Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep
by Mary Elizabeth Frye (1904-2004)


Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the softly falling snow.
I am the gentle showers of rain,
I am the fields of ripening grain.
I am in the morning hush,
I am in the graceful rush
Of beautiful birds in circling flight.
I am the starshine of the night.
I am in the flowers that bloom,
I am in a quiet room.
I am in the birds that sing,
I am in each lovely thing.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there — I do not die.

I don't usually like these types of poems, but this one was read at my grandma's funeral and sometimes I miss her a lot a lot a lot. And this says so much about her.

Rome. Venice. Paris. Barcelona.

While so much of who I am resists change and clings instead to constancy and security, my recent travels have broadened my horizons in an inspiring and beautiful way. Eight days of constant movement, living out of backpacks and in sleeping bags, braving insanely cold temperatures, eating an obscene amount of baguettes, doing a lot semi-structured wandering that led us to breathtakingly beautiful discoveries, having good conversations with good friends....I haven't felt this alive in a long time.

There have been moments lately.....when it occurs to me that God created humans to sometimes just be and just enjoy what He gave us senses for. We sat on the grass in front of the Eiffel Tower on our last night in Paris, the end of our travels. And as I watched the sparkling lights go off on the tower for the first ten minutes at midnight, I thought about how completely satisfied I was in that moment....just to be and to be there. And again in Sitges, as we sat out on the rocky jetty as the sun made its final bow, I was taken aback by the sheer beauty of it all and the fact that my God made it just to be that way, just because.

I have good friends. I realized while traveling that I am BLESSED. Lauren. Ben. Neo. We travel together like we've been doing it forever. I haven't laughed this much or had so many good conversations in a long time....not to mention the nights of watching The Office and our classy jazz club Christmas. I loooooovvveee my friends.

Here is a rather short travel summary:

Rome is grand. The Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Vatican city, the Sistine Chapel....they come out of nowhere, pretentiously boasting a wealth of tangible history. The Trevi Fountain is beautiful, especially at night. The food is DELICIOUS. And I just love the accent.

Venice is exquisite and mysterious. Seeing the Grand Canal at dusk took my breath away. The beauty is in the details, the forgotten streets and smaller canals, the ancient churches, the rustic colors. This city was made for wandering.

Paris is glamorous. The Champs Elysées, the Louvre, the Moulin Rouge, Arc de Triumph, the Eiffel Tower....it never stops. The castle at Versailles is so much more incredible than I imagined it, especially the garden. CREPES. Paris is the world's jewel.

And now I am back in my beautiful Barcelona, which I missed a little more than I thought I would.

Here are things I miss - in a stream of consciousness sort of way:

Watching Gilmore Girls with Mom, the way I can settle next to her on the couch and how I fit perfectly against her, and how it feels like time can never take that away, like perhaps she’ll always be able to make me feel like her baby. And I guess, how simple everything was at that time in my life. I miss all the regular things that I could prop my life up against for guidance and a sense of structure - the trivial things that I used to think were just filler but have turned out to be surpisingly fundamental. I miss those.

They say San Diego doesn’t have seasons, but really it does, in a beautiful, subtler way. And I feel myself missing the way Summer indiscreetly makes it’s exit while Fall slips secretly in, back at home, how the light changes and the air has a go at being crisp but actually just loses it’s summer thickness and feels fresh and slightly thinner. Maybe places with four distinct seasons are nicer or more exciting, but to me it feels unnecessarily harsh. San Diego has an artfully smooth way of changing seasons, like the atmosphere is running on some implicit poetic meter. I love the way the ocean is beautiful and welcoming no matter the time of year, how the beaches have a constancy that makes them addicting in a life-giving sense. I am honestly convinced that San Diego holds the copyright on casual and unforced classiness.

And maybe more than anything, I miss the in-between moments of home. I love the quality of light in the late afternoon – how it brings all the colors to fruition – and when Dad gets home from work we sometimes get out the camera and take pictures outside of the hummingbirds or the sunset. And the way cups of coffee bring us all together – in the kitchen or the patio outside, sometimes we rehash our days but sometimes we just soak up the stillness of the afternoon or midmorning together. I miss the way that a house can harbor memories and perhaps parts of me, too, in the most unusual places. Even while my flat is finally becoming home, it’s not the same way that home is home. Here my lamp and my desk and closet are just that. But at home, my closet is the one that has awful neon colored drawers that I love only because Dad expressly painted them so, thinking I’d like them. And my room has traces of all my friends, knickknacks or notes they left that are irritatingly scattered about my desk. And how the laundry room is a whole world of hidden treasures, and sometimes I stumble upon an old box that takes me back and there goes my whole day.

I've just finished reading Tender is the Night and I feel as though it deserves some recognition....and finding my own words insufficient, I've posted some descriptions by other readers. If nothing else, this work is provokingly beautiful because of the painful truth embedded in it. I believe literature based on the sadder truths is slightly less enjoyable to read but all the more magnificent.


"Gatsby was a tour de force, but this is a confession of faith." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, on his book, Tender is the Night.


¨Tender is the Night flows like a tone poem, vividly capturing the illusions and sickened foundations of its flawed protagonists, and the escapist existence in which they dwell. Herein lay ghosts, drifting through splendor, oblivious until it is too late, and then insensate still, crippled by self-imposed restrictions: the patterns of denial, dissipation and dream-death.¨


¨To define the myriad qualities of Tender is the Night into simplistic buzz-word recommendation: this is a haunting, occasionally stunning work, with beautifully lyrical prose and well-defined conflict, interspersed with casual insights into the urges/constructs of human reality.¨


¨F. Scott Fitzgerald, and by extension his work, was/is inescapably tied with the exuberant facade of the Jazz Era, an era defined (at least in the socialite sense) by its splendor and waste, its heedless optimism blind of cost. And though Scott basked in the cradle of this opulent "season," the author seething beneath the fly-by-night exterior could not help but be keenly aware of its follies and hypocrisies: his novels and short stories savagely depict the inward condemnation he felt. But unlike earlier efforts, this, Scott's last completed novel, was composed between 1925 and 1934, and the disintegration of the roaring 20's into the dust-bowl Depression of the 30's seems to me clearly represented in the progression from Tender is the Night's first to third books - the illusion has crashed and there is no regaining it, despite the determined dissipative efforts contrary.¨


And here are some quotes from the novel:

"You told me that night you'd teach me to play. Well, I think love is all there is or should be. Anyhow..."


"In the dead white hours of Zurich staring into a stranger's pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in."


"Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy - one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."


"You know, you're a little complicated after all." "Oh no," she assured him hastily, "No, I'm not really--I'm just a--I'm just a whole lot of different simple people."


"All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love," Dicked mourned persistently. "Isn''t that true, Rosemary?"

"Do you know what time it is?" Rosemary asked.
"It's about half-past one."
They faced the seascape together momentarily.
"It's not a bad time," said Dick Diver. " It's not one of the worst times of the day."

"Her naïveté responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world's bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at."

Here is what calms my soul on days when I feel like Spain has knocked the wind out of me:
(today happens to be one of those days)

1. Hand-written letters from Grandma.
2. Amos Lee
3. 45 céntimos coffees from the machines around campus
4. Literature - currently: Fitzgerald´s Tender Is The Night
5. And most of all - sweet words from my Savior.

¨Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.¨ -Philippians 4:6-7


¨Sometimes we forget who we got,
Who they are.
Oh, who they are not.
There is so much more in love,
Than black and white.
Keep it loose child,
Gotta keep it tight.
Keep it loose child,
Keep it tight¨
- Amos Lee

¨....for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.¨-Philippians 4:11-13

These are two of the best poems I know. The second one is a bit longer but oh so worth it.



i carry your heart with me
By: E.E. Cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)




The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock By: T.S. Eliot

S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair --
(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!")
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin --
(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

* * * *

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet -- and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" --
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor --
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

"It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preocupy me with the meaningless." - Donald Miller

And so goes the story of my life as of late. Every so often I have these moments of awakening, and I am reminded, again, just how much is going on around me. It is sickening how easily I ignore the flagrant, world-wide social injustice that is suffocating so many of the people whom God absolutely loves. How can I claim to follow/know/love Jesus but not care about the ideals and people He gave His life for? I will not be satisfied living a life centered around me. Even though awareness is, more often than not, heartbreaking, it brings me so much closer the heart of my Savior and compels me not to settle for meaningless.

Here is something I like : "The place where God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet." - Frederick Buechner


I am starting to entertain the idea that the negatives effects of capitalism may at times outweigh the positive ones. And when I say at times, I mean at THIS time, this current moment in history. Every time that I watch Motorcycle Diaries, it makes me seriously question why I believe the things I believe.

"Justice too long delayed is justice denied."

God is green. While still completely an amateur, I am - wierdly - excited about beginning to lead a life that takes into consideration the environment and taking care of what God has entrusted us with. It has come to my attention that I am an extremely consumptive person and there are a MILLION ways to use less and be more considerate of the generation that is coming after us....Mars Hill Church has some great podcasts on this topic that've given me so much to think about...pruébalos.