What the Stars are Made Of: A Journey Within

I am not going to quote Journey, don't think it again. But I am going to quote an astronomer and a philosopher, respectively, both much more ancient than that rockin' band:

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

"Understand that thou art a second little world, and that the sun and moon are within thee, and also the stars."
-Origen

So what are these two gentleman saying? They both make our guts sound pretty stellar. Turns out, we are all stars. Turns out, there is another world within us. Crazy to believe? At first, yes. But on second thought, it makes complete sense. Considering the world within, you can justify all the emotions and experiences and battles and decisions and storms that you endure on a daily basis. Now, don't you feel a little less crazy remembering that the human experience involves the individual struggle against him/herself?

This past year of post-graduation has been one for the books, terrible and wonderful, but mostly wonderful. About a year ago when I was settling in at home, one of my goals I made for myself was to take a journey within. Not until a couple weeks ago did I really understand what taking a journey within entails.

I was chatting with a gal at my favorite coffee shop in the area and we got to talking about the joys of traveling. For the past several years, she hasn't been able to travel. As she was itching yet unable to get out, she thought about what it was that she loved so much about traveling. She realized this: one is stuck in the moment and forced to experience the immediate surroundings. She thought, how can I generate that feeling in my daily life? As the yoga guru she is, she finds in her yoga practice she can embrace the moment and surrender to the present. I thought about it myself, and this can be practiced through many different outlets, because really it is an internal state of mind that requires one key thing: surrender to the moment.

This encounter encouraged me to go to a yoga class that night. In my practice, I got to thinking (uh oh). If yoga can be traveling, and traveling can be yoga, they both are a form of prayer- of looking deep within and taking a journey into the moment when and where you are at right now…wait, I have been traveling for a whole year! An AHAH moment struck me in the middle of shavasana pose. We are just passing through in this life and every situation is a journey in itself, making us all perpetual travelers.

Just remember, we are made of starstuff, so we will eventually be able to put all the stuff together and glow from one solar system to the next.

Grow Where You're Planted

Today marks my one-year anniversary of living at home. Granted, I have made half a dozen trips to the Bay, one trip to Washington, D.C., one to Florida, another to Portland, to Chico, and another half-dozen to the Eastern Sierras.

Nevertheless, I really have been living at home, inhabiting a princess room, paying cheap rent, and enjoying a limitless food-and-booze meal plan. It really is the good life and I couldn't be more blessed.

My wonderful friend Jenny and I have talked about how getting too comfortable in one place makes us weary, even uncomfortable. It's a worry rooted in the fear of getting stuck in a place, of not pursuing dreams that would carry one out of their comfort zone and lift one out of their super-cozy princess bed. This perspective is coming from two gals that are always on the move and in the mood for an adventure.

But, shoot, what a nurturing and peaceful experience it has been to live at home. To give myself time to think, to write, to create, to explore my beliefs and passions. That opportunity wasn't always readily available in college. With so many people coming in and out of the scene, so many ideas floating around, so many external distractions, it was challenging to focus on what I truly did believe and care about. My relatively open-minded persona was overwhelmed with so many options and possibilities. That still reigns true, but now I am more rooted, which only helps when ideas are flying right and left.

"Grow where you are planted," another one of my grandpa's wise biblical extractions, never became so relevant in my life until I was pushed home on a plane from John F. Kennedy to LAX on August 26, 2012. I had officially graduated; I was officially lost and speechless.

Grow where you're planted. Because I believe God's timing is much slower than my own projected plans. Because I realize people are people everywhere. Because I can find a coffee shop, salsa club, and soccer team in any city of the world. Because I think relationships are the most important thing to nurture. For now, I continue to grow where I am planted in Brea, California, enjoying my princess life.

An adventure is just around the corner, a topic for a later time.

All that being said, my little garden is flourishing, overgrown, and producing tomatoes as large as pumpkins. Abandoned by their gardener, they have done just fine on their own. A reminder that I don't need my princess bed forever.

Pi Phi's Foundations, as Hard as Big Hearts

Pi Beta Phi Sorority sits in the middle of fraternity row on Piedmont Avenue in Berkeley, California. In a certain given week, passersby may hear high-pitched shouts coming from inside chanting, "Who are WE? PI PHI! ..." during recruitment week. Girls come and go throughout their college experience, and some boys even slip in. The house is kept up by the National Pi Beta Phi Foundation, but there are a few individuals that often go unseen and are arguably more of a foundation to the house than anyone else.

Juana, Tomas, and their son Victor have worked in the Pi Phi house for over a decade now; they have seen thousands of girls live in the house and have worked with a handful of house moms through the years. Humbly working the kitchen, they not only feed the bellies of hungry college girls, but they fed my soul with their kind hearts.

