Sunday, December 7, 2014

India Trip, Verse-by-Verse and Play-by-Play (PHOTOS!)

Pamela asked me a good question, about two days before I left her beautiful country. "Why are you here?" she said. I responded with the litany of reasons that, one year ago, I made the decision to come back to India. "No," she said, "I don't mean why did you plan the trip. I mean, with everything stacked against you, and most people in the same situation would never have made it, why is it that you made it all the way back here?" That question has been echoing in my mind with only whispers of answers I hardly dare think. Only time will tell. But one thing I do know: God has been in this from the very beginning. Even the choice of plane ticket was in response to His instructions to "wait," then "go." The canceled American Airlines flight, the overnight stay in Charlotte, the 2 minute delay in paging my name so I'd be on the other side of security, the missed second flight so I'd be rerouted through London instead of Qatar - all that just so I could approach the Indian consulate in person instead of being trapped in a foreign airport. Sure, it would have been easier if God had simply revealed my little mix-up on the visa expiration date months ago, but no, this is all exactly how He wanted it to go down.

James 1 and lots of photos after the jump.

Friday, November 21, 2014

Thankful in India: Getting Here

Hi everybody! Guess where I am! Haha, I know, only the most unobservant wouldn't have gathered it from the title.
Well, I am compelled to blog better than I did on my first India trip. Again I'm confronted with the struggle to write one more narrative when I've already relayed it to so many people in diverse ways (mostly Facebook messages, status updates and photo upload). Then I thought, why don't I just use that to my advantage? So here is the story, so far, as told through Facebook snippets.

In Charlotte they cancelled my first flight and put me up in a hotel. This delayed my ETA by 24 hours.


Monday, March 10, 2014

It's Not Easy, Being Green

Sorry for leaving y'all hanging with the India thing. When I tell my stories extensively in person, through letters, journals, and Facebook albums, I have little energy left to blog about it too. Next time (November 2014) will be different though. I'll keep field notes like I did when I went to New Orleans. If you're reading this blog then you are likely my friend on Facebook anyway. Look there for pictures.

One of my friends has taken an interest in my Theory of Colors so I've decided to share a little more about it. It started coming together for me in 2010, during the altered state of consciousness I think of now as "the Time." I've referenced the theory a little bit before in my post, "A Drop of Red." I wouldn't be so bold (or stupid) as to claim God created the Theory. He just created the Colors. And a fanciful young woman who enjoys theorizing about them. I call this my "personal symbology" because I know it doesn't hold up universally. In fact I can see it is actually quite Lydia-shaped. There are myriads of ways to slice and dice Truth. Mine isn't particularly better or all-encompassing, it's just one more way of making sense of self and world.

But, for what it's worth...

(First, credit where credit is due - in addition to drawing inspiration from nature, bits and fragments of human culture and artifice, and even the Bible, my theory owes much to the True Colors personality test, as well as the classic four personality types that date back to ancient times.)

Today I'm writing to you about Green. Green like a leaf. Green like the bunny from the Last Mimzy. Green like the Android and the inside of an iPhone. Green like The Robinsons.  Forgive me while I speak in similies. Some things are too difficult to explain without them. Wizard. Mad Scientist. Evil Genius. Medicine Woman. "Witch." Green is a trait that, when noticed, is often misunderstood. Yet, it is always there behind the scenes planning for the future, making things run smoothly, making things go. Oftentimes just making things. But rarely without purpose. Green is celebrated today as "science" and was variously worshipped and feared in earlier times as "magic." It is the systematic creativity of architecture, mathematics, music. Observation meets creation. Intuition meets logic.

My dad - My favorite Green.
As a Green person, like my father, I have always been utterly fascinated by how things work. Poring over charts and diagrams, spending hours in the non-fiction section of the library, taking apart my laptop to see if I could fix it. Leornardo Da Vinci has been my muse since childhood because he is both artist and scientist. Attended to both form and function. The art I call red. The function, I call green. Nikola Tesla is another Green who captured my imagination from an early age.

Probably the most popular Green stereotype of modern times is the "nerd." The brainiac with thick glasses, the Unix programmer in his underwear with a beard 4 feet long because he is too consumed with code to bother with mundane things like clothes and shaving. Most of the characters on Big Bang theory. Read the book, Hackers: Heros of the Computer Revolution. I read it and loved it. Loved it because I identified so much with these guys, these "geeks," who just wanted to explore and make things work. They didn't care about their reputation, they didn't care about the authorities, they weren't interested in making trouble though if they happened to step into it, they weren't too concerned. They knew they were changing the world, they didn't need credit for it, and they didn't care that nobody in the whole world "got it" but them. 

That's one thing about Greens, we are always ahead of our time.

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