Poetry.

It reminds me of my mission, of remembering and forgetting and experiencing vivid, color-drenched things, both in the moment and afterward. Enjoy.
 
The Improvement

by John Ashbery

Is that where it happens?
Only yesterday when I came back, I had this
diaphanous disaffection for this room, for spaces,
for the whole sky and whatever lies beyond.
I felt the eggplant, then the rhubarb.
Nothing seems strong enough for
this life to manage, that sees beyond
into particles forming some kind of entity—
so we get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment.
A life of afterwords begins.

We never live long enough in our lives
to know what today is like.
Shards, smiling beaches,
abandon us somehow even as we converse with them.
And the leopard is transparent, like iced tea.

I wake up, my face pressed
in the dewy mess of a dream. It mattered,
because of the dream, and because dreams are by nature sad
even when there's a lot of exclaiming and beating
as there was in this one. I want the openness
of the dream turned inside out, exploded
into pieces of meaning by its own unasked questions,
beyond the calculations of heaven. Then the larkspur
would don its own disproportionate weight,
and trees return to the starting gate.
See, our lips bend.

My Inception top.

I pull out of Barnes and Noble in my old student car, park on campus (I'm no longer suspended indefinitely from BYU parking; they put me on a year's probation but I didn't tell them I was going on a mission and wouldn't be driving for the next year and a half anyway), sift through preliminary literature for my honors thesis in the library, meet with professors, talk my way into and out of course requirements and schedule logistics, and sometimes it feels like the last year and half never even happened.Sometimes I feel like I've always been here, like there isn't a twenty-month void in my knowledge of recent events, like I never lived in that first floor apartment in 신갈, never got up and ready at 6:30 every morning, never confirmed appointments for painstakingly planned lessons I taught according to strangers' needs, never cut up rich red stripes of fermented spicy cabbage to make 김치볶음밥, never spent all day walking around talking to strangers in the snow, never tried with all my heart to get people to do things they didn't want to do because it would bring them benefits they could feel but couldn't see. I might accept this creepingly believable self-talk (in fact, it's easier to believe than the alternative) if it weren't for just one thing. There's something that remains despite myself, something I have that unquestionably grounds me in reality. All I have to do is remember it's there and give it a spin and it lets me know what's real and what's a dream. My Inception top. Korean.Whenever I start doubting the reality of what I did on the other side of the world for so long I make myself switch into Korean. I put on a song, a television drama, a podcast in my beloved mission language and I can't deny the fact that I understand, that it's all real.한국어를 하는 능력이 없어지는 날은 선교사업이 저한테 꿈이 되는 날입니다.The day my Korean disappears is the day my mission will become to me no more than a memory, a picture, a story--a dream.

Recent events.

Today I have done almost absolutely nothing.

I say almost because there was that stint between 2 and 3:15 pm where I put on decent clothes and attended a lavish baby shower where I sat by someone wrinkly from my past life and ate expensive salad and raspberry sorbet at the redesigned Riverside Country Club. It was the first time I've been to the Club since returning from my mission and the place is impressive. The entryway has a large warm fireplace and smells comfortingly of cinnamon.

My post-mission life (three weeks ago I was on a plane over the ocean) is a flat line studded with sparkling expensive Events. I do things like lay on the couch in front of the TV for seventeen hours straight, getting up once to use the bathroom and once because I rolled too close to the edge and had to stop myself from falling off. I didn't even turn on the TV.

On Tuesday I dressed up and went to the opera at the Capitol Theater, and looking up at the huge gold splattery golf ball in the ceiling that's been there ever since I can remember made me feel classy and at home. The performance was "The Magic Flute" by Mozart and though I didn't expect dialogue in English (songs, of course, remained in German) it was marvelous and beautiful and way more thought-provoking than I expected (from the Wikipedia article: "The story itself portrays the education of mankind, progressing from chaos through religious superstition to rationalistic enlightenment, by means of trial and error, ultimately to make 'the Earth a heavenly kingdom, and mortals like the gods'").

Yesterday I went to the Mummies of the World exhibit in SLC and stared very very closely at the browned, stretched, peeling skin of all the thousands-of-years-dead people and even more closely at their hair; they still have hair, you know; some of it is even long and thick and dark and beautiful and braided. My mom came with me but she is more of a take-a-quick-glance-at-all-the-big-stuff-and-move-on type of museum person and I am a read-every-single-plaque-and-the-wall-stuff-and-take-fifteen-minutes-imagining-stories-about-just-that-one-piece-of-ancient-Egyptian-jewelry kind of person so she finished like an hour and a half before I did and lay on a couch at the end of the exhibit playing on her iPhone while I took my time.