Juana and Tomas looking good for their nephew's wedding

Juana and Tomas are from Mexico and are some of the hardest workers I know, enduring so much and making a livelihood for their next generation in the family, always with a smile. Paths crossed in the kitchen corridor as I learned more about their family, and as I was invited to Juana's birthday party, and her nephew's wedding. I learned something different from my time with them than my education at Berkeley. The people I meet are my education, and these two were my Berkeley parents. After a long day at work, I would come home late for dinner, look around for some leftovers, and chat with my favorite company.

It's amazing what kind of impressions can be broken when you talk to someone, when you listen to someone. At first glance, these two were the Pi Phi workers, and that defined them in this house. They are more to me than that now; our encounters at Pi Phi were just a way of getting to know what they were all about- beyond the facade of a sorority house. 

These two are exemplary figures in their family of strength and hard work. They have built a beautiful life for their family in Berkeley and that feeling resonated to my friends that went to the nephew's wedding. It resonated when we went over to their house for Juana's birthday celebration. It resonated again when I recently visited them a year after graduation. They welcomed me with open arms at Ashby Bart station. A dinner out, a visit to Victor's family's house, and a cozy night's sleep- my mind swirling with the rusty Spanish I used all day- and I could not have felt more love and friendship.

I wish I had the talent to draw this feeling of coming back from a long school day to my Pi Phi parents, sitting on the stool in the kitchen eating my dinner, chatting with the lovely pair, and feeling at home. You will just have to imagine it yourself. 

The Grammar of Music: Out in Space

I am taking a group beginning piano class, with the first priority being an excuse to see my good college friend; the piano comes second. The class is a hoot, with frequent snack breaks and chatty cathys. Nevertheless, we always get to the piano part. As the students attentively listen to each other perform our pieces, I get to thinking.

We learn about notation as the grammar of music, everything that makes and creates a coherent piece of music. The accidentals, pauses, time scale, chords, all contribute to something that would sound like a well-formulated, educated...sentence? Indeed it is true, as a faulty note makes you cringe just as a conjugation error might. A wrong chord makes you as unsure as a misused word. Pauses make for a dramatic effect; the speed and strength of playing also add drama, just as they would in speech. And then there's the spaces between notes, as important as the spacebar on your keyboard.

One question from a fellow student got me thinking about what's in a space. "Why do they even divide the notes like that?" Our teacher Ms. Rodriguez responds, "Spaces, Kathy, it's all about spaces!"

About a year ago, I was writing a paper on a few poems and I was heading in the direction of describing how black ink makes words on a page, but the contrasting white paper defines it. Without the contrast we couldn't understand a thing. As annoyingly metapoetic as this is, I see the white page now as SPACE. Just as the space within the lines of a measure in music. Without those spaces, we don't have music- no harmony or melody or symphony or song.

Yet very often we disregard those white spaces- the simple tap of the space bar, the simple break in a line, the simple indent on a page. And yet, they are the structure, the foundation, and the creation of music and literature alike.

Certainly psychedelic is the idea of space, just as it is in our daily lives. To ask for some space or time alone sounds antisocial, odd, and kind of offensive. Yet, really, how are we to live without just a little bit of space to be an individual note on the measure, word on the page, and individual in this grand world? The grammar of music has shown me how to be an individual, and also a member of a chord. Both versions (individual or member) have unique attributes; either one depends on the time and place.

I guess all I'm really saying is that we all need some space to make ourselves individuals, but it doesn't hurt having someone else close by. 

Pitching the American Game

As the movie 42 swept the nation, even I made the effort to go see it. Granted, I did have a free movie pass, so that only further motivated the hopelessly frugal side of me. I had been thinking a lot about the American game in the past months before I saw Chadwick Boseman's fabulous bat at Jackie Robinson's character. Boseman hit it home. This would be a good time to warn my reader of the terrible baseball analogies to come throughout this post. However, if you are in a cheesy mood, you're in the right place.

My cousins are a baseball family, six boys and one girl, with a total count of nine teammates. Recently, my sister and I have been to a couple of the boys' games at Long Beach State and Orange Coast College. Let me tell you, sometimes it takes someone close to heart to understand something otherwise you would never really appreciate: baseball.



Long Beach State game

What caught my attention was the silent moment before the pitch. Filled with tension and the unknown, the pitcher and catcher subtly communicate with funky signs and hand motions. On the mound after shaking off a pitch a few times, the pitcher and catcher come to agreement and decide on what is to come. Then, the tension before the pitch sets in: stomping feet like a bull, slyly checking on the runners, and winding up with one knee to the sky. In scientific terms, the potential energy peaks at this moment.

