Since the start of the year I have been officially certified as a nurses assistant, with plans to achieve my CNA2 this spring term at PCC. Allowing me to work in hospitals.
I am smack in the middle of Stats (learning how to gamble better), Bio (this life stuff amazes me every day), labs (haven't blown anything up... yet), and writing (such a great outlet for me in this time). I couldn't be happier with my professors and feel blessed everyday to be cramming so much new information into my brain.
With my background originally in the arts, I have noticed that my creative answers and ways of looking at things tends to separate me from the rest of the science majors. Continuing to pull grins and chuckles from that of my professors and class mates.
Oh, and the universe keeps gracing me in connecting with the best spirits ever. My stats girl Jazzy had my favorite coffee order waiting for me this Monday morning at 7am, knowing that my weekend was a little rough.
I leave you all with one of my most favorite written pieces I have ever read. One of the pleasure from reading so much new material in my writing class.
THIS IS THE LIFE
By Annie Dillard from the Fall issue of Image:
A Journal of the Arts and Religion, published by the Center for
Religious Humanism at Seattle Pacific University. Dillard's most recent
book is For the Time Being.
Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to
wit as everyone else does. Probably most cultures prize, as ours rightly
does, making a contribution by working hard at work that you love;
being in the know, and intelligent; gathering a surplus; and loving your
family above all, and your dog, your boat, bird-watching. Beyond those
things our culture might specialize in money, and celebrity, and natural
beauty. These are not universal. You enjoy work and will love your
grandchildren, and somewhere in there you die.
Another contemporary consensus might be: You wear the best
shoes you can afford, you seek to know Rome's best restaurants and their
staffs, drive the best car, and vacation on Tenerife. And what a cook
you are!
Or you take the next tribe's pigs in thrilling raids; you grill yams;
you trade for televisions and hunt white-plumed birds. Everyone you
know agrees: this is the life. Perhaps you burn captives. You set fire
to a drunk. Yours is the human struggle, or the elite one, to achieve...
whatever your own culture tells you: to publish the paper that proves
the point; to progress in the firm and gain high title and salary, stock
options, benefits; to get the loan to store the beans till their price
rises; to elude capture, to feed your children or educate them to a
feather edge; or to count coup or perfect your calligraphy; to eat the
king's deer or catch the poacher; to spear the seal, intimidate the
enemy, and be a big man or beloved woman and die respected for the pigs
or the title or the shoes. Not a funeral. Forget funeral. A big birthday
party. Since everyone around you agrees.
Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people
on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or
spear points, hoe, plant; they kill aurochs or one another;
they prepare sacrifices as we here and now work on our projects. What,
seeing this spread multiply infinitely in every direction, would you do
differently? No one could love your children more; would you love them
less? Would you change your project? To what? Whatever you do, it has
likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or
the Red Sox.
However hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as
dead in their war, our war. However dead you are, more people will
come. However many more people come, your time and its passions, and
yourself and your passions, weigh equally in the balance with those of
any dead who pulled waterwheel poles by the Nile or Yellow rivers, or
painted their foreheads black, or starved in the wilderness, or wasted
from disease then or now. Our lives and our deaths count equally, or we
must abandon one-man-one-vote dismantle democracy, and assign six
billion people an importance-of-life ranking from one to six billiona
ranking whose number decreases, like gravity, with the square of the
distance between us and them.
What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking
at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb
down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music
to be as provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jugs and shoes, to
turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your
people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and
even if someone cares to listen, then what? Everyone knows times and
cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or
tongue-tied absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking
around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people's wall, then what
new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well,
maybe you will not go into advertising.
Then you would know your own death better but perhaps not dread it less.
Try to bring people up the wall, carry children to see it to title, necklaces, degree, murex shells, or ownership of slaves.
Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away
humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men
swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips
attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a
shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the
pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone,
cow, cross, or mountain and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at
all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows.
Who is your "everyone"? Chess masters scarcely surround
themselves with motocross racers. Do you want aborigines at your
birthday party? Or are you serving yak-butter tea? Popular culture deals
not in its distant past, or any other past, or any other culture. You
know no one who longs to buy a mule or be named to court or thrown into a
volcano.
So the illusion, like the visual field, is complete It has no holes
except books you read and soon forget. And death takes us by storm. What
was that, that life? What else offered? If for him it was contract
bridge, if for her it was copyright law, if for everyone it was and is
an optimal mix of family and friends, learning, contribution, and joy of
making and ameliorating what else is there, or was there, or will there
ever be?
What else is a vision or fact of time and the peoples it bears
issuing from the mouth of the cosmos, from the round mouth of eternity,
in a wide and parti-colored utterance. In the complex weave of this
utterance like fabric, in its infinite domestic interstices, the
centuries and continents and classes dwell. Each people knows only its
own squares in the weave, its wars and instruments and arts, and also
the starry sky.
Okay, and then what? Say you scale your own weft and see time's
breadth and the length of space. You see the way the fabric both passes
among the stars and encloses them. You see in the weave nearby, and
aslant farther off, the peoples variously scandalized or exalted in
their squares. They work on their projects they flake what end? Fewer golf courses? What is wrong with golf? Nothing at all. Equality of wealth? Sure; how?
The woman watching sheep over there, the man who carries embers
in a pierced clay ball, the engineer, the girl who spins wool into yarn
as she climbs, the smelter, the babies learning to recognize speech in
their own languages, the man whipping a slave's flayed back, the man
digging roots, the woman digging roots, the child digging roots what
would you tell them? And the future people what are they doing? What
excitements sweep peoples here and there from time to time? Into the
muddy river they go, into the trenches, into the caves, into the mines,
into the granary, into the sea in boats. Most humans who were ever alive
lived inside one single culture that never changed for hundreds of
thousands of years; archaeologists scratch their heads at so
conservative and static a culture.
Over here, the rains fail; they are starving. There, the
caribou fail; they are starving. Corrupt leaders take the wealth. Not
only there but here. Rust and smut spoil the rye. When pigs and cattle
starve or freeze, people die soon after. Disease empties a sector, a
billion sectors.
People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make
beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies
beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they
help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears;
they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language,
philosophy, and science; they build, they kill, they preserve, they
count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they
tell their stories and gird themselves.
Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end?
Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of
what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through,
and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting
stars. Then what?
