The Beauty of the Word

I absolutely love this performance of spoken word poetry by Sarah Kay. I didn't post it to show you anything about poetry, but rather to demonstrate how we can influence others (their minds, their emotions) by our words-- the rhythm of them, the passion of them, the beauty of them, the ties to those words, those feelings, that they have in their own lives. We are inspired by the words of others.

As a few of you know, I sprained some ligaments in my foot at dance practice a week or so ago. Yesterday, I decided that my foot felt well enough to participate in my Irish Dance class. I was just so sick and tired of watching everyone else dance while I had to sit there like a useless mound of flesh. So yesterday, I decided it was time to dance again. I was so excited, so ready, to finally strip my foot of that horrifying orthopedic boot and put my sleek, black soft-shoes on. About ten minutes into the warm-up, I started to feel my foot tense up, like a twig stretched too far, threatening to snap. Up until now, I'd been pretty careless with my foot, not really taking the pain into account. But now, as I did jumping-jacks, I was genuinely afraid I would set my foot's recovery back even further. So I stepped out and resumed the pitiful position of "useless mound of flesh".

I was so frustrated. I tried to keep from crying, but I'm sure my face twitched at least a little. After hobbling home, I wrapped my foot in bandages and put the boot back on. I tried walking around with the crutches for a bit, but I hate those stupid crutches. When I woke up this morning, the pain was terrible. I thought about the one class I had today. There is no way I am walking across campus on this foot, I thought to myself. So as I sat on my bed, icing my foot, thinking about what I could blog about today, I thought about how words can draw people in and affix their minds, sometimes just as powerfully as drugs or hypnotism.

I'm sure the little story I just told came nowhere near to "affixing" your minds as many other things do, but I really wanted to share the performance with Sarah Kay with you. To me, what she just did was incredible. Through the words she spoke, and the way she spoke them, she was able to elevate me to a different level of feeling and thought. The power and beauty of words in absolutely amazing. We are taught from the Bible that the world was created from a word.

No, I didn't talk about the history of words or anything like that in this post, but I hope I at least vicariously conveyed the power of words to all of you.

"The World Cannot Be Governed Without Juggling."

Skylar's first recorded attempt at juggling three pears

Something I have discovered in this study we've done on folk knowledge is that folk knowledge is the kind of knowledge that takes a lot of love to transmit.  There needs to be someone charitable and invested enough in another person to teach them, and the other person needs to be patient and humble as they are taught, or the knowledge we cannot fully convey with books is eventually lost.  The importance of folk knowledge is that it builds a community of teachers and students, and those roles are shifting all the time.

From Hearts to Hands

I know that we are wrapping up the unit on folk knowledge, but I could not pass up this opportunity for a great post! Once a week I have an honors seminar where we listen to a lecture from different professors or professionals on campus about what they do. This week’s was from the Museum of Art’s curator and educator Lynda Palma. She talked about the main exhibit entitled “From Hearts to Hands”. Quilts hang in the museum made by a diverse group of African American quilters working in Alabama and its environs during the last half century.

Colombian Hot Chocolate

“Love is like swallowing hot chocolate before it has cooled off. It takes you by surprise at first, but keeps you warm for a long time.”

Traditionally, a chocolatera (aluminum pitcher placed directly on stove) and
a molinillo (wooden mixer) are used for the process

This summer, I had the awesome opportunity to travel to Colombia with family friends from my congregation in Lynbrook, New York, who were headed back to their country for the first time in ten years.

Food Glorious Food!

I walked into the kitchen and came face to face with my new enemy—raw chicken! Cooking has always been a foreign concept to me, considering how many hamburger helpers I’ve had to exhaust in order to survive here at BYU. Now, raw chicken in it of itself seems harmless, but when the recipe tells you to “half it”, “sauté it” and make a casserole—your mind turns to mush no matter how many AP credits you’ve earned. Yet, as I grit my teeth and dug that butcher’s knife into to breast of the chicken, I realized “Hey this isn’t that bad, I kind of like cutting open things.” And so, with the assistance of my friend’s brother-in–law, I proceeded to sauté the chicken.

As I continued to cook, the process seemed easy. However, cooking with an aid right by you is hardly the same as cooking by yourself. When you cook by yourself, a whole new level of confidence is required, because once you complete a step in the recipe there’s no going back to fix mistakes. Then there’s the variable of art that needs to be put into cooking. The point where you can look past the methodical aspect to where you add ingredients based on what you feel is what defines a true cook.

Cooking meat has been a common folk knowledge since biblical times a s in the story of Jacob and Esau. As their father Isaac was blind, one of the ways he could distinguish between his sons was by the way Esau prepared his meat. Undoubtedly, Esau would pass on his knowledge of cooking to his children in which that knowledge would churn and evolve even to the present day. I’m grateful to have become a part of the legacy of cooking meat that has withstood for thousands of years.

But the part of the cooking experience that I enjoyed most was the opportunity to socialize. There’s more to just mixing ingredients and forming chemical bonds to make something new. Friendships are born from sharing a meal that has been prepared from scratch. To me, that’s more important than acquiring new folk knowledge.

The Art of Beads

My R. A., Zoe, loves to make jewelry.

I asked her to teach me how to craft a piece of jewelry, and so we sat ourselves down in the middle of her dorm, bags and buckets of beads of every size, shape, and color spread around us.

"Jewelry-making runs in my family," she says. "My aunts get really into the history of the beads."

"These were my great-grandma's," Zoe says, holding up a handful of cork-stoppered vials of tiny glass beads. She fingers teal beads and says, "These are from the Czech Republic."

Zoe has beads from Hawaii, Peruvian seed-beads, and coral and turquoise beads she got from a Native American craft stand.

"In the nineties, my family went through a phase where they liked to make Fimo ("fee-mo") beads, which are made from a type of clay that you bake, and then it hardens."

She shows me a handful of black beads with yellow stars.

"And I don't even know where I found these," she says, holding up a bag of clay bird beads.

We decided to make an Anthropologie-esque bracelet, clamping the ends in a tight, metal spring to prevent the beads from falling off. I chose beutiful, smooth pale pink beads, and sparkling, faceted light green beads. Instead of stringing the beads in an "every-other-bead" color pattern, I opted for the green beads to comprise a half of the bracelet, and the pink beads to make up the other. It was really neat and artsy looking. Zoe told me that after I tied the stretchy string, I could hot-glue the ends to make it last even longer. The finished product was a super cute, artsy bracelet.

Ukulele Jam!

Now I know that we weren’t asked to do history for this post, but I was curious as to the origins of such a small and, before recently, localized instrument. We often associate the ukulele with Hawaii, but the instrument was actually the result of Portuguese influence on the islands during the late 1800s. It soon became a staple in Hawaiian traditions. The ukulele has also had its history throughout pop culture. There is the famous Tiny Tim, whose single “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” (1968), helped make the ukulele popular. And recently, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole’s performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World” that exploded on YouTube and reignited an interest in the small instrument. (If you like the melodic sounds of this simplistic instrument, I would suggest looking into NeverShoutNever’s album “Me and My Uke”, “Ukulele Songs” by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, and also the varied work of ukulele player Nellie McKay. )

So I must preface this story by saying that I am by no means an expert. I am much more like the girl in Professor Burton’s story who was an expert of one day. I began to play the ukulele just last December when my friend gave me her old one as a present. She taught me my first chord (C major) and I was let loose.