Babel: The multilingual, multicultural online journal and community of arts and ideas

For about a year I had been worrying that maybe I have never really been in love. As a woman 6 months shy of 40, this is saying something.

And then recently I realized that the feeling a friend was describing to me about falling in love with his partner was the same feeling I am having about my whole life: Chest filled with joy! Heart asking, “How did I get so damned lucky?”

I am having this feeling about myself, about my life, rather than about any particular person, and yet I am finding myself surrounded by love—all different kinds of it—a kind of love continuum. Friends, lovers–all wonderful people who enrich my life.

And I have also allowed myself–finally–to fall in love with other people.

I think what it means to me now is, “I feel all this love in my life, and [the person I'm saying it to] is a focus for this love.” I think what must have kept me from really feeling free to love others was a fear that they would not return the love, or that they would leave and take their love away–it has certainly happenned like that in the past.

Now, I don’t fear that their leaving would take the love away because I am not getting love from others so much as I am giving it to myself through them.

It is not the other person who gives us love

It is we who love ourselves though this other person; thus, when they go away, they don’t take the love with them because it was never theirs to give us, it is only ours to give ourselves through them.

Thus, we can hope that our lovers are loving themselves through us, as we are loving ourselves through them, but we are also not going to take their self-love away by no longer being in their lives.

Love Corollary: This kind of love never has to be selfish or jealous, because there is no fear of losing it–so it does not need to be restrictive.

My Lesson: To be in love, first find yourself and love yourself.

Go easy on yourself, be gentle; don’t be afraid and never abandon yourself (to love with wild abandon need not mean abandoning yourself or your heart’s well-being).

~Wei Ming Dariotis

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My mother recently passed away unexpectedly, and going through this has left me with a few tips to give to friends of the bereaved.

First of all, most importantly, is to do something. Call, visit, write, text: it doesn’t so much matter what you do, just so much that you do something. Everything is appreciated.

Second, give the person all the grace you can muster. They are damaged, weak, afraid and overwhelmed. Don’t be offended if they don’t call back, or if they seem like they don’t appreciate you because they do. All the phone calls I could never answer or return still mean a lot to me.

Third, after the initial onslaught of support (which is amazingly important) keep in touch. A strange thing happens. Everyone calls and brings food right away, but then a week or two goes by, and all of the food goes bad, and the phone calls stop coming. It becomes a very strange and lonely time.

I thought I understood death and grieving until my mother passed. Now I know that I’m just another clueless soul in the face of one of life’s great mysteries. To reiterate the sentiments of my contribution to her eulogy, “I feel lucky and blessed to have been her son. And I feel lucky and blessed to be surrounded with such an amazing group of people.” That ever-growing group of people continues to support me, and there isn’t a day that I don’t appreciate that as one of the greatest gifts of my lifetime. A million thanks to them and to my mother.

-David Rodich

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My mother recently passed away unexpectedly, and going through this has left me with a few tips to give to friends of the bereaved.

First of all, most importantly, is to do something. Call, visit, write, text: it doesn’t so much matter what you do, just so much that you do something. Everything is appreciated.

Second, give the person all the grace you can muster. They are damaged, weak, afraid and overwhelmed. Don’t be offended if they don’t call back, or if they seem like they don’t appreciate you because they do. All the phone calls I could never answer or return still mean a lot to me.

Third, after the initial onslaught of support (which is amazingly important) keep in touch. A strange thing happens. Everyone calls and brings food right away, but then a week or two goes by, and all of the food goes bad, and the phone calls stop coming. It becomes a very strange and lonely time.

I thought I understood death and grieving until my mother passed. Now I know that I’m just another clueless soul in the face of one of life’s great mysteries. To reiterate the sentiments of my contribution to her eulogy, “I feel lucky and blessed to have been her son. And I feel lucky and blessed to be surrounded with such an amazing group of people.” That ever-growing group of people continues to support me, and there isn’t a day that I don’t appreciate that as one of the greatest gifts of my lifetime. A million thanks to them and to my mother.

-David Rodich

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[lang_en]I was encouraged to make my first post to the Tower of Babel blog an introduction, so here’s a little bit about me.  My name is Jim Rovira.  I’m currently an Assistant Professor of English at Tiffin University in Tiffin, Ohio.  My dissertation, which I successfully defended last April (graduated with my Ph.D. last May), is about William Blake and Soren Kierkegaard.  I am actively publishing in my field.  My most recent publication is a book review of a recent Blake study for undergraduates for College Literature, and I’m currently reading two books on reception studies of Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott for my next review.  I will be presenting on William Blake at the upcoming International Conference on Romanticism this coming November.

