A Shadow Story

Have you ever thought about the stories that are hidden? You know, the ones that whisper from deep within the shadows of the books that have already been written? What follows is one such story—two “chapters” long, and stitched together from three different texts. Each paragraph addresses one or more issues I’ve been considering over the last few months in relation to my own life, and offers a nugget of insight worth pondering.

I

"Mysteries, she realized, had their own laws. No matter how marvelous they appeared to common folk, they still followed their own natural order. As a hound couldn't fly nor an apple tree blossom with roses, so those of the green had their own strictures that they must observe" (de Lindt, 1993, p. 88).

“First, look at people and try to find the truth within them. You need to understand people, really understand them, if you’re going to be a hero . . . . Second, beware of things that shine and glitter and make promises, especially promises that play on your weaknesses . . . . Third, you have to have a strong imagination” (Bode, 2007, p. 43).

"But knowing took the sight, to see beyond the world that is . . . and practical as housey-folk were, they believed only what they could hold and weigh . . ." (de Lindt, 1993, p. 92).

" . . . a good thing, to be sure, but a place of limited joys" (Dunkle, 2008, p. 3).

II

"The witch wanted him to feel again, but feeling encompassed remembering, and remembering only hurt. What use was the gift of the green if all it brought was pain?" (de Lindt, 1993, p. 136).

"We all carry the dark places inside us . . . ." "'I'm not . . .' Angharad began, but then she thought. Not what? Not a bad person? Perhaps. But had she never known anger? Never held unkind thoughts? The stranger's observation was valid. No one was innocent of darkness" (de Lindt, 1993, p. 85).

"She turned, not sure she could bear another of his sorrows. He might be able to forget them, but she could not. They were a part of her now. She took them willingly--for that was part of a poet's task--regretting only that in taking them, she did not lessen his burden" (de Lindt, 1993, p. 98).

"So Angharad sang to him before she left, a song of the loneliness that wisdom can sometimes bring--when the student won't listen, when the form is bound to the earth by its roots and only the mind ranges free" (de Lindt, 1993, p. 54).

References

Bode, N.E. (2007). The slippery map. NY: HarperCollins Publishers.

de Lindt, Charles. (1993). Into the green. NY: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Dunkle, Clare. (2008). The sky inside. NY: Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

The Freedom to Fly

I attended the International Association of Language Learning Technology Conference (IALLT) in Atlanta, Georgia last week. (For a synopsis of session content, view the tweets.) The experience of spending time in Georgia provided me with a great deal of clarity about many paradoxes in my life, leaving a residue of overflowing gratitude for what is present in my life, in spite of unfulfilled desires. It is so easy to take life for granted and to misunderstand our place in it.








When my life feels like this








Entrance to Georgia State University Dorms










And the point of each step







Stone Mountain, Georgia










Is invisible to the eye







Cable Car Ride, Stone Mountain, Georgia









The joy in the journey is easily missed







Kite Flyer Atop Stone Mountain, Georgia









As I long for the freedom and strength to fly







Bird near Stone Mountain, Georgia










So I ponder as I stop for a rest







Stone Mountain, Georgia










Those who came before








Granite Carving, Stone Mountain, Georgia











And pray for the light to see how best






Atlanta, Georgia From the Top of Stone Mountain










To help those around me soar.







Birds float on the air currents at Stone Mountain

The Diversification of Social Investments

During tax time, one can't help but think about finances. However, I find the topic a rather tedious one. It comes as no surprise, then, that I found my mind wandering away from the numbers and into other realms such as social capital--specifically, investments of a social nature. If you were asked to describe your cadre of friends and acquaintances in terms of an investment portfolio, what would you say?

Have you invested your resources into a series of "pre-set mixes"--default groupings determined primarily as a matter of convenience, but somewhat aligned with your prevailing perspective on social investment? After all, it is easy to add the people who occupy the places in which you spend the most time (church members, colleagues from work, neighbors, etc.) to your portfolio of acquaintances. Then again, perhaps you make your social investments based on the degree to which you can comfortably and easily slip into a pre-defined role? The adult world isn't all that different from high school in this regard. There is always some person or organization looking for someone to be their all-star athlete, cheerleader, coach, clown, teacher, techie, etc.