The matted body of a four-thousand-year-old Peruvian woman with two children fascinated me, especially when my meticulous plaque reading taught me that she was originally buried with only one child under her head, which is missing its head and arms, and then two hundred years later another child was bundled up tight and placed in her arms as if it were a baby, but now thanks to DNA evidence and based on the size of the bones and the closure of skull sutures researchers guess the child was actually four or five years old and died of a mandibular tumor; regardless its bones were scrunched and bundled up like a baby and buried in the arms of a woman lying in a two-hundred-year-old grave. Another woman was found in a strange burial position, hands crossed around her waist, each hand clutching a child's incisor. Another woman with braided hair was found with weird possibly symbolic tattoos of ovals with dots inside on her breasts and below the left corner of her lower lip. I highly recommend looking at all of these people.

Being close to things from Egypt made me remember standing in the Cairo museum all by myself and being overwhelmed with death and time and passion and languages I can't read and things that fall apart and things that don't and wanting to see everything there is, just everything, and really not much has changed.

Except that everything has changed. I was a missionary for a very long time. I lived in South Korea and I had to take all responsibility for everything all the time and so many things hurt me over and over and the hurt wore calluses into my body and now I am stable and thick-skinned, deep-rooted, firm in my conviction, impossible to push over. Now I know how to survive. I know lots of weary secret things about the insides of families and churches and people and spirits and it makes me feel very very old. I had no idea what I was getting into, started down the rabbit hole as a blindfolded initiate but now I know lots of very important and true things about things not in this world and I feel mysterious and deep. But nobody asks me about those things anymore; now I lay on my couch for seventeen hours and I don't even turn on the TV.

I speak Korean. Spoke Korean. Well. Well enough to maybe neglect my 첫사랑 and make Korean-English simultaneous translation my grad school focus. And now I speak just to myself, listening to podcasts and Korean dramas and making myself play commentator so I won't lose the language. When I watch English TV I pause it after every sentence and make myself translate. It's lonely and pathetic and I know that but I worked too hard for my ability to let it fade away. I look forward to Saturday afternoons, when I volunteer at the MTC TRC and talk to actual Koreans for three hours straight, like nothing else in the world.

My mission was the best thing that ever happened to me; it IS me now, in fact. I carved a beautiful life for myself out of a culture and language I never thought would break; my hands got all bloody in the process but diamond knives cut through granite if you just know how to handle them right; it was the handling that took me a while to master. And I left at the peak of my artistic career--my painstakingly exact Korean, flowing more and more perfectly every day so I left in awe of my own language skill; my plentiful investigators and great relationships and overflowing gospel knowledge--and now I lay here on my couch and nobody talks of salvation or eternity and there is March Madness on TV now but I have no patience for this. I have an iPhone 5 and I will never be bored again, I'm reading The Picture of Dorian Gray because it's free on my iPhone 5 and literature  takes me aback; it's so ridiculously exquisite. Music, too; that doesn't seem to get old. There are five straight days of music on my computer and I can listen, mesmerized, rediscovering lyrics and feelings and beats and marveling, just marveling.

This is water.

This is water.

And tonight I am going on a blind date. I am going on a blind date because my mom and her friend thought it would be a good idea. Some kid called me during intermission at the opera; the opera was in German and German is his mission language and now he is coming over at 9:15 to get me tonight. I am scared of blind dates because I am scared of the world and date rape and missing people on milk cartons and guns. But this kid seems all right. They set me up with him because they say I am an Intellectual and he only likes Intellectuals. I don't know what that's supposed to mean. But I don't feel much like anything. I feel like someone who lay on the couch for seventeen hours and dressed up just to eat expensive salad.

See you in 2013.

"Stages"
by Herman Hesse

As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
Serenely let us move to distant places
And let no sentiments of home detain us.

The Cosmic Spirit seeks not to restrain us
But lifts us stage by stage to wider spaces.
If we accept a home of our own making,
Familiar habit makes for indolence.
We must prepare for parting and leave-taking
Or else remain the slave or permanence.
Even the hour of our death may send
Us speeding on to fresh and newer spaces,
And life may summon us to newer races.
So be it, heart: bid farewell without end.

Endings.

Well, folks, I'm reaching the end of my rope.
I enter the Provo MTC this Wednesday afternoon, إن شاء الله.

I'm saying goodbye to the people I love and it feels weird. For me, leaving for months on end isn't abnormal because I've spent various semesters in various places around the globe since I was 15. This just feels like I'm leaving on another one of my adventures, but for some reason everyone's making a big deal about this one and hosting goodbye get-togethers and singing dramatic songs and giving me things. Last Sunday's farewell talk went over well; my topic was meekness and I was able to incorporate a lot of my language learning experiences by comparing them to learning the language of the Spirit. I was overjoyed to see some of my very favorite people in the audience and hope it won't be the last time I see them, though life moves fast and that is a very real possibility.

