplicable horrors. A friend's husband wakes up, has a massive heart attack, and dies -- in his mid-thirties.  Another friend's marriage ends, a casualty of faithlessness.  Yet another friend moves to another state to accept her dream job, only to be forcibly tied up and raped by an intruder just hours after moving into her new home.  All of this (and more) happened just in the past few months.  It's difficult to conjure up a palatable explanation.

My lunch companion lamented that she fears she's losing her faith -- that her prayers aren't heard.  I don't have a good answer.  I'd give back the cookbook in exchange for more important requests, if I could.  But I keep praying and asked her to keep praying too.                  

Wednesday's Word -- Foreign

Door in Tunis, Tunisia

The Tunisian woman in the photo I blogged about this week has me thinking about the word "foreign."  I am, admittedly, a word nerd.  But even for the less nerdy among us, you have to admit this is interesting.

Foreign

The word "foreign" means "of, pertaining to, or derived from another country or nation; not native."  It means "strange or unfamiliar."  But here's the fascinating (to me) thing.  The word comes from the Indo-European Root *dhwer-, which means door or doorway.  "Foreign" literally means "out of doors."  Something that is foreign is outside your comfort zone, your home, your enclosure.  She is on one side of the door, and you are on the other.  It's just a matter of opening the door and letting the outside in.  

Other words that come from the same root include forest (originally used to capture the idea of a place forbidden or protected by a barrier) and foreclosure (literally, put out of doors).  Isn't that interesting?  Come on, it is.  

Makes me love the beautiful foreign doors I discovered on my travels all the more. 

Post script:  this post evidences the fact that my days and weeks blur, and I often lose track of the days of the week.  Thus a Wednesday's Word post on a Tuesday.  Truth be told, sometimes I even get morning and night confused, as I stand staring into my medicine cabinet, trying to figure out whether to use the night moisturizer or the daytime sunscreen. 

Different Worlds, Same Taste in Handbags

I keep thinking about the Tunisian woman in the photo I posted on Friday.  Although I took it from quite a distance, I was using a good camera.  I enlarged the photo on my computer and was amazed at a couple of things:  (1) the look in her eyes, boring right into mine; and (2) her handbag.  Now isn't that something that the handbags we carry (a world apart) are so very similar?  And here I thought mine was so unique.  Here's the side by side:

And here's her face.  Lovely but fierce.

One Looks at One

For some reason, I've been thinking today about this photo I snapped as surreptitiously as I could while we were in Tunisia this past summer.  I looked at her, and she looked at me.  Such different worlds -- me from my American life and she in her North African muslim life.  But there was something about her, the way she stood with her arms crossed and attitude on her face, that I quite liked.

Somehow, it makes me think of these lines from Robert Frost's "Two Look at Two":

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.


She saw me in my field, and I her in hers.

Seattle Ramblings

I'm in Seattle for a few days.  Not for fun, for obligation.  My Phoenix-adapted body is complaining at the cold, but I'm spending most of my time indoors, meeting and meeting, and talking and talking.  (Otherwise known as a partner planning conference.)  

For several hours last night and several hours this morning, I had the pleasure to meet with a group of "diverse" lawyers from across our firm as we talked about how to lead efforts to promote diversity.  What a thing it is to sit and listen to another person tell her life story, and for you to realize that what you thought you knew about a person was barely scratching the surface.  We all prepare faces for the faces that we meet, and that's a shame, because who we are instead is so much more interesting than who we purport to be.  In this group, there were individuals from all ethnicities and walks of life.   Individuals whose families had come to this country to escape persecution.  Individuals who deal with physical disabilities.  Individuals who defied all odds to become what they have become.  Children of immigrants.  Children of poverty.  Children of teenage, unwed mothers.   

Amazing.  

And there I sat.  Waiting to share the story of a white girl who had it pretty good, truth be told.  The reality, though, is that we are all diverse.  We are all minorities.  We are all outsiders in some way.  Every one of us.  It was an interesting experience, because the consultant running the session didn't get to me until almost the very last.  I had been wrestling internally, trying to decide whether to be honest about what makes me really different from others in the room.  These are, after all, colleagues I must interact with and who will form judgments.  In the end, knowing how the information might be received by some, I said it.  I'm a Mormon.  {I am a Mormon woman.  I am a working Mormon woman.  And I am alone in this room.  I have always felt like an outsider of sorts at nearly every stage of my life, among every group to which I supposedly "belong."}  

I didn't say all of that.  Instead, I focused on how different and yet alike we all were in that room.  How I could relate to the person who had grown up in a family of 8 children.  How I could relate to the woman who now has a fresh perspective on the beauty of diversity through her own non-white children.  How I could relate to the person who was frustrated to be stereotyped and pigeon-holed before he had even opened his mouth.    

And I reminded them that we are more alike than we are unalike.   You might just be surprised to find that the person who doesn't look like you, talk like you, live like you, or believe like you is so very much like you.  But you have to make some effort to find out.