Tag Archive for 'epiphany'

Jenni’s Journal: My Dialogue Slam Poem Epiphany of Greatness

Jenni published on May 24, 2012 in food and superforest journal. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

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HELLLOOOO SUPER FOREST!

WOW I JUST HAD AN AMAZING EPIPHANY! I AM AN EXPLOSION OF GREATNESS!

Context: Right now I am currently a student at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Right now (for May and June) I am a student in the Semester in Dialogue Program and we are focused on Sustainable Food Systems. In short…

The Undergraduate Semester in Dialogue addresses what we believe is the principal challenge for contemporary education: to inspire students with a sense of civic responsibility, encourage their passion to improve Canadian society, and develop innovative intellectual tools for effective problem solving. Each semester we develop an original and intensive learning experience that uses dialogue to focus student education on public issues. (via)

Today we had local Zero Waste Leaders Art Bomke and Helen Spiegelman in our dialogue.

My inspiration come from people like you.

- ART BOMKE

The following is a slam poem of my thoughts. Maybe i’ll make a video tonight (I literally couldn’t wait to post this and my heart is beating like crazy right now).

Soooo….

I made a pretty concise list of the things that I hold dear, and I realized that those things make up what I’ve got to share. Fun. + education + celebration + value(s) … + listening, laughter, love, creativity, hugs + criticism. Criticism is treasure and gold: I want to celebrate a different thought and climb up from the old. Everything in the wold universe has led up to this day. And all the people I’ve ever met have have influenced what I’m about to say. We are all hero’s in our own way. We all have a thing to learn and a thing to give away. Keep on moving forward because we are inherently – inheartantly – ants – for everything we do builds the hill up from the grass. How are others saying NO a strength, an opportunity, to evolve the status quo. What makes your life great? What’s on your list that you hold dear? What are you learning? What have you got to fear? And how will that inform my list and what I choose to hear?

Sidenote: I am literally clicking like a typewriter I am making so many connections right now! Let’s do this! Bam!

Love,

Jenni

Drake’s Journal: Reactions and Abstractions

drake published on August 11, 2010 in build and food. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I have been thinking lately about the weight of ideals. Being raised on comic books and other myths I’ve always been attracted to them, from the dark heroism of Batman, all the way to Plato in my studies in philosophy. That influential Greek thought that the “forms” were more real than reality, that all chairs are a (mis)representation of the perfect chair, which exists somewhere, but not here.

As many readers may know, I have lived in Asia for the past six months, and it has engendered a change in my thought. Westerners think in categories, while East Asians think in relations. In Eastern thought, the world is a continuous substance, not broken apart in into chairs, tables, and glasses of water. Do not separate the tones, Lao Tzu cautions us, for that does harm to them. In the West, we might call this “monism,” but the application of such a label misses the point entirely. While abstractions, such as logic, are useful, a cacophony (or symphony) of inputs exist in every situation. Existence is complex. Difficult to understand.

Idealism is wonderful, and necessary, I think, to live in this world. It can sometimes be a yoke in social relations. What I mean to say is this: I have wanted so much for this love to define my life, to be some great story. And while this is great for narrative, a life  — or two lives — is not steered by some ideal that I project. That is to put the cart before the horse. This, then, is an important realization: it is not that a story is my life, but my life is a story. I  need not  put pressure on it. I must concern myself with the matter of living, to be present in existence, and not as much in abstraction. While I often act as though it were, my heartbeat is not a metaphor; it’s right here in my chest, pumping, pumping, pumping into this body, into this world.

My American Self in a Korean Collective: A Matter of Context

drake published on July 26, 2010 in superforest journal and technology. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

Hey team! Sorry I’ve been so silent lately. A pile of deadlines, report cards and couch surfers have kept me away from my SuperForest. And in nine hours I’m heading to Osaka and Kyoto. So, to give ya’ll some love, here’s a magazine column I wrote a few weeks back:

During a routine Sunday walk I came upon a signature Seoul sight: a crowd of apartment buildings  hiking up a mountain.

“If I lived in one of those, I wouldn’t feel individual at all,” my girlfriend said, biting her lip, “but that’s what they want.”

Such a realization conjures up a mixture of antipathy and appreciation. As an expat, I’m a legacy of Western individualistic inquiry, washed ashore to teach English in the Hermit Kingdom. Upon arriving, I did not understand why a face must be saved, or why even in nouveau chic Hongdae, everyone dressed the same.

As an American, clearly what I thought was right and what they thought was wrong — until I realized that I had no right to such chauvinism. To hold the possibility of only one truth is an Anglophone trait not present in East Asia.  So a goal was set: to stop emphasizing the I and consider the we, to see if one culture’s homogeny is another’s harmony.

Ever-eager to curtail my ego, the aforementioned lady later handed me Richard E. Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why. The book unravels many East/West relation riddles. Nisbett writes that “East Asians live in an interdependent world in which the self is a part of a larger whole; Westerners live in a world in which the self is a unitary free agent.” A Japanese wishes to belong to a group, a Briton seeks to be himself. A Korean gathers context, an American focuses. These conflicting worldviews manifest every day, in conversations and in contracts.

To gain individual counsel in a collective, I rang Mr. Nisbett. He said that newcomers must recognize the indirectness of East Asian communication. “Americans are often annoyed by what they see as evasiveness or even dishonesty; that when he says maybe, he probably means no.” This is because Asians are much more concerned with a broader context, beyond a given interaction.

“(Westerners) are focused on one particular goal and how to achieve it,” the professor said, “but because effective action in Asia depends much more coordination on with other people, people can be confused about exactly why they’re having a different perception of a situation.”

East Asians are responding to a wider range of signals. Saving face is not so much to placate you, but to consider group cohesion, to maintain a larger system.

Getting off the phone, I am reminded of Synecdoche, New York, Andy Kaufman’s sprawling postmodern masterpiece. Near the end, an aged Philip Seymour Hoffman calls out, “There are nearly 6.5 billion people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They’re all the leads of their own stories.” Perhaps the director should have halved that claim. Westerners are leads in their autobiography, while Asians are part of a grander production: The nation, the family, the whole.

So now, looking up at Lotte’s latest squadron of cement sentinels, I appreciate the double feature: the dae-han-min-guk opera, forever in harmony, and my waeguk adventure story, alone against the world.