Perhaps you prefer to have a bit more control over your social portfolio, so although you avoid the pre-set mixes, you play it safe--investing in very stable, low-risk, but also low-yield friendships? On the other hand, maybe short-term, high-yield relationships constitute the majority of your social portfolio? This strategy can be risky, and requires constant vigilance and adjustment.

I have also been thinking about the recent credit crisis, market crashes, and ensuing recessions. It seems to me that these events also offer lessons about social relationships. For example, one-sided friendships are not generally sustainable when crisis hits. One cannot live on social credit (i.e., indebtedness) in the long term any more than one can indefinitely live on financial credit. Putting all one's eggs in the same social basket carries its own set of risks and potential consequences. It not only makes us vulnerable when a crisis, emergency, or natural disaster shakes the social group, but also limits our access to information, new perspectives, and ultimately, to growth. And how is a person to recover who has been burned when a "company" in which they have invested everything fails and there is no bailout available to salvage the relationship? And on a larger scale, what about social recession? What happens when people stop participating in the social economy, when they are afraid to invest in the larger social economy, or when they withdraw their social resources from society?

My own musings have led me to the conclusion that it may be time to diversify my social portfolio. This has some pretty interesting implications--in terms of how to identify potentially worthwhile investments, how much to risk, and the degree to which it is possible to protect against catastrophic loss.

Thoughts?

Graveside Games

Death--seldom convenient,
Still, there's life yet to live
Knowing this
Children wandered away

From the grief to the graves
Where they searched for and saved
49 drowning worms that day.

Had Grandma been there
She would have agreed
The game that they played was worthwhile

For she never liked tears
And throughout all her years
God's creations made her smile.

Cherice Montgomery, 4-19-2009

Cherice on "The Edge"

25 Random Things

Well, I haven't done a very good job of keeping up with my blog these days, so perhaps this will serve as penance (and will kill 2 birds with one stone--my blog and Facebook).

1) I have always loved my name, which comes from the song My Cherie Amour.

2) I wanted an easy-bake oven when I was little . . . cooking a cake with a light bulb—so ingenious!

3) I am amazed and grateful that my parents let me spend 2 weeks as an exchange student in Mexico even though I was only 12, had taken just one semester of Spanish, and couldn’t conjugate a verb yet.

4) I can type (in English) almost as fast as most people talk.

5) I know from personal experience that it is possible to intend to go to Kansas City and end up in Nebraska instead. I am hopelessly, perpetually lost—even (especially) in a parking lot.

6) I enjoy thinking—especially on a meta-level (and yes, I suspect that has something to do with #5).

7) I have never been hospitalized, but hospitals fascinate me. I used to want to be a nurse and even volunteered in the blood bank at the Red Cross for awhile, where I quickly determined I didn’t have the stomach to make medicine a career. Still don’t, but I do enjoy helping other people.

8) I like to camp (in a tent), fish, and waterski (slalom), but I don’t like dirt.

9) I tend to be somewhat reserved, very task-oriented, and rather perfectionistic, so people often express surprise when they discover that I can be extremely playful and witty.

10) I have always had an affinity for the aesthetic and enjoy creative pursuits, but I am rather clumsy when it comes to translating what is in my head into something that others can understand. One of the reasons I love technology so much is that it makes it possible for me to be more “myself”—by extending my reach and compensating for my lack of artistic skill.

11) I care deeply, so things hurt deeply.

12) I put myself through college by working as a live-in housekeeper for an incredible woman. My family jokes that it was a private finishing school, with lessons in domesticity, deportment, and social graces. I'm not sure how "finished" I was when I left, but I definitely learned a lot.

13) I love talking about ideas—to be deeply immersed in a scintillating conversation for a long period of time with someone who can make quantum leaps from concept to concept is one of my greatest pleasures in life (although unfortunately a rather rare one).

14) I worked as a customer service/security dispatcher for a mall--it is scary when you call 911 and the phone rings 9 times and no one answers!

