"They Say that I Can Move the Mountains"

(click on image to enlarge)

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, the day which Christians celebrate the day Jesus entered into Jerusalem on a donkey to crowds who laid their coats and palm branches on the ground in for the donkey to tread on. Hosana means "save now".

Most of the crowd spread their coats on the road ahead of Jesus, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. He was in the center of the procession, and the crowds all around him were shouting,
"Praise God for the Son of David!
Bless the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Praise God in highest heaven!"

Matthew 21:8-9

For as long as I can remember, the churches I have attended have had Palm branches available on the Sunday before Easter. Children usually did a procession into the church waving the green, leafy plants. Even the adults would get a branch.

But there was always a difference between the adults holding palm branches, and the children who held them. Kids can make anything fun, including pieces of tree. And so, they play with the palm branches in church. They wave them around. They use them to dance. They sing Hosana! Hosana! Loudly, as if they were really a part of the celebrations when Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey.

The adults on the other hand, they try to quiet and calm down the children. The adults hold their branches at a modest level, not making a big deal about the whole situation. They are dignified and reverent. That's what church is all about, right?

They say that I can move the mountains
And send them falling to the sea
They say that I can walk on water
If I would follow and believe
With Faith Like a Child

"Like a Child", Jars of Clay

Maybe there is something we can learn from these children. Maybe we shouldn't be so dignified by holding our palm branches at our side. Maybe we should dance and sing and shout and wave or palms!

The he said, "I assure you, unless you turn from your sins and become as little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven. Therefore, anyone who becomes as humble as this little child is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven."

Matthew 18:3-4

Please Stay tuned!

Wow guys! Thanks for all the comments! Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, there will be no more Video Bogging Week Vlogs ! But eventually more videos will ago up! So Stay tuned! Exams starting soon!

MtA's Last Class Bash

Watch on Windows Media

Technorati Tag: videobloggingweek2006.

Okay, it is SLIGHTLY late, I'll admit! It's been a fairly busy day, and I didn't even go out tonight with my roommates! I did spend time with them at the house until about 11:00pm though, and then got to editing this thing. It's a little long, but bite me! :) I like it!

Plus, she's a little dangerous today. I actually took the camera out and did something different than the talking head routine (which was also dangerous if only for the fact that I had never vlogged before!) So, here is vlog attempt two! Thank you for everyone who commented on attempt one! It really encouraged me to do this again! And I am kind of enjoying it!

For those who don't understand why I am trying to be dangerous, it is the theme of this year's Video Blogging Week; the challenge which challenged me to vlog in the first place!

Also, check out this REALLY GREAT VLOG!!!

Wanderlust

Sunday night, a night which was spent writing an exam while giving up my chance to go to the Junos, also was an opportunity for me to contemplate the act of writing. My philosophy prof gave us a "take home" exam which was to be completed and passed in online, and it required writing three essays. When you spend your night saturated in essay writing about philosophy, a mind is bound to wander. And wander mine did.

We had choices on the exam, but the fact of the matter was, no doubt at least fifty percent of the class were writing the same essay question that I was. This was interesting to me, because no doubt, we would all write something different. And then I though that even if I had sat down to write the essays at a different time, it would come out very differently than the essay that I was writing then. And that's what is interesting about writing. With simply 26 letters forming our English language, we form so many different words which in turn form so many different sentences and paragraphs and full works. Post Modernism claims that everything that can be done, has already been done. And maybe everything is a copy of everything else. But what I write, no one else will ever write that. The forming of my words are unlike anyone else's.

The ab-TH-urdity of Vlogging

Watch the video

videobloggingweek2006

How is this for a first attempt? I have never ever taken video with my camera before, I have never ever edited video, and I have never ever sat in front of a camera and talked to it for this long (except for one formal interview once for a promotional video someone was doing).

What is the deal with this? I really don't even understand vlogging yet. But you can't be critical until you try, right?

Red

Directional Confessional

Writing is an interesting tool.

Sometimes I find myself sitting down at a computer, and picking up a story or two which I have begun in the past. Fiction is the only way I know how to enter back into the fairy tale world that helped me escape from all my childhood perils. I could be a princess or a detective or a pioneer or a mermaid. Innocence soon loses its naivete, and it became easier and easier to see through the happily ever afters.

Other times, writing is used to keep up to date through e*mails or blog entries. The more interesting these blurbs are, the better. Hyperbole is used and only certain key points are emphasized. It must be short and sweet, or it will be too long for people to care enough to read. Our internet and television generation have such a dumbed down attention span that it no longer matters what is written, as long as it is interesting and short.

