Driver's Seat

Driver's Seat

3/7/12

My life was like an RC car

Which other hands controlled

To drive some course, used well or ill,

And race to win them gold.

But I am not an RC car

To handle or control

My life: my course; not race or fight,

None else dictate my goal.

I may not take the route you'd take

Nor choose your sights to see

If, gypsy wander, so I seem

That, too, is my right to be.

For driver's seat I boldly claim -

I've OnStar with the Lord

And back-seat drivers mind your place -

I'll drive to my accord.

Share friendly smiles and honked 'hellos'

Post warning signs at need

But please respect my driver's seat

And I'll respect your tweed.

The Wind Will Blow

The Wind Will Blow

(Written 11/2008)

All this way the wind once blew -
Through snow cloaked trees and dusky blue,
O'er heathered fields, past shady glen,
To mountain cave from humid fen,
In sea-storm gale and lover's breath -
But then to die at kiss of death
That stilled the free-flown life of youth
And perished in that mortal truth.


Yet hope there is of breath once more
If one could find that open door
'Twixt death and life, that promised way,
To call forth light to sacred day -


E'en so it stands, the way is clear -
The price was high, the cost so dear.
Now portal'd death that reaches still
Shall hold no more its empty kill.
For time will come when time will cease,
When all held breaths will know release,
And all this way the wind will blow,
And eyes will see, and hearts will know
From Whom this gift and whence it came
Confessing e'er His holy name. 

Parable: Relevance

Written 8/18/14

In times that are there is a valley. It is a valley large enough for many villages yet isolated enough to be determined in their ways.

Long ago, three villages were almost at war. The reasons are long forgotten. What was remembered was the friendship of four young people of these villages that finally brought peace to the valley.

With a peace newly attained, a craftsman sculpted a memorial to the strength of friendship and unity. Four arms encircling the valley, bound with bracelets of friendship. It was placed in the new governing building.

The bracelets had been a mark of friendship between the four during the conflict. The weaver's daughter had made them with specific colors to name home, family, profession. When one married she'd add the new family color.

Out of honor and respect for those brave enough to speak peace, these friendship unity bracelets were adopted by all. One look at a person's wrist and a person knew who they were talking to. In time, the people added greater distinction to the meanings available, such as whether one was a master at their profession or simply an apprentice.

Time passes. Another floor is added to the government center. An opening is left to leave a view of the sculpture from above.

Time passes. There are some disagreements among the people. Some begin using the wrist bands as a means to include or exclude others. Some think one can only work in the profession of the family. The miners disagree. A new leader reminds the people of the four and the peace they worked for. Finally peace was remembered again.

In the rejoicing of unity safeguarded, another craftsman regards the statue in reverence. He seeks to add his own witness and is granted permission to create a stained-glass interpretation of the sculpture and meaning below.

Time passes. The center grows larger. The original floor becomes a forgotten basement used only by custodians and assistance for storage. The sculpture is forgotten.

Time passes. A student studies the stained glass and finds patterns and insight from long ago history. The student submits their analysis and a plaque is mounted with this third interpretation. Prominent are the ideas that the valley was built upon enslavement symbolized in the wrist bands now worn as a reminder of the uncivilized days.

Time passes. The people are unhappy again. One group claims the pick represents the violence of the workers that must be kept in line. The other group claims the wristbands are just modern enslavement forms of class and rank. Both groups gather at the stained-glass as historical proof that they are right. "See the proof!" They yell at each other.

One lowly assistant hates walking by when the demonstrators gather. She has heard all the rantings. She has studied the stained-glass and read the plaque. But all she sees is that nobody wants to find an answer. They only want to be right and the others to be wrong.

One day she seeks refuge in the basement. While those argue and yell above, she studies the glass from below. "It is even prettier from down here where the light shines through," she thinks. Not watching where she is going, she backs into a covered pedestal.

Only it is not a pedestal. It is the sculpture. There are no picks. It is unexpected and different and unknown. All it has is a date, a title "Unity from Friendship", and the creator's mark. Clearly the story is different from all she had heard.

She begins to dig through storage. She finds writing so old they're difficult to read. But it is important for her to know, to understand. She learns of the friends and the danger they faced. She learns that they made everyone so angry for daring to stand together that they faced death yet stood together, still. She learns that they'd stand in front of anyone threatened with harm, no matter which village they were from. She learns this won them over until the villages were finally willing to talk peace. She learns of the friendship bracelets.

After learning these things, she looked up at the glass and listened to the arguing above. "They don't even know what they argue about," she thought.