I spent my last week of normal life at our traditional family vacation spot, Hebgen Lake, Montana, with my family and best friends/cousins, spending six fluid days sunning my pale skin, rereading some books I love, eating to my heart's content, sleeping late and watching moves later, sitting in the shade discussing politics, and zooming around on boats and jetskis. I might be the only sister missionary in the MTC with a peeling summer sunburn in places I won't be able to display for a year and a half. :-)
I said goodbye to most of my family after Sacrament Meeting outside the quaint little brown-tiled church in West Yellowstone. My brothers hugged me for a long time and we all got teary-eyed. I'll miss Ryan for three full years; he'll go on his mission before I return from mine.

And then tonight I got to have late-night dessert with as many of the Friendship as were in town. I love these girls. :-)

I have a few more things to check off my list and then I'll be ready to go. I think my last good meal will be Mexican food--Los Hermanos--but I'm still deciding what to watch for my last movie and what to listen to for my last song. Again, it just doesn't seem real.

Flow.

try to realize it's all within yourself
no one else can make you change
and to see you're really only very small
life flows on within you and without you

when you've seen beyond yourself then you may find
peace of mind is waiting there
and the time will come when you see
we're all one and life flows on within you and without you.

مع السلامة يا درس العربية

original

I spoke my first Arabic words in a room with a view of the Dome of the Rock. Our class was casual--a quirky supplement to a summer in Jerusalem--but the language made an unforgettable first impression. I remember pronouncing the letters of the alphabet slowly and in sequence, exaggerating the خ and stuttering over the غ. At that point I could not have fathomed that choosing to take this class seriously would change the direction of my future. I could not have imagined the way I would spend hundreds and maybe thousands of hours poring over the spidery script, the way I would so easily leave my lifelong dream of a medical career to compose sentences and paragraphs, to memorize verb forms and decline participles. But maybe my subconscious knew more than it let on.

After diving into an intensive first semester with the language--and long before any thought of changing my major crossed my mind--I wrote, "Arabic has catalyzed my intellectual expansion for the first time in years." I detailed my ecstasy at discovering I could read, my ongoing frustration with speaking, and the pieces of artwork (!) I made to describe my feelings. And throughout my two-and-a-half-year struggle to read, write, speak, and listen, this blog assumed its true form. It is, passionately, a love letter to the Arabic language. Nearly a full twenty percent of my five hundred and eighty-six posts mention Arabic, chronicling my frustrations, challenges, successes, and failures. This is why I was so sad this morning after walking into the last Arabic class in which I will participate for eighteen months. We translated an article from al-Jazeera, reviewed the حال construction, ate my goodbye donuts, and then I left the JKB, beginning to understand just how much I will miss all of this. "Because Arabic is my first second language, my oldest child. And I love her more fiercely than I can explain."

"Well, I hope you come back to Arabic after your mission. You're really good at it."
--Dil Parkinson

Culmination.

original

Now.

I am doing just a few things right now in my calm before the storm:

1. Attending and loving Arabic class
2. Working as a research assistant for the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship
3. Putting the final touches on my mission shopping
4. Going to the temple as often as I can
5. Thinking about doing more actual, doctrinal, linguistic preparation for my mission (I know I should be doing more, but with three months in the MTC it's hard to feel motivated during my last two weeks of freedom)
6. Fearing that my visa will be denied or something else will go wrong and my mission will have to be postponed (this just barely happened to a friend of mine--he was supposed to enter the MTC today--so I am incredibly freaked out!)
7. Spending time with my fabulous family
8. Sleeping as much as I like
9. Eating as much as I like (probably not the best idea, but I figure I'll lose weight subsisting on kimchi)
10. Reading as much as I like

My farewell's on Sunday, I spend the following week at Hebgen Lake with my cousins, and then I come back and enter the MTC. Two weeks from this minute I will have been at the MTC for two and a half hours. I can hardly believe it.