Similar to the e*mail and blog outcomes of writing is the letter. This can be hand written or typed, sent through the snail mail or electronically, and usually an attempt is made to be persuasive. Letters are edited much more carefully than the life updates. Content is closely monitored so that the point comes across, so that a specific side is heard.

Where is the truth? Writing used to be so much more personal to me. Whether it was abstract or simply an outlet, I used to pour out my heart. Maybe this could have been taken as being overly emotional, an emo, angsty teenager searching for the meaning of life. But growing up doesn't seem to equal finding meaning. Does becoming an adult mean finally finding our way after being lost for so long? Everyone still seems to be seeking. That part of us just doesn't seem important anymore. We don't write about it anymore. And instead, we give a damn about how short and sweet and entertaining we are.

I do not know when I became lost. I do not know when I lost the ability to dream and to wish. I do not know when I stopped being a princess with the world at my fingertips. I do not know who I am now. I just see act after act, intermingled between this agonizing search process. I end up exhausted. I stand here, not knowing where to turn next.

To you, I am a fictional tale.
To you, I am a quick and entertaining.
To you, I am a persuasive letter that you read without knowing the author.

To me, I seem to have lost all the words.

BAM!

In response to my blog on The Bachelor, I just want to relate a hardy "I told you so"!

Maybe This Would Have Helped...

Losing Trust

Last night was the final show of this season's The Bachelor. I must admit, I never watched more reality TV than I have this year. With five girls living in one house, you tend to sit down and watch whatever someone else has on the TV. So this season was my introduction to The Bachelor, and I only watched about two episodes in total (one full episode plus bits and pieces of others).

Last night, bachelor Travis, whose medical career was the only thing going for him, gave a ring to down home, kindergarten teacher cutie, Sarah, while California surfer hottie Moana went home heartbroken and embarrassed after spending weeks in Paris falling in love along with twenty-five other women - to the same man.

Episode six, second to last, Travis takes the three women to the most romantic places around the world and completes each date with an invitation to his hotel bed. After sleeping with three beautiful women, the bachelor complains about how difficult this whole ordeal is.

Although Travis did not officially propose to Sarah, as he gave her the ring on the chain; he is clearly intending for a further relationship. How, after spending weeks competing for the heart of one man, after he has given away so much of himself in such a short period, can she trust him? Around the same time that she first slept with him, so did two other women!

The Bachelor is all about competition and jealousy and heartbreak and a deterioration of trust. Reality TV doesn't just make mulch of entertainment, it makes a mulch of Love too. And we sit, and watch it, and love it.

Keep your hands and feet in the ride at all time

Birthdays are a lot like roller coasters. You have huge expectations each time you step into the car; you want the excitement and the rush that the really big loop-the-loop Roller Coasters offer; you want the speed and the thrills. Expectations are huge.

Birthdays have all those same expectations. No other day do we expect all our cards to line up just right (except perhaps the day of our prom and our wedding). Every other day, we have Murphy's Law and sayings such as "Nobody ever said life is fair" floating around the back of our heads, smudging our outlook; but my birthday is "MY Day". It is all about me, when we celebrate the day I was born, and we eat my favorite kind of cake, we give birthday presents to me, ... Basically, not to mention all our selfishness, on our birthday, we have an innermost desire to feel extremely special by those who are special to us.

But every Roller Coaster is dangerous. There are safety harnesses which must be secure, there are operators who know when to start and stop the machine, there are warnings to keep those people with high blood pressure and weak hearts at bay, there are directions to keep hands and feet and other appendages in the ride at all times.

Birthdays have none of these safety harnesses accompanying them.

My birthday was just over a week ago, on a day which all other people despise! It seems that more people are alone on Valentine's day and the Valentine's-haters despise those who have a Valentine (even if their Valentine is miles away and they're alone too). Valentine's Day offers even higher expectations and attracts even weaker hearts.

I suggest that birthdays come mandatory with safety harnesses, warnings, operators, and directions.

Enjoy the ride!

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY

Everything is alright.

"I just want to warn you," Alicia told me as we walked to her birthday supper, "that you're going to cry on your birthday." Big tears. Twenty year old tears.

It's all going to be alright. Everything is alright. You're okay. Everything is going to be okay. Either God is a woman and she's talking to me, or the loudspeaker outside of Bridgestreet Cafe was blasting some strange self-help CD. I wonder who listens to that stuff. I wonder if that CD is in someone's stereo playing over and over every night, just so that the listener can be convinced by some electronic device that the world really isn't all that bad.