As I see it, baseball is a game of patiently waiting for action, quick decisions when the action comes, and then assuming the position of patience yet again. From what I remember of my first and only(laughable) season playing softball in 8th grade, staying in the game was all mental. It could drive you mental, too, if you didn't play it right.

That being said, the other day my dad made an analogy to baseball and the game of life sitting with his aging dad. It was a few weeks ago when we were visiting our grandparents in Florida at their senior living center, a relatively new situation for the couple. Grandpa Palmer, an 89-year-old WWII Purple Heart Veteran and former Chicago cop is a tough guy and is used to keeping busy. Now, he has a grumpy old man attitude about selling the house and living in this new place. I can't blame him- they take care of everything for him so he is left with nothing to do.




Grandpa Palmer and son on the Gulf

After a few days of visiting with my lovely grandparents, my dad's baseball analogy came out of left field while conversing with Grandpa the night before our departure. It went something like this: "You know Dad, some may think of life as a baseball game; that last pitch can be just as important as the first, the game winner even. The last inning could change everything." Grandpa kind of grumbled over the point, saying something about counting his blessings, and moving on to the topic of organizing his investments before his passing. But the message struck home for me.

The message I heard was that of making progress in every pitch, before every play, after every error, and through all the tense moments. Making progress we play the American game every day up to our last, awaiting moments of action and appreciating the tension in the silence. How is that for some cheesy food for thought? I believe Jackie Robinson would agree that each moment matters, for a homerun is just a pitch away.

Gaga for Good, Not Great

We know of the world's greatest: Steve Jobs of Apple, Messi on the pitch, and Sasha Fierce at the Superbowl halftime show. But I know good. Here's a poem dedicated to my Grandpa McWeeney, who has known the two sure things in life being death and taxes, and has lived with the other uncertainties one day at time. Now arriving at 97 years old, three cheers to the good man:

He was great at it all.

From making sandwiches to making smiles
From riding his bike to walking miles
Cook lemon chicken, that he'd do
Pasta primavera, indeed that too.

He was a classy man.

From head to toe, no denying it.
From shoelace to collar, the perfect fit.
White hat and green jacket
We'll never forget.

A family man.

He combed their hair
A 20 minute nap, back into the lair.
For every special date,
Memorizing the license plate.

A true Renaissance man.

Yet to pull a boast from him-
More likely you'll get toast with jam,
With all your might, I doubt you could.
The best of his greatness, he was so good.

You've Got Mail, Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Who doesn't love the feeling of getting a soulful piece of mail? Not the bills or advertisements; rather the thoughtfully written, sealed and sent letter from a good friend. I have a few nostalgic tendencies, and snail mail is my favorite by far. Whenever I am feeling down, these notes grow a smile and all my pearly whites see the break of day. Sometimes, I'll admit, revisiting past letters can draw out tears as well. When I studied abroad in Spain, nothing comforted me more than receiving a few gems from home including my "Happy 21st Birthday" chocolate cake shot from my bartending brother, wrapped in a bandana (1 part kettle one, one part kahlua, sugar on the edge, lemon to chase and it tastes just like a piece of chocolate birthday cake). Amazing that it even made it overseas, unharmed. Other good mail gems I've received over the years include Anne's stationary from Berlin; Jenny's handpainted card from India; the singing birthday cards I got in college every year from my mom; and a cat-shaped letter from Cate in Italy. If you could capture the joy of mail in a jar, it would surely make fireworks and then explode once you tried to put a lid on it.



Patiently waiting for the mail, courtesy of Creative Commons

For every yin there is a yang. The downside of snail mail is the waiting game. Void of modern speed and delivery assurance, there is a certain mystery to the mail you send. Will they recieve it? When? How? When will they respond? How long do I wait for a response? These are some parallel feelings to the macrogame of life that we are all playing together, as really I find our patience is always being tested. We wait to get test results, anticipating the best and preparing for the worst. We wait to be accepted into a dream graduate program, unsure of where we may be placed. Our patience is tested as we wait 9 months for the baby to come, hoping everything goes well. We anxiously apply to jobs as we wait to see where we may land. In the anticipation, though, we learn patience. We must. And behind patience is hope, as hope is the only thing that can make the waiting game endurable.

A lot of our lives is a test to our patience, up until our final breath. We don't know what path our life might take, as much as we try to plan for and pursue certain opportunities, careers, and lifestyles. Thus, we become patient people, hoping that we will get that neatly wrapped package with the pretty bow on it soon, and yet fully prepared for a mangled disheartening package as well. Knowing that we are all in it together, I believe we should make it easier on each other whenever possible. A smile, a lift, and a thank-you go further than you'd imagine. And hey, why not take a moment out of worrying about the future and spend some time frolicking in the fields. Okay, maybe there is no field to be frolicked in near you, but a park will do.

Perhaps, somewhere over the rainbow, we will feel something like this: