Amie's Portfolio

E603, Fall 2004

Pied Beauty

Prompt: Imagine yourself inside a large cylinder.  What is around you?  What do you know about it?  What was here before you?  What will be here after you?

Relevant Quotes:

Franzi: "I’m sorry, but Buddhist monks wouldn’t have phones…"

Katie: "Hey Amie, I think the donkey’s eating your hair."

Forrest: "Hey Amie, that mule’s chewing on your purse."

Amie: "Dang donkey! Stop eating my paper!"

Within my cylinder are things living and things inanimate; things temporary and things even more temporary – but nothing permanent. In the golden sunset, Katie, Beca and I all sit in the middle fo this field in awe of the day’s beauty. My human friends and I have a new bond – in the car on the way here, we all shared our insecurities about our first semester at UT. We were really vulnerable with each other, and I feel more connected to them now than ever before.

Now I wonder, as I sit in my cylinder, how I can be vulnerable with the world around me (besides kissing a pig) (and a donkey?). How can I understand it, truly, authentically, with my deepest parts – not just understanding what it’s like, or how it works – but knowing it?

For the past several weeks, I have not felt like myself. As I described it to a friend last week, it’s like for a while, I just lost myself. And I had no idea of how to find myself again until yesterday afternoon when, for some reason, I felt alive again.

(Side note: the donkey just bit my sandal)

(and my hair)

So, our current study of the sympathetic imagination holds a lot of meaning for me. In a sense, for along time I was trying to sympathetically imagine myself. But I wonder if it’s possible to really master our thinking as much as we would like 0 after all, if I can’t get my own self to feel like myself, how much can I really figure out or know on my own?

Sitting here right now, I’m feeling more confident than ever before that God created all this life and matter within my cylinder. Whose idea of God is right – that I’m still working through. I talked with a guy from the Sikh student association today, and his theology was startlingly similar, yet still very different from mine. It’s scary to think about how weighty theology is – if you really believe that there’s a God and a spiritual dimension to human life, then you also believe that God is, well, God – not contained by anything but influential over everything, beyond all things, but sovereign over them, powerful at all times but not limited by time. I can’t sit here and look at the world without thinking about God. This earth was created by God… but why? One hundred years ago, these footsteps in the mud had yet to be formed, these blades of grass weren’t even yet seeds, and this dirt was conceivably soil somewhere in Europe. One hundred years ago, the air in my lungs was in someone else’s. One hundred years from now, my hair (though coated with donkey slobber) will be fertilizing tulips.

Am I happy, thinking about this? In a sense, yes. The fleeting joys of life seem sweeter because they are just that – fleeting.

But I do know that dinner’s ready now, and that gives me an excuse to run away from the donkey.