To Saint Catherine of the Wheel

Saint Catherine of Alexandria ...hmm

Venerated patroness of women scholars, they say you were condemned to be broken on the wheel by pagan Romans for your brilliant defence of the One True Church. The only thing is, torture on the wheel was invented long after Rome had converted and crumbled; the only Romans that broke poor souls over a wheel were Catholic priests tormenting heretics.

So Catherine of the Wheel, you may tickle certain uninformed ears, but you come off a bit contrived, even a little dishonest.

I visit you from time to time. You review writers, presuming to be a fellow; wax and spin sentimental stories you think we want to hear. Ho Hum. Maybe some readers' hearts are warmed, but not mine.

Because I know there's fire.

I've seen it burn, when you discovered a fallen angel under your roof, and even when you poured coals over my head. And I can't say that I always liked it, but Catherine flashing and flaming was never boring.

So you may earn peer recognition and you might find the right word, but if you can't be real and muster the guts to put it on the page, you will never more than scratch the surface, irritate the skin. And I know you are capable of piercing the heart.

There was no wheel and you're no saint, Catherine. Get that through your head and maybe you will be able to write.

Hidden Treasure

I found this blog by acccident, digging for something totally unrelated.

Hide Me
by psychedelic pisces at Cerulean Ciphers

I'm like a tightly closed bud of a flower,
hidden layer by layer of wonderful surprises.

I'm beautiful, I'm brilliant, I'm funny and witty, I'm fragile and sweet, I'm vindictive and loyal, I'm sensitive, I'm a complete enigma. And I'm hidden. Hidden from you and everyone else.

Find me... like I found you - unpolished, rough diamond beneath a pile of fool's gold.

Discover me... like I discovered you - slowly and with great enjoyment
as i watched you shine.

Cherish the moment you uncover me like a child
who eagerly opens his present on christmas morning.

I am hidden so you can find me.
Find me soon for I am buried beneath all pretty baubles and trinkets.
Hopefully, you are not blinded by all the glitter and sparkle for
I am plain and dull.

When you find me at last, do not lose sight of me.
I am hard and edgy from the hiding. If you treasure me, polish me with care until at
last I shine like a tear from your eye.

And I will be yours forever.

Xiu On Poetry

Xiu has featured more than once here at My People. She is only 19, but a woman for all seasons. Scholar, athlete (rugby!), fashion model, business woman (of late), a woman of letters (January Winds) and ............ a poet.

You can find her almost daily at January Winds. Sometimes its merely her personal diary; short notes more to herself than to her readers or messages to the ones closest to her. And sometimes she writes poetry.

This isn't the first time I've posted about her poetry (Xiu's Song). Xiu verse is short, not metered but rather a rhythm of ideas, thoughts. So much poetry, especially the old fashioned classical kind, confuses more than captures the imagination; fanciful foliage of language crowd the flowers of emotion and meaning. Xiu's poetry is unadorned, simple beauty like a single rose.

Like "On Love":

You see, I loved her.
It was love at first sight,
at last sight
at ever and ever sight.

I've always wanted to ask her about her poetry, and today I got my chance. I saw her online on Facebook, and for the first time we had a real conversation. I asked her about her poetry:


5:54pm Lim Yi Xiu
i just come up with phrases once a while, and i break them apart into like a poetry form. instead of one whole sentence...

so it goes
Something like this
once in a while
or maybe all the time

and i have layers..
that not everyone notices-
which is good!
subtle meanings/ metaphors...

and i try to make them
as real as possible.
personal things i experienced.
so it is real,

and not some thing
i merely THINk about.
but i do
experience them.

So even when talking about her poetry she breaks into verse.

And now while blogging this, I see Xiu wrote me a poem at January Winds:

Remember the Times:

Remember the times, so fine,

when we were too young to be prudent

about emotions, love, speech, actions

Remember the times, so fine,

when we thought that

nothing could stand in our way

Remember the times, so fine,

for they keep us alive

so why don’t we try

Remember

With the genius of brevity, short and sweet Xiu took sentences from a Facebook conversation, and made me a rose.

