Blogging Connections

This blogging assignment has helped me in so many ways. I have found many different and might I add interesting connections through the literature we have read in class and through the way we are to write about them. Also, by just blogging about what you have read allows you to mediate on the literature, rather than just read it once or twice and be done with it. In our, Guide to Blogging Criteria, it has many different prompts that we can use to write of off and by doing so, we engage in the text further than we would have that that we could. For example the first prompt on the list is to give an interpretation of the work and use quotes from the text to make your interpretation plausible. This not only teaches us how to support the things we say, but it also makes us search for a better answer rather than just the one that we might make up in our head. Searching the text for details to support our theories or arguments is an excellent way to engage in literature, because you are focusing on the voice of the text more than the voice of yourself. Of course, your voice needs to be heard, but your credibility skyrockets when you are able to back up what you are saying on a particular topic with an exact quote from the literature.

A connection that I can see from the instructions of the blogging project and the activities that we have done in class is that they all involve a new way of engaging literature. For example, one of the prompts asks us to translate the work we have read into a painting, short story, or a poem and we actually did this in class. Well, we have not translated any literature into a short story or a poem, but we have painting in class to help us engage with the Book of Joel. I painted a huge red moon because of when in the text it said that the moon dripped red with blood. I then painted around it beautiful colors that intertwined each other to give it an abstract feel, which was supposed to reveal to be a sunset. I did this because despite all the horrible and sad things the Book of Joel talks about, there is a section in the book were it talks about restoration and Christ saving the ones that believe in Him, or at least that is what I got from a section of the text. I abstractly drew the sunset around the moon because that part of the book reminded me of Christ and for some reason whenever I think of Christ I think of the sky and the beauty it holds and how it reflects the beauty of Christ. Painting is an excellent way to view literature in a whole new light, one in which I truly enjoyed.

Obviously, we have read a lot of depressing things in the class, but surprisingly, I have been able to find more meanings behind the works that we have read in class because of the activities and blogging that we have done. Instead of having a judgement based off of what the text means by simply just reading it once or twice, I have been able to find more meanings behind the text. By blogging, it has helped me either to focus on a particular subject or point in the text where I am able to dissect that and that alone and perhaps even relate it to my own life. I think that by relating it to my own experiences has helped me the most because I am able to bring past emotions and feelings back up when I re-read a particular text. By doing this, I feel that I connect with the author or the characters in the literature when I do this, which has absolutely changed how I read in a very good way.

Blogging, like I have said earlier, allows us to extend the reading process by engaging in the text in new and exciting ways. It allows you not only to make a connection with the text and yourself, but also the text and other texts. By doing this, we grow as readers because we are able to bring in outside sources to the text we read. All in all, we, as readers, are expanding our mind to interpret things in new ways, which will help us in the future when we read other literature. I have been able to make this work for me; however, it was not very hard to adapt to this form of engaging in literature. Whenever I read the Bible, I usually always have my highlighter, pen and journal with me, so I can highlight things that stand out to me, and then go back and record my thoughts about what it meant to me. By doing this, I am able to go back to those thoughts when I re-read the same passage of scripture, but usually what I find is that I find new things that stand out to me and I interpret in new and living ways. I find that no matter what you are reading it is always important that you take something out of it, as long as it is wholesome for your mind and soul.

Tiger Flowers Cemetery

I went to the Lakeview, Roselawn and Tiger Flowers cemetery complex for this fieldtrip, and I stayed there for at least 40 minutes. It was an interesting experience in which I felt pretty alone while being there. While reading, "In the swamp in secluded recesses, A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song," I felt as is what I was reading was reenacting before my very eyes as I heard the sounds of a bird or two chirping and then flying away.

Another line that stuck out to me was the paragraph right underneath that, which stated, "Solitary the thrush, The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings by himself a song." After i read that I looked around and I was literally the only other person in the cemetery along with my friend who took the picture, but those words rung true as I stood there looking at all the tomb stones. Knowing that there were bodies beneath me really made me see that line differently as I thought of the bodies being the hermit withdrawn to themselves, all alone in the solitude of their graves. This experience opened up literature in a whole new way for, which was quite and exciting experiment.