15) I really want to begin every reference section in my academic papers with the following epigraph from one of Emily Dickinson’s poems: “How dreary to be somebody, how public like a frog, to tell your name the livelong day to an admiring bog.”

16) Some of my high school friends’ parents used to worry that I had an eating disorder because I have always been very thin, but I have just been blessed with a very high metabolism (a fact I never fully appreciated until I hit graduate school and gained 20 pounds).

17) I love to read and sometimes feel like I’m “Johnny #5”—on a constant quest for input. I am generally full of questions, much to the chagrin of my friends.

18) I absolutely LOVE to sing—especially where harmony is involved--but dropped out of choir in high school because I disliked the teacher.

19) My favorite time of the day is when the world shuts down, funneling my concentration into a single, focused beam.

20) I loved my debate and drama classes in high school because they gave me permission to be myself.

21) Presently, one of the great ironies of my life is that I love to write, but academic writing currently makes me physically ill.

22) Spiritual things have always been important to me, but are also an ongoing source of great personal struggle. My understanding of such things has come at a very high price.

23) Teaching is truly one of my greatest passions and my deepest joys.

24) The mentors who have been most influential in my life taught me simply by being themselves.

25) The things I like best about myself are also the things that most other people don’t understand.

The Understatement of the Year

"Students who are living and learning with technologies that generate dynamic forms of content may find the current formalism and structure of scholarship and research to be static and “dead” as a way of collecting, analyzing and sharing results" (Johnson, Levine, & Smith, 2009).

References

Johnson, L., Levine, A., & Smith, R. (2009). The 2009 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium. Retrieved February 22, 2009, from http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2009-Horizon-Report.pdf

Random Ruminations

"Her restlessness was not easily appeased. . . . Everywhere she turned there was a blinding sameness. She could no longer distinguish one moment of her life from another, and the events of each day were forgotten as soon as they had passed" (Graham, 2001, p. 99).

In transition? Clearly. But transition to what? While waiting, I've polished off a number of books, but so far, the nuggets I've encountered in them haven't coalesced into a particularly coherent set of understandings. However, it occurs to me that many may prefer the raw data without the commentary anyhow. Sometimes it is safer that way too. ;-) So, think of what follows as random graffiti that various authors have spray-painted on the walls of my mind. As is the case with graffiti from time to time, at least some of these quotes have artistic qualities that extend beyond the functional purposes they were intended to serve within the context of the books in which they appeared.

"All educational growth is loss ... teachers in higher education are pressured to construe their work in oppositional rather than relational terms, pitting teacher against student, separating knowledge and identity, and describing the world in black and white terms" (Stengel, 1998).

"Living matter and clarity are opposites--they run away from one another" (Gilder, 2008, p. 100).

"John had always been drawn to the invisible: more specifically, the invisible connections between things. As a child he had puzzled over the phenomena ordinary men take for granted in modern life: the connection between a flick of a switch and the sudden appearance of light, or sound, or image. He tore things apart--looking for the connections. But his interest went beyond the engineer's obsession with mechanical cause and effect, with deconstructing and reconstructing physical reality: he searched for things that would leave him awestruck, things residing in mystery and obscurity. Invisible connections" (Graham, 2001, p. 106).

"Co-existence is not the same as communication or connection" (Montgomery, 2009).

"When two particles interact with each other, they exchange energy and/or momentum" (K.C. Cole in Graham, 2001, p. 98).

"It is a gift, you know, to see and to be moved" (Graham, 2001, p. 14).

"Schrodinger nodded . . . 'And matter is like light,' he said, 'and it diffracts'" (Gilder, 2008, p. 89).

"Everything . . . starts with a fall" (Guedj, 2000, p. 17).

"I'm in a constant state of beta...perpetually reinventing myself..." (Adam Schokora)

References

Fleischman, Paul. (2001). Seek. Chicago: Cricket Books.

Gilder, Louisa. (2008). The age of entanglement: When quantum physics was reborn. NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

Graham, Janice. (2001). Sarah's window. NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons.

Guedj, Denis. (2000). The parrot's theorem. NY: Thomas Dunne Books.