Thanks Xiu

:)

My People 2008

My People owes its existence to a girl I knew in high school. She, my brother Barry and I all rode the same Tri Met bus home from school. She was a very serious girl. I enjoyed stirring her up. I guess I was pretty obnoxious. Maybe it was that she was so naïve (or so pretentious) and I couldn't resist trying to burst the bubble she was blowing.

Barry once asked me if I ever wondered why we hooked up with her. I don't; we didn't have much of a choice being on the same bus and all. What I do wonder about is why out of all the people I knew back then, she is one of the few I still know 30 years later.

Just about this time last year I finally joined the internet community and discovered that girl from the back of the bus on her blog, Recollected Life. After close to a decade since I'd last heard from her, it was a pleasant surprise. She turned me on to blogging.

The name of my blog was almost obvious. Ami means "my people" in Hebrew, and I write about myself and the people in my life. In most cases they are people I know personally. My family, my friends, my army buddies … my people. Blogging at My People added more to that list, like Xiu at January Winds and Olivia who blogs Inspired By Grace.

So a year has passed (almost). Where did I go with My People?

I think I wrote more about Maayan that anyone else. She's at an interesting time in life, a lot of important choices. She's on my mind a lot and that's why she's featured so much in my blog. Some of my more pointed observations were 'Maayan: before and after' and 'Taking the Reins'.

How much I write about any one person doesn't reflect on my relationship with him/her. Directly or indirectly, that girl at the back of the bus shows up a lot at My People, but in fact she's played only a small part in my life. On the other hand, my wife Yael who has to contend with me every day, hardly appears at all.

'Footprints in the Snow' and 'Kissing the Mirror' were about the women in my past, and 'The Language of Romeo' about the woman I'm with.
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Maybe the 'Hands' project wasn't great, but hopefully it was original. I'm thinking about an 'eyes' project in 2009.

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I live in an interesting place, and hopefully My People has shed a different light on Israel that that presented by the media. Not the war zone you see in the news or Sacred ground – just a beautiful little corner of the world. In the course of my continuing education I have 66 required days in the field. It occurred to me that this would be an excellent source for a new blog. We'll see.

I probably wrote more about my faith than any other subject. I hope none of my readers took this to mean that I am an authority on religion. I'm not. I am still searching and struggling with God. I think 'Kissing the Mirror' and 'It's Just Grass' say most about where I am spiritually.

If it seems that I have an axe to grind with the Catholic religion in general and the Anglican Church in particular, I do and I don't. Nothing from my Protestant past and my Jewish present would endear me to the Catholic faith, but I don't have any personal accounts to settle. While getting my degree I researched the Anglican mission in Israel (then Palestine), so I am simply more familiar with that particular subspecies of Christianity.

Probably the most moving piece I blogged wasn't mine at all. I translated into English Karnit Goldwasser's eulogy to her husband Ehud in 'Time Stopped'.

I don't know what makes a blog successful. I get a lot of hits, but most are people mining pictures. The most popular posts are 'I am a Chameleon' (photo of the blue panther chameleon), 'Snake in the Synagogue' (the Talmud page), 1492 (painting of Queen Isabelle of Spain), 'On Blogging' (Xiu's naval piercing) and 'Being a Boot' (the picture of muddy boots). I don't know if you need to be a good writer to succeed in blogging; apparently people are more interested in muddy boots.

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It's been 30 years since I rode Tri Met home from school with Barry and that serious girl, but I still have that impulse to deflate what is puffed up, to poke people with reality. Maayan refers to it with the Hebrew expression "to sting". And some of my posts are sharp, but they only hurt when they touch the truth.

My People is about the people in my life. They are from all races and religions, from every corner of the world. Most of them I know personally and many of them I'm related to. Some are friends, some not, but in one way or another they are all a part of me. Even that girl that from high school.

