Ramadan at Glacier

This week marks the second week of the month of Ramadan, a month often characterized as a month of starvation. For me, this Ramadan has been far different than any other. This year Ramadan has fallen in the summer, and though the hours are long, incredibly long, I've taken a different approach to the month. For me, it isn't about what I've often been told it's about-- to feel for the hungry, to avoid temptation, to practice the "rules." For me, this month is about grounding myself, learning to really live.
We started our Ramadan at Glacier National Park. Though we didn't fast for the week,I felt the essence of Ramadan more than any other year.
Living a city-life, one is programmed to believe that man is the eternal prophet, that any message the earth has to give or any task that must be done, can be and will be done through us. We change what we please to create what we need. But, as I stood surrounded by vast snow covered mountains, on earth covered in wildflowers, only steps away from the most pristine, limpid lakes, I saw the dynamics shift before my eyes. The place of man swept down from the top to where it belonged, with the rest of wildlife.
Here we were the prey. And there were no rules we could set or plans we could make definitely.
One night we pitched a tent and made a fire. We went to sleep, and left the fire to finish the last log through the night. In the dead calm of night, just as I was falling asleep, a wind swept through the mesh of the tent. It was followed by others. In an instant the still night had been overtaken by a storm. We rushed out to pin down the tent cover and put things away. I poured water over the fire and just as I turned around the wind lifted the flames again.

Throughout the park were "Grizzly Bear" warnings. "Entering Bear Country," they read with a picture of an angry bear, jaws open, below the warning. Bear spray sold out instores across the park. We are not used to feeling our place in the food chain. But these bears with four inch nails, that were feared so much and were depicted so viciously, filled themselves with berries and fish!

I have locked certain images and scenes from this trip in my heart and in my mind. This Ramadan, I want to meditate on the still lake and the sound and image of water, stars in the sky against a backdrop of owls calling. This is my goal--to breathe every breath through this view, to understand how much of nothing and how much of everything I am, like the small, red rock rock against which the creek slides against that nudges it down to the river, to the fall, to the lake...

Ashes

Yann Tiersen made "Dust Lane" after his mother's death, and so it's an album that's meant to be one that expresses the mourning of death and the joy of life. I felt like the song, Ashes captured the essence of his album. It was strange for me to come by this song again, today because this morning as I was playing a song from Explosions in the Sky for Mehdi, he asked me "Is it just music? No lyrics?" And it got me thinking about how songs without words say what they want to say. It seems that it's more difficult for these artists, because the lyrics are the emotions they put behind the instruments."Ashes," takes me right to the edge of death and then back to Spring.

This week feels like a year! Monday, I lost it emotionally while arguing with someone. I got more upset than I've ever gotten upset in my life. Nothing has ever shattered me as that argument did, the yelling, the insults. And in the end, I was much more angry at myself than I was with the man who was not even worth my time to begin with. In the heat of the argument, I saw a side of myself I had never seen before. Frankly, a side I didn't even know I had. An angry, ugly side. Actually, a lot of people saw it since (embarrassingly) this was in public. At home, when all I did was replay the night in my head for hours through the night, I realized how much energy it takes to dislike someone. It literally drains energy to be negative about someone. It takes way too much to hate. Far, far, far more than it takes to love. So the opposite of love, I suppose, is indifference.

Today I went on a hike. After dragging myself up a steep hill for thirty minutes, I saw a bench surrounded by trees. As I turned to sit, I was hit with a wave of dizziness. All of the Bay Area was at my feet. Berkeley. San Francisco. Oakland.
It reminded me of a summer day in Iran. I sat with my cousin at the top of a hike, and all of Tehran was at our feet. We opened cold cans of artificial orange juice. She told me how she was in love and how he'd left.I listened, and watched an old man continue past us.

Today I realized how small I am, and how little I've seen. There's so much left for me to...

Rooted

These days I feel like grapefruit flesh. Strange, perhaps, but for days it's all that comes to my mind when I think about how I'm feeling. Like my thick skin has been peeled, and the thin screen that surrounds each slice of me has been peeled, and all that's exposed of me is flaky grapefruit flesh, vulnerable. I'm not sure how I came to feel this way. I'm not sure why. I think I've been so wrapped up in my life that I've forgotten to root myself.

Facing my window, there's a home being built, almost from scratch. Since we moved here seven months ago they've been tearing down walls and rebuilding them. For some time, they had torn the roof off the backside of the house to build another story. The stairs from the first floor lead to the sky. The construction workers would walk up the stairs and onto the roof, that is now the floor of the second story. It's become one of my favorite past times, to pour myself a cup of tea and sit on my couch and watch the construction workers through my blinds. They measure wood and draw lines with pencils. They saw off segments, just enough so that the piece fits perfectly into the space they've made for it. And before they drill it to the house, they rub the surface several times as if preparing it for its new responsibilities. As I eat lunch, I watch them with sweat dripping off their faces as they all find a corner of the house covered in shade to sit in and open a can of soda or eat a sandwich. Two days ago, they built walls around the second story, and now its insides are concealed again. And half the workers are out of view. Only when they finished the walls did I notice a tree that had somehow grown right against the house, among all the construction. It's leaves reached the start of the second story. It resembled the Money Tree I have at home. The branches were covered with skinny green leaves. The day the walls were put up and the stairs no longer lead to the roof, I sipped my tea and looked at the tree. It looked happy. Every leaf in view was vibrant green. Not a single one wilted or even a faded yellow. As if it had been there all its life. Perhaps it had.


Today, there's only one worker here. It's near 5pm. He's been drilling all day. And the tree's gone. Not sure what happened. I stepped out during his lunch break and walked past the home hoping to catch sight of its leaves, only to be reassured that it's gone. And for a second I wondered, Did I imagine it there yesterday and the day before?

Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits

I finished reading Isabel Allende's "House of the Spirits" this morning. It took me much longer to read than I expected, considering I love Isabel Allende's writing. This was her first novel, and after reading some of her other novels, one can tell. The first half of the book is a bit slow. The characters do not develop as quickly and as powerfully as they do in her later works, and she seems to have really nailed how to switch between characters and move between time periods in her later novels. But it was really interesting to read this book and see how she's grown as a writer. I consider her one of my favorite authors. I love her "Portrait in Sepia." She's the only writer who can really get me hooked emotionally into a book, in such a way that I feel furious when her characters are angry and in love when her characters are passionate.

There is a particular paragraph from the book I found compelling:

She tried to explain Miguel's point of view: that it was not possible to keep waiting for the slow passage of history, the laborious process of educating and organizing the people, because the world was moving ahead by leaps and bounds and they were being left behind; and that radical change is never brought about willingly and without violence. History confirmed this. The argument went on and on and they became locked in a confused rhetorical exchange that left them exhausted, each accusing the other of being more stubborn than a mule. But in the end they kissed each other good night and both were left with the feeling that the other was an extraordinary human being.


The most admirable skill she has as a writer is that she can evoke such powerful emotion without every getting sentimental or poetic. Her images and the way she pushes a tone into her words creates the emotion.

The second half of the book is amazing! As she tells the story of the Communist movement in Chile and the dictatorship it faced, I couldn't help but notice how the political censorship, political prisoners, confessions, and even the conversations the young revolutionaries had in the book were mirror images of those currently in Iran.

Some of What I've Learned Starting Adulthood

Now that I have officially submitted my final grad school application and gotten over my typical post-long-term-project-of-any-sort-cold I have decided to make a list of a few things that I have learned, things I'd like to remember, and things I have realized at Berkeley as an undergraduate. Of course, I'll forget to add a ton of stuff onto this list, but for now the following:

1) NEVER buy anything but tea from South Side coffee shops, unless the only thing you value from coffee and espresso drinks is the caffeine. Any drink made in less than thirty seconds is probably not very good unless it's hot water and a tea bag.

2) Those people who you see around campus, who reply "how's it going?" with "I'm so busy. I have no time for anything. So much school work. I'm so busy," no matter what time of the year it is probably spend more time wasting time than they do school work. Honestly, if people study as much as they actually say they study we'd all be serious geniuses.

3) There are beautiful blackberry bushes in front of VLSB behind the willow tree. They're delicious and most people don't even know they exist.

4) How to learn as much as you can from a textbook without reading all of it or even most of it. In other words, BS my way through reading and discussion, though this is a skill that takes practice and cannot be learned through a blog.

5) The homeless in Berkeley are incredibly smart. My favorite: the man with the shopping cart, from which a solar panel sticks out, charging his laptop (?) that is playing incredibly loud techno music.

6) Second-hand clothing stores are amazing!!!! Favorite: CrossRoads Trading Co.

7) Squelch is only funny the first and maybe second year at Cal. Then the fact that the only humor they can sum up is vulgar and sex-related becomes boring.

8) I wrote this in my journal at my first semester at Cal, so I guess it's only fair I add it here: They no longer have "school dances" in College. It was pretty new for me then.

9) The trees that line the entrance of the University are engineered so that they are in full bloom during the Spring, but in the fall when they're leaves fall, they are meant to look like roots sticking up out of the ground. As if they're heads in full bloom are underground. I'll miss them.

10) Don't bother putting up flyers on Sproul. They'll be covered within a few hours.

11) I'll miss the Eucalyptus Grove.



There is one thing that I realized at Berkeley that I think has changed me, possibly one of the major things that transitioned me into the realities of adulthood. We grow up learning about the Civil Rights Movements, Slavery, the Holocaust, Apartheid and we think, "How could people have supported that?" And I know at least for me, that was always a genuine question. It seemed absurd, beyond comprehension. "How we could we have supported injustice to this degree." But after being involved in the SJP's movement to Divest UCB from Israel and the long debates and protests that occupied the weeks leading up to the final vote, I've learned how it's possible.

Because the same type of people who can sit through seven hours of stories about the oppression facing the Palestinian people and children, who can hear first-hand accounts, who can see with their own eyes on video innocent children and people being massacred and then argue against divestment are the same type of people who could see Black people and Jewish people being dehumanized and remain silent, refusing to fight against the oppression. People are afraid. And the emotions, politics and power struggles involved complicate the injustice. It takes bravery and courage to fight against what those in power say. Perhaps now it is obvious to us, unquestionable that Blacks deserved the right to equality, but in its time it was a "complicated issue." Perhaps now the question of whether we should take out a university's money from purchasing bombs and fighter planes that massacre civilians is a "complicated issue," but years from now we'll look back and wonder, "How could people have supported that?"

Revisiting my Blog

I suppose I would like to write in here more often. I've been thinking about the point of writing in here versus writing in a journal versus merely thinking about my thoughts. I haven't come to any firm or convincing solutions yet. When I read other people's blogs I find it fascinating that I can see their views on the world. It's like that moment when you're reading a book and you've gotten to a scene that takes your breath away and you forget where you are, who you are, what time it is and you're in awe. Complete awe that this is how another person sees the situation, the world. That's the beauty of writing. It's so intimate. It's the transfer of my thoughts to the page; it's the closest one will ever get to me. So it's been difficult for me to convince myself to write more often and more personally.

But then again, isn't that why there are 6.8 billions of people on the earth rather than 1, myself or yourself? So that we can create those moments for one another? Perhaps at some point in my writing someday, one person will feel that intimate connection with me through words even if it is for a fleeting moment.