She went back upstairs to find her supervisor. "Guess what I found down there. Do you know what I learned?" The supervisor did not want to be bothered. She went to the balcony. "Did you know there's a sculpture and a story down there that tells a different history?" They shushed her and pushed her away.

She drew pictures of the statue and wrote the story she had learned. She put them on the wall by the plaque hoping the others might see and consider it. Her supervisor took them down. She tried to bring people down to see the sculpture and records for themselves. She was fired for insubordination.

She went home and made her own record. "This for posterity, should they ever wish to know the truth. My generation only wishes to argue irrelevant interpretations."

Open Minded

"Don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out."

"You religious types are SO closed-minded!"

****

I have had this post stewing in the back of my mind for over a year. It's as though the various applicable pieces have arrived at various times and now I must figure out how to lay them out for your understanding. But perhaps you will understand, even if I just give you the pieces instead of trying to string them together.

****

Receiving a Testimony of Light and Truth

By President Dieter F. Uchtdorf

(EXCERPTS)

As telescopes became more sophisticated—including telescopes that could be launched into space—astronomers began to grasp a spectacular, almost incomprehensible truth: the universe is mind-bogglingly bigger than anyone had previously believed, and the heavens are filled with numberless galaxies, unimaginably far away from us, each containing hundreds of billions of stars.³

In a very short period of time, our understanding of the universe changed forever.

Today we can see some of these distant galaxies.⁴

We know that they are there.

They have been there for a very long time.

But before mankind had instruments powerful enough to gather celestial light and bring these galaxies into visibility, we did not believe such a thing was possible.

The immensity of the universe didn’t suddenly change, but our ability to see and understand this truth changed dramatically. And with that greater light, mankind was introduced to glorious vistas we had never before imagined.

It Is Hard for Us to Believe What We Cannot See

Suppose you were able to travel back in time and have a conversation with people who lived a thousand or even a hundred years ago. Imagine trying to describe to them some of the modern technologies that you and I take for granted today. For example, what might these people think of us if we told them stories of jumbo jets, microwave ovens, handheld devices that contain vast digital libraries, and videos of our grandchildren that we instantly share with millions of people around the world?

Some might believe us. Most would ridicule, oppose, or perhaps even seek to silence or harm us. Some might attempt to apply logic, reason, and facts as they know them to show that we are misguided, foolish, or even dangerous. They might condemn us for attempting to mislead others.

But of course, these people would be completely mistaken. They might be well-meaning and sincere. They might feel absolutely positive of their opinion. But they simply would not be able to see clearly because they had not yet received the more complete light of truth.

...

The Things of the Spirit Can Be Understood Only by the Spirit

Scientists were struggling to understand the breadth of the universe until instruments became sophisticated enough to gather in greater light so they could understand a more complete truth.

The Apostle Paul taught a parallel principle regarding spiritual knowledge. “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”¹²

In other words, if you want to recognize spiritual truth, you have to use the right instruments. You can’t come to an understanding of spiritual truth with instruments that are unable to detect it.

****

Years ago, I worked with a couple kids fresh out of high school, neither religious, in a predominantly Mormon city. I often worked near them and we'd talk, and joke, and were friends as far as I was concerned, and as far as they were, too, I believe. But I was obviously Mormon which contained all their suppositions as ones who were not.

One day I came in to work and the girl told me she had just started studying palmistry. She wanted to look at my palm, because, according to her, the distance between the two main lines indicates 'open vs closed mindedness'. The wider, the more open, the closer, the more closed. She was certain that because I was clearly Mormon, there would be almost no space between the lines on my palms. So I showed her and she compared to her own, and her friend's hand as well. They were both a bit dumb-founded to find my lines were wider apart than either of theirs.

****

I've written before about my abstracted thinking patterns and how I am very spacial. One of my chosen mind metaphors is similar the Sherlock's noted mind palace, but my metaphor is not bound to memory and location. It is rather a sort of museum wherein new information either catalogs as part of existing exhibits or combines with previously disparate information to create a new exhibit. For me, learning is very much a sense of opening, of expansion.

On a similar note, the ideal of Mormon achievement in the eternities is not simply to sit on clouds in Heaven, playing harps and singing praises. (forever?) Rather, it is to continue learning and growing to be as our Father in Heaven. This concept excites me far more than harps do, though I imagine I'll learn that, too, at some point. There is not enough time in mortality to learn all that interests me.

****

Perhaps these vignettes help you understand why I find the liberal claim of ownership on 'open-minded' and the reactive conservative Christian warning to not be too open-minded all sorts of backwards. To my view, the secular 'scientific' perspective, which only allows what the five senses can duplicate, is an incomplete model. I have seen it said that the best theories are the ones that take in and use the fullest amount of information to build an understanding. How can you say that billions of people's experiences are null and void if you are not even willing to honestly test for them with the appropriate methodology? How can you claim to have superior understanding when you deny evidence to suit your own preferred interpretation?