I live here in Tiffin with my wife Sheridan and two youngest children, Penn and Grace, but have four older children from a previous marriage in the Central Florida area. They are almost all grown; my youngest from my first marriage is going to be a senior in High School this coming academic year.

I’m a displaced Californian.  I lived the first seventeen years of my life in Southern California (I have an essay published on the Tower of Babel website about growing up in So. Cal.), the next seventeen in Florida, the next five around the New Jersey/Pennsylvania area for graduate school, then back to Florida for four years to teach college in a full time, non-tenured position while I worked on my dissertation, and now to Ohio for my first Assistant Professor level job. You can get more details about me on LinkedIn.com and connect with me through jamesrovira (at) gmail (dot) com.

I hope to be posting here about the upcoming elections as I observe them happening in and around Ohio.  This, to me, involves writing a bit about Ohio –  I don’t think we can fully understand people’s attitudes without understanding the place where they live.  But the person writing needs to be understood as well: not just where that person lives, but where that person has lived.  What you need to understand about me is that until this last June I’ve lived 38 of my 43 years of life within twenty miles of either Disneyland or DisneyWorld.  So when my wife and I were driving from Tiffin to Fremont, watching mile after mile of corn, wheat, and soy fields, it made perfect sense that my wife would turn to me and say, “You’re going to lose your mind before I do.”

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[lang_en]Good Morning!  Pax et Bonum.  My name is Gardenia C. Hung.  I am a returning writer for the Tower of Babel since 1998.  On the tenth anniversary, in 2008, I have been invited to contribute as an author to the Babel Blog and continue to help building the Tower of Babel Online Journal Multilingual and Multicultural efforts in English, Spanish, French and/or Portuguese.  It is a great celebration to join you with the Tower of Babel in 2008.  I am very glad to work with the Babel team to continue on-line journal communications.

The Windy City known as Chicago is my writing inspiration–the city by Lake Michigan with ethnicity, multicultural, and multilingual peoples.  However, Lilac Town is where I live, as a resident homeowner and U.S. citizen, in the Village of Lombard, in the County of DuPage, in Illinois, United States of America.  I write freelance as an author for feature articles, upon request, as a Communications Media Arts consultant on behalf of Communications, Languages & Culture, Inc.

Anyone who has Evidentiary Legal proof of wrongdoing against the Hung Family and Lombard real estate property at 502 S. Westmore-Meyers Road and Washington Blvd., should address this information to Judge Bonnie M. Wheaton, in care of Circuit Court Clerk Chris Kachiroubas, at the 18th Judicial Circuit Court, 505 North County Farm Road, Wheaton, Illinois  60187, USA, before or on Monday, August 4, 2008, 1:30 p.m., Room 2007.  I am requesting your cooperation and legal support in this court evidentiary hearing. Please help me preserve the Lombard Historic Brick Bungalow owned by the Hung Family in the Village of Lombard, Du Page County, Illinois, USA.

–Gardenia Hung

http://www.preservehistoricestate.zoomshare.com

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[lang_en]Umbria’s Lago Trasimeno is most famous for being the place where Hannibal, the Carthaginian, surprised the Romans in a bloody ambush. This happened in the marshy area that is now approximately where the little town of Tuoro is located.

Yes, Hannibal is the elephant guy, but by the time his army had arrived here, the elephants were all dead.

Alvilda and I used to buy each other little elephant sculptures–especially Ganeshas, once we were on to that in late high school. They always reminded me of the family of ivory elephants my grandmother (my YaYa–I know it is not spelled properly, which would be Yia-yia, but this is how our family spelled it so now that is what we call her) used to have on her fireplace mantel. She must have been given them from our little family’s sojourn in India when I was a baby.

The idea that elephants had long memories always appealed to me as a child, because I did everything I could to remember the kinds of things no one expects you to remember from childhood–things that happened before you turned 3 years old. The smell of your mother’s milk. The feeling of the jumping swing you’d be content in for hours. I remember things I’m told I was too young to remember. I am like an elephant, I used to think to myself.

Elephants also seem to have a loyalty to family and tribe that connected to my intense feelings of loyalty as a child. They mourn deaths, I remember learning from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I was always frightened, as a child, that my mother might die (it didn’t help that she would tell me things like, “The fortune teller predicted I would die at age 47,” or “If I die soon, you won’t be too sad, will you?” I became frantic about this, of course, and could not be consoled. I mourned in advance. I pre-mourned.

In the end, Hannibal littered the waters of the lake with the bodies of Roman soldiers, but then he heard that the remainder of Rome’s forces were headed for Carthage, so he hurried back to protect his home and never conquered Rome. He won the battle, but, as they say, lost the war.

~Wei Ming Dariotis[/lang_en]

Celebrate it!  WP is a wonderful program to blog with.

- Rudy Carrera.

Hello Folks!

Rudy here. I am gob-smacked to see how many new posts we have going these days! It’s making for some stunning reading, and each contribution has been wonderful.

I wanted to bring up a couple of small points for you all, however:

Please sign your name at the bottom of each post so we know who to thank for their work, and if you have a draft, keep it there for a month or so, and then clean it out. We have 13 drafts dating back to March, and I just want to know if these were unformed thoughts or if you were planning on posting these. They’re not getting deleted or anything, but it’d be nice to see all your work up for a great reading.

Anyway, these are mere trifles. You’re all doing a sterling job on your posts, covering a wide range of topics and, it seems, coming from various points from the religious, political and cultural spectrum. You’re the reason the blog is doing well!

- Rudy Carrera.

Hi Folks,

I guess it is time for a little self-introduction. Malcolm Lawrence, Founder/CEO & Editor-In-Chief of towerofbabel.com noticed that I had joined his Tower of Babel group on InterNations.com so he invited me to blog here.

I am very new to blogging–my only experience being a travel blog I’ve been keeping for about 3 weeks on facebook, mostly for my family and friends. However, I write a lot, mostly for public consumption through book chapters and journal articles (in my waking life I am an academic).

My writing often focuses on Asian American literature (the subject of my dissertation), art, culture, and community activism around identity politics. I have a particular fondness for poetry–particularly Asian American poetry–which requires often layers of references. I’ve recently been writing and lecturing a lot about the use of the Native Hawaiian word, “Hapa,” by non-Native Hawaiian Asian Americans. I’m also working on a book about mixed race Asian American artists (think Isamu Noguchi) with Laura Kina, herself a mixed Asian (Okinawan) artist. I also write about science fiction and mixed race (I have a chapter in a book on Star Trek, “The Influence of Star Trek on Television, Film, and Culture,” which is all about Spock as a mixed race character and Seven of Nine as a transracial adoptee). And I love ethnic vampire literature, feminist and racially conscious science-fiction/speculative fiction (this all comes together for me in the poetry of Bryan Thao Worra, a Lao transracial adoptee speculative poet).

Recently, I have co-founded the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association, and I am writing about what critical mixed race studies is about–it is an emerging field within Ethnic Studies.

Personally, I am a mixed Asian American (Chinese, Greek, Swedish, English, Scottish, German, Pennsylvania Dutch), born in Australia, raised in San Francisco (and sent to Japanese Bilingual/Bi-cultural school for a few years), tenured at San Francisco State University in Asian American Studies, and at this very moment taking my first vacation in years and spending 5 weeks living with my best friend at her home in Brussels (after having just gotten tenure and having recently, amicably divorced).

And I just turned 39 on the recent summer solstice.

best,

Wei Ming Dariotis

After going out onto the kitchen deck to view the moon hanging over Lago Trasimeno, with its little star companionably lurking over its shoulder, we were greeted by firelies dancing a mating dance and twinkling at us.

This inspired a desire for star gazing, so we adjourned to the uppermost deck of the house, above the front door. The air was so perfectly perfumed and lovely it made me wonder aloud what it might be like to sleep outside there. My friend, Alvilda, said that as children she and her cousin, Noam (now the mayor of New Rochelle, NY–think “The Dick Van Dyck Show”), used to sleep out on the porch to watch the stars in every stage of the summer night.

Who would not rest peacefully after hearing this?

~Wei Ming Dariotis

The moon tonight, the night of the longest day of the year (June 21st) is the size and color of a ripe apricot. I had resisted, at first, buying the apricots here in Umbria. I had only a memory of California’s apricots that looked ripe but were hard and never ripened, or ripened into a surly pulp without ever tasting satisfyingly apricot-ish.