So in the end, My People is no more than a personal journal that is open to the public. My People is about me.

On Blogging

I'm not a writer. This month I will have been a blogger for half a year. Before that writing was a diversion (for me) and a distraction (for my cousin Tracy and my brother Barry, who had to read my stuff). So I don't claim to know a lot about writing, and I have no business telling others how to write. But I know what I like.

When I read anything, I ask myself 3 questions:

- What is he/she saying?
- How did he/she say it?
- Do I believe him/her?

That's what I look for; content, craft and candor. (Forgive me for the three C's thing.)

Sometimes I read blogs that are simply a delight to the eyes. And I'm not one to read for recreation. The thing is, sometimes I enjoy reading something, but then I think about it a bit and realize that the author put a lot of words together cleverly without actually saying anything, or if he/she did have something to say, it was worthless.

Of course, value is in the eye of the beholder, and the eyes of the writer are the ones that count. I do it myself. The things I write about my kids probably aren't very valuable to anyone outside my family, but if it tells them how I feel about them (and helps me remember it), that's enough for me – and if readers outside that small circle don't like it or don't get it – well, I don't care. So, I guess the value of a blog's content depends on who it was aimed at and how important it is to the target audience.

Craft, how something is written, is very subjective, but for me the key is communication. How well did I convey to someone else not only what I think, but how I feel about it? Did I clarify myself – and if s/he didn't understand what I'm saying, did s/he at least understand Me?

I am of the minimalist persuasion. Some writers will carpet bomb their readers with words. I think their concept is that while the overwhelming majority of what they write is irrelevant, something will hit someone randomly by right of the law of averages. The problem with redundancy when writing is familiar in the military; if you try to hit everything, you end up hitting nothing. One has to remember that the guys on the receiving end aren't stupid, and once they see incoming, everyone takes cover. In blogging, it's clicking over to something else.

Then there are artsy-smartsy bloggers. They puff and fluff it up with lots of needless or poor metaphors, tack on needless and obscure adjectives and throw in pointless anecdotes that have no connection whatsoever to what they are saying. They're trying to be clever, but actually they are defeating themselves. Any intelligent reader knows when something is being stretched out like saltwater taffy (there – see – I did it now myself.)

In The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy shoots metaphors in bursts, but pulls it off because they are so good and so on the money that it works to her favor. In most cases, however, I don't appreciate being on the business end of meaningless metaphor. A lot of writers do this and they are (to use Roy's metaphor), "polishing firewood".

And honesty. Does the written square with the writer? Do they actually believe what they are saying, or are they saying things they don't mean because they think it will tickle the ear of the reader? Without knowing the blogger personally, it's hard to tell, but sometimes you have the opinionated trying to appear open-minded, the shallow digging holes way over their heads. It's probably something all of us do to some degree, coming off as something we're not. So it's a rare gift when a blogger has the guts to be brutally honest with himself and the reader.


I've chosen 3 bloggers that I enjoy; each is stronger in one of my three C's.

Xiu/Megan

I have featured her in My People a few times. She's an 18 year old Singaporean (Singaporese?). It's obvious from her blog "January Winds" that she's well read, well educated and, in my opinion, she's brilliant. Some of the best things she's written are the shortest ones. I suspect that she has imported techniques from Chinese poetry to the English language – a feat that only one fluent in both languages can pull of as well as she does.

This is a comment she wrote here once:

"I used to hang upside down on a monkeybar,

just so that those tears would not flow down,

in case my eyes get swollen.

those times when I was little.

i would just hang upside down for ages;

and as simple as a child i was,

i forget about everything unhappy after a while,

and I walk away."
(comment on "It's Okay to Cry")

Most remarkable is her honesty. She's simply out there, something not many are able to do.

Even her naval piercing.

This is something I found in her blog from a couple of years ago when she first started blogging:

"Comments are not the measure of blog success.
Don't bother whoring for comments. It's simply not worth it."
Stella Sez, January Winds (blogspot)

She's pretty much lived up to that.

(January Winds moved to Wordpress about a month ago.)

Liz Strauss

Liz at "Letting Me Be" is about the best example of good writing in a blog I've seen. For the most part, her stuff has substance as well, but even when it doesn't, you hardly notice it because she writes so well.

"Something happens when I write on the Internet. Perhaps it's the fact that (I) know other people are writing on other screens words that I'll read. It simply be that I'm looking up as if another person is sitting across from me. I am more aware that I'm talking with my keys -- that my words are a doorway to relationships."

From "Please Don't Stop"


For a sample of Liz's style, I recommend this; "Knowing Everything" and more

Olivia M. Brigham

Lastly, Olivia at Inspired by Grace. Olivia deals with a variety of issues, both personal and not. She's not very old, but she has amazing perception and depth. The interesting thing is that prose isn't her strongest genre; it's what she's able to express with photographs that's unique - the text is commentary. (This should come as no surprise as she is a professional photographer).

Olivia captured the experience of pilgimage, walking where Jesus walked, on film in a way most aren't able with words. See her blog under the Israel label, or my post about her - "Hands Revisited"

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My blog is the product of stuff rattling around in my head. I ask myself three things when I blog something:

- Do I have something to say? (What is it?)

- Do I know how I want to express it? (Will anyone get it? Who?)

- Do I want to spill my guts. (And how much?)

I'm not a writer. I don't know how well I have kept my own standards of good blogging, but I try and I'm learning. And to you, dear readers, my thanks for your patience.

Xiu's Song

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When I was 18 and a freshman at Seattle Pacific University, one of the few things I indulged in was a subscription to the newspaper. I really couldn't afford to spend the money I made washing dishes on weekends at Gwinn Commons, but I was hooked on Spiderman.

Every morning I had to get a three caption fix of the life of Peter Parker and his adventures. It wasn't the superhero stuff that captured my imagination, rather the moody guy in the Navy pea coat with hang ups and a secret life nobody would ever believe. I had a Navy pea coat and was moody and my secret life included fantasies about going to Israel, but that was so far out that I had to keep it to myself like Peter and his Spidey alter ego.

Xiu at January Winds has been pining of late for Leroy, literally counting the days until he returns from Nepal. She wondered aloud if her readers are tiring of her blog. I don't know about the others, but for me every post she writes is another episode in an unfolding saga, the Adventures of Xiu; like those 3 captions of Spiderman every morning by my door in Ashton Hall.

But sometimes it's more than just a diversion. Sometimes she comes up with a real gem, a diamond in prose. Like this one:

"What a random thing I did that I made myself happy coincidentally." (Xiu)

It struck a chord with me, like a melody you hear on the radio and replay under your breath all day, but I didn't know why.

And then it hit me. It's poetry. Long after I dropped out at SPU to come to Israel, I returned to Academia, Jewish Studies at a branch of Bar Ilan University. I was a student of the Bible and learned the ancient poetry of Israel, the psalms. The art in verse in the Bible doesn't rhyme and isn't measured; it is a rhythm of thought, repetition of ideas wrapped like the petals of a flower around its heart.

"The Lord will protect you from all evil,
He will keep your soul.
The Lord will guard your going and coming,
from now and until forever more."
(Psalms 121:7-8)

Hebrew poetry retains its beauty even when translated because it wasn't created to please the ear, rather to speak to the spirit. Xiu's verse is poetry in the Hebrew tradition. Balanced and layered, a moment of magic unfolds like the petals of a rose.

Xiu's poem stirred up in me memories of something else from those days at Seattle Pacific. That year something random happened coincidentally over Christmas break. I went back to Seattle, so Mary flew up from Portland and we had a day that I remember from beginning to end, a day that comes to mind when I think of happiness.

Xiu captured it in simplicity, beautifully.

What a random thing did, that made me happy coincidentally.