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

When I first read the poem, it took me a while to understand that it was about Abraham Lincoln death. I must admit that I was pretty confused the whole entire time I read the poem. Then after a couple times through, I felt like I started to understand the meaning a bit more. The author was obviously torn up about his death, which the poem greatly resembles by referring to the season of spring as a time of mourning when most poets consider that a time for rebirth.

Since I was not able to go to class on Monday, I was unable to engage in the class discussion of the poem, but I had the chance to talk to Cierra about the poem. We discussed how when something horrible happens to you, you find yourself remembering every single detail about that horrific moment. For example, my mother just called me the other week telling me that one of my best friends dad died by drowning in a river. It had been raining a lot back home and there was a low water crossing, but I guess her dad could not see very well because he drove his car into the water. The rest of the details I do not know, but I do know that he was a great and caring man and loved his family dearly. When I heard this information, I burst into tears, and the relevance of this story is that, I too, remembered exactly what was going on. I was in the car with my boyfriend driving to his sister’s for the day in Orlando. We were right about to exit and we were talking about how school was and what are schedules were going to be like this upcoming week.

Walt Witman’s poem is extremely meaningful and full of precise details. He connects the details of the day and the emotions he was feeling in such an enticing way that it makes the reader want to read his poem over and over again. Even though I read it multiple times I feel as if there are so many things that I still have missed from the poem and look forward to finding out what those things are.

Onions

The Traveling Onion, by Naomi Nye, was by far the most interesting poem I have ever read. I would first like to start off by saying that I loved the fact that the author gave us a bit of history of the onion before she started her poem, because it allowed me to read the poem with some background knowledge in mind. (Side note: I could not help but think of the movie Shrek and the conversation about ogers being like onions.) Despite this distraction of I was able to read the poem and find a sentimental and meaning. Whether or not this is the meaning of the entire poem, it is something that made me think after reading it and listening to others' response.

In class someone said, "You can't cry until your opened up", as they related this to the section of an onion causing people to cry once you cut into one. Then for some reason I thought about what I prayed for last night. I specifically asked God to take old habits and old ways of thinking out of my life, but in order to do this He must "dissect" me internally before I act out externally. I must allow Christ to make an incision on my body so that He may pull back the insidious layers that are causing damage to my life. As I sat there, contemplating in my thoughts, I realized that if I want God to truly take away, uproot, the undesired things in my life, then I am going to have to surrender and allow the layers of my life to be revealed. It is in that moment of surrendering my life to Christ where I feel the most vulnerable to cry and I find it relevant that when you cut into an onion, it isn't until you start pulling back and cutting into the layers that you start to cry as well. There is definitely a connection with vulnerability and revealing the layers of your life, which I feel is a healthy process that people should actually go through when asking for healing in certain areas.

Even though I do not feel like the author was trying to get that across to the reader it is what I thought about when my classmate read aloud his thoughts on the poem.

The Book of Joel

On Monday, my class had the opportunity to read a loud the Book of Joel. It was actually quite fun and interesting to hear the different voices read the parts they chose. When I decided to read I did the section on the Deliverance Promised. When I was done reading I realized that, that was the exact passage in which I wrote about in the beginning of class when Professor Corrigan asked us to write about something that struck us the most while reading the Book of Joel. I liked how the book started off with locusts, starvation and drought but then God was faithful to provide again for His people the things that were taken away, and that is why this passage stuck out to me.

For the tree has borne its fruit,

The fig tree and the vine have yielded in full.

So rejoice, O sons of Zion,

And be glad in the LORD your God;

For He has given you the early rain for your vindication

And He has poured down for you the rain,

The early and latter rain as before.

The threshing floors will be full of grain,

And the vats will overflow with the new wine and oil.

"Then I will make up to you for the years

That the swarming locust has eaten.

Professor Corrigan also asked us in class if this was weird or different by trying to read scripture as literature and it struck me that when we read scripture, we should look at it as we look at literature a lot more often. For when you analyze literature, you look at it from all different angles, such as the words used, theme, plot, climax, sentence structure, and much more. These exact techniques we use to analyze literature should also be used to analyze scripture, so that we may look past what we read and be able to tap into the structure of what we read. Now, I am not saying that we should not look to the words when we read scripture, but what I am suggesting is that we search a little more in depth to why the author chooses to write certain ways or why the author chooses certain words to describe people, places, and emotions expressed in the Bible. When we do this with literature, I feel that we are able to connect more with the stories we read, so why not do the same thing with the Bible? Something I do when I am in devotions is choose a passage to read simply read through it without stopping. Then I reread the same passage but this time I circle or underline phrases or words that stick out to me or words that I do not understand. I then meditate on that particular section that I focused in on. I usually like to try and connect it to something within my personal life so I can relate more profoundly to the passage of scripture. I love doing this, and God tends to reveal new things to me every time I do it. Therefore, truly meditating on literature, whether it be scripture or simply a fictional book, can be an important/ vital step in our reading.