But I was wrong; the apricots in Umbria are gorgeous. And the moon in Umbria tonight is a heavy, succulent fruit.

One star hangs above the moon’s shoulder, keeping watch as they rise together over a hill on the edge of Lago Trasimeno.

We had apricots for dinner, and the tangy honey of their flesh still lingers on my tongue. The apricots taste like the moon. *

* I must credit my friend Reg with this line.

~Wei Ming Dariotis

Introductions…how silly of me! My name is Chelsea Leroux. I’m an excitable young spaz from hometown indefinite in the western US. A writer of ten years (and, thanks to the benevolent people behind this intriguing site, a new-to-the-scene blogger), in recent days I’ve found myself penning mostly about the present media and communication trends, the environment as a whole, and the general haze of the day-to-day. Presently a student with a focus on history and anthropology, when not shoved by the nose into endless seas of printed paper, I’m usually on the go (travel, my boat, whatever gets me out there).

As a writer, I suppose, my focuses have been lackadaisical at best. I’ve always wished for the greater benefits of the artist without the effort that goes usually goes into it. Recent days have found me overcoming my optimism in favor of the reality that work is just that. I, along with a small group of my peers, am foregoing ambition for now, and working on the true art of the word. (Without these peers, I must say, I could not bare to ink. They are better than I ever will be, and their amazing and disturbing talents are what push me on).

As a traveler, however, I feel I can retain a bit of that youthful spirit. It keeps me balanced. It is how I discover the world, and so it is what best delivers me from the shadows of ignorance.

And now, to Work, I say! Looking forward to working in a new medium, and I hope I can deliver!

-Chelsea Leroux

A writer of many years, this is my virgin run at this particular medium (the blog), so I chose to stick with what I know. Now, that’s not much, but if there’s one thing I know intimately, it’s the universe…or, perhaps, the pen. I frequently get the two of those confused, and use them rather interchangeably.

Why? I’m not entirely sure; but, at my best guest, it’s because there is nothing in the universe that can’t be filtered through the fine ball of a pen: It speaks whatever language you want it to speak, knows whatever you want it to know, tells anyone and anything whatever you’re out to say, and does it all in such a perfunctory manner that we forget it’s far more capable of communication than we are (why else would we use them the way we do)? Then again, I could be totally off on all of that. But, in all my wanderings, the one thing I never forget, that one thing I always stash in the satchel before fresh chonies, is the universe…or the pen – pick your tomato.

(I’m begging you, please save the scrutiny, remember – new and still lighthearted about trying something different! And, think about it: very little else will function for as many causes as indiscriminately at the pen).

-Chelsea Leroux

First it was all alone. And then it was the blow hole of a whale and then the eye. Then more clouds blew over and seemed to freeze for brief moments like little digital glitches – like I was downloading this scene and waiting for the hiccups to pass.

I stared at it from my roommate’s balcony and had a near blankness inside of me. If it was my balcony I’d stay out there all night, I thought. If I had it my way I’d live the whole rest of my life under this moon. But that’s the trap.

The whale was long gone after all. It’s the basic fact: you can’t put something like this in your pocket. It all passes. Life is in motion.

Smiling hugely, I came back inside and continued to work.

-David Rodich

I am a writer in Brooklyn, New York. I write short fiction, artist biographies, press releases, and now, thanks to the gracious invitation from Malcom, I write a blog. I was trained at Indiana University (in my home state) as an elementary teacher, and while I love those little maniac students, I feel the need to be selfish and pursue my number one passion of writing. Although an obvious choice, this is a hard thing to do as I am also interested in the electric piano, geology, soccer, and food. It’s often these days that I nod and sigh and think to myself that I’ll maybe focus on one of these in some alternate lifetime. Maybe.

As I am learning to write and learning how to ‘be a writer’ I am surrounded with an ever-growing group of artists that are all pushing their lives in the same way. I find this to be the most amazing thing about this city: the network, the hook-up, the camaraderie, the energy, the constant potential for new collaborations and new friendships.

Aside from being an inherently interesting process, this is especially amazing because so many of the people I meet come from different parts of the world. With over %40 of its population foreign-born, New York City truly is a great multi-cultural experiment. I want to use this blog to capture bits of this and chronicle my experience here as an emerging professional writer. I want to tell you about the people I meet and the things I see; my progress and points of excitement. Simply put, I want to be continually answering the question of, what is it like to be me in this time and place.  Hopefully in this process I’ll be able to provide you with some entertaining tales.