After Arabic this afternoon I attended a lecture given by an Egyptian professor from the American University in Cairo. He spoke on his personal experiences in ميدان التحرير (Tahrir Square) during the Egyptian revolution this January and I almost cried. I've never cared more about a political event in history as I did about Egypt this spring, and I'm sad that I'll miss the election scheduled for September and the developments surrounding the new constitution. It's strange to think about how much politics I will miss, strange to realize that there will be an eighteen-month void in my newfound political consciousness. On the bright side, though, Cairo will probably be calm enough that I can study there with BYU when I return from Korea. إن شاء الله

Glass.

 original

I saw The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams performed at the Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City yesterday and came away entranced. I love to stumble into good literature; it's rare I pick up a classic novel or play without any background, but walking into this one I couldn't have told you a thing about it. I surprised myself by how strongly I identified with Laura, the adult daughter nicknamed "Blue Roses" who, remaining unmarried, dissolves into her own imaginary world populated solely by delicate glass animals. The only "gentleman caller" the family can persuade to come meet Laura, Jim, not only breaks her favorite glass animal--a sparkling unicorn--but totally shatters her fragile psyche. The play is heartbreakingly beautiful and if I ever marry I want blue roses in my bouquet. Enjoy my favorite scene.

Jim: Now how about you? Isn't there something you take more interest in than anything else?

Laura: Well I do - as I said - have my glass collection.

Jim: I'm not right sure I know what you're talking about. What kind of glass is it?

Laura: Little articles of it; they're ornaments mostly. Most of them are little animals made out of glass, the tiniest little animals in the world. Mother calls them a glass menagerie! Here's an example of one, if you'd like to see it. This one is one of the oldest. It's nearly thirteen. [He stretches out his hand.] Oh, be careful! If you breathe, it breaks!

Jim: I'd better not take it. I'm pretty clumsy with things.

Laura: Go on, I trust you with him! [Places it in his palm.] There now, you're holding him gently! Hold him over the light, he loves the light! You see how the light shines through him?

Jim: It sure does shine!

Laura: I shouldn't be partial, but he is my favorite one.

Jim: What kind of a thing is this one supposed to be?

Laura: Haven't you noticed the single horn on his forehead?

Jim: A unicorn, huh?

Laura: Mm-hm.

Jim: Unicorns, aren't they extinct in the modern world?

Laura: I know!

Jim: Poor little fellow. He must feel sort of lonesome.

Laura: Well, if he does he doesn't complain about it. He stays on a shelf with some horses that don't have horns and all of them seem to get along nicely together.

Jim: How do you know?

Laura [lightly]: I haven't heard any arguments among them!

Jim [grinning]: No arguments, huh? Well, that's a pretty good sign. Where should I set him?

Laura: Put him on the table. They all like a change of scenery once in a while.

Wisdom.

Today my cheeks are huge, my mouth is bleeding, and my pupils are dilated. The surgery was quick and I got to load up on nitrous oxide and watch Anchorman (ten times funnier when high) over my dentist's head. Hydrocodone's never been my favorite pain med (it makes me all queasy), but on the bright side I did get to watch six episodes of Hoarders (I just cannot get over those people) and lay in bed with packs of frozen peas strapped to my jaws. The highlight of the day was a visit from my sweet cousins Hannah, Mitchell, Erika, and David (who just came home from his mission to Honduras yesterday). They brought me a mango Jamba and a quesadilla, which I was pleasantly surprised that I could eat by ripping into teensy pieces. It makes me sad that my generation of cousins (Hannah, Michael-Sean, Mitchell, David, McKinlee, and Covey/Kelsey) are all going to be in Provo together this fall for the first time in over 3 years and I'm going to miss it. :-(
They'd better write me letters. :-)

I was also disappointed at missing Arabic class this morning (and probably tomorrow morning as well), particularly since I can only attend once next week thanks to the Fourth of July and a trip to the Shakespeare Festival. Where is the time going? Pretty soon (and by pretty soon, I mean in 17 days) I'll be giving my farewell talk. Talk about مجنون.

Muna.

I am the intersection of infinite passion and a finite heart that yearns.

I read something like that somewhere once and mistakenly attributed it to Robert Browning, but I finally tried looking up the quote today and realized that it isn't actually a quote. Browning uses this imagery in his poem "Two in the Campagna," but his words are "The Old trick! Only I discern - / Infinite passion, and the pain / Of finite hearts that yearn." With all respect to Browning, I like my corruption of his words better than the original. I am infinitely passionate about many things and know what it is to feel pulled in a thousand directions only to regret having a finite heart that yearns for everything and cannot have it all.

Today I also learned that my Arabic name, منى (Muna)، means something. I picked it just because I liked شكل الكلمة وصوتها (its shape and sound), particularly since it sports a nice alif maksuura on the end (the large swoopy one that dips below the line; it's my favorite ending letter in Arabic). In Italian Mona (as in the Mona Lisa) is a contraction of ma donna, which means "my lady," but Wikipedia tells me that in Arabic Mona means "unreachable wishes." It apparently originates from a plural noun, though a rare one. So I am unreachable wishes, the intersection of infinite passion and a finite heart that yearns.