Montgomery, Cherice. (2009, January 11). A random thought.

Schokora, Adam. (2008). 56minus1::

Stengel, Barbara S. (1998, Sept. 10). Review of Burbules, Nicholas C. and Hansen, David T. (Eds.). (1997). Teaching and its Predicaments. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. EdRev. Retrieved February 1, 2009, from http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev37.htm<

Practices Makes . . . Daffodils?

"On this Sunday afternoon I keep playing the notes anyway, running through every piece. Because that's important too, to have each note of each score burned into my mind and my fingers. The physical part of the performance needs to feel as natural as pouring water from a pitcher. Still, with just two days to go, I should be feeling actual music. It should feel real. The composer's ideas ought to be burning the paint off my practice room walls. The emotions should be vaporizing the muscles and the violin and the fingers and the bow, until there's nothing left but pure thought. Because that's what a true performance is, and nothing less will do" (Clements, 2006, p. 100).

As I prepare my mind for the new semester on this Sunday evening, the fact that I have not yet finished the revisions on my dissertation weighs heavily upon me. It seems that after having written 10 chapters (586 pages), "I should be feeling actual music. It should feel real." My ideas ought to be burning SOMETHING up! However, instead of "pure thought" I currently have a muddy, slushy mess that isn't that much different from the winter roads outside. And, just as snow loses its appeal after one has been entrapped by it for several months, I have a terrible case of cabin fever with respect to these ideas. I am SO ready for Spring in every sense of the word! I can only hope that as it draws nearer, the frozen extremities of my mind will also begin to thaw, nurturing mental crocuses and daffodils that will assure me that this wretched winter will not last forever.

References

Clements, Andrew. (2006). Things hoped for. NY: Philomel Books.

Entanglement

"Any time two entities interact, they entangle. It doesn't matter if they are photons (bits of light), atoms (bits of matter), or bigger things made of atoms like dust motes, microscopes, cats, or people. The entanglement persists no matter how far these entities separate, as long as they don't subsequently interact with anything else--an almost impossibly tall order for a cat or a person, which is why we don't notice the effect. . . . . It starts when they interact; in doing so, they lose their separate existence" (Gilder, 2008, p. 3).

I find the conceptual implications of the above quotation (and the Wikipedia definition of entanglement) captivating. It comes from a book on the history of quantum physics which I am currently (if somewhat guiltily) enjoying. Like most non-fiction books, this one is also organized much too chronologically for my taste. However, the author has done a beautiful job of grounding the development of quantum theory in the daily lives of those through whom it was revealed to the world. She also does a brilliant job of reconstructing conversations from historical documents in a way that highlights the significant influence the scientists' personal and social "entanglements" had on theoretical developments in the field of physics.

It is interesting to consider the degree to which we are consciously aware of our "entanglement" with others, the relative strength of each of those connections, and how intensely the connections persist in the face of prolonged separation (due to death, the decay of a friendship, divorce, or simply increased absence from the realities of one another's normal, daily routines). Have you ever spent time trying to isolate and unravel the "entanglements" that are most persistent in your life? Are there people who are no longer physically part of your daily routine with whom you continue to be deeply entangled (in terms of the influence they exert on your thoughts and actions)? Do you ever wonder why THOSE particular people seem to have such a disproportionate influence within your sphere of existence?

From an alternative perspective, have you ever wondered what noticeable effect your individual existence has on the rest of the world? Do you ever ponder whether the brief comments, insignificant interactions, or trivial activities in which you engage affect anyone else in deep and lasting ways? Have you ever thought about the degree to which the effect of those tiny expressions of self may be magnified by their absence in someone else's life? Have you ever considered the effect that your unspoken musings would have on the world if you were to share "the real" you with more of the world? Conversations about the concept of entanglement merit a much greater investment than the time and space inherent in a midnight blog post. For now, I'll suffice to say that the manner in which we live would surely change if we truly believed and viewed ourselves as connected to others and our environment in physical ways.

References

Friendwheel.

Gilder, Louisa. (2008). The age of entanglement: When quantum physics was reborn. NY: Alfred A. Knopf.