Thank you so much for reading.

-David Rodich

I’ve been feeling very introspective the past week. I learned just a few days ago that an old friend who I lost touch with from high school committed suicide in the fall of 2005.

I remember her as a cheerful, intelligent, thoughtful and kind person. Her dream in high school was to become a veterinarian. Mine was to become a pilot for the US Air Force. In my yearbook, she wrote “Don’t give up your dream!” and beneath her signature she wrote D.V.M. (Doctor of Veterinarian Medicine)

We corresponded through snail-mail, because we graduated high school in 1989. (I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get my first AOL email account until late 1995.) In one of her letters she asked me to call or write her friend, our mutual classmate. She was concerned that her friend was feeling depressed. I remember feeling both touched by her thoughtfulness and jealous of her friend. Did I have friends who would care enough about me to do the same? Of course I did, but I was too selfishly insecure to know better.

News of Stacey’s death, of her suicide, profoundly affected me. When I was a child, I was very dark, depressed, and was alarmingly close to ending my life. Three things held me back however: fear of pain, fear of the unknown (what happens at and after death?) and the aftermath (people discovering my body, and the pain of the news/discovery that would have been afflicted upon my family).

Stacey was a C.H.P. officer. She used her own gun to end her life. (C.H.P. officers have a higher-than-average suicide rate when compared to other law enforcement officers in the nation.) Had I easy access to a gun, would I be here now typing these words? If Stacey had instead became the veterinarian she once dreamed of becoming, would we have instead found each other on Facebook and be exchanging our life stories?

She died over two and a half years ago, but to me, she died the day I got the news. People who have come into my life, for however long they remained in my life, are part of me, my memories, and they live on as I remember them and wonder where they are now. Even the grumpy old man who came into The Velvet Creamery (a restaurant back home where I once was a waitress) one hot summer day in 1990 and yelled at me, “Can I be served?!?!” (and to whom I responded, “Are you having a bad day?”) is alive and well, and annoying those who love him with his foul outbursts. Surely now, he too is dead.

So, if you are reading this and you are in depths of the deepest, darkest, loneliest, most hopeless place imaginable, I want you to pay special attention: Don’t do it. You matter. You’ve touched people’s lives. Even if you don’t believe me, because I know you don’t, I want you to entertain the possibility that I am right. Your death will affect 100’s of people. Those closest to you will share the news with others, and those others will pass on the news to others… And years down the road, old childhood friends will receive the news of your suicide and they will remember the time you gave them a kind word when they were feeling low; they’ll think back to the time when you were in the high school locker room chatting with your friends and they will remember how happy you looked, and they will be profoundly sad. All the good memories you helped create in the minds of every person you know, will forever be tainted with the knowledge of your decision to put a permanent end to a temporary problem. It’s not right. You matter to somebody, and it is wrong to end a life that is not completely yours. You belong to the people who love you, you belong to the people who loved you, and you belong to the people who will love you in the future.

——

*As I was writing this post, here in Siena, Italy, the beautiful spring sunny day clouded over. (It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.) When I hit the button to publish the post, thunder rattled my windows. The storm is continuing now, even as I type this. I am reminded of the passing of intergal theorist Ken Wilber’s soulmate and wife, Treya Killam Wilber, as told in his book Grace and Grit. The night Treya died, after a long physical and spiritual battle with cancer, the heavens seemed to crack open with a magnificent thunder storm.

Stacey, may you find peace in your next journey.

~Janelle Renée

[kml_flashembed movie="http://it.youtube.com/v/sJbwGYa_XnQ" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I’m cheating a bit here! Lot-Lorien are a band I’ve worked with since their inception 10 years ago as their publisher, and it’s time they get brought to a wider audience. This is their signature tune performed at their 10-year anniversary concert on April 10, 2008. I hope for another 10 great years out of these kids.

- Rudy Carrera.

…you’re making this a very interesting place!  More, please!!

- Rudy Carrera.

A wonderful Good Friday to the Western Christians who peruse these pages, and a blessed Purim to our Jewish mates. Enjoy your weekends!

- Rudy Carrera

To my fellow bloggers from The Tower of Babel, I bid you welcome! If there are things musical you wish to see here, by all means, comment away!

- Rudy Carrera