This is a frustration, but a minor one, because my model of understanding says they'll figure it out eventually and I still get to aim for the thrill of learning all those skills mortality didn't allow for and finally understanding the answers to SO many questions!

What questions are you waiting to have answered?

An Agricultural and Humanitarian View of the Word of Wisdom

It occurred to me sometime in the last year that there could be more than just the dietary view of the Word of Wisdom (WoW). It occurred that it could also indicate an issue of world-wide agriculture and the resulting effects on humanity. I have not yet sought the data proof for this idea, but I will lay the theory out in general here.

The concept occurred to me after a couple documentaries played within a week or so of each other. The first was about global disasters caused by changing weather patterns. It linked the 2009 drought in Russia caused by wind changes and then fires to the start, the final straw if you will, of the civil war in Syria, with the obvious current issue of the refugee crisis. After all of the internal troubles the Syrians had dealt with, the impossible rise in the price of bread (supply and demand where 60% of Russia's supply had perished) was simply too much. The people had had enough and war broke out.

The second (short) documentary I saw was about the economy in the area of Africa within view of Mount Kilimanjaro. (There is more than one country border in that area and Africa was the one section of geography I never quite mastered - and I simply have memory problems. I don't remember.) They showed how the economy actually was strong because the fertile lands were used for growing the coffee so many in Western culture is addicted to. (They also showed the local artistic style which I quite liked, but that's beside the point.)

After that second documentary, I was struck with the idea that the list of 'no's in the WoW - coffee, tea, alcohol, drugs,... - are all huge economic industries that use up lots of cropland to produce them. Land and water resources that could be used instead to grow food for the starving people in so many places around the world. The scriptures tell us there are enough resources in the world to sustain humanity if we will use them wisely. They do not say we might just be wasting a lot of those resources.

Consider, then, the injunction to use meat sparingly. By now, most 'first-world' students have heard that much ozone depletion occurs due to bovine flatulence. Whether that's even an issue is beyond my current understanding. But what about other things? What about how much water is needed to keep and feed the amount of animals required for such a carnivorous Western society? What about the living conditions those animals are forced to live in? How much healthier would humanity and animal-kind be if we stopped seeking meat at every meal? There are other sources of protein, and those living in temperate climates do have access to a broader diet than those in the Arctic reaches.  

What if the land used for supporting addictions and the people who thrive off supporting them went to actually growing healthful substances? How much would starvation go down? Especially since so much of that land is in the poorer countries where the baddies can take control more easily! Then the good food would be close to those who need it. Think how that could effect general health and overall well-being? How would that effect local economies, then education, then government and the sciences and the humanities? How many geniuses die with their incredible potential contributions because none of that was available? So not only are we wasting global physical resources, we end up wasting global human resources.

Like I said, I'm not getting into the dietary effect of the pattern recommended in the WoW. I do, however, hope that considering another potential layer of purpose to it might cause you to consider the world and the uses of it. Maybe you will even find some way to help better those uses.

Speak For Me

As much as I dislike the emotional hijackings of pretension I see too often in poetry, I've found myself writing in that form in spurts of collections over the years. The Junior High period (mostly church and people ponderings), the High School period (mostly assignments from creative writing), the Breaking from Home period (fighting my way through abuse to hope), and the Sporadic period (where I write less often, at random, of late). This post is to introduce my opening of a new blog to start sharing the Breaking from Home collection, which I titled Speak for Me.

I wrote these over a period of about four years, from mid 2005 to early 2009. This covers the period from shortly after my mom died, through moving, paternal re-marriage, moving away from home, breaking from home, and moving even farther away from home. It covers a lot of emotions as the ones I couldn't write out in my normal journals would crescendo until they came out in poetry form. They express frustrations, trying to hold on, feeling trapped, mad at feeling scared, and almost always work through till I can find a way to keep hoping for a better time.

Some of the poems have easily shareable themes. Just One Day is the first that comes to mind, and I've already shared that on this blog. They are all very personal and I've been conflicted between pulling it all into a presentable form and resisting actually presenting it. I'm still scared to open this up because a lot of people were oblivious to this part of me and even more people resent the idea that a person can be so extremely traumatized without the socially comprehended forms of physical and sexual abuse.