Theme in Literature

Learning to find the theme of a piece of literature can be a little difficult if you are someone who only sees things in black or white. For if we are insisted to find the theme of the story this could be "viewed as an avoidance of the literary experience", because many stories are ranged from a series of complex emotions that could inspire many different themes. This is why finding a theme cannot be viewed from a black or white mindset, but rather a mind that explores the grey areas of the text. These areas could be words that have more than one meaning, or words that are purposely positioned in the text to create symbolism. Literature is truly an artwork, you can study it and have multiple meanings that develop in your mind, while another person can also study the same literature and construe completely different thoughts/ meanings.

I read the story, "Little Red Riding Hood", to my roommate and at the end I asked her what she thought the theme was or simply a message she thought the author was trying to get across to the reader. Her answer was that she thought it was warning people about deceit while I thought it was more about knowing your surroundings so that you may have better discernment about bad situations. Both of our thoughts had taken different angles of the story but both connected in some way about being careful of other people. Another take on this story was what the book said about the moral. It took a literal approach by directing the story specifically for young girls who should not listen to just anyone who happens to cross their path. It when on to say that little girls can be naive about men being predators to them and will openly talk to strangers with out even thinking about it. By doing so this, it has been a huge contributing factor of why young girls find themselves in harmful situations. So obviously, the story does not have one precise theme, but rather multiple possibilities of different themes.

With many different morals of the story, "Little Red Riding Hood" or any other piece of literature, one can realize that theme "doesn't need to be boiled down to a moral even when a moral is offered". When we, as readers, read stories, we need to be more open and less absolute about what we consider to be the moral of a story. A great goal to consider is instead of always trying to find the answer for a story, perhaps it is better to raise ideas about the meaning of a particular text and discuss it with others. This chapter taught me a lot about deepening my thought process and opening my mind to many possibilities when considering a theme for literature.

Is God the Road or the End?

"Am I, for instance, just sliding back to God because I know that if there's any road to H., it runs through Him? But then of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all."

This paragraph hit me really hard because when I read it I thought about all the times when I would approach God for something but then I would forget to approach Him for just Him. This paragraph alone really got my thoughts going about why I approach God, if that is even what I could call it. I am hoping that I do not look like a spoiled brat who only comes to God on my own terms and for my own reasons. C.S. Lewis could not have put it any better, if we are using God as a road to something, and not as an end then we are not really approaching God.

This got me thinking about how many times in high school I would just approach my mom or dad when I needed money for something or when I was hungry or even when I just needed permission to do something. It was rare, in my earlier years of high school that I would approach my parents simply because I wanted to talk, share, or here's a big one... actually listen to them. I would add my two cents in by saying, "thank you" and "I love you" but then I thought to myself, when did I actually show them that gratitude or that love that I was professing. They were a means to an end, but they, themselves were never the end. Today, I look back at all the times I could have listened or I could have just sat down and talked with them, but instead, I was too consumed with my own life that I forgot one of the most important things in life, relationships. Building relationships, especially with your family members, not to mention your own mom and dad is vital in the developmental process of a human being. But that was the problem, I was too consumed with my life that I only cared about what I could get out of it rather than what I could give to it.

With all that said, C.S. Lewis was very bold by admitting that he had been sliding back to God only so He could be with H. again. He was too consumed with his own sorrows that God was not the destination but the car he used to get where he wanted to go. God is not concerned with our human relationships as He is with our relationship with Him. He is the way, the truth, and the Light, He is not a doormat for people to walkover when entering a door, but rather, He is the door, or might I say, the "house". For He is where we should be residing and He is the only destination that we should be concerned about reaching. This passage really helped me with understanding that God is not here to be the road that we travel on but the end, in which we want to arrive at.