I wonder what went through each pedestrian's mind as they walked up and down Bridge Street, as the dim glow came from the closed storefront windows; Walking either to and from bars or pizza joints, expecting to drink away some repressed emotion or to eat away drunken heartbreak.

Everything is alright.

Twenty Year Old Tears.

Loudspeakers don't lie.

The Science of Art

Art is Science made clear.

~Jean Cocteau

What is it that made me love science? I obviously had (have) a passion for the subject throughout the end of high school and the beginning of university, to the point where I still really enjoy learning about it. And yet, here I am now, an arts student. When I think back to Fogarty's class, or Beatty's class, or Gallant's class; when I think back to Astrophotography and taking pictures of nebulas and meteors hitting the moon; or Aventis and blended fish guts smelling up an unplugged fridge all summer; when I think back even to Wednesday's Anthropology class on genes and evolution, I am struck by this thrill of excitement! It certainly is not a desire to learn more math equations or name carbon bonds or understand formulas.

No, it was none of those things.

What I love about science is the intricacy of it all. To learn about science is to learn about how everything works together from the very smallest building blocks of our world, to the wonders of our universe!

http://www.scienceart.nl/Frames/HOMEpage.htm

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2006/01/

That's the great thing about it. Instead of pushing the science that I love aside, I have instead embraced it! That is what I fell in love with when I encountered my English and Philosophy classes. Art is taking the natural world, and looking at it in a way that isn't blinded with formulas and equations, but instead looking beyond that and finding beauty. I am not in any way denying our science around us. We are biological entities. But art is what lifts us above our biology. I believe that science unifies us with our humanity, but art attempts to connect us with the divine. Oh, how sublime.

This idea however presents me with a dilemma, one which I find myself at an impasse. If art really has this power to enlighten and evoke contemplation; if beauty is really something above our purely humanistic elements, then experiencing art should be much more of a sacred event than it is now. Instead, because of how easily art can be reproduced, we just glance over it. Anytime a photograph or a poem is added to my blog, I am further endorsing the mind set of our society to merely glance over to figure out what the quick and hard point is.

Maybe there isn't a point. Maybe art has no simple formulas. Maybe art is the language of the gods.

Success

Old, stone staircase, what do you know
Of success?
You know the coming and going of seasons;
Summer, winter, autumn, and spring.
You feel the load of each freshman,
Stepping up to undertake the pressure.
You feel the steps of each graduate -
Walking out of one world and into another.

Oh, old stone staircase,
what do you know of success?
When I would rather sit on you
and weep,

Than walk one step further into this unknown place.

-picture taken behind the library at Mount Allison University.

Apples and Oranges

I remember when I was just a wee girl (well, in middle school and high school), my dad used to tell me that someday, I'd be the type of girl that all the right guys would fall for. At the time, I felt ugly and lonely and would constantly wonder why I wasn't good enough to get a boyfriend. My dad told me that someday, the boys would notice the smart girl, who was beautiful to boot (I never felt beautiful, but Dad told me I was).

Now I stand, and look back with my 20/20 goggles, and realize that he was right. When Dan fell for me, it wasn't my looks that grabbed him. It wasn't my sexuality, or my flirtatiousness which caught his attention. No, it was when we started to talk about what was important to us; when I talked about my faith and my lifestyle, and who I was underneath my clothes, underneath my makeup, underneath my skin, and in my heart and mind.

So, to my sister and to the boys who are missing out, I give you this quote (I thank nc_martialartist for bringing the quote to my attention):

Girls are like apples on trees. The best ones are at the top of the tree. The boys don't want to reach for the good ones because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they just get the rotten apples from the ground that aren't as good, but easy. So the apples at the top think something is wrong with them, when in reality, they're amazing. They just have to wait for the right boy to come along, the one who's brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree.

I wish someone as beautiful as you could know that you're going to be so loved by someone. And don't feel bad about being lonely, but don't think that finding someone is the ultimate bliss either. You are beautiful. The bible speaks about Eve being the crown of creation, the thing that made it perfect. Some day, you will fell as beautiful as you are meant to feel. You are worthy to be loved for who you are, for everything you are.

I sometimes wish that we aren't always searching for constant reassurance. Sometimes we go above it, or find it in the wrong places if we can't get it how we want. But many times this desire just leads to pain. I wish no one had to go through the pain. I wish the difference between our emotions and our realities weren't like comparing apples and oranges.

Home

Depth of Field

Finding a gas pump in the middle of nowhere
Next to a bridge fallen from somewhere
Fueling my steps
My steps which take me from here to there
To the place where nowhere leads.
So give me my energy
To continue walking
Over sinking bridges
Which end abruptly.
Maybe I'll end up somewhere.

What You're Missing (or, What's Missing You)

Dear Boyfriend,

While you're enjoying your two bedroom, four balconied penthouse near the beach, here is a little piece of home to remind you of what you're missing.


SNOW!!!

That 'good luck' that you sent to Molly really did her some good (I promise, I passed them along). Tonight she both played and sung beautifully. Since I was the only one home to watch her school Christmas concert, I brought the digital camera to get some pictures. Since you're missing Molly oh-so-much, we decided to make you feel as if you were sitting right beside me in the Lakefield Elementary School gym.





I am in complete awe in how all these grade four and five kids can play the violin so well! I got a prelude to a few of the Christmas pieces in the hospital last night when Molly played for Papa, but hearing the group of them playing is just beautiful.

A ukelale group came to play a few numbers (didn't compare to the violins of course!) and then, Molly came out once more with the choir. They sang beautifully, and such a wide assortment of Christmas pieces. I recorded 10 seconds of each Dona Nobis Pacem, one of my favorite songs to hum while wandering around the house alone. I managed to get some of rendition of 'Let it Snow' to send to Australia! Each song was beautiful, and many were harmonized or sung in round. You should have heard it! The choir sung at the Imperial Theatre here in Saint John sometime last week with choirs and orchestras from all around the area, and apparently it was a night of beautiful music. From what I heard tonight, I don't wonder why.





After the choir, I headed into the 'backstage' area to get Molly bundled up to walk home. (Seriously, a walk home here in Quispam is nothing like what you're getting used to in Australia, (other than the riots. We don't have to worry about our safety, just about how our extremities will react to frostbite.) It was then I suggested to Molly that we make sure you get to experience this night with us! She was thrilled with the idea. She also suggested that I take a picture of her and Emily, the friend which she is planning to make a scrapbook for! Emily recently gave her a Best Friends Charm bracelet that Molly was thrilled about, because it looks remarkably like the silver bracelet I wear around my wrist constantly. Behind Molly and Emily is the infamous Luke - the boy who tried so desperately to be Molly's boyfriend, and who in my opinion is pretty cute! (Molly put me up to saying that!)



Since we decided to have you see these pictures, we decided that I should be in a few of them. So, we took a lovely sister-picture just for you (and for me to have. You can never have enough sister-pictures).


We headed home, and just before curling up in the living room to start reading the second book in Madeline L'Engle's Time Chronicle, we decided to show you what Christmas looks like in our house (because you haven't seen it yet!). Remember, this is without my decorations on the tree yet!





Merry Christmas Dan! We all miss you here! Molly can't stop saying it, and I can't stop feeling it. Don't let the warmth of the sun make you forget about those who love you fifteen time zones away.

Love always,
Molly

And,
Your Girlfriend who loves you

"It's 3 AM I Must be Lonely"

Question: What are normal people doing at three in the morning? Actually, what are normal people doing at three a.m. when they have a nine o'clock exam in the morning.

Not wanting to be out done by the norm, I was sleeping this morning at 3:00 a.m. however, I hadn't been sleeping for very long. I had quite a hard time falling asleep after studying and getting into bed at 12:30. I had Christmas carols running through my head incessantly. When I finally got rid of them it was Emminem running through my head, keeping me awake.

Finally I fell asleep. Finally.

Then, I heard a noise. I looked over at the clock. I read 3:00. I couldn't figure out what the noise was. It was coming from my computer. Still half asleep and groggy, I turned on the screen, and there was my Skype, going off. My moron boyfriend (I mean boyfriend who I love and miss!!) was calling me.

"Hello?" I mumble.

"Hey! What were you doing?"

"?? SLEEPING!!!"

"Oh... What time is it there?"

I know it is hard to compute the fifteen hour time difference between him and I. But I was awake now. We might as well talk.

"Oh, I thought it was three o'clock in the afternoon. I just got home to Cassie's" he says. "You have your exam in the morning? Oh, well then you should go back to bed."

"Well, now that I'm awake...."

"Nope, go back to sleep!"

So, I crawl back into bed. Bring on the Christmas carols running through my head keeping me awake again... .... ....