Sometimes I try to explain the effects of my experiences as brainwashing. Life was often an active battle to simply retain my identity, to not disappear into a mind-less, being-less, soulless slave. The Speak for Me collection is very much my active fighting to survive. PTSD is recognized as trauma that physically threatens ones life and thereby alters the body's reaction to stimulus which recalls the originating trauma. What I survived threatened to erase me, not just my physical body. I believe this kind of abuse is rampant. It is pernicious precisely because it isn't talked about and is ignored when outsiders catch a glimpse. "It's none of my business," is the usual thought response.

How often I wished someone had spoken up and told me I had a right to think what I think and feel what I feel. That what was happening was not ok and was not my fault. That an understanding haven would have been offered where I was wanted and welcome and understood. Instead, I hid in my car because I couldn't face going inside yet and had nowhere else to go. I had imaginary conversations with the closest things I had to friends to try to work through the craziness that was my life because everyone was too busy to want to be bothered by me. I hated looking in the mirror and seeing what I was taught was a disgusting person. I can face mirrors now. I can see me, now. But pictures still make me feel a bit sick. I was left alone, without family, with church as my only refuge, but resented and abandoned repeatedly by people who had no interest in slowing down enough to see that my unusual reactions had a terrible cause. Instead, they just saw them and me as unwanted irritation.

And so, even though I am nervous, I am sharing this because someone needs to start the conversation. Someone needs to say - these are the emotions. And those trapped in the nightmare I finally escaped need to know it can be done, even if no one else decides to notice, care, or try to help. I did it with God by my side, guiding my understanding until I was read to break from home and learn to feel safe in freedom. Speak for Me is my journey during this difficult time.

The scriptures that introduce each poem are almost all the very verses that helped me reach the poems' conclusions I needed to keep going. They were very much my life-line. The afterwords are reflections on the topic or the events which prompted the poems. The new blog can be found at:

hearthewordsunspoken.blogspot.com.

Parameters and Paradigms

I posted a tweet, recently, asking,

"Do your paradigms define your parameters,

or do your parameters define your paradigms?"

At some point during Jr High math, the concept of parameters was introduced which I found to be quite enlightening. I grew to see life and people in terms of individual parameters - that which defines boundaries of possible action such as values, circumstances, experience, personality, etc... While any number of possible actions could be a response to a given situation, an individual's parameters will identify which options are automatically excluded and which are most likely. (This is likely a large part of how I started noticing people's patterns and anticipating their responses.)

Paradigms are more like existing templates, usually of an external source. Politics, school of thought, nationality, ethnicity, science vs humanities, religion vs atheism, etc... This concept was brought to my attention in an anthropology class in which the liberal, feminist teacher liked to challenge and dismiss religion for its common sense of 'Tradition' (complete with singing and hands raised as known from Fiddle on the Roof). While I am not seeking to start a debate about which is 'right' - a ridiculous waste of energy, usually - I hope the evidence of the chosen paradigms is clear.

The point of my question is to consider whether your parameters are constricted to the boundaries of the paradigms you choose to accept or do you build your own boundaries, with what paradigm influences you choose, be they more or less evident?

Simple example.

American government has formed into a two party system. Other parties exist and people even run for office under those parties. But the strength of the democrat and republican parties is such that, without a major revolution of sorts, no other party will replace those two. The parties are the paradigms. To vote a person of a particular party means you ultimately vote for the whole party's platform. Does that mean you are obligated to therefore view the world and American issues according to that party's paradigm and only that paradigm? I sincerely hope not. 

Laying my thoughts out like this, it may well seem obvious, in the 'duh' kind of way, that people consciously would prefer to define their own parameters. In many ways, we all do. I would posit, however, that many are more rigid in their thought patterns than they might expect.

Wait, what do thought patterns have to do with this?

How do you think we define our parameters?

Food for thought.

On a side-note, if you can observe and discern another person's parameters - their motivations and principles, their character and so-forth - you can learn to anticipate the reactions and behaviors of those around you. This takes attention/observation and a certain level of active awareness. It also takes time, which may vary from person to person, influenced by many factors such as openness, self-awareness, how talkative they are, etc.

For example, one man I knew suggested at my speaking a need for help due to my illness that I should go back to the one he knew was my abuser rather than bothering people like him. Clearly troubling and upsetting. Months later, I heard him state his deep belief that under all the 'problems' a family might have, they are all actually good in the end. Suddenly, his dismissal (though still inappropriate) made much more sense.

I call it 'tipping the hand'. We all do it eventually. Some might feel threatened by that idea, but if you are introspective enough to be self-aware and honest about it, I think it would only feel threatening if you don't like what you find. If you know yourself, you might find that it makes things easier to simply be up front about things to begin with. Many don't understand why I am open and immediately so, but these very concepts are what help build my parameters.