tonight reminded me of just what I love about UP and why I came here.
I started off the evening with a lovely dinner with lovely people. My friends here make me so happy. It's really nice to have the maneuverability here to really choose your friends and not hang out with people who don't really fit with you. I feel like that was one of the few drawbacks of my high school career. A lot of my drama wouldn't have happened if I could have moved on to different friends when things were obviously not jiving anymore.
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Then I went to the Schoenfeldt Lecture series to see Pico Iyer. "A regular essayist for Time since 1986, he writes on literature for The New York Review of Books; on globalism for Harper's; on travel for the Financial Times; and on many other themes for the New York Times, National Geographic, TLS and many other publications." The most interesting part about him is that he is an Indian born in England and raised transcontinentally between England and the United States. There are very few places he hasn't traveled; most recently, he spent several years with the Dali Lama. No big. He spends half of his year traveling frantically around the globe and the other half in a monastery either off Highway 1 on the coast of California :) or in Japan. "I like to think of it like breathing", absorbing information, then processing it. He believes our lives are about the balance of motion and stillness. The motion is worth only as much as it can be comprehended and made sense of in the stillness, and the stillness is only as valuable as the motion that it processes.
His speech was structured in a very peculiar manner. He announced that he was going to have four reading of different pieces that he'd written. This sounds incredibly boring, especially because the readings were so disparate. One was a description of his addiction to being a frequent flier, one from his fictional piece about tensions from Islam and the West from the point of view of a Sufi mystic, one on his time with the Dali Lama, and one on the fires of Southern California. And yet he wove them together so seamlessly and conversationally, you would find yourself surprised that he'd arrived at the next reading because we were still in discussion of the previous ideas, but the reading dovetailed so perfectly with the previous discussion. It was wonderful.
He had a refreshingly positive outlook on globalization. Being somewhat of a global mutt himself, his pension for travel has only fueled his positive perspective that we have much to learn from each other. "One of the most moving things in all of my time with the Dali Lama was his first thoughts upon arrival in Darmsahala from the treacherous journey from exile in Tibet. He was grateful for the opportunities this afforded him and his people; for the ancient culture of Tibet, especially the women, to receive education and other modern advantages, and also to share with the world their ancient wisdom." He described having this same feeling after his parents house and several almost finished book were burned to the ground in the Santa Barbara fires. Burning his almost completed manuscript on Cuba and, more importantly,all his notes, he was afforded the opportunity to try out fiction writing that he had hitherto been too afraid to try. Even tribal cultures, he believes, must integrate with the modern world, but they should try engage in a process of sharing rather than a stage of resistance or grief because all of us are losing our "homeland". Where is that? Where your ancestors came from? Where you live? Where you were born? It was quite refreshing to hear someone, especially someone of an older generation face the problems and thrills of globalization so honestly, someone willing to grapple with the complexities of cross-cultural communication with first-hand experience.
Then we had a Border Plunge meeting and those people empower me and just make me very happy in general. I'm so grateful I got that opportunity and that experience defines a lot of what this school means to me. Here's the video with members of my group. I couldn't go in at the times they were filming, and honestly, I was still processing but I feel like they did an amazing job of